OPINION
I’ve been ranching this hard country between the Davis Mountains and the Rio Grande for nearly sixty years, and I figured I had seen every breed of fool the good Lord ever turned loose.
Fools who leave a gate open. Fools who try to outrun a flash flood in a half-ton pickup. Fools who buy a bull off the internet, sight unseen.
But I swear on my granddaddy’s Bible, I never thought I’d live to see a fool set out to build himself a 250-foot golden monument to his own self while the rest of us out here sweating and counting nickels at the feed store.
Yes sir, you heard right.
Donald Trump is fixing to build himself a “Triumphal Arch” – triumphal over what, I couldn’t tell you (and he can’t either) – and he aims to plant it square at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.
That arch will squat right across the solemn sightline that runs from the Lincoln Memorial to the graves of our honored dead. That corridor belongs to the fallen, not to the vanity of some ‘jackass’ who never wore the uniform a day in his pampered life.
Trump might not know it, seeing as he dodged the draft with a doctor’s note, but Arlington is holy ground.
My people are buried in ground like that. Most every family out here in the Pecos Country, and all over West Texas, has sent somebody off to war, and some of them came home in a flag-draped box.
Those brave men and women gave everything they had to keep tyrants off our doorstep. They ought not have the gate to their final resting place gussied up with a gaudy gold arch honoring a modern-day American tyrant with a spray tan the color of a rusted gate hinge.
Now let’s talk about timing, because out here timing is everything – you don’t brand in a duststorm, and you don’t haul hay in the rain.
While this man is dreaming up his shiny arch, I’m paying ransom money for the diesel it takes to get to town and back, and town is eighty miles each way.
The screwworm is chewing its way through our state, and every rancher I know is out doctoring calves and praying over the rest, wondering if this is the year the whole operation goes under.
Groceries cost more than they ever have in my long life, and on top of all that, we’re tangled up in a fool’s war in Iran, started by the King of Fools himself, near as I can tell, to keep us all so busy fretting that we don’t notice our wallets being picked clean.
That’s an old trick – wave your hat at the horse so he don’t see the spur coming.
And who do you suppose is going to pay for this monstrosity?
Why, the same Americans paying sky-high prices for gasoline, groceries, and every other blessed necessity of life.
The man has said, right out loud, that he doesn’t spend his time thinking about regular folks and our economic miseries.
Well, that makes us even, because none of us regular folks spend our time thinking a 250-foot arch covered in gold is a sensible use of anybody’s money.
A former Texas Historical Commission member from Abilene says there’s no justification for building it at all.
Monuments of that kind, he says, are supposed to be earned – they commemorate sacrifice, historical consequence, and the slow passage of time.
Trump’s altar to himself has no historical precedent and never will. At 250 feet, it would stand half again taller than the Lincoln Memorial. Think on that a minute.
Abraham Lincoln held this country together through its bloodiest hour and freed four million souls, and he got a few feet of quiet marble. Donald Trump got a bone-spur deferment, and he wants 250 feet of shiny granite slathered in gilt.
I swear that man would gold-leaf a stock tank!
Some of us out here have taken to calling it what it is: Trump’s Golden Calf, straight out of Exodus 32, and you’ll recall what Moses did when he came down off that mountain and found the people bowing to a hunk of shiny metal – he ground that calf to powder in his righteous anger.
Lord, this country could use a couple of leaders like Moses right about now — in Austin and in Washington.
Is there hope? Maybe.
Veterans’ organizations, military families, and historians are raising objections to the arrogance of it all, and bless every last one of them for it. They know what some folks in Washington have clearly forgotten – that Arlington Cemetery ground was bought with blood, not bluster.
Puts me in mind of what old Erasmus wrote about fools centuries ago: “The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.”
He could have been describing a certain Trump Cabinet meeting.
So here’s what I’m asking, neighbor.
Put down your hat, pick up the phone, and call your state and congressional representatives.
Tell them West Texas didn’t raise fools, and we can spot one’s handiwork from a county away. Tell them to halt the Trump Arch before the first shovel hits that sacred ground.
The dead at Arlington kept their promise to this country. The least we can do is honor their sacred memory.
Signed,
Constance Truthe
