art by Josh Chambers
by Kyle K. Mann
You know, one of the great things about the current age and living situation of our boy Kyle is the luxury of absolute fearlessness. No kids, no significant other, no job situation to be afraid for, no social status to worry about. So yours truly can cut to the chase right now: I first took LSD in 1966, at age 15, when it was still legal.
As soon as it came on, I knew everything had changed forever. I Got It. I knew who I really was and what I didn’t want. I could stop pretending I was angry, that life was meaningless. I could be who I wanted to be. And nearly 50 years later, despite some grim moments recently, I am relatively content, and looking forward.
So let’s examine the idea that JFK took acid with a mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, ex-wife of CIA man Cord Meyer, at some point in the early 60’s. Personally, I’m convinced it happened. President Kennedy’s famous “Peace Speech” of June 10, 1963, at American University is all I need. This is the voice of a man who has heard The Word. The 23 minute speech should be required watching for every person on earth, but especially every American.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter how JFK found his way to unilaterally suspend atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs and hold out an olive branch to the USSR. The fact is that he did so in the face of the military and intelligence community’s strong opposition. This quote alone nails it: “…what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana, enforced by weapons of war…”
And there you have it, why they blew his brains out in Dallas five months later. “They” were most likely the CIA, who Kennedy planned to break up, having already fired the hierarchy.
A Pax Americana is exactly what the War Party is selling as a Deal You Can’t Refuse. What we are looking at is a country, our country, that openly states it will do anything to any country or anyone that stands in the way of American Exceptionalism, and our bloated military budget backs that up. The implied quid pro quo for American citizens is a comfortable standard of living, though it has slipped drastically since Reagan was elected. But generations of propaganda still has most of us convinced we are all, as John Steinbeck said, “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
As of March 1, 2015, our number one enemy is Russia. The outright lies and media demonization of the country is degrading. The steady drumbeat for war is mind numbing. I refuse to watch TV, and news radio is difficult for me to listen to at the top of the hour. It usually involves me cursing and switching channels or putting on Mozart.
If you have gotten this far in our lad Kyle’s commentary, let me again stress the importance of watching the JFK Peace Speech, if you have never done so. Click that link above. Now. Do it! At the two minute mark, he gets going; at the six minute mark he is in full flight. This is wisdom, this is brilliance, this is spirituality. At ten minutes in, he discusses the results of a nuke war between the USSR and the USA, noting “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty four hours.”
It’s this danger that should give us all the heebie-jeebies. We have come full circle, back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. We have inaugurated and enabled a proxy war in the Ukraine, on the very border of Russia, at the urging of Obama and that nauseating trouble-maker Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose arrogant leaked phone conversations clearly show whose hand is at work in the Ukraine.
Obama, quite simply, is playing with fire by attempting to bully the second-strongest nuclear power on Earth. The argument that somebody is making Obama do it doesn’t hold water with me. The buck stops with him. And compared to JFK, Obama is a monster who spies on the world and his own people via the illegal, immoral NSA; who kills American citizens and other “terrorism suspects” in the most cowardly way possible, by drone; and who persecutes, prosecutes and jails the whistleblowers who bravely step forward to inform us of vast governmental wrongdoing.
Born in August, 1961, Obama missed the good acid of the 60’s. Who knows what he ingested in the 70’s and 80’s. Whatever it was, it failed to enlighten him much. His chief talent is lying in elegant sounding speeches. As a result, he literally gets away with murder.
I would ask those who continue to support this evil man Obama for their own narrow ends, such as abortion rights as just one example, to contemplate a Russia being pushed down a road that leads to either distressing humiliation or fighting back with nuclear bombs. Yes, it is a terrible thing to contemplate, but needful, in my view, as we realistically assess the current events in the Ukraine.
Let’s get it clear: Putin is not my favorite politician. His policies in numerous areas are dubious at best. But I don’t blame him for incorporating the Crimea back into Russia. The territory was Russian prior to being grafted onto the Ukraine in the 1950’s, by JFK’s enemy (yet eventual co-conspirator) Nikita Khrushchev. Now we have talk of US troops on the ground in the Ukraine. This is madness that could conceivably result in all-out nuclear war.
Of course, the trouble with forecasting a possible catastrophe of that nature is that you can’t win. It it happens, everyone is dead and the point is moot. If it doesn’t happen, you look like an idiot.
So here I am, out on a limb, demanding we break up the CIA into (as JFK reportedly wished) a thousand pieces. Demanding sanity in our foreign policy by stopping the bombing of numerous countries. Demanding we cut the military budget in half, and close the majority of our foreign bases at once. And demanding we reign in our corporate and financial structures who profit from human misery.
JFK concluded his speech this way: “Confident, and unafraid, we must labor on, not towards a strategy of annihilation, but towards a strategy of peace.” Soon enough he would be blasted dead, and less than a year after that Mary Pinchot Meyer, who quite arguably “turned on” the President, was likewise shot to death in a murder that remains unsolved to this day. The CIA has been running the show ever since, and despite an attempt by the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975 at accountability, their dirty fingers reach into all our lives, some more than others, disgustingly so.
Ahhhh, fuck it. What do I know? I’m just an aging acid-head, outraged by the military-corporate-CIA madness that has engulfed my country for most of my life. But at least I can string words together in defiance. It’s going to be a fight to the finish, and to paraphrase John Paul Jones, I have not yet begun to write.
Kyle K. Mann
Topanga
3/1/2015
