I’ve been trying to get around to posting a follow-up on the May One at Faneuil Hall thing. I’ve got lots of great pix but my battery went semi-dead the last week. Not the camera battery, my posting battery. Maybe it’s my digestion – of life in Bush’s America circa 2008. Turning over the compost piles and planting things has been taking up my mind. So I was thinking earlier that it’s been seven full days since then and rising up from memory comes the book of the title name. Synchronicity sends me wandering down the rabbit hole.
Seven Days in May was both a book and a movie, both of them pretty good. It’s a political thriller about a plot by the Pentagon to pull off a bloodless (more or less) coup to overthrow the president. The problem with the president is he’s not sufficiently anti-Communist for the right-wing plotters. He’s actually about to sign a treaty with the Soviets to mutually nuclearly disarm.
The plot itself, called ECOMCON (for “Emergency Communications Control”), entails the seizure of the nation’s telephone, radio and television network infrastructure by a secret United States Army combat unit created and controlled by Scott’s conspiracy and based near Fort Bliss, Texas. Once this is done, General Scott and his conspirators will control the nation’s communications assets; then, from their headquarters within a vast underground nuclear shelter called “Mount Thunder” (based on the actual continuity of government facility maintained by the U.S. at Mount Weather in Berryville, Virginia), they will use the power of the media and the military to prevent the implementation of the treaty.
The book came out in ’62 and the movie in ’64. The movie was shot in ’63 while Kennedy was still alive. He encouraged the filmmakers by heading home to the Cape when they needed to get shots done around the White House; the Pentagon was none too pleased. If written today the authors would have to add in cell phones, cable and the internet to complete the communications media needed to be controlled. Take a jump to the link above for some solid background and I’ll give you a tour of the rabbit warren. We’re going to visit Granddaddy Bush and Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location – Raven Rock. We’ll see an actual coup d’etat plot against FDR, Lee Harvey Oswald will jump up in a plot line you’ve probably never even heard of and you may even get a whiff of a hint of a sense of the presence behind the curtain. Who knows?
Feel free to break out the Reynolds Wrap.