Trump’s election and the resulting grand mal seizures from the Left once more highlight a house not just divided, but irreconcilably fractured and now ablaze
By Mark Cromer
It’s Veteran’s Day weekend and under the gorgeous wild blue yonder of Southern California skies I find myself amid the sweep of fine lawns that still cover the Oakdale Cemetery in Glendora. A bedroom community nestled alongside the San Gabriel Mountains that has long dubbed itself ‘The Pride of the Foothills,’ Glendora was once a favored place of my stepfather Will, who enjoyed saddling up at The Golden Spur on Route 66 for his never-ending post-war therapy with his old counselor Jim Beam.
And so I have returned here once more to help my frail but determined mother place flowers on his gravesite and honor a man who answered his nation’s call during the last existential fight to the finish our country found itself in a virtual lifetime ago.
I reflect on Will’s gravestone and note its badge of honor, “Cpl. United States Marine Corps” and am swayed by a rush of memories of my stepfather. He was a coiled wire of a man, spring-loaded but wrapped in an understated demeanor and a steeled conviction for a country that carried him through a relatively short life, one that began in 1925 on his family’s farm in Hume, Illinois. He grew up in a rural America that expected its children to learn and work at the same time and to be prepared to defend the individual liberty that the nation’s forefathers had bestowed upon the so-called Silent Generation. He was still in his adolescence when America became locked in a death match with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but he joined The Marines at 17-years-old and after a relatively brief but brutal bout of training he and his platoon were shipped across the vast South Pacific where he landed on the volcanic sands of an island named Iwo Jima for what proved to be one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps’ history.
He never glorified or glamorized the war, in fact he didn’t talk about it much unless he was asked and he never left me with anything other than a grim sense that war was a bloody horror of a nightmare that’s all too real and filled alternately with drudgery and dread. Shit, vomit and death, the terrible screaming of men followed by the terrible moaning of men and then a terrible silence that falls upon men.
A teenager armed with an M-1 carbine, a few grenades and a fixed bayonet, he fought hard and valiantly alongside his fellow young Marines. He did as the nation had asked: he killed the Imperial Japanese soldiers that he was sent to kill, both from a distance and up close and personal in hand-to-hand combat across a cratered lunar landscape filled with machine-gun nests and spider holes from which the Japanese would suddenly appear. Following the surrender and occupation of Japan, he was sent back stateside and discharged, returned to the farm and then went off to college where he earned a degree in education before moving out to sunny Southern California where he took a job at a public elementary school in La Puente where he would eventually meet a fellow divorced educator who happened to be my mom.
As I stand here at his graveside and ponder my stepfather’s sacrifice as a young man and his subsequent life that followed, I can’t help but contrast it with the ‘battles’ that so many of America’s young fancy themselves fighting today and sadly marvel not how far the country has come since my stepfather’s era but rather just how far gone the nation is.
My stepfather and his peers were born and raised amidst the Great Depression, their hands were hardened young by labor as was the virtue of their character. They were not bestowed some sparkling generational title that spoke of pomp and bequeathed with a sense of entitlement by mere birthright alone but rather they were summoned forth from country farms and small towns and throughout America’s Great cities and from all points in-between, heeding the nation’s call to arms against the Axis.
The men and women of the ‘Silent Generation’ toiled and struggled and killed and ultimately triumphed did so indeed rather quietly, and so Time magazine christened it with its generational moniker in 1951, even as the post-war haze was settling into a dangerously tense Cold War with its spinoff bloodbaths like Korea all while the seeds of disaster were being planted in a place called Vietnam. And yet through it all they managed to build a bustling economy that lifted tens of millions of working Americans into the newly identified socioeconomic strata christened ‘the middle class’ that was symbolized at its core by a single family home, a car, and a ‘nuclear family’ of four that never comprised more than two genders.
This was an era when America liked Ike but respected Adlai Stevenson.
It was also an era when Americans of every racial and ethnic stripe may have had their familial roots in some far away lands—including some that we had literally just laid to waste—but following a prolonged and significant reduction in mass legal immigration, the vast majority of people in America were born here, spoke English and were identified as white. And that, in and of itself, was seen neither as inherently wrong nor bad, anymore so than the largely homogeneous natures of most other countries around the planet. It was an era when the grande dames of academia, from Georgetown to Princeton to Columbia to Yale, had yet to begun adding to their course of study rosters curriculum dedicated to why America was so white and how best to alleviate that apparent social ill.
