Wow.

I was going to write about another Netflix documentary, “Breakdown: 1975,” but when the ending reflected the attitudes of today…I lost the inspiration.

You see there’s no snow in Colorado. Just the stuff they made back in November. Since then, not only has it been too warm to make more snow, it hasn’t snowed for three weeks. The news has been pretty widely disseminated, but don’t conflate what is going on in California to what is happening in the Centennial State. As of this writing, Mammoth has gotten 67″ already from the Golden State storm you’ve been reading about, and it’s still snowing! And that’s not completely atypical for California, where they have these insane dumps and then days and days of sunshine. In Colorado it’s an accumulation of a few inches here and a few more there and you end up with three hundred plus inches at the end of the season. But not this year.

Now my policy is to go out each and every day. But on Monday…

It’s more crowded here than I’ve ever seen it. Bombers and beginners. The slopes are frightening, a straight-liner missed me by mere inches. But later in the day, just before I was done, I was just above the entrances to chairs 3&4, below the SLOW banners, and I saw this snowboarder about ten to fifteen feet away and I yelled out DON’T HIT ME! She was barely moving, I was completely stopped. And then she ran right into me.

I haven’t been out since.

Of course she skied away. And when I got up from my fall, my butt hurting and my knee a little bit too, I raced down to confront her. She just smiled and said she was skiing, she didn’t apologize at all.

And there you have it in Vail, Christmas 2025. It’s supposed to snow one inch tomorrow, and then six the day after and…I’ll go back out, but really, that’s not enough to make a truly significant difference.

So I’ve been reading and last night we finished “Pluribus” (am I the only one who doesn’t get it?) and today I decided to fire up Netflix and watch the 1975 documentary.

And this smorgasbord of images is great, however it always bothers me when they interview those who were not alive back then to testify… But everybody’s afraid if they only feature old farts, youngsters won’t watch. And for a minute there, I thought every American needed to watch “Breakdown: 1975,” to see the way it once was, when movies were necessary viewing, at the theatre, but… The film fudged the dates, it just wasn’t 1975, and then said the era was over with “Jaws,” which was untrue, and then featured right wing blowback and the gas emptied from my tank.

So I decided to watch the Seymour Hersh documentary, “Cover-Up.” Once again, WOW!

Now thinking about it, what struck me most about this doc was when Hersh referred to himself as an outsider. That’s it in a nutshell. Now, more than ever, society doesn’t like outsiders. And people don’t want to be  outsiders, they don’t want to be out there alone, never mind victimized by online abuse, so they take a side and stick to it. Seemingly everybody in America, from musicians to corporate executives…they hold their head down and don’t make waves because they don’t want to suffer the consequences, even if they’re right.

And Hersh has been right many times.

Of course he’s also been wrong. But that’s the nature of the game, if you’re never wrong, you’re playing it to close to the vest, you’re holding back too much. I guess you could say the same thing about musicians, when you get inspired and what you’ve created is too far out for the record company, if you’re afraid of alienating fans, that’s what you should include, that’s what you should release, because that’s what changes the world, not what is expected.

So you get Hersh’s story… His upbringing, his acceptance at the University of Chicago almost by accident. And I hate to piss people off, but that college experience helps form him, makes him who he is, because in that elite hothouse there are smart, educated people who challenge him, who want to wrestle with ideas, who inform and teach him too.

And then he becomes a reporter.

His “cases” are legendary. There’s the My Lai Massacre.

No one wanted to believe it. And then Calley was released from jail soon after conviction…just like the January 6th protesters. Didn’t matter what you did, if you supported the war… And Hersh posits that the story hadn’t leaked despite so many knowing about it because it was de rigueur, it happened all the time.

And if you ever thought Henry Kissinger was a hero instead of a war criminal… Wow a third time. He had a cozy relationship with the “New York Times,” they printed what he dictated while he was responsible for so much heinous stuff that people were unaware of. (At least until Hersh arrived.)

There’s Watergate…

You’ll watch “Cover-Up” and be disillusioned with the government. But the weird thing is today, the administration is doing all this stuff openly that they used to hide.

But the generations have changed. Boomers were taught to question authority. If you do that today, you can’t get a job at the bank, and then you can’t join the country club and…

When you’re outside looking in and it doesn’t add up, oftentimes you’re right, which is why this Bari Weiss/”60 Minutes” thing is so important. If we can’t depend on the news to bring us the truth…

Then again, today most people get their information online and are convinced of inane conspiracy theories that end up overshadowing the real ones. Even Abu Ghraib…we all saw the images. Today, the news site you click on, the one that aligns with your views, may not even post a story that doesn’t comport with the orthodoxy… Fox News got the message, when it started challenging Trump it was losing viewers to even more right wing outlets, so it got with the program.

Everybody gets with the program, but not Sy Hersh.

And this documentary is a bit different from most. It’s not a linear retelling of Hersh’s life. You ultimately get some details of his growing up, but what you’ve really got here is his greatest hits, and his reluctance to do this movie at all.

So “Cover-Up” is the documentary all Americans need to see. And since it’s on Netflix, many more people will see it than if it debuted in the theatre. You only get publicity once, and if people can’t partake immediately, they forget about a movie when it’s finally available for streaming, it’s not only no longer new, there’s a tsunami of additional product and…

Netflix is smart. “Cover-Up” came out today, when most people are on vacation and have the time to watch it. “Cover-Up” cuts to the heart of not only the government, but life in these United States. On one hand it will leave you numb, on the other suspicious of the government. And you should be suspicious of the government, and corporations too…Hersh gets into Gulf & Western and in the process it’s revealed that the editor he reports to, who doesn’t want to run Hersh’s business stories in the “New York Times,” has crossed the line too. And what does the editor say when confronted with his behavior? That his lawyer said it was okay. And then Hersh responds that that’s what he hears every day from those he’s investigating.

I can’t recommend “Cover-Up” enough. Not because it’s the best documentary I’ve ever seen, but because it raises issues that are not being raised elsewhere, and it illustrates you can make it, have a career, challenging conventional wisdom. Just don’t expect to be honored by the company or be invited for drinks at the bar…

But if you have the cojones…