The Big Tent Review
Number Three, 10.1.23
The Big Tent Review
Number Three, 10.1.23
Hey folks! Here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine of writings that are so far exclusively my own 'intellectual product.' The BTR premise is twofold, first that I have interesting and entertaining things to say and second that a type of 'consumer' exists who likes to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose. As will ever remain the case, I've got my fingers crossed that the breadth and volume of the material will not alienate even the most inveterate readers and that these subscribers and occasional interlopers will, despite how much is here, elect to pick and choose among each issue's offerings. In any event, thanks for stopping in and all of that sort of thing.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Mediation’s Manipulative Miracles, Marvelous & Mundane
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—A Pair of Recent Readings
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter III
3. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, PART THREE
4. Old Stories & New—”I Want to Play Too,” continued
5. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”Little Red,” continued from #1
6. Communication & Human Survival—”Contextualizing Godard’s Contempt”
7. Happy Union Grammar Nerds—’Defaulting to Passive Voice,’ continued
8. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A First in-Depth Ukraine Report, continued
—Last Words For Now
Introduction
As I reflect about my already somewhat bloated ‘lean’ pitch paragraph above the contents, I realize that a couple of other categories of human might just see fit to subscribe to BTR. One such consists of people who know me and my work. Folks who’ve bought my art or engaged in conversation with me are conceivably in this category. Such individuals often enough find my ‘trains of thought’ intriguing and full of fun blah blah blah.
The other sort of potential subscriber could be someone who values erotic aspects of human existence, who honors what I call “life force energy” and who can relate to my ‘existential duty to seek understanding’ about all such matters. After all, my writing occasionally enters the realm of ‘scientific study of human sexuality’ and more often than not includes explicitly carnal, if not altogether smutty, passages.
“What if one doesn't consider himself an avid reader? Or count Jim Hickey among her acquaintances? Or have much interest in titillating erotic entertainment? Why read the Big Tent Review?”
In a way that I hope at least suggests an answer to this most basic of questions, I’m calling today’s beginning missive, redolent of another of my ‘existential duties,’ a briefing about “Mediation’s Manipulative Miracles, Marvelous and Mundane.” My take on matters at hand indicates that what folks say they believe and see and experience often illuminates obvious mirroring by subjects of artfully mediated messages, a tutelage of propaganda, as it were—’population management’ via ‘social media.’
Thus, my scribblings: I am a kind of counter-propagandist who is proposing a different sort of artfully-mediating-messaging process in order to suggest different mirroring outcomes. In this vein, I see most of my fiction as documentary in nature; literally, as in I can refer to journals and files and so on in constructing characters and their arc through things. So in a sense what appears in these pages is documentable auto-fiction, since the autobiographical element is also immutable, altogether a reasonable basis for credibility among my underlying storytelling materials.
At times, too, as with particular pieces of my Driftwood Message Art, one of the ideas there circumscribes a sort of pithy, pointed story. After all, I occasionally say to people who venture into my Marshall Arts’ Guaranteed-Kick-in-the-ASSthetic tent, ‘you better watch your ass; you’re now officially infected with radical ideas about everything in existence, ha ha!’ A piece of wood from the “Life & Love & Art in the Time of COVID” table reveals an apt instance of this conflation of thought and wry narration.
“We Adhere As If Glued to Screens That Persistently Parse Panoplies of Bombastic Bullshit & Putrid Punditry, Thereby Evading Soulful Introspection & Avoiding Collective Engagement on Which Depend Our Kind’s Continued Survival, Altogether Perhaps the Most Ironic, & Idiotic, Instance of Willful Ignorance to Afflict Humanity During Days When Direst Danger Commingles With Miraculous Opportunity, When Technical Magic Mixes With Mutuality’s Meltdown."
BTR’s story-telling, confabulation, commentary, and reportage reflect my personal predilections, my particular brand of partiality, so to speak. I am akin to a ‘preacher of the real,’ or at least so I maintain. In the event, in any case, my subjectivity overwhelmingly results from an investigatory nexus; in other words, I seek out mediation in the form of actual information rather than in planned propagation of propaganda nuggets—whether from the New York Times, the so-called ‘National Public Radio,’ Fox News, or wherever else in the corporate mediation sphere most people gather their nuggets of nuanced newsworthiness.
