honor america day

Though intentionally apolitical nearly to the point of obfuscation and denial, the Fourth of July celebrations held in Washington, DC in 1970 branded as Honor America Day could not ultimately separate themselves from the milieu of war and social injustice and incivility that it tried to rise above.
Richard Nixon’s milquetoast and hardly objectionable gala, orchestrated by hotel magnate J Willard Marriott, secured universal and neutral celebrities like astronaut Frank Borman, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Glen Campbell, et al—though to pull back the curtain a bit all were at least ostensibly supportive of the expanding war in Vietnam that had crept into Laos and Cambodia and had resulted in massacres domestically, at least to the point where they could be reliably trusted not to turn on the hosts and protest.
Unlike the pomp and pageantry of Nürnburger rallies of recent years, this asymmetrically white and mainstream celebration was not meant to cause more division than was already baked into the ongoing tensions but inevitably attracted protests and counter-protests. Conservatives, neo-Nazis, members of the religious-right plus the so called Silent Majority clashed and the event ended in tear-gas.  

american top 40

On this day in 1970, the ABC Radio Network first broadcasted its three-hour block of syndicated programming hosted by radio personality and music historian Casey Kasem (*1932 – †2014), counting down the top of the domestic charts according to Billboard magazine.  Also a veteran voice-actor, Kasem also played the role of Norville “Shaggy” Rogers in the Scooby-Doo franchise throughout most of the incarnations of the characters. The show’s format—which included trivia, predictions, dedications and letters from listeners—was exported around the world and launching several spin-off ranking shows, a version of the Top 40 is still airing today.

operation cyclone or charlie wilson’s war

Though exponentially expanded under the Reagan administration, US president Jimmy Carter secretly authorised for the first time on this date in 1979 measures that would aid and underwrite the resistance efforts of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the occupying Soviet troops and the USSR’s client state, the secular and liberalised Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
The decade-long undertaking is the largest and most expensive known operation of the Central Intelligence Agency (the UK’s MI6 ran a parallel one), budgeted at seven hundred thousand dollars during its first year and upwards of six-hundred million by 1987—to incite insurgency and eventually bankrupting the Soviet Union and precipitating a violent civil war in Afghanistan. Carter reluctantly agreed to lend initially non-lethal support to the Mujahideen in part under pressure from nuclear neighbour Pakistan—believing the US should try to make amends with regional partners especially after its involvement in the unrest in Iran—though arguably, the secondary US motivation was to draw the Soviets into a quagmire, like the one the US had only recently extricated itself from with Vietnam. Ultimately financing jihadists and undoing the social and economic reforms that the country had aspired to effect and then abandoning it as a failed narco-state once it had served its purpose, resulted in consequential, inevitable blowback.

six grandfathers

The perfect venue to encapsulate all that is controversial and conflicted about the United States of America and its fraught history heir to this awful present, Trump will be the master of ceremonies for Independence Day celebrations beneath the colossal desecration of a mountain sacred to the Lakota people and promised in perpetuity in accordance with the settlement of the Black Hills of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The sacred promontory called Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe was renamed in honour of the wealthy benefactor named Charles E. Rushmore who sponsored an unauthorised (they were trespassing on tribal land) prospecting exhibition to the area, and with the discovery of gold in them there hills, the United States promptly withdrew from its obligations of the peace accords.
Interested in promoting tourism to the region (see also), sculptor and white supremacist John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (*1867 – †1941) explored the idea of creating a massive monument, the national mythos writ large in the early 1920s. Thinking representing pioneering figures would have limited appeal, Borglum rejected the idea of creating statues in the Needles of Lewis and Clark and their guide Sacagawea, Chief Red Cloud, Chief Crazy Horse and Buffalo Bill Cody instead selected three past presidents and the incumbent as representative of the breadth and depth of the country’s history and legacy to come. Also responsible for the monument to the Confederate Army in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the latter two of Borglum’s giant visages were slightly less genocidal for the continent’s aboriginal population than the first two Founding Fathers featured, all worked zealously to clear Native Americas out for Lebensraum for the Anglo-Saxon settlers with Teddy Roosevelt developing particular ideas about race in later years and continuing a long chain of Indian removals in order to in part create the US national park and wildlife reserve system—Mount Rushmore included. Though usually pictured from a forced perspective so as to not notice the pile of rubble at the base, it is not a work-in-progress any long to be chiselled away at but rather ossified and forcefully enshrining the worst and most shameful aspects of American history that defy reconciliation even when confronted its gigantic faces. Every bit the ahistorical affront as the sculptor’s other creations and those who would commission such memorials, it is designed to intimidate and ought to topple with the rest.

narrowcast

Via Things Magazine, we are quite enjoying this streaming channel (see also here and here) of video artefacts and interstitials whose continuous blocks of programming are expertly curated between shorts and speciality anthologies (Nothing But Star Wars, David Bowie Mixed Tape, Bollyweird, etc.) from the creative team at EXP TV. Should one want video breaks on demand or submit to the algorithmic suggestions, they also are found on more traditional platforms but I think the real treat is in being receptive to serendipity in the inconspicuous and strange.

public law 88-352

Originally proposed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy in June of the previous year but forestalled by a filibuster in the US Senate, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushed forward the legislation and signed the anti-discrimination Civil Rights Act, rigorously debated but eventually approved by Congress, on this day in 1964. Aside from outlawing difference in treatment or preference based on heritage, religious background or sex, the eleven entitlements of the act guarantee uniform application to voting rights and burdens of exercising them, prohibits segregation, promotes equal employment opportunities and affirms and improves upon prior similar legislation by providing a host of evaluation and enforcement measures.

we have clearance, clarence

While—courtesy of our faithful chronicler—it’s worth noting the anniversary of the general release in North America on this day in 1980 of the supremely silly Jim Abrahams and Zucker Brothers comedy for its own sake, it does strike me as hard to reconcile the rapidity of contemporary riffs, among them the mostly overlooked meta-reference that the action-drama franchise Airport (1970 – 1979, based on the Arthur Hailey novel and became the epitome of the disaster genre of the decade) had just concluded and cycled out of theatres.
Enjoying three sequels—with the first two being big box office hits—the final flop Airport ’79…The Concorde (even called Airport ’80 in some markets due to the distribution schedule, whereas Airplane’s sequel didn’t fare so well), it reminds me how the Kennedy White House took the metonym Camelot not because it was particularly courtly or chivalrous in its own right but rather due to the concurrent popularity of the Broadway play.

9x9

toccata und fuge in d-moll: table settings scatter and repair to Bach’s virtuoso piece

tapón del darién: the gap in the Pan American Highway that may never be bridged

hording: USA buys up all available stock of a drug treatment for COVID-19, leaving none for the rest of the world—unclear whether it is an effective intervention, via Super Punch

double-decker: panoramic people mover designed for physical distancing

dr-dr-draugur: Icelandic utility company contracts an exorcist (see previously) to clear neighbouring farmstead of ghosts

we’d call them farmers’ markets: the indispensable role of China’s “wet markets” in food logistics and how they’re unfairly stigmatised

afrofuturism: Sun Ra’s syllabus from a 1971 UC Berkley “African American Studies” course

oppression of scale: a gallery of evocative large construction projects

various artists: another look at the New Age anthology Pure Moods, via The Morning News