Historic Media Quakes: 2011, 1923...

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Moments in History; Media Quakes The Year 2011 will be noted (as far as one can see at this early stage) for a terrifying quake, tsunami, and nuclear event in Japan, as well as a geopolitical and cultural quake across the Arab world. The United States, at the same time, is wrestling with its long-standing gravitational attraction toward extreme right-wing, corporate politics. The outcomes are unclear, but the foundations in history are there if we want to see them. More to the point, while this site celebrates the growth of digital publishing and the new freedoms it brings to readers and writers, there are times when we must set the bottle aside and talk about the wine. Media are not an end in themselves. Content, as always, is boss.

Japan's Great Quakes: 2011 and 1923 This week, the entire world is gripped by the horrific tragedy unfolding in Japan. History's fifth-largest earthquake (the Great Tohoku-Kanto Quake), measuring 9.0 on the Richter Scale, on 11 March 2011 snapped undersea tectonic plates against each other as if they were flint stones. Water thrown up by the disturbance caused a tsunami over 40 feet tall to sweep miles inland, a few hundred kilometers north of Tokyo, causing untold devastation and loss of life. Then the atomic reactors began to fail near Sendai, and the disaster became a world catastrophe. History is always worth consulting, and sometimes offers the most remarkable parallels from long ago. The deadly (Kanto,after the central plain) quake of 1923 was 'the perfect storm,' killing over 150,000 people, many of them burned alive in horrific fire storms. The quake swept away old Japan, emboldened her powerful military caste, and changed world history

Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: how the shogun's ancient capital became a great modern city, 1867-1923 Edward Seidensticker's engaging and stylistic (New York Times) and knowledgeable (Japan Times) analysis traces Japan's opening to the world in the generations before World War II. He picks as his starting point the end of Feudal Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate, and the emergence of modern Japan in the Meiji Restoration. It was called the Japanese Empire, and it began shortly after Commodore Perry's Black Ships woke up a sleeping giant with their cannon fire. Seidensticker picks as his end point the 1923 quake and fire storms that swept Japan at the same time as Gen. Billy Mitchell, starting in the early 1920s, began railing against future Japanese aggression and demonstrated the effectiveness of naval air power. Mitchell's prescient vocalism earned him a court-martial from the ossified U.S. general staff, who, like all general staffs composed of ancient generals, are prepared to fight the wars of their youth, half a century earlier. Mitchell's demonstrations of sinking mothballed battleships seemed heretical to men who had cut their teeth on Civil War-style saber duels in the military academies of the late 1800s (despite the recent Great War and its lessons). Likewise, a terrifying new kamikaze (divine wind) swept Japan.

The Perfect Storm: Japan's Horrific 1923 Great Quake At almost exactly noon on September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake rolled across the main Japanese island of Honshu. The quake measured 7.9 on the Richter Scale and lasted between four and ten minutes. Its epicenter was in the sea off Sagami Bay, south of Tokyo by almost the same distance as the 2011 Sendai quake occurred north of Tokyo. In 1923, Tokyo, Yokohama, and other central cities were devastated by the quake and its horrifying aftermath. Between 100,000 and 140,000 human lives were lost. These included 105,000 confirmed dead, and over 40,000 missing who had vanished and would never be found. While Japan and the world hang on every moment in the atomic disaster following the 2011 quake, the 1923 spewed an aftermath more terrifying than the quake itself. At the same moment as the quake of 1923 hit, a powerful typhoon was raging off the coast near Tokyo Bay. The resulting havoc with air pressure changes caused fire storms that consumed both stone buildings and bamboo homes. In the aftermath, mobs of ethnic Japanese and local police hunted down, tortured, and butchered Koreans and other Asian nationals suspected of causing many deaths through well poisoning and other hysterical rumors. Thousands disappeared in the collapse of rain-soaked hillsides, paralleling the 2011 tsunami disaster. Out of the 1923 disaster, the militarist caste arose ever more powerful, poised to recapture Asia from European and U.S. colonialists, and widen the Japanese Empire.

