Woody tonight
On the occasion of HBO's sneeringly one-sided Woody Allen documentary airing tonight, here's a repost of last April's piece in defense of Allen from the unsubstantiated charges he still faces from his ex nearly three decades on. I'll be very curious to see what evidence of child molestation these documentary filmmakers can come up with that two state investigations at the time could not. One change that needs to be made to the text is that I said the statue of limitations is up on any hypothetical civil case. Not true, according to writer and historian Bob Weide. Dylan Farrow could still choose to pursue a civil case against Woody Allen if she's willing to be questioned about the case by legal authorities and not just her mother's and brother's journalism friends.
The American coup d'etat
The Kennedy assassination is an enduring topic here. It’s the most celebrated crime in United States history-- a violent political coup brought home by the orchestrators of so many violent political coups abroad, both before and since. Shockingly, we have endured now three months (really four years and three months) of national public dialogue surrounding the juicy topics of the peaceful transfer of political power and the legitimacy of our democratic system-- and yet almost nobody that I’ve found has brought up the subject of Kennedy and his murder.
His death has been the ultimate “hit,” up to this point, by the Deep State. They took batting practice against equatorial nations. The far right wing elements of our brutal government still today make their bread from the yeast of the mythical Cold War threat in Eastern Europe. They've never relinquished their power-- the only true power that resides in Washington. The spooks back in Kennedy’s day-- the scum on the bottom of your shoe personified by the likes of Guy Banister, Howard Hunt, and David Phillips-- were never going to accept the United States at peace with Castro’s Cuba only 90 miles off our shore. This bunch was even opposed to peace talks with Vietnam. Peace with the Communists was considered capitulation.
But they pulled the damn thing off. We can admit that now as the entire concern fades on cue with what Studs Terkel called our condition of the United States of Alzheimer’s. Donald Trump will likely be the last American president to even promise the declassification of the secret assassination files, and it turned out that he had just been blowing smoke. The hardliners against the Soviets lassoed into their horrific scheme the Cuban exile circus clowns of the Bay of Pigs and the anti-Castro thugs in the Trafficante/Marcello/Roselli/Giancana criminal syndicates, farmed out the hit in order to keep the entire lot of them safe from blowback, caught the president in a nest of gunfire in Dallas, shot him through the larynx from behind, blew out the back of his skull-- and his brains onto the dress and hands of his terrified wife from behind a fence on the knoll, blamed it all on “a nut” that New Orleans Mafioso Carlos Marcello and CIA anti-Castro figures knew well and that could be pinned as both a murderer and-- this is important-- a “leftist,” then chose a Marcello stooge to quickly and forever silence the nut in question.
Most of us don’t venture an opinion on the Kennedy murder investigation today. There are too many names in any possible conspiracy to try to remember. Too many webs to untangle. Too many contradictions in the tragic character of Oswald, that vast collection of contradictions and spy assignments that made him so vulnerable to the power of his handlers. Most of us have adopted the same posture on the matter as that of Fidel Castro for all those years: Butt your nose out, or it might get shot off. It could have been Fidel in Jack’s place if the G men had had more competence, or if Kennedy hadn’t prevaricated on the topic of the island. The empire will do as the empire does, but like El Comandante, take care of you and yours, and be wary of what is spooned onto your plate and what cigars you put in your mouth.
Americans don’t seem all that pissed about it anymore, but they should be, more so now, in fact, because the conspirators got away with it. When, in 1978 and 1979, the House Committee on Assassinations finally set fire to the preposterous Warren Commission Report, we were obviously too distracted by Studio 54 and the peak seasons of Saturday Night Live to give much of a damn. I was still in short pants but although the nation's lawmakers had finally determined that a conspiracy of bad actors, and not a lone gunman, likely killed the president, I suspect we had already grown too emotionally dependent upon the lone gunman theory to collectively part with it, or to demand actual justice.
Even though many of the same heels (Hunt as the prime example) had been rounded up and imprisoned for their Constitutional crimes during the subsequent Watergate scandal, and we had come to learn about the covert CIA attempts on Castro and other heads of state, and we had finally seen the Zapruder film, and we had finally heard the actual witness testimony, and heard what had been omitted or ignored by the Warrens, and seen Sam Giancana shot dead before he could give his compelled congressional testimony, and we had heard about the body of John Roselli, following his testimony, decomposing in a 55-gallon oil drum in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay, it was post-trauma symptomatic to admit-- maybe still today-- that such a thing was capable of ever happening. The president being murdered by elements of the nation’s intelligence service? We figuratively shelved the entire horror, sort of how United Artists literally shelved Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate for a quarter century following Kennedy's death. The mind shuts down as a coping mechanism. Perhaps the collective one does as well.
