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*Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations* by Michael Adzema. Free. Downloadable. Complete book.
Posted by sillymickel in 1%, activism, America, authenticity, awakening, book, books, Civil Rights, Class, Class War, climate change, consciousness, Culture War, Culture War Class War, education, free, Generations, globalrevolution, History, media, Michael Adzema author, money, occupy, occupywallstreet, oppression, psychology, sixties, social media, sociology, totalitarianism, truth, US, Vietnam War on April 3, 2020
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Because of the current global crises of war, rising fascism, and environmental collapse, I am making this book available in many formats, most of them at no cost. I am hoping to help a Democratic Blue Wave on
November 8th, 2022, election day.
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You may use this book, in any of its formats, any way you wish. I own the copyright, and am making it available for you to use, distribute, post, embed on your site, whatever.
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Culture War, Class War 2022 by Michael Adzema was released October 16th, 2022.
A complete copy of Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations is posted on this page. Scroll down past the other offers. The book was published at Amazon on October 16th, 2022.
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And if you want the paperback copy, you can get it at the following link... All my books are sold at cost or the minimum allowable by Amazon.
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Click link: Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations
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And again, for the ebook/Kindle copy, click this link:
Click link: Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations
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You can see & read the book, at two of my blogs, by clicking either of the links below:
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https://sillymickel.blogspot.com/2017/10/culture-war-class-war-by-michael-adzema.html
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Finally, you may use the following embed code for the entire book, as a pdf, for your website or anywhere else that takes code.
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If you’ve read down enough to see this, thank you for your caring. Now, let’s all do something to help Democrats win big on November 8th. At the eve of the most consequential election of all time, with the fate of democracy in the world and the continuation of life on planet Earth in the balance, I encourage you to use any of the means above to share this information in any way you want in doing your part to create a Blue
Wave and save freedom and the continuation of your life and that of your children.
*Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations* by Michael Adzema is Book 1 in the Return to Grace Series..
Also by Michael Adzema
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From the Return to Grace Series:
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Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations.” Volume 1. (2022)
The Necessary Revolution. Volume 2. (forthcoming; currently Chapters 17 to 32 on Culture War, Class War blog)
Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call. Volume 3. (2013)
Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious. Volume 4. (2013)
Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events. Volume 5. (2016)
Planetmates: The Great Reveal. Volume 6. (2014)
Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation. Volume 7. (2015)
Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor. Volume 8. (2013)
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness.
Volume 9. (2014)
Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man. Volume 10. (2016)
Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide. Volume 11. (2018)
Back to the Garden: The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future. Volume 12. (scheduled 2023)
Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace. Volume 12. (forthcoming)
Primal Renaissance. Volume 13. (forthcoming)
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From The Path of Ecstasy Series:
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The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. Volume 1. (2016)
Dance of the Seven Veils I … Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self … Adult to Toddler. Volume 2. (2017)
Dance of the Seven Veils II … Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self … Infant to Prenate, Veils Four-Six. Volume 3. (2022)
Dance of the Seven Veils III … Periconceptional/Transpersonal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face … Cellular to Soulular, Veil Seven and Beyond. Volume 4. (scheduled 2023)
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Other:
The Dangers of Mysticism for Modern Youth. (1970)
Primal Renaissance: The Millennial Return. (1995)
Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths.” (2013)
Who to Be: Identity, Authenticity, and Crisis. (2020)
CULTURE WAR,
CLASS WAR 2022
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A Cultural and Political Psychohistory of America from the 1950s to 2022
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Revised, Completely Updated, 2022
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Return to Grace, Volume 1
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MICHAEL ADZEMA
Gonzo Sage Media: Eugene, Oregon: sillymickel@gmail.com
Copyright © 2022 Michael Adzema
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-8354828982
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For “My Generation” — the Vietnam/Boomer Generation — and for resisters and progressives in all cultures who are struggling against all odds to maintain and advance democracy and freedom. This is for you.
And for new generations arising in a context they cannot understand, I wrote this book also for you.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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| PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. Civil War is Class War Manifest:
A “Fierce, Rearguard Battle” by the Filthy Rich Intensifies … Things Have, As Predicted, Heated Up Since 2013 |
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| INTRODUCTION: Culture War Is Class War Disguised.
As Progressive Ideas Gain Ground Alongside Increasingly Oppressive Governmental Policy, Conflict Intensifies |
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| PART ONE: CULTURE WAR — TRUTH | ||||
| Chapter 1 | Smoke, Lies, and Revelations — 1950s Through 1970s:
Politics, Truth, and the Furious Market in Enlightenment Lobotomies |
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| Chapter 2 | Truth’s Solitary Journey:
War, Nukes, and the Media …. the Comfortable Ignorance of Grade School Propaganda Gone Forever |
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| Chapter 3 | “1984” Comes to America — Slick, Gradual, and Perfect:
Dictatorship, Authoritarianism, and the Consequences of a Lack of Accountability |
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| Chapter 4 | Matrix Aroused — The Sixties:
How We Became a Nation Of Puppets, and The Hidden Puppeteers |
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| PART TWO: CULTURE WAR — GENERATIONS | ||||
| Chapter 5 | World War Two Generation, Alcohol, and Tobacco:
“I Need a Drink” … Booze and Tobacco Are Perfect Drugs for a Generation Rooted in Denial and Recklessness |
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| Chapter 6 | Fifties Generation, Marijuana, and Caffeine:
Rebels Without a Cause, Beatniks, and “Mad Men” … Existential Angst and “Phony” Conformity |
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| Chapter 7 | Vietnam/Boomer Generation — Marijuana and Psychedelics:
“Wow, Man!” “Just Do It” “Go With the Flow” |
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| Chapter 8 | Castles in the Sky:
Cocaine, and Booze: Gen X/13th Generation is a Concocted Generation, born 1961 through 1980 |
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| Chapter 9 | To Save the World:
Millennials … Psychedelics and Activism |
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| PART THREE: CULTURAL REBIRTH, ABORTED: | ||||
| Chapter 10 | The King Won’t Die:
Attack of the Body-Snatchers … an Aborted Changing of the Guard |
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| Chapter 11 | Culture War Allegory:
Reversing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers … to Follow or Not to Follow the Script |
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| Chapter 12 | Cultural Rebirth, Aborted:
It’s a Not so Wonderful Life for the WWII Generation … yet the King Refuses to Die |
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| Chapter 13 | A Culture War Rages:
Monsters Never Really Die in Horror Flicks … The King on Life Support and The Consequences of an Abomination |
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| PART FOUR: CLASS WAR — THE MATRIX | ||||
| Chapter 14 | Truth and Liars:
“Obvious Truths” (Actual Untruths) Were Employed Together with an Exact and Strategic Use of Misinformation |
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| Chapter 15 | Creating a Totalitarian Mind:
Recipe for The Matrix: Misinformation, Repetition, Impoverishment |
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| Chapter 16 | Your Mind Made Fertile for the Planting of Lies:
Power Versus Passion, Money Versus Authenticity — Opposing Ways of Changing America |
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| Chapter 17 | A Matrix of Misinformation:
The Lies Themselves … When Did the People Become a “Special” Interest? |
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| Chapter 18 | Erosion of Reason, Self-Confidence:
Repetition Makes It Possible to Control and Equal Time for Idiots |
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| Chapter 19 | Reality Transplant, the Media:
The Ladder of Status, the Great Suck Upward, and What They’ve Succeeded in Getting Us to Forget |
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| Chapter 20 | Only the Game Remains:
Religion of Capitalism — The Game Is the One Truth Faith; The Game Is to Lie and Manipulate Without Consequence |
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| Chapter 21 | The Great American About Face:
There Was a Time When Kindness Was a Noble Thing; Nightmare Apparent |
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| Chapter 22 | Better Off than Fifty Years Ago?
Rules Made to Benefit the Wealthy Are Now More Important Than Life |
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| Chapter 23 | The Compassion Gap:
With the Excuse of “The Game,” Small-Hearted Folks Can Now Flaunt Their Mean-Spiritedness |
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| Chapter 24 | Money Madness:
The Wealthy Are the Creative Sector … Creative in Devising Schemes Putting Our Money in Their Pockets |
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| Chapter 25 | An Attack on Facts and Reality Itself:
Confused People Take Comfort in Stupidity, and Burdened People Become Confused People — That’s Their Plan |
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| Chapter 26 | Setting the Record Straight on Boomers:
The Boomer — Generation X Culture War and the “Truth Dividend” of Having Been There |
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| Chapter 27 | The Fall 0f “Obvious Truths”:
Arrogance Comes Before the Fall, Lies Are Being Called Out; The Awakening, Their Legacy Remaining, Everything Hangs in the Balance |
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| Chapter 28 | A Life-or-Death Struggle Ensues:
On a Field Ravaged by Corruption and Incompetence, an Ultimate Battle for Life and Democracy Is Waged. It Could Go Either Way |
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| AFTERWORD | ||||
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | ||||
| NOTES | ||||
| REFERENCES | ||||
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | ||||
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Civil War Is
Class War Manifest:
A “Fierce, Rearguard Battle” by the Filthy Rich Intensifies … Things Have, As Expected, Heated Up Since 2013
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…while public opinion favors the Democratic side of this Culture War/ Class War, the moneyed interests have for decades restructured American institutions to reflect their intentions, and not the will of the people….”
“…such a civil war would be desired by the wealthy powers-that-be for the purpose of keeping folks busy and distracted, while they use their influence in Congress for additional larceny against the American people.”
“…this civil war has already started, and already with casualties.”
“Race war is also class war disguised, with the issue of race being used by the wealthy side of the class war to enlist gullible White racists and Republicans to their side.”
“…it has become increasingly clear that the country’s conservative, right-wing turn is being accomplished only by illegal, unjust, and unfair means. As the majority of the country has moved on to more progressive ideas, the Right and Republicans continue to win only be cheating, by changing the rules that have been in place for many decades.”
“…the division between the people’s will and their controlling-governing bodies is the Culture War/ Class War I have been analyzing made manifest. And the success of the Right at the governmental and institutional level is exactly that ‘fierce rearguard action’ massively fueled by the moneyed interests I described in the First Edition as being their last effort in an ultimately futile agenda.”
“…all the patterns of the Culture War/ Class War described therein have expanded and have become more intense and violent. They are currently reaching a peak of tension as the January 6th Congressional Investigation continues revealing its stunning findings…”
“…the day of reckoning for Democrats and for democracy — election day for the 2022 midterm elections — is coming up fast. Democrats need to win big to stop the Republicans’ ongoing coup and to keep our democracy.”
“…all this Culture War/ Class War/ Civil War will culminate soon in that Americans will know in November 2022 whether we will be irrevocably shunted onto one route or another: Democrats will win in November enough seats to actually control the government of the U.S. or else Republicans will get in, take up control again, and will continue uninhibitedly undermining American democracy, taking away American freedoms, destroying our planet’s life, and interfering into the private lives of Americans. All this Republicans will attempt to do; even as they swim against an increasingly powerful tide of public opinion and progressive awareness. The tension could not be greater.”
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My Prediction — A “Fierce, Rearguard Battle”
We will look into those developments in this and subsequent works in the Falls from Grace Series, of course. However, at this point it would seem a good idea to take a look at how the First Edition of this book, Culture War, Class War — the first volume in said series — fared in its analysis and prediction of events.
Right off, for the Second, Revised Edition, we have the Donald J. Trump phenomenon. This book’s First Edition thoroughly analyzed the George W. Bush years. In looking back at what I wrote, it is clear Trump was W. Bush 2.0. Donald Trump was a meaner, more criminal, more violent, sexist, and racist version of former president George W. Bush. And whereas Bush acted as a dictator; with Trump we had a person who acknowledged his desire to be a dictator — praising dictator of North Korea, Kim Jung Un, saying he, Trump, would like to be adored by Americans the way North Korea’s people “adore” Kim.
That which George W. Bush did that was hidden and covered up, Donald Trump did right out in the open and with him brazenly (or ignorantly) admitting it. The fact that Trump has so far, August 2022, gotten away with his many crimes shows an important factor of the Culture War/ Class War. This is one that has to do with how thoroughly the 1% is protected from their corruption and illegality — with all kinds of systemic perks in place and employing the protection of the media … which they indeed own. While on the other end of the spectrum, with minorities, laws are being enacted to allow them to be run over at protests and they are being gunned down and slaughtered by police when being pulled over for minor traffic violations. Culture War is Class War manifest.
For while public opinion favors the Democratic side of this Culture War/ Class War, the moneyed interests have for decades remade American institutions to reflect their intentions, and not the will of the people. That is exactly what this book showed wealthy folks were doing in its First Edition. There, I detailed how the filthy-with-money folks controlling us had since 1970 restructured education, especially higher education, along with publications and media broadcasting. With that in place, Republicans and the mainstream media colluded in instilling ideas, processes, and inanities into the minds of ordinary Americans — these are those “obvious truths” discussed in this book that indeed are not true at all. Yet these notions are put out there to fill the air with nonsense, tortuous untruths, “alternative facts,” and outright lies and to thereby confuse efforts at revealing truth. Indeed, the Filthy Rich, since 1970, reconstituted publishing and the media for ends they would desire, while spinning their actions differently when explained to the public.
Most certainly that is the pattern we saw of the wealthy elite in the First Edition, as enacted through their proxy Republicans in government. I detailed a good deal of that pattern in Part Two of the First Edition, which was on “obvious truths.” For Republicans wish to convince Americans of lies and fabrications for the sole purpose of keeping folks blinded with misinformation and conflict, keeping people steeped in confusion and violence. This cobbles any power ordinary folks have to fight back.
This time, 2022, however, Republicans have added the remaking, in a hard reactionary twist, of the Supreme Court. We find now, as well, that the FBI and even the Secret Service — who protects the president — need to be added to the list of institutions that have been corrupted to cut an image along the wealthy elites’ desires. Which greedy intentions benefiting the very few are ever, for over a hundred years now, behind the actions of Republicans and now, even worse, are still buttressing Trump against any blowback for his many crimes.
This corruption of institutions to protect the wealthy side of this Class War, I predicted in 2013, the filthy rich would do. It is part of the “fierce rearguard battle” I described they will continue to wage; even as they must needs continually retreat overall since their policies are increasingly seen, by an ever more woken public, to be against the popular will. To that end, the wealthy elite, operating through Republicans they have installed in government, have inserted a right-wing bias in many of the institutions of government. Which powerful governmental entities operate — much as the systemic racism does in general in our society — to undermine the people’s will and freedoms and to act for the benefit of the 1%. Indeed, Hillary Clinton was correct, in the Nineties, in calling out the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that has been taking over in America. The First Edition detailed the rise of that “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and this Revised, Second Edition will further reveal it.
We see this right-wing corruption with the current makeup of the Federal Bureau of Investigation — which is riddled with careerists beholden to a conservative ideology. Christopher Wray, the current head of the FBI, is a member of the Federalist Society, to begin with. He was appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, shortly into Trump’s term. Comey had refused to play along with Trump’s direction to go light on Trump’s criminal cohorts. After Comey’s firing, Christopher Wray was hand selected by “the Donald” to do the corrupt president Trump’s bidding.
The Federalist Society is a powerful conservative-libertarian organization pushing extreme Right-wing policies. It is funded by the Koch Brothers and other wealthy conservative donors. It was supremely influential in Trump’s picks for the bench, during his one term. Notable among its members are Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Josh Hawley — both of whom were significant players in the January 6th, 2021, insurrection against the United States.
Among Supreme Court Justices, The Federalist Society includes six of the current nine of them — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. Former Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, can be added to that list. Christopher Wray’s membership in the Federalist Society coincides with his refusal to properly investigate Donald J. Trump or his accomplices in the January 2021 coup attempt. It coincides also with Wray’s refusal to do anything preemptive or preventative ahead of the January 6th, 2021, coup attempt. Wray knew the insurrection was coming, did nothing.
It is reported, additionally, that it was Christopher Wray’s sabotaging of the investigation into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the time of Kavanaugh’s confirmation process that allowed Kavanaugh, an accused rapist, to make it through to the Court. Specifically, the FBI had a tip line for Kavanaugh and received 4,500 tips from women who had something to report. The FBI did nothing to follow up. The FBI then, under Wray, selected a few of these women and, check this, sent their names to the Trump administration. There, of course, they were tossed. As Sheldon Whitehouse, senator from Rhode Island, phrased it in a tweet posted recently, August 4th, 2022, “Wray confirms: Kavanaugh tips from tip line were sent to Trump White House without investigation; and Trump White House directed what witnesses FBI would interview.”1
So in the same Trump administration, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service all were breaking the law for Trump. And some of that led to a restructuring of the Supreme Court of the United States, which will remain long after Trump. What Righties will not tell you is that the so-called “Deep State” they fear so much is indeed in place … but it is there to protect their guys — Republicans, Trump, W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and so on. It is rarely if ever, as we will continue to see in this book, on the side of Democrats.
Yet in 2022 President Joe Biden, like Barrack Obama before him, is timid about “looking political” in doing what should rightly be done in removing the current FBI Director. Hence Christopher Wray remains.2
Along the same lines, although David DeJoy — appointed to be head of the United States Postal Service by Donald Trump — acted in a traitorous manner to obstruct the presidential election of 2020, he also remains. We are told it is “difficult” to remove him. Again the timidity Barrack Obama showed during his terms appears again with an only slightly bolder Joe Biden. We might remember that DeJoy destroyed sorting machines and delayed postal deliveries in 2020 with an intention to obstruct the mail-in votes for that year’s presidential election, for the purpose of supporting Trump’s campaign.
Similarly timid, Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is overly concerned with “looking political” in his investigations of Trump and into Republican treason. Consequently, Garland has allowed these right-wing careerists in the Department of Justice to undermine efforts at justice we might make in terms of accountability for the Republican traitors and criminals who attempted to overthrow American democracy in 2020-21, and continuing, in 2022.
Merrick Garland was Barrack Obama’s nomination for the Supreme Court in early 2016. He was never allowed a confirmation hearing; as Speaker of the House, Republican Mitch McConnell, delayed putting his hearing on the Congressional agenda until after the 2016 election. At that point, with Trump installed as president, Garland’s nomination was withdrawn; and Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, instead, to fill the vacancy left by the passing of Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on April 7, 2017. As a kind of consolation prize, after Joe Biden became president in January of 2021, Biden appointed Merrick Garland to be his Attorney General.
Merrick Garland has been a disappointment to the forces seeking justice in America for the criminality, corruption, and deaths perpetrated by Trump both during and after his term in office. Merrick Garland follows in Barrack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s footsteps in being “timid” about going after Republicans and especially Trump.
Indeed, quite recently (19 July 2022) Attorney General Garland released a memo saying that “election-year sensitivities” preclude his investigating Trump. In response I say, Trump has not even announced for 2024, and this is 2022, fer chrissakes. With that reasoning by Garland, there is no time where it is possible to enact justice on a Republican president — current or prior.
. Not long after that, Merrick Garland let us know, in a televised interview with Lester Holt on NBC News, that the January 6th investigation is the largest one ever conducted by the FBI. Despite this, actions requested of Garland by the Congressional January 6th Investigation Committee go nowhere at the Department of Justice. Subpoenas ignored by Mark Meadows, Trump’s Chief of Staff at the time of the insurrection, and others equally high up in government, are left unpunished. Meadows and such others who are higher in the “food chain” — who are in plain sight criminally refusing to cooperate, who are often actively participating in a continued attempted overthrow of our government, who are ignoring subpoenas, violating gag orders, withholding documents demanded by the Committee, fund-raising around their corruption, and such — are left, by the DOJ under Garland, to continue their illegality.
It would seem, then, that Merrick Garland is content to investigate and indict lower-level players in the January 6th insurrection but not the prime player and protagonist in its coming about, Trump, or any of its other major players. Jim Jordan; Ted Cruz; Josh Hawley; Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas; Matt Gaetz; Andy Biggs; Kevin McCarthy; Roger Stone; and many more Republicans are among those in and out of government being allowed to freely continue their damage free of any consequences.
Not to mention, with this delay in prosecution by Garland, Republicans will be saved the fire that should be upon them prior to the upcoming 2022 midterm elections. Clearly, a more robust investigation by the Department of Justice, leading to indictments of higher-up Republicans, and Trump, around their treasonous acts, would put welcome pressure on the GOP in the midterms. Such investigation and prosecution of traitorous Republicans and their accomplices in full view of the American public could not help but swing the electorate away from Republicans and their abundant lies. This is important, because it is expected that the governing party, Democrats, will lose seats in Congress in 2022 — as happens routinely in the midterms — and not gain them.
If Republicans take over Congress in 2022, as it appears they will, they have vowed to investigate Democrats in a purely partisan manner, and to hold hearings, indict, and even imprison their Democratic opponents. Just yesterday, in response to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department [the Department of Justice]…. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.” No doubt, then, with Republicans controlling Congress, the GOP will sabotage any actions Merrick Garland might have made by then around justice for their Republican co-conspirators in treason.
If you don’t think Republicans’ control of Congress would affect ongoing investigations in the Department of Justice, I refer you to the news of 6 August 2022. Reports from CPAC — the Conservative Political Action Conference — have it that Republican’s goal should be to defund the FBI and the Department of Justice. This was put out by Republican Congressman, Andy Biggs. Biggs is one of four Trump cronies the January 6th Committee referred to the Department of Justice for enforcement of subpoenas. He’s a guy with justice breathing down his neck for his involvement on January 6th. So this is how Republicans react to a threat that the Department of Justice is coming for the filthy elite’s Republican proxies. In order to cover up their criminal actions and to allow them to continue their treasonous activities, their efforts to remake America in any perverted form necessary has no limit.
Moreover, if a 2022 midterm pickup of seats by the GOP leads to a 2024 Republican presidential win, we can expect Attorney General Garland’s efforts to be tossed as quickly as FBI tips on Kavanaugh were when they were sent to Trump. Lastly, the Statute of Limitations will come into effect quite soon and render moot many such possible charges against Trump.
Yet Trump, in criminality and illegality, went well beyond anything any Republican had ever done — Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush. Regardless the corruption of those former Republican presidents, Donald Trump outmatched them decisively in actively working for the overthrow of democracy in a bloody coup — January 6th, 2021 and ongoing in 2022 — and, in plain sight and with audio recorders everywhere, seeking the reversal of election results and his installation as president for what would to him have no doubt been indefinitely.
Correspondingly, the Culture War/ Class War I described in 2013 has heated up to the point where it is exploding in violence and conflict of all kinds. The attempted coup by Donald Trump — the insurrection of January 6th 2021 — is the potent example of that Culture War/ Class War. For that reason, a photo of its violence was selected for the cover of this current, Second Edition. The insurrection of 6 January 2021 demonstrates the end result of such a Culture War/ Class War conflict in a civil war, which that January event, and other events connected with Donald Trump, were intended to bring about.
Yet bloody civil war is already bubbling beneath the surface in America. The ongoing occurrence of mass shootings is a visible and gruesome aspect of the Culture War in America. The National Rifle Association (the NRA) we find has also colluded with Russia in the undermining of American well-being. The NRA bestows huge amounts of money on Republicans in government who will kowtow to its demands. And even after shootings like the one at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, where nineteen children and two teachers were murdered and seventeen others injured by a young man with an AR-15, assault-style rifle, Republicans maintain that folks should have unlimited access to such weapons of massacre and ghastly murder. The assault at Uvalde was so brutal, so gory — an AR-15 being so powerful as to blow people up — it is said some of the ten-year-olds were decapitated by the bullet blasts. Indeed, they needed to do a DNA check on some of the children so as to identify them.
Yet the NRA continues to have support among right-wing conservative Americans in that such MAGAts feel they need such high-powered weaponry like AR-15s to defend themselves against a government they are told — often it is by Fox “News” — will oppress them and take away their freedoms. So, this is not about rifles to be used for sport, as often the gun proponents claim. Hence, we see the rise of gun massacres and gun violence in America as a violent bloody outcropping of the Culture War … and as a prelude to a civil war, if the Right gets their way in the fall elections of 2022.
Civil War Is Class War Manifest
These right-wingers are indeed preparing themselves for a civil war in America. Such a civil war would seem to be the Culture War made manifest. Which is one way of looking at it. Yet we have seen that Culture War is actually Class War in disguise. Hence, such a civil war would be desired by the wealthy powers-that-be for the purpose of keeping folks busy and distracted, while they use their influence in Congress for additional larceny against the American people.
So yes, the Culture War/ Class War I described in 2013 has intensified and now even civil war of some sort is arguably at our doorstep. We have Texas wanting to secede from the Union. We have Southern and Midwestern states wanting the power to overturn election results if Democrats win. And we have blue states, especially on the West Coast, and particularly the Pacific Northwest, wishing to be free of the racist and fascist baggage of the majority of states in the Union. These blue states also are heard wanting to break away on their own.
We had right-wing thugs busting windows, piling up bricks to be handy for protesters, and setting fires during Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 with the intention of implicating the demonstrators — Black and White — and setting off a race war. Which race conflict is also and quite clearly another variation of the ongoing class war — the class war ongoing since the beginning of civilization and as familiar as the brutal reign of pharaohs and kings.
One proponent of the right-wing agenda and a supporter of Donald Trump is Steve Bannon. This is a man who frequently discusses the civil war/ race war he is expecting to happen and wants to bring about. As recently as August 2022, in a speech at CPAC, Bannon said we are already at war: “We are at war … a political and ideological war.” He went on to call President Biden illegitimate and said that the 2020 election was stolen. meh.
Yet this civil war has already started, and already with casualties. We see it in the ways protesters on the Left — for example, Black Lives Matter and Antifa — are treated differently by police than those on the Right. On one side, the conservative side, killer Kyle Rittenhouse — who outright murdered several protesters and injured another with an assault-style rifle during the BLM protests of 2020 — is hailed as a hero. Meanwhile, the other side, we witness one killing by a BLM protester in Portland, Oregon, who thought he was acting to protect the life of another protester who was under attack.
The man in question, claiming self-defense, was never even given a trial when the police went to apprehend him days later. He was merely gunned down by the authorities. The officer’s claimed he was attempting to run. Which sounds a lot like the official police rationale for any of these slaughters against minorities and the Left; which we have seen can be an outcome for any infraction, no matter how small, if it is performed by the Left.
Michael Reinoehl was the protester in question. He released a video on social media before he was gunned down by supposedly arresting police officers. Reinoehl explained how he had fired in self-defense during the encounter at the demonstration; he did this to save another protester who he thought to be about to be stabbed. Of the incident on 29 August 2020, Reinoehl said, “Had I stepped forward, he would have Maced or stabbed me…. I was confident that I did not hit anyone innocent and I made my exit…. I had no choice. I mean, I, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn’t going to do that.”
The right-wing victim, Aaron Danielson, was a member of the white supremacist group, Patriot Prayer. Its members were known to engage in violence against anti-fascist and BLM protesters in Portland, going back as long as 2016. Danielson was one of the participants in a massive rolling demonstration of Trump supporters that Saturday — the day of his death — which was termed the Trump 2020 Cruise Rally. The rally involved hundreds of cars, many bedecked with Trump signs and flags. It is reported this parade of cars attempted to drive through the crowds of BLM protesters and that folks in the rally were spraying demonstrators with pepper spray from the back of their pickup trucks. All this happened before the shooting in question. All this played into the context of a BLM protester shooting a member of such a group who had been harassing and assaulting protesters for hours.
Yet none of these details of the incident mattered to the police who gunned down Michael Reinoehl. A family man, who was an avid snowboarder, Reinoehl became concerned about the fate of the planet and began attending the Portland protests. His murder during his supposed apprehension was noted by William Barr, infamous Attorney General of the United States under Donald Trump, the way one would describe the assassination of a terrorist leader: “The tracking down of Reinoehl — a dangerous fugitive, admitted Antifa member, and suspected murderer — is a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities.”3
Correspondingly, and as we might expect, the media barely mentioned the incident of this Black Lives Matter protester’s killing by police. We see that, just like with the murders at Kent State in 1970 and the assassination of Black Panther Leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on 4 December 1969, the media conforms to a right-wing narrative that Lefties are dangerous and vicious; whereas they view those on the Right who storm Capitols, kill police, and occupy State Houses as being more like errant children or tourists.
The killing of Black Panthers Hampton and Clark, incidentally, is instructive here. The attack began when fourteen plainclothes police officers pulled up in front of the apartment building of the victims during the predawn hours of December 4th, 1969. They arrived hunkered inside a Peoples Gas truck. They had a machine gun, a shotgun, pistols, and a map of their target — the bedroom of Fred Hampton. The police busted down the door and began firing. They sprayed bullets over ninety times, which included machine gun rounds. They fired ninety rounds wounding four young Black Panthers and killing Hampton and Clark. History.com reports, “Not only was the killing of Hampton and Clark a cold-blooded assassination of two militant Black activists, but documents later revealed it was coordinated by the FBI as part of a secret program to neutralize and destroy the Black Panther Party, which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover privately called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”4
The real story of this attack, however, did not come out for years, as the police, as they are wont to do, provided the initial cover story; just as they did later in Portland on the killing of Reinoehl. Cook County state’s attorney, Edward Hanrahan, said at the time of this cold-blooded assassination of Black Panther activists in 1969 that the officers were trying to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons when they were surprise attacked. Quoting Hanrahan, “The immediate, violent, criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party.”5 None of that is true however. The victims were in bed, probably sleeping; hardly were they able to fire back. “Announced police officers”? I repeat, the attacking authorities were in plain clothes and they arrived hidden in a Peoples Gas truck, as though it were a Mafia hit. Notice the pattern: A cold-blooded assassination by police was followed by bald-faced lies from authorities.
These Black Panther and Reinoehl examples therefore demonstrate the differences in how the Left and the Right are treated by authorities and the police: One side is murdered, gunned down in cold blood, then lied about afterward; the other, like Trump and his accomplices, are honored and/or go free. Just as with the murders of those two students at Jackson State, in Mississippi, in 1970 and the four at Kent State, as well; one side, the right-wing side, of this Culture War applauds the assassinations and assaults of those on the Left. It was headlined in newspapers at the time in 1970 that folks in the South cheered the killings of students at Kent State, calling them “bums.”
Let’s revisit the Jackson State killings. According to Wikipedia.com, on 15 May 1970, eleven days after the Kent State massacre, two more students were murdered and twelve were injured in a thirty-second volley of over 460 shots by police directed into a student dormitory on campus. Initially, around seventy-five police from Jackson, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol responded to about one hundred Black students at then Jackson State College, now Jackson State University, who were reportedly harassing drivers on the main street that bisected the campus. I repeat, about seventy-five armed officers were dispatched to handle about a hundred mischievous African-American college students.
That overreaction, not suspicious enough, then two and a half hours later, the crowd was gathered in front of a woman’s dormitory, Alexander Hall. Mind you, while the initial minor confrontation happened around 9:30pm, what follows at Alexander Hall happened around midnight, with no indication there was much belligerence on the student’s side between. Unexpectedly, the police gathered there opened fire on the dormitory.6 Forty state highway patrolmen used shotguns to blow out the windows on the narrow side of the dormitory building. Every window was shattered in the barrage of 460 bullets.
Naturally the police provided a bogus report to justify their outrageous response to mere protesters. The police response was that a “sniper” had been seen on one of the upper floors of the dormitory. Seriously, they actually came up with: that a single sniper was shooting at them “from all directions.” Of course, afterward no evidence for a sniper was ever found, and the students maintain they never provoked the officers. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest investigated the incident. It resulted in no arrests, but the Commission concluded, “…that the 28-second fusillade from police officers was an unreasonable, unjustified overreaction…. A broad barrage of gunfire in response to reported and unconfirmed sniper fire is never warranted.” 7
This shooting of students by police occurred eleven days after a similar thing occurred on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. The Kent State massacre occurred on 4 May 1970, in Kent, Ohio. Four unarmed students were murdered there, and nine others were injured. Around three hundred students had gathered to protest President Richard Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War, in his bombing of Cambodia, and the presence of the National Guard on campus. The student protesters were confronted by twenty-eight National Guard soldiers. The National Guard fired tear-gas canisters into the crowd to disperse the protesters. About ten to fifteen students proceeded to throw the canisters, and some rocks, back at the soldiers. When supposedly a sniper shot was heard — there was no shot, but at this point, you know they’re going to have some bogus story — the Guardspersons began firing.
Now, keep in mind the cold-blooded assassinations — in a massive barrage of bullets — of Black Panthers Hampton and Clark that were ordered by FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, five months earlier. Remember also the similarly unprovoked barrage of 460 bullets by police into Alexander Hall at Jackson State, which would occur only days later. First, one notices that sniper fire seems to be the go-to cover story at this time. Second, these events all have the markings of being intentional, of being planned. All occurred while J. Edgar Hoover was FBI Director. He was FBI Director for fifty years, up till 1972. Clearly, FBI Director Hoover shows himself — using the assassinations of the Black Panther leaders as evidence — to have no compunctions about using police authorities to gun down leftist opposition. The strategy seems to have been to use selective murder of activists to keep the Left terrorized and subdued, so Righties in authority, on behalf of the 1%, could continue their thievery and corruption in government undisturbed.
Further evidence that the massacre at Kent State was a strategic move by the powers-that-be, directed by J. Edgar Hoover, is based on what is heard on an audio recording of the event. On the recording, one can hear the word, “fire!” though it is not clearly heard enough to be definitive. This theory has it that a National Guard commander shouted “fire” — to open fire on the protesters — in the moment before the assault. In any case, over a horrific thirteen seconds, about sixty-seven bullets were fired into the crowd and at the end of it lay four dead and nine wounded student protesters.8
This violent assault of the Right on the Left continues to have casualties. Even this year, 2022, in Portland, Oregon, again a right-wing, women-hating thug shot into a group of anti-racist protesters. A sixty-year-old woman was killed. On 19 February 2022, Benjamin Smith, age forty-three, sprayed bullets into an anti-racist demonstration injuring four and killing the woman. Calling them “violent terrorists” and misogynistic slurs, Smith also threatened to shoot them if they passed his house. News reports have it that these women shot at were not even part of the official demonstration but were traffic coordination volunteers. And what happened? Says, Dajah Beck, one of those involved with the group attacked by Smith, “We were unarmed traffic safety volunteers who weren’t with any protesters…. Four women trying to de-escalate, and he unloaded a 45 into us because he didn’t like being asked to leave and stop calling us ‘terrorist cunts.’”9
Note that the first official police reports, according to an early news release, had it that the initial confrontation was between an armed homeowner and “armed” protesters. This is a typical spin used against the Left, characterizing them as armed, vicious, and dangerous — to use words used against the Black Panthers in 1969, against the Kent State antiwar protesters, and by William Barr against Portland protester Michael Reinoehl. These characterizations of the Left are ever used to hide police and right-wing terrorism of the Left and to distract the public from the murderous injustice involved in their attacks on them.
And as usual, such a characterization of the Left as violent, armed, and vicious is a fabrication; totally made up by the media and the Righties in government to keep the Left under violent attack by gullible MAGAts in this Culture War. Whereas Righties repeat concocted untruths like the one everyone has heard that there were antiwar protesters in the Sixties spitting on veterans returning from Vietnam … totally untrue! a fabrication with absolutely no evidence … indeed, “peaceniks” is a more accurate characterization of the Left. Unlike on the Right, where violence is praised and rewarded, on the Left we have, overwhelmingly, folks working for a world without violence, with peace, and doing it nonviolently.
Sure enough, the video of the Portland shooting of traffic coordinator, June Knightly, showed a man approach the group and begin yelling at them. He threatened to shoot them if they should go near his house, calling them “violent terrorists,” and casting misogynistic slurs at the women.
In actuality, the deceased victim, June Knightly, was a longtime and beloved member of the activist community in Portland, Oregon. She would frequently help to keep marchers safe by assisting with traffic control and security at protests.
As for the shooter, Benjamin Smith, his roommate told Oregon Public Broadcasting, “He talked about wanting to go shoot commies and Antifa all the friggin’ time.”
What it amounts to is that one side — people of color, demonstrators, hippies, and Democrats — are seen as proper targets for murder. Using twisted logic and outright untruths, right-wing media outlets like Fox News implicate them, insanely. Lefties are blamed for everything wrong, including the criminal actions of the Right. We see this, for example, in the batshit crazy claims by Republicans — Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance. She maintains that the January 6th insurrectionists, bedecked with Trump flags, summoned and then directed by Trump himself to go the Capitol, and shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” were actually Antifa. This, as late as August 2022, Greene has publicly asserted; while conversely she has called the insurrectionists Trump-supporting political prisoners.10
Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, knowing they are speaking to uneducated simplistic MAGAts, Righties and Republicans no longer even try to appear consistent or logical and will say just about anything at anytime … as long as it riles up their followers and keeps them confused enough for future manipulation. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity also revel in their rousing up violence against those on the Left, speaking as if we are already at civil war.
Meanwhile those protesters and murderers on the Right are sometimes given the royal treatment, sometimes honored, and when egregiously committing crimes, they are let off with little consequences for their actions. There is no doubt that White and Right protesters are treated with much kindness. Whereas ever since Chicago police and construction workers rioted at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, brutally beating and cracking the skulls of protesters; and ever since four were murdered at Kent State in 1970 for protesting an unjust war, there has been open season on the Left and its protesters. I should mention the incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 August 2017 — where a peaceful demonstrator, Heather Heyer, protesting against a White supremacist rally, was run over and killed when a car driven by White supremacist James Alex Field, Jr, plowed into the crowd.
Heather Heyer — being run over by an auto driven by a Right-wing thug — is not the only incidence in recent years where protesters have been maimed and murdered by Righties running vehicles into protest crowds. We need keep in mind, such murders by the Right of Leftie protesters are even being sanctioned by law in some states. Republican lawmakers in 2021 introduced eighty-one anti-protest bills. And Oklahoma and Iowa passed legislation that grants immunity to drivers who have run over and injured protesters in public streets. You heard that correctly, the Right is being told they can get away with driving cars into protesters and maiming people.
Compare that sanctioning of Rightie violence and the kindly and supportive treatment of the Right by authorities with what I have been saying about the Black Panther leaders, student protesters, and Michael Reinoehl. Clearly one side is getting away with murder and being encouraged in it, while innocents on the Left are being massacred.
Race War
We can say, culture war is class war disguised. Race war is also class war disguised, with the issue of race being used by the wealthy side of the class war to enlist gullible White racists and Republicans to their side. Finally, civil war is class war manifest. That also is something not pointed out, generally speaking.
We see that the Civil War in America in the 1860s was a manifestation, much like today, of the desires of the wealthy elite — particularly the slave owners and the powerful rich people in adherence to their economic interests. They set themselves against the will of the African-American slaves, initially, of course. Yet more and more people, White as well as Black, even at that time in the Nineteenth Century, were moved by their empathy past the hate and bigotry around them.
Such “woke” people over a century and a half ago increased in number as America grew psychologically past the ego compulsion to find fault with an “out” group, in order to bolster one’s flagging self-esteem. Hence the wealthy elite of the Civil War era, in collusion with the slave owners, set themselves as well against the will of the people, not just the African-Americans of that time. This is very much like they are doing today in America … with the wealthy forcing their huge meaty palm down upon the Right side of the scales of justice … in spite of public opinion arrayed against them.
My Prediction — Truth Versus the Big Lie
This book also predicted the rise of the Big Lie and the use of falsehoods, which we see abundantly in America since the installation of Donald Trump. What we saw that was commonplace with the W. Bush administration became comically absurd and reality bending during the Trump years. We witnessed surreal assertions that there were “alternative facts” — as Trump advisor, Kellyanne Conway, phrased it, famously. We saw also the rise of torrents of “fake news” and misinformation. And this in particular by the person and persons who made it their modus operandi to accuse others of it — which would be Donald Trump, Republicans, and the Russians supporting them.
We see how those committing crimes and treason are the most likely to raise a ruckus about it and point their fingers at innocent others. This tactic of boldly shouting out that the other side is doing what one, oneself, is doing was Trump’s and the Republicans’ strategy and was pervasive during the Trump years. And it makes strategic and psychological sense to direct attention at a scapegoat when one is oneself guilty. A prime example of this use of preemptive accusations as a shield for one’s own crimes was Donald Trump’s allegations of Hillary Clinton as “crooked Hillary,” “stolen election,” and “lock her up.” These and terms like them thrown out by Trump and his Republican stooges are actual admissions and depictions of their own secret and not-so-secret activities.
Such a preemptive accusation by the GOP is strategic because one’s opponent is thrust into having to defend themselves, which takes the heat off oneself. Even more diabolically, any pushback to the accusations, any attempt to address the crimes of those shouting about it, comes across as defensive and childish. For no matter how well phrased the accurate accusation, it ends up sounding like, “No, I’m not. You are.” And how that shows up in the actions of those Democrats on the defensive is exactly that “timidity” I mentioned — thinking especially about the responses of Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Attorney General Merrick Garland — where one is afraid of “looking political” and so hesitates in doing justice and seeking accountability.
This tactic by Republicans falls under the category of “rope-a-dope,” as framed by former Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele. By that I mean that in so many ways, Republicans use Democrats’ less aggressive stance and their sensitivity to fairness and peace against them. Whereas when comes an opportunity to counterattack, Republicans come in guns blazing, truth and fairness, irrelevant.
This pervasive use of the Big Lie by Republicans was all laid out in the second half of this book on the “obvious truths.” While the terms that were being used in the national political conversation — as I analyzed in the 2013 version — might seem dated, now, they still accurately reflect the arenas of operation of the conservative mind. It was once popular for the phrases “Democrat special interests,” “tax and spend” Democrats, “wealth-creating” sector of the economy, the “health-care crisis,” “Obamacare,” and union “fat cats” to be thrown around. The terms in use by the Right to concoct their self-serving fabrications are continually changed, though the underlying agenda remains. Now we hear such terms as “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “alternative facts,” “stolen election,” “treason,” and “coup” repeated endlessly by the very entity, the GOP and Trump, who are most guilty of that which they accuse others. That hidden Republican agenda, served by the use of these terms, has to do with the Right’s intention to use government as a profit-making enterprise for the supremely wealthy.
Although changing the terms by which Republican propaganda is put out might make it seem we are somehow changing, we are not: The pervasive mindset on the Right — one that was analyzed and described as far back as the 1950s as “the authoritarian personality” and more recently as that of “the patriarchy” — remains. It is characterized by an emphasis on power, control, scapegoating, and punishment. Its methods are lies, misinformation, propaganda, threats, brutality, and murder. To that end of tracking their varying terms, I’ve updated some of those “obvious truths” — which are not actually true — in the final Part of this book. I include as well some newer gambits being thrown out there by Republicans more recently, in 2022.
My Prediction — Psychedelics and Mental Health
This book in its original version also shed light on the developments in the drug and counseling field, when I detailed how the generations alive today differed in their use of recreational drugs.
We find increasingly that the drugs attractive to the Sixties Generation, which I mentioned in the First Edition were psychedelics and marijuana, are being found, just as they were for primal societies, to be the best hope for the mental health of the nation; indeed, the world. This is another area where the Baby-Boomer/ Sixties/ Vietnam Generation showed themselves to be ahead of the wave in terms of America’s and the world’s direction. We saw in the First Edition how that psychological evolution — manifesting along with and promoted by that very Sixties generation — was blocked by the powers-that-be: The “king” simply will not “die.” We are beset by the reactionary thuggish thinking of bygone generations surrounded by a sea of an increasing number of “evolved,” “woke” folk, wondering why their greater numbers have so little sway in government policy.
For in our society, progress continues in the cultural arena unabated, less so in the political arena. This progress corresponds with the growing legalization of such psychedelics and marijuana in the U.S. In Oregon, magic mushrooms/ psilocybin are now, August 2022, legal, as is marijuana. When the First Edition of this book was published — November, 2013 — there were only two states in which pot was legal: Washington State and Colorado. Both had legalized the substance only shortly before, in November 2012.
Currently, however, 2022, there are nineteen states plus Washington, D.C., and Guam where one can legally purchase cannabis. In Maine, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado, California, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, Washington state, and Oregon, pot is now legal. In California there is an effort to legalize magic mushrooms as well. Meanwhile many cities have legalized magic mushrooms/ psilocybin on their own, and they include, Denver, Colorado — the first city, in May 2019 — Oakland, California, June 2019; Santa Cruz, California, January 2020; Washington, D.C., November 2020; Somerville, Massachusetts, January 2021; Cambridge and Northampton, Massachusetts, in February and March 2021; and Seattle in October 2021.
This is a potent example of how this Culture War/ Class War is being won by the people in terms of their desires; while the intentions of those wealthy who would wish to control all aspects of our lives are in retreat. This contrasts with the management of the governmental and social policies of the U.S. in recent years, which have become increasingly aligned with the intentions of the wealthy.
November 2022 — Culture War/ Class War’s Reckoning Point
To this end — specifically, increased control of society’s mechanisms by the Right even as it goes against public opinion — the stealing by Republicans of three more seats on the Supreme Court and the overturning of Roe V. Wade come to mind.
The reversal of Roe V. Wade is instructive on many levels. Amy Coney Barret’s seat was stolen by rushing through her nomination process just prior to the 2020 election; it was the seat held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Brett Kavanaugh’s seat was taken from Anthony Kennedy, when during Trump’s term, Kennedy suspiciously stepped down from the bench. It was suspicious because Brett Kavanaugh clerked under Justice Kennedy and Justice Kennedy’s son worked for Deutsche Bank, the same bank that gave Trump so many loans. Then Kavanaugh’s $200,000 credit card debt disappeared before his confirmation.
And of course, the Supreme Court seat that Antonin Scalia held at his death on 13 February 2016, almost nine months before that year’s presidential election, was robbed of its proper Obama nomination. For Mitch McConnell defied American rights and the Constitution in preventing any nomination process from going forward in Congress during the last year of Obama’s term; hence the seat was left for Donald Trump to fill in 2017. With these stolen seats on the Supreme Court in place, Roe was overturned.
Yet on the cultural side? As of 3 August 2022, conservative, red-state Kansas has voted overwhelmingly — fifty-nine percent — to keep the right of abortion, in a referendum held the previous day on the Supreme Court’s decision to allow it to be outlawed. The numbers that showed up to vote for the right to abortion in red-state Kansas are reported to be as high as they were for Barrack Obama, when he won his surprisingly popular race for the presidency in 2008. Yet this was a referendum, and it was on a primary day, not a general election. More so, and outside of just Kansas, polls are reporting that approximately seventy-five percent of the American population favors safe and easy access to abortion; which contrasts with the opposition to reproductive choice as enshrined currently in the Supreme Court.
These things in mind, it has become increasingly clear that the country’s conservative, right-wing turn is being accomplished only by illegal, unjust, and unfair means. As the majority of the country has moved on to more progressive ideas, the Right and Republicans continue to win only be cheating, by changing the rules that have been in place for many decades.
We’ve had three stolen Supreme Court seats, along with three stolen presidential elections: Gore’s, Kerry’s, and Hillary’s victories were taken from them in ways that I explained in 2013 and expand upon in this revised work.
In sum, the division between the people’s will and their controlling-governing bodies is the Culture War/ Class War I have been analyzing made manifest. And the success of the Right at the governmental and institutional level is exactly that “fierce rearguard action” massively fueled by the moneyed interests I described in the First Edition as being their last effort in an ultimately futile agenda.
All in all, since this book was published in November 2013 originally, all the patterns of the Culture War/ Class War described therein have expanded and have become more intense and violent. They are currently reaching a peak of tension as the January 6th Congressional Investigation continues revealing its stunning findings, which implicate so many Republicans; and Biden’s Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland, continues issuing subpoenas and indictments of lower-level players, on his way, supposedly, to the top.
We can hope that the FBI search of Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022 — ostensibly having to do with Trump’s removal of many boxes of classified documents from the White House — indicates Garland will have some teeth.
On the flip side of that, we notice Merrick Garland only acted against Trump after the former president made off with nuclear secrets above top secret along with payroll information on those working as spies for our intelligence. Even with espionage of the likes that our intelligence operatives would be ferreted out and killed and the possibility that nuclear secrets in foreign hands could lead to worldwide nuclear annihilation, it took Garland eighteen months to approve the search.
With what else we know about collusion between Trump and Putin to undermine the United States and return Russia to its Soviet-era glory, along with Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons against the world for its support of Ukraine, we can speculate now what their grand plan might have been. This is a plan that was worked out by Trump and Putin, with oligarchs around the world, for example, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia. It is a plan whose details were concocted on pleasure boats and hotel rooms around the world going back before Trump’s installation in 2016.
It is a story that was told us by whistleblowers from the U.S. and Russia. For their contributions in warning us, these truth-telling witnesses to the worldwide conspiracy were rounded up and prosecuted by Russian and American authorities, after Trump gained power. Reality Winner, in the United States, comes to mind. Yet this patriotic person, who was imprisoned for her service to our democracy, had at least one Russian counterpart.
Winner’s Russian counterpart was a first-hand witness to the conspiracy involving Russian oligarchs with Trump and Republicans undermining America. As Rachael Maddow of MSNBC News reported at the time, she reached out to, tried to warn the United States. Yet Trump, with his Attorney General, Barr, would have nothing to do with her. Ignored by American authorities, she was picked up in Southeast Asia and returned to Russia, for consequences about which we can only guess.
It would seem the plan was to unite Russia and the United States strategically — with Trump and Putin working behind the scenes together using nuclear blackmail to keep themselves in power — to create a worldwide hegemony. Which for the rest of us would be a dystopian nightmare, along the lines of North Korea, if Trump were to get his wish. When Trump lost, it appears plan B was to steal the nuclear and other sensitive documents and proceed as close to plan A as possible.
Despite these grave and dire consequences for Trump’s theft of national secrets, we find out Garland had been in negotiations with Trump for the return of these top secret national documents for a half year and even longer. This, for a crime — espionage, nuclear secrets to the Russians — that was punished by death when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did the same thing in the early Fifties.
So, with the gravest consequences ever for non-action — the end of life on this planet and the enslavement of the world with a nuclear gun held to its head — Merrick Garland has pussyfooted. Despite the highest crimes being committed by Trump and the Right against the United States and the very life on this planet, the wealthy elite conspirators — example, Trump — are protected, allowed to skate, walk free. No consequences. So far.
If Garland has a bite, it has so far been a nibble. A man, Trump, who has committed high crimes and treason against the United States continues to walk free in September 2022 and to spread lies and incite violence towards the rest of us in the country.
If Garland has teeth, then, for the sake of the country, the life of the planet, and the cause of democracy continuing in this world, he’d better get to his indictments fast; it needs to happen soon. The Democrats cannot risk having another time when they had an opportunity to act but didn’t — out of some nicety or other toward Republicans. For the day of reckoning for Democrats and for democracy — election day for the 2022 midterm elections — is coming up fast. Democrats need to win big to stop the Republicans’ ongoing coup and to keep our democracy.
Indeed, all this Culture War/ Class War/ Civil War will culminate soon in that Americans will know in November 2022 whether we will be irrevocably shunted onto one route or another: Democrats will win in November enough seats to actually control the government of the U.S. or else Republicans will get in, take up control again, and will continue uninhibitedly undermining American democracy, taking away American freedoms, destroying our planet’s life, and interfering into the private lives of Americans. All this Republicans will attempt to do; even as they swim against an increasingly powerful tide of public opinion and progressive awareness. The tension could not be greater.
In this Second, Revised, Edition of Culture War, Class War — subtitled, this time, Truth and Generations — we will again and again see how this book accurately depicted and predicted the current radical division of minds in American society. We will review also the psychological forces on both sides, and operating in all generations involved, which help us understand this divide, this violent split in the American population between Left and Right. I will have added, however, for this edition, additional more recent developments in this Culture War/ Class War. For the tendencies detailed herein have burgeoned in recent years and have reached an explosive level.
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INTRODUCTION
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Culture War Is Class War Disguised
As Progressive Ideas Gain Ground Alongside Increasingly Oppressive Governmental Policy, Conflict Intensifies
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Culture War, Class War explores the resulting cultural divide and how it was instigated and kept alive for fifty years in America by certain elite powers and how and why they chose to benefit while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.”
“Hostilities have resumed since the Sixties — especially beginning in 1970 — until currently there is all-out class war that is becoming increasingly bloody and one way or another is taking a toll in lives of the American people.”
“Democratic and liberal ideas have been gaining ground everywhere since 1960, and Hillary Clinton easily won the popular vote. Yet Hillary Clinton was blocked, as Al Gore and John Kerry before her, by GOP shenanigans and, in 2016, foreign, specifically Russian, interference in America’s elections.”
“The ferocious assault from the Right on liberal values on the policy level, while those values have been gaining in popularity throughout the country, is clearly understood in light of the intense fighting of a waning old guard with its back against the wall — an increasingly maniacal geriatric set of the filthy rich and its paid accomplices, fearing their extermination, as their policies are increasingly unpopular and extraordinarily blatant in their corruption and abject alliance with the ends, solely, of the 1%.”
“This book will help you to understand how the wealthy elites were able to pull off that major accomplishment of installing Trump — who was arrayed firmly against any benefit to the voters — after having fertilized the minds of Americans with lies, in a full out and conscious assault, since 1970.”
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[Introduction text begins:] Class War is disguised as Culture War. The 1% — especially the wealthiest of them, who have been termed the Filthy Rich — foment Culture War among the 99% to distract and cover their real economic motives.
Culture War, Class War explores the resulting cultural divide and how it was instigated and kept alive for fifty years in America by certain elite powers and how and why they chose to benefit while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.
Class War
Of course, class war has been going on since the beginning of civilization; it is inevitable with hierarchical societies.
Yet some eras are more harmonious than others. One might think that enlightened principles of democracy, freedom, and human rights — normally associated with Western societies in recent centuries — had made modern times one of them. One would be wrong.
While the rise of unions in the early decades of the Twentieth Century and the post–Depression-Era initiation and expanse of social programs to benefit the common welfare might have made the America of the Forties, Fifties, and to some extent, Sixties, one of those more harmonious eras, that trend in America and that era of relative class peace has been totally reversed. Hostilities have resumed since the Sixties — especially beginning in 1970 — until currently there is all-out class war that is becoming increasingly bloody and one way or another is taking a toll on the lives of the American people.
Culture War, Class War is about how that reversal happened and what has transpired in the last fifty years to bring us to this crisis. In particular I focus on the story not told about that — the story the 1% has made sure you would not hear.
Culture War
This book looks into why America’s “privileged class” — its “royalty,” “blue bloods” — started a “culture war” against the middle class, working class, the poor … and the educated, artists, and humanists … in the early 1970s. We discover how their fear of Sixties activism panicked them into an all-out assault against elements that threatened their wealth and privilege in all institutions of American society — media, education, medicine, government, politics, publication, religion, especially higher education, and so on. They then restructured these institutions to better suit themselves and to ever facilitate their profit-making enterprises.
We see how this Culture War/ Class War continues today: blatantly so in the MAGA, Trump, and Tea Party movements, the Republican Party, the Wall Street giveaways at the expense of jobs, tax cuts for the “filthy rich” and corporations, budget battles and cuts in government services and entitlement programs, rampant anti-environmentalism, the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade, and anti-minority, anti-immigrant laws and attacks.
For example, we see rabid Culture War/ Class War in the abortion debate; attacks on unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and many other states; ever shrinking civil and human rights, including the suspension of habeas corpus signed by George W. Bush; assaults on voter rights; the gunning down and murdering of minorities; redistricting and gerrymandering in states to ensure the cultural divide while giving unfair advantage to Republicans; runaway imprisonment of minorities and free-thinkers through egregious anti-drug and anti-sex/anti-gender laws; indefinite imprisonment without trial and torture of political prisoners; ongoing budget, debt, and tax battles; and much, much more.
We saw it in 2010 with politicians like Congressman Barton who kowtow to corporations shamelessly defending British Petroleum from having to pay for its atrocious oil spill. Culture War/ Class War was visible to all in the candidacy — Republican of course — for the Arizona Senator’s race running in 2012 on a platform of doing away with Social Security and Medicare. Currently, in 2022, Republican Senators Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are taking such a position of eliminating Social Security, as well. Moreover, Senators Lindsey Graham (SC), Mitt Romney (UT), and Marco Rubio (FL) — all Republicans — have gone on record saying they want to at least cut Social Security.
We have seen Culture War/ Class War since 2010 in the all-out attack on the poor and middle class by the wealthy 1%, who succeeded in getting an additional half trillion dollars in tax cuts at the end of 2010 from President Obama and have been using that money to take away free speech and democracy by clubbing their critics mute in the public arena of discourse and orchestrating the legislative and electoral processes ever since.
The Resistance
And we see the fightback from the grass roots in the form of the Wisconsin union uprising of 2011, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the rising up of pro-choice women in support of reproductive freedom in 2022, the Women’s Movement, and the worldwide Occupy movement, which began in 2011. There has been an Arab Spring and an American Autumn to get or restore those basic human rights and move toward economic justice in societies around the globe.
Other more current outcroppings of resistance have to do with the reversal of Roe Versus Wade in July of 2022. This fight over abortion rights, thus, is far from over. A new wrong has been created which the women, and righteous men, of America will struggle to correct. The women are already showing their power in nationwide demonstrations.
And the women are powerful. The Women’s March in Washington D.C., on 21 January 2017, a day after Trump’s inauguration as president, exemplified both their ability and their desire to not turn back the clock on their rights. The March has been called the largest single-day protest ever staged in the U.S.1
One of the biggest battles in that Class War was waged in the U.S. presidential election of 2012. The 1% — having gained an unfair advantage to use their vast wealth unrestrainedly to further their ends electorally — had managed to pollute the electoral process so much that one of its most visible members, Mitt Romney, was able to be one election away from being the most powerful person in the world. Almost one half the American people somehow did not see how that would be a Waterloo for the forces of the 99%, and they were okay with that happening. The unfair advantage was one that, claiming free speech, allowed corporations to unrestrainedly use their money to contribute to candidates and influence elections. This occurred with the Supreme Court decision of 2010 regarding Citizens United in which corporations had been declared to have the rights of people.
To make things worse, this came on the heels of the 1%’s ongoing effort to dial back the 99%’s ability to have a say in their governing with fantastical redistricting outlines and by limiting and harassing voter participation throughout the U.S. with draconian registration requirements and purging of voter rolls. The fact that Mitt Romney lost in 2012 is in indication of the “fall of obvious truths” that will be discussed in the latter part of this book and which is the hope abundant in the advance of generations.
Still, the never-ending budget battles — which included, incidentally, a shutdown of the U.S. Government in 2013 because the Republicans do not want to allow health care coverage in America (Obamacare) — and the filibustering and gridlock in Washington during the Obama years on virtually all legislation needed for American advance indicated that the Romney battle, though won, did not end the class war. Regarding the government shutdown, Barrack Obama wrote, at the time, “They’ve shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. In other words, they demanded ransom just for doing their job.”
Finally, we see how the aspirations of the corrupt 1% and the filthy rich billionaires was realized four years later with the installation of puppet Trump. Of course, that was only accomplished through the robust assistance of Russia’s Putin.
The Trump Factor
How this outright foreign interference in a U.S. election — by the power in the world, Russia, most arrayed against the U.S. — could happen is made understandable in this book. Democratic and liberal ideas have been gaining ground everywhere since 1960, and Hillary Clinton easily won the popular vote. Yet Hillary Clinton was blocked, as Al Gore and John Kerry before her, by GOP shenanigans and, in 2016, foreign, specifically Russian, interference in America’s elections. The ferocious assault from the Right on liberal values on the policy level, while those values have been gaining in popularity throughout the country, is clearly understood in light of the intense fighting of a waning old guard with its back against the wall — an increasingly maniacal geriatric set of the filthy rich and its paid accomplices, fearing their extermination, as their policies are increasingly unpopular and extraordinarily blatant in their corruption and abject alliance with the ends, solely, of the 1%.
We recall again that which happened in 2016, when a worldwide cartel of billionaire oligarchs headed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in collusion with moneyed interests in the United States, was able to put into power the billionaire puppet Donald Trump. The culmination of all the prior voter suppression, redistricting, and voter registration manipulation previously — and now employing a massive hacking and misinformation campaign — was that the 1%, through Trump, were able to hypnotize a huge swath of the American population that their middle- and working-class interests would be advanced by a person born into money, Trump, who had displayed anything but a nature of largess, let alone compassion, previously.
The 1% managed to convince a goodly number that an autocratic personality, who gloried in surroundings of gold, would somehow benefit their pocketbooks. The billionaire elites somehow orchestrated the media to convince many that an ostensibly authoritarian (“You’re fired!”) and acknowledgedly sexist personality would benefit their freedom and human rights. And the 1% somehow convinced enough people that someone who advocated nuking Iran (Trump) and using nuclear weapons with North Korea would somehow be better for peace. This book will help you to understand how the wealthy elites were able to pull off that major accomplishment of installing Trump — who was arrayed firmly against any benefit to the voters — after having fertilized the minds of Americans with lies, in a full out and conscious assault, since 1970.
The Women’s Movement
Yet immediately upon Trump’s inauguration, Trump was faced with astonishing pushback from a resistance movement fueled by women power.
The Women’s March on Washington arose as a reaction to the installation of Donald Trump as president of the United States. In particular, women were alarmed because Trump’s misogynistic comments, past behavior, and his implemented and proposed policies clearly revealed him to be anti-women, anti-children, anti-democracy, against free speech and the open media, reactionary and regressive (in the bad meaning of the word) and authoritarian in general … aspiring to be totalitarian.2
The Women’s March on Washington of January 21st, 2017 — exactly one day after illegitimate President Trump’s inauguration — addressed issues that were comprehensive. Yet they were held together by a keystone regarding overturning the pervasive male domination of the trajectories and policies of nations — which currently, are still in the sway of patriarchal notions — toward something that has all the elements I have been mentioning as needing changing in the First Edition of this work. This includes, along with women’s rights, a concern for the environment and the planet, LGBTQ rights, workers’ rights, racial equality, immigration and healthcare reforms, religious freedom, and reproductive rights.
Regarding the issues of climate change, nuclear contamination, and pollution, the March’s organizers were clear: “We believe that every person and every community in our nation has the right to clean water, clean air, and access to and enjoyment of public lands. We believe that our environment and our climate must be protected and that our land and natural resources cannot be exploited for corporate gain or greed — especially at the risk of public safety and health.”3
The Women’s Movement, as it arose in the Women’s March, was a worldwide movement at its very start. A credible estimate of its strength in January 2017 is that over five million people — women, men, and children — marched throughout the world, in eighty-two nations. Other estimates have it even stronger and that 3.3 to 5.2 million participated in the United States alone.4
In the United States, the March encouraged women to step up to positions of political power. The organizers of the March came out with “Ten Actions for the First One Hundred Days,” in which, among other things, women were encouraged to run for office at all levels and in numbers greater than they ever had.5 That part succeeded, as was evident in the unprecedented gains by women in political offices nationwide in the elections held later that year.6
These gains were indisputably inspired by the Women’s March and catalyzed by the Ready to Run program operated out of Rutgers’s University. The Ready to Run program schools women on the details and procedures of running for office. Applications for the program, which has eighteen partners and is carried out nationwide, soared after the 2016 election was stolen from Hillary Clinton, a woman.
Hillary’s Win and Its Theft
Incidentally, the manner in which a win in the 2016 election was taken away from Hillary Clinton was part of what drove the fury of women that followed it. Hillary’s presidency was ripped from her through a massive misinformation campaign conducted out of Russia, with collusion from the Trump campaign and many in the Republican Party.
Despite all this, Hillary Clinton prevailed by over three million votes in the popular vote count but was not awarded the office because of razor-thin, highly questionable “wins” for Trump in states — it is still to be determined to what extent there was Russian and Republican influence on the actual tallies, though that is likely — which created an electoral college win for Donald Trump. As former president, Jimmy Carter, remarked in 2022, the presidency of Donald Trump in 2016 should be declared illegitimate, due to the illegal interference in the election from a foreign power. I might add, with paper-thin wins in battleground states, clearly if there had been no interference it would have made the difference and we would have seen an easy win for Hillary Clinton, including in the electoral college. Yes, Hillary was robbed.
Indeed, the vote totals in the states that created the electoral college “win” seemed perfectly calculated to bring them about, barely winning, in these states. Experts using mathematical models have asserted that the win was highly unlikely to have occurred in those states — in those exact states with those perfectly suited electoral votes and with such consistently narrow margins of victory — without some intentional manipulation of the results, brought about through some kind of hacking.
Further suspicion attends the fact that, just as with Gore in 2000, states were given to Hillary early on which were taken away later on election night. In both cases, exit interviews conducted with folks after they voted showed the Democrats winning, while the final tallies contradicted that giving the win to Republicans. In response we were given — just as after the 2000 and 2004 elections, stolen from Gore and Kerry, respectively — ludicrous explanations as to why people, in exit interviews, would lie after the fact about who they voted for. Ludicrous, because such exit interviews had been reliably accurate in the past. As if suddenly in the history of elections and polling American psychology had changed from what it had been and what it is like everywhere else in the world.
Additionally, though the intelligence services of the United States looked into Russian influence on the 2016 presidential campaign in the misinformation it spread and other ways, it never looked into whether the final vote tallies were tampered with. Clearly, for intelligence authorities to admit there was hacking of the election results and that Hillary had actually won the electoral college as well would have created a constitutional crisis and a kind of civil war that the powers-that-be wished to avoid by simply saying it was not looked into. Not looked into became, then, in the media and among the politicians and talking heads, that it had not happened.
This pattern of not finding that which one does want to know reminds me of the half-assed investigation into Brett Kavanaugh that allowed him onto the bench. With Christopher Wray at the head of the FBI, we find that the investigation was so shallow it did not even include interviews with other female complainants against Kavanaugh. Not looked into sufficiently, it was determined that the attempted rape by Kavanaugh could not be determined. You seeing the pattern? The intelligence services of the U.S. and the FBI simply cannot find evidence for things they simply do not want to be true. Or they want to keep hidden from public scrutiny, for reasons which, when you come down to it, amounts to treason against the United States on behalf of a foreign power.
Yet, since this vote tampering has happened as well in order to deny John Kerry and Al Gore the wins they also earned, in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, it is something I hope will finally be addressed. Then we will have a chance to ensure actual democracy in the United States, for we can prevent vote tampering in the future by implementing non-hackable means of vote counting, with paper receipts.
In any case, this corruption of democracy — along with Trump’s infamous comments, derogatory of women, and including references to sexual predation and assault, as evidenced by his “pussy grabbing” comment, and with the Women’s March on Washington as inspiration — resulted in such phenomenal interest by women in politics in 2017. EMILY’s List, a partner of Ready to Run, was contacted by ten thousand women, by March of 2017 alone, who were enthusiastic about running for office. Another partner, VoteRunLead reported interest by 6,545 women. That was the number of women signing up to learn about campaigning as of April of 2017.
Thus Trump’s policies, his misogynism and apparent sexual predation, and the theft of the presidency in 2016 mobilized women to run for office the following year. They not only ran, they won. And in a big way. The Left has its tools for progressive change; they contrast with those of the moneyed Right.
#MeToo Movement
Not long after the elections of 2016 another movement related to women’s rights arose, triggered by one after the other of revelations of sexual abuse by men in power. This time, these events were not covered up, dismissed, or overlooked. America is currently reeling from the changes being wrought in our understandings of men’s behavior regarding women, in the workplace and otherwise, and the increasing awareness of the way misogyny infects patriarchal cultures, even the ones of today. This movement is nothing but auspicious for gender relations in America and for an increased power of women’s voice on all issues of policy and in the cultural arena.7
Moreover, around the world, we see gains by women, even in recalcitrant Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, where women are finally being allowed to drive automobiles.
Joe in the Middle
Furthermore, as we saw in the Obama years, we see the continuation of that Republican obstruction of any legislation benefiting ordinary humans, to date, during the first and second years of Biden’s presidency. Though Joe Biden won a stimulus package in 2021, Republican forces … all of them … with the help of two renegade senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — were able to block Build Back Better in 2022.
Build Back Better — President Joe Biden’s premiere plan, which he had campaigned on — had substantial help for the fight to save the planet and to rebuild the infrastructure of the United States. So, while four years earlier the Republican-led Congress, under Trump, voted massive multi-trillion dollar tax relief packages for the very wealthy; with the Democrats in charge and Republicans obstructing, nothing of funding was allowed Biden in Build Back Better to save the planet and to redo the infrastructure in America that would benefit the lives of ordinary Americans or help protect them from some of the dire environmental collapses that are upon us.
Indeed, then, this one-time “cold war” between the 1 percent and the 99 percent — begun in the Seventies — has heated up fast and continues unabated for the foreseeable future. In comprehending how all this came about and arming ourselves for the ultimate struggle approaching, let us start by looking at Culture War/ Class War beginnings.
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PART ONE
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CULTURE WAR — TRUTH
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Smoke, Lies, and Revelations — 1950s through 1970s:
Politics, Truth, and the Furious Market in Enlightenment Lobotomies
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[Quotes/highlights:] “This book reminds us of truths we should not forget.”
“…with the rise of the power of huge corporations during this period, and with competition and profit rapidly eroding all values and making truth the servant of the (always hidden) agenda, factuality and honesty were the first of life’s pillars to be invaded and occupied.”
“…by the end of the Fifties, Americans were caught between the opposing evils of confusion and anomie, on one side, and being assimilated by corporate culture (“resistance is futile”), on the other…. [M]any suffered through or clung to traditional ways. This would be true specially of the elderly. Many, also, ignored the assaults on the credibility of these institutions over time.”
“…when JFK was assassinated, the floor fell out from beneath aspiring Americans. It left them feeling empty, directionless, and therefore vulnerable.”
“JFK’s assassination left people feeling powerless. If a President could be assassinated, no one is safe. When the cover-up succeeded, we knew we had no voice. We knew the truth would probably never be revealed. This was the new America.” – Carol Lemieux
“Of note is the fact that Democrats would win the popular vote in three out of the last six elections — Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote — and be denied the presidency because of the electoral college. This trend of popularity for Democrats thus shows increasing progressive enthusiasm over time laid alongside a concerted effort by the powers-that-be, the moneyed interests, to keep that progressive fervor from manifesting in public policy.”
“Afterward, however, after Obama’s eight years as president, we saw a repeat of history with the installation into the presidency of Donald J. Trump…. Trump was W. Bush 2.0. Trump’s corruption and illegality ignored the Constitution of the United States and were more severe and consequential, even, than George W. Bush’s.”
“We will soon see how Barrack Obama was himself, with his ‘timidity,’ the cause of that ascension by Trump in several crucial ways. This culpability begins with the fact Democrat Barrack Obama and his Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, declined to take up investigations of the crimes the W committed in office and continues right up to the time just before the presidential election of 2016.
“…in his memoirs, Barrack Obama delves deeply into whether he had been ‘too timid’ during his terms. For Obama did not release to the public the intelligence community’s discovery of the interference in our election by Russia.”
“…over the course of those decades since 1970, Americans saw essentially the rise of a one-party government. Corresponding to that, we witnessed a consolidation of the mass media and its subservience, along with the government’s, to that same small group of people and powers, aligned with the huge corporations and serving their interests for profits and for enrichment of the already filthy rich.”
“…since 1973, there was little room in America for any of the elements that characterized the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason or Rationalism, or the Age of Enlightenment — whose adherents and tenets spawned the American experiment.”
“It had become clear to the people at the top that they could better manipulate the masses without free thinkers in the way. They did not want smart people noticing, that’s for sure.”
“…the government taking over people’s minds, having happened beginning in 1971, is now being done in full view.”
“Students at my college … Franklin and Marshal College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania … occupied the Administration building and found the documents — the letters from wealthy benefactors and alumni insisting on this change or they would stop their funding. This was a concerted effort by the wealthy elite that hit all the liberal arts institutions/universities in America at the exact same time — the spring and summer of 1971.”
“…the Sixties Generation was the last educated generation. The result was that free-thinking generations would no longer be. They would not be encouraged; they would not be fostered; they would not be tolerated; they would not be allowed.”
“…yes, we are still fighting this Culture War. For not only did it never go away, not only has our side not been heard, not only has the other side pounded our positions into rubble; and shouted down, ridiculed, slandered, and misconstrued our points to their own malevolent ends, but…. We ain’t won yet!”
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[Chapter 1 text begins:] I was born in the year 1950, just prior to the collapse of certainty and traditional truths in America during the 1960s. Culture War, Class War is far more than my story, however. I can say I watched the developments that this book unveils and that I was an avid participant in many of its events. But this is America’s story, America’s untold story. I could not have witnessed all the happenings that are brought out here, nor could anyone. For much of this was hidden, and that is the first point.
Yet that which is also here is much that many people have seen. Though a lot of it is not remembered. These events are discouraged from being thought about, because they are a reality inconvenient to those who orchestrate events. Hence, such people, who own the media, are wont to back away from allowing their news organizations to report on them or to remind us of them. This book reminds us of truths we should not forget.
Yet, when brought to mind, these truths lead to obvious conclusions. This book sheds light on these “inconvenient” but obvious realities of America’s past and present. We begin in the past, the 1950s in America.
Politics, Truth, and the Furious Market in Enlightenment Lobotomies
For many the Fifties, with the Cold War as a backdrop, was a time of confusion. The traditional bellwethers for morality and behavior had been undermined from several fronts. Important among them were religion, the military, and the family. Discoveries in the sciences and social sciences had called for a revision of what was commonly thought … what counted as common sense and what could be counted on as reliable knowledge.
Right-wing, Cold War politics did their part to confuse the populace. Honesty and truth had been — since the McCarthy era of the early 50s — shaky, uncertain, and vulnerable. We should note that after WWII and with the Cold War against Russia in full-on battle mode, the control over the populace that was instituted during WWII remained in place as Cold War strategies.
Dark Visions, Dire Warnings
Then, with the rise of the power of huge corporations during this period, and with competition and profit rapidly eroding all values and making truth the servant of the (always hidden) agenda, factuality and honesty were the first of life’s pillars to be invaded and occupied. Yet insightful commentators saw through it. While this erosion of honesty and truth over the course of the Fifties, tied to the rise of corporations, was gradual, secretive, and so went largely undetected, some astute observers were not fooled and even tried to warn the nation.
Books were written in the Fifties about the changing values influenced or directly the result of the amassing of power in these huge corporations. These exposes increased in number during the early Sixties. Noteworthy among these analyses include Organization Man (1956) by William Whyte; David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950); & C. Wright Mill’s trilogy on power—The New Men of Power (1946), White Collar (1951), & The Power Elite (1956), along with his obviously relevant Character & Social Structure (1953). Works like Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955) & Presthus’s The Organizational Society (1963) made arguably more serious criticisms that the psychological map of Americans were being negatively affected in important areas.
Literary works that were read widely during the 1950s, having a significant impact on this era, include George Orwell’s 1984 (published 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Both books describe dystopian societies that were plausible evolutions of societal tendencies occurring at that time. Conformity; repression of feeling; propaganda and the control of minds by a totalitarian regime; the use of drugs to placate the populace and to keep them in compliance to overweening social controls of all kinds; the consolidation of wealth into an upper echelon of society that would determine all that happened below — these and other characteristics of a world of slaves and sheeple were described in these works.
Works such as these set the stage for the decades following in providing clear images of the dangers of a corporate-dominated society with little concern for human feeling, liberty, or rights. On the other side of it, however — something we would not know for decades later and not until the second decade of the Twenty-First Century — these books describe some of the tendencies and goals of our current totalitarians out of Russia, other oligarchs around the world, and Republicans in the United States. It is as if they took such books as 1984 and Brave New World, meant to be warnings, as societal blueprints for their desires to be worshiped and for their goals to control everything below them for their ends alone.
Prophetic, prescient presidential address
The most significant warning came from the President of the United States who had presided over this post–World-War-Two rise of corporations. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his final televised address to the nation before leaving office, warned against the power and influence of the military-industrial complex. Prophetic and prescient, his words — often quoted over the decades since — included “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex….”
Eisenhower gave this address only days before his term was to end. The significance of Eisenhower waiting till he was about to leave office to inform the American public calls out to be addressed.
Many of us, in 2009, after Barrack Obama was elected, wondered what had happened to Obama since he took the presidency. We wondered what happened to his ideals, his promises, his “audacity of hope,” and his prescriptions for fundamental change. As Jon Stewart — the well-known comedic political commentator — famously put it at the time, Obama was “timid.” I think we all were expecting more “audacity” after Obama’s election and less mere “hoping” for change.
We suspected something dire had happened to Obama, for we have watched as Democratic president after Democratic president — especially Bill Clinton, to some extent Jimmy Carter — dialed back their progressive efforts once they assumed the presidency. Jesse Ventura, speaking on CNN, two years into Obama taking office, said Obama was no doubt “taken out to the woodshed.” It occurs to me that those unseen hands directing Obama’s actions might have even been there in 1961, too, and that they were the military-industrial complex Eisenhower called out.
Certainly, the forces of the military-industrial complex at that time, in 1961, were not as influential, bloated with power, as they are now. Still, why else would Eisenhower not speak about this until his term was just about over? If he did not feel pressured (threatened?) previously, why would he not have been making this an important issue? His speech on the “undue influence” of certain sectors of society over the rest of us was, after all, the summary statement, culminating viewpoint, of his eight years.
Also, if he did feel pressured (threatened?) not to reveal or let some truth be known during his time in office — yet felt it was something of extreme, even dire, importance — might he not have risked it at the very end, for the good of the country? In such a situation it is possible Eisenhower was feeling that his conscience needed to be relieved as he saw the end of his influence and of his own life in sight. Eisenhower had, after all, gone through several health crises during his term that could have been terminal.
Eisenhower might conceivably have reasoned that his legacy would be completely blackened, his influence totally skewed in a way he did not wish if he did not “spill the beans” at some point. The end of his term — just prior to leaving office — would then be his last chance to come clean and the only time, perhaps, that he could feel he could go through with it without immediate personal, or some other kind we do not know of, repercussions.
There may be much more to this warning to the nation than had previously been brought out. For coming into office right after Eisenhower we had John F. Kennedy, a Democrat. With his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as Attorney General, JFK was anything but “timid.” They went after organized crime, and no doubt ruffled the feathers of the military-industrial complex as history records that prior to JFK’s assassination he had come to the conclusion that the United States needed to withdraw from or dial back substantially its involvement in Vietnam. The hidden powers of America, behind that military-industiral complex, would not be keen on these and other moves by the Kennedys. And we see the result of their bucking that complex of which Eisenhower spoke in the event transpiring on the 22nd of November 1963 in Dallas, Texas. This complex would then complete their assassination assignments for the Kennedys on 6 June 1968 when the younger brother would also be taken out.
“Resistance is futile”
Regardless, at the time, by the end of the Fifties, Americans were caught between the opposing evils of confusion and anomie, on one side, and being assimilated by corporate culture (“resistance is futile”), on the other.
You might say Americans’ minds were under siege from both the Right, with its misinformation, and the Left, with its new discoveries and new facts coming to light in the sciences. One was forced to make a choice between the hatred and violence of traditional society and a new one based on science and the multiculturalism coming out of the humanities and social sciences. This division was the earliest schizoid splitting of society’s mind that would become the Culture War we saw ever after and till today. A lot of it, as we see clearly now, comes down to whether you believe the fantasies of traditional religion, which itself is a cover for the desires of the wealthy elites, or you believe science.
Back in the Fifties, however, in reaction to the untruths coming from the political sector — with its Cold War rhetoric and propaganda — and the sciences’, with its truth undermining traditional beliefs about family, religion, and the military, many suffered through or clung to traditional ways. This would be true specially of the elderly. Many, also, ignored the assaults on the credibility of these institutions over time.
There was an astounding era of unity and enthusiasm during the Kennedy years, where corporate culture was subsumed under lofty ideals, which included both technological advance — and thus harnessed corporate energy in a positive direction — and social and intercultural advance, as for example with the Peace Corps. Fragmentation and anomie were forgotten as America believed it was involved in higher causes emanating out of the times that seemed powerful enough to propel everyone into the future with all the fragmentation following and somehow working itself out eventually.
The dream is over
President John F. Kennedy however was murdered, arguably by the Mafia — as History.com would have it — but either in collusion with or under pressure from powers aligned with that military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower spoke.
The Commission that was formed to investigate the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission, came up with a ludicrous explanation of how the murder happened. They claimed a “magic bullet” — one bullet — had passed through Kennedy’s neck, gone into John Connally’s chest, then continued through his right wrist and ended up embedded in his left thigh. The conclusions of the Commission were as full of holes as the two victims, it turns out. Indeed, at least as many holes as the single-bullet theory — the brainchild of Arlen Specter, before he became a Republican Senator for Pennsylvania — would have, considering the theory involves up to seven entry/exit wounds in both men. From one bullet. This “magic bullet theory,” as it was called, would allow the Commission to conclude there had been only one gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
This fantastical theory allowed the Warren Commission to wrap up work without further investigation. Subsequently, other types of investigations produced the evidence that would lead to the History channels conclusion that it was the work of the Mafia. Thus, the Warren Commission was a precursor to the coverups that would later come about over other Republican scandals — Ronald Reagan’s Contragate; H. W. Bush’s Savings and Loan Scandal (S & L Scandal); W. Bush’s many scandals, most importantly lying to get the U.S. into the Iraq War; and of course the ongoing efforts of the conservative establishment in Washington, D.C., and the media, to minimize Donald Trump’s many scandals and treasonous acts by “normalizing” them.
At any rate, these failures of the Warren Commission would be brought to our awareness over the years; the JFK murder became a source of many conspiracy theories. Yet much evidence was uncovered that contradicted the Warren Commission’s conclusions and pointed to the existence of several gunmen, with Lee Harvey Oswald being the fall guy. This would make Oswald the patsy whose murder by Jack Ruby only two days after Oswald’s arrest would ensure his actual story would never be told. Indeed, the movie, JFK, which came out in 1991, directed by Oliver Stone, gathered this evidence together and laid a good foundation for overthrowing the Warren Commission’s findings in the public’s mind.
In any event, at the time, when JFK was assassinated, the floor fell out from beneath aspiring Americans. It left them feeling empty, directionless, and therefore vulnerable. Carol Lemieux expressed this malaise perfectly in her tweet of 17 August 2022 commenting on this point. She writes, “JFK’s assassination left people feeling powerless. If a President could be assassinated, no one is safe. When the cover-up succeeded, we knew we had no voice. We knew the truth would probably never be revealed. This was the new America.”1
Remember back to what I said a couple pages back on the military-industrial complex not being happy with JFK’s plans, just before his murder, to draw down troops in Vietnam. Well, not coincidentally almost immediately after JFK’s killing, Lyndon B. Johnson — who succeeded Kennedy as president — escalated the Vietnam War and the funding for it. America had its first coup, its first massive cover-up and Big Lie.
Republicans would take over soon enough and over the next forty-six years would hold onto Executive Power for all but seventeen years, including Johnson’s five years.
Of note is the fact that Democrats would win the popular vote in three out of the last six elections — Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote — and be denied the presidency because of the electoral college. This trend of popularity for Democrats thus shows increasing progressive enthusiasm over time laid alongside a concerted effort by the powers-that-be, the moneyed interests, to keep that progressive fervor from manifesting in public policy.
During this time, the tendencies that began in the Fifties — involving the gathering of power into fewer and fewer hands, and the use of that power to influence the beliefs, ideals, and even psychology of the masses — increased and became more severe, pervasive, and threatening, up to the point of the outright lunacy and obvious deceptions and manipulations evident under George W. Bush; and later, even more maniacally, under Donald J. Trump. You might say that whereas Eisenhower, along with the majority of Americans, would view a dystopian military-industrial society as a thing to be avoided at all costs, the wealthy elites after Eisenhower — as evidenced by the Republicans acting on their behalf in government — would act as to seem they were using the books, 1984 and Brave New World, as roadmaps and models of the world they’d like to create.
Yet at a certain point, in 2008, with year after year throwing up W. Bush scandals, corruptions, misgovernment, several presidential elections stolen by Republicans, an unnecessary war, runaway deficits, and most significantly, right from the start, another massive transfer of wealth upward to benefit that small elite and increase their power; Americans were finally beginning to open their eyes to the ways they had been lied to, used, and robbed by the rich and powerful.
All that governmental mismanagement, scandal, and oppression under the W played out on the media nightly, year after year, with no recourse even for impeachment of W. Bush because of an ill-timed agreement between the parties about impeachment that had come out of the debacle of the impeachment attempt on Clinton. This overwhelming evidence against Republicans and W. Bush — stimulated by the discovery that Americans had been lied to by W. Bush’s administration to take us into war with Iraq — finally resulted in the cracks in the Matrix, or web of Big Lies built up over nearly fifty years. It took all that, so that finally an authentic man, a man not of the powerful elite, could win the Presidency handily. That man would, of course, be Barack Obama.
Afterward, however, after Obama’s eight years as president, we saw a repeat of history with the installation into the presidency of Donald J. Trump. We will soon look into why, indeed, history could not help but repeat. Indeed, Trump was W. Bush 2.0. Trump’s corruption and illegality ignored the Constitution of the United States and were more severe and consequential, even, than George W. Bush’s. Yet the increasing progressiveness of the American electorate — overall, despite seldom being reflected in government policy — would make it that history would repeat, again, and would elect another Democrat, after Trump, to clean up the mess of another corrupt Republican.
This of course occurred with the election of Barrack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, to the presidency in 2020. Biden took over after only four years of a Republican, Trump, trashing the Constitution, human rights, and human lives. That is what amounts to the progress in awareness between 2009 and 2020. Only four years were allotted this time by the powers-that-be for a Republican to destroy so much of what Democrats accomplish beforehand. Am I being sarcastic? Well, yeah.
We will soon see how Barrack Obama was himself, with his “timidity,” the cause of that ascension by Trump in several crucial ways. This culpability begins with the fact Democrat Barrack Obama and his Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, declined to take up investigations of the crimes the W committed in office and continues right up to the time just before the presidential election of 2016. What happened at that time, in 2016, was that the intelligence services of the U.S. informed Obama that Russians were interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Obama sat on that information, rather than using it to fight back against such foreign interference in our elections by publicly disclosing it. If Obama had been forthcoming at the time this was uncovered, just prior to the presidential election of 2016, it would undoubtedly have made more than the small difference that was needed for Hillary Clinton to win the electoral college as well as the popular vote.
Obama wasn’t, however. Indeed, in his memoirs, Barrack Obama delves deeply into whether he had been “too timid” during his terms. For Obama did not release to the public the intelligence community’s discovery of the interference in our election by Russia. Hence, Trump “won” and we were doomed to repeat it all — all those horrible years of incompetence, criminality, corruption, grifting, and thieving by the Filthy Rich of all below them, under the W — with a Trump presidency. The Donald took over the presidency in what should have been an easy win for Democrats in 2016, as it was thought it would be.
The face of mine enemy, 1984
However, before those more recent events and over the course of those decades since 1970, Americans saw essentially the rise of a one-party government. Corresponding to that, we witnessed a consolidation of the mass media and its subservience, along with the government’s, to that same small group of people and powers, aligned with the huge corporations and serving their interests for profits and for enrichment of the already filthy rich.
With most powers and most institutions, including education and publishing, orchestrated to the ends of a mighty few, there existed a pervasive — however very slick and clever — propaganda and cover-up apparatus constantly at work to fill or bend the minds of Americans along lines not in their interests, but rather those of these hidden powers with their corporate and political fronts. So pervasive and overwhelming was this effort in the United States at mind control and misinformation that it mirrored that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Since such U.S. mind control going back to the 1950s provided no comfort, motivating people through the strategic use of terror and the incitement to hatred, it left that aspect wanting. Many people … pushed to desperation and irrationality because of the continual terror and hatred campaigns … ran to traditional religions or clung feverishly to any one of the many alternatives offering easy one-stop full-service truth — whether evangelical, political, ideological, or traditional.
Enlightenment Overthrown (No Smarts for YOU!)
In this context at no time was there an opening for the kind of rational or thoughtful, peaceful and considered, pursuit of truth, insight, or enlightenment that had characterized the eras that had actually led to the birth of America and its system of democracy, freedoms, and rights. By this I mean that since 1973, there was little room in America for any of the elements that characterized the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason or Rationalism, or the Age of Enlightenment — whose adherents and tenets spawned the American experiment.
Can’t have liberal arts, it’s got the word “liberal” in it
Indeed, I personally observed the downfall of the ideal of education in the liberal arts. Since the birth of America, a liberal arts college education had been regarded as a preeminent basis for further education and for life and career in general for those who would be among the educated and eventually the leaders and decision-makers of society.
Liberal arts ideals came directly out of the Enlightenment and Renaissance ideals of a well-rounded, diversely educated, and broadly knowledgeable individual and citizen. It was wisely considered such widely knowledgeable and broadly thinking leaders would benefit society in the wisdom, social consciousness, and moral conscience, indeed, selflessness and social service ideals that would result from that kind of exposure to varying viewpoints and approaches to truth.
However, the Vietnam War had seen increasingly larger degrees of complaint, criticism, resistance, and defiance to its pursuit from these liberal arts campuses. I was on campus and was part of it. I also saw how the campuses were purged of the liberal thinkers — professors were fired, departments of philosophy, religious studies, history, and the other liberal arts were cut back, often to be eliminated entirely. It had become clear to the people at the top that they could better manipulate the masses without free thinkers in the way. They did not want smart people noticing, that’s for sure.
We stormed the administration building and found the documents — the letters from wealthy benefactors and alumni
In May of 1971, a year after the Kent State murders of protesters and while this restructuring of American higher education was going on full tilt, we stormed the Administration building at my college of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
We found the documents — the letters from wealthy benefactors and alumni demanding a conservative turn be made in higher education. I say this today, the 6th of July 2022, while the news all over Twitter is of the fact that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, has passed a law requiring students and faculty of all Florida universities to report their political beliefs yearly. They are being required to fill out a survey questioning them about their views; and if the university does not have a sufficiently conservative-leaning faculty and students, its funding from the state of Florida will be dropped. I mean, as they say, “you can’t make this shit up.” This is how far we have seen the tendency I am reporting, of the government taking over people’s minds, having happened beginning in 1971, is now being done in full view.
However, back in 1970 and 1971, the alumni’s maneuvering behind the scenes to redirect the minds of university students and faculty was visible in its effects only, at first. The Vietnam War protests brought the suppression/repression of university minds onto the agenda of alumni and the wealthy elite, who were acting to negate such protests and pushback from the campuses to the designs of the filthy rich Controllers.
They actually fired professors on my campus, not because they were radical or speaking out against the war, but because they were cutting back departments that had anything to do with the humanities — even the social sciences, religious studies!!! … anything that involved encouraging students to be independent thinkers or to learn anything different from the elementary and secondary school propaganda they had been taught before.
Students at my college … Franklin and Marshal College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania … occupied the Administration building and found the documents — the letters from wealthy benefactors and alumni insisting on this change or they would stop their funding. This was a concerted effort by the wealthy elite that hit all the liberal arts institutions/ universities in America at the exact same time — the spring and summer of 1971. We gathered in front of the Administration building and demanded the Dean appear and answer to the charges and respond about the documents, as a condition of our leaving the building. The Dean showed up and, standing on the steps of the building, he sheepishly mealy-mouthed his way through his responses to our evidence. He never denied it.
Afterward, some students chipped in (what little they could) to pay for some of these fired professors to continue teaching the next semester. We could not use any facilities; we sat on the grass, outside. Of course, we could not afford to continue to pay our professors out of our own pockets; nor could the profs get by on the $1 — $25 voluntary donations!
The result was that the Sixties Generation was the last educated generation. The result was that free-thinking generations would no longer be. They would not be encouraged; they would not be fostered; they would not be tolerated; they would not be allowed.
People like to dismiss efforts such as mine and those of my cohorts at this time as trying to dredge up the battles of the Sixties, to relive or redo the past. This ignores the fact that this battle — this Culture War of the Seventies — has not gone away at all but is simply being ignored … and consciously dismissed. This 60s-70s Culture War is as much here as two-hundred-thousand people in Wisconsin — at one point, other demonstrations had similar attendance — were there to protest union suppression, in February through June of 2011; although the media ignored and dismissed these powerful turnouts in keeping with their insidious obedience to the wealthy elites. This 60s-70s Culture War is as much there as that we were in 2011 surfing the tsunami of a worldwide Occupy movement addressing all the issues of this Culture War, Class War.
This 60s-70s Culture War is as much there as the massive Women’s March in Washington in 2017, whose record-breaking turnout marked the beginning of the resistance after Trump’s inauguration. This 60s-70s Culture War is as much there as the months-long protests against the White racism fueling police departments throughout the country after the George Floyd execution by police, seen by billions of people via the internet.
This 60s-70s Culture War is as much there as the January 6th attempted coup in 2021 and its resulting ongoing battle in the press and the streets, as the details of this in-plain-sight treason against America is revealed. This 60s-70s Culture War is as much there as the packing of the Supreme Court thru illegal means, which led to the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade, in June of 2022, and the massive national pushback and protests rising up against it, since.
Meanwhile the media exaggerates every MAGA and Tea Party twitch involving handfuls or at the most hundreds of folks and broadcasts far and wide every trivial pronouncement coming from their gang of cartoonish Republican and Trumpian figures. Meanwhile Fox News and the mainstream media following it portray every little wiggle of liberal thought or action into insane reams of misunderstanding broadcast to the public, infecting American MAGAt minds; while billionaire-supporting pundits and conservative leaning commentators spouting insanity and gibberish `— Chris Christie, Rick Santorum, Paul Ryan, Megan McCain, for example — are given equal or greater footing than rational talk on even moderate platforms like CNN and MSNBC. Meanwhile, the corporate and filthy rich Controllers continue to pour guns into the streets and classrooms, demoralizing America, keeping it ripe for a fascist coup and the installation of a puppet government beholden to Russia’s Putin.
So yes, we are still fighting this Culture War. For not only did it never go away, not only has our side not been heard, not only has the other side pounded our positions into rubble; and shouted down, ridiculed, slandered, and misconstrued our points to their own malevolent ends, but … We ain’t won yet!
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However this book is not merely about history and activism, it is about truth. History is supposed to be about truth, isn’t it? And activism is supposed to be about truth being brought into reality, is it not? As Mahatma Ghandi phrased it, satyagraha — the power of truth. Satyagraha has been defined as holding firmly to truth or “truth force.” Using strength in numbers and placing oneself, nonviolently, in front of evil is the power of truth, satyagraha.
So this book is about truth and how different generations have approached it and what factors, for example, recreational drugs, have contributed to the way they would apprehend it. Yet the real truth, as in the quest for truth? It starts with oneself. Being no different myself, I will tell you in the next chapter how it is that I began to see the cracks in America’s mesmerizing Matrix of misinformation, as long ago as 1969.
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Truth’s Solitary Journey:
War, Nukes, and the Media …. the Comfortable Ignorance of Grade School Propaganda Gone Forever
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[Quotes/highlights:] “… when I had my first personal experience with a major national lie at the age of nineteen — one that involved an obvious collusion of State Department, Department of Defense, and all the major newspapers in America — I was shaken. When I saw that one day later all the local media followed up by headlining stories that further misinformed and that nowhere was the truth ever reported accurately of what one million people experienced on a day that would go down in history, anyway, but ‘censored,’ I was further changed.”
“…if the 1% do not like the facts, they lie. If they can’t cheat, if the masses rise up in great numbers to struggle for peace, they can simply arrange for it not to be properly credited in the press nor included correctly in the historical record.”
“…the people who pull the strings in this country pulled the strings at ABC that day and changed what would be reported as history. And it would be a lie.”
“If you think this lack of coverage of the pushback is inconsequential, I will note that it had consequences that were huge, when it came to the public’s lack of understanding of the Mueller Report or the decision of Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay the initial impeachment of Donald Trump. We know that reduced media coverage of Trump’s opponents and Democrat’s flaccid pushback against the Donald are linked in that when the Democrats, in June and July of 2022, finally put together a nationally broadcast investigation of Donald Trump’s crimes of treason and insurrection for his efforts to remain in power, suddenly many more folks — a significant majority, now — understood that Trump had lost the 2020 election and that the Trump family had been using them.”
“When the Controllers force the news media to portray our situation that way with its conservative bias pumping up conservative proponents on the Right, with a wall erected on the Left blocking out Leftist ideas and activities, they indeed make it so:”
“…the media, at the behest of the Filthy Rich, have totally restructured what is considered news and what will be promoted and forced down upon the pegs of the populace since the early 1970s.”
“Never again would I look at a story out of the mainstream press, no matter how widely reported and/or held to be fact, without looking for the possible agendas and forces that would affect the veracity of what was being said.”
“I found myself caught up in virtually all the major trends over the last sixty years either through first-hand observation or through the fact that as a writer and avid follower of the events of the day — in an era that seemed my whole life to be peppered with national and international surprises and upheavals, some positive; others mostly not — I could not look away.”
“Not many people could tell you why or how that happened— that 180-degree reversal in America’s march toward a nuclear nation. I was one of the people involved in bringing that about.”
“This example is instructive for how our unthinking ways of doing things — evolved out of a time vastly different from today — are mechanically undermining our lives; how they could be changed to benefit us given a little thought to the matter; and finally, how citizens can use their strength in numbers to take action to effect such necessary change.”
“…lifeline utility rates and the default on WPPSS nuclear plants, show the success that can come of activism. They also demonstrate the importance of distributing accurate information to the public. Otherwise, ordinary folks are awash in a sea of misinformation, lies, and propaganda from all large, corporate, and wealthy entities and are vulnerable to any manipulation of them desired by such elites. Indeed, without such an informed public, no progress is possible. Ultimately, then, totalitarianism is the inevitable result.”
“…while this quest was and is personally gratifying, it led me to the most disturbing truth of all time, something widely known, something dire, something so big that most people — in keeping with the times of smoke and lies — are fearfully distracting themselves from, even at the cost of their lives and those of their children.”
“We begin here, however, with the most important part of that terrible truth — the part that is a linchpin in doing anything about the other parts regarding the environment. This has to do with fascism and the truth. With the first and without the second there is no way to do anything about any of the problems of peace, justice, or the environment. We look next at how a society ever more controlled by its and the world’s wealthiest people increasingly also flooded the minds and media of America and the world’s citizens in many and comprehensive ways to benefit themselves. To benefit themselves, regardless the cost to truth, human lives, and the well-being of the world’s masses.
“Amazingly, also, we see how the Filthy Rich, through their Republican proxies in government, needed to continue to up the ante in their assault on us, our money, and our liberty. Their views were coming increasingly under attack, and they were being seen to be what they are: Lies benefiting the rich. So that the ideas of the Left, with roots, many of them in the Sixties, showed their greater value in their increasingly popularity, even with all the assaults on them.”
“How a society could be increasingly progressive in the minds of its population, yet its government and media be increasingly regressive, is hard to understand; it doesn’t make sense. Yet despots throughout history have maintained such arrangements, however brutal their means. They have used the same weapons, as the Filthy Rich and Republicans today, to control otherwise rebellious populations, to set them in alignment with the ends they wish, not any of their own. It comes down to control. Control of power and of information. Control, with its accomplices ‘Might makes right,’ ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune,’ and ‘alternative facts.’
“And, yes, it is happening here in the United States.”
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[Chapter 2 text begins:] Regarding my life and my quest for what is real, I can tell you that the pursuit of truth is a solitary journey. Yet, as I have alluded, I have an unusual and particular personal history in childhood that turned me a particular way.
Comfortable Ignorance of Grade-School Propaganda Gone Forever
I also have a very common set of experiences in growing up that led me to the average American’s thorough belief in the transcendence of America, its superiority as a nation and a form of government, and as the leader of the free world, based on individual rights. I was brought up believing that freedom of the press and the other rights and institutions — such as shared powers in government, a balance of powers, the separation of church and state — gave our country a foundation to provide like no other the discovery and the reporting of events most closely in alignment with the facts, the actual truth. That is the way I was taught; I had no basis or evidence to believe otherwise.
So Much for Being Comfortably Dumb
However, when I had my first personal experience with a major national lie at the age of nineteen — one that involved an obvious collusion of State Department, Department of Defense, and all the major newspapers in America — I was shaken. When I saw that one day later all the local media followed up by headlining stories that further misinformed and that nowhere was the truth ever reported accurately of what one million people experienced on a day that would go down in history, anyway, but “censored,” I was further changed. I mean, this was not the America I had been brought up to believe we had.
Indeed, I have checked the history books and they tell the story of what I saw with my own eyes inaccurately, following the newspaper reports, which followed the reports from unknown sources in the Department of Defense. Even the idea that anyone — especially the media — would take the Department of Defense’s version of the largest anti-war demonstration in history as the basis for the story of that day is telling. For while approximately one million people showed up on Moratorium Day, in Washington, D.C., the Department of Defense’s official estimate had it at 200,000. As if 800,000 other people were not there.
As was reported at the time, this 200,000 is the number who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. Which is suspicious because the turnout was so huge, Pennsylvania Avenue was packed from one end to the other. Protest coordinators could not safely file any more people into the street. Thus, the majority of us were directed to walk over the grass, down the Washington Mall, not onto the street. I was one of those so directed.
After waiting a long time just to get onto Pennsylvania Avenue, we were informed no more could fit on the street and that we could all walk down the Mall to get to the Washington Monument, where the rally would be held. I’ll tell you, I never saw Pennsylvania Avenue that day. I never saw any march down it; nor even any person in said march. Yet I was there, as was the majority of the crowd — as far as I could tell — who never marched. Is it possible the Department of Defense used that ploy of indicating a number who marched as a way of negating the protest’s impact by citing an estimate of only part of the crowd, those on the street. And even then, low-balling the number…. Impossible, right? Incredible.
Yet such speculation follows from what was reported in Sunday newspapers the following day. In headlines around the country, the media cut that “estimate,” that lie, down to only 100,000 people. Some 900,000 people had their voices muted, their passionate activism liquidated.
By Monday, the message of that million-people demonstration — its numbers effectively falsified — was forgotten beneath reports by America’s major newspapers of a meager 10,000 or so who “violently” pelted rocks at the Department of Justice building after the main march. The publication Stars and Stripes, describes this: “The demonstration was mostly peaceful except for a small section of the crowd that violently protested near the Justice Department on the evening of Nov. 15. Demonstrators threw rocks, bottles and paint bombs, smashing windows and splattering the building with red paint. The clash resulted in police using tear gas on the crowd.”1
This pivot to any violence involved — whether, or not, as we have seen with Black Panthers, Jackson State, and Kent State earlier, there was any — as a way to negate the people’s impact, is a ploy familiar to activists. For us demonstrators, this major coverage of minor violence only added insult to the injury of the march being inaccurately reported, intentionally downplayed.
This corruption of the truth, which would go down as our historical record, had a huge impact on the antiwar movement afterward. Such disappointment followed this rendering futile of so much powerful activist energy that the Weather Underground was formed as a result. We activists realized that all the good intentions in the world and all the peaceful energy directed to our leaders were rendered moot if one is not the one driving the bus. Hence a faction of the antiwar movement decided it would require violence to actually render any change in America’s war stance, to actually create peace. These folk became the Weather Underground.
Later I was to find there is additional evidence of the powers-that-be twisting and attempting to negate the impact of that day. It turns out there was quite a dustup in the newsrooms over the coverage of that days’ story. Howard K. Smith lost his job at ABC over the telling of the truth of Moratorium Day. People remember Howard K. Smith from the PBS channel. Some of us who are older remember that he was one of the major anchors at ABC.
What would cause such a precipitous event as his firing? Well, it had to do with the fact that ABC news was scheduled and fully prepared to do dawn-to-dusk coverage of Moratorium Day on November 15th, 1969. One million people flooded into Washington, D.C., the largest gathering for an event, save Woodstock, in American history, and for the purpose of stopping a war. Mom, Pop, and the kids and the students came from all fifty states. The buses were lined up and I personally saw buses that came from the West Coast, from Wisconsin, from Washington State, and so on. It was phenomenal.”2
If a Million People Appeared in DC, and the Media Didn’t Cover It, Did It Really Happen?
Well, before coverage could begin over at ABC, as it turns out, word came down from “on high,” meaning outside of the news department. People like to say that it does not matter who owns a media outlet, like, say Rupert Murdoch now owns the Wall Street Journal, along with Fox News. They say editorial policy is not affected by who owns it.
Well, that day whoever controlled and owned ABC decided their personal interests were going to be hurt by showing a gathering of that many people amassing against the war — one out of every two hundred people living in America at that time managed to personally show up; how many more would have come if they could; how many more would be at home watching and would be stirred and influenced by such a sight? When Woodstock saw such numbers, it was talked about in the media as a phenomenon and it became history.
We see that if the 1% do not like the facts, they lie. If they can’t cheat, if the masses rise up in great numbers to struggle for peace, they can simply arrange for it not to be properly credited in the press nor included correctly in the historical record. Well, that was something I did not expect. I truly thought the press could be counted on, at least, to tell a pretty good version of the truth … or fer godsakes at least get the numbers right.
Media Masters
But no, the people who pull the strings in this country pulled the strings at ABC that day and changed what would be reported as history. And it would be a lie.
As for the News Department at ABC having independence: Well, Howard K. Smith, veteran and senior news reporter at the time, was so incensed and so insistent on finding out who and how and why this coverage was changed from dusk-to-dawn to practically nothing that it led to his dismissal. If he was angry about it, angry enough to get fired over it, can you not imagine that the entire News Department was against the change?
Where’d Wisconsin Go?
While this is history not news, it is more recent news as well … though we cannot call it “headline” news for reasons that have to do with the media. Something disturbingly similar happened decades later, in 2011, regarding media coverage of the Wisconsin pro-union rallies. While the largest rallies in Madison, Wisconsin, history were going on — an estimated 100,000 showed up on one day, 200,000 people a week or so after that — barely anything about them was mentioned in the mainstream media.
Tea Party Patsies and MAGAts
Keep in mind that this same media has covered and continues to promote and “tout” (even) rallies of (often paid) Tea Party and MAGAt proponents attended only by crowds in the hundreds! Even Trump’s events, though he is no longer president, are covered; while so many protests go on for Black Lives Matter, women’s and abortion rights, and the environment that such demonstrations are — not coincidentally, yet conveniently for the Filthy Rich — no longer considered news by the media controllers.
Keep in mind that the media could use the same rationale to stop covering Trump’s events, pronouncements, and activities — that they are commonplace, not newsworthy — yet the broadcasters do not. Thus, we hear of Trump’s antics, less about the pushback against him, and we think that Trump is powerful and that the pushback against him is not as strong.
If you think this lack of coverage of the pushback is inconsequential, I will note that it had consequences that were huge, when it came to the public’s lack of understanding of the Mueller Report or the decision of Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay the initial impeachment of Donald Trump. We know that reduced media coverage of Trump’s opponents and Democrat’s flaccid pushback against the Donald are linked in that when the Democrats, in June and July of 2022, finally put together a nationally broadcast investigation of Donald Trump’s crimes of treason and insurrection for his efforts to remain in power, suddenly many more folks —a significant majority, now — understood that Trump had lost the 2020 election and that the Trump family had been using them. Not all MAGAts came to that conclusion, yet a crucial and sizable number of them did. That is a direct result of the January 6th Congressional Investigation Committee’s broadcasting of its hearings to all major news networks … save Fox … some of it in prime time.
The swing in polling around attitudes to Trump and beliefs in a stolen election show the importance of media coverage to keep folks abreast of important developments. Failing which, criminal politicians and Controllers can act, as we see in spades during Trump’s term as president, unhindered in their defrauding the American people out of their money and liberty.
When the Controllers force the news media to portray our situation that way with its conservative bias pumping up conservative proponents on the Right, with a wall erected on the Left blocking out Leftist ideas and activities, they indeed make it so: That the Trump, though out of power, is still powerful and the narrative against him and his treason is unimportant.
Yes, the media, at the behest of the Filthy Rich, have totally restructured what is considered news and what will be promoted and forced down upon the pegs of the populace since the early 1970s. This slant is what qualifies as propaganda, then.
Convenient (for the Filthy Rich) “Truth”
So who determined what would be the truth that day — Moratorium Day, November 15th, 1969, in Washington, D.C. Well, it certainly was not news reporters.
The story is only that the decision to minimally cover the largest protest in U.S. history came from “on high.” I guess from that you can discern that ownership made the decision that day; and we have no idea how many other times it has done that. We can only conclude that just the threat of interference from the moneyed elite will keep the media in line with the interests of ownership.
We Decide, You React
We need consider that when senior people, household names, are fired on the spot, that it sends a message that only grows stronger with the years, especially as ownership will make the decisions behind the scenes as to the kind of reporters it will even have working for them.
Rather Hear from Dan?
By the way, a more recent example of such a thing happening has to do with the dismissal of Dan Rather by CBS News around the time of the 2000 presidential election. You’ve probably heard the ownership’s slant on that story. You should listen to Mister Rather tell the story some time. It is quite different from the “official” version.
President Al Gore. Sorry, I Was Dreaming About a Democratic America
Dan Rather’s version, if it had not been undermined, would most likely have led to Al Gore, not George W. Bush, getting the Presidency in 2000. That is to say, even with “filthy rich” and Supreme Court support at that time to begin “installing” our presidents. That is another thing to think about when you think that we have a free press in this country; or if you should think that any ownership involvement in the news has little or no consequences.
Back to my story, this incident has to do with my understanding of the truth and of history as it relates to the media and their coverage. Properly reported on, Moratorium Day, 1969, should have been one of the major historical events on American public record. It would arguably have been influential in the course the war would take after that day. Yet with the corrupted news coverage of it and in the days following, my belief in America’s premier role — because of its supposed rights, such as “freedom of the press” — in being the most reliable in getting to the real story and reporting events as close to actuality as humans are capable of was shattered forever.
Never again would I look at a story out of the mainstream press, no matter how widely reported and/or held to be fact, without looking for the possible agendas and forces that would affect the veracity of what was being said. Especially I would look at who would benefit financially from the story, if it were true; and who would benefit financially, if it were not reported.
There is a less discouraging aspect to this development. The historical record relates that Richard Nixon saw the massive outpouring of resistance at Moratorium Day, 1969. It is said he was impressed and perhaps intimidated by the outpouring of people flooding the mall from one end to the other. We learn that Nixon intended to drop nuclear bombs on Vietnam, in particular, on Hanoi; but he changed his mind after seeing the huge wave of people who came to Washington, D.C., on November 15th, 1969. It is reported Nixon reasoned that if he did use nukes in Vietnam, the outpouring against him would be so huge it would sweep away him and his administration.
This is at least small comfort, demonstrating to activists that all our actions in a progressive direction bear fruit, yet often in ways about which we will not know. We have no way of calculating the number of people inspired by such events, the number swayed by such events, the number intimidated, or the way the effects of such massive demonstrations ripple out through the country and the world.
Truth’s Solitary Journey
What follows from here in this narrative? This is the story of one person’s informed take on those times. This is the perspective of one person intimately involved in the events of our days. For, Forrest-Gump-like, I found myself caught up in virtually all the major trends over the last sixty years either through first-hand observation or through the fact that as a writer and avid follower of the events of the day — in an era that seemed my whole life to be peppered with national and international surprises and upheavals, some positive; others mostly not — I could not look away.
In particular, this is a story of my quest for truth during those times. Through a coincidence of birth, genetics, and upbringing, and because in general a quest for truth requires too much time involvement and is usually not a higher priority over things like family and community; my quest for truth, forgoing family, wealth, and community ties, was unusual for my times. I found few fellow travelers. In my quest for truth, I could feel, and was quite carried along with, the ebbs and flows of the tides of my times.
I had a life different from most — one which took me to live, to study, and to participate with groups and in places around and around the country for fifty-odd years. Many of these groups and places and the activities and thinking of them would be considered exotic or alien to most Americans. And when folks heard about these developments, for the average person it was something that was happening far away from them with people they did not know … and was on top of that reported to them in a way to distort and misinform.
I, For One, Can Tell You Why We Stopped Building Nuclear Plants in This Country … I Helped Make it Happen
So many of the events of my life would not be well known, although some of the things I was involved in had major influences on our country. For example, the cessation of the building of nuclear power plants in the early Eighties. Not many people could tell you why or how that happened — that 180-degree reversal in America’s march toward a nuclear nation. I was one of the people involved in bringing that about. I was not one of the major players up front. However, I was involved full-time over a couple year period that led up to the events that stopped nuclear power construction to this day. I can tell you what happened.
What is instructive is that at least one of the other persons involved at one point tried to get the story of what happened published. He was not a writer, and he failed; but it is doubtful his piece would be selected for publication anyway. The end of nuclear plant construction in the United States is one of those stories that you will only hear from our opponents and for most people it will have been chalked up to some confusing, mysterious, and random events. It was not.
No Nukes is Good Nukes
The cessation of nuclear plant construction was something that was desired, worked for, and hoped for by people who knew the dire consequences of nuclear energy and who understood the motives of the people behind nuclear energy who had no concept of that, or conscience. Keep in mind this all happened long before the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns, just as we predicted something like that would happen. We predicted that nuclear plants along shorelines or fault lines would be especially vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis leading to catastrophe. Fukushima’s catastrophic meltdown was the result of a tsunami that was caused by an earthquake.
Activism
Let me back up a second. I am an author, now, but for most of my life I was a psychotherapist who specialized in primal therapy and holotropic breathwork. As well, I am a prenatal and perinatal psychologist, and a philosopher. I did graduate work in anthropology and history, as well as pre- and perinatal psychology; and indeed this book was helped along in its development as my history thesis in my graduate research course in the early Nineties at Sonoma State University. Most recently, I have been advancing theory in the field of ecopsychology in a number of works.3 However, I am also an activist.
For a year and a half, from the fall of 1981 to the spring of 1983, I worked for an organization called Oregon Fair Share. I worked as a canvasser out of the Springfield, Oregon, office. The organization was an attempt to work on any issue the community deemed it wanted addressed, sort of like a public, non-work-related union … gathering folks together collectively to have strength in numbers to go up against the large entities in our world determining things for us … government, corporations, you know what I mean….
Oregon Fair Share worked on the issue of fair utility rates, and it won a major victory in restructuring electricity rates around the state so they no longer favored larger consumers of power and instead benefited ordinary folks, smaller consumers.
This example is instructive for how our unthinking ways of doing things — evolved out of a time vastly different from today — are mechanically undermining our lives; how they could be changed to benefit us given a little thought to the matter; and finally, how citizens can use their strength in numbers to take action to effect such necessary change. So let me elaborate a little on this victory of Oregon Fair Share.
These utility rates proposed by Oregon Fair Share — “lifeline rates,” as they are called — are still in effect. Notice, their intent was simple — to effect an environmental advantage for us, while making things better for ordinary folks. And how? By taking away the unfair advantage given almost routinely to the big and the powerful. For the utility rate structure had been set up previously so that the more electricity you used, the lower the rate per kilowatt hour you would pay. Kind of like the way you pay less per item when you, say, go to Costco and buy in bulk.
It makes sense, you would think, I know, to pay less when you buy more. Yet we are in an environmental crisis where use of electricity should be cut back as much as possible, not encouraged. And, yes, we were well aware of all these environmental issues we talk about today back then in the Eighties … and even Seventies…. Which shocks me, by the way, to realize how little things have changed in all this time. It is as if the environmental issue just started up recently, the way some folks think. Even worse are climate-change deniers. How silly to think that the government is orchestrating a problem that we have known about for thirty years and which was discovered nearly two hundred years ago.4
Anyway, the way things are normally done, in an economic model geared toward profit, is someone who buys more of something gets a lower price to encourage them to buy even more, and then a lower price at that point to buy even more. This is how businesses maximize their return on investment and how consuming people are pushed into the mindset of consumerism … to buy buy buy as the goal and purpose of life.
Yet these ways of doing things are put on their head in an environmental crisis. What do you do when the best thing, the only sane thing, is actually to encourage folks to consume less? Also, this was a public utility, keep in mind. We needed to ask folks, why in hell does a public utility, a monopoly, need to maximize profits? Why not just enough to cover operating expenses and wages? And here we came up against another common notion of a capitalistic society: Which is that the other goal, outside of buying as much as one could, is to make as much as one can … of money. So greed and consumption are the two and only goals in this capitalist model.
What Oregon Fair Share had to do was to get the utility to see things differently and change its rates. But first they had to get the community out of its mindset. Believe me, most folks, regardless of the benefit to themselves in having lower rates, simply could not see the issue outside the box in which they were trained to think: That is, that consuming more should reap a reward, which would encourage more consumption.
Think about the environmental consequences of this. If you were able to pay less per gallon of gas the more you drove your car … so that at the end of the month, you could be paying fifty cents a gallon, say … would you not then drive your car a lot more and waste a lot more gas? On the other hand, if at the end of the month you were paying six bucks a gallon wouldn’t you have significant motivation to restrain yourself?
Well, this is how it worked out in the early Eighties with lifeline rates and Oregon Fair Share. It was a small, yet important and long-standing, victory. We were able to cut back the size of the utility bill folks would pay — and it is still a modest amount, even today, I can tell you — while doing something to help the environment by restraining the overconsumption of electricity. I can guarantee you the big operators, who had had it good with cheap electricity, found all kinds of ways to conserve and use less, once they had to pay their fair share.
Nuclear
When I was canvassing for Oregon Fair Share, we canvassed on that issue, utility rates, lifeline rates, using it as an example, to the folks we’d talk to at the door, of the benefits of strength in numbers … and how that worked in tackling the large issues. However, the major issue we were working on when I was there was the nuclear one. I don’t need to lay out the dangers of nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and such to you, I know. Yet keep in mind, nuclear weapons could hardly be tackled as a local issue. Oh, sure, folks could get a stop sign erected at a dangerous intersection in their neighborhood through the power of Oregon Fair Share. People could also change the rate structure on their electric bill to benefit themselves and the environment. But how does one deal with the problem of burgeoning nuclear waste that is poisoning the globe and nuclear proliferation that threatens our existence at any particular moment?
There was a way to get at the problem, however. It had to do with the issue of the cost of nuclear energy.
At that time, the nuclear power plants that were being built, in Washington State, were the WPPSS plants (Washington Public Power Supply System). They were facetiously called “whoops” plants, because they were way, way, way over-budget, over-cost. So much so that it was an increasing financial debacle to continue building them. They were so over-budget they were going to end up costing the people in the Northwest part of the country roughly twelve-thousand dollars per household, over time, of course, through increases in their utility bills.5
That price tag was just to mothball the plants; that is, to put the construction done on them at that point under wraps for a time when the construction might be able to be completed. Keep in mind, this cost to the residents of the Northwest would not get them any electricity for their money. We would be paying to cover the costs of the bad decisions made by those investors and municipal and regional officials who had decided on building them. So, twelve-thousand dollars per household to cover up a huge mistake of investors and officials, and all without getting a kilowatt hour of power out of it.
Well, we created an uprising in the early Eighties, in Springfield and Eugene, Oregon, as well as around the state, which resulted in the city of Springfield, in 1983, refusing to shoulder those costs and instead taking the loss in their bond rating that resulted. Specifically, our community activism triggered public outcries, marching in the streets, and eventually precipitated a lawsuit, which, winning, caused the city of Springfield to default on the bonds issued to fund the plants.
The lawsuit hinged on a piece of information dug up by the research arm of Oregon Fair Share: The City Charter of Springfield, Oregon, stipulated that its citizens could not be indebted above a specified amount without a vote of the people. The cost overruns at the WPPSS plants were such an exorbitant indebtedness, way above what the City Charter allowed. Since there had been no vote in Springfield, default on the bonds was the only legal course. Once Springfield defaulted, all other municipalities in the Northwest United States followed suit. The investors had to swallow the consequences of their bad investment.
Remember, the entire Northwest of the United States had contracted to build these nuclear plants in Washington State, the WPPSS plants. So, when Springfield defaulted on the bonds, and the rest of the Northwest U.S. followed, it effectively ended nuclear plant construction in the United States. This action, extending its reach to cover the nation, broke the arms of the nuclear industry. No more applications until 2012 were submitted in the United States to build a nuclear power plant. Construction on one hundred plants that were being built at the time was abandoned. Even the applications that were submitted in 2012 pertained to nuclear sites that already had nuclear reactors in operation. No new ground for nuclear plants has been broken in the United States since our action in Springfield, Oregon, in 1983.
To put one leg of this narrative on terra firma, I can tell you this at this time: Peter DeFazio, Democratic congressman from Oregon, was one of the players in the WPPPS default that resulted from our actions. This happened just before he won his seat; and if memory serves me it was one of the reasons he won. He was one of the people who came in at the conclusion to play a critical role.
Representative DeFazio was my neighbor at this time, too, living in the house across the street from me, in Springfield, Oregon. I personally canvassed him at his house on this issue for the organization I was working for, which was tackling this problem, Oregon Fair Share. We had a nice talk about nuclear and other issues. He contributed and was a member of our organization. He is a very, very good man.
I rarely heard of Peter DeFazio on TV in the twenty-five plus years after that, when I was away from Oregon. DeFazio is one of the people who would tell you the truth, so obviously he would not be one of those speaking to you on TV during the W. Bush years. Interestingly, I saw Peter DeFazio on TV a number of times after Obama took office. I don’t consider this non-appearance and reemergence to be coincidence in either instance.
Summing up, these two items, lifeline utility rates and the default on WPPSS nuclear plants, show the success that can come of activism. They also demonstrate the importance of distributing accurate information to the public. Otherwise, ordinary folks are awash in a sea of misinformation, lies, and propaganda from all large, corporate, and wealthy entities and are vulnerable to any manipulation of them desired by such elites. Indeed, without such an informed public, no progress is possible. Ultimately, then, totalitarianism is the inevitable result.
Things Ain’t Bad Enough? This Leads Me to Uncover the Most Horrific, Hidden in Plain Sight, Truth of All Time
So, again, this perspective is rooted in my life experience. It arises out of my personal, passionate quest for truth; and it details a good deal of truth’s many aspects — personal, historical, social, cultural, political, especially spiritual, and so much more.
Unfortunately, while this quest was and is personally gratifying, it led me to the most disturbing truth of all time, something widely known, something dire, something so big that most people — in keeping with the times of smoke and lies — are fearfully distracting themselves from, even at the cost of their lives and those of their children.
That terrible truth and liberating vision is something I unveil over the course of this work, and in the four books that follow from this: The Necessary Revolution, Apocalypse Emergency, Apocalypse NO, and Wounded Deer and Centaurs.
We begin here, however, with the most important part of that terrible truth — the part that is a linchpin in doing anything about the other parts regarding the environment. This has to do with fascism and the truth. With the first and without the second there is no way to do anything about any of the problems of peace, justice, or the environment. We look next at how a society ever more controlled by its and the world’s wealthiest people increasingly also flooded the minds and media of America and the world’s citizens in many and comprehensive ways to benefit themselves. To benefit themselves, regardless the cost to truth, human lives, and the well-being of the world’s masses.
Amazingly, also, we see how the Filthy Rich, through their Republican proxies in government, needed to continue to up the ante in their assault on us, our money, and our liberty. Their views were coming increasingly under attack, and they were being seen to be what they are: Lies benefiting the rich. So that the ideas of the Left, with roots, many of them in the Sixties, showed their greater value in their increasingly popularity, even with all the assaults on them.
How a society could be increasingly progressive in the minds of its population yet its government and media be increasingly regressive is hard to understand; it doesn’t make sense. Yet despots throughout history have maintained such arrangements, however brutal their means. They have used the same weapons, as the Filthy Rich and Republicans today, to control otherwise rebellious populations, to set them in alignment with the ends they wish, not any of their own. It comes down to control. Control of power and of information. Control, with its accomplices “Might makes right,” “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and “alternative facts.”
And, yes, it is happening here in the United States. .
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“1984” Comes to America — Slick, Gradual, and Perfect:
Dictatorship, Authoritarianism, and the Consequences of a Lack of Accountability
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana
“…liberal arts ideals in colleges were bulldozed away to make room in university curriculums for the career tracks leading directly into positions in management, medicine, law, and many new and highly specialized niches — usually the kind of specialization that would not occur until the postgraduate years, or after graduation directly on the job.”
“Increasingly over the years, a corporate-benefiting and more intensive indoctrination into outmoded and mechanical behavior, befitting a totalitarian state, had people more subdued, more contented in the ‘bread and circuses’ still provided them, even as their rights were incrementally and surreptitiously taken from them.”
“…with education and media suppression, along with an ongoing propaganda and misinformation campaign, Americans increasingly were wont to react with familiar though untrue and/or outdated ideas and truisms in the face of increasingly complex and tumultuous events.”
“…in America, we are better [sarcasm] because we just seduce folks away from higher aspirations of the soul to the lower base impulses that are satisfied with what money can buy. The corporations buy the talent of these ‘uneducated’ graduates and their potential for high achievement and all the rewards that come with rich lives of insight and personal growth. In exchange for their moneyed positions they receive an enlightenment lobotomy.”
“Since Kennedy’s time and because of the Vietnam War protests, I have seen an increasing web of deceit cover this land. I have witnessed things with my own eyes that have been changed when reported to the country and written into history books. I have watched the “1984” of George Orwell creep into America unnoticed — slick and gradual and perfect — as only the best minds, paid handsomely by the people with wealth, can concoct.”
“Bush’s dictatorship was the end result of the slick suppression of truth and manipulation of the masses that had its roots in the Fifties, took the helm after killing Kennedy, and went into all-out war stance when confronted by the backlash of the educated in the late Sixties and very early Seventies.”
“…we have seen W. Bush’s affront to the rule of law and manipulation of the masses for the ends of war simply brought to fruit with the installation of Trump. Worse still, we have seen the dictatorial aspirations of W. Bush more fully implemented by Trump. And it was done in a way to make those changes more difficult to undo.”
“You will see as we continue in this book how W. Bush’s crimes against the United States should not have been allowed to avoid investigation, as was the case under President Obama and with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, I wrote about this lack of investigation of the prior Bush administration by Obama at the time, in Obama’s first year, saying, ‘those who don’t know history are apt to repeat it, yet those whose history is not accurate cannot therefore know it and are guaranteed to repeat it.'”
“…Obama and Pelosi ensured that coverup of Republican crimes would continue. They set a precedent that even lies that lead to wars with over a million dead can be safely ignored after the fact.”
“The decision was made at the time of Ford’s pardon of Nixon, that the ‘stress-free’ functioning of society trumps justice, trumps accountability, trumps consequences. Although such sweeping under the rug of Republican crimes and treason favors the criminal and corrupt, that part is conveniently ignored….”
“…this thinking that the comfort of a few is more important than the rights of all came about — and it remains in effect in the government and media establishment to this day — making some folks to assert that Trump, currently, is free from accountability as president. This, despite having staged the most treasonous act of an American — an attempted violent overthrow of the government, with people murdered and many more planned to be — and doing it while himself president. This, despite Trump having engaged in espionage: removing nuclear secrets and lists of U.S. intelligence operatives — spies — for the purpose of selling to our adversaries.”
… the rise of liberal thinking in America since the Sixties has been kept at bay and largely fruitless despite its popularity. Indeed, I have heard it said that in the media — publication and broadcasting — there is a wall on the Left, blocking progressive thinking and ideas from showing up in the mainstream. My personal experience and observation agree with that.”
“…by 1975-1976, the wall on the Left of the mainstream had been erected and its door locked to keep out ‘pesky’ counterculture folk with their ‘annoying’ (to the Filthy Rich) ideas. Instead and specifically, books that benefit the profit-takers and powers-that-be, directly or indirectly, began being the ones put out by major publishers. A wall on the Left. A deluge of idiocy washing in from the Right, promoted by wealthy interests.”
“…this is a continuation of the kind of misinformation and attempts to change the narrative of events from one fitting more solidly on the pins of facts to one that is pleasing and supportive of the agendas of the wealthy.”
“…in hindsight after Trump’s abominable four years in his stolen office of the presidency, we see that the wealthy elites intent to control all aspects of the American mind and the American’s purse has no bounds. We see that even treason, espionage, insurrection, attempting a coup, separating children from their parents, inciting mass murder, and the overthrow of democracy and rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the separation of church and state, and the rights of a woman to make decisions about her body are fair game for our American (and Russian) totalitarians.”
“As I predicted in 2013, the forces under threat would, with their huge wealth, fight a ‘fierce rearguard action’ against the cultural elements threatening their values — their much cherished albeit profit-enabling values.”
“…this fight — this undeclared Class War/ Culture War — continues with one side, liberalism and the Left, rising in popularity among the masses, consistently and increasingly since the Sixties. And the other side — conservative and fascist, Republicans and the Right — are viewed with more and more disdain, as their ideas are revealed to be ineffective and irrelevant and their tactics increasingly corrupt and illegal, criminal, and this: treasonous.”
“…we all see that those regressive and irrelevant ideas, flooding us from the Right, remain more powerful than kinder and progressive ones. For the moneyed elites control minds and policy with their exorbitant wealth. They are able to shove their demented views down the minds of gullible Americans through massive media campaigns on Fox News and right-wing media, on the internet and otherwise. Sinclair Broadcasting’s control of the majority of local television news in America comes to mind.”
“It is difficult, to be sure, in the current environment awash with misinformation, much of it purposely targeted by Putin’s Russia to undermine America’s democracy and elections. It is a daunting task —surrounded by such walls of misinformation and lies — to know what is real and what is fabricated by moneyed interests to turn our minds in a particular direction, no matter how false, cruel, violent, or unfair.”
“…this is a time more dangerous and more unlike any time in history by far. Yet it is invigorating with promise and progressive change.”
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[Chapter 3 text begins:] Before the corporations and their ownership by an obscenely wealthy elite, there were the abominably well-off of other societies and economies — the filthy rich nobility that kept the peasants as virtual slaves.
Filthy Rich, Nobility, Peasants, Slaves
The point, I guess, is that we are all taught something quite different about America, from kindergarten on up. We see now it is all questionable: We see how the wealthy elite and the huge corporations use newspapers and the media more than anything else to ever advance their profit-seeking agenda. So I can only wonder how different this control of the media by the filthy rich is from the brainwashing and propaganda we heard that totalitarian societies engage in, especially the Communists in the Soviet Union that were used as examples for most of my life.
Still, is it corporations that do these things, the enslaving? Let us say it exactly so we can pinpoint who are really the actors. Is it not the people who own/run the corporations? So, that, in my opinion, makes it what one network (CNN, I think) who did a documentary years ago on the obscenely increased wealth and power of this class … occurring during the Bush Administration … termed “the Filthy Rich.” I think it is high time we started being specific about who is running America into the dirt.
White-Collar Slavery and Rat Racing
At the same time, along with this amassing of governmental power and institutional control over media, education, and so on — beginning in the early 1970s — it was deemed a good idea to use higher education to train people for corporate niches that were becoming increasingly complex.
So liberal arts ideals in colleges were bulldozed away to make room in university curriculums for the career tracks leading directly into positions in management, medicine, law, and many new and highly specialized niches — usually the kind of specialization that would not occur until the postgraduate years, or after graduation directly on the job. I’m talking, for example, about such tracks as international finance and the like, where formerly the student’s major would have been the more broadly encompassing and social-science-related study of economics.
College students were decreasingly being exposed to the great ideas of the millennia, ideas that had stood the test of time and influenced numerous societies and nations and individuals. Increasingly over the years, a corporate-benefiting and more intensive indoctrination into outmoded and mechanical behavior, befitting a totalitarian state, had people more subdued, more contented in the “bread and circuses” still provided them, even as their rights were incrementally and surreptitiously taken from them.
Alongside that, folks were less able to make rational decisions based on the facts. Media outlets reinforced the sheeple control of the masses, making it so Americans were more likely to know convenient slogans rather than the knowledge come of actual facts and critical thinking. This is what I refer to as the “rise of ‘obvious truths.’” By this I mean that with education and media suppression, along with an ongoing propaganda and misinformation campaign, Americans increasingly were wont to react with familiar though untrue and/or outdated ideas and truisms in the face of increasingly complex and tumultuous events.
Higher education did their part, as I said. The Big Ideas were not taught as much after 1971, making way for the power of the Big Lie to be employed later and ongoingly into current times. For example, if corporations were seen or heard to be needing, say, people knowledgeable in inter-managerial, mid-corporate, communicative intercourse and response, well entire four-year programs were built around that.
Add that kind of narrowly focused citizenry with its ephemeral knowledge and you have the kind of population that will do the bidding of the overseers and be happy for their fat paychecks — until their narrow niche of “knowledge” becomes obsolete because of the development of a new way of approaching or handling things, equally as ephemeral, but more efficient or something … and itself to become outmoded eventually.
Slaughtering Smart Folks
Such an “educated” yet narrowly focused citizenry will be happy for their paychecks, not knowing of any higher ideals than greed and accumulation. Lacking a more generalized view of their society, lacking a more comprehensive overview of the ocean of knowledge and science, such folks with specialized knowledge will not know of their enslavement. Such unsmart grads would not know of the historical predecessors to their manipulation or the like. They would not have training in original thought but rather in specialized training in decided upon processes and procedures and the jargon accompanying them. Hence, they would become rote learners of narrowly applicable and short-lived “knowledge.” This would remove the educated class as a barrier to any kind of totalitarian efforts.
So we can consider ourselves to be better in America. For totalitarianism — as, for example, under Stalin, Mao, or the Khmer Rouge — is usually accompanied by the slaughter of the educated. In my own lifetime, in Cambodia at least one million were killed wantonly, anyone with education was slated for death.
Enlightenment Lobotomies
However in America, we are better [sarcasm] because we just seduce folks away from higher aspirations of the soul to the lower base impulses that are satisfied with what money can buy. The corporations buy the talent of these “uneducated” graduates and their potential for high achievement and all the rewards that come with rich lives of insight and personal growth. In exchange for their moneyed positions they receive an enlightenment lobotomy. Precluding the freedom wrought of an expansive perspective — blocking that way to transcendence and fulfillment — such dumbed-down members of the “educated” class will be useful cogs in the corporate machine.
Should people feel dissatisfied — as we psychologists and liberal arts thinkers know they will sooner or later — others of their kind who took the medical or pharmaceutical tracks have conveniently produced the sedatives, palliatives, and opiates to keep them numb. I guess you could say these social palliatives — including as well, the entertainment industry, religion, and electronics — are the “breathing holes” that Kurt Cobain talked about. They may put you in a jar, but they’ll give you “breathing holes,” and you’ll think you’re happy, he sang.1
Slick, Gradual, and Perfect
So this look into American history notices a decades-long and increasing suppression of truth.
Since Kennedy’s time and because of the Vietnam War protests, I have seen an increasing web of deceit cover this land. I have witnessed things with my own eyes that have been changed when reported to the country and written into history books. I have watched the “1984” of George Orwell creep into America unnoticed — slick and gradual and perfect — as only the best minds, paid handsomely by the people with wealth, can concoct.
American Dictatorship
A well-regarded book about Bush’s America published shortly after George W. Bush left office, and tallying the actions and events of the W’s eight years, concludes without equivocation that America had become a dictatorship.
I believe that to be true. But even if it did not rise to that level, whatever it did rise to did not happen overnight and just because of one administration. Bush’s dictatorship was the end result of the slick suppression of truth and manipulation of the masses that had its roots in the Fifties, took the helm after killing Kennedy, and went into all-out war stance when confronted by the backlash of the educated in the Sixties and very early Seventies.
History, Doomed to Repeat
Having published this book in 2013 — this edition of 2022 being the revised, updated version — one easily sees how prescient the words of this book have been, how prophetic. For we have seen W. Bush’s affront to the rule of law and manipulation of the masses for the ends of war simply brought to fruition with the installation of Trump. Worse still, we have seen the dictatorial aspirations of W. Bush more fully implemented by Trump. And it was done in a way to make those changes more difficult to undo.
Trump was able to put people in positions of power difficult to remove — the Supreme Court, the head of the U.S. Postal Service, the head of the FBI, and many career positions in the Justice Department. Alongside the Trump appointees remaining at their posts, we have seen gerrymandering and the erosion of election rights allowing the absolute worst, the most “deplorable,” elements of society to hold positions of power in Congress under the Republican banner. Alongside that, we have watched the continued onslaught of the democracy of the U.S., with ever more vicious attacks on human rights, our elections, and ever-increasing gun violence, fueled by GOP policy.
You will see as we continue in this book how W. Bush’s crimes against the United States should not have been allowed to avoid investigation, as was the case under President Obama and with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, I wrote about this lack of investigation of the prior Bush administration by Obama at the time, in Obama’s first year, saying, “those who don’t know history are apt to repeat it, yet those whose history is not accurate cannot therefore know it and are guaranteed to repeat it.”
And we see that has happened in that Obama and Pelosi let W. Bush slide, allowed the narrative that he was a respectable president — worthy of all the accolades of the office. In that way Obama and Pelosi ensured that coverup of Republican crimes would continue. They set a precedent that even lies that lead to wars with over a million dead can be safely ignored after the fact.
President Barrack Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in forgoing the investigation of Republican crimes during the years the GOP headed the government under George W. Bush, under the guise that — like Gerald Ford’s reasoning about pardoning Nixon — such unsavory aspects of politics should be put behind us as soon as possible, nevertheless also set a horrible precedent. Which is, that the office of the presidency would be so excessively regarded … and protected …as to allow the most egregious acts of the president and his entourage to go by unnoticed by the media, and free of accountability or consequences, assuming you are a Republican.
And such folks, whose actions had been illegal, fraudulent, corrupt, and even treasonous would remain media and governmental figures with all honors and privileges, regardless the criminality of their acts. The decision was made at the time of Ford’s pardon of Nixon, that the “stress-free” functioning of society trumps justice, trumps accountability, trumps consequences. Although such sweeping under the rug of Republican crimes and treason favors the criminal and corrupt, that part is conveniently ignored when presenting this rationale. That criminality in government that is not investigated and rooted out sufficiently will remain to lift its diabolical head in a not-too-distant future is also not considered.
This rationale behind the pardon of Nixon was reinforced again in 2000 when the Supreme Court ruled that the smooth functioning of society — which in their minds requires only conservatives be allowed in positions of power — and the peace of the nation was more important than the accuracy of the election process. For Al Gore had amassed enough votes in Florida to actually win the election; this was determined not long after the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to W. Bush.
Regardless the supposed “legality” of all these events and their abundantly funded albeit twisted rationales, the occurrence of these frontal assaults on justice in our history makes the America of the 2020’s more like the totalitarian states of China and Russia than anyone influential would ever publicly admit.
Indeed, this thinking that the comfort of a few is more important than the rights of all came about — and it remains in effect in the government and media establishment to this day — making some folks to assert that Trump, currently, is free from accountability as president. This, despite having staged the most treasonous act of an American — an attempted violent overthrow of the government, with people murdered and many more planned to be — and doing it while himself president. This, despite Trump having engaged in espionage: removing nuclear secrets and lists of U.S. intelligence operatives — spies — for the purpose of selling to our adversaries.
Much as in the same way Presidents Ronald Reagan — Contragate, for example — and H. W. Bush’s … the Silverado scandal and the Savings and Loan Crisis … crimes in office were left without consequence, which allowed the ascension of W. Bush and his illegal and costly Iraqi war. Much as Gerald Ford and the Republicans of 1974 allowed the rise of Ronald Reagan, as a consequence of Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon in 1975.
All these are ways, and there are many more, that the rise of liberal thinking in America since the Sixties has been kept at bay and largely fruitless despite its popularity. Indeed, I have heard it said that in the media — publication and broadcasting — there is a wall on the Left, blocking progressive thinking and ideas from showing up in the mainstream. My personal experience and observation agree with that.
In point of fact, the first book I wrote in 1970, I sought to get published in 1975. The book deals with mysticism as it relates to the youth of the counterculture. My literary agent edited it professionally and sent it out to publishers for a year. As he put it, these kinds of work were being picked up just a year prior (1974), but now no publisher wanted to touch them. This is how I am a first-hand witness to one of the specific ways publication and the media were restructured after the Sixties. So that by 1975-1976, the wall on the Left of the mainstream had been erected and its door locked to keep out “pesky” counterculture folk with their “annoying” (to the Filthy Rich) ideas. Instead and specifically, books that benefit the profit-takers and powers-that-be, directly or indirectly, began being the ones put out by major publishers. A wall on the Left. A deluge of idiocy washing in from the Right, promoted by wealthy interests.
I might mention that even some of the more traditional liberal tomes are being removed from university, school, and mainstream availability at this very time. Compare that also with the assault by the Right on what it calls “Critical Race Theory.” Not only is the term, Critical Race Theory, suspect, but also what it actually refers to are the views of history and society showing the way racism is endemic in our society and has been through history.
And to deny that clearly evident and observable endemic racism all around us is to deny facts, is to concoct a history more suitable to Controllers, less likely to “rile up the masses” and threaten their places in power. As you will see coming up, this is a continuation of the kind of misinformation and attempts to change the narrative of events from one fitting more solidly on the pins of facts to one that is pleasing and supportive of the agendas of the wealthy.
As I predicted in 2013, the forces under threat would, with their huge wealth, fight a fierce rearguard action against the cultural elements threatening their values — their much cherished albeit profit-enabling values. Concerning Critical Race Theory, above, I notice Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has forbidden such ideas to be shared at the educational banquet of thought. Not bad enough, just yesterday this paragon of “1984” thinking has decreed that no school or university will get funding if they do not have the correct beliefs among its faculty and students. Specifically, students and teachers will have to yearly fill out a survey where they will be questioned about their political and other beliefs.
So, no, my analogy of America becoming like the dystopian society of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, is more than a metaphorical frame of perspective. It is all too real, as we will see increasingly in this work and especially in the next one in the Series, which is titled, The Necessary Revolution.2
Returning to the class war embroiled with these details, I didn’t think I needed to add that that battle between the obscenely filthy rich and all classes below them would not be a fair one or would abide by any democratic principles, as is the case when money and power, not principles, govern the actions of a nation’s decision-makers.
For the record, though, in hindsight after Trump’s abominable four years in his stolen office of the presidency, we see that the wealthy elites intent to control all aspects of the American mind and the American’s purse has no bounds. We see that even treason, espionage, insurrection, attempting a coup, separating children from their parents, inciting mass murder, and the overthrow of democracy and rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the separation of church and state, and the rights of a woman to make decisions about her body are fair game for our American (and Russian) totalitarians.
So this fight — this undeclared Class War/ Culture War — continues with one side, liberalism and the Left, rising in popularity among the masses, consistently and increasingly since the Sixties. And the other side — conservative and fascist, Republicans and the Right — are viewed with more and more disdain, as their ideas are revealed to be ineffective and irrelevant and their tactics increasingly corrupt and illegal, criminal, and this: treasonous.
Yet we all see that those regressive and irrelevant ideas, flooding us from the Right, remain more powerful than kinder and progressive ones. For the moneyed elites control minds and policy with their exorbitant wealth. They are able to shove their demented views down the minds of gullible Americans through massive media campaigns on Fox News and right-wing media, on the internet and otherwise. Sinclair Broadcasting’s control of the majority of local television news in America comes to mind.
All this said, what possibilities are there to know the truth? It is difficult, to be sure, in the current environment awash with misinformation, much of it purposely targeted by Putin’s Russia to undermine America’s democracy and elections. It is a daunting task —surrounded by such walls of misinformation and lies — to know what is real and what is fabricated by moneyed interests to turn our minds in a particular direction, no matter how false, cruel, violent, or unfair.
Yet books like this are available for those who wish their minds to be free. The internet, as well, though seething with Russian and corporate lies, still allows people-to-people connections where, if nowhere else, actual truth can be revealed and shared. The internet is, I believe, our one solid hope and our primary weapon against the pervasive corporate-benefiting Matrix that binds us.
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Now, that glimpse from the hilltop completed, let us descend the valley and see what got us to this apocalyptic pass — to this time on the verge of fascism, global tyranny, world war, global pandemic, expanding totalitarianism, and planetary implosion: all of it, every bit of it, being rooted in the obscene differences in income and wealth between the supremely filthy rich and all the rest of us. All of it rooted in class war.
For, this is a time more dangerous and more unlike any time in history by far. Yet it is invigorating with promise and progressive change. There is certainly plenty to be done.
Importantly, this ultimate Earth struggle for survival and freedom, arises in a historical context of events that explain it, advise it, open doors to solutions, foretell its unfolding events, and even give us hope for the future. And to this we now turn.
We begin, ever, at the roots. The Sixties changed everything.
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[Quotes/highlights:] “These instances may be seen as the examples of the use of ‘The Big Lie’ as a major, sometimes the only, strategy in conservatives’ attempts to fight back against this outpouring of sensitivity to injustice at all levels, as evidenced by an increasing liberalization of values among the populace.”
“…the media’s active refusal to cover events could be seen as a small, albeit influential, aspect of a much larger effort — however unconsciously carried out — at suppression of the new values and reinforcement of traditional ones by the powerful interests that those values, if successful, either directly or indirectly put in jeopardy.”
“Some commentators in the Seventies speculated that established societal powers had been caught off guard by the initial fervor and tenacity of counterculture energy and demonstrations, but that toward the end of the Sixties and early Seventies there had been time to regroup.”
“…this decline of interest in the Sixties Generation and its values, as exhibited in the counterculture, was part of a concerted effort by the media. The media in collusion with the threatened established sectors of society benefiting the wealthy clearly acted to firmly put a lid on student and youthful dissent and unrest and to stifle the counterculture.”
“…the media played a large and active part in the ‘disappearance’ of this generation. It has been noted, for example, as simply one indicator, that 90% of youth protests were reported by the media in 1969, but only 20 to 25% were covered in 1970-71, and only 1% of such dissident activities could be found in the media coverage of 1972.”
“Donald Trump has surpassed all in his use of The Big Lie as his one and only stratagem. His camp has invented ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ as alternate realities within which to enslave their followers. That nearly 40% of Americans buy into the new, improved ‘reality’ fascism and Russian takeover of democracy is an astonishing and ominous fact of our current times.”
“…these puppeteers owned the media and therefore controlled what the public would be told; they were the main sources of income for universities across the country, so they controlled what would be rolled out as truth and knowledge. Ultimately, these wealthy elite could fund politicians and speakers … and radio and TV show hosts … who would speak their Big Lies. They really had all the weapons to roundly put down this band of youthful idealists whose only weapons were truth, and righteous feeling, and passion of youth, and clarity of youthful mind.”
“…with the constant and pervasive repetition of a ‘conservative backlash,’ the media had a big influence on taking the wind out of the sails of many of the youth.”
“…this cadre of youth retained their values into later life. It became common to hear that these motivated youth decided on a strategy of playing the game to gain entrance to the positions of power and to change the structures of violence and hatred from within.”
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[Chapter 4 text begins:] Whatever happened to Sixties youth? What became of the values, aspirations, ideals, and energy that manifested in those turbulent but exciting, angry but supremely hopeful years? So many books were written about this unusual generation and its revolutionary values. I cite, as only one example, the works of social psychologist Kenneth Keniston who reported on his research in studying the psychological makeup of both activists and hippie types of this generation. His well-regarded and widely read works include The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (1965) and Young Radicals: Notes on Revolutionary Youth (1968).
“Dirty Hippies!”
Indeed, there was a time during the 1960s, when the influence of the “baby-boomer” youth generation was everywhere to be found. Their activities were broadcast daily on the TV news. They were making political events. They were setting trends in fashion and style which business did its worst to copy, package, and sell — attempting thereby to cash in on such powerful enthusiasms. They created an entire alternative culture in America — the counterculture — which still exists in some areas. They were primary actors in a “shocking” — to conservatives — worldwide sexual revolution, which has continued into today. They experimented with mind-expanding drugs, which have become even more popular since and are seen to be increasingly beneficial. They began an environmental movement whose importance has only increased in the decades since.
Yet suddenly, faster than their appearance, this generation of youth faded from significance in the early Seventies. At the time, commentators were falling over each other attempting to fit a rationale to the relative disappearance of youth influence and the comparative placidity of events.
A common explanation that surfaced in those days was that many youth leaders, particularly activists, had begun being disillusioned about the effectiveness and results of confrontational politics.
Some argued that activists were beginning to “look inward” for the roots of problems or were reevaluating and seeking to come up with better ways of eliciting change. As for the less activist sectors of the youth culture — those referred to by the originally pejorative terms “flower children” or “hippies” — many had moved out of the cities, often in disgust and equal disillusionment, to the countryside.
There they were reputed to be actively carrying out their “back to nature” values singly, in couples, and in communal groups. As far as the larger culture was concerned, they were invisible.
What happens to a revolution not televised:
Others have asserted that the media played a large and active part in the “disappearance” of this generation. It has been noted, for example, as simply one indicator, that 90% of youth protests were reported by the media in 1969, but only 20 to 25% were covered in 1970-71, and only 1% of such dissident activities could be found in the media coverage of 1972.
One could argue in response to this that demonstrations were becoming commonplace, so they qualified less as news as time went by. Yet this reasoning does not fully explain the precipitous nature of this decline, nor the resulting virtual elimination of coverage. In respect to comparable events of recent times, such a pattern has elicited the label “media cover-up.”
Killing “The Sixties”
It is therefore much more likely — and there has been evidence and published commentary to this effect — that this decline of interest in the Sixties Generation and its values, as exhibited in the counterculture, was part of a concerted effort by the media. The media in collusion with the threatened established sectors of society benefiting the wealthy clearly acted to firmly put a lid on student and youthful dissent and unrest and to stifle the counterculture.
Keeping the People Down
I myself have knowledge and personal experience of how a similar suppression at exactly this time was perpetrated on university campuses.
Enlightenment lobotomies … again
Specifically, at the college I was attending — Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — and other colleges and universities around the country in 1971, wealthy alumni threatened to withdraw funding unless (1) certain faculty members, considered “threatening” to established interests, were fired, (2) certain programs — considered too innovative, “disruptive,” or “instigative” — were cut back or eliminated, and (3) certain “unorthodox,” “undisciplined,” or “publicly disrespectful” student behaviors were discouraged, suppressed, and/or harshly responded to and clamped down on.
The total remaking of society, so such a generation would never arise again
Indeed, such active “blacklisting” of counterculture figures, behavior, and values on university campuses seemed to be part of a general dictum across institutions — including publishing, films, TV, education at all levels, medicine and science, and the workplace — to actively fight back at what was seen as dire threats to traditional mainstream values. These are indoctrinated values, incidentally, that were calculated to placate the masses and keep them, as for hundreds of years, feeling nervous, unworthy, inferior, and slavish in relation to the wealthy and powerful.
Culture War and Matrix Beginnings
The Fear We Engendered in the Privileged
Some commentators in the Seventies speculated that established societal powers had been caught off guard by the initial fervor and tenacity of counterculture energy and demonstrations, but that toward the end of the Sixties and early Seventies there had been time to regroup.
Declaration of Culture War
A massively funded attack by “the establishment”
These established forces and economic interests began to implement a well-conceived, hugely funded, well-orchestrated, and highly cooperative counteroffensive against the new cultural values, which in their minds represented a dagger poised at the heart of their very existence.
From this perspective, then, the media’s active refusal to cover events could be seen as a small, albeit influential, aspect of a much larger effort — however unconsciously carried out — at suppression of the new values and reinforcement of traditional ones by the powerful interests that those values, if successful, either directly or indirectly put in jeopardy.
Creating a “conservative backlash”
With these considerations, it is understandable that in 1971 and 1972 — despite increasing unrest and demonstrations on college campuses, increasing liberalization of values among all age groups and growing liberal and counterculture political power — there would be a number of books published and widely reviewed that closed their eyes on all this. Instead, they presented dubious evidence and selectively chosen incidents to make a case for a so-called “conservative backlash,” which there is no doubt the authors earnestly hoped for and fervently sought to bring about in their proclamation of it.
The same tactics were used during Obama’s terms to create a conservative Tea Party “movement.” They are being used now to support the defeated and twice impeached Trump. His supporters continue to maintain, along with Trump himself, the Big Trumpian Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
These instances may be seen as the examples of the use of “The Big Lie” as a major, sometimes the only, strategy in conservatives’ attempts to fight back against this outpouring of sensitivity to injustice at all levels, as evidenced by an increasing liberalization of values among the populace.
Strong man truth — Big lies!! … big ones
As background: The Big Lie basically amounts to the idea that you can say the most outlandish thing long enough, loud enough, and from the highest pulpit, and eventually it becomes accepted fact. No doubt, its use can be traced to the earliest times of civilized history and is certainly evident in this past century in the tactics of Hitler and Mussolini, where it played crucial and primary roles.
However, its more recent re-emergence in contemporary America and its rise to the heights of skillful political brandishment came in the hands, first, of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Later it had its most pervasive use, however awkward and skill-less, during the eight years of George W. Bush, where Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and others took it to such moronic lengths they eventually were seen to be what they were — big lies, with no attempt to educate the public at all; but simply to cover up and to manipulate, like common criminals would.
Most recently, though, Donald Trump has surpassed all in his use of The Big Lie as his one and only stratagem. His camp has invented “alternative facts” and “fake news” as alternate realities within which to enslave their followers. That nearly 40% of Americans buy into the new, improved “reality” fascism and Russian takeover of democracy is an astonishing and ominous fact of our current times.
Nevertheless, these later major uses, in fact the evolution of The Big Lie into the only strategy of Republican politics, may find its beginnings in such publications as these books from the early Seventies, as well as to its highly skilled, and much documented, use by Richard Nixon throughout his political career.
Creating Their Own Reality — It’s Their World, We Only Just Live in It
The Success of The Big Lie, and Its Eventual Morphing into the Big Web of Deceit, More Easily termed The Matrix
The hidden puppeteers
Whereas Sixties youth had only their enthusiasm and their heartfelt passion to allow a world of freedom, and all the other values espoused in our Constitution, they were up against huge entrenched, and filthy with wealth, nameless puppeteers. The wealth of these puppet masters got them any support they wanted for anything.
In the Sixties, these wealthy manipulators sensed a threat to the status quo, hearing about idealistic notions of equality, freedom, and such. But they also knew that their positions depended not on the actual enjoyment of the masses of their supposed “freedoms” but only of ordinary folks being convinced they had them.
Culture War, Beginnings: Trauma at the Top:
“Our Youth Have Gone Crazy! They Actually Believe That Claptrap About Rights and Freedom That We Put in Schoolbooks to Keep the Masses Complacent! They’re Daring to Use Them!”
So it was a huge threat to see masses of people proclaiming their rights and actually daring to use them. They could be slowed down in using their rights by having them violently bludgeoned by police and riled up construction workers in Chicago; they could be taken off track perhaps, by having several of them killed at Kent State; and they could be continually arranged to be misreported in the media and maligned as well. But this seemed to make them only more determined.
Paying the piper, calling the tune
Still, these puppeteers owned the media and therefore controlled what the public would be told; they were the main sources of income for universities across the country, so they controlled what would be rolled out as truth and knowledge. Ultimately, these wealthy elite could fund politicians and speakers … and radio and TV show hosts … who would speak their Big Lies. They really had all the weapons to roundly put down this band of youthful idealists whose only weapons were truth, and righteous feeling, and passion of youth, and clarity of youthful mind.
No contest
It was no contest, especially as only one side, the Controllers, was fully aware that they were at war. Indeed the other side, the progressive youth — most of them — had no inkling of the powers behind the scenes. That reality would of course be left out of the history and sociology books they had read — funded by the puppeteers of course.
Many Sixties youth even began to believe that they had lost their cause and that most Americans were lashing back at them. This would be disheartening to many; especially to those who had seen the coming together of middle class, upper middle class, and working class to join in mass movements like the one million who showed up from all over the country to be at Moratorium Day on November 15, 1969. In this way, with the constant and pervasive repetition of a “conservative backlash,” the media had a big influence on taking the wind out of the sails of many of the youth.
Living Under the Big (Conservative) Lie
Other youth activists of the Sixties felt they must have been wrong in their beliefs because they had now, according to the media, become the enemy of those they hoped would see the wisdom of these values that basically came from them! That is to say that young radicals in general had come from middle class liberal family backgrounds. They always felt they were carrying out the values their parents had taught them.
For them, then, to be violently attacked by the institutions of the establishment, which they had been taught embodied their parent’s liberal and just values, struck them not just as hypocrisy. More than that, to have the parental generation turn on them, they felt to be not just ignorant and hypocritical, but hurtful. For it demonstrated they had been fed a matrix of lies about what America was all about.
“First, We’ll Instill Doubt in the Masses, Thereby Creating Division”
These youth saw the country come awake to their values through massive movements like the antiwar movement and the cultural flowering, which older and middle-class folks were increasingly taking on themselves. It was therefore disconcerting and confusing to be told they were actually at odds with a conservative majority, a “silent majority.” This wasn’t true, but that would not be obvious to them at the time. So, thinking the country was at odds with the actual following through on the values of their parents and the liberal worlds they grew up in, doubt was palpable.
“Next, We’ll Push Them Into Poverty, Thereby Eliminating Alternatives”
For these youth, their response, unfortunately, was to try to reintegrate with the society they had thrown behind them, but now saw as the only one possible.
“Last, We’ll Compel Obedience”
Still, this cadre of youth retained their values into later life. It became common to hear that these motivated youth decided on a strategy of playing the game to gain entrance to the positions of power and to change the structures of violence and hatred from within. To some extent they succeeded, as we see from the careers of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Peter DeFazio, to give just four names of many that could have been used.
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In this, “Part One: Culture War — Truth,” we have overviewed some of the major forces at work in America from the 1950s till today. We saw how what would be thought to be true would be that which had been overly promoted and orchestrated by the wealthy elite, the Filthy Rich, who had total control of the media.
Outside of the influences from on high, we notice another factor, a psychological one, which affects if and how truth would be seen. This relates to the vast differences in recreational drugs in use by the various generations over the past seventy-plus years. We will look into this in the next Part of this book: “Culture War — Generations.” To that we now turn.
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PART TWO
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Culture War — Generations
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World War Two Generation, Alcohol and Tobacco:
“I Need a Drink … Booze and Tobacco Are Perfect Drugs for a Generation Rooted in Denial and Recklessness
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Alcohol numbs pain and creates a euphoric state by blotting out higher-order cerebral-cortical functioning. It reduces access to memory, diminishes physio-motor skills, blocks anxiety, depression, and nervousness.
“These effects alone make it the perfect drug to create and sustain a defensive style centered on denial…”
“There have historically been entire generations (see below) as well as individuals during any period who have kept themselves ‘under the influence’ pretty much all the time, sometimes considering it to be the natural state.”
“…how a cigarette is the perfect breast substitute. Not only does it engage the oral sensory gestalt, but the breathing in of a warm and full air simulates the taking in of warm mother’s milk.”
“Smoking tobacco re-creates for the smoker both the desired warm relaxation — which the neonate or infant would have experienced if he or she would have been tenderly held and breastfed — as well as the depression/sadness which actually was experienced in infancy because the need to nurse was not satisfied.”
“…the physical and psychological effects of sucking in a ‘smoke’ are those of (psychologically) sucking back, or inside, one’s feelings and anger…”
“…the true version of the events that led to such genocide would never be related in history books. And who would ever want to believe that the formative events of great nations … or the calamitous, genocidal events of other nations … could be instigated by a rash action from a small group of idiotic old men in a full-on state of intoxication?”
“Pointing out the normality and ritualizing of alcohol use in this era of the WWII Generation is important because it is an indication of the pervasiveness, at any time of day, of the state of consciousness — that is to say, intoxication — that this potent drug produces.”
“Yet in the WWII-Generation era, normal cultural, business, and social intercourse was often conducted in such an intoxicated state. Heady decisions concerning war, peace, and everything else were influenced by this culturally accepted drug use.”
“World War Two, therefore, was conducted and fought by a generation who grew up to believe that alcohol and cigarettes (nicotine) were an acceptable answer to unpleasantness — whether inside or outside of themselves. Alongside this and supporting it were an attitude and beliefs that negative — that is, unpleasant — emotions and feelings were harmful and should be kept out of consciousness. Thus, denial was the predominant defense in use by the World War Two Generation and defensiveness was their style.”
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[Chapter 5 text begins:] In continuing our exploration of cultural and generational conflict and the Matrix evolving out of that, it is instructive to focus on an aspect of that conflict that has burned with controversy — drug usage.
Drugs and Generations
Since drugs affect consciousness and personality and different substances have different effects, looking at the polar opposite views on consciousness-altering substances is especially fruitful.
For additional perspective on the topic of culture war and the processes of cultural change that have gone on since the 1950s between and because of the different generations involved, let us consider the relation between particular drugs, with each their own unique effects on consciousness, and the generation that uses them. Or, we might say … let us look at the prevailing drug use of a time and the generational culture that is created.
The next three chapters cover “Opposing Worlds,” which deals with the World War Two, Fifties, and the Sixties Generations and their drug usage. Chapters following that are about “Concocted Worlds.” They bring attention to the generations since — Generation X and Millennial — and their recreational preferences and cultural profiles.
To begin, I present some salient facts for your consideration:
Drugs and Consciousnesses
Drug Research, Public and Private
While it is common to state that drugs act differently on different people — especially, when referring to the less-mainstream, more esoteric ones, whose effects have not been experienced by the majority of people as yet — there are some obvious generalizations that can be made. For example, we would not say that we could not comment on the effects of alcohol. Its effects on the neurochemistry of the brain and on consciousness have been fully and scientifically explored, and of course its effects have been experienced by nearly everyone in our culture. Similarly, though research on the effects of the less-mainstream drugs have not been as thoroughly explored and documented, there is, in fact, quite a substantial body of scientific and popular literature on this, especially over the last half century.
Because of the widespread drug use of the Sixties Generation, massive amounts of money were spent to try to determine how and in what way people are affected by the substances they used. Though this research has largely been driven by a World-War-Two-Generation desire to find fault with the drugs, so that the research is biased toward looking for and of course then coming up with findings that would be considered negative, still, the research has a good deal of useful information if you can read “between the lines,” so to speak.
Alongside mainstream research there is also a considerable body of privately funded research, which is therefore less biased, as well as a sizable body of anecdotal research on drug effects. By this last I mean that there is a good deal of literature detailing what people have said they have experienced while under the influence of the various substances.
What follows is based on study of both kinds of research described above, as well as from reports by experiencers related to the author. Last but not least, it is a result of the fact that this author is a member of the Sixties Generation, born smack in the middle, in 1950, and it may be concluded that I share some of the characteristics of my generation. Enough said, or, see below.
Drug Effects — Alcohol
Alcohol was a drug of choice for the World-War-Two Generation, much more than it is for generations today. As we continue, consider how that drug’s effects might have contributed to that era’s historical events.
Alcohol numbs pain and creates a euphoric state by blotting out higher-order cerebral-cortical functioning. It reduces access to memory, diminishes physio-motor skills, blocks anxiety, depression, and nervousness.
These effects alone make it the perfect drug to create and sustain a defensive style centered on denial. Indeed, the drug can be said to “block out reality” in that one can be unaware of aspects of reality that could end up being dangerous and harmful while simultaneously enhancing the positive aspects of reality in an almost manic way. One can feel unafraid and unaware in the face of pain and danger, as well as one can feel confident and overoptimistic in terms of one’s evaluations of oneself, one’s capabilities, and the potential consequences of one’s actions.
We can say these are blocks to reality in that very often reality intervenes, through accidents, adverse social reactions, and the reevaluation of grandiose schemes afterwards “in the cold light of sobriety.” Most often, in the light of day, alcohol-fueled dreams and intentions are seen to be unrealistic in that they did not take into account other aspects which would prevent their success.
There have historically been entire generations (see below) as well as individuals during any period who have kept themselves “under the influence” pretty much all the time, sometimes considering it to be the natural state. For these folks who rarely venture into that state where decisions and plans are evaluated in a sober “cold light,” we know that the effect is a blocking out of reality in that the result of acting on the drug-influenced decisions and schemes is most often failure. It is actually disastrous, one way or the other, a good deal of the time more than would be the case following soberly decided acts. Alcohol-fueled decisions can result in acts leading to harm to the person, to others, or to the physical or social environment.
Drug Effects — Nicotine
There are three relevant effects of nicotine: It is a stimulant; it causes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure and can cause sweating from the speeding up of metabolism. This allows it to be used to aid in working situations, where continued or repetitive action is required, beyond what a person would normally wish to do. However, it is not useful in, say, sporting types of action in that another effect of nicotine is a diminished physio-motor capacity. For example, people will sometimes complain of feelings of “wooziness” and/or its affecting one’s sense of balance, particularly if one has taken a greater amount of the drug or is unaccustomed to its effects.
Nicotine can paradoxically create a depressing effect. This effect on the body can be felt as a relaxation, and sometimes, but only at its onset, as a relatively short-lasting feeling of a surrounding warm numbness, which is sometimes termed a buzz. Thus, a person can feel relaxed, sometimes to the point of mental depression, but simultaneously be metabolically stimulated. These effects are related to certain psychological effects of taking the drug, if it is taken in the form of smoked tobacco, as in cigarette or pipe smoking.
Arthur Janov — the originator of primal therapy and hence founder of primal psychology — has pointed out how a cigarette is the perfect breast substitute. Not only does it engage the oral sensory gestalt, but the breathing in of a warm and full air simulates the taking in of warm mother’s milk. Indeed, people who smoke have often, in psychotherapy, discovered they have severe deprivations around nursing during the neonatal and infancy periods. The appeal of cigarette smoking, then, for these people, lies in its ability to both engage and to some degree temporarily satisfy the oral craving carried over from infancy. Smoking tobacco re-creates for the smoker both the desired warm relaxation — which the neonate or infant would have experienced if he or she would have been tenderly held and breastfed — as well as the depression/sadness which actually was experienced in infancy because the need to nurse was not satisfied.
We will see again and again this interesting pattern in drug effects, which helps to explain their appeal, in that very often they both assuage an underlying Pain as well as re-create it, either simultaneously or at different times of the drug experience. Primal and other psychologists have learned, of course, that those are the two motivations that emanate from early Pain. That is, that a person, for one thing, is driven to run away from and to avoid her or his Pain. Yet, for another, “the body” … as it is sometimes said … pushes the person to re-create the original situation, over and over again, in what may be considered the psyche’s way of trying to resolve it. Put simply, we are psychologically designed to be forever faced with our problems until we handle them. In the case of primal pain, we stay stuck in the patterns and sensations of our past traumas until we resolve them.
A final effect of cigarette use is its ability to repress anger. Considering the above, it can be seen why cigarette smoking would be related to an “oral rage,” which is how some psychologists have described one of the emotional reactions to nursing deprivation. Stated plainly, a baby would be extremely pissed-off to not get the comforting and nourishing experience of breastfeeding that a human is biologically designed to crave. This anger remains inside, like all primal emotions, and is easily and often brought to consciousness, triggered by the frustrations of normal life, if nothing else.
However, the physical and psychological effects of sucking in a “smoke” are those of (psychologically) sucking back, or inside, one’s feelings and anger or reversing the natural push of anger which is to lash outwardly. These effects are connected with a kind of holding or controlling of one’s breath that occurs with cigarette smoking. Which is also related to the attempt to hold back or control one’s anger in that breathing and emotions are connected (let’s not get into that just here). The physical and psychological effects are also related to replacing the urge to anger with the soothing warm intake described above, the deprivation of which, in nursing, helped to cause the rage in the first place. Last but not least, tobacco intake creates a state of consciousness altered from the one of anger — one in which feelings are hazily confused and not clear and in which thinking and memory are somewhat impaired.
Alcohol, History, and Cultures
Lest one think the effects of alcohol are of no consequence on the events of history, we need take a look at said history.
Medieval Times, Drunken Adolescents at War
For example, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France during the Middle Ages was fought by adolescents whose primary beverage was wine. In fact, there was one campaign in which England was raiding and advancing into France which turned into a precipitous retreat back to England. Because the French turned them back, stopped them? No. There was little resistance to their advance. However, they did run out of wine! Unable to acquire the needed wine in France … for what reason, I do not know … they could not continue.
History also reports that The Hundred Years’ War was ordered and commanded, oftentimes, by royalty and kings in their teens, who considered a daylong, somewhat intoxicated state to be normal; and it was fought by drunken adolescents and teenagers for the most part.
911 and Phantom WMDs, Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbor, Sinking of The Maine … But at the Start There Was the Wyoming Valley “Massacre”
I have mentioned how the Hundred Years’ War was fought by intoxicated teenagers. It can be added that other wars, including America’s own War of Independence, were fought by inebriated soldiers. For example, “in a severe battle, General Putnam, who was almost perforated with bullets, complained most of all, that a shot had passed through his canteen and spilt all his rum….”
Moreover, major events in colonial times were brought about by alcohol-saturated actors. The Wyoming Valley Massacre, in which a handful of colonists were killed by Native Americans, was precipitous in American’s involvement in the extermination of established Native American cultures and nations — Mohawk, Seneca, especially the Iroquois. The reaction to the “massacre” was a crusade up and around the Hudson Valley in which the Iroquois, among others, were largely eliminated from the face of the Earth. “If they surrendered, they were killed … if they fled, they were killed,” it was written of the nature of this campaign.
What is not very well known is the nature of the precipitating event, the Wyoming Valley Massacre. The true story is that while a number of adult settlers in their prime were off fighting in the Revolutionary war, a group of older, elderly, and fringe citizens gathered one night. Under the heavy influence of alcoholic spirits, the group riled each other up with fiery rhetoric against the nearby Native Americans.
This pumped-up inebriation resulted in a hastily put together, drunken assault against their Native American neighbors. Naturally these elderly inebriated attackers did not fare very well in their attempt, and the Native’s response had the colonists retreating to their fort. Not everyone made it. About four were captured by Natives. It is said the stragglers’ screams could be heard that night from inside the wall of the fort as they were killed by the Native American defenders.
This “massacre” was built up and slanted against Native Americans for propaganda reasons to garner the colonists’ full-handed participation in the war, with its extermination of Native peoples, as mentioned. It was quite successful in accomplishing that. Consequently, also, the true version of the events that led to such genocide would never be related in history books. And who would ever want to believe that the formative events of great nations … or the calamitous, genocidal events of other nations … could be instigated by a rash action from a small group of idiotic old men in a full-on state of intoxication?
World-War-Two Generation, Driving — Wars and Culture — “Under the Influence”
The World-War-Two Generation grew up in a time in which alcohol use was considered fashionable and elegant. It was common and acceptable for men to carry, in their shirt or coat pockets, flasks of potent whiskey or other hard liquor, from which they could publicly imbibe a swallow here and there throughout the day. And they were able to, as well. For in those days it was acceptable to drink while at work in many occupations, including white color ones, where a “two-martini lunch” became a thing. When the World-War-Two Generation came of age, cigarette smoking also became fashionable.
We can see evidence of these patterns around alcohol and cigarette use in the movies produced in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. Any unpleasant occurrence or announcement could be followed by “I need a drink” or “Sounds like you could use a drink.” And offering a drink of hard liquor was considered the first act in the normal ritual of hospitality. Also, offering someone a cigarette and/or offering to light another’s cigarette were considered a normal part of genteel behavior.
Elegant accouterments accompanied these rituals as well. Ornate, elegant, and often finely crafted metal flasks were purchased and used. In the same way, elegant crystal and glass containers for holding the liquors as well as elaborate and ritually designed glasses into which the alcoholic beverages were poured were commonly owned and used in genteel culture. In middle-class homes, it was considered fashionable to have a “bar” area in one’s living room containing these liquors, each in separate crystal containers, and the glasses for serving them.
Many a conversation in the movies of the era were shown to be conducted at or near these home bars, following upon the alcoholic bonding ritual of pouring and imbibing the drink. This ritual conversational imbibing of a beverage has its analogies in the water-cooler, coffee klatch, and coffee/espresso-house rituals of other eras and subcultures.
Pointing out the normality and ritualizing of alcohol use in this era of the WWII Generation is important because it is an indication of the pervasiveness, at any time of day, of the state of consciousness — that is to say, intoxication — that this potent drug produces. Since this cultural behavior is still somewhat with us so that its anomalous quality may not be readily apparent, it may be helpful to keep in mind that current drunken driving laws of nearly all states would apply to everyone of that era involving themselves in only a modicum of that alcoholic ritual.
That is to say, those folks, imbibing only one drink, would be considered “drunk” by our standards today, and sufficiently into an altered state of consciousness as to warrant their receiving severe criminal penalties, including jail time, should they put themselves into the driver’s seat of a car.
Yet in the WWII-Generation era, normal cultural, business, and social intercourse was often conducted in such an intoxicated state. Heady decisions concerning war, peace, and everything else were influenced by this culturally accepted drug use.
The results of those decisions could only have been disastrous, most often. We witness an era where many millions in Europe and later in Russia were killed off by the decisions of this WWII Generation. We remember that nuclear weapons were invented, then used, by such people who were predominantly users of alcohol and nicotine. As comparison, today, we find out that the normally inebriated Rudy Giuliani is the one who concocted and set in motion the attempted coup of January 6th, under Trump’s direction. A disastrous plan to undermine democracy in America by means of a bloody coup was concocted by a drunk man. With disastrous and murderous consequences, today. Yet in the WWII era, entire wars, campaigns, and policy were initiated and conducted by mostly inebriated actors.
World War Two, therefore, was conducted and fought by a generation who grew up to believe that alcohol and cigarettes (nicotine) were an acceptable answer to unpleasantness — whether inside or outside of themselves. Alongside this and supporting it were an attitude and beliefs that negative — that is, unpleasant — emotions and feelings were harmful and should be kept out of consciousness. Thus, denial was the predominant defense in use by the World War Two Generation and defensiveness was their style. Folks were more wont to take offense than to seek understanding and personal connection.
Positive Thinking, Negative Results
It is no coincidence that “positive thinking” — as popularized by the late Norman Vincent Peale, which is the keeping out of negative thoughts and the striving to focus always on positive ones — became such a rage near the end of their era, the Fifties, early Sixties. Positive thinking was important in the beliefs of World War II Generation politicians. Notable among those are Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both of whom subscribed to Peale’s philosophy. Positive thinking has one continuing in fruitless endeavors long after they should have been superseded by better ones, or adjusted to changing developments.
Yet wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were perpetrated by folks who refused to allow into their minds the unwanted facts of events and who remained faithful to catastrophic policies long after they would normally have been changed. For positive thinking is like that: It tells you to not have in mind anything but optimistic outcomes. It wants you to make decisions only cognizant of one-half of the facts — those only that support what you already want and believe. It comes right out of the Bible where it is said one can move mountains with steadiness of faith and belief, allowing no contrary thought.
And just as in the alcohol use, the “positive thinking” fad continues — both of them much abated, of course, since the World-War-Two Generation gradually has been leaving the scene. Astonishingly, though, even in this postmodern era, one World-War-Two Generation author admonishes, in huge text no less, in the title on the cover of his popular book: “You Cannot Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought”! (yipes!)
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Yet in reaction to these policies and, as it would turn out, as a precursor to the Sixties Generation of activists and hippies, the Fifties Generation countered the WWII Generation. We will find that this Fifties generation had two sides of it — the revolutionary and the conforming.
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Fifties Generation, Marijuana, and Caffeine:
Rebels Without a Cause, Beatniks, and “Mad Men” … Existential Angst and “Phony” Conformity
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Some [Fifties Generation members] conformed to and followed the WWII Generation mentality and some others, a lesser number, were radically individualistic free-thinkers and social experimenters; they would be forerunners to the generation succeeding them, the Sixties Generation.”
“These free-thinking sorts were cast alongside the pervasive conforming mindset of the Fifties, which was embraced by the great majority of that generation. Yet this dual nature of the Fifties Generation was an influential template in creating the stark division that we see in America as the Culture War, today.”
“Revolutionary numbers for the Fifties Generation were not large, relatively, yet in being the initiators of many of the evolutionary ideas that would come into fruition in the Sixties, these Fifties Generation members were extremely important. Meanwhile, the conforming side of the Fifties Generation would continue their alliance with outmoded and dangerous ideas as brought to them from their culture and their WWII Generation elders. The one side of the Fifties Generation would listen to the beatnik poetry and socially conscious folk songs of that era of the Fifties. The other side would be conforming ‘Mad men’ (Madison Avenue men), corporate cogs.”
“A more evolved generation, which was a result of the change in parenting practices, occurring over this time, sought better recreational drugs — ones that were not as much about denial and defensiveness but about openness and self-realization.”
“Janov has said that marijuana acts to kind of ‘bend’ defenses, which allows repressed feelings to surface….
“Since we all have some degree of primal pain (Pain), we all have defenses to being fully feeling, so the effect of marijuana for most people is to open them to some of the pleasurable feelings that have gotten repressed along with the repression of Pain.”
“…marijuana fosters an alpha-wave state of consciousness — the state sought by meditators. Which brings up another effect: Cannabis reduces one’s feelings of needing to achieve or to be goal- or achievement-oriented.”
“In contrast to drugs like alcohol and nicotine, which serve to aid repression and to help to numb or reduce one’s perception of both inner and outer reality, both marijuana and LSD have the effect of opening or enhancing one’s awareness of inner and outer reality.”
“…for some people this effect of marijuana changes with continued drug use. It is as if the continued “bending” of defenses can eventually lead to a “loosening” of them….”
“This enhanced inner awareness can include the awareness of the underlying motivations of oneself and others, and this is mostly not pretty.”
“Because the normal person is motivated mostly by past, or primal, pains or traumas and is acting out scripts or roles that are pathetic attempts to re-create or struggle with events that happened a long time ago, the normal person is not really in the present.”
“The person, as humanistic psychologists have described, is inauthentic and is acting out games or scripts, about which they are totally unconscious. They have identified with these scripts, roles, goals, and motivations — the outgrowth of a completely unique set of past experiences of pain and trauma — and haven’t a clue as to their arbitrary character.”
“In this state of heightened awareness of the inner world of oneself and others, one perceives oneself and others as puppets or windup dolls. One can become aware of one’s actions as pathetically seeking to satisfy very old needs, which are totally irrelevant to the present context, with others who are similarly and robot-like also seeking to satisfy very different past deprivations.”
“What follows from this perception is the conclusion that people are basically ‘phony,’ or ‘plastic;’ that life is unreal. One perceives that ordinary motivations in pursuit of normal social values such as achievement, status/popularity, and pleasing appearance are meaningless rituals — games — that are totally irrelevant to the true nature of one’s being or reality. And one can see oneself as being trapped in this prison of unconscious scripts, with no chance of release or true perception of reality.”
“Their culture [of the “Beat Generation” of the Fifties] included the rise of existential belief, the glorification and poetification of angst, and the belief that their contemporary society was characterized by alienation, conformism, inauthenticity, and, most tellingly, ‘phoniness.’ The normal life of the World-War-Two Generation was seen as a ‘rat race,’ motivated by such high ideals (sarcasm intended) as ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ and pervasive materialism and consumerism.”
“…art was deemed a weapon, however impotent, with which to rail against what seemed an overwhelming, huge mainstream ignorance or unconsciousness.”
“The Sixties Generation — also called the Vietnam Generation and the Baby-Boomers — would make a complete break with the dominant culture. They would create a counterculture. They would redefine everything; they would seek to start everything over again, in view of the corruption and conformity they discovered all around them in the form of the establishment.”
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[Chapter 6 text begins:] The Fifties Generation was bordered by the World War II Generation and the Sixties Generation, and it partook of qualities of both of those generations. Some conformed to and followed the WWII Generation mentality and some others, a lesser number, were radically individualistic free-thinkers and social experimenters; they would be forerunners to the generation succeeding them, the Sixties Generation.
Enter the Beats
This generation is exemplified by “the Beats” (beatniks); activists such as Jerry Rubin, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Abbie Hoffman; political figures, such as Bernie Sanders, Jerry Brown, and Joe Biden; and literary figures such as Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr. These free-thinking sorts were cast alongside the pervasive conforming mindset of the Fifties, which was embraced by the great majority of that generation. Yet this dual nature of the Fifties Generation was an influential template in creating the stark division that we see in America as the Culture War, today.
Interestingly, the supreme American standout from that generation — Elvis Presley — would come down nicely on both sides of that. The Fifties Generation — termed Silent Generation by Strauss and Howe (1991) — is reserved for those born 1925 through 1942. Presley was born in 1935, smack in the middle. His music and his style were individualistic in the extreme. He would set off a rock and roll revolution, of sorts. Yet he was conforming as well; he allowed himself to be drafted into the Army. This is in contrast to Muhammad Ali who refused to be inducted. It is not coincidence Muhammad Ali was born 1942 and therefore, while a Fifties Generation member technically, he was on the Fifties Gen/ Sixties Gen cusp.
Revolutionary numbers for the Fifties Generation were not large, relatively, yet in being the initiators of many of the evolutionary ideas that would come into fruition in the Sixties, these Fifties Generation members were extremely important. Meanwhile, the conforming side of the Fifties Generation would continue their alliance with outmoded and dangerous ideas as brought to them from their culture and their WWII Generation elders. The one side of the Fifties Generation would listen to the beatnik poetry and socially conscious folk songs of that era of the Fifties. The other side would be conforming “Mad men” (Madison Avenue men), corporate cogs.
Not coincidentally, the drugs of use affecting the Fifties Generation subculture were quite different from those of the WWII Generation. It is my argument that this change in focus of drug use was not random but was part of the psychological maturation or evolution of the American populace. A more evolved generation, which was a result of the change in parenting practices, occurring over this time, sought better recreational drugs — ones that were not as much about denial and defensiveness but about openness and self-realization. I explain this evolution of child-caring practices and the resulting evolution of the American personality in others of my works. See especially my Apocalypse NO and Wounded Deer and Centaurs.
In any case, with the Beats in 1950s America, marijuana, for the first time, began being influential in the culture, and the consciousness, America would create. Let us take a look at its effects and then at the events associated with this generation.
Drug Effects — Marijuana
The effects of marijuana are more diverse than those of alcohol and nicotine. Yet there are a number of things that can be said about its effects in general. The effects of marijuana are more subtle than the two drugs mentioned thus far. In fact, there are some people who cannot feel the effects of marijuana; and sometimes it takes several times of using it before one begins to realize its effects. Yet it is not an ineffectual or weak drug by any means.
Initially
The reasons why some people cannot feel marijuana’s effects appear to be related to their having very defended personality types, or, one might say they have a great deal of repression. The reason this would affect their ability to feel the drug’s effects are easy to understand when we consider the fact that repression of feelings of trauma would include repression of the ability to feel things in general. A repressed person is a more neurotic, more defended person; and more defended persons are basically defending against painful feelings. Yet, feelings cannot be separated. And to repress feelings of Pain (i.e., primal pain) means also to repress the ability to be sensitive to other feelings. Hence highly defended or repressed persons can smoke marijuana and yet not “get off” or they may just feel feelings of relaxation.
Janov has said that marijuana acts to kind of “bend” defenses, which allows repressed feelings to surface, for those who are not in the category described above, which would include the majority of people. Since we all have some degree of primal pain (Pain), we all have defenses to being fully feeling, so the effect of marijuana for most people is to open them to some of the pleasurable feelings that have gotten repressed along with the repression of Pain.
Therefore, some widely noted effects of marijuana concern its enhancing sensory ability and therefore pleasure. Listening to music, being in Nature, watching a movie, or sex can all be quite enhanced and different while experienced under the influence of marijuana. Aspects of these experiences that were always there but were never noticed can be explored. One can seem to be experiencing something on many levels at once, or to be fully immersed in the experience so that aspects of it that formerly seemed more “walled off” from one can seem almost tangible in one’s ability to experience it. One can become so immersed in experience that complexities of it can be taken in and enjoyed, which one never even noticed before.1
Part of the reason for this type of effect of “pot” is that it lowers blood sugar and thus causes the normal cortical defenses to be less effective in blocking out experience. Related to this is a feeling of timelessness — a feeling of being in the Now — which can also be related to the diminished cortical functioning, which brain function is goal-oriented and related to linear time. Relatedly, marijuana fosters an alpha-wave state of consciousness — the state sought by meditators.
Which brings up another effect: Cannabis reduces one’s feelings of needing to achieve or to be goal- or achievement-oriented. The sensory world is that which is initially enhanced in the course of one’s experience with this drug; and the experience of the sensory world in its own right does not engage more complex, more “inward,” and more individually unique goals, feelings, scripts, dramas, scenarios, or motivations.
Eventually
Robert Masters and Jean Houston, in their book, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (1967/2000), provided an architecture of the psyche, derived from their study of the effects of LSD, that is useful in understanding what can happen eventually with continued use of marijuana. They conducted “depth soundings” of the LSD experience and discovered that there were four levels of the experience: the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic, and the integral. While marijuana is not as powerful in its effects as LSD, it has a similar effect on consciousness; one might say it acts in the same direction as LSD. In contrast to drugs like alcohol and nicotine, which serve to aid repression and to help to numb or reduce one’s perception of both inner and outer reality, both marijuana and LSD have the effect of opening or enhancing one’s awareness of inner and outer reality.
However, the effects of marijuana are complex because they do not as consistently open one to inner realities as does LSD. Pot opens or enhances one’s experience of the sensory world initially. As long as it does just this, it can be used as a drug of avoidance of painful (inner) reality in the same way alcohol and nicotine are. That is, one with sufficient repression and defenses can use marijuana to flee from inner pain, depression, or whatever, into an enhanced, pleasurable sensory world that does not trigger one’s pain. At this stage, only, pot can be used to defend against pain and can be psychologically addictive in providing a palliative to pain. Once again, it can do this because it serves only to “bend,” not bust, one’s defenses against one’s primal pain.
Yet for some people this effect of marijuana changes with continued drug use. It is as if the continued “bending” of defenses can eventually lead to a “loosening” of them, and with that loosening comes the deeper level of experience described by Masters and Houston and termed the recollective-analytic. At this level, enhanced sensory experience opens the door, so to speak, to enhanced inner awareness. This enhanced inner awareness can include the awareness of the underlying motivations of oneself and others, and this is mostly not pretty. However, this angst is actually part of the Ego death that becomes more important with the psychedelics.
Let me explain: Because the normal person is motivated mostly by past, or primal, pains or traumas and is acting out scripts or roles that are pathetic attempts to re-create or struggle with events that happened a long time ago, the normal person is not really in the present. The person is, as the great religions have described it, in ignorance, in samsara, in dukkha, and is basically unreal. The person, as humanistic psychologists have described, is inauthentic and is acting out games or scripts, about which they are totally unconscious. They have identified with these scripts, roles, goals, and motivations — the outgrowth of a completely unique set of past experiences of primal pain and trauma — and haven’t a clue as to their arbitrary character. Let alone do they realize that other people are similarly acting out their own unique roles which are just as arbitrary and, well yes actually, pathetic.
However, pot, just like LSD, can eventually open one to the horrifying perception of the inauthentic and unreal nature of ordinary social behavior. Sometimes even with initial usage can this perception arise, for persons who — perhaps because they are young, or whatever — are unusually undefended, more sensitive, and more open to actual reality.
In this state of heightened awareness of the inner world of oneself and others, one perceives oneself and others as puppets or windup dolls. One can become aware of one’s actions as pathetically seeking to satisfy very old needs, which are totally irrelevant to the present context, with others who are similarly and robot-like also seeking to satisfy very different past deprivations. In common parlance, it is said that most actions of people are just “games.”
Hence, part of the horrifying nature of this perception, on the recollective-analytic level of awareness, is that indeed people are not truly relating to each other at all, that they are “like people trapped in spacesuits trying to communicate with each other through the layers of barriers between them.” That last is the way one Sixties Generation member described communication between people, as reported in a book by Kenneth Keniston titled The Uncommitted (1963). That book delved into the psychology of the alienated, the non-conformist or hippie, segment of Sixties Youth.
That perception of alienation, dismal existentialism, and the futility of personal connection was happening earlier, also, with the beatniks, along with the marijuana use of the Fifties. What follows from this perception is the conclusion that people are basically “phony,” or “plastic;” that life is unreal. One perceives that ordinary motivations in pursuit of normal social values such as achievement, status/popularity, and pleasing appearance are meaningless rituals — games — that are totally irrelevant to the true nature of one’s being or reality. And one can see oneself as being trapped in this prison of unconscious scripts, with no chance of release or true perception of reality.
The “Beats” — “Phony Baloney,” So, “YOU do it!”
The “Beat Generation” of the Fifties — especially those referred to as “beatniks” — used marijuana and caffeine, predominantly. Their culture included the rise of existential belief, the glorification and poetification of angst, and the belief that their contemporary society was characterized by alienation, conformism, inauthenticity, and, most tellingly, “phoniness.” The normal life of the World-War-Two Generation was seen as a “rat race,” motivated by such high ideals (sarcasm intended) as “keeping up with the Joneses,” and pervasive materialism and consumerism.
Yet activism was not the beatnik’s predominant response to this perceived negative social context, as it would be only a generation later. Passivism, apathy, pessimism, and defeatism — masquerading often as existential insight — were the most common attitudes expressed. This is what one would expect as a result of marijuana and caffeine use.
Nonetheless, art was deemed a weapon, however impotent, with which to rail against what seemed an overwhelming, huge mainstream ignorance or unconsciousness. So the apparent activism of that time in the Fifties is found in rebellious poetry, folk music, and fine arts of all kinds, especially literature, theater, painting, and some film.
Yet such artistic renderings had a powerful impact on the culture in that they were contrary, were opposite of, the dominant conformism of the times, as exhibited in the WWII Generation as well as in their establishment-oriented Fifties Generation cohorts. These literary and artistic works set the stage for the revolutionary thinking and acting of the next generation to come on the scene, the Sixties Generation. The Sixties Generation — also called the Vietnam Generation and the Baby-Boomers — would make a complete break with the dominant culture. They would create a counterculture. They would redefine everything; they would seek to start everything over again, in view of the corruption and conformity they discovered all around them in the form of the establishment.
And they would continue the trend away from the Pain-repressing drugs of alcohol and tobacco and toward the ones that opened one to more aspects of reality, not less. The Sixties Generation would experiment further with mind-expanding drugs, including marijuana, mescalin, and magic mushrooms. And of course, they were influenced by this powerful new psychedelic — accidentally created and discovered in a lab — LSD.
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Vietnam/Boomer Generation — Marijuana and Psychedelics
“Wow, Man!” “Just Do It” “Go with the Flow”
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…for every LSD experience gone wrong, there were hundreds or thousands other LSD experiences that were powerfully transformative. This, simply, is due to the fact that, even without a guide, the psyche’s normal tendency is toward growth and resolution.”
“…those of us who lived through that period and either participated in LSD use or heard the stories of psychedelic experiencers can attest that transformative spiritual experiences were quite common, even when the drug was used just for the ‘fun’ sensory part; and people also described experiences of curling up in fetal position and reliving their births, long before anyone even heard the term perinatal. As concerns the spiritual level, it was not uncommon to hear of people who met with someone who would be comparable to a Jesus, or who went to a place they could only describe as ‘heaven,’ and this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the varieties of spiritual experiences that were had.”
“…it is only when one goes deeper into the psyche and ‘feels’ the Pain of that estrangement, or in psychedelic terms goes deeper into the actual reliving of the traumas that caused the creation of those alienating scripts, that one can go beyond the horrifying reality of cognitive estrangement.”
“…in doing that processing, one arrives at a reality in which one’s ‘heart’ is opened, and one can catch a glimpse of a reality beyond the normal one — one in which we are all spiritually connected, in Love.”
“The Sixties subculture was one of experimentation in all areas, including drugs, which grew out of beliefs — following in the footsteps of the Beat Generation — that normal life/people were characterized by phoniness, alienation, conformism, robotism, and lack of feelingness … and hypocrisy. Plastic became the pejorative the Vietnam-era Generation would use to describe the phony people they saw around them, as revealed, often, by the mind-expanding drugs.”
“…the Sixties Generation … predominant drugs of choice were ‘pot’ (marijuana) and LSD. Alongside this sort of drug use were attitudes of activism, free love, love as the ultimate value and/or as equivalent to God, pacifism in regards to the war, the valuing of openness, authenticity, ‘real’ communication, and passion and/or feelingness, including sensory awareness or heightened perception of the physical world.”
“Once the pot experience opens to the second level of awareness — the recollective-analytic, which is deeper and more real than the initial enhanced sensory awareness — there is no going back.”
“Regardless the cost, the one thing the Sixties Generation did not want to do was to end up like their parents; thus, the disdain for the use of alcohol.”
“By the time of Altamont — another huge musical event held in California after Woodstock — the change was apparent. Alcohol was now being used, with the other drugs, in abundance; there was no disdain for its use; and violence and death at the event coincided with this change.”
“Gen X were raised and educated to be a corrective to Sixties youth and their values. They would not be influenced to be critical thinkers, to be generalists — free thinking and open-minded, which would make them liberal thinkers, politically. Rather, they were taught that open-heartedness and free thinking were silly and impractical in a ‘real world’ of greed, gamesmanship, status climbing, and struggle. They would not be introduced to heroic or idealistic notions of possibilities for world renewal or evolution but would be shunted onto the traditional paths of job/career, family, competition, wealth acquisition, and consumerism.”
“Generation X would swallow whatever untruths they had been fed. For they had been led, by the WWII-Gen media, to scapegoat the Sixties Generation for any problems they saw around them. This use of fake news and misrepresentation beginning in the 1970s and 1980s to deflect attention away from the actual filthy-rich perpetrators is important. This tactic of the wealthy elite targeting a scapegoat to create a Culture War, which would keep their larceny in the shadows, is indeed the premise of this book.
“I need to make clear just how long has been going on this ploy of the wealthy using Culture War to hide their secretive and ongoing Class War. It makes it easier to see why it is so pervasive today, as we observe in the media’s use of Lefties as target practice for the irritations of grumbly MAGAts.”
“Rather than the Superman/Mighty-Mouse influences on the childhoods of the previous Boomer generation — which had Sixties youth thinking they could and should change the world for high ideals of peace, love, and utopian betterment — Gen X would ape being rascally Bugs-Bunny–like figures: Not giving a damn, laughing at the ‘kumbaya,’ spitting on the environment, and ridiculing the airy-fairy. Because of the propaganda put upon them to turn them away from Sixties values, Gen X would end up despising the actual revolutionaries of the cohort of Sixties youth preceding them. They would pride themselves on tossing a monkey wrench into any utopian works, generally being a nuisance or obstructionist to any attempts at a better, or simply survivable, world.”
“Gen Xers would conveniently deem their abject submission to monetary and traditional values as some kind of grand rebellion against what they had been taught were ludicrous values of peaceniks, tree-huggers, dirty hippies, and ‘Berkeley’ radicals. For their generation had been taught, by the establishment, in typical Culture War fashion, that it was the political correctness of the generation prior to them that was the actual danger, the actual ‘established’ order, the actual establishment.”
“Gen X correspondingly would not be influenced to drugs of mind expansion but to ones of this-worldly practicality, especially ones that aided their WWII-Gen inculcated values of greed, acquisition, and power. To that, the 13th Generation’s more privileged upbringing would have them add indifference to the plights of others and reckless defiance of social niceties. These values would later be highlighted in the MAGA movement, whose greatest numbers are those of the 13th Generation/ Gen X.”
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[Chapter 7 text begins:] The preeminent researcher on the effects of LSD on consciousness is, without question, Stanislav Grof. However, Robert E. L. Masters and Jean Houston’s research with LSD led to their seminal work, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. This book came out in 1967 and had a significant impact on the drug culture of the time.
Most influential on the counterculture at the time, however, was Timothy Leary’s work, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was a work that sought to be a guide for journeyers in mind-expanding experiences, which was based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as its title informs. That work came out in 1966 and was coauthored by two other notables in consciousness research, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. Richard Alpert is he who later became Ram Dass. As Ram Dass, Alpert authored another influential work in the Sixties consciousness culture, Be Here Now (1971).
Drug Effects — LSD
In Stanislav Grof’s many works (for example, 1975, 1977, 1980, 1981, and so on), he concurs with Masters and Houston’s earlier work (1967) that the initial phases of psychedelic experience are predominantly enhanced sensory awareness. It is this type of experience that is usually related to the use of LSD as when the experience is expressed in colorful and swirling images, which has been called psychedelic art. And for many people who used LSD, the experience remained on this level of surface, enhanced sensory awareness. Thus, they could use it for “recreational” purposes.
Yet more often with LSD than with pot, people accessed deeper levels of the mind, so that the recollective-analytic — Grof calls it the biographical or psychodynamic level — is reached, as well as levels of consciousness beyond it. These levels were experienced even when the drug was used “recreationally,” because of the relative potency of the drug as compared with marijuana.
So it was that while Grof and other researchers like Masters and Houston were studying LSD’s effects in controlled settings and with sessions guided by researchers who had experience with accessing deeper levels of the experience — as, for example, Grof himself — there was some degree of access of the deeper levels of the experience even by people using it in uncontrolled situations and with no guidance. It is for this reason that there were some calamities that occurred under the influence of the drug. These rare instances were seized upon by counterculture opponents to spread falsities about the drug’s safety. This, in turn, led to LSD being outlawed.
These portrayals of LSD are clearly seen to be outlandish and paranoid, when you consider that the effect of LSD on DNA, which is one of the charges against it, are about as powerful on affecting DNA as an ordinary cup of tea would be. This was pointed out by Stanislav Grof in his book LSD Psychotherapy (1978). So we see how much lying and propaganda were brought to bear by the WWII Gen around this cultural phenomenon, LSD. Indeed, as it turns out, for every LSD experience gone wrong, there were hundreds or thousands other LSD experiences that were powerfully transformative. This, simply, is due to the fact that, even without a guide, the psyche’s normal tendency is toward growth and resolution. Hence, many people were able to flow with and be taken to deeper, more transformative levels of the experience with little or no direction.
These deeper levels include, for example, what Stanislav Grof terms the third level of psychedelic experience the perinatal, meaning “surrounding birth.” It is equivalent to that which Masters and Houston termed the symbolic level — the difference being due to the fact that perinatal material is initially experienced in highly symbolic ways, and it is only in later sessions with the drug that the birth material becomes more apparent. Since Masters and Houston’s research method was to study the effects of one session of the drug on over two hundred subjects and Grof’s method included its use with some hundreds or thousands of individuals over a number of sessions, it is understandable why Masters and Houston did not recognize the birth material laced through the encounters with their “symbolic” level. On the other hand, Grof subjects experiencing multiple sessions would find — later, if not sooner — the birth-related aspects of their experiences too obvious to be able to ignore.
Yet beyond the symbolic/perinatal level the researchers concur once again, with Masters and Houston calling the deepest level integral, and describing a number and variety of spiritual experiences that can happen at that level, and Grof terming the same level the transpersonal, and presenting in exquisite detail in his works a vast array of “spiritual” type experiences at that level.
With this in mind, I wish to point out that most of the Sixties Generation did not know of these levels and, for the most part, were totally unaware of the research that was coming up with these typographies or architectures of the psyche, or of at least of the drug experience. Nevertheless, those of us who lived through that period and either participated in LSD use or heard the stories of psychedelic experiencers can attest that transformative spiritual experiences were quite common, even when the drug was used just for the “fun” sensory part; and people also described experiences of curling up in fetal position and reliving their births, long before anyone even heard the term perinatal. As concerns the spiritual level, it was not uncommon to hear of people who met with someone who would be comparable to a Jesus, or who went to a place they could only describe as “heaven,” and this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the varieties of spiritual experiences that were had.
For our purposes here, however, it is important to keep in mind that LSD had the capacity to take one to deeper realities than the horrifying recollective-analytic one. One might say that the recollective-analytic perception is a cognitive view, an intellectual view, or an existential view, and it is certainly an alienated one; but that most of all it lacks the aspect of “the heart.”
In other words, it is only when one goes deeper into the psyche and “feels” the Pain of that estrangement, or in psychedelic terms goes deeper into the actual reliving of the traumas that caused the creation of those alienating scripts, that one can go beyond the horrifying reality of cognitive estrangement. This happens on LSD when the biographical or psychodynamic level is reached; and even more so when the perinatal/symbolic level is worked through, relived. For in doing that processing, one arrives at a reality in which one’s ‘heart’ is opened and one can catch a glimpse of a reality beyond the normal one — one in which we are all spiritually connected, in Love.
It is significant to point out that LSD has this capacity beyond the use of pot so we might understand the differences between the Beat Generation’s reaction to their perception of the unreality of existence, obtained in their use of marijuana, and the Sixties Generation’s quite different reaction to that perception of social phoniness, who were influenced by the use of both marijuana and LSD.
Vietnam-Era Generation — “Wow, Man!” “Just Do It” “Go With the Flow”
The Vietnam-War, or Baby-Boomer, Generation was noted for their use of a number of drugs. Marijuana; wine; “speed,” i.e., amphetamines; “downers,” for example, “ludes” or qualudes, also “reds” — that is to say, barbiturates; LSD; and other hallucinogens such as mescaline, “magic mushrooms,” psilocybin, and peyote — all were in use. The Sixties subculture was one of experimentation in all areas, including drugs, which grew out of beliefs — following in the footsteps of the Beat Generation — that normal life/people were characterized by phoniness, alienation, conformism, robotism, and lack of feelingness … and hypocrisy. Plastic became the pejorative the Vietnam-era Generation would use to describe the phony people they saw around them, as revealed, often, by the mind-expanding drugs.
Though the Sixties Generation — another term used for this generation — experimented widely with drugs, their predominant drugs of choice were “pot” (marijuana) and LSD. Alongside this sort of drug use were attitudes of activism, free love, love as the ultimate value and/or as equivalent to God, pacifism in regards to the war, the valuing of openness, authenticity, “real” communication, and passion and/or feelingness, including sensory awareness or heightened perception of the physical world.
It is easy to make the connection between the spiritual access capable with LSD and the emphasis on feeling, community, communication — “rapping,” for example — transcendence, and sensory enhancement that characterized the Sixties Generation. On the negative side, there was sometimes apathy and defeatism, like the Beat Generation, associated with marijuana use.
Marijuana “Cocktails,” History, and Culture
Once the pot experience opens to the second level of awareness — the recollective-analytic, which is deeper and more real than the initial enhanced sensory awareness — there is no going back. That does not mean that people will not try to recapture the earlier type of experience. Very often it is at this point that the person will begin mixing the pot with other drugs, in particular, alcohol, because they will try to block out the deeper awareness of the mind-expanding substances with these other drugs that diminish awareness.
Indeed, we saw this happen on a massive scale in the Sixties. Initially, pot users were disdainful of people who used alcohol, calling them “juiceheads.” They were disdainful of alcohol use because they were aware that it reduced awareness and that it had served that purpose for their World-War-Two-Generation parents. And the Sixties Generation saw their parents as in great denial of obvious realities — about themselves and the world — as people who did not “walk their talk,” and were … a charge leveled like an arrow at the heart of the WWII Generation’s values and world … “hypocrites”! Regardless the cost, the one thing the Sixties Generation did not want to do was to end up like their parents; thus, the disdain for the use of alcohol.
Booze Was the “Apple” in the Psychedelic Eden
However, it is said that the movement changed, exemplified by the differences between the rock festivals at Woodstock and Altamont, both of them occurring in 1969. Woodstock epitomized the height of euphoric use of mind-expanding substances like LSD and marijuana, undiminished by awareness-diminishing drugs like alcohol. And Woodstock was, of course, noted for the fact that it brought together a million people for three days of peace and harmony. It was a model of nonviolent behavior under adverse conditions that, it was said, was never before exemplified by the alcohol or “juicehead” celebrations or gatherings of the past.
By the time of Altamont — another huge musical event held in California after Woodstock — the change was apparent. Alcohol was now being used, with the other drugs, in abundance; there was no disdain for its use; and violence and death at the event coincided with this change. It might be concluded that the “honeymoon phase,” let us call it, of marijuana use had passed for many who were using it, that the heightened sensory awareness was now opening more and more people to the deeper awareness of traumatic psychological realities which needed to be blocked from awareness by mind-diminishing drugs.
At any rate, the other response to the deeper awareness of horrifying inauthenticity that pot was revealing was for people to stop using marijuana. Indeed, a great many “potheads” abruptly discontinued its use.
And they dealt with the horrifying reality that it had revealed to them in a number of ways. Oftentimes it turned them into activists to change the social reality or into psychologists or personal growth facilitators to change it on the individual level. However sometimes they tried to retreat into traditional values and culture, only doing it one better — becoming “Jesus freaks,” for example. Or they hid away in career and family; or they attempted to build utopian and “authentic” communities of relationship, sans pot.
Some took up the use of cocaine or amphetamine, finding that the reality that “speed” revealed hid the horrifying reality of pot, replacing it with an avid and manic identification with one’s roles and scripts. In fact, some used “uppers” with alcohol, then added pot, for a “twist,” and in this way sought to regain the initial innocent sensory euphoria. As the popular song described it at the time, “Just give me weed, whites, and wine….”
Nevertheless, some people simply never had the experience of the horrifying inner inauthenticity of normal existence. Being very defended, they were able to continue to use pot for pleasure, and some of them are able to continue to use it this way to this day. Older folks — middle-aged and up — are especially well-defended and repressed in general. As Janov has pointed out, such persistent and long use of defenses against reality reinforces and strengthens them to such a point as to make them inaccessible to change. Their defenses against painful perceptions cannot be brought down by primal therapy or pot. In common parlance, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and older people are more “set in their ways.” So it is that when some of these, having missed the “party” during the Sixties, use pot hoping to get a taste of what they missed, they almost never experience anything but the initial sensory awareness and relaxation, that is, if they are able to experience the drug’s effects at all.
A Concocted Generation, Gen X
These things in mind — the unpredictability of the psychedelic experience and its tendency to sooner or later bring up buried feelings of Pain and trauma — it is clear that for practical purposes, psychedelics were anything but helpful. And Gen X, following their Fifties Generation conforming parents, were suddenly practical, were suddenly “real world”–oriented.
Taught to Ridicule the Sixties and Hate Goodness
This confrontation with a harsher practical reality than their Boomer/Sixties predecessors was what was put upon Generation X in their formative years by the powers-that-be. For such wealthy Controllers had attacked the counterculture with the educational and media changes I have been describing as having occurred beginning in the Seventies. Together with that control of information and the narrative of common opinion toward more conservatism, Gen X would be influenced to ridicule the values of the prior generation’s counterculture and its members.
It was repeatedly impressed upon Gen X by the WWII Gen–owned media that the previous generation of Sixties youth were a bunch of “flaky,” “kumbaya-singing,” “tree-hugging,” moronic, “airy-fairy,” “dirty,” drug-addicted, long-haired losers, radicals, and “hippies.” Sacrificing for the common good and wanting to build a better world — which had been the hallmark of the Sixties youth — were seen as soft-headed, effeminate, and silly by these later youth. In time, these harder-edged Gen X youth would refer to the more idealistic, non-conforming, anti-establishment, liberal-thinking revolutionaries and hippies as “pukes.”
Gen X were raised and educated to be a corrective to Sixties youth and their values. They would not be influenced to be critical thinkers, to be generalists — free thinking and open-minded, which would make them liberal thinkers, politically. Rather, they were taught that open-heartedness and free thinking were silly and impractical in a “real world” of greed, gamesmanship, status climbing, and struggle. They would not be introduced to heroic or idealistic notions of possibilities for world renewal or evolution but would be shunted onto the traditional paths of job/career, family, competition, wealth acquisition, and consumerism. Gen X would not wish to “drop out”; they would think it wise to hunker down in the remaining cultural trappings of a WWII-Generation materialism and focus on family pleasures and either unquestioning religiosity or unbending atheism. In either case, they would close their minds to the psychological mindedness and philosophical yearnings of the Sixties youth. They would sing, following Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, “Choke me in the shallow water, before I get too deep”; adding, “Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box; religion is the smile on a dog.” Which song, “What I Am,” (1988) was played repeatedly on radio and other media outlets in the late Eighties, early Nineties.
Sixties Gen/ Gen X Opposition Amplified Cultural Division
Rather, Generation X would swallow whatever untruths they had been fed. For they had been led, by the WWII-Gen media, to scapegoat the Sixties Generation for any problems they saw around them. This use of fake news and misrepresentation beginning in the 1970s and 1980s to deflect attention away from the actual filthy-rich perpetrators is important. This tactic of the wealthy elite targeting a scapegoat to create a Culture War, which would keep their larceny in the shadows, is indeed the premise of this book.
I need to make clear just how long has been going on this ploy of the wealthy using Culture War to hide their secretive and ongoing Class War. It makes it easier to see why it is so pervasive today, as we observe in the media’s use of Lefties as target practice for the irritations of grumbly MAGAts. I repeat, these MAGAts, these Trumpers and those who would wish to overthrow American democracy largely comprise Gen Xers.
Yes, I’m saying, the liberal WWII Generation, in reaction to their radical children, Sixties youth, set about the creation of an opposite generation, Gen X. Being opposite, they would be conservative, superficial, and encouraged to be hateful. Their attitude was expressed in the term, snarky, which has been tossed around a lot since Gen Xers have come on the scene. The definition for snarky, according to Meriam-Webster, includes “critical or mocking in an indirect or sarcastic way.” So this generation, Gen X, was created, then used by the WWII Gen as a weapon against their Sixties-Gen sisters and brothers.
Nonetheless, for their complicity in bending themselves along lines pleasing to higher ups, for their overall conformity, Gen X would be allowed a veneer of smart-alecky rebelliousness. Notice the sarcastic/snarky tone in “What I Am,” for example. This allowance for being irreverent placated Gen X for their conformity by letting them cover it up with a self-obsessed bravado. “Who needs philosophy? Who needs religion? Haha.” Not Gen X, told they were better than the philosophical-spiritual generation prior to them.
In this way, Generation X were somewhat like their Fifties Generation parents in being allowed to “ape” rebelliousness — examples, Elvis Presley, born 1935; Johnny Cash, born 1932; James Dean, born 1931; and the movie, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — while actually being very conforming. Witness Presley’s willingness to be drafted into the Vietnam War; whereas a latter-born generation member, Muhammad Ali — born 1942, thus on a Fifties-Sixties Gen cusp — defied the draft and, like his activist cohorts of the Sixties Generation — paid a price for his idealism, for his refusal to submit. Ali was arrested for his “draft dodging” and was found guilty in 1967 — after only twenty-one minutes of jury deliberation, mind you — of violating the Selective Service laws by refusing to be drafted. He would have his boxing license suspended and would suffer having his World Heavyweight Champion title stripped from him.
Hence, Gen X would be like their Fifties Generation parents in their getting to mimic iconoclasm and unconventionality, in their case, of the previous Sixties Generation, while at the same time they were being molded into WWII-Generation conforming clones. This manifests today as the difference in their modes of protest: With nonviolent Sixties types putting themselves in front of charging and tear-gas throwing officers … and getting gassed, shot, and arrested; whereas violent, arrogant Gen X types would be using guns, murder, destruction, and any means possible against the targets of their scapegoating … and would get treated with kid gloves by authorities, in response. These means would include the stealing of elections, the overthrowing of democracy, and the violent bloody storming of the Capitol, as we found out.
In general, Gen X rebelliousness would come out in recklessness and rudeness, and as arrogance; for they had been brought up to think they were deprived and deserved better than they got. They had been told they were smarter and not delusional — as the older Sixties Generation had been portrayed — and that the generation prior to them had been spoiled, privileged, immoral, and soft. Gen Xers had been led to feel they were second-fiddle to a much more numerous and influential older generation and that they had been robbed of their proper entitlement. This set them up for hate and violence.
Rather than the Superman/Mighty-Mouse influences on the childhoods of the previous Boomer generation — which had Sixties youth thinking they could and should change the world for high ideals of peace, love, and utopian betterment — Gen X would ape being rascally Bugs-Bunny–like figures: Not giving a damn, laughing at the “kumbaya,” spitting on the environment, and ridiculing the airy-fairy. Because of the propaganda put upon them to turn them away from Sixties values, Gen X would end up despising the actual revolutionaries of the cohort of Sixties youth preceding them. They would pride themselves on tossing a monkey wrench into any utopian works, generally being a nuisance or obstructionist to any attempts at a better, or simply survivable, world.
And whereas the Sixties Generation and Boomers would be ridiculed through television’s depictions of them along the lines of “Reverend” Jim Ignatowski — the brain-fried, albeit likable cab driver in Taxi — these “wacky wabbits” of Gen X would be depicted as the likable albeit annoyingly materialistic and arrogantly self-centered Alex Keaton character in Family Ties, the television show of the Eighties.
Gen Xers would conveniently deem their abject submission to monetary and traditional values as some kind of grand rebellion against what they had been taught were ludicrous values of peaceniks, tree-huggers, dirty hippies, and “Berkeley” radicals. For their generation had been taught, by the establishment, in typical Culture War fashion, that it was the political correctness of the generation prior to them that was the actual danger, the actual “established” order, the actual establishment.
This would be later reflected as their misconstruing the gains of the Sixties as an oppressive “political correctness,” when in actuality they were merely the minor corrections to a traditional patriarchy. And that patriarchy was convincing them that things had been just great, in the Fifties, notice, before the emergence of these pesky “elites” — c’mon, seriously, hippies as elites? Yet that is what they were being fed — these pesky elites had brought in these unnecessary ideas: Care for the environment, abortion rights, equality of all races and religions, humane child-caring, protection of other species, and so on. And Gen X was led to believe it was these inconvenient yet necessary changes in our evolution that were oppressing them, not the Filthy Rich orchestrating these events, who could be seen removing the foundations of our democracy and thieving from the Treasury, once they had these sorts distracted with hatred toward others
Further, these Gen X would be led to think their conformity was actually some kind of cool and to be admired rebellious patriotism which was set against the norms of society in general, which they would end up calling the Deep State.
Whereas Sixties youth confronted a conservative “establishment” — rooted in the ways of a bygone patriarchal era; Gen X were set against and taught to hate the evolution that had already occurred and been enshrined in the Constitution — the 13th Amendment which freed the slaves, the cherished principles of separation of church and state, the Civil Rights Act, the right for a woman to control her body won through Roe Versus Wade, and the Bill of Rights with its free speech, freedom of religion, and such. Those enshrined and traditional institutions protecting our democracy would be cast as forces undermining our way of life — a “Deep State” — and that is what Gen X MAGAts had been allowed to rail against in exchange for their overall conformity and their pathetic submission to authoritarian leaders … Trump, DeSantis, and so on.
White-Washing Fascism … and Gen X’s Cocaine Use
Gen X correspondingly would not be influenced to drugs of mind expansion but to ones of this-worldly practicality, especially ones that aided their WWII-Gen inculcated values of greed, acquisition, and power. To that, the 13th Generation’s more privileged upbringing would have them add indifference to the plights of others and reckless defiance of social niceties. These values would later be highlighted in the MAGA movement, whose greatest numbers are those of the 13th Generation/ Gen X.
Regardless, it is no coincidence that drug usage beginning in the Eighties, when these folks were coming into college and the work world, turned away from psychedelics in the direction of stimulants. Stimulants such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and such washed over America at that time. The effects of these stimulant drugs were not coincidentally fitting with a manic reversal of focus away from mind-expanding compounds of the Sixties toward ones aiding acquisition, social advance, and power.
This reversal of focus, coincident with a societal turn toward traditionalism engineered by the Controllers, characterized the 13th Generation/Gen X. This back-and-forth swinging of values between the conservative ones of the WWII Generation and the more liberal, freeing ones of the Sixties/Boomer Generation and then back to the more repressed, acquisitive ones of the 13th Generation/Gen X sets the dynamic for what we experience today. The polar world views of Right and Left in our society establishes conflict as the center of all social and political happenings. We need look more deeply into this.
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Castles in the Sky … Cocaine and Booze:
Gen X/ 13th Generation is a Concocted Generation, born 1961 through 1980
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…this swinging back and forth of attitudes is mirrored also in the drug usage of these generations: We go from repressive drugs such as alcohol and tobacco with the WWII Generation; to mind-expanding substances like marijuana and LSD for Sixties youth; back to suppressive drugs again with Gen X. For with this generation born 1961 to 1980, white was king, cocaine snowed down on all levels of society.”
“[Amphetamines, ‘speed,’] are euphoriants and cause one to have the feeling that one’s mental capacities are expanded. One feels that one can envision projects and outcomes precisely. So, one expends oneself in organizing and preparing for great achievements, which rarely are embarked upon.”
“One does not feel constrained by normal fears or apprehensions, so one throws oneself into new activities with reckless abandon. One feels overly confident in one’s abilities and engages in all kinds of risk-taking — financially, sexually, interpersonally, legally. Later, we would find out, politically. These activities have one embarking on dubious schemes which rarely pan out.”
“The less idealistic, more materialistic ones, the Yuppies, came in at the same time as Ronald Reagan into the White House and, indeed, exemplified much of what Reagan stood for. They were seen as greedy, over-achieving, materialistic, narcissistic, and societally and environmentally insensitive careerists.”
“[Yuppies] are driven solely by a value that ‘Greed is good!’ This was later expressed on television as ‘Greed is good; money is everything.’ This slogan is completely the opposite of the previous generation — the Sixties Generation — whose attitudes were expressed in lyrics like ‘I don’t care too much for money; money can’t buy me love’ and ‘Love is all you need’; who bought and lived by books with titles such as How to Live on Nothing, The Greening of America, and Back to Eden; and whose most famous slogan was ‘Tune in, Turn on, Drop out.’”
“…the Yuppies were the creation of the WWII Generation in their attempt to reverse the course of society that their own daughters and sons, as ‘Sixties Youth,’ had put it on.”
“…the Vietnam-era or Sixties Generation began being denigrated in the press with the accusation, ‘The ‘Me’ Generation,’ and Sixties values were also denigrated — the scapegoating of the Sixties Generation continuing — despite the fact that it was a different age group in society, the younger Yuppies, who were actually the ones triggering the attack.”
“The hypocrisy of the charge of the Sixties Generation being Yuppies becomes even more blatant when considering their values. Sixties values included such selfless acts as risking, sometimes incurring, violence and personal harm, jail time, and a lower standard of living for the sake of their idealistic beliefs in peace, environmental restoration and preservation, and selfless communitarian living, among others. None of that has any overlap with Yuppie careerism, consumerism, materialism, or their individualistic greedy selfishness.”
“Post–high-school education was being turned into career-factories dedicated to producing compliant businesspersons, engineers, physicians, and scientists — folks who were not being educated to think for themselves, rather, how to achieve and make money in a culture with which the World-War-Two Generation was comfortable.”
“The Fifties Generation have kept themselves as invisible as possible but running things from behind the screen, since they took over conservatism and greed from the WWII Generation and upped the ante. Witness the Koch Brothers — Charles and David Koch, born 1935 and 1940 respectively — both of whom are Fifties Gen members. Indeed, Fifties Generation members values manifest today in the difference between traditional Republicans — those called RINOs (Republicans in name only) by MAGAts — and the MAGAts or Trumpers themselves. These RINOs are folks like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Ron Paul, and John McCain. They have been the ones behind the curtain — old-school Republicans, who have more of a World-War II Gen mindset.
“Whereas nearly all the folks fighting them and wanting to be even more reactionary and fascistic are the MAGAts/Trumpers, the reckless ‘wacky wabbits’ of the Gen X/Yuppie/13th Generation. These include Trumpian MAGAts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Josh Hawley. These latter have more of a Yuppie/Gen X mindset in being irrational, reactionary, and sarcastically obstructionist.”
“…the materialism the Fifties Generation members were nurtured in after World War II — as a reaction to the fear and uncertainties their parents had because of the Depression, the war, and The Bomb — would be replicated in their children.”
“There are two aspects of trickle-down economics and the recession that followed Reagan’s implementation of it that are especially relevant here for a discussion of drugs and generational cultures. Those factors are the manic quality of the times — the go, go, go, buy, buy, buy mentality of the investing — and the other is the obvious proof it gave to marginal returns theory: In other words, the money, given to the rich, was valued little and was mindlessly blown on trivialities; it was said that the Eighties was a huge party for the rich.”
“…this shift of wealth upward at Reagan’s time would only be the first of many of such Republican larcenies to come, as we saw with the financial policies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The fact that such trickle-down and such an upward shift of wealth leads to recessions, inevitably, would become an inconvenient truth that would be suppressed in the media’s narrative.”
“Republicans will then blame the mess they left behind on the Democrats who regain power, each time, after the economy has been trashed. For the electorate will put Democrats in office after every Republican financial calamity — Hoover’s Great Depression, cleaned up by Roosevelt; Reagan’s late Eighties, early Nineties recession, fixed by Bill Clinton; W. Bush’s Great Recession of 2008, corrected by Barrack Obama. Currently Joe Biden is tending successfully to the mess left us by Donald Trump. American’s financial house in order once again, the American electorate will be ripe to have their racism and hate stoked once again, directed at scapegoats, creating another Republican ascension. So the GOP can pick up on their thieving, again.”
“[Yuppies] primarily comprised youth in their twenties and early thirties who followed behind the Vietnam-era Generation. Their mantram was to get rich, get powerful, erect and maintain ‘family islands’ which they saw as competitive with the rest of society — quite unlike the communitarianism of the Sixties Generation — and to retire early … social and environmental problems be damned.”
“…beginning in the Eighties, it became fashionable to sneer at and blame — often scapegoating — the more unfortunate ones of society: The poor, helpless, mentally ill, children, the powerless. It was as if Reagan emptied the mental hospitals onto the streets so as to have a target to feed to his rabid Right followers. Honestly, it worked. Americans were encouraged by the media and propaganda systems to find some time for that kind of hatred, for the poor and homeless, alongside their ongoing and outright snickering and smugness as directed at the ‘hippie-dippie’ values and ‘kumbaya’ visions of the generation older than them.”
“…the drug use of Xers strayed back to the use of alcohol & cigarettes. These are the drugs used by their Fallow Generation parents.…”
“Alongside this ‘traditional’ drug use, Generation Xers are noted for their pessimism, defeatism, and fascination with death.…”
.
[Chapter 8 text begins:] First off, this swinging back and forth of attitudes is mirrored also in the drug usage of these generations: We go from repressive drugs such as alcohol and tobacco with the WWII Generation; to mind-expanding substances like marijuana and LSD for Sixties youth; back to suppressive drugs again with Gen X. For with this generation born 1961 to 1980, white was king, cocaine snowed down on all levels of society.
Gen X, according to the Census Bureau, comprises those born 1965 to 1980. However, Strauss and Howe, in their book, Generations, points out that those born in those years do not constitute a true generation. A generation, for analytical or sociological purposes, is a group that shares the same formative experiences in their youth and childhood. If the group does not have much in common, how can it even be discussed as a “thing”? Compared to other “things”? With this in mind, Strauss and Howe — who represent the “gold standard” in generational theory — designate the 13th Generation, roughly comparable to the Census Bureau’s Gen X, as comprising those born between 1961 and 1980. The difference is the Census Bureau has Gen X beginning in 1965.
For the very same reasons, Strauss and Howe designate the Vietnam Generation — roughly comparable to the Census Bureau’s Baby-Boomer or Boomer Generation — as those born between 1943 and 1960. This contrasts with the Census Bureau’s designation of the Boomers as being those born 1945 to 1965. And I repeat, this is because that group — those born between 1943 and 1960 — can be seen to have been shaped by the same national and cultural events growing up; whereas those born 1945 to 1965 do not have a common set of formational experiences.
Generational theorists other than Strauss and Howe also see that period — born 1943 to 1965 — comprising different generational sets. Indeed, a special designation of Generation Jones has been suggested for those born between 1955 and 1965, because that period does have its unique set of cultural and historical markers, which lent themselves to creating the kind of personality that would develop. In either case — Gen X and Boomer — we see that the Census Bureau’s designations were arbitrary and were useless for any analytical purposes where such and such group could be said to share common characteristics. They didn’t. Generational theorists have had to alter the Census Bureau’s designation to make any sense of generational trends in our recent history.
I deal with this issue of differing designations for the generations depending on whether it is arbitrarily set by the Census Bureau or it represents a true generation in being folks who were shaped by the same events in much detail later in this work. For now, I wish to simply note that in this chapter we will, following Strauss and Howe, be talking about those born from the year 1961 through the year 1980.
Drugs and Generations
That said, let us look now at that ricocheting of cultural mores and minds between the poles of liberal/conservative, open-minded/closed-minded, idealism/conformity, democratic/authoritarian, and expressive/ repressive. Again, I contend that the changes in the drug usage between those used by Sixties youth and those used by Gen X youth, because of their effects, are not coincidental to those pendulum swings in national direction. I’ll explain…
Drug Effects — Cocaine, Speed
Drugs in the amphetamine class are stimulants. This includes cocaine, methamphetamine, “meth,” “crystal,” crack cocaine, “crack,” “speed,” amphetamine, uppers, “whites,” and so on. They repress Pain extraordinarily well.
Building castles in the sky
They are euphoriants and cause one to have the feeling that one’s mental capacities are expanded. One feels that one can envision projects and outcomes precisely. So, one expends oneself in organizing and preparing for great achievements, which rarely are embarked upon.
Free from fear, reckless, overconfident, risk-taking
Since these drugs repress Pain, creating an amped state of mind more than normally able to fend off unwanted emotional material, they repress the normally present residue of fear, with its attendant caution in the face of activities outside of one’s comfort zone requiring forethought and anticipation. One does not feel constrained by normal fears or apprehensions, so one throws oneself into new activities with reckless abandon. One feels overly confident in one’s abilities and engages in all kinds of risk-taking — financially, sexually, interpersonally, legally. Later, we would find out, politically. These activities have one embarking on dubious schemes which rarely pan out.
A land of light and darkness
Despite these negatives, the corollary of this mental activity is that one’s ability to think and see more clearly on some issues is enhanced, precisely because one’s fears can pollute one’s perception and apprehension of things.
It is enlightening to remember that Sigmund Freud, among other notables in history, experimented with cocaine. At one point, Freud was heartily endorsing its use to his colleagues; he was waxing expansively about its benefits for mental life and clarity of consciousness. “Waxing expansively” does happen to be one of the things one does on cocaine, incidentally. Of course, Freud changed his position on cocaine’s benefits later. No doubt his use led him to see its face of darkness as well.
Glimpses of clarity
Nonetheless, concerning the positive aspects of cocaine, it can be mentally enhancing partly because of its repression of fear. For fears, as mentioned, are both of the helpful-cautionary as well as the oppressive types. Being released from the oppressiveness of fears, being freed of the constraints of “fearful thinking,” can result in seeing one’s reality more clearly. Feeling fearless can lead one to acknowledging truths and realities normally defended against — thus being therapeutic even, getting a glimpse of reality outside one’s fears.
Reckless
Being freed from normal caution, however, can lead one into reckless activities with consequences far beyond one’s ability to handle in either a normal, or drugged, state. It is no coincidence that these stimulant drugs have seen heavy usage by wartime participants — notable are their use by fighter pilots and by American warriors in Vietnam.
A land of empathy and insensitivity
Lastly, since these stimulants repress feelings, they can lead to insensitivity toward others. Yet since they can repress fear which blocks truer perception of and appreciation of others they can, paradoxically, result in feelings of love toward others and a feeling of finally really seeing others and appreciating them for who they are, not simply in the way one has cast them … “pigeon-holed” them … to fit into one’s scripts, agendas, ego projects, or desires.
Matrix Manifesting
The Eighties
The Eighties saw an epidemic of cocaine use. This was commonly attributed to Yuppies, which is the popular term for the Young Upwardly-mobile Professional character of this era and is contrasted with the idealistic, activist, and anti–Vietnam-War Yippies. Yippies stands for Youth International Party, whose founders and most famous members were antiwar activists, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
Reagan, Yuppy-Kay-Yo-Kay-Yay
The less idealistic, more materialistic ones, the Yuppies, came in at the same time as Ronald Reagan into the White House and, indeed, exemplified much of what Reagan stood for. They were seen as greedy, over-achieving, materialistic, narcissistic, and societally and environmentally insensitive careerists.
On the positive side, Yuppies had a keen appreciation for the finer things in life….
It’s okay to laugh here, that was meant to be snark.
“Love is all you need” turned into “Money is good!”
Yuppies were portrayed in film. One in particular that sought to delineate the attitudes of this character type was the movie, Wall Street, in which Charlie Sheen plays the role of the Yuppie, mentored by the Fifties Generation character, Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. Together they give a portrayal of complete self-centeredness and insensitivity to the ways their Machiavellian strategies harm others or the environment.
As expressed in Wall Street, they are driven solely by a value that “Greed is good!” This was later expressed on television as “Greed is good; money is everything.” This slogan is completely the opposite of the previous generation — the Sixties Generation — whose attitudes were expressed in lyrics like “I don’t care too much for money; money can’t buy me love” and “Love is all you need”; who bought and lived by books with titles such as How to Live on Nothing, The Greening of America, and Back to Eden; and whose most famous slogan was “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out.” Or, as it was sometimes said, “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.” I’m not sure anyone in the generation knew which was the “proper” way to say it. Both apply, anyway.
“Me Generation”
Another term used for the Yuppie Generation was the “Me” Generation. Thus it was that from the height of Vietnam-Era youth’s influence on society and culture in the late Sixties, early Seventies to the late Seventies and most of the Eighties — within a period of a mere decade — the prevailing, media-amplified cultural values of our society swung, pendulum-like, a hundred-and-eighty degrees from where they had been.
Matrix Manifest and The Big Lie
This change had a great deal to do with the efforts of the World-War-Two Generation — in total horror at the way their sons and daughters seemed to be reversing the values for which they had lived, and fought — to “take back” society. The WWII Generation did this by putting pressure, as well-to-do alumni, on universities and colleges across America to turn their curricula away from liberal arts and toward job-oriented curricula, and by using their positions of power in the media to influence the flow and content of the information to be fed to the mainstream public. For example, in the early Seventies, specifically beginning in 1972 and just before the election of Nixon for a second term, the WWII Generation’s money and power directed the press to declare that a “conservative backlash” was occurring in America, when in fact the opposite was happening.
And yes, at that time, 1972, Nixon did defeat liberal George McGovern, which coincides with a conservative backlash; yet this only occurred after the well-known, the hugely popular Robert F. Kennedy, who had been surging toward the Democratic nomination, had been assassinated earlier in the year. Confounded with the fact that McGovern was a last-minute stand-in was McGovern’s debacle of casting Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. Eagleton was found to have been treated during his life for “mental illness,” depression. Which was a pretty common thing, even then, and should not really have been an issue.
Yet McGovern would be first of many Democratic politicians to shoot himself in the foot — in trying to come across as “nonpartisan” — by overly conforming to traditional prejudices and backing away from liberal principles. So he would drop his vice-presidential pick and, thinking to regain that Kennedy gleam, replace him with a supremely colorless, though credentialed, figure out of the Kennedy clan — Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., known popularly as Sargent Shriver. Only with all that confusion in the months leading up to the 1972 election did Nixon win. So it was unsurprising, to some, when two years later public outcry at Nixon’s criminality in government led to his being forced to resign. Public opinion had changed drastically after the Watergate hearings, so the recently reelected Nixon was left without support.
Yet eventually their “Big Lie” tactics, as exhibited in their promotion of a “conservative backlash,” won out so that people began to believe and then to create what they had been repeatedly told. Since the opposite or liberal view, as part of the strategy of creating a conservative backlash, had been censored in the media, people began to think that is what was going on. At that point even Hollywood unconsciously colluded with the Big Lie of a conservative backlash in putting out movies and television shows along those lines.1 We will discuss later on how the show Family Ties was an especially blatant example of their intention to misinform the populace about the actual direction of the country.
Thus, the Yuppies were the creation of the WWII Generation in their attempt to reverse the course of society that their own daughters and sons, as “Sixties Youth,” had put it on. And the propaganda against the Sixties Generation and its values, repeated endlessly over the decades, led to a media narrative that conservative ideas were winning and that, indeed, progressivism and idealism were silly impulses of a narcissistic generation. Whereas the opposite was what was actually true, such a narrative remains to this day, propped up by moneyed interests because it is convenient for their ends if the populace believes that.
And even Democrats have come to subscribe to it over the years, with moderate supporters of Hillary Clinton justifying the slanted playing field against Bernie Sanders in 2016. With all these years convincing themselves that progressives cannot win — often using McGovern’s loss as the example — Clintonites ignored the polls showing Bernie Sanders as another transformational figure. Surveys done during the campaign showed such popular support for Sanders — perhaps even more so than for Barrack Obama earlier — that Sanders would have won in a head-to-head against Donald Trump and been even stronger than Hillary Clinton ended up being. And by the way, if progressives cannot win according to moderate Democrats, and the example of McGovern in 1972 is given, how is it that Barrack Obama won in the greatest Democratic landslide in half a century? Barrack Obama … who campaigned as a fierce progressive, only eight years earlier, and won.
Scapegoating an Entire Generation
Coinciding with and supporting the strategy just described, and because the World-War-Two Generation during the Eighties were still in their triumphant phase — a psychohistorical term meaning they were at the stage of their life in late adulthood in which they had pretty much gained control of the reins of society — they furthered their cause by managing to plant a fantasy in the collective consciousness of American culture concerning the origins of Yuppies which persists to this day.
Designer generation
The WWII Generation was in obvious denial … again, it being their predominant defensive posture … of the fact that they had helped to “create” the Yuppies. They blocked out of their minds the obvious similarities between their own values and those of the Yuppies, as exemplified by the similarities between the World-War-Two-era Reagan-Bush political agenda and that of the Yuppies — who indeed helped elect Reagan and Bush. Yet aware of the criticism that their very own values, taken to the Yuppie extremes, was generating in the independent press, as well as the negative publicity there about the cocaine use of the Yuppies, the World-War-Two Generation saw an opportunity not only to defeat but also to “get back” at their opponents, the Sixties Generation, by ridiculing them. The Sixties Generation had of course incurred the wrath of the WWII Generation by opposing and confronting them on the Vietnam War in sometimes harsh and hostile ways.
As for the Yuppies who came on the scene after the Sixties Generation, in the predominant World-War-Two Generation fashion of scapegoating — which is the accompaniment of denial and ignoring the fact Yuppies expressed the values the WWII Gen had inculcated in them — the WWII Gen targeted their younger Yuppie clones from the outset. Especially the older generation directed their ire at the cocaine use of the time. The Yuppies, with their cocaine use, were portrayed in the WWII-Generation-paid-for media as former Sixties hippies who had simply grown older but — consistent with their alleged “narcissism” — were still selfish, only now, materially so. Thus the appellation, the “Me” Generation.
So the Vietnam-era or Sixties Generation began being denigrated in the press with the accusation, “The ‘Me’ Generation,” and Sixties values were also denigrated — the scapegoating of the Sixties Generation continuing — despite the fact that it was a different age group in society, the younger Yuppies, who were actually the ones triggering the attack.
Opposing Worlds
The hypocrisy of the charge of the Sixties Generation being Yuppies becomes even more blatant when considering their values. Sixties values included such selfless acts as risking, sometimes incurring, violence and personal harm, jail time, and a lower standard of living for the sake of their idealistic beliefs in peace, environmental restoration and preservation, and selfless communitarian living, among others. None of that has any overlap with Yuppie careerism, consumerism, materialism, or their individualistic greedy selfishness. But then truth was not their forte, the WWII and Fifties Generations. Later these same elderly generational types would tell us that an election in 2020 was stolen, and they would dare to say that some imaginary Antifa were who stormed the Capitol during the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. Daunting, these lies are, as they are indiscriminately piled, one upon the other down through the decades.
Despite the success in our society’s collective consciousness of the fantastical lie of Yuppies being former hippies — once it had been planted in the popular culture by the WWII Generation sitting comfortably in front of American society’s steering wheel — the truth is that these Yuppies were predominantly the generation that shadowed the Sixties generation, arising as youth in the aftermath of the Sixties cultural revolution.
Yuppies — Products of the WWII Generation’s Todo List
Yuppie values become understandable, then, in that many of these Gen Xers were in secondary schools and universities during the Seventies when the “conservative backlash” Big Lie was being promulgated. They would be those born 1961 on, the oldest of whom would be eleven to nineteen, during the Seventies, after 1972. This propaganda would be taken up in abundance as well during the 1980s, when the youngest of that cohort would be nine to nineteen, also.
Being thus for the most part in secondary schools and universities from 1972 through 1981, Gen X would be the generation most affected by those changes in society that accompanied the Big Lie involving the scapegoating of the Sixties Generation. For alongside the media’s promotion of a bogus conservative backlash we saw that, at that time, 1971 on, universities were cutting back funding from courses in liberal arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, politics and government, and the like. Post–high-school education was being turned into career-factories dedicated to producing compliant businesspersons, engineers, physicians, and scientists — folks who were not being educated to think for themselves, rather, how to achieve and make money in a culture with which the World-War-Two Generation was comfortable.
Yuppies — Children of Fifties Generation Parents
The values of the Yuppies are understandable, furthermore, in that they were the sons and daughters of a generation between the World-War-Two and Baby-Boomer Generations, who are rarely talked about. It is often said that the World War Two Generation — termed the G.I. Generation by Strauss and Howe and designating those born 1901 to 1924 — was followed by Boomers/Vietnam Gen, born 1943 to 1960, and that Generation X, the next generation, were the children of Boomers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The generation that followed the WWII Generation and the actual parents of Gen Xers were born 1925 to 1942 and came to adulthood during the somnolent Fifties, having most of their babies between 1961 and 1981.
We might call this overlooked generation the Fifties Generation, or the Eisenhower-McCarthy Generation, or the Elvis Generation, or the Happy Days Generation … a more cumbersome but more accurate term for them would be the War-Born Generation. They have been called the Silent Generation and the Beat Generation, and this does say something about them.
The Fifties Generation have kept themselves as invisible as possible but running things from behind the screen, since they took over conservatism and greed from the WWII Generation and upped the ante. Witness the Koch Brothers — Charles and David Koch, born 1935 and 1940 respectively — both of whom are Fifties Gen members. Indeed, Fifties Generation members values manifest today in the difference between traditional Republicans — those called RINOs (Republicans in name only) by MAGAts — and the MAGAts or Trumpers themselves. These RINOs are folks like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Ron Paul, and John McCain. They have been the ones behind the curtain — old-school Republicans, who have more of a World-War II Gen mindset.
Whereas nearly all the folks fighting them and wanting to be even more reactionary and fascistic are the MAGAts/Trumpers, the reckless “wacky wabbits” of the Gen X/Yuppie/13th Generation. These include Trumpian MAGAts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Josh Hawley. These latter have more of a Yuppie/Gen X mindset in being irrational, reactionary, and sarcastically obstructionist.
Other major players in this drama are also Gen X/ 13th Gen, including Liz Cheney (born 1966) and Adam Kinzinger (born 1978). Lauren Boerbet, who is a Millennial, born 1986, and Matt Gaetz also a Millennial, barely, born 1982, are two, only, Millennials among the major Republican players.
Hence all these MAGAts — save Boebert and Gaetz,— are members of Gen X. Gen X/ the 13th Generation and are those born 1961 to 1981. Of the ones mentioned, they include Ted Cruz, born 1970; Jim Jordan, born 1964; Sarah Palin, born 1964; Marjorie Taylor Greene, born 1974; and Josh Hawley, born 1979. Other major reactionaries past and present are numbered among the ranks of 13th Generation/ Gen X, including Rand Paul, born 1963; Paul Ryan, born 1970; Ron DeSantis, born 1978; and Chris Christie, born 1962
Ron Paul, born 1935 and thus a member of the Fifties Generation, is a parent of Rand Paul, the Gen X Yuppie type, and this pairing demonstrates both the parentage of Gen X, as being the Fifties Gen, as well as the way that generation, Gen X, conformed to their Fifties Gen parents, not rebelling. Mostly, this pairing depicts the alliance we see predominantly on the Right — that between Fifties Gen and Gen Xers.
The Fifties Generation, Strauss and Howe’s Silent Generation, are those born 1925 to 1942. Keep in mind this alliance of Gen X and the Fifties Generation and that the Fifties Gen are predominantly the parents of and are those who inculcated values into the 13th Generation/ Gen-X, along with Gen X’s subcategory of Yuppies.
It is interesting to notice that the same pattern of the younger generation being more adamant and radical than their parents, but in the same direction, plays out here like it did with the Sixties Generation and their WWII Gen parents. As mentioned, previously Sixties radicals has liberal parents. Similarly, 13th Generation/ Gen X radical reactionaries had conservative ordinary Republican parents … and attempted to do them one better.
This dynamic of a Fifties Gen/ Gen X alliance has been represented by the Gekko character in the movie Wall Street, played by the Fifties Generation character, Michael Douglas, whose protege, correctly enough, was played the by the yuppie-Generation Xer, Charlie Sheen…. Accurately cast, in that he was born 1965.2
Not So “Happy Days”: The War-Born Generation — Fifties, Eisenhower Generation
The media tends to focus on the big trends and to ignore or miss the lesser ones. The way our recent history was portrayed, you would think that just because there was a huge number of babies born in the decade and a half after World-War-Two’s end — the much discussed Baby-Boomer Generation — that there were no babies born during the War … almost as if every man in America was overseas fighting or that, when home on leave or whatever, they simply would not or could not conceive!
Marinated in the Womb of War Fears
However, of course these ridiculous notions are not true, so there is a pre–Baby-boomer Generation who happened to be born during or in the decade leading up to WWII, that is to say, between about 1925 and 1942. And the Yuppies were predominantly the sons and daughters of this — let us call it — Fifties Generation. Marinated in the womb with Great Depression and war fears and born around the time of the war, the Yuppies’ parents then had their formative adolescence and young adulthood during the Fifties.
Abandoned, overlooked, fearful, resentful, rooted in conservatism
So their beliefs are rooted in the cultural soil of Fifties conservatism, the Cold War, Elvis Presley, McCarthyism, Eisenhower, traditional religion, belief in the economic primacy of capitalism and the evil of communism, and the early “schmaltzy” rock and roll … for example, “Crying In The Chapel,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Bye Bye Love,” “In The Still Of The Nite,” and such. These songs would often depict innocent love existing in a world of danger, in a world that misunderstands them. Witness “Teen Angel” by Mark Dinning (1960).
Their roots reaching deep into war fears — hot and cold wars — many would feel jealous and angry about the freedoms and openness of the generation immediately after them, Boomers. They would, as well, heartily resent all the attention being showered on the much larger cohort of Baby-Boomers.
Yuppies, Fifties Nostalgia, Materialism
And it is the worldview of this Fifties Generation that was passed on to their children, the Yuppies. It is no coincidence that when these Gen X Yuppies were teens and young adults (mid-Seventies through the Eighties) we saw also a lengthy period of Fifties nostalgia alongside the caricaturizing and ridiculing of Sixties lifestyles, values, and beliefs. It is easy to see that the materialism the Fifties Generation members were nurtured in after World War II — as a reaction to the fear and uncertainties their parents had because of the Depression, the war, and The Bomb — would be replicated in their children.
Only the fear and uncertainty their children would try to amass wealth against was the tumult, anomie, violence, and confusion of the decade of the Sixties — the era the Yuppies would experience swirling around their roots and upsetting the stability of their nurturant years.
The Eighties Began, Ominously, with Reagan’s Election and John Lennon’s Assassination
The Eighties began, significantly enough, with the death of John Lennon and the election of Ronald Reagan. Concurrent with the epidemic of cocaine use was a manic economy, massive military expenditures, and a tripling-plus of the National Debt. It is relevant to note that the huge increase in the National Debt was caused by a tax cut for the rich, which of course benefited those of the World-War-Two Generation who either inherited or earned, with a lifetime behind them, their wealth, as well as those upwardly mobile, materialistic Yuppies. The rationale for the tax cut — which was characterized by some commentators as “Robin Hood in reverse,” because it also coincided with cutbacks in social programs — was a “voodoo economics” … George H. W. Bush’s term … with a “trickle-down” theory of investment and economic growth.
That Voodoo That They Do So Well
This economics is based on a belief that a “dollar,” metaphorically speaking, given to a rich person will be more wisely invested, creating more jobs and wealth for everyone, than will that same “dollar” given to a middle-class or poor person.
This view, however, ignored human psychology, the standard economics of marginal returns, and the common observation that, simply put, for a person with a little or a moderate amount of money, that metaphorical dollar will have more value … because it will represent a much larger increase, percentage-wise, in their financial situation … than it will for a rich person, for whom its value is only marginally related to a rather large “purse,” so to speak.
Trickle-Down Ignores Human Psychology
Therefore, common sense tells us that “dollar” will be more conscientiously and thoughtfully spent or invested, creating more jobs and wealth for all, by the moderate-income person, who of course will attempt to maximize its benefit to him- or herself so that he or she can also rise to the ranks of the wealthy. To the moderate-income person that “dollar” represents an opportunity for a rise in economic status; hence it will be invested, sweated over, and monitored intensely. In general, he or she will attempt to squeeze every possible ounce of benefit out of it, very often starting businesses of their own and thereby creating new jobs, opportunity, and wealth in the process. Whereas for the already wealthy person, that “dollar” is only a dollar alongside many others, and is only marginally relevant, reaping only marginal, or minor, returns.
And of Course, It Didn’t Work, Still Didn’t Work, Still Didn’t Work.…
Voodoo economics did not work, of course, as indicated by the tripling of the National Debt during and after Reagan. Another important indication of the falsity of its premises was the huge expenditures of money, during the Eighties, on luxury items, like yachts, works of art, expensive cars, and so on. Art items and artifacts were being bid through the roof and the prices they were going for were making headlines in newspapers and stimulating commentaries on the tube. Along with this was the overinvestment in spurious business transactions, including “junk bonds,” soon-to-be-left-unrented commercial buildings, and unwanted real estate. Much has been said about how these manic and ill-considered business transactions led to the lengthy recession of the late Eighties and early Nineties. Along with this is the connection with the Savings and Loan scandal — the S & L Scandal — which was behind the plethora of boondoggles and ill-advised investment.
The Manic Mentality and Mindless Waste
There are two aspects of trickle-down economics and the recession that followed Reagan’s implementation of it that are especially relevant here for a discussion of drugs and generational cultures. Those factors are the manic quality of the times — the go, go, go, buy, buy, buy mentality of the investing — and the other is the obvious proof it gave to marginal returns theory: In other words, the money, given to the rich, was valued little and was mindlessly blown on trivialities; it was said the Eighties was a huge party for the rich.
So rather than creating wealth for the wealthy, which would “trickle down” to the less well off, Reaganomics, as it was also called, turned into an unparalleled failure. It was called the largest shift of wealth in America’s history, taking it from the poor and middle class and benefiting the richest, top two percent of Americans. More than that, it led to a debt that will be adversely affecting the well-being, lifestyles, and financial pictures of several generations to come.
Even worse than that, this shift of wealth upward at Reagan’s time would only be the first of many of such Republican larcenies to come, as we saw with the financial policies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The fact that such trickle-down and such an upward shift of wealth leads to recessions, inevitably, would become an inconvenient truth that would be suppressed in the media’s narrative. For that way the larceny could continue. And when the recession inevitably comes about, as they know it will, and the market crashes, the Filthy Rich you will find are the ones profiting on the downward trend as well. As they short the market. As they profit off the disaster of their financial mismanagement for the rest of us.
Meanwhile, as is their pattern, Republicans will then blame the mess they left behind on the Democrats who regain power, each time, after the economy has been trashed. For the electorate will put Democrats in office after every Republican financial calamity — Hoover’s Great Depression, cleaned up by Roosevelt; Reagan’s late Eighties, early Nineties recession, fixed by Bill Clinton; W. Bush’s Great Recession of 2008, corrected by Barrack Obama. Currently Joe Biden is tending successfully to the mess left us by Donald Trump. America’s financial house in order once again, the American electorate will be ripe to have their racism and hate stoked once again, directed at scapegoats, creating another Republican ascension. So the GOP can pick up on their thieving, again.
It is the challenge of this year, 2022, with everything on the line — democracy, women’s bodies, the environment — for Democrats to come out in numbers so huge as to buck the general trend of the governing party to lose seats in the midterms. Republicans must be kept from gaining power as they will bury any of Biden’s gains and will build a freeway to fascism, with Democrats and opponents being attacked, jailed, and murdered. Democrats need to gain seats, not lose them in this year’s midterms, and at this point, 22 August 2022, it really could go either way.
The Hypocrisy and Materialism
Going into such detail about the intricacies and results of the economic policy promulgated by the WWII Generation, in alliance with the Yuppies and their parents, the Fifties Generation, is important because of the hypocrisy it demonstrates in the charge leveled at the Baby-Boomer Generation of being a “Me” generation and of being narcissistic. Again, we see the WWII Generation’s same tendency to denial, projection, and scapegoating.
To continue, however, other elements in the Eighties cultural arena, existing alongside the epidemic of cocaine use, was the aforementioned careerism and materialism among the Yuppies. Remember, they primarily comprised youth in their twenties and early thirties who followed behind the Vietnam-era Generation. Their mantram was to get rich, get powerful, erect and maintain “family islands” which they saw as competitive with the rest of society — quite unlike the communitarianism of the Sixties Generation — and to retire early … social and environmental problems be damned.
The Necessary Mean-Spiritedness — Hating on the Kumbaya
Other standouts of the cultural scenery of the time included a rise of mean-spiritedness — for example, cutbacks in social programs and charities, which, as it was said, had one effect of emptying the mental hospitals into the streets. Partly as a consequence of that, and beginning in the Eighties, it became fashionable to sneer at and blame — often scapegoating — the more unfortunate ones of society: The poor, helpless, mentally ill, children, the powerless. It was as if Reagan emptied the mental hospitals onto the streets so as to have a target to feed to his rabid Right followers. Honestly, it worked. Americans were encouraged by the media and propaganda systems to find some time for that kind of hatred, for the poor and homeless, alongside their ongoing and outright snickering and smugness as directed at the “hippie-dippie” values and “kumbaya” visions of the generation older than them. Contrast that derision against the most needy of us with LBJ’s War on Poverty — a quite opposite stance — of the Sixties.
Generation “X”
The next generational set we can make out is the one of which the Yuppies were a subgroup. Yet this main core wandered into the cultural limelight during the latter half of that period and has been termed Generation X.
Was Disconnected from The Sixties
Whereas Yuppies came of age during the Eighties, the greater portion of Generation X came into adulthood in the Eighties and Nineties. As I have been saying, Yuppies were the earliest contingent of Gen X.
Predominantly these Gen X are not the sons and daughters of the Sixties Generation as the values of the Vietnam-era Generation included marrying late and having children late so that their children are mostly younger than and not among Generation X.
This value concerning marrying or having children later in life tied in with the Sixties folks’ belief in personal freedom, but it is more closely related to the hypocrisy they perceived in the marriages of their parents, those of the WWII Generation. They not only perceived their parents’ marriages as being false and loveless, they perceived themselves as being the victims of poor parenting, wherein they felt they were not understood and were not accepted for who they were or supported in what they uniquely wanted to do with their lives.
Furthermore, these Sixties Gen saw the social and global context as a negative and highly dangerous one. For one thing, having been children during the “drop and roll” and bomb-shelter, nuclear-shadow era of the Fifties, and having seen the assassination of idealistic values in the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King during their teens and young adulthood, they had great doubts about the future of the world. Though of course the Sixties Generation is noted for its idealism and for its attempts to fight these perceived dangers and injustices, underneath there has always been for them an uncertainty that success is possible, so that bringing a child into this particular dangerous and unjust social context was seen as possibly not a good thing for the child.
Parented by a Fallow Generation
So it is that Generation Xers are predominantly the sons and daughters of the Fifties Generation as well as those less idealistic of the Vietnam-era Generation who had, more often than not, opted for the traditional route of career, home, and family and thus had started having children many years earlier than their more socially conscious counterparts.
This Fallow Generation, let us call it, would conceive the children who would be called Generation X — who are noted for their apathy and lack of distinctiveness.
Yet keep in mind that the Fallow Generation is not a true generation in the sense that it is composed of two age groups — the Fifties Generation and those of the Baby-Boomers who opted for a family instead of the social activism, college education, and establishing a career before raising a family decisions of their more heralded peers.
Hence Generation X’s lack of a unifying cause, value, or characteristic may have to do with their being children of parents from two different age groups and generations.
Drugs and Generations: Generation X Returned to Booze
At any rate, & understandably because they are mostly not children of the idealistic segment of Sixties youth, in addition to the aforementioned cocaine use, the drug use of Xers strayed back to the use of alcohol & cigarettes. These are the drugs used by their Fallow Generation parents, including the smaller number of them who were Boomers and who did not make either the cultural or drug changes of their peers. Alongside this “traditional” drug use, Generation Xers are noted for their pessimism, defeatism, and fascination with death — as, for example, in their selection of black clothes, their tendency to ripped jeans, tattoos, and the insertion of all sorts of pins and studs, as adornments, into virtually all parts of their bodies, and, in the extreme ones among them, a fascination with vampirism.
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9
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To Save the World:
Millennials … Psychedelics and Activism.
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Not coincidentally, Millennial Generation parents were predominantly of the Vietnam Generation/ Boomers and Millennials echoed their parent’s more liberal and mind-expanding drug use. The psychedelic that came on the scene at this time and enamored the youth of the Nineties was, however, Ecstasy.”
“Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, is very similar chemically to the amphetamines. Ecstasy has an hallucinogenic aspect, which distinguishes it, however. Yet it more reliably elicits the opening to love for others and the favorable perceptions of others and sense of unity with them….”
“Raves became an emerging phenomenon following somewhat upon the fading of the disco phase — a decline which occurred in the late Seventies, early Eighties. So raves were a phenomenon coincident with the rising use of Ecstasy and primarily affecting the generations following the Yuppie/Me-Generation…”
“…although during the Nineties the WWII Generation was in the process of leaving the scene, those elderly of them left were conducting a fierce rearguard battle to save what they could of the culture they knew and created. In their desperation, they risked any cost in terms of outlandish scandals, government costs, and loss of social progress and governmental effectiveness. They were helped by a Fifties Generation entering retirement with a lot of wealth …”
“Beginning in 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, the youth vote swung back to going for the Democrats; the oldest of Millennials, at that time, were eleven years old. While Clinton’s victories were helped by a Boomer/ Gen X alliance; it was also helped by a general trend toward liberalism as there has been an increase in activism and idealism among the young in the last three decades.”
“…the issues that appeared to concern Millennials the most have to do with racism and the environment. It is no coincidence that in the peak of their influence as young adults, there was an astounding wave of participation in Obama’s campaign, largely by this cohort, that resulted in the first African American to attain the presidency. Following that, their anti-racism came to the fore during the massive and ongoing demonstrations of Black Lives Matter, following the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“This group also has fears that the future might not be very bright or as good as it was in times before them, particularly in terms of a ruined ecology due to environmental assault and/or nuclear disaster, yet they, like their parents, also are more likely to activism and taking up causes in the face of such dire possibilities.”
“…alcohol and nicotine use could be correlated with a generation that could put a Hitler into power, create a holocaust, and carry out the most destructive war in this planet’s history. It should be obvious how marijuana use could be correlated with the alienation, pessimism, and defeatism … but also brilliance … of the Beats. It should be abundantly clear how the use of LSD and marijuana among Sixties youth could correlate with a disgust with normal society and culture and thus the creation, from scratch, of a counterculture, with a pacifism in regard to war, with a reemergence of a lived and individual spirituality, with an emphasis on real communication, with an attempt to create real community and relationships, and with much more that has been associated with them. and it should need no explanation how cocaine use could be correlated with a manic economy and irrational, overoptimistic schemes, and failed business ventures”
“…it is that distinctive minority of any generation that paints the face that generation presents to the world. It is the differences in generations and the new ideas and perceptions that make up the intellectual currency of a period and which rise above the familiar scenery to be spotlighted by the media and press.”
“It is the differences between generations that is worthy of discussion. and it is my point that those differences are unusually correlated with the distinctive drug use of that generation and the effects that those drugs have on one’s perceptions of reality…”
“…these drug-influenced perceptions create the worldviews of generations out of which they create their generational cultures — the stark differences of which can fuel culture wars.”
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[Chapter 9 text begins:] The Millennial Generation succeeded Gen X; they are those born 1982 to 2000. Once again, drug usage swung away from what it had been in a way that coincided with a different political and personality profile for Millennials. Not coincidentally, Millennial Generation parents were predominantly of the Vietnam Generation/ Boomers, and Millennials echoed their parent’s more liberal and mind-expanding drug use. The psychedelic that came on the scene at this time and enamored the youth of the Nineties was, however, Ecstasy. It had its own unique effects, which were reflected in the cultural happenings of their era.
Drug Effects — Ecstasy
Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, is very similar chemically to the amphetamines. Ecstasy has an hallucinogenic aspect, which distinguishes it, however. Yet it more reliably elicits the opening to love for others and the favorable perceptions of others and sense of unity with them as described above as occurring for amphetamines also, along with the drivenness of speed that is more characteristic of it. That, among other reasons, is why MDMA has been found helpful in counseling and mental health settings for personal growth.
Ecstasy came into use in the late Seventies and in the Eighties; and it has had continued appreciation of its effects through to the present. In fact, it is considered the drug of choice at raves — psychedelic and musical large-scale parties, which became a more recent generational phenomena, coming about in the Nineties. The growth in popularity of raves maps nearly exactly on the increasing appreciation for Ecstasy. It would be hard to view that as coincidental.
Disco Yupp
The free love and communalism of the Sixties was superseded by a disco phase in the late Seventies. The disco phase emerged and grew immediately upon the waning of use in the psychedelics, the increasing use of marijuana as a “cocktail,” mixed with alcohol, and the predominant use of cocaine by the Yuppies and Me Generation — the early contingent of Generation X.
Rave on, Millennials!
Raves became an emerging phenomenon following somewhat upon the fading of the disco phase — a decline which occurred in the late Seventies, early Eighties. So raves were a phenomenon coincident with the rising use of Ecstasy and primarily affecting the generations following the Yuppie/Me-Generation, that is to say, specifically, Generation X and the Millennial Generation.
Baby-Boomer Echo Generation
This generation is currently in their thirties and forties, though some are still in their twenties, some still in college, as a consequence of the tendency for some Baby-Boomer parents to postpone having children, often waiting till the very end of a woman’s reproductive years, just before the age of forty.
This generation has been called an “echo” of the Baby-Boomers in that just as the Baby-Boomers represented a significant population increase, conceived in the post-WWII euphoria and stability, these children of Boomers also represented an incoming population wave, due to the numbers of their parents. There was a wave of increased school attendance during the Nineties and post-millennial years. Universities not long after that were attending to their needs.
Just as in every other generation mentioned, this Echo Generation, also called Millennial Generation, shares many of the characteristics and values of their parents.
Similarly, they mirror the drug use of their parents. There was a great to-do in the press during the Nineties about the increase in drug use among the young, particularly in high school. Furthermore, in typical WWII-Generation style, the media and Republicans in Congress attempted, during the Nineties, to scapegoat Sixties-Generation President Bill Clinton on this issue of drug use.
For, although during the Nineties the WWII Generation was in the process of leaving the scene, those elderly of them left were conducting a fierce rearguard battle to save what they could of the culture they knew and created. In their desperation, they risked any cost in terms of outlandish scandals, government costs, and loss of social progress and governmental effectiveness. They were helped by a Fifties Generation entering retirement with a lot of wealth who, as I have said, were extremely jealous of the attention paid to the larger Boomer generation who came after them.
Nevertheless, the truth of the matter is that the increase in drug use among the young — which significantly enough involved predominantly an increase in the use of marijuana and, as they say: LSD … It’s b-a-a-a-a-ck! — had to do with the fact that the parents of these young people are indeed the people of the Sixties who themselves experimented with these substances.
