Them 🐜

 Did I wake up in the ‘60’s?

When you have an administration that so constantly, shamelessly, openly lies, pretty soon there’s no faith in any information streams coming from the administration, so there’s no way to convey true information in a way that lands right, which leads to more chaos.

Because I remember the Gulf of Tonkin.  And the Tuskegee experiments. And Nixon’s “secret bombings,” expanding the war into Laos and Thailand . (My brother-in-law was Green Beret, in Thailand long before the secret broke). I remember “body counts” (flagrant lies. Apparently the VietCong were breeding like rabbits and maturing like mutants.) I remember lies: lies about racism and equal rights for non-whites and non-males (the lie being the obdurate resistance to even thinking about them). I remember reading the “radicals” explaining how many ways the government lied, and about how many things. I’ve learned how we convinced ourselves eugenics was reliable enough science to base forced sterilization laws on. And “Manidfest Destiny” allied us to slaughter millions with nary a blush (“Injuns” we’re still automatically @vad guys” in the play of my youth).

It all sounded just like the quote above.

Same old, same old, in other words. And people who can’t distinguish between truth and lies? What do you think ‘60’s activism was about? Our parents’ generation believed the government and the social institutions (the Big 3 car makers, the big three food companies, the Big three networks). Watch “Them,” as 1950’s Angelenos (all white people!) see army jeeps and troop carriers rumble through the streets on the way to the giant ants.🐜 The people don’t blink. They are comfortable with such displays of military might. WWII and Korea taught them to trust those in power. They trusted so much they stood in the desert, watching atomic tests, and only decades later questioned what they were exposed to. The friction of Vietnam was between that generation (and their children who upheld them), and college students who became “woke,” and saw the truth of that war; of civil rights; of social justice.

Lies, the “radicals” told us in the ‘60’s, were the bread and butter of government, of corporations, of the media blandly assuring us “that’s the way it is.” Journalists proudly proclaim the work of Woodstein. But from the start of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, until the resignation of Nixon, how many “Woodsteins” were there? Daniel Ellsberg was not a journalist.

Relevant to today, I remember when the Smothers Brothers were cancelled because they refused to stop speaking (softly) against the war (Vietnam).  The more things change.

And for all that, what did we get? Reagan running against “welfare queens in Cadillacs;” and Trump; and Miller. And the Roberts Court.

In fact, a great deal of cynicism today grows directly out of the experiences of Boomers. Administrations openly, blatantly, shamelessly lie? Do you mean like JFK and the press covering up his multiple affairs? LBJ’s lies (he was a great president, but not a good person). Nixon? (Say no more.) Reagan. Rekjavik? Iran Contra? His Alzheimer’s?). GHW and Iran-Contra, which he ended by pardoning everyone, and pardoning himself by association. And on, and on.

Trump is worse, but not fundamentally worse. He’s worse because he isn’t interested in, doesn’t understand, governance at all. He’s a toddler with a shotgun in the White House. That’s worse; but it’s not because of the lies.

Lies/truth, right/wrong? Yeah. Go and please the world. Slavery was a lie, and wrong. As is the racism that endures in America long after ratification of the 13th Amendment. Economic injustice and inequality is a lie, and wrong.  Do we want to think about it? I’ve met very few people who want to thin critically at all.  “The mass of men,” Thoreau wrote, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” I’m sure it seemed so to him, but I’m convinced the mass of people are comfortable with their circumstances, longing only for more of what they have, or for what they don’t have. Trying to convince them what they feel is desperation is, frankly, arrogance. Trying to explain to them they are “subjected to the rule of lies” is like trying to teach a tiger to eat grass. You may think it’s true, but that requires denying the legitimacy of their beliefs.  It’s not, on other words, exactly “unifying.”

Of course “unifying” usually means making you agree with me. To some degree, that’s necessary. To an absolute degree, it’s as useful as teaching a a dog to appreciate Shakespeare.

Same as it ever was.