Author Archives: gail chumbley
The Little Things
If you love . . .
Protecting a dim-witted, would-be dictator from legal consequences,
Suppressing a woman’s right to self-actuation and privacy,
Expediting white, unqualified patriarchs to the Supreme Court,
Rendering the US Senate inert,
Legislating so the wealthy have no tax burden,
The open targeting of Americans of color to brutality and murder,
The whole-sale destruction of the planet, and the rape of natural resources
Abetting political misinformation and conspiracies through social media,
Targeting those of differing sexuality
Pushing religion into American government,
Aligning apportionment and voter suppression to disenfranchise the poor, and people of color,
Withholding health care to the few with means,
The wholesale flood of firearms into civilian hands,
Cruelty dispensed upon desperate immigrants,
Coddling of white offenders over those of color,
Predatory treatment of consumers,
Blocking legislation to meet the dangers of the above list, and otherwise accomplishing nothing,
Vote for today’s Republican Party
Gail Chumbley, frustrated American History Educator.
The Long Haul
After the 1929 Market Crash the world fell into regional, nearly feudal isolation, and international trade quickly dried up. America, too, focused inward largely due to the nation’s earlier participation in the Great War in Europe.
Across the Pacific the Japanese Empire aimed to take advantage of global disinterest promoting its own national interests. Sold to other Asian countries as the “Co-prosperity Sphere,” hyper-nationalistic Japan intended to expand across the region, especially toward vulnerable, resource rich China.
Great Britain as well, struggled alone in a financial malaise, as did the French across the channel; both nations saddled with debt to American banks from the previous war. Germany, the defeated nation struggled with their own war debt demanded by the British and French.
The shroud of economic depression hung like a millstone over Europe and the rest of the world.
As the financial, and political fallout grew wildly unstable, regimes hunkered down and hoped for better times. However the climate instead became chaotic, bringing anti-democratic demagogues to power.
The Italians were first, producing a Fascist strongman, Benito Mussolini. El Duce, as he was known suppressed political diversity, harnessed economic efficiency, and soon, like the Japanese, pursued colonial inroads into Libya, and later the conquest of Ethiopia.
Germany soon flirted with its own style of fascism, with a meaner, violent credo. In a reaction to impossible debts, and national pride, Adolf Hitler, a feckless dreamer, stood on beer hall tables, and passionately spoke of national betrayal. Hitler revealed his malicious intentions by blaming Bolsheviks, Capitalists, and Jews for the hated Armistice of 1918, and war debt owed to the Allies.
Yet America, unlike the rest of the world, clung with all their might to the national system of Constitutional norms. At the same time Germany elected Hitler in 1932, the U.S. found their champion in Franklin Roosevelt.
A popular Roosevelt Coalition steered the country through those hard years holding America together. FDR’s New Deal and Fireside Chats broadcasts kept at bay the fears of a nation. That’s not to say there weren’t kooks, to borrow Lindsay Graham’s phrase, but Americans faced the long haul together, believing better days had to be ahead.
The current President is no Franklin Roosevelt. And his autocratic tendencies, strongly echo those in the 1930’s.
In Project 2025 Trump aims to raise tariffs, shut down borders, all done to economically and politically isolate America. Using the same playbook of past despots specific groups are targeted as the problem. The guilty include immigrants, the LGBTQ community, liberals, educators, women, and the rule of law all in the crosshairs. All done to divert and distract while he lines his pockets.
And his tactics, so far have succeeded making half of the electorate real mean.
So, here is the question. Can America survive?
Can Americans remain bound to the framework of our 238 year old republic as it did in the Great Depression? Or will this nation forsake our financial, social, and political traditions and turn to petty retribution and scapegoating?
Will we, as a nation withdraw from the world and exchange our democracy for a strong man who insists he has all the answers?
The signs are clear. When this national crisis has passed will there be enough of us left who stood resolute for our democracy? That is the question of this historic moment.
Gail Chumbley is a writer and history educator.
Punishment
In 2017 American women and their male allies to the tune of a half-million, organized to protest the unfit incoming new president. This determined mass of citizens lent a true sense of history in the making as we marched that day as one.
In the days, weeks, and months following that massive protest women returned home energized. Women took action running for office, working for candidates, and by 2020 we all witnessed the election of the first female Vice President in history.
This change was as breathtaking as it was exciting. So it came as no surprise women would pay a steep price for such audacity.
At this writing American women stand on the precipice of losing fifty years of reproductive rights. And this retribution is especially nasty, a vicious retaliation on female medical and political autonomy. No quarter is given for rape, incest, or domestic violence. American women are fair game, once again, relegated as second-class-citizens.
