I’m a Mutt-American. I’m half Italian, 3/8th English, and 1/8th Swedish. But I’ve never thought of myself as other than 100% American.
Ancestors on my mother’s side go back to the 1630s when they came across the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surnames like Wilder, Bird, and Hayward. I’ve been able to trace them back to England and to specific regions, even to ship’s names that they took in emigrating to the New World. At least one of my mother’s ancestors fought in the American Revolutionary War. Take that, J.D. Vance.
Another ancestor on my mother’s side, surname of Johnson, came from Sweden in the 19th century. He was a janitor. Other ancestors were reverends, clockmakers, and tanners, among other occupations. Again, typically American.
On my father’s side, his parents came from Italy in 1902 and 1913, so in that sense my American pedigree is more recent. That said, my father and his two brothers all served in World War II, my dad staying stateside as his two brothers served overseas, one in Europe, the other in the Pacific.
I think my family background is about as typical, as unexceptional, about as “normal” as they come. Unless you are of Native American ancestry, your roots here in America are fairly shallow, relatively speaking. A few centuries at best—not much on the cosmic timescale.
I mention all this because of the Trump administration’s vilification of immigrants, notably so-called illegals. Yes, I think people should immigrate legally to this country, but I don’t think anyone should be demonized.
Ilhan Omar, American (official portrait, 2019)
Trump in particular likes to attack Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is a Somali-American. His harsh rhetoric against her is dangerously irresponsible as well as hateful. I see Omar as akin to my Italian grandmother, who proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945.
Trump is a remarkably puny man—a man who thinks he can puff himself up by belittling others. It’s shameful behavior. He should be impeached by Congress and removed for his un-American attacks that endanger other lawmakers—that demean others, that sow discord.
So many immigrants came (and come) to this country seeking a better life, a fresh start, a land where you really could be judged by the content of your character. In its attacks on immigrants, the Trump administration has shown itself to be characterless and wanting of the true American spirit.
Unless you’re Cheyenne or Pawnee or Iroquois or some other kinship group drawn from indigenous peoples, you’re a recent American, and probably a Mutt-American like me. As Americans, we’re all in this together—all equal under the law, all striving to form a more perfect union.
Well, except for Trump and his tribe of dividers. It’s high time they left America. Perhaps Elon Musk has a few rockets ready to send them to the Moon and beyond.
Next year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. There’s going to be the usual fight over what that anniversary should mean to Americans, and what lessons we should draw. For example, the Ken Burns series on “The American Revolution” starts this Sunday night on PBS. I’ll be watching it. If it comes close to his series on the U.S. Civil War, it should be interesting and informative.
There are so many lessons we could take from the American revolution (or war of independence). Speaking as a retired military officer, I might stress the citizen-soldier tradition, the ideal of the Minuteman, the rejection of tyranny, the suspicion of large standing armies, the desire for independence and liberty, the courage to affix one’s name to a declaration that could end with your head swinging in the air.
I don’t know what lessons Trump & Crew will be selling, but something tells me they won’t be salutary. Lots of flag-waving, of course, along with American exceptionalism.
We know America was founded as an imperfect union. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wasn’t granted to slaves. Or indigenous peoples. Or women for that matter. (Let’s not forget women couldn’t vote for president until 1920.) The founders were mostly white men of property, with some holding “property” in slaves. For African-Americans, the “revolution of 1776” certainly didn’t prove revolutionary for them.
I would stress the idea of striving toward a more perfect union, recognizing the early republic was, in so many ways, imperfect. And that’s putting it gently. I’d stress as well what Benjamin Franklin said. As a form of government, a representative republic is better than most but also difficult to keep. And there’s the rub: today our representatives, our public servants, serve the owners and donors, the power brokers, rather than the people. A revival of the republic isn’t going to come from either major political party—they’re both beholden to money.
So how can we end this “tyranny” without a bloody revolution? Is a national revival possible without years and years of domestic conflict and strife? Meanwhile, can America reject its embrace of militarism and imperialism? Can it advance the rule of law as represented by the U.S. Constitution? Can we be touched, as Abraham Lincoln wrote, by the better angels of our nature?
1776-2026. 250 years of glorious imperfection. We can be better. We can do better. Let’s strive to live up to the promise of America.
To them, the right lessons; to everyone else, the wrong ones
We just marked the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Did American officials learn anything from the disastrous Vietnam War?
Saigon, April 1975
Of course they did. Just not the lessons you’d have wished they’d learned.
So, what did they learn?
They learned that wars can indeed last forever, but that Vietnam wasn’t the best “forever war” for the military-industrial complex because it became deeply unpopular and was disrupting cohesion within the military itself. The best forever wars are open-ended “wars” like the global war on terror. And perhaps a “new Cold War” with Russia and/or China. Wars that don’t involve the deployment of over half a million men (unless that “new” Cold War turns hot).
They learned to control the narrative. No more journalists traveling freely in war zones as in the 1960s in Vietnam. Journalists are now most often embedded in U.S. military units. Embedded reporters, dependent on the military for access and protection, know what they can and can’t say, even as they tend to sympathize with the troops they’re with.
They learned that forced conscription via a draft doesn’t work well for unpopular wars. So they transformed the military into an “all-volunteer” force. Draftees may well be resentful, rightly so, but volunteers? Too bad—they volunteered for this.
Along with “volunteers,” they learned to indoctrinate U.S. troops to be “warriors” and “warfighters” rather than citizen-soldiers. Warriors exist to fight wars, so shut up and blast away.