Quite likely, therefore, my tendency to ‘go to the source’ and look at history and demographics and other true data and such is very different from how most people come to individual expressions of their own subjective conjectures. In any event, I intend every line of every issue of the BTR to serve as ‘food for thought’ in our centrally important task, inescapably a collective endeavor, of finding nourishing information for our cognitive and imaginative and social capacities.
In an unexpected instance of evocative juxtaposition in this regard, these notions bring to mind a dissertation that a friend and associate shared with me, a heavy tome that he wrote more than four decades back. After he presented me with his copy of the ten-pound bound typescript, he quipped that, since he definitely proofread it, I “will be (his) second reader.” The volume, for a doctorate in education, has a title eerily apropos for the Big Tent Review. Ways of Knowing Among College Students examines attitude and belief formation among undergraduate non-science majors as they complete their required ‘science’ courses.
Among the many “ways of knowing” that supplement science’s naturalistic bent—admittedly, in my humble opinion, most often the best way to start anyhow—are intuition and revelation, which cover onlookers whose guts tell them how to approach matters and participants in life’s panoply who rely on religious avenues to arrive at knowledge and understanding. In future BTR installments, deeper dives into Ike’s Ph.d thesis will be forthcoming.
In any event, this scholarly examination of science education did not mention how propaganda can manipulate what Ike called “plausibility structures” for evaluating one’s beliefs or the ideas and assertions of others. Especially in the current context, such an oversight may well amount to a profound misstep, inasmuch as present ‘press liaisons’ and journalistic denizens seem to have studied at the Joseph Goebbel’s ‘Institute For Perfecting Public Influence:’ following are some samples of this sort of material from Herr Goebbels himself, the progenitor of the fascist perspective on deploying mediated messages so as to keep people in line.
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over; (t)his is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it; (t)hink of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play; (i)f you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself,” or, “(a) lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth."
Finally, for now, we might make a special note of what Hitler’s personal press agent had to say about those, for example scholars and others with subject-matter expertise, who make being informed their business. “There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be "the man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."
Edward Bernays meanwhile, as the ‘father of public relations’ more or less contemporaneous with Goebbels, has views perfectly congruent with his Nazi cohort, when Goebbels intones, “It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.” As an American, not to mention Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Bernays gives us a more homegrown source of the kind of ‘leadership’ that believes ‘common folk’ to be inept at coming to their own conclusions. His work on ‘public opinion’ and its dutiful manifestation by ‘better sorts’ of citizens minces no words.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
Bernays deployed his skills for such clients as the United Fruit Company, which loathed the idea of higher wages or unions among its banana plantation drudges in Guatemala, enlisting the estimable propaganda impresario to design a campaign to upend the government of Jacobo Arbenz, a popular Guatemalan popular politician who was greenlighting social reforms in favor of working class people. Bernays launched his assault on a sovereign government on many fronts.
“He recommended a campaign in which universities, lawyers, and the U.S. government would all condemn expropriation as immoral and illegal; the company should use media pressure to induce the President and State Department to issue a policy pronouncement comparable to the Monroe Doctrine concerning expropriation.’ In the following months, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and the Atlantic Monthly had all published articles describing the threat of Communism in Guatemala."
As a result of this ‘offensive against communism’ that was in truth a defense of corporate oligarchy, well over 200,000 Guatemalans died violently, or simply ‘disappeared.’ Since our nation’s victory over Spain in 1900, this pattern of propaganda in service to oppression has played out scores and scores of times. The coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, the original 9/11, and the purported ‘Maidan uprising’ in Kiev against the admittedly unpopular Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 come to mind, for example, as the United States government in all its august imperial mightiness has been for nine years, without notable letup, conducting possibly the most extensive information-warfare campaign in history to promote puppets and fascist partisans who are America’s only ‘allies’ in its proxy-war with Russia on Ukrainian terrain some hundreds of highway miles from Moscow.
