14-06-2013, 03:46 AM
(This post was last modified: 14-06-2013, 04:49 AM by Albert Rossi.)
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Going through public school and college in the 70s and 80s, all I ever learned about JFK was that he was a Cold War hawk who stood up to the Russians during the Missile Crisis, plus the Berlin speech, the Bay of Pigs, and the moon race. That was it. Oh, and LBJ was just following Kennedy's Vietnam policy.
Tracy, I can concur with all that you say. What saddens me most about this is that academic intellectuals on the left, not just the right, have put their rubber stamp on this view.
Quote: Only through my own research did I learn how distorted and inaccurate that picture was. In fact, I'd say Americans don't learn any real history about any of their Presidents. They learn a lot of myths, legends and stereotypes. And many are totally happy listening to the Right-wing myth machine (our Founding Fathers wanted this to be a Christian nation, etc).
I think these myths are so ingrained -- from school, the media, family, and in many cases religious organizations -- that it is almost impossible to shake them. I also wonder why most Americans are so passive, even when they (we) learn something about the power structure that should outrage them (us). It has been my own experience -- and this is more an impression than anything else -- that Europeans will take to the streets for much less than what we swallow here daily.
I receive mail from numerous "progressive" organizations, and while I try to participate as I can, I am sometimes put off by their childlike ingenuousness about what they have done and can accomplish. I suppose you have to be, or you wouldn't do anything. But sometimes I feel like grabbing them, shaking them, and saying, "don't you realize you will never be anything but a minority in the US?" I agree with JimD that if the possibility of a broad consensus on the left ever existed in this country, it was done away with between 1963 and 1968.
P.S. Editing my comment. I just read your Eric Norden post. I've hung my head in shame often enough over this trahison des clercs among my "liberal" academic peers. I have also ruined several friendships among them precisely over the JFK assassination.
P.P.S. Thanks for the considerable effort you undertook for that long posting on the other thread about the MIC. The impact of seeing all of that culled and ordered into a compressed chronology is formidable.