They learned to keep the American people isolated from war and its deadly effects. Recall that under Bush/Cheney, Americans weren’t even allowed to see flag-draped caskets. During Vietnam, war was in America’s living rooms during dinner, complete with body counts. Coverage of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere was sanitized, almost bloodlessly so.
They learned never to talk of sacrifice (except by those volunteer warriors) by the American people. Taxes aren’t raised in the name of war. There are no war bond drives. America’s leaders tell the rest of us to enjoy life, to visit Disney and to go shopping, while “our” warriors fight overseas.
Together with those “lessons,” they continue to preach “peace through strength,” attacking those who truly seek peace as misguided (at best) and treasonous (at worst). As ever, they tend to attack those who’d dare criticize the U.S. military as ungrateful backstabbers. And of course they consistently obscure the truth of how poorly wars like Iraq and Afghanistan were going while holding no one in the upper echelons responsible and accountable for rampant corruption and disastrous endings.
All these “lessons” ensured that Vietnam wouldn’t be the last example of hubris, folly, and atrocity, and indeed it hasn’t been. Until the right lessons are learned, expect future repeats, tragic variations on a theme of Vietnam.
“Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.” — Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
I read Norman Mailer’s fine book about World War II, “The Naked and the Dead,” several years ago, though I’d forgotten the quote above until I ran across it again in an article by Andrew Bacevich at Harper’s in 2009.
Bacevich’s article was titled “The War We Can’t Win,” in which he critiqued and rejected President Barack Obama’s decision to “surge” in Afghanistan. As Bacevich wrote back in 2009:
What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing, that the United States requires, that justified such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. Today, as then, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Bacevich was right, of course. And once America pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, we were encouraged to forget about it, just as we were encouraged to forget about Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
If it doesn’t matter much to the U.S. when we lose wars, doesn’t that suggest the wars meant little to begin with? That there never truly were vital matters of national interest at stake?
The same was true of the Iraq War, as Bacevich describes it in the same article for Harper’s. This war, Bacevich writes, was “utterly needless” as “no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [were] found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the [9/11] jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set into motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad,” yet the U.S. was nevertheless hyping the success of the “surge” there from 2007 and how it should be applied to Afghanistan, an example of obtuseness and self-delusion that Bacevich said “is nothing short of obscene.”
He was right, of course, as both surges proved as fragile and reversible as weasel-worded General David Petraeus hinted they would be. Petraeus might be America’s best example of Grima Wormtongue from “The Lord of the Rings,” though of course there’s a lot of competition for that honor.
Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, political scientist, and Vietnam War veteran, criticizes U.S. leaders for their “failure of imagination,” for their crusading zeal, for their hubris, and for their tendency to substitute technique for sound strategy. He is right about all this, but someone always profits from war. Somebody always wins. And so perhaps the best way to understand these wars is to focus on the winners.
So, who won these wars? Certainly, the military-industrial complex won them. Every war, winning or losing, wise or unwise, strengthens the MIC by expanding its budgetary authority and scope of action. Military contractors, the merchants of death, especially profit from war, notably long “stalemated” ones like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
In a short video clip, Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange explained the purpose of the Afghan War which, as Bacevich mentions above, is inexplicable in terms of U.S. national interest:
A vast money-laundering operation that enriches oligarchs who profit from war, death, and mayhem: it makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Note too how Assange explains that the ultimate purpose here is to make war permanent, to make it normal, to make it unremarkable, even to make it the height of sanity.
This has happened and is happening. Today, Iraq and Afghanistan are largely forgotten in the U.S. and Europe. New fears are focused on bigger fish: Russia and/or China, even as the U.S. pummels Yemen. Few Western leaders are talking about peace; Europe is fixated on Russia even as America is more concerned with pivoting to Asia and doing the bidding of Israel in the Middle East.
And so the money-laundering continues.
A lesson here is to follow the money, especially when wars seem strategically stupid, because the people and forces in charge aren’t stupid—their priorities are just far different from our priorities.
And this is something Bacevich catches in a different context as he explains that the costs of war are not borne “by the people who inhabit the leafy neighborhoods of northwest Washington, who lunch at the Palm or the Metropolitan Club and school their kids at Sidwell Friends.” Indeed not. The costs are borne by the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and so on, as well as those U.S. troops who get caught waging these wars, and who likely come from small towns in Alabama and Texas and similar rural areas.
A patriotic song I was taught in my youth was “You’re A Grand Old Flag,” written by George M. Cohan in 1906. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it, but it flashed into my mind the other day because of its lyrics, especially the refrain:
You’re a grand old flag, You’re a high-flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave. You’re the emblem of the land I love, The home of the free and the brave. Ev’ry heart beats true ‘Neath the Red, White and Blue, Where there’s never a boast or brag. But should auld acquaintance be forgot, Keep your eye on the grand old flag.
Forever in peace? I second that sentiment, except America is constantly at war or preparing for war. An America that doesn’t boast or brag? Amen to that, except presidents from Bush to Obama to Biden to Trump boast and brag about America having the world’s best and strongest military, with Obama adding that America has the best military in all human history. How’s that for a boast?
Cohan’s song, of course, is nakedly patriotic, with its references to marches and pride. Yet even this stanza is more resonant of democracy than America’s actions today:
Here’s a land with a million soldiers, That’s if we should need ’em, We’ll fight for freedom!
The song speaks of U.S. military potential (“a million soldiers”) but adds only if we should need them, in which case they’ll fight for freedom.
