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THE ABSURD TIMES
Illustration: I could figure the above out more easily than I could what has happened to the U.S. gradually, but reading those sorts of handwritten manuscripts in differing languages is what Philologists are trained to do. And no, I cannot decipher the above at all. I do know it is Nietzsche’s handwriting and, of course, in German, but about the only person who could readily decipher that script was Peter Gast, and he is long dead. Still, it can be done.
Decline and Fall of Democracy
So, how do we understand what has happened to the U.S.? It used to be the clear leader in all sorts of nice stuff, but today about all it leads in is its military budget (which is about equal to or above all the rest of the world’s combined). We have been at war constantly. Each President has seemed to be worse than the previous one and even Nixon, Mr. Scum himself, seems liberal by today’s standards. So – What happened?
I have attributed this to money, capitalism ueber alles, corporate media and the lack of information, a stupid electorate, Just about anything that would explain it. Finally, I heard an answer.
It came from a very strange source. I used to be a fan of Mort Sahl’s but he seemed to drop off the radar and then when he reappeared he seemed to lack the same sharpness. Perhaps the fact that he is in his 80s has something to do with it. Anyway, he recently tweeted a line that made sense to the effect that we are being ruled by the descendants of JFK’s assassins. (John F. Kennedy.) I’ve always thought the assassins were part of our government and his brother’s assassination followed right when he was about to retake that position. Eugene McCarthy followed a far more principled path, but RFK was more likely to be elected. So, then he was eliminated with extreme predjudice.
Lyndon Johnson replaced JFK and did the bidding of the Assassin camp. While he stated he did not think we “should” be at war in Vietnam, he was careful to point out before he died that he said, “shouldn’t,” not, “wouldn’t”. An extreme point of contention, even today, was whether JFK would have pulled out of Viet Nam.
JFK was no Roosevelt in domestic matters, but he did feel strongly about a number of domestic issues. It was in foreign policy, however, that he had the greatest impact. He inherited a CIA with all its plans and an FBI that was its own world. The CIA planned the Bay of Pigs and JFK was livid when he learned how he was being mislead by them and the “foreign policy experts.” He refused to bomb Cuba during that invasion and that was what led to the Bay of Pigs failure.
This is still obscure and this is one of the reasons: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20121207/ When Castro took over, he nationalized all the big business properties, but tried to reimburse the companies. They said that the properties were worth more than that. He said that he would pay that, then, if they paid back taxes at their own valuation. They said no. So he took them. Big business made sure no one knew about that, but that they did know he was a, gasp, Communist. (Actually, he wasn’t – more socialist.)
During to so-called embargo, both he and RFK conspired, along with Kruschev, to pretty much end the worst phase of the cold war, although credit for avoid a nuclear war at the time should go to a soviet submarine captain who refused to attack the US fleet at the time. From that time on, he began to eliminate most of the Eisenhower/Nixon/Dulles personnel (and that caused problems). RFK kept making Hoover report to him, as Attorney General, instead of the President directly. Hoover did not take kindly to that and lived to see RFK die.
So, that leaves Viet Nam. When JFK was killed, we had 20,000 troops there, all so-called volunteers. He had talked in his inauguration speech about “Communist” threats there and I knew then that it was time to start research on the Viet Nam issue before I was conscripted as an indentured servant in the Killing fields. It turned out that Viet Nam had been at constant war for over 1,000 years, that the French were the last to occupy it, that we had stashed munitions there at the end of WWII or Korea (not sure which), and that they simply would not be occupied peacefully or defeated – ever. It seems that JFK came to the same conclusion, or that parties of the “Military-Industrial-Complex” had decided that he did and thus he had to go. After all, whose country is this? Big business or the people? He had to go.
LBJ did carry on with most of JFK’s programs (civil rights, medicare, etc.) but had agreed or resolved to escalate Viet Nam in accordance with the desires of the Complex. He also enjoyed reading the salacious gossip steadily fed to him by Hoover. The people were angry. He led them to believe no war. His opponent, Barry Goldwater, promised bombing Viet Nam into the Stone Age. It was a clear choice. Actually, Goldwater had helped LBJ get re-elected. All was going according to plan.
