The City of Conversation: Remembrances by Steve Jonas

The City of Conversation: Remembrances by Steve Jonas

May 28, 2014 The Planetary Movement My wife and I recently saw a new play entitled “The City of Conversation,” at the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York City.  The play is centered on the adult life of a once-famous “Washington Hostess,” a power-broker of sorts for whom there were several real-life models.  In the days before the Reagan/Gingrich/Tea Party GOP, when there was true give-and-take between the Democrats and Republicans, on some level at least, these women played an important role in bringing leading members of both parties together for informal negotiations, out of the public eye.  The brilliance of the play is that it intertwines public and personal lives, the political and the emotional, and how they interact, in this particular telling leading to no good outcomes on the latter side.  Historically, in three acts, it is set in 1979, 1987 and 2009.  But it does reach back to the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon era as well. This column is not a review.  It is rather a collection of some of the remembrances that I had during the play, which covers the period of my adult political life.  Some are related directly to the substance of the play; many are not, but the play brought them up into my consciousness.  And so let me share some of them with you. There was President Kennedy’s little-remembered “American University” speech of June, 1963.  In it he essentially proposed taking Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev up on his earlier proposal to try “Peaceful Co-existence” as the basis for relations between the US and the USSR.  With that speech, perhaps even more than with his not-too-well hidden intent to withdraw US forces from Viet Nam after the 1964, JFK signed his own death warrant. Many of us who fought hard against the War on Viet Nam from the beginning of the escalation (I was marching in 1965 when people would come up on the street and ask “what’s the Viet Nam War?”), wondered just why it was that LBJ gave up on the Great Society, only to get sucked into the “Big Muddy.”  Had he not, he would have gone down in US history as one of the greatest Presidents of all time.  Only recently did a Johnson tape come to light in which he offered his prime reason: He was afraid that if he didn’t escalate, the Republicans would call him a “commie.”  And we are still living with the droppings of the Era of McCarthyism. Just before the 1968 election, the Democratic candidate, Sen. Hubert Humphrey wanted to declare that he would end the Vietnam War right after election, just as Dwight D. Eisenhower had done with the Korean War. For reasons that have never been clear, the by-then totally lame-duck Johnson told him, “No!” and for equally unclear reasons Humphrey listened to him.  In the meantime, the GOP candidate Richard Nixon was secretly negotiating with the right-wing South Viet Namese government which Johnson was trying to steer towards a settlement at the “Paris Peace Talks” to scuttle these talks (which they did).  Johnson knew about the treason but decided to do nothing with the information. Sen.  George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic candidacy, featuring the slogan “Bring America Home,” was doomed from the start when the right-wing Democratic establishment, the predecessors of the Democratic Leadership Council, led by Washington State’s Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing,” refused to support him.  McGovern was portrayed by Nixon as a weak-kneed, lily-livered liberal.  Not once did George McGovern, whom I later came to know (he wrote the Foreword to my first political book, The New Americanism) ever mention that during World War II, when Nixon had a nice desk job in the US Navy, McGovern, was flying 35 missions (volunteering for an extra 10 over the required 25) piloting one of the “flying coffins” (because it was so difficult to escape from when hit by enemy fire) B-24 bombers.  George, who had survived the famous Second Ploesti Raid (Romanian oil fields, vital to the Nazi war effort), didn’t have a chance. On Nixon, I recall that when in 1972 I saw the first article in the New York Times about the Watergate break-in (front page, but a single column, “below the fold”), at which time there was not the least hint that Nixon had anything to do with it, having known of “Tricky Dick” as he used to be called, since he ran his first red-baiting campaign against the unsuspecting California Congressman Jerry Voorhis in 1946.  I said to myself, “Nixon’s behind this one.” Ronald Reagan, counseled by the famous political consultant Lee Atwaterbrought racism into the mainstream of Republican politics.  In March, 1980, he symbolically opened his Presidential primary campaign in the tiny town of Philadelphia, MS.  It just happened to be the site of the murder of the three civil rights workers during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 (one of whom, Andy Goodman, I had known a bit at high school). Reagan also was the first to make abortion rights a political issue.  Starting down that track from the beginning, he made the resignations of George and Barbara Bush from their long-time Board memberships with Texas Planned Parenthood a condition of giving the Vice-Presidential nomination to Bush.  On energy policy, one of Reagan’s first acts as President was to shut down, on January 21, 1981, the Federally-funded alternative energy research program that President Carter had started, as well as ordering the removal of the solar panels that the former president installed on the roof of the White House.  The Global Warming Denial Movement is a direct descendant of the Reagan Presidency.   Just imagine where this country could have been in the alternative energy technology movement had that program stayed in place.  But Big Oil was as much behind Reagan as it is behind the present whole of the GOP/TP. And oh yes, in the 1980 election Reagan’s victory was called a “Landslide.”  Actually, he got 50% of the vote, Jimmy Carter got 43% and a third party candidate (for whom I had worked), former Congressman John Anderson, got 7%. On “Iran-Contra,” during his Presidency Reagan broke the law by supporting the right-wing rebels in Nicaragua, such support being specifically prohibited by an Act of Congress.  (He also broke the law by secretly dealing with the Iranian “terrorists,” with whom, during the 1980 Presidential Campaign, much like Nixon he committed treason by bargaining with them not to release the US Embassy hostages until after the Presidential election, thus making sure that Carter would continue to be saddled with the continuing crisis.)  “Iran-Contra” eventually got to a joint Congressional Committee.  Ted Kennedy and other liberals were kept off the Committee by Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, the Democratic fixer for the GOP, who would in the future play a similar role on the “9/11 Commission.”  It is interesting to note that current Democratic “fixer,” Cong. Steney Hoyer, has arranged to keep such liberal lights as Cong. Alan Grayson off the newly minted House “Benghazi” (Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi) Committee.  Hamilton also arranged for Col. Oliver North, who was at the center of the Iran-Contra plot, to be given Congressional immunity.  Otherwise, he would have been forced to take the Fifth, which likely would have rightly led to Reagan’s impeachment. The appearance of two gay men in the third act of the play (2009) made me think back to the first AIDS Crisis, which broke about in the middle of the Reagan Presidency.  Reagan, so strongly indebted politically as he was to the “Revs.” Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who had immediately labelled AIDS as, “God’s punishment for the sins of homosexuality,” of course Reagan had known many gays during his days in Hollywood, including the “Male Archetype” Rock Hudson, who happened to have been one of the early victims of the dread disease, couldn’t bring himself to mention the word (AIDS) for more than two years after it had been coined. Finally, you might ask, why so many negative memories and so many that feature Republicans and Ronald Reagan.  Only because it is the Republicans,and the policies with which they have been running our country, whether in the majority in Washington or not, and gradually running it into the ground, for the bulk of my adult life.  And, it was Ronald Reagan, the “failed B-movie actor,” as he is described by the leading liberal at the beginning of the play, who set the pattern on so many levels for what the Republican Party and our nation have become today. Yes indeed, Sean, “What would Reagan do?”  One only has to look at the record.

