(a valediction)
RIP Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, Boston Brahmin, journalist, flack, newspaper editor, author and card-carrying member of The One Percent. At the helm of the Washington Post during a crusading period of its history, he inter alia broke the Watergate caper that brought down the Nixon presidency. But in doing so, was he a traitor to his class or an unwitting tool of the power elite? And what does the answer mean for life in the good old U. S. of A.?
I'd like to digress on one episode in Bradlee's personal and professional life, one he recorded in his memoirs. He was a journalist for Newsweek magazine working in the DC bureau. Newsweek was about to be sold, and Bradlee and others had qualms about who it was going to be sold to.
What he did was he phoned up Post owner Phil Graham and suggested Graham buy the magazine. Graham invited him over and proceeded to pump him for information on the personalities, procedures and politics of the company Bradlee was working for at the time. The upshot was a 50-page typescript, since lost or destroyed. After delivering this what these days would be called confidential business information, Graham bought the magazine and Bradlee found himself, in rather quick succession, DC bureau chief, Graham son-in-law and Post honcho, a position from which he helped bring down a President.
Question 1: How did Graham and Bradlee going after Nixon serve the interests of The One Percent? Wasn't Tricky Dicky a Republican, therefore One Of Them?
Well, yes and no. Nixon, however privileged, wasn't quite Their Class, besides which he instituted wage and price controls at one point. As Democrats, Graham and Bradlee might have preferred a member of their party in the White House, but after a certain net worth party labels lose much of their meaning. And what they got in that case was a couple years of Gerry Ford and the disaster that was the Jimmy Carter administration, which set up the rule by Republican and centrist Democrat tools of the moneyed class that has lasted nearly 34 years.
Question 2: If the Newsweek sale was part of some elitist conspiracy, why be so open about it?
This one goes to the heart of the matter imho. The One Percent don't need to form secret societies, elect officers, collect dues, devise secret handshakes, skulk around like clandestine agents, or pass resolutions about how They are going to run the world.
The interests of the oligarchic class currently ruling the U.S.A. are so intimately bound together, and their sense of personal worth and privilege so innate, that the "conspiracy," if we are to call it that, runs by itself. Bradlee didn't need orders from the Trilateral Commission, Bilderburg or the Illuminati to pick up the phone and sell his company down the river to his fellow oligarch. All he needed was his innate sense of belonging to the right crowd and his desire to keep the news outlet he worked for under that crowd's collective thumb.
One last thing to throw out there: when has the Post, or any other major U.S. news source, last taken any editorial or reportorial position explicitly against the interests of The One Percent, their control of an outsize share of the nation's wealth or their willingness to employ that wealth to defend their position, power and privilege? In what sense then is it, its editor, or any other news outlet or honcho some kind of hero of the people?
(a peroration)
Well, that about wraps it up for me. I leave US-TOP a highly developed, prosperous Nation with huge income disparities, an illusory freedom and scores of controversies that help keep its less-well-off inhabitants' minds off the fact that We control every important aspect of their lives; the U.S.A. with its mask off. I may drop in over the next few days to make a wise crack or scurrilous comment here and there but after that, I'll be done. Be seeing you. Enjoy playing with your zombies.
