Strike it Rich

(Publicity photo of American Bandstand host Dick Clark. Public Domain.)

I wondered at the link between the three completely unique people who left this world early in this year. They all struck it rich in the America that roared out of World War Two.

Big Mama was one of them, the first to go, though she had more years on the planet than Don or Dick did.

Mom got into the Quiz Show thing in 1948, long before Don enlisted in the Marine Corps and shipped off for Korea, and before Dick broke into the radio game. Big Mama and Raven were jitter-buggers, and late into their lives together could still cut a mean rug.

I remember Raven talking about going in to The City from New Jersey to see the big bands play in venues like the Paramount in the Big Apple, and Big Mama sported the Bobbie Soxer look of the late forties when she blew into New York late in the War.

Bobbie Soxers were the proto-teens of the day: they were zealous fashionistas, with poodle skirts and socks rolled down to their ankles, swooning over Frankie Sinatra. Big Mama was industrious and frugal- she made her own skirts, since the design was simple and the materials easily available. She used to tell me she bought patterns and made Raven a suit, and after the Socotra kids started to come along, she would put a quarter in a jar for the college funds with each shirt she ironed herself and did not take to the dry cleaner.

Big Mama and Raven were fixed up by Raven’s old pal Ray Rappaport. He died last year, but in 1948, everything was just starting to rock and roll after the social deep-freeze of the war years. When they went out in New York, they wore beer jackets and smoked their cigarettes straight. They got married at the Little Church Around the Corner on 34th Street along with thousands of other couples in those years, and started in gentile poverty in an apartment in Brooklyn.

At that point, someone was getting married, everyone was those days, and maybe it was Ray himself. Big Mama had a scheme. They didn’t have the money to fly up to New York State, so she convinced Raven that they should get on a radio quiz show called “Strike It Rich.” The format of the show was that people would come with problems that a little cash could solve, and answer a few simple questions.

Todd Russell was the host, the network was the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Luden’s Cough Drops was his benevolent sponsor.

Raven used to tell the story years later, when he could still talk, that Big Mama had identified the name of the man to went through the audience looking for personable people with problems. Big Mama called out the man’s name as he walked down the aisle, got his attention out of the maelstrom of pleading voices. He stopped to talk to her, and she explained that she and Raven wanted to attend the wedding of the guy who had introduced them.

It was simple homework, getting the man’s attention. She won the prize, which was the price of two round trip airline tickets from New York to Rochester. It did not seem like a lot of money, when she told me how much she had won, but the very idea of climbing into a DC-3 airliner to go some place was pretty heady stuff for a young couple, even if Raven was a Navy flyer.

1948 was a big year for Dick, too. He started in radio that year, just as the music was starting to veer away from Swing and into something else. Music- and television. It burst into the mainstream of go-go American consciousness. When Raven and Big Mama moved to the Motor City, only about ten percent of American households had a television.

By the time Dick took over American Bandstand, nearly half had an idiot box, and by the time JFK was running for President, the television was ubiquitous.

There were a couple things that happened in the meantime that could have destroyed Dick’s career. The “payola” scandal was the first- of course the radio jocks made money direct from the record labels to publicize their songs. Dick was as corrupt as any of them. He even had his own label that he promoted relentlessly. And then there was the game show corruption that was endemic to the medium.

Charles Lincoln Van Doren was a well-born, Ivy-educated cheat and fraud. In that, he shared a lot in common with Golden Boy Alger Hiss, who was on trial for perjury as the decade began. It might be part of the famous “end of innocence” nonsense about America, but it was real enough.

Hiss wouldn’t admit he was a red under the bed. Van Doren confessed to Congress that the fix was in, and the producers of “Twenty-one” had fed him the answers to the questions. There was widespread shock and disbelief that everything was rigged.

Who are you going to believe?

Maybe I have the paradigm all wrong. Maybe rather than the JFK, RFK and MLK killings, maybe it was Charles Van Doren who destroyed the American Dream. And maybe it was eternal teen Dick Clark and Don Cornelius who played out the divisive saga of race in America.

It is the height of irony that the payola scandal forced Dick Clark to divest his music business, and position himself as the producer of the iconic game shows that attempted to win back our trust. He hosted “Pyramid,” and produced a dozen others. He also played the strange tic-tac-do game of creative format theft, colliding with Casey Kasem and his “American Top 40.”

You can say Don Cornelius ripped off the “Bandstand” format, but you can’t say it wasn’t because Dick had enough people of color on his show. It took years to crack the lily-white audience, and when Don made “Soul Train” a hit in 1970. Dick immediately came up with an ersatz Soul Show, which folded almost immediately and the two feuded bitterly. Don privately accused Dick of attempting to take over the African American media market.

Put a happy face on it- The Soul Train-American Bandstand controversy was short-lived. Clark and Cornelius discussed the matter, and Clark dropped his show Soul Unlimited while offering to co-produce some black specials with Cornelius for ABC.

Despite its racial overtones, the conflict seemed less a struggle between black and white and more a contest over the Saturday afternoon audience.

Don committed suicide in February. Dick had a stroke he never came back from- you remember how painful that New Year’s Eve wasy for all of us- and passed yesterday.

Big Mama took her poodle skirt and bobbie socks with her in January. She did not get much comment, except from her many friends and her children. Don got a brief flurry of retrospective interest for the show for which he wrote, hosted and hustled advertising. Don Cornelius was Soul Train, and Dick was American Teen Culture writ large.

Big Mama was- well, she was my Mom. This is a much smaller world- one much less rich- with the three of them gone.

(Don Cornelius in 2006. Credit: Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Hope (and Fear)

(Shuttle Discovery flies down the National Mall 17 April 2012 in a last pass of glory. Photo CBS News.)

My knee feels better today but my back is killing me. One step forward and half a step back, I guess. But life is good. I was thinking that, among other things, when the Shuttle Discovery was touring the capital, perched on the custom Boeing 747 that was bringing the spaceship to its final destination at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Really Big Ass Airplane Annex at Dulles International.

The Porters were in the unit at that precise moment, doing the semi-annual inspection to make the cut-over from heating to cooling seasons. I had the furniture all pulled away from the convector units for their convenience as I heard the sound of jet engines roaring on the other side of the building. I hobbled out to the balcony and peered toward the roar.

“Did you see it?” I asked Old Jim later at Willow.

He nodded.  “I just looked up from my computer and out the window and there it was, just over the trees.”

John-with-an-H had captured a tiny image on his phone and he passed it down the bar. “I missed the first shot since the airplane was actually below the tree-line,” he said. “It was low. They say under 1,500 feet.”

