On Thursday, the former president* of the United States gave a burlesque of a "press conference" at his south Florida redoubt. He took exactly five questions. Instead, he spent the vast majority of the time giving what was essentially a stump speech to the assembled press, who should've walked out the moment they realized how badly they'd been suckered. It was the now-exhausted litany of imaginary horrors and barefaced non-facts. But, at a speech at Mar-a-Lago after the afternoon's farce, the former president* managed against all odds to find a new subgroup of his fellow citizens that he could alienate. To wit:
But I really. I have to say, Miriam [Adelson], I watched Sheldon [Adelson] sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's the highest award you can get as a civilian. It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. But civilian version. It's actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that's soldiers, they're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead. She gets it, and she's a healthy, beautiful woman.
And they're rated equal. But she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and she got it for her–it's through committees and everything else. She's done an incredible job on addiction as a doctor and so many other things. And I watched your husband sitting at the White House and he was so proud. I've never seen him so proud. He didn't like to show it because he was cool. Right? But he was so proud of you.
There is just enough outrageous stupidity in those remarks to make you forget that, a week prior, he and Elon Musk dismissed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the two cities are thriving now. But the absurdity of comparing the Congressional Medal of Honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom is best illustrated by the roster of people to whom the former president* doled it out.
He gave one to Rush Limbaugh during the State of the Union address. He handed them out to sports heroes from Babe Ruth to Tiger Woods. But, most significantly, he bestowed them upon the people who ran cover for him during his crime spree in the White House. These included Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Van Heusen) and Miriam Adelson, the wife of rightwing sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson. It was to Adelson that the former president* directed that remarkable assessment of the two awards.
It certainly is an interesting criterion for judging the relative merits of awards based on whether or not one has to risk life and limb to win them. The Medal of Freedom is judged to be better than the Medal of Honor because so many of the people who won the latter were wounded or killed as they were earning it. The remarks were of a piece with the former president*'s long history of denigrating military service beginning with his blithe dismissal of the late Senator John McCain's imprisonment and torture and passing through those episodes in Europe where he called the people interred in a military cemetery in France "suckers and losers," and declined to get out of his limo to honor them because it was raining and his hair might get wet. A brave stance, certainly, from a third-generation draft dodger whose grandfather had come to this country to get rich in the gold fields and run brothels for the other miners rather than serve his mandatory hitch in the King's army back home in Bavaria.
Naturally, there was an explosion of outrage among veterans at the affront of the former president*'s remarks. Providing us with such explosions is really the former president*'s most significant political accomplishment. But the former president* did in his own mad way open up the question of what constitutes historic American heroism in 2024, and who gets to define it. And it summons up again the wisdom of the Wizard of Oz who, upon bestowing courage upon the Lion, told him:
Back where I come from, we have men called heroes. Once a year, they take their fortitude out of mothballs and parade it down the main streets of the city, and they have no more courage than you do. But they do have one thing you haven't got – a medal.
As with all things involving the former president*, I already feel guilty taking his prattle seriously enough to discuss it at this length. After all, he just babbled something that perked up through the spark gaps in his brain for the purpose of sucking up to the people with real money, like Miriam Adelson. But, as also has been the case since he dragged American politics down the golden escalator to hell, with reckless casualness, he profaned something that once used to matter a great deal.
It mattered to the country, as represented by the Congress, when it awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to George Henry Maynard. It mattered on a winter's afternoon in a field outside of Fredericksburg when he realized that Charles Armstrong had been left on the battlefield and went back out to get him. It mattered when George Henry Maynard left his job as a jeweler's apprentice to enlist in the 13th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. And, at least from this laptop, it matters that, not too far across a river fat with lily pads, George Henry Maynard rests along Woodburn Path in the Mt. Feake cemetery in Waltham in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Something is lost among those lily pads and, as the poet once said, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
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