An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

I have what is now a many year tradition with Noticing New York, another blog I write (about real estate development in New York and associated politics), of publishing a seasonal reflection about the year on Christmas Eve.  (More about the Noticing New York tradition here.)  This year I deviated from my pattern of previous years to publish, as Noticing New York's seasonal reflection, a letter I wrote to Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons, our minister at our First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Brooklyn, requesting that she deliver a sermon about peace.   There is a little bit more about my decision at Noticing New York.
Because the letter I wrote concerns topics that have been central to the concerns pursued as national issues here in National Notice, perpetual war, the environment and the climate emergency, wealth and income inequality, censorship and information control, I am also publishing my letter to Reverend Ana requesting a sermon about peace here in National Notice.  So, on this Christmas Eve, following a few days after the winter solstice and coming not many days before the day that officially starts our country's new year, may we all move forward to a more blessed future and I hope that I have written something that is worth passing along so that it may have some beneficial effect.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false “confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally `presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

As The Kochs Acquire Ownership of Time Inc.- More About Where On The Spectrum Of Left/Right Politics That Publishing Organization Was Once To Be Found Plus More About What Once Did and Didn’t Get Said/Published In The U.S. Media

As the Koch Brothers were stalking ownership of Time Inc., (the Time Life empire that includes the once mighty Time Magazine), I wrote here from a standpoint of somewhat unique personal experience about how, whatever we may worry that Time will become, subject to Koch influence, that Time Magazine was not exactly a very liberal magazine to begin with.  In the course of doing so, I wrote about my uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, a Time/Life man of significant stature in his time.  See: Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ?? Friday, November 17, 2017.

Time Inc. currently publishes Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly.

Since I last wrote, the Koch ownership acquisition has gone forward.  And since that time I have come across and had a chance to remember and think about a letter in praise of my uncle written after his death to Fortune magazine by revered economist and writer John Kenneth Galbraith.  It expressed Galbraith's opinion of where on the political spectrum Fortune magazine (not necessarily Time) was under the stewardship of my uncle: That Fortune was “with some exceptions . . . by the standards of the time dangerously to the left.”
   
The Koch acquisition of the interest in Time Inc. is reportedly causing consternation about Time’s editorial direction internally on the part of Time staff and one former Time editor, Charles Alexander has promulgated his worry that his 23-year of work at Time work will go "down the drain."  Although he admits that Time was a “conservative publication” under publisher Henry R. Luce with that “bias” persisting “for a long time after Luce’s death in 1967," Mr. Alexander points out Time Magazine’s important converge of climate change, a subject about which the Kochs, in the fossil fuel industry, have invested long and massively to spread disinformation about.

Jane Mayer, author of "Dark Money," about the Kochs and how they have built up their political machines and influence, obtained thoughts on the Koch Time Inc. investment from Emily Bell, a professor of professional practice at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for an article in the New Yorker.  Bell said that she doubts that the Kochs have put six hundred and fifty million dollars into the purchase of a media company saddled with ailing print publications only for financial reasons: “It can’t just be the return on investment, because, if so, you’re in the wrong asset class,” she said.

When ownership of publications changes hands, It is not just the future slant of the publication that should be worried about.  Sometimes what had been published in the past vanishes or becomes less accessible.  That is what recently happened when the Gothamist, providing coverage of local New York City news, was acquired by an opinionated conservative Republican buyer.

That’s one reason why we need libraries.  Not everything is available on the internet; not everything remains on the internet.

One thing you can’t currently find on the internet is the letter, published in Fortune, that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in tribute to my uncle Ralph Delahaye Paine after his death in January 1991.  In it, Galbraith expresses his view that the writing in Fortune magazine, under my uncle could be considered on the left for that day and age.  I can offer that Galbraith's assertion to balance out the observation I made when previously writing about the pending Koch investment in Time Inc. that Time magazine was not very liberal when reporting about the Vietnam War.

Ralph Delahaye “Del” Paine Jr. in the FORTUNE years

To reiterate, Fortune is one of the publications in which the Koch’s have acquired an ownership interest.  Here is what Galbraith wrote about my uncle and the time he spent working under him at Fortune:

IN TRIBUTE TO DEL PAINE

I read in January of the death of Ralph Delahaye “Del” Paine Jr., who was editor and managing editor of FORTUNE from 1941 to 1953 and publisher from 1953 to 1967. I share with the present editors and the readers of FORTUNE my admiration and affection for a truly notable and much-loved figure in the history of journalism.

