{"id":137553,"date":"2019-07-15T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-07-15T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=137553"},"modified":"2019-07-12T12:04:52","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T11:04:52","slug":"happenings-in-the-land-of-the-free-and-the-home-of-the-brave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/07\/happenings-in-the-land-of-the-free-and-the-home-of-the-brave\/","title":{"rendered":"Happenings in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere\u2019s something happening here\/What it is ain\u2019t exactly clear.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 Buffalo Springfield<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

11 Jul 2019 – <\/em>The Sunday newspaper had been left on the park bench.\u00a0 Its book page had lists of best-sellers, as if numbers two through ten could be the \u201cbest\u201d along with number one.\u00a0 Absurdities were everywhere for the taking.\u00a0 On the Non-Fiction Hardcover list, numbers 3, 5, and 10 each had the word fuck in the title.\u00a0 The books were published by two old and respected publishing houses: Harper and Little Brown.\u00a0 However, something was odd, for the word fuck was spelled f*ck.\u00a0 These books were about hope, acceptance, and living the good life, clich\u00e9 topics in a feel-good culture: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Everything is F*cked, <\/em>and Calm the F*ck Down.\u00a0 <\/em>It seemed you had to be fucked first before you could accept the hope that the good life was coming your way.\u00a0 <\/em>He wondered if these publishing houses thought that by eliminating the \u201cu\u201d they kept their hands clean and were not descending into the gutter with hoi polloi, while simultaneously titillating potential readers.\u00a0 Did they think readers would be offended by the word fuck, but would not be by f*ck?\u00a0 Then it occurred to him that he didn\u2019t know what the fuck non-fiction books were anyway.\u00a0 Maybe he had been wrong all his life and the opposite of up was non-up, not down.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On every table in the seaside resort\u2019s breakfast room there was a brightly colored flower in a clear watered vase.\u00a0 When he picked it up to smell the orange blossom, there was no smell and the water didn\u2019t move.\u00a0 He imagined an ersatz form of plastic happiness, a conjurer\u2019s delight, where everything was a trick, nothing moved, not even water.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Leaving the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in southern California where white and black Marines were regularly fighting and there were even some killings never reported by the press, the two young Marines escaped the tense and claustrophobic atmosphere on a weekend pass.\u00a0 It was early February 1967, and they took an overnight bus up the coast to San Francisco where they wandered around and found a breakfast restaurant near Union Square.\u00a0 There they read in the newspaper that for the week of January 12-19 the U.S. military had suffered its highest casualty count so far in Vietnam: 144 killed, 1, 044 wounded, and 6 missing-in-action.\u00a0 It jolted them awake more than the coffee.\u00a0 Later that afternoon, the two naifs wandered into the Haight-Ashbury district were they were startled by the first waves of acid-dazed hippies, who would soon arrive in hoards for the \u201csummer of love.\u201d\u00a0 In the evening when they visited a bar for some beers, the waitress who delivered their drinks was topless.\u00a0 While they regarded this slight anomaly with manly indifference, she must have noticed their military haircuts that stood out among the longhairs, and so she served them buttons with their beers.\u00a0 The buttons read: Vietnam Love It Or Leave It. <\/em>Heading back to the base, they knew where they didn\u2019t want to go.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The young man was studying for a PhD.\u00a0 He was intent on learning what made the world and people tick.\u00a0 He was attending a small seminar at the home of his professor, a famous German emigre who had worked for the Rand Corporation and U.S. Intelligence.\u00a0 Each of the five students was to give a short presentation on the subject of fake news and the issue of knowledge, since the course concerned the sociology of knowledge.\u00a0 The student began his presentation by quoting a famous philosopher\u2019s words: \u201cIn formulating any philosophy, the first consideration must always be: What can we know?\u00a0 That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is all knowable.\u00a0 Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything?\u00a0 Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, \u2018My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.\u2019\u00a0 By \u201cknowable,\u201d incidentally, I do not mean that which can be known by perception of the senses, or that which can be grasped by the mind, but more that which can be said to be Known or to possess a Knownness or Knowability, or at least something you can mention to a friend.\u201d\u00a0 The student paused and the eminent professor said, \u201cSo very interesting.\u00a0 Who is that philosopher?\u201d\u00a0 The student replied, \u201cWoody Allen.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cHe is very perceptive,\u201d said the professor, \u201cand yet I have never heard of him.\u00a0 I will have to read his work.\u201d\u00a0 The student realized he was in good hands with such U.S. intelligence and Rand Corporation experts, so he asked the professor\u2019s wife for another glass of the German wine she was serving and toasted his good fortune with a wry grin.\u00a0 None of the other students got the joke.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

