Who says it not all about me?
If Big Money is indeed the secret source of Q, then what better letter?
Consider that in the early 1900s Millionaires ($M) were Big Money, and then into the end of the century Billionaires ($B) were Big Money, and now we’ve got people close to being Trillionaires ($T).
What’s next? Quadrillionaires. Yes, $Q. Truly Big Money, with a capital Q.
The question is, who is behind QAnon? Who supports the marketing genius that captured so many people’s hearts and souls?
We can develop a meta-conspiracy theory about QAnon by considering some of the main ideas of QAnon.
For any conspiracy theory to appeal, it has to have elements of truth. The idea of a Deep State, nefarious forces controlling our government and institutions, has more than just an element of truth.
It’s real and we all know it’s real. It is Big Money. It is the corporate donors and their lobbyists influencing Congress. It’s the Super PACS and the money used to get their own people elected. It’s the corporations limiting our choices and driving up prices, like for gas, or cable TV, or pharmaceuticals, or… well the list just goes on and on.
Consider, though, how we know it’s real. We read about it in papers, and more important, we see it in the movies and on TV all the time. Hollywood loves telling the store of corporate greed behind some dark deeds, and some hero rising up to take them down.
Hollywood is clearly an enemy of the Big Money behind the Deep State. So the Deep State is true, but Hollywood is not a force behind it, but rather a force that exposes it. Worse, for Big Money, Hollywood tends to drive people towards the Democrats.
We have a two party system, where neither party is particularly beholden to the people. The Republicans are clearly aligned with Big Money. The Democrats also get funding from Big Money, but are more likely to put in place legislation that makes it look like they are the people’s party. They might tax the wealthy, and the corporations, and pass laws to protect the environment, or worker safety. They might try to provide social safety nets, like Medicare and Medicaid.
These all cost Big Money money. So the Democrats are clearly enemies of the Big Money behind the Deep State.
QAnon is a brilliant conspiracy theory that does what all effective propaganda does. It takes the truth of the Deep State and turns it 180 degrees around. It says, look, it’s not not Big Money that is evil, but Hollywood and the Democrats.
Remember, the Big Money people are the ones that used doctors to advertise cigarettes, that got the government to protect us from cheap Canadian drugs saying it was for our own good, and that got Congress to use our tax dollars to bail out the big banks that caused so many to lose their homes in the mortgage crisis (and do nothing for the people who actually lost their homes).
It’s classic. Take the people’s frustration with the Deep State, and turn that anger against the very forces that fight the Deep State. A piece of cake for the manipulative marketing geniuses working for Big Money.
Here’s the exciting part. People are frustrated, and feel powerless against the Big Money behind the Deep State. But, with QAnon, and the Deep State redefined as Hollywood types and Democrats, well then, we can rise up and defeat them.
They call them pedophiles. How much of a fight can pedophiles put up? And who would feel sorry for pedophiles going down in defeat? Much easier to fight them, than say Exxon or Goldman Sachs.
All that’s needed is a leader, someone willing to carry the flag into battle, to take down those pedophile Hollywood types and Democrats that make Big Money look bad.
But doesn’t it tell you something that that savior, Donald Trump, leading the charge, is someone who self-identifies as Big Money? Whose signature legislation when president was tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy?
Isn’t it obvious that QAnon is a brilliant marketing effort that inspired a large number of people to, not fight against the Big Money of the Deep State, but to fight Big Money’s enemies and help it tighten its grip on our society?
I encourage others to uses these ideas and get them published in op-eds around the country. Here’s my letter to the local Greenfield Recorder.
Here is 169 word version that can be submitted as a letter to your local paper. Feel free to use it as is, or maybe better to modify it a bit in your own style.
Who is the Q behind QAnon? Here’s a meta-conspiracy theory. Like all propaganda, QAnon is based on a partial truth, a Deep State. We all know it exists, and we know it is Big Money behind many of the wrongs of our government and institutions. How do we know? For one, Hollywood keeps telling stories that illustrate it, making Hollywood an enemy of Big Money. Who else is an enemy? Democrats who tend to raise corporate taxes and regulate Big Money.
How can Big Money fight back? Turn the story around. These are the people who used doctors to sell cigarettes, so no problem creating QAnon that paints Hollywood and Democrats as Deep State evil.
Who will lead the Storm that overthrows them? A man who self-identifies as Big Money. A man whose signature legislation while president was tax cuts for the wealthy. Can there be any question Big Money is behind Q? And Q’s followers have been duped into fighting for, not against, the Deep State they resent?
Who’s behind QAnon? Maybe looking at a story Hollywood loves to tell can provide the answer.
It’s a story of dark conspiracies, behind evil doings, that a brave individual, or band of individuals, uncovers and battles to overcome.
It’s not a new story. It’s Robin Hood and his Merry Men fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham, stealing from the rich (this is key point) and giving to the poor. The back story there was that the Sheriff had stolen lands from individuals, like Robin Hood, while they were away at war in the Crusades.
It’s James Bond fighting dark hidden international crime syndicates, it’s Batman and Robin against, yes more crime syndicates, it’s countless TV and movie detectives working some case only to discover there’s some powerful politicians and money interests behind the evil doings.
It’s the lovable Sully in Monsters Inc., up against the evil CEO, Waternoose, who will kidnap children to make a profit. Here’s how Hollywood (Disney in this case) pictures Waternoose:
It’s not very flattering.
Not all the movies are fiction. It’s “The Big Short” uncovering the financial institutions behind the sub-prime mortgage crisis (which, on a personal note, caused me to lose about 1/3 of my retirement funds), it’s “Erin Brockovich” taking down the PG&E utility company hiding the health risks it caused, and more recently “No Sudden Moves,” an excellent Netflix flic based on a true story of a consortium of car companies suppressing fuel efficient technology for it’s own financial gain.
These stories are so common, they are ingrained in our consciousness. We all know of the influence of money in our politics. How the military-industrial complex made all that money in Iraq (our tax dollars), how the financial companies were too big to fail in the mortgage crisis (but not the people who lost their homes), and how Congress continually protects the financial interests of the health care industry as it remains the largest cause of personal bankruptcies.
These are not well-kept secrets.
So when QAnon says there is a Deep State running our government and other institutions, it rings true. In fact, it is true if you consider that the ultra-wealthy and large corporations are the ones behind a government that does NOT work for the people. Let’s call them Big Money.
Do you see the problem? Big Money does not like Hollywood telling the story, over and over, of its corrupting influence on our institutions. It is bad PR.
Worse, it gets people to want to vote for Democrats. I’m not saying the Democrats work for the people, they are just as much bought and controlled by Big Money. It was, after all, the Democrats who failed to give us nationalized health as they catered to the world’s most profitable health-care industry.
But they do give more back to the people. The Democrats are more likely than the Republicans to raise taxes on Big Money, and put in government regulations protecting the environment, ensuring work place safety, and providing safety nets like Medicare and Social Security. All of these programs cost Big Money money.
So there’s the problem for Big Money. There is a Deep State, and it is Big Money. And people know about it because of Hollywood, and government reacts to it because of Democrats. How can poor, unfairly treated, Big Money fight back? To get Hollywood and the Democrats off its back?
QAnon. It’s absolutely brilliant. It takes that story that is so ingrained in our psyches and turns it upside down. It tells the powerless that there is a Deep State and that they can fight it.
It says there are powerful interests at work, but it’s not Big Money, it’s despicable sex offenders. And who are these sex offenders secretly controlling our institutions? Hollywood types and Democrats.
And who is going to root them out? And bring them to justice? Yup, Big Money.
It’s brilliant! The Deep State isn’t Big Money, but despicable sex offenders. And it’s not brave individuals who battle them, it’s, yes, Big Money!
The Sheriff of Nottingham is the good guy! Fighting that bandit Robin Hood (and his Merry? wink-wink men!) The Joker is the good guy, taking down the evil Batman (and what’s with him and Robin?)
Can there be any doubt that Big Money is behind QAnon? That it’s a brilliant spin to get Hollywood and the Democrats off its back? To let the Sheriff of Nottingham keep the land he stole from the people, to protect the Joker’s criminal enterprises? To bail out the big investment banks, the car companies, to protect the drug companies, to….
Consider their savior. The man who will lead QAnon’s “The Storm.”
A man who self identifies as the epitome of Big Money. The man behind the Trump Tower (which kind of looks like a Hollywood prop for an evil corporate headquarters.)
Readers, if this rings true, spread the idea, let your QAnon friends know that they’ve been had, that they’ve been tricked into fighting, not against, but FOR the very Deep State / Big Money conspiracy they fear.
I never liked Roe v. Wade.
It never seemed right to me that nine, politically appointed, individuals should decide the law of the land on a topic like abortion. That should have been Congress’ job, to meet and deliberate, weigh all sides of the issue, and come up with good law that reflects the will of the people, the people they represent.
But no, that’s not what politicians do. Instead they try to make an issue like abortion divisive. They want us to be in Pro-Life or Pro-Choice camps, and get mad at each other.
Those very labels completely cloud the issue. We have a word, “fetus,” which we use because there is nothing else like it. The Pro-Life people want us to think a fetus is just the same as a new born infant, who we all agree has a right to live. The Pro-Choice people want us to think the fetus is just like a blemish every woman has a right to remove from her body with elective surgery.
But the truth is, it’s not an either or situation. I don’t think even the most adamant Pro-Choice person thinks an eight month pregnancy should be aborted. Nor are there many Pro-Lifers, except the hard core, who think a morning after pill is a bad idea.
Instead, it’s a question of where you draw the line. Even the Texas law says abortion is OK in the first six weeks, and Roe v. Wade said states could ban abortion in the third trimester. Most of the people in the country kind of agree abortion should be legal in some situations and not in others.
As I said, Congress doesn’t deliberate on issues like this. But there is a better way, and it was done in Ireland, and it worked.
Like here, abortion was a volatile issue in Ireland, with demonstrators and politicians doing the sorts of things they do here. As an alternative to that, a Citizens’ Assembly (CA) was convened to study the abortion issue and make recommendations on what abortion law should be in Ireland. The CA was made up of around a hundred people drawn from all walks of life who got together to listen and discuss the different sides of the issue, and make a recommendation on what the law of the land should be.
All well and good in theory you might say, but can it work for real? Yes it did. People with wildly differing initial opinions, came together on a middle ground recommendation. How did it become law you might ask? Well the Irish legislature decided to put the CA’s recommendations up to a national referendum, and the people voted, and it easily passed, and those recommendations, from a demographically diverse group of citizens, without a financial or political stake, became law. Law that, according to various surveys, closely matches public opinion.
In a way, this was quite freeing for the politicians, no longer having to worry about taking a stand one way or the other, of offending some voters at the expense of others, no longer having to frame such a complex issue with sound bites for their base.
I highly recommend Googling “When Citizens Assemble” on YouTube to learn about that particular CA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjpuDk9_BWI The video was shot before the final ending resolution became law. And to further research democracywithoutelections.org, sortitionfoundation.org, and helena.org to learn more about how CAs are being used today for other issues around the globe. This is actually happening, it can be done. It’s not pie in the sky.
Instead of people gathering and protesting with Pro-Life and Pro-Choice signs, I’d love to see them gather to demand a Citizens’ Assembly be convened to write the law of the land, and not nine, politically appointed, individuals.
Pat Hynes, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, wrote an op-ed piece in the Greenfield Recorder about work to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and looked to the way a forest of trees cooperates as a model for human behavior.
In that same issue of the Recorder was an article about a couple with a prominent BLM sign that keeps getting defaced. Previous issues had articles about John Turner’s massacre of a Native American village as people wonder if Turner’s Falls is really such a good name for that local town.
