Newton’s Third Law of Motion Mauls Elon Musk

The Wednesday, March 19, 2025 Cable News Network (CNN) current affairs program titled “NewsNight with Abby Phillip” was one of the most captivating and intellectually fascinating of its kind served on the aforementioned global news network over the past couple of months, that is, since the beginning of the COVID-like onslaught of the Trumpian Revolution, also nicknamed Agenda 2025, which paradoxically seeks to witheringly pare America down to size even while also pontifically pretending and claiming to be poised to Making America Great Again (MAGA) as never before, or perhaps as great as our vast empire state of a nation could be prior to the morally, politically and philosophically enlightened period of the progressive introduction and the salutary implementation of what has presently come to be known and proudly cherished as the policy of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), originally known as Affirmative Action.

DEI, in its original manifestation as Affirmative Action (AA), of course, was institutionally created by the United States’ Congress as a facilitator for equal opportunities for all citizens within the geographical and the geopolitical confines of the United States of America and its contiguous and far-flung administrative territories outside the American Mainland, as it were, without regard to race, ethnicity, gender and historic origin. Such a morally and philosophically enlightened policy of inclusion or inclusivity may be clearly and inescapably envisaged to have been inspired by a French Aristocrat by the name of Monsieur Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous tour of a relatively recently independent United States of America resulted in the authoritative authorship and the publication of his damning observation of the moral paradox that was the euphoric celebration of “decolonized” and “de-imperialized” and a “democratic” America that continued to self-righteously hold its dehumanized Continental African-descended population in thralldom and chattel servitude.

Titled “Democracy in America” and published in the 1830s, that is at least two generations before the Bavarian or German paternal grandfather of the now-President Donald John Trump, Monsieur De Tocqueville noted, by way of a thesis, that the then still-fledgling mega-polity that was the United States of America was magnanimously endowed with great potential for further growth and even greater socioeconomic, scientific, cultural and technological advancement as a nation, if only its so-called Founding-Fathers could humble themselves appreciably well enough to realize the glaring and the easily rectifiable moral and intellectual blindness to the fact that there was absolutely no way for a country in which half of its membership was “legally” enslaved, repressed and civically prevented from exercising the full capacity of its richness in talent and ingenuity to realize its utmost or fullest potential.

The obvious reference here, of course, was to the estimated 4-million Continental African-Descended Americans, about 25-percent of the total population of the United States, who were still “legally” held in bondage, for the most part, and thoroughly and hermetically governed by the same Black Codes of Neo-Fascist Exclusivity as is being preached and practiced by the MAGA Cohorts of the Right-Wing US Republican Party-sponsored Agenda 2025 Crusaders in our time. In the politically, philosophically and morally unimpeachable opinion of Monsieur Alexis de Tocqueville, benightedly and/or primitively preventing a “legally” subjugated half or a “moiety” - that was his exact word - of American citizens or inhabitants from fully participating and contributing to the socioeconomic, cultural and the scientific and the industrial advancement of the United States of America could not be more inexcusably inadvisable by any measure.

Among the latter category of deprived Americans, of course, the French Aristocrat also had in mind an effectively domesticated White Womanhood whose natural attribute of female sexuality and gender ascription had been weaponized as symbols and markers of moral blemish and civic weakness by their politically dominant White or European-American Menfolk, Über Mensch, in the lexicon of the present Agenda 2025 Crusaders or Neo-Aryan Neo-Nazis. Surprisingly, in the wake of the savage, furious and the implacable and, some may even say, the atavistic onslaught by the Trump Government to “Tsunamistically” regress the socioeconomic and cultural advancement of 21st-Century American Civilization, the name of Sir Alexis de Tocqueville and his globally celebrated tome, “Democracy in America,” has not been afforded even a split-second mention by any of the major media establishments in the country, including both the print and the electronic media, as well as , of course, the digital media.

Is this a cancerous exhibition of “Collective Amnesia” as a nation, or it is simply time for another one of the historically recorded great civilizations, having become irredeemably decadent, to simply crash, fold and give way to another on this existential wheel-of-fortune that is the eternal human experience? Now, what inspired this write-up, as Ghanaians are wont to say, was the clearly politically mischievous expression of shock by US-born, Indian-descended California Democratic Congressional Representative, Mr. Rohit “Ro” Khanna, at the patently pedestrian fact that the veritable human demolition wrecking ball behind the Trumpian Revolution - actually “Devolution” - Mr. Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame or infamy, depending on one’s perspective, would have tens and dozens of his automobiles set alight by several of the hundreds and thousands and millions of hardworking American civil and public servants whose lives Messrs. Musk and Trump and their Agenda-2025 Demolition Squad had literally and permanently ruined or upended.

Contributing to a panel discussion on the Abby Phillip-hosted “NewsNight” current affairs program on CNN on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, the Philadelphia-born California Democrat stagily lamented what Mr. Khanna claimed to be Elon Musk’s well-deserved immunity from Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, this very basic law of poetic justice that we all learned in our high school physics class. At least that is one of the few lessons that I remember from my high school physics class at Okwawu (Kawhu)-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School. It runs as follows: “To Every Action, There Is a Reaction.” To every chainsaw, a Counter-Chainsaw.

Now, what is so difficult for a Yale Law School-educated legislator like Mr. Rohit “Ro” Khanna to appreciate here? Which, in the end, not really make me regret not having gotten to know Prof. Jerome Brooks, the first African American Chairperson of City College of New York’s English Department and a good friend of legendary novelist Chinua Achebe, who once disconsolately regretted not having had the chance to know Yours Truly well before he graduated from CCNY of CUNY in June 1990, so he could have recommended him for advance studies at Yale University. Prof. Brooks, this author also recently learned, was the first African American to have been ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church of the United States of America.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]