Friendship and Politics in the Age of XiTrumPutin

Friendship means something more in China than in the west. It is a different experience, a delight in its sincerity and intensity but also a responsibility. It is hard to explain to a westerner who has never come under its spell. It doesn’t require constant maintenance, but when it is renewed, even after years of separation, it is understood that it is not just a lifetime commitment, but one that can transcend generations if properly observed. WeChat helps maintain these relationships, but the recent tightening of political control coming out of the 13th National People's Congress seems to be putting a damper on what we can say. You can just feel it, even though nothing is explicitly expressed. I know I will not lose touch with my friends anymore, but it feels like we are descending into another period of political estrangement, and even though our "WeChats" are innocuous and bland from a stranger's perspective, there is an undercurrent that wasn't there last year.
The major difficulty with maintaining friends with Chinese people in times like these is the fear that my publicly proclaimed opinions about, and strong disapproval of the dictatorial actions of the CCP will somehow taint my Chinese friends, cause some loss of preferment or other subtle punishment that can affect them. They claim when you see them not to be bothered by it, but just the same I try to be careful when chatting, even though if looked at objectively what I say is not related to them in the least. I know a bit about Chinese history, (with 3,000 years of continuous historical records - who can say they more know than “a bit”?) and I know it is presumptuous to judge that kind of continuity too hastily, but there is a ying and yang to that history, a cycle (天降大任) related to mandate of heaven, (天命) that China can't seem to escape. The curbs on political freedom in China deeply sadden me, and the harsh repression of those who break out of silence in China infuriates me. I hear the voices of those inside and outside China risking everything in their call for change. And I acknowledge those who say that to ignore or gloss over it, is to be complicit with it on some level.
Still - it isn’t really all that simple. I speak Chinese well enough to converse with non-English speakers on more than a superficial level, and what I heard when I was there last year was not outrage so much as resignation and a willingness to give the devil his due. I talked to strangers in restaurants, people on trains, people who helped me in ways small and large and the sum of it was - they know what is happening, they have an awareness of the repression but always put it in the larger context, the crux of which is - it is so much better now than before. Right now China is more prosperous than it has ever been. That it is freer in an economic sense cannot be denied. People can rise based on their own merits in ways that were never possible before. China is respected on the international stage and there is pride in that. This is no small thing.
It is clear to me that CCP is from an internal perspective a patriotic organization, and the majority of its pronouncements and policies are aimed at benefiting the majority of the Chinese people. It is, for the most part, rational and not driven by racist hate or even xenophobia. After our most recent election, perhaps, the CCP says, and I can not disagree, we liberals in the US need to fix things at home before we go looking for evil on the other side of the world to oppose. Besides, the last fifty years should teach us all that pressuring China on its domestic policies doesn’t work.
I can go on and justify China’s domestic policies by looking at its history and how it has reaped a lot of harm from western ideas that got warped when transferred to a Chinese context (see the underlying “Christian” ideology of the Taiping, whose revolt in the mid-19th century might have killed more people than any war in history. Or, even consider Marxism, another “Western” idea). But I have already stained myself in the eyes of some as a dupe of the Chinese Communist Party so perhaps I should just stop here. Being a cowed useful idiot is not something anyone who wants to think himself to be. I have read Ma Jin's scathing criticisms of Westerns who kowtow (磕头)to Beijing. It is very easy to understand his viewpoint.
But for me, I want to be with Zhivago, and move to the countryside with Julie Christie, and pretend none of it is happening. As I get older I find my active politics ends at the shores of the US. I feel perfectly justified at raging against the US government and everything Trump is doing, vilifying him, satirizing him, calling for his impeachment and the jailing of him, his family and henchman at the soonest moment possible. But other than shaking my head sadly at the rise of dictators elsewhere, I stay out of other countries' business.
You can make the old “What about Hitler?” argument. If I had been alive in the 30s, would I have condemned the Nazis for their racist, anti-semitic policies in the years before we knew about the Holocaust? Would I have called for boycotting everything German in those days? If the world had united and condemned them at the time, might it have had an effect? (I stare back blankly, sheepishly…acknowledging that standing against evil might really not be as complicated as I pretend.)
But contrariwise, look at Mesopotamia in the post-Bush(Jr) era. Look at what American Exceptionalism led to - maybe a million dead and a society destroyed. Many people the world over are tired of American “do-goodisms” and see us sticking our noses in other countries affairs as insulting and in the long run counterproductive to the long-term struggle of the people who actually have to live in the countries involved. I can’t see that far ahead, and history is always a surprise, so we make our choices and take our chances.
Anyway, for those of us who care about the well being and happiness of our friends to the exclusion of protesting against the government's they live under, we probably have a lot to answer for, but would in any event anyway.  

Review of "Red Mandarin Dress" by Xiaolong Qiu

This review was originally published December 31, 2012 on Amazon.com



An old man, soon to be forced out of his old familiar Shanghai dwelling by a developer of high rising, expensive apartments finds a young woman's body, her legs askew, barefoot, without underwear, clad only in a torn red Mandarin dress, (qipao). This opening scene of the Inspector Chen crime novel 'Red Mandarin Dress', illustrates the theme of the old and new China colliding with painful consequences. The Mandarin dress, is a perfect vehicle of this clash, as it was once a symbol of elegance in the China before Mao, then a symbol of decadence, only to re-emerge in the post Deng Xiaoping era as a chic symbol of wealth and status. Qui makes the dress his serial killer's calling card and the search for the killer is a trek through 20th Century China itself.

Inspector Chen, a famous Shanghai detective, is getting pressure from his Communist party bosses to take on a political case to protect the Party from embarrassment in a real estate corruption scandal. Chen, who has translated several famous Western Detective novels into Chinese, is a lifelong amateur scholar and is finally getting serious about his hobby. He wants to avoid the dirty real estate case by trying to plead off by saying he is too busy with a literature class. A noted human rights lawyer has the party in his sights again, this time by suing a crooked real estate mogul who is pushing people out of their homes. The Party wants to bring him down. Chen's maneuvering to avoid the real estate case is a classic illustration of the social mores that dictate relationships in official China. Chen is not brought in to investigate the murder until a second one occurs with the same MO - the disheveled body, suffocated, in an identical, old style, hand-made Mandarin dress. Neither one of the bodies had evidence of sexual activity.

The politics of the Chinese police play a central role in the novel. Li, the party leader, sees everything through the lens of the pre-boom China. "Check with the neighborhood committee' he says, clearly oblivious to the fact that Shanghai life had changed - at least for the wealthy. People had their own apartments now, and were not under the thumb of the old Party ladies who controlled everyone's life with gossip and 'motherly' intrusion. The real cops barely give Li lip service while moving ahead with the case based on the reality of the evidence and their available resources. Li is of course concerned because of the public nature of the crimes, because the bodies are being left in the most populated areas of the city - right on Nanjing Rd, in the center of town. The information starved daily news papers are speculating in a way worse than anything readers of Fleet Street or the NY Daily News could even conceive. Sex and Murder in a town where politics can't be seriously discussed are big stories.

There are a host of secondary characters in the novel - Chen's colleagues Liao and Yu,Yu's wife, Little Zhou, the department driver and Hong a pretty young police woman ho is assigned to the case. All are devoted to Chen and help him by doing whatever research etc that he needs. Inspector Chen also has a host of other allies, business men and restaurant owners who vie for his favor. He even has a young woman, White Cloud, whose salary is paid by Gu, who wants Chen to quit and work with him in his business. White Cloud would be anything Chen wants, but her main tasks is checking up on Chen's mother, who of course wants him to marry.

There are others too - the literature professor he studies with and his daughter, and all of the people Chen meets as he investigates the crime. Beijing (the Central Government, hated by Shanghai) continues to pressure him on the first case too, so he investigates the human rights lawyer who is suing the real estate crook.

Chen only begins to devote himself to the case when someone close to him is killed by the serial killer and we start diving into the real story of the Red Mandarin Dress. Chen is a weak man in the Western sense of the word. He is constitutionally the opposite of the typical American hard-boiled detective. He can't handle coffee much less booze. He has a serious nervous condition and he has to steel himself constantly to push on to solve the case. Chen is constantly moving in his thoughts from the past to the present and seemingly gets side-track on the most obscure points of literature. Because Chinese people have a deep respect for teachers and scholars his foibles are tolerated. Even Li the Party leader leaves him alone. As much as money drives this new China, a man like Chen retains real power because deep down, the Chinese really don't respect 'Big Buck'  guys even though they fear them. Confucius remains the model man.

The case has roots in the Cultural Revolution, which deeply scarred China and in large part, this novel is about that scarring. Chinese policy, after Cultural Revolution finally ended in 1979, was about forgetting. Too many were guilty for a full accounting. If you think of how the Vietnam War still affects the US, with division, mistrust and anger, and multiply it by ten thousand - even that, I think, would not come close to the affect that that period of discord had on China. The novel intersects the Cultural Revolution with the modern changing Chinese society in a way that is startling and yet is restrained and understated in the 'Chinese manner'.

Westerners who come to this book thinking of the other detectives whose adventures have been like Chandler's Phillp Marlowe or Hammett's Sam Spade or any of the detectives of Elmore Leonard might be frustrated by this novel. While all of these authors have their digressions - think of the long section about the history of the Maltese Falcon that Dashiell Hammett invented - still their digressions are 'hard links' to the main story. Sometimes Qui's digressions are 'soft links' - they kind of sort of fit into the big puzzle, but not directly. The novel is a bit of a scholarly romp though the history of Chinese poetry, a deconstruction of ancient stories that are told again and again, each time changing, the history of Chinese clothing - and the details of the organizational structure of the Cultural Revolution and its affect on real people. Another words, its not a detective potboiler. If you want to know who done it, you have to wait, (even though it is easy to guess about 2/3 of the way through)and if the scholarly romp doesn't interest you, then it might not be your book.

The murderer, when he is finally found, will not be an unsympathetic character. You could say that Hannibal Lector had some good qualities, but this goes way beyond that. So, once again, it is not a book that fits between the lines normally found in the genre.

Novel's like this - hybrids - are difficult to judge and grade. In math - X + = -. So if it is a good scholarly romp but a bad pot boiler - well that is a minus. I liked it - and give it 4 stars, but it has to find the right audience. I think anyone who knows China and loves it for what it is will appreciate it. If you are new to the Middle Kingdom - then be ready to adjust your expectations about what a detective novel is about.

Mother doesn't like me - Blues from the Streets of Xian

Last spring on the Streets of Xian I heard two musicians who were within a half mile of each other.  An erhu player on a freeway overpass that in 1985 was a little not-too-busy intersection.

In my novel Farewell the Dragon, my main character encounters an old, poor erhu player, about 1/4 mile from where this fellow was playing.  My erhu player would eventually become a sensation in pre-internet China - but that was just fiction.

"The next morning when the blind erhu player arrived at Xiao Zhai, I broke away from my breakfast of tea and lamb and barbecued pork on unleavened bread, and cold noodles with vinegar and cheap white liquor and found a spot to sit. He was dressed like a monk, except for his porkpie hat and fifty cent-piece sized dark round glasses. He alternated from very sad to madcap delight, matching the mood of the piece he played...I was put in a trance by the music, it was something so different from my past reveries that I was almost able to shed my so-called objective view of life.  There really is a Dao (道)...and the erhu music rode on the currents of the Dao, pulling me in..."

Click links below 

Erhu player in Xiao Zhai, Xian China

妈妈不喜欢我

And just down the street - a kind of Chinese blues - My mother doesn't love me...

Xian-blues

Introducing the Second Edition of Farewell the Dragon

The Second edition is ready! The book is available on Amazon and other bookstore outlets.  Here is a bit of an introduction to the novel.

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Farewell the Dragon Reviews

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Farewell the Dragon

Farewell the Dragon?

What is this novel, Farewell the Dragon (FTD) about and why should you read it?

Now in 2017, it is historical fiction, a slice of life from three decades ago, in a place and time unlike any we are likely to see again.

The Cold War was on its last legs, and just before the novel begins, Reagan had asked Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

China had just woken from the Cultural Revolution, and its scars are still fresh, but the anticipation big change was everywhere.

The events of Tiananmen in June of 1989 were still a couple of years away, but the clues to its genesis littered the scene. China was at the apex of Deng Xiaoping’s 改革開放; Gǎigé kāifàng; literally: "reform and opening-up" policies. Westerners with liberal arts educations were welcomed to teach with almost complete freedom, to travel, to socialize and even, if they were careful and used discretion, to love.

China was, technologically, (compared to the West) still in the 1930s. At the university where I worked, in Beijing, there was one telephone on campus, and the easiest and fastest way to quickly communicate with the outside was to send a telegram. There was one shower house, that nearly everyone had to use, for the entire faculty/foreign student side of the campus. Mass media consisted of one or two TV stations that constantly reran shots of factories, that appeared to have just been cleaned, with neatly filled bins of indeterminate raw material being dumped into recently polished cauldrons, all managed by nervous technicians dressed like Chicago meat cutters expecting a visit from the FDA inspectors. The voice over, a monotone staccato, probably spoken by unsmiling young women in clear-framed glasses and loose-fitting dull blue pants and blouse, praised local officials for raising production for the tenth year in a row. Then, in mid-sentence, the video would jerk to a painfully awkward ribbon cutting ceremony, where portly middle-aged men in Mao jackets applauded each other...

The first thing I noticed living with authoritarian propaganda is that the more governments lie and oppress free expression,  the more people will value the truth, any truth. As a foreign teacher, I was exempt from the petty Party induced paranoia that my Chinese students and colleagues had to endure, and was greeted with universal warmth and goodwill. The freedom I had, to teach what I wanted and spend my free time as I wished was the dream of everyone around me, colleagues, students, and the campus workers. My existence was a model, a thumb in the eye of the party that had decided to endure for the sake of Deng Xiaoping's grand policy statements.  It was a huge responsibility, and I squandered it with proper elan and panache to the delight of the audience that was almost always cheering. This open-door gilded cage I lived and worked in had the effect of burning out the western cynicism that I had carried around with me before coming to China. For the first time in my life, I felt like everything I did really mattered.

Thinking back, I realized I had never been so close to the people around me, especially now when we can console ourselves with fake social media-driven lives. It is ironic that enforced isolation opens people up. The thrill was amplified by China itself because the incredible physical change to China, the make-over of the cities with endless skyscrapers of recent years had not begun. In the 80s, Beijing was still, for the most part, a flat, one or two storey city of alleyways, or "hutongs". But the psychological change was already rolling through the city like a slow moving tsunami. Clothing styles were morphing overnight. Mao jackets and blue work jackets were changed to blouses, skirts, and jeans. Arrogant attitudes and sexually tinged postures were being tried out, basement dance clubs started appearing in the outlying reaches of the city, reverberating with nasty metal-rock from cheap Taiwan-made boomboxes. Secret clubs for foreign businessmen and their special Chinese friends were rumored to be opened at certain hours on certain days. The feeling was electric and affected everyone, from students to workers, and the Party itself. Foreigners were becoming more numerous and you could see the effect it was having on the Chinese people.  But the oppression of the Cultural Revolution still held sway, psychologically if not in fact.

The FTD story takes place between August and October 1987, primarily in the university section of Beijing, in the northwest corner of the city. The main character doesn’t really want to leave China but circumstances are making it increasingly inevitable. Nathan Schuett, a former liberal American Democratic party political operator in his mid-thirties, has put himself into a fix by quitting his teaching job before securing the next one as a software businessman. Worse he has allowed his romantic life to become too complicated. 

But when he finds the nearly naked bodies of two university colleagues, both shot, things really begin to spin out of control. A West German woman and Hungarian man who may or may not have been romantically linked lay dead in her apartment, where Nate looks briefly for clues to a crime that no one seems to want to solve.

Nate is a man of his generation, a man who understands women’s liberation to mean sexual liberation for himself. Thirty years previously, in the 1950s, and thirty years later, (now), he would be seen for different reasons, as a disgusting philanderer. But the eighties, the disco-cocaine years before AIDs, was the high watermark in male-centric promiscuity. As Rodney Dangerfield put it at the end of Caddie Shack. "We're all going get laid!"

The double standard still applied though. He suspects that his American girlfriend has returned to the US in order to have a tryst with her former beau, and he intends to use the time apart to get his own. The authorial inspiration for his outraged jealous lust was partially inspired by Sir Harry Flashman, a bounding 19th Century Englishman, made famous in George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. Flashman sees any sexual opportunity in the same the way that a Bedouin crossing the desert sees an oasis. Flashman, who also had a romantic adventure in China in one of the novels, (see “Flashman and the Dragon”), was the hilarious fictional epitome of “white Privilege”, and Nate was consciously meant to be his fictional descendant.

Flashman and the Dragon

The other literary inspiration for FTD was Victor Selgalen’s novel “Rene Leys”, a much under-appreciated tale of the last days of the Qing Empire, the story of a young Belgian man who comes and goes, in and out of the inner chambers of the Forbidden City.

Rene Leys

Nate is an English teacher, but also an aspiring business man.  He was a seemingly reasonable and obliquely patriotic, if mildly left-wing American, surrounded mostly by students and officials on sabbatical from the Soviet Empire. By all accounts, Nate was a model teacher at the Beijing Foreign Language school. He can get by in the Chinese language but is no scholar. After finding the bodies, he tells his story to a couple of Beijing cops investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two foreigners. On the surface, it appears like a murder-suicide, or possibly a double suicide. But for some reason, Nate knows it is more complicated than that.

When not being interrogated, there are tantalizing anecdotes told over drinks at the Friendship Hotel bar to go with the endless gossiping about amorous escapades, bizarre encounters at an illegal Beijing Bordello, forbidden East/West love, as well as a cameo or two by some famous personalities of the era.

For Nate, China is a self-imposed exile from Reagan's America. Now, in January 2017, we are entering a new era that has echoes of the 1980s. Back then, a reactionary old white man with huge gaps in his apparent knowledge had been elected President, and he threatened to undo much of the liberal fabric of the country. During the 80s, the income gap had soared, labor unions were being decimated, death squads were supported at the edges of the American Empire and the rich and powerful were made more so. For those that don’t remember the 80’s, well, it appears we are getting a chance to relive those years (in Marxist terminology, the sequence occurred first as a tragedy, and now seemingly somewhat farcically). Maybe "Farewell the Dragon" will inspire more self-imposed exiles, which in the long run, will only bring the world closer together. Remember Dante wrote the Divine Comedy as an exile.

Is China Changing Direction?

Many China watchers seem to have come to the conclusion that China is no longer on the road toward moderate, semi-democratic liberality, but is passing into a point of no return toward permanent strongman dictatorship.  

The change is clearly related to Trump’s election, although the reasons why this is true are somewhat complex.  The event that most illustrates this sea change is the recent CCP decision to remove the term limits on its Premier.  Everyone seems to assume that this is solely Xi Jinping's decision and that he wants to be the "Maximum Leader" for life, whether as Premier, head of the military or Party Chairman or all three.  But, as far as western analysts go, no one really knows exactly why this was done, or even if it is definitely a done deal. Nor does anyone know what it really means for China’s future.

There is a multitude of China pessimists on the scene now, you see them on Fox and some of the financial networks. They have been emboldened to criticise those who had more or less subscribed to the theory that as China’s middle class prospers and becomes educated and connected in various ways with the west, that it would slowly become more democratic, and liberal regarding human rights, censorship, and economic policy.  

While I worry about recent trends being fostered by Beijing, I am not convinced that there will be a major retrenchment in the political culture that has taken hold there, especially in the affluent cities. China has come too far and is too highly integrated with the west to risk becoming isolated again.  Relationships on every level are still in place, and while the computerized control of information is pervasive (not just in China), computerized tools, such as private VPN's needed for business, also allow people to know more about what is going on both inside and outside their country. That newly minted class of professionals doesn’t and I believe will not accept blatant propaganda anymore. People can only live with falsehoods so much before the absurdity can no longer be tolerated. I do believe this is true in China, but that it will express itself differently than how we would expect it to unfold in the West.

We can't fool ourselves and whitewash history. Ten thousand people died in the streets of Beijing in June 1989, and the Chinese people, for the most part, know that. But those events proved that they are not a fearful people, and they don’t have infinite patience, particularly if they begin to lose any ground economically. There are real limits to what the CCP can do.

