CLOWNTIME IS OVER Q&A

May 16, 2017, 8:18 pm

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Back when the MadLab theatre group out of Columbus, Ohio, staged an award-winning production (a revival, as the world premiere happened at the Overtime) of my play Clowntime is Over, the director/actor Andy Batt sent me a few questions to answer. I did my best to answer them. (Note: this Q&A took place in August of 2015.)

ANDY BATT:  Do you have any personal feelings about clowns, llamas, bunnies, mice, or snakes that you feel we should know about?

JOE GREEN: Yes. I love bunnies more or less like an eight year old. Llamas are generally amusing, and the snake...to reveal that story will give away plot points in the play. However, someone very close to me had a snake (which I had named Pancakes despite the snake already having a name) that inspired that element.

This play has a lot of religious as well as scientific ideas and philosophies floating around in the text.  Do you identify yourself with any specific religion?  Atheist or Agnostic?

I became an atheist around age 12 or so and stayed that way for twenty years. I would lean agnostic these days. I studied Western philosophy from a young age and am reasonably familiar with its major tenets and movements up until Wittgenstein, where in my opinion things got a little derailed. But that's a long story.

You also touch on a lot of historical psychiatry. Do you have a love of psychiatry?  If so, where does that come from?  Tell me about your mother.

Nice. No mom issues here! I am familiar in a casual way with psychology but am in no way expert. Jung is an important thinker to me, but almost every writer or artist will say that.

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What was your initial inspiration for the play?

One of my best friends is Michelle Mezzone, for whom the play is dedicated. We were talking one day about a television show she used to watch in the Pacific Northwest that featured a clown, and as she was describing it to me the first act of the play more or less appeared in my head. That doesn't happen very often - very little of my life directly comes into my plays, except this one. Which might be why it's my favorite of the ones I've written.

Who is your favorite playwright and why?

An impossible question. I love so many modern playwrights - Shanley, McNally, Mamet, Durang, Kushner, Guare, and of course Beckett and Ionesco and Stoppard and Robert Bolt. I do gravitate more to post-Beckett playwrights than, say, O'Neill or Williams. I actually kind of dislike Arthur Miller. Very difficult question.

What is your favorite play and why?

Jesus. Probably the play I've read more than any other is Richard III for the sheer pleasure of the words. I could go Travesties, by Stoppard. Speed the Plow or Glengarry, Mamet was at his peak then. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and this one thing - a little one act where these two kids fall in love that Shanley did that just knocks me out every time. [I didn't remember the play at the time, but it is The Red Coat.] It's a really hard question and hope I didn't bore you with the answers. Also - I'm a pretty big fan of Clowntime.

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A FEW PHOTOS FROM KING KILL 63

May 21, 2017, 8:36 pm

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Still don't know when the hell we'll ever get distribution, but I found some stills to give some idea of the speaker list. (function(jQuery) {function init() { wSlideshow.render({elementID:"810611726371466792",nav:"thumbnails",navLocation:"bottom",captionLocation:"bottom",transition:"fade",autoplay:"0",speed:"5",aspectRatio:"auto",showControls:"true",randomStart:"false",images:[{"url":"4/0/2/4/40249619/screen-shot-2017-05-20-at-10-42-45-pm.png","width":"400","height":"223","caption":"John Judg [...]

BLADE RUNNER AND THE UBERMENSCH

June 10, 2017, 8:46 am

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This essay, which appeared originally in Dissenting Views, discusses the film Blade Runner as contrasted by Philip K. Dick's original novel. Given the anticipation surrounding the remake, it seemed a good time to unearth it for the blog.

Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? proposes that even in 2021, Americans will be driven by a bourgeois desire to fit in, and surpass, one’s neighbors. Rick Deckard, the book’s protagonist, owns an electric sheep. He can’t afford to replace it with a real one because they’re too expensive; in a world in which most animals have been killed in a chemical world war, animals have become a status symbol. As far as his neighbors are concerned, the deception works – but this hardly satisfies him. He refers to the sheep as "a mere electric animal," a cover to reassure the outside world. Meanwhile, the creature’s artificiality eats at him. Every day he goes to work -­‐-­‐ which entails killing humanoid androids – all the while dreaming of the real sheep that one day will be his. At the end of the book, when Deckard has suffered through a record-­‐breaking day (for android-­‐killing) he finds himself in a kind of spiritual quicksand, wandering on the outer edges of the city. He sees desolation in all directions, without any sign of life. Then he comes upon a frog; cradling it, he manages to carry it home with him to his wife. He goes away to take a shower, leaving the frog in his wife’s hand. She examines the frog and discovers that it is artificial. She also decides not to tell her husband. At that moment, Deckard’s moment of spirituality is defined by artificiality, as it has been at every turn.

In the film version of Dick’s novel, this notion of artificiality is carried over to its protagonist. Rather than being a kind of human Virgil in a tour of all things android, Deckard is an android. It is specifically this artificial quality that unnerves or even bores some about the film. Roger Ebert referred to it as a picture inspired by "the dreams of mechanical men" and most critics have largely agreed with this assessment. Blade Runner, if discussed at all, is discussed in terms of its enormous influence in set and production design. The technical aspects are described in triumphant terms even as the story is described as incoherent, or simply tedious. It’s certainly true that the film has been enormously influential; in fact, its influence is all-­‐encompassing to the point that it has become cliché. However, the movie flopped in its first release, partially because of some insipid decisions (adding voice-­‐over narration and cutting a few key scenes) that destroyed the continuity. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, rectified these changes with his recent re-­‐release cut, and the thematic sense has been restored. It is this latter cut that I will be referencing at various points in this essay.

Blade Runner is a film which lacks a sense of audience-­‐to-­‐protagonist identification, and the major problem is Harrison Ford’s excellent performance. Ford, now and then, has gained audience acceptance as a Star, rather than an actor. Ford has specialized in archetypes: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan. When he has attempted to stretch himself, as in this film or The Mosquito Coast, the films have not done well – despite his superior performances. Simply put, audiences have not shown their enthusiasm for him as anything other than a two-­‐fisted Everyman. While Ford was not happy about playing an android (as reported in Paul Sammon’s Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner) he did a fine job of it. His deadpan tones and curiously jerky head movements betray inhumanity; even when he performs his characteristic smirk, he does it with an exaggerated head-­‐tilt, skewing the expression from charming to off-­‐putting. His apparent disinterest led to audience disinterest, since they could hardly identify with what seemed to them an android Harrison Ford. What immediately strikes the viewer is the great disparity in style and energy between Ford’s Rick Deckard and the lead android Roy Baty, played by Rutger Hauer. Hauer’s performance has been castigated for being over-­‐the-­‐top, too overtly theatrical; in truth, the performance is less theatrical than operatic. Once again, what should be remembered is that Hauer is an android in the film, and what plays out in the final sequences is an inhuman reaction to the realization of imminent mortality.

It is Hauer’s Roy Baty that I wish to focus on, as it seems to me his presentation is the key to understanding the last half of the picture. Blade Runner has a similar theme to Dick’s novel, but a vastly different conclusion; where the novelist is interested in the lies and artificiality at the heart of spirituality, the filmmakers are interested in value creation. To this extent, the influence of Nietzsche is apparent. I hesitate to discuss Nietzsche in this context, if only because he has been misunderstood and misrepresented by artists too often; artists have often adopted him because of his penchant for bold declarations and because he is easier to read than Kant. Still, it’s almost impossible to ignore the strong Nietzschean flavor of what goes on in the last act of Blade Runner; Baty’s epiphany is clearly meant to parallel the Ubermensch, in English the Superman or Overman.

The Overman (or Superman) in Nietzsche is the man who creates values for himself, who lives by his own genius and rejects all forms of weakness and religion. He makes his own morality, a master morality as differentiated from the "slave morality", i.e. the perspective of humility, tranquility, etc. The Overman does not help the poor or infirm, he ignores (and is largely disgusted by) them, because he has better things to do. Bertrand Russell once described Nietzsche’s philosophy by quoting a passage from King Lear about committing acts which are unknown but "will be the terror of the earth." While somewhat unfair, this does carry the flavor of his pronouncements. It is Nietzsche who popularized the notion that "God is dead" in Thus Spake Zarathustra: the complete phrase is "God is dead, and it is we who have murdered Him."

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Baty, let us remember, desperately wants to meet his maker, Dr. Tyrell. He uses John Sebastian, the nerdy genius with Methuselah Syndrome, to this end. Baty wants to meet him because he is obsessed with his own mortality; he loves the android Pris (Darryl Hannah) who is swiftly running out of time. His own time, he knows, runs short as well. He manages to arrange the meeting by besting his master at chess; then they stand face to face. "It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker," Baty says.

After the android demands more life, Dr. Tyrell reveals his limitations – he cannot give him more life, but only homilies about living life to the fullest. God’s power is ultimately restricted, unable to bestow immortality or give meaning to death. Baty, penitent, seeks punishment from God – "I’ve done questionable things," he says. Dr. Tyrell ignores this, proud of his creation and eager to please: "And also great things. Revel in your time." Baty smiles and then murders him by tearing at his eyes – destroying a God who could not see the evil in his creation. He then murders John Sebastian offscreen, as the film cuts to a shot of Baty standing in some sort of spacecraft, hurtling ahead with the stars behind him. It is as if he is beginning a new and terrible journey, while also perhaps serving as a flashback to his trip from the Moon to the Earth. The moment is positively Wagnerian; shot from below, light shining on his face, at this moment Blade Runner reveals that the hero is actually Roy Baty, and that he has discovered freedom in the capacity to create his own values. Tyrell is dead, and it is he who has murdered him.

Baty, rapidly dying, and apparently losing his sanity, engages in a final confrontation with Deckard, who has been forgotten for some time. Deckard single-­‐ mindedly seeks to destroy him, while for Baty everything is a game, in which the rules are only to experience as intensely as possible. Once, in the middle of the combat, Baty sticks his head out of a window and closes his eyes, feeling the rain strike his artificial skin – a momentary intermission in the duel. He tries to involve Deckard in the game: "That wasn’t very sportsmanlike," he tells him, after Deckard has struck him with a pipe, "Aren’t you the good man?" This reversal of good and bad, using the words that describe morality in their ordinary sense but in the inverse, is also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s tactics. Then, almost expiring, Baty pushes a spike through his hand to stop an apparent short-­‐circuit of some kind; the parallel here with Christ is obvious, although it is something of a send-­‐up. Baty has replaced Christ with himself, which is further shown by his rescue of Deckard as the blade runner is about to fall off a building. On a whim, Baty gives redemption, saving the man’s life because he chooses to do so – where he had murdered before. In either case he is adopting the power of God. Then, in his final moments, he reflects on his time: "I’ve seen things you humans wouldn’t believe. . .all of these moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain." A dove he has captured flies free, and the metaphor (of course) is to an ascending soul. However, there is no soul, and death is permanent – as Baty’s concluding speech asserts; one can choose only the manner of one’s life.

