Hey folks! Again, I’ve arrived with yet another ‘newest number’ of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine of writings that remain so far exclusively my own 'intellectual product.' The BTR premise has two components, 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, as always, thanks for stopping in and I’ll hope to hear from some of my visitors, some of whom may then become subscribers.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Speaking & Writing, Listening & Reading
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—A Recent Reading of Particular Interest?
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter IV
3. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, PART FOUR
4. Old Stories & New—”I Want to Play Too,” Number Three
5. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Two
6. Nerdy Nuggets—The Origins and Meaning of Public Health
7. Communication & Human Survival—”How to Imagine a People’s Media”
8. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A First in-Depth Ukraine Report, Section 3
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—”Speaking & Writing, Listening & Reading”
I can’t help myself. Even as various of our ‘cousins’ are murdering each other hither and yon, I like to start with Driftwood Messages. They’re pithy, and at least evocative if not perfectly instructive. They are part of my contribution to a People’s Media, a theme of this issue.
The most aged of my Driftwood Message Artifacts contains just four words, which have never changed as six of that line now have sold, with the seventh on the market: Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything. Another has words that also graced one of the first pieces that Alicia and I created long ago and far away, the second incarnation of which recently started service at the table. “Our Cosmic Cradle Rocks, But in Rarely Detected, Barely Detectable Fashion, in So Doing Nonetheless Incubating All the Stuff of Galaxies & Stars, the Earth & Us: Vast Spans of Energized Matter in Transit Contain Such Nearly Infinite Reaches of Time & Space That These Magically Mysterious Marvels Practically Guarantee the Manifestation of Every Conceivable Strange, Unexpected Artifact, & Its Contemplation."
Another benefit, for me, of proceeding in this fashion is that I needn’t include a Wood Words Essay with every edition, all of which seem already so full to bursting as to permit not another paragraph. For today, as well, I am emphasizing, for both moral and practical reasons, the importance of grassroots mediation’s having a ‘dialogic element.’
In that regard, the first message emphasizes something that I don’t make much of a point of highlighting, to wit that this work is inherently spiritual in many ways. When I write a sentence, a paragraph, or an essay/chapter, I am speaking to readers, who are in turn listening to what is there, less in one case than in another but always the same process.
Just having such an exchange can be satisfying, even as extending this back-and-forth purveyance of parries and thrusts inherently opens up new opportunities for action and understanding. Perhaps this is part of what German philosopher Juergen Habermas means when he suggests that ‘ideal free speech communities’ are essential to, or at least highly adaptive in, human survival. We must make room for dialogue, for development, for deepening.
Thus, without exception, the way that we communicate connects to our sense of ethics and, for lack of a more incisive word, spirituality. Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything is a beautiful idea, despite being only arguably true in any universally verifiable way. By implying the necessity for loving, soulful equality, the little sentence is utterly a proverb or psalm of wisdom, a combo of the psychic and the sacred. This spirituality of good faith and well wishes is inherently part of any people’s mediation process.
Whatever the case may be, given current martial events in the so-called Middle East, both this evocation of universal amity and the formerly reported incantations along similar lines on “Terrorist Babies” deliver bracing food for thought. I’ll repeat the text from that earlier iconic piece, just because of its plausible tonic in the here and now.
“Without Exception, Every Human Cousin Starts As an Infant—Every Single God-Fearing Christian, Every Allah-Loving Muslim, Every Torah-Toting Jew, Every Nonattached Buddhist, Every Reincarnated Hindu, Every Wild Wiccan, Every Godless Atheist, Every Single Terrorist, & So on & So Forth, Establishing a Ubiquitous, Indisputable Biosocial Context, the Dire Daily Reality of Which Ought to Require All Inquisitive Minds, With the Utmost Urgency & Diligence, to Inquire, ‘What Would Need to Happen to Induce the Far-Flung Members of Our Fractious, Factional Clan to Treat Each Other With Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect?”
The second new Wood Snippet above, a physics joke that I often end with a quip, “And there you stand, by God, proof positive of the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” has at its center the vastness of All-That-Is in relation to even the most capacious human understanding. All human beings who are not cognitively deficient or otherwise impaired have to acknowledge that certain elements of their beliefs involve faith or guesswork of one sort or another, theory or ideology or blah blah blah. Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems demonstrate this point in practical terms.
