Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Dr. Madness continues...

Today in 1987, the highly-controversial 14 1/2 hour, week-long miniseries “AMERIKA” — Starring Rhodes scholar, second lieutenant Ranger helicopter pilot Kris Kristofferson, and Robert Urich, Wendy Hughes, about life in the United States in 1997, 10 years after a Soviet invasion and occupation that premiered on ABC (more than 3 years after ABC produced and broadcast the widely-watched nuclear war movie "The Day After", which many right-wing conservatives claimed was left-wing propaganda)




Many liberals dismissed the mini-series as right wing paranoia, while many conservatives complained that the Soviet brutality that was depicted was seriously underplayed. Kris Kristofferson insisted on removing unfavorable references to the United Nations. The Soviet government at one point threatened to shut down the ABC News Moscow Bureau if the mini-series aired (although this threat was never carried out.) This prompted ABC President John B. Sias to state "We're going to run that program come rain, blood, or horse manure."

“Money, capital has a life of its own...it’s a force of nature, like gravity, like the oceans it flows where it wants to flow.” ~ Maxwell Emory in  Rollover 1981; Kris Kristofferson & Hanoi Jane.


NBC counter-programmed with THE FACTS OF LIFE DOWN UNDER. AMERIKA won the night in the ratings.


“Believing ABC’s mini-series ‘exploits ignorance, fear and paranoia about the Soviet Union,’ [Ted] Turner is broadcasting more than 12 hours of counterprogramming without commercial interruption over superstation WTBS(TV) Atlanta throughout the month.”



Source: Page 54 of magazine: The Fifth Estate - Radio TV Cable Statellite Broadcasting Feb 16, 1987 (Vol 112 No. 7)


The 14 1/2 hour miniseries was a direct response to conservative criticism of “The Day After” and ABC’s decision to broadcast it. It was inspired by Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein’s column in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published Oct 31, 1983; 21 days before “The Day After.”

Snippet from Canadian university professor & researcher Robert A. Hackett's (2008) scholar essay The Campaign Against ‘Amerika’: Catalyst for Media Democratization (PDF):

Filming began in spring 1986, in Tecumseh, a depressed rural Nebraskan town which doubled as Milford in Amerika's Heartland. Smitten by the glamour of Hollywood, the local press greeted the film with civic boosterism, and the populace lined up for jobs as extras. The relatively few Nebraskan peace activists who protested the film's militaristic implications were generally ignored or dismissed as spoilsports.
..
The protests focused on several themes. Most frequently, the film was decried for fostering an unduly paranoid view of the USSR, a criticism shared even by some Establishment figures, like ex-CIA chief William Colby. Other elite critics focused on the film's negative depiction of United Nations’ peacekeepers as a brutal tool of Soviet domination. Prodded by concerned Americans and Canadians, UN officials and supporters joined the emerging controversy.

Critics further to the left were angered by the film's portrayal of socialist and even liberal interpretations of American society as Soviet propaganda, by its perceived stereotyping of women that provided grounds for a feminist critique of the film, and by its promotion of militarism. FAIR’s founder Jeff Cohen called the mini-series a commercial for Reagan's Star Wars program (Waters 1986)

One suspects, however, that much of the opposition was animated less by the film's (mis)representation of specific groups and viewpoints than by the “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977) that it both expressed and evoked.


Amerika was, in the very words of an ABC commercial, a "call to arms”. It sought to "revitalize" American patriotism, without clearly distinguishing it from superpower chauvinism, and to equate it with an ideologically narrow set of values, such as "freedom" defined as rugged individualism. It created a mood of siege from without and betrayal from within, and provided a myth of national degradation and potential redemption through a charismatic (male) leader who personifies national ideals. It offered the pleasure of a narrative in which American audiences could, yet again, revel in seeing themselves as victims, underdogs and rebels—an inversion of their system's real role in the world which had been evident in popular literature even following the US atomic bombing of Japan (Boyer 1985, 14)

In short, Amerika was a litmus test of political sensibilities. It was most likely to offend Americans whose social experience or historical memory—most notably from the counterculture of the Vietnam war era—gave them reason to fear the intensification of American nationalism into an unreflective chauvinism. It was a lightning rod for Americans who felt the dominant media had been complicit in the political consequences of Reaganism—renewed Cold War tensions, the containment of domestic dissent, growing economic inequality, and a militaristic and interventionist foreign policy. Similar sentiments regarding the US corporate media’s complicity in massaging public opinion prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, catalyzed outrage and resurgent media activism two decades later (McChesney 2004, 279-80).

Here is a promotional commercial for “AMERIKA” which highlights the stars in the cast and some of the action yet still manages to be rather boring:



Some Boomers claim this miniseries planted the memetic virus in fellow Boomer brains that resulted in the black helicopters/NWO/UN takeover conspiracy theories of the 90s that evolved into the Soros/Globalist/Great Reset shit we have today.

Here’s an interesting historical footnote regarding the tendentious and little-remembered 1987 miniseries “AMERIKA” found in the Variety archives: Nicholas Meyer (@NicholasMQ) and cast members from THE DAY AFTER requested rebuttal time on ABC after the network's Soviet occupation miniseries AMERIKA ran in Feb. 1987. ABC instead aired a ViewPoint special hosted by Ted Koppel.





“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” was directed by Nicholas Meyer and released in 1982.


Happy birthday, Herman Kahn!



Herman Kahn, (Feb 15, 1922 - July 7, 1983) American physicist, military strategist and systems theorist at RAND Corp. In 1962, Kahn published a 16-step escalation ladder. By 1965 he had developed this into a 44-step ladder. Concepts and Models of Escalation (PDF, by The Rand Corporation, 1984)

Herman H-bomb Khan:


His book "On Thermonuclear War" (1960) was a major influence on Stanley Kubrick's film DR. STRANGELOVE (1964). Highlighted text (images below) is from the definitive biography of Kahn, "The Worlds of Herman Kahn" by Sharon Ghamari-Tabri and LIFE magazine, 12/6/68, pg 110.