When was the last time the U.S. military truly fought for freedom? World War II, I reckon.
This song’s references to peace, to humility, and to fighting only if we should need to in the defense of freedom, mark it as a true museum piece. How do we recover that version of America?
Hi Everyone: If you’d like to support this site but don’t want to subscribe and pay a yearly fee, perhaps you’d consider my new book, My Father’s Journal, available through Amazon for $10 (paperback) or $5 (Kindle). Just click on that link and order away. Order five copies for your dad! (Yes, that’s reference to a song lyric, “Gonna buy five copies for my mother.”)
Anyhow, here’s an except from the book, which details my father’s efforts to fight raging forest fires on the West Coast in Oregon and California during the 1930s. His account will likely remind you of the recent fires in LA.
A big “thank you” to those who order the book—I hope you enjoy it.
*****
It is surprising how many forest fires our crew fought and other groups that we assisted in the two summers I was in Oregon.
The main and largest fire we fought was in the fall of 1936. A very dry summer and fall added to the fire danger. We were in Enterprise, Oregon when we got our call to go to Bandon “By the Sea” Oregon. Enterprise is in the northeast corner of the state. The day before, Bandon had been swept by the forest fire. Twelve people lost their lives. It could have been much worse but all inhabitants fled to the ocean beaches. One pregnant lady gave birth to a baby on the beach.
Fifty of the men in our camp, using 2.5-ton trucks, traveled across the state (guessing approximately 300 miles). The areas were involved in hundreds of fires that covered an area greater than the state of Massachusetts.
We were on the fire lines for over five weeks. At times we were put on reserve where we could shower and shave. We had about 5000 men, woodsmen, rangers, and CCC boys fighting this fire.
We were at Gold Beach, Oregon and we could look into California at the Siskiyou Mt. Range. There was a rumor we were going to fight a fire in the redwoods of California. But the call never came. We drove through Bandon; there were rows and rows of dwellings, gas stations and buildings burned to the ground. Quite a few chimneys were still standing. Every once in a while you’d see a dwelling or building spared by the fire. Just a whim of fate.
My father was a great saver of documents, including in this case The Medford District News, a local newspaper in Oregon that devoted two full pages to the five-week campaign to contain the Bandon Fires of 1936.[i] Written by Roy Craft, a first lieutenant, the story is worth quoting at length:
It was on Saturday, Sept. 26, 1936, that all hell broke loose in the Oregon coast country! With the forests dry as a Minute Man’s powder and the humidity at 20%, a 40-mile wind blew up out of the southeast, swept through the wooded hills and laid waste the coastal city of Bandon. It was a Declaration of War between the destructive forces of fire and the protective forces of the Civilian Conservation Corps….
As in all CCC activity, the Army oversaw the feeding and care of the men. It was the Army’s job to set up the fire camps, supply the enrollees with food and personal equipment, care for their health and see that they were in shape for action….
[Later that night] the fire had swept up to the very edge of the city. Then, borne on the shoulders of the 40-mile wind, the flames rode into Bandon. The Bandon fire department and the CCC men made a desperate stand but normal fire equipment was no match for the blaze.
As the fire approached the town, many residents were still unaware of the impending tragedy and had gone to the local theatre to see the feature picture, “Thirty-Six Hours to Live.” The film didn’t last that long, for in the middle of the show the film was stopped and a call was made for volunteer fire fighters.
As the fire poured into Bandon, building after building went up in flames. The residents literally “ran for their lives,” with men of the CCC … assisting in the evacuation.
Many people escaped in boats across the Coquille River, but the fire claimed at least eleven lives. As my father mentioned, a baby was indeed born that very night on the beach, which was taken as a “symbol that Bandon would rise from it charred ruins,” according to a somewhat fanciful newspaper account.
More than 100,000 acres burned over a period of five weeks until the November rains came to extinguish the flames for good. (Dad penned a quick postcard, dated 10/26/36, to tell the family he was fine and that he’d “been out fighting forest fires for over a month now.”)
As LT Craft put it in his newspaper account,
Anybody can play at being a hero for a couple of hours, or face trying and dangerous situations when the stimulus of excitement makes them glamorous and daring. But it takes guts to put out day after day on the fire line! Nothing tests a man’s mettle like a five weeks’ siege with fire, when it’s drudgery to put in a day and a night on the line, sleep a few hours on the hard ground, and then crawl out again and go back to pitch in with shovel, hazel hoe and back pump.
The Bandon Fire was the largest that my father faced, and he spoke of it often.
(If you’d like to order the book, here’s that link again. Thanks!)
My latest article at TomDispatch (below) was written before President Trump’s most recent commitment to end the Russia-Ukraine War while cutting Pentagon spending in a big way (up to 50%, he said; even a 10% cut would be a minor miracle in DC).
Even as Trump makes positive moves in favor of peace and lower spending on wars and weapons, he continues to advance a madman’s theory of Gaza as a new Riviera (without Palestinians, of course) while gobbling up places like Greenland and the Panama Canal. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Trump is a palindrome of sorts. Whether read forward or backward, it’s always all about TRUMP.
Greenland! Canada! The Panama Canal! The Gulf of America! Gaza!
