Maxine's club-drug mindlessness, the Insensitive Daughter (Zinn History)

[Fiona Shnapple]

There was a troubling incongruity in the society. Electoral politics
dominated the press and television screens, and the doings of
presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and other
officials were treated as if they constituted the history of the
country. Yet there was something artificial in all this, something
pumped up, a straining to persuade a skeptical public that this was
all, that they must rest their hopes for the future in Washington
politicians, none of whom were inspiring because it seemed that behind
the bombast, the rhetoric, the promises, their major concern was their
own political power.

The distance between politics and the people was reflected clearly in
the culture. In what was supposed to be the best of the media,
uncontrolled by corporate interest-that is, in public television, the
public was largely invisible. On the leading political forum on public
television, the nightly "MacNeil-Lehrer Report," the public was
uninvited, except as viewer of an endless parade of Congressmen,
Senators, government bureaucrats, experts of various kinds.

On commercial radio, the usual narrow band of consensus, excluding
fundamental criticism, was especially apparent. In the mid-1980s, with
Ronald Reagan as President, the "fairness doctrine" of the Federal
Communications Commission, requiring air time for dissenting views,
was eliminated. By the 1990s, "talk radio" had perhaps 20 million
listeners, treated to daily tirades from right-wing talk-show "hosts,"
with left-wing guests uninvited.

A citizenry disillusioned with politics and with what pretended to be
intelligent discussions of politics turned its attention (or had its
attention turned) to entertainment, to gossip, to ten thousand schemes
for self-help. Those at its margins became violent, finding scapegoats
within one's group (as with poor-black on poor-black violence), or
against other races, immigrants, demonized foreigners, welfare
mothers, minor criminals (standing in for untouchable major
criminals).

There were other citizens, those who tried to hold on to ideas and
ideals still remembered from the sixties and early seventies, not just
by recollecting but by acting. Indeed, all across the country there
was a part of the public unmentioned in the media, ignored by
political leaders- energetically active in thousands of local groups
around the country. These organized groups were campaigning for
environmental protection or women's rights or decent health care
(including anguished concern about the horrors of AIDS) or housing for
the homeless, or against military spending.

This activism was unlike that of the sixties, when the surge of
protest against race segregation and war became an overwhelming
national force. It struggled uphill, against callous political
leaders, trying to reach fellow Americans most of whom saw little hope
in either the politics of voting or the politics of protest.

[...]

Democrats and Republicans had long been joined in a "bipartisan
foreign policy," but in the Reagan-Bush years the United States
government showed a special aggressiveness in the use of military
force abroad. This was done either directly in invasions, or through
both overt and covert support of right-wing tyrannies that cooperated
with the United States.

Reagan came into office just after a revolution had taken place in
Nicaragua, in which a popular Sandinista movement (named after the
1920s revolutionary hero Augusto Sandino) overthrew the corrupt Somoza
dynasty (long supported by the United States). The Sandinistas, a
coalition of Marxists, left-wing priests, and assorted nationalists,
set about to give more land to the peasants and to spread education
and health care among the poor.

The Reagan administration, seeing in this a "Communist" threat, but
even more important, a challenge to the long U.S. control over
governments in Central America, began immediately to work to overthrow
the Sandinista government. It waged a secret war by having the CIA
organize a counterrevolutionary force (the "contras"), many of whose
leaders were former leaders of the hated National Guard under Somoza.

The contras seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua and so
were based next door in Honduras, a very poor country dominated by the
United States. From Honduras they moved across the border, raiding
farms and villages, killing men, women and children, committing
atrocities. A former colonel with the contras, Edgar Chamorro,
testified before the World Court:

We were told that the only way to defeat the Sandinistas was to use
the tactics the agency [the CIA] attributed to Communist insurgencies
elsewhere: kill, kidnap, rob, and torture. .. . Many civilians were
killed in cold blood. Many others were tortured, mutilated, raped,
robbed, or otherwise abused. . . . When I agreed to join ... I had
hoped that it would be an organization of Nicaragnans.... [It] turned
out to be an instrument of the U.S. government. . . .

There was a reason for the secrecy of the U.S. actions in Nicaragua;
public opinion surveys showed that the American public was opposed to
military involvement there. In 1984, the CIA, using Latin American
agents to conceal its involvement, put mines in the harbors of
Nicaragua to blow up ships. When information leaked out, Secretary of
Defense Weinberger told ABC news: "The United States is not mining the
harbors of Nicaragua."

Later that year Congress, responding perhaps to public opinion and the
memory of Vietnam, made it illegal for the United States to support
"directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in
Nicaragua." The Reagan administration decided to ignore this law and
to find ways to fund the contras secretly, looking for "third-party
support." Reagan himself solicited funds from Saudi Arabia, at least
$32 million. The friendly dictatorship in Guatemala was used to get
arms surreptitiously to the contras. Israel, dependent on U.S. aid and
always dependable for support, was also used.


On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> I can take only too much Zinn, but he's useful here as we press the
> Reverse and scan through the years Maxine, living at home and working
> on her college degree, was oblivious to what distracted her parents.
> In the clubs was coke. In the protests was pepper spay and police
> brutality. Maybe her parents protected her as March suggests. Maybe
> she was too busy studying up on Material Girl Feminism, maybe she was
> lost in the Snow. But Maxine thinks she was kept in the dark because
> of some flaw in character that her parents recognized early on, and
> she still thinks they think its there still. Is it? Is she trying to
> rub out this flaw now? Is that why she's so into Ice & Co.? Or is it
> the flaw that draws her into the depths of departure.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igov2xBS_D8
>
> http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncarebu21.html
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l