A young man was reading a book that he highly recommended to his uncle.\u00a0 Leafing through it, the older man came upon this passage: \u201cthe free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms.\u201d\u00a0 So what was the point of reading such a book, he wondered, since doing so was an exercise in pre-programmed absurdity since there was no freedom.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

You have probably seen the bumper sticker that says: \u201cShit Happens.\u201d\u00a0 Some people are just lucky, I suppose, and odd coincidences mark their lives.\u00a0 When he was just out of Columbia College and working for a reputed CIA front company, Business International Corporation, Barack Obama had a chance encounter with a young woman, Genevieve Cook, with whom he had a 1-2 year relationship.\u00a0 Like Obama and at about the same time, Cook just happened to have lived in Indonesia with her father, Michael Cook, who just happened to become Australia\u2019s top spook, the director-general of the Office of National Assessments, and also the Ambassador to Washington.\u00a0 Of course, Obama\u2019s mother, as is well-known, just happened to be living in Indonesia with Barack and Obama\u2019s step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian military officer, who had been called back to Indonesia by the CIA supported General Suharto three months before the CIA coup against President Sukarno. Suharto subsequently slaughtered over a million Indonesian Communists and Indonesian-Chinese.\u00a0 As is also well-known, it just so happened that Obama\u2019s mother, Ann Dunham, trained in the Russian language, after teaching English in the US Embassy in Jakarta that housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia, did her \u201canthropological\u201d work in Indonesia and Southeast Asia financed by the well-known CIA conduits, USAID and the Ford Foundation. Then there is Cook\u2019s stepfather, Philip C. Jessup, who just happened to be in Indonesia at the same time, doing nickel-mining deals with the genocidal Suharto government.\u00a0 Anyway, \u201cshit happens.\u201d\u00a0 You never know whom you might meet along the way of life.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The hostess at the seaside restaurant had an eastern European accent, so he asked her where she was from.\u00a0 She said, \u201cBelgrade, Serbia.\u201d\u00a0 He told her he was sorry for what the U.S. government led by Bill Clinton had done to her country and that he considered Clinton a war criminal.\u00a0 She said the bombing in 1999 was terrifying, and even though she was young at the time, she vividly remembered it.\u00a0 It traumatized her, her parents, and her family.\u00a0 Then she smiled and said that in the month she had been in the U.S. for her summer job, all the Americans she had met had been so friendly.\u00a0 He welcomed her to the U.S., and as he was walking away, he remembered that Clinton\u2019s savage bombing of Serbia that had killed so many Serbian children and other innocents had been code-named \u201cOperation Noble Anvil.\u201d\u00a0 He wondered what kind of \u201cnoble\u201d people would think of innocent children as anvils: \u201cheavy usually steel-faced iron blocks on which metal is shaped,\u201d and did the friendly Americans accept Clinton\u2019s sick lies when he ended his March 24, 1999 war address to the American people with these words: \u201cOur thoughts and prayers tonight must be with the men and women of our armed forces, who are undertaking this mission for the sake of our values and our children’s future. May God bless them, and may God bless America.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The banal, 1967 hit song, \u201cSan Francisco\u201d (Be sure to wear flowers in your hair), which was influential in enticing young people to come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, was written by \u201cPapa\u201d John Philips, who attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and whose father was a Marine Corps Captain.\u00a0 \u201cPapa\u201d John\u2019s wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence work in Vietnam.\u00a0 His neighbor and Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles) buddy was Jim Morrison of Doors fame, whose father US Navy Admiral George Morrison commanded U.S. warships in Vietnam\u2019s Tonkin Gulf during the \u201cTonkin Gulf Incident.\u201d\u00a0 Frank Zappa, the father figure of Laurel Canyon\u2019s many musicians who just happened to converge in one place at the same time where a covert military film studio operated, had a father who was a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal.\u00a0 Stephen Stills, David Crosby and many other soon to be famous musicians all came from military and intelligence backgrounds and frolicked in Laurel Canyon.\u00a0 Although they were draft age, none of them was drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement whose music was catchy but innocuous and posed no threat to the establishment. But \u201cshit happens.\u201d \u00a0In his disturbing book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon<\/em>, David McGowan raises the question: \u201cwhat if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the \u2018movement\u2019) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them?\u00a0 What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray\u2026.What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The reporter was interviewing four of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi\u2019s young \u201cexecutive governors,\u201d who were all dressed in three-piece business suits.\u00a0 They were in the process of conducting Transcendental Meditation\u2019s weeklong course leading to supernormal abilities, including, flying, levitating, disappearing, x-ray vision, and other siddhis, or supernormal powers.\u00a0 Their recent press release had advertised the course as \u201ca new breakthrough for human life on earth\u201d for any person. \u00a0The reporter was a bit skeptical that people could be taught \u2013 for a large fee \u2013 to fly or disappear.\u00a0 He asked one of the executive governors, \u201cCan you literally rise into the air and move horizontally; can you see yourself and can others see you actually fly?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d Larry Johnson replied without hesitation, \u201cabsolutely.\u00a0 Once you eliminate all stress from your nervous system, you have unbounded, unlimited potential.\u00a0 A human can achieve any desire he wants, flying is only one of them.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cPeople will be skeptical,\u201d the reporter continued, \u201cHow about a demonstration?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cA public demonstration would cause too much of a ruckus,\u201d said Johnson.\u00a0 \u201cAnd we couldn\u2019t show you because we only do it for each other.\u00a0 Actually, we do our techniques with our eyes closed, but we do peek out once in a while and see each other flying around the room.\u00a0 You know, one of the siddhis is a technique for making yourself invisible, and the Mararishi has said, \u2018Don\u2019t peek out to see if you\u2019ve disappeared.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Johnson giggled and added, \u201cWe can also teach people to x-ray their own bodies and see through walls. Absolutely, absolutely.\u00a0 It\u2019s all about infinite correlation.\u00a0 Absolutely.\u201d\u00a0 As the battered reporter left the interview, he wondered if the Maharishi was a creation of the CIA.\u00a0 He remembered John Lennon\u2019s song lines about the Maharishi\u2019s assistant: \u00a0\u201cBut he often spread rumors through his right hand man\/Who used to be with the CIA\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