Manifest Destiny Gets a Reboot Under President Donald Trump
A few years ago, I came across an old book at an estate sale. Its title caught my eye: “Our New Possessions.” Its cover featured the Statue of Liberty against stylized stars and stripes. What were those “new possessions”? The cover made it quite clear: Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The subtitle made it even clearer: “A graphic account, descriptive and historical, of the tropic islands of the sea which have fallen under our sway, their cities, peoples, and commerce, natural resources and the opportunities they offer to Americans.” What a mouthful! I’m still impressed with the notion that “tropical” peoples falling “under our sway” offered real Americans amazing opportunities, as did our (whoops — I meant their) lands. Consider that Manifest Destiny at its boldest, imperialism unapologetically being celebrated as a new basis for burgeoning American greatness.
The year that imperial celebration was published — 1898 — won’t surprise students of U.S. history. America had just won its splendid little imperial war with Spain, an old empire very much in the “decline and fall” stage of a rich, long, and rapacious history. And just then red-blooded Americans like “Rough Rider” Teddy Roosevelt were emerging as the inheritors of the conquistador tradition of an often murderously swashbuckling Spanish Empire.
Of course, freedom-loving Americans were supposed to know better than to follow in the tradition of “old world” imperial exploitation. Nevertheless, cheerleaders and mentors like storyteller Rudyard Kipling were then urging Americans to embrace Europe’s civilizing mission, to take up “the white man’s burden,” to spread enlightenment and civilization to the benighted darker-skinned peoples of the tropics. Yet to cite just one example, U.S. troops dispatched to the Philippines on their “civilizing” mission quickly resorted to widespread murder and torture, methods of “pacification” that might even have made Spanish inquisitors blush. That grim reality wasn’t lost on Mark Twain and other critics who spoke out against imperialism, American-style, with its murderous suppression of Filipino “guerrillas” and bottomless hypocrisy about its “civilizing” motives.
After his exposure to “enlightened” all-American empire-building, retired Major General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, would bluntly write in the 1930s of war as a “racket” and insist his long career as a Marine had been spent largely in the service of “gangster” capitalism. Now there was a plain-speaking American hero.
And speaking of plain-speaking, or perhaps plain-boasting, I suggest that we think of Donald Trump as America’s retro president from 1898. Isn’t it time, America, to reach for our destiny once again? Isn’t it time for more tropical (and Arctic) peoples to be put “under our sway”? Greenland! Canada! The Panama Canal! These and other regions of the globe offer Donald Trump’s America so many “opportunities.” And if we can’t occupy an area like the Gulf of Mexico, the least we can do is rebrand it the Gulf of America! A lexigraphic “mission accomplished” moment bought with no casualties, which sure beats the calamitous wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in this century!
Now, here’s what I appreciate about Trump: the transparent nature of his greed. He doesn’t shroud American imperialism in happy talk. He says it just like they did in 1898. It’s about resources and profits. As the dedication page to that old book from 1898 put it: “To all Americans who go a-pioneering in our new possessions and to the people who are there before them.” Oh, and pay no attention to that “before” caveat. We Americans clearly came first then and, at least to Donald Trump, come first now, and — yes! — we come to rule. The world is our possession and our beneficence will certainly serve the peoples who were there before us in Greenland or anywhere else (the “hellhole” of Gaza included), even if we have to torture or kill them in the process of winning their hearts and minds.
It’s 1900 Again in America
My point is this: Donald Trump doesn’t want to return America to the 1950s, when men were men and women were, as the awful joke then went, “barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen.” No, he wants to return this country (and the world) to 1900, when America was unapologetically and nakedly grabbing everything it could. To put it in his brand of “locker room” language, Trump wants to grab Mother Earth by the pussy, because when you’re rich and powerful, when you’re a “star,” you can do anything.
It’s white (male) hunter all over again. Think Teddy Roosevelt and all those animals he manfully slaughtered on safari. Today, we might even add white (female) hunter, considering that Kristi Noem, the new director of homeland security, infamously shot her own dog in a gravel pit because she couldn’t train it to behave. It’s an America where men are men again, women are women, and trans people are simply defined out of existence while simultaneously being forced out of the U.S. military.
To replace the “yellow journalism” of newspaperman William Randolph Hearst in that age, think of the corporate-owned media networks of today, with billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos showing due deference to you know who. For the robber barons of that age, substitute men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (to name only the two most famous billionaires of our moment) along with Bezos and their billionaire tech bros. It’s a new gilded age, a new age of smash and grab, where the rich get richer and the poor poorer, where the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.
Of course, it’s highly doubtful Trump can convince Canada to become the 51st state. Denmark doesn’t seem remotely interested in selling Greenland to America and the Panamanians aren’t eager to return their canal to all-American interlopers and occupiers. Even the “Gulf of America” remains the Gulf of Mexico to the other peoples of the Western Hemisphere. But perhaps Trump and Musk can team up to plant the American flag on Mars!
Yet, while Trump may fail when it comes to any of these specific imperial designs, he’s already succeeding, famously so, where it really matters. With all his imperial blather about Greenland, Gaza, and the like, what he’s really conquering and colonizing is our minds. The man and his ideas are now everywhere. Whatever else you can say about Trump, you can’t get rid of him, especially in the mainstream media which he uses so effectively to trumpet (pun intended) his expansionist agenda.
Yes, Trump is normalizing imperial conquest (again); yes, naked exploitation is unapologetically “destiny” (again). It’s “drill, baby, drill” and party like it’s 1900, since ideas about global warming due to fossil-fuel production and consumption simply didn’t exist in that age. It’s so retro chic to be chauvinistically selfish, to loot openly, even to commit or enable atrocities under the cover of humanitarian concerns. (Think of Gaza and Trump’s recent open call for cleansing the region of Palestinians to make way for their “betters,” the Israelis, to enjoy peace and a “beautiful” seaside location.)
Regression, thy name be Trump. Unabashed greed and unbridled hypocrisy are selling points once again. Protectionist tariffs are “great” again. Immigrants, black- and brown-skinned ones naturally, are depicted as endangering America’s way of life. Time to get rid of as many “illegals” as we can. Deport them! Jail them in Cuba! America is for Americans!
A Global Military Makes It All Possible
President Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan of the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet, the 16 battleships, painted white, that he sent around the world in 1907. He used it to intimidate recalcitrant powers and impress them with America’s growing might and reach. Though the U.S. wasn’t quite a military superpower yet, it was already an economic one, and combining military persuasion with economic prowess was an effective tactic to get other countries to toe Washington’s line.
Today’s U.S. military is quite obviously a global one, an imperial one bent on total dominance of everything: land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, information, narrative. You name it and our military and its partners in what Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT (which includes industry, Congress, intelligence, the media, academe, and think tanks) conspire to seize, occupy, control, and otherwise dominate. Small wonder that Trump and his operatives within what might be thought of as the Mondial Imperial State have continued a tradition of seeking ever greater budgets for the Pentagon, more and more weapons sales, and the unending construction of new military bases. Contraction in this highly militarized version of disaster imperialism is never an option (until, of course, it becomes one). Only growth is to be allowed, commensurate with seemingly bottomless appetites.
One example: newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his Project 2025 supporters argue that U.S. military spending should equal 5% of America’s gross domestic product (GDP). With this country’s GDP sitting just under $29 trillion in 2024, that would drive an imperial war budget of $1.45 trillion instead of the nearly $900 billion in this year’s Pentagon budget. For Hegseth & Co., the U.S. military is all about warfighting (and wars, if nothing else, are expensive), so it must embrace and hone its warrior mystique. It matters to him and his like not at all that, since 9/11, if not before then, the U.S. military has honed its warfighting identity in disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.
Another example. Just before I retired from the U.S. military in 2005, I learned of efforts to create a new military command with sub-Saharan Africa as its focus. At first, it seemed like a joke. How was Africa directly related to U.S. national security? Whence the threat? Of course, Africa as a threat wasn’t the issue. It was Africa as an arena for U.S. economic exploitation, just as it had been for European countries like Belgium, England, France, and Germany circa 1900, most infamously in the Congo, later exposed as the “heart of darkness” at the center of a European imperialism that would contribute to the tensions leading to the eruption of World War I in 1914. Two years after I retired, the U.S. military did indeed form Africa Command (AFRICOM) as its latest combatant command. Today, every sector of the globe has been accounted for by various commands within the Pentagon assigned to four-star generals and admirals, each in his or her own way as powerful as, once upon a time, the proconsuls of the Roman Empire.
With all of this as background, in his own mind at least, Donald Trump doth bestride the world like a colossus. What backs him up is a Republican vision (shared by most Democrats) of an imperial military (theoretically) unchallengeable in all domains. And whether the United States spends $1.45 trillion or a mere $900 billion annually on it, count on this: in the years to come, that military will be used in, most likely, the stupidest and most violent ways imaginable.
How Long Before the Next World War?
If you buy the conceit that Donald Trump is taking America back to 1900, it suggests a likely starting point for the next world war roughly 10 to 15 years in our future. Ever-increasing military spending; calls for mobilization and a return of the draft; talk of enervating national decline that could allegedly be reversed by an embrace of a new warrior mystique; viewing all competition as zero-sum games that America must win and countries like China must lose: these could act collectively to create conditions similar to 1914 — a tinderbox of tensions just waiting for the right spark to set the world aflame.
The critical difference, of course, is nuclear weapons. Though World War I wasn’t the “war to end all wars,” a World War III fought between the U.S. and its allies and China and/or Russia and their allies promises to be that “last” war. There’s nothing like a few dozen thermonuclear weapons to settle accounts — as in ending most life on Planet Earth.
In an age of weapons of mass destruction and their widespread “modernization,” jaw-jaw, as in compromise and cooperation through conversation, is the only sane choice when war-war looms. Dominance through destruction must give way to détente through dialogue. Can the Trump administration advance progress toward peace instead of letting us regress into war?
Mr. President, here’s the real art of the deal. Rather than turning the calendar back to 1900, your goal should be to turn the atomic clock back to several hours (if not days or weeks) before midnight. That clock currently sits at a perilous 89 seconds to midnight, or global nuclear war. With every fiber of your being, your goal should be to guarantee that it will never strike that ungodly hour.
For surely, even the most deluded strong man shouldn’t wish his manifest destiny to be ruling over an empire of the dead.
It seems like forever and a day, but I finally published my dad’s journal with my notes and photos at Amazon. Here’s the link.
It’s available for $10 in paperback, $5 on Kindle, or free if you have Kindle unlimited.
Here’s my description of the book:
Before he died, my father wrote a journal about his life. Born in 1917, he lived through the Great Depression, served in the Civilian Conservation Corps (mainly in Oregon) in the 1930s, survived working in factories and in the U.S. Army during World War II, and eventually became a firefighter for the City of Brockton (MA), serving for over 30 years.
Though he never finished high school, he read philosophy, loved classical music, and was an avid opera fan. The son of Italian immigrants, his story is the story of America, the story of a young man who worked hard and who in the process acquired a lot of wisdom from life’s setbacks.
