AMERICA at TWILIGHT (2)

It was the closest Presidential race in U.S. history. Now Americans prepared for John F. Kennedy, the 35th president, and to welcome a glamourous family to the White House. Arriving with the new first family was the Age of Television. It brought America the first televised presidential debate, the first gavel to gavel coverage of political conventions, and a buffet of television entertainment so varied it pushed radio and the movies onto life support. The new age was here with ascending stars Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Johnny Carson, Ed Sullivan, The World of Disney, these and many others charged daily with the momentous task of reporting the news, capturing the personalities, compiling the changes that arrived with the Cape Cod Kennedys. Those early days of the 60’s promised so much. It set a high tone for an afflicted future.

At the White House the new president found a couple of old problems set in motion by the previous Eisenhower-Nixon combo. There was the Bay of Pigs, a poorly planned invasion of Cuba that was both deadly and embarrassing. Kennedy did not plan it but he wore it. It was his first encounter with the lying, immoral and despicable miscreants in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency. Kennedy’s youth found him at odds with the aging Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. They blamed him for the Cuban debacle by failing to order aircraft cover for the invaders. It was Kennedy’s first close encounter with the CIA, the agency that planned it. Then there was Vietnam. The military/industrial complex was pushing for greater U-S involvement. The cabal was disingenuous when it claimed South Vietnam had to be saved for democracy. They wanted the oil. Maybe the skulls in the Pentagon Fog forgot that the French Indo-China adventure did not end well. The Generals also obsessed about this new guy, Castro. Cuba was planning to export revolution and some members of the Pentagon wanted to drop a nuclear bomb and eliminate the problem. Checkmate! Again Kennedy was at odds with General Curtis Lemay, a dangerous hawk, and a couple of other Generals who secretly called JFK weak. Meanwhile, for the rest of America, oblivious to the challenges facing the occupant of the Oval office, things were going swimmingly. The generation gap was not yet but soon – at this point rock n’ roll music was replaced by a folk revival led by Peter, Paul and Mary, The Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, a crowded field, for sure. Girl groups topped the charts – the Ronettes, Supremes, Shirelles. “Here’s Johnny” was now a late night treat. Jackie Kennedy was redecorating the White House and changing the hairstyles of many American women. They said she was everything a First Lady should be.

The Cuban Missile Crisis sobered America’s happy dance for the moment. Those Ten Days in October 1962 took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. And again Kennedy encountered the Militancy of several Pentagon Peacocks. Russian missiles in Cuba? Take them out with a first strike nuclear attack!!! In the face of exacting pressure to nuke Cuba, the President was blunt, “…gentlemen call me when you come to your senses.” Direct communication between JFK and Nikita Khrushchev ended the crisis! I don’t know if they still teach those Ten Days in October 1962 in school but they should. That crisis led to secret exchanges via undercover couriers allowing both Kennedy and Khrushchev to explore real nuclear disarmament away from prying eyes, because neither trusted their advisers. So at this point in 1961 Jack Kennedy was fighting a Cold War and dealing with the mayhem and chaos created by the CIA. The Agency was in the Congo assassinating Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister; crashing the plane carrying UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold, who was on an African peace mission; and managing to place undercover agents in every branch of the U-S government helping out in South Vietnam. Hoping to get some advantage over the CIA, JFK fired the CIA director Allen Dulles. Didn’t help. His Vietnam problems mounted. The Generals were restless, they wanted the States to really get involved in South East Asia and save Vietnam from communism and put some boots on the ground. Kennedy agreed to send more advisers but was four-square against sending ground forces to fight a war his more sane advisers told him the United States could not win. It was edging to a stalemate. CIA planning involved trying to trick Kennedy into agreeing to send men and materiel otherwise face a coup in Saigon. There was a CIA engineered Coup but Kennedy didn’t bite. Then there was Khrushchev threatening to end the four power Berlin agreement. So there was turmoil in the trenches but generally life in the first decade of the 60’s in America was going great! The Beverly Hillbillies were number one, Timothy Leary was encouraging people “to turn on, tune in and drop out.” LSD, free love, bring it on. The British invasion, Flower Power and the Counter Culture movement were still to come. But the Folk Revival, Twilight Zone, and Rowdy Yates were already here. Clint Eastwood played second fiddle in Rawhide but millions of women confirmed the star was Eastwood. Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, “The Eagle has landed” were works in progress along with Expo ’67 and the IMAX debut in Montreal. The Queen would visit. So would the Great Asparagus!

