This question was posed to me in 2010 by Randy Benson, who was then working on his film THE SEARCHERS, which released this year. I thought it was a good question and answer, and I thought it might make sense to include it here in my blog. RANDY BENSON: Wondering if I could get your opinion on a JFK research question: One thing I'm trying to do is to address questions the intelligensia has been posing to me, i.e. people I work with at Duke, etc. A question I feel I need to answer is, "What do they (researchers) want? Most of Americans believe that it was a conspiracy, so what do you want?" It's a fair question. Most are dead already, so they can't be held accountable (save perhaps Billy Sol Estes, Hosty, et al.) But do we want the Times or the Post or the rest of the MSM to validate us? If all of the files are finally released, can they create an accurate narrative to inspire people to force accountability in the national security state, etc? This is something that I really feel I need to address in my movie. Any opinions? JOE GREEN: Sure thing. This is something I've tried to address in my work maybe more than some other researchers, and specifically to the academic crowd. Len [Osanic] and I have talked about it loosely in my last couple of BOR [Black Op Radio] appearances, and I closed my newest CTKA [now Kennedysandking.com] article with comments in this direction. I think, in some ways, that this is the key question of the whole thing. First, I agree that if you study the JFK assassination solely in terms of its internal structure, then it is a hobby and essentially interchangeable with being a Trekkie. There are a few people who are like that, attending parties set in a mock-up of Jack Ruby's bar just for fun. Not many, however. Most people became interested in the assassination because they identified with Kennedy, and by extension his policies, and against the Vietnam War, among other things. In my view, the assassination is a kind of Rosetta Stone to understanding how power operates in the United States. Prior to 1963, American exceptionalism was very much the rule; Frances Fitzgerald showed this in her study of American high school textbooks. After 1963, the thesis is still operative (in such writers as Stephen Ambrose and David Halberstam) but there is an undercurrent of popular dissent and a realization -- at least by some -- that American actions are not always endorsed by God, so to speak. The counterculture movements were birthed from it; after all, I think Jim Douglass has shown that Kennedy was murdered in large part because of his opposition to the Vietnam War in particular and War in general (also cf. the excellent film Virtual JFK) and of course these movements were spawned to oppose war. The trick is not to get mired in the assassination itself, but to go outward, to make judgments about what happened in this singular instance -- Nov. 22, 1963 -- and use that information to judge other events in this light. What one finds, I think, is that the real driving force of the assassination, and most of the terrible events in our lives, is monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism is an economic machine which burns finite resources at a rate that would only make sense were they infinite, and therefore demands the acquisition of greater and greater resources until the whole thing collapses upon itself. In the last analysis, I tend to view the Industrial Revolution as an evolutionary dead-end, in effect; it will one day be replaced, because it is totally unworkable. Our own civilization, we must remember, is an eyeblink compared to some others, and our assumed superiority is entirely in our own perception. One thinks of the Aesop fable in which a lion says that if lions could sculpt, they would sculpt a lion eating a man. The question is whether we can avert the system before it collapses totally (resulting in chaos and mass death among the civilian population, especially, as always, the poorest among us) or whether we can get enough of a popular will to restrain the machine enough to prevent it from destroying us. To this end, in order to wake up the populace, we need to exploit the holes in American exceptionalist theory (which survives in Milton Friedman and other paid cheerleaders) such as the Kennedy assassination. JFK's murder reveals the US for the what it is: the most powerful banana republic in the world, or as Parenti says, a gangster state. So no, I am not looking to pin the assassination tail on a particular donkey. I hope that makes some sense, at least -- kinda tossed this off the top of my head. You've made me realize that I should try to write a full essay on this topic, however...