Deckard rushes home to find his lover Rachel, whom he knows to be an android, and discovers that he himself is one as well. He appears to absorb this with knowing resignation, as he remembers the phrase uttered by a street cop (played by Edward James Olmos): "It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?" Indeed. Deckard escapes with Rachel, having apparently learned a lesson from Baty about love and time. Deckard, who had been pushed around by everyone, ordered to kill, decides to take control of himself and escape. We are ignorant of the results of his decision, but it hardly matters. Blade Runner is about one’s choices, about the realization of mortality, and the desire for independence. God is dead, life is mechanical, and the only escape lies in the assertion of will.

GEORGE A. ROMERO: AN APPRECIATION

July 17, 2017, 10:47 am

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Actor Duane Jones, star of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Once upon a time, there was a guy who was determined to make motion pictures on his own, without stars or financing.
 
In Pittsburgh.
 
 The guy’s name was George A. Romero, and the picture he made was Night of the Living Dead. In this pivotal year, 1968 – during which, among other things, Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would be murdered by the forces of American fascism – he cast as his lead a theatre actor named Duane Jones. Jones happened to be African-American. Romero said that he’d won the part by giving the best audition rather than for any other reason. It was nonetheless unusual, and notable, especially in that the character, Ben, was not defined in any way by his blackness, but by his strength of character, intelligence, and command. He is the only character who keeps his head on throughout the picture.
 
The year before, Sidney Poitier had broken taboos in In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Night of the Living Dead has held up better than either of those: Horror is stronger than justice. Indeed, the core of the story has impaled itself into our consciousness so deep that everyone knows what a zombie is, what it does, and what the rules are for its existence.
 
Like so many of Romero’s films, Night of the Living Dead is really about the collapse of civil society. The undead begin to walk, and for a while there is chaos; during the course of the film, we learn that armed posses have begun to surge against the tide of zombies. We also learn that they can be re-killed, but only via burning or a shot to the brain. In the meantime, a few souls barricade themselves from the zombies, led by Ben as he tries to get them to cooperate and not lose themselves to panic. Alas, everything turns to shit, as they tend to do, but Ben manages to survive out the night.

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The next morning, however, Ben hears a posse coming, and goes to investigate. One of the members of the posse spots him, takes him for a zombie, and shoots him through the head. Our hero gets thrown in a pile next to the other corpses.   Ben won’t even get the chance to rise again. He can’t even aspire to be Undead.                                      *** It is exactly these little observations that make Romero’s films special, especially for their time. In his next film, The Crazies, he dealt with the conditions of a pandemic on a small populace. People start going crazy and killing each other, and soon the military arrives to try and quarantine them. The man in charge, Colonel Peckem (Lloyd Hollar), knows he’s been given a shit job, and all he wants to do is get the situation under control and get the hell out of there.

There is a great scene near the end where he is commended by his superior officer. “You’re doing a great job,” he is told. Such a great job that he is being pulled from his station and transferred to another part of the country – where the whole mess is starting again. Hollar’s body language is perfect as he is advised of his fate. One goddamn thing after another.
 
Romero’s films are rough, street level, and present a reality to them that most horror films don’t sustain. He really thinks about how human beings would react to a situation in which zombies became part of the normal course of business. In his masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, he observes a group of four people trying to survive by barricading themselves in a shopping mall. Inside, the zombies do what they did in life: circle aimlessly past shop windows.
 
That reality is established in the opening scenes, where we see a SWAT team descend on a black neighborhood to enforce martial law. Under the strain of the situation, the (non-zombie) residents fight back and the cops respond by shooting people wantonly. It continues when we see groups of rednecks turning the process of shooting zombies into a sport.

The great opening shot of DAWN OF THE DEAD featuring the main protagonist, Francine Parker (Gaylen Ross).

When our four protagonists arrive at the shopping mall, then are able to drive out the zombies from the building and make a safe haven for themselves. And they set themselves up as a kind of aristocracy: with the mall’s stores of food and clothing, they live in luxury while the rest of the world burns. For a while, anyway. Eventually that world – in the forms of zombies as well as nomadic gangs – comes bursting through the door to destroy them.
 
(Incidentally, Tom Savini, the great makeup effects artist whose work in Dawn and other films came to be celebrated, was originally offered the job for Night. He wanted the job but was drafted into the Vietnam War. Reality intruded.)
 
The best Romero films aren’t high concept, as one might think given his zombie obsession. (In fact, the remakes of his films are fairly effective at the horror bits but disregard the strong characters and themes.) In Martin, a young man believes himself to be a traditional vampire, but who has to resort to razor blades rather than teeth; he later becomes a local celebrity on a radio show where he details his exploits. In the truly bizarre film Knightriders, a group of motorcycle jousters (led by Ed Harris, in his first starring role) attempt to maintain an Arthurian code in our modern age. In Day of the Dead, a military bureaucracy tries to reassert itself in a world that has moved past any hope of control. However, Romero takes these stories in unexpected directions and developing his characters in novelistic fashion, against a backdrop that is both satirical and observant.

Actor Ken Foree, kicking ass and keeping his cool in DAWN OF THE DEAD.

Asia Argento from LAND OF THE DEAD.

The connecting theme of control runs throughout Romero’s films. In a late masterpiece, Land of the Dead, the surviving population is able to control the zombies by shooting distracting fireworks into the air when they move about the city. This works until a black zombie (played by Eugene Clark) realizes what is happening and leads a zombie revolution against the white aristocrats. Control only works for a while. Reality intrudes.

Whether tackling themes of race, sexuality, or most importantly, class – George A. Romero was one of the great filmmakers of his era. Hampered by low budgets and interference (from studios and occasionally his friends), he nevertheless managed to make highly personal films. The monsters and mayhem may have overshadowed that – the people he most directly influenced have replicated his gore but not his thoughtfulness – but in some ways he was closer to John Cassavetes than Lucio Fulci. His pictures were hugely influential on my work, especially my plays, and I will miss him and his work.
 
George, RIP.
 
Or come back if you prefer.

A TALE OF TWO STATUES

August 15, 2017, 10:47 am

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This short essay first appeared in my book Dissenting Views, published in 2009. Reprinted here due to current events...

The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, TN.

The Klu Klux Klan (from the Greek “kuklos” meaning circle) was founded by six Confederate officers in the aftermath of the Civil War.  If you have ever seen old photographs of the Klan, they are frequently arranged in a circle facing each other – hence the name.

The very first Imperial Grand Wizard, bestowed in 1866, was a high-level Freemason by the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Another Freemason, Albert Pike, was named the Chief Justice of the KKK.  Pike wrote the book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, a virtual Bible of the Freemasonic movement.

When I was in Memphis the weekend of April 5th for the 45th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, the keynote speaker for the Coalition on Political Assassinations was Judge Joe Brown.  During Judge Brown’s talk, he noted that there had been a great controversy in Memphis surrounding Nathan Bedford Forrest.  In addition to being the person Forrest Gump was named after, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slaveowner as well as being the champion of the KKK.  Indeed, the hotel we were staying in was just a few blocks away from the slave auction, which at one time was the largest in the United States.

There is a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in a public park in Memphis.  I took some video of it during my tour of the city.  He is in a heroic pose gazing at his enemies in the distance.  I am of both Hispanic and Jewish descent, so one imagines that I would be among those enemies.

There is a statue of Albert Pike in the United States, too.  It’s across from the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.  He is the only Confederate soldier to have his own statue in our nation’s capitol.  What an honor.

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The statue of Albert Pike in Washington, D.C.

There is a great deal of controversy about Albert Pike’s identification with the Klan, because the first extant source that we still have dates back to 1905, 14 years after his death.  There are a great many sources that identify him as such, however, and there is no dispute that Forrest was both the highest Klansman in the land and a high-level Freemason.  In any case, there was no particular contradiction between the two.

Scottish Rite Freemasonry, incidentally, posits a religious doctrine reminiscent of the Egyptian cult around Horus and Set.  Horus, the god of the sun, would rule the day, while Set would rule the nighttime.  Similarly, Morals and Dogma preaches the worship of Lucifer (identified as the “light-bearer” or the “morning star” in the Bible) like so: “Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy; and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good,is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.''

By “Adonay” Pike means what most people take to be God – i.e., Yahweh or El.  You may recall that in the story of the snake in the Garden of Eden, the snake tempts Eve with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  That is to say, Lucifer is the god of Education, if you see what I mean.  Whereas God, as depicted in the Bible, is a maniacal egotist who identifies himself as “Jealous” when speaking to Job and casually sends she-bears to kill those whom He doesn’t like.

Why in the hell are there statues in the United States of two Confederate “heroes” whose primary contributions to humanity are the destruction and enslavement of fellow human beings?  How can we be serious about improving race relations while continuing to honor the psychopaths who took part in the slave trade?  Is there a statue of Curtis LeMay or Robert MacNamara in Tokyo? How’s that shrine to Henry Kissinger coming along in Chile?

Honoring these men is insane.  Those statues should come down.

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DICK GREGORY, R.I.P.

August 19, 2017, 9:27 pm

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Still image from the film KING KILL 63

I only spent about four hours with Dick Gregory, and it’s one of the few times in my life I was actually starstruck. The Great Dick Gregory. Pryor before Pryor. Presidential candidate in that wildest year, ’68. A conspiracy researcher who had co-written the book Code Name Zorro (re-titled Murder in Memphis) on the MLK assassination (no, James Earl Ray didn’t do it) and spoken often about the JFK assassination and other topics in hidden history. One of the world’s great comedians and raconteurs.
 
I’ve had this weird and lucky life where I’ve met (and worked with) a lot of my heroes and I’ve appreciated every moment of it. That said, however, Gregory was on another level. He broke the Tonight Show in 1962, when the host was Jack Paar. He wrote an autobiography and called it Nigger. In the preface to his book, he wrote, “Dear Momma – Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”
 
The book is amazing, by the way. It’s filled with stories that are hilarious and harrowing, and he really makes you feel his desperation. There’s a scene in the book where he’s driving his girlfriend’s car, low on gas, and her mother’s in the car, and she wants a Scotch for the road, and the kids are hungry, and he only has five dollars to his name. So he’s mentally calculating every single purchase to try and get everything he needs to get through the night, when his car gets stuck in snow. There’s a bunch of white boys willing to help stuck cars for five dollars a pop, and he can’t afford that. So he tells his girlfriend that he’s going to get it out himself. He gets out, trying to push the car. But he has to cover what he’s doing, so he says “I regard this as a personal challenge. Man must triumph over Nature.”
 
