I am an American, born and bred. I am a patriot, I'm proud of my country, I'm proud of the many good and righteous things my country has done. I am patriot enough to be objective about my country, to look at it honestly and see where it might have done better, because I want my country to do better each time it takes an action, takes a stand for the cause of good and right. To do that you must be objective. So now I'm going to do my best to look at my country the way world did and now does, from time to time I'm going to play their hand for them, move their pieces for them so I can make it obvious how they were thinking, what was planned and maneuvered to bring those plans into reality.
The objective? I'm going to assume the original objective was to neutralize the impact of the United States of America as a dominating power player on the global economic stage, and equally reduce the impact of the United States of America on the world's cultural evolution to be no larger than their percentage of the world's population. For all that the United States has held a dominant position in global politics it really isn't that big in terms of population, some 330 million out of a global population estimated at 6.5 billion. Quick arithmetic: 3.3E8/6.5E9 = .0507, call it five percent for easy numbers, the population of the planet is growing faster than the population of the United States.
Those were the original objectives, of that I'm rather sure. But, and this is a most critical but, the attitudes of the world are not a static thing, no more there than in the United States. Before all was said and done I'm afraid the campaign to back the Americans off, to make them stop being a bully, I'm afraid what the world set in motion to that objective backfired in a manner never seen before, something truly new and acutely dangerous to all nations, a thing that is now working to the endangerment of everyone. But more on that later, for now let's return to the situation as it began unfolding in the '70s.
When the world looked at the United States back then what did they see available for them to work with? Me oh my, what a circus it was. The travesty of Viet Nam had the country split along both generation and economic lines, in the universities the grading scale bottomed out at V for Viet Nam. Sex was safe and speed was dangerous, the liberated women folk were hard at work building their own good old girl network, Detroit was putting ever more muscle on the street so those not inclined to dance half the night and screw themselves silly waiting on dawn could still rock out and race, hey, I was there and I'll tell you, there's no substitute for cubes, and amazing things happen when you play with cam timing… anyway. The United States pulled out of 'Nam in '75 and nothing happened, the satellites took over spying on Red China and Michelin was making radials out of synthetic rubber just like everyone else. Happy days are here again, right? Well, almost.
Beneath the carnal circus entertaining the youth the adults were still steeped in what they'd brought forward through the years. One of the things about carrying around hurts like those is the tendency to try and assign the discomfort to something remote and removed from the self, it's always easier to say "they caused me this hurt, it wasn't anything I did…" You know, the old blame game played soft, and then a bit of feel better about it by making sure it doesn't happen to someone else. A tiny bit of play the hero for the world. Ok, fair enough, not a bad thing in most cases, I'm sure some good things happen for that motive from time to time. This tendency was well known, has been from well before Freud went to work on the Austrian ladies in dire need of a little sexual freedom. Every wise woman and good barkeep knew of it from way back when. From what I can see that tendency was the first point to be exploited by those who had motives they didn't reveal at large.
Those who make a career of education, the teachers, the administrators, they are not a separate part of the culture, they like everyone else of a common age carried those hurts in about the same proportions. Education is truly a critical thing for any industrialized nation, we knew that, and a decent percentage of those doing the educating were vulnerable to the syndrome mentioned above. Since they were in charge of education it was a relatively simple matter for us to skew some numbers in psych studies we'd put together from folks we picked very carefully indeed, and then use those numbers to convince the American educators the hurts they were feeling (but could never admit to, code of silence and all) were caused by their school days.
The so called "feel good" education, the new math, dropping phonetics entirely, these were all things that were being tried in limited areas in the 60's, but those were just experimental programs, and in all truth were not really making much headway. Their numbers were coming back at best a break even, no real gains, and a fair amount of evidence that they weren't likely to succeed once they were moved into the general system. They were fading, some things learned from the try, but fading.
It was only after we tweaked the senior educators in the late 60's to early 70's those programs really took off, invading the bulk and majority of the school systems. Our thought was simple, really. The American's had always had superb public schools, if we could get that blunted down a bit it would mean their workers wouldn't be quite as sharp as our workers, we're driving our schools hard and demanding excellence measured to objective standards, not emotional ones. The American workers get a bit blunter, their quality falls, ours looks better, we get back the markets the American's stole from us while we were down. The American's aren't dumb people, if it lasts a decade we'll be surprised, but ten, fifteen years from now those kids will be workers who will make our guys look good, and by the time the next crop of American workers comes along it will be back to a level playing field. No real expense involved, no illegal risks, whatever gain cheap at the price. That was the idea, and it worked a lot better than we thought it would. In fact, it worked a bit to well.