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I only spent about four hours with Dick Gregory, and it’s one of the few times in my life I was actually starstruck. The Great Dick Gregory. Pryor before Pryor. Presidential candidate in that wildest year, ’68. A conspiracy researcher who had co-written the book Code Name Zorro (re-titled Murder in Memphis) on the MLK assassination (no, James Earl Ray didn’t do it) and spoken often about the JFK assassination and other topics in hidden history. One of the world’s great comedians and raconteurs. I’ve had this weird and lucky life where I’ve met (and worked with) a lot of my heroes and I’ve appreciated every moment of it. That said, however, Gregory was on another level. He broke the Tonight Show in 1962, when the host was Jack Paar. He wrote an autobiography and called it Nigger. In the preface to his book, he wrote, “Dear Momma – Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.” The book is amazing, by the way. It’s filled with stories that are hilarious and harrowing, and he really makes you feel his desperation. There’s a scene in the book where he’s driving his girlfriend’s car, low on gas, and her mother’s in the car, and she wants a Scotch for the road, and the kids are hungry, and he only has five dollars to his name. So he’s mentally calculating every single purchase to try and get everything he needs to get through the night, when his car gets stuck in snow. There’s a bunch of white boys willing to help stuck cars for five dollars a pop, and he can’t afford that. So he tells his girlfriend that he’s going to get it out himself. He gets out, trying to push the car. But he has to cover what he’s doing, so he says “I regard this as a personal challenge. Man must triumph over Nature.” She responds that it’s only some snow. Yes, he says, “But this is white snow.” Nobody laughs, and in the middle of his frozen desperation, trying hopelessly push his car out of the snow, he allows himself to be a little upset about that. That was a good line, he thinks. For me, I will just say that’s a very relatable story. And that’s Dick Gregory. I interviewed him in D.C. for a documentary we were working on. We were actually there to interview the spokeswoman of the Newseum, where they were having a Kennedy exhibit, my mentor John Judge, and the ARRB expert Doug Horne. We got on Gregory’s radar thanks to Richard Belzer, who put in a good word for us after we had a good experience interviewing him at Dick Russell’s house in L.A. After trading many calls trying to solidify the interview, I got a confirmation but he would be arriving late – around 9PM. I was waiting outside the hotel when his car arrived and walked up to say hello. For the next hour and a half or so, I spoke with him while the crew set up in the hotel room. He didn’t trust us. We offered him water, he turned it down. We said, it’s bottled water. “And maybe it has LSD in it,” he said. “I don’t know you.” All he knew was Belzer said we were OK. I told him I was a John Judge guy, and Mae Brussell. He started quizzing me. He had this bag with him, carried by his driver, and he would pull out folders with different stories in it. I started looking through it. Research. I had boxes at home that looked much the same. All kinds of stuff. Nazis in America, fluoride, chemtrails, political assassinations. We talked about the Reagan shooting and the weird connections with John Hinckley. He wanted to know, I think, that we weren’t fuckups. In some ways it was déjà vu. When I first met John Judge, we had breakfast for about two hours while he blew my head off with the most dazzling information I’d ever heard. Gregory was like that – these little asides that would make me stop and say “what?” At a certain point he said OK and sat down where we needed him to sit. “I’ll take that water now,” he said. We shot a couple of hours with Greg. At first, I started with some formal questions, but pretty soon it became a pretty loose conversation. He knew so much about so many different things that it was fun trying to keep up. I had a yellow notebook with me that I filled up with little notes about what he was saying. We finally wrapped up the shoot (to the relief of our understandably grouchy camera and sound crew, because they had been going since the early morning) and I thanked him. His driver got his stuff and they started out, but then he waved for me to follow him into the hallway. “Hey,” he said. “How come you know fuckin’ everything?” “Uh, well there’s John, and I read…” “No. When’s your birthday?” I told him. He asked for a couple more bits of information. “Mmm-hmm,” he said. “Astrology is bullshit. When you meet the richest people in the world, you learn that they use numerology.” He paused and said “You got more than you just like to read.” “Thank you,” I said, because what else was I going to say? An amazing experience, and he gave us great stuff for the film. Since most of the obituaries are liable to focus on Gregory’s comedy, I thought it might be a good idea to put in a few quotes from his book Dick Gregory’s Political Primer. The man could write.
