Breaking the Sound Barrier

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Weekly Column Thursday, July 2, 2020


** Trump, Mt. Rushmore, COVID and the KKK
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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Paha Sapa is the traditional name the Lakota people give the sacred center of their universe. The region is also known as The Black Hills, in South Dakota, home of Mount Rushmore, itself named after a gold rush lawyer and speculator. The Mount Rushmore Monument features the sculpted heads of four U.S. presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — blasted out of the ancient granite between 1927 and 1941 by 400 workers, directed by sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Earlier, he was recruited by the Daughters of the Confederacy to carve the huge, Stone Mountain memorial to Confederate leaders in Georgia. While he left that project in a dispute, Stone Mountain allowed Borglum to hone his mountain carving skills, enabling the Rushmore monument. Borglum was close to the Ku Klux Klan and was likely a member.

On Friday July 3rd, kicking off this weekend’s Independence Day holiday, President Donald Trump is rallying at Mount Rushmore with a fighter jet flyover and fireworks, which are banned in the area due to extreme forest fire potential. With 7,500 people expected, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a staunch Trump ally, declared, “we won’t be social distancing.” Face masks will not be required. This “comeback” event occurs as the U.S. suffers an explosion of COVID-19 cases and a charged, national debate on how to deal with statues and symbols enshrining systemic racism.

Tribal governments and activist organizations in the region are calling for the event’s cancellation. “The lands on which that mountain is carved and the lands he’s about to visit belong to the Great Sioux nation,” Oglala Sioux president Julian Bear Runner told The Guardian. “He doesn’t have permission from its original sovereign owners to enter the territory at this time…It’s going to cause an uproar if he comes here.”

Trump’s ill-timed, inflammatory spectacle is reminiscent of his failed June rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was scheduled to fall on Juneteenth, a day that celebrates the end of slavery in 1865, at a venue not far from the scene of one of the worst ... Read More → ([link removed])
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** Related
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The Untold History of Mount Rushmore: A KKK Sympathizer Built Monument on Sacred Lakota Land ([link removed])
As the coronavirus pandemic intensifies in the United ... Read More → ([link removed])

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