In such a context, I would wager tons that the most optimal communication strategy would involve as close to complete openmindedness as is humanly possible. Is that how we treat each other? Is that how we treat ourselves? For example, one might ask, as regards noisome snafus now unfolding in the crazed geographies that the clueless reflexively label ‘the Middle East,’ are we even close to utterly openminded? The clue-phone is ringing on the ‘No!’ line. Duh. Duh to the power of duh.
I like this essentially Laissez Faire quality in myself, that I don’t formulate my opinions in advance. Nor, no matter how jocular or ironic my tone, do I judge others for their thoughts even though I don’t always get the same favor in return, ha ha. The way I see things, anyone can be a part of any conversation that transpires, here or elsewhere. Since this space is mine, I get to control BTR’s microphone, so to speak, but as anyone who knows me knows is true, I’m a very fair-minded person; I’m generally willing to meet someone more than halfway; in the world of backgammon settlements, I’m much more prone to give up equity than to insist on an exact mathematical match.
I mention these things about myself because I’d love to hear from people. Of course, that could mean that readers would subscribe, a lovely concept. But I’ll share my e-mail with anyone. Most of my few readers know me already: that way, they can send ideas and comments to loujamlitgam@gmail.com if they don’t want to be ‘followers.’
Clearly, I’m pretty flexible, and in so stating cap another requisite, if tertiary, aspect of a successful ‘People’s Media,’ about which concept a bit more is accessible a few paragraphs below and in one of today’s essays. In the view that prevails in this issue, a media of, by, and for the people must have at least this trio of components.
This third necessary element, mentioned just above, is that popular mediation must include truly equal exchanges among participants, recipients, and so forth, even about the most difficult topics. The second is that it must be truly openminded and refuse to reject ideas or facts on ideological grounds—tres bizarre, but all too common. And the first is that it must soulfully and ethically promote human thriving and survival. Another Wood Message provides an exit line apropos to this triptych of necessary attributes, as it were, of a popular media pie. I have deployed these lines a lot, but they bear repeating: ‘The Needle of Consciousness Will Penetrate Next to Nothing Unless Our Thirst For Understanding Outweighs Our Fear of Honesty.’
Today’s Big Tent instantiation continues many of the serialized installments that have characterized this effort—All God’s Cousins, Mad Cows & Englishmen, and so forth. As noted, its new content includes this new overview of media matters, a delineation of what a true ‘People’s Press’ might mean.
As well, in a first case of ‘many more to come,’ it examines an aspect of the current context of how our ‘Biosecurity State’ manages its manipulation of citizens to manifest acceptably profitable outcomes for the high and mighty. In a sense, the article below on ‘Public Health’ is a perfect foil for last issue’s exploration of propaganda that plutocrats propagate for their continued collective power-mongering.
After all, an ideal method for inducing erstwhile free agents to act in preferred fashion is to terrify them, through the sorts of propagandized nonsense that Joseph Goebbels and Anthony Fauci made their SOP, that sickness and death must rapidly attend any tendency to either disobedience or individual ideation that deviates from standard protocols. However, whereas Nazi technique focused on a supposed social pathogen, a ‘Jewish race’ with no more reality than the idea of ‘an Aryan nation,’ current U.S. methods highlight ‘science’s’ statements about a virus and the blah blah blah deadly darts that it supposedly sends our way.
In relation to all such thinking, here are two more or less incontrovertible facts. First, masking is noxious in its effects and generally useless as a prophylactic agent against viral transmission; second, the so-called SARS-COV-II pathogen is at most approximately as virulent as a typical flu pathogen. Here is a third assertion: actuarial analysis suggests with some degree of certainty that MRNA inoculations have contributed to significantly elevated mortality among the recipients of these shots. Even attempts to refute this idea make its accuracy appear highly plausible. I could readily go on and on and on and on and on about the damning evidence that condemns the present “pandemic of insanity” that a friend labelled the ‘biosecurity’ here and now.
However, continuing along these lines misses a crucial point. Nothing in present SOP mandates and protocols depends on critical thinking about matters of evidence and argument. Instead, contemporary mores manifest management measures for inducing quiet compliance among the ‘common herd.’ This fourth issue of BTR explores the background of this processing of panicky alarm about health and well-being by investigating the origins of what we might term a ‘modern take on Public Health and its social role and meaning.’
