It's not only America where the population lives in this state of delusion and unreality, (though I suspect you guys have lived in this state longer), it has infected the entire west. The New Zealand Media is full of news about Harry and Meghan and advertisements for "Pregnant People" to get the vaccine (which they are still pretending is safe and effective). About the US/Russia proxy war crickets. About the 20% increase all cause mortality and the plunge in fertility rates that both coincided with the vaccine roll out crickets. Our prime minister doesn't know what a woman is, only 50% of children regularly attend school (where they learn about how to use sex toys at 6, that they can chose which biological sex they want to be, and that math's is racist). Our chattering classes shake their heads at all the violence, poverty and decay but can't figure out why or how things went so badly wrong, or what to do about it apart from punish people who commit the sort of crimes working class people commit when they are desperate. It feels like living in the matrix.
Thank you. ''This too shall pass" feels like just about the most realistic hope one can have at the moment. Nothing is permanent apart from change, thus this too will pass.
An insightful and potent reflection and meditation to be sure . . . but not as complete as it could be IMO. I would date "The day it "came apart" both physically and psychologically (if not existentially) for the great mass of Americans, at the point when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963: a vision of a peace loving America toward the rest of the world (including orders for advisers to leave Vietnam) that could have been created was destroyed and the war in Vietnam was then embraced by LBJ and the military. The presumption of innocence and, more importantly "hope" for a better world died in the national consciousness that day, leaving an open, even if suppressed, psychological wound of national despair, and for many "resignation" about the evils committed by the "The powers that be." The vacuum created was exploited by then servants of nascent U.S. Empire that led to Vietnam and subsequent national disasters.
Agree. And one should not forget the enormous cover up made possible by the fraudulent "powers that be" in the Warren Commission, many of whose members may have been complicit (most probably were) in the assassination itself. We may never know for sure. Re-reading the work of Mark Lane and others makes it clear that from then on many in the country lived in fear of the truth.
Will we ever see justice for that crime? Your point about resignation to 'the powers that be' is powerful - I feel that resignation as despair. It astounds me that such a brazen act, with such obvious actors did go, and still goes, unchallenged.
That sickening feeling of the entire U.S. military enterprise-for-profit just gets stronger as our own latter hours are upon us. What do I know that I didn't know while protesting and feeling that national psychosis so deep in my bones all the way back in the 1960s?
Only that we were right in our moral urgency, just as we are right about Ukraine (etc, etc, etc) being the same. old. shit.-different. day.
The players have been named, their schemes and crimes have been public for decades now, but their formulaic approach to pacifying the U.S. public seemingly has just as strong a hold on perception as ever.
How to break that chain when the clamps on the human psyche have now been tightened down utilizing tech to provide the ultimate in mind-fuckery distraction(s), this in conjunction with DARPA-Pentagon-MIT-Stanford-Harvard-Yale mental manipulators who have been working at opposite ends to keep us living the truth of Aldous Huxley's most famous quotes?
Let alone out here in the hinterlands of Thoreau's bomb-for-all-time "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
My youngest brother was always subject to bouts of anger and rage in his early years; my mother said she had a fever of 105 F while pregnant with him. He didn't get any better after coming back from Vietnam, managed to get a 'general' discharge rather than the dishonorable one he probably was eligible for from constant shipboard fights.
He had a pitching tryout with the Seattle Mariners---a wicked Randy Johnson kind of fastball and same intimidating intensity to boot. But the scouts found him too unstable.
His last day in Vietnam was spent rifle-butt clubbing Vietnamese civilians trying to get into his already overloaded Huey, one of a long line of them ferrying them out to the aircraft carriers on that now long ago day, April 30, 1975.
In 1990 Dutch Harbor cops had him handcuffed on the floor for drunken disorderly conduct. One of them kicked him repeatedly in the head. Of all of life's coincidences, this same cop had just heard of his own brother's suicide only moments before.
So now my brother lives entirely dependent upon anti-seizure meds, he's a goner without them.
Thank you, Patrick. Open wounds after so much time gone by. Your piece took me to that place where my thoughts were waiting to get out.
Your writing, your thoughts put to paper have a consistent way of doing that for me. Profound resonance and the highest ballet, sophistication without pretension, that's your offering so gladly received by me in this now madhouse of a country and the world beyond.
Vietnam was effect, not cause. Keep in mind Dwight Eisenhower cautioned about the MIC long before Vietnam was McNamara's wet dream.
The problem goes to the fact that World War 2 was the United States' defining moment.
Before the war there really wasn't that much of a collective sense of identity. The Civil War was about 75 years previously. There were still just 48 states. Much of the population was third generation or less. Those going back further likely identified with their states and regions, more than the country as a whole. Cars, planes, telephones were as new as the internet is today. The split between rich and poor was far more estranged than it is today, because there was no collective economic history. That sense of cooperation was a product of World War 2, as the biggest public works project in history. The war also pulled together all the different cultures, races, regions, etc, into one big collective effort. That was a seemingly clear, black and white, good and bad conflict.
Think how all those Old World countries have several thousand years of collective efforts, pushing and pulling and putting down very deep roots. Ups and downs, of hopes and lessons learned.
Not only does the military give the industrialists a steady source of contracts that are not likely going to be tested by reality, but it gave generations of men and women a job and a sense of purpose. Think just the college programs.
The world we look back on, the childhood years of the Baby Boomers, was a creation of the effects of World War 2. Both domestically and foreign.
It was like a 14 year old doing some good coke. There was no turning back.
That it made the MIC the only public works project everyone could agree on was fundamental. Yes, our generation, (actually I was born in 60) is obsessed with Vietnam, but more tonnage of bombs were dropped on Korea, than were dropped on Germany and Japan combined. There simply was nothing to turn it off.
There are other issues, like the fact the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth, but to draw the line at Vietnam totally misses the big picture.
I understand your point entirely, and the comments of others regrading the Kennedy assassination as ai turning point in the direction of the country. Yes all around.
But the column concerns that moment when self-deception, wholesale distraction, and a deluded self-image became our norm, our way of life, our prevalent consciousness. It is a psychological question, a psychosocial question. I think this goes to the unbearable bitterness not just of the defeat in SE Asia, but of the subliminal awareness among us of the shame of all that was done in our names.
Half a century later we get lost in quality corkscrews and--did you see this in this morn's paper?--whether it is sartorially proper to wear sneakers to the office.
I certainly agree that was when it was becoming obvious, but understanding the why should be worth considering.
Certainly the 70's were the turning point, the wave cresting, but my own sense of when it really tipped over the edge was Reagan's election. Even his own VP referred to his economic policies as voodoo economics. If we are talking throwing an election, how about the Iranians letting the embassy staff go, practically the day after. In terms of suspicious looking, that was over the top.
What was his solution to everything? Borrowing gobs more money and spending it on the military.
As I try pointing out, it wasn't Volcker that cured stagflation, but Reaganomics. The only difference between the Fed selling the bonds it bought to create the money and the Treasury selling more new ones, was the money the Treasury pulled out was poured back into the military. The bondholders still get the interest and the rest of the economy gets stiffed either way, but military spending creates an illusion of productivity.
The military industrial complex is really just the trophy wife of the banks.
Remember the air traffic controllers strike? The 80's were when we started shipping all the industry overseas and financializing everything, from education to healthcare.
I suspect we will find this country's domestic and foreign policies are two trains about to crash into each other.
I remember the reason they designed the F-16 was the F-14, F-15 and F-18's were too expensive and complicated to really do a lot with, even if they were really fast. So they needed an economy model.
I also remember hearing about the Chinese shore to ship missiles by the early 90's and thinking, well that outdates the aircraft carriers, like aircraft carriers outdated battleships.
That's the problem with bullshit. Once you start using it to avoid reality, the split only becomes ever wider. It does appear the mother of all reality checks is in the mail.
Not that these dummies are going to admit it, but the viability of the dollar will eventually get someone's attention and when that goes, local and regional currencies will have to develop. Sort of like the saplings getting the light, when the big tree falls.
Then foreign policy is between Texas and California, not the US and everyone else.
The United States will go the way of the Soviet Union.
My sense is probably the political situation might well look like Mexican cartels for awhile, unless some political center does develop fairly quickly. Which will be regional and local. Though with mafioso tendencies in some cases, thus cartels.
Cities will be the worst, given the basic function of a city, as some form of industrial, or economic center has been lost and the systems for feeding people currently on various forms of welfare, as well as the innumerable bullshit jobs breaks down.
The problem with how most try to understand the situation is in terms of the current political polarities and show, but a lot of this is divide and conquer, combined with basic herding instincts. The underlaying reality is the economic support system and how well that adapts. That's like the foundations of the house. The politics is just the furniture.
Chechnya was a CIA job. I wonder if they will prove as dedicated as they were there? Why not? They made sure the Russian soldiers returning to the U.S.S.R. could (and would) feed their Afghan-acquired habit. I seem to recall something in the mid-1980s in the U.S. urban ghettos that had Contras and the CIA in the equation...
Simple really. Power corrupts. And nothing more corrupt than the US. But now it has effected all of the west. Australia and New Zealand are better than that. We should learn from India and put our interests first, abandon the unipolar world and join the emerging multipolar world based on rules everyone agrees and abides with with no exceptionalism
New Zealand is no longer better than that. We are deeply, hopelessly lost. Our prime minister doesn't know what a woman is, (but still congratulates himself on having 50% of his cabinet be women). Only half our children regularly attend school, where they learn how to use sex toys (from age 6), that they can pick their own biological sex, and that math's is racist. Our news is propaganda paid for by the government, with it written into their contracts that they will not only lose their funding but have to pay it back many times over if they criticize the govt or the govt agenda. Socially conservative charities lose their charitable status for "getting involved in politic's." Traditionally left or in any way progressive charities recieve large grants from the government, but this comes with the same strings attached as the funding of the media, resulting in women's refuge, which does not allow male children over the age of about 8 to live in their houses least the presence of so much male energy retraumatizes their traumatized female residents allows men who identify as women to live in, and women who complain that these men are behaving in creepy ways (peeing all over their things for example, getting their dicks out in the communal bathroom) are kicked out. Every single political party currently in parliament lied about covid, lied about masks, lied about early treatment, lied about vaccine safety. They all egged each other on to take harsher and harsher penalties against those who didn't comply with the vax mandates, and they all refused to meet the protestors who showed up to parliament to protest. New Zealand is woefully and completely lost at this point, and only about a third of the population is even aware of it. The rest are all stuck in the matrix.
