Manly Cap Pistols

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around my 5th birthday, in July 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Of course, all silver linings line something non-silvery. In the case of television there was the mass marketing and associated mass influence. For my 5th birthday, just two months after we got a television, I had to have a cap pistol with holster and chaps, and a cowboy hat. Any parent who did not comply with those sorts of demands was to be subjected to verbal torture for 16 hours a day, said the TV.

"Every one else has one!" "How do you know? You live on a farm." "I know! I saw it on TV!"

It worked. I got the chaps, the cap pistol, and the cowboy hat. My parents soon discovered that it really was a scam to get them to buy caps for the rest of their lives. A roll would only last 30 minutes. Pretty soon they were buying them by the crate.

My Father encouraged it all because it was the only evidence he had seen that I was growing up heterosexual. This was decades before it became common knowledge that the Marlboro Man was gay, and long before Brokeback Mountain. In those days "everyone knew" that cowboys were real men.

If he had bothered to ask my Mother what else I watched during the day, he might not have been so worried. In addition to Gene Autry films, I also had to see Big Picture every week. Big Picture was a weekly show created by the US Army. It ran from 1953 to 1959. It showed film footage of US military battles from WWI onward. In one incredible episode they showed a captured film the Chinese made of themselves attacking South Koreans and Americans. It showed darkness at first, then dawn on a hill covered in brush. After a minute, suddenly, all the bushes stood up. Every bush was really a Chinese soldier carrying a rifle, and they advanced firing. It was probably the assault along Chongchon River, in November 1950. Anyway, if my Father had seen me watching all that raptly he would have been assured that I was male, because I was sucked in by guns, and would never have noticed that I was rooting for the Chinese.

He couldn't see anything that far from his expectations.

Distant Seeing

Video Find of the Day

Television inspired rebellion. It also showed me the world and it showed new personalities. It broke up the isolation of living in a farm house with parents and a dog. One of the new discoveries was the Today Show hosted by Dave Garroway, a man whose calm on-air nature was in marked contrast to my parents. He greeted me every weekday morning. In the video below he is promoting television to people who haven't got them yet. In doing so he shows scenes that became familiar to me in just a couple of months of watching. I watched all those things, horse races, ball games, fights, Hopalong Cassidy, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry (my favorite), You Bet Your Life, symphonies, mysteries, adventures, news programs, fashion shows.

I also saw travelogues, Queen For a Day, big band shows, the Arthur Godfrey Show, and a military documentary series. I saw the weekly magazine show Omnibus, hosted by Alistair Cooke, which was about everything. I saw Leonard Bernstein's music lectures there.

The television opened the world up to me.

Words Have Power

I can't over-emphasize the huge change television made in my life. I've already talked about it a little in earlier posts, My Early Humor(s) and Have You No Sense Of Decency, Sir? I'll talk about it now, and I'll talk about it more later.

My Father wasn't going to get a TV, ever. He grew up on radio and radio adventure shows, and loved them and talked about them all the time, but he considered TV to be entertainment for the mindless. It took time away from reading. Besides, by showing everything, "it doesn't exercise the imagination."

Then the Army-McCarthy Hearings started. The Army accused Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn of inappropriate pressures to give preferential treatment to a friend of Cohn. McCarthy in his turn said that the Army's charges were a retaliation for his investigations of suspected Communists in the Army and the security risks they presented. A special Senate committee began meeting April 22, 1954, to sort the matter out, and the meetings were nationally broadcast live on ABC.

My Father, the Army Captain, was decidedly on the Army's side. My Father always needed to belong to something. Loyalty was the highest value. The Army was what he belonged to then.

It took a few weeks. My Father's buddies wore him down by telling him every day about seeing the hearings on their TVs. Finally he gave in.

Once he decided we had to have a TV to watch the hearings with, my Father became a member of a new class, the class of TV owners. It sparked a new loyalty: now, the television was one of the greatest inventions ever. He got us a 13-inch black and white Zenith with an iron stand. He became a loyal Zenith owner. "Zeniths are the best."

There was a struggle getting the antenna up. This involved many uses of words I wasn't allowed to say. An Army friend of my Father had to come and help. The two of them finally got the TV working and able to bring in the Boston channels on a weekend in late May or early June. My first memory of watching TV was witnessing a routine Sunday morning live televised mass from a Boston cathedral. I amused my Father by insisting that even though the picture was black and white, I could see the colors of the stained-glass windows.

There followed at least a week of watching the Senate hearings. I barely understood what was going on. In fact I could barely hear it half the time, because whenever McCarthy or anyone on his side was heard to say anything my Father loudly derided him. Of course, when the Army side was speaking we had to all be very quiet.

