Tonight I watched a Western from my Tim Holt Collection, called "Land Of The Open Range" (1942), in which a crooked land baron, recently deceased, has left special instructions in his will, to be carried out by his shady lawyer. The instructions call for all of the baron's land - consisting of a 65,000 acre ranch - to be given away for free in one hundred parcels of 650 acres apiece. However - the will states that these land parcels are only to be given to men who have done at least two years time in state or federal prison. In life, the land baron was a schemer who obtained most of his acreage illegally. He was a crook and he hated the local Sheriff, so this was his way of getting back at him, by requiring that his land be given away only to ex-cons.
Naturally the Sheriff is up in arms about this, because he knows that many if not most of the applicants will be men who have not been reformed, for whom crime is a way of life. And they will be convening on his little town to claim their free land.
Not a bad plot for a one hour Western, eh? This was one of the best of the Holt films I have seen so far, and as a special treat it was shot in large part at a place called Burro Flats. Have I mentioned Burro Flats before? I may have. But if I did not, it is interesting to note that it is a section of land way up in the Simi Hills, located on what is now the property of the Santa Susana Field Lab. The first time I heard of Burro Flats was on a tour of the SSFL back in 2010, and the tour guide mentioned it not as a former movie location but as the site of a sacred and protected Indian cave, one with petroglyphs that are said to be 10,000 years old.
As you may know, the Santa Susana Field Lab was a defense department facility for rocket engine testing for NASA space programs from Mercury to Apollo. There was also a locally infamous nuclear reactor meltdown there in 1959, which has been exaggerated in the media, but anyway, the point is that the site is a Big Deal, a place where rocket engines were tested for excursions into Space, and folks my age from the Valley can still remember the roar from those tests that occurred until the late 1960s.
All of which is why it was such a trip to see this Tim Holt film, which was shot at Burro Flats in 1942, before the Santa Susana Field Lab ever existed. The land was wide open then, and you can recognise a few landmarks in the Chatsworth hills.
On a side note, it is interesting how much of our current national defense establishment and military/industrial complex was created in the year 1947. The CIA was created in 1947. The Air Force was created in 1947. The National Security Act was created in 1947. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory, then known as Rocketdyne, was created in 1947.
Roswell happened in 1947.
1947 was The Year, my friends, in which the modern state of secret affairs began. And it is those secrets that are holding back The Whole Shebang from moving forward.
Which is why is was so instructive to see Tim Holt and his gang of character actors riding across the open plains in this movie tonight, because there was nothing there.
The national security state that dominates America did not yet exist in 1942.
And folks, 1942 was not all that long ago, only 77 years.
So things haven't always been this way, with lock-down security, and terrorism, and surveillance technology, and paranoia and fear. We haven't always lived in a gadget-based era of distraction, and in fact we very recently lived in an era of open land where people were connected to nature because they lived in an agriculturally based economy. In that era, the most important of technological inventions had been developed, like the telephone and the refrigerator. Radio was soon to come, and it was good, too.
Even television was good, when it first began.
But then human beings got carried away with technology. They began to use it as a means of information, a substitute for thought, and they made Gods out of men like Steve Jobs, who in the long run will be seen as a man who created nothing but exponential mental distraction with his annually-updated devices.
Before this there was Burro Flats. The Indians made cave paintings there, ten millennia ago, thousands of years before Jesus was born. Then came the movie business and Tim Holt, in the 1940s, during an era of technological advancement that was exciting (motion pictures, tv, radio) but which still served to benefit the soul, because it was entertainment rather than distraction.
Then Burro Flats became the site of a testing ground for the major achievement in human technology in all of our history. We went to the Moon in 1969, and nothing we have done since then has topped it.
All of the technological advancements since then, meaning AI and the endless devices we all use, have had massive social consequences, not all of which have been good. I would argue that the Internet has done as much bad as good (he said, as he typed his blog on the Internet, lol).
It is easy to see what I am getting at, the benefits of a simpler life, when technology was part of our lives, and was being advanced, but did not yet come to dominate us to the point where we needed to have a lock-down national security state of affairs in America, which has resulted in a false president and a country on the verge of seeming chaos.
For tonight, just keep in mind that everything about the national security state began in 1947, the year of Roswell. It's no joke, but very real. Do some reading if you wish.
We have had a dozen or so presidents since 1947, but it's been the Secret Keepers who have really been running the show all this time. Pentagon types, and certain special people as well.
Certain people. Just a handful of them, from generation to generation, who know The Secrets.
The secrets are economic, too, but mostly they have to do with defense, and the paranoia on the part of the Secret Keepers, over what they know and fear.
That's all I know for tonight. I would love to see the secret cave in Burro Flats.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):) see you in the morning.
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