My first foreign policy memory is the Fall of Saigon. I remember asking my mom what was happening and she couldn't explain it to a 5 year old. The next year was the huge Bicentennial celebration, a huge patriotic party. It seemed like a huge deal to my young mind. I remember asking my dad when the next one was happening.
Anyway I grew up with Morning In America, but I also saw something was wrong with America.
As a Gen Xer, I often felt the weight of the Boomers, the Silent, and the "Greatest" generations. I thought they made too big of a deal about JFK and Vietnam.
However, if I were to pinpoint the day it came apart, I would put it today at that day in Dallas, 1963. I don't think JFK was a great man or great president, but his death was the end, or the beginning of the end.
If you think JFK wasn't great, if not the greatest President this country ever had, then you do not understand the knife edge civilization itself was poised on during the Cuban Missile Crisis and how this young guy had the nerves to stand against a bunch of homicidal maniacs in uniform who were shouting and raging at him "JUST FUCKING DO IT!"
Khrushchev had a similar contingent. That the fate of our human world rested upon just two individuals who had the stomach to stand there under a kind of fire most cannot even imagine was about as lucky as we are ever going to get.
They got him in the end. Before a long term peace had the chance to break out. They got him and they got him dead to rights---their sense of being "right.'
Ok, Boomer. The only reason the Cuban Mission Crisis escalated was JFK's inexperience. Like much of the Cold War, it was also a tool to keep Americans in fear and willing to support mad schemes of the Military Industrial Complex. The Powers That Be love keeping the population in fear as it makes it much easier to manipulate and control them.
Jesus Fucking Christ! Not only are you an ignorant oaf, but you resort to the crudest of obscenities. You don't know jack shit about ACTUAL history and obviously you will be content presuming you do, so just Fuck Off, Richard Cranium.
My first memory was JFK's shooting. My sense as a kid was my mother put Jesus and JFK in the same category.
What really has to be kept in mind is that JFK was the Greatest Generation's first president. Whatever his history, it didn't have time to get tarnished. That it was followed by Johnson, a definite throwback to both the prior generation and decidedly tarnished politics, then Nixon, only served to deify his memory.
There were two factions of Boomers, Pre-Vietnam and, well I want to say Post Vietnam but I mean during Vietnam. When did America come apart? It depends on your generation, for mine it was JFK for others perhaps Jekyll Island and others maybe 9/11. In any case the trajectory is clear.
Father Richard Rohr's daily meditation for May 17, 2023 stresses that evil often masquerades as good, and so provides justification for immense injustice: "The world (or 'system' as we say now) is a hiding place for unconsciousness or deadness in the words of Paul. Both Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis taught that the triumph of evil depends entirely on disguise. Our egos must see it as some form of goodness and virtue so that we can buy into it."
Signs that say "I Support Ukraine" show that someone believes they stand for human rights, dignity, and other good things, but the person is in effect supporting America's war machine, death and destruction across that beautiful country, and our proxy war against Russia, China and the rest of humanity that does not agree to bow to the U.S. imperium.
Very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, thank you. Your framing of "the day it came apart" is useful, and there is much to be said for your case about the shame of Vietnam. I also think the US has had a mixed, and somewhat sordid, history from the start. Manifest Destiny was a psy-op, perpetuated by innumerable lies, broken treaties, and Indian Wars... and the slave trade pretty much speaks for itself. Matthew Ehret describes "Two Americas" always pulling in opposite directions, which I think is helpful. But ultimately I do see the turning point as CIA's bloody coup in broad daylight of a president who, once awakened, was standing up to them and zionist Israel and the corporate capitalists and the war machine, et.al. - the entire corrupt entity which has not been threatened since. That the lone gunman myth persists at all shows how deep the unreality took hold right then, and continued with the CIA's subsequent murder of RFK and Dr. King.
How soon before we have boots on the ground in Ukraine? How deluded are we now because our press (stenographers for the incumbent party) and politicians tell us that ‘the war is going well’ for the Ukrainian armed forces.
How frightened, how chilled are we now to assemble and protest our government for redress of grievances after the full weight and mechanisms of federal law enforcement crashed down upon those that did the same on January 6.
We shouldn’t be in Ukraine, but we are. We should know where the billions are going, but we don’t. We should have a say in all of this, but WE do not.
i hate to say this, because it's just my instinct but perhaps the problem comes from thinking that holding a sign and ranting at "the System" back then made you folks think you changed the world. to this day people tell me they "stopped" the war in Vietnam from holding signs and walking, when really the System itself stopped it when they chose to and no sooner, simply because they grew tired of it and it was an obvious PR failure. and then the System simply moved onto their other projects, which were all of a piece with Vietnam and could be conducted much more in the background.
you weren't changing the world. you were simply revitalizing the System and being absorbed into it. hence all of that "rebellion" became thoroughly co-opted and was sold back to us who were young in the 90s as "culture".
in fact, my readings suggest lots of the counterculture figures who weren't obviously about making moolah (the Rolling Stones, fashion designers and other pond scum floating to the top) were agents of the elites and government, who were their ultimate patrons. the turn towards "cure the inside of you and you will cure the society" was a turn towards unreality and proper corkscrew buying.
you need to look over your entire history with a much more gimlet eye to find "the source". unfortunately, that will probably be far too self-indicting.
This piece puts me in mind of Plato’s cave scene from The Republic. The vast majority of people prefer to remain in the dark, and if you attempt to drag them into the light, they will literally kill you:
“ truth is like poetry, and most people hate fucking poetry”, overheard in a bar.
Thanks Patrick, always first on my list when I see something from you. An omitted issue is the triumph of fandom over discourse. Political parties are now run as sports franchises---and fans do not need to be rationale, balanced, or objective. Also, in this respect, see how sports dominates high school and university education. Where do we start? We need to fix the algorithm.
Another great article, Patrick! And many fine comments too!
Funny thing you mentioned Colonel Moore of the Ia Drang Valley fame. Ia Drang 1 was the first-pitched battle between American soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (the Gary Owen Brigade) of the 1st Cavalry Division (air mobile) in November of 1965, between those troops and the PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam) North Vietnam's Regular Army soldiers, and not the hit and run Viet Cong guerilla fighters both, IMO, Resistance Fighters, defending their country from the invading American imperialist forces. The PAVN fought you man for man.
Anyway, the First Battalion walked into a regimental ambush in the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands and took heavy casualties between KIA and wounded soldiers. A lot! Two troopers wounded in that battle were singer Kate Smith's (God Bless America) grandson, who played possum when "opposition" troops (my term) were nearby. For those of you old enough to remember News commentator Howard K. Smith, his son was the other wounded trooper. In January of 1966, Smith's son wrote an article for LOOK magazine describing the battle. For information about the casualty rate in that article than anything I read in official U.S. Army books or literature.
Long story short, the 2nd of the 7th made air assults to rescue their comrades and continue the fight, as the PAVN or most call them the NVA were dug in with grazing fields of fire., but bombed to smithereens by our gunships and Air Force F-4 Phantom jets.
Thirteen months after that battle, I was stationed with the 2nd & the 7th, and heard the nightmarish stories from some of the old-timers (not age, but time in country - say nine or ten or eleven months. The tours were for 12 months, but the Marine Corps tours were 13 months. (?)
Anyway, in my infantry experience "over there," I had the greatest respect for "Charlie," (the Viet Cong) and the PAVN from the North, who kicked out the French Foreign Legion in 1954 as well.
When the movie came out about Colonel Moore, my wife and I went to see it and I'll never forget my late Beloved putting her hand on my arm and shoulder as tears ran down my face.
Uncle Sam committed a "Crime of Aggression," something we condemned a few Nazis for doing during the Nuremburg Trials, as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was a false flag operation that never happened. Same with our invasion of Iraq. BTW, former Lt. Colonel Collin Powell was the investigating officer in the My Lai massacre, and covered it up, not wanting to rock the boat.
Sorry folks, the overwhelming majority of the American people have "crossed the Rubicon," with their weapons not of swords and spears but the delusional mindset that might is right and everybody we attack are the bad guys. For that matter, the Israelis are just as bad.
More and more homelessness, mental disorders, suicides, and random mass murders dot the landscape of modern day America where we're taught to (subtly) worship those "over-achiever billionaires and mega-millionaires and look down on those who have fallen on hard times. Trillions for the Death & Destruction industry (the Department of Defense) or it should be called Offense, but never enough money for the betterment and care for the common people.
Greed is good is the American creed in this day and age, as our pathos for helping others in need is increasingly diminishing, not to mention the high cost of apartment rentals and home prices. The author knows it well.
I don't know what's gonna happen with the psychopaths of NATO, but I have plenty of toilet paper if WW3 transpires.. Most friends and relatives call me a "conspiracy theorist," (a CIA invented phrase) because of my gloomy outlook. I call it realistic.
Hi Patrick. A couple of years ago, you kindly put a blurb o my book "A Legacy of Chains," which starts with a group of people considering when the public's sense of betrayal by their government was born. Among other answers, that of Paul Klippen, the story's protagonist, was the Vietnam War. That mistrust of government, I think, promoted the byways of fantasy and denial that you deal with. One present example is the pathetic search for a national savior in figures like Donald Trump.
It's not only America where the population lives in this state of delusion and unreality, (though I suspect you guys have lived in this state longer), it has infected the entire west. The New Zealand Media is full of news about Harry and Meghan and advertisements for "Pregnant People" to get the vaccine (which they are still pretending is safe and effective). About the US/Russia proxy war crickets. About the 20% increase all cause mortality and the plunge in fertility rates that both coincided with the vaccine roll out crickets. Our prime minister doesn't know what a woman is, only 50% of children regularly attend school (where they learn about how to use sex toys at 6, that they can chose which biological sex they want to be, and that math's is racist). Our chattering classes shake their heads at all the violence, poverty and decay but can't figure out why or how things went so badly wrong, or what to do about it apart from punish people who commit the sort of crimes working class people commit when they are desperate. It feels like living in the matrix.
When it looks necrotic and smells necrotic, it's likely necrotic, no matter how much lipstick and air freshener they use.
This too shall pass.
Thank you. ''This too shall pass" feels like just about the most realistic hope one can have at the moment. Nothing is permanent apart from change, thus this too will pass.
An insightful and potent reflection and meditation to be sure . . . but not as complete as it could be IMO. I would date "The day it "came apart" both physically and psychologically (if not existentially) for the great mass of Americans, at the point when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963: a vision of a peace loving America toward the rest of the world (including orders for advisers to leave Vietnam) that could have been created was destroyed and the war in Vietnam was then embraced by LBJ and the military. The presumption of innocence and, more importantly "hope" for a better world died in the national consciousness that day, leaving an open, even if suppressed, psychological wound of national despair, and for many "resignation" about the evils committed by the "The powers that be." The vacuum created was exploited by then servants of nascent U.S. Empire that led to Vietnam and subsequent national disasters.
Agree. And one should not forget the enormous cover up made possible by the fraudulent "powers that be" in the Warren Commission, many of whose members may have been complicit (most probably were) in the assassination itself. We may never know for sure. Re-reading the work of Mark Lane and others makes it clear that from then on many in the country lived in fear of the truth.
Will we ever see justice for that crime? Your point about resignation to 'the powers that be' is powerful - I feel that resignation as despair. It astounds me that such a brazen act, with such obvious actors did go, and still goes, unchallenged.
That sickening feeling of the entire U.S. military enterprise-for-profit just gets stronger as our own latter hours are upon us. What do I know that I didn't know while protesting and feeling that national psychosis so deep in my bones all the way back in the 1960s?
Only that we were right in our moral urgency, just as we are right about Ukraine (etc, etc, etc) being the same. old. shit.-different. day.
The players have been named, their schemes and crimes have been public for decades now, but their formulaic approach to pacifying the U.S. public seemingly has just as strong a hold on perception as ever.
How to break that chain when the clamps on the human psyche have now been tightened down utilizing tech to provide the ultimate in mind-fuckery distraction(s), this in conjunction with DARPA-Pentagon-MIT-Stanford-Harvard-Yale mental manipulators who have been working at opposite ends to keep us living the truth of Aldous Huxley's most famous quotes?
Let alone out here in the hinterlands of Thoreau's bomb-for-all-time "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
My youngest brother was always subject to bouts of anger and rage in his early years; my mother said she had a fever of 105 F while pregnant with him. He didn't get any better after coming back from Vietnam, managed to get a 'general' discharge rather than the dishonorable one he probably was eligible for from constant shipboard fights.
He had a pitching tryout with the Seattle Mariners---a wicked Randy Johnson kind of fastball and same intimidating intensity to boot. But the scouts found him too unstable.
His last day in Vietnam was spent rifle-butt clubbing Vietnamese civilians trying to get into his already overloaded Huey, one of a long line of them ferrying them out to the aircraft carriers on that now long ago day, April 30, 1975.
In 1990 Dutch Harbor cops had him handcuffed on the floor for drunken disorderly conduct. One of them kicked him repeatedly in the head. Of all of life's coincidences, this same cop had just heard of his own brother's suicide only moments before.
So now my brother lives entirely dependent upon anti-seizure meds, he's a goner without them.
War without end.
David.
Moving beyond words, although yours do the job. Thank you.
& for your continued presence in tis forum.
Bests.
Patrick.
Thank you, Patrick. Open wounds after so much time gone by. Your piece took me to that place where my thoughts were waiting to get out.
Your writing, your thoughts put to paper have a consistent way of doing that for me. Profound resonance and the highest ballet, sophistication without pretension, that's your offering so gladly received by me in this now madhouse of a country and the world beyond.
Your work, your love, your mistress: she matters.
Patrick,
Vietnam was effect, not cause. Keep in mind Dwight Eisenhower cautioned about the MIC long before Vietnam was McNamara's wet dream.
The problem goes to the fact that World War 2 was the United States' defining moment.
Before the war there really wasn't that much of a collective sense of identity. The Civil War was about 75 years previously. There were still just 48 states. Much of the population was third generation or less. Those going back further likely identified with their states and regions, more than the country as a whole. Cars, planes, telephones were as new as the internet is today. The split between rich and poor was far more estranged than it is today, because there was no collective economic history. That sense of cooperation was a product of World War 2, as the biggest public works project in history. The war also pulled together all the different cultures, races, regions, etc, into one big collective effort. That was a seemingly clear, black and white, good and bad conflict.
Think how all those Old World countries have several thousand years of collective efforts, pushing and pulling and putting down very deep roots. Ups and downs, of hopes and lessons learned.
Not only does the military give the industrialists a steady source of contracts that are not likely going to be tested by reality, but it gave generations of men and women a job and a sense of purpose. Think just the college programs.
The world we look back on, the childhood years of the Baby Boomers, was a creation of the effects of World War 2. Both domestically and foreign.
