Another Layer of Lies He Roman Republic Stood for Keeping Civic Dialogue Civil
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The New Hampshire Gazette, Friday, September 29, 2017 — Page 1 A Non-Fiction Newspaper First Class U.S. The New Hampshire Gazette Postage Paid Grab Me! I’m Free! Portsmouth, N.H. The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ • Editor: Steven Fowle • Founded 1756 by Daniel Fowle Vol. CCLXII, No. 1 Permit No. 75 PO Box 756, Portsmouth, NH 03802 • [email protected] • www.nhgazette.com Address Service Requested September 29, 2017 The Fortnightly Rant Another Layer of Lies he Roman Republic stood for keeping civic dialogue civil. 500 years before lapsing into It was inevitable that our story- dictatorship.T The United States tellers of record would eventually of America, in half that time, has find themselves in an unenviable gone from George Washington’s position familiar to every Ameri- first inaugural address to Donald can President from FDR through Trump losing a battle of wits with George W. Bush: contemplating Kim Jong Un as Congress tries to Vietnam and asking, what the hell kill off constituents by depriving do I do about that? It’s not as if they them of healthcare. could ignore forever the most for- How the hell did that happen? mative event in U.S. history since Gradually and then suddenly, over WW II. Ten years ago they saw the the past seventy years—which hap- 50th anniversary coming and started pens to be the period covered by the doing the best they could. new documentary series, “The Viet- In interviews, the filmmakers nam War.” have been candid about the trepida- That half-forgotten war is our tion they felt over this volatile topic. Rosetta Stone: one can read on it In the work they produced, though, the story of our republic’s precipi- they’ve been equivocal. tous decline. “There is no simple or single truth This new series might seem at to be extracted from the Vietnam first to be a chance to gain a better War,” they wrote. “Many questions understanding of that sorry period. remain unanswerable.” In other It fails, though, to break through words, they punted. the cramped boundaries of the Of- In their version of events, the war ficial Narrative. In fact it never had was a tragic mistake made by honest a chance. people doing the best they could in Story,” narrated by Charlton Hes- a century. The expense of maintain- gon puppet government were run- Author! Authoress!! Sponsor!!! difficult circumstances. That’s one ton, America’s involvement in Viet- ing this mission civilisatrice was ning competing heroin rings while As we all know, Ken Burns and way to look at it, but it’s not very nam was a noble cause in which our defrayed by selling opium to the de- their country collapsed. Lynn Novick were long ago granted helpful and largely not true. brave soldiers won every battle, only spairing masses. Ho Chi Minh was Important, If True tenure as America’s Videographer Déjà Vu to be stabbed in the back by hippies, just one of many Vietnamese who “To see what is in front of one’s Laureates. They earned this exalted Though we have not seen them draft dodgers, the lying media, and took exception to this arrangement. nose needs a constant struggle,” position by toiling in the vineyards refer to it, Burns and Novick were gutless politicians. When an opium purchasing agent George Orwell wrote, just about the of PBS. PBS receives 12 percent of surely aware of what happened The Vietnam War, With the Bark On for the Vietnamese stiffed a tribe of time Harry S Truman started lying its funding from the Corporation to Stanley Karnow. He wrote the French missionaries began what Meo poppy growers in Laos, they about Vietnam. for Public Broadcasting [CPB]. script for “Vietnam: A Television they called a mission civilisatrice in happily helped Ho’s Viet Minh haul To that we would only add that CPB, in turn, is funded by Con- History,” the first multi-part Viet- Vietnam in the 17th century. By the artillery to the hilltops surrounding the biggest obstacle to a clear view gress. Each link in that chain pro- nam documentary, which aired on mid-19th century, a few hundred Dien Bien Phu. of how governments and the world vides some measure of distance, but PBS in 1983. His straightforward, thousand Vietnamese had convert- By the time this charming French at large work is that most people are there is still a hand at one end and a accurate, honest work was attacked ed to Catholicism. Many of the mil- enterprise went bust, Truman and decent and therefore reluctant to be- neck inside the other. The neck al- for its alleged left-wing bias, errors, lions who had not converted found Eisenhower had been propping it up lieve that things could possibly be as ways knows that a hard yank could and