“I shall return.”
General Douglas MacArthur
Trump is now at the moment where he is playing out his “I shall return.” People asked MacArthur not to put out “I shall return” because ours was a nation at war and they wanted we shall return. MacArthur would not listen.
More
knowledgeable than all the generals.
Shrewdly rations the truth.
Cannot predict his actions.
Decides what information he wants the people to
have.
Making sure his image is the proper one.
Gets the maximum amount of credit for any victory.
A tendency to ignore matters.
He talks you listen.
No dissent around him and people get terminated.
Everyone has to play by his rules.
An addiction to fame.
Demands the ultimate in loyalty.
Personal hatred of a president.
Slow to react to initial invasion.
Intelligence reports ignored.
Never is wrong.
Putting men at risk.
Warnings ignored.
Unrealistic views.
He is perfect in the face of his weakness.
People are out to get him.
Others are blamed for things that go wrong.
Immense ego.
In the midst of a war, he has his mind on
campaigning.
He lives in the kingdom of self.
Makes comments about people calling them murderers
and rapists.
He wins over Americans in decline.
Mistakes covered up.
Willing to dance with nativists. Anti-Semites,
racists, and labor leaders.
Supporters who were filled with passion,
rectitude, and anger.
Magic Johnson has just compared the Corona Virus with AIDS (SIDA en español). He is right about this disease spreading, the political battle including placing blame, its economic and social tolls, including sexual “social distancing” if you get what I mean, among other things.
This Corona Virus has to be taken much more seriously by hundreds of millions of people who can be liquidated or fired just as people are fired from a job. Kaput! Congressman John Kennedy of Louisiana wants to bring back the economy now and Trump has his sights now on May 1.
The times are dangerous and made more dangerous by Trump’s inaction. There was a mold that wiped out economies and people back in the 1800s, an event that we have been taught in school as the “potato famine” which took place in Ireland. Decades earlier the Irish poor were in a state that looked like no human recovery was possible. And in Ireland the aim was to rehabilitate the Irish instead of taking them out of their suffering by feeding them. And in 1846 Irish families “were sitting down to eat a meal of potatoes (that an Englishman) would be sorry to offer to a hog.” People hardly died from “blighted potato” and they were getting sick. In about a month in Clonmel, Ireland, mobs of people were breaking into every baker’s shops and other stores, taking flour and 50 tones of oatmeal. Those starving Irishman accomplished that while cannons were being fired in the streets. This was just the beginning. And the landed classes were just thinking about what the government would do.
A million Irish lost their lives during those years and another million left Ireland to seek life elsewhere and many died during the voyage or soon after arriving in places.
Actually it took place all over Europe and affected by late grandmother’s community much more in Galicia than it did in Ireland. The death was incredible. The world has learned a small but important lesson since to channel funds, food, and medical and other resources to the people though such horrible history. That history built up the United States, Canada, and other countries around the world as Irish left and then others came. My family came in 1911.
The history of those days was largely horrible and the Spanish Flu, World War I, and other things made things that way. To Congressman King there was “poverty” which he alludes to today as workers fighting for US to survive are demanding more protections and higher pay due to higher risk. Be careful about people that hardly seemed to care about poverty before who will use it and abuse it now.
We had coal miners that died unnecessarily, men and women in the sweatshops, people in construction who build our nation under dangerous conditions. The victims in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire cost insurance companies very little money in the settlement. Republicans like Kennedy live off doing such things. They protect the rich and then make the middle class pay up. The middle class should have had a bigger chunk of Trump’s tax reform just two years ago.
Getting back to MacArthur in the 1940s and 1950s. He made his mistakes just as Trump has made several including ignoring the pandemic. MacArthur always boasted about how easily we (he) could defeat the enemy. Japan first and then North Korea. Much of his “success” was myth and he rose and rose and rose in the ranks and in the hearts and minds of Republicans. The same kind of feelings existed then that we see today in the streets as people organize to get our economy started again. Trump is morphing into MacArthur right before our eyes.