It was like a 14 year old doing some good coke. There was no turning back.
That it made the MIC the only public works project everyone could agree on was fundamental. Yes, our generation, (actually I was born in 60) is obsessed with Vietnam, but more tonnage of bombs were dropped on Korea, than were dropped on Germany and Japan combined. There simply was nothing to turn it off.
There are other issues, like the fact the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth, but to draw the line at Vietnam totally misses the big picture.
John.
I understand your point entirely, and the comments of others regrading the Kennedy assassination as ai turning point in the direction of the country. Yes all around.
But the column concerns that moment when self-deception, wholesale distraction, and a deluded self-image became our norm, our way of life, our prevalent consciousness. It is a psychological question, a psychosocial question. I think this goes to the unbearable bitterness not just of the defeat in SE Asia, but of the subliminal awareness among us of the shame of all that was done in our names.
Half a century later we get lost in quality corkscrews and--did you see this in this morn's paper?--whether it is sartorially proper to wear sneakers to the office.
Patrick,
I certainly agree that was when it was becoming obvious, but understanding the why should be worth considering.
Certainly the 70's were the turning point, the wave cresting, but my own sense of when it really tipped over the edge was Reagan's election. Even his own VP referred to his economic policies as voodoo economics. If we are talking throwing an election, how about the Iranians letting the embassy staff go, practically the day after. In terms of suspicious looking, that was over the top.
What was his solution to everything? Borrowing gobs more money and spending it on the military.
As I try pointing out, it wasn't Volcker that cured stagflation, but Reaganomics. The only difference between the Fed selling the bonds it bought to create the money and the Treasury selling more new ones, was the money the Treasury pulled out was poured back into the military. The bondholders still get the interest and the rest of the economy gets stiffed either way, but military spending creates an illusion of productivity.
The military industrial complex is really just the trophy wife of the banks.
Remember the air traffic controllers strike? The 80's were when we started shipping all the industry overseas and financializing everything, from education to healthcare.
I suspect we will find this country's domestic and foreign policies are two trains about to crash into each other.
" . . . steady source of contracts that are not likely going to be tested by reality."
John, isn't that testing well underway right now?
Wait until they have to start using the F 35.
I remember the reason they designed the F-16 was the F-14, F-15 and F-18's were too expensive and complicated to really do a lot with, even if they were really fast. So they needed an economy model.
I also remember hearing about the Chinese shore to ship missiles by the early 90's and thinking, well that outdates the aircraft carriers, like aircraft carriers outdated battleships.
That's the problem with bullshit. Once you start using it to avoid reality, the split only becomes ever wider. It does appear the mother of all reality checks is in the mail.
Not that these dummies are going to admit it, but the viability of the dollar will eventually get someone's attention and when that goes, local and regional currencies will have to develop. Sort of like the saplings getting the light, when the big tree falls.
Then foreign policy is between Texas and California, not the US and everyone else.
The United States will go the way of the Soviet Union.
That the Soviet Union dissolved as peacefully as it did was nothing short of miraculous — can you envision America repeating the trick? I can’t …
Chechnya.
My sense is probably the political situation might well look like Mexican cartels for awhile, unless some political center does develop fairly quickly. Which will be regional and local. Though with mafioso tendencies in some cases, thus cartels.
Cities will be the worst, given the basic function of a city, as some form of industrial, or economic center has been lost and the systems for feeding people currently on various forms of welfare, as well as the innumerable bullshit jobs breaks down.
The problem with how most try to understand the situation is in terms of the current political polarities and show, but a lot of this is divide and conquer, combined with basic herding instincts. The underlaying reality is the economic support system and how well that adapts. That's like the foundations of the house. The politics is just the furniture.
Chechnya was a CIA job. I wonder if they will prove as dedicated as they were there? Why not? They made sure the Russian soldiers returning to the U.S.S.R. could (and would) feed their Afghan-acquired habit. I seem to recall something in the mid-1980s in the U.S. urban ghettos that had Contras and the CIA in the equation...
And I would imagine ex CIA will be part of those cartels.
From mafia, to mafia.
Indeed.
As for the F 35, I'm guessing it will be kept well away from Ukraine.🙂
Simple really. Power corrupts. And nothing more corrupt than the US. But now it has effected all of the west. Australia and New Zealand are better than that. We should learn from India and put our interests first, abandon the unipolar world and join the emerging multipolar world based on rules everyone agrees and abides with with no exceptionalism
New Zealand is no longer better than that. We are deeply, hopelessly lost. Our prime minister doesn't know what a woman is, (but still congratulates himself on having 50% of his cabinet be women). Only half our children regularly attend school, where they learn how to use sex toys (from age 6), that they can pick their own biological sex, and that math's is racist. Our news is propaganda paid for by the government, with it written into their contracts that they will not only lose their funding but have to pay it back many times over if they criticize the govt or the govt agenda. Socially conservative charities lose their charitable status for "getting involved in politic's." Traditionally left or in any way progressive charities recieve large grants from the government, but this comes with the same strings attached as the funding of the media, resulting in women's refuge, which does not allow male children over the age of about 8 to live in their houses least the presence of so much male energy retraumatizes their traumatized female residents allows men who identify as women to live in, and women who complain that these men are behaving in creepy ways (peeing all over their things for example, getting their dicks out in the communal bathroom) are kicked out. Every single political party currently in parliament lied about covid, lied about masks, lied about early treatment, lied about vaccine safety. They all egged each other on to take harsher and harsher penalties against those who didn't comply with the vax mandates, and they all refused to meet the protestors who showed up to parliament to protest. New Zealand is woefully and completely lost at this point, and only about a third of the population is even aware of it. The rest are all stuck in the matrix.