Supporting the Troops?

Well here’s a simple exercise in hypocrisy.  Those who cheer the loudest for war also want to cut the taxes that would help treat the predictable casualties of war.  This is not a new issue, and stems back to the beginning of time.  The warmongering, often racist, militant right wants to pay nothing toward services that would actually help people, the victims of their own wars, even their own allegedly beloved “troops.”  Such monstrous, callous, barbarous stupidity is now normalized across large swaths of the population.

 

Veterans Affairs: Support a 90 yr old Purple Heart recipient and veteran of two wars

By Nicole M.
Sun City Center, Florida

My dad, James March, is a World War II and Korean War veteran with a Purple Heart he received in WW2 — but now that he’s seriously ill, the VA is refusing to help him.

Even though his injury from the war caused him terrible back and leg pain throughout his life, my dad never complained to the VA — he rarely asks for help from anyone. But now that he’s 90 years old, dad is really sick and he urgently needs help from an assisted living facility. Our whole family is worried about him: he’s barely eating, he’s nearly lost his eyesight, and he’s suffering from dementia. In just a few months, he lost 70 pounds.

Dad needs constant care, but Mom isn’t able to be a full-time caregiver because she’s struggling with cancer recovery and diabetes — and my family doesn’t have enough money to pay out of pocket for him to get a home aide.

The VA lost our application for assistance two times before they denied our claim. Even though my parents are crippled by medical costs and their home was foreclosed on 2/27/2013, the VA says my dad “makes too much money” to qualify for help. In reality, my parents barely have enough left over at the end of the month to buy their groceries, let alone pay for at-home care.

My dad was there when our country needed him to fight in WWII, healing others as a medic on the battlefield where he earned a Purple Heart. Now that he needs us, will we turn our back on him? Sign my petition asking that the VA give my dad the benefits he and all veterans deserve for their service and sacrifice.

