Showing posts with label 1950s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1950s. Show all posts

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Joyce Malcolm on the Meaning of the 2nd Amendment


All graphics: Click to enlarge

This week in New World Notes, radio program #90 (Tuesday, November 24):

Joyce Malcolm on the Meaning
of the 2nd Amendment

In a nutshell:

An offbeat look at guns & gun-banning. I tell of my own development from a capgun-slinging 7-year-old to a liberal-academic gun-banner ... to somebody who knows a little about guns & gun laws and thinks the NRA is not totally wrong about everything.

Then historian & legal scholar Joyce Lee Malcolm discusses the meaning of the 2nd Amendment & the recent landmark Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which affirmed the right of the individual citizen to keep & bear firearms.

Heller, though, applies only to the District of Columbia! Next year, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Court will decide whether the individual right applies to the rest of the country as well.

Joyce Lee Malcolm

Thought experiment

What do you understand this sentence to mean?--

  • A well-educated workforce being necessary
    to the prosperity of a free State, the right of
    the people to buy and read books shall not
    be infringed.

Does it, say, guarantee only the right of an employer to provide printed instructional materials as part of a formal job-training seminar?

Does it empower the government to ban the possession of racy novels or other literature having no connection with earning a living?

This week's song: Fred Eaglesmith, Time to Get a Gun

Miss part or all of our last 2 programs?

Our radio adaptation of the documentary Sir! No Sir! is good for the soul and good for the blood pressure. Learn more, listen online, or download the audio for future listening by clicking on this link.


No comment.

Coming soon -- Tuesday debut date on WWUH shown:

  • December 1 -- Joyce Malcolm asks, Is There a Right of Self-Defense? -- The U.S. vs. the U.K.

  • December 8 -- Michael Parenti on Political Liberties and Economic Democracy

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):

Malcolm's latest (Yale University Press, 2009)--nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize. More information at www.joyceleemalcolm.com .

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Naomi Klein on CIA Project MK-ULTRA



This week in New World Notes, #64, May 19 & 22:

Without their knowledge, American and Canadian citizens were used as guinea pigs in a bizarre series of top-secret experiments funded by the CIA. The series was known as Project MK-ULTRA. (The MK designates the particular CIA department in charge.)

Sensational revelations in the 1970s focused on the project's use of LSD on unwitting subjects. This caught viewers' attention, but LSD was just the tip of the iceberg. The MK-ULTRA experiments used a wide variety of powerful and sometimes antagonistic drugs in attempts to erase the contents of the subject's mind so that new content could be implanted. They used large and repeated doses of electroshock to complement the drug cocktails. To this they often added long periods of sensory deprivation.

None of the subjects of the experiments had consented--or were even aware that they were being used as guinea pigs.


Top: Author Naomi Klein.
Bottom: World's worst psychiatrist: Dr. Donald Ewen
Cameron (1901-1967).

An early public justification of MK-ULTRA--when the project finally was exposed--was that it sought to understand "brainwashing" or "mind-control" techniques supposedly employed by the enemy in the Korean War. More recent statements by intelligence officials suggest that the main focus was on developing new and more effective methods of torture to extract information from "enemies."

In recent years, the Bush-Cheney stooges who tortured detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and elsewhere followed the MK-ULTRA playbook to the letter.

In a chapter of The Shock Doctrine (2007), Canadian journalist Naomi Klein tells the story of Gail Kastner. In the 1950s Gail had been an unwitting guinea pig in MK-ULTRA experiments performed on her in Montreal by Dr. (Donald) Ewen Cameron--an American, one of the continent's most distinguished psychiatrists. The experiments--involving bizarre drug cocktails, sensory deprivation, and massive doses of electroshock--failed to erase her mind. However, they did induce schizophrenia ("with hysterical tendencies") and also permanent amnesia of her life from birth through the time of her "treatment" (early 1950s). They permanently damaged her mind, to this day.

Gail, then a nursing student, had gone to Cameron seeking treatment for anxiety.



Top: Cameron at Work (1940s?) His mind-control experiments
predated MK-ULTRA.
Bottom: Child victim of MK-ULTRA, ca. 1961


In this episode of New World Notes, Klein reads aloud--and very well--most of her chapter on Kastner, Cameron, and MK-ULTRA.

It's a scary story that leaves you wondering: If they'd do this, what else are they capable of?

And they did such things starting in the administration of one of the 20th century's sanest and least warlike U.S. presidents, Dwight Eisenhower.

What did they do under maniacs like Bush-Cheney??

Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute, McGill University--lair of
Ewen Cameron and other CIA-funded medical researchers.

