Charles P. Pierce: The Great American Shadow

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a56132/fourth-of-july-under-trump/


The Great American Shadow
The Fifth of July under President Donald J. Trump.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jul 5, 2017

snip//

There is always a shadow over the Fourth, one that becomes clearer on the Fifth, when all the clamorous mock patriotism disappears from the news programs, and all the rubble is cleared from places like the National Mall and the Charles River Esplanade. The shadow falls between the promise of the enthusiasm of the day and the reality of history, between the notion and the act, as T.S. Eliot warned us. Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" calls out from that shadow every year. So does Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again." Marvin Gaye asks "What's Going On?" from deep in its murk, and that's the place from which Grandmaster Flash delivered "The Message."

The shadow falls between the promise of the enthusiasm of the day and the reality of history.

snip//

This year, however, the shadow seemed deeper, darker, and somehow more poisonous, like a deadly cloud of gas over an uncertain battlefield. The people for whom those pronouncements had meant as much in practice as they had in theory suddenly were enveloped in the shadow themselves, wandering blind, wondering how they'd got there. The voices from the shadow could have told them.

snip//

The promise of the Declaration, the finest of the fine words, always had been empty to them.

That put the edge on the celebration this year. Because of the man we elected president, nothing is solid any more. All of the reliable landmarks of citizenship, the ones that we had not abandoned on our own years ago, are gone. There were only two ways to go when the Fifth of July dawned. We could deny that we all have passed into the shadow, or we can deny that the shadow exists at all. Or we could recognize where we are, the clouded, uncertain place into which we chose to go as a country. We could recognize that the promises of the Declaration of Independence remain aspirational, that the pursuit of happiness is not a fait accompli, that the shadow will persist in some places because, in this context, moving the notion closer to the act requires a kind of political honesty and civic courage that has atrophied to a point that none of us truly realized until last November, when the nation endorsed at the polls the very forces that had come to cripple it.

Then we could recognize that we all share in the promise and in the shadow, and that our most basic job as citizens is to make sure the balance between the two is kept fair for all our citizens. We could join our voices to those of Jefferson and Douglass. We can make the words of Langston Hughes our own. We could Make America America Again.

[mopinko]

1. i have to wonder

how many of these poor forgotten folks seem to have a low income because they are not reporting the income they make from weed. the area is rife w growers.