I HOPE YOU NOTICE
This is the second CURIOUS CITY in a row that doesn’t castigate our City Council or City Manager and doesn’t whine about how our once-fair city is going to hell in a handbasket.
Columnists often have a favorite topic, one they feel is pressing. I wonder how many consecutive times Jack Neworth has gone without mentioning Trump in his Laughing Matters column? Even at one week off he starts to get the heebie jeebies and feels like he is not doing his part, and usually gives in.
Well Jack, you can take this week off (if you wish). I’ll go after the Mango Mussolini, because it’s been quite a while for me and because recently he crossed a line, again, that was too much for me.
For all the depraved, horrid things he’s said and done, when he disrespected our veterans -- again -- on the blood-soaked beaches of Normandy, it was too much for this veteran.
If he did and said all these churlish things as a private citizen, as he has all his miserable life, it would still be odious but easier to ignore. But when he does it as our President, our representative to the world, our Commander-in-Chief with the lives of our military men and women in his hands, I am sickened.
WHAT A SAD TWIST OF HISTORY
That for the sacred, emotional 75th anniversary of D-Day, with American veterans of that bloody campaign, now in their 90s, making the effort to get to France, some even parachuting again onto the Normandy Beach, the very beach they so valiantly and successfully invaded at such great cost on 6/6/1944 -- the U.S. “president” overseeing it is the guy who Kremlined his way into the Oval Office, is a total narcissist who doesn’t care about anyone but himself and certainly not about long-gone American heroes who saved the world from fascist enslavement.
We knew all this already, of course. At this point we don’t expect anything different. I know that what he did over there with his disgraceful rhetoric does not measure up to the human cost of his heartless, deadly immigration and climate change policies. But it got to me.
I was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1966 at 19, released in ‘68, and through crazy chance wound up in Germany, not Nam. But many who became my friends did go there, at that most deadly time, and surely some of those did not come back. Perhaps one of them was the one who had to go because Donald Trump didn’t. Maybe my best friend from high school, Dave Baca, best man at my wedding a year after he returned from Nam, alcoholic and shattered inside, took Trump’s place. My father served during WWII, and I doubt there are many even today who didn’t have a family member serve then, or in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.
THE D-DAY COMMEMORATION
Should have been all about that history-changing event to which so many Americans gave their very lives, in a horrifying hail of bullets and bombs. For every other world leader there, it was. By all accounts the actual staged ceremony was moving and Trump’s speech respectful. But for Trump, it is always only about him.
He gave an interview to Laura Ingraham of Faux News, with the endless rows of graves as a backdrop, in which he viciously attacked his political opposition back home. “Nancy Pelosi is a nasty, vindictive, horrible person.” Asked what he took away from this trip, he spoke mostly of his visit with the Queen in England, just prior. Ingraham tried to pin him down: “Imagining the invasion, 150,000 Allied troops, climbing these cliffs, landing on these shores -- what’s going through your mind?”-- and he spoke at length about the great weather. She asked him about NATO and he went on and on about how little everyone but the U.S. is paying, and nothing else about this most vital of American military alliances with the European nations post-WWII, to protect against the threat from Trump’s beloved Russia.
IN ANOTHER INTERVIEW
With Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” TV show winner Piers Morgan, he had the nerve to claim that he would have served in the military, given the chance. “I would not have minded that at all, I would have been honored, but I think I make up for that right now.” (He had previously joked to Howard Stern that “avoiding VD, that was my Vietnam.”) Of Vietnam, “Well I was never a fan of that war, I’ll be honest with you. I thought it was a terrible war, I thought it was very far away, nobody ever... you know, at that time, nobody had ever heard of the country.” Everyone had heard of it by the mid-’60s and could probably find it on a map, and very, very few draftees or “forced” enlistees wanted to go.
Anyone who does not denounce Trump for his “unpresidented” betrayal shares the shame. I’m not at all a violent person, had my last fistfight in 5th grade, but it’s entirely possible that if I met him face to face, just because of his disrespect for veterans, I would not be able to restrain myself from punching him in the mouth. Fed up with the deafening silence.
Charles Andrews has lived in Santa Monica for 33 years and wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. Really. Send love and/or rebuke to him at therealmrmusic@gmail.com
