Every Which Way

Something Like a Choral Sketch

Talking with Tom Solly and some friends having sausages and ale this afternoon beneath the umbrellas on the patio deck at BEERWOODS, in the back-bay Baywood neighborhood of Los Osos, and, recalling something in the morning news, one of the guys reminds us that most middle-of-the market media regulars are never to be trusted,

"they deliver lies" one of the guys said- "as if their lies were true shit."

"Smelling like government-Made-in-the-Shade," another added, "every day, and by the clock."

To which, in not-quite-cynical agreement, we all nodded, each having maybe something of his own disenchantment to offer.

But, face it. It's not like anybody's really full-time into It, not as if they watch CNN, thinking as they watch, that it's all CIA scripted,

- everybody knows what’s going down : either flat-out-lies, or fucking Big Mouth nonsense.

The guys around the table, after all, neither critics nor scholars, have seen what’s out there to be seen, observations of the ought-to-be obvious:

the government lies, the people you voted for lie, “reliable information sources' make their living by lying.

And like so many of us who should have been more alert, no matter: the guys around the table are taken in most of the time in too, just like the rest of us. - by the flow of the continuity of the presentation, just like most of us here in America every day.

So I've described the "the look of the book” elsewhere, but as a persuasive device, a common device of propaganda, you should know, it works like this:

The Los Angeles Times receives a US Dept of State press release: It's b.s. of course -

but worse, written in typical administrative anti-style -it's not quite geekish jargon, but not much else.

Virtually unpublishable, a Times editor rewrites it to fit the Times' style-sheet and, that done, if it's important enough, individual page editors then purge anything in Automotive or Travel and Leisure, or anywhere else that might be confusing.“

So, as Tom says, “everything stinks of the same shit."

"Thus -everything in today's Times, Post, NPR, NBC, you name it. -Everything fits into "the look of the book" and we, wary skeptics as we are, we flow mindlessly along too.

But here in the afternoon coastal sunlight -not in your TV room, glued to the tube, but here over ale and sausages, media manipulation is familiar stuff

Even though it's not immediately hot doo doo, like whatever Kanye West is up to, everyone around the table knows street wise, corporate news has "always" been a fully-on-the-payroll-partner

-has always been - strategically deliberated government persuasion -in over more than 150 years, rarely much else but,

all, all paid-in-full agencies and,. abbettors, of US aggression -overt and covert

And, like everyone else in the country, we all know that we've been lied to every day of our lives.

LIke the rest of the country too, -we believed every word of it

So in retreat from having lived most of our lives within a prefabricated bs package of daily-delivered-to-your-door pig shit, each of us had long ago found something like refuge in whatever face-saving nonsense we could try to hide within.

Yet far, far harder to digest, -and nearly impossible to accept, is, I think, our slow, reluctantly eventual recognition that a growing, rapidly increasing maybe. -majority of Americans have become fully incorporated true believers

-Whole classes of respectably received professional Americans, are up-to-their-ears-committed to unrestrained investment in US global domination, US land-grabbing and blood-letting around the world,

Whole classes of ever-on-the-rise, in-the-know respectables whole-heatedly give their support, play their small part in the global advantage of white American domination

disguised, always, as emancipation and progress .

Thousands of good Americans making it a point of professional accomplishment and virtue, to design, initiate, -and direct, genocidal activities anywhere and everywhere-

Thousands of good Americans matriculated into the depravity of institutionalized oblivion.

Products, many of them now, of the survivalist transformation of “Higher Education,”

-Colleges and universities everywhere, having abandoned the formerly serious study of issues of substance and critical thinking for a more lucrative government-friendly, “pragmatic curriculum” of Administrative Professionalism and Teck-Job-Training.

Thousands upon thousands of young Americans eagerly becoming elastic miniatures of the authoritarian corporate complex by which our country is run.

The Military industrial / Financial/ Corporate / Litigation/ Education / Complex

The most fearsome “democracy” in history

Providing that the pay-off is big enough.

Not so easy to look the other way,

with a blind eye

when the greed is so great

and the crimes insupportable.

