Similarities Between the Second Trump Presidency and a Zombie Invasion

In 1985’s Day of the Dead, a former soldier, renamed as “Bub” (Sherman Howard), reacts strongly to walkman head phones.

I just finished reading The Living Dead by George A. Romero and David Kraus (Romero’s last zombie creation).
This novel was published in 2020, about three years after George Romero’s death.
Romero’s agent (Chris Roe). and Suzanne Desrocher (George Romero’s wife). asked David Kraus to finish the novel soon after Romero died.
[This piece contains spoilers.]

Back story: the novelization of Dawn of the Dead* (1978) was written by George Romero and Susanna Sparrow.
Therefore, The Living Dead is the first novel by George Romero that isn’t based on a script.
John Russo wrote the 1974 novelization of Night of the Living Dead; that work was based on the 1974 screenplay, written by John Russo and George Romero.

When he died, George Romero was working on a zombie film in which the living dead drove cars. Its' working title was Road of the Dead.

Five interesting facts about Romero’s series of zombie films, versus his novel:

(A) The novel shifts the zombie timeline to the early 2020’s. In the novel (just as in 2007’s Diary of the Dead), there are cell phones, computers, and the internet.

(B) Romero regretted the implication in Night of the Living Dead (1968) that a Venus probe produced the zombies. Shortly before his death, he asserted: “No one ever would, ever could, figure out why zombies came into existence.”

(C) Animals aren’t zombified in the Romero films, but they are in the novel. Certain species of mammals begin to prey on humans, but not on each other.

(D) Zombies have a time limit, roughly fifteen years. After that time period, the living dead slow down, decay, and begin to fall apart.

(E) If certain zombies have clear objectives that they want to fulfill, prior to becoming the living dead, then they will still do these actions after they become zombified (in both the films and the novel).

By reading the coauthor’s note, I learned that while The Living Dead might not exactly be what Romero would have written (had he lived a few more healthy years), Kraus tried to be as close as possible.
I think that if Romero had survived, the novel would have been much, much longer.

The novel is extremely gory, a bit uneven, and sometimes it’s even unclear.
The novel does give us George Romero’s last stories on zombies.
Since I’ve been fascinated with Romero’s work from 1968’s Night of the Living Dead through 2009’s Survival of the Dead, it was a good read.

The zombie version of Cholo DeMora (John Leguizamo) avenges himself on the owner of Fiddler’s Green, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), in 2005’s Land of the Dead.

George Romero (1940-2017) was a Bronx-born film-maker, and the father of the modern zombie myth.
Because of his name, I had high hopes that Romero was a fellow Italian-American.
However, I was mistaken.
Although Romero was the grandchild of immigrants, his ancestry was half Lithuanian and half Spanish.
He became a citizen of Canada in 2009.

One of the things I liked most about the Romero films was his liberal sensibility.
In Night of the Living Dead, the hero is a black man who summons up the strength to help others, while the villain is a selfish, white “family man.”
In Day of the Dead, military grunts decide that they don’t want to work for the common good.
In Land of the Dead, selfish millionaires get their comeuppance.
It was obvious that Romero was a liberal from his first films.
Anyone who didn’t understand this, was just looking for a gore fest.

Avid zombie shoppers wandering a mall in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.

In Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, Kim Paffenroth analyzes the film Land of the Dead. Paffenroth says,* in the chapter on that film, that the villain of the piece, Kaufman (played by Dennis Hopper):

Based his entire kingdom [Fiddler’s Green] on ignoring others’ rights and acting like a terrorist and a criminal. . . a potent and uncomfortable indictment of the United States, for all the disenfranchised and exploited on which we base our affluent and wasteful lifestyle.

Romero and Kraus end The Living Dead in Toronto, Canada, the city where Romero died at the age of 77.
Many of the main characters, who we’ve followed in Acts One and Two of the 635-page book, meet up in Toronto, in Act Three.
Surprisingly, they come to the conclusion that they shouldn’t have spent years killing the living dead after all.
The readers are left with a question: Are human beings really worth the attention of God? 

Leader zombie Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) pumping gas, in 2005’s Land of the Dead. 

The American “heroes” of The Living Dead novel are a very diverse group:

• a black high school student who lives with her father in a trailer park, and is very skilled with a bow and arrow
• a near retirement Japanese-American master helmsman on an U.S. aircraft carrier (who happens to be gay)
• a blonde female autopsy technician in San Diego, who has a crush on her Latino boss
• a famous male TV newscaster known as “The Face.”
• a neurodivergent female statistician who works for the Government in D.C.

The “villain” of The Living Dead novel is an ex-movie producer called Richard Lindof.
He reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” because he comes from money, he limps, plus he’s rather ugly.
(However, “limping Lindof” appears in very few pages.)
The true villain of The Living Dead novel is human nature itself!

By the end of The Living Dead novel, one group (led by our heroes) is willing to compromise their own safety, lock up their guns, and live peacefully next to the dying zombies.
The group comes into conflict with another group (led by Lindof) that goes for chaos, and behaving viciously.
Mammals, like rats and dogs, become zombified.
However, the zombie mammals only attack humans, not each other.
Miraculously, one of the main characters turns into zombie hybrid.
Her eyes are not clouded white, she speaks, and she’s retained her pre-zombie personality.

The similarities between the second Trump presidency and a zombie invasion are the following:

1. We live in a state of fear. In Romero’s universe, we’re worried whether zombified rats will bite us while we sleep. In our universe, we wonder whether Trump will invade Venezuela or Nigeria.
2. We’re participating in a battle between a desire for the common good, and watching out only for our own lives and prosperity.
3. There are two sides and they don’t understand each other; each side believes they’re the prey of others out to do them wrong.

*The sections I quote from Gospel of the Living Dead, by Kim Paffenroth (Baylor University Press, 2006) carry footnotes that reference Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, a film director and college professor, who reviewed the film Land of the Dead in the Journal of Religion and Film (2005, Volume 9, Issue 2). 

Americans Voting for the Sizzle

A poster for Joe Dante’s 1987 political satire The Second Civil War. 

In the 1987 film, The Second Civil War (a film first created to stream on HBO), slick lobbyist Jack Buchan (the late great James Coburn) instructs the U.S. President (the fondly remembered Phil Hartman):

“No disrespect sir, but the American people vote for the sizzle, and not the steak.”

