Looking ahead down the road a ways

The Column: 08.27.24

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When Mr. Trump goes down to defeat in November, after he’s done complaining about the rigged election, the unconstitutionality of Biden’s withdrawal, the AI enlargement of Harris’s crowds, the oppression by the Fake News, he will finally turn his attention to the creation of the Trump Library, two words that do not sit comfortably together, and my guess is that he will designate Mar-a-Lago as the site for the government to maintain and for him to have the right of residency. A special wing will be created for the public display of top-secret documents.

He will, of course, want to control the narrative of the Library, choose the historians who will be in residence there, so it will proclaim his Greatness and the Tragedy of his Unjust Defeat and the Meaning of his Martyrdom. There will be a great deal of Capitalization of Key Words at the Library, and in the Portraits of Himself will be no flaws of pigmentation nor strands of hair askew. The Faithful will come to the site and Rededicate themselves to the Great Cause. But eventually they will all die off and one day a young executive will take charge and she will ask herself, “What do I do with this trash heap?”

And then, once more, America will need to deal with the delicate issue of what to do with historical relics from shameful periods of the past. Other nations deal with this; we are not alone. Brussels is full of magnificent buildings paid for by Belgium’s vast profits from the African slave trade in the Congo and elsewhere. Same with London. Outside of Berlin is the enormous moldering estate of the late Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man, which the stigma of fascism and the Holocaust has rendered unusable. Germans simply want it to disappear and eventually it will but not nearly soon enough. Some great architecture was accomplished during the Nazi era and was preserved, but people had to pretend not to know they were once decorated with swastikas. In America, some statuary and memorials honoring Confederate heroes have been quietly removed. The statue of the old imperialist Teddy Roosevelt on horseback has been removed from the steps of Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and shipped to North Dakota, which doesn’t want it either.

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator.

I’m an Episcopalian and I think I could profit from a few months dancing and sweating out on the Plains, dreaming. I’ve had dreams of miserable times in my own life, marital miseries, fascistic periods when I threw myself militantly into realizing my vain ambitions and abandoned spiritual wakefulness entirely. The Little Bighorn would be a national spiritual park meant for people of all colors and religious beliefs or unbeliefs to gather on the prairie and attempt to rediscover the best parts of themselves and let those bloom and bear fruit and the crappy stuff wither away.

As for what to do with Mar-a-Lago fifty years from now when Trump is long forgotten, I take no position. The number of lies he’s told has surely passed a hundred thousand and is close to two, maybe three. Any statue of him is a waste of good marble and that’s the truth.

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