Regarding the 1916 American election and the Socialist party: “To avoid the clear and present danger of all-out war, the Socialists offered a mind-expanding vision of peace, totally the opposite of the muscle-flexing proposals of the Democrats and Republicans. They called for checks on the power of the President to involve the nation in war, a halt to military build-ups, and a world congress to rationally arbitrate disputes among the belligerents.” (116) On the buying of elections: “Of course, if a kid is born with enough money, he can let his dreams run wild…Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York is a good example. He reported that he spent $5.2 million in 1966 to get reelected to a $50,000-a-year job…With that kind of money, I could run for God – and win!” (149-150) On Spiro Agnew: “I tried to convince Lyndon Johnson that if he was really smart, he would have picked me as his Vice Presidential running mate in 1964. That way, he would never have to worry about someone being crazy enough to assassinate him. It begins to look like President Nixon adopted my idea.” (203) “Cats, on the other hand, do not seem to be a political asset in this country, though they are the favorite pets of kings and queens. And it is understandable, since cats do not evoke the same sentiment in the minds of the American public that dogs do. Dogs are loyal, obedient, and faithful. They are much like Boy Scouts in that respect. But although a person may be ‘playful as a kitten,’ anyone being particularly vicious or slanderous is ‘catty,’ and many a politician has been described as ‘ornery as a polecat.’” (226) “Government research on food is usually handled by the breakfast-food industry, so you can readily see how ‘objective’ such research findings would be. The breakfast-food industry has been deceiving the American public for years concerning the nutritional value of their products…If Wheaties was really the “Breakfast of champions,” the American government would have fed some Wheaties to the South Vietnamese army and sent them back into Laos!” (264) Rest in peace, Mr. Gregory. This short essay first appeared in my book Dissenting Views, published in 2009. Reprinted here due to current events... The Klu Klux Klan (from the Greek “kuklos” meaning circle) was founded by six Confederate officers in the aftermath of the Civil War. If you have ever seen old photographs of the Klan, they are frequently arranged in a circle facing each other – hence the name. The very first Imperial Grand Wizard, bestowed in 1866, was a high-level Freemason by the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Another Freemason, Albert Pike, was named the Chief Justice of the KKK. Pike wrote the book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, a virtual Bible of the Freemasonic movement. When I was in Memphis the weekend of April 5th for the 45th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, the keynote speaker for the Coalition on Political Assassinations was Judge Joe Brown. During Judge Brown’s talk, he noted that there had been a great controversy in Memphis surrounding Nathan Bedford Forrest. In addition to being the person Forrest Gump was named after, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slaveowner as well as being the champion of the KKK. Indeed, the hotel we were staying in was just a few blocks away from the slave auction, which at one time was the largest in the United States. There is a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in a public park in Memphis. I took some video of it during my tour of the city. He is in a heroic pose gazing at his enemies in the distance. I am of both Hispanic and Jewish descent, so one imagines that I would be among those enemies. There is a statue of Albert Pike in the United States, too. It’s across from the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. He is the only Confederate soldier to have his own statue in our nation’s capitol. What an honor. There is a great deal of controversy about Albert Pike’s identification with the Klan, because the first extant source that we still have dates back to 1905, 14 years after his death. There are a great many sources that identify him as such, however, and there is no dispute that Forrest was both the highest Klansman in the land and a high-level Freemason. In any case, there was no particular contradiction between the two. Scottish Rite Freemasonry, incidentally, posits a religious doctrine reminiscent of the Egyptian cult around Horus and Set. Horus, the god of the sun, would rule the day, while Set would rule the nighttime. Similarly, Morals and Dogma preaches the worship of Lucifer (identified as the “light-bearer” or the “morning star” in the Bible) like so: “Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy; and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good,is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.'' By “Adonay” Pike means what most people take to be God – i.e., Yahweh or El. You may recall that in the story of the snake in the Garden of Eden, the snake tempts Eve with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That is to say, Lucifer is the god of Education, if you see what I mean. Whereas God, as depicted in the Bible, is a maniacal egotist who identifies himself as “Jealous” when speaking to Job and casually sends she-bears to kill those whom He doesn’t like. Why in the hell are there statues in the United States of two Confederate “heroes” whose primary contributions to humanity are the