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azulpitlane · 5 months ago

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be aggressive l ln4

lando norris x dcc!reader summary: the internet is curious as to why lando suddenly has an interest in american football, specifically with the dallas cowboys masterlist

f1gossip

13,283 likes

f1gossip Lando Norris and Mclaren CEO, Zak Brown at the Dallas Cowboys game today in the AT&T stadium!!

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user his ass did not wanna be there😭

user lando?? american football?? huh???

user guys it was sponsored by hilton!! pretty sure thats why they attended

user makes sense cause bro looked miserable by the second half of the game

user a strange strange sight

user mf was bored the whole game except when the cheerleaders performed LMFAO

user the video of him locking in as soon as they stepped out in the field💀 ↪user WHERES THE VIDEO HAHAH? ↪user the video is all over twitter, cameraman did him dirty lmfao

yourusername

liked by landonorris and 12,379 others

yourusername victory sunday💙🤍💙

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user lesss goooo cowboys

user FAVE DCC

user in y/n we trust🧎‍♀️

user wait a minute- lando what are you doing here?!?

user no cause i noticed that too👀

user obsessed with you

user patiently waiting for the lando girlies to realize he followed her immediately after tonights game

user poor lando didnt get the follow back tho😭😭

yourusername

liked by landonorris and 19,382 others

yourusername first ever grand prix!!! such a delight to perform for these lovely faces✨

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user you guys made paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket worth it tbh

user icons

user another lando like, jolene im begging you pls dont take my man😔

user its the other way around for me😩 lando needs to back off my girl

user 🔥

landonorris amazing performance😍

user oh we're getting bold??? user down bad lando is my favorite lando fr user OMGGG FUTURE WAG Y/N??

user STOP is she the reason lando went to that cowboys game a few weeks ago

user going to her games and they're not even dating yet, gotta respect the game tbh😭

user sorry to break girls' hearts but there's videos of her and lando talking at the gp and he was blushing and giving her heart eyes the whole time

user literally came to her account cause of that video HAHAH

landonorris

liked by danielricciardo, maxfewtrell and 930,482 others

landonorris 'murica

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user PASSENGER PRINCESS LANDO???

user ARE THOSE DCC BOOTS IN THE LAST SLIDE???

user it HAS to be the cheerleader he just followed cause they wear the exact same boots ↪user her name is Y/N!! put some respect in our dcc queen's name ↪user yes maam🫡, i apologize for my ignorance as a brit

user lando in a cowboy hat?? SHOW IT TO ME NOW RACHEL

maxfewtrell man you never let me drive when youre in the car

landonorris yeah cause i dont trust u maxfewtrell YOUVE KNOWN ME LONGER THAN Y/N??this comment has been deleted

user did max just confirm it is y/n THEE DCC in the last slide🧍‍♀️

user LMFAOO i know lando gave him an earful after that deleted comment user too late for him to delete, I HAVE IT PRINTED OUT! Y/N AND LANDO CONFIRMED

user streets are saying it's y/n in the last slide... we lost her guys😔

user AND WE LOST HER TO A BRITISH MAN💔💔

user now we wait for y/n to follow him and start soft launching too

danielricciardo glad i trusted the process

landonorris TOLD YOU user i hate when they comment inside jokes, got me feeling left out :(

user wait the way he let her drive even though hes said before he hates not being in control, meaning he already trusts her🥹

user i love her already omg

user lando dating an american cheerleader is actually the most lando thing ever

yourusername

liked by landonorris, maxfewtrell and 18,392 others

yourusername current side mission: turning a brit into a texan

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user bae just tag lando norris, we know it's him

user NOO I WAS HOPING IT WAS JUST RUMORS💔

user girl lando does not know who you are ↪user i was talking about y/n ↪user oh sorry, valid reaction tbh

user the matching pictures of her driving and him as the passenger princess on his post omg this is the most perfect soft launch i fear

user i waited for 3 and half years for her and white man did it in one week😩

user her soft launching as if max didnt already confirm it on landos post

yourusername shhh just pretend you didn't see that, cant have my soft launch ruined ↪user sorry maam, whatever you say maam

user lando is so posh but she has him driving dirt bikes and going to rodeos HAHAHHA

user the way he looked just watching a football game was hilarious, i cant even imagine a rodeo

user as a european f1 fan, can someone explain why she's so loved? (IM ASKING IN THE NICEST WAY POSSIBLE I SWEAR)

user LOL she's a cheerleader for the dallas cowboys football team which is a huge deal here! it's pretty hard to join the squad but shes a fifth year veteran (about to retire after this year) and she's known as one of the sweetest and kindest leaders on the squad!! she also met lando at a game!

user does she know she has twitter freaking out with this post?

user not that im complaining but this is the first time i see an f1 couple getting so much love HOW AND WHY??

user well y/n is quite literally america's sweetheart

yourusername

liked by landonorris, pietra.pilao and 23,492 others

yourusername one last christmas show🥹

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user what is dcc without y/n☹️

user gonna miss her so bad

user still looked amazing

user okay but is she still with that nascar driver or whatever cause wowwwww😍

landonorris yes, she is still with the FORMULA ONE DRIVER. ↪user OMG AN OFFICIAL CONFIRMATION???

pietra.pilao be with me please?

landonorris 🤨

landonorris woah woah you didnt say you were gonna post this one??? you look too good???

yourusername what happened to not commenting on each other's post until the hard launch🙂 (but ty ily) landonorris i take that back. (ily more) ↪user theyre losers but i love them your honor

footballplayer 🔥

landonorris yeah nice try🤣

user landos fighting for his life in these comments HAHA

user he fr ruined y/n's soft launch cause he cant handle these commenters hitting on her omfg

user kinda scared to comment, i dont want lando coming for me

user please dont be in love with someone else😩please dont have somebody waiting on you😩

landonorris she is in fact in love with someone else and does in fact have somebody waiting on her (ME) ↪user lando is a loser bf CONFIRMED

landonorris

liked by yourusername, danielricciardo and 973,492 others

landonorris winter break means football games with my beautiful girl

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user finally the hard launch

user she literally is turning him into a texan GRAHHHH🦅🇺🇸

user *pretends to be shocked*

yourusername ILYYYYYYY

landonorris ❤️

user sad about her retiring dcc but happy we'll be getting so much WAG content

user OMG i didnt even think of this ↪user already imagining the paddock fits😩

user ig i have to accept shes officially taken :(

landonorris yeah. ↪user chill bro aint nobody taking her from you

user bro saw all the thrist comments on her last post and decided to hard launch

maxfewtrell ranch in texas when??

yourusername OMG SOON PLEASE @/LANDONORRIS?? ↪landonorris um idk about that ↪yourusername 🤨 ↪landonorris I MEANT ILL THINK ABOUT IT!! IT SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT IDEA😁🫶

user shes got him on a LEASH

danielricciardo ahh feels like yesterday that you bought tickets for the game AND the flight to have a 5 second interaction with the cute dcc

user damn lando was down bad wth😭 landonorris thank you for making this public information. ↪yourusername hey at least you beat the norizz allegations! eventually...

user as an american, im allowing you to count cota as your home race for bagging this queen

user oh lando norris i underestimated your game

User he gets the y'all pass now

landonorris THANK YALLLLLL

user the americanfication of lando is not something i knew i needed, but i did. thank you miss y/n

yourusername youre welcome, he will be listening to zach bryan and dolly parton in no time🫡

notes: one thing about me is im gonna start getting lazy at the end of every smau i make. LOL. anyway i love american reader if you havent noticed already :)

#lando norris x reader #lando norris smau #f1 x reader #lando norris #lando norris fanfic #lando norris imagine #lando norris x y/n #lando norris x you #ln4 #f1 fanfic #mclaren formula 1 #f1 imagine #f1 fic

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hooked-on-elvis · 8 months ago

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The "Street suit", worn onstage by accident (1975)

TWO-TONED STREET SUIT | Other names: Penguin suit Used only once onstage, on August 19, 1975, at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, during the Midnight concert. Elvis wore the suit with a Black Macrame belt. Info from website elvisconcerts.com (Jumpsuit index)

According to the rumors, Elvis was late for the show that night and he had no time to change his clothes, so he just walked on-stage wearing what he had on at the moment: the Two-toned Street suit.