This is why I laugh at Tom Brokaw’s publishing choice for our “greatest generation.” The World War II generation, really? The assassination perpetrators? The group that turned on their own during the ‘50s and created a seemingly-everlasting era of paranoia, fear, and loathing? That generation? If we’re going to indulge such nonsense at all, I favor instead-- to wear the championship heavyweight belt-- the baby boomers. Imagine having to endure teen angst and the palace revolution of your government by radical right wing jacknuts at the same time. Despite the personal anguish, the boomers changed the world. They became the first generation since the radical laborists of the late 19th century to truly challenge the actions of their government. They were the first to recognize-- at least during their youth-- the folly of empire, even as it stubbornly endures today.
Of all the historical “threats to democracy” that are being touted now towards a comparison with the Trump antler brigade storming the people’s castle-- this would be your Civil Wars, your disputed elections of 1876 and 2001, etc., I don’t read or hear anybody nominating November of 1963. A vital comparison from then to today is the way we see the news media hurry its attempts to carve out historical context from still-developing events. So I’ll give it a go too. The media back then (as now) wasn’t adversarial towards entrenched power at all. In ’63, the Warren Commission was elevated to sovereign authority of assassination investigation by the incoming president, ending the legal possibility at that critical time of any other law enforcement entity taking a look at the murder. The commission was served by and steered behind the scenes by Allen Dulles, the CIA’s former head, author of the ’53 Iranian coup, the ’54 Guatemalan coup, and (most ironically) the MKUltra mind control program. He had been fired by Kennedy just two years previous over the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. For LBJ to choose Dulles to fill one of the limited seven seats on this all-star roster was like putting the fox at the head of the Henhouse Massacre Committee. Did the JFK assassination conspiracy stretch all the way to the top of the United States government? All we have as evidence is the fact that Johnson tabbed Earl Warren, then the chief justice of the supreme court, to lead the commission and then the resulting report spread manure like a farmer racing to wrap up in the field before a storm.
Not only are Americans not appropriately angry today about the coup of one of their all-time favorites, they seem to be increasingly angry instead at the monolithic and vague idea of “conspiracy theories.” Instead of calling for more government openness and demanding the release of secret files, a new hysteria seems to be lumping all opinion unapproved by the neoliberal government in with QAnon and the like. A nitwit on the Independent’s website made the fantastical leap from QAnon’s pedophile inventions all the way back to an actual endorsement of the long-ago-discredited Warren Report. Netflix and National Geographic both turned down Oliver Stone’s new documentary JFK: Destiny Betrayed, which is nevertheless headed to the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. Executives claim the denial was due to an “unapproved fact check,” begging the question, of course: unapproved by whom?
If the goal of a coup d'etat is political suppression, murdering Kennedy was more than a home run. It was a grand slam. Not only did it punish the man and his family and his country and its citizens for his having policed organized crime and for waging peace during a hysterical anti-Communist era, it continues to suppress, intimidate, and threaten nearly six decades on. Do a Google search on Stone’s new documentary right quick and see how many critics are willing to immediately surmise, film project unseen, that Stone’s film has issues with historical accuracy. And this is based solely on the fact that giant media corporations have reported problems with it and then not even specified their problems. I guess if you succeed in making the connection between Jack Ruby spending a month in Havana in 1959 and moving within the Giancana and Marcello criminal circuit before killing Oswald under the pretense that you lost your cool in a heated moment after you snuck into the Dallas police station, you're liable to also believe that Hillary operates a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant.
It’s a bullshit claim to say that Americans “love conspiracy theories.” They actually hate them with a passion. What we actually love is secrecy and pat endings, where we find solace, and I’ll match you example for example. We’re begging-- and we have been begging-- for more Warren Commissions to be formed and gently assure us that each of our national, institutional sins are only the sins of lone nuts and not instead those of our collective failure, or worse, perhaps our own personal culpability. Read me another bedtime story, Uncle Sam… or Uncle Joe, so I can get to sleep.
The normalizing of government secrecy
The United States, discussed as a single entity, is afraid of its proverbial shadow. This is a characteristic most common of empire. You possess all of this that does not belong to you and the paranoia is bound to overflow. I stole it so somebody else is going to try to steal it. We build walls, literal and otherwise. We imagine threats from outside
and more so, threats from inside. The latter is the focus of today.
Our privacy as private citizens and residents has never been more at peril from the threat of our own government, even as that government takes action that is without historical precedent in order to keep itself operating in shrouded secrecy. Compliant news media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and NBC have hired “media reporters” to secretly infiltrate private chat rooms online and to “out” those that might be anywhere saying or thinking a bad thing-- expressing private opinions of nuance perhaps, and certainly opinions that would land safely outside the permissible orthodoxy of the day. They publicly shame the offenders and refer to the results of their reporting as “news,” even while they walk in unquestioning lockstep with those that just happen to be the current power players in each of the government’s co-equal branches.
