AI needs copper. Yes. Sure. Okay. But what happens next? We live in a world of banal narrative - news media, politics, advertising - wherein our lives are curated with messages and stories of progress and performative empathy (think “thoughts and prayers” or “appreciate your patience and understanding”). Much of this gospel of progress and toxic positivity contradicts our own lived experiences - we know things don’t work, and the system sets up to screw us. History narratives often work that way too, with big national stories of shiny continuity and advancement, where the occasional “road bumps” — say, environmental destruction and labor impoverishment due to the strip mining of, oh, copper — get written off as collateral damage. Just aberrations in the narrative, with stories of people and places lost in the folds of a map, and unremembered lives hidden in the shadows of the archives. And the beat of progress goes on. Want the truth? Demand better stories about the past. Forget about “objectivity,” “both sides,” and god knows, “fair and balanced,” and make your inquiries avowedly truthful and ethical. Look into the shadows, examine the folds, investigate the cracks in the storytelling, because like Leonard Cohen said, cracks are where the light comes in.

When is a war not a war, but a police action? When is killing not killing but a “pragmatic, managerial militarism”? If you guessed, when the war criminal represents a liberal democracy, you win the cheese! If you simply said, “Henry Kissinger,” you win the whole wheel of cheese! “A perfect expression of American militarism’s merry-go-round” is what historian Greg Grandin calls Kissinger’s tautology of justifying wars in the present by appealing to wars in the past. And here at HAG, we have our own name for it. We call it, the narcissism of power. With narcissists of power, it can be pretty hard to tell the heroes from the villains, especially when they all use the same AI-generated come on. But as Frank Herbert reminds, you better think twice before accepting the doe-eyed kid with the perfect locks and curls is a messiah, cause he might just be a pissed off, spice-sniffing, megalomaniac with a rising body count out to settle some scores. Our advice? Ask to see his publicity photos first, and find out what’s going on his statue before signing over your soul.

Sell the story and people will buy the product, so goes a hallowed principle of marketing. It works so well in advertising that corporations will spend 7 million dollars on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial, peppered up with shilling celebrities, just to sell a donut. And what works for donut companies works for nations. Wrap the story in enough celebrity mythology - let’s call it history - and a nation can sell almost anything: bad deeds become star-spangled reveries, while the supposedly sacred symbols veil the product’s toxic contents.

Join us with our special guest Ricardo Catón, as we ponder the past, from the banal to the just plain bad, and the marketing schemes known as national history.