The second portion of the initial series of reports about Ukraine, the final component of today’s Number Three, both contextualizes this geographical fact and draws some reasonable inferences therefrom. In sum, this backgrounding effort suggests that we are being played again, and the stakes—human extinction—cannot go any higher. On the side of historical genocide, on the side of grotesque injustice, unalterably opposed to democracy and human rights, our overseers and pundits promulgate risks of Mass Collective Suicide in order to defend their geopolitical ends, which is to say the maximum profit and power possible for themselves and their interests in Ukraine and everywhere else. As Orlando Letelier stated matters, ‘Los hechos hablan por si solos!’
Since society’s generally self-selected supervisors openly—one might state, blatantly— celebrate their manipulative magic tricks, one consistent BTR topical category will be the media and its primarily monopolistic corporate practitioners in the United States. Such august critics of monopolized commercial ‘news’ as Bagdikian, McChesney, Chomsky, and more—including any of the luminous essayists whom I contact here on SubStack, whom I’ll offer a byline and a slot—will be grist for the collective mill, come what may.
To round out this briefing, I would posit that very few people are aware of the Church Committee’s 1970’s revelations about the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Mockingbird, tricky and duplicitous attributes of which continue to appear ubiquitously in the corporate mass communications sphere today. This lack of awareness of distortion, manipulation, corruption, and fraud is especially troubling when one considers the evidence of how present standard views about Ukraine have come to prevail. Incontrovertibly, complete skepticism about U.S. plans and objectives is adaptive, a necessary survival tactic for sapient humans under certain conditions. Readers can consider today’s ‘Mundane Media Marvels’ introduction as a precursor of what is forthcoming.
Basically, beginning in the four monthly magazines that are BTR fare in November through February, various of these media-reports will begin to show up. Till then, turning toward ‘lighter fare,’ we’ll sign off with another ‘Ciao For Now.’
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
In between sessions on the Alpine Court’s lawn in Hot Springs, which happen plus-or-minus once monthly, I mainly read for myself since I don’t have a big following for my Tarot talents, ha ha. Something useful, at the very least vaunted ‘food for thought,’ shows up in these interludes of self-analysis, so that the entire experience often verges on the spooky and almost always qualifies as eerie.
Thus, this issue also includes a pair of my related queries to the Goddess as well as one of the relatively rare random Readings that resulted from an encounter with a young Chinese woman at the Welcome Center. At the conclusion of her session, a smile stole over her face as she exhaled audibly to use a rhetorical question to announce, “So! It’s like magic, right?”
As usual, I asked her not to share her query, although I infer it probably involved her mom, who sent her then sixteen year old daughter, freshly finished with rigorous secondary-school instruction to the United States for another sixteen years of college, graduate education, and varied ‘knocks in the school of life,’ the sum of which had left her so at odds with her maternal parental unit that they had been doing nothing for months but fighting with, and casting aspersions at, each other. MayLi, who had been wandering through the Welcome Center with a woeful cast, suddenly lit up as she detected Santa Claus sitting before her at my desk.
In the passage of a quarter hour, her story spilled forth in a heated rush. She had only heard vague rumors about Tarot but seemed amenable, rather than continuing in a cloud of moody ennui, to seeking counsel from sources whose very existence she couldn’t definitely affirm.(continued below the PayWall)…
All God’s Cousins(continued)
This, my most ‘finished’ novel, has just introduced two characters who pretty closely resemble me and the sweetheart with whom I ventured to Dixie after we left Radcliffe’s cocoon behind. This yarn, an interweaving of characters and story and analysis of life and literature, fulfills my hope to produce documentary fiction, insodoing illustrating a theme of the overall volume, actually one in a projected series of thirteen books, to wit that our trajectories, which feel inevitable as they impel us to impact others’ lives, evolve from varied pasts that play their important historical part in our mutual encounters, when they first unfold as if fated and then often come to separated endings in some future present-pass.
Anyhow, here we meet Gordon, from South Africa, who became an important part of my work in Atlanta in the late 1990’s. Since he still lives in the Southern Hemisphere in this selection, his Solstice tale happens in his Johannesburg-suburb Winter.