This late 1980’s dystopian satire* was set forty years in the future (the mid 2020’s).
Unfortunately, no network has had the nerve to brush the cobwebs off of this film.
It’s a comedy about immigration, and we can’t do comedies about immigration anymore!
The main plot is this: the Federal Government orders Idaho to accept one million Pakistani immigrants.
The Idaho Governor (Beau Bridges) objects, and a second Civil War results.
(My husband and I own a DVD of the film.)

Speaking of “sizzle,” one of the reasons that Trump was elected in 2016, was that people were tired of voting year after year, and seeing no real change in our unjust systems.
On November 18th, 2025, survivors of Epstein-Maxwell abuse gathered outside the Capitol.
They spoke of being ignored by five different administrations.
Several women mentioned contacting the FBI, and the Justice Department, and not being listened to because mere women were accusing rich and powerful men.

1939’s The Wizard of Oz, with the Wizard (Frank Morgan) revealed from behind the curtain.

Trump reminds me of the big green head in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Trump is the head, and the people who wrote Project 2025 are Professor Marvel (the person behind the curtain).
Trump has never been an “idea man.”
When pressed for an agenda, he rails against his enemies, blames other people, and lies that he has a “concept of a plan.”
During his November 2, 2025, 60 Minutes interview, with Norah O’Donnell, Trump actually said that he didn’t know the billionaire cryptocurrency founder (Changpeng Zhao), who he’d pardoned just a few days before!
Does Trump truly believe that ignorance makes actions OK?

I’ve been unable to trace it back, but a few days after Trump took office, in 2016, one pundit said that he’d never realized (until that election) how many Americans simply didn’t care if the world “blew up.”
I keep going back to this memory over the past nine years.
Why did so many people want something (anything, anyone) to shake up the status quo?
Weren’t they worried about the nuclear football?
Couldn’t they see that Trump just cared about himself?

An “old” Italian-American saying.

Is America mainly a nation of gamblers?
I guess that would make sense.
Most of our ancestors—at least the ones who came here willingly—gambled with their lives as they made their way to these shores.
They gambled that the ads published in European newspapers (promising streets paved with gold) would be accurate.
They gambled on surviving, as they traveled from Boston to California in wagon trains.
Men and women gambled that they wouldn’t die of diphtheria, or dysentery, or scarlet fever.
Women gambled that they wouldn’t die in childbirth, or starve to death. 

Why are Canadians not gamblers?
Why are they not as divided, and not as violent, as Americans?
Is it because most of their population came to Canada for safety, and for land?
Is it because Canada’s population is so much smaller in proportion to its’ land mass?
Is it because the Canadian climate is colder?
Is it because Canadians are more likely to be bilingual?
(The official languages of Canada are English and French.)

Is Canada so different from the US because Canada has never been dependent on slavery, and the tainted wealth that slavery brought?
Upper Canada ended slavery in 1793.
It’s estimated that there were only about 4,000 African slaves in Canada, when Canadian slavery was totally abolished in 1834. 

Volume 5 of the 1997 Collier’s Encyclopedia (page 268, in the “Canada” article) postulates that: “Canadians have shown a persistent desire to not become Americans.”
While Americans talk about being “a melting pot,” many Canadians have viewed their country as “a mosaic.”
Canadian citizens (except Inuits, and other native groups) have been encouraged to keep their ethnic individuality.
I much prefer the concept of a mosaic, over that of a melting pot.

Of course, like all countries, Canada has not been free of ethnic conflicts, or of racism.
Native groups have been oppressed and discriminated against.
In the 1990’s, French-Canadian citizens still tended to make less money than non-French-Canadian citizens.
Although most Canadians consider themselves “middle-class,” there are still class divisions, as well as a gap between the rich and the poor.

Americans have long been different from Canadians, however, in that Americans tend to be more materialistic, more violent, and “better” risk-takers.

Although the giant lumberjack, Paul Bunyan, is part of both American and Canadian folklore, he originated in Canada.

Another difference between the U.S. and Canada is that there were no “heroic thieves” (like Billy the Kid, and the Sundance Kid), or a “Wild West,” in the Canadian national mythology.
Instead, Canada was the place where Paul Bunyan was born, and wild creatures like Sasquatch or Wendigo roamed the forests.

The question comes down to this: Are Canadians generally a touch more conservative, less materialistic, and less “sensation-seeking,” than Americans?

* The Second Civil War (the 1997 HBO film), is close in title (at least) to Alex Garland’s 2024 thriller Civil War, that starred Kristen Dunst. Although the two films have a few things in common, they are polar opposites in terms of sensibility. Both films are about another Civil War, but in the current time period. Both films also feature news journalists (and a U.S. President) as main characters.

Imperfect Fathers and del Toro’s Frankenstein

Baron Frankenstein (Charles Dance, left) talks to his son, Victor, in del Toro’s Frankenstein.

Unless you want to be spoiled, don’t read these musings until you’ve seen Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.
This memorandum contains spoilers.

With the possible exception of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994), Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the closest movie to Mary Shelley’s novel than any of the other Frankenstein films.*
The “Frankenstein” 2011 play (performed with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, switching between Victor Frankenstein and his “creature”) follows the Shelley novel more closely than either film.
However, that’s a play that was filmed, not a movie.

Essentially, Branagh brought into his story the creation of a female “creature,” and got further away from the original story.
On the other hand, del Toro brought in an additional character (Harlander), plus he changed the main female character Elizabeth.
(Harlander fills in partly for the Henry Clerval character (in the novel); however, while Clerval was the voice of love and sanity, Harlander portrays a purely materialistic point of view.)
Del Toro’s mysterious Elizabeth becomes the only idealistic figure in the del Toro film, but her motivations are unclear.

I loved the del Toro film.
However, it didn’t hit me in the gut as much as my two favorite del Toro films, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.
I didn’t identify with Elizabeth in Frankenstein, as I identified with Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, or Elisa in The Shape of Water.
Instead, if I identified with anyone, it was with the creature.

Del Toro’s very tall creature (Jacob Elordi) in his 2025 Frankenstein.

Perhaps, Frankenstein is more a man’s film, than a woman’s film.
It’s mainly about two males, their relationships with their father-figures, and a battle against materialism.
It's also more of an action film.