In the autumn of 1943 I joined the editorial staff of FORTUNE. I was never more content. Gathered under Paine was perhaps the most remarkable community of writers ever brought together on one magazine. Archibald McLeish, Dwight McDonald, and James Agee had but recently departed. The inimitable Eric Hodges of Blandings fame, Wilder Hobson, and the Davenport brothers, Gilbert Burke, and others were very much present. All were young; all shared an unqualified respect and affection for our young editor, then in his mid-30s.

With some exceptions we were by the standards of the time dangerously to the left. For some, like Dwight McDonald, Marx was a far from irrelevant figure. More generally, the New Deal was seen as an essential design for escaping the widespread economic devastation of the Great Depression. It was Del’s task to make us reasonably acceptable to our business readers.

This heated with intelligence, tact, and charm.  He was assisted by the thoughtful view, strongly supported by Henry R. Luce, that businessmen would rather read well-written, interesting, politically debatable articles with pleasure and comprehension then basically unintelligible prose with which they might agree. The acceptability, even prestige, of the magazine affirmed the rightness of this view.       

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Cambridge Massachusetts

The letter, clipped from Fortune, hangs in my mother’s hall.  I’d like to think that when John Kenneth Galbraith himself died in 2006 my mother returned the favor by writing to Galbraith’s family, his four sons included, to recollect some of the flattering things my uncle had to say about Galbraith, but I am not sure that happened.

John Kenneth Galbraith was not just a famed economist and writer; he was also a member of John F. Kennedy’s administration serving formally under Kennedy as ambassador to India.  The other day I was listening to John Kenneth Galbraith’s son, James K. Galbraith, explaining how Kennedy involved his father to support him in his efforts to pull out of the Vietnam War.  James K. Galbraith is an economist and writer like his father who teaches as a professor at the University of Texas.  The discussion was on Austin’s KUT public radio station program Views and Brews hosted by Rebecca McInroy and he was speaking with Dr. John Newman, a retired U.S. Army Intelligence Officer and historian, about his book “JFK and Vietnam.”  (V&B: JFK and Vietnam – What We Know & Why It Matters, May 18, 2017.  You may want to save this link if you want to find this talk again: Google’s algorithm doesn’t have this showing up quickly making it hard to find.)
   

Ultimately influential, Dr. Newman’s book documents with first-hand research evidence of JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam just before he was assassinated, confirming and fleshing out accounts that the senior Galbraith shared with his son James.  That book championed by James Galbraith is as of now recently available, but it was published 26 years prior only to be suppressed and pulled from bookstore shelves by its publisher.  That was despite the book's being reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review Section by Kennedy special assistant and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who also said "This commanding essay in critical history is the most authoritative account anywhere of President Kennedy's Vietnam policy and it is fascinating reading as well." Plus it was endorsed by former CIA head William Colby.

When the NSA failed to stop the book with unsuccessful claims its information was classified the publisher cooperatively made the book unavailable anyway.  That is another example of why who owns the media is so critically influential what the public hears or reads about.  Similarly, after 9/11 Michael Moore’s publisher was going to pulp, unpublished, a book it had printed that it felt was too critical of George W. Bush.  When that book was rescued by a librarian leading comrades it became a bestseller.

The KUT discussion was months prior to the release this year of Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” on PBS, but Galbraith and Newman already knew and were dismayed that the Burns 18 hour documentary left out of its narrative any reference to Kennedy’s likely withdrawal plans.  Another similar failure of the Burns documentary, at least in tone, that I found jarring is that while it covered the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a relevant major national event, the documentary, epically focused on Vietnam as its subject, didn’t note the incredibly strange resonance that King’s April 4, 1968 assassination was on the one-year anniversary of King’s historically pivotal April 4, 1967 Riverside Church denunciation of the War.

It is interesting to review what is and is not deemed acceptable to express as the events of history re-contour the landscape around us.  A lot of what gets said has to do with who are the gatekeeping owners and sponsors of our media.

I just recently rewatched on Turner Classic Movies the film “Seven Days In May” about an attempted military takeover of the United States Government.  The film was made from a novel of the same name published in 1962 written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, political journalists familiar with Washington D.C. who researched their subject.  The film was made with help, assistance and encouragement from the Kennedy administration, Kennedy reputedly believing it depicted threats that were real at the time.  It was due for release in December 1963, which would have been just days after Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 assassination.  Because of the assassination, release of the film was delayed until mid-February of 1964.

