Better writers than I are straining to describe the White House catastrophe known as DJT. Like Harry Potter’s foe, Voldemort, his name is not to be said out loud in proper company.
We share a charge to speak the truth even when it’s easier to gloss over difficult subjects with euphemisms. Retreating to hope alone is not the answer. Nor can we deny that America has an ongoing governance problem of its own making.
Bumper sticker: Elect a clown. Expect a circus!
America’s faults are out of their cages and flying high. Sadly winging free are racism, justifications, excuses, sexism and Fred Astaire-like moves of dancing around the facts. To blithely ignore obvious truths is civic laziness. No longer can we kid ourselves that patience will bring any redeeming change to a 71-year-old leader who seems to have lost his bearings and his wits.
When conservative Republican Sen. Robert Corker of Tennessee says that the candidate he supported for president last year is “unstable and putting the country in peril,” we don’t need more committee hearings. The horse is out of the barn.
Corker has decided to leave office when his term expires. The good senator isn’t likely to make the list for the JFK Library’s Profile in Courage Award. “Good luck to y’all. I’m gone.”
A new tide of realization has opened eyes long closed to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Huge statues built mainly in the Confederate states of the old South are no longer silent. They shout in words slave descendants hear clearly. They whisper, finally, to everyone else that their time is past.
Let’s shift them into history’s graveyard.
I had an Irish father who lived under British rule for most of his 20 years before coming to America. Growing up, he lived a character-shaping chunk of his country’s bloody history, including the failed 1916 uprising against British rule. Dad was born in 1910. The Irish Free State followed in 1922. He emigrated in 1930.
Admiral Horatio Nelson’s 1805 victory over Napoleon’s Navy at Gibraltar prompted a grateful England to construct a gargantuan monument in London’s Trafalgar Square. A century before dad’s birth, a second monument to that English hero was erected in the heart of Dublin.
Both statues impressed this novice traveler in 1953.
Dublin’s much shorter Nelson’s Pillar was pointed out to American tourists seeking roots in the old country. My uncle Donal O’Leary smilingly insisted on also taking me to “shake hands with the crusader” — one of the mummified bodies in the crypt of St. Michan’s Church — where a coffined hand extends toward queasy visitors.
In 1966, a rogue band of Irish patriots got sick of being lorded over by the 1809 Dublin statue of Lord Horatio Nelson. In the dead of night someone set off an explosive charge, which is an unsolved crime to this day. Nelson fell again as when he was shot on the deck of his Trafalgar flagship, HMS Victory, during the battle. It’s on display in Portsmouth, England, an ocean away from the USS Constitution “Old Ironsides” in Boston. Their unique histories spur old enemies, now caretakers, to share preservation secrets.
Nelson’s Pillar was bombed during Ireland’s 1916 Easter rebellion. That explosion failed to do its job, and the rebels were unmercifully crushed in battle. Its captured leaders soon hung for the crime of wanting to be free.
The 1805-09 dates of Trafalgar and the erection of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin happen to bookend the arrest, trial and hanging in Northampton of two railroaded Irishmen in 1806. Daley and Halligan have their own craggy-rock monument at the foot of Hospital Hill. Their trial was a precursor of America’s shameful Jim Crow era in which people of another race were suspect on the face of it, and when tried werefound guilty with no defender like Atticus Finch.
In times of war and afterward we honor those who serve. There is hardly an American city or town, North or South, that doesn’t boast a cenotaph to the lost. They, as Lincoln said, made monuments in sacrifice.
Shockingly, President Kennedy died 54 years ago today. Jack Kennedy served his country in war and in peace. We remember the good that he did and the goals he set. His flame burns bright.
The remnants of America’s 2016 election error will require a mammoth punch list of constitutional repairs.
Jim Cahillane, of Williamsburg, writes a monthly column. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.