May 8, 2008
"There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear"
What it is ain’t exactly clear"
Join
me now, if you have the time, as we take a stroll down memory lane to a
time
nearly four-and-a-half decades ago – a time when America last had
uniformed
ground troops fighting a sustained and bloody battle to impose, uhmm,
‘democracy’ on a sovereign nation.
It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command
of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under
attack
while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently
dubbed the ‘Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing
by the
U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution,
which will,
in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody
Vietnam
quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies –
along
with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies – will litter the
battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
For the record, the Tonkin Gulf Incident
appears to
differ somewhat from other alleged provocations that have driven this
country
to war. This was not, as we have seen so many times before, a ‘false
flag’
operation (which is to say, an operation that involves Uncle Sam
attacking
himself and then pointing an accusatory finger at someone else). It was
also
not, as we have also seen on more than one occasion, an attack that was
quite
deliberately provoked. No, what the Tonkin Gulf incident actually was, as
it turns out, is an ‘attack’ that never took place at all. The entire
incident,
as has been all but officially acknowledged, was spun from whole cloth.
(It is
quite possible, however, that the intent was to provoke a
defensive
response, which could then be cast as an unprovoked attack on U.S
ships. The
ships in question were on an intelligence mission and were operating in
a
decidedly provocative manner. It is quite possible that when Vietnamese
forces
failed to respond as anticipated, Uncle Sam decided to just pretend as
though
they had.)
Nevertheless, by early February 1965, the U.S. will – without a
declaration of war and with no valid reason to wage one – begin
indiscriminately bombing North Vietnam. By March of that same
year, the infamous “Operation Rolling Thunder” will have commenced.
Over the
course of the next three-and-a-half years, millions of tons of bombs,
missiles,
rockets, incendiary devices and chemical warfare agents will be dumped
on the
people of Vietnam in what can only be
described as one of the worst crimes against humanity ever perpetrated
on this
planet.
Also in March of 1965, the first uniformed
U.S.
soldier will officially set foot on Vietnamese soil (although Special
Forces
units masquerading as ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’ had been there for at
least
four years, and likely much longer). By April 1965, fully 25,000
uniformed
American kids, most still teenagers barely out of high school, will be
slogging
through the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year, U.S. troop strength will have
surged to 200,000.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world in those
early
months of 1965, a new ‘scene’ is just beginning to take shape in the
city of Los
Angeles.
In a geographically and
socially isolated community known as Laurel Canyon – a heavily wooded,
rustic,
serene, yet vaguely ominous slice of LA nestled in the hills that
separate the
Los Angeles basin from the San Fernando Valley – musicians, singers and
songwriters suddenly begin to gather as though summoned there by some
unseen
Pied Piper. Within months, the ‘hippie/flower child’ movement will be
given
birth there, along with the new style of music that will provide the
soundtrack
for the tumultuous second half of the 1960s.
An uncanny number of rock music superstars
will
emerge from Laurel Canyon beginning in the mid-1960s
and carrying through the decade of the 1970s. The first to drop an
album will
be The Byrds, whose biggest star will prove to be David Crosby. The
band’s
debut effort, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” will be released on the Summer
Solstice of
1965. It will quickly be followed by releases from the John
Phillips-led Mamas
and the Papas (“If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,” January 1966),
Love
with Arthur Lee (“Love,” May 1966), Frank Zappa and The Mothers of
Invention
(“Freak Out,” June 1966), Buffalo Springfield, featuring Stephen Stills
and
Neil Young (“Buffalo Springfield,” October 1966), and The Doors (“The
Doors,”
January 1967).
One of the earliest on the Laurel
Canyon/Sunset
Strip scene is Jim Morrison, the enigmatic lead singer of The Doors.
Jim will
quickly become one of the most iconic, controversial, critically
acclaimed, and
influential figures to take up residence in Laurel Canyon. Curiously enough though,
the self-proclaimed “Lizard King” has another claim to fame as well,
albeit one
that none of his numerous chroniclers will feel is of much relevance to
his
career and possible untimely death: he is the son, as it turns out, of
the
aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison.
And so it is that, even while the father is
actively
conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively
accelerate
an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the
‘hippie’/anti-war crowd. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is,
you
know, a small world and all that. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s
story is
in any way unique.
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