There are rumors that, after the Kennedy assassination, Frank Sinatra pulled from circulation director John Frankenheimer’s already released (October 1962) previous film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” explicitly about a conspiracy orchestrating a political assassination in order to takeover the U.S. presidency.  Even if the film wasn’t widely shown for a time after the assassination, according to Wikiepdia, those rumors have been disproved, and, additionally, the film was apparently revived at a cinema in Brooklyn, New York two months after the assassination.

Nevertheless, it is said that the Kennedy assassination also affected what was ultimately the content of Dr. Stangelove, another film released soon after the assassination, at the end of January 1964.  The film was a satire about strategies of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) devolving into nuclear Armageddon. Stanley Kubrick, the director, had filmed a War Room pie fight to end the film, “the best pie fight ever filmed.”  However, the pie fight seemed tone deaf after Kennedy’s killing, including a portion where George C. Scott’s character General Buck Turgidson holding in his arms a pie-stricken U.S. president played by Peter Sellers as president says:

Gentlemen, our beloved president has been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of his life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation! 

The scene reportedly got as far as a test screening that occurred right around the time of the actual assassination.  More likely Kubrick would have sacrificed the scene anyway realizing that no matter how technically executed it may have been it did not sync properly with the film’s satire.  In addition, according to its screenwriter, Terry Southern, studio executives were apparently skeptical of the scene from the beginning plus they were beginning to turn on the film and disavow it as ‘un-American” or “anti-military.”

Monday, September 10, 1962, evaluating the book “Seven Days in May” before Kennedy’s assassination and before the movie was made, New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott started out by putting it in the genre of  Sinclair Lewis’ “ironically” titled "It Can't Happen Here."   He noted that the authors “are both experienced newspaper men. .  Both employed in the Washington bureau of the Cowels publication and judged by this book, they view the course of future events with considerable alarm and [t]hat they know much about the Washington scene, the routine life inside the White House and inside the Pentagon.”   Prescott, however, offers no rousing endorsement of the book concluding that with “stock characters” the prose does not “make the most of” its plot coming across like a “parlor game” that “as a whole never seems real.”  Acknowledging that it is scheduled to become a movie Prescott offers that “it ought to make a better movie than it is a novel.” Notwithstanding, the novel was a bestseller with an appreciable run.

Returning to mention the novel in his writing again a few weeks later about “Fail-Safe,” like “Strangelove” dealing with the specter of nuclear Armageddon (October 24, 1962), Prescott commented that “according to several of this autumn's new novels, the near future is going to be even more unpleasant than most of us sensible pessimists expect.”  While Prescott opines that “Fail-Safe” “cannot fail to chill the spinal columns of its readers,” and his verdict is that it was a “slam-bang thriller” despite its “deficiencies as fiction,” he concludes, much like he did with the novel “Seven Days in May,” that the authors “have no gift whatever for characterization” the “prose is commonplace” and the “dramatization . . crude and mechanical.”   Again, the novel was, nevertheless, a bestseller.  He does credit the authors for having done “considerable research assembling declassified material” and with basing the novel on a real incident. 

“Fail-Safe” too became a film, coming out after, but on the heels of  “Dr. Strangelove” (October 7, 1964).  The film, although a drama rather than comedic, was so similar to “Strangelove” that “Strangelove” director Kubrick filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against it (both were Columbia Studio pictures), settling that suit based on an agreement that “Fail-Safe” would come out after his film.  The devastating nature of the Kubrick comedy probably severely undermined and helped account for the poor performance of “Fail-Safe” at the box-office.
             
The New York Times Bosley Crowther review of the film “Seven Days in May” necessarily came out after the Kennedy assassination.  Under those circumstances, the “suffering cats and little kittens!” exclamation accompanied lead-in of the review dealing with a film about “not too farfetched speculations” seems oddly lighthearted.  (Does that translate to “farfetched”, but not too “farfetched”?)  To wit:

It's beginning to look us though the movies are out to scare us all to death with dire and daring speculations on what might happen, any day in Washington.

First we had "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," . .  .  Now, . . . we are offered a similarly fearsome prospect of the crisis that might occur if another Air Force general planned to seize control of the Government.

. . .  One might ask what we're coming to if such shocking thoughts are penetrating the deep domes of Hollywood!

Rod Serling

Crowther credits that the film “gathers a sense of actuality and plausibility.”  Actually, the script was obviously written with great seriousness by Rod Serling, of his very best.  It has none the `this-is-fantasy' or `this-is-speculation' veneer with which Serling avoided censorship with his Twilight Zone scripts.   Many of the Twilight Zone scripts Serling wrote were trenchantly antiwar.  By creating that science fiction fantasy anthology series Serling, sorely vexed by censorship, mainly from television sponsors, but not always just sponsors, side-stepped such censorship (a clever ruse?).

