National Review had a lead article about how weak Republicans were in the aftermath of Watergate, and how liberals were prevented from imposing a socialist program during that period.

During that period I was on Capitol Hill, I was working with National Review publisher Bill Rusher, and I wrote two major political books. My boss John Ashbrook led a tiny group that stopped congress in its tracks repeatedly.

I have only mentioned that I saved the space telescope because that was only me doing it and that issue is more easily explained, though it involves a knowledge of Appropriations Committee membership, the primacy of the Subcommittees, and other things that most congressional staff is not really familiar with.

And, incidentally, I was also writing a few articles for National Review.

The reason I scanned the article was to see if there was a single incident or person in the article that I recognized.

There wasn’t.

This is routine, it is as I expected, but if you haven’t spent your whole life in the guts of this business you might start thinking some of Conspiracy to Hide History was under way.

National Review was doing what every magazine does when it deals with history or any other subject. The writer wasn’t going into history to find out what happened. The article wasn’t featured because of some sudden interest in the political history of the late seventies.

As every writer who wants to eat regularly learns, the piece was aimed at making a point about NOW. It was written for a respectable conservative magazine to show that respectable conservatism worked then and is the only true faith now.

There wasn’t a lot of room in today’s NR for the fact that unrespectables were taking over and going for the “Wallace” vote, that a few congressmen, in the teeth of respectable opposition, were using hard ball to stop the congress in its tracks and keeping congress sitting extra days to force items off that the huge Democratic majority in both houses and the White House put in.

So a writer ignores the reality. He also avoids the John Ashbrooks. He avoids the influence of George Wallace. It is obvious that this puts him in Never-Never Land, but the reason the article appears is to serve the purposes of a publication trying to survive in 2010.

I am simply not naïve enough to expect any such an article to overlap with reality a generation ago. I am not only aware that information is produced for a reason, I assume it.

You would think that a man who was in the middle of things in a major historical battle would find any discussion of it at least worth reading. But if you have long since learned that information is produced for a reason, you know that the article is a repetition of what the magazine says in all the things it chooses to publish.

Any source of information survives by putting out what helps it survive. A lot of people are constantly enraged at this. I take it for granted because the simple, basic rule, “Why is this information produced?” makes this, not a conspiracy, but a matter of course.

When people talk about big happenings, they want big causes. When Kennedy was shot, no one wanted to attribute that to one lone nut job, especially a Communist nut job.
That is a major reason conspiracy theories flourished.

That is what makes BUGS so hard to sell. No one wants to hear that the historical catastrophes we have seen were the result of simple causes. No one wants to hear that all that complicated talk about race relations just comes down the Final Solution to the White Problem.

I just wrote a piece here about how television was monomaniacally New York-centered from the history of granting licenses. The average person who hobbies in politics would say that is a cute observation and go on to Big Stuff.

In big historical events, people associate realism with Big Stuff. Reality is not made of Big Stuff. Reality has a lot of Big Stuff, medium stuff, and tiny stuff. The catch is that when you talk about the little stuff, like TV programming, very few people want to hear about it.

Which means their picture of the world is completely unreal. If a plane goes down, it may be the result of a terrorist plot or it may be a tiny piece of defective equipment like the one that knocked out all power in the entire Northeastern United States for hours in the 1960s.

If that happened today a dozen books would come out showing it was Arabs.

The article about early New York provincialism in TV programming was written to DEMONSTRATE the truth that no one is as provincial as a rube who thinks he’s sophisticated.

The rule here is that you don’t reach reality by searching for excitement. You could have talked yourself blue about Arab Terrorist Plots or some other Great Conspiracy causing that Blackout, but the fact is that the blackout would have continued until you replaced that one little switch.

Our movement can get lots of membership with News and Jews. But it will get nowhere until it gets to the basics.

I have spent over a decade trying to get them to change that one switch. I will probably literally die trying.

There was a period in the history of TV when it was not only a monopoly of New York City, it was when no one understood you if you said “New York provincial.” At that time “barbarian” and “sophisticated” had exactly the meaning a college graduate is trained in.

To say a New Yorker was not sophisticated was exactly like saying the Pope is not Catholic.

EXACTLY.

Only big cities had TV stations. Then the FCC gave out no more for years. The TV licenses were, of course, “free,” meaning the public got no money for these enormously valuable pieces of public property.

