by Roger Kimball
The consequences of history often arrive like starlight: events unfold in real time, but their true significance can take years to reach us.
I don’t recall exactly when it was that I learned that it took a bit more than eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us here on Earth. Sometime before high school, I think. Anyway, that pedestrian fact made a deep impression on me. I knew that light traveled at a fixed speed and that its operation wasn’t (quite) instantaneous, although in our quotidian lives, it seemed almost so.
But the fact that the sunlight we see all about us is eight minutes old made a deep and disconcerting impression on my young self. Who knows what might have happened to the Sun in the meantime?
I began researching this phenomenon and was duly impressed by the awful (in the old sense) immensity of things. The sun’s light, traveling some 93 million miles, takes 8.3 minutes to arrive here.
Light from the Orion Nebula, wherever that is, takes about 1,500 years to reach us. Light from the Andromeda Galaxy takes 2.5 million years. Then, there are the lights from long-dead stars glimpsed by that astronomical peeping tom, the Hubble Telescope.
Until recently, the oldest light glimpsed was from a defunct star called Icarus. It shone when the universe was about 9.5 billion years old. A few years back, Hubble registered light from a star called Earendel, which flickered 12.9 billion years ago, when the universe was a mere 6 percent of its current age.
These are stupefying, incomprehensible numbers.
Blaise Pascal touched on the psychological—or is it the ontological?—coefficient of such contemplations in his Pensées. “Quand je considère la courte durée de ma vie, absorbée dans l’éternité précédente et suivante, le petit espace que je remplis, et même que je vois, abîmé dans l’infini immensité des espaces que j’ignore et qui m’ignorent, je m’effraie . . .” (“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified.”)
Nietzsche gave tart expression to the physical reality behind Pascal’s anxiety in his remarkable early essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” “Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing,” he wrote. “That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”
Such cosmic expressions of metaphysical angst have an aspect of adolescent self-indulgence about them. As Jeeves observed to Bertie Wooster, there’s something “fundamentally unsound” about Nietzsche.
Still, since 2026 began with some big bangs—ask Nicolás Maduro about the bang in Caracas, ask the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (if you can find him) about the bang in Tehran—it is worth pondering some local, pedestrian ways in which things that have already happened may finally reveal themselves in their true significance. Gregory of Tours (ca. 539–94) began his sprawling History of the Franks with one of the most irrefragable sentences vouchsafed to humanity: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.”
Here we are at the summer solstice, the halfway point of the year, and many things have happened, some good, some bad, and some, like the light emanating from a distant star, delayed in reaching us.
The year opened with Operation Absolute Resolve, the stunning military operation that simultaneously extracted Maduro from his fortified palace in Caracas, opened up Venezuelan oil to the U.S., and denied terrorist groups from Hamas, China, and Iran a safe haven in Venezuela. We are already feeling some of the benefits of that operation, but its full significance will, like distant starlight, take months or years to become fully manifest.
It is the same with the effects of Operation Epic Fury. In some 30 days, Trump destroyed Iran’s navy, its air force and air defense network, huge swaths of its drone and ballistic missile stockpile, and most of its military industrial infrastructure. He also eliminated Iran’s top leadership twice over, beginning with its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who was incinerated in the opening moments of the war. Trump and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent mounted a concerted economic assault on Iran, depriving the murderous regime of some $500 million a day, partly in lost oil revenue, partly through Bessent’s pursuit of the leadership’s foreign accounts. In brief, Operation Epic Fury, in partnership with Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion, was perhaps the most successful military operation in history. As Mark Thiessen noted, “No president in 47 years has done more damage to the Iranian regime than Trump has.”
That news hasn’t filtered through the anti-Trump scrims that surround the legacy media. For them, destroying Iran’s military capability and eliminating its leadership counts as “capitulation.” That is a prominent meme in the bustling bazaar of anti-Trump static. Regarding the “Memorandum of Understanding” that is still being hammered out, Trump himself noted its provisional nature. “It’s a memorandum of understanding,” he said with some exasperation, “and if I don’t like it we’ll go back to shooting at them and dropping bombs on their head.”
Similarly, the fact that Trump has been a better friend to Israel than any previous U.S. president is suddenly recast as a betrayal of Israel. The hysteria is remarkable.
I thought that Mark Zell, Chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel, provided a useful corrective. In one post, he listed 40-odd things that Trump has done in his five and a half years as president to benefit Israel. In another post, he began by noting that “President Trump has not flipped or abandoned Israel. His support for the Jewish State and the Jewish People is incontestable.” He went on to make two important points. One, Trump’s exclusion of Israel from the Memorandum of Understanding was not (as some are claiming) a slight to Israel but rather a gift that “gives Israel a free hand to protect its vital national security interests in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran.” Two, while admitting that there are aspects of the MOU that he doesn’t like, Zell also insisted that Trump is dealing with the political reality of an impending election. “President Trump,” Zell noted,
has decided that winning the November midterms and preventing the Dems from taking control of Congress is of paramount importance given the certainty that if this were to happen the opposition will seek to impeach him and derail his administration’s foreign and domestic policies for the balance of his second term.
That seems right to me. The “bottom line,” Zell concluded, is that “the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is strong and inviolable. Israel will protect its interests and so will the U.S. protect the American public, including 750,000 U.S. citizens in Israel.”
It may take a while for the light generated by these episodes to arrive in the tenebrous redoubts of anti-Trump animus. When it does, expect the anti-Trump zealots to blink and rub their eyes while looking around for additional reasons to repudiate their greatest benefactor.
Roger Kimballl is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/21/the-solstice-of-our-discontent/
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