Lest I be misunderstood, I am in no way saying that parents, in general, actively teach their children to take drugs — whether we are talking about the alcohol and cigarette use of the WWII Generation or marijuana and LSD use of Boomers — yet children are influenced by what their parents do or have done, even if just in the fact that the parents are more tolerant of such usage, having done it themselves. I say this because it could be countered that even the Sixties Generation, as parents, were engaged in the public antidrug campaign. Yet when they did so they were doing it out of a fear for their children’s physical welfare, not from a severe moral perspective that these drugs are the royal road to hell or from such other paranoid attitude, as was most often the case in the parents of the other generations discussed so far.1
Politics — Activism. Values — Idealism
To return to the point, though not as widely studied, yet, as Boomers and Gen X, these are some of what has been noted about this “echo” generation: Beginning in 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, the youth vote swung back to going for the Democrats; the oldest of Millennials, at that time, were eleven years old. While Clinton’s victories were helped by a Boomer/ Gen X alliance; it was also helped by a general trend toward liberalism as there has been an increase in activism and idealism among the young in the last three decades. Surprisingly this increase was noticed as early as when this generation was in high school and grade school. Polls done on their attitudes as children and adults showed a strong increase in their concern about social and global issues.
In fact, the issues that appeared to concern Millennials the most have to do with racism and the environment. It is no coincidence that in the peak of their influence as young adults, there was an astounding wave of participation in Obama’s campaign, largely by this cohort, that resulted in the first African-American to attain the presidency. Following that, their anti-racism came to the fore during the massive and ongoing demonstrations of Black Lives Matter, following the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd in 2020.
This group also has fears that the future might not be very bright or as good as it was in times before them, particularly in terms of a ruined ecology due to environmental assault and/or nuclear disaster, yet they, like their parents, also are more likely to activism and taking up causes in the face of such dire possibilities.
These values of the Echo Generation are understandable, not only in that they reflect those of their parents, but also in that in the most recent decades the Sixties Generation — and indeed it would tend to be the more idealistic of them that would opt for the low pay that teachers currently get — predominated as the teachers and administrators in the primary and secondary schools that taught the Echo Generation.
The same, however, cannot as much be said of the universities, with Millennials attending, for reasons having to do with cutbacks in educational funds, the lingering success of the WWII Generation in turning universities into career factories as opposed to truly educational institutions, and, with the cutbacks in funding, the lack of job openings for Sixties Generation applicants and the resulting continued influence, bolstered by the institution of tenureship, of pre-Sixties professors — those of the Fifties and Fallow Generations, and a few remaining, very old, WWII folks.
Still, the Sixties Generation influence on these youth in college existed because of several contrary trends. The Echo Generation’s numbers swelled university attendance, requiring additional hiring somehow, whatever the funding constraints, and those of the generations preceding the Sixties Generation passed from the universities into retirement, or the beyond.
The candidates for the openings that did come about at the university level would be, not as much those of the Fallow Generation, the Yuppies, or Generation Xers, but instead members of a Sixties Generation who alone, among the generations mentioned, valued education over money and careerism. They had been waiting a long time, diplomas and experience in hand, for their chance to return to the universities — this time as the instructors and administrators — and eager to change its course back to true education, as it was when they were students in the liberal-minded Sixties.
We see the effects of this in Obama’s election and the phenomenal numbers of demonstrators coming out to fight back union attacks and budget squeezes in Wisconsin and throughout the US. Though these were not attracting media attention these outpourings continued unabated. We witnessed their activist inclinations as well in the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and the Black Lives Matter protests nine years later. My analysis provides insight into why these events are occurring now, as they are in the prime of their adulthood.
Different Drugs, Different Worlds
This has been a brief overview of salient characteristics of generational cultures of some past and current generations alongside a description of that generation’s predominant drug use. I simultaneously unveiled in some detail what we know about the effects of these particular substances on consciousness and attitudes. Finally, I discussed the behavior and beliefs that can coincide with the use of these drugs, as they affect consciousness in different ways, creating different kinds of consciousnesses, different perspectives, indeed entirely different and distinct ways of perceiving the self and the world.
This discussion of drug use and generational cultures might be complete enough at this point. Any of the many connections not specifically made should be readily apparent and the information being brought together this way is suggestive of much more.
What I do not think needs to be spelled out is the obvious: For example, alcohol and nicotine use could be correlated with a generation that could put a Hitler into power, create a holocaust, and carry out the most destructive war in this planet’s history. It should be obvious how marijuana use could be correlated with the alienation, pessimism, and defeatism … but also brilliance … of the Beats. It should be abundantly clear how the use of LSD and marijuana among Sixties youth could correlate with a disgust with normal society and culture and thus the creation, from scratch, of a counterculture, with a pacifism in regard to war, with a reemergence of a lived and individual spirituality, with an emphasis on real communication, with an attempt to create real community and relationships, and with much more that has been associated with them. and it should need no explanation how cocaine use could be correlated with a manic economy and irrational, overoptimistic schemes, and failed business ventures.
Painting the Faces of Generations
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I should point out that, except for the WWII Generation whose drugs were legal and easily available, the above is based on generalities and trends of a minority of the people in the generations mentioned. Yet it is that distinctive minority of any generation that paints the face that generation presents to the world. It is the differences in generations and the new ideas and perceptions that make up the intellectual currency of a period and which rise above the familiar scenery to be spotlighted by the media and press.
The “Beats” did not comprise the majority of their generation and not all of them took marijuana or even had the horrifying perception of our normal unreality that is possible on that drug, yet a number of them, larger than any previously in any other generation, did exactly that … and those who did were often compelled to express those perceptions and the accompanying ideas, in revelatory literature, poetry, theater, and the like, that would influence the reality constructions of the rest of their generation and would come to characterize the palpable ideas of the era.
So it is as well with the Sixties Generation, the Yuppies, and even Generation Xers and the Millennial Generation. It is the differences between generations that is worthy of discussion. and it is my point that those differences are unusually correlated with the distinctive drug use of that generation and the effects that those drugs have on one’s perceptions of reality — a point that I have not seen explored before.
Drugs and Culture War
Finally, I wish to emphasize that these drug-influenced perceptions create the worldviews of generations out of which they create their generational cultures — the stark differences of which can fuel culture wars.
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PART THREE
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Cultural Rebirth, Aborted
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10
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The King Won’t Die
Attack of the Body-Snatchers … an Aborted Changing of the Guard
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…[the Sixties Generation] were biding their time, waiting — sometimes hopeless that it would ever arrive — for a reversing of the pendulum and a return in society to the ideals and visions of a better world that had so inspired them in their earlier years.”
“…[the Sixties Generation] would wonder, as decades passed, why it took so long for the rest of society to catch on to what they felt was an inviting and appealing evolution — one both necessary and therefore inevitable as well.”
“Another reason these terms depicting cultural division, specifically, generation gap and counterculture, went into disuse was due to the mobilization of the World War Two Generation — after their initial phase of somnolent confusion over the events that were emerging in the Sixties which left them paralyzed and watching, growing in irritation and anger — into a comprehensive counterattack against the Sixties Generation, using all the Nixonian-like tactics in their arsenal….”
“In the early Seventies, the World War Two Generation used their power and wealth, being themselves in the triumphant phase of their lives, to put pressure on colleges and universities, nationwide, to discontinue the programs, courses, and the professors that they felt were responsible for the youth’s rebellion.”
“A transformation of colleges and universities into ‘career mills’ — whose primary function was to prepare the young for practical and skill-oriented jobs and professions — was called for … or else!”
“The youth produced by these institutions would hereafter be dissuaded from thinking for themselves and from ‘questioning authority’ — as the previous generation had been encouraged to do….”
“…the wave of youth that followed the Sixties Generation would be molded, in their college years, into distant replicas of World War Two Generation members. They would be termed the ‘Me Generation,’ since selfishness, greed, money-as-god, and upward mobility were characteristics of the WWII Generation that they were able to instill in their youthful clones.”
“…beginning in the early Seventies, institutions of higher learning turned away from their idealistic goals of “bringing out” from the students their inner truths and wisdom (which is the original meaning of the term educate), which is the avowed role of liberal arts programs, and instead turned hard, to the right, onto a path of churning out engineers, MBAs, hard scientists … even in the field of psychology, where humanistic psychology was shunned … medical professionals, lawyers, and the like.”
“…these frightened and wealthy WWII ‘conspirators’ … however unconscious their alliance … would use their leverage to ensure that books and the media — TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers — would expound their views predominantly, would present events through the particular psychological lenses and filters with which they were familiar, and would eschew viewpoints, and even coverage of events, that would in any way strengthen the stance of the, by this time, scapegoated Sixties Generation.”
“Controlling the media in this way and saying it long and loud enough, the ‘big lie’ of the ‘conservative backlash’ began to be accepted as truth. And even many in the counterculture and among the youth began to believe it.”
“…with Trump we see a division in the country corresponding roughly with generational lines, with both sides actively and passionately fighting back the gains of the other side.”
“Every generation, at some point, leaves or is removed from their seats of power when they are at or near the end of their arc of effectiveness and prowess by a younger generation that is coming into or — as in the unusual case of the Sixties Generation for the reasons unique to this time to be mentioned below — is fully in the prime of its life.”
“The triumphant phase of the Sixties Generation had been delayed, however, longer than any other generation in history because of the advances in modern medical science, which served to keep the World War Two Generation alive and kicking longer than any previous generation.”
“…the WWII Generation might be said to have been more threatened than any previous one by the generation to succeed them, because the ascendancy of the next generation appeared to overturn and oftentimes reverse so much of what they believed, valued, worked and sacrificed for.”
“…the World War Two Generation used their longevity for all their worth to block the ascendancy of their successors. They used their long lives to amass wealth and power — wealth greater than any previous generation before and, because of their actions, likely to come.”
“…the World War Two Generation used their unprecedented wealth and power to wage a war against the generation who would be taking over from them, keeping them and their values under attack and away from the centers of power and influence in society as long as they possibly could.”
“…your position on the abortion issue is the closest thing to a military uniform indicating on which side of the culture war you have enlisted. Specifically, I am saying that there are few of the Sixties Generation who would not classify themselves as ‘pro-choice.’ Meanwhile, the anti-abortionists are found to primarily comprise those of the WWII Generation, their Eighties Generation clones, and the Eisenhower-Presley-McCarthy — and now we might add ‘Pleasantville’ — Fifties Generation.”
“The World War Two Generation, especially after the elections of November 1998, learned that it was way off in some of its assumptions, that their analysis of what had been happening in this country was woefully miscalculated. They were like the deluded schizophrenic who believed passionately in the world he himself created coming up against some of the hard, harsh, and indisputable facts of existence which undermine his world.
“The World-War-Two-Generation–minded — whatever the individual’s age, and especially now, their underlings of the Fifties Generation — have been fighting back, since the Nineties, with all the firepower they can muster against realizing the harsh realities around them of their waning ideals. They have been in total and absolute denial of the direction of the American, indeed the world, consciousness; and they have been flinging all their wealth into the mix to try to repress the emerging truths.”
“But we shouldn’t be surprised if we see some of those in their ranks — wealthy and facing their inevitable demise — merely increasing the ferocity of their war waging … humiliating themselves and seeming ever more pitiful in the minds of the majority of observers, who increasingly, as time continues to decimate their WWII ranks, are younger than they and thus do not share their delusions.”
“…we have faced, since the change of the millennium, neo-con wars built on lies and confused tea-baggers railing against their own interests. All of which culminated in the installation of a Russian asset, Trump. Illegitimate president Donald Trump brought together in one person all the class-war waging ferocity; all the misogyny, racism, and idiocracy; all the pitiable gooberish nonsense pretending to be truth; and all the cruelty and insensitivity of the Filthy Rich, the Republicans, the White supremacists, and the greedy generations, into one person.
“Yet this war is not over; we can still glimpse a world … for it has been growing everywhere outside the limelight … where peace, love, harmony, sexual freedom, intelligence and rationality, and kind-heartedness abound.”
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[Chapter 10 text begins:] What do these events have in common? The popularity of Democrats since the Nineties, with Obama’s favorability ratings high despite US entanglement in several wars; the astounding progress in race relations exemplified by ever increasing numbers of African-Americans elected and appointed to the highest posts in US government since the Nineties, highlighted by the election of the first ever black president in the most lopsided victory in decades;
America Getting Free, Breaking Out
… the wild success of the Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin union movements; massive demonstrations around the U.S., attended by hundreds of thousands at times, in favor of liberal Democratic causes and opposing Republicans and showing people carrying signs displaying the peace symbol; outpourings of peaceful pro-freedom and democracy protesters throughout the Middle East and North Africa; the reborn popularity of the “peace sign” — two fingers extended in a V-like shape, for those who don’t know — including saying “peace” while extending it as a greeting (most often these days, when leaving); the phenomenal outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter in 2020;
… renewed interest in the book, Catcher in the Rye; the nostalgia for Sixties and Seventies cultural accouterments as exemplified by the TV show, That 70s Show ; the resurgence of fashion items like bell-bottoms and, on women, clunky high-heel shoes; the movies Pleasantville and The Truman Show; the popularity in the Nineties of shows like Ally McBeal and The X Files;
… one-time Sixties activist Bill Clinton’s sixty-some percent approval rating throughout almost the entirety of the White House Sex Scandal alongside the pundits’ complete and total befuddlement as to the causes for it; the strong presidential run by a woman, also with roots solidly in Sixties activism, Hillary Clinton, in the 2008 Presidential race … significantly only beat out, and barely, by an African-American;
… the passage of medical use of marijuana laws in a number of states and legalization of marijuana initiatives; the return to ballad-style, Dylan-esque music embracing and expressing social, philosophical, and extremely intimate personal views and experiences….
We’ve also seen, in California, the passage of Proposition 10 — the ballot measure that imposes a fifty-cents tax on cigarettes to fund programs for young children … which ballot measure, significantly enough, was begun by Sixties-Generation representative Rob Reiner — formerly Meathead from All in the Family! The passage of single payer health insurance in Vermont.… I could go on.
America in Chains, Breaking Down
On the other side of this we have seen, in the last three decades, several “Republican revolutions” taking the opposite side on women’s issues, union and worker’s rights, environmental policy, health care and education, budget and economic issues benefiting the poor and middle class, and all other “liberal” causes;
… the rise of a media-supported Tea Party movement, heavily funded by wealthy and corporate interests, espousing wildly reactionary and regressive measures like eliminating Social Security and Medicare, gutting environmental policies to give corporations a free hand in despoiling the environment, anti-union measures, deep budget cuts in social programs, and the showing in this movement of demonstrators hoisting signs with racist images and slogans and gleefully applauding the acting out of a slave auction depicting an African-American president, Obama, and his supporters in Congress and his administration as bloodied slaves in chains;
… the popularity of a news network promoting, in blatant and mostly dishonest form, reactionary issues and figures; the resurgence in the careers of Pat Buchanan, right wing propagandist out of the Nixon administration turned talk show pundit, and Newt Gingrich, reactionary culture warrior during the early Nineties; extreme pro-gun positions and actions, including openly carrying weapons to political rallies and events and proposing the allowance of children to bring guns to schools; thuggish attacks on left-leaning activists and demonstrators; the murder of physicians on the pro-choice side of the abortion/women’s rights issue; and attacks and threats against progressive politicians and legislators, including the nearly successful assassination attempt on Democratic Congresswoman, Gabriel Giffords…. I could go on.
Most folks would see nothing connecting these issues on either side. What I believe we are seeing is a resurgence of the underground “culture war” that has been going on in the US since the 1960s between the Sixties Generation — those whose adolescent and young adulthood, formative years were influenced by the events of the Sixties — and the World War Two Generation — those whose equivalent times of life were forged in the Forties, during and around the time of World War Two.
Generation Gap and Counterculture
The huge ravine separating the views of these two generations was most apparent when those of the Sixties Generation were in their youth, engaged in the process of discovering and exploring their values and therefore expressing them blatantly and with all the indiscretion, lack of subtlety, confrontation, and rebelliousness that characterizes the inexperienced. Thus, terms like generation gap and counterculture were bandied about, analyzed, and fervently discussed. The differences were “on the table,” in full view; and because the views and values of the youth were so “counter” or opposite to those of the WWII Generation, much debate and analysis was spawned in the media to try to explain — for the most part to the WWII Generation — how this could be so.
Nevertheless, these terms of generation gap and counterculture, which highlighted the great disparity of views, would fade mostly into disuse. This was because, later, the Sixties Generation would learn to keep their private views and values more hidden, for practical reasons having to do with making a living, advancing in their careers, being able to raise their children, and so on. Yet this did not mean their values had changed, regardless the propaganda being infused into the public mind so as to scapegoat this generation. They were biding their time, waiting — sometimes hopeless that it would ever arrive — for a reversing of the pendulum and a return in society to the ideals and visions of a better world that had so inspired them in their earlier years.
For the most part, these Sixties adherents did not know about the psychohistorical tendencies I will be describing here — as for example in the evolution of child-caring and the triumphant phase of generations. For most it was just an awareness that something so strong and so right could not simply have completely vanished from the Earth, that with time comes change, and therefore there had to be a time, again, when the mood of the country would swing in the direction they felt to be healthiest and more ideal. For some of these people their hopes were based on the simple rules of gambling: Eventually, at some time or other, with the passage of time, the dice just had to roll their number, if just out of pure chance or randomness.
Others had a slightly more reasoned view buttressing their hope for a return to idealism. These folks were those of the Sixties Generation who had applied themselves to implementing the values they learned in the Sixties in the jobs and careers they held, in whatever small or not-so-small way that they were allowed by their older generation superiors, bosses, managers, or supervisors. Never knowing that they had allies among their generation who were doing the same kind of thing in their separate fields, they followed through, the best they could, on simple conviction, born of experience, of the rightness of the more idealistic ways.
Lastly, there were those of the Sixties Generation who identified themselves completely with their youthful idealism. In putting themselves “out front” this way in their values and beliefs they found others who were doing the same. They would together become the “New Age” movement, actively engaged in bringing about the better world their generation had envisioned in the Sixties and early Seventies. They would wonder, as decades passed, why it took so long for the rest of society to catch on to what they felt was an inviting and appealing evolution — one both necessary and therefore inevitable as well.
But these last, the New Agers, would be marginalized and scapegoated by the mainstream of society — a mainstream whose outlines, of course, were determined and inscribed by the mainstream media, which was, in turn, controlled by the wealthy elite of the World War Two Generation (more about this to come). Examples include Jerry Brown labeled “Captain Moonbeam,” the family dynamics in the TV show Family Ties, the burnt-out hippie depiction of cabdriver, Jim, in the Taxi television series, and thousands of other instances where those holding New Age views were labeled “flakes.”
An Aborted Changing of the Guard — Attack of the Body-Snatchers
Another reason these terms depicting cultural division, specifically, generation gap and counterculture, went into disuse was due to the mobilization of the World War Two Generation — after their initial phase of somnolent confusion over the events that were emerging in the Sixties which left them paralyzed and watching, growing in irritation and anger — into a comprehensive counterattack against the Sixties Generation, using all the Nixonian-like tactics in their arsenal … understandably, since Nixon was of that generation and his tactics were typical of the defensive style of his contemporaries.
Lassoing the Universities
In the early Seventies, the World War Two Generation used their power and wealth, being themselves in the triumphant phase of their lives, to put pressure on colleges and universities, nationwide, to discontinue the programs, courses, and the professors that they felt were responsible for the youth’s rebellion. Their targets for destruction included such noteworthy “dangers” as liberal arts programs in general, and especially “highly revolutionary” philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and humanistic psychology courses. A transformation of colleges and universities into “career mills” — whose primary function was to prepare the young for practical and skill-oriented jobs and professions — was called for … or else! Or else these World War Two alumni would discontinue their contributions to these educational institutions. The “bottom line” being threatened in this way, no university administration, to my knowledge, withstood their demands for very long, if at all.
Cloning Themselves … WWII Generation Creating an 80s Generation of “Mini-me’s”
The youth produced by these institutions would hereafter be dissuaded from thinking for themselves and from “questioning authority” — as the previous generation had been encouraged to do — so part of the lapse in the terms of division between the generations — counterculture and generation gap — had to do with the fact that the wave of youth that followed the Sixties Generation would be molded, in their college years, into distant replicas of World War Two Generation members. They would be termed the “Me Generation,” since selfishness, greed, money-as-god, and upward mobility were characteristics of the WWII Generation that they were able to instill in their youthful clones.
Thus, we saw the rise of Young Republicans on campus in the late Seventies, the return of ROTC to campuses, and the seeding of fertile young minds with the values that would later be verbalized — in the movie Wall Street — in the mantram “Greed is good!” At the height of this phase, periodicals were declaring how similar the “youth of today” — meaning those of the late Seventies and Eighties — were to their parents, how close they were to their parents in the beliefs and values they held, and how the generation gap had inexplicably closed. Such was the success of the WWII Generation in cloning themselves in producing Eighties youth.
In sum, beginning in the early Seventies, institutions of higher learning turned away from their idealistic goals of ‘bringing out’ from the students their inner truths and wisdom (which is the original meaning of the term educate), which is the avowed role of liberal arts programs, and instead turned hard, to the right, onto a path of churning out engineers, MBAs, hard scientists … even in the field of psychology, where humanistic psychology was shunned … medical professionals, lawyers, and the like. My liberal arts, semi–ivy-league college — founded, by half, by Benjamin Franklin — turned from the idealistic studies that typified Franklin and those of his time and swung from being a bastion of energetic inquiry into all controversial realms — political and spiritual and societal — a virtual “Plato’s Academy” of inquiry, into being a career mill centered around a “pre-med” program.
Harnessing the Media
Similarly, these frightened and wealthy WWII “conspirators” … however unconscious their alliance … would use their leverage to ensure that books and the media — TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers — would expound their views predominantly, would present events through the particular psychological lenses and filters with which they were familiar, and would eschew viewpoints, and even coverage of events, that would in any way strengthen the stance of the, by this time, scapegoated Sixties Generation.
The media declared, with much fanfare, in the early Seventies that a “conservative backlash” was occurring; and they published books documenting this event. Meanwhile they ignored the polls and the events — specifically the ongoing and growing antiwar and other counterculture “demonstrations” — that would show the lie to this idea; and they rejected and refused publication of the kind of books and articles, still being effusively churned out — that would support the counterculture movement. Controlling the media in this way and saying it long and loud enough, the “big lie” of the “conservative backlash” began to be accepted as truth. And even many in the counterculture and among the youth began to believe it.
Interestingly, those on the extreme right did not forget that the great divide in views was still with us. In the Nineties, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich said a “culture war” was going on. More recently we see WWII- and Fifties-style Tea Partiers going up against huge rallies of Sixties style pro-union demonstrators and massive recall efforts. And, of course, with Trump we see a division in the country corresponding roughly with generational lines, with both sides actively and passionately fighting back the gains of the other side.
So those on the right decry such massive outpourings against them, but they are correct that it is a “culture war.” Obviously they can see that the world has changed from the Fifties-style “Pleasantville” they had imagined and wanted it to be.
Culture War — The King Must Die
Still, the World War Two Generation could not maintain control forever. For one thing, people die. And being older than the Sixties Generation, eventually their numbers had to dwindle. Their numbers dwindling, they had to be replaced by those younger — some of whom were of the Sixties Generation and were now in what psychohistorians call the triumphant phase of life — that is, the time of life when a generation is in its “prime,” when it is most influential, when it takes over the reins of society, when it gets behind the wheel of the cultural bus.
From this perspective, we can view a remarkable film, Pleasantville, released in the late Nineties at the peak of the Sixties Generation’s triumphant phase, and see that it is a metaphorical review of history from the early Fifties up to that time — one which shows the Sixties Generation, in the end, finally realizing their vision of a more colorful, alive, open-to-new-experience and to change, growthful, changeful, passionate, unregimented, truthful, sensual, feeling and emotionful, and less determined, ritualized, and preordained existence. More about this later.
The Generational Changing of the Guard
First let me point out that this change in power, evident by this movie and the other recent cultural items I’ve mentioned, is a change as old as our species. Every generation, at some point, leaves or is removed from their seats of power when they are at or near the end of their arc of effectiveness and prowess by a younger generation that is coming into or — as in the unusual case of the Sixties Generation for the reasons unique to this time to be mentioned below — is fully in the prime of its life.
Myths, fairy tales, stories, historical tales, and legends the world over depict this change of power. The myth that is most transparent in its depiction of this change is the one in which a monarch, despot, or ogre controls and rules the land, keeping the people miserable with oppressive and selfish decrees and policies. A young prince emerges and, after a period of trial … in the case of the Sixties Generation, an unusually long period of trial … in which the prince proves himself worthy, he takes up the cause of the people and overthrows the old king and takes his place. Thus the saying, “The king is dead. Long live the (new) king.”
The triumphant phase of the Sixties Generation had been delayed, however, longer than any other generation in history because of the advances in modern medical science, which served to keep the World War Two Generation alive and kicking longer than any previous generation. The average life expectancy in the last ninety years … since the time when the World War Two Generation were in their youth or young adulthood … has increased remarkably. Hence the Sixties Generation had to wait longer than the World War Two Generation to get a chance behind the wheel of society. It is strange and ironic that at a time when the speed of cultural change is greatest because of an ever increasing speed of technological change, at a time when the elder generation’s worldview becomes obsolete sooner and faster than ever before, at such a time when it would seem the younger generation’s view would attain relevancy and effectiveness faster and sooner than at any previous time, at such a time we had the reverse occurring, that is, the younger generation’s ascendancy was delayed and the older one’s stranglehold on power was extended.
However, this rapid change and increasing rate of obsolescence may just have had something to do with the WWII Generation’s desire to hang on and their vehement struggle against change. For, as mentioned before, there is a gap — greater than ever before — between the views of the younger and those of the older. This gap is wrought of the different technological worlds and the corresponding sociocultural worlds that each experienced. It is widened by different, more advanced on the one side, child-caring of children, as well as by different drugs used, and the contrasting world views they would elicit — as explained in Chapter Five and those following.
So the WWII Generation might be said to have been more threatened than any previous one by the generation to succeed them, because the ascendancy of the next generation appeared to overturn and oftentimes reverse so much of what they believed, valued, worked and sacrificed for.
Because of the unprecedented technological change and corresponding change in material culture, catalyzing in ways too numerous to mention a myriad of sociocultural and psychological changes in their successors, there was less overlap than ever before between the worldviews of the generation handing over power and the generation coming into power. It follows that it would seem to the generation in power, even as they approached the end of their mortality, that less of what they are and were would live on after them than has ever been the case in the history of generational succession.
This being so, such a generational succession represented a previously unheard of personal invalidation and undermining of the self-esteem of those of the World War Two Generation and a corresponding unprecedented attack on the usual delusions of immortality … themselves living on in some fashion in their successors … that older generations are allowed in exchange for their relinquishing power.
Culture War — The King Won’t Die
At any rate and whatever may be the reason, the fact remains that the World War Two Generation used their longevity for all their worth to block the ascendancy of their successors. They used their long lives to amass wealth and power — wealth greater than any previous generation before and, because of their actions, likely to come.
For example, their actions led to a situation, currently, wherein they were taken care of in their old age by a Social Security and Medicare system funded by the work of the Baby-Boomers, aka Sixties Generation, at the same time that predictions abound that that same Social Security and Medicare system will be depleted just as it is the Baby-Boomers’ time to belly-up to the bar. One might also note the WWII Generation’s environmental and ecological decisions making it that no generation after them woule enjoy anywhere near the benefits — health and quality of life among them — of clean environment, abundance of natural resources, and ecological balance that they enjoyed. Finally, their decisions regarding arms buildup and proliferation may deny life itself to the generations following them. Other unprecedented ogre-like — greedy, selfish, and uncaring-of-succeeding-generations — actions can be numbered against this generation.
Generational Changing of the Guard, Aborted
So, the World War Two Generation used their unprecedented wealth and power to wage a war against the generation who would be taking over from them, keeping them and their values under attack and away from the centers of power and influence in society as long as they possibly could.1
Desperate Stand: The Battle of the Bill (Clinton)
It is enlightening to consider in the Nineties the persistent attacks on Bill Clinton (similarly, on Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, continuing) — the first Sixties Generation U.S. president — ever since he took office. The Monica Lewinsky scandal is a typical example of the extent to which the World War Two Generation so effectively controlled the views and values expressed and subtly expounded in the media ever since it took conscious control of the society’s “collective consciousness” in this way in the early Seventies. By this I mean that in the entire time of the scandal, it was assumed that sex is bad, or at least that sex outside of marriage is bad. It was assumed that Hillary must be horribly pained and angered by the revelation of her husband’s affair(s).
Make Love, Not War
It is as if the slogan “Make Love, Not War” was never a generational outcry. I don’t believe you will ever find in the history books paid for/published by World War Two Generation owned publishing houses mention of the fact that slogan was ever used. Indeed, with all the talk by pundits, analysts, and commentators on literally hundreds of TV shows during the entire time of the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment drama, that slogan, “Make Love, Not War,” was practically never mentioned. I am aware of only one time — when I heard it slipped in unnoticed by a participant in the middle of a talkin’-all-at-once brouhaha on the TV show Politically Incorrect, whereupon it was totally ignored.
Even more astonishing, those same pundits discussed, ad nauseum, this scandal and all the myriad ramifications of it yet never, to my knowledge, made note of Clinton’s generational status and the views, exemplified by “Make Love, Not War,” which my generation espoused. It has simply been assumed that all of the Sixties Generation “grew out” of that kind of “nonsense” and had adopted the views of the WWII Generation … again, polls on values and viewpoints be damned.
Rewriting History
Most telling of all in the attacks on Clinton’s behavior is the assumption that such a stance on open marriage and uninhibited sexuality is a product of uncontrolled lewdness and the sexual license exhibited primarily by the young, which naturally everyone grows out of in order to adopt the constrained and secretive sexual views of the old. The sexual revolution’s parallel growth in the Sixties with expanding civil rights, women’s rights, and individual liberty is completely ignored. Its roots in an idealism about final and complete gender equality is totally vanquished as if it were never so.
In fact, I doubt you, the reader, know of this. Yet hordes of Sixties youth shared with each other, conspiratorial-like, the Sixties novel, The Harrad Experiment by Robert H. Rimmer, which portrayed — in poetic and highly intelligent fashion — an evolution to a radical equality between the genders, to an elimination of neurotic suffering around sexuality as, for example, in painful jealousy, to an ending of sexual violence as in spouse abuse, and a final and complete solution to a gender war existing for all time with incalculable casualties and near infinity of suffering on both sides. It was a story about non-monogamy and open relationships … “free love.”
Neither did the pundits point out that Bill Clinton is of a generation who made a book on “open marriage” a bestseller. The clinch on the media by that older generation has been so complete as to have, apparently, completely dismissed or erased from the minds of the pundits the facts that those ideas and books ever existed. Another thing erased from history since the Seventies: the “sexual revolution.” Remember that? When was the last time you heard that talked about? All of the energy that had surrounded these controversial ideas has, because of media manipulation and repression of these views, been channeled into and reduced to a fight over a woman’s right to choose, that is to say, the abortion issue, and more recently to fights over union rights and budget issues.
Abortion Wars
Incidentally, it is no coincidence that the issue of abortion has taken on such importance for so many in the electorate, for it is the last remaining battle of the “culture war” directly continuing from the Sixties. Prior to the Sixties, women’s bodies could not be considered their own, in many ways; a prominent way was the illegality of abortion, which made outcasts and corpses out of untold numbers of women. It was reversed by Roe v. Wade in the Sixties. But the battle never went away and is the major front in a Gender War that has been going on for millennia. Indeed, in 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned by a Supreme Court hand- and illegally picked to produce such a result.
And your position on the abortion issue is the closest thing to a military uniform indicating on which side of the Culture War you have enlisted. Specifically, I am saying that there are few of the Sixties Generation who would not classify themselves as “pro-choice.” Meanwhile, the anti-abortionists are found to primarily comprise those of the WWII Generation, their Eighties Generation clones, and the Eisenhower-Presley-McCarthy — and now we might add “Pleasantville” — Fifties Generation.
World War Two and Fifties Generations Just Don’t Get It … Never Have, and Never Will
Of course, I am saying that the War on Clinton was, in its essence, an unacknowledged but desperate battle in the Culture War that has been going on since the Sixties — despite these attacks not being framed or talked about this way — between the World War Two and the Sixties Generations. The World War Two Generation, especially after the elections of November 1998, learned that it was way off in some of its assumptions, that their analysis of what had been happening in this country was woefully miscalculated. They were like the deluded schizophrenic who believed passionately in the world he himself created coming up against some of the hard, harsh, and indisputable facts of existence which undermine his world.
The World-War-Two-Generation–minded — whatever the individual’s age, and especially now, their underlings of the Fifties Generation — have been fighting back, since the Nineties, with all the firepower they can muster against realizing the harsh realities around them of their waning ideals. They have been in total and absolute denial of the direction of the American, indeed the world, consciousness; and they have been flinging all their wealth into the mix to try to repress the emerging truths.
When I first published on this topic in 1998 I wrote, “But we shouldn’t be surprised if we see some of those in their ranks — wealthy and facing their inevitable demise — merely increasing the ferocity of their war waging … humiliating themselves and seeming ever more pitiful in the minds of the majority of observers, who increasingly, as time continues to decimate their WWII ranks, are younger than they and thus do not share their delusions.”
I am sorry to say I was more correct than I could ever have dreamed as we have faced, since the change of the millennium, neo-con wars built on lies and confused tea-baggers railing against their own interests. All of which culminated in the installation of a Russian asset, Trump. Illegitimate president Donald Trump brought together in one person all the class-war waging ferocity; all the misogyny, racism, and idiocracy; all the pitiable gooberish nonsense pretending to be truth; and all the cruelty and insensitivity of the Filthy Rich, the Republicans, the White supremacists, and the greedy generations, into one person.
Yet this war is not over; we can still glimpse a world … for it has been growing everywhere outside the limelight … where peace, love, harmony, sexual freedom, intelligence and rationality, and kind-heartedness abound. Let us look at one such vision.
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11
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Culture War Allegory:
Reversing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers … to Follow or Not to Follow the Script
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…we are beginning to see a metaphor for psychological realities and that ‘following the script’ has a broader meaning for a choice that everyone must make in life in growing up, specifically, to follow the script laid out for oneself by one’s parents and society in general or to follow one’s inner direction and inner guide in asserting one’s individuality and expressing one’s unique self.”
“These Blue Meanies, especially their leader, are depicted as powerful and cruel, yet sniveling, insecure, weak, and selfish underneath. Their angry and oppressive personas are shown to reveal poor little whining babies behind them. Their actions are shown to be those of ‘big babies,’ whose gruff exterior must remain intact at all costs, lest their hidden sniveling and hurt little selves be revealed. The analogy the Beatles are making to those of the WWII Generation — at that time the parental generation, those ‘over 30’ — is impossible not to make.”
“…in recent history, despite the increasing drum beating of the Religious Right in the last three decades, those of us who grew up in the Fifties know that the introduction of sex — in the Sixties, as in the ‘sexual revolution’ — was a step forward from the hypocritical sameness and plodding repression of the Fifties.”
“The underlying factor that was introduced into the movie causing color and that was also introduced into our society causing all the sociocultural changes that we, usually, complain about is the factor of choosing something different than what is expected by society, than what is expected by the outside. What is introduced in the movie — as it was introduced in our culture — is the preeminence of inner authority in making decisions, as opposed to outer authority.”
“The black-and-white Fifties Pleasantville is a representation of a mode of child-rearing — which characterized the Fifties — wherein the role of the parents is to ‘mold,’ model, and guide children along paths that the parents have deemed to be correct — called the socializing mode of child-rearing. The child is expected to be a clone of the parents, a mini-me….”
“By contrast, the colorized Pleasantville represents the mode of child-caring that came out, big time, beginning in the Sixties, wherein the parents’ role is that of ‘bringing out’ from and supporting, encouraging, and helping the child to discover what the child’s talents and inherent abilities, feelings, and proclivities are, and then encouraging the child to ‘believe in him/herself’ in the expression of those inherent and inborn good qualities and values — termed the helping mode of child-caring.
“This mode contains a radically new view of basic human nature. Humans are seen to be essentially good (even ‘divine’). It is evil and painful events impinging upon the child from the outside — family and society — that are deemed causative in taking the child from its natural state of innocence and goodness and inherent unique talents to one wherein the child is corrupted and thus becomes bestial and lacking in inherent good qualities and talents.
“Therefore the solution is to protect the child from traumas coming from the outside, especially the huge one of feeling unloved through not being seen or respected as a unique individual … as opposed to being seen as a mere outgrowth or mini-me of a parental entity. And in so doing the parents’ role includes helping the child to discover his or her uniqueness and dispensing unconditional love, that is, love that is given freely, without the requirement, as in the socializing mode, that the child do and be what the parents want before the child is accepted or shown approval or any emotional warmth.
“In representing this advanced mode of being (and child-caring) the ‘colorized’ people in Pleasantville open themselves to possibilities that were never before considered; they stray from the earlier mode requiring strict conformity to parental scripts. Robert Kennedy’s Sixties quote comes to mind as expressing this: ‘Some people look at things as they are and ask, why? I think of things that never were and ask, why not?’ This means, then, a capacity to experiment and adventure in one’s life, which, at bottom, involve a belief in questioning authority and thinking for oneself in Sixties terms or, in Carl Jung’s words, a belief that we are, each of us, ‘experiments in truth’ in our sojourns on Earth.”
“The whole point of change is that it is always something one does not expect. Likewise, when people act out of inner rather than outer authority, one can only expect that what happens will be unique, like people are when they are not conforming to external expectations.”
“…this ending expresses the spiritual razor’s edge each of us must cross during our life’s sojourn. Whenever we try to put life, or love, into a box, package, or a gilded cage, it dies or stagnates — just like a boring black-and-white sitcom world. Real change and spiritual growth means letting go and opening oneself to the unexpected and the unknown.”
“One of the reasons the movie, Pleasantville, so appealed to me is that its view of current events is so akin to that which I have been expressing in other of my more recent writings … wherein I make the argument that recent events are not evidence of a downfall of civilization, as conservatives as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan would have us believe, but are the necessary ‘birth pains’ of a new age being born.”
“Those of us who lived through the Fifties know that the lack of color is an apt metaphor for exactly the way it was at that time. It was a back-and-white world — a world that covered up its underlying nastiness and evil by repression and denial — psychological defense mechanisms that characterized the World-War-Two Generation especially.
“The point in the movie, which is so appealing, is that it causes us to look again at the changes in our society that have occurred because of the various ‘revolutions’ of postmodern times — civil rights, student antiwar, women’s rights, sexual, and so on — and to stop bemoaning the ‘messiness’ that comes with freedom. We have more choice, more freedom now than ever. And this freedom allows us the opportunity for a higher spirituality — some would say the only true spirituality — which involves the harrowing path of deciding for oneself, based upon one’s ability to intuit or “feel” the correct path, and experiencing the consequences of one’s choices, as opposed to the preordained religiosity of following a script.”
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[Chapter 11 text begins:] The film, Pleasantville, is a postmodern sociological allegory or fable released in 1998.
Not So Pleasantville
It begins in then-current time against a backdrop of the usual violence, chaos, and turbulence that we are conditioned by the media to believe characterized the Nineties in America. Two high school teenagers, David and Jennifer, played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, are planning their evening.
A Tale of Two Siblings
David is planning to watch the Pleasantville marathon on television and to participate in the trivia contest that will be part of it. Pleasantville is an old sitcom from the 1950s in the Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons style which has attained a cult-like following and is shown regularly on a cable channel similar to the “Nick at Nite” one that we know of which specialized in reruns of old sitcoms.
It becomes clear that David is an ardent devotee of the show in part because it compensates for the lameness of his real life. Unlike his sister, who is portrayed as a real “firecracker” of a young woman, he doesn’t date or participate in the school scene. It is implied that he may be using the sitcom as an escape from not only a boring life but a threatening one and that he longs to live in the kind of ordered, safe, and unchallenging reality that the sitcom depicts. David is such an avid follower of the show that he is shown to be a master of Pleasantville trivia and is primed and eager for the contest on Pleasantville trivia.
However his sister, Jennifer, is planning for a hot date at home … their parents being away for the weekend providing an opportunity for her to be unchaperoned with her guy … which she eagerly anticipates. At odds over what will be played on the TV — Jennifer wanting to watch instead an MTV concert with her date — they wrestle over the TV remote and end up breaking it. Nevertheless, all is not lost as at just that moment and completely inexplicably a television repairman played by Don Knotts drives up in his truck, knocks on the door, and imposes his services on them in fixing the problem.
Don Knotts — perfectly cast, in a Hero’s Cycle sense, for it is often the impish or normally overlooked and unnoticed element that initiates sweeping changes in people’s lives — indeed does introduce the magical element into the film. He produces a different kind of remote control, which he claims has special effects saying, “You want something to put you right in the show!” Sure enough, in checking out the remote they hit a mysterious button and are transported into the TV and thus into the sitcom and the town that is called Pleasantville.
To Follow or Not to Follow “The Script”
After their initial confusion, they realize what has happened and try to return, but do not know how to. David — who it becomes apparent has been thrust into the role of Bud in the sitcom — advises his sister — Jennifer who has become Mary Sue in the TV series — to go along with events until they figure a way to get home. Since he knows all the plots of every show of the sitcom, his idea is that they act out the events as they are supposed to happen and that they do what the two characters — the teenage son and daughter of the parents in the sitcom, Betty and George Parker, played superbly by Joan Allen and William H. Macy — are known to do in the different episodes he has seen.
Essentially, then, David as Bud is advising his sister to “follow the script.” And of course it is not hard to discern at this point that we are beginning to see a metaphor for psychological realities and that “following the script” has a broader meaning for a choice that everyone must make in life in growing up, specifically, to follow the script laid out for oneself by one’s parents and society in general or to follow one’s inner direction and inner guide in asserting one’s individuality and expressing one’s unique self.
The remainder of the movie is the story of how these two characters — transported magically from the future as well as from the real world as opposed to a made-up TV world — introduce change into the town and thereby color. Mary Sue, formerly Jennifer, does it consciously. Rebelling against her brother’s admonishments to follow the script, she goes on a date with someone she is not supposed to according to the sitcom script and then — horror of horrors for a 1950s world — engages in sex with him at the local “lover’s lane” — where the farthest that anyone goes, according to “script,” is holding hands. We find later that her date describes this unheard of experience to his classmates, and, like ripples emanating from a pebble dropped in a pond, her action results in a number of the school youth engaging in sex and thereby becoming, to everyone’s amazement, colorized!
The brother also introduces change, and therefore color, but it is done unconsciously at first. As mentioned, he tries to get his sister to follow the script. Still, in a metaphorically powerful scene, when he is late for work at the local malt shop — this is unheard of as well because Pleasantville is a world where no one is ever late for work — he inadvertently introduces change himself. In fact, he introduces the most insidious element of change because he explicitly advises — without realizing what he has unleashed — that his boss think for himself!
In this scene Bud, formerly David, finds his boss and coworker, Mister Johnson, played by Jeff Daniels, stuck at the end of the counter, cleaning away with a washcloth, like a stuck record, at the same spot, even as the surface of the counter is rubbing away.
When the soda jerk, Mister Johnson, explains confusedly that the normal regimen would have required Bud to arrive at work before he, Mister Johnson, could go on to the rest of his chores, Bud simply suggests to Mister Johnson that in the future he continue with his next chore even if Bud is not there.
So simply in being himself, coming from a future in which people react to change by thinking out new responses and thereby adapting to them, Bud, aka David, introduces a totally new element into the soda jerk’s script. This has far reaching consequences as the movie progresses and Mister Johnson begins thinking for himself and having ideas about other things as well. In this way, the soda jerk, soon to be artist, too ends up “colored.”
Blue Meanies
The 1998 movie, Pleasantville, thematically, is remarkably akin to the 1968-released movie Yellow Submarine put out by the Sixties Generation rock group The Beatles.
In Yellow Submarine there is a region ruled by the Blue Meanies. These Blue Meanies, especially their leader, are depicted as powerful and cruel, yet sniveling, insecure, weak, and selfish underneath. Their angry and oppressive personas are shown to reveal poor little whining babies behind them. Their actions are shown to be those of “big babies,” whose gruff exterior must remain intact at all costs, lest their hidden sniveling and hurt little selves be revealed. The analogy the Beatles are making to those of the WWII Generation — at that time the parental generation, those “over 30” — is impossible not to make.
“Nowhere Man”
The movies are so similar in theme that the only major thematic difference between Pleasantville and Yellow Submarine is that it is music that is not allowed in Yellow Submarine whereas in Pleasantville it is color. Yet the idea behind them both is the same: Music and color both represent deep feeling, aliveness, thinking for oneself, and change. In Yellow Submarine, the man without music is Nowhere Man, who “knows not where he’s going to, doesn’t have a point of view.” In Pleasantville, the men without color act in the same ways, performing the same actions, day in, day out, without change, zombie- or robot-like — like characters in a 1950s-style sitcom in which nothing unpleasant, different, new, or too emotional is allowed to occur.
And above all, the black-and-white men do not think for themselves. This is graphically portrayed in the scene mentioned where the owner of the town malt shop, Mister Johnson, portrayed by Jeff Daniels, is left cleaning the same spot of the counter for hours so that its top is rubbed away because his coworker is late and the routine they use to close up cannot be completed in the way it is done, every day, in exactly the same way. Confronted with this small change, he shows himself to be the “Nowhere Man” and like a needle stuck on a record, he is rigidly stuck repeating the same action, not having the power to think of an alternative action in response to a change in the usual routine.
“The Awakening” — No Longer a Distant Vision
The differences in the years of the release and the different artistic modes used to express the themes of these two movies have something to say as well. In 1968 the changes in culture of the New Age were a vision and a hope. It is appropriate and telling that Yellow Submarine was expressed in animated form. Like a dream that would take a long time to realize, it needed to be expressed in cartoon-like fashion, for the time of its emergence in reality was too far off.
By contrast, Pleasantville blends a fantasy world — appropriately it is a TV sitcom, which has more similarities with reality than an animation — with the actual reality of postmodern times. The advance toward reality is patent in the evolution from an animated form — indicating the change is far off, a fantasy, a wish, a hope — in the 1968 movie; to a black-and-white form involving real actors, real people; and then to a colorized version involving real people in what is supposed to be real time and real cultural reality, in the movie released thirty years later. One might say that what was a fantasy over fifty years ago is, however unconsciously, being heralded as, hopefully, emerging and coming into being now — in actual, black-and-white or colored, real time and place.
Reversing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Concerning the movie, Pleasantville, noted movie critic Roger Ebert quite astutely pointed out that it was “like the defeat of the body snatchers” (from his excellent review, “Pleasantville”). One might also say that it is one in which Holden Caulfield, the character in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, wins out and children do not grow up to be adult “phonies.” Another analogy would be that it is a depiction in which Peter Pan stays young, when he succeeds in keeping the children from ever growing up and thereby losing their capacity to “fly” — representing the capacity to dream, to envision, to be open to new possibilities, to adventure.
What It Is That Makes One Alive
Against this backdrop of lack of real aliveness, the introduction of color into the town of Pleasantville through the introduction of sex is not seen as something bad at all. Similarly, in recent history, despite the increasing drum beating of the Religious Right in the last three decades, those of us who grew up in the Fifties know that the introduction of sex — in the Sixties, as in the “sexual revolution” — was a step forward from the hypocritical sameness and plodding repression of the Fifties.
Other elements introduced into Pleasantville that produce colorization in the participants include thinking for oneself (Jeff Daniels in his role as the soda jerk), intellectual passion (the sister), questioning the way things are supposed to be or, in Sixties terms, questioning authority (when the brother finally becomes colored), artistic and creative passion (Jeff Daniels again), and even the passion of honest rage (the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce). These elements arise in Pleasantville just as they arose into the collective consciousness of those of us living in the Fifties and Sixties.
Of course, I am not naively saying that these elements never existed before the Sixties. The underlying factor that was introduced into the movie causing color and that was also introduced into our society causing all the sociocultural changes that we, usually, complain about is the factor of choosing something different than what is expected by society, than what is expected by the outside. What is introduced in the movie — as it was introduced in our culture — is the preeminence of inner authority in making decisions, as opposed to outer authority.
A New Psychohistorical Era!
In psychohistorical terms this difference is marked by Lloyd deMause as a difference in a mode of child-rearing. The black-and-white Fifties Pleasantville is a representation of a mode of child-rearing — which characterized the Fifties — wherein the role of the parents is to “mold,” model, and guide children along paths that the parents have deemed to be correct — called the socializing mode of child-rearing. The child is expected to be a clone of the parents, a mini-me, or at least to represent the parents’ ideas of proper behavior, ideals, and mode of living, regardless of whether the parent models them or not. And when not, the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” and the term hypocrite as applied to the parents are apropos.
The basic nature of the child is considered to be sinful and evil or at least bestial; the classic novel Lord of the Flies depicts this view of human nature. Therefore, the child needs to become other than itself and conform itself to something outside of itself in order for she or he to be considered “good” and to receive good responses in turn from parents and society.
By contrast, the colorized Pleasantville represents the mode of child-caring that came out, big time, beginning in the Sixties, wherein the parents’ role is that of “bringing out” from and supporting, encouraging, and helping the child to discover what the child’s talents and inherent abilities, feelings, and proclivities are, and then encouraging the child to “believe in him/herself” in the expression of those inherent and inborn good qualities and values — termed the helping mode of child-caring.1
This mode contains a radically new view of basic human nature. Humans are seen to be essentially good (even “divine”). It is evil and painful events impinging upon the child from the outside — family and society — that are deemed causative in taking the child from its natural state of innocence and goodness and inherent unique talents to one wherein the child is corrupted and thus becomes bestial and lacking in inherent good qualities and talents.
Therefore the solution is to protect the child from traumas coming from the outside, especially the huge one of feeling unloved through not being seen or respected as a unique individual … as opposed to being seen as a mere outgrowth or mini-me of a parental entity. And in so doing the parents’ role includes helping the child to discover his or her uniqueness and dispensing unconditional love, that is, love that is given freely, without the requirement, as in the socializing mode, that the child do and be what the parents want before the child is accepted or shown approval or any emotional warmth.
In representing this advanced mode of being (and child-caring) the “colorized” people in Pleasantville open themselves to possibilities that were never before considered; they stray from the earlier mode requiring strict conformity to parental scripts. Robert Kennedy’s Sixties quote comes to mind as expressing this: “Some people look at things as they are and ask, why? I think of things that never were and ask, why not?” This means, then, a capacity to experiment and adventure in one’s life, which, at bottom, involve a belief in questioning authority and thinking for oneself in Sixties terms or, in Carl Jung’s words, a belief that we are, each of us, “experiments in truth” in our sojourns on Earth. And just as these elements and beliefs became more and more a part of America’s collective consciousness in the Sixties and Seventies and ever since then, they also gradually develop in Pleasantville.
“Love My Uncertainty”
One reviewer described the ending of the movie as “not at all easy and tidy, but rather very, very messy” (“Pleasantville” by Chris A. Bolton). Ebert — more astutely but not quite correctly — wrote that the determining factor in whether someone became colored was the factor of change. The first reviewer, like someone with one foot still in Pleasantville or one who is still not fully colored, does not understand that the ending, wherein the characters proclaim that they do not know what is going to happen next, contains exactly the essential message of the movie. The ending can only be “messy” if one expects a particular ending.
The reviewer is very much like the critics of Occupy Wall Street who claimed the protesters do not have a message, or a leader … essentially do not know where they are going. He is wrong for the same reasons those critics are.
The whole point of change is that it is always something one does not expect. Likewise, when people act out of inner rather than outer authority, one can only expect that what happens will be unique, like people are when they are not conforming to external expectations. So there could be no pat or predicted ending. The moviegoer could not leave knowing whether Betty Parker, the Stepford housewife turned liberated woman, returns to her husband, George, or takes off with the soda jerk turned artist, Mister Johnson, because that would destroy the uncertainty inherent in change, growth, aliveness, and so on. So the ending is exactly what it has to be.
And this ending expresses the spiritual razor’s edge each of us must cross during our life’s sojourn. Whenever we try to put life, or love, into a box, package, or a gilded cage, it dies or stagnates — just like a boring black-and-white sitcom world. Real change and spiritual growth means letting go and opening oneself to the unexpected and the unknown. So it is in this vein that the spiritual teacher Sathya Sai Baba tells his followers, “Love my uncertainty,” in helping them to deal — after the usual “honeymoon phase” at the beginning of their spiritual path — with the trials, changes, tribulations, and suffering that his devotees experience later on, along their path to greater purity of heart and compassion, and eventually spiritual liberation.
The Scenery of Healing
One of the reasons the movie, Pleasantville, so appealed to me is that its view of current events is so akin to that which I have been expressing in other of my more recent writings — for example, the books Apocalypse NO, Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious and Apocalypse Emergency, Love’s Wake-Up Call — wherein I make the argument that recent events are not evidence of a downfall of civilization, as conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan would have us believe, but are the necessary “birth pains” of a new age being born.
In Pleasantville, indeed, though everyone smiles and there is no crime or unpleasantness — which is supposed to reflect the view of reality presented in Fifties sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver — it is inherently flawed in that it is lacking in “color.” Those of us who lived through the Fifties know that the lack of color is an apt metaphor for exactly the way it was at that time. It was a back-and-white world — a world that covered up its underlying nastiness and evil by repression and denial — psychological defense mechanisms that characterized the World-War-Two Generation especially.
New Mantram: “Thinking for Oneself Is Good!”
The point in the movie, which is so appealing, is that it causes us to look again at the changes in our society that have occurred because of the various “revolutions” of postmodern times — civil rights, student antiwar, women’s rights, sexual, and so on — and to stop bemoaning the “messiness” that comes with freedom. We have more choice, more freedom now than ever. And this freedom allows us the opportunity for a higher spirituality — some would say the only true spirituality — which involves the harrowing path of deciding for oneself, based upon one’s ability to intuit or “feel” the correct path, and experiencing the consequences of one’s choices, as opposed to the preordained religiosity of following a script.
Though many would argue this, one has only to look, as this movie forces us to do, back at where we started. and from that perspective, with that stultifying, hypocritical, dishonest, and phony kind of supposed “living” in mind, we can easily see the changes and progress made in individual freedom and, dare I say, genuine spirituality, and accept the uncertainty, emotional pain, apparent evil, “messiness,” social and political turbulence, and all the rest that comes with it.
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Cultural Rebirth, Aborted:
It’s a Not so Wonderful Life for the WWII Generation … yet the King Refuses to Die
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“…the Sixties was such a time of turmoil because the values of individual freedom, personal passion, feeling and experience, questioning authority, and thinking for oneself were shared by so many Baby-Boomers and were so contrary to the values of the generation in power.”
“It’s a Wonderful Life is beloved and timeless, no doubt, because it reassures an entire generation and all those who have had to give up their dreams for whatever reason that their sacrifices were for a higher good and that it is a wonderful life after all.”
“In one way or another, the situation in the Forties, with the war effort and afterwards, created a generation who, except for the rare individual or one of unusual circumstances, was called upon to step up into mature responsible tasks long before the idealism of their youth would have preferred that they do so. Their generation is scarred for having missed this opportunity. They are individuals deserving of our sympathy; yet crippled they were, nonetheless.”
“Pearl Harbor Day, when their fate was inevitably forged, when it became clear that for the second time the light of individual freedom would be extinguished, would become an important marker in their lifetimes — a day almost as much to be memorialized as their birthdays.”
“…we can pity the World War Two Generation. As in John Updike’s The Centaur, the World War Two Generation is depicted as a generation that was required to give up its dreams and do its “duty,” above all. It was required to carry out a script given to them by their society, not allowing them to follow their natural youthful ideals. And as in Updike’s novel, they are beaten down in a life that is regimented and has no “color,” spark, life, idealism, or dreams. They have become the robot-like residents of Pleasantville. But Updike points out in his novel that their sacrifice, despite the personal tragedy of it on the individual scale, is both necessary and noble in that it makes possible the realization of dreams by the generation to which they gave birth.”
“…it is women who are the real instigators, the least threatened by change.”
“As in the hundredth monkey phenomenon, it is first the young, especially females, who are open to new experiences, ways, and ideas. Then it is adult females — in this movie exemplified by Betty Parker, the mother of Bud and Mary Sue — who are next to consider alternatives and new ways. Adult males are the last to turn to color, but among them it is the sensitive of heart….”
“Big Bob’s Chamber of Commerce represents MAGAts, Trumpers, Republicans, Tea Partiers, and those in general in our society who have succumbed to the rewards and threats of the World War Two Generation, and their Fifties Gen/ Gen X clones, to live a regimented, robot-like, unfeeling, passionless life; to become one of J.D. Salinger’s “phonies,” to abide by their misconstrued idea of “family values,” and above all to “behave” and not do anything to rock the boat of the status quo which might threaten the privileges of those currently enjoying power and wealth handed down, mostly, by heredity.”
“The events in China’s Tiananmen Square more than thirty years ago so affected and still affects some of us here in America because we know at some level that we have experienced it before. What happened in China three decades ago is so much like what happened in the U.S. five decades ago, somewhat less graphically, around the Vietnam War demonstrations.”
“…the result of both was the same: In both cases the opposition, the youth movement, crushed — violently in China, subtly and behind the scenes in the US — at the command of an octogenarian generation, clinging desperately to power as much as to their waning physical frames.”
“…we no longer assassinate our president as we did with JFK, we character assassinate instead, as we did with Bill Clinton.”
“The Filthy Rich, in collusion with Russia, aimed their weapons, as well, against Hillary Clinton who received all the ridicule and vicious slander imaginable … and oh, let us not forget those emails *guffaw*. And currently the lie-making machine on the Right is pumping out propaganda against Joe Biden who also — though he had been the poorest person in the Senate and who famously took the train to and from Washington every day — has been charged with making money hand over fist, somehow. In some imaginary world. We see in this Trump era, with Russian misinformation and slander allowed to be flooding our social media, there is not a second thought given about making up the most outrageous charges — pedophilia in pizza store basements that don’t exist, for example.”
“…the results in both countries are the same. They involve the ultimate victory of sociocultural change in both instances being delayed until the dying off of an elderly generation in power — a generation refusing to die or hand over the controls at the proper time like the generations before them. Simply, the king won’t die!”
“Time is running out for the octogenarians and ninety-somethings on either side of the Pacific.”
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The paramount theme in Pleasantville — which is that thinking for oneself and following one’s own unique path and being open to the change that comes with that brings “color,” truth, and aliveness to one’s life — is truly a Sixties Generation idea. Again, it is not that it has never been thought before. All great ideas have been thought before, but that does not mean they have been implemented on a sociocultural, macrocosmic level. Many ideas have remained in the realm of the solitary pursuits of philosophers and mystics and been exemplified only in individual lives. Yet, the Sixties was such a time of turmoil because the values of individual freedom, personal passion, feeling and experience, questioning authority, and thinking for oneself were shared by so many Baby-Boomers and were so contrary to the values of the generation in power.
It’s a (Not So) Wonderful Life — WWII Generation
An excellent example of how opposed the Sixties values are to those of the WWII Generation is found in that beloved movie of all time, It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart. In that film, the main character is prevented by circumstances from following his dreams. One event after another keeps him from leaving his hometown. His story might be called The Truman Show in reverse for he comes to accept the loss of his dreams. He is rewarded for giving up his yearning for adventure with the warmth of a loving family and friends.
Nonetheless, he has been reduced to someone who simply follows a script or role and when it appears that he might fail in that role he considers killing himself.
Reassures a Generation
It’s a Wonderful Life is beloved and timeless, no doubt, because it reassures an entire generation and all those who have had to give up their dreams for whatever reason that their sacrifices were for a higher good and that it is a wonderful life after all.
Will never know what might have been
It provides a rationalization against the painful feelings of knowing that one will never know “what might have been” by pointing out the truth that one’s life affects others and has meaning regardless of whether or not one has been fortunate enough to actualize one’s deepest desires, talents, aspirations, and dreams.
War Compels Dashing of Dreams
As mentioned, It’s a Wonderful Life calls out to and epitomizes the experiences and attitudes of the World War Two Generation in particular. They were called upon to fight a war, after all, which no doubt would derail many a young man’s and woman’s dreams. As in It’s a Wonderful Life, the circumstances that arise to prevent their following through on their dreams are imposed from the outside — the state of being at war and being called upon by a draft to enlist or else be enlisted. For the women, as well as the men who stayed behind, the war’s influence on their lives and the carrying out of idealistic schemes and dreams are only a little less pronounced. For, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, the war created a society heaving with needs and pain, which only the truly heartless … who would not have any dreams anyway … could not help but feel compelled to respond to.
Growing up too fast
In one way or another, the situation in the Forties, with the war effort and afterwards, created a generation who, except for the rare individual or one of unusual circumstances, was called upon to step up into mature responsible tasks long before the idealism of their youth would have preferred that they do so. Their generation is scarred for having missed this opportunity. They are individuals deserving of our sympathy; yet crippled they were, nonetheless.
Mashing Butterflies and Drowning Kittens
This is not to say, however, that the generations before the WWII Generation were allowed their dreams and that the WWII Generation was unique in being crippled in its development. For we know that earlier child-rearing modes required the submission of children and youth to parental wishes.
Therefore, dreaming or envisioning an adventurous life was not the norm. For much of the history of the world and in most cultures, indeed, even the selection of one’s spouse was decided by the parents. So much has our history — in both Eastern and Western cultures — been marked by the assassination of youthful dreaming, idealism, and choice that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet can be said to be a revolutionary work in even depicting that this assassination of dreams is a tragedy!
Roaring Into Life
Still, the WWII Generation can be said to have been especially affected by this slaying of self, for they did, after all, experience the heady freedom of the “Roaring Twenties” and the dreaming that preceded the Great Depression. In the Twenties, victorious in World War I and with it now put behind, America was coming into its youthfulness and was heady with its achievements. Unbelievable accomplishments and inventions in all areas of life were speeding up sociocultural change causing some to believe that a new era was around the corner, just within reach, an era unlike anything the world had ever known. This was the atmosphere in the Twenties when the WWII Generation were in their childhood or adolescence. It could not help making a very strong, because of its being early, imprint on their expectations.
Suddenly Depressed
However, these dreams would be dashed in the Great Depression, during which time they would be adolescents and young adults, and they would be harnessed into struggling like their parents had to earlier and were now again struggling.
Getting a New Deal … Light at the End of a Tunnel
Still, as time wore on the dreams of a new world would be reignited with the idealistic union movement and the Franklin Roosevelt changes in the social contract that rescripted the relation between the society and the individual, creating a symbiotic one which enhanced them both as champions of each other. Folks would magnify the power of the person when united with others. They would dream of a fairer world in which the rich did not dominate with their wealth because the poor could balance the scales with their strength in numbers, adding to their individual power by joining in unions and by combining their votes in elections. They could begin to envision the light at the end of the tunnel of the Great Depression in which they might realize the freedom and adventure they’d glimpsed around them as children in the Twenties.
War. Shot Down Again
So it is understandable that they would not wish to enter World War II when it began. Pearl Harbor Day, when their fate was inevitably forged, when it became clear that for the second time the light of individual freedom would be extinguished, would become an important marker in their lifetimes — a day almost as much to be memorialized as their birthdays.
We Are the Centaurs (My Friends) — Sixties Generation
Sitting on the Shoulders of One’s Ancestors
For this we can pity the World War Two Generation. As in John Updike’s The Centaur, the World War Two Generation is depicted as a generation that was required to give up its dreams and do its “duty,” above all. It was required to carry out a script given to them by their society, not allowing them to follow their natural youthful ideals. And as in Updike’s novel, they are beaten down in a life that is regimented and has no “color,” spark, life, idealism, or dreams. They have become the robot-like residents of Pleasantville. But Updike points out in his novel that their sacrifice, despite the personal tragedy of it on the individual scale, is both necessary and noble in that it makes possible the realization of dreams by the generation to which they gave birth.
The Sixties Generation Arrived
It is significant that the protagonist of change in the movie Pleasantville would be a young male, Bud (David). This is in keeping with legends of old where a young prince comes bearing the new knowledge. Yet in postmodern style, wonderfully so, he is drawn only reluctantly into this role, and we see that it is women who are the real instigators, the least threatened by change. At first, David/Bud opposes his sister and argues for the status quo, maintaining that his sister, who is actually the first one to “break the rules” And thereby to bring color to the town, must abide by the script.
The Prince in Exile
The Prince is schooled in tradition
The “young prince” knows the rules well. This fits with legend, where the new ways are brought by a prince who is not ignorant of tradition; in fact the prince is the one who has excelled in training in traditional ways.1
In the movie, David is in fact a Pleasantville trivia whiz. He knows exactly the way things are supposed to unravel, the way events are supposed to go.
The Prince is reluctant to break with tradition
So when his sister first introduces color by introducing sex, he admonishes her. And when he also is tempted to a change in the “script,” he refuses at first. This is when Bud is offered homemade cookies by the young woman who would be his romantic partner. He refuses because he knows that, according to script, it is another young man who is supposed to get the cookies and end up with that particular girl. Despite his attraction for the young woman, his strong sense of maintaining the status quo, not rocking the boat, causes him to try to refuse the cookies. It takes a great deal of forcefulness on the young woman’s part to get him, reluctantly, to accept the cookies that he actually does want. So, again, it is a young, significantly “colorized,” woman who tempts him into a change in the script.
The Prince brings change, without realizing it, just being himself
It is not that the young man does not have the makeup for accepting change. In fact, even before his sister blatantly brings about change, and therefore color, by rebelliously introducing sex, he has already sown the seeds of change, although unconsciously, when he suggests to his boss, Mister Johnson, that he think for himself, instead of following a rigid script. This he does unconsciously and out of selfish motives in that he by nature is different from the character he is supposed to portray and so he does not play his role exactly as it is “supposed” to be played. Specifically, because he is not really the robot character he has replaced, he ends up being late for his job — which heretofore was a totally unheard of event.
Cultural Rebirth
It is also significant that it is the young that are the first ones in the town to become “colored.”
The Hundredth Monkey
As in the hundredth monkey phenomenon, it is first the young, especially females, who are open to new experiences, ways, and ideas. Then it is adult females — in this movie exemplified by Betty Parker, the mother of Bud and Mary Sue — who are next to consider alternatives and new ways. Adult males are the last to turn to color, but among them it is the sensitive of heart, exemplified by the artist/soda-jerk character, Mister Johnson, who “turn on” initially.
Good Old Boys, the Last to Learn
Last to become colorized — that is to say, to be open to change and thinking for oneself — are the “authorities” of the town, in this instance, those on the Chamber of Commerce. and among these the most recalcitrant of all is their leader, Big Bob, played by J. T. Walsh, in his final film role before his passing away. Though Big Bob displays a pleasing and affable persona on the surface (for this read “good old boy”), there is an insidious Hitleresque quality to him which provides the suspense at the climax of the movie where he presides over the fate of the artist, Mister Johnson, and the “young prince,” David/Bud.
“You Can’t Legislate Morals
With the support of the Chamber of Commerce, we know Big Bob has the power to do whatever he will with the two on trial. And since the events preceding the trial have included mob actions, as in a book burning, the attack and destruction of the malt shop, and the cornering, physical intimidation, and physical attack of “coloreds” by gangs — images common to modern times which has seen these sorts of events in actuality occurring in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam-War movements, and in recent decades in democracy and freedom uprisings in the Middle East, America, Turkey, Brazil, and throughout the world in Occupy movements — the fate of the prisoners is imagined to include the ultimate penalty of death.
“Conservative Backlash”
Indeed, this ominous possibility is promoted by the actions of the soda-jerk artist who, at the trial, pitifully pleads for a compromise. This is pitiful since we know that his art is his life, that it is the one thing that has truly enriched his life and made it worth living.
Sitting at the Lunch Counter
We know of its importance in that, even after the attack on his malt shop, he defied the “rules” laid down by the town’s authorities, which outlawed art and color, by working with the Prince through the night to produce a colorful mural on the outside wall of his shop depicting the current events of the town and the feelings swirling about inside its residents.
This defiant act by the artist is reminiscent of antiwar demonstrators, who got fired upon at Kent State, of civil rights demonstrators, who police attacked with dogs, and of Tiananmen Square demonstrators, who were rolled over by tanks, shot, and killed, and most recently of all the courageous men and women of the Middle East risking their lives for freedom and of the Occupy heroes throughout the world putting their bodies in front of, arguably, the most dire, widespread fascism ever to exist.
Since this character, recently so courageously defiant, is intimidated into pleading for a compromise in which he would be willing to use only certain colors or where he would submit for approval by the Chamber’s leader his ideas for painting beforehand — a compromise which his body language and facial expressions show, wonderfully acted by Jeff Daniels, is one near up against the very death of his soul — we know he fears for the loss of his physical life.
“Just Sign This Confession”
The compromise is too much like the compromises we have witnessed being offered and come to expect being offered to some of the Tiananmen Square and other political prisoners of recent times wherein they are required to do something along the lines of admitting their guilt, apologizing to the State for the trouble they have caused it, and promising to never again to engage in such activities … and only in the most benevolent of circumstances being allowed to continue anything like their former activities; but, if so, only under the supervision and with the approval of authorities with veto power over their proposed actions.
The Religious Wrong
So Big Bob and the Chamber of Commerce represent in the current social framework the Religious Right — sometimes referred to as the “religious wrong” and sometimes about which it is noted that the Religious Right is neither. Big Bob’s Chamber of Commerce represents MAGAts, Trumpers, Republicans, Tea Partiers, and those in general in our society who have succumbed to the rewards and threats of the World War Two Generation, and their Fifties Gen/ Gen X clones, to live a regimented, robot-like, unfeeling, passionless life; to become one of J.D. Salinger’s “phonies,” to abide by their misconstrued idea of “family values,” and above all to “behave” and not do anything to rock the boat of the status quo which might threaten the privileges of those currently enjoying power and wealth handed down, mostly, by heredity.
Civil Rights Movement
It is highly significant that in the courtroom scene the “colored” townsfolk would be sitting in the balcony, above the black-and-white men. One might say this represents their status as being an elevated state, something to aspire to, and yet not on the level where matters are decided. But even more so, this scene is important in that it is a near exact replication of the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, wherein the balcony of the courtroom is filled with African Americans — another kind of “colored.” This makes it clear that when the movie is dealing with the conflict between the adult males of the town and the “colored” it is referring to the Civil Rights movement.
Cultural Rebirth Aborted
The events in China’s Tiananmen Square more than thirty years ago so affected and still affects some of us here in America because we know at some level that we have experienced it before.
The American Tiananmen Square
What happened in China three decades ago is so much like what happened in the U.S. five decades ago, somewhat less graphically, around the Vietnam War demonstrations. Let me explain.
Standing before tanks, flowers in barrels
For one thing, the images of the demonstrations in China, for example, the lone man standing in front of the tank, were so like those of Sixties demonstrations, as in Sixties youth blocking the paths of soldiers and placing flowers in their gun barrels.
Revenge of the octogenarians
And the result of both was the same: In both cases the opposition, the youth movement, crushed — violently in China, subtly and behind the scenes in the US — at the command of an octogenarian generation, clinging desperately to power as much as to their waning physical frames.
The King Won’t Die
Assassinations — character and otherwise
We see the same pattern of violent versus subtle played out in the US as well where we no longer assassinate our president as we did with JFK, we character assassinate instead, as we did with Bill Clinton. Which the Tea Party and the wealthy Right tried to manufacture against Obama; he was called rich and elitist. The Filthy Rich, in collusion with Russia, aimed their weapons, as well, against Hillary Clinton who received all the ridicule and vicious slander imaginable … and oh, let us not forget those emails *guffaw*.
And currently the lie-making machine on the Right is pumping out propaganda against Joe Biden who also — though he had been the poorest person in the Senate and who famously took the train to and from Washington every day — has been charged with making money hand over fist, somehow. In some imaginary world. We see in this Trump era, with Russian misinformation and slander allowed to be flooding our social media, there is not a second thought given about making up the most outrageous charges — pedophilia in pizza store basements that don’t exist, for example.”
One might say that, in America, the WWII generation and its protégés have gotten more finesse, with practice, in its beating back sociocultural change not to their liking and that the Chinese geriatric set didn’t have as much practice with it.
The King refuses to die
Nevertheless, the results in both countries are the same. They involve the ultimate victory of sociocultural change in both instances being delayed until the dying off of an elderly generation in power — a generation refusing to die or hand over the controls at the proper time like the generations before them. Simply, the king won’t die!
Time is running out
Time is running out for the octogenarians and ninety-somethings on either side of the Pacific.
The expected, supposedly inevitable defeat of the WWII Generation — their dying off — is portrayed in Pleasantville by Big Bob, head of the Chamber of Commerce, ending up fleeing the scene in the courtroom. Strange coincidence, the actor actually died after making this film. There are many ways his defeat could have been played out in the movie. I think it is highly significant that he runs away, never to be seen again, just as in the current context the dying off of the WWII and Fifties Generations is a l iteral leaving of the scene, not an outright defeat or some other means of change of power.
Yet has the WWII Generation actually left the scene? In the next chapter we will look at how the WWII Gen kept themselves alive longer than any other generation and how they used that longevity to buy and clone their ideas into the generations following them. In fact, the way the media portrays it, the world that the WWII Generation created, as manifested in the Fifties, the Fifties style of culture, is the one against which all happenings are to be measured. The Fifties, we are led to believe through incessant repetition, is what is “normal.” This is the narrative the money of the Fifties and WWII Gens has managed to embed in media minds, as networks continue to broadcast the same naïve and silly sitcoms from the Fifties and early Sixties to new generations.
So this looking to a former time for values is a repudiation of all generations after who grew up in different times and who have evolved along with an evolving cultural and global environment. This refusal to “die,” to turn over the reins of society to younger generations, is indeed an abomination. It represents the WWII and Fifties Gens worldviews being propped up mechanically, though the sand beneath their beliefs is continually washed away. This tension between obsolete old ideas that refuse to die and new ones needed for progress and survival is what we look at next. A Culture War rages.
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[2022 Revised version updated to here.]
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PART THREE
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Cultural Rebirth, Aborted
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10
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The King Won’t Die
Attack of the Body-Snatchers … an Aborted Changing of the Guard
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“…[the Sixties Generation] were biding their time, waiting — sometimes hopeless that it would ever arrive — for a reversing of the pendulum and a return in society to the ideals and visions of a better world that had so inspired them in their earlier years.”
“…[the Sixties Generation] would wonder, as decades passed, why it took so long for the rest of society to catch on to what they felt was an inviting and appealing evolution — one both necessary and therefore inevitable as well.”
“Another reason these terms depicting cultural division, specifically, generation gap and counterculture, went into disuse was due to the mobilization of the World War Two Generation — after their initial phase of somnolent confusion over the events that were emerging in the Sixties which left them paralyzed and watching, growing in irritation and anger — into a comprehensive counterattack against the Sixties Generation, using all the Nixonian-like tactics in their arsenal….”
“In the early Seventies, the World War Two Generation used their power and wealth, being themselves in the triumphant phase of their lives, to put pressure on colleges and universities, nationwide, to discontinue the programs, courses, and the professors that they felt were responsible for the youth’s rebellion.”
“A transformation of colleges and universities into “career mills” — whose primary function was to prepare the young for practical and skill-oriented jobs and professions — was called for … or else!”
“The youth produced by these institutions would hereafter be dissuaded from thinking for themselves and from “questioning authority” — as the previous generation had been encouraged to do….”
“…the wave of youth that followed the Sixties Generation would be molded, in their college years, into distant replicas of World War Two Generation members. They would be termed the “Me Generation,” since selfishness, greed, money-as-god, and upward mobility were characteristics of the WWII Generation that they were able to instill in their youthful clones.”
“…beginning in the early Seventies, institutions of higher learning turned away from their idealistic goals of “bringing out” from the students their inner truths and wisdom (which is the original meaning of the term educate), which is the avowed role of liberal arts programs, and instead turned hard, to the right, onto a path of churning out engineers, MBAs, hard scientists (even in the field of psychology, where humanistic psychology was shunned), medical professionals, lawyers, and the like.”
“…these frightened and wealthy WWII “conspirators” (however unconscious their alliance) would use their leverage to ensure that books and the media … would expound their views predominantly, would present events through the particular psychological lenses and filters with which they were familiar, and would eschew viewpoints, and even coverage of events, that would in any way strengthen the stance of the, by this time, scapegoated Sixties Generation.”
“Controlling the media in this way and saying it long and loud enough, the “big lie” of the “conservative backlash” began to be accepted as truth. and even many in the counterculture and among the youth began to believe it.”
“…with Trump we see a division in the country corresponding roughly with generational lines, with both sides actively and passionately fighting back the gains of the other side.”
“Every generation, at some point, leaves or is removed from their seats of power when they are at or near the end of their arc of effectiveness and prowess by a younger generation that is coming into or — as in the unusual case of the Sixties Generation for the reasons unique to this time to be mentioned below — is fully in the prime of its life.”
“The triumphant phase of the Sixties Generation had been delayed, however, longer than any other generation in history because of the advances in modern medical science, which served to keep the World War Two Generation alive and kicking longer than any previous generation.”
“…the WWII Generation might be said to have been more threatened than any previous one by the generation to succeed them, because the ascendancy of the next generation appeared to overturn and oftentimes reverse so much of what they believed, valued, worked and sacrificed for.”
“…the World War Two Generation used their longevity for all their worth to block the ascendancy of their successors. They used their longevity to amass wealth and power — wealth greater than any previous generation before and, because of their actions, likely to come.”
“…the World War Two Generation used their unprecedented wealth and power to wage a war against the generation who would be taking over from them, keeping them and their values under attack and away from the centers of power and influence in society as long as they possibly could.”
“…your position on the abortion issue is the closest thing to a military uniform indicating on which side of the culture war you have enlisted. Specifically, I am saying that there are few of the Sixties Generation who would not classify themselves as “pro-choice.” Meanwhile, the anti-abortionists are found to be primarily comprise those of the WWII Generation, their Eighties Generation clones, and the Eisenhower-Presley-McCarthy — and now we might add “Pleasantville” — Fifties Generation.”
“The World War Two Generation, especially after the elections of November 1998, learned that it was way off in some of its assumptions, that their analysis of what had been happening in this country was woefully miscalculated. They were like the deluded schizophrenic who believed passionately in the world he himself created coming up against some of the hard, harsh, and indisputable facts of existence which undermine his world. The World-War-Two-Generation–minded — whatever the individual’s age, and especially now, their underlings of the Fifties Generation — have been fighting back, since the Nineties, with all the firepower they can muster against realizing the harsh realities around them of their waning ideals. They have been in total and absolute denial of the direction of the American, indeed the world, consciousness; and they have been flinging all their wealth into the mix to try to repress the emerging truths.”
“But we shouldn’t be surprised if we see some of those in their ranks — wealthy and facing their inevitable demise — merely increasing the ferocity of their war waging … humiliating themselves and seeming ever more pitiful in the minds of the majority of observers, who increasingly, as time continues to decimate their WWII ranks, are younger than they and thus do not share their delusions.”
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What do these events have in common? The popularity of Democrats since the Nineties, with Obama’s favorability ratings high despite US entanglement in several wars; the astounding progress in race relations exemplified by ever increasing numbers of African-Americans elected and appointed to the highest posts in US government since the Nineties, highlighted by the election of the first ever black president in the most lopsided victory in decades;
America Getting Free, Breaking Out
… the wild success of the Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin union movements; massive demonstrations around the U.S., attended by hundreds of thousands at times, in favor of liberal Democratic causes and opposing Republicans and showing people carrying signs displaying the peace symbol; outpourings of peaceful pro-freedom and democracy protesters throughout the Middle East and North Africa; the reborn popularity of the “peace sign” — two fingers extended in a V-like shape, for those who don’t know — including saying “peace” while extending it as a greeting (most often these days, when leaving); the phenomenal outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter in 2020;
… renewed interest in the book, Catcher in the Rye; the nostalgia for Sixties and Seventies cultural accouterments as exemplified by the TV show, That 70s Show ; the resurgence of fashion items like bell-bottoms and, on women, clunky high-heel shoes; the movies Pleasantville and The Truman Show; the popularity in the Nineties of shows like Ally McBeal and The X Files;
… one-time Sixties activist Bill Clinton’s sixty-some percent approval rating throughout almost the entirety of the White House Sex Scandal alongside the pundits’ complete and total befuddlement as to the causes for it; the strong presidential run by a woman, also with roots solidly in Sixties activism, Hillary Clinton, in the 2008 Presidential race … significantly only beat out, and barely, by an African-American;
… the passage of medical use of marijuana laws in a number of states and legalization of marijuana initiatives; the return to ballad-style, Dylan-esque music embracing and expressing social, philosophical, and extremely intimate personal views and experiences….
We’ve also seen, in California, the passage of Proposition 10 — the ballot measure that imposes a fifty-cents tax on cigarettes to fund programs for young children … which ballot measure, significantly enough, was begun by Sixties-Generation representative Rob Reiner — formerly Meathead from All in the Family! The passage of single payer health insurance in Vermont.… I could go on.
America in Chains, Breaking Down
On the other side of this we have seen, in the last two decades, several “Republican revolutions” taking the opposite side on women’s issues, union and worker’s rights, environmental policy, health care and education, budget and economic issues benefiting the poor and middle class, and all other “liberal” causes;
… the rise of a media-supported Tea Party movement, heavily funded by wealthy and corporate interests, espousing wildly reactionary and regressive measures like eliminating Social Security and Medicare, gutting environmental policies to give corporations a free hand in despoiling the environment, anti-union measures, deep budget cuts in social programs, and the showing in this movement of demonstrators hoisting signs with racist images and slogans and gleefully applauding the acting out of a slave auction depicting an African-American president, Obama, and his supporters in Congress and his administration as bloodied slaves in chains;
… the popularity of a news network promoting, in blatant and mostly dishonest form, reactionary issues and figures; the resurgence in the careers of Pat Buchanan, right wing propagandist out of the Nixon administration turned talk show pundit, and Newt Gingrich, reactionary culture warrior during the early Nineties; extreme pro-gun positions and actions, including openly carrying weapons to political rallies and events and proposing the allowance of children to bring guns to schools; thuggish attacks on left-leaning activists and demonstrators; the murder of physicians on the pro-choice side of the abortion/women’s rights issue; and attacks and threats against progressive politicians and legislators, including the nearly successful assassination attempt on Democratic Congresswoman, Gabriel Giffords…. I could go on.
Most folks would see nothing connecting these issues on either side. What I believe we are seeing is a resurgence of the underground “culture war” that has been going on in the US since the 1960s between the Sixties Generation — those whose adolescent and young adulthood, formative years were influenced by the events of the Sixties — and the World War Two Generation — those whose equivalent times of life were forged in the Forties, during and around the time of World War Two.
Generation Gap and Counterculture
The huge ravine separating the views of these two generations was most apparent when those of the Sixties Generation were in their youth, engaged in the process of discovering and exploring their values and therefore expressing them blatantly and with all the indiscretion, lack of subtlety, confrontation, and rebelliousness that characterizes the inexperienced. Thus, terms like generation gap and counterculture were bandied about, analyzed, and fervently discussed. The differences were “on the table,” in full view; and because the views and values of the youth were so “counter” or opposite to those of the WWII Generation, much debate and analysis was spawned in the media to try to explain — for the most part to the WWII Generation — how this could be so.
Nevertheless, these terms of generation gap and counterculture, which highlighted the great disparity of views, would fade mostly into disuse. This was because, later, the Sixties Generation would learn to keep their private views and values more hidden, for practical reasons having to do with making a living, advancing in their careers, being able to raise their children, and so on; but this did not mean their values had changed. They were biding their time, waiting — sometimes hopeless that it would ever arrive — for a reversing of the pendulum and a return in society to the ideals and visions of a better world that had so inspired them in their earlier years.
For the most part, these Sixties adherents did not know about the psychohistorical tendencies I will be describing here — as for example in the evolution of child-caring and the triumphant phase of generations. For most it was just an awareness that something so strong and so right could not simply have completely vanished from the Earth, that with time comes change, and therefore there had to be a time, again, when the mood of the country would swing in the direction they felt to be healthiest and more ideal. For some of these people their hopes were based on the simple rules of gambling: Eventually, at some time or other, with the passage of time, the dice just had to roll their number, if just out of pure chance or randomness.
Others had a slightly more reasoned view buttressing their hope for a return to idealism. These folks were those of the Sixties Generation who had applied themselves to implementing the values they learned in the Sixties in the jobs and careers they held, in whatever small or not-so-small way that they were allowed by their older generation superiors, bosses, managers, or supervisors. Never knowing that they had allies among their generation who were doing the same kind of thing in their separate fields, they followed through, the best they could, on simple conviction, born of experience, of the rightness of the more idealistic ways.
Lastly, there were those of the Sixties Generation who identified themselves completely with their youthful idealism. In putting themselves “out front” this way in their values and beliefs they found others who were doing the same. They would together become the “New Age” movement, actively engaged in bringing about the better world their generation had envisioned in the Sixties and early Seventies. They would wonder, as decades passed, why it took so long for the rest of society to catch on to what they felt was an inviting and appealing evolution — one both necessary and therefore inevitable as well.
But these last, the New Agers, would be marginalized and scapegoated by the mainstream of society — a mainstream whose outlines, of course, were determined and inscribed by the mainstream media, which was, in turn, controlled by the wealthy elite of the World War Two Generation (more about this to come). Examples included Jerry Brown labeled “Captain Moonbeam,” the family dynamics in the TV show Family Ties, the burnt-out hippie depiction of cabdriver, Jim, in the Taxi television series, and thousands of other instances where those holding New Age views were labeled “flakes.”
An Aborted Changing of the Guard — Attack of the Body-Snatchers
Another reason these terms depicting cultural division, specifically, generation gap and counterculture, went into disuse was due to the mobilization of the World War Two Generation — after their initial phase of somnolent confusion over the events that were emerging in the Sixties which left them paralyzed and watching, growing in irritation and anger — into a comprehensive counterattack against the Sixties Generation, using all the Nixonian-like tactics in their arsenal … understandably, since Nixon was of that generation and his tactics were typical of the defensive style of his contemporaries.
Lassoing the Universities
In the early Seventies, the World War Two Generation used their power and wealth, being themselves in the triumphant phase of their lives, to put pressure on colleges and universities, nationwide, to discontinue the programs, courses, and the professors that they felt were responsible for the youth’s rebellion. Their targets for destruction included such noteworthy “dangers” as liberal arts programs in general, and especially “highly revolutionary” philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and humanistic psychology courses. A transformation of colleges and universities into “career mills” — whose primary function was to prepare the young for practical and skill-oriented jobs and professions — was called for … or else! Or else these World War Two alumni would discontinue their contributions to these educational institutions. The “bottom line” being threatened in this way, no university administration, to my knowledge, withstood their demands for very long, if at all.
Cloning Themselves … WWII Generation Creating an 80s Generation of “Mini-me’s”
The youth produced by these institutions would hereafter be dissuaded from thinking for themselves and from “questioning authority” — as the previous generation had been encouraged to do — so part of the lapse in the terms of division between the generations — counterculture and generation gap — had to do with the fact that the wave of youth that followed the Sixties Generation would be molded, in their college years, into distant replicas of World War Two Generation members. They would be termed the “Me Generation,” since selfishness, greed, money-as-god, and upward mobility were characteristics of the WWII Generation that they were able to instill in their youthful clones.
Thus, we saw the rise of Young Republicans on campus in the late Seventies, the return of ROTC to campuses, and the seeding of fertile young minds with the values that would later be verbalized — in the movie Wall Street — in the mantram “Greed is good!” At the height of this phase, periodicals were declaring how similar the “youth of today” — meaning those of the late Seventies and Eighties — were to their parents, how close they were to their parents in the beliefs and values they held, and how the generation gap had inexplicably closed. Such was the success of the WWII Generation in cloning themselves in producing Eighties youth.
In sum, beginning in the early Seventies, institutions of higher learning turned away from their idealistic goals of “bringing out” from the students their inner truths and wisdom (which is the original meaning of the term educate), which is the avowed role of liberal arts programs, and instead turned hard, to the right, onto a path of churning out engineers, MBAs, hard scientists (even in the field of psychology, where humanistic psychology was shunned), medical professionals, lawyers, and the like. My liberal arts, semi–ivy-league college — founded, by half, by Benjamin Franklin — turned from the idealistic studies that typified Franklin and those of his time and swung from being a bastion of energetic inquiry into all controversial realms — political and spiritual and societal — a virtual “Plato’s Academy” of inquiry, into being a career mill centered around a “pre-med” program.
Harnessing the Media
Similarly, these frightened and wealthy WWII “conspirators” (however unconscious their alliance) would use their leverage to ensure that books and the media — TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers — would expound their views predominantly, would present events through the particular psychological lenses and filters with which they were familiar, and would eschew viewpoints, and even coverage of events, that would in any way strengthen the stance of the, by this time, scapegoated Sixties Generation.
The media declared, with much fanfare, in the early Seventies that a “conservative backlash” was occurring; and they published books documenting this event. Meanwhile they ignored the polls and the events — specifically the ongoing and growing antiwar and other counterculture “demonstrations” — that would show the lie to this idea, and they rejected and refused publication of the kind of books and articles, still being effusively churned out — that would support the counterculture movement. Controlling the media in this way and saying it long and loud enough, the “big lie” of the “conservative backlash” began to be accepted as truth. and even many in the counterculture and among the youth began to believe it.
Interestingly, those on the extreme right did not forget that the great divide in views was still with us. In the Nineties, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich said a “culture war” was going on. More recently we see WWII- and Fifties-style Tea Partiers going up against huge rallies of Sixties style pro-union demonstrators and massive recall efforts. And, of course, with Trump we see a division in the country corresponding roughly with generational lines, with both sides actively and passionately fighting back the gains of the other side.
So those on the right decry such massive outpourings against them, but they are correct that it is a “culture war.” Obviously they can see that the world has changed from the Fifties-style “Pleasantville” that they had imagined and wanted it to be.
Culture War — The King Must Die
Still, the World War Two Generation could not maintain control forever. For one thing, people die. and being older than the Sixties Generation, eventually their numbers had to dwindle. Their numbers dwindling, they had to be replaced by those younger — some of whom were of the Sixties Generation and were now in what psychohistorians call the triumphant phase of life — that is, the time of life when a generation is in its “prime,” when it is most influential, when it takes over the reins of society, when it gets behind the wheel of the cultural bus.
From this perspective, we can view a remarkable film, Pleasantville, released in the late Nineties at the peak of the Sixties Generation’s triumphant phase, and see that it is a metaphorical review of history from the early Fifties up to that time — one which shows the Sixties Generation, in the end, finally realizing their vision of a more colorful, alive, open-to-new-experience and to change, growthful, changeful, passionate, unregimented, truthful, sensual, feeling and emotionful, and less determined, ritualized, and preordained existence. More about this later.
The Generational Changing of the Guard
First let me point out that this change in power, evident by this movie and the other recent cultural items I’ve mentioned, is a change as old as our species. Every generation, at some point, leaves or is removed from their seats of power when they are at or near the end of their arc of effectiveness and prowess by a younger generation that is coming into or — as in the unusual case of the Sixties Generation for the reasons unique to this time to be mentioned below — is fully in the prime of its life.
Myths, fairy tales, stories, historical tales, and legends the world over depict this change of power. The myth that is most transparent in its depiction of this change is the one in which a monarch, despot, or ogre controls and rules the land, keeping the people miserable with oppressive and selfish decrees and policies. A young prince emerges and, after a period of trial … in the case of the Sixties Generation, an unusually long period of trial … in which the prince proves himself worthy, he takes up the cause of the people and overthrows the old king and takes his place. Thus the saying “The king is dead. Long live the (new) king.”
The triumphant phase of the Sixties Generation had been delayed, however, longer than any other generation in history because of the advances in modern medical science, which served to keep the World War Two Generation alive and kicking longer than any previous generation. The average life expectancy in the last seventy years (since the time when the World War Two Generation were in their youth or young adulthood) has increased remarkably. Hence the Sixties Generation had to wait longer than the World War Two Generation to get a chance behind the wheel of society. It is strange and ironic that at a time when the speed of cultural change is greatest because of an ever increasing speed of technological change, at a time when the elder generation’s worldview becomes obsolete sooner and faster than ever before, at such a time when it would seem the younger generation’s view would attain relevancy and effectiveness faster and sooner than at any previous time, at such a time we had the reverse occurring, that is, the younger generation’s ascendancy was delayed and the older one’s stranglehold on power was extended.
However, this rapid change and increasing rate of obsolescence may just have had something to do with the WWII Generation’s desire to hang on and their vehement struggle against change. For, as mentioned before, there is a gap — greater than ever before — between the views of the younger and those of the older. This gap is wrought of the different technological worlds and the corresponding sociocultural worlds that each experienced. It is widened by different, more advanced on the one side, child-caring of children as well as by different drugs used and the contrasting world views they would elicit — as explained in Chapter Five and those following.
So the WWII Generation might be said to have been more threatened than any previous one by the generation to succeed them, because the ascendancy of the next generation appeared to overturn and oftentimes reverse so much of what they believed, valued, worked and sacrificed for.
Because of the unprecedented technological change and corresponding change in material culture, catalyzing in ways too numerous to mention a myriad of sociocultural and psychological changes in their successors, there is less overlap than ever before between the worldviews of the generation handing over power and the generation coming into power. It follows that it would seem to the generation in power, even as they approach the end of their mortality, that less of what they are and were will live on after them than has ever been the case in the history of generational succession.
This being so, such a generational succession represented a previously unheard of personal invalidation and undermining of the self-esteem of those of the World War Two Generation and a corresponding unprecedented attack on the usual delusions of immortality (themselves living on in some fashion in their successors) that older generations are allowed in exchange for their relinquishing power.
Culture War — The King Won’t Die
At any rate and whatever may be the reason, the fact remains that the World War Two Generation used their longevity for all their worth to block the ascendancy of their successors. They used their longevity to amass wealth and power — wealth greater than any previous generation before and, because of their actions, likely to come.
For example, their actions led to a situation, currently, wherein they were taken care of in their old age by a Social Security and Medicare system funded by the work of the Baby-Boomers, aka Sixties Generation, at the same time that predictions abound that that same Social Security and Medicare system will be depleted just as it is the Baby-Boomers’ time to belly-up to the bar. One might also note the WWII Generation’s environmental and ecological decisions making it that no generation after them will enjoy anywhere near the benefits — health and quality of life among them — of clean environment, abundance of natural resources, and ecological balance that they enjoyed. Finally, their decisions regarding arms buildup and proliferation may deny life itself to the generations following them. Other unprecedented ogre-like — greedy, selfish, and uncaring-of-succeeding-generations — actions can be numbered against this generation.
Generational Changing of the Guard, Aborted
So the World War Two Generation used their unprecedented wealth and power to wage a war against the generation who would be taking over from them, keeping them and their values under attack and away from the centers of power and influence in society as long as they possibly could.1
Desperate Stand: The Battle of the Bill (Clinton)
It is enlightening to consider in the Nineties the persistent attacks on Bill Clinton (similarly, on Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, continuing) — the first Sixties Generation U.S. president — ever since he took office. The Monica Lewinsky scandal is a typical example of the extent to which the World War Two Generation so effectively controlled the views and values expressed and subtly expounded in the media ever since it took conscious control of the society’s “collective consciousness” in this way in the early Seventies. By this I mean that in the entire time of the scandal, it was assumed that sex is bad, or at least that sex outside of marriage is bad. It was assumed that Hillary must be horribly pained and angered by the revelation of her husband’s affair(s).
Make Love, Not War
It is as if the slogan “Make Love, Not War” was never a generational outcry. I don’t believe you will ever find in the history books paid for/published by World War Two Generation owned publishing houses mention of the fact that slogan was ever used. Indeed, with all the talk by pundits, analysts, and commentators on literally hundreds of TV shows during the entire time of the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment drama, that slogan, “Make Love, Not War,” was practically never mentioned. I am aware of only one time — when I heard it slipped in unnoticed by a participant in the middle of a talkin’-all-at-once brouhaha on the TV show Politically Incorrect, whereupon it was totally ignored.
Even more astonishing, those same pundits discussed, ad nauseum, this scandal and all the myriad ramifications of it yet never, to my knowledge, made note of Clinton’s generational status and the views, exemplified by “Make Love, Not War,” which my generation espoused. It has simply been assumed that all of the Sixties Generation “grew out” of that kind of “nonsense” and had adopted the views of the WWII Generation … again, polls on values and viewpoints be damned.
Rewriting History
Most telling of all in the attacks on Clinton’s behavior is the assumption that such a stance on open marriage and uninhibited sexuality is a product of uncontrolled lewdness and the sexual license exhibited primarily by the young, which naturally everyone grows out of in order to adopt the constrained and secretive sexual views of the old. The sexual revolution’s parallel growth in the Sixties with expanding civil rights, women’s rights, and individual liberty is completely ignored. Its roots in an idealism about final and complete gender equality is totally vanquished as if it were never so.
In fact, I doubt you, the reader, know of this. Yet hordes of Sixties youth shared with each other, conspiratorial-like, the Sixties novel, The Harrad Experiment by Robert H. Rimmer, which portrayed — in poetic and highly intelligent fashion — an evolution to a radical equality between the genders, to an elimination of neurotic suffering around sexuality as, for example, in painful jealousy, to an ending of sexual violence as in spouse abuse, and a final and complete solution to a gender war existing for all time with incalculable casualties and near infinity of suffering on both sides. It was a story about non-monogamy and open relationships … “free love.”
Neither did the pundits point out that Bill Clinton is of a generation who made a book on “open marriage” a bestseller. The clinch on the media by that older generation has been so complete as to have, apparently, completely dismissed or erased from the minds of the pundits the facts that those ideas and books ever existed. Another thing erased from history since the Seventies: the “sexual revolution.” Remember that? When was the last time you heard that talked about? All of the energy that had surrounded these controversial ideas has, because of media manipulation and repression of these views, been channeled into and reduced to a fight over a woman’s right to choose, that is to say, the abortion issue, and more recently to fights over union rights and budget issues.
Abortion Wars
Incidentally, it is no coincidence that the issue of abortion has taken on such importance for so many in the electorate, for it is the last remaining battle of the “culture war” directly continuing from the Sixties. Prior to the Sixties, women’s bodies could not be considered their own, in many ways; a prominent way was the illegality of abortion, which made outcasts and corpses out of untold numbers of women. It was reversed by Roe v. Wade in the Sixties. But the battle never went away and is the major front in a Gender War that has been going on for millennia.
And your position on the abortion issue is the closest thing to a military uniform indicating on which side of the culture war you have enlisted. Specifically, I am saying that there are few of the Sixties Generation who would not classify themselves as “pro-choice.” Meanwhile, the anti-abortionists are found to be primarily comprise those of the WWII Generation, their Eighties Generation clones, and the Eisenhower-Presley-McCarthy — and now we might add “Pleasantville” — Fifties Generation. (For a definition and explanation of Fifties Generation see Chapter Five, “Drugs and Generations — Concocted Worlds”)
World War Two and Fifties Generations Just Don’t Get It … Never Have, and Never Will
Of course, I am saying that the War on Clinton was, in its essence, an unacknowledged but desperate battle in the Culture War that has been going on since the Sixties — despite these attacks not being framed or talked about this way — between the World War Two and the Sixties Generations. The World War Two Generation, especially after the elections of November 1998, learned that it was way off in some of its assumptions, that their analysis of what had been happening in this country was woefully miscalculated. They were like the deluded schizophrenic who believed passionately in the world he himself created coming up against some of the hard, harsh, and indisputable facts of existence which undermine his world. The World-War-Two-Generation–minded — whatever the individual’s age, and especially now, their underlings of the Fifties Generation — have been fighting back, since the Nineties, with all the firepower they can muster against realizing the harsh realities around them of their waning ideals. They have been in total and absolute denial of the direction of the American, indeed the world, consciousness; and they have been flinging all their wealth into the mix to try to repress the emerging truths.
When I first published on this topic in 1998 I wrote, “But we shouldn’t be surprised if we see some of those in their ranks — wealthy and facing their inevitable demise — merely increasing the ferocity of their war waging … humiliating themselves and seeming ever more pitiful in the minds of the majority of observers, who increasingly, as time continues to decimate their WWII ranks, are younger than they and thus do not share their delusions.”
I am sorry to say I was more correct than I could ever have dreamed as we have faced, since the change of the millennium, neo-con wars built on lies and confused tea-baggers railing against their own interests.
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Culture War Allegory:
Reversing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers … to Follow or Not to Follow the Script
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“…we are beginning to see a metaphor for psychological realities and that “following the script” has a broader meaning for a choice that everyone must make in life in growing up, specifically, to follow the script laid out for oneself by one’s parents and society in general or to follow one’s inner direction and inner guide in asserting one’s individuality and expressing one’s unique self.”
“These Blue Meanies, especially their leader, are depicted as powerful and cruel, yet sniveling, insecure, weak, and selfish underneath. Their angry and oppressive personas are shown to reveal poor little whining babies behind them. Their actions are shown to be those of “big babies,” whose gruff exterior must remain intact at all costs, lest their hidden sniveling and hurt little selves be revealed. The analogy the Beatles are making to those of the WWII Generation — at that time the parental generation, those “over 30” — is impossible not to make.”
“…in recent history, despite the increasing drum beating of the Religious Right in the last three decades, those of us who grew up in the Fifties know that the introduction of sex — in the Sixties, as in the “sexual revolution” — was a step forward from the hypocritical sameness and plodding repression of the Fifties.”
“The underlying factor that was introduced into the movie causing color and that was also introduced into our society causing all the sociocultural changes that we, usually, complain about is the factor of choosing something different than what is expected by society, than what is expected by the outside. What is introduced in the movie — as it was introduced in our culture — is the preeminence of inner authority in making decisions, as opposed to outer authority.”
“The black-and-white Fifties Pleasantville is a representation of a mode of child-rearing — which characterized the Fifties — wherein the role of the parents is to “mold,” model, and guide children along paths that the parents have deemed to be correct — called the socializing mode of child-rearing. The child is expected to be a clone of the parents, a mini-me….”
“By contrast, the colorized Pleasantville represents the mode of child-caring that came out, big time, beginning in the Sixties, wherein the parents’ role is that of “bringing out” from and supporting, encouraging, and helping the child to discover what the child’s talents and inherent abilities, feelings, and proclivities are, and then encouraging the child to “believe in him/herself” in the expression of those inherent and inborn good qualities and values — termed the helping mode of child-caring.”
“This mode contains a radically new view of basic human nature. Humans are seen to be essentially good (even “divine”). It is evil and painful events impinging upon the child from the outside — family and society — that are deemed causative in taking the child from its natural state of innocence and goodness and inherent unique talents to one wherein the child is corrupted and thus becomes bestial and lacking in inherent good qualities and talents.”
“Therefore the solution is to protect the child from traumas coming from the outside, especially the huge one of feeling unloved through not being seen or respected as a unique individual … as opposed to being seen as a mere outgrowth or mini-me of a parental entity. And in so doing the parents’ role includes helping the child to discover his or her uniqueness and dispensing unconditional love, that is, love that is given freely, without the requirement, as in the socializing mode, that the child do and be what the parents want before the child is accepted or shown approval or any emotional warmth.”
“In representing this advanced mode of being (and child-caring) the “colorized” people in Pleasantville open themselves to possibilities that were never before considered; they stray from the earlier mode requiring strict conformity to parental scripts. Robert Kennedy’s Sixties quote comes to mind as expressing this: “Some people look at things as they are and ask, why? I think of things that never were and ask, why not?” This means, then, a capacity to experiment and adventure in one’s life, which, at bottom, involve a belief in questioning authority and thinking for oneself in Sixties terms or, in Carl Jung’s words, a belief that we are, each of us, “experiments in truth” in our sojourns on Earth.”
“The whole point of change is that it is always something one does not expect. Likewise, when people act out of inner rather than outer authority, one can only expect that what happens will be unique, like people are when they are not conforming to external expectations.”
“…this ending expresses the spiritual razor’s edge each of us must cross during our life’s sojourn. Whenever we try to put life, or love, into a box, package, or a gilded cage, it dies or stagnates — just like a boring black-and-white sitcom world. Real change and spiritual growth means letting go and opening oneself to the unexpected and the unknown.”
“One of the reasons the movie, Pleasantville, so appealed to me is that its view of current events is so akin to that which I have been expressing in other of my more recent writings … wherein I make the argument that recent events are not evidence of a downfall of civilization, as conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan would have us believe, but are the necessary “birth pains” of a new age being born.”
“Those of us who lived through the Fifties know that the lack of color is an apt metaphor for exactly the way it was at that time. It was a back-and-white world — a world that covered up its underlying nastiness and evil by repression and denial — psychological defense mechanisms that characterized the World-War-Two Generation especially.”
“The point in the movie, which is so appealing, is that it causes us to look again at the changes in our society that have occurred because of the various “revolutions” of postmodern times — civil rights, student antiwar, women’s rights, sexual, and so on — and to stop bemoaning the “messiness” that comes with freedom. We have more choice, more freedom now than ever. And this freedom allows us the opportunity for a higher spirituality — some would say the only true spirituality — which involves the harrowing path of deciding for oneself, based upon one’s ability to intuit or “feel” the correct path, and experiencing the consequences of one’s choices, as opposed to the preordained religiosity of following a script.”
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The film, Pleasantville, is a postmodern sociological allegory or fable released in 1998.
Not So Pleasantville
It begins in then-current time against a backdrop of the usual violence, chaos, and turbulence that we are conditioned by the media to believe characterized the Nineties in America. Two high school teenagers, David and Jennifer, played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, are planning their evening.
A Tale of Two Siblings
David is planning to watch the Pleasantville marathon on television and to participate in the trivia contest that will be part of it. Pleasantville is an old sitcom from the 1950s in the Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons style which has attained a cult-like following and is shown regularly on a cable channel similar to the “Nick at Nite” one that we know of which specialized in reruns of old sitcoms.
It becomes clear that David is an ardent devotee of the show in part because it compensates for the lameness of his real life. Unlike his sister, who is portrayed as a real “firecracker” of a young woman, he doesn’t date or participate in the school scene. It is implied that he may be using the sitcom as an escape from not only a boring life but a threatening one and that he longs to live in the kind of ordered, safe, and unchallenging reality that the sitcom depicts. David is such an avid follower of the show that he is shown to be a master of Pleasantville trivia and is primed and eager for the contest on Pleasantville trivia.
But his sister, Jennifer, is planning for a hot date at home … their parents being away for the weekend providing an opportunity for her to be unchaperoned with her guy … which she eagerly anticipates. At odds over what will be played on the TV — Jennifer wanting to watch instead an MTV concert with her date — they wrestle over the TV remote and end up breaking it. However all is not lost as at just that moment and completely inexplicably a television repairman played by Don Knotts drives up in his truck, knocks on the door, and imposes his services on them in fixing the problem.
Don Knotts — perfectly cast, in a Hero’s Cycle sense, for it is often the impish or normally overlooked and unnoticed element that initiates sweeping changes in people’s lives — indeed does introduce the magical element into the film. He produces a different kind of remote control, which he claims has special effects saying, “You want something to put you right in the show!” Sure enough, in checking out the remote they hit a mysterious button and are transported into the TV and thus into the sitcom and the town that is called Pleasantville.
To Follow or Not to Follow “The Script”
After their initial confusion, they realize what has happened and try to return, but do not know how to. David — who it becomes apparent has been thrust into the role of Bud in the sitcom — advises his sister — Jennifer who has become Mary Sue in the TV series — to go along with events until they figure a way to get home. Since he knows all the plots of every show of the sitcom, his idea is that they act out the events as they are supposed to happen and that they do what the two characters — the teenage son and daughter of the parents in the sitcom, Betty and George Parker, played superbly by Joan Allen and William H. Macy — are known to do in the different episodes he has seen.
Essentially, then, David as Bud is advising his sister to “follow the script.” and of course it is not hard to discern at this point that we are beginning to see a metaphor for psychological realities and that “following the script” has a broader meaning for a choice that everyone must make in life in growing up, specifically, to follow the script laid out for oneself by one’s parents and society in general or to follow one’s inner direction and inner guide in asserting one’s individuality and expressing one’s unique self.
The rest of the movie is the story of how these two characters — transported magically from the future as well as from the real world as opposed to a made-up TV world — introduce change into the town and thereby color. Mary Sue, formerly Jennifer, does it consciously. Rebelling against her brother’s admonishments to follow the script, she goes on a date with someone she is not supposed to according to the sitcom script and then — horror of horrors for a 1950s world — engages in sex with him at the local “lover’s lane” — where the farthest that anyone goes, according to “script,” is holding hands. We find later that her date describes this unheard of experience to his classmates, and, like ripples emanating from a pebble dropped in a pond, her action results in a number of the school youth engaging in sex and thereby becoming, to everyone’s amazement, colorized!
The brother also introduces change, and therefore color, but it is done unconsciously at first. As mentioned, he tries to get his sister to follow the script. Still, in a metaphorically powerful scene, when he is late for work at the local malt shop — this is unheard of as well because Pleasantville is a world where no one is ever late for work — he inadvertently introduces change himself. In fact, he introduces the most insidious element of change because he explicitly advises — without realizing what he has unleashed — that his boss think for himself!
In this scene Bud, formerly David, finds his boss and coworker, Mister Johnson, played by Jeff Daniels, stuck at the end of the counter, cleaning away with a washcloth, like a stuck record, at the same spot, even as the surface of the counter is rubbing away.
When the soda jerk, Mister Johnson, explains confusedly that the normal regimen would have required Bud to arrive at work before he, Mister Johnson, could go on to the rest of his chores, Bud simply suggests to Mister Johnson that in the future he continue with his next chore even if Bud is not there.
So simply in being himself, coming from a future in which people react to change by thinking out new responses and thereby adapting to them, Bud, aka David, introduces a totally new element into the soda jerk’s script. This has far reaching consequences as the movie progresses and Mister Johnson begins thinking for himself and having ideas about other things as well. In this way, the soda jerk, soon to be artist, too ends up “colored.”
Blue Meanies
The 1998 movie, Pleasantville, thematically, is remarkably akin to the 1968-released movie Yellow Submarine put out by the Sixties Generation rock group The Beatles.
In Yellow Submarine there is a region ruled by the Blue Meanies. These Blue Meanies, especially their leader, are depicted as powerful and cruel, yet sniveling, insecure, weak, and selfish underneath. Their angry and oppressive personas are shown to reveal poor little whining babies behind them. Their actions are shown to be those of “big babies,” whose gruff exterior must remain intact at all costs, lest their hidden sniveling and hurt little selves be revealed. The analogy the Beatles are making to those of the WWII Generation — at that time the parental generation, those “over 30” — is impossible not to make.
“Nowhere Man”
The movies are so similar in theme that the only major thematic difference between Pleasantville and Yellow Submarine is that it is music that is not allowed in Yellow Submarine whereas in Pleasantville it is color. Yet the idea behind them both is the same: Music and color both represent deep feeling, aliveness, thinking for oneself, and change. In Yellow Submarine, the man without music is Nowhere Man, who “knows not where he’s going to, doesn’t have a point of view.” In Pleasantville, the men without color act in the same ways, performing the same actions, day in, day out, without change, zombie- or robot-like — like characters in a 1950s-style sitcom in which nothing unpleasant, different, new, or too emotional is allowed to occur.
And above all, the black-and-white men do not think for themselves. This is graphically portrayed in the scene mentioned where the owner of the town malt shop, Mister Johnson, portrayed by Jeff Daniels, is left cleaning the same spot of the counter for hours so that its top is rubbed away because his coworker is late and the routine they use to close up cannot be completed in the way it is done, every day, in exactly the same way. Confronted with this small change, he shows himself to be the “Nowhere Man” and like a needle stuck on a record, he is rigidly stuck repeating the same action, not having the power to think of an alternative action in response to a change in the usual routine.
“The Awakening” — No Longer a Distant Vision
The differences in the years of the release and the different artistic modes used to express the themes of these two movies have something to say as well. In 1968 the changes in culture of the New Age were a vision and a hope. It is appropriate and telling that Yellow Submarine was expressed in animated form. Like a dream that would take a long time to realize, it needed to be expressed in cartoon-like fashion, for the time of its emergence in reality was too far off.
By contrast, Pleasantville blends a fantasy world — appropriately it is a TV sitcom, which has more similarities with reality than an animation — with the actual reality of postmodern times. The advance toward reality is patent in the evolution from an animated form — indicating the change is far off, a fantasy, a wish, a hope — in the 1968 movie; to a black-and-white form involving real actors, real people; and then to a colorized version involving real people in what is supposed to be real time and real cultural reality, in the movie released thirty years later. One might say that what was a fantasy over forty years ago is, however unconsciously, being heralded as, hopefully, emerging and coming into being now — in actual, black-and-white or colored, real time and place.
Reversing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Concerning the movie, Pleasantville, noted movie critic Roger Ebert quite astutely pointed out that it was “like the defeat of the body snatchers” (from his excellent review, “Pleasantville”). One might also say that it is one in which Holden Caulfield, the character in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, wins out and children do not grow up to be adult “phonies.” Another analogy would be that it is a depiction in which Peter Pan stays young, when he succeeds in keeping the children from ever growing up and thereby losing their capacity to “fly” — representing the capacity to dream, to envision, to be open to new possibilities, to adventure.
What It Is That Makes One Alive
Against this backdrop of lack of real aliveness, the introduction of color into the town of Pleasantville through the introduction of sex is not seen as something bad at all. Similarly, in recent history, despite the increasing drum beating of the Religious Right in the last three decades, those of us who grew up in the Fifties know that the introduction of sex — in the Sixties, as in the “sexual revolution” — was a step forward from the hypocritical sameness and plodding repression of the Fifties.
Other elements introduced into Pleasantville that produce colorization in the participants include thinking for oneself (Jeff Daniels in his role as the soda jerk), intellectual passion (the sister), questioning the way things are supposed to be or, in Sixties terms, questioning authority (when the brother finally becomes colored), artistic and creative passion (Jeff Daniels again), and even the passion of honest rage (the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce). These elements arise in Pleasantville just as they arose into the collective consciousness of those of us living in the Fifties and Sixties.
Of course I am not naively saying that these elements never existed before the Sixties. The underlying factor that was introduced into the movie causing color and that was also introduced into our society causing all the sociocultural changes that we, usually, complain about is the factor of choosing something different than what is expected by society, than what is expected by the outside. What is introduced in the movie — as it was introduced in our culture — is the preeminence of inner authority in making decisions, as opposed to outer authority.
A New Psychohistorical Era!
In psychohistorical terms this difference is marked by Lloyd deMause as a difference in a mode of child-rearing. The black-and-white Fifties Pleasantville is a representation of a mode of child-rearing — which characterized the Fifties — wherein the role of the parents is to “mold,” model, and guide children along paths that the parents have deemed to be correct — called the socializing mode of child-rearing. The child is expected to be a clone of the parents, a mini-me, or at least to represent the parents’ ideas of proper behavior, ideals, and mode of living, regardless of whether the parent models them or not. and when not, the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” and the term hypocrite as applied to the parents are apropos.
The basic nature of the child is considered to be sinful and evil or at least bestial; the classic novel Lord of the Flies depicts this view of human nature. Therefore the child needs to become other than itself and conform itself to something outside of itself in order for she or he to be considered “good” and to receive good responses in turn from parents and society.
By contrast, the colorized Pleasantville represents the mode of child-caring that came out, big time, beginning in the Sixties, wherein the parents’ role is that of “bringing out” from and supporting, encouraging, and helping the child to discover what the child’s talents and inherent abilities, feelings, and proclivities are, and then encouraging the child to “believe in him/herself” in the expression of those inherent and inborn good qualities and values — termed the helping mode of child-caring.1
This mode contains a radically new view of basic human nature. Humans are seen to be essentially good (even “divine”). It is evil and painful events impinging upon the child from the outside — family and society — that are deemed causative in taking the child from its natural state of innocence and goodness and inherent unique talents to one wherein the child is corrupted and thus becomes bestial and lacking in inherent good qualities and talents.
Therefore the solution is to protect the child from traumas coming from the outside, especially the huge one of feeling unloved through not being seen or respected as a unique individual … as opposed to being seen as a mere outgrowth or mini-me of a parental entity. And in so doing the parents’ role includes helping the child to discover his or her uniqueness and dispensing unconditional love, that is, love that is given freely, without the requirement, as in the socializing mode, that the child do and be what the parents want before the child is accepted or shown approval or any emotional warmth.
In representing this advanced mode of being (and child-caring) the “colorized” people in Pleasantville open themselves to possibilities that were never before considered; they stray from the earlier mode requiring strict conformity to parental scripts. Robert Kennedy’s Sixties quote comes to mind as expressing this: “Some people look at things as they are and ask, why? I think of things that never were and ask, why not?” This means, then, a capacity to experiment and adventure in one’s life, which, at bottom, involve a belief in questioning authority and thinking for oneself in Sixties terms or, in Carl Jung’s words, a belief that we are, each of us, “experiments in truth” in our sojourns on Earth. and just as these elements and beliefs became more and more a part of America’s collective consciousness in the Sixties and Seventies and ever since then, they also gradually develop in Pleasantville.
“Love My Uncertainty”
One reviewer described the ending of the movie as “not at all easy and tidy, but rather very, very messy” (“Pleasantville” by Chris A. Bolton). Ebert — more astutely but not quite correctly — wrote that the determining factor in whether someone became colored was the factor of change. The first reviewer, like someone with one foot still in Pleasantville or one who is still not fully colored, does not understand that the ending, wherein the characters proclaim that they do not know what is going to happen next, contains exactly the essential message of the movie. The ending can only be “messy” if one expects a particular ending.
The reviewer is very much like the critics of Occupy Wall Street who claimed the protesters do not have a message, or a leader … essentially do not know where they are going. He is wrong for the same reasons those critics are.
The whole point of change is that it is always something one does not expect. Likewise, when people act out of inner rather than outer authority, one can only expect that what happens will be unique, like people are when they are not conforming to external expectations. So there could be no pat or predicted ending. The moviegoer could not leave knowing whether Betty Parker, the Stepford housewife turned liberated woman, returns to her husband, George, or takes off with the soda jerk turned artist, Mister Johnson, because that would destroy the uncertainty inherent in change, growth, aliveness, and so on. So the ending is exactly what it has to be.
And this ending expresses the spiritual razor’s edge each of us must cross during our life’s sojourn. Whenever we try to put life, or love, into a box, package, or a gilded cage, it dies or stagnates — just like a boring black-and-white sitcom world. Real change and spiritual growth means letting go and opening oneself to the unexpected and the unknown. So it is in this vein that the spiritual teacher Sathya Sai Baba tells his followers, “Love my uncertainty,” in helping them to deal — after the usual “honeymoon phase” at the beginning of their spiritual path — with the trials, changes, tribulations, and suffering that his devotees experience later on, along their path to greater purity of heart and compassion, and eventually spiritual liberation.
The Scenery of Healing
One of the reasons the movie, Pleasantville, so appealed to me is that its view of current events is so akin to that which I have been expressing in other of my more recent writings — for example, the books Apocalypse NO, Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious and Apocalypse Emergency, Love’s Wake-Up Call — wherein I make the argument that recent events are not evidence of a downfall of civilization, as conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan would have us believe, but are the necessary “birth pains” of a new age being born.
In Pleasantville, indeed, though everyone smiles and there is no crime or unpleasantness — which is supposed to reflect the view of reality presented in Fifties sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver — it is inherently flawed in that it is lacking in “color.” Those of us who lived through the Fifties know that the lack of color is an apt metaphor for exactly the way it was at that time. It was a back-and-white world — a world that covered up its underlying nastiness and evil by repression and denial — psychological defense mechanisms that characterized the World-War-Two Generation especially.
New Mantram: “Thinking for Oneself Is Good!”
The point in the movie, which is so appealing, is that it causes us to look again at the changes in our society that have occurred because of the various “revolutions” of postmodern times — civil rights, student antiwar, women’s rights, sexual, and so on — and to stop bemoaning the “messiness” that comes with freedom. We have more choice, more freedom now than ever. And this freedom allows us the opportunity for a higher spirituality — some would say the only true spirituality — which involves the harrowing path of deciding for oneself, based upon one’s ability to intuit or “feel” the correct path, and experiencing the consequences of one’s choices, as opposed to the preordained religiosity of following a script.
Though many would argue this, one has only to look, as this movie forces us to do, back at where we started. and from that perspective, with that stultifying, hypocritical, dishonest, and phony kind of supposed “living” in mind, we can easily see the changes and progress made in individual freedom and, dare I say, genuine spirituality, and accept the uncertainty, emotional pain, apparent evil, “messiness,” social and political turbulence, and all the rest that comes with it.
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Cultural Rebirth, Aborted:
It’s a Not so Wonderful Life for the WWII Generation … yet the King Refuses to Die
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[Quotes/highlights:] “It’s a Wonderful Life is beloved and timeless, no doubt, because it reassures an entire generation and all those who have had to give up their dreams for whatever reason that their sacrifices were for a higher good and that it is a wonderful life after all.”
“In one way or another, the situation in the Forties, with the war effort and afterwards, created a generation who, except for the rare individual or one of unusual circumstances, was called upon to step up into mature responsible tasks long before the idealism of their youth would have preferred that they do so. Their generation is scarred for having missed this opportunity. They are individuals deserving of our sympathy; yet crippled they were, nonetheless.”
“Pearl Harbor Day, when their fate was inevitably forged, when it became clear that for the second time the light of individual freedom would be extinguished, would become an important marker in their lifetimes — a day almost as much to be memorialized as their birthdays.”
“…we can pity the World War Two Generation. As in John Updike’s The Centaur, the World War Two Generation is depicted as a generation that was required to give up its dreams and do its ‘duty,’ above all. It was required to carry out a script given to them by their society, not allowing them to follow their natural youthful ideals. And as in Updike’s novel, they are beaten down in a life that is regimented and has no ‘color,’ spark, life, idealism, or dreams. They have become the robot-like residents of Pleasantville. But Updike points out in his novel that their sacrifice, despite the personal tragedy of it on the individual scale, is both necessary and noble in that it makes possible the realization of dreams by the generation to which they gave birth.”
“…it is women who are the real instigators, the least threatened by change.”
“As in the hundredth monkey phenomenon, it is first the young, especially females, who are open to new experiences, ways, and ideas. Then it is adult females — in this movie exemplified by Betty Parker, the mother of Bud and Mary Sue — who are next to consider alternatives and new ways. Adult males are the last to turn to color, but among them it is the sensitive of heart….”
“This rebellious act by the artist is reminiscent of antiwar demonstrators, who got fired upon at Kent State; of civil rights demonstrators, who police attacked with dogs; of Tiananmen Square demonstrators, who were rolled over by tanks, shot, and killed; of Black Lives Matters protesters, who were tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and plowed into with cars; and most defiant of all the courageous men and women of the Middle East risking their lives for freedom, and the Occupy and Antifa heroes throughout the world putting their bodies in front of, arguably, the most dire, widespread fascism ever to exist.”
“Big Bob’s Chamber of Commerce represents MAGAts, Trumpers, Republicans, Tea Partiers, and those in general in our society who have succumbed to the rewards and threats of the World War Two Generation, and their Fifties Gen/ Gen X clones. They are the ones induced to live a regimented, robot-like, unfeeling, passionless life; to become one of J. D. Salinger’s ‘phonies’; to abide by outdated and misconstrued idea of ‘family values’; and above all to ‘behave’ and not do anything to rock the boat of the status quo which might threaten the privileges of those currently enjoying power and wealth handed down, mostly, by heredity.”
“The events in China’s Tiananmen Square more than thirty years ago so affected and still affects some of us here in America because we know at some level we have experienced it before.
“What happened in China three decades ago is so much like what happened in the U.S. five decades ago, somewhat less graphically, around the Vietnam War demonstrations.”
“…the result of both was the same: In both cases the opposition, the youth movement, crushed — violently in China, subtly and behind the scenes in the US — at the command of an octogenarian generation, clinging desperately to power as much as to their waning physical frames.”
“…we no longer assassinate our president as we did with JFK, we character assassinate instead, as we did with Bill Clinton.”
“The Filthy Rich, in collusion with Russia, aimed their weapons, as well, against Hillary Clinton who received all the ridicule and vicious slander imaginable … and oh, let us not forget those emails *guffaw*.”
“And currently the lie-making machine on the Right is pumping out propaganda against Joe Biden who also — though he had been the poorest person in the Senate and who famously took the train to and from Washington every day — has been charged with making money hand over fist, somehow. In some imaginary world. We see in this Trump era, with Russian misinformation and slander allowed to be flooding our social media, there is not a second thought given about making up the most outrageous charges — pedophilia in pizza store basements that don’t exist, for example.”
“…the results in both countries are the same. They involve the ultimate victory of sociocultural change in both instances being delayed until the dying off of an elderly generation in power — a generation refusing to die or hand over the controls at the proper time like the generations before them. Simply, the king won’t die!”
“Time is running out for the octogenarians and ninety-somethings on either side of the Pacific.”
“…we will look at how the WWII Gen kept themselves alive longer than any other generation and how they used that longevity to buy and clone their ideas into the generations following them. In fact, the way the media portrays it, the world that the WWII Generation created, as manifested in the Fifties — the Fifties style of culture — is the one against which all happenings are to be measured. The Fifties, we are led to believe through incessant repetition, is what is ‘normal.’ This is the narrative the money of the Fifties and WWII Gens has managed to embed in media minds, as networks continue to broadcast the same naïve and silly sitcoms from the Fifties and early Sixties to new generations.”
“…this looking to a former time for values is a repudiation of all generations after who grew up in different times and who have evolved along with an evolving cultural and global environment. This refusal to ‘die,’ to turn over the reins of society to younger generations, is indeed an abomination. It represents the WWII and Fifties Gens worldviews being propped up mechanically, though the sand beneath their beliefs is continually washed away. This tension between obsolete old ideas that refuse to die and new ones needed for progress and survival is what we look at next. A Culture War rages.”
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[Chapter 12 text begins:] The paramount theme in Pleasantville — which is that thinking for oneself and following one’s own unique path and being open to the change that comes with that brings “color,” truth, and aliveness to one’s life — is truly a Sixties Generation idea. Again, it is not that it has never been thought before. All great ideas have been thought before, but that does not mean they have been implemented on a sociocultural, macrocosmic level. Many ideas have remained in the realm of the solitary pursuits of philosophers and mystics and been exemplified only in individual lives. Yet, the Sixties was such a time of turmoil because the values of individual freedom, personal passion, feeling and experience, questioning authority, and thinking for oneself were shared by so many Baby-Boomers and were so contrary to the values of the generation in power.
It’s a (Not So) Wonderful Life — WWII Generation
An excellent example of how opposed the Sixties values are to those of the WWII Generation is found in that beloved movie of all time, It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart. In that film, the main character is prevented by circumstances from following his dreams. One event after another keeps him from leaving his hometown. His story might be called The Truman Show in reverse for he comes to accept the loss of his dreams. He is rewarded for giving up his yearning for adventure with the warmth of a loving family and friends.
Nonetheless, he has been reduced to someone who simply follows a script or role and when it appears that he might fail in that role he considers killing himself.
Reassures a Generation
It’s a Wonderful Life is beloved and timeless, no doubt, because it reassures an entire generation and all those who have had to give up their dreams for whatever reason that their sacrifices were for a higher good and that it is a wonderful life after all.
Will never know what might have been
It provides a rationalization against the painful feelings of knowing that one will never know “what might have been” by pointing out the truth that one’s life affects others and has meaning regardless of whether or not one has been fortunate enough to actualize one’s deepest desires, talents, aspirations, and dreams.
War Compels Dashing of Dreams
As mentioned, It’s a Wonderful Life calls out to and epitomizes the experiences and attitudes of the World War Two Generation in particular. They were called upon to fight a war, after all, which no doubt would derail many a young man’s and woman’s dreams. As in It’s a Wonderful Life, the circumstances that arise to prevent their following through on their dreams are imposed from the outside — the state of being at war and being called upon by a draft to enlist or else be enlisted. For the women, as well as the men who stayed behind, the war’s influence on their lives and the carrying out of idealistic schemes and dreams are only a little less pronounced. For, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, the war created a society heaving with needs and pain, which only the truly heartless … who would not have any dreams anyway … could not help but feel compelled to respond to.
Growing up too fast
In one way or another, the situation in the Forties, with the war effort and afterwards, created a generation who, except for the rare individual or one of unusual circumstances, was called upon to step up into mature responsible tasks long before the idealism of their youth would have preferred that they do so. Their generation is scarred for having missed this opportunity. They are individuals deserving of our sympathy; yet crippled they were, nonetheless.
Mashing Butterflies and Drowning Kittens
This is not to say, however, that the generations before the WWII Generation were allowed their dreams and that the WWII Generation was unique in being crippled in its development. For we know that earlier child-rearing modes required the submission of children and youth to parental wishes.
Therefore, dreaming or envisioning an adventurous life was not the norm. For much of the history of the world and in most cultures, indeed, even the selection of one’s spouse was decided by the parents. So much has our history — in both Eastern and Western cultures — been marked by the assassination of youthful dreaming, idealism, and choice that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet can be said to be a revolutionary work in even depicting that this assassination of dreams is a tragedy!
Roaring Into Life
Still, the WWII Generation can be said to have been especially affected by this slaying of self, for they did, after all, experience the heady freedom of the “Roaring Twenties” and the dreaming that preceded the Great Depression. In the Twenties, victorious in World War I and with it now put behind, America was coming into its youthfulness and was heady with its achievements. Unbelievable accomplishments and inventions in all areas of life were speeding up sociocultural change causing some to believe that a new era was around the corner, just within reach, an era unlike anything the world had ever known. This was the atmosphere in the Twenties when the WWII Generation were in their childhood or adolescence. It could not help making a very strong, because of its being early, imprint on their expectations.
Suddenly Depressed
However, these dreams would be dashed in the Great Depression, during which time they would be adolescents and young adults, and they would be harnessed into struggling like their parents had to earlier and were now again struggling.