The remedy they arrived at to remake America, it is now clear, was the largest sustained tide of mass immigration into the United States ever witnessed in the history of nation-states. The Migration Policy Institute calculated between 1980 and 2015 the number of foreigners living in the United States exploded from 14 million to nearly 45 million, moving from about six-percent of the population to nearly 15-percent, and the number of foreign born continues to grow dramatically.
And yet despite accommodating this Biblical scale flood of peoples from across the globe, America remains casually characterized on the Left as a racist nation that has waged war against immigrants, when in fact it is the working American citizen who has been relentlessly under siege for the past three decades or more, though not that you would know it from the university cradles.
I don’t have to wonder what Will would think of the university ‘students’ who have been coddled from cradle-to-campus and now seem to spend more time obsessing over an ever-expanding list of social grievances, locked not in a rigorous intellectual pursuit of knowledge and the multi-dimensional and nuanced truth that knowledge ultimately reveals, but rather marching lock-step across their colleges-turned-spas in a frothing state of perpetual grievance and believing in no greater truth than their own righteous corner of it and, of course, whatever leads to the immediate satisfaction of their every impulse.
For this is the era where the child-Pharaohs of suburbia have left their parent-servants quarters, where they had long been lavished with a largess that was obscenely heaped upon them disguised as love, and they have now moved into the temples of scholarship where the high priests busy themselves accommodating these little Caesars from the classroom to the commons, dutifully jotting down the flatulent burp of their every demand and proclaiming it to be the sweet jasmine of social justice.
Considering that my stepfather Will pretty much thought that the main problem with the National Guard opening fire at Kent State University in May 1970 was that the guard had unleashed a fusillade of live fire on a large crowd of violent protestors but scored only four kills—which he immediately found alarming as it suggested to him a range of training deficiencies from marksmanship to combat determination—I don’t need a Ouija board to discern what he would make of these students today who literally collapsed in shrieking, sobbing heaps (some wailing as inconsolably as they had in 2006 when they didn’t get the PlayStation 3 they had instructed their parent-servants to deliver) as the reality of Donald Trump’s election became apparent.
As I stand at his graveside this Veteran’s Day weekend, I’m pretty confident I understand what his take would be on the protestors who marched through American cities waving Mexican flags and denouncing America even as other protestors literally defecated on Old Glory in the street, dragged our nation’s flag along the ground and burned it.
And I am pretty sure I understand what his prescription for this particular brand of national ailment would be. In fact, it would likely hew the same line of another Mid-Western Democrat from Illinois, the old Big City Boss from Chicago, Richard Joseph Daley, who once declared on television that he’d instructed his officers to shoot looters on sight— but with orders that they were to “shoot to maim.” Arsonists, Daley explained to reporters, were to be shot on sight as well, with the caveat: “Shoot to kill.”
Nearly a half-century later and the Windy City is still lorded over by a Democratic mayor and it is still a chaotic bloodbath—where someone is shot in South Chicago less than very two hours—but it’s the cops who are on the run and outgunned and the criminal street militias that act with impunity.
In the week since the election the surreal campus temper tantrums have given way to a hurricane of hostility and menacing threats unleashed from the amalgamation of radical Left and some anarchist elements on the street and the globalist elites that aid and abet them from positions of establishment power in a collective declaration that they will never accept a President Trump.
And he’s still two months away from being sworn in to office.
How much and how fast the vitriol and violence escalates from this point is uncertain and dependent on a number of fluid variables, but the trend lines are certainly clear, as is the still growing divide across the nation. But the idea that more than 60 million American citizens who voted successfully for the election of their candidate, come what may, will somehow suddenly be denied the fruit of their ballots by nihilistic rioters vandalizing and destroying private property, looting businesses, disrupting traffic and terrorizing drivers and violently attacking citizens in American cities is just further magical thinking on behalf of those who never reckoned on Trump’s rise—or more specifically what it truly represents—to begin with.
As I wrote of Trump back in early May, in a column entitled ‘The Devil’s Advocate,’ they didn’t see him coming: “And from the ‘Redneck Riviera’ of the Florida panhandle to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and just about everywhere in between, working white America feels not just under siege, not just left behind, not just ignored—and they feel all of those things—they have the growing suspicion they are not just being screwed over but actually targeted.”
Those feelings have only grown more pronounced over the past week and are likely to grow even sharper still in the days, weeks and months ahead.
