fact-- Trump has literally trademarked the Reagan phrase "Make America Great Again," but offers no serious plans as to how to accomplish that.
fact -- the response to Trump from the left is to shriek about past wrongs that America committed, implying, in essence, that America is greater today because we have same sex marriage, than it ever was.
and yet while the makers of "The Newsroom" are probably not Trump fans, they seem to agree with the premise that America has lost its greatness, and that we need to recognize that and make it great again.
If you want to make sense of this thread, you really need to watch this video.The clip is dead wrong on four minor points --
1. wrong that there is nothing positive in which America is the greatest. [the USA is the greatest in its contributions to HIV and cancer research, and that's nothing that a person who can look herself in the mirror should sneer at];
2. wrong on the claim that america has the highest # of people who think angels are real; that honor goes to Madagascar;
3. tragically wrong in distracting from an otherwise brilliant and candid speech into a whorish cheap shot at people who believe in angels. That's precisely the sort of self-aggrandizing cheap shot that's turned our elections into an international joke. Such pointless divisive rhetoric provides edge governments like China Russia and Turkey with an all excusing cautionary tale against the dangers of unbridled freedom of speech.
4. tragically wrong in scapegoating Millenials as the "worst.generation.ever" without considering who raised that generation and provided its expectations.
-- but the clip is otherwise brilliant and on point. As if answering the politically correct hacks that write off our Greatest Generation as the generations that "bombed hiroshima and Nagasaki, Jeff Daniels' character says--
It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right, we fought for moral reasons, we passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured disease, and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it, it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy.... We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered.
First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
From what I've seen, from listening to my grandfather and reading Vonnegut, I don't think the Greatest Generation thought of themselves as the Greatest generation. There is nevertheless something great in them to which we can aspire. I don't know that it's objectively provable or useful, to say that at any point in history, that america was "the greatest" country in the world. I think we've done extraordinary things, but more importantly, we've been guided by a dream that is great, that there is, or was, a dream of America which once led us to greatness, even if we never at any time lived up to the greatness of the dream. Isn't this what Lincoln was saying with --
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
wasn't lincoln's whole point that we had yet to live up to that promise?
Wasn't that Martin Luther King's point in alluding to Lincoln's speech--
ive score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.
--that the great dream and promise of America remained unrealized?
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
America has always come closest to living up to its promise, when it acknowledges that it has stumbled, and looks upward from the dirt at the dream of what could be.
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967
I don't see the promise of American greatness in either of the major candidates. I hope to be proved wrong. but even if I am right, the idea of America has survived presidents such as James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps there is a measure of greatness we can aspire to despite who sits in the Oval Office for the next 4-8 years.