My dad needs help

Chaos on Bullshit Mountain!

Jon Stewart finally takes off the gloves:

“2016” a Fantasy From the Right Wing Machine?

 

From the you-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me files, I find 2016: Obama’s America playing in not one, but two local theaters today. Well, that’s a quandary wrapped in a dilemma. What is this obvious election-season propaganda, and who’s behind it?

In trailer 1, we learn that what concerns the filmmakers doesn’t appear to be 2016, but 1982 and black people in Africa. The blackness, front and center, and the plight of Africans gets a highlight. Here the filmmakers attempt to make a point that Barack Obama has something against “colonialism” and his real agenda (not actually in evidence in the real world, but hey, it’s right wing masturbatory fantasy time), the current president’s real agenda is to “downsize America.”

 

This is an interesting claim to make, seeing how Obama has been more competent at shoring up the empire than his inept predecessor could hope to be. The claim also seems to imply that colonialism is a good thing, and that America should be expanding its empire because of that uniquely American word “liberty.” You see, if you say the word “liberty” then you can simply colonize others for their own good, and baby Jesus smiles.

Apparently the creation of AFRICOM has no bearing on Obama’s claimed drive to end colonialism – which we’re supposed to be against? We’re supposed to be against a fantasy that’s not occurring, because Obama is for it, deeply related to his blackness and African heritage. Oh yeah, then cue the Middle Eastern music in the soundtrack. Crank it up loud as Obama proclaims, “Change has come to America.”

George Orwell might have opted to just shoot himself in the head at this point.

Some black children then fight one another irrationally over a game of Monopoly. I’m gonna need a psychologist’s interpretation of that one. Dissonance rules this piece, and it is apparently not intended to make any sense.

The poorly-mixed audio then continues over shots of “Wall Street.” Yes, Wall Street repeatedly appears, as a symbol of – what exactly? Is the implication that Obama has opposed Wall Street, its rape and exploitation of the American sheeple as well as its ongoing depredations around the globe? Seriously? Fantasy two: Obama is destroying Wall Street?

A piece of propaganda so incompetent, so detached from reality has little chance of fooling a literate, thinking people. As for our co-citizens, however, all bets are off. He is black, yes. His father was African. Case closed.

“America must grow so liberty grows.”

Really? What is the real-world meaning of this line? Where are we “growing?” With U.S. military bases in the majority of the world’s countries, which direction are we to “grow” next? Fascist empires have proclaimed their naked desire to rule the world before. This film seems to champion this idea unabashedly. Code word after code word obscures the real meaning these people mean to impart. The saddest thing is that Obama himself is on board with their concerns and is in no way opposed to these aims. This is kabuki theater aimed at uneducated, irrational viewers. There doesn’t appear to be any truth in sight, whatsoever, the ideologues behind this piece so deluded by their own bullshit that they couldn’t make a valid point if their lives depended on it.

 

That leads us to trailer 2 of “2016: Obama’s America.” Here we are informed, much as in the first propaganda, that Obama’s roots trace right back to Kenya. Hide the children. Then Obama’s first sin, the federal budget had been stalled for a claimed “1,000 days.” Really? That’s Obama’s plan to destroy America. He rejected the right-wing extremists in Congress for some time and forced them to negotiate. Eventually they rammed their cuts aimed largely at the lower classes and the needy down the nation’s throat while protecting their billionaire paymasters from any sort of new taxation whatsoever.

But it is Obama, we are told, who is “pitting one class of Americans against another.” One would have to be from Mars to be swayed by such gibberish. The utter incompetence of this hit piece is its most striking feature. It really is the product of a billionaire’s PR machine, written by sycophants to please their demonic overlords. The film should tour with neurosurgeons offering free lobotomies at kiosks in the theater lobbies. Or at least offer free alcohol if you’re going to subject people to such an assault on reality.

Trailer 2 closes with golden boy author Dinesh D’Souza, warning us, “Nothing can rob the future as much as the debts of the past.” That over Obama in Kenya again presumably at the grave of his father. It’s really his father’s plot to keep the billionaires from further cutting their taxes. If only the billionaires could pay zero, or negative taxes, “liberty” would swallow the universe. And blackness would be put in its rightful place.

Oh yes, there’s a trailer 3. Did you think you were off the hook yet?

We’re back in Kenya, back in 1982, because that has so, so much to do with America in the year 2016. Kenya, the seat of global domination and hegemony for our solar system is the cornerstone to understanding the great mysteries of planet earth today. This trailer version seems to be almost identical to the first one, with the voice over quality improved somewhat so that the words are better deciphered.

