MONUMENTS AND REALITY

When my beloved Great Aunt Mary--essentially my grandmother on my dad’s side--passed away, we gathered up her old shrub rose, over a century of age, and replanted it in our garden. When I was a boy, this wise and gentle woman, an elementary schoolteacher, had tasked me to help care for it, telling me she had done the same with her father, and that if I did so a little bit of me would grow in the rose bush--and a likewise a little bit of it inside of me. Just as her father had told her decades earlier. It was a profound thought for a small boy.

When my dad died, my mother asked that we plant a tree to his memory in her front yard. We planted a flowering crab, which grows and blooms yet today--although my mother is now gone. But I drive by that tree nearly every day, and think fondly of them both. I know that many people plant trees in honor of someone’s passing--or more fittingly, in honor of their life. There is even a program wherein folks can have a tree planted in a National Forest as a memorial to a loved one.

Sometimes, when someone who has had an outsized positive influence on the world passes away, other ways are found to commemorate their lives. Their name on a performance art center perhaps, their head on a coin, a tall obelisk dedicated to the ‘Father of the Country,’ or a solemn memorial to the man who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and held the nation together through a Civil War. All of these, from a bush to a tree to a coin to a monolith, or even a mountainside in the Black Hills, may be fitting. (Although I have my doubts about the mountainside.) But they all have one thing in common. Sane people. Good people. Rational, normal people. Do not erect them to themselves. Period. Ever.

That is the realm of the autocrat, the dictator, the insane. The stupid. That is the realm of one Donald Trump. He has long had the compulsion to put his name and image on anything he can think of, from a steak to a tennis shoe to an airplane to a fake ‘university.’ But now that he is *president (ask me and I will tell you that he isn’t really, never has been and never will be) his insanity and megalomania know no bounds. So he daily seeks to erect a new monument to himself. A gold statue. His name on the currency, on a billion dollar ballroom, or next to John F. Kennedy’s on the Kennedy Center. An archway. Passports. A commemorative coin. (Gold, of course). Etc.

There two main reasons--one supposes--that the Creature in the White House does this. One, as already mentioned, is insanity. (Narcissism, megalomania.) The other reason, obviously, is that he knows. He knows very well at some level, that despite the ignorant adoration of his cult, the verdict of history will never allow such things to stand, to be erected by others to commemorate the most corrupt, destructive, traitorous person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Or nearly any other office. So, he commemorates himself. How must that feel? I can’t imagine.

None of it will last. None of it is deserved. None of it is real. My Aunt Mary was more real and deserving. Times a thousand. My mother and dad as well, and surely yours. But Aunt Mary has a rose bush. My dad has a tree. My mother’s beloved Steinway piano, which she played every day for a half-century and which Kathy lovingly plays today--all of these are real memorials to real people--who actually made a positive difference in the real world. The key word, obviously, is real. For despite the Creature’s frantic efforts to bend reality to his will, it has a separate existence, untouched by his insanity. And in the end, it will stand and reassert itself. Perhaps, in some tiny way, through the blooming of a rose or the flowering of a tree, or the ringing notes of a piano. And a million other ways, too.

Reality is not always grandiose, or gold-encrusted. But it is real

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