Ok, so we put a bit of a touch on education, but we weren't counting on that to do the job by itself. You can learn a lot on the job, you'll learn in a big hurry if your job depends on it, same for the Americans as for us. No, we needed to back that up with something to slow down the chances that OJT would pick up what the school missed. We needed a conflict of some sort to make sure the Americans stayed divided generation to generation, region to region, through the next couple of decades.
Right then we had the whole Viet Nam thing working for us, a bit of political corruption at the Watergate, no biggy that, but everyone knew the American's were loosing in 'Nam, they'd be pulling out just like we did soon enough. What we were worried about was that once they pulled out of 'Nam and the kids quit protesting we'd need something to keep that generation gap open, or it wouldn't take the old timers six months to undo what we'd done with education and we'd be back to square one.
There were a couple of things we had going for us, things ready to be tapped, and they worked well together played properly. We had Communism, and we had the Vatican. By then we knew Communism was on the skids, we knew beneath the bluster and brass the Soviet Union was in worse shape than the Americans. We knew that, but the American's didn't. They weren't allowed to, a fellow by the name of Joe McCarthy was a real stroke of luck for us. Courtesy of his insanity and the cold war propaganda machine we knew the average American wouldn't know a communist from a coyote, not if it bit him on the ass. All the average American was allowed to know was that anything bad had to be communist since communism was the work of the devil on earth. The cold war propaganda had been using religion, what wartime propaganda doesn't? For us that was a magnificent freebie, the propaganda brought religion into the mix and gave us a spin point not to be had for any amount of money.
That we could exploit fairly easily, and we did, keeping all the momentum of that propaganda alive by hooking it onto something new using that spin point, that single non sequitur spin point. What did we hook it to? We hooked it to sex, coming and going (ok, laugh if you want, but it's still true), and we did it with what we'd learned over the centuries from the Vatican. As such things go it was quite a coup, to turn political propaganda sideways without loosing much momentum at all, and tie the intensity of one sort of a campaign to something totally different and in fact even larger than the original. It worked like a dream.
It was so simple, such things usually are when you get them right. Hormone based contraception, yes, the pill, was still a fairly new thing back then, and oh yea, the girls were going nuts for it. Of course they would, they could get down with the boys and have themselves a rolling good time without worrying, to much, about getting pregnant. No need for forethought, no need to break the mood. Sex was doing great.
What was not doing so great were the guys of all ages who really didn't have much of a clue what to do with the new breed of liberated woman appearing in ever larger numbers, other than share sex with her and live with the fact she was collecting bragging rights just like the boys were. Not poking fun, mind you, we're a little more open on the subject, but not all that much, we were having some interesting times with our women folk as well. Suffrage started on our side not that much ahead of America.
In point of fact, by the mid 70's the guys were starting to get seriously scared of the girls in a lot of ways. No more could they say the girls couldn't earn themselves a good living, the girls had broken that idea when they crewed the factories that produced the arms we all were using in the big war, their mother's were making sure they knew that, they wanted their part in that war effort remembered as well. They'd proven themselves there, and as a side consequence shown the world just how fast folks can learn something new, when they want to.
Their daughters were showing up in the universities in ever larger numbers, and doing well there as well, they had something to prove, to themselves and to the world. They were quite dedicated, and successful in their dedication. Bit by bit the things that had been the exclusive domain of men were coming open to the ladies as well, and where a lady will play her hand a bit differently than a man might they won their share of the pots, they didn't use the same modes of thought. One of the newer facts of life: the girls will most likely go about it in a slightly different manner, but left on their own they'll get the job done as often as the guys will. A fact of life. There's only one more thing I really need to say about the rise of the liberated woman, at least in this context, and that is how their success enabled us to flip and spin that old and by then very tired propaganda campaign over to our needs.
Every time the guys won the pot, won the hand, if the competition was with a woman the victory didn't count towards maintaining that man's security, his position and his self esteem. It couldn't, don't you see? If he tried to claim the victory he'd get it thrown back in his face, his victory was over a woman, how can that be a victory? His chauvinistic brothers, just as scared of the girls as he was, wouldn't let him claim his victory no matter how hard fought or how well won, to allow that claim would be to allow that women were equal to men in that arena, whatever that arena might be, and that thought had been absolutely taboo for a very long time. The girls made the babies, they could do that where no man could even make the attempt, the rest of the world was supposed to be the man's compensation for that God given feat of creativity.
The Vatican, well, to be precise all the religions descended from the tent of Abraham and several beyond that, had been using that point since the beginning as a foundation of their cultural templates. In the days before modern medicine could support the women folk in that immense and amazing labor of love there was some justification for that stance, infant and maternal mortality was very high, in point of fact those mortality rates were a very close match to the mortality rates of warfare, the challenge of strength and endurance, fate and fortune the boys had created to match the danger the girls had to dare to keep the race alive, and to keep the gender ratios reasonable. In the old days there had been a balance to such things, but by the 1970's that balance was completely gone. What was serving as a war for the boys, the Cold War, it wasn't creating very many casualties, not really, and neither was childbirth. The United States even more than the rest of the world was on totally uncharted terrain, the old reasons just didn't apply anymore and nothing was very sure or certain concerning that most primal of balances, the one between women and men.