Crowther praises Serling for one sentiment expressed by the film’s fictional president, played by Frederick March, who says that the enemy is not the general, but the nuclear age: “It happens to have killed man's faith in his ability to influence what happens to him.”  To me (at least in 2017) incorporation of the sentiment that Serling apparently recycled from the original novel rang hollow.  The film as praised by Crowther and others is safe for its audiences, and perhaps for the larger world of the-powers-that-be, in that it hopefully holds out democracy, its institutions, the constitution, and basic human decency as strong enough to triumph.  And it also sticks with the idea that the mutinous generals, still principled, just have a different calculation of what to do in face of their fear of nuclear weapons. . .

. . . What the film never offers is any idea of how the money side of armaments can perpetuate their continuation and even use.

“Seven Days in May,” like “Strangelove” and “Fail-Safe,” is also about the balance of terror with Russian as a threat and the potential for worldwide nuclear holocaust.  A plot point of analysis is whether the U.S. military coup, if successful, would have provoked the Russian attack the generals wanted to forfend against.  Similar to how Crowther couches his praise for “Seven Days in May,” “Fail-Safe” is sometimes praised as a superior to “Strangelove’s” treatment of the same subject matter for being more soberly adult or mature, because it launches its speculative disaster scenario from the presumption of good intentions on the part of those in the military industrial complex.

Crowther’s review of “Seven Days in May,” says that the `plausibility’ of the plot (which takes place in what was then the future- May 1974) does not extend to “one twist,” which is the supposition of a large secret military base- some 3000+ men- in El Paso, Texas.  Next to the Mexican border El Paso is the actual location of Fort Bliss, one of the largest military complexes of the United States Army and very active in recent years as the largest training area in the United States, plus the home of other security facilities.  It is the home of one of the privately-owned ICE immigrant detention centers about which the public knows little these days even as these private ICE centers operate outside most conventional laws and the United States and ICE funding and private ownership of ICE centers is increasing dramatically.  If “Seven Days in May” was remade in another update, the takeover of the government would not be by the military, but by an even less accountable joint operation between the military and the mercenary corporations the military industrial surveillance complex now contracts out to.

When it comes to the military industrial surveillance complex interesting questions can be raised about what one can write about.  That is certainly the topic of director Steven Spielberg’s new “The Post” film concerning publication of the Pentagon Papers that documented decades of lies by the U.S. government about the Vietnam War (to get back to one of original subjects), which the government enjoined the New York Times from publishing as a violation of the espionage act.  The papers were copied and furnished by  Daniel Ellsberg a United States military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation at the time.

That was Daniel Ellberg’s role then.  Ellsberg is only now, with his new book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” detailing information from his “top-secret nuclear studies, his front row seat to the Cuban missile crisis” (the crisis that helped set the national consciousness for the nuclear war subject films discussed here) when Ellsberg was a consultant with the Pentagon and the White House.  According to his account, Ellberg himself drafted plans for nuclear war and was privy to plans for nuclear war that were “insane” and “evil” in the hundreds of millions of people that would have been killed world-wide.


The question of what one theoretically can and cannot publish about the military can be interesting. 

"Red Alert"- Original title

The book “Red Alert” from which “Dr. Strangelove” was made was published in 1958 in the United Kingdom.   It was written by Peter George, an ex-RAF intelligence officer under the pseudonym Peter Bryant.  The later more popular “Fail-Safe” was published in the United States.  Terry Southern, screenwriter for “Strangelove,” asserts that because “national security regulations in England, concerning what could and could not be published, were extremely lax by American standards” George was able to “reveal details concerning the `fail-safe’ aspect of nuclear deterrence . . . that, in the spy-crazy U.S.A. of the Cold War era, would have been downright treasonous” and thus give all the “complicated technology of nuclear deterrence in Dr Strangelove” a base “on a bedrock of authenticity” that gave the satirical film the strength of credibility.

Keeping the military’s secrets about the potentially absurd destruction of the entire world at its hands is one thing.  Avoiding the more omnipresent censoring influences of commercial interests is another.  Rod Serling bridled at the censorship that emanated from the TV sponsors who readily rankled at the slightest hint of anything in a script that could `threaten’ corporate profits: For instance, Serling told of how the line, “Got a match?” had to be eliminated from the script of “Requiem for a Heavyweight” because the sponsor of the show as Ronson Lighters, and how the Chrysler Building had to be painted out of the New York skyline of a show that was sponsored by Ford Motor Company.

