Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
Part I
May 8, 2008
"There’s something happening here
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.
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr93.html
The Laurel Canyon rock music series is up to 19 installments and at least one more is planned. The thesis is that many of the musicians that came together in Laurel Canyon were children of the MIC and the music and drug culture was to derail the anti-war movement. Lookout Mountain at the top if Laurel Canyon was a military intelligence facility for years.
Jim Morrison is the son of Admiral Morrison of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. There is one picture of Jim with his father not that many years before his fame and the transition to rock star is striking.
I saw and heard the Doors at Winterland in 1968, Janis and Big Brother at Winterland and Fillmore West, and Hendrix at Berkeley Community Theatre (on a high school field trip no less).
I also quite favor(ed) Mr. Zappa.
I post the above link for entertainment and humor value only as an example what can happen by a busy exercise in connecting the dots.
Two interesting books to read:
1. Storming Heaven - LSD and the American Dream (1987); Jay Stevens
2. Acid Dreams - The CIA, LSD, and the 60s Rebellion (1985) Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
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