Speaker 1: Looking ahead down the road aways. When mister Trump goes
down to defeat in November, after he's done complaining about
the rigged election, the unconstitutionality of Biden's withdrawal, the AI
enlargement of Kamala Harris's crowds, the oppression by the fake news,
he will finally turn his attention to the creation of
the Trump Library, two words that do not sit comfortably together.
And my guess is that he will designate Mari Lago
as the site for the government to maintain and for
him to have the right of residency. A special wing
will be created for the public display of top secret documents.
He will, of course want to control the narrative of
the library, choose the historians who will be in residence
there so it will proclaim his greatness and the tragedy
of his unjust defeat, and the meaning of his martyrdom.
There will be a great deal of capitalization of key
words at the library, and in the portraits of himself,
will be no flaws of pigmentation nor strands of hair askew.
The faithful will come to the site and rededicate themselves
to the great cause, but eventually they will all die off,
and one day a young executive will take charge and
she will ask herself, what do I do with this
trash heap? And then once more America will need to
deal with the delicate issue of what to do with
historical relics from shameful periods of the past. Other nations
deal with this. We are not alone. Brussels is full
of magnificent buildings paid for by Belgium's vast profits from
the African slave trade in the Congo and elsewhere, same
with London. Outside of Berlin is the enormous moldering estate
of the late Joseph gerbels Hitler's right hand man, which
the stigma of fascism and the Holocaust has rendered unusable.
Germans simply wanted to disappear, and eventually it will, but
not nearly soon enough. Some great architecture was accomplished during
the Nazi era and was preserved, but people had to
pretend not to know they were once decorated with swastikas.
In America, some statuary and memorials honoring Confederate heroes have
been quietly removed. The statue of the old imperialist Teddy
Roosevelt on horseback has been removed from the steps of
the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and shipped to
North Dakota, which doesn't want it either. History is a
complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good
deal of swamp. The Little Big Horn Battlefield in Montana
was preserved in honor of General Custer, who there gave
his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry,
a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What
is the good of preserving an enormous sight of military
stupidity in an unjust cause. The granite monument on Last
Stand Hill was put up in eighteen eighty one, five
years after the debacle, and in two thousand and three
a monument was erected to the Lakoda, Arapaho, and Cheyenne
who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers.
Tourists still come to look at this, But why it's
a dishonest historical site. The reason for its existence is
a piece of trivia. A few hundred white guys on
horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men,
and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger
context of the story is lost The real enemy wasn't
the Seventh Cavalry, but the smallpox and other diseases that
Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes.
The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the
land set aside for the instruction and practice of native religion,
the sweat lodge, the sun dance, the quest for visions
and dreams, the worship of the Creator. I'm an Episcopalian,
and I think I could profit from a few months
dancing and sweating out on the plains dreaming. I've had
dreams of miserable times in my own life, marital misery,
these fascistic periods when I threw myself militantly into realizing
my vain ambitions and abandon spiritual wakefulness entirely. The Little
Bighorn would be a national spiritual park, meant for people
of all colors and religious beliefs or unbeliefs to gather
on the prairie and attempt to rediscover the best parts
of themselves and let those bloom and bear fruit and
the crappy stuff whither away. As for what to do
with Mara a lago fifty years from now, when Trump
is long forgotten. I take no position. The number of
lies he has told has surely passed one hundred thousand,
and is close to two maybe three hundred. Of him
is a waste of good marble, and that's the truth.
Garrison Keeler is taking a Prairie Home Companion Christmas to
Saint Paul, New York and Galveston, Texas. Celebrate the December
holidays with music, sketches, the news from Lake Wobegon, and
a whole lot of holiday cheer. Tickets are on sale.
For details, clickthevents page at Garrison Keiller dot com