I’ve been reading two separate books these past mornings, centered around two men: Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy. Each suffers from overblown reputation, one for evil and the other good intentions. But it does reinforce in me the idea that there are two forces in politics that feed one another: leaders and movements. Right now we have neither.

This coming Tuesday the Democrats will be given a well-earned cold shower, having provided us with neither vision or leadership for six years. But therein lay the problem of American politics, that we turn to the weak and disingenuous Democrats as relief from strong and deeply stupid Republicans.

Back and forth we go.

To be mushroomed is to he kept in the dark and fed shit. I am continually impressed with the American news and entertainment media. Despite our ability now to travel the world and get information and news from a host of English-speaking sources, most Americans passively absorb news from American sources. They are mushroomed.

I see it everywhere. Most recently there was an interesting exchange at 4&20 involving Turner, a nice fella doing his best, but he repeated the current propaganda meme that Vladimir Putin is a monster bent on destroying civilization. It takes but a quick spin around the globe, to French, Iranian, even British, Canadian and Indian sources, for example, to see that Putin is widely respected. He is in a class by himself these days, perhaps the most able and articulate world leader on the stage.

I’ve been watching the monologues on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with David Letterman since our return from South America. Each of them, unknowingly of course, is repeating the US propaganda line that Putin (not Russia) invaded Eastern Ukraine (false), and stole Crimea (false). A caricature of Putin is a recurring Jimmy Fallon character.

This works, as most Americans absorb their opinions from entertainment sources rather than academics or straight “news.” Whatever the reality of Putin’s and Russia’s current activities, Americans are drawn into the caricature and form their opinions on that more than on any credible source.

The US is demanding now that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine. Russia naturally responds (not reported here) that they don’t have any troops in Ukraine. The US insists, nonetheless, that they be withdrawn. If Americans don’t go outside US media for at least some news, our lying leadership gets away with such nonsense. Outside this loony bin the lies don’t have legs.

But the lessons stands: If you sit passively and wait for “news” to come to you from American sources, entertainment and otherwise, you’ll be mushroomed. It is up to you as a vigilant citizen to actively seek out information from many sources, and then use your brain to assemble it in a coherent package. It is not easy. It takes an effort.

I was going to wait until I actually saw the movie Kill the Messenger to write about it, but it plays late in the day, and we don’t usually go to movies unless they play early afternoon. (My God, I’ve become a senior citizen! Soon I’ll be grabbing early bird specials in restaurants!) I might, on my own, take a trip down the hill, but I don’t really need to see this movie to write about some important aspects of it.

• Jeremy Renner: I enjoyed the work of Robert Ludlum. He had inside knowledge of spycraft, and wrote about hard and chiseled people who were never who they appeared to be. There were no good guys in Ludlum’s work except the occasional amateur two got trapped in events over his head. When Ludlum died, his name was trademarked and other people began to write using it, and the work turned to crap. I wish his estate had let his body of work stand on its own.

  Jason Bourne was an important character in Ludlum’s work, the only one ever to appear in more than one book. He wakes up on a beach not knowing who he is, and slowly discovers he has abilities and knowledge beyond the ordinary person. I wondered if Ludlum was seditiously inferring that Bourne was part of MKULTRA, the CIA mind control program (MK – “Mind Kontrol” has a nice German ring to it.) Matt Damon became Jason Bourne in our minds, and I enjoyed those movies, like everyone. When the fourth movie was to be made without Damon, I only watched reluctantly. Jeremy Renner playeld Aaron Cross, a man like Bourne. As I watched the movie unfold, I realized that Renner was good, the script and casting was excellent, and the chase scene in Manila at the end one of the best I’d ever seen.

  My favorite movie of all time was The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. The Bourne Legacy takes second place now. I know these are not deep and artistic movies, but if they are on the screen, I drop everything and watch them. I cannot not watch. That’s my criteria for “favorite.”