destruction and enslavement of fellow human beings? How can we be serious about improving race relations while continuing to honor the psychopaths who took part in the slave trade? Is there a statue of Curtis LeMay or Robert MacNamara in Tokyo? How’s that shrine to Henry Kissinger coming along in Chile? Honoring these men is insane. Those statues should come down. Once upon a time, there was a guy who was determined to make motion pictures on his own, without stars or financing. In Pittsburgh. The guy’s name was George A. Romero, and the picture he made was Night of the Living Dead. In this pivotal year, 1968 – during which, among other things, Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would be murdered by the forces of American fascism – he cast as his lead a theatre actor named Duane Jones. Jones happened to be African-American. Romero said that he’d won the part by giving the best audition rather than for any other reason. It was nonetheless unusual, and notable, especially in that the character, Ben, was not defined in any way by his blackness, but by his strength of character, intelligence, and command. He is the only character who keeps his head on throughout the picture. The year before, Sidney Poitier had broken taboos in In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Night of the Living Dead has held up better than either of those: Horror is stronger than justice. Indeed, the core of the story has impaled itself into our consciousness so deep that everyone knows what a zombie is, what it does, and what the rules are for its existence. Like so many of Romero’s films, Night of the Living Dead is really about the collapse of civil society. The undead begin to walk, and for a while there is chaos; during the course of the film, we learn that armed posses have begun to surge against the tide of zombies. We also learn that they can be re-killed, but only via burning or a shot to the brain. In the meantime, a few souls barricade themselves from the zombies, led by Ben as he tries to get them to cooperate and not lose themselves to panic. Alas, everything turns to shit, as they tend to do, but Ben manages to survive out the night.
There is a great scene near the end where he is commended by his superior officer. “You’re doing a great job,” he is told. Such a great job that he is being pulled from his station and transferred to another part of the country – where the whole mess is starting again. Hollar’s body language is perfect as he is advised of his fate. One goddamn thing after another. Romero’s films are rough, street level, and present a reality to them that most horror films don’t sustain. He really thinks about how human beings would react to a situation in which zombies became part of the normal course of business. In his masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, he observes a group of four people trying to survive by barricading themselves in a shopping mall. Inside, the zombies do what they did in life: circle aimlessly past shop windows. That reality is established in the opening scenes, where we see a SWAT team descend on a black neighborhood to enforce martial law. Under the strain of the situation, the (non-zombie) residents fight back and the cops respond by shooting people wantonly. It continues when we see groups of rednecks turning the process of shooting zombies into a sport. When our four protagonists arrive at the shopping mall, then are able to drive out the zombies from the building and make a safe haven for themselves. And they set themselves up as a kind of aristocracy: with the mall’s stores of food and clothing, they live in luxury while the rest of the world burns. For a while, anyway. Eventually that world – in the forms of zombies as well as nomadic gangs – comes bursting through the door to destroy them. (Incidentally, Tom Savini, the great makeup effects artist whose work in Dawn and other films came to be celebrated, was originally offered the job for Night. He wanted the job but was drafted into the Vietnam War. Reality intruded.) The best Romero films aren’t high concept, as one might think given his zombie obsession. (In fact, the remakes of his films are fairly effective at the horror bits but disregard the strong characters and themes.) In Martin, a young man believes himself to be a traditional vampire, but who has to resort to razor blades rather than teeth; he later becomes a local celebrity on a radio show where he details his exploits. In the truly bizarre film Knightriders, a group of motorcycle jousters (led by Ed Harris, in his first starring role) attempt to maintain an Arthurian code in our modern age. In Day of the Dead, a military bureaucracy tries to reassert itself in a world that has moved past any hope of control. However, Romero takes these stories in unexpected directions and developing his characters in novelistic fashion, against a backdrop that is both satirical and observant.
Whether tackling themes of race, sexuality, or most importantly, class – George A. Romero was one of the great filmmakers of his era. Hampered by low budgets and interference (from studios and occasionally his friends), he nevertheless managed to make highly personal films. The monsters and mayhem may have overshadowed that – the people he most directly influenced have replicated his gore but not his thoughtfulness – but in some ways he was closer to John Cassavetes than Lucio Fulci. His pictures were hugely influential on my work, especially my plays, and I will miss him and his work.
