The Clare Spark Blog

Nonconformist society[/The Enemy]

I have read three books since wrote my last blog. They are Kent Clizbe’s WILLING ACCOMPLICES(1988), Lindsay Chaney’s and Michael Cieply’s THE HEARSTS (1981), and Robert Gottlieb’s and Irene Wolt’s THINKING BIG (1977). Each book has a lengthy subtitle: the Clizbe’s How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness, Obama’s Hate-America-First Political Platform, and Destroyed America; Chaney’s and Cieply’s Family-Empire The Later Years; and Gottlieb’s and Wolt’s The Story of the LOS ANGELES TIMES Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California. I think that the first two books (revealing the anticommunism of the government or the publishers) were sent to me, and the third (pro-lefty book) given to me while at Pacifica Radio by Marc Cooper.

The Clizbe book did not show the origins of PC, though I expected it and was disappointed, but it did dwell upon George S. Counts, educator, Walter Duranty, and Dorothy Parker (a likely suspect); it was also antisemitic, supported “traditionalism,” but ignored Marx, Progessivism, abd the Depression of the 1930s, and failed to explain how political correctness “destroyed America.”

The Hearsts book, on its way to destroy the veracity of “Citizen Kane,”(did there was no Rosebud: the William Randolph Hearst parents were wealthy entrepreneurs, and there was a long-suffering first wife Phoebe Hearst, and the sort-of Marion Davies character, though somewhat disreputable, was well rewarded for her services)did succeed in establishing the anticommunist credentials of the five Hearst sons, along with its publications some of which persist today. It also gives lots of details of the Patty Hearst kidnapping.

The mammoth story of the LA TIMES (now acceptable to Democrats, though originally right-wing) is strongly pro-union, and includes many storied accounts of the growth of Southern California: its spectacular growth, its automobile culture, its water problems, and the condition of its black and brown inhabitants.

The book aroused my semi-latent socialist sentiments although I have moved to the Right since I was a KPFK-program-director in the early 1980s.