The public cover-- as well as the sometimes legal cover-- for doing something so thoroughly un-American is that they are saving us from Donald Trump or someone like him ever being elected again. This is the pure definition of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is very real and which is more fascist at its core than anything they’ve been describing to us of late as fascist. You must understand that, to this privileged class, unmonitored spaces anywhere in the U.S. now are akin to social laboratories capable of creating attacks on democracy, that foment what they have deemed “misinformation.” These spaces must be exposed. And it’s okay if they expose it because these are not actually “public” spaces, they argue. The First Amendment, they’re quick to inform, does not extend to “freedom from consequences.” And just try to forget for a minute that we’ve succeeded in privatizing the freedom of expression.
They’re going after podcasts and platforms such as the Parler app, Clubhouse, Telegram, and Substack. For those that work in the corporate media, it’s a long-awaited moment to richly savor-- the opportunity to take aim at the independence of those news competitors with too much editorial independence, those alternative journalists that have stubbornly refused to make the same career compromises they’ve chosen to make.
And transparency is a great thing. Who could disagree with the premise? I’m always arguing for more transparency here. But how do we line up corporate media’s promotion of their idea of transparency with their simultaneous detestation of Edward Snowden, of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, of government and corporate whistleblowers of all stripes? Of their unbending support for official government secrecy that extends inexplicably to millions upon millions of “classified” documents? Dr. King famously said the United States offers socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. True it still is, and we also have the First Amendment for the privileged class and paternalism and censorship for the unwashed. The nation’s billionaires will judge which is which.
The root of the danger to civil liberties can be dug up again at the New Left’s hatred for populism. They believe the uneducated and the poor are racist, sexist, and willfully ignorant of all things. It can’t possibly be the case that the government has betrayed any expectation of the people’s trust. How dare you say this presidential election was rigged after we spent the last four years telling you the last one was rigged by Vladimir Putin. Left wing intellectuals look down their noses at these people’s unskilled and low-paying jobs, and at the depressed communities in which they choose to live. It used to be that these were the ugly traits of the nation’s conservatives. No longer. Neo-liberals and corporate Democrats have abandoned any hope of ever again getting the votes of the rural poor because in order to do so, they would have to do something to earn them, and they’ve chosen to be beholden instead to the banking, tech, and military-industrial giants. The Democrats are fighting a battle against “misinformation” this very moment in the well of the United States Senate, but I’ve already got the new Democratic president down for misinforming us about his son’s business dealings, his history as a sexual predator, several lies and plagiarisms regarding his resume, and my promised $2000 stimulus check. Misinformation is how our government has long functioned.
It’s one of the few plays they have. There was no other way to discredit a Bernie Sanders or a Tulsi Gabbard, no other way to defend indefensible trade deals, immoral wars, and the get-out-of-jail-free cards given to the arsonists of our national economy. Now we can see precisely what that play is. #Resistance politics is denouncing your opponents as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes to distract from bloody foreign policy and secret government. What other way are you going to sell-- to a populace that ostensibly believes in democracy-- a totalitarian surveillance and empire-building state, especially after you’ve been forced to replace a great salesman in Obama with a borderline-senile one in Biden. The approved national storyline is that we’re surrounded on all sides by white male fury-- well, except, that is, inside the CIA, NSA, FBI, and in the banking sector.
There was initially some widespread liberal support for Julian Assange, and then for Edward Snowden, when those individuals exposed some of our nation’s most heinous and secret crimes. Not by institutional government officials, mind you, but at least by self-described liberals in the civilian ranks. That little support seems to have evaporated under the relentless, now decade-long assault on these men and their cohorts by the neo-liberals. Now the newly-defined liberals have partnered with the establishment right under the belief that the hackers and the whistleblowers are the villains. Julian Assange is Roger Stone. Edward Snowden is Julius Rosenberg gone off to literally live in Russia. and it’s our nation’s law enforcement agencies that will be our hero protectors. Lest we forget that there were actually loud calls less than ten years ago to “defund” the NSA. Now a simple call to “defund the police” is thought to be like holding up a placard that reads “Kushner for POTUS 47.” Even media exposures such as the one involving Hunter Biden’s corruption are labeled “misinformation” when they are factually plausible and not at all disproven or even denied, but simply have the wrong political impact. That’s fascism.
Politicos on the inside seem to be telling us now that free speech is a fallacy. Speech has been “weaponized,” says one pundit, because-- hmm, as I read it-- it takes place between two or more individuals without first having passed through an attempt by the corporate media to contextualize it. Michael Moore told us back in the mid-90s this would ultimately happen, and I’ll bet he doesn’t even remember saying it, but I remember. He said, paraphrasing now: use the internet, organize, before they take it away from us. And now the taking is happening.
The fear of our own shadow that I mentioned before is no longer collective, it’s turned person to person. Your neighbor is a threat. Maybe even your family member. Turn him in. We got you. We’re your new family. You and I both know that the Trumpies are a cult, but, unlike them, you’re an independent thinker. I could tell that about you right away. Oh, and thanks for looking past the Tara Reade assault allegations, and Hunter’s completely-logical, coked-up foray into Ukrainian national industry, and those exciting campaign promises that fizzled to nothing within the first 24 hours that immediately followed the Georgia runoff. No cult behavior to see over here.