My first foreign policy memory is the Fall of Saigon. I remember asking my mom what was happening and she couldn't explain it to a 5 year old. The next year was the huge Bicentennial celebration, a huge patriotic party. It seemed like a huge deal to my young mind. I remember asking my dad when the next one was happening.
Anyway I grew up with Morning In America, but I also saw something was wrong with America.
As a Gen Xer, I often felt the weight of the Boomers, the Silent, and the "Greatest" generations. I thought they made too big of a deal about JFK and Vietnam.
However, if I were to pinpoint the day it came apart, I would put it today at that day in Dallas, 1963. I don't think JFK was a great man or great president, but his death was the end, or the beginning of the end.
If you think JFK wasn't great, if not the greatest President this country ever had, then you do not understand the knife edge civilization itself was poised on during the Cuban Missile Crisis and how this young guy had the nerves to stand against a bunch of homicidal maniacs in uniform who were shouting and raging at him "JUST FUCKING DO IT!"
Khrushchev had a similar contingent. That the fate of our human world rested upon just two individuals who had the stomach to stand there under a kind of fire most cannot even imagine was about as lucky as we are ever going to get.
They got him in the end. Before a long term peace had the chance to break out. They got him and they got him dead to rights---their sense of being "right.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18 (Murder Most Foul---Bob Dylan)
Ok, Boomer. The only reason the Cuban Mission Crisis escalated was JFK's inexperience. Like much of the Cold War, it was also a tool to keep Americans in fear and willing to support mad schemes of the Military Industrial Complex. The Powers That Be love keeping the population in fear as it makes it much easier to manipulate and control them.
Jesus Fucking Christ! Not only are you an ignorant oaf, but you resort to the crudest of obscenities. You don't know jack shit about ACTUAL history and obviously you will be content presuming you do, so just Fuck Off, Richard Cranium.
Poor soul. Can't write without swearing. So sad. I hope they can adjust your meds to help.
My first memory was JFK's shooting. My sense as a kid was my mother put Jesus and JFK in the same category.
What really has to be kept in mind is that JFK was the Greatest Generation's first president. Whatever his history, it didn't have time to get tarnished. That it was followed by Johnson, a definite throwback to both the prior generation and decidedly tarnished politics, then Nixon, only served to deify his memory.
There were two factions of Boomers, Pre-Vietnam and, well I want to say Post Vietnam but I mean during Vietnam. When did America come apart? It depends on your generation, for mine it was JFK for others perhaps Jekyll Island and others maybe 9/11. In any case the trajectory is clear.
That was a fantastic rumination. Steven Cohen would approve I suspect.
Father Richard Rohr's daily meditation for May 17, 2023 stresses that evil often masquerades as good, and so provides justification for immense injustice: "The world (or 'system' as we say now) is a hiding place for unconsciousness or deadness in the words of Paul. Both Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis taught that the triumph of evil depends entirely on disguise. Our egos must see it as some form of goodness and virtue so that we can buy into it."
Signs that say "I Support Ukraine" show that someone believes they stand for human rights, dignity, and other good things, but the person is in effect supporting America's war machine, death and destruction across that beautiful country, and our proxy war against Russia, China and the rest of humanity that does not agree to bow to the U.S. imperium.
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/evil-depends-upon-disguise-2023-05-17/
Very thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, thank you. Your framing of "the day it came apart" is useful, and there is much to be said for your case about the shame of Vietnam. I also think the US has had a mixed, and somewhat sordid, history from the start. Manifest Destiny was a psy-op, perpetuated by innumerable lies, broken treaties, and Indian Wars... and the slave trade pretty much speaks for itself. Matthew Ehret describes "Two Americas" always pulling in opposite directions, which I think is helpful. But ultimately I do see the turning point as CIA's bloody coup in broad daylight of a president who, once awakened, was standing up to them and zionist Israel and the corporate capitalists and the war machine, et.al. - the entire corrupt entity which has not been threatened since. That the lone gunman myth persists at all shows how deep the unreality took hold right then, and continued with the CIA's subsequent murder of RFK and Dr. King.
How soon before we have boots on the ground in Ukraine? How deluded are we now because our press (stenographers for the incumbent party) and politicians tell us that ‘the war is going well’ for the Ukrainian armed forces.
How frightened, how chilled are we now to assemble and protest our government for redress of grievances after the full weight and mechanisms of federal law enforcement crashed down upon those that did the same on January 6.
