San Simeon, Calif. — I’m sitting in a movie theater that resembles the I-Mag at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in other words a doozie of a theatre, about to watch a film about William Randolph Hearst, whose “castle” I’ve just toured. The movie begins with a stylish re-enactment of Hearst touring great cities with his mother as a boy, developing a love for architecture, art and graceful living that would eventually inspire him to recreate what he’d seen high atop a hill on the coast of California. The movie traces the careful design and building of Hearst Castle, replete with religious architecture, art and artifacts from the cathedrals of Spain, France and Italy. It documents Hearst’s determination to share his many riches with others, and glamorizes the visits of famous celebrities who came to San Simeon to rest from their stressful lives.
The film — written and produced by the National Geographic Society — is, of course, a preposterous lie. Hearst was one of the most rapacious robber barons in history, a greedy megalomaniac who was equal parts war-monger, serial philanderer, sybarite, and, some say, murderer. Hearst Castle was a Vegas-style pleasure palace where movie stars, politicians, business moguls and showgirls could doff their inhibitions and frequently their clothing to party hearty with Hearst and leave there what happened there. Other than his appetite for food and drink, about the only thing Hearst shared was his bed, with a succession of gigglies anxious to appear in his movies, while his wife and five sons pined away (well, not exactly) in the family’s 100-room mansion in New York. In all fairness, at his death he did share his considerable wealth with his long-time mistress, the actress Marion Davies, to whom he left half of all he owned.
The myth-building surrounding Hearst and his contribution to the human condition is noted here not out of malice — goodness knows, the shops, restaurants, and guided tours that feed off San Simeon and the tacky castle employ several hundred very nice people. Rather, it is used to dramatize the kind of “big lie” that can be told only in America, where money, applied liberally enough in the right places (such as through a grant to the National Geographic Society) can rewrite whole pages in history.
It is precisely this “big lie” technique that was used first by political warlords in our country to position our withdrawal from Viet Nam as a disgraceful national defeat. Now it is being employed to brand our feckless incursion into the Middle East as a war of atonement for our cowardice in the Far East. But Viet Nam was no defeat, it was a victory for a huge majority of Americans who rose up and rejected the notion that peace can be achieved through massive bloodshed. And Iraq is a war of atonement only for what General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military/industrial complex,” the giant corporations, hawk politicians and military leaders for whom making war is a life-sustaining IV.
Both wars were, of course, begun in deceit, Viet Nam through Lyndon Johnson’s rancid tale of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq via George W. Bush’s conscious fabrication of weapons of mass destruction. Both wars were perpetuated in perfidy: exaggerated body counts signaled a military victory always just a rice paddy away in Viet Nam; false calculations of converted sheiks place a political solution daily on the horizon in Iraq. We awoke from our nightmare in Viet Nam when American youth, in its finest hour, orchestrated public opinion into a booming moral voice that demanded and got withdrawal.
Here the similarities end. Extraction from Iraq will be far more difficult because we’re bound into conflict not only by the traditional military/industrial complex, but by new-born mercenaries like Blackwater and neo-profiteers like Haliburton, who conspire so that one can supply more troops, and then the other can supply the troops that were just supplied.
In 1953, Eisenhower characterized our conundrum when he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Americans are finally beginning to understand that we are indeed hanging from that cross. Trouble is, how do we get down when we are bound by manacles hammered in place by forces in our country for whom death and destruction are revenue streams, murder and mayhem twin profit centers?
-end-
Addendum to Michael Jackson: Visit San Simeon. And take notes for Neverland.
San Simeon, Calif. — I’m sitting in a movie theater that resembles the I-Mag at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in other words a doozie of a theatre, about to watch a film about William Randolph Hearst, whose “castle” I’ve just toured. The movie begins with a stylish re-enactment of Hearst touring great cities with his mother as a boy, developing a love for architecture, art and graceful living that would eventually inspire him to recreate what he’d seen high atop a hill on the coast of California. The movie traces the careful design and building of Hearst Castle, replete with religious architecture, art and artifacts from the cathedrals of Spain, France and Italy. It documents Hearst’s determination to share his many riches with others, and glamorizes the visits of famous celebrities who came to San Simeon to rest from their stressful lives.
The film — written and produced by the National Geographic Society — is, of course, a preposterous lie. Hearst was one of the most rapacious robber barons in history, a greedy megalomaniac who was equal parts war-monger, serial philanderer, sybarite, and, some say, murderer. Hearst Castle was a Vegas-style pleasure palace where movie stars, politicians, business moguls and showgirls could doff their inhibitions and frequently their clothing to party hearty with Hearst and leave there what happened there. Other than his appetite for food and drink, about the only thing Hearst shared was his bed, with a succession of gigglies anxious to appear in his movies, while his wife and five sons pined away (well, not exactly) in the family’s 100-room mansion in New York. In all fairness, at his death he did share his considerable wealth with his long-time mistress, the actress Marion Davies, to whom he left half of all he owned.
The myth-building surrounding Hearst and his contribution to the human condition is noted here not out of malice — goodness knows, the shops, restaurants, and guided tours that feed off San Simeon and the tacky castle employ several hundred very nice people. Rather, it is used to dramatize the kind of “big lie” that can be told only in America, where money, applied liberally enough in the right places (such as through a grant to the National Geographic Society) can rewrite whole pages in history.
It is precisely this “big lie” technique that was used first by political warlords in our country to position our withdrawal from Viet Nam as a disgraceful national defeat. Now it is being employed to brand our feckless incursion into the Middle East as a war of atonement for our cowardice in the Far East. But Viet Nam was no defeat, it was a victory for a huge majority of Americans who rose up and rejected the notion that peace can be achieved through massive bloodshed. And Iraq is a war of atonement only for what General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military/industrial complex,” the giant corporations, hawk politicians and military leaders for whom making war is a life-sustaining IV.
Both wars were, of course, begun in deceit, Viet Nam through Lyndon Johnson’s rancid tale of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq via George W. Bush’s conscious fabrication of weapons of mass destruction. Both wars were perpetuated in perfidy: exaggerated body counts signaled a military victory always just a rice paddy away in Viet Nam; false calculations of converted sheiks place a political solution daily on the horizon in Iraq. We awoke from our nightmare in Viet Nam when American youth, in its finest hour, orchestrated public opinion into a booming moral voice that demanded and got withdrawal.
Here the similarities end. Extraction from Iraq will be far more difficult because we’re bound into conflict not only by the traditional military/industrial complex, but by new-born mercenaries like Blackwater and neo-profiteers like Haliburton, who conspire so that one can supply more troops, and then the other can supply the troops that were just supplied.
In 1953, Eisenhower characterized our conundrum when he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Americans are finally beginning to understand that we are indeed hanging from that cross. Trouble is, how do we get down when we are bound by manacles hammered in place by forces in our country for whom death and destruction are revenue streams, murder and mayhem twin profit centers?
-end-
Addendum to Michael Jackson: Visit San Simeon. And take notes for Neverland.