Media: Mistrust and Revolution Coverage of the 2011 Japanese disaster has unveiled an unexpected tectonic divide of another kind, with ripples in a world pond (to mix metaphors). Japan is notoriously a culture run by consensus rather than individual leadership. This is not a plug for either Western sensationalism or Japanese-style obfuscation, because in fact the mass media often have a way of creating their own echoes. The accusation is now being made in U.S. media that the Japanese government, and almost by extension the Japanese media, have been less than forthcoming in the timeliness and truthfulness of their reporting. The anchors of TV-Japan remain unfailingly polite and understated while showing disaster images. The Japanese government continues to rely on information from the discredited owner-operators of the atomic power plant and its six damaged reactors, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which was in recent years indicted for falsifying inspection and damage records at those plants, with direct consequences in today's disaster. It has been pointed out, in fairness, that the U.S. government relied on British Petroleum for information during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil rig and oil spill disaster, with plenty of corporate obfuscation and self-servingness. In an age of demagogues and corporate shills owning and running the mass media, and twisting the truth to destroy the middle classes and increase corporate profits to obscene levels while the rest of the economy still teeters near the brink, perhaps a tectonic rattle will be brought about as reality overcomes corporate dishonesty. Don't get me wrong. Big corporations can and should be a national jewel and a societal asset—but only under the Ronald Reagan maxim "Trust but verify." It is up to the voters to decide if the courts and the legislatures have become echo chambers for corporate P.R. The most egregious and costly example in U.S. history has to be the set of lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that propelled the nation into a totally unnecessary, and detrimental, war with Saddam (our ally under Bush Sr., and our inadvertent ally in that he was a key enemy of Osama bin Laden), which took our eye of the ball in Afghanistan (where Osama was really holding shop).

Arabs: Mistrust and Revolution There is an obvious parallel in the revolutionary fervor currently sweeping the Arab world. Remarkably and refreshingly, the voices we hear on rebel-sympathetic TV in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other nations seem to be educated, Western-leaning, often female, and understandable to those of us who have grown up with democratic traditions, however much those traditions may be under attack in today's corporate-run United States. Here, in the US, the Western-leaning, progressive educated class , including unionized teachers, fire and police personnel, and other public workers—as opposed to the gullible, unschooled, and noncritical thinking teabagger class—react with chagrin to the lies and propaganda of old-fashioned union busters and Republican big government, recklessly spending political hacks who are in the employ of corporate special interests. The typical uneducated teabagger will not flinch when their favorite political icons (Palin, Bachmann, et al) flub simple history facts or can't tell which state they are speaking in. For those who took the trouble to learn about history, economics, science, and the like, the tide of uncontrolled media lying is a tsunami of disastrous proportions, which is burying millions of hapless U.S. citizens—to begin with, nearly sixty million without any health insurance, and another hundred million who pay exorbitant premiums, but will be denied health care when they fall ill. When we look to the Arab world in 2003, we see Comical Ali (Saddam Hussein's 'information' minister al-Sahhaf) stating that the US troops in Iraq were simply committing mass suicide at the gates of Baghdad, when in fact the city was being overrun by Allied forces. Likewise, in 2011, we see nutty Ghadafy's son declaring with a straight face that nothing is going on in Libya, while his father, wearing a collection of silly hats and old carpets, declares from his burning bunker that all his people love him. Somebody send that guy some razor blades! At this moment in time, the US and her allies have finally begun making noises about a no-fly zone to prevent another GHW Bush-style massacre of Shiites in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, or a 1956 style Hungarian uprising, when the world paid lip service while not lifting a finger as Soviet tanks crushed a democracy uprising in Budapest. Need we mention the former Czecho-Slovakia in 1938 or 1968?

…and the point is… In our focus on publishing and media, we must pay due attention to content as well as container. It's fine to promote a new digital industry, but we must hope that the standards for quality of the new offerings will rise above the increasingly formulaic, inbred product of the six-flag print monopoly in New York City. Readers deserve more steak and less hamburger. On the news side, we need aggressive and objective reporting, with reliable news sourcing rather than corporate P.R. departments and P&L seismographs. We are clearly at a global turning point. The unthinkable is happening. The polite Japanese are finally outraged at their lying government, in its elbow-locked consensus with industrial committees. The docile Arabs are suddenly looking very Western, very middle class, very educated and English-speaking, very feminine and unwilling to stand for any more bloody fascist dictators and their Comical Ali speakerphones.

