MISTY WATERCOLORED MEMORIES OF THE WAY WE WERE
When I was a kid, my father called this holiday Decoration Day. It began in 1868 as a way to honor Union soldiers who died in the Civil War by decorating their graves with flowers. Southerners, of course, demanded equal time, and began their own traditions, state by state, to honor dead Confederate soldiers. After World War I, the holiday was expanded to commemorate the dead of the Great War and all other U.S. military actions. After World War II, people began calling it Memorial Day, but my father was old school.
It’s ironic that on Memorial Day, 2017, much of what our ancestors fought and died for in battles from Valley Forge to Gettysburg to Iwo Jima is now being flushed down the toilet by a corrupt and foolish President who needed clandestine assistance from Vladimir Putin to eke out a win in the Electoral College.
Since the end of World War II, twelve American presidents (six Republicans and six Democrats) have worked hard to make NATO a firewall against the ambitions of the Soviet Union and its successor nation, Russia. Conversely, the goal of every Soviet Premier and Russian President from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin has been to destabilize NATO, and particularly to drive a wedge between Germany and the United States.
Putin and Trump have managed to undo seven decades of American strategic alliance building in less than six months. NATO is coming apart at the seams, and America is as demoralized as it’s been since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Trump has given Russia everything it has wanted, and there’s nothing accidental or coincidental about it. He was pro-Russia during the campaign, and he’s been pro-Russia since his first day in office. This from a guy who barely remembers his campaign promises, and doesn’t care if he keeps them. On most issues, he tends to adopt the position of whoever spoke with him most recently. He’s been all over the map on every issue. Except one. Trump has never wavered in his pro-Russia, pro-Putin stance.
Maybe he’s in debt to the Russian mafiya. Maybe the rumors about Russian prostitutes are true, and he’s being blackmailed. The leaders he admires most are brutal dictators like Duterte, Erdogan, and of course his BFF Vladimir Putin, so maybe he yearns to be like them – able to silence unfriendly reporters, shut down hostile newspapers, and murder his political opponents. And grab women by the pussy, of course.
But whatever the reason, Trump is surrounded by a motley collection of senior staff who are, like him, deeply entangled with Russia. He’s been willing to ignore criminal activity on the part of some of those staffers, he has revealed highly sensitive intelligence to Russian agents, and he’s even engaged in obvious obstruction of justice to protect those staffers, whatever the cost to his credibility. He’s been more loyal to Russia than he’s ever been to any of his wives.
Unfortunately, his behavior is a reflection on America and its citizens. Of course, our hands aren’t exactly clean. In the years since World War II, presidents of both parties have tinkered with so-called third world countries as though they were pawns on a chessboard, assuming that either the local populace would never find out what we’d done, or that if they did realize what was happening, they’d have no alternative than to submit meekly to our invincible military might.
Except that many of them did not submit meekly. And in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, and Iraq, our military might turned out to be quite vincible. We win all the battles, but lose all the wars. The truth is, we’ve never been quite as smart or as powerful as we thought we were.
What goes around comes around, and for the United States, it came around in 2016. Russia treated us like we’d treated those small, allegedly weak countries, brazenly interfering in our domestic politics. They succeeded in installing a puppet regime sympathetic to their interests rather than to our own, or the interests of our historic allies. And they did it without having to fire a single shot.
The President of the United States used to be known as the leader of the free world. It took Trump less than five months to forfeit that title. German chancellor Angela Merkel has seen the writing on the wall. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands,” she said. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days.”
Angela Merkel is now the leader of the free world. I don’t think of myself as particularly chauvinistic, but I’ll admit that I hope America can reclaim the title at some point. In the meantime, though, we should contemplate how fragile our democracy has turned out to be. If we find ourselves in a position of leadership again, I hope we can display more restraint and humility, and less arrogance and bluster.