Certainly, del Toro’s creature (Jacob Elordi) is more of a “superman” than Branagh’s creature (Robert De Niro), or the Universal Frankenstein (Boris Karloff), was.
The skin of del Toro’s creature heals miraculously after being shot.
He “dies,” and then recovers, at least twice.
He seems to have the strength of fifty men.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein differs from Mary Shelley’s novel, in that Victor Frankenstein’s father (Charles Dance) is a benign presence in the novel, but a malignant presence in the film.
In the novel, Victor’s father is not interested in science, and is a loving mate to his wife.
In the film, however, his father is a physician obsessed with his career.
Another older “father” figure (Harlander, played by Christoph Waltz) is invented for the film, in order to provide funds for Victor’s experiments, and to portray the purely materialistic viewpoint. 

Was Victor (Oscar Isaac) a “bad father” to his creation because he was badly parented by the males in his life?
The creature is lucky enough to find a more caring father (than Victor had), in the person of the blind man (David Bradley) in the forest.
Learning from the blind man is how the creature begins to communicate with others, and to say more than the two words “Victor” and “Elizabeth.”

The creature, as drawn in the Bernie Wrightson “Frankenstein” graphic novel.

In terms of looks, the creature resembles what Mary Shelley described in her novel, and the work of artist Bernie Wrightson (who del Toro thanks in the end credits).
Wrightson (1948-2017), one of the creators of “Swamp Thing,” drew the creature in his 1983 “Frankenstein” graphic novel.
The Wrightson drawings make the creature look a bit more cadaver-like, than the film does.

Another significant difference between the book and the film is the character of Elizabeth.
In Shelley’s novel, Elizabeth is a foster sister who Victor grew up with.
(In the novel, Victor describes his adopted sister Elizabeth as “the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures.”)
In del Toro’s film, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is a wealthy stranger betrothed to Victor’s younger brother (William, played by Felix Kammerer), plus she’s Harlander’s niece.

Elisa (Sally Hawkins, left) with the amphibian man (Doug Jones) in The Shape of Water.

Unlike the Elizabeth in the novel, del Toro’s Elizabeth is enraptured by the strangeness of Victor’s creature as soon as she sees him.
Her attraction to the creature brings up memories of Elisa’s fascination with the amphibian man in The Shape of Water.

I didn’t realize (until I read the end credits), that Mia Goth played both Victor’s mother Claire (in a dark wig), and Elizabeth (in a red wig).
Mia Goth is quite different in the two roles.
As Claire, she’s a fragile woman, devoted to her son, and afraid of her husband.
As Elizabeth, she’s a much more exotic female, newly released from a convent, independent, and (although she’s religious) very interested in the sciences.

Although del Toro’s creature is as full of rage as Shelley’s creature in the novel, he does not kill except to defend himself.
He doesn’t commit the sin of raping or killing Elizabeth.
He doesn’t kill an innocent child.
He doesn’t plant evidence (a necklace) pointing toward another killer for a murder that he committed. He does cause Victor Frankenstein’s death, but (at the end of the film), he’s as filled with remorse, as the creature is in Mary Shelley’s novel.
After all, Victor is the creature’s foster father.

*I’ve also written about Roger Corman’s Frankenstein film, in three memorandums: “Must Knowledge Lead to Progress? Part I,” “Must Knowledge Lead to Progress? Part 2,” and “Losing a Dime Making a ‘Message’ Film.”

Alien Government

In Alien: Earth, Prodigy leader Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and Weyland-Yutani leader Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) face off when Boy Kavalier hijacks a Weyland-Yutani spaceship filled with alien species.

On Alien: Earth (Hulu), which just ended on a cliff-hanger, some of the most interesting plot lines involve the companies who run the Earth in 2120 (about a hundred years in the future).
In the world of Alien: Earth, the planet is controlled by five mega corporations, just as it was run by all-powerful Weyland-Yutani in 1979’s Alien, 1986’s Aliens, and 2024’s Alien: Romulus.

In the Alien: Earth universe, three other companies are mentioned (Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold).
However, the two companies featured in the series, are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani.
Prodigy Corporation controls Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Weyland-Yutani owns North and South America (plus planets Mars and Saturn).
These companies run the planet, and control all humanity.
There are no governments.
Regular people have no guaranteed rights.
The only goals are more profit, and power, for the companies.

Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is the owner of Prodigy.
Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) runs Weyland-Yutani.
They each are surrounded by servants (both real humans, and artificial beings), who obey (or seem to obey?) their whims.
In the opening crawl, for Alien: Earth, artificial beings are listed as three types: Cyborgs, Synths, and Hybrids.

Medic Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther) wants to go back to school, and become a doctor. However, Prodigy Corporation has other ideas. Joe is forced to continue his work contract, and remain in a military search and rescue team.

Living conditions on Earth are extremely depressing.
There seems to be a wide division between the rich and the poor.
The wealthy elite live in giant sky-scrapers where they enjoy decadent parties.
The worker class lives in tiny slum apartments that don’t appear to have kitchens.
In episode 2 of Alien: Earth, a group of very wealthy people are having a costume party.
(The party was organized to celebrate the purchase of a famous baseball once thrown by Reggie Jackson in 1977.)
In that same city, members of the military live in drab, dark spaces with few amenities, and hang out together on a roof-top. 

As I watched the series, I wondered if Alien: Earth is the future that the leaders of Russia and America have in mind for earth’s peoples.
Do they really desire a world in which only the oligarchs have autonomy, and in which most humans are subservient to them?

250 years after 1776, does the Right want us to go back to a version of North America (the 1600’s?) run by the Company of New France, the Dutch West India Company, Virginia Company of London, The Plymouth Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company?
George III, and the British government, took over the rule of the thirteen colonies when private companies weren’t able to give British royalty the tax profits that they expected.

Star Fleet headquarters in San Francisco as seen in Star Trek from Star Trek: the Next Generation onward.

In 1966, the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) told corporate sponsors that his show would be “Wagon Train in space.”
However, what he didn’t tell sponsors is that he envisioned an Earth in which class divisions, and racial divisions, were eradicated!
In the Star Trek world, the people of earth voted for a President.
It was a democratic (small D) society. 

