I recently watched actor Matthew McConaughey offer his salute to America at 250 years old, recorded for and presented on social media platforms, and I was struck by several different elements that anchored what he offered the nation dressed up as a 'happy birthday.'
The first of which was his declaration that America is an idea, not a country in the traditional sense, and furthermore he posits its a land that has "never been, yet...it's a place we are never going to arrive at."
McConaughey then offers that America was essentially conceived as a series of ideas that had no basis of "proof" and was launched in the opening battles of the Revolution as really nothing more than a firm decision to relentlessly pursue a set of mercurial goals that will ultimately never be reached. And that, he asserts, was all by design.
I thought of additional note was the experienced tradecraft in which McConaughey delivers his two minute monologue; the backdrop is a rural patch that could well be East Texas, he's attired in T-shirt and blue jeans, his Texan twang is more pronounced than usual, his gesturing animated but not as terribly distracting as Gavin Newsom's perpetual jazz hands routine. It's all a rather calculated effort to dress up in folksy, rural American aesthetic and cadence the delivery of a message that is, most generously, a hippie-dippy estimation of the American construct and its people, part Timothy Leary platitudinal exhortation, part Tony Robbins self-realization seminar and stirred with a splash of imitation frontier determination.
As I have long been a fan of McConaughey's work as an actor, I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes people say absurd things and advocate for terrible ideas for reasons that are not malevolent or intentionally subversive to the common good, but rather just because they simply have a different view of things.
So, I'll default to an honest assumption that Matthew was sincere in his happy birthday wishes for America and just got carried away with his rhetorical flights of fancy, perhaps enhanced by the tailwinds at altitude of the incredibly potent THC that he has been known to indulge. I think his work on the 2012 film Mud should afford him white working America's enduring affection and appreciation for capturing (along with a great supporting cast) a very real snapshot of white river life along the Mississippi in Arkansas. I spent considerable time during my formative youth in the Ozarks (albeit is an extended-stay visitor from Southern California, which offered me perks and perils of its own...) and I was captivated by the truths the film captured.
And I thank McConaughey for taking the role and delivering the goods.
That said, his take on America as an "idea" that will intentionally never be realized has been increasingly run obscenely up the flagpole as those desperate to destroy the white foundations of this nation and to deny the white heirs of their rightful position and inheritance in the American estate become ever more violently reactive to whites' elevating awareness of what is happening to them as a people and their homeland as a nation.
Thus the furious cries that America is a propositional country based on little more than at least a superficial embrace of a shared set of ideas and ideals.
And that, of course, is horseshit. Or worse.
America is a nation of blood and soil. America is a nation of people; and while not exclusively white in its composition, in my view, heritage Americans are indeed overwhelmingly white. Their blood, sweat and sacrifice is what created our nation, is what fueled our country's long march and is what built the most prosperous, free, dynamic, powerful, generous and creative civilization seen since the apex of Rome.
I can forgive an actor like McConaughey for waxing foolishly about America as an "idea." Again, I don't think he intended harm or foul and I think he does love this land of ours.
But my family can trace its bloodline back to the Revolution, and its sons fought in every major conflict the nation has had, including those who wore blue and a few who donned gray more than a 160 years ago, and I don't accept and will not sit idle while foreigner squatters in our midst seek to erase our past, seize our present and claim our future for themselves.
My Great Uncle William 'Buddy' Creamer gave his life at the Battle of Midway as a pilot in Torpedo Squadron 8, flying off the USS Hornet and mounting a doomed-but-decisive attack (without fighter coverage) against the Imperial Japanese Navy's carriers.
Uncle Buddy didn't sacrifice his life for a propositional nation.
He would never have imagined this age in which a smug African man slithers from the hell pits of Uganda and arrives in the United States to leech off its riches while polluting our American homeland with his contemptuous presence and toxic hate for our way of life and is subsequently declared to be American after taking a test and smiling his way through the lies told under oath only to be promptly elevated to the Mayor of New York.
What utter madness, my great uncle would no doubt have thought.
Our fight is even more existential than the ones in which my ancestors and our ancestors fought, killed and died.
Our fight is not for a propositional nation that never existed, our war is to reclaim and restore the blood and soil nation that is our birthright and to smash into a thousand shards the grotesque obscenity that rank traitors and stench-spreading trespassers seek to replace it with.
We must stand, fight and deliver.
As they say, God willing.
(Photo attached of my Uncle Buddy on the flight deck of the USS Hornet shortly before the Battle of Midway in footage shot by famed filmmaker John Ford. My uncle is on the right in the black leather flight helmet, his radioman and gunner Francis Polston is on the left.