Big Tent Review

Number 6, 12.1.23

Hey folks! As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine.  BTR’s twofold premise continues, first, interesting and entertaining writing and second, 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appears serially or periodically or otherwise little by little. 

Often, as today, a particular edition will have a theme, or at least a thematic rubric, so to speak. Numbers 6 and 7 deal with a rarely examined here-and-now conjunction, that of empire and human sexuality, an unexpected intersection of geopolitics and personal intimacy. In any event, thanks for stopping in and all of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading!

Table of Contents

—Introduction: Holidays, Holy Days, & Hopes For Light’s Life-Force Return

1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Some Recent Spreads

2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter VI

3. Wood Words Essays—Categories & Their Anti-Fascist Purpose

4. Empowered Political Forays—The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Repressing Relationship

5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, PART SIX

6. Old Stories & New—”I Want to Play Too,” completed, Number Five

7. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”Little Red,” continued from #5

8. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Four

9. Nerdy Nuggets—Daniel Defoe’s Feminist Forays & Moll Flanders’ Sagacity

10. Communication & Human Survival—Internet Origins, War, ‘Pornography’

11. Happy Union Grammar Nerds—’George Orwell’s Passive Voice Classic,’ Part Two

12. Erotic Snippets—Undermining B.O.B.

13. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A First in-Depth Ukraine Report, Final Section

—Last Words For Now

Introduction—”Holidays, Holy Days, & Hopes for Life-Force Return”

I work a lot these days from my little hovel of a studio—no heating, no running water, very rudimentary—where I sometimes have very interesting conversations, both informative and evocative, with the property owner here, ‘Darla,’ a former insurance agency proprietor who now manages her life based on rental income from a dozen little buildings on the Marshall Bypass. Recently, we agreed to disagree—or so I hope anyhow, since she’s the property owner here, my landlord, ha ha—on our conclusions about ‘immigrants’ from Mexico who have ‘come from all over the world,’ those from Asia and Africa of special interest to her.

I pointed out that I’d seen indicia of data that demonstrated that the vast majority, “between ninety and ninety-five percent of them,” I asserted, came from Hispanic origins in this hemisphere. ‘Oh no!’ was her response. The upshot, as anticipated, anyhow, by me, who was willing to bet ninety-nine bucks on the matter in my ‘putting-my-money-where-my-mouth-is’ style, was that over ninety-five percent came from these mas o menos ‘local’ points of origin.

No doubt, that my most common reply to such arguments, “I told you so,” was again in force is inconsequential. This whole arena of nationalistic and chauvinistic and wildly contradictory ‘ethnographic discourse,’ will merit attention sooner or later in these pages. However, now is neither time nor place, since the ‘theme’ of this issue is relationship and gender and the divide-and-conquer, of the most intimate and insidious sort, that results from today’s conjugal and familial landscape, embedded as it is in militaristic predominance by America’s ‘exceptional’ ‘leadership.’

In addition to me, one of Darla’s tenants is a fifty-year-old son who is experiencing ‘relationship problems’ of one sort and another, which, I have inferred, imply his working doubly hard to pay some young princess’ passage through things. “He’s never learned,” she said to me, “the hard lessons, you know?” I could see the consternation, like muscular, facial, emotional waves, crossing and recrossing her features, her eyes’ darting, her mouth’s puckering and then pursing, the corners of her eyes all atwitch, revealing irremediable feelings of gloom about her progeny’s ‘middle class’ existence, which may well appear just now to be circling the drain.

At this juncture in our give and take, obviously, she needed some relief, an ideal instant to find a scapegoat since, with her petty bourgeois propensities, she couldn’t readily render capitalism as the culprit, ‘good God.’ Thus, as if guided by destiny, out popped the ‘immigrant swarms’ concept to explain ‘why everything is so hard’ and other matters at hand, from which, in turn, flowed our more or less agreeable disagreement.

Our little ‘chat,’ as unsatisfying as it may have been as a case of ‘reasoned debate,’ nevertheless manifested, and pretty magically at that, at least one incarnation of today’s little juxtaposition of imperial imprimatur and erotic dysfunction. The exchange on that sunny, globally-warmed, honeyed afternoon, relaxing in the warmth and shielding our eyes from the glare, brought to mind, reflecting on the scenario later, my Portland shtick, the central piece of one of today’s little video things.

The script goes like this. ‘So you have this friend about whom you have strong loving feelings. Unfortunately, he or she is going through a nasty rough patch. You promise always to be accessible if she or he needs someone with whom to converse, day or night, so you leave your phone, turned on, next to the bed. Sure enough, soon thereafter, the ringer chimes its peals at three one morning.

“Hello?” you offer, instantly alert.

The voice through the ether is frantic. “You gotta help me! You gotta help me!! You gotta help me!!!”

Alarmed yet available, you reply. “Yes. Yes! Tell me what I can do.”

The response is instantaneous. “You gotta tell me how to get to Portland.”

This is definitely odd enough to be anomalous, yet still you are engaged and seeking to deliver the goods. “Okay? So where are you?”

Again, the riposte is immediate. “I don’t know, but you gotta help me get to Portland.”’ The absurdity here is obvious: one cannot navigate a way to anywhere if one is unaware of one’s location in the scheme of things, if some sense of where one is coming from is not readily obtainable. If nothing else provides this essential info, one must recollect one’s previous pathways, so as to deduce one’s contemporary coordinates, so to speak.

In like fashion, whatever are our concerns about our lives right this second, they have resulted from discernible step by step passages that have yielded the here and now out of yesterday and the day before. Quite simply, one just cannot trek to a desired destination without, minimally, this cognizance of previous perambulation, as it were. By the time a fellow traveler has ambled anywhere near the length of my own sojourn, she will almost certainly be aware of such interpersonal relationship dynamics, he will with near certainty see these sorts of issues clearly in his love and friendship connections.

Nevertheless, embracing an analogous impossible impasse is precisely how many folks, perhaps a vast majority, try to figure out their place in the sociopolitical current context. As regards Ukraine, for instance, or homelessness, or Gaza, or cancer, or ‘China,’ or depression, or almost any complex and multifaceted ‘problem’ of our present passage—say refugees and migration, perhaps?—those who woe what is happening at this instant in time cannot state even the fundamentals of how things now truly stand; of course, such a capacity to recognize this moment depends on, perhaps more so than on anything else, an ability to explicate the most basic aspects of what came before, or from whence the here and now originated.

In presenting things in this way, pretty clearly, I am justifying, or at least rationalizing, a Big Tent Review historical-foundations approach to matters of merit, so to say, one that I champion. One must start with the past and how matters from before have evolved to yield just this second in all its multifarious variations, including both all its unusual components and its sum of regular features as well. Minimally, this type of template is a sine qua non for reasonabley astute sentience about All-That-Is.

Then, obviously, one must be able to see the present, in utero, inside those vistas from a ways back, no matter how much these insights might inspire flights of horror from this very awareness. That such gestation is no more arguable than that each of us entered the world from a woman, unfortunately, does not make acknowledgement of that fact any more common than its relative paucity in present discourse would indicate.

Et voila! Big Tent Review Number Six makes a stalwart stab at substantiating this interconnectedness both in and between the most intimate and most geopolitical elements of human existence. An intermingling of empire and Eros shows up in regard to every piece of this new issue, especially if one knows a little background.

Ten of thirteen stories in particular illuminate these interconnecting threads with pulsing potency. This is true as Tarot Tidbits give way to new characters, savvy miscegenators, in All God’s Cousins; and then, as Wood Words notions explore categories in Marshall Arts’ ouevre, a bright thread connects Eros and Polis to demonstrate empire’s natural subsuming of love relations; the fourth item purveys an analysis of Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, a monograph that asserts a central role of sexual repression in all such reactionary processes; BTR’s central fictional quintet’s materials appear in sequence at that point, all with their incidental instantiation, so to say, of inevitably intertwined erotic and political components; “Nerdy Nuggets” then delves Moll Flanders and how Daniel Defoe’s genius created an eighteenth century simulacrum of our own ‘bleakest love landscape in history;’ “Communication & Human Survival,” in the meantime, proffers an initial ‘media history’ articulation, an examination of Internet origins in thermonuclear competition that has culminated in a space replete with pornography of every conceivable cast; a George Orwell take on English usage falls into line then, Eros and empire both lurking offstage in this erstwhile screed against the passive voice; “Erotic Snippets” next reveals its carnal confabulations, with BTR’s final piece of a first Ukraine exploration to culminate Number Six, with multiple ‘behind-the-scenes’ connections to today’s thematic foundation.

However strongly we might hold our opinions about humanity’s being ‘a higher life form,’ we must acknowledge the ways that the most carnal and concupiscent concatenations of life force energy both launch our individual journeys and delightfully and demonically delineate the parameters of our pedestrian pathways as well as of our moments of purest epiphany. Since we all originate erotically and, with luck, also fill our days and nights with that inaugural energy, even as monstrous ministrations of war and terror might undermine the entire Homo Sapiens endeavor, a process of examination and explication like that in “Number Six” might truly be a godsend, or in the parlance of a BTR POV, a ‘grand Goddess gift.’

In any event, the universe has been throwing all manner of validating evidence at me that such a conclusion is much more likely valid than not.

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits

For this second once-monthly issue, I begin with a recent three card spread, one which I actually delivered over the phone, since my inquirer had left Hot Springs before she could find the time to drop in on my Marshall Arts Feral Nerd Performance Space. I pointed out to this particular seeker, as I do to everyone, that I claim zero credit for whatever useful comes from this process, yet something helpful, at minimum the ever desireable ‘food for thought,’ appears to present itself on almost every occasion.

As always, I wanted no knowledge of her inquiry. I shuffled when she said, cut when she directed me to do so, and chose cards from the fanned-out array in front of me when she intoned, three times, “now!”

The results were suggestive enough to manifest all manner of explanatory narratives; in the event, she also wept a bit, so that some emotional connection with her query must have been implicit in the array. One meets the most interesting and intricately wired humans by performing these mantic-arts rites, again confirmed here as I learned about this young woman in the aftermath of our session.

In the event, her Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis layout was stupendous, coming and going. The Dioscuri Twins were first in the garments of the Knight of Swords. Thus, conceivably, at the center of her inquiry might be a likelihood of clever and querrulous connection, at once both conflicted and constructive, contrary and required. As an aspect of such a plausible dynamic, preparing for upheaval that necessitates personal and social transformation might be a good focal point.

The Magician next came to the fore to represent a reasonable inner contradiction to this potential main point. Hermes, in this card, initiates The Fool’s journey in the Mythic Tarot tradition. The master of all realms of life, a playful and often scandalous scamp, the God champions the traveler, the wayfarer, the seeker, those who are lost and looking for answers, even as he might readily send any supplicant through thorny thickets rather than illuminating any version of a ‘high road to easy success.’ This deity of communication and master of missives always opens up the potential to manifest previously unanticipated skills and abilities that can help one to extricate oneself from insalubrious circumstances with the mundane miracle of our own persistence, resilience, and perspicacity.

Finally, Hecate’s spooky and hypnotic power showed up in the form of The Moon. (continued below the PayWall)…

All God’s Cousins(continued)

At the same moment that Thomas Johnathon James, Lou’s superstar brother, was carrying bones out of the continental divide in Southern Colorado, Jackson Jackson Jemison had just enrolled in a Mainframe Computer Maintenance course at local Jefferson State Community College, just outside Birmingham proper. He still had a year of high school ahead, but his sweetheart, Mary Alice Mettison had signed up to learn to be a Dental Technician, and between the two of them they found a dozen or more trysting spots on campus. Today’s chapter introduces their part of the story.

CHAPTER VI

Mary always drove. That was one trick. Another was that he often rode in the back, as a look of complete servitude suffused his face, almost a hangdog expression, though with a gleeful cast that would sometimes flow across his features like the ripple in still surface water when a big fish was passing beneath.