She responds that it’s only some snow.
 
Yes, he says, “But this is white snow.”
 
Nobody laughs, and in the middle of his frozen desperation, trying hopelessly push his car out of the snow, he allows himself to be a little upset about that. That was a good line, he thinks.
 
For me, I will just say that’s a very relatable story. And that’s Dick Gregory.

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Dick Gregory and I

I interviewed him in D.C. for a documentary we were working on. We were actually there to interview the spokeswoman of the Newseum, where they were having a Kennedy exhibit, my mentor John Judge, and the ARRB expert Doug Horne. We got on Gregory’s radar thanks to Richard Belzer, who put in a good word for us after we had a good experience interviewing him at Dick Russell’s house in L.A. After trading many calls trying to solidify the interview, I got a confirmation but he would be arriving late – around 9PM. I was waiting outside the hotel when his car arrived and walked up to say hello.
 
For the next hour and a half or so, I spoke with him while the crew set up in the hotel room. He didn’t trust us. We offered him water, he turned it down. We said, it’s bottled water. “And maybe it has LSD in it,” he said. “I don’t know you.” All he knew was Belzer said we were OK. I told him I was a John Judge guy, and Mae Brussell. He started quizzing me. He had this bag with him, carried by his driver, and he would pull out folders with different stories in it.
 
I started looking through it. Research. I had boxes at home that looked much the same. All kinds of stuff. Nazis in America, fluoride, chemtrails, political assassinations. We talked about the Reagan shooting and the weird connections with John Hinckley. He wanted to know, I think, that we weren’t fuckups.
 
In some ways it was déjà vu. When I first met John Judge, we had breakfast for about two hours while he blew my head off with the most dazzling information I’d ever heard. Gregory was like that – these little asides that would make me stop and say “what?”
 
At a certain point he said OK and sat down where we needed him to sit. “I’ll take that water now,” he said.
 
We shot a couple of hours with Greg. At first, I started with some formal questions, but pretty soon it became a pretty loose conversation. He knew so much about so many different things that it was fun trying to keep up. I had a yellow notebook with me that I filled up with little notes about what he was saying.

Dick Gregory, explaining the faked Oswald photo in KING KILL 63

We finally wrapped up the shoot (to the relief of our understandably grouchy camera and sound crew, because they had been going since the early morning) and I thanked him. His driver got his stuff and they started out, but then he waved for me to follow him into the hallway. “Hey,” he said. “How come you know fuckin’ everything?”
 
“Uh, well there’s John, and I read…”
 
“No. When’s your birthday?”
 
I told him. He asked for a couple more bits of information.
 
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “Astrology is bullshit. When you meet the richest people in the world, you learn that they use numerology.”
 
He paused and said “You got more than you just like to read.”
 
“Thank you,” I said, because what else was I going to say?
 
An amazing experience, and he gave us great stuff for the film.

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Since most of the obituaries are liable to focus on Gregory’s comedy, I thought it might be a good idea to put in a few quotes from his book Dick Gregory’s Political Primer. The man could write.
 
Regarding the 1916 American election and the Socialist party:
 
“To avoid the clear and present danger of all-out war, the Socialists offered a mind-expanding vision of peace, totally the opposite of the muscle-flexing proposals of the Democrats and Republicans. They called for checks on the power of the President to involve the nation in war, a halt to military build-ups, and a world congress to rationally arbitrate disputes among the belligerents.” (116)

On the buying of elections:
 
“Of course, if a kid is born with enough money, he can let his dreams run wild…Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York is a good example. He reported that he spent $5.2 million in 1966 to get reelected to a $50,000-a-year job…With that kind of money, I could run for God – and win!” (149-150)
 
On Spiro Agnew:
 
“I tried to convince Lyndon Johnson that if he was really smart, he would have picked me as his Vice Presidential running mate in 1964. That way, he would never have to worry about someone being crazy enough to assassinate him. It begins to look like President Nixon adopted my idea.” (203)
 
“Cats, on the other hand, do not seem to be a political asset in this country, though they are the favorite pets of kings and queens. And it is understandable, since cats do not evoke the same sentiment in the minds of the American public that dogs do. Dogs are loyal, obedient, and faithful. They are much like Boy Scouts in that respect. But although a person may be ‘playful as a kitten,’ anyone being particularly vicious or slanderous is ‘catty,’ and many a politician has been described as ‘ornery as a polecat.’” (226)
 
“Government research on food is usually handled by the breakfast-food industry, so you can readily see how ‘objective’ such research findings would be. The breakfast-food industry has been deceiving the American public for years concerning the nutritional value of their products…If Wheaties was really the “Breakfast of champions,” the American government would have fed some Wheaties to the South Vietnamese army and sent them back into Laos!” (264)
 
Rest in peace, Mr. Gregory.

A FEW PHOTOS FROM KING KILL 63

May 21, 2017, 8:36 pm

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Still don't know when the hell we'll ever get distribution, but I found some stills to give some idea of the speaker list. (function(jQuery) {function init() { wSlideshow.render({elementID:"810611726371466792",nav:"thumbnails",navLocation:"bottom",captionLocation:"bottom",transition:"fade",autoplay:"0",speed:"5",aspectRatio:"auto",showControls:"true",randomStart:"false",images:[{"url":"4/0/2/4/40249619/screen-shot-2017-05-20-at-10-42-45-pm.png","width":"400","height":"223","caption":"John Judg [...]

BLADE RUNNER AND THE UBERMENSCH

June 10, 2017, 8:46 am

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This essay, which appeared originally in Dissenting Views, discusses the film Blade Runner as contrasted by Philip K. Dick's original novel. Given the anticipation surrounding the remake, it seemed a good time to unearth it for the blog.

Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? proposes that even in 2021, Americans will be driven by a bourgeois desire to fit in, and surpass, one’s neighbors. Rick Deckard, the book’s protagonist, owns an electric sheep. He can’t afford to replace it with a real one because they’re too expensive; in a world in which most animals have been killed in a chemical world war, animals have become a status symbol. As far as his neighbors are concerned, the deception works – but this hardly satisfies him. He refers to the sheep as "a mere electric animal," a cover to reassure the outside world. Meanwhile, the creature’s artificiality eats at him. Every day he goes to work -­‐-­‐ which entails killing humanoid androids – all the while dreaming of the real sheep that one day will be his. At the end of the book, when Deckard has suffered through a record-­‐breaking day (for android-­‐killing) he finds himself in a kind of spiritual quicksand, wandering on the outer edges of the city. He sees desolation in all directions, without any sign of life. Then he comes upon a frog; cradling it, he manages to carry it home with him to his wife. He goes away to take a shower, leaving the frog in his wife’s hand. She examines the frog and discovers that it is artificial. She also decides not to tell her husband. At that moment, Deckard’s moment of spirituality is defined by artificiality, as it has been at every turn.

In the film version of Dick’s novel, this notion of artificiality is carried over to its protagonist. Rather than being a kind of human Virgil in a tour of all things android, Deckard is an android. It is specifically this artificial quality that unnerves or even bores some about the film. Roger Ebert referred to it as a picture inspired by "the dreams of mechanical men" and most critics have largely agreed with this assessment. Blade Runner, if discussed at all, is discussed in terms of its enormous influence in set and production design. The technical aspects are described in triumphant terms even as the story is described as incoherent, or simply tedious. It’s certainly true that the film has been enormously influential; in fact, its influence is all-­‐encompassing to the point that it has become cliché. However, the movie flopped in its first release, partially because of some insipid decisions (adding voice-­‐over narration and cutting a few key scenes) that destroyed the continuity. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, rectified these changes with his recent re-­‐release cut, and the thematic sense has been restored. It is this latter cut that I will be referencing at various points in this essay.

Blade Runner is a film which lacks a sense of audience-­‐to-­‐protagonist identification, and the major problem is Harrison Ford’s excellent performance. Ford, now and then, has gained audience acceptance as a Star, rather than an actor. Ford has specialized in archetypes: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan. When he has attempted to stretch himself, as in this film or The Mosquito Coast, the films have not done well – despite his superior performances. Simply put, audiences have not shown their enthusiasm for him as anything other than a two-­‐fisted Everyman. While Ford was not happy about playing an android (as reported in Paul Sammon’s Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner) he did a fine job of it. His deadpan tones and curiously jerky head movements betray inhumanity; even when he performs his characteristic smirk, he does it with an exaggerated head-­‐tilt, skewing the expression from charming to off-­‐putting. His apparent disinterest led to audience disinterest, since they could hardly identify with what seemed to them an android Harrison Ford. What immediately strikes the viewer is the great disparity in style and energy between Ford’s Rick Deckard and the lead android Roy Baty, played by Rutger Hauer. Hauer’s performance has been castigated for being over-­‐the-­‐top, too overtly theatrical; in truth, the performance is less theatrical than operatic. Once again, what should be remembered is that Hauer is an android in the film, and what plays out in the final sequences is an inhuman reaction to the realization of imminent mortality.

It is Hauer’s Roy Baty that I wish to focus on, as it seems to me his presentation is the key to understanding the last half of the picture. Blade Runner has a similar theme to Dick’s novel, but a vastly different conclusion; where the novelist is interested in the lies and artificiality at the heart of spirituality, the filmmakers are interested in value creation. To this extent, the influence of Nietzsche is apparent. I hesitate to discuss Nietzsche in this context, if only because he has been misunderstood and misrepresented by artists too often; artists have often adopted him because of his penchant for bold declarations and because he is easier to read than Kant. Still, it’s almost impossible to ignore the strong Nietzschean flavor of what goes on in the last act of Blade Runner; Baty’s epiphany is clearly meant to parallel the Ubermensch, in English the Superman or Overman.

The Overman (or Superman) in Nietzsche is the man who creates values for himself, who lives by his own genius and rejects all forms of weakness and religion. He makes his own morality, a master morality as differentiated from the "slave morality", i.e. the perspective of humility, tranquility, etc. The Overman does not help the poor or infirm, he ignores (and is largely disgusted by) them, because he has better things to do. Bertrand Russell once described Nietzsche’s philosophy by quoting a passage from King Lear about committing acts which are unknown but "will be the terror of the earth." While somewhat unfair, this does carry the flavor of his pronouncements. It is Nietzsche who popularized the notion that "God is dead" in Thus Spake Zarathustra: the complete phrase is "God is dead, and it is we who have murdered Him."

