Date: March 1, 2026.
If you stay up late at night you have probably caught the television program MacGyver.
I am speaking of the 2016 to 2021 version starring Lucas Till as the new MacGyver.
And yes, there is the original 1985 to 1992 series starring Richard Dean Anderson.
Both versions work for the same fictional employer, the Phoenix Foundation.
The current MacGyver, the second MacGyver, the one I watch on television, ran for five seasons with ninety-four episodes.
Like before, the Phoenix Foundation handles scientific, technical, and global crisis missions.
MacGyver is a field agent who uses ingenuity, science, gadgets, and teamwork to solve problems instead of brute force.
It is part of basic Cox Cable, which is all I have ever been able to afford.
Whatever.
It is one of my few escapist strategies from current politics.
That and listening to Henry Mancini, especially the theme from The Pink Panther.
Meanwhile, the clever attitudes of Donald Trump unfold like a labyrinth of possibilities.
His latest escalation involving Iran hovers in the background like unfinished business.
Is it not obvious that he conflicts with nearly anyone who disagrees with him.
I cannot see how the American people doing the daily work of the country benefit from the constant friction.
Many wish he would simply go away.
Instead, he appears to keep stuffing money into his pockets while offering enormous excuses for advancement and floating ideas that sound horrific, including talk of private military structures within our own borders.
On the other hand, how much Henry Mancini can one take.
How many repetitions of “Days of Wine and Roses” before you ask what happened to Coltrane.
Trump’s idea of modernizing is, to me, completely bizarre.
You would think he might have taken a basic modern art class in college.
He does not seem to grasp what modernization actually means.
I have my own resentments toward Frank Lloyd Wright.
I have always felt a certain anxiety over his version of modernism.
Yet even that argument never rises to the surface in comparison, because Trump does not even stand at the edge of modernism in the sense of progressive thinking.
Modernism is a deep argument in our culture.
It involves making advancements in society and seeing one another in different reflections.
Even that is hard to do.
The debate over whether Frank Lloyd Wright was the main driver of American modernism was already old when I was in college.
Still, Wright helped shape the concept of city centers and civic spaces.
My own examples are the Scripps House and the original Oceanside City Hall, projects tied to federal works programs and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Those public efforts created the nest egg from which later architectural profits and expansions could grow.
They gave rise to practical civic applications carried forward by architects and artists from the early 1950s onward.
Wright’s concept of organic architecture paralleled nature, even when critics called it impractical.
The current political attempts at modernization do not even scratch the surface of that philosophy.
They do not approach the idea of organic growth, let alone expand upon it.
There is aesthetic minimalism, which grows out of modern art and architecture. It is reduction in order to clarify form. It pares away ornament so structure can be seen. It is disciplined subtraction. The goal is not emptiness but focus. When a painter reduces color fields or an architect simplifies lines, the act is meant to heighten awareness, not to shrink meaning. This kind of minimalizing refines perception. It asks, “What is essential here.” It is philosophical and formal.
Then there is creative or analytical minimalizing, which happens in problem solving. This is reduction as diagnosis. A complex issue is broken down into components so it can be understood. Engineers, scientists, and even writers use this method. It strips away noise to locate cause and effect. It does not destroy the system. It temporarily simplifies it in order to rebuild or repair it. Its correlation to minimalism is procedural rather than aesthetic. It values clarity over spectacle.
Next is corporate minimalizing. This is reduction as cost control. It trims departments, labor, regulation, or long-term investment in the name of efficiency. The language is streamlined, optimized, lean. The correlation to minimalism is superficial. It borrows the vocabulary of simplicity but often pursues margin expansion rather than structural elegance. What disappears is not ornament but accountability, benefits, or public obligation. The subtraction is financial.
Finally, there is political minimalizing. This is reduction as power consolidation. It reduces oversight, reduces complexity in public discourse, reduces nuanced debate into slogans. It may shrink government services while expanding executive leverage. It can also reduce large social questions into binary conflicts. Its correlation to minimalism is rhetorical, not philosophical. It simplifies narratives in order to control them. Where aesthetic minimalism seeks truth through clarity, political minimalizing often seeks advantage through compression.
All four forms involve subtraction. But the intention behind the subtraction defines the category. One subtracts to illuminate. One subtracts to understand. One subtracts to maximize profit. One subtracts to centralize authority. The word sounds the same in each case, yet the ethical and cultural consequences are entirely different.
MacGyver is clever. That is the point. He represents ingenuity directed toward preservation. He improvises in order to prevent destruction. He reduces harm. His “minimalizing” is creative distillation. He strips a problem down to its essential elements so that something can be saved. That kind of minimalizing belongs to science, to art, even to modernism at its best. It is reduction as clarification.
Political minimalizing, is something else entirely. It is reduction as erasure. It trims public responsibility. It shrinks accountability. It compresses civic space while expanding private advantage. Corporate minimalizing cuts regulation, cuts labor leverage, cuts cultural nuance, and calls it efficiency. That is not cleverness. That is subtraction without imagination. It is not the paperclip defusing a bomb. It is the quiet removal of the wiring diagram.
So MacGyver becomes the escape precisely because he is not destructive. He does not reduce in order to dominate. He reduces in order to understand. He simplifies to preserve complexity later. Watching him is a relief from a political atmosphere where “streamlining” often feels like dismantling and “modernizing” feels like hollowing out. The television fiction offers a version of intelligence that protects. The real world, as you see it, too often offers a version of power that contracts.
That contrast is the tongue and cheek. One man improvises to save a room from exploding. The other, treats demolition as strategy and calls it progress. And so Saturday night becomes a small sanctuary of ingenuity in a week otherwise crowded with rhetoric about reduction.
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