“Amazing,” I said. “I missed it, but I did hear the sound of the jet engines. Pretty cool, and makes you proud of NASA.”

“That is sort of like being proud of the British Empire as they lower the flag on a former colony,” growled Jim. “There is nothing to replace it. We are done.”

“Oh hell,” I said. “Remember, the Shuttle was never anything except a space truck for low-earth orbit. Plus, the SpaceX guys are going to launch an unmanned Dragon capsule to rendezvous with the International Space Station in just two weeks. Maybe it was time for the Government to get out of space.”

Jim and John-with looked dubious, and I decided to have another glass of wine, just for a change. Liz-with-an-S topped me up and I asked if she had heard back from the Inspector General’s office of the agency down the block. She shrugged. “I sent them a nice note thanking them for interviewing me. I told them I found their office engaging.”

“That is a polite way to talk about the IG,” said John-with.

“Nothing since?” I asked, looking a the late afternoon light through the amber color of the Australian Hay-Burner White in my glass.

She shook her head, and her chestnut ponytail danced on her lithe shoulders. “Nope. But I have hope.” She walked back along the bar as Jim said something rude but appreciative about her beauty.

“Where there is life…” I said. “But we seem to be out of the hope business, even though we keep trying.”

“Bill Clinton was from Hope, Arkansas,” said John-with, owlishly. “I think I am going to change from red to white wine in honor of the season. I hope that is acceptable.”

“And of course Mr. Obama was about Hope and Change,” said Jim.

“We read a book by General Gordon Sullivan at the War College called “Hope is Not a Method,”” I said. “The General said that hope by itself is no substitute for planning. He was Colin Powell’s Army Chief of Staff. That was the last time we took a big whack in the dense establishment. It sucked.”

“You are going to have to be doing a lot of hoping, then, if you are going to try to stay on the gravy train,” said Jim.

“You know,” I said, “Unless something else happens- Korea or China or Iran- we are going straight down the tubes in terms of force structure. I don’t see hope saving much. It is like the Shuttle- a grand last hurrah and then off to static display.”

“Can’t abandon hope,” said John-with. “It is a question of what you hope for.”

“That is what Pascal Bruckner said.”

“Who?”

“Bruckner. He is a crazy Frenchman who thinks that a paradigm shift in our thinking happened around Y2K. The era of revolution ended, and the Age of Catastrophe began.”

“You mean like the Global Warming thing?”

“He says it’s everything. Science, demographics, global warming, sea level, food. The whole nine yards. In five years or in ten years, temperatures will rise, Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode.”

“Well, it might, right? Look at the Tsunami and the Fukashima reactors.”

“That is exactly the point. They just keep moving the goal posts. That is why people are losing interest. But the West has adopted a basic philosophy that we have despoiled the planet, ravaged the habitat and we must act immediately to change everything. Or else.”

“I certainly agree with that,” said John-with. “The Europeans have taken leave of their senses, and they seem to have convinced everyone here, too. Even NASA says so.”

“Not all of it. Mostly that idiot James Hansen. Did you see the letter from the 49 Astronauts telling Director Bolden that his chief of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies is becoming a public embarrassment.”

“Doesn’t he want an immediate international carbon tax? Isn’t that what Vice President Biden was calling for the other day? I say the hell with it. Apres moi, les deluge,” growled Jim.

“There are people who think the world would be better off without us,” said Liz-S, topping up my tulip glass.

“Apres nous, le deluge,” I said taking a satisfying sip. “Just don’t go on without us.”

“There is some question of whether Louie XV said that, or his mistress Madame Pompadour,” said John-with. “It is a matter of some controversy.”

“Whether he did or didn’t say it, his attitude managed to weaken the power of the state, gut the treasury, discredit the monarchy and set the stage for the French Revolution.”

“Not bad for a dilettante at government,” I said. “Every Age has its little challenges.”

“That Bruckner guy might be on to something,” said John-with.

“Fuck that,” growled Old Jim.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

Something Completely Different

My eyes blinked open early this morning, but it was late for being early. I had slept straight through from nine or so to only an hour short of the alarm. I had pushed it a little- I am trying to walk with the stupid brace and the stupid cane, experimenting with geezerhood on the slow road to recuperation.

I had driven to Willow, of course, earning myself in the process a Big Stink Eye from a stout middle-aged woman who was ambling across North Utah. She seemed to think that my swerve to secure a primo parking place directly adjacent to the bar entrance was directed at her, rather than available curb space.

I felt bad for a minute or so, considering (as I do so many things these days) that I enjoy giving the same judgmental glare at the idiot DC drivers.

She was long gone by the time I staged the cane out the door and did the herky-jerk to get the damaged leg out the door of the Bluesmobile while still encased in the rigid brace. A hobble to the uni-meter and one near miscue with the cane tip on some broken pavement near the curb after I dropped the proof-of-payment on the dashboard and I was into the cool darkness of the Willow afternoon.

“Whew,” I said to no one in particular. The fear-of-falling-thing is pretty profound and I am pretty much ready to be over it.

Old Jim and John-with-an-H were going at it hammer and tong at the Amen Corner. Well, better said, John-with was fulminating about something and Jim was giving him his version of the Stink Eye under beetled brows. I hooked a stool with the crook of my cane- they are useful for some things- and began to dismantle the brace on my leg so I could sit with some comfort.

A guy at the end of the bar wore a ballcap and shorts. He was clearly not dressed appropriately for Willow standards, and what’s more, he had taken the contents of his briefcase out and placed them on the mahogany in front of him. For all the world, it appeared he had established an office workstation at the end of the bar, perilously close to Old Jim.

His briefcase rested imperiously on the stool next to Jim. “Uh oh,” I thought. That is one of Jim’s pet peeves from his days on the business side of the bar: people who took up paying stools for their coats and briefcases. I thought if another stack of papers came close to him, Jim might take his cane with the snarling bulldog on the top and rap him across the forehead.

“So,” said John-with in a conspiratorial manner. “Did you get the link I sent you?”

“No,” I said. “It is on the publishing company website and I don’t check it that often. What was it?”

“Five greatest sniper kills,” he said. “Two of them ours.”

“Only two?” I said. “I thought we had the best snipers in the world. I hate snipers.”

“The Royal Marines had the best that one day,” said John-with. “It was incredible. A half-mile shot in a fierce gale. An Iraqi fighter was holding back a vital advance. The Marine gauged the wind speed perfectly to bend the 7.62 round from his L96 sniper rifle to the target. They say it curved 56ft in the air before killing the gunman instantly.”