This is the op-ed piece I wrote referring to all that.
I share Pat Hynes’s horror at the current state of global nuclear arsenals. I also share her wonder at the ways the trees in the forest communicate. I mean even the tomato plants in my garden are talking to each other for their mutual benefit by sending chemical messages through the soil.
But I think the forests also illustrate the real problem with nuclear proliferation. Those amazing technologies employed by the trees to help each other is also used to wage war amongst the different species. The evergreens and the deciduous trees are fighting for control of the forest, just as my tomatoes are battling the weeds for my garden. The forest pines have no problem using their needles to create a soil inhospitable to oaks.
The lush variety and wonder of our local woods has come about due to a balance of power, as each species uses its own weapons and networks to compete with the others.
In much the same ways different cultures have both lived and fought through human history. In much the same way the nuclear powers co-exist today. But, as Pat Hynes points out, it really has gone too far, it really is very scary.
Let’s go back to the Japanese and Americans in WW II. Comparing us to trees, the question then is, were we just common members of the same species who should work for a common good? Or members of different species who see each other as threats?
Clearly at that time we saw each other as threats and used our technologies accordingly. Them at Pearl Harbor, us at Hiroshima.
Clearly if we want to save the planet as being fit for human habitation we need to do the equivalent of having oaks and pines agree to work together. This will not be easy.
The problem with Japan and America at the end of WW II is we didn’t understand each other. A Japanese friend of mine once recommended a book to better understand Japanese culture and thinking. It was called the “Chrysanthemum and the Sword” by Ruth Benedict. The book itself is interesting and informative, but what I found even more interesting is how it came to be written.
It was written by an anthropologist who was hired by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1946. We really were looking for answers, for clues to understand the “them.” Did it work?
Well I believe it did, for it shaped the thinking of American – Japanese relations after the war. Unlike my father who witnessed the death and destruction in the Pacific caused by the clash of our nations, I only knew a World where the Japanese were our friends. It’s actually hard for me to imagine the Japan that my father knew.
I believe it is this sort of cross-cultural understanding that will be vital in curing our global ills.
I just finished reading “Mayflower” by Nathaniel Philbrick. It is all about understanding the cultural clashes between the Puritans and the Native Americans. And just as Pat Hynes points out about WW II days, there were those then that understood and tried to reach less deadly solutions to the conflicts. But the majority simply didn’t understand, or even care to understand. The atrocities of King Phillip’s War, on both sides, were the result of that. What John Turner did to the Native Americans at what is now Turner’s Falls was exactly the same as what we did at Hiroshima. And for the exact same reasons.
Sigh, it goes on and on. Robert McNamara, a main architect of the Viet Nam War, later went to North Vietnam to try to better understand his counterpart there. Guess what? There was a big misunderstanding. We didn’t understand that it really was just a civil war in a small country. They didn’t understand why giant America cared so much about their small civil war. They didn’t grasp the weight of the Cold War on our psyche.
We were worried about nuclear Armageddon and saw Viet Nam as part of that. I grew up practicing hiding under my Long Island desk in case a nuke was dropped on NYC, which seemed a real possibility at the time.
Can we learn to understand each other on a global scale? Bringing it closer to home, can the left-leaning people of Massachusetts learn to understand why the right-leaning people hate us so? Can the owners of the BLM sign in Orange understand the person who keeps defacing it?
I got to spend another week in Cancun getting more work done at (product placements coming) Cancun Dental Specialists. I stayed at the Flamingo Resort hotel which is right across the street. The dental work was good, as was the resort, but that’s not what this is about.
Walking along the beach one day I saw some strange tracks.
I wondered what could have made them. They all connected the sea and deep, freshly dug, depressions, three or four feet in diameter.
And then I thought — Sea Turtles!
A woman with excellent English and a French? accent came out from a condo on the beach where I was standing. She saw me taking pictures and came out and explained.