More Parallels: Atomic Bomb Attack Let's ponder these coincidental parallels of history while we are at it. During World War II, Japan became the world's first (and still only) nation attacked with atomic bombs. Today, Japan sits atop an unfolding atomic disaster so far second only to Chernobyl, during 1986 in the failed nation called the Soviet Union. The U.S., which was a prime supporter of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in the post-war years, today is a leading contributer of aid.

More Parallels: Fire Balloons & Jet Stream Also during World War II, Japan had a program for attacking the U.S. via high altitude balloons, packing high explosives, and sent drifting across 12,000 miles of Pacific Ocean to land in the U.S. One family in Oregon were killed while inspecting such a balloon. They were called Fu-Go, or fusen bakudan, literally balloon bombs. According to Wikipedia 9,300 of these explosive or Fire Bombs landed in the USA, with Between November 1944 and April 1945, Japan launched over 9,300 fire balloons. Americans and Canadians spotted about 300 balloon bombs, which killed six people and caused relatively little damage. They were, in effect, a terror weapon above all, meant to further intimidate a US population already subject to constant blackouts and air attack drills. Nearly a century later, North Americans watch the jet stream currents, which may bring radiation from Japan's defunct Daichi reactors.

Rewriting History on the Fly The comparisons with what is going on in the USA are quite apt. For example, George W. Bush was known to have oil company censors in the White House, falsifying legitimate science reports to support the unsupportable, like drilling for oil in our pristine national parks of Alaska. As with BP in the Gulf, and now TEPCo and the Japanese goverment, the uncontrolled fusion of corporations and government is a recipe for moral, health, and cultural disaster. Democracy is robust while its legs are nurtured, especially a free press. By their nature, large media are expensive to operate, and by definition fall under corporate ownership with the deep pockets it takes to keep things going. Currently, in the US, a strong teabagger-driven wave of corporate activism is underway among the corporations' GOP handmaidens in the US Congress, to end funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). CPB, whose major arms include the generally educated and progressive Public Broadcasting Corporation, provides media an dinformation to vast areas of the country not covered by commercial networks—except, of course, Fox News, which reaches everywhere, being the right wing propaganda arm of unchecked corporations. Rupert Murdoch, purveyor in equal portions of pornography, violence, and phony patriotic/moralistic hype (an irony of course lost on teabaggers), took dual Australian/U.S. citizenship some years ago for the obvious purpose of qualifying to buy a large segment of U.S. satellite channels so he could beam his Axel Springer-like tripe to the tiniest hamlets of Michigan, Wyoming, Arizona, Alaska, and other distant places where the compass needle doesn't point. Traditionally, US media were controlled by wealthy, ultra-conservative local families (the Jacksons in Connecticut, the Copleys in California, and many others). This media shogunate was upended in the 1880s/90s by the arrival of that era's Internet, the telegraph. Media empires of Wm Randolph Hearst, Ochs-Sulzberger, and other kings of the big lie sprouted, drumming the nation into military and imperial ventures in Hawaii, Central America, and the Spanish Empire. As the propaganda would have it, we did not become an empire by gobbling up the Spanish Empire. Somehow, in the US disconnect, A did not result in B, even though B followed A in the alphabet of reality. For generations, US educators trumpeted the line that the US was attacked in 1898, when evil Spanish brown people with fangs and glowing eyes blew up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. Even then, more honest and critical thinkers established that it was an accidental boiler explosion in an aging warship, but as the saying goes (my paraphrase): Never let the truth stand in the way of a good emotion. The aphorism more commonly goes "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good opinion." The problem is that, to have an opinion, you have to have information. Teabaggers of all time periods—be they the urban mob that immolated Caesar's corpse in the Forum, or the drunken masses who destroyed all that priceless Medieval stained glass in the Notre Dame de Paris in their orgy of destruction and revenge against smarter people—are epically lacking in information and facts. Even if someone handed them a book, and showed them how to open it, and if they could decipher the writing within, they still lack the critical thinking apparatus to make much of those details. Thus, an uneducated person, lacking critical thinking skills, does not have any information. They therefore do not have an opinion, but an emotion—violent, explosive, dangerous, and destructive. It remains to be seen how much more stained glass they will destroy in the USA. It took a Great Depression in the 1930s to rally voters enough to put the Republican corporationists out of office. FDR remains the most hated man for Republicans to this day, perhaps even more so than the former Republican President Herbert Hoover became the most hated man in the US during the Depression. People commonly and bitterly joked about Hoover Blankets (a newspaper you slept under on the cold sidewalk); Hoover Chickens (barely edible jackrabbits, an ironic twist on "A Chicken In Every Pot"); and Hoover Flags (pull out your empty pockets; those are Hoover Flags). The great tsunami of amnesia and hubris and pseudo-economics that put Reagan into office in 1980 is not yet done destroying entire segments of modern civilization. I should know. I was a fool with a newly minted Master's in Business Administration who voted for him twice, and regret it today. We still live in a culture where anyone speaking of the things promised by the U.S. Constitution is confused for a 'socialist' or a 'communist' or some other demon conjured up by the corporate propaganda machine to keep us all ignorant, obedient, and dirt poor. Today, one in seven US citizens lives in poverty. Half have either no health coverage, or insufficient coverage while paying exorbitant taxes and premiums for nothing, because the corporate hijackers of US health care will deny your cancer coverage and take your house from you, and all that you own. Your neighbors will look away in denial, because to acknowledge that the American Dream has become an illusion (or maybe always was) might mean they, too, are communists for not believing like good orthodox peasants. Acknowledging your plight as you die, or your child needlessly denies from health care denial, might mean that they could be next, and that would be unthinkable in a culture of limitless credit with no thought of tomorrow; of wrinkle creams galore allegedly erasing the blemishes of age and reality; and of absolutely no responsibility for the thousands of our best young people we send to die or be maimed on false pretenses like those that GW Bush started to satisfy his primitive testosterone gluttony (proving he was a hotter shot than his old man, whom he drunkenly tried to beat up while in college, and later out-priapused by going to Baghdad), and to enrich his corporate friends.