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Baty, let us remember, desperately wants to meet his maker, Dr. Tyrell. He uses John Sebastian, the nerdy genius with Methuselah Syndrome, to this end. Baty wants to meet him because he is obsessed with his own mortality; he loves the android Pris (Darryl Hannah) who is swiftly running out of time. His own time, he knows, runs short as well. He manages to arrange the meeting by besting his master at chess; then they stand face to face. "It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker," Baty says.

After the android demands more life, Dr. Tyrell reveals his limitations – he cannot give him more life, but only homilies about living life to the fullest. God’s power is ultimately restricted, unable to bestow immortality or give meaning to death. Baty, penitent, seeks punishment from God – "I’ve done questionable things," he says. Dr. Tyrell ignores this, proud of his creation and eager to please: "And also great things. Revel in your time." Baty smiles and then murders him by tearing at his eyes – destroying a God who could not see the evil in his creation. He then murders John Sebastian offscreen, as the film cuts to a shot of Baty standing in some sort of spacecraft, hurtling ahead with the stars behind him. It is as if he is beginning a new and terrible journey, while also perhaps serving as a flashback to his trip from the Moon to the Earth. The moment is positively Wagnerian; shot from below, light shining on his face, at this moment Blade Runner reveals that the hero is actually Roy Baty, and that he has discovered freedom in the capacity to create his own values. Tyrell is dead, and it is he who has murdered him.

Baty, rapidly dying, and apparently losing his sanity, engages in a final confrontation with Deckard, who has been forgotten for some time. Deckard single-­‐ mindedly seeks to destroy him, while for Baty everything is a game, in which the rules are only to experience as intensely as possible. Once, in the middle of the combat, Baty sticks his head out of a window and closes his eyes, feeling the rain strike his artificial skin – a momentary intermission in the duel. He tries to involve Deckard in the game: "That wasn’t very sportsmanlike," he tells him, after Deckard has struck him with a pipe, "Aren’t you the good man?" This reversal of good and bad, using the words that describe morality in their ordinary sense but in the inverse, is also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s tactics. Then, almost expiring, Baty pushes a spike through his hand to stop an apparent short-­‐circuit of some kind; the parallel here with Christ is obvious, although it is something of a send-­‐up. Baty has replaced Christ with himself, which is further shown by his rescue of Deckard as the blade runner is about to fall off a building. On a whim, Baty gives redemption, saving the man’s life because he chooses to do so – where he had murdered before. In either case he is adopting the power of God. Then, in his final moments, he reflects on his time: "I’ve seen things you humans wouldn’t believe. . .all of these moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain." A dove he has captured flies free, and the metaphor (of course) is to an ascending soul. However, there is no soul, and death is permanent – as Baty’s concluding speech asserts; one can choose only the manner of one’s life.

Deckard rushes home to find his lover Rachel, whom he knows to be an android, and discovers that he himself is one as well. He appears to absorb this with knowing resignation, as he remembers the phrase uttered by a street cop (played by Edward James Olmos): "It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?" Indeed. Deckard escapes with Rachel, having apparently learned a lesson from Baty about love and time. Deckard, who had been pushed around by everyone, ordered to kill, decides to take control of himself and escape. We are ignorant of the results of his decision, but it hardly matters. Blade Runner is about one’s choices, about the realization of mortality, and the desire for independence. God is dead, life is mechanical, and the only escape lies in the assertion of will.

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GEORGE A. ROMERO: AN APPRECIATION

July 17, 2017, 10:47 am

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Actor Duane Jones, star of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Once upon a time, there was a guy who was determined to make motion pictures on his own, without stars or financing.
 
In Pittsburgh.
 
 The guy’s name was George A. Romero, and the picture he made was Night of the Living Dead. In this pivotal year, 1968 – during which, among other things, Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would be murdered by the forces of American fascism – he cast as his lead a theatre actor named Duane Jones. Jones happened to be African-American. Romero said that he’d won the part by giving the best audition rather than for any other reason. It was nonetheless unusual, and notable, especially in that the character, Ben, was not defined in any way by his blackness, but by his strength of character, intelligence, and command. He is the only character who keeps his head on throughout the picture.
 
The year before, Sidney Poitier had broken taboos in In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Night of the Living Dead has held up better than either of those: Horror is stronger than justice. Indeed, the core of the story has impaled itself into our consciousness so deep that everyone knows what a zombie is, what it does, and what the rules are for its existence.
 
Like so many of Romero’s films, Night of the Living Dead is really about the collapse of civil society. The undead begin to walk, and for a while there is chaos; during the course of the film, we learn that armed posses have begun to surge against the tide of zombies. We also learn that they can be re-killed, but only via burning or a shot to the brain. In the meantime, a few souls barricade themselves from the zombies, led by Ben as he tries to get them to cooperate and not lose themselves to panic. Alas, everything turns to shit, as they tend to do, but Ben manages to survive out the night.

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The next morning, however, Ben hears a posse coming, and goes to investigate. One of the members of the posse spots him, takes him for a zombie, and shoots him through the head. Our hero gets thrown in a pile next to the other corpses.   Ben won’t even get the chance to rise again. He can’t even aspire to be Undead.                                      *** It is exactly these little observations that make Romero’s films special, especially for their time. In his next film, The Crazies, he dealt with the conditions of a pandemic on a small populace. People start going crazy and killing each other, and soon the military arrives to try and quarantine them. The man in charge, Colonel Peckem (Lloyd Hollar), knows he’s been given a shit job, and all he wants to do is get the situation under control and get the hell out of there.

There is a great scene near the end where he is commended by his superior officer. “You’re doing a great job,” he is told. Such a great job that he is being pulled from his station and transferred to another part of the country – where the whole mess is starting again. Hollar’s body language is perfect as he is advised of his fate. One goddamn thing after another.
 
Romero’s films are rough, street level, and present a reality to them that most horror films don’t sustain. He really thinks about how human beings would react to a situation in which zombies became part of the normal course of business. In his masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, he observes a group of four people trying to survive by barricading themselves in a shopping mall. Inside, the zombies do what they did in life: circle aimlessly past shop windows.
 
That reality is established in the opening scenes, where we see a SWAT team descend on a black neighborhood to enforce martial law. Under the strain of the situation, the (non-zombie) residents fight back and the cops respond by shooting people wantonly. It continues when we see groups of rednecks turning the process of shooting zombies into a sport.

The great opening shot of DAWN OF THE DEAD featuring the main protagonist, Francine Parker (Gaylen Ross).

When our four protagonists arrive at the shopping mall, then are able to drive out the zombies from the building and make a safe haven for themselves. And they set themselves up as a kind of aristocracy: with the mall’s stores of food and clothing, they live in luxury while the rest of the world burns. For a while, anyway. Eventually that world – in the forms of zombies as well as nomadic gangs – comes bursting through the door to destroy them.
 
(Incidentally, Tom Savini, the great makeup effects artist whose work in Dawn and other films came to be celebrated, was originally offered the job for Night. He wanted the job but was drafted into the Vietnam War. Reality intruded.)
 
The best Romero films aren’t high concept, as one might think given his zombie obsession. (In fact, the remakes of his films are fairly effective at the horror bits but disregard the strong characters and themes.) In Martin, a young man believes himself to be a traditional vampire, but who has to resort to razor blades rather than teeth; he later becomes a local celebrity on a radio show where he details his exploits. In the truly bizarre film Knightriders, a group of motorcycle jousters (led by Ed Harris, in his first starring role) attempt to maintain an Arthurian code in our modern age. In Day of the Dead, a military bureaucracy tries to reassert itself in a world that has moved past any hope of control. However, Romero takes these stories in unexpected directions and developing his characters in novelistic fashion, against a backdrop that is both satirical and observant.

Actor Ken Foree, kicking ass and keeping his cool in DAWN OF THE DEAD.

Asia Argento from LAND OF THE DEAD.

The connecting theme of control runs throughout Romero’s films. In a late masterpiece, Land of the Dead, the surviving population is able to control the zombies by shooting distracting fireworks into the air when they move about the city. This works until a black zombie (played by Eugene Clark) realizes what is happening and leads a zombie revolution against the white aristocrats. Control only works for a while. Reality intrudes.

Whether tackling themes of race, sexuality, or most importantly, class – George A. Romero was one of the great filmmakers of his era. Hampered by low budgets and interference (from studios and occasionally his friends), he nevertheless managed to make highly personal films. The monsters and mayhem may have overshadowed that – the people he most directly influenced have replicated his gore but not his thoughtfulness – but in some ways he was closer to John Cassavetes than Lucio Fulci. His pictures were hugely influential on my work, especially my plays, and I will miss him and his work.
 
George, RIP.
 
Or come back if you prefer.

A TALE OF TWO STATUES

August 15, 2017, 10:47 am

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This short essay first appeared in my book Dissenting Views, published in 2009. Reprinted here due to current events...

The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, TN.

The Klu Klux Klan (from the Greek “kuklos” meaning circle) was founded by six Confederate officers in the aftermath of the Civil War.  If you have ever seen old photographs of the Klan, they are frequently arranged in a circle facing each other – hence the name.

The very first Imperial Grand Wizard, bestowed in 1866, was a high-level Freemason by the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Another Freemason, Albert Pike, was named the Chief Justice of the KKK.  Pike wrote the book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, a virtual Bible of the Freemasonic movement.

When I was in Memphis the weekend of April 5th for the 45th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, the keynote speaker for the Coalition on Political Assassinations was Judge Joe Brown.  During Judge Brown’s talk, he noted that there had been a great controversy in Memphis surrounding Nathan Bedford Forrest.  In addition to being the person Forrest Gump was named after, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slaveowner as well as being the champion of the KKK.  Indeed, the hotel we were staying in was just a few blocks away from the slave auction, which at one time was the largest in the United States.

There is a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in a public park in Memphis.  I took some video of it during my tour of the city.  He is in a heroic pose gazing at his enemies in the distance.  I am of both Hispanic and Jewish descent, so one imagines that I would be among those enemies.

There is a statue of Albert Pike in the United States, too.  It’s across from the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.  He is the only Confederate soldier to have his own statue in our nation’s capitol.  What an honor.

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The statue of Albert Pike in Washington, D.C.

There is a great deal of controversy about Albert Pike’s identification with the Klan, because the first extant source that we still have dates back to 1905, 14 years after his death.  There are a great many sources that identify him as such, however, and there is no dispute that Forrest was both the highest Klansman in the land and a high-level Freemason.  In any case, there was no particular contradiction between the two.

