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.

Hagiographers Masquerading As Historians: The REAL Reason The Movie 'Selma' Is Being Attacked

Hagiography is an ancient literary art, perfected through antiquity via the practice of whitewashing the lives of saints to make them appear much better, more superior, than they really were. Carried to an extreme an expert hagiographer could make a veritable slime ball seem like the most perfect and decent human ever to walk the Earth. As you would gather from this, the word means to portray someone as much better than they were. Originally confined to devotional books, hagiography has recently entered the historical realm to make certain political personalities, politicians, past presidents appear much better than they were.

Alas, it is when hagiography eclipses facts and history that the critical mind must take note and understand when the wool is being pulled over its eyes.  Sadly, too many in the U.S. today are unprepared to cast a critical eye on goings on, far less be disposed to expose a so-called history as really pulp hagiography.

But this is not surprising because historians themselves can often become trapped in their own bullshit and believing whatever they want to - especially concerning some past politician currently regarded as some hero, say of civil rights.

Such is the case now, as we witness another movie subject to slurs and attacks based on the claim that "it gets history wrong". WHOSE history? That which is real and unvarnished or that of a hagiographer out to reconstruct the person to be something he never was? The movie to which I refer is the soon to be released 'Selma' and the subject of the criticism is how one Lyndon Baines Johson is portrayed within it - basically as a reluctant civil rights warrior and even racist.

But those who complain don't have one remote clue about LBJ and what a feral, bastard rat he was- a likely architect of the JFK assassination, as well as a racist pig through and through who once referred to the emergent civil rights bill as the "nigger bill". But don't take my word! Do your own research!

So why are all these schwein hund latter day "historians" crawling out of the woodwork to hurl invective and criticism at an authentic portrayal of LBJ in the film?. Well, because at heart they can't handle the truth and are actually hagiographers of LBJ as opposed to genuine historians.

They are determined to reconstruct his image and cleanse it to make this pig some kind of hero with a legacy as opposed to a filthy scum ball not much better than Dick Cheney.

Salon.com's Joan Walsh  was actually one of the few to get the contretemps between Johnson and King as she observed last year, in her piece ('The Radical MLK We Need Today') :

"King crossed some Democrats and labor leaders when he turned against the Vietnam War in 1967, after his unparalleled Riverside Church speech. He knew the war was not only wrong, but was making Johnson’s alleged “War on Poverty” fiscally impossible"

Though she doesn't venture into the plot to kill Martin, we in the deep politics community are aware that once he came out aggressively against the Vietnam War his days were essentially numbered.  We know from more than a year earlier LBJ had his pal J. Edgar Hoover monitor Rev. King's comings and goings - who he spoke to, who he affiliated with, as well as his motel rooms We also know - despite the Neolib media wanting to cover it up- LBJ had already gotten away with the crime of the century in the JFK assassination, using the bogus Warren Commission as a Potemkin investigation to cover his crime.

LBJ's propensity to remove obstacles by murder was finally uncovered by 1984, in a Dallas Morning News headline article, e.g.

Billie Sol Estes reported that Johnson had Henry Harvey Marshall, a USDA official in charge of the federal cotton allotment detail,  killed because he had attempted to link Estes’ nefarious dealings to the then Vice-President.  While Estes ended up doing prison time, he did have his say before a grand jury (which subpoenaed him) after his release in 1984. As reported in news story, Estes linked Johnson and two others to the slaying of Marshall.  

 In the follow-up grand jury investigation, Johnson, his one-time aide Cliff Carter, and ‘Mac’ Wallace were all deemed “co-conspirators in the murder” of Marshall[1].

Re: the JFK assassination, most of us in deep politics firmly believe that Vietnam was the “Devil’s deal” LBJ struck with his JFK assassination collaborators, in order that he be catapulted into office – while facing  felony charges(barely days before) .  This isn’t “blowing smoke” either. As Steve Kornacki reported in his ‘UP’ journal on MSNBC, the morning of Nov. 23, 2013. Using tapes and media documents, Kornacki showed that Johnson was about to be exposed as an influence peddler in conjunction with the Bobby Baker scandal by LIFE magazine in its upcoming issue.