Great Media Shakeout of 2011 The Americans—unquestionably, in the cocoon of their inward looking media, believing in the bullet-proof cloak of their divine mandate, which makes them better than everyone else in the world&@#151;are having another Katrina awakening as GOP corporate shills arrogate yet more power after a spasmodic November 2010 election, on the heels of GW Bush's appointment to power in 2000 by a corrupt US Supreme Court owned by the corporate elite. This time, in the US, it's not impoverished people of color sitting on rooftops, waiting for federal aid that came, if at all, too little, too late, and too politicized. It's what is left of the educated middle class, many having lost their pensions and homes in the economic disaster created by reckless, Cheney-approved speculators during the 1920s revisited, which leveled into the 2008 crash. Now it's teachers, fire fighters, police; and the civil servants who send out the Social Security checks, send out the VA checks, and staff the Medicare system. The mob of unwashed teabaggers, driven by hysteria and the lies of their corporate owners, want to bring everyone down to a minimum wage level, with no benefits, that will suit the big corporations just fine. Why not bring everyone up to the union level instead, with universal health care and all that other "socialism" that the corporate owners of the USA fear will take their immoral bonanza away? Maybe we are seeing another Egypt occurring in the USA, as the American corporate Mubaraks and Ghadafys need to go; especially, poignantly, in view of the fact that they are all (oil) joined at the fossil fuels hip. What lesson can we draw from the 2010 Gulf oil disaster? Maybe Japan needs a Libya to shake off 76 years of post-World War II complacency. It strikes me even at that—the most subterranean connectors among all these quizzically related events across the globe, when we finally get a free and honest press to shed some light into the tunnels, can be described in one word: energy.

