Who does Heather Cox Richardson imagine herself to be?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 28, 2024 – People who traffic in logic and reason, yet remain willing to call themselves Lincoln republicans, are liable to assert that copulation does not vitiate virginity.
One such person, Heather Cox Richardson, apparently is unaware that when Barry Goldwater promised Strom Thurmond, in 1964, that there was room for the champion of segregation in the republican caucus, Abraham Lincoln rolled over in his grave to burn his GOP membership card.
Devoid of the spirit of the Great Emancipator, the republican party is merely a CEO-heavy mailing list, period. Except for her expert’s credentials, we would excuse Ms. Richardson, who was a toddler in ’64, and a pre-teen during America’s long national Nixonian nightmare. At the apex of Tricky Dick’s reign was the Saturday Night Massacre, which she must have heard the adults talking about, because of the names involved?
On Saturday night, Oct. 20, 1973, Elliot Richardson quit his job as attorney general instead of firing special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Nixon is the first man elected president after the Goldwater-Thurmond copulation, which gave birth to the Southern Strategy, which has carried us to the brink of Civil War ll.
If someone hadn’t beat me to the punch, I’d lay claim to the coinage, “Politics makes strange bedfellows!” Not that I wouldn’t swipe it if I thought the coast were clear, but I must pretend, at least, to a high measure of literary integrity before taking Ms. Richardson to task for naming her side-hustle, Letters from an American.
With it, she corrupts a sweet locution that made all the sense in the world when the trans-national amateur and lapsed aristocrat, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, wrote his Letters from an American Farmer. His were written before the Revolutionary War was won; she posts her’s while the lamp of Liberty barely flickers in the dusk of Lincolnian-republicanism.
There was something brave and noble in his declaring himself an American farmer. The eloquent and humorous de Crevecouer was both brave and modest when he chose American as a suitable descriptor for his new-found occupation as farmer on an un-tilled, un-plowed, dream-filled continent.
Ms. Richardson leaves us agape and alone to wonder what occupation American is meant to describe in her case, or does she ask us to accept her as the generic American – the new Ms. America?