A paper trail of bank statements and payments was to have been included, and as Kornacki pointed out a Senate investigation would likely have ensued with LBJ being dumped from Kennedy’s 1964 ticket.  In other words, LBJ had by far the most to gain from JFK’s assassination, since he’d then be next in line as President, and not have to face justice in the Baker scandal. Just consider the contrasts: dishonor and imprisonment versus ascension to the top office in the land and the power to set in motion an “investigation” that would not only hide the real culprits but quash the Baker episode in its tracks.

Philip Nelson, whose book ‘LBJ – The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination’ – is noteworthy for its exacting documented detail, observes (Chapter 6: The Conspirators, p. 317):

“The crime could only have been accomplished with at least the acquiescence and foreknowledge of the only man capable of choreographing the massive cover-up which was immediately launched. It is axiomatic that since the cover-up started before the shots were fired, the order for JFK’s assassination could only have come from his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.”

He goes on to note that no other conceivable person, whether Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Clint Murchison, H.L. Hunt….or Lee Harvey Oswald…" had the motive, means, the opportunity, the demonstrated pattern of previous criminal – even murderous conduct, and the resolve to see it through.”

All this may appall some delusional,  Pollyanish Americans, and I can picture some of them holding fingers to their ears  and doing a screaming song:  ‘La la la la la la..nay....nay....nay”.. But they had better damned well wake up to the facts. This guy not only saw to it Kennedy was offed, and he could take his sordid place in history without being prosecuted, he also paved the way for the massive expansion of the Vietnam war (via the Tonkin Gulf incident- and resolution) as payback to his nefarious  allies (especially in the national security state) who helped him do it! 

As for the Civil Rights Act, let's get it clear that the conception for the bill was largely due to JFK, but his assassination prevented completion of the process. LBJ,  then, though a reluctant civil rights warrior, realized he could kill two birds with one stone by getting the legislation through: 1) Further adding to his cover (as assassination mastermind) by deflecting attention to Kennedy's bill and its successive passage, and 2) building a basis for a legacy to take hagiographers (nee, 'historians') minds off his actual deeds - making them build him up as some latter day civil rights 'hero'.

Do not believe it! Johnson was an exploitative sewer rat, who expediently used civil rights and the voting rights act to build his so-called legacy and deflect attention away from his real and ongoing misdeeds - including the bogus Warren Commission as a cover-up device for the Kennedy assassination. As one HuffPo author put it:

LBJ was an awful man. He only promoted and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act because he thought it was politically expedient. He disagreed violently and kept it a secret, something I think is unreservedly detestable. Or is it a common politician's disease?
Let's look at another quote attributed to "Great Society & Civil Rights Hero" LBJ:

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

The best thing anyone can do in the midst of all the anti-Selma blather is to go see the movie and tune out the cacophony of zeros trying to disparage it. And if they claim creds of a "historian" - don't buy that either. They are merely  LBJ hagiographers masquerading as historians!

See also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1rIDmDWSms

Walter Block - Another Libertarian Blockhead! ("Slavery wasn't so bad!")

Where in the hell do these economic blockheads come from? What regressive pit of offal breeds them and then disgorges them into the world to posture like madmen, confuse their students, and undermine polity in the name of some misbegotten theory?  I've already expounded on one branch of these cretins, the bunch that pushed Pareto-based economics, e.g.  http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/06/modern-economics-its-evil-basis-pareto.html

This was the work of none other than Vilfredo Pareto, who invoked the example of a "collectivity" of a wolf and a sheep - with the wolf only happy unless he could eat the sheep. (Else, only the sheep remains happy grazing on its patch of grass - while poor Wolfie starves)  Thus was born modern economic theory which inverts everything sensible, such as Greenspan arguing back in 2003 that Bush tax cuts were preferable to Social Security benefits. The poor little rich folks would use the money saved from those cuts to invest and help the economy, while Social Security could be collected merely because a guy could breathe.

Pareto's model translated into the argument that the buck is worth more to the rich man, and hence, any transfer from the rich to the poor hurts the rich more than it helps the poor (especially as the 'utils' for the poor man is also rather smaller by comparison).  E.g.     