  Jeremy Renner, to my surprise, used his own resources to get Kill the Messenger made, as it had languished around Hollywood for over a decade. He thought it was important.

• Gary Webb: In 1996 I had only had internet for a little while in my office, and was one of seven million people to go to the San Jose Mercury News website to download Webb’s Dark Alliance series. Since San Jose is in Silicon Valley, it only made sense that the little newspaper had developed a model website, complete with the ability to link to every footnote in a story. Readers were able to judge for themselves whether or not sources were legitimate and accurately used. Using a dial-up connection, I downloaded the whole series and printed it, a first for me and so many others.

  Webb wrote about something that was already on record, Iran Contra, that typical of American scandals, something we only surface-skimmed. He uncovered just one small part of it, that the Nicaraguan Contras, thugs and terrorists from the Somoza regime, were cut off from US government funding by the Boland Amendment, so that CIA turned to its well-documented alternative means of funding, drug running, to raise the necessary cash to supply arms to them. In so doing, crack cocaine, which Congress had been warned about in the late 1970’s, made its first serious inroads into American culture, and became epidemic in the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Webb wrote about the means and methods of getting it into the country, and how the money made its way back to the Contras.

  San Jose Mercury News is a small newspaper, but because the Internet was used and was so effective, the story had legs. It traveled and made headlines to the point where John Deutch, Director of Central Intelligence under Clinton, had to travel to LA and face an angry black crowd and lie to them about what had happened. He didn’t get away with it, was caught in the lies. Here’s what happened:

  CIA has assets in all major newspapers, as documented by the Church Committee and reported by (real) journalist Carl Bernstein in 1977. Some, like Judith Miller or Anderson Cooper, are easy to spot, but most are mere moles, perhaps never doing anything more than watching what goes on and reporting back to the agency. With the Gary Webb matter, they came out in droves. The LA Times assigned seventeen reporters to its “Get Gary Webb” project. The NY Times and Washington Post all got into the act too. They did what American journalists do so well, attacking anyone who practices real journalism. They destroyed Webb. He was demoted at the Mercury News, and eventually blacklisted, unable to get a job on any newspaper in the country.

  Webb committed suicide in 2004. I had trouble accepting that he had done so, as when the CIA does not like someone, a staged suicide is but one means of assassination. What I have read since of the circumstances of his life indicate that this indeed is what happened. At age 49 he could no longer support himself in his profession, even as he had won so many awards for his excellent work. He was living with his mother. End of story, I suppose, except …

“Anyone can commit a murder, but it takes an expert to commit a suicide.” (Bill Corson, CIA agent)

We have living right among us professional liars, murderers, assassins, terrorists. They are centered in Langley, Virginia. Even though their Assassination Manual is public now, we don’t talk about it or them. When Agency enemies die, the mere fact that people know that CIA murders people is usually enough to keep people quiet. They have countless means at their disposal of eliminating enemies, and drugs that induce severe suicidal depression are among them.

Did they get to Webb in this manner? Of course I don’t know, can’t know, never will know. Just remember that the Agency is composed of thugs, murderers, liars, terrorists, and that killing people is one of the things they do best, with their second-best activity being the cover-up. So I will always suspect that Gary Webb was undone 1) by American journalists, who know nothing about journalism, and 2) by the CIA, which might have led him down the path of blacklisting so that he could not work his trade. The Agency also might well have found a way to inject him with a drug that induces suicidal depression. I do not give the Agency the benefit of any doubt. Ever.

But judge for yourself. Here’s a one-hour and twenty-four minute interview with Webb from 2001. In it he is bright, quick, well-versed, alert and possessed of a fully functioning memory. The man is anything but depressed. In short, he exhibits all the skills that made him an excellent journalist, and not a hint of depression.

