Some easy contrasts between the current president and those whose faces are chiseled into the mountain exist. George Washington led America's fight for independence from Great Britain. A young Donald Trump sought deferments from military service claiming he had bone spurs. Further, the myths surrounding Washington have him eschewing lies. Trump's lies are legion.
Theodore Roosevelt provides another easy comparison. He was shot while he giving a speech. Roosevelt told the crowd not to harm the man who attempted to assassinate him. While a candidate, Trump promised to pay legal fees for those who physically attacked people who protested at his rallies. (Protesters who exchange high fives seem to anger Trump more than others.)
More importantly, it is one history's of great ironies that Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong slave owner, could pen "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Eighty-seven years later, Abraham Lincoln would declare that the nation was "conceived" and "dedicated to the proposition" that all men are created equal."
No evidence exists that the current president has the cognitive or rhetorical skills to use language the way that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln did. Distressingly there's a similar dearth of evidence that he believes all are created equal or that the nation is dedicated to the proposition supporting that fact.
Finally, Trump seems totally incapable of asking Americans to convincingly appeal to the "better angels of their nature" or to adequately copy Lincoln's call at a time our nation needs to hear it:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Current discussions about monuments and their significance are politically and morally fraught, and those around Mount Rushmore will continue to be so. For the purposes of this post, however, the mythos surrounding the four presidents on Mt. Rushmore illustrate a vital reminder about the failings of the current occupant of the Oval Office.
2 comments:
South Dakota is home to numerous sculptures that idolize genocide visited upon American Indians.
Mount Rushmore is the state's premier example of racist ideology. Its sculptor was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Calling him a rapist some twitter accounts are calling for the removal of Rapid City's statue of Bill Clinton. Fact is: most of the downtown statuary depict slave owners and figures in history that ordered the murders of Natives.
Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren drove thousands from their lands and to their deaths over the Trail of Tears.
The United States was founded on the backs of slaves as systematic genocide became a way of life for white christians quoting scripture as they slaughtered their fellow humans. After colonizers realized enslaved American Indians had no resistance to diseases brought from the Old World, Africans were imported to do the dirty work.
In the early twentieth century after President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House white supremacists began erecting statuary commemorating and celebrating treason in the United States so Confederate flags routinely fly in Rapid City showing support for racism in like-minded states, South Carolina and Mississippi. Many more come out during the Sturgis Rally.
Moody and Pennington Counties struggle with racism on a local level.
George Custer, Phil Sheridan, George Crook and William Harney all committed crimes against humanity yet their names still besmirch numerous government and geographical features.
Right to life in South Dakota? Not if you're non-white.
Thanks for stopping by Larry.
I should have mentioned Roosevelt's meeting with Booker T. Washington in the post. It stands in sharp contrast to "fine people on both sides."
About 15 years I read an article that asserted people my age think racism is evil. People in their 20s think racism is stupid. I hoped that scorn would do what moral condemnation did not. I was wrong.
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