Whatever the case may be, participation is a key element to consider in today’s speculation about the construction of a People’s Media, so to say, similarly as only taking a part in real conversations is likely to produce apt understanding and action about those means for improving people’s lives and well being. With any luck at all, before too long, I may encounter some participants in regard to these matters and more.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
As I point out generally, many of the Readings that I do are for myself. Whether a particular encounter with Gaia is affirming and upbeat or fraught and scary, it inevitably reflects ideas or approaches that might serve us as we seek to wend our ways through wonder and woe, managing, in the event, to follow the advice of Joseph Campbell, ‘to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.’ Whatever the case may be, one must forswear all faintheartedness in fashioning one’s questions and then receiving the Goddess’ answers.
In the event, I asked recently for thoughts about the ‘robustness of my resilience,’ since I succumbed briefly to an airborne respiratory virus of some sort—in regard to which a few doses of Ivermectin proved an adequate tonic, albeit with an all-too-typical lingering cough in the aftermath. The Spiral Spread that I plucked was positively spooky in its plausible applicability to my experience of matters; more pointedly, it was intimidating or worse to a fellow such as I am, with a strong distaste for ‘falling apart like a cheap Sears tent’ and then dying on schedule, as it were.
The Wheel of Fortune’s shifting fates started things out with a big gulping ouch! Past Influences yielded The Hanged Man and Prometheus’ ‘voluntary sacrifice’ for the greater good. The Present Passage served up Aphrodite’s upwelling of Eros in the Ace of Cups, while Likely Future Prospects gave me Daedalus’ shifting loyalties in the Seven of Pentacles. No-Matter-What, Opportunities proffered the always fraught Five of Swords and Orestes’ interlinked lessons of the limitations of fated necessity and the impossibility of exceeding one’s basic human capacities. Problems & Prospects thereafter elicited Atilanta’s fierce loyalty to a creative ideal and its smart-money realization in the Queen of Swords, followed by a Synthesis in which Hades’ required ending of matters appeared with the frightening implications of the pull of Death itself.
Seeing this array of the chances to manifest pain and loss and limitation was in and of itself tough to manage.(continued below the PayWall)…
All God’s Cousins(continued)
In this segment, another character shows up, who, in a later Book in the All Gods Cousins series, will fly as if fated into my literary doppelganger’s life, albeit my encounter with the fetus in this tale does not come to pass till more than four decades after the events depicted here. I learned the sidereal story of his inception into the world from his own lips.
CHAPTER IV— — —“Fucking men!” He laughed as he said it; she arched her eyebrows inquisitively. “I keep stepping on your best lines,” he acceded with a sheepish grin, almost precisely as Gordon was stepping into Angola, mere weeks after Lou and Danielle started their life in Alabama. Now she laughed, for in fact he had done just that once again.
“Yes,” continuing, a bit rueful. “So like the one time we say 'damn the rubbers; full speed ahead. ...” she began.
"Exactly," he said. And then, “There I go again. Christ!”
"You're Jewish," she said in reply, a nervous smile playing her lips as she lit a cigarette, a Salem, "a great brand for sisters," she'd told herself.
"Right. But Christ, I've never knocked up a nun," he stated flatly.
"Yes, I know. You've never dated a nun, kissed a nun, had sexual relations with a nun. You've told me; only a rabbi." They both laughed.
"I never knocked up a rabbi, though, she was on the pill, so..."
"It's sort of like you're a virgin in this department. Is that it?" They laughed again, as tears moistened her eyes, which he insisted on calling "purple-hazel" for the odd lavender tint that stared out from Mary Ann Godchaux's, or Sister Jean's, pretty oval of a face that mounted her at once pert and statuesque body like a holy icon, as if Betty Boop had taken vows and decided to join the order.
One of her students, a sweet sophomore imp, had brought her a glossy-black, natural-hair wig and a stick of fire-engine red lip gloss for last year's Halloween party. “There, now we'll have our own cartoon vamp at the dance.” Sister Jean had demurred, pointing out that all bright red lipstick contained lead, “a known neurotoxin.” Her focus returned to her lover, in all his illicit glory, who was regarding her closely in silence.
