It’s like déjà vu, but even worse.

If we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it. It’s an adage I didn’t believe when I was in school. My childhood was in the optimistic ‘90s. America’s greatest threat had become an ally. I took installations like Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a nice day off of school in February and naively believed that everyone was just as ready to bury racism in the past and move on to an exciting equitable future. Then I moved to the South, where I learned that they told themselves that the Civil War was merely about states’ rights. My mom recalls getting the bird before we changed our New York plates—a Yankee family in a beat-up Chevy Astro was so hated, I wondered what if we weren’t white. The George W. Bush/ post-9/11 era should have been a time when I realized that history could repeat itself, but Seventh-Day Adventist teachings had us more focused on the apocalypse than the socio-political implications of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t remember when the gloom of 9/11 broke and when America began to feel normal again, when everything started to feel less like survival guilt or that another tower was going to fall or that a nuclear power plant would explode, but somehow it ended, and America learned to party again, even legalizing same-sex marriage.

SHE THINKS IT’S SPECIAL, BUT IT’S ALL REUSED. In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo began her pop career with SOUR, a hit album with two number 1 hits and several other top 20 hits from the album. Rodrigo was different from many pop singers as she was able to grab a diverse fan base, bringing fans from her teen Disney career and older fans who found something nostalgic in her music, especially by her third single “good 4 u,” which established the singer as a bona fide rocker. Her second single, “deja vu,” credits Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” as inspiration. Rodrigo’s second single is a sequel to her debut single “drivers license.” That song brought about the discussion about the alleged love triangle between Rodrigo’s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series costar Joshua Bassett and the “blonde girl,” most likely Sabrina Carpenter (pre- Short n’ Sweet). In “drivers license,” Rodrigo laments that the one reason she was looking forward to the namesake’s rite of passage is to spend more time with her boyfriend, but this is all for naught since he has moved on to another girl. The sequel, “deja vu,” is a further lamentation on the end of the relationship, listing the fond memories in specific detail of singing harmony to syndicated episodes of the musical dramedy Glee to Rodrigo sharing her love of Billy Joel with him. Those precious moments spent together; however, are then recycled on the next love interest, causing Rodrigo’s frustration. She asks her ex if he ever gets déjà vu when he’s with her. Interestingly, last year when Sabrina Carpenter released the song “Taste,” the song felt a bit like déjà vu of Olivia Rodrigo, though “Taste” is supposedly not about Bassett but rather about Shawn Mendes.

WATCHING RERUNS OF GLEE. Maybe nothing’s new under the sun, as King Solomon complained. Maybe “strawberry ice cream with one spoon for two” feels like an original date idea when you’re 16, but eventually we run out of ideas. Last year, something eerie happened: more and more of us started to experience déjà vu. It’s like we were reliving the year 2016 and 2020 at the same time. The Super Bowl felt like déjà vu with the same teams playing from 2020. South Korea faced impeaching a president. Faker won the League of Legends championship in both 2016 and 2024. And of course, “Weird Al” Yankovic pointed out this phenomenon in The Gregory Brothers “songifying” of the June 27th presidential debate. “Deja Vu” (But Worse) highlights what many Americans were thinking: the prospect of two power-hungry presidential candidates arguing about their golf scores in what should be a nursing home, but it was really on America’s cable news network, CNN. Yankovic asks, “Have we fallen under a wizard’s curse / to suffer déjà vu, but worse?” In the middle of the song, Yankovic, exasperated, lists all of the sequels this pairing of presidential candidates is worse than. He even asserts: “I think Olivia Rodrigo would agree, this is worse than your ex eating strawberry ice cream.” Since the cursed presidential debate and Biden dropping out of the race, Harris’s campaign couldn’t help but feel a little similar to Hillary Clinton’s cursed 2016 candidacy, mainly the establishment vs. the antiestablishment, and it turns out people really hate the establishment. Now the déjà vu seems to have been reset to a time before I was alive; it’s a combination of pre-Civil Rights marches and pre-Nazi Germany. The very free world that most of us have taken for granted is under attack. It’s the most dreadful case of déjà vu imaginable. It’s like watching Groundhog Day, as the same people repeatedly make the wrong choices. Bill Murray is trapped in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, forever doomed to miss Andie MacDowell. Meanwhile, the news broadcasts reveal the gradual erosion of our rights, leading to our assimilation into the tools of the oligarchs.