“That is like getting lucky with a garden hose and hitting something almost nine football fields away.”

“He couldn’t aim at the guy. It was a complete offset shot.”

“Damn. That is astonishing marksmanship. I prefer my targets a lot closer.”

“You mean like the firing squad that greased Patrice Lumumba?”

“Oh, wow, I haven’t thought about the Katangan Gendarmes in a long time. I remember Moise Tshombe and the Congo crisis. Those must have been the days. I met one of the US soldiers who was there, and I knew a senior Indian Service official who went to the Patrice Lumumba Institute in Moscow. He had the diploma up in his office in Delhi. I think he got arrested later.”

“It is a strange world. The people who got sent to Lumumba U hated it. But the US military had nothing to do with Lumumba’s killing.”

“I am not so sure about that,” I said. “You would have to have met the guy I knew Master Sergeant Slowey. He had nothing to do with it like our military would never have an appreciation of the commercial sex trade overseas,” I said wit a smirk. “I am shocked. Shocked.

“Gambling at Rick’s,” said Jim, and hefted his Budweiser long-neck’s bottom ceilingward.

“It is an interesting story,” said John-with. “Ike ordered Allen Dulles to eliminate Lumumba because he was a pain in the butt,” said John-with. “That was the start of a lot of things.”

“Master Sergeant Slowey was driving around Leopoldville after the other UN forces pulled out . He was a spook and a half. But didn’t the CIA blow the hit?

“I think Bronson Tweedy was chief of the Africa Division at the time. He was old school OSS. He was the guy that recruited Mac to work at Langley. I think the story goes that he was sent out there to stage manage things. You can look it up.”

“He didn’t know Mac until much later,” I said. “That was the late 1960s, after the madness had pretty much run its course. Tweedy was number three for Richard Helms when Mac knew him.”

“The murder of Lumumba, whoever did it, was when things were starting to go really weird,” said Jim. “Before they got JFK.”

The guy next to Jim was putting things back in his bag, clearly unsettled by the conversation at the Amen Corner. He slipped his iPad into the case, squared his ballcap and got up. He walked as briskly as possible to the exit.

“So long,” said Jim to his back as he left. Turning back to us, he growled “Son of a bitch should know not to put his briefcase on a working stool.”

Happy hour had finally arrived. There was a regular parade through the front door. The lovely Mary Margaret, the most thoughtful woman I know, came in with the President of the Ornamental Concrete Workers International Union. She gave me a kiss before they swept back to the dining room. Then, Tracy O’Grady, the vivacious owner of Willow came in the front door in her white chef’s coat. She had clearly been working- she held a sheaf of lined yellow paper with proposed themes and menus for the holidays to come.

“Hi, Tracy!” we said in unison. “What’s cooking?”

She laughed, and then we stopped talking about short and long-range shooting and listened with interest to the menu for Cinco de Mayo and the Kentucky Derby. There were even a couple items from Tracy’s girlhood home in Buffalo, New York.

“It is too bad you took the Pomme Frites off the menu,” I said. “You make the best ones in town. How do they serve them in Buffalo? Drenched, right?”

Tracy nodded and hooked a strand of her rich copper-chestnut hair over her right ear. “French Fries in gravy,” she said. “That is comfort food.”

“It ain’t all haut cuisine,” Growled Jim. “We could all use a little comfort,” growled Jim. His lovely bride Mary arrived and hopped up onto the stool vacated by the briefcase. Jon-with-no-H appeared next to me and ordered something completely different from Jasper behind the bar.

Jasper said: “No vodka and iced-tea?”

“No,” said Jon-without. “It is feeling awfully summery out there,” he said. “How about a gin and tonic? Can you make it Hendricks gin?”
“Just for a change?” said John-with.

“Absolutely,” said Jon-without. “Just for a change.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

A Night (Not to Forget)

(The Titanic Memorial on the placid banks of the Potomac, Washington’s gateway to the world ocean. The statue, carved from a single block of granite, depicts a partially clothed First Class male passenger. Photo Wikipedia.)

Sorry campers, this is late. AOL, that creaky excuse for an e-mail system, got me this morning. No pictures meant no story, at least at the usual time. But better late than never? You be the judge.

You can’t get away from it this week, and yesterday the tide of memory finally swept over me, along with a dollop of bile. History is never “settled science,” I guess. The sinking of the most modern ocean-liner ever built on her maiden voyage, with one of the most veteran skippers on the bridge. The “A” list of passengers, the slow motion unfolding the disaster.

Downtown there was a ceremony at the Titanic Memorial. The inscription it to those who did their duty, stayed behind, and ensured that women and children got on the boats first. The words on the front of the memorial read:

TO THE BRAVE MEN
WHO PERISHED
IN THE WRECK
OF THE TITANIC
APRIL 15 1912
THEY GAVE THEIR
LIVES THAT WOMEN
AND CHILDREN
MIGHT BE SAVED
ERECTED BY THE
WOMEN OF AMERICA

Back:
TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD
THE RICH AND THE POOR
THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED
ALL
WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY
TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The memorial has moved around a bit, unlike Titanic herself, scattered in a twenty-five square mile debris field around two major chunks of her once impressive hull. The Women of America originally place the sculpture at the foot of New Hampshire Avenue in Rock Creek Park. It was moved down river without ceremony to the edge of Fort Leslie J. McNair when the Kennedy Center was built in 1966.

Maybe the lack of pomp on the relocation is symptomatic of something else. The sentiments are a little schmaltzy by today’s standards, and the narrative of the death of a great ship has been hijacked to tell another story.  Dedicated in 1931, by the widow of President Taft.

There was something about this version of history that was recounted in Walter Lord’s vivid re-telling of the narrative in his 1955 book “A Night to Remember,” and Kenneth More’s 1957 film adaptation of the same name. In these versions of the sinking, the riveting drama of the sinking holds a “tragic yet peculiarly reassuring story that points to lost certainties, a story of British identity, imperial ambition, engineering bravado, and structured social class.”

I liked both. But I am boycotting the re-release of James Cameron’s bloated film “Titanic” in 3-D. I went to see it in the first release and I think I enjoyed it. But the number of things wrong with it from a historical perspective are astonishing in their mendacity.

I heard that when Chinese president Jiang Zemin watched the first release of the movie, he smiled, “Gentlemen, behold the enemy.” For him and many Americans, the movie’s cloying, cowardly first class passengers represent that capitalistic ethic.”

The matter of the lifeboats is the pivot on which James Cameron transforms a tale of stoic courage by most of the First Class male passengers into a narrative on class warfare. I boycotted his blockbuster film “Avatar” since with vast wealth has come his ability to re-write both past and future history.

