The Dark Umbrella

Played a lot of Resistance and BioShock. My enormous Fabian Bachrach campaign poster of Nixon watches me with smug, airbrushed eyes. Every day I squat here in the basement, I get weaker. Yeah, Maybe I'll just get a pizza and watch Apocalypse Now. That's probably best.

It's really sick to look forward to Mondays.

I always know what's up. I mean, that's what it is to be a conspiracy researcher, always looking for "other orders behind the visible," never being satisfied with the "official story" and, despite what the critics say, never holding blindly to a hypothesis under which the facts have begun to erode.

And that's why I'm in such a peculiar place right now. I'm getting home after another brutal week at work, and instead of diving in, certain of where I'm going, I feel like I'm spinning my wheels.

This is what it's like not to be sure.

People had been telling me I had to watch the film, and I will admit, there were some suggestive ideas. The notion of Nixon being a larger-than-life force all the way through to 1985 is interesteing, and I can see why some of the folks in the conspiracy community read the film as an allegory of American foreign policy and domestic disinformation. But for me, it was just to morally ambiguous. I'm not a big fan of comic books -- sorry, graphic novels -- but maybe I should trying reading it. People tell me it's better. Meh.

I've figured out what's been nagging at me about the Sixites and Seventies. If we assume that the Nixon Administration was aligned with the Dark Umbrella (a given) and that the counterforce was effectively muted (which also appears the only conclusion from the evidence) then how does one account for the Weathermen.

Their goals are too orthogonal to the Adminstration to consider the possibility of a splinter cell of the Dark order. I suppose that a false flag operation cannot be entirely ruled out (with the operatives themselves, perhaps, not even knowing that they were operating in service of the Dark. Could Nixon's people  have infiltrated and run a fifth column of Manchurian insurrectionists?

I have learned not to put anything beyond the pale of the Dark Umbrella cabal, but that seems to strain credulity. Will need to think.

I generally don't blog about personal stuff, but every once in a while, I have to admit that walking through downtown Manhattan gets to me. I have to walk down through Battery Park to get to the Staten Island ferry every day, and most of the time, I just turn off that switch in my head. I might just be walking through a Nebraska corn field. But sometimes -- like this week -- I just start to lose it. I see the Sphere, or despite my best efforts, I catch a glimpse of the cranes and construction at Ground Zero, and it all just comes rushing in on me.

It's ironic, I suppose; someone like me, working as a tech support geek at a Wall Street financial services firm. If I thought there were jobs for geeks like me somewhere outside the city, sometimes I think I'd move out of Staten Island. And no, contrary to the snide comments over on on the alt boards, I don't live in my parent's basement.  It's an in-law apartment, ***hole. I put every penny into getting the word out, and I'm proud of that.

I just wish, sometimes, that I worked in midtown.

I wonder if Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was a easily readable to his contemporaries. It must have been, or why else would the folks from the SDS have appropriated the name.

But I am struck by the playful clarity of the opening lines of the third verse, which are all clearly ways to avoid the draft. "Get sick, get well, hang around an inkwell,"  that is, receive a deferment for higher education.) "Ring bell" took me a while, until I stumbled across an early 60s PSA for mental illness, whose symbol, in those days, was a hand-rung school bell. Avoiding the draft by faking insanity. "Get barred" i.e., use (or perhaps become) a lawyer. "Write braille," would be a medical deferment for vision. "Get jailed," speaks for itself. Easy to see why this appealed to the "Weathermen."

And their symbol -- well, at least some others have noticed its similarity to Obama's corporate logo.

With all the research I've done on the Weathermen, I keep coming back to the same question: why did the forces of the White Umbrella not take better advantage of their momentum during the 1960s? There is no question that they were overmatched; not since the 1930s, when the new medium of radio propelled Hitler to power had a major political figure been in such a position to control a uniquely penetrating medium (Television, in the 60s was very different that today, my research has shown. There were only three networks, and you could control content quite effectively. The Administration managed to do this for nearly ten years.)

There were several key points of failure. In some of them (RFK, MLK) one can discern the work of the Dark, but what to make of the collapse of the anti-war movement? Or, especially, the curious blindness America has about the Weathermen?

We had a full-fledged revolutionary force operating within our borders, and nobody today even remembers it. We talk about Al Qaeda all the time, and they never even get a sidebar.

Of course, deliberate elision is always the work of the Dark Umbrella.

If we assume that Nixon held the Dark Umbrella (I'm speaking loosly and metphorically here; obviosusly I don't believe that the umbrella iteslf has any power) and that he ran point for the Dark forces during the 1960s, where was the counterforce?

Obviously in San Francisco, it goes without saying. And New York. You had a loose cabal of drug-addled anti-government forces in both locations, with Kesey and the Grateful Dead on the Left Coast and the Greenwich Village intelligentsia (Ginsburg, Rubin, Dylan) on the other, with yeasty campus outposts spread between. It is no accident that the Weathermen arise from this dynamic. Of which, more anon.

Back to work tomorrow. Did I mention work sucks?

Once one sees past the flash and drama of the Kennedy assassination -- a magician's force designed to distract; I mean, shooting Oswald on live TV? Brilliant! -- the gnomic kernel of wisdom is obvious: Nixon received the Dark Umbrella to begin his Ascendancy over the Sixties.

It's established in evidence that JFK was reconsidering Vietnam, that his agenda was moving in the direction of greater civil liberty. He even intended to retire from politics and start a newspaper. Imagine the Sixties with a swinging, acid-head ex-President behind the bully pulpit of a major metro daily (something that still had force and value in those days.)

No, that could not be tolerated. One can easily see why the Order of the Dark Umbrella saw 1964 as a flex point needful of manipulation, and why they picked Richard Nixon as horse to run. Boy, were they ever right on the money. You'd have to go back to Roderigo Borgia to find a better standard bearer for the Dark Umbrella.

And where was the White Umbrella all this time?

THis series of posts will quite likely evolve into my next book.

Day jobs are the bane of my existence. Why must I spend an entire week of my highly creative time serving as a unit of production in service of some corporate entity whose only interest is generating wealth for shareholders. **** the [redacted] corporation and all their heirs and assigns.

Long-time readers may wonder if this has something to do with my less-than-stellar performance review from December, and the fact that I didn't get a raise this year. We're in a recession, pal. Nobody got a raise.

Although, this Great Recession is certainly convenient for the forces of the Dark Umbrella. Never waste a good crisis, eh?