"No Country for the Young" by Sen. Eugene McCarthy

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

"No Country for the Young" is a poem by the maverick anti-war Senator McCarthy who rocked the nation 40 years ago.
Say, wasn't there a Coen brothers movie title like this, won awards or something?

Right. 'No Country for Old Men.'
Based on a book by another McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy.

That's more than a coincidence, I think.
Gosh, do you think they knew about this poem title?

I've noted political subtexts to Coen brothers movies, often relating to CIA.
Maybe Cormac, too? He must've known about the other McCarthy's title.
Could this be a...meme-reversal counterpropaganda book/movie device?
Like other spook writers create - Robin Moore, Robert Condon, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, etc.

Senator Eugene McCarthy had five poems published in the January 1979 issue of Harper's Magazine from his book, 'Ground Fog and Night.'
He was from Minnesota and a progressive like Paul Wellstone.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccarthyE.htm

McCarthy had tried to facilitate talks between Castro and both the JFK and Johnson White Houses.
Hey, that's kind of current what with Castro ill and stepping down and the 45th anniversary of the JFK assassination by CIA.

McCarthy entered the 1968 presidential race opposing the Vietnam war and got so much support that Johnson opted not to run for re-election and Senator Robert Kennedy entered the race opposing the Vietnam war. Only he got assassinated by CIA, too.
Hey, that's kind of current what with Iraq being Vietnam II and the 40th anniversary of the RFK assassination by CIA.

McCarthy's poem called "No Country for the Young" describes a bleak dying landscape
with the line "ice cubes smell of mammoth flesh."
Hey, that's kind of current what with global warming, ice caps melting, and all.



No Country for the Young by Senator Eugene McCarthy

This is no country for the young.
Vultures prey on living flesh
and eat the skins of kettledrums.
The old refuse to die.

Eyes turn inward, chicken-like,
or stare, unlidded, vague as fish
within a deep and pressuring sea.

At the St. Regis
ice cubes smell of mammoth flesh,
and all the clocks have stopped.
A three-fingered pianist
plays only the black keys
until the dancers fall.
Shadows dare to stand against a sun
veiled by the ash of Hiroshima.

Time is tired of you and me.
It now runs out
like dust
from the broken hourglass.

The young begin too soon
to wait to be the last.
They cover stains of salt and blood
with antimacassars
and watch old curtains disintegrating
from the bottom up.


[ An antimacassar is a doily or protective cloth put on a chair to protect it from hair oil or pomade.
The Coen brothers know about pomade.]

[streeb]

dude, the Coen bros, adapted No Country for Old Men from a book by Cormac McCarthy, so strictly speaking, it's McCarthy who's keyword hijacking here. Is it possible that McCarthy conjured his title in tribute to the poem?

I might actually be even less culturally engaged than you are, Hugh, which is saying something, but I went to see No Country on Oscar night (I didn't even known it was Oscar night), with NO prior knowledge about the movie or the book - I have assiduously avoided reviews of either - and saw a subtle commentary on the Bush/Reagan conservative ascendancy of the 80s with a clear reference to the importance of narco-dollars as its foundation. And I noticed that there's a tiny picture of JFK pinned to the wall in the movie's key scene - when Sheriff Bell visits his uncle and sighs, "I'm overmatched..."

That's what I got. A movie made by people more or less on my side. I admire you in a lot of ways Hugh but for fuck's sake - your monomaniacal interpretation of art as nothing but cold-blooded behaviourist inducement makes you sound like Sidney Fucking Gottlieb At the Movies.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

dude, the Coen bros, adapted No Country for Old Men from a book by Cormac McCarthy, so strictly speaking, it's McCarthy who's keyword hijacking here. Is it possible that McCarthy conjured his title in tribute to the poem?

Noted in my edited post. Could be Cormac's hijacking or tribute*.
[*on edit: this title is from a Yeats poem about YOUTH establishing an EMPIRE, 'Sailing to Byzantium. The plot thickens.]

But Cormac/Coen's narrative reverses something important which is what makes me see a device here which would be the reason for the keyword/title hijacking.

War is run by old men who waste the young.
Cheney and Rumsfeld threw away the lives of US soldiers 18-25 mostly plus hundreds of thousands of youth in the 'enemy' countries.

So this idea that 'crazy young men' are too much for the 'tired old western sheriff' strikes me as exactly the reverse of current violence which is WAR, not some 'lone gunman.'
And you can see why I note this emphasis on a 'lone gunman,' I'm sure.