Scottish Rite Freemasonry, incidentally, posits a religious doctrine reminiscent of the Egyptian cult around Horus and Set.  Horus, the god of the sun, would rule the day, while Set would rule the nighttime.  Similarly, Morals and Dogma preaches the worship of Lucifer (identified as the “light-bearer” or the “morning star” in the Bible) like so: “Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy; and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good,is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.''

By “Adonay” Pike means what most people take to be God – i.e., Yahweh or El.  You may recall that in the story of the snake in the Garden of Eden, the snake tempts Eve with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  That is to say, Lucifer is the god of Education, if you see what I mean.  Whereas God, as depicted in the Bible, is a maniacal egotist who identifies himself as “Jealous” when speaking to Job and casually sends she-bears to kill those whom He doesn’t like.

Why in the hell are there statues in the United States of two Confederate “heroes” whose primary contributions to humanity are the destruction and enslavement of fellow human beings?  How can we be serious about improving race relations while continuing to honor the psychopaths who took part in the slave trade?  Is there a statue of Curtis LeMay or Robert MacNamara in Tokyo? How’s that shrine to Henry Kissinger coming along in Chile?

Honoring these men is insane.  Those statues should come down.

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DICK GREGORY, R.I.P.

August 19, 2017, 9:27 pm

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Still image from the film KING KILL 63

I only spent about four hours with Dick Gregory, and it’s one of the few times in my life I was actually starstruck. The Great Dick Gregory. Pryor before Pryor. Presidential candidate in that wildest year, ’68. A conspiracy researcher who had co-written the book Code Name Zorro (re-titled Murder in Memphis) on the MLK assassination (no, James Earl Ray didn’t do it) and spoken often about the JFK assassination and other topics in hidden history. One of the world’s great comedians and raconteurs.
 
I’ve had this weird and lucky life where I’ve met (and worked with) a lot of my heroes and I’ve appreciated every moment of it. That said, however, Gregory was on another level. He broke the Tonight Show in 1962, when the host was Jack Paar. He wrote an autobiography and called it Nigger. In the preface to his book, he wrote, “Dear Momma – Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”
 
The book is amazing, by the way. It’s filled with stories that are hilarious and harrowing, and he really makes you feel his desperation. There’s a scene in the book where he’s driving his girlfriend’s car, low on gas, and her mother’s in the car, and she wants a Scotch for the road, and the kids are hungry, and he only has five dollars to his name. So he’s mentally calculating every single purchase to try and get everything he needs to get through the night, when his car gets stuck in snow. There’s a bunch of white boys willing to help stuck cars for five dollars a pop, and he can’t afford that. So he tells his girlfriend that he’s going to get it out himself. He gets out, trying to push the car. But he has to cover what he’s doing, so he says “I regard this as a personal challenge. Man must triumph over Nature.”
 
She responds that it’s only some snow.
 
Yes, he says, “But this is white snow.”
 
Nobody laughs, and in the middle of his frozen desperation, trying hopelessly push his car out of the snow, he allows himself to be a little upset about that. That was a good line, he thinks.
 
For me, I will just say that’s a very relatable story. And that’s Dick Gregory.

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Dick Gregory and I

I interviewed him in D.C. for a documentary we were working on. We were actually there to interview the spokeswoman of the Newseum, where they were having a Kennedy exhibit, my mentor John Judge, and the ARRB expert Doug Horne. We got on Gregory’s radar thanks to Richard Belzer, who put in a good word for us after we had a good experience interviewing him at Dick Russell’s house in L.A. After trading many calls trying to solidify the interview, I got a confirmation but he would be arriving late – around 9PM. I was waiting outside the hotel when his car arrived and walked up to say hello.
 
For the next hour and a half or so, I spoke with him while the crew set up in the hotel room. He didn’t trust us. We offered him water, he turned it down. We said, it’s bottled water. “And maybe it has LSD in it,” he said. “I don’t know you.” All he knew was Belzer said we were OK. I told him I was a John Judge guy, and Mae Brussell. He started quizzing me. He had this bag with him, carried by his driver, and he would pull out folders with different stories in it.
 
I started looking through it. Research. I had boxes at home that looked much the same. All kinds of stuff. Nazis in America, fluoride, chemtrails, political assassinations. We talked about the Reagan shooting and the weird connections with John Hinckley. He wanted to know, I think, that we weren’t fuckups.
 
In some ways it was déjà vu. When I first met John Judge, we had breakfast for about two hours while he blew my head off with the most dazzling information I’d ever heard. Gregory was like that – these little asides that would make me stop and say “what?”
 
At a certain point he said OK and sat down where we needed him to sit. “I’ll take that water now,” he said.
 
We shot a couple of hours with Greg. At first, I started with some formal questions, but pretty soon it became a pretty loose conversation. He knew so much about so many different things that it was fun trying to keep up. I had a yellow notebook with me that I filled up with little notes about what he was saying.

Dick Gregory, explaining the faked Oswald photo in KING KILL 63

We finally wrapped up the shoot (to the relief of our understandably grouchy camera and sound crew, because they had been going since the early morning) and I thanked him. His driver got his stuff and they started out, but then he waved for me to follow him into the hallway. “Hey,” he said. “How come you know fuckin’ everything?”
 
“Uh, well there’s John, and I read…”
 
“No. When’s your birthday?”
 
I told him. He asked for a couple more bits of information.
 
“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “Astrology is bullshit. When you meet the richest people in the world, you learn that they use numerology.”
 
He paused and said “You got more than you just like to read.”
 
“Thank you,” I said, because what else was I going to say?
 
An amazing experience, and he gave us great stuff for the film.

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Since most of the obituaries are liable to focus on Gregory’s comedy, I thought it might be a good idea to put in a few quotes from his book Dick Gregory’s Political Primer. The man could write.
 
Regarding the 1916 American election and the Socialist party:
 
“To avoid the clear and present danger of all-out war, the Socialists offered a mind-expanding vision of peace, totally the opposite of the muscle-flexing proposals of the Democrats and Republicans. They called for checks on the power of the President to involve the nation in war, a halt to military build-ups, and a world congress to rationally arbitrate disputes among the belligerents.” (116)

On the buying of elections:
 
“Of course, if a kid is born with enough money, he can let his dreams run wild…Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York is a good example. He reported that he spent $5.2 million in 1966 to get reelected to a $50,000-a-year job…With that kind of money, I could run for God – and win!” (149-150)
 
On Spiro Agnew:
 
“I tried to convince Lyndon Johnson that if he was really smart, he would have picked me as his Vice Presidential running mate in 1964. That way, he would never have to worry about someone being crazy enough to assassinate him. It begins to look like President Nixon adopted my idea.” (203)
 
“Cats, on the other hand, do not seem to be a political asset in this country, though they are the favorite pets of kings and queens. And it is understandable, since cats do not evoke the same sentiment in the minds of the American public that dogs do. Dogs are loyal, obedient, and faithful. They are much like Boy Scouts in that respect. But although a person may be ‘playful as a kitten,’ anyone being particularly vicious or slanderous is ‘catty,’ and many a politician has been described as ‘ornery as a polecat.’” (226)
 
“Government research on food is usually handled by the breakfast-food industry, so you can readily see how ‘objective’ such research findings would be. The breakfast-food industry has been deceiving the American public for years concerning the nutritional value of their products…If Wheaties was really the “Breakfast of champions,” the American government would have fed some Wheaties to the South Vietnamese army and sent them back into Laos!” (264)
 
Rest in peace, Mr. Gregory.

WHAT DO RESEARCHERS WANT?

November 7, 2017, 5:12 pm

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This question was posed to me in 2010 by Randy Benson, who was then working on his film THE SEARCHERS, which released this year. I thought it was a good question and answer, and I thought it might make sense to include it here in my blog.

RANDY BENSON: Wondering if I could get your opinion on a JFK research question:  One thing I'm trying to do is to address questions the intelligensia has been posing to me, i.e. people I work with at Duke, etc.  A question I feel I need to answer is, "What do they (researchers) want? Most of Americans believe that it was a conspiracy, so what do you want?"  It's a fair question.  Most are dead already, so they can't be held accountable (save perhaps Billy Sol Estes, Hosty, et al.)  But do we want the Times or the Post or the rest of the MSM to validate us? If all of the files are finally released, can they create an accurate narrative to inspire people to force accountability in the national security state, etc?

This is something that I really feel I need to address in my movie.  Any opinions?

JOE GREEN: Sure thing. This is something I've tried to address in my work maybe more than some other researchers, and specifically to the academic crowd. Len [Osanic] and I have talked about it loosely in my last couple of BOR [Black Op Radio] appearances, and I closed my newest CTKA [now Kennedysandking.com] article with comments in this direction. I think, in some ways, that this is the key question of the whole thing.

First, I agree that if you study the JFK assassination solely in terms of its internal structure, then it is a hobby and essentially interchangeable with being a Trekkie. There are a few people who are like that, attending parties set in a mock-up of Jack Ruby's bar just for fun. Not many, however. Most people became interested in the assassination because they identified with Kennedy, and by extension his policies, and against the Vietnam War, among other things.

In my view, the assassination is a kind of Rosetta Stone to understanding how power operates in the United States. Prior to 1963, American exceptionalism was very much the rule; Frances Fitzgerald showed this in her study of American high school textbooks. After 1963, the thesis is still operative (in such writers as Stephen Ambrose and David Halberstam) but there is an undercurrent of popular dissent and a realization -- at least by some -- that American actions are not always endorsed by God, so to speak. The counterculture movements were birthed from it; after all, I think Jim Douglass has shown that Kennedy was murdered in large part because of his opposition to the Vietnam War in particular and War in general (also cf. the excellent film Virtual JFK) and of course these movements were spawned to oppose war.

The trick is not to get mired in the assassination itself, but to go outward, to make judgments about what happened in this singular instance -- Nov. 22, 1963 -- and use that information to judge other events in this light. What one finds, I think, is that the real driving force of the assassination, and most of the terrible events in our lives, is monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism is an economic machine which burns finite resources at a rate that would only make sense were they infinite, and therefore demands the acquisition of greater and greater resources until the whole thing collapses upon itself. In the last analysis, I tend to view the Industrial Revolution as an evolutionary dead-end, in effect; it will one day be replaced, because it is totally unworkable. Our own civilization, we must remember, is an eyeblink compared to some others, and our assumed superiority is entirely in our own perception. One thinks of the Aesop fable in which a lion says that if lions could sculpt, they would sculpt a lion eating a man.