Getting a New Deal … Light at the End of a Tunnel
Still, as time wore on the dreams of a new world would be reignited with the idealistic union movement and the Franklin Roosevelt changes in the social contract that rescripted the relation between the society and the individual, creating a symbiotic one which enhanced them both as champions of each other. Folks would magnify the power of the person when united with others. They would dream of a fairer world in which the rich did not dominate with their wealth because the poor could balance the scales with their strength in numbers, adding to their individual power by joining in unions and by combining their votes in elections. They could begin to envision the light at the end of the tunnel of the Great Depression in which they might realize the freedom and adventure they’d glimpsed around them as children in the Twenties.
War. Shot Down Again
So it is understandable that they would not wish to enter World War II when it began. Pearl Harbor Day, when their fate was inevitably forged, when it became clear that for the second time the light of individual freedom would be extinguished, would become an important marker in their lifetimes — a day almost as much to be memorialized as their birthdays.
We Are the Centaurs (My Friends) — Sixties Generation
Sitting on the Shoulders of One’s Ancestors
For this we can pity the World War Two Generation. As in John Updike’s The Centaur, the World War Two Generation is depicted as a generation that was required to give up its dreams and do its “duty,” above all. It was required to carry out a script given to them by their society, not allowing them to follow their natural youthful ideals. And as in Updike’s novel, they are beaten down in a life that is regimented and has no “color,” spark, life, idealism, or dreams. They have become the robot-like residents of Pleasantville. But Updike points out in his novel that their sacrifice, despite the personal tragedy of it on the individual scale, is both necessary and noble in that it makes possible the realization of dreams by the generation to which they gave birth.
The Sixties Generation Arrived
It is significant that the protagonist of change in the movie Pleasantville would be a young male, Bud (David). This is in keeping with legends of old where a young prince comes bearing the new knowledge. Yet in postmodern style, wonderfully so, he is drawn only reluctantly into this role, and we see that it is women who are the real instigators, the least threatened by change. At first, David/Bud opposes his sister and argues for the status quo, maintaining that his sister, who is actually the first one to “break the rules” And thereby to bring color to the town, must abide by the script.
The Prince in Exile
The Prince is schooled in tradition
The “young prince” knows the rules well. This fits with legend, where the new ways are brought by a prince who is not ignorant of tradition; in fact the prince is the one who has excelled in training in traditional ways.1
In the movie, David is in fact a Pleasantville trivia whiz. He knows exactly the way things are supposed to unravel, the way events are supposed to go.
The Prince is reluctant to break with tradition
So when his sister first introduces color by introducing sex, he admonishes her. And when he also is tempted to a change in the “script,” he refuses at first. This is when Bud is offered homemade cookies by the young woman who would be his romantic partner. He refuses because he knows that, according to script, it is another young man who is supposed to get the cookies and end up with that particular girl. Despite his attraction for the young woman, his strong sense of maintaining the status quo, not rocking the boat, causes him to try to refuse the cookies. It takes a great deal of forcefulness on the young woman’s part to get him, reluctantly, to accept the cookies that he actually does want. So, again, it is a young, significantly “colorized,” woman who tempts him into a change in the script.
The Prince brings change, without realizing it, just being himself
It is not that the young man does not have the makeup for accepting change. In fact, even before his sister blatantly brings about change, and therefore color, by rebelliously introducing sex, he has already sown the seeds of change, although unconsciously, when he suggests to his boss, Mister Johnson, that he think for himself, instead of following a rigid script. This he does unconsciously and out of selfish motives in that he by nature is different from the character he is supposed to portray and so he does not play his role exactly as it is “supposed” to be played. Specifically, because he is not really the robot character he has replaced, he ends up being late for his job — which heretofore was a totally unheard of event.
Cultural Rebirth
It is also significant that it is the young that are the first ones in the town to become “colored.”
The Hundredth Monkey
As in the hundredth monkey phenomenon, it is first the young, especially females, who are open to new experiences, ways, and ideas. Then it is adult females — in this movie exemplified by Betty Parker, the mother of Bud and Mary Sue — who are next to consider alternatives and new ways. Adult males are the last to turn to color, but among them it is the sensitive of heart, exemplified by the artist/soda-jerk character, Mister Johnson, who “turn on” initially.
Good Old Boys, the Last to Learn
Last to become colorized — that is to say, to be open to change and thinking for oneself — are the “authorities” of the town, in this instance, those on the Chamber of Commerce. And among these the most recalcitrant of all is their leader, Big Bob, played by J. T. Walsh, in his final film role before his passing away. Though Big Bob displays a pleasing and affable persona on the surface — for this read “good old boy” — there is an insidious Hitleresque quality to him which provides the suspense at the climax of the movie where he presides over the fate of the artist, Mister Johnson, and the “young prince,” David/Bud.
“Conservative Backlash”
The events preceding the trial included mob actions, as in a book burning, the attack and destruction of the malt shop, and the cornering, physical intimidation, and physical attack of “coloreds” by gangs. These are images common to modern times which has seen these sorts of events in actuality occurring in the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam-War movements, and in recent decades in democracy and freedom uprisings in the Middle East, America, Turkey, Brazil, and throughout the world in Occupy and BLM movements.
With the support of the Chamber of Commerce, we know Big Bob has the power to do whatever he will with the two on trial. Hence, the fate of the prisoners is imagined to include the ultimate penalty of death. Indeed, this ominous possibility is promoted by the actions of the soda-jerk artist who, at the trial, pitifully pleads for a compromise. This is pitiful since we know that his art is his life, that it is the one thing that has truly enriched his life and made it worth living.
Sitting at the Lunch Counter
We know of its importance in that, even after the attack on his malt shop, the artist defied the “rules” laid down by the town’s authorities, which outlawed art and color, by working with the Prince throughout the night to produce a colorful mural on the outside wall of his shop depicting the current events of the town and the feelings swirling about inside its residents.
This rebellious act by the artist is reminiscent of antiwar demonstrators, who got fired upon at Kent State; of civil rights demonstrators, who police attacked with dogs; of Tiananmen Square demonstrators, who were rolled over by tanks, shot, and killed; of Black Lives Matters protesters, who were tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and plowed into with cars; and most defiant of all the courageous men and women of the Middle East risking their lives for freedom, and the Occupy and Antifa heroes throughout the world putting their bodies in front of, arguably, the most dire, widespread fascism ever to exist.
Since this character, recently so courageously defiant, is intimidated into pleading for a compromise in which he would be willing to use only certain colors or where he would submit for approval by the Chamber’s leader his ideas for painting beforehand — a compromise which his body language and facial expressions show, wonderfully acted by Jeff Daniels, is one near up against the very death of his soul — we know he fears for the loss of his physical life.
“Just Sign This Confession”
The compromise is too much like the compromises we have witnessed being offered and come to expect being offered to some of the Tiananmen Square and other political prisoners of recent times wherein they are required to do something along the lines of admitting their guilt, apologizing to the State for the trouble they have caused it, and promising to never again to engage in such activities … and only in the most benevolent of circumstances being allowed to continue anything like their former activities; yet, if so, only under the supervision and with the approval of authorities with veto power over their proposed actions.
The Religious Wrong
So Big Bob and the Chamber of Commerce represent in the current social framework the Religious Right — sometimes referred to as the “religious wrong” and sometimes about which it is noted that the Religious Right is neither. Big Bob’s Chamber of Commerce represents MAGAts, Trumpers, Republicans, Tea Partiers, and those in general in our society who have succumbed to the rewards and threats of the World War Two Generation, and their Fifties Gen/ Gen X clones. They are the ones induced to live a regimented, robot-like, unfeeling, passionless life; to become one of J. D. Salinger’s “phonies”; to abide by outdated and misconstrued idea of “family values”; and above all to “behave” and not do anything to rock the boat of the status quo which might threaten the privileges of those currently enjoying power and wealth handed down, mostly, by heredity.
Civil Rights Movement
It is highly significant that in the courtroom scene the “colored” townsfolk would be sitting in the balcony, above the black-and-white men. One might say this represents their status as being an elevated state, something to aspire to, and yet not on the level where matters are decided. But even more so, this scene is important in that it is a near exact replication of the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, wherein the balcony of the courtroom is filled with African Americans — another kind of “colored.” This makes it clear that when the movie is dealing with the conflict between the adult males of the town and the “colored” it is referring to the Civil Rights movement.
Cultural Rebirth Aborted
The events in China’s Tiananmen Square more than thirty years ago so affected and still affects some of us here in America because we know at some level we have experienced it before.
The American Tiananmen Square
What happened in China three decades ago is so much like what happened in the U.S. five decades ago, somewhat less graphically, around the Vietnam War demonstrations. Let me explain.
Standing before tanks, flowers in barrels
For one thing, the images of the demonstrations in China, for example, the lone man standing in front of the tank, were so like those of Sixties demonstrations, as in Sixties youth blocking the paths of soldiers and placing flowers in their gun barrels.
Revenge of the octogenarians
And the result of both was the same: In both cases the opposition, the youth movement, crushed — violently in China, subtly and behind the scenes in the US — at the command of an octogenarian generation, clinging desperately to power as much as to their waning physical frames.
The King Won’t Die
Assassinations — character and otherwise
We see the same pattern of violent versus subtle played out in the US as well where we no longer assassinate our president as we did with JFK, we character assassinate instead, as we did with Bill Clinton. Which the Tea Party and the wealthy Right tried to manufacture against Obama; he was called rich and elitist. The Filthy Rich, in collusion with Russia, aimed their weapons, as well, against Hillary Clinton who received all the ridicule and vicious slander imaginable … and oh, let us not forget those emails *guffaw*.
And currently the lie-making machine on the Right is pumping out propaganda against Joe Biden who also — though he had been the poorest person in the Senate and who famously took the train to and from Washington every day — has been charged with making money hand over fist, somehow. In some imaginary world. We see in this Trump era, with Russian misinformation and slander allowed to be flooding our social media, there is not a second thought given about making up the most outrageous charges — pedophilia in pizza store basements that don’t exist, for example.2
One might say that, in America, the WWII generation and its protégés have gotten more finesse, with practice, in its beating back sociocultural change not to their liking using lies and manufactured untruths and that the Chinese geriatric set didn’t have as much practice with it.
The King refuses to die
Nevertheless, the results in both countries are the same. They involve the ultimate victory of sociocultural change in both instances being delayed until the dying off of an elderly generation in power — a generation refusing to die or hand over the controls at the proper time like the generations before them. Simply, the king won’t die!
Time is running out
Time is running out for the octogenarians and ninety-somethings on either side of the Pacific.
The expected, supposedly inevitable defeat of the WWII Generation — their dying off — is portrayed in Pleasantville by Big Bob, head of the Chamber of Commerce, ending up fleeing the scene in the courtroom. Strange coincidence, the actor actually died after making this film. There are many ways his defeat could have been played out in the movie. I think it is highly significant that he runs away, never to be seen again, just as in the current context the dying off of the WWII and Fifties Generations is a literal leaving of the scene, not an outright defeat or some other means of change of power.
Yet has the WWII Generation actually left the scene? In the next chapter we will look at how the WWII Gen kept themselves alive longer than any other generation and how they used that longevity to buy and clone their ideas into the generations following them. In fact, the way the media portrays it, the world that the WWII Generation created, as manifested in the Fifties — the Fifties style of culture — is the one against which all happenings are to be measured. The Fifties, we are led to believe through incessant repetition, is what is “normal.” This is the narrative the money of the Fifties and WWII Gens has managed to embed in media minds, as networks continue to broadcast the same naïve and silly sitcoms from the Fifties and early Sixties to new generations.
So this looking to a former time for values is a repudiation of all generations after who grew up in different times and who have evolved along with an evolving cultural and global environment. This refusal to “die,” to turn over the reins of society to younger generations, is indeed an abomination. It represents the WWII and Fifties Gens worldviews being propped up mechanically, though the sand beneath their beliefs is continually washed away. This tension between obsolete old ideas that refuse to die and new ones needed for progress and survival is what we look at next. A Culture War rages.
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A Culture War Rages:
Monsters Never Really Die in Horror Flicks … The King on Life Support and The Consequences of an Abomination
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[Quotes/highlights:] “We saw the beginnings of cultural enlightening and progress during Clinton’s term in the Nineties. In retrospect it was a colorful time; it was an enthusiastic time.”
“…the installment of the W represented a resurgence, in typical Culture War style, of the dominance of WWII-type oppression and manipulation of the masses.”
“It was the abortion of the changing of the cultural guard that was naturally occurring. It was the King propped up mechanically, robot-like carrying out the dictums of those who once lived but were no more. It was an abomination of the natural order.”
“Like the endings of horror flicks, which leave always a hint or part of the monster living on somehow, thus setting up a possible sequel, the WWII Generation left behind part of itself in the form of the Eighties Generation clones and the Fifties Generation. And these folks aren’t going away any time soon! They are here in Trump and his MAGAts; they are here in Republicans; they are here in the Tea Party; they are here in the wealthy Right; they are here in the ownership and guiding principles of the mainstream media, now become principal propagandists of the American patriarchy — the ‘filthy rich.’”
“…we saw the rise of the Donald, pushed by his collusion with Russia. This set up a four-year struggle in America, as Trump went about dismantling the democratic norms of our society and the simple rules of fairness in his subjugation to the will of Russia’s Putin. He went so far as to steal nuclear codes and documents, and lists of our spies working in other countries, which for all we know, went into foreign hands, in exchange for some kind of financial or other benefit”
“In the second and third decades of the Twenty-First Century, it is the same old Culture War/Class War begun in the Sixties, brought to furious and fiery life. This is what one could expect of a struggle suppressed by decades of domination by untruths would be, as it emerges even angrier for having to wait”
“…after everyone has experienced color there is no semblance among them of a wish to return to a black-and-white world.
“In the same way, we might hope that as our society turns more and more away from war-making, selfishness, race- and sexism, ecological destruction, misogyny — and all the other WWII Generation evils left behind — it will resist that much more strongly their reinstatement by reactionary forces. We can hope that as we move more and more toward economic prosperity, peacekeeping, loving our children and having honest relationships, and the reclaiming of our natural environment and ecological balance, there will be fewer and fewer who will wish to turn back the times to the unreal black-and-white world of the ‘Blue Meanies.’”
“We witnessed such progressive fervor in the phenomenal outpouring of support for Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. Indeed, polls at the time, in 2016, had Sanders winning in a hypothetical matchup with Trump. We have witnessed ‘blue waves’ in both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. Which 2020 election, incidentally, saw the most votes ever for a Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.
Currently, the overturning of Roe V. Wade has stimulated torrents of support for Democrats in primaries and other bellwether elections. The results of the referendum on abortion rights, which was won handily — by a whopping twenty percentage points — in red state Kansas by pro-choice forces, comes to mind. We can conclude that the majority of Americans want to go forward into a better future, not regress into a sugar-coated version of a dismal 1950s past.”
“Sixties Generation values are infectious because they offer so much hope.”
“Black political power is what got Biden the nomination and sealed his win over Trump in 2020. We witness Blacks continuing to flex their muscles in a phenomenal surge of African-American candidates in 2022 for the highest positions in Congress and government in general.”
“…the young will always be idealistic if they are shown any ideals, which is what we can expect the Sixties Generation to be doing for them, as Boomers continue taking their seats in the Wise Elders section of the parliament of sociocultural creation. “
“…the current frenzied attack from the Right — beginning with the Tea Party rebellion and continuing in the MAGAt support for treasonous Trump — can be seen as a desperate last-ditch battle in a war they will, depending on the results of the 2022 midterms this year, likely and inevitably lose.”
“The bad news is that, similar to the way the Republicans cleaned out the Treasury and left huge deficits and several wars on the desk of the incoming Democratic administration in 2009, thus hobbling it before it began, we have no idea how great will be the destruction left behind from these Culture-War waging, albeit waning, authoritarians in the current context.”
“With their gains in stealing from all classes of society below them in their last dying clingings of a dying old guard, a king who simply won’t die, the abominably wealthy are heavy with gold.”
“ These disgustingly greedy Controllers of our culture have the means to buy much more influence than their numbers.“
“The multitudes are growing in size against these filthy rich regressives. Yet, with their wealth and with the technology and science available now multiplying further their abilities, their capacity to control the minds of much of the population is magnified beyond anything previously and beyond anyone’s abilities to calculate or foresee.”
“…despite the trends toward a natural evolution like we have seen in the past, we might witness a strange aberration — a ‘zombie apocalypse’ created out of the thinking of a time long gone comprised of sick ghostly fantasies of a black-and-white golden age that never was.”
“…despite the scientific and technological monkey wrenches that might permanently upset a natural order of progression, it is more likely that things will work out as they have most of the time than that we will see an aberrant development. There is, after all, at least as much technology and science catalyzing progressive change as that being wielded by the Controllers to mesmerize and better control us.
“With so much change needed, it is easy to forget how much has changed for the positive since the Sixties.”
“…with color and, by inference, imagination and thinking for oneself, Pleasantville has become part of a larger world, one in which Pleasantville citizens can participate and in which they can travel and take up residence. This represents the global village, the coming together of the interests of all nations in a multicultural world, and the connection of all minds and hearts by means of the Internet and intercultural travel and tourism. The global economy will play a positive role, too. Though on its downside, such international trade contributes to the exploitation of resource-providing nations and the decimation of the environment, we see, as for example in the worldwide economic sanctions against Russia after its invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, that the global economy can also be used as a lever for good, for peace, and as a guard rail for wayward nations.
“Perhaps most of all, this connection to a larger world represents those factors of modern telecommunications and travel that have made the world open to the eyes of all, which is the real reason the Iron Curtain fell, the real reason apartheid was overthrown, the real reason democratic revolution arose to the Middle East and may yet be causative in bringing democracy to places like China and Iran. This, despite their oppressive propped-up elder-archies, their kings who will not die, their frozen non-renewing social processes.”
“…the most potent analogy of all: the World Wide Web, bringing together all peoples of the world into a collective consciousness sharing ideas and together shaping a world, not just a neighborhood, with true democratization of information. While there are attempts by the wealthy — Elon Musk’s current bid to take over Twitter, for example — to control even the information flow on the internet, it is largely uncontrollable by any wealthy elite of any country or any generation.”
“…it is a complete unknown what happens if Musk’s plan to allow paid trolls undeterredly to overwhelm the Internet with misinformation and conspiracy theories. With the wealth on their side pushing such a flood of dark and hateful ‘journalism,’ it is debatable what happens to the truth under those conditions. I confess this is one corner of it all into which I am completely unable to see.”
“…what we might next expect: The only thing we know for sure is that what is coming will be different from anything we have known.”
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[Chapter 13 text begins:] With these factors in mind, what have we experienced in the last two decades, as the Sixties Generation finally got its turn at the wheel?
America Since Its “Pleasantville”
As expected, it was at first quite different from what the WWII Generation had been serving up during its forty-plus years’ reign.
The Nineties and Clinton
We saw the beginnings of cultural enlightening and progress during Clinton’s term in the Nineties. In retrospect it was a colorful time; it was an enthusiastic time. In comparison to today, it could even be considered peaceful. It was certainly naïve and childlike in many ways, as evidenced by the sitcoms, as, for example, Seinfeld.
The Nineties were bookmarked between the economic wreckage left by World War II Gen members, Reagan and G. H. W. Bush, and their voodoo economics throwing money at the rich leading to a huge recession and a financial scandal — the S & L Scandal — that involved, for that time, an extraordinary price tag for the country. The other end was the assignment by the Supreme Court of the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush over Al Gore — a battle of a Sixties Generation member against a WWII Generation paid-for concoction, the W.
A culture war raged
In between those two markers a war was waged, a culture war, whose battles — economics, abortion, sexuality, cultural expression, war/peace, child abuse, spouse abuse; and whose personalities — Clinton, Gingrich, Lewinsky, OJ Simpson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Brown, Ross Perot — were detailed and rehashed endlessly via the daily news mills.
The 2000s and the W
At the end, the installment of the W represented a resurgence, in typical Culture War style, of the dominance of WWII-type oppression and manipulation of the masses.
The King Propped Up Mechanically
It was the abortion of the changing of the cultural guard that was naturally occurring. It was the King propped up mechanically, robot-like carrying out the dictums of those who once lived but were no more. It was an abomination of the natural order.
The consequences of an abomination
And its consequences during the first decade of the Twenty-First Century were exactly what would be expected from an abomination like that.
Monsters don’t really die in horror flicks
Like the endings of horror flicks, which leave always a hint or part of the monster living on somehow, thus setting up a possible sequel, the WWII Generation left behind part of itself in the form of the Eighties Generation clones and the Fifties Generation. And these folks aren’t going away any time soon! They are here in Trump and his MAGAts; they are here in Republicans; they are here in the Tea Party; they are here in the wealthy Right; they are here in the ownership and guiding principles of the mainstream media, now become principal propagandists of the American patriarchy — the “filthy rich”.
Millennium’s Second and Third Decades — Good News, Bad News, and Hope
During the second decade of the new millennium, the Culture War erupted in Nineties fashion.
Same Old Culture War
The entire arsenal of lies and defamation used by our cultural regressives against Bill Clinton were targeted this time at Barrack Obama. Additionally, the Wisconsin-style anti-cutback, pro-union uprisings and the worldwide Occupy phenomenon brought the lingering issues into the open in a style not much different from the rebellious Sixties.
Later in that decade we saw the rise of the Donald, pushed by his collusion with Russia. This set up a four-year struggle in America, as Trump went about dismantling the democratic norms of our society and the simple rules of fairness in his subjugation to the will of Russia’s Putin. He went so far as to steal nuclear codes and documents, and lists of our spies working in other countries, which for all we know, went into foreign hands, in exchange for some kind of financial or other benefit. For acts that in the past would have gotten him executed — treason, the stealing and selling of nuclear codes and documents, the stealing and selling of lists of U.S. intelligence operatives to our enemies1 — Donald Trump, with the assistance of a truly “Deep State,” continues to walk free.
I thought I woke up to the corruption of our information systems back in 1969, when I saw how the antiwar movement was lied about and defamed. Yet this incidence of a former president getting away with the highest crimes imaginable — one that could lead to worldwide nuclear destruction and to the murder of American spies1 — has me clear-eyed at how pervasive is the control of the system … how ludicrous is the notion we are a nation of laws, not “men” … how silly is the statement that in the U.S. no one is above the law.
This overwhelming and entrenched hegemony by the wealthy of the world over all cultural systems we in the Sixties termed the establishment. Though Deep State is a term used by Righties and directed at the normal institutions of our government — in the typical style of MAGAts calling out that others are doing what indeed they are doing — we see without question how some kind of establishment or Deep State, with a conservative-reactionary agenda benefiting the super-rich, is in place. I prefer we use the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” — a term made famous by Hillary Clinton in the Nineties — for it accurately indicates the perpetrators and methods of our continuing Twenty-First Century unease.
In the second and third decades of the Twenty-First Century, it is the same old Culture War/Class War begun in the Sixties, brought to furious and fiery life. This is what one could expect of a struggle suppressed by decades of domination by untruths would be, as it emerges even angrier for having to wait.
Hopeful News
However much we cannot know the future, and despite the seeds of WWII Generation values left incubating in the minds of Eighties and Fifties Generation members and emerging under red MAGA and tea-bag hats, we can hope that the progressive vision of Pleasantville will eventually hold out.
People fight harder to keep what they have … for good things they’ve experienced.
In the movie, Pleasantville, after everyone has experienced color there is no semblance among them of a wish to return to a black-and-white world.
In the same way, we might hope that as our society turns more and more away from war-making, selfishness, race- and sexism, ecological destruction, misogyny — and all the other WWII Generation evils left behind — it will resist that much more strongly their reinstatement by reactionary forces. We can hope that as we move more and more toward economic prosperity, peacekeeping, loving our children and having honest relationships, and the reclaiming of our natural environment and ecological balance, there will be fewer and fewer who will wish to turn back the times to the unreal black-and-white world of the “Blue Meanies.
Reason for hope
We see evidence of this progressive evolution in both the elections of Obama and the high popular ratings for him while he was in office.
Earlier we observed it in the strong support for Bill Clinton even during the assassination attempts on his character throughout his terms. I might mention again that though the media lambasted Clinton endlessly over a mere sexual act — note the difference between the two parties’ crimes, Republican treason on a massive scale versus a Democratic blowjob — still Clinton maintained his popularity. In fact, polls at the time showed him increasing his job approval rating during the time of the impeachment and that two-thirds of the population did not want him impeached. It was clear that the entire brouhaha was another example of the Republican “Deep State” … “establishment” … “vast right-wing conspiracy” … punishing its liberal opponents for political reasons, thereby strengthening their hegemony over all major societal institutions. Yet, again, doing it against the will of the people.
Forward-leaning views continued to gain ground within the American collective consciousness into the second decade of the Millennium. We witnessed such progressive fervor in the phenomenal outpouring of support for Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. Indeed, polls at the time, in 2016, had Sanders winning in a hypothetical matchup with Trump. We have witnessed “blue waves” in both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. Which 2020 election, incidentally, saw the most votes ever for a Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.
Currently, the overturning of Roe V. Wade has stimulated torrents of support for Democrats in primaries and other bellwether elections. The results of the referendum on abortion rights, which was won handily — by a whopping twenty percentage points — in red state Kansas by pro-choice forces, comes to mind. We can conclude that the majority of Americans want to go forward into a better future, not regress into a sugar-coated version of a dismal 1950s past.
People of hope
The approval ratings of these Sixties-side-of-the-Culture-War Presidents — Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, and Joe Biden — certainly is not composed only of Baby-Boomers. Sixties Generation values are infectious because they offer so much hope. African-Americans of all ages supported Clinton overwhelmingly; of course they support Obama; and we have witnessed that Black political power is what got Biden the nomination and sealed his win over Trump in 2020. We witness Blacks continuing to flex their muscles in a phenomenal surge of African-American candidates in 2022 for the highest positions in Congress and government in general. We can certainly deduce that African Americans and people of color in general would not wish a return to the black-and-white world that included discrimination and violence against them.
Women of all ages, for the same reasons, would not be expected to wish a return to a less individualistic status, to a subservient state. We can expect their opposition to the Supreme Court decision allowing the banning of abortion — the overturning of Roe V. Wade in July 2022 — to continue undiminished. Especially so, since the media will continue to report on abominations involving pregnant women being forced to carry to term babies resulting from rape and incest; involving murder charges being brought against abortion seekers, even if they do it in a state where it is legal; involving vigilantes being handsomely rewarded for turning in the names of women who have received abortions, who are then prosecuted as murderers; and involving medical complications and possibly the death of women who are denied medical care for nonviable pregnancies, which are then forced to continue.
Finally, the young will always be idealistic if they are shown any ideals, which is what we can expect the Sixties Generation to be doing for them, as Boomers continue taking their seats in the Wise Elders section of the parliament of sociocultural creation.
Last ditch battle
We have seen examples of this change all around us. In fact the current frenzied attack from the Right — beginning with the Tea Party rebellion and continuing in the MAGAt support for treasonous Trump — can be seen as a desperate last-ditch battle in a war they will, depending on the results of the 2022 midterms this year, likely and inevitably lose. That is the good news.
Bad News
How bad the aftermath, the devastation left behind
The bad news is that, similar to the way the Republicans cleaned out the Treasury and left huge deficits and several wars on the desk of the incoming Democratic administration in 2009, thus hobbling it before it began, we have no idea how great will be the destruction left behind from these Culture-War waging, albeit waning, authoritarians in the current context.
Heavy with gold
With gains by the Filthy Rich in stealing from all classes of society below them in their last dying clingings of a dying old guard, a king who simply won’t die, the abominably wealthy are heavy with gold. They received trillion-dollar bailouts and subsidies under George W. Bush; under Barrack Obama, despite his opposition; and massively through the criminal largess of Donald Trump. These disgustingly greedy Controllers of our culture have the means to buy much more influence than their numbers.
Their power is magnified
The multitudes are growing in size against these filthy rich regressives. Yet, with their wealth and with the technology and science available now multiplying further their abilities, their capacity to control the minds of much of the population is magnified beyond anything previously and beyond anyone’s abilities to calculate or foresee.
Zombie apocalypse?
So despite the trends toward a natural evolution like we have seen in the past, we might witness a strange aberration — a “zombie apocalypse” created out of the thinking of a time long gone comprised of sick ghostly fantasies of a black-and-white golden age that never was. Such things have happened before; cultures have indeed stagnated for hundreds and even thousands of years. The Middle Ages is one such example of stagnation beneath an oppressive deathly authority that would never renew, which lasted for hundreds of years.
Still, despite the scientific and technological monkey wrenches that might permanently upset a natural order of progression, it is more likely that things will work out as they have most of the time than that we will see an aberrant development. There is, after all, at least as much technology and science catalyzing progressive change as that being wielded by the Controllers to mesmerize and better control us.
The Positive … Good News?
The evidence for a natural development is there for all with eyes to see. With so much change needed, it is easy to forget how much has changed for the positive since the Sixties. Still, with no inclination to see it, no amount of listing of the evidence will bring them into view.
What might be helpful, though, is to note some other analogies from the movie Pleasantville which can provide insight as to what may be on the horizon or at least be considered food for speculation:
It takes a village; we are a global village
Whereas the black-and-white Pleasantville ends at the town’s borders and turns round again to the center of town, the post-color Pleasantville roads continue going, connecting Pleasantville with the rest of the world. Thus, with color and, by inference, imagination and thinking for oneself, Pleasantville has become part of a larger world, one in which Pleasantville citizens can participate and in which they can travel and take up residence. This represents the global village, the coming together of the interests of all nations in a multicultural world, and the connection of all minds and hearts by means of the Internet and intercultural travel and tourism. The global economy will play a positive role, too. Though on its downside, such international trade contributes to the exploitation of resource-providing nations and the decimation of the environment, we see, as for example in the worldwide economic sanctions against Russia after its invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, that the global economy can also be used as a lever for good, for peace, and as a guard rail for wayward nations.
We have what really brings down tyrants — the power of individuals is also magnified by technology
Perhaps most of all, this connection to a larger world represents those factors of modern telecommunications and travel that have made the world open to the eyes of all, which is the real reason the Iron Curtain fell, the real reason apartheid was overthrown, the real reason democratic revolution arose to the Middle East and may yet be causative in bringing democracy to places like China and Iran. This, despite their oppressive propped-up elder-archies, their kings who will not die, their frozen non-renewing social processes.
The W’s legacy finally overthrown by the WWW?
And the most potent analogy of all: the World Wide Web, bringing together all peoples of the world into a collective consciousness sharing ideas and together shaping a world, not just a neighborhood, with true democratization of information. While there are attempts by the wealthy — Elon Musk’s current bid to take over Twitter, for example — to control even the information flow on the internet, it is largely uncontrollable by any wealthy elite of any country or any generation.
It would require quite a change of our established electronic infrastructure to take away that free exchange of information, worldwide. Although it is a complete unknown what happens if Musk’s plan to allow paid trolls undeterredly to overwhelm the Internet with misinformation and conspiracy theories. With the wealth on their side pushing such a flood of dark and hateful “journalism,” it is debatable what happens to the truth under those conditions. I confess this is one corner of it all into which I am completely unable to see.
Stay Tuned
Finally, the image at the end of Pleasantville is the most apt for what we might next expect: The only thing we know for sure is that what is coming will be different from anything we have known.
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PART FOUR
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Class War — The Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”
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14
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Truth and Liars:
“Obvious Truths” (Actual Untruths) Were Employed Together with an Exact and Strategic Use of Misinformation
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[Quotes/highlights:] “We see the fifty-year invisible ‘family’ revealed — the ‘community’ that surrounded all Americans and affected every aspect of their lives, including, and intentionally, the basic components of one’s personality and the erosion of reason, Soul, and independent thought or action.”
“These ‘obvious truths’ were employed together with an exact and strategic use of misinformation….”
“The intended goal was the castration of the power of all Americans….”
“What was desired was an American personality splintered and disintegrated and desperate for something however irrational to which to cling.”
“In contrast to the former American personality, this campaign by an American, and increasingly global, elite worked to create an apathetic, neutered American easily manipulated to the ends of wealthy overseers.”
“…only because of increasingly cocky and greedy acts and extreme over-reaching ‘in broad daylight,’ before the entire world, did this malevolent surround become visible.”
“…the Filthy Rich had an absolute certainty of their success because of their unmitigated power. What is also evident is the absolute inability of the Filthy Rich … which was the shocking thing they’d carelessly let out and therefore displayed to the World … the absolute inability of the Republicans and the Filthy Rich to actually notice — let alone view or act towards — Americans as anything even living or having sentient ability, let alone as humans, people, or individuals.”
[Chapter 14 text begins:] In Part Four of Culture War, Class War (2022) we look at how the Big Lie continued in the past five decades of America. We delve more deeply into the Class War that has been behind the Culture War as laid out in Parts One, Two, and Three. We see the fifty-year invisible “family” revealed — the “community” that surrounded all Americans and affected every aspect of their lives, including, and intentionally, the basic components of one’s personality and the erosion of reason, Soul, and independent thought or action.
“Obvious Truths”
Part Four of Culture War, Class War, this part on “Obvious Truths,” delineates the history of the American Republican Party’s incredibly disciplined, relentlessly persistent, and amazingly cohesive — seemingly coordinated — fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactor corporations and the Filthy Rich, through totally concocted untruths. These falsehoods were introduced carefully, slowly, and therefore invisibly, over time, one-by-one with persistent, relentless repetition replacing reason or rational persuasion; along with a coordinated campaign whose goal was the creation of an American Mind eroded of rationality and confused and made fertile and desperately receptive to these fabrications seamlessly portrayed as truths.
These “obvious truths” were employed together with an exact and strategic use of misinformation precisely targeted and measured for the achievement of specific ends. These were combined with their campaign to physically and financially weaken the American public through the simultaneous, and equally slow, meticulous, and perfectly coordinated introduction of policies, which though not invisible were cleverly packaged and perfectly timed to confuse the obvious step-by-step and year-by-year connections of these policies with their cumulative, increasingly successful results.
The intended goal was the castration of the power of all Americans except for the Filthy Rich and the Republicans in government, their lackeyed public faces. Coincident with this goal, what was sought were the lessening of Americans’ power to act constructively to alleviate even their clearly felt and increasing suffering; the slow but comprehensive elimination of rational thought and ability to reason in the American Mind; and the creation of an American consciousness clouded and afog in confusion and thus forgetful of its past as a point of comparison.
What was desired was an American personality splintered and disintegrated and desperate for something however irrational to which to cling. Along with such a fractured and weakened psyche, the campaign sought the dismantling of any solidarity of Americans on any large scale. They reasoned this disunity of purpose would be the natural consequence of the average person’s confused state and its inability to discern indisputable aspects of reality which, otherwise and in times prior to the campaign, would have been obvious organizing principles giving rise to passionate resistance.
In the past, passionate engagement in action to change one’s circumstances could occur because of the former unconfused clarity in witnessing big events and pervasive, blatant, and universal patterns of change and making the obvious and easy correct interpretations. This clarity created conviction in one’s beliefs, rooted in first-hand observation. and in the past these convictions were reinforced virtually universally by the great majority of Americans, who also witnessed the obvious same things and made the apparent and doubtless interpretations that cried out from them.
In contrast to the former American personality, this campaign by an American, and increasingly global, elite worked to create an apathetic, neutered American easily manipulated to the ends of wealthy overseers.
Our Invisible “Family”
This Part of Culture War, Class War reveals the fifty-year invisible family and community that surrounded all Americans and affected every aspect of their lives, including, and intentionally, the basic components of one’s personality through the unrelenting batterings upon reason, Soul, and independent thought or action.
I explain how only because of increasingly cocky and greedy acts and extreme over-reaching “in broad daylight,” before the entire world, did this malevolent surround become visible. These brutish and thievish over-reaches displayed an incredible disregard for, disrespect of, indeed, an actual literal inability of the Filthy Rich and their Republican puppets to see American People, who were the recipients of these attacks.
Together these reveals — displayed unintentionally however blatantly and unknowingly by the Republicans and the “Filthy Rich” … and before the entire world — disclosed to the masses of Americans some “cracks,” “stains,” or textures in the “dome” of unreality they’d existed in, which had made them blind to Reality itself, and had kept them in a near zombie-like dream reality.
As this awakening continued, some began remembering events, the memories of which had been “bleached” out of awareness until just then, and then with remembering they realized how they had been trained like animals their entire lives for the uses, whatever they would be, of the “Filthy Rich,” and been trained then to forget that.
It is clear that the Filthy Rich had an absolute certainty of their success because of their unmitigated power. What is also evident is the absolute inability of the Filthy Rich … which was the shocking thing they’d carelessly let out and therefore displayed to the World … the absolute inability of the Republicans and the Filthy Rich to actually notice — let alone view or act towards — Americans as anything even living or having sentient ability, let alone as humans, people, or individuals.
And as for the term “fellow Americans” often employed by Rich-publican politicos in addressing the masses — to make it seem as if you are one of them, or they are one of you — if that thought even crossed your mind for a second as being anything but a device, you are not fully appreciating just how literally I mean for my words to be taken. You may very well, in fact, be deeply dreaming and have missed the crack in the dream state that had shone the light in the eyes of a sufficiently large segment of the world population as to cause them to come out of trance and begin to untie their formerly invisible bonds, so that they could try looking around.
Which led to the realization of the reality that had been blocked from view and to the beginnings of investigations into the real truths of their existence. Which led to this series of expositions, among others, delineating the actual, formerly invisible profile of the actual actors in Americans’ lives and their processes of control. Which investigations revealed as well the things in ordinary people’s lives that were determined for them by the “Filthies,” though ordinary folks thought they had been making decisions for themselves.
And the last aspect of this series delineates the real factors in our lives and the outlines of the real intentions for us these puppet masters have had, and have even now in mind.
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15
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Creating a Totalitarian Mind:
Recipe for The Matrix: Misinformation, Repetition, Impoverishment
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Money — as arrayed against music, passion, and social movements — is especially more powerful in a situation where the people have been put in financial jeopardy because of the prosperity of the rich. As an aside, I remember a time in America’s past when people were more prosperous and confident about their abilities to manage their lives. I do not believe it is a coincidence that in those days money wielded by the wealthy had less power to persuade and people were less easily bought than today.”
“I was drawn to looking into those commonly accepted truisms — truth-sounding but not true; let us call them ‘obvious truths.’ Not true but sounding true: Think of how correct it must have sounded at one time to hear that the Earth is flat. So, an ‘obvious truth’ is something unthinkingly accepted as true but is not actually true when thought about or looked into.”
“These untruthy truisms arise out of the American Republicans’ disciplined, relentless, persistent, cohesive fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactor corporations and the ‘filthy rich’ through totally concocted untruths, which are introduced carefully, slowly and therefore invisibly, over time….”
“These untruths are introduced carefully, slowly and therefore invisibly, over time, one by one, with persistent, relentless repetition replacing reason or rational persuasion, as part of a coordinated comprehensive campaign whose goal is the creation of an American mind eroded of rationality and confused and made fertile and desperately receptive to these fabrications of the Republicans seamlessly portrayed as truths.”
“The Republicans’ goal, to be precisely and inexorably attained, is the creation of an American mind eroded of rationality and confused. And this mind is to be shepherded by the exact and strategic use of misinformation specifically targeted and measured for the achievement of specific ends. This seeding of minds is to work dialectically with their campaign to physically and financially weaken the American public with the simultaneous and equally slow and meticulous and precisely timed introduction of policies….”
“This introduction of policies, which though not invisible are cleverly packaged, is to be perfectly timed to confuse the obvious step-by-step, year-by-year connections of these policies and their cumulative increasingly successful results.”
“These results are the castration of the American … of Americans in general — except for the Filthy Rich and the Republican leadership which are their lackey public faces. So, the intent of this long campaign, employing ‘obvious truths’ as munitions, is the crippling of Americans’ power in particular to resist even the inexorable increase in the clearly felt suffering heaped upon them as these years went by.”
“…what we have is Americans’ power monkey wrenched through policies directed at them and sustained by ‘obvious truths’ pushed by Republicans whose purpose is to diminish people, to reduce their power, and ultimately to bring them down financially while raising the wealthies higher.”
“These specific objectives are also to be brought to fruition through a massively funded, all inclusive, and strategically targeted campaign to financially weaken the American public through incremental changes in national fiscal policy as well as — note this — in national culture. National policy changes are to be achieved through the simultaneous and equally slow, meticulous, and precisely timed introduction of policy initiatives. Though these national initiatives could not be invisible, they are to be cleverly packaged as well as sneakily introduced and are to be perfectly timed to confuse the obvious step-by-step, year-by-year connections of these policies and their cumulative, increasingly successful results.”
“…those sought for results include the emasculation of the average American through sabotage of her or his powers to act in an effective way in any and all aspects of their lives. To be achieved at the same time is the fortification of the power and wealth of the Filthy Rich puppeteers and their lackey public faces in the Republican Party.”
“Instrumental in strengthening the wealthy class of insidious directors is the weakening of the remainder of the population’s abilities. And in particular and ultimately the intention is to cobble the ordinary person’s power to get out from under or to alleviate for very long the inexorable increase in their clearly felt suffering as the years go by. For this suffering and the helplessness about it is crucial to the directors’ success.”
“…the key to all this being brought about is the creation of an American consciousness clouded in fog and confusion and thus forgetful of its past as a point of comparison. In this way splintered … we’re talking about the American mind … splintered, and disintegrated, it is desperate for something however irrational to which to cling.”
“I went through a time where people would go into the streets and there were people who complained. I also went through a time, during Nixon, when there were nationally broadcast investigations of the corruption of an administration and when folks involved in conspiracies went to jail. Among other high-ranking corrupters and criminals who were imprisoned, we actually had the Attorney General of the United States under Nixon, John Mitchell, indicted for his crimes during Watergate and forced to serve nineteen months in jail.
“Yet in more recent times, we had the installation of W. Bush over Al Gore in the presidential election of 2000 when, as it was soon determined, it was Gore who had won — both the popular and electoral counts. Despite this, there was no pushback by Democrats, no investigations, no lawsuits, no marching in the streets or ‘storming’ something or other. America slept. Its media encouraged it; its Democrats let it slumber.”
“…the corruption [under W. Bush] was so rampant it was like on a daily basis we were hearing things that in a former time — the Sixties, the Fifties, anytime — would have caused the W to be tossed out on his ear. This time, somehow, it was like there was nobody in the streets. People went about their lives as if ignoring what was going on….
“And we see the unfortunate outcome of that in the installation of Donald Trump in the presidency only eight years later.”
” Around that same time, 2015, we saw Republicans take over the Supreme Court by refusing to do their Constitutional obligation in approving a Supreme Court Justice, when Antonin Scalia died. Any other time, we would have had mass uprisings at this mini–coup d’état.”
“Subsequently we watched a goober president, beholden to a Russian oligarchy, as he not only benefited himself and his cronies financially through his (stolen) office but he slowly unraveled the fabric of the largest and most long-lasting democracy on Earth, before our very eyes. While Trump tightened the screws on people’s ability to complain, attacking the press and removing freedom of speech in all kinds of ways, including removing net neutrality, folks stood by in fascinated and terrified awe at this train wreck gradually flying apart in all directions before us. For years this went on, with only a handful of Democrats calling for impeachment, while the rest of them, along with society, put their heads under their pillows hoping it would all somehow, please, just go away.
“Until the very end, the Democrats, media, and Speaker Pelosi dallied. By then it was too late to stop the institutional carnage. Around the time of Trump’s first impeachment, as it was reported, one could make a case for eighty-two grounds for impeachment. The Democrats under Speaker Pelosi only went forward with two articles of impeachment, in December, 2019, after three years of Trumpian destruction. Pelosi, with Obama, held back from investigating W. Bush after Obama attained the presidency in 2009. That kid-glove approach to Republican corruption she continued with Trump by waiting so long and then holding her fire with only two out of eighty-two violations. The country was saved the turmoil that would have resulted from thorough and broadcasted investigations in each case — of W. Bush and Trump. Nevertheless, each time of hesitation and lack of boldness by Democrats has had dire consequences … with even more of that on the horizon. (Note to Merrick Garland.)”
“…we have former American minds capable of seeing obvious wrongness, injustice, illegality, untruth, deception, or worse.”
“…in former times, people came together in solidarity and sameness of purpose to right obvious wrongs, or the like. Morality and personality might affect how one viewed those wrongs and events, yet the facts about them were held in common. Folks had clearly identifiable rallying points visible to the great masses of Americans. These things were talked about in the newspapers, on TV, there was no denying what was obvious.
“Notice the stark contrast with the media today, which is rife with outright lies — Trump’s ‘stolen election’ lies; Bill Barr’s lies to cover up the Mueller report; the insanity around a Hillary pizzagate pedophilia ring and emails; Obama’s citizenship; Hunter Biden’s laptop; and anything said by or associated with Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Breitbart, or QAnon.”
“We have virtually all of Fox News spewing lies, hatred, and discontent. We have right-wing social media in the form of Truth Social, and right-wing news outlets, Newsmax and OANN, doing Fox one better in calling for civil war and violence — all of it based on abject bald-faced lying and intentional distortion of facts. Witness House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, especially, on this last point. She and others are still claiming the storming of the Capitol was done by Antifa, even as she seeks to support the insurrectionists in prison — who she acknowledges are all Trump supporters.
“And they know they are lying, too. Sidney Powell, a lawyer who headed Trump’s stolen election fraud, was sued for defamation by Dominion Corporation, who manufactures the voting machines she claimed were involved in the conspiracy. She had conducted a weekslong campaign to invalidate the results of the 2020 election based on spurious accusations and wild conspiracy theories. In her lawyer’s statement defending her, however, it is acknowledged none of that was true and — excuse anyone for daring to believe any of these charlatans — in their filing, they claim, ‘No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact….’”
“Tucker Carlson had the same defense when he was called out on his lies as well. He along with Fox News were sued for slander by Dominion Corporation, and what was his defense? His lawyers shamelessly put out that, you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. You can’t make this stuff up.
“Seriously, we are supposed to know that Carlson and folks like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — who are believed by millions of Fox followers, some of whom subsequently participated in an insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government — are merely making stuff up; that it is all for ‘entertainment’ value … just for ‘fun,’ you see. Yet if so, why is there not a disclaimer on their shows and on that ‘news’ network to that effect. And how much ‘fun’ was it for people to die in the insurrection and for children to be slaughtered wantonly in schools as a consequence of Fox News lying on behalf of Trump and the NRA.”
“How is progress possible if even the courts will allow slander, lies, defamation and major misinformation to flood American minds, with the mere caveat, ‘Let the viewer beware’?”
“…it was determined that what was to be allowed into one’s body should not infect or poison one, and the [Food and Drug Administration] was created. Yet, when it comes to what is allowed into America’s minds, all license is allowed for its poisoning with hateful and vile untruths from major media and its figures.”
“When did outright liars begin getting to speak at the highest levels of society, infecting the minds of the vulnerable and gullible? When did such diabolical deceivers start getting to bellow, undeterred, into the loudest bullhorns of broadcast and electronic media?
“We can easily trace such wide-scale deception to the lies being told about Vietnam by Democrats under Johnson, but especially by Republican Nixon and his administration. We see it progressing during the W. Bush years where intentional misrepresentation of facts — lies, the one especially about wmd’s in Iraq — led to a war and over a million casualties.
“It is doubtful we ever got the truth of 9/11, which saw Building 7 inexplicably falling down ‘in sympathy’ with the other towers.”
“And how can we do something about the epidemic of mass shootings — many of which are having our children slaughtered even as we watch, helplessly — when lies like those of Alex Jones, saying Sandy Hook was staged, are allowed to infect the minds of Americans, weakened by years of Fox News and NRA influence.
“If those consequences of intentional dishonesty are not severe enough for you, consider over one million Americans dead from Covid. It was allowed to get that high as a result of the lying Trump and the Republicans did about the vaccine and about mask use. Put that in perspective, almost one of every one hundred Americans died — are gone forever — because of Donald Trump’s reckless negligence and continual deception around this pandemic. During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump famously said, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?’ He said that while mimicking firing a gun with his fingers. Little did we know he’d still be walking free after pulling the trigger on one million faces.”
“…look what it took to get Obama elected: eight long years of Bush! Look what it took to get Biden and the Democrats back behind the wheel again in 2020: four years of comprehensive trashing of American institutions and rights by an out-of-control baby of a man, operating out of instructions from a foreign power … and doing it in open and clear view of the world. Wow.”
“…solidarity of purpose gives ordinary people combined strength equal or greater to that of the ‘filthy rich.’ The ‘filthy rich’ are the would-be puppet-masters, the deciders and initiators of the events that have been witnessed so widely, including by the masses. These egregious acts, happenings, or developments brought the masses together in singleness of purpose to decry the source of the wrongs. Crucially, they needed to know the perpetrators of unhappy happenings; it needed to be clearly pointed out who were those responsible for the wrongs universally observed and condemned.
“These things known, the result could be the massive gathering of intentions, a movement, perhaps a great social movement, united in purpose, against the observed wrong, seeking justice on the perpetrators and some sort of social or cultural change that might possibly or would definitely prevent future events of the same or similar sort of wrongness.”
“But when things aren’t obvious and you have massive lies being told and you have comprehensive, pervasive media exposure to those lies — those untruths in direct conflict with people’s own observations — people can get confused. Confused, people’s power gets dissipated.”
“…as a consequence of this massive orchestration of the media, education, and all information systems in America by a mean-spirited, greedy, and murderous conservative elite — the minute daily elements of our American way of life were orchestrated for ends not our own.”
. .
[Chapter 15 text begins:] “The Rise and Fall of ‘Obvious Truths’” discusses the history of the American Republicans’ incredibly disciplined, relentlessly persistent, and amazingly cohesive, seemingly coordinated fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactor corporations and the “filthy rich” through totally concocted untruths.
Creating an American Mind and Personality: The Power of Money to Persuade … When You Happen to Be Poor
This started when I was reading over a post I had written. The title was relevant, and it triggered this whole thing. The title was “On Cultural Change, Consciousness, and Music.” and I described it as so: “The perfect confluence of context, moment, and person makes history … Obama’s astonishing rise to the Presidency, for example.”
Changing the World?
“Yet the perfect alignment of a nation’s or world’s deep mood, the moment, and a musician or artist can change the world forever. For example, The Beatles.”
Times weren’t always like this
After reading that, I imagined someone else viewing it, and I considered how chances are it would be someone younger than me — for I am old enough. That is part of what this is about. I am old enough to have seen some things, and I remember some things that people growing up in this day and age would have no conception of. Those more recently coming of age are used to a particular American setting somewhat different than the one I knew. Growing up in a particular context, naturally they would think that is the way things are and how they have to be; they could not know any differently.
“Obvious truths” is about how I saw things change
I was born in 1950, so I am aware of other ways that America has been. This part of the book, on “Obvious Truths,” is a lot about how I saw things change. Specifically, I look at the changes in the way we view ourselves, our lives, and authority; I have yet to hear anyone else mention these kinds of changes.
But, really, change the world we did
Getting back to that younger person reading that description, I imagined this other person seeing what I wrote about the Beatles and all that, about changing the world … changing the world! In the harsh light of their cold-hearted reality and the comfortable assuredness of their beliefs, I figured they would consider me naive, if not more. How could that person understand? But, really, change the world we did.
Music’s Power to Persuade
Addressing that younger person, I started writing, “If the title’s claim sounds silly or trite to you then you are operating out of a social prejudice we carry from childhood, particularly around status. and you haven’t stopped to evaluate and compare.” Now, I know that sounds kind of harsh, but it comes together, you’ll see.
For one thing, leaders and politicians, even great ones, can only alter the course of events slowly and meticulously. Sweeping changes cannot happen by fiat as they depend on the people’s passionate involvement, which you cannot create. In the case of a dictatorship — for example, Hitler’s Germany, or Kim Jung Un’s North Korea — that passion might be faked, probably it would need to be faked. Still, even in a free society, politicians can only use words; and no matter how stirring those words, they can reach only so deep inside. It is with great difficulty that political leaders try to move the soul of a nation; most of that mood is untouchable to them.
Sergeant Pepper
Meanwhile music, in particular, more potently than any other art form, has the capacity to alter consciousness. I will explain that later; it is an area I have done a lot of study in. It is a part of my profession.
Anyway, music affects your feelings and so it affects your consciousness. So its effects will really stay with you more than words will. Music is a more powerful thing, and it has been used consciously to try to sway the spirits of humans ever since the times of shamans.
Yet music is a much more powerful thing when the perfect combination of mood, context, and music come together. If you think music is not so powerful then explain why music is required at virtually any social gathering … particularly, when there is involved any attempt to persuade the feelings of the attendees. Have you ever noticed that? What is truly shocking is how music can even be more powerful than vast piles of money put against it.
I said, can be. In talking about music’s power to persuade I am reminded of political rallies and such.
The Persuasive Power of Money … When You Happen to Be Poor
On the other side from the power of leaders’ words of inspiration, which is limited, of music’s more effective persuasions, and of the potency of passion and heartfelt feeling naturally arising in people; consider the power of money. Money in the hands of the “filthy rich” is used in a variety of ways and obviously has tremendous persuasive powers of its own.
And here is what I am getting at: Money — as arrayed against music, passion, and social movements — is especially more powerful in a situation where the people have been put in financial jeopardy because of the prosperity of the rich. As an aside, I remember a time in America’s past when people were more prosperous and confident about their abilities to manage their lives. I do not believe it is a coincidence that in those days money wielded by the wealthy had less power to persuade and people were less easily bought than today. It was said that people then were wont to question authority more than they were likely to bow down to it. I will get back to this later.
Anyway, these are the things I was thinking about when this started.
“Obvious Truths” — The True Sounding Untruths — in the Creation of the American Mind
Then I started thinking about that: the “filthy rich,” specifically, the power of the Filthy Rich and their money. I began to consider it more deeply.
The True Sounding Untruths. (Hell! It’s Obvious the Earth is Flat!)
Remember this is called the rise and fall of “obvious truths.” I was drawn to looking into those commonly accepted truisms — truth-sounding but not true; let us call them “obvious truths.” Not true but sounding true: Think of how correct it must have sounded at one time to hear that the Earth is flat. So, an “obvious truth” is something unthinkingly accepted as true but is not actually true when thought about or looked into. I considered some of these errant habits of thinking and looked at where and why they arose and why they would take hold and have power despite having no foundation in reality.
Doing so, I came up with this description of “obvious truths” and the context birthing them:
These untruthy truisms arise out of the American Republicans’ disciplined, relentless, persistent, cohesive fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactor corporations and the “filthy rich” through totally concocted untruths, which are introduced carefully, slowly and therefore invisibly, over time….
Just accept my word for it for now; I will explain….
These untruths are introduced carefully, slowly and therefore invisibly, over time, one by one, with persistent, relentless repetition replacing reason or rational persuasion, as part of a coordinated comprehensive campaign whose goal is the creation of an American mind eroded of rationality and confused and made fertile and desperately receptive to these fabrications of the Republicans seamlessly portrayed as truths.
Precise and Strategic Use of “Obvious Truths” in the Creation of the American Mind
I know this is sounding pretty wild. But, you’ll see. Hang in there and see if I can support it. As I was explaining,
Their goal
The Republicans’ goal, to be precisely and inexorably attained, is the creation of an American mind eroded of rationality and confused. And this mind is to be shepherded by the exact and strategic use of misinformation specifically targeted and measured for the achievement of specific ends. This seeding of minds is to work dialectically with their campaign to physically and financially weaken the American public with the simultaneous and equally slow and meticulous and precisely timed introduction of policies….
I said, I can support this….
Their means
This introduction of policies, which though not invisible are cleverly packaged, is to be perfectly timed to confuse the obvious step-by-step, year-by-year connections of these policies and their cumulative increasingly successful results.
Now, again, bear with me….
Their intended results
These results are the castration of the American … of Americans in general — except for the Filthy Rich and the Republican leadership which are their lackey public faces. So, the intent of this long campaign, employing “obvious truths” as munitions, is the crippling of Americans’ power in particular to resist even the inexorable increase in the clearly felt suffering heaped upon them as these years went by.
I’ll give you a hint, alright? I remember living in a time that was not so economically depressed. I watched it slowly get worse, and worse, and worse; and I saw people suffering more, and more, and more, okay? But I did not hear people complaining more, and more, and more. That’s a hint.
Their vision
Okay, so what we have is Americans’ power monkey wrenched through policies directed at them and sustained by “obvious truths” — actual lies — pushed by Republicans whose purpose is to diminish people, to reduce their power, and ultimately to bring them down financially while raising the wealthies higher.
Recipe for The Matrix: Misinformation, Repetition, Impoverishment
Getting back to the truisms themselves, remember, as I said, these totally concocted untruths are designed to be surreptitiously introduced — carefully, slowly and therefore invisibly over time — one-by-one. They are to be planted through persistent relentless repetition, not by rational persuasion, and are intended to replace reason and independent thought.
Weaving the Matrix
They are meant to do their work within an invisible matrix as part of a coordinated campaign whose purpose is the construction of an American mind lacking in its ability to reason and confused. Lastly, this mind is to be made fertile and desperately receptive to these fabrications seamlessly portrayed as truths through the exact and strategic use of misinformation precisely targeted and measured for the achievement of specific ends.
Alright? I said bear with me, I’ll be able to give you some examples of this … or I’ll make a fool out of myself, that’ll be your choice …
These specific objectives are also to be brought to fruition through a massively funded, all inclusive, and strategically targeted campaign to financially weaken the American public through incremental changes in national fiscal policy as well as — note this — in national culture. National policy changes are to be achieved through the simultaneous and equally slow, meticulous, and precisely timed introduction of policy initiatives. Though these national initiatives could not be invisible, they are to be cleverly packaged as well as sneakily introduced and are to be perfectly timed to confuse the obvious step-by-step, year-by-year connections of these policies and their cumulative, increasingly successful results.
Okay? I’ll get into the policies, soon. But I am starting with a conclusive statement, and it might seem over the top. You may think it too bold, but I think I can back it up.
Again, those sought for results include the emasculation of the average American through sabotage of her or his powers to act in an effective way in any and all aspects of their lives. To be achieved at the same time is the fortification of the power and wealth of the Filthy Rich puppeteers and their lackey public faces in the Republican Party.
Instrumental in strengthening the wealthy class of insidious directors is the weakening of the remainder of the population’s abilities. And in particular and ultimately the intention is to cobble the ordinary person’s power to get out from under or to alleviate for very long the inexorable increase in their clearly felt suffering as the years go by. For this suffering and the helplessness about it is crucial to the directors’ success.
Bear with me….
The Creation of Confusion, The Stifling of Conviction and Thus Passion
Now, the key to all this being brought about is the creation of an American consciousness clouded in fog and confusion and thus forgetful of its past as a point of comparison. In this way splintered … we’re talking about the American mind … splintered, and disintegrated, it is desperate for something however irrational to which to cling.
Along with or coincident with the orchestration of the American mind was the dismantling of any solidarity of Americans on any large scale. This follows, because of the confused state that the average American would normally have and its inability — the person’s inability or the American mind’s inability — to discern obvious aspects of reality and distortions of it (lies) which in times prior would have provided obvious organizing standards around which would be passionate resistance. This is what could and would happen in times previous to the Republicans’ campaign.
For example, I went through a time where people would go into the streets and there were people who complained. I also went through a time, during Nixon, when there were nationally broadcast investigations of the corruption of an administration and when folks involved in conspiracies went to jail. Among other high-ranking corrupters and criminals who were imprisoned, we actually had the Attorney General of the United States under Nixon, John Mitchell, indicted for his crimes during Watergate and forced to serve nineteen months in jail.
Yet in more recent times, we had the installation of W. Bush over Al Gore in the presidential election of 2000 when, as it was soon determined, it was Gore who had won — both the popular and electoral counts. Despite this, there was no pushback by Democrats, no investigations, no lawsuits, no marching in the streets or “storming” something or other. America slept. Its media encouraged it; its Democrats let it slumber.
Let’s talk about what happened then. There is a book out about how George W. Bush actually created a dictatorship during his eight years. It’s amazing to me we all knew that; the corruption was so rampant it was like on a daily basis we were hearing things that in a former time — the Sixties, the Fifties, anytime — would have caused the W to be tossed out on his ear. This time, somehow, it was like there was nobody in the streets. People went about their lives as if ignoring what was going on….
And we see the unfortunate outcome of that in the installation of Donald Trump in the presidency only eight years later.
Around that same time, 2015, we saw Republicans take over the Supreme Court by refusing to do their Constitutional obligation in approving a Supreme Court Justice, when Antonin Scalia died. Any other time, we would have had mass uprisings at this mini–coup d’état.
Subsequently we watched a goober president, beholden to a Russian oligarchy, as he not only benefited himself and his cronies financially through his (stolen) office but he slowly unraveled the fabric of the largest and most long-lasting democracy on Earth, before our very eyes. While Trump tightened the screws on people’s ability to complain, attacking the press and removing freedom of speech in all kinds of ways, including removing net neutrality, folks stood by in fascinated and terrified awe at this train wreck gradually flying apart in all directions before us. For years this went on, with only a handful of Democrats calling for impeachment, while the rest of them, along with society, put their heads under their pillows hoping it would all somehow, please, just go away.
Until the very end, the Democrats, media, and Speaker Pelosi dallied. By then it was too late to stop the institutional carnage. Around the time of Trump’s first impeachment, as it was reported, one could make a case for eighty-two grounds for impeachment. The Democrats under Speaker Pelosi only went forward with two articles of impeachment, in December, 2019, after three years of Trumpian destruction. Pelosi, with Obama, held back from investigating W. Bush after Obama attained the presidency in 2009. That kid-glove approach to Republican corruption she continued with Trump by waiting so long and then holding her fire with only two out of eighty-two violations. The country was saved the turmoil that would have resulted from thorough and broadcasted investigations in each case — of W. Bush and Trump. Nevertheless, each time of hesitation and lack of boldness by Democrats has had dire consequences … with even more of that on the horizon. (Note to Merrick Garland.)
Okay, so there I’m giving you a taste, alright? Anyway.…
So, I said that in a previous time there would have been passionate, a passionate response. Now I say it’s passionate because of the former unconfused minds’ clarity in witnessing big events and pervasive, blatant universal patterns of change and making the obvious and easy correct interpretations. What I’m saying is clarity of thought creates sureness of action and sureness of one’s feelings, whereas confused minds lends itself to apathy or misguided self-destructive acts. In just a bit I’ll get into how these minds get confused and I think you’ll begin to see some of those things inside of yourself, because I think we’re all feeling some of it.
Anyway, so this clarity, of seeing these things happening, created conviction in one’s belief which was rooted in first-hand observation. I have in Part One shared some of my first-hand observations of events, especially those happening in my formative years. The conviction of my thinking is rooted in such events.
At the time, I also experienced much confirmation and affirmation of my views on these events. So, in general, in times previous to the one we’re in, this clarity and conviction born of first-hand observation was reinforced virtually universally by the great majority of Americans around them who also witnessed the obvious same things and made the apparent and doubtless interpretations that cried out from them.
An example, okay? America once had a president who was much despised, though he was actually not as bad as W. Bush. And compared to Trump, he comes across as reasonable. Yet the American people were unfettered in their feelings about this president’s actions, and their refusal to put up with his despicable acts caused Nixon to resign.
So, first off, we have former American minds capable of seeing obvious wrongness, injustice, illegality, untruth, deception, or worse. In our example, this might be the suffering and/or death of innocent young men or the unspeakable horror being inflicted on the bystanding innocents in the conflict they are engaged in — the Vietnam War is one such example.
Once, with clarity seeing, then about it gathering with great conviction — undoubting and unconfused conviction — and passion in large numbers and in solidarity and sameness of purpose to right these obvious wrongs, or their like.
It all starts with clearly identifiable rallying points in obvious view of the great masses of Americans, however.
Too many people are unaware or forget that there was a great union movement in America, there was a great antiwar movement in the country … okay? You don’t see much of that action these days. So, this is what I’m getting to, there’s been a change.
So when these great masses of Americans were clearly in solidarity about things they saw were obviously wrong they effected change. Think about it. Go back to the Depression. People knew they were poor and they put Roosevelt in power. Okay? They did something about it.
Anyway, so in times past you might have this clarity of what’s wrong and of your own suffering around it. You are not confused about blatant happenings in the reality around you. and the people around you, they see it as well. and they confirm it in you. Then you’re pretty sure what the heck’s going on. I mean it’s hard to deny your own reality. But it’s even harder to deny it when other people see it too, and they’re experiencing the same thing.1
The Media’s Capacity to Confirm, Or Deny … Any Wonder Why Americans Are So Confused, or Dumb?
We have former American minds capable of seeing obvious wrongness, injustice, illegality, untruth, deception, or worse: Once with clarity seeing, then about it gathering with great conviction — undoubting and unconfused conviction — and passion in large numbers and in solidarity and sameness of purpose to right these obvious wrongs, or their like. The examples I gave were the union, antiwar, suffragette, and civil rights movements; we could add the Revolutionary War itself and the abolitionist movement. And I mentioned how people rose up for a New Deal and elected Roosevelt during the Great Depression and how Nixon was hounded out of office, yet Bush the Dubya’s crimes — far worse, including “dictatorship” — were not enough even to bring people out into the streets.
It all starts with clearly identifiable rallying points in obvious view of the great masses of Americans, however. In times past you might have this clarity of what’s wrong and of your own suffering around it. You are not confused about blatant happenings in the reality around you. And the people around you, they see it as well. And they confirm it in you. Then you’re pretty sure what the heck’s going on. I mean it’s hard to deny your own reality. But it’s even harder to deny it when other people see it too, and they’re experiencing the same thing.
The Media’s Capacity to Confirm, Or Deny
But what if the media is saying that it ain’t happening? Does that sound familiar? At all? It ain’t happening? How about an economic collapse — the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, which was the most severe downturn in the economy since the Great Depression — that began years before anybody publicly mentioned it. I remember at the time, just before the collapse, W. Bush’s economy was being called a “goldilocks” one. Yep. This, from the guy, Larry Kudlow, who later would be the top financial advisor to Trump as Director of the National Economic Council for three years. Figures, eh? As for any collapse, not happening. Right now I’m not going to say a lot about this as it will appear in a big way beginning with Volume 2 in the Return to Grace series of books, titled The Necessary Revolution.2
So anyway, in former times, people came together in solidarity and sameness of purpose to right obvious wrongs, or the like. Morality and personality might affect how one viewed those wrongs and events, yet the facts about them were held in common. Folks had clearly identifiable rallying points visible to the great masses of Americans. These things were talked about in the newspapers, on TV, there was no denying what was obvious.
The Media’s License to Lie
Notice the stark contrast with the media today, which is rife with outright lies — Trump’s “stolen election” lies; Bill Barr’s lies to cover up the Mueller report; the insanity around a Hillary pizzagate pedophilia ring and emails; Obama’s citizenship; Hunter Biden’s laptop; and anything said by or associated with Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Breitbart, or QAnon. These are only a few among many more sources I could cite.
We have virtually all of Fox News spewing lies, hatred, and discontent. We have right-wing social media in the form of Truth Social, and right-wing news outlets, Newsmax and OANN, doing Fox one better in calling for civil war and violence — all of it based on abject bald-faced lying and intentional distortion of facts. Witness House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, especially, on this last point. She and others are still claiming the storming of the Capitol was done by Antifa, even as she seeks to support the insurrectionists in prison — who she acknowledges are all Trump supporters.
And they know they are lying, too. Sidney Powell, a lawyer who headed Trump’s stolen election fraud, was sued for defamation by Dominion Corporation, who manufactures the voting machines she claimed were involved in the conspiracy. She had conducted a weekslong campaign to invalidate the results of the 2020 election based on spurious accusations and wild conspiracy theories. In her lawyer’s statement defending her, however, it is acknowledged none of that was true and — excuse anyone for daring to believe any of these charlatans — in their filing, they claim, “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact….”
Tucker Carlson had the same defense when he was called out on his lies as well. He along with Fox News were sued for slander by Dominion Corporation, and what was his defense? His lawyers shamelessly put out that, you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. You can’t make this stuff up.
Seriously, we are supposed to know that Carlson and folks like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — who are believed by millions of Fox followers, some of whom subsequently participated in an insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government — are merely making stuff up; that it is all for “entertainment” value … just for “fun,” you see. Yet if so, why is there not a disclaimer on their shows and on that “news” network to that effect. And how much “fun” was it for people to die in the insurrection and for children to be slaughtered wantonly in schools as a consequence of Fox News lying on behalf of Trump and the NRA.
The fact that this defense by Fox News and Tucker Carlson was successful says a lot about the long road ahead of us in this country. How is progress possible if even the courts will allow slander, lies, defamation and major misinformation to flood American minds, with the mere caveat, “Let the viewer beware”? Or actually, with no warning at all. This is analogous to the way consumers were poisoned in their food and drinks by corporations, prior to the pushback from the people in the form of the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA). Prior to the formulation of that governmental agency, American consumers were left at the mercy of corporations who would allow contaminated or otherwise bad food onto the market. In response, it was determined that what was to be allowed into one’s body should not infect or poison one, and the agency was created. Yet, when it comes to what is allowed into America’s minds, all license is allowed for its poisoning with hateful and vile untruths from major media and its figures.
When did this all change? When did outright liars begin getting to speak at the highest levels of society, infecting the minds of the vulnerable and gullible? When did such diabolical deceivers start getting to bellow, undeterred, into the loudest bullhorns of broadcast and electronic media?
The Establishment’s Habit of Lying
We can easily trace such wide-scale deception to the lies being told about Vietnam by Democrats under Johnson, but especially by Republican Nixon and his administration. We see it progressing during the W. Bush years where intentional misrepresentation of facts — lies, the one especially about wmd’s in Iraq — led to a war and over a million casualties.
It is doubtful we ever got the truth of 9/11, which saw Building 7 inexplicably falling down “in sympathy” with the other towers. Untouched it was by any plane or anything, save a controlled demolition. Which controlled demolition would have the building falling down, like both of the Twin Towers did, incidentally, in free fall. Which Building 7 did.
And how can we do something about the epidemic of mass shootings — many of which are having our children slaughtered even as we watch, helplessly — when lies like those of Alex Jones, saying Sandy Hook was staged, are allowed to infect the minds of Americans, weakened by years of Fox News and NRA influence.
The consequences of lying
If those consequences of intentional dishonesty are not severe enough for you, consider over one million Americans dead from Covid. It was allowed to get that high as a result of the lying Trump and the Republicans did about the vaccine and about mask use. Put that in perspective, almost one of every one hundred Americans died — are gone forever — because of Donald Trump’s reckless negligence and continual deception around this pandemic. During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” He said that while mimicking firing a gun with his fingers. Little did we know he’d still be walking free after pulling the trigger on one million faces.
People Power — the Only Corrective to Mass Deception
However prior to this, with facts in common, not in dispute, we could have solidarity of purpose … And this is the important part … With solidarity of purpose, with Americans united, feeling the same way, wanting change, their feelings were powerful and so significantly altered major events. World War II was won; we had a union movement, a suffragette movement, a civil rights movement, a War on Poverty, a Great Society, and a New Deal, to name some.
You even see that going on after the Millennium. We had a Democrat, Obama, elected to the presidency of the United States. The first African-American and only one of many who would grace the administrations and high institutions of our government afterward, as we see with the vice-presidency of Kamala Harris and the appointments being made by Joe Biden. And Obama had a major accomplishment in creating the largest expansion in health care in the U.S. with the Affordable Care Act.
Nonetheless, look what it took to get Obama elected: eight long years of Bush! Look what it took to get Biden and the Democrats back behind the wheel again in 2020: four years of comprehensive trashing of American institutions and rights by an out-of-control baby of a man, operating out of instructions from a foreign power … and doing it in open and clear view of the world. Wow.
So anyway, solidarity of purpose gives ordinary people combined strength equal or greater to that of the “filthy rich.” The “filthy rich” are the would-be puppet-masters, the deciders and initiators of the events that have been witnessed so widely, including by the masses. These egregious acts, happenings, or developments brought the masses together in singleness of purpose to decry the source of the wrongs. Crucially, they needed to know the perpetrators of unhappy happenings; it needed to be clearly pointed out who were those responsible for the wrongs universally observed and condemned.
These things known, the result could be the massive gathering of intentions, a movement, perhaps a great social movement, united in purpose, against the observed wrong, seeking justice on the perpetrators and some sort of social or cultural change that might possibly or would definitely prevent future events of the same or similar sort of wrongness.
Now, these things did happen in America, folks. Not long ago in historical time but before our day in America, food used to come out from corporations and got people sick or dead. So Americans created a Food and Drug Administration to remedy that. People created a governmental entity to represent them as a counterweight against the power of the corporations.
Why did this happen? It was because people were pissed, and it was because it was obvious what was going on.
But when things aren’t obvious and you have massive lies being told and you have comprehensive, pervasive media exposure to those lies — those untruths in direct conflict with people’s own observations — people can get confused. Confused, people’s power gets dissipated.
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So I’ve kind of told you part of it, haven’t I? I just felt I was giving you too much and without any grounding.
Now let’s take a look at how — as a consequence of this massive orchestration of the media, education, and all information systems in America by a mean-spirited, greedy, and murderous conservative elite — the minute daily elements of our American way of life were orchestrated for ends not our own.
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Your Mind Made Fertile for the Planting of Lies:
Power Versus Passion, Money Versus Authenticity — Opposing Ways of Changing America
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…we do have these preconceptions about status and money that affects what we think is more important or powerful. It affects what we think of as ‘real’ and ‘real world’ versus what is considered silly or superfluous … ‘flaky’ … ‘kumbaya.”’”
“[With Obama’s election,] people could feel again, some for the first time, that they had the power in their passion and numbers to throw off the shackles of the Filthy Rich. Unbelievable.”
““We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise, we’re not going to make it.” — Helen Caldicott
“Only people know just how to change the world.” — John Lennon
“The public’s power could be stirred only by these facts coming out and becoming widely known.”
“”…we all have these prejudices regarding what is deemed powerful and important. We all have stuff from childhood that makes us shrink before authority, cower before money, status, and power. We all have irrational ideas magnifying the power of our oppressors, telling us to obey, to not question, to go along with that which others would have of us but which is not in our own interest and in fact brings suffering into our lives. And on top of all that, these early imprints and social teachings would have us rationalize our subjugation and deny our felt experience, ever fending off inner and outer information — clues threatening to our precious conscious untruths and instilled self-sabotaging beliefs and notions.”
“I have never seen Americans so busy … so busy and so preoccupied.”
“Busy, busy all the time is now required for survival concerns. There was a time in which you might be really motivated … you’d see people that were really striving … trying hard to be a big success or something like that. But it wasn’t required.
“There is also the increased paper load, the mountains of red tape, which is also filling up the supposed ‘free time’ of the average American.”
“…with exorbitantly more paperwork, there’s less time for thought, less time to think. We’re busy, and we’re nervous. Why? We got a lot of red tape, we got a lot of things to do. We’re under stress…. “
“…over time, even this linking to the common good was not necessary, so the tax codes got exceedingly more convoluted and hopelessly contradictory, essentially lacking any reason. We all know that. It’s a dead document, so to speak, which would never, ever, ever be able to be brought back to rational health, so riddled with myriad kinds of cancers which are special interest convolutions of its elements so that it would be impossible to excise them all.”
“…the tax code is hopelessly brain dead, and everyone knows it. Any former link to fairness, reasonableness, or coherency has been severed; it has become a coffin into which anything can be thrown and in which any corporate wish can be granted. The country has now turned completely into the hands of the corporations….”
.
[Chapter 16 text begins:] In the last sixty years, Americans have experienced unprecedented changes in their lives, their lifestyles, in what it means to be alive and human in America in these times. Rarely have societies experienced this kind of change. What is even more astounding is the way the changes send us shooting dramatically in one way and then in the other direction.
Of course, it is amazing that people are able to manage these kinds of change. But we don’t do this easily.
Let us look at the side-to-side careening of American life in that time and where we are today in that.
Creating an America Worthy of its Name
In introducing “Obvious Truths,” I talked about how politicians and leaders can only do so much and that the effects of their words are often fleeting. I said that social change that’s either reinforced or carried forward, or even initiated, by something like music or something that affects your feelings, can be greater and longer lasting. The powerful feelings that are stirred this way can affect people for their whole lives and even have influence for generations. I mentioned that these emotional influences reach more deeply into people because feelings exist at a deeper level of the brain undergirding words, thought, or even reason.
Finally, keep in mind that this is titled the rise and fall of “obvious truths.”
Obvious “Truth” — “Money Changes Everything”…. Really? … Only?
So I’m gonna start looking over what has transpired so far. I said at the beginning there was a title, one that pointed to the power and grandeur of these social movements. I wrote at the time that if the title’s claim — casting ordinary folks, along with revolutionary art, as the instigators of grand movements … the people of the Sixties and the music of bands like the Beatles, for example — sounds silly or trite to you that you are operating out of social prejudices we all carry from childhood, like most people do, particularly around status.
And by that I meant we have a tendency to assume that it is money that changes everything and that ordinary folks have little power without it.
For example, we assume that artists and musicians can’t affect anything. They more often arise from non-affluent beginnings; we have the term, starving artist, for example. Their power in society is considered to be as minimal as their finances.
“Real World” Versus “Flaky”
Yet, this is not true — that is what I’m getting at. For, has the power of people been created with money, solely? Well, I think there’s a tendency to think it has.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Yet not long ago, America and I went through such a change arising artistically from the masses. The Beatles affected us in such a great way that we were changed forever, and society’s traditional momentum in a direction benefiting its moneyed royalty was stopped and even reversed. Their music and that of those like them changed the world in terms of the way we saw peace. The way we saw love. The way we saw drugs. The way we saw tolerance of other people … the way we looked at other people.
Status and money, more than ever, determining what is “real”
But I’m not going to go too far there, because that’s all coming up, too. I’m just saying that we do have these preconceptions about status and money that affects what we think is more important or powerful. It affects what we think of as “real” and “real world” versus what is considered silly or superfluous … “flaky” … “kumbaya.”
I was talking earlier about how, these days, it seems like only people with money have power. Everybody knows that and assumes it can only be that way. This is so because many people today have not had the experience of seeing it being different from that.
The Exception That Reveals the Rule
There is one exception and as it happens this exception does reveal the rule.
The Blue Meanies dissed, dismissed
For Obama’s rise to the presidency was startling, shocking even, because it was a unique phenomenon for this time. It was a grand and sweeping movement because people got a chance, for the first time in a long time, to see that ordinary folks getting together could effect massive change … without the power of gobs of money. We can recall how his campaign was largely done over the Iinternet and with small contributions. People could feel again, some for the first time, that they had the power in their passion and numbers to throw off the shackles of the Filthy Rich. Unbelievable.
Creating an America That Is Not: Stolen Elections, Complacent Electorate
Obama’s success was astounding, yet look what it took! Remember what had to happen before a Democrat, Obama, and the first African-American ever, could win the presidency. It only came about after a long time of national suffering, disgrace, war, loss of life, incompetence, cronyism, scandal, atrocity, erosion of rights, squandering of money, tragedy, and more.
All that, and much more, treason, was repeated when Trump got into office and was allowed his time as the bull in the china shop during the four years before Biden was put into the presidency to fix his mess.
Unlike Trump, George W. Bush was in the presidency for a full eight years; he actually got to steal a second election.
The Blue Meanies — Stolen Election
It is clear that Bush’s first term was not won fairly. Even putting aside the intimidation of Black voters in Florida and similar unfair and illegal practices perpetrated by Republicans, we still have the fact that Bush was given the presidency by a decision of the Supreme Court. Our history records how vote counting was stopped before the outcome could be determined; the Supreme Court decided on a winner, Bush; and subsequently the vote tally came out that Gore had actually won the presidency! These are simply the facts, the things not in dispute.
The Rule Itself — Money Changes Everything.
The facts of Bush’s second election are less well known; in fact they are more assiduously covered up. Still, in the vote tally against John Kerry in the presidential election of 2004 it should not have even been close … but for more obscure reasons.
There is plenty of documented public evidence that the electronic voting machines were fixed, making the outcome fraudulent. The machines were owned by Diebold Corporation, a firm solidly in the Republican camp. The head of the company actually promised the Republicans, before the election, that he was going to get Bush elected. I mean, seriously. Isn’t that pretty much an admission that the voting machines were going to be fixed?
And in fact this is what they discovered to have taken place. It was confirmed, to some extent even prior to the election, that even a person walking by with an iPhone or something similar could hack into these electronic voting machines and change the votes. That is, if they had the correct access information. And the only ones who had that and therefore could decide the vote tally were the Diebold Corporation in league with the Republicans. Is it any wonder Bush “won”?
Now, is this not the kind of thing that in the past would have brought people out into the streets? The complacency of Americans around that time — the first decade of the Millennium — was noted by Helen Caldicott, famed nuclear activist and physician. In 2011, she compared our apathy in the face of dire happenings — such as Fukushima — to the parents who respond emotionless when she has to tell them their child has leukemia. She says, “Get mad. Get emotional.” She urges us to take back our governments from these mad perpetrators of the darkest doom imaginable. And, in the least, occupy! She proclaimed,
“It’s time you took your country back…. Use your bodies like they did in Wisconsin. Do a Tahrir Square here. Take back New York. Take back the Congress. Invade the Congress! Those people belong to you. They are your representatives, and you are their leaders. But you’ve got to have some guts! And stop being so goddamn polite all the time! And don’t need approval. Step up to the plate….
“We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise, we’re not going to make it.”1
The Battleground for America
“Only people know just how to change the world.” — John Lennon
So the two things of relevance in this example of the stolen 2004 election are that in previous times this would have brought people out into the streets, would have caused people to rise up in outrage against authority when it was found out.
The Duty, and Failure, of the Press
Which brings out the second relevant point: The public’s power could be stirred only by these facts coming out and becoming widely known. This information on the 2004 stolen presidential election did come out; entire popular books were written describing how and that it was done. It came out in the broadcast media as well.
It is unlikely that you know that, however. That can only be because it wasn’t told enough in the media, that it was downplayed in the media, covered up, or the media directed your attention away from it. And that is the problem I’m getting at.
Changing America by Changing its People
But you see there’s another thing that happened. Even with a responsible media you have to have a citizenry that is open to this kind of information and able and willing to process it and draw conclusions from it. That is what I will be addressing now.
Your Mind Made Fertile for the Planting of Lies
Going back, I was saying we all have these prejudices regarding what is deemed powerful and important. We all have stuff from childhood that makes us shrink before authority, cower before money, status, and power. We all have irrational ideas magnifying the power of our oppressors, telling us to obey, to not question, to go along with that which others would have of us but which is not in our own interest and in fact brings suffering into our lives. And on top of all that, these early imprints and social teachings would have us rationalize our subjugation and deny our felt experience, ever fending off inner and outer information — clues threatening to our precious conscious untruths and instilled self-sabotaging beliefs and notions.
Thinking About There Not Being Enough Time to Think
But you know sometimes you have a chance to kick back and not be caught up in the struggle to survive. You have a chance to reflect on your circumstances, your prejudices, and to re-evaluate matters. You have leisure time in which to do more than survive, to actually re-create, re-new yourself, and to grow in wisdom so you are not so blinkered by the blinders of the comfortable ignorance of grade-school propaganda and other early conditionings, prejudices. So society benefits both through your productivity but also through the fact that you have leisure time to become a wiser social actor. You have this leisure time….
Or, do you?
Well, not too long ago we had more leisure time, let’s put it that way. We had more leisure time; we had more time to pause and reflect. So some things might occur to us that were different than what we originally thought … than our preconceived notions; we might actually change our mind about things if we thought about them. I am not saying that was what everybody did all the time or anything like that. I am saying it could happen, and it happened more. So I’m saying a lot has changed.
Well, you don’t think we have less leisure time? If you are much younger than me, you probably don’t know. But I am old enough to know that I have never seen Americans so busy … so busy and so preoccupied.
Climbing Down the Ladder of Your Todo List
Backing up, so imagine you or somebody like you is saying, “Ah, naw naw naw, naw, y’know, musicians, ordinary folks, they can’t do anything; they’re not politicians, they’re not powerful, they’re not rich!” Okay? But this person or you may not have had occasion to actually pause your life … to step back from the twenty-four hour climbing down the ladder of your todo list to success. Y’know?
How long is your todo list by the way? Busy, busy all the time is now required for survival concerns. There was a time in which you might be really motivated … you’d see people that were really striving … trying hard to be a big success or something like that. But it wasn’t required.
Forms Fill Up Free Time … “Fax It Over, I’ll Look at It”
There is also the increased paper load, the mountains of red tape, which is also filling up the supposed “free time” of the average American. Man! What the hell is with that!?
Now they can blame it on computers; they can say it’s because we have more information and they can store larger amounts of it electronically, and they can put more…. Aw, c’mon; it’s people deciding that you have to fill things out and that you have to get and give more and more and more and more information, this is a lot of time!
Did you ever buy a house? You sign that Sisyphean hill of documents? I can only just imagine the day when there was just a deed, signed over. I’m not that old.
So, with exorbitantly more paperwork, there’s less time for thought, less time to think. We’re busy, and we’re nervous. Why? We’ve got a lot of red tape, we’ve got a lot of things to do. We’re under stress….
Taxes to Twist You With
And part of that paperwork … probably the worst part, if you’re like me, is due to the complex and contradictory tax codes. Part of the leisure time lost disappears into the black hole around tax forms. Seriously, I am old enough to have seen taxes get more contradictory and complex over the years. In fact the tax codes are rather convoluted abominations twisting themselves to benefit corporate special interest, with little or no rationale even presented to explain why these special interests should be benefited. And this sort of corporate special interest input into tax codes has just exploded over the years.
In previous times, such things as benefits to any special interest were usually presented to the legislature, and the public, in a particular way to justify them. You can just imagine like, in some kind of bargaining session in Congress, they would say, “Well, if we provide a break here, that’ll result in benefits over in this sector….” Or they might say, “… and it benefits our economy as a whole, which will….” And they might add a few elements into the equation before the inevitable, “It’ll benefit the average American or be a boon to our society as a whole.” And the reaction, we imagine, would be like, “Aw, yeah, yeah … okay.” Then it’s good; it’s approved.
Crazy-Making Social Processes Aid Manipulation
Yet over time, even this linking to the common good was not necessary, so the tax codes got exceedingly more convoluted and hopelessly contradictory, essentially lacking any reason. We all know that. It’s a dead document, so to speak, which would never, ever, ever be able to be brought back to rational health, so riddled with myriad kinds of cancers which are special interest convolutions of its elements so that it would be impossible to excise them all.
You have probably all heard the story. You call up the tax adviser, you have a question about how to fill something out … how to do something. And you’ll ask one person and they’ll tell you one thing; and then you call back and you get a different person and they’ll tell you something entirely different; then if you call again, somebody else will tell you something again … all different. Well, this is crazy-making.
And that crazy-making takes up your time; and it makes you worry more … and, well, it works itself into your time to ponder things, especially important things.
So, the tax code is hopelessly brain dead, and everyone knows it. Any former link to fairness, reasonableness, or coherency has been severed; it has become a coffin into which anything can be thrown and in which any corporate wish can be granted. The country has now turned completely into the hands of the corporations, okay?
So, what now?
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16
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Your Mind Made Fertile for the Planting of Lies:
Power Versus Passion, Money Versus Authenticity — Opposing Ways of Changing America
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…we do have these preconceptions about status and money that affects what we think is more important or powerful. It affects what we think of as ‘real’ and ‘real world’ versus what is considered silly or superfluous … ‘flaky’ … ‘kumbaya.”’”
“[With Obama’s election,] people could feel again, some for the first time, that they had the power in their passion and numbers to throw off the shackles of the Filthy Rich. Unbelievable.”
““We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise, we’re not going to make it.” — Helen Caldicott
“Only people know just how to change the world.” — John Lennon
“The public’s power could be stirred only by these facts coming out and becoming widely known.”
“”…we all have these prejudices regarding what is deemed powerful and important. We all have stuff from childhood that makes us shrink before authority, cower before money, status, and power. We all have irrational ideas magnifying the power of our oppressors, telling us to obey, to not question, to go along with that which others would have of us but which is not in our own interest and in fact brings suffering into our lives. And on top of all that, these early imprints and social teachings would have us rationalize our subjugation and deny our felt experience, ever fending off inner and outer information — clues threatening to our precious conscious untruths and instilled self-sabotaging beliefs and notions.”
“I have never seen Americans so busy … so busy and so preoccupied.”
“Busy, busy all the time is now required for survival concerns. There was a time in which you might be really motivated … you’d see people that were really striving … trying hard to be a big success or something like that. But it wasn’t required.
“There is also the increased paper load, the mountains of red tape, which is also filling up the supposed ‘free time’ of the average American.”
“…with exorbitantly more paperwork, there’s less time for thought, less time to think. We’re busy, and we’re nervous. Why? We got a lot of red tape, we got a lot of things to do. We’re under stress…. “
“…over time, even this linking to the common good was not necessary, so the tax codes got exceedingly more convoluted and hopelessly contradictory, essentially lacking any reason. We all know that. It’s a dead document, so to speak, which would never, ever, ever be able to be brought back to rational health, so riddled with myriad kinds of cancers which are special interest convolutions of its elements so that it would be impossible to excise them all.”
“…the tax code is hopelessly brain dead, and everyone knows it. Any former link to fairness, reasonableness, or coherency has been severed; it has become a coffin into which anything can be thrown and in which any corporate wish can be granted. The country has now turned completely into the hands of the corporations….”
.
[Chapter 16 text begins:] In the last sixty years, Americans have experienced unprecedented changes in their lives, their lifestyles, in what it means to be alive and human in America in these times. Rarely have societies experienced this kind of change. What is even more astounding is the way the changes send us shooting dramatically in one way and then in the other direction.
Of course, it is amazing that people are able to manage these kinds of change. But we don’t do this easily.
Let us look at the side-to-side careening of American life in that time and where we are today in that.
Creating an America Worthy of its Name
In introducing “Obvious Truths,” I talked about how politicians and leaders can only do so much and that the effects of their words are often fleeting. I said that social change that’s either reinforced or carried forward, or even initiated, by something like music or something that affects your feelings, can be greater and longer lasting. The powerful feelings that are stirred this way can affect people for their whole lives and even have influence for generations. I mentioned that these emotional influences reach more deeply into people because feelings exist at a deeper level of the brain undergirding words, thought, or even reason.
Finally, keep in mind that this is titled the rise and fall of “obvious truths.”
Obvious “Truth” — “Money Changes Everything”…. Really? … Only?
So I’m gonna start looking over what has transpired so far. I said at the beginning there was a title, one that pointed to the power and grandeur of these social movements. I wrote at the time that if the title’s claim — casting ordinary folks, along with revolutionary art, as the instigators of grand movements … the people of the Sixties and the music of bands like the Beatles, for example — sounds silly or trite to you that you are operating out of social prejudices we all carry from childhood, like most people do, particularly around status.
And by that I meant we have a tendency to assume that it is money that changes everything and that ordinary folks have little power without it.
For example, we assume that artists and musicians can’t affect anything. They more often arise from non-affluent beginnings; we have the term, starving artist, for example. Their power in society is considered to be as minimal as their finances.
“Real World” Versus “Flaky”
Yet, this is not true — that is what I’m getting at. For, has the power of people been created with money, solely? Well, I think there’s a tendency to think it has.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Yet not long ago, America and I went through such a change arising artistically from the masses. The Beatles affected us in such a great way that we were changed forever, and society’s traditional momentum in a direction benefiting its moneyed royalty was stopped and even reversed. Their music and that of those like them changed the world in terms of the way we saw peace. The way we saw love. The way we saw drugs. The way we saw tolerance of other people … the way we looked at other people.
Status and money, more than ever, determining what is “real”
But I’m not going to go too far there, because that’s all coming up, too. I’m just saying that we do have these preconceptions about status and money that affects what we think is more important or powerful. It affects what we think of as “real” and “real world” versus what is considered silly or superfluous … “flaky” … “kumbaya.”
I was talking earlier about how, these days, it seems like only people with money have power. Everybody knows that and assumes it can only be that way. This is so because many people today have not had the experience of seeing it being different from that.
The Exception That Reveals the Rule
There is one exception and as it happens this exception does reveal the rule.
The Blue Meanies dissed, dismissed
For Obama’s rise to the presidency was startling, shocking even, because it was a unique phenomenon for this time. It was a grand and sweeping movement because people got a chance, for the first time in a long time, to see that ordinary folks getting together could effect massive change … without the power of gobs of money. We can recall how his campaign was largely done over the Iinternet and with small contributions. People could feel again, some for the first time, that they had the power in their passion and numbers to throw off the shackles of the Filthy Rich. Unbelievable.
Creating an America That Is Not: Stolen Elections, Complacent Electorate
Obama’s success was astounding, yet look what it took! Remember what had to happen before a Democrat, Obama, and the first African-American ever, could win the presidency. It only came about after a long time of national suffering, disgrace, war, loss of life, incompetence, cronyism, scandal, atrocity, erosion of rights, squandering of money, tragedy, and more.
All that, and much more, treason, was repeated when Trump got into office and was allowed his time as the bull in the china shop during the four years before Biden was put into the presidency to fix his mess.
Unlike Trump, George W. Bush was in the presidency for a full eight years; he actually got to steal a second election.
The Blue Meanies — Stolen Election
It is clear that Bush’s first term was not won fairly. Even putting aside the intimidation of Black voters in Florida and similar unfair and illegal practices perpetrated by Republicans, we still have the fact that Bush was given the presidency by a decision of the Supreme Court. Our history records how vote counting was stopped before the outcome could be determined; the Supreme Court decided on a winner, Bush; and subsequently the vote tally came out that Gore had actually won the presidency! These are simply the facts, the things not in dispute.
The Rule Itself — Money Changes Everything.
The facts of Bush’s second election are less well known; in fact they are more assiduously covered up. Still, in the vote tally against John Kerry in the presidential election of 2004 it should not have even been close … but for more obscure reasons.
There is plenty of documented public evidence that the electronic voting machines were fixed, making the outcome fraudulent. The machines were owned by Diebold Corporation, a firm solidly in the Republican camp. The head of the company actually promised the Republicans, before the election, that he was going to get Bush elected. I mean, seriously. Isn’t that pretty much an admission that the voting machines were going to be fixed?
And in fact this is what they discovered to have taken place. It was confirmed, to some extent even prior to the election, that even a person walking by with an iPhone or something similar could hack into these electronic voting machines and change the votes. That is, if they had the correct access information. And the only ones who had that and therefore could decide the vote tally were the Diebold Corporation in league with the Republicans. Is it any wonder Bush “won”?
Now, is this not the kind of thing that in the past would have brought people out into the streets? The complacency of Americans around that time — the first decade of the Millennium — was noted by Helen Caldicott, famed nuclear activist and physician. In 2011, she compared our apathy in the face of dire happenings — such as Fukushima — to the parents who respond emotionless when she has to tell them their child has leukemia. She says, “Get mad. Get emotional.” She urges us to take back our governments from these mad perpetrators of the darkest doom imaginable. And, in the least, occupy! She proclaimed,
“It’s time you took your country back…. Use your bodies like they did in Wisconsin. Do a Tahrir Square here. Take back New York. Take back the Congress. Invade the Congress! Those people belong to you. They are your representatives, and you are their leaders. But you’ve got to have some guts! And stop being so goddamn polite all the time! And don’t need approval. Step up to the plate….
“We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise, we’re not going to make it.”1
The Battleground for America
“Only people know just how to change the world.” — John Lennon
So the two things of relevance in this example of the stolen 2004 election are that in previous times this would have brought people out into the streets, would have caused people to rise up in outrage against authority when it was found out.
The Duty, and Failure, of the Press
Which brings out the second relevant point: The public’s power could be stirred only by these facts coming out and becoming widely known. This information on the 2004 stolen presidential election did come out; entire popular books were written describing how and that it was done. It came out in the broadcast media as well.
It is unlikely that you know that, however. That can only be because it wasn’t told enough in the media, that it was downplayed in the media, covered up, or the media directed your attention away from it. And that is the problem I’m getting at.
Changing America by Changing its People
But you see there’s another thing that happened. Even with a responsible media you have to have a citizenry that is open to this kind of information and able and willing to process it and draw conclusions from it. That is what I will be addressing now.
Your Mind Made Fertile for the Planting of Lies
Going back, I was saying we all have these prejudices regarding what is deemed powerful and important. We all have stuff from childhood that makes us shrink before authority, cower before money, status, and power. We all have irrational ideas magnifying the power of our oppressors, telling us to obey, to not question, to go along with that which others would have of us but which is not in our own interest and in fact brings suffering into our lives. And on top of all that, these early imprints and social teachings would have us rationalize our subjugation and deny our felt experience, ever fending off inner and outer information — clues threatening to our precious conscious untruths and instilled self-sabotaging beliefs and notions.
Thinking About There Not Being Enough Time to Think
But you know sometimes you have a chance to kick back and not be caught up in the struggle to survive. You have a chance to reflect on your circumstances, your prejudices, and to re-evaluate matters. You have leisure time in which to do more than survive, to actually re-create, re-new yourself, and to grow in wisdom so you are not so blinkered by the blinders of the comfortable ignorance of grade-school propaganda and other early conditionings, prejudices. So society benefits both through your productivity but also through the fact that you have leisure time to become a wiser social actor. You have this leisure time….
Or, do you?
Well, not too long ago we had more leisure time, let’s put it that way. We had more leisure time; we had more time to pause and reflect. So some things might occur to us that were different than what we originally thought … than our preconceived notions; we might actually change our mind about things if we thought about them. I am not saying that was what everybody did all the time or anything like that. I am saying it could happen, and it happened more. So I’m saying a lot has changed.
Well, you don’t think we have less leisure time? If you are much younger than me, you probably don’t know. But I am old enough to know that I have never seen Americans so busy … so busy and so preoccupied.
Climbing Down the Ladder of Your Todo List
Backing up, so imagine you or somebody like you is saying, “Ah, naw naw naw, naw, y’know, musicians, ordinary folks, they can’t do anything; they’re not politicians, they’re not powerful, they’re not rich!” Okay? But this person or you may not have had occasion to actually pause your life … to step back from the twenty-four hour climbing down the ladder of your todo list to success. Y’know?
How long is your todo list by the way? Busy, busy all the time is now required for survival concerns. There was a time in which you might be really motivated … you’d see people that were really striving … trying hard to be a big success or something like that. But it wasn’t required.
Forms Fill Up Free Time … “Fax It Over, I’ll Look at It”
There is also the increased paper load, the mountains of red tape, which is also filling up the supposed “free time” of the average American. Man! What the hell is with that!?
Now they can blame it on computers; they can say it’s because we have more information and they can store larger amounts of it electronically, and they can put more…. Aw, c’mon; it’s people deciding that you have to fill things out and that you have to get and give more and more and more and more information, this is a lot of time!
Did you ever buy a house? You sign that Sisyphean hill of documents? I can only just imagine the day when there was just a deed, signed over. I’m not that old.
So, with exorbitantly more paperwork, there’s less time for thought, less time to think. We’re busy, and we’re nervous. Why? We’ve got a lot of red tape, we’ve got a lot of things to do. We’re under stress….
Taxes to Twist You With
And part of that paperwork … probably the worst part, if you’re like me, is due to the complex and contradictory tax codes. Part of the leisure time lost disappears into the black hole around tax forms. Seriously, I am old enough to have seen taxes get more contradictory and complex over the years. In fact the tax codes are rather convoluted abominations twisting themselves to benefit corporate special interest, with little or no rationale even presented to explain why these special interests should be benefited. And this sort of corporate special interest input into tax codes has just exploded over the years.
In previous times, such things as benefits to any special interest were usually presented to the legislature, and the public, in a particular way to justify them. You can just imagine like, in some kind of bargaining session in Congress, they would say, “Well, if we provide a break here, that’ll result in benefits over in this sector….” Or they might say, “… and it benefits our economy as a whole, which will….” And they might add a few elements into the equation before the inevitable, “It’ll benefit the average American or be a boon to our society as a whole.” And the reaction, we imagine, would be like, “Aw, yeah, yeah … okay.” Then it’s good; it’s approved.
Crazy-Making Social Processes Aid Manipulation
Yet over time, even this linking to the common good was not necessary, so the tax codes got exceedingly more convoluted and hopelessly contradictory, essentially lacking any reason. We all know that. It’s a dead document, so to speak, which would never, ever, ever be able to be brought back to rational health, so riddled with myriad kinds of cancers which are special interest convolutions of its elements so that it would be impossible to excise them all.
You have probably all heard the story. You call up the tax adviser, you have a question about how to fill something out … how to do something. And you’ll ask one person and they’ll tell you one thing; and then you call back and you get a different person and they’ll tell you something entirely different; then if you call again, somebody else will tell you something again … all different. Well, this is crazy-making.
And that crazy-making takes up your time; and it makes you worry more … and, well, it works itself into your time to ponder things, especially important things.
So, the tax code is hopelessly brain dead, and everyone knows it. Any former link to fairness, reasonableness, or coherency has been severed; it has become a coffin into which anything can be thrown and in which any corporate wish can be granted. The country has now turned completely into the hands of the corporations, okay?
So, what now?
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17
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A Matrix of Misinformation:
The Lies Themselves … When Did the People Themselves Become a “Special” Interest?
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…the GOP is consistently overfunded because the Rich-publicans are carrying the wishes of those corporations into the board rooms of Congress along with their huge amounts of money.
“Yet these payoffs were small investments to corporations, relative to the benefits they would get in the changes in government policy which affected them.”
“…it remained true that for the most part Democrats were funded by unions and organizations dealing with issues, like education, health care, seniors, jobs, and so on that affect the average American.”
“…the tax system in America became a tool of larceny for the Filthy Rich. The tax codes were molded to the greedy desires of various industries and corporations; this was allowed as a tradeoff for legislative and other benefits to the common good.”
“…eventually it was getting to where a huge increase in that problem could be attributed to corporations not even having to justify that the paybacks they wanted were good for America anymore. No tradeoffs to the common good even necessary.”
“Republicans are excused of all wrong-doing, at the behest of the wealthy with a beam in their eye, on the basis that it is equal to the mote that is in the eye of the Democrats.”
“Is Hillary Clinton’s deletion of emails — many of which were probably the spam mails and niceties between friends that fill up all our inboxes — equal to a treasonous insurrection? Some people would have it so. Hard core MAGAts would have it that it is somehow far worse; go figure.”
“…these ‘lesser of two evils’ arguments are ones where the factor of proportion is left out. These things are not seen as amounts, which can be compared, which are relative; but as absolutes. MAGAts are gullible innocents when it comes to slogans that require a little thinking to make out their absurdity, especially if it includes any arithmetic.”
“…forget about trying to get them to understand anything that involves percentages. You just get that blank look, before they change the subject or throw up one more ‘whatabouts’ they’ve heard from Fox News.”
“…the slogan — ‘the lesser of two evils is still evil’ — sounds really cool and clever. Perhaps even profound. Still, this kind of ploy, which is one version of what is called a false equivalency, is bullshit. For there is nothing in life that is totally good and nothing totally evil. It asserts an absolutism that emanates out of the thinking of religiophiles who seek to maintain such categories of white and black, goodness and sinners, for dogmatic reasons. And as a way to make oneself better than others with an allowance to be judgmental … and punishing … of them.”
“…outside of dogma and with neutral analysis, we see such a thing — ‘the lesser of two evils is still evil’ — could be said about virtually anything. Being said about everything, it would have it that nothing could ever be done, no progress could ever occur, for one could find a negative consequence, however small or relatively small, for virtually everything.
‘The lesser-of-two-evils-is-still-evil argument is so obviously stupid, yet it is tossed around as truth, infecting the minds of erstwhile activists or progressives.’
“The lesser-of-two-evils argument derails any positive change, any benefit to the people — save imaginary ones that are somehow not in any way possible seen as negative — for it sets up a ‘purity’ standard for all decisions that is impossible to find.”
“Republicans were always seen, rightfully so, as the ones who were representing various corporations and what were called the special interests — defense, big agriculture, big oil, the Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies, big pharma, and so on.”
“…this Big Lie, firmly woven into the fabric of the Matrix as to be both invisible and therefore unchallengeable even by rational arguments … this lie, and I’m sure you’ve heard it is that: Well, both parties are funded by special interests!”
“Education’s a special interest? Does that mean that there are like only a few people that have kids that need education?”
“…we have an idea of what a big difference intelligence makes … what a big difference it is when you have intelligent people running things versus when you don’t.”
“…after eight years of intelligent guidance from America’s cockpit with Obama, we got Trump. This is a guy who has been called ‘the dumbest student I ever had,’ by one of his professors.”
“…this is a man, Trump, who hides his college grades from public scrutiny, yet claims to be the smartest of his class. This is a man who pathetically bragged, as some kind of intellectual feat, about his ability to pass a simple test for dementia. And we saw the result of having this goober dimwit at the helm: millions dead from Covid alone, the slaughter of our allies the Kurds and Afghans in the Middle East, a Russian invasion of Ukraine with many more tens of thousands murdered … and a Presidential Medal of Freedom Award for, of all people, Rush Limbaugh.
“Such things that occurred under Bush and Trump are incompetencies that never happened before. Never! Not even under Republicans.”
“…contrast that with Harvard Law Review editor Obama. How many press conferences did he have after taking office? How frequently did you see him on the job? He handled some of the biggest problems this country has ever had. People were impressed he could do it. And there was so much of it to do after Bush’s mishandling.
“In an almost identical way, Biden is masterfully handling the problems left over from Trump — Covid, infrastructure, the credibility and reliability of our governmental institutions, the economy. So, isn’t intelligence kind of a good thing for us all?”
“If the Filthy Rich and their corporations can convince people that the government’s job of serving the people is a special interest among all the rest, then corporations and the Filthy Rich can advance the proposition they are due some special consideration and financial bonuses whenever the government does anything for the society it is supposed to serve. If you think about it, this narrative sets them up as an insatiable entity needing to be appeased for any largesse going to ordinary folks.
“Yet where do corporations and the Filthy Rich get the right, or the gall, to claim some special status equal to that of the people themselves, allowing them to increase their already heavy-with-gold coffers as an offset of something benefiting the common good. They are like the voracious monster of the forest, feared by the villagers, who sets itself up as deserving of human sacrifice, just so it doesn’t release its terrible power on the townsfolk.”
“Corporations and the Filthy Rich were able to demand compensation from the government—in all kinds of ways, both sneaky and obvious — simply for allowing the government to function also for the benefit of the people at other times.”
“It used to be that the Republican narrative that was pushed was that benefits to corporations and the wealthy are appropriately balanced by attention to the people’s needs and wants. That is akin to ‘sacrificing of the village’s youth to the forest monster.’ A tax cut here could be rationalized as justified by a social program there.”
“It was the same old ‘bread and circuses’ being given to the masses in exchange for their enslavement and money. It was an appeasement of the masses to serve as a distraction from the larceny and creeping fascism the Controllers would be perpetrating.”
“… [this earlier appeasement through ‘bread and circuses’] was superseded by an acceptance of the notion that the wealthy could simply claim/steal tax and other benefits from the government without any requirement of allowing the government to function otherwise for the people. In this scenario — exemplified perfectly by the huge tax cuts and the bailouts we saw the Filthy Rich were able to extricate from the Treasury under the American presidents of the last two decades — the monster of the forest simply ravages the village, no tradeoff necessary, no benefit allowed.”
“…we will look more into the disaster that accrues to a society — like ours and indeed that of most of the world — that exists mostly to fund the extravagances and egos of the rich, with little or no largesse allowed its citizens.”
“…this socialism for the rich has immediate consequences. Every major tax benefit for the rich, going back to Hoover — all of them provided by Republicans — has led in a few years to a recession or depression. They take the money, then they leave the scene and leave the Democrats holding the bag: Not only do Democrats then need to fix the economy all over again, but the recession that the tax cuts caused will be attributed, in the Republican narrative, to the spending the Democrats necessarily must do to right the financial ship again. Thus, the wealthy Controllers will even frame any benefit to the people as being some affront to their intentions to suck even more money from the masses to add to their obscene wealth.”
“…many of the conservative Republicans who attacked the student loan forgiveness plan as being ‘socialism’ … as per their usual … were beneficiaries of the PPP program, and … get this … had their PPP loans, sizable loans, forgiven.”
“We have the best recent example of this pattern of a recession following tax cuts for the rich in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts given by W. Bush to his wealthy donors and friends. That corporate socialism led to the Great Recession only four years later.”
“’Despite promises from proponents of the tax cuts, evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.’”
“…the financial ‘meltdown’ of 2007-2008, the Great Recession, came from the people who are supposed to know so much about economics. They claim they are fiscally responsible conservatives. That is yet another lie. As McCain said in 2008, ‘I don’t know too much about economics.’”
“It’s true Republicans can’t handle government. It’s true that they will claim to be fiscally responsible and yet … what happened? Well, the largest economic collapse in American history second to the Depression … and it was the largest collapse in the economy of the world.”
“…the Internet kind of brought folks together in solidarity of purpose the same way maybe a rally or demonstration in the past would have brought people together.”
“There’s a pattern I’ll be talking about where … it’s like black is made white, white made black, where things are turned around.”
“Republican proposals end up accomplishing the exact opposite of what they say they will. And they know their proposals are fraudulently presented, even when they propose them.”
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[Chapter 17 text begins:] With corporations firmly backing Republicans, the Democrats in every election that I can recall — especially in the presidential elections — always were way underfunded.
The Money Changing Everything — The Planting of Lies
Meanwhile the GOP is consistently overfunded because the Rich-publicans are carrying the wishes of those corporations into the board rooms of Congress along with their huge amounts of money.
Corporations Invest in America (Government)
Yet these payoffs were small investments to corporations, relative to the benefits they would get in the changes in government policy which affected them. Republicans were — It was obvious … it was all on public record — Republicans were getting huge amounts of money going into their campaign coffers and were way overfunded. One hell of a lot of money was put toward putting and keeping Republicans in office. It was not even a fair fight.
Democrats Not Wanting to Be Totally Disarmed
So with no hope then … and this is what I saw happen … Democrats, who were still wanting to work for a better America and therefore better government, were forced into a choice of either continuing to rely only on contributions from the American people … as for example unions, keeping them woefully underfunded, and therefore losing … or to accept what was being offered them also by corporations.
So you began to have some Democrats making compromises with their principles and accepting some corporate money. Though even then it remained true that for the most part Democrats were funded by unions and organizations dealing with issues, like education, health care, seniors, jobs, and so on that affect the average American.
Now, this is where I get to those Big Lies, those concocted untruths that end up everyone just knowing to be true.
The Lies
To make this point, I need to back up to that thing related to convoluted tax codes and corporations and how the tax system in America became a tool of larceny for the Filthy Rich. The tax codes were molded to the greedy desires of various industries and corporations; this was allowed as a tradeoff for legislative and other benefits to the common good.
Yet I was saying that eventually it was getting to where a huge increase in that problem could be attributed to corporations not even having to justify that the paybacks they wanted were good for America anymore. No tradeoffs to the common good even necessary. How did this happen?
Well, we have the situation mentioned where eventually Democrats were virtually required to accept corporate money or else they had no chance to win elections. Naturally then, they had to produce at least a little for their benefactor corporations as well. Then they would be painted with the same brush as the corrupt Republicans.
Obvious “Truth” — The Lesser of Two Evils Is Still Evil
Folks would apply an absolute standard to these considerations. They would conveniently forget their own fallibilities when targeting Democrats, as they were instructed to by Republicans. They would pretend that folks in government are capable of a standard they would not themselves be able to meet.
Breaking news — politicians are human
Let me put it this way: We expect politicians to be like the people we maintain we are like, what we would like others to think we are like … but aren’t. What this ends up looking like: Republicans are excused of all wrong-doing, at the behest of the wealthy with a beam in their eye, on the basis that it is equal to the mote that is in the eye of the Democrats. Basically, while Republicans are allowed much leeway, Democrats are punished for not being like the people we are ourselves pretending to be. Ultimately this tarring of Democrats in the same vat as Republicans gets Republicans off the hook.
People can still be good, even if not Mother-Theresa good
It is crucial to keep in mind the fact that Democrats, over the sixty-year period under review, were not getting near as much money from corporations as Republicans, by and large, and they remained afloat mostly through contributions from unions and from organizations of masses of people pushing issues of overall social benefit. So Democrats were backed for the most part by actual people not corporations; still they had to produce something for the overlords.
To misinform about this, the Republicans would encourage a narrative in the country and in the social media that goes like this: “The lesser of two evils is still evil.” Which has it that all evil things are equally bad.
Say, you had to decide between one person on a hill being bombed out of existence versus one hundred people on a nearby hill getting killed. This thinking on lesser evils being evil would have it that both instances — one hundred dead versus one death — are equally evil. It is saying your decision to allow one hundred to die is not a hundred times more evil than one death, but equivalent. Now, there are ninety-nine people who would vehemently disagree with that, aren’t there? If they were allowed to live, that is.
Let us take a real-world example. Is Hillary Clinton’s deletion of emails — many of which were probably the spam mails and niceties between friends that fill up all our inboxes — equal to a treasonous insurrection? Some people would have it so. Hard core MAGAts would have it that it is somehow far worse; go figure.
Is a risk ratio for a possible adverse reaction to vaccines of five cases in one million shots, 0.000005 percent1 — which would get you anaphylaxis, not death, by the way — equal to a one in one hundred chance of death ratio, 1 percent, for not getting the vaccine? Again, some people would have it so. Lesser of two evils is still evil, right?
“Don’t know much about” arithmetic….
So these “lesser of two evils” arguments are ones where the factor of proportion is left out. These things are not seen as amounts, which can be compared, which are relative; but as absolutes. MAGAts are gullible innocents when it comes to slogans that require a little thinking to make out their absurdity, especially if it includes any arithmetic. I swear, these folks, who apparently slept through third-grade numbers class, go into a brain fog and are unable to fathom the differences between amounts: Everything over a thousand is equally “a lot”; everything under one and especially if there are zeros involved is equally “a little”; millions and billions are imagined the same way, let alone are they able to imagine the meaning of “trillions”; and forget about trying to get them to understand anything that involves percentages. You just get that blank look, before they change the subject or throw up one more “whatabouts” they’ve heard from Fox News.
I know, the slogan — “the lesser of two evils is still evil” — sounds really cool and clever. Perhaps even profound. Still, this kind of ploy, which is one version of what is called a false equivalency, is bullshit. For there is nothing in life that is totally good and nothing totally evil. It asserts an absolutism that emanates out of the thinking of religiophiles who seek to maintain such categories of white and black, goodness and sinners, for dogmatic reasons. And as a way to make oneself better than others with an allowance to be judgmental … and punishing … of them.
Yet, outside of dogma and with neutral analysis, we see such a thing — “the lesser of two evils is still evil” — could be said about virtually anything. Being said about everything, it would have it that nothing could ever be done, no progress could ever occur, for one could find a negative consequence, however small or relatively small, for virtually everything.
The lesser-of-two-evils-is-still-evil argument is so obviously stupid, yet it is tossed around as truth, infecting the minds of erstwhile activists or progressives.
Put it this way: If the lesser-of-two-evils rationale is, as ostensibly it is, something meant to make folks think, to stop & consider…. Then quite frankly it only works if the person is dim-witted. For any thinking would cause one to reject it.
So, no, it does not promote thinking; it shuts it down. It provides a convenient cover that allows people to continue in their comfortable and lazy ignorance. That’s its actual purpose, when used, actually. It is to shut down any further thought on the matter.
The lesser-of-two-evils argument derails any positive change, any benefit to the people — save imaginary ones that are somehow not in any way possible seen as negative — for it sets up a “purity” standard for all decisions that is impossible to find. It prevents all progress, because there is always some way in which any particular thing can be seen by somebody — even if they have to distort it, which they will — by somebody as evil or simply not good.
The twisted thinking required to do that is amplified when the argument involves percentages or numbers; for the comparison of them requires that ability to do arithmetic and to understand and be able to imagine numbers. That is totally lost on those whose ideas of science are found in the Bible, who have been taught to believe the insane propositions of the “religious,” who have been indoctrinated to unthinkingly conform to the worldviews and conclusions of patriarchal strong-man authorities; and who — Herman’s fucking Hermits2 again — “don’t know much about” arithmetic. These, together, allow folks to criticize everything they want, indiscriminately, which maintains the status quo, which ultimately most benefits the wealthy overseers, the ones who have it good in the current system.
Obvious “Truth” — Both Parties Funded by Special Interests
Alright, so it happened that Democrats would seek to strengthen their overall hand to accomplish beneficial things for society by tossing occasional bones of tax concessions to their corporate backers. They would go to their GOP counterparts and would want something in the tax code, for example. And the Republicans would say, “Well you want that? Well, I’ll give you that, you give me this.” So it could not help but happen that taxes and public policy got more and more convoluted in conforming to these complications and outright contradictions. We saw this increasingly over the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Nevertheless, Republicans were always seen, rightfully so, as the ones who were representing various corporations and what were called the special interests — defense, big agriculture, big oil, the Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies, big pharma, and so on.
Then this is what also happened: This huge lie was created, becoming a big part of the Matrix, the Matrix of misinformation and confusion that was being put out to cover up truth. This lie was impossible to make out, blocked out by an omnipresent media saying all the same thing, in rather like this monotone voice almost like Pravda in the old days of the Soviet Union. I saw this happen too. You no longer had differences of opinion you just had the same thing being said.
Anyway, this Big Lie, firmly woven into the fabric of the Matrix as to be both invisible and therefore unchallengeable even by rational arguments … this lie, and I’m sure you’ve heard it is that: Well, both parties are funded by special interests!
Real truth: Democrats funded by a special interest — people
Now, of course, you know you’ve got Big Oil and Big Coal, and you’ve got the Pharmaceuticals and the Defense Industry and they’re funding the Republicans, and they would come back and say, “Special interests?! Well you Democrats have them too. What about your unions? You’re being funded by them!”
Well let’s just take the unions for starters, okay? Seriously, the unions as special interests? The unions?
Real truth: Republicans funded by non-people — corporations
Okay, let me step back. We’ve got corporations, which are a few people getting rich and it’s not even benefiting people. They’re not even including the people who work at the corporations, because they’re union people, maybe, or else they’re non-union people but they’re certainly not making any money off of what the corporations are getting in laws and benefits from their paid-for Republican representatives.
Obvious “Truth” — Unions Are a “Special” Interest
So, what is a special interest now? Okay, so, is the American public a special interest? Wait, I thought the government was supposed to be for the people. Now if the people are workers, primarily; and at one time there was a lot of them that were union workers, okay? But even if they’re not union workers, aren’t the unions aiming for benefits for their membership that also carries over to the non-union workers? If the unions are able to get medical benefits, for example, which is one big thing that they pushed for, well then it became common for all workers to get medical benefits.
Is it a “special” interest if it benefits virtually everyone?
Okay … that’s a special interest? I thought special interest was something that was against the interests of the American people and it was only going to benefit a certain small segment, a certain handful of people. That’s why it’s called special, isn’t it? Yet there’s the Republicans saying, “Oh, they’re unions, workers benefits are for unions.” And I just wonder if the unions are just a handful of people, who the hell is making all the stuff in America, who’s building the buildings, who’s…? Geez! I think you’ve got the point.
For, I’m sure you’ve all heard it, and I’m sure you’ve all accepted it that “unions are special interests.” But I just don’t get it how … well maybe I didn’t have a high paying job, or anything like that. But before retirement, I worked … doesn’t everybody? … I’m a working person and unions weren’t against me. I just wished there were more unions, so that whenever I would have a job or something like that I could have had one to represent me against the powerful corporate owners.
Put out to cover up and confuse
So here, quite clearly, we have one of those obvious “truths” put out to cover up and confuse clear thinking: “Unions are a special interest.”
Obvious “Truth” — Education Is a “Special” Interest
What else is a “special interest” for Democrats? Oh, it’s the teacher’s union or stuff like that. Or, education.
Oh, great! So, what is that again? So education is for who now? Okay, now that’s a special interest. Mmmm hm. Education’s a special interest? Does that mean that there are like only a few people that have kids that need education?
Education is a “special” interest … it is only for those who own brains
I’m starting to get sick here. I don’t quite get it. I mean I’ m getting confused, you know what I mean. This is what I’m talking about, this is that irrationality: Special interest, education? Aw, c’mon, c’mon, I want to say.
An America without people is an America that doesn’t need education
I mean, c’mon, aw, c’mon, somebody, somebody point out that education is not a special interest. It’s … Jesus! We won’t have an America in the future unless we have kids!
Don’t need education … it doesn’t matter if stupid people make our corporate and governmental decisions. *sarcasm*
Not to mention how can it be a special interest if we were to give more money to education, we would have better educated people growing up … these people would even benefit the corporations by being better corporate employees. They would, in fact, benefit all of society by making better decisions.
I kind of think we have an idea of what a big difference intelligence makes … what a big difference it is when you have intelligent people running things versus when you don’t.
We kind of know how that works (stupid people running things)
For didn’t we have a kind of a little contrast there; didn’t we have plenty of experience of that in this century? I believe it had to do, firstly, with C-student Bush … if you remember some things like Katrina and things like that. Or maybe what hits you is something about a huge costly war that … well, it was gotten into on false grounds, illegally, we were lied to … but the whole matter and even the conduct of it, wasn’t it all rather … stupid what happened?
Then after eight years of intelligent guidance from America’s cockpit with Obama, we got Trump. This is a guy who has been called “the dumbest student I ever had,” by one of his professors. While Trump — doing that lying thing he does — claimed to have graduated at the top of his class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, his former college professor, William T. Kelley, felt that he was a fool. A close friend of Kelley’s revealed in the Daily Kos, after Kelley’s death, “Professor Kelley told me a hundred times over three decades that ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.’”
So this is a man, Trump, who hides his college grades from public scrutiny, yet claims to be the smartest of his class. This is a man who pathetically bragged, as some kind of intellectual feat, about his ability to pass a simple test for dementia. And we saw the result of having this goober dimwit at the helm: millions dead from Covid alone, the slaughter of our allies the Kurds and Afghans in the Middle East, a Russian invasion of Ukraine with many more tens of thousands murdered … and a Presidential Medal of Freedom Award for, of all people, Rush Limbaugh.
Bush gets presidency — kind of like he won the lottery
Such things that occurred under Bush and Trump are incompetencies that never happened before. Never! Not even under Republicans. We had W. Bush taking more time off from the presidency than any president in history … it was kind of like he thought he won the lottery or something. Didn’t even bother to look like he had a job to do. Wasn’t his first press conference something like ten months after he was sworn in?
Trump did far worse, of course, he even stopped having press conferences completely. He also spent much of his time, like W. Bush, golfing and vacationing.
Obama gets presidency — kind of like he got a job!
Now, contrast that with Harvard Law Review editor Obama. How many press conferences did he have after taking office? How frequently did you see him on the job? He handled some of the biggest problems this country has ever had. People were impressed he could do it. And there was so much of it to do after Bush’s mishandling.
In an almost identical way, Biden is masterfully handling the problems left over from Trump — Covid, infrastructure, the credibility and reliability of our governmental institutions, the economy. So, isn’t intelligence kind of a good thing for us all?
Anyway. You get the point. Education a special interest? Seriously now.
Obvious “Truth” — The Sick and the Elderly Are “Special” Interests
How about medical care? Health and life are not for the common good. God, no, we don’t need medical care, that’s a special interest, that’s just for them people who get sick … And you know, as Nixon said, “Some people are just wanting to get sick all the time.” And I’m starting to get sick here. I mean, y’know, a special interest only for people who get sick? C’mon!
Okay, then health care is a special interest … it’s only for people who have bodies
And, it’s like, “Oh, no, no, it’s not just for those people who get sick, it’s those people who have to pay medical bills.” Oh, I see, then that must be just for…. Who’s gotta pay medical bills, again? Well none of us have to pay medical bills, it’s all free, right? Nooo, it’s not.
The elderly are a special interest … it only benefits those who are affected by time
And is it really necessary to point out that seniors and the retired are not a special interest? I suppose if you’re thinking the current group of the elderly are the last humans ever to reach an advanced age it would limit their numbers some.
So unless we all suddenly stop getting older, help to the elderly and the retired is help to us all; it is not special. Am I not right?
Obvious “Truth” — Democrats and Republicans Are Equal
So, where do you hear anybody pointing this out? I don’t know but if you’re hearing the same media and TV coverage that I am, you’re hearing that the two major parties in America are equal. The Democrats and Republicans are equal because they’re equally funded by special interests, and the special interests…. What are these special interests again? Well, sometimes it’s like, “What are those special interests?” “Well, it’s the union, and the education, and it’s the medical care.” Oh, geez, just listen sometimes.
What is the rationale behind this strategy of calling the government’s function of serving the people a special interest? I’ll tell you, and you’ll notice this is exactly how it has played out: If the Filthy Rich and their corporations can convince people that the government’s job of serving the people is a special interest among all the rest, then corporations and the Filthy Rich can advance the proposition they are due some special consideration and financial bonuses whenever the government does anything for the society it is supposed to serve. If you think about it, this narrative sets them up as an insatiable entity needing to be appeased for any largesse going to ordinary folks.
Yet where do corporations and the Filthy Rich get the right, or the gall, to claim some special status equal to that of the people themselves, allowing them to increase their already heavy-with-gold coffers as an offset of something benefiting the common good. They are like the voracious monster of the forest, feared by the villagers, who sets itself up as deserving of human sacrifice, just so it doesn’t release its terrible power on the townsfolk.
And that is actually what it came down to: Corporations and the Filthy Rich were able to demand compensation from the government—in all kinds of ways, both sneaky and obvious — simply for allowing the government to function also for the benefit of the people at other times.
Yet it has gotten worse. If you can believe that. It has gotten worse than simply the Filthy Rich demanding ransom for any assistance it might allow the people to grant to themselves.
It used to be that the Republican narrative that was pushed was that benefits to corporations and the wealthy are appropriately balanced by attention to the people’s needs and wants. That is akin to “sacrificing of the village’s youth to the forest monster.” A tax cut here could be rationalized as justified by a social program there. There wasn’t this tradeoff ostensibly in the Congress, of course. It is just that this offsetting of gains could mollify the gains of the Filthy Rich (the losses of everyone else) — in the minds of Americans. It was the same old “bread and circuses” being given to the masses in exchange for their enslavement and money. It was an appeasement of the masses to serve as a distraction from the larceny and creeping fascism the Controllers would be perpetrating.
We will soon see how even that — as the Controllers increased their power and money over this period since the Sixties and till today — was superseded by an acceptance of the notion that the wealthy could simply claim/steal tax and other benefits from the government without any requirement of allowing the government to function otherwise for the people. In this scenario — exemplified perfectly by the huge tax cuts and the bailouts we saw the Filthy Rich were able to extricate from the Treasury under the American presidents of the last two decades — the monster of the forest simply ravages the village, no tradeoff necessary, no benefit allowed.
This is a danger in itself, for many reasons increasingly obvious as we continue.
Obvious “Truth” — Republicans/ Conservatives Are Fiscally Responsible
As we go along, we will look more into the disaster that accrues to a society — like ours and indeed that of most of the world — that exists mostly to fund the extravagances and egos of the rich, with little or no largesse allowed its citizens.
Benefits for Republicans are expected, for the people, are socialism
For now, though, I wish simply to point out that this socialism for the rich has immediate consequences. Every major tax benefit for the rich, going back to Hoover — all of them provided by Republicans — has led in a few years to a recession or depression. They take the money, then they leave the scene and leave the Democrats holding the bag: Not only do Democrats then need to fix the economy all over again, but the recession that the tax cuts caused will be attributed, in the Republican narrative, to the spending the Democrats necessarily must do to right the financial ship again. Thus, the wealthy Controllers will even frame any benefit to the people as being some affront to their intentions to suck even more money from the masses to add to their obscene wealth. I feel so sorry for them, don’t you?
We witnessed that obscene greediness recently — August 2022 — when President Joe Biden came up with a plan to relieve ten thousand dollars of student loan for strapped students. That’s a measly amount, compared to what students might have to owe; it’s an infinitesimal amount compared to what is given corporations and wealthy Republicans in tax breaks, bailouts, subsidies, and PPP loans.
Incidentally, that last was loans out of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was set up to distribute funds to hard-strapped businesses and corporation to buffer the economy from the effects Covid was having on it. And we found out most recently that many of the conservative Republicans who attacked the student loan forgiveness plan as being “socialism” … as per their usual … were beneficiaries of the PPP program, and … get this … had their PPP loans, sizable loans, forgiven. These same folks are in August 2022 calling student loan forgiveness “socialism,” while they have not had to pay back their sizable government financial payments.3
Recessions, affecting everyone, follow tax cuts for the wealthy
We have the best recent example of this pattern of a recession following tax cuts for the rich in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts given by W. Bush to his wealthy donors and friends. That corporate socialism led to the Great Recession only four years later. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it this way, “The biggest tax policy changes enacted under President George W. Bush were the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts…. High-income taxpayers benefited most from these tax cuts, with the top one percent of households receiving an average tax cut of over $570,000 between 2004-2012 (increasing their after-tax income by more than 5 percent each year). Despite promises from proponents of the tax cuts, evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”4
So the financial “meltdown” of 2007-2008, the Great Recession, came from the people who are supposed to know so much about economics. They claim they are fiscally responsible conservatives. That is yet another lie. As McCain said in 2008, “I don’t know too much about economics.” He don’t know too much about economics! Who does McCain think he is, the Herman’s fucking Hermits!? Anyway, McCain kind of spilled the beans there. Some of the actual truth came out: About conservatives and fiscal matters … Republicans “don’t know too much” about it. What they know a lot about, clearly, is larceny.
Bush brought us all together….
