Las Vegas in 25 Words or Less

In the last half of the 20th Century mob money transformed this tiny desert bus stop into a sprawling, hideous shrine to greed and perversion.

Prohibition Through The Keyhole

A lot of people born long after the Prohibition Era in the United States probably found it hard to believe that the USA has once ventured so far toward becoming a totalitarian state that it passed a law declaring that no one in "America" could thereafter "take a drink". The very idea was just so preposterous to most Americans. And yet it actually happened.

Why it happened was really no mystery. After World War I ended, Americans just couldn’t seem to stop celebrating. In fact, by the end of 1918, so many Americans were drunk and fornicating and committing alcohol-fueled crimes that it stood to reason that somebody just had to do something about it. And, boy, did they ever.

Bolstered by the American Temperance Movement which began in the 1860s and which was on quite a roll ever since then (especially throughout the Bible Belt and in Washington, DC), Congress passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution on January 16, 1919, virtually outlawing the consumption of alcohol in the United States and penciling Prohibition into the national archives. The 18th Amendment paved the way for the passage of The Volstead Act in October 28, 1919 which was the federal government’s official act of declaring a national Prohibition of alcohol.

Despite a standing federal law against the consumption of alcohol between January 16, 1920 and December 5, 1933, drinkable alcohol was still legally available during that period by certain means and methods. It could be obtained with a medical prescription and many doctors during this era wrote many such prescriptions with reckless abandon. In fact, they wrote so many phony prescriptions that a lot of drug stores that filled these prescriptions for “medicinal alcohol” were shut down by the feds. After all, it was considered one thing to put a crooked druggist out of business and quite another to jail a delinquent sawbones.

During the years of Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, it was also permissible to make hard cider and wine at home, in limited quantities, of course. All commercial wineries were forced to sell their wine through government warehouses and then only for use in religious ceremonies. Unh hunh. Right.

During Prohibition more Americans were incarcerated than before the moral right and left took away their beer and whiskey. Gangsters had a lot more to peddle now than games of chance and human flesh. Without Prohibition, bootlegging on a large scale would have never existed in America. In fact, without Prohibition, Al Capone would probably have been only a minor crime figure of that period.

Prohibition in the U.S. was repealed by the 21st Amendment, which turned over the control of alcohol to the states. It is interesting to note that Pennsylvania and Ohio only dared to ratify the 21st Amendment after Utah had done so. Hmmm.

The fact that Prohibition was a monstrous failure in the United States should have come as no surprise to anyone. After all, it was strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan. What more can be said?

Manning The Moon

Between 1969 and 1972 there were six lunar landings made by NASA and eleven men walked on the moon’s surface during that time. The first man to walk on the moon was Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969 and the last man to set foot on the lunar surface was Eugene Cernan on December 11, 1972.

Nobody can really say for sure why the milestone Apollo Missions were replaced by the millstone Shuttle Launches, which are about as exciting as watching a neighborhood kid fly a kite on a still day. NASA thinks that playing Buck Rogers in the 21st Century and blasting off the Earth in rockets big enough to power a city for a year and loud enough to wake up aliens anywhere in the solar system is still a laudable idea when almond-eyed, bubble-headed extraterrestrials have been flitting in and out of our atmosphere on the whisper of gravity for centuries.

Hmmm....you don’t suppose these are the same almond-eyed, bubble-headed bastards who told us to get the hell off the moon in 1972? After all, they just may have outposts on the dark side of the moon (the part that never faces Earth) and want to remain hidden. But then NASA Apollo astronauts would surely have seen their lights while orbiting the moon in search of a landing spot so how could this possibly be?

Let’s face it, going to the moon was a very big deal and making rings around the Earth in a “spaceship” that looks like it was made from Lego blocks is nothing but window dressing for an American space program that was zapped in the bud by extraterrestrials who put their foot down about our traipsing all over the solar system without a plan.

And a Mission to Mars? Forget that. Until we learn to eliminate our exhaust emissions, we’ve pretty much been “grounded” by the solar system police.

Axis Legacy of Death

For the second time in the twentieth century an economically and morally bankrupt Germany would declare itself a nation of super people and blame all its woes on the rest of the world and especially on Jews living in Europe and the Soviet Union. This time, Germany had the help of Japan and Italy, two countries whose leaders simply claimed to be God’s gift to the world and the hell with anyone else, including their own people.