Perhaps it is time to change the context of the conversation. The United States has been the prime mover in China’s sudden rise and in my opinion, especially on a people-to-people level, the Chinese know and appreciate this.  They know we were responsible for beating Japan in 1945 and ending its occupation of China.  The US gradually opened its markets, its universities, and its corporations to China over the last 30 years.  In the 19th Century, the US was perhaps the least egregious in its grabbiness toward the weakened Qing Dynasty. We never had any territorial claims on China, and in fact, John Hay’s Open Door policy was the only Western initiative that respected China's administrative and territorial integrity.  In many ways, China’s reclamation of its own destiny began with that.

The CCP has moved on from its revolutionary paranoia and jingoism and now for better or worse, represents historical China. The Party functionaries are chosen primarily by merit now and they understand the importance of stability and continuity in its relationships with the outside world. Taking the long view, China through its history has not had an inclination toward far-flung aggression.  They eventually overwhelmed Genghis Khan's Mongols by absorbing them, and they primarily see their real power to be based on its way of life and its people. While in the long run, this might actually be more threatening to "our way of life", that is something future generations will have to decide based on the cards they have to play.  One thing we do know is China is and will continue to be a fact of life. I am convinced our progeny will be worse off if we position ourselves as an enemy of China. 

China is really a vulnerable and fragile country, and that also will continue to be a fact. Its first responsibility is to feed its own population and to manage their own wealth gap that has massively widened in the last decade.  In that regard, they are not out of the woods yet, in spite of their fat bank accounts. It is a country at great risk for devastating drought, as its three major rivers all are sourced within a few hundred miles of each other in the Himalayas.  On their borders, they have potentially powerful and at times unfriendly neighbors in India and Russia as well as a host of smaller powers (Vietnam, Korea, Japan, even Taiwan) that are perhaps more dangerous.  China has very legitimate security concerns that have little or nothing to do with the United States.

China absolutely needs to keep exporting and depends on free navigation of the seas. While they are building a new navy, they are decades away from being able to militarily threaten the US, nor does that appear to be their aim.  Our two economies are in a symbiotic relationship, (or if you prefer, a mutual death grip, the fight between the snipe and the clam, 鹬蚌相争.)  This relationship between China and the US was Henry Kissinger’s legacy project in many ways, and if you read his book On China, published in 2011, you can see that while understanding the dangers, he doesn’t think that conflict is inevitable. 

We have to continue to forge a peaceful relationship with China. We have come too far to bail out now.   China will sink into chaos if we suddenly stopped buying stuff from them, and our bond markets will collapse if they stopped buying our financial paper.  Anyone who wants to take us to that point, (as Trump seems to with his tariff proposals) is the enemy of the majority of Americans who would (at best case) be sunk into penury as a result of those actions.  

It is true the United States soon won’t have overwhelming and unchallengeable power in East Asia.  To that I say, welcome to the normal course of history America. The last seventy years of American dominance has been the exception to history, and it is unsustainable. We are going to need sophisticated diplomats and a coherent long-term policy, that is clearly understood by all if our children are to thrive in the coming century. China, or any other country for that matter, has a right not be subject to threat and intimidation, and when we announce the kind of military expansion Trump is calling for, that is what he is signaling.   

If we do make it to a post-Trump era, we will have to become a normal nation that lives with the rest of the world as a neighbor, hopefully in a measure of peace and friendship.  The alternative is to live in a militarized state, with no say in the larger existential questions that hang over our society.  And if that alternative is the course we choose, then what exactly is it that we were complaining about regarding China?

Acupuncture

I have been treated with acupuncture 8 or 9 times, including a 'miraculous' tennis elbow cure. One time, (for a stiff neck) it had no effect at all, once it could have played a role in recovery, but it could have been something else just as logically, and the other two times, I am sure it played a role. But I admit, I can not forcefully argue with someone who is skeptical other than to say it happened to me, and I know my body and I listen to it and I can feel what is going on in it. But that is too subjective – so forget I said it. Anyway, all of the 'cures' I experienced were  'mechanical' injuries, shoulder, neck, elbow, wrist. So my experience is pretty limited.

I taught English at Xian Medical College (now University) in 1985-86. My main class was about 30 doctors, most late 20s to mid-30s, (my age at the time). They wanted to learn English, to study in the west, and I was successful getting almost all of them to pass Tofel after one year. I had a good relationship with all of them – we were together through a lot of turmoil and stress as well as good times. We would have discussions about medicine and Chinese success and failure in science. Did you know the Chinese successfully reattached a hand on a western sailor in the early 1960s? That kind of micro-surgery, meticulous, painstaking in a Chinese way, was not done in the West back then. Anyway, in spite of that and other points discussed, some of my Chinese doctor-students had no faith in Chinese medicine or acupuncture in particular. All of them were scientists and knew that they had to study in the West to continue their work. One or two privately expressed to me that they didn't think acupuncture or any Chinese medicine was worth the time, effort and faith that Chinese people put into it. At the time I thought that those views were related to their disillusionment with China because of the recently ended Cultural Revolution, which had affected all of the students in some way or another. But of most of my students thought acupuncture and other Chinese medical techniques could be effective in some cases, when applied by the right doctor. And several had great faith in it.

I had a chronic case of 'tennis elbow' that I developed before going to China and it continued to plague me. One day when I was in front of the class teaching, one of my students noticed how I was holding my elbow crooked and close to my body as I wrote on the blackboard with the other hand. After class he asked me about it, I described it and he offered to treat it. I was very skeptical, but we went back to my apartment and he put one needle in in the soft area between my thumb and forefinger, one about 8 inches above my wrist, and one near my shoulder. He twisted the one on my hand and it felt like a funnybone 'shock' through my arm. He removed the needles and my elbow was instantly cured. It never recurred either.

The doctor who treated me for the elbow, Zhang, was the most respected Doctor in the class. His father had been a famous doctor in Shanghai before “Liberation”. His family suffered throughout the 50s and 60s, (Hundred Flowers Movement and Great Leap Forward, Four Pests Movement, etc) because he was from a relatively rich family. He told me as a young medical student he rejected Chinese traditional medicine. Undoubtedly the Maoist campaigns of the post Liberation period were a factor in this rejection and was related to his disappointment in his own country at that time.

But he re-discovered the effectiveness of acupuncture compared to western medicine when he was exiled out in the deep rural countryside during the Cultural Revolution. There, far from the cities, lacking access to basic modernity, he had no other means of pain alleviation for his patients, (except herbs he might find). So he taught himself acupuncture from a copy of a 2000-year-old text. He began slowly, teaching himself techniques from the ancient text, at first using it for simple cures, (like he would do for my elbow), but eventually, he even used it as anesthesia for open thorax surgery. He claimed he also was able to use it on livestock because he was also the local veterinarian. I can say I have never met a more humble, hard working or self-effacing man in my life. He was behind in his English proficiency when we started and was older than most, but he quickly caught up with and passed most of the class. I taught these doctors 3 days - 12 hours a week for an entire school year so I can say I got to know him. I believed what he told me.

