Dave Read's essays

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 11, 2024 – Those broken and co-opted by the commanders of commerce, and by the laws crafted by their legislative-affairs employees for our perpetually campaigning electees to enact, betray an uncanny tendency toward what Jung-Americans label “Stockholm syndrome.” They fall in love with their captors/oppressors – or at least become overly desirous of pleasing them.

As if to illustrate to me that hope is to be found in even the most hopeless circumstance, the accidental death of my father in January 1963, soon after my 14th birthday, although depriving me of decades more time in the company of a truly wonderful and heroic man, gave me a headstart on my peers in acheiving personal emancipation from parental authority – in becoming my own man, so to speak.

His death freed me from the untoward influence of that generation of fathers who’d begun life during the Great Depression, then were sent to war in Europe and Africa and Asia, and sent again to Korea. The sin of Vietnam was only possible because the parental cohort, people already browbeaten by the likes of Father Coughlin and Sen. McCarthy, were impotent in the face of the bi-partisan effort to keep the war-making segment of the coming consumer economy bustling.

Few of my peers escaped being harmed by being raised in the novel atmosphere of the Cold War, which is the first “war” waged where words are the principle weapons. The USA and the USSR conspired to rebuild their post-war economies with the assent of populations scared into submission by the heinous construct of “Mutually-Assured Destruction.”

The biggest mistake America made in the aftermath of WWII was to reconstitute and make permanent the C.I.A., which FDR had reluctantly been convinced would be essential to the successful prosecution of the war, since the UK, Europe and Russia already had centuries of experience in bribery, blackmail, and the suborning of treason. Russians are still the acknowledged masters of espionage, with the French, Germans, English and others in her Imperial wake.

After an initial flirtation with the dark arts, President Truman shuttered the war-time arency – then was convinced of its necessity. Was Truman susceptible to the charms of the half-American Churchill, as FDR decidedly was not? Would various of the west’s “atomic secrets” become KGB property if the aristocrats of England’s MI6 hadn’t handed them over to their Marxist heroes?

Would your opinion of the C.I.A. change if you knew that the funding source for their first series of uprisings was the Marshall Plan? The lies and bribes that toppled the first democratically elected leader in the Middle East, with the C.I.A. puppet Shah propped-up in his place, plus secret acts of treachery in every part of the world, were financed by secret pools of foreign cash raised via the Marshall Plan, without the knowledge or consent of the American people?

Every dollar congress authorized for it had to be matched by the beneficiary country – those monies amounted to the bank that paid every unaccounted-for check deposited by the C.I.A. to pay for assassinations and uprisings around the globe.

The feckless GOP, taking full advantage of a war-weary President Eisenhower, gave Ike’s pals, Alan and J. Foster Dulles, absolute control of the State Department and C.I.A. By early in Ike’s second term, the horrors that have spoiled every second of the 21st century had been set in motion in Tehran, in Japan, in Vietnam, in Latin and South America, by an unfettered band of bourbon-guzzling cowboys, mostly recent Yale graduates.

I’ve been lucky enough to follow my own dim lights; I didn’t get drafted, and so I haven’t been trained to kill, nor even taught the difference between a weapon and a gun! That is a blessing many of my friends and peers were deprived of. I made a half-hearted effort to merge into the mainstream, at the wrong age and for the wrong reasons, which I followed with decades working on the fringe of the “establishment,” but otherwise not asked to compromise much of my precious personal principles. For the most part, I’ve gotten by, able to remain in communion with family and friends, almost none of whom share my alienation from the status quo!

Of course, I’m just as petty a sinner as the next guy, but I haven’t sold nor leased whatever talents and gifts nature saw fit to outfit me with. And unless the likes of Cadillac and Victoria’s Secret come calling, I ain’t gonna start selling out in my seventies!

The mine field that trapped all those Depression-era fathers and their Baby Boom sons did terrible damage to boyhood pals and cousins. Friends whose fathers had financed their professional training, in exchange for some years in the custody of the armed services, found themselves estranged from their sons when ordered to suspend the discharge of their fatherly obligations in favor of discharging their postponed military duty. It’s long been said that truth is the first casualty of war, but I think family is – both the old-fashioned nuclear family and the figurative American family. Neither survived Vietnam. Neither is well today.

