The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – No one should aspire to being in a state of infamy.

Yet it seems human beings have a genetic predisposition to end up there whether they plan it or not.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in the U.S. territory of Hawaii. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed and the U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized. A total of twelve ships sank or were beached in the attack and nine additional vessels were damaged. More than 160 aircraft were destroyed and more than 150 others damaged, and 2,300 Americans died in the attack.

According to the version of history posted on the website of the Library of Congress, a hurried dispatch from the ranking naval officer in Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, to all major navy commands and fleet units provided the first official word of the attack at the ill-prepared Pearl Harbor base.

It said simply: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NOT DRILL.

The following day, in a now famous address to a joint session of Congress broadcast over the radio, President Franklin Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.”

Congress declared War on Japan, abandoning the nation’s isolationism policy and ushering the U.S. into World War II. Within days, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States, and the country began a rapid transition to a wartime economy by building up armaments in support of military campaigns in the Pacific, North Africa and Europe.

Members of my family on both my mother and father’s sides lost their lives fighting in those conflicts, including my father’s older brother, Curtis Wilson from St. Clair County, Alabama, who died fighting the Japanese on the island of Okinawa.

All federal offices are flying the flag at half staff today because of the death of Bob Dole, who The New York Times described as “the plain-spoken son of the prairie who overcame Dust Bowl deprivation in Kansas and grievous battle wounds in Italy to become the Senate majority leader and the last of the World War II generation to win his party’s nomination for president…”

President Biden called Dole “an American statesman like few in our history. A war hero and among the greatest of the Greatest Generation.” He added, “To me, he was also a friend whom I could look to for trusted guidance, or a humorous line at just the right moment to settle frayed nerves.”

To me, he was a politician who was a throw back to another time, a time when bipartisanship actually meant something. I came of age in the news business back when quoting both sides was a daily exercise in being fair and balanced, when Republicans and Democrats would gracefully congratulate each other after an election no matter which side won.

Clearly those days are long gone.

While there are still a few hold outs in the news industry who still attempt to play this 20th century fantasy of a game, it is as dead to most people as those soldiers who died on that infamous day 80 years ago today.

And that is just sad.

While the partisan divide was already growing and driving us apart as one people before he came along and tricked his way into the White House, Donald J. Trump must share much of the blame for the current state of our seriously divided America, along with the social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter and the search engine Google, which also owns YouTube.

Newspaper industry managers were already bitching about bloggers taking their audience on the internet before Facebook came along and obliterated their advertising budgets. If Google had paid a fair rate for ads on news sites, news companies with newspapers and websites may have been able to remain in business and compete in the internet era. Now it is up to readers to pay for The New York Times and The Washington Post to keep them in business, along with other sites such as Politico, ProPublica and the New American Journal.

The sensational tabloid online wire service Buzzfeed just went public, but according to the Columbia Journalism Review, that did not go so well.

The traditional news business is not the only American institution stuck in a 20th century fantasy world. In many ways, the U.S. government is stuck in that world too. Just look at the current stance of the Biden administration towards Russia and China. It’s as if we are back in the Cold War again, which supposedly ended in 1989.

The news wires are full of stories today about Russian troops amassing on the border with Ukraine, and President Joe Biden is threatening sanctions against Russia.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration also announced that the U.S. diplomatic staff will boycott the Winter Olympics in Beijing but let the athletes compete, and this is billed as retaliation for China’s human rights “atrocities.”

No War With China

I suspect it has more to do with a saber rattling campaign by the conservative Hoover Institute to drum up public support for a war with China, including a cyber and space war, led by Trump’s former National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger.

He wrote an op-ed for The New York Times recently claiming China is already beating the United States in the war for “data,” allegedly the “the oil of the 21st century.” Then he appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday pushing the same line.

Here is why the American public should remain skeptical. Here is a guy who willingly worked for a president who literally wanted to be America’s first dictator and autocrat, who worked to undermine the peaceful transfer of power and American democracy leading up to the insurrection on Jan. 6, being quoted by CBS News claiming he is interested in protecting American “democracy” from “autocracy” in China.

When I heard that I threw up in my mouth and spewed sweet tea all over the place. Clearly there is something wrong with this picture. Am I the only opinion writer in America who noticed?

To their credit, “60 Minutes” did tell part of the other side of the story about what’s going on in China, with President Xi Jinping cracking down on the monopolies of social media companies, taxing the top 1 percent and working to raise the wages of average factory workers in China. Unfortunately it just came off as Chinese propaganda the way they prevented it.

Is it not possible that we could learn a thing or two from this? Rather than threatening to start a war over it?

Trump started this war of words against China, and just pissed them off with his stupid trade war. China holds more American debt in the form of treasury bonds than any other country. We need to remain friends and allies with China. Bashing them and threatening them will lead only to folly.

Let’s hope this day is not remembered as another day of infamy. The last thing we need right now is a war with Russia and/or China.

We have our hands full just trying to continue getting the coronavirus pandemic under control and keeping our own economy moving, not to mention the need to rebuild our own infrastructure and ramp up the fight against climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

Let’s not get distracted from the main mission here. Stay the course.

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