The post I wrote to the imdb1 message board has continued to foster discussion. I am attaching entries on these developments to “Historical Analysis and Literature 6,” since that entry covers my childhood through 1982 – NATO was formed at the start of the cold war, a couple years before my parents met, and the cold war was important in that period. Conventional history for the time might suggest that the TV show, M*A*S*H, had a more direct effect on me than most other cold-war-related “events.” My father went to Korea as an enlisted mechanic after the war officially ended. Later, however, he did work in an engineering capacity in a plant that made, along with civilian machinery, sophisticated weapons of war. Perhaps the only family dramas I remember as relating to politics were heated arguments between my McGovern-supporting father and Nixon-supporting mother.
At that time, my brother Will, now an “anarcho”-capitalist, also supported McGovern during the 1971-72 campaign. This was a bit out of character for Will, especially considering the central role he played in the chthonic ritual a couple years before. Memories of that time have continued to emerge in bits and pieces. At my paternal Grandparents, when all the adults had gone for a few hours, they left my eldest brother and cousin in charge. I remember hiding from them and being caught by this cousin. I remember him trying to carry me out of the house and my grabbing a doorframe, but someone else prying my hands away. I remember my eldest brother, Jack, laughing while I was tied up, saying that I was “smart” for having avoided his raping me earlier that year. I laughed with him until he hit me, then he asked me how I had done it. I told him about warnings I had gotten from supernatural forces that told me the right times to hide and to run. After the ritual, my cousins and Jack left and Will returned. I had a gag on at this point, and he told me he was going to put a worm in me. Then he said he would put something over my nose so I couldn’t breathe. He then followed up on his promises, also putting some kind of mask over my face so no one would see the distress I was in. I don’t remember exactly when or how I was revived, though I do remember, as it says in the above-linked archive, Jack’s urgent question, “What’s today?” – a question he continued to ask almost compulsively throughout the rest of his life. I remember someone (I think it was the female cousin who took part in the ritual) telling me that all participants had gotten a beating afterwards. I remember later having discharge, and my mother taking me to a gynecologist, who told me kindly, “We don’t hurt little girls.” The next school year, when Will was in junior high, he had psychological tests taken, and he briefly acted nicer. The only reason I can think of for this improved disposition and his support of such a progressive anti-war candidate is that my parents considered sending him to a facility.*
Back to the message board, one member contended that, contrary to my implication, the US & NATO were a force for democracy and possibly for human rights. He qualified his assertions by saying, “Special interests and money always get in the way and with that pledge, it’s no different.” I answered that…
...I find less evidence of US support for democracy than of our disruption and corruption of attempts to establish democratic governments around the world. From Korea, where we set up the puppet government of the murderous Syngman Rhee, through the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and our refusal to sign an agreement (that we helped to create) to hold elections in Vietnam, to the present day, our history is riddled with disavowed imperialism. Truman formulated his doctrine in large part to keep Greece a monarchy, and this doctrine led to the formation of NATO. NATO swallowed the European Western Union, creating a tool to make capitalism hegemonic. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we can see the success of this tool in how money always gets in the way – especially in its corruption of education to bring about “the end or history.” (Contrary to Fukuyama’s claim that history would move toward liberal democracy, however, we have moved toward neoliberal kleptoracy.) I wrote the pledge, with its call for self-conscious dialogue and growth therefrom and for development of the listed qualities, to help get money out of the way of education and of conversation in general.
I’ll write about other discussions in a separate entry.
* The idea of this possibility perhaps started to form when a friend of ours told us that his brother, who was schizophrenic, autistic, and developmentally challenged, had to be sent away to one, in part to keep him from harming his younger siblings. (He had already started to abuse one of them.) Will soon wrote on his blog about the value of keeping such challenged children at home – According to Will, this would provide societies better information on how to care for such children. He specifically brought up danger to other children (he qualified the word children with the word “healthy” in scare quotes) to immediately dismiss this concern as trivial. This strange blog entry only makes sense if he had been threatened by this fate himself.
Seeker247365v2 