by Miles Mathis
Although Dennis Hopper had always lived in or near Los Angeles, he used to have a house in Taos, New Mexico, as well. In 2009, he had an art show at the Harwood Museum there (which I critiqued here). He died in 2010 and is said to be buried in Taos. The town has recently inaugurated a Dennis Hopper day, and I am told they plan to name a street after him. I find this ironic, seeing that it is the “anglos” in Taos who must have pushed for this (or the local spooks), and many or perhaps most anglos here fancy themselves as progressive. There are a lot of older white people here who are ex-hippies— or pretend to be—and they should know better than to show up for a Dennis Hopper day. Hopper was always a Republican donor, and worse, a CIA agent or hire. He was never progressive and never a hippie. He was just another pawn of the fascists.
If you don't know that, I will show you the clues. He has been involved in making propaganda films from the beginning, starting with 1955's Rebel without a Cause. Rebel was simply part of the “Beat Generation” campaign to destabilize the youth. The recently created CIA saw the younger generation moving left (anti-war) in the early 50's and therefore had to find some way to misdirect them into dead- end paths. By pretending to sympathize, the makers of this propaganda were able to lure the unwitting audience into the theater, where the credulous youth could be turned from any meaningful path of action. By hiring pretty boys like James Dean*, the producers could lure both males and females, subtly turning them away from activism and protest and toward drugs, meaningless sex, and thrill- seeking.
We see all this in the plot of Rebel, but we see it even before that in the title. What real rebel, growing up then or now, would have trouble finding a cause? There are so many good causes now the Modern World should be like a candy store to a rebel (as I can tell you firsthand), but this film was made to convince you it is more complicated than that. The title itself was created to make you think clear and distinct causes are a thing of the past. They want you to think the world is so blurry and unfathomable, the only thing you can do is get drunk and play chicken and fire guns at nothing and comb your hair all day.
We see this again in the way the movie corrupts the message of the book it was taken from. The book Rebel without a Cause: The Hypno-analysis of a Criminal Psychopath was written by psychologist Robert Lindner, and obviously his main character is not a working-class hero. His title implies that a Rebel without a Cause is in fact a psychopath: someone incapable of political, social, or other meaningful action. But the Hollywood movie inverts that logic, trying to glorify the juvenile, narcissistic floundering of pretty boy Dean, selling it to the youth as a cool counterculture. In other words, while Lindner wanted to steer you away from being a psychopath, the CIA wanted to steer you toward being one. If you were a psychopath, you would most likely be too into yourself to cause them or the governors any trouble. And if you were a psychopath, well, you were immediately that much easier for them to understand.
That very same inversion was used again and again by the same people, and we can skip ahead to the 1967 film The Trip, written by Jack Nicholson and starring Hopper and Peter Fonda. In this one, the subtitle uses LSD to stand for “A Lovely Sort of Death.” They pretend to be warning the audience against LSD, but they are really pushing it. If they were really warning against LSD use, they wouldn't use the word lovely, would they? They wouldn't use dancing naked women to draw you in, would they?
That doesn't look like much of a warning to me. More like a beacon. As is this:
Yes, Fonda's character is supposed to “crack-up” at the end, at least in special effects, but he gets to boink this package first:
That will seem like a fair trade to most guys, so the film doesn't act as much of a deterrent. Just the opposite.
Let's look at some more clues. Wikipedia tells us:
[The Trip director] Corman included inscrutable fantasy sequences including one where Fonda is faced with revolving pictures of Che Guevara, Sophia Loren and Khalil Gibran in a wildly lit room. For no apparent reason, a little person riding a merry-go-round in the background blurts out "Bay of Pigs!!"
Clues galore there, although I won't have time to hit them all. I will unwind only the last one. It is a clue because the Bay of Pigs was another piece of manufactured propaganda. In short, it never happened. Rather than prove that in gory detail, let me just put it this way: did you know that the Russians don't believe in the Bay of Pigs? Why should they? Say you were taught in school that Russia wanted to overthrow St. Lawrence Island in the 1960's. As part of this story, you were taught that the entire Russian navy was repulsed from the island by small band of Eskimos using sticks and rocks, and that Russia decided to turn back, never to return. Would you believe it? Or, say you were taught in school that Trajan led ten Roman legions against the island of Guernsey in 100 AD, and that although the island was inhabited only by a Celtic nunnery, the Romans were routed and never returned. Would you believe it?