This journal recounts many episodes in his life and the lessons he learned from them. It is one remarkable note in a fanfare for the common man.
*****
I started transcribing my dad’s journal soon after he died in 2003, but it took me two decades to put it all together in book form. If you find time to read it and you like it, perhaps you can bop on over to Amazon and write a review of it.
Thanks so much to all my readers. I hope you enjoy my book about my dad.
I started blogging in 2007 for TomDispatch.com. Tom Engelhardt, the mastermind of that indispensable site, saw something in an article I sent him on saving the U.S. military from itself. That is, from its own vainglory, its own global ambitions for power and dominance, its own illusions of being number one, both the world’s toughest military and also the world’s freedom-bringers. Certainly, the megalomania and Messiah-like fantasies weren’t a military mindset alone; it was even more pronounced among the neocons who orbited the Bush/Cheney administration and who still largely define U.S. foreign policy in the Biden/Harris administration. Things are so bad that some (wrongly) believe Trump/Vance offer a more moderate, far less warlike, alternative, when Trump’s record suggests little of the sort.
Anyhow, this is my 108th article for TomDispatch in the 17 years I’ve been writing for the site, a mark of persistence that suggests a certain folly on my part, and considerable patience on Tom’s part.
During World War II, American leaders proudly proclaimed this country the “arsenal of democracy,” supplying weapons and related materiel to allies like Great Britain and the Soviet Union. To cite just one example, I recall reading about Soviet armored units equipped with U.S. Sherman tanks, though the Soviets had an even better tank of their own in the T-34 and its many variants. However, recent news that the United States is providing yet more massive arms deliveries to Israel (worth $20 billion) for 2026 and thereafter caught me off guard. Israel quite plainly is engaged in the near-total destruction of Gaza and the massacre of Palestinians there. So, tell me, how over all these years did the self-styled arsenal of democracy become an arsenal of genocide?
Israel, after all, couldn’t demolish Gaza, killing at least 40,000 Palestinians in a population of only 2.1 million, including thousands of babies and infants, without massive infusions of U.S. weaponry. Often, the U.S. doesn’t even sell the weaponry to Israel, a rich country that can pay its own bills. Congress just freely gifts body- and baby-shredding bombs in the name of defending Israel from Hamas. Obviously, by hook or crook, or rather by shells, bombs, and missiles, Israel is intent on rendering Gaza Palestinian-free and granting Israelis more living space there (and on the West Bank). That’s not “defense” — it’s the 2024 equivalent of Old Testament-style vengeance by annihilation.
As Tacitus said of the rampaging Romans two millennia ago, so it can now be said of Israel: they create a desert — a black hole of death in Gaza — and call it “peace.” And the U.S. government enables it or, in the case of Congress, cheers on its ringleader, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Of course, anyone who knows a little American history should have some knowledge of genocide. In the seventeenth century, Native Americans were often “satanized” by early colonial settlers. (In 1994, a friend of mine, the historian David Lovejoy, wrote a superband all-too-aptly titled article on exactly that topic: “Satanizing the American Indian.”) Associating Indians with the devil made it all the easier for the white man to mistreat them, push them off their lands, and subjugate or eradicate them. When you satanize an enemy, turning them into something irredeemably evil, all crimes become defensible, rational, even justifiable. For how can you even consider negotiating or compromising with the minions of Satan?
Growing up, I was a strong supporter of Israel, seeing that state as an embattled David fighting against a Goliath, most notably during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Forty years later, I wrote an article suggesting that Israel was now the Goliath in the region with Palestinians in Gaza playing the role of a very much outgunned and persecuted David. An American-Jewish friend told me I just didn’t get it. The Palestinians in Gaza were all terrorists, latent or incipient ones in the case of the infants and babies there. At the time, I found this attitude uncommon and extreme, but events have proven it to be far too common (though it certainly remains extreme). Obviously, on some level, the U.S. government agrees that extremism in the pursuit of Israeli hegemony is no vice and so has provided Israel with the weaponry and military cover it needs to “exterminate all the brutes.” Thus, in 2024, the U.S. “cradle of democracy” reveals its very own heart of darkness.
Looking Again at the World Wars That Made America “Great”
When considering World Wars I and II, we tend to see them as discrete events rather than intimately connected. One was fought from 1914 to 1918, the other from 1939 to 1945. Americans are far more familiar with the Second World War than the First. From both wars this country emerged remarkably unscathed compared to places like France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and Japan. Add to that the comforting myth that America’s “greatest generation” pretty much won World War II, thereby saving democracy (and “Saving Private Ryan” as well).
Perhaps, however, we should imagine those years of conflict, 1914-1945, as a European civil war (with an Asian wing thrown in the second time around), a new Thirty Years’ War played out on a world stage that led to the demise of Europe’s imperial powers and their Asian equivalent and the rise of the American empire as their replacement. Germanic militarism and nationalism were defeated but at an enormous cost, especially to Russia in World War I and the Soviet Union in World War II. Meanwhile, the American empire, unlike Germany’s Second and Third Reichs or Japan’s imperial power, truly became for a time an untrammeled world militarist hegemon with the inevitable corruption inherent in the urge for near-absolute power.
Vast levels of destruction visited upon this planet by two world wars left an opening for Washington to attempt to dominate everywhere. Hence, the roughly 750 overseas bases its military set up to ensure its ultimate global reach, not to speak of the powerful navy it created, centered on aircraft carriers for power projection and nuclear submarines for possible global Armageddon, and an air force that saw open skies as an excuse for its own exercises in naked power projection. To this you could add, for a time, U.S. global economic and financial power, enhanced by a cultural dominance achieved through Hollywood, sports, music, and the like.