CHAPTER III— — —He didn’t think of his parents as he took the final step to strike, even of his father’s loving eyes—which either might have occurred to him as nostalgia, so as to impede the blow, or, because of the fact and manner of his father's end, might instead have impelled an overly vicious stroke. He just leapt from the alley’s shadows and snagged the paunchy, yet thickly muscled policeman—himself a da’ three times over and no more than average in his commitment to White Supremacy and practicing the institutional degradation of African life by which the regime survived—by the collar with his right hand while he raked the razored blade across the copper's throat with his talented left.
Hardly a sound marked the rushing splash of blood and the almost instant lapse into unconsciousness of this now-dead defender of Apartheid. In the ‘dead’ of the night, Ngele had punched his ticket to Namibia, Angola, or wherever else his A.N.C. comrades would send him first, before the years of training and ‘personnel development’ to follow, that would take this diminutive child of the veldt to climes and realms that, literally, he had never dreamed existed—Soviet Russia for political inculcation; Romania for weapons and explosives; Palestine for hand-to-hand combat; Yugoslavia even, for English and French and Spanish and whatever additional linguistic acumen that could supplement his current paltry English, serviceable Afrikaans, and fluent Zulu and Shona, all the 'blah-blah' clicks and glottals of actually indigenous African linguistic legerdemain.
The African National Congress had not started with a plan for violent revolution. What had happened to Ngele’s father typified the inevitable turn toward such tactics as those that had left this corpse, drained of life by one neat slice, in the gutter of Tembisa for the authorities to find and consider.
He knew, because he never lost track of time—the striker in him had that perfect sense of when to send the ball screaming, that ability always to know what had just lapsed and what was now coming—that the two o’clock hour had just passed in the alley entrance that now contained a corpse. He had, at least, in the relatively wintry darkness of June 15th outside Johannesburg, five hours to meet his contact and make his move away from what had been his life for fifteen years: a talented child of brilliant parents, both teachers, whom the Apartheid regime had murdered, in the case of his father, and devastated psychologically, for life, in the case of his mother.
He thought back to his conversation prior to crouching in the alley, blending into the warehouse wall with the standpipe and all its doors closed off by padlocks. “Why Tembisa?”
“Don’t need to know, tyke.”
“Yeah, but I know less than nothing ‘bout the place.”
“Maybe that’s part of the test, eh?”
This fellow, his ‘contact,’ though he didn’t look the part of a revolutionary leader, an efficient killer and indomitable fighter, carried himself in a way that always left Ngele feeling nervous after their interactions, as if he had just handled a mamba. Besides, looks were deceiving, as Ngele had learned, multiple times from his mentor, and now, master. “For you, I’m Tommy. From now on, you’re Gordon.”(continued below the PayWall)…
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)
PART THREE(Our Thomas Hawkins, a fellow who resembles the author enough to be his doppelganger, has found himself in a pickle, assuredly so surreal and dangerous a spot as to be nauseating.)
"And Norman? You don't mind if I call you Norman, do you? We can't have any further outbursts of the sort that you've shown us so far." ‘Doc Whoa’ paused, his smile still equable if also made of steel. "We have very important work to do, and little time to do it. Am I clear? You do follow, eh?"
A jerked nod of assent emerged. "We've got a very interesting day planned for you," Doc resumed, implications of Chinese curses dancing like putrid sugar plums in my head. "So we want to feed you a bit first."
The basket of crackers that he proffered could have been traditional tea biscuits, but for pinkish flecks running through them. And they were greasier and meatier than all but the most buttery concoctions of wheat, which, these days anyhow, was only slightly more obtainable than beef or less precious than pork.
"Please, each of you should take two." He paused, the smile again distracted, his eyes dancing. "What?" The grin grimaced at us again. "Yes, of course." He was talking to some other presence than ours. "I'm Dr. Winston," he told us with a note of apology.
I took my prophecy about an initial to be a very favorable sign, but then again, I've never liked the idea of mortality much,(continued below the PayWall)…
Old Stories, & New
“I Want to Play Too”(continued)
(We have met the narrator, like me a librarian, and his paramour, who is ameliorating her pangs of heartache in the arms of Mr. James as they navigate their lives at the Institute where they work and share still more of experiences that combine wage-earning and lovemaking, complex bureaucratic structures and social networks, the personal and collective elements of existence.)