The last movie* in which CIA featured prominently was the piece of excrement called ARGO, a lie spun into a bigger lie, poorly acted, obviously green-screened, and then given best picture honors even as it wasn’t even a candidate for special effects. (There was one accurate and undeniable fact as portrayed in that movie: Tehran does indeed have an airport. That’s about it, however.)

Kill the Messenger also features CIA prominently. I wonder what treatment the Academy will give it. I’ll write more when I actually see it.
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*Charlie Wilson’s War also appears to be based on a CIA-sponsored screenplay. That movie too was a lie, that one sugar coating CIA’s secret war that devastated Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

This meant that the Republicans had to appear to move to the Left, closer to the Center, while the Democrats had to appear to move from the fringes toward the Center, usually by moving to the right. As a result, the National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed, as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War). As soon as the presidential election was over, the two National parties vanished, the party controls fell back into the hands of the congressional parties, leaving the newly elected President in a precarious position between the two congressional parties, neither of which was very close to the brief National coalition that had elected him.

The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. (Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, P1247) (Emphasis added)

That phrase “obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans…” would read today as “wedge issues.”

I’ve been dabbling here and there around the blogs, and realized after a particularly exasperating exchange with Big Swede that there is a reason why elites eschew politics. There are too many fifth graders among us. Most TV and radio ads for candidates (please see this for yourself) are aimed at the fifth grade level of education. They emphasize one easily memorable point using emotional music in the backdrop, with flattering pictures of the favored candidate and unflattering ones of the opponent. The issue in question might be a one single vote among hundreds, or something to do with gun control, abortion, or immigration. The vote does not have to matter, usually does not. The impact of the ads is not in the apparent message, but in the emotional subtext, good versus evil.

Shit works. Not kidding. It does.

In this system it is easy to see why the people who actually have to run the country pay little heed to public opinion, other than to manage it. American public opinion is a reflection of the American public, distracted, uneducated, uninformed, emotional and full of hatred and resentment.

Here’s another quote I ran across, this from Richard Nixon as he ran for reelection in 1972:

“…The average American is just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something…He is going to do something…If, on the other hand, you make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him soft, spoiled and eventually a very weak individual.”

I suspect Nixon was addressing welfare concerns in this statement, but it resonates for me in another sense, that we can be better than we are, that we do have more capability, but nothing is asked of us other than to vote, shop, and watch sports. We are everything expected of us at this point, which is a sad state of affairs.

We have spent the last eight days in the Galapagos, and are sitting now in the Guayaquil, Ecuador terminal waiting for our flight to Quito. Tomorrow night we take a red eye and will be back in Denver around 9 a.m. Thursday.

I was very pleased in the Galapagos not to be taking notes or attempting to learn anything. We are part of a Road Scholars group, a not-for-profit travel service, and so had naturalists on board our cruise around the islands. I quickly decided I did not care about species adaptations on exhibit there, and so did not pay much attention to lectures and stops on walking tours. After the grueling Machu Picchu trak, this was a breeze. All of the participants are 55 or older, most in poor physical condition, so that a one-mile 1,000 foot climb to the mouth of a volcano was cause for concern as being too strenuous.

That’s OK. They are all very nice people, and we enjoyed the comraderie. They hail from Raleigh, Sleepy Hollow, San Diego, Coca Beach, Austin (MN), Las Vegas and other places. We were served three meals on board every day, and I found myself barely hungry most of the time. The equivalent of Ecuadorean beer in the US is, I think, O’Douls. I am happy the Galapagos are preserved in their mostly natural state, that people study the animals and habitat, and that tourism does its part to protect the place from billionaires who want to buy the islands and quarantine them.

It is amazing, being away from news now for virtually three weeks, that nothing has changed. We are diddled by the illusion of connection to events that are mostly hidden from view.

I do hope everyone has opportunity to travel as we have. It is eye-opening, mind-opening, and fun. On deck, we have decided, are trips to New Zealand and Australia (one trip) and Iceland/Switzerland (ditto). Don’t know when. Just know that to be our current plan.