Not, of course, that the United States emerged utterly unchallenged from World War II. Communism was the specter that haunted its leaders, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or Southeast Asia (where, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it would fight a disastrous losing war, the first of many to come, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Here, there, and everywhere, even under the very beds of Americans, there was a fear of the “commie rat.” And for a while, communism, in its Soviet form, did indeed threaten capitalism’s unbridled pursuit of profits, helping American officials to create a permanent domestic war state in the name of containing and rolling back that threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 erased that fear, but not the permanent war state that went with it, as Washington sought new enemies to justify a Pentagon budget that today is still rising toward the trillion-dollar mark. Naturally (and remarkably disastrously), it found them, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or so many other places in the case of the costly and ultimately futile Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
And eternally losing (or at least not winning) its wars raised the question: What will replace it? What will happen as imperial America continues to decline, burdened by colossal debt and strategic overreach, and crippled from within by a rapacious class of oligarchs who fancy themselves as a new all-American aristocracy. Will that decline lead to collapse or can its officials orchestrate a soft landing? In World Wars I and II, Europeans fought bitterly for world dominance, powered by militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed. They suffered accordingly and yet did recover even if as far less powerful nations. Can the U.S. manage to curb its own militarism, nationalism, racism, and greed in time and so recover similarly? And by “racism,” I mean, for example, reviving the idea (however put) of China as a “yellow peril,” or the tendency to see the darker-skinned peoples of the Middle East as violent “terrorists” and the latest minions of Satan.
And then, of course, there’s always the fear that, in the future, a world war could once again break out, raising the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons from global arsenals that are always being “modernized” and the possible end of most life on Earth. It’s an issue worth highlighting, since the U.S. continues to “invest” significant sums in producing yet more nuclear weapons, even as it ratchets up tensions with nuclear powers like Russia and China. Though a winnable nuclear war among the great powers on this planet is inconceivable, that hasn’t stopped my country from pushing for a version of nuclear superiority (disguised, of course, as “deterrence”).
Making America Sane Again
The world wars of the previous century facilitated America’s global dominance in virtually all its dimensions. That, in fact, was their legacy. No other nation in history had, without irony or humility, divided the globe into military combatant commandslike AFRICOM for Africa, CENTCOM for the Middle East, and NORTHCOM here at home. There are also “global” commands for strategic nuclear weapons, cyber dominance, and even the dominance of space. It seemed that the only way America could be “safe” was by dominating everything everywhere all at once. That insane ambition, that vainglory, was truly what made the U.S. the “exceptional” nation on the world stage.
Such a boundless pursuit of dominance, absurdly disguised as benefiting democracy, is now visibly fraying at the seams and may soon come apart entirely. In 2024, it’s beyond obvious that the United States no longer dominates the world, even if its military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) does indeed dominate its national (in)security state and so increasingly the country. What an irony, in fact, that defeating European militarism in two world wars only accelerated the growth of American militarism and nationalism, making the world’s lone superpower for so many decades the scariest country for all too many peoples outside its borders.
Think, in fact, of the U.S. emerging from World War II with what might be thought of as victory disease. The last nearly 80 years of its foreign policy witnessed the remarkable progression of that “disease,” despite a lack of actual victories (unless you count minor escapades like the invasion of Grenada). Put differently, the U.S. emerged from World War II so singularly an economic, financial, and cultural juggernaut that subsequent military defeats almost didn’t seem to matter.
Even as America’s economic, financial, and cultural power has waned in this century, along with its moral position (consider President Obama’s curt “We tortured some folks” admission, along with support for Israel’s ongoing genocide), the government does continue to double-down on military spending. Pentagon budgets and related “national security” costs now significantly exceed $1 trillion annually even as arms shipments and sales continue to surge. War, in other words, has become big business in America or, as General Smedley Butler so memorably put it 90 years ago, a first-class “racket.”
Worse yet, war, however prolonged and even celebrated, may be the very definition of insanity, a deadly poison to democracy. Don’t tell that to the MICC and all its straphangers and camp followers, though.
Ironically, the two countries, Germany and Japan, that the U.S. took credit for utterly defeating in World War II, forcing their unconditional surrender, have over time emerged in far better shape. Neither of them is perfect, mind you, but they largely have been able to avoid the militarism, nationalism, and constant warmongering that so infects and weakens American-style democracy today. Whatever else you can say about Germany and Japan in 2024, neither of them is bent in any fashion on either regional or global domination, nor are their leaders bragging of having the finest military in all human history. American presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have indeed bragged about having a matchless, peerless, “finest” military. The Germans and Japanese, having known the bitter price of such boasts, have kept their mouths shut.
My brother Stevie once memorably said: “No brag, just facts.”
My brother has a saying: no brag, just facts. And when we look at facts, the pursuit of global dominance has been driving the American empire toward an early grave. The “finest” military lost disastrously, of course, in Vietnam in the last century, and in Afghanistan and Iraq in this one. It functionally lost its self-proclaimed Global War on Terror and it keeps losing in its febrile quest for superiority everywhere.
If we met a person dressed in a military uniform who insisted he was Napoleon, boasted that his Imperial Guard was the world’s best, and that he could rule the world, we would, of course, question his sanity. Why are we not questioning the collective sanity of America’s military and foreign-policy elites?
