Why can’t my generals be more loyal, like Hiter’s generals? Donald Trump to Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly.
Hitler’s generals tried to kill him, and they almost pulled it off, Kelly replied.
The most famous example of Kelly’s history, which is factual, as opposed to the President’s knowledge of history, which is nonexistent, is the July 20, 1944 bomb plot, engineered, as we all know, by Tom Cruise (Valkyerie), not my favorite actor, with an assist by Bill Nighy, who is.
The story is familiar to those who study history. Claus von Stauffenberg, a decorated German officer who kept losing parts of himself (one eye, one arm), was, like most of modern Washington D.C., disgusted with his nation’s leader. Unlike most of D.C., he was willing to do something about it.
At Hitler’s bunker in East Prussia, the Wolf’s Lair, Stauffenberg nudged a briefcase full of plastique under the map table to the edge of the Fuhrer’s kneecaps. He then discreetly left. Another officer, wanting a better view of the movement of the mythical panzer divisions–reinforced, equipped and sped into action across the map—Normandy at one end and the Russian frontier at the other, by Hitler, nudged the briefcase out of his way and behind a support that held the map table up.
The finicky offer painted the wall when the bomb detonated.
The Fuhrer had his pants shredded. Sadly, the explosion did not kill him at all.
Hours later, Stauffenberg was shot, the lucky fellow, unlike other senior officers, Bomb Plot plotters, who were hanged with piano wire, a procedure filmed and played for Hitler’s pleasure.
Our piano-wire days are not here yet, but we need to be patient. We’re firing already, nicely, on all eight cylinders of Gestapo.
The doomed nationalist, Stauffenberg, was from Baden-Wurttemberg, and so were the ancestors of my beloved Grandma Kelly, whose maiden name (Kircher, from the word for “Church”) was blended with Irish blood, which may have led to two Irish husbands—one Keefe, a charming drunk and a car thief, my biological grandfather; one Kelly, a cop, my real grandfather.
Baden-Wurttemberg, where the bomb plotter and a California gold chlorider (my Grandma Kelly’s father, Michael, who worked in a gold-processing mine and mill now beneath Lake Shasta) is stunningly beautiful.. On the left is the town where the Kirchers lived, until the 1830s; on the right is the Evangelical Lutheran church were Michen, my third great-grandfather, was baptized.
So there’s little chance that Stauffenberg and I are distant cousins. I wouldn’t mind it.
That’s not all. Oh, no.
Hitler was examined intensively after the bomb’s detonation had reduced his pants to crenelated culottes, There was not damage Down There, not that der Pilz des Anführers (“The Leader’s Mushroom”), a term suggested by porn star and Trump couplet and strumpet Stormy Daniels.
But up there? Here’s where I come in. I attended Stanford University.
Okay, for a week.
I studied the history of Depression, New Deal and World War II America with Dr. David Kennedy—an amazing man—who’d written the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of those years, Freedom from Fear. On one of our breaks—all of us high-school history teachers—we toured the Hoover Institute.
To refresh your memory, Hoover accomplished this in the 1932 presidential election (in red).
He was succeeded, of course, by some fellow from upstate New York who gave my teenaged father a job in relief work, distributing food to proud Ozark hill people whose starvation, briefly, overcame their pride, who sent CCC teenagers from New York City to Arroyo Grande to reclaim the soil that had been devastated by erosion, whose federal employees built school buildings extant in Arroyo Grande, whose vice president appointed my father to Officers’ Candidate School during World War II, whose tour of Camp Lejeune in December 1944 was guided by a Marine, a motor pool driver, a sergeant, a woman, from nearby Oceano, California, who’d lost her brother two years before on Tarawa.
–hie is now buried with her–in 2017.
So there’s all that.
The Murrays are all that. Our alleged president isn’t. He gives us nothing, sacrifices nothing, cares nothing for us, deserves nothing from us.
But at the Hoover Institute, an incredible repository, I was allowed to hold the X-ray of Hitler’s skull, taken after the misdirected explosion at the Wolf’s Lair this day in 1944. I have not seen an x-ray of our leader’s skull, but I have seen this one.
What I’ve seen instead, and just in the last few days, are President’ Trump’s ankles. They are grossly swollen, explained away glibly by the latest of his snake-oil doctors, like the one who proclaimed him the fittest man ever to occupy the White House.
But I’ve learned not to take his doctors’ word for anything. A more hopeful explanation, after a steady diet of Big Macs, incinerated New York steaks, gray inside, and colored only by Heinz ketchup, Kentucky-fried buckets whose grease is wiped clean on the armrests of Air Force One, double Mar-a-Lago helpings of chocolate cake with ice cream—he eats piggishly in front of his guests, allowed slivers of cake—complemented by exercise that consists of driving a golf cart across painfully manicured—by immigrants–putting greens. So there is a good chance that those bloated ankles portend congestive heart failure.
And, with God’s help, and may it be soon, the arteries that supply his heart and his brain will collapse.
He will not die for awhile.
He will stare, silent and furious, just as Stalin did at his Inner Circle after his stroke—many of them were soon the be shot at the Lubyanka, the secret police slaughterhouse in Moscow—at the the White House eunuchs who’ve abetted his every aberrant behavior, most of all the predatory ones, and they will have nothing for him, nothing to save him from the drowning his cruelty has earned him.
The cruelty he’ll leave behind is vast and invasive. The healing will take years. The war that lies ahead of us will be the hardest we have ever fought. To fight it, we need to look beyond ourselves.
A Work in Progress 