The hearings came to a head on Wednesday, June 9. I have heard that Joseph Welch, the counsel for the Army had rehearsed the line "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" already and was just looking for a good time to spring it. The time came when a possibly drunk McCarthy randomly attacked, by name, a member of Welch's law office. The full line was "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

It was an Army lawyer speaking, so we had been quiet. I heard the line, the applause, and saw the look on McCarthy's face. I was thrilled. It sent a chill up my spine, as I realized even amid my Father's cheers that the incident had implications for my own life.

Words have power.

The OK Generation

At the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. logo for King County, one of the speakers made it sound like Baby Boomers made the sixties civil rights movement happen. This reminds me once more of one of my pet peeves.

There seems to be two general opinions regarding this Baby Boomer Generation of mine. They are both wrong.

The first wrong view is that we were glorious idealists who brought about the end of segregation and ended an evil war.


The second wrong view is that we are and were a bunch of spoiled brats who, in our endlessly selfish quest for new kicks and turn ons and toys and debauched sex and rock & roll, are responsible for everything that is currently wrong with America, including but not limited to AIDS, crack, meth, crack whores, too much sex, too little sex, American Idol, SUVs, wussy foreign imports, The Dixie Chicks, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, delaying the fall of soviet communism, causing the fall of soviet communism, Clinton's blowjobs, making Reagan look good, making George Bush look good, George W Bush himself, rap, the Christian Right, LaRoucheys, besmirching liberalism, bringing liberalism into being, too much Monty Python on KCTS, Trekkies, and you can't get good weed [pussy / acid / shrooms] anymore, they used it all up between '67 and '71, and now all the weed [pussy / acid /shrooms] smells like burro butt.

A big load of duck drip.


Contrary to everything you've been told, Baby Boomers did not all march with Martin Luther King Jr. They did not become Freedom Fighters en masse. They did not even rally against the Vietnam war to the degree the media at the time portrayed. When Seattle had its Freeway March against the war, the march was well publicized in advance at UW. Five thousand students participated, which the local news played up as if it were a youth revolution in the making. But there were over 30,000 students enrolled at UW at the time. 85% of all UW students sat that one out. 85% OR MORE of all Boomers everywhere in the land sat almost everything out you've read about.


Boomer drug use was no greater than that of the Roaring Twenties, when the drug war really got started, with what was seen through the distortions of the media of that era as an "epidemic" of heroine addiction. The popularity of weed was well known to boomers as having been firmly entrenched among the Beats, who were not Boomers, and the Beats knew they were copying behaviors stereotypic of participants of the Harlem Renaissance. The free sex was definitely more free back then owing to the lack of AIDS, which we did NOT invent or cause, but it was also more free in every earlier generation, as long as no one talked about it. And who talked about it when we did it? The media.

Now I will tell you the real achievement of the Baby Boomer Generation. Every generation before us had been bad mouthed in the media of their day. But none of them before had to grow up in a television age with only 3 or 4 channels, in the middle of an explosion of knowledge about psychological manipulation.

Advertisers used the fact that they could mount focused hot media blitzes on the few channels to reach all of us cheaply. TV was at its utmost effective. It was more immediate than radio. It was less fragmented than now and the internet didn't compete with it. While our own government researched and experimented with psychological operations techniques inspired by the KGB, the Nazi propaganda machine, and Chinese brainwashers, to wage the Cold War, those techniques filtered down to the corporations that collaborated with the government and the military and they deliberately employed them to manipulate the general public.

[Shown: A US Psy Ops insignia adopted in 1967, for the 5th Psychological Operations Battalion.]

The chief tool in all this was the same systematic perversion of normal human socialization that made the Milgram experiments work. The advertisers told us day after day we had to get our parents to buy us the next thing that ever body is going to have to have. Be the first kid on your block... don't be left out... So I got chaps, and toy six-shooters at one point. At another point I had to have a coon-skin cap like Davy Crockett, or I would be a disgrace. Hula Hoops and Frisbees became necessities. Not knowing the latest hit dance was taboo. Learn the dance, buy the single.

Then the civil rights movement made serious headway, thanks mainly to older heads. About that time growing numbers of Boomers caught on to what was happening all at once. There was already a large literature on the dangers of conformity. But Boomers figured out that something more insidious than mere undirected conformity was happening. It wasn't undirected.

There was a common feeling, that emerged over the course the second half of the sixties, that the civil rights movement was all about making the US a place where you could be free to be Black, i.e., a place where you could be free to do what you had no other choice but to do, but that it was remaining a place where, thanks to government meddling & demands of employers and schools & reactionary social pressures bolstered by media in the pocket of corporations, there was barely any freedom to make choices.

The absurdity of the situation first became evident when the same media that brought us the Beatles, also portrayed us as dangerous filthy radical revolutionaries when our guys started copying the Beatles and growing their hair longer. Today it may all seem silly, but remember that we Boomers grew up being told that WWII was fought to make us free. If my freedom is only to wear a crewcut and slacks uniform & if a simple frivolous choice like choosing to grow my hair two inches longer than boot camp style is going to get me branded as an enemy of the state and I'm not going to be able to get a job and my school is going to suspend me, what's going to happen to me if I choose to do something significant that isn't universally approved? I'm only free to do what 100% of America says I can?

