The K-Nut At the Reflecting Pool

 

So many wonderful stories from the Trump era will, if our nation survives, enter into the pantheon of folktales, Bible stories, parables, but, for Mad Dog, his favorite just might be the story of our nut king ordering the Reflecting Pool to turn American Flag Blue.

The Reflecting Pool, over which Martin Luther King delivered his immortal "I Have A Dream" speech, where Jennie Curran  leaps into the water and splashes toward Forrest Gump, and a national moment is transformed into a personal moment for a man who Trump would inevitably deride as a worthless "low IQ" sort. The Reflecting Pool which is hard by that elongated, modest black streak which is the Vietnam Memorial, which is so simple its power was, initially unappreciated. 

Oh, the power of a long ribbon of meaning. Mad Dog read about the Vietnam Memorial and looked at the artist's rendering and thought, "What an ode to defeat and wasted lives this is." But when Mad Dog later approached that black marble trace, and he saw the people gathered at it, reaching out and touching names engraved in gold, and he read the names, from Hispanic, to Puritan to Jewish to WASP, to Irish, Mad Dog was struck that this war was fought by the full breadth of American citizenry, not just the unfortunate, unconnected Black men who got caught in the web of the draft, but by men up and down the scale. His own brother, who thankfully survived, fought there, and he could have avoided a hazardous path but chose a swift boat along a river. And Mad Dog thought that memorial to be, hands down, next to the Lincoln Memorial, the most moving and best of all the memorials in the Capital City.

Sometimes, you build it and something happens totally unexpected: The thing gets a life of its own. 

And maybe the Vietnam memorial is safe from Trump as he doesn't want to talk about his heel spurs, and there is maybe enough gold in the lettering to satisfy him.

Mad Dog supposes architects know about this, and talk about it: The Sphinx, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, Stonehenge--they all just continue to speak to us.

And then Donald John Trump, who knows that he is the Great Trivializer, who has hung banners with his own photographs all over federal buildings in Washington, looks at the Reflecting Pool and it looks back at him and says, "You are just dust in the wind. You are a sour burp, flatulence. You do not matter. You will be gone and be remembered as a sick joke, if you are remembered at all."

And he becomes furious, like King Knut, who had the insight that for all his earthly powers, he could only order men to bend to his will, but to be really great he'd have to bend nature to his will--so he ordered the tide to stop washing in.

Didn't work.

And now, Mr. Trump orders the Reflecting Pool to turn American Flag Blue and it turns, instead, green.

And, as we all know, it isn't easy being green.