"I Cannot Tell a Truth"

I wonder what Parson Weems would have done with Donald Trump. Mason Locke Weems, the first biographer of George Washington, invented the charming tale I was taught (or read in my parents' encyclopedia--I can't blame this one on my second-grade curriculum) that young George could not tell a lie. The future first POTUS chopped down his father's prize cherry tree with his little hatchet, so the story goes, and when interrogated said, "I cannot tell a lie," admitting the crime and being rewarded with kisses instead of punishment.
So the first president could not tell a lie--generations of schoolchildren believed--and the last (will America exist after Trump? Does it still exist?) can't tell the truth. He really can't. It's not even that he won't. He is incapable of telling the truth because he has no interest in doing so.

American Myth #1: The president cannot tell a lie. Now, like any other politician, he can. He's gone, in a way, all-embracing, if not upscale. American individualism, American expansionism, American exceptionalism, all express themselves with greatest fervor in the person of POTUS.

American Myth #2: "American history is immigration." It was. For Oscar Handlin, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Uprooted (1951) and the one who summed up American history in that memorable way, the people who brave the oceans and deserts to try to build themselves a life free of narcos and grinding poverty create America. That America now sits in cages at the border. Handlin, child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Harvard professor who directed eighty dissertations, could never have helped create America under the Trump administration. Imagine Oscar Handlin being told to go back where he came from. Or left in a cage to rot.
Maybe grass roots individualism still has a chance. Maybe free speech--which I thought Trump had rendered irrelevant--can get him after all. And if so, Merry Christmas!!: