We are, self evidently,
entering upon a retroactive form of history,
and all our ideas, philosophies and mental techniques
are progressively adapting to that model.

We may even see this as an adventure,
since the disappearance of the end is in itself
an original situation.

It seems to be characteristic of our culture and our history,
which cannot even manage to come to an end,
and are, as a result, assured of an indefinite recurrence,
a backhanded immortality.

Up to now, immortality has been mainly that of the beyond,
an immortality yet to come, but we are today
inventing another kind
in the here and now, an immortality
of endings receding to infinity.

The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard, trans. by Chris Turner, page 115, pub. 1992

Today is the first day of February. Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. According to legend when the rodent comes out of its burrow, if it sees it’s shadow, we are in store for six more weeks of winter. Though what I have in mind is the 1993 move by Bill Murray. To jog your memory of the plot, here is a snipped from Wikipedia:

On February 2, Phil [Bill Murray] awakens in the Cherry Street Inn to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” playing on the clock radio. He gives a half-hearted report on the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil and the festivities. Contrary to his prediction, the blizzard strikes the area, preventing all travel out of Punxsutawney, and although he desperately searches for a way to leave, he is forced to spend the night in the town.

The next morning, Phil wakes once more to “I Got You Babe” and the same DJ banter on the radio in his room at the Cherry Street Inn. Phil experiences the previous day’s events repeating exactly…

The movie presents an ironic rendition of hell, to be trapped in a time loop, a repetition of events, inability to escape recurring form of events, to end anything. This was a dark movie.

We are living in a dark time in 2025. In similar fashion we are likely to awaken day after day over four years, perhaps even more, to the voice and the image of Donald Trump or his acolytes intoning “I got you babe…”

A retroactive form of history as Baudrillard wrote would include a retrograde of rights for women, especially access to healthcare. Another ghost, that of involuntary servitude, chattel slavery rises up from America’s past. Remember the President’s comments of a day or so ago of housing 30,000 exiled immigrants at Guantanamo, Cuba, placed in tents within barbed wire pens. A final example is the freedom of speech that we felt sure was granite-rock-solid. This bulletin:

President Trump’s new head of the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS, with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting. – CNN

Do you catch the philosophers sardonic tone, his notation that this material return of what we thought to be ghosts in our rear view mirror, the indefinite recurrence, – amounts to a backhanded immortality?

Some Americans see this as an adventure…