Well, that’s one thing that Bush gave back to America. He united us. He united us around at least one obvious rallying standard. He made our minds finally clear that … it’s true he’s an idiot! It’s true Republicans can’t handle government. It’s true that they will claim to be fiscally responsible and yet … what happened? Well, the largest economic collapse in American history second to the Depression … and it was the largest collapse in the economy of the world. So, thank you, C-student, George W. Bush!5
Obvious “Truth” — Corporations Fund the Elections of both Republicans and Democrats
And by the way, I said this was the rise and fall of Obvious “Truths.” The idea that both parties are funded by huge corporations, what they call large donor contributors, was blatantly revealed as the lie it is during the 2008 presidential election.
Remember, in the 2008 presidential election. Contrasted with Republican McCain’s funding from those real special interests — those related to Big Business and Defense … what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex — Democrat Obama ran a campaign where the donations were voluntarily capped at an unusually low level. The upper limit was set at $1,000, which meant that his backing would have to come from numerous small contributors, not special interests benefiting only a group. Amazingly, he received a record amount of money to support him. It was said he had all kinds of money more than McCain, even though McCain was backed by corporations.
Then I must be a corporation, because I gave to Obama
Now, how did that happen? Well, it could only have happened because the masses of Americans wanted to give, even if it was $5, $10, or whatever … whatever they had. It required that donations come from a huge number more of people than contributed to McCain. I gave. My wife gave … several times. Didn’t you give, too?
For a change, in recent memory, Obama’s fund-raising and election demonstrated that strength I was talking about before — that strength that’s of so many people feeling the same way, therefore acting in solidarity with each other. Surprisingly this happened despite those folks not being in face-to-face contact with each other, in general. This was one of the interesting things about this development: that it was largely accomplished just through the power of the Internet.
It’s the Internet Versus the Matrix
So the Internet kind of brought folks together in solidarity of purpose the same way maybe a rally or demonstration in the past would have brought people together.
It was significant that most of this happened from the actions of people sitting alone in front of computers, not buoyed up by the effusiveness of a demonstration. It showed an unexpected power of social media.
In the past, face-to-face, like demonstrations, were where people connected with people like themselves
Remember, in demonstrations in the past … and I’ve been to them … you would go and you would share your feelings of outrage and hurt. You would be affirmed in the importance of your concerns and be instilled with hope of a change in them. Most of all you would have your sense of what was going on expressed out loud. Previous to that, you may have been reading the newspapers, say, and feeling, this is wrong, this is an outrage. This would have motivated you to attend a demonstration, and there you would have found other people who were feeling the same things. So you would be confirmed in your beliefs that it was wrong.
In the past, face-to-face, like demonstrations, were where people learned and grew in understanding
Nowadays, social media and the Internet have provided a similar thing where you can express your concern and rage and find others who feel the same way you do and so confirm your beliefs, and even expand on them with more information. So you can grow in your understanding of events and in your knowledge of what you can do about them.
This function of developing your insight and your effectiveness was provided by the rallies and demonstrations in the pre-electronic eras. The point is that over the election of Obama people connected again; and it was people not loads of military-industrial money that got him elected.
Coming Up — Watch Black Be Made White, White Be Made Black! Oh, Those Rascally Magical Republicans!
Okay, that’s it for the first section of “Class War — The Matrix,” which is Chapters Fourteen through Seventeen in this book.
The next section is coming up — Chapters Eighteen, Nineteen, and Twenty — in which I go more deeply into how they were able to get American people — including the media and the pundits and everybody — to accept this obvious unreality which is that both parties are funded by “special interests”; and you probably believe that yourself.
Oh, The Things They Do
But I think if you hear what I have to say, I think I’ll convince you of how amazing it was that they were able to pull that off. I think it will shock you to see how they could get so many people thinking irrationally about something that is so obviously not true. And there’ll be other things like that too.
Watch ‘em Turn Black into White!
There’s a pattern I’ll be talking about where … it’s like black is made white, white made black, where things are turned around. For example, Republicans might have a proposal to help with the health care problem, for as they say, and we all knew, the costs of health care were high and people, prior to Obamacare, were not getting covered. Yet Republican proposals end up accomplishing the exact opposite of what they say they will. And they know their proposals are fraudulently presented, even when they propose them.
It is a matter of record that these sorts of swindles have been proposed and pushed by Republicans fully knowledgeable of what they were accomplishing. These things happened; we see they continue to happen. Taking health care again: Obviously in 2009, after Republican control, we were left a very, very bad health care problem. The point is that right from the beginning — you can go back to Nixon on this — they knew what they were doing in creating the health-care system that collapsed. They knew how it would turn out, and there’s proof of this. We have their very words.…
A Glimpse Ahead
The last thing to be disclosed in this series: the Why. The actual events that led these people to decide on this path toward us all, and moved them to increase and add and elaborate those initial moves to the levels of the most comprehensive totalitarian controls over a people ever attempted, let alone succeeding, as far as we know right now.
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Erosion of Reason, Self-Confidence:
Repetition Makes It Possible to Control and Equal Time for Idiots
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[Quotes/highlights:] “This section continues the exposition of this incredible phenomenon of decades-long and increasing intentional misrepresentations used by one party representing a tiny segment of the electorate to weave a fabric of falsity over the eyes of the American public.
“ Similar to a kind of hypnotic trance, it is a widely accepted but unreal and mostly opposite mental state acting like a filter to reality, blocking out the truth and substituting a fantasy quilt woven of verbal constructions.”
“These constructions — the ‘obvious truths’ — are designed to please the ear, rationalize the urges, and comfort the ego, so that they will become acceptable substitutes for reason and honest perception in a population which has also been intentionally burdened, stressed, and busied through policies intended to keep them submissive and fearful.
“This coordination of policy and mantra is a strategic effort, emanating essentially from a sliver of the population, as a terrified reaction initially to a rapid series of popular developments and mass movements with global reach, with the apparent power and possibility of overthrowing a multigenerational structure of power, wealth, privilege, and dominance.
“The acceptability of this substitute narrative was shaken only in recent decades as it collided dramatically with the system that it had spawned, exposing its roots in the minds of a class — the wealthy among us, only — and its utter lack of foundation in reality.”
“I talked about the fifty-year Republican campaign to convince the media and the American people of certain truisms that had nothing to do with the truth, in fact were almost one-hundred percent of the time the opposite of the truth. It’s pretty amazing what they were able to do.
“It’s quite a story what a campaign it was, involving such things as getting people poorer and poorer, requiring them to work longer hours and so on so that they would have less time to think about things. It included other elements such as the way in which people’s minds were either stressed or made busy, and also the way they wore down the American people’s resolve to fight back against injustice.”
“The Republican untruth, no matter how contradicted by observable reality, was endlessly repeated in the exact same way, by each and every Republican. Always and everywhere when reason would be called on, instead the hypnotic truism would be brought out. Pounded home in this manner, the ‘obvious truth’ would eventually take root, sadly, without fail, for lack of anything else countering it able to be remembered.
“The Democrats, meanwhile, were of course on the opposite side of this seamless coordination of Republican effort. Since their motives were not to enslave, their instinct was to respond, for their part, with reason and explanations that step by step delineated the causes of things. However, all those words could not be remembered or take root in the minds of the befuddled masses, surrounded by such a barrage of an organized, disciplined ongoing assault of ‘talking points’ against them.
“This mesmerism was combined with carefully crafted and timed Republican policies which succeeded beyond all expectation in eroding leisure (and importantly, pondering) time, financial power, physical strength, and sleep and pleasure time.
“Together they created increasing worry and stress time, overwhelmed and busy moments, and mindless paperwork time. It brought in confusional realities and mental ‘supports.’ This precarious mental state left people defenseless against the major thrust of verbal repetition, comprised of simplistic, simple-minded, irrational, then increasingly irrational, but perfectly concocted verbal phrasings that elicited the precise proportions of fear, apprehension, uncertainty, feelings of paternal comfort and of being approved of, unimpeachable direction, comprehensive reinforcement and support, pleasing reward, and congratulation so as to manage, direct, and control the populace.”
“There’s something really wrong when you have a media that doesn’t have the ability to reason enough to point out the irrationality of these concocted untruths. For they are broadcast endlessly, repetitively, over and over again, by one after another of Republicans, whenever they get on TV, whenever they get on the radio. Then they are repeated by their lackeys in the media, like Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, or whatever”
“…without clarity on events and in particular who’s at fault, and when the waters are muddied and any talk of specific people responsible is covered in social niceties and generalities with relevant details only in the fine print, well, people are hamstrung in their ability to do anything to right any wrongs.’
“…can’t we make a comparison as to who a better party is, what group is more trustworthy based upon twelve percent of the most corrupt being Democrats and almost ninety percent being Republicans? Does that not sound like the one party made out like bandits and this other guy, a Democrat, was in the room at the time? Or do you still believe that the lesser of two evils is equally evil? Pshaw.”
“…do we just, as media, cavalierly toss out clichéd thoughtless truisms as if the masses don’t matter … as if they are not real and thoughtful deciders in our collective drama but merely pawns to be placated or riff-raff to be kept down. If we find something wrong with one party, why must we paint both parties with the same brush? Isn’t that what is done?”
“There’s been an erosion of rationality, and it’s not just of regular Americans. It’s also of those Americans who are in front of us on TV, soothing us with comfortable truisms, which I think many of them half believe.”
“The result is a situation where it is doubtful there is much reason involved in what is told. Hardly any common sense or thought into it, it is as if the scripts are cobbled together by computers from random clichés that are currently about…. In the example of bribes paid to politicians, and the Abramoff one is typical, isn’t the media’s take on it slanted? No doubt they would want to derail public anger toward the masters of the troughs at which they feed.’”
“…the far bigger ‘bosses,’ if we can call it that, of Democrats is the ordinary folks, often, as in the issue-oriented organizations … those ‘special’ Americans seeking to be heard through unions and groups whose concerns are education, the environment, the elderly, public health, liberty, justice, civil rights, consumer protection, world peace, integrity of government, media accountability, the welfare of the helpless and the poor, and so on.”
“…whereas the media insinuates that Democrats are enslaved by the relatively meager amounts of corporate money directed to them, for the Republicans, who are receiving the tenfold amounts and are virtually exclusively funded by corporations … their entire paycheck paid by the rich folks … the media implies that these folks, miraculously defying human nature, are actually going to go out there and day after day point out the corruption in America that is ever the product of this bloated elite, their sole benefactors.”
“…however inconsistent with common sense these insinuations and outright assertions from the media, when you have something that’s repeated over and over again, mantram-like … man! Especially if you’re in a confused state, or a stressed state … it’s gonna be the only thing you can think of when you’re coming up with opinions.”
“These untruths are so firmly woven into the fabric of the Matrix….”
“And these nonsensicals are so perfectly knitted into the blanket of that matrix that they’re both mesmerizing and invisible, therefore unchallenged, even by the pundits. They are even, by rational argument, unchallenge-able.”
“Bush would never give an answer to the question. It would be used like a jumping off point to say what he really wanted to say. It had the intended effect of distracting the viewers from any clear thought on the issue or subject.
“It also freed up that time to be used, once viewers were led off track, for the seeding of those now assailable minds.”
“Attacks on our reason … i.e., Republicans to public — ‘You’re a dumb shit, I’m not going to answer your questions!’”
“Here we have politicians, who are always telling us what the truth is, but who will not answer our questions so that we can add our own thinking to the matter. We are prevented from coming to our own conclusions, so also making our own decisions.”
“…it is sort of like a coordinated chanting. It doesn’t matter what the issue or topic is, from the GOP side you just keep hearing the same phrases about it — phrases intended to replace reason.”
“…Republicans are using any question, as in a television interview, as a launch point into a rehearsed nicely knit together, truth-sounding, package of untruths.”
“…there’s a certain power in something that’s said over and over again in the exact same words.”
“There’s a certain kind of comfort in not having to think, all you have to do is chant.”
“…this omnipresent repetition of phrases in response to questions … This chanting of untruths instead of having rational discourse, when people are hearing this year after year and even decade after decade, what does it do?
“Well, it adds to the smokescreen of confusion and misinformation that was effectively castrating and making Americans easily manipulated to whatever end the Republicans wanted.”
“…after all you’re not getting reasoned answers, you’re just getting slogans, and that leaves you confused, especially if it’s combined with a lot of misinformation which challenges the facts on everything, when everything is turned backward and they’re lying about everything.”
“I remember a time when the facts were not so much in dispute so there wasn’t such a huge divide between the Democrats and the Republicans about what the issues were. What was debated could then be what you do about those commonly acknowledged problems.”
“…this confusion over the issues has birthed an increasing polarization of opinions over the years about what the issues are. You see, we’re being told by some Republicans that there’s no global warming going on.”
“Recipe for ‘accurate’ reporting — start by mixing equal amounts of truth and lies…. (It’ll be fun seeing if the public can figure it out!)”
“Giving stupidity a chance … the only thing about which we’re compassionate these days.”
“…this method of reporting was actually debated when it started to happen. There were more seasoned journalists who were pointing out, ‘Hey, this is not giving equal time! We don’t give equal time to an idiotic argument just because it challenges, just because it is the opposite of the truth.’”
“…you’re easily manipulated. You’re standing there. Now if you’re just standing there not knowing what to do, and somebody starts pushing you in a particular direction, you’ve got no reason not to go in that direction … if you don’t have any ideas about what the truth is, you can be told anything.”
“The American public believed this truism that managed care would lower overall costs. They missed the part that they would not benefit from lowered costs, that lowered costs meant profits that would go into unseen hands, who would then go even further in denying medical care and increasing overall suffering and tragedy so that they could gather even more booty.”
“…when the Republicans need a change of public opinion or want people to believe a particular thing, the Big Lie is employed; in its repetition it makes it possible to control.”
“Republicans can keep it simple and be that much more persuasive. There can be no disagreement or confusion about an aim so singular, so clear — to benefit themselves and the people that are paying to get them elected. That keeps them pretty consistent and gives them a lot of solidarity.
“Good examples of this acting in lockstep abound in the last couple decades. We currently see Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, even when out of office. We see their solidarity again and again, even in standing firm against the truth. We might recollect how few Republicans accepted Biden’s win/ Trump’s loss in the 2020 election in the time between the voting and Biden’s inauguration. Some still maintain that lie. With Trump beating the election-fraud drum, very few would even acknowledge the election’s actual outcome. They attained solidarity in the Big Lie. That is what gives them their gains despite their corruption.”
“I saw this increasing corruption of Republicans to the point of it becoming overt and blatant in the last twenty, thirty years … the fall of “obvious truths.” By this I mean they’ve become so arrogant and callous in their lying and corruption they have become careless in hiding it. And now it’s as plain as day.”
“…this viewpoint that Republicans are an owned and paid for subsidiary of corporate behemoths over that time became a more frequently expressed perspective … especially since Bush’s ignoble slide and abject economic and diplomatic failures.
“For anyone who has a memory, though, we see that Trump was a continuation — a treasonous, lying, larcenous, incredibly costly one — of the corruption and mismanagement of government we got with W. Bush. Because of Trump’s treason and attempted coup, some folks are saying it is the end of the Republican Party. In truth, that is one possible outcome. Yet if not that, their influence is on the decline as a consequence of the Bush and Trump travesties and the ways Republican’s secretive corrupt activities were revealed in broad daylight, as a result of those two.”
“Around the end of Bush’s ‘regime,’ Republicans had declined twenty percent in numbers, and there was talk of them becoming extinct. They had been showed to be who they are. Finally, people were starting to realize that, yeah, yeah, you can be lied to … there was a decline of “obvious truths” — a crack in the Matrix — corresponding to the light that was dawning and the naked Republicans that could be seen scurrying for the doors.”
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[Chapter 18 text begins:] This is the second of three sections detailing the history of the Republican Party’s incredibly disciplined, relentlessly persistent, and amazingly cohesive nearly fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactors, the corporations and the Filthy Rich, through totally concocted untruths.
Reprise … The Campaign
This section continues the exposition of this incredible phenomenon of decades-long and increasing intentional misrepresentations used by one party representing a tiny segment of the electorate to weave a fabric of falsity over the eyes of the American public.
The Matrix
Similar to a kind of hypnotic trance, it is a widely accepted but unreal and mostly opposite mental state acting like a filter to reality, blocking out the truth and substituting a fantasy quilt woven of verbal constructions.
The “Obvious Truths”
These constructions — the “obvious truths” — are designed to please the ear, rationalize the urges, and comfort the ego, so that they will become acceptable substitutes for reason and honest perception in a population which has also been intentionally burdened, stressed, and busied through policies intended to keep them submissive and fearful.
The Perpetrators and Their Motive of Fear
This coordination of policy and mantra is a strategic effort, emanating essentially from a sliver of the population, as a terrified reaction initially to a rapid series of popular developments and mass movements with global reach, with the apparent power and possibility of overthrowing a multigenerational structure of power, wealth, privilege, and dominance.
The Fall of “Obvious Truths”
The acceptability of this substitute narrative was shaken only in recent decades as it collided dramatically with the system that it had spawned, exposing its roots in the minds of a class — the wealthy among us, only — and its utter lack of foundation in reality. The story of this lengthy and comprehensive intentional deception, its dramatic collision, and the gradual awakening of the population to the real forces behind the events of their lives and times, revealed in the shock of the disruption, continues.
The Campaign
In the first section of Part Four, about “Obvious Truths” and the Matrix — which is Chapters Fourteen through Seventeen — I talked about the fifty-year Republican campaign to convince the media and the American people of certain truisms that had nothing to do with the truth, in fact were almost one-hundred percent of the time the opposite of the truth. It’s pretty amazing what they were able to do.
It’s quite a story what a campaign it was, involving such things as getting people poorer and poorer, requiring them to work longer hours and so on so that they would have less time to think about things. It included other elements such as the way in which people’s minds were either stressed or made busy, and also the way they wore down the American people’s resolve to fight back against injustice.
Repetition Makes It Possible to Control
The Republican untruth, no matter how contradicted by observable reality, was endlessly repeated in the exact same way, by each and every Republican. Always and everywhere when reason would be called on, instead the hypnotic truism would be brought out. Pounded home in this manner, the “obvious truth” would eventually take root, sadly, without fail, for lack of anything else countering it able to be remembered.
Democratic Efforts on Deaf Ears
The Democrats, meanwhile, were of course on the opposite side of this seamless coordination of Republican effort. Since their motives were not to enslave, their instinct was to respond, for their part, with reason and explanations that step by step delineated the causes of things. However, all those words could not be remembered or take root in the minds of the befuddled masses, surrounded by such a barrage of an organized, disciplined ongoing assault of “talking points” against them.
Policy Was Added to Words to Bring into Unconscious Complicity the New Mental Territories Invaded
This mesmerism was combined with carefully crafted and timed Republican policies which succeeded beyond all expectation in eroding leisure (and importantly, pondering) time, financial power, physical strength, and sleep and pleasure time.
The Result
Together they created increasing worry and stress time, overwhelmed and busy moments, and mindless paperwork time. It brought in confusional realities and mental “supports.” This precarious mental state left people defenseless against the major thrust of verbal repetition, comprised of simplistic, simple-minded, irrational, then increasingly irrational, but perfectly concocted verbal phrasings that elicited the precise proportions of fear, apprehension, uncertainty, feelings of paternal comfort and of being approved of, unimpeachable direction, comprehensive reinforcement and support, pleasing reward, and congratulation so as to manage, direct, and control the populace.
That’s all I’m going to say now, but, if you didn’t read the previous three chapters, that will give you a little jumpstart on this. This second section of “Part Four, Class War — The Matrix,” picks up from the end of the first section, and continues now.
Erosion of Reason
A Herman’s Hermit of Economics
So, like John McCain said, “I don’t know too much about economics.” So he kind of spilled the beans there. Some of the truth actually came out.
Smear Campaign
So how did that happen? This idea of a special interest, and it being equal for both? It’s basically a smear campaign against Democrats who were trying to do things for Americans. And Americans were being told something different. By who? Well on the TV, on the news media.
So who talks on the news media. Well, it’s the supposed journalists, the pundits, and so on. And they’ve been saying that for decades now, I’ve heard them … “special interests” … that the Democrats have their special interests. So therefore how does anybody know the truth? and you’ve heard it, I’m sure. They say, “Well, the Democrats and Republicans are the same; there isn’t any difference between those parties.”
How is it that working to benefit people and working to benefit corporations are the same?
Now, how did that happen? How did it happen that Democrats who were trying to do things for the average American, for Americans in general, how did it become that they were the same as the Republicans, basically who were doing things for a handful of people in one corporation or a handful of people in the other corporation … or on behalf of some industry … all at the expense of the American people? And I’ll get to that last part later.
Answer: Start with an unthinking media
There’s something really wrong when you have a media that doesn’t have the ability to reason enough to point out the irrationality of these concocted untruths. For they are broadcast endlessly, repetitively, over and over again, by one after another of Republicans, whenever they get on TV, whenever they get on the radio. Then they are repeated by their lackeys in the media, like Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, or whatever. I wonder how many of you out there are actually thinking: “Yeah, that’s what that is … yeah, unions, environment … those are special interests.”
Then paint everyone with the same brush
I pointed out that Democrats have taken money, much smaller amounts than Republicans, from this or that corporation. Yet every time there’s a scandal, every time some of this practice leaks out, that is not what we hear.
There was a clear example of this around the time of W. Bush’s mismanagement of the economy with the Abramoff scandal. Abramoff was a lobbyist funneling huge amounts of cash into Congress for favors. It was largely Republicans that were involved. Only one of the top eight recipients was a Democrat; the rest were Republicans.
Cover up the culpable
However, was that detail important to the media? No, no, they couldn’t have it sound that way, like we have one particularly despicable political party. It might upset people. So Abramoff gave to both parties we were told — technically true, but deceptive, certainly not informative.
Cobble people’s ability to discriminate, think, act.
And as I discuss later, without clarity on events and in particular who’s at fault, and when the waters are muddied and any talk of specific people responsible is covered in social niceties and generalities with relevant details only in the fine print, well, people are hamstrung in their ability to do anything to right any wrongs.
You’d Have to Be Abraham-Lincoln Noble
Back to the scandal, so we have one Democrat out of the eight politicians who made off with the most loot. One Democrat and seven Republicans in the top bunch. Do you see that picture? I doubt the percentage of ordinary folks cheating on taxes is that small — one out of eight.
Can we not discriminate differences? Is that too much hard work?
So can’t we make a comparison as to who a better party is, what group is more trustworthy based upon twelve percent of the most corrupt being Democrats and almost ninety percent being Republicans? Does that not sound like the one party made out like bandits and this other guy, a Democrat, was in the room at the time? Or do you still believe that the lesser of two evils is equally evil? Pshaw.
“Free computers time!”
I mean, Jesus, if I see a truck fall over in the street and it’s got all these goodies, and they come rolling out … I don’t know, maybe it’s typewriters …. I told you I was old. Let me change that, maybe it’s computers or something. Everyone around me is taking some, taking free computers, and I’m thinking, “Hey, it’s free computers time!”
I mean, c’mon. How noble do you have to be to resist almost nine out of ten people around you? You gotta be pretty damn noble. I’m talking Abraham-Lincoln noble, right?
Dumb and Dumber
So anyway, can we have a little rational thought, or comparison?
Treating people like they’re dumber
Or do we just, as media, cavalierly toss out clichéd thoughtless truisms as if the masses don’t matter … as if they are not real and thoughtful deciders in our collective drama but merely pawns to be placated or riff-raff to be kept down. If we find something wrong with one party, why must we paint both parties with the same brush? Isn’t that what is done?
Is it any wonder then there is apathy? Any wonder there is confusion and self-sabotage among so many?
Doesn’t the media have any way of discerning any differences? … and that’s what I was setting up at the beginning, wasn’t I?
The dummies in front of us
There’s been an erosion of rationality, and it’s not just of regular Americans. It’s also of those Americans who are in front of us on TV, soothing us with comfortable truisms, which I think many of them half believe.
And by the way who arranges for the televising of these pundits and the news shows and programming like that? Geez, isn’t it like really, really big corporations and rich people who own them … General Electric, Rupert Murdoch, and folks like that?
This new app for creating the news
The result is a situation where it is doubtful there is much reason involved in what is told. Hardly any common sense or thought into it, it is as if the scripts are cobbled together by computers from random clichés that are currently about and, of course, the always handy “obvious truths.” In the example of bribes paid to politicians, and the Abramoff one is typical, isn’t the media’s take on it slanted? No doubt they would want to derail public anger toward the masters of the troughs at which they feed.
The Result
So lacking in the most minimal analysis, the insinuation that goes out is that the Democrats, well, they get a little bit of money from a corporation and much more from the American people but that little bit is going to corrupt them equally as much as the tenfold amounts that the Republicans take in.
Democratic “bosses”
This also in disregard of the fact that the far bigger “bosses,” if we can call it that, of Democrats is the ordinary folks, often, as in the issue-oriented organizations as mentioned in Chapters Fifteen through Seventeen — those “special” Americans seeking to be heard through unions and groups whose concerns are education, the environment, the elderly, public health, liberty, justice, civil rights, consumer protection, world peace, integrity of government, media accountability, the welfare of the helpless and the poor, and so on.
Democratic “special” interests
Here are some examples of what I mean about Democratic “special” interests. I list the special interest followed by the “small” group benefited by it:
- workers — only people who work
- education — only people who think
- environment — only people who breathe, drink, eat … who don’t want to die
- elderly — only people who get older
- public health — only people who get sick
- consumer protection — only people who buy anything
- liberty — only people who want to decide things for themselves
- justice — only people who would not like to spend their lives in jail for no reason and with no recourse
- free speech and free press — only people who have anything to say to others at any time
- civil rights — only people who are not part of any group whatsoever and also do not have a conscience
- world peace — only people who do not want their families, themselves, to die and who don’t have a conscience
- integrity of government — only people who would like things to go well and to avoid unnecessary misery
- truth in the media — only people who would like to avoid living in confusion
- media accountability — only people who want truth in the media, who would like to avoid living in confusion
- social security — only people who want to avoid being beaten to death by poverty
- welfare of the helpless — only people who know for sure they are never going to have bad luck and who don’t have a conscience
- welfare of the poor — only people who know they will never, ever lack money and who don’t have a conscience
[Hint: Consider the ones who actually fit this last category to find the ones who would be a Republican “boss,” would never favor Democrats, and would want to confuse you on all the above. This is a point that will elaborated even further as we continue.]
Media mollifying us that Republicans would actually bite the hand that feeds them
On the flip side, whereas the media insinuates that Democrats are enslaved by the relatively meager amounts of corporate money directed to them, for the Republicans, who are receiving the tenfold amounts and are virtually exclusively funded by corporations … their entire paycheck paid by the rich folks … the media implies that these folks, miraculously defying human nature, are actually going to go out there and day after day point out the corruption in America that is ever the product of this bloated elite, their sole benefactors.
Talking Points and Chanted Misinformation
C’mon, c’mon, a little bit of rationality, folks! Yet however inconsistent with common sense these insinuations and outright assertions from the media, when you have something that’s repeated over and over again, mantram-like … man! Especially if you’re in a confused state, or a stressed state … it’s gonna be the only thing you can think of when you’re coming up with opinions.
“To … Catapult the Propaganda” — G. W. Bush
These untruths are so firmly woven into the fabric of the Matrix — you’ll see there are others you’ll recognize — that when hearing them you’ll probably say, “Oh, yeah, that’s true.”
That’s what they’ve accomplished. And these nonsensicals are so perfectly knitted into the blanket of that matrix that they’re both mesmerizing and invisible, therefore unchallenged, even by the pundits. They are even, by rational argument, unchallenge-able.
Talking Points = “Obvious Truths”
Now, what do I mean by that … “unchallenge-able”? Republicans at a point in my lifetime included in their coordinated daily attacks on clarity a kind of chanting in coordinated fashion. By that I mean they were repeating the same, as they call them now, talking points.
“You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the [un’]truth to sink in” — G.W. Bush
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but remember, if you did tune in for any of the W’s debates, when he was running for president either time. He’d be asked a question.
And Bush would never give an answer to the question. It would be used like a jumping off point to say what he really wanted to say. It had the intended effect of distracting the viewers from any clear thought on the issue or subject.
It also freed up that time to be used, once viewers were led off track, for the seeding of those now assailable minds. Specifically, Bush was able to use the time allotted for answering questions instead to pound home the talking points Rich-publicans were trying to turn into some new (untrue) “obvious truths” (of course also to reinforce the old ones).
Palin: I’m not going to let the media set me up to answering your questions, I’m going to brainwash you instead!
Oh by the way, we had a really good example of that with the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008. I don’t know how many of you saw it, but Sarah Palin, in the vice-presidential debate, she was so … incredible … in a way … in her brazenness. She’s up there alongside Biden who’s answering questions. And at her turn, she’s saying (paraphrasing) “I’m not going to let you media folk set me up here, so I’m going to talk to the people directly.”
And that’s how it went the whole hour, hour and a half, whatever it was. Whatever the question was, she’d totally ignore it and recite a monologue instead. Well, basically she’s repeating again and again her favorite, most lucrative mantra, her most delicious untruths.
Attacks on our reason … i.e., Republicans to public — “You’re a dumb shit, I’m not going to answer your questions!”
But what if you really wanted to know something? She wouldn’t answer you. So it was also like a one-way conversation.
Here we have politicians, who are always telling us what the truth is, but who will not answer our questions so that we can add our own thinking to the matter. We are prevented from coming to our own conclusions, so also making our own decisions.
Well that’s really an attack on our reason, isn’t it? I mean we can’t ask questions, but you can just tell us what the truth is? And that’s basically what was going on.
Chanted Misinformation
So it is sort of like a coordinated chanting. It doesn’t matter what the issue or topic is, from the GOP side you just keep hearing the same phrases about it — phrases intended to replace reason.
It doesn’t either matter which Republican is talking or what TV show they are on, they are repeating the same phrases. Like Sarah Palin, Republicans are using any question, as in a television interview, as a launch point into a rehearsed nicely knit together, truth-sounding, package of untruths. You see this one Republican saying something here, say, then there’s another Republican over there, and if you compare you notice she or he is repeating basically the same thing almost in the exact same words.
Postmodern Mesmerism
And there’s a certain power in something that’s said over and over again in the exact same words. We know this. We’ve seen that power conspicuously in recent times. We can hear Hitler, in Nazi Germany, repeating the same thing over and over again … and using this rhetorical device in targeting Jews, getting people all riled up and such. On recordings from this era we hear their … “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” There’s a certain kind of comfort in not having to think, all you have to do is chant. And you can rely on these chants because everybody’s saying them, so they have the power, of like, wow, they must be true, because, well, everybody’s saying them, everybody around you. Well that’s a sad state of affairs.
This is your brain. Now, this is your brain on deception….
So what does this do, this omnipresent repetition of phrases in response to questions? This chanting of untruths instead of having rational discourse, when people are hearing this year after year and even decade after decade, what does it do?
Well, it adds to the smokescreen of confusion and misinformation that was effectively castrating and making Americans easily manipulated to whatever end the Republicans wanted. I mean after all you’re not getting reasoned answers, you’re just getting slogans, and that leaves you confused, especially if it’s combined with a lot of misinformation which challenges the facts on everything, when everything is turned backward and they’re lying about everything.
I’m sure you haven’t forgotten how flagrant that intentional deception was over Bush’s eight years. You can hardly not notice the lying on a daily basis done by Donald Trump both during and after his term. And isn’t that gonna make you confused? I remember a time when the facts were not so much in dispute so there wasn’t such a huge divide between the Democrats and the Republicans about what the issues were. What was debated could then be what you do about those commonly acknowledged problems.
Equal Time For Idiots
Denial of a Problem … Yeah, That’s Gonna Solve It
So this confusion over the issues has birthed an increasing polarization of opinions over the years about what the issues are. You see, we’re being told by some Republicans that there’s no global warming going on. Nooo. Wow. They are saying that issue, and for that matter virtually every environmental issue, does not exist! Certainly we’d all like to believe that, so even at their own peril adherents will be found for this obvious denial.
A convenient “truth”
And who do they have to back up that refusal to look at the problem? Well keep in mind, first, it is virtually one hundred percent of the reputable scientists studying global warming that are in agreement on the dire reality of it, regardless of the “inconvenience” of that view. Meanwhile, to oppose that position, from the Right they get, say, someone who’s got a degree from a Bible institute, and he says, “Aaaah, there’s no global warming.” And his opinion is given by media as equal to that of all those scientists, in the world?
Would you really think it’s debatable if…?
So this misinformation I’m talking about is put out there. And you don’t have the media telling you, “Well these are one hundred scientists saying this, all writing statements, and studying these issues. And on the other side of this issue, we have this person who’s studying theology and he got his information from the Bible. And the Bible says there’s no global warming.” Now, if they were to put it to you that way, would you really think there was a debate? Would you really think that it’s like “Ah, maybe there is global warming, maybe there isn’t?” Naw, I don’t think you would. But that’s not the way it’s presented.
“Fair and Balanced”?
At a certain point in my life I saw how the media changed its way of presenting topics. They would say they are just providing “equal time” … or that they are “fair and balanced”? … but this was not about candidates at all.
Recipe for “accurate” reporting — start by mixing equal amounts of truth and lies…. (It’ll be fun seeing if the public can figure it out!)
The media claim that their position on reporting is rooted in the equal time restrictions we have for elections. This appears to be a convenient rationalization for a more insidious intent.
What they began doing is, okay, let’s say that the Democrats basically thought the sky looked blue. But there were some Republicans that were in the camp of the yellow sky movement, the pink sky movement, whatever. And what reason do those Republicans give for saying that? Well maybe it’s because the Bible says it or something. An aside: that might be the reason they’d give, but typically their real reason would be that an industry that is supporting them is spewing something into the atmosphere making the sky more and more yellow or pink.
Giving stupidity a chance … the only thing about which we’re compassionate these days
Now, what do the journalists do here? Well, they figure there’s two opinions on this thing. Honest to God, that’s what happened.
And this method of reporting was actually debated when it started to happen. There were more seasoned journalists who were pointing out, “Hey, this is not giving equal time! We don’t give equal time to an idiotic argument just because it challenges, just because it is the opposite of the truth.”
Erosion of Action
But if they do follow this Recipe for the Advancement of Idiot Persons (RAIP), it’s because of what? It happens for the reason that you have journalists thinking that’s what they’re supposed to do, or maybe they are being told to do that, or maybe they’re being paid to do that, or maybe they’re getting benefits to do that, or maybe they’re being liked if they do that.… By you know who? By people up above them. And people above them happen to want to be liked by people above them. And people above them want to be liked by people above them. And people at the top are, y’know, the Filthy Rich. So … confusion.
So what happens? When you’ve got this kind of smoke screen and this misinformation, it’s debilitating. I mean I felt it.
Doubting the Obvious, You’re Paralyzed
And what does it do? It makes you doubt the truth about obvious things. And if you doubt the truth about obvious things, then are you gonna take any action? No! You’re powerless, you’re gonna stand still and you’re gonna go, “What am I supposed to do?” It’s kind of like a castration.
Surrounded by Untruth, You’re Easily Swayed
Powerless against the tides
Also, you’re easily manipulated. You’re standing there. Now if you’re just standing there not knowing what to do, and somebody starts pushing you in a particular direction, you’ve got no reason not to go in that direction. Basically, that’s putting it in physical terms, but if you don’t have any ideas about what the truth is, you can be told anything. Well, that’s been pretty dangerous in the past.
We’ve had many, many people killed … whether it’s in Nazi Germany or Cambodia or whatever. They were easily manipulated, and they were not fighting back. And they were confused about the truth. That’s what Hitler did.
Why wouldn’t you want a Brooklyn Bridge?
So that you’re easily manipulated to whatever end the Republicans want. And, we’ll get more into what they want, if you haven’t already figured it out. You’re also easily persuaded into firmly believing any untruth the Republicans would contrive. When at any turn they will see an advantage or benefit worth pursuing that requires a change of public opinion, then Americans would be more easily convinced.
Those Magical Republicans Turning Darkness into Light
I’ve even got an example of this from Nixon … I said it’s been going on for fifty years. Nixon was horrid even compared to the Republicans at the time. It’s only when he’s compared to Bush and the even more larcenous Republicans currently that he is seen to have any positive qualities.
The example I wish to give, however, pertains to the establishment of HMOs — Health Maintenance Organizations — as a solution to the health care problem. He is the one who brought the profit motive into health care, jumping onto the HMO bandwagon after learning, through Ehrlichman, from Kaiser Permanente’s CEO, Edgar Kaiser, that “All the incentives are toward less medical care, because … the less care [we] give them, the more money [we] make … and the incentives run the right way.” Explained this way Nixon was sold on the idea; we hear him saying on the recording tape, “Not bad” and “Well, that appeals to me.”
Nice trick, Dick!
So, is that the way Nixon presented it to the American public — “I’ve got this great way that will insure you will suffer more when you’re sick so that my filthy rich friends can wallow deeper in dough”? Hardly.
A few days later Nixon rolled out his health care “solution.” In his speech he stressed how this managed care would expand medical care and coverage and be a tremendous boon to the overall health and longevity of Americans.
Giving a helping hand … to your assailants
And Nixon’s minions in his Republican party and the media took it from there: They turned his deception into talking points and ultimately into “obvious truths.” The American public believed this truism that managed care would lower overall costs. They missed the part that they would not benefit from lowered costs, that lowered costs meant profits that would go into unseen hands, who would then go even further in denying medical care and increasing overall suffering and tragedy so that they could gather even more booty.
From today’s perspective of accelerating medical costs and the recent widespread denial of coverage and benefits as to require massive corrective legislation in the Affordable Care Act, brought by Democrats under Obama, we can see just how well Nixon’s plan to lower the cost of health care and expand coverage worked out for us.
So we see how one Republican molded the American mind to make it complicit in its own abuse, to cause average folks to participate in the very assaults on them.
I will return to this example of Nixon and what actually happened with him later on, because there’s more to be said about it.
Mind-Gaming
I just want to finish the thoughts about how this process works, this confusion, making people more manipulated, keeping them stressed and so on so that they will be more receptive to their own abuse.
Repetition makes it possible to control
As I was pointing out, when the Republicans need a change of public opinion or want people to believe a particular thing, the Big Lie is employed; in its repetition it makes it possible to control.
Anyone remember the wmd’s in Iraq? The supposed weapons of mass destruction? Okay. So the persistence in selling an invasion into Iraq was so effective … that persistence of repeating the same thing by all the Republicans was an unqualified success due to its masterful coordination. Republicans are known for this cohesion of action.
Having the sole aim of making money keeps a party focused
By contrast, the joke that goes around is the statement by an opponent, “I don’t belong to any organized party, I belong to the Democratic Party.” There is this feeling among those up against Republicans because of the radical individualism, the radical differences of opinion that Democrats have.
Whereas Republicans can keep it simple and be that much more persuasive. There can be no disagreement or confusion about an aim so singular, so clear — to benefit themselves and the people that are paying to get them elected. That keeps them pretty consistent and gives them a lot of solidarity.
Getting a kick out of those rascally Republicans
Good examples of this acting in lockstep abound in the last couple decades. We currently see Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, even when out of office. We see their solidarity again and again, even in standing firm against the truth. We might recollect how few Republicans accepted Biden’s win/ Trump’s loss in the 2020 election in the time between the voting and Biden’s inauguration. Some still maintain that lie. With Trump beating the election-fraud drum, very few would even acknowledge the election’s actual outcome. They attained solidarity in the Big Lie. That is what gives them their gains despite their corruption.
We saw that when Obama was president as well. How many times did we see Republicans in perfect array going up against Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the Democrats? Those rascally conservatives were so pleased with themselves in 2009. They couldn’t be more proud when not a single one of their hundreds in the House voted for either the Democratic stimulus or budget in Obama’s first year.
They continued that solid front in blocking any and all benefits to the people under Trump, as well. And they are doing all they can of that with Biden as president, now.
“Wtf! Are you in grade school?”
In 2009, the Republicans were so proud of that: They “stared down” Obama (What the fuck are they in grade school?). We had Arlen Specter, only at the end of his career become a Democrat, who voted in the Senate for the stimulus plan along with the lone two Republican senators — two women, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins from Maine.
Now that I think about it … they’re being so cohesive and so disciplined … you just got to wonder if some of them tried to take ol’ Arlen Specter out to the woodshed and that’s why he ran to the Democrats.
The Fall of “Obvious Truths”
How do they get Republicans to be so disciplined? Well, one of the things is, they’ve all got the same aim.
Whereas if you’re a Democrat, you’re going to have all kinds of concerns; the party allows you to have them. Some Dems might be more interested in health care, and some might be thinking education is the answer….
But with Republicans it’s all the same — corporations, you must help the corporations out … “I’ll help you help your big corporation and you’ll help me help my big corporation, and we’ll all continue to get reelected and get plenty of money.”
Republicans in plain sight hidden
So that’s a good way of viewing their differences. But most folks would hardly know that, because Republicans are very effective in avoiding any talk about anything that might give them away. I mean none of the Republicans want to be showed up for what they are really in office for.
But it’s no longer crazy talk
Of course, this abject distinction between the major parties has become most pronounced over the course of the last fifty years. What I’m saying now doesn’t sound as crazy as when I learned it, when I saw it happening and first spoke of it. I saw this increasing corruption of Republicans to the point of it becoming overt and blatant in the last twenty, thirty years … the fall of “obvious truths.” By this I mean they’ve become so arrogant and callous in their lying and corruption they have become careless in hiding it. And now it’s as plain as day.
Naked Republicans
So this viewpoint that Republicans are an owned and paid for subsidiary of corporate behemoths over that time became a more frequently expressed perspective … especially since Bush’s ignoble slide and abject economic and diplomatic failures.
For anyone who has a memory, though, we see that Trump was a continuation — a treasonous, lying, larcenous, incredibly costly one — of the corruption and mismanagement of government we got with W. Bush. Because of Trump’s treason and attempted coup, some folks are saying it is the end of the Republican Party. In truth, that is one possible outcome. Yet if not that, their influence is on the decline as a consequence of the Bush and Trump travesties and the ways Republican’s secretive corrupt activities were revealed in broad daylight, as a result of those two.
Around the end of Bush’s “regime,” Republicans had declined twenty percent in numbers, and there was talk of them becoming extinct. They had been showed to be who they are. Finally, people were starting to realize that, yeah, yeah, you can be lied to … there was a decline of “obvious truths” — a crack in the Matrix — corresponding to the light that was dawning and the naked Republicans that could be seen scurrying for the doors.
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19
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Reality Transplant, the Media:
The Ladder of Status, the Great Suck Upward, and What They’ve Succeeded in Getting Us to Forget
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[Quotes/highlights:] “Perhaps we can understand news commentator’s and reporters complacency and complicity by considering their situation. They are immersed in this barrage of irrationalities that is coming out constantly from the Republicans over all kinds of airways, radio, TV, what have you.”
“…these reporters, pundits, and news anchors are working for huge corporations, virtually all of them these days. Only on the Internet is there the possibility of unbiased thought. And we know who owns the corporations … it ain’t me or you or the average Jane. So I don’t think it accidental pundits are unlikely to speak for us. For the people.”
“The wishes of the upper echelons are sycophantically served by those just below them. For those a step down are terrified by the idea of losing their lives of moneyed comfort and becoming, god forbid, like the ‘unwashed’ below. They also, like everyone, have a craving to be ‘liked’ and approved of by someone above.”
“…this jonesing is something in each of us, even those of very high status. It is an urge we all carry forward from our earliest experiences of life. So even those sitting smugly above us are cravingly desirous of the approval of those above them. And so it goes right down the ladder of status. Those of each level sucking up pathetically to those above them while patronizing those just below.”
“…news reporters, also, from a certain perspective, can be seen as the pathetic little boys and girls they are, still wanting daddy’s approval. They don’t have a clue that they are coming across as smiling tail-wagging pets eager to please in the foppish performance of their cultivated tricks.”
“Maybe pundits can’t see the Republican lies as much because they are become one with it, not seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe it’s that they’re dancing to a long ago tune, accepting approving smiles as payment for their jig.”
“I saw over time this slow, steady stream of pundits and journalists adopting Republican mantra as obvious facts. And that was very sad. “
““When you’re feeling pissed on, they’d like you thinking it’s really money coming down.”
“…you can try to make a case that somehow money to corporations will benefit ordinary people, but it’s easier and more honest to show how corporate ‘socialism’ is actually at people’s expense. So the payoffs to the corporate hogs are hardly indirect contributions to the common weal.”
“…the pundits and journalists are seen adopting the Republican mantra as obvious facts and as unnecessary to ponder or question … it is clear they rolled over.”
“It was as if these pundits hearing so many GOP lies — tax-and-spend Democrats and such — had undergone a reality transplant. Somehow they disposed of their knowing that it was the Republicans who tripled, nearly quadrupled the National Debt under Reagan-Bush.”
“How did people become so dumb all of a sudden? Anyway, I think a lot of it has to do with these things being repeated over and over again until people think they’re true. And it’s unnecessary to ponder or question them.”
“It is the American worker who is represented by unions, for they carry their voices.
“The Republican line, the lie, that unions are entities equally as small and distinct from our society of people as are corporations, and are therefore ‘special,’ and that what is good for unions is bad for people, for ordinary citizens, somehow given Frankensteinian life, jolted large and menacing by incessant repetition into zombified minds, blotting out the truth like a monster would the sun, and terrorizing, so they run away and fight, the very folks that now muddied truth would lift up.”
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[Chapter 19 text begins:] The Republicans had their help, though; believe me they had their help.
The Puppet Strings (The Media)
Okay, so who helped them? Well, like I was saying.… The first thing is you have politicians with the Big Lie, and they’re repeating it endlessly. and that persistence is so extremely effective and comprehensive.
Lying Down on the Thinking Job … or … Thinking Is Down on the Lying Job
The next thing is the paid pundits. You would think a pundit’s job would require more than the exposure to facts and the time allotted for that, but also some time for thoughtful consideration and analysis of those facts. Isn’t part of their job to think? Don’t they have that duty, and get that privilege, unlike a lot of people, who might be working two jobs and taking care of the kids and such and so don’t have time to ponder anything? But these are pundits who are supposed to give opinions. And you would think that their salaries include time both to be on TV as well as to study issues and to think about them. But why is it then that they are so complicit, even cooperative?
Everybody Has One … Except Those Paid To
Backing up, being handsomely paid to do so, you’d think TV commentators and pundits would bring some thoughtful consideration and analysis to the issues. You would think they would have some understanding and therefore conclusions and therefore opinion on these issues, for isn’t that what they as pundits are required to have? They’re called pundits, they are opinion-makers, they are opinion havers.
Everybody Needs a Little Understanding.…
Perhaps we can understand news commentators’ and reporters’ complacency and complicity by considering their situation. They are immersed in this barrage of irrationalities that is coming out constantly from the Republicans over all kinds of airways, radio, TV, what have you.
And don’t forget a pundit’s job requires they take it in; they can’t just tune out; they have to be on top of these things. They have to be on top of what people are saying, including and perhaps especially the Republicans.
How Long Could You Maintain Your Sanity If…?
So perhaps pundits and reporters are more brainwashed than others. Perhaps they are since they hear the lies more than the rest of us. I don’t know. That’s a kind way of saying that they didn’t do their job, too, though … the one about seeking out the truth behind the barrage of lies, if they still remember it.
I need also point out that these reporters, pundits, and news anchors are working for huge corporations, virtually all of them these days. Only on the Internet is there the possibility of unbiased thought. And we know who owns the corporations … it ain’t me or you or the average Jane. So I don’t think it accidental pundits are unlikely to speak for us. For the people.
The Ladder of Status
So whose view is being rained upon us by these storm-clouds of “obvious truths”? These pundits?
The Great Suck UPward
Well, there’s a tendency, like I said, going right down the line: The wishes of the upper echelons are sycophantically served by those just below them. For those a step down are terrified by the idea of losing their lives of moneyed comfort and becoming, god forbid, like the “unwashed” below. They also, like everyone, have a craving to be “liked” and approved of by someone above.
Take my word for it, this jonesing is something in each of us, even those of very high status. It is an urge we all carry forward from our earliest experiences of life. So even those sitting smugly above us are cravingly desirous of the approval of those above them. And so it goes right down the ladder of status. Those of each level sucking up pathetically to those above them while patronizing those just below.
Dandified Little Pups
At one of those levels are the pundits and journalists. You have to remember that news reporters, also, from a certain perspective, can be seen as the pathetic little boys and girls they are, still wanting daddy’s approval. They don’t have a clue that they are coming across as smiling tail-wagging pets eager to please in the foppish performance of their cultivated tricks.
If the face of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy, Chuck Todd, or Brian Kilmeade pops into your mind right now, you’re on the right track.
Dancing to a Long Ago Tune
So I’m not sure, but maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why the pundits shy from the cool light of truth. Maybe it’s part of it. Maybe pundits can’t see the Republican lies as much because they are become one with it, not seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe it’s that they’re dancing to a long ago tune, accepting approving smiles as payment for their jig.
Or maybe it’s some of both … and perhaps something more? Who knows? What matters is they were not doing their job, as we see now.
The Corporate Feast
So I saw over time this slow, steady stream of pundits and journalists adopting Republican mantra as obvious facts. And that was very sad. Like I was saying before about the special interests … Democrats are accused of having special interests of their own. It is often heard that unions are a special interest, that education is a special interest.
“Persons R Us. Corporations R Not”
And even though Democrats would say, “But, you know, doesn’t everybody get the benefit from education?” I never heard the pundits or the moderator say, “Well, that’s true, and, Mister Republican, what do you have to say to that? What do you mean, ‘special interest’? You’re promoting the coal companies. Are the coal companies benefiting everybody? By your trying to get them profits, trying to create tax breaks for them, is that going to benefit the people … in any way?”
When You’re Feeling Pissed On, They’d Like You Thinking It’s Really Money Coming Down
I’ll get to that later, but obviously, you can try to make a case that somehow money to corporations will benefit ordinary people, yet it’s easier and more honest to show how corporate “socialism” is actually at people’s expense. So the payoffs to the corporate hogs are hardly indirect contributions to the common weal.
Shall we review recent events and remember the gluttonous corporate profits, with their CEOs sitting down to enjoy hundred million dollar banquets? Bonuses, paychecks, jets and yachts to feast on. Even the stockholders only receive crumbs from that table.
CEO with Fifty Cookies to Tea Party Bloke with One: “That Union Guy Wants Some of Your Cookie”
And with all their girth, getting hundred-million-dollar “at-a-boys,” you see them giving money away? With all these people having problems, and having foreclosures and everything, do you see them giving money away? I mean … no.
So anyway, the pundits and journalists are seen adopting the Republican mantra as obvious facts and as unnecessary to ponder or question as if … well, probably they couldn’t help it after a while of continual, coordinated, and irritating repetition, I don’t know … so not “as if,” it is clear they rolled over.
Disposable Truth, Reality Transplants
It was as if these pundits hearing so many GOP lies — tax-and-spend Democrats and such — had undergone a reality transplant. Somehow they disposed of their knowing that it was the Republicans who tripled, nearly quadrupled the National Debt under Reagan-Bush.
GeorgeOrwell-land — Fun New Capitalist Theme Park!
The truth that it was Bush the W who doubled the Debt again after that mysteriously ended up in the trash, as well.
Smoke and lies around tax and spend
We were in such bad economic shape during Bush’s Great Recession because of these Republican spendthrifts. Yet there would be the pundits repeating, even after Reagan-Bush and the recession they caused, “it’s the tax-and-spend Democrats.” America’s “thinkers” would forget that Bill Clinton had balanced the budget for the first time in decades during his terms. They would not remember that those supposed “tax and spend” Democrats left to the Republicans who stole back the presidency in 2000 a surplus, which they promptly handed over to the rich.
I recall how during the Nineties, tax and fiscal policy was so carefully managed by Bill Clinton’s administration. It was touch-and-go maneuvering out of the fiscal ditch; few people thought they could do it. How could anyone, let alone Democrats, balance a budget, let alone reverse the huge National Debt at that time? But with Robert Reich at the wheel, they did.
So what happened? Just as soon as the Republicans enter the White House, they issue a tax cut for the rich. The surplus was no more. Wow! And, still, pundits didn’t saying anything. People didn’t say anything.
Disposable Truths
How do you explain this barrage of historical malfeasance? How do you explain this lack of reaction to obvious wrongness, unfairness? It’s supposed to be a country of, by, and for the people. And most folks still think it is, even despite all the evidence of their eyes.
Maybe Americans cannot learn from, even remember, recent history because their perceptions and memories are not validated around them. If on the media their feelings are not confirmed, folks are going to doubt themselves; they’re going to be confused.
Reality Transplant, The Media
Are They So Immersed in Republican Culture?
Why commentators would be so easily forgetful and then complicit is the question. We were wondering if perhaps it is the continual bombardment of untruth they are under. In such a setting, required to stay immersed in Republican culture so much more than the rest of us, maybe they would find it nearly impossible to be as questioning and confrontational as would be required if they were to truly do their job in helping to clarify events.
Besides, they know these Republican mouthpieces socially; they play golf, have drinks with them, and more in their off hours. Of course these media types want to be seen as civil people, too. So they don’t want to say, on their TV program, “Aw, c’mon. That’s bullshit, man!” They’re not going to say that. They might think it’s bullshit, but they’re not going to tell us!
Are You Reeling in the Years?
And it’s going to keep the American people confused. If the obvious lies of the right-wing politicians and propagandists are not pointed out by the reporters who are questioning them, well then you only have the Democrats to counter these untruths.
And if these pundits are also saying that the Democrats and the Republicans are equally the same and that all politicos are corrupt and such, well, after a while, when you hear that enough, you’re not going to have really any basis for discerning the truth. You’re not going to be seeing what’s actually been going on over the years.
What They’ve Succeeded in Getting Us to Forget
In the last century, Democrats were responsible for the most influential and most popular public policy developments: They brought in Social Security, Medicare; they supported the unions and minimum wage measures that boosted the lifestyles of the American worker. So consider the right wing and media achievement in getting Americans to forget all that? Wow.
Narrative for the New History … Why That’s One Dumb Republican!
We even had one Republican, Steve Austria, during Obama’s term found himself in the spotlight. He was an elected Congressional representative … god only knows how that happened. He was talking on economic policy. He was changing history to fit his argument … which Republicans do, you know.
But this guy really believed it! He was saying how it was Roosevelt who caused the Great Depression! He actually maintained it was Roosevelt who was in power when the Great Depression hit. He said the Depression was caused by tax and spend.1
No, it was Hoover. Monetary policy favoring the rich caused and kept the Great Depression going; tax and spend, for example, Social Security, is what got us out of, not into, the ditch. Roosevelt was not even in office when the Great Depression hit, or before it. He was voted into the Presidency many years later and so as to fix it. All this is part of history that is practically — except for you, Steve — common knowledge. There were what were called Hoover, not Roosevelt, camps full of the poor unemployed. Wow.
Dogma for the New Religion. “Obvious Truths” from On High
How did people become so dumb all of a sudden? Anyway, I think a lot of it has to do with these things being repeated over and over again until people think they’re true. And it’s unnecessary to ponder or question them.
It seems as if the pundits felt this way after a while, to the point that when the Republican or conservative would say her or his talking point, it was almost as if that frequently heard statement was gospel. Seeing the media’s response, you would think that drivel had been carried down from Mount Sinai, engraved on a stone tablet. It didn’t have to be reasoned about; it was given down from “on high.” Over and over and over again.
Smoke and Lies Around Unions. Truth Taken Out at the Knees — Unions Are the New Rich Fat Cats
So the lie, the mantram, the notion at one time in my life, was nonexistent. At another time, quite the opposite, it was all pervasive.
At one time folks believed that unions represented working people like themselves, more than anything else. At the later time and now, the exact opposite of the truth — that union workers are the wealthy and their leaders are now the fat cats, to hear people tell it.
The truth — unions represent otherwise powerless workers
But well, of course it was the original view that was true: It is the American worker who is represented by unions, for they carry their voices.
The Republican line, the lie, that unions are entities equally as small and distinct from our society of people as are corporations, and are therefore “special,” and that what is good for unions is bad for people, for ordinary citizens, somehow given Frankensteinian life, jolted large and menacing by incessant repetition into zombified minds, blotting out the truth like a monster would the sun, and terrorizing, so they run away and fight, the very folks that now muddied truth would lift up.
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20
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Only the Game Remains:
Religion of Capitalism — The Game Is the One Truth Faith; The Game Is to Lie and Manipulate Without Consequence
[Quotes/highlights:] “…the Republicans were at one point cornered by justifiable attacks about being backed by special interests, so they concocted this idea that the Democrats were too.”
“An added benefit for Republicans and the Filthy Rich in ‘democratizing’ the guilt this way is that folks thinking all politicians are the same, that they’re all taking money, means they would be unlikely to vote.”
“And keeping the masses, who are helped by Democrats, away from the polls can only help Republicans engaged in swindling them.”
“…when the term was coined, the special interests were thought of as the interests of the very small numbers of wealthy people and their financial arms, big businesses, who sought favors from government that were at odds with the welfare of the masses of less moneyed Americans.”
“…the common good would be reduced for the temporary financial benefit of a relatively small group of individuals, in this case, coal barons. Keep in mind also it would only be the rich capitalist owners in these industries who would see the benefits. That is the real meaning of special.”
“The threat of workers losing their jobs is always, always, the gauntlet thrown down to jimmy profits into the hands of a few.
“And saving workers’ jobs is always, always thrown out to the public as the justification for granting these singular boons.”
“What is recklessly ignored is that when this regulation easing, as in our example, goes into effect, it will actually kill some people; it will diminish people’s lives….”
“…that’s the magical meaningless mantram — ‘American workers will suffer’ — which is another one of those lies again added to create fog, to create confusion, in this case a smog of misinformation, stifling the reasoned understanding of what is actually at stake.”
“The Filthy Rich, in the guise of investors, pulled off one of the biggest extortions in American history and got away scot free.”
“…with George W. Bush at the helm, these bankers were rewarded for the harm done the rest of America and the world.”
“…small groups with higher rates of crime, when there is smaller mounds of money to protect them, are labeled as ‘criminal gangs,’ ‘hoodlums,’ ‘organized crime,’ ‘gang-bangers’ and the like. Not so, when the perpetrators dress in such fine suits and stink with money.”
“…the immeasurably larger crime of the super wealthy is let go … and this in spite of the fact mentioned that the future threat is larger and considerably more likely if the current wrong is not addressed.”
“One way or another the idea is to obscure the reality that help to the banks will help primarily this small group, in this case, of bankers, and to make it that their problem is seen as our problem, the public’s problem. This increases the pressure on politicians to grant the favor. For it is spun that it is not the wealthy investors whose welfare is at stake but the public at large”
“…in retrospect that money would have been much more wisely spent going somehow directly into the people’s hands who needed it, not by funneling it through the hands of gluttonous banking institutions.”
“…society did pay dearly, did suffer, even though the banks were paid their extortion money, handsomely too. And since so much of that loot went to the folks who didn’t need it, overall the economy ended up worse off.”
“…in borrowing from the future to help rich people today it guaranteed the problem would get a permanent installation in America’s economy.”
“…the game is to claim that the pain of those with wealth is really the American people’s pain, so as to make it seem a large number of people would be helped when they get the bailout, when they succeed at their larceny against the American people.”
“…the Filthy Rich would always package any benefit to them as being not for them, really, at all but for a great number of people. and if they could pull that off, if they could make that magical equivalency, then it was like they had a home run.”
“That’s a lot of what the difference is. It is that some people will wager with any amount of harm to others; they will say anything, will make up anything. They don’t have to have any facts; they don’t have to know if that’s the way it works.”
“…their game — that of the Filthy Rich — involves winning at any cost to others, being willing to assert anything, with no thought that truth should even come into a bargaining situation.”
“It’s like, we can make a good argument; we can convince people; we can persuade people; we can fool enough people into thinking it’s true … and that’s all that matters.”
“…they don’t bother even to come with any evidence to be laid out on the table; it becomes the most elegant spectacle in sophistry imaginable.”
“The Filthy Rich are seeing these matters, which are of dire importance to most of society, about the way we do when playing a game of Monopoly, in which we compete without consequences and try to win without remorse.”
“The consequences of their cavalier play are being felt somewhere. Yet the Filthy Rich cover up their unconcern through the pretense of acting on interests not of their own, but of that reliable home base of the society at large.”
“No longer were phrases like ‘society-at-large,’ the common good, government of and by the people, the welfare of the majority, government ‘caring’ for people, anyone’s suffering being eased, and such even brought in.”
“Words like suffering, compassion, ease, good, benefit, the people, were not uttered anymore. In fact they were felt to be counterproductive. They were considered deal breakers if let into the conversation on matters that were deemed, well … ‘real.’”
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[Chapter 20 text begins:] ”Well since they believe a loving God would condemn them to endless suffering, don’t see why we can’t convince them their own biggest enemy is to be found in a mirror.” [What Republicans Wealthies must think about their “deplorable” followers.]
Reason and Action Eroded, The Game Is All That Remains
Note to Ordinary Folks: Ordinary Folks Are Out to Get You
However, the Republicans were at one point cornered by justifiable attacks about being backed by special interests, so they concocted this idea that the Democrats were too.
Everybody’s Doing It
They couldn’t deny it was true about them, so they just made it like, well, it was everybody. That way they avoided being revealed as bad people. For what they did wouldn’t make them bad. It would just make them politicians.
An added benefit for Republicans and the Filthy Rich in “democratizing” the guilt this way is that folks thinking all politicians are the same, that they’re all taking money, means they would be unlikely to vote. They would say, “Ah, they’re all crooks.” Is not that what we’re hearing? Isn’t what we’re hearing that there is no such thing as an honest politician? And keeping the masses, who are helped by Democrats, away from the polls can only help Republicans engaged in swindling them.
The Really Special Interests: What They Want Is at Our Expense
Yet at one time, the term special interest meant something very specific, and it was hardly confusing. We need to go back to the time before the whole subject became so muddled and full of misinformation that even the pundits didn’t know what they were talking about anymore. Back when the term was coined, the special interests were thought of as the interests of the very small numbers of wealthy people and their financial arms, big businesses, who sought favors from government that were at odds with the welfare of the masses of less moneyed Americans.
For example there might be a group from, say, the coal industry, whose interests would be higher profits for being allowed to spew extra amounts of toxic fumes into the atmosphere. That would be the kinds of things they would want: something that benefited them at the expense of the majority of folks. Consider: If what was sought would benefit most other people as well, it would not need to be lobbied for solely by this small group, this business concern. Such a change would be advanced on behalf of the greater number of people and would succeed that way.
So a really special interest would push for something that would bring them greater profits in spite of the fact that it would hurt the majority of Americans. In this example of air pollution, it would be felt negatively by all Americans, eventually the whole planet, including people of other countries, and even the plant and animal life, in which species in existence thousands of times longer than us would be gone forever. This is why an interest might be “special.” It would be special in that its benefits would be singular, not shared.
To the contrary, the common good would be reduced for the temporary financial benefit of a relatively small group of individuals, in this case, coal barons. Keep in mind also it would only be the rich capitalist owners in these industries who would see the benefits. That is the real meaning of special.
Religion of Capitalism — The Game Is the One Truth Faith
And Then the Great Threat
In a clear-headed sense, a boon to a special interest would involve some sort of legislative help to the profits of, basically, these special rich capitalist owners; and it would be given, very often, at great cost to all those others I have been mentioning who were not in the Congressional bargaining room. So how could such a thing be justified? Well, here is how it works, beginning with another great lie, delivered as a threat.
The threat would amount to this: That unless these favors are granted, say, as in the example, if you didn’t let us put that stuff in the air, we’re gonna have to have layoffs. The threat of workers losing their jobs is always, always, the gauntlet thrown down to jimmy profits into the hands of a few.
And saving workers’ jobs is always, always thrown out to the public as the justification for granting these singular boons. So the American worker is indirectly threatened with the loss of a job and a paycheck.
The part that will rarely be spoke is the cost of this legislative largess to the general population. In our example, what will not be mentioned is that some people’s lives will actually be ended — there is always some of this, though this is the biggest unspoken — for the granting of this wish. What is recklessly ignored is that when this regulation easing, as in our example, goes into effect, it will actually kill some people; it will diminish people’s lives; it will increase diseases, cancer and emphysema for example; and overall it will result in more suffering for thousands or millions of times more people than the few that will benefit. Do you begin to see how really special a real special interest is?
But as for these costs to us ordinary, non-special, people, they will not be mentioned by either side of the bargaining. This will hardly even be a chip in the negotiations. What will be put on the table is workers’ jobs. That threat is that unless these favors are granted, well, we’re gonna have to have layoffs. and then they would say, “Well, American workers will suffer.”
And that’s the magical meaningless mantram — “American workers will suffer” — which is another one of those lies again added to create fog, to create confusion, in this case a smog of misinformation, stifling the reasoned understanding of what is actually at stake.
And Then Outright Extortion
In fact we had a conspicuous example of this, the way … let’s call it what it is … extortion was employed by the banks not many years ago. The Filthy Rich, in the guise of investors, pulled off one of the biggest extortions in American history and got away scot free. Even the Democrats could not see through it (still don’t). I am talking, of course, about the TARP bailout … the Troubled Asset Relief Program … that was put in place under George W. Bush in October of 2008 to protect the very entities responsible for the Great Recession from suffering any consequences from their malfeasance.
Remember that I related in Chapter 2 how my experience with Oregon Fair Share and the WPPSS plants taught me the benefits of letting corporations pay for their own mistakes? How the economy would be better off if the ones gambling huge amounts of our money — the banks — would be forced to suffer the consequences of their actions? How that might lend itself to them making better decisions in the future? Well, with George W. Bush at the helm, these bankers were rewarded for the harm done the rest of America and the world.
Whereas, in any other instance of such a tactic, in any other instance by anybody in America doing what was done — extorting billions from the government to bail out the perpetrators of their unwise, often criminal, business decisions — it would have been criminally prosecuted. But not so in the case of these special rich people, represented by these bank executives.
How spectacular this oversight in singling out the guilty is rarely brought out. But truly massive is this miscarriage of justice. Consider that there are vastly more ordinary Americans than there are in the tiny group of filthy rich. So there will, of course, be far more instances in the general population of any crime you would think of. In this case we are looking at extortion, and virtually every instance of such a crime committed among the general population would attract the intense attention and the full wrath of justice there. Naturally, the harm to the victim or even victims would be constrained to the tiny number of people affected, and the limited amounts of money involved, in any particular case.
On the other hand here, with TARP, we had a much tinier group of people — the Filthy Rich and the heads of the banks that represent them. And the percentage of that group involved in such an extortion is far greater than the incidence of that crime in the greater population, another way of putting it, they represent a high crime zone for such malfeasance and a much bigger danger when their crimes go unpunished and can continue unfettered. Such small groups with higher rates of crime, when there are smaller mounds of money to protect them, are labeled as “criminal gangs,” “hoodlums,” “organized crime,” “gang-bangers” and the like. Not so, when the perpetrators dress in such fine suits and stink with money.
Further, the scale on which these crimes are perpetrated is that of the entire population of the United States and expands itself to include harm to those in other nations and even among the unborn — future generations. So the magnitude of the crime is infinitely larger than could ever be pulled off by an average American. Still, the smaller scale, less harmful instances of this crime are ruthlessly sought out and punished. Whereas the immeasurably larger crime of the super wealthy is let go … and this in spite of the fact mentioned that the future threat is larger and considerably more likely if the current wrong is not addressed.
With these things known, how mind-boggling is it to notice this blatant extortion not pointed out, not labeled as such, hardly addressed?
Their Kind of “Sharing the Pain” — My Problems Will Be Your Problems, They Say
Well here we have, in this case, the banks, the preeminent fronts for the organized Filthy Rich, demanding extortion money, which if not received … here we go again … eventually would result in their inability to do business and would affect people. This threat is one of their ploys.
Just like the coal barons in the example above who would ask for concessions saying if they did not get them they would be forced to lay off American workers, the banks would have their way of trying to convince that they should be helped or it will affect great numbers of people. In their case, they would say it would affect their ability to do business and to serve the American people.
One way or another the idea is to obscure the reality that help to the banks will help primarily this small group, in this case, of bankers, and to make it that their problem is seen as our problem, the public’s problem. This increases the pressure on politicians to grant the favor. For it is spun that it is not the wealthy investors whose welfare is at stake but the public at large.
So there is the extortion, you see. Unlike coal barons threatening to fire workers, essentially bankers threatened to stop providing loans. They would hold them back if not paid. The degree to which this was untrue is shown by the fact that after they did get the bailout, they used it to feather their nests and to expand their bank’s market share. Chase Bank, for example, sat on the bailout cash they received, with the intention of using it to buy out other banks that would fail, which is exactly what they did with the money. Banks also gave out those high bonuses like I’ve discussed.
Meanwhile the public was not served. Money remained tight. There arose a big hue and cry over the fact that the money from TARP was covering bankers’ losses … in other words, going into their pockets … and the public was not getting the loans they needed. So in retrospect that money would have been much more wisely spent going somehow directly into the people’s hands who needed it, not by funneling it through the hands of gluttonous banking institutions.
And what about their threat of it affecting society at large if they were not placated? Well, society did pay dearly, did suffer, even though the banks were paid their extortion money, handsomely too. And since so much of that loot went to the folks who didn’t need it, overall the economy ended up worse off. Short term the problem was swept under the rug, but in borrowing from the future to help rich people today it guaranteed the problem would get a permanent installation in America’s economy. Seriously, this problem cannot be calculated or even imagined away, so Americans will suffer its results forever as far as we know.
So this is the extortion and the lie that sits in the middle of the threat that it is the American workers who will suffer if the wealthy don’t receive their payola.
For it is never the workers or, in this case, those needing loans who would suffer if the extortion is not given in to, it is the fat cats, coal barons, filthy rich, 1% who would suffer, and for that matter, not even all that much compared to the suffering inflicted on the public by their greedy practices, whether or not the extortion money or concession is provided.
The Game Is to Lie
Anyway, the game is to claim that the pain of those with wealth is really the American people’s pain, so as to make it seem a large number of people would be helped when they get the bailout, when they succeed at their larceny against the American people. That’s one of their lies that gets by; this is how they seek to “share the pain” … “spread their burden.” It is a banking problem, in this instance, something that has had disastrous effects on the economy and on people’s lives, but it would be better handled by society if the problem of the people involved would be addressed, not the problems — money lost, investments gone under — of the Filthy Rich.
The upshot is that over and over we hear these big lies of how “the American people” … one of those huge buzz words … “the American people are going to be hurt.” Or, it became, “the working people of this country,” or in the example of the coal barons, above, that a huge group of coal miners would see massive layoffs. In light of what has been said, I hope it is clear what b.s. that is.
How They Try to Convince That Their Problems Are Ours
We see the threat; we see the extortion; we see the crime and its magnitude, and we see the lie that gives life to it all. Let us look more closely at the manner of the making of this spectacular ruse.
First … some of this has been said, yet watch how it unfolds … you’re starting out with a group that is a minute segment of the population as a whole. But they maintain they are identical with or equivalent to society as a whole, making it that it is not the magnitude of their money but of their numbers which raises their voice above all, which is not true of course. I was talking earlier about how they would do that in making up the tax codes. Recall, they would say, “Well, society as a whole will suffer if you don’t.…”
So the Filthy Rich would always package any benefit to them as being not for them, really, at all but for a great number of people. And if they could pull that off, if they could make that magical equivalency, then it was like they had a home run. They would say the working people of this country would be affected, that a huge group of coal miners would see massive layoffs, for example.
Then here is how they make that number bigger: These people, in this example the coal barons, not to be underestimated, would assert that because of their layoffs naturally there would be more of these layoffs by other coal companies. and then, they’d say, these layoffs would affect all the shopkeepers, retail merchants and so on who service the impacted regions; which in turn … gotta keep making it bigger and bigger, more and more and more people … which in turn would affect all the industries making the products that won’t be sold because of the layoffs; and of course a pullback in demand for products means fewer workers needed to make what is needed, thus an increase of unemployment in all other sectors would ensue; which unemployed workers on a grander scale would have them unable to buy from their local merchants; which equals the losses to the manufacturers in an ever more expanding array of products and industries; requiring they let people go; thus even more, ever accelerating rates of layoffs and widening unemployment; and, they would claim, those laid off would not be buying the products in their local shops; which leads to … well, armageddon, the way they would have it.
So it just gets bigger and bigger; it goes around and around and around.
To Win at All Costs
But They Will Say Anything to Win
Just a hint though, this is one of those seemingly rational analyses that although appearing to make sense is not grounded in the real world; it is speculative and made up. Its roots are solely in the dark hearts and motivations of those attempting to push through their argument, to give it added weight, to basically win at any cost.
That’s a lot of what the difference is. It is that some people will wager with any amount of harm to others; they will say anything, will make up anything. They don’t have to have any facts; they don’t have to know if that’s the way it works. As McCain said, “I don’t know much about economics.” This is the guy who was popular among the corporate crowd of the country, the same group making that simplistic argument above.
What’s Truth Got to Do with It?
So basically their game — that of the Filthy Rich — involves winning at any cost to others, being willing to assert anything, with no thought that truth should even come into a bargaining situation. I mean, really, the attitude is that, what the hell does truth have to do with it? It’s like, we can make a good argument; we can convince people; we can persuade people; we can fool enough people into thinking it’s true … and that’s all that matters.
So you see they’re getting kind of cocky; they don’t even think they have to have truth … any actual facts or evidence backing up their arguments. Then you have your whole attitude of, “What the hell, why is anybody bothering to bring any truth to this?”
So they don’t bother even to come with any evidence to be laid out on the table; it becomes the most elegant spectacle in sophistry imaginable.
Unlike Monopoly These Results Are Real
What it becomes then for these special interests and their Republican representatives is something with about as much gravity as a board game. The Filthy Rich are seeing these matters, which are of dire importance to most of society, about the way we do when playing a game of Monopoly, in which we compete without consequences and try to win without remorse.
Though the differences should be noted. There’s nothing at stake in a game of Monopoly among friends; it is just simple play with light-hearted risks. There are no real families having to move out if one player buys up all the land and houses of another; there’s nobody even paying rent of $40 if they land on Boardwalk, nobody suffering when you’re told to pay a doctor bill … or to go to jail.
Going Directly to Jail, Not Passing Go — The Only Part That’s Really Like Monopoly, for the 99%
This point, however, keep in mind as increased perspective on the real-world actions of these wealthy folk. In Monopoly you try to win. and you would consider deception. You might hide how much money or property you have … if you’re asked, for example, you might not tell the truth. and this dissembling would be considered a good ploy and harmless. Even the other players might admire such a deception.
Yet is this the way it is in the bargaining of the special interests through their lackey paid-for Republican representatives? No. The consequences of their cavalier play are being felt somewhere. Yet the Filthy Rich cover up their unconcern through the pretense of acting on interests not of their own, but of that reliable home base of the society at large.
We’re Not Supposed To Be Monopoly … Or the Wild West
So, there’s Monopoly, then there’s the real world, where things like deception, or whatever, for the purpose of winning have real world effects on people. Yet we’re supposedly living in an era that is not like the old Wild West. We purportedly have a democracy with the aim of benefiting the majority of people, or at least as many people as possible. And we claim our intention is to do this without unduly punishing any particular group or having any persons inflicted with unnecessary grief. It’s supposed to be fair; government is supposed to serve people.
This Game’s Not For You
So that’s why I was saying, in the early days when there was bargaining in Congress by the special interests, they maintained a pretense of caring about people. After all, we maintain that government is supposed to be representing the American people.
Getting to Home Base, in Their Baseball Game
So moneyed interests would garner these special breaks, in the tax codes or wherever, because basically they would get to the point where they would convince enough deciders, even if it wasn’t true, that such a change, in the tax code or policy, or whatever, would benefit society at large. As I said, that is kind of like reaching home base for them. You got it then; you’re home free if you can make that link. For that is the touted purpose of our elected deciders; it is to benefit the society at large.
Now, nobody can benefit all the people all the time, so that’s as close as you can get … society at large … it’s as near to a home base as you can get.
Anyway, that was the thought involved on both sides of this whole game for a long time. And I stress — if you haven’t gotten the point already … I’ve been leading up to it — that this was the thinking on both sides of this game. It’s like a game for the Republicans, just like Monopoly for us.
And, how was it played? Well the thoughts were, if you were able to get to home base — which is equal to proving a benefit for average Americans, society at large or as a whole, or the electorate — then you score.
But Supported by “Obvious Truths” — Those Untrue Truisms — It Is Now Easier for Them to “Score”
Nonetheless, that thinking has changed over time. This difference in particular shows the effectiveness of the brainwashing resulting from the repetition of Republican lies over time … the enshrinement of “obvious truths.”
I noticed that over the course of the decades … and this is a development folks younger than me don’t know about … that the terms formerly used in the game were no longer used. No longer were phrases like “society-at-large,” the common good, government of and by the people, the welfare of the majority, government “caring” for people, anyone’s suffering being eased, and such even brought in.
“It’ll Benefit Society-at-Large? What Are You, a Wuss?”
Words like suffering, compassion, ease, good, benefit, the people, were not uttered anymore. In fact they were felt to be counterproductive. They were considered deal breakers if let into the conversation on matters that were deemed, well … “real.”
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21
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The Great American About Face:
There Was a Time When Kindness Was a Noble Thing; Nightmare Apparent
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[Quotes/highlights:] “You don’t know what I’m getting at. Yet this is the indicator of the gradual change in our country that would be missed by those younger than myself. I only see this glaring discrepancy because of having lived many years in an America whose values were different, and who thought differently, more compassionately than today. I know of an America where even that last big word that I used, compassionately, wasn’t the dirty word that it is today … or the certain game loser, deal breaker if uttered.”
“…what’s happened today is that it’s not even society at large that is supposed to benefit. Compassion is not a goal, or even a value, when negotiating. The scornful repetition of those words, ‘bleeding heart liberal,’ has had its intended effect.”
“…in those days, the easing of suffering was a value, compassion was a noble thing, not indicative of weakness like today.”
“Yet starting with Reagan and slowly since then it has become that.”
“…why has it gotten to that again, even to where it’s back to where it was … again … at the beginning of the Great Depression: No compassion allowed.”
“…over the course of all these years we’ve seen the marginal tax rate for the very wealthy go from ninety-one percent in the Fifties and Sixties, when the American economy was booming, to where the top tax rate is down to thirty-seven percent now? Not to mention that the average tax rate for the wealthy is lower than any in the country, averaging out at 8.2 percent. Even the lowest tax bracket, for those making between $0 and $9,950 is set at 10 percent. Worse than that, the average tax payment for the wealthiest twenty-five Americans was 3.4 percent, as reported 13 April 2022.”
“Did those increasing cuts in taxes for the wealthy increasingly stimulate the economy, as we were told they would? … No…. We’re a lot worse off.”
“…what happens when something is repeated over and over and over again … self-benefiting mean-spiritedness like this can be spoken of as being, somehow, reasonable.”
“…these days, if you are one of those who uses words like compassionate … you’re a hippie!
“And on the other side of this, the side that is presented to all, promulgated to everyone, and the only one considered ‘real,’ we’ve got these mean-spirited feelings. They are at war with the idea that we have government that’s there to at all benefit, be on the side of, or even be for its citizens.
“…that is based on this old-fashioned notion that it is a good thing to save people from dying or from suffering in situations where a single individual is helpless against a cultural or societal wrong.
“Government could be seen this way because one preeminent value was that life was precious and good, that people dying was not good, that it was important to prevent that to the extent one could … more important than money or profits or the comfort and pleasure of people with riches.”
“These brutish and thievish over-reaches displayed an incredible disregard for, disrespect of, indeed, an actual literal inability of the Filthy Rich — the 1% — and their Republican puppets to see American People, who were the recipients of these attacks. Together these reveals, displayed unintentionally however blatantly and unknowingly by the Republicans and the Filthy Rich … and before the entire world … disclosed to the masses of Americans some ‘cracks,’ ‘stains,’ or textures in the ‘dome’ of unreality they’d existed in, which had made them blind to Reality itself, and had kept them in a near zombie-like dream reality.
“As this Awakening continued, some began remembering events, the memories of which had been ‘bleached’ out of awareness until just then, and then with remembering they realized how they’d been trained like animals their entire lives for the uses, whatever they’d be, of the Filthy Rich, and been trained then to forget that.”
“I discussed how this erosion of reason resulted in an erosion of action as well and why this would be desirable by the societal puppet-masters. Next, I discussed the means of the manipulation — the media, the puppet strings employed by the masters.”
“I talked about the way our lives were focused away from human concerns and reduced to the level of a game, contrived by the elite and which was geared toward their ends, suited to their abilities, and in which they dominated. This game was most of the time camouflaged in positive, civic sounding phrases and terminology that made it seem that it was an endeavor for the betterment of all, but I explained how it actually was played and what the motives and ends really were.”
“…even this ruse of societal welfare was ever more let go of, as the puppet-kings gained in strength and in success in converting mass minds to a belief in the dogma of the game that they controlled.”
“The Filthy Rich Controllers channeled people’s inclinations away from their own priorities and from human concerns to be in alignment with the overseer’s non-humanistic, alien ones. Human concerns such as life, easing of suffering and the like were seen as silly and laughable.”
“As the super wealthy gathered power, they became more blatant and reckless in their machinations. The game was successfully installed as the focus and preeminent value of life itself; but in this headiness of accomplishment, they became complacent about their subterfuge. Reckless in their maneuvers and ever more careless in concealing it, they risked being exposed.”
“We see how this creates a condition of such extreme suffering in the populace that stimulates them into awakening from the dream. The Matrix is glimpsed.”
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[Chapter 21 text begins:] You don’t know what I’m getting at. But this is the indicator of the gradual change in our country that would be missed by those younger than myself. I only see this glaring discrepancy because of having lived many years in an America whose values were different, and who thought differently, more compassionately than today. I know of an America where even that last big word that I used, compassionately, wasn’t the dirty word that it is today … or the certain game loser, deal breaker if uttered.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
No. See, what’s happened today is that it’s not even society at large that is supposed to benefit. Compassion is not a goal, or even a value, when negotiating. The scornful repetition of those words, “bleeding heart liberal,” has had its intended effect. No, no, it’s not the function of government to care about anybody anymore.
It may be hard for you to realize what a huge change this is from, like, Roosevelt days. The Great Depression went on for a long time, crushing hopes and aspirations, shortening lives, increasing suffering. People lived beneath this yoke for a time that must often have felt interminable. They came out of this darkness only slowly, and with great effort.
There Was a Time When Kindness Was a Noble Thing
So, yes, in those days, the easing of suffering was a value, compassion was a noble thing, not indicative of weakness like today. This is the way it was then and for most of the decades afterward, not much changing. Even Eisenhower, a Republican … he wasn’t, y’know, at war with the common good in the Fifties; he didn’t think government was not supposed to be compassionate, that it wasn’t their job or anything, that they couldn’t give anybody a helping hand or anything like that. Yet starting with Reagan and slowly since then it has become that.
People Suffering, People Dying … and This Guy Thinks It’s a Card Game!
Perhaps you’ve heard it too. At the time of it, you would see it discussed all over. There was Rick Santelli on CNBC. This was during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 when it first got out that Obama might just — with millions of foreclosures, people living in tent-cities and everything — might just present as part of his overall policy to deal with the problem something to help … okay, there’s one of those words (help), a certain game-loser; so you know what’s coming next … something that might “help” people who are heading into foreclosure, people losing their homes. The idea was to renegotiate deals with the bank, to recalculate the terms of their mortgage to make it workable to both sides again.
Don’t forget the banks had before that been given huge amounts of money by the American people. So in this plan, instead of proceeding with a foreclosure the banks were asked to be willing to accept slightly less money on the loan than the original terms called for.
It was thought, what would that hurt? After all the banks aren’t going to lose. At the expense of the American people they’ve made out like bandits … in fact, they’ve been bandits … they used extortion to get that money out. With this policy they would get some money out of the loan instead of none in the case of the foreclosure; they would even still make a profit. The only thing they wouldn’t be able to do is to add that note to the pile of losses they would be claiming as part of the government bailout. An aside, that last part — making less money than if they could claim it a loss — is the key to understanding the uproar about Obama’s plan to help financially strapped homeowners.
So we saw Rick Santelli, a highly visible financial commentator for CNBC, someone I saw every day for years. He stood in front of the camera on the floor of the stock exchange; CNBC broadcast it to the world. He was against Obama’s plan to “help” mortgage-holders … they should probably have used a different word than help. As he put it “In America, a card laid is a card played.” He said, “This does away with contract law!”
This was February 19th, 2009. It has been widely said that this “rant,” as it was called, was the beginning of the Tea Party movement in America. Steven Perlberg, writing for Business Insider, wrote, “‘A lot of people have been credited with starting the modern-day tea party but make no mistake, it was Rick Santelli,’ Glenn Beck told Business Insider in an email. ‘His off the cuff monologue spoke the words that millions of Americans felt but could not nor dare not speak….
“‘All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing,’ he screamed from the CME on February 19, 2009. It was time, Santelli said, for another Tea Party. His infamous segment — in response to a minor homeowner bailout — is now credited with helping launch the Tea Party tidal wave that began during the early years of the Obama administration and ended up ‘shellacking’ the Democrats in the 2010 midterms.”1
Yes, We’ve Made This Mistake Before
And what Santelli said, well, yeah, yeah, they used to say those things back in Hoover’s day too, alright? And then when everybody was hurting, and there was thirty to forty percent unemployment and nobody was making any money including the rich fat cats and they were losing their shirts in investments and no longer making money in the stock market, then … then … all of a sudden, okay, then it was okay to help out people who were starving.
But Why Do We Insist on Making It Again?
Well, why did it have to get to that? and why has it gotten to that again, even to where it’s back to where it was … again … at the beginning of the Great Depression: No compassion allowed.
What is that? It’s like “Oh, these people are all deadbeats here.” Oh, yeah, all those millions of people? Doesn’t have anything to do with all that money that went to the rich people? Nothing to do with the fact that over the course of all these years we’ve seen the marginal tax rate for the very wealthy go from ninety-one percent in the Fifties and Sixties, when the American economy was booming, to where the top tax rate is down to thirty-seven percent now?2 Not to mention that the average tax rate for the wealthy is lower than for any in the country, averaging out at 8.2 percent. Even the lowest tax bracket, for those making between $0 and $9,950 is set at 10 percent. Worse than that, the average tax payment for the wealthiest twenty-five Americans was 3.4 percent, as reported 13 April 2022.3
However, to offset those huge cuts in revenue — allowing the super wealthy such low taxes — did we get any more prosperous in that time? Did those increasing cuts in taxes for the wealthy increasingly stimulate the economy, as we were told they would? I repeat, did we get any more prosperous in that time? Did the tax cuts work the way the fat cats said they would?
Well, No.
Well, I was there. No, they didn’t … and we didn’t … didn’t get more prosperous. We’re a lot worse off. Y’know, when I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties my father was poor. But only he had to work! He might bring home fifty dollars a week, with six kids. But my mother didn’t have to work. Believe me, fifty dollars in that day, it wasn’t like it was worth a thousand dollars or something today; there wasn’t that much difference.
Kumbaya. My Lord!
So there used to be this idea of benefiting society-at-large. There was this thing put out — even though it was a sham on the part of Republicans — that if you could somehow convince the Democrats that what you wanted was going to benefit the “society at large” they might come over to your side. Republicans still found it useful to promote the idea that they were representing the people.
What “Extra” Kitchen?
But no, no, no. If these days you say that something is going to benefit somebody …. Like Rick Santelli said, “Well, a card laid … contract law’s all important … blah, blah, blah…. Do any of you people out there…” He was talking to the stock exchange people; he said, “Do any of you want to pay your hard-earned money so that the guy next door can have that extra kitchen that he put in?”
Now, where the hell did that come from? I hardly think that many of the people losing their homes were out there spending all their money on “extra” kitchens. So what’s the implication? The implication is that we’ve got a bunch of losers, spendthrifts, who are throwing their money away and they don’t deserve a break.
More Likely It Was Your “Extra” Kitchen, Rick. And, Thank You Very Much but We’ve Already Paid, and Dearly, for It
Duh! Doesn’t that sound like the banks? “Extra kitchen” … Doesn’t that sound like the stockbroker people; doesn’t that sound like the people who are talking about the other people this way? Wow.
Anyway, it was played over and over again. There were even people, even some pundits and governmental folks in public who were saying, “Yes, he was expressing what a lot of people are thinking.” And, what the hell is that? That nobody can catch a break unless you’re rich? See, that’s what happens when something is repeated over and over and over again … self-benefiting mean-spiritedness like this can be spoken of as being, somehow, reasonable.
A Broken Person Is Preferable to a Broken Rule in This Game
And what is it that was repeated over and over and over again? Well, let me just put it this way … because I was there. You know the real issue here … when you say that it’ll benefit “society at large” or you say it’s going to help or benefit real people, or you indicate in some way that it’s gonna ease the suffering of a lot of people. The real thing insinuated has to do with that thoroughly maligned idea — “bleeding heart liberal” — and things like that.
Worse than that, these days, is when that human touch somehow gets in, it’s no more considered a game! “It’s supposed to be a game,” that’s what they’re thinking, now. And it’s like, “Aw come on, you’re trying to benefit people instead of playing a game.” That’s where that contract law comes in, it’s like, “No, that’s breaking the rules.” Well we’re supposed to be running a government for the people not for the rules, aren’t we?
You Value People Over Rules? You’re No Doubt a “Hippie”
So you don’t even hear goodness coming in anymore. Or if you do hear the word compassionate it’s at most the naive utterance of someone that’s wet behind the years … some newbie or hippie … some “soft-headed” person who might have used it in a question in a town meeting, or the like.
And that’s another thing. A hippie? What the hell’s a hippie? Well, this hippie can tell you. That is a definition I’ve watched change over the years. Its meaning in these strange days and among these current cold-hearted people is way different than originally.
In looking at this change in the meaning of hippie we bring into view another aspect of the overall argument I am making. I can tell you now that at the end you will see it all comes together neatly.
It all makes sense because of some basic human feelings, which are even present in large groups. Unfortunately those widely shared feelings are completely at odds with another set of commonly held basic human feelings that can be present and shared in another large group. That might sound complicated.
Compassion = “Hippie”
Mean-Spirited = The “Real” Reality of The Game
What I’m trying to say is, who might that hippie be? Basically, these days, if you are one of those who uses words like compassionate … you’re a hippie!
And on the other side of this, the side that is presented to all, promulgated to everyone, and the only one considered “real,” we’ve got these mean-spirited feelings. They are at war with the idea that we have government that’s there to at all benefit, be on the side of, or even be for its citizens.
Like earlier I brought up the example of the Food and Drug Administration as something that benefits everyone, actual people, though it puts constraints on businesses. Government seen this way exists to protect American people in situations where they would otherwise be powerless. And that is based on this old-fashioned notion that it is a good thing to save people from dying or from suffering in situations where a single individual is helpless against a cultural or societal wrong.
Government could be seen this way because one preeminent value was that life was precious and good, that people dying was not good, that it was important to prevent that to the extent one could … more important than money or profits or the comfort and pleasure of people with riches. Those turn-of-the-century “hippies” valued life over arbitrary rules, people over profits, the common good over the capitalist game.
But I guess nowadays they’d say, “No, no, no … those people paid for that food!” And, you know, let the buyer beware. A dollar laid is a dollar played, after all….
“Part Four: Class War — The Matrix” Sections One and Two Reprise
Coming up, is the third and final section in this series delineating the history of the American Republicans’ incredibly disciplined, relentlessly persistent, and amazingly cohesive … seemingly coordinated … fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactor corporations and the Filthy Rich through totally concocted untruths.
All in the Family
We are seeing here revealed the fifty-year invisible family and community that surrounded all Americans and affected every aspect of their lives, including, and intentionally, the basic components of one’s personality, and the erosion of reason, Soul, and independent thought or action.
American Awakening
I am showing how only because of increasingly cocky and greedy acts and extreme over-reaching “in broad daylight,” before the entire world, did this malevolent surround become visible. These brutish and thievish over-reaches displayed an incredible disregard for, disrespect of, indeed, an actual literal inability of the Filthy Rich — the 1% — and their Republican puppets to see American People, who were the recipients of these attacks. Together these reveals, displayed unintentionally however blatantly and unknowingly by the Republicans and the Filthy Rich … and before the entire world … disclosed to the masses of Americans some “cracks,” “stains,” or textures in the “dome” of unreality they’d existed in, which had made them blind to Reality itself, and had kept them in a near zombie-like dream reality.
“They’re so cute when they jump for their treat”
As this Awakening continued, some began remembering events, the memories of which had been “bleached” out of awareness until just then, and then with remembering they realized how they’d been trained like animals their entire lives for the uses, whatever they’d be, of the Filthy Rich, and been trained then to forget that.
”From here, they look just like ants”
It is clear that the Filthy Rich had an absolute certainty of their success because of their unmitigated power. What is also evident is the absolute inability of the Filthy Rich … which was the shocking thing they’d carelessly let out and therefore displayed to the world … absolute inability of the Republicans and the Filthy Rich to actually notice, let alone view or act towards, Americans as anything even living or having sentient ability, let alone as humans, people, or individuals.
All We Have to Do Is Dream
And as for the term “fellow Americans” often employed by Rich-publican politicos to make it seem as if you are one of them, or they are one of you, if that thought even crossed your mind for a second as being anything but a device, you are not fully appreciating just how literally I mean for my words to be taken. You may very well, in fact, be deeply dreaming and have missed the crack in the dream state that had shone the light in the eyes of a sufficiently large segment of the world population as to cause them to come out of trance and begin to untie their formerly invisible bonds, so that they could try looking around, which led to the realization of the reality that had been blocked from view, and the beginnings of investigations into the real truths of their existence, and to this series of expositions, which delineates the actual, formerly invisible profile of the actual actors in American’s lives, and the processes of control, and the things in their lives that were determined for them by the Filthies, though ordinary folks thought they had been making decisions for themselves.
What The 1% Want to Do with Us
And the last aspect of this series delineates the real factors in your life and the outlines of the real intentions for our lives these puppet masters have had … and have even now in mind.
Processing the Populace
In the first section of “Part Four: Class War — The Matrix,” which is Chapters Fourteen through Seventeen in this book. I talked about the fifty-year Republican campaign to convince the media and the American people of certain truisms that had nothing to do with the truth, in fact were almost one-hundred percent of the time, the opposite of the truth. It is a pretty amazing story of a campaign involving such things as getting people poorer and poorer, requiring them to work longer hours and so on so that they would have less time to think about things. It included other elements such as the way in which people’s minds were either stressed or made busy, and also the way they wore down the American people’s resolve to fight back against injustice.
The second section of “Part Four: Class War — The Matrix,” which is Chapters Eighteen through Twenty-One, elaborated on these parts of the campaign, which together resulted in an erosion of reason among Americans. I discussed how this erosion of reason resulted in an erosion of action as well and why this would be desirable by the societal puppet-masters. Next, I discussed the means of the manipulation — the media, the puppet strings employed by the masters.
The Great Hustle (Cool Hand Gipper)
After that I talked about the way our lives were focused away from human concerns and reduced to the level of a game, contrived by the elite and which was geared toward their ends, suited to their abilities, and in which they dominated. This game was most of the time camouflaged in positive, civic sounding phrases and terminology that made it seem that it was an endeavor for the betterment of all, but I explained how it actually was played and what the motives and ends really were.
$$$ 666 The Great Religion
Last, I bring out how even this ruse of societal welfare was ever more let go of, as the puppet-kings gained in strength and in success in converting mass minds to a belief in the dogma of the game that they controlled.
Dogma Keeping Out Pesky Saviors
The Filthy Rich Controllers channeled people’s inclinations away from their own priorities and from human concerns to be in alignment with the overseer’s non-humanistic, alien ones. Human concerns such as life, easing of suffering and the like were seen as silly and laughable.
And Then The Awakening
As the super wealthy gathered power, they became more blatant and reckless in their machinations. The game was successfully installed as the focus and preeminent value of life itself; but in this headiness of accomplishment, they became complacent about their subterfuge. Reckless in their maneuvers and ever more careless in concealing it, they risked being exposed.
Nightmare Apparent
Aspects of their self-benefiting game play and the cockiness with which they pursued them are further disclosed here in Section Three, which is Chapters Twenty-Two through Twenty-Seven. We see how this creates a condition of such extreme suffering in the populace that stimulates them into awakening from the dream. The Matrix is glimpsed. How the masses awaken and behold in horror the shackles and blinders upon them is described beginning here and in subsequent parts of Culture War, Class War 2022.
Sections One and Two of “Part Four: Class War — The Matrix” are intended to be read before this one, but if you haven’t done so this review will give you a platform from which to view what follows.
“Brother, I Do Not Know Thee”
Section Three continues from the end of section two where I was describing how the brouhaha around Rick Santelli’s callous comment revealed a wholesale and disturbing change in American’s sensitivities toward each other and in particular a callousness about each other’s suffering. Section Three continues from here.
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22
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Better Off Than Fifty Years Ago?
Rules Made to Benefit the Wealthy Are Now More Important Than Life
[Quotes/highlights:] “…these days you have the attitude, ‘A dollar laid is a dollar played’; people’s suffering is irrelevant to the game.”
“We have seen a lot of change over the last five decades. And many new thoughts have become truisms that are actually not true. In the real world they’re nonsensical.
“Unfortunately, they abound because of the cultural change initiated by Ronald Reagan that lowered the standard of living for everyone except for the rich who were the beneficiaries of that switch. It was the greatest shift of money upward, to the higher classes, in history, at that time. George W. Bush, after the millennium, outdid him though. Then Trump doubled down on what Bush arranged to be granted the wealthy.”
“Voodoo economics gradually brought the highest marginal rate of taxes down below thirty percent from the seventy percent it had been when Reagan took office. This should be compared with the ninety-some percent it was under Democratic and Republican presidents — Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy — in the 1940s through 1963. Reaganomics took corporate tax rates down to forty percent from the fifty percent that it had been previous to that beginning in the Forties.”
“…the last time, previous to Reagan, that marginal tax rates were below forty percent was in the Twenties, prior to the Great Depression. Not coincidentally at that same time, preceding the Depression, corporate tax rates were also at their lowest and were down in the teens. History records how well those low corporate and private marginal rates worked out. This did not stop the Reaganites from opting to repeat the previous debacle.”
“…this bonanza for the rich — along with union-busting and other anti-worker practices by Reagan — had the effect of gradually lowering the standard of living for the vast majority of Americans. The result could not have been more ironic. These pro-capitalist, fervid anti-communist Republicans like Reagan and his supporters began the process that would make us mirror images of Soviet Russia in several hugely important ways.
“Reaganomics brought in the two-salary family.”
“The anti-communist Reaganites also brought in institutional childcare, for now this was needed because both parents were working. Someone had to take care of the children, and they would begin that at earlier and earlier ages.”
“Reagan’s economic policies pushed Americans into a lower standard of living — fooling them in all kinds of ways that this was not the case — which was evident in major changes in American culture which mirrored that of the Soviets such as the virtual requirement of two-salary families and along with that the necessity of childcare outside the family at earlier and earlier years. Yet these Soviet-like changes did not also bring with them Communist benefits of job security, free child and medical care, guaranteed lifelong support, and so on.”
“…after Reagan instituted ‘voodoo economics,’ with prices on health care and pharmaceuticals going through the roof along with the sudden unexpected increases of other necessities of life, you had that lowered standard of living we have now become accustomed to for the great majority of Americans. You had a population that was poorer, in relative terms, and got increasingly poorer.”
“The records show that Americans achieved a peak of affluence in the Sixties and that since then, and rapidly accelerating since the Eighties, we have been on a downward slide.”
“…ever since Reagan determined that ketchup qualified as a vegetable serving, I have noticed this public stinginess about food.”
“I could hardly believe the happenings in this Oliver Twist world. My heart went out to those young boys who — in this once wealthy land and still surrounded by plenty in this post-millennial, rich suburban California — stood near the kitchen with plate in hand, their eyes pleading if they might ‘please have some more.’”
“The epidemics of obesity and diabetes in our country attest to how much worse is the nutrition for young folks today.”
“…we passed universal health care ‘coverage’ … not care. Everyone has to be insured does not mean everyone gets taken care of.”
“…health care that is delayed, rationed out, or cut back and denied for certain conditions can be just as much a death sentence as being turned away at a hospital door.”
“‘We can’t afford to keep you alive (we’ve got tax cuts for the rich to pay for).’ So they did. They died. Republicans clamored about ‘death panels’ in opposing health-care legislation; then promptly implemented one as soon as they could after it was passed.”
“I felt like I was in a scene from the movie Soylent Green, wondering where they were taking this one who had fallen by the wayside.”
“The unwritten rule is, ‘You’re asking for health care at a discount!? Well, we’ll make you pay … one way or the other, DAMN you!’
“You don’t think this attitude trickles down to the masses from policy on high? Well, you tell me what the policy makers of the 1% are thinking when they say they are going to ‘starve the beast’ of government … continually cut back funds for government services … as a back-door way of making government smaller.
“Just who do they imagine is really that ‘beast’? And why use the word, ‘starve’? Yes, the ‘beast’ of the masses, the riff-raff, is being ‘starved’ — being made to suffer for lack of sufficient money for systems and workers so folks can be served faster. With money stretched thin for humane processing systems and employees to implement them, people are refuse … mere ‘beasts’ … having to stand and suffer.
“I wonder how this is not simply a more undetectable way of eliminating in America the handicapped, disabled, and/or mentally challenged than the way the Nazis did it to the same sort of ‘riff raff’ when they got to power during the time of the Third Reich.”
“…what is the upshot of all this? It is that many folks have to weigh getting health care in America — which is claimed to be ‘available’ — against the complications and time of getting it.”
“The upshot is that many folks are weighing these costs of health care when choosing whether or not to seek help. And their decision is leaving many of these folks dead.”
“’Money changes everything,’ crooned Cyndi Lauper in 1983. Yet first you had Ronald Reagan who redistributed America’s money to benefit the already super rich. This affected the values of America’s citizens. Where once we believed in brotherly love, ‘kumbaya,’ helping the poor, lifting up the needy … ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore’.… Where once we worked and longed for a world of peace and love, now there was a compassion gap. For, with the excuse of ‘The Game,’ America’s ‘deplorables’ could flaunt their mean-spiritedness. Indeed, Reagan changes everything.”
[Chapter 22 text begins:] So these days you have the attitude, “A dollar laid is a dollar played”; people’s suffering is irrelevant to the game.
Foolin’ the People About History
Obvious “Truths”:
- Reagan “saved” America.
- Reagan rescued Americans from an oppressive tax burden.
- Reagan brought down the Iron Curtain, the Soviets, Berlin Wall.
- In America we were far better off than the Soviets were because…
o We are the richest country in the world. In America we only get better.
o wealthier.
o don’t have to work as hard.
o can take better care of our children.
Reagan’s Great Ruse
Need I say the above are all accepted as truth, though not true? We have seen a lot of change over the last five decades. And many new thoughts have become truisms that are actually not true. In the real world they’re nonsensical.
The Eighties Changed Everything … The Great Swindle
Unfortunately, they abound because of the cultural change initiated by Ronald Reagan that lowered the standard of living for everyone except for the rich who were the beneficiaries of that switch. It was the greatest shift of money upward, to the higher classes, in history, at that time. George W. Bush, after the millennium, outdid him though. Then Trump doubled down on what Bush arranged to be granted the wealthy. The Republicans pulled off this transfer of wealth under the banner of capitalism. The huge tax cuts for the seriously rich, which was how this relocation of money was accomplished, began with Reagan. When it was proposed during the 1980 presidential race Bush the Elder called it “voodoo economics.” This was before he was invited on the ticket with Reagan.
Voodoo economics gradually brought the highest marginal rate of taxes down below thirty percent from the seventy percent it had been when Reagan took office. This should be compared with the ninety-some percent it was under Democratic and Republican presidents — Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy — in the 1940s through 1963. Reaganomics took corporate tax rates down to forty percent from the fifty percent that it had been previous to that, beginning in the Forties.
Keep in mind that these were times — Forties through Sixties — when America’s economy boomed, turning the U.S. into the wealthiest country in the world. Remember also that the last time, previous to Reagan, that marginal tax rates were below forty percent was in the Twenties, prior to the Great Depression. Not coincidentally at that same time, preceding the Depression, corporate tax rates were also at their lowest and were down in the teens. History records how well those low corporate and private marginal rates worked out. This did not stop the Reaganites from opting to repeat the previous debacle.
The Face of the Enemy, Ours
Overall, this bonanza for the rich — along with union-busting and other anti-worker practices by Reagan — had the effect of gradually lowering the standard of living for the vast majority of Americans. The result could not have been more ironic. These pro-capitalist, fervid anti-Communist Republicans like Reagan and his supporters began the process that would make us mirror images of Soviet Russia in several hugely important ways.
At One Time, “Women Don’t Have to Work”; At Another, “Women Are Free to Work”
Reaganomics brought in the two-salary family. This had been one of those major propaganda points for the anti-communists in the Fifties: We were horrified finding out that behind the Iron Curtain both parents had to have jobs to support their family. It was thrown out as one of the ways we were superior in our capitalist way of life — American wives and mothers did not have to work and were able to spend their time instead raising the children.
The anti-Communist Reaganites also brought in institutional childcare, for now this was needed because both parents were working. Someone had to take care of the children, and they would begin that at earlier and earlier ages.
At One Time, “Strangers Take Care of Their Kids”; At Another, “Child Care Teaches Social Skills and Enhances Multicultural Awareness”
Again, extramural child care was one of those elements of Soviet life that in the Fifties was pointed out to us disdainfully and which we were grateful not to be subject to. It would be thought inhuman, if not barbaric, for children to be cared for by strangers, while the mother was working. There was something dangerous, if not lascivious, insinuated to us by propagandists, about pre-school children not being with their mothers, not receiving her protection and love during that vulnerable and needy time, but being instead “in the hands of strangers” … (god forbid!)
Nevertheless, after Reagan this dreaded feature of Soviet culture became the norm in American culture as well.
So Reagan’s economic policies pushed Americans into a lower standard of living — fooling them in all kinds of ways that this was not the case — which was evident in major changes in American culture which mirrored that of the Soviets, such as the virtual requirement of two-salary families and along with that the necessity of childcare outside the family at earlier and earlier years. Yet these Soviet-like changes did not also bring with them Communist benefits of job security, free child and medical care, guaranteed lifelong support, and so on.
Obvious “Truths”:
- Americans are innovators and problem-solvers.
- There’s nothing Americans can’t do, no problem we can’t solve, once we put our minds to it.
- Things just keep getting better in America
- Republicans are for small business.
So unfortunately, after Reagan instituted “voodoo economics,” with prices on health care and pharmaceuticals going through the roof along with the sudden unexpected increases of other necessities of life, you had that lowered standard of living we have now become accustomed to for the great majority of Americans. You had a population that was poorer, in relative terms, and got increasingly poorer.
Over time, over the course of my lifetime, though we might ostensibly have appeared to prosper we did not. The apparent rise in standard of living was a result of the glut of new consumer items produced in an increasingly technological and complex culture. You might be able to afford plenty of cheap trinkets and toys; but for things that pertained to your well-being and quality of life, such as health and medical care, good schools, wholesome food, higher educational opportunities, a clean environment, recreational opportunities, fuel and energy, leisure, family, and quality time, and so on, we were ever more wanting.
Peaking in the Sixties
In retrospect I can see we prospered in the Fifties and Sixties. The records show that Americans achieved a peak of affluence in the Sixties and that since then, and rapidly accelerating since the Eighties, we have been on a downward slide.
Poor Mothers Could Afford to Stay Home and Take Care of the Kids
I can see the ways we, living in the Fifties and Sixties, were as a culture fairly well off, though personally my circumstances were anything but that. My father made only fifty dollars a week for a time. However, my mother never had to go to work. She actually did get a part-time job much later in life for the enjoyment of it. Can anyone today imagine that?
How Much for That House? Okay, Let Me Get My Wallet
My father never made over a hundred dollars a week until later in his life when he actually started his own small trucking outfit … that’s another story about who are the real job creators in America that I get into elsewhere. Yet he bought his home with cash he had saved up. Eight thousand dollars smack on the barrelhead in 1953. He never had to work three jobs to get by either, like some folks have to today. No mortgage on his house and he bought every car he owned — roughly once every five years — also with cash he had saved.
College Educations for Free in the Sixties and Seventies. #occupycollege Today
No loans, never in debt and yet five of his six children attended at least some college and two attained at least Master’s degrees. I was talking with my older brother about his college education, which mirrored my own, and we both remember getting by with very little or no debt afterward. We both received enough to cover all college plus living expenses most years just on scholarships and grants — mostly state and federally funded — yet we both attended private, somewhat prestigious, colleges.
I know, Millennial Generation, but don’t blame us, we’re on your side. #occupycollege.
What’s Health Insurance?
My family didn’t have any health insurance, had never even heard of it. We were not well off, but we like most people could afford to go to the doctor. Similar to others we could even normally pay hospital bills, for maternity and so on. If anything very serious developed that required more money no one ever imagined they would be turned away at a hospital. The Mercy Hospital in my city, run by a religious order of Catholic nuns and funded by contributions, was a place one could always go regardless of one’s means. Sounds unbelievably quaint, doesn’t it? I know. I can hardly believe it was once that way myself.
Foolin’ the People About America
Obvious “Truths”
- There is an abundance of food in America
- There is a huge problem with obesity in America because folks actually have too much to eat.
- People are overweight because they eat too much.
Starving for Prosperity
“Have Some More, There’s Plenty!”
And my family never starved back in the Fifties and Sixties. The dinner refrain was “Have some more, there’s plenty.” Though we were fairly poor by the standards of that time, I never, ever, ever imagined there being a lack of or limitation on food. There were big restrictions on sweet treats and goodies, but not on wholesome food. So it shocks me to see how much more concerned parents are today about how much their children will eat, as well as how precisely they mete out their gustatory offerings when entertaining.
“You’re Not Leaving This Table till You’ve Eaten All Your … Ketchup”
When not that long ago I worked in a group home for troubled boys I was shocked and distressed to see the controversies over the food portions given and the restrictions on when they could eat. This was a government-funded group home and had to abide by all kinds of minimal standards in nutrition. Still, ever since Reagan determined that ketchup qualified as a vegetable serving, I have noticed this public stinginess about food.
Where I worked, sugared-water drinks qualified as juice, and peanut butter consumption was limited to a thin layer like that of butter that’s spread on bread. Cheap sugar this and thats and nutrient-low, colon-clogging baked goods, noodle dishes, and pizza were the at-hand substitutes for wholesome, more substantial offerings. The resulting blood-sugar swings and erratic, aggressive behavior were handled with drugs and listed within their case histories.
“Please, Sir, Some More?”
There was much more like this but suffice it to say that I could hardly believe the happenings in this Oliver Twist world. My heart went out to those young boys who — in this once wealthy land and still surrounded by plenty in this post-millennial, rich suburban California — stood near the kitchen with plate in hand, their eyes pleading if they might “please have some more.”
This miserliness about food seems a prevalent thing throughout the culture as it is evident in school lunch programs also. Whereas at the grammar and secondary schools I attended while growing up I enjoyed complete wholesome meals on a par with and sometimes surpassing the enjoyable repasts at home and even seconds were allowed, what is considered a decent school lunch today is shocking. Corporations have taken over as suppliers. Can you believe we had a Joe the Cook in grade school who concocted home-style offerings, which were ladled out by those of our mothers, including my own, who had volunteered?
The Beloved School Cook — Pepsico
Today the school meals are akin to that in fast food restaurants and just as monotonous … pizza, chicken nuggets, spaghetti, greasy burgers, hot dogs, fries. They are not “cooked.” From what I understand, they are taken from freezers, popped in microwaves, and dealt out to pupils like one would cards. The epidemics of obesity and diabetes in our country attest to how much worse is the nutrition for young folks today.
Your Medical Payment or Your Life
What else is different now than fifty years ago? Well, there’s people who can’t pay for health care … can’t get health care? … Now that’s something new for me too. Can’t get health care. Wow. You mean you’re sick, you’re gonna die, but you can’t get help in the medical system? Unbelievable. That used to be unheard of.
I know. You’re thinking, “But we passed universal health care under Obama.” Remember though, we passed universal health care “coverage” … not care. Everyone has to be insured does not mean everyone gets taken care of.
Now, I don’t know if folks are being turned away from hospitals like they were before the Affordable Care Act was passed. Folks got refused care for lack of coverage in recent decades. And sometimes they died. I wonder how many others died while struggling to fill out the forms to apply for health care for the needy? *sarcasm*
Regardless, health care that is delayed, rationed out, or cut back and denied for certain conditions can be just as much a death sentence as being turned away at a hospital door. Example? After we passed “universal” coverage Governor Jane Brewer of Arizona allowed a change in policy in their state-funded health care to deny organ transplants to those folks who could not afford it otherwise. These were organ transplants needed to save their lives. These people would have received them under some other coverage, but falling through the cracks and being poor — some of them born too disabled to be able to work at a job — they were essentially told, “We can’t afford to keep you alive (we’ve got tax cuts for the rich to pay for).” So they did. They died. Republicans clamored about “death panels” in opposing health-care legislation; then promptly implemented one as soon as they could after it was passed.
Isn’t this the kind of health care the opponents of “socialized medicine” say we would get if we went to single-payer? Well, we’ve got it folks — delays, rationing, denials, complications … and stress! — without any of the benefits of “socialized medicine.” I’ve watched it take two weeks to get a prescription in Riverside County, California, when it should have taken forty-five minutes or less. The folks there handling health care for people who include poor folks on Medi-Cal are so overworked and stretched thin that you need to stand in line, literally stand in line for sometimes four hours or more to get a prescription filled. Think I’m exaggerating? I’m aware of at least one elderly gentleman who collapsed while waiting and was removed on a stretcher. I felt like I was in a scene from the movie Soylent Green, wondering where they were taking this one who had fallen by the wayside.
And the answer is no. No to the other question in your mind: “Don’t they have places you can sit down?” I know of no other place where you have to stand to get your prescription, you’re required to stand. But then this is a huge county hospital catering to the poor. It handles many poor people … and it does it poorly. The unwritten rule is, “You’re asking for health care at a discount!? Well, we’ll make you pay … one way or the other, DAMN you!”
Starve the “Beast”
You don’t think this attitude trickles down to the masses from policy on high? Well, you tell me what the policy makers of the 1% are thinking when they say they are going to “starve the beast” of government … continually cut back funds for government services … as a back-door way of making government smaller. This is the exact wording they have used, since Reagan, for their policies of tax cuts for the rich that require massive spending cuts on services for poor and middle-income folks.
Yet think now: Just who do they imagine is really that “beast”? And why use the word, “starve”? Yes, the “beast” of the masses, the riff-raff, is being “starved” — being made to suffer for lack of sufficient money for systems and workers so folks can be served faster. With money stretched thin for humane processing systems and employees to implement them, people are trash … mere “beasts” … having to stand and suffer.
I wonder how this is not simply a more undetectable way of eliminating in America the handicapped, disabled, and/or mentally challenged than the way the Nazis did it to the same sort of “riff raff” when they got to power during the time of the Third Reich.
And Do You Get a Doctor?
Do you get a doctor, though? Not in this decade you don’t. When I was a child we went to the doctor’s office and paid $7 for a doctor’s visit. Even on my Dad’s $50 a week, that was affordable; and that was the least he made. When you now have doctor’s visits that cost a hundred to three hundred dollars if you pay out of pocket (or more), do you realize how much you’d have to make for it to be as affordable as it was for my Dad? Figure $700 to two to three thousand a week. Some people make that nowadays, but not the poor. Remember, my father was dirt poor, getting by on $50 a week with six kids.
House Calls in the Past; “Pretend” Doctors Today
Yet we got to see a real doctor. We even got a doctor who made house calls. Today? Well you get a pretend doctor who confers, along with a gaggle of other pretend doctors, with an actual physician, then gets back to you as you wait … and wait some more.
And You Wait
One time, it took four hours for the visit and another four hours to get the prescriptions in another place at the same hospital … and the prescriptions didn’t all come through until after two weeks and a number of phone calls, as at one point they had to order a common prescription and then lost the order … they had no record that it had ever been made; though on several phone calls they referred to it … and had to make it again. And this experience has been common. I’ve experienced it a number of times. I’ve since got health care elsewhere, believe me.
You Get an “Assumed” Doctor
Did I get a doctor? No. Oh, they call themselves doctors. The last one was more honest and announced when he came in that he was so and so who was a “student doctor.” I didn’t hear him correctly. My mind scanned thousands of files in an instant and what it came up with I just had to ask. I said, “Did you say you are an ‘assumed doctor’”?
And You Like It
And being “processed” like a piece of meat this way, you get a different “assumed doctor” every time. There is no continuity. You don’t bother to keep track of their names, for it doesn’t matter. You start all over on every visit. The only thing they know of you is what has been electronically recorded from previous visits; nothing human or relational is carried forward. They will tell you it is because all the “assumed doctors” are equally competent and qualified, so it doesn’t matter. Of course, that is a rationalization for a system so “starved” of funding the personal touch has long ago been squeezed out in favor of assembly-line processing.
Or You Choose to Die
So what is the upshot of all this? It is that many folks have to weigh getting health care in America — which is claimed to be “available” — against the complications and time of getting it. I didn’t have a job, so I was able to persevere. What of folks who have to work full time or more? I was well enough to stand around and coherent enough to make notes and make phone calls. What of folks who are sicker than that?
The Unspoken Costs of Health Care
The upshot is that many folks are weighing these costs of health care when choosing whether or not to seek help. And their decision is leaving many of these folks dead. I know of a number of people who have made such a decision; many of you also do.
Some are choosing a “soylent green” escape
I know of one instance where it was even done consciously, for the person did not want to spend what might be her last time on Earth struggling with an insensitive and mean-spirited medical system, so she just opted to let her cancer take her in the serenity of her home and surrounded by loved ones.
Why am I now thinking of that movie Soylent Green again? Well, maybe you remember that scene as well.
Others are risking it
I know I myself weigh these costs in time and suffering and inconvenience whenever I feel I might need to be looked at for something. and very often … most of the time actually … I put off being looked at. I postpone doing tests that are made more time consuming and painful for poor folks (don’t get me started on that); and I often give up in pursuing the treatments and medications that I am prescribed … figuring that putting up with the suffering of the ailment is better than the suffering incurred in its cure. and I am not alone. Will it cost me my life? Perhaps.
Universal health care in America? Don’t make me laugh..
America — Best Health Care in the World
… Before Them
Now, compare all this with the way it was fifty years ago. A friend of mine on Facebook shared how her brother was treated when he had a life-threatening injury. This was that long ago, and she relates they were poor. She says, they flew in a specialist from Australia to perform the delicate operation. I repeat, they were poor. But then this was all before Reagan … and Nixon. I’m getting to that.
“Money changes everything,” crooned Cyndi Lauper in 1983. Yet first you had Ronald Reagan who redistributed America’s money to benefit the already super rich. This affected the values of America’s citizens. Where once we believed in brotherly love, “kumbaya,” helping the poor, lifting up the needy … “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”.… Where once we worked and longed for a world of peace and love, now there was a compassion gap. For, with the excuse of “The Game,” America’s “deplorables” could flaunt their mean-spiritedness. Indeed, Reagan changes everything.
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The Compassion Gap:
With the Excuse of “The Game,” Small-Hearted Folks Can Now Flaunt Their Mean-Spiritedness
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…what happened to our country? We were supposed to be a country that valued human life, for example, but is now valuing contract law over that.”
“…the word has become more important than the person, and better that people sleep in the gutters or lie out in the park than to lend them a hand.”
“Rules (Made Up to Benefit the Wealthy) Are Now More Important Than Life”
“…this is the kind of thing that was brought up year after year over the decades to the point where it became that the things that I heard being valued growing up were laughable: compassion, if you were caring about people, or not wanting people to die.”
“…by the time of Nixon.… You couldn’t say you were actually going to help out the poor anymore.”
“…isn’t it kind of like that racism has become classism? It’s kind of like a hatred that’s not been eliminated because they’re still saying that about people of color, but it’s been expanded. It includes more people — Whites and Blacks … and all other kinds of colors. All the poor, they’re all now lazy, deserving what they get … if you listen to our society’s wealthy Controllers. And by the way, with their voices broadcast everywhere, with even CNN going the way of fascism as of September 2022, it is virtually all you will hear.”
“Nixon’s answer to health care, to help the middle class, he started the move toward HMOs.”
“[Nixon] is told that Edgar Kaiser is proposing a ‘for profit’ system of health care.
“Now here we have people who can’t afford health care and now you want to have a system that’s going to add to the costs of it.”
“…to all necessary costs that are already there, HMOs add the cost of profits to go to the owners of that health care system.”
“…by this point, because of the Culture War and mean-spiritedness being stirred up in the country by Republicans, it had become necessary to single out the middle class as the only ones receiving the benefit….”
“…an HMO employee received bonuses upwards of twenty-thousand dollars for cancelling coverage on people who were costing the insurer a lot of money. She cancelled hundreds of policies, including for those who were scheduled for life-saving procedures. In one ‘particularly good’ year for this person, she saved her employer six million dollars.”
“…these HMO-persons were rewarded for taking people’s lives….”
“…[Linda Peeno] admitted her action amounted to a murder, for which she should have been charged but wasn’t. She pointed out how perverse it was that instead the system rained rewards upon her.”
“And it’s contract law that is stretched to benefit the people with the most money and who have the better lawyers and who can, y’know, twist things better in their favor.”
“…at the time of his health-care proposal, [Nixon] said huge managed-care systems, which he touted as being one-stop medical systems, were going to lower health care costs.”
“[Nixon] said these lower expenses would benefit the whole system.
“Apparently, he forgot to mention the for-profit part, which ended up funneling all those benefits, those lower expenses, into the pockets of the owners and shareholders. That is what happens when you put profit-hungry businessmen in charge of care. Gradually, America’s medical needs were primarily the purview of business, big business. Just as with school lunches in America, American corporations were making huge profits taking over, and reducing the quality of, essential needs — food, health care, prisons, and so on. You will see this as a pattern of Republicans always..”
“…the health care law that went into effect under Obama was to make sure everyone would receive coverage, not health care. We are still finding out how effective this health care reform will be in reducing these sorts of abuses by insurers. No doubt it is better than what existed before. Much better. Yet, sadly, Obamacare leaves intact the profit motive in American health care. Hence, any regulation and prohibitions of abuses are likely to amount to tying down a ravenous beast with bungee cords. It is hard to believe this monster created by Nixon will not break free whenever it can and wreak much havoc before being stopped again … but again with piles of dead Americans in its wake.”
“…my own story about my wife is similar to Obama’s but different, because it has to do, not with money payments, but the quality of care that comes about when profit-seekers control the health care of a country. My own story is about how my wife physically suffered during her last days, although it was most definitely covered by her insurance.”
“…her agony put money in the hands of corporate fat cats’ hands who owned that HMO as well as some of the doctors making out handsomely getting paid for each operation and procedure, even if it is an unnecessary one….”
“My wife didn’t benefit by the HMO’s cutting services to increase their profits. She didn’t make out very well with these doctors performing these unnecessary procedures, which put money in their pocket. She wasn’t helped at all by the physician who insisted that her writhing around on the bed was not from a hip joint out of place — the doctor could have just checked, the CNA was able to see it — but was from an advanced dementia. Yet that kind of poor care is what can be expected from doctors and nurses who are overworked to benefit the corporation and who themselves are operating out of a profit motive in the health-care decisions they make for you and me.”
“…to the costs in suffering of healthcare provided poorly, with the only remedy being litigation, add the costs of time taken away from other pursuits, better pursuits, pursuits that would benefit society … none of which gets done when people are forced into The Game as their only option for redress. When corporate-benefiting policies result in cruelty, and death.”
“Much of health care, you see, had been in the hands of charitable entities and people dedicated to the idea of service, caring for the sick, getting them well, caring for your fellow person, your fellow man or woman, and so on; naturally the type of care you received was infused with such ideals.
“Yet with Nixon all that changed. and Nixon loved it.”
“Now you not only have to pay more for private care but also compared to not so long ago it is being increasingly performed by angry, stressed, tense, overworked, underslept professionals. Well, what happens when you’ve got those kind of people providing you medical care on the private side? One example of what happens we saw with my wife’s final days.”
“This story of HMOs taking over from private practitioners is the same pattern we know so well of the big guys gobbling up the little ones. It’s the story of creeping corporate insertion into every aspect of your life that you keep seeing over and over again in America. And it’s changed America.”
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[Chapter 23 text begins:] So what happened to our country? We were supposed to be a country that valued human life, for example, but is now valuing contract law over that.
The Word’s More Important Than The Life
So the word has become more important than the person, and better that people sleep in the gutters or lie out in the park than to lend them a hand. And god forbid when you have children, that one of them get sick, someone have an accident, or someone get killed….
Rules (Made Up to Benefit the Wealthy) Are Now More Important Than Life
Goddamn it. Y’know, here you’ve got Rick Santelli saying, well they must have put in a kitchen or else they wouldn’t have gotten foreclosed on. Where does he get that? That’s not a fact. That’s a made-up thing, just to get people angry.
And that’s the game. A game that’s not founded on any facts, only played to be won, and it’s won by making the best argument to arouse the most passions, the most negative passions in people, and to find scapegoats.
Stop War? Don’t Be Silly
And this is the kind of thing that was brought up year after year over the decades to the point where it became that the things that I heard being valued growing up were laughable: compassion, if you were caring about people, or not wanting people to die. Life, increasingly, was becoming as cheap as in Third World countries. This was no longer America.
Say, there was a war or something and there was agony over the loss of life. and all these people would gather together out of their concern. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. People anguished and horrified by other people’s deaths and sufferings … reaching out to help them, help each other, comfort each other, pray together … hope … weep.
Oh My Lord, Kumbaya
Yeah, a great big kumbaya moment! Wow. and I’m sure that’s what you heard, too. So I get it. Okay, so you shouldn’t have any feelings toward your fellow suffering brother or sister. Is it, what, silly? Uncool? Weak? Wussy? Sappy? What?
What is it you’re trying to prove to others with that?
What is it you’re hiding about yourself?
… What would Jesus have said to that …
It seems more than the standard of living was lowered since those days. and I’m sure they are in many ways connected…. I’ll get into that later.
Health Not-Care
Getting back to the change in the physical standard of living that Reagan wrought, though, let’s take for example the increase in health care costs. This is one of the necessities of life, and it’s been climbing out of reach, putting a burden on people, okay?…
Humbug for the Poor
As I explained in section two of “Part Four: Class War — The Matrix,” Chapters Eighteen through Twenty-One, Nixon addressed that problem in the Seventies. He was supposedly helping out the people, the poor…. Uh. But, no, he would never say that. He would never say he wanted to help the poor! Previous to him, in Johnson’s time … The Great Society and all that, yes. That was surely a time when you would hear talk like that. There was actually a War on Poverty then.
But by the time of Nixon….
So, I guess that’s when it started happening.
You couldn’t say you were actually going to help out the poor anymore. Because the truism, which I’m sure you all agree with, whether you admit it to yourself or not, is that the poor people deserve to be punished because obviously they’re lazy. Think about that; isn’t that the same stuff that, back in the day, they were saying about African Americans?…
Democratizing the Hate
So isn’t it kind of like that racism has become classism? It’s kind of like a hatred that’s not been eliminated because they’re still saying that about people of color, but it’s been expanded. It includes more people — Whites and Blacks … and all other kinds of colors. All the poor, they’re all now lazy, deserving what they get … if you listen to our society’s wealthy Controllers. And by the way, with their voices broadcast everywhere, with even CNN going the way of fascism as of September 2022, it is virtually all you will hear.
The Middle Class — The Last Bastion of Who You Can Give a Damn About
So instead what you hear today is like the “middle class”! Well, supposedly the middle class are okay people. They’re not deadbeats; they didn’t put in that kitchen they can’t afford…. Actually they’re the ones who are owning homes, so some of them actually are the ones getting those new kitchens. But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good argument to make in “The Game.”
Nixon Cared About Health … Healthy Profits
So Nixon’s answer to health care, to help the middle class, he started the move toward HMOs. And remember how it came about. There were actual White House tapes, an actual taped phone conversation of it. You hear Nixon talking to Ehrlichmann. and they are discussing the matter, health care. Nixon is told that Kaiser, and this is the guy who started Kaiser Permanente, one of the top HMOs. He is told that Edgar Kaiser is proposing a “for profit” system of health care.
Now here we have people who can’t afford health care and now you want to have a system that’s going to add to the costs of it. How’s that you say?
Some People Just Wanting to Get Sick Again and Again!
You say HMOs lower health care costs by reducing overhead? Maybe, but to all necessary costs that are already there, HMOs add the cost of profits to go to the owners of that health care system. Okay?
Also, Kaiser pointed out it would discourage “overuse” of medical treatment. Wow! So, here we go again.
So now we see that people who need medical treatment are just like those deadbeats, they’re like poor people, they’re overusing medical care. My god! They’re getting sick too much. and if you had a for-profit system, well, they could deny people coverage. And they could deny people medical treatment, no doubt, because they would naturally want to increase their profits.
GOP-Think. GOP, Think! GOP … Think?
So guess what? So, Nixon replied, “Well, now that I like.” This is a true story. So this is a look into how Republicans think.
Well not long afterwards, Nixon gives a speech to present his sweeping new health care proposal. What does he say?
Remember, there is this obvious racist and classist disdain for certain groups of people who might be getting too much health care. On the other hand, Nixon is wanting to see that certain other groups of people — White and wealthy — will make out big time from profits that will be involved.
