"Hit me like, as my high school English teacher liked to say, "like a MAC truck." The episode starts with the tale of Icarus. You know, the kid who flew too close to the sun with his wax wings and plummeted into the sea. Or the little cherub NES character. Either way. And I'm sitting there thinking: has anyone in Washington actually read this story? Played the game?"
"The Greatest Generation, the folks who actually lived through fascism, world wars, and democratic collapse, they're mostly gone. We're losing the people who could look at 2026 and say, "Yeah, we've seen this movie before. Here's how it ends." It's left us searching for answers to problems "we've"" already solved. Maybe that's what happens when you prioritize STEM education and gut the humanities. We've created a generation that can code but can't recognize fascism."
Cultural familiarity with classical myths and historical memory is fading among current leaders and the public. Collective living memory of mid-20th-century total wars and fascism has largely vanished as World War II veterans decline to fewer than 66,000 in the United States. The loss of firsthand witnesses combines with a steep drop in humanities degrees to produce a generation adept at coding but less able to recognize historical authoritarian patterns. Popular stories like Icarus offer warnings about hubris and consequences, yet such references often fail to register with political actors. That gap weakens civic resilience and complicates recognition of democratic threats.
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