The Real Thing

This summer my family is planning a trip across the country to take a look at America's history. My son is very excited about spending as much time as we will let him in the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. My wife and I are hopeful that he will take the opportunity to experience as much of Washington D.C. has to offer: the Capitol, the monuments, the vast storehouse of our nation's past.
If we wanted to see the present and the future, we might just have to head the other direction. That's where we would travel if we wanted to see Barack Obama's birth certificate up close and personal. No other document, even the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, has stirred up such a fuss in the past forty years. At last, we can settle in to the business of governance: balancing the budget, ending the wars, creating jobs, finding alternatives to fossil fuels, and of course, preparing for the next election.
If you were the trusting sort, you could simply look at the full birth certificate on Al Gore's Internet. You might be as "proud" as Donald Trump claimed to be at the release of this record of an event that happened almost fifty years ago. You might also go in the opposite direction and start generating conspiracy theories about the time it took to produce the certificate, and why we are only allowed to see copies of it. After all, you can do some pretty amazing things with Photoshop these days. But maybe if you really believe that the shark was attacking the Coast Guard helicopter, you should stay home in your basement and wait for the death squads to come and take your liver. We'll be in Washington D.C. looking at the past, and worrying about our future.
Oh, and this just in: Donald Trump's hair is not of this earth.