People only have a limited time to learn what they do in life. Everything we do has an economic "opportunity cost". Opportunity cost (OC) is the time (and money) it takes for whatever you do.  That OC is the price you pay for what you don't have time to do. So if a modern person is busy studying what we call medical science, then she has to pay the OC  - forgo the opportunity of not learning the medical lessons of the distant past.  While we have advanced in many ways, we still only have the same amount of time as our ancestors, so we are subject to that 'opportunity cost' through time.

In some ways, this OC is the most important factor in what separates us from the past.

There is no reason to think people who lived 5000 years ago were not as "smart" as we are, that their minds could not handle deep, subtle thought and analysis. They paid attention to signs, the traces of information that we would miss – because they were not distracted by our modernity. Polynesians navigated the Pacific by watching and noticing subtle changes in the waves, the wind, and the kinds of fish and of course the sun, moon, and stars as well. They could see things that no modern man can. Medicine in the great civilizations before 'science' was practiced by serious men. Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages was a medical doctor by profession. He had no 'science', as we know it, but was renown for his medical skill around the Mediterranean. Knowing from his writing just how profound of a philosopher he was, and how dedicated he was to the truth, how could we think he thought any less deeply as a Doctor?

If a Chinese "traditional" doctor, or a medieval practitioner like Maimonides, trained and practiced to 'listen' to the body, in ways that  we consider 'unscientific' was still able to produce good results – (and they did – as did Galen the Greek, known as the "Father of Medicine" because of his detailed writings from 2000 years ago) -  then it is because while our doctors are struggling with all of the science of their field, such as genetics, biology.organic chemistry etc, Chinese traditional doctors spent their time watching and looking and learning the hidden messages that the body sends out. The smells, the palpitations, the contours of the organs that they could feel through the skin, etc all portend changes and disturbances in our biological functions. These ancient doctors created 2000 years of documentation, (from completely different traditions).  So in one sense, it is in part what we call science because their methods are still repeatable, (if enough time is taken to study the methods.)

Is it as effective or predictable as modern medicine practiced in the west? For most cases, I don't think so, and most modern traditional doctors probably would not think so either.  It would be foolish to ignore the advances of Western medicine.

But - Do I believe in acupuncture? Yes – mainly because I have never had a cure as quick or as total as what I had when Zhang healed my elbow. And my faith is such that I believe that if Zhang said he could cure me of a deeper disease with it, I would trust that he could. I think for a practitioner who dedicates himself to the art, acupuncture can be very effective. In some cases (such as my frozen shoulder of 5 years ago that the orthopedic doctor told me would take six months to heal – and was healed within three weeks by acupuncture) it is a powerful tool, in some cases better than the best techniques the West has.

Which brings me to the 'placebo' effect. What is that? A double-blind test where one set of participants takes a sugar pill and it cures them. Western doctors laugh and say it was the placebo. What does that mean? 

“Oh – well – it's in their head – they wanted to believe it so it worked”. 

“Oh – why?” 

“Well – the body is mysterious and works in strange ways...”

Yes – it does. And I think Chinese medicine might be better in sync with those mysteries than western medicine.

The Yankee Cowboy War By Carl Oglesby

 (From a Review published on Amazon, December 1, 2013)

The 50th Anniversary of the murder of JFK in Dallas has come and gone and we (US culture as defined by TV, cable and broadcast) seemed to have accepted that we will probably never know what happened and it is probably better that we don't. Which made it time for me to re-read the best 'Conspiracy' book of all, Carl Oglesby's "The Yankee Cowboy War". Naturally, it is now out of print.

Oglesby would probably have been the first to admit that it is good to listen to the cautious voices now and again. During the 50th Anniversary week, we re-learned from a thoughtful mini-documentary by Errol Morris on the NY Times website that The Umbrella Man was probably Louis Steven Witt, who in 1978 claimed he was just a protester against Kennedy's Father, who supported the Umbrella-wielding Neville Chamberlain's Appeasements to the Nazis before World War II.

The Umbrella Man, who so many Conspiracy Nuts, including yours truly, had assumed was Exhibit A in the closing argument of almost any of the various, sometimes contradictory 'alternate' theories, was 'obviously' a rifle-fire controller of some sort, signaling to the spread-out marksman to commence fire when he opened his umbrella. However, investigator Joshua Thompson now convinces me that I was wrong.

Oglesby doesn't mention the Umbrella Man in The Yankee Cowboy War.

During the week-long media remembrance, almost everyone, without apparent irony, referred to Oswald as the lone assassin. Of course, much of the reflection was about 'us', what the day-light murder of the 35th President meant for us, “where were you when”  human interest features ... Aging New Frontier types droned on about JFK's courage, ideals and vision and how handsome he was and the loss of the dream. But mostly the line was that Oswald was a leftist nut who got off a lucky shot and then was murdered himself on National TV. And even though Oswald's killer was on first name basis with almost every cop in Dallas, including the chief and had known ties to Mafia that went back to Capone, he too – was just a lone nut. But don't despair, In spite of it all, American resilience and national spirit allowed us to persevere and move forward just as JFK would have wanted us to ... we did get to the moon after all.

There was a low budget documentary “JFK: The Smoking Gun”, introduced by an aging Bill Curtis, that rehashed the Howard Donahue theory as told by Bonar Menninger (re-examined and confirmed as likely by a veteran Australian police detective, Colin McLaren) that Secret Service Agent George Hickey, riding in the back seat of the following car, reacting to the sound of Oswald's first shot, grabbed an automatic rifle and while turning toward the sound, inadvertently pulled the trigger and hit Kennedy in the head, ending Camelot. In spite of its breathless, late night cable sensationalism, it was a useful addition to the national 'dialogue' such as it is. The documentary ignored any evidence of a larger conspiracy, and focused strictly on the ballistic evidence, (The kill shot fragmented, the Magic Bullet did not, how could they be from the same gun?). It also looked at the bizarre post-assassination behavior of the Secret Service at Parkland Hospital and the circus atmosphere of the Bethesda Autopsy.

But the media Big shots wanted no part in making the public think about flaws in the National Cover Story.

Over 1,100 documents relating to the assassination remain classified in the National Archives. The United States is not alone in clinging to national amnesia about painful memories. Chile, Spain, Russia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, more recently Serbia have all shown a reluctance to the face the truth about the nasty aspects of their past. The list is much longer than that. I can hear the practical unsentimental voices of hard men I have known both personally and from a distance (mostly now all dead ...) "Jesus Christ pull your head out ... It is easy to understand. Some people thought things were going off the rails - rightly or wrongly they considered themselves patriots - they made a move and got us back on the track they thought was right - and of course it had to stay quiet. You saw what happened in the sixties - the riots, unending demonstrations - the government would never have survived if the truth came out back then - Is that what you wanted? - Hitler or Lenin ? Because that would be the choice! Once you start a lie you can't go back. It is not that hard to figure out ..."