What is \u201cexactly clear\u201d is that Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills, Neil Young et al.) toured with their Laurel Canyon buddies, the Beach Boys, in late 1967 (their other mutual bud, Charlie Manson, stayed out west presumably to work on his craft) and performed at a very odd venue for a \u201cdissident\u201d rock group, The U.S. Military Academy at West Point.\u00a0 At that time nearly 500,000 American troops were waging war on the Vietnamese.\u00a0 That concert was an odd happening, wouldn\u2019t you say?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

If everyone actually looked, they\u2019d see precisely what went down, \u201cwhat\u2019s going down,\u201d and why we are going down.\u00a0 If you think many of these things \u201cjust happen\u201d for no reason, then I guess you are just \u201cf*cked.\u201d\u00a0 Excuse me, but it\u2019s true.\u00a0 Does the asterisk help?<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/span><\/a>. Website: <\/span><\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Jul 2019 – The books were published by two old and respected publishing houses: Harper and Little Brown. However, something was odd, for the word fuck was spelled f*ck. These books were about hope, acceptance, and living the good life, clich\u00e9 topics in a feel-good culture: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Everything is F*cked, and Calm the F*ck Down. It seemed you had to be fucked first before you could accept the hope that the good life was coming your way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[290,234,109,70],"class_list":["post-137553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-culture","tag-media","tag-politics","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}