I might actually be even less culturally engaged than you are, Hugh, which is saying something, but I went to see No Country on Oscar night (I didn't even known it was Oscar night), with NO prior knowledge about the movie or the book - I have assiduously avoided reviews of either - and saw a subtle commentary on the Bush/Reagan conservative ascendancy of the 80s with a clear reference to the importance of narco-dollars as its foundation.

Mexicans with drugs at the border? That's Reagan's cover story for CIA drug smuggling.

And I noticed that there's a tiny picture of JFK pinned to the wall in the movie's key scene - when Sheriff Bell visits his uncle and sighs, "I'm overmatched..."

Now you're confirming my thesis. Too much emphasis on a 'lone gunman' in the year of anniversaries of the Three Big Spook Murders of the 1960s-JFK, RFK, MLK.
And recruiting quotas have been pushed up. Bang bang bang.

That's what I got. A movie made by people more or less on my side. I admire you in a lot of ways Hugh but for fuck's sake - your monomaniacal interpretation of art as nothing but cold-blooded behaviourist inducement makes you sound like Sidney Fucking Gottlieb At the Movies.

Good catch phrase. Especially since I keep insisting that Hollywood is where MKULTRA meets the masses.

But I've already found propaganda subtexts in the Coen brothers movies and this one has the same thematic alignment with the context of real world politics.

I'd have to read Cormac's book to see what transferred to the movie but there's a hub of about a dozen political themes in this bleak shoot-em-up film of constant death where the good guy gets killed and the bad guy gets away. Remind you of anything big politically?

That's what I got. A movie made by people more or less on my side.

Ahh. "You got." So you inferred an agenda, too. Just not the same as me.
But I thought this was just a seriel killer and a sheriff? Guess movies MEAN THINGS.

No 'art' happens in a vacuum. That's the most common myth I hear about movies.
"Just a movie." There's no such thing. That'd be like a building that doesnt' have an address.
Source, context, themes, keywords, etc. That is part of EVERY movie. So looking and thinking at the same time is not 'monomaniacal' or 'cold-blooded.'

ON EDIT: This title is the opening line of a noted William Butler Yeats poem called 'Sailing to Byzantium' which became the Byzantine Empire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantium

The vigor of youth and making a mark on history is central.
'Terrorism' or 'spreading freedom,' that is a timely theme.

But what do we see in the Coen brothers' movie?
A sheriff on the American west's border ill-equipped for the malevalent forces afoot who win against him in the end. Gee, could that serve as some kind of propaganda?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_to_Byzantium

There are levels of implication within Cormack McCarthy's book and the Coen brothers visualization is yet another one.

So what is the actual effect on the young audience in the context of the time when they see it?

[MinM]

dude, the Coen bros, adapted No Country for Old Men from a book by Cormac McCarthy, so strictly speaking, it's McCarthy who's keyword hijacking here...

Which may be the case if the hypothesis floated in this thread at Spartacus holds any validity.

In any case it's an interesting discussion that began 4 years ago about Eugene McCarthy...

CIA backed Eugene McCarthy in '68 v. RFK

“A Tale of Two Doves,” JFK Assassination Forum, No.7, (April 1975), p.2:

“…when a dove of more conservative cast, Gene McCarthy, decided to oppose Johnson for the nomination, the CIA promptly infiltrated his campaign.

Names to conjure with: Allard Lowenstein, Curtis Gans and Sam Brown. Ostensibly these men were concerned with ‘containing’ the student anti-war movement. The motto of McCarthy’s student supporters was ‘Keep clean for Gene’ – none of your Hoffmans or Rubins, please.

In early 1968, when McCarthy’s campaign seemed dangerously short of funds, help was forthcoming from West Coast industrialist Sam Kimball, chairman of Aerojet-General Corp. whose representative in Washington was Admiral Raborn, a former CIA chief.

When Robert Kennedy…entered the nomination stakes, two more ‘former’ CIA men, Thomas Finney and Thomas McCoy joined McCarthy’s campaign. (For fuller information, see Private Eye 169.)”


According to Time (“The Nonconsensus,” Friday, Jul. 05, 1968 – see this link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 95,00.html ),Thomas Finney was “the Senator's organization chief.”

In 1980, William Blum notes, good old Gene, the eternal splitter of the anti-Republican vote, backed Reagan:

Continues today with correlations to the "Arab Spring."