George, RIP. Or come back if you prefer. This essay, which appeared originally in Dissenting Views, discusses the film Blade Runner as contrasted by Philip K. Dick's original novel. Given the anticipation surrounding the remake, it seemed a good time to unearth it for the blog. Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? proposes that even in 2021, Americans will be driven by a bourgeois desire to fit in, and surpass, one’s neighbors. Rick Deckard, the book’s protagonist, owns an electric sheep. He can’t afford to replace it with a real one because they’re too expensive; in a world in which most animals have been killed in a chemical world war, animals have become a status symbol. As far as his neighbors are concerned, the deception works – but this hardly satisfies him. He refers to the sheep as "a mere electric animal," a cover to reassure the outside world. Meanwhile, the creature’s artificiality eats at him. Every day he goes to work -‐-‐ which entails killing humanoid androids – all the while dreaming of the real sheep that one day will be his. At the end of the book, when Deckard has suffered through a record-‐breaking day (for android-‐killing) he finds himself in a kind of spiritual quicksand, wandering on the outer edges of the city. He sees desolation in all directions, without any sign of life. Then he comes upon a frog; cradling it, he manages to carry it home with him to his wife. He goes away to take a shower, leaving the frog in his wife’s hand. She examines the frog and discovers that it is artificial. She also decides not to tell her husband. At that moment, Deckard’s moment of spirituality is defined by artificiality, as it has been at every turn. In the film version of Dick’s novel, this notion of artificiality is carried over to its protagonist. Rather than being a kind of human Virgil in a tour of all things android, Deckard is an android. It is specifically this artificial quality that unnerves or even bores some about the film. Roger Ebert referred to it as a picture inspired by "the dreams of mechanical men" and most critics have largely agreed with this assessment. Blade Runner, if discussed at all, is discussed in terms of its enormous influence in set and production design. The technical aspects are described in triumphant terms even as the story is described as incoherent, or simply tedious. It’s certainly true that the film has been enormously influential; in fact, its influence is all-‐encompassing to the point that it has become cliché. However, the movie flopped in its first release, partially because of some insipid decisions (adding voice-‐over narration and cutting a few key scenes) that destroyed the continuity. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, rectified these changes with his recent re-‐release cut, and the thematic sense has been restored. It is this latter cut that I will be referencing at various points in this essay. Blade Runner is a film which lacks a sense of audience-‐to-‐protagonist identification, and the major problem is Harrison Ford’s excellent performance. Ford, now and then, has gained audience acceptance as a Star, rather than an actor. Ford has specialized in archetypes: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan. When he has attempted to stretch himself, as in this film or The Mosquito Coast, the films have not done well – despite his superior performances. Simply put, audiences have not shown their enthusiasm for him as anything other than a two-‐fisted Everyman. While Ford was not happy about playing an android (as reported in Paul Sammon’s Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner) he did a fine job of it. His deadpan tones and curiously jerky head movements betray inhumanity; even when he performs his characteristic smirk, he does it with an exaggerated head-‐tilt, skewing the expression from charming to off-‐putting. His apparent disinterest led to audience disinterest, since they could hardly identify with what seemed to them an android Harrison Ford. What immediately strikes the viewer is the great disparity in style and energy between Ford’s Rick Deckard and the lead android Roy Baty, played by Rutger Hauer. Hauer’s performance has been castigated for being over-‐the-‐top, too overtly theatrical; in truth, the performance is less theatrical than operatic. Once again, what should be remembered is that Hauer is an android in the film, and what plays out in the final sequences is an inhuman reaction to the realization of imminent mortality. It is Hauer’s Roy Baty that I wish to focus on, as it seems to me his presentation is the key to understanding the last half of the picture. Blade Runner has a similar theme to Dick’s novel, but a vastly different conclusion; where the novelist is interested in the lies and artificiality at the heart of spirituality, the filmmakers are interested in value creation. To this extent, the influence of Nietzsche is apparent. I hesitate to discuss Nietzsche in this context, if only because he has been misunderstood and misrepresented by artists too often; artists have often adopted him because of his penchant for bold declarations and because he is easier to read than Kant. Still, it’s almost impossible to ignore the strong Nietzschean flavor of what goes on in the last act of Blade Runner; Baty’s epiphany is clearly meant to parallel the Ubermensch, in English the Superman or Overman. The Overman (or Superman) in Nietzsche is the man who creates values for himself, who lives by his own genius and rejects all forms of weakness and religion. He makes his own morality, a master morality as differentiated from the "slave morality", i.e. the perspective of humility, tranquility, etc. The Overman does not help the poor or infirm, he ignores (and is largely disgusted by) them, because he has better things to do. Bertrand Russell once described Nietzsche’s philosophy by quoting a passage from King Lear about committing acts which are unknown but "will be the terror of the earth." While somewhat unfair, this does carry the flavor of his pronouncements. It is Nietzsche who popularized the notion that "God is dead" in Thus Spake Zarathustra: the complete phrase is "God is dead, and it is we who have murdered Him."
