Rock Head

For the Fourth of July, Joe Biden offered a message of reconciliation and hope for the future of this nation, recently scarred by COVID-19 and tumult over racial injustice  And then there was Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore.

Trump's speech was a declaration of war against those who would take down Confederate monuments and present a more accurate history of the United States where more women and more people of color are presented was easily most hateful presidential speech of all time.  The historian Henry Steele Commanger once insisted that Ronald Reagan's 1983 anti-Soviet "Evil Empire" speech was the worst presidential speech ever.  Nonsense. Trump's speech Friday night beats Reagan's by a wide margin.  I could only get through a minute of it.

If there's anything positive to be said about the Mount Rushmore event (and I'm stretching it here), it's that the fireworks there didn't start a forest fire or crack any rock in the mountains.  But the fact that people attended the event in great proximity without any protective wear probably means there will be another COVID spike across the country when they go home.

But the most obscene thing about Trump's speech is that he made it at Mount Rushmore, and not for the reason you might think.  See, Mount Rushmore is a part of Native American land, and when the Sioux Nation told Trump not to come for a political rally disguised as a patriotic event, he ignored them.  Protests by the Sioux did nothing to change any minds, but it did enlighten people as to how the area was stolen from the Sioux for oil exploration because treaties promising the Sioux the land were broken (which the Supreme Court recognized in a 1980 decision) and how the indigenous people have been so unfairly wronged.  And it inevitably led to the reconsideration of Mount Rushmore itself - the heads of four white male Presidents carved in to a sacred Sioux mountain for the sake of creating a tourist attraction in South Dakota.  Of the four Presidents, only Theodore Roosevelt had any direct connection to the Dakotas, so the idea of putting the likenesses of leaders of a country younger than the Sioux Nation - and the other original indigenous nations of this continent - suddenly seems far more than merely offensive.  

And Mount Rushmore has not only been criticized for cultural reasons. The late literary scholar Paul Fussell made a very persuasive artistic case against it, comparing it to the Statue of Liberty, which he called kitschy for baring a torch that actually lights up.  "The show off-size and irrelevance of J.G. Borglum's Mount Rushmore, the coarse neo-Egyptian hypertrophy of the whole of operation, make that achievement an easy runner-up to the vulgarities of the Miss Liberty," Fussell wrote.  "Besides constituting a tribute to gigantism - if you can't have quality, get quantity - Borglum's Folly, in its unimaginative representationalism, also celebrates philistine artistic retrogression and reaction. Seen from whatever distance, these four immense heads deliver a message popular with the culturally aggrieved and uneducated: 'Down With Modernism!' It's a native version of Soviet Realism, aimed similarly at our peasant class."

I think we saw that peasant class at Trump's rally.

Anyway, Mount Rushmore is now being called into question. What should be done with it?  Should we destroy it?  Shall we keep it but present it in a different context? Should we stop maintaining it and let it fade away?  One thing we won't likely do is add another face to it.

Least of all the one on the right.

The Best of the BAD

If you're still confused by BAD as defined by Paul Fussell, a quick rundown of the difference between the bad and the BAD should make it clearer. Some of these examples are mine, others come from Fussell's 1991 book "BAD Or, The Dumbing of America."

Jell-O is bad food. Dyed, chemically treated fruit is BAD food.

Howard Stern is bad because he's an obnoxious radio entertainer. But because Stern has never pretended to be sophisticated or profound, he doesn't qualify as BAD. Rush Limbaugh, who's taken seriously as a political commentator despite his own obnoxiousness and his inability to get his facts straight, is BAD.

A public sign that misuses the apostrophe ("Open Sunday's") is merely bad, but a sign that needlessly inflates language ("Open Monday to Sunday" instead of the simpler "Open Daily," for example) is BAD.

Detroit is a bad city. Atlantic City, which is just as rotted and decaying as Detroit but bills itself as a tourist destination because of its glitzy, modern, sumptuously appointed casino-hotels, is BAD. Las Vegas, because of its sense of what kind of city it is and its acknowledgment of its own character, is more bad than BAD, but Washington, D.C., because it is our nation's capital and has nothing other than the showy, empty political elite to brag about, is very BAD.

Sarah Palin and Scott Brown, I believe, are more bad than BAD because they're not showy enough, but if either one of them runs for President, that may change.

I think that should explain Fussell's ideas.

John Edwards: BAD to the Bone

The great intellectual Paul Fussell once described the idea of BAD, as opposed to what is merely bad, as thus: Plain bad is something like a case of scarlet fever or a failing grade - something no one ever said was good. BAD, on the other hand, is something that can be seen as wonderful, prized, desirable and valued but is in fact pretentious, showy, stupid, fake and shallow. John Edwards falls into the latter category.

Edwards finally admitted that he is in fact the father of his mistress Rielle Hunter's daughter. This, in and of itself, was hardly shocking news - people figured it out. What was shocking was that Edwards lied about it and went through great lengths and spent great amounts of campaign money to cover it up in his quest to uphold his image as an erudite, virtuous populist. Edwards in fact was none of those things, and the scandal revealed himself to be a duplicitous phony divorced from the reality of his own personality. A glib trial lawyer who talked his way into a fortune and proved to be clueless on many issues - particularly foreign policy - that he needed a grasp of if he were to be elected President of the United States, Edwards showed a callous selfishness cheating on a wife battling cancer and walking around with expensive haircuts while claiming to be a man of the people. It makes his announcement for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination from a Katrina-ravaged neighborhood in New Orleans seem all the more cynical, and no less phony than when George Walker Bush went down there after the hurricane to help build a house.

You can come back, Gary Hart. All is forgiven.

By the way, I take back my criticism of Jim Cramer for his rants against Edwards. Cramer was on to something about Edwards, citing the hedge funds Edwards was involved in that enabled him in part to build up his fortune. He could sense the phoniness in Edwards that most of us - me included - could not. That's what makes Edwards so despicable - he fooled everyone with his white-knight persona, even his closest aides and supporters. Now I understand why he was so conscious about his appearance. He had to tend to two faces.

Edwards's outing as a reprehensible monster is an upward blip in an otherwise downward trend. As Paul Fussell wrote, politicians in America, like so many other American people, places and things, are BAD to such a great degree that calling it out is hardly going to reduce the level of BAD in this country.