Before the Age of the Donald by Dave Jaffe - Part Three

                Before the Age of the Donald - Part Three


       One of my blogs on poetry horrified a woman who read it. "You're so full of hate and anger," she told me. "You're so anti-American. Just stay away from me." I never did speak to that woman again. But I get her point. My writings on the U.S.A. scared her as they scared a landlord I knew who read my writings.
     Now so far this story on the U.S. of A. has trashed this country of 300 million people. Yet to be fair to America part of its problems come from the fact that it's a great power.  Many of the Americans like the ones who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, think that their country's declining in power. In fact it remains the most powerful nation in the world.
    There's three or four reasons for this. First off, America's military power is still awesome to behold. It has 1.3 million people in its armed forces and spends about $650 billion (U.S.) every year on its military and weapons. The U.S. also has 750 military bases around the world and has at least 46 counterintelligence agencies. As a result of these and other government agencies, U.S.  leaders often know more about certain countries than those countries' own leaders know.
    America's violence at home and overseas has sometimes been exaggerated. Yet this streak of violence does exist. And it was there right from the county's beginnings. The South African writer Ronald Segal claimed that America was born in violence. Here, Segal was referring to the American Revolution of 1776 to 1783 that threw out the Americans' British overlords and set up a new country. "America," said the late American activist Tom Hayden, "was born out of a genocidal impulse." Hayden was referring to the fate of the First Nations of the U.S.A. White people slaughtered indigenous people by the tens of thousands as the white people moved across the continent.
     So the U.S. like other great powers often uses war to get its way. To-day U.S. forces are fighting, killing and dying in Iraq and Syria. If you have what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called ' a military industrial complex' you tend to use it and America surely has done that. America's armed forces have laid waste to many lands and this makes the country still the most powerful nation in the world. In the last ten years of more, it has killed Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Libya's Moammar Gaddafi. All of these men were hostile to the U.S. of A. and now they're all gone.The U.S. military machine wiped them out.
     Their fate tells the world a message. "Don't mess with the U.S.A.," it says. "Or you'll pay a price." The American war machine still makes it a very powerful nation.