Muddling Through
Sept 18 2026
History doesn’t happen like that.
Not how it looks, looking back
— as if everything that happened
was inevitable
pre-ordained
made sense.
Rather, it’s muddling through
contingency
and random events.
Great and little men
who sometimes step up.
That is, just like your own life history
of bad decisions
accidents
and coincidence.
How you’d never have met
if you’d missed that bus,
how the stock went down
instead of up.
How just one
of the billions of sperm and thousands of eggs
crossed paths
by kismet or chance
and turned out to be you,
or was lost
before she ever knew.
They say that while history doesn’t repeat
it often rhymes,
comes close enough
to be a cautionary tale
of a life misspent,
or exemplify
one well-lived.
But it isn’t done yet,
so who knows
how they’ll look back and judge.
Whether books will be written
documentaries shown,
or if the crowd scene
where you briefly appeared and had no lines
gets left on the cutting room floor.
Not inevitable.
Not close to memorable.
And an ending
that doesn’t even rhyme.
As you may have gathered, my utter abhorrence of Donald Trump — someone whom history will remember (if there is any future history in which to do it!) — has become somewhat obsessive. Detestation will do that. So when an Atlantic article about the uncanny similarities between him and Hitler appeared, I couldn’t resist.
It was the opening line of that piece that gave me this poem. Its actual content I mercifully left out. Because no one wants to read (or write!) poems about despised wannabe autocrats and unredeemed evil. At least not me — I’ll leave that stuff to prose! So the following excerpt and link are included here just for your interest.
(Btw — and for any nitpickers reading this — I took poetic licence with the number of sperm in an ejaculate. Because a number like 500 million (average app. 200 million; high app. 900 million) doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue! And “millions” instead of “billions” didn’t stretch the odds as much.
As well, I apologize for Great and little men. But “men and women”, “human beings”, and “people” also didn’t fit.
Does history repeat itself, or merely rhyme? The historian Timothy W. Ryback has thought about this question a lot.
. . . As Joseph Goebbels noted at the time, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means of its own destruction.”
. . . Ryback’s 53 Days makes no reference to contemporary politics. And yet certain echoes of the 1930s resonate so loudly that it is impossible not to hear them. To cite just a few: Hitler was obsessed with tariffs. Hitler tried to fire his central banker. Hitler was preoccupied with seizing Greenland. Hitler was intent on adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery, part of his grandiose architectural ambitions for the nation’s capital. He attacked and muzzled the press, attempted to purge the civil service of anyone disloyal to him, had a genius for inflaming the populist grievances of his base, and spurred angry young men to take paramilitary action against perceived enemies.
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