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This past July 3rd, the President of the United States delivered what was without question the finest Presidential address since Ronald Reagan - so great that an argument can be made that, taken as a whole, it exceeded even the Great Communicator's finest.
He did this on the finest of platforms - in front of Mt. Rushmore, with four of America's giants overlooking him and his audience. All four have have had statues of themselves attacked in recent weeks; the speech shone a renewed spotlight on exactly why George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt are enshrined there in stone, and why they ought to remain for the ages.
For most readers of Scragged, none of this is news. If you should happen to mention it to anyone out in the real world, though, your likely response would be either "Huh?" or a profanity.
You'd think a major Presidential address, from a national shrine, on our national holiday, would be worthy of mention. And you wouldn't be wrong - but what mentions! CNN summed up the perspective displayed to ordinary non-political-junkie Americans:
CNN correspondent Leyla Santiago took to the airwaves on Friday to report on the president’s rally to mark Independence Day at the memorial later in the evening, putting heavy emphasis on its links to slavery and abuses of Native Americans while implying the site was chosen for those reasons.
“Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mt. Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave holders and on land wrestled away from Native Americans,” she said, noting Trump would focus on what he called “the effort to tear down our country’s history.”
Indeed, this explicitly un-American take was among the milder ones, given that, while outrageously biased, it is not factually incorrect. Yes, Washington and Jefferson did own slaves, and it is fair to say that pretty much the entire United States was "wrestled" away from - well, not Native Americans, as we're all native Americans, but aboriginal Americans, which we all know is what they meant.
More odiously, ABC claimed he "pushed racial division"; the news unanimously declared his speech dark and divisive. As so often, the news reports say far more about the black hearts of the reports and their corporate bosses than they do about any actual news. Quoth Trump:
Before these figures were immortalized in stone, they were American giants in full flesh and blood, gallant men whose intrepid deeds unleashed the greatest leap of human advancement the world has ever known. Tonight, I will tell you and, most importantly, the youth of our nation, the true stories of these great, great men.
Which he then proceeded to do. If that's divisive - which, these days, it seems like it is - then doesn't that simply prove the truth of his most-reviled assertion?
Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains.
How is it possible for even our media to report on yet another statue of an American hero being torn down by an angry mob, and then in the very same news report call the President's statement a lie?
The simple answer is - mostly, they didn't. They reported the speech as being dark, divisive, racist, bigoted, and a call for war. What they didn't do, was to report the actual speech.
There's a good reason for that: Any American who actually listened to the speech couldn't help but applaud and cheer President Trump's glorification of American heroes and their legendary deeds.
Americans harnessed electricity, split the atom, and gave the world the telephone and the Internet. We settled the Wild West, won two World Wars, landed American astronauts on the Moon — and one day very soon, we will plant our flag on Mars.
Anyone who could listen to this speech and boo it overall, is by definition anti-American because there never was anything more profoundly, aggressively, unapologetically American as this speech. But the key here is "listened": The media made darn sure that as few Americans as possible had the opportunity to do so.
Of course, anyone so minded can quickly find the transcript or recording on the Internet. Those, though, are not the people we need to reach. It's also not the rioters, who, to the extent they have functioning brains at all, have fully committed themselves to the pursuit of evil and to educating the masses in the unwisdom of defunding the police.
What's needed is to put this speech in front of the great American middle who just wants to get back to their BBQ and TV, both of which fill them with a steady diet of tasty but ultimately poisonous fare.
In one oratory masterstroke, President Trump gave the lie to everything the media has been saying for the past four years and counting. Not even the greatest actor of all time could deliver such a speech after betraying his country to the Russians, or who ran for office simply to enrich himself, or who seeks to set himself up as dictator.
All America could see this... if, that is, all America could see it. Which they won't.
The open question that stands before President Trump, his supporters, and the entire country, is this: Is it possible to undo or overcome 50 years of consistent, steady, organized, comprehensive lies with a handful of rabidly-suppressed profound truths?
Philosophers claim that it is. In November, we'll find out.