1937 Baseball All Star Game - Griffith Field Washington DC - July 1937

American League beat National League 8-3


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Oliver Stone is no Great Historian - His Secret History of the United States Sucks the Big One!

I have sat through the first three episodes of Oliver Stone’s The Secret History of the United States and am quite disappointed.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/

The spark of Stone’s youthful talents in storytelling Hollywood Style has been sequestered into a malaise of middle age non-focus and boring self-opinionated fluff.

Not to say that interested students in American History domestic and foreign should not watch this series which is interesting in itself, if you already know a lot of history, but as a sole basis of knowledge, it lacks a lot and is rather sloppy IMO in its unfinished editing phase.

The Secret History adds maybe ten to fifteen percent of content to the general body of knowledge but most of what is discussed is already there in the history books one way or the other. As another or alternate opinion as a historian, Stone, like his movies deserves much respect.

I agree with one critic that Stone’s narration is slow, boring and puts you to sleep. It was no doubt done as budgetary gap kind of thing.

What I learned in a more definitive manner about American History is that the hard edge of economics shapes our history as does any Fourth of July picnic myths retelling that history over a communal marshmallow roasting at the twilight fire pit.

That Hitler was put in place by bankers in Germany as much as by many bankers in New York I was aware of but now somebody else in a more prominent role in the American public sphere agrees and speaks such a thought.

That the Russian People won World War Two with their blood and brute force born of sheer numbers of lives lost. That the Soviet Government merely armed their own people to win that tragic blood fest.

That Churchill was a real pussy when it came to having British involvement in a real land war with Hitler on the European mainland.  That Churchill was a warrior in his own mind like the original Lord Churchill of three hundred years ago.  But in retrospect I now see him as merely a pencil pushing clerk of the Brit Banker’s Global Slave Empire, that he in fact was.

That FDR might have set us up for a fall by dying in the beginning of his fourth term in office. But it was a personal delusion that he could live forever or that his vision for a post WWII world was probably more impossible to achieve than Woodrow Wilson’s failed vision.

That the Industrial Complex with it Bankers and Generals was the stuff that shaped the post WWII world more so than any textbook vision.

Stone somehow pretends that Stalin was a good domestic dictator and that a little better polite handling of that Russian peasant would have prevented the Korean War and by domino effect the Vietnam War, which Stone fought in. That is a true cloud of Oliver Stone fantasy and marijuana smoke.

That Stone’s Messiah in all this politics and real progress of the human race is Henry Wallace, FDR’s second Vice President who spoke a soft cloth coated Socialist rhetoric, who could have prevented the Cold War and the dropping of the two Atomic Bombs on Japan, stretches it a lot.

That Stone hates Truman and trashes him on an implied sexually confused level to make his manufactured Wallace Messiah more real and or palatable.

Truth is that Truman was a learning curve following FDR's death and Harry didn’t have a clue what FDR had in his mind for a post WWII world. 

The beast, the bureaucracy and the military/banker complex went forward on its own and from its maker FDR, pretty much the way it was designed to function, with or without him.

That Truman for all his lack of polish was a prissy kind of guy; he loved you or hated you kind of guy. The pettiness and prissiness got lost along with that perception in his thick Missouri Horse Shit accent.

That a Henry Wallace may have had a National American Healthcare System in place by 1950 in America but he would not have desegregated the military like Harry S Truman did, which in turn I think was a catalyst to the whole Civil Rights movement.

That the real tragedy of the extra information Stone supplies or blandly resurrects into common view is that the Japanese surrendered not because of the nuclear bombing of two of its cities but surrendered to the Americans rather than have the Russian invade their mainland as they in fact were ready to do.

That the endgame of military toy games in the U.S., made and used the atomic bombs against a background of indifference of a distant and out of touch Japanese hierarchy. 

A good question never asked by Stone is would FDR have used atomic weapons on Germany if they had been ready in place to use and to end that war?

The true tragedy is that nobody in power in the U.S. or Japan cared about the lost Japanese people of Hiroshima / Nagasaki and or their humanity that some or the rest of us care about now of those trapped tragic pawns, these many decades later. That says something significant about our own human evolution as reaction to the events Stone merely frames in his personal art gallery.

Better luck Olly on your next artistic endeavor whatever, puff, puff, it may be.

Francis Spellman - Patron Saint of Closeted Clergy

Looking at the agony of some closeted clergy who can’t leave their job and or vocation, they have no job skills. And quite frankly they have never touched a child or adolescent in the rounds of their duties.

Looking at the heartbreak of young men who cannot lie to themselves about their natural sexuality, who cannot pretend that they are not homosexual in their life outlook or deny their birthright. They do not want to be clergy living a lie. That is one reason the clergy is dying. For centuries it has always been the "odd" son that got foisted off the family meal ticket and into Holy Orders.