This time Germany’s legacy to the rest of the world, with the assistance of Japan and Italy, would be an estimated 52 million people dead worldwide, 6 million of them Jews whose deaths were not easy ones. Germany was a nation that needed to be squashed like a bug. Instead, people still buy their cars, guns and machinery as if nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

But Germany is not alone in its ability to be forgiven for its heinous and massive crimes against humanity. No one seems to remember Pearl Harbor, either, when they go shopping for a new car or a TV. But then, no one is going to stop eating pizza or spaghetti, by the way, and doesn’t everyone want to wear at least one thing with an Armani label before they die?

The good news is that there will probably never be a Third World War as long as the children and grandchildren of mass murderers control companies in the Fortune 500.

Civil Rights War

The Civil Rights Movement of America's 1960s was inevitable in a country that didn't have very much respect for people with African-American origins or for women of any origin. Bolstered by President Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to take Americans’ minds off the horrors and the merchandising of the war in Vietnam, the movement was initially a demonstration of southern black opposition to the slavery mentality still prevalent in much of the Bible Belt.

Led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and encouraged by LBJ, the Civil Rights Movement was suddenly in every American's face and the movement would be in full swing by the time the "n" word was generally considered to be a dirty, racist, bigoted word. Black Americans wanted to be referred to as "African Americans" and the term sounded good to most Americans and even progressive. But white Americans were still called "white", whenever they weren't being called "honky" or "whitey" or "cracker". Apparently non-white Americans thought it was perfectly OK for black people to continue calling white people names like that, especially on the new TV sitcoms starring African Americans like Sherman Hemsley and Redd Foxx, whose hatred of white people as characters George Jefferson and Fred Sanford, knew no bounds.

Racial slurs against white people were, for some stupid, hideous reason, considered to be funny and not offensive, especially when famous black movie actors in the 1980s began referring to white men as "white bread" or "Jim Bob" or "Joe Bob" or "Jethro" or "hillbilly" or just plain "redneck". Well, it might have been fun for these "African-American" actors to enjoy their equal opportunity for hatred in the public arena but these dirty, racist names were just as bad as the word "nigger" and none of these names were one damn bit funny to me. Nasty is nasty and racist is racist, no matter how you slice it. Fighting racism is pointless if you use racism as your weapon and anybody from my part of Appalachia could have told you that.

"European-American" would have been a nice word for any American who had family origins in Europe but that would have also included people of African, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Island origin as well. "Native-American" would have been a better handle for anyone born in the United States but that would have made us all just a little too equal and that apparently wasn't the purpose of this new movement. Besides, what would Americans call the descendants of the people originally native to the North American continent? The word "Indian" was definitely out. And Whoopi Goldberg seems to be the only non-Caucasian U.S. citizen who likes being called just plain "American" these days.

Alas, The Civil Rights War all boiled down to incidents of name-calling and finger-pointing and demands for reparation that would obviously never benefit those who had been wronged in the first place or punish any of the original wrongdoers. Apparently, the Equal Rights Amendment wasn't the crown of victory for minorities and women it was intended to be. But then any real social panacea is spelled out in actions, not words.

So, what began as a necessary component of cultural evolution, the Civil Rights Movement in America soon ended up as a new civil war of race hatred, fueled by television, Hollywood and the Internet, instead of a welcomed cultural movement spearheaded by a handful of dedicated visionaries with a plan.

Elvis in 25 Words or Less

In 1956 Elvis Presley brought hillbilly America out of the closet and into the mainstream and by 1970 he was the Liberace of Pop.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

I’m sure it started way before 1951, when I was born, but not too much before. I think it was a post-World War II phenomenon, Americans trying to stay “one up” on the neighbors at all times, especially where material possessions were concerned.

This shallow practice of striving to be better than those around you was never more prevalent than in the 1960s, when Madison Avenue started employing behavioral psychologists and began creating subliminal advertising, TV commercials that would cut to the quick and make parents and even children feel as bad as you could about that old station wagon still parked out front or that dreadful depression-era wallpaper disgracing your living room.

After all, this was the Sixties. Color television would soon be worth fighting for and fussing over. The Democrats were back. Men would be walking on the moon before you knew it.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” meant that, if the family car was a Chevy, then you’d better make your next one a Pontiac. And if the Joneses across the street already had a Pontiac, than you’d better consider test driving a Chrysler as soon as possible. The big question, of course, was “why?”. Why??? Well, hell, so the kids didn’t develop some kind of awful complex because they were surrounded by people who were better than their parents were and, hence, better than “they” were because that other family’s disposable income was greater.

