It's High Noon, and Will Kane's Out of Town

"We're in a very dangerous slippery slope. ... Where we are is so shocking to so many people they're sitting around saying 'ah, we can't really be there.' You know, we are a group of people that don't like the truth, Andy Ostroy. We don't like the truth so we pretend it doesn't exist, and we live in some realm of denial ... I want to wake you and all your viewers and listeners up to the systemic crisis that we have right now."

(Anthony Scaramucci on The Back Room with Andy Ostroy. 31st January 2026)

"Why is there no backbone anywhere ... This is not what the United States stands for, and this is what the person behind you, George Washington, would have said. This is why we have these removal procedures in place to get this insane person out of office. Why are they not doing that, Jim Acosta?"

(Anthony Scaramucci on The Jim Acosta Show. 4th March 2026)

Just in case anyone's forgotten, on the 4th of July 1776, the Founding Fathers declared that:

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Unlike Britain, which staggered merrily on under its tyrannical monarchs and a Bill of Rights no-one's ever heard of, these and other genuinely great and inspiring phrases went on to be repeated ad nauseam to everyone else for the next two hundred and fifty years.

And counting.

The United States of America wasn't the first democracy and hopefully it won't be the last, but it is perhaps the loudest and it's always seemed like they bought the franchise on flag waving.

This despite the fact that a lot of Americans' beliefs about the wars for Independence are pretty darn inaccurate. As the noted filmmaker Ken Burns recently commented, "our revolution is so drowned in kind of Madison Avenue, sanitized, fife and drum, treacle."

In Made in America, Bill Bryson also made it painfully clear that the Pilgrims did not come ashore at Plymouth Rock in 1620.  As he said, "no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from near by." Plymouth Rock wasn't even mentioned anywhere until 1715 and only finally immortalised in myth by the Welsh poet, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, in 1826. I guess she was seriously into dramatic license...

But every country is partly founded on myth, legend and exaggeration. And the thing is, none of this ever grated on me. I've been across America five times and flown into it several more. I found a pleasant and hospitable people I greatly liked. I went to Philadelphia, visited Independence Hall and saw the Liberty Bell. I walked round the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in D. C., and took a photograph of the Gettysburg address. I was strongly influenced by John Steinbeck and came to love Point Lobos maybe more than he did. I even met my own Hollywood princess. The day I first saw her on Sunset Boulevard I misquoted Ronald Reagan, writing that "all America looks for that sunlit city on the hill."

No, I'm not a trendy leftie who secretly hates America. In many private and personal ways, it is for me the beloved country and my footsteps round its states are baked solidly into the sidewalks.

The trouble is, if you shout long and loud enough about your willingness to die before you give up your liberty, if you wave that flag high and long and hard enough I should have realised that, finally, someone would come along who'd really test out just how much the citizens of the greatest, wealthiest nation in the world really mean what they say.

What their high-sounding words really mean.

Whether they'll put their money where their mouths are.

Whether, when it really comes down to it, they'll walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

I believe a certain Captain Kirk was at least partially based on John F. Kennedy and his Camelot, a far-seeing administration in search of new frontiers. I often think of Kirk's speech in The Corbomite Maneuver:

"What is the mission of this vessel, Doctor? To seek out and make contact with life forms wherever we find them. Life. An opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean."

And General John Stark, Hero of Bennington, made things even more clear:

"Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils."

All America has mouthed such high-sounding words at one time or another, but now someone has come along who is indeed testing, really testing, just how much Americans really mean what they say.

His name is Donald J. Trump.

Trump has described himself as a dictator. He has called himself a king. He has ignored Congress regarding tariffs (a form of taxation). He has started wars, also without Congressional authorisation. He has curtailed civil liberties via ICE and indirectly got American citizens killed. He believes (devoutly, I suspect) that Article II of the Constitution literally allows him to do whatever he wants. He has threatened to withdraw the licenses of media networks which dare to criticise him.

You might as well forget about the First Amendment in Trump's America.

Trump was corrupt before he regained the presidency, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So we have a crude but simple conclusion:

Trump is bad.  He's so bad I've been privately begging for any other available grown-up to take over. He puts Nixon in a whole new light. Although Tricky Dicky was a heavy drinker and an anti-Semite, he was a scholar who studied and wrote about the Constitution. He was exceptionally good at foreign policy and, most notably for me, he was enough of an adult to admit to David Frost during their famous series of interviews that he'd made so many bad judgments, that he'd let the American people down.