I look across time and see those hard men fade into the mist and wonder if it could have been any different than that ... Olgesby understood those that made the 'keep it quiet' argument - but he posed a different view, one just as hard-headed and practical, one that would have required a clear eyed, patriotic belief in the real decency and honor of the country. But, after listening to the talking heads of the national media all week, one might think that as a society, we just don't have the stomach for demanding an answer. One thing is sure - Oglesby would have had none of that kind of pessimism.

Carl Oglesby was raised in Akron Ohio son of a rubber factory worker. His people were Appalachian Hill folk who migrated north for the work. In 1964, while supporting his family working as a tech writer for a defense contractor, he wrote a dense, finely reasoned and withering critique of the then slowly escalating Vietnam War for a University of Michigan campus magazine where he was a part-time student. Within a year he was elected President of the 'radical' Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS). He was perhaps most noted for his speech at huge Anti-War Protest in Washington in 1965. According to another writer, Oglesby's speech was "...a devastating performance: skilled, moderate, learned, and compassionate, but uncompromising, angry, radical, and above all persuasive. It drew the only standing ovation of the afternoon....". In 1969, as the protests fizzled and Nixon took power, Oglesby was drummed out of the SDS for not being 'left' enough. Oglesby saw connections between leftist critiques of the Government and Libertarian concepts. I saw him on Bill Buckley's 'Firing Line' at least once in the 1970s. He later assumed an academic post (at MIT) and died in 2011.

The Yankee-Cowboy War's opening paragraphs sum up the book best. "The two events - Dallas and Watergate - are actually concrete links in a chain of related and ominous events passing through the entire decades in which they occurred and beyond. ... Dallas and Watergate are intrinsically linked conspiracies in a hidden drama of coup and counter-coup which represents the life of an inner oligarchic power sphere ... a clandestine American state, perhaps an embryonic police state."

The book is mostly a history lesson, but also a detective story, that owes much to the narrative consciousness of Thomas Pynchon, casting a big net over a lot of free swimming facts that can clearly be explained in many ways. It is a vision of the history of the 20th Century, depicting the actors as they exit the main stage and play out their real stories in the dark unseen corners of history's other theater. The Yankees are old money oligarchs, Rockefeller, Ivy League bankers, Atlantic facing easterners. The Cowboys are new money Westerners, defense industry moguls, oil and mineral magnates, pacific facing Stanford educated academics. Olgesby did not invent this dichotomous view of American History, but he expands on it, dramatizes it and draws possible connections between events and people that had never been made previously. He is a scholar though, and never descends to the persona of the shadowy, off-center-frame 'academic' of the History Channel shows about Area 51 and the like. He minds the 'gaps' in the facts and points them out and doesn't strain coincidences.

The Yankee Cowboy War starts on the eve of World War II, as Meyer Lansky and Fulgencio Batista made a pact allowing the syndicate to control the molasses trade and the Havana Casinos. (See "The Godfather Part II"). It would later expand to black market rubber, which brings in Nixon, as a recent law school graduate working in Roosevelt's Price Control Bureau Board in the rubber section. One of the mechanics of the Syndicate's tire smuggling operations was Beebe Robozo, who it is postulated, met Nixon in these days and cemented Nixon's position into a possible 'group' that combines the darker sides of American clandestinity with Cowboy aggressiveness and Nixon's special talents. A case before Nixon's section is decided in favor of the 'importers', but all the notes are missing ... It proves nothing of course, as Oglesby is quick to point out. We aren't even sure that Nixon was involved ...but you have to wonder what Rebozo and Nixon had in common that would make Beebe his friend of last resort. (Later in the book, Oglesby returns to that period where Jack Ruby gets his start as a messenger boy for Al Capone in Chicago.)

Oglesby's definition of that darker side is based on two facts. The first was the well-known alliance (Operation Underworld) that was formed when Lansky offered to protect the American waterfront from Axis sabotage for certain considerations - considerations that lead to easy time and eventual freedom for Lucky Luciano, for Patton's tanks flying the Mafia Black and Yellow flag on his run through Sicily, returning the Mafia to power on the Island. After the war, the CIA supported the Corsican gangs in Marseilles France, pushing the Communist-controlled French dock workers out of jobs and power. (Remember where the heroin smugglers were based in The French Connection?) A working relationship between the US Government and the Syndicate developed and continued into the fifties and sixties.

The second dark event that the war brought into the American Espiocracy was Reinhard Gehlen's defection from the Nazis to the Americans in 1945. Gehlen was (according to Wikipedia) a Major General in the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Starting in 1942 he served as chief of the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front. During the emerging phases of the Cold War, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union (known as the Gehlen Organization) which employed numerous former SS, SD and Wehrmacht officers and eventually became head of the West German intelligence apparatus. He served as the first president of the Federal Intelligence Service until 1968.

According to Oglesby, Gehlen recruited himself. He hid boxes of material on his Eastern Front spy network in Bavaria and used it as a bargaining chip to secure his conditions - conditions that stated he would run the network himself with no oversight from the Americans. That he would act autonomously as almost a sovereign entity selling answers but not methods to the western Espiocracies. Americans authorized these former Nazis - not just Gehlen, but his whole vast Eastern European network - to continue working against America's former allies.

These alliances with high-level Nazis and Western gangsters would begin to erode 'the ideals' that Americans thought shaped the actions and behaviors of the elites who controlled their Government. These Ideals, that true power sprang from the people, Abraham Lincoln stuff, was perhaps believed in more back then than it is now. Olgesby suggests that these alliances provided the rationale for why the US Government slipped into the behavior that it used to manage its worldwide post-war empire - behavior that condoned actions to undermined foreign governments at will and to mislead its own people about their nation's actions.

The whole Bay of Pigs thing ...

June 23, 1972, 1 pm. - Nixon and Halderman together
NIXON: Okay (unintelligible) and, ah, just, just postpone the (unintelligible, with noises) hearings (15 second unintelligible, with noises) and all that garbage. Just say that I have to take a look at the primaries (unintelligible) recover (unintelligible) I just don't (unintelligible) very bad, to have this fellow Hunt, ah, you know, ah, it's, he, he knows too damn much and he was involved, we happen to know that. And that it gets out that the whole, this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it's a fiasco, and it's going to make the FB, ah CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate for CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy, and he just better tough it and lay it on them. Isn't that what you...
HALDEMAN: Yeah, that's, that's the basis we'll do it on and just leave it at that.

Oglesby they spends time laying out the now well known history of the failed Bay of Pigs operations. In many ways, the Yankee Cowboy War is about what Nixon meant in the above tape, which directly follows the more famous excerpt that proved Nixon's involvement in the coverup and forced him to resign.

Nixon was the political 'angel' behind the Bay of Pigs planning. As the fading Eisenhower's young ambitious Vice President, Nixon was in on all of the meetings that set up the operations, the assassination attempt on Castro, the landings, the B-26 air cover. And of course when Kennedy in the 'Five O'clock shadow' debate inferred that it was Nixon who was soft on Castro, Nixon had to let it slide, (you can imagine him boiling inside as he kept silent ...) so as not to compromise the operation. Then, having won the election and taken over the Nixon plans, Kennedy failed to send in the planes or approve the CIA hit on Castro. Which was consistent with Kennedy's often stated principal, (contrary to George Will) that the US would only support counter revolutions when they had the people's support.