Elvis during concert in August 19, 1975, at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This sounds a little off to me, to be truthful. If EP in fact wasn't intending wearing the Street suit onstage then I wonder the reasons why: Did he get distracted and forgot to change his outfit in time? Maybe he was visiting with fans backstage or too busy chatting with guests/friends/family in his suite while resting before another concert could begun? (He performed the dinner concert the same night at 8:15pm and wore the Totem Pole suit for it); perhaps something happened with the other outfit he planned to change into for the second concert, considering he didn't want to wear the Totem Pole suit for both concerts the same night; or Elvis simply felt like wearing the Two-toned Street suit because he felt more comfortable in it at the moment. I guess we'll never know what actually happened.

UPDATE: I learned reason why he probably wasn't properly dressed for the August 19th concert. Thanks @deke-rivers-1957 for commenting on this post and sharing your knowledge on what was going on in Elvis' life in those days. I see I was only trying to be optimistic while guessing why Elvis wasn't properly dressed onstage in August 19, 1975 because it went through my mind it could be due to illness someway but I chose not to mention this possibility before. Thanks to you, we have an answer to share here. There you go:

Friday 15, in August 1975 "Late in the evening Elvis leaves Memphis for Las Vegas, very likely in the Jet Commander, but the place is forced to make an unscheduled stop in Dallas when Elvis has difficulty breathing. After resting for several hours in a motel, he recovers sufficiently to continue on the trip." Excerpt from book "Elvis Day by Day: The Definitive Record of His Life and Music" (1999) by Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen.

Using my words to finish the explanations, Elvis was visibly not okay since, at least, August 15, but all signals were ignored by him and the ones around him. On August 18, 1975 Elvis opened another engagement in Vegas, at the Las Vegas Hilton, but he was visibly still not in good shape. In the book, Ernst Jorgensen says "Elvis had to sit down for much of the performance". The 19th was the second concert night at the venue. Apparently, other than the "wrong suit" situation during the second concert that night, the shows ran smoothly — During the first concert that night, Elvis wore one of his proper performance outfits, the Totem Pole suit, as mentioned before. A possible reason why for the second concert he was dressed casually can be explained from what happened in August 20. On August 20, Elvis told his manager, Col. Parker, he wasn't feeling good enough to perform. Colonel Parker told him to perform that day again because "no prior notice had been given". After the concerts in August 20, the remainder of the shows at the Las Vegas Hilton for that season (it was suppose to be a two-week engagement) were "canceled due to illness". On the 21st, Elvis was back in Memphis and he was hospitalized at the Baptist Memorial Hospital.

The way I see it now with the accurate information, Elvis was trying to say he wasn't feeling okay and this suit was likely his way of showing he was ready to go home. It's only mentioned he was vocal about his illness on August 20th, but knowing this "Street suit" concert was the second that night on the 19th, Elvis was probably not intending to even perform a second concert when he wore his off-stage wardrobe during a performance that night. Maybe backstage he was trying to convince Parker to let him cancel the second show for the night and he didn't succeed in his attempt but it was too late to change his outfit for the show, or, perhaps, knowing a little of Elvis' personality, he was probably not dressed to perform just to piss Colonel Parker off, a way of showing his will needed to be respected and taken seriously.

I confess I really was trying not to imagine EP was sick during that concert, but that's the backstage story behind the "Two-toned Street Suit" worn onstage in 1975.

LET'S SEE THE KING IN ACTION WEARING THAT SUIT:

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Elvis had several different colored "two-toned street suits". He wore them during 1975 and 1976. This was the only one which was worn on-stage. Excerpt from website elvisconcerts.com (Jumpsuit index)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

VERSIONS OF THE TWO-TONED SUIT

About that, it's a part of Elvis's personality, as his friends told over the years, "when Elvis likes something, he goes all the way". From general off-work activities (going to the movies, amusement parks, riding motorcycles, collecting guns/police badges, and so on), to food and also to his wardrobe choices, Elvis overdid things when he liked something.

The King owned clothes in the same model in different colors, usually his favorites (blue, red, black and white). Below we have an example of this, before going to the Street Suit.

Two-toned Street Suit

EP had at least four of them: two are black and white with the variation between them being the reverse color scheme, another one goes in two shades of blue and a fourth suit goes in brown and beige tones.

The one he wore onstage is in the second picture below, this time worn casually, as usual. On the photos in both sides of that one, Elvis is wearing the reverse color scheme suit - same model but white with black side stripes and black lapel. On the latter pictures Elvis is wearing Two-toned Street suits in blue and another one in brown/beige tones.

Sometimes Elvis would wear the Two-tone suit jacket as a coat, over his actual stage wear:

The King wearing the Chicken Bone suit with the jacket of his blue shades "Two-Toned Street Suit" over his shoulders.

Elvis performing at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 19, 1975 (Midnight concert).

Note: Those are only the pictures I could find of this one suit model Elvis had in different colors but it wouldn't surprise me if EP had more of them, which I imagine it would go in red-white or red-black color schemes or even all white/all black versions, but I haven't found pictures that can endorse this theory, so far.

#elvis presley #elvis fashion #1975 #street suit #elvis #elvis the king #elvis fans #elvis fandom #elvis history #70s elvis

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deadpresidents · 1 year ago

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Waking Up In Dallas: November 22, 1963.

Two American Presidents woke up in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Neither of them were the two men who actually served as President on that tragic day -- John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson.

The 37th President of the United States, 50-year-old Richard Nixon, had arrived in Dallas on November 20th for a conference of the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages on behalf of Pepsi-Cola, a company that his New York law firm was representing. On November 21st, Nixon sat down with reporters in his room at the Baker Hotel, where he criticized many of the policies of President Kennedy, his 1960 opponent, who would be arriving in Dallas the next day. That night, Nixon and Pepsi executives including actress Joan Crawford, who had been married to Pepsi's chairman, Alfred Steele, until his death in 1959, were entertained at the Statler Hilton.

In the early morning of November 22nd, a car dropped Nixon off, alone, at Love Field, the Dallas airport that would host President and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson, and Texas Governor John Connally and his wife in just a few hours. Nixon later remembered the flags and signs displayed along the motorcade route that Kennedy would soon follow. Nixon approached the American Airlines ticket counter to check-in for his flight to New York City and told the attendant, "It looks like you're going to have a big day today."

Nixon landed several hours later in New York at an airport that would be renamed after John F. Kennedy a month later. He described what happened next in his 1978 autobiography, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon:

Arriving in New York, I hailed a cab home. We drove through Queens toward the 59th Street Bridge, and as we stopped at a traffic light, a man rushed over from the curb and started talking to the driver. I heard him say, "Do you have a radio in your cab? I just heard that Kennedy was shot." We had no radio, and as we continued into Manhattan a hundred thoughts rushed through my mind. The man could have been crazy or a macabre prankster. He could have been mistaken about what he had heard; or perhaps a gunman might have shot at Kennedy but missed or only wounded him. I refused to believe that he could have been killed. As the cab drew up in front of my building, the doorman ran out. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. "Oh, Mr. Nixon, have you heard, sir?" he asked. "It's just terrible. They've killed President Kennedy."

