The T.A.M.I. Show-Wha Hoppen?

I can only come to one conclusion: Politically the American people are, collectively, the stupidest people on the planet, followed close behind by the people of Alberta.

Movie poster for the first annual T.A.M.I. There never was a second show!

(CALGARY, Alberta) - A few days ago I read an excerpt from a new book by Marc Spitz titled Jagger . The excerpt covered the Stones’ appearance at The T.A.M.I. Show (Teenage Awards Music International)—the first ever live rock concert. It was compiled from the footage of three shows over two days—Oct 28/29, 1964 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium which seated 3,000.

It was released in LA on November 14 and North America-wide by the end of the year. I saw it ometime in 1965 at a drive-in (what we teenagers euphemistically called the finger bowl). In the 47 years since, it’s been around in partial bootleg versions but is now available on DVD for the first time in its entirety.

The time of the T.A.M.I. show was the apotheosis of American history, from 1776 to the present and it’s primarily been downhill since. The decline wasn’t always constant and there were some brief upticks (Neil Armstrong on the moon, for example), but America's final decline had begun—as happens to all empires, Roman, Persian, Ottoman and British.

I watched the DVD and admit that I fast forwarded through much of it; I’m not a teenager anymore (who knew?) and there wasn’t a single song that appealed to me or even brought back emotional memories (although a couple of tunes have since become earworms). But watching it from a new perspective prompted some new thoughts.

The first was that about half the performers were what were then called negroes—James Brown and the Flames, The Supremes, Smoky Robinson and the Miracles, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye—and that those negroes were second class (or worse) citizens in their own country. I thought of how much money most of them made. They made, and had, a hundred times, a thousand times, more money than any Southern cracker, yet in most parts of the country, particularly the South, they could not have lived or traveled in comfort or safety.

The second was that America was, in the early 1960s, at its height, yet the negroes still had little or no part of it. In one of the audience shots below, you can see a black person. I scanned the audiences on a second viewing and I never saw another although I did see two black dancers (one male, one female). That one black in the audience shot may have been the token negro.

When the T.A.M.I. show took place, JFK had been dead barely a year and, despite that, the nation still believed in itself. But far worse was on the horizon.

Three months earlier, at the end of July, there had been three days of race riots in Rochester, NY where four people died (three in a helicopter crash). The next August—ten months later—the Watts riots raged for five days where 34 were killed, 1,032 injured and 3,438 arrested. There was a substantial list of race rioting over the following years—Cleveland, Omaha, Newark (NJ), Detroit, Chicago, Washington, Akron, Baltimore... The fundamental underlying causes of these riots was poverty, substandard housing, poor schools, unemployment and racial prejudice. Public opinion polls at the time showed that about the same number of people who believed these causes, believed they were communist backed or inspired. Talk about wilful denial.

Also unknown to these naïve teenagers were the impending assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Every year American society leaked hope.

The biggest black cloud on the horizon was the Vietnam War. In 1964, Vietnam was still not much more than a glorified police action. The dying of America’s youth had yet to begin in earnest.

Looking at the audiences—those at the live performance and those who watched the show at theatres I was forcibly struck by another realization.

This was the generation that was going to change the world. Of those in the audience still alive today, all of them are now, or will be shortly, collecting social security. They’ve gone from youth to old age and, as a cohort, have made a negative overall contribution to the nation.

In 1964 the country was about halfway through what is called The Great Prosperity—from the end of World War II to the oil shocks of 1973-4. Economically, the nation as a whole grew through these three decades and median wages kept increasing. The growing middle class was able to consume more goods and services which created more and better jobs. It could even be argued that the U.S., in fact, would be better off today if most of them had never been born to consume. How’s that for a negative endorsement? The middle class deserves to lose their economic status because for thirty years they sat back and gobbled up far more than their share of the planet’s resources and, at the same time, disproportionately contributed to the planet’s environmental degradation.

(This was exemplified by Walter Brooke, as Mr. McGuire in 1967’s The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. Mr. McGuire says to Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman): “I just want to say one word to you. Plastics.)

The unravelling wasn’t just the oil-shocks of the 1970s. New technologies, such as container ships and satellite communications—undermined those American jobs that could be automated or done more cheaply offshore. American companies became global, with no loyalty to the U.S. By 2007, financial companies accounted for over 40 percent of American corporate profits and almost as great a percentage of pay, up from 10 percent during the Great Prosperity. Global American companies were making tens of billions of dollars in profits overseas and the tax system allowed them to keep those profits without paying any U.S. taxes.

The decline of the U.S. was predicted by Abraham Lincoln in his 1858 “House Divided” speech. He said

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

While the effects of slavery have not yet been fully eradicated from American society, the equivalent issue today is one of economic inequality and the U.S. is almost to the point where it is all one thing—an economic dictatorship. The U.S. today is the second most unequal nation in the world after Switzerland, which is a special case.

At the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth and the top 1% owned 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth. The financial gains over the last decade have been mostly made at the very top of the economic food chain as more people fall out of the middle class. The

• top 20 % of Americans holds 84% of the national wealth
• the 2nd 20% holds 11%
• the third 20% holds 4 %
• the 4th 20% 0.2%
• the bottom 20% 0.1%

(Doesn’t total 100% due to rounding)

The bottom forty percent of Americans, more than 120 million people, hold less than a half of one percent of the national wealth. This is not new, and is even worse than it was at the time of T.A.M.I. As Ferdinand Lundberg observed in 1968 (The Rich and the Super-Rich):

“Most Americans—citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal-swathed country in the world—by a wide margin own nothing more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usually purchased on the instalment plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs….At the same time, a relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes in the Arabian Nights tales. Their agents deafen a baffled world with a never-ceasing chant about the occult merits of private property ownership… It would be difficult in the 1960s for a large majority of Americans to show fewer significant possessions if the country had long labored under a grasping dictatorship. How has this process been contrived of stripping threadbare most of the populace, which once at least owned small patches of virgin land?.”