However, his speech doesn’t go like that. Nixon is recorded giving a speech, proposing a big solution, purportedly to answer the problem of the rising health care costs that are beginning to be felt at that time. He will emphasize that his proposal would be a great benefit to the middle class.1
Make It to the Middle Base and You Score
Keep in mind as I was saying in Chapter Twenty, there was a time in which influential groups would consider they “had a home run” when they could make a case that their proposal was going to benefit the American people. Yet by this point, because of the Culture War and mean-spiritedness being stirred up in the country by Republicans, it had become necessary to single out the middle class as the only ones receiving the benefit, because, y’know, poor people … they’re not “real” Americans.
Foolin’ the People About America: Nixon’s Big Idea — HMOs
Thanks for the Health Care Savings, Dick
So Nixon says he is going to lower health-care costs. Well, you can see how right he was about that. Just look at Michael Moore’s documentary on America’s health care system if you can handle knowing how bad it got. The documentary, Sicko,2 lays out in brutal detail how devastating it was to inject the profit motive into health care.
“I Was a Hit-Man for the HMO”
There is one especially disturbing example of this. A former employee of a huge HMO testified before Congress. Crying and tearful she related how she was rewarded for denying an operation that would have saved a man’s life. It would have cost the HMO a half million dollars. Instead, he died; they increased their profits.
In another situation an HMO employee received bonuses upwards of twenty-thousand dollars for cancelling coverage on people who were costing the insurer a lot of money. She cancelled hundreds of policies, including for those who were scheduled for life-saving procedures. In one “particularly good” year for this person, she saved her employer six million dollars. I don’t know offhand how many folks died in exchange for her dutiful and lucrative actions and am not sure I want to. This is hard to look at, isn’t it?
The upshot is these HMO-persons were rewarded for taking people’s lives; and they are in no way untypical. Linda Peeno, the physician mentioned who testified before Congress, confessed as much; she admitted her action amounted to a murder, for which she should have been charged but wasn’t. She pointed out how perverse it was that instead the system rained rewards upon her. Now, you show me the moral dividing line between these actions of professionals of the HMO and “professional” assassins … mafia hit men. For I don’t see it.
Pay Us Now. We’ll Think About Covering You Later
Now you might argue that saving money on costly care means there would be more help for others.
But, no. That’s not the rationale. That’s another part of it. They can deny health care on any basis. They can deny it on any basis, but they went out and they found more ways to make even greater profits. If you were going to cost them a lot of money, if what you needed to live was medical treatment that they might consider too expensive, well what they would sometimes do is hire people to look into you. These people would be paid to research your background, to see if they could find something that could be used as an excuse to deny your costly procedures to you.
Michael Moore records in his documentary at least one such researcher who explains, with remorse, what he had been paid to do and how he would go about it. He, and people like him, would pore over your records to look for something, even slight, that they could hang a denial of coverage on. They would in particular look into your childhood for any care that they could say indicated the presence of a medical condition for you at that time.
When they found something, they would be able to say that you had a pre-existing condition and so they were not liable for your care now. They would claim that you lied on your application in not listing such an ongoing ailment so that they could drop you from coverage and let you die.
So people were being left to die, killed in this manner. Does this not amount to more “hits” put out on people by the HMO?
Buuuut It’s Contract Law!!
Did you, at any point in the past, pre-exist this application?
Buuut it’s contract law! … dollar laid, dollar played, y’know. And it’s contract law that is stretched to benefit the people with the most money and who have the better lawyers and who can, y’know, twist things better in their favor.
Here you have a situation, where, let’s say, somebody is dying and they’re dying of emphysema. I don’t know enough about medicine to know if that would be the kind of thing that could entail very costly care, but let’s just say it did. So this person very ill with emphysema might be informed that it had been discovered, let’s say, that they had a bronchial condition as a child … maybe to them, they were prone to get colds. Yet they would make the determination that your frequent colds show a preexisting condition for you. Now you tell me how a person who is dying is going to be able to fight that.
Over Your Dead Body Getting Paid
We’ve all heard Obama’s story about his mother and what she had to go through prior to her death. She spent the last months of her life arguing with the medical insurers over the bills. She was being told they didn’t have to cover her. Are those the kind of final days you would want for a loved one of yours? How does that prospect fit your own view of your last days?
One-Stop Larceny
Getting back to Nixon, at the time of his health-care proposal he said huge managed-care systems, which he touted as being one-stop medical systems, were going to lower health care costs. This was so, he claimed, because cost sharing and lower overhead would rein in the price of providing medical care. He said these lower expenses would benefit the whole system.
Apparently, he forgot to mention the for-profit part, which ended up funneling all those benefits, those lower expenses, into the pockets of the owners and shareholders. That is what happens when you put profit-hungry businessmen in charge of care. Gradually, America’s medical needs were primarily the purview of business, big business. Just as with school lunches in America, American corporations were making huge profits taking over, and reducing the quality of, essential needs — food, health care, prisons, and so on. You will see this as a pattern of Republicans always. Notice how much funding these Righties in government took away from the United States Postal Service to benefit the private corporate carriers, their fat cat donors. To this day, Republicans are out to privatize the postal service.
Remember, again, that the health care law that went into effect under Obama was to make sure everyone would receive coverage, not health care. We are still finding out how effective this health care reform will be in reducing these sorts of abuses by insurers. No doubt it is better than what existed before. Much better. Yet, sadly, Obamacare leaves intact the profit motive in American health care. Hence, any regulation and prohibitions of abuses are likely to amount to tying down a ravenous beast with bungee cords. It is hard to believe this monster created by Nixon will not break free whenever it can and wreak much havoc before being stopped again … but again with piles of dead Americans in its wake.
The Deadly Cost of the HMO — My Personal Story
Let me tell you how this affected me and my wife in 2019, when Obamacare had been in effect for years. For this has to do with managed care and corporations being in charge of the health care given and the kind of health care they would provide. This is not about whether she got coverage, she did. Yet the way that care was given her by a huge corporation caused great suffering to her when she was on her deathbed as well as to me, who was attending her.
I stayed with my wife, Mary Lynn, for twenty-four days from May 31st to June 23rd, 2019, when she passed away. I slept in her room at the hospital and was by her side, every day. I didn’t even go home to shower. Well, once, toward the end. She was dying of Parkinson’s and from Lewy-body dementia. Yet what put her in the hospital this last time was a fractured hip; she’d fallen at her memory-care facility.
We were told we could put her in hospice and keep her comfortable till the end, or we could get a hip replacement the following day. I was led to believe the hip replacement was rather routine. I was later to find that indeed they did a lot of these procedures, as one of the doctors who would end up working on her bragged, giving me some big number of operations he performed and telling me how many he could do in a day.
I mentioned earlier the widely reported story about Barack Obama’s mother and how she spent her last days fighting with insurance companies to get them to pay. We can all sympathize with her. Who would want to spend their last days that way? Well, my own story about my wife is similar to Obama’s but different, because it has to do, not with money payments, but the quality of care that comes about when profit-seekers control the health care of a country. My own story is about how my wife physically suffered during her last days, although it was most definitely covered by her insurance.
What happened is she had the hip-replacement operation. And that day she was back in her bed and was eating heartily again. For hours a nurse attendant helped to feed her. Yet that night, in the middle of the night, her heart rate went to 180 bpm. This is a condition she had, atrial fibrillation. She had been in that same hospital several times for that high heart rate, including earlier within that year. In fact, they prescribed a drug for her, metoprolol, which worked wonderfully to reduce her heart rate in such an event.
I might mention the fact that they also administered another of her drugs, which also reduces blood pressure, like metoprolol, at the same time, during that earlier visit. For it is part of the overall story of what has happened to the quality of our health care, with the profit motive involved. With those two drugs in her and after they discharged her, we left in a taxi. When we got home, she was a limp rag of a person, not able to get out of the cab. Her blood pressure, we found out later, was about 60 over 40. She collapsed in my arms when she was getting out of the vehicle, and she looked at me with eyes of great alarm that said she was terrified she was going to die. It was a look I wish I could forget. It broke my heart. We got her to our upstairs apartment in a wheelchair, and she slept it off and her blood pressure returned to normal the following day. This malpractice, giving her the two drugs, which combined caused her blood pressure to plummet, almost killed her.
Yet that’s not the half of it. Half a year later, when that night at the hospital her heart rate goes to 180; the doctor who came to help is looking at the computer and all her records. I’m calmly explaining that this high heart rate happens to her, and she has a medicine to do something about it, metoprolol. However, the doctor cannot find any record of that. I repeat, this was a drug prescribed for her by that very same hospital, less than six months earlier. Yet, no record of it.
They are doing this and doing that, and are calling for more help. And I’m telling them, just give her the metoprolol. I’m told repeatedly they have no record of that. Well, I had some metoprolol, which I had brought with me for her, just in case. And I slip her one of the pills. They find out soon after, and are very critical of me, scolding me.
Shortly after, a crew of nurses and doctors come in, and they do this radical procedure where they give her a medicine which stops her heart — completely. It stops her heart and as one nurse described it, the patient feels like they’ve been kicked by a horse. For it stops and restarts her heart, so as to reset it.
Well, they did that, and it didn’t work. Still 180 bpm. Now, they’re taking her down in a gurney to the cardio unit of the hospital. I’m alongside her gurney, and in the process of moving her, we discover her heart rate has normalized. This was not from the procedure, as that would have happened earlier, immediately upon their doing it. One nurse shared with me, not too loud, as the doctors were still there, well this is about the time it would take for the metoprolol to work. So apparently the metoprolol I gave her, against the vehement objections of the medical unit, fixed her problem. The procedure of resetting her heart, which failed, had not been necessary.
So, now she’s in the cardiovascular unit of the hospital. Keep in mind none of this would have been necessary if they’d listened to me or if they’d kept better records. She’s been asleep, but she is moved a time or two by the nurses attending her, as they do, to prevent bed sores. One nurse remarks to me that her hip, the one that had been replaced, was out of joint. She’s easily able to see that in working with her to move her and attend her wound. I figure this displacement is something that surely the doctors will notice.
However, Mary Lynn comes to consciousness and is in severe pain. It was excruciating to see her writhe on the bed, agonizing, moaning, calling out. I am there with a nurse, and she is trying to get the doctor to authorize some pain medication. We’re waiting. Waiting. No response from the doctor. She’s writhing in pain; hours go by. I exclaim, to the nurse, why is it taking so long? I ask her if she’s ever seen someone in so much pain, and she admits she has not. We wait longer. I’m distraught and agonizing over my wife’s pain, completely helpless to do anything about it, while she cries out continually from her hospital bed.
Four hours go by. We still haven’t heard from any doctor or received any pain medication. My wife lies and writhes there, continually moaning groaning, and crying out. At about the four-and-a-half-hour mark, the pain medication has arrived.
She makes it through the night. The next day I am summoned to a meeting with several hospital staff, nurses, and doctors, as they want to do an intervention with me to have her be on hospice. I know that once she is given morphine on a regular basis, she will sleep and be unable to eat, and she will die. I ask simply that she receive pain medication when she needs it, when she’s in pain, not all the time.
This is where the doctor comes in and tells me how she’s seen this before; how she hasn’t been eating. And that she is terminal and will soon die. She even claims that her writhing in agony the night before, when she was in excruciating pain was due to the dementia. She knows this, because she’s a doctor, and I’m not. Yet she knows nothing about my wife, never met her before. And while I’m telling her she never experienced such a thing just from her dementia, she counters saying she recommends her getting a catscan for her brain, to check for the degree of brain damage.
I’m distraught. Why are they concerned about her brain deterioration when she just had a hip replacement, and she has been in severe and tortuous pain because her hip had gotten out of joint?
Just as the night before, they ignore my input on her condition — that her hip is out of joint and that is why she is in pain — just as they dismissed my input that her heart rate could be steadied with metoprolol. You see, the procedure of restarting her heart was probably more costly; someone perhaps was making more money for that to be done than to simply have her take a pill. I don’t know. Maybe it was just stupidity and arrogance.
They ignore what I say, and when I tell them that she has been eating well, they dismiss it. The fact is she was eating more than they realized because we were having the food trays left, so I could feed her whenever she awoke throughout the day. Those amounts of food did not make it into the record, however. And my words about it to them were met with as little regard as if I were on mute.
Later that day, they do send an x-ray technician to x-ray her pelvis in her hospital room. I am asked to help to spread her legs so they can take the shot of her hips. She cries out continually when we are doing this, and at one point she shrieks and begins clawing the air like she is in so much pain she wants to crawl out of her body. Again, I’m agonizing.
Turns out the hip was out of joint. It might indeed have gotten out of joint during the unnecessary heart-restart procedure, in which she bucked from the brutality of it. I am contacted by a doctor who will do another procedure, this time to reset the hip.
The next day, that operation happens. Long story short. They botched that one, too. The stressed doctor tells me that when he went to pull the leg to reset the joint, the metal ball that was put in to replace her hip ball, separated from where it was inserted in her bone. I am told this never happens. Lucky me.
At this point nothing can be done except keep her comfortable till she passes.
Yet that is not all of it. You see, this woman, who is dying, and who they are so concerned is not eating — that being the reason why they want her to be in hospice and taking morphine till death — has been moved to five different rooms at this point. All were on different floors and under different specialties in the hospital — orthopedics, ICU, cardiovascular, and a few others. And their policy has it that, at each separate unit, she cannot receive or be allowed to eat any food without someone on hospital staff, a particular person who does this, different for each floor and specialty, determining that she does not choke when she eats her food.
She had been forced to do this after every move. They would have to come to ascertain her swallowing ability at the times when she was awake, and they were not available on call like that. When she was awake and would have been able to eat, I tried calling these assistants and they were never around. They would show up when she was sleeping again.
The upshot was that she was not allowed to eat, and she starved to death. At one point, I was eating a turkey sandwich, and she asked for it. I gave it to her, against hospital policy. She ate it greedily. That night when I confessed that to the CNA, the nurse got all alarmed. Like she would get in trouble. And the CNA made my promise I would not do that again.
That turkey sandwich was the last solid found my wife, Mary Lynn, enjoyed. This was weeks before her death. In retrospect, can you imagine the poignancy remembering her eating that sandwich easily, enjoying it, knowing that soon after she will be blocked from ever enjoying food again? She will be starved.
Think about it. She was prevented from eating during her last few weeks of life because it was hospital policy to have an attendant ascertain she would not aspirate while eating. That is to say, to make sure she would not get food in her lungs, which would end her life. Yet she was going to die anyway. When I explained this to one of the doctors, finally they said I could feed her with food I would bring in from the outside, solid food, and they would stay out of it.
However, by that point, she was rapidly losing her ability to eat solid food; it had been too many days of starvation. She was also becoming too weak to even want it. I fed her ice cream and yogurt, whenever she woke, till the very end. That was not enough, however. She died a frail, skeleton of a woman. One who, nevertheless, when she lie in my arms dying, looked at me like she was looking at the Divine. That beaming look of joy as she looked at me for seven-eight minutes before she took her last two breaths is what I carry with me. It helps to heal, a little, the agony of watching her suffer so much unnecessarily at the hands of these supposed “professionals.”
The final act in that play has to do with the fact that that particular hospital — PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend — in Springfield, Oregon, made it onto the television news. It turns out they were being charged with having too few nurses and doctors to help their patients. Remember what I said about her agonizing for four and a half hours waiting for a doctor for pain medication. Keep in mind what I told you about the five different medical attendants she had to wait for, each time she moved rooms, before she was allowed to eat. Remember that they would not be there when she wanted to eat; and in the end, in her last room, they never came, and she starved to death.
I won’t get into the number of times I needed help with her, needed a nurse, and after pushing the button in the room to notify them, and not getting a response for times that would go up to a half hour or more, I would go out into the hallway. The hallways in this hospital were long, very long. You could see hundreds of feet in either direction. I would look and see no one in the halls; think, tumbleweeds rolling on a lonely desert plain. And silence. I would find no one at the nurse’s station. Lack of sufficient staff, you see.
So this story has to do with the profit-makers of that HMO making more money by having less staff than is needed. It has to do with the fact that that lack of funds given to hospitals would make it so their computer systems would not be accurate, and they would not be able to see that they themselves had prescribed a drug for a condition — the exact same condition of a 180 bpm heart rate — that they would instead overreact to. They would reset her heart; it was probably when she was being jump-started this way then moved from bed to gurney to bed again by many attendants’ hands that her hip went out of joint.
Yet at the same time, the doctor performing the botched surgery was pointing out how many of these operations he does, how many per day, and so on. Like he was proud of his “production,” his work output. That last part of the profit motive involved in health care provided by HMO’s is something that comes up again soon, when I talk about the kind of care overworked and overstressed doctors are able to provide. Care that is riddled with mistakes and botched procedures.
I mentioned Obama’s mother having to fend off hospital bills during her last days. My wife, Mary Lynn, suffered excruciating pain on numerous occasions; she was continually pushed to take morphine when she didn’t need it. Which morphine caused her to sleep, so she could not eat, in what amounted to a kind of euthanasia. And she finally shriveled up and died of starvation at the hospital’s hands.
However, clearly her agony put money in the hands of corporate fat cats’ hands who owned that HMO as well as some of the doctors making out handsomely getting paid for each operation and procedure, even if it is an unnecessary one or, as in the case of the heart restart that could have been accomplished just by taking a single pill, could be handled simply and with less cost.
My wife didn’t benefit by the HMO’s cutting services to increase their profits. She didn’t make out very well with these doctors performing these unnecessary procedures, which put money in their pocket. She wasn’t helped at all by the physician who insisted that her writhing around on the bed was not from a hip joint out of place — the doctor could have just checked, the CNA was able to see it — but was from an advanced dementia. Yet that kind of poor care is what can be expected from doctors and nurses who are overworked to benefit the corporation and who themselves are operating out of a profit motive in the health-care decisions they make for you and me.
I know what you’re thinking. Sure, I could have sued. Sure, I would have won a settlement. However, I have books to write for you. I need all the time I’m able to wrestle away from everything else to get them out to you. I am not going to live forever, and I have much more to tell you. I do not have the time to be distracted by a lawsuit. I cannot write when I am in battle. So, to the costs in suffering of healthcare provided poorly, with the only remedy being litigation, add the costs of time taken away from other pursuits, better pursuits, pursuits that would benefit society … none of which gets done when people are forced into The Game as their only option for redress. When corporate-benefiting policies result in cruelty, and death.
You Mean You Care … and You’re Not Paid To?? (Oh, Kumbaya)
Previous to all this stuff of big business being put in charge of the life-or-death decisions of Americans, much of what was involved in caring for the sick had been attended to by religious and charitable organizations, non-profit ones. These concerned social institutions might be dedicated to idealistic or religious principles, for example, which included compassion and caring for the sick as one of their values or one of their religious ideals. Much of health care, you see, had been in the hands of charitable entities and people dedicated to the idea of service, caring for the sick, getting them well, caring for your fellow person, your fellow man or woman, and so on; naturally the type of care you received was infused with such ideals.
Yet with Nixon all that changed. and Nixon loved it.
The Monopoly Game Again: HMOs Drove Out Private Physicians
So then also, these businessmen with their HMOs are having near monopolies; they’re the only HMO providing health care in many areas. The only alternative is privately paid physicians. and these medical providers have costs that have gone up because of their reduced client base, their patients having been siphoned off by the HMO.
”Buy One Appendectomy, Get a Second One for a Dollar!”
So, private care physicians have the same overhead, and now they’ve got less clientele. In addition to that, now with their making less money and having higher costs, they also have extra costs, of competition, advertising for the first time.
“I Need to Take Two Aspirin … I’ll Call YOU in the Morning”
But that’s only one of the many costs that occur in a situation where you have a small market, with the same number of providers. You have a scrambling with other private small medical practitioners over a smaller pile, which increases not only the competitive costs involved in having to put oneself out there to win clients from competitors and thus further increases the cost of private care, it also increased pressures and tensions on private physicians who now are required to have two jobs. They have to be medical provider and businessperson. They have to work longer hours because of this too.
Of course you can imagine what a boon this was for medical care in our country. Now you not only have to pay more for private care but also compared to not so long ago it is being increasingly performed by angry, stressed, tense, overworked, underslept professionals. Well, what happens when you’ve got those kind of people providing you medical care on the private side? One example of what happens we saw with my wife’s final days.
So, on the one side — the mega-care side, you have them denying you medical care even if you’ve paid. You’ve got them denying you coverage if you have anything wrong, or if you’ve ever had anything in your life and you admit it. You either don’t get covered at all, or you may have paid premiums for years but when you get sick you don’t get treated so you die.
“Take Two Aspirin and Call Me After Tax Time”
On the other hand, you can pay the higher costs for private care out of your pocket. And these people are overworked, spending much of their time trying to drum up business and trying to take care of all the increasing paperwork of a competitive business enterprise and that of an ever-increasing number of payers. So they’re making more mistakes.
And more mistakes equal what? More mistakes in medicine means more people dying, by mistake, or having the wrong procedure done, or having the wrong limb removed, or botching a hip replacement. The extra stress will push some physicians to “operate under the influence” of alcohol or the readily available prescription mood drugs glutting the market.
You get the idea that things may have been getting worse over the years in a lot of areas?
So with all the extra pressure on medical practitioners, we begin to hear more and more about malpractice. So, another cost is introduced. and medical malpractice insurance for physicians has ever increasing premiums. This adds even more to the price of private care.
The Kind of Care That Increases Suffering
So you can see that the suffering of the masses, in both health care systems, is going up. As for the doctors themselves, well now they’re either out of business because they made a mistake or they’re keeping up with the competition and trying to make a living. Yet now they have these huge malpractice insurance payments. This is a cost HMOs can easily absorb, but for private physicians, it adds even more to their costs of business, their need to increase their fees, their loss of patients, their financial stress.
So what happens? They’re forced out of their professions. Or, they’re minds are filled up with financial considerations and they are burdened with concerns … and now they’re gonna treat you!
Foolin’ the People About America: Republicans Are for Small Business?
Making It So You Need a Car to Do Anything
Well, I’ve been around long enough, I saw this before. This story of HMOs taking over from private practitioners is the same pattern we know so well of the big guys gobbling up the little ones. It’s the story of creeping corporate insertion into every aspect of your life that you keep seeing over and over again in America. And it’s changed America.
Back in the Time of Neighborhoods
There was a time when there were no supermarkets in America. I remember that time. You used to be able to walk up to the corner, walk down the street, and you’d see bakeries, drug stores. There were penny candy stores, there were meat markets…. There was a wonderful ambiance of community about it … it was a garden of delights … people smiling and everything.
Drive to the Store, Get a Loaf of Bread
And now they have these huge mega supermarkets. And I saw the way it slowly changed; it didn’t happen overnight.
Republicans — On the Side of the Mom-and-Pop Walmart
Those supermarkets — run by hourly wage workers — could beat mom-and-pop prices. Gradually over the years we don’t have meat markets, bakery stores….
And Republicans say they are for the small businesses, the backbone of the middle class. Well, this is an example of just what a lie that is because, no, supermarkets are not small businesses. It’s all those meat markets, bakery stores and all that — those are the small businesses, they are the mom and pop, those are the average Americans trying to be self-employed. Self-employment is not huge corporations.
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Money Madness:
The Wealthy Are the Creative Sector … Creative in Devising Schemes Putting Our Money in Their Pockets
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…when you hear the same things again and again, even black-and-white facts can be put up for dispute.”
“…we have a group of people who think that people are really rich. The assumption is that most Americans are rolling in dough so that any tax increase on the wealthy is an attack on all Americans.
“And you can’t tax that sliver of the very, very wealthy a little bit more so that the majority of Americans might benefit. Benefiting the majority of Americans used to be how you got to ‘home base.’ But now, it’s like, ‘No, you can’t tax Americans; we are Taxed Enough Already!’
“The way this ‘obvious truth’ is phrased now … no way to get around it, it’s a flat out lie … goes, ‘You can’t tax the very rich, cause that’s’ … and they’ll just say it right out … ‘that’s gonna affect all Americans, that’s taxing everybody.’”
“Well how did it get to that conclusion when actually it’s going to lower taxes?”
“Pre-Roosevelt turn-of-the-century initiatives so common and familiar now, such as the Food and Drug Administration, are the kinds of things Democrats brought in that added to government. Yet, Republicans spout misinformation; they get people angry about ‘evils’ of such ‘big government.’
“The Democrats are the ones who brought in the FDA, worker’s rights, workman’s compensation. They’re the ones who put in Medicare. They’re the ones who put in Social Security.
“And we remember the Republicans are the ones who created the Great Depression, created poverty for everybody at that time. Republicans are the ones who did it again with Ronald Reagan, who tripled and nearly quadrupled the National Debt under the twelve years of Reagan-Bush, then more than doubled it under George W. That’s a lot of goddamn money.”
“…how could we forget that they just took the money and did whatever they wanted with it? They paid off debts to other rich friends; they went overseas and invested in other countries.”
“…we have this idea of tax-and-spend Democrats. It’s been repeated, going back many decades. It basically goes back to Roosevelt who ended the Depression and benefited virtually all Americans. And now that’s somehow a bad thing, brought up to get you mad about the tax-and-spend Democrat. And they’ve got all Americans convinced that if you vote for a Democrat, they’re going to take your money, they’re going to tax it, and they’re going to spend it on somebody else. Well, that has nothing to do with the truth.”
“Certainly Roosevelt benefited all Americans with Social Security and so on; certainly Medicare, brought in under Lyndon Johnson benefited the vast majority of Americans. All these things the Democrats did. And Bill Clinton raised taxes on the very rich a few percentage points and balanced the budget. Clinton created jobs and prosperity, balanced the budget, reduced the National Debt, and created a surplus that could have gone into creating a better America for all Americans. But, no, that was considered bad, because they said it hurt all Americans when the extremely wealthy had to give a little more in taxes.”
“…it wasn’t about the truth anymore. And it wasn’t about benefiting society at large. At this point, it was solely about how you made it to home base, how rich folks got money for themselves. And it didn’t matter anymore if you just skipped all the bases, and you started at home and went to home … if you just took the money. I mean, after a while the Republicans could just do that; tax breaks for the wealthy just because they were wealthy. Because, after a while, after all those years of repeating it: They could get away with, ‘If you tax the wealthy, you’re taxing all Americans.’”
“The wealthy were scrambling; they had so much money they were fighting over art objects. And the art objects — paintings and so on, famous paintings — were making headlines in being sold for so much.”
“You give money to rich people who don’t need it, they’re the ones who are going to squander it….
“In economics this is called diminishing marginal returns.”
“You simply cannot throw money at folks or ventures and expect to get as much, let alone more, return or reward later when the person is less ‘hungry’ or the project less ‘starved’ for funds.
“Whereas, you give a fraction of that money to a poor person, a tiny amount of that to a poor or moderate income person and what will they do? You have any idea how somebody who is poor will make a little bit of money go a long long way?”
“…you have people who would take any money coming their way to better their situation in life, the real American way. They would really love to be millionaires; they would risk their very lives for that. They would work their asses off. But those folks aren’t the people who are already billionaires.”
“…you’ve got these inanities thrown out there. They’re being said over and over again … ‘Rich people create the jobs; they’re society’s creative sector.’ These obvious untruths are not being countered by journalists and pundits.”
“Obvious ‘Truth’ — A rising (economic) tide lifts all boats. Real Truth — The rich get richer at our expense. Real Truth — Our suffering has paid for even greater obscenities by the wealthy.”
“…we have this increasing deterioration of our prosperity, of our standard of living, of our joy of life. Life becomes more and more of a struggle, and who benefits? Well, we see who benefits. We now have a new super-rich class which is above even the very rich. It’s called the Filthy Rich…”
“…to create this super-rich class where did that money come from? Well, it’s come at the cost of average people like us.”
“…our rights and our freedoms have changed. Because of their successes in the Culture War/ Class War, because of Reagan and Bush, the Patriot Act, the neo-con takeover, Trump, and everything, our rights to speak out and to live without harassment have been diluted. Out of all the civilized countries in the world we have the greatest percentage of our people in jails.”
“We have these huge corporations taking over, and it’s humiliating to people.”
“I can say I feel fortunate to have lived many years in an America quite different from what most people in the U.S. being younger than me have been growing up with.”
“How did the wealthy Controllers, the Filthy Rich, manage to convince so many people that their problems, rich folks’ problems, are actually a burden on poorer folks? What accounts for their being able to convince people of such nonsense, such stupidity … it starts with making folks ripe for the picking. It begins with people being herded like pigs for the slaughter. And that involves taking over their minds.”
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Obvious “Truths”:
- Tax the wealthy, you’re taxing me.
- Democrats tax and spend, they bust the budget, balloon the National Debt.
- Republicans are fiscally responsible, fiscally conservative; they balance budgets and are careful about the National Debt.
- Rich people create the jobs.
- The wealthy are society’s creative sector.
- That “class warfare” stuff “just doesn’t work.”
Obvious “Truth” — Tax the Wealthy, You’re Taxing Me
[Chapter 24 text begins:] As usual, all the above … they’re not true. Often the truth is the opposite of those “obvious truths” you’re constantly being told.
Yet when you hear the same things again and again, even black-and-white facts can be put up for dispute. For example, during the 2008 presidential race and prior to Obama’s first budget, the Democrats’ tax proposal was explained as a tax cut for the middle class and no increase on any Americans making less than two hundred thousand a year. This was a black-and-white fact, part of the public record, not in dispute. But how did the Republicans explain it?
That’s a Small Business?
I certainly heard it, over and over again; I bet you did too. Republicans were saying the tax proposal was going to affect small businesses. So we have small businesses that are making over two hundred thousand a year in pure profit? and that’s a small business? That’s a small business? I think if you’re making, after all your deductions and everything and you’re still making two hundred grand, I think that you’re not a small business. I think you can afford extra taxes. Yet that’s what we are told.
We’re All Rich. Somehow I Missed That Memo
So apparently we have a group of people who think that people are really rich. The assumption is that most Americans are rolling in dough so that any tax increase on the wealthy is an attack on all Americans.
And you can’t tax that sliver of the very, very wealthy a little bit more so that the majority of Americans might benefit. Benefiting the majority of Americans used to be how you got to “home base.” But now, it’s like, “No, you can’t tax Americans; we are Taxed Enough Already!”
Obvious “Truth”: The Democrats’ Want to Take Your Money
The way this “obvious truth” is phrased now … no way to get around it, it’s a flat out lie … goes, “You can’t tax the very rich, cause that’s” … and they’ll just say it right out … “that’s gonna affect all Americans, that’s taxing everybody.”
Well how did it get to that conclusion when actually it’s going to lower taxes? And they were saying it over and over again: “No, we don’t even need to know what the plan is; we just know he’s a Democrat and that he’s going to raise taxes,” they would say of Obama … or for that matter of any Democrat at any time in recent history.
Now, how did that become true? “Well because … he’s a Democrat and well haven’t you ever heard the term tax and spend Democrats?” And there we go again.
Obvious “Truth” — Fiscally Responsible Republicans
Pointing Some Fingers Already
Alright, let’s go back. Pre-Roosevelt turn-of-the-century initiatives so common and familiar now, such as the Food and Drug Administration, are the kinds of things Democrats brought in that added to government. Yet, Republicans spout misinformation; they get people angry about “evils” of such “big government.”
Misplaced Credit
The Democrats are the ones who brought in the FDA, worker’s rights, workman’s compensation. They’re the ones who put in Medicare. They’re the ones who put in Social Securi
Misplaced Blame
And we remember the Republicans are the ones who created the Great Depression, created poverty for everybody at that time. Republicans are the ones who did it again with Ronald Reagan, who tripled and nearly quadrupled the National Debt under the twelve years of Reagan-Bush, then more than doubled it under George W. That’s a lot of goddamn money.
That’s a Lot of Money
And then, with TARP, in October of 2008, under W. Bush, the Republicans were giving away seven hundred billion dollars to rich people who afterward were giddy in their ingratitude. This giveaway, keep in mind, came at the end of W. Bush’s terms. And you would hear CEOs bragging how they’re not going to spend any of that on people; they’re not going to use any of that money to loaning any of it out, which was supposed to be the purpose.
And even afterward, all Congressmen were agreeing that’s a huge amount of money, which at the time was the biggest amount of money being spent at one time, in such a short period of time on anything. And how could we forget that they just took the money and did whatever they wanted with it? They paid off debts to other rich friends; they went overseas and invested in other countries.
Chase Didn’t Use the Money for What It Was Intended
Goldman Sachs used sixteen billion of what it received to pay off an outstanding debt to a German bank.
Along the same line, the head of Chase bank is known to have said he wasn’t going to use the money to increase credit. In fact, he said he was going to keep that money and he was basically going to feather his nest with it and keep Chase solvent so that when other banks went under he could buy them up with it. That’s the money of the taxpayers he’s playing “Monopoly” with, mind you.
“Obvious “Truth” — Tax and Spend Democrats
Stacked up against these facts we have this idea of tax-and-spend Democrats. It’s been repeated, going back many decades. It basically goes back to Roosevelt who ended the Depression and benefited virtually all Americans. And now that’s somehow a bad thing, brought up to get you mad about the tax-and-spend Democrat. And they’ve got all Americans convinced that if you vote for a Democrat, they’re going to take your money, they’re going to tax it, and they’re going to spend it on somebody else. Well, that has nothing to do with the truth.
Social Security, Medicare, and Surpluses, Oh My!
It has nothing to do with the truth. Certainly Roosevelt benefited all Americans with Social Security and so on; certainly Medicare, brought in under Lyndon Johnson benefited the vast majority of Americans. All these things the Democrats did. And Bill Clinton raised taxes on the very rich a few percentage points and balanced the budget. Clinton created jobs and prosperity, balanced the budget, reduced the National Debt, and created a surplus that could have gone into creating a better America for all Americans. But, no, that was considered bad, because they said it hurt all Americans when the extremely wealthy had to give a little more in taxes.
The Fun Times Anticipating the Surplus
Never mind the facts, never mind that fact that we had a surplus at the end of Clinton’s second term that we were talking gleefully about how we were going to spend it. If you can remember, back in 1999 and 2000, we were discussing investing in better roads and infrastructure that would have benefited even the businesses. It was being offered that with the surplus we had, we could provide solar power to every home in America. And wouldn’t that have been a huge benefit to our citizens’ pocketbooks as well as giving us a huge win in our battle to save the environment?
Stealing Home
But no, it wasn’t about the truth anymore. And it wasn’t about benefiting society at large. At this point, it was solely about how you made it to home base, how rich folks got money for themselves. And it didn’t matter anymore if you just skipped all the bases, and you started at home and went to home … if you just took the money. I mean, after a while the Republicans could just do that; tax breaks for the wealthy just because they were wealthy. Because, after a while, after all those years of repeating it: They could get away with, “If you tax the wealthy, you’re taxing all Americans.” Wow.
Obvious “Truths”:
- Rich people create the jobs.
- The wealthy are society’s creative sector.
- Poor folks don’t create jobs, don’t invest their money.
- That “class warfare” stuff “just doesn’t work.”
Obvious “Truth” — Rich People Create the Jobs
Obvious “Truth” — The Wealthy Are Society’s Creative Sector
Yes, I have actually heard it said this way; a good chance you have too. Here’s how it works: Raising taxes on the wealthiest is gonna hurt all Americans because by taxing that sliver of the upper two percent of Americans, you are inhibiting the creative sector’s ability to create jobs. Rich folks are society’s wealth creators. The wealthy are the creative people in our country.
They’re Creative All Right
They’re the creative people, huh? Yeah, they’re creative in stealing from us. They’re creative in fattening their wallets at our expense. They’re creative in getting people elected who are liars and things like that.
That’s not the kind of creativity I’d like to have. As far as creating jobs. Who creates jobs?
Excess Wealth Given to the Rich Created High Art Prices, Not High Employment
Here’s the facts. You know all that money that was given to the rich people? All those tax incentives given to the rich people by Reagan? Well, It didn’t create jobs so much as it created a lot of excess wealth that went into, well, people were buying yachts, and they were investing in art objects that were being bid through the roof.1
The wealthy were scrambling; they had so much money they were fighting over art objects. And the art objects — paintings and so on, famous paintings — were making headlines in being sold for so much.
During the Eighties under Reagan it was common to hear of 39 million dollars for such and such … 58 million, 82 million. Of the 25 most expensive paintings ever sold, only two did not come at a time when tax cuts of either Reagan or one of the Bushes were in effect.1 And because what? Because the rich had so much extra freakin’ money. Now you tell me how many jobs money tied up in art objects created?
Real Truth — The Rich Will Squander or Sit on Extra Money
I mean it isn’t rocket science. It’s very simple … simple psychology. This has to do with facts: You give money to rich people who don’t need it, they’re the ones who are going to squander it; they’re the ones who are going to spend it frivolously, or not going to spend it just let it sit. They’re not going to benefit society with it; they’re not going to multiply it; they’re not going to invest.
In economics this is called diminishing marginal returns. Simply put, it means that food eaten by a hungry person will reap greater reward than the food consumed later when the person is satiated. The same amount of money funneled into projects, or people, will have a greater percentage return when sorely needed than when not; a dollar will go far toward feeding a hungry African child and will be as nothing for a rich American. You simply cannot throw money at folks or ventures and expect to get as much, let alone more, return or reward later when the person is less “hungry” or the project less “starved” for funds.
Obvious “Truth”: Non-Wealthy Folks Don’t Create Jobs, Don’t Invest Their Money
Real Truth: People With Less Money Will Sweat Over and Multiply Money, What They Can
Whereas, you give a fraction of that money to a poor person, a tiny amount of that to a poor or moderate income person and what will they do? You have any idea how somebody who is poor will make a little bit of money go a long long way?
I saw my father do it. He is the same person making the meager fifty dollars a week at one point. With a wife at home, not working, and six children. I don’t know whether I am ashamed or proud that my dad received that working for a “rag man” who went around picking up rags, scraps of cloth, from folks to turn in for money, using a horse-drawn cart. It would be similar to someone today being an assistant to someone picking up cans and bottles to turn in for the deposit. He was an assistant to that. Actually, call me proud.
And he wasn’t making much more in any of the other jobs he had. Yet eventually he got a truck driving contract with the U.S. postal service. He was able to own several trucks and to hire several workers.
So, why did he do that? Because he didn’t have a lot of money. And by taking those chances and becoming a businessperson, taking that little bit of money he had, he created jobs for a few other people. Because he was motivated, he was desperate. and for him it was all about a chance to raise himself out of being poor. He spent his life scanning for and working for such opportunities till he finally came across one.
Billionaires Are Not Highly Motivated to Become Millionaires
So you have people who would take any money coming their way to better their situation in life, the real American way. They would really love to be millionaires; they would risk their very lives for that. They would work their asses off. But those folks aren’t the people who are already billionaires.
But Nobody Will Point This Out!
So you’ve got these inanities thrown out there. They’re being said over and over again … “Rich people create the jobs; they’re society’s creative sector.” These obvious untruths are not being countered by journalists and pundits. There is really no one pointing out that anything is a lie, there’s nobody saying out loud that these self-serving pronouncements are untrue, or that what is being said is vastly different from the facts.
Obvious “Truth”:
- A rising (economic) tide lifts all boats.
Real Truth — The Rich Get Richer at Our Expense
Life Has Gotten Harder — Real Truth
So we have this increasing deterioration of our prosperity, of our standard of living, of our joy of life. Life becomes more and more of a struggle, and who benefits? Well, we see who benefits. We now have a new super-rich class which is above even the very rich. It’s called the Filthy Rich, as I’ve pointed out.
Real Truth — Our Suffering Has Paid for Even Greater Obscenities by the Wealthy.
And to create this super-rich class where did that money come from? Well, it’s come at the cost of average people like us. And I can tell you this because I lived through it all. I’m old enough to have seen the changes. I was born in 1950. I’ve been there to know, things are much harder than they used to be.
And our rights and our freedoms have changed. Because of their successes in the Culture War/ Class War, because of Reagan and Bush, the Patriot Act, the neo-con takeover, Trump, and everything, our rights to speak out and to live without harassment have been diluted. Out of all the civilized countries in the world we have the greatest percentage of our people in jails. So what does that say?
Humiliation … Increasing Humiliation of Working People
We have these huge corporations taking over, and it’s humiliating to people. I mean in times past we had the small retailer. Perhaps this person had a small coin shop, bakery, drugstore and pharmacy, shoe shop, maybe a corner grocery store. Now, there aren’t any small stores like that. And where does that person end up making a living?
Well, he worked in retail so maybe he even ends up working for the same department store that pushed him out of business. So what does that do to your self-esteem?
There’s example after example of people like that in recent years; it’s something that went into high gear under W. Bush. There are ever more people who are losing their jobs, well-paying jobs, because they’re being sent overseas; and they are sometimes actually forced to train the people who are taking their jobs.
I can say I feel fortunate to have lived many years in an America quite different from what most people in the U.S. being younger than me have been growing up with.
So, how were they able to pull that off? How did the wealthy Controllers, the Filthy Rich, manage to convince so many people that their problems, rich folks’ problems, are actually a burden on poorer folks? What accounts for their being able to convince people of such nonsense, such stupidity. Like I said earlier, it starts with making folks ripe for the picking. It begins with people being herded like pigs for the slaughter. And that involves taking over their minds.
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25
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An Attack on Facts and Reality Itself:
Confused People Take Comfort in Stupidity, and Burdened People Become Confused People — That’s Their Plan
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[Quotes/highlights:] “It’s just natural that if you don’t hear anything to counter something, you’re going to believe that the only thing being said is the truth. And that certainly has increased over time … through the years. The amount of actual truth that is being left out of the narrative of our country has increased dramatically. All the media networks are spouting the Big Lies, the Republican talking points.”
“What I observed is that the great majority of pundits weren’t any help in clarifying things for people….”
“all these words can’t be remembered, they can’t take root in their mind after the lies they’re always hearing from the other side. Americans are surrounded by the organized disciplined ongoing assault against them by the Republicans. They are filled up with talking points benefiting the wealthy, comprising simplistic simple-minded irrational mantra … nonsensical, repetitive, simple slogans.
“The result is Democrats don’t end up having a lot of power….”
“I heard Reagan’s appealing to the worst in people countered by reason, by sensible explanations and realistic proposals of a Dukakis, a Carter, and a Mondale. and then at the end it was … it didn’t mean a damn thing. Because people just felt more comfortable around somebody who kept things simple, who said simple words, and seemed angry like they were.”
“Because Reagan, like other Republicans, was able to confuse people into thinking that any screwing up, of any time, must have been done by Democrats. They will tell you your poverty now is caused by Democratic policies of the past which actually got us out of depressions, recessions, and created surpluses. They will tell you your lousy health care now is caused by money going to the Medicare that you like. They will tell you that the financial squeeze you feel is because of the ‘penny’ going to a poor person not the bundles of loot they are taking.”
“…the electorate is swimming in these simple irrational things that have been made to sound reasonable. And they are unable to see through them because they have been kept in this situation of increasing pressure to produce, produce, produce; of less leisure time and no time to think; of worries, medical care, all kinds of things you have to put out money for. Folks can hardly see through the swindle ….”
“Who has the time to think clearly or reason confronted by all this other uncertainty, this other insanity? So we have all these pressures and then there’s these slogans put out and people are not able to follow rational arguments.”
“That ignorance on the Right is the result of factoids, ‘obvious truths,’ replacing reason in burdened and confused minds. So how could these people possibly, without being able to see clearly, how could folks like this ever be united against the real injustices against them … which they don’t even realize are happening … their minds filled with the fake stuff?”
“People do not even know who the perpetrators are, for the pundits won’t tell them. Folks cannot figure it out for themselves; and the pundits absolutely refuse to point out who’s responsible for the things that add misery to their lives.”
“…equal time turned into something where, no matter what lie is put out there or would be put out, no matter what truth is put out there, the media will find somebody, they could find anybody, who would be willing to say a lie and sound reasonable for the purpose of confusing things.
“With all this, how can anybody know what the truth is?”
“…the rearguard has gotten fiercer, as expected. How that is manifesting in the Trump and beyond years is an astonishing doubling down on inanities and untruths. More ‘obvious truths’” have been set in American’s minds, making them unable to see over them to the truth. To them have been added this incredible 1984-ish assault on facts and reason itself. Indeed, on reality itself.
“With the MAGA devolution of American politics and civility, there has been no bar too low for Republican inanity and perversion of reality through words. We hear of ‘fake news’ broadcast loudly by the very entities pouring them out. How does one’s mind respond when knowing that ‘fake news’ spouted by them is actually … uh, fake news?”
“The mind boggles with the knowledge that so many people are unable to see through the Republican falsehoods, misrepresentations, totally made up “facts”….”
“This prophesied battle at the end of this era will come about when the great liar, the great deceiver, has managed to become dominant on Earth. It will arise when the Big Lie prevails, and truth and goodness are vilified. It will come about in a time like now, when reality and sanity have become whole-cloth concoctions, horrible nightmarish imaginings, bloody fantasies rivaling some kind of violent video game. Yet we cannot exit this game.”
“In such end times, the ultimate battle between Truth and Lies, between Goodness and Evil, between Life and Death, Eros and Thanatos, will be fought. It is said it will be the last struggle prior to the rising up of a new age or era wherein that conflict is resolved in a way that brings the entire world back into the fold of Goodness, the Divine … Eros. How can one not consider that Ultimate Battle is not the one in which we are currently caught up?! We have The Great Deceiver, Trump, along with Putin, threatening not only our democracies but the life of all living things on Earth, out of pure Ego and greed. Which is pure Evil. We have the final battle of Middle Earth, with Putin as our Sauron in Mordor, and Trump our Saruman the Mad, in ‘Middle Earth’ South. The Ukraines, currently, are referring to the Russian invaders into their country as orcs. Orcs are the mindless abominations of living things, monsters, which are set against all that is good in Tolkein’s trilogy of the rings. Yes, we’ve come to that. We are especially reminded of it as in September 2022 we discover torture chambers used by Russian ‘orcs’ and mass burial graves, with evidence numbers of Ukrainians were tortured to death.”
“…we hear ‘fake news,’ ‘witch hunt,’ ‘alternative facts,’ ‘stolen election,’ ‘treason,’ and ‘coup’ broadcast and hammered into our minds by the very monster engaged in them. It is the most clever psychological ploy. Keep your opponent constantly off balance with wild accusations, have a media owned by you who will repeat them endlessly, requiring that the entities charged, those innocent others and scapegoats, must constantly respond to the agenda of the guilty party. It keeps the guilty party out of the limelight and the world distracted as they pile up their abominable crimes, murders, corruptions, threats, brutalities, thieving, and oppression … seeking always the utter humiliation of the American people.”
“Republican tactics mirror those of crafty street thieves….”
“…being on the defensive allows you no move to seek justice for the perpetrator. They get away with their crimes.”
“I have seen such strong arm/ conning tactics being used by corporations, phone scammers, online entities … folks posing as Social Security to take your money, for example.… All this, now, because lawlessness is rampant on the level of any part of government or society touched by Trump or his goons.”
“Do you see how such folks, MAGAts, Trump, Republicans, are able to get the much greater intelligence of their opponents used against them. Like rope-a-dope.
“So, attack, accusation, drama, confusion, distraction… and
“ESCAPE
“for criminals.”
“…this Republican tactic is so outrageous because it is the strategy of outright war. In war, there is no attempt to tell truth, to find agreement. There is only intent to apply maximum punishment upon your opponent. To keep them distracted while you invade, and plunder.”
“…that is what the GOP has become today. It is a party at war with America, just out to see us hurt. And if you don’t think that fits too neatly with what a particular global adversary would want of the U.S., as a punishment for the breakup of the Soviet Union, to bring down the U.S. similarly, to break us up in a civil war or the seceding of states from the Union, just like happened with the USSR,
“then you’ve yet to see behind the screen.”
“Though in their idiocy they’re bringing themselves down as well. That’s like the guy shooting another guy in a boat that puts a hole in the boat and both drown.
“Blinded by the danger their actions pose even to themselves, these Filthy Rich Controllers would gobble up all they can, letting others suffer, using their unbridled wealth to orchestrate governments; courts; judges to investigate the innocent, indict the true patriots like Reality Winner; and to murder, unrestrainedly, any and all opponents who might threaten their egos or wealth. Regarding murder, these days that’s being called being Epsteined. That relates to the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his cell a day after being visited by then Attorney General, Bill Barr. It relates, also, to the fact that Ivana Trump, the Donald’s ex-wife, died “accidentally” … was Epsteined … a day before her non-disclosure agreement (her NDA) was to expire and prior to her planned appearance before a government investigation into Trump’s criminality.
“It is clear Epstein, just as Trump’s ex-wife Ivana, had enough info to bring down many of these political criminals and pedophiles. Even in front of the entire world, just like the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, these behind-the-scenes players, manage events of all kinds using any means necessary … lies, murder, and we see now with Putin, war. The war on the Ukraine. Yet W. Bush and his cronies also used war as the distraction from their thievery.”
“All this is to set up the governments of the world as profit-making enterprises for the benefit of the Filthy Rich. It is to set up a dystopian society for the rest of us, pouring out the products of our working hands, using the money dearly earned for the bread and circuses they distract us with, for paying our bills; meanwhile suffering under debt, worrying about whether our children will be murdered in their school classrooms, and much more of the oppressive lives they have concocted for us; while they, the Filthy Rich … golf.”
“They are attempting a full-on takeover of the world’s minds. Their dystopian aims could not be any plainer. And the lack of pushback to these existential threats to everything good that exists could not be any more frustrating.”
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[Chapter 25 text begins:]
Obvious “Truths”:
- Things you hear a lot are true.
- Simple “truths” are real truths.
- Democrats think they’re better than everybody; they’re snobs, elitists….
- Unlike Republicans who are regular people just like me, folks I could sit and have a beer with … who’d understand me.
Confused People Take Comfort in Stupidity
When ALL You Hear Are Lies, You Begin to Think It Has to Be the Truth
So, what happens? What is the result of these things being heard long enough, with nobody countering them or anything? It’s natural, if you hear something said enough, you don’t question it.
I myself am that way. I was told that we should go into Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t hear anybody saying anything differently. So I believed it. Well, that turned out to be a lie.
It’s just natural that if you don’t hear anything to counter something, you’re going to believe that the only thing being said is the truth. And that certainly has increased over time … through the years. The amount of actual truth that is being left out of the narrative of our country has increased dramatically. All the media networks are spouting the Big Lies, the Republican talking points.
Democrats Feel Like They’re Talking to a Wall; They’re Talking to the Weary
It is not that these lies weren’t countered; they were … by progressives and Democrats … and the few, the brave of commentators. In later years, MSNBC emerged and could be counted on for straight talk. Comedy Central became the “real news” for the young educated for being willing to throw light, albeit hiding behind the built-in denial mechanism of a comic façade, on the inanities of the Wingnuts and Well-Funded.
Yet that has not been the reality touching the lives of ordinary Americans. What I observed is that the great majority of pundits weren’t any help in clarifying things for people. Journalists would say, “Okay, Mister Democrat, what do you have to say about that issue?” And The Democrat would respond with a reasoned argument, laying out all these things that made perfect sense if you’re familiar with the issue.
Yet pundits wouldn’t delve into their argument, tease out its elements so as to enlighten.
And keep in mind that now more than ever people need that. We have people listening to this who are working two jobs, tired, overworked, worried about their health care, stressed. They’re not going to be able to follow an argument very well. In fact they’re going to forget what all those words meant and how they all fit together.
So after a while a lot of these folks are going to say … I’m sure you’ve heard them, they’re Republicans and the ones who vote for Republicans … they would say, “Aw geez, that’s just a bunch of words, it don’t mean anything.”
But what the hell does that mean?
Confused People Retreat into the Stupid
Well, it means that all these words can’t be remembered, they can’t take root in their mind after the lies they’re always hearing from the other side. Americans are surrounded by the organized disciplined ongoing assault against them by the Republicans. They are filled up with talking points benefiting the wealthy, comprising simplistic simple-minded irrational mantra … nonsensical, repetitive, simple slogans.
The result is Democrats don’t end up having a lot of power; they don’t get elected. I saw it happen in presidential election after presidential election. I saw Reagan saying simplistic things, getting all the people pissed off about poor people and about the Soviets.
From the other side, I heard Reagan’s appealing to the worst in people countered by reason, by sensible explanations and realistic proposals of a Dukakis, a Carter, and a Mondale. and then at the end it was … it didn’t mean a damn thing. Because people just felt more comfortable around somebody who kept things simple, who said simple words, and seemed angry like they were.Fast forward … this needs to be said … consider how that worked out later with Trump.
Yet, it was not much different with idiot W. Bush or befuddled Ronald Reagan. Not that Reagan said anything indicating any of his policies were going to benefit average folks. No, actually he screwed them, but they still liked him! Because Reagan, like other Republicans, was able to confuse people into thinking that any screwing up, of any time, must have been done by Democrats. They will tell you your poverty now is caused by Democratic policies of the past which actually got us out of depressions, recessions, and created surpluses. They will tell you your lousy health care now is caused by money going to the Medicare that you like. They will tell you that the financial squeeze you feel is because of the “penny” going to a poor person not the bundles of loot they are taking.
And Burdened People Become Confused People — That’s Their Plan
So, the electorate is swimming in these simple irrational things that have been made to sound reasonable. And they are unable to see through them because they have been kept in this situation of increasing pressure to produce, produce, produce; of less leisure time and no time to think; of worries, medical care, all kinds of things you have to put out money for. Folks can hardly see through the swindle since they are distracted by the threat to their lives from insurance companies — those folks who may or may not pay you if you need it though you have faithfully paid them.
We’ll Insure You, Up to the Time You Need It
It’s gotten to the point where you have insurance but you dare not ever make a claim. You live with the risk of unexpected loss to your home at any time that you cannot cover, because if you make a claim you may not get it next time. You risk losing home insurance and threatening your home. What the hell kind of insurance is that? You are insured, but they can deny you? They can deny your claim; or as it happens all the time, you have one or two claims, and you no longer have an insurance company.
So if your payments are not making them a profit, if you are one of those few who are costing them more to be a member or to be covered by that insurance company, if you’re costing them more, they’re not going to take it out of the profits they are getting out of all those who are costing them less. So, you’re eliminated. Then why do we even have insurance companies? Most people have insurance just in the hope that they’ll be covered.
Then people wonder why there are increasing numbers of people living on the streets….
Rational Thought Replaced with Slogans … How Can Anyone Know the Truth?
How Can Folks Unite Against Injustices Hidden from Them
Who has the time to think clearly or reason confronted by all this other uncertainty, this other insanity? So we have all these pressures and then there’s these slogans put out and people are not able to follow rational arguments.
How this expresses itself came out in a discussion I vividly remember on Facebook. One rational type was trying to reason with a supporter of Mitt Romney, who was convinced everyone knew all the “true facts,” EVERYONE knew about all the “failed” and horrible things Obama had done … as she’d learned from Glenn Beck among others. My earnest and reasonable friend finally threw in the towel saying, “It’s like talking to a random thought generator. What do you think about foreign policy? [Answer:] Cheese.”
That ignorance on the Right is the result of factoids, “obvious truths,” replacing reason in burdened and confused minds. So how could these people possibly, without being able to see clearly, how could folks like this ever be united against the real injustices against them … which they don’t even realize are happening … their minds filled with the fake stuff?
How Can Folks Protect Themselves From “Wizards” Hiding “Behind the Curtain”?
People do not even know who the perpetrators are, for the pundits won’t tell them. Folks cannot figure it out for themselves; and the pundits absolutely refuse to point out who’s responsible for the things that add misery to their lives.
Media types say they cannot do that because they say it has to do with, something about equal time, the Fairness Doctrine and all that. Yet that was supposed to be for elections. And, as I pointed out earlier, equal time turned into something where, no matter what lie is put out there or would be put out, no matter what truth is put out there, the media will find somebody, they could find anybody, who would be willing to say a lie and sound reasonable for the purpose of confusing things.
With all this, how can anybody know what the truth is?
Their Assaults on Reason and Reality Itself
Now, a lot of what you just read was inspired by the period up through to the W. Bush years. However, many of the principal characters at that time are still in place. Yet, as I repeat, the rearguard has gotten fiercer, as expected. How that is manifesting in the Trump and beyond years is an astonishing doubling down on inanities and untruths. More “obvious truths” have been set in American’s minds, making them unable to see over them to the truth. To them have been added this incredible 1984-ish assault on facts and reason itself. Indeed, on reality itself.
With the MAGA devolution of American politics and civility, there has been no bar too low for Republican inanity and perversion of reality through words. We hear of “fake news” broadcast loudly by the very entities pouring them out. How does one’s mind respond when knowing that “fake news” spouted by them is actually … uh, fake news?
Wow. The mind boggles with the knowledge that so many people are unable to see through the Republican falsehoods, misrepresentations, totally made up “facts”…. It is something right out of ancient mythology as revealed in Zoroastrianism of how the end of times will bring together the greatest battle of truth versus untruth. This prophesied battle at the end of this era will come about when the great liar, the great deceiver, has managed to become dominant on Earth. It will arise when the Big Lie prevails, and truth and goodness are vilified. It will come about in a time like now, when reality and sanity have become whole-cloth concoctions, horrible nightmarish imaginings, bloody fantasies rivaling some kind of violent video game. Yet we cannot exit this game.
In such end times, the ultimate battle between Truth and Lies, between Goodness and Evil, between Life and Death, Eros and Thanatos, will be fought. It is said it will be the last struggle prior to the rising up of a new age or era wherein that conflict is resolved in a way that brings the entire world back into the fold of Goodness, the Divine … Eros. How can one not consider that Ultimate Battle is not the one in which we are currently caught up?! We have The Great Deceiver, Trump, along with Putin, threatening not only our democracies but the life of all living things on Earth, out of pure Ego and greed. Which is pure Evil. We have the final battle of Middle Earth, with Putin as our Sauron in Mordor, and Trump our Saruman the Mad, in “Middle Earth” South. The Ukraines, currently, are referring to the Russian invaders into their country as orcs. Orcs are the mindless abominations of living things, monsters, which are set against all that is good in Tolkein’s trilogy of the rings. Yes, we’ve come to that. We are especially reminded of it as in September 2022 we discover torture chambers used by Russian “orcs” and mass burial graves, with evidence numbers of Ukrainians were tortured to death.
Yet, from the other side, we hear “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “alternative facts,” “stolen election,” “treason,” and “coup” broadcast and hammered into our minds by the very monster engaged in them. It is the most clever psychological ploy. Keep your opponent constantly off balance with wild accusations, have a media owned by you who will repeat them endlessly, requiring that the entities charged, those innocent others and scapegoats, must constantly respond to the agenda of the guilty party. It keeps the guilty party out of the limelight and the world distracted as they pile up their abominable crimes, murders, corruptions, threats, brutalities, thieving, and oppression … seeking always the utter humiliation of the American people. Only that. Humiliation and abject obeisance to the lying conquerors. Nowhere short of that will they stop.
How They Keep Us on the Defensive and Their Criminality Hidden
Let me relate a story of something that happened to me not long ago, as it has amazing relevance here, related to the idea of Republicans use of the tactics — directed by Putin and puppet Trump — involving creating chaos in the country against which backdrop they remain unscathed and their criminality undeterred.
Regarding the use of making accusations as a defense against one’s own culpability, the following story is how an erstwhile bike thief put me on the defensive and got away cleanly. This happened only months ago. In looking at this narrative, those of you following the last four years of Republican responses to Democratic efforts to bring them to justice might see some intriguing, and disturbing parallels. It shows that Republican tactics mirror those of crafty street thieves, and it helps us understand how Democrats can find it so difficult to get their narrative out there. For as you can see, just like myself, in the story, being on the defensive allows you no move to seek justice for the perpetrator. They get away with their crimes.
This is about Trump, MAGAts, Republicans, and their tactics since Trump. Here’s what happened:
I’m down at the Chevron convenience store.
I have a bike, shiny, one month old. I had to buy this cheap new bike to replace one stolen six weeks earlier. I purchased the bicycle online.
I meet my girlfriend, on her bike, and I’ve got my bike parked about fifteen feet away, around the corner of the store. We kiss. Stuff. I turn back around and there’s a guy pushing one bike and has his hands on mine as well, about to push it away.
Clearly, he was attempting to steal my bike. And this is in a matter of only about a minute from my having gotten there! And this, with me nearby and him even pushing a (probably) stolen other bike! Bold, eh?
Not seeing the Trump/Republican connection yet, I’m sure. But you will.
You see, I’m not even concerned he’s pushing my bike away. I kind of expect it as there is a lot of homelessness & desperation in Eugene, and several huge homeless camps. I feel compassion for these folks, and I have many friends among them.
So, I’m not even ruffled. I just go over to my bike; I put my hands on it, and I start removing it from the guy’s hands. About like you would with your child who had grabbed the wrong toy, or someone mentally confused (also like many on the streets).
This guy looks at me & says, matter-of-factly, “Where’d you get this bike?”
I say, unperturbed, “I bought it.”
Right back at me, “Take me to the person you bought it from.”
Me, still thinking he’s admiring the bike and like wants to get one, and being helpful, like he was wanting to purchase one himself, or something, “Bought it online. Walmart.”
“Take me to the person who sold you this.”
“I said, I bought it online. I put it together myself.”
“Take me to who you bought this from.” Again, he keeps saying.
Now I’m getting irritated, and I repeat myself, yet he keeps repeating the same asinine question.
It gets heated. He says, “Who’s getting angry here?”
I said, “I am. You keep asking the same fucking question, which I’ve answered again and again.”
And I am gradually getting louder, as I know this is a situation that I want folks around to focus on. If this guy is going to get violent, I want others around to see it and help deescalate the situation.
I even started defending myself a little, asking the gas attendant, “Haven’t you seen me here with this bike?” (I was there each of the last two nights.)
Getting it yet? Anyone? How it is about Trump? MAGA? Republicans?…
He won’t directly call me a liar, he just keeps demanding I take him to the person I bought it from, refusing to go away and back off.
Thinking “stolen election,” yet? You will.
Now, I’m really thinking there could be trouble, so I say, “Do you really want me to call the police to straighten this out?”
“Serial numbers could be checked.” Says he.
“Yes. And is that what you want?” Saying me.
“I don’t call the police, I’m not a snitch.” Him, again.
He actually had me there, a little, as I tried to de-escalate the situation…
Ignoring his obvious attempt at misdirection, I tried to lower the temperature by grabbing at a piece of shared humanity,
I say, “Well, yeah, I can respect that.”
But nooooooo. “Take me to who you bought this from.”
And now it’s creating a scene, with the manager and my girlfriend coming outside now.
Long story, short, he was shooed off by the store manager. And I felt a little vindicated and glad no harm would come to anyone or my lady and I didn’t have to kick someone’s ass to ensure that.
It was only later it dawned on me how I was conned & how slick this bike thief (election thief?) was.
I was impressed with the savvy but really miffed at myself that I didn’t see what he was doing while he was doing it, and that he simply walked away.
In the end, all were just happy to have him leave the scene. I had been defended & protected, but as for bike thief, well….
Remember, he left the scene, walked away, no problem, and I had been vindicated, though I was pretty damn pissed.
Yet he left free and clear and able to go steal his next bicycle.
Okay, enough.
Do you see this and what it has to do with Democrats, Republicans, MAGA, the 2016 election, insurrection, QAnon, Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks, Bill Gates, Antifa, BLM, George Soros, pedophilia, Jeffrey Epstein, Russian collusion and infiltration, corruption, emails, Hunter Biden’s laptop, & much else…
I have seen such strong arm/ conning tactics being used by corporations, phone scammers, online entities … folks posing as Social Security to take your money, for example.… All this, now, because lawlessness is rampant on the level of any part of government or society touched by Trump or his goons.
Yet right down to street thieves?
The tactics of a street thief?!
I mean, the strategies employed by this erstwhile thief down to every single nuance… Wow.
Aren’t they more than like familiar by now?
Do you see how such folks, MAGAts, Trump, Republicans, are able to get the much greater intelligence of their opponents used against them. Like rope-a-dope.
So, attack, accusation, drama, confusion, distraction… and
ESCAPE
for criminals.
Also, note that this Republican tactic is so outrageous because it is the strategy of outright war. In war, there is no attempt to tell truth, to find agreement. There is only intent to apply maximum punishment upon your opponent. To keep them distracted while you invade, and plunder.
And that is what the GOP has become today. It is a party at war with America, just out to see us hurt. And if you don’t think that fits too neatly with what a particular global adversary would want of the U.S., as a punishment for the breakup of the Soviet Union, to bring down the U.S. similarly, to break us up in a civil war or the seceding of states from the Union, just like happened with the USSR,
then you’ve yet to see behind the screen.
It is horrible to look at, so don’t be too hard on yourself for not taking it in earlier. Indeed, I’ve saved a more thorough explication of this horror festering behind the curtain for the next book in the Return to Grace Series, The Necessary Revolution. Yet it is not the purpose of this part or of this book, even, to look as deeply as that does into the heart of this evil … this evil so huge it would bring down all life on this planet through worldwide nuclear destruction, pandemic, and environmental collapse … just for the hell of it. Or just because some folks are saying, “There! Got you this time!” Though in their idiocy they’re bringing themselves down as well. That’s like the guy shooting another guy in a boat that puts a hole in the boat and both drown.
Blinded by the danger their actions pose even to themselves, these Filthy Rich Controllers would gobble up all they can, letting others suffer, using their unbridled wealth to orchestrate governments; courts; judges to investigate the innocent, indict the true patriots like Reality Winner; and to murder, unrestrainedly, any and all opponents who might threaten their egos or wealth. Regarding murder, these days that’s being called being Epsteined. That relates to the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his cell a day after being visited by then Attorney General, Bill Barr. It relates, also, to the fact that Ivana Trump, the Donald’s ex-wife, died “accidentally” … was Epsteined … a day before her non-disclosure agreement (her NDA) was to expire and prior to her planned appearance before a government investigation into Trump’s criminality.
It is clear Epstein, just as Trump’s ex-wife Ivana, had enough info to bring down many of these political criminals and pedophiles. Even in front of the entire world, just like the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, these behind-the-scenes players, manage events of all kinds using any means necessary … lies, murder, and we see now with Putin, war. The war on the Ukraine. Yet W. Bush and his cronies also used war as the distraction from their thievery.
The reason. All this is to set up the governments of the world as profit-making enterprises for the benefit of the Filthy Rich. It is to set up a dystopian society for the rest of us, pouring out the products of our working hands, using the money dearly earned for the bread and circuses they distract us with, for paying our bills; meanwhile suffering under debt, worrying about whether our children will be murdered in their school classrooms, and much more of the oppressive lives they have concocted for us; while they, the Filthy Rich … golf.
So while some of the terms these days have changed from nine years ago, the rationale remains the same for concocting ever new ones in their Class War against the less well off. They are attempting a full-on takeover of the world’s minds. Their dystopian aims could not be any plainer. And the lack of pushback to these existential threats to everything good that exists could not be any more frustrating.
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26
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Setting the Record Straight on Boomers:
The Boomer — Generation X Culture War and the “Truth Dividend” of Having Been There
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[Quotes/highlights:] “I can say I feel fortunate to have lived many years in an America quite different from what most people in America being younger than me have been growing up with.
“I watched in the early Eighties the lies about a ‘Me Generation’ coming out. Republicans brought that out to beat people down with. The idea was planted that folks who wanted anything for themselves were selfish, for after all, only the wealthy should ever benefit.”
“The 1% of the WWII Generation’s response to Sixties activism on campus … led to their taking over the universities in the early Seventies and turning them away from the humanities and social sciences and into career mills; I was there and observed it firsthand. The success of this is what created the Yuppies in the Eighties — young upwardly mobile professionals — who were the first batch of Generation X — who are those born 1961 to 1981, who therefore left high school beginning in 1978.”
“…these Gen X Yuppies were coming onto the scene in the early Eighties, when the first of them were leaving the universities. The turnaround in education, away from free thinking and towards conservative careerist values, was in full swing by the time they reached college in 1978 on. And its effect on them was patent when they began coming of age. They were what the WWII Generation wanted: money-oriented and compliant … greed had been made ‘good’ again. Despicable standouts of this generation today are Sarah Palin (born 1964), Eric Cantor (born 1963), Rand Paul (born 1963), and Paul Ryan (born 1970).”
“[The World War II Generation] were able to take their values of greed and conformity, sow them in another generation, Gen X Yuppies, point to those values and criticize them, blame them on the hippies, all the while hiding their own espousal of those values. They perpetrated, denied, criticized, scapegoated, distracted, and obfuscated all together! They thoroughly convinced Americans that the Me Generation and Yuppies were those who formerly were flower children.”
“…this actual Me Generation, these Yuppies, were predominantly a bunch of reactionary young people who said baloney with this idealism, and of helping out, and kumbaya, and all that stuff. They said, we’re for money, to hell with anyone else. And somehow the WWII-Generation-owned media, assisted by a Fifties Generation now in their prime, convinced folks that these careerists out only for themselves were the one-time visionaries. Of course they only pulled this off because they owned or controlled all the major organs of expression in America….”
“The media flooded American minds with the idea that the Me Generation was My Generation (I’m “talkin’ bout my generation” here) in the Eighties. They had prepared the ground for that lie, as there had been constant slander of my generation in the press since the beginnings of our activism in the Sixties, exactly like they are putting out against the Millennials in the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa movements today.”
“The media controlled by the 1% said the Sixties generation had gone from idealism to just wanting money, thereby discrediting their opponents, us who were consistently representing the 99%. At the same time they gave credibility to their claim of the superior veracity of their own values of greed, materialism, ruthless pragmatism, ego above all, and even me-spiritedness. Also, it validated, even glorified their personal traits of conformity, hard-headedness, cynicism, compliance, and even mean-spiritedness.”
“…what the 1% do is drive people into lowered standards of living and poverty where they experience desperation for money at times. Then they can point to that grasping to survive as proof that their values of money above all else are legitimate and that it is not possible for humans to have any other values higher than that. They create the conditions that they can use to support and validate themselves … how convenient.”
““Yippie Versus Yuppie” was a Leftist debate about tactics. Today it would be considered a discussion of liberal versus progressive views … hardly conservative, Yuppie, or Republican views. And Jerry Rubin’s putting on a suit made him about as conservative as it made Bob Dylan a conservative when he picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Festival of 1965.”
“…these lies become instituted and they’re not challenged after a while, after you hear them for decade after decade after decade….
“You have to be older to know that it wasn’t always the way they tell you it is. It helps to have lived in different times and places and to have seen things with your own eyes to be able to see through these inane ‘obvious truths’ that people take as absolute truths. It helps to have had experience with the things they are talking about to know what are actual facts and what are complete fabrications.”
“…the Gen X/Yuppie — Fifties Generation alliance was responsible for getting Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II elected. Boomers voted against Republicans, especially these; it’s all in the public record. Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II are the ones who did the tax cuts. Whereas Clinton — a Boomer and a Democrat — raised taxes on the 1% and balanced a budget for the first time.”
“…it is Democrats — supported heavily by Boomers — who are opposed to tax cuts and favor reining in the greed of the 1%.”
“We, Boomers … I was born in 1950 … supported Democrats who fought for environmental legislation, alternative energies, and reduced dependence on dirty energies against Republicans, supported by the Fifties-Gen X alliance, who watered down those policies and legislated a rape of our natural resources and our environment to benefit big business, Big Oil, Big Nuke, Big Coal, and the 1%.”
“…Boomers have consistently voted in greater numbers for Democrats than Republicans over all these decades….”
“…it was the WWII Generation who had the greatest retirement wealth per person and who instituted Social Security and other benefit programs for themselves … making themselves the wealthiest as well as the ‘Greatest Generation.’ Probably with the tax cuts, the current Fifties Generation who in their retirement years are ransacking the wealth of the country to fatten themselves, are bettering them. Whereas the Sixties Generation, scapegoated again, is facing cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits at the exact time as they need it and are beginning their retirement….”
“Lies and toxic misinformation are not healthy, at all, for a movement that is predominantly an alliance of Millennials and Boomers, with some Gen Xers (notably, few Fifties Generation folks). After all, how do you think a progressive Boomer feels, after fighting his entire life with his generational cohort for the changes that we are still fighting for with the OWS and Wisconsin union movements, and with resistance to MAGAtism and Trumpikin fascism, and after hearing his entire life the made up lies, the slander, the scapegoating about himself, his generation, and his beliefs? How do you think she feels seeing those same lies being pulled out again and thrown against BLM, Antifa, and OWS supporters, for example, continuing therefore to throw salt into old wounds?”
“In this antagonism against Boomers, the other side — the WWII-Fifties Gen alliance, supportive of the 1% and their MAGAt and Tea Party sycophants — have won again.”
“…these WWII–Fifties-Gen lies have thrown discord into progressive ranks. And they have thrown off the aim of our movements as to who the perpetrators are, giving the 1% a convenient fog of confusion behind which they can continue unfettered their actions against us.”
“…in understanding what might be the truth and what are obviously lies, it helps to be older, for you can know that it wasn’t always the way they tell you it is or has to be. It helps to have lived in different times and places and to have seen things with your own eyes to be able to see through these inane ‘obvious truths’ that people take as absolute truths. It helps to have had experience with the issues talked about to know what is truth and what are diabolical lies, intended to stir hatred, create conflict, and, once again, cover for actual perpetrators.
“And with that seeing comes the knowledge that over the course of the last fifty years America descended into a deep slumber of untruth from which it could not awaken … regardless of all the righteous efforts of many true-seeing progressive activists who did their best to sound alarms.”
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[Chapter 26 text begins:]
Obvious “Truths”:
- Yuppies are former hippies.
- “Flower children” abandoned their idealism and became greedy careerists focused on money.
- Former young radicals saw the error of their ways and became more conservative politically as they got older.
- The “Me” Generation is the Sixties Generation
- Sixties youth turned from free love and a sexual revolution to conservative sexual values and evangelical religion.
- “My Generation” gave up their idealism as everyone does with greater age and maturity.
- The Woodstock generation turned from pot and visionary thinking to booze, cocaine, and disco dancing a decade later
- The “free love” generation settled down and focused on family and jobs, centered around monogamy.
- “My Generation” (the Sixties Generation) in their adulthood settled on filling up the suburbs and feverishly maximizing their portfolios, at any and all cost.
Real Truth — All the Above Are Lies … Propaganda to Further the Motives of the 1%, the Filthy Rich
I can say I feel fortunate to have lived many years in an America quite different from what most people in America being younger than me have been growing up with.
I watched in the early Eighties the lies about a “Me Generation” coming out. Republicans brought that out to beat people down with. The idea was planted that folks who wanted anything for themselves were selfish, for after all, only the wealthy should ever benefit.
And it’s funny too, how they were able to use their own spawn to make this case. You could look around and see a new cadre of young folks — Gen X Yuppies — who had bought into the WWII values, who had been deluded by the untruths the 1% of that WWII generation had been using against the masses. The rich elite had succeeded in convincing those younger of mind that the wealthy folks’ interests where actually their own.
The 1% of the WWII Generation’s response to Sixties activism on campus, as I showed earlier, led to their taking over the universities in the early Seventies and turning them away from the humanities and social sciences and into career mills; I was there and observed it firsthand. The success of this is what created the Yuppies in the Eighties — young upwardly mobile professionals — who were the first batch of Generation X — who are those born 1961 to 1981, who therefore left high school beginning in 1978.1
So these Gen X Yuppies were coming onto the scene in the early Eighties, when the first of them were leaving the universities. The turnaround in education, away from free thinking and towards conservative careerist values, was in full swing by the time they reached college in 1978 on. And its effect on them was patent when they began coming of age. They were what the WWII Generation wanted: money-oriented and compliant … greed had been made “good” again. Despicable standouts of this generation today are Sarah Palin (born 1964), Eric Cantor (born 1963), Rand Paul (born 1963), and Paul Ryan (born 1970).
So then the WWII Generation, fully in charge of society, could point to these Yuppie spawn as examples of the obscenity of greed, thus deflecting attention away from their own, WWII Generation, me-spiritedness. To further their ends, they also claimed the origins of this unseemly greed lie in the failed, unrealistic values of the Sixties generation and their idealism.
This was one of their most amazing feats. They were able to take their values of greed and conformity, sow them in another generation, Gen X Yuppies, point to those values and criticize them, blame them on the hippies, all the while hiding their own espousal of those values. They perpetrated, denied, criticized, scapegoated, distracted, and obfuscated all together! They thoroughly convinced Americans that the Me Generation and Yuppies were those who formerly were flower children.
Whereas this actual Me Generation, these Yuppies, were predominantly a bunch of reactionary young people who said baloney with this idealism, and of helping out, and kumbaya, and all that stuff. They said, we’re for money, to hell with anyone else. And somehow the WWII-Generation-owned media, assisted by a Fifties Generation now in their prime, convinced folks that these careerists out only for themselves were the one-time visionaries. Of course they only pulled this off because they owned or controlled all the major organs of expression in America — the newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, education, book publishing. I delineated in Chapter 4 how they did this in one of the earliest all-out assaults, after their initial setbacks in the Sixties, of the Culture War/ Class War they have been waging on the 99% since that time.
The media flooded American minds with the idea that the Me Generation was My Generation (I’m “talkin’ bout my generation” here) in the Eighties. They had prepared the ground for that lie, as there had been constant slander of my generation in the press since the beginnings of our activism in the Sixties, exactly like they are putting out against the Millennials in the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa movements today. Beginning in the Seventies, owning the publishing and media industries, they concocted the lie that there was a conservative backlash going on. (See “Chapter Four: Matrix Aroused — the Sixties.”)
This supposed conservative backlash was merely a continuation of Nixon’s laughable claim that he was supported by a “Silent Majority,” which he had used since the beginnings of his term in 1969 and which was obviously false, as demonstrations grew in size and support swung away from him throughout this period; and eventually he was forced to resign. Yet Republicans always claim there are a majority of real folks out there — “real Americans” as Palin and her kind like to say — who support them but are doing it secretly. (btw, lol!)
Anyway, by the Eighties the powers-that-be were able to place this idea of a selfish “Me Generation” of Sixties youth, which they had been saying for a while, as being the ones on the campus at the time or recently out, the Yuppies. It fit their narrative. But it was a lie, and virtually all my generation knew it and thought it laughable. We stopped laughing after a while as over the years, it became clearer they had done such a good job of preparing the ground and repeating the lie that it stuck in the minds of those other than my generation — the Fifties Generation ahead of us and Gen X behind us — and the right wing, who of course saw this as red meat to further their causes.
The media controlled by the 1% said the Sixties generation had gone from idealism to just wanting money, thereby discrediting their opponents, us who were consistently representing the 99%. At the same time they gave credibility to their claim of the superior veracity of their own values of greed, materialism, ruthless pragmatism, ego above all, and even me-spiritedness. Also, it validated, even glorified their personal traits of conformity, hard-headedness, cynicism, compliance, and even mean-spiritedness.
The Lies About Jerry Rubin
In promoting this lie of former hippies becoming Yuppies, they could only give one example, Jerry Rubin; and even about him they lied and slandered. First off, neither Jerry Rubin, or Abbie Hoffman … the founders of the Yippies … for that matter, were Boomers or Sixties Generation members. They were Fifties Generation, born in 1938 and 1936 respectively. Boomers were born in the post-WWII baby boom from 1943 through 1960. So that is enough to discredit what they said about Jerry Rubin as being about “my generation,” Baby-Boomers. Yet taking it as an attack aimed at the counterculture, let’s examine it:
They said Jerry Rubin was engaged in trying to make money. And they never mentioned what he was trying to make money on … but God forbid anyone but the Filthy Rich should try to make money anyway. You see, what the 1% do is drive people into lowered standards of living and poverty where they experience desperation for money at times. Then they can point to that grasping to survive as proof that their values of money above all else are legitimate and that it is not possible for humans to have any other values higher than that. They create the conditions that they can use to support and validate themselves … how convenient.
However, telling the whole truth would never allow them to do that. They didn’t mention about Jerry Rubin that he was engaged in selling health supplements; he was trying to help people out with their health. He was involved in multilevel marketing, so he was into facilitating people in becoming self-supporting by having them own small businesses. He was an early investor in Apple Corporation, helping to foster the cybernetic revolution that progressives depend on today and which has strengthened our movement incredibly with Facebook and Twitter aiding us in overthrowing dictators in the Mideast and joining us in support of the Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin union movements. Jerry Rubin was hardly some white-collar Madison Avenue or Wall Street guy, fer chrissakes.
Rubin traveled with Abbie Hoffman in doing “Yippie versus Yuppie” debates, that is true. However, since it did not fit the narrative of their discrediting their opponents in the Sixties generation, the owned media never understood or at least never mentioned that in using those terms for their “debates” Hoffman and Rubin were continuing their tradition of fucking with their opponents’ minds by flaunting the terms that had been used against them. Critics don’t get, and opponents conveniently overlook, the heavily ironic and playful way my generation, and Yippies in particular, present themselves. “Yippie versus Yuppie” is supposed to make you think; it is a hook; and it is funny to those of us in the know. Believe me, I have the same problem with people sometimes misunderstanding my intent for the opposite of what I believe because of the amusingly ironic titles I sometimes give my writings.
Nonetheless, Rubin’s position in this “debate” — which was actually a discussion of different ways the Sixties values might succeed, not be overturned — was that the poor could be helped by promoting programs to create wealth in their communities. I quote:
Rubin’s argument in the debates was that activism was hard work and that the abuse of drugs, sex, and private property had made the counter-culture “a scary society in itself.” He maintained that “wealth creation is the real American revolution. What we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country.”2
Someone who knew him well, Stew Albert, said this of Jerry in eulogizing him.
Jerry was always a rebel, but then he was always a rebel within the rebellion. He was always sort of rebelling against the norms of the rebellion.
And,
Jerry changed costumes, and he changed rhetoric, but he never changed his heart.3
Does that sound like someone promoting the interests of the 1%? Or like someone just out for himself, as Yuppies really are? Remember that at the time, militant, even violent revolution had been in the air for a while — with the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and the Symbionese Liberation Army and such. So “Yippie Versus Yuppie” was a Leftist debate about tactics. Today it would be considered a discussion of liberal versus progressive views … hardly conservative, Yuppie, or Republican views. And Jerry Rubin’s putting on a suit made him about as conservative as it made Bob Dylan a conservative when he picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Festival of 1965. Dylan got booed for what was only considered unusual alongside some very high, and strict, expectations about purism in music having nothing to do with political ideology or musical quality but simply technology. Rubin’s wearing a suit was the same kind of thing at the time he did it … and it had nothing to do with ideology but simply tactics — that is to say, revolutionary technology.
Also, at the same time as Rubin was doing all this and supposedly a Yuppie, he was running a legal and civil rights office in an artsy/alternative part of L.A., Echo Park, where he also lived. When he died he was on his way to dinner in the company of Fred Branfman of the Making a Difference project,4 whose purpose was to bring money into poor communities by helping inner-city youth learn how to start their own businesses. Does that sound like a Wall Street careerist? Does that sound like he turned over his ideals and bowed to the god of money? Does not that sound more like he was Epsteined?
So, lies, lies, lies. And these lies become instituted, and they’re not challenged after a while, after you hear them for decade after decade after decade….
You have to be older to know that it wasn’t always the way they tell you it is. It helps to have lived in different times and places and to have seen things with your own eyes to be able to see through these inane “obvious truths” that people take as absolute truths. It helps to have had experience with the things they are talking about to know what are actual facts and what are complete fabrications.
Setting the Record Straight on Boomers
Boomer — Generation X Culture War
A friend who supports the Occupy movement, and who happens to be a Gen Xer, recently shared this with me,
As a Gen Xer, I have to say we were outnumbered as a Generation with half the numbers of the boomers and the previous traditional generations.
… the boomers cut taxes on the wealthy and wages for the middle class to create the world’s largest debt, our dependence on dirty foreign oil grew as our manufacturing base got shipped overseas.
You Boomers call Gen X a slacker generation while doing all that?
It is the boomers who are the dead beat generation now.
If this person were correct, then why have the Boomers voted consistently Democratic?5 And I’m talking about Boomers, as defined by the Census Bureau, which is more conservative than the Vietnam Generation, or Sixties Generation, as defined by Strauss and Howe. The Vietnam/Sixties Generation is even more liberal and is decidedly Democratic supporting.
Meanwhile, the Gen X/Yuppie — Fifties Generation alliance was responsible for getting Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II elected. Boomers voted against Republicans, especially these; it’s all in the public record. Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II are the ones who did the tax cuts. Whereas Clinton — a Boomer and a Democrat — raised taxes on the 1% and balanced a budget for the first time.
Indeed, all Democratic candidates and Presidents going back to Roosevelt at least, with the one small exception of Kennedy, favored and fought for raising taxes on the 1%, not cutting them, so as to relieve the burden on the 99%. The Right likes to use Kennedy as an example of a Democrat seeing the wisdom of cutting taxes to improve the economy, but Kennedy’s proposed tax cut for the 1% was when the marginal rate was in the 91% range, not at 35% as today, and the country was prosperous. (See “The Myth of JFK as a Supply Side Tax Cutter,” online.6) Also the tax cut was not instituted until Johnson began his term … which was incidentally when the huge deficits began. So Kennedy’s tax cut had nothing at all to do with the prosperity we enjoyed during his term, indeed its institution marked the beginning of increasing deficits.
Even today, it is Democrats — supported heavily by Boomers — who are opposed to tax cuts and favor reining in the greed of the 1%. This includes Obama, who incidentally is a Gen X-Boomer cusper, born 1961. Note that he had surrounded himself with Boomers — Biden, Clinton, et al. And they are engaged in that same Democratic struggle of decades past of trying to get the 1% to pay their fair share in taxes. Meanwhile Republicans supported by that Fifties Generation (the Koch Brothers, John McCain, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, et al) — Gen X/Yuppie (Palin, Cantor, Ryan, Rand Paul) alliance oppose Boomer-Democratic tax and other progressive initiatives at every turn.
So to accuse Boomers, who voted predominantly for these Democrats and their policies, of cutting taxes is grossly misinformed or a lie. And for a Gen Xer to do this blaming is either ignorant, a denial, or delusional … but is in any case a product of that misinformation I’ve been talking about.
For to address that Gen Xer’s charge of Boomer’s causing the dependence on dirty foreign oil, the Sixties Generation started the environmental movement. I know a little about this; as I explained previously, I was one of those who helped bring nuclear plant construction to a halt in America, which we did in Springfield, Oregon, in the early Eighties. We, Boomers … I was born in 1950 … supported Democrats who fought for environmental legislation, alternative energies, and reduced dependence on dirty energies against Republicans, supported by the Fifties-Gen X alliance, who watered down those policies and legislated a rape of our natural resources and our environment to benefit big business, Big Oil, Big Nuke, Big Coal, and the 1%.
As for the accusation that Boomers sent our manufacturing base overseas and caused a lowering of middle-class wages, how can that possibly be true alongside the more than obvious knowledge that Democrats are the ones who consistently push for and favor raising the minimum wage and are the union supporters? Can this OWS person not be aware of the parallel Wisconsin union movement which had Democrats and union folks up against Republicans and Gen X/Fifties Gen Koch-supporters? Or is he somehow unaware of the fact that Boomers have consistently voted in greater numbers for Democrats than Republicans over all these decades?5
Well, this shows the amount of success the WWII Generation and Fifties Generation enjoyed in shifting the blame for their policies and their theft of the national wealth. And, by the way, it was the WWII Generation who had the greatest retirement wealth per person and who instituted Social Security and other benefit programs for themselves … making themselves the wealthiest as well as the “Greatest Generation.” Probably with the tax cuts, the current Fifties Generation who in their retirement years are ransacking the wealth of the country to fatten themselves, are bettering them. Whereas the Sixties Generation, scapegoated again, is facing cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits at the exact time as they need it and are beginning their retirement — being beaten down, harassed, and scapegoated by the Gen X–Fifties Generation alliance again.
You think this is ancient information and is irrelevant to what is happening today? Remember that the comment I quoted above from my Gen X friend and fellow Occupier was made only a decade ago. He has his sights set on my generation as the perpetrators of the problems; these ideas have caused a split between Gen X and Boomer Progressives. I can tell you that his comment is not atypical from others I hear from Gen X in their attitudes toward Boomers.
Similarly, to some extent the Millennials believe Boomers are at fault also — this is what they have been taught. They are simply misinformed and so are not so committed to the lies as the Gen Xers. The Millennials are open to the fact they have been deceived. After all their Boomer parents are models of the fact that these “facts” about selfish Boomers are actually lies. The Millennials have been made to believe, simply, that their own parents and those of their friends are somehow just different from those “bad Boomers” out there who are really the selfish and tax-cutter ones.
Occupy Generations
Lies and toxic misinformation are not healthy, at all, for a movement that is predominantly an alliance of Millennials and Boomers, with some Gen Xers (notably, few Fifties Generation folks). After all, how do you think a progressive Boomer feels, after fighting his entire life with his generational cohort for the changes that we are still fighting for with the OWS and Wisconsin union movements, and with resistance to MAGAtism and Trumpikin fascism, and after hearing his entire life the made up lies, the slander, the scapegoating about himself, his generation, and his beliefs? How do you think she feels seeing those same lies being pulled out again and thrown against BLM, Antifa, and OWS supporters, for example, continuing therefore to throw salt into old wounds? And finally how do you think she feels to hear from her friends and allies in the movement that she has been the problem all this time, not the solution? It is disheartening, to say the least.
In this antagonism against Boomers, the other side — the WWII-Fifties Gen alliance, supportive of the 1% and their MAGAt and Tea Party sycophants — have won again.7
For these WWII–Fifties-Gen lies have thrown discord into progressive ranks. And they have thrown off the aim of our movements as to who the perpetrators are, giving the 1% a convenient fog of confusion behind which they can continue unfettered their actions against us.
Finally, a most visible example of the right-wing/Republican Fifties Generation – Gen X alliance was shown in the 2008 presidential election with a Fifties Gen, McCain, matched with a 13th Generation/Gen X — Palin, born in 1964, coming smack in the middle of the Yuppies (1961 through 1970). This is the generational alliance and the generational values we should be targeting, not Boomers, and Progressives would do better to know that.
The “Truth Dividend” of Having Been Around
So, in understanding what might be the truth and what are obviously lies, it helps to be older, for you can know that it wasn’t always the way they tell you it is or has to be. It helps to have lived in different times and places and to have seen things with your own eyes to be able to see through these inane “obvious truths” that people take as absolute truths. It helps to have had experience with the issues talked about to know what is truth and what are diabolical lies, intended to stir hatred, create conflict, and, once again, cover for actual perpetrators.
And with that seeing comes the knowledge that over the course of the last fifty years America descended into a deep slumber of untruth from which it could not awaken … regardless of all the righteous efforts of many true-seeing progressive activists who did their best to sound alarms.
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27
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The Fall of “Obvious Truths”:
Arrogance Comes Before the Fall, Lies Are Being Called Out; The Awakening, Their Legacy Remaining, Everything Hangs in the Balance
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[Quotes/highlights:] “…this corruption and the insane attempt to rearrange reality began to reveal itself gradually as the W. Bush years rolled on. We lived through an inside job on the World Trade Center, an Iraqi War, and finally an utter breakdown of the financial system — the Great Recession of W. Bush — resulting in the greatest depression in America since the Great Depression.”
“The Republican’s, because of the W. Bush debacle, were on the run.
“They were being found out to be the liars they are. That term, lie, for the first time in my lifetime began being used for what they what they do. They were being discovered to be who they are and what they have been doing all those years began being told.”
“In all these many ways, Republicans firmly maintain that Matrix of misinformation around money and taxes, as they consistently switch the blame for the consequences for their mismanagement so as to confuse the other-than-wealthy and thus keep them vulnerable and ripe for more picking in their next round.”
“Republicans would keep us helpless for lack of a clearer understanding, as well as to keep us disintegrated and disunited.”
“Despite the restructuring of America’s informational institutions to benefit the super wealthy, which began in the Seventies, U.S. media in the Nineties, with a Democrat at the helm of government giving Democrats a louder voice than otherwise, was more likely than afterward to bring accurate information.
“Such reporting pulled aside the curtain, revealing the concerted Republican campaign to enrich themselves. Hillary Clinton at the time alluded to this collusion of the wealthy in proclaiming a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” It became ever more apparent that the aim of the Right was to apply comprehensive pressure — akin to the Class War it was — on government and social policy at all levels of society to increase their already bloated wealth.”
“Their intentions are no less than those nobles of old, to keep people in servitude and serfdom, essentially to bring people into compliance with their totalitarian will.”
“…the truth, ever attacked, has become clearer and more apparent over time, once glimpsed, once the wall of misinformation is breached.”
“The Republicans got so cocky, they took so much money, they were so uncaring of the suffering, of the dying of Americans. They were so obviously not caring … not even putting up a pretense of being for the American people, who they were supposed to be representing and who they were claiming to be on the side of.”
“We find the economic collapse of 2007-2008 resulted from Republicans under George W. Bush, taking away regulations that people and good thinking Democrats and so on had instituted to protect people from having their life savings taken away from them.”
“…we saw what happened when corporations had their investment and financial guard rails removed by Republicans. The rich people … they went crazy, they went amok. Even at the end they took 700 billion dollars out of the American Treasury, and got away scot free.”
“Barrack Obama’s origins have nothing in common with those of, say, a Romney … or a Bush. He wasn’t cradled in wealth, and his family had no ties with Nazis like the Bushes.”
“…that is what the Republicans and the right-wing-nuts do. They will find one example of anything. Always just one example will they be able to come up with, but they will use that to make their crazy “truth.”
“Yet their ‘crazy truth, their attack on others, invariably is a veiled confession of their own ongoing criminal and conspiratorial activity.”
“Biden grew up in the unassuming city of Scranton, in the center of the one-time Pennsylvania coal region, only ten miles from where I happened to have been raised. Biden was one of the least moneyed if not the actual poorest of any of those in the Senate.”
“…by the time of the 2008 election and after a sorry eight years of the reign of a foolish Bush, these “obvious truths” — such as that you give money to the rich and it’s gonna create prosperity — well, they were falling. They came out into the light and began being seen to be the lies that they are.”
“The Awakening began in reaction to an idiot ‘king’ — W. Bush — and on the shoulders of a new committed generation of Millennials. It swept the first African American ever into the office of the presidency of the United States. However, Barrack Obama’s election was naturally not enough to throw off the vines of tyranny that had grown over America during a full fifty years of ‘obvious truths.’
“Nevertheless, within a matter of only two years of his election, by 2010 and continuing into 2012, these revelations of the ways people worldwide had been managed like house pets for the gains of the super-rich caught the headwind of an Arab Spring. Not long after the Mideast awakening of 2010, in 2011, this ‘truth force’ sailed into a Wisconsin union movement and an American Autumn. Between the Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin uprisings in 2011, America saw the largest outpouring of revolutionary fervor since the Sixties. Not only did the throngs of demonstrators mirror, perhaps surpass, the numbers that rose up in the Sixties; but the movement this time was world-wide; the cause — which was rich folks screwing everyone else to benefit only themselves — was the same everywhere in the world. A Global Awakening had begun.
“Nonetheless, the fields upon which we the people arose had been burned and the earth in which we tried to take root had been salted”
“The wealthy have you thinking after a while about this scapegoated group the way they think of you. They do not think you are as human, as deserving of a nice life as them. They want you thinking that there is some group … Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays … who are responsible for your problems and who are not as deserving, are not as American as you. Thence they create all kinds of lies so you’ve got someone to blame who is not them, who are not the actual perpetrators of these things.”
“We see through their bombardment of inanities and lies, yet they have desperately stepped up their assault … as frightened actors can be expected to do. This proves we are winning. Nonetheless, they increase their control of the dialogue in America with a virtual media monopoly, spinning their line, their narrative almost exclusively and leaving the internet the only unconquered land outside their broadcast hegemony.”
“Americans were starting to know again what is really important during the Obama years. Pushing against the media tides, they were connecting outside the public limelight. They were using the Internet to exchange views. They were learning and taking action, gathering by the hundreds of thousands in rallies for change and to speak out against what was continuing to be imposed on them to benefit the well-off. They were doing this despite being ignored by the media, the media continuing its policy of trying to make some realities to go away while blowing up the ridiculous and the insignificant into matters of great and pressing portent.”
“If only the sanity arising in the population were not so drowned out by the overwhelming amounts of money being poured into all media — the Internet, social media now, too, where Russian bots prevail to shout down every sliver of intelligence and awareness tweeted or posted. It is the corporations, with the Filthy Rich, Putin, and global oligarchs, that is the monster behind the events of nations, now.”
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[Chapter 27 text begins:] So, we have these Big Lies, these “obvious truths,” which are actually not true, and they are all-pervasive. It makes it virtually impossible to know what is actually going on.
Lies Finally Being Called for What They Are
Yet this corruption and the insane attempt to rearrange reality began to reveal itself gradually as the W. Bush years rolled on. We lived through an inside job on the World Trade Center, an Iraqi War, and finally an utter breakdown of the financial system — the Great Recession of W. Bush — resulting in the greatest depression in America since the Great Depression. Well now folks were losing money again. The richest made out on the downslide, shorting the market. Yet just as in the Thirties when the Great Depression was finally so bad that even the wealthy were losing out, there was a change in the media’s coverage of Republican’s corruption and inanity. Toward the end of the W’s assault on the sanity and reason of America, the truth began being told in the media again. The Republican’s, because of the W. Bush debacle, were on the run.
They were being found out to be the liars they are. That term, lie, for the first time in my lifetime began being used for what they do. They were being discovered to be who they are and what they have been doing all those years began being told. This revelation of GOP corruption and detachment from reality continued into the early Obama years, after 2008. All the things Republicans like to do — the undermining of unions and the collective bargaining system, the ever-increasing giveaways to the rich — were being brought into the light.
The Republican Lie About JFK Being a Supply-Sider
America was prosperous in the Sixties under Kennedy. And Republicans like to refer to his cutting taxes on the wealthy as support for their policies. They like to point to the good economy then, in the Sixties, as being the sort of thing that happens with their voodoo economics of shoveling money into wealthy hands. And they dare to imply that JFK would be in agreement with them.
Yet Rich-publicans have been extracting far more from America than the modest gain they received with Kennedy. What Republicans will not tell you is John F. Kennedy reduced taxes to percentages in the seventies, for the highest tax bracket. Also, they do not tell you — many of them are too uneducated or too thoroughly programmed within the various indoctrination programs for Righties to even know, actually — that JFK tax cut was actually not implemented until Johnson took office.
Hence, the prosperity many of us remember from JFK’s America happened with the marginal rate above ninety percent. Righties and Republicans are not pointing out that America boomed under Eisenhower, a Republican, when the marginal rate was also in the nineties. They’re avoiding the fact that their hero, Reagan, later took JFK’s levels to the twenties and caused a recession.
The Republican Lie That Cutting Taxes Creates Prosperity
We see that Republicans are comparing a small reduction enacted during prosperous times — the early Sixties — with huge cuts in times that are precarious — currently. And they’re failing to point out how lower taxes in the Twenties before the Depression, in the Eighties before Reagan-Bush’s recession, and in the last decade under Bush all devastated the economy.
Despite these dire consequences of their past actions, Republicans would opt for the highest bracket of taxes to be in the low thirties even now when they can hardly be afforded. Additionally, they pushed Obama into continuing their GOP tax cut at the end of 2010 and then blamed him for the economy not responding sufficiently enough for them afterward.
It has been calculated, since then, that it was the Republicans putting pressure to reduce the amount of Obama’s plan to save the economy — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as Obamanomics — and to delay its full roll out that was responsible for the gradual, however robust, recovery that it did accomplish. The Recovery Act, as it is also called, was passed on February 17, 2009. The economy responded immediately and powerfully, yet in retrospect it was noted that a greater increase and a faster implementation of Obamanomics would have reaped greater and faster rewards.1
In all these many ways, Republicans firmly maintain that Matrix of misinformation around money and taxes, as they consistently switch the blame for the consequences for their mismanagement, so as to confuse the other-than-wealthy and thus keep them vulnerable and ripe for more picking in their next round.
It Is Now Clear That Their Intentions Are No Less Than Those of the Nobles of Old
Republicans would keep us helpless for lack of a clearer understanding, as well as to keep us disintegrated and disunited. No big union movements, no big antiwar movements, no big environmental movements, and no movements for the poor and economic justice.
The misinformation overlay had become so pervasive during the W. Bush years, the masses had lost the clarity and firmness of resolve they had enjoyed only a decade previous to the W when issues received less of such moneyed corruption. For even Clinton’s America in the Nineties was a time when the truth was easier to make out. Despite the restructuring of America’s informational institutions to benefit the super wealthy, which began in the Seventies, U.S. media in the Nineties — with a Democrat at the helm of government giving Democrats a louder voice than otherwise — was more likely than afterward to bring accurate information.
Such reporting pulled aside the curtain, revealing the concerted Republican campaign to enrich themselves. Hillary Clinton at the time alluded to this collusion of the wealthy in proclaiming a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” It became ever more apparent that the aim of the Right was to apply comprehensive and punishing pressure — akin to the Class War it was — on government and social policy at all levels of society to increase their already bloated wealth. It was ever more evident they were doing this through a comprehensive policy involving keeping the average American confused, poorer, poorer and poorer, overworked, overwhelmed because of crazy-making ways of doing things, helpless, and thus dumber and more controllable, easier to manipulate.
“This Is Not the Way America Is Supposed to Be!” — OWS Protester
What does Republicans’ consistent, daily, pervasive and unrelenting repetition and lies accomplish? What does all that amount to? Their intentions are no less than those nobles of old, to keep people in servitude and serfdom, essentially to bring people into compliance with their totalitarian will.
Yet I refuse to believe that is the only possible fate for workers and the masses of people. I still actually believe in those things we were all taught about America in our schools. I still think of what we are supposed to be.
We’ve Brought Down Soviet Oppression … Only to Raise It Ourselves
However, in our propaganda and lies we have become the Soviets in many ways. We’ve done it in a much slicker way that has got everybody confused, though.
Well, I did say this was about the rise and fall of the “obvious truths.” And I talked at length about those lies and those obvious “truths” that were never challenged. I hope I made my case that is why Americans could be so easily led like so many sheep. Yet the truth, ever attacked, has become clearer and more apparent over time, once glimpsed, once the wall of misinformation is breached.
Yet What Did It Take for Such Truth to Be Revealed?
It is our good fortune for these lies to have become more obvious in recent years and for the perpetrators to become more visible. Yet what did it take for those guys to be seen for what they are? It took a lot of suffering by the American people. For eight long years under the W, it took a lot of being abused by the powerful. The Republicans got so cocky, they took so much money, they were so uncaring of the suffering, of the dying of Americans. They were so obviously not caring … not even putting up a pretense of being for the American people, who they were supposed to be representing and on whose side they were claiming to be. They were obviously the wealthiest of us and those fighting for those interests of the Filthy Rich, but they were insinuating that they were all people, that what suited them was a benefit to us all.
Arrogance Comes Before the Fall
But you see, you can get so cocky that you can lose your discipline, and then you start to say things that people can see through. And then you have a war and people are dying. Then you finally have a collapse, an economic collapse. We find the economic collapse of 2007-2008 resulted from Republicans, under George W. Bush, taking away regulations that people and good-thinking Democrats and such had instituted to protect people from having their life savings taken away from them. These were regulations that were also put into effect to level the playing field with the rich and anybody else playing the stock market.
We had such regulations, yet they went and took them away. We saw that lapdog for the Filthies, Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman for eighteen years, appointed by Ronald Reagan, saying we have come into some bright new era, during the Nineties and 2000s, when corporations no longer need restraints for they are (magically) now self-regulating. However, when the stock market crashed, Greenspan acknowledged how wrong he had been, expressing astonishment that folks would be so greedy and corrupt. The New York Times reported Greenspan’s newly “enlightened” attitude in 2008, two years after he stepped down as Fed Chair, when he was speaking to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”2
Their Thievery Blatant, Cocky
Well, we saw what happened when corporations had their investment and financial guard rails removed by Republicans. The rich people … they went crazy, they went amok. Even at the end they took 700 billion dollars out of the American Treasury, and got away scot free.
I was making the point earlier how that was extortion on a massive scale.3 I brought to mind how extortion happens a lot more among the hundreds of millions of Americans, but when they do it on a tiny scale they go to jail. Yet when this elite does it on a large scale, well they just talk about it as if it is history. And it’s like, “That’s too bad. We gave all that money to them, and they didn’t do what they said they were going to do. Hmmm. Too bad. I mean there’s nothing we can do.”
The American Awakening — The 99% Rising … in a Plundered Land
However, people did start to see through the “obvious truths,” finally, through all the haze of omnipresent untruth. Maybe it was because so many people were out of work they had some time to think. I don’t know.
99% Rising
Then Obama came along. He spoke plainly. He spoke like one of us, because he was one of us. Just as Bill Clinton, who incidentally was also raised by a single mother, Obama had a middle-class background and humble origins. His mother was said to be a “hippie” of sorts; she was certainly internationalist in her perspective, not jingoistic. She died owing medical bills and, sadly, struggling with insurance companies. Barrack Obama’s origins have nothing in common with those of, say, a Romney … or a Bush. Let alone a Trump. Obama wasn’t cradled in wealth, and his family had no ties with Nazis like the Bushes.
You couldn’t say he wasn’t one of us; you couldn’t make Obama out to be an elitist. Of course, they tried to; they got so cocky there is nothing the Filthy Rich and their Republican lackeys would not speak to see if they could get away with it. Obama was called “elitist” when he was campaigning, and when in office they changed that to “socialist” and un-American. He had the same kind of pejoratives thrown at him that the 1% have always drummed up against any of us radicals, “hippies,” activists, or any of us coming up from the 99%. He forgo taking up some lucrative position in the corpocracy after his university years and instead worked as a community organizer. I personally can appreciate that having done something similar at one point in my own life.
But, no, hardly elitist, he spoke like us. He made sense. He used rational arguments like his Democratic predecessors, yet unlike them he could weave that logic with examples and words from our lives. Perhaps Clinton is the only president in recent memory who could really do that as well. And, being an African-American, he obviously didn’t look like our usual American overlords.
Certainly, they tried to make President Obama into some rich person. It is amazing how unerringly the Filthy Rich will paint their opponents with the color belonging to them. One of the big lies they always put out there is that “The Democrats are the ones who are rich.” And they’d say, “Well, the Kennedys….” Seriously, they do this. It is so typical.
Nowadays they bring up the name, George Soros. They find the one billionaire on our side. His critics — MAGAts, Trumpers, Tea Partiers, conspiracy theorists — don’t tell you he’s got one-tenth the wealth of the Koch Brothers who fund the Republicans and the extreme right. With Soros’s billions dwarfed and insect-like up against the mountains of gold behind Republicans, they still make Soros out to be some kind of source of all evil. Unbelievable.
Yet that is what the Republicans and the right-wing-nuts do. They will find one example of anything. Always just one example will they be able to come up with, but they will use that to make their crazy “truth.” We saw that earlier in the way they used Jerry Rubin, one example, one that did not even fit their narrative of who a Sixties Gen member is, to make their case that Boomers, which Rubin was not, had become capitalist, materialist, and greedy. Yet their “crazy truth,” their attack on others, invariably is a veiled confession of their own ongoing criminal and conspiratorial activity. Or in this case, it is a projection of their own hidden values of avarice, cruelty, and me-spiritedness.
Contrary to the charge of Democrats being wealthy, we have Obama’s humble beginnings, yet additionally, President Obama chose a running mate, Joe Biden, who also had unprivileged beginnings. Biden grew up in the unassuming city of Scranton, in the center of the one-time Pennsylvania coal region, only ten miles from where I happened to have been raised. Biden was one of the least moneyed if not the actual poorest of any of those in the Senate. He ran his first campaign on a shoestring budget, and now-President Joe Biden was still taking the train to Washington at the time of his nomination to the vice-presidency. You can argue the policies of these Democrats all you want, but what you cannot do is include them in the ranks of the 1%.
The Awakening
So by the time of the 2008 election and after a sorry eight years of the reign of a foolish Bush, these “obvious truths” — such as that you give money to the rich and it’s gonna create prosperity — well, they were falling. They came out into the light and began being seen to be the lies that they are. Not all the untruths were revealed, of course. Yet some, at great cost to Americans during eight years and more of suffering, were swept like cobwebs from the minds of an awakening populace in America. The American Awakening began.
The Awakening began in reaction to an idiot “king” — W. Bush — and on the shoulders of a new committed generation of Millennials. It swept the first African American ever into the office of the presidency of the United States. However, Barrack Obama’s election was naturally not enough to throw off the vines of tyranny that had grown over America during a full fifty years of “obvious truths.”
Nevertheless, within a matter of only two years of his election, by 2010 and continuing into 2012, these revelations of the ways people worldwide had been managed like house pets for the gains of the super-rich caught the headwind of an Arab Spring. Not long after the Mideast awakening of 2010, in 2011, this “truth force” sailed into a Wisconsin union movement and an American Autumn. Between the Occupy Wall Street and Wisconsin uprisings in 2011, America saw the largest outpouring of revolutionary fervor since the Sixties. Not only did the throngs of demonstrators mirror, perhaps surpass, the numbers that rose up in the Sixties; but the movement this time was world-wide; the cause — which was rich folks screwing everyone else to benefit only themselves — was the same everywhere in the world. A Global Awakening had begun.
Their Legacy Remaining
Nonetheless, the fields upon which we the people arose had been burned and the earth in which we tried to take root had been salted. There had been that massive transfer of wealth upward to the coffers of the already stinking-with-it since the Eighties, over the course of some thirty years. It had been going on full throttle since the Republican coup that put Bush into power in 2000, which, without blinking an eye, swallowed up the Budget Surplus that had tediously been built over the eight years of the Democrat, Clinton.
All that money squandered on those not needing it could have paid for childcare for everybody in America, could have given everybody in America solar power, so that we would be completely energy independent in that way, not worried about terrorism or anything.
No, but all that money was just thrown at the rich people. These very important life-and-death issues were tossed aside as irrelevant in the game. The players were intent on winning, and it was like nobody really cared anymore if anybody got hurt.
After all, once you start telling people that poor people deserve to be poor and that they are responsible for any misfortune that others heap on them … even if they get hurt or killed … you’ve opened the door for much more. It’s like “Oh, yeah, it’s the gangs they’re in. They’re having gang wars, they can’t control themselves, they’re not like the rest of us, they’re always starting trouble, they can’t be helped, they’ll always be poor, the poor we always have with us….”
And once you start saying things like that, you’re speaking their talk. You’re helping to keep the rich in control of you, because you’re helping them to cover up what they do. You’ve allowed them to distract you from their nefarious game to focus on some other group. You begin having it out for some easy scapegoat and begin to think of those unfortunates as not part of the “real” Americans.
The wealthy have you thinking after a while about this scapegoated group the way they think of you. They do not think you are as human, as deserving of a nice life as them. They want you thinking that there is some group … Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays … who are responsible for your problems and who are not as deserving, are not as American as you. Thence they create all kinds of lies so you’ve got someone to blame who is not them, who are not the actual perpetrators of these things.
The Fall of “Obvious Truths”
In sum, this is what is meant by the rise and fall of “obvious truths.” We see through their bombardment of inanities and lies, yet they have desperately stepped up their assault … as frightened actors can be expected to do. As cornered rats will do. This proves we are winning. Nonetheless, they increase their control of the dialogue in America with a virtual media monopoly, spinning their line, their narrative almost exclusively and leaving the Internet the only unconquered land outside their broadcast hegemony.
I saw what an extraordinary job Clinton did. Our economy and culture boomed in the Nineties; with his guidance, both rebounded soundly from the Republican recession of the early Nineties. And I saw how that was covered up through the words and actions of Republicans and the owned media, how we were distracted to seeing only a scandal. Oh, yeah, so Bill Clinton had sex. Our leader had sex, how horrible. So all of the people who died because of the Bushes and Reagan, all the suffering caused by rubbing people’s faces in the dirt of poverty are not to be mentioned. But Clinton had sex with some woman; that’s a cause for outrage. Wow.
Yet you hear that enough, and you don’t have any real perspective anymore. You cannot weigh the gravity of one wrong against the other, or in this case a supposed wrong against real ones.
Despite this, Americans were starting to know again what is really important during the Obama years. Pushing against the media tides, they were connecting outside the public limelight. They were using the Internet to exchange views. They were learning and taking action, gathering by the hundreds of thousands in rallies for change and to speak out against what was continuing to be imposed on them to benefit the well-off. They were doing this despite being ignored by the media, the media continuing its policy of trying to make some realities to go away while blowing up the ridiculous and the insignificant into matters of great and pressing portent.
In spite of it all, I think Americans have started to get back their solidarity. I think they are starting to get back their ability to reason. If only the sanity arising in the population were not so drowned out by the overwhelming amounts of money being poured into all media — the Internet, social media now, too, where Russian bots prevail to shout down every sliver of intelligence and awareness tweeted or posted. It is the corporations, with the Filthy Rich, Putin, and global oligarchs, that is the monster behind the events of nations, now.
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28
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A Life-or-Death Struggle Ensues:
On a Field Ravaged by Corruption and Incompetence, an Ultimate Battle for Life and Democracy Is Waged. It Could Go Either Way
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[Quotes/highlights:] “America and the world were evolving as needed in the Sixties if we were to sustain life, freedom, democracy, and the planet. For we discovered all were under attack.”
“We were startled to realize there were hidden forces at work behind the scenes whose activities I traced back into the Fifties. Of course, these forces — the power of mega-money in the hands of wealthy elites — extend back into history and the times of pharaohs and kings.”
“It is these stories of the Filthy Rich — told and written by suck-ups, the words lubricated with the largesse and patronage of higher ups — that indeed we call our history.
“Yes, history is the story of what the elites have done, how they have used their power to initiate and control events.”
“What we get are the reactions of ordinary folks to these events not of their choosing as well as the story of their movements and suffering under the purview of the Filthy Rich of all time.”
“…in the Sixties, as a result of a natural evolution of parenting and childcaring making for less traumatized adults, there was a massive worldwide coming to consciousness. This was a powerful upsurge by ordinary folks of the repressed impulses of the ages for peace, freedom, happiness, and a say in the events and circumstances of their lives — democracy.”
“This natural evolution was a threat to the powers-that-be as it meant an end to their controlling of the populace for their own ends of power-gaming, profits, and warring. We saw that the World War II Generation was the generation most threatened by such a leap in consciousness, for such an evolution would seem to undermine the world in which they were familiar and to challenge some of their cherished, however harmful and errant, beliefs.
“Consequently, with a moneyed elite feeling threatened it was losing control of the people’s minds, orchestrating the sentiments of a generation confronted with social and cultural change on a scale unheard of, a fierce counterattack to virtually all the necessary changes, a Class War, which they would disguise as a Class War, was initiated and waged.”
“…we were able to address the elements of that Class War and to see how its waging led to the abortion of the cultural rebirth that was happening, worldwide. It was a worldwide natural evolution of consciousness gestating in the minds and cultures of the masses during the Sixties, quashed — in the Seventies and beyond — by a global elite of Wealthies who would have none of such “nonsense.” All higher ups were acting in collusion, consciously or not, to undermine the rising forces of renewal and to create and foster, to take its place, an abomination of thoughts, untrue ideas, and policies.”
“The result of that abomination of reality, concocted to pacify and control the masses, was a Matrix so encompassing that, over time, and especially with money raining hard on the media to make it comply, it was virtually invisible. This Matrix could be seen by worthy and clear-sighted observers, yet the words of those seers, prophets, and truth-tellers were buried in an avalanche of untruths, opposite truths, made up and fantastical concoctions, insane conspiratorial narratives, and bald-faced lies.”
“The progress and processes of this Matrix of misinformation, this cultural overlay of untruth, we followed, and we noticed it reached a crescendo under George W. Bush. Which peak of mind-fuckedness was followed by an eruption of truth, reality, and facts with the presidency of Barrack Obama. With that, the world experienced widespread hope, albeit amid increasing obstruction and illegality from the threatened right-wing wealthy interests, from 2008 on. And the people of the world, led again by developments in America, one more time, attempted that cultural evolution denied it in previous decades.
“Yet the forces under attack were dripping with money, which equaled unparalleled power. The moneyed interests gathered more wealth to itself, and it created such a disparity in wealth among the classes, unparalleled in history.”
“Indeed, the forces of the wealthy have never been more powerful. Their media hegemony at this time is nearly total, with some small outliers like MSNBC and PBS.”
“This, at a time, when the fight for democracy and to save the world’s environment and its lifeforms is at a tipping point. The fork in the road we see directly before us. It is the midterm elections in the United States.
“Culture War is ever more raucous and violent, filled with the fury, ignorance, and the money of the Right; Class War is anything but covert, as things once avoided as being too overtly criminal and treasonous are proposed, as though reasonable, and are hammered through with all the power money can provide; and outright Civil War and secession from the Union are being proposed and pushed forward by the endless faces … bought … and brought forth to bring about our enslavement.
“The time is now. You are the person you have been waiting for. This is either the end of days or the beginning of the end and the rebirth of something new and longed for by righteous and good-hearted folks for sixty-plus years. The beginning is nigh!
“November 2022 will no doubt determine the fate of American democracy. It could be the death knell for democracy and the Earth with all its lifeforms within our lifetimes. It could leave us under an ominous cloud of dystopian doom — to live out our lives, enslaved, toiling away our time, until the environmental collapse they will assuredly speed along brings it all to an end.
“Or this midterm election in the United States of 2022 could open us to a reimagined world, one where peace, freedom, and sanity reign. For this election might also be the bellwether for democracy around the world and the beginning of the rebirth of Earth itself. This vote will determine everything, and it is the most important event in the world. Perhaps it is the most consequential election of all time. America’s voters must vote wisely. The fate of the world, of all its lifeforms, and the freedom of its people hang in the balance.”
[Chapter 28 text begins:] In this book we have shared a journey through America’s past and present. We have looked into the minds of the participants in these tumultuous events.
We have seen that America and the world were evolving as needed in the Sixties if we were to sustain life, freedom, democracy, and the planet. For we discovered all were under attack.
We were startled to realize there were hidden forces at work behind the scenes whose activities I traced back into the Fifties. Of course, these forces — the power of mega-money in the hands of wealthy elites — extend back into history and the times of pharaohs and kings. Indeed, from the dawn of civilization — which can be defined as the time when humans became sedentary, acquired the ability to store wealth, and consequently used that wealth to “guide” and bully underlings — it is they, the wealthiest of the wealthy, who have determined the major events of history. It is these stories of the Filthy Rich — told and written by suck-ups, the words lubricated with the largesse and patronage of higher ups — that indeed we call our history.
Yes, history is the story of what the elites have done, how they have used their power to initiate and control events. We get very little of the actual cultural history of the world’s peoples. What we get are the reactions of ordinary folks to these events not of their choosing as well as the story of their movements and suffering under the purview of the Filthy Rich of all time.
We found that in the Sixties, as a result of a natural evolution of parenting and childcaring making for less traumatized adults, there was a massive worldwide coming to consciousness. This was a powerful upsurge by ordinary folks of the repressed impulses of the ages for peace, freedom, happiness, and a say in the events and circumstances of their lives — democracy. What was addressed was the environmental problem, in which a world informed by modern science discovered how it was ending its life and that of all other lifeforms because of the policies and practices of that sliver of the elite. The problems of race, misogyny, ethnophobia, and sexual repression were addressed in movements like the Civil Rights movement, feminism, the antiwar movement, and the Sexual Revolution.
This natural evolution was a threat to the powers-that-be as it meant an end to their controlling of the populace for their own ends of power-gaming, profits, and warring. We saw that the World War II Generation was the generation most threatened by such a leap in consciousness, for such an evolution would seem to undermine the world in which they were familiar and to challenge some of their cherished, however harmful and errant, beliefs.
Consequently, with a moneyed elite feeling threatened it was losing control of the people’s minds, orchestrating the sentiments of a generation confronted with social and cultural change on a scale unheard of, a fierce counterattack to virtually all the necessary changes, a Class War, which they would disguise as a Class War, was initiated and waged.
This book has been the story of that Culture War, Class War. We followed its course from the 1950s in America to the current crises of democracy and the environment, today, in 2022.
We followed the political developments over this expanse of time, and we delved into the generations who were major players in these events. We looked into the different forces moving the actions of these generations, including their histories and personalities. And we were astonished to discover that the drug usage of these generations corresponded with the events and attitudes of their respective eras.
With these things in mind, we were able to address the elements of that Class War and to see how its waging led to the abortion of the cultural rebirth that was happening, worldwide. It was a worldwide natural evolution of consciousness gestating in the minds and cultures of the masses during the Sixties, quashed — in the Seventies and beyond — by a global elite of Wealthies who would have none of such “nonsense.” All higher ups were acting in collusion, consciously or not, to undermine the rising forces of renewal and to create and foster, to take its place, an abomination of thoughts, untrue ideas, and policies.
The result of that abomination of reality, concocted to pacify and control the masses, was a Matrix so encompassing that, over time, and especially with money raining hard on the media to make it comply, it was virtually invisible. This Matrix could be seen by worthy and clear-sighted observers, yet the words of those seers, prophets, and truth-tellers were buried in an avalanche of untruths, opposite truths, made up and fantastical concoctions, insane conspiratorial narratives, and bald-faced lies.
The progress and processes of this Matrix of misinformation, this cultural overlay of untruth, we followed, and we noticed it reached a crescendo under George W. Bush. Which peak of mind-fuckedness was followed by an eruption of truth, reality, and facts with the presidency of Barrack Obama. With that, the world experienced widespread hope, albeit amid increasing obstruction and illegality from the threatened right-wing wealthy interests, from 2008 on. And the people of the world, led again by developments in America, one more time, attempted that cultural evolution denied it in previous decades.
Yet the forces under attack were dripping with money, which equaled unparalleled power. The moneyed interests gathered more wealth to itself, and it created such a disparity in wealth among the classes, unparalleled in history.
Indeed, the forces of the wealthy have never been more powerful. Their media hegemony at this time is nearly total, with some small outliers like MSNBC and PBS. Yet even formerly moderate CNN just recently was overtaken by a Trump supporter, who has turned it hard Right. John Malone has turned CNN into Fox lite.1
Just as in the event mentioned in this book where the policy changes from on high at ABC News led to the dismissal of Howard K. Smith, CNN’s takeover by the Right has its casualties. I might mention John Harwood, who, immediately after the takeover by John Malone, was canned the very day he spoke an unapproved truth on CNN airways. We will see how many follow his departure.
CNN will not be able to silence all their current pundits and commentators, so those sorts will be replaced. In a New York minute, they will be gone, and their seats filled with Filthy Rich patsies, as we saw with John Harwood.
This, at a time, when the fight for democracy and to save the world’s environment and its lifeforms is at a tipping point. The fork in the road we see directly before us. It is the midterm elections in the United States.
Culture War is ever more raucous and violent, filled with the fury, ignorance, and the money of the Right; Class War is anything but covert, as things once avoided as being too overtly criminal and treasonous are proposed, as though reasonable, and are hammered through with all the power money can provide; and outright Civil War and secession from the Union are being proposed and pushed forward by the endless faces … bought … and brought forth to bring about our enslavement.
The time is now. You are the person you have been waiting for. This is either the end of days or the beginning of the end and the rebirth of something new and longed for by righteous and good-hearted folks for sixty-plus years. The beginning is nigh!
November 2022 will no doubt determine the fate of American democracy. It could be the death knell for democracy and the Earth with all its lifeforms within our lifetimes. It could leave us under an ominous cloud of dystopian doom — to live out our lives, enslaved, toiling away our time, until the environmental collapse they will assuredly speed along brings it all to an end.
Or this midterm election in the United States of 2022 could open us to a reimagined world, one where peace, freedom, and sanity reign. For this election might also be the bellwether for democracy around the world and the beginning of the rebirth of Earth itself. This vote will determine everything, and it is the most important event in the world. Perhaps it is the most consequential election of all time. America’s voters must vote wisely. The fate of the world, of all its lifeforms, and the freedom of its people hang in the balance.
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AFTERWORD
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Continue with The Necessary Revolution, Apocalypse Emergency, Apocalypse NO, and Wounded Deer and Centaurs
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[Afterword text begins:] This Afterword is a good place to give an overview of the totality of my works to date. I also include a peak at what works are also in the queue, so you can know what to look forward to. There are two series begun, with much of it already in print. They are the Return to Grace Series of books and The Path of Ecstasy Series. This overview also includes a look at the books that are standalone books.
The Return to Grace Series
The Return to Grace Series of mine is already well along. It comprises fifteen volumes, of which ten are in print at this time. In this overview you can see how the books fit into an overarching narrative of a “return to grace.”
The fifteen books of the Return to Grace Series I am bringing to print in the years 2013 through 2025. What remains to be put to paper are five books — Book 2, The Necessary Revolution; Book 12, Back to the Garden: The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future; Book 13, Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace; Book 14, Primal Renaissance; and possibly a Book 15, Return to Grace. In this series of books, I lay out in great detail where we are, how we got to where we are, why we are here, why we need to change from being here, and where to go from here … and how to do that. The Return to Grace Series is as follows:
Book One, Culture War, Class War 2022
This book is the first in a series of books I have termed, the Return to Grace Series. This book dealt with the rise of fascism in America, its control of the media, and the resulting ongoing Culture War, which is a Class War in disguise.
Book One: Culture War 2022: Truth and Generations” (2022) describes where we are politically as a result of recent history. We are in a dire state — politically and environmentally — because a natural evolutionary development of consciousness and generational succession, begun in the Sixties, in a movement encompassing the entire world, was derailed by moneyed interests with a profit motive. Because of this advance being monkey-wrenched by selfish interests, we are in a quandary in all areas of public and environmental life.
Book Two, The Necessary Revolution
Book Two, tentatively titled The Necessary Revolution is not yet in print but exists online as Chapters 17 through 32 of my blog, Culture War, Class War, at the site of the same name.1 It elaborates on the dire quality of our times, requiring drastic measures at all levels and in all areas … a new paradigm of economics, politics, individual life purpose, human achievement, and relation to Nature.
Book Three, Apocalypse Emergency
Our environmental predicament, in particular, is introduced in all its severity and urgency in Book Three: Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call (2013). This book is both an appeal to our highest beingness and a call to action, wrapped in a psychological and spiritual look at why we are not alarmed at the moment, though we should be.
Book Four, Apocalypse NO
Book Four: Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious (2013) details an alarming and yet possibly opportune development of our times, existing alongside our current environmental and sociopolitical dilemmas. It shows how, through means apparently generational and psychological as well as environmental, we are seeing a rise of perinatal material in the consciousness, motives, and personalities of ourselves and everyone around, including and significantly those in power in these times.
I show how we both manifest and act out our perinatal pain in our physical environment, but also in our social environment at all levels, from individual; to group and to national, as exemplified in our politics; and to international. I show where we can place the lever of human effort and activism in order to bring about the change we need in order to survive. It is revealed within our perinatal patterns.
Book Five, Wounded Deer and Centaurs
In Book Five: Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events (2016), I carry those themes forward, focusing on two factors in particular. These are, first, the deepest roots of those perinatal-apocalyptic upsurges occurring in modern life … and I trace them to actual late-gestation prenatal events of even more significance than the birth elements. The second thrust of the book concerns the phenomenon of the self-sacrificing individual required to take us forward from these times.
This necessary hero, it turns out, is not only apparently coming to our aid and is manifesting in greater numbers, but is imbued with just the kind of access to their own pre- and perinatal material as to make possible their leading us beyond these ties — these prenatal traps keeping us in bigotry, violence, greed, and fear and away from our deeper nature of love and compassion — which have been holding down humanity from real progress for thousands of years.
Book Six, Planetmates
In Book Six: Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014), I have all of these — a plea from our planetmates for us to wake up; a vision of who we are in Nature and in relation to them that shows how and why we have strayed and how it has to do with perinatal factors; a revolutionary view on civilization and evolution that puts us in a new and non-complimentary light but also reveals places for change and renewal never before seen; a new-paradigm understanding of a way of being in the world and in Nature that is more natural, primal, and in touch with our basic nature; and a prophecy that in humans taking up the challenge presented, “Something wonderful is going to happen.”
These are brought forth within a literary device that, within the context of an event called “The Great Reveal,” has the voice of our planetmates — that is, all the life and beings who abide with us on this planet — teaching, revealing, directing, cajoling, lecturing, scolding … ranting at times … all to the end of a redirection of the human race so as to save the life on this planet, including ourselves, before it is too late.
Book Seven, Funny God
Book Seven: Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015) describes the new paradigm of activism required of the necessary hero as the “Tao of Funny God,” which has it that only true and radical responses not rooted in the paradigms we confront can be effective. It details old paradigm patriarchal perspectives and how they are wrong and why they need to be gone beyond. And it explains matriarchal new paradigm ones that are needed.
In its second part, it lays out, in story format, a prophecy and a vision of a potential wondrous future, coming soon, something along the lines of that “something wonderful” of Planetmates. This vision is consistent with the findings about Nature, reality, and psychology, which I advance in other parts of the Series.
And in its final part, “The Mind’s True Liberation,” Funny God presents an expansive, indeed, towering, overstanding of human life and its purpose in a cosmic, a Divine scheme, along with a vision — a revelation on the nature of God, human life, life purpose, and on existence itself.
Book Eight, Experience Is Divinity
Book Eight: Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor (2013) explains the nature of reality and human consciousness that is consistent with the views of quantum physics and modern consciousness research, especially that of the kind I have experienced in deep experiential psychotherapy and especially in nonordinary states of consciousness brought about spontaneously and via my primal, meditation, and breathwork experiences of many years.
Book Nine, Falls from Grace
In Book Nine: Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness (2014) I bring to light the devolutional model of consciousness. It tells how we got to where we are in each of our individual lives and where we need to address our attention to return to the state of grace, which is our birthright, indeed, is our true identity.
Book Ten, Prodigal Human
In Book Ten: Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016) I bring together the ideas of Falls from Grace and Planetmates in describing the evolutionary/devolutionary arcs of humanity and the individual, founded upon growing edge views from our current sciences. In revealing the descents and their processes of occurring we have seen revealed obvious correctives we can embrace collectively, to save our world, as well as personally, to save ourselves. It is the most complete and comprehensive explication of the human condition. It is an elucidation of it never before offered, envisioned, or revealed. For these reasons it brings with it hope for change and success in our personal and planetary lives that was never imagined or allowed before now.
