We have a President who daily seems to get more petty, more vengeful, and less understanding of the country he unfortunately was elected to lead.
Example one: One of the many lies that dominated his speech to Congress last week, lost in the avalanche of other irresponsible claims and accusations, came when he congratulated hit man, Elon, for uncovering a federally-financed program to change the gender of mice.
My friend Derry Brownfield would call stuff such as this, “ignorance gone to seed.” The mental Kudzu that is this administration’s crop is as invasive to democracy as the real weed is to the southern countryside.
The program that produced this totally-undeserved presidential scorn has to do with transgenic mice, which are used in biomedical research to study how human tissue reacts to disease and the cures or potential cures for those diseases. Do not expect Trump to ever correct himself.
In fact, it’s his newest factoid and he’ll beat the blood out of transgender mice.
Second: Trump has cut off $400 million in grants and other federal funds to Columbia University because some pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place on the campus. He also has threatened cutoffs to other schools that allow “illegal” protests. Forget the First Amendment’s protection of speech and the right of assembly. If Prosecutor, Judge, and Jury Donald Trump decides events or words are “illegal” in his mind, then they’re illegal and he again will demonstrate his capacity for retribution aimed at those who think differently than he does—-assuming he thinks at all.
The third, and far more egregious thought this man had is the late-week decision to erase history from the Pentagon’s records.
That kind of thing usually was a matter for Soviet Premiers in the 20th Century and for conquering tribes thousands of years ago. Chipping off all of the carved words and records of deeds of former rulers was fairly common when their land was conquered. It has continued in a material sense in areas of the Middle East infected with the Taliban and other brutal bands. Erase the history of a people. Erase their culture. Erase the people.
In his rabid drive to erase anything from the public mind that encourages equal opportunity, Defense Secretary—Pete Hegseth—has ordered, as the Associated Press says, “tens of thousands of photos and online posts“ that emphasize Diversity, Eqality, and Inclusion removed from the department database.
When the AP published its story last week, and when officials confirmed this looney program, more than 26,000 images had been slated for removal with an outlook that the total removals might reach six figures.
The main priority might be the most childish of all—remove ALL content in that archive that was published during the Biden administration, regardless personhood.
Erasing history—and that’s what this is—has eliminated the stories of a lot of people who overcome the prejudices of their day long before DEI became an epithet. But they’re being erased because they are not one of “us,” as defined by our President.
By far the most inane victim of this purge of the image files is the elimination of images of Enola Gay. THE Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb in world history in 1945. So far, however, the current administration has not towed the real airplane out of the Smithsonian installation at Dulles International Airport and broken it up. .
The airplane already has survived a decades-long controversy over whether it should be put on public display, not because of it’s “gayness” but because some felt displaying it would glorify the use of nuclear weapons against human beings.
The rabid rush to eliminate images of the first women, the first black person—the first minority of any kind—to achieve something notable in military service has put a spotlight on the bomber which is named for pilot Paul Tibbets’s mother. The spotlight also has been put on people who are committed to narrowness in thought, in speech, and in their corrupted definition of leadership.
One of the targeted photos is of Marine Corps PFC Harold Gonsalves, a Mexican-American who threw himself onto a Japanese grenade at Okinawa to save the lives of others. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. But he has a Hispanic name and that appears to be enough to erase him from that database of history.
Author Richard Cohen comments in his book, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped History, observes, “History has ever been a harbor for dishonest writing—a home for forgers, the insane or even ‘history-killers’ who write so dully they neutralize their subjects…
”Most countries at one time or another have been guilty of proclaiming false versions of their past. The late 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan is known for his statement that “forgetfulness” is ‘essential in the creation of a nation’—a positive gloss on Goethe’s blunt aphorism, ‘Patriotism corrupts history.’ But this is why nationalism often views history as a threat. What governments declare to be true is one reality, the judgments of historians quite another. Few recorders set out deliberately to lie; when they do, they can have great impact, if only in certain parts of the world.”
We are seeing the truth of Cohen’s remarks in the lies being circulated in Washington that seek to modify, if not destroy, our past as well as corrupt our present.
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