He's a Yankee Doodle Donald

In case you hadn't heard, President Trump will be the star of his own Fourth of July show in Washington this year.

Righteous people are all upset about the plans, because they deviate so recklessly from The Norm of presidents just sitting sedately on the White House balcony and watching the fireworks explode above our nation's great phallic symbol, a/k/a the Washington Monument. This monument might have presaged Trump when it sustained serious cracks a few years back due to a renegade earthquake believed to be caused by some very serious fracking in the area.

USA! USA! USA!

One typical headline bemoaning the sacrilege to be perpetrated upon our Great National Birthday is "Donald Trump Is Not America." 

 Oh, yeah?

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says he hates to waste his valuable column real estate on Trump, but sometimes patriotism and decency demand that he take a stand, that he set people and Trump himself straight on the fact that this holiday cannot, just cannot, be all about Him:

Most of his predecessors did nothing of the kind. They understood that the day belonged to the country, not its leader, and they didn’t conflate the two.
Trump does, all the time, and it’s alternately annoying, confounding and galling. If you’re not thrilling to his vision and submitting to him, you’re possibly guilty of treason — remember that rant? If you’re asking legitimate questions about unholy alliances that he may have forged or conflicts of interest he may possess, you’re orchestrating a coup.

Most Black people and native Americans also understand that this holiday was never about them, given that the great white Fathers and Constitution-writers decreed that the enslaved would be only counted as three-fifths of a person -- and that was only so that plantation owners could be as well-represented in Congress as their northern Brethren. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, certainly did not include the people he purported to own in his assertion that "all men are created equal." And as for the Indians, they had already been personae-non-grata and extermination fodder for hundreds of years prior to the signing of the national birth certificate - or, in the contiguous future USA, at least since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock settlers began infecting them with their European diseases before expelling them and killing them.

So, again, Trump is simply ripping the mask right off all the historical and hysterical hypocrisy that is the very heart of the Fourth of July. He is exposing and encapsulating and symbolizing American Exceptionalism into one symbolic little blob of corpulent flesh.

My comment on the Bruni column:

Trump's bizarre-spangled Fourth would lose its luster if only the cable TV networks will set aside their greed for one magical night and patriotically refuse to broadcast this grotesque event.

Will they, though? His Nuremberg-style rallies are always reliably lucrative for the networks and their corporate sponsors. Think of the audience share and the ratings, the blow-by-blow coverage starting at the crack of dawn's early light, the talking heads acting out all the shock, awe and outrage they can muster.

Who in their right consumer mind has ever stayed home on the Fourth to watch military brass bands playing on PBS, or a rerun of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" with James Cagney as George M. Cohan? Trump could literally change the whole tradition and meaning of this day for at least some people.

 Not that he'd use the occasion for the public good, of course, such as lecturing young people not to blow their fingers or their MAGA-hat wearing heads off with illegal fireworks. In fact, he might do the exact opposite, and load up his cheesy online store with Trump-branded sparklers or rocket grenade launchers for the kiddies. It would certainly help get people all hyped up for all the new global wars he seems so anxious to start with his pals Bolton and Pompeo.

 Boycott Trump this Fourth of July. As George M. Cohan might say as he rolls in his grave: "My mother will thank you, my father will thank you, my sister will thank you, and I will thank you!"