AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

I was 61 years old when I first visited Washington, DC. I’d been dying to go for years — hell, decades even, ever since I watched for the first time the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A flying saucer lands in the nation ‘s capital and the visitor from another planet who emerges from it — his name was Klaatu — warns us that our at-the-time primitive delving into nuclear power to make bombs was a threat to neighboring planets. “I am leaving soon and you will  forgive me if I speak bluntly,” Klaatu says in his valedictory as he and his robot Gort prepare to depart the Earth. He goes on to say humanity’s fiddling with nuclear weapons not only threatens our own survival but that of neighboring planets. Klaatu and Gort are sort of cosmic policemen who roam about warning benighted civilizations such as ours to knock off all this war business and start acting…, well, civilized. “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder.”

Klaatu

Earlier in the movie, Klaatu, in disguise, accompanies a ten-year-old kid to the Lincoln Memorial where he reads the Gettysburg Address etched in the pedestal of the Lincoln statue within. “Those are great words,” he says. “He must have been a great man.”

I promised myself I’d go to that very spot one day. I wanted to see the great words of a great man with my own eyes. Later, after learning about the March on Washington, I was doubly moved to visit the Lincoln Memorial. For dozens of reasons, I never got to Washington until my seventh decade and — just my luck — the first year of the first Trump term.

The Loved One and I stopped in for my coffee fix one morning at a McDonald’s that was a stone’s throw from the White House and — wouldn’t you know it — right above the trash bin was a framed portrait of the sitting president. I don’t know if that particular McDonald’s displays a portrait of whomever is president in that spot, or if the manager was making a witty statement re: Li’l Duce. I like to think it was the latter.

Anyway, TLO and I rented bikes to get around the Mall and the Smithsonian and all the other highlights of the capital. The first place we went (after my McDonald’s coffee) was the Lincoln Memorial. I wanted to stand precisely where Klaatu stood in the movie and on the very same steps where Martin Luther King stood when he proclaimed, “I have a dream.” I did both things. Highlight of my life.

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington. People again are gathering on the spot where a quarter of a million stood on that late summer day in 1963. I don’t know how many people will show up today. The speakers are scheduled to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, Bernie Sanders, and a slew of other progressive notables. The ’63 March took place when there was still a smidgen of optimism in this country, before JFK was gunned down and Vietnam  us apart and Watts and Newark and Detroit burned and Nixon’s Watergate served as the final nail in whatever faith or loyalty or hope the public had in this thing called America.

A Quarter of a Million

Since then, we’d become so disenchanted that we elected — twice! — a snake-oil selling, prevaricating, insulting, incurious, unread, power-mad TV reality show star as president simply because he thumbed his nose at all the previous hypocritical sons of bitches who’d preceded him in the Oval Office.

Martin Luther King had a dream in 1963. This year, we have a nightmare.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.