A "No Nipple" Superbowl to Take Our Minds Off Half a Century of Waste
BY G. DUFF
GONZO JOURNALIST IN TRAINING
I have yet to see a superbowl. I have yet to go to a superbowl party. I don’t even know who is playing. I still remember we drop the ball from time to time during the big game. I was an offensive lineman during Vietnam and helped coach one or two others. The real games were short of Gatorade and long on coffins and crying.
Looks like most of us reading here are in the 50 plus age group. I wanted otherwise, but I suspect the Department of Defense email filters (hell, I even have a DOD email address) keep this site away. We tend toward the subversive, read failure to lie.
Some of us are sick. Some of us are overeducated. All of us have lived thru the end of WW2, Korea, the Cold War/Vietnam and into the endless conflicts since. We have watched two space shuttles blow up…
The biggest single thing that has poisoned our lives has been November 22, 1963. For an earlier generation it may have been Pearl Harbor but for us, the ones who remember who Kennedy really was and the promise he represented, it was then.
Many of us grew up in the Eisenhower era, 8 years of racial prejudice, accepted by all, almost without a thought, 8 years of no government, 8 years of Russians always having their way, 8 years of fear.
Movies were always World War 2, almost all bullshit with few exceptions. Music was chosen by paid off disc jockeys and any ideas of freedom often carried the stain of "communist subversion". Mediocrity became a national obsession.
We were a sickness and never knew it until Kennedy came along. Ike told us there was no Mafia, that Negros’s should remain second class citizens and that starving kids and rural poverty were a permanent part of freedom as long as money flowed to the few.
TV shows like "I Led 3 Lives" honored undercover snitches who cleaned the endless "commie infiltators" out of labor unions and schools. the entire world began to look on us as the replacement for Nazi Germany. Every politician we supported was a mass murderer, every government we overthrew was dangerous because it had the support of the people. Russia went half a century humiliating us as the idiots we were until Kennedy came in and gave us back our honor.
For that we killed him. As to who "we" was, decades have shown it to be the FBI and right wing money boys of the Republican party, Director Hoover of the FBI who were in bed with the Mafia for decades. When you really chase it down, lots of big names come into the Kennedy murder.
I wonder how many of his son’s killers Joseph Kennedy knew? Even today some doubt "conspiracy". I see little anymore but conspiracy. We simply call it politics as usual. TV and the internet has made us immune. When "real life" and fiction mirror one another, we scratch our heads and go to the fridge for another brew.
For those of us who walked home from school that day, be it kindergarten or high school, it was the worst day of our lives. Years of deaths from Vietnam, drunk drivers or cigarettes have added to the toll. Every day or so American families are told of loved ones who die the honored death in a war we almost all agree is both immoral and illegal.
We can still love our kids and miss them yet know our wars are sometimes shit. How can I tell a parent that a child died to fight imaginary terrorism, concocted as a game to replace a cold war even the Russian had tired of. The kids are as dead. The wars seemed just as real. The wounds no different than if from Guadalcanal or Omaha Beach. The pain is no less real except it is felt by a very few as the bodies are brought back in the dark of night.
No FDR anymore, only small men with small minds and smaller hearts have taken his place. Soldiers and politicians serve in preparation for their just reward, a job with a military contractor, lobbyist firm or big polluter.
Memorials to their service should be fabricated from human excrement. Their lives were a testimony to the ability of this common material to stay erect, move from place to place and even speak.
Vietnam murdered the best of a generation and left behind BJ Burkettes followers (the "self ordained" UFO/Vietnam debunker working for the Neocon billionaires) , the kiss ass phonies and a sea of damaged former combat heroes, debased by decades of hollywood movies and tv shows depicting all veterans as murderous psychopaths.
Now our new volunteer army is depicted as "lower class", "homeless" (or to Bill O’Reily, invisible), ready to murder their families, all only in the military because they must have been unemployable and infected with preexisting "personality disorders" and moral weakness.
They are heroes when they stand next to Bush and Cheney and bums when they look for medical care. Millions of Americans are perfectly happy to see this and have no problem at all with contradiction. I would personally volunteer to go to hell today just to stoke the fires for their arrival. I will be the one standing next to Satan with a cool drink in his hand. Satan has a warm place in his heart for Vietnam Veterans, America has been sending them his way for a very long time.
What we lost on that dismal day in November 1963 was our hope. We have never gotten it back. For a few blind and foolish, the glib one liners of Ronny RayGun brought on amusement as America spent itself into permanent bankruptcy and our middle class began the migration from hope and betterment to debt and trailer parks. We sold our worst enemies weapons, cut deals with every drug dealer on the planet and broke every law in site and now, after 7 years of "W" we dream of the good old days of Ronnie. Millions of older Germans miss the clarity of Hitler as millions of Russian’s miss Stalin. People learn to love clarity even in lies.