In that light the striking down of Roe isn’t about abortion. Few women seek such a procedure, and even those numbers have continued to decline. The thrust is to punish and marginalize women standing up for equal protection under the law. There is clarity in this moment of looming suppression, and we have no choice but to double-down to protect ourselves, our daughters, and granddaughters.
Other select groups also feel that same oppressive heat. Americans of color, and non-binary sexual orientation are suffering similar treatment because, they too, have demanded social justice. Trump’s GOP has made it clear that they serve only white, male, reactionaries.
Vote blue.
Since writing this piece the Court has indeed overturned Roe. The good news is women are not victims and we will not retreat an inch. Vote.
Gail Chumbley is a history educator and author.
Why We Try
When I first began this essay it ripened to nearly five hundred words to share one idea. Why I am a life-long Democrat.
The original essay discussed the New Deal, the creation of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, and how strengthening Labor Unions evoked a sense of common purpose; how the economy boomed, and the middle class flourished.
Now all I want to impart is that Ronald Reagan was wrong. Big government is not the problem. Big government checked by regulations works remarkably well.
I am a Democrat because with all its flaws, we stand equal in the eyes of Constitutional Law.* People made the Constitution, and we must preserve it. In general, States’ Rights is no more than a distraction perpetrated by selfish insiders who legislate their own interests. Residents are convinced through a wink and a nod, that the enemy (Big Government) must be defied, using catch phrases like “our values,” and “real conservative.”
In truth, the Federal Government can do more for all of us than any individual state, or any individual citizen can do for themselves. As I write, Idaho’s governor has asked for, and been granted federal funds for drought aid. Talk about biting the hand that feeds the State.
I am a Democrat because I’m inspired by the nobility of America’s past champions; the persistence of General George Washington, the compassion of Abraham Lincoln, the purpose of Alice Paul, and the articulate vision of Barack Obama. I am a Democrat because James Madison instructed us to create “A More Perfect Union.” Without that persistence, compassion, purpose, and vision America cannot continue as “the world’s last best hope,” as Lincoln also described us.
At bottom I am a Democrat because I know not one of us is perfect. We just keep trying.
*Just heard the headline regarding the reversing of the Roe decision. Time to gather 4,600,00 of my best friends (2017 Women’s March) and organize.
Riverside 1973
First Teacher
The front door opened and promptly slammed. The timing was expected, as the kids were getting home from school. Trooping through the door didn’t seem unusual-but that slamming of the front door sounded emotional. In the hallway I encountered my little fourth grader, my girl, who wouldn’t catch my eye or respond to “how was your day.” She stomped into her bedroom, pushing her door closed. And then the crying began.
I waited a moment, finally tapping and entering her room. She didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to talk to me at all. Concerned, I sat on her bed and rubbed her back while she sobbed. After a while my girl composed herself and began her story.
In Idaho schools Fourth Grade Social Studies covers state history. From memorizing all the names of counties, to mapping locations, to learning “Here We Have Idaho,” the state song; 9-years-olds learned it all. On that day the lesson covered Native American tribes in the state.
The teacher read Chief Joseph’s “I Will Fight No More Forever,” speech, the one Joseph declared when his people, the Nez Perce, surrendered to the Army just short of the Canadian border.
My little girl understood, perhaps for the first time, the power of compassion and of tragedy. Watching as her heart absorbed a tough, American injustice, my heart filled as well. This kid sensed something deep, an empathy that still alludes many. In that moment we shared a thoughtful, teachable chapter in American History.
I didn’t accost the principal, nor complain to the school board. To those who do, railing to ban books, or challenge curriculum, remember that your children are watching. Honest concerns are one matter, but raising hell in public meetings frightens your grade schoolers, confuses your middle schoolers, and mortifies your high schoolers.
Besides, as a child’s first teacher, parents are demonstrating that raging and bullying in public is acceptable as a means to solve disagreements.
Leave schools alone, leave libraries alone. Get to know the teachers, volunteer in the classroom. You’ll find American schools do a tremendous job, much better than we could do ourselves.
As for Chief Joseph, my daughter grew from that experience. Maybe parents should do likewise.
Gail Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir, “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight.” Chumbley has also written two plays, “Clay,” about the life of Henry Clay, and “Wolf By The Ears,” examining the beginnings of American slavery.
gailchumbley@gmail.com
Without Justice
So many students had dropped the class, the professor had us meet in his office. The course, (a 300 level?) concerned the history of Eastern Europe, and though challenging, I sucked it up and remained.
Exotic names such as Moldova, Herzegovina, and Macedonia evoked mystical places barely touched by the Renaissance or Enlightenment. The prof tossed around these names as an American would with Oklahoma or Nevada.
