When Europeans first landed on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay founding Jamestown, the bay was literally filled with fish and shellfish. Now less than one percent lives there because we have caught millions of tons, polluted the waters, and filled in much of the spawning areas. Today’s environmental activists are trying to use the basis of the bay populations of the last century to get laws passed and rejuvenation effort to try to regain those numbers. That is called shifting baseline syndrome.

I look at the sprawl of housing on Caton Farm Road west of Route 59 extending Joliet by thousands of acres. I used to drive through fields and woods getting between communities. Those spaces are now built over. It reminds me of how America has added more than a hundred million people since I graduated college. At that time we studied the population/resource rations. Several researchers thought we would always have enough fish in the oceans to feed us forever. We are not eating newly named baitfish and trying to preserve what is left of many species.

Billions of tons of coal have been stripped off the surface and over a hundred Appalachian mountaintops have been chopped off to get coal. Valleys have been filled with slag. Billions of barrels of petroleum have been refined and burned. All that smoke has gone into the air raising CO2 levels warming the planet.

When I first moved to the area, underground pipes froze, heavy snows were normal, and a 100 degree day was rare. What was called a thousand year flood now occurs every few years.

Today’s kids perceive today’s conditions as normal so that is now their baseline to work from. I remember a saying “You can’t go back” and perhaps that is my baseline syndrome problem.

Who was the greatest showman ever? Phineas T. Barnum said he was because he was an artist in self-promotion. He conned people with the truth wrapped in exaggerations and outright lies. Suckers were pulled into his world of deceit every time he made a proclamation of major and minor importance. Barnum was a narcissus who did everything he could to get media coverage of himself. People during his time did not have the advantage of science and fact checking media we do today.

I suggest we have an even greater narcissistic showman as our current President. He has an innate emotional requirement to puff up his ego by conning and lying. Instead of sitting in the oval office and working, he goes out to the front gate every day to parade himself back and forth in front of a gaggle of journalists and cameras. He creates a crisis, fumbles with it, and declares only he could have fixed the problem. Often the problem was solved during a previous administration and he only took credit.

Most of the problems he is in today are because of his paranoia and ego. People he appoints are temporary so they don’t have to be confirmed–allowable for one year–and must be completely beholden to him. They must not only do their job, but must protect him, and cater to his massive ego. Failure to do the last two will cost them their job. Many of the latest leakers and whistleblowers are his appointees who must be tired of his flagrant breaking of laws and his boasting of it.

Perhaps his fifteen minutes of fame as a disruptive President will end up a footnote in future American history books. To the rest of the world he already is.