"Virginal,” he said; “something like that." The quiet, such as it was on the nineteenth floor of the Cavendish Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, stretched out a long moment of uncertain eternity. She certainly hadn't anticipated, when she accepted the position teaching math at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, that she would start sleeping with a handsome atheist Jew in the room that the school provided for its star faculty, of which she was definitely one, what with her 4.0 average from City University of New York and her bona fides as an assistant teacher in Public School 41 in Brooklyn. Nor had she expected her affection for this fellow, who looked like Joey's twin, for God's sake, to lead to a pregnancy within a matter of a few weeks. They'd used condoms, after all, for the most part. She toyed with a wisp of pubic hair, underneath the fringe of her lover's shirt, which she'd appropriated to wear in the air-conditioned aftermath of their coital crescendos.
Exploring things, given this complicated dynamic, was, to say the least, a delicate business. “Did you know?” she began, a bit tentative as she now played with a button of the dress shirt that she'd commandeered.
“What?" Generally ready to play the bloke, he intervened, though this constituted still more of the 'stepping-on-lines' that he had recently eschewed. "That I'd fall for the sister who was teaching my niece?” He gazed at her averted 'purple-hazel' peepers, as his penis poked out, verging again on erection, from the roomy kimono that he'd snagged from her closet.
“No, no. I was going to ask if you were aware that Catholics are the most likely religious group to get abortions.” Again, the one-in-the-morning quiet, punctuated by honking taxis two hundred feet below, and all the never-completely-muted sounds of hundreds of other New Yorkers, many merely temporarily so, in more or less intimate proximity, hung between them, a black velvet curtain that he parted with his insistent stare.
“Ah, Jesus, don't do that. I think I love you; we could make a go of it.” Now tears stained his cheeks.
“Except I'm a nun, right?” She pursed her lips and paused. “We don't do such things, do we?”
“Yeah, well, I'm skeptical about that...”(continued below the PayWall)…
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)
PART FOUR(Our Thomas Hawkins is about to find out what the upshot will be of his apparently random incarceration in a surreal and yet harshly realistic laboratory setting, with a frighteningly powerful bloke as his cellmate and a somehow both deranged and methodical mad scientist as his inquisitor.)
Though I have generally felt no more valiant than a steer in front of a brain bolt discharge, nevertheless, I had schooled myself, through a predilection for games of chance and a stubborn resistance to the ironic disposition of the fatalist that so defines modern personality, to repeat the old Chinese saying as a mantra, that 'every
crisis is an opportunity,' even if most of life appears as the obverse, that every appearance of fortune is a rotten trick to further enmesh one in the muck. As such, I've come to hold that 'luck,' as powerful a force in human affairs, in my estimation, as any other single item, is in fact nothing other than the intersection of the chances that inevitably accompany any given day, and the willingness to embrace a real choice. Although operationalizing this view had never been my 'strong suit,' I occasionally could call up its intellectual form as a talisman against hopelessness.
"Now then, where was I? " Again, the smile slipped, and a "Damn!" sputtered out in its place, dripping tension and sweat. "Oh yes," jolly again, "you see, we--that is I and those whose vast apparatus of control you are witnessing here," at which juncture his hands glided through a 180 degree flourish that might have been operatic in origin,
"have been having the devil to pay to devise some workable response to this"--he was honestly flummoxed about how to state the matter--"truly unfortunate turn of events: economic meltdown, agricultural snafus, riotous hunger, bee-colony collapse, universal BSE, complete..."
"The fuck is Bay Ess Ai?" Norman asked, proving he had more wit, and a closer attention, than a careless compadre might have given him credit for.(continued below the PayWall)…
Old Stories, & New
“I Want to Play Too”(continued)
(The narrator’s lover’s and her paramour’s perfect love resembled the perfection of the King and Queen of France in 1788. Its smiling facade hid the rot that would soon burst forth with decapitating energy. Love, as a social relation, demarcates the narratives that we create about ourselves. The heroine of this story wanted the passionate purpose of a true marriage and would rue not having it.)
Part Three—While bitterness was close at hand, as increasingly moody Spring turned into an even less-loving Summer, the lovers elicited only approbation from clinic management. Anna was frequently and overbearingly manipulative regarding her lover's time, status, and anything else that might touch her. She inserted herself shamelessly into his professional life.
"Christ, she'd stick her head into Ron's office when Bill was in there kissing ass, with her cheery laugh, and 'just checkin' up on you two!' Ron undoubtedly had apoplexy." Mary Jane Sommers, another adolescent instructor, related this to me at one point. And Ronald Paladin was as likely to countenance such behavior with aplomb as he was to allow one of the resident/inmates to stick a finger up his ass. A paraplegic with a will steelier than his leg braces, his level gaze occasionally evaporated outbursts of complete psychosis among patients.