Energy Afterword A disaster in Japan, a revolution in Libya, a slow awakening in the USA. When the epitaph is finally written for our age, it will be titled Rest in Pieces, The Oily Age, Fueled by the Hitler-loving racist and anti-Semite Henry Ford's first mass production factory for automobiles…gone geopolitical as U.S., British, Dutch, and other Western oil interests went global and swallowed entire regions and governments including those of the U.S. and Europe. How truly global the mutually resonant earthquakes, tsunamis, and energy disasters of our age will turn out to be remains for history to instruct our descendants. How much they will destroy and reshape our world will depend, in large part, on whether we can wrest control of the media from the corporate predators who have long since forged a new Patrician oligarchy in a society we thought was class-free. We can look to the Japanese firestorms of 1923, and their concomitant destruction of the entire nation by 1945, for lessons in how history can be either a great builder, or a great destroyer. Can we recover the ballot box that was wrested from our hands in 2000 and thrown into the trash can of history, while a corrupt supreme court handed the election to one of the most incompetent, morally hollow, and clownish rulers in history. Just when we thought Napoleon III or Mussolini could not be bettered as clown princes, we learned that the U.S. blender-mix of Calvinist anti-science and Anglican class-elitism (we have had more Episcopalian presidents than of any other religious persuasion) could produce in U.S. culture something akin to a missing link. G. W. Bush fades like a bad dream, a proof of evolution. His handlers had to wrest his 'presidency' from him in October 2008 to prevent a world economic melt-down that would have returned us to an age of barter. Now we have a horde of even less credible Ghadafys and Saddams chattering in our sans-culottes media. Take, for example, Miss Bachmann this week, who gave a 'speech' to a teabagger mob in New Hampshire, and praised them for being Massachusetts, the state in which (balm to the ears of any Second Amendment delusionist) was fired 'the shot heard around the world.' That shot, methinks, is a dud. It doesn't matter what the paid shills—the brainless and amoral hacks beholden to corporate interests—burp to their witlessly cheering mobs. What counts is that the corporate gorilla has our Constitution under his or her arm, and is running away with it. It goes back to one thing we did learn in grammar school, in relation to Peter Zenger and Ben Franklin. Democracy rises or falls as the free press goes. And goes. And goes. Is there a whiff of gorilla in the air? Do we hear a rattle of frayed parchment? Or is that the wind, howling through a dearth of coherent ideas?

The Generals of October

The Generals of October is a fictional thriller about a Second Constitutional Convention that threatens to reshape or destroy the U.S. as we have known it. It's a fiction-coated, scary what-if scenario, which the author thoroughly fact-checked and which has been accepted as a reference work (despite being fiction, a rare distinction) at a number of leading law school libraries in the U.S.

The novel anticipates the worst crisis since U.S. history since the Civil War—right around the corner, amid a climate of divisive hatreds, increasing economic woes, and spiraling civil unrest. Written in the 1990s, it is a visionary exercise in what is very likely to happen when the public discourse is poisoned, as now, and back-to-back serial recessions (terminology from the novel, written during the illusion of prosperity during the Dot-Com Bubble) let demagogues in Congress and the media persuade a desperate and gullible public to support CON2.

What is CON2? There is a ticking time bomb in the U.S. Constitution. Article V allows us—almost encourages us—to rewrite or even discard most or all of the Constitution as the whim strikes us. There has only been one Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia in 1787. Do today's foundering fathers believe they can improve on the Founding Fathers? To hear today's extremist politicians and hate media hacks, you'd think they are the inventors of genius. But it's a doomed exercise in futility, with terrifying results. The author is the first person to think Article V and CON2 through to its ultimate, inevitable conclusions. Throw aside all the empty formula thrillers—this is the real thing. If you want something to really scare you to death, this is our future on steroids. Find out all the ways we can destroy the United States, by not paying attention, and by believing in snake oil sellers.

The Generals of October is both a rousing, entertaining thriller, and a cautionary tale. The premise comes directly from Article V in the U.S. Constitution. "What if voters grew tired of financial ruin, government chaos, and endless bickering--and let raving demagogues sway them into ignoring the voices of reason, and into voting for a Second Constitutional Convention (CON2)?" Can today's shallow, self-interested politicians really do better than the Founding Fathers? The recipe for doom is right there, inshrined in our founding document. Young Army officers David Gordon and Victoria 'Tory' Breen must unravel the conspiracy of the treasonous Hotel Generals. David and Tory must bring together the forces of tradition and reason-and help restore the United States to order, liberty, and sanity. Cpt. David Gordon is on a military intelligence mission, masquerading as an Inspector General officer. Lt. Tory Breen is the Executive Officer of the most ultra-secret computer operation in the nation's capital, which is highjacked by military extremists for a take-over of the United States, using CON2 as a Trojan Horse. Along the way, they fall in love—and must solve a terrible personal secret from her past life.