Thinking back, many of Roddenberry’s scripts were very “woke.”
Perhaps, that’s why the show was cancelled after three seasons.
After Roddenberry died (in 1991), new show-runners introduced the Black Ops group Section-31, and major wars against alien races, to the Star Trek canon.

Captain Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) and Dr. Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodriquez) are caught up in an ICE raid (in an alternate time-line's 2024), in the season 2 “Watcher” episode of Star Trek: Picard.

In season 2, of Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023), Admiral Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds himself transported to an alternate time-line by the godlike alien Q (John de Lancie).
In one time-line, Earth is under a Fascist government that uses alien races (like Vulcans and Klingons) as slave laborers.
Season 2 tells the story of Picard, and his team, fighting to prevent this horrible time-line from beginning by traveling back to 2024.

While Earth in the Star Trek universe is a utopia, the Alien universe can best be described as dystopian: “an imagined state in which there is great suffering and injustice.”

In the first Alien film, Ash (Ian Holm), the only artificial being in the Nostromo crew, is beheaded by Parker.

It’s clear, in the first Alien (1979), that the Nostromo crew is not valued by Weyland-Yutani.
When they learn that their cargo ship is being diverted to investigate a mysterious transmission, the crew has no say in the matter.
They must check out the alien signal, or lose their salaries (or shares).
Later, Ash (the great Ian Holm) is revealed as an android.
Ash has obviously been placed on the Nostromo to make sure that profit is valued over human life.
Similarly, in Alien: Earth, the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) chooses loyalty to Weyland-Yutani, and the transport of his dangerous cargo, over the lives of his crew mates.

The modified cargo containers that housed the “colonist/workers” in 2024’s Alien: Romulus.

In Alien: Romulus (2024), the young mine workers (who we meet at the beginning of the film) are being forced to extend their work contracts by Weyland-Yutani.
It seems that the teenage “colonists” are trapped in an indentured servant situation.
They work under brutal conditions, and live in squalid, modified cargo containers.
Many of the parents (who brought them to planet LV-410), have already died from overwork and a toxic environment.
The older workers died, just as generations of immigrants died, building the United States of America.

Looking at world events, I guess that the future described in the Alien stories, is a lot more likely than the future described in the Star Trek stories.
Let’s pray that this isn’t the case.

In 1381, Wat Tyler (1341-1381), leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, demanded of King Richard II, that all hierarchy be abolished (except for the king’s lordship), and that serfdom be abolished in England.
The 14-year-old King agreed to Tyler’s arguments, but soon after, Wat Tyler was beheaded, and all agreements were rescinded.
People have fought for basic rights, and an end to hierarchy, for a very very long time.
How far have we really gotten in ending hierarchy?

Around 550 years later, on February 20, 1933, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, informed a group of 25 German industrial leaders that: “We are about to hold the last election. Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”*
Does American society believe in continuing our democratic system?
Can a democracy be maintained?
How much democracy will be permitted by our AI, and human, overlords?

*Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923-1941, by Susan Ronald, page 84 (2023, St. Martin’s Publishing group, Macmillan).

The Little Villains Call’d the Smallpox

Dr. Edward Jenner vaccinating an adult, from Real Heroes Comics, Issue 15, page 31.

The history of vaccination is quite interesting.*
Many of us have read that British physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823), vaccinated people in the late 1700s.
However, smallpox vaccination has a long history, before 1796.
Dr. Jenner was responsible for refining the process (using cowpox pus instead of smallpox pus) so that people wouldn’t die, or become very ill, after a smallpox vaccination.

A Chinese man with pustules, and variolation (the practice of inoculating people with smallpox pus).

The first reference to smallpox inoculation (1549), in medical literature, was made by Chinese pediatrician Wan Quan (1499-1582). Variolation (the practice of inoculating people with smallpox pus) became common place in China in the late 1500’s.
The technique had a mortality rate as high as one death per thousand patients, but patients who under went it were immune to smallpox.
Since smallpox itself had a 20-30% mortality rate, patients were willing to undergo the procedure.
Variolation spread to Africa, and parts of Europe.

Onesimus explained the practice of smallpox vaccination to Cotton Mather.

Around 1706, Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather (a Harvard graduate) learned of vaccination from one of his slaves, a man called Onesimus.
Onesimus had been vaccinated in Africa, years before he was brought to America, and enslaved.
Mather went on to promote vaccination during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721-1722.
(Mather finally released Onesimus from slavery in 1716.)
You can read the full comic strip that I excerpted HERE!

In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) introduced the idea of smallpox vaccination to the British royalty.
Lady Montagu was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey.
That is where she had learned about inoculations.
Montagu had both of her own children vaccinated against smallpox, and encouraged the royal family to do the same.

The cover of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, by Elizabeth A. Fenn (published in 2001).

In 1777, General George Washington ordered that the entire Continental Army be inoculated, because of the 1775-1782 smallpox epidemic during the Revolutionary War.
General Washington had had a mild case of smallpox in 1751, so he was already immune.

As I learned in Dearest Friend (a biography of First Lady Abigail Adams by Lynne Withey), the entire John Adams family underwent smallpox inoculations.
John Adams (the second U.S. President) was inoculated in 1763, before he married Abigail.
In a letter to his fiancé, he joked that he:

must permit the little Villains call’d the small Pox to have their Feast this Spring. [colonial-era spelling, and capitalization]

Mrs. Adams, and several of the Adams children, were inoculated in 1775.
This procedure usually took at least six to seven weeks.
First, the secluded patients would take various debilitating medications (laxatives and diuretics), preparing themselves for inoculation.
Then, they’d be infected with the virus, and (hopefully) merely experience a mild form of the disease.
Two of the Adams children became dangerously ill, but that was common at the time.

British DVD cover from 80,000 Suspects (1963) a British film about a smallpox epidemic in the city of Bath.

The American Medical Association didn’t push for compulsory smallpox vaccination until 1899.
Some American citizens did rebel.
In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Jacobson vs Massachusetts, and ruled that it was within the authority of local governments to make vaccination requirements of their citizens, and to levy fines against those who resisted.
There were still smallpox outbreaks around the world, as late as the 1970’s.