Truman probably could have had MacArthur replaced a dozen times over his behavior from 1945-1953 but Truman feared losing the election in 1948. Eisenhower was no great supporter of MacArthur because he had seen him up close, even during the days of the Great Depression when MacArthur threw our nation’s former soldiers under the bus in Washington, D.C. when they were homeless and jobless and lived in tents during the Summer of 1942. The men had suffered losses during World War I and Congress refused to give them an adjustment in pay that it has promised (their opposition called and named it a “bonus.” The United States Senate blocked the passing of the “bonus.” And those men were seen as trouble, especially since their appeared to be race unity in the camp that was set up.
The comment in the list above about the “rapists” and “murderers” was made by Douglas MacArthur and he included other sensational comments as he fought against those people against the best advice. He took it on himself to demonstrate that kind of force against orders of a weak president. There were tanks, tear gas thrown as the soldiers wore masks. The Army was prepared to even use machine guns as the people were evacuated and the camp was set on fire.
Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were defeated in the Election of 1932 by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats. And there was no evidence that the Bonus Army was part of a “communist revolution” about to take place. I think about Captain Brett Crozier and his men who whose lives were threatened recently on the USS Roosevelt (Theodore not Franklin).
We have entered a better stage of socialism than we had before. It is temporary and it was achieved with the signature of Donald J. Trump. And back then people were crying out for a new American system which ushered in the New Deal. There was a death in the Bonus Army camp as a veteran was shot by police and killed. People were wounded and bayonetted. There was no Corona Virus nor the Spanish Flu. There were divisions that propelled FDR to four electoral victories and there was hate against African Americans, Jews, and others across America. There was no easy fix as there is no easy fix now.
The Corona Virus is ushering in a new reality and possibly promoting greater change than is realized right now or has been publicized.
To my readers around the world, I learned in 2002 that when the United States gets a cold, El Salvador get pneumonia. Right now we see with 22 million people who have applied for unemployment due to the Corona Virus in a nation that was building jobs and now our nation has pneumonia instead of a cold. What will happen to El Salvador, for example, which is supposed to become far worse (even with a president that has almost 90 percent popularity). My hope is that El Salvador can maintain, at least, the economic status quo and not worsen. Things can only get much worse under conditions that are much worse. But where are the people going to emigrate to?
On that note we must think about our future. Lots of Americans and American businesses have always gone overseas to find work or desirable work as the opportunities arose. A small necessity has been changed and the outlook for the future is uncertain and will impose new modes of thinking that the United States has never known. Job, job, jobs as they become available all over the world will wreck faith in all countries. Will nations such as the United States take draconian measures and block its own people seeking opportunities else? What will be the future of our people as huge unemployment may loom for years to come? Trump is trying to make himself the great American “cheerleader” right now even though his delays probably caused at least 5 times (at a minimum) more deaths and illnesses than we would have had. That means that in numbers that 30,000 deaths could have been 150,000 deaths. The Repugnicans have their spin on things but Trump is a disaster within a disaster. He had no cure for the Corona Virus and he does not belong in charge. We need people that can cure.
We may be generating a new statistic soon about jobs. That statistic may be jobs that professionals are taking here at home as the economy bounces back slowly and jobs that Americans and American residents take in other countries if and when those people are needed. We do have a global economy even though there was much talk over the last four years about destroying it in favor of America First. And those jobs taken by our people overseas will, of course, reduce our great unemployment.
If you thought, as you read the list, that those anecdotal comments referred to The Donald. You are wrong. I was reading The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam. Essential information about the Korean War is alive today. MacArthur’s traits are Trump’s traits and those traits have surely betrayed US in 2020. Much or most of what Trump has done is myth and misinformation and he should go the way that MacArthur finally went. Fired!
MacArthur had been designated “The Greatest Man in America” and I feel that Trump should now designate himself “The Greatest Man in History.”
“Life’s ladder is so hard to climb
So won’t you spare a moment of your time
I’ll do a dance, sing you a rhyme
And say, ‘Hey mister, can you spare a dime?’
Well, I’m standing on the edge of insanity”
Our nation is in the midst of great change. The 1930s had the Bonus Army. The 1960s had the Massacre at Kent State (Ohio). “Right now “The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be the last
For the times they are a-changin’”
I have been to Cork, Limerick, Blarney, Kilarney, Dingle, Waterville, and Kinsale in Ireland. Great places, great people, and a great place to live that has attracted foreigners as jobs have been created. And it is much easier to get there since the “Potato famine” decimated Ireland.