Theirs was an odd love affair. He was well aware of that. When his wise preacher-man father had enrolled him in Karate lessons—Jackson Jackson was barely six at the time, and the roly-poly child, so soft and doughy and noncombative, just made imagining the stout adolescent or the burly, muscled, limber adult inconceivable—‘pops’ had known precisely what he was doing. The KKK or the cops might do in his eighth and youngest son, of thirteen children, but they would not do so without a significant cost or a dire fight.

Mary had first approached Jackson when he had just turned fourteen and was already putting his juju moves to productive use. She was then sixteen and said that she liked to watch him, while she served as a captain on the girl’s drill team, working out with the football squad, where Coach Thomas—foretelling later martial moves in Jackson’s life—had hired the freshman to teach his varsity lineman blocking, evasion, and tackling methods that might finally get them past the district playoffs.

The coach had begged the youngster to be part of the football program, but the elder Mr. Jackson had been obdurate: “No football, no boxing.” He left open for Jackson to decide about basketball—too short—or baseball—too boring—but no sport was permissible that involved, as the then still-sturdy and always ferocious Leroy Jemison stated the case, “Africans beating up Africans for money.”

Martial arts’ story differed. Its contests entailed his son’s overpowering mainly White boys who thought that they were superior. For his part, Coach Thomson had seen the kid evade and toss his team’s college prospects about like bundles of foam in their gym-class flag-games and had had the presence of mind to recognize that here was a “secret weapon.”

In the event, it had worked. Parkview won State that year for the first time in its history. They reached the finals the next two seasons too, winning once more, before young Jemison had sauntered off to Tuscaloosa to remain part of his odd-bird pairing with Mary Mettison, whose daddy was probably Klan and whose uncles and granddaddies were all decidedly Klannish in their orientation.

“They’d’ve killed me for sure, and maybe Jackson,” she admitted to Louis in their one unguarded moment, as he washed party glasses a few months hence and she chattered tipsily nearby in their Eighth Avenue kitchen. Nor did Jackson’s father appreciate this commingling. He only spoke to his son again after his cancer diagnosis, when Jackson came back to visit Birmingham from the Arabian Peninsula with his second White wife in train.

Jackson’s dark hue could easily have been Nigerian or other Central African cast. His was an almost hairless masculinity, a musculature in which the surface was smooth and almost pudgy, even as what was beneath was as firm as the will that he had demonstrated with his daddy, the fire-breathing fundamentalist Primitive-Baptist preacher to Bessemer’s Southside Soul Ministry’s three-to-five hundred members, a man who sired more than a dozen offspring, and, for all his moralizing, was also an all-too-typically profligate ‘man of the cloth,’ a potency and eagerness that his final boy child had fully inherited.

At Parkview, Mary had found this guileless sex drive, which he always flaunted and yet with which he never, ever attempted to score, irresistible. Jackson’s philosophy was straight from Lao Tse: “Indirection is the only way to gain one’s goals.” Infectious smile, relaxed mien, percolating chuckle, and then, with the rising lilt that was almost a giggle: “You know?”

Meanwhile, prior to picking him out on the practice field, every date whom Mary had feted for four years through the church supper kisses and movie theater gropes and furtive yet grinding moves on various dance floors away from the Southern Baptist purview had come up short, so to speak. Not one had propositioned her; “I was about to bust!” she admitted to the cousin who had first inquired, about Jacks, “What’re you doin’ with that boy, girl?”

Of course, neither had Jackson suggested any erotic exploration. But he had been clear, in any event. “So, you have a healthy appetite, don’t you Mary?” he’d asked when she was eating a candy bar as they chatted on the bleachers, an October sun’s setting explosion of golden light’s enveloping his Black and her pale forms.

“I’m always hungry after practice,” she replied artlessly. Then she blushed as his grin, and the tilt of his head, told her with precision that the candy that he had in mind did not come in a wrapper.

He exploded with laughter. “You’re just always hungry. That’s okay.” As she reddened noticeably enough to make her blend with the sunset, he reassured her. “That’s good. I like that.” (continued below the PayWall)…

Wood Words Essays—Categories & Their Anti- Fascist Purposes

Marshall Arts’ Driftwood Magic started out as three categories, now joined by a fourth: “Life & Love & Art in the Time of COVID.” The initial trio bookended Politics & Personal Empowerment with Love & Erotic Passion, on the left, and Philosophy, Psychology, & Spirituality on the right, so to speak.

In this Northern Hemisphere context of light’s daily diminution, a recent item that sold may be apt to ponder in regard to our current Thanksgiving and sacred Winter experiences, decidedly a ‘Spiritual’ message in a ‘Political’ costume, or vice versa. Two stalwart local fellow travelers, healers and iconoclasts, bought this little Thought Charm just a few weeks back.

“Halcyon Yuletide Celebrations Contemplated No Shopping For Gifts, No Mediated Ministrations of 'Merriness;' in All Probability, Denizens of These Original Solstice Gifting Cycles Would Guffaw in Astonishment Or Recoil in Horror at the Self-Aggrandizement & Self-Serving Silliness That Plutocratic PR Impresarios Have the Gall to Call 'the Sacred Christmas Season.'"

Another interaction has just transpired, out here on a breezy Sunday, that embodies the dictum to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’ or to ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.’ Aaron, one of those drawn to me perhaps because of my clarity and willingness to dispense with judgment, has just departed, perhaps slightly less confused than when he arrived, or, in any event, less troubled by his disordered state of mind, living on the road while living on his wages and his wits as a Stoic who nonetheless responded emotionally enough to the latest version of “Death’s Double-Edged Benefits.”

He and I hung out together on the forty-two degree Sunday that I was praying would generate more engagement, and income, than had the two previous days in this year’s undeniably tepid Black Friday ‘extravaganza.’ We had been bantering, bartering, and bickering for at least three quarters on an hour when he espied the little coffin that contained the idea that he impulsively announced his intention to purchase.

I pointed out its nearly $150 cost, he negotiated a down payment and installment plan, we sat to put his name and e-mail and the piece’s words in my Sacred Gold Book, only to discover that he actually had no money. Ahh. ‘No problem,’ I laughingly affirmed, while thinking that the universe had further fuckery in mind in my little marketplace, alas. The message is an apt one, quite plausibly, on the cusp of a new ‘tripledemic’ and blah blah blah.