Mr. Cameron is a despicable fellow when it comes to integrity. The storyline of “Avatar” was stolen from an ancient (1957) pulp sic-fi story by Poul Anderson, which I read in the pages of Amazing Stories in the first edition. Anderson’s story “Call Me Joe” was ripped off without attribution and injected with blatant anti-American theme, masquerading as a treatise on interstellar anti-imperialism.

My second objection to “Avatar” was philosophical.

As a Canadian, Cameron is playing out some post-imperial ideas in Titanic, even as his larger-than-life undersea adventures flak him as a bold adventurer of the old Imperial school. The Titanic story appeals to us on a host of levels because it points to a deeper sense of loss and belonging in modern Britain.

In the early retelling of the story, it is one of serendipitous survival, some craven cowardice (I like the man who cross-dressed to gain access to a seat on a boat), and the wealthy who died by their code of honor, with the band playing proudly as the ship went down.

But here are the lengths to which Mr. Cameron goes to highlight his radical view of history. I saw a commentary by a northern California minister named Austin Miles that showcased the trashing of a hero in order to make a better story of class warfare and thinly veiled anti-military sentiment:

“The most egregious assault was the totally false portrayal of Lt. William McMaster Murdoch, the officer in charge during that tragic night. Cameron portrayed him as an incompetent and a coward who pushed others aside and shot a man in order to get on a lifeboat to save himself.

It’s a total lie. Lt. Murdock spent the last moments of his life getting reluctant passengers on lifeboats, women and children first, then men, and stayed on duty until he perished in the icy waters as the giant ship sank.

This false portrayal was distressful for the family and descendants of Lt. Murdoch. And that is the “history” that will remain embedded in the public’s conscientiousness including him being seen as a murderer.”

Here is what James Cameron is up to: “To kill a man’s good name, to deliberately slander and libel a fine gentleman officer, a heroic one at that, who saved others at the cost of his own life is unthinkable.”

(LT William McMaster Murdock, Royal Navy Reserve. Circa 1907.)

He concludes with the interesting fact that Cameron did feel bad enough about Murdock’s outraged family and the residents of Dalbeattie, Scotland,that he donated $7,500 to the charitable fund that awards a prize in the name of Murdock’s courage.

With the re-release of the 3-D version of the film, Titanic rolled over $2 Billion in box office receipts. Cameron’s gift makes his science fiction account of a night to be remembered just fine, right?

Better to celebrate is Captain Edward John Smith. Like LT Murdock, he is a man to remember. He stood his position on Titanic’s bridge, did his duty and went down with his ship.

(Titanic and Royal Navy Reserve Captain Edward John Smith. Photo White Star Lines.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

A Very Fine Line

There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
– Dave Barry

(Vintage photo of a squadron of Supermarine Spitfires in echelon formation. Photo RAF)

I had more time than usual on my hands this bright Sunday morning. The drunks came back rom the bar about 0400, filled with merriment and the joy of high-octane alcohol and youth. It being spring, and at the junction of the cut-over from central heating to cooling at Big Pink, the windows were open with a satisfying cool breeze to waft over the thick eiderdown.

Geezerhood comes with obligations, I now realize, and they do not call them grumpy old men for nothing. I was tempted to start yelling at the revelers, and thought better of it. I wished I was fully ambulatory and filled with exuberance and a careless confidence that the world was new and endless. So, I made the coffee and sat down to sort the morning traffic.

It is a slow news day. Five more members of the Presidential entourage were sent home from Colombia on grounds of alleged sexual misconduct having nothing to do with the President and everything to do with commercial sex at the hotel where the Secret Service detail was billeted. These were military members of the advance detail, apparently, and I suspect flight crew or communicators. The Associated Press was on the case, and interviewed waiters at the hotel, who described the agents as drinking heavily during the down-town before Mr. Obama arrived. The President travels with a small army, as you know, and this is a hazard of the trade.

He reportedly was miffed that the old bad blood with Cuba- something that dates to before the Commander-in-Chief was born- brought ancient grievances about Yanqui gun-boat diplomacy out in the open. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

And that is the difference between the public narrative and what we would like to believe. I remember one of the most attractive stories from the days when I would have been one of the drunken young men far below my window. You might remember it from junior high school:

“Cheap Army Surplus Jeeps! You can buy a brand new jeep in a crate for $50!”

Ads with headlines like this ran for decades in the back of Boy’s Life, Popular Mechanics, and several other magazines I used to read as a kid in the 1960’s (and those ads probably ran in the 1940’s and 1950’s as well). The ads promised to tell you how to buy Willys MB and Ford GPW jeeps and other government surplus for extremely low prices. They charged a fee for sending you this information. You mailed in your payment and waited for the postman to deliver the pamphlet that would divulge the secrets of buying tools, equipment, jeeps, trucks, etc. etc. on the cheap for “your fun and profit.”

It was complete nonsense, of course. No such crated vehicles actually existed, but in the long aftermath of the Biggest Conflict in Human History, there were a lot of strange things laying around. In fact, I have heard that the Korean War forced the Navy to dispatch plain-clothed agent to the Surplus stores to quietly buy back electronic gear that had been auctioned off in the great demobilization. And I remember well the consortiums that formed between third and fourth period to assemble the cash involved to get the crated vehicles and have our own mechanized battalion to take to High School.

Oh well. Scheming to get the non-existent jeeps had an element of pleasant madness about it, and some people have never got over it.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain has been assailed recently for some international travel. Like Mr. Obama, some commentators have opined that his recent trip to Burma (aka Myanmar) verged on state-sponsored tourism. I saw the pictures of him bare-foot at the vast golden temple complex of the Shwedagon in Rangoon, and sighed. He had gone out to the old Imperial colony to meet with Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, recently released from house arrest and elected to parliament.

(Socotra and Burmese dissident Mimi Miyant Huu at the Shwedagon Pagoda, 1995. Photo Socotra)

It is a matter close to my heart. The last time I stood barefoot in the Shwedagon we were attempting to get The Lady sprung from arrest, and had an immensely good time as part of Congressman Bill’s entourage. As part of a comprehensive effort to secure her release, we met with members of the brutal SLORC junta and opposition figures. For the latter, it was wise to be in adjacent Thailand, and we traveled across the border to the old RAF airbase at Mae Sot to tour a Karin Refugee site.

There is a lot of crap laying around from the late conflict in SE Asia. There are hulks of C-47 Skytrains along the runways, and more.  There is a persistent rumor that Spitfires might be buried in Australia’s remote Queensland, possibly under a derelict drive-in theater in the town of Oakey. My guess is that they have more in common with the jeeps in a box than anything else, but the hunt for Spitfires is what brought Prime Minister Cameron to a place where he could see the boundary between hobby and mental illness in Burma.

