When the idea first circulated that our family should drive down to see the Trump fireworks in DC on July 4th, I was a bit unnerved by the heat warning. It would be over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (39 centigrade). When we arrived four hours later, the humidity was also at 95%. It was hard for me to walk. Still, we walked 13,000 steps the first night. The following day, I walked 30,000 steps.
As soon as we debarked from the car, a woman was blaring a tape loop that said, “Trump is a paedo. Lock him up!” Around her stood about 250 men and women dressed in red, white and blue, screaming in her face, “USA! USA!”
It was so hot that I went into the National Gallery of Art, because it has air conditioning. I beelined to the Simone Martini painting The Angel. It didn’t hit the way it had the first time a year ago, so I wandered with my wife to the various rooms of Italian Renaissance. Then I went into the East Building and looked at an exhibition about the American flag. It displayed the Jasper Johns painting, and many others, including a strange depiction by an anonymous painted in 1865. I had never seen that one before. It featured a black Yankee soldier. It is little-known that nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought for the North in the Civil War. They made up about a tenth of the Union Army. About a quarter of their number perished in the conflict.
For years, the Smithsonian museums in DC have presented a harsh portrait of American history. In the American History Museum, for example, it was all about mistreatment of blacks. Last year when I went down, it was miserable. Every exhibit showed blacks getting lynched or fighting against the police. Amiri Baraka was quoted in much of the signage, even though his strange poem about 9/11 got him fired as New Jersey’s poet laureate. “Somebody Blew Up America” presented Jews as knowing the attack would occur and therefore leaving the Twin Towers early. Yet Baraka’s weird historical takes were everywhere in the museum, as if the curators had used him to think out the presentation of the exhibits. Trump has asked the various museum curators to present a more balanced view. It doesn’t need to all be beating up America.
For years, the Smithsonian museums in DC have presented a harsh portrait of American history.
Baraka was widely known to have said that white women should think it was glorious if a black man raped them. In the 1965 collection Home: social essays, he wrote, “the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped”. His much later work denies this earlier viewpoint in favor of a Marxist-Leninist approach that presents a somewhat different set of allies and enemies. He sees the Appalachian characters presented in “Li’l Abner” as marginalized and mocked similarly to blacks, and sides with them. I almost like the later Baraka.
The Smithsonian version of the truth of American history has been skewed to present the progressive view that America is about racial terror and nothing else, but meanwhile, there is another world going on.
Walking through the city, black men would come up to me, and say, “King, you come to see the fireworks?”. I don’t know why they called me King. I am no King. I am an Emperor.
It was still so hot that I wanted to stay inside the museum, but the place closed at 5 pm and the fireworks did not begin until 11. I walked past the White House with my wife. We talked with two National Reservists who were guarding one of the many service entrances. You couldn’t see the White House at all from any vantage point: they were all blocked off for fear of snipers. The men were in heavy body armor and said it was very weird because it was their first time out of Texas, and they thought the north would have snow and they would need coats.
The White House guards were in heavy body armor and said it was their first time out of Texas, and they thought the north would have snow and they would need coats.
The racial make-up of America is vastly different after the Biden years, when the border was wide open. You now see Indians, Chinese, and many others in massive numbers. And yet, that day, there were also so many whites dressed up in red, white and blue. Trump spoke at about 11 after a heavy downpour lowered the temperatures outside from 100F to 73F (39C to 23C) in the space of twenty minutes. When he ended his speech at 11:58, the fireworks began. A crescendo of tracer bullets and bombardments recalled the War of 1812 and the national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner”, which Francis Scott Key penned in 1814.
The fireworks lasted about an hour. The initial estimate of the crowd’s size was about 500,000, but when lightning began to hit the Mall surrounding the Washington Monument, many were evacuated from open areas. We were squeezed into tightly controlled fencing and had to walk forever to get out of the maze that had been constructed to stop terrorists. Police lights pulsated. Helicopters hovered and jets screamed overhead.
We were squeezed into tightly controlled fencing and had to walk forever to get out of the maze that had been constructed to stop terrorists.
The meaning of the event was that we should “Give War A Chance”. We beat the British and earned the right to self-representation and to the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. The right to bear arms. The right to free speech. Every right in the Constitution is now under attack from the left. And yet, here those rights were once more respected. We won against the British. We won against the Confederates. We beat the Nazis in World War 2. I had wished we would free the people of Iran, but it looks like that is too tall an order. Images from these earlier wars were projected against the Washington Monument along with the word “FREEDOM!”.
The next morning, CNN and others news stations yattered on about the costs of the fireworks. They said that Trump constantly mixed up words in his speech. They tried to present him the way that Biden was presented after his disastrous debate with Trump that got him benched.
The next morning, CNN and others news stations yattered on about the costs of the fireworks.
But America still stands. Past crises have been far worse, according to the filmmaker Ken Burns, who was on PBS in the breakfast room in our hotel: “we have faced far more serious tensions” and even fought a civil war. Tensions around Vietnam were far worse. People like Obama’s benefactor Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorhn began a terrorist group called the Weather Underground. They exploded at least 25 bombs and killed several people, but were exonerated on a legal technicality and are now famous professors in the Chicago area.
It was this group that Trump’s fireworks could be compared against. The fireworks were persuasive. They hark back to the beginnings of America. The jet fighters screaming overhead, the flags waving throughout the city, and the firemen, police, and army units represented the return of a patriotic order that has been flickering on and off throughout America over the last sixty years. But our light has not been extinguished. I hope that in the discussions and internecine rivalries to come no one side will be able to establish a monopoly. I hope that instead e pluribus unum will prevail.
