TL;DR: > "Who's that whisperin' in the trees? It's two sailors and they're on leave Pipes and chains and swingin' hands Who's your daddy? Yes I am" > "Who's That Whisperin' in the Trees?" The True Strangeness of the Zoot "Who's that whisperin' in the trees? It's two sailors and they're on leave Pipes and chains and swingin' hands Who's your daddy? Yes I am"
Cherry Poppin' Daddies
"Who's That Whisperin' in the Trees?" The True Strangeness of the Zoot
by Geri Roberts
Strange things happen to the minds of men in wartime. In 1943 groups of sailors returning to port after long and hazardous service in the Pacific, having spent weeks of stress without benefit of alcohol or female companionship, arrive in Los Angeles, a city crammed with bars, bordellos and beautiful starlets, and immediately hurry off their ships with only one compelling thought in mind:
"Let's search the city for Mexican men in funny looking suits, chase them around, beat them up and rip off their clothes. YAAAAAY! What fun! The women and the booze can wait."
So, does the official story of the zoot suit riots make any sense to you? That wartime sailors on leave in Los Angeles made it their patriotic duty to punish minority youths for wearing clothes that were wasteful of rationed cloth?. Even mainstream historian Kathy Peiss in her excellent book Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style seems to find the phenomenon of the "riots" inexplicable. She can only hint at their strangeness because she is employed at the University of Pennsylvania where questions such as "Could this have been an early form of intelligence agency social engineering?" would not be welcome. . .
First, we must ask: What is a zoot suit?
According to Cab Calloway (if you don't know who he is, for shame! Go look him up!), the word "zoot" means "exaggerated" and a "zoot suit" is "the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit." This definition works for us right now.
The zoot suit featured a brightly colored shirt, very full pants tightened at the ankles, a baggy coat, or drape, a swinging watch chain and a wide brimmed round hat, often feathered. Definitely eye catching during the drabness of the late thirties and the ensuing war years. There are abundant theories about who invented the look and where, when and why it appeared.
My own theory is that this style suit emerged initially as a genuinely home grown phenomenon. It appeared in tandem with swing music because it was impossible to dance the new jitterbug steps in tight fitting clothes.. Young people of the Depression era were often forced economically to wear ill-fitting hand-me downs rather than special dancing clothes. I get the sense of unseen and probably dark forces behind the Big Band era itself and its raucous dances. Yes, I know I see dark forces behind just about everything in history. And it gives me no joy to tell you that the more I dig, the more ugly conspiracies I find. .You can get a definite sense of this undercurrent of unclean magick in the original music video "Zoot Suit Riot" put out by the Cherry Poppin' Daddies in 1997.. (But I have to admit that I really like this song and all the big band era music!)
In the 1950s, this idea of a special costume linked to ideology would pop up among the youth of America once again, almost as if it were planted there, and just in time for the Great Juvenile Delinquency scare with its leather jackets, switchblades and motorcycles. Like so many creative ideas we humans come up with, the music and costumes of each era are suborned into some malevolent and controlling undercurrent..
Now that the words "malevolent and controlling" have been mentioned, it is time for a rant about historians and their hatching grounds--academia.
What exactly is the purpose of "minority studies" in academia? Or of its conjoined twin "Holocaust Studies?." As you listen to the poisonous reptiles who promulgate these ideas, you realize that they voice a mixed message that humans should live together peacefully, while all the time inculcating the insidious narrative that humans are either victims or oppressors. And that must be the sum of our identity as human beings. We must all either suffer or inflict suffering. This victim-oppressor script chains our minds to a whirling wheel of emotion that we must run on, hamster-like, and never stop if we want to get good grades in school and keep our funding from the government. We are never permitted to step off the emotion driven wheel to think logically about WHY our emotions are constantly engaged rather than our minds. Historians of "minority studies" and their ilk have gleefully seized on historical events such as the "Zoot Suit Riots" and incorporated them into their own narratives, whether they fit there or not. Whether they happened or not. Any objective study of these occurrences is forbidden by the Blind Idiot God of Political Correctness.
Humans are divided into races artificially. I believe that, if left to ourselves, we would think of ourselves as living in extended families or tribes.. The Nefarious Elite encourage the exploitation of "race" so that descriptions of racial discrimination can be used to manipulate us emotionally.. I'm not saying these descriptions of cruelty and exploitation of other humans are always inaccurate. Only that there is a deeper reality behind them that we should be aware of. They are part of a narrative scripted and performed to trigger reactions implanted into us by the culture that surrounds us everywhere. We are all victims of mind control from early childhood.