In this day and age of merging conglomerates the heavy hand of commercialism is more consequential with one the most overriding humankind-destroying concerns being that climate change misses getting reported on, almost as if it were a classified secret itself.   Because that reporting would affects profits; Not because we are afraid of the Russians.

It is one thing that the Kochs and fossil fuel companies spend phenomenal amounts of money to spread misinformation about climate change.  We moreover have to deal with how in 2016, the year of the national presidential elections, already scant reporting of climate change was reduced drastically and questions about climate change were left out of the presidential debates.  In 2017 the national networks and corporate media managed to report on extraordinary hurricanes and massive wildfires continually breaking records without mentioning climate change.

And now, as the Kochs acquire their ownership interest in Time Inc. we, like former Time editor Charles Alexander, must worry that what is motivating the Kochs is their desire to have the public see even fewer references to climate change and its world-destroying implications.  As media ownership concentrates overall throughout the country we may similarly worry that we will achieve less insight and learn less about what we need to know concerning the current day equivalents of the Vietnam War as well as all the things that the military industrial surveillance complex is up to that we would want to know more about.  .  .

.  .  As much of the discussion here makes evident, media in our culture is an all enveloping cocoon.  What does or does not get through in the way of ideas and possibilities because of who owns or sponsors that media affects our thinking mightily.

Although not perfect, Time magazine may have produced good climate change reporting and Fortune may have been, for its era, to the left in reporting economic matters, but with more and more of the kind of events we see represented by the Koch's Time Inc. ownership acquisition, we are moving ever further away from the the balance we had in the media then, whatever it was and such as it might have been.

Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ??

Before we get to the "Time Goes Bye" part of this article (Koch Brothers stalking ownership of the once mighty Time Magazine), let's speak of "times gone by." 

I want to tell you a story that involves looking way back.

At the time of which I am speaking I was quite certainly in college, although when I think back remembering it feels almost as if I was still in high school, that I was so recently out of.  Since I was listening to WBAI on the radio, I had to have been in college and that means the year was probably 1970 or 1971.

On WBAI I heard a truly startling and appalling story about recent events in the Vietnam War.  I was sure it was going to be big news and probably would have a big influence on a lot of people when they too learned about it.  I wanted to see how else it would be reported, and I waited with eagerness for my weekly Time Magazine to come out and see how the story was featured.  When Time came out I scoured the week’s Vietnam War coverage and the event wasn’t there at all, not even a hint.  I was fit to be tied.

Once upon a time I had supported the Vietnam War, in high school seeing it in the basic good guy/bad guy terms in which my father had explained it to me: We were helping good guys against bad guys.  By the time of the story I am telling, I had shifted over in my thinking to oppose the war, having been chagrined to learn that by that time I did shift I was only just catching up with father’s own changed thinking to oppose the war.  Somehow, father and son, we had neglected to have that updating conversation before I told my father how increasingly troubled I was by the way I could not reconcile and sort through to believe that there were any truly good reasons for fighting a bad war.

My father, who voted for Lyndon Johnson instead of Barry Goldwater, was a Republican.  He was firmly against the war before he died at the end of 1968.  In addition, although I knew there were reasons my father had disliked Robert Kennedy based on my father's own early personal, youthful encounters with Kennedy (my father was from a similar Irish Catholic family that had contacts with the Kennedys), my father supported Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the White House that terminated with his assassination.  My father liked Kennedy’s stance on race relations (about which my father was growing increasingly passionate) and on the war.

Unfortunately, my memory is dim so I cannot tell you exactly what incident happened in Vietnam that went unreported by Time, but I was outraged and I was going to do something about it.  I called the Editor In Chief of Time Magazine to complain.

You might think this was absurdly presumptuous of me to do, and how could I possibly get through to someone of his stature.  I did get through, and I was encouraged to make the phone call by my mother.  My uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, Jr., had been an important man at Time/Life.  Among other things he had been Managing Editor and Publisher of Fortune Magazine, part of that Time/Life/Fortune triumvirate.  Part of our family lore (and there were many stories about my uncle) was how my uncle had been in charge of the Time/Life staff as they retreated back as the Nazis advanced through Europe and France and my uncle remembered vividly how vital it was for him to get everyone successfully out ahead of time.  Many of that Time/Life staff he sought to get out safely were Jewish.

