Mount Rushmore

Sunday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Our Mount Rushmore

Personally, I regard Mount Rushmore as an excrescence on the mountain and a monument to the horror that Edward Abbey called industrial tourism. Beyond that, it is an expression of a naive piety and a patriotic sentimentalism that no longer exists in America. Matthew Davis correctly views the presidential sculptures carved into the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota by Gutzon Borglum in the 1920s and 1930s as very much a period piece, an expression of popular American patriotism in the early decades of the 20th century. His “biography” of the mountain is equally a cultural work reflective of its time. Preeminent among Davis’s concerns in writing this book was to determine, “What is a memorial for?

rushmore

Tuesday

Cockburn

Who could be Mount Rushmore’s fifth head?

Late last week, the New York Times once again floated the idea that President Trump could become the fifth head on Mount Rushmore, to the right of Abraham Lincoln (that’s for sure). He’d be like the fifth Beatle, but yuge. While it’s true that Trump has brought peace to Africa and the Middle East in the last week, and has done an excellent job lining the Oval Office with gold filigree, maybe we should hold off on carving his visage into a mountainside until we see the final fate of the Big, Beautiful Bill. For Trump’s a jolly good fellow, and what nobody can also deny is that there’s available rock space in South Dakota. The President likes nothing more than a good real-estate deal on undeveloped land. But let’s hold off on clearing headspace for the Donald just yet.

Rushmore

Monday

The Spectator

Doug Emhoff knocked up nanny during affair

Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, admitted this Saturday to cheating on his first wife following an explosive report that he once got their nanny pregnant. “During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN. The report indicates that more than a decade ago Second Gentleman Emhoff cheated on his then-wife with a blonde nanny, Najen Naylor, who taught at the Willows, a Californian private school attended by his two children.

Monday

Roger Kimball

The weaponization of whining

Bill Buckley used to observe that liberals always say they are in favor of entertaining opinions opposed to their own but are then surprised to discover that there are opinions opposed to their own. Bill died early in 2008 when the species homo liberalis was already under siege, his little squeaks for tolerance, at least in principle, drowned out by an inbred horde of professional victims, drunk on the cloying nectar of their own quivering sense of virtue. These days students arrive for their bright college years with plump mental bottoms swaddled in moist moral nappies, their mouths puckering for the grateful nipple of energizing pabulum about the horrors of racism and prejudice, their tiny minds soothed by reassuring nostrums caressing their unshakeable sense of election.

whining

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Trump takes on anti-nationalism

Even the most ardent Trumpist must admit that it has been a bad few months for the President. The COVID-19 crisis robbed Donald Trump of his strongest argument for re-election, the economy, and made his administration seem ineffectual. He was wrongfooted by the riots after George Floyd’s death. The country has been in chaos under his watch. He has looked weak, even disorientated. His polling slid.Yet Trump, ever the reality entertainer, loves a comeback story — and last night he launched his. Under the heads of Mount Rushmore, on a blue-white-and-red dais, the President marked Independence Day with a fiercely patriotic and defiant speech. It was an address that tackled, head on, the crisis that has rocked America in recent weeks.

anti-nationalism