STEPHEN COOPER—Equally more illuminating than Brinkmann’s minimalist musings is masterful American writer James Baldwin’s take on modern society’s lack of consciousness. In his essay “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist,” Baldwin piercingly observed: “What the mass culture really reflects . . . is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are in the world…
AMERICAN BRAINWASH
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B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
17 minutes readDAVID WALSH—the novel on which John Huston based his 1948 film, was published in German in 1927 and in English in 1935. It concerns three Americans and their back-breaking efforts to find gold in the desolate Mexican countryside. Their success leads ultimately to tragedy. The novel’s author was the left-wing writer known as B. Traven. Considerable mystery surrounds Traven, some of it sustained by the writer himself during his lifetime.
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CJ HOPKINS—At that point, the media had been hammering hard on the Trump-is-Hitler narrative for months, so they had to stick with that for a while. It had only been a few weeks, after all, since The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and numerous other establishment publications, had explained how Trump was using special fascist code words like “global elites,” “international banks,” and “lobbyists” to signal his virulent hatred of the Jews to the millions of Americans who, according to the media, were secretly Hitler-loving fascists.
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CJ HOPKINS—These are just the latest salvos in the corporate establishment’s War on Dissent, an expanded version of the War on Terror, which they’ve been relentlessly waging for over a year now. As you may have noticed, the ruling classes have been using virtually every propaganda organ at their disposal to whip up mass hysteria over a host of extremely dubious threats to “the future of democracy” and “democratic values,” Russia being foremost among them.
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ANDREW LEVINE— The voting bloc comprised by Trump supporters, though not quite what it used to be, remains formidable. It turns out that many of the people Hilary had in mind were not deplorable at all; just bamboozled, ill-informed and too pissed off for their own good. Also, many of them loathed her and her husband and their hangers on, sentiments for which they can hardly be faulted. But that was a year ago. Anyone still on Trump’s side no longer has any excuse.