“Manifest Destiny”: Journalist and newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined the phrase in 1845. It captures a conviction that glosses a century of colonial expansion. A verbal anchor for the heartfelt, pervasive belief that the government and citizens of the United States have been divinely ordained to stampede across the North American continent–no matter the cost to principles or to life–and to claim it as their own.
So the battle must be joined. McEnany has done her part by helping to transform the previously secular tradition of the White House Press Briefing into a sacred act of Christian Nationalism. She has also provided a glimpse of the forces she believes she is personally up against.
In the coming days, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee will begin its full-Covid press to approve the originalist-textualist Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States. Her lovely autumn nomination ceremony in the White House Rose Garden was a family affair, full of kind, well worded tributes and good GOP vibes. The ceremony has, in the shortest of hindsights, turned out to be a superspreader event, one that has exposed a great many attendees and their families to the coronavirus. It is a textbook case for the contact tracers, whose earnest calls to the White House have gone unanswered.
Someday soon, somebody will write the definitive history of Donald Trump’s perverse anti-science. How, during a global pandemic, he has undermined the very people with the knowledge that we the people, as a nation, depend upon to survive. How scientific guidelines appear and disappear and reappear again, revised and revised and revised again, with confused and contradictory messaging on how we might protect ourselves and others from viral transmission; how firm directives written one day are then released the next as softer, optional suggestions.
So up went those monuments to Confederate politicians, generals, and soldiers and the people rallied around their new stone martyrs and wept. The purpose of the hallowed statuary, of course, was never only about commemorating history. The purpose was specific, strategic and contemporary. The goal was to inspire a gut-level, rah-rah blessing for the new crimes of Jim Crow, for the whites-only and exclusionary voting laws that needed to be defended, yet again, against Yankee judgement and possible aggression. That wordless man on the plinth in the square, holding a rifle, standing there through day and night, through summer and winter? He died so that you may live free.
Derby Day, September 5, 2020. Six white men are in attendance: the very important SENATOR FROM KENTUCKY, the not as important SENATOR FROM SOUTH CAROLINA and the as-yet-disgraced EVANGELIC IMPRESARIO, all Dixie born, and THREE YOUNG MEN, in sailor suits, who attend to them. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, all seats of Churchill Downs remain vacant, save those occupied by these six men.
Unreliable narrators pose a problem for the stories they tell. They make the world they depict for us, and we see that world through their eyes. In fiction, unreliable narrators betray themselves in a variety of ways or, to be more precise about it, they are betrayed by the writers who invented them. Unreliable narrators can be deceptive, but readers nevertheless slowly begin to doubt the narrator when contrary facts are revealed.
The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad monotonous song. “Summer is over and gone,” they sang. “Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.”
The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year–the days when summer is changing into fall–the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.
It’s not something you’re likely to read front to back. You flip through it, skip around in it. Glance at the afterword first and then maybe the introduction. The middle is full of off-putting grammatical nomenclature. The pronominal possessive. The appositive. The split infinitive. To soften the blow, some peculiar characters usher forth from the wings to illustrate these grammatical lessons.
After more than a year of darkness and silence, the lights of the White House Press Briefing Room, without much warning, turned back on. The flat fluorescent light reveals the shadowless theater once again. Once again, video cameras have started to record the dialogue, as the discursive engines rumble back to life. In some ways, everything is the same as it ever was.
