Watching over us

One of the ironies of these days is a video image that shows up every evening on the evening news. The Trump organization has not provided many opportunities for the press to photograph the president-elect as he goes about putting together an administration. The major time Trump was available to the press was when he paid a call on Barack Obama, and the initial pictures of Trump and the president sitting in small mahogany chairs on either side of a fireplace got altered and cropped to the point that what we see now are pictures of Trump only (Obama the victim of the croppers knife, the indignity of lame duck), and these altered pictures keep showing up, over and over again during these days. In each of the pictures, on a stand against the wall of Barack Obama’s Oval Office, behind Trump’s head, is a small, perhaps two-thirds life-size bronze bust. In the center of these pictures is Trump himself, the orange, red faced, angry face we’ve become so familiar with. What he’s not is serene. Beyond his head is that bust, and it is unmistakably a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. In every picture that is produced by the nation’s media is, just beyond Trump’s head, the bust of one of the world’s most famous men who, for much of the world, has become a legend,  who was assassinated, but before he was assassinated, who dreamed. And every time this picture runs, we are reminded—all 325,000,000 of us—of what America is all about. It’s not the orange, angry man in the middle of the picture. It is the bronze bust of Martin Luther King, looking serene. On the mountain top.