The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you pay the slightest attention to what’s going on in the world, sometimes the irony hits you in the face like a blast of 100 degree August heat at the airport.

On this day 60 years ago, Martin Luther King expressed a dream and chastised the American people to finally live up to the nation’s founding creed.

Are we there yet?

Not yet kids. Sorry.

This month 49 years ago, unelected President Gerald Ford declared our national (Nixon) nightmare over.

Oh, mommy, is the nightmare over?

Not by a long shot. Sorry kids.

This week down in Georgia, former president and dictator wannabe Donald Trump said it was “not a comfortable feeling” having his mug shot taken by Fulton County “Rice Street” Jail authorities in Atlanta.

But do millions of people care?

Not according to what’s being posted on social media. Millions of people think it’s funny as hell, if hell is something that can be funny.

On the stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the first so-called “debate” on Fox News in the Republican primary contest in the presidential election of 2024, former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley called the mugshot “disgraceful.”

“I mean, the idea that we’re seeing a mug shot of a 77-year-old former president. I mean, how did we get to this point?” she asked. “And I don’t know that anyone in America should look at that and feel good about it.”

But judging by what millions of people are sharing and saying on social media, lots of people are feeling pretty damn good that Georgia officials stuck to normal, legal protocol and forced Trump to submit to a mugshot like every other person accused of violating the law in that state.

It was one of the first moments in the past two years when a majority of Americans could FEEL GOOD about SOMETHING!

It is disgraceful, but not in the way she meant.

Personally, I could not watch the so-called debate. I started watching an HBO series on the “White House Plumbers” starring Woody Harrelson as Howard Hunt: Trailer.

But as Washington Post chief correspondent Dan Balz pointed out in an analysis piece, the word “DEMOCRACY” was emblazoned in all-capital letters on the back wall of the debate stage.

“Yet during two hours of bickering and disagreement among the eight participating candidates, the topic was never seriously addressed,” he wrote. “Few need to be refreshed about why questions about the health of democracy will play a role in the coming election.”

He means few Washington Post readers. There are still millions of uneducated Americans who have not received the memo that Trump and his propaganda tactics pose an existential threat to government of, by and for “the people.”

And by “the people,” that does not mean a mislead mob supporting a tin pot dictator seizing all power in a country. What it means is that “the people” must play a role in making democracy and government work. And that does not mean sharing stupid, fake, false memes on Facebook.

It might mean some people need to step up and run for the local school board, to stop the “Moms for Liberty” with ties to the Proud Boys from turning schools and libraries into hot beds of white nationalist athoritarianism. Calling book bans, closing libraries and insisting on discrimination against certain types of people on the basis of race or sexual orientation “liberty” is the most ironic distortion of reality and actual history perhaps we’ve ever seen.

Related: The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance: How Authoritarian Leaders Mutilate Reality, History and Culture

These tactics can be traced directly to Trump himself, and the way he twisted the language to fool poor, uneducated people into voting for him. This must not be allowed to continue once the existential threat of Trump is gone — and it will be gone soon. One of these juries he faces will surely find him guilty. What then? He will not win any election even if the Republican Party nominates him again.

He should not be allowed to serve in public office, as Liz Cheney said, although Attorney General Merrick Garland and Jack Smith, the special counsel, did not charge him with inciting an insurrection under the Insurrection Act, which would have prevented him from ever holding public office again. Why?

As for Trump’s holdout MAGA supporters and the Mom’s for Liberty, why don’t they just come out of the closet, tell the truth, and declare openly what they actually want? That want America to be a place where the only people who have rights at all are white, “born again” Christians based on their biased, limited religious interpretation of what that means.

It’s certainly not the Christianity of the Reverend and Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., who so eloquently made the case for it 60 years ago today.

Read Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in its entirety

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today,” Dr. King chanted.

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

“And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true,” he said.

“But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee (and Alabama). Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

“And when this happens, and when we allow freedom (to truly) ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

Unfortunately, ironically, we are not there yet.