Jack and Jackie traveled some. First to see the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Then to Paris for a meeting with Charles De Gaulle and Madame. JFK’s meeting in Vienna in 1961 with Nikita Khrushchev didn’t go nearly as well. He left that first session with the Russian bear – shaken. The U-S president told one of his advisers, “I’ve never met a man like this; I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill 70 million people in ten minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say, ‘so what’?” But despite Khrushchev’s desire to humiliate Kennedy, the Russian agreed to open a back channel to facilitate unfiltered messaging between the Oval office and the Kremlin.

Kennedy returned from Europe to debrief advisors and the Joint Chiefs who continued to ride hard toward the Apocalypse. He was appalled by Generals Lemnitzer and LeMay who wanted him to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in both Berlin and Southeast Asia. They also told him they were opposed to allowing John Frankenheimer to use the White House for the movie “Seven Days in May”, but Kennedy, who could be a teaser-weaser, tweaked the Generals, saying “when the cameras come to the White House, I’ll be at Hyannis Port sailing.”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a man marked for executive-action because he was fearless in the face of major challenges thrown down by: the Generals, The Dark Shadows of the CIA, the spectre of a nuclear miscalculation, his predilection to cavort with dangerous women, and Vietnam.

The plans are drawn, the patsy trussed, the people of America are to be afflicted by crushing sadness.

(America at Twilight 3 )- next

(Next America at Twilight 3)

AMERICA at TWILIGHT (1)

The birth of the United States in 1776 served to reflect a hopeful future for the world because France, coincidentally, was slipping from the ENLIGHTENMENT to the AGE of REASON, a soul destroying trip into the French version of Dante’s Inferno. The hope America was bringing to the world was Freedom. It was a nation built on the separation of Church and State. That’s a concept about which 18th century Europeans knew nothing. Europe was not to emerge from the blackness of civic totalitarianism driven by the Papacy for another half century, by which time America was well along welcoming the tired and the poor, the downtrodden, and the persecuted of many nations, all yearning to breathe free! These huddled masses and all who arrived with them seized the concept of America and built the most powerful nation under God that the world had seen since the time of King David. The halcyon days of the Israelites. Remarkably, for the next one hundred and 80 years the United States grew in wisdom and power and freedom. Of course there were problems. Slavery triggered a Civil War, booms and busts dotted the economic landscape, two world wars dramatically changed US society while the bomb ushered in a Cold War. In spite of these challenges, or maybe because of them, America prospered. There was the Great Depression-not fun, Prohibition-a mistake, the hemp and cotton lobby-brouhaha (the banishment of hemp until recent acceptance of cannabis). Late to the party was women’s suffrage. For some reason America had the toughest time giving women the right to vote. The nineteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution was finally declared law August 26,1920. By contrast, New Zealand 1893; Finland 1906; Iceland 1915; Canada 1918. Through it all Americans were not to be denied. Citizens in the 48 worked hard and played hard. There was Jazz; Basie, Hawkins Young, Webster, swing; Miller, the Dorseys, Goodman, Armstrong and when they weren’t swinging, swaying and jitterbugging, Americans were at the movies. Hollywood dominated with a thousand stars and the long history of Broadway-style shows made its way to New York City. Non-stop showstoppers: West Side Story, Oklahoma, Sound of Music, Call Me Madame, Guys and Dolls, Bells Are Ringing, The King and I, etcetera etcetera etcetera!! By the time the 60’s arrived Alaska and Hawaii were on board. Americans had it all – the cockiness, belligerence, the bravado of the main man on Broadstreet. But storm clouds were taking shape.

The lack of congressional oversight set the stage for a major change in the US character. To that end, while sharing incrementally their work with oversight committees in Congress, the newly incorporated NSC (National Security Agency) began spying on US citizens at unprecedented levels. The CIA, while very much engaged in foreign adventurism, was also using private Americans and Canadians in “secret brainwashing methods”, all part of the CIA’s,”MK ultra mind control experiments”. And J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was out of control. The spy game coincided with the establishment of a permanent American armaments industry and a military to meet the challenges of the Soviet Union and China. The combination would grow into what some call Deep State. The first alarm about this growing juggernaut came from U-S president Dwight Eisenhower. January 17, 1961. In his final address to the nation that he served in peacetime and in war, he worried about the impact that this immense military establishment and large arms industry would have on every town and city in America. He said, “…in the Councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial Complex.” “The potential,” he warned, “for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Less than three years after Eisenhower’s unambiguous warning, America would suffer the Shock and Awe of that misplaced power engineered specifically to re-route the American Dream. Over the next two decades Americans were forced to travel a road of death, destruction, body bags and humiliation.