The question is whether we can avert the system before it collapses totally (resulting in chaos and mass death among the civilian population, especially, as always, the poorest among us) or whether we can get enough of a popular will to restrain the machine enough to prevent it from destroying us. To this end, in order to wake up the populace, we need to exploit the holes in American exceptionalist theory (which survives in Milton Friedman and other paid cheerleaders) such as the Kennedy assassination. JFK's murder reveals the US for the what it is: the most powerful banana republic in the world, or as Parenti says, a gangster state.

So no, I am not looking to pin the assassination tail on a particular donkey. I hope that makes some sense, at least -- kinda tossed this off the top of my head. You've made me realize that I should try to write a full essay on this topic, however...

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NEW RULES FOR OLD RADICALS: ROMAN J ISRAEL, ESQ.

January 20, 2018, 10:17 pm

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“We live in an era of migrating corporations. In order to escape organized labor in this country – and this higher wages, benefits, and so on – corporations roam the world in search of nations providing cheap labor pools…Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospects for future jobs. Because the economic base of these communities is destroyed, education and other surviving social services are profoundly affected. This process turns the men, women, and children who lives in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison.”

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

We are introduced to the title character of Roman J. Israel, Esq., (Denzel Washington) as he types up a legal brief against himself. He has violated both rule or law and his code of professional conduct, and the rest of the film shows us how he got to that point.
 
Roman has been a silent partner in a two-man attorney’s office for decades, doing all the background legal maneuvering while his partner shows up to court. He seems to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, possessed of a brilliant mind, and a real soul brother who never stopped trying to work toward the social and political revolution promised in the 1960s. He literally carries this work around with him in his briefcase, a monster brief he wants to file in federal court to try and undo the private prison industry, among other things.
 
He also hasn’t had to deal with the real world, and real people, in a very long time. So when his partner goes down with a heart attack, he is suddenly forced to handle clients up close and deal with prosecutors and judges accustomed to playing the agreed-upon game rather than following the strict letter of the law.
 
Things become further complicated when he forms a friendship with a young woman (Maya, played by Carmen Ejogo) who volunteers at a civil rights organization in Los Angeles, and finds himself at a new job at a huge corporate firm run by a slick lawyer George Pierce (Colin Farrell) who has mastered the game. At first, Roman struggles in this new world, but – desperate for money – he learns fast, taking the advantage of a client’s privileged disclosure to get some quick hard cash.
 
This is an unruly and ungainly picture, eccentric in pacing and structure, much like its titular protagonist.  At a certain point, writer/director Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) writes himself into a corner, making the ending something of a predictable anticlimax. That is too bad, but the problem for Gilroy is that he had to graft a thriller onto what is essentially a character study. I don’t this for a fact, but it’s easy to imagine that he got involved writing all the great character scenes for his hero that he lost interest in the thriller part. (And in fact, the film’s title went from Inner City in pre-production to finally Roman J. Israel, Esq., which has to one of the least commercial titles of all time. But fitting.)
 
So yes, this picture has flaws. But it also does so many things well. How many films have you seen that know who Bayard Rustin was? How many films deal with the plea-bargaining that means well over 90% of criminal cases never see trial? How many films try to grapple with what real social justice actually looks like – thankless and tireless work. Or as Roman himself puts it, “I’m tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful.”
 
Most importantly, however, is that the film really deals with the spiritual, physical, and emotional costs of giving a shit.
 
Roman’s whole problem is that he gives a shit. George Pierce, the Colin Farrell character, has life figured out. He wears great suits, runs four offices, makes a fantastic living and endures very little drama. In fact, Roman starts to infect George with his giving a shit virus right about the same time Roman starts to give up on it. Which causes his own existential crisis.
 
One of the basic aspects of this society we live in is that it doesn’t pay to try and be truthful. Working and caring about the truth gets you nothing but grief, both at work (if you work in a normal corporate environment) and in life. Try getting rich telling people the truth. Uh-huh. Who gets rich? Corporate pastors with megachurches. Douchebag lawyers who flip their clients into the system. Movie producers like Jerry Bruckheimer selling military propaganda to young people too poorly educated to understand how they’re being lied to.
 
At schools and universities, teachers and professors struggle to make rent. Know who doesn’t? Administrators, who seem to replicate like cancer. I’ve worked in and out of claims organizations for twenty years. There are many good people who work in these organizations. And there are also total incompetents blessed with zero conscience and the ability to wear a tie. Guess who ends up rewarded by the system.
 
My wife and I walked out of the movie, and she turned and asked me, “Did you like it?” And my immediate answer was: “Yeah. It’s kind of made for me.”
 
So take what I’m saying here with a grain of salt. I’m more willing to forgive the picture’s flaws because it’s the kind of picture that I like. It deliberately evokes the 1970s, down to the soundtrack and Denzel’s amazing afro, and it tries to tackle adult subjects in an adult way. And Gilroy, the writer, seems to have done his homework.

​For one example, there is a scene where Maya calls Roman and invites him out to a dinner “date.” Except it isn’t really a date, although Roman would be perfectly happy for it have been one, he picks up on the fact that it isn’t when Maya gets emotional. Of course she does. Life is hard when you give a shit, and Roman is becoming one of her heroes. She remarks to one of her co-workers who makes fun of the out-of-touch attorney: “We stand on his shoulders.” She sees that.
 
This is really good, tricky writing by Gilroy. It would be easy to make their relationship stilted or icky. It isn’t, because he has a grip on the ins and outs of the two human beings he’s writing about.
 
***
 
There’s another reason I connected to this film. I am a political researcher (sometimes a “conspiracy researcher,” although that term is problematic) and I have been blessed to meet, and work with, many of my heroes. And these were heroes to me because they worked to either overturn existing social structures and conditions, or to obtain the truth about events our government has deliberately concealed. And mostly they run around in old clothes and don’t necessarily know how to use Instagram and aren’t always politic about expressing themselves.
 
They end up paying a price for giving a shit.
 
Both the public and the critics have rejected this picture by and large, and it’s not surprising. But I expect this to be one of those films that grows in reputation over time and is eventually looked at as a wonky classic. Not only because of the terrific acting work (Denzel is terrific as one expects, but Farrell is brilliant in a great role as well) but because of the many good scenes and the many good questions raised in the film, despite some of the narrative issues.

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MEET MATT LEWIS, THE 21st CENTURY JOSEPH GOEBBELS

January 27, 2018, 8:23 pm

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I am not prone to hyperbole, and I don't get pissed off easily, but the Daily Beast has driven me to indulge both of these today. They ran an article by Matt Lewis, ostensibly a journalist, entitled "Meet the Woman Who Was the Nixon Era's Alex Jones."

This is one of the most staggeringly inane articles I have ever had the displeasure to read, and certainly one of the worst caricatures of journalistic integrity to ever appear in a semi-legitimate publication. The subject of the piece is Mae Brussell, and as you can see from the title he compares her to Alex Jones.

This is already an insult, but Matt's just getting started.

Now Mae Brussell is a legendary figure in the counter-culture and in conspiracy circles, and her work is meticulous, complex, and possessed of an insight into both historical veracity and human nature. She sometimes gets labeled as a "conspiracy queen," but this term is mostly used to demean her, as is the frequent observation that she was a housewife. As if there is anything inherently wrong with that.

Brussell's intelligence is on display on any of her radio shows or her articles (which found an audience in Paul Krassner's magazine The Realist. Krassner was so impressed with her that he helped put out her Conspiracy Newsletter.) Her intelligence - and singular power of analysis - is readily apparent, whether or not one agrees with her assessments. Although, frankly, if you're disagreeing with her assessments you are probably wrong. For just one example, the Watergate burglars were arrested in June of 1972. Before Woodward and Bernstein started their series in the Washington Post, two weeks after it had happened, Brussell had written her article "Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped?" in which she had figured out most of the structure involved. That article appeared in The Realist in August 1972.

Seriously, read the article. It's amazing. She has the players down cold. Instantly.

And do you know why that article is amazing? Because Mae had this habit of reading - a habit that Matt Lewis seems to be unacquainted with. She knew who the people were, and knew their backgrounds. Jesus Christ, she already mentions the slush fund tied to Richard Nixon. Woodstein, the intrepid pair, wouldn't get there for another year and needed Hal Holbrook in a parking garage to feed them breadcrumbs, if you believe that story.

The point is, what I am saying is that Matt Lewis comparing Mae Brussell to an assclown like Alex Jones is beyond the pale. Only someone who either (1) has an agenda or (2) is bereft of cognition could make the comparison. I used to live in Austin, and I'm a political activist, so I'd see Alex around at events. I saw him interact with his staff, and somewhere there may be tape of me refusing to be on his public access show. When we were in Dallas for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, John Judge was talking to a small group who had braved the ice storm to participate in the memorial. John's speech was interrupted by Alex, of course, blaring nonsense from his bullhorn and accompanied by his usual gang of idiots. 

To say that Mae and Jones are comparable because they were both "conspiracy theorists" is like saying Matt here is like Stephen Glass because they're both journalists. If you aren't able to draw distinctions as obvious as these, then you are in the wrong profession.

But it gets worse. Because next, he compares Mae Brussell to Father Coughlin. Father Coughlin may not be a familiar figure to many, but he was a believer in the "Jewish conspiracy," and promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - much like Henry Ford did, among many others in America both in the years leading up to World War II and, unfortunately, now.

Equating these two people is…the word I want to use is "demonic," and I am not religious.

Perhaps that's an overstatement; I don't have a good word for this comparison. Trumpian. 

Mae Brussell was the most anti-fascist personality that one could possibly imagine. She spent her life's work rooting out Nazi influences on the American government and found a great many. Her work was continued to a large degree by John Judge and also Alex Constantine, continuing the research into the fascist operatives lurking in sheep's clothing of a democratic republic.

Saying Mae Brussell is like Father Coughlin is like saying Matt Lewis is Joseph Goebbels. So hence my hyperbole. By the way, Mae Brussell was Jewish. So yeah, you just did that.

Matt writes:

Likewise, the iconoclastic Brussell defied ideological labels, though she was probably more left-wing than right-wing. Crazy knows no bounds.

He's writing this about a woman who is deceased and can neither respond nor sue.

Fuck you, Matt. And fuck the Daily Beast for allowing this insane article to be published. If this idiot had read one sentence about Mae Brussell, he would not have been able to write that she was "probably more left-wing…" It's unbelievable. Except unfortunately it isn't, because welcome to our America, I guess.

