I got distracted by another movie yesterday (I do confess to being somewhat of a movie buff) – I mean aside from Snowden — this one for more personal reasons, i.e., the subject matter and the chronology of the story: Made in America with Tom Cruise purports to be the ‘based on a true story’ of Barry Seal, the legendary drug smuggler, active from the late 70’s until his ‘demise’ in 1985 (the movie reminded me of how unlikely his death was, on a couple levels). See, as some of you know, I was also a smuggler and my time frame (the decade of the 70s) overlapped with Barry’s by a couple or so years.
Sifting the buds, Colombia, 1979.
The big difference between Barry and me was not so much a difference in bulk/money but of product. Pot (by the boat/plane load) was my thing and the rise of the cocaine trade that Barry for a while perfected was a reason for my retirement. Cocaine was and is a truly ugly drug; not so with pot (in my opinion). I in fact do believe that the change in America’s ‘drug of choice’ from pot/psychedelics to cocaine/heroin that came about in the mid-1970s was part of the cultural engineering of the PTB. It was at about this time when they realized that the ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s, which they had so carefully engineered, was backfiring on them.
Anecdotally, a good example of this can inferred by my own little film, Water Time, which on a surface level is a tale of two friends of the same age, one of which (me) dives headlong into the hippie (surfer) counterculture of the time, while the other ‘remains’ with the culture of the previous generation (think the 1950s); the latter’s course takes him to death on a battlefield in Vietnam. My course, on the other hand, led me to… right here and now, writing to you about truth and lies in my half-assed blog — in some sense an ‘enemy of the state’ (the deep state, that is, as opposed to an enemy of my country). My old friend, if he left an enduring trace, it’s an etched-in name on a ‘wall of death’ in our nation’s capitol.
Allan and Donnie. Which one would become ‘culturally debased’?
Joe Atwill returns to mind here, with his rant on how the 1960’s ‘revolution’ ‘debased culture’ (Joe has repeated this so many times that I have to assume that the creation of this [false] meme is in some sense a formal part of his ‘job’). Atwill (and others) are quite correct in their observation that my surf buddies and I (plus the other, non-surfing ‘drop outs’) were ‘steered’ into our ‘druggy’ lifestyles by projects like the CIA’s MkUltra, and that the ‘debasement’ was deliberate.
True enough on it’s surface, but the issue that Atwill and his disinfo cohorts dodge, is best alluded to by the divergent paths taken by myself and my old friend. And it’s not so much my friend’s death that bothers me (we are all going to die) but how, in his failure to become ‘debased’ (like me) he was mind-controlled (by the ‘culture’ Atwill pines for) into his final, ‘un-debased’ version of a human – ‘175 pounds of Cong-killing terror’ (my friend’s description of himself, from the last letter I got from him, while I was surfing and planning smuggling ops in Hawaii).
Likewise what Atwill & Co leave out in their revisionism – and this will return us to the subject of Made in America – is how the PTB, by the mid-70s, had seen the error of their ways and did the ‘engineering’ that would end the 1960s counterculture, partly via the above-mentioned change in ‘America’s drug of choice.’ I know this in a personal way because when I saw the change coming I ducked out of smuggling — and, God help me, went to Hollywood. The main agents of that change were the Barry Seals of the day and those above them.
Tom and the real thing. Close enough?
The movie of course was mostly a fantasy but it did have its moments. For those of you who don’t remember, at his zenith Barry Seal pretty much ran the U.S. cocaine trade and he did it out of the little town of Mena, Arkansas – yes, during Bill Clinton’s governorship of the state. Since I already knew quite a bit about the Seal story, I watched the film with giggly anticipation, wondering how H-wood would handle certain… touchy… subjects.
To their credit, the makers of Made in America (a deliciously ironic title) didn’t completely obfuscate the identities and deeds of high government officials of the time. (H-wood long ago gave up in denying the CIA’s role in drug trafficking; nowadays it’s a staple in ‘retro’-historical ‘true stories’.)
In one memorable scene (which combined events several years apart) Seal is busted by a circus act involving every federal agency on the planet (minus the CIA of course) and is being threatened with life and no parole by the outraged Arkansas attorney general. The scene is milked for all the absurd irony it’s worth and at it’s height a call comes in from… ‘the Governor’… although the call transpires off screen, its upshot is immediate and laden with subtext – Barry walks, charges dropped. The governor, our future president, was making way too much money on the Mena Project to let it go down in flames with Barry Seal.
Here’s a hilarious clip (only 2 minutes) with Bill Clinton clearly ‘busted’ by the shrewdly phrased query of good old Sarah McClendon (gone forever are the journalistic likes of Sarah). This is the documentary flick from which the clip is drawn. It’s pretty close to the ugly truth.
Made in America even features walk-ons by Ollie North and almost has the balls to finger the real brains behind Barry Seal, another future president and hands down the biggest of the big in terms of gringo drug lords, i.e., George H.W. Bush. Sly indeed was the film editing: in the wind up to the narrative (‘where are they now’ kinda montage) we see Bush ducking behind an aide as the narrator reminds us that the Barry Seal Op led directly to the Iran-Contra Scandal of the late 1980s.
Shit. I only meant to mention the movie. I did go on, didn’t I? I meant to talk about my continuing disappointment in Alex Tsakiris. I emailed him yesterday’s post in the hopes of guilting him into a response. I don’t see Alex as dirty, as I do with Atwill.
No. Alex’s problem is a simple one and very human: He’s interviewed Atwill three times (I think) and raves about Atwill’s ‘following the evidence’ and so forth, so now – with my evidentiary links – he’s faced with the fact that he is wrong about Joseph Atwill. (Atwill does follow evidence – his scholarship regarding the roots of Christianity and Shakespeare’s literature is likely correct, from what I can see – except when he’s working as a disinfo agent of the state.)
I don’t get it. I really don’t. I mean I know what I’d do: Notify my audience of the above (Alex, if you’re reading this, feel free to use the parenthetical at the end of the above paragraph). How hard is that?
Allan
I forgot to explain the ‘unlikely’ death of Barry Seal. First, the hit (if there was one) was most likely ordered by George Bush, who, just before Barry’s death, Barry threatened to expose as the head of the smuggling op. Second, Barry is portrayed as worrying about a car bomb day after day and changes motels nightly (to avoid a hit) yet shows up every week at the same Salvation Army to sign in (as part of his ‘sentence’). Makes no sense at all. Barry was smart enough to maybe arrange to ‘disappear’ with a phony killing in the media. (A stretch, but more likely than the ‘official story’.)