For all his faults, it takes a man to do that. He's a man I'd have liked to have talked with, whom I sometimes think of as a tragic figure, who was never really liked.

But Trump? He's a punk and a kid.

But the people have to put the president in power. The American people have done so twice. And therein lies the rub.

The Americans, who invest the government with both its political power and obedience to the Constitution, who hold the inalienable right of representation in Congress and supposedly retain their rights and liberties secure from government overreach, have gone to sleep on the job.

I agree with Professor David Cay Johnston that the American poor and middle-class have been manifestly fleeced of income and starved of healthcare by billionaires and vested interests over the past fifty years. I understand the way Trump has played on their justified anger about lack of equality and I admire the way many brave and selfless Americans are now standing up and risking their lives and reputations by defying Trump; but I don't really see the absolute revolution that should have taken place once all the flag waving patriots realised they really had a tyrannical king in the White House.

And unfortunately, I think there's one simple reason.

To write this, I've had to go back to my earliest and ugliest memories of people who would do anything to avoid trouble, whose words and promises meant nothing, who had no education and only a low cunning, who would never step out of line and just supinely go with the flow, dumbly placing their faith in the latest politician, orator or snake-oil salesman so they wouldn't have to decide what to do for themselves.

In Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, an 18th century American ghost proudly proclaims that "an American baby sucks in freedom with the milk of the breast at which he hangs ... America, sir, is the only place where Man is full grown."

Are you?

If you were, then no matter how unjustly you'd been treated, you'd know what being an American meant. You would know that this is not what America stands for and you'd march patriotically in your millions on the White House. You'd stay there, encamped, even if some of you died. For that is the price of freedom. Freedom is not free, as a monument to Korean War veterans in Washington says.

I don't like the Second Amendment much, but it is law; and again, millions of Americans have long been braying on about how they must hold onto their guns in order to protect their liberty and defend against tyranny.

Okay guys, now is the time. Live up to Stark's words and prove it.

Scholars and lawyers seem to argue and litigate so hard about the meaning of the Constitution that they've forgotten what it actually says. I think, as Captain Kirk also once said, "you have slurred the meanings of the words 'We the People" to the point where you've forgotten who you are, what you're fighting for and what your gaudy symbols truly mean.

I was once depressed to hear that most Americans don't know any more than the first one or two amendments (there are twenty-seven), that (as Bill Bryson also pointed out) "a few years ago an organization called the National Endowment for the Humanities tested 8,000 American high school seniors and found that a very large number of them didn't know, well, anything. ... [that] there is a kind of emptiness of thought at large these days that is hard to overlook. The phenomenon is now widely known as the Dumbing Down of America."

That was written nearly thirty years ago. I guess things have only got worse.

Senate, Congress and country are utterly and dangerously polarised. Many Americans are so obese they couldn't march anywhere. Perhaps they vaguely think it'll all be sorted out at the midterms or, as the astute Scaramucci and Burns said, live without backbones in a state of denial with a treacly view of the Revolution, entrenched in myth.

But Trump and his masked minions have their hands firmly on the levers of powers and the beacon of democracy has a cancer clawing aggressively at its vitals. They are doing permanent damage to America's status in the world. And like the officer said to the guys on the way to Iwo Jima, "they will not leave politely, gentlemen!" 

I'd also like to mention that, for all the hopes and rumours that Trump's deteriorating, that MAGA will turn on Trump, Trump's one cheeseburger away from a whopping great heart attack, Trump's got dementia and so on, there is one simple crude fact you must remember:

He's still there, and so are his goons.

But will you make them leave?

My sober and terrible conclusion is, indeed, simple.

I don't think so. 

I fear this is your High Noon, but Will Kane's out of town.

I fear that the New World is just like the Old World. The Great Experiment has failed. Man is no more full grown in America than he is anywhere else.

Despite all the flag waving, you're just like the rest of us. No worse, but no better. But you've been yelling so loudly about defending freedom and liberty all these years that, finally, God, the Devil or destiny is demanding you put up or shut up.

And this is the one thing no one's said to you: there's nowhere to hide.

You've asked for this and now it is upon you.

So make all your fine words mean something or forget it.

That's all.

America can be saved, but it'll need some pretty drastic surgery. Just about every single Republican needs to be thrown out of office if possible because, by and large, they have colluded with the crucifixion of the Constitution. You need a universal healthcare system, a much better minimum wage, wealth has somehow to be redistributed and the gaping rents in your society repaired.

I'd even like to come over and help.

But I'm just not sure whether you're full grown enough to do so.

There is a fifty-first state in America, and its name is Denial.