In mathematics it is called the associative law: if A is the same as B, and B is the same as C, well, it's easy to see that A has to be the same thing as C no matter what they look like, they're both the same thing as B. Junior high school stuff, give or take a year or two. Even if Algebra is a total mystery that thought is easy enough to see.
Bottom line is that law is how we did it, how we flipped all the momentum of the Cold War propaganda machine to focus on matters internal to the United States instead of having them focused on matters external to the United States, and we used religion to do it, leveraging back against all those centuries of tradition that in their day had had a valid reason to exist, but traditions that by the 1970's while still active and powerful in the culture were no longer really supported by the facts of life.
We used religion and the associative law, and we used communism and the devil, and we used them set a common point between two unrelated things so we could set them equal in the eyes of the American men so that for oh, forty years or so they'd be busy trying to make peace in their own house and not a pain in the posterior to us. Just like with education we really didn't think it would last as long as it has, but that wasn't totally our fault as I'll get to here in a bit.
It took a bit more effort than it had with the educators, a bit more but not all that much, not when most of what needed saying would have been in the sermon anyhow. Anyone who really looks at religion as a social force rather than a spiritual one will know that whatever else religion does it tries to be a source of comfort to its' subscribers when the world at large is causing them distress, and by the mid to late 70's a large part of the American population was in distress, the majority of that large part the men who were having troubles getting used to the new state of affairs among the women folk.
Our target group were those most rigidly structured for a conventional patriarchal society, and since by the sheer saturation of the Cold War propaganda campaign the majority of them were equally victims of that irrationality, a great deal of what they would have needed to know to defend themselves had been denied to them as part of their government's efforts to maintain the victor's paranoia that was allowing the Cold War to continue into those years in the first place. Seriously, by the time we began the Russians were buying wheat from the Americans, there was no way they'd attack what was feeding them, anyone with half a brain could see that.
But a very large part of the American population was convinced the Russians were going to attack them, a huge part of their lives had been founded on that belief, and so what we did was essentially a bait and switch on them, we made it our business to tell them we knew something about the Russians they didn't, they came asking what that might be since they had to be ready for anything. We flattered their pride, we fed their insanity and we brought back the ghost of Tail Gunner Joe in drag: we convinced them the changes they were seeing in the culture, the maturation of the culture in point of fact, was actually nothing more nor less than a communist plot to undermine the moral fiber of the United States. Of course, as soon as communism was mentioned the devil was in the game as well, that was already established, and it was off to the races with no further ado.
They bought it hook, line and sinker since their pride demanded they believe the communists would never be a match for the might of America's military so long as the moral fiber of the nation was sound. The preachers did the rest for us, quite a few of them had been inducted as young men into the Cold War propaganda machine to set communism and the devil as one and the same force, by then they were well on their way to being the patriarchs of their respective organizations and just as emotionally addicted to the propaganda spiel as anyone else, more really. What they did was simply partisan support from our perspective, they were believers before we ever put our plan in motion.
Of course, it didn't hurt a thing the American's were so totally ignorant of what communism really is, or was. They didn't have clue the first that the Godless Communists were actually more socially/sexually conservative than they were, that the Soviet Union enforced laws so primitive their Puritan forefathers would have likely found them adequately cruel and repressive enough to stay on God's good side. That information had been denied them, if it hadn't been we'd never have gotten away with it.
That was it, that was the limits of our plot and our plan, just two strokes intended to slow the United States down enough for us to win back what we'd lost in our domestic markets. We wanted the youth blunted down for a bit, so our workers would have a bit of an edge, and we wanted the elders busy working out the same things we were dealing with, which is how to arrange society for equality between the genders. By the time Ronald Reagan won his second term in office we knew we'd succeeded, that our plan was performing beautifully, doing exactly what we wanted. We went back to our other endeavors, and America, that was our mistake and a big one, one we're paying for every bit as much as you are.
We should have looked a little deeper, thought a little deeper on what the honorable old soldier Ike Eisenhower said as he finished his long and glorious career by serving his country as it's President. If we'd thought just a bit deeper on that, looked one level beyond what he was able to perceive we'd have done quite a few things differently. But we didn't, and what came to pass as a result of that oversight may write the history of the twenty first century the way the World Wars wrote the history of the twentieth.
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The series will continue in the forthcoming chapter "What the Dishwasher Saw"
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