It was turtles. They come out at night and lay their eggs which then take weeks before they hatch. But there’s a problem. Frigate birds, which I loved watching fly, were hanging out just waiting for baby turtles to eat.
Hmmm, is that why I saw so many when I first arrived?
So, she and her husband would wait for the turtles to hatch and gather them up and hold them until dark, when it was safe to let them in the ocean.
There were also conservationists who would ride up and down the beach on ATVs and collect the eggs and put them in nurseries. There was one at the Flamingo hotel.
She said they saw turtles at any time of night, after sunset, before sunrise and in the middle of the night.
So I decided to go and look. The first night I went out after dark. I saw nothing. The next night it rained. The following night I woke up at 2 AM and thought, I’m going to look for turtles.
I walked one way down the beach, seeing some fresh tracks but no turtles. I turned around and headed back, with a half moon hanging over the ocean. As I was walking, I saw a small light down by the water. A flashlight of a person? Too dim. Some phosphorescence? Too regular. Maybe moonlight reflecting off the back of a turtle???
I approached and in the dark, saw a big old turtle crawl from the water’s edge over the sea weed. I watched as it lumbered along. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, and rest.
I wanted to watch the whole drama unfold, but really? This turtle was moving sooo slow. OK, OK, I have nothing else to do. I didn’t want to use a light because in the 1960s movie Mondo Cane they said artificial light confused the turtles.
But I couldn’t help myself and took one flash photo. I was behind and the turtle was making its way up that steep mini-cliff that ran along the beach. It didn’t seem to mind.
The iPhone takes surprisingly good night time photos. Well, still dark, but here you see the turtle digging its nest, throwing up sand.
And then it returned to the ocean. I tried to capture the turtle wading into the sea in the moonlight, but you can’t see the turtle in any of them. Here though is some glint of moonlight off the turtles back as it approached the sea. The same lighting that first drew my attention.
The next day I wanted to go back and see the nest of the turtle I had watched. On the way I saw this evidence of another turtle’s work, covering resort beach chairs in sand as a result. Yes, there were nests all in and about the resort’s chairs.
Here then are the photos of the track and nest from the night before.
I’m working on a follow-on book to Jazz Chords for Baritone Ukulele which will be called, surprisingly, something like Jazz Chords for Guitar. (This story is only going to be about that for a little while, major digression coming.)
The chapter I’m working on is about chord progressions, of which a fundamental one involves the I, IV and V chords. (Doesn’t matter if you know what that means or not.).
So I came up with a simple progression using those chords that sounds like a lot of songs. This is it:
I IV I V I IV V I
Seeing as how I was going to use this progression to illustrate different ways of playing it, I decided it needed a name. I came up with the clever name 1415-1451.
But that’s kind of boring. What if I considered those numbers as dates? And used some historical context for the name? Enter Wikipedia.
The Battle of Agincourt, that’s the battle where Henry V lead the heavily out-numbered English to beat the French and made St. Crispin’s day a memorable one for the British.
It was the center piece of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and Henry’s speech before the battle was considered some of Shakespeare’s best writing. Here’s Kenneth Branagh’s version:
A Mohawk prophet, whose name means Two Rivers Flowing Together had a vision of peace between the warring tribes in the area. He’s also called The Great Peacemaker. Some didn’t agree with his vision, but he formed an alliance with Hiawatha, a great orator, and a woman, The Mother of Nations, who offered her home up as a meeting place for the leaders of the five warring tribes.
(How do they know it was 1451? Legend has it there was a solar eclipse at the time. Hmmm, that means it could have been in the 1100s as well, but never mind that.)
They created the Iroquois Confederacy with a tribal council made of the leaders of all the tribes. This might have been one of the first, if not the first confederacy. That is, a government where there are a number of independent political entities that join together just for those things that benefit all, such as for the common defense.
Defense was, of course, the big one, and by joining together for that they could better deal with the other tribes in surrounding areas. Other non-defense issues, such as marriages, property disputes, etc. were all handled on a tribe by tribe basis.
