Donald Trump – Harry Heuser

30th Jan 2026

“A piece of ice”: Greenland, a US Mission, and the Drafting of Another War Below Zero

The dust jacket of *War Below Zero* (1944)

When, at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, the forty-seventh and perhaps last elected President of the United States, in one of his characteristic falsehood-and-insult-littered tirades, referred to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark he had long coveted, as “a piece of ice,” his imperialism, imperiousness and imperviousness to historical facts were once again on blindingly stark display.

Greenland, Iceland, or whatever the misleader of the fabled free world may call the largest island of them all—if indeed it is land, or a land, rather than a frozen asset on the verge of liquidation—it needed to be his, outright. Until, that is, Number 47 (previously 45 but never adding up to more than number two) was duped into settling for cubes portioned out in a deal existing since 1951. Put that in your Diet Coke and drink it, sucker!

“A piece of ice.” Is not Melania enough? Well, not according to the Epstein files, if ever we get to see them entire and unredacted. The likely scenario of hell freezing over comes to mind, boggled though it is.

“A piece of ice.” That, clearly, is what cultures and communities—history and humanity—are to a rapacious tyke-oon, a petulant plutocrat whose crude, rudimentary vocabulary and short attention span remind us daily how limited his definition of “great” is and how precisely that limitation sums up the narrow mind of a bottom feeder—a Moron-roe Doctrinaire?—raised, none too loftily, on the notion that anyone aspiring to be a big fish needs to swallow whatever comes or gets into his way.

Greatness, thus conceived, means little more than to amass much to amount to more in the eyes of the world he, in a less-than-popular deviation from his America First agenda, has set his greedy peepers on.

“A piece of ice,” indeed! The word is chilling enough as an acronym, when it refers to a deadly experiment in cryotherapy involving the deep-freezing of democracy until it falls off the body politic as if it were an unwelcome and unsightly growth.

While I could not gauge the degree of ire among the largely undemonstrative audience at Davos, the phrase certainly made my blood boil, as does pretty much every exhausting waste of air emanating from a hothead whose actions are raising the global temperature as perilously as the actual warming his administration has chosen to deny for the opportunity of raking in a final few billions. When Number 47 talks Greenland, you can bet he means greenbacks.

It is undeniably global warming that makes the island of Kalaallit Nunaat more strategic a region than it ever was, now that melting ice caps open routes and facilitate access to the Arctic.

Climate change was not yet an issue during the so-called “Battle for Greenland”—the subtitle and subject of War Below Zero, a book published in 1944. And yet, atmospheric conditions and the ability to forecast them on location were apparently key to the US interest in the region in a pre-satellite age.

According to War Below Zero, the conflict in question was not a war for “territory” but “a war for weather.”

22nd Jan 202623rd Jan 2026

“Trump … and Trump Again”: Pulp, Politics and the Impossibility of Getting Away from the One Who Gets Away with Murder

A page from *Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine*, May 1965

Over the past few months, enervated by minor illnesses and the lingering nuisance of ingrown eyelashes that make reading for pleasure less than pleasurable, I have been busying myself performing the mentally undemanding task of cataloguing my digital collection of detective and mystery magazines, most of which, for the reason aforementioned, still await my perusal.

Not one to embrace chaos or relish disorder, I derive comfort from such indexing. The virtue of record-keeping is not simply its own reward, however. After all, owing to a dogged determination that some may prefer to label “anal retentiveness” or look upon as signs of life “somewhere on the spectrum,” I now have a fairly comprehensive overview of twentieth-century British and US American crime fiction, especially by writers active during the so-called golden age of murder mysteries between the two world wars, authors whose rules-governed puzzles resonate with us once more in a period of heightened global uncertainties and the attendant anxieties to which they gives rise.

I was just completing, for the time being, my currently 139-page-long single-spaced crimino-bibliography, replete with cross-references and annotations, when I happened on an item that brought home again how elusive and downright illusory any attempts are to escape, via fictional chronicles of crimes long solved, from the actual and ongoing illegalities of today, not least the enforced lawlessness in the rewilded West of the by now all but nominal United States.

