While in Washington, DC, we had a couple meals at a restaurant called Busboys and Poets. What a trip! It was right out of my life years ago, when freshly sprung from my right-wing Catholic conservative upbringing, I did what I called “the bounce”. Assuming my prior life had misled me about everything, I discovered there was a left, and assumed I would find some truth over there.
My sojourn lasted but a couple of years, and I walked away as disenchanted with the left as I had been with the right. It took me time to absorb the lessons, that it does no good to follow or look for truth in so-called leaders as given to us by popular news and politics. Sorting through them it is hard to know who is genuine, who fake. We’re on our own.
But walking through this bookstore/restaurant, I had a feel for a time gone by. The shelves were crawling with causes and authors. And the walls had images of many of their leaders. I have to say, so long away from that crowd, I did not recognize most of the images. I saw two whom I knew to be dead rock stars, known in their former lives as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I recognized Howard Zinn (d 2010), controlled opposition and author of A People’s History of the United States, which I once read with eyes wide shut. Ralph Nader is there, now 92 and out of circulation. He too I am pretty certain to be controlled opposition. I campaigned hard for him in 2000, less so in 2004., again, with eyes wide shut.
In total, I recognized seven faces, all of them I suspect to be controlled opposition. I once read where the FBI had infiltrated the Communist Party USA, and as a result that pathetic little offering of a movement had more FBI agents in it than real members. Conspicuously absent, maybe just aged out, is Joan Baez (now 85). Baez was ID’d by Dave McGowan as coming from a military family. I am going to do some photo work there, as I suspect she was assigned to a military family who acted as controllers of her and many other rock stars. I found with other such rock stars that their childhood family photos are often fake.
Also absent from the board is Noam Chomsky. Did the left grow disenchanted with the old curmudgeon?
Anyway, take a look, and see how many more you can identify. I know one of them is Medea Benjamin, as her signature is aside her photo, but I know nothing about her. Note in the middle photo above, which is a last-supper-type painting, that one of the subjects has a halo. I assume he is a martyr.
I learned in 1984 that, without exception they all lie.
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And not just our leaders. Everyone who is not mentally deranged will lie or withhold truth. The Santa Claus project is the most obvious of all in the west. I have never come across an adult in my life who was willing to reveal this deception. Every teacher, doctor.,nurse, uncle aunty etc goes along with it.
I suspect at the high levels revealing the truth to a peasant is considered a worse offence than revealing the Santa scam to a child. We all are so easily manipulated.
I suspect after the revelation of the Santa scam by my friend Ben in 1984 when I was 5 I’ve never truly believed another authority figure ever. And probably can’t. Just the idea that everyone lied to me. And when I asked already knowing they all still lied.
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You hit on something I’ve learned to live with, that everything is a lie on some level. It brings me back to to CIA Director William Casey allegedly saying back in the 1980s “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” AI says he didn’t say that, but AI lies too. And anyway, whether he said it or not, it points in the direction of truth. Everything about us seems to be a lie!
So I just run my little blog and observe the world. I do like it when I hit on something interesting.That part is fun.
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I’m no better than anyone else, or at least very similar. I just go along to get along the same as everyone else, most of the time. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. I actually suspect back in tribal times it was much worse and probably worse again for animals that lived in herds or troops.
Currently I believe there are many people who are much more tolerant of different opinions than in the past and that creates a greater willingness to speak out. Then we also have access to different groups where we can hear and. say different things to different people. It’s just historically I suspect it almost never happened.
Now does this increase or decrease the likelihood of false beliefs? Possibly neither. I would suggest it makes it slightly more likely for people to believe what makes them feel better. I believe it might create less conviction in our beliefs. It certainly gives us a few more options.
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LOL. When I seven, my brother eight and my sisters six and 4 1/2, our father told us about how santa would be coming down the “chimney” later. And we needed to be good little boys and girls and go to bed. I blurted out that we didn’t have chimney! My sisters started crying. My brother had a bewildered look and my father was mad as hell. Like you, I’ve never trusted authority since.
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Baez’ only husband was a spook writer named David Harris. I mention this because Harris’ second wife Lacy Fosburgh was a writer pushing a seriously fake op called The Goodbar Murder from the early 70’s. That “murder” (single woman looking for a barroom one night stand) was in my opinion an eastern urban companion piece to the fake hitchhiker murders being salted on the west coast at that time. Such transportation was a viable form of travel since the invention of the automobile but was completely shut down in the seventies with tales of girls, especially, vanishing while thumbing rides. The Goodbar op was also an update and variation on the Kitty Genovese op. Harris allegedly did a short stretch in the slam for anti-war efforts but if he did any time at all, he was probably there as an informant to rat on actual dissidents. Joan’s underage sister married another spook writer named Richard Farina who died in spooky circumstances just as his paen to dissent, “been down so long it looks like up to me” was published. Uber-spook Thomas Pynchon is in this stew, looking like Farina’s handler. I digress…
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I mention Baez because she once said, before I had my kind of awakening, that people come up to her assuming she’s the liberal she pretends to be (my words), and she replies “You don’t know me at all.”
She has all the earmarks of family ties, her father holding an important patent in X-Ray technology and working for UNESCO … I said military, but that was not correct, technically.
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I was recently doing research to check on some of Dave McGowan’s claims of all these rock stars being associated with the military, since he is known to be sloppy, and an agent to boot. So I did a straight AI search asking about the 1960s rock stars that were associated with the military. I found some very interesting answers, and spins on the “conspiracy”.
For example I believe he claimed David Crosby’s father was an admiral – he was not, he was a Hollywood cinematographer.
According to AI both Hendrix and Jerry Garcia joined the military because they were caught stealing cars. It must be an inside joke with agents. And both were honorably discharged after a year or so, Garcia for “poor discipline” and Hendrix for an ankle injury. Yet somehow Hendrix was 101st Airborne, which is one of the most elite in the military. Go figure.
The other one that was AI funny was Ray Manzarek – he was in the army as an intelligence analyst, and somehow quit after a year, just like Hendrix and Garcia. They must have had a fast track for talented artists. There’s no doubt all these guys I listed were heavily involved in pushing LSD on the youth of the 1960s, especially Hendrix and Garcia.
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Thanks … that’s the kind of insight that makes my day. The idea that people join the military and then get early exit for disciplinary issues or minor physical ailments stretches the imagination. More likely disciplinary problems result in brig time or guard duty well into sleep cycles, and physical ailments are timed out with assignment to duties that allow time to heal. It makes no sense!
Garcia is someone I’ve not thought about, as except for a couple of nice tunes (for me) the Grateful Dead sounded awful. He pushed marijuana hard, most likely in my view his assignments. There is a joke, humor me as it’s been around the world several times … what does a deadhead say when he runs out of weed? “Man, this music sucks!”
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