“Which dream will we carry into 2016?”

The black African one or the white one?

As false dichotomies go, this garbage should frustrate the hell out of people with multiple working brain cells. They carefully avoid making plain factual statements, placing their propaganda in the realm of questions, grand visions, vagueries.

Perhaps they’ll fleece the ignorant poor white-wing who consistently vote against their own interests. Such customers are numerous. The Tea Party will make much of this nonsense, but no one will touch on any of the realities of the day. That’s guaranteed.

Writer/director Dinesh D’Souza is a slick operator. His book was called, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” Rage? Black must equal rage in some lexicon. The claim is as false as everything else in this moronic mind wash. Dinesh hails from the American Enterprise Institute, the minor leagues for wannabe plutocrats. He knows from which direction his cash flows.

I pity the anti-fascists who will sit through this assault on intelligence for educational purposes. The central theme of the piece can be summed up in this one sentence from D’Souza’s Rage book:

“This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

Good luck with that. Back on earth, however…

Prometheus – A Culture of Idiocy?

by Jeff Sparrow

In the late sixties and early seventies, the Swiss quack Erich von Daniken made a fortune peddling a hundred different iterations of his ‘Chariots of the Gods’ thesis, asserting that sundry unusual artifacts from prehistory provided proof of extraterrestrial intervention.

As everyone knows, the von Daniken hokum plays a central role in Prometheus, the dire new Ridley Scott movie. But what’s interesting is how Scott wrenches this ‘ancient astronauts’ hooey from its original context and re-articulates it for the epoch of the Tea Party.

Chariots of the Gods recognizably stems from the same milieu as Carlos Castanedas’ equally preposterous The Teachings of Don Juan, both of which appeared in 1968. The sixties radicalization fostered a surge of interest in Third World cultures and alternative spiritualties, and in his own demented way, von Daniken presented his research as a quest for truths ignored or suppressed by the mainstream of which the New Left had become understandably suspicious.

In Prometheus, by contrast, it’s not the establishment that’s dangerous – it’s knowledge itself.

Thus the specialistschosen to explore the mysteries of human origins react to their mission like frat boys interrupted on the way to a kegger. But it’s not simply that they’re so disinterested in the prospect of scientific discovery that, once inside the alien monument, you expect them to leave off surveying in order to light their own farts. It’s also that they’re shown as perfectly correct to jeer at the high-falutin’ theories that have spurred the mission: in this movie, curiosity inevitably results in a swift and grisly death.

In Scott’s version of the Greek myth, Prometheus got what was coming to him: the secret of fire belonged to our betters and man had no business messing with it. The film portrays inquiry as inherently suspect, with the most admirable characters openly refusing to learn anything about the new world around them.

‘I just fly the ship,’ says the captain, as if he’s driving a school bus rather than piloting an expedition into uncharted space. His subsequent self-sacrifice accords with the peculiar notion of heroism that has evolved over the last decade – the hero as a taciturn blue-collar everyman, intuitively hostile to the nonsense spouted by an overeducated elite. One thinks of Peggy Noonan’s infamous explanation of how, in the wake of 9/11, intellectualism departed, giving way to ‘masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things.’

And then there’s the film’s treatment of religion.

Von Daniken’s thesis, at least in its early incarnation, expressed a sixties’ skepticism about traditional Christianity, since the attribution of ancient cave paintings and Biblical scriptures to the same alien source provided an obvious challenge to conventional dogma.

In Prometheus, on the other hand, the ancient astronauts actually confirm the faith of the central character, Elizabeth, largely, it seems, on the basis that the extraterrestrial role in shaping humanity discredits Darwinism, the eternal bête noire of the fundamentalist right. When her drippy boyfriend suggests that proof of interstellar beings manufacturing humanity poses a teensy problem for believers (ya think?), Elizabeth shoots back, like Sarah Palin sassing the New York Times: ‘Well, who made them?’

As James Bradley points out, the religiosity that runs throughout the movie is immediately identifiable as the pop Christianity associated with conservative megachurches, a creed that can assimilate any kind of woo hoo into its theology. For many Americans, religion now entails less a coherent set of doctrines than a homemade assemblage scrabbled together from TV evangelists and the Left Behind books and Hallmark cards about angels and whatever else comes to hand, and so there’s no reason why identifying God as a cosmic astronaut should pose any particular dilemma.

