The Forever Battle for Independence
Letter from Santa Fe, where the nation lives on, no matter what
Here in Santa Fe, America seems almost sane. People order red or green enchiladas, depending on the chili pepper of their choice, with no thought for tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue or troops in L.A. Women come here year round from Texas to find the medical care they cannot get at home, and people flock to Santa Fe in the summer for sunny but not scorching afternoons and cool nights at the opera.
Still, the Fourth of July requires of us a little reflection on where we’ve been and where we might be going if we’re not careful. Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, comes to mind. She was an advocate for workers rights in New York before FDR named her Secretary of Labor, and she was with him to the end, from 1933 to 1945. Frances Perkins often quoted her grandmother who said, “If you walk through a room and there are bodies on the floor, keep on walking.”
Well, there are plenty of bodies on the floor this Fourth of the July, though not, as far as I know, in Santa Fe. Quite a few in Washington, though, and across the world: the 15 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization, fired by Secretary of Health and Human Services Bobby Kennedy, Jr., immigrants convicted of nothing transported to a prison in El Salvador, or an international student at Tufts arrested on the street by six men in masks because she had written a pro-Gaza op ed for a student newspaper, then shipped to Louisiana, now the Salvador of the United States; carriers of the flame at the National Endowment for the Humanities, now decimated; USAID, PEPFAR and millions who were saved by their generous ministrations; not to mention the thousands who ran afoul of Elon Musk’s chainsaw massacre. And not to forget the President of the University of Virginia, either, or of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, or the director of the National Portrait Gallery.
Uh oh. It’s easy to suppose that nothing else untoward could happen at the National Portrait Gallery, and certainly not to presidential pictures. Don’t count on it. The mission of this museum is “to tell the story of America by portraying the people who shape the nation’ history, development and culture.” But much of the carnage inflicted on excellent people by the current regime has come about because of that regime’s categorical rejection of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This could lead, while no one was looking, to the superlative portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama in the National Portrait Gallery.
The painting of Michelle by Amy Sherald is the centerpiece of a show of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, up until August 10. I hope that it will not be returned to Washington until the White House is cleared of its current occupants. It would not be a bad idea for President Obama’s spectacular picture by Kehinde Wiley to be sent to the Whitney also where both could hang on extended loan for the duration.
Of course this sounds crazy. But it was crazy for the guy in the gilded Oval Office to fire Kim Sajet as NPG director because she was too DEI. It was crazy for him to say that Biden did not win the presidential election of 2020. Will he next decide that Obama’s two victories were fraudulent also? That really would be crazy. More likely would be a directive to put the Obama portraits— creative and exciting— in an obscure, out-of- the- way location, where few can find them.
The GOO guy might be especially agitated when he contemplates his own portrait alongside theirs. Already he has noted that a painting of Obama in the Colorado State Capital looks much better than his and demanded that the pudgy picture of him be replaced with the scowling your-money or-your-life visage that he now prefers.
On this Independence Day is there any serious choice but to commit ourselves to resistance? Tim Snyder already has laid out a blueprint for this kind of citizenship in “On Tyranny. ” It’s very good advice, such as don’t obey in advance. To that might be added: Don’t go to Kennedy Center or the National Portrait Gallery or any place contaminated by this regime if you possibly can avoid it. Help immigrants on a personal level wherever you can as St. Rita’s Catholic Church in Dallas now urges its parishioners to do, and the Oak Lawn Methodist Church, also in Dallas, has done for years. Support a candidate in next year’s elections. Go about your accustomed rounds as teacher, doctor, developer, nurse, writer, retailer, architect, banker, lawyer, investor, violinist, contractor et al with maximum effort and maximum integrity, as if the fate of the nation depended on it. Because it does.