Your bag is empty.
Stroll the battlefield at Gettysburg. If you’re not humbled by the site of the Civil War battle that cost around 50,000 lives and was widely considered the high-water mark for the Confederacy before the tide rolled back, then you might just be Corey Lewandowski: incapable of telling the truth, disrespectful of yourself and others.
The second day of the three-day exchange in rural Pennsylvania turned at Little Round Top. The 20th Maine, led by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a former professor of rhetoric, defended repeated attacks from the South as General Robert E. Lee tried to flank the massive Northern Army. By the end of the day General Chamberlain routed the attacking Confederates and charged down the mountain. He was later chosen by U.S. Grant to accept the surrender of the Confederate infantry at Appomattox. In a move that stunned both the Northern and Southern armies, Chamberlain reportedly offered a respectful military salute to the Confederates as they laid down their arms. He said it was controversial at the time but thought it the honest and right thing to do, no matter how it was reported.
In his autobiography, Chamberlain wrote this: “My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;—was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”
He wrote this despite his vehement opposition to slavery and the cause for which the Confederates fought.
No Civil War in the history of the world ever ended so civilly. Confederate General John B. Gordon, who rode at the head of the tattered remains of the Southern Army that day, said later that Chamberlain was “one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal Army.”
Chamberlain, a stalwart Republican who later was elected the governor of Maine four times, was always in the thick of the fight. During the Second Battle of Petersburg in 1864 he was shot through the right hip and groin, the bullet exiting his left hip. He withdrew his sword and stuck it into the ground in order to keep himself upright and dissuade the growing cry for retreat. He stood for several minutes until he collapsed and lay unconscious from loss of blood. The division’s surgeon predicted he would perish.
Some 50 years later, he did. He was the last Civil War veteran to die as a result of wounds from the war and is considered by some the last casualty of the war.
Trump’s staff consists mostly of sycophants who cannot find employment anywhere else—unless it’s putting on a puffy lime-green shirt and cavorting in fits and starts on ‘Dancing With the Stars.’
Contrast Chamberlain’s story with that of today’s occupant of the White House or Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager who testified on Capitol Hill this week that he had no obligation to be honest with the media because, he said, we are “just as dishonest as everyone else.” He advocated for lying to us all.
For those left in the country trying to build a consensus among many disparate views, Lewandowski’s words and the President’s continued prattling are an insult to all who came before us and sacrificed much to advance the cause of liberty, democracy and freedom.
It is futile to repeat further the villainy of a president who reduces the actions of the executive branch of the federal government of the United States to semi-coherent tweets. It is exasperating to point out the continued hypocrisy, criminality, lies, narcissism and sheer bombast of a man who views the presidency as an income source, a reality show and a stand-up comedy routine combined. It is almost beyond words that the party of Lincoln has descended into the madness of Donald Trump.
We all know Trump is corrupt. His staff consists mostly of sycophants who cannot find employment anywhere else—unless it’s putting on a puffy lime-green shirt and cavorting in fits and starts on *Dancing With the Stars.*
Trump, for all of his shortcomings (of which there are more than just the 12,000 documented falsehoods or misleading claims he’s voiced in office), has actually done something for which we all should be thankful: He may not have drained the swamp, but he’s exposed all of the swamp creatures to the full light of day, on both sides of our great political divide.
What Trump and many of the Democrats who are now vying to replace him as our nation’s chief executive don’t yet understand is that there is a growing number of people who do not like any of them. These voters are tired of divisive politics; tired of the corruption, lies and self-serving actions of those elected to office.
Trump remains the epitome of a low-grade conman, but he is not an aberration of the system. Lack of voter education, low voter turnouts and political candidates who seek to make a career out of looting the public instead of serving it have led us, arguably, to the starkest cliff we’ve faced since the Civil War. Donald Trump, as it turns it out, is just one of many stupefyingly corrupt politicians.
How can a nation so challenged ever survive?
We can start by seeing the current political scene for what it is: a cautionary tale. We have elected grifters, mindless hucksters and a plethora of weaklings from both major parties who probably got too many wedgies in middle school or were always picked last for kickball. We elevate them and some of us swear fealty to these itinerant poltroons as if they were leaders. They are not. The best of them serve the commonwealth and the worst prey upon it. They are temp employees we elect to serve us, but through gerrymandering, the influx of special-interest money and our lack of involvement in the political process these servants have flipped the script so we serve them and they can spread their political bile across the countryside.
Trump stripped away the thin veneer of civility, exposing, through his multitude of dysfunctional rants, others who tried to fool (often with great success) voters for decades. He attracted like-minded individuals of low moral fiber and loud mouths to twist the knife of division into the body politic. He let rise the racists, the nationalists, the misogynists, the greedy, the vacuous and those who would do anything to have their moment on television—dancing in that godawful puffy shirt.
Trump remains the epitome of a low-grade conman, but he is not an aberration of the system.
This week, The Washington Post broke a story wherein a whistleblower said, back in August, that our president made a “troubling” promise to a foreign leader back in August. Also this week the president again threatened war with Iran and dangled the possibility of additional sanctions on that country after his administration and the Saudi government accused it of bombing installations in Saudi Arabia.
When I asked him on the South Lawn how he could trust the Saudi Arabians to tell us the truth about Iran when they lied to us about killing Jamal Khashoggi, Trump brushed it off as he does virtually all questions about issues and policies. He does business with Saudi Arabia and loves despots. Like Lewandowski, our president seems to have no problem lying to the media—and since we report what he says, lying to the American people.
Trump, Lewandowski, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and a host of others like them represent today’s Republican party. This is the same party that gave us not only Lincoln, who held our nation together, but the first environmentalist president: Teddy Roosevelt, who also was a “trust buster” and took big business to task. The GOP also gave us Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who once told us that “the power of noble deeds is to be preserved and passed on to the future.”
Those Republican leaders of the past, despite their human flaws, inspired generations of Americans to respect one another, preserve our environment and provide an economic climate in which all of us had a chance to succeed.
In the future, today’s politicians will be seen as examples of what can go wrong with our country when we do not protect our rights or get involved in the process of self-governing. They will serve as warning signs on the road to wherever lost souls wander aimlessly in a dark place of their own creation, wondering how they ended up there, unable and unknowing of how to leave.