CIA Memories

[Guest-blogged by Jon Rappoport]

 

CIA Memories

By Jon Rappoport

qjrpress@gmail.com

Fiction

NOTE: A patient presently confined to the Sleight Center psychiatric facility believes he is the current director of the CIA. He also believes he is living in the year 2053. He is writing CIA memos to “his own top people.”

Memo: July 7, 2053

Dear All:

I am shifting identities, and each identity carries its own time signature.  Obviously, I have many legends and cover stories I developed over the years in the Agency.  At some point, the covers began to take on new force.  They ceased being simple disguises.  They penetrated past and future.  This is a theatrical quality.  For example, I found myself reading documents which hadn’t yet been written.                               

I don’t think I’ll be coming back to this place, Earth, after I leave.  I don’t think so.  I don’t know where I’ll go, but it won’t be here.  There is one thing I need to do while I’m still around.  I need to sever my last connection.  That connection has to do with secrets.  Secrets still fascinate me.  So I’ll have to take the lid off and go down that hole into the massive cave and spill all I find there.  Some secrets are quite complicated.  That’s not a problem.  I’m ready.  I’m ready to deliver those messages.  For example, the one about the person who thinks he is me, who imitates me, who accesses records about me, in order to build his legend.  I assume he is the current working CIA Director, posing as me.  I would pose as me, too, if I could.  After all, I have a great deal of knowledge.  I’m rather handsome.  I’m facile.  My enemies fear me.  Most of you don’t know this, but at the Agency we have a number of doubles who are posing as employees.  Don’t ask me where the actual employees have gone.  I don’t know.  I don’t keep track of that.  Apparently, someone wants to take over the Agency and is doing so at a slow pace.  Replace an agent here, an agent there.  On the other hand, and this is what really interests me, the replacement program could stem from the desire to improve the Agency.  Bring in new and improved doubles, as an upgrade.  Produce androids.  This is the future.  Suppose, one day, you’re walking around and you see a person who looks exactly like you buying bread in a shop.  You approach him and engage him in conversation.  You discover he knows everything you know.  But he knows it with more clarity.  He’s integrated.  He’s more agile.  You’re no longer useful, pragmatically speaking.  You’re out.  In an instrumental society, you’re defunct.  You have to go somewhere else.  You have to start over.  You’re cut loose.  You don’t need to consider your obligations.

That’s where I am now, except I’m confined.  But that will end.  I’m not unhinged.  I’m lucid.  And I consider my options.  When I was in my office at Langley, behind my desk, acting as Director every day, I made sure conflicting messages were broadcast in the press.  This is the straightest path to sowing confusion in the public mind.  Confusion leads to despair, and despair leads to inaction.  Does that sound like the work of a crazy man?  I knew exactly what I was doing.  Just as I do now.  Think about it.  I can communicate with you, my top people at the Agency, can’t I?  They can’t stop me.  So I’m still the de facto Director of the CIA.  They may have my double over there sitting in my chair, but I supersede him.  He thinks he’s me, but I know I’m me. 

Remember when we got rid of Nixon?  We worked through our cutout at the FBI, and he worked with Woodward.  Woodward peeled away the layers of the onion on that story.  But the whole story was already in the bag.  It was a preordained conclusion that Nixon would leave the White House.  We had to make it look like an investigation, a sequence.  We do that for the rubes and yokels.  We give them sequence, but time is already collapsed.  We work with time, ladies and gentlemen.  That’s our forte. 

With JFK, we were aiming for shock value.  The sudden explosion of a shot, to induce public trauma.  But with Nixon, we spread it out.  We can go either way.  We destabilize.  That’s one of our primary missions.  They’ve tried to destabilize me, but they’ve failed.  I’m stronger than ever.  The psychiatrists at this facility think they’re experts at creating imbalance, but they don’t have a clue who they’re dealing with.  From the beginning, I was suckled on an unpredictable nipple…

Above all, we must remember, when we’re fighting enemies, they are the people to whom we gave life.  We invented them.  We brought them up.  If we lose that knowledge, we lose everything.

We turn out reality.  We make it up.  Through our agents and assets and cutouts, we disseminate the truth as we create it.  If we say the sky is falling, the sky is falling, even if it isn’t.  We have the means to build a world, a universe.  Why wouldn’t we build it?  Should we shrink back from our duty?  There is no actual world.  It’s an indefinable mix of people and events.  It has no form.  We give it form.  We give it meaning.  It’s not our fault that people can’t achieve that on their own.  Remember, when the ancient Roman Empire was crumbling, because it couldn’t control all the territory it was conquering, it changed course.  It decided to shape a Church that would construct a cosmic order according to a story line it invented.  It would thus control minds.  That was the great change.  Why use armies when words and pictures and theatrical presentations shape thought itself?  We are our own Church.  We still use political subversion and force, but on the whole we are dealing with mental processes.  We slip in unnoticed and re-constitute belief and opinion and perception. 

