I began to chant “M***********. M***********” when the video arrived of the smirking white boy in the MAGA hat, appropriately unnamed (for now) and his mob of laughing white boys and the lone Native American, Nathan Phillips, veteran, water protector, singing, surrounded, dignified, continuing to sing while the crowd shouted “Build the Wall” two days before Martin Luther King’s holiday.
I felt as if I were looking into one of those mirror set-ups that show us an infinity of regressing images — smiling crowds around lynching victims, the laughing and jeering crowds around schools being desegregated, the laughing toughs showing off their trophies from Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, smiling SS rousting Jews.
The video shows the poison that has always been present in this country — the smirking sense of superiority that mobs of the powerful have always possessed, the tang of violence in the air, the grotesque stench of racist power — we can block you, frighten you, mock you and nothing will happen.
Maybe the boy will be expelled. Big Deal. He will go on comfortably once the initial sting of his punishment is gone.
The video reminds us what the stakes are during this moment. MAGA is the mob, the smirk the sign of its prerogatives. Nathan Phillips is the man and women we should aspire to be: calm, unafraid, singing, resolute. Nathan Phillips is the gift we have not earned.