One of the PM’s constituents is a farmer named David Cundall. When not hunting for warbirds, he operates a farm at Sandtoft, near Scunthorpe. He got his version of jeeps-in-a-crate through and American who heard a story about some other guy’s story about the dumbest thing he had ever heard of, which was that several aircraft had been buried in the C-B-I theater. Maybe as many as twenty Supermarine Spitfires.

According to the story, the aircraft had been shipped out from Britain in the last days of World War II. No less a figure than Lord Louis Mountbatten decided that the complex situation on the ground was so fluid that the crated iconic fighters should be buried at their aerial port of arrival. Crated and swaddled in packing, wrapped and dolloped with cosmolene reservative, just like the Jeeps.

Virtually brand new. No, not virtually. Brand new and never out of the box.

As a demonstration of his commitment to the hobby of aviation archeology. Mr.
Cundall spent more than $200,000 of his own money and more than a decade of his life to visit Burma a dozen times, court the notoriously reticent dictatorship, hire ground penetrating radar devices and engage increasingly elderly local guides to search for the buried birds.

I would offer that this obsession passes any line between hobby and madness, but it looks like it has worked, and he found them.

Considering that the Spitfire might be the prettiest pistol-engine aircraft of all time, and is the icon of the desperate fight of The Few against the bomber streams of the Luftwaffe, an existing flyable Spit might be worth two or three million dollars. Less than 35 of the aircraft exist in this world today. A discovery of twenty is something of almost incalculable value.

The people who engage in this sort of hide-and-seek of aviation history are mad, absolutely. A P-38 Lighting is on the air-show circuit these days. The P-38 might be one of the prettiest warbirds ever to fly: twin-boomed and twin-engined, the Lightning was the airplane that Chester Nimitz chose to intercept Admiral Yamamoto’s plane and shoot it down.

The only flying example remaining is “Glacier Gal,” since some loons found evidence that a whole squadron of the fork-tailed long-range fighters had run low on fuel and crash-landed on a Greenland ice sheet in 1942. The aircraft were there, sure enough, but buried beneath 250-feet of accumulated ice and snow.

This is what Glacier Gal looked like when they tunneled down to find her:

Other lunatics did their homework and discovered that a post-war reconnaissance mission flown by the B-29 Superfortress Kee Bird had ended in an emergency landing on the Greenland ice. The bomber has rested there undisturbed until 1994, when a privately-funded mission was launched to repair and return it. The attempted recovery resulted in the destruction and loss of the airframe by fire on the ground. The maintenance crew chief died of a blood clot in the process of the attempted restoration, and an aircrewman was nearly overcome by smoke inhalation in the fire.

(Kee Bird on Fire.)

In the end, recovery of the Spitfires of Burma will have to pass through some interesting political wickets. International sanctions forbid the movement of military materials in and out of Burma, and it was also feared the Burmese government would not allow any foreign excavations on their territory. Hence the need for the PM’s intervention.

The time may be just right. The new, reformist posture of the Burmese government, coupled with the election of The Lady, and the personal request of the Prime Minister means it is likely that some sanctions will be lifted after an EU review begins on April 23.

With the help of David Cameron, and his state-sponsored tourism, hopes are surging that  Burmese President Thein Sein of Burma will grant permission for the dig.

People do extraordinary things to get close to the old war-birds. There will be more to come on this story of madness in a very strange land, and you better believe that I will be following with interest. Hell, I might even want to go back and look for myself. Maybe there are some Flying Tiger P-40s in the jungle.

It is one of my hobbies, after all.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Running AMOC

(Mac and Ed D. Photo Socotra).

I pushed it. Fridays are like that, I have come to find. I try to take care of myself during the week, wear the brace, so my exercises to loosen the knot above the left knee. I feel better. I wear the stupid brace on the leg to the office, and to those excursions outside, and have devised a means of mounting and dismounting the driver’s seat of the Bluesmobile without stressing out the aching sciatic nerve down deep in my back.

But I seem to push it on Fridays.

The Advanced Maritime OPINTEL Course was coming to town. They wanted to sit down with Mac and pick his brain on the events of a long-ago war, one that created the discipline of radio intelligence.

Mac has to budget his trips these days, and has good and better days, as we all do. It was easier for the AMOC folks to come here than for him to go there- a mountain and Muhammed thing- and I volunteered to coordinate a private room at Willow as a place to chat.

It meant leaving the office a little early, damn the bad luck, and I slid the police cruiser into a better parking place than I usually get and wriggled my way out of the driver’s seat.

I was hobbling my way up the block to the uni-meter to purchase my time at the curb and saw Old Jim headed down the block. When I had secured my receipt for time at the curb, we made a peg-leg parade back down to Willow’s bar entrance.

“How is your day going,” I asked.

“Better than being a North Korean rocket scientist,” he said with a grimace.

“Or a Secret Service agent with the President,” I said. “Did you hear about the detail getting sent home from Colombia?”

“Interesting that things have changed so much since JFK’s time,” he growled. “But of course public morals are just for show.”

We set up camp at the Amen corner to wait for the AMOC delegation to show up, and I removed the straps from the leg brace and hung it from one of the hooks under the bar. We placed our canes on opposite sides of the corner. I sighed.

“Just a couple gimps,” I said. “Pathetic.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Jim. “At least I came by mine honorably.”

“No misconduct on mine,” I said. “I have been damaging that knee for years.”

Jasper produced a fine crisp glass of Hay-Burner white and I carried it over to the long table in the nook by the front window as Ed D and three gentlemen appeared from the back door. We got arranged I seats around the dazzling white tablecloth and neatly-folded napkins as Mac himself arrived.

“I drove,” he said. “I wondered about walking, since it is a nice day, but decided to take the Jaguar over.”

(The Dean and two Chiefs. Photo Socotra).

Ed introduced the AMOC students, two Chiefs and a retired Dean of the Olde Dominion
University. They were loaded for bear- they copies of the book we did to commemorate all the sessions at Willow, the unofficial history of the Pacific War, and then some serious works of history. The Dean had an ominously thick tome called “Shattered Sword,” which is one of those revisionist histories, I gathered.

“Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War,” said the Dean gesturing at the thick volume with the famous picture of the SBD Dauntless dive-bomber wheeling majestically over the sharply turning wakes of the IJN carriers far below. “Parshall and Tulley have uncovered some original source documents in Japan that turn the narrative around. It is the first time since Gordon W. Prange’s Miracle at Midway that there has been a critical look at the battle.”

