There are tales of people who die and are resuscitated. They describe a vast panorama of scenes from their past life that unfolds all around them. For those who feel America is currently in the throes of a near-death experience, this book could provide that vast panorama of scenes from our shared past life. A book of poetic moral force, with unflinching historical precision, it becomes a trustworthy guidebook to our next life—an American Book of the Dead. As in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you don't have to die to profit from reading it.
As you move through this brilliant guidebook, you reconnect to quotes or phrases that themselves may be half-forgotten, but the events they are drawn from have formed and shaped our lives.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
--Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity Test Site quoting the Bhagavad Gita
"We came, we saw, he died,"
---Hillary Clinton laughs about killing Moammar Gaddafi
“We don't want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.”
--Dr. Condoleezza Rice during the build-up to the Iraq War
"You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free."
--CIA Headquarters
“There's something happening here/
What it is ain't exactly clear."
For What It's Worth (Stop, Hey What's That Sound)
--Stephen Stills written in response to the Curfew Riots on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding.”
--Upton Sinclair
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
----An aide from the Bush White House speaking to Ron Suskind from a New York Times article in 2004.
Ed Curtin's incisive commentary and elucidation surrounding these events and so many others provide the guideposts in our collective psyche that help us answer the one question we are all facing in these almost apocalyptic times, 'How did we get here?"
Many of us seem to think that our troubles started with the election in 2016. The book couldn't be more exact on why this is a naive assertion and where we need to turn to look for an answer:
There is no way to understand today's world without confronting five key historical events out of which spring today's conditions of oligarchic rule, constant war, and the growth of an intelligence apparatus that makes Orwell's 1984 look so anachronistic.
They are: the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK by elements within the U.S. intelligence services, and the insider attacks of September 11, 2001. Discussing these is anathema to a group of very prominent left-wing intellectuals and liberal publications. It is okay for them to attack Bush, Obama, Clinton, Trump, the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, liberals in general, creeping fascism, capitalism, the growth of the intelligence state, etc.; but to accept, or even to explore fairly in writing, what I assert as factual above, is verboten. Why?
But Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies can also be read as a kind of biography. It works to draw forth all aspects of the author. In the wonderful portrait of Frank Serpico Curtin revealing the nature of a true actor, reveals himself at the same time:
I was drawn to him because I sensed he was a compañero, similar to old, authentic friends I had grown up with in the Bronx. Guys with consciences, not crooks. Friends who could laugh and joke around. From our first meeting we connected: each of us dressed in individual camouflage—he, the bearded, aging Village hippie, concealing a conscience-stricken Italian-American kid from Brooklyn; me, sporting the look of an Irish-American something from the Bronx, concealing a conscience-stricken radical thinker and writer. Birds of a feather under different plumage, costumes concealing our true identities. Real play acting.
And then there was that Catholic thing. Both of us were products of New York Catholic families and schools. Thus conscience does not necessarily make cowards of us all. It also calls to us be honest, brave, and frank, despite the corruption of religious institutions.
Reading Curtin, you get a breath, a hint, of what it was like to grow up Catholic in the early '60s. When you would go into shops or people's kitchens, and you would see the two Johns in frames side by side. The President and the Pope. When the air was palpable with an earnest, yes, innocent but exquisitely profound telos. Before the assassinations, before the CIA had turned our protests into a giant house party. There is something happening here but what it is ain't exactly clear indeed, but what's clear is it's the CIA moving against a force that threatens the Masters of War.
Besides the profound and courageous political writing, you will find beautiful essays on art, music, and literature written from an artist’s perspective. There is a meditation on Silence and the joys of the natural world that could serve as an excellent companion to your softer hours, especially if you find yourself in a lockdown.
These essays or experiments- as Curtin calls them- are tightly structured and always 'gets there' with clarity and precision. But because he is a poet at heart, his process is performative. It moves from one 'found moment to the next.' The truth of this moment emerges out of the truth of the one prior—a process of discovery for both author and reader.
If you decide to take part in that process of discovery with Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, I have every confidence that it will fortify your next life, whether that is in your next week, your next day or your next breath.
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Top reviews from other countries
Robert S. Moore
If you are a critic of US domestic and foreign policy and of the US propaganda machine.
Reviewed in Canada on February 4, 2023
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Un libro lleno de ideas y coherencia sobre el poder detrás de los gobiernos de EE.UU.
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This book gives voice to sanity in an insane world.
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