Nobody in South Carolina could get TV without an enormous antenna tower aimed at Charlotte. Tiny, broken-down houses would have a sixty-foot piece of metal sprouting out of their roofs. This was so familiar to most of the country that Saturday Evening Post had a cartoon of an outhouse with a huge tower on it.

There was no caption. There didn’t need to be.

Finally the moratorium on licenses was lifted. Columbia got three stations almost simultaneously.

There was an immediate catastrophe in popular programming. Molly Goldberg went under. Milton Berle went under. A guy Murray’s program, sponsored by Manischewitz wine, went under. The whole program list went under.

But the network programmers, responsible for billions of 1950s dollars, learned not a thing from this. Almost every show was placed in New York.

These are the Geniuses Who Control Everything and Never Make A Mistake. The Learned Elders must have been on acid during that period.

TV Guide, almost the country’s only politically conservative magazine, pointed this out in a cover article about 1964, which I remember well. It was a breakthrough. It pointed out that New Yorkers still referred to the territory between New York and Los Angeles as “flyover country.”

That article talked about the giant money losses networks were sustaining by their Big City fixation. By “losses” I mean the media monopoly made less money than it could have.

We are not talking chickenfeed here. These were some of the country’s top executives, and not entirely by cheating.

Being provincial is routine. But for top executives to lose billions of dollars by being provincial demonstrates that there is no one as provincial as a rube who thinks he’s sophisticated.

A large part of our age is explained by rubes who thought they were becoming city slickers by adopting the Little New Yorker mentality.

I have never seen any evidence that anybody ever actually thought the world was flat.

The reason we don’t see what shape people thought the world was is because it was information that one would produce. It takes a LOT of leisure before one begins to talk about things like that.

Such information is not produced and it is not preserved. We try desperately to hook our history to that of Rome, but again, one of the most basic aspects of Rome is totally unnoted.

Rome kept records only of itself. They kept Greek records because of their claim to have come from the Trojan War, but otherwise they kept NOTHING. Yes, they did ignore all the languages of the “barbarians,” but they also ignored the Etruscans, who were once their kings and from whom they actually did get a beginning of their knowledge of building.

The only Etrurian title we know of now is “chief builder of bridges.” That is because it was a title given to the top man in Etruscan Rome, it was adopted as a title by the Emperors, and now is known as Pontifex Maximus, one title the Pope has.

The point is not the accuracy of that observation. The point is that we have NO survival of anything Etruscan despite the fact that the titanic record keeping capitol of Rome was built there.

Just as it is assumed that all earlier people thought the earth was flat, it is assumed they were illiterate. As a matter of fact, the first thing any Jehovan faith does is burn all writings.

In my youth, no one had any difficulty with the idea that the only writing Nordic peoples had was on rock.

Nobody knew of anything but advanced writings etched into rock. Pretty good, to learn how to etch rock without ever having any place to do your learning. No destructible writings were found, so it was assumed they didn’t exist.

Destroying writing is serious business for Jehovans. We do know that when Islam took over Iran, its native script was abolished for Arabic script, as was every other native script. Today, we all know that Yiddish is a simple form of German, you can actually understand Yiddish if you speak Afrikaans

But Yiddish is written in Hebrew script.

When Christianity took over Egypt hieroglyphics was still Egyptian writing. The last hieroglyphic writing dates to about the fourth century.

The Romans outlawed the uniting factor of Celtic society, the Druids. If the Romans didn’t leave a shred of Etruscan writing except on tomb walls, what do you think they would do to Druidic writing?

So we all assume the Druids wore robes, totally alien to their society, and that they had large organized seminaries but no writings.

This information is worth producing because it demonstrates that all real knowledge, the world is round, writing, so forth is entirely the product of those who own the Books today. It is one with the idea that we wouldn’t have the electron microscope today if a Greek philosopher had not argued with Aristotle about whether the substance of a thing changed if it were cut down to its irreducible size, what ancient Greeks called the atom.

We have learned in the last generation that animal society is NATURALLY much like our own, and that our society is NATURALLY different from what all forms of Wordism tell us. As real history is dug out, we may have to cope with the reality that literacy was much more general, and that our real legacy from Egypt, Rome, and the Jehovan faiths is bigotry.