9-4-26. Most of us have had sad birthdays, but this is the saddest one for the United States that I’ve seen in my lifetime, certainly worse than after 9-11. It’s no surprise that Roy Cohn’s greatest acolyte delivered a speech last night before Mount Rushmore that would have made Joe McCarthy a very happy destroyer of lives.

Inmate 47 mostly stuck to prompter, which I think he hates. He sounds disengaged, semi-robotic, but also feeble. He much prefers to free-wheel it, inventing his own facts and grammar along the way. But this it-must-have-been-Stephen-Miller screed was too important to be entrusted to “the weave.” The unemployed and undocumented immigrants are communists, it now appears. So are those who acknowledge our morally spotty history including our stealing-land-from-the indigenous tendencies. (Ironic, as the speech was made on stolen land.) All communists, and it seems this may refer to all Democrats, must be expelled. Which may mean me.

I’ll point out that refusing to own our past sins means we can’t become better, only worse. This is a concept that should be understandable to people of real faith. But the white nationalists/Christian nationalists who are running the show now have very little to do with actual Christian precepts, or anything remotely spiritual. That includes the man at the rotten core of it, the profoundly empty figure who embraces whatever movement will better serve his self interests in the moment. (Recall that Hitler was not aryan. Or German. Also that the Felon-in-Chief was a Clinton-loving Democrat when that served him.)

The only thing that redeemed our past from horrors like slavery, which we are no longer supposed to mention, was that we were trying to be better.

I look for hope but find none as long as we willingly place ourselves in thrall to this profoundly empty figure, this Sauron who desires nothing but power and worship, and who despises the very idea that there exist those who do not exalt him, who hold dear their own independent, defiant thoughts on what this country is supposed to mean.