Iconic image from 1960s: Jack Ruby guns down Lee Oswald at Dallas PD. Many of us knew then the ruse was up and the cover-up had begun.
It's truly incredible how many bloviating hacks have spouted opinions and ideas on the 60s who either never lived through that decade, or - if they did - were essentially comatose the entire time. I already noted this syndrome with former great folk singer Bob Dylan, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/has-bob-dylan-totally-lost-his-moorings.html
As well as P.J. O'Rourke
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/p-j-orourke-wants-60s-taken-off-life.html
In Dylan's case he just couldn't comprehend why people kept making a "fuss" over a decade that saw two signal pieces of legislation passed (The Civil Rights Act in 1964, and Voting Rights Act in 1965) that conferred the practical basis for the exercise of rights to a minority that hadn't been manifested for over 100 years. Oh, and then there was the legislation that gave us Medicare, which nearly 45 million seniors currently depend upon and without which they'd likely be dying in ditches, unattended and impecunious. Dylan also evidently didn't see the fuss in all the anti-War protests for which his songs provided anthems. Not to mention his being oblivious to the rioting that erupted(in inner cities- since 'peaceful' protests weren't getting anywhere to advance civil rights- and the four major political assassinations. Dylan clearly missed the memo that the 60s marked the most tumultuous decade in U.S. history.
I was so flabbergasted by his piffle that I had to ask if he was stoned the whole time.
Then there was uber hack O'Rourke who related (in a TIME essay) how he was driving his daughter and 3 classmates to school and asked them if they realized it was the day President Kennedy was assassinated - and none of them had a clue. I noted at the time:
"I'd have been ashamed to admit such a thing in a widely circulated medium, even TIME. It reveals the author to be defunct (as a parent) in his own contributions to his daughter's education, in failing to provide what her school didn't. It also says more about the currently deficient high school history curriculum than it does about an event O'Rourke presumes is passé. It again, shows that if today's kids are being denied knowledge of this defining event (which likely saw a coup d'état and our nation's future course permanently altered) than they really do need to avail themselves of other sources i.e. via the Kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1450964693/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-the-graphic-adaptation"
But alas, both examples show how easy it is to be oblivious when people are not conscious enough to actually appreciate the periods in which they live. No one is saying you need to use a note pad to document every event and your response, but you should be open enough to the living experience to faithfully recall it years later - as opposed to corporate media telling you what it was about!
Fortunately, some of us are able to do this - as well as being obsessive about the details of history - including how the Neoliberal imperative has sought to distort or revise it.
Enter now Bloomberg scribe - or hack - Sam Tanenhaus, who penned an essay about commencement speeches in the Perspective section of the Sunday Denver Post. While opening with complaints about academic "correctness" - i.e. in the examples of assorted speakers pulling out of their speeches under protest, he eventually ended up pontificating on the 60s - as I suspected he would.
After quoting Joan Didion (from a 1975 address to the class of the same year at University of California - Riverside):
"We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what's really going on".
He then jumps to her remarks on the 1960s, as she invited her audience to "look through her eyes at 'a generation still in thrall to that darkling plain we call the 60s'."
Adding Didion's words:
"Which seems when we look back on it, a decade in which everyone lived in an entirely imagined world; when everyone operated from an idea and all the ideas got polarized and cheapened."
But WHOSE fault was that exactly? Was it the fault of the people living at the time - many of whom had just lived through one of the most earth shaking events in modern history: the assassination of a beloved President, and seeing his whole agenda washed away? Destroyed under the lies and subterfuge of one Texas varmint named "Lyndon" - who set up his own commission to conceal his earlier crimes as well as the crime of the century and worse, concoct the pretext for a conflict that would eventually claim 58,000 American lives, and millions of Vietnamese.
I don't blame the people who zoned out in the aftermath, I blame the crass political elites, their media and power structures which mind fucked them to a far- thee -well to the point most were no longer capable of thinking clearly. Because ultimately, the reasoning capacity and truth-seeking barometer of a population hinges on the information - the knowledge it receives from the knowledge "minders" - on what's "really going on". Ultimately those knowledge-minders and dispensers failed the American people and big time.
Yes, some of us saw through the ruse, and thirty or so years later (after actual files to do with the JFK assassination were finally released) we saw how so many had been played, by Johnson, his bogus Commission and its fabricated lies, and distortions of history. But few saw it at the time, because hell, everything - all the key evidence was being "handled" and much of it covered up. The so-called commission wouldn't even release the actual autopsy photos for view, fearing they might incept thousands of nervous breakdowns.