“Every Breathing Being Eventually Accrues Death's Inescapably Double-Edged Benefits, Which Support Such Requisite Functions As Respiration & Perspiration, Even Inspiration's Aspiration, For Not Only Will Doom's Fell Swoop Sweep Clear a Path For the Young & Strong to Make Attempts to Prance Their Dancing Chances, But All These Jejune Creatures Must, As a Matter of Course, Also Kill to Live, If Not to Feed Themselves, Then to Defend Preferential Dietary Options, Along With Their Own Skins, From Plethoras of Wily Predators, in Aggregate a Mundane Embodiment of Complete Complicity in Extermination's Extemporaneous Eradications, a Deadly Jive That Thereby Delineates Existence's Most Piquant Paradox: Though We Automatically Cling to Life As Fiercely As Famished Infants Feed at the Maternal Fountain, We Must Somehow Come to Terms With Dissolution & Demise, Even Our Own, Even Our Children's, With a Measured Grace That Is Due Any Central Element of Gaia's Grand Gift." (continued below the PayWall)…

Empowered Political Forays—”The Mass Psychology of Fascism: Repressing Relationship”

Wilhelm Reich is one of America’s madcap maestros, someone whose vision penetrated to the core of many critical issues, even as his ultimate response was to build a machine—a ‘commodity’ to overcome the contradictions of commodified social connections. Of his many volumes, I have read but one, mentioned in the title. Its assessment so allured me that I’ve read and used snippets of the volume—which I first devoured in a few hours while riding to and fro on the Red Line between Cambridge and Boston, all thoughts of the weekly ‘championship’ bridge tournament enervated and abandoned—on countless occasions, many scores of times at minimum.

One big reason for the pulsar pull of Reich’s narrative was that it in many cases, and at its core, revolved around sex. In case the reader hadn’t noticed, I frequently, if not constantly consider things as part of a sexual millieu, so to speak. How could things be otherwise? Intuitively, if not for certain deductively, a positive attitude toward humanity’s innate sexual state seems more likely to make sense than would any type of demonizing and denigrating of this inherent human energy.

In preparing to write this column, inevitably, I’ve done some searches, the results of which are sometimes titillating and always fascinating. Here is one: <reich "mass psychology" review OR analysis OR background OR research>. It garnered 132,000 hits. By narrowing my search, <reich "mass psychology" review OR analysis OR background OR research sex OR "sexual repression">, I anomalously more than doubled the total detectable links.

Reporting this is gratifying. Let me tell you. I mean, I’m not the only one who finds thinking and acting erotically irresistible. As I like to quip in my ‘feral nerd performance spaces,’ “It’s how we’re wired!”

Reich’s language too is redolent of our primal human condition. In the Table of Contents, the sixth overall section presents a wonderfully evocative subtitle, almost ebullient—“Organized Mysticism: the International Antisexual Organization." The second subheading in the subsequent, and seventh, overall section is similarly delightful: “The anchoring of religion through sexual anxiety," while the following big portion of the book, Number Eight, develops “Some Problems of Sex-Political Practice.” Its central subsection offers, in its turning, this: “Sexual happiness versus mysticism.”

Overall, roughly half of this intricate and interesting volume, which proffers a prima facie case that guides how we think about fascist upsurges, deals with the varieties of sexual repression and suppression and erotic demonization, and then illuminates how they fuel Nazi proclivities and practice. So much was this theme central to Reich’s argument that for many years I vowed to bring out a new edition with a slightly altered title, to wit this: Sexual Repression & the Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Today’s review might readily give voice to Mark Knoffler’s lyrics, “I dug up a diamond, rare and fine.” It makes sense of so much that it should be part of all erstwhile ‘progressive dialog,’ despite the hideous negativity that Gringo belief-structures deploy to evalutate humanity’s sexy propensities. Well might one inquire, in any case, ‘what were Professor Reich’s premises and arguments in this work?’ (continued below the PayWall)…

New Fiction Series

Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)

PART SIX(Both the narrator and his burly companion have learned that they have become cannibals. However surreal the situation may strike them, they both feel quite warmly the visceral stakes of their captivity, a heated anal prick, so to say. After Norman’s resuscitation from his vomiting and loss of consciousness, they pay close attention, at least for a time, to Dr. Winston’s delineation of established initiatives to manage this altogether prickly present pass.)

"Our response, which goes by the acronym 'N.H.P.,' for 'New Human Protocols,' has a variety of educational and logistical hurdles to overcome, obviously."  Both Doc and I smiled, though I imagined that my grin suggested sickly gallows humor instead of an actual, or even a forced, bonhomie; Norman huddled inside himself.

"It's all devilishly complicated, you see," Doc said, his face for the first time compressed with a semblance of compassion, "but in a nutshell, we have at most a matter of years, maybe only months, to come up with a reliable vaccine to administer to the ten per cent, more or less, of people whom we feel confident can live on chickens.

And since processing chickens may not proceed in the way that we've come to see as normal, which is to say with twenty-first century efficiency, in the," and here the rumble and stutter of Doc's hmm's and ha's positively grumbled like a gutsy volcano, "inevitable turmoil at the loss of the other ninety-odd per cent of our friends and families and enemies and strangers, processing chickens may not proceed in the way that we've come to see as normal, which is to say with twenty-first century efficiency, we need a back-up food supply that won't undo the vaccine that has saved a few of us."  He looked at us, albeit I'm not sure that either of us were up to realizing entirely the implications of his presentation, as an appraising buyer might have examined a pair of prime bulls, one of which would end up steaks while the other was let out to stud.

Norman's attention, in fact, had completely disappeared, and my own capacity to internalize this data had dissipated markedly, until Doc had this to offer us, with an upbeat, esprit-de-corps intonation.  "And that's where you two fine specimens come in!" (continued below the PayWall)…

Old Stories, & New

“I Want to Play Too”(continued)

(In this concluding section, we encounter what probably plenty of discerning readers have already guessed is coming. Nevertheless, inasmuch as both devilish and angelic aspects of life inhere in its details, a continued attention to the narrative might bring a tear and guffaw at once.)

