Nothing important happened today
… King George III’s mythical diary, July 4, 1776
The first time I saw that quote a few years ago, my reaction was that we were being too hard on Georgie.
True, the king we were rebelling against was eventually judged insane. But George III didn’t have a twitter feed or even CNN, and couldn’t have kept up. We do have all that – but we also have Snopes.com and other fact-checking resources as well, and so after some years of seeing that quote dragged out every year on the Fourth of July, I discovered that it is entirely phony; George III never kept a diary at all.
I had already known that American independence wasn’t really declared on the Fourth of July; the Continental Congress voted to declare independence two days before.
Nor did the patriots gather around on July 4 and sign it, as all the paintings show. As historians Joseph Ellis, David McCullough have shown, the faded document some of us have stood in line to see was produced weeks later, and most of the patriots signed in on August 2, or soon after that.
But no matter! For whatever reason, the elegantly written document in the Library of Congress is dated July 4, and that’s when we’ve been celebrating our independence.
And you know what? There’s a lot in that document worth celebrating, by even the most cynical of us:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, I know those writing those words meant them to apply mostly to white men with property.
The words themselves, however, allowed and even compelled further generations to push those boundaries, to expand the franchise to the poor and women and minorities.
We fought a civil war over this; we gradually evolved and got better, right up until the ten years ago, when we triumphantly elected and then reelected an African-American.
Then, two years ago, we took a giant flying leap back into the cesspool of our worst impulses and fears.
Christopher Hitchens, the late great British journalist, wrote in 1990 that “The United States, for example, has never had a President as bad as George III.”
Hitchens died, tragically way too young in 2011, (another reason not to smoke, kids) but I doubt he’d say that today.
“I wish nothing but good, therefore, everyone who doesn’t agree with me is a traitor and a scoundrel.” Now that’s something George III did, in fact, say, in reference to those beastly Americans wanting to be independent.
Guess who is the only American president we could ever imagine saying anything similar? Yes; let’s face it: We now have the worst person in the Oval Office we’ve ever had. True, they all haven’t been saints: “May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof,” John Adams wrote his wife Abigail when he became the first president to live there.
Few of them were wise all the time. James Buchanan sat on his hands and allowed Southern states to secede. Richard Nixon was a paranoid who sanctioned corrupt and illegal, if totally ham-handed, spying on his enemies. Warren Harding was a poker-playing, dim-witted slob; George Bush II took us into a disastrous war, and others had other failings.
But all of them did share some respect for the sacredness and traditions of the office, even if they failed to live up to them.
That is, until now.
Here’s one bit of reason to be optimistic. We should never forget, despite his lies, that Donald Trump is largely an accidental president, who owes his job to a dramatic Electoral College malfunction.
We shouldn’t forget that most of those Americans who voted in November 2016 – 54 percent – did not want Donald Trump to be president. He got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Mitt Romney had four years before.
Hillary Clinton beat him by a bigger margin that Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford or Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey.
She beat Trump by more than ten times John F. Kennedy’s winning margin… except she lost. We should also remember that she was probably the weakest and most disliked candidate the Democrats could have nominated.
But that’s the past. Late last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld by a 5 to 4 vote, Trump’s travel ban against citizens of several mainly Muslim countries. The justices who approved this latest stain on what America was supposed to be all about did so by pretending it wasn’t a “Muslim ban.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, in especially weasel-like language, admitted that the tweeter-in-chief had called “for a total and complete ban on Muslims entering the United States,” and had alleged that “Islam hates us.”
But he essentially said that any President ought to do whatever he wanted in terms of directives aimed to protect “national security.” There was one minor ray of light; the court did overturn the 1944 Korematsu v United States decision that had found that the horrible practice of sending Japanese-Americans to concentration camps during World War II had been legal. The court now says you can’t do that to American citizens, which at least means I’m unlikely to be writing this from a chicken coop or an abandoned racetrack anytime soon.
By the way, this disgraceful decision never would have happened if the Senate had been allowed to vote, as it should have, on Merrick Garland, President Obama’s moderate choice for the court when Antonin Scalia ascended to the angels.
There’s even reason to believe Scalia might not have supported this obscenity. But Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch has been a rubber stamp for the far right.
Now, of course, Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring. Things have gotten so bad that he was seen as a moderate, because once in a blue moon, he would cast a vote for decency, mostly on social issues, like same-sex marriage.
Kennedy, of course, supported the travel ban, and was on the wrong side of many issues, from harming unions to Bush v. Gore. But things are also so bad now his successor is indeed likely to be worse. The only hope is to delay the confirmation of any dreadful nominee till after the midterm elections.
Decent people need to do all they can to pressure the senate to try to make that happen. The Republicans have by their actions shown that they think this is acceptable.
By the way, there is something else you need to do too. Two years ago, some otherwise intelligent people argued there wasn’t any significant difference between Clinton and Trump.
Can anyone now say that today?
Whatever else you do, if you ever want to be even somewhat proud on the Fourth of July again… vote!
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Silver Lining for Mass Transit: The Center for Michigan’s Bridge Magazine, usually the best source for serious journalism in this state, reported last week that any chances of getting a new bus-based mass transit proposal on the ballot proposal was dead, thanks to opposition from Macomb and Oakland County leaders.
That’s dismaying – but may be a blessing in disguise. It was unlikely that the proposal would pass this year, given the smaller turnout of an off-year election.
Another loss might doom a transit proposal forever, and trying again in 2020 would make much more sense. A much better transit proposal nearly won two years ago, but those behind it did a lackluster job selling it to the people. L. Brooks Patterson, whose transit ideas are anchored in 1954, won’t be running for reelection then, and the world may look very different, providing it’s still here.
