Dear Marty,

Thanks for another well written piece, founded on solid truths. Am copying to friends and contacts who might find it interesting as well. And putting in the following addendum, a small polemic on one of my favorite subject : false hero worship.

You are so correct in showing how the differences between your subjects are not as important as their honorable actions, that we need to be reminded of good people like Ali and DiMaggio. Even Sinatra, if only for his fine melodies, excellent voice and big balls.

 We are in such dire need of any kind of honest hero, in every field of our endeavor, to replace and bury deep all the egotistical politician-minded fixers of national myths we have been inundated with, specially since World War II.

Perhaps the founding epitome of which may be General Douglas Mac Arthur, Colonial Governor of the Philippines (following in the footsteps of his Colonial Governor father, General Arthur Mac Arthur, director of the murder of over 100,000 Filipinos being 'saved' from Spanish oppression, 1900-1; nor let's not here consider father Arthur's previous violence against Native Americans in many Western campaigns nor his helping direct the rape of Cuba concurrent with the Philippines, both of which firmly established the reigns of his corporate masters who continued their economic Noblese Oblige for so many decades; nor the continued enslavement of Puerto Rico. Neither father nor son ever looked back on what they had perpetrated; for neither possessed the humanity or moral courage of one of General Arthur's more illustrious and forthright contemporaries, General Smedley D. Butler, who summed a similar career path by writing about his awakening in 1921, as follows:

All of which, and more, he came to more succinctly, and eloquently, render into one high truth in a later article :

...so neither Governor General Arthur or son Governor General Douglas ever reached that level of humane honesty, as they marched to the same neo-colonial call to duty demanded by their corporate Great White Father's perspective on Noblese Oblige).

A General Douglas MacArthur who : was negligent with Philippine, nay even Asian, defense planning over the years before the war, severely underestimating Japanese capabilities and certain indigenous reactions, through racist ignorance similar to the colonial British, until in 1942 he abandoned his 120,000 American soldiers, sneaking away by PT boat at night; shortly after, 70,000 men under General King had to surrender on Bataan and the Death March began, leaving General Wainwright with 6,500+ Americans and Filipino soldiers also to surrender; this commander who fled was the proudly melodramatic Douglas Mac Arthur who also proscribed guerilla war in the Philippines, so his victorious wading ashore had no competitors to his "I shall return" picture-taking festival in July, 1945; a "return", to his feudal Philippines, which he ordered started so far from the weakened Japanese Army and command center that this delayed conquest of Manila allowed for Hirohito to stop his microbiology experiments in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo long enough to implement a plan made with his henchman-killer Colonel Masanobu Tsuji (a most interesting Co-Prosperity Sphere racist responsible for that Bataan Death March as well as genocide in the Malaysian and Singapore campaign, who also, later in 1948, began cooperating with the new CIA during Mac Arthur's Japan occupation) to send 15,000 Naval Special Landing Force sailors and marines throughout Metro Manila to murder civilian witnesses and all prisoners of war, a slaughter resulting in some 1,000 American and over 115,000 Filipinos killed while Mac Arthur triumphantly marched north city by city; though several hundred American war prisoners were saved from Hirohito's Armageddon executioners by another soldier, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, soon after to be hung by an embarrassed General Mac Arthur; shortly after the World War we find 5 Star General Douglas Mac Arthur unilaterally attacking and invading China, dragging them into the Korean War, which got Mac Arthur fired by President Truman, from General Marshall's wise advice; finally, still smoking his symbolic grandfather pipe, Douglas was given a New York ticker tape parade, maybe in honor of his direct disobedience of orders, though by statute law and the Military Code of Conduct he should have been court martialed.

Thanks to all political grandstanding and PR expertise orchestrated by General Douglas and friends, we kept forgetting about another General, one far greater in military ability, international insight and humanity, General 'Vinegar Joe' Stillwell - a friend of the Chinese people who thusly became MacArthur and Chiang-kai shek's most honorable nemesis. Removed from the Asian theater and sent home - although he was the only Allied commanding general to ever beat the Japanese on the Asian continent - Stilwell's politically incorrect heroism and MacArthur's popularly correct cowboy immaturity were truths hidden from the public; for such truths did not pragmatically serve the hubris being developed by America's Military Industrial Intelligence complex, an ideology serving the corporations beginning even then to micromanage America's economic production and foreign entanglements.

Although the winners make the history, still it can be said that General Douglas Mac Arthur's role at least occurred in a real, basically honest we can say, war, not like that woefully professional sting operation Washington not long past used to suck the malevolent Sadaam Hussein into the oil, armaments and mercenary military commercialism we quite profitably labeled with the honorific 'Desert Storm'.

The one bright spot in our post World War II history of hero worship is that General Westmoreland, who willingly helped kill millions of Indochinese civilians and thousands of loyal, albeit naive in the beginning, US military men and women, has not been honored. Not condemned as he should be, mind you, with the rest of the political and military liars, fabricators and statistic falsifiers from those days, but at least not held up as a symbol for our youth to follow.

I thought perhaps we had made progress there, until Texas' good old boy George Bush announced that Desert Storm had corrected, nay vindicated, America's overseas image overseas as true friend of dictators: that all those missiles and smart bombs, killing over 200,000 Iraqis hiding in the sand or running away, had fully obliterated the 'last' sad memory of America's liberal heritage, our greatest national weakness, the Vietnam Syndrome. This Desert Storm story the sleepy American silent majority fell for, it would appear, created new false heroes and parades for their own kids to remember when they all-to-soon march off to defend our 'National Security in yet another 'police action' , invasion or war (we have had over 200 troop landings on foreign soil since 1776).

Yes, we desperately need honest national heroes. For much false, shallow or bad hero imagery is trickling down into America's needful youth : like simple, single-minded billionaires, vacuous celluloid faces, self-centered sports figures, Hollywood and TV heroes, and dishonest media talking heads; greedy corporate leaders who think foreign invasions and 'National Security' are all about controlling any resource, market, people or country worthwhile exploiting; some military men who are adulated yet who never actually faced an honest enemy of our people or fought in a honorable war; cowardly politicians who have sold out to the highest bidder (remember the senior staff guy for Dole who quit and wrote a book, "Dole: Senator for Sale"?

….which our would-be president Dole ignored; corporate multi-millionaires now averaging more than 300 times the annual salary of their own median workers; FBI, other Federales and police heroes combating dangerous threats on TV as their bribe taking managing lawyers and cowardly supervisors rot out the center of our Apple Pie democracy

Yes, Marty maybe your good thinking and writing about comparative heroes at this time will help some of our patriotic brethren to reflect on America's post World War II record of heroes, and how that false imagery has disregarded real cultural heroes while it degraded our commonweal. Maybe we can wake up enough of the public to these postmodern truths they have missed; so that, in time, our police and military and media defined "National Security" can be deconstructed, the economically self-serving secrecy of our elite intelligence masters ended, and our American welfare and security systems opened to redefinition. Maybe then our national ethos can begin to heal at home and, as a result of that individual moral vigor, our debased reputation overseas brought back to what our last true Citizen Soldiers heroically earned fighting two fascist empires 1941-1945.

Best regards,

richard

PS: The above comments are historical, taken not only from much research and reading for a trilogy manuscript in progress but also from over ten years of living and working in Asia, originally as a US intelligence officer and subsequently managing my own small loss consultant company. As part of the latter work, I first went to the Philippines in 1969 and last in 1987 while working pro-bono for President Aquino's Presidential Commission on Good Government....

nyc, 3/1999