Glamorous Notions

by Megan Chance

she understood it, that wish to be something, to be more than everything around you, that feeling that you were different, that you had to be, or what was the point?

“Religion is a drug. It keeps you from thinking too hard about anything important.”

Grief and fear were a terrible combination and an unbearable weight.

The US Psychological Strategy Board, established in 1951, united several departments of US national security bureaucracy behind one goal: utilizing a campaign of psychological warfare in an effort to defeat the Soviet Union. The organization had a Motion Picture Service that employed director-producers who were given high security clearance and pursued film assignments (it cultivated directors like Frank Capra and producers such as Walt Disney) that fulfilled US messaging objectives. They searched out allies who were prepared to insert in their scripts the right actions and ideas, and employed men who worked undercover as producers, and agents whose job was to influence scripts, casting, and directors into portraying a “healthy” America.