Given enough time, and adequate personnel, we could convince the population that the world is made of jelly beans.  Why not?  Atoms, electrons, protons, nuclei, quarks--all dead, all in motion according to inexorable laws.  They therefore eliminate the possibility of consciousness.  It’s already a jelly bean cosmology…

(Jon Rappoport ran for a Congressional seat in 1994.  He knows something about politics.  He has worked as a freelance investigative reporter for 36 years.  His website is www.nomorefakenews.com)

 

Craig Gidney's A SPECTRAL HUE

I first met Craig Gidney at the Clarion Writers Workshop back in 1996. Of all the imaginative short stories workshopped during those six weeks, the one that sticks with me the most is Craig's "Zoe Coalrose" (eventually published as "Coalrose" in Craig's 2014 collection SKIN DEEP MAGIC). At that time Craig's phantasmagoric fiction struck me as a strange mixture of Italo Calvino, Tanith Lee, Jean Genet, and Toni Morrison. Years later, I was delighted to publish Craig's darkly humorous Southern Gothic story "Her Spirit Hovering" in the pages of RIPRAP #24. You can now find that tale in Craig's 2008 collection, SEA, SWALLOW ME. As I wrote in my Amazon review of SEA, SWALLOW ME, "If the music of The Cocteau Twins could somehow be converted into prose, it might read like the fiction of Craig L. Gidney." His use of the English language has become even more lyrical over time, as evidenced by his debut adult novel A SPECTRAL HUE, recently published by Word Horde.

I ordered A SPECTRAL HUE as soon as it was announced, and a copy arrived on my doorstep just the other day. Naturally, I did what any other Craig Gidney fan would do: I took the book with me to Disneyland and read the first two chapters while perched on an artificial Amanita muscaria mushroom in Pixie Hollow located in the dark depths of Fantasy Land. It somehow felt appropriate to be surrounded by the simulated weirdness of the Happiest Place on Earth while freebasing 100% Pure Weirdness via Craig's oneiric prose. Fortunately, you don't need to be under the influence of Uncle Walt's giant fiberglass psychedelic mushrooms to appreciate the dream-like, marshy world of Shimmer, Maryland (the mysterious setting of Craig's novel), as evidenced by this 6-20-19 NPR review of A SPECTRAL HUE by Jason Heller (who, I assume, has never imbibed an oversized Pixie Hollow mushroom).

I highly recommend purchasing a copy of A SPECTRAL HUE directly from the publisher, Word Horde, based in Petaluma, California.

This has been your reporter, Robert Guffey, addressing you from the pastoral environs of Pixie Hollow....

Patrick Chappatte's "The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times"

For those of you familiar with my 2017 book UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES (a darkly satirical novel about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain), you might be interested in reading political cartoonist Patrick Chappatte's 6-10-19 blog post entitled "The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times," which he wrote in response to The New York Times' cowardly decision to cancel their own political cartoons for the foreseeable future:

"All my professional life, I have been driven by the conviction that the unique freedom of political cartooning entails a great sense of responsibility.

"In 20-plus years of delivering a twice-weekly cartoon for the International Herald Tribune first, and then The New York Times, and after receiving three OPC awards in that category, I thought the case for political cartoons had been made (in a newspaper that was notoriously reluctant to the form in past history.) But something happened. In April 2019, a Netanyahu caricature from syndication reprinted in the international editions triggered widespread outrage, a Times apology and the termination of syndicated cartoons. Last week, my employers told me they'll be ending in-house political cartoons as well by July. I’m putting down my pen, with a sigh: that’s a lot of years of work undone by a single cartoon - not even mine - that should never have run in the best newspaper of the world.

"I’m afraid this is not just about cartoons, but about journalism and opinion in general. We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in [...].

"Curiously, I remain positive. This is the era of images. In a world of short attention span, their power has never been so big. Out there is a whole world of possibilities, not only in editorial cartooning, still or animated, but also in new fields like on-stage illustrated presentations and long-form comics reportage - of which I have been a proponent for the last 25 years. (I’m happy, by the way, to have opened the door for the genre at the NYT with the "Inside Death Row" series in 2016. The following year, another series about Syrian refugees by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan got the NYT a Pulitzer prize.) It’s also a time where the media need to renew themselves and reach out to new audiences. And stop being afraid of the angry mob. In the insane world we live in, the art of the visual commentary is needed more than ever. And so is humor."

 

Yes, with each passing day, it seems that the speculative world of UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES is becoming a grim reality. 

 

To read Chappatte's entire post, click HERE.