Part Five—Madness and despair characterized the next few weeks for Anna. She'd almost decided to quit on her own and devote herself full time to her acupressure work. She had a magical reputation among athletes, so the loss of the job posed very little economic fright. But she couldn't quit coming back to "that bitch," often adding believably snarled regrets that "I didn't break her God-damned neck."

After all the feedback she'd gotten, Anna still fantasized with total concentration that she could win her sweet lover back. The problem was not Starr, but the hussy who'd seduced him. Wild and insatiable, her curiosity ate at her like strong acid, and an incident weirder and more sinister than the parking lot spat was brewing in her because of lack of contact.

Then she appeared at my back door serene and grinning one twilight evening six days after her brawl. In she waltzed without so much as a hello or a knock, ravishing me thoroughly. Afterward, she revealed what was driving her.

"I heard there's an opening for an information specialist at the school." She knew that I'd looked for some time for an escape from the bureaucracy, of oriental opacity, that characterized the city library. As well, my former lover worked in a nearby downtown facility, and running into her several times a week made me a tad sad and frantic. So Anna had plenty of reason to offer me this information as if she thought only of me in the process.

Obviously, in reality I was to be Anna's agent. Thus she recruited me for my job at Tripacteia, which is worthy of many tales in its own right, as well as for my role in this wild melodrama of love, lust, and the search for connection. Or so the picture appears on the surface. Actually, Ronald Palladin, whose favorite work as he pursued his education Ph.d. from Harvard was Machiavelli's The Prince, may have possessed an even deeper cunning than the patently obvious conniving for which his colleagues and employees knew him so well.

He mentioned my interest in his former child care coordinator in passing at my initial interview. And Anna had heard of the job from perky little Mary Jane, who took over day care and cut back to teaching a single class a day. As Byzantine as this entire story is, my hiring could represent insurance by the headmaster against Anna’s showing up one day with a smile and an automatic weapon.

Indeed, with me to question every evening about the situation in general, and in particular about rumors regarding Wanda and Starr, we entered into a very therapeutic portion of our relationship. She could feel some distance from the sorry rich boy who'd dumped her, without feeling totally isolated. And if she especially wanted some salacious bit of information, I, always the purveyor of data, could dig out the tidbit she desired.

Still, a period of calm and healthy growth was not in store yet. Anna's affect would sometime be so vacant, I wondered if she had retreated into some sort of trance. But she would shake off her mourning as easily as stepping out of a shadow into sunlight most of the time. She intended to get on with living, even if she harbored wishes of patching things up with a fantasy man who became her personal horror story.

Unfortunately for us, I was neither ready nor willing to take up where she had hoped her love with Starr would lead. I basked in her physical heat, but made clear my suspicion of monogamy, and desire for variety.

Even had we had the strength to overcome the obstacles that the context of our love affair presented us, she may have found my quirks unsustainable. I thrived on intellectual geysers that burgeoned from the disorder of scattered books and piled papers, dishes unwashed so that tomes could be digested. She sought a spare and efficient aesthetic that emphasized internal connections between two people. In a matter of months, scarred despite a great deal of healing, spontaneous smiles as yet intolerable, she left Atlanta to establish a lucrative bodywork practice in a Colorado resort community noted for its progressive health opportunities. (continued below the PayWall)…

Classic Folk, Rejuvenated

Here we present a fourth piece of an initial ‘fairy tale’ recontextualization, a stab at storytelling so as to show therein connecting layers, perhaps, of mythos and psyche and human awareness.

Little Red(an old tale in new garb)(Continued from #5)

(Little Red and her grandmother, having relieved Will-the-Wolf of his tale and thereby immunized themselves from his direct vengeance, have heard the noxious toxins of hellish lupine hoards that care nothing for their courage and strength and fortune to this juncture.)

CHAPTER FOUR— — —"Did he make a sound before you put him to sleep with the mead?" asked good Gran, grabbing her progeny by the elbow to command the child's attention away from the sound of the looming wolves.  "Did he yell or howl?" persisted Gran.
        "I thought my ears would burst," replied Little Red, recalling the prolonged screech of pain and fury that Will had emitted.  The girl kept looking for the source of these new howls, which seemed suddenly to emerge from every direction.
        Gran's fierce grip jerked Little Red's attention away from fear, as the old woman spit, "We must fly child!" running at first with the youngster in tow and then letting her go so that Gran herself could force her old legs to move like a young deer's limbs, prancing for its life.
        Little Red, of course, could have left her favorite grannie far behind, yet, despite the terror that made her low as she ran, like a calf surrounded by dogs, a good trick indeed, to whine while sprinting, the athletic girl faithfully stayed right on her elder's
tail, ready to pounce, with the knife that she still carried, in the old woman's defense.  Although Gran's recently intractable flu had nearly healed, Little Red could hear the labor of phlegm and the torture of age in her grandmother's breath.  Still, they did indeed run, though more like a modest breeze than a fierce gale, through the woods, their fear a spur that drove them to leap beyond their strength.
        While the droning yowls of the ancient killer pack drew ever nearer, until the sound was so distinct that the women could discern different voices in the unholy choir, and the beasts, sensing prey, began to yelp and bark and growl in triumph, the good pair wavered not an instant in their flight.  The light of Gran's cabin winked at them, finally, through the now thorougly darkened woods, just as the moon's ghostly golden glow broke above the crest of the hill that protected Gran's little village from the scouring North wind.  Little Red felt sure that the moon would not mock them with its light, and she relaxed just a little with the certainty that they would reach the cabin.
        Of course, that was when a first quartet of snarling, snapping fiends, each larger than either of the female humans who sought to flee, broke through the trees to announce that they had the pack's victims in sight.  The chorus of deafening cries truly exploded then, and one ancient canine, grey and white and long and lean, fangs
dripping from the exertion of its own tiring trek, left the protection of its fellows to leap directly at the throat of Gran, whose white mane marked her as the weaker of this human duo marked for doom.
        The pack's leader was not larger, however, than many of the boys whom Little Red had bested in tough physical tests.  With the agility of a fencer, she stepped to the side of her dear grannie and sliced the creature's throat, so that a moon-brightened stream of blood and howls from hell simultaneously rent night's chill air.  Before the other wolves could regroup, and without a second's reflection, Little Red had removed her precious cape, her strong arms now bursting with goose-flesh from two sources, and, to her Gran's astonishment gathered the two of them under it next to the twitching, gurgling lobo captain, its death rattle barely audible in the wild commotion. (continued below the PayWall)…