After the android demands more life, Dr. Tyrell reveals his limitations – he cannot give him more life, but only homilies about living life to the fullest. God’s power is ultimately restricted, unable to bestow immortality or give meaning to death. Baty, penitent, seeks punishment from God – "I’ve done questionable things," he says. Dr. Tyrell ignores this, proud of his creation and eager to please: "And also great things. Revel in your time." Baty smiles and then murders him by tearing at his eyes – destroying a God who could not see the evil in his creation. He then murders John Sebastian offscreen, as the film cuts to a shot of Baty standing in some sort of spacecraft, hurtling ahead with the stars behind him. It is as if he is beginning a new and terrible journey, while also perhaps serving as a flashback to his trip from the Moon to the Earth. The moment is positively Wagnerian; shot from below, light shining on his face, at this moment Blade Runner reveals that the hero is actually Roy Baty, and that he has discovered freedom in the capacity to create his own values. Tyrell is dead, and it is he who has murdered him. Baty, rapidly dying, and apparently losing his sanity, engages in a final confrontation with Deckard, who has been forgotten for some time. Deckard single-‐ mindedly seeks to destroy him, while for Baty everything is a game, in which the rules are only to experience as intensely as possible. Once, in the middle of the combat, Baty sticks his head out of a window and closes his eyes, feeling the rain strike his artificial skin – a momentary intermission in the duel. He tries to involve Deckard in the game: "That wasn’t very sportsmanlike," he tells him, after Deckard has struck him with a pipe, "Aren’t you the good man?" This reversal of good and bad, using the words that describe morality in their ordinary sense but in the inverse, is also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s tactics. Then, almost expiring, Baty pushes a spike through his hand to stop an apparent short-‐circuit of some kind; the parallel here with Christ is obvious, although it is something of a send-‐up. Baty has replaced Christ with himself, which is further shown by his rescue of Deckard as the blade runner is about to fall off a building. On a whim, Baty gives redemption, saving the man’s life because he chooses to do so – where he had murdered before. In either case he is adopting the power of God. Then, in his final moments, he reflects on his time: "I’ve seen things you humans wouldn’t believe. . .all of these moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain." A dove he has captured flies free, and the metaphor (of course) is to an ascending soul. However, there is no soul, and death is permanent – as Baty’s concluding speech asserts; one can choose only the manner of one’s life. Deckard rushes home to find his lover Rachel, whom he knows to be an android, and discovers that he himself is one as well. He appears to absorb this with knowing resignation, as he remembers the phrase uttered by a street cop (played by Edward James Olmos): "It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?" Indeed. Deckard escapes with Rachel, having apparently learned a lesson from Baty about love and time. Deckard, who had been pushed around by everyone, ordered to kill, decides to take control of himself and escape. We are ignorant of the results of his decision, but it hardly matters. Blade Runner is about one’s choices, about the realization of mortality, and the desire for independence. God is dead, life is mechanical, and the only escape lies in the assertion of will. |
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