From this degraded bollocks, it became possible to argue - for example - that it makes more sense to give the prospective patient or person to be screened (say for colon cancer)  $1,499 NOT to get the colonoscopy, than to let her get the test and consume valuable specialist time and resources via $2,000 subsidy. (Bestowed by whatever insurance allows it, say Medicare or Obamacare, or even high flier private) .

In a similar vein, these dregs argued that having 1,000 - 10,000 average Joes and Janes die each year from climatic catastrophes  (or fouled water from pollutants) is more tolerable than having oil speculation losses for the rich, because then they will also pull back on their investments in ETFs (exchange traded funds), hedge funds, and all the rest ....ultimately ending in less investment banking profits and perhaps another financial collapse. 

By a similar line of perverse Pareto reasoning, it made more sense for the impoverished billions in the third world to breathe filthy, polluted air than clean air. The reason is obvious: it is inefficient because if they had to pay for it, they couldn't afford it. By the same token, it makes more sense to dump the toxic wastes from advanced nations in poor nations than vice versa, because the same reasons apply: the 3rd worlders would never be able to afford their own clean up costs, so what's an extra five million gigatonnes of waste in the overall scheme of things?

Hence, from this "Libertarian-ish" style of bunkum it is not surprising that a Prof named Walter Block could spring, though I'm amazed he's at Loyola- where I studied in the 1960s (before transferring to Univ. of South Florida, where I could do astronomy with some of the best names in the discipline - including Heinrich Eichhorn, Sabatino Sofia and James Hunter).

According to a  Jan. 26 New York Times Sunday Review article on the 'Rand Paul Political Brand', Block actually had stated that "slavery wasn't so bad" - taking up the long standing libbie trope that, after all, the blacks were cared for, got their 3 squares a day and some time off (Sundays) and so long as they behaved themselves they weren't flogged by the overseer. (Block ought to be forced like 'Alex' - the character of 'Clockwork Orange' - to be strapped to a seat with his eyelids fixed in place and forced to watch the whipping scenes from '12 Years a Slave' in an endless loop for at least a day)

That may cure him of his delusions, but maybe not. Most hard core libertarians are so detached from reality that they inhabit a land of delusion of their own. (In one argument some three years ago, one actually argued that the gov't had no business interfering to interject civil rights legislation, and if the blacks really wanted it they ought to have struggled on their own to achieve it.)

In a similar kind of vein, Block - in an interview response to the author of the Times piece (p.21) observed that in the 1960s:

"Woolworth's had lunchroom counters and no blacks were allowed. Did they have a right to do that? Yes, they did! No one is compelled to associate with people against their will."

But consider the consequences if this bat shit crazy meme was extended willy-nilly so that anyone could apply it. Pharmacies could refuse serving people they regarded as 'misfits'  - say denying birth control pills to young, single women or not even permitting blacks to cross the doorway.

Owners of football teams could decide that they want no Jews, blacks, or gays entering their stadiums and they might put that into place. Private hospitals -operating as businesses - might decide that they want no blacks, Jews or gays on their premises either. Restaurants would feel free to bar anyone they think is marginal, including those who look like 'thugs' - or  whoever doesn't fit flitty criteria like hair length, or quality of dress.

In other words, you'd invite a society bordering on chaos, and don't think for a moment that  the millions of excluded folk would just sit there and take it! It is no wonder that Block describes himself as an "anarcho-capitalist".    No surprise that Block's ideas were hatched from the "Austrian School" of Friedrich von Hayek. See below:


















Recall that von Hayek's austerity solutions led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism.  The Wehrmacht soldiers I met in May, 1985, all agreed that Hitler would have had little chance to attain the Chancellorship had austerity measures not been implemented in the late 1920s - such that most people had to beg, borrow or steal just to get bread or feed their infants. Hitler offered a promise of plenty for all, via his concept of  Lebensraum - or expanded living space. Of course, these riches would come at the expense of other nations taken over by the Nazi expansion of the Third Reich!