From the "unspeakable" lies of the Warren Commission there then issued a foul pestilence that permeated the body politic and set up the toxic polarization seen today. The further assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy - with the accompanying lies on how they happened, merely added to the then extensive mind fuck. By the time Bobby was assassinated in June, 1968, nearly everyone from a generation had tuned out - resigned to the belief that all hope for change in the world, at least in the country - was destroyed.
That despair then led to the so-called "counter culture" because so many believed the system as it was couldn't be trusted to produce real change for the better. It was too corrupt from the inside, the politicos too in the maw of a money-dominated bribery system.
All that mistrust was subsequently proven true when the Watergate conspiracy erupted in 1972. It was further reinforced when Gerald R. Ford (he who altered the bullet path descriptions in the Warren Report) then pardoned the perpetrator. A pardon, a looking the other way, that enabled the Iran-Contra conspiracy barely 15 years later.
So Tanenhaus has some nerve when he writes that:
"Americans had collectively lost the ability to think and judge". And, quoting Didion, "the whole country was like a cargo cult".
But again, in general the ability of a people to think and judge hinges on the quality of the information they receive to know and recognize the world (and nation) they live in. But through the 60s the American people were let down, and over and over again, by their own media - which recklessly lied to them about everything from Vietnam (originally) to Kennedy's assassination. Many of the lies in the latter case kept alive via an operation called "Mockingbird" we only learned about when Frank Church opened his CIA investigations a decade later.
Indeed, few at the time recognized that the virus of false consciousness was the name for what citizens had been subjected to, so no wonder so many were unable to think or judge. A false conscious person can no more do that than a drowning man can breathe.
'False consciousness' is the term given to a false
information system that's been absorbed in part or whole, osmotically or via
direct mental ingestion, by the majority of a population. It has specific uses in the Corporatocracy to
mislead a population about how things actually work. In the political system, for example, '
democracy' is the rhetorical term, but corporate dictatorship the reality. In the
economy 'free market' the rhetoric, but controlled markets the reality, and so
on. If people's understanding can be obfuscated, and attention deflected to
specious distractions and titillation, then the people can be disempowered and their thought processes undermined. They can even cooperate in their own economic (or social, political) subjugation.
Are the people to blame for harboring erroneous perceptions and rendering "false judgments"? Not at all. As noted by Maxine Baca-Zinn and D.Stanley Eitzen (p. 371, 'In Conflict and Order',
1991):
"The
United States is undemocratic in many very important ways. The people, although
they do vote for their representatives every few years, are really quite
powerless. For example who makes the really important decisions about war and
peace, economic policies and foreign policy? The people certainly do not. The
record shows that many times the American people have been deceived when the
object was to conceal clandestine illegal operations, mistakes, undemocratic
practices and the like."
Also as Charles Reich has pithily observed ('Opposing the System', p. 15)
"Today
much of the system by which we are governed is invisible, because it is either
not seen at all, or seen incorrectly. The system that we 'see' is democracy and
a free market. But if we really have such a system, why have people's efforts
at change failed over and over again? The answer is that we are actually
governed by a system that we cannot see - an *invisible* system."
"However, where the original Bolsheviks fully intended to build their centrally planned state in the ashes of the old, the market Bolsheviks believed in a kind of magic: if the optimal conditions for profit were created - the country would rebuild itself- no planning required."
The very fact a financial hack like Tanenhaus can hold a character like Friedman up for adulation, shows he is part and parcel of the same disinformation establishment that brought us the original mind fuck of the Warren Report. not to mention Operation Mockingbird and in toto - the entire thrust of false consciousness that's dogged us since the early days of Edward Bernays works on Propaganda.
Unable to recognize facts, including accepted scientific ones, and with a disabled language - founded mostly on PR and euphemisms, it's no wonder so few can engage in sustained argument or incisive, intelligent debate. It's also no surprise why what one beholds instead is the regurgitation of the propaganda sound bites of the corpora-media. So, of course, all discussion reduces to "point of view" - Fox's or MSNBC's - with little else to go by.
Those who comment on the 1960s, should at least be required to study that decade carefully minus the corporate filters they may not be aware of using. Those who lived in the 60s, and venture to discuss it, need to ensure they aren't also victims of the Orwellian language manipulations used so prevalently at the time to distort and undermine objective perceptions, and thought.
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