An Indulgence
"I want you to know it was always about you. Not the magic or the demons or anything. You. Your power's just like magic, 'cause it doesn't exist unless enough people believe in it. In a way, that's what I've been fighting all these years. Just belief.
"All I ever wanted was for the world to be free of your kind, whether you were here in Parliament, or in senate or junta or hell or in heaven. Maybe that's pointless, then. Maybe the people are too small and scared to be free. Maybe they want you there, shitting all over them.
"But like a salesman who's only too eager to sew up his market and stitch up his customers, you're happy enough to exploit that.
"Aw, sod it. Sod you. For whatever it's worth, you were always the enemy. So you can listen to what I have to say.
"I'm not ashamed."
Those are the words of a cartoon character. Well, a 'graphic novel' character, if you wanna be that way about it. John Constantine (soooo badly portrayed by Keanu Reeves, in a recent movie) is a man who walks a tightrope between Heaven and Hell. Neither wants him, both hate him. He tries to do the right thing consistently, and often does, but often ends up getting his friends killed, and doubts the verity of his mission each and every day. He also knows that he can't rest.
Not gonna give you a full rundown. The comic's been running since '87, so there's too much there. In any case, in the above quote, he was standing on a bridge in London, looking at the Halls of Parliament, while he thought the above thoughts, and it sorta makes me misty. I hear him.
I had a nice chat, in between classes, with the only Gringa Alta that matters today. She's working her way into a job as a computer programmer, but the academic system wishes that she round herself out, knowledge-wise, so she's also taking this class called "Understanding Terrorism".
Or 'Perspectives on...', I don't remember. In any case, her faculty is a published author, and the kind of person the media calls on when they would like to trot out An Expert. He asked a funny question the other day: "Who was the first president of the United States to declare war on terrorism?"
I would have answered Johnson, had I been there, but I would be wrong. His quote was, "This isn't a war against a particular country, but against tyranny." Close, but not quite the same abstraction.
Teddy Roosevelt. That's the answer. Then the teacher asked, "How did Roosevelt become presiedent?"
I'm gonna brag here, she knew this because I told her. Th' lady answered that he had been McKinley's vice president, when Bill got shot.
"So someone in here has read their history!", he said. Then the discussion began about who the man was who had shot the president.
"They pointed out that he was an avowed anarchist?" I asked. "But that a lot of people even then wondered if maybe Roosevelt paid him?"
Not exactly, went the answer. But it was implied that there, as has happened so many times in American history, was an occurrance that caused Americans to say-Here Is The Threat; Anarchism, and start to do things they previously would not have chosen to do.
Not too long after, a battleship of ours blew up in Havana harbor. It's known now that it either was a sailor smoking around the powder magazines, or maybe something else, but at the time, it was seen as a reason to go to war against Spain, and take their territories. After which we made them our own, of course.
We then got talking about the interestingly large amount of supposed lone nuts who seem to be doing the assassinating in American history. We talked about Hinckley. Supposedly just wanted to assassinate Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, but it's not like he didn't have a history.
He used to work for World Vision, International, which is a missionary/paramilitary organization, with ties to the CIA. His family was close to the Bush family. The only person I could think of who would have actually wanted Reagan dead was George Bush, Sr., who had just had his ass handed to him in the run up to the '80 election. Still, strange choice, though.
And to take "Taxi Driver" as your cover story? Truly weird, but just weird enough that it makes the whole thing sound plausible. Crazy people do things like that.
Almost as crazy as using "The Catcher in the Rye" as your cover story. When Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he removed a thorn from the side of the FBI that had been there too damn long. He'd been viewed as a criminal by that organization since he became a citizen, and was widely suspected to be on the verge of leading a massive resistance movement against Reagan.
Chapman was another one not without a history. He too was with World Vision, but was still referred to as being a crazed lone nut. When the "Catcher in the Rye" thing came out later, both Time and Newsweek dutifully printed excerpts from that book, suggesting that certain passages might very well contain information that could cause one to kill.
Which is silly. That book is nothing more than basic teen angst. No-the entirely plausible though completely ridiculous alternative is that Chapman was some sort of "Manchurian Candidate", triggered by the book, after indoctrination. He just happened to let the game slip, in some small part, by mentioning the book connection in print.
He is also only one of a long list of assassins described by those attending as seeming to be in some sort of trance at the time of the murder.
I mean, whoever was running the show when they killed the Kennedy brothers were amateurs, at the time. They let the patsy show his face in public, and let a mafia bagman kill him on television. The bagman then told the Warren Commission that he wasn't safe in federal prison, and that he recanted his original reason for killing Oswald (to spare Jacquie the pain of a trial), and if they could get him out, he'd tell them the real reason.
No dice, they said. He died soon after from an awfully fast-acting cancer that he claimed to his dying day that he'd been injected with. Silly, and not impossible.
The two highest ranking congressional members on that commission had very different fates. One was Wade Boggs of Arkansas (the father of beloved pundit Cokie Roberts, by the way). After he made too much public noise about the FBI not allowing access to needed evidence, and engaging in "gestapo tactics" (almost every material witness in the case had died in suspicious circumstances, shortly thereafter), he boarded a plane for Alaska, and was never heard from, again. The young Arkansas boy who drove him to the airport (and packed his bag for him, depending on who you believe) was named William Jefferson Clinton.
The other congressional member who springs to mind was named Gerald Ford. He later became president, after what some say was an insider coup against the president, who did have a hell of a lot of dirty money behind him, no matter who you ask.
In that whole debacle, before they shut down an independent prosecutor who had already learned too much (and planes started strangely crashing), it became clear that the FBI and the CIA had basically been involved in a very long turf war. The sadsack who had replaced Hoover at the FBI had basically laid it out, and the CIA had a few too many employees on the White House 'plumbers' payroll. The Chief of Central Intelligence in those days was a nut who had a big mouth, too.
Once the "bad" president was out, and everything was back to normal, the first thing Ford did was say he would clean up the CIA. He brought in an "outsider" by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush. For all that anyone knew, he was just an oilman from a rich family (whose father sold trains to the Nazis, some say). However, on the day JFK was assassinated, a memo was delivered to J. Edgar Hoover that read, "Mr. George Bush of the CIA has been informed of the events in Dallas..." The only person by that name on the employment rolls of the CIA in those days was a lowly stenographer, who most certainly had not been informed.
But the mysterious oilman had owned a company named Zapata, and had a wife named Barbara. The two landing craft at The Bay of Pigs were also thusly named, for some reason.
After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy said he would tear the CIA into a thousand pieces for their mendacity and incompetence. He never got a chance.
On the White House transcript tapes of Nixon talking with his boys, the only time he really sounds nervous is when he puts the kibosh on certain schemes, citing that it might bring up "the whole Bay of Pigs thing again..."
So a professional cleaner-up-of-messes is President, and an unknown "outsider" is "cleaning up" the CIA. The peace movement is forever discredited by the Manson family murders (though Charlie Manson had been in and out of government "care" his entire life, and had connections to the Process Church of England, a satanic cult that had been infiltrated, some say, by intelligence sources from Elsewhere), and was further done in by the actions of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a movement that seemingly sprung from nowhere at all. Almost as if they were planted there. The Republicans knew that no one they would put up that year would take the Presidency.
Instead, a man who claimed to be a humble peanut farmer from Georgia won. He was, however, a person with strong ties to the Trilateral Commission, and Naval Intelligence. A certain subsect of Naval Intelligence had been said to be all but at war with the CIA, going way back, by the way...
The next time a southern governor became president, he too had strong ties to the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a Rhodes scholar, long viewed as being a part of the Jesuit plot that ultimately took the life of Princess Diana...
Ahhh. I love this shit. Thank you for indulging me.
"All I ever wanted was for the world to be free of your kind, whether you were here in Parliament, or in senate or junta or hell or in heaven. Maybe that's pointless, then. Maybe the people are too small and scared to be free. Maybe they want you there, shitting all over them.
"But like a salesman who's only too eager to sew up his market and stitch up his customers, you're happy enough to exploit that.
"Aw, sod it. Sod you. For whatever it's worth, you were always the enemy. So you can listen to what I have to say.
"I'm not ashamed."
