Another Letter To America…
By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart
As I sit in my Kailyard I often wonder about the future.
Dear America,
Sorry, it’s me again. November is not that far away, and Arlington is in my mind.
It should be, very much, in yours.
Now, I have never been in the military. I have no idea what to do with a gun. I watch movies with guns in them and never feel like I want to be the guy mowing down the baddies. I am not that kinda guy.
During the 1980s, whilst a student at university, many campuses protested about the military being on campus. It was a time of mass unemployment and lots of working-class young men ended up in the army or navy or air force, because they got jobs through that. In civilian life they had no hope, and little prospect as heavy industry shut shop, and got rid of massive numbers of their workforce. I did not protest the presence of the military on our campuses but was uncomfortable that many recruitment centers were placed right next door to job centers where the unemployed went to look for employment.
And to be fair, that is about the level of my interest and engagement with the military.
But I am grateful for them.
As I have grown older, I have become able to realize that every country no matter their political philosophy has certain things – a system for honors, a justice system, law enforcement and the military. Doesn’t matter if you are left, right or settled right in the middle you have all of these. I look back at the people who protested all those years ago and I think of how angry they were about uniforms and the people in them. The people in them were often the young and formerly unemployed who simply needed a job. They ended up being in a uniform and many ended up there because they felt like they had little option. Don’t get me wrong, I know many were idealistic and wanted to serve their country and so enlisted. But they wanted to serve.
Service.
For some people all that means is getting your Big Mac delivered.
Oh, Donald…
I could not care any less who invited who. There is an area in Arlington which you simply go and be humble in…
Ah, I see the flaw.
Humility means that you can foresee something bigger than yourself, that you have the ability to notice that the world does not revolve around your being and that there are people far more worthy than you who deserve to be honored, in private, without prying eyes and without cameras taking evidence of your equivocation.
Unworthy as you are to walk around the graves of people who gave service whilst you seek to gain advantage by association, Mr. Trump, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s lines from MacBeth when there is a knocking at the gate. Within the place kept and guarded by the Porter, there is a grave murder of a King to be discovered by truth seekers at that gate, seeking entry. On the way to open the gate, the Porter, who is a little the worse for wear, is walking through a graveyard to get to it. He stops at some graves to “welcome them in.” He stops at the grave of an “equivocator” and says:
“Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God’s sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.”
The equivocators were most notably identified as the supporters of Guido or Guy Fawkes, the man caught trying to blow up parliament. The man trying to destroy democracy. There was no real voting in those days, so history does not record how Guy Fawkes felt about stuffed ballots. But the Porter has much to say about the effect of “an equivocator.”
“Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
And so, there is little to translate here of the more obvious sexual references but again it does seem to fit Donald J. Trump so well…
He has set himself on and you need to take him off. He should persuade no one and you should be disheartened if he does. It is time for us all to stand to because if we do not and we sleepwalk into November, then the lie shall leave him and be the definition of the United States of America abroad.
Want that?
Then look at a man shamelessly, wandering round a cemetery, who derided these soldiers in life because he dodged serving with them but, now they cannot answer back, is disgustingly using their memories for his own end.
There is one more quote, often attributed to Plato. We do not know from whence it really came but it holds wisdom. “Those who seek power are not worthy of that power.”
November, you know what time it is.
Aye Yours,
Donald C Stewart
A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…
(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…
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