“Well,” said Mac, “I was there and don’t need any critical new interpretations.” Since he is about the last one alive who remembers exactly what happened, and who did it, we launched into an animated and detailed discussion of the decoded operations order that FRUMEL (Fleet Radio Unit- Melbourne) and Station HYPO in Pearl put together to reveal the details of Admiral Yamamoto’s great scheme. That line of inquiry lead, in no particular order, to why no copy of that message survived the war, and Joe Rochefort’s calm reaction to the news of the battle’s outcome, and whether Fleet Admiral Nimitz had worked in his parent’s bar at the hotel they owned in Fredericksburg, Texas, and then the complex prickly relationship between Douglas MacArthur and the Nimitz Staff.

“Don’t say anything negative about MacArthur,” I said. “That is how Mac and I met. I was writing something about Doug-out Doug years ago and he said we were not supposed to do that.”

Mac nodded. “Never respond to anything that came out of the South West Pacific,” he said. “The Admiral was very firm about that.”

“So,” I said, taking a sip of wine “I started out in trouble and stayed there.” Then I told them about visiting MacArthur’s office in the Dai Ichi Insurance Company Building that the General had appropriated as the General Headquarters Building of the Occupation. “The little Japanese guide who showed it to me said they only use it once a year,” I said. “I have no idea what for.”

We agreed that was a curiosity, and I had another glass of wine, possibly two, as a couple of Kate janen’s signature flatbread pizzas arrived. I pointed out that Jasper was a native of Guam, which made him and Mac the representatives of the territory where America’s Day begins, and we talked about the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto.

“What was the response of Chester Nimitz when his intelligence officer Eddie Layton told him they had decrypted the itinerary of the inspection visit to the South Pacific and might be able to intercept the Japanese aircraft” asked the Dean.

Mac pursed his lips. “Nimitz asked what it would mean, and Eddie said it would be the same as the Japs killing him. Nimtiz replied: “kill the son of a bitch.””

The AMOC was interested in the what-ifs of fate. The Dean said, “Like imagine if George H.W. Bush had not been rescued by the submarine after he was shot down, and had been executed by the Japanese on Chichi Jima. Eight of the aircrew shot down there were captured by Japanese troops and executed. That would have taken out two future Presidents of the United States- Bush and his son.”

Mac snorted. “I don’t do what ifs. History is what it is, and we need to remember what happened, not what might have happened.”

My phone went off, and it was Ensign Socotra. He wondered if I might be at Willow, and I said I was there with the AMOC and Mac, and that there was a cold beer in it for him if he cared to come by. “I am in khakis,” he said. “Is that OK?”

“Best thing the Navy did was make it a liberty uniform,” I said. “See you when you get here.”

The Chiefs were continuing to ask questions- Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor was the subject of one line of questions, and Mac explained how his good friend had transitioned from Crytpology to Intelligence as a way to make flag rank, and the first Restricted Line officer to make three stars. They were on top of their game, and had read everything in preparation for the session.

“It is a different Navy than the one I knew,” I commented. Both Chiefs had college degrees, and were better prepared than most of the junior officers of my day, when the Goat Locker was populated by colorful rogues and liberty risks. I said as much, and they nodded. We talked about the fact that the modern service was becoming a bit of a hot-house, with those who serve often having connections with fathers and grandfathers.

When Ensign Socotra arrived the talk had turned to how far it was back to Norfolk, and that the AMOC was going to throw in the towel. Mac thanked them for their interest, and they thanked him for being a National Treasure.

(ENS Socotra and RADM Mac).

Mac and the Ensign huddled over at the bar after the AMOC departed. I was very glad I was not driving to Virginia Beach, and settled in at the Amen Corner. I looked down the bar, one generation earnestly talking to another. I decided I could not have been prouder, and said so to Old Jim and Jon-no-H and the lovely Mary.

“You lucked out, you son of a bitch,” growled Jim. “Now all you have to do is not fall down on the way home.”

I nodded, and defensively reached for the leg brace where it hung under the bar. “I can always fall down when I get there,” I said.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Failure to Separate

(South Koreans watch a TV screen showing a graphic of North Korea’s rocket launch, at a train station in Seoul, April 13, 2012. A lot of other people were watching, too. Photo Voice of America.)

 

I am moving kind of slow this morning- the knee is coming along, slowly, but the first moments of the day, integrating vertical and linear motion is still a challenge.

 

I made it safely to the breakfast table and began to soak up the versions of the North Korean rocket launch- I liked the misdirection on the actual launch time- they announced the 14th yesterday, presumably to distract the Japanese and their Aegis and PAC-3’s deployed to Okinawa.

 

My Air Defense Artillery associate Senior Executive Jeff says they never would have had a shot at anything, though I have to ask him if they would have and opportunity to engage the carcass falling from 400,000 feet. His contention is that both systems are actually point defense, and I will defer to someone who spent their life with rockets and interception algorithms.

 

The missile reached an altitude of almost a hundred miles before disintegrating into twenty objects and falling into the ocean 100 to 150 kilometers off the western coast of the ROK. Asian stocks and the South Korean currency- the won- rose on the news, which demonstrates the irrationality of the stock market.

 

It has been a wild couple months. The launch came just weeks after the North struck a deal with Washington that would that would provide food aid in exchange for a pledge that the DPRK would not launch any long-range rockets, or detonate any atomic devices.

 

This is not the first Administration that has been confounded by the North. Someone at State, according to the BBC this morning, darkly implied that since they failed at this, the Northerners would detonate a nuclear device. I sighed. They really are an amazing bunch.

 

I wasn’t particularly surprised that they failed again, but what happened really did astonish me. Previously, when their rockets failed to make orbital velocity (normally third stage failures to separate) they announced success and claimed that they broadcast Patriotic songs from a sputnik-sized satellite whizzing through the cosmos.

 

But this time there were witnesses. An announcer on North Korean television broke into what passes for daily programming (why can’t we get it on Comcast?) a scant four hours after the launch to announce that things had not worked out so well.

 

Maybe it is the number of foreigners who had been invited to witness the triumph of Chuche Idea science- the original Great Leader’s doctrine of self-reliance. That the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il-Song’s birth is marked with public humiliation is too delicious for words. The announcer read a short script that stated the Kwangmyongsong-3 earth observation satellite did not succeed in reaching orbit and scientific experts are investigating the cause of the failure.

 

It is not going to be a great day to be a rocket scientist Up North.