The “Vaccination and Immunization” article, in volume 23 of Collier’s Encyclopedia, points out that no vaccine is 100% effective.
Factors like age, nutritional status, and overall immunologic competence can make a vaccine much less effective.
Vaccinations, like medicines, act differently on different people, and medical studies try to determine what’s what.
There can also be side effects with vaccination, sometimes serious side effects.
However, just because vaccines don’t work 100% of the time, or occasionally cause side effects, doesn’t indicate that we should rid ourselves of vaccines.
Isn’t that just throwing the baby out with the bath water?

Still from The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 movie, in which public health doctors seek a diamond-smuggler spreading smallpox.

On September 17, 2025, Senator Rand Paul interrogated former CDC Director Susan Monarez, PhD, about the COVID-19 vaccine.
They argued whether the vaccine reduces hospitalization for children under 18, and whether the CDC should change recommendations for infants under six months old.
Ms. Monarez was appearing before the Senate, because in August of 2025, she had been fired for refusing to loyally rubber stamp all of RFK Jr’s vaccine policies, sight unseen!

This change in attitude toward vaccination, from 1776 to 2025, is fascinating.
250 years ago, John Adams, his family, and the entire colonial army, took a risk, so they would not live in fear of those “little villains call’d the smallpox.”
People of the time joked about “the smallpox,” even though they greatly feared it.
Today, around 23% of Americans don’t trust scientists as a group (Pew Research Center).
Some say that it isn’t enough if a vaccine just minimizes their disease symptoms.
Any vaccine has to be “perfect,” and work in every case, for them to roll up their sleeves.
In 1776, smallpox vaccination was a long risky process.
Today, some folks believe that one almost risk-free injection is an imposition on their freedom.

*Most, but not all, facts pertaining to vaccination are taken from the “Vaccination and Immunization” article in volume 23 of Collier’s Encyclopedia. Fun fact that I didn’t find in Collier’s, but did discover in the above comic book about Onesimus: Ben Franklin was against smallpox inoculation in his youth. However, he accepted its’ usefulness when he reached adulthood.

A Good Use for Artificial Intelligence?

In the 1967 film, To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an idealistic high school teacher who guided rowdy teen-agers living in a London East end slum.

Not surprisingly, for something so experimental, Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesn’t always do a good job.
According to Google: “Food Network developed a skill for Alexa-enabled devices, providing show information, schedules, and featured recipes.”
(That sentence doesn’t even make sense!)
However, as a result of AI, the recipes (and episodes) have become much harder to locate on the Food Network.
Also, the recipe PDFs are sometimes maddeningly incomplete because of formatting problems!
AI obviously needs a lot of oversight!

In another context, could AI do a better job than human H.R. personnel, to hire skilled professionals, than it does in monitoring websites like the Food Network?

In the United States, it’s estimated that black people earn (on average) at least 16% less during their lifetimes than white people do.
All ethic varieties of women earn (on average), 18% less than all ethnic varieties of men.

During the 1960’s, Bahamian-American actor Sidney Poitier starred in films in which he portrayed a police detective (In the Heat of the Night); a physician (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner); and an educator (To Sir, With Love).
A section in the book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (published in 1973), by Donald Bogle, calls Poitier a “Hero for an Integrationist Age,” and notes:

In all his films he is educated and intelligent. He spoke proper English, dressed conservatively, and had the best of table manners. For the mass white audience, Sidney Poitier was a black man who had met their standards. [Italics mine.]

Sidney Poitier films, up until the 1970’s,* were propaganda.
The studio goal was to convince Middle America to accept black men as policemen, teachers, and doctors, just as long as they weren’t too black.

In the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep played demanding Miranda Priestly (left), editor of one of the world’s most prestigious fashion magazines.

Stanley Tucci played Nigel (right), the magazine Art Director.

As early as the 1940s (when the majority of women still were stuck in low level jobs, or kept as “mere housewives”), movie audiences began to see movies in which actresses portrayed powerful business women.
The list includes Mildred Pierce (1945), Working Girl (1988), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and The Proposal (2009).
In all of these films, the lead actress is a skilled female business woman.
However, these high-power women are always portrayed as far from successful in their private lives.

These films were movie studio propaganda.
The goal was to convince Middle America that it’s impossible to earn success as a business woman, and also be a successful wife and mother.

In the 2024 television comedy, St. Denis Medical, Joyce (the Executive Director of the hospital) is played by Wendi McLendon-Covy.

In the current TV comedy, St. Denis Medical, the focus is placed on female characters unable to enjoy a good life-work balance, more than on male medical professionals having this problem.
Wendi McLendon-Covey plays Joyce, the driven hospital executive director whose only female “friends” are drug company reps.
Allison Tolman plays Alex, who struggles with combining life as a workaholic supervising nurse, with being a wife and mother.
At one point in the storyline, Alex refuses her husband’s wish to have another child, and they opt for a vasectomy.

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not judging St Denis Medical.
I love this mockumentary series, and I’m looking forward to the second season.
I’m not criticizing the show. I’m merely pointing out a viewpoint about social “norms.”

For a long time, Big Business has decreed that “alpha” men (micro-managers, screamers, attention hogs) were “ideal” managers.
Women have often imitated their alpha male mentors.
In recent years, this trend has shifted a bit.
Business books like Blind Spots, and Dare to Lead, offer the “new” theory that a “softer” form of management (empathetic, cooperative, emotionally intelligent) is a much more successful strategy in dealing with people.

I just finished Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass (2025) by Ramin Setoodeh.
It’s very clear, in this book, that the people who “won” were the candidates who pleased Donald Trump best.
It wasn’t a matter of how good their ideas were, or how skilled they were as business people.
It was just a matter of how much Mr. Trump liked them.

During the fourth season, Trump attempted to persuade the first black male winner (Randal Pinkett) to “share his victory” with a white female contestant.
To Trump’s immense surprise, the black Rhodes scholar refused to accept Mr. Trump’s “script change.” Despite winning the prize, and later working for Trump for a year, Pinkett was never wholly in Trump’s good graces again (because he had acted against the “Big Man’s” wishes).

In Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier played a tough wagon master named Buck.

Poitier also directed the 1972 film.

Essentially, the theme of The Apprentice TV show (2004-2017) was that American Big Business, is a land of dominance, with people at the top lording over others, and terrorizing their subordinates.
(The Apprentice shows us the way Donald Trump wishes to run this country, not as a public servant, but as a CEO from another era.)