We have never reached this level of crazy, even with Bush, although, for awhile, he was getting close. However, when I look in Mitt Romney’s eyes, I see that glint of Dachau and the Gulag. He may be the one.
Things have changed. In blue states, black and white people can sometimes talk as friends. Debt has grown so high under Bush that we are the financial joke of the world. We are a nation of liars and thieves and dead children. Honor and respect brought to us for a short moment on 9/11 became little but the lies and bullshit of Rudy Guiliani and the mindless mumblings of "W" lost and confused from that day forward.
Rudy the "photo op" hero became "Run away Rudy", responsible for doing favors for friends, like buying bad radios or putting his control center at "ground 0", all for a bit of campaign money. Rudy and Kulick, wherever they go, have the ghosts of the dead on their trail.
John Kennedy died for our sins, sins we had not yet committed. Our sin was hope. His death was "them" telling us we were fools and that they could kill anyone who stood against them. They showed us over and over they could murder at will, be it RFK or MLK. Now, with ownership of the news, crooked voting machines, a sock puppet supreme court, the assassin and his patsy can be put back on the MKUltra shelf.
Welcome to feudal America. The Robber Barons are back with a vengence. You read about them every day. They live above the law. They bank overeseas. They pay no taxes. They live on government contracts for things that never work, are never delivered and were never really needed. They make weapons for wars and when there are no wars they make wars for weapons.
They steal oil and sell it to us as 4 dollar gas.
They fill our finest restaurants, our country clubs, our yachting marinas and the Mercedes showrooms.
Today we can forget John Kennedy. We can watch TV. Two groups of steroid poisoned idiots will pour their hearts out for millions of dollars in salaries while we swill down beer and the best our food system has to offer.
Our wars will be forgotten. Walter Reed and the dozens of similar hell holes will be forgotten. Nobody will remember Afghanistan or Iraq.
Thousands will remember Vietnam. We can’t forget, we are doomed to remember. Each year it will be tens of thousands less. Think of it as a kindness. Thousands remember Vietnam though millions touched by the suffering and death have forgotten and have moved on to new wars. People are temporary. When they are dead they are useless.
Memory is pain. Drag out our dead every November 11. We no longer have national war, we have private war with volunteer armies, private contractors and more private suffering. Call it efficiency. We can spend and profit like a world war and only kill a few thousand kids at a time. Perhaps we should be thankful. I think "they" expect it of us.
If we can forget this war, we can be confident that we ourselves, the vets of earlier wars were forgotten before we even left for war, back in that endless past some of us still have nightmares in. For many of us who served in our series of wars that have dotted the last half of the 20th century and moved into the 21st, our own families have forgotten us, fiance’s married old boyfriends, jobs went to the "stay behinds" and life moved on. It is moving on still. Veterans are little more than ghosts, spectres brought out for parades and on election day only, fit for little else.
John Kennedy was the beginning of an era that would have changed all that, made us, veterans and Amerians of all colors and creeds, more than we were. His killers are now old, some are dead. They number in the hundreds, perhaps the thousands. Their children have inherited America and have kept us at war ever since. Kennedy understood too well that the business of America was war without end, a business hard to keep afloat in a democracy.
The faithfully deluded dream of Oswald with his broken Italian rifle hiding behind the leaves of the impenetrable Texas Liveoak, putting rapid fire rounds blindly but exactlingly and impossibly has moved from mythology into our history, albeit a history few believe. For my "gun buddies", imagine a Carcano 6.5 (infamous for being the worst shoulder weapon of the 20th century) with a 4x Tasco scope with one broken mount even chambering a round much less hitting anything smaller than a billboard at 50 feet.
Imagine a Marine buying a 19.00 piece of junk when an M1 cost 30 dollars at any pawn shop and is still a world standard for marksmen and the rifle he trained on.
Our assassins, they call themselves "the christian right" or "neocons" but they represent years of diminishing rights for all Americans, a sea of debt, no jobs and endless riches for anyone willing to sell out their nation, their honor and their soul. We have had no shortage of takers. The ghosts of our war dead tread our country with the living souless wraiths of a life of profit and greed.
Behind every thief is a newspaper, a TV station and a radio commentator and a dozen white male fear ridden children afraid of communists under their beds, negros marrying their daughters and foreigners moving in next door, taking the place of the hillbillys with the meth lab.
For 45 years those of us who remember have had this national disaster to add the the personal ones life has dealt us. The sacrifice of our children might not be so painful if we all didn’t know in our hearts it was to pay for an oz of cocaine at a frat party at Princeton and a Porsche for an Andover brat.
G. DUFF IS A REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR ON SPORTS AND MEDICAL ETHICS
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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