The Civil Rights movement in the United States was necessary to correct civil wrongs but the wrongs themselves were engineered by those who profited from the division of race in the first place. This narrative of hatred and inequality is drilled into us by the media and in the concentration camps called "schools" to make sure we all remain divided from each other for forever and ever.
The zoot suit was pushed onto impressionable teenagers by the press, by Hollywood entertainers in movies, by jazz musicians and by the forerunner of rock n' roll--the Big Bands. Unsurprisingly, even Donald Duck and Goofy joined in. As I read Kathy Peiss' book I noticed statements from older people in the 1930s and 1940s who were confused and concerned by what was happening to their children. They realized that some dark alchemy was being practiced on young people. This realization would be echoed by families throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and so on..
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The so-called "Zoot Suit Riots" were the first ominous efforts of the nascent intelligent services to "socially engineer" us. It was not enough that the citizens of Los Angeles were kept fearful of enemy invasion and demoralized by rationing. No--they needed to be terrified of one another. The thought of Americans uniting in any way at all was a very threatening idea. So some street theater was developed to introduce fear of both race AND juvenile delinquency. Two birds with one silly looking stone. Southern Californians are now the unfortunate recipients of the most sophisticated and deadly "social engineering" programs any government ever inflicted on its own people: Gang stalking. And, ladies and gentlemen, I do believe it began right here in 1943.
In her book, Kathy Piess includes this photo on page 120 with the caption "...his facial expression is at odds with his appearance, the result of violent treatment at the hands of the rioters." (Peiss, Kathy. Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)).
A true historian, Ms. Piess valiantly attempts to come up with a believable explanation that fits the accepted narrative for the utter incongruity of the expressions on the faces of people in this photo. There simply isn't one. I suspect that Ms. Peiss suspects something is going on beneath the surface of all this and wants to draw our attention to it. Doesn't it look as if they are all trying to keep a straight face? And by the way, how did this guy's zoot suit baggy pant leg get ripped/cut neatly up to the waist yet his belt remains neatly buckled?. The photo is credited to the Bettman/CORBIS archive, which is a digital stock photography company founded by Bill Gates. I just thought that factoid might be interesting.
Bars and dances in Los Angeles were searched by "sailors" looking for zoot suiters to beat up. I find one incident to be very revealing. A group of sailors entered the Carmen Theater, turned up the house lights, and proceeded to inspect the pants of the men in the audience for zoot bagginess. And all this street theater was enacted by men in easily identifiable costumes who made very sure that that they were noticed.
The zoot suit riots in Los Angeles supposedly set off a wave of racially motivated violence all over the country in which people were reported killed and injured. Historians rely on newspaper headlines and articles for their information about all this and we know how reliable THAT is. Eyewitnesses and participants in the original events have passed on to a better world and seemed to have left little information behind them.. . I can only identify one death that could tentatively be related to the Los Angeles "riots", that of Jose Gallardo Diaz. This 22-year-old farm worker was discovered unconscious near a swimming hole called Sleepy Lagoon in Commerce, California. No definite cause of death was ever determined and although seventeen men were arrested for the "crime" not one single conviction stood on appeal. For some reason that eludes me (not being a trained historian) this incident that took place on August 2, 1942 is described everywhere as a precursor to the Zoot Suit riots of June 1943.
A man named Malcolm Little (1925-1965), better known as Malcolm X, gives us an important perspective on the zoot suit. Growing up in the 1960's I remember hearing the name but paid no attention to him and had no idea that he had actually been assassinated. He appears in Kathy Peiss' book and I give her a great deal of credit for pointing out that his writing is constantly misinterpreted (in other words, twisted) by historians. She presents a summary of what Malcolm X said about the zoot suit and associated phenomena of that era:
"Malcolm X produced a riveting account of his early life as Malcolm Little, a young black man in Boston and New York, where he embraced the world of zoot suiters, jive talk and jitterbug. Recalling those days twenty years later, he saw those urban pleasures as signs of his spiraling degradation as a black man; the son of a Garveyite and radicalized in the Nation of Islam, he understood the complexities of African American politics, but he did not portray street life as a world of political meaning. .Yet Malcolm X is widely accepted as evidence of the zoot suiter as a figure of resistance."*
That is exactly how the process works. A vile alchemy of degradation and cruelty is enacted against a group of people, who are then manipulated into blaming other people and to use their suffering as an excuse to enact the same degradation and cruelty against them. And so on and so forth. And a man like Malcolm X, who was able to step off the whirling wheel of emotion and see into the underlying structure of the narrative, is removed and his words twisted to support the process he is trying to warn us about. Such is the fate of prophets who try to tell us the truth..
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