If that weren’t bad, or sad, enough, even our self-appointed narrator of the national story, Ken Burns (now without bangs, at long last), was made to lie by America’s Vietnam episode. He declared, in the introduction to his Vietnam product, that every American involved at the war’s outset had good intentions. You don’t even know every American who was involved, Ken, and I’m pretty sure you’d never make such a claim again if there were anybody on hand to challenge your baseless, false assertion.

Officialdom is dull and plodding like a turtle, which is why Washington failed to fling her lariat around poetry to brand it an Official thing, until a full century after one poet had announced the death of preaching from pulpits, seventy-five years since another had pronounced sex to be good, and about fifteen years since another had pronounced ice cream to be the only emperor.

Nothing scandalizes the bureaucracy and personnel of government more than people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, poets who act as if life is illuminated from within, rather than by public agency, political party, sect, cult of spirituality or personality.

And so it was during the Great Depression, during the reign of FDR, that this albatross of bureaucratic jargon was launched – the office of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, in 1937. Then, as if to remind us that bureaucracy grows continually, like weeds, some minion of Ronnie Reagan’s transitioned the office into a full-blown British thing – Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress!

Before such ugly nomenclature would become the law of the land, you can bet your bottom dollar that America’s far-flung cohort of poets had been kept in the dark! Some things are overwhelmed by the odor of officialdom. (When natural poets aren’t consulted, look what can happen: The Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division of the Science and Technology Directorate of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security. How did America manage without it, for more than two hundred years?)

We seem so keen to keep poets and writers on the right page, that we allow the Library of Congress to run Affiliate Centers for the Book in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and Northern Marianas.

If there were official Centers for Newspapers, Periodicals, Records, Movies, and TV shows, for Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, Opera, and Dance, for Atari, Activision, TikTok, Youtube, etc., then all those Book Centers wouldn’t feel so ominous, so Orwellian, so very 1984, which, of course, is the year the centers were established!

But, since there is no more demand among the public today for books of poetry than there was when giants such as Frost, Moore, Williams, Stevens, Bishop, and Lowell roamed the land, how can it be a good thing when an artificial agency, the ill-tempered issue of a Congressional appropriation, goes all-in on books?

In order to restore natural order to the people’s literature, we must repeal legislation that empowers public employees to promote or suppress it. Governments come and go, but literature is forever. Government knows that the pen is mightier than the sword, which is why it seeks to regulate both of them!

p.s. Please consider this coincidence: since the bankrupting for fraud of the Famous Writers School in 1970, the number of American college campuses where Creative Writing is an undergraduate major, or can be the basis for a master’s or doctoral degree, has exploded from six to several hundred.

By Dave Read, July 29, 2023 – History is unlike TV, movies, and screened entertainments. History accumulates to produce today, it is neither serial nor episodic the way entertainment is, which produces profit. The blood from the slaughter of war soaks into the soil, then rises into the bloodstream of victor and vanquished alike. Never do the vanquised forgive, nor will they ever forget.

Take notice where the emblems of America’s lost cause appear; it is where the vanquished enemy of American unity still crave revenge for the confiscation of their ancestor’s personal property. Only those wearing blindfolds will fail to notice that people who revere the stars and bars make common cause with people who revere the swastika of vanquished Nazi Germany.

Birds of a feather flock together. Misery loves company.

The inevitability of the collateral killing of innocent people is what makes all war slaughter. Why that truth doesn’t make global peace and brotherhood the explicit aim of every nation must be attributed to a combination of societal ignorance and the artful marketing of those who profit from war.

Much contemporary American history traces straight back 1953, when President Eisenhower and congressional leadership allowed the C.I.A. to overthrow the freely-elected Prime Minister of Iran. From that dastardly deed has flowed 70+ years of bloodshed, at the behest of the bankrupt Anglo-Persian Oil Company. History is that simple, but is it taught in public schools, truly?

And, of course, that region was only the 1916 product of the British and French Empires, who drew the boundaries of today’s Middle East out of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire. Today Israel promises to continue their war in Gaza until they eradicate the ideology that produced Hamas. Do they not know that all the global forces arrayed against it, from 1939 onward, has not eradicated the ideology of Nazism?

Probably half German Nazis joined the original party, not because of ideology but because membership was the only way to get a job, or remain alive; maybe half American Nazis are in it for a job in Trumpworld, while the the balance are afflicted with bloodlust but otherwise indifferent to the source of the blood they thirst after.

It is one thing to win a shooting war, another thing altogether to win the peace that ensues. So has it been since Cain killed his brother. So shall it be until people admit the truth, until people trust that what their eyes see and what their ears hear is the sight and sound of the slaughter of innocent people, and not the national vindication that the politically powerful promise them it is.