If you would to read some of Mae Brussell's work, or listen to her shows, I can suggest the following websites:

Worldwatchers.info (the best Brussell site of them all, built by my late friend Rob Falotico)

Ratical.org (run by Dave Ratcliffe)

You can also find some of her work collected in this book, published by Feral House and edited by Alex Constantine:

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I strongly urge you to look at her material. I think you might come to realize that maybe Mae has a point. Considering who the President is and what the hell's going on in this country, I would suggest that perhaps she has a little more insight into our situation than Matt Lewis, who has failed to do his homework like a fucking child.

I don't expect much from the Daily Beast, but I do expect better than this.

DID THE FBI KILL JFK? BY VINCENT SALANDRIA

June 27, 2018, 3:19 pm

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Vince Salandria is one of the earliest and best-respected Kennedy assassination critics. A Philadelphia lawyer, as he identified himself in one classic essay, he is as charming as he is brilliant. Still razor-sharp, he recently sent an off-the-cuff reply email regarding the FBI that makes some wonderful points. Vince very kindly granted permission to allow me to reproduce the contents of that email here.

For the uninitiated, a good place to find more information is the online version of False Mystery by Vincent Salandria (edited and formatted by Dave Ratcliffe). Vince will also be featured in an upcoming documentary by Max Good.

Please note the title is my own, and not Vince's, but I think it accurately captures its contents.

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 Here is what I know.  Wnat do you make of it?

        1.  Sibert and O’Neil, two FBI agents who attended the JFK autopsy, filed a report with the FBI that the bullet which impacted on Kennedy’s back never exited.  That tended to create a possible small problem for the Warren Report.

       2.  Robert A. Frazier, the FBI ballistics expert, testified before the Warren Commission that Commission Exhibit 399, because it had shed many fragments and weighed what a normal bullet would have weighed, could not have been the bullet which paved its way through Kennedy and Connally.  So, Frazier proved that the Warren Commission was dead wrong and that the law of the conservation of mass prevailed over my  friend Arlen Specter’s myth.  I dedicated one of my articles in “Liberation Magazine” to Mr. Frazier.

       3.  The FBI Report which was signed by J. Edgar Hoover, that was supposed to guide the Warren Commission, but which Report was not printed by the Commission and was found in the National Archives by me, confirmed that the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back never exited.  That Report never was amended and never got lost, unlike the transcript of the Pentagon’s radio report to Air Force One and the Cabinet Plane did announcing that Oswald had killed Kennedy, and that there was no conspiracy, a conclusion which was announced in the afternoon of 11/22/1963, before there was any evidence against Oswald.  Mr. Hoover’s Report was perhaps a bit damaging to the sole assassination myth. Don’t you agree?  (italics mine)

       4.  Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney at the time of the assassination, immediately leaked Oswald’s FBI number and pay.  There has not yet been an admission that Oswald, the fake Soviet defector, was CIA, nor do we know what his CIA number and pay was.

         5.  The biggest effort to destroy my credibility was undertaken by Lulu Belle Holmes, a/k/a Rita Rollins, a famous FBI agent. I concluded that she was trying to destroy my credibility by trying to get me to go to Canada on a search for the "real" Kennedy killers, promising $12,000.00 for my efforts,  and a "New York Times" interview. She returned to my home about six months after the effort to discredit me had failed.  In her later trip she offered to get me the proof that Hoover and LBJ had arranged for the killing of Kennedy.  I suggested that I had no interest in this proof and instead strongly suggested that she return to the real killers and to her real employers, the CIA.  

        6.  When I first asked for, under the Freedom of Information Act, my FBI and CIA files, I got the both of them.  The CIA reported truthfully that I attributed to them the killing of Kennedy.  The FBI reported that I had signed a petition against the rearming of West Germany. The FBI also made mention of my first article on the assassination published in the “Legal Intelligencer.”  Several years later, when I again sought those same files, the CIA had a file which imputed to me the same truth telling about that agency having executed President Kennedy. The FBI reported that I had no file.

       7.  The FBI was responsible for reporting Communist activities of certain School District of Philadelphia teachers, which resulted in their firing. The Monday following Kennedy’s assassination, I reported to my classes that the Kennedy killing had the earmarks of a CIA killing.  I continued to teach this to my high school students until my promotion to the District’s labor department in 1967. I litigated on behalf of the District all of the strikes.  The FBI never interfered with my career.  

        What do you make of the above?
 
​       Love,
        Vince

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WHAT COUNTS AS A CONSPIRACY THEORY?

July 6, 2018, 5:21 pm

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The following is a text conversation I had with Sheldon Rampton on Facebook. I made no edits except removing other comments in the thread. It ended up being an interesting - and instructive, I think - exchange about where mainstream liberals draw the line as far as "conspiracy theory." I should say that I am still a big fan of his books, especially Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us, We're Experts! Sheldon first began saying that he thought conspiracy theories and religious devotion were similar in that both were a product of irrational thinking (or, to use his precise words, "distorted thinking.") Then he gave the usual critique of conspiracy theories being pattern-recognition "taken too far.") So I responded. In the end, he asked me a series of questions and, not receiving the answers I believe he was looking for, ended the thread.

SHELDON RAMPTON: Actually, we've all witnessed conspiracies. Most crimes involve a conspiracy of some kind, so if you've ever watched episodes of NYPD Blue or Law & Order, you've witnessed dramatizations of conspiracies. For that matter, Iran/Contra was a real conspiracy by people like Oliver North and others within the Reagan administration to subvert the will of Congress by covertly selling weapons to Iran and funneling the money from those sales to the contras in Nicaragua. There was a left-leaning organization called the Christic Institute back in the 1980s that wove facts from Iran/Contra into an elaborate conspiracy theory that they claimed connected Iran/Contra to various covert actors involved in a wide range of prior criminal acts including the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, etc. People at the time (myself included) found the Christic Institute's claims credible because they fit the pattern of what we already believed about the Reagan administration and the contra war.
​
The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq in part by promoting a false conspiracy theory connecting Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. I remember reading a news story at the time where someone interviewed a "man on the street" who supported the war. The interviewer asked if the man believed that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. He replied, "Yes. It sort of fits the pattern of what I know about the guy." At around that same time, there were people on the left who believed that Bush was behind 9/11 somehow because it fit *their* pattern of what they believed about Bush. (ITALICS MINE)
​
JOSEPH GREEN: ​I’ve noticed that many people are obsessed with anti-conspiracy thinking, to the point where they will overlook obvious evidence in favor of a reality that makes them feel better. They will dismiss details as “trivial,” when the details are in contrast to their deeply held anti-conspiratorial notions. Many people, for example, continue to hold the preposterous notion that Oswald killed JFK - or worse, that Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK - even when the slightest understanding of physics would deny their conclusions. They will go so far as to project mental illness on people who disagree with them, despite having no expertise in the subject beyond reading a few articles in their newspaper of choice. It’s troubling.

SHELDON RAMPTON: Joseph Green Actually, I *do* believe that Oswald killed JFK and Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK. I used to think otherwise about the JFK assassination, but I've changed my opinion, although I appreciate that reasonable people might think otherwise. However, it's obvious that *all* of the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination cannot be true. Some people think Castro was behind it. Others think it's the CIA. Others think it's the Mafia. The Christic Institute, which I mentioned previously, wove the JFK assassination into its narrative about Iran/Contra. Even if you think one of those scenarios is what happened, you can't possibly believe that they're all true.

...I don't claim to know everything about how this works, but often when there is a traumatic event in the news you see conspiracy theories circulate about it. For example, conspiracy theories emerged following the mass shootings a few months ago in Las Vegas by Stephen Paddock. As is often the case, people circulated "unanswered questions" about the shooting, such as these:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-04/16-unanswered-questions-about-las-vegas-shooting-mainstream-media-doesnt-want-talk-a

I think events like this attract conspiracy theories because (1) they're dramatic; (2) information about events of this nature usually comes in pieces, and the early information is often fragmentary, incomplete and contradictory. People puzzle over those inconsistencies and try to fit them into the pattern of their expectations about the world. In the case of the Las Vegas shootings, I think a lot of the people who circulated conspiracy theories were opponents of gun control who wanted to believe that it was a "false flag" incident engineered to pass legislation that would enable the government to take away everyone's guns. Similar "false flag" theories have emerged after Sandy Hook and other mass shootings.

JOSEPH GREEN: Sheldon M Rampton, multiple theories exist for virtually every fact in the known world. There are physicists who believe the universe is a computer simulation. Most physicists seem to believe in dark matter, for which no evidence exists whatsoever. Turbulence is not perfectly understood. Not every aspect of Newtonian mechanics is perfectly understood. 

“Conspiracy theories” aren’t a special category. Presumably you believe in the Woodstein version of Watergate. Does that make you a conspiracy theorist? Why or why not?

I would say that theories asserting that the world is run by lizards etc. have a low probability of being correct, so low that it’s not worth taking seriously. But it is pure confusion to lump that sort of theory with (for example) the evidence that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK. That thesis has a zero probability of being correct. If you don’t understand why, you haven’t read the coroners report.

SHELDON RAMPTON: I've already explained that I believe conspiracies exist. Please learn to read.

JOSEPH GREEN: Sorry if I wasn’t clear; however, you said that you believe Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK and that is a belief every bit as absurd as anything Alex Jones says. This isn’t something one can have differing opinions about - either you are familiar with and understand the evidence, or not. There is no scenario in this universe in which Sirhan could have killed Bobby Kennedy.

In light of this, my questions are: what is your program for determining which conspiracies are acceptable and which are not? And who gets the pejorative “conspiracy theorist” and who doesn’t?

SHELDON RAMPTON: Joseph Green I look at the evidence and reach a conclusion. Maybe I'm not always correct, but I do my best. I tend to distrust people like you who insist that they are absolutely certain about their theories, because that level of claimed certainty is usually a marker of emotional investment more than a marker of actual knowledge. We could go back and forth if you like about the evidence connecting Sirhan Sirhan to RFK's murder, but I doubt that either of us will find our views changed at the end of that exchange.

As for "my program for determining which conspiracies are acceptable and which were not," I don't have "a program." I have some opinions, which I've already outlined above. Just read what I've already written if you want to understand my views. As for which conspiracy theories are valid and which are not, I just do my best to follow the evidence. Perhaps you'd care to share your opinion about which of the following conspiracy theories you believe to be true:

(1) The Bavarian Illuminati has been working behind the scenes to orchestrate world events including the French Revolution, the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of JFK, and infiltrating Hollywood.

(2) The Rothschild banking family is the secret force behind history beginning with the Napoleonic Wars and continuing through to the present day.

(3) The a United Nations has black helicopters with which tye plan to bring the U.S. under UN military control.

(4) Chemtrails are a conspiracy to poison the air.

(5) JFK's assassination was the work of Fidel Castro.

