I spent time in Cambodia in 1996 working with de-mining teams and writing a little book about the devastating effects of landmines with the photographer Bobby Adams. Now, mines in the Strait of Hormuz have wreaked havoc on global trade. And it turns out that getting rid of those mines in the water is very much like getting rid of them on land. It’s a time-intensive, painstaking process relying on individual human de-miners (divers) to find the mines and blow them up. If you try to do it too quickly or skip steps, you get blown up.
In 1996, I wrote, “Mines recognize no cease-fire, no treaty, no change of governments. They send no representative to the peace talks. In military parlance, they are ‘blind weapons in relation to time.’”
Trump has been laying mines everywhere since he came into power. These mines will be going off for many years to come, causing death and destruction all across the world. One of his first acts in his second term, through DOGE, was to summarily shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was set up by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to administer civilian foreign aid and development assistance and to promote democracy around the world while advancing US foreign policy and national security. On February 3, 2025, Elon Musk brag-tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” His violence left millions of people around the world without desperately needed food and medicine. A year ago, The Lancet estimated that Musk’s actions could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2.4 million deaths per year, including 4.5 million children younger than five years old.
This homicidal behavior on a massive scale came from the world’s richest man. A five percent tax on Elon Musk would refund all the cuts to USAID into the distant future and save the lives of millions of people.
Almost everything that Trump does happens in strangely complementary pairs, like reflecting pool repairs and the war in Iran. It turns out that reflecting pools were actually invented by the Iranians. These pools first appeared in the Iranian gardens of the Achaemenid Empire and were spread through Persian literature to Hellenistic gardens in Greece and the Ptolemies in Alexandria. The Achaemenid Empire, which commenced in 550 BC, grew to be the largest empire the world had ever known. Its capital was Babylon. Hegel called the Persians the “first Historical People.” The Persian gardens where the first reflecting pools appeared were called “paradise.” This was the word in Iran for the “enclosed spaces” of the gardens. The reflecting pools were intended to aid in contemplation and lead to a meditative state.
The reflecting pool that lies between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument was designed by the prominent Beaux-Arts architect Henry Bacon and was dedicated in 1922. It took Bacon eight years to build the Lincoln Memorial and the “water mirror” of the reflecting pool, that reflects both monuments, the shade trees on the sides, and the sky, bringing earth and sky together in the mind. The pool as Bacon built it worked well for the first 95 years.