Former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who died this morning—weeks after reportedly falling ill after attending a Trump rally in Tulsa—had no such excuse. He should’ve known. He could’ve prevented his death. He could’ve saved himself. He could’ve saved others. But he died how he lived—tragically, stupidly, and clutching onto an anchor of white supremacy, hoping it would save him from drowning, not realizing it had bound his arms too.

It is unfortunate that he is dead. My thoughts and my prayers today, however, are for the people he might have also infected; who might be sick today and dead tomorrow because a 74-year-old Black man still wished to be white.

I first heard about him in the 1990s when I was following an obsessive curiosity about American Imperialism in Central America, Banana Republics, and the United Fruit Company. I found info about him and how he learned from his Uncle Freud, by reading Bernays’ autobiography from 1965. Also I learned how he was hired by United Fruit to create the “need” for bananas in the US so they could sell more. Anyway, in 1998 this new biography came out: The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the birth of Public Relations, which I bought and have read a few times and used for research for an essay I was writing about US manipulation and economic takeover of Guatemala back in the 1950s and later. What I found most fascinating in the book is 1) his work with the tobacco companies to manipulate the public into accepting women as smokers by portraying it as women wanting to be “independent” and “free” so that it would double their corporate income. 2) Then the one I was most interested in was the lengths he went to in getting everyone in the US to believe that a banana was an essential and healthy breakfast for all American children to eat every day, creating a bigger market for the US Fruit companies who were operating in Guatemala and Honduras, etc. The technique he invented, as I am sure you know, called Crystallizing Public Opinion, used fake health nonprofits and commissions with fake doctors writing briefs about the benefits of the banana, teaching packets for teachers in schools with kid activities, etc. They also had doctors writing briefs about the benefits of smoking for women, “to lose weight.” This was so the public thought that all these experts from all over the place “must” be telling the truth.

So back to your point about Goebbels. I had not remembered reading anything about him in my research on Bernays, but that was a long time ago, so tonight I got the book off the shelf and found Goebbels name in the index and there was that one page about just what you were saying. Goebbels used Bernays, Crystallizing technique as his “campaign against the Jews of Germany.” I totally agree that we see these techniques taught in PR and marketing: how to manipulate people into spending money and buying products. But more insidious is their use politically, as you point out...on both sides, or all sides. I don’t know what the answer is, the spin is all around us, and only education can get people to see it. In the '90s when I was researching my curiosity on this, I was also in the midst of 10 years teaching public school (elementary) to 9-11 year olds. I remember trying to teach critical thinking skills by bringing in videos of commercials and walking kids through the rhetoric and how they were being manipulated. It was pretty funny and eye opening, but who knows if it stuck. So anyway, I do go on and on but it was so exciting to read your reference to Eddie and realize that we are possibly more alike than different in our world view.

Just for “fun” (and for anyone else reading this post) here is a quote from page 111 of my book about Bernays:
“. . . he learned in 1933 that Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was using Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. Bernays heard about it from Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent for the Hearst papers, who had visited with Goebbels in Germany and had been given a tour of his library. While scholars still debate the extent to which the Nazis used Bernays works, Goebbels did employ techniques nearly identical to those used by Bernays—skillfully exploiting symbols by making Jews into scapegoats and Hitler into the embodiment of righteousness, manipulating the media by trumpeting Nazi triumphs on the battlefield and hiding their extermination campaigns; and vesting unheard-of power in state propagandists just as Bernays had advised in Crystallizing.”