This was state of the Indian Nation when the French and English, still fighting after all those centuries, arrived in North America. And why it was so important to get the Iroquois on your side. The French got the Iroquois on their side, whereas the English had other tribes on theirs.
It is said that our Founding Fathers were well aware of the Iroquois Confederacy and used it as a model for our own Constitution. The rules of that confederacy are all written down and were widely known at the time. Just like the Iroquois tribes, each state wanted to run its own business, but they wanted to join together mostly for the common defense. (Against who? well Canada was one of their big fears, territorially very similar to the Iroquois situation.)
The French and English fighting all had to do with 1066, when the French conquered England and English royalty was French, and so let them claim rights to land in what we now call France. As did the French, who happened to live in the land we now call France.
Key to the legal battles was one of the nobles on one side or the other didn’t have a male heir, and the claims of the other side that the female heir counted were disputed, and, well a lot of people died. And how did the English win at Agincourt? It appears it was a superior weapon.
The English long bow delivered an arrow with such force that it could penetrate the cheaper armor worn by the French infantry. (The nobles were better protected.) One move in the eternal arms race.
But the French wound up, in the end, coming out on top of the war, in large part due to the efforts of Joan D’Arc. She’s in this story too!
Well clearly I needed to write some lyrics to go in this song, 1415-1451. Here they are.
I – In fourteen fifteen
IV – On St. Crispin’s Day
I – At the Battle of Agin-
V – Court,
I – The English destroyed all
IV – French hope of victory
V – And ended the Hundred Year
I – War.
—
I – In fourteen hundred and
IV – Fifty one in a
I – Land across the
V – sea,
I – Warring Iroquois tribes
IV – Made a lasting peace
V – In a new born confedera-
I – cy.
—
I – Three Hundred years later
IV – The French and the English brought
I – Their strife to the American
V – Shore.
I – The Iroquois Nation
IV – Allied with the French in
V – The French and Indian
I – War.
—
I – Defeated again the
IV – French then supported the
I – Colonist’s revolu-
V – tion.
I – Who on winning then used
IV – That Iroquois model
V – In framing their new
I – Constitution.
Abbot Cutler and Diana Merritt helped get to the final verses, and Nancy Shinn then wrote a melody line. I then performed three parts in a video. Now, I don’t really have any ego in my musical or reading ability, but I did have fun putting this together while in Cancun getting my teeth fixed.
Jerry was probably more of a college acquaintance than friend of mine, being closer to our mutual friend John. Like John, Jerry was a math major, and like John and myself, Jerry was a Go player.
Jerry was blind, and I mean completely and totally blind. He had had some degenerative disease around age five which required the removal of both his eyes. He just had eye sockets. He didn’t wear dark glasses or anything, he just figured he looks how he looks and if seeing people had a problem with it, that was their problem.
His parents enrolled him in the Perkins School for the Blind. Apparently the first thing they do with the kids is put them at the edge of a large playing field and ask them to run. Very few blind kids will run. Jerry was one who did. It turns out this changed the way the school approached his education.
I was walking down one of the streets just outside of the college campus and Jerry came up behind me, moving fast, late for class. He never used a cane, but had a kind of defensive gate and moved quickly and precisely. As he passed me I watched him avoid the other people on the sidewalk, and then, without slowing down, veer right through the center of the archway and onto the main campus.
Wow.
John said he was walking with Jerry once and Jerry asked him, “what’s that big square object over there?” It was a truck parked where there usually wasn’t one. Did I mention Jerry didn’t have any eyes?
Go is a game played on a 19×19 grid with black and white stones. Jerry wanted to play and someone made him a metal Go set with holes for the grid and pegs for the stones. The tops of the pegs had two different textures so Jerry could tell them apart. He would run his hand over the board, “seeing” the position, and then place a peg for his move.
I played with him a few times, and I was talking about it with his friend John. I mentioned that Jerry took a long time making his moves. John replied, “That’s not because he’s blind. He knows the board as well as you do. It’s because he’s Jerry.”