“U.S. leftists and liberals need to reorganize themselves and prepare for a LONG WAR that has no end 

in sight with militant groups like the Trump White House and their allies in Fox News…,” 

is my absurd mistranslation of Joint Chief of Staff’s Gen. Martin Dempsey’s farewell speech to the Pentagon 

about our endless war.

 

Of course what Dempsey actually said is that this “long war” will be against ISIS and involve worldwide 

proxy wars like Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Africa.

 

Gen. Dempsey might as well be talking to us: “We must be able to rapidly adapt to new threats 

while maintaining comparative advantage over traditional ones,” Yes, indeed!

 

When thousands of U.S. veterans helped Sioux “water protectors” temporarily win at Standing Rock, 

I flippantly suggested that we could learn from the military. Like how to reorganize ourselves for our 

own version of the long war.

 

Or as Bette Davis says in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

 

In hearing the agonized responses of friends and other writers to Trump’s election I’m struck by the 

same words they use over and over: grief, horror, mournng, shock and shellshock, despair, sad, depressed, blocked etc.

 

Really? Still? It’s been over a month since 8 Nov. As George C. Scott as Gen. Patton liked to bellow at 

traffic jams, what’s the holdup?

 

Surely we’re not waiting for the dead-ass Democratic Party?

 

From Hillary and Obama on down they’re wasting precious time squabbling like has-been boxers, “We wuz robbed!”

 

Does it help or hinder to grasp that Bannon-Trump’s election coup is not unprecedented but the culmination of a 

previous “long war” not against Obama but decades ago against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to save 

capitalism from itself in the depressed 1930s?

 

The One Percent, then called the Liberty League based at J. P. Morgan’s 23 Wall Street, never recovered from 

the trauma of one of its own class FDR stabbing it in the back. They even tried to mount a military coup against him.

 

Unlike us nice people, Republicans are gut fighters. They never give up, because they retain long, long memories 

of how “socialist” and awful life is when the top class is taxed at top rate and when the middle class, poor and weak 

have, gasp! Social Security and jobless insurance.

 

Democrats fight for their rights; Republicans fight for their lives.

 

The struggle changes form over time. It adapts to circumstances. What’s unchanging is the ancient, smug hatred 

of the poor and misbegotten.

 

That’s us, folks.

 

Fasten your seatbelts.