'hat to this immigrant is the 4th of July? It’s America’s birthday, but it’s also, in a sense, mine. It’s a confirmation of my choice to leave behind other scenes and other cultures and reinvent myself anew on these shores, and an affirmation of all the virtues that drew me here.
And so, I had a lovely and long Independence Day weekend. I grilled kosher hot dogs and drank some local IPAs. I listened to Skynyrd and Muddy Waters. I watched Angels in the Outfield, which is a great movie about family and faith and baseball and all the other things that make America what it is. I fished for trout and played with my children and teared up a bit when looking at Old Glory waving in my yard, framed against the cloudless sky like an eternal promise.
When Sunday rolled in, I woke up and begrudgingly looked at my phone. The president, a news alert informed me breathlessly, had delivered a “dark and divisive” speech on the foothills of Mount Rushmore. How dark and divisive? To hear our pundits tell it, Trump’s address made Cicero’s fiery rebuke of his would-be assassin Catiline seem like a good-natured toast by comparison. Over at CNN, for example, editor-at-large Chris Cillizza found no fewer than 28 outrageous lines worth cataloging and discussing at length, while the Associated Press announced that the speech promoted “racial division” and The Washington Post alerted its readers that “Trump is running an openly racist campaign.” Sighing, I made myself a cup of coffee and sat down to watch this contested oration.
Now, I consider the president neither savior nor demon, because this is America and one big reason to love it is that here we neither crown our elected officials the harbingers of all hope and change nor do we detest them with the fiery animus that thrusts so many fractured societies into civil war. Here, we remember that we’re a republic, which means that the men and women we dispatch to represent us are often, like us, a little too careless and a little too gross and always striving and all too human. Trump is no different: I support some of his policies, and find others disastrous. But because I believe—as a great man who had earned having his face carved into Mount Rushmore once said—that the poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer, I tuned in to Trump’s speech with an open mind.
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trump-mount-rushmore-speech
'must read' - Nunes (Parler)