This week's music:

Midnight Oil, Short Memory

I chose the song because of its theme--the American government's habit of making the same mistakes over and over again. Later it dawned to me that my choice of song might be seen as mocking the memory loss that Kastner and other victims of MK-ULTRA had experienced. No such mockery is intended.

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):





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Saturday, February 7, 2009

Radio-Great Revived: Mr. Jean Shepherd



In this week's installment, Shepherd talks a lot about Covington, Kentucky. Here it
is (foreground)--looking northwards toward the Ohio River and Cincinnati, Ohio.
(Click photo for larger image.) Madison Avenue, where Shepherd lived,
runs from the lower-right corner to the river. Shep says he lived two blocks from
the river. Alas, the Wheel Inn diner appears long-gone. The round and surprisingly
gray twin towers of Procter & Gamble's world headquarters can be seen beyond
Cincinnati's red-and-white baseball stadium. Covington is a city of bricks--as are
its fellow river-towns Pittsburgh (upstream) and St. Louis (downstream).


New World Notes News

Volume 2, Number 7 -- February 17, 2009


This week in New World Notes, #52 -- February 17 & 20:

In contrast with George Carlin and Jello Biafra--both heard recently on this show--Jean Shepherd created humorous spoken-word-art that seemed almost devoid of political content. Theoretically, this isn't possible, but darned if I can figure out even what his political assumptions are.

He liked to show the foibles of Americans and of 20th-Century American culture. Did he want to change anything? I dunno. Did Picasso?

Said to be a good book on the subject.

For 21 years, late at night, he'd lean into a microphone at WOR radio in New York and deliver a loosely-structured 45-minute narrative. It sounded like a shaggy-dog story. Later you'd begin to see how every element of the story was beautifully connected. Well, lotsa elements were, anyway . . . including scripts for commercials that he was supposed to read verbatim but never did. I'll always remember a commercial he delivered for the French automobile brand Peugeot. It ended (approximately), "Don't even think of buying a car until you've had a chance to test-drive the new Peugeot. That's spelled P-O-O-J-O-E. Peugeot."

Covington at night. What could be more American than that sign?
Why is education good? Because it gets you money!

Covington night-life: admiring "mullets" at the Blue Moon Cafe.
See mulletsgalore.com for more creative hair-styling ideas.

This week, NWN will play a substantial portion of Shepherd's broadcast of October 28, 1965. I don't want to spoil the story for you, so I'll give only some general listening advice. Two themes are important. The first is ordnance (e.g., hand grenades, guns, and whatnot). The second is that an event as you experience it seldom resembles the same event as the media depict it.

For me, the highlight is Shep's recreation of Covington, Kentucky, in the 1950s. Covington is a poorer, louder, and wilder version of genteel Cincinnati, Ohio--which lies just across the Ohio River. If you understand Covington, you understand America.

What sort of "roscoe" did Claire employ? In the 1950s, revolvers were much
more commonly used than semiautomatics, outside the military. I'm betting on this
period (1953) Smith & Wesson "Military & Police" model chambered in .38 Special.
Full-sized, yet compact enough to fit into a ladies' handbag.

Note: I had to discard about half of Shepherd's monologue. What remains amounts to a good introduction to Jean Shepherd's art; and Shepherd's show works well, as condensed. If you like it, why not try some in their original form? Radio Veronica (U.S.) has restored, and made available for free download, fourteen 45-minute episodes, here: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Jean+Shepherd+Rewound. NWN #52 is taken from Program #2 in this series.

Shepherd (left) visiting the studios of WITR, at the Rochester Institute of
Technology, fall 1968. An interview may be in progress.


A better essay than this one:

Musician Donald Fagen (left: click to enlarge), co-founder of Steely Dan, has written a subtle, complex, and very personal appreciation of Shepherd--who had played as large a role in Fagen's early adolescence as Mad magazine played in mine. It was the same role, too, and with the same qualities: sanity-preserving, reassuring, necessary, and ultimately flawed and inadequate. (Sounds a little similar to New World Notes, no?)

Fagen's writing abilities are on a par with his musical abilities. This fine essay should interest anyone who was a bright and alienated suburban kid or who is interested in Jean Shepherd's "word jazz"--as Fagen aptly names it (pace Ken Nordine). The essay is here: http://www.slate.com/id/2207058/pagenum/all/#p2


This week's music:

  • Intro: Fiedler, Boston Pops, Bahn Frei Polka by Eduard Strauss
  • California Ramblers (?) with Jean Shepherd (vocals and kazoo), Sheik of Araby
  • Outro: Warren Zevon with Something Happens, Werewolves of London

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern) . . .

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