Book Eleven, Psychology of Apocalypse
Book Eleven, Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide is a comprehensive look at its topic. It provides my most extensive exposition yet on the prenatal matrices of human evil (the PMEs). While Book Five, Wounded Deer and Centaurs, introduced and first expounded upon these prenatal templates for “human nature,” in Psychology of Apocalypse they are brought clearly into focus. So this book details the roots of the problems we see in the world as well as calls for the only viable response to our dilemmas, which is activism. Activism in the face of extinction — apocalypse — is the only sane thing left us. And, yes, this book addresses what is sane and how to become sane.
Indeed, it answers the question: How do we become sane in an insane human world — a world that is at war with its own home, that is burning down its own house, even as it barricades itself on the couch, watching television and eating chips from plastic bags that will not decompose, and so simply adding more fuel to the inferno already raging all around.
Amazingly, in the context of a vision of humanity set within Nature, as one planetmate among all the others, and clearly having gone through a devolution from Nature, not an arrogant transcendence above Nature, allowing us dominion over it, we are seen to be quite insane.
It is not that there is no basis for establishing what is sane. What is sanity then? Continuing from concepts first brought out in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, this work shows just what sanity looks like in our current situation. It requires we look at the deepest roots of our personality created out of the experiences we have in common during our womb and birth experiences — our prenatal and perinatal templates.
Beyond that, the only sane response to an emergency is activism … and the sanest response is heroism. Not sainthood. Not enlightenment. Not social status. Not corporate success. Not any kind of material achievement. No. the only sane response to a situation where we stand in front of a house on fire is to pick up a bucket. Anything else is numb, unfeeling, quite dissociated, and selfish. And when one is inside that house, the only response is to get out the fire extinguisher, seek to help the ones inside to get free from the flames, to minimize the suffering of others and to save others and oneself, regardless if one succeeds or not. The only sane response is thus heroism.
Book Twelve, Back to the Garden
The book following Psychology of Apocalypse in the Return to Grace Series is titled, appropriately enough, Back to the Garden. It is subtitled, The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future. That should tell you a lot already about what is in it. Let me be more clear, however.
Back to the Garden addresses many of the topics of Prodigal Human and Psychology of Apocalypse — its two predecessors — but they are rendered within a mythological, metaphysical, and spiritual framework, bringing out additional highlights and insights. In addition, it focuses in more closely on the apocalyptic features of our times — the humanicidal ones. Humanicide meaning this compulsion we have currently to kill ourselves all off, to die and become extinct as a species, to commit species-suicide.
This book shows how our current situation fits within a framework expressed in the myths of Eden, Prometheus, Icarus, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Pandora, Gilgamesh, and others. We see how our situation has always been revealed to us through our collective unconscious, though we were not hearing; and if we did pay attention, we got the message wrong, or backwards. It shows how, as well, our entire trajectory of descents was explained and how their resolution was foretold in these myths. In this way, our collective unconscious exposes the path home … the way that we prodigal humans, like the myth of the Prodigal Son in The Bible, can return and be embraced again by a welcoming and bounteous Nature and a benevolent, forgiving, ever helpful, and loving Divinity.
Back to the Garden takes our estranged state, as made clear in my works and especially in Prodigal Human, as a starting place from which to explore how we can get back that which we lost. It looks at the environmental collapse, revealed in clear detail; it looks at current developments working against as well as for our survival; and it describes societal and personal changes that we can, and indeed need to make in order for humanity to survive. Thus, “the necessary future.”
It reveals the same predicament as Prodigal Human; in fact its first few parts lay out what was written there, but in a condensed form and with a nod to mythological expressions of it. It provides much more of the profile of our environmental plight, of our corresponding psychological array (or Matrix), and of what they both reveal in terms of a spiritual dilemma of current times. Beyond that, it outlines our possible return — that “something wonderful” again — and shows why it is necessary as well as how it is truly possible, as seemingly impossible as the notion might seem at the outset.
Book Thirteen, Primal Return
Following Back to the Garden will be Book Thirteen of the Return to Grace Series to be titled Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace.
It will detail the specific ways we might change our current trajectory; and it will paint a compelling, a comprehensive vision of a possible society, a possible humanity, a possible Earth, and a possible future congruent with and enlightened by the prenatal and perinatal understandings that have heretofore been overlooked in previous attempts to present a workable model for humanity.
For comparison on what this work will be like, see the worker’s utopia proposed by Marx. My vision will be different from his, for his was merely an addendum to the unnatural plight of “civilized” man — a man still beholden to the hierarchy, but himself a dominator of women, indigenous cultures, and planetmates; and utilizing, still, those as resources to fuel selfish gains and advantages, regardless how equitably distributed, or “fair,” they would be. A more just slavery — coinciding with oppression and exploitation of others outside the group of male human slave worker “elites” — is hardly compelling, let alone utopian.
My utopian vision, to the contrary, will be constructed on our actual human nature, our primal one … which happens also to be congruent with what we have learned about ourselves from prenatal and perinatal psychology. And I will fashion a template of where we could, and should, ideally end up …. as a vision to pull us forward to which to aspire. Also I will detail the steps we can take to get from where we now are to there.
Book Fourteen, Primal Renaissance
At this time, it looks like there will be a Book Fourteen, which will be titled Primal Renaissance, using the same title as the work of mine that was published in 1995. This version will be much updated and expanded, however. The intention here is to detail a utopian future as a vision to be a kind of lodestar in our thinking about how to change and where to go.
This utopian vision has a particular characteristic, never before advanced. For this vision shows a future in which all that we lost in coming from Nature — our primal allotment of gifts and traits and wisdom — is married with all that we have gained, of real worth, during our estranged state of civilization.
It will describe a renaissance, in that it is similar to the Renaissance of pre-modern times where with the collapse of Catholic hegemony, texts hidden in the monasteries of our Greek and Roman heritages were released and distributed. And this, combining with the technology of the time, the printing press, allowed the dissemination of these ideas and their intermarriage with the other ideas characteristic of the times and pervasive throughout its culture. The cross-fertilization of Catholic/Christian orthodoxy with “pagan” insights & wisdom created a flowering of culture, thus a renaissance, or rebirth.
In the same way, this book of mine to come predicts a cross-fertilization of our repressed and denigrated primal, primitive, indigenous, natural heritages with our current scientific understandings and technological achievements. This primal heritage — which is knowledge and wisdom from even prior, in history, to the Roman and Greek heritages — comprises wisdoms and perspectives which were even more thoroughly and brutally repressed, to our discredit and supreme disadvantage, than our Greek and Roman heritages earlier.
Yet we are already seeing a renaissance, wherein the vast scientific findings and technological wonders wrought of the human journey are married with the wisdom and consciousness technologies of those earliest of all, primal, times. In so doing we are able to envision a utopian postmodern society, embracing its scientific and material achievements yet imbued with gatherer-hunter simplicity, nobility, and wisdom … in tune with a benevolent Nature and a gracious Divinity. Thus, this possible future, in its beginning stages currently, I predict will be a primal renaissance. It is no coincidence that this renaissance will be lifted as well on the wave of a radical new technological advance in communication, like the printing press was then. This time, it is called, the Internet.
This Book Fourteen is meant to open to the quality of the livable future we are heading towards, if we survive. That is to say, it will describe the cultural paradigm manifesting a rebirth of culture and humanity, the primal renaissance, which is currently being created out of a coming together of long suppressed wisdom from primal cultures and current science and technology and all the knowledge it brings with it. Such a flowering of culture, if it is done in the way it can be as described in this Series of fifteen books, which would allow a future to actually occur, would be wonderful beyond current imagining, bringing together for the first time all that we know along with all that we need to know to both correct as well as to augment and catalyze what we currently know.
And in this book, Primal Renaissance, I will reveal it in as clear and detailed a vision as possible, in the hopes of awakening clarity of direction in the idealistic and the movers and changers among us to bring it about.
Book Fifteen, Return to Grace
That is the overview of Return to Grace, the series. There is also an idea to condense the entire fourteen books into an abridged version of the Return to Grace Series, as a single book. For Return to Grace, the book, think of it as a kind of “favorite hits” book, slanted toward the theme of the crisis and opportunity presented to us in our times, these “end times.” Stay tuned.
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Where to Go from Here … Also by Michael Adzema
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The Path of Ecstasy Series
The Path of Ecstasy Series is separate from and paralleling the Return to Grace Series. At the moment, two of the thirteen volumes planned for it are in print, with at least two more coming out in the next two years, 2022 and 2023. I wish, here, to share with my readers what they can look forward to in this series, The Path of Ecstasy.
Book One, The Secret Life of Stones
This was the first book in The Path of Ecstasy Series. Being the launching point, it introduced and touched on many of the new perspectives developed and elaborated in the subsequent works. It presented a comprehensive new overstanding of Reality — a new map, if you will — comprising elements usually categorized under Idealism, in philosophy; and pantheism and panentheism, in religion. The essence of this new-paradigm view is that Reality — the Universe in its totality — is basically Consciousness or Subjectivity and that the seemingly physical part of It is a mere epiphenomenon of that all-inclusive Beingness … a Beingness which I have termed, Experience.
Coinciding with that perspective is a perceived awareness that such Subjectivity undergirding the material universe is not separated into parts, as we think normally — with different experienced realities whirling away inside the separate “boxes” of different physical bodies. Rather this Subjectivity is not only shared, it is singular. There is only one of It. And we, immersed in this Universal pool of Experience, are merely areas of It which are “lit” in our own uniquely configured way, through our focus on and participation in those elements within It. We are different experiential regions of It, though we are not separate from each other. Rather we are overlapping experiential fields, ultimately interconnected with All.
This way of looking at things is in direct contrast to the dominant materialist old-paradigm stance of modern times, which holds that the world is basically matter. Regarding consciousness? Well, it is thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter — an offshoot of it. Which consciousness, by the way, springs inexplicably into existence at some point, yet unknown, along the billions of years trajectory of biological evolution.
Meanwhile, the non-separation involved in the new cosmic overstanding, which has Experience as Reality’s base, is demonstrated empirically. This has been revealed in quantum physics as well as the new biology — where the phenomena of morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields point to a sharing of subjective space, or fields, or a Common Intersubjectivity. As the quantum physicist, Schrödinger, put it, “The number of minds in the universe is a total of one.”
Various other experiences of “experience-sharing” are verifiable — such as the trans-species experience and identification with aspects of the so-called “material” world. Both experiences of being other animate beings as well as being parts of the physical world have been described by Stanislav Grof in his many works as occurring quite frequently.
And, yes, for those who are waiting, in this last — identification with and experience of aspects of the material universe — is where we encounter the consciousness of matter … “of stones,” metaphorically speaking. It is here where we get a peek into “the secret life of stones.”
We find that we understand and partake of the inner experience of Nature — animate and inanimate — in at least some way that is not so much less than we partake of and are able to understand the experience and inner states of other humans. The extent of similarity between people is what accounts for the degree of accuracy in our abilities to do that, in the normal sense of ordinary consciousness, which is called empathy. Though in the sense of it occurring in a nonordinary state of consciousness, well even the amount of similarity, or difference, between such units of being is not such a barrier.
Indeed, the history of science in the last hundred years has amounted to a gradual giving back to Nature of its status as aware and conscious, which was initially taken away by Western hubris in regard to Nature. So, we have animal rights, the “secret life of plants,” and so on, in a gradual procession of acknowledgment over the decades. I need to add that, sadly, before that we even needed to bring awareness to the facts of children’s and babies’ consciousness. Remember, there was a time when it was thought that newborns do not feel pain. That is merely one example.
Even, if you can believe it, Western culture needed to acknowledge women’s feeling consciousness. In a similar way, in fact, some societies have considered folks in other societies as lacking in feeling awareness. And some strata of society have denied the feeling consciousness of certain “lower” segments of the population … or even of other races, as when we had slavery. I am reminded of recently hearing the pronouncements of a political figure and industrial mining titan of early Twentieth Century America rationalizing his insensitive treatment of workers as that they do not experience suffering … not really. Hard to believe, isn’t it?
Thus, my book, The Secret Life of Stones, only continues the reversal of such abject greed and cruelty manifesting as the lack of empathy and the stupidity as we see in the examples above. Still, it seems the understandings of the consciousness and aliveness in the inanimate world, the world of matter — which are the most recent and necessary conclusions, arising from the findings of quantum physics and modern consciousness research — are the most difficult of which to grasp.
Yet, matter is alive, is conscious. Our sciences do tell us. There is an awareness in the physical world which is beyond our imagining. The Universe is at base Consciousness, Absolute Subjectivity, Experience, or mind-stuff. This is the finding of quantum physics and Consciousness research. Does that not imply that matter and stones are, somehow, aspects of that Consciousness, mind-stuff, Experience?
No doubt about it, there is a secret life in the Universe. It is found everywhere and in the most unlikely places. The physical world is an illusion arising from our human perception, we have found; and the fundamental reality is consciousness; it is experiential. When you look at a mountain you are seeing Experience, in some indirect way. This is the conclusion of the new physics and our latest consciousness research. There is a secret life of stones.
The Secret Life of Stones is a journey that explores the territory approaching and bordering that overstanding of matter being alive. Not just humans, plants, and animals, but all the physical world is alive. This vision of a world pregnant with Being, beyond our imagining, is the catalyst for the revolution needed in our times. It does change everything we think we know, in science, and otherwise. It brings forth a perception of reality as something in which we are immersed that is on our side, blessing us, supporting us, encouraging us — in all ways, large and small. Regardless our actions, our successes and failures, we are part of an aliveness interpenetrating us and connecting us with alive beings, experiential units, and higher realities. It is a web, unable to be broken, in which the spot of it we see in life — with all its drama, dead ends, seeming fragmentation, circularity, and meaninglessness — is revealed to be perfect in every detail, in spite of us.
More even that that, it brings the blessing that we can be proud and noble in our rightful and truly honored place in the Universe. We can feel, rather than the cosmic aloneness to which we have relegated ourselves, the joy of cosmic belongingness, which is the right of all beings.
To our astonishment, the discovery of modern times and current science is that the boundaries of self are arbitrary and mutable. Quantum physics and modern consciousness research have revealed the possibility, once again — using psychotechnologies such as entheogens, holotropic breathwork, shamanism, deep experiential therapies, past-life regressions, and expanded forms of primal therapy — that we are not just the All, in potential, as in an experience of “becoming one with God” or in an opening to the All That Is. Along with and more easily than that, our sciences and psychotechnologies have revealed that we can take up one of the infinite foci already existing in Reality, or in potential within It, and actually be, for a time, another entity … be it an insect; a star system; a single celled animal; a sperm or egg cell; a planet, such as Gaia, the Earth; and anything in between. And amazingly, even far beyond.
Using these rediscovered and newly invented psychotechnologies, people are able to identify with and experience the consciousnesses not only of other planetmates — that is, of other species on Earth — but also are able to merge with and experience the consciousness of higher orders of beings: the Earth; individual planets; the galaxy; individual collections of people, such as the women of all time; and even collectives of supranormal beings and realities, including archetypal consciousnesses and their subjective experience. It is possible to experience consciousness of supposedly inanimate, non-living forms and even identify with consciousnesses on the atomic and subatomic levels.
Not only is the Universe alive and we are interconnected with it, but we find we can experience it. We can expand our boundaries or pass through them into the experiential realms of seemingly separate beings and Realities. And we discover we are all alike, inside, though we act and exist within different forms. Therefore, we can grok the inner realities of others, animate and inanimate. So trees bloom for the joy of it. Bees delight in their tasks. The ocean is deep, wise, and comforting. And the Universe is pervaded by love, which we erroneously label gravity. This is what we know because we are part of Reality, part of Nature, part of Divinity and not superior to it as the Judeo-Christian religions presume…. Or fallen from it like we are some kind of alien fruit that was somehow projected out of a tree, a Nature, that we have no part of, as fuddy-duddy scientists assume.
The Secret Life of Stones explains how all of this is so and reveals the profound implications that has for us and for how we live our lives. This book can be described as an adventure in logic surrounding an investigation into the discoveries on the cutting edge of our sciences, bringing forth the most profound and comprehensive philosophy, to date. We walk hand-in-hand through that new and wondrous country; we follow all the paths we find there, brought into view by this new cosmic overstanding.
Book Two, Dance of the Seven Veils I:
Identity/Primal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self … Adult to Toddler, Veils One-Three.
This book, the second volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series, is the first of three parts on this topic of the Seven Veils. This first part answers the questions, who to be? And, what is the real self? It deals with our stage of adulthood and goes back to that of toddlerhood. It is all about pulling back the Veils of anthropocentrism and species-superiority, which is Veil One; the hidden agendas of societies and especially its elites which get construed as rites of passage and initiation into adulthood for young girls and boys and which thus corrupt their personalities along lines not their own, which is Veil Two; and the layers of parental abuse, misdirection, control and direction, for their ends, not our own, which get impressed upon us in infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood, and which coalesce as the primal scene, which is Veil Three. And which tells each and every one of us that we are not going to be loved unless we be something other than what we are, what we were meant to be, and what we were destined to be — which is our real self.
Book Three, Dance of the Seven Veils II:
Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self … Infancy to Prenate, Veils Four-Six.
The Series continues with the second of three parts of Dance of the Seven Veils. This book, the third volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series, answers the questions, what is the Divine Self? Do we have such an inner core of being? If so, how did we lose it, so that we think we do not? And, how can we get it back?
This book is concerned with the time of our lives around birth; however it traces the psychological imprints from that time back into the womb. This work’s elucidation of the experiential realms of the prenatal is, in fact, that which distinguishes it from what has been said about this time around birth, previously, in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology.
Just as fresh to the field, it adds to that discipline by exploring the influences from our time of “prenatal hell,” during late gestation. That is something never really dealt with before and only written about by one other.2 So it is that this book has to do with the time after birth — the newborn and infancy periods — yet it extends back to the time before birth, the prenatal. However, the prenatal is divided into two separate Veils, which could not be more contrasting.
There is the time of blissful existence during the first two trimesters of gestation. This is the basis of much of what I call the joy grids — which is the substratum of each human’s personality having to do with what gives them pleasure, joy, fulfillment, ecstasy, and bliss. It is our deepest self in this lifetime, and it is interconnected with the Divine. From which we had only a little time earlier separated, keep in mind.
It also expands on what happens, generally speaking, during the third trimester, when the fetus’s larger mass, in conjunction with the bipedal stance of humans, results in constriction of the blood vessels going to the prenate. The extreme compression experienced by the unborn baby at this time already causes increasingly more difficulty in movement and pressure from all sides on the body. This crowdedness in the womb brings forth claustrophobic-like feelings in the prenate of wanting to explode, yet being unable to do anything about it. No exit.
Then, because of the inefficiency of the blood flow in bringing nutrients to the fetus, which includes, most importantly of all, oxygen; it is characterized by feelings of suffocation along with the cramped feelings. Finally, because the reduced blood flow means the toxic byproducts of food conversion will not be removed as efficiently, we routinely experience feelings of being force-fed toxins, waste matter, and “poisons.” This is accompanied by feelings of nausea, sickness, and — because it seems to come from all around and yet from nowhere in particular — paranoia, the sense of a dire threat which can come from anywhere at anytime and is directed in particular at oneself.
Also consequent to this buildup of toxins in the amniotic surround is a feeling of burning or irritation on the surface of the skin.
These feelings—these templates impressed upon our experience, our consciousness, from our earliest times prenatally — are the basis of the human evil of all times, and I call them the prenatal matrices of human evil, or the PMEs. Comprising, as they do, the greatest amount of the trauma and pain of our early lives, they are pretty much congruent with what I call the pain grids.
One of the major points of the book is that in any growth — spiritual, personal, or psychotherapeutic — the goal is to go through the pain grids, by facing, acknowledging, experiencing, and reliving them, and tapping into the joy grids beneath them. Which “joy grids” I liken to our deeper human nature. This deeper self or personhood is interconnected with and interacting with the Divine — which is a state of beingness that is the experience of that time as well as is a quality of everyday consciousness that embraces one when one reconnects with these repressed experiences in the process of personal growth as an adult.
Dance of the Seven Veils II also lays out, for consideration and integration into the larger overstanding being presented, the aspects of the perinatal matrices of experience. These are matrices that have been discovered and presented to our collective understandings by Stanislav Grof.
Another aspect of this book is that it brings out the truly amazing coincidence of the events of these times with the religious ideas, theologies, iconographies, and beliefs of all cultures of all times. We discover the roots of many of the archetypes here. We can discern the imprints of that time playing into both the positive and negative proclivities of religious behavior. Naturally, these early prenatal-perinatal matrices all together — both Grof’s and mine — are the patterned substratum which gets ever and over again reflected in our basic beliefs, which we conceptualize and narrate in our mythologies.
In terms of the sequence being laid out in Dance of the Seven Veils, the time of birth itself — including the postnatal period, with its graces or horror … depending — is what I term Veil Four. The time of prenatal malnutrition and our experience of third trimester hell, with its four aspects, the PMEs, comes under the heading of Veil Five. Lastly, the time of, optimally, early blissful womb experience, connection with Divinity, and experience of harmony and buoyant optimism, confidence, and delight is what I call Veil Six.
All of these, whatever their experiential qualities — pleasureful or painful — are Veils. They are films across our comprehension because they are imprints about what Reality is that arises of our unique human experience — either individually or collectively. Thus, being a consequence of early, quite variable, quite unique (in comparison to other species) events, they cannot truly be considered accurate about what exists outside the parameters they most definitely inscribe. They comprise hard and fast prejudices about what is True and Real.
So, what is Real, then? What is Reality prior to the events which skewed our understandings of What Is so that It is a particular thing, not any other things. What actually is Naked Reality? Who were you before you were you as you think you are? What is your “original face”? Well that is what we look at in the next book.
Book Four, Dance of the Seven Veils III:
Transpersonal/Periconceptional Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face … Cellular to Soulular, Veil Seven and Beyond.
In the third book of Dance of the Seven Veils, which is Volume 4 in The Path of Ecstasy Series, I take on the most profound of all human questions, which has to do with what is really really real. What is Reality? That is a question that lies deep at our roots, and deep in our souls.
It is no coincidence its discovery might lie at a consideration of those deepest parts of our selves. Indeed, having removed six overlying Veils upon Reality — Veils which were projected out onto our screens of perception and understanding as a result of prior experience, especially traumatic and deeply affecting ones — this is our best chance to remove the last Veil. That is exactly the purpose of all the preceding pages in these volumes and all the prior ideas which — one by one — were used to pry back the boards upon which we stand which unthinkingly create our arbitrary platform within Reality. The culmination and purpose of this entire journey approaches its fruition here.
In this third book of Dance of the Seven Veils, then, we look at the last Veil, which has to do with our periconceptional experiences. That is to say, the experiences around conception. Periconception extends back to our emergence into Form with the creation of ovum, first, and then sperm. It continues with the actual events of the coming together of ovum and sperm at conception. It passes on into the events of the fertilized egg, the blastocyst, of implantation, and finally, of early embryonal existence. We find the deepest imprints on our human reality here, periconceptionally. Hence it is our first, our deepest, our initial Veil across our ultimate identity as Divinity and our experience in the No-Form State.
This Seventh Veil — the first reduction from Cosmic Awareness, the first cookie cutter on the dough of our physical reality — establishes our physical world, in many ways. We find here the creation of duality as perceived in the world, of thing and no-thing, of self and other, of forward and backward. We discover here the philosophical basis of our human reality. These are the things we believe, without any doubt. It will require the removal of all the preceding, and overlying, Veils to have a chance to grok what is to be gotten here. For at this point we border on the truly astounding and mind-blowing. All else may be interesting, is no doubt instrumental, is most of it useful; that is, in a practical psychological or spiritual sense. But here is where we “get real.” That phrase will be seen to never have been so true and profound as it is in its applicability here.
This third book of Dance of the Seven Veils pulls to the side the final Veil on Naked Reality. We see the soulular, the No-Form State, the face of Ultimate Divinity. And … we find … our Original Face, which is discovered to be part and parcel of all of that. Knowing this thing, one knows everything.
So this is where we will go in those books. We will, like Salome, do a Dance of the Seven Veils and find out what Naked Reality is more likely to be like.
Book Five, Womb with a View
The next volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series will be titled, Womb with a View, and it will continue this exposition. Much of it is already written, so I can tell you a little about what it will contain.
In Womb with a View, I will continue this look into the screens of distortion across human perception by focusing on the ways our womb experiences — our prenatal events and traumas — create our beliefs in life. You will notice that this is something I will have addressed, at this point, in Book 3, or Dance of the Seven Veils II; yet here is where I will unfold the premises and revelations therein. It will focus exclusively on this time in utero, which is the foundation of all our most profound religious beliefs.
We have already seen how our experiences of the events of this time create our beliefs about the supernatural. Here is where I will present the grand matrix of our prenatal basis of beliefs in goodness, joy, God, fulfillment, and life. Which I term the joy grids. We will see what that is in us; how it affects us in every moment of our lives; what its greatest profile is, collectively; how we have expressed it in religions, mythologies, and theologies; and most importantly, how this knowledge can be used to provide our truest direction in life and the path to our greatest fulfillment and joys.
It represents, as well, the passage beyond the constraints of our pain grids. This is the road to freedom. Many talk about it; many yearn for it. In this book I will show you what it is, where it is, and how to get to it. This is the heaven attainment. It is still one step removed from enlightenment, which is a going beyond all the Veils, including this one. Still, not bad. This is the basis for a happy life.
Book Six, Cells with a View
Prior to Book Six, I will have presented for your consideration many examples of the way fundamental and mostly unvarying events around conception arise and configure so much of our ritual and mythologies in widely varying cultures, often widely separated in time. I will have shown how much alike they are, and I will have expressed to you my incredulity at the fact that their remarkable consistencies have not been catalyst for research about that previously. Which congruence of patterns cross-culturally can finally — with the understandings I present of the prenatal and perinatal precursors of them in mind — garner some possibilities for comprehension, if not ultimate conclusions.
Regardless, it would seem culture in and of itself does not exert as large an influence on cultural patterns of belief as was once thought. Nor does cultural transmission account for all similarities. We have a common substratum of being, you see, arisen of our common biological experiences as humans.
Cells with a View will dive even more deeply into the original underpinnings of our reality, as laid down in us through our absolute earliest experiences in Form. In so doing we can expect to reveal the most fundamental matrix, the deepest template of our mind, and the seeds, if not foundations, of all human beliefs and culture.
We can expect that what we see here will be at least interesting; more likely it will be enlightening of much beyond it.
Book Seven, The Prenatal Matrix of Human Events
Following Cells with a View, I have plans to write a more elaborate exposition of the “prenatal matrix of human events,” as I introduced it in my works, Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events; and more extensively and recently, Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide. Which I also expanded on in several of the chapters of Dance of the Seven Veils I, especially, Chapter 5, “The Prenatal Matrix of Human Nature,” and which I will, shortly after the time of this book’s publication, have explored in Dance of the Seven Veils II, dealing with the prenatal and Veil Five. That book is scheduled for publication a month or so after this book’s release.
There is much more to be said on this topic, and it is vitally important. As I explained in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, this prenatal matrix is virtually the root of the evil that humans distinctively manifest, out of all of Nature. More than that, it is essential we see it and remove those weeds from the meadow of human personality if life is to continue on Earth. This book, Book Seven, like Wounded Deer and Centaurs, will elaborate on why and how that can be done.
Book Eight, The Centered Path Through Hell
Beyond these first seven — that is to say, the three in the Dance of the Seven Veils, The Secret Life of Stones, Womb with a View, Cells with a View, and the one elaborating on the prenatal matrix — six more works are in this queue, at this time. These include one that would be about the centered path through hell. This one follows logically the one elaborating the prenatal matrix and explaining the source of human evil. For this one begins discussing the path that is necessary in order to go beyond those hellacious influences. It is one that involves facing and going through them in order, like Dante proceeding through Inferno and Purgatorio, to release oneself from their influences.
This work will include important corrections to common spiritual thinking, including my stressing the truth that the path to liberation involves facing the darkness. Unless one deals with the pain-evolved proclivities in one’s personality, one might simply become a calmer crazy person, with spiritual or religious practice. Or, as Jung put it, “One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” This book, as well, will highlight a fundamental acknowledgment that the path to authenticity, to rootedness in Divinity, is not a ladder-style one, as Wilber and transpersonal Ego psychologists think of it. Rather, an authentic spiritual path embraces, as Hesse phrased it, “seeking the depths.” As Jung also wrote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” My book on the centered path through hell, correspondingly, acknowledges that “the way forward is down.”
This work reveals the equally disastrous matriarchal and patriarchal mistakes that are made in the spiritual quest. And in noticing the mistakes to the left and to the right of true-footedness it carves a road, a centered path, avoiding them. It shows how to keep oneself centered and unharmed while also proceeding in the direction down, into one’s feelings, into life experience, hence metaphorically, into “hell.” This book would be Beatrice to Dante in his Divine Comedy.
So this work focuses, for one thing, on the matriarchal mistakes we make on the path, which delays or blocks our progress. These matriarchal mistakes have to do with opening to overwhelm through various reckless means, at the times when actualization, not more access to potentiality, is what is warranted, as I explained in Chapter 35 on “Identity and the Sea of Potentiality.” At this time, I expect to include, additionally, in this particular book some of the ideas I was laying out in that chapter on Identity and potentiality about the dangers of mysticism for “modern” youth. So “the centered path through hell” book will also deal with Identity, potentiality, rites of passage, youth and mid-life and other liminal crises, drugs and their effect on the process, multiculturalism, the occult, and generations — mine of the Sixties and the ones subsequent.
However even more importantly this work on the centered path through hell deals with the much more widespread patriarchal mistakes we make. Especially in that we live in a patriarchal world, almost totally, and going back ten thousand years and more in some places, the patriarchal mistakes virtually riddle our religious and spiritual beliefs and even our ideas of personal and psychological growth. These patriarchal mistakes predominantly involve the use of control, versus surrender, and mastery, versus vulnerability, on the path. These are Ego mistakes; they are ones that are ladder-like and intellectual and are rooted in a false reliance on “rationality” as a tool of spiritual growth. Which “rationality” is an aspect of Ego, as opposed to intuition, faith, guidance from within and without, and grace.
Book Nine, The Journey of Re-Membering … The Four Phases of Self-Awareness
After this, in line, is a book on the “the journey of re-membering,” with a title something like that. Following the corrections to the misunderstandings of spiritual evolution unveiled in the previous book on the “centered path,” I have laid out a volume detailing the path to ecstasy and Self, or Divinity, as it proceeds in four stages, which are four completely different orientations to life itself.
These are four truly distinct phases of self-awareness that those who become liberated embody and go through in this life and over the course of their incarnations. It is the path involved in moving out from the prejudices and the evil that accrue to us all, as described in the first seven books of this Path of Ecstasy Series. The book previous to this one, the eighth volume, dealing with the “centered path,” focuses on the mistakes common on the road of self-actualization. Whereas this one, on stages, takes a look at what that path entails. So this book, by contrast to “centered path,” is the one that will depict the true and authentic route of realization — the one avoiding the pitfalls of matriarchality and patriarchality which in one way or another keeps one stuck in hellish misery.
Once one realizes the way of the centered path through hell, then, there are four phases of expanding self-understanding that are related, roughly, to four stages of life, correctly lived. More importantly these four phases are related to levels of the unconscious — each deeper and more expansive than the previous. Thus they lead to the superconscious, once those levels are embraced, incorporated, and gone beyond.
These phases of self-awareness were inspired by Masters and Houston (1966, 2000) in their seminal work, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. These levels — congruent with Masters and Houston’s model of the entheogenic experience itself — are the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic-existential, and the integral. Don’t worry I’ll come up with “sexier” labels for them by print time. lol. At any rate, these stages are found in virtually all valid spiritual, psychological, transpersonal paths of evolution or growth to liberation. Therefore, they provide a yardstick against which one can evaluate one’s progress. They can provide direction, when needed; and confirmation, when that is what would help.
Book Ten, Primal Spirituality and the Primal Process … The Second Half of “The Cure”
The book following that, a tenth book in the Series, is the one I am anxious to bring to print. It is on “primal spirituality.” I have several parts of it currently online, including “Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” (1993); “Reunion with the Positive (Self), Part 1 (1995); and “Creating Positive Scenarios” (1995).3 These are ideas that have already melded into the culture of the field of primal therapy, by now, as I brought these ideas out initially in the early Nineties. But I have much much more to say on them. And they are very important.
For one thing, the fact that it is radical unconditional acceptance that truly allows growth, that truly heals, is hardly known. Outside of the primal modality, and unfortunately sometimes even under its aegis, it is missed. If it is known, it is rarely understood sufficiently for it to bring about the powerful transformation it can. This of which I speak goes way beyond Carl Rogers’s (1961) admirable therapeutic advances termed client-centered, by the way.
However, it is truly difficult for facilitators to apply it without having done considerable deep experiential work themselves. For, predictably in a patriarchal culture and a capitalist system of economy, everything pushes in the direction of a medical-type model of growth and healing; where facilitators can get paid to give direction, provide advice, and so on … to be authorities and to be esteemed and paid that way. Fine for them, but basically that usurps the growing person’s primary mechanism for growth — which is the self-realization coming from within. Beyond that, the authority-citizen, the teacher-student, the doctor-patient mode is the only one that a person, whether counselor or client, has encountered in life, usually. The client expects it; the counselor often does not know there is anything wrong with it. Hell, what else would they be getting paid for? Why else should folks give them money except for they telling them what they need to know and fixing them wherever one thinks one can?
Nonetheless, there is a mode of radical unconditional acceptance, as we learned it in primal therapy. It is close to what Tav Sparks — the current director of Grof Transpersonal Training — is getting at in his manual Doing Not Doing: A Facilitators Guide to Holotropic Breathwork. Hard to explain, it is, but I will in my forthcoming book. For now I offer this as analogy: I am reminded that as a one-time community activist I was taught that organizers do not succeed by doing what is needed to be done, but rather by encouraging others in the group, and then stepping to the side when an event arises, so that those in the community can be motivated to step up and can learn to be leaders and initiators of change. That in no case should one step in, even if failure results, for that precludes people finding their own power, their own ability to lead and initiate progressive action.
Well, the vast majority of healers and psychotherapists are way behind the curve in learning this, unfortunately. The temptation of wanting to be seen as an authority, to be able to label oneself a “professional” … the ego and the remuneration involved in that … is virtually impossible for most would-be healers to forgo. So, that point is important to bring out in this upcoming work.
The other aspect of this book, which I see now is also very very important … I think even more so as time goes by … has to do with the final movements in the spiritual symphony. This is where so many get stuck. My experience is that even primal people, not to mention folks in virtually all spiritual and psychological paths, get this wrong. If you have come here by way of The Secret Life of Stones, think back to what I said about the spherical path versus the circular ones, in Chapter 31 of that book. Virtually all spiritual and psychological modalities see everything in terms of “balancing” opposites or “integrating” dualities within the person. And there is a huge flaw in that. I want to make a joke and say it implies that being an asshole is fine as long as one does it only half the time. And while that hits on part of it, the problem far surpasses that.
Even in my “centered path” book, I stress that it is not about “balancing” or “integrating” matriarchal and patriarchal ways but forgoing them, for what good is it to make two mistakes, however equally? One is not benefited by opening to overwhelm, a matriarchal mistake, and then alternately enlisting ruthless body-bullying will power, a patriarchal error. What is best is to avoid both blunders and learn to surrender to an inner flow that has one naturally unfolding and effortlessly actualizing, not in a “balanced” way but in a seamless, though sometimes alternating, way.
Hence, as one would expect in models that are circular, indeed yes, they go round and round and go nowhere. For they are ever trying to fix the person prior to or outside the person’s engagement in the world. This is another aspect of the medical model. For the medical model does not only have the problem of authoritarianism coming about because of its paid authorities, but it also has a category of “sickness”; hence, withdrawal from the world is included as an aspect of that. So also do virtually all spiritual paths involve such a retreat from life. This is the “monastery” stage — the contemplative or meditative or therapy arc of the process of growth.
Now, certainly it is important to have liminal times for growth. Yet there is a problem in this as well. For what usually happens is those liminal times get clung to by sick people. Then to add to that, these folks are encouraged in their dependency by professionals who can hardly keep from operating out of motives of financial gain, since they live in and are constantly pressured by the demands of a capitalist system. Dependent clients make for steady streams of income, you see.
So a huge realization is missed: It is what I call the second half of the cure. And it is embodied in this statement, that:
It is only when one aligns oneself with a cause beyond oneself that one is truly healed.
For in doing so, one is lifted out of oneself into a larger, and higher, reality in which one’s Pain is not focused on, is inconsequential, hence becomes forgotten.
Another reason this is not seen is that professionals who might lead — whether in psychotherapeutic or spiritual milieus — are often ones who are themselves stuck. Indeed, they then are pied pipers. They are blocked themselves, are often unhappy and unliberated, yet they feel the need to pass on what has not worked for them … for regardless its barrenness of results, hell, they worked and paid hard for it! They tell themselves that it is okay for them to do that, for — with faith as blind as any fundamentalist — surely they will at some point, somewhere in the future, sometime, succeed in what they have been trying to achieve.
What is funny is how they sometimes will try to convince others — they will brandish it as some kind of badge of courage — that there are no real answers, as a way of rationalizing to themselves their failure and avoiding the necessary correction in their path that their failure is trying to reveal to them. Saying silly things, meant to come across as bravado, like “the only answer is there are no answers,” and such, they affirm their dead end in growth as a value. And they hate like hell any insinuation that there are actual answers and that they have simply been failures in finding them in this life.
This cul de sac is often the street signed, Existential Circle. Folks living there do not know of the freeways beyond where they live and try to convince you to live there with them. They would have you believe the “no exit” and “dead end” signs you notice are just more proof of their hardiness in living there anyway. Though perhaps being tough-minded in a losing cause is not very smart? However macho it might seem to be in some kind of existential no-nonsense “real-world”–worshiping way?
The other reason the second half of the cure — the one involving higher causes, fate, actualization, destiny, and atmadharma — is missed is related to that monkish mistake in that once retreat is taken as a value, one finds all kinds of ways to deprecate more active paths, paths of activism and service in this world. You will hear such folks decry politics, as in some egoic way of trying to put out that they are above that stuff, would not get their hands dirty. They refer to politics as “negativity,” perhaps, or “drama.” And they proclaim how they are superior in “not getting caught up in that” — those “petty concerns of this world.” However, in truth, it is simply that they are fearful of venturing outside their cocoon of the monastic, the fearful, the narcissistic, the self-obsessed — that hypochondriacal cul de sac they have made a home and rationalized as a value.
Regardless the reasons, all these folks miss the culmination of the healing process, which is expressed in the final stage of the hero’s cycle, when one brings back to the world what one has learned in the liminal state. It is related to what Maslow called self-actualization. It is parallel to what Sathya Sai Baba called the path of service (of seva, in the Sanskrit), which according to him was far far superior to the meditative route. Indeed, Sai Baba explained how the meditative route was not a properly fruitful spiritual route at all. That it was just a kind of way of doing mental spring-cleaning, so to speak. That it was only the paths involving service in the world and to society or to something beyond oneself that are any kind of spiritual paths. Castaneda in enjoining one to choose “a path with a heart” was saying something similar. In any case, this is what I agree with, what I think it is vitally important for folks to know, and what I bring out in the ideas on “the second half of the cure.”
So in terms of being healed, it is true in practice that one will not be really complete or authentic until one finds a way to bring what one has learned out into the world in some kind of helpful way, often by applying it to some cause of importance, often involving the relief or prevention of suffering to some beings other than oneself, for a change. This actualization of what was discovered within is clearly evident in vision-quest sorts of experiential cycles; it is the final stage of the Hero’s Cycle; Janov has alluded to it in his explanation of the “dialectic” between feeling feelings and action in the world; and I have written at length — in Wounded Deer and Centaurs, especially — how the myth of Chiron as the ever-suffering centaur, become the “wounded healer, is showing us this need.
And, yes, this activism is the missing component in virtually all spiritual and psychological paths. I touched on it in the first book of The Path of Ecstasy Series, as well, in The Secret Life of Stones. There, I wrote about the bodhisattva path, for example. Yet again there is far far more to be said about it. What I wish folks to get out of this upcoming book on primal spirituality and the primal process is the release into knowing that one gains oneself when one gives oneself. That sickness and neurosis and Pain cause one to look inward — that is fine. However, staying constrained and fearful keeps one stuck in misery and neurosis, in directionlessness and meaninglessness. What I want folks to know is that there is a grand and beautiful and fulfilling world out there in which to participate. And that at a certain point, far earlier than most folks know, the way to grow is to stretch out to it, to stretch past one’s Pain. And to align with something that measures up suitably with what one discovered within.
It is because spiritual paths tend to draw to them introverts that this is not seen. Introverts hate like crazy having to do anything that would seem to require something like extroversion. Understandable, of course. However, they then rationalize it is not needed and is inferior to them and their path. Yet this is out of a mistaken notion of what activism or a higher cause is. So this is their fear or prejudice that they need to put behind them in order to feel free.
By the way, though I am not planning a book on it, extroverts, who naturally embrace activism as a matter of course, have the complementary problem in the way they pooh pooh inwardness. Yet, as I have been saying in my books, especially Funny God, that is their tragic mistake, as well. And it is the one needing correction in order for actual success on the pressing problems of the world to be had.
Now, this notion regarding a necessary engagement in the world and alignment with a cause greater than oneself is something I wrote a bit about in The Secret Life of Stones in the chapter on gods being seen as demons, Chapter 34. I pointed out the hero’s cycle aspects of the alien abduction phenomena. And quoting Joseph Campbell (1972) and Keith Thompson (1989), I was making the point that a liminal time — a time of social “alienation” and living on the borders of one’s group, of retreat and reevaluation, of moratorium — is an absolutely essential stage in the cycle. But that if one does not come back to the world … one is “harassed night and day by the demon within,” in Joseph Campbell’s words.
This problem of emotionally sick people clinging to the liminal world — spending one’s time immersed in fantasy and in wishing things were a different way is the way this commonly manifests — is in the camp of what Campbell (1972) called the “refusal of the return.” Similar, though different, is something I dealt with in this book in detailing what happened in America when the counterculture revolution and awakening was crushed by the fearful and the powers-that-be of the second half of the Twentieth Century, which is in the category of Campbell’s “refusal of the call.”
The point is that one needs to take what one learns and bring it back to the world. It is only then, with the cycle complete, that one gets relief. Indeed, one gets liberation. And more important than those, one feels fulfillment in the surety that one has been helpful; and one is rewarded being at home in a place among the noble ones who have lifted the suffering of the world a tad. Knowing that, is the wholiest blessing of all.
In summary then, the book on primal process will explain how to traverse the path of Re-Membering described in the previous book on the four phases of self-discovery. It will explain the process, its permutations; and it will show how to “go in” — that unconditional acceptance and the primal process. But also it will unveil how to “come back out” — the second half of the cure.
Book Eleven, Authenticity Rising
The book planned for after that is one about current times and its cultural changes which involve a shift to the importance and valuing of authenticity. It is a book on “authenticity rising.” And it will show how the current state of the world in so many aspects — multiculturalism, mass media, social networking and the Internet, and the environmental and political and civil crises of the day — is pushing for more and allowing for more in terms of personhood.
I will show how this powerful and promising trend is raising itself up, as well I will show the powerful forces seeking to push it back down … to snuff it out. There is authenticity vying with conformity and the status quo. There is original and dharmic roles and living going head-to-head with the incessant, relentless demands of a material industrial corporate culture and its governments, geared to keep the masses compliant, unmoving, uncomplaining … but also ungrowing. Only time will tell who will win out.
Book Twelve, Return to Grace … The Crisis and Opportunity of End Times
What follows naturally from a book on current times and its craving for authenticity is the outer — or the social, historical, current events aspect of that. For not only is there an increasing hunger for realness and truth, the times themselves are demanding genuineness and integrity of us. No less than the survival of all life on this planet is at stake. This is the greatest crisis.
However, it is also the grandest opportunity for folks to find themselves and to participate in a cause beyond themselves. There has never been a time so ripe for personal fulfillment alongside and within a time so dire and having such momentous consequences. There has never been a better time for heroes to come forth and rainbow warriors to awaken. This is the grandest adventure of all time, the greatest story ever being told on Earth, and it is happening in our lifetimes. We are lucky to be here, despite the dark cloud of gloom and doom approaching. For we can never be better than we are able to be now. The brightest angels of our beings are being summoned at this exact time, like never before.
So this book, Book Twelve, will explore the unique and apocalyptic character of our times … in all its wondrous implications.
Book Thirteen, The Cosmic Overstanding … You, God, and Identity
The final book in this series, at least the way it is all being envisioned at this time, not only caps off the entire series in a kind of culmination, but it brings it back around again to some of the themes of the first volume, The Secret Life of Stones. For Volume I of The Path of Ecstasy Series dealt with the nature of Reality in all its components. And it pointed to some implications of that for one’s life.
Well, in this final book, I will put forth the greatest overstanding — The Cosmic Overstanding — of us in relation to the Universe as revealed in that first book, especially, but also all subsequent volumes. Whereas The Secret Life of Stones (2016) was about the nature of matter and Divinity, the final book will be about the nature of The Game, our script, and how we can be liberated within it. It will expand the ideas of “The Mind’s True Liberation” as put forth in Part Three of Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation (2015), as well as conveyed in Part Three, “Experience Is Divinity” of the book by the same name (2013).
It will do far more than explain the path of liberation, though. Let alone, give you steps to achieve it — that kind of direction and to-doing of you is something I would never do. Rather, it will embody it … embody liberation. It might also open your eyes to the realization that you already are.
The Path of Ecstasy Series, Summary
In summary these books are:
Book 1. The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. It dealt with the metaphysical nature of Reality as Idealist and panentheistic, as an experiential pool in which you, along with everyone and everything else is immersed. In which you belong, are never alone, and are noble. And in which ultimately, you are Divinity.
Book 2. Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self. It answers the questions, who to be? And, what is the real self? And it is concerned with our anthropocentric bias as a human, and the time of our adulthood back to our time as a toddler. Which is Veils One through Three.
Book 3. Dance of the Seven Veils II: Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self. It will be concerned with the questions, how to be happy? And, what is the Divine Self? It deals with the pain grids as laid down in us through our prenatal and perinatal experiences. Importantly, though, it reveals the joy grids, deep inside us and imprinted in us through our early womb experiences. This is Veils Four through Six.
Book 4. Dance of the Seven Veils III: Periconceptional/Transpersonal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face. This book will look into the actual nature of Existence. More importantly it will answer the questions, what is Naked Reality? And, what is our existence in the No-Form State? Which is the state in the place that is no-place and the time that is no-time both before and after this current incarnation. Naturally, it is the no-place, since it is outside of Form, or physical reality, and one can be everywhere in a place that is nowhere. However, since time is an illusion, it is also in no-time, which means an aspect of yourself exists in it right now.
The book also addresses what is the nature of No-Form beings and our existence in our No-Form aspect, our soul. Additionally, Dance of the Seven Veils III reveals the spiritual grids, which are the absolute earliest imprints we have while in Form, and which themselves need to be journeyed beyond. These spiritual grids are concerned with our cellular and soulular existences, and so, with Veil Seven, and beyond it.
Book 5. Womb with a View. This will be about how our womb experiences create our religions and supernatural beliefs and how those pre- and perinatal experiences show up in our mythologies, our spiritualities, and our theologies.
It will get into biology as both metaphor and mythology to elaborate upon what our bodies and our early biological experiences tell us about life, Reality, and our purpose and meaning of life … and how that is reflected back again upon us in our mythologies and religious beliefs.
Book 6. Cells with a View. This work will tell how our earliest experiences of life at the cellular level create our physical world and our deepest assumptions about Reality. It will uncover how these early imprints show up in the makeup of the world of matter and Nature, which we share; and of the time, cosmos, and supernatural that we assume.
Book 7. On the prenatal matrix of human events. Here will be laid out for review and insight how our late-stage gestation experiences configure our actions … how they give rise to human evil … how they are the origins of the brutality and atrocities of all time and how they are hence not our true human nature. So they can finally be gone beyond when that is recognized and addressed.
Book 8. On the centered path through hell and the way forward is down. This work will take up and strip away the matriarchal and patriarchal mistakes which mar a true apprehension of our journey. Hence it will also unveil a centered and safe navigation of our way through our Pain and dis-ease on the way to our liberation.
Book 9. On the journey of re-membering and the four phases of self-discovery. This one delineates the path of ecstasy to Self, or Divinity, as it is found in the transpersonal paths of all times and places. It shows how each of us travel from Pain and darkness to ecstasy and reunion, from the prenatal matrix to the cosmic overstanding.
Book 10. On primal spirituality and the primal process. It will reveal how radical unconditional acceptance heals and how anything less hurts or diverts. More importantly, it will unveil the necessary stage, the second half of the cure, which involves aligning with something greater than oneself — a cause, a principle, a duty, or a blessing — as the way to finally achieve release from the tortuous prison of Ego, of primal pain.
Book 11. On authenticity rising. This book will dive deep into some auspicious trends in our postmodern society involving the goals that the masses are fashioning and the feelings and personalities that are being valued. This craving for genuineness, this adherence to only the real, this no-nonsense insistence on truth … “Just give me some truth!” as John Lennon asserted it … could not have happened at a better time. And it is none too soon.
Book 12. On return to grace and the crisis and opportunity of end times. This book will bring out the unparalleled fortune of our times even as we stand on the brink of disasters as great as eco-apocalypse.
Book 13. Finally, The Cosmic Overstanding: You, God, and Identity will present the good news involved in a new paradigm as it rises up from all these understandings, and more. Consistent with consciousness studies and quantum physics, yet revealing a friendly and loving reality, it says what we can rely on, why we should have hope, and how there is no reason not to be happy and free, at this time, even as we apply ourselves. For we are always and everywhere assisted and saved, uplifted and loved, even “in spite of ourselves.”
Other Books and Series
Just an fyi, I have intentions for other series — some of which I have done already considerable work on.
The Stages of Re-Membering Series
For a very long time — for fifty-one years, in fact — in the works has been the elaboration, in four volumes, of the phases of re-membering or the four stages of self-understanding. These ideas, at this time hopefully, will have already been published initially in one work, as Book 9, above. These four volumes expanding on the earlier one — this Stages of Re-Membering Series — would include, again with sexier titles by print time:
Book 1. The Sensory. This describes the place from which we all start. It is a way of apprehending world and life where sensory experiences are all that matter and the sensory and the material are all that has value. Regardless what “religious” beliefs people have, we start with a “fundamentalist” view of the world of it being comprised of things. We might be the average person seeking, in the “venerable” words of George W. Bush, to “throw food on their families” (lol). We might be the careerist. We might be the religious-minded, thinking that God created us five thousand years ago in a Garden of Eden, who can’t wait to get lifted up in the skies physically when the Rapture comes. It could be the Catholic thinking that at the end of time God is going to raise all the bodies from the graves, refurbish them somehow, and then the lucky of us are going to get to hang out in “heaven” in those bodies. I just hope they have grilled cheese sandwiches, in that case.
And regardless, what is valued as a goal is the accumulation of sensory experience in life, as much as possible. So it is aligned with the struggle for wealth, as well, in that it is seen that it is money that allows more sensory experience — whether that is the finest vacations, the most elegant residences, the most sophisticated dining, or the most daredevil of stunts … or having the most accomplished of sexual partners, the most variety and amount of sexual experiences.
At this level of personal development, or spiritual advance, if there are any goals beyond surviving and increasing the pleasure quotient of life to the max, they center around stuffing as much as possible of different experiences into one’s life, having the longest “bucket list” and accomplishing them. The more parties, the more sexual partners, the more cars, the more planes jumped out of, the more motorcycles raced, horses rode, medals won, the more lavish repasts and exotic locales visited, the winner … or as they boast, those who are at this level, “the one with the most toys at the end wins.”
This is the sensory level of evolution back to Grace. This is where we start after having been diminished by the four falls from Grace as we came into this world. It is the one everyone knows; it is the one you are the most familiar with, even if you have grown past it. For we each contain it even if we supersede it. For these levels are not about different stops on a bus route, they are about expanding outward in all directions at once. So the innermost circle, this sensory one, is encompassed in all beyond it. It is integrated within one’s personality, even if one has reached past it to place the focus, the interest, of one’s life elsewhere and beyond it, in the domain of one of the outer rings from it.
As a stage of life, the sensory level is childhood. Regardless how we evolve afterward, virtually every one of us in childhood apprehends the world this way and has these kinds of values. As a spiritual experience, it is the one most are aware of, where there is enhanced sensory experience; sensory experience that is open and wonderful as a child’s, but which doesn’t go beyond that.
Book 2. The Recollective-Analytic. Some folks, however, enter upon a search for Identity in youth that involves more than simply finding out what route one might best take to acquire the materials of life and to draw to oneself the sensory experiences desired — the pleasures of the world including all the above from stage one as well as sex, spouse, family, and friends. Such individuals, instead, seek a grander identity and wish to know a more ultimate truth. And it might arise at any time of life, actually, not just youth. Especially so it might arise after the occurrence of a life-shattering tragedy. Often it emerges in mid-life, as Jung chronicled, when life’s material and sensory attainments are revealed as the shallowness they are. Nevertheless, it is an Identity stage that contains all the components of the one at youth, and some folks in youth do embark on it.
People often do not choose it — this opening into self-reflection. It is frequently forced upon one, rather, as a result of a tragedy: One experiences a serious illness or the death of someone close to one or has an accident, a career disaster, a heart-breaking love disappointment, or some other major misfortune. And this unexpected stumbling block on one’s well-planned route to material, sensory, and social success, this enforced “moratorium” from life, causes the initial inward turning. One wants to know “Why?” As in “Why me (Lord)?” “What’s it all about?” “What’s wrong with me?” “What did I do to deserve this?” In response one becomes reflective. One turns self-analytical. One begins the process of self-inquiry that is the initial and necessary stage of any and all spiritual or personal evolution.
This stage of spirituality has its corollary in the life stages as the student phase of life. Indeed, often this quest begins in college. However, the recollective-analytic as a spiritually evolutionary phase involves more of a vision quest, or of an existential search for meaning, than occurs for the average youth or student. And all things considered, this search for identity, for who to be in life and what to do, takes on the character mostly of a more profound and wider search — that for self-understanding.
Book 3. The Symbolic-Existential. This phase of spiritual evolution comes about after one has discovered some aspects of self (and Self) on the inner plane, through the previous stage, that one wishes, rather needs, to express and bring to the world. I talked above how this is a necessary stage in the primal process. Indeed it is, but in all other processes of growth it is vital as well. In terms of the primal process, the therapy stage would be the recollective-analytic above, from Book 2 of the Stages of Re-Membering Series; and this book would be the actualization phase required, or, as explained above, “the second half of ‘the cure.’”
This stage is existential for it involves immersing oneself fully in existence, in the game here and now that one came to human form on Earth to play. It is symbolic as well, for it has mythological overtones. This is the phase often depicted in mythologies, which portray the path, the journey, of everyman-woman through life. It is the life as lived by the “hero of a thousand faces,” as Campbell laid it out, and as exists in all cultures and is available for all peoples.
It is the facing of challenges, the overcoming of obstacles, the expression of what was discovered within and now in the context of society and the rest of life and the world. From stage one to stage two it was a leaving of the fold, the community, society. From stage two to stage three it is a returning to the fold, the community, the society, although perhaps not the same one. For as Tom Wolfe said, “one can never go home again.” In that case it is about finding one’s tribe and then participating in it.
It is dramatic; it is the grandest theater, for the stakes are high. It is the life that is worthy of a soundtrack, so to speak. For it is urgent and necessary to bring to the world what one uniquely can. No one else can do it. And if you fail in it, the world will simply lack forever whatever it is you came here to contribute.
This stage of spiritual evolution is full and fulfilling but stressful, intense, and all-encompassing. Failure in one’s task is the thing most feared. Not loss of material things or lack of avenues for sensory gratification. Not either is the problem that of confusion and wondering about “it all.” One does not feel here that one lacks meaning in life or considers life to be empty. There are always periods of self-reflection and re-evaluation at every stage. Yet in this one, one is not obsessed by that, is not paralyzed by that. One does not retreat from the world; one throws oneself into it … eager to do and belong in it. For here, at this stage, one knows enough about “it all” to know that the world lacks and needs what one can uniquely bring it. So responsibility is laid upon one’s actions as well.
It is the heroic quest, thus mythologically important, and it is in that sense “symbolic.” It is immersion in life experience; it is the experiential path of evolution, it is one where one is lined up with a cause higher than oneself … thus it is existential.
It corresponds to the adult time of life, though few adults in any society bring adulthood to fruition in the way it needs to happen in order for it to be a stage in liberation. But some do. Creative and spiritual people in particular know what I am talking about here. And when one fulfills one’s life and purpose in this grandest of fashions, the next ring of the circle of growth becomes accessible. That’s a crucial point of this whole series, by the way: Which is that one cannot “jump” to the final stage from the first or second stages, but must traverse each of them, all three of them, before the doorway to the final way of being opens.
Notice, these are rings outward, with each one encompassing all the ones that preceded it. They are not rungs of a ladder in which each step takes one further away from what was below and wherein the earliest efforts are left behind and forgotten, no longer feeding or fulfilling the ones following, no longer being a headspring for ever greater wisdom. No. Each phase is enclosed within every level following it. Each way of being, with all its advancing vision and expanding awareness, is integrated within more comprehensive and truer stances in life, that it is to say, in larger wholes.
So one edges outward along the circumference of one’s self, bordering on the Divine. Here is where the magic is palpable. One has grown in purpose to the point where it brings about the next stage, the Integral.
Book 4. The Integral. This is the one the spiritual literature talks about. It corresponds to the sannyasi stage of life in the Indian culture. It corresponds to Jung’s Wise Old Man and Crone archetypes, framed as stages of life and spiritual evolution. At this point one has fulfilled oneself in relation to the society; one has done one’s Atmic duty. One approaches the Cosmic. It is not about getting anywhere at this point, it is about being here.
As I said in a previous chapter, first there is a mountain, that is the Sensory. Then there is no mountain, that is the Recollective-Analytic. Then there is … this is the Symbolic-Existential. And at this stage of the Integral one has gone beyond even that, and one has merged into Self. And if still alive, one expresses and operates out of that Source. This is the stage of the individuated person, using Jung’s terminology. In the spiritual literature, much more is said about this stage of spiritual evolution than any other, for it is the one wherein one is on the doorstep of the “goal.”
However, that reveals a mistake as well. For although in Hindu culture these stages are reflected as the four stages of a human life, if one looks in the spiritual literature it is as if this is the only stage and one can attain liberation from any of the other stages of life. Whereas that is not the case.
We now know that one cannot jump from sensory experience to enlightenment. If one takes an entheogen at that first stage, the Sensory one, all one can expect is enhanced sensory experiences. At the most there is possible an opening to the Recollective-Analytic. The experience might lead to deeper self-reflection and/or the undertaking of a spiritual quest for understanding and liberation. It might even lead to a break-down that hopefully, sooner or later, will be seen to be the break-through it in actuality is. In such case it is termed a spiritual emergency, and it is not at all pleasant or comfortable … one’s self-esteem gets wrecked, for one thing … regardless how growthful and necessary it turns out to be. In any case, that is just the beginning.
Similarly, one cannot expect to jump from the Recollective-Analytic, the monastic, the student phase directly to liberation. That is what I was stressing in what I said regarding the book that will be about the second half of the cure. One needs to bring one’s re-freshed, re-newed, re-born self into the world and add what one can to it, in engagement with the community of souls and the life on this planet. One can do that in parts, for one should always keep one foot in the world of self-evaluation, but one needs to embark on self-actualization where and when one can. It is the dialectic between the two that catalyzes growth. One goes from self-understanding to worldly actualization and inevitably confronts obstacles. Leading one back for more self-inquiry; then out into the world again, to expression and participation; which sooner or later finds stumbling blocks. Leading one inward again for another stint at the drawing board, followed by another ad-venture, and round and round again.
Nevertheless, this fruitful and often ebullient process is not the Integral stage. The Integral stage is the dawning of wisdom, or at least the beginning of that. It is open-hearted beingness in the world; palpable reunion with all life, all Experience; it is both cosmic and community belongingness at once. And that can only come about through participation and immersion, fully, in the pulsing phases of expansion, previous.
The Quadrilogy, Remembering
The other series I have planned at this time has to do with the quadrilogy, the novel in four books that I have worked on over the years. The name of the quadrilogy is Remembering. It comprises four books. Book One: Leaving. Book Two: Looking. Book Three: Arriving. And Book Four: Being Here.
Perhaps these titles make sense after what I was just relating about the four stages of re-membering above? In any case, it is true these novels are fictional expressions of the ideas of the four stages of self-understanding of the Journey of Re-Membering Series described above.
Finally, I have plans to fill out the ideas of Falls from Grace (2014) in a series of four books covering each of the phases: The First Fall, Conception. The Second Fall, Birth. The Third Fall, the Primal Scene. And The Fourth Fall, Identity. Also, with no apparent series for them to find a home, are these five books in process: Prenatal Earth; The Primal Matrix of Being; An Existential Metaphysical; The Psychology of Generations; and The Secret of Men.
I am not going to say any more, and I have already said too much. For these plans are likely to change, indeed they undoubtedly will. What usually happens is these plans expand as put into practice, so that more books will be added. But you see here the grandest overview possible of what you can look forward to in the upcoming years. This is a look at what is enroute and will appear, barring unforeseen circumstances. That is, as they say, this is what will arrive, “the Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” Lol.
We will see what the Universe wants and what it will support. So far, It has wanted and has supported a prolific amount! As for the future, well, stay tuned.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I wish to acknowledge the love and support of my late wife, Mary Lynn Adzema. Half of this book was completed before my wife, Mary Lynn Adzema, passed away. Half afterward. Mary Lynn Adzema died on 23 June 2019. Truly her thoughts were threaded into everything I wrote, and they elevated the tapestry of words everyone sees.
I am grateful for the help of my history mentor at Sonoma State University, Peter Mellini, who, in 1993-1994, was in on and gave input into the earliest drafts of Part One of this work. I want to thank all those on Facebook and Twitter who interacted with and provided input on every part of this book, from text to cover, over the last eleven and a half years as I posted and shared its parts. The final work is much better for the thousands of minds that have thought it with me.
I wish to give a shout out to my family. I want to mention my Dad, Joseph Adzema, who inspired my work ethic and attention to detail and taught me the value of things. I am grateful to my Mom, Margaret Adzema, who demonstrated how a family could stay afloat and happy in any financially inclement weather and taught me the value of feeling and emotion. I want to express my love and appreciation for my brothers and sisters, Joseph Adams, Mary Ann Lewis, Chuckie Adzema, Peggy Pritchard, and James Adzema. They are responsible for my sense of fundamental belonging and provided me the experience of my first “union.” Surely, from them I learned the meaning of we’re all in this together and that what we do, we do for all and everyone.
Great appreciation goes to my tribe. For their kindly and familial support during the Covid pandemic, while this book was being written, I want to shout out to my drum circle family members, Marsha, Robin/Rich, Ray, Eddie, Lee, Syd, Randy, Dave Devore, Beth, Lee, Leaf, Marc, Lawrence, and all the rest.
Most of all I want to acknowledge the assistance of my life partner, Maureen Graves. She did so much and supported me in so many ways small and large, during the revision of this book in 2022. Indeed, my partner brought me food, cleaned my apartment, handled practical matters, and did many other things to free me up to work on this book. She is the one who first heard what I would write here as it would come out in revelations, rants, and obsessions. Her assistance has been invaluable, and she other than myself is the one who has contributed the most to bringing this work to print. I am forever grateful to this angel who has entered my life for her assistance, her love, and for her patience.
As I like to say, Maureen is my feet, when I cannot feel the ground. She’s my connection to the world of “things that need to get done,” while I’m engaged in scholarly pursuits. I wish to give a bow and sincere thanks to her.
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NOTES
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Preface to the Second Edition
- From “FBI Admits It Got 4,500 Tips on Brett Kavanaugh—Then Punted Them to Trump Team” as reported by Daily Beast, 23 July 2021. Available online at
- Cf., “Column: Obama too timid” by George Will, published on cjonline: The Topeka Capital-Journal, 13 March 2010. Available online at
https://www.cjonline.com/story/opinion/columns/2010/03/14/column-obama-too-timid/16504138007/
Cf. also, “Jon Stewart Was Right! President Obama Is Too Timid! He NEEDS to Shout From the Rooftops!” by Bonnie Fuller, published on Huffpost, 25 May 2011. Available online at
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jon-stewart-was-right-pre_b_775610
Cf. also, “Obama was far too timid for 8 years. His “centrism” hurt the USA and helped to elect Trump,” published on Glen’s Parallax Perspectives, 26 January 2021. Available online at
- From “Suspect In Fatal Shooting Of Portland Right-Wing Protester Killed By Law Enforcement” as reported by NPR and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) on 4 September 2020. Available online at
- From “Black Panther Party,” at Wikipedia.com. Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party
- From History.com, “The 1969 Raid That Killed Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton: Details around the 1969 police shooting of Hampton and other Black Panther members took decades to come to light.” Available online at
https://www.history.com/news/black-panther-fred-hampton-killing
- From “Jackson State killings,” at Wikipedia.com. Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings
- Ibid.
- 8. From “Kent State shootings,” at com. Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
- From “A 60-Year-Old Woman Was Killed After a Man Who Reportedly Had Radical Right-Wing Views Shot At Anti-Racist Protesters,” as reported by BuzzFeed on 22 February 2022. Available online at
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/portland-protest-shooter-radical-victim
- See “Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz showed up unannounced to the jail where several Capitol riot suspects are being held and were turned away. They’re now accusing DC authorities of ‘hiding something.’” by Cheryl Teh, published on Insider, 30 July 2021. Available online at
Introduction
- From Wikipedia.com, “2017 Women’s March.” Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women%27s_March
- From “Women’s March on Washington Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles” put out by Women’s March on Washington. Available online at The Forum on Human Rights, 2 February 2018, at
- Ibid.
- From Wikipedia.com, “2017 Women’s March.” Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women%27s_March
- Ibid.
- Many sources for this as well. From the website, Governing, 8 November 2017, we have a summary, “Election 2017 Was a Historic Night for Women,” is available online at
https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-election-2017-historic-night-women-candidates.html
- For more on the #MeToo movement, see “Me Too movement” online at Wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement
Chapter 1
- The Audacity of Hope (2006) is the name of the Obama’s book that was on the market during his campaign for president
- Tweet by Carol Lemieux of 17 August 2022 [emphasis hers], at
https://twitter.com/carollemieux/status/1560047292673040384
Chapter 2
- From “Washington in 1969 hosted largest antiwar protest in US history,” as reported in Stars and Stripes, 15 August 2019. Available online at
https://www.stripes.com/washington-in-1969-hosted-largest-antiwar-protest-in-us-history-1.593314
- While history records only 100,000 to 200,000 attended Moratorium Day in Washington, D.C., Wikipedia reports the D.C. event as follows, giving a figure of 500,000 for the November event. I explain in the text why I think even that figure is way low.
Wikipedia also claims Woodstock was attended by 400,000 people and that Moratorium Day attendance was “two Woodstocks.” That figure of 800,000 is closer to the truth, however still under. Wikipedia reports:
The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was a massive demonstration and teach-in against the United States involvement in the Vietnam War that took place cross the United States on October 15, 1969, followed a month later by a large Moratorium March on Washington….
The Moratorium developed from Jerome Grossman‘s April 20 1969 call for a general strike if the war had not concluded by October. David Hawk and Brown, who had previously worked on the unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy, changed the concept to a less radical moratorium and began to organize the event as the Vietnam Moratorium Committee with David Mixner, Marge Sklenkar, John Gage, and others….
As with previous large anti-war demonstrations, including the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam‘s April 15, 1967 march on the United Nations and their 1967 March on the Pentagon, the event was a clear success, with millions participating throughout the world. Boston was the site of the largest turnout; about 100,000 attended a speech by anti-war Senator George McGovern. Future U.S. President Bill Clinton, then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, organized and participated in the demonstration in England; this later became an issue in his Presidential campaign….
The first nationwide Moratorium was followed a month later, on November 15, 1969, by a second massive Moratorium march on Washington, D.C. which attracted over 500,000 demonstrators against the war, including many performers and activists….
The vast majority of demonstrators during these days were peaceful; however, late on Friday, conflict broke out at DuPont Circle, and the police sprayed the crowd with tear gas. The people of Washington, D.C. generously opened schools, seminaries, and other places of shelter to the thousands of students and others who converged for this purpose. In addition, the Smithsonian Museum complex was opened to allow protesters a place to sleep. A daytime march before the White House was lined by uniformed police officers, some flashing peace symbols on the inside of their jackets in a show of support for the crowd. The second Moratorium drew an even larger crowd than the first, and it is considered to have been the largest demonstration ever in Washington, D.C. The Woodstock Music Festival had drawn about 400,000 people in August 1969, and it was estimated by some that the second Moratorium had brought out a number equal to “two Woodstocks.”
President Richard Nixon said about the march, “Now, I understand that there has been, and continues to be, opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation. As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it, however under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it….
On Moratorium Day, half a million demonstrators gathered across from the White House for a rally where they were led by Pete Seeger in singing John Lennon’s new song “Give Peace A Chance” for ten minutes or more….”
Activists at some universities continued to hold monthly “Moratoria” on the 15th of each month.
From “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam” at Wikipedia.com. Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moratorium_to_End_the_War_in_Vietnam
- My works that in particular apply to ecopsychology are Apocalypse Emergency (2013), Apocalypse NO (2013), Planetmates: The Great Reveal (2014), Wounded Deer and Centaurs (2016), and Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man (2016).
- Global temperatures began rising in the late 1980s and was alarming scientists and prodding action to combat it even then. It was first presented to the scientific community in 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius with his paper, published as “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” It was predicted to occur; and it was demonstrated scientifically also back in the 1800s. For more, see “The Discovery of Global Warming [Excerpt]” in the online Scientific American at
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/discovery-of-global-warming/
- Helen Caldicott, If You Love This Planet, 1992/2009, p. 27.
Chapter 3
- These are the lyrics to “Sad” by Nirvana:
Rare song by Nirvana titled “Sad” or “Verse Chorus Verse.” Also known as “Sappy.”
Lyrics:
And if you kill yourself,
You will make him happy
And if you save yourself
Then you will make him happy
He’ll keep you in a jar
And you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll give you breathing holes
Then you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll cover you with grass
And you’ll think you’re happy
Now
You’re really in a laundry room,
You’re really in a laundry room
Conclusion came to you, oh … .
And if you cut yourself
You will think you’re happy
He’ll keep you in a jar
Then you’ll make him happy
He’ll give you breathing holes
Then you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll cover you with grass
Then you’ll think you’re happy
Now
You’re really in a laundry room,
You’re really in a laundry room
The clues that came to you, oh … .. (x2)
And if you fool yourself
You will make him happy
He’ll keep you in a jar
And you’ll think you’re happy
He’ll give you breathing holes
Then you will seem happy
You’ll wallow in your shit
Then you’ll think you’re happy
Now
You’re really in a laundry room (x3)
Conclusion came to you, oh….
- The Necessary Revolution, which is Volume 2 in the Return to Grace Series of my works, is currently Chapters 17 through 32 on my Culture War, Class War blog. It can be accessed at this link:
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/chapters-complete-21/
Chapter 6
- An extremely funny exposition of the effects of marijuana is contained in an album put out during the Sixties titled “Child’s Garden of Grass.” While its intent is completely comedic — at which it succeeds masterfully — it succeeds more than anything else I know of in depicting, to both the experienced & inexperienced, the most common effects of this trickster drug. “Child’s Garden of Grass” is available online at youtube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw5mvMJ-eUs
Chapter 8
- The events & statistics about this concerted effort are detailed in my book-in-progress titled The Once & Current Generation: Regression, Mysticism, & “My Generation” … stay tuned.
- I’m not the only one to notice this generation or to see the swings in political leanings from one generation to the next. Kevin Drum, writing in The Political Animal, on January 5th, 2008 called this generation the Eisenhower generation. He places this generation in time between the World War II generation & the “counterculture generation of the sixties.”
He describes the swings from Democrat to Republican — World War II gen, Democrat; Eisenhower gen, Republican; Sixties gen, Democrat; Generation X, Republicans; Gen Y (boomer Echo generation, Millennial Generation), Democrats. And he predicts a political coming of age for Gen Y in that year’s presidential election (2008), which is exactly what happened.
What I add to that is the obvious point that these swings coincide with the parents of each generation of these youth. Specifically, counterculture generation members voted Democratic like their World War II generation parents; Gen X youth went Republican like their Eisenhower generation parents; Gen Y or Echo youth are solidly Democratic in line with their Sixties generation parents.
He describes it as follows:
Democrats & the Youth Vote
Voters, like other consumers, develop brand loyalties early in life. The World War II generation, which came of age during the New Deal & cast its first votes for FDR & Harry Truman, sustained a Democratic majority for decades.
Likewise, the Eisenhower generation that entered the workforce during the fifties remains Republican to this day; the counterculture generation of the sixties & seventies remains a Democratic stronghold; and “Gen X,” the famously angst-ridden generation that started voting in the eighties, continues to vote Republican as it enters middle age.
And today’s youth? Surprise! It turns out it’s a Democratic powerhouse. In the early nineties young voters began shifting rapidly toward the Democratic Party and haven’t looked back since, even after a Republican won the White House in 2000. Today, twenty-somethings lean Democratic by 52%-37%, an astonishing advantage of 15 percentage points. It’s a bigger gap than any other generation currently alive, and it’s already showing up in the voting booth. Last year, not only was turnout up, but young voters cast their ballots for Democratic congressional candidates by 60% to 38%.
[see figures online at https://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.0.html ]
All of this might be no more than a temporary blip if it were caused merely by a combination of George W. Bush’s historically dismal disapproval ratings and dissatisfaction over a grinding, unpopular war in Iraq — both of which will eventually come to an end one way or another. But that’s not what the evidence suggests. After all, the Gen Y movement toward the Democratic Party began in the early 90s, long before either Bush or the Iraq war had taken center stage. What’s more, in a recent New York Times/MTV poll of 17-29 year olds, young people were actually more optimistic about the war in Iraq than the rest of the population.
[ see online at https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20070627_POLL.pdf ]
It’s true that they don’t like President Bush much, but the war really isn’t the driving factor.
So what is? The most likely, and ironic, answer is a different war: the culture war that was originally stoked by the Christian Right and then taken up as electoral salvation by Republicans starting in the early nineties. Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, famously believed the Christian Right to be the key to victory in 2000 and 2004, and recent Republican leaders from Newt Gingrich to Tom DeLay have embraced it with open arms.
But young people aren’t buying. Quite the contrary. For the most part, they’re turned off by the sex and gender fundamentalism that animates so much of the modern Republican Party’s social agenda. Polls show that most young voters are OK with abortion remaining legal. They have openly gay friends and are far more comfortable with gay marriage than their elders. They think that legalizing marijuana for personal consumption is common sense, not a sign of moral decay and the breakdown of western civilization.
So when Pat Buchanan declares that there’s “a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America” — as he did in prime time at the 1992 Republican convention — or when Jerry Falwell goes on national television and blames “the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” for bringing on 9/11, young voters cringe. and when the Republican Party embraces their agenda, they go off to vote for Democrats.
Over the past 20 years Democrats have found themselves consistently on the wrong side of conservative campaigns based on social wedge issues like these. But although these campaigns have produced short-term gains for the GOP, they seem to have done so only at the expense of long-term ruin. A generation that’s more secular, more sexually at ease, and more tolerant is increasingly casting its lot with the Democratic Party and is increasingly showing up at the polls to prove it. And unlike changes in the voting patterns of independents or soccer moms or other favorites of the political sociologists, this change is likely to be permanent. If Gen Y acts like previous generations, keeping its political loyalties essentially for life, it means that the past 20 years have produced a time bomb: an enormous reservoir of new Democratic voters who are just beginning to flex their electoral muscles. 2008 will be their coming out party.
Related article by myself, available online: “Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution Awakening Millennial Gen….” It is vailable online at
Chapter 9
- For a look into Millennials balanced perspective on psychedelics, check out the youtube video of prototypic millennial, Jeffrey Lewis, performing his inspired “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane.” It is available online at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lofpZIz190Q
Chapter 10
- For pics and additional information on the characters and manner of the way the World War Two Generation used their wealth and power to block the advance of the generation meant to succeed them, see the article, “America Since Its “Pleasantville” Fifties: Cultural Rebirth Aborted, Changing of the Guard Denied, The Elders on Life Support, and the Abomination Fills the Land,” on my blog, “Michael Adzema, Author, Pre/Perinatal & Primal Psychologist, EcoActivist” at
https://sillymickel.blogspot.com/?q=the+king+won%27t+die
Also see on my Culture War, Class War blog:
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/1-smoke-lies-50s-70s/ch-5-the-king-won%e2%80%99t-die/
These examples include,
For World War Two Generation
- Stephen J Bechtel, Jr., born 1925
- Richard Vos, born 1926
- Fred Koch, born 1900, died 1967, co-founder of John Birch Society, living on through Fifties Generation sons, David H & Charles C., below
- Stanley Hubbard, born 1933; Pawlenty donor goes to Bachmann: Billionaire media mogul Stanley Hubbard, a longtime friend & donor of the Minnesota governor, told Politico he’s now backing the Minnesota congresswoman. Read more:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61504.html
For Conservative Fifties Generation Followers, Fawning Fallow Fascist Generation
- David H. Koch, born 1940
- Charles G. Koch, born 1935
For Yuppie Freak WWII Gen Clones. Examples:
- Eric Cantor, born 1963
- Sarah Palin, born 1964
- Rand Paul, born 1963
- Paul Ryan, born 1970
These examples are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive. See also “Balance the Budget on the Back of Billionaires” at the bottom of Life Vs. Matrix at
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/chapters-complete-21/ch-27-life-vs-matrix/
which is on my blog, Culture War, Class War at
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/
Chapter 11
- See Foundations of Psychohistory by Lloyd deMause (1982).
Chapter 12
- Cf, “Common Themes from Myth and Mythology in Modern Fiction, Prince in Exile.” Available online at
https://hubpages.com/literature/myth-in-modern-fiction
- Cf., “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” by Amanda Robb, published in Rolling Stone, 16 November 2017. Available online at
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/
Chapter 13
- Cf., “REPORT: CIA Admits That Agents Are Going Missing At Alarming Rate” by Sergie Daez, at Daily Caller, 5 October 2021. Available online at
https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/05/central-intelligence-agency-cia-agents-missing-alarming-rate/
and “Leaked: Dozens of CIA informants killed, captured or compromised: Report” by Liz George, at American Military News, 13 October 2021. Available online at
and “Is a super-mole betraying the CIA’s spies? – The Times” by Ben Macintyre, at The Times – UK, American Military News, 8 October 2021. Available online at
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-a-super-mole-betraying-the-cias-spies-q7wcpjvs3
Chapter 15
- On how people are made confused, intentionally, so they can be used for the profits of others, at extreme, dire cost to themselves, you might want to check out the video, “Doubt.” At the time of publication it was available on youtube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDacrl1aSA
It is a fantastic video. I encourage everyone to wait for it to get past the cigarette stuff at the beginning. That is only used to make a much bigger, more profound point a little further in.
For the video is actually about climate change … and what climate denying corporations and politicians are doing to confuse people about it. This will end up killing billions at least, if not all life on this planet, in my opinion. Is that important enough?
- The Necessary Revolution, which is Volume 2 in the Return to Grace Series of my works, is currently Chapters 17 through 32 on my Culture War, Class War blog. It can be accessed at this link:
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/chapters-complete-21/
- Cf., “Sidney Powell’s legal defense: ‘Reasonable people’ wouldn’t believe her election fraud claims.” “Lawyers for the Trump ally claim she was just sharing an opinion when she said the election was stolen using machines built to rig races for Hugo Chavez.” NBC News, by Jane C. Timm, 23 March 2021. It is available online at
- Cf., “You Literally Can’t Believe The Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox’s Lawyers.” NPR, by David Folkenflik, 29 September 2020. It is available online at
Chapter 16
- You may want to check out the video of Helen Caldicott’s exhortation for Lefties to stand up and take action. It is titled Dr Helen Caldicott Protests Nuclear Reactors @ No Nukes Rally. It is available online at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCN-c4yd2LM
Chapter 17
- Cf., “Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3 October 2022. It is available online at
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
- From “Wonderful World,” a song by Herman’s Hermits, 1973. Composed by Herb Alpert / Lou Adler / Sam Cooke and originally sung by Sam Cooke, 1960.
Lyrics:
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about science books
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you loved me too
What a wonderful world this would be
Don’t know much about geography
Don’t know much trigonometry
Don’t know much about algebra
Don’t know what a slide rule is for
But I know that one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful world this would be
Now I don’t claim to be an A student
But I’m tryin’ to be
Oh maybe by being an A student, baby
I can win your love for me
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about science books
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you loved me too
What a wonderful world this would be
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you loved me too
What a wonderful world this would be
- Cf., “White House shines light on Republicans who are criticizing student debt cancellation after getting their PPP loans forgiven.” NBC News, by Zoë Richards, 26 August 2022.
“The White House hit back at Republicans in an uncharacteristic manner Thursday by using its Twitter account to go after GOP lawmakers who are bashing President Joe Biden’s move to cancel some student debt after they personally benefited from having Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven during the Covid pandemic.” Available online at
- From, “The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 “Bush” Tax Cuts.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, by Emily Horton, 23 October 2017. Available online at
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-2003-bush-tax-cuts
- You might want to step back and enjoy the humor in this as I did. This is my little, oh, “thank you note” to George W. Bush. The text is below, and the video of it is available on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wSvf1nWafw under the title, “Why Thank You George Bush.”
It is a satirical piece. A supposed admirer-fan-chum of George W. Bush encourages thank-yous for Bush’s “accomplishments,” which, described glowingly by the fan, sound quite the opposite to the listener. The fan has the most admiration for the great caper Bush “pulled off” at the end.
This comedic monologue combines the actual facts of recent history with a simple, unspun speculation of them, coming from the mouth of a fawning admirer who, for that reason, is allowed to elaborate on the shady dealings. So Bush, it is intimated, basks in the glory of having his ideas for illegal dealings praised as clever and awesome, or even cute.
This is political satire that will have you laughing from the total incongruity and irony of the monologue, but it will also leave you more informed and thinking. This is provocative, funny stuff.
[From February 2, 2010] Yesterday the airwaves were abuzz re: the CEO of Goldman Sachs taking $100 million in bonuses and thumbing his nose at Obama in doing so. Other reports this week are confirming the sleight-of-hand and shadiness surrounding the TARP bailout of the banks: Specifically, that TARP money handed out by Paulson was not recorded, let alone accounted for or monitored; and therefore it cannot be traced or even determined whether it went to benefit American corporations, let alone Americans, and not foreign corporations or even private interests or parties.
With these recent developments coming to light, along with the tea-baggers and Republicans continued blaming of Obama for everything from being born, daring to take the oath of office with unpresidential skin pigmentation, to daring to reverse the direction of the country from the cliff that Bush had so clearly left it heading for, it seems it’s time to revisit those days of yore, those nostalgic last glimmerings of a time when we had a government solidly on the side of the people, that is, helping them in keeping them comfortably distracted from the sight of the truckloads of loot being removed from the Treasury to the coffers of the Filthy Rich and the huge, oftentimes, foreign or international corporations.
Let us return, then, to December, 2008, and President Bush’s last couple months in office, and recalling those halcyon days, render our gratitude anew:
A Big “Thank You” to George W. Bush, with Admiration for “The Great Bush-Paulson-’Filthy Rich’ Caper”:
C’MON EVERYONE, JOIN IN NOW!: “Why, Thank you, George Bush!”
This is my little, let us say, oh, “thank you note” to George Bush for all his “hard work.”
Also, in appreciation of the “Paulsie Scam,” which we will be dealing with forever….
luckily it’s been arranged that won’t be too long….
“Thanks George W. Bush for all your efforts and “hard work” which have led,
your decisions and your Administration solely to blame —
thank you for being “THE DECIDER!” by the way —
to leave us in the midst of so many dire and rapidly expanding problems, so that many people are not just wondering if they will have a job or money, but that even if this planet will make it through another fifty years.
So, hey, thanks for all the hard work and for relieving us and all our grandchildren of any money, and….
oh, I see, there probably won’t be any planet for the little dears to live on.
And everyone dead and all….
Why, gosh, Mister W., you’re so smart, you probably knew that!
So that’s why you and your cronies went so far as to commit grand larceny even at the end, scraping out the last of any money in the Treasury — wasn’t much left for Obama to do with anyway, after your eight years of partying on high with your Halliburton and your god-only-knows faceless “filthy rich,” gang.
Must’ve felt like the ol’ times, eh, except for the cocaine. . . Er, I mean, I didn’t mean to presume, I mean, you can have cocaine, who am I…
Oh! What a relief, glad to hear you did not partake like the others. It’s just that….
I mean George, friend, my Man here, c’mon there were some pretty weird dancing and stuff and things — right at the end there — that had me wondering and worrying….
Oh, I get it, no cocaine, but wink, wink, you’ve got your ways you say? Hmmm? Finding things better than cocaine and getting away with it?
Well, heh heh, I’m not about to judge. I mean if we can have Rush Limbaugh asking for drug users to be hung up by their fingernails, even as he’s got a constant drip for a codeine fix, and he gets away scot free, why shouldn’t you have your fun? You always said it was haaaard work.
But I gotta get back to that stunt with the Treasury at the very end. I mean many, many a lesser, “criminal,” shall we say, mind would never go back again and again, let alone in broad daylight and in front of the entire world! Gad!
Was this all your idea to totally take everything while you could? Somebody else’s?
Anyway, it was brilliant. First, you enlist the support of that guy Paulson. Er, now that I know more about him, being worth $700 million, like and, getting bonuses of $37 million in 2005 and then 16.4 million the next year before he came into office with you….
Why, could it actually be that he was the one that talked you into it!!! Naaaaaaw?
Certainly, he’d have to be characterized as one of them “filthy rich” that you helped to create, making people wonder who’s really calling the shots in Washington.…
But, never mind, even if it was his good idea — and now I understand he’s had plenty of experience — being involved with the folks who did Watergate and all … way back in his early days … with Ehrlichman and all — so that — no doubt he’s got lots of good ideas, ya gotta give him that.
But, hell, don’t want to take any shine off your apples. No, it was you who chose him. and despite his background, managed to get him on your side and portrayed as one of the most well-respected men on Wall Street, at the time … I remember that well…. I’d never know about his background, and I was most respect … everybody said it was a big … a good pick for you? ‘Course that was the old Wall Street; ‘cuz we now know those bonuses and stuff aren’t too popular right now.
Anyhow, brilliant move, you put this man of yours on task for the high-pressured auto trading that you knew would be required to pull off such a heist.
So you had your guy Paulson, former head of Goldman Sachs … coming to take this position of Secretary of Treasury for you. And now we find out that none of that money went where it was intended to go and it did not change the situation but rather exacerbated it! Brilliant! More on that later, but.…
more on that later, but, Jesus! I gotta say though … pretty incredible!!? I mean, Paulson himself, gets like, uh, what was it … 50 some billion to a German bank? That then owes … Goldman Sachs 16 billion, and so he makes off with 16 billion on top, is that like.…
What a crackup this guy is being! I mean he had everyone fooled, and, in fact, there is nothing at all being said about his involvement or his possible effects on what happened, even to this day.
That’s smoothness even you and I could learn from , y’know, Mister W and … stay away from him, man…. He’s just tooo smart for all of us, okay, I think he’ll have … Heh, heh, I think he’s already had his hands in all of our pockets, heh, heh, I figure … (I’m sorry bout that) … But anyway….
Naw, c’mon, let’s, let’s … we wanta go over your accomplishments tonight, Mister President, I mean…. I mean … the whole thing … y’know, going to Congress, there…. Getting them to tally up that un-be-leiv-able sev-en hun-dred bill-ion dollars! … like almost a trillion dollars…. I mean they could not get that high, I mean….
Anyway … so we heard how you guys gathered these guys together in Congress … I mean how it was done, y’know, it was like … well musta been like one of those movies … like Ocean’s elev … like an Ocean’s 33, yeah! And. Anyway, so you gathered those suckers, those guys, in Congress together, who had the money, huh?
And, heh, heh, heh, y’know, like, we heard afterwards how you guys gathered, Congressional Leaders … and … without explaining exactly how it would happen — of course Congressmen could not be expected to understand the workings of economics and high finance like a Paulson could. So, kindly Paulson and his deputies explained using analogies, how nice of them to bring it down to their level, so sweet of them….
Y’know analogies … like this is like this, this is like this, y’know, and … yeah, like that….
I just want to say how cute you are, W…. I mean, it was just, soooooo you….
Anyway, the analogy they used was that if Congress didn’t cough up the dough pronto — perhaps those weren’t the exact words, my bad. But anyway, that the consequences — and tell me W. this was all you, right? — The consequences would be that of a “GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN” (tell me, that part was you, right?) a terminal global economic meltdown that would … (wait, I’m getting an inkling here … was this next part, Cheney’s?) “end modern civilization as we know it for the foreseeable future.”
Wow! It gives me shivers just hearing it. I mean there ain’t no auto salesman in his wildest fantasies that could come up with something so absolutely, well, disabling.
You guys really took those suckers in Congress “out by the knees”! How could they have had a chance!
And, boy, there’s that implied nuclear thing again … “the meltdown”; yeah. Doesn’t have to make any sense; I mean economics melting, but hey close enough. How clever! I mean that whole image of a mushroom cloud, why it just worked stupendously to get us into a war. And now, this being economics.…
Oh, my God, I see it; it’s like a Fifties movie — “Oh, please help, we’re meeee-ee-llll-tiiinggg. It’s the economics mel-ting!” Yeah, super scary. Heck, anything like that from Fifties horror flicks … just good stuff. Heck, you know that most people believe that stuff anyway. So, I see, you feed them what they always feared anyway. Brilliant. Brilliant.
But that’s my George, the W himself, going with what he knows. And, hey, why bother coming up with anything else, that card’s a winner for you, my man….
And c’mon, level with me, I just gotta know, won’t tell anyone else … Was that Cheney with the “end of civilization” part? C’mon, he’s already living the Wild West out there in Wyoming, he’s probably thinkin Mad Maxin it and everything … I mean, c’mon…. C’mon, it’s got to be him, that’s just sooo Darth Vader, who else could think like that?
Please tell me I’m right … I feel like I know this guy and that is…. Well, that is just sooooo him!…
Chapter 18
- From “Erlichman-Nixon and the HMO’s,” at Stripersonline.com, started by Tatonka James, 1 July 1 2007. She gives a transcript of a conversation between Richard Nixon and Edgar Kaiser and introduces it with these words:
Perhaps the best introduction to the Kaiser HMO and Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Plan is the summary by Mr. Edgar Kaiser that the less Kaiser does for patients the more money it makes. To get the full context one can go to the University of Virginia and review the presentation Mr. Edgar Kaiser (then Kaiser CEO) made to President Nixon through Mr. Erlichman – the less we do the more we earn. This convinced President Nixon to go forward with the HMO Act of 1973 with Kaiser as the template. The conversation is recorded below within the Nixon White House Tapes: [emphases in original]
It is available online at
https://www.stripersonline.com/surftalk/topic/175609-erlichman-nixon-and-the-hmos/
Chapter 19
- Cf, “GOP Congressman: FDR Caused The Great Depression,” at TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime, by Big Tent Democrat, on 11 February 2009, on Steve Austria blaming Franklin Roosevelt and tax-and-spend Democrats for the Great Depression. Available online at
Chapter 21
- From “Rick Santelli Started the Tea Party with a Rant Exactly 5 Years Ago Today — Here’s How He Feels About It Now,” by Steven Perlberg, in Business Insider. Available online at
https://www.businessinsider.com/rick-santelli-tea-party-rant-2014-2
- From “Is the Income-Tax Rate on the Rich 8%, or 23%? Depends on Whose Math You Use,” by Richard Rubin and Rachel Louise Ensign, in Wall Street Journal, 10 October 2021. Available online at
- From “Wealthiest Americans pay just 3.4% of income in taxes, investigation reveals. Tax records from 2014 to 2018, analyzed by ProPublica, show 25 Americans collectively earned $401bn but paid just $13.6bn” by Lauren Aratani, in The Guardian: US Edition, 13 April 2022. Available online at
Cf., “Fact Sheet: Taxing Wealthy Americans,” by Americans for Tax Fairness. Available online at
Chapter 23
- For a humorous, hard hitting aside on this callous attitude of Republicans, on behalf of the rich, and as contrasted with Democratic efforts, check out this monologue of mine, “‘You’re Turning Down my Money for ME!…To Stare Down…Who?!!’: Likely Constituent’s Response to Republican Governors Who Turned Down Unemployment Money from Stimulus to ‘Score Points’ Against Obama,” below:
[From July 2009] What a riot these Republicans are. There was Louisiana, Alaska, Arizona, South Carolina, and Texas governors refusing stimulus money to “show up Obama.” Then they turn around and ask for it secretly, or as in the case with Texas, which turned down almost 550 million in unemployment extension money at the time, only in this last week (7/14-7/18/2009) to ask for a loan from the federal government for about 440 million, get this, to pay for extensions on unemployment. HA!
Well, in this clip, I play a constituent of the Louisiana governor who went nationally to say he was going to turn down the unemployment money from the stimulus. Now, if you’re a Louisianan, and you’re on unemployment…hmmm…just imagine how freaking happy you’d be to hear that! Well, that is what I express in this clip.
Keep in mind this happened just after this governor had given the (horrible) Republican “response” to Barack Obama’s unofficial “State of the Union” address in January 2009. And this governor, Governor Bobby Jindal, at the time was being touted big time as a presidential front-runner for the Presidency in 2012.
You’re gonna love this response to the self-serving “more principles-than-brains” political one-upsmanships at the expense of their constituents by these Republican x@#&%$%#@@# governors.
The text of the “You’re Turning Down my Money for ME….”:
Okay, so now I’m one of those “constituents.” I’m thinking…
Thanks a lot, bastard, you think I got it easy? You jerk! Who the hell you think you are down there in Louisiana, Mister freaking Governor who don’t need no additional unemployment money. No, idiot! You GOT a job! It’s me that can’t find work and that’s worried about my kids getting sick and, well, now the almost certainty, by the way because of your stupid-assed spiteful action to turn down my money for me. Now, I ‘m gonna lose my house, worry about my kids staying healthy, but you’ve done what? You’ve stood up to Obama (the guy who was gonna give me money?) You’ve said we don’t need no stinkin’ money and made yourself a spectacle on the national stage and, you think (here’s that lying again. You screwed us over and then you’re thinking you can tell us that we were better than that or something or other of a slick confusing fog of insanity.), and you think that this will give you a leg towards the Presidency.
Well, Mr. Jerk-off turning down my money for me like it’s my pride your fighting for, do you really think we are still that stupid, still that happy to be burdened and crushed for your aspirations, which obviously don’t include, you’ve made that damn clear, doing anything for any person, any “constituent,” any citizen, no, not anyone, and it’s clear that our burdens are so meaningless to you that you will heap misery on us to do, now what was that again? You “stood up” to Obama? What the fuck, are you in grade school? Do you think I give a shit who’s staring who down? I’m trying to live a life; a life that you have just put a cloud of unhappiness and worry over that will not go away for many many years; in fact I may never own a home again.
But I won’t go on about things that cause your eyes to glaze over. Just let me ask you this Mister, wise-potato? You “stood up” to the guy who’s gonna give me money, and hold out his hand to me. Okay, Mister more principles-than-brains, what’s your next big plan? Oh, I see, you’re gonna stand up to, well, Santa Claus. Oh, yeah, I hear it all right. Out on the National stage; spoutin out as if you’re talkin our mind; shit, you ain’t even one of us. But I hear you:
“Nope, Mister Matthews, you see we’re Louisianans? Not beggars. We don’t need Christmas. We can take care of ourselves. Let you folks out there have Christmas. I mean, if you’re so weak. So you’ve had it your whole life and now you’re kind of like addicted to it. Well okay. I’m not going to talk down any on those who are obviously so weak and needy.
“But, you see, Mister Matthews… Mister Matthews, well let me put it this way, you ever come down to Louisiana? Ever? To visit or anything? You have? So you’ve met with some of our citizens, have you? You have. Well, then you know what a strong-willed, strong-spirited, and PROUD people we are down here, don’t you? You agree. So you see that’s why. I knew you would agree because it’s so obviously true about the folks that live down here, I didn’t see how you’d miss it.
“So that’s okay, let Santa go somewhere else where he’s, you know, where they’re the folks that need to have a handout and can’t get by the year without having a good time. No, my constituents are strong-willed, and they wouldn’t have me letting any squirrely funny-suited guy out here prancin around and lookin foolish. Well, not us. We’re not foolish. We’re PROUD.”
- Cf., “Sicko” at Wikipedia.com. Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicko
Chapter 24
- From “List of most expensive paintings,” at Wikipedia.com. Available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings
Chapter 26
- A lot of confusion about Boomers, Yuppies, & Generation X has been generated by the Census Bureau and mainstream media. A generation, see below, is defined as a cohort of people occurring roughly every twenty years who share some common viewpoint & experiences.
This is what a generation actually is:
Defining a generation
Strauss and Howe define a social generation as the aggregate of all people born over a span of roughly twenty years, or about the length of one phase of life: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and old age. Particular generations are identified (from first birthyear to last) by looking for cohort groups of this length that share three criteria. First, members of a generation share what the authors call an age location in history: they encounter key historical events and social trends while occupying the same phase of life. Because members of a generation are shaped in lasting ways by the eras they encounter as children and young adults, they also tend to share certain common beliefs and behaviors. Aware of the experiences and traits that they share with their peers, members of a generation also tend to share a sense of common perceived membership in that generation. For example, in a 2007 Harvard Institute of Politics survey, Americans born 1982 to 1989 (whom Strauss and Howe define as the first-wave cohorts of the Millennial Generation) identified themselves as belonging to a “unique and distinct” generation, with an outlook different from people in their 30s or older. Surveys show that Boomers also strongly identify with their own age cohort.
Strauss and Howe base their definition of a generation on the work of diverse writers and social thinkers, from ancient writers such as Polybius and Ibn Khaldun to modern social theorists like José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, John Stuart Mill, Émile Littré, Auguste Comte, and François Mentré.
– From “Strauss-Howe generational theory” in Wikipedia online, available at
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau definition of Boomers is different.
Why would it be different? That is the crucial question. The Census Bureau’s definitions of Boomers and Generation X is as follows:
The Baby Boom Generation is the generation that was born following World War II, from 1946 up to 1964, a time that was marked by an increase in birth rates. The baby boom has been described variously as a “shockwave” and as “the pig in the python.” By the sheer force of its numbers, the boomers were a demographic bulge which remodeled society as it passed through it. In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values; however, many commentators have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of affluence. One of the features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before them. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about.
See “Baby boomer” in Wikipedia online, available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers
Generation X (also known as the 13th Generation and the Baby Busters) is the generation generally defined as those born after the baby boom ended from 1965 to 1981. The term generally includes people born during all or part of the 1960s: According to Strauss-Howe generational theory, 1961 is the starting point, though other sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, consider it to have started in the mid-1960s. It ends in late 1970s to early 1980s, usually not later than 1981 or 1982. The term has also been used in different times and places for a number of different subcultures or countercultures since the 1950s.
– From “Generation” in Wikipedia online, available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
So why are those born 1961 through 1964 considered part of the Boomer Generation by the Census Bureau, which has informed much of the discussion on this in American media circles? Why is the Census Bureau attributing only 17 years to Generation X but 19 years to Boomers, when in fact the Boomers were born in a World War II “baby boom” that had them being born in a distinctly shorter period. Whereas Generation X was born of the Fifties Generation during a more languorous, hence longer period? Why is the Census Bureau including as Boomers those born at the end of the boom, in the years 1961 through 1964, when the number of births was decreasing, not “booming”? Why are they including as Boomers those who did not share or face the same historical and cultural markers that those who identify themselves as Boomers did?
I don’t know the answer, but I do know this decision by the Census Bureau has served pundits and right-wing commentators in giving more weight to their positions by diluting the distinctly liberal voting record of actual Boomers. As I have been stating above, there was a concerted effort to scapegoat Boomers and to confuse them with Yuppie–Gen Xers. This confused definition by the Census Bureau is part of that. It has allowed pundits to slander the Sixties Generation, as I said, by attributing qualities to them that were actually a part of the WWII Generation’s Culture War Attack of creating a generation different from and more compliant than the Sixties Generation/ Boomers.
At any rate, that is why we have the discrepancy shown in this description of the Pew Report findings on “Boomer” voting patterns. Let’s look at a few relevant findings:
Of greatest interest to BTS are the Pew Research Center survey findings about Boomers.
- In recent years Boomers increasingly call themselves conservatives. They voted for Republican candidates in 2010, but are still on the fence for the 2012 Presidential Election.
- Older Boomers tilt Democratic while younger Boomers tilt Republican. When asked to name the best President during their lifetime, Boomers were evenly divided between Clinton and Reagan.
- Younger Boomers and Generation Xers have been one of the most reliable Republican voting groups.
– From “The Baby Boomer Voting Bloc”online.
This supports what I am saying about generational voting patterns. The difference lies in that this author has to differentiate between late Boomers and early Boomers. They are opposite in their voting patterns. This person would not be so confused if he placed the generational divide where it belongs, at 1961, not 1965. Boomers were born between 1943 and 1960, with Gen X beginning in 1961.
The Boom Generation defined by Howe and Strauss, born 1943 thru 1960 are the ones who vote consistently Democratic. They are the ones who shared common events and experiences growing up and were shaped by them, notably the Vietnam War; the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations in 1968; the sexual revolution; the explosion of the use of LSD and pot as drugs; and the counterculture. These events were not on the cultural map that faced the ones born 1961 through 1964, for they were too young. Yet how can one define a Boomer-Sixties Generation that does not include these as formative experiences?
So this discrepancy is an example of what I’m talking about in this chapter. For it continues the confusion about Boomers and contributes to the scapegoating and the denigration of Boomers as being a Me Generation and Yuppies being former hippies by simply getting confusing results by including some from Gen X — some actual Yuppies. To include those born between the four years, 1961 through 1964, you end up getting the confused results this author gets. You are including the likes of Sarah Palin and Eric Cantor, fer Chrissakes! I’ve never heard anyone mistake them for my generation. It would have Barack Obama, born 1961, categorized as a Boomer, as if there is not an obvious generational difference between him and some of the notable Boomers in his administration, like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Yet by seeing that Obama is a Yuppie-Gen Xer, it helps explain the differences between him and the actual Boomer president, Bill Clinton.
For more on this, see “Generation Jones,” in Wikipedia, on-line, which is the term given for those born 1954 through 1964. It is available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones
Generation Jones are seen to be very different from the Boomers. They did not confront the same social realities as did Boomers. They even came of age after the Vietnam War. They missed the counterculture movement. It is ludicrous for generationalists to include Generation Jones with Baby Boomers as especially the second half of these have an entirely opposite world view from Boomers. Their stalwarts include Rick Santorum (born 1958), Sarah Palin (born 1964) and Eric Cantor (born 1963) … hardly Boomers. Notice that it also includes Rand Paul (born 1963), who as expected is the son of a Fifties Generation parent with whom he is allied, Ron Paul (born 1935).
See also the write-up on “Generation X“ in Wikipedia, which addresses this confusion as to where the dividing line between Boomers and Gen X is as well. It is available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X
Finally, see “Baby boomer,” online. Available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers
The article discusses this confusion and adds two important considerations: The person who coined the term “baby boomer” described them as those born between 1943 and 1960. So why did the Census Bureau change it? The second point discussed is that many theorists have two distinct generations during this supposed period of Census Bureau Boomers — Boomers and Generation Jones, which are said to be those born 1956 through 1964. So this latter group is not included with Boomers.
Is all this not confusing enough? Does it not play into the right-wing agenda to dilute their opponent’s power by confusing their opponent’s profile, so they can lob any charge against them? Or attribute any self-congratulatory trait to them, as they wish?
Most of all, this strikes me as devious in that it allows right wingers to blame Boomers for the cadre of youth, the Yuppies, who were actually their creation — that of the 1% and those reactionary culture war forces — and were in no way influenced by, so should hardly be included in, “my generation” of Boomers, the Sixties Generation.
- From “Jerry Rubin.” It is available online at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rubin#cite_note-6
- From “Who Killed Jerry Rubin?” by Paul Krassner, in The Realist Archive Project, summer, 1995. It is available online at
https://www.ep.tc/realist/130/12.html
- From “Who Killed Jerry Rubin?” by Paul Krassner, in The Realist Archive Project, summer, 1995. It is available online at
https://www.ep.tc/realist/130/11.html
- BLAM!! From the site, “Gallup Politics,” of May 8, 2009. Even though continuing the misinformation that Boomers were born up till 1964, going with the Census Bureau definition, Gallup Poll data still solidly support the premise that Boomers are predominantly Democrats, as well as the fact that Millennials are as well:
Although Democrats currently enjoy a party identification advantage over Republicans among Americans at every age between 18 to 85, the Democrats’ greatest advantages come among those in their 20s and baby boomers in their late 40s and 50s. Republicans, on the other hand, come closest to parity with Democrats among Generation Xers in their late 30s and early 40s and among seniors in their late 60s….
Demographers and social observers have made attempts over the years to classify Americans into generational groups based on the social, political, economic, and cultural environment of the years in which they grew up and “came of age.” The most clearly delineated such group is the baby boomers, generally agreed to be those born between 1946 and 1964 — or roughly ages 45 to 63 today. Generation X follows the baby boom and is generally considered to be those born between 1965 and 1979 — or roughly between ages 30 and 44. Those younger than Generation X have been labeled Generation Y or the “Millennials,” who are 18 to 29 today. There are various ways of grouping those who preceded the baby boom generation, including the famous sobriquet “The Greatest Generation” used by Tom Brokaw in his book of the same name, but it is convenient to label those who today are 64 and older as seniors (even though some in this group would no doubt resist that label).
Notice here that not only are arbitrary birth figures used to stipulate Boomers and Generation Xers, but everyone older than a Boomer is classified as part of the World War Two Generation — “The Greatest Generation.” So they would have everyone born in the forty-five year period from 1901 through 1945 to be WWII Gen even though some were born during the war and had their coming of age after the war and in the decade of the Fifties — those born 1925 through 1945. Elsewhere this generation has been termed the Silent Generation or the Eisenhower-Presley-McCarthy Generation … I’m calling them the Fifties Generation for convenience sake. Still, the study does find Democratic tendencies among Boomers, however wrongly defined, and Millennials. And it finds Republican leanings among Generation Xers, however wrongly defined, and the Fifties Generation, however wrongly defined again.
To continue,
The current data suggest that political party identification in the United States today follows these generational patterns to a perhaps surprising degree.
- Generation Y (18 to 29) clearly is skewed fairly strongly in the direction of being either independent or Democratic in political orientation. This group constitutes a significant weakness for the Republican Party.
- Generation X (30 to 44) includes some of the strongest support for Republicans. For whatever reasons, the Democratic over Republican gap among Generation Xers, particularly those ages 37 to 43 at the heart of this generation, is on a relative basis much closer to parity than for any other age group with the exception of those in their late 60s.
- Baby Boomers (45 to 63) skew Democratic in their political orientation, with the Democratic advantage reaching a peak at ages 58 and 59.
- Seniors have a more mixed pattern of party identification, with Republicans gaining on a relative basis among those in their late 60s, but with Democrats doing better as Americans age into their 70s and early 80s.
Bottom Line
Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans today in terms of overall party identification, and the data reviewed here show that this advantage holds at every age between 18 and 85.
At the same time, there are clear ebbs and flows in the degree of this Democratic advantage across the age spectrum. Democrats have the greatest advantage vis a vis Republicans among Americans at the very youngest voting age and also among members of the fabled baby boom, particularly those in their late 50s. Republicans do relatively better among those who are in Generation X, including in particular those in their late 30s and early 40s. Republicans also show greater support among older Americans in their late 60s….
There is … the hypothesis that the differences are explained by the unique circumstances that surrounded the coming of age of the generations. Baby boomers, as is well known, grew up in the tumultuous age of civil rights, Vietnam, Woodstock, and Watergate. It is certainly possible that these events have marked this generation in a more Democratic or liberal direction for life. Many Generation Xers came of age during the Reagan-Bush years (1980 to 1992) or the “Republican Revolution” marked by the 1994 midterm elections. Today’s Generation Y has reached maturity in a time period largely marked by the administration of George W. Bush, and certainly for many the nascent Obama administration is a major formative factor in their political orientation….
– From “Democrats Do Best Among Generation Y and Baby Boomers: Republicans do better among Generation X,” by Frank Newport, 8 May 2009, on Gallup. It is available online at
https://news.gallup.com/poll/118285/democrats-best-among-generation-baby-boomers.aspx
Now contrast what is said above in the Gallup Poll about Boomers with what is said here about “late Boomers,” or who Howe and Strauss and other social scientists would call Generation X, and I would call Gen X-Yuppies:
…the 1980-1988 run where young Late Boomers broke heavily for Republicans in the three Presidential landslides of that decade. When that generation grew to political maturity, it resulted in by far the most Republican-identifying generation in over half a century, the 1994 Republican landslide, and the general sense of creeping conservatism the country experienced through the 1990′s and first half of our current decade
– From “The Importance of Generation Y” online.
The article above also describes the Democratic voting patterns of the Millennials, or what they call Generation Y.
On the idea that the Millennials are the sons and daughters of the Sixties Generation/Boomers, as I continually point out, I offer the following definition of Millennials from WhatIs.com,
Millennials, an abbreviation for millennial generation, is a term used by demographers to describe a segment of the population born between 1980 and 2000 (approximately). Sometimes referred to in the media as “Generation Y,” millennials are the children of the post-WWII baby boomer generation.
A few things about millennials:
- According the U.S. census bureau, around forty percent of the millennial generation is African American, Latino, Asian or of a racially-mixed background.
- There are about 76 million millennials in the United States (based on research using the years 1978-2000).
- Millennials are the last generation born in the 20th century.
- Twenty percent have at least one immigrant parent.
- A number of studies, including one by the Center for American Progress, anticipate that millennials will be the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents.
- Millennials are also sometimes called the Net generation because (at least according to some people) they don’t remember a time when there was no Internet.
- As a result of growing up with the Internet and associated devices, millennials are often said to be the most technologically savvy generation to date.
Finally a most visible example of the right-wing/Republican Fifties Generation – Gen X alliance was shown in the 2008 presidential election with a Fifties Gen, McCain, matched with a Gen X — Palin, born in 1964, coming smack in the middle of the Yuppies (1961 through 1970). This is the generational alliance and the generational values we should be targeting, not Boomers, and progressives would do better to know that.
– From “Definition: Millennials (Generation Y),” on Whatis.com, June 2021. It is available online at
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/millennials-millennial-generation
- From The Myth of JFK as Supply Side Tax Cutter: Kennedy was a Keynesian, not a a Reagan forerunner.” by Robert Schlesinger, in U.S. News & World Report, 26 January, 2011. It is available online at
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2011/01/26/the-myth-of-jfk-as-supply-side-tax-cutter
- There is some scapegoating done by Millennials out of this misinformation. The following was published on 17 June 17 2012. It is further validation of the antagonism against Boomers regarding the issues of the movement — OWS & Wisconsin union:
9/11 and the “war on terror” became part of common jargon. Recently, the “war on women” and the “war on religion” are hot political topics. Now, I’m thinking there is a “war on boomers”….
I was sitting at a reception party table politely nibbling on a too-sweet slice of wedding cake chased with lukewarm burnt coffee when a recent graduate seated at the table started whining about how unfairly life was treating him. First, he believed that four years of (sheltered) college life entitled him to a first-class ticket to affluence with a side-trip on a guaranteed career path. And, now there were no job tickets to be had and (worse) he was expected to pay back all the money he borrowed to get in on this total sham. Life was so unfair! His debt should be forgiven — because it was only fair to be compensated for this bait-and-switch.
He continued his tirade. Boomers should be retiring to make room for all the recent grads that deserve jobs now. It’s only right. On top of this, these boomers with all of their massive wealth were actually going to bankrupt Social Security — a heartless action since they don’t actually need it. The injustices just keep piling for the new graduates with their superior skills and up-to-date knowledge. Down the road he had nothing to look forward to — once he finally got that plum job that he had a right to based on his attendance at an institution of higher learning — except huge national debt and no Social Security or Medicare, an unwanted and unwarranted gift from self-centered boomers.
And, now I’m starting to pay attention to what seemed idle conversation. I glance at the Count who gives me a look that says, “Don’t go there — — please!” I concentrate on my cake that is now too dry to choke down without more lukewarm burnt coffee; and wonder if Clueless thinks those seated at the table are in our 30s (or perhaps our 80s!) and am amazed at how he can find it acceptable to disparage all boomers while sitting among them. Generously, I wonder if maybe he just has a sarcastic sense of humor. However, Clueless continues. I smolder some and then catch the Count’s glance again. He slyly places his thumb and first finger on either side of his mouth pulling a smile into place — and I reluctantly accept his wisdom. But, the Count did get an earful on the way home.
- I think about Julie, a single mother, who helped two kids through college while working 40 hours per work as an administrative assistant, selling Avon after work hours, and running a food concession stand at weekend events during the summer. Julie has little in her nest-egg, but her children do have a chance at the American dream — although it will always require some effort.
- I suspect that John, another co-worker, was on track to fund his retirement. Unfortunately, at about the same time the 2008 financial crisis cratered his retirement savings his father was diagnosed with Alzheimers. John knew he should avoid using his tax-deferred savings at the bottom of the financial market, but his father’s healthcare bills had to be paid. John’s plan to retire at 62 is a dream lost to reality.
- I bumped into Mary Beth at the greenhouse when we were buying our bedding plants. She pointed us to the “spikes” that the Count insists on adding to the geranium-filled pots on the patio. As we caught up on gossip about former neighbors, she confided that plants have always been her hobby and that this “green” job was perfect. This temporary part-time job was crucial to replacing the family income lost when Jerry was laid off from his welding job — months ago. And, she laughed when she acknowledged that, in fact, “work” was a respite from a house now over-crowded since her daughter and family are living in the basement. I’m pretty certain that Jerry and Mary Beth — both boomers, planners, and savers — no longer have the luxury of maximizing their tax-deferred retirement savings accounts (or even the ability to set aside savings) as they approach the age they used to believe would be the end of their full-time working careers.
With investment portfolios and home values shrinking, medical expenses and LTC costs rising, financial worries for some boomers are dire.
- A May 2010 Pew Research survey found that 60% of Americans age 50 to 61 believe they may need to delay retirement because of the recession. Plus, the highest percentage of any generation, 57% of boomers, said that their household finances have deteriorated in the past few years.
- In 2010 the ERBI reported that only 13% of workers age 55 or older are “very confident” that have enough money to live comfortably in retirement.
- Some have labeled the boomer generation the “sandwich generation”, a group dealing with healthcare issues of their elderly parents at the same time they are backstopping the impact of the stagnant economy on their boomerang grown children.
Aiming fingers and lobbing blame doesn’t solve anything. We are all in this together since our generations are linked in complex ways. We are all fighting the same war of financial and economic uncertainty, just not on the same battlefield — as determined by our stage of life. A war on anyone does nothing but divide us — when the ultimate victory is prosperity for everyone.
– From “The War on Boomers” online.
Chapter 27
- From “Jobs & The Economy: Putting America Back To Work: The Recovery Act,” at The White House. President Barrack Obama. Available online at
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/economy/jobs/recovery-act
- From “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation” at The New York Times, 23 October 2008. Available online at
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html
- Cf., “”I’ll Occupy” Recruitment Song: The 99 is Pissed and We Will Not Be Dismissed!” Available online at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N5N8UzSRTQ
Chapter 28
1 Cf., “”Why billionaire John Malone’s shadow looms over CNN: One of the world’s most powerful news outlets has a new mandate — which happens to sync with the views of one of the world’s richest men!” At Vox.com, by Peter Kafka, 26 August 2022. Available online at
Afterword
- The Necessary Revolution, which is Volume 2 in the Return to Grace Series of my works, is currently Chapters 17 through 32 on my Culture War, Class War blog. It can be accessed at this link:
https://culturewarclasswar.wordpress.com/chapters-complete-21/
- To my knowledge the only other pre- and perinatal psychologist, outside myself, who delves into this time of prenatal malnutrition, occurring during the third trimester of gestation, is Lloyd deMause. See his works in References for more on this.
- These initial publications of my ideas regarding “primal spirituality” can be found online at these locations:
“Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process” (1993) at
http://primals.org/archives/newsletters/1993%20Summer.pdf
“Reunion with the Positive (Self), Part 1 (1995) at
http://www.primals.org/articles/adzema01.html
and “Creating Positive Scenarios’” (1995) at
http://www.primal-page.com/madzema.htm
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CULTURE WAR, CLASS WAR 2020 REFERENCES
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Adzema, Mary Lynn. 1990. as Mary Lynn Radford. “Unity Is Divinity” 157-174. In Transformation of the Heart: Stories by Devotees. Judy Warner (ed.), Newburyport, MA: Weiser
Adzema, Michael. 1970. The Dangers of Mysticism for Modern Youth. Unpublished manuscript. sillymickel@gmail.com.
Adzema, Michael. 1993. “Only Half a Cure: Unconditional Acceptance and the Primal Process.” IPA Newsletter: International Primal Association, Summer, 4. Available online at
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Adzema, Michael. 1995b. Creating positive scenarios: The other half of the cure. Primal Feelings Newsletter, Spring, 1995. Available online at
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Adzema, Michael. 1995b. Reunion with the positive (self), part 1: The other half of “the cure.” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, 1(2), 72-85. Available through sillymickel@gmail.com and online at
http://www.primals.org/articles/adzema01.html
Adzema, Michael. 2013a. Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call. Return to Grace, Volume 3. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013b. Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious. Return to Grace, Volume 4. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013c. Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths.” Return to Grace, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2013d. Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor. Return to Grace, Volume 8. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2014a. Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness. Return to Grace, Volume 9. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2014b. Planetmates: The Great Reveal. Return to Grace, Volume 6. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2015. Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation. Return to Grace, Volume 7. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2016a. Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man. Return to Grace, Volume 10. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2016b. The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. The Path of Ecstasy, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2016c. Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events. Return to Grace, Volume 5. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2017. Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self. The Path of Ecstasy, Volume 2. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2018. Psychology of Apocalypse: The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future. Return to Grace, Volume 11. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
Adzema, Michael. 2020. Who To Be: Identity, Authenticity, and Crisis. Eugene, OR: Gonzo Sage Media. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and at bookstores.
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deMause, Lloyd. 1982. The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots.
deMause, Lloyd. 1987. “The Fetal Origins of History.” In Verny, T. (ed.) Pre- and Perinatal Psychology: An Introduction, New York: Human Sciences Press, 243-259.
deMause, Lloyd. 1988. History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse. New York: Peter Bedrick Books.
deMause, Lloyd. 1994. “The History of Child Abuse.” Aesthema: The Journal of the International Primal Association, 11, 48-62.
deMause, Lloyd. 1995. “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23, 344-391.
deMause, Lloyd. 2002. The Emotional Life of Nations. New York & London: Karnac.
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Grof, Stanislav. 1996. Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed. Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, 2(1), 3-26. Available through sillymickel@gmail.com
Grof, Stanislav. 1998. The Cosmic Game. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
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Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes – The Classic Sociological Study of the Office Worker and the Bureaucracies. New York: Pantianos.
Mills, C. Wright, & Hans Gerth. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1956. Character & Social Structure. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
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Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four [1984]. London: Secker & Warburg.
Presthus, Robert. 1963/1988. The Organizational Society, rev. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Ram Dass, Baba. 1971. Be Here Now. San Cristobal, New Mexico: Lama Foundation.
Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, & Reuel Denney. 1950/2001. The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press.
Rimmer, Robert H. 1966, 1971, 1990. The Harrad Experiment: The Sex Manifesto Of the Free Love Generation. Amherst, N.Y, Prometheus Books.
Rogers, Carl J. 1961. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Salinger, J. D. 1951. Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Sparks, Tav. 1987. Doing Not Doing: A Facilitator’s Guide. Available at
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Howe, Neil, & William Strauss. 1991. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. New York: William Morrow & Company.
Thompson, Keith. 1989. The UFO encounter experience as a crisis of transformation. In Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, S. Grof and C. Grof (eds.), Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Michael Adzema is an author, ecoactivist, philosopher, psychologist, former university instructor, and psychotherapist, now retired, who specialized in primal therapy, breathwork, and rebirthing. He is a pioneer in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology and was the editor of Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology — a professional journal of primal psychology. He was the first person in the United States to teach prenatal and perinatal psychology at the university level, which he did at Sonoma State University in the early Nineties; he was one of the first in the United States to receive a graduate degree in pre- and perinatal psychology.
Michael also did doctoral work in psychological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego; elsewhere, he did graduate work in history, philosophy, Eastern philosophy, religious studies, and humanistic psychology. He served for years on the Board of the International Primal Association; he contributed by giving workshops and lectures at their conventions and conferences; and he was on the Board of Editors of the journals, Anthropology of Consciousness, published by the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness; and Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal, put out by the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health. Michael did training under, among others, Stanislav Grof, Jules and Helen Roth, Graham Farrant, and Thomas Verny
In the early Eighties, working as an anti-nuke activist with Oregon Fair Share, he was one of a small group of people whose actions led to the lawsuit that put a stop to nuclear plant construction in the United States.
His voice can be heard on youtube and other broadcasts speaking on topics of activism, spirituality, ecopsychology, the environment, prenatal and perinatal psychology, metaphysics, politics, primal psychology, and philosophy.
Over the last twenty years, Michael Adzema has managed and authored a number of popular websites and blogs — with articles posted numbering upward of five thousand and millions of views, to date — including Primal Spirit; Becoming Authentic; Culture War, Class War; The Great Reveal by SillyMickel and the Planetmates; Apocalypse—NO!; SillyMickel’s Blog of the Obvious Unspoken Things; and Funny God; among others. Currently, he publishes prolifically and often on his primary blog — titled Michael Adzema, Author, Pre/Perinatal & Primal Psychologist, Ecoactivist — at sillymickel.blogspot.com. Additionally, he has produced quite a few videos of his work, which are available on his youtube channel under the name, sillymickel. He teaches and publishes frequently on Facebook under Michael Adzema and on Twitter under Mickel Adzema, @sillymickel; and on LinkedIn under Michael Adzema.
In addition to Culture War, Class War 2022, he has authored the books, Who to Be: Identity, Authenticity, and Crisis; Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide; Dance of the Seven Veils I: Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self…Adult to Toddler; The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy; Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man; Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events; Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation; Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness; Planetmates: The Great Reveal; Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor; Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious; Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”; Primal Renaissance: The Emerging Millennial Return; and Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call.
The book, Dance of the Seven Veils II: Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self…Infant to Prenate is scheduled to be in print within months of this book’s publication, so in 2022 or early 2023; with Back to the Garden: The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future, which is the next volume in Return to Grace Series, and Dance of the Seven Veils III: Periconceptional/Transpersonal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face … Cellular to Soulular, the next volume in The Path of Ecstasy Series, both due, as well, out in 2023. Michael, now retired, is compiling and releasing the fruits of his fifty-three years of research in as timely a manner as possible, as he settles into his community activities and international efforts in his beloved city of Eugene, Oregon.
Since 2008, Michael has been disseminating, on social media, the results of his decades of research. Since 2013, he has been encapsulating that research in the books mentioned — thirteen, to date — with dozens more still in the queue. Concerning Michael Adzema’s life and work, a fairly recent and informative interview, available online, can be watched on youtube at https://youtu.be/2mm9OBbYjRE. It is titled, “Michael Adzema talks to Michael Harrell ~ Unfolding our Primal Gifts,” if you need to google it.
His books can be found at Amazon, are available on Kindle as well, and can be ordered through any major book outlet. For any published or forthcoming works by Michael Adzema, one can visit his Author’s Page at Amazon, for current listings and information.
Click for a free downloadable copy of this book, Culture War, Class War 2022: Truth and Generations”,with my compliments. You can also purchase your own copy, print or kindle.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
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*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
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Through Gaia’s Eyes, Eden Arise: Chastened by the Environment We’ve Created, We Are Forced Inward to Rediscover Our Deeper, More Cooperative Human Nature
Posted by sillymickel in activism, allegory, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, Humor, life, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality, US on June 1, 2013
The Heart of the Problem, Gaia’s Cure, and Back to the Drawing Board for Humans: It’s a Consciousness Revolution as We Rediscover Our Natural Self
Apocalypse No! Chapter Seven Nature Balances HerSelf
We Discovered the Heart of the Problem in the Heart of America: Our First-Hand Look Into “Tinkle-Down” Economics, Reagan-Style, and Where It Would Lead
Lest We Forget and Things Never Before Seen: A View Into Reagan’s America — A Place We Never Left, Its Dire Prophecy Still Unfolding
“Tinkle-Down” Economics
“This land is your land,” they sing. Taking them at their word, my wife and I spent a year, in the early Nineties criss-crossing our land in a twenty-three-foot Prowler travel trailer, pulled by an old but ambitious Oldsmobile with way too little horsepower. Our idea was to attend conventions and trainings in our field before we had to be in Northern California, by September 1992, where I had accepted admission into a graduate program. [Footnote 1]
So West and East, North and South we went—there was much to see…all too much to be alarmed about. This was, after all, in 1991-1992, the final year of the Reagan-Bush era when Reagan’s voodoo economics had played its course in distributing the wealth upward to the wealthy where it could be squandered on luxury items like yachts and overpriced objects of art and the trickle-down theory had shown itself to be a piss on the poor or, let us say, “tinkle-down” reality.
Correspondingly, the 1980s “party” was over. It left little money for government to do its job properly, though. The National Debt, after all, had nearly been quadrupled in this Reagan-Bush give-away to the rich. Budget cutbacks at all levels of government were in effect…and these cutbacks were grossly evident in what we saw.
“Neutron-Bomb Turf”
Similarly, the suckers…or coke-heads, or both…who had bought into the false prosperity promised by the Robin-Hood-in-reverse fiscal policies of the Eighties were now waking up from their mania with the hangover of ill-conceived schemes in ruins surrounding them. This was apparent in the places we traveled as well. All over Florida and Georgia, for example, we saw shopping centers looking half like ghost towns—evidence of recent bankruptcies or, my wife wondered, is it possible those spaces were never leased?
The only thing comparable in my experience I could think of was Springfield, Oregon, during the recession of the early Eighties. I remember well, while doing door-to-door anti-nuclear canvassing, how up to half the houses in a given neighborhood would be empty and unoccupied…the continual frustration of nobody answering doorbells leaves an imprint, I suppose…. 
We used to call it “neutron bomb turf”; and it almost—but not quite—served as an excuse for not making “quota.”
In Springfield, where the lumber industry was taking a beating because of the lack of new housing starts caused by the recession, people had moved out of town to look for work where it still existed.
But in the South in the early Nineties it was somehow different. My wife and I wondered if this plethora of vacancies had something to do with the S&L scandal: all those boondoggles…all those poorly conceived investment projects gone belly up, leaving only haunted shells as evidence of that mania.
.
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Budget Cutbacks
Rest Areas
Throughout the South, evidence of the cutbacks in services was everywhere. Too often we found rest areas along the highways so overcrowded we had to drive on for lack of parking. We saw tractor-trailers forced to park along exit routes, or side roads—anywhere there was space. Some rest areas had “two hour limit” signs—something else I had never come across—and others were closed down completely…”for cleaning,” allegedly.
I half expected to see truck wrecks littering the roadsides as I envisioned the plight of truckers pushing on in bleary-eyed exhaustion for lack of some place to pull over; or raising themselves up from a dead sleep, in a fog, with an alarm clock set to abide by the two-hour limit. I myself was rather dangerously dazed several times when, in the wee hours, we were forced to continue past eagerly anticipated rest areas that turned out to be barricaded or otherwise unavailable.
These imaginings of sleep-driving truckers barreling, obliviously, across 
medians and into oncoming traffic it turns out were premonitions, as a few years later they were proven to be horrifyingly correct. In 1998 to be exact, this problem became big enough to finally become a story in the mainstream media. Highway deaths, caused by a lack of places for sleepy truckers to park, were piling up in numbers too large to ignore any longer.
Of course, the media provided an alternative to fully acknowledging this truth—as they are wont to do—by laying alongside the actual facts a concocted theory that some trucking companies were at fault, for pressuring truckers to meet unreasonable deadlines for delivery. Regardless, scores of cars and other trucks have been involved in some of these accidents, including head-on collisions, with people dead and many injured.
But in ’91-’92, these realities had not been statistically blatant enough to make the evening news and went unnoticed. However our U.S. Congress was not completely oblivious to such effects of its cutbacks. “America can no longer afford to maintain its infrastructure,” they said in 1993 when they had the chance to appropriate money for ordinary maintenance. 
To get themselves off the hook, they dared to call these highway and infrastructure funds “pork barrel.” And instead they wrote laws to crack down on the truck drivers and their employers for overtime driving…now that’s gonna find ‘em a place to pull over!
Roads
In our travels we also found that roads were often bumpy and wavy—“these are supposed to be freeways,” I mused,” not side roads.” The “deteriorating infrastructure of America,” they called it.
