If it’s difficult to describe here at home after all this time, it was nearly impossible to talk at all while at Arlington National Cemetery twenty years ago.

The place demands silence. No talk above whispers to share and confirm the palpable awe all around you. If the concept of a memorial wasn’t enough to keep us quiet, there was the sight: the whiteness of the gravemarkers, the ordered rows both parallel and perpendicular, the exact distances, the cut of the grass, the appearance of guards, even the trees seemed uniform as they stood at attention casting generous, merciful shade.

Many tourists were there that late May day, warm enough for t-shirts and shorts. My friend and I were just as casual, but I marveled at the sight of several t-shirts with images and messages you wouldn’t want at a family gathering, and others so silly you wouldn’t want to be seen with anyone wearing them.

Sure seemed an insult to the place, and considering what the place is, an insult to the country. But the teens in them were well-behaved, quiet enough, and no-one objected, so on the tours went–with or without any expected reverence or deference.

And as we saw this week, it’s those in suits and ties whose desecration of hallowed ground forces us to speak out loud. Reports have since surfaced that the event itself was staged by the Trump campaign so they could slam Kamala Harris for not attending. That explains JD Vance’s seeming nonsequitur of a reaction, accusing Harris of “not bothering to show up,” even after the stunt, complete with abusive treatment of a cemetery official, was exposed. In effect, JD gave the game away.

Never seems to be any bottom to how low these characters will go, which is why I’m so tempted to dismiss the incident by seconding if not plagiarizing a friend who “did not mind him entering a cemetery. I did not like him coming out.”

Be that as it may, those objecting to Bonespur’s use of Arlington for a photo-op are forgetting what he and First Lady I-Don’t-Care staged in an El Paso hospital days after the mass shooting in a shopping mall in August 2019.

Tempting to say the same about those who rationalize their hero’s turning the grief of others into self-promos, but their forgetfulness has proven to be more deliberate or maybe selective than natural. I’ve been calling this willful ignorance, but events such as Charlottesville, Jan. 6, and the crude exhibitions at the El Paso hospital and now Arlington suggest that it is more like unwitting hypnosis.

Call this what you will, but you cannot call it normal, much less good:

An infant survived the shooting when both parents shielded him from the rapid, automated fire of an impressionable young Texan who drove 650 miles under the influence of Bonespur’s anti-immigrant rants to wipe out as many brown-skinned, black-haired shopping mallers as he could with a weapon designed for war-zones.

Thanks to the NRA’s hysterical, anti-historical, high-financed and selective interpretation of the Second Amendment, “war-zone” is defined as anywhere between the Canadian and Mexican borders. Over which of those borders or into which of our oceans the term “well-regulated” jumped to escape the NRA’s interpretation is anyone’s guess, but it’s worth noting the term’s abject failure to mean anything in the supposedly English-speaking USA–and never mind who penned it.

But I a-gress. Back in bi-lingual El Paso, both parents perished while protecting their son and are now surely enjoying Republican thoughts and prayers for their efforts. Their protection was so thorough that the baby was quickly released from the hospital into the custody of an aunt and uncle.

Apparently under the hypnosis of “Make America Great Again,” when they heard that Bonespur was making an obligatory visit to the hospital, they returned with the boy. Likely they are Catholics, possibly among many Hispanics for whom abortion is the first and foremost political issue. Be that as it may, they jumped at the honor of being photographed with a man who compares himself to Jesus Christ, autographs Bibles and offers them, upside down or rightside up in return for campaign donations.

And so the pic was taken. Bonespur couldn’t resist adding a thumbs up to his smile. Assigned to display the living, breathing prop, I-Don’t-Care thoughtfully left her jacket on the plane.

At Arlington, he did the same following an invitation to the cemetery from a Gold Star mother who has been convinced that Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris killed her son in Afghanistan, proving that, under hypnosis, you can be led to believe and say anything.* I-Don’t-Care, not needed for a display, stayed home with her jacket.

To think that 20 years ago I was shocked by people wearing frivolous, nasty, suggestive, and at times border-line obscene t-shirts at Arlington when walking in groups around the tombs, the crosses, the markers! I recall thinking that neither “evolution” or “intelligent design” could be applied to what was in front of me.

Today I see a man use a cemetery and a hospital as photo-ops, graves and orphaned babies as props, while knowing he has the presidential nomination from one of our two major political parties and has a reasonable shot at returning to the White House.

Many Democrats claim that the November election will be a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. While I do not disagree, I suggest that another dichotomy may be more to the point:

Democracy vs. devolution.

-622-

Here’s what her news sources never tell her:

Oh, you villain, villain, damned, smiling villain! Where’s my notebook? I should write down that one can smile and smile, and still be a villain. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5