distortions. those who had annoying. Naturally for a decade, acting like Lillian Hell- awful as they appear. They’re proba- come at any time. The source of this critique was the French felt responsible. Rath- man, of whom Mary McCarthy fa- bly worse, but try getting anyone to Congress, of course, also funded Accuracy in Media [AIM], a tax er than withdrawing, though, they mously said, “every word she writes sponsor that story. the Vietnam War—until it didn’t: a dodge which diverts money from instead provided soldiers to protect is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Political lies were not invented by reversal that still provides one of this the U.S. Treasury to Right Wing the converts, and forts to protect the Anyone assuming our skirts must American politicians in the wake of topic’s most obdurate points of con- propagandists. Thanks to like-mind- soldiers. One thing led to another, as have been cleaner than those of the WW II, but the Cold War proved tention. Other entities which paid ed executives appointed by the such things have a way of doing. French could learn a lot from read- to be a perfect hot house for their for the right to jerk on that chain, Reagan Administration, PBS, in By the end of WW II, French ing Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics propagation. Paranoid Right Wing- including noted truth-seekers such 1985, aired a two-hour rebuttal to colonialists had, for all practical pur- of Heroin in Southeast Asia. McCoy, ers cowed Democrats into senseless as David H. Koch and the Bank of Karnow’s documentary. According poses, been treating “French” Indo- a respected academician, concludes fights that could not be won—or America, have their own reasons for to “Television’s Vietnam: The Real china as a slave labor camp for nearly that the three top figures in our Sai- even ended. The Alleged News® World Almost Ends, We Almost Miss It Nine days ago Puerto Rico was the situation any when it published a lieve in mumbo-jumbo—not of the “Depravity on Parade.” publican Caucasian, and the funds hit by its second major hurricane piece about David Meade, a self-de- Doomsday Christian variety, any- Get Smart in question would create jobs in the in less than three weeks. The is- scribed Christian numerologist who way. Out in Orange County, Calif. Shortly after our last bilious military-industrial sector while bol- land has been knocked flat. Its is now slightly famous, thanks in it’s a different story. They still believe screed began littering the fine dining stering our ability to create world 3.4 million inhabitants, all U.S. large part to the Post. Apparently in Richard Nixon, Duke Cunning- establishments of this literate, tem- peace by killing people, it would see citizens, will be without electricity Meade convinced a lot of people ham, and Jesus—in about that order. perate paradise, the Senate approved the President’s bid of $54 billion, for months. As many as 1.5 mil- that the world was ending Septem- People there were going about a $700 billion Defense Department and raise it another $26 billion. lion are said to be without potable ber 23rd. their business as usual on Septem- budget. Something about the resulting water. Apparently this information has ber 21st when their regularly-sched- President Trump—prudently $700-billion figure dislodged a syn- Two days later, the President been sitting there in the Bible, in uled programming on HGTV was assuring that the Joint Chiefs had apse—a recurring problem around of the United States took a break plain sight, at Luke 21:25 to 26, for interrupted by the familiar tone of enough cash on hand to back up his here, we fear. from taunting Kim Jong Un to tell a couple of thousand years. Appar- an Emergency Alert, followed by a September 19th threat (from the We could not rest until we had an the owners of NFL football teams ently no one had ever noticed it be- man’s voice saying things like, “Re- podium of the United Nations, an answer—did the Pentagon ever find what to say when a player kneels to fore. Work on that comprehension, alize this: in the last days, extremely international body whose primary that missing $2.3 trillion-with-a-T protest racism during the national people. violent times will come.” function is to avert human extinc- that Donald Rumsfeld talked about anthem: “Get that son of a bitch off Fortunately we’ve been so dis- The Orange County Register re- tion by nuclear holocaust) to “totally on [a little ominous background the field right now. Out! He’s fired. tracted by the concatenation of gen- ported a few days later that what had destroy North Korea”—had asked music, please] September 10, 2001? He’s fired!” uine catastrophes that we didn’t find sounded like an Emergency Alert for a budget increase of $54 billion.