Signs
Related to this, we found many roadways were not clearly marked and signs were out of date. In trustingly following them, we got lost a number of times. It seemed nobody cared out there; nobody was paying attention. I lost count of the number of side journeys and turnarounds we were forced to make. 
I don’t remember ever—in my fifteen or so transcontinental adventures over twenty-three years—having 
so much trouble with signs.
Often we were forced to return to the point of departure from the true course, and I’d examine the sign that led us astray. “Yes, dammit, the sign does indicate to turn here for that route.” I wondered if perhaps that was once the correct way but had since been changed without the sign being corrected.
Some Joke
And then I imagined all the other cars, of all those others who didn’t just so happen to live in the area and be aware of this anomaly, traveling up that 
side road and turning back around again…almost as if that were part of the route—to make that kind of loop before proceeding.
I pictured a local watching these cars, one by one, turning around in the course of a day. “Check it out, Mabel,” he’d chuckle. “We got another one.” Or, “Strangers in town! Strangers in town!” It is something to behold…smacks of human futility and ridiculousness.
Some Loss
I thought of the gallons of gas wasted in this way…of the jobs in maintaining these services—to keep things in working order and correct—that no doubt were lost.
I thought also of the huge sums of money now gone that could have been spent this way—money which was wasted instead for weapons to fend off a Red Menace that turned out to be a straw man. I recalled with anger how the warhawks tried to take credit for the downfall of Communism by claiming it a victory for their weapons-production policies, how I never heard it pointed out that the fact that Communism collapsed from within indicates a tremendous waste of money and poor policy to think that we needed to prepare to fight it from without.
But the Pentagon was not the only “bottomless well” in the Eighties. I thought of all the money funneled into the coffers of the wealthy in the orgy of extravagance that we taxpayers got the bill for as the S&L scandal. I thought how that money could have been used not only for signs, for roads, for rest areas…but also for all the pressing needs of our people, so neglected in the Reagan-Bush years.
So much for being the “wealthiest nation in the world.”
State Parks
And then there was the situation in the state parks. More than once we were prevented from camping for a night. We arrived too late at a park and were unable to enter—an iron gate barring the driveway.
We found other evidence of cutbacks: a cutback in employees; areas roped off and blockaded, not to be used. My mind liked to break into a “This Land Is Your Land” melody when encountering such barriers and fences; the overall effect would be altogether depressing.
Overpopulation
All this of course in addition to the other signs of deterioration: pollution of the countryside, over-industrialization, wilderness areas turned stinking and worn by commercial interests.
On one occasion while hiking in a Florida park, once more due to a lack of signs we lost our way. 
During the inadvertent nine-mile hike back to our campsite, we saw signs…at least there was money for these…indicating how the dunes should not be walked on because the sea oats would be worn down and killed—resulting in sand drifting, blowing around, killing trees, and destroying campgrounds.
And indeed everywhere we walked it appeared as if thousands of people had stamped beneath the trees, so that even the space between them looked like trails. I began to speculate on just how many people there are on the planet. Clearly the basic problem was there were too damn many of us here!
Gaia Heals HerSelf: So Far Astray and With Global Cabin Fever, We Are Forced to Look Inward and Go Back to the Drawing Board
Chastened by the Environment We’ve Created, It’s Back to the Drawing Board for Humans: Nature Balances HerSelf
How Far Astray
I began to consider how far we’ve gone astray from any meaningful or sustainable path for our species on this planet. 
I reflected on how the effects of the changes we’ve made—for example, the reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere that goes with the increase of carbon dioxide, known commonly as the greenhouse effect—how it’s been discovered that these effects keep people close to their unconscious pain, closer to their unconscious in general.
It is as if we as part of Nature are also regulated by Nature, that the very effects of our overpopulation and our straying from a cooperative ecological niche for our species result in consequences that are inevitably going to bring us back into line …one way or the other!
Going Inward
Knowing as I do that environmental pollution and lowered oxygen levels promote diseases, general illnesses, hay fevers, epidemics of allergies, and a general weakening of our immune system–all of which, since the Reagan Eighties, we are seeing in abundance—I realized that people are more and more being forced to go inward because they are less and less able to go outward in a healthy manner.
Chastened by the Environment We’ve Created
Another factor in this is that the deteriorating quality of air and the increasing levels of toxins that we ingest are also attacks on ego defenses, which has important yet previously unexplored implications.
As I said previously, both Stanislav Grof and Arthur Janov—and others as well, I am told—at one time used carbon dioxide to take people into a nonordinary state of consciousness where people would be more open to their repressed traumas, to their unconscious mind. They did this to help these people heal these traumas.
They found that slight increases in carbon dioxide inhalation invariably brought up primal pain and birth-trauma feelings—that is, repressed painful feelings from our experiences of birth and infancy that our ego defenses normally keep “safely” tucked away in our subconscious.
Consider for a moment what that means for those trapped in the pollution-ridden cities! Though keep in mind that increased carbon dioxide is an atmospheric problem that affects everyone on this globe. I recall a TV report when I lived in the air-chunk-city of Denver, Colorado, in 1978. At the time, Denver’s air was rated as being the second worst in the country,
behind Los Angeles, partly because the high altitude made for 
thinner air and thus higher percentages of toxins relative to normal air. Anyway, the TV report proclaimed how the number of hospital admissions for spouse abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, and related violence would soar on days when the air pollution index was high.
Air Pollution as a Psychedelic
Apparently, the reduction of oxygen in these situations acts similarly to a reduction of blood sugar or glucose to the brain, which results in an inhibition of the ego’s defensive ability to keep out unwanted information. Coincidentally, research has shown that this same kind of reduction of glucose to the brain is instrumental in producing the effects of certain psychedelics, including mescaline and marijuana.
But this reduction in defenses is not experienced or understandable only by those who have experimented with psychedelics. In fact, in at least minor ways we have all experienced it.
The workings here are similar to those in the common experience of being more cranky; irritable; irrationally emotional; more prone to depression, anger, and tears; 
more excitable; and in general, closer to one’s “shit,” when one is tired, overworked, or just gotten up from a sound sleep. In these situations as well the brain is inhibited—here because of fatigue—from being able to effectively fend off unwanted information, impulses, and emotions.
The evidence concerning heavy metal toxicity indicates that it, also, can have a similar effect at times on one’s mental and emotional state.
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Global Cabin Fever
Also, there is the experience of “cabin fever,” which many people are familiar with. We like to think that simply the fact of being cooped up for a long period of time psychologically leads to wanting to break out and be free, to be irrational and highly prone to emotional outbreaks, and in the extreme to result in delusions and hallucinations. But obviously this is not the case or else these symptoms would be rampant in other situations where one is contained for a long period of time, and they are not. It turns out that there are biochemical reasons—not simply the fact of being cooped up—which account for cabin fever symptoms.
Consider that cabin fever describes a situation, most often, in which one lives in an environment that is insulated against cold winter weather—thus keeping out fresh air. 
And in which very often oxygen is further depleted by the burning of oxygen-consuming wood fires in fireplaces or woodstoves, or oxygen-consuming coal fires…whatever. With this in mind one can easily understand that that environment is going to be increasingly deficient in its oxygen level as time goes on. Add what we now know about lowered oxygen levels leading to lowered defenses and eruption of unconscious content, and we can see how such environments can lead to the symptoms that, combined, we call cabin fever.
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When you consider that on a smaller scale, with the greenhouse effect, we are globally setting up the same conditions as that of cabin fever, we can see why there would be an emerging perinatal unconscious occurring.
With the entire world suffering a low-level cabin fever, it becomes even more understandable why there is the current fascination with escaping the Earth and setting up colonies on other planets and in other solar systems. This idea we see in science fiction scenarios of all kinds—consider the popularity of the Star Trek programs and movies. But I’ve also heard it coming out of the mouths of NASA spokespersons.
At NASA, they have considered building colonies on Mars! A multibillion dollar project—talk about high-cost housing! But this fascination and irrationality is understandable when you think of it as a symptom of a global cabin fever. Apparently, we not only wish to be break out and be free in traffic jams, we have magnified it to wanting to break free of our planet itself—as if Gaia, Mother Earth, were some confining, stifling Mother-womb that we needed to bust out of or die!
Of course, the other symptoms of cabin fever—being highly emotional, irrational, delusional, and prone to hallucinations—we have already discussed as being part of the furniture of our current global reality, so we need not go into them here.
Back to the Drawing Board for Our Species
But the consequences of all these factors taken together are inescapable: As we edge our way, in a myriad of ways, toward global destruction, we increasingly “sicken” ourselves both 
physically and 
emotionally/ mentally in the process. And this “sickening” is one of an eruption of unconscious material that causes us to psychologically “return to the drawing board” and seek solutions—both inner and outer—to our misery.
Eden Arise: Consciousness Revolution as We Rediscover Our Natural Self — A Deeper, More Cooperative Nature
Moratorium and Death as an Ally: Apocalypse Is the Teacher to Wake Us and Return Us to Eden, Our Natural Self
Down Can Be Up
Specifically, I am saying that inhibited brain functioning—whether through oxygen depletion, heavy metal toxicity, or other environmental anomalies—has the effect of 
heightened “mind” functioning…in the sense, at least, of lowered ego and defensive functioning. Thus, in the same way that psychedelic substances can open us to repressed perspectives by inhibiting “brain” activity, these environmental changes can be helpful in the sense of opening us up to suppressed individual…and global/universal…truth.
Therefore this “sickening,” this seeming decline or going down, can really be an “up”—in other words, it can be viewed as part of a necessary “negative” retreat for the purpose of bringing in new information and re-evaluation. And we may then create anew our more harmonious ecological role based upon this more accurate information.
Now, I am not espousing environmental poisoning as a technique of higher consciousness. But I am saying that apparently Nature…and we are part of Her…has ways of balancing HerSelf.
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Death As An Ally
In this respect I might note that our co-habitation with the bomb and with environmental destruction is a spur to our growth of consciousness in a way akin to the traditional spiritual paths that speak of the catalyzing power of “having death as an ally.” That is, that the realization of the imminent possibility of death, which is in truth our existential condition, has been known to act as a spur to taking life seriously, and spiritually, and to “waking up” in general.
“Pay Attention!”
The power of this spiritual attitude can be imagined by considering how one would live one’s life if one constantly asked oneself: “If I knew I was going to die tomorrow…or in an hour, or next minute, et cetera...how would I live this day…hour, minute…before me?”
Indeed, a lot of the transformative power of near-death experiences is known to come from their ability to jog one into awakening to the fact of one’s mortality—the precariousness of one’s biological existence. In this light, we might view environmental damage on a global scale, then, as analogous to the bonk on the head from the stick of a Zen meditation teacher, telling us to “pay attention!”
The upshot of all this is that with this degradation of the external environment we are forced to go inward, to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, whether we want to or not. Illness in general and lowered oxygen levels in particular lead to a rising up of people’s repressed emotional pain, and they force us to confront the roots of our motivations and patterns of cultural engagement as well as our social and relational styles.
Moratorium
This “turning inward” is the essential meaning of the “peace” symbol, when you think of it. The upside-down cross pointing downward in a circle has rightly been used to symbolize “moratorium” — in other words, a period of halting of action in the world because nothing worthwhile can result from the ways we are currently doing things, and a turning away from the external world and looking inside to reevaluate. 
It is as if Nature, completely unbeknownst to us, balances us, 
pushes us down to our deepest programming and back to our earliest “grids,” individual by individual, and that this forces us to reassess our lives and causes us to create more meaningful lifestyles, more synergistic patterns.
So in a sense Nature’s reaction to our misconduct is to cause us—by means of the psychological effects induced by the biochemical alterations that are the result of environmental changes—to create new social and cultural forms. We cannot help but do this. And collectively, cumulatively, it cannot help but result in massive cultural changes of one form or another.
Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances Herself: Eve of Destruction or Global Healing Crisis
Through Gaia’s Eyes — Nature Balances Herself: Eve of Destruction or Global Healing Crisis
Eden Arise — The More Natural Self
Many have proclaimed, in these strange days, that it is our Western estrangement from Mother Nature—our particular need to control—that is at the core of the threats to the end of life on this planet. In such a case, one needs to regain harmony with Nature and acquire a consciousness of cooperation, not control.
It’s Cooperative Not Controlling
As Grof has claimed—and my personal experience attests—such a cooperative human nature is indeed our most fundamental human nature. In contrast to the “me versus them,” aggressive, and competitive imprint that is derived from our traumatic and premature human births, this more fundamental human nature is the result of a more fundamental imprint of symbiosis with the Other, as was the case in the womb surround during the relatively blissful prenatal period. The relation of the fetus to the mother at that time is one of cooperation, all needs met, flow in <——> flow out, and synergy of intents.
And when, as an adult, we reconnect with this more fundamental human nature, this more fundamental imprint, it manifests in us as a tendency toward that same kind of reciprocal relationship—cooperative, synergistic, and mutually beneficial. Only, as an adult, the Other with which this reciprocal relationship is had is Society and Nature. For these bear the same characteristics and relation to the adult as the womb did to the fetus.
Our More Fundamental Human Nature—Back to Eden
Furthermore, as Grof and I and many others have discovered, such a more positive human nature occurs naturally in a person when they have faced, reexperienced, and integrated their perinatal unconscious…as opposed to what is usually done, which is, completely denying it, projecting it on a scapegoat or enemy and engaging in wars and social violence.
So it is the recovery of this sort of more fundamental human nature—one in which we are in cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with Nature, all life on this planet, and other humans—that would remove us from the brink of extinction.
Looking Through Gaia’s Eyes
When you think of it, when you consider that all of Nature—the whole planet, Gaia—is threatened by the actions of our species, and that that Nature would want to avoid this by balancing the elements that are currently skewed, it may be just the kind of global situation we see now around us that Nature would need to create in order to save “HerSelf.” It’s simple: We either change or die. Hey, why the long face!? If Gaia doesn’t look out for HerSelf, who will?
Acting Out
Granted, some people are not dealing in a healthy or positive way with the material that is arising. Instead of re-doing their basic programming, these people “act out.” Thus we have increased crime, aggression, hostility, one person against another.
And this fact is glaringly apparent in our big cities, where many who are not integrating this emerging information from outside their ego boundaries—from the unconscious—sadly are instead venting the energy of their pain—which our degenerating environment is opening up to them or giving them access to—in violent, destructive, wasteful, self-destructive, and pathetic ways.
One can also look to the grasping at racism, nationalism, and fundamentalism, which are not primarily urban phenomena by any means. These conduits of hatefulness are also a response that people are using to the feelings of pain, uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt that rise up, especially initially, in conjunction with these emerging truths.
Similarly, a great majority of people in general in our society are using drugs of one form or other to gloss over and obscure this emerging material rather than facing and integrating it. 
All in all these kinds of responses add up to a tragedy. And it is something that, if these reactions end up prevailing, could actually do every one of us in. [Footnote 2]
Helping Out
But about these others, what can we do—those of us who are changing our programming and creating new cultural patterns? It may be practical and advisable much of the time to just get out of their way if 
the ones acting out choose to kill each other off.
But we are often not able to “get out of the way” of those who are trapped in negativity. In addition, since we are all interconnected, we are bound to at least be indirectly affected by their actions.
And most importantly, since we are One and these others are actually ourselves in different garb, to the extent we are able to show compassion and be of assistance, we should not always want to step aside. I begin taking this up in the next chapter, “Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence.” I discuss more fully how exactly we can be helpful to these others, in both small and large ways.
“Eve of Destruction” or Scenery of Healing?
To put the current chapter’s theme another way: If we were to concoct a world situation in which we 
would be forced to take a quantum step in consciousness evolution by healing the nefarious elements of our perinatal unconscious, would not that world situation look something like what we see around us today?
Would it not be a world rife with obvious perinatal elements…and influences…with some people 
resolving and thus being healed of them? While others would act them out and self-destruct because of them…not to mention contributing to our collective global self-destruction, as mentioned earlier?
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In other words, the situation today, as it looks, could as easily be seen as a prologue to an apocalypse and just as easily be seen as a healing crisis 
preceding a massive consciousness transformation. Put another way, this same situation can be seen by one person as the “eve of destruction” and another as the “scenery of healing on the pathway to peace.” So which will it be?
In the next and final chapters of this book we will take a look at what are the most likely possibilities for ourselves and our planet, considering all that has been said so far. We will bring together all that we now know to conjecture: Apocalypse? Or Earth rebirth?
Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Eight:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Six: Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well
Footnotes
1. “This Land Is Your Land” is most often used as a form of feel good jingoism and heart-swelling expression of love of the homeland.
But this defense of the Fatherland is also, rather pathetically, a feel good denial and a counter to the reality of what we are doing to our land and our country in the US. The lyrics, as Woody Guthrie wrote them, are indeed anything but jingoistic.
The same thing has happened with Bruce Springstein’s “Born In the USA,” by the way, where a critique of the Fatherland has become a patriotic anthem by ignoring most of the lyrics except the ironic chorus. It has been harder to distort the meaning of John Mellencamp’s “Little Pink Houses,” thankfully.
Anyway, here is the unsanitized version of Woody Guthrie’s sarcastic “anthem.”
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
Woody Guthrie has a variant:
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.
“But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
It also has a verse:
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
From Wikipedia, “This Land Is Your Land“
2. I wish to draw your attention to something I posted in the last year bringing together these aspects of rising prescription drug use and rising social, political hatred-idiocy. It was in response to an article announcing evidence that antidepressants, specifically, Paxil, make one more “normal.”
“Is Paxil creating more people who aren’t self-reflective? More “Conservatives Without a Conscience”? Happy Idiots?”
3. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?” on the Primal Spirit site.
Continue with Apocalypse No! Chapter Eight:
Derailing the Cycles of War and Violence
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Six: Healing Crisis – Getting “Sick” To Be Well
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Eden Arise and a Message to All Wounded Deer and Centaurs: It’s a Consciousness Revolution, Aided by Gaia We Are Rediscovering Our Natural Self
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on February 25, 2013
Back to the Drawing Board for Our Species and a Call to Centaurs: You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting for … This Is Our Time … And the Time Is NOW
Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Fifteen: Eden Arise and a Call to Centaurs
The Heart of the Problem, Gaia’s Cure, and Back to the Drawing Board for Humans: It’s a Consciousness Revolution as We Rediscover Our Natural Self
Through Gaia’s Eyes, Eden Arise: Chastened by the Environment We’ve Created, We Are Forced Inward to Rediscover Our Deeper, More Cooperative Human Nature
Gaia Heals HerSelf: So Far Astray and With Global Cabin Fever, We Are Forced to Look Inward and Go Back to the Drawing Board
Chastened by the Environment We’ve Created, It’s Back to the Drawing Board for Humans: Nature Balances HerSelf
How Far Astray
In doing the research for this book, I began to speculate on just how many people there are on the planet. Clearly the basic problem was there were too damn many of us here! I began to consider how far we’ve gone astray from any meaningful or sustainable path for our species on this planet. I reflected on how the effects of the changes we’ve made—for example, the reduction of oxygen in the atmosphere that goes with the increase of carbon dioxide, known commonly as the greenhouse effect—how it’s been discovered that these effects keep people close to their unconscious pain, closer to their unconscious in general.
It is as if we as part of Nature are also regulated by Nature, that the very effects of our overpopulation and our straying from a cooperative ecological niche for our species result in consequences that are inevitably going to bring us back into line …one way or the other!
Going Inward
Knowing as I do that environmental pollution and lowered oxygen levels promote diseases, general illnesses, hay fevers, epidemics of allergies, and a general weakening of our immune system–all of which, since the Reagan Eighties, we are seeing in abundance—I realized that people are more and more being forced to go inward because they are less and less able to go outward in a healthy manner.
Chastened by the Environment We’ve Created
Another factor in this is that the deteriorating quality of air and the increasing levels of toxins that we ingest are also attacks on ego defenses, which has important yet previously unexplored implications.
As I said previously, both Stanislav Grof and Arthur Janov—and others as well, I am told—at one time used carbon dioxide to take people into a nonordinary state of consciousness where people would be more open to their repressed traumas, to their unconscious mind. They did this to help these people heal these traumas.
They found that slight increases in carbon dioxide inhalation invariably brought up primal pain and birth-trauma feelings—that is, repressed painful feelings from our experiences of birth and infancy that our ego defenses normally keep “safely” tucked away in our subconscious.
Consider for a moment what that means for those trapped in the pollution-ridden cities! Though keep in mind that increased carbon dioxide is an atmospheric problem that affects everyone on this globe. I recall a TV report when I lived in the air-chunk-city of Denver, Colorado, in 1978. At the time, Denver’s air was rated as being the second worst in the country, behind Los Angeles, partly because the high altitude made for thinner air and thus higher percentages of toxins relative to normal air. Anyway, the TV report proclaimed how the number of hospital admissions for spouse abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, and related violence would soar on days when the air pollution index was high.
Air Pollution as a Psychedelic
Apparently, the reduction of oxygen in these situations acts similarly to a reduction of blood sugar or glucose to the brain, which results in an inhibition of the ego’s defensive ability to keep out unwanted information. Coincidentally, research has shown that this same kind of reduction of glucose to the brain is instrumental in producing the effects of certain psychedelics, including mescaline and marijuana.
But this reduction in defenses is not experienced or understandable only by those who have experimented with psychedelics. In fact, in at least minor ways we have all experienced it.
The workings here are similar to those in the common experience of being more cranky; irritable; irrationally emotional; more prone to depression, anger, and tears; more excitable; and in general, closer to one’s “shit,” when one is tired, overworked, or just gotten up from a sound sleep. In these situations as well the brain is inhibited—here because of fatigue—from being able to effectively fend off unwanted information, impulses, and emotions.
The evidence concerning heavy metal toxicity indicates that it, also, can have a similar effect at times on one’s mental and emotional state.
Global Cabin Fever
Also, there is the experience of “cabin fever,” which many people are familiar with. We like to think that simply the fact of being cooped up for a long period of time psychologically leads to wanting to break out and be free, to be irrational and highly prone to emotional outbreaks, and in the extreme to result in delusions and hallucinations. But obviously this is not the case or else these symptoms would be rampant in other situations where one is contained for a long period of time, and they are not. It turns out that there are biochemical reasons—not simply the fact of being cooped up—which account for cabin fever symptoms.
Consider that cabin fever describes a situation, most often, in which one lives in an environment that is insulated against cold winter weather—thus keeping out fresh air. And in which very often oxygen is further depleted by the burning of oxygen-consuming wood fires in fireplaces or woodstoves, or oxygen-consuming coal fires…whatever. With this in mind one can easily understand that that environment is going to be increasingly deficient in its oxygen level as time goes on. Add what we now know about lowered oxygen levels leading to lowered defenses and eruption of unconscious content, and we can see how such environments can lead to the symptoms that, combined, we call cabin fever.
When you consider that on a smaller scale, with the greenhouse effect, we are globally setting up the same conditions as that of cabin fever, we can see why there would be an emerging perinatal unconscious occurring.
With the entire world suffering a low-level cabin fever, it becomes even more understandable why there is the current fascination with escaping the Earth and setting up colonies on other planets and in other solar systems. This idea we see in science fiction scenarios of all kinds—consider the popularity of the Star Trek programs and movies. But I’ve also heard it coming out of the mouths of NASA spokespersons.
At NASA, they have considered building colonies on Mars! A multibillion dollar project—talk about high-cost housing! But this fascination and irrationality is understandable when you think of it as a symptom of a global cabin fever. Apparently, we not only wish to be break out and be free in traffic jams, we have magnified it to wanting to break free of our planet itself—as if Gaia, Mother Earth, were some confining, stifling Mother-womb that we needed to bust out of or die!
Of course, the other symptoms of cabin fever—being highly emotional, irrational, delusional, and prone to hallucinations—we have already discussed as being part of the furniture of our current global reality, so we need not go into them here.
Back to the Drawing Board for Our Species
But the consequences of all these factors taken together are inescapable: As we edge our way, in a myriad of ways, toward global destruction, we increasingly “sicken” ourselves both physically and emotionally/ mentally in the process. And this “sickening” is one of an eruption of unconscious material that causes us to psychologically “return to the drawing board” and seek solutions—both inner and outer—to our misery.
Eden Arise: Consciousness Revolution as We Rediscover Our Natural Self — A Deeper, More Cooperative Nature
Moratorium and Death as an Ally: Apocalypse Is the Teacher to Wake Us and Return Us to Eden, Our Natural Self
Down Can Be Up
Specifically, I am saying that inhibited brain functioning—whether through oxygen depletion, heavy metal toxicity, or other environmental anomalies—has the effect of heightened “mind” functioning…in the sense, at least, of lowered ego and defensive functioning. Thus, in the same way that psychedelic substances can open us to repressed perspectives by inhibiting “brain” activity, these environmental changes can be helpful in the sense of opening us up to suppressed individual…and global/universal…truth.
Therefore this “sickening,” this seeming decline or going down, can really be an “up”—in other words, it can be viewed as part of a necessary “negative” retreat for the purpose of bringing in new information and re-evaluation. And we may then create anew our more harmonious ecological role based upon this more accurate information.
Now, I am not espousing environmental poisoning as a technique of higher consciousness. But I am saying that apparently Nature…and we are part of Her…has ways of balancing HerSelf.
Death As An Ally
In this respect I might note that our co-habitation with the bomb and with environmental destruction is a spur to our growth of consciousness in a way akin to the traditional spiritual paths that speak of the catalyzing power of “having death as an ally.” That is, that the realization of the imminent possibility of death, which is in truth our existential condition, has been known to act as a spur to taking life seriously, and spiritually, and to “waking up” in general.
“Pay Attention!”
The power of this spiritual attitude can be imagined by considering how one would live one’s life if one constantly asked oneself: “If I knew I was going to die tomorrow…or in an hour, or next minute, et cetera...how would I live this day…hour, minute…before me?”
Indeed, a lot of the transformative power of near-death experiences is known to come from their ability to jog one into awakening to the fact of one’s mortality—the precariousness of one’s biological existence. In this light, we might view environmental damage on a global scale, then, as analogous to the bonk on the head from the stick of a Zen meditation teacher, telling us to “pay attention!”
The upshot of all this is that with this degradation of the external environment we are forced to go inward, to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, whether we want to or not. Illness in general and lowered oxygen levels in particular lead to a rising up of people’s repressed emotional pain, and they force us to confront the roots of our motivations and patterns of cultural engagement as well as our social and relational styles.
Moratorium
This “turning inward” is the essential meaning of the “peace” symbol, when you think of it. The upside-down cross pointing downward in a circle has rightly been used to symbolize “moratorium” — in other words, a period of halting of action in the world because nothing worthwhile can result from the ways we are currently doing things, and a turning away from the external world and looking inside to reevaluate. It is as if Nature, completely unbeknownst to us, balances us, pushes us down to our deepest programming and back to our earliest “grids,” individual by individual, and that this forces us to reassess our lives and causes us to create more meaningful lifestyles, more synergistic patterns.
So in a sense Nature’s reaction to our misconduct is to cause us—by means of the psychological effects induced by the biochemical alterations that are the result of environmental changes—to create new social and cultural forms. We cannot help but do this. And collectively, cumulatively, it cannot help but result in massive cultural changes of one form or another.
Through Gaia’s Eyes – Nature Balances Herself: Eve of Destruction or Global Healing Crisis
Eden Arise — The More Natural Self
Many have proclaimed, in these strange days, that it is our Western estrangement from Mother Nature—our particular need to control—that is at the core of the threats to the end of life on this planet. In such a case, one needs to regain harmony with Nature and acquire a consciousness of cooperation, not control.
It’s Cooperative Not Controlling
As Grof has claimed—and my personal experience attests—such a cooperative human nature is indeed our most fundamental human nature. In contrast to the “me versus them,” aggressive, and competitive imprint that is derived from our traumatic and premature human births, this more fundamental human nature is the result of a more fundamental imprint of symbiosis with the Other, as was the case in the womb surround during the relatively blissful prenatal period. The relation of the fetus to the mother at that time is one of cooperation, all needs met, flow in <——> flow out, and synergy of intents.
And when, as an adult, we reconnect with this more fundamental human nature, this more fundamental imprint, it manifests in us as a tendency toward that same kind of reciprocal relationship—cooperative, synergistic, and mutually beneficial. Only, as an adult, the Other with which this reciprocal relationship is had is Society and Nature. For these bear the same characteristics and relation to the adult as the womb did to the fetus.
Our More Fundamental Human Nature—Back to Eden
Furthermore, as Grof and I and many others have discovered, such a more positive human nature occurs naturally in a person when they have faced, reexperienced, and integrated their perinatal unconscious…as opposed to what is usually done, which is, completely denying it, projecting it on a scapegoat or enemy and engaging in wars and social violence.
So it is the recovery of this sort of more fundamental human nature—one in which we are in cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with Nature, all life on this planet, and other humans—that would remove us from the brink of extinction.
Looking Through Gaia’s Eyes
When you think of it, when you consider that all of Nature—the whole planet, Gaia—is threatened by the actions of our species, and that that Nature would want to avoid this by balancing the elements that are currently skewed, it may be just the kind of global situation we see now around us that Nature would need to create in order to save “HerSelf.” It’s simple: We either change or die. Hey, why the long face!? If Gaia doesn’t look out for HerSelf, who will?
Acting Out
Granted, some people are not dealing in a healthy or positive way with the material that is arising. Instead of re-doing their basic programming, these people “act out.” Thus we have increased crime, aggression, hostility, one person against another.
And this fact is glaringly apparent in our big cities, where many who are not integrating this emerging information from outside their ego boundaries—from the unconscious—sadly are instead venting the energy of their pain—which our degenerating environment is opening up to them or giving them access to—in violent, destructive, wasteful, self-destructive, and pathetic ways.
One can also look to the grasping at racism, nationalism, and fundamentalism, which are not primarily urban phenomena by any means. These conduits of hatefulness are also a response that people are using to the feelings of pain, uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt that rise up, especially initially, in conjunction with these emerging truths.
Similarly, a great majority of people in general in our society are using drugs of one form or other to gloss over and obscure this emerging material rather than facing and integrating it. All in all these kinds of responses add up to a tragedy. And it is something that, if these reactions end up prevailing, could actually do every one of us in. [Footnote 1]
Helping Out
But about these others, what can we do—those of us who are changing our programming and creating new cultural patterns? It may be practical and advisable much of the time to just get out of their way if the ones acting out choose to kill each other off.
But we are often not able to “get out of the way” of those who are trapped in negativity. In addition, since we are all interconnected, we are bound to at least be indirectly affected by their actions.
And most importantly, since we are One and these others are actually ourselves in different garb, to the extent we are able to show compassion and be of assistance, we should not always want to step aside.
“Eve of Destruction” or Scenery of Healing?
To put the current chapter’s theme another way: If we were to concoct a world situation in which we would be forced to take a quantum step in consciousness evolution by healing the nefarious elements of our perinatal unconscious, would not that world situation look something like what we see around us today? Would it not be a world rife with obvious perinatal elements…and influences … with some people resolving and thus being healed of them? While others would act them out and self-destruct because of them…not to mention contributing to our collective global self-destruction, as mentioned earlier?
In other words, the situation today, as it looks, could as easily be seen as a prologue to an apocalypse and just as easily be seen as a healing crisis preceding a massive consciousness transformation. Put another way, this same situation can be seen by one person as the “eve of destruction” and another as the “scenery of healing on the pathway to peace.” So which will it be?
A Call to Centaurs
Obviously it is too soon to tell. But all things considered—an emerging perinatal unconscious, the wounded deers and return of the centaurs, a consciousness transformation in generations, and Gaia aiding us by keeping us unable to look away from our problems—there is reason to hope.
Most important, this book shows that some of the things we have thought were problems and indicative of a disintegration of culture and personality are just the opposite: There is a healing crisis going on, and people are becoming weller, not sicker. If nothing else my hope is that those wounded deer and centaurs reading this will realize they need no longer despair about the suffering inherent in who they are and their lots in life. Certainly, you are different, but this does not make you less than others. Indeed, you are part of the change happening. You are the ones you have been waiting for. Your inner turmoil is not a sign of imminent collapse and is not dangerous. It is more likely leading to a break through, not a break down.
As Hesse expressed long ago, a bird in being born out of its shell needs to destroy a world before one can be born. We also are being born; we are part of the world’s renewal, the Earth’s rebirth. So above all, do not lose heart. Instead embrace your role in this transformation. We do not know whether we will succeed or not. But we do know that we are in tune with and participating in the most incredible transformation this planet has ever seen. We have the opportunity to be lifted up in the most righteous and magnificent of causes.
And in so doing we can step out of our individual sufferings by dedicating ourselves to an effort on behalf of all others. In so doing we can cease the endless pain and woundedness of the melancholy deer. We can, like Chiron, embrace our wound and transcend it by seeking the healing of all. We can ultimately lay our suffering down in sacrifice to save our Promethean world. It cannot do it. It is doomed without us. It is up to us. We are the Centaurs, my friends.
Continue with next book: The Great Reveal by SillyMickel and the Planetmates. Begin with chapter, “Return to Nobility.”
Return to Psychology of Generations —The Changing of the Generational Guard: Why There Is Less Violence but More Depression…. And What’s Good About That
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Psychology of Generations —The Changing of the Generational Guard: Why There Is Less Violence but More Depression…. And What’s Good About That
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on February 23, 2013
Consciousness Evolution from the WWII to the Millennial Generations: A Hierarchy of Healing, a Global Healing Crisis, and the Unseen Revolution 
Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Fourteen: Psychological History of Today’s Generations and Changing of the Guard 
Healing Crisis Means Needing to Get “Sicker” Before We Can Be “Weller” and Making It When You DON’T Fake It: Centaurs, Wounded Deer, and the Consciousness Revolution, Untold
What’s in Your Head, Zombie? Being Really Sick, But Denying It — WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party
Birth Woes ~ World Wars and Can’t Know What You Don’t Know … What’s in Your Head, Zombie? 
Getting Sick In Order to Get Well
What does this all mean? What does this portend? What might be the outcome of this emerging perinatal unconscious? In other words, consciousness evolution or apocalypse? And what is the meaning of this change in consciousness and of these wounded deer and centaurs? Is there hope in this development?
To answer what is the portent of these wounded deer and centaurs and what the emerging perinatal unconscious might mean on a macrocosmic or societal-global scale, it is helpful to look at what an emerging perinatal unconscious portends on the individual or microcosmic level.
What we have learned from the experiential modalities—holotropic breathwork™, primal therapy, rebirthing, vivation, and others like them—is that unerringly people need to get “sicker” before they can get well. This should not be news to psychoanalysts or any of the other mainstream psychotherapists or counselors either.
Healing Crisis
Basically, the underlying repressed material must come to the “surface,” must become more conscious…and obviously when it becomes more conscious its accompanying symptoms are exacerbated. This can be called a healing crisis in that the symptoms get worse, more obvious, more blatant; and there is a period of acting them out before integration and resolution happens.
One Must “Die” to One’s Sickness Before One Can Be “Born” Well
When Grof talks about birth/death scenarios in the perinatal unconscious, he is including these sorts of healings, where one must “die” to one’s sickness before one can be “reborn” into another way of being, without those sick patterns or symptoms.
Degrees of Disease
Dissociation – Completely Split Off
It’s YOU! YOU’re the f&^$#r!
We see a progression over the last century in which there was complete dissociation from the perinatal unconscious by those of the Fifties, the World-War-Two, and previous generations—hence complete projection of it on The Other—to lesser dissociations from it by the generations since, baby-boomer and afterward, which involve more awareness of it as being a part of oneself and less projection of it on The Other.
Wounded Deer
In this latter instance, there is more suffering from it and more individual acting out of it, so that in a sense one appears “sicker”—the perinatal is more obvious in one’s behavior, taking more individual forms, and it is more easily recognized and seen to be a personal problem…a “sickness.” Earlier I described this consciousness as being the way of the centaur, for it reflects Chiron, in ancient myths, having an ongoing wound but eventually becoming a teacher and healer.
To understand the ways the perinatal manifests depending upon one’s “closeness” to it, let us contrast the two extremes of being split off from it and being close to it.
Being Really Sick, But Denying It: WWII Generation, Nazis, KKK, Right Wing, Tea Party
Can’t Know That You Don’t Know
![clip_image010[3]](http://fitsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hitler-tea-party-cartoon.jpg "clip_image010[3]")
First let us take a look at what the perinatal appears like when it is completely split off from one’s conscious personality. This complete splitting off from the perinatal entails 
a complete repression and denial of it. Consequently, one has absolutely no access to it, and thus one is in total ignorance of the underlying motivations of one’s actions. One unconsciously acts out perinatal elements and traumas and manifests them in one’s behavior, rationalizing all the while that one has really good—non-perinatal, “real world”—reasons for why one is doing the things one is doing.
What”s in Your Head, Zombie?
Psychohistorians deem this state to be such an oblivious one that they use the term trance-state for it, fully intending all the implications and connotations that term engenders. That is, they are saying that people who are this repressed and split off do their acting zombie-like and out of motivations completely hidden from themselves. [Footnote 1]
Birth Woes ~ World Wars
In such total ignorance, and of course being totally ignorant that one is in ignorance, people in the past century have been able to act out their perinatal underbellies in ways to make such hideous and all-encompassing wars as World War I and World War II possible.
![clip_image013[3]](https://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/clip_image0133.jpg?w=423&h=298 "clip_image013[3]")
Leaving aside for a moment the myriad ways the perinatal has unconsciously been acted out in this century in creating the current situation in which we are on the brink of extinction—which can be considered the most serious consequences of this splitting off imaginable—simply focusing on this century’s major wars as evidence of perinatal acting-out alone is instructive.
![clip_image014[3]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/holocaust_gas.gif "clip_image014[3]")
The Nazis, in particular, were extreme in their dissociation from their perinatal, in their projection of it onto the Jews, and their consequent ability to act it out in horrific ways on them and others. Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause have each detailed the psychodynamics of this projection of primal pain—both perinatal and childhood—in the creation of the people that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis became in their adulthood. [Footnote 2]
![clip_image016[3]](http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/holocaust.jpg "clip_image016[3]")
The Nazis present us with the patterns of these processes of dissociation and projection in blatant and obvious relief. The way Nazis, especially in concentration camps, acted out perinatal trauma on their prisoners has been described in great detail by Grof as well. [Footnote 3]
Wounded Deer and Centaurs – Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker – Perinatal Awareness of Boomers and Beyond
Perinatal Boomers and Beyond—We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.… But You Certainly Are
Being “Weller,” But Appearing Sicker—Generations Since
As I said, contrasted with being completely split off — dissociated — from one’s perinatal unconscious, as the Fifties and WWII Generation are predominantly, is being less cut off from it and having 
some access to its energies. This means that rather than being totally and blindly driven by these forces, which are acting on one indirectly,
one actually feels them somewhat: One has a sense of their being a part of one’s experience as opposed to living within them so thoroughly that one has not a clue of their existence.
This means that one has more options than to act them out, but it also means they make one aware of one’s perinatal sickness. One feels them, suffers from them, struggles with them.
On the other hand, one does not suffer or struggle from unconscious energies that one is compliant with and that are completely manifest and supported in one’s social and cultural environments (for example, the worlds of the WWII and previous generations), however destructive that makes one’s actions.
Trancing Vs. Suffering
This difference may be likened to the difference between being a fish in water and totally oblivious to that fact versus living out of water and experiencing a downpour. When one is in less of a trance state, one is aware of alternative ways of being; in the example, that would be being dry. Consequently, one suffers and struggles amidst these forces and options…and one has at least some ability to choose one’s actions.
I do not believe it is simply coincidence that we are currently going from the Piscean Age — symbolized by fish in water — to the Aquarian Age — symbolized by a water bearer. This change was a big part of the consciousness during the Sixties, 
and I think we are beginning to see why: Going from a state where one is oblivious to the forces around one to a state where one can see the things one is dealing with (carrying the water) is no small thing.
It seems everything about evolution in humans has something to do with being between two mediums and the advance/the added perspective that comes with that, 
going all the way back to being the only ape to take to the water so much as to become partly aquatic—placing our species between water and land, halfway between a dolphin and a chimpanzee. I think we are heading toward being like the fairies and angels we imagine—halfway between land and air—but that is a whole other post.
Another analogy I’ve heard of this difference between the two modes of being completely oblivious and somewhat aware of one’s unconscious is that 
between living full-time in an arctic environment where one has to wear a heavy coat versus living in a milder climate. In the warmer climes, one is both aware of what it is like to not have a coat—one has capacity to feel better ways of being—as well as how bulky, obstructing, and uncomfortable it is to have the coat on—suffering 
more from it, suffering from one’s perinatal memories. Finally one is better able to decide when to have it on and not—one has more options. 
At some point I will discuss what this has to do with the increase of bipolar disorders, but not now.
One analogy I find especially provocative is the difference between watching a movie and being fully engrossed in it so that one does not know it is a movie, which is equivalent to acting out unconsciously from one’s early imprints. Compare this to watching the same movie with equal interest, but being aware that one is in a theater. You can see where in the second instance one would feel there are more options; and one would feel that one could step back before finding oneself caught up in horrific actions.
Wounded Deer and Centaurs
However, being aware of one’s discomfort (having “more access” to the perinatal), one suffers like the wounded deer—the innocent who feels things and so struggles with society’s sickness that many others are unconsciously perpetrating. But, with time and success in handling this pain, one can become the wounded healer—the Centaur.
Now, why and how would this occur? As I’ve said, some access to the perinatal and more blatant and direct acting it out is exhibited by many of the baby-boomer generation. This is in large part due to their having been raised in a way that required less in the way of ego defenses to keep their primal pain suppressed. Psychohistorians like Glen Davis and Lloyd deMause have detailed a slow advance of child-caring techniques, with generations since the WWII Generation being raised with more attention to their needs and less harshness and cruelty…increasingly more love.
“What the World Needs Now, Is…”
Before anyone begins thinking “permissive” or “spare the rod, spoil the child,” let me point out that I will be continually stressing how this development is not only a good thing (why wouldn’t love be good?)
but is one of the few sources of hope for our future we really do have.
For less childhood pain and trauma means one is stronger and more able to face the even deeper perinatal pain.
Choosing Lesser Evils
At any rate, the extreme acting-out and total dissociation from the perinatal exhibited by the World-War-Two Generation was followed, in the generations coming after, by less relative dissociation and less horrific forms of acting it out. Quite simply, generations as a whole had better ability to refrain from the more blatantly evil act outs—wholesale murders and world wars, pogroms and genocide,
inquisitions and witch-burning, racism and slavery. They were more able to choose seemingly milder forms of suffering and self-destruction — polluting the atmosphere, water, and food; population explosions and crowding of cities; and traffic jams.
The common everyday traffic jam is especially instructive of perinatal dynamics as traffic congestions replicate asphalt birth tunnels where one not only breathes exhaust fumes from trucks and other autos—fetal malnutrition—but also can become gridlock at any moment, thus re-creating the intense frustration and no-exit hopelessness, and rage, of BPM II.
Baby-Boomer Perinatal Awareness
Other examples of the scenery of modern times where the perinatal is manifesting but is less projected onto another:
We Know THAT We Don’t Know…We Could Be Wrong.
Many baby-boomers had enough access to their perinatal underbellies to question the absolute rightness of the Vietnam War and so they campaigned against it. This is indicative of closeness to the perinatal because it shows an ability to doubt one’s egocentric defenses—as given by society and family of origin—and to look at situations from the eyes of the Other.
So much was this evident in boomers that some were even able 
to see the Vietnam War through the eyes of the enemy—exemplified by Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi, the waving of North Vietnamese flags at demonstrations, and the carrying of little red books of the sayings of Chairman Mao tse Tung.
But It’s Clear You’re Wrong.
The baby-boomer—or Sixties—generation also indicate their closeness to their perinatal in their campaigns against some of the act-outs of the perinatal mentioned above: These include actions against pollution; a rejection of city life, with its gridlocks, pollution, and crowding , and a return to the country, in communes or otherwise; an awareness and rejection of polluted foods and creation of a natural and organic foods movement; and actions against global overpopulation including support for birth control, a pro-choice stance on abortion, and delaying of baby-making on their own parts along with a reduction in the size of their families.
The sexual excess that is characteristic of the perinatal, specifically BPM III, was evident in boomers’ free love and promiscuous sexual behavior.
Many more examples could be given. But the proof of their closeness to their unconscious dynamics lies not only in their actions—as mentioned above, in their more blatant acting them out or in their actual actions against the blatant acting out, both of which indicate closer access—but also 
in the study of their unconscious dynamics. 
As mentioned in Chapter Twelve, Kenneth Keniston found in his study of the psychodynamics of the Sixties generation when they were in their youth an unusual amount of perinatal symbolism and self-analysis. (See “Raging to Reenter, Digging Under Ground.”)
Boomer Rage, Perinatally So
We Shall Overcome.
We also see perinatal feelings in the focus of the baby-boomers on empowerment. This word appears to come up in every area of their lives. It can be seen as the natural focus of a generation that feels itself inside to be a helpless fetus facing an overpowering obstruction of a womb.
Hence baby-boomers are of course also closer to the frustration, rebellion, and yes, rage, that is part of the perinatal complex. We saw it exhibited by them in their anger at authority in the Sixties, their rebellion against the Vietnam War.
“Get the &%$ OFF Me!”
Keep in mind that a huge aspect of the perinatal is feelings of restriction, thus frustration, and, consequently rage against large entities of obstruction—like the womb was in relation to the small and helpless fetus. In doing so, we see that the reason for their rage is simple and understandable.
Baby-boomers, characterized as being closer to their unconscious, especially the perinatal, have more access to their anger: This means they feel their anger and are less likely to act it out in more hidden, disguised, and dire ways such as war-making, racism, and anti-Semitism.
This does not mean their rage would not be troublesome. The perinatal lets no one get off scot free. We see lots of pre- and perinatal anger coming out in the last few decades in the phenomenon of the “angry electorate.” Let’s look at that next.
You Didn’t Really Believe Elections Had Anything to Do With Issues, Did You? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate
Seriously? You Actually Think Elections Have Something to Do With Issues? Biting the Feeding Hand … Perinatal Rage and Panicky Electorate
More recently these baby-boomers have been coming into the triumphant phase of their lives. They make up the largest sector of the electorate, and their influence is reflected more as they come into positions of power in the media and elsewhere.
The Angry Electorate and Boomers
But their influence has been diffused and confused because of the anger of some of them. Their irrational rage—combined with the reactionary consciousness of the Fifties Generation, many of the Fifties Gen children of Yuppies-Gen Xers, and the remaining WWII folks—has most often skewed election results against the Boomers interests and their true desires. Though not the majority of boomers, enough of them expressed their rage to swing election results in favor of the other side.
1992 – “Mad as Hell”
Beginning in the 1992 and 1994 national elections, these baby-boomers exhibited their perinatal influences in contributing to the totally unexpected phenomenon of the “angry electorate.”
At the time, pundits and media analysts were at a total loss to explain the rage of the electorate that was affecting these elections. In 1992, they were totally surprised by the showing of three men in particular—Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot—who seemed to have one thing in common: the angry tones and rebelliousness that characterized their speeches, as compared to others. [Footnote 4]
The demeanor of these candidates was at such odds with the other candidates that when Bill Clinton one night responded angrily to a comment by Jerry Brown about Hillary, Clinton’s wife, it was that part of the debate—of Clinton being angry, all issues aside—that made the news that night!
Though the rage of the electorate in 1992 caused the Brown, Perot, and Buchanan phenomena, it was split among them, so Clinton ended up winning. 
This of course was also OK with the baby-boomers in that (1) Clinton and Gore were baby-boomers like themselves and (2) in the race against Bush, Clinton was the challenger, and thus the rebel; and Bush was the “bum to be thrown out.”
However, this rage did not go away after the election, which highlights its having perinatal origins. In fact, after the shortest “honeymoon period” in history, by some accounts, it became directed at the most likely target/center—the President, Bill Clinton, himself.
We all know how despite the successes and progress of Clinton’s first year, he was especially singled out for ridicule and denigration by the media. He could not seem to do anything right, and the most incredibly outrageous behaviors were attributed to him.
1994 – “Throw the Bums Out … Again.”
This rage spilled over into the next year and, sure enough, during the midterm election—the issues be damned—the angry electorate was in a mood to “throw the bums out” again. It did not matter the party….I do not claim that all those of my generation are always as politically astute as they are angry.
The Republicans called it a “revolution.” It was simply the acting out of an electorate in the throes of perinatal feelings—that is, feelings of frustration, 
being “tied up” by red tape, an inability to go forward…that is, up the economic ladder—wages had been stagnating since the early 80s…being overcontrolled and pushed around by regulations…big government being the big mother womb keeping the fetus locked in and unable to move…and out of all this, the consequent anger and rage.
1996 and 1998 — “To Hell With You!”
At any rate, succeeding elections bear out this analysis of an angry electorate. In 1996, despite the much ballyhooed “Republican Revolution,” sure enough, the electorate was spoiling to “throw the bums out” again—only this time it was the Republican Congress. 
So there were Democratic gains at the time.
And in 1998, when everything pointed to a huge Republican landslide because of the Lewinsky scandal, the electorate again showed their rebellion and anger toward both the pundits and the Republicans who had been lambasting them with details of the scandal for nearly a year by giving the Democrats gains again! [Footnote 4]
2006, 2008, and 2010 — Panicky Electorate
In 2006, 2008, and 2010, it was an angry electorate reeling against oppression; and in the case of 2010, doing it mindlessly, against their own interests. If there were not perinatal charge to all this, Americans would not be so irrational about their choices.
Perinatal Rage
People have had good reasons to feel oppressed since the Eighties when Reagan began the giveaways to the rich and the budget cutbacks, continuing to this day, that have caused the masses to feel constricted and oppressed.
Yet, if this did not result in their being perinatally overloaded so that they cannot reason, they would not have been able to be led to fight their own interests as they were in 2010 and in an ongoing way as exemplified by the Tea Party and the success of right-wing agendas.
Reacting, Too Angry and Confused to Think
Another aspect of this irrationality on both sides of the political spectrum has to do with this idea that there is no difference between the two major parties. Feeling oppressed perinatally is characterized by a pressure from all sides simultaneously. 
There is an inability to distinguish or discriminate between forces that are helpful and those that are dire, as any and all developments seem threatening in situations of crisis. In a situation of overwhelm, further, there is an inability to think clearly. One just fights back, explodes, reacts. It’s no coincidence that righties are called reactionaries.
Biting the Feeding Hand
The upshot is an inability, under the pressure of perinatal feelings, provoked endlessly by actual oppression economically, environmentally, socially, and culturally, to rail against any authority, to bite the hand that feeds one. This is exactly like the panicked swimmer who in danger of drowning fights off his or her rescuer.
Can anyone at this point still maintain that the politics of the last few decades had anything at all to do with ideology or issues?
Millennials and Their Opposites – Fifties Generation Tea Partyers … How OWS and Tea Party Movements Are Generationally and Perinatally Different
Millennial Gen Occupiers and Eisenhower Gen Tea Partyers Are Perinatally As Well As Generationally Opposed
Right-Wing “Hate Groups,” the Tea Party, and the Fifties Generation: Perinatally Oblivious
![clip_image004[5]](http://dailycensored.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/IR-141-cover-pr.jpg "clip_image004[5]")
One might also note the rise of “hate groups” occurring at the same time as the phenomenon of the angry electorate. Hate groups fill their ranks from folks on the extreme right and their actions are exemplified in the Oklahoma bombing tragedy and more recently in the Tea Party.
Perinatally Clueless
But notice again then that these hate groups are always on the extreme right of the political spectrum and thus exemplify a World-War-Two mindset in relation to their perinatal unconscious: Specifically, the mindset is one of being completely cut off from one’s unconscious dynamics and being in total denial of unconscious motivations so that one can have the complete certitude—lacking any access to the unconscious which would give rise to doubts—that makes violent actions possible.
![clip_image006[4]](http://steliq.com/c/lm/f/fa/12555700_RAND+PAUL+THUGS.jpg "clip_image006[4]")
![clip_image007[4]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/clip_image0074.jpg "clip_image007[4]")
However the reason for bringing up the hate groups is to show how much their actions as well are dominated by 
perinatal—in their case, totally unconscious—dynamics.
For without exception their reasons for rising up against the government—representing the overwhelming womb—has to do with frustrations, like the trapped fetus feels, in regards to “oppressive” taxes, governmental red tape, laws, and other regulations that they feel restrict their freedom…to move freely, as one wanted to but couldn’t, in the womb.
Tea Party and hate group ranks are prevalent with Fifties Generation folks. The Eisenhower Generation — after the WWII Gen and before Boomers — were born just before or during WWII. They are mired in prenatal fears coming from the fact that their parents were living through such distressing times as WWII and the Great Depression when they were 
inside their mothers. They were “marinated” in the womb with fear and insecurity. They also were not brought up with the societal advance in child-rearing the next generation of boomers, and those afterward, would be granted. So it is understandable they would be both cut off from perinatal access yet full of perinatal pushes and pulls to act out in confused and self-destructive ways.
Perinatal Access of Millennials
Being Boomer Kids, Wouldn’t You Kind of Expect That?
Now on the other end of this perinatal spectrum we have the most recent generational cohort to be making a mark. The Millennial, or Baby-Boomer Echo generation, show the same inner access as their Boomer parents. They demonstrate as well their parents’ consequent refusal to act it out on a larger scale: It has been said that the greatest concerns of those in this generation, now in their twenties and thirties, are the environment and racism-bigotry.
Activist, Progressive
![clip_image001[4]](http://apocalypseknow.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/clip_image0014.png "clip_image001[4]")
They show the progressive bent of their parents, also, in their having a lot to do with giving America its first African-American president. And to the environment and minority rights, we need to add classism, economic fairness, and human rights because of their phenomenal outpouring of support in the past year for Occupy Wall Street and for union rights in Wisconsin and other states. They are showing global strength in opposing fascism, economic injustice, political oppression, and human rights abuses in Occupy and Arab Spring movements. They’ve filled massive demonstrations against the draconian economic policies of Republicans in Wisconsin.
Climate Change and The Environment
We know how pollution and action against pollution indicates a closeness to one’s perinatal. To put it another way, it is clear that only a total denial and disconnect between one’s consciousness and one’s unconscious perinatal dynamics would allow one to act it out unconsciously in the creation of pollution and in the denial of it as a problem or a mindless neglect of it. So the fact that these Baby-Boomer children, the Millennials, are so cognizant, concerned, and active in relation to global pollution and climate change shows their lack of denial of this perinatal act-out.
Multicultural, Resisting Racism and Oppression
But what of racism and bigotry? How is this an indication of a closeness to the perinatal. There are several ways in which this is so. As mentioned, a closeness to the perinatal allows one to doubt one’s given defenses and to glimpse alternate perspectives—in particular to look at things from the eyes of The Other.
In this way, the baby-boomer echo generation are able to see oppression, injustice, and unfairness as it is played out in the lives of minorities who don’t share their (predominantly) middle-class advantages. They simply don’t “get” racism, sexism, or bigotry of any kind; it is incomprehensible to them. They strongly oppose imperialism, colonialism, or oppression of any kind. Relatedly, they support animal rights and oppose animal abuse and cruelty. They don’t understand torture and violence against fellow planetmates.
![clip_image002[4]](http://cacm.acm.org/system/assets/0000/4546/010611_iStock_Millennials1.large.jpg?1294345530&1294345529 "clip_image002[4]")
Naturally they were helped in that awareness by the gains of previous decades, beginning in the Sixties, which had them growing up with diversity of racial and ethnic heritages—seeing things multiculturally not narrowly—in their schools and in the omnipresent media. They grew up with the environmental awareness that was set in motion in the Sixties; they don’t know of a world before recycling and energy conservation. Activism, demonstrations, and political action have been a part of their lives since they were born, unlike the several generations that preceded them and even their Boomer parents who grew up in a politically castrated Fifties.
But there is another, stronger element. This is the factor of oppression and unfairness itself. We experience compression (oppression), and frustration at our attempts to go forward, and what feels like hopeless unfairness and injustice, when in the throes of BPM II birth trauma. To see these facets of the fates of minorities, as in racism, or gender or sexual bias, points to this echo generation’s closeness to their own perinatal oppression; hence their ability to empathize with oppressed minorities.
This ability to realistically sense and respond to oppression is also the reason they would throw themselves in heartily in defense of unions, an increasingly oppressed middle class, and public sector employees.
Of Goths, Gen X, Anti-Abortionists, Pacifiers, and a Hierarchy of Healing … You Make It When You DON’T Fake It
Flaunting One’s Sickness Is Healthier Than Hiding It … Gen X, Goths, Pacifiers, and The Hierarchy of Healing
A Hierarchy of Healing?
This idea that those close to their unconscious conflicts are more likely to act them out blatantly goes completely against one of DeMause’s tenets. He wrote, “The higher the psychogenic mode of the psychoclass, the less it is necessary for it to act out its conflicts.” [Footnote 5]
However this is exactly the crux of my difference with his theory and is a 
central point I am making. For from my perspective, the higher the mode of child-caring equals the less the defenses. Hence, the more it is likely that that generation’s conflicts will be close to the surface, seeking resolution … like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. We might want to call it a hierarchy of healing theory. [Footnote 6]
In other words, our observing the supposed “acting out” of an underlying trauma does not mean that the group or person in question is actually or, at least completely, “acting it out” and defending against it. It may be that that group is resolving, healing, or integrating it—taking it inward rather than acting it out…in the world, on others…whether to a small or great extent. 
Using the analogy of Pandora’s Jar, described earlier, they are opening the jar, at least a little. And I disagree with deMause in that I wish to stress that it is healthier by far to do that. Let me explain:
The difference between acting out and resolving is whether the actions are done in total dissociation from the unconscious dynamics, that is to say, in a trance state—as explained earlier in regard to the World War Two generation and the Tea Party—or whether there is at least a modicum of insight into it occurring as a result of things inside of oneself, not completely projected onto the outside.
The attitude that leads to total dissociation and acting out was expressed in a recent 2012 military movie, Act of Valor, which depicted Navy Seals engaged in anti-terrorism activity. At the end, the manner of dealing with pain recommended for these American soldiers and “men of valor” was to (paraphrasing) put all the pain in a box, shut it tight, press it down till it is smaller and smaller, and never, under any circumstances, let it out!
However, in non-acting-out—“acting inward” or taking back the projection—there is a tad of insight, as, for example, in the “overexamined life” of the “uncommitted” and the “self-analysis” of the young radicals of the Sixties generation. Similarly, the rock concert revivication of all current generations except the Fifties and WWII ones, as I’ve mentioned, is 
about personal experience and growth, and it is not about acting out on another; whereas an example of the extreme other end of that would be engaging, trance-like, in a mass killing against a perceived political enemy, as Loughner did, and as we do as nations in wars.
Another example of complete dissociation are the anti-abortion folks. They don’t have a clue of the connection between their own unconscious prenatal pain and the feelings they have about unborn others. They are not wrestling with their feelings, they are trying to change the world to conform to their defenses around those feelings—that is, they want the world to suppress that womb time out of existence like they have done to it in their own minds. The proof that it is acting out is that it is all about changing others’ behavior, and it involves imposing one’s inner pain on others forcefully and aggressively—which we have seen in its extreme form with the murders of physicians committed by anti-abortionists
Flaunting One’s Sickness Beats Hiding It—Generation X
The self-analysis of the Sixties Generation was followed by a different mode of struggling with perinatal pain by Generation X, which continues in abated form with the Millennial Generation. 
It was manifest rather strikingly with the Goth phenomenon and the vampire fascination that began in the Eighties, coincident with Gen X’s coming of age. Goth and vampirism show blatant perinatal dynamics that are not unfelt and completely repressed as in dissociation with its trance-state aggression against others. An example of Gen X perinatal acting out of these dynamics in total dissociation and trance state was given above in the anti-abortionists. But Goth and vampire culture show folks feeling and immersed consciously in these pushes and pulls and wrestling with them, trying to work them out as opposed to act them out.
Hey, It Was Tough!
This is rather clearly shown in looking at the “regression” in Europe, described by psychohistorians, which occurred in the Nineties. This behavior showed a bit of insight…and resolution happening…in that the baby song being hummed was about the very real hardships of being a baby. Therefore, an actual truth about their own lives was being faced there by those singing along with it. The song was not being used to deny or defend against those traumas.
One might suspect that as well in carrying around such blatant examples of regression as a pacifier. For 
someone in a more defended mode would be highly threatened by such an obvious symbol that they are really needy children inside. More defended folks would be terrified such overt behavior would make them look wussy or sissified—that is, look like that vulnerable, frightened baby that they 
really feel themselves to be but are doing their damnedest to hide from everyone. Imagine how those Navy Seals described above would feel walking around sucking on a pacifier, for example.
So in actually carrying around a pacifier these youth were not only displaying an insight into their feelings of sometimes being needy babies, on the inside, but 
are actually flaunting this awareness, as if to shame, or slap the face of, or be “in the face” of a generation of their parents—the Fifties Generation for the most part—who did not see their needs when they were babies—however effortfully and obviously they sought to demonstrate them. Thus the symbols needed to become more and more shocking and obvious.
Look at What You Did to Me!
For example: the jeans with requisite holes around the knees was screaming out, “You did not take care of me; you made me feel like a poor, orphaned, ragamuffin child.”
The piercing of mouths, nose, ears, and even tongues shouted,
“
I am in pain, dammit! Can’t you see that when you stick needles in me as a little baby that I hurt? How can you be so insensitive? Can’t you see that when you refuse to breastfeed and thus nurture me orally that I am forever damaged there, ever painful there? What does it take, my sticking pins—safety pins make the point even more that it was when I was in diapers—in myself to make you see that I hurt there?”
And, of course, the black clothes, the hideous macabre makeup, and depressed, sullen expressions was exclaiming,
“Look, you might think we’re a wonderful family and everything is hunky-dory here; but I wish I were dead! I’ve felt so much pain, from in the womb, at birth, and right after birth, that I wish I’d never been born.
“Also, somehow in courting death, I have the feeling
that I might somehow be reborn again into a good life, not like this place of torture and tears, right from the beginning, where my welcome into the world consisted of being drugged, handled like an object or piece of meat, blasted by bright lights, scrubbed by rough cloths, having needles and suctions stuck in me, blasted with noise, made to lie on cold stainless steel surfaces, and then bundled like a tamale so that I could not move…making me feel again
like I was back in the hellish womb where in the later stages, for a time that felt like an eternity, I felt unable to move and was suffocating for lack of sufficient oxygen…and the only action that was possible was for me to scream my bloody head off for long periods of time or go into a stupor—which is what I did, alternating between them.
“Can’t you see that I’d rather be dead than live in such a world of insensitive zombies like you. Hell, in fact, to
further drive the point home, I’ll even look and act like a zombie, I’ll try to appear as unfeeling and morose as you all seemed to me, especially at my birth. And I’ll go a step further and mirror yourselves back to you by becoming enamored of vampires….
“Can’t you see that you sucked my very life force, my blood, and turned me into an unfeeling vampire like you, by suffocating me in the womb, poisoning me with your toxic blood which you both sucked from me and then forced down my throat!”
The Consciousness Revolution They Don’t Want You to Notice. It’s Inconvenient for Them, Initially Hard for Us, and Hopefully Not Too Late
The “Inconvenient” Revolution – Unacknowledged Consciousness Evolution from the WWII Generation to the Millennials … More Suffering, Less Killing
Different Levels, Different Defenses
It is instructive at this time to note that Arthur Janov once compared the defenses that characterized the youth of the time—the late Sixties, early Seventies—with those of their parents and older people in general and came up with findings that amplify my own assertions here.
“Mind’s Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me With the Facts!”
Specifically, Janov found that older people—clients of his as well as others of whom he was aware—were characteristically more repressed, more split off, 
more prone to dissociation, more defended and, most importantly for our uses here, tended to use defenses of denial and obfuscation against inner information and impulses. Correspondingly, they tended to use drugs that repressed and blotted out reality, such as alcohol and nicotine; and they tended to be sexually repressed. They were also more compulsive. They tended to suppress their tension and hold it in for all their worth.
“How Can You Have Any Pudding if You Don’t Eat Your Meat?”
Truth was greatly feared, and all attempts were made to fend off incoming information that might threaten the delusional reality set of the conscious mind. This left them open to the characterization: “My mind’s made up! Don’t confuse me with the facts!” which was leveled at them by anti-Vietnam War protesters. In more recent years, it is no wonder they have engaged in a war against education and against Hollywood, as really they are at war with new information. Consequently, Janov found that the dominant mode of reaction, when threatened, was to act out aggressively against the supposed “oppressor.” Like prenates up against an overpowering womb, they are in constant war with overwhelm.
“Peace, Out.”
On the other hand, he found that his youthful clients—under 30—tended to use defenses of excess, release, and addiction, or to be unusually lacking in defense mechanisms. They were more impulsive. They tended to have weak barriers to incoming information, to be open to negative unconscious content, even at the expense of their self-esteem, and to be tension expressers. They were therefore more likely sexually promiscuous than repressed, and they tended to drugs that opened them to information and unconscious knowledge – such as 
marijuana and LSD.
Consequently they were less split off from their unconscious truth…though it made them uncomfortable…were less repressed, and, if anything, used defenses of masochism, self-denial, and self-inflicted aggression or depression. Truth was more important to them than emotional comfort. They tended to go out of their way to dig up negative information about themselves, and they accepted the low self-esteem and sense of self-worth that came with that kind of openness to truth.
Their delusional reality set — if it could be called that — entailed taking on the worries and cares of the world as their own, since their openness to their own cares and worries allowed them to empathize with others in obviously 
similar situations. When triggered into their pain, their dominant reaction was to take it inward and to take it out on themselves causing depression. In doing so they showed they would rather hurt themselves than hurt another.
Generation Gaps … Again
I don’t believe you need to be a rocket scientist to see that Janov was discovering an historical — one might say millennial — ”changing of the guard” as regards access to the unconscious, openness to personal truth, and lessening of the tendency to act out early trauma in 
violent or belligerent ways. The older generation had more tendencies to blame others, to find scapegoats for their ills, and to act out violently on them. The younger generation had more tendencies to look inward and to blame and punish themselves … and to prefer to hurt themselves before hurting another. They would more likely cut themselves than cut another; they would more likely commit suicide than kill.
The youthful generation might also become alcoholic, addicted to drugs, or do something else to injure themselves…rather than act it out on another.
Less Wars, More Suicides
And this “acting in,” as opposed to acting out, is indicated as well in the rise of teen suicides in recent decades. So you might say that the tradeoff we are currently getting is a reduction in the use of wars and racism to solve problems—that is, a reduction in the tendency to act out one’s Pain on others and to scapegoat. But, since the perinatal trauma is still there, and one is even more conscious of it, we have increased suicides. We have not had a world war or dropped a nuclear weapon on people since World War II; but we suffer unceasingly from relatively less loss of life in regional conflicts and the self-inflicted harm of air, water, and food contamination and from radiation poisoning from nuclear power plants. We have not had millions killed in genocides or purges since World War II, but we have suffered lesser loss of life in uprisings for democracy in China, Iran, Syria, Southeast Asia, and the Arab world. We have not had lynchings and racial riots have ceased, but we have suffered less lethal damage from culture and class wars, increased incarceration, creeping fascism, and struggles for economic justice.
Overall then, less death, more suffering. Less killing in wars, more suicides. Less large scale atrocities, more depression. On a collective level, we are taking our conflicts increasingly inward.
As deMause pointed out,
Those considered ‘neurotic’ in each age may often be a higher psychogenic mode than those considered ‘normal,’ only they must stand the anxiety of not sharing the group-fantasies of the age. [Footnote 7]
Away From Hubris: Nature Balances HerSelf
In this part on healing crisis, we have seen how perinatal acting out can be of two kinds: totally unconscious and trance-like, or semi-conscious with at least some access. We have looked at how a progression to more access to one’s perinatal underbellies has led to more acting in than acting out. We have seen how it has led to less violence and more depression.
Suffering Beats Dying.
At this point, one could make the point that the tradeoff is worth it: That individuals suffering more emotional pain and trauma is preferable to the horrors of world war and nuclear or genocidal holocaust…put bluntly, suffering beats dying.
But we are still looking at the situation from the microcosmic scale. We are talking and acting here like we are the only ones on Earth that matter.
This is natural of course, in that this is always the way we have thought of things—that is to say, as if all things were to be considered around the concerns of humans. This is called anthropocentrism—a form of species-centrism—in which Homo sapiens is considered the reason for the existence of the rest of the Universe.
With the Universe as awesomely and unimaginably large as it is, one might wonder at our hubris in our considering things in only this way—that is, from our perspective.
Likewise, with a mind-boggling number of species living or having lived on this planet alone—species numbering in the hundreds of millions, if not trillions—again one might question the validity of choosing the perspective of our species alone in making our analyses.
How ‘Bout We Step Outside?
Yet this is the way we have always done it. And this is the way I have been slanting my perspective so far in this book.
But now let us do something radically different. Let us walk out of ourselves — figuratively speaking — and seek to stand upon that Archimedean point from which we might view the events currently transpiring.
From such an attempted non-species-centric viewpoint let us view this emerging perinatal unconscious, with its wounded deer and centaurs, as it is currently manifesting in humans. However tenuous our attempt, let us at least try such a new-paradigm viewpoint. For certainly all old-paradigm ones—containing all the hubris of anthropocentrism that they do—have failed in their attempts to save our species and indeed have contributed to such a likelihood.
Let us attempt to see through the eyes of Gaia, now—from the viewpoint of Earth itself—as we look at how the current human predicament may in fact be an example of Nature balancing HerSelf. With both perspectives in mind, we can have a complete picture. We will return then to look at where there is cause for hope, what we are doing wrong as well as where there are positive trends and forces at work, and how we might let go of the self-defeating and instead apply ourselves to fostering the forces of good going on in global consciousness and the globe itself.
Continue with Eden Arise and a Message to All Wounded Deer and Centaurs: It’s a Consciousness Revolution, Aided by Gaia We Are Rediscovering Our Natural Self
Return to We Have Manifested a World That Mirrors and Re-Creates Our Traumatic Human Births: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive
Footnotes
1. “Zombie” by the Cranberries lyrics:
Another head hangs lowly
Time is slowly taken
And the violence causes silence
Who are we mistaken?
Let he see, it’s not me
It’s not my family
In your head, in your head
They are fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head
They are cryin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Whats in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Another mother’s breaking
Heart is taken over.
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken.
It’s the same old theme
Since 1916!
In your head, in your head
They’re still fightin!
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head!
They are dyin!
In your head! In your head!
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
What’s in your head, in your head?
Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
2. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984; and Lloyd deMause, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 344-391. Reprinted, with permission, on Primal Spirit site as “Restaging Prenatal and Birth Traumas in War and Social Violence”)
3. Stanislav Grof, “Planetary Survival and Consciousness Evolution: Psychological Roots of Human Violence and Greed.” Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology 2(1): 3-26, p. 23. (Article reprinted, with permission, on this Primal Spirit website).
4. See “It’s the Attack on Privacy, Stupid! What Republicans and Pundits Don’t Get About Clinton’s Support,” on the Primal Spirit site, for more on the angry electorate and how it played out in the 1996 election.
5. Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 139. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?”
6. See also “Are Some ‘Sick’ People More Healthy Than Normals?” on the Primal Spirit site.
7. Lloyd deMause, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 143.
Continue with Eden Arise and a Message to All Wounded Deer and Centaurs: It’s a Consciousness Revolution, Aided by Gaia We Are Rediscovering Our Natural Self
Return to We Have Manifested a World That Mirrors and Re-Creates Our Traumatic Human Births: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive
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Perinatal Printouts Of Sixties, X, and Millennial Generations: No-Exit Wombs, Vampire Apocalypse, Drug Use, and Being Gratefully Dead
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, Politics, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on February 19, 2013
Perinatal Arising in Sixties and Generations Since: Tune Inward, Turn Back, Drop Down – Psychedelics, Depression, and Those Nasty Birth Feelings
Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Twelve: Perinatal Printouts in Generations … Prospects of Collective Regression
Raging to Reenter, Vampire Apocalypse, Drug Use, and Being Gratefully Dead – Perinatal Printouts Of Sixties, X, and Millennial Generations
Perinatal Arising in Sixties and Generations Since as Seen in Drug Use, Fantasy of Fusion, Vampire Apocalypse, and Being Gratefully Dead
Perinatal Arising in Sixties and Generations Since
Other evidence for closeness to the perinatal unconscious comes from Kenneth Keniston, who studied the youth of the Sixties. In Keniston’s widely read book of the time titled The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society, he described an increasingly prevalent, unusually influential, and relatively newly emerging personality type, which he discovered in his sociopsychological study of youthful college students.
Raging to Reenter, Digging Under Ground, Fantasy of Fusion
Among other traits, he found these youth to be characterized by fantasies of a “rage to reenter” the womb; and a “fantasy of fusion” with the mother, which took 
perinatal forms of all kinds including stories of wishing to dig one’s way back into the earth; a fascination with and wish to return to the past, the long forgotten, and the under ground; and a desire to find oblivion in some enveloping medium…even at the price of self-destruction!
Existential Angst, Death and Dying, Peter Pan
Some of the other noticeably perinatal elements of Sixties youth were existential angst, being enamored of death and dying, and a refusal of “normal” adulthood. (See BPM I, BPM II, and BPM II.) And think about it. Are these descriptions also not a lot like what we have heard of the generation that followed Sixties youth…the so-called Generation X?
Vampire Apocalypse…It’s All So Black and White
For Generation X, black clothes, white painted faces, and black lipstick were the fashion statement of the Eighties and Nineties.
And what was this statement of that sector of Gen X youth—a statement that began in the 
Seventies among what was then called the “punk” movement, which includes now the fad of vampirism—except the same fascination with death as Sixties “alienated” youth…again. This mental set is an obvious reflection of the death/rebirth aspects of the perinatal I’ve been discussing. The “perinatal veil” through which they saw things was becoming more blatant.
Being Gratefully Dead
But this trend began with the Boomer Generation. Need I remind of this same theme of being dead and then reborn coming from the Sixties as in being “gratefully dead”? It seems that this trend toward easier access to and higher awareness of perinatal influences has been going on for a while now.
A Perinatal Printout Is Indicated by Drug Use
There are other perinatal similarities between the youth of the Sixties and the generations to follow—this time specifically with the Millennial Generation, the one that followed Gen X and who are predominantly the sons and daughters of Boomer parents. Millennials were born after the mid-Seventies; they are a different cohort from those born 1960 till roughly 1974—Gen X; and those born 1945 to 1959—the Boomers.
Drug Usage Rising Since the Nineties Shows Perinatal Attraction
Illegal drug use among youth, beginning in the Nineties, began going up again. This coincides with the coming into young adulthood of the Millennial Generation. Unlike drug usage of the legal and mind-debilitating kind (booze and tobacco), drug usage of the illegal and mind-facilitating kind (pot, LSD, speed, ecstacy) is an indication of an emerging 
perinatal unconscious. Drugs are intimately woven with perinatal influences in a number of ways. Not only can some drugs bring up birth feelings, as Grof’s work has shown, but the mother being drugged while giving birth to her child can result in drug abuse by that child later in life.
Generations – Their Drugs and Politics. Gen Xers Are Fifty-ish, Millennials Are Sixty-ish
An Aside on Drugs and Generations —Sixties, Gen X, Millennials and Their Parents
Millennials Are Sixty-ish
There is another overlooked factor or aspect of this rise in drug use in the Nineties by Millennials: These youngsters were the sons and daughters of the Sixties generation who, in their own youth, as we all know too well, engaged in drug experimentation. In fact, this younger generation of drug users has sometimes been called the baby-boomer “echo” generation.
Gen Xers Are Fifty-ish
Millennials are quite a bit different from the previous “echo” generation — Gen X. The generation that came to age during the Eighties—Yuppies and Xers—had parents who were 
born during the Great Depression and 
World War Two, who had their young adult formative years during the Eisenhower — Joe McCarthy –Presley Fifties. So Gen X was influenced by their parents to conservatism, career-mindedness, and, for drug-of-choice, alcohol.
But this “echo” generation of Millennials has parents whose young adulthood was forged in the rebellion, drug and sex experimentation, activism, liberal-radicalism, and idealism of the Sixties, not the Fifties. [Footnote 1]
Forget What You’ve Heard About Generation Gap
Generationally speaking, we know that children do not predominantly rebel to the opposite of their parents’ values. Kenneth Keniston, for one, has made it clear—referring to studies—that children are paramountly influenced by the values and attitudes…conscious and unconscious…of their parents. So this most recent cohort of youth was of course going to be more liberal in their attitude to drug use than Gen X, even if their parents, in their coming into adulthood, overtly decry or are against the use of drugs. Keep in mind also that many of the baby-boomers have retained, not reversed, their acceptance of drug experimentation, and many still believe in and use drugs; many still considering the occasional use of certain types—especially the psychedelics, and to some extent, pot—to be an aid to self-development and/or spiritual awareness.
Family Lies Not “Family Ties”
The myth that youth rebel against their parents’ values was expressed and propagandized by the TV show “Family Ties.” 
This was an oh-so-convenient portrayal, as it contributed to the pervasive scapegoating of the Sixties generation by the Fifties Generation—the Eisenhower–Joe McCarthy–Presley generation—who came into their Triumphant Phase, that is, took over the reins of society as mature adults in the Eighties.
Rebellion in Youth Amounts to Being Uncompromising About Parents’ Values Not Defying Them
This “Family Ties” kind of rebellion, however inaccurate, seems to be credible largely as a result of the observation that youth do rebel against their parents. But it 
ignores the fact that when they do, and they don’t always, they revolt or rebel, as in the Sixties youth, most often in the direction of being more insistent of actually living the values of their parents, not simply voicing them. 
As Keniston found out, for example, as he described in his follow-up to The Uncommitted, in the book, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, radical youth had liberal (hardly conservative!) parents.
When Sixties youth were angry at their parents it was out of their perception of their parents as compromising and not living out their own expressed ideals, as laid out to their children in raising them. Therefore, Sixties rage against adults came out of their disgust at their parents for “not walking their talk.” As we may recollect, there was the oft-repeated charge of “hypocrite” directed by some of these youth toward their parental generation.
Millennials and Their Sixties Parents
In this regard notice also that this latest crop of young—born mid-70s through roughly 2000 (Boomers had children over a longer expanse of time than generations previous and since, for reasons that I’ve dealt with in other places) 
and being now in their twenties and thirties…the sons and daughters of the Sixties Generation—has also seen increases in voting for liberal or Democratic candidates. Their turnout for Clinton in 1992 was the first time since the Seventies that the youth vote went Democratic. Their support of Obama was widely given as the reason for his success.
Occupy Wall Street … Sixties Gen Liberals, Millennial Revolutionaries?
In the Nineties we saw — despite the AIDS scare — an end to a fledgling “youth celibacy movement” — which had been a movement of Yuppie/Gen Xers encouraged by their Fifties Generation parents. The Millennials, 
echoing again their parents and this time the sexual revolution, were noted for early and/or increased sexual experimentation.
This latest cohort of youth also has seen increases in idealism, activism, and volunteerism. It is no coincidence that we have finally seen a rising up of activism again in the occupy wall street movement, with Millennials taking the lead and supported, taught, and inspired by their Sixties cohort parents. [Footnote 2]
Tune Inward, Turn Back, Drop Down – Psychedelics, Depression, and Those Nasty Birth Feelings
Perinatal Propensities in LSD Use … Lucy in the Sewer with Depression and No-Exit Wombs
The Epidemic of Depression Shows Pervasive BPM II Influence
Lucy in the Sewer with Depression
Other connections between drug use and perinatal influence: Perinatal feelings are very often of the depressive, no-exit type, and some drugs are temporarily effective antidotes for that. Depression itself is epidemic nowadays, indicating the rise of BPM II feelings. There is widespread use of antidepressants in America currently.
No-Exit Wombs
Stanislav Grof has claimed, based upon the tens of thousands of sessions of exploration into the perinatal unconscious that he has personally facilitated and thus 
observed, that the roots of endogenous—that is to say, deep rooted and engrained, not just situational—depression lie in the no-exit BPM II experience in the womb prior to birth. Furthermore, my personal experience with depression earlier in my life and my primal re-experiencing of prenatal, womb feelings, as well as birth, confirms his statement.
Psychedelics and Birth: Tune Inward, Turn Back, Drop Down
Finally, psychedelic drugs..LSD… “they’re ba-a-a-ack.” Though they are more discreetly used these days and so are less obviously evident. Various psychedelics and hallucinogens are used at postmodern raves, among many other places.
Their increased use also points to perinatal influences in that it is known that psychedelics—LSD in particular—can help people to access and to some extent resolve perinatal trauma, when taken for purposes of personal growth.
Corrective on LSD Misinformation
For those who have cynically adopted the line that either psychedelics are another drug that blots out one’s Pain or that they are only used for recreational or sensual/hedonistic purposes or that the kinds of birth experiences that Grof describes as occurring on LSD only occur in supervised and guided sessions, like the ones he offered…for those who have dismissed psychedelics and LSD in any of these ways, let me say,
LSD is Hardly Escapist
First, psychedelics, especially LSD and to some extent, even marijuana, are known to act in the brain in a way almost exactly the opposite of the drugs used to escape from reality—such as, for example, alcohol, nicotine, or heroin—though this news flies in the face of the myth put out by the all-encompassing anti-drug propaganda machine, which puts all drugs in the same category. This 
is common knowledge among researchers and scientists who study these things. For elaboration, see Culture War, Class War Chapter Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds—especially the part on “Drugs and Consciousness“—as well as subsequent chapters of that book/blog.
Drugs—Not Just for Fun Anymore
Second, that drugs are only used for recreational purposes is patently false. Though the vast majority of drug use is recreational, there are in print many examples, and the admissions of many authors, of the use of LSD by individuals and groups for purposes of personal 
growth. 
And, in my own limited exploration, personal growth was my motivation. In fact, many people are afraid to take the drug LSD, knowing full well that its effects are not always pleasurable or recreational. So why would they accept that risk if they did not have some other intent, like personal growth, for experimenting on themselves with it?
LSD and Birth Reliving
Finally, before I had ever heard of such a possibility of reliving one’s birth, let alone heard of Grof, or Janov for that matter, I learned that at least one person at my university on LSD found himself feeling like a fetus and then going through a process of struggling through a birth canal, and so on.
“Most Peculiar, Mama!”
In this book so far, we have considered the uniqueness of our times and the elements of the perinatal unconscious. 
We have followed that with a look at the predominant underlying fantasies and myths of our times—our contemporary collective dreams as projected onto the silver screen, boob tube, and printed page, with a perinatal rock heartbeat of a soundtrack.
Our Nightly News and Neighborhoods
Finally we have taken a look at the anomalous elements of our everyday reality — those confusing and bizarre, newly emerging 
images that permeate our nightly news and neighborhoods, along with those totally unprecedented cultural, environmental, and social factors that weave the backdrops of our lives.
Going Forward, Explore Our Hells and Heavens
Let us now go deeper. Let us make the connections. Let us explore the way we have reflected our innermost intimate hells and heavens into 
the fabric of our times. And back again, let us uncover the way the warp and woof of 
these strangest of days has affected each of us, in our most superficial of behaviors to the most intimate and deepest of our minds. The way forward is down.
Continue with We Have Manifested a World That Mirrors and Re-Creates Our Traumatic Human Births: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive
Return to How We Re-Create Human Prenatal Irritation and Burning in a Polluted Planet: Diagnosis, Prognosis, and What to Do About Toxic Womb ~ Toxic Earth
Footnote
1. See my blog/book Culture War, Class War, especially Chapter Two: Matrix Aroused, the Sixties and Chapter Four: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Concocted Worlds and Chapter Five: The King Won’t Die – An Aborted Changing of the Guard.
2. These aspects and generational phenomena are spelled out in more detail in my work-in-progress, Regression, Mysticism, and “My Generation.” Right at hand, however, you can read an elaboration of some of these ideas in the chapters mentioned in Culture War, Class War—especially Chapters One through Seven and the post, Awakening Millennial Generation Occupy Global Revolution.
Continue with We Have Manifested a World That Mirrors and Re-Creates Our Traumatic Human Births: Life or Death Matters We Need to Face to Survive
Return to How We Re-Create Human Prenatal Irritation and Burning in a Polluted Planet: Diagnosis, Prognosis, and What to Do About Toxic Womb ~ Toxic Earth
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Wonderful Can Happen: With Dumbness at the Top and Media as the New Opiate of the Masses, Still, “Yes, We Can” Proved We Could.
Posted by sillymickel in activism, allegory, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality, US on November 6, 2012
To Our Amazement, Charlie Brown Connected, Lucy Apologized, a Man Who Said “Yes We Can,” Would: Anything Is Possible … Means Everything Is Possible
Culture War, Class War, Chapter 23: Something Wonderful Can Happen
There Are Good Reasons Why Our Financial and Environmental Fortunes Careen Wildly About: Dumbness Rises to the Top
Blinded by Their Greed, They Overlook the Obvious: Why Our National Misfortunes Are Greeted with Such Surprise by Authorities and Pundits
Voices Never Heard
What I’ve been trying to say here is, there are perspectives that are relevant and are never heard. And I’m talking about perspectives that are right outside the doors of power ready to talk and be heard; often having been perspectives that had been embraced not long ago, but suddenly, not having any credibility at all…so that our democracy of many voices—now with the filthy rich and their Republican lackeys and their paid-for media in collusion to mine only one avenue of discourse—begins to echo the Soviet Union of old with its one voice, Pravda.
Horrors Far Worse
Back in 2000, I also had written,
“I believe we are in grave danger of losing things far worse than those horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining, let alone progressing, in the freedoms and privileges that we take for granted.”
I believe our friend speaks eloquently about some of those far greater horrors, and indicates they are there right now on our doorstep. We had a surplus and a will to tackle them a decade ago. Sadly we have wasted the last ten years reversing those environmental policies whose intent it was to help. And we have reversed our financial situation, which could have helped. In addition, we have reversed the restrictions on corporations and other policies that would have helped and at least slowed down this ominous impending doom.
So we are a decade further along in environmental collapse, and it is has increased its acceleration toward us. Meanwhile we have slashed away at our financial and other resources for dealing with it and chopped back the time in which to work. The way I phrased it a decade ago.
So is this election important? I believe it is. For me it is especially important, for I feel that if the Republicans take over, they will do so much to damage to the dreams of my generation that even if the Democrats were to be reelected to all branches of government in 4 or 8 years, they will do so much damage
(the example of Reagan-Bush nearly QUADRUPLING the National Debt in their mere 12 years being the perfect example) that My Generation will have to clean up their mess afterwards, taking more years. And only then will we be in a position to progress in this country and world and bring it more in line with the ideals of peace, love, community, and harmony we envisioned in the Sixties.
So what I mean is that if we fail in the next 80 days, I can envision no more time of real hope again, for this country or the world, until I am in my Sixties, Seventies, or older. And then, even then, there will be no real hope. For as it is said of the poor, these forces of regression, Cowboy shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot, cynicism, and – let us call it what it really is: evil – will always be with us.
Dumbness Rises to the Top
And sure enough, as we all know…and what these people could not even imagine, as that trader put it, well, it is happening. One wonders what these buffoons who could not foresee such things will do in terms of fixing them; having acknowledged their extreme lack of foresight (and we’ve added, their extreme inability to look anywhere farther than their tight knit group of true believers for answers.) This should be something to see.
As for Wall Street and the economy, let’s take another look at how the media has dealt with other perspectives to flesh out my claims above of these perspectives not being far off.
On CNBC, a couple of years before the economic downturn, they used to have as a commentator, Robert Reich, who was President Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury and the mastermind of the great economic turnaround of the Nineties.
But he was talked over, laughed at, and was routinely talked to as if he was a child or suffered sadly from some kind of bleeding heart brain cloud. Well, as his words began to be the ones that should have been listened to, he was no longer to be seen on CNBC. And then afterward we have such a comment like, “Well, nobody could have seen it coming.”
Well how could they, if they were no longer put on the show?
No, apparently there was such an insular crowd on Wall Street, the White House, and, most unfortunate, among the very media whose job it was neither to make news as prognosticators or economic experts, nor was it to be part of a partisan “anti-plunge patrol.” 
Their lack of even-handedness and their alliance with particular theories created just the kind of apparent reality that the trader bemoaned. No, it wasn’t that nobody was seeing it coming–as you see below, I was seeing it as inevitable from the shared experience of a mere decade or so ago. And I mention one figure who was silenced. So to the mystified trader who knew no one who saw anything but, as one particularly wrong-headed man phrased it, “a goldilocks economy.”
So, blinded by their greed, they missed what the people I knew were all seeing—danger ahead, and the unsustainability of a rally that had risen on so much manipulation, misinformation, 
and constant drum blows of obviously wrong economic talking points hammered over and over across our airwaves and drowning out every sound of warning or opposition, so that surprise and misinformation informed the trading decisions of the great bull traders.
So many people were hurt by this partisan power play. But that was the way of just about everything during those 8 years of, as one recent writer dubbed it, dictatorship.
If you’re still reading, you will see I have reasons for pointing these things out, providing this background, for it is this context of a kind of dumbness rising to the top which, even now, makes for the strangest of comments on TV talk shows, and the most asinine and foot-shooting policies and stances of the remaining Republicans.
Media Feel-Good Talk Does Not Equal Reality … and Why We’re Helpless to Prevent the Future Fukushimas and Killer Hurricanes.
Media Is the New “Opiate of the Masses,” with Pundits a New Priestly Caste Between Modern Pharoahs and the New Enslaved.
Media Mollifies Masses
All this being said, now, perhaps for you the Message in a Bottle provides, as it did to me, a provocative window into the workings of cause and effect. More than that I hope it sheds light on the huge efforts of deception that are ever needed to advance false partisan ideas which, though proven wrong, will by greed be raised anew and banner-like be carried forth to beat back the voices of common sense in favor of a reality that must be forced to be made to be true only because its rich adherents would wish it to be so.
Media Feel-Good Talk Does Not Equal Reality
Another advantage of having the time capsule is what we can learn about such warnings. Will the media tell you of impending doom, so that we might avert it?
No, they will, for the sake of ratings (profits), be a “feel good” media. They will spin out “comfort truth” — junk food for the mind — insubstantial and inconsequential and hardly soul-satisfying. But it will soothe the stresses brought to listeners through their otherwise participation in the capitalist matrix. As empty of truth as junk food is empty of nutrition it 
will act as medicine for the troubles of the postmodern soul—enslaved and unfree—but unaware even of that…and unable to even know that. So this media will serve the functions that religion once did for the elite, becoming another opiate of the masses. And the pundits will play the role of the priestly intermediaries between our modern pharoahs—the banksters and the filthy rich—and the masses upon which they feed.
So no, it is not the media’s role to warn us of disaster. Hardly. Indeed, when that disaster is one of the many forthcoming from the actions of those elite they serve, it will be the media’s job to set up the screens of smoke and trivia to distract and entertain away from real concerns. Then they will, as we’ve seen, report afterward on it and bring out the “No one could have foreseen this happening.” Well that is a self-serving lie. I hope that is gleaned from all this if nothing else.
I’ve been detailing on the media complicity, indeed, facility in the Great Recession caused by the tax cutting policies of George W Bush. But since then we have seen Fukushima, the BP oil spill, and Sandy. Could Fukushima have been prevented? Yes. For I can personally tell you, as an anti-nuke activist in the Eighties, how we were warning back then of the immense dangers of nuclear power plants and especially those on earthquake fault lines. Has the media advanced that story line? You know the answer to that.
Has the media since Fukushima kept us informed on developments there so we might prepare for the consequences coming to us from that? I’ll put it this way, I’ve had otherwise knowledgeable people tell me that 
“It is a good thing Fukushima turned out how it did … it could have been worse.” Worse? 
Something far worse than Chernobyl—which itself resulted in one million deaths (where’s the media on that fact?)—turned out ok? For this we can thank a media that stopped reporting on developments there when it turned out they could not spin it in any feel-good way. Things got worse, are still getting worse, and they stopped covering it.
Then there’s Sandy. It is being said this has brought climate change and global warming back into the dialogue. But why was it not in already? We have an entire political party in America hell bent on ignoring global warming in their insane pursuit of profits at any and all costs. Has the media been on top of this? Those self-interested climate-denying Republicans—has the media been holding their feet to the fire? Have they even lit a match near their feet? You know the answer again. For prior to Sandy and in four presidential and vice presidential debates there was not even ONE question … from the media, mind you … on the environment … let alone, climate change or Fukushima. Yet there was plenty of interest in setting up the candidates to see who could be the most manly on drilling and fracking our way to ecological hell.
Feel good media? I think so! At odds with reality? You tell me.
In the Past It Has Had Horrific Consequences.
Feel-good talk does not equal reality. If it did there would not have been the Nazis, the Holocaust, a Stalin—five million dead; a Cambodia—millions dead; a Rwanda—dead dead dead; or an AIDS epidemic—uncountable dead and growing.
Yet what I wrote over a decade ago, at the time if it had been shared in any place of power, would no doubt have been challenged by this word: “Paranoid.” This is the common way the public uses denial to avoid harsh realities. 
Blame the messengers, the dangers go away. I’m sure my planetmate friend’s piece earlier has already been labeled that way: “Paranoid.” “It’s all paranoia on the part of some crazies” is the common attitude.
That is the way we keep out the truth. It is like using a drug to ease the pain of your cancer, but it doesn’t do anything to keep you from dying.
Indeed, the planetmates’ lament, though it be labeled paranoid, is based on the findings of the best scientific minds of our times about the environmental collapses—the outright ecocide that is upon us from so many causes and in ways that are now uncountable in number. 
Their message is so much more important in that we will likely reach the point of no return long before the masses of humanity are severely suffering from the continued environmental assault. 
I don’t like to say it, but it needs to be said that some are convinced that it is already too late, that we had a window of opportunity and blew it. I know of groups in the 
know who are absolutely convinced there is no saving us now and that it is naïve to expect anything but doom.
Troubling it is that, on top all that’s been said about this message and what it has told us about what we lost and how far we are now from where we need to go, not to mention knowing we were betrayed by our government obviously, we now realize without a doubt our media too helped when they could have stopped it all.
Wonderful Can Happen, Part Three — Amazingly, Charlie Brown Connects: Remember … “Yes, We Can” Proved We Could
Shaken Out of Our Mental Maze, We Would Be A-Mazed: Lucy Apologizes, Sisyphus Rests, A Man Who Said “Yes We Can,” Would
Why Know This? Amazingly, Charlie Brown Connects
So, these things we know. They are sobering rationalizations and ones we should not run from.
But lastly and most importantly, these prescient thoughts of long ago help me. I find that these time-capsule writings from my former mind are able to inform me and sharpen my vision of the Now,
as the events continue unfolding and rolling relentlessly over and through us and are reflected in high-pixel, high-def, infinite colors clarity on the flat screens all about. This time is felt and witnessed, the story being revealed cinema-like, but with pundits galore expounding 24/7, like loud-mouthed fellow movie-goers.
But then also they become the movie and are interwoven into the times themselves. 
And their words, with this time capsule before me, are sounding childish, repetitive, forgetful, amnesiacal. Especially this is true as many of the ones speaking now are remembered as being the exact persons commenting then. And their words, little changed, bespeak a zen-like ability to be newly alarmed, being reborn in every minute, but yet totally unchanged and untaught by all the years of witnessing and commentary. So they also have forgotten the way they once saw the world and their life … just as I once did.
If We Knew, Would We Act?
It seems a defense mechanism to forget that we saw all this coming. For to know that is to despair in realizing the impotence, even, of awareness. Who wants to realize that in these matters even a knowledge of the story line, as if having seen the movie once before, is totally useless? Who wants to think that there is a helplessness in affecting the events of our lives and times, that there is a total futility in changing or steering away or around even the tragedies clearly seen beforehand? 
For knowing this we feel as detached as actual cinema-goers from the unfolding of the plotline. We feel ourselves to be not actors and hardly even the scriptwriters of our lives, instead merely the witnesses of intensely shocking and stunning events, which we actually expected but hoped we would be wrong about. So wouldn’t we want to block out that awareness of the futility of our actions? Wouldn’t we have to in order to have the heart to keep going at it? To get up and keep trying every day?
Sisyphus Remembering, Would He Continue Pushing?
If we remembered, like Charlie Brown approaching the football, or like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill… if we remembered, would we continue to act?
No, we have to believe that we will be surprised this time, that indeed Lucy will hold the football and we will complete the kick. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. As true as that is, how ironic then that we realize that those who remember history too clearly are doomed to helplessness in the midst of its unfolding. So it seems we are ineffectual either way.
But There’s More To It
Yet this is not the whole truth. If it were, then the cynicism we felt about “The Audacity of Hope”…remember that book?…well, that cynicism would have proven a correct perception. We would have been bored, again, watching a naïve young idealistic black man—like the many before, differing only in skin color—seeing his efforts, visions, hopes, and heartfelt desires to be helpful and to love away some of the darkness in the world around him vanish like the memory of yesterday’s storm-driven winds. But we, I, was one time wrong in that cynicism.
Lucy Apologizes, Sisyphus Rests.
To the astonishment, truly, of an entire world, Charlie Brown connected with the football, Lucy apologized for her past actions, and one heavy boulder remained steady on the top of a hill and gave a man a much needed rest from his endless labors.
For one incredible and glorious time, the movie we’d seen had a different ending—amazing enough in itself. But also the tragedy in the original did not occur. And as if God had for a time touched this planet, this Reality we call our World, our Life…as if God had just for one time touched, tipped, and turned our events, the awesomely unexpected happened.
A man so unbelievably naïve and unaware as to declare the “audacity of hope” and to call out and stir up the masses, deluding them as we’ve seen so many times before, that “yes, we can,” would.
Shaken Out of Our Mental Maze, We Would Be A-Mazed.
And we’d have to pinch ourselves to believe it to actually be happening even as we witnessed it. That he would actually succeed in doing exactly what he said he would do would not only show us that a man could actually affect the course of events, would show us that a person could not only change things from the way they’d always been (what kind of man can this be?). But that he would do it in a grand and sweeping way would be all the more astonishing. We would be all the more unbelieving that a man who said “yes we can” not only could but he could do it in a way that achieved beyond merely succeeding; never mind that merely succeeding would be doing the impossible.
The Only Thing We Can Be Truly Sure Of … Is We Can Never Be Sure… Which Means That Anything Is Possible… Which Means That Everything Is Possible.
Our Inability to Know Is the Source of a Hope That IS Real: Wonderful Can Happen, Part Four: It’s Just as Likely the Miraculous Will Happen.
Just When We Thought We Knew…
So I am saddened having been awakened from my forgetfulness by this catscan of a mind perfectly preserved in an electronically sealed time capsule… oh, what could have been…. But then I remember, happily, that we are, I am, imperfect prophets and seers. That just when it seems we know, for sure now, how things are, the way the world is, and how the movie will end; that just then when we know, totally convinced we are, that truly things will be as they will be and that it is futile to rail against the inevitable, to hope, even to try; that just then when we have finally 
accepted “reality for what it is,” accepted “life on its own terms” not ours; that when we’d given up the things of youth, accepted the limitations of life, addressed ourselves, resignedly, to carrying forward on the mundane things of life, to the ordinary activities of everyperson, to the simple responsibilities and expectations of every man, every person, from every time that’s ever been and accepted the unrelenting lack of specialness in either 
our times or ourselves…that just at that time we would be touched and wakened to see that the most unchanging thing of life is not its utter resistance to change, its utter forgetfulness and repetition, but is the mysterious darkness surrounding the utter clarity of everyday knowingness, is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world.
Anything Is Possible… Which Means That Everything Is Possible
Sounds complicated. What I’m saying I think is important enough to repeat. I’ll say it more simply.
The most unchanging thing of life is not the things we see that never change. They are not the most unchanging thing of life. The most unchanging thing of life is something surrounding the absolute clarity we have about these things, these harsh realities even. When you’ve finally come to accept life, you’ve accepted these unpleasant things, these hard truths, and you think that for sure now you’ve got it, that it was all about learning to accept that…and thereby become the “adult,” the seasoned, assured cynic.
Accepting Life’s Pain. But Because We Are Imperfect…
But rather, the most unchanging and most true thing about life is that no matter how much we think we know how exactly life is, there’s a darkness surrounding that utter everyday clarity that we carry around and share with our neighbors, reinforcing it’s trueness. There’s a darkness surrounding it. And that darkness is in fact the imperfection of our selves. We’re not perfect; we’re not all-knowing. 
It is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world, you see. I’m being sarcastic there.
What I’m saying is: Knowing that, we know that it is exactly the imperfection that is the most solid thing in life. You see? It’s not the things that they try to make solid. This is the thing that is solid, is gonna be there, always. Nobody has to try to make that happen, there’s always going to be an unknown.
Therefore, since there’s always going to be an unknown there’s always going to be human imperfection. For we may think we know everything, sometimes. But only a fool goes through life very long thinking that. And so, in knowing that, knowing that that’s the most unchanging thing of life, the thing you can really count on, that’s never going to go away…well, we know that it is exactly the imperfection, that lack that’s in a person, that evil, that unmoving wrongness of the world that we have tried so futilely to change, that being in us, is the source of the blessedness of life, which is the fact that our ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that IS real,
It’s Possible “Something Wonderful Is Going to Happen.”
It is only because we know that we cannot really know, for sure, that then we can know for sure that there’s always got to be hope because we could never know for sure that there wasn’t. So, what a blessing that is. That being wrong, being imperfect means something unbelievable when you think of it: Which is that against all odds, “something wonderful is going to happen.”
Ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that is real. And you say, how can you say that? You say, that’s not true. Then I ask you, are you perfect? You say, no. Then I say, the only true thing is that you’re not perfect, so that anything you are absolutely sure is wrong has a possibility of being right.
And Anything Is Possible … Means Everything Is Possible.
So, who knows? You might say that we don’t know what’s real. That’s true, of course, so why would we necessarily think things are dire right now? Why, it’s just as possible that something wonderful is going to happen. It’s just as likely that, in spite of ourselves, the miraculous can happen; that magic is real; and that hope, and happiness, and blessedness, and forgiveness, and glorious divine wonders beyond even the envisioning of our ideals are possible.
And all because the only thing that we can be truly sure of—even when we are finally convinced that we should not expect anything special—is that we can never be sure… which means that anything is possible… which means that everything is possible.
Continue with Culture War, Class War, Chapter Twenty-Four: Naked Republicans
Return to Culture War, Class War, Chapter 22: Horrors Worse Than That
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The Only Thing We Can Be Truly Sure Of … Is We Can Never Be Sure… Which Means That Anything Is Possible… Which Means That Everything Is Possible.
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality, US on November 4, 2012
Our Inability to Know Is the Source of a Hope That IS Real: Wonderful Can Happen, Part Four: It’s Just as Likely the Miraculous Will Happen.
Just When We Thought We Knew…
So I am saddened having been awakened from my forgetfulness by this catscan of a mind perfectly preserved in an electronically sealed time capsule… oh, what could have been…. But then I remember, happily, that we are, I am, imperfect prophets and seers. That just when it seems we know, for sure now, how things are, the way the world is, and how the movie will end; that just then when we know, totally convinced we are, that truly things will be as they will be and that it is futile to rail against the inevitable, to hope, even to try; that just then when we have finally accepted “reality for what it is,” accepted “life on its own terms” not ours; that when we’d given up the things of youth, accepted the limitations of life, addressed ourselves, resignedly, to carrying forward on the mundane things of life, to the ordinary activities of everyperson, to the simple responsibilities and expectations of every man, every person, from every time that’s ever been and accepted the unrelenting lack of specialness in either our times or ourselves…that just at that time we would be touched and wakened to see that the most unchanging thing of life is not its utter resistance to change, its utter forgetfulness and repetition, but is the mysterious darkness surrounding the utter clarity of everyday knowingness, is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world.
Anything Is Possible… Which Means That Everything Is Possible
Sounds complicated. What I’m saying I think is important enough to repeat. I’ll say it more simply.
The most unchanging thing of life is not the things we see that never change. They are not the most unchanging thing of life. The most unchanging thing of life is something surrounding the absolute clarity we have about these things, these harsh realities even. When you’ve finally come to accept life, you’ve accepted these unpleasant things, these hard truths, and you think that for sure now you’ve got it, that it was all about learning to accept that…and thereby become the “adult,” the seasoned, assured cynic.
Accepting Life’s Pain. But Because We Are Imperfect…
But rather, the most unchanging and most true thing about life is that no matter how much we think we know how exactly life is, there’s a darkness surrounding that utter everyday clarity that we carry around and share with our neighbors, reinforcing it’s trueness. There’s a darkness surrounding it. And that darkness is in fact the imperfection of our selves. We’re not perfect; we’re not all-knowing. It is in fact the imperfection of ourselves even as we observe so clearly the assured imperfection of the world, you see. I’m being sarcastic there.
What I’m saying is: Knowing that, we know that it is exactly the imperfection that is the most solid thing in life. You see? It’s not the things that they try to make solid. This is the thing that is solid, is gonna be there, always. Nobody has to try to make that happen, there’s always going to be an unknown.
Therefore, since there’s always going to be an unknown there’s always going to be human imperfection. For we may think we know everything, sometimes. But only a fool goes through life very long thinking that. And so, in knowing that, knowing that that’s the most unchanging thing of life, the thing you can really count on, that’s never going to go away…well, we know that it is exactly the imperfection, that lack that’s in a person, that evil, that unmoving wrongness of the world that we have tried so futilely to change, that being in us, is the source of the blessedness of life, which is the fact that our ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that IS real,
It’s Possible “Something Wonderful Is Going to Happen.”
It is only because we know that we cannot really know, for sure, that then we can know for sure that there’s always got to be hope because we could never know for sure that there wasn’t. So, what a blessing that is. That being wrong, being imperfect means something unbelievable when you think of it: Which is that against all odds, “something wonderful is going to happen.”
Ultimate unknowingness is the only true source of a hope that is real. And you say, how can you say that? You say, that’s not true. Then I ask you, are you perfect? You say, no. Then I say, the only true thing is that you’re not perfect, so that anything you are absolutely sure is wrong has a possibility of being right.
And Anything Is Possible … Means Everything Is Possible.
So, who knows? You might say that we don’t know what’s real. That’s true, of course, so why would we necessarily think things are dire right now? Why, it’s just as possible that something wonderful is going to happen. It’s just as likely that, in spite of ourselves, the miraculous can happen; that magic is real; and that hope, and happiness, and blessedness, and forgiveness, and glorious divine wonders beyond even the envisioning of our ideals are possible.
And all because the only thing that we can be truly sure of—even when we are finally convinced that we should not expect anything special—is that we can never be sure… which means that anything is possible… which means that everything is possible.
Continue with Culture War, Class War, Chapter Twenty-Four: Naked Republicans
Return to Wonderful Can Happen, Part Three — Amazingly, Charlie Brown Connects: Remember … “Yes, We Can” Proved We Could
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Wonderful Can Happen, Part Three — Amazingly, Charlie Brown Connects: Remember … “Yes, We Can” Proved We Could
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, nonconform, occupywallstreet, Politics, psychology, US on November 3, 2012
Shaken Out of Our Mental Maze, We Would Be A-Mazed: Lucy Apologizes, Sisyphus Rests, A Man Who Said “Yes We Can,” Would
Why Know This? Amazingly, Charlie Brown Connects
So, these things we know. They are sobering rationalizations and ones we should not run from.
But lastly and most importantly, these prescient thoughts of long ago help me. I find that these time-capsule writings from my former mind are able to inform me and sharpen my vision of the Now, as the events continue unfolding and rolling relentlessly over and through us and are reflected in high-pixel, high-def, infinite colors clarity on the flat screens all about. This time is felt and witnessed, the story being revealed cinema-like, but with pundits galore expounding 24/7, like loud-mouthed fellow movie-goers.
But then also they become the movie and are interwoven into the times themselves. And their words, with this time capsule before me, are sounding childish, repetitive, forgetful, amnesiacal. Especially this is true as many of the ones speaking now are remembered as being the exact persons commenting then. And their words, little changed, bespeak a zen-like ability to be newly alarmed, being reborn in every minute, but yet totally unchanged and untaught by all the years of witnessing and commentary. So they also have forgotten the way they once saw the world and their life … just as I once did.
If We Knew, Would We Act?
It seems a defense mechanism to forget that we saw all this coming. For to know that is to despair in realizing the impotence, even, of awareness. Who wants to realize that in these matters even a knowledge of the story line, as if having seen the movie once before, is totally useless? Who wants to think that there is a helplessness in affecting the events of our lives and times, that there is a total futility in changing or steering away or around even the tragedies clearly seen beforehand?
For knowing this we feel as detached as actual cinema-goers from the unfolding of the plotline. We feel ourselves to be not actors and hardly even the scriptwriters of our lives, instead merely the witnesses of intensely shocking and stunning events, which we actually expected but hoped we would be wrong about. So wouldn’t we want to block out that awareness of the futility of our actions? Wouldn’t we have to in order to have the heart to keep going at it? To get up and keep trying every day?
Sisyphus Remembering, Would He Continue Pushing?
If we remembered, like Charlie Brown approaching the football, or like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill… if we remembered, would we continue to act?
No, we have to believe that we will be surprised this time, that indeed Lucy will hold the football and we will complete the kick. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. As true as that is, how ironic then that we realize that those who remember history too clearly are doomed to helplessness in the midst of its unfolding. So it seems we are ineffectual either way.
But There’s More To It
Yet this is not the whole truth. If it were, then the cynicism we felt about “The Audacity of Hope”…remember that book?…well, that cynicism would have proven a correct perception. We would have been bored, again, watching a naïve young idealistic black man—like the many before, differing only in skin color—seeing his efforts, visions, hopes, and heartfelt desires to be helpful and to love away some of the darkness in the world around him vanish like the memory of yesterday’s storm-driven winds. But we, I, was one time wrong in that cynicism.
Lucy Apologizes, Sisyphus Rests.
To the astonishment, truly, of an entire world, Charlie Brown connected with the football, Lucy apologized for her past actions, and one heavy boulder remained steady on the top of a hill and gave a man a much needed rest from his endless labors.
For one incredible and glorious time, the movie we’d seen had a different ending—amazing enough in itself. But also the tragedy in the original did not occur. And as if God had for a time touched this planet, this Reality we call our World, our Life…as if God had just for one time touched, tipped, and turned our events, the awesomely unexpected happened.
A man so unbelievably naïve and unaware as to declare the “audacity of hope” and to call out and stir up the masses, deluding them as we’ve seen so many times before, that “yes, we can,” would.
Shaken Out of Our Mental Maze, We Would Be A-Mazed.
And we’d have to pinch ourselves to believe it to actually be happening even as we witnessed it. That he would actually succeed in doing exactly what he said he would do would not only show us that a man could actually affect the course of events, would show us that a person could not only change things from the way they’d always been (what kind of man can this be?). But that he would do it in a grand and sweeping way would be all the more astonishing. We would be all the more unbelieving that a man who said “yes we can” not only could but he could do it in a way that achieved beyond merely succeeding; never mind that merely succeeding would be doing the impossible.
Continue with The Only Thing We Can Be Truly Sure Of … Is We Can Never Be Sure… Which Means That Anything Is Possible… Which Means That Everything Is Possible.
Return to Media Feel-Good Talk Does Not Equal Reality … and Why We’re Helpless to Prevent the Future Fukushimas and Killer Hurricanes.
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Media Feel-Good Talk Does Not Equal Reality … and Why We’re Helpless to Prevent the Future Fukushimas and Killer Hurricanes.
Posted by sillymickel in activism, Class, Culture, economics, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, occupywallstreet, Politics, psychology, spirituality, US on November 2, 2012
Media Is the New “Opiate of the Masses,” with Pundits a New Priestly Caste Between Modern Pharoahs and the New Enslaved.
Media Mollifies Masses
All this being said, now, perhaps for you the Message in a Bottle provides, as it did to me, a provocative window into the workings of cause and effect. More than that I hope it sheds light on the huge efforts of deception that are ever needed to advance false partisan ideas which, though proven wrong, will by greed be raised anew and banner-like be carried forth to beat back the voices of common sense in favor of a reality that must be forced to be made to be true only because its rich adherents would wish it to be so.
Media Feel-Good Talk Does Not Equal Reality
Another advantage of having the time capsule is what we can learn about such warnings. Will the media tell you of impending doom, so that we might avert it?
No, they will, for the sake of ratings (profits), be a “feel good” media. They will spin out “comfort truth” — junk food for the mind — insubstantial and inconsequential and hardly soul-satisfying. But it will soothe the stresses brought to listeners through their otherwise participation in the capitalist matrix. As empty of truth as junk food is empty of nutrition it will act as medicine for the troubles of the postmodern soul—enslaved and unfree—but unaware even of that…and unable to even know that. So this media will serve the functions that religion once did for the elite, becoming another opiate of the masses. And the pundits will play the role of the priestly intermediaries between our modern pharoahs—the banksters and the filthy rich—and the masses upon which they feed.
So no, it is not the media’s role to warn us of disaster. Hardly. Indeed, when that disaster is one of the many forthcoming from the actions of those elite they serve, it will be the media’s job to set up the screens of smoke and trivia to distract and entertain away from real concerns. Then they will, as we’ve seen, report afterward on it and bring out the “No one could have foreseen this happening.” Well that is a self-serving lie. I hope that is gleaned from all this if nothing else.
I’ve been detailing on the media complicity, indeed, facility in the Great Recession caused by the tax cutting policies of George W Bush. But since then we have seen Fukushima, the BP oil spill, and Sandy. Could Fukushima have been prevented? Yes. For I can personally tell you, as an anti-nuke activist in the Eighties, how we were warning back then of the immense dangers of nuclear power plants and especially those on earthquake fault lines. Has the media advanced that story line? You know the answer to that.
Has the media since Fukushima kept us informed on developments there so we might prepare for the consequences coming to us from that? I’ll put it this way, I’ve had otherwise knowledgeable people tell me that “It is a good thing Fukushima turned out how it did … it could have been worse.” Worse? Something far worse than Chernobyl—which itself resulted in one million deaths (where’s the media on that fact?)—turned out ok? For this we can thank a media that stopped reporting on developments there when it turned out they could not spin it in any feel-good way. Things got worse, are still getting worse, and they stopped covering it.
Then there’s Sandy. It is being said this has brought climate change and global warming back into the dialogue. But why was it not in already? We have an entire political party in America hell bent on ignoring global warming in their insane pursuit of profits at any and all costs. Has the media been on top of this? Those self-interested climate-denying Republicans—has the media been holding their feet to the fire? Have they even lit a match near their feet? You know the answer again. For prior to Sandy and in four presidential and vice presidential debates there was not even ONE question … from the media, mind you … on the environment … let alone, climate change or Fukushima. Yet there was plenty of interest in setting up the candidates to see who could be the most manly on drilling and fracking our way to ecological hell.
Feel good media? I think so! At odds with reality? You tell me.
In the Past It Has Had Horrific Consequences.
Feel-good talk does not equal reality. If it did there would not have been the Nazis, the Holocaust, a Stalin—five million dead; a Cambodia—millions dead; a Rwanda—dead dead dead; or an AIDS epidemic—uncountable dead and growing.
Yet what I wrote over a decade ago, at the time if it had been shared in any place of power, would no doubt have been challenged by this word: “Paranoid.” This is the common way the public uses denial to avoid harsh realities. Blame the messengers, the dangers go away. I’m sure my planetmate friend’s piece earlier has already been labeled that way: “Paranoid.” “It’s all paranoia on the part of some crazies” is the common attitude.
That is the way we keep out the truth. It is like using a drug to ease the pain of your cancer, but it doesn’t do anything to keep you from dying.
Indeed, the planetmates’ lament, though it be labeled paranoid, is based on the findings of the best scientific minds of our times about the environmental collapses—the outright ecocide that is upon us from so many causes and in ways that are now uncountable in number. Their message is so much more important in that we will likely reach the point of no return long before the masses of humanity are severely suffering from the continued environmental assault. I don’t like to say it, but it needs to be said that some are convinced that it is already too late, that we had a window of opportunity and blew it. I know of groups in the know who are absolutely convinced there is no saving us now and that it is naïve to expect anything but doom.
Troubling it is that, on top all that’s been said about this message and what it has told us about what we lost and how far we are now from where we need to go, not to mention knowing we were betrayed by our government obviously, we now realize without a doubt our media too helped when they could have stopped it all.
Continue with Wonderful Can Happen, Part Three — Amazingly, Charlie Brown Connects: Remember … “Yes, We Can” Proved We Could
Return to There Are Good Reasons Why Our Financial and Environmental Fortunes Careen Wildly About: Dumbness Rises to the Top
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SillyMickel Adzema
Culture War, Class War 
Where There Is Hope and What Did You Expect Awakening to Look Like? Look Hard Enough, You Just Might See the Seeds of Light Amidst the Darkness Surrounding.
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on July 7, 2013
Chapter Ten: Where There Is Hope, Cultural Rebirthing
Societal Self-Analysis and Talk Show Soul-Searching for Peace … Sorry, I Know You Wanted to Hate Reality Shows.
The Price of Peace Is Inner Sight: Societal Self-Analysis, an Internet Reformation, and Talk Show Soul-Searching for Peace
Societal Self-Analysis
Culture War Replaced Cold War
We see the workings of these opposing tendencies to look away from problems or to embrace them by examining the reactions in America to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The disappearance of this huge object for distraction from inner unhappiness, about which one could rationalize the use of defensiveness and scapegoating, led to continued turning away through the emergence, in America, of a search for other societal scapegoats and therefore the “Republican revolution.” Culture War replaced the Cold War as the way one could be comfortably ignorant of one’s insides and self-assuredly distracted, self-righteously engaged.
This removal of a collective punching bag or scapegoat also resulted in a healthy turning toward the darkness within and a collective self-analysis in America. This reaction has brought to the fore many of our social and political shortcomings.
Talk Show Soul-Searching
We also witnessed the rise of reality shows as part of this societal pull to see beneath the covers of what is thought to be real. Now, progressives and intellectuals have lots of fun vamping about how superior they themselves are to such interests, as exemplified in reality shows. This can only be the position of elitists out of touch with the ways ordinary folks live their lives.
Sitcom Socialization
To make my point, let me back up a bit. The swagger that the Left, and intellectuals in general, display around reality shows is the same superiority they have expressed for decades concerning sitcoms. First, let me say that I consider most sitcoms and reality shows to be rather boring and a bit inane with their laugh and soundtrack framing.
Yet, when I was a child, growing up in a medium-sized city in the coal country of Pennsylvania and coming from a very traditional family, it was only through such sitcoms that I had a chance to find out what a different style of family and parenting would be. Today, I would laugh at a “Father Knows Best.” But it was a step up and into socialization from the “Father Knows Little” or “Father Not Around” of many in my social stratum when I was a kid. This exposure allowed me, and many of my generation, to seek for more in our life and for better interpersonal family relationships…and eventually better parenting.
A Modern “Priesthood”
This is where righties have it right when targeting “hollywood” for many of the changes in our culture over the last half century…though they see that as a negative influence. But intellectuals and lefties blow an opportunity and lose support among ordinary folks through an unconscious haughtiness and a cultural snobbery they are blind to but display in their turning up their noses at popular culture.
Luckily, as an anthropological social scientist, I can study popular culture and get away with it, though not without some snide commentary coming my way from progressive and professional circles. They simply will never understand an intellectual who can speak to working folks because he’s one of them. They simply don’t get my attempts to package the crucial understandings of modern science and social sciences, on which the existence of our very world depends, in words that are not primarily directed to and meant to appease the gods of academia. They consider themselves important within their tiny professional circles, thinking they are changing the world when no one even knows what they are doing beyond that constrained perimeter.
Keeping the People Down
Indeed the attitude of academics and progressives about popular culture, especially talk and reality show tv programming and although they would be appalled to ever think it, is no different from the attitudes of the Catholic church and the clergy about matters of faith during medieval times. There, too, we had an elite wanting to “keep out the unwashed.” There, too, we had a distinction between people in the know and the rabble, with the anointed ones requiring ordinary folks to go through them for matters of truth and faith. We had then also this sharp distinction between the “high culture” of the Church and aristocracy—exemplified in the chamber music of the time—and the “low culture” of the masses—exemplified by the folk music of the troubadours of that day.
Nowadays this poo-pooing of tv culture by intellectuals is the same kind of attempt to funnel reality to the masses through the filters of a new “priesthood.” The cultural purists and intellectual elites would prefer that for truth you go through them in academia, where you ‘d have to pay a toll of course, just as the priests of the Middle Ages required you to pass their way on the road to the divine.
Therapy for the Masses
At any rate throwing off the snootiness of intellectualism, I contend, allows us to notice that sitcoms, reality shows, and talk shows serve functions in society that are, overall, beneficial in advancing our culture and catalyzing increased growth. They may not reflect, yet, where intellectuals and progressives think we should be, but for many they show something beyond where they are.
We should know that they are overall helpful in our cause from the fact that conservatives want to attack hollywood and limit freedom of expression on any airwave. The fact that many reactionaries want to keep their children out of schools, home-schooled, and away from tv sets should be telling progressives something about the value of popular culture.
Rebirth Denied
American Rehab
If there weren’t reality shows, folks would have a harder time knowing appropriate ways for men and women to act with each other. The gains of feminism would not have spread so widely or as fast if they were not being modeled and reinforced repeatedly on talk and reality shows.
They demonstrate parenting and social skills—“politically correct” ones, in the good sense—to folks who would otherwise not know any better than to behave crudely and abusively. They bring the world, geography, travel, and history to the masses.
Intellectuals quibble about the quality of that, which comes across as quite childish, for it arises as if out of a jealousy of others getting the attention they want and out of a fear of competition for informational matters around science, culture, and humanities. It strikes me as more than ironic that those on the Left who would wish people to wake up from their zombie slumber would want to push programs of literature or drama where truths are filtered through the consciousness, and unconscious, of the artist, while wishing to deprive folks of a direct look—however contrived, it is actual reality and not scripted—at the world around them and people’s actual unplanned behavior and spontaneous reactions to unusual events.
Seeing people’s behavior in some of these shows does often remind me of the dynamics I’ve seen in therapy groups, and some of the personal changes in the participants mirror some of the evolutions I’ve seen in folks undergoing deep experiential psychotherapy. The audience participation part often sounds like group therapy or an intervention. I’ve been struck by how some of the group processes in the show remind me of family day in rehab, with folks reflecting back what they see in each other and how others’ behavior has affected them. These are all things that conservatives cringe at…actually hate. Yet liberals, except for notable exceptions like Jerry Springer, are not seeing the opening they have here. Lefties are fighting rather than using these forces, which are in the direction of personal growth and, cumulatively, much needed societal change.
As a psychologist and simply someone who loves people, I am fascinated by some of the things I see in these shows. They can be heart-wrenchingly real at times. So it occurs to me that folks who disparage these shows, comparing them with literature and dramatic productions, is another thing where some are wanting to have their reality filtered, managed, and packaged for them, lest it be too “disruptive” to their prejudices of things.
The Price of Peace Is Inner Sight
The upshot of all this is to say that just as a lack of a Cold War caused both collective acting out—another war, a Culture War—and collective inner searching via television talk shows, documentaries, and such.
So also the prevention of “hot” wars on an international, not just intercultural, scale and the cause of peace in general require such inner soul-searching and such confrontation with one’s darker sides. And if we must, it is better to endure the psychotic acting out of a culture war—with its battles played out on the airwaves—than an actual war.
For is there any doubt that either of these or any combinations of these alternatives, however uncomfortable and even violent…on a smaller scale…at times, is a small price to pay compared to the price of outright war and violence which, by any measurement, is a cost horrifyingly huge and unacceptable?
America Currently Refusing to Pay Such Price
The converse of this is also true: When the dramas wanting to be discussed are suppressed in the mainstream media, it is as stifling of the growth of a nation as an individual’s growth. Unfortunately we have seen this as well recently. There have been massive worldwide and nationwide Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, massive Wisconsin union outpourings, and events in Japan and about Fukushima that the American people really want to and need to know and discuss, but they are being blacklisted from being broadcasted on.
There has been a change in government in Iceland, with banksters being jailed, that Americans are not hearing about; there have been demonstrations in Japan about their insane response to their tragedy, which Americans won’t be told about; there have been massive demonstrations in Israel against the colonial policies of their own government that curiously do not make it into the offerings of news programs. These are things that in the Nineties would have fed the talk on tv and stimulated the necessary societal hashing out for there to be a chance of going beyond them.
What Is the Cost of Denial? Of Complacency?
Internet Revolution Is Another Reformation
Luckily all this is changing as the internet and social networking have upended the academic elitists, swarming around and over their petty barriers of intellectual privilege. The blogsters and “rabble” of the net have taken over the cultural dialogue of the time as assuredly as Martin Luther and the Reformation changed religion forever and helped to bring to an end the cultural stagnation of the Middle Ages and to ignite an Age of Reason and of Enlightenment.
We Could Use More “Narcissistic” Generations: Know Thyself … Let the Buck Stop Here!
Moratorium … Let the Buck Stop Here! We Could Use More “Narcissistic” Generations
“Know Thyself” ~ “Narcissistic”?
Self-Discovery, Soul-Searching, Psychological-Mindedness, Self-Analysis – Sixties Generation
“Let It All Out? No, Leave Some of It In!” – Pat Buchanan, Fifties Generation
These highly defended and fear-minded conservatives, prone to projection, are incapable of appreciating the integrity of an inner-thinking generation like the Boomers are. These outer-minded authoritarians would not get, would outright hate those who “questioned authority” in the Sixties.
Let the Buck Stop Here!
If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?
We had seen normal ways of doing things to be impotent and often dangerous and most importantly leading to apocalyptic endings in our near future. This understanding is what was responsible for all the “non-normal” behaviors my generation displayed—communes, confrontations, clothes, relationships, organics, alternative ways of everything…an entire counterculture. We have been laughed at for essentially being ahead of the curve on the messages of modern events. We have been called crazy for our inconvenient prophecies, virtually all of which are now coming to pass.
While I and my cohorts, to use just one example, spoke out on the dangers of nuclear energy and in particular the insanity of building plants on fault lines, the professional pundits scoffed and boasted they lived near nuclear plants. This was thirty years and more before the world ever heard the word, Fukushima. The examples like this are endless. We saw all these unworkable endings and asked ourselves, “What would be a real way of doing that?” “What would be a workable, sustainable way?” “What would be a sane and happy life, ethic, and lifestyle.” “What would be a loving, peaceful mode of being?”
While we sought to redo culture from scratch, building it on perennial and unimpeachable principles, the threatened elders and the jealous youngers, who would soon enough come behind, poked fun from within the confines of their assured and comfortable wrongness.
They called us narcissistic for thinking we could look at ourselves and the world and dare to think we could change it from ancient ways. They thought we were making ourselves important that way, putting on airs, even. Actually we were shouldering responsibility we did not want—yearning for a simpler, less serious time—but which we accepted for the sake of all those who would come after, knowing their very existence depended on our actions. We took faith in the touchstone of love itself—the only thing that did not crumble under examination—and sought to bend all emerging along its outlines.
What others will never get is that our “overexamined life,” our “psychological-mindedness,” our perinatal propensities, and our soul-searching and self-analysis were not about being narcissistic. It was about needing to start everything anew as a rational response to the horrors we saw about us in our culture and in the world… horrors which we were correct in trying to address at the time. For their existence today, because of our inability to be completely successful in remedying them, are bringing about all the political, economic, and environmental armageddons I’ve been discussing in this, and its related, books. And we knew, and still know, that only some change huge and radical will help us, and for that we need to find and stand upon the deepest and firmest of ground within us. That is what we’ve been looking for, are still looking for…only now we have lots of company .
Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits: A Drive to Healing, the Hard Rain Fallin’, and Millennial Promise
A Drive to Healing and What Did You Expect Peace to Look Like? Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits
A Drive to Healing
We cannot expect that everyone will heal their birth traumas when they arise into consciousness during periods of peace. However, we can expect—especially now that there is understanding of these dynamics and there are techniques and modalities available for healing them—that some people will!
Furthermore, even the more ritualistic and superficial yet blatant regressions to infancy, birth, prenatal, or even prior to that—for example, as Mayr and Boelderl describe in Europe—are not the indication of a “death drive” or “death instinct” as these researchers claimed. [Footnote 3]
What Did You Expect Peace to Look Like?
Better Hitler Had Jumped Into Mosh Pits
What Might We Expect?
Millennial Promise
“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”
From the roads and TV screens of America the scenery can often appear bleak. Sure, heavy changes are coming down…but what should we expect? “A hard rain’s gonna fall,” sang Bob Dylan. And that’s what it takes to blossom the spring. Look hard enough, you just might see the seeds of Light amidst the darkness surrounding.
Evidence in Our Collective Dreaming
Next we will take a look at one of the projective systems of our society, specifically, our cinema, to see if it shows evidence of the change of consciousness that we have here been describing as necessary to derail the cycles of war and violence that have plagued our species for millennia uncountable and have led us to the brink of extinction.
Films are both the collective dreams of our society as well as the only truly
widely shared method of collectively experiencing a nonordinary state of consciousness. Thus they are telling, in the messages they contain, as well as powerful in their impact on the audience, who in this mild nonordinary state of consciousness are more open to suggestion and to receiving mental impressions and information.
We will look to examples from films of the last few decades for indications that our collective consciousness is actually changing and that there are grounds for hoping that we will be able to stave off apocalypse…creating instead the quantum leap to an Earth rebirth.
Footnote
1. For “overexamined life”see Keniston, op. cit., 1965; for “psychological-mindedness” and “self-analysis” see Keniston, op. cit., 1968, especially p. 81.
2. Davis, op. cit., especially Ch. 7, “The Great Society and The Youth Revolt.”
3. Mayr and Boelderl, op. cit., p. 149.
Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Eleven: Control Versus Surrender … Heaven Leads Through Hell
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Nine: Regressions in the Service of Society — Messy Healing
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