Part Two—I told her though that she'd asked for trouble from this outset--so much so soon to one so inexperienced and clearly upper crust. But she was right in a sense as well. Why shouldn't she have the chance to get exactly what she wanted, even if that was as crass and unrealistic as a gorgeous hunk with incredible sexual stamina, a personal fortune, and eyes only for her? God knows that relations among men and women are tortured enough, without the dominance of the cynicism that some of the wounded often try to pass off for realism. The roots of our mutual need for and battering of each other are as deep and tangled as any other real crisis society faces. Overoptimism in any such situation is less dangerous than negativism.
And silence gives consent; everybody remembers the line from "A Man For All Seasons," so if he didn't say "I'm yours" in reply to her ardored peals of passion, he did nothing to indicate anything other than acceptance. Cooler heads may note that love and silence are anathema, but hers was not a forsaken lust; the two of them broke records for fucking.
Some of Ann's friends still smile wistfully about their sexual staying power. He could never have responded sexually as he did, week after week, in the face of her consistently expressed hope for permanence, without a willingness to consider commitment. So she assumed he would tell her something or show some other sign than silence were he particularly uneasy.
And from all accounts, silence or reticence, despite his wide arctic smile, was the primary characteristic of Bill James at this point. The accounts come from friends of Ann, a legion of comrades and acquaintances who love her great heart and booming laugh, her emotional honesty and fierce loyalty. The William who became Starr didn't bring a social circle to the relationship, although he had many chums and substantial family who made Ann's acquaintance at one time or another.
"His step-mother hated me, condescending bitch, thought I was too low-life for her precious Billy."(continued below the PayWall)…
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
Here we continue an initial ‘fairy tale’ recontextualization, revealing connecting layers, perhaps, of mythos and psyche and human awareness.
Little Red(an old tale in new garb)(Continued from #1)
(The Wolf, who has won his footrace with Little Red, has just arrived at Granny’s door)
CHAPTER TWO— — —No sooner had Little Red's Gran opened the door than Will--a very popular name among this breed's beasts, who fancied themselves able to have their way, wantonly, with any others whom they might choose to victimize--had fallen on the weak and wheezing crone and knocked her unconscious, a feat so quickly accomplished that the terrified old woman had not even been able to cough or gag before she passed out, let alone scream out in horror or warning. Old Will rapidly tore twice at her neck with magical bites that would not allow her revival for many hours, and only then with a final administration of his saliva to both of the wounds.
"That will keep her quiet and warm," Will thought, drooling, "should I still have hunger, after...," and here he imagined the course of his repast of 'Little Red' too ugly and vicious to recount in these pages. Stripping Gran of her night-dress and cap and booties in less than an instant, the lithe beast managed in just a bit more time than that to dress in her clothes and stuff her in a closet full of quilts and other linens. Wise to the wisdom of children as he was, he rubbed himself with Gran's clothes, further massaging himself with her bedding in an attempt to mask his bestial scent. "At least her housekeeping has been lax," he chuckled to himself; "it stinks a bit in here in fact."
Just as he was completing his camouflage and taking stock of Gran's lack of tidiness, a little tapping resounded at one window, and a few moments later at another, followed in short order by a series of rapid knocks at the front door, after which the stifled giggles of a girl were clearly audible.
"It's some game they play," thought Will the Wolf sagely, grabbing up stockings from Gran's great bed as he pondered what to say in response. "Oh!" he shouted in a nearly perfect imitation of Gran's voice, "What a dream; I thought I heard my Little Red signaling me."
Peals of laughter came from the front door then. "It's I, Gran," cried out Little Red, her perfect grammar always on display for her favorite grandmother, who sometimes had tutored the wealthy family's children in proper speech. "Let me in, or I shall freeze here in such shady a place as this."
Just by the door, Will coughed and responded, "My dear, what a start you gave your old Gran; I fear that my state, and the disarray here in my home, would shock you," he offered as he plotted how to disguise his presence.
