Another Hack Who Misfires On the 60s

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."

 Too many citizens from the era of the 1960s then, had been left essentially like blind men by the institutional media powers on which they depended for facts, honesty. Worse, they'd been victimized by an unseen system they couldn't even track or parse on account of its draconian secrecy rules -  but which wrought untold havoc on their lives. And Tananhaus seeks to blame them?

 

He even goes beyond that by extolling no less a Neoliberal tool than Milton Friedman, referring to his 1975 University of New Hampshire address where he spoke about "the fragility of freedom" and "America at a crossroads".. It was at a crossroads, all right, a crossroads in which one path led to the Neoliberal domination by markets we're all experiencing now. Markets ex machina!

 

As for Friedman, Naomi Klein pegged him perfectly in her book 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007).   In  her chapter on the Russian capitalist "experiment" (pp. 282-87) she documented how a  cabal of gangster capitalists under the IMF and the "Chicago gang of Milton Friedman" attempted to brutally re-make the existing Russian centrally planned economy into a Neoliberal free market outpost of  the West. The process was long and painful, entailing first getting rid of Mikhail Gorbachev - who through his glasnost and perestroika did far more than Reagan to render the world more peaceful, never mind the propaganda.
 

Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz (p. 283) called Russia's pro-capitalist market experimenters  like Milton Friedman "market Bolsheviks". As Klein put it (ibid.):

"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 sad facts on Friedman's Russian experiment? After only a year of Neoliberal thuggery and "market therapy" millions of Russians had lost their life savings when the ruble lost nearly all its value (similar to what happened to Germans and their Deutsch mark, thanks to von Hayek). Adding insult to injury, abrupt cuts in government subsidies meant that millions of workers had not been paid in months. Consumption? The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than 1991 - and they weren't even consuming that much in '91!

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.

 

Tanenhaus near the end writes:

 

"The truth is, political correctness is just one symptom of a broader malady. Argument itself has all but disappeared from public conversation. The premium is on opinions and points of view.."

 

 

The real truth? The universal aversion to the truth! The reluctance to call a spade a spade - which prolongs false consciousness and compromises minds as it robs of them of the facility to argue based on critical thought. And the debasement of thought always begins with the language distortions and substitutions of euphemisms for reality. Using "passed" for DIED, using "collateral damage" for those killed in a military attack -but unintended, using "scandal" for conspiracy, and enablng "war" for occupation. Once the building blocks of thought have been compromised, thought as a whole is next, which explains why mostly today one finds only "opinions" and POVs.

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.

"The Butler" - A Film Every Citizen Needs to See - Especially the Young! (Some Spoilers)

"The Butler" is a film that cleaned up over the weekend, knocking out numbskull fare like 'Kickass 2' (a film mainly for the mentally challenged) as well as 'Paranoia'. It is that rare blend of a Hollywood movie with class and intelligence that also delivers a critically needed historical perspective for generations (mainly X and Y) that may have only passing knowledge of the civil rights movement, for example. As Harvey Weinstein put it this morning, on CBS' Early Show, his own daughter was nonplussed, asking "Did this stuff really happen?"

Uh, yes it did! The insults (n-words galore) and spitting on African-American sit- in protestors at lunch counters in Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama, the horrific truncheon beatings and kicks to the head of fallen protestors, and the actual fire bombing of a bus carrying dozens of freedom riders. All of it was all too real, and it all really, REALLY happened! The film doesn't grind the viewer under with such scenes but the exposure is ample to make a dent and impress brain neurons - especially for the Millennials and others who may not had much of it in their American History classes. (Given the way a lot of American history is taught in generic marshmallow, vanilla style).

At the same time, 'The Butler' is much more than a civil rights -historical flick. It also tells the story of how a humble black share cropper - with grit and determination - rose above his original station to become the premier butler on the White House staff, as well as telling a story of father-son conflict. This is because Cecil Gaines' son soon goes his own way, including being directly involved in the civil rights protests, then joining the Black Panthers. At the end he,  like his dad, finds redemption.

Already the right wingers, as per their perpetual grievance shtick, are bitching about the portrayal of Ronnie Reagan. Complaints have poured in that he is depicted as uncaring about the poor, especially blacks, and also impeded constructive racial changes (to eliminate apartheid) in South Africa. But, alas, all of that is true. The screen play writers didn't make it up! The righties, in fact, ought to be thankful the full fell swoop of Reagan wasn't portrayed, including: shuttering mental wards in hospitals - effectively tossing a half million into the streets (who subsequently ended up mainly homeless or in prisons), and his drastic cutting of taxes which savaged domestic support programs. Oh, Reagan is shown doing some good: if black people actually wrote him and asked for money, he'd put a few bucks in an envelope and send it off to them!

LBJ lovers also won't be happy with how he was portrayed, as often using the n-word....even in front of the black butler staff, and showing the clear contempt for people most of us always suspected this sleaze bag to harbor. (A good case can also be made he wanted JFK's job, and was instrumental in changing the motorcade route to make sure Kennedy was taken out and he could succeed.) It was also well known by those familiar with 1960s politics that Kennedy planned to dump Johnson- for the 1964 Democratic ticket -  on account of all the fallout from the Billy Sol Estes scandal.  This LBJ could not allow.

Johnson did do one thing right, as shown in the movie, and that was to pass the Civil Rights Act first conceived by Kennedy. (He also got Medicare passed, another Kennedy proposal from his 1960 campaign, but this wasn't shown) What he absolutely didn't do right was launching the Vietnam War on a false pretext. Martin Luther King eloquently criticized the conflict, and he likely met his end because of it - killed by black op SOG units, see e.g. the book, Orders to Kill, (http://www.amazon.com/Orders-Kill-Behind-Murder-Martin/dp/0446673943 ) by William F. Pepper. Of course, as in the Kennedy case, a lone nut loon - James Earl Ray- got the rap.

My primary complaint with the film was the ridiculous choice of an actor far too young to be a credible John F. Kennedy. I mean, Jeebus, this guy looked more like an escapee from  'Kick Ass 2'  than a credible stand-in for our 35th president (who was 43 in 1960, when elected president). Wifey's theory is that they chose this young kid to highlight the age difference with Gaines, the butler. But I maintain if that was the case, they went overboard. You don't get a de facto frat boy look alike to play JFK! 

To the film's credit, when the assassination occurred you didn't see TV images of Lee Harvey Oswald being paraded, as the supposed killer - nor did the background radio announcements mention him. The film basically left it open. (But you can be sure more films due to appear later  this year won't, including "Parkland", another Tom Hanks co-effort, set to open Sept. 20th.  I will, however, await more credible fare, assuming it appears at all. If not, I'll save my money!)

Arguably, 'The Butler' will be the only decent worthwhile movie at the cinemas for a few weeks at least. A movie that respects viewers' intelligence as opposed to insulting it. I highly recommend the film to anyone, except maybe those right wingers that have a problem with race issues and their role in engendering black inequality.