The Grift Outright

I’m not American,¹ but I did spend a formative year of my life in the place and have feelings for it. So on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’d sincerely like to wish Americans a happy Fourth of July. But it isn’t, and I can’t, as the United States government has been captured by oligarchs fomenting a kind of dime-store fascism as a cover for corruption and cronyism.

Call me naïve, but I’ve always admired the ideal of the United States as a nation founded on ideals. The unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right of the people “to alter or abolish” any government “destructive of these ends.” True, white supremacism and black slavery too, but the clash of these evils with America’s vaunted ideals did seem to bend the arc of history towards justice for a while. I admire America’s constitutional experiment, the careful design of checks and balances. Their dismantling is dismaying to see. The persistence of the first modern democracy has been a sign of hope for the world. But what hope for democracy when “We the People” reelect a man who, among several other tyrannic abuses Jefferson catalogued, “has excited domestic insurrections”?

Yet there is much to admire in Americans. Their awareness of their rights. The tenacity and resilience with which they shrug off their mistakes and pick themselves up off the floor, again and again. The way that, after exhausting every other possibility, they sometimes do the right thing. Qualities needed for the Resistance to prevail in the end and for democracy to survive the Trump era. If that’s something you want to be part of and are looking for inspiration, I suggest you hop over to the message from Timothy Snyder and friends instead.

Of all the things I love about America, from lowbrow popular culture to cutting-edge science (now cut), I have a special soft spot for its poetry. I would have liked to pen an occasional paean to people power myself. But like his whole government, Trump’s ’Freedom 250’ celebration is a tawdry travesty, and the form of art should fit the occasion, so a travesty is the best I can do. With apologies to Robert Frost:²

THE GRIFT OUTRIGHT

The brand was Trump’s before we were the brand’s.
It was a brand of steaks and slot machines
Before it hawked the White House. Gilded towers
in New York, at Mar-A-Lago.
But we were Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s, still the People,
Governed by, and of, and for, the governed,
Enfranchised, not a Trump-Org-licensed franchise,
’Til he found out: if you’re famous, fake, and fascist
They’ll let you … anything, the land’s for looting
– And forthwith flew from tax fraud to state capture.
Such gaudy gifts he gives himself outright
(the greed for grift spurred many tweets of hate)
From the land vaguely slinking bottomward
Still harrassed by peacetime troops and tyrant tantrums
Great as she was, how small she has become.