AMERICA AT TWILIGHT (2) -NEXT

CRTC? Working for Ma Bell!

Haven’t given the Commission much thought lately even though I spent most of my long broadcasting career working for radio companies who lived under the shadow and in fear of the Radio-Telelevision Telecommunications Commission. Today a thunderbolt recalled the life and times of the COMMISSION and how it has laid waste the country’s broadcasting landscape. A Facebook post from Elaine Loring and another by Evelyn Macko, both broadcasting veterans, declared CFRB and CKFM had been savagely put to the sword. A Canadian telecoms publication, Cartt.ca politely reported 210 employee will be laid off. Laid off? Is that how you put it? Fired! is the brutal truth. They were made redundant by a corporation that has more than 5 billion dollars in the bank and has just received 122 million dollars from Canadian taxpayers in Covid-related labour subsidies as Mother was busy signing larger dividend payments to shareholders. What is Ma Bell?

It is probably one of the largest broadcasting companies in the world. It claims an empire streaming 215 music channels, operating 109 licensed radio stations in 58 markets across Canada. It owns a swath of this country’s most viewed television stations including TSN, CTV, BNN Bloomberg, CP 24 and others too many to mention. And now this fiscal bully has put the boot to the long serving radio combo CFRB/CKFM. Naturally there is an explanation from a Bell spokesperson who claimed the “programming changes reflect Bell Media’s streamlined operating structure.” What’s that mean? Saving money! What the goal BellBoy? “……we’re focused on investment in new content and technology opportunities, while also ensuring our company is as agile, efficient and easy to work with as possible.” Perfect explanation if you’re a car company. Puerile nonsense from a broadcaster. …”agile, efficient and easy to work with”…oh please! Ma while you’re still in your drive-by hit job mode, get a spokesperson who can actually make sense.

Here’s another thing. At a time when a relentless pandemic continues to ravage this land and we are spending tax money to shield families from evictions, paying millions to those aged 15 to 17, vacating hotels so that the homeless and normally downtrodden have a place, Ma Bell throws 210 people into the street. After a year of living in uncertainty, more uncertainty. Do I hear the cavalry? Oh yes that’s an American thing. Anyway don’t expect anything from a country that doesn’t know the insurrection is two thousand miles from Washington DC. And such a pathetic reaction from the Premier to the news that devastated the ‘RB-200. And I quote, “Keep your chin up. You’re going to come back. You’re going to get back on your feet. Maybe you’ll find a career within the media or you might find it outside the media.” That’s Dougie’s message of hope. No wonder the handling of the Covid challenge has turned into a cattywampus. Maybe the Ontario Premier knows this but let’s suppose he doesn’t. Premier Ford there’s no comeback, most everybody at CFRB/CKFM thought they had a career. Media jobs at a living wage are as rare as hens teeth. Why? Because decisions made by the CRTC over the past 30 years have ripped away the talent and shredded the honesty of the Broadcasting industry.

So the real villain in the piece is the Commission responsible for regulating Media. The CRTC. Here’s a regulatory body that should have been abruptly closed down 30 years ago. No other agency had the power to do so much for so few. The Commission, through wilful negligence, allowed Bell, Rogers, Corus, Quebecor to divide the spoils. Face it. Bell Media is larger and more powerful than the CRTC . That means Ma Bell, like her name sake Ma Barker, can fiscally mutilate the people that work for her and change the programming of radio stations they own at will. They can fire hundreds. It is what it is.

Like so many other critical areas of Canadian life, the gift of owning a broadcasting facility no longer is the people’s to give. Whom do you serve you might ask Bell?

Bell answers, we serve no one not even the Canadian Radio-Telelvision and Telecommunications Commission.

Simply said, today’s broadcasters no longer work under the shadow and in fear of the Commission.

They used to walk cap in hand to get their licenses. Now they arrive wearing jackboots.