What woke YOU up???

“What woke YOU up???”

Frankly, I’ve learned from both real life and a hobby game I have played for nearly 20 years and often defer to it as an anchor to help analyze geopolitical or otherwise domestic and international affairs called Diplomacy, which is based on geopolitics or otherwise how geography impacts international relations, that it’s not always wise to consider yourself awake or otherwise enlightened. Utilizing Diplomacy as an example, it’s intrigue and challenge rests with diplomatic relations among 7 or more players where honesty, deception, and manipulation are part of how the game progresses from beginning-middle-end. In any case, I’m told that some find my analysis insightful, and it at least gives me something of a baseline although the hobby has had such famous and infamous hobbyists as JFK and Henry Kissinger (Kissinger has an infamous reputation in the hobby).
The other factor is that I hate to put it this way… But, I’m a dino-nut that peaked my interest in sciences, and Diplomacy, Civilization, Stratego, and Chess peaked my interest in domestic and international affairs. I’m pretty sure if these didn’t set me down the path; I doubt that I’d be remotely informed.

In any case, I made acquintences with both a Historian and a Diplomatic Historian, and I learned that it truly does take learning Civilization, US History, World History, and Diplomatic History to have a working history of world events. I’ve been introduced to many of the same books mentioned earlier the comments like Creature from Jerkal Island, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and others like Desperate Deceptions, Esponiage’s Most Wanted, and Diplomacy. I was also referred to such sites as Zero Hedge and Shadowstats by several acquintances. It certainly helps that possibilities appeals to me more than probability, which I surmise makes me a poor candidate in scientific law derived disciplines like Chemistry, Economic nutritionists, Physics, and etc (Playing God is against my values, and I don’t want to develop a God Complex either).

Inevitably, it was through these 4 items that made me really take notice, and I’ve amped up my own research ever since although I don’t consider myself apt at it.

(By the way, if you read/re-read Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger watch how he writes about Cardinal Richelieu uniting France’s protestant population behind the King of France against the Catholic Feudal Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire and Otto Von Bismark. Richelieu is considered the world’s first Prime Minister, and there’s much more reading beyond Diplomacy on Otto Von Bismark including those focused on ideologies).

Inevitably, I don’t consider myself awake or enlightened merely informed and seeming constantly playing catch-up.

Fuck me dead, Stucky, what a time to drive by.

OK, retrospective look at what made me the curmudgeon I yam today. (I yam wot I yam. Right?)

1948-9 I’m discovering science fiction. And I find a paperback of “1984”, yahoo. What? Which leads me to “Brave New World”. And around then, I read my first Robert A. Heinlein novel, little did I know how insidious it would be.

And then there was high school, from which I remember 1-1/2 teachers that weren’t brain dead. But I graduated in 1953 (age 16 , and 12th grade just in case anyone was wondering.)

Fast forward to 1959. I’ve been working in my first fulltime adult job, have married, and … am drafted. Karma, luck, destiny, I end up in Washington, DC, belly-of-the-beast as an army security clerk. We have a colonel that’s seldom there; a major who is only dreaming of retirement back to Seattle and buying a fishing boat; and a fat captain, just back from overseas, bragging about the many ways he’s smuggled minor fire art paintings into the country. Captain is later seen by the command general at an official arrival of foreign dignitary (Sukarno), who delivers an edict, “Keep that fat fuck away from public view.”

I go back to flyover country on leave and no one has a clue what I’m talking about that’s going on in DC. And then I manuever myself into the Information Office as a journalist — and I have lots of ideas and get to go to the Library of Congress and other places doing research. And I uncover the predecessor to “Creature from Jekyll Island”. Imagine trying to explain the nature of the Federal Reserve System half a century ago?!

Along the way, I’ve found Admiral Rickover’s “Education and Freedom” with its first hint of peak oil (thought the term didn’t even exist) and one of the few business people/writers who grok’d the real world, Robert Townsend. And before, William H. White. “The Organization Man”. And more. Yeah, “Ugly American” and “Dr Strangelove” and even the first “Planet of the Apes” and … a lot of dystopian SF and mutant movies (yay, American International) and atomic dOOm.

