Red, White, and Blue, Especially Red

     In 1975 I brought my father's silver-plated trumpet to the first day of sixth grade band class.  Positioned at fourteenth chair, only Fritz Christensen occupied a lower position.  We shared a music stand, played supporting and boring third part trumpet harmonies; unnoticed, occupying the middle of a mass of eleven and twelve year old musicians.  Christensen, curious about my 1928 trumpet made in Elkhart, Indiana, thought it was cooler looking than his or any of the other rental instruments in our row of fifteen horn players.  Fine gold work decorates the trumpet's bell area.  Just now I tried to make a musical sound come out of it but produced only air passing through curving metal.  With practice I could make it sound at least all right again, as I was able to do by 1977 when I was first chair.
     Another memory from that time involves the stunning popularity of Disco.  I had no direct experience of the musical genre other than hearing excerpts on the radio and seeing TV shows trying out Disco-themed episodes, like the one on Wonder Woman guest starring Wolfman Jack as a DJ working in a club where a hotshot Disco dancer is also a mind control specialist--a typically bizarre Wonder Woman plot.  The Disco dancer, dressed in a white suit like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, does his mind fucks in a private mirrored room at the discotheque, a disorienting space where a victim's brain finds itself unmoored from stable life experience, guided by a malign mind.
     Such mindfuckery parallels CIA experiments from the 1950s and 1960s and probably later, too.  When Wonder Woman aired from 1975 to 1979 (a period when my pre-teen and early teen self was drawn, with accompanying erections, to the show's star, Lynda Carter), the CIA was in Congress's doghouse.  President Carter, seeking to curtail their illegal clandestine activities, succeeded only in making the spooks more underhanded until they burst into multiple horrible actions during the Reagan years.
     Congressional investigations in the mid-1970s into CIA activities revealed an astonishing record of criminal behavior, ranging from the psychopathic (spiking random strangers' drinks with LSD and monitoring them to see what would happen) to the ludicrous (trying to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar; cartoon style, I guess).
     That nefarious organizations and individuals would seek to control minds and commit a host of unlawful activities against the public for criminal reasons played out honestly sometimes in 1970s American entertainment.  Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a CIA analyst targeted by his own employers, is not a film friendly to the intelligence community and would not be made during these days of intelligence agency-friendly movies and television.  In the 1970s, human experience in America, generally, was depicted as gray, rather than red, white, and blue.
     Diana Prince (Wonder Woman in human form) works for the IADC (Inter-Agency Defense Command), and also works for Naval Intelligence with the rank of Commander.  She's a spook.  IADC coordinates the work of other intelligence agencies (including, I infer, the CIA) but is separate from them.  In the show, villains sometimes do the terrible acts that U.S. intelligence agencies really do.  Apart from the comic book fantasy aspect of an immortal super-being with extraordinary powers, the other fantasy in Wonder Woman consists of the pretense that an organization like the IADC would be benign.  This debatable idea, of course, is reflected in today's sanitized TV dramas about the FBI, Navy Seals, and the police.  There are no shows in which a police character murders an unarmed Black man and then doesn't do time for it.  I have yet to see a show about ICE agents putting children in concentration camps.
     If the IADC were to exist, what would it actually do?  And would Diana Prince, presented as she is as a force for good, want to have anything to do with a secret spy agency concerned with collating data concerning numerous accounts of execrable behaviors and activities committed by the CIA and other agencies?
     I never played "Taps" on my trumpet, the song sending soldiers to their dreams, the slumberous world where they often don't escape what they've done and experienced in war theaters.

                                                                               Vic Neptune