He spent a great deal of time lecturing on the Balkan region. This mountainous peninsula is situated south of both Slavic Ukraine, and the Magyars of Hungary. This area, I learned, suffered an especially turbulent past, and for that matter still does today. One book on the course list, “Land Without Justice,” by Montenegrin, Milovan Djilas starkly described and reiterated that point.
Seated around a small table, our teacher introduced the Slavic folk who embraced the Orthodox faith of Byzantium. while the Croats to the northwest remained Catholic. For good measure, the Ottoman Turks rode hard northward, flashing scimitars of enforced conversion or butchery through remote pockets of alpine settlement.
Violence tinted the region red, scarring the inhabitants through generations of fierce reprisals.
The people of South-Central Europe appeared to have been dragged pillar to post in the religious chaos of competing Kings and Sultans.
In the wake of Turkish conquest, the youngest boys were systematically abducted from Orthodox villages up and down the rugged terrain. Raised in the Islamic faith, these children grew into fearsome warriors, eventually unleashed back on their former homes. These Janissaries coldly delivered Ottoman violence upon their own kinsmen.
Mired in blood, rulers like Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula eliminated his many enemies by impaling victims on wooden stakes. Most were Muslim.
I don’t recall my grade in that course, but I was mesmerized. Enough remained with me to pass on to my history students. For example, as America fought their Civil War, a Medieval system still restrained Eastern European society. Blood feuds raged through the mountain terrain pitting Croats against Serbs, against Albanians, against Bulgars, and on and on. By the end of the 19th Century the Balkans acquired a new moniker, “the powder keg of Europe.”
The ignition of World War One began in Sarajevo, the center of Bosnia Herzegovina. As the Ottoman Empire eventually receded southward, the Austro-Hungarian Empire aimed to absorb Bosnia as their own. Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph sent his nephew on a good will mission to picturesque Sarajevo. For the nephew, Franz Ferdinand, this would be his last royal duty. A Serb teenager waiting on the processional route shot the Hapsburg heir, and his wife, too. From that incident came “The War to End All Wars.”
This essay barely scratches the full history of Eastern Europe. Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Kosovo, all hold eons of collective history, enough to study a lifetime.
Still much like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle with scattered and missing pieces, an incomplete picture of the region remains. World War Two, the frigid tension of the Cold War, and the Balkan Wars of the mid-1990’s all continue to pull the world in, as if a black hole.
I stuck with that college class, in that professor’s office, and as a result understand why NATO, including US peace-keeping forces, still must remain in the “Land Without Justice.”
Gail Chumbley is an author, and history educator. Her two books, “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight,” both available on Kindle. In addition Gail has composed two plays, “Clay” and “Wolf By The Ears.”
Speculators
*A former student, Todd Christiansen, works as a Wellsite Geologist in oil. Reprinted with his permission.
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I’ve seen lots of people posting about oil and gas and the prices thereof, and there’s a tremendous amount of bullshit flying around. So allow me, a scientist working in Oil, to say a few things:
1.) Gas prices are largely determined by speculators. Supply and Demand has almost nothing to do with them. Things like “international uncertainty,” and “these idiots don’t have any other choice because half the country thinks public transportation is for liberal pussies,” drive prices up and there’s no real way to force them to come down. No matter what Newsmax or MSNBC is telling you, Joe Biden can’t flip the “Lower Gas Prices,” switch without an act of socialism on a scale that would make Reagan’s corpse reanimate and storm the capital more effectively than they did on January 6th.
2.) Access to more or less oil doesn’t really effect gas prices. Rather, it’s what that more or less access to oil causes the speculators to think that drives prices one way or the other. To put it another way, if the US were to stop buying Russian oil, gas prices would go up, not because there would be a shortage of oil or anything but because the speculators would think “this should drive prices up.” It’s really as simple as that.
3.) The Keystone XL pipeline is for Canadian oil. While the US certainly buys it’s fair share, and the pipeline might lower costs, it isn’t going to realistically change gas prices. Unless you own stock in Canadian oil companies, or you just REALLY HATE environmentalists, the pipeline isn’t the answer to anything. It’s just a red herring. Like Communism.
4.) We are drilling and producing oil all over America, including in the Bakken in North Dakota. I saw some ridiculous shit yesterday about how liberals have shut down drilling in North Dakota, and I can’t explain thoroughly enough how absolutely not true that is. I’ve got coworkers up there as we speak. And Liberals or Democrats or whoever have never really had any sort of impact on domestic drilling(outside of Alaska, but Seward’s Folly is a whole different kettle of fish) since I got into the industry in 2010. There is only one factor that I’ve seen that changes the amount of drilling we do: oil prices. Anyone who points the finger at anyone other than oil companies is selling you a bridge, dude.
Gail Chumbley 