This country doesn’t need to be made great again, it needs to be made sane again by the rejection of wars and the weaponry that goes with them. For if we continue to follow our present pathway, MADness could truly lie in wait for us, as in the classic nuclear weapons phrase, mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Another form of madness is having a president routinely implore God — yes, no one else! — to protect our troops. This is not a knock on Joe Biden alone. He’s just professing a nationalist piety that’s designed to win applause and votes. Assuming Biden has the Christian God in mind, consider the irony, not to say heresy, of functionally begging Christ, the Prince of Peace, to protect those who are already armed to the teeth. It’s also an abdication of the commander-in-chief’s responsibility to support and defend the U.S. Constitution while protecting those troops himself. Who has the biggest impact, God or the president, when it comes to ensuring that troops aren’t sent into harm’s way without a justifiable cause supported by the American people through a Congressional declaration of war?
Consider the repeated act of looking skyward to God to support military actions as a major league cop-out. But that’s what U.S. presidents routinely do now. Such is the pernicious price of pursuing a vision that insists on global reach, global power, and global dominance. America’s leaders have, in essence, elevated themselves to a god-like position, a distinctly angry, jealous, and capricious one, far more like Zeus or Ares than Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, he is alleged to have said, “Suffer the children to come unto me.” The militarized American god, however, says: suffer the children of Gaza to die courtesy of bombs and shells made here in the U.S.A. and shipped off to Israel at a remarkably modest price (given the destruction they cause).
To echo a popular ad campaign, Jesus may “get” us, but our leaders (self-avowed Christians, all) sure as hell don’t get him. I may be a lapsed Catholic, not a practicing one like Joe Biden, but even I remember my catechism and a certain commandment that Thou shalt not kill.
Today, I thought I’d write about someone who’s uncontroversial: Donald Trump.
My reflections are impressionistic and random. Regular readers of Bracing Views know I won’t be voting for Trump (or Biden for that matter), so my comments here are not meant as an endorsement. With that said, let’s dive in:
When Trump was trying to get rid of Obamacare, he naturally had no replacement plan in mind. At the time, I read that Trump allegedly turned to his advisers and said, Why don’t we simply give everyone Medicare? It sounds like Trump: a simple solution to a problem he wants to put behind him. Of course, it was also the goal of Bernie Sanders and progressives. Trump’s advisers quickly told him he couldn’t do Medicare for All, and Trump dropped the matter. (I’m not sure this story is true, but it sounds true.)
As a businessman, Trump has a knack for discerning bad deals, so it’s not surprising he hit on NATO as a “bad” one. Why was America spending so much, allegedly to defend Europe, when Europeans themselves were spending far less for their own defense? Does America even need NATO? Once again, Trump’s advisers intervened, keeping the U.S. in NATO even as Trump did win commitments from some European countries to spend more on their militaries.
Trump ran in 2016 on the idea of draining the swamp, after which he surrounded himself with advisers drawn from the swamp, especially retired military generals. They were allegedly the “adults in the room” who were meant to control Trump’s worst impulses. What they ensured was that nothing fundamentally changed in the Trump administration, especially for the military-industrial-congressional complex and similar power complexes.
I’ve read, and I think it’s probably true, that Trump expected to lose in 2016. He ran because the Republican competition was so weak, and it gave him a platform to rebuild his popularity, which he apparently wanted to parlay into another lucrative TV deal. That November, Trump was as surprised as most Americans were when he won. He should have listened to his wife, Melania, who predicted he would win if he ran.
I’ve called Trump a con man, and I stand by that. And he’s a good one! He is absolutely shameless and will slap and stamp his name on anything to make a few bucks, whether it’s Bibles, towers, vodka, steak, sneakers, a university, you name it. This doesn’t make him a “bad” person. It makes him a shameless and therefore highly effective grifter.
Trump recognized in 2015 that the Republican candidates arrayed against him were nowhere near as skilled as he was at attracting attention and selling illusions. That’s how he was able to dispatch JV competitors like Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, and Lyin’ Ted so quickly. In this, he was aided by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ “pied piper” strategy of encouraging Trump. Be careful what you wish for, Hillary.
Trump, unlike so many U.S. politicians, occasionally blurts out a big truth. The Iraq War was a disaster. The U.S. is in decline and is no longer the “greatest” nation. NATO is obsolete. Far too many people are dying in the needless and awful Russia-Ukraine War. We’re in Syria to steal its oil. We want Venezuela’s oil too. If you think Russia has killers, so does the United States. And so on. It’s not Trump’s cons that piss off the establishment. It’s those rare truths that Trump lets slip that they despise.
Yes, Trump is a con man, but he’s a genuine con man. He is exactly what he appears to be. In this sense, Trump is more genuine—more real—than most politicians, Republican and Democrat, who pose as public servants even as they practice their own grifts.
“War Paint” was the first idea that popped into my head when I saw this image
Trump, whatever else you can say about the man, often has superb political instincts. His raised fist and cry of “fight, fight, fight” after the assassination attempt made for stunning theater. The blood smeared on his face looked like war paint.
Trump, in sum, is a complex man, talented and flawed, perceptive and undisciplined, intuitive and uninformed, determined and manipulable. What he is not, in my opinion, is a public servant. What he is likely to become is our next president.
If so, one can only wish he shows a capacity for growth and a spirit of true public service. Whatever else he is or becomes, he is a quintessentially American figure.
Bracing Views 