"Ah, Gran, go on," guffawed Little Red, "you know yours is always a bit like a sty. You've said so yourself many a time. Now let me in," begged Little Red, stomping her feet to keep warm, despite the warm laughter in her voice.(continued below the PayWall)…
Communication & Human Survival
The themes of Jean Luc Godard’s works are classic—Eros, Logos, Polis, or sex, understanding, and power. He finished over fifty substantial works in a decades-long career, most of them full length dramas of one sort or another, and most of which enjoyed public and critical acclaim as well as commercial success. A lush new release of his sixth major movie has just left theaters in much of the U.S., prodding me to write this essay about what, on the surface, is a weird and at least somewhat stilted tale of a failing marriage in the context of a French writer’s travails in the hands of an all-too-typical ignoramus American tycoon.
I propose here to take a stab at contextualizing this cinema giant’s re-released colorful, contrarian feature, Contempt, a task of review appropriate today for this section because however crafty, beautiful, and entertaining are Godard’s filmic confabulations and their repeated confections-in-motion, their purpose is in significant measure didactic. The creator, Jean Luc, has some points to make, and a viewer must be blind and deaf to avoid internalizing and pondering some of these instructional communiques.
Or, whatever the case may be, such conclusions seem apt in relation to Godard’s actual life and career, as a committed Marxist who envisioned a radical ‘new wave’ approach to moviemaking so clearly that he named an association that he co-founded after a Soviet documentarian who in turn derived his name from a Slavic phrase for ‘spinning top.’ Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera influenced, and some would say laid the basis for, much of the movie magic that Godard and his cohorts produced, including Contempt, the production of which occurred at the beginning of the most militant phase of the director’s career.
For a routine glorification of Contempt, superb surface description of the film and quotidian praise of Godard’s craft, one may turn to Roger Ebert’s examination, which is subtly critical of the movie as a ‘failed experiment’ even as he sings arias of praise to Godard. Ebert incisively summarizes a key aspect of the Frenchman’s brilliance. Always, the director “breaks the illusion of the fourth wall in order to communicate directly with the audience, usually in such an enigmatic way that he seems to be satirizing the whole idea of communication."
This insight calls into question the trite upshot of Ebert’s analysis, that Contempt was a ‘failed experiment.’ If nothing else, bowing to Godard’s greatness makes the superficiality of the great critic’s estimate seem anomalous. Perhaps Godard knew precisely what he was doing,(continued below the PayWall)…
Happy Union Grammar Nerds(continued)
Reporting the Real Meaning of Things
Speech, Writing, and the Default Choice of Passive Voice
(We’ve learned that ubiquitous passive construction makes the grammatical subject of a thought receive rather than deliver the action, using generally some form of the verb ‘to be’—is, are, was, etc—together with a past participle, as in the clause, ‘She was astonished by her luck!’)
PART TWO
…HOW CAN WE EDIT OUT THE PASSIVE VOICE?
While nearly everybody attests to how passive construction is practically automatic, only the rare writer indeed can easily transform such writing and make it show instead of hide, act instead of receive the action. Nevertheless, just a modicum of practice can totally shift such inadequacy.
For today’s episode, we’ll just view one way of proceeding, which will always work so long as a writer can see or imagine the prepositional phrase following the past participle that confirms the passive voice in the first place. Here are a handful of little embodiments of this idea.
*The desserts were consumed with utter relish(by the diners);
*All of the diners relished every bite of the sweet confection.
*The child was battered beyond recognition(by the bully);
*The vicious attacker’s relentless assault rendered the youngster unrecognizable.
*The answer was presumed by fully half the class;
*At least half the students presumed that they knew.
*The fateful words were uttered by the judge;
*'You shall hang by your neck till you’re dead,’ said the judge.
*Most of these books were never read(by anyone);
*Nobody read most of the volumes.
