Blowing the Trumpet

Fellow Survivors,

These are perilous times.  In part because they are hard to figure, hard to follow.  Who else but Tubs -- I like to think of him as Tubby the Draftdodger -- would pack his White House with unapoligetically Jewish Goldman-Sachs bigwigs like Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn after excoriating Hillary for taking a stipend for a speech at Goldman's while simultaneously depending for strategy on so outspoken a bigot and racist as Steve Bannon?  Perhaps Bannon's tremendous gut aroused an irresistible fellow feeling. But then surrounding himself with strong-minded generals who are guaranteed to bristle each time Tubs lathers over in response to his adolescent counterpart in North Korea?

The contradictions keep piling in.  Never having watched The Apprentice, I found myself confused when Trump first burst into prominence during the primaries.  To me he seemed like an overstimulated Borscht Belt comedian, a clown whose routines would normally have been abandoned with the passing of Prohibition.  To Tubs John McCain looked like another quitter who, shot down, let a broken back compromise his sense of duty by surrendering to the North Vietnamese.  This from a Manhattan playboy who worked the deferment racket as long as he could, then claimed bone spurs would invalidate his service -- Trump seems to have trouble remembering which foot justified his exemption.

Each time Trump rants away at Arlington Cemetery it gives me a sharp pain in my universally beloved keester.  Having served myself -- one very cold winter, temporarily an Acting Sergeant, I ran a mobile radio station just across the Czech border; the heavy guns of Russian artillery and tanks woke me up each morning in my sleeping bag in the snow.  We were the tripwire in case of a Soviet invasion.  When his turn came, Donald Trump was too busy groping the interns to take his chances.   McCain, in one recent aside, couldn't resist referring to bone spurs as a problem for all true patriots.

Equally galling to me has been Trump's insistence on rescinding all the environmental regulations Obama left in place.  Virtually his first executive order authorized the dumping of carcinogenic coal slag into rivers and lakes, and chemicals long demonstrated to trigger cancers are again freely distributed by greedy manufacturers.  My recent trilogy, the Landau saga, digs imaginatively into big-league corporate malfeasance and terrifying environmental violations, in Cuba and Costa Rica and finally on the Comanche reservation in Oklahoma.  Heart-stopping stuff, according to Amazon readers, who have boosted the first novel -- The Hedge Fund -- into the top thirty books in its category for sales.  All available digitally; the first book, The Hedge Fund, you can get free. To assure  that you are properly hooked.

One last note.  The government is finally releasing the documents pertaining to the assassination of Jack Kennedy.  As readers of my book Bobby and J. Edgar know, I found compelling evidence that Kennedy was killed by the Chicago Outfit and elements of the CIA consequent to a conspiracy, and not by Oswald.  See Chapter Nineteen.  A careful investigation over several years by a Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives directed by Notre Dame professor Bob Blakey also determined that there were several shooters -- there was indeed a conspiracy, and probably not involving Oswald.  A recent court case reveals that Oswald never reached Mexico City and so he never actually threatened the president, as his wife insisted. He had no powder burns on his cheek or hands when he was grabbed in the Texas Theater by Federal Marshals, and so could not have fired a weapon.  Read Bob and Ed.  Now we will see what the newly-released documents indicate. This cover-up has outlived its usefulness.

But enough indignation for one session.  Have a gratifying Thanksgiving.

Burton Hersh