Yet, even after my arrival the next Fall, a favorable disposition toward both Starr and Anna appeared operative. And, by that time, the couple's relationship heaved convulsively, like a thrombotic derelict, showing lots of energy but no focus and little chance for survival. I've often wondered at this unusual sign of laissez faire from "Master Paladin", who expected and far too often obtained the devotion of indentured servants from his subordinates.
He hardly seemed the sort to support, in his tyrannically-ordered environs, dallying that might lessen an employee's devotion to the cause of Tripacteia. The "discipline, service, and love" of the corporate mission statement, these were the qualities an associate would guess he would demand.
The explanation for tolerance became clearer as my understanding of the place grew. In fact, tolerance is not a strong enough characterization; active support of employee sexual connections was common. Ronald's wife, Sally, introduced Anne Marie and Bill within a week of Mr. James employment, according to my astute friend Mary Jane. 'She practically told them they'd do each other a world of good if they dated.' The director’s wife frequently encouraged the formation of bonds of other than platonic affection in this manner.
In other words, the geist of Tripacteia had a pronounced component of erotic searching. The practical basis for this was not difficult to fathom. Lusty, busty Ann, for example, had attracted at least two live-in residents' fathers; one sent her flowers, the other called occasionally regarding his son and then asked to speak to sweet Annie, who had absolutely nothing to do with the care and treatment of the youngster. Ann talked to anyone, regardless of the potential for scandal or uproar, and the guy had some charm; he was an accountant with wit.
Unfortunately, he also had a perfectly valid marriage, and his pursuit would not have been the first instance of a liaison between an employee and a resident's married relative. In a couple cases, the affair ended in wild and explosive fury, funny and titillating in retrospect but bad for staff morale and awful public relations. Once, someone alerted a gossip columnist that a battery charge in DeKalb Superior Court involved a prominent pediatrician and salacious scandal at a pricey local treatment center. Ron had to kowtow slavishly, a posture that neither his character nor his disability made easy, in order to forestall publication.
Such tales of greedy passion and irresponsible intimacy, though wonderful to recount and hear, rapidly became complete anathema to Director Paladin. And as in any setting that juxtaposed compassionate clinicians with troubled adolescents and young adults, the possibility existed of illicit communion between staff and patient. Half the cases at Tripacteia had roots in some sort of sexual or sensual pathology, and the healthy, wholesome 'case management team' generally offered all sorts of opportunities for positive transference that might go astray. This had never happened, at least not that anyone would admit, but a facility in Buckhead was on the verge of collapse over a sadistic director who had recruited young boys into his harem. A conservative estimate of the settlement costs of the lawsuits there was $25 million.
So both past messes here and the nightmares of a kindred institution helped to shape an unwritten policy. Employees who had any remote chance of interacting with residents and kin, who had the least spark of sexuality, needed to find a safe outlet for their plausible passion. Singles bars provided little assurance of relief, and might contribute to other sorts of difficulties--from hangovers to absenteeism. Thus, Ron and his wife, Sally, became a matchmaking service. Whatever psychological trickery helped preoccupy staff libidinal interest was perfectly acceptable.
Considering this overall environment, Ron's tolerance of Ann's nosiness and interruptions, which he otherwise would have excoriated, made some sense.(continued below the PayWall)…
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—II(continued)
(We left our affable hero in the midst of his full and satisfying existence, carnal congress and material mastery seemingly fate’s beneficent boon to his worthy adoration of luck and life.)
His work, silent but for sibilant tunes of local color or personal power, often took place beneath his cottage, canning and curing and otherwise availing himself of the cool, clean moisture there. The boiling, of slowly percolating pots in his kitchen, and the dancing flames of his hearth, as often as not crowned by his sooty black cauldron, drew neighbors from miles around. Tendrils of scent hooked them, and beaming eyes and eager mouths would lean in Jack's open doors and windows, or wander into his abode to inquire, "what're you cookin' there, Jackie?"