Oglesby suggests that Kennedy was killed because of his principled refusal to support right wing counter revolution in Cuba. Oglesby's theory is a well known and often repeated by others in many contexts. But in my opinion, the deeper motivations and the historical forces that hold it all together - the real Why - is better explained by Olgesby, explained more boldly or clearly, than any other thing I have read or heard. He explains the deeply embedded, Cowboy resentment of Kennedy's failure to commit totally in Cuba. It wasn't just Communism or the desire to "free" the Cuban people that the Cowboy's resented - it was the loss of the Mob's Havana Mother lode.

If you accept that non-intervention is indeed what Kennedy wanted to apply to our foreign policy and it is what he would have done if he had lived, then it is fair to ask - Was it the right stance? It was a moral principle as well as a tactical and strategic view point. George Kennan, laid it all out in 1947 in the Long Telegram, his famous coded telex sent from the US embassy in Moscow which analyzed Russian history and essential said that Communism really changed nothing, that Russia would follow its national interests which had not changed since Czarist times. Kennan's document recommended 'Containment rather than confrontation' . Me thinks history has proved Kennan correct. Consider - Vietnam fought and defeated its sponsor, China, in a bloody conflict within three years of the last US helicopter leaving Saigon. Doesn't sound like the Domino Theory to me. This has been the sticking point for Yankees and Cowboys ever since and continues today. Are we dealing with "A Global Menace" or several semi-independent states or state-like entities acting out in easy to understand ways? The other related sticking point is that Cowboys have a superiority complex, they see America as Exceptional, a condition many of them believe is invoked by God. History once again ... is covered with the dust of past empires.

What is it that fundamentally divides Cowboys from Yankees? Cowboys always fall back on Churchill's warnings about Hitler in the 1930's and always seem to put policy disagreements in terms of appeasement - an argument that is not always applicable. You could almost say the whole thing boils down to - was Central Europe in the 1930's an aberration or was it the historical norm? Except for hereditary kingdoms like North Korea, I think Nazi Germany was a historical aberration because most modern states seem to have developed decent safe guards against psychotics taking power. Cowboys, in the final analysis, tend to lean on that argument that we have to prepare for the final showdown, and to always expect that the next threat will rise to that level. But doesn't that thinking doom us to perpetual war or a perpetual state of war preparation? Isn't that the very condition that Orwell (the Great Anti-Communist writer - Churchill's literary counterpart) warned us of - that the way we lose our freedom is to be in perpetual war, because the state can justify anything then? For Cowboys, there doesn't seem to be any other options, and it becomes of course a self-fulfilling prophecy.

George Will in a recent column (11/20/13, Washington Post) tried to preemptively undermine the theory that Kennedy supported (or would have, in the end, supported) non-intervention in Vietnam by using public quotes of JFK and RFK to show that Kennedy was not contemplating any exit from Vietnam. Oglesby strongly answers this argument. He lists quotes from a number of men who knew Kennedy well and conferred with him regularly on foreign policy, General James Gavin among them, men who were convinced that regardless of what he said in public (he had an election coming up in 1964) he would have pulled out of Vietnam. His basis of deciding was - Could the South stand on its own (with low intensity Special Forces help) or not? It was becoming clear in the fall of 1963 that they could not. Ten days before the assassination, Kennedy told Wayne Morse of Oregon, (the only Senate heavyweight to stand against involvement from the beginning) "Wayne, I want you to know you are absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy. I am in the midst of an intense study which substantiates your position on Vietnam." Kennedy was really the realist, trying to base his foreign policy on national interest. Emotional arguments should not enter into it. Clearly, the extended engagement the US eventually made in Vietnam was not in our long term interest. Yet, even still, jumping ahead (and going back) to the refrain we heard as Bush 2 took power that "the adults are back in charge", Cowboys portray themselves as the hard-headed, practical ones, like those gravelly voices I used to hear.

We all know that before Watergate, Hunt and Cubans tried and failed to break into the safe of Las Vegas Sun publisher, and former Bugsy Siegel associate Hank Greenspun. What was in the safe? Why did the Watergate Burglars go after it? Oglesby thinks that Howard Hughes' former high level assistant Robert Maheu, (a former FBI and CIA man) had hidden something there.

The Spruce Goose project and Hughes' personal style (and growing delusional paranoia) hit the wall in his failure to comply with the bureaucracy of the government war materiel procurement. As we move into the 50's we see the conflict between Hughes Tool, (the company started by his father, which was independently managed and very successful due in part to its dominance of the oil drill bit business) and his own schemes which revolved around airplanes and Casinos. He was moving into Mob territory and there is evidence that he was an early partner with Lansky and later swindled by Lansky's group. It is a long and complicated story, that perhaps is best simply explained as Yankee banks trying to take over Cowboy Howard's personal property - in this case TWA. Airlines can not be run like loan sharking operations and that is essentially what it had become. Hughes tried to use his money to buy anybody who could help him overturn court judgments that were bleeding him of money and power, people like Nixon (through his hapless brother Donald) or Democrats (such as Larry O'Brien, former Chairman of the Party and then future Commissioner of the NBA). Meanwhile Hughes Tool had become an essential player in the CIA's quest for technical dominance in the Cold War, developing the Glomar submarine which was used by the Company (CIA) to try to salvage a sunken Russian nuclear submarine. Hughes was super rich, growing crazier by the day and had his fingers on a lot of important buttons. The chapter on Hughes is again fascinating and in the end Oglesby does not give us a smoking gun. But Oglesby makes a good circumstantial case - guess more than case - that the safe contained evidence that linked Nixon to some of the shadier aspects of the Bay of Pigs (such as the use of the Mob as a hit squad) and to later actions, which these teams (Hunt and the Cubans and others) might have performed.

Ruby's Blues

Jack Ruby is an enigma that who really never satisfied anyone, not conspiracy theorists or those who choose the saner yet crazier path.

One witness, former stripper Rose Cherami, predicted the assassination in front of several people just before it occurred as she and several nurses watched the Dallas Motorcade on TV from a mental hospital common room. She also said that Ruby and Oswald were good friends. She had worked in Ruby's Carousel Club. Another stripper, Julie Ann Mercer, driving up Elm, saw Ruby with a rifle at the Triple overpass an hour before the shooting. Other witnesses that put Officer Tippett, Oswald and Ruby together at Ruby's Carousel Club. But these witnesses were easy to impeach of course, (they were strippers) and their testimony never made it into the Warren Commission.