The propaganda watchdogs of the established order, Lundberg goes on to say, “when hard pressed, offer an incantation about a mythical high American standard of living which on inspection turns out to be no more than a standard of gross consumption.”

There’s only one thing that can change America’s direction and that is if the nation actually becomes socially united. This is unlikely as inequality and injustice have been built into the nation’s DNA from the outset. This is most evident today in health care where up to 50 million Americans do not have access to health care. Obama passed a slap-dash program and the Republicans are united in their goal of dismantling it if they gain power.

The tragic reality is that millions of those so deprived are children, yet the majority of the American people clearly do not care about the welfare of their fellow citizens.

Social cooperation is anathema and routinely rejected as socialism or communism—depending on which right-wing sycophant you talk to. Canada, a peaceful, prosperous nation, is denigrated by them as a socialist paradise.

Economically America is in a sinkhole. There are problems in some European nations, but nothing to compare. Consider Germany.

Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread. While Americans’ average hourly pay (adjusted for inflation) has risen only 6 percent since 1985, German workers’ pay has risen almost 30 percent. At the same time, the top 1% of German households now take home about 11 percent of all income—about the same as in 1970.

American union membership is 12.4% of the total workforce, broken down to 36.8% of public sector workers and 7.6% of private sector workers. Union membership has declined every year since 1983. Laws are now being introduced or passed in many states to reduce, or even eliminate, public sector unionization.

Union membership for a few developed countries:

• Iceland 88%
• Denmark 80%
• Sweden 78%
• Norway 62%
• Austria 40%
• Italy 33%
• Canada 30%
• Greece 30%
• UK 28%
• Germany 20%

It was Karl Marx who said that the State is the Executive Committee of the ruling class. The current manifestation of this is that the government is the enemy of the people although not in the way that most Americans think it is. It is the ruling class that is the enemy of the ordinary citizen and they use the “state” to exercise their will. This is no where better demonstrated than when the State (government) turns its armed forces against its own citizens which is, in effect, the American people against themselves. This was demonstrated in the Ludlow mine massacre of 1914 where the Colorado National Guard was turned against striking workers and their families at the behest of John D. Rockefeller.

A less tragic example is the 1912, Lawrence, Mass. textile strike. Militiamen with fixed bayonets here surround a group of striking workers.

Looking at the cognitive dissonance of these factors I can only come to one conclusion: Politically the American people are, collectively, the stupidest people on the planet, with the people of Alberta a close second.

Daniel Johnson

Deputy Executive Editor, Salem-News.com

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, as a teenager, Daniel Johnson aspired to be a writer. Always a voracious reader, he reads more books in a month than many people read in a lifetime. He knew early that in order to be a writer, you have to be a reader.

Another early bit of self-knowledge was that writers need experience. So, in the first seven years after high school he worked at 42 different jobs ranging from management trainee in a bank (four branches in three cities), inside and outside jobs at a railroad (in two cities), then A & W, factories and assembly lines, driving cabs (three different companies), collection agent, a variety of office jobs, John Howard Society, crisis counsellor at an emergency shelter, salesman in a variety of industries (building supplies, used cars, photocopy machines)and on and on. You get the picture.

In 1968, he was between jobs and eligible for unemployment benefits, so he decided to take the winter off and just write. The epiphany there, he said, was that after about two weeks, “I realized I had nothing to say.” So back to regular work.

He has always been concerned about fairness in the world and the plight of the underprivileged/underdog. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that he understood where that motivation came from. Diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) he researched the topic and, among others, read a book Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Maté, an ADD person himself. Maté wrote: "[A] feeling of duty toward the whole world is not limited to ADD but is typical of it. No one with ADD is without it."

That explains his motivation. Hard-wired.

As a professional writer he sold his first paid article in 1974 and, while employed at other jobs, started selling a few pieces in assorted places. He created his first journalism gig. In the late 1970s, when the world was recovering from a recession, the Canadian federal government had a job creation program where, if an employer created a new job, the government would pay part of the wage for the first year or two. The local weekly paper was growing, so he approached the publisher and said this was an opportunity for him to hire a new reporter. The publisher had been thinking along those lines but cost was a factor. No longer.

Over the next 15 years, Daniel eked out a living as a writer doing, among other things, national writing and both radio and TV broadcasting for the CBC, Maclean’s (the national newsmagazine) and a host of smaller publications. Interweaved throughout this period was soul-killing corporate and public relations writing.

It was through the 1960s and 1970s that he got his university experience. In his first year at the University of Calgary, he majored in psychology/mathematics; in his second year he switched to physics/mathematics. He then learned of an independent study program at the University of Lethbridge where he attended the next two years, studying philosophy and economics. In the end he attended university over nine years (four full time) but never qualified for a degree because he didn't have the right number of courses in any particular field.

In 1990 he published his first (and so far, only) book: Practical History: A guide to Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” (Polymath Press, Calgary)

Newly appointed as the Deputy Executive Editor in August 2011, he has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and, as of summer 2011, has published more than 160 stories.

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