New Folk Fables

Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—IV(continued)

(With Molly’s jealous fury as its proximate cause, a lynch mob, or something very similar, has risen up at the behest of Sir Robert Thomson, with its object the seizing of good Jack Higgins and ‘teaching him some lesson,’ brutal enough to guarantee morbidity and threaten mortality.)

…In the general mayhem and hilarity that ensued as 'Fat-Bob' upended himself in an inebriated heap, only Sir Winston, whose eyes unsuccessfully sought out the raging green poison that blazed forth from Molly, maintained any semblance of cohesion or decorum. Finally, by planting himself practically astraddle Molly's heaving breast, her teeth gnashing a combination of rictus grimace and predator's snarl, he conveyed to her, with a self-deprecatory grin and a player's fierce belief in a wining hand, "No matter your sins, girl: you'll always have a toasty bed and plenty of all you need, eh?"

As a snaking convulsion writhed through her after her ears took in Sir Winston's promise or challenge or both conjoined, though she still refused him her gaze, a guttural moan issued forth from the crimson, sodden beast that she had become, rising in pitch to a punctuating shriek: "Hang him!! Damn you all unless you hang this man who so violates me as a woman."

Collapsing in a molten, flowing heap, a coarse whisper cast a final curse that the sensitive ears present realized meant primarily to goad the still semi-conscious and disoriented Sir Robert, to insure that his courage remained screwed to the sticking place, as it were. "Nor one, nor any here will recover your manhood till you've done this thing for me."

She needn't have worried about her lover's intentions. (continued below the PayWall)…

Nerdy Nuggets—Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders' Sage Foresight

Perhaps history’s most prolix wordsmith, Daniel Defoe, who lived to be nearly seventy, published lengthy, memorable works once or more annually for many decades, albeit most people today who recollect his name remember him for his most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, or, more literally, The Life & Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, a come-on title with a florid subtitle in addition.

He led a very politicized life full of the libertine erotic ethos that then was fairly popular. He spent a year in prison. He had multiple scrapes with, and narrow escapes from, constituted authorities. His writing in identifiable fashion channels the dialogs of his life and times, wild adventure mixed with insight, high idealism intertwined with a blissful pleasure principle.

Defoe’s subheading for Moll Flanders, meanwhile, provides a trenchant historical reference point, in relation to women’s wonders and woes that parallel Defoe’s own. It reads thus: “Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and dies a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums…"

In some semblance of things, Defoe was, quite likely, initiating what I’m calling, for example in All God’s Cousins, Documentary Fiction. He wrote compellingly of the inner turmoil that a real person such as Moll Flanders might undergo in connection to well being and fiscal needs. His dialog, in its incisive essence, seemed lifted from a recording device’s soundtrack. He referred constantly to known institutions and practices: Newgate and the gallows merely the starkest of these. His characters’ interpersonal dynamics evolved from incontrovertibly commonplace motivations and beliefs.

The plot is worth recounting, therefore, almost as a historical biographical timeline. Defoe’s Preface lays out the biographical premise of the story, the promise of which he richly fulfills in what is in broad terms a comedy of errors, morality tale, romantic comedy, and true-crime yarn all in one. This woman who is his heroine contends with a rude fate at every turn and manages the trick with some measure of wit and even, given the circumstances, real wisdom.

The female child who became Moll Flanders starts out as a thief’s offspring, her mother’s exile to Virginia from Newgate Prison only delayed till her fetus entered the world in typical fashion. Cared for as a ward of charity till she found herself abandoned as a four year old, she closets herself away from erstwhile Gypsies who have taken her on as an investment. Discovered in her Colchester hiding place by local Essex authorities, good fortune lands her with a kind gentry widow, diminished in circumstances, but loving and a good instructor in the arts of domestic well-being, cooking, cleaning, stitching, crocheting, and pinching pennies.

The first crisis after this clearly fortunate outcome to ‘Betty’s’ earliest adventures is the County’s plan to put her out to service, which discomfits the eight year-old child so greatly that she is disconsolate with weeping and woebegone terror at the prospect of being a foundling ‘orphan’ whose only position in life would be that of an overworked servant. She wins over her ward, whom she treats as her mother, and, when this good lady dies before young ‘Betty’ is fifteen, her horror at being a maid has lessened as she has gained skill and become a beautiful, intelligent young woman.

In fact, she so impresses the mother and sisters of one family that she has occasionally assisted that they peremptorily make her a part of their household staff, a position in which she excels as she flowers into a sublimely gorgeous human female. Two brothers are also a part of ‘Betty’s’ new estate, and neither of them can resist young Betty’s charms.

The elder brother seduces her quite artfully. The future Moll blames her own vanity for this situation, but the licentious pair manage to avoid impregnating her, a commonplace catastrophe that would likely have moved her in the direction of her mother’s fate. She accepts substantial sums—at least many thousands in today’s currency—from her lover, whose promises of marriage are mere puffery even as Betty completely believes them.

The younger brother also falls for the sweet maidservant, but he is not only honorable, he is also relentlessly persistent. Betty is flabbergasted. “Yet I could not think of being a whore to one brother and the wife to the other." Under the pressure of certain exile should her true situation come to light, she allows the scoundrel sibling, her love object, to convince her to marry the callow innocent who so adores her.

