| Comment | Introduction
Everybody wants to be wanted, even television producers. So even though the little production company of which I am a part already has a business magazine television show up and modestly successful (Global Business 2000; don't tell us you haven't seen it) we wanted more. We had seen with our own eyes, for example, the sickening spectacle of what passes for entertainment these days: Tammy Faye Bakker at NATPE (television production convention) last year, peddling some talk show in syndication. And with one of the major studios distributing, yet!
We asked ourselves: have they no shame? In today's America that is what is known as a rhetorical question. What is this woman famous for? And the answer (Her husband embezzled hundreds of millions from little old ladies who couldn't afford it) was so depressing, we decided one day to offer up something of our own to add to America's no-longer-all-that-rich cultural stew.
Then one night while eating Mexican down on Melrose we came up with it: "conspiracy: the secret history." Remember "In Search Of" with Leonard Nimoy? Back in those more innocent times, nobody was running around in camouflage uniforms talking wildly about The New World Order. We wanted to do an "In Search of" for the paranoid '90s.
This is the story of the filming of the lead segment on that show.
Mena, Arkansas. If you haven't heard of it, don't worry: either you will, in which case the whole sordid mess has finally found the audience it so richly deserves, or you won't, in which case you were probably better off not knowing anyway. Because after months of research, the one thing we can say with certainty about US Government drug policy is, "If you have to ask, you're not allowed to know."
The Mena story reeks of government hypocrisy on the subject of drugs. It's the place mentioned when talk of Oliver North's contra-guns-and-cocaine operation comes up (not often, in polite conversation, and we still wonder, wazzup wit that?) It's where drug smuggler Barry Seal based planes that flew guns down to Central America, then drugs back, then guns down again, etc., with impunity, literally right under the noses of local law enforcement. If there is, in Bill Moyers' legendary phrase, a "Secret Government," a government that runs the other, more official one, Mena is a good place to look for it.
For Mena is what the 'Clintongate' scandals are all about, really; the commodities money was and is small potatoes, the Whitewater real estate deal simply par for the course in American political life. But around Mena swirls the smoke of real scandal: allegations of massive drug-smuggling with government complicity, whiffs of Oliver North's illegal, unconstitutional and national soul-corroding Iran/contra/cocaine connection. And all flavored with spicy rumors of secret Swiss bank accounts, hastening murder by death.
That's what makes Mena so important. If there's to be a real Watergate-type Sam Ervin at-the-gavel scandal in the next four years, Mena is where it will be focused. So Mena is where we headed. |
