Trump Versus the Smithosnian

Donald Trump has declared war on the Smithsonian. The vener­able US institution, which runs 20-odd museums, more than a dozen educa­tion centres as well as the National Zoo, “is OUT OF CONTROL, where every­thing discussed is how hor­rible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” according to the US president. The Smithsonian, founded in the 1840s, is not part of the executive branch despite federal funding and the White House has no busi­ness telling it what to do. In February 2017, Trump had said, “I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage”. Now his Kulturkampf warriors want the Smithsonian to remove/ adjust any content problematic in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” within four months. It takes a lot more than that to put together a Smithson­ian exhibit but that detail might be lost on Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer and for­mer Miss Colorado contes­tant leading the assault who has no prior experience with museums. Trump can post “WOKE IS BROKE” but he is doing everything to keep its embers burning. They talked of “improper ideology” on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

And That’s How You Move a Historic Church

Kiruna, a Swedish town 150-odd km north of the Arctic Circle, is being relocated because of a century of iron mining underneath which has opened up ground fissures. The first buildings were moved in the last decade but this week’s challenge was the biggest, attended in person by 79-year-old King Carl XVI Gustaf himself. Kiruna Church is one of Sweden’s most beautiful buildings. But at 35m high, 40m wide and weighing 672 tonnes, moving the church five kilometres meant engineers working overtime to raise the building on self-propelled modular transporters after adding steel support beams inside. Equally challenging was widening the road, which meant re­moving lampposts and traffic lights and even a bridge. In the end, the move was completed much ahead of sched­ule and without a glitch. There are quite a few in­stances of buildings like hotels and theatres and structures like lighthouses being shifted intact but never for more than a few blocks and never before was such a move on such scale captured in its entirety from all angles by drone and then recast in time-lapse footage for the world to see. As the planet boils and sea levels rise, moving towns intact might become more regular.

Another Red Bastion Falls

Bolivia has joined the larger shift away from the left across South America. For the first time in 20 years, the governing Movimiento al Socialismo (MaS) party has failed to make it to the second round of presidential elections, with its candidate getting just 3.16 per cent of the vote. The country which made Evo Morales its first indigenous president, has forsaken the socialists. MaS has been obliterated by its own indigenous base. The landlocked Andean country’s future will now be reshaped by either centre-right Senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira or former President Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga after the October 19 runoff.

BoliviaDonald TrumpgeopoliticsKiruna Churchtrade tariff