Or say you were taught that Alexander the Great led 100,000 men against the island of Thasos in 330 BC, only to be turned away by a pack of ferocious sea lions. Would you believe it? Well, the Bay of Pigs story is just that believable. The entire US military—which already has a base on the island, and had since 1903—can't invade an island with no appreciable air force or navy, and a tiny army? The burden of proof for such a preposterous story isn't on me, it is on them. All the evidence I have seen looks manufactured, and the story doesn't make any sense from the first word. So the question is, why would anyone believe it?
The reason it is included in this 1967 film is to act as more confusion. They are showing you other stories you have already bought, so that you will buy the current one. If you are stupid enough to buy the Bay of Pigs story, you may be stupid enough to go out and buy some LSD.
Beyond that, the film (like the later Easy Rider) misdirects you into the source of all these drugs. You are meant to think the hippies or the Mexicans or the Mob is supplying it, while of course it has always been our own government manufacturing it and supplying it.
Which brings us to Easy Rider, which opens with our two fake hippies smuggling cocaine from Mexico to Los Angeles. I suggest you read a book by Gary Webb called Dark Alliance, which will educate you on who is really smuggling cocaine into Los Angeles. In short, it isn't the hippies, and never was. It is the CIA. Easy Rider was written and directed and acted by the CIA, to divert the blame away from themselves and toward the hippies. The film was part of the counter-intelligence push in the late 1960's, which included both the CIA (Operation Chaos) and FBI (Operation Cointelpro). The goal was destabilization and destruction of the hippie and antiwar movements, which were threatening to cut into the profits of the war machine.
We see Peter Fonda in both these films, and he was always just another government asset, like most in Hollywood. The Fondas came from Omaha, and Omaha has long been one of the conduits to Hollywood. It is a hellish place, even by American standards. It is the home of Offutt Air Base and Conagra Foods, as well as of Warren Buffett. The manufactured Malcolm X came from there. The Gallup Poll—another arm of propaganda—is based there. Enron came from there. In the 1960's, race riots were manufactured in Omaha to drive blacks out. A 30-50% housing loss in North Omaha partially achieved that, allowing for the later gentrification of central Omaha.
Peter's father Henry was sold as a New Deal Democrat, but his most famous foray into politics is probably his involvement in JFK's PT-109 story, which Fonda helped to sell in 1960. That story, like most others you have been taught, is fiction. Remember, JFK's dad Joseph was the owner of RKO studios in Hollywood in the late 1920's, early 30's, so there were direct links between Hollywood and government going way back. When I say that much of the reported history of the US is scripted (falsified), I am not making an airy accusation. Those in government have had direct access to the best fiction writers and producers in the world for over a century, and they have made full use of that access.
But back to Easy Rider. Remember, Fonda's character doesn't just dress in red, white and blue leathers, he wears an Office of the Secretary of Defense Identification Badge. Real hippies never wore flags, unless they were worn upside-down as distress signals; but in Hollywood films, hippies are always wearing red, white and blue. Fonda's flag is rightside-up. Even stranger is that badge. An OSD badge is for soldiers assigned to the Secretary of the Defense. It was first created in 1949. CIA was created in 1947. No hippie would be wearing that badge, or would even know what it was. A hippie couldn't get one even if he wanted it. They didn't sell them at the five-and-dime. Its inclusion in the film is both an inside joke and a signal to other insiders. It says, “This film is not what it seems. Don't worry. We are only pretending to think hippies are worth making movies about.”
Another thing the movie was created specifically to do is to induce a war between rednecks and hippies. This war had to be induced by Hollywood, since it wasn't happening on its own. As now, there were actually alliances being forged in the 1960's between rural folks and peace-niks, since all middle and lower class folks were sick of continuous war, anti-democratic policies, and unfair taxation. We see a similar thing if we study the relationship of real hippies to blacks and other minorities: we see budding alliances. But the government couldn't have that. They needed to created tension between hippies and all other groups, and the best way to do that was to manufacture it. Make films about it, write books about it, report it in the press, and so on. Say it was happening even though it wasn't. Then as now, many people will believe it if they see it on TV or in a movie, though it contradict their own experiences.