[Wombaticus Rex]

Actually, Hugh, there's a deeper conspiracy at work here to KWH William Butler Yeats. Eugene McCarthy was an agent and his poem was a false flag attack, the Coen brothers are actually leading a memetic resistance movement.

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

As always, your lack of simple nuts-and-bolts research remains your biggest source of evidence for your theories. You do detailed and superb work on the monomaniacal slice of communications theory you love, and your JFK gematria game is off the charts, but yet you make mistakes on simple chronological details that are Wikipedia level questions. It's a startling illustration of confirmation bias, but you're awesome at it and I'm grateful you stick around. Without question, I have learned a lot I never would have otherwise and I'm especially grateful for some of these threads:

viewtopic.php?f=44&t=18523

viewtopic.php?f=44&t=26326

viewtopic.php?f=44&t=18585

viewtopic.php?f=44&t=18584 <-- that book is f'ing great, picked it up on BetterWorldBooks and been re-reading it ever since.

So if I seem like a constant heckler, know at least that I'm a reluctant and affectionate one.

[norton ash]

The Coen brothers know about pomade.

But they also know about 'the golden bough' mentioned in Yeats' last stanza, with which Eugene and Cormac McCarthy are surely familiar...

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

More wiki-level 411:

Despite whatever controversy the work may have generated, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough had a tremendous effect on the literature of the period. Robert Graves adapted Frazer's concept of the dying king who is sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet's necessary suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess in his Frazer-esque book on poetry, rituals, and myths, The White Goddess, which was published in 1948. William Butler Yeats makes reference to it in his poem, "Sailing to Byzantium". H. P. Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu". T. S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. William Carlos Williams references it as well in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books, Paterson. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, William Gaddis, Mary Renault, Joseph Campbell, Roger Zelazny, Naomi Mitchison (in her The Corn King and the Spring Queen), and Camille Paglia are but a few authors deeply influenced by The Golden Bough. Its literary impact has given it continued life, even as its direct influence in anthropology has waned.

So Senator McCarthy's poem is quite fine in its homage to Yeats, Eliot, Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the overarching, unstoppable wasteland/fisher king/grail mythos.

How can we know the dancer from the dance? (Yeats, "Among School Kidz.")

I appreciate it when Hugh demonstrates the influence of anxiety, it's a new approach to comp-lit.

[MinM]

By Ernest A. Canning on 7/29/2011 4:17pm

Anti-war sentiments today are strikingly similar in many ways today to what they had been in March 1968 when Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) challenged fellow Democrat and incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. In March 1968 only 41% of Americans said "no" when asked whether we made a mistake in sending troops to Vietnam. Today six out of every ten Americans surveyed (70% of Democrats) favor an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan. Another 59% oppose our involvement in Libya.

While opposition to war is similar, the "democracy deficit" --- what Prof. Noam Chomsky refers to in Failed States as the significant gap between the policy positions of the electorate and their elected representatives --- is much wider today than it had been in 1968.

Medicare, the centerpiece of President Johnson's Great Society, like Social Security, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal, remains immensely popular with the American people. As revealed by a recent Washington Post poll, 78% of Americans oppose cutting Medicare. 72% favor raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 and only 17% oppose raising taxes on those making more than $250,000.

Yet, the political elites of both major parties, operating, as they did during the Wall Street bailout of 2008, under a contrived crisis mode, are advancing alternative deficit reduction proposals that will, in the words of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (see video below) "do just the opposite of what the American people want."

While third parties are an option, today we sorely need an option that was available in 1968: a Eugene McCarthy...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8631

[hanshan]

...

norton ash:

So Senator McCarthy's poem is quite fine in its homage to Yeats, Eliot, Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the overarching, unstoppable wasteland/fisher king/grail mythos.

How can we know the dancer from the dance? (Yeats, "Among School Kidz.")

I appreciate it when Hugh demonstrates the influence of anxiety, it's a new approach to comp-lit.

By Ernest A. Canning on 7/29/2011 4:17pm

Anti-war sentiments today are strikingly similar in many ways today to what they had been in March 1968 when Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) challenged fellow Democrat and incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. In March 1968 only 41% of Americans said "no" when asked whether we made a mistake in sending troops to Vietnam. Today six out of every ten Americans surveyed (70% of Democrats) favor an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan. Another 59% oppose our involvement in Libya.