So here we are. We’ve defined, we’ve analyzed, we’ve reconfigured. If one likes passive voice better, then one will use it. But most people in fact prefer active vocalizations. Surveys have been conducted about this.(continued below the PayWall)…
Odd Beginnings, New Endings(continued)
If thermonuclear war erupts as a result of the ignorance and arrogance of ‘free-world’ policies in Ukraine, quite probably such a cataclysm will preclude ever ‘learning the lessons’ of history and socioeconomic reality about this region that has already been at the center of two World Wars and one revolution. Studying in advance, and thereby discovering a more credible reality orientation to matters in this terrain, seems like a better approach. This second section of a first five-part report on Ukraine will continue the process here of seeking understanding about how things truly stand in lands that for centuries people called ‘Little Russia.’
Past As Prologue in Ukraine: Communism & Reaction, Fascism & War, Finance & Community in ‘Little Russia’
Section Two— — —(As a Homily Stick started us out in BTR Number Two, “The Needle of Consciousness Will Penetrate Next to Nothing If Our Thirst for Knowledge Does Not Outweigh Our Fear of Honesty.” Section One of this assessment laid out the false or at best incomplete and biased reporting of monopoly media about Ukraine and then began to explore how the region experienced World War One and the Russian Revolution.)
…The war’s mayhem, for the Cossacks and Ukrainians, occurred largely on the terrain of ‘Little Russia.’ At one point, survivors of an engagement, having seen half their number literally cut to pieces by Austrian machine-gunners in Galicia, returned to find Golovachev, the Division Chief-of-Staff, showing off snapshots of the action that he had taken and developed. A lieutenant struck him in the face and then collapsed in sobs. “Then Cossacks ran up and tore Golovachev to pieces, made game of his corpse, and finally threw it into the mud of a roadside ditch. So ended this brilliantly inglorious offensive.”
But these communistic proclivities did not spring forth full-blown from the Russian Revolution or from Russia’s and Ukraine’s horrific experience of WWI. The radicalism that permeated Ukrainian culture also contributed to the area’s being a center of the 1905 uprising against the Czar, where the insurrection on the Battleship Potemkin took place in Sevastopol. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth in fact, what we now know as Ukraine—which was then ‘Little Russia’—was home to diverse radicals and militants.
One whom many Ukrainians consider a ‘national poet,’ Ivan Franko, embraced Marxism, socialism, and internationalism on occasion, while also feeling the populist pull toward nationalistic pride and rejection of Russian preeminence. In displaying the complexities of Ukraine, he demonstrated the fierce core of a ‘to-the-ramparts’ orientation. Many other commentators also note the late-nineteenth century prevalence of socialist, communist, and other anti-establishment movements and analyses among Ukrainians, with the common emergence of revolutionary leaders here such as Leon Trotsky, whose well-to-do family owned a large farm North of Kyiv.
But these fiery threads of contrariness go back further still in regional history. Partly, this relates to the role of Jewish culture in the region, on the one hand serving as exploitative agency for the czar’s tax-collections, on the other hand yielding many of the wage-earners and artists and thinkers who rejected their forebears’ legacy to become the region’s first proletarians and gadfly intellectuals.
Not that these veins of insurrection were the only elements of Ukrainian life, on the contrary, deeply reactionary forces, loyal to czar or Archduke or church, also existed. Many Jewish people feared and loathed their neighbors. Memories of discrimination and murder, of double-dealing and betrayal, were also part and parcel of the lives that unfolded here. Yet, central conduits of these bubbling cauldrons of contrariety were radical; citizens more often than not spit at the czar, studied Marx, plotted revolution.
Part of this red strain also results from the mines that are today part of the very locus of contemporary carnage in the area, and in the 1870’s gave birth to wildcat strikes and syndicalist actions that spread through all Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev came into the world in East Ukraine, outside Donetsk; his father worked the mines, and young Nikita followed him at age sixteen as war engulfed the entire region.(continued below the PayWall)…
Last Words For Now
Voila! Eight additional introductory components and one complete introductory essay provide the free content for this third installation of the Big Tent Review. Whether or not a ‘people’s media’ is easily attainable or readily demonstrable as a useful contextualization of the trials and opportunities of common folk, my intention is to attempt to contribute to the fruition of such a project, with the stories of my days and nights and thoughts about all manner of other matters, in the shape of summaries, arguments, reviews, reports, and the inevitable blah blah blah. Until next time, therefore, ciao for now.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Jim’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.