And he'd laugh, interrupting whatever melody he might be whistling, and without raising his famously shy voice from its hiding places share a cup, even with the ne'er-do-wells, though when they inquired, whether slyly or guilelessly, if "you have enough to let me take a bowl of that home," proffering whatever praise or sense of desperate want they believed might most move Jack, he'd look at them stonily and query, deigning to speak in defense of reason and equity, "And what would you be proposin' to trade for my sweat and my goods?"
With the good folk who lived, as Jack did himself, by the Golden Rule, he gave and took in more or less equal measure, walking the goddess' walk much more nimbly than he sang out any scripture's talk, the basis for any life in which joy rules. Such qualities, of course, his lovers found particularly attractive, whether the ecstatic equity in question was gutturally connubial in its emission or of a more spiritual and social bent. In sowing what he had to offer, his purview went well beyond his regular and occasional lovers, sharing not only his output with his wide circle of friends and supporters, rare finds and treasures of his many minds, but also the locations of his secret lairs and springs and many-layered trysting spots where the goddess' energies were in one way or another most obviously manifest.(continued below the PayWall)…
Nerdy Nuggets
These days, “Public Health” is very much among the top topics that those who consider themselves au courant follow, albeit often with a fraudulent dose of COVIDified context. The very idea would have been difficult for citizens to articulate two hundred years ago. Nevertheless, farsighted ‘progressives’ have managed to insist on certain standards well ahead of the languaging of often ‘fake’ narratives of concern for popular well being, such as those that have become ubiquitous since March, 2020.
This essay combines elements of Mary Harris(Mother) Jones’ story with a briefing about the beginnings of the discipline of Public Health and its related study of epidemiology. Mary Harris arrived in the United States from Ireland at age six and learned to teach and make dresses. She came from a family of Irish patriots whose radicalism was part and parcel of her home life as a youth.
She married a skilled metal worker in Memphis, Tennessee and brought four children into the world, aware of the filthy, insalubrious conditions that afflicted workers and slaves, the victims in her view of industrial and chattel slavery, respectively. A yellow fever outbreak struck her community in 1867, inflicting the most horrific tragedy on her life and simultaneously priming her for a life as a nurturing ‘mother’ of the working class, a parental figure who insisted that only by organizing ourselves can we ever achieve even a semblance of social justice.
She wrote about her experience. “In 1867, a fever epidemic swept Memphis. Its victims were mainly among the poor and the workers. The rich and the well-to-do fled the city. Schools and churches were closed. People were not permitted to enter the house of a yellow fever victim without permits. The poor could not afford nurses. Across the street from me, ten persons lay dead from the plague. The dead surrounded us. They were buried at night quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear weeping and the cries of delirium. One by one, my four little children sickened and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial. My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken as was mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the wheels of the death cart."
Mother Jones warned that grotesque health disparities were among the inevitable results of profit’s ascendancy as the primary social value. Her life’s work lay ahead of her after she managed to pull herself together in the aftermath of her horror. Her legendary dedication to union organizing is one of the most astonishing and underreported stories of American history. Her efforts and wisdom will show up hither and yon in BTR’s pages.
Today, the congruence between her own tragic experiences and the origins of ‘Public Health’ give an opportunity for presenting today’s Nerdy Nuggets(continued below the PayWall)…
Communication & Human Survival—”Imagining a People’s Media”
Kurt Godel is arguably the most famous mathematical physicist, possibly even more so that Max Planck. Albert Einstein famously pooh-poohed the necessity, or at least the centrality, of mathematics to an apt understanding of the universe: intuition, reasonable inferences, serendipity, and grace, in Einstein’s view of the situation, all played a role in figuring things out. Physicists, at least ideally, have nevertheless decided to take part in a joint enterprise of describing how everything works.
And, of course, whether by grace or by calculus, ‘figuring out matters at hand’ is also, in some shape, form, or fashion, what any media tries to accomplish. That’s what mediate means, to transfer knowledge, or at least ‘information,’ about the ways of our world, from the Earth, and our culture on it, to an audience. Good storytelling in a way requires writers and speakers to become social physicists; well might we inquire, therefore, how, through what special awareness, might a consumer fruitfully recognize and come to grips with a ‘popular mediation’ of everything? In other words, how can a reader find and engage such work?
The answer probably requires an attitude adjustment of some sort, in the sense of discovering within oneself a willingness to play a part in the process of finding out and articulating matters, actually, in fact, to join ongoing dialog about ‘what’s happenin’ here.’ Obviously, such a probing discursive process is essentially the opposite of almost all current cases of so-called ‘social media,’ where passivity overwhelmingly trumps any potent, let alone purposeful, participation.
