Listening to Kim Iversen discussing China’s long patient war against USA, I suddenly realized that China didn’t start this war. I’ve been writing about the front end of this sequence for a long time, but didn’t connect the two ends as question and answer.
In 1946 we stopped minding our own business and resumed minding everyone else’s business. We were occupying China in 1946, helping our puppet Chiang. Mao won because our puppet was seen as foreign, so we occupied Taiwan and continued trying to mind China’s business. When China tried to push into Korea, we minded their business again.
BUT THEN: Ike brought back MYOB. Ike halted our war in Korea and prevented us from jumping into Vietnam. Ike was ZERO PROBLEMS. Ike was the only politician in our miserable history who neither solved or created problems. (FDR was 100% solve. All the others were 100% create.)
The MYOB mood was strong at that time. Here’s part of an obviously scripted Louella Parsons interview with John Wayne in 1951.
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Louella and Wayne were discussing popularity and Oscars, and Wayne was pretending to be frustrated about his lack of Oscars.
Louella: Oh, I get it. Success has given a big strong guy like you ulcers.
Wayne: No, no, success has taken away my ulcers. Back when I was number 33 or so at the box office, I had the biggest crop of ulcers west of the Mississippi. All earned from minding everybody else’s business.
Louella: I suppose you mean telling the director how to direct, and the writer how to write.
Wayne: Oh, I didn’t stop at that piddling stuff. I told the extras how to dress, the cameramen how to photograph, and the electricians how to wire. I carried things so far that one day walking down the street, I got into an argument with a man over the way a beautiful woman was parking her car. He said “Isn’t that just like a woman driver?” And I said “You’ll have to apologize for insulting this lady!” And then the lady said “You leave my husband alone!”
So I started minding my own business.
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Good lesson. Jumping into someone else’s affairs automatically makes you an enemy. Their internal “fights”, which might look unpleasant to us, are part of their normal way of doing things, and our interference is the real fight.
After Ike was heartattacked, Deepstate Nixon gradually brought back interference, then JFK hit the gas. When China decisively defeated us in Vietnam, Nixon surrendered unconditionally, and since then China has been saying “You leave my husband alone!” in a billion ways.
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Irrelevant sidenote: Louella’s interviews were always obviously scripted. The stars, mostly movie actors, didn’t know how to sound ad-lib. Old vaudevillians and radio announcers had mastered the art of sounding natural. I don’t know why the movie types were able to sound normal in a film but not on radio. Was the impression of normalcy achieved by precise verbatim imitation of the director’s examples?
Polistra's Mill 