‘It’s what I choose to believe,’ says Elizabeth, neatly voicing the contemporary sense that sincerity matters more than truth. ‘True for me’ is, of course, a notion entirely at odds with 2000 years of Christianity, and thus an illustration of the paradoxical secularism now embedded in so much contemporary religion. As we learned during the Bush years, even (or perhaps especially) for fundamentalists, truth has given way for what Stephen Colbert calls ‘truthiness’, a knowledge that resides in the gut rather in the brain, a way of understanding the world that depends more on emotion than intellect.

That’s the spirit suffusing Scott’s movie, a vapidity that means it’s unable to invest profound questions about human origins with any excitement whatsoever. Symptomatically, the aliens aren’t in any way alien – they’re just muscled-up white people, an advanced culture demonstrating its superiority via more effective Nautilus machines.

In place of any intellectual wonder, the elaborate CGI effects deliver only bombast, in headache-inducing 3D. Nora Ephron once compared reading Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls to ‘masturbating while eating M&Ms’. The high-tech eye candy of Prometheus produces the same kind of onanistic stupor, without the inconvenience of having to turn pages.

All of this makes a depressing contrast with Scott’s Alien (and even James Cameron’s Aliens). Those films introduced Sigourney Weaver as a new kind of female protagonist – a woman who was smart, cynical and tough. Prometheus reverts to a much more familiar treatment of a woman in charge, with Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers rehearsing the old trope of the castrating bitch with daddy issues. The earlier paranoia about the faceless corporations controlling the ship has also vanished, replaced by a backstory about succession in a family business, like something you’d hear in a small claims court.

The sad truth is that this is not a movie about another planet so much as a representation of where our world’s at. The Engineers have their enormous stone temple; we have Prometheus, an expensive monument to a culture enmeshed in self-regarding idiocy.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence.

Astro Turf Wars (2010)

“How corporate America is faking a grassroots revolution.”

From the film’s website.

Synopsis (Short)

From the Tea Parties to the healthcare and climate wars, America’s conservative citizens have revolted against the Obama agenda. But are these grassroots actions in fact examples of `astroturfing’? – The practice of manufacturing citizens groups for the purpose of delivering corporate messages. Curious to find out, Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham went undercover to investigate. What he found was astroturfing on a scale greater than he could have imagined, threatening not only the heath of American democracy, but that of its citizens and the planet as a whole.

Generation Zero: a Weak Brew – Teabagger Cinema

[Editor’s Note:
I was going to post a link to the film’s trailer, but all versions of the trailers are completely deceptive. They paint a real problem, but they fail to disclose their ridiculous agenda of pinning all the blame for the financial industry meltdown on:

“The people who were the ’60s hippies. The people at Woodstock in the ’60s who became the yuppies of the ’80s really the barons of the 2000s and really are the leaders around the country that helped cause this.”
-Dave Bossie, executive producer and the president of Citizens United Productions

Mr. Bossie has a bright future with Ringling Brothers. He’s a world-class clown.

You can read more from the geniuses behind this idiocy at your favorite fascist “news” broadcast, Hannity.”
-jg]

“Generation Zero:” a Weak Brew
Teabagger Cinema

By PRAIRIE MILLER

Dredging up tired old myths about America while concocting misleading new ones, the documentary Generation Zero assembles a host of valid gripes currently troubling the nation, but is more than careful to detour around any proposed remedies anchored in reality. In other words, all dressed up in undercover Republican in rebel’s clothing, and with basically nowhere new to go.

Written and directed by reactionary Reagan partisan propagandist Stephen K. Bannon (In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed, and Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration) the inaugural Tea Party cinema documentary Generation Zero boasts an exceedingly odd couple combo of assorted right wing egghead think tank rhetoric talking heads and angry white middle class rants. And all wrapped up in highly sophisticated production values fueling alarmist high speed imagery, and topped off with a musical score seemingly gleaned from really scary slasher movies.

Invoking intimidating biblical scriptures that are fused visually with looming tornadoes, rotting fruit, paper money on fire, and a man versus lion beatdown, Generation Zero gets down to business on fast forward by blaming the current economic crisis retroactively on Lucifer, Woodstock, Dems, post-hippie yuppies lighting up cigars with burning Ben Franklins, Hollywood, Black Panthers, anti-war protesters and disrespectful post-WWII youth. Which might leave the marginalized left in this country scratching their collective heads while caught between pondering these neo-McCarthyite attacks, and shock that they seem to wield such enormous power over the course of history.