Their marriage, an elevation of station practically inconceivable, fulfills Betty’s childhood fantasies of becoming a ‘gentlewoman,’ and when her mate dies after a few years and a couple children, she consigns her youngsters to in-laws of means and enters Essex society with a small fortune, more or less like a hundred grand in cash today. Though opportunities for marital or mistress status abound as she takes a room with one of her suitor’s ‘wild and gay’ sisters, Betty holds to her precept. “(A) woman should never be kept for a mistress who had money to keep herself.” (continued below the PayWall)…

Communication & Human Survival—Web Origins & War & Porn

How do most people think about the set of phenomena that add up to the World Wide Web? More and more, especially since 2020, opinions have been decidedly a mixed bag of ‘neutral,’ ‘positive,’ or ‘negative’ beliefs. BTR #5 argued that a central element of understanding complex problems must focus on their history. Well might one wonder, therefore, “what are people’s beliefs about how in the heck this virtualization of existence came to pass?” This is not a readily answerable question, which ought to be worrisome if in fact we think that comprehension of these types of issues, using this kind of historical lens or framework, might just be important.

Given the importance of mediated life, virtual reality, the e-sphere’s impact on everything from business to politics, from the boardroom to the bedroom, so to speak, devoting time and effort to this sort of explication makes perfect sense. In any case, in this first of an occasional series of articles about the Internet, its meaning and evolution and purpose and more, readers will encounter today a combination of overall contextualization, case study, and analytical commentary.

To start, a little thought experiment occurred to me; I had zero sense of how it would turn out. Very simply, what would an investigator expect would be the ranking of four one-word searches for the terms ‘God,’ ‘love,’ ‘sex,’ and ‘porn?’ If I’d had to choose, respectively, I would have ranked the quartet 1, 3, 2, and 4. I got one position right—sex was number two, with over 14 billion connections; love was first with sixteen billion even; third was porn with eight billion and change. God brought up the rear with a mere 7.1 billion hits.

One might extend this with surreal and fascinating mixtures or with more quotidian blends. Thus, in the follow-up expansion of this introductory look at the Web’s origins, readers will juxtapose such searches as <porn god> and <porn sex love> and more.

The point, in the event, must, at a bare minimum, include the notion that our virtual arenas compensate for what we’re missing as actual biological beasts with elemental beastly biological needs. That said, virtual reality’s erotic landscape now combines the surreally alluring expressions of FLR erotica with the primally nauseating, at least to many basic lads and lasses, ministrations of fisting and fisticuffs while fucking and all such ‘fetishes’ of violence, domination, and brutality.

Whatever the case may be, the question remains. How’d this all get started, anyway?

Ballistic Beginnings—Two Decades of D.o.D.

I mean, I know the answer, of course, at minimum in broad outline. My life in no small measure consists of researching this sort of interrogatory. Before October, 1957, media moguls and military contractors primarily interacted in regard to propaganda projects, either at home or abroad. After Sputnik’s spectacle of coordinating communication and data transfer from on high, despite their vast on-the-ground superiority, America’s ‘captains and commanders’ felt very starkly the pulsing horror or a prospect for realistic visions of communism prevailing in this arcane new martial arena.

The military aphorism is apt: ‘seize the high ground.’ The strategically oriented Soviets had done so. In the popular press and on monopolized broadcast outlets, as well as in the halls of power—from the Council on Foreign Relations to the President’s National Security Advisors—or on the pages of elite journals—in Orbis, say, founded in 1957 in a climate of wary jingoism, or in the more venerable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, both in their way ‘liberal’ publications, or in either of the twin pillars of upper-crust-establishment thinking, both started in 1922, Foreign Affairs in Washington and International Affairs in London—stark warnings and a clarion call of ‘to the ramparts’ poured forth in reply to Russia’s little satellite.

The lead article in Orbis’ Winter, 1959 issue bore the threatening title, “Technology and National Survival,” by George C. Reinhardt, a ‘strategic scholar’ who became a leading proponent of the perspective that ‘outer space’ constituted perhaps the most critical realm in ‘America’s eternal conflict with Communism.’ This mediation of matters lit a fire.

The significantly greater extent and destructive capacity of U.S. thermonuclear-megadeath potential notwithstanding, for practical purposes, both on the mass-collective-suicide battlefield and in relation to Keynsian boosts to key economic sectors, America’s response to Sputnik’s success orchestrated the prioritization of controlling space, on the one hand, and absolutely guaranteeing extinction-level hydrogen-bomb barrages, on the other. Each of these objectives likely inherently necessitated, and indisputably correlated with, efficient and yet comprehensive communication channels.

Whether of warhead design or rocket fuel chemistry, whether of survivable electronics or practical bomb shelters, or something else altogether, especially something ‘new and improved,’ scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats all agreed that an entirely novel mediation of ongoing dialog was essential, a conclusion that had military contractors of different sorts licking their chops. One of the ‘altogether different’ outcomes was a missile specialist’s inventing the first computer video game.

The policy upshot of all this brouhaha was the formation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) in the Department of Defense. While initially the efforts of this massive ‘shaking of the federal money tree’ ended up dispersed among scores of university, government, and corporate research facilities, soon enough those who were trying to manage this process needed wider net to facilitate the array of joint communication and interactive development routines and dynamics that were unfolding as a result of all this expenditure and the findings and practices that flowed therefrom.

Thus, in 1966, the first continental ‘packet switching’ computer network came into existence, as ARPANET. Soon enough ARPA acknowledged its parentage and became DARPA, so the network’s name gained a letter to start as well. Among the achievements that transpired during the ARPANET/DARPANET phase of Internet history, Shakey the Robot foretold both artificial intelligence and mechanize murder machines, while the Transfer Control Protocol’s(TCP) capacitated wide-area-networks generally. The Network Transfer Protocol followed apace in 1970, and e-mail’s inaugural missives arrived thereafter.

After the Defense Communications Agency took over network supervision in 1975, a key missing piece of a practical World Wide Web came online as a souped up TCP, the Transmission Control Program. This period ended up being the dawn of the I.T. age. Not only longstanding giants like International Business Machines, and upstart successes like Hewlett-Packard began to commodify and market a wired world, but completely novel business experiments arose, as in the case of Apple Computer, now arguably the most highly valued company on our little planet. However extensively one might examine such matters, this dawning light of the now was martial in nature, with a decidedly thermonuclear glow.