 

Spokespeople at the US Pacific Command called the rocket a Taepo Dong-2 ( more comforting quotation on previous failures to separate), and the x-band radar platform tracked the missile on a southern trajectory. The first stage had successful separation and fell into the Yellow Sea. The North American Aerospace Defense Command says the other two stages failed to continue in flight and the whole mess went into the drink shortly thereafter.

 

The North is now 0-4 on peaceful satellite/ominous ICBM launches, and their public admission of failure is a curious thing. Maybe it was just to public to ignore. I have to ponder whether it means anything more than a pragmatic approach to the idea that there is more external media penetrating the Hermit Kingdom. I heard that there is chatter on the DPRK cellphone networks about the Latest Baby Leader, Kim Chong-On, and that he looks pudgy and bloated, among other things.

 

In a nation that is starving, perhaps a belly is considered a mark of prestige- it has elsewhere in other cultures and other times. But I have my doubts.

 

To salvage their reputations, I guess we can stand by for a nuclear test. Of course, they could fail at that, too. I have concerns for the poor pudgy boy who now sits on the throne. Some people are probably muttering about the Kims- and the failure to separate.

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

 

 

Acid Tests

(Owsley Stanley, left, with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead in a 1969 publicity photograph. Mr. Stanley was a financial backer of the Dead and also provided the band with a supply of LSD. Photo Rosie McGee, via Reuters)

Sorry to drag you into this fevered dream of long ago. Oh, hell, no I am not. It is still aas psychedelic as it was then, the old order under siege by paisley and pot and unrest in the streets.

The years that saw the murders of a President and his lover- by person or persons known or unknown, were also the years of Owsley.
Owsley Stanley just died a year ago, having survived the whole long strange trip. He was the applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s. He died at the age of 76 in a car accident in Australia just last year. He was 76, and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland.

The police said his car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near the hamlet of Mareeba. His wife was injured but survived.

Owsley was the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He had become a recluse in his later years, an enigmatic icon of his age. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.

So much familiar here. It wasn’t global warming, then, it was the fear of the next Ice Age. So much is strangely inverted in the stories of the fevered acid-fueled age of the ’60s have been sobering and still filled with surprise and wonder. I knew about most of the weird stuff that is painfully true (which may include an imminent ice age, or maybe that is some sort of collective flashback) as we all have, but the juxtaposition of the unfolding racial struggle, drugs, and the wars and the political killings are so very unsettling.

I doubt if I will ever get over the grim fascination with the Day in Dallas that seemed to set everything in motion.

If you lay the strands all out, side-by-side, it is mind-boggling. Putting Mary Pinchot Meyer in the middle of it, rather than the slain President, makes it all seem the stranger. All of Georgetown society is in the story (it must have been something to have attended the memorial service at the Washington. Did they look one another in the eye?) and it was clear that the national security community had its fingers in everything.

The leadership of that community really never retreated from their war-time mindset (it was less than 20 years from their time as junior officers in a world at war) to the hit on a sitting President.

The plots against Castro, the murders of Trujillo and Lumumba, the organized assassination teams of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam are the operational backdrops that make it all plausible that there was something going on, something big.

Even sifting through the wild claims and assertions about the biggest murder of the century make my brain overheat. Mary Pinchot Meyer and her death put it all in perspective: her little house is still there in Georgetown, the place from which she set out to join the mystery forever.

We won’t solve anything in The Daily. Other people have driven themselves crazy over the details, and dissolved in hallucinations as powerful as Owsley’s acid.

Or that was the perception, anyway. Life seems to be more about perception than objective reality anyway, right?

And I never did get to the paranormal wars. Oh well.

Koo Kook a Choo.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Out of the Woodwork

What is history, but a fable agreed upon?
-Napoleon Bonaparte

(Day Laborer Ray Crump is arrested as the only suspect in Mary Pinchot Meyers execution. Photo Washington Post)

Mid-October in Washington is about as good as it gets here in Your Nation’s Capital.

There are those who love the Spring, and it is delightful and filled with promise. There are others, with whom I inclined to agree, who love the Fall best. There is the poignancy of the dying year, the sweet sense of impending loss and the memory of acts accomplished and not.

Mary Pinchot Meyer put on a gray sweater to fend off the chill, and then another blue one atop it. The air is moist along the C&O towpath. She set off from her house with the detached studio at 1523 34th St NW to head south to the towpath while a painting dried on her easel. She was killed 1.3 miles and about a half hour later.

I commend a fine independent investigation to your attention:
http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/Meyer.html

(Zalin Grant. Photo by Claude Boutillon – August 9, 2010)

Zalin Grant unemotionally paints a comprehensive appreciation of the background to the hit. His approach combines an appreciation of who Mary Pinchot Meyer really was (as does Nina Burleigh in her book “A Very Private Woman”) and the nuts-and-bolts of a clinical murder (Peter Janney’s “Mary’s Mosaic”).

Zalin concludes (with Janney) that the facts of the murder case assembled by the government after Mary’s body was found against a day-laborer named Raymond Crump don’t make sense. A pioneering lawyer named Dovey Roundtree got the jury to agree. Crump was acquitted, the case unsolved and officially closed. There has been much more to come out of the woodwork on the matter, though.

You might think that someone as well connected as Mary would have her socialite friends band together in a quest for justice. You would be wrong.

The Washington Post pronounced Ray Crump guilty only two days after Mary was executed- the same newspaper that was up to its neck in the CIA media manipulation- Operation MOCKINGBIRD. And there the matter rested, until the story of Mary’s association with President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as related by Mary’s pal James Truitt was finally published by the bottom-feeding National Enquirer in 1976.

My pal Mac was part of the big clean-up. By that, of course, I do not mean cover-up. The recommendations of the Rockefeller Commission were implemented to ensure that the intelligence community would be reigned in, and put back on the reservation from which it had so widely strayed.

I invite your attention to the Burleigh, and Janney books, which come to opposite conclusions on who was responsible for killing Mary. I like Zalin’s crisp synthesis of the facts.

See what you think. Given what we know now, it is pretty clear that things do not line up. As in so many of the strangely convenient deaths, evidence has been disappeared. Documents have been destroyed. Secrets have been held.

Many of them have been leaked, either officially or through FOIA.

For example, the apparent penetration of the Communist party of the United States by J. Edgar Hoover has now been made public in 44 volumes of documents about the agent team code-named SOLO and in reality a . I hate to burnish the posthumous reputation of a man I consider a monster, but from my initial scanning of the documents, it appears Hoover produced something good and useful about Soviet and Chinese intentions that served the nation well. Check it at:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB375/

Sometimes the more you know, the less you understand.