Those are the words of a cartoon character. Well, a 'graphic novel' character, if you wanna be that way about it. John Constantine (soooo badly portrayed by Keanu Reeves, in a recent movie) is a man who walks a tightrope between Heaven and Hell. Neither wants him, both hate him. He tries to do the right thing consistently, and often does, but often ends up getting his friends killed, and doubts the verity of his mission each and every day. He also knows that he can't rest.
Not gonna give you a full rundown. The comic's been running since '87, so there's too much there. In any case, in the above quote, he was standing on a bridge in London, looking at the Halls of Parliament, while he thought the above thoughts, and it sorta makes me misty. I hear him.
I had a nice chat, in between classes, with the only Gringa Alta that matters today. She's working her way into a job as a computer programmer, but the academic system wishes that she round herself out, knowledge-wise, so she's also taking this class called "Understanding Terrorism".
Or 'Perspectives on...', I don't remember. In any case, her faculty is a published author, and the kind of person the media calls on when they would like to trot out An Expert. He asked a funny question the other day: "Who was the first president of the United States to declare war on terrorism?"
I would have answered Johnson, had I been there, but I would be wrong. His quote was, "This isn't a war against a particular country, but against tyranny." Close, but not quite the same abstraction.
Teddy Roosevelt. That's the answer. Then the teacher asked, "How did Roosevelt become presiedent?"
I'm gonna brag here, she knew this because I told her. Th' lady answered that he had been McKinley's vice president, when Bill got shot.
"So someone in here has read their history!", he said. Then the discussion began about who the man was who had shot the president.
"They pointed out that he was an avowed anarchist?" I asked. "But that a lot of people even then wondered if maybe Roosevelt paid him?"
Not exactly, went the answer. But it was implied that there, as has happened so many times in American history, was an occurrance that caused Americans to say-Here Is The Threat; Anarchism, and start to do things they previously would not have chosen to do.
Not too long after, a battleship of ours blew up in Havana harbor. It's known now that it either was a sailor smoking around the powder magazines, or maybe something else, but at the time, it was seen as a reason to go to war against Spain, and take their territories. After which we made them our own, of course.
We then got talking about the interestingly large amount of supposed lone nuts who seem to be doing the assassinating in American history. We talked about Hinckley. Supposedly just wanted to assassinate Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, but it's not like he didn't have a history.
He used to work for World Vision, International, which is a missionary/paramilitary organization, with ties to the CIA. His family was close to the Bush family. The only person I could think of who would have actually wanted Reagan dead was George Bush, Sr., who had just had his ass handed to him in the run up to the '80 election. Still, strange choice, though.
And to take "Taxi Driver" as your cover story? Truly weird, but just weird enough that it makes the whole thing sound plausible. Crazy people do things like that.
Almost as crazy as using "The Catcher in the Rye" as your cover story. When Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he removed a thorn from the side of the FBI that had been there too damn long. He'd been viewed as a criminal by that organization since he became a citizen, and was widely suspected to be on the verge of leading a massive resistance movement against Reagan.
Chapman was another one not without a history. He too was with World Vision, but was still referred to as being a crazed lone nut. When the "Catcher in the Rye" thing came out later, both Time and Newsweek dutifully printed excerpts from that book, suggesting that certain passages might very well contain information that could cause one to kill.
Which is silly. That book is nothing more than basic teen angst. No-the entirely plausible though completely ridiculous alternative is that Chapman was some sort of "Manchurian Candidate", triggered by the book, after indoctrination. He just happened to let the game slip, in some small part, by mentioning the book connection in print.
He is also only one of a long list of assassins described by those attending as seeming to be in some sort of trance at the time of the murder.
I mean, whoever was running the show when they killed the Kennedy brothers were amateurs, at the time. They let the patsy show his face in public, and let a mafia bagman kill him on television. The bagman then told the Warren Commission that he wasn't safe in federal prison, and that he recanted his original reason for killing Oswald (to spare Jacquie the pain of a trial), and if they could get him out, he'd tell them the real reason.
No dice, they said. He died soon after from an awfully fast-acting cancer that he claimed to his dying day that he'd been injected with. Silly, and not impossible.
The two highest ranking congressional members on that commission had very different fates. One was Wade Boggs of Arkansas (the father of beloved pundit Cokie Roberts, by the way). After he made too much public noise about the FBI not allowing access to needed evidence, and engaging in "gestapo tactics" (almost every material witness in the case had died in suspicious circumstances, shortly thereafter), he boarded a plane for Alaska, and was never heard from, again. The young Arkansas boy who drove him to the airport (and packed his bag for him, depending on who you believe) was named William Jefferson Clinton.