Still enough inculpatory evidence existed to make Ruby's confession of motive, (to save Jackie the emotional pain of having to return to Dallas for Oswald's trial) seem contrived to say the least. Ruby did testify under questioning several times for many hours before Chief Justice Warren and Congressman Gerald Ford and the rest of the Commission. Oglesby selects and annotates the hundreds of pages of dry testimony into a Shakespearean tragedy. It is an amazing read. Essentially he shows Ruby concealing into order to reveal. Ruby wants to be taken out of Dallas to Washington and given a lie detector or put "under pentathol or what ever you call it.." He says that if he tells them the truth in Dallas that "his people would be tortured and mutilated". He becomes on first name basis with the Chief Justice. When he asked to be moved to Washington away from Dallas they change the subject - he asked them "Am I boring you?" Several times he says directly, that he killed Kennedy.

P. 130
"...they already have me as the accused assassin of our beloved President." The commission must have given him a blank look as this new idea tried to register: Ruby shot Kennedy? Ruby says, "Now if I sound screwy telling you this, then I must be screwy."
Warren rallies his senses and moves into the breech:
WARREN: Mr. Ruby, I think you are entitled to a statement to this effect, because you have been frank with us and have told us your story. I think I can say to you that there has been no witness before this commission out of the hundreds we have questioned who has claimed to have any personal knowledge that you were a party to any conspiracy to kill our President.
RUBY: Yes, but you don't know this area here.
WARREN: ...if any witness should testify before the Commission that you were, to their knowledge, a party to any conspiracy to assassinate the President, I assure you that we will give you the opportunity to deny it and take any tests you may desire to so disprove it.

But how does he know that this is what Ruby is talking about or that Ruby would necessarily want to "deny and disprove" it?

It goes on like that, with Ruby playing Cat & Mouse and the Commission pushing him away from the implications of what he is saying. If you want 'proof ' of a conspiracy by the government to hide the truth about the assassination, you need look no further than the Ruby transcripts. The Commissioners bob and weave and move away from the implications of what he is trying to tell them. They bring in a psychiatrist to say that he is crazy, but under Oglesby's analysis of that testimony, it is clear that effort fails. Nothing is easy or clear cut about the Jack Ruby story, it is foggy from start to finish. Oglesby doesn't simplify it, but the more your read the more you know that something was in all that smoke and fog, just outside of our view.

Howard Hunt's wife Dorthy Hunt's was killed in the crash of United 553 on December 8, 1972 at Midway Field in Chicago. Would they actual bring down a commercial jet to silence a witness? This chapter is hard to read because the overall premise seems so outrageous. Dorthy Hunt suitcase was found with $10K but other evidence suggests that she actually was carrying a half a million, which has never turned up. Olgesby lays out the evidence that a team of Mob specialists in airline crime was in the 'vicinity' and had the experience and means to pull it off. On December 9, the day after the crash, 'Bud' Egil Krogh, Halderman's aide and Segretti's boss was made under secretary of Transportation and the only thing he did during his tenure was over see the investigations of the crash. He removed the technical competent staff and installed politically compliant people. It is all, again, circumstantial - the circumstances go on and on - and it is too incredible and hard to believe yet, you can not look away - cyanide found in the blood of the pilots, the flight recorders were tampered and made useless. The evidence piles on and on and it leaves you shaking your head. Forty passengers and three crew members died in the crash.

Then we get to Watergate. The Cubans, Hunt and Liddy have already tried to get into Greenspun's safe in Las Vegas. Now they went into the Watergate complex and tried to break into Larry O'Brien safe in the Democratic Headquarters but are caught because James McCord left a piece of door tape visible. A security guard saw the tape and they were arrested. Of all the President's men, the most overlooked and discounted was the one that Oglesby focuses on - McCord - who was he? The cover story was he was a former FBI and CIA employee, who retired after an undistinguished career, then formed a security company and was hired by CREEP (Even evil fictional organizations - CHAOS and SPECTRE - don't come close to encompassing the underlying meaning of the "Committee to REElect the President"). Oglesby's research reveals that McCord was, even before Kennedy was President, one of the greatest American spies of the twentieth Century. During World War II, as an FBI agent, he worked on operations against German spies. He also had a hand in uncovering the Russian network which included Whitaker Chambers. McCord joined the CIA in 1951. He worked for the "Company's" Physical Security Division. He debriefed a pilot who had been downed in Russia and the pilot later recalled that McCord immediately identified the English instructor the Russians had assigned to be a minder for the pilot. McCord was in the loop. In 1962 McCord became a CIA senior security officer in Europe, working closely with MI5. He then become head of Physical Security at Langley CIA headquarters. McCord retired from the CIA in August, 1970 and then joined CREEP.

Another words, one of the most competent spies alive regarding "physical security", accidentally caused the discovery of the break-in that would lead to the fall of a President. He then sent a letter to Judge Sirica revealing the whole thing under the pretext that he didn't want to be the fall guy. He said he was scared of a little time in prison. You can hear Liddy's snort of contempt! Oglesby's theory is that McCord - a Yankee trying to protect the integrity of the American Intelligence establishment - outed the Plumbers to provide cover for the CIA and got rid of Nixon in the bargain. Oglesby has McCord not only working the operation - but actually running it, ordering actions of the CIA Director (Helms), planning the next moves. Since Hunt and the Cubans were CIA or former CIA - how could it have ever been proved not be be a Company operation? Later information that Deputy FBI director Mark Felt was Deep Throat seems to collaborate this.

Post script - We have Bush 2 (Cheney) subverting the CIA in order to justify the Iraqi invasion. It doesn't matter that they were proved wrong later - they got what they wanted and now - poor Iraq. Poor us too - literally, since the war nearly bankrupted us - But it shows the Yankee-Cowboy war continues. The shadow boxing goes on. Americans seem more compliant to the Yankee Cowboy oligarchies than ever. The baby boomers were bought off by prosperity - and their children suffer under both Yankee and Cowboy austerity. Perhaps it is time for massive numbers of young people to fill the streets and demand a better government. Worse case - Maybe they can be bought off like their parents.

All Presidents lie. Kennedy lied about his desire to stand fast in Vietnam and support South Vietnam to the bitter end. Johnson lied - he ran as the Peace Candidate against Goldwater. Nixon .. etc. You can't overlook Obama - his drone policy and continuing to hold men indefinitely in Guantanamo are not what most Democrats thought they were getting. Perhaps the worse of all, in the long run, is Obama's massive collection of personal data and his Cyber spying around the world. That data, our phone calls, social media postings and email will never disappear regardless of who controls the levels of government. Ask older, former East Germans what large scale Government snooping does to ordinary citizens.

The first step toward reclaiming our Government is for us to understand our history. Censorship is the first barricade to tear down to regain an open government. We need something like a 'Left Wing Tea Party' – organized, with a catchier name, committed, willing to punish at the ballot box erstwhile friends who fail to follow through with their promises. We need to begin rattling the cages.


We should first demand that all of the files currently classified as 'secret' that relate to the assassination of John F. Kennedy be released immediately. After 50 years, if there is any possible national advantage that could be retained by keeping whatever is still locked up and censored, that advantage, however embarrassing, is far outweighed by requirements of an informed citizenry.

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