In the early Sixties “Keeping up with the Joneses” meant buying a bigger and better station wagon and to hell with the gas mileage. It meant housewives could be proud of the fact that they didn’t have to go to work, that they could easily afford those avocado Capri pants and the avocado sectional and the avocado melamine to dress up their boring interior days. In a pinch, beige would do.

Did I mention that avocado was in and green was out? Just as all things French and Continental went out the window in 1959 and everything Latin was in by the time 1960 rolled around, especially if it came from Brazil. And especially if it was the color avocado.

I’m not sure when this fad of trying to be better than the neighbors faded out. It probably never did. It probably went underground in 1970 when America got so funky that parents went back to being drab just to maintain some sort of balance at home. But the American family slowly recovered and, by the mid-1980s, upwardly mobile parents began buying their kids sneakers with three-figure price tags and all the latest electronic gizmos to annoy the neighbors with.

By the mid-1990s, “Keeping up with the Joneses” was pretty much back in full swing. A bigger and less fuel-efficient SUV meant that you had so much money you didn’t care and, to further prove that point, the kids started getting their own ATVs to tear around in. And next year, what the hell, they’d get bigger and noisier ones than the kids down the street.

Britain Invades Manhattan

On February 9, 1964 the Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and thus began the downward spiral of American culture and the slow demise of Western civilization as we knew it. It took them almost 200 years but the British finally paid us Yankees back for stealing the Thirteen Colonies from them in 1776.

But we've patched it up with "Merry Old England" since then and, even though both our countries are going to hell in a handbasket, we often go marching off to war together as if all that unpleasantness had simply never happened.

Women’s Lib Fib

The so-called “Women’s Movement” actually began in the late 1960s but it wasn’t really evident as a “generational cause” until the early 1970s when Baby Boomer women began worshiping the “mother of feminism", that hideous pagan idol Betty Friedan (a.k.a Betty Goldstein) and her diabolical protégée, Gloria Steinem.

What began as an American cultural movement to free women from the stigma of being second class citizens and to fight for equal employment opportunities for them soon degraded into a surreptitiously orchestrated, life-long, man-hating event.

The fact that Betty Friedan was a homely and miserable hag who simply hated men seemed to go unnoticed by everyone except the beautiful and sophisticated — and unscrupulous — Gloria Steinem, who stuck herself to Friedan and her bilious diatribe like fly paper and who subsequently exploited the American man-hating movement for her own personal aggrandizement.

Throughout the Seventies decade Steinem almost single-handedly duped millions of Baby-Boomer women into not only hating the men of their father’s and grandfather’s generations for all the alleged abuse suffered by their mothers and grandmothers, but focused her own man-hatred on instilling in feminine youth a hatred for the men of their own generation, young men who were hated for things they didn’t even have a chance to think about yet, let alone be guilty of.

Besides, an awful lot of them were dying in Vietnam, without ever having the opportunity to try on “a male chauvinist pig” mask to see if it actually fit.

Just like the Nazis who preceded them and who successfully hated an entire world for no reason at all, the feminists of “Women’s Lib” also proved to the world that a philosophy built upon hatred can, indeed, move a nation forward.

The Wonder of Disney

More impressive to me than the automotive empire that Henry Ford built with his “assembly line” or the steel dynasty of Andrew Carnegie was the magical kingdom without a king created by Walt Disney in the mid-20th century.

The “house that Uncle Walt built” had television shows like “Disneyland” on ABC, which premiered on October 27, 1954, and which had prime time offerings that included wonderful family shows like “Davy Crockett”, starring Fess Parker.

When “Disneyland”, the TV Show, moved to NBC in 1961 it was broadcast in color and renamed “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” and it later became “The Wonderful World of Disney”. It was family entertainment at its best and it offered American children a wholesome opportunity to wish upon a star and see what happened next.

Disney meant Disneyland, the theme park in California, and later “Walt Disney World” in Florida. Walt Disney brought us the “Mickey Mouse Club” each weekday on TV in the late 1950s and dozens of animated films and “G-Rated” feature films, including quality westerns and action/adventure movies with big-name stars.

When Walt Disney died in 1966 his dynasty continued to flourish but the entertainment empire that Disney built was not the thing that really impressed me about Walt Disney. It was the man, himself. Here was a man who loved entertaining children and who dared to dream of mystical realms and magical kingdoms and of wonderful things that were bigger than himself.