There was a lot to cover up. They did, mostly.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Flashbacks

(The Fugs, live in 1966.)

It certainly does not get less crazy as the time passes. What an astonishing decade it was. We have been talking about the events between the assassination of a President, and the murder of one of his many lovers on the towpath of the C&O Canal a year later.

The murder of Mary Pinchon Meyer in an enigmatic event- a tragedy, of course, and the abrupt and early termination to a life in transition. There are allegations that she managed a small cadre of other women coming to an evolved feminist consciousness in the first half of the 1960s. It is alleged that in addition to her romantic involvement with John Kennedy, she introduced him to marijuana and a mild acid trip.

It is an astonishing revelation, of true. I mean, the issues of the day were so astonishing as to defy the imagination. We dodged an atomic bullet in the very near catastrophic confrontation over the Soviet Missiles in Cuba. How close we got to obliterating American cities in an exchange over a land invasion of the island were not fully understood until the Berlin Wall fell, and the archives were (briefly) opened and leaders of the former USSR were allowed to speak candidly about the crisis.

Had the more hawkish wings of the United States Government prevailed in the policy struggle prevailed, we might have discovered that local Russian commanders had authority to use nuclear weapons in self-defense, a consequence of the less-than-reliable command-and-control mechanism that connected Moscow and Havana.

The theory regarding the murder of (one of them) Mary Pinchon Meyer is that: “a disgruntled CIA, in unholy alliance with a sitting Vice President, staged a coup d’etat. There were loose ends. Mary was one of them. Her murder was a hit organized by a rogue CIA.”

This is a wild and powerful accusation. It is predicated on a belief system, and belief is a problematic creature.

For example, I got a mild correction to my personal history yesterday- I was not actually at the concert to Free John Sinclair, the noted founder of the White Panther Party and manager of The MC5. That band will stand forever, with The Fugs, as being absolutely the defining examplars of anti-war Rage Rock.

It appears, based on expert testimony, that we may have been somewhere else at the time of the concert on the 10th of December 1971. It is possible.  After all, the concerts all blur together: for sure we were at the following at Crisler: Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, with the Allman Brothers and Dr. John the Night Tripper as the openers.

Plus, there were all those amazing Blues Shows we attended were at Hill Auditorium.   Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. Hill was where we saw the astonishing Mountain featuring the guitar stylings of Lesley West.

Plus the headliners at the Goose Lake international music festival that made us citizens of- if not the Woodstock Nation- but part of something abroad in the land that was completely new. I mean, look at it.

It was a big deal that John Kennedy did not wear the traditional Homburg hat as he walked to his inauguration on the 20th of January, 1961.

We were at the brink of nuclear war by October, 1962.

Mary began an affair with the President that year, and was a visitor to the White House more than 30 times as documented in the official logs. At the private residence, she may have convinced the priapic President to try drugs.

John Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963.

Mary Pinchon Meyer’s life was snuffed out shortly before her 44th birthday the next year, on October 12, 1964.

The Fugs were performing revolutionary music in New York at the same time. Homburgs to Fugs inside three years.

By 1968 several more Americans of stature are dead and the summer of rage has scourged the cities. By 1969 drug use has become mainstream and Woodstock Nation is born. But I digress. This is not intended to be a rumination about cool bands of some bygone age. It is rather a discussion of memory and its vagaries, the truth revealed in records, and falsehoods uttered so often and so fervently that they have assumed lives of their own.

My pal Dave is a highly regarded entrepreneur. He is skiing at the moment, something I wish I could do, but he sent me a story that needs no elaboration nor elegant snide commentary from me. It stands as something that I could not make up, nor even imagine as something that could be done in the guise of working for the United States Government, which I did with pride and energy for more than a quarter century.

Take a look at it and see Your Taxpayer Dollars at work.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-03-14/news/cia-lsd-wayne-ritchie-george-h-white-mk-ultra/

This is just part of what was going on. But how much of what they are saying now is fable, and what is fact? MKULTRA is true. Is JFK on acid true, too?

The source for that part of the fable is Dr. Timothy Leary’s book “Flashback,” which quotes Mary Pinchon Meyer extensively on this matter, and parts of it appear to be confirmed by research on Mary Pinchot Meyer by Peter Janney in his book “Mary’s Mosaic” and Lisa Burleigh in her biography “A Very Private Woman.”

Both books are meticulously researched, and arrive at very different conclusions from the identical information.

Mary’s alleged acid circle, her murder and theories about subsequent cover-ups continues at a variety of more (or less) hysterical places, most of which veer across known facts about the clandestine CIA acid program known as MKULTRA, first disclosed by Sy Hersh in 1974 as revealed by the Rockefeller Commission which are weird enough and the program documents were deliberately destroyed by order of Director Richard helms in 1972.

(Dr. Timothy Leary around the time of his relationship with Mary Pinchon Meyer.)

Leary’s account is interesting but less than authoritative- after all, the dialogue he quotes is all from him, and he was a showman and a lifelong psychoactive drug user. Leary and his recollections can be challenged, just like mine.

The Good Doctor had a wild ride after his relationship with Mary was ended by her death- his quote from her about the President in the aftermath of the killing was “they can’t control him- he is changing too fast” is one of the keys to the CIA conspiracy-murder theory.

But who can you trust? This quote is from a unique press conference held at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 18, 1974. It was sponsored by a group calling itself People Investigating Leary’s Lies, or PILL, and in their book Acid Dreams Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain sum it up this way:

“A can of worms had been opened. Paranoia was rampant among radicals who feared that Leary might be talking about any number of people he’d been in contact with over the years. Some blamed Leary for being a turncoat, others directed their anger at the government and the criminal justice system. The discussion grew increasingly acrimonious as the afternoon wore on. There for all to see were the signs of disintegration — fear, backstabbing, confusion, resentment, animosity. “The 1960s are finally dead,” said Ken Kelley after the conference adjourned. “That was just the funeral.”

For my part, I will content myself to accept the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Committee’s final report in 1979 concluded: “President John F. Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” They specifically excluded the governments of the USSR and Cuba, and the Committee was of the opinion that the Mob and/or anti-Castro had nothing to do with the murder- although individuals may have.

The Committee could not rule out individual members of any of those groups acting together, though, and that pretty much leaves you with the idea that a rogue confederation of the USG itself was responsible.

I won’t go beyond the fact that there was more than one shooter, and that means the Warren Commission report was wrong, and possibly intentionally so.

JFK and LSD? Leary says so. The lady that knew for sure was dead. We can be done with that tomorrow, if memory serves.

(Mary Pinchon Meyer.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com