The goal of DEI in American business was to train employees, and encourage diversity in the workplace.
However, the dirty little secret is that this “bottom-up approach” didn’t create much real change.
Where real change is needed is top-down.
How do you convince department heads, to evaluate people based solely on their skill sets: not their skin color, not their gender, who they know, or how “well” they dress?

What would happen if we used a well-programmed AI (not Grok!) to hire employees, and to evaluate the salaries at companies?
This AI would just use information about skill sets and education levels, and not consider gender, or ethnic heritage.
Would we soon discover that some people were badly underpaid, while others were vastly over paid?
Would it quickly become apparent that giant disparities are based on gender, and whether employees are non-white?

Think of AI as a tool for improving fairness.
AI could tell the company where it had made mistakes, and then the company would make adjustments accordingly.
It might be a problem (at first) to reduce the out of whack salaries of CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, and Vice Presidents, but regular productive employees would earn a lot more.
Perhaps, if AI was allowed to make all hiring and salary decisions, companies would make less mistakes, as the years went on.

In the “The Ultimate Computer” episode of the original Star Trek, William Marshall played Daystrom, a brilliant scientist who has created a computer that can make its’ own decisions.

Of course, it all boils down to how AI is programmed.
We’ve all learned from Elon Musk’s Grok, “The Ultimate Computer” (Season 2; episode 24) episode of Star Trek, and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), how AI can be extremely destructive, especially when Ai is programed too closely to a human personality.

*During the 1970’s, Sidney Poitier began to branch out from playing “perfect” role models. He starred in such films as Buck and the Preacher (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), and A Piece of the Action (1977).

Working for the Common Good

During Al Capone’s reign in Chicago, he was known for being generous to the poor by setting up soup kitchens.

In Chapter One of Al Capone’s Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago During Prohibition, author John J. Binder, offers the opinion that some immigrants to Chicago:

Brought with them a belief . . . that the system was there to be exploited by individuals for their personal gain as opposed to the idea that individuals worked for the common good. [Italics mine.]

Binder was trying to put the Chicago “Beer Wars” into context.
He was explaining why immigrants from the semi-feudal worlds of Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Russia, worked to exploit American society: some by building legal businesses, and others by building illegal businesses.
(Based on my own family history, I’m quite sure that many Italian-Americans were a lot more idealistic citizens than Binder imagined.)

In the conclusion of his book, Binder gives Capone an A minus, for his work as a professional gangster.
These were his reasons for this “less than perfect” grade:

He had strong business sense and excellent martial skills . . . However, his public behavior . . .put him [too much] in the spotlight” and he should have filed his income tax returns.

A portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) by George Catlin, after a painting by Thomas Sully.

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), as a thinker, was more concerned about “the Common Good” than many of the other Founding Fathers.
Jefferson was the son of a landowner, and he owned slaves throughout his life.
However, he did believe in Universal Suffrage, and in the ideals of Democracy (at least in theory).
He certainly didn’t believe in a “divine right” for English men, then only one-third of the population!
Jefferson also didn’t believe that the American system of slavery would continue many generations after his death.
(He left that disquieting problem for future generations to contend with.)

In 1813, idealist Jefferson wrote to John Adams (1735-1826) that Europe’s class system of “rank, birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance.”*

A few days before he died (in 1826), Jefferson wrote: 

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately. . .*

Despite Jefferson’s materialism, he truly believed that only the American people could preserve our Democratic system.
He stipulated that our nation must become better educated, and more guided by the sciences.
(If this were not so, I think he feared that eventually we would lose our Democracy.)

A portrait of Abigail Adams by Jane Stuart (after Gilbert Stuart, circa 1800).

I just finished the biography Dearest Friend A Life of Abigail Adams (published in 1981) by Lynne Withey.
It’s about the wife of the nation’s first Vice President and second President, John Adams.
In Dearest Friend, I learned that Mr. and Mrs. John Adams (a couple who disliked the whole idea of political parties) switched from being Federalists to being Republicans, during their lifetimes.
Here’s a section:

Behind her growing conservatism was a profound distrust of the ordinary man or woman. Such people, she believed, were incapable of thinking rationally about important issues but would follow a charismatic leader blindly and could easily be duped by propaganda.

A deep materialism, and the goal of the “Common Good,” have been at war in the U.S. since its’ inception.
After the Revolutionary War, many of the elite colonialists fled to Canada.
When framing the Federal Government, the Founding Fathers bowed to the financial interests of the big plantation owners, and counted blacks as 5/8ths of a human being (for mainly financial reasons).
After the Civil War, many plantation owners received $300 payments, but only a few blacks received forty acres and a mule.
Since the beginning of this country, some Americans have considered true Democracy to be just a pipe dream, not really worth working on.

A scene from The Migrants, a 1974 TV movie about migratory farm workers, that starred Cloris Leachman (right) and Lisa Lucas (left).

When studying U.S. history, it’s evident that the English elite exploited both the non-English, and the English plebs, as North America was settled.
During the 1600s and 1700s, wild forests were farmed (and Native Americans murdered) through the use of slaves, English and Irish convicts, and the indentured servant system.
During the 1800s and 1900s, immigrants from Europe, and Asia, were used to build our cities and railroads, as well as staff our mines and factories.
A few immigrants (like Andrew Carnegie) became titans of industry, but most first-generation Americans worked long hours doing manual labor, in hopes that some of their children would eventually survive existence in the underclass.

The book Round Trip to American describes how many immigrants came to the U.S. for a while, found it not to their liking, and returned to their home countries (Europe or Asia).
Some migrants returned to Europe and Asia, and transformed their home countries into modern societies.

The massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming, drawn by Lieutenant C.A. Booth. 7th U.S. Infantry. White miners slaughtered Chinese miners.

Trump talks about saving America by deporting immigrants, but his idea is not based on logic, or facts.
By deporting so many hard-working immigrants, he’s just disrupting profitable American companies.
Undocumented immigrants typically pay into the Social Security system, but then get nothing back, helping to keep the system solvent.
Throughout the history of this country, immigrants have always started more new businesses than the U.S. born.
Immigrants spend money on food and housing, increasing consumer spending.
Financially speaking, deporting immigrants by the thousands, is not a good move for the U.S. economy.