The other congressional member who springs to mind was named Gerald Ford. He later became president, after what some say was an insider coup against the president, who did have a hell of a lot of dirty money behind him, no matter who you ask.
In that whole debacle, before they shut down an independent prosecutor who had already learned too much (and planes started strangely crashing), it became clear that the FBI and the CIA had basically been involved in a very long turf war. The sadsack who had replaced Hoover at the FBI had basically laid it out, and the CIA had a few too many employees on the White House 'plumbers' payroll. The Chief of Central Intelligence in those days was a nut who had a big mouth, too.
Once the "bad" president was out, and everything was back to normal, the first thing Ford did was say he would clean up the CIA. He brought in an "outsider" by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush. For all that anyone knew, he was just an oilman from a rich family (whose father sold trains to the Nazis, some say). However, on the day JFK was assassinated, a memo was delivered to J. Edgar Hoover that read, "Mr. George Bush of the CIA has been informed of the events in Dallas..." The only person by that name on the employment rolls of the CIA in those days was a lowly stenographer, who most certainly had not been informed.
But the mysterious oilman had owned a company named Zapata, and had a wife named Barbara. The two landing craft at The Bay of Pigs were also thusly named, for some reason.
After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy said he would tear the CIA into a thousand pieces for their mendacity and incompetence. He never got a chance.
On the White House transcript tapes of Nixon talking with his boys, the only time he really sounds nervous is when he puts the kibosh on certain schemes, citing that it might bring up "the whole Bay of Pigs thing again..."
So a professional cleaner-up-of-messes is President, and an unknown "outsider" is "cleaning up" the CIA. The peace movement is forever discredited by the Manson family murders (though Charlie Manson had been in and out of government "care" his entire life, and had connections to the Process Church of England, a satanic cult that had been infiltrated, some say, by intelligence sources from Elsewhere), and was further done in by the actions of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a movement that seemingly sprung from nowhere at all. Almost as if they were planted there. The Republicans knew that no one they would put up that year would take the Presidency.
Instead, a man who claimed to be a humble peanut farmer from Georgia won. He was, however, a person with strong ties to the Trilateral Commission, and Naval Intelligence. A certain subsect of Naval Intelligence had been said to be all but at war with the CIA, going way back, by the way...
The next time a southern governor became president, he too had strong ties to the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a Rhodes scholar, long viewed as being a part of the Jesuit plot that ultimately took the life of Princess Diana...
Ahhh. I love this shit. Thank you for indulging me.
Labels: history
posted by rich bachelor | 9:00 PM
8 Comments:
Hm. This is interesting. Have you noticed that almost all the spam seems to include at least some hijacked content from actual blogs?
Makes you wonder if your stuff or my stuff is being pirated in some sad attempt to sell off-market penile enhancement product, or something.
For my response, hit the hyperlink, and go down to the third item on the menu.
Folks gotta make a living little brother. I'm sure Rosa is just trying to feed her several small hungry children.
Hannah just finished Catcher this very evening. Perfect stuff to stir the hormonal pot.
Conspiracy theories indulged. Now inspire a revolution.
Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. knew too much and now sleeps forever in a glacier.
It's all fun stuff to mull whether fact or fiction.
Oh and by the way, the playing field will never be level. We can wrap ourselves up in conjecture, but whenever a nugget does bob to the surface of the mainstream it is always spun away just as quickly. It helps when you get to play by the rules that you made up in the first place.
So true. Hey-been a while since you've written anything, I notice.
Too much on my plate right now. On top of which my head feels like one of those snow globes with all that white stuff swirling around and around with no where to go. It is bound to crack open sooner or later though.
'White stuff swirling around', eh?
I told you not to do that shit.
What is that white stuff anyway? Even more of a mystery is the stuff it's swirling around in.
You forgot to mention Huey Long. If he had not been gunned down he may have won the White House. What would have become of the New Deal and the effects that idealistic binge has had on our society for the last sixty odd years?
Well I squeezed one out...a posting that is...over at carrier1. See if you agree.
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