Today, the seeds of this aberrant thinking remain, as voting rights laws are gutted state by state and even portions of the civil rights bill are placed in peril. Meanwhile, billionaires like Peter G. Peterson want to impose austerity via cuts to Social Security and Medicare, so he and his wealthy pals - like Tim Perkins -  can live high off the hog, buying up 18 giant yachts instead of 2 and fifty giant residences from Curacao to Monaco while homeless citizens have nada.

To the extent we let these fools succeed, we will all regret it, and the decline of our nation will be accelerated.

To read some of the reactions of the Loyola community to Block's bollocks, go to:
http://www.loyolamaroon.com/search-1.2265630?q=%22Walter+Block%22

50th Anniversary of JFK’s Courageous Defense of Civil Rights

This month commemorates the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s valiant defense of civil rights, which as many biographers (e.g. Kenny O'Donnell), historians, (e.g. Arthur Schlesinger) and others have noted came with a stiff political price for his party.

I am writing, of course, of his ballsy federalization of the Alabama National Guard, 17,000 strong, in September of 1963 to ensure integration in Gov. George Wallace’s state. Wallace, recall, was memorialized in Southern Secessionists’ lore by his infamous remark: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”

To be sure, JFK was reluctant to take such a radical step, since he could foresee the effects which would lead to the now dominant GOP "southern strategy". In other words, by that federalization of southern troops, he essentially ceded the South to the Republicans in perpetuity. And he knew this would transpire. But he nevertheless federalized the AL national guard to protect black students trying to attend academic institutions.

Make no mistake that after that seminal executive act, JFK was regarded by a “race traitor” by most Southerners –and many deep politics researchers believe it contributed to one more “nail” in his coffin, along with his NSAM (263) to pull out of Vietnam, his refusal to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his circulation of U.S. Notes outside the Federal Reserve system.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his book A Thousand Days, pulls no punches on how Kennedy was vilified after his courageous act: “…in the domain of the radical right it all became much sicker and nastier. Not since the high point of the hate-Roosevelt enthusiasm of the mid-thirties had any President been the target of such systematic and foul vilification. Everything about Kennedy fed resentment: his appearance, his religion, his wealth, his intelligence, his university, his section of the country, is wife, his brothers, his advisers, his support of the Negroes, his refusal to drop the bomb.”

Indeed, in Dallas and many other southern cities disgusting and vile images of Kennedy as well as Jackie were put up, as well as despicable racist descriptions. This offal has continued to this day – in many cases by vile historical revisionists seeking to detract from the fact HE laid the foundations for he Civil Rights Act that was passed by LBJ – after his assassination.

Fortunately, after his assassination, many media columnists were not led astray by the lone left nut version of events – they knew who likely had a hand in the killing and the reasons. One of the best, which I still have, is: ‘The Enemies He Made’ in Newsweek, Dec. 2, 1963, p. 35, by Kenneth Crawford. Crawford singles out the degenerate Southern bigots, racists as well as other extremist groups that had it in for Kennedy. He even pointedly noted the ”suspicious irony inherent in a lone-pro-Castro gunman being fingered in a city (Dallas) regarded as a ‘citadel of right wing strength’.. The referencing the town’s right wing groups as well as the racists latent within it. Including the ones who put up the ‘Wanted for Treason’ posters on the day of the assassination.

Rife in Big D were a number of fringe right extremist groups, including: The American Political Forum, The Ku Klux Klan, The John Birch Society, The Dallas Committee for Full Citizenship, The Texas White Citizens’ Council, The National States Rights Party and The Dallas White Citizens’ Council.

The racist reaction to Kennedy’s courage even extended to the Secret Service in his own White House detail, as documented by former agent Abraham Boldin in his book, 'The Echo from Dealey Plaza' and described at length in my April 15, 2012 blog post. Boldin noted that after JFK federalized the National Guard in both Mississippi and Alabama, several agents referred to Kennedy as a "nigger lover".

Author James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, notes in regard to Bolden, JFK and the White House Secret Service detail at the time (p. 103):

”Abraham Bolden joined the White House secret Service detail in June, 1961. He experienced personally John Kennedy's concern for people. Kennedy never passed Bolden without speaking to him. He asked about him and his family in such a way that he knew he meant it.. Abraham Bolden saw increasing evidence, however, of the president's isolation and danger from the standpoint of security. Most of the Secret Service agents seemed to hate John Kennedy. They joked among themselves that if someone shot at him, they'd get out of the way. The agents' drunken after-hours behavior carried over into lax security for the president. The other agents remarked about 'niggers' in his presence."