I guess that our relationship to the Constitution, and Democracy, is a bit like our relationship to marriage.
Some men (or women) vow never to commit the sin of adultery during the wedding ceremony.
A few years later, however, “the heart wants what it wants” and they are unfaithful to their wives (or husbands).

Charles H Bennett’s illustration of a coalman confronting a chimney sweep: “the pot calling the kettle black.”

I know that the folks who back Trump are hypersensitive about this idea of the Common Good.
Kevin Roberts (President of the Heritage Foundation) mischaracterizes Lefties (in Project 2025), saying that “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal. They believe they are superior.”
He mistakes idealism for self-righteousness.

Trump, and his supporters, swear that they believe in the Democratic system of government, and that the Left must “hate America.”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black.
Without a concern for the Common Good, Democracy will fail.

*Both of the Jefferson quotes are taken from Thomas Jefferson on Democracy, selected and arranged by Saul K Padover, Penguin, 1939. 

An Old Joke

Vincent Van Gogh painted his vision of The Good Samaritan in 1890.

There’s an old joke about Heaven and Hell.
I’ve no idea where this joke came from, or how old it is.

Here’s the way it goes:

Heaven is where the Italians cook, the Germans organize, the French are the lovers, and the English make the rules.

Hell is where the Germans are the lovers, the English cook, the Italians organize, and the French make the rules.

The above “joke” is based on ethnic stereotypes, that were once very common.
My parents’ generation tended to think in these ways, much more than baby-boomers do.
I'm pretty sure that Millennials, GenZ, or GenXers, have never even heard of European stereotypes.
However, it seems that prejudices against people who are “different,” is a part of human nature.

Remember the parable about the “Good Samaritan?”
The reason why Jesus told the story of a Samaritan caring for a stranger left for dead, was because Samaritans were not generally viewed as “good.”
In fact, they were considered enemies* of the Jews.
That was the point!

It’s fairly good-humored to say that Hell is where the main punishments are enduring clumsy German lovers, bland English food, and a badly-run society, while Heaven is where we’d enjoy tasty Italian food, sensual French lovers, and an orderly society.
No group is pointed out as being irreparably stupid in the above joke.
Instead, each nationality is portrayed as being skilled in some ways, but not in others.

Cover of Memoires by Josephine Baker, first published in French in 1949, but not translated into English until 2025.

I recently read Fearless and Free, the “memoir” of the great entertainer Josephine Baker (1906-1975), a book that’s recently been translated into English, after being published in French just after World War II.
I put the word “memoir” into quotes, because the book was mostly written by French journalist Marcel Sauvage (1895-1988).
Sauvage began to interview Josephine Baker when she was a young performer, recently arrived in France.
Their last interviews happened when she was a famous star, nearly twenty years later.
The duo published the interviews, as Memoires, in 1949.

Let’s just be accurate, and say that Josephine Baker didn’t tell Marcel Sauvage everything, and leave it at that.
Why would you tell a journalist all your secrets?
I know that I wouldn’t.
(Actress Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) didn’t even give journalists her correct birthday!)

Chapter Three of Fearless and Free covers the two years (from 1928 to 1930), when Baker toured in over 25 countries, in Europe and the Americas.
When Josephine Baker described the audiences, she tended to “generalize” about each nationality, just as my mom (born in the early 1920’s) often did.
Josephine found Dutch people “serious and rosy,” and Danes to be “very polite.”
She was especially interested in trying out foreign cuisines.
However, she seemed to have a sensitive stomach.

The book Fearless and Free touches on some of Josephine Baker’s World War II experiences, when she was: a decorated spy for the French resistance, nursed Allied soldiers in hospitals, and sang and danced for the troops.

A January 2025 New York Times review had some problems with this book, specifically, the section in which Josephine Baker (during a visit to Harlem, in the late 1940’s) described Jewish-American landlords mistreating their black Harlem tenants.
In the forward of the book, American author Ijeoma Oluo says that she wishes that eventually “Baker was able to find more nuanced answers as to why she witnessed what she witnessed in New York.”

Josephine Baker with some of her Rainbow Tribe.

Baker didn’t begin adopting children, and forming “The Rainbow Tribe” until 1950, a year after Memoires was published.
The purpose of her adopting more than a dozen children was to prove that all people could live together peacefully.
Despite the fact that she had become a Roman Catholic, Baker made a point of not changing the religions of any of her children.

Josephine Baker faced despair (in Memoires) when she realized how very little the U.S. had changed during the twelve years she had become an international star.
In 1948, when she and her husband (French composer, Jo Bouillon) visited New York city, they assumed that they could sleep in a high-quality hotel, and travel down to the visit Josephine Baker’s mother in a first-class train car.
Well, they were wrong!
One Manhattan hotel after another used subtle, and not so subtle, means to force them to leave.
This chapter gives is a blow-by-blow description of how even well-to-do blacks were treated in Northern cities.

Another book on my shelves is The Clumsiest People in Europe, or Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, by Todd Pruzan and Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer.
Mrs. Mortimer (1802-1878) wrote books for children, mainly about the peoples of the world, that were published in 1849.
The Todd Pruzan book is derived from several of Mrs. Mortimer’s books; Todd Pruzan’s title is taken from Mrs. Mortimer’s view of the Portuguese in her book The Countries of Europe Described.
(An illustration from his, and her book, appears below.)

The Countries of Europe Described (1849), by Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, says that “No people in Europe are as clumsy . . . as the Portuguese,” pointing out Portuguese lack of skill in making boxes, carts, and keys.

Mrs. Mortimer had some appalling ideas about people in various countries and regions.
She was firmly convinced that Spaniards were cruel (mainly because of bull-fighting), and that Welsh people kept dirty houses.
However, she also decried the mistreatment of blacks in the U.S., twenty years before the Civil War:

There are no slaves in the Northern States, but there are many blacks there; and perhaps you think they are kindly treated as they are not slaves. Far from it. They are not beaten, it is true, but they are despised and insulted in every possible way. Is not this very wicked? Merely because they have a black skin.

Leonard Joseph Marx (1887-1961), one of the Marx Brothers, played “Chico,” an unscrupulous Italian immigrant from Naples. Typically, he pointed his index finger at the piano, as if shooting a gun.

