American Town Square – Sense of Community – Lost in the Modern Age?

I was totally struck by the statement in Russell Brand’s youthful POV in his Guardian article, about the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher and how she broke a “Sense of Community” along with the Coal Strikers in 1980’s Britain.

That the solidarity that got Britain through a World War with Satan and his minions literally breathing down their necks was the sense of community and sacrifice and blind hard work for the cause.

The Brits turned out Churchill after that war because they did all the heavy lifting in that war and created a sort of socialist state for the benefit of the many and or the all.

That ideas of Marx were not exclusively communist but like the earliest traditions of the Christian faith, a community based on common survival and shared sense of all.

I have written somewhere here or there how I thought of Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the Air Traffic Controller’s union as Conservative ideologue and not as fellow American being the root why we could not protect our skies twenty years later on September 11, 2001.  

That losing experience and sense of camaraderie and common purpose and sticking one’s neck out left us with a scooped out pale reflection of an air controller’s network that could have been an asset in our national defense but instead had been turned into some hollowed trophy of Conservative dogma.

That Ronny fed off of Margaret’s actions in Britain and vice versa in their one upmanship of ways to break humanity in favor of profit and all at the loss of a sense of national purpose or on a local level a sense of community that used to exist in the American town square.

That so much rhetoric these days serves as politics and PR drivel as the ship of state fades from greatness and into the deep forgotten abyss of history like all past empires etc.

Spilled milk? Or a sense of purpose to redirect our personal goals if we are a basic Christian and our national goals if our combined sense of ancestry and common ethic can be re-galvanized into something like the idealized forum and town squares of our youth?

Is the eventual global town square going to be a great place to meet and hang out with your global neighbors or is it going to be one cold stone faced plaza that nobody cares to frequent?

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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.