This Thursday, April 10, marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Over time, the novel of American aspiration has morphed into a Rorschach: As we read it, we see ourselves. Thus is the power of enduring literature. Many students first engaged with “Gatsby” in high school. I have discovered that re-reading novels at various stages in my life allowed me to bring a more mature perspective to an author’s work. As I gained sophistication and experience I became a critical reader. This has enriched my life and relationships.

In 1925, “The Great Gatsby” was four years away from another American “great”: the Great Depression sparked by the crash of 1929. Gatsby is more than a portrait of greed during the 1920s, it is a cautionary tale about our American future. It describes in detail the “careless people who smashed things up and then retreated back into their money and let other people clean up the mess.”

Today, Mark Zuckerberg advises his cyber bullies “to move fast and break things.” Sometimes the things we break are people. The millionaires of the Jazz Age have morphed into the billionaires of today. They could easily sing along with the sarcastic anthem of a hundred years ago, “The rich get rich, and the poor get poor.”

The voice of Tom Buchanan screams of white supremacy and xenophobia. He fears that our national identity is being threatened by immigrants: “Civilization is going to pieces … it is up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things … we’re Nordics and we produced all the things that make civilization.” Tom who is described as “a brute of a man” lacks impulse control and spews out whatever nonsense comes to mind. He has no regard for whom he may offend as long as his narcissistic needs are fulfilled. He could seamlessly sit in Trump’s Cabinet.

Though separated by a century, we have never been closer to 1925. We bear witness to an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. Gatsby lives in spectacular wealth yet must drive through “The Valley of Ashes,” where the desperately poor reside, under the watchful gaze of T.J. Eckleburg, which George Wilson declares are the “eyes of god.” They live next to each other but never meet.

Our current economic divide can only end in tragedy.

“Mein Kampf,” also published in 1925, wove a toxic tale of rabid nationalism. It claimed that only a strong man could release Germany from a suffocating fiscal grip. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was promising to return his country to “the glory of Rome” — I guess he wanted to make Italy great again.

Today, authoritarianism around the globe is on the rise.

“Gatsby” is a story about car culture. The man who shaped that culture more than anyone else was Henry Ford who wanted to return America to wholesome living and had standards for both his cars and American morals. Ford declared in the New York Times, in August 1924, that the KKK was “a patriotic body, concerned with nothing but the future development of the country in which it was born and the preservation of the supremacy of the true American in his own land.” Hitler awarded this industrialist with the German Eagle, the only American to be honored with such a distinction.

Today’s Henry Ford is Elon Musk, who is apparently equally enamored of Nazis. He spoke at a rally for Germany’s far-right AFD Party just two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He urged Germans to take pride in their heritage. “Frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that,” he said. 1925 intersects with 2025.

Jay Gatsby wanted to repeat the past, return to an idealized world of perfection with Daisy, hold on to a “first kiss” forever. It’s a trap. Trump wants to return America to an illusory Golden Age, to Make America Great AGAIN. But every moment of “greatness,” the moments of American Exceptionality, are underscored by a horror story. The glory of the rise of American Democracy is washed in the blood of slavery. The pioneering spirit of Westward Expansion yields a Trail of Tears and the genocidal massacre of indigenous peoples. The profits of the Gilded Age built on the backs of the poor fattened the wallets of the Robber Barons. Every Golden Age, every return to the perfection of The Garden of Eden, casts a long shadow of myth and illusion. “Gatsby” is our Paradise Lost. The way out of our current turmoil is to move forward not back. 2025 does not have to be a repeat of 1925. I suggest as we move through the present-day Valley of Ashes, we keep our brights on.

Jim Vacca is a retired English teacher who lived in Boulder for 30 years. Vacca is a member of the Camera’s Community Editorial Board. He lives in Louisville.