While opposition to war is similar, the "democracy deficit" --- what Prof. Noam Chomsky refers to in Failed States as the significant gap between the policy positions of the electorate and their elected representatives --- is much wider today than it had been in 1968.

Medicare, the centerpiece of President Johnson's Great Society, like Social Security, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal, remains immensely popular with the American people. As revealed by a recent Washington Post poll, 78% of Americans oppose cutting Medicare. 72% favor raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 and only 17% oppose raising taxes on those making more than $250,000.

Yet, the political elites of both major parties, operating, as they did during the Wall Street bailout of 2008, under a contrived crisis mode, are advancing alternative deficit reduction proposals that will, in the words of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (see video below) "do just the opposite of what the American people want."

While third parties are an option, today we sorely need an option that was available in 1968: a Eugene McCarthy...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8631

Suggesting a McCarthyesque figure as a modern option is, at best, disengenuous;
& belies an enormous ignorance of deep-state machinations
(see: Ambassador Hotel, June, '68; Memphis, April, '68; etc.).


...

[MinM]

[MinM]

dude, the Coen bros, adapted No Country for Old Men from a book by Cormac McCarthy, so strictly speaking, it's McCarthy who's keyword hijacking here...

Which may be the case if the hypothesis floated in this thread at Spartacus holds any validity.

In any case it's an interesting discussion that began 4 years ago about Eugene McCarthy...

Continues today with correlations to the "Arab Spring."

Posted 09 July 2012 - 10:01 PM

Manufactured Realities: The Truth About The Arab Spring by Bill Noxid

To understand the #iranElection operation is to understand the whole. As the manufactured “Arab Spring” has marched across the Middle East toppling governments in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya, and as operations continue in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Myanmar, and many others, the original goal of the #IranElection prototype (destabilization and regime change) has manifest over and over with exponentially increasing destruction, death, and deception. The Occupy, Anarchy, and Anonymous subdivisions of this operation have caused untold destruction and divisions across Europe and the United States as this operation methodically turns governments against their people and people against their governments, just as they turn Sunni against Shia and Shia against Sunni across the Middle East. This global remote control puppetry continues to train myriad divisions of false flag terrorist groups responsible for unspeakable acts as the usual suspects are scapegoated without any validation whatsoever, as mainstream media remains little more than the propaganda wing of the operation – offering no critical analysis of the ongoing fraud.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... ntry256459

Manufactured Realities of Occupy Anonymous & Arab Spring

[seemslikeadream]

^^^^


I'm not preachin' anymore




Crimson flames tied through my ears
Throwin' high and mighty traps
Countless fire and flaming road
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
"Rip down all hate," I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic flanks of musketeers
Foundation deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I'd become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now

My guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

[MinM]

Posted 04 December 2012 - 03:40 PM

The conflict within the Democratic party-- during the JFK admin. -- was expressed in terms of JFK's battle with the National Security Bureaucracy. Since these included the most dangerous moments in world history, and included many that still are only now beginning to be recognized such as just how close the US was to a nuclear first strike in the summer of 1961,it should not surprise us that left-liberals -- largely subsidized for their understandable but not forgivable timidity in the wake of McCarthyism-- should have failed to see inside the chrysalis.

Later this conflict would be much more visible in the 1968 RFK campaign. To the extent that they ever mention it, today's Foundation Funded Fake leftists use the Clean with Gene ploy so politely offered by dry cleaning foundations and their friends in North Virginia.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... 9728&st=30

[MinM]

@BeschlossDC

Peter Paul & Mary wrote & performed this 1968 campaign song for Eugene McCarthy—includes dig at Robert Kennedy:

Ironically this RFK tribute video is accompanied by a Peter Paul & Mary song...

[NeonLX]

The 1968 Democrat convention is what turned my mom completely sour with electoral politics. She was already decidedly anti-war but the process that shat out Hubert Humphrey threw her into a decades-long depression. There was a glimmer of hope with McGovern in 1972, but we all know where that went.

[MinM]

The 1968 Democrat convention is what turned my mom completely sour with electoral politics. She was already decidedly anti-war but the process that shat out Hubert Humphrey threw her into a decades-long depression. There was a glimmer of hope with McGovern in 1972, but we all know where that went.

John Nichols

In 1968 @HillaryClinton traveled to NH to campaign for Gene McCarthy's heroic anti-war presidential campaign.