The United States has always claimed “dominion” — the way Wallace Stevens’ jar placed on a Tennessee hill (“It took dominion everywhere”) does.
America continues to nurture “corporate capitalism” over the moldering bones of murdered indigenous tribes; has defended the “republic’s democracy” from blue/gray Civil War, through “the halls of Montezuma” to “the shores of Tripoli,” and into numbered-world wars and those geographically named: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and (soon, perhaps) Iran.
This American “ad infinitum exceptionalism” is acutely personified by Donald John Trump: twittering incessantly from his slapdash, from his White (Supremacist) House.
This, while Robert Gehrke advises Utah’s Republicans to bend over and “embrace your inner Trump.” And so it goes.
Steven R. Harper, Salt Lake City
