"In the end, what we have is a cruel and
deceptive game that appears to be informative when it's not, presided over by
professional actors and reactors.
And like the old joke asks, "How do you know when they are lying?" The answer: 'When their lips are moving.'"
The
blogger's last lines are often this forceful.
*****
It
would be easy and is tempting to review the bare bones of each blog, to display
poly-dimensional art and craft of a journalist who practically invented his
genre, the Vincent Canby of news analysts.
In
Blog 2, Schechter reveals his poetic side (maternal influence; his mother was a
published poet) by using excerpts of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," in
order, to dissect the divisive U.S. foreign policy. The book ends with a poem
celebrating the author's turning age sixty, his identity and life's mission
having been formulated in the sixties ("From the Sixties to Sixty").
And
speaking of the sixties, at the end of section III, he describes this
spine-tingling revolutionary era in more detail:
"It was a heady time and it's shameful to read in
2011 that most students today are not taught about what we called "THE
MOVEMENT," in caps, and felt part of something bigger than ourselves--a force
that rolled across this country touching and changing so many lives."
In my experience, they tend not to want us relics around; I tried for a paying job collecting money on the street for a human rights organization and lasted around a week for not amassing enough (I'd earn into the hundreds a few times; later I discovered a "colleague" who confessed she had the same job and hadn't earned a cent) but here we are tolerated by Occupy (more on Occupy below): "the media labeled it 'kids and ageing hippies.'"
Blog 3, on fascism, is a masterpiece of
knowledge and analysis, equating fascism with corporatism, convincingly
predicting the economic if not political direction of this country.
What can we do? Some of the answers have
been advocated again and again in other of his books. No hypocrite, he lives
these answers. To jump ahead to his section predicting and then dissecting the
Occupation, there is footage (in one of his films, which should have been
excerpted here--is it?) of Schechter standing on Wall Street a year before the
Occupation, literally preaching about its evils. The Reverend Jesse Jackson
stands at his side. A few listeners stand in front of him, rather absurdly, as
others walk by ignoring the scenario.
What a scenario.
In another solution scenario, in Section
3, blog 6, the author spells out an agenda for Occupy (Dec. 2011):
1. Investigate
who stole what;
2.Indict wrong doers;
3.Prosecute the guilty; and
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