The people were angry. They had not been outright lied to in so long, and JFK had instilled an emotional idealism in them, that they could not accept what had happened. Many had joined the Peace Crops when it was run by Sergeant Shriver and before it was turned into a cover for the CIA. They had little memory of Nixon and McCarthyism, the Depression was in the past, they believed in government, even became patriotic, and then came the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, something LBJ carried around in his pocket for six months before he pulled it out.
After 4 years of escalation, and McCarthy’s surprise support in the primaries against him, LBJ resigned. Then RFK joined in the campaign. He was assassinated too. The convention to name a new Democratic candidate took place in Chicago of 1968.
It was a crowd filled with peace, love, hate, anger – just about every emotion you can imagine and just about every character you could imagine. Many of those I knew, scattered to corners of the parks. Many of those I met, I didn’t identify until much later. The only one I had even corresponded with before was Tom Hayden and I didn’t see him. Norman mailer was there, gave a self-promoting speech, and went off to write up his version of what happened. Hunter Thompson was there, but I didn’t know who he was. Abbie Hoffman was everywhere and there was no way to follow anything about him or predict what was going to happen next.
I grew up in Chicago and tried to tell people about the police, warn about alleys, but, as was usual in those idealistic days, no one listened. It got louder and louder and I finally would up far away after one particularly bloody police blitzkrieg watching the rest on television. I knew when the attack was about to start, was off by a few minutes, and wound up finally escaping down toward the lake shore. (No one went looking there, at least not wearing a badge and carrying a stick and a gun.) I saw the rest on TV. It was enough to see reporters beaten up in the convention hall and the tape delayed by 30 minutes. In short, anyone who objected to the election process as dictated by the assassination’s aftermath got the bloody shit beat outta them.
Some of them would up on trial a couple years later and that trial is a story all in itself. Even the transcripts of the testimony are lively reading. The lead Defense attorney was given 4 years in jail for contempt charges alone. Hoover had long since turned from fighting organized crime to killing “communists”. I always suspected that the mob caught him cross-dressing and put the heat on him.
That led to Richard Nixon being elected. I think you can take it from there. Ever since then, each president was worse than the previous. Carter seemed to try to turn things around, but Iran’s deal with Ronny Raygun did him in. Ever since them, the split between rich and everyone else has gotten bigger.
To sum it all up, there is no reason to idealize JFK or to attack him. Yes, he was on painkillers, speed, was hypersexual, and so on. And yes, Bobby had to run around and clean up after him. And yes, Jackie got hooked as well. And yes, Joe helped a great deal in getting him elected and his connections were involved. The point is, however, that he went into the office with the notion of doing what was best for the American people and ran up against the so-called “Military-Industrial-Complex” that Eisenhower warned about. Eisenhower was in a great position to know as he was in the middle of it all and could do nothing. The Dulles brothers were the mouthpieces for it all and the CIA and FBI were in their hands.
Kennedy ran into a myriad of problems with this crowd, being tripped up repeatedly by things they had going on that they kept secret from him. When he found out, he started cleaning house. These people didn’t like that, had too much money and power to lose, and so they stopped him the most effective way they could. Threats and blackmail didn’t work, so they simply killed him – and with him any chance there was of moving this country in a sensible direction. We don’t need the stupid cliché’ of “Conspiracy Theory” as it has been manipulated into sounding insane and, hence, wrong. The fact that there was a conspiracy, meaning a group of vested interests cooperating in ending JFK’s reforms, remains, however – make it sound as you will – you still have to live with the results.
One of the results is the strange change in some Presidents once they get into office. Of course, Reagan was produced by GE, and Bush by the oil companies, but we certainly saw a great difference between Obama the candidate and Obama the President. I think these international interests, which are now firmly entrenched, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse early on, right after he signed the papers closing Gitmo.
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