23rd Sep 202524th Sep 2025

“It gets something off my chest, doesn’t it?”: Keeping Norman Corwin’s “Appointment” (1941) Because Liberty Won’t Keep in the Heat of Hatred

Cover of *Thirteen by Corwin*,
containing “Appointment,”
from my collection of radio-related literature

Speaking out against fascism—publicly and nationally, via the airwaves—used to be regarded in the United States of America as a moral imperative, or at least, in the terms of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as an act “in the public interest.”

These days, in the era of MAGA on steroids—and, to be clear, the first “A” in the acronym can be readily substituted to designate any number of imperiled democracies—fascism is no longer the anathema to democratic rule that it used to be understood as constituting.

This is mainly because democracy itself—as a construct, an ideal and a reality—has become anathema to the members of a growing movement that is celebratory of autocracy and that, perversely and perfidiously, argues anti-fascism to be a threat to autocracy as a preferred system of streamlined government in which checks and balances are discarded and in which oppositional forces and alternative voices are denounced as deleterious and traitorous.

I had been meaning to write about the weaponization of the FCC in the wake of the cancellation and temporary or partial silencing of late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration; but for some reason, and via a route too tedious to trace, I happened, quite fortuitously, as it turns out, on a script for a radio play by poet-journalist Norman Corwin, the unofficial “poet laureate” of US radio during the early to mid-1940s.

I have already devoted a dozen or so posts to Corwin and his work, including plays as diverse as “A Ma n with a Platform,” “My Client Curle y,” and “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay.”

To this day, one of the most rewarding acknowledgments of my scholarly pursuits, such as they are, remains receiving word from Corwin expressive of his approval of my academic writings on him.

Although I have discussed many of Corwin’s writings for radio in Immaterial Culture, I had somehow failed to show up for his “Appointment”—a play first produced on 1 June 1941 as part of the cycle Twenty-six by Corwin.

9th May 202524th May 2025

“There is a [loose] cannon”: Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Undefended Border” Revisited

The published script as it appeared in We Stand United, an anthology of radio plays by Stephen Vincent Benét and “decorated” by Ernest Stock.

I commenced this journal back in 2005. It was intended as a continuation of, and promotional vehicle for, my doctoral study “Etherized Victorians: Drama, Narrative, and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954.” Its title, broadcastellan, was meant to declare me to be keeper of a vast Luftschloss—a neglected alcazar of the air, immaterially composed of numberless radio recordings I determined to play back.

As of this post, broadcastellan is nearing its twentieth anniversary. While I do not take this as an opportunity, let alone an excuse, to reissue older posts, I nonetheless wonder: When history seems to be repeating itself, perhaps I may be justified to do the same, if only to demonstrate that not every “been there” necessarily translates into a feeling of “done that,” and that not all twice-told tales are a rehash—not, at least, when you approach them from a perspective that has profoundly, even fundamentally, changed along with the context, your life experience and your attitude toward the world.

I devoted one early entry to “The Undefended Border” (1940), a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943). Revisiting it now, in the age of the MAGA tariff wars and annexation threats, I cannot but think of the loose cannon that is recklessly flouting, or at any rate tarnishing, the legacy of the rusty “lone cannon” commemorated in Benét’s play.

24th Feb 202524th Feb 2025

“You Can’t Do Business With Hitler”: A “picture of Nazi trade methods” Re-Viewed in the Second Age of MAGA

First page of the script for the first episode of *You Can’t Do Business with Hitler*

“This is Douglas Miller speaking. I’ll be very blunt and to the point. I want to give you a picture of Nazi trade methods and Nazi business methods as I saw them during my fifteen years in Berlin.” Intimate and immediate in the means and manner in which, in the days before television and internet, only network radio could reach the multitudes of the home front, the speaker addressed anybody and somebody—the statistical masses and the actual individual tuning in. The objective was to persuade the US American public that “You Can’t Do Business with Hitler.”

