Thanks Marty 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 endeavors, 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 Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur, ex-Colonial Governor of the Philippines (following in the footsteps of his Colonial Governor father, Gen. Arthur Mac Arthur, director of the murder of over 100,000 Filipinos being 'saved' from Spanish oppression, 1900-1).

A General Douglas MacArthur who : screwed up Philippine, nay even Asian, defense planning over many years between the wars, until then in 1942 he abandoned, by small boat at night, his 12,000 Americans and 30,000+ Filipino soldiers at a crucial stage, just as the fighting on Corregidor got tough, men who were in heavily fortified positions facing less than 6,000 Japanese troopers ; a Mac Arthur who then made his wading ashore "I shall return" picture taking festival in 1945 so far from the highly weakened Japanese Army and command center that he allowed Hirohito to order his Naval detachment to form into death squads which organized throughout Metro Manila the slaughter of well over 115,000 of MacArthur's own Filipino 'subjects'; a Mac Arthur who shortly thereafter unilaterally attacked and invaded China, bringing them into the Korean War; a Mac Arthur who then, still smoking his wisely symbolic grandfather pipe, was given a ticker tape parade in honor of disobeying orders, instead of being court martialed as the law required.

We forget about a great and humane General 'Vinegar Joe' Stillwell - MacArthur and Chiang-kai shek's more honorable nemesis - strictly because the truths about each, Stillwell's politically incorrect heroism and MacArthur's popularly correct cowboy immaturity, are still hidden as being of no practical use to America's Military Industrial Intelligence hubris, that corporate controlled Complex macromanaging our economic and foreign entanglements.

Yet Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur's role was at least in a real, 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 honorificly, and quite profitably, labeled 'Desert Storm'.

The one bright spot in our post World War II history of hero worship is that Gen. Westmoreland, who willingly helped kill millions of Indochinese civilians and thousands of naive 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 image overseas as a true friend : 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 story the sleepy American silent majority fell for, it appears, creating 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 (over 200 foreign adventures since 1776).

Yes, we desperately need honest national heroes. For so much false, shallow or actually bad hero imagery in America is trickling down into our worshipful children : simple, single-minded billionaires, vacuous celluloid faces, self-centered sports figures 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; 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 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 managers 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 economicly self-serving secrecy of our elite masters ended, and our American welfare and security 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.

Best regards,
richard

(c) r. manning
nyc, 3/1999