{"id":17499,"date":"2017-05-06T22:50:17","date_gmt":"2017-05-07T04:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=17499"},"modified":"2017-05-06T22:50:17","modified_gmt":"2017-05-07T04:50:17","slug":"prairie-lights-we-shouldnt-forget-what-trump-doesnt-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/05\/prairie-lights-we-shouldnt-forget-what-trump-doesnt-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: We shouldn’t forget what Trump doesn’t know"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ed\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n

The funniest, truest thing I\u2019ve read about what\u2019s going on in the United States these days was written by David Brooks in a recent New York Times column<\/a>: \u201cThose who ignore history are condemned to retweet it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was referring, of course, to President Donald Trump, whose knowledge of history, even of American history, would be an embarrassment in a junior high classroom, and who can say everything he knows on most subjects in no more than 140 characters.<\/p>\n

But in this, Trump is just being Trump. Everything he does is on an outrageous scale, so it only makes sense that his ignorance, like his ego and his self-delusion, would be monumental.<\/p>\n

He is the exemplar of the amnesiac American, the embodiment of the dismissive idea that everything that happened before last week is \u201chistory,\u201d meaning irrelevant, meaningless, out of sight and out of mind.<\/p>\n

I thought of that last week when I came across an account of America\u2019s napalming and carpet-bombing of North Korea in the early 1950s. Blaine Harden, writing in the Washington Post in 2015<\/a>, was attempting to explain why North Korea\u2019s leaders, for all their manifest crimes and gangsterism, are not simply \u201cnuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, they teach North Koreans to hate and fear the United States, drumming it into their heads on a daily basis. But there is a hard kernel of truth at the bottom of the message. As Harden writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America\u2019s own leaders. \u2018Over a period of three years or so, we killed off\u2014what\u201420 percent of the population,\u2019 Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984<\/a>. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed \u2018everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.\u2019 After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Those civilian deaths were hardly reported on at the time and rarely have been mentioned since, Harden says, calling the carpet-bombing \u201cperhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought of our selective amnesia again as I was reading some essays by Eduardo Galeano, the late Uruguayan writer whose best-known book in these parts is probably \u201cSoccer in Sun and Shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n

The essay that got me thinking was \u201cThe Civilization of Black Gold,\u201d written in 1971 about Venezuela, which Galeano called \u201cone of the richest countries on the planet\u201d and also \u201cone of the poorest and the most violent.\u201d Why? Because as in so many parts of the world, nearly all the money that flowed in from Venezuela\u2019s bottomless reserves of oil went to a privileged minority in the capital, Caracas, and to their foreign overlords.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo city in Venezuela has generated so much wealth as Cabimas,\u201d Galeano wrote. \u201cBut Cabimas doesn\u2019t even have sewers, only a couple of paved streets. Cabimas is a vast swamp filled with big-bellied barefoot kids. After squeezing Cabimas for half a century, Rockefeller abandoned it and even had the company buildings razed. \u2026 The story of Cabimas is that of many other oil towns, and it presages the future of all the others, miserable, dark, shining with oil, bound to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet when did the American government, and the American media, suddenly develop an all-consuming interest in the affairs of Venezuela? When its people elected Huge Chavez as president in 1998.<\/p>\n

Chavez was a socialist and a populist who lavished oil revenues on social programs and subsidized goods for the poor. It was misguided, at least in its extravagance, and it was unsustainable, but the piracy of generations of Venezuelan leaders before Chavez was also misguided, unsustainable and immoral as well.<\/p>\n

It just wasn\u2019t newsworthy, as long as the dictators kept the Rockefellers\u2014and by extension the American government and the American media\u2014happy.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s ignorance of history seems as genuine as it is blithe. He doesn\u2019t know because he doesn\u2019t care. What excuse do the rest of us have?<\/p>\n

As Harden also said in his piece about North Korea, the United States, which likes to claim \u201cthe democratic high ground,\u201d can \u201csometimes be shockingly incurious and self-absorbed. In the case of the bombing of North Korea, its people never really became conscious of a major war crime committed in their name.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPaying attention in a democracy is a moral obligation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is also a way to avoid repeating immoral mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The funniest, truest thing I\u2019ve read about what\u2019s going on in the United States these days was written by David Brooks in a recent New York Times column: \u201cThose who ignore history are condemned to retweet it.\u201d He was referring, of course, to President Donald Trump, whose knowledge of history, even of American history, would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[5822,3297,2853,5820,5821],"class_list":["post-17499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-blaine-harden","tag-david-brooks","tag-donald-trump","tag-north-korea","tag-venezuela","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17502,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17499\/revisions\/17502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}