And that kind of humble, hands-on, American entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Woodstock: Giving America the Finger

While I donned a white dress shirt and tie in August 1969 and rode with my parents the thirty miles to Penn State’s main campus and put in a forty-hour week in Accounting Administration and then 20-hours-per week in Accounting Studies as a part-time accounting assistant and full-time English major, thousands of young people in my age bracket were brazenly showing the rest of the world that my generation consisted largely of sociopaths who didn’t care that they were naked and fornicating and getting stoned in public.

And we wondered why they kept sending our asses to Vietnam.

The Watergate Show

On June 17, 1972 five people were arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic national headquarters in Washington, DC and were subsequently tried and convicted.

Then one of the rat canaries, James McCord, squealed on President Richard Nixon the following March and the Watergate scandal was blown wide open. Nixon was accused of covering up the break-in at Watergate, which was a political black-op strategy to wiretap the Dems, not to get dirt on a call girl operation supposedly operating out of the now infamous apartment complex.

Another rat fink, former White House counsel John Dean, testified at the Watergate Hearings that former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell had actually signed off on the burglary, with the full knowledge of former White House counsels H. R. Halderman and John Erlichman.

All of these crafty jaybirds subsequently did stretches in federal pens, as did former FBI agent and current radio talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy, who helped plan the Watergate break-in. It’s an old ploy: give me a deal and I’ll give you the boss.

That sniveling coward John Dean served up Nixon on a platter and the Commander-in-Chief got the axe. But not for ordering the Watergate burglary or for masterminding it or for even knowing about it. Nixon was the scapegoat for an America that had learned to hate and to hate hard and long and Americans crucified Richard Milhous Nixon for the lesser sin of sweeping the whole nasty incident under the rug. And now, that pseudo-macho, know-it-all Liddy is the king of right-wing haters and shakers everywhere, while the memory of President Richard Nixon remains tarnished forever.

People forget that this was the same President who ended that stupid and hideously wasteful Vietnam War and who parted the bamboo curtain by being the first U.S. President to ever visit China. He was also a strong law-and-order President who was far from being "a crook" and a tough presence in the Executive Branch who helped keep OPEC at bay at a time when that cartel really began flexing its muscles in its effort to hogtie and swindle an entire world. Just ask Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were both powerless to fight the notoriously greedy oil barons of OPEC. (author's note: Gerald Ford was still living at the time of this blog posting).

More than anything else, the Watergate scandal was a watering hole for the liberal press and a spotlight for left-wing patriots from Maine to California. These were the people who watched “All in the Family” like it was a religious service and who believed that the characters “Meathead” and “Little Girl” represented the visionary spirit of a new America, while they disdained anything Archie Bunker did and said as bigoted and narrow-minded. The new America was now the land of equal opportunity for muck-raking, scandal-mongering and downright hatred and Watergate was the biggest political legacy of the Baby-Boomer Generation. Will we ever own up to that or, like Nixon, just try to sweep it under the rug?

As for me, I don’t really give a hoot. When they impeached Bill Clinton for having a girlfriend in the Oval Office and then didn’t impeach George W. Bush for invading Iraq to end a family feud with the bin-Ladens, I stopped wondering if anyone in government would ever do the right thing again.

"And that’s the way it is..."

...followed by today’s date in the voice of “CBS Evening News” anchorman, Walter Cronkite. I mean, was this the voice of God or what? For many American TV viewers in the mid-twentieth century, this wasn't far from the truth. Unfortunately.

That's right. If you were one of the millions of Americans in the 1950s through the 1970s who wanted his or her evening meal of current events pre-chewed and even digested for you, Walter Cronkite was your man.

Anyone with a half a mind back then, and certainly anyone with an inquiring mind or a questioning spirit, watched the “Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC instead.

Cronkite, like Dan Rather who followed in his footsteps, not only reported the daily world news to most of us, he actually chose for us and even edited in or edited out what we’d see and hear out of the day’s voluminous collection of worldwide happenings. So, if you were like most of us middle-class American viewers, what you got at 6:30 pm EST on CBS was not actually “the evening news” but “The World According to Walt”.

More than once I found myself talking back to Walter Cronkite as he signed off every night with “And that’s the way it is...”. My rejoinder went something like this: “Sez you, Walt. Sez you.”

(Author's Note: Walter Cronkite was still alive at the time of this blog posting. The veteran broadcast journalist, an American television icon for decades, passed away July 17, 2009 at the age of 92. Whether you liked him or not, he will certainly be missed by millions.)

Who Shot JFK?