The editor of Time Magazine took my call.  I am named after my uncle.  (And to be 100% complete, my daughter, born days after my uncle died in 1991, is now also.)  I played the relationship card, mentioning names, when I made my call as my mother encouraged me to do.  The editor’s secretary took my information and the editor picked up.  I am not going back at this time to check on that editor's name.  As I am telling a story after a long intervening time where my memory has some fogginess, it is probably better to leave names out.

What I remember was that the editor graciously took my call.  He probably enjoyed talking with me as an unusual break in his day.  I remember that he was more than polite, but I think I detected some bemusement on his part respecting my naive passion as he explained that there is lots of news to print and editorial decisions to be made and that not everything can always be printed.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  I was too young to have heard many of these kinds of explanations in my life and, no doubt I was out of my league knowing little about how best to express things in this kind of situation.  Some young people are savants and have natural instincts about these things at a very young age: Not me.

I don’t think my energy on the subject carried me over to write an official “letter to the editor” in hopes that it might get published.  I couldn’t have whipped one out at that point in my life and I certainly didn’t yet know the formula for quickly commanding attention, or tricks to succinctly synthesize the politically complicated.  My unwritten letter with respect to something that Time had not deigned to mention in the first place would not have been published, I’m sure.

I tell this story mostly to emphasize that, back in the day, Time Magazine and the Time/Life publishing empire were not exactly found on the left of the political spectrum in terms of the way they saw the world or what they chose to report.  I also tell the story to bring up and emphasize that where you get your news can powerfully affect your point of view because of what is and is not included.

After a few more years of reading both Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week (they were both weeklies for those who have forgotten or were not around), I finally terminated my subscription to Time because I found it so much more conservative than Newsweek when reporting on the same items.  Part of me felt a bit like a traitor.

And it also seemed as if I was acting against my own self interest: I owned a tiny amount of Time Incorporated stock that had been given to me as a baby present.  Escalating in value in those past decades, it was, in fact, my sole success with stock ownership.  My father had coached me in learning the benefits of investing in the stock market by encouraging me to buy Studebaker stock with some of my saved allowance combined with his contributed subsidy.  The purchase was not a good idea: Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturing company and in 1963 they closed the plant in South Bend, Indiana where they were based.  I learned then that what happens to stock when companies fail to thrive is not pretty.

Nowadays, what is happening to the stock of ever less profitable legacy news organizations like Time is not pretty, except that the stock of Time Magazine after a period of decline has reportedly just jumped up 25% percent because the Koch bothers, Charles and David, are circling around to engineer a takeover of the ownership.

This is yet more frightening news about the ownership of our news sources.  We are seeing that as income and wealth inequality become ever more pronounced, as the finances of news organizations grow increasingly anemic (reducing their relative price to that of play things), and as the government fails to enforce anti-monopoly laws and regulations, the sources of much of our news is increasingly supplied by just a few disproportionately wealthy men (or their corporate extensions) that hold some very peculiar ideas.  Those ideas include bizarre thoughts about how everyone else should sacrifice so that they can become wealthier, how we should continue to destroy the planet with exhumation and burning of fossil furls, and the glories of spending on weapons and waging wars.

But, to go back a bit, this is just the half of it, because however much worse it can be to have “news” provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, what I indicated at the outset with my story about Time Magazine and its previous conservative non-reporting about the Vietnam War, doesn’t do justice in giving you a true flavor for how biased-by-omission so much news media reporting has been in this country over the years.

Last week, Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92.  Among other things, Mr. Herman was coauthor with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” Some say he was the principal author.  That important and influential book was about how media cooperates with the powerful so that the electorate capitulates to what those in power want.  That consent manufacture includes a lot of non-reporting (and skewed reporting) of events that happen in our world.  In this vein, The New York Times virtually didn’t report Mr. Herman’s death.

The disregard was mutual. . .

. . . We understand that Mr. Herman’s last published work was about the New York Times.  It was about the Times' omissions and some very unreliable reporting on the part of the Times over multiple decades, a complete disaster if for those endeavoring to formulate their world view. His article ran in the July/August 2017 edition of Monthly Review: Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies- The New York Times, 1917-2017.  The article covers a lot of ground.  And, (to get around, in a sense, to where we began) it includes a section about misleading reporting about the Vietnam War by the Times, with criticisms you might not have thought of until you hear Mr. Herman express them eloquently with many others.

I suggest you read it next.  Consider your read of Mr. Herman's last solemn article as a commemorative mediation on things missing: the lost, the departing, and things lost when they were never included in the first place.