The turning point

I am ready now to move on from JFK, both blogging and personally. I realize that most readers were not alive when he was murdered, and even those with an interest in solving the crime do not realize its importance today. That crime was a seminal event in U.S. history, in my view:

  • It was coup d’état, a military takeover. It could be that the original coup was the death of FDR and importation of surviving remnants of the Third Reich by the Dulles brothers immediately post-war. Thus begat our CIA. But killing JFK insulated those in power.
  • It spawned a near-revolution. The “sixties” (1964-1975) are a mixed up era, but immediately post-JFK there was a squeaky clean anti-war movement on the larger campuses, and it was growing in strength. Later it would be infiltrated and hijacked,  and covert operators brought hippies and drugs and Tex Watson (aka “Manson”) into the forefront to successfully derail the movement. (This is where Dave McGowan’s Laurel Canyon scene picks up, and I wonder if he has figured out the bigger picture. I suspect he has.) imageJane Fonda, daughter of a military intelligence officer, did not just happen on the seat of a gun turret in Hanoi one day. She was, knowingly or not, part of a PSYOP. She alone set the anti-war movement back ten years.
  • Out of his death came a flourishing of movements, from anti-poverty to civil rights, environmentalism, anti-war and feminism. Medicare passed at this time. He did not create or foster them, but the angst of his murder unleashed a torrent of pent-up emotions. Pandora had to be put back in her box.
  • The murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King effectively killed hope. There were hundreds of other murders during that time, Black Panther leaders and important witnesses, but those two public executions sent a message:  “Give it up, folks. You cannot defeat us.” The origins of totalitarianism are always highlighted with a trail of murders. A dark cloud fell over the nation in 1968, and has never lifted. Indeed, it seems the good they die young. And not by accident.

I will try to write less about this event in the future, but urge readers to explore on their own for this reason: It is a portal. As inexperienced military doctors performed a sloppy autopsy of JFK’s body that night, they were being supervised by military brass in the balcony above.

That scene is a nice metaphor for our country, with that nameless power structure looking down at the corpse of a republic.

But it is time to move on. I realize that. My “obsession” is not with JFK or the string of murders that followed, including his son, but with what has become a totalitarian system. Such systems have come and gone throughout history, Germany and the U.S.S.R recent examples. This particular system seems much more oppressive because most people are not aware of it.

I interact quite a bit on the blogs and know, as do those who follow this blog, that it is an intellectual desert out there. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the early 1800’s that this place was mostly drunk every evening. The American public in general has never been exceptional.  Our intellectual class, our academics, our journalists and teachers these days are a smug and deeply ignorant group.

I feel the oppression, but it appears most people have internalized it, and so don’t know about it. There was a turning point. I think it started with a very important murder, and the elevation of an extremely corrupt and stupid man to the presidency. His name: Truman.

22 thoughts on “The turning point”

    1. I do not have time to read your link right now, but skimmed the opening paragraphs. Later. I do know that Mary Meyer was murdered by the CIA, but again, I am not good at making obvious links.

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    2. According to Mae Brussel, via her according to a Who’s Who in the CIA published in East Germany in the early 70’s, another prominent CIA man was … Eugene McCarthy.

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    3. Great article, Steve, but containing more hints at substance than substance, Peter Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic is a much more sympathetic treatment of Mary Meyer, but the guy seems to be is nearly in love with her. Her murder, which Janney dissects in detail, was a highly organized setup, even selecting the patsy that morning and finding clothing and a black man to wear them to frame the poor schmuck. He calculated that 8-15 people had to be involved, going on memory here. Just another life ruined, and who really gives a fuck about destroying lives. James Jesus Angleton was right there, in Mary’s safe, after her death.

      Ever since I read from Quigley that The New Republic was nothing but a catch-all for opposition, I’ve been wary of any outfit portraying itself as leftist that is not attacked, defamed, and destroyed. Ramparts was destroyed by the CIA, as was From the Wilderness, but The Nation and Democracy Now! thrive. You know as well as anyone that organization on the left is alwasy a matter of people and energy, as money is hard to come by. Controlled opposition is always the name of the game, so that Leary and Manson and McGowan all come together in a mosaic.

      After deciding to enter the rabbit hole on 9/11, it did not take more than a few months to understand that the “911 Truth Movement” is controlled opposition too, to be avoided. It all leaves me with the notion that this structure, this former republic, is so infested and rotted that it can only collapse of its own weight. I hope that in rebirth, as with Russia, that some lessons about totalitarianism are learned by the new leadership. I hope I am alive for the rebirth, but the collapse might be too ugly to bear watching. Empires never go out without a fight.

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  2. Leary and Jim Morrison were the only “concerts” I ever walked out of while attending college (’67-’71) in Denver. Something wasn’t right. Never thought about it until after Reagan was in the White House. At that point, I thought, anything’s possible.

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    2. thank you for that link, Steve. I just finished a book about the relationship between Leary and Ginsberg and there are details of Leary’s progression I had no idea about.

      the 60’s echoed through out my formative years because I partook of similar tests on my own mind, even took a cross-country trip from KC to Oregon for a Hemp festival. I was obnoxious and audacious enough to actually look Kesey up and knock on the door. his wife was kind enough to allow us to check out the new Furthur bus in the barn. I have lots of pictures with me behind the wheel, shit-eating grin on my face. didn’t meet Ken, though.

      I read all I could and was of course taken in by the romantic surface that’s been packaged and sold to subsequent generations. but something never sat well with me, either. you definitely need to read Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon.

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      1. I wasn’t fooled when Rolling Stone put the younger Tsarnaev brother on the cover of their magazine.

        And I’m still not fooled when there’s no mention of the verdict on their website.

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          1. Matters to you. Your words.

            “The Church Committee exposed CIA infiltration of the news media in the late 1970’s. Carl Bernstein wrote about it. He shopped his work around, but only Rolling Stone would publish him.”

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            1. The Bernstein piece, which is long, so don’t go near it, was in RS in 1977, Swede. 1977. Things were different then – Ramparts even still existed. Rolling Stone is no better now than the Daily Snow or MSNBC, just another partisan outlet with a boner for Obama.

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        2. Before you get on me for attacking you personally when I don’t have anything else, allow me to say this: ON the Boston bombing and all other matters, your involvement is only cursory and you’ve no idea of the depth to which others have gone to understand the events. Unless you are willing to look at the evidence, your silly comments here about the Tsarnaev’s, who fit the profile of classic patsies, are cause for ridicule. As with all other matters there is no point in having a discussion with you because you simply do not know anything.

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            1. Follow this link: show trial.

              The only reason Dzhokhar was allowed to live was because it was known that he would present no threat to the people who organized the event. If he was a threat to say something true, they’d slash his throat again.

              Don’t be so gullible.

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