From "I Cannot Tell a Lie" to "I Shall Never Tell the Truth" is a Long, Long Journey
For the past several years, Madame (Mom), my slightly-older-sister Erica (Riki). nephew Adam, Madame’s special gentleman Fred, and the Pentagon have been conspiring to create a special birthday gift for yours truly. The only thing I knew about it was that Fred - a longtime Navy veteran and highly-skilled framer - and the rest of the clan had been working on some sort of “art project.” Having no idea of what they were doing, I decided to stop asking questions. Well, I celebrated my 71st (gasp!) birthday a couple of weeks ago, only to discover that over the past dozen years, they have been retrieving my late father’s war ribbons from WWII in order to put them into a marvelous shadow box, which now adorns the wall in my home.
Dad, who at the time he entered the Army Air Corps shortly before Pearl Harbor, was known as “Henry E. Schimberg”; he had yet to legally adopt his “Hollywood name.” He remained in the service until 1946, serving mostly as a weather forecaster in the CBI (China-India-Burma Theatre), where his main task was keeping planes from flying “over the hump, the name given by Allied pilots in WWII to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew military transport aircraft from India to China to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek and the units of the United States Army Air Forces based in China. Although largely unsung, their role was crucial. Without their highly developed technical skills - matched by good old-fashioned intuition - dozens, if not hundreds, of planes would have gone down in the Himalayans.
Dad’s medals and battle ribbons were next to impossible to retrieve, due to the fact that he served under his birth name; he wouldn’t legally change the family name to “Stone” for more than a decade. But for those who know Madame and Erica, you can understand: nothing is impossible; when they get their claws into a project, watch out!
Dad rarely, if ever, spoke of his military service; he was both humble and an extraordinary gentleman. And yet, he was proud of serving his country. He was definitely neither a loser nor a sucker. Far, far from it. He served 6 of his first 31 years in the military, leaving behind his dream of becoming a movie star, and emerging as as a newly-wed who eventually became a highly successful stock broker in Southern California. Were he alive today Dad (1915-2002), would have been 65 kinds of P-O’d at the current POTUS: “How dare you call us “losers” and “suckers . . . we’re the men and women who saved the world from fascism!” Dad wasn’t an overly political sort, spending his life as a moderate FDR-Democrat. The one time he even suggested the possibility of voting for a Republican (Nixon in ‘68) Madame read him the riot act and urged him to recall Lysistrata - Aristophanes’ comic account of a woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnese War between Greek city states by denying all the men of the land any sex. Thank G-d Henry was literate enough to understand the illusion . . . he wound up voting for Hubert Humphrey.
Fast forward to a September 3, 2020 article in which the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that ‘45, “the president who cannot tell the truth,” canceled a presidential visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 - the centennial of the battles of Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry. (This cemetery, which sits at the foot of Belleau Wood, contains the graves of 2,289 American war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918.) According to the Atlantic’s Goldberg, Trump blamed rain for the last-minute cancellation, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
In his astounding article - backed up by incontrovertible facts - Goldberg writes: Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Sir Nicholas Soames, a Conservative member of the British parliament and Winston Churchill’s grandson, tweeted his utter disapproval of Trump’s snub and lame excuse:
“They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen.”
True to form, the White House and Trump’s Twitter account found in Goldberg’s meticulously reported, well-crafted story, a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the “left-liberal-socialist media.” Even Fox News went back-and-forth on whether or not to find any truth in Goldberg’s article. When ‘45 learned that Fox New’s political reporter Jennifer Griffin supported Goldberg’s piece, ‘45 demanded that her employers immediately fire her. For Trump, all this is, of course, “fake news.” But then again, throughout his public career, Boss Tweet has been a volcano of untruths, misstatements and outright prevarications . . . many of which have actual video and/or audio backup . . . such as the number of times he said of the late Senator John McCain “he’s no hero,” due to his having been captured, tortured and imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” by the North Vietnamese.
I don’t like losers,” he repeatedly stated even before announcing his candidacy back as far as 2015. Trump went on to dismiss McCain’s war service: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” 45’s “McCain’s a loser” meme began when the Arizona Senator lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama . . . again, “I don’t like losers.” In her new book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” (which sold more copies on the day it was released than her uncle’s The Art of the Deal has in nearly 30 years) presidential niece, Dr. Mary Trump (she earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University) clearly stated that what DJT fears and loathes the most is being called a “loser” or "a sucker.” She has also “revealed” what oh so many of us without doctorates in psychology have long suspected . . . if not fully known: that he is a psychopathic liar who is incapable of feeling empathy or compassion, and is imbued with an inferiority complex the size of the Grand Canyon.
Listening to Donald Trump endlessly praise himself is a form of self-torture; hearing him disavow any knowledge let alone familiarity of any indicted person who has ever worked for or served him (until the time comes for a pardon); or endlessly bragging about how much more he knows about medicine, history, economics, diplomacy or the philosophy of Edmund Husserl (the school of “Phenomenology,” which is generally defined as “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view”) for all I know. To listen to ‘45, as POTUS he has accomplished more for blacks than Lincoln or Dr. Martin Luther King; more for women than Susan B. Anthony or Eleanor Roosevelt; more for Hispanics than Caesar Chavez'; more for the modern State of Israel than Theodor Herzl or David Ben-Gurion; and that “Veterans have no better friend than President Trump.”
To a majority of those with eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear or minds with which to think and remember, all these are demonstrable lies; the product of a man who is taking both our nation and our planet down into the swamp of delusion.
It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, our very first - and likely greatest - POTUS, George Washington. was once known by every school child in this land as a person who could “never tell a lie.” What could be more honorable, admirable and moral? Then there was Lincoln, our 16th president, whom every school child knew was nicknamed “honest Abe.” Today, our 45th POTUS has been saddled with an overabundance of monikers - none of which, so far as I know, is even slightly endearing.
It grieves me deeply that so many people in this land are willing to give ‘45 a pass and ignore his gaffs, his lies, his immoral nature . . . his very presence. What we need is not a self-proclaimed genius-about-everything but a person who seeks wisdom and guidance from those who truly know what they’re talking about. Not a blatherskite who blows his own horn, or a braggart whose only script is the one he provides himself. And certainly not a man who may one day be convicted, but rather a man of convictions.
Indeed, from “I cannot tell a lie” to “I shall never tell the truth” is one hell of a long, long journey . . . a journey into fear and damnation.
There are 56 days to go until November 3, 2020.
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone