The Mighty Wurlitzer

A couple of anecdotes that hopefully, at the end, will tie into this piece, which is based on my reading of Frances Stonor Saunders The Cultural Cold War. They may seem detached, and if you are reading this, I have decided they are useful. Or maybe just interesting.

First, we had a man come to our house recently to clean our wood stove. It’s a long and tedious process that requires that he walk up onto our steep-peaked roof and use various tools which only make sense in light of chimney sweeping. While he was working I asked if he would mind my looking on, as there is always much to learn about the machines and devices in a home and how they work. We talked about a wide range of subjects, including music* and the sign business. While he set the ladder for the roof ascent, I mentioned that my Dad had been in the sign business, and my Mom insisted that he take me with him on summer trips to various Montana outposts. My job was to hold the ladder. I could have been filling shopping bags with Styrofoam for all the help I gave him.

In truth, Mom had threatened Dad at dinner one night with loss of her eternal soul if he did not quit drinking. She would stop attending church on Sundays. They were both Catholic to the bone, so the threat was of monumental importance to Dad. What to do? In a scheme that now seems so transparent to the adult me, the child me did not understand. Dad had thereafter the Sunday church threat hanging over him. He invested in a small sign shop 115 miles away, and went there on weekends to work. In truth, he needed a place to drink in solitude. Bringing me along in the summer was Mom’s way of forcing him on the straight path. More than once on those trips I sat alongside Dad as he downed a couple of beers in various bars. The business he purchased never flourished, and as he spent more time there and less at home he managed to get himself fired from his real job. This condemned my mother to a lonely and broke life, forcing her into the work force, and she became embittered and angry, the kids of our neighborhood fearing her. Her nickname, The Bitch.

Our chimney sweep knew the sign business in depth, having been in it until 2020. Dad was a glass bender, and Dan said that LEDs had put the benders out of business. It’s good that Dad came from a different era, as he would have been put out of work, merely going on benders rather than being a glass bender.

But is it not interesting how my Dad, not a scholar nor psychopath, but merely a scarred man who married a scarred woman so that they could heal each other’s pain, had engaged in creating a fiction that overpowered me: that Dad was a sign man who had to travel. Dad was a drunk who needed a place to drink without Mom, who knew better, looking on. That’s the power of a lie well told, but that’s only half the story. The victims of the lie need to suffer from childlike innocence. That’s why they fall for it.

Happy ending, Dad would eventually move back home, give up the drink for real, and become the sweet little man outsiders knew. I would not piece it all together until well into adulthood, just as I could not bring myself to abandon the Catholic Church until age 37. That’s the power of lies well told.

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*I asked Dan if he was familiar with the song Dancing Bear by the Mamas and Papas, and even sang the opening lyrics to him:

I wouldn’t want to be a chimney sweep
All black from head to foot
From climbing in them chimneys
And cleaning out that soot.

No, Dan said, he was not familiar with the song, and anyway, “who are the Mamas and Papas?” I had to laugh, as Dan is 55 and I am 74, so he came of age in a different era. His high school dream was to be a rock star, and we did not discuss why it did not come to pass, but Dan was and is a drummer. I asked him if he knew the concept of “big ears”, where rock stars are often widely versed in all music, from classical to far edge punk and heavy metal. He did not know that expression, but mentioned that his favorite group, Metallica, used classical themes to fashion their music.  In fact, he said there is a group, Apocalytica, that is comprised of four cellists, and they replicate the songs of Metallica faithfully, including melody and tempo. He suggested I listen to the song “One,” his favorite, by Apocalytica, and see if I can feel the subtle classical tones behind it.

Man, I have to say, that is a stunning composition played by artists of great skill. I’ve never thought of Metallica that way. I never will again.

I mentioned the Museum of Musical Instruments in Phoenix, which we visited some years back. It was so much fun, we spent a whole day there where normally in museums my brain s full within an hour. In it was a corner on the main floor dedicated to famous drummers, one of whom was Buddy Rich. Dan knew Buddy, knew him well, and explained his amazing talent and techniques to me. The drum sticks rest on balance on the fingers, and when they hit the drum they can either tap once, twice, or three times before being lifted. That’s where the cadence comes from. Rich, said Dan, had perfected this skill to a point where no one could touch him. His hands moved at lightning speed and he never missed a beat.

I mentioned to him that a famous jazz drummer, Bernard Purdie, claimed to have sat in on over twenty Beatles songs, overdubbing Ringo. Dan said that many drummers idolize Ringo as one of the best. Purdie, I said, claimed Ringo was mediocre at best and had to be pushed aside. Dan had never heard this, so I suggested that perhaps these drummers who so idolized Ringo were unknowingly offering praise to Purdie.

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Enough of this … I have a second thing to write about, and will have to finish this post in the future, as it has already run off course and around the bend. My second point was a book that I read, Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, an American historian. Sometime back my wife and I went on a long trip, flying to India from the East Coast to visit our daughter, who lived in New Delhi. We then hiked maybe half of the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. We stayed in little huts, gave up coffee, ate marginal but very tasty food, and I drank Nepalese beer, which was not bad. On this trip I carried with me Tragedy and Hope, which is a tome, and read it whenever I could. I finished it on a 787 as we flew from Tokyo to LAX. Yes, I carried it with me in my pack on the Circuit. I am a special kind of nerd, I mean, wonk.

The story behind the book is that Quigley was offered access to a trove of files owned by the Council on Foreign Relations, and that he was told that certain parts of the files were not to be included in his work. In it he claims that  a secret society initially led by famous and powerful people pretty much wrote American and British foreign policy over the first half of the twentieth century. Quigley went ahead and wrote and published the book against the wishes of his benefactors, and much to their dismay. I thought at the time I read it that I was privilege to what was to that time deeply guarded secrets.

Nonsense! Quigley’s benefactors, those who ran and still run the CFR, had oversight and could easily delete any passage and even prevent publication. Quigley was but a pawn.

Tragedy and Hope was false history, but the spooks and insiders that run our lives and form our thinking know that outright lying is a bad strategy. Lying is the worst way to tell a lie. The best way is misdirection, and what better misdirection than to claim that a scholar had divulged secrets against the will of the powerful. That’s how professional lies are told. That’s why they stick. Quigley, knowing or not, gave us false history that became real by deceit.

Just as Dan had never heard of The Mamas and Papas, I am going to link to a post I wrote (The True Art of Lying) on an episode from the early 1970s  wherein the same technique used in Tragedy an Hope was used to sell a false history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers caper, or just the Paper Caper. Few here will remember that episode. A group of spooks known as The Rand Corporation had compiled that fake history of the Vietnam War and needed a way to sell it. They chose an employee, Daniel Ellsberg, to “steal” the papers and then, along with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, to run up and down the east coast using primitive copy machines to make a backup copy of the embezzled originals. Eventually excepts were published in the New York Times, sealing the con.

Eventually Ellsberg was arrested and put on trial, and faced life imprisonment. Then deus ex maxima arrived … a group in the Nixon White House known as The Plumbers, broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in LA, a burglary like Watergate itself, so clumsy that a person might think it was done by a black bear searching for food. Locks were busted, files broken, wires planted, and a trail that led to the Plumbers was left behind. The judge in the Ellsberg case, surely in on the game, Mathew Byrne, and later the US Supreme Court (also in on the game), declared a mistrial, and Ellsberg was given his freedom. Paper Caper complete.

What was the real intent? No one has ever read the Pentagon Papers, especially not Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. Or me. But after the above affair of classic and professional misdirection, the papers, made public in 2011, became the official history of the Vietnam War. Who will read them, pore over them, write about them, cite them, make them part of college classes and ‘popular’ books on the shelves of Barnes and Noble that go unread? Scholars and historians.

That’s how history is made, how we walk backwards through the events of our times, living with eyes closed, misunderstanding all we see.

I will pick up again later with Frances Stonor Saunders and The Cultural Cold War.  It has a Tragedy and Hope feel about it, deliberate misdirection. With any luck and perseverance, I will understand her purpose better. There are too many ‘tells’ in her means and methods.