(6) JFK's assassination was the work of the CIA.

(7) JFK's assassination was the work of the FBI.

(8) JFK's assassination was the work of Lyndon Johnson.

(9) JFK's assassination was the work of the Mafia.

(10) JFK's assassination was the work of the KGB.

(11) RFK was killed by someone other than Sirhan Sirhan.

(12) Sirhan Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate who was hypnotized into killing RFK.

(13) The Pill and abortion are a conspiracy to eliminate black people.

(14) Political elites are conspiring to eliminate the white race.

(15) Haile Selassie never died in Ethiopia.

(16) The Apollo moon landing was faked with help from filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

(17) he Bush family, Margaret Thatcher, Bob Hope, and the British Royal Family are shape-shifting alien reptiles.

(18) 9/11 was planned by the Bush administration to create a pretext for the war in Iraq.

(19) The Clintons murdered Vince Foster and 50 other people.

(20) The mass shootings at Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, the Parkland School and elsewhere were "false flag" operations in which "crisis actors" pretended to be victims so the government can take away everyone's guns.

(21) Barack Obama's birth certificate was faked, and he is a secret Muslim.

(22) The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency is building of concentration camps in preparation to impose martial law and genocide.

(23) The AIDS virus is a conspiracy to kill blacks and gays.

(24) Water fluoridation is a Communist conspiracy to weaken the U.S. population.

(25) The earth is flat, and the government is covering up the truth.

(26) Vaccines are a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.

(27) The auto industry has been covering up the availability of technology to build cars powered cheaply by water, hemp and cold fusion.

(28) The pharmaceutical industry has suppressed knowledge of cures for cancer.

JOSEPH GREEN:

OK, I’ll play.

1. No, although George Washington was apparently concerned about it.

2. No.

3. No.

4. Don’t know.

5 through 10. No, although the CIA comes closest. Domestic assassinations, like foreign assassinations, come from the Pentagon.

11. Definitely.

12. No. He killed no one.

13. No, but eugenics was a huge influence on Margaret Sanger. Go and read her letters to H G Wells in particular. Edwin Black also has an excellent book on the eugenics movement called WAR AGAINST THE WEAK.

14. Yes, they’re called Republicans. Do you follow the news? (Sorry I thought you typed “white” by mistake rather than “Black.” If you really meant white, then no.)

15. No.

16. No.

17. No.

18. Possibly, although it isn’t clear.

19. Definitely not.

20. No, but the Las Vegas shootings in particular had many anomalous elements. The “take away guns” theory is stupid, but I haven’t done enough work on these cases to really state a position. 

21. No.

22. No, but if you’ve noticed we have our immigrant children in concentration camps.

23. Not sure, but the WHO records are quite strange. The Boyd Graves lawsuit also turned up some amazing documents. Something is odd about it.

24. Communist, no. Fluoridation was a byproduct of industrial engineering and certain companies like Alcoa got the government to agree to dump it in our water. This was a terrible idea. I thought I read about this in your books, but perhaps not.

25. No.

26. Definitely. The pharmaceutical industry has shown again and again that it doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits. This is not a “conspiracy” except in the sense of the nicotine conspiracy, cigarette companies covering up the dangers of their own products. Fifty or a hundred years from now I am quite sure that people will shake their heads in amazement at what we allowed to be injected into infants. Note: I don’t think that vaccines are bad in of themselves, but only the extra material put into them as stabilizers. See FEAR OF THE INVISIBLE by Janine Roberts.

27. Of course they have. They also did their best to put mass transit out of business. See INTERNAL COMBUSTION by Edwin Black. This is not conspiracy except in terms of profits, however - like various banks conspiring with Enron to ignore the obvious flags in their accounting principles. Everybody was making too much money.

28. I don’t know, but trusting pharmaceutical companies about anything is stupid.

Also, my certainty in the RFK case isn’t a result of an innate stubbornness, but from the fact that a person can’t shoot another person in the back of the head at point blank range if they are three feet away and facing the front.

FAVORITE JFK BOOKS

September 23, 2018, 1:47 pm

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I often get the question which are my favorite JFK research books. The answer always depends upon on what the goal is. So I will put them into sections below.

FIrst of all, read Mae Brussell. And listen to her shows. Be greedy. You want to start understanding the American republic, she left you a treasure trove of information to start with. You can start with The Essential Mae Brussell.

Second, you can check out Edwin Black's brilliant article, "The Chicago Plot." This is the best single reason I am lukewarm to all the LBJ-is-the-mastermind type books.

If you are starting fresh, these are great places to start: Accessories After the Fact by Sylvia Meagher, False Mystery by Vince Salandria, JFK and the Unspeakable by Jim Douglass, Into the Nightmare by Joe McBride, Destiny Betrayed (2nd edition) by Jim DiEugenio, The Last Investigation by Gaeton Fonzi, Understanding Special Operations by Dave Ratcliffe, and The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot.

You could also start with - ahem - my zine, An Intro to the JFK Assassination. 

Also recommended: Reclaiming Parkland by Jim DiEugenio, Presumed Guilty by Howard Rothman, History Will Not Absolve Us by Marty Schotz, On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Lachy Hulme edition) by Dick Russell, Breach of Trust by Gerald McKnight, The Oswald Affair by Leo Sauvage, Survivor's Guilt and The Not-So-Secret Service by Vince Palamara, The Echo from Dealey Plaza by Abraham Bolden, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott, The Killing of a President & The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald by Robert Groden, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? by Joachim Joesten, The Assassinations by DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti, JFK the Book of the Film, by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar, The Secret Team and JFK by Fletcher Prouty, Spy Saga by Phil Melanson, and The Zapruder Film by David Wrone.

Recommended, but not as your first JFK book: Harvey & Lee, by John Armstrong. Anything by Harold Weisberg, whose writing style leaves something to be desired although his books have great information. If you get into Weisberg, I actually recommend starting with Case Open, which flows fairly well. All of the Penn Jones Forgive My Grief books, although he is much beloved by me. Assassination Science and Murder in Dealey Plaza, edited by Jim Fetzer, both have fine essays in them - especially by David Mantik and Vince Palamara - but Fetzer has since gone off the deep end, so I can't use these books for citation and don't recommend them to an unseasoned researcher.

Gee, what about these famous books?: I don't really recommend Mark Lane until you've read some other, better books. If you want to know why, you can hear this interview with me I did on the Midnight Writer News show. Same with Tink Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, despite some of his good work in that book. He undermines much of his own book in the final passages and has later taken actions that are extremely suspect. John Newman's first book JFK and Vietnam is worthwhile, but be careful. Also be very careful with anything he wrote after that; I'll let Vince Salandria explain why. 

Read this instead of that: Anthony Summers wrote a pretty good book called Conspiracy, and then twenty years later he rewrote it and watered it down and called it Not in My Lifetime. Read the first version.

Good books that aren't assassination books per se: Thy Will Be Done, by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, and all of the Doug Valentine books, especially The Strength of the Pack and The CIA as Organized Crime.

Your mileage may vary: Family of Secrets by Russ Baker, Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney, Dr. Mary's Monkey by Ed Haslam, Our Man in Mexico by Jefferson Morley, Crossfire by Jim Marrs, Coup De'tat in America by Weberman & Canfield, anything by Joan Mellen or Walt Brown.

The guy I kind of like that most researchers don't: Harrison Livingstone either co-wrote or stole High Treason with Bob Groden (depending on who you ask) and then also wrote several other books, including High Treason 2 and Killing the Truth. I personally find Killing the Truth very entertaining and often hilarious in his observations about other researchers, particularly David Lifton. But I don't cite the research, no.

Disinfo but kind of interesting: The Torbitt Document, Farewell America by James Hepburn.

Disinfo: Reclaiming History, by Vincent Bugliosi, Case Closed by Gerald Posner, Best Evidence by David Lifton, Contract on Amerca by David Scheim,  Inquest by Edward Epstein, False Witness by Patricia MacMillan, JFK the Man and the Myth by Victor Lasky, A Cruel and Shocking Act by Philip Shenon, The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh, all of the Noam Chomsky output on the subject, any book by Dale Meyers or John MacAdams, any book that relies on Judith Exner as a source for anything that's expected to be true. I also think Larry Hancock is disinfo, which will shock some, but take a look at the two books he cowrote about MLK.

I published 'em, so take it with a grain of salt, but these are both essential or I wouldn't have published 'em: Judge for Yourself by John Judge and The Deep State in the Heart of Texas by Richard Bartholomew.

HALF A BILLION DOLLARS

October 9, 2018, 7:36 am

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There is a new report from the UK newspaper The Independent which states that the Pentagon paid a public relations firm $500 million to produce anti-Al Qaeda propaganda films. Half a billion dollars. These films were aimed at insurgents.

Bell Pottinger was first tasked by the interim Iraqi government in 2004 to promote democratic elections. They received $540m between May 2007 and December 2011, but could have earned as much as $120m from the US in 2006.

Lord Tim Bell, a former Bell Pottinger chairman, confirmed the existence of the contract with the Sunday Times. The Pentagon also confirmed that the agency was contracted under the Information Operations Task Force, but insisted that all material distributed was “truthful”. 

However, former video editor Martin Wells, who worked on the IOTF contract with Bell Pottinger, said they were given very specific instructions on how to produce the fake Al-Qaeda propaganda films. 

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/us-government-pentagon-fake-al-qaeda-propganda-videos-a7348371.html

In case you were unaware, the United States government created, trained, and funded Al-Qaeda ("The Base"), including alleged 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. 
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www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam

Yes, this cover is real.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

This was confirmed by Zbigniew Brzezinski himself, who boasted about it in 1998:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the national securty advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan , nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q : “Some agitated Moslems”? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today...
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West has a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid: There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia , moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries...

dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview

The United States government created and funded a terrorist group. That terrorist group was then blamed for attacking us on 9/11, although their attacks also had the benefit of bringing down two buildings which were full of asbestos and one building which was full of records related to the CIA and several SEC investigations. It also had the benefit of making everyone forget about Donald Rumsfeld's remark that the Pentagon had misplaced $2 trillion the day before, and of course funded any number of domestic military projects, thus pouring money into the coffers of Halliburton, Raytheon, etc. 

Then they took $500 million over a four year period to finance videos opposing the terrorists they created.

What good could half a billion dollars have done in our own country, applied to something useful, like say infrastructure or food? I know, it doesn't work like that, I'm a crazy leftist. But doesn't it at least seem slightly odd?

Not really. After all, Israel created both Hamas and Hezbollah. So this is just business as usual: create your enemies, then fight the enemies you created, then #winning. Ok.