This is about the dumbest question Americans have been asking themselves and each other since November 22, 1963. (No, that would have to be, "Who shot J.R.?") Anyway, the BIG question is "Why was JFK shot?" *or, most importantly, "Who gave the order to have had JFK assassinated?"*

The little pinko prick Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger and everybody knows that. Whether or not there was "a puff of smoke from the grassy knoll", indicating the presence of another gunman, is a moot point. JFK was more than likely shot dead because he tried to end the war in Vietnam, a dangerous undertaking in those times of unchallenged U.S. military might, pat-on-the-back, good-ole-boy politicians and corporate America ass-kissers, all of whom stood to gain a lot from the uninterrupted flow of guns and ammo and aviation plastics and high-tech goodies from Yankee factories into southeast Asia.

We can't blame Castro, who never forgot the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion and the subsequent trade embargo JFK signed off on. Fidel Castro was too emotional, too stupid and too poor to pull off such a stunt. And we dare not blame Jackie Kennedy, who may have been at the end of her rope with a husband who couldn't keep it zipped (let's face it, JFK made Bill Clinton look like a monk), because Jackie Kennedy was a loyal First Lady from day one and a true patriot.

But we might be able to blame an over-ambitious Lyndon Johnson, the cross-dressing tyrant J. Edgar Hoover, that dastardly General Hershey who headed up the Selective Service System and The Joint Chiefs of Staff for JFK's assassination. Hell, playing Cold War chess with the Soviet Union in southeast Asia was obviously very high on their agendas while watching the Secret Service stand guard over the back door into JFK's secret love nest apparently wasn't.

There are other theories, of course. Many people still believe that the Mafia had JFK killed because Robert Kennedy, as U. S. Attorney General under JFK, had been putting a lot of mobsters in federal pens for murder and racketeering and he was gunning for Jimmy Hoffa who controlled the Teamsters Union's purse strings, a purse he loaned the Mob money out of to buy and build casinos in Las Vegas. The Mafia theory gained a lot of strength after RFK was gunned down by another zealous, bird-brain trigger man, Sirhan Sirhan, in 1968.

And there's the theory that JFK was assassinated because he dissolved The National Bank (The Federal Reserve Bank) and was pushing for a silver standard, a move that would make a dollar of U.S. currency worth 100 cents again. An inflation-fighting move that would pull the rug out from under Wall Street investors and speculators who rely heavily on wage-price spirals in order to make their periodic windfall profits. On June 4th 1963 JFK signed Executive Order 11110, stripping the privately-owned Federal Reserve bank of its power to lend the U.S. Government money at interest. That Executive Order is still valid today. The Federal Reserve still exists but it's not supposed to make money by lending the federal government money. Maybe one day they'll try to sell the feds The Brooklyn Bridge.

Then there's the theory that the speech JFK gave on TV, a mere ten days before his assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, is the thing that got him killed. This is the same speech JFK gave to The National Press Club in April of that year. But, this time, the White House interrupted regular television programming just for this speech, as if what the President had to say was urgent and breaking news. As if the public had to hear what The National Press Club and the government would try to conceal. Or ignore. In this brief speech President Kennedy made veiled references to what seemed to be the Communist threat from the Soviet Union. But when JFK denounced "secret societies with secret oaths and secret proceedings" and referred to a "monolithic conspiracy" I doubt very much if he was referring to the U.S.S.R. Especially when he promised the American people that his administration would be open and not secret, that it would be accountable ("transparent", as they say today).

It sounds to me like JFK was renouncing the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergers, the Skull & Bones Society, The Knights Templar, the 35th Degree Masons and the secret world government whose control and influence Abraham Lincoln had previously rejected during his administration, especially because of the diabolical, money-tending Rothschild family who already controlled Great Britain's entire money supply and who was after control of America's abundant wealth. The "real" Earthly powers-that-be. That's right, the Rothschilds offered to finance the Union Army's battle against the Confederacy but President Lincoln, true to form, told the Illuminati's money tenders to take a hike. That, people, is an historical fact that they don't teach you in high school in America the Beautiful.

Considering what subsequently happened to both Lincoln and JFK, my money is on the last theory. I think having two American presidents take a stand against the Illuminati was the straw that broke the camel's back. The "camel" being the power brokers of the "New World Order", an Illuminati-inspired global conspiracy that reared its ugly head long before President Herbert W. Bush (the 41st President) announced its inevitability to a shocked and disbelieving world. But, then, I've always been a conspiracy theorist. So don't go by me.

* Post edited on April 5, 2014 for clarity