It's Terribly Dangerous To Hold Up Generals In Some Kind of Civic-Deification

As I've mentioned before, my father was a marine who fought in World War 2, he was wounded in battle and I've got his decorations in a drawer in my dresser.  For the record, my mother was also a veteran of WW2, that's how my parents met.   From my parents I never learned the present day mystique of the marines.  My father never had that attitude toward his own service or the service of others he fought with, though he certainly was proud of that.   He once told me that he was disgusted that Oliver North wore a marine uniform as he lied about the crimes he and others in the Reagan administration committed and thought he should have lost his status and been prosecuted for that.  He thought it was thoroughly dishonorable for him to have accepted immunity for his testimony, he held that the oath he took when he enlisted in the Marines as a volunteer after Pearl Harbour made it a point of honor to tell the truth to a legitimate Congressional committee without having protection against possible prosecution for crimes committed.

Listening to the conversation between Lawrence O'Donnell and Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen about John Kelly, reminded me of everything my father ever said about what he thought being a marine, a PFC and how the ridiculous romantic view of the marines has been so thoroughly bought by members of the media who never served in the military and how dangerous it is.  John Kelly's behavior, as pointed out in Kevin Cullen's column, is all the reason anyone needs for giving up that romance because it is dangerous.

But since he went to work for Donald Trump, Kelly has squandered so much of his honor, so much of his integrity, and so much of his identity that, frankly, I don’t recognize him anymore.

It pains me to say this. Because I deeply admired the man. I know people, Marines, especially, who can’t and won’t say a bad word about him. And, I think, that assessment of John Kelly, the man, the Marine, is mostly accurate. . . 

But the reason I am taking pen to paper, or, to be more precise, fingers to keyboard, is because once he left the military and became a political figure and hitched his trailer to an incurious fool named Donald Trump, John Kelly lost the plot and has, with every passing day and week and month, forfeited whatever goodwill he earned as a consummate military leader.

Though his joining the administration may very well have been motivated by his sense of duty to country, Kelly became caught up in and distracted by the daily chaos and melodrama that is the Trump White House, the most dysfunctional Oval Office in living memory. He became — at some human level not surprisingly — in debt to his political patron, the president of the United States.

As such, Kelly suspended his natural Marine BS-meter, doing the opposite of what the military taught him, which is that you are, in fact, allowed to ignore orders when they are neither moral nor lawful.

Before he knew what hit him, Kelly faced a difficult choice: serve his president and his country, or denounce the incompetent, crazy person to whom he pledged fealty.

Still, it is too easy and totally disingenuous to blame Kelly’s fall from grace solely on Donald Trump. Kelly has to own most of it. . . . 

And it bears repeating that Trump went out of his way to avoid military service. I don’t understand why, coupled with his attacks on war heroes and Gold Star families, any military person would have a shred of respect for the man.

This is merely a newspaper column, and as a result I have not nearly enough space to enumerate how great John Kelly was and how far he has sunk.

Let’s just stick with the sunk part for now.

As the secretary of Homeland Security, he sicced ICE agents on noncriminals, breaking up families, like that of Francisco Rodriguez, an MIT janitor from Chelsea who fled El Salvador in 2006 after a co-worker was murdered by a gang and he feared he’d be next. Rodriguez’s stay of deportation was renewed without issue for years, and then, under Trump’s ethos and under John Kelly’s orders, ICE began rounding up ordinary people like Francisco Rodriguez rather than use its limited resources on targeting criminals. By locking Rodriguez up, Kelly was essentially forcing American taxpayers to take care of Rodriguez’s three children, all American citizens. Beyond being mean-spirited, beyond being morally reprehensible in needlessly breaking up a family, how on earth does that make America great again?

And that's just a small part of the column in which he outlines how thoroughly dishonorable John Kelly's time in the Trump regime has been.  Only, I don't buy that this came out of nowhere, I can't believe someone who could have done this didn't have it in him all along.  While the discipline of the chain of command might have minimized his willingness to let the real John Kelly loose and his actions were not as dishonorable before, as with Mike Flynn, once that wasn't an inhibition on his inclinations, things went quickly to hell.  In coevering up for Trump and his regime, John Kelly is in a long line of professional military officers who, in civilian office, show less than the honor that the media and civilians often buy even as their dishonorable and dangerous actions are exposed. 

It was one of the worst effects of Watergate, the Woodward and Bernstein romance as played by Redford and Hoffman, that lots of college kids decided to take university based journalism courses and go into that profession, the alleged professionalization of what should have been a job taken by people who learned reporting the hard way, preferably after a stint in the military had disillusioned them in the way I'm regretting the present day press isn't.  Even worse, it made it even more a career choice of the scions of the rich.   I think they did a lot better job when they hadn't been to college, mostly, and learned a bit of prophylactic skepticism about uniforms and robes and those who wear them.

Especially given the fact that such a small percentage of the population has ever been in the military and the professions and media are full of people who I doubt has ever had a close member of their family in the military, the present day mystique of uniforms is extremely dangerous, especially when such people are, as the putrid Sarah Huckabee Sanders has demanded, aren't to be questioned.  That's an open door to fascism, one that the media, especially Hollywood, is responsible for having opened in the first place.