PRISMATIST

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It appears that The Prince Of Orange has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down at the end of this month (September, 2020).  This is not technically treasonous, but for me it's the last straw.  Stars and Stripes was your local paper when you were posted overseas, especially in the days before the internet--and even now if you're assigned someplace with lousy or no internet service.  Stars and Stripes was family in a way that even our real local papers couldn't aspire to be, for reasons that were not their fault.  

 

Our parents depended on it during all the wars they served in, and so did their parents.  And even if your spouse or parent and not you was the one in service, it was your newspaper.  It came even on the rare occasions when the mail didn't come (transported, you may recall, by what was earlier the Post Office and later the Postal Service, now also under the gun).  

 

I can no longer imagine anyone who had friends or family in the military supporting this despicable character.  He can deny saying scurrilous things about veterans and soldiers killed in action, even though everyone knows he is lying.  He cannot deny killing off our most reliable connection with our homeland when we were far away.   I am afraid I no longer feel under any social or political obligation to be polite or understanding in dealing with his supporters.  

 

(Full disclosure:  I was IV-F and never in the military.  My father was an officer in the Air Force, so we spent the Cuban Missile Crisis on a major overseas base, confidently expecting to become radioactive dust before lunchtime every day for a couple of weeks.  And Stars and Stripes was there with us, telling us the truth about what was happening or might, just as it was with the troops at Anzio and Iwo Jima and Normandy and Belleau Wood.)

 

(Even more full disclosure:  I weep when any newspaper dies--well, not any newspaper, but I am still in mourning for the New York Herald Tribune, for example.  I may be overreacting.  But I don't think so.)

 

So please, either vote for his flawed and lackluster opponent, or at least abstain from voting for any presidential candidate this year.  Whoever you are, you owe Stars and Stripes that much.

 

POSTSCRIPT

 

It doesn't matter that he cancelled (or maybe just postponed) the execution when the backlash hit.  What matters is that some gormless twits in DoD figured--correctly--that he'd be okay with it.  In a line I recall as being from Fred Allen but can't find a source for,  "He is so low he'd have to climb a ladder to sneeze up a snake's pant leg."  And whoever in DoD thought the idea even remotely acceptable, or indeed even had the thought at all, is lower than that.  Whatever you feel as strongly about as I do about Stars and Stripes is next on the chopping block if he and his minions stay in office.  Since they can't stop themselves, it's up to us to stop them.