So a bunch of us tested that out. And we found out you could get your skull cracked if you did virtually anything out of line. Like for instance oppose a war instead of support it.

The opposition to the Vietnam War was partly about the draft. It was partly about the war itself, that it went on too long and it was pointless. But deep down it was a generation's test of the promise of freedom in this country, and the country failed. "You call this a free country and say we have free speech, but when I take you up on that and exercise my right to speak out against the war, you call up the National Guard." It was a test. It was about an entire generation being told that you're free to be any color you happen to be, but don't let it go to your heads.

So we let it go to our heads. There were excesses, but bear in mind that the excess were all committed by a minority. The only thing the general majority of Boomers had in common was that we all knew how absurd the media's coverage of it all was. That was the glue that held us together.

The sense of the absurdity of the media's manipulation of us coupled with its simultaneous stereotyping around the outcomes of its manipulations, was encapsulated in the ironic phrase, "Stop making sense." The media was trying to make our sense for us. Even people who didn't do drugs, like me, knew what it was the drug use was rebelling against. Everyone was looking for another channel, one that wasn't owned and programmed by the Man.

Then, in the late sixties, Boomers learned how to turn the tables on the corporations and the government and the media, by using the power of the media itself, stealing the show and exploiting the media right back.

Our great achievement was half shaking off the media's grip on us. We didn't completely shake them off. But we made a start. And every generation after us has had it that much easier to see through the media lies about them and to shake off the continuing efforts to manipulate them. Because we created a template of attitudes and tricks to cope.

My Early Humor(s)

As you all should know, the word humor comes from the ancient Greek word for bodily fluids. The ancient Greeks were polytheists. That is why they allowed that different people could have different bodily fluids, or that any one person might have several bodily fluids at once, and that all that was alright.

At first, the Greeks recognized seven basic kinds of humors, or bodily fluids, namely Sanguine (blood), Choleric (yellow bile), Phlegmatic (phlegm), Melancholic (black bile), Pissy (urine), Spunky (jizm), and Mammary (milk). But right from the start political correctness reared its ugly butt, and ruled that the last two were too gender-specific, and had to be replaced by Emissions. That was subsumed into Pissy, even though everyone but the Germans knew Pissy and Spunky were totally unrelated. Yes, they did too have Germans back then. The Greeks called them mounts.

Finally, Pissy was eliminated altogether by the post-Socratic theorists, who said Piss is yellow, Cholera is yellow -- so they're the same, see? Yeah, and like Bush is shitty, and my shit is shitty -- so Bush comes out of my ass, see? I'll talk more about theory, and theorists, and how much I love theory and theorists, later. Right now I'm talking about humor(s) (see title).
Here is a rare photo of my emotional state at age four. As you can see, my Father was still asserting that our family would never in a million years own a television, or wake up out of the Dark Ages, or stop beating me bloody and leaving me in ditches. My main humor at this age is the Phlegm humor. I am cold and moist, sluggish and pallid.

This is a snapshot of my emotional state just one year later. To the untrained eye there is virtually no change, except that I have now divided into a fat man and a weird black cat. But if you look very closely you will see that the Army-McCarthy Hearings have come and gone in the background , and my Father got a TV so he could scream at McCarthy in real-time. Having a TV and watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings changed my main humor to Sanguine. I became hot and moist, amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, and irresponsible. Still moist, but a hot moist. I sought out girls to play "house" with. These were generally imaginary girls, as the nearest house with a real girl in it was a mile away, at the time.

As I began school we moved closer to civilization and I encountered actual other humans and their spawn. Among these were religious bigots. I have since come to understand that Christian religious bigots fall neatly into two distinct classes, and that this is all you need to know about them. The two classes consist of 1) Puritans and their ilk, who don't want anyone to laugh, because amusement springs from the Devil, and 2) Evangelicals and their ilk, who expect everyone to have a big fuckin smiley face and laugh and be joyous because "Haven't you heard the Good News? Christ is here!" -- Halle-fuckin-lujah.

My attitude was and is the pagan attitude of I'll laugh when the Laugh God moves me to laugh and I won't laugh when the Laugh God wants a smoke break. Get your religions off my bodily fluids.

A study of my early humor(s) is not complete without a reference to the man pictured below, Percy Dovetonsils.

This man is wearing funny glasses to view the world. That does not mean he does not see the world. It means he sees the world through funny glasses, as opposed to rose-colored glasses, say. Metaphorically, he uses humor to see and understand reality, get it?

I want to end this post on that note, combined, or amalgamated, with this additional one, said by some guy played by Jack Nicholson, which I would like to place with the first note in a sack, so they can fight each other and roll around the floor for my entertainment: "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."