When the country learned that Phillips was-in addition to being, as we were endlessly reminded, a “Native elder”-a veteran of the Vietnam War, the sense of anger about what had happened to him assumed new dimensions. His version was all-encompassing, and he was treated with such patronizing gentleness by the news media that he was never directly confronted with his conflicting accounts.
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It was also the first in a series of interviews in which Phillips would prove himself adept-far more so than the news media-at incorporating any new information about what had actually happened into his version of events. It was moving, and it was an explanation of the terrible thing that had just happened-“I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall.’ ” It was an ode to a nation’s lost soul. I wish I could see … the could put that energy into making this country really great … helping those that are hungry. We took care of our children … We taught them right from wrong. His voice soft, unsteady, he begins:Īs I was singing, I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall, build that wall.’ This is indigenous land we’re not supposed to have walls here. In the golden hour at the Lincoln Memorial, the lights illuminating the vault, Phillips stands framed against the light of the setting sun, wiping tears from his eyes as he describes what has happened-with the boys, with the country, with land itself. It was a battered Rodney King stepping up to the microphones in the middle of the Los Angeles riots, asking, “Can we all get along? Can we get along?” It was the beautiful hippie boy putting flowers in the rifle barrels of military policemen at the March on the Pentagon. It seemed to tell us an old story, one that’s been tugging at us for years. There was something powerful about it, something that seemed almost familiar. Shot shortly after the event, it consisted of an interview with the drummer, Nathan Phillips.
“I’d be ashamed and appalled if he was my son,” the actress Debra Messing tweeted.Ī second video also made the rounds. Because the point of the viral video was that it was proof of racist bullying yet showed no evidence of it, the boy quickly became the subject of rage and disgust. What has brought them to this strange, charged moment? From the short clip alone, it is impossible to tell. Twenty seconds pass, then 30-and still the boy is smiling in that peculiar way. They are locked into something, but what is it? Soon enough, the whole of the video’s meaning seems to come down to the smiling boy and the drumming man. The boys around him are cutting up-dancing to the drumbeat, making faces at one another and at various iPhones, and eventually beginning to tire of whatever it is that’s going on.
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The video shows a man playing a tribal drum standing directly in front of a boy with clear skin and lips reddened from the cold the boy is wearing a MAGA hat, and he is smiling at the man in a way that is implacable and inscrutable. The fact of there being a video became stronger than the video itself.
What mattered was that it had happened, and that there was video to prove it. Was it problematic that it offered no evidence that these things had happened? No. It is the kind of thing that happens every day-possibly every hour-in Donald Trump’s America. On Friday, January 18, a group of white teenage boys wearing MAGA hats mobbed an elderly Native American man on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, chanting “Make America great again,” menacing him, and taunting him in racially motivated ways.