Opinion/Editorial
PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON
The grand worldwide respected and so many times supportive nation-state of the United States of America can be said, with its relatively young age, and seemingly endless display of a near total generous lack of guile or violent avarice, be compared to the conducted and mindset of a little boy, still learning and still growing. What has happened to this grand ‘experiment,’ as this ‘boy’s’ growth has been termed by many through these early years, is an aging process that has taken a course of the rapidity of development that seems to have shrunk the wonderful years of development by its drastic and violent acceleration, going from sub-sonic to light speed in the course of only a few months.
A dragon entered the picture of this country’s development, although the dragon came disguised as a chicken-hawked bad school boy, punished by his father before inheriting gigantic sums of money and vaulting this boy to a point of vicious adulthood that has not seen since the meteoric rise of a wall-paper hanger to the position of Fuhrer, or ultimate leader of a European country, dead set on conquering the world. Peter Paul and Mary took the poem written by Leonard Lipton and wrote about the now-occurring historical result of the boy’s encounter and befriending of the dragon named Puff. One stanza of the song, as it plays out reads: “His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain. Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane. Without his lifelong friend Puff could not be brave, so Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave.”
With the country of the United States substituted for Puff the Magic Dragon, and the boy being the current supposedly elected leader of this country, it would seem, in paying very close attention to the symbolic wording of the poem, that the poet Lipton, acting as so many philosophical seer-like literary geniuses have done before, was writing about a predicted future of the greatest country ever to exist on the face of the earth. Not so amazingly, if one is to take Lipton’s lyrics as real predictors of the future, now present time, this ‘boy,’ a full-grown man, like the wall-paper hanger before him, appears almost without anyone’s ability to validly argue against it, that he is out to conquer the world.
Some will say, as this new boy-king looks to increase the holding territories and states of the current USA to include Canada, Greenland Panama, and quite possibly Mexico (wherein it would become by far the largest country on earth, about one and a half times larger than all of Russia or about the size of Russian and China put together!) All the talk of a ‘manifest destiny’ excuse, as used by President Tyler to annex Texas and bring about the Mexican-American war with the loss of about 40,000 men, the current ‘boy’ leader of the USA seems dead set on a similar course of actions. California and the extension of the country from ocean shore to ocean shore took place as a settlement of that war. Tyler worked through his entire four-year term of office to make the annexation, and the resulting war happened. He signed the annexation on his last day in office.
The current leader has four years left in office, if his currently often-spoken hope of extending the presidency beyond two terms does not go through, so the question, since this leader openly and often talks about the expansion of the United States to include these other countries and territories, is, will he be able to accomplish what President Tyler set out to do and then accomplished at the end of his single four-year term? Will such expansion, if physically undertaken (and the military takeover of these land masses is openly discussed in the President’s Oval Office and almost everywhere else in the media right now) will such expansion be at the cost of wars and losses of even more than forty thousand young American lives? It seems almost impossible, or at least highly improbable, that such an opinion piece, such as this one, could be written in our time for you to read.
Credibility is vital to such an article but there is no end to the ability of readers to go on CBS, MSNBC, and even Fox News to read and listen to this boy president’s own words in pursuing such seemingly outlandish, selfish and even downright thieving considerations, none of which have reached any action stage yet. It took Tyler four years to build the case for the Texas annexation, much of which was motivated by plebiscites taken in Texas where so many wanted the Mexican territory to become a state, unlike the current situation in every country where annexation is being now discussed (Greenlanders voted 94% remain a part of Denmark and Canada’s polls show about the same lack of support for such potential annexation actions to be taken against that nation by the United States.
Not long ago in this same newspaper, I wrote an editorial about the ‘habit’ that the American leader has proffered out among the population, using Internet social media sites like “X.” That habit is about how this leader simply says things to get negotiating gains or to put fear into the hearts and minds of his opponents. Yet, Elon Musk is involved on this leader’s behalf in dismantling most of what the United States government has grown into (to become by far the most powerful economy and military on earth). Unqualified and those without any true credentials are being placed to run such things as the intelligence community, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the education department and its leadership, and much more. He is doing what he threatened to do. With just those examples that were once spoken of even inside the environs of the MAGA movement, this man must be taken seriously about what may happen. The ‘green scales that fall like rain’ are metaphorical. The reality is that those ‘scales’ will be your scales, money, freedom, and potentially even your life.