The statement served as the title of a radio program that first went on the air not long after the US entered the Second World War in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, an act of aggression that prompted the United States, and US radio, to abandon its isolationist stance. Overnight, the advertising medium of radio was being retooled for the purposes of propaganda, employed in ways that were not unlike the methods used in Nazi Germany.

You Can’t Do Business with Hitler was also the title of a book by Miller on which the radio series was based. Upon its publication, lengthy excerpts appeared in the July 1941 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the editor of which introduced the article by pointing out that Miller had personally “observed German industry and particularly noted the ruthless determination with which it was directed after Hitler came to power.”

During the 1920s and ‘30s, Miller had served as Commercial Attache to the American Embassy in Berlin and had subsequently written an account of his experience. In You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, he argued that his long record of service “entitle[d]” him “to make public some of [his] experiences with the Nazis and—after drawing conclusions from them, discussing Nazi aims and methods—to project existing Nazi policy into the future and describe what sort of world we shall have to live in if Hitler wins.”

Posting this—the 855th—entry in my blog, on the day after the national election in Germany in 2025, in which the far-right, stirred by Elon Musk and JD Vance, chalked up massive gains, and in the wake of the directives and invectives with which the second Trump administration redefined US relations with many of its global trading partners—I, too, am projecting, anticipating what “sort of world” we shall find or lose ourselves if “Nazi methods” take hold in and of western democracies.

Far from retreating into the past with a twist of the proverbial dial, I am listening anew to anti-fascist US radio programs of the 1940s to reflect on the MAGA agenda in relation to the strategies of the Third Reich regime, asking myself: Can the world afford to do business with bullies?

27th Jan 202512th Mar 2025

“… an America that must never happen—that will never happen!”: Revisiting US American Anti-Third Reich Propaganda in the Second Age of MAGA

The script for “Chicago, Germany” as it appeared in the June 7-13 issue of Radio Life

Delving into the “Draft and Ideas” folder set aside for this blog, I came across a fragment titled “‘Chicago, Germany’: A 1940s Radio Play for Our Parallel Universe.” It was intended for posting on 10 November 2016 as a response to a “Trump administration having become a reality.” The draft was abandoned, but no other piece of writing was published in its place.

In fact, the next entry in this journal did not appear until 15 May 2017, and it coincided with the opening of Alternative Facts, an exhibition I staged with students at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, in Wales.

As the abandoned fragment and the ensuing hiatus suggest, the “reality” of the Trump presidency had so rattled me that I could not bring myself to continue a blog devoted to the popular culture of yesteryear, as much as I had always tried to de-trivialize bygone trifles not only by examining them in the context of their time but also by relating them to the realities of the present day.

The exhibition project that kept me busy in the interim, had similar aims. Alternative Facts provided me, as a curator and educator, with an opportunity creatively to engage with the outrage of MAGA by appropriating a phrase that encapsulated the duplicity and travesty of those early days of spurious swamp-draining.

Fast forward to 20 January 2025, the day that Trump returned to office, by the popular demand that is a product of his populist brand, with the singular and single-minded vengeance of a MAGA-loomaniac. Pardon the execrable pun, but I find no words other than that crass neologism adequately to describe a US President who pardons rioters storming the Capitol and defecating on democratic principles, much to the Nazi-salute inspiring enthusiasm of enabling, super-empowered and quite literally high-handed oligarchs who, I suspect, will, rather than Elon-gate this reign, eventually assume the gilded let’s-lay-democracy-to-rest-room that, in the interim, is the seat of Trump’s throne,

It struck me that the time was ripe for—and indeed rotten enough—to pick up pieces of that draft in light or dimness of the current and perhaps irrevocably changed political climate, which, far from incidentally, is the only human-made climate change we are likely to hear about from the US government for the duration, as dramatically shortened for our species and for most lifeforms on our planet as that time may have become in the process.

As a melodramatist who staged the end of the earth both on radio and for the movies (in the 1951 nuclear holocaust thriller Five), Arch Oboler would have much to say about all this—except that what Albert Wertheim has called his “penchant for altered reality” was being “married to his anti-fascist zeal” in propaganda plays sponsored by or at least aligned with the objectives of the US government during the FDR years.