Here is an excerpt from the opening of “The Moral Equivalent of War,” published in 1910, by William James, brother of the celebrated novelist Henry James:

“Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition.”

A mere two years later, the men of America elected a southerner as president for the first time since 1848, and before Woodrow Wilson had time to build an army and send it to the rescue of the old, broken world, he re-segregated the federal bureaucracy, as if to make democracy safe for racial bigotry again.

Clearly the people in positions of national responsibility continue to overlook the prophecy of William James. War has raged somewhere nearly every year since 1910, and today, another mass slaughter feels imminent.

In the aftermath of “The Great War,” predatory Germany was allowed to re-arm and to maintain its aristocratic officer corps, under the limp pretense that submission to military authority is the principle source of good personal character, which is the only guarantee of a healthy society. Unless people are obedient to personal codes of conduct, and have acheived mastery of their own base instincts and animal appetites, they mustn’t be allowed to carry a gun, much less serve in the nation’s police or armed forces. Nobody as heartless as Derek Chauvin belongs in public service, much less military service, as he was.

The maintenance of a standing army, global navy, and air force make it all to easy for politicians to solve by brute force whatever problems they failed to prevent and/or solve with honest reason. If we continue to arm and drill soldiers on the arts of warfare, sooner or later, there will be war; it won’t be fair, and more innocents will be slaughtered.

Having diverted so much of our national genius to the art of war, having invented and spent our national treasure on the annihilation of life on earth, isn’t it time we do a proper, military about-face, and begin to study the art of peace?

Isn’t it time, at long last, that we heed our ancient brother Isaiah and “turn our swords into ploughshares?”

By Dave Read, July 29, 2023 – In a single instance of gaslighting, when he tells his faithful fans becoming a grandfather has inspired him to quit smoke, only to sell them fire pits, Snoop Dogg shows that his audience is as indifferent to honesty and as desperate to belong as MAGAs are.

Whereas one monetizes love of country, the other monetizes familial love, and both want to widen the gap between their billions and the tiny wad of benjamins their worshipful fans may cling to.

Even though Snoop Dogg’s audience probably chuckled and insisted that he didn’t hoodwink them, the sad truth is that the episode demonstrates the pervasiveness of marketease, the language of the marketplace. Trouble with that is the primacy of profit, a gravitational force that salutes money for her own sake.

Just now, there is a nascent movement among the over-monied cohort called Effective Altruism, as if they’re re-imagining the Golden Rule. It’s most notorious evangelist is Bankman-Fried, pastor of the collapsed crypto cathedral FTX. But, as Bob Dylan proclaimed sixty years ago, “money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

To rock the merch and manners of pop stars is to purchase membership in something bigger, something grander, something that will do for the spirit what being an anonymous drudge in the consumer economy will never do.

It demonstrates that, a mere two generations since the arrival of TV, the ubiquity of commercial speech has erased from public memory cultural wisdom such as the fable of the boy who cried wolf. It is as if centuries of civilization have been replaced by the one law of the marketplace, caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

How long will we allow promoters to get away with bait and switch, with saying one thing but meaning something else? Can we demand honesty in the marketplace of politics while dishonesty thrives there, or while it makes so much bank in the marketplace of stuff?

By Dave Read, Nov. 22, 2023 – Politicians have deprived us of our national birthright; their recklessness has made us unworthy heirs of the good men and women who rescued non-republican Europe, Africa, and Asia from the back-to-back killing orgies their various monarchs, despots, and tyrants were impotent to prevent.

During the anti-republican millennium that preceded the American Revolution, every principality, state, and empire sought to guarantee its own immortality by way of espionage, by way of meddling in each other’s business, by every means imaginable, but especially by fraud, bribery, and assassination.

For our first dozen decades, Americans stuck to their guns and refused to betray the exalted principles the country was founded upon. Then, as another world war loomed, FDR was convinced that Hitler and Hirohito could not be defeated unless an agency was established that would oversee and coordinate Army and Navy intelligence.

The Office of Strategic Services was disbanded after the war, but only momentarily. Before our liberators had time to catch their breath and contemplate the consequence of global peace – much less dream about a world without war, somehow they were overcome by fear of Marxism, or whatever was the theory that animated Stalin’s blood lust.