Call it cultural denial:

The people believe what they want to believe,

they believe in the machinery of success

the machinery of Greatness

And they believe in those people who are the machinery

Many among the most respected professionals of contemporary America have made themselves a congenial second career, expediting the suffering and death of thousands of the darker skinned peoples of Hispanic America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Anywhere in the world, if someone’s not quite ready to kiss America’s ass, our graduates make killing them as cost-effective as required.

Whenever a substantial pay-off was in the works

And especially when the blood is only ankle deep,

and the bodies are under the rubble.

For example, and not, in fact, blood-splattered at all, every one of them were all respectable American businessmen who forcibly wrenched the Hawaii Islands from the Hawaiians.

They were the combined executives of United Fruit, International Railways of Central America and Electric Bond & Share, who recruited the CIA trained and equipped thugs who destroyed the land-reform Guatemala government of Jacobo Arbenz, brutally rounding up, sadistically torturing and killing a conservatively estimated 200,000 “suspected communist” Guatemalan men, women and children.

-Doctors and hash-slingers, carpenters and high-schoolers, machinists and seamstresses and attorneys and farmers.

200, 000 Guatemalans murdered by order of the US executives of American owned Electric Bond & Share, International Railways of Central America and Tax-dodging United Fruit, the (illegally) largest land owner in Guatemala.

All, all respectable men.

And indeed, moreover, it was soon-to-be-blood-soaked American publisher, Augustin Edwards and no one less than Harold Geneen, CEO of ITT, "one of the best known businessmen in the world and, Donald Kendall, then CEO of Pepsi-Cola, "who together" engineered the horrifically violent overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected Chilean government, thereby establishing the grotesquely murderous blood-drenched dictatorship of pathologically sadistic Augusto Pinochet

So it almost needs not be said,

it has been such respectably admired gentlemen such as these to whom critical commentator, Chris Hedges, refers, when he writes of the fraternity of "American Oligarchs" whose world-wide blood-letting, land-grabbing, and torture have transformed our United States into the most fearsome "democracy" in history.

That’s who we’ve become.

Who we are

Who we have been

Remarkably educated, richly experienced, and deeply informed – one of the most honest of contemporary journalist-commentators in America, Hedges calls forcefully to our often resistant attention, the lies within which we actually live-

Within which we are enveloped,

blood-letting and land-grabbing and torture

the machinery of Greatness

the progress liars lie about

a surprisingly satisfying second career

both here at home and abroad

American Executive Officers, step-ladder administrators and middling executives of International Investment organizations, real estate development entities, transnational law firms, almost every natural resource or energy production organization, any large-scale Food production entity and any other unfettered organization pleased to pick up a few extra billion by commandeering whole-hog whenever possible, an always smaller, much weaker country

Letting blood, and Grabbing land and Torturing anyone who might resist .

Iraq, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor, Sudan,Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Columbia, Uruguay, Mexico

All small matters of our history

Forcibly executed expropriations, violent thefts, illegal extractions, brutal confiscations,

incidental killing.

Overseen and justified by the highest Executive Offices of the United States government,

-its Department of State, its extensive Military Forces, their 170 reputedly nuclear “defense” installations around the world,

-an ambassadorial goon squad

in every targeted nation,

-johnny-on-the-spot-

"Regime Change Specialists.”

Sausages and ale

-in the coastal sunlight-

This was a sort-of-song in memory of Thucydides to be sung by Bertold Brecht.

SHORT TAKE

Background Music

Never, throughout its history, -never, has our government believed there was a country in the world in whom the leadership of the United States could bring itself to believe it could unequivocally place its trust.

Even in the days of its beginning, Washington, Adams and Hamilton, for example, and probably Madison as well, said among themselves, that given half a chance, the Spanish, French, Dutch, the Poles and even the Russians, would cut the country up into petty mini-nationettes to fight among themselves as “Europeans had been doing for centuries”-

In 1778 or 9, the administrative corporate state had yet to be born, but it was coming.

So, especially during the last century or so -a period of increasingly dangerous big-power nation-state anarchy, our ever-mistrustful government had, as a matter of course, neither patience nor sympathy for those stubbornly independent countries wanting our help and of course our money, but also simunltaneously, claiming non-partisan neutrality and, as US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles would characterize it. - “irresponsibly” wanting to co-exist equally with both the United States and the Soviet Union; and, thereupon, as Dulles would also observe,

demonstrably proving themselves to be untrustworthy.

