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| Tom & Meryl |
Sunday morning: I watched an interesting film on the telly
last night. It is a 2017 film called The Post starring Meryl Streep and
Tom Hanks. Meryl played the part of Katherine Graham who was the
owner of the Washington Post. It was all about the decision to publish
the Pentagon Papers which revealed the lies and secrets of the USA
government during the Vietnam War. It was these revelations which hastened the
end of the war. What the film showed was the importance of a free press to hold
the government to account for their actions. I think the problem these days, in
Britain at least, is that newspapers don't care about telling the truth anymore. large chunks of the media have fallen into the hands of
billionaire tax dodging media moguls and their papers have become propaganda
machines for right wing governments.
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| Daniel Ellsberg |
When the film ended, I looked online to see what happened
in real life to the protagonists in the film. I was pleased to find out that Daniel
Ellsberg who was the man who leaked the papers is still alive today aged
89. One interesting thing I found out was that he met Beat poet Gary Snyder in
Kyoto Japan in 1960. Gary at the time was halfway through a ten-year study of
Zen Buddhism. He had wanted to meet Gary after reading The Dharma Bums by
Jack Kerouac. Daniel said that it was partly due to his arguments with
Gary about active Buddhism and US foreign policy that convinced him to reveal the truth about what
was going on. I wonder what Jack Kerouac & Neal Cassady would have made of all
that? They could be quite right-wing in their views sometimes. I found this
little fact about Daniel Ellsberg & Gary Snyder and their place in American
history quite fascinating, so I am glad I watched The Post last night.
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| Gary Snyder. |