Today we live in an era when we don’t hear Polish jokes.
However, joking about Italian-Americans as criminals, or as lower class, is as safe a gambit as it was in the days of the Marx Brothers.
(The Marx Brothers was a famous comedy group that performed in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in 14 films.)
I guess that it’s fine to say that you probably carry a knife if you have an Italian accent, but no longer acceptable to say that you’re stupid if you have a Polish accent.

The key words are “Americanization” and “hyphenation.”
This is why so many Italian-Americans changed their surnames (from Martino to Martin, and their first names from Giuseppe to Joe).
Do WASPs think it’s OK for immigrants to eat their own food, and enjoy their own culture, only as long as they accept that America is an Anglo-Saxon society, not a nation of equals?

*According to Wikipedia, as of 2024, there were only about 900 Samaritans left in the world. The main theological disagreement between Samaritans and Judaism, is over whether the Temple Mount, or Mount Gerizim, is the world’s holiest site.

Mudsills* vs Blue Bloods

Trump has set up an altar of sorts in the Oval Office (2025).

There is a strong class system in the United States, and a strong prejudice encouraging male Americans of Northern European descent, especially those of British descent, to be the powerful ones on top.
That’s why—when we’ve “cast” candidates for the role of U.S. President (by voting for them)—they’ve been male, and had at least one parent who was of Northern European descent.

Both the Right, and the Left, seem to be fighting against the class system.
Who knew that when Graydon Carter (and Spy Magazine) called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the 80’s they’d help to bring a crass real estate developer into the White House?
Who knew that when candidate Kamala Harris (in her run for the presidency) called for more people to obtain college degrees, less citizens would come out to vote?

Last year, I read Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, by British author Kevin Siena.
This book reveals the English perspective on Britain’s colonization of North America.
The 2019 book explains how the British upper crust dealt with the British, Irish and Scottish vagrants who wandered the cities and countryside.
During the 1700s, the government essentially used vagrants to populate the 13 colonies, and thereby reduce the prison population.
(It wasn’t until the 1840s that British intellectuals began to deal seriously with the British class system. Let’s just say real social change is taking a while.)

Tattooed Barbie (2011). Today, around 33% of US adults are inked.

I just finished White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.
This 2016 book describes how the class structure in the U.S. has kept its’ Anglo-Saxon plebs under control, from colonial times through this century.

I learned from these two books that it wasn’t just prejudice against black and brown people, that fed the class system in Europe.
For centuries, the European elite believed that there were two types of people—the people of “good blood,” and the people of “bad blood”—and sometimes people with “bad blood” could look similar to you.
Giving alms boxes to the poor at Christmas was one thing.
Associating with them, was quite another.
Obviously, this attitude toward people who didn’t own property carried over to the New World.

Trump being interviewed while sitting in a garbage truck (2024).

Class-conscious Republicans have elevated Trump, possibly because they identify with him?
In the last days of the 2024 campaign, this all became clearer when it seemed each side was talking about the opposing side as “garbage.”
MAGA has chosen Trump to fight against “educated elitists” who they assume look down on them.
The Left dislikes Trump because he’s acting against their cherished fantasy that America is a classless melting pot.
It’s a big mess of people—sometimes ones who are essentially in agreement—fighting each other over scraps.

Some Right-wing pundits have acknowledged that Donald J. Trump isn’t a particularly good representative for the Anglo-Saxon “cause.”
Trump is one of our very few Presidents to be the child of immigrants.
(Andrew Jackson’s parents immigrated from Ireland in 1765.)
Trump’s mother was a servant girl, who immigrated as a teenager from Scotland.
His father was a first generation American.
Both of Fred Trump’s parents were born and raised in Germany.
When Trump chose to marry, his first, and his third, wives were both Slavic adult immigrants.
Only his middle wife (Marla Maples) was born in this country (the state of Georgia), and that was his shortest marriage.
(Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have been aghast! Is Donald Trump afraid of American DNA?)

Babs Johnson’s trailer in 1972’s Pink Flamingos. Middle-class couples sometimes drive their children past trailer parks, and tell them: “This is NOT where we want you to live. 

Unlike other “developed” nations, the citizens of the U.S. live in a country without a safety net.
It’s estimated that around 26 million Americans have experienced homelessness.
Since the 1970s, we’ve lived in a country in which it takes two salaries to buy a house and/or raise a family. 

In The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class—and How to Rescue Our Future, by Thom Hartmann, Hartmann describes how the 40th President, Ronald Reagan, began to destroy the middle class, from 1981-1989.
Back in the early 1980’s, the middle class controlled almost 22% of the nation’s wealth. Today, it controls under 5% of the wealth.

Since the late 1770’s, the United States has lied to the rest of the world, and portrayed itself as a classless society.
However, America has never been that.
The Englishmen who planned the colonization of North America saw this land as one giant workhouse where they could send their orphans, debtors, vagabonds, and convicts.
In Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, she mentions how the third US President Thomas Jefferson (in one of his public education proposals) planned that a few lucky scholars be “raked from the rubbish,” and be educated above grade school level.
(Jefferson used the word “rubbish” to describe poor men who didn’t own property.)

Urbanites confront hostile locals in 1972’s Deliverance.

When Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” he wasn’t speaking about everyone.
He was only referring to white property-owning males, preferably, Englishmen.
It’s a certainty that many of our Founding Fathers thought of poorer communities as “waste people.”
It wasn’t until 1830 that all states dropped owning property, as being necessary in order to vote.

The Civil War was about class, in addition to being about slaves.
Confederate leaders argued that the planter class was born to rule, and that Northerners were degenerates for not believing in their Southern “utopia.”
Southern plantation owners, newspaper editors, and politicians argued against the education of “offscourings,” “mudsills,” crackers, hillbillies, and swamp people.

The 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), explained the Southern Dixiecrat mentality to his White House staff:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Americans seem angry at the class system, but the Right, and the Left, are in conflict over solutions.
Right-wingers believe they are fighting the educated elite; they want white, property-owning Northern Europeans to be honored as those with the “best blood.”
Left-wingers are sick of the empty promises of DEI departments, and the Democratic Party; they want real change, not just adherence to slogans and political correctness.

*The term “mudsill” was coined by US Senator James Henry Hammond (according to Nancy Isenberg, on page 157 of White Trash) to describe the innate inferiority of Northerners, to the plantation elite of the South. According to Hammond (1807-1864), “mudsills” were the “urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, and unwashed immigrants” who infested Northern cities.