Air Force One soared above the Black Hills of South Dakota Friday evening carrying the nominal leader of this sea-to-shining-sea nation. He came to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore. He is running for president again this fall, for the chance to give a second inauguration speech. Friday night’s was, as former President George W. Bush said of this man’s first inaugural address, “some weird shit.” It was the trailer for #AmericanCarnage 2 — America Laid Waster.
This is the grimmest July 4th in memory. The coronavirus pandemic has spread from blue, coastal cities into Republican red states. Deadly. About 130,000 Americans alive at the dawning of 2020 have not survived to see this Independence Day. Nearly three million Americans contracted the virus while the panjandrum occupying the Resolute Desk attempted to wish it away between mean tweets. What once was New York City’s catastrophe now has Texas intensive-care units overflowing. Hospitals in Florida are at or near capacity.
In the streets, white supporters of the acting president shout angrily that they will not have their birthright liberty constrained. No, not by a virus they pretend is no worse than the flu nor by the politicians belatedly trying to stem the carnage by asking that they wear masks to slow its spread. This by-God America! Besides, to wear as mask is to publicly confess that their avatar of whiteness failed to protect their health, their jobs, and their privileged place in the preordained order, that neither America nor their champion is living up to the hype. This they cannot concede.
This July 4th the white majority is getting a taste of how nonwhite neighbors experience America. It is a place where liberty and justice are as substantial as a Potemkin village, where equality is as hollow as Confederate monuments to centuries of human bondage. They don’t like being reminded of it. Not one bit.
Charlie Pierce recalled Friday how in 1852 Frederick Douglass (someone “getting recognized more and more“) had a less than soft-focused view of July 4th celebrations. Douglass said:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II recited more of that Douglass speech at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC this time last year. Having it read aloud has more power than words on the page.
At Mt. Rushmore last night, the Pretender-in-Chief, claimed to be defender of monuments to America’s history. He appropriated the memory of Reverend Martin Luther King when in monotone he read from his teleprompter, “We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King when he said that the founders had signed a promissory note to every future generation.”
Omitted was how King finished that thought:
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
What was true in 1852 and was true in 1963, is still true in 2020.
Writer James Baldwin told filmmaker Ken Burns, “For a Black America, for a black inhabitant of this country, the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke, meaning nothing to us.”
The memory of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery and too many other nonwhite Americans to mention here are monuments to this country’s failure to live up to its promises and to the hypocrisy of its public pieties 168 years after Douglass spoke. The union Lincoln preserved has yet to be perfected.
We have solemn work to do.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.