And so the O.S.S. was reconstituted and re-branded as the C.I.A., and ever since, the United States has worked overtime to produce as despicable and as sullied a resume as any other nation in history. And so the American experiment in government of the people, by the people, and for the people has perished from the earth.

Under the secret rule of President Eisenhower’s friend Alan Dulles, the C.I.A. did more harm in more countries than Teddy Roosevelt even dreamed of shaking his big stock at. When the MI6 clones hired by Dulles deposed the first democratically elected head of a Muslim nation to restore the Shah of Iran, he cemented American foreign policy in perpetuity.

Even though the C.I.A. eventually admitted its dastardly deed, there are a thousand such secrets that no ordinary American has so much as a clue about. In place of the republic we inherited, there teeters and totters a bankrupt duopoly, the perpetual contest of blue versus red. No matter how pathetically short of the mark is team blue, team red is too close to being a clone of the world-wrecking Nazi party for it to be a coincidence.

Since there is documentary evidence that Donald told more than thirty thousand lies while in office, to support his return there, is to demonstrate either mental illness, or simple hostility to the American constitution. How could anyone even qualify for a high school diploma without it being demonstrated that they recognize honesty to be the sine qua non of republican democracy?

By Dave Read, Nov. 15, 2023 – Our reaction to Taylor Swift is as perilous to society as is our reaction to Donald Trump. It demonstrates a widespread hunger, an insatiable appetite to adopt a packaged identity – to graft onto something greater than ourselves. (Can you even graft onto a grifter?)

Our fraternal twins, Swiftie and MAGA, act as if they do not know the sublime nature of the individual. They seek refuge in ad hoc congregations of fellow seekers. Concerts and rallies become cloning exercises, where they assume religious-ey identity, around someone they imagine to be worthy of worship.

History is rife with antecedents to the MAGA mistake; Donald is a dime-store version of Mussolini and Hitler. Swifties descend from the original Dylan Freaks, who would have become as scary as Swifties, if he hadn’t left the road and detoured into the Hudson Valley in 1966.

By then, Dylan had realised that the popular media has no more interest in the truth than a dollar bill does, and so he never again engages them, except when he has an album, merch, or tickets to sell.

Mashed spuds with gravy again

Trump’s resemblance to Mr. Potato Head, whether in external appearance or internal character, is either serendipity, or proof that coincidence merely is how the creator maintains her anonymity.

Mr. Potato Head headlines this piece because it is the first commercial product sold over the public airways straight to children. Barbie followed soon thereafter and makes this missive’s title appear fair and balanced!

Without use of the public airwaves to sell stuff, television never gets off the ground, much less into every household that welcomes it into the family. Because airwaves are public property, their use by private and commercial interests must be strictly regulated, to protect the interests of the people. That is the essence of a republic – government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation could never get off the ground in America, could it? For all intents and purposes, that is precisely what happened in 1952, when an FTC regulation was loosened to allow televised sales pitches to be aimed at kids, instead of being addressed to parents, or other responsible adults.

An ad for Mr. Potato Head is the first example of TV programming designed to made kids nag their parents. It/he/she is still on the market, even as the animated counterpart again rolls toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Welcome to the consumer economy, which is another way of saying welcome to the wasteland, because waste is the inevitable product of consumption. The Swiftie and the MAGA are the result of the erosion of parental authority, in the aftermath of electronic media becoming the most attractive and most consistent voice in the typical American household.

Mothers and fathers no longer rule families like queens and kings, as they had done before TV. Some may be able to regulate how much mass media their child consumes while in their presence, but how many are able to protect against the psychological tricks found in TV commercials on the living room wall, or in the ads wedged between the videos and reels that animate devices held in the palm of every child’s hand?

Since the sellers of things know which demographics are easiest to monetize, they make sure to design programming to make the targeted consumer feel like a queen or a king. Scholars call the phenomenon “manufacturing consent.”

Having snipped the connection that made parents the default heroes in the minds of their children, consumers of mass media today are left in a permanent state of adolescence, reluctant to emancipate themselves, to leave the nest and become the heroes of their own lives.

Independent, responsible adults know better than to believe people who lie, they know better than to put their faith in someone who has paid $25 million to settle a fraud charge, they know better than to entrust the business of the nation to someone who already has bankrupted six businesses – including a casino!

Nor do healthy, well-adjusted people behave like Swifties, or like pro sports fanatics, whose hunger to belong leads them to spend more money on tickets and team merch than they spend on their children’s education. They get hoarse rooting for teams of millionaires, instead of by reading bedtime stories to their kids.