UNLIKE THE CALLOW young, middle-aged things in the media and some in the Congress who either weren't born yet or were toddlers at the time the South Vietnamese government collapsed and the Communists took over Vietnam, I do remember that, I was a young adult at the time, politically involved and a news junkie, as is my family tradition.
I'm old enough to remember in detail and I am old enough to have heard the right-wing and center figures who tried to rig history to make their own blame in what had happened disappear or turn into something it certainly was not, wise and noble. Blaming those who had been right all along for what happened when they predicted what would happen with remarkable accuracy.
The banally evil and futile folly and, at that time, longest American war, the terrible consequences for those who worked for or with the U.S. military and embassy and for American companies and others, were soon to be turned by Hollywood into myths of American servicemen returning from Vietnam being spit on by anti-war types, the typical Hollywood lie that informs the minds of the entertainment addled plurality if not majority of Americans - certainly the death of any sane and egalitarian democracy based in reality and learning from the worst mistakes.
Lawrence O'Donnell's commentary on this last night is the best I've heard yet, it deserves to be given a link and a listen.
I am also old enough to remember the early and best years of NPR under Frank Mankiewicz before the establishment Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its partners in destroying public radio, right wing foundation money, installed a big donor pleasing regime of mealy-mouthed Republican-propaganda and warm, fuzzy nostalgia as its typical product. [Is my memory correct that Morning Edition sponsorship was where I first heard of "My Pillow?"] I seldom to never listen anymore. I am very doubtful that you can have high-overhead journalism without risking the corruption of advertising, though the CBC radio division has been able to do it to some extent in Canada. But, then, they have a modern constitution not an 18th century anachronism and a population that has been used to honest elections.
And I remember the absurdly legendary "golden age of television" when the legendary Edward R. Murrow still had a major TV show before William Paley chose his relationship with the best and brightest over reporting hard fact. I will tell you that most nights right now on MSNBC is far better than anything he was allowed to do and then only once in a while. If you had told me at the beginning of the American war in Afghanistan I would say that about MSNBC, I'd have said you had a hole in your marble bag. Back then that channel had on the 1990s style Republican minstrelsy of Alan Keyes, the old American-fascism of Pat Buchanan and the developing American-fascism for the now middle-aged Tucker Carlson on as they were cancelling Ol' Phil Donahue.
I will never forgive Donahue for his years as a talk show host promoting an easily sold caricature of liberalism that was such an easy foil and push-over for the fascists. It tells you something about how bereft of actual liberalism it was in the media that he was the one you had to support as Rick Kaplan was firing him for being insufficiently supportive of the Bush II wars as he figured luring Tucker Carlson from PBS was a feather in his cap. Rick Kaplan was a fixture of the Shorenstein Center at the very Republican friendly Kennedy School of Government at the establishment whore house of Harvard, which is necessary to point out.
I would advise everyone to support the current make-up of MSNBC because without a financial motive to keep what they've got now, it's no more secure than Murrow or Donohue were. Now that print is in such decline - as was bound to happen because the cost of printing news on paper is prohibitive and the financial base of doing it online will not support the same level of journalism that print was capable of at times - if it goes, so does our lifeline to this kind of accurate and honest memory as well as current news. Hollywood won't support it, neither with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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What Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out about the ignorant arrogance of the "best and brightest" believing, fully, that because Robert McNamara had been one of the team brought in to manage the Ford Motor Company after WWII and had risen to the top during a period of enormous profits that he could use his same management skills to make and sell cars to manage the American war in Vietnam as Secretary of State is worth thinking about, hard.
It is testimony to one of the stupidest and more ingrained articles of faith in "enlightenment" thinking and the academic, college-credentialed set, that the universe is a monistic entity in which everything is guided by a few if not only one Law discernible by human science and that all of human thought and life should fall in line with that. I think they really did believe that the management schemes and organizational ones used to make and sell cars was fungible and that such a person could be expected to succeed in carrying out the war policy of the United States. It is the same faith that the Trumpists, perhaps especially those "white evangelicals" and "white Catholics" who believed that the totally phony business genius conman would fulfill that wet-dream of Hollywood and other Republicans that what the country really needed was a businessman to be president. As if George W. Bush had not already proved that such a creature, a legacy, daddy propped up businessman was no substitute for someone with the skills for the job.
It is the biggest lesson of Joe Biden's few months in office that it is someone with his experience and knowledge from decades in public service who should be trusted to know what they are doing. And the media and the Republicans are doing their damnedest to thwart that because they mostly don't want the American government to be a successful, egalitarian democracy, they want a gangster government only different in type and extent of violence than what Trump negotiated into power in Afghanistan on the watch of his successor.
I have mentioned, repeatedly that during the hearings into Trump's time as Putin's water boy in regard to Ukraine that I was impressed that it was the diplomats who had been on the ground and in harms way and the military officers who had some realistic view of reality who bravely risked their careers and, Trump's fanatical fans being what they are, their lives to expose his crimes.
In that period, I could not help but notice it was the lawyers, the people who had worked at the Department of Justice, the FBI (with the exception of Andrew McCabe), the granite man with feet of clay, Robert Mueller, who I found disgustingly ass-covering and, in many cases cowardly. I think that it is not unrelated to the same training in a legal culture built with the same kind of "enlightenment" concepts and thoroughly in line with them. In time everything is viewed as an aspect of that kind of substitution on the basis of everything being, essentially, the same thing, integrity for self-preservation, truth for cover-up, democracy for expediency. But that thought will take a lot longer to continue. I think it's also the difference between having talking heads on spouting lies and the reporting of the truth as if it mattered as "journalism,".
I'll have more to say on that sometime.
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