We shouldn’t be in Ukraine, but we are. We should know where the billions are going, but we don’t. We should have a say in all of this, but WE do not.
i hate to say this, because it's just my instinct but perhaps the problem comes from thinking that holding a sign and ranting at "the System" back then made you folks think you changed the world. to this day people tell me they "stopped" the war in Vietnam from holding signs and walking, when really the System itself stopped it when they chose to and no sooner, simply because they grew tired of it and it was an obvious PR failure. and then the System simply moved onto their other projects, which were all of a piece with Vietnam and could be conducted much more in the background.
you weren't changing the world. you were simply revitalizing the System and being absorbed into it. hence all of that "rebellion" became thoroughly co-opted and was sold back to us who were young in the 90s as "culture".
in fact, my readings suggest lots of the counterculture figures who weren't obviously about making moolah (the Rolling Stones, fashion designers and other pond scum floating to the top) were agents of the elites and government, who were their ultimate patrons. the turn towards "cure the inside of you and you will cure the society" was a turn towards unreality and proper corkscrew buying.
you need to look over your entire history with a much more gimlet eye to find "the source". unfortunately, that will probably be far too self-indicting.
This piece puts me in mind of Plato’s cave scene from The Republic. The vast majority of people prefer to remain in the dark, and if you attempt to drag them into the light, they will literally kill you:
“ truth is like poetry, and most people hate fucking poetry”, overheard in a bar.
Thanks Patrick, always first on my list when I see something from you. An omitted issue is the triumph of fandom over discourse. Political parties are now run as sports franchises---and fans do not need to be rationale, balanced, or objective. Also, in this respect, see how sports dominates high school and university education. Where do we start? We need to fix the algorithm.
Another great article, Patrick! And many fine comments too!
Funny thing you mentioned Colonel Moore of the Ia Drang Valley fame. Ia Drang 1 was the first-pitched battle between American soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (the Gary Owen Brigade) of the 1st Cavalry Division (air mobile) in November of 1965, between those troops and the PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam) North Vietnam's Regular Army soldiers, and not the hit and run Viet Cong guerilla fighters both, IMO, Resistance Fighters, defending their country from the invading American imperialist forces. The PAVN fought you man for man.
Anyway, the First Battalion walked into a regimental ambush in the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands and took heavy casualties between KIA and wounded soldiers. A lot! Two troopers wounded in that battle were singer Kate Smith's (God Bless America) grandson, who played possum when "opposition" troops (my term) were nearby. For those of you old enough to remember News commentator Howard K. Smith, his son was the other wounded trooper. In January of 1966, Smith's son wrote an article for LOOK magazine describing the battle. For information about the casualty rate in that article than anything I read in official U.S. Army books or literature.
Long story short, the 2nd of the 7th made air assults to rescue their comrades and continue the fight, as the PAVN or most call them the NVA were dug in with grazing fields of fire., but bombed to smithereens by our gunships and Air Force F-4 Phantom jets.
Thirteen months after that battle, I was stationed with the 2nd & the 7th, and heard the nightmarish stories from some of the old-timers (not age, but time in country - say nine or ten or eleven months. The tours were for 12 months, but the Marine Corps tours were 13 months. (?)
Anyway, in my infantry experience "over there," I had the greatest respect for "Charlie," (the Viet Cong) and the PAVN from the North, who kicked out the French Foreign Legion in 1954 as well.
When the movie came out about Colonel Moore, my wife and I went to see it and I'll never forget my late Beloved putting her hand on my arm and shoulder as tears ran down my face.
Uncle Sam committed a "Crime of Aggression," something we condemned a few Nazis for doing during the Nuremburg Trials, as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was a false flag operation that never happened. Same with our invasion of Iraq. BTW, former Lt. Colonel Collin Powell was the investigating officer in the My Lai massacre, and covered it up, not wanting to rock the boat.
Sorry folks, the overwhelming majority of the American people have "crossed the Rubicon," with their weapons not of swords and spears but the delusional mindset that might is right and everybody we attack are the bad guys. For that matter, the Israelis are just as bad.
More and more homelessness, mental disorders, suicides, and random mass murders dot the landscape of modern day America where we're taught to (subtly) worship those "over-achiever billionaires and mega-millionaires and look down on those who have fallen on hard times. Trillions for the Death & Destruction industry (the Department of Defense) or it should be called Offense, but never enough money for the betterment and care for the common people.
Greed is good is the American creed in this day and age, as our pathos for helping others in need is increasingly diminishing, not to mention the high cost of apartment rentals and home prices. The author knows it well.
I don't know what's gonna happen with the psychopaths of NATO, but I have plenty of toilet paper if WW3 transpires.. Most friends and relatives call me a "conspiracy theorist," (a CIA invented phrase) because of my gloomy outlook. I call it realistic.
Take care, everybody!
Hi Patrick. A couple of years ago, you kindly put a blurb o my book "A Legacy of Chains," which starts with a group of people considering when the public's sense of betrayal by their government was born. Among other answers, that of Paul Klippen, the story's protagonist, was the Vietnam War. That mistrust of government, I think, promoted the byways of fantasy and denial that you deal with. One present example is the pathetic search for a national savior in figures like Donald Trump.
"We Were Soldiers Once … and Young", is a great anti-war film.