The close 1960 Presidential election changed the relationship between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, but they had once been very close. When they first entered Congress together in 1947, they considered each other personal friends, and when Nixon ran for the Senate from California in 1950, JFK stopped into Nixon's office and dropped off a financial contribution to Nixon's campaign from Kennedy's father. Nixon would later write that he felt as bad on the night of Kennedy's assassination as he had when he lost two brothers to tuberculosis when he was very young. That night, he wrote an emotional letter to Jacqueline Kennedy:

Dear Jackie, In this tragic hour Pat and I want you to know that our thoughts and prayers are with you. While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents I always cherished the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947. That friendship evidenced itself in many ways including the invitation we received to attend your wedding. Nothing I could say now could add to the splendid tributes which have come from throughout the world to him. But I want you to know that the nation will also be forever grateful for your service as First Lady. You brought to the White House charm, beauty and elegance as the official hostess of America, and the mystique of the young in heart which was uniquely yours made an indelible impression on the American consciousness. If in the days ahead we could be helpful in any way we shall be honored to be at your command. Sincerely, Dick Nixon

••• On the morning of November 22, 1963, the 41st President of the United States also woke up in Dallas, Texas. George Herbert Walker Bush was the 39-year-old president of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company and chairman of the Harris County, Texas Republican Party, and had stayed the night of November 21st at the Dallas Sheraton alongside his wife, Barbara. Bush was planning a bid for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and making the rounds to line up support amongst many Texans who considered him far too moderate. One of the groups that was strongest in opposition to Bush was the ultra-right wing John Birch Society, which had recently been lodging vehement protests against President Kennedy's upcoming visit to Dallas.

Conspiracy theorists claim that there were far more sinister motives for George Bush being in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Some claim that Bush was a secret CIA operative involved in planning or even carrying out the assassination of President Kennedy. Some even argue that a grainy photograph of a man resembling Bush taken shortly after the assassination proves that Bush was actually in Dealey Plaza at the time of Kennedy's shooting.

He wasn't. He wasn't even in Dallas. We know where George Herbert Walker Bush was at the time of JFK's assassination -- we have plenty of eyewitnesses who can confirm it. While Lee Harvey Oswald was shooting President Kennedy, George Bush was about 100 miles away from Dallas, in Tyler, Texas, speaking at a Kiwanis Club luncheon. Like Nixon, Bush and his wife, Barbara, had also boarded a plane that morning in Dallas -- a private plane that transported them to Tyler for the Kiwanis Club event. While Bush was speaking, word of the President's assassination reached the luncheon and the local club president, Wendell Cherry, leaned over and gave the news to Bush. Bush quickly notified the crowd, and said, "In view of the President's death, I consider it inappropriate to continue with a political speech at this time." He ended his speech and sat down while the luncheon broke up in stunned silence.

Bush's wife, Barbara, wasn't at the Kiwanis Club luncheon. While her husband was speaking, Barbara Bush went to a beauty parlor in Tyler to get her hair styled. As her hair was being done, Barbara began writing a letter to family and heard the news over the radio that JFK had been shot and then that the President had died. In her 1994 memoir, Barbara included the letter, part of which said:

I am writing this at the Beauty Parlor, and the radio says that the President has been shot. Oh Texas -- my Texas -- my God -- let's hope it's not true. I am sick at heart as we all are. Yes, the story is true and the Governor also. How hateful some people are. Since, the beauty parlor, the President has died. We are once again on a plane. This time a commercial plane. Poppy (George H.W. Bush's family nickname) picked me up at the beauty parlor -- we went right to the airport, flew to Ft. Worth and dropped Mr. Zeppo off (we were on his plane) and flew back to Dallas. We had to circle the field while the second Presidential plane took off. Immediately, Pop got tickets back to Houston, and here we are flying home. We are sick at heart. The tales the radio reporters tell of Jackie Kennedy are the bravest. We are hoping that it is not some far-right nut, but a "commie" nut. You understand that we know they are both nuts, but just hope that it is not a Texan and not an American at all. I am amazed by the rapid-fire thinking and planning that has already been done. LBJ has been the President for some time now -- two hours at least and it is only 4:30. My dearest love to you all, Bar

As Barbara Bush noted in her letter, the Bushes did not stay another night at the Dallas Sheraton on November 22nd, as they had originally planned. They returned to Dallas on the private jet that had transported them to Tyler earlier in the day, and caught a commercial flight home to Houston. The "second Presidential plane" that took off while Bush's plane circled Love Field was the plane that had transported Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Dallas earlier that day, Air Force Two. Johnson was already heading back to Washington, now on Air Force One, with the casket of John F. Kennedy.

••• The 37th President of the United States and the 41st President of the United States woke up in Dallas, Texas on the morning of November 22, 1963. The 31st President, 89-year-old Herbert Hoover, was in failing health in the elegant suite he called home at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. Within the next few weeks, he would be visited by the new President, Lyndon Johnson, and President Kennedy's grieving widow, Jackie, and the President's brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. The 33rd President, 79-year-old Harry Truman, learned of JFK's death in Missouri, while the 34th President, 73-year-old Dwight D. Eisenhower, heard of the assassination while attending a meeting at the United Nations in New York. Truman and Eisenhower would squash a long, bitter personal feud that weekend while attending Kennedy's funeral in Washington. The 38th President, 50-year-old Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, was driving home with his wife Betty after attending a parent conference with their son Jack's teacher when they heard the news on the radio in their car. Two days later, President Johnson would call on Ford to serve on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination.

The 39th President, Jimmy Carter was 39 years old and had just gotten off a tractor near the warehouse of his Plains, Georgia peanut farm when a group of farmers informed him of the news of the shooting. Carter found a quiet area, kneeled down in prayer, and when he heard that Kennedy had died, cried for the first time since his father had died ten years earlier. Ronald Reagan, the 40th President, was 52 years old and preparing for a run as Governor of California. A little more than 17 years later, the now-President Reagan would also be shot by a lone gunman in the middle of the day. While Reagan would survive the attempt on his life, it was very nearly fatal and reminded his wife, Nancy, of November 22, 1963. As she was transported to George Washington Hospital following Reagan's shooting, Nancy would later note, "As my mind raced, I flashed to scenes of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Texas, and the day President Kennedy was shot. I had been driving down San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles when a bulletin came over the car radio. Now, more than seventeen years later, I prayed that history would not be repeated, that Washington would not become another Dallas. That my husband would live."

The 41st President, Bill Clinton, and the 43rd President, George W. Bush, were both 17 years old and in school -- Bush at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Clinton at Hot Springs High School in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Clinton was in his fourth period calculus class when his teacher was called out of the room and returned to announce that President Kennedy had been killed. Four months earlier, Clinton had traveled to Washington with the Boys Nation program and, during a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House, pushed his way to the front of the line and shook President Kennedy's hand. The 44th President, Barack Obama, was a 2-year-old living in Hawaii.

••• The 35th President, 46-year-old John F. Kennedy, would die in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Lyndon B. Johnson, 55, would become the 36th President in Dallas that day. But they woke up that morning in Fort Worth at the Texas Hotel. Kennedy had slept the last night of his life in suite 850 on the eighth floor, now the Presidential suite. LBJ had slept the last night of his Vice Presidency in the much more expensive and elegant Will Rogers Suite on the thirteenth floor. The Secret Service had vetoed the Will Rogers Suite for the President because it was more difficult to secure. It was raining in Fort Worth as they woke up, but the skies had cleared by the time they landed in Dallas. Before breakfast, President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and Texas Governor John Connally headed outside and briefly addressed a crowd that had gathered long before the sun had come up in hopes of seeing JFK. Jacqueline Kennedy didn't accompany them outside and President Kennedy joked to the crowd, "Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it."

Afterward, they headed inside for breakfast in the Texas Hotel's Grand Ballroom with several hundred guests. The President sent for Mrs. Kennedy to join them, and her late arrival to the breakfast excited the guests in the ballroom. When the President spoke to the group, he joked again, "Two years ago I introduced myself in Paris as the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I'm getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas." Then he noted, "Nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear."

When the breakfast ended, the Kennedys headed upstairs and had an hour or so to wait before heading to the airport for the short flight to Dallas. It was during this time that Jackie Kennedy saw a hateful ad placed in that morning's Dallas Morning News accusing President Kennedy of collusion with Communists and treasnous activity. Trying to calm Jackie down, the President joked, "Oh, we're heading into nut country today." But a few minutes later, Jackie overheard Kennedy telling his aide, Ken O'Donnell, "It would not be a very difficult job to shoot the President of the United States. All you'd have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, and there's nothing anybody can do."

••• Even though the trip from Fort Worth's Carswell Air Force Base to Dallas's Love Field would only take thirteen minutes by air, the trip to Texas was first-and-foremost a political trip -- a kickoff of sorts to JFK's 1964 re-election campaign -- and a grand entrance was needed. So, JFK and Jackie boarded the plane usually used as Air Force One, LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson boarded the plane usually used by the Vice President, Air Force Two, and the huge Presidential party took to the skies, covering thirty miles in thirteen minutes, in order to get the big Dallas welcome that they were hoping for. They landed in Dallas at 11:40 AM, and President Kennedy looked out the window of his plane, saw a big, happy crowd, and told Ken O'Donnell, "This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us."

At 2:47 PM -- just three hours and seven minutes later -- everyone was back on Air Force One as the plane climbed off of the Love Field runway and into the Dallas sky. John F. Kennedy, the 35th President, was in a casket wedged into a space in the rear of Air Force One where two rows of seats had been removed so that it would be fit. Lyndon B. Johnson had officially been sworn in as the 36th President about ten minutes earlier on the plane by federal judge Sarah T. Hughes. On one side of Johnson while he took the oath was his wife, Lady Bird, and on the other side, the widowed former First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, still wearing a pink dress splattered with her husband's blood and brain matter.

Two American Presidents woke up in Dallas on November 22, 1963 -- Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush -- but they weren't in town when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, no matter how many ways conspiracy theorists try to twist the story. The President who died in Dallas that day, John F. Kennedy, and the man who became President in Dallas that day, Lyndon B. Johnson, woke up in Fort Worth on the morning of November 22, 1963. But they'll be forever linked with Dallas -- and the world that woke up the next morning would never be the same again.

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diceriadelluntore · 5 months ago

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Storia Di Musica #332 - Area, Crac!, 1975

Le storie dei dischi dello scatolone del mese di Giugno hanno avuto un grande riscontro, e ne sono particolarmente felice. E per quelle di Luglio vorrei ripartire da quello scatolone, perché conteneva un altro disco, che però rispetto ai 5 scelti avevo già comprato da me. L’ho scelto per tre motivi: perché è l’occasione di parlare di un grande personaggio, che ho citato di striscio nelle storie del mese scorso; perché questo lavoro è un formidabile esempio della grandezza e delle capacità di uno dei gruppi italiani più grandiosi di sempre; perchè il suo titolo mi ha sedotto a trovare altri dischi che hanno nel titolo lo stesso simbolo grafico, il punto esclamativo. Gli Area, che avevano nel nome di gruppo una dicitura chiarissima, International POPular Group, sono stati una delle punte di diamante della musica europea degli anni ’70. Nascono a Milano nel 1972 quando musicisti provenienti da esperienze molto diverse mettono su un gruppo. Il primo nucleo comprendeva il tastierista Patrizio Fariselli, Giulio Capiozzo alla batteria, Johnny Lambizzi alla chitarra, sostituito subito da Paolo Tofani, Patrick Dijvas al basso e Victor Busnello al sassofono, con in più uno studente di architettura di origini greche, alla voce, Demetrio Stratos (psudonimo di Efstràtios Dimitrìou). Convergono nel gruppo esperienze diversissime: Fariselli è diplomato al Conservatorio di Pesaro, Capiozzo ha suonato per anni all’Hotel Hilton de Il Cairo e fu prolifico sessionman per la Numero Uno di Mogol e Battisti, Tofani suonava la musica beat con i Califfi, Stratos aveva avuto un certo successo negli anni precedenti, avendo cantato il brano Pugni Chiusi dei Ribelli, che entrò in classifica nel 1967.

Ma qui è tutta un’altra storia: scelgono una musica totale e creativa, ricchissima di suggestioni, puntando anche sulla “complessità musicale”. Quest’ultimo punto li vide clamorosamente osteggiati durante il loro primo tour a supporto di grandi nomi come Rod Steward e i mitici Gentle Giant, accusati dal pubblico di essere troppo ostici. Poco dopo l’incontro che cambia la loro storia (e in parte anche quella della musica italiana). Gianni Sassi è un fotografo, scrittore, artista bolognese che fonderà una etichetta, la Cramps, che scompaginerà il panorama musicale del tempo. Li mette sotto contratto, dà loro libertà creeativa ma si mette a scrivere i testi, con lo pseudonimo di Frankenstein. Il debutto è leggendario: nel 1973, Arbeit Macht Frei, la beffarda e drammatica scritta che accoglieva i deportati nei lager nazisti, già dalla copertina è un colpo alla coscienza, con un pupazzo mascherato e con un lucchetto, imprigionato tra totalitarismo e sistema del Capitale. La musica è altrettanto dirompente: un jazz rock teso, di caratura internazionale, ma che profuma di mediterraneo, vedasi il suono balcanico del primo pezzo culto, Luglio, Agosto, Settembre (Nero), netta presa di posizione a favore dei palestinesi, e che spesso vira all’avanguardia (L’Abbattimento Dello Zeppelin). Tra tutto, spicca la voce, prodigiosa, di Stratos, non solo per l’estensione o la duttilità, ma per il ruolo che gioca nelle canzoni, e per le straordinarie capacità tecniche (studierà le diplofonie, facendo della sua voce uno strumento aggiunto e inimitabile, arrivando a produrre contemporaneamente fino a 4 note diverse). Busnello e Dijvas lasciano il gruppo, quest’ultimo andrà alla PFM, e entra in formazione Ares Tavolazzi al basso. Nel 1974 arriva Caution Radiation Area (in copertina il simbolo del pericolo radioattivo) e radioattiva è la musica, che abbandona la forma canzone (tranne Cometa Rossa, che sfoggia ancora suggestioni mediterranee) e vira decisamente sull’avanguardia e la sperimentazione. Il pubblico non gradisce, ma dal vivo la band macina concerti su concerti, ad un ritmo forsennato (oltre 200 l’anno) è spesso invitata in contesti internazionali, e chi li ha visti dal vivo assicura che erano straordinari. Dopo aver registrato una versione strumentale de L’Internazionale (con lato b Citazione Da George J. Jackson, con Stratos che recita un famoso discorso del leader delle Pantere Nere) per la liberazione dell’anarchico Giovanni Marini, all’epoca detenuto in carcere per l’omicidio del vicepresidente del FUAN, Carlo Falvella, avvenuto a Salerno nel 1972, nel 1975 arriva l’atteso nuovo disco.

Crac! è un disco che media tra il primo e il secondo. L’immediatezza di alcuni brani, che furono tacciati di frivolezza (storica la stroncatura di Riccardo Bertoncelli e la contro risposta di Stratos sulla rivista Gong) ma che invece sono una lucida organizzazione del solito alto livello musicale, un formidabile jazz rock al massimo livello, a cui per una volta si aggiunge un giocoso approccio. Crac! si apre con L’Elefante Bianco, che diventerà brano culto, una cavalcata rock con i fiocchi e prosegue con La Mela di Odessa: Stratos che qui fa davvero capire che voce incredibile è stata, è anche famoso perché durante i live Demetrio raccontava la storia che la ispirò. Secondo lui infatti, il testo si baserebbe su un fatto realmente avvenuto nel 1920, e che potrebbe essere uno dei primi dirottamenti marini della storia. Un pittore dadaista tedesco, tale Apple, che intendeva assistere ad una mostra d'arte a Odessa, vi dirottò una nave passeggeri con l'intenzione di regalarla ai russi che avevano da poco fatto la rivoluzione. Una volta a Odessa, Apple venne salutato con feste enormi, che comportarono anche far saltare in aria la nave con tutti i suoi passeggeri tedeschi. Della storia non c’è traccia in nessuna fonte storica e ormai è chiaro che fosse stata inventata per rendere ancora più potente le metafore che il testo sprigiona in un brano “enciclopedia” per la commistione di generi, stili, suoni, un capolavoro assoluto. Megalopoli e Nervi Scoperti spiegano la vita mediterranea al jazz rock. Nel disco c’è anche il brano più famoso degli Area, Gioia E Rivoluzione, che dice “Canto per te che mi vieni a sentire\Suono per te che non mi vuoi capire\Rido per te che non sai sognare\Suono per te che non mi vuoi capire", e che verrà ripresa decenni dopo con successo dagli Afterhours; l’elettro-psichedelia retta dal basso di Implosion e la sperimentazione vocale di Area 5 chiudono l’LP. Il successivo tour verrà ricordato con un live, Are(A)zione, con tre brani noti dai Festival a cui parteciparono, e una nuova suite, omonima al titolo del disco.

La band durerà altri due anni: divisi dal sentirsi alfiere dell’avanguardia musicale, con scelte a volte del tutto incomprensibili, come Event del 1976, una lunga suite sconclusionata, faticosissimo tentativo di cavalcare la tigre del suono, progetti solisti che crearono tensioni, il passaggio dalla Cramps alla CGD di Caterina Caselli, che nel 1978 pubblica Gli Dei Se Ne Vanno, Gli Arrabbiati Restano, che esce pochi mesi prima che Demetrio Stratos muoia di leucemia fulminante. “Stratos è stato senza dubbio il personaggio più originale e importante nella musica italiana di ricerca degli anni Settanta, proprio per il suo voler sfuggire alle definizioni, per aver saputo, con coerenza e intelligenza, mettere in comune mondi apparentemente lontanissimi.” (Ernesto Assante).

#area #crac!#1975 #recensione

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austinslounge · 28 days ago

Note

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14029969/Kaia-Gerber-puts-racy-display-Dallas-Cowboys-cheerleader-joins-Hailey-Bieber-Cara-Delevingne-Paris-Hilton-Vas-J-Morgan-Michael-Brauns-Halloween-party.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_dailymailceleb

Kaia has to pay the DM cause why on earth would she be the main focus of the title when more famous celebs were in attendance?🤣 Racy outfit indeed, maybe wanted to catch her next victim to social climb on.🤭

Girl, she has to be. Because there were way more iconic looks that night imo.

Like, Cara dressed up as Christian Bale in "American Psycho":

Paris Hilton dressed up as Britney Spears:

Rita Ora dressed up with her husband as Zorro and Catherine Zeta Jones:

And Kaia wasn't the only one dressed up as a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader at that party either. Chantel Jeffries dressed up as a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader as well that night! 🤭 womp womp lol

They keep trying to make this girl happen and force her untalented self down our throats. 🙄 At least, she took Surrogate Boyfriend (Travis) with her to this Halloween party, and we didn't have to suffer through a couple-themed Halloween costume with Austin like last year, or that cringe Elvis and Priscilla photoshoot thingy she did with Jacob Elordi. 🥴

Btw, Matt Smith was also at this party in LA, which is shocking, since I thought he was dining "Caught Stealing" with Austin in NYC? 🤔

Is he done with filming already?? 😅

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dailyanarchistposts · 16 days ago

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Chapter Seven. The New Class

To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them. —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1[143]

The elevator at the Hilton Hotel in Anaheim, California, fills floor by floor, as it descends with delegates for the National Religious Broadcasters annual convention. There is a slightly forced camaraderie and an awkward cheerfulness as we head down to the lobby. People glance quickly at the plastic name tags on one another’s chests. They smile as new passengers step inside and say good morning. They sprinkle the words of the converted into their banter, talking about how “blessed” they are to be here, beginning brief dialogues with phrases such as “Where is your ministry?” and ending them with “Praise the Lord.” This call-and-response is a form of initiation, an easy way to draw the lines between themselves and nonbelievers, to establish the parameters of their exclusive community. All subcultures have their linguistic codes of identification. This new class is no exception.

The convention has brought together some 5,500 Christian broadcasters from radio and television, who reach, according to their figures, an estimated 141 million listeners and viewers across America. And they see themselves as both the persecuted and the powerful. These twin themes run through the event. They are both threatened by conspiratorial forces that seek to destroy them and empowered by the certainty of Christ’s return. These emotions bond them together as a crowd, as comrades in the battle against the godless.

Southern California, along with Colorado Springs, is one of the epicenters of the radical movement. Numerous television evangelists, including the disgraced Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker, got their start in these huge, soulless exurbs. These large developed tracts of housing are isolated, devoid of neighborhood gathering places, community rituals and routines, even of sidewalks. The isolation, coupled with the long, lonely commutes in a car; the cold, impersonal world of the corporate office; and the banal, incessant chatter of talk radio and television create numbness and disorientation. This destruction of community is one of the crucial factors that has led to the rise of the Christian Right. The megachurches, which have prospered in these environments, have become surrogate communities, places where people can find clubs to pursue common interests, friends, a sense of belonging, and moral direction. In these sprawling churches, which often look like shopping or convention centers, believers are reassured, told that affluence is blessed by God—a sign of their righteousness and the righteousness of their nation—and that in the embrace of the church they have a place, a home.

There is a Starbucks in the Hilton Hotel lobby. Dee Simmons from Dallas is waiting to order a coffee. Around her neck she is wearing a gold cross studded with diamonds, and on her face, smooth and unwrinkled, makeup is artfully applied. The line of men and women, in front and behind us, is conservatively dressed in skirts or coats and ties. They are about to head into the convention hall next door. Simmons and a friend, Samantha Landy, with red hair, are chatty and friendly.

In 1987, Simmons says, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a “modified radical mastectomy.” Five years later her mother died of cancer. These events led her, she says, to turn her focus away from the designer clothes boutiques she owned in Dallas and New York to nutrition.

“When God gave me my life back, I decided to make a difference in people’s lives,” she says.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out some pamphlets for Ultimate Living, her company. She tells me about her books, including The Natural Guide to Healthy Living, and mentions the numerous Christian talk shows she regularly appears on, including Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, as well as Hope Today, Praise, Something Good Tonight and the Armstrong Williams Show.

“I was saved and found Christ when I was 3,” she says. “I’m64. My daughter is 36.”

She appears to wait for the effect of her age, which she will repeat a few more times, to sink in.

“I also have skin care products which are all natural,” she says. “I am on Living the Life once or twice a month, the show with Terry Meeuwsen, who was Miss America. There is a huge crossover with my nutrition work. Everyone is interested in nutrition, even nonbelievers. I use organically grown papayas. I have eight laboratories where I make Green Miracle. Green Miracle combines greens and roots that are ground up. They have all the vital nutrients. I sell it at cancer hospitals. It is good for diabetes, heart disease, immune support, hormone problems, any issue, really.”

Landy tells me she runs “Christian celebrity luncheons” in Palm Springs as part of her work of “salvation outreach for snowbirds.” Her ministry, she says, focuses on country clubs and golf courses, places “where people do not often hear the word of God.

“A lot of people go to churches and assume the pastor has a personal relationship with Christ,” she says, “but they often do not. I bring in celebrity speakers like Gavin MacLeod, he was the Captain on Love Boat; and Rhonda Fleming, she was in over 40 films and starred with Bing Crosby—speakers who have really accomplished things in the world who are Christian. Rhonda Fleming did her own stunts.”

Her list of Christian celebrities available to speak includes Donna Douglas from the Beverly Hillbillies; Ann B. Davis, who was Alice on The Brady Bunch; and Lauren Chapin, who played Kathy on Father Knows Best.

“Tell him about the wedding,” Landy prompts.

Simmons’s daughter recently got married in Dallas. The wedding was filmed for broadcast on a show called Sheer Dallas. She urges me to watch it. The wedding theme, she says, was “Sultan’s Palace: Her Majesty the Queen.” There were 500 guests who gathered in a building known as the Hall of State and “flowers from all over the world.” She says she would rather not mention the cost. Her husband—who, she says, is “very, very wealthy,” adding “I don’t need to work”—refers, she says, to the wedding expense as “the national debt.”

“Her husband is quite a bit older,” Landy interjects.

“There was a huge fireworks display,” Simmons says, “but I am too embarrassed to tell you how much it cost. When the fireworks stopped, a quartet sang ‘God Bless America.’ There was a saxophone solo. Everyone had chills.”

“It was awesome,” Landy says.

The cake took three months to make. There were jewels and semiprecious stones both on the cake and in the bridal bouquet. Both had to be brought the day of the wedding to the Hall of State in an armored truck.

“The bridal gown took five and a half months to make,” she says. “It had mink this thick,” she adds, holding her thumb and index finger about four inches apart.

The women, minor celebrities in the world of Christian broadcasting, capture the strange fusion between this new, flamboyant gospel of prosperity and America’s celebrity-driven culture. Not only are the wealthy blessed by the Lord and encouraged to engage in a frenzy of outlandish consumption, but also those who are famous, those who have achieved any celebrity or notoriety, no matter how minor, or those who have power, are seen as having important things to say about faith. Wealth, fame and power are manifestations of God’s work, proof that God has a plan and design for believers. This new class of celebrity, plutocrat Christians fuses with the consumer society, one where the lives and opinions of entertainers, the rich and the powerful are news. The women tell me they are in Anaheim because the yearly convention is the only time they can see all the major Christian broadcasters in one place. But it is clear they also come to be seen.

“These are the people who set up the shows,” Simmons says. “This is a good way to see everybody. It is like the gathering of one big family. We have flown in to network.”

This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions and pensions. This new oligarchic class is creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China: denied rights, their wages dictated to them by the state, and forbidden from organizing or striking. America once attempted to pull workers abroad up to American levels, to foster the building of foreign labor unions, to challenge the abuse of workers in factories that flood the American market with cheap goods. But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity or left to churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.

The Convention Center, located next door, is a huge, curvy glass structure with gleaming towers. The exhibition hall on the first floor has plush, blue carpeting and 320 display booths. At the far end of the hall lie the twisted remains of an Israeli bus blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism has the largest display space in the hall. The Christian Law Center, organized to remove “activist judges” in the courts, has people handing out yardsticks of gum. At a booth featuring Valerie Saxion’s book The Gospel of Health, they are mixing raspberry shakes in blenders. A Virginia Web design company in another booth offers “church Web sites the way God intended.” A bearded man dressed as a biblical prophet promotes tours to the Holy Land. Numerous antiabortion booths are staffed by women, who, it often turns out, had multiple abortions before finding Christ. There are fringe groups such as Jews for Jesus and Accuracy in Media, which is passing out a report with the title American Troops Cheer Attacks on U.S. Media.

Rows of palm trees are visible through banks of windows, and on the upper floors are technical workshops, such as “Finding God in Hollywood,” as well as luncheons. One seminar is entitled “Taking Over Cities for Christ: The Thousand-Day Plan.” In the parking lot outside the center is a pickup truck with large hand-painted panels covered with antigay slogans. There is a round red circle with a line through the center superimposed on the faces of two men kissing. “Stop the Insanity” is painted across the top. I walk outside after surveying the hall and pick up one of the pamphlets in a metal box on the side of the truck. “PROTECT YOUR FAMILY & FRIENDS FROM THE DANGERS OF…HOMOSEXUALITY: THE TRUTH!” the pamphlet says. It lists “the facts about homosexuality they refuse to teach in Public Schools or report on the Evening News!” including “because of unsanitary sexual practices, homosexuals carry the bulk of all bowel disease in America” and “homosexuals average 500 sexual partners in their short lifetime.”

The opening session is held on the third floor, a large room with a round stage surrounded on three sides with rows of folding chairs. The hall is dimly lit. There are a few thousand people. Large television screens are suspended from the ceilings, and the platform in front of us has a podium and a grand piano. The host, Bob Lepine, cohost of the radio show Family Life Today, broadcast from Little Rock, Arkansas, is a round-faced man with an easy smile. He begins the session by showing himself in a video wandering the beaches near Anaheim asking surfers and stray Californians, some of whom clearly spent the night sleeping on the beach, what “NRB” means. No one knows, but the guesses evoke laughter from the hall.

“One of the fun things about coming here…I was thinking about the old days, you know, when we used to go to Washington to the Sheraton in February, and it’s cold, and now we come here and it’s warm, and you get to go to the beach and see weird people,” he quips. He explains that the evening is sponsored by the Family Research Council and introduces its president, Tony Perkins, who, he notes, “was responsible for the covenant marriage law that got passed in Louisiana,” a law that made it harder for couples to divorce.

Perkins is typical of the new class of insider-cum-outsiders. He organized the rallies, broadcast around the nation to church audiences, known as “Justice Sunday,” which featured an array of politicians such as Senate majority leader Bill Frist, all pounding home one central theme: the Democrats are at war with “people of faith.” The Democrats used the filibuster, viewers were told, to block judicial appointees who were people of faith. Perkins works for James Dobson, who founded the Family Research Council, the lobbying arm of his Focus on the Family empire. Dobson has said the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade unleashed “the biggest Holocaust in world history” and has compared the “black-robed men” on the Supreme Court to “the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan.”[144]

Justice Sunday was part of a strategy devised more than two decades ago by Woody Jenkins, Perkins’s political mentor. Jenkins and some 50 conservative men gathered in May 1981 at the northern Virginia home of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie to plot the growth of their movement following Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory. They formed the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive, right-wing organization that brought together dominionists such as R. J. Rushdoony, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell with right-wing industrialists willing to fund them, such as Amway founder Richard DeVos Sr. and beer baron Joseph Coors. As DeVos quipped, the CNP “brings together the doers with the donors.”[145]

Jenkins, then a Louisiana state lawmaker, became the CNP’s first executive director. He told a Newsweek reporter: “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”[146]

In 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush addressed the group as he launched his bid for the presidency. The media were barred from the event. But those who wrote about the meeting afterward said that Bush, who refused to release a public transcript of his speech, promised to only appoint antiabortion judges if he was elected. The group, which meets three times a year in secret, brings together radical Christian activists, right-wing Republican politicians and wealthy patrons willing to fund the movement. During Bush’s presidency, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have attended CNP meetings.[147]

Perkins, like other leaders in the movement, has troubling associations with white supremacy groups. They work hard now to distance themselves from these relationships, often quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and drawing parallels between their movement and the civil-rights movement. But during the 1996 Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins, Perkins, who was Jenkins’s campaign manager, signed an $82,500 check to the head of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, to acquire Duke’s phone bank list.[148] And as late as 2001, Perkins spoke at a fund-raiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist group that has called blacks “a retrograde species of humanity” on its Web site.[149]

The ties by Christian Right leaders such as Perkins with racist groups highlight the long ties between right-wing fundamentalists and American racist organizations, including the Klan, which had a chaplain assigned to each chapter. During the Depression, when many on the right and in corporate America were openly flirting with fascism, fundamentalist preachers such as Gerald B. Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith fused national and Christian symbols to advocate the country’s first crude form of Christo-fascism. Smith, who openly admired the Nazis, founded a group called the Christian Nationalist Crusade, whose magazine was The Cross and the Flag. The movement proclaimed that “Christian character is the basis of all real Americanism.”[150]

By the late 1950s these radical Christians had drifted to the fiercely anticommunist John Birch Society. Many of the ideas championed by today’s dominionists—the bizarre conspiracy theories, the calls for unrestrained capitalism, the war against “liberal” organizations such as the mainstream media and groups such as the ACLU, along with the calls to dismantle federal agencies that deal with housing or education—are drawn from the ideology of this rabid anticommunist enclave. Timothy LaHaye used to run John Birch Society training seminars in California. And Nelson Bunker Hunt, a member of the John Birch Society’s national council, worked with LaHaye to help found the CNP.[151]

A baritone voice booms throughout the arena as we watch video images of the nation’s capital: “America’s culture was hijacked by a secular movement determined to redefine society, from religious freedom to the right to life. These radicals were doing their best to destroy two centuries of traditional values, and no one seemed to be able to stop them until now.”

“Will Congress undo 200 years of tradition?” the video asks ominously. “Not on our watch.”

“This is about calling Christians across this nation to action,” Perkins says in the video. “As one who spent nearly a decade in political office and even longer as a minister of the Gospel, I see [the Family Research Council] as a bridge between Christians and between government. Spanning a gulf that has been created by judicial decisions that have taken away the rich soil of this nation, that is this historical soil of Christianity, and by those whose misguided theology have caused Christians to abandon the public square, leaving a cavernous void in public policy. As this bridge, the Family Research Council sends its team to Congress and into the White House on a daily basis, to advocate for family and for our faith.”

There was a brief attempt at resistance to the rule of National Religious Broadcasters by these dominionists. Wayne Pederson in 2002 was appointed to replace the group’s longtime president, Brandt Gustavson. “We get associated with the far Christian right and marginalized,” Pederson told a reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. “To me the important thing is to keep the focus on what’s important to us spiritually.”[152] His effort to shift the organization’s focus away from politics saw the executive committee orchestrate his removal a few weeks later. He was replaced by Frank Wright, who had spent the previous eight years serving as the executive director of Kennedy’s Center for Christian Statesmanship, a Capitol Hill ministry that conducts training for politicians on how to “think biblically about their role in government.”

Wright, with white hair and a cold, hard demeanor, lacks the easy banter of Lepine or the comforting, bland good looks of Perkins. Wright lauds the transformation in Washington, saying that 130 members of the House of Representatives are “born again.” He tells a story, which elicits laughter and applause, of how during a late-night private tour of the capital, he and other pastors stopped and prayed over Hillary Clinton’s Senate floor desk.

Wright, like most speakers, begins by talking about his long marriage. It is a reminder that in Christ is stability, that the home and marriage are protected, that Christian men and women achieve bliss denied to others. The movement, he says, is the bulwark against chaos, against a return to lives spinning out of control.

“The Gospel changed not just my life, it changed my marriage to Ruth,” he says. “It changed my family. The Gospel changes families, and churches and communities and cities and nations. All of what we call Western civilization today, it has the shape that it has and the character that it has because the Gospel changes things.”

And then he warns his listeners about the enemies at the gate, saying that “calls for diversity and multiculturalism are nothing more than thinly veiled attacks on anyone who is willing or desirous or compelled to proclaim Christian truth. Today, calls for tolerance are often a subterfuge, because they’ll tolerate just about anything except Christian truth.”

The broadcasters’ association, he explains, is lobbying in Congress against hate-crime legislation, which, Wright explains to the audience, “is step one to defining what you do as against the law.” The broadcasters have worked to thwart the “fairness doctrine,” what he calls “the bane of Christian broadcasters.

“A bill was filed in the House of Representatives that would require any programming that was ‘controversial,’ quote unquote, in nature, to give equal time to opposing viewpoints,” he tells the crowd. “Now let me think about this…controversial things…the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the bodily Resurrection. Everything we teach is controversial to someone else. If we had to give equal time to every opposing viewpoint, there would be no time to proclaim the truth that we’ve been commanded to proclaim. So we will fight the ‘fairness doctrine’ tooth and nail. It could be the end of Christian broadcasting if we don’t.”

The preoccupation with legislation, the plethora of speakers who come from Christian lobbying groups based in the capital, attest to a movement that is increasingly as preoccupied with legislation as with saving souls. And those that do not deal with the nuts and bolts of legislation remind those present that there are forces out there that seek to destroy Christians. James MacDonald, an imposing man with a shaved head, runs a church in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and is heard regularly on 600 Christian radio outlets. He fires up the crowd.

“How many of you out there think ministering the Word is unpopular?” he asks, as a sea of hands shoots into the air.

“His eyes are like a flame of fire,” MacDonald says, quoting Revelation 19. “Out of his mouth goes a sharp sword, and with it he can strike the nations. He treads the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of the almighty God, and on his robe and on his thigh a name is written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus commands all men everywhere to come to the knowledge of Him.”

He reminds us that “ages of faith are not marked by dialogue but by proclamation” and “there is power in the unapologetic proclamation of truth. There is power in it. This is a kingdom of power.” When he says the word “power,” he draws it out for emphasis. He tells the crowd to eschew the “persuasive words of human wisdom.” Truth, he says, does “not rest in the wisdom of men but the power of God.” And, in a lisping imitation of liberals, he mocks, amid laughter and applause, those who want to “share” and be sensitive to the needs of others.

His antics delight most of the crowd, but not all. Luis Palau, a close protégé of Billy Graham, is one of the few present at the convention who is uncomfortable with the naked and repeated calls for power. Palau is an affable man, an Argentine with a refreshing worldliness about him. He also represents a traditional evangelicalism that has been shunted aside, often ruthlessly, by this new class. His focus is on personal salvation, he says, not the seizing of political power. He refused to become involved in the referendum banning gay marriage in Oregon, where his organization is based, although he, like Graham, is no supporter of gay rights. But he bristles at the coarseness, the naked calls for a Christian state, and the anti-intellectualism. He, like Graham, shuns the movement’s caustic, biting humor that belittles homosexuals, those deemed effete intellectuals and those condemned as “secular humanists.” The emphasis on abortion and gay marriage to the exclusion of other issues worries him.

“There are some Christians who have gone overboard,” Palau says, choosing his words carefully as we talk. “The message has become a little distorted in states where they talk about change yet focus on only one issue. We need a fuller transformation. The great thing Billy Graham did was to bring intellectualism back to fundamentalism.

“I don’t think it is wrong to want to see political change, especially in places like Latin America,” he says. “Something has to happen in politics. But it has to be based on convictions. We have to overcome the sense of despair. I worked in Latin America in the days when almost every country had a dictator. I dreamed, especially as a kid, of change, of freedom and justice. But I believe that change comes from personal conviction, from leading a more biblical lifestyle, not by Christianizing a nation. If we become called to Christ, we will build an effective nation through personal ethics. When you lead a life of purity, when you respect your wife and are good to your family, when you don’t waste money gambling and womanizing, you begin to work for better schools, for more protection and safety for your community. All change, historically, comes from the bottom up. And this means changing the masses from within.”

Palau sees his work as focused on the conversion of souls, who, once they become saved, will become a force for “structural, institutional change.” But this, he adds, “can take two or three generations.”

The emphasis on personal renewal and commitment to Christ—the staple message of evangelists such as Billy Graham and Luis Palau—is an anachronism to the new class. While speakers demand that followers give their lives to Christ, and while the born-again experience is considered the dividing line between believers and nonbelievers, the conversion experience is no longer the dominant theme pounded home from the pulpit or across the airwaves. It has been replaced by the rhetoric of war, the demands of a warrior God who promises blood and vengeance, and by the rhetoric of persecution, by the belief that there are sinister forces that seek the destruction of believers. It has also been replaced by a conspicuous and unapologetic infatuation with wealth, power and fame. As the movement has shifted away from the focus on personal salvation to a focus on power, it has incorporated into its theology the values, or lack of them, of a flagrant consumer society.

The strangest alliance, on the surface, is with Israeli Jews. After all, the movement generally teaches that Jews who do not convert are damned and will be destroyed in the fiery, apocalyptic ending of the world. It is early on Sunday morning in a ballroom on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel. The Israel Ministry of Tourism is hosting a breakfast. Several hundred people are seated at round tables with baskets of bread, fruit plates and silver pitchers of coffee. Waiters are serving plates of scrambled eggs and creamed spinach. Nearly everyone is white. On the platform is a huge picture of the Dome of the Rock, the spot where the Temple will be rebuilt to herald the Second Coming. Some 700,000 Christian tourists visit Israel each year, and with the steep decline in overall tourism, they have become a valued source of revenue in Israel.

Dominionists preach that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return. The belief that Jews who do not convert will be killed is unmentioned at the breakfast. The featured speakers include Avraham Hirschsohn, the new Israeli minister of tourism; and Michael Medved, a cultural conservative and a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. Medved is one of the most prominent Jewish defenders of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and of the radical Christian Right. He wears a yarmulke and is warmly greeted by the crowd.

“A more Christian America is good for the Jews,” he says. “This is obvious. Take a look at this support for Israel. A more Christian America is good for America, something Jewish people need to be more cognizant about and acknowledge. A more Jewish community is good for the Christians, not just because of the existence of allies, but because a more Jewish community is less seduced by secularism.”

A former left-wing radical, who in later life embraced Orthodox Judaism, he lambastes other Jews for their hostility to Christianity.

“When you see Jews who are part of the attack on Christmas,” he says, “you know they have rejected their own faith.”

He ticks off causes in which both Jewish and Christian people have been active, including the call for prayer in schools and the fight against abortion (although abortion is legal in Israel). He defends his Jewish integrity by saying he does not believe in the Rapture. But this is more than a religious alliance. It is a political alliance. It unites messianic Christians with right-wing messianic Jews, who believe God has anointed them to expand their dominion throughout the Middle East at the expense of the Arab majority.

This is soon made clear by the next speaker, Glenn Plummer, a black minister from Detroit who is active in the Republican Party. It is his role—I suspect because his status as an inner-city black minister makes expression of such sentiments “all right”—to unleash the audience’s vituperative hate against Muslims. He says he knows about Muslims because “I come from Detroit, where the biggest mosque in America is. It didn’t take 9/11 to show me there is a global battle going on for the souls of men…. When Islam comes into a place it is intent on taking over everything, not only government, but the business, the neighborhoods, everything.”

The Christian writer Kay Arthur, who can barely contain her tears when speaking of the Jews and Israel, assures those in the room that, although she loves America, if she had to choose between America and Israel, “I would stand with Israel, stand with Israel as a daughter of the King of Kings, stand according to the word of God.” She goes on to quote at length from the Book of Revelation, repeating many of the familiar passages that inspire the movement, and speaks of Jesus seated in a throne floating about Jerusalem as believers are raptured up toward him in the sky. The fate of unreconstructed Jews, including—one would assume—those hosting the breakfast, is omitted.

A popular radio host, Janet Parshall, who also leads tours to the Holy Land, speaks to the group of her dialogue with the Lord about taking tourists to a place where there are suicide bombings and attacks.

“‘God, the Holy Land has terrorists,’ I said. But God said, ‘Janet, you’re from Washington DC,’” a quote that elicited laughter.

Hirschsohn, Israel’s minister of tourism, says to the gathering: “You stood with us for the last four years when nobody else would. Thank you.”

“The Bible tells us the Lord spoke to Abraham in the land where today American troops are defending freedom,” he says. He announces that the Israeli tourism ministry will build a “pilgrim center” for Christian tourists in the Galilee.

The charred remains of Israeli Public Bus 19 are in the neighboring convention hall. The bus, owned by a Christian Zionist group called the Jerusalem Connection, was blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers in January 2004. The president of the organization, retired U.S. Brigadier General James Hutchens, according to information from the group, “looks at the conflict in Israel within a biblical context.” Bus 19 has, since the group acquired it, been displayed around the world, including in The Hague and in numerous “Remember Israel” rallies in the United States. On a table next to the bus, a seated Jerusalem Connection official hands out pamphlets reading, “Bring Bus #19 To Your Community!”

One of the reasons to bring the bus, the pamphlet says, is that “for Christians, you will increase in stature, appreciation and acceptance by Jews.”

An Egyptian woman, a Christian who is manning a booth near the bus that advertises Christian broadcasts to the Arab world, is periodically reduced to tears by enraged conventioneers who, after visiting the bus, tell her Arabs are “terrorists.”

Onlookers climb onto a platform alongside the bus to peer within. Its sides are scorched black, center doors twisted, steel frame bent and shattered. Bus 19 has been adorned with banners bearing biblical quotations, including: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them” (Amos 9:15); “And I will bless those who bless you. And whoever curses you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3), and “Those who say come, let us destroy them as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more…. They form an alliance against God” (Psalm 83:4–5).

There are cards of condolences from American schoolchildren, flowers on the flooring of the bus, and at the base of the raised platform large photos and biographies of those killed in the attack. A poster reads: “When Palestinians love their children, more than they hate Israel, then there will be peace in Palestine.” The poster shows six photos of children holding weapons or strapped with explosives.

“Over 50 public transportation buses just like this one have been bombed in Israel,” reads another sign. “In three and a half years, suicide bombers have killed more than 975 people in Israel. They are represented here.”

But some of the Israelis in the hall are uncomfortable with the Bus 19 display. They are telling conventioneers, whom they are trying to get to visit Israel, that the bus represents an old phase in the conflict, and that Israel is now moving toward peace. One Israeli is Marina, who has long, blond hair, a brown shirt, and knee-high leather boots. She immigrated to Israel from Holland and lives on a cooperative mango farm near the Sea of Galilee. She says she is “embarrassed” to be at the convention. “These people are anti-Semitic,” she says, speaking softly as conventioneers move past the large Israeli display space. She is unhappy with the bigotry toward Muslims expressed by the speakers. When asked why the ministry is here, she answers curtly: “money.”

“No one else visits Israel,” she says.

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education—in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs. They will become the new class. Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible. It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration.

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