Reactions to the convicted-felon-elect’s noise about annexing Canada, claiming Panama, and buying Greenland have been surprisingly few. Most have been humorous, as if it’s all a joke.
My daughter and son-in-law, my employers, my next door neighbors, and the kids of my college and high school friends are all of a generation that can afford a laugh. And all their kids, two of them grand to me, are too young to get such a joke–much less the implied menace if taken literally.
My reaction features a flashback, a scene some 25 years ago at this very table. Here I sat with two college friends, both former roommates, and my daughter, then a Vassar undergrad. Bill, rest his soul, was wearing a shirt he had since the days when we marched on Washington and Boston, and sat-in at Salem State, with an emblem on the pocket:
When Rachel inevitably asked “What’s that?” both Bill and and I waved our hands at her, “No, no! You don’t want to know!”*
But Buddy knew better, and insisted, “Yes, you should know.” Bill and I relented, and Buddy gave her a valuable history lesson, one that anyone our age will recall, though there has always been bitter disagreement about the details. Briefly put for younger readers, the Gulf of Tonkin is where, according to Pres. Lyndon Johnson, North Vietnam forces attacked an American ship. This became the premise for the deployment of American troops in Vietnam.
Bill and I started adding details and historical comparisons. The Gulf of Tonkin was to us what W’s “weapons of mass destruction” would soon become to Rachel’s generation. A hoax.
America’s tradition of contrived scenes to generate enthusiasm for a war reaches as far back as 1847 when Pres. James Polk decried “American blood on American soil” to gain support for a war on Mexico. Truth is that he sent troops into disputed territory who shot first, provoking a response. Some American–or rather a luckless Irish immigrant pressed into service straight from the docks in New York and Baltimore–was bound to get hit.
The fraud was so transparent that a young officer fresh out of West Point would call it “that wicked war” in his memoirs years later. U.S. Grant realized the land-grab for what it was while he was there, and he regretted being too timid to raise that serious an objection at the start of his career. To this day, it is the only American war that does not have a single monument, memorial, or plaque in Washington DC.
Fifty years later, “Remember the Maine!” served as a battle-cry to justify Pres. William McKinley’s attack on Cuba. The USS Maine exploded in Havana’s harbor for reasons no one knew at the time, but which in time appeared more and more to be the result of a malfunction. McKinley supporters and expansionists such as Teddy Roosevelt didn’t wait for time. They jumped to the conclusion for which they longed. Before long, the slogan was expanded to “Remember the Maine and to Hell with Spain!” And American military action was expanded to the Philippines.
Some historians make the case that FDR deliberately let our guard down in the South Pacific figuring that Japan would bomb some small outpost, say Guam or the Marshall Islands. Just enough to serve as a pretext to retaliate. Not settling for low-hanging fruit, the Japanese blitzed the big kahuna of Hawaii, and Pearl Harbor was far more than mere pretext. If those historians are correct, then FDR’s strategy was that of Polk and McKinley–and later of LBJ and W. Bush–provoke confrontation, use it as a pretext, coin a slogan to rally support. By wiping out Pearl Harbor and killing 2,400 Americans, the Japanese handed FDR his pretext and guaranteed American support. The call, “A Day of Infamy,” though true, was redundant.
Whether or not FDR should be included, this picture forms the background for the geographical juggling act we’ve been treated to of late. Laugh at your own peril.
Canadian officials dismissed it as “tough guy talk” the way that Melania dismissed the convicted-sex-offender-elect’s boasts of P-grabbing as nothing more than “locker room talk.” An invasion of Canada is so hard to imagine that they may be able to laugh it off.
As for Greenland and Panama, however, the designs are not so far-fetched. Greenland is quite apart from Denmark to which it belongs, and it extends into the Arctic which is what American and Russian oil companies prize.
Panama? The Canal once belonged to the USA. We built it, and there’s a photo of Teddy Roosevelt operating a steam shovel to prove it.
All that’s needed is a pretext to take. The convict-elect calls them both necessary for national security. Oh, how far America has come! Seventy years ago, Pres. Eisenhower was successful giving that reason for building interstate highways on which jets can find a runway on any 25-mile stretch. Will it work to claim a giant melting iceberg? Or a canal that no longer operates at full capacity year-round because climate change has lowered the levels of lake water needed for the higher locks?
For military action, it’ll take something more, a direct threat that will fool enough of us to think it’ll be worth putting several thousand young men and women in harm’s way.
On that night long ago, I suspect Rachel got more than she bargained for, but I saw that she was wide-eyed through it all. And I do believe she’ll recall it when some odd, surprising news is reported from Central America or the Arctic Circle made to sound like a threat to the USA.
If only more of us were so prepared.
-648-
*I always thought the emblem was a joke someone had made up and put on clothing for the hell of it. That’s what Bill thought when he spotted the shirt in a thrift store. Turns out we were right about the joke, but wrong about the joker: Someone in the Navy on one of the American ships in the Tonkin Gulf coined the name, and it quickly stuck. That sailor or another designed the patch, and many wore it:
Mouth of the River 