3/4/25
Trump: I return to this chamber tonight to report that America’s momentum is back. Our spirit is back. Our pride is back. Our confidence is back. And the American dream is surging — bigger and better than ever before. The American dream is unstoppable, and our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again. Never been anything like it.
Reassuring? Hardly.
The Reassurer
A people in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe
poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food,
who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that
they breathe, drink, and eat,
such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It
is not logical,
but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President
who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever.
The President reassures the farmer and his wife who have
exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted
themselves to pay for it,
and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake
of the free market, foreign trade, and the prosperity of
corporations;
he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their
place of exile, because the poor land contained something
required for the national prosperity, after all;
he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a
substance used in the normal course of national prosperity
to make red apples redder;
he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit
watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of the floor
of a mined-out stripmine;
from his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right
to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their
misfortunes, and that these are equal rights.
The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man who
has seen God, and found Him a true American, not
overbearingly smart.
The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the
Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,
who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if it came,
would bring financial ruin;
he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory and
Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who has been
wakened in the night by a dream of the calamity of peace.
-written by our prophet, Wendell Berry, from "The Mad Farmer Poems" (Counterpoint, 2013).
CPW
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