But I can see Will now, still sitting in his chair outside my mom’s place with a Lucky Strike burning between his fingers (my mom would never let him smoke inside), scanning the Los Angeles Herald Examiner as the Dodger game was called on his old transistor radio, wincing every time Steve Garvey made an error as he considered the classic infield’s first baseman to be a “pretty boy politician,” and I imagine him looking up at me with that big grin that would flash across his storied face that had been leathered early by murderous combat, the Pacific sun, the bottom of the bottle and a two packs of Lucky Strikes-a-day habit, and offer me a Marine’s perspective on the chaos confronting America today.
“Let me tell you something, hot rod, and listen up (when I was a kid he called me ‘hot rod’ because I was running everywhere), when you see these uh, ‘protestors,’ smashing windows, attacking people, always moving in packs, stealing, screaming obscenities at our police officers, pissing and shitting on the American flag—look at their hands, are they calloused and hard from work? Look at their faces, or are they hiding them behind bandanas and masks? Listen to what they’re saying: is it an idea they’re declaring or a demand they are making? Because it’s hostage-takers that issue demands. And ultimately just step back and size them up and tell me what you think they’ll do if this really does turn into an actual national firefight, because you ask me, if it comes down to it, once the shooting starts these mobs of club-wielding punks are going to be defecating on the camera again, but it won’t be on the flag—they’ll be shitting themselves.”
Of course, I am extrapolating his riffs and wisdom from 40 years ago and framing them around the issue of America at its crossroads in 2016. Will’s life was cut short after all those counseling sessions with Jim Beam and the endless parade of Lucky Strikes that helped ease the horror of the slaughter on Iwo Jima finally caught up with him in the fall of 1978 and put him in his grave at the age of just 53.
But as I stand at his graveside, I think I can hear him telling me over the cosmic transom that I got it right. I offer the gravestone a brief salute and a silent promise to make my way over to The Golden Spur for an evening of further reflection, the sort of séance that he would approve.
As I slowly walk my mom back to my car, I am reminded of another memory of my stepfather Will that reminds me in rather stark terms of where America stands today. It was the mid-1970s and we had just finished watching an interfaith church league basketball game at Palomares Junior High School in Pomona. Along with all the local churches in the Pomona Valley, the league also allowed a team from Camp Afferbaugh, a Los Angeles County Probation Department reformatory ‘camp’ in the foothills in La Verne. My family was there to support our Pomona First Presbyterian team on which my older brother played.
As we walked across the parking lot to our car, a car with three Camp Afferbaugh supporters pulled up alongside Will and apparently words were exchanged, probably something along the lines of ‘You need some help getting back to your car old man?’ and Will replying ‘As as a matter of fact I do, long hair, so why don’t you get out of the car and help me?’
It escalated from there and four decades later I just recall a few moments of what was a brief encounter, but they were very telling moments. I remember seeing the white guy in front passenger seat and the black dude in the back passenger seat both had their windows rolled down and were taunting Will, who had a smile of somewhere between serenity and sickness on his face as he walked right along side their car. And I remember he just kept saying “I know, I know, I’m an old timer and you’re gonna kick my ass, so just get out of the car. Come on, just get out of the car and I’ll dance with you. Who’s gonna dance with me?” And he never dropped that calm smile.
And I remember my mom kept saying “Will, no! Will, no!” though I am pretty sure it wasn’t for his sake.
I knew that Will often carried a knife with him, probably something he never stopped doing since February 1945, and looking back now I know that had those mouthy young thugs had stopped the car and started to get out, well, they may very well have been introduced to the man who twenty years earlier had confronted, fought and killed some of the toughest soldiers on the planet—and he respected the Japanese as soldiers, even if he was determined to kill as many of them as he could. I could tell then and I remember now the look in Will’s eyes and that casual smile radiated the total contempt for the three thugs that had pulled alongside a church-going family to harass them.
And I suspect they sensed the odd and unexpected danger sign Will seemed to be flashing with his refusal to turn away. They seemed to grasp the real possibility that he might open and reroute some of their arterial highways the moment they started to exit their car. They made a good decision, shouted some profane taunt and did a burnout as they pulled onto Orange Grove Avenue and into the night.
Will shrugged and we all got into the car. My mom was furious but he calmed her down and said something to the effect that sometimes you just can’t let other people threaten you into walking away so that they can get their way. Pick your battles, sure, but at some point be ready to battle—and then do what needs doing to win.
As I drive my mom home, I take the lessons that Will taught me to heart and wonder how much longer will it be before working America has had enough and is ready to look these street thugs in the eyes and say “Ok, lets dance.”
And then do what needs to be done to win.
[ Note: The Devil’s Advocate column can be found here: https://thecromerreader.com/the-daily-read-archives/the-devils-advocate/ ]