Obviously, if JFK was truly the “racist” the real racists portray him as, he’d not have been so odiously dismissed by his S.S. detail. Hell, they’d have been singing his praises not joking about ducking if someone shot at him!

All of this is a cautionary note sounded in this 50th year after the assassination, that we must not only be wary of the disinformationists who would lie about the fact a conspiracy was behind it (reinforcing the “unspeakable” evil Douglass writes about) but also the emergence of vile historical revisionists whose only talent is decrying a man whose shoes they’re not even fit to lick.

The Chutzpah of Racist White Trash Yahoos Knows NO Bounds!

Even as some misguided GOOPr morons and white racist asses attempt to “boycott” the excellent film ‘The Butler’ (too late, you dolts!) on the basis of being “anti-American” (because Jane Fonda plays Nancy Reagan) a reminder has surfaced that racism remains as strong as ever in this country

This with an incident at a Charleston, SC restaurant called “Wild Wings Cafe” , where 25 black family members were chased out because one lone white trash woman (of clearly questionable intelligence) claimed she felt “threatened” by the group. Aw, boo hoo hoo, missy. Here’s a piece of advice then: better not go to Barbados where you will find ALL the customers are black.

How the hell could this occur in this day and age, when we supposedly left the Jim Crow past behind, in the South? Well, the logical reason is that too many haven’t heard the news that the Jim Crow laws went out with the Civil Rights Act! Also, maybe the establishment that forced the African-American family out needs to be forced to watch ‘The Butler’ (along with a certain cretin fake Confederate asshole) to see just what went down at multiple lunch counters in the South some 50 years ago.

Turning peaceable folk away who just wanted some food, on the basis of “feeling threatened”? Threatened of WHAT? A spontaneous riot? Violence? Any such feeling must therefore clearly be at the root of a primeval racist reaction – which paranoia NO restaurant should honor or succumb to. The correct reaction here? The rational one?

“Lady, we are sorry you feel the way you do, but we aren’t going to turn away 25 customers because you are suffering from paranoid schizophrenia,”

According to WNEM Channel 5 in Charleston, Michael Brown stood up to the manager and asked her to clarify her actions, which she did as another member of the group filmed the confrontation.

According to Mr. Brown, the woman said – get this – she felt “threatened” by his party so asked the restaurant manager not to seat them in HER section when they’d already been there for two hours! Brown's party was then denied service and essentially informed it had to depart. All this because of one piece of white trash – who really did believe it was HER section and that the restaurant was obligated to meet HER needs! Are U fucking kidding me?

This woman and all the proto-Rebel trash that would defend her and the Wild Wings honchos, need one thing and one only: a series of electro-convulsive therapy treatments! Oh, in addition to seeing ‘The Butler’ in the same manner as the punk protagonist Alex in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ – forced to view therapeutic films to curb his violence with his eyelids taped open!

Brown has since made countless attempts to contact the corporate office of Wild Wings to file a complaint, to no avail. So he took the issue to Facebook, notifying his circle and all others who might read it that he will never go to Wild Wings again. In his own words: “This type of racial discrimination is unacceptable and we have to put a STOP TO IT. The manager looked me dead in the face and said she was refusing us service because she had a right to and simply she felt like it. “

Does a place of PUBLIC business have the right to refuse service based on skin color? No it does not! The era depicted in ‘The Butler’ ought to have ended by now, but this is yet one more reason to go to see the film – to be reminded of what our African –American citizens had to endure a half century ago, and why it must never be permitted to return. No matter how much the disgusting racist revisionists, including all latter day pro-Confederate traitors, want to try to turn history on its head!

On this, the 50th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's 'I Have A Dream' speech (on the D.C. Mall) it reminds us of just how much work we have to do to bring this nation fully out into an era of genuine post-racial reality. Where one's character ought to trump the color of one's skin in any human interaction.

"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.