Read the columnists. Be careful. Some are to be taken very seriously, (William Safire). Some perform no other function than to divert your attention from real issues' They publish some "asleep" columnists for just this reason. Most often the humour of Art Buchwald and Russell Baker is on two levels. If you only get one level, you are not getting the message. William Safire is very aware, and not very funny. There are levels to his language pieces. I had a girlfriend who just loved Safire. Read him constantly and never, ever, understood a thing he was saying. And this was a very bright lady in publishing! He refers to himself as a "lexiconic irregular". He means soldier, not verb, a hit man for the ruling elite. He is unique in being able to set policy. Now the usher to Mr. Lehman's war. One Russell Baker piece was entitled Good King John. It went on and on about a certain "John" - controlling everything, particularly, in this case, both sides of a presidential election. It would make no sense if you did not know who the John was. I showed it to a very educated friend. He laughed. I asked him what he was laughing at. He didn't know. I asked him if he had any hint who "John" was. He didn't. If I typed up the same article and asked him if it would make a good newspaper column he would have said, "Who is John? This makes no sense." The same words in the Times and he makes believe that he understands. Again, is hypnotism to strong? Is there something stronger? Large billboards are often in companies controlled directly by John Lehman, our "ex Secretary of the Navy". The operation that Luce started could not be run by committee. He selected as his successor someone young and someone who was inheriting a gigantic chunk anyway. Kissinger was John's teacher and mentor. For a while John was on Kissinger's staff. There is a recent biography of Kissinger now in the malls. It might be a good exercise for you to look up John in the index. Take a second and won't cost you a penny. Read the referred passages and ask yourself: was John working for Kissinger, or Kissinger for John? Sad to say, all of the above is new even to professors of journalism. What I am telling you is logical, just emotionally hard to swallow. The press does a good job of portraying itself as outside of government, bright crusaders "comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable". Not so. This flies in the face of our dearly held mass images of Murphy Brown and Clark Kent. Wouldn't Hersey, the man who wrote Hiroshima clue us in? Afraid not. They stay true to their code. This code of emotional bonding at the top is very tight. The Bomb was the unspoken "elephant in the room" in Hersey's writings concerning Luce. We are deceived by images of Bob Woodward in All the President's Men, the fearless investigative reporter. Deep Throat was the real voice, and Woodward was guided all the way. In Woodward's book, Veil, on the secret wars, the most telling interviews with Bill Casey (on his deathbed) are omitted. This clearly shows that Woodward too is bonded at the top, and also, in Casey's words "A true believer". It is odd that conspiracies sound crazy in a world where conspiracies by the powers make common sense. As my Father would say, "Of course they conspire, they would be crazy not to." These then were just a few of the "rules" I learned, the most important: look! My Father went through a slow transformation. I remember years when he identified totally with the "rulers" he was so near. He said "we". "We" were doing this, or "we" were doing that. The news was a sacred meditation. This changed through the Kennedy years. In the beginning JFK was carrying the torch for Alfred Smith, and it touched notes from his Brooklyn background. But something changed. I remember him staring out of the commuter train, looking pained as he rode through Harlem, when he usually would have been absorbed in the news. My guide for my first and only LSD trip was an African on a CIA scholarship to Oneonta State. Timona worried this "scholarship" group by writing texts on colonialism. Once he dropped by my parent's apartment when I was not there. He and my Father spent four hours talking. Whatever this change was, my Father no longer said "we". My most potent memory was a few years earlier. As Jeremiah also drew the maps of history, he often lectured on how the maps tell a different story from the official history. "The maps," he would say, "don't lie." Dinnertime was a series of lectures on current events. Often he would "get the history" and bound up the three steps of the split level to his studio to come back with the historical atlas to make a point. Most always the atlas was an old "Sheapard's". "Our editors are saying such and such: "but look what the Sheapard's is saying!" I remember after one such lecture hiding on a flat rock behind some huckleberry bushes playing with a kit radio. My Father snuck up on me with more than his usual heavy allotment of scotch. He brought the Sheapards's. Without talking he opened it and pointed to one of his "examples". It might have been the Phoenicia-turning-into-Armenia-jumping-over-Turkey example. Then he closed the atlas and tapped it with his knuckles: "This Sheapard's is my Lord. It leads me through the lies and points to the wrongful owners of these pastures. I know I walk close with the valley of death, and yes, I fear this evil."