Looking for an image to match the hypocrisy of the self serving American Bishops, trying for close to a decade now, to keep throwing shit against the wall in hopes that it will stick and find a sufficient scapegoat, to blame the clergy child sex abuse scandal on, nothing sticks except the truth.

Mismanagement and not caring about humanity has marked the American Catholic Hierarchy for decades.

The magisterium of the RC church has always been trickle down from the top. Arch-conservatives such as Francis Cardinal Spellman set the tone of things to come, failure, in the American Catholic church when he said “Change will not get past the Statue of Liberty” at Vatican II to his cronies.

When the John Jay College/USCCB whitewash talks about priests not properly trained in the 1940s and 1950s and not being able to function, they only scratch the surface of ten more needed studies on human sexuality and the repressed state of it in the RC church.

“Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s.”

Interesting point. But who was in charge of the American Catholic Church in the 40s, 50s and 60s or set the tone for the whole nation. None other than Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, first among equals among American Catholic clergy and very clever and very ambitious to push that church’s foreign born agenda.

“Franny” was the success role model of every Irish Catholic boy in the Seminary who wanted to be rich, respected and powerful. And yeah there was that ritual and Jesus thing too. But the real power was in raising money from rich friends to build schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

The baby boom of post WWII meant that you had to crank up the seminary machine and spit hundreds and thousands of new priests out on an annual basis to maintain all that new church property, schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

On that point, the John Jay College report may be right. But then again what the Vatican is presently embracing with pandering to the right wing SSPX party in the church is probably a mistake and an unintended cup of hemlock.

Grinding out priests out of makeshift seminaries in South America, Africa and Asia is setting the stage for the final refuge of the RC church and also the final death throes of that church using the Spellman model of church business success to sell the product. It is a defective dysfunctional model of that product, because child abuse among untrained and sexually repressed, closeted, celibate clergy will produce the same results in the rest of world that it has done here in America in the past half century.

I remember attending the Army Navy Game in 1967 with my father in Philly. The loud speaker made the announcement that Francis Cardinal Spellman, Vicar General of the Armed Forces, had died. The crowd was momentarily silent and then went back to its business.

I asked my father who Cardinal Spellman was. He gave me that “don’t ask” non verbal Irish look. It was also the look you might get when asking about uncle Fred who you never met. It was that don’t ask about your crazy queer uncle in the attic look. I shut up.

Indeed, Cardinal Spellman’s taste for chorus boys was no secret amongst Irish Catholics it would seem. The MSM complied with the conspiracy to keep quiet as well on the subject of the biggest queen in America, red dress and all, living in the Bishop’s Palace at 50th St. and Madison Avenue in New York City on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Perhaps the present political culture wars started in the thirties when people like Joseph P. Kennedy, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) and Franny Spellman sat down to dinner in Boston to plot the silence of radio populist Father Charles Coughlin and plot other political strategy for the 1936 re-election of FDR. But this is not really a history lesson, is it?

An aside, I don’t think that J. Edgar Hoover was as big a queen as Francis, as some say. J. might have been a closeted gay and maybe even asexual. I don’t think that he wore dresses. I think those stories about J. Edgar are exaggerated and revenge after that blackmailing bureaucratic snake went to his eternal reward and have been perpetuated by his many, many, many enemies.

Indeed, the dysfunction of recent American culture seems to stem from the McCarthy era. Everybody knows that Joe McCarthy was a tortured repressed closet gay and only married to have a beard wife. Another crony of Joe Kennedy, former gangster and bootlegger, and father of a future Catholic (first and only, thank God) U.S. President.

The overtone of the present culture war is not so much about gay or suppressed gay sexuality as it is about suppressed sexuality among Christians who have a mindset that all sex is dirty. It is an immature view that the rest of the world is not aware of from a distance. But if the American Empire falls tomorrow and people, future historians, ask why. One primary reason was that honest discourse in the public arena had to always talk around the elephant in the room, and that is the Christian distorted view of human sexuality. Laws against women, laws against gays, they are all laws against God’s gift to humanity – sexuality.

In a sense there was one great conspiracy among the RCs or the Irish Catholics in general to get a RC and or Irish Catholic into the White House. And if that meant covering up everybody’s personal flaws - of McCarthy, Kennedy, Spellman, well it worked. Don’t ask, don’t tell worked quite well for centuries among the rich and the elites of governments and church hierarchies.

There is an incredible amount of silence and lack of published documentation about Franny Spellman’s open secret sexuality. Even the New York Times kept silent. Now that was power to be feared for the NYT to be silenced back then when that paper still had a backbone.

So when the present hierarchy of the American Catholic Church want to blame child abuse on the 40s, 50s and 60s, let’s also have an open discussion about celibacy and closeted clergy and the patron saint of closeted “celibate” clergy, let’s start talking about Saint Franny, our gay uncle in America’s history attic. The truth could set you free.