Then there was JFK. At the time I thought he was just another cunt, seeing as how us conscripts were just grist in the mill for his adversarial situation with the Pentagon and other neocons. See, no one now probably remembers when Mr. Camelot took office, he reckoned “we were spending too much on the military (the never-ending peacetime draft, you see, etc.) so some of my army buddies were getting released from active duty six months early. I was within two weeks of the same schedule … and came his Sunday might message to the nation. (What it really amounted to was Kruschev. “He called me a boy!”) Instead of getting out of indenturedl servitude early, I got four extra months.

Returned to Cincinnati, Ohio with a wife 8-1/2 months pregnant, anticipating a return to my guaranteed job at AT&T, Oops, sorry, this slight hearing impairment you experienced at Fort Hood negates the ‘contract’. That took a letter to an Ohio senator and I did get my job back. But my benefits didn’t kick in for a while and I was no longer on active duty so I got to fund the hospital bill for my first son out of a very lean pocket.

Not a whine, looking back, it is all one big fucking joke. On me, you, everyone. It is what it is.

Somewhere back a ways was “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”, more Heinlein — I never stopped on that fix. It took me a while to understand “Starship Troopers” because I’d missed the minor but key points in earlier novels about slavery and conscription.

One good thing about being in the army, I learned going back to AT&T forever was not A Plan but an early death sentence.

So I had embarked in free time on uni courses, a data processing certification, studying up for the FCC radiotelephone licenses.

Fast forward to 1969, I’d left AT&T, ended up as 2IC to the best man I ever worked for, building a station in Cincinnati. He got ‘fired’ for corporate reasons. Funny thing, all his staff resigned. I got my first education as a contract in a foreign land, Saudi Arabia. Saw at first hand how Amerikan multinationals ‘thought’ they could screw the camel jockeys.

Returned to the land of the free two years later and was hit with a massive IRS penalty bill. What?! See back then, out of the country for 18 months plus, and you’d signed a form before you left, you were tax free. But that’s theory,the reality is, any minion that thinks he can squeeze a sheckel out of you, you are fair game.

The first IRS cunt that thought he could browbeat me was sadly mistaken. By the time I finished with him on the phone and promised to be in his office the next morning — and I fronted up — he’d called in sick. His replacement an obese creature asked, “Did you bring your checkbook.” Hah. I guess no one before had ever been bowed down before her eminence.

Some time after that, I was offered another contract position in Samoa. Yeah! Get the fuck out of this hellhole. While there, I did get the settlement from the IRS, they called it a draw. So the next tax season, I filled out my forms properly, and got everything I’d paid in returned. Eh? American Samoa is not ‘foreign’, not it’s part of the Department of the Interior. Go figure! Only DC could concoct such shit.

From there, I snagged a job in Australia. Walsy wanted to see it. Never thought I’d still be here! But a broadcast engineer coming to a country that only got TV at all in 1956 B&W and was due for an upgrade in 1974, I was preferred occupation and ‘here, have this permanent residency’ and that’s how it worked out.

So, over the next quarter century, my first wife died. Erk. I met someone a year later, lucky sez me, married in 1999. By then, pretty much ignoring the rest of the world other than the land of oz. But yeah, seeing the encroachment of government into private life growing, hmmm …. (less bad but still!) Moved to Queensland, got a message my mother collapsed in her Florida condo in 2002. Was flying over the Pacific 24 hours later. Ended up there trapped in the medical system and other bureaucracy until she died four months later. Returned =home= America ain’t there any more!

My second wife died in 2005 — and the Xtian that rabbits on about “God’s will” is gonna meet his maker via my fist in his guts.

So, Stucky, the answer ot your question is: 66 years ago, it started, and it’s been downhill ever since. And, I am going to go to the window … and open it … and lean out, and say, I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this any more.

(And Ned Beatty in hia role there, was even betterer.)

OK?