As most every member of today’s aspiring administrative Professional Class understands,

only compliance is acceptable

However-

I’m not suggesting that the US leadership establishment did not recognize the sincerity tof those nations wanting to be friends with both great powers; nor do I mean to imply that US authorities doubted the weaker countries desire for neutrality.

Instead, It's my take on things, that the US National Policy Establishmentdid not think neutrality was possible at all.

They “knew” “of course” that neutrality was an absurdity.

“Accept Russia’s help and, - you’re Russia’s dog.”

By 1945 -55, at least, and having time and experience to know that the US was an habitually practiced supporter of Imperialist White Supremacy everywhere, and a relentless a global expansionist, many of the “darker nations,” among them, for a random example, Iran, Guatemala, or Indonesia, would, nevertheless, each have understandably have preferred to have both peace and good will of both the US, the Soviet Russia, and, (soon enough) China.

But throughout the newly emerging Third World, complicating this picture, formerly colonized people, many having only recently established their independence, tended most often to see Russians as friendly, sympathetic supporters, and to in turn, be wary of proven pro-colonial suprematist US racism.

Financially fortunate once-colonial students from Vietnam, Iraq, Sri Lanka and the Congo went abroad to study, many absorbing disturbingly “radical” ideas - thee American Declaration of Independence, theories of republican democracy, equality under the law., universal human rights and varieties of Marxist theory.

Some became communists and returned home to Jakarta, or Chile, to start independent communist parties, to organize for workers rights, land reform and women’s equality, and some even established linkage with Joseph Stalin.

In the view our then Russo-phobic Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, any friend of Stalin was an enemy of ours.

Paradoxically, and a seemingly endless catastrophic tragedy in the making, Stalin had no interest whatsoever in hostilities with the United States .

True enough, communism and capitalism were believed to be hopelessly opposed ideologies widely expected to inevitably clash one day in an apocalyptic struggle to the death.

But while the US media was frantically hyping the apocalypse, pulling out all the available stops, and creating possibly the most frightening -and utterly unjustifiable war hysteria in US history, Stalin was having none of it.

Russia had lost twenty million men in the war. The country was struggling to rebuild from near utter devastation and chaos, and while the American press screamed warnings about impending diabolic Russian aggression every two minutes, Stalin was telling every communist party leader he could reach, everywhere in the world, to please stand down and let things cool off.

Stalin had made an agreement with Roosevelt at Yalta not to exceed his initial post-war spheres of influence, and with neither Eisenhower nor Dulles having the sympatico inclinations of FDR, Stalin knew that any wayward misstep by any ambitiously independent CP leader anywhere, China, Greece or anywhere else, could give the Americans cause for catastrophic alarm.

The Americans had unnecessarily destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki as much as a warning to him as anything else. They were clearly capable of anything, and the last thing Stalin wanted was more Russians killed.

Better said, The last thing he wanted was a war with the inestimably destructive United States.

But to be sure, Stalin, wan unimaginably diabolical mass-murderer by anyone’s standards, hardly a geo-political Goody-Two-Shoes, and for many people around the world, Americans, Europeans, and Russians especially, war between the two countries seemed all but inevitable.

The usual characteristically jingoist chest-thumping notwithstanding however, no one in the US wanted such a destructive war either; for, much , much more efficient, by suckering the Russians into a suicidally expensive arms competition they could destroy Stalin’s fragile war-exhausted economy and, simultaneously, exterminate the Soviet Union itself as well.

For those neo-conservatives still strutting today, that’s exactly what happened.

Thus, here in America, the collapse of the hated and feared Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, was the occasion for more arrogantly self-congratulation among leadership careerists and their patrons than when an even more delusional cohort came home from Versailles (1918) crowing that they had made the world a safer place for everyone.

-so long as everyone was white.

What the authoritarian administrative state -Russia, China, the United States -actually wants above all else, however, is un-equivocating compliance -from its citizens and its client states especially.

Hence those unspeakably blood-drenched “lessons” originating in the early cold-war years and continuing, possibly, until day-before-yesterday, resolutely meted out to any ”irresponsibly unreliable politically un-aligned Impulsive.” -Indonesia, Guatemala, Catalina Island, foolish enough to accept a tuna tin from a happenstance Russian vacationer.

“Silence", it’s been said, “is consent"