By John Kass

April 26, 2024

My family survived a terrible Civil War in Greece just before I was born.

Not in some Hollywood movie, with combatants issuing their pithy sayings, those bad fantasy hombres with just the right length of chin stubble as they squint through the sights, but a civil war in real life, with real blood and real bone, where people who knew each other and had histories together and murdered each other.

They grabbed each other by the hair and shot them, screaming, throwing bodies in a ditch. Or on the side of a hill. In the shadow of a building. In a quiet alley off a church square. A water reservoir with other human beings floating mute to the cruelties of men.

Anywhere. Everywhere.

I was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1956, just six years after that Civil War ended over there.

But we rarely if ever talked about the Greek Civil War, though we talked about everything else at those multi-generational extended family Sunday dinners in our two flats on Chicago’s South Side. Every Sunday. On special occasions the uncles might have one Peoria Street highball—whiskey, 7-Up, maraschino cherry, in a fancy glass with a swizzle stick–but not too many. No one ever got drunk or even tipsy. No alcohol was ever served without food. The men wore jackets and ties. We would not wear jeans to a Thea’s house. It was Sunday.

We had hard-core socialists and hard-core conservatives at the dining room table, from the left to the right and everything in between, and over the roast or pastichio and later fruit, coffee, maybe galaktoboureko, we’d talk about everything. From history to the wars in the news, even to parakeets and The Twilight Zone and student protests and blue jeans at school.

We’d crowd around the dining room table and everyone—even kids—were expected to participate. We could think and say anything with respect, no matter the topic.

The only thing we couldn’t do was act like a snowflake and demand others be silenced. We were Americans. We were free.

But they were refugees from Greece, and they’d fought the Germans, the Italians, the Greek Communists and famine to be free, and survived as a family. In the world they’d endured, snowflakes didn’t survive.

And if I could I’d ask them about that movie “Civil War” and the great actor Jesse Plemons who in that movie provided the epic meme for a divided America:

What kind of American are you?

“What kind of American are you?” pic.twitter.com/GZzx5cl0Tz

— Mr. Beat (@beatmastermatt) April 20, 2024

Plemons is our great American character actor. He is young, in his 30s, a young father. His casual, almost offhand menace in the scene was worthy of an Oscar. He was terrifying.

You could have asked the same in all the countries that had suffered civil war, in South America, Central America, Africa, Asia.

But I wish I could ask my family about it at those Sunday dinners that are now just an old man’s memory.

Years ago, I did ask my dad once why our family didn’t talk about the civil war in Greece.

Nobody wants to remember it, he said. Nobody. He fought in it. He want any part of it. He fought house-to-house in famine ruined Athens, as my aunts in our family village were commanded to applaud the communist guerrillas in the town square.

And that was it.

We buried it and kept it down there where we put it, as far as we could, way down under the earth.

It was a subject to be avoided because it threatened what was important, the reason they were able to survive:

The family.

Years later my brothers and I talked to him about it. And my late cousin John Katsaros, a man of the left but a fair and honest teacher who loved all of us regardless of politics, interviewed surviving aunts and asked them about those years when the communists shot the teachers in a nearby village.

What was missing in the movie “Civil War” was that casual friendliness that could turn deadly with a blink, with a sigh. A pistol drawn and death in the once-open hand. The friendly menace of it all in  Greece, Central America, Asia. What kind of Greek are you? What kind of Nicaraguan are you? What kind of American are you?

The wrong answer means your death, and the deaths of your loved ones.

There was little of that in “Civil War.” I could have seen sections of Americans murdering each other over politics, since we’re already at the edge of it now, Americans screaming out as their final words:

“You played basketball with my little brother!”

“You had supper at my house!”

“You went fishing with our dad!”

“My mom was your teacher!!!”

WWJPD? What Would Jesse Plemons Do?

And then the screams and the final gunshots and the silence and perhaps later, the birds hungry for something to eat.

These were not in the movie. But if we don’t mend our ways they will invariably be there, in what we call “real” life.

In one bit of the movie with the usual suspect white rural men, one mentions off handedly that his blow-torch torture victim had gone to his high school.  The victim was tied to a pipe and I wondered: What would Hollywood and media do without rural white men to hate?

These are the same rural white men that the media and Hollywood celebrate as heroes in Afghanistan and Iraq, since the white guys die at much higher rates in combat.

But in the movie I didn’t see many threads and connections between the dead and the dying, wondering about their common high schools the way some of us might comment on playing touch football in the parking lot, and these common threads dipped in common blood are the truly grotesque aspects of civil war.

There is reference to “the president” on his third term, a nod to President Trump dragged by the heels and shot by a soldier.

The film sent out actors to insist it wasn’t supposed to be Trump, but Americans aren’t as stupid as many in Hollywood and the media think we are.

A friend of mine, the writer Michael Ledwith, a former U.S. Army officer, noticed that Hollywood played Trump as something of the Romanian Communist strongman Nicolae Ceausescu. The character was begging for his life, dragged through the White House, shot dead by a black female sergeant.

“Hollywood wanted to kill the president, so they killed him,” said a man in the near-empty AMC theater on a Saturday night. “They killed him.”

He had that look I didn’t want to argue with. The film’s “fictional” president was on his third term, and so it obviously pointed to Trump…but wait! Aren’t we really suffering now under Barack Obama’s third term, with his meat puppet China Joe Biden gaffing it up, getting lost at speeches, unsure of where to turn, even reading “pause” on his teleprompter?

But Hollywood wouldn’t dare kill such a president? They loved Obama. But Hollywood hated Donald Trump.

In real “fake” life, the presidential meat puppet continued to do only staged campaign events opening himself up to ridicule.

“Four more years, Pause!” said Joe Biden the Meat Puppet as if he were famed anchorman “Ron Burgundy.”

This too was roundly ignored by most mainstream media.

Is it fictional?

Of course.

But look at how far we’ve come:

President Joe Biden, Obama’s meat puppet, has been installed in office and protected by Deep State intelligence operatives who wrote the infamous propaganda letter that son Hunter Biden’s laptop was created by the Russians. It was a lie. We know that now. Later, Biden tried to portray American parents concerned about “drag queen” story hour in their kids’ school as being potential terrorists.

President Donald Trump meanwhile is constantly ridiculed on national media by the lead witness against him in his porn hush money trial, as his mouth is stuffed shut by a judicial “gag order.”

Jewish students are hunted on elite university campuses by supporters of the terrorist HAMAS, as Biden does little and worries about losing pro-Palestinian votes in Michigan. And his puppet master, the sainted Obama–to whom Chicago builds a great temple of adoration and fealty on priceless lakefront land–also says nothing. Geppetto and his meat-puppet from Scranton carefully avoid saying much. And the Jewish students are afraid and the Democrats say nothing as they mealy-mouth their way through interviews.

I suppose that this column began as a movie review that I should make a recommendation. I guess you could waste the money if what you want is senseless violence.

Or you could wait and if we keep going the way we’re going, you could see it out your window.

I have told some people to see it as an exercise, but smart people with brains, not those susceptible to media manipulation. But now after writing this, I’ve changed my mind.

I’ve  come up with a simple answer that even our presidential meat puppet would understand:

Don’t.

Bury it, until you see it happen outside your front door. But then you realize that won’t be able to get a popcorn refill.

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.