This continues to happen up to the present time, and most of the racial and class hatred in this country has to be manufactured by the government. Without the government faking events every week, people would soon learn to get along.
Easy Rider was made in 1969. Remember what else happened in 1969? Something to do with hippies? That's right: the Manson Family murders. Most people don't remember that Hopper acted as the mouthpiece not of the hippies then, but of the Los Angeles Police Department. He reported to the LA Times that
They [at the Tate house] had fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality—and they recorded it all on videotape, too. The L.A. police told me this. I know that three days before they were killed twenty-five people were invited to that house for a mass-whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.
Why would the police tell him this? Do we have any solid evidence of this, or are we just supposed to take Hopper's word for it? Where is the tape? They lost it. Do we have testimony from anyone who was actually there? No. All the court proceedings and evidence are a joke. So Hopper now just looks like a narc. He looks like an official spokesperson for the police or FBI, planting fake stories—which is exactly what he was.
Which brings us in a great circle back to Dennis Hopper day in Taos, New Mexico. For some reason, this non-event was picked up by the Associated Press and reported all over the country. I rode my bicycle through at the peak of the non-event, and there were only a few dozen people attending, most of them there to hear the local bands. Although the day was warm and sunny, Dennis Hopper's ghost drew fewer people to the plaza than the normal Thursday shows in the summer. The number of motorcycles present was also minimal, and the AP admits only a couple dozen showed up. To see why this event bombed, let's study the town manager's quote from the AP story:
Town Manager Rick Bellis says the day is aimed at recognizing Hopper's contributions as a resident, a filmmaker, a supporter of the arts and for simply being a "colorful member" of the community. "His image really represents the spirit of Taos," Bellis said. "He was independent, slightly eccentric but incredibly talented. He sort of became a symbol for a whole new generation."
Either Bellis knows nothing about Hopper, or doesn't care. I suspect he is just desperate to sell Taos, by hook or crook. That is what town managers are paid to do, among other things. But everything he says is false. Hopper was never independent. Hired propagandists are not independent. CIA jobbers are not independent. Hollywood mouthpieces are not independent.
That's the pic they are running with this AP story, but that isn't Hopper, that is Hopper playing a hippie. It is an act. It is fiction. In real life, Hopper was a government man, a Republican, and a CIA toadie.
He was never a supporter of the arts, either. Just the opposite. When he came here in 2009 to “curate” himself and his buddies into the town museum, he and the art critic Dave Hickey used it as an opportunity to slander the working artists of Taos, calling them ignorant and provincial. He and the others on the dais were reported in the TaosNews making fun of realism and beating the drum for more avant garde nullities. It was clear they wished to turn the Harwood into another front for Modernism, forcing their non-art down the throats of Taosenos who have no interest in it. In large part they have done this, taking local taxdollars to it.
In this, Hopper was again acting as a CIA hire. The CIA has been promoting Modernism since before WWII, and admits it. So Hopper was not a supporter of the arts, he was just another conman promoting non-art. Like the rest, his job was not to encourage art, but to destroy it.
And does his image “represent the spirit of Taos—a symbol for a whole new generation?” I would like to think not, but could be convinced it does. We have seen that Hopper was always a big phony selling a pack of lies, and the reality of Taos—and of America in general—fits that description. I would like to think that most in Taos aren't conscious liars, they are just fooled too easily by lies. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter: either way, the lies prevail. Most people are led their whole lives by a constant line of lies, and most seem quite happy taking this blue pill. Most people reading this will not thank me for telling them the truth, even after they confirm it at Wikipedia. They will go away from this grumbling—but grumbling at me, not Hopper. To look squarely at this and other truths would take away their movies and TV and other pacifiers, and they can't go there. It is far easier to just quit reading my papers.
You see, the problem isn't that most people are outrageous liars, it is that most people have very little interest in the truth. A majority of people are only lied to. But those who accept the lies are almost as guilty as those who lie, since as I have shown it is fairly easy to refuse to accept them. A lie could never work without an audience of naifs and gobemouches.
*Here is your footnote freebie for the day: James Dean, like so many others, faked his death. It has long been part of the actors' clause, allowing them a full exit. The most recent actor who took it was Paul Walker, and he took it using the same story as Dean. They get tired of having to make up new stories, so they tend to get lazy and just recycle the same ones over and over.