Certainly, asserting such a capacity to deconstruct and criticize stands at the center of my reporting in Big Tent Review. Thus, the key to a ‘People’s Media,’ from my perspective, is that it includes me and my work, a demand not so much solipsistic egotism as recognizing that I am indisputably producing material here, journalism and commentary to which I challenge readers to respond, critically, probingly, imaginatively, blah blah blah.
In order to determine how this process of finding and engaging an audience might productively unfold, both here in the pages of BTR and otherwise, one might examine how today’s mediation of matters has managed to become the primary manifestation of this inherently central cultural endeavor. As noted in BTR’s previous episode, reports are forthcoming on such ‘giants’ of media criticism as Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, and Robert McChesney.
For the present moment, today’s essay will examine more generally the contextual background of what we might, along with Professor Bagdikian, call ‘monopoly media,’ in contradistinction to populist cultural output, in contrast, for example, to the humble Big Tent Review. An excellent jumping-off place for this endeavor, perhaps, shows up in a hundred year old volume by Upton Sinclair, entitled The Brass Check.(continued below the PayWall)…
Odd Beginnings, New Endings(continued)
Ukraine remains at least a subterranean component of almost every arena in the everyday here and now. Speaker of the House kerfuffles ‘interrupt’ Ukraine funding. Elections in Europe illuminate ‘cracks’ in the ‘wall of support’ for the gangsters in the nation who are America’s darlings. Last month’s review of a French movie about gringo imperial processes, a film which a Parisian Marxist cinephile directed, unveiled two direct links to Kiev and its environs—Jack Palance’s heritage and Godard’s Communist Party hero’s stewardship of early Ukrainian moviemaking.
No doubt, given the lines of kith and kin that connect all human beings, a deep enough digging might reveal these types of linkages anywhere on Earth these days. In any case, here we have the next portion of BTR’s first extensive report on Ukraine as such.
Past As Prologue in Ukraine: Communism & Reaction, Fascism & War, Finance & Community in ‘Little Russia’
Section Three— — —(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.”)
Capital’s early fascination with Hitler did not begin and end with German manufacturers and merchants. Quite the contrary, from the early 1920’s, this artist and poet and believer in Germany’s volksreich attracted influential patrons from further afield than Central Europe.
The Rapallo Treaty between Germany and Russia, meanwhile, showed the risk of permitting even a ‘liberal’ German polity free rein in the aftermath of Versailles. Trade and even collaboration with communists rooted and grew.
This then is the context for the origins of Mein Kampf and the conflation of Jewishness and banking by social reactionaries. As opportunities dissipated, as jobs disappeared, as those who had lived gaily and sweetly found themselves hungry and fearful, the attraction of ‘strong policies’ that squashed unions, eliminated immigrants, emphasized warlike investment became irresistible for many. But this social setting for fascism did not pay the tab.
Who Financed Hitler is one of many sources that prove that the potent attraction that industrial and even finance capital felt for Adolf Hitler elicited his ascendancy. Again, this took place not only among German titans but throughout the haute bourgeoisie in the ‘free world’ as a whole.
A fascinating case study in this regard concerns Henry Ford’s admiration and support for the Austrian corporal and his National Socialist machine. Readers may find a thorough introduction to this tale here. Hitler kept a portrait of Ford behind his desk, the only such depiction in his office. Mein Kampf itself owed allegiance to Ford’s monograph on “international jewry,” which the industrialist had bequeathed to the Nazi leader without strings. Ford Motor Company laid the basis for the expansion of military production that, as Ford and Hitler both agreed, would have the primary purpose of annihilating the Soviet Union.(continued below the PayWall)…
Last Words For Now
So again we have arrived. Another smorgasbord, further extravaganzas of fiction and reporting, more reading, all of these and more have come to the fore, each initiation above, every conclusion below. What I would ask readers to consider is a simple nostrum—while murder and mayhem are indisputably part of the human condition, they will never be the only choice, the sole directive from on high about how to live our lives. Our continuation as a species arguably requires that we ponder this point. At the same time, we, as Americans, have an existential duty to consider the context of current events so as to avoid ecocidal catastrophe in our names. Blah blah blah, true enough, but listen to the videos for examples about the “Middle East.”
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.