And so, on this two-hundred-forty-fourth celebration/anniversary of giving the King of England the finger (with ornate phrasing and equally ornate calligraphy) — not because taxes were too high or the military was overused, but because the white slaveowners over here weren't landowning gentlemen in England and therefore couldn't vote on taxes or war (or even send corruptible representatives to vote) — there were speeches and displays of military might in DC.
By a draft dodger (or, at least, someone who has shown no sign of heel spurs that keep him from strolling about).
With visuals that, if captured on slightly grainy black-and-white film, evoke Nürnberg in 1934, or Москва́ in 1950, all too well. Including the contempt for the actual wishes of the majority of the populace, as both of those leaders were "elected" through harsh limitations on voter eligibility… and extolled returning their respective nations to a more-glorious past.
The irony that the Supreme Court just declared that partisan gerrymandering is essentially outside the jurisdiction of the courts to even decide; and the further irony that voting rights are equally bound up in the census matter also just decided (or, more properly, not decided but declared ripe for trial); and the final irony that this President got into office by use of a mechanism that was supposed to be a brake on demagogues (the Electoral College), at least in the minds of those white male landowners and slaveowners we celebrate as The Founders — are individually and collectively too much.
I'll just wash down some Native-American-caught-and-smoked salmon with a craft brew and be all snooty about it, sneering the whole while at burnt-hot-dog-and-PBR self-declared "Real Americans" — the ones who came along a thousand years or more afterward, and haven't considered that most of their ancestors were themselves economic and/or human-rights refugees. One wonders how much attention has been paid to economic conditions in Germany at the time the Drumpf family came over… or the inscription on that damned statute in New York Harbor.
But all of this just leads to the next question: Who will be absent from the reviewing stand next year, Comrade? Look at those photos carefully and pick your candidates. Hopefully in 2021, the centerpiece will be absent, too.