By Hal Brown
I didn’t click on any of the stories shown above though I did look at the tweet shown here.
These articles made me think of “Apocalypse Now” and Marlon Brando’s memorable whispered line.
It may be a stretch but in many ways surviving four years of Trump and Trumpism is analogous to coming out the other side of the Vietnam War alive.
There are various estimates of the number of people who died during the Vietnam War up to 1,353,000, however the number of allied deaths is probably the most accurate at 282,000. The most recent statistics of the number of Covid deaths in the United States is 274,000 so it will soon exceed the number who died in Vietnam during the entire American involvement in the war.
These deaths are entirely due to Trump’s downplaying and outright denial of the dangerousness of the pandemic.
It isn’t only literal death that Trump is responsible for. He is responsible for pushing our democratic republic as close to death as it was during the Civil War. This is an apt comparison for obvious reasons. All you have to do is an Internet search for “far right calls for another Civil War” to see what I am referring to.
Truly, “the horror, the horror” seems to be an appropriate reaction to watching what Trump has done and is continuing to do. So, for that matter is the imagery of Trump channeling Lt. Kilgore reveling in the smell of napalm:
Kilgore : Smell that? You smell that?
Lance : What?
Kilgore : Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end.
There’s a major difference between the healing which eventually occurred after the war was over both in this country and between the United States and Vietnam. Even with Trump out of office the horrors of Trumpism will live on.
Update:
Even Trump’s current rhetoric may get people killed. For example: