It's A Bullseye

This but improved

History comes up in the strangest places. Drifting through an episode of Bullseye on Challenge (there was a guy wearing a style of cardigan that must have been briefly in fashion at the time, thoroughly discredited through the 90s, 00s, and now purchasable from any high street shop of your choice), and Jim Bowen asked a contestant  "What important event had caused a big political stir in 1987?" Turns out it was something called the Zircon satellite affair.


"An extremely delicate moment"


The war over possession of the Falkland Islands was a blow for British politicians who believed in the 'special relationship', the political bond shared between America and Britain born of their co-dependence during the Second World War, and subsequently the Cold War. America declined to intervene militarily against the Argentinians, although in private they supported Britain with intelligence, and publicly supplied the sidewinder missiles for Britain's harriers that allowed Britain's air force to massively outperform their Argentine counterparts.

The American's position was however much more ambivalent. The release of secret documents has shown that Alexander Haig, the American Secretary of State, discussed with British Ambassador Sir Nicholas Henderson the possibility of giving early warning to the General Galtieri about the impending invasion of South Georgia, which could have done immense harm to the British invasion force. A request for the use of NSA spy satellites was also turned down as at the time because they were tasked with monitoring El Salvador. The British resolved that, rather than rely on the Americans who were increasingly untrustworthy, they would design a range of satellites of their own: the project was named Zircon.

Building a new range of satellites seemed to call back to an earlier age of British aerospace innovation, when Britain had produced Ariels (launched with the aid of the Americans), or Prosperos (launched by Britain itself from Woomera, Australia). The Zircon was to be built in Portsmouth and shipped to America to be launched into space via NASA's space shuttle programme; the project cost £500 million however, and for this reason was scrapped by the Chancellor Nigel Lawson in 1987. For the government however, there was another problem brewing, in BBC Scotland.

"The Secret Society"

Duncan Campbell was an investigate reporter working for the BBC, hated by some in the government and intelligence community because he had exposed their secrets. Campbell was making a series for BBC Scotland called "The Secret Society", a series examining the channels of power that run beneath Britian's parliamentary democracy that looked at secret cabinet committees, emergency powers, dodgy radar defence, the Data Protection Act, ACPO, and the Zircon programme. The series was already contentious with BBC and government staff expressing their doubts that the series should be broadcast: eventually the series was cut to five episodes and the Zircon episode dropped. The story however, that the Zircon project may have breached a requirement that costly defense projects should be placed before the Public Accounts Committee, and that £500 million of tax payer's money had been wasted, was already out. Campbell wrote an article about the Zircon project in a column in the New Statesmen, causing the Special Branch to launch a raid against Campbell and the New Statesmen. In retaliation, Campbell began making plans to show the Zircon film in parliament.

Shortly after the raid Alisdair Milne, the BBC Director General of the time, who had produced programmes impartial or critical of the Tory government, stepped down on the orders of the Board of Governors. David Wilby, the BBC's parliamentary correspondent, describes the series of events in this article, and highlights the links between the intelligence community and BBC executives.

The programme was eventually in 1988, and the storm passed, but interestingly the programme focusing on secret select committees was never seen. Alastair Darling alleged in 1989 that the Zircon affair was really aimed at putting down the secret committee report, which would have focused on the 1983 election campaign.

The motivations for the government in the Zircon affair are obscure, but it seems sensible to conclude that defense and intelligence elements, as well as BBC staff with links to these, were pushing for the series to be shelved, not for the reasons necessarily that they were trying to lock down secrecy  but to avoid embarrassment  Britain had tried to grasp some of the post-WW2 power that it had briefly enjoyed in aerospace, and was trying to carry on the possible resurgence of imperial fervor sustained by the Falklands. Campbell's documentary was an attack on not only their secrecy, but a long term vision of a resurgence of Britain's techno-imperial leverage with regional powers like Argentina. Being snubbed by the Americans and then barely scraping by in the Falklands must have been very unsettling for the British military, leading to a failed attempt to edge back into space-technology that ended up resembling the debacle of the Skybolt system.

Along similar lines to this post, check out Phil Knight on the Royal Navy and the shadow Empire.

Gotcha!

Desecration Acts, Continued

Part Two: Highway 61 Revisited as an Emergency Evacuation Route

New York City's a good "working musician" kind of town...if you know how to hustle, you can always find a gig. Such was the case with the members of Shockabilly. As the world would come to know them, Shockabilly consisted of guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, bassist Mark Kramer, and drummer David Licht -- all three of whom had played in differing capacities throughout the eclectic and more "avant" quarters of the city's music scene. The band had originally been started by Chabourne and had a revolving personnel (including at various times John Zorn and cellist Tom Cora) for a few years before finally simmering down into a trio. The group's formerly diverse set had by that point settled into that of "covers" act -- a lounge act whose repertoire most involved running the Nuggets songbook through the shredder. "Psychotic Reaction," "Eight Miles High," "Purple Haze" -- it was all fair game. Eugene brought the amplified garden rake to up the noise factor, while Kramer brought along some tape machines that allowed him to punch up random snippets and "samples" culled from the detritus of the media landscape.

The trio had a nice run out of it for a while, even landing a couple EPs out of it, mulchifying a number of "classics" and having a long and gleefully noisy romp on the grave of the Age of Aquarius. When the opportunity arose to record a full-length album, however, it seems the band decided that the schtick might wear a little thin over the duration of a long-player, and decided to augment the outings with a larger share of their own original tunes. The result was a pair of albums -- Vietnam and Heaven (1984 and 1985, respectively) -- that amounted to a dark, surreal, and often bleak and nightmarish plunge into the country's recent history. Popping up in the middle of the "Reagan Years," some of the songs sounded less like a cry of protest than a resigned and bitter croak drifting up from the bottom of a well.






YYes, there was a new round of hippie-era favorites being lined along the trenches for a hearty mowing-down. "Born on the Bayou,""Instant Karma,""Lucifer Sam,""Life's a Gas," et al make an appearance, but they only served to thread the narrative like recurring brown-acid flashbacks, mere bric-a-brac adorning a revisitation of the American Dream -- a waking dream now strewn with shrieks and howls from monster movies, the babble of TV commercials and political speeches, the aforementioned croak, and the rumble of cognitive dissonances bubbling up through the socio-economic substrata. In the end it amounted to scattered scenes from a road movie, one where the journey's a scrambling flight from an impending apocalypse. You pile all your belongings and essentials into your car and getting the hell out of the city, away from the vulnerable coast…punching across the FM spectrum for some driving music, only to find a selection of "oldies" that now sound mockingly confident and alien to your ears…all of which is overlaid by news reports and howls of the damned bleeding through the transmissions and following you as you drive inland, as you try to get as far from it all as you can in search of refuge…driving into the landlocked depths of the country, away and into the heartland, the sounds of a nation's recent cultural history folding back on itself, swallowing its own tail, chasing you -- a reprise of John Lee Hooker protesting "(I Don't Wanna Go To) Vietnam," Charles Manson ranting from prison that he's "your lost son, America," and beatnik poet and former Fugs frontman Ed Sanders stepping in to offer a plaintive critique of U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Eventually the signal fades into static as you approach your destination, which turns out to be a wasteland littered with missile silos and long-abandoned gas stations.

Either that, or the the two albums can be listened to as some sort of evil, bipolar, quarrelsome conjoined twin for Springsteen's Nebraska. You be the judge.




Within a couple of years, the nostalgia industry had stepped to reclaim the 1960s. Some would claim that this revival involved looking back to the decade's idealism, but mostly – some argued– it mostly just amounted to the "Baby-Boomer" generation selling its own past back to itself. Amidst it all, the Grateful Dead experienced a huge resurgence in popularity, their audiences swelled by the ranks of a new generation of fans who followed the band around on tour. The Dead lyric what became something of a recurrent slogan in the years that followed. That slogan eventually becoming the title of a gloating TV special in which Rolling Stone magazine took a gloating 20-year anniversary rewind on its own history..."What a long, strange trip it's been."

To which any number of people probably wanted to reply: "Motherfucker, you don't even know the half of it."

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