Many ‘patriotic critics’ of those who would rub people’s faces in the militaristic wellsprings of the web want to reorient this kind of history. Whatever the case may be, pornography made no widespread appearance on these initial expressions of electronic and computational networking. That development awaited the passage of the High Performance Computing Act in 1991 and the formation of the National Research and Education Network that same year, his participation in which facilitated Al Gore’s specious claim of having ‘invented the Internet’ that had its actual roots in the Modern Nuclear Project’s strategic deficiencies in the 1950’s.

A three part series is upcoming that will examine more thoroughly this interim in the evolution of modern media, a slice of time with Minow’s Vast Wasteland at one end and the initiation of a proto-world-wide-web model, replete with porn, at the other, with a moderating influence of war-spending and anticommunism throughout. For today’s purposes, this briefing serves to deposit the reader, so to say, on the walkway to the doorsteps of the modern Internet.

An America Online Case Study’s Confirmations

Multiple intersecting timelines play key parts in all the manifestations of virtual life, which so characterizes the present pass that many people can no longer conceive an 'unwired' existence. Computers, military and academic laboratories, printing and publishing, telecommunications, all have an arc of expansion that, as one, has yielded the montage of interfaces and devices and distracted human beings who meander over the earth today, both actually and electronically, both as flesh-and-blood and as avatars.

America Online, or AOL, emanated from the fire and flux of DARPA-nets development. Its founders, Steve Case and his predecessors, availed themselves of the rocket-scientists’ and computer engineers’ protocols for packaging and transmitting information while staying in constant communication with colleagues and minions and more who had business-plans for these flickering cursors of virtuality. They made the modern world what it is, right down to its portals to porn and fetish and glitzy naked excess. (continued below the PayWall)…

Happy Union Grammar Nerds(#2)

(Grammar and style go hand in hand. And sometimes, no doubt, we want to obscure the subject and emphasize something other than the person, place, thing, or idea that is a thought’s true central motif. However, despite lawyering, lobbying, and other slippery sorts who might favor such locution, most folks more likely benefit from plain speech, directly spoken.)

Passive Voice, George Orwell, General Outrage

Disputes & Brouhaha About Promoting Or Condemning the Passive(Part Two)

ORWELL’S ESSAY

Only a few style-and-grammar prescriptions are likely to generate as great a scholarly and critical interest as that which “Politics and the English Language” has received. Google estimates a total of just over two-and-a-half million resulting connections if a researcher enters the following slight variation on the title in the Internet giant’s ‘engine:’ “politics of the English language.”

Whatever the plethora of reasons that might engender that level of engagement, the fact is incontrovertible that people “check out this Orwell shit about, you know, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ or more generally ‘the politics of the English language.’” And at least a small chunk of this huge sample—plausibly a majority of entries—nod to or note in some way the matter of passive voice, in passing as it were.

For whatever reason, then, a sizable number of global citizens, who have interests that bridge ‘politics and the English language,’ find George Orwell’s pronouncements alluring enough to perform a Google look-up. At the same time, Orwell himself writes in the text, which is a rushed and scattershot affair indeed, more like a schoolboy’s composition than a completely articulated scholarly or otherwise expert conceptualization, “Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.”

What in hell does that imply? The essay’s tone is about as far afield from irony as one side of the galaxy is distant from the other. In his helter-skelter need to state these things, and (What? Have done with them? Get back to them as time allows? What?) convey them to readers, he had caught himself writing vaguely, reflexively relying on passively voiced verbs. (continued below the PayWall)…

Erotic Snippets—Undermining B.O.B.

“God damn you!” Jo Ann said with a laugh.

I giggled inquisitively, my mouth poised over her sweet love channel. Then she repeated herself. “God damn you, Lou James.”

So I stopped, reversed course, and lay beside her. “What?” I wasn’t sure whether this was fraught flight-or-fight territory—a specialty according to my lover of all Pisces lasses with their always fickle pairs of fish—or something more jocular and fitting with the overall mood of the moment, which had been heatedly jolly indeed for much of the early afternoon: our ‘Nooner’ and our ‘Twoner’ had run together, so that our mutual gushing had blossomed explosively so many times that the entire span of this brief eternity was one concatenation of blissful kissing and mysterious hissing of prissy percolation.

I pulled back, not quite breaking contact, but definitely offering some breathing room between our genital equipment, so to speak. “What’d I do?” I repeated, honestly inquisitive.

“You’ve ruined Bob for me,” she grunted, with a closing “Hmmph!” for good measure, although she provocatively sidled her back side into my groin simultaneously, thereby initiating an ongoing and salacious bump and grind.

I laughed, a long and hearty guffaw that turned into giggling whimpers as she slithered and turned to take me in her talented mouth, the epitome of the old saying, ‘that girl could suck the paint off a trailer hitch,’ silencing me entirely but for little moaning cries of delight when she moved an additional ninety degrees to straddle my face, in turn, so that my legendary lingual skills could ignite their fires. “I love you, Joannie,” I managed when I took a breath, before I continued my slurping ministrations’ intention of delivering orgasmic frenzy’s repeated crescendos.

Only afterward, a half hour or so hence, did we continue our dialog about ‘Bob, (her) other boyfriend,’ about whom we had been conversing for a few months, just slightly less time than since our first, wild lunch date in Hendersonville, which inaugurated our freaking, fucking, sucking, bucking frolic through things, en route to uncertainty’s election, for the most part, of either erotic completion or denouement.

‘Bob,’ actually, or more accurately anyhow, needed a slightly different elocution than this voicing of a shortened ‘Robert.’ It needed to convey ‘B.O.B.’ instead. (continued below the PayWall)…'

Odd Beginnings, New Endings(continued)

The ubiquity of Ukraine’s impact persists, as Gaza’s Palestinians’ horrors explode each day with a new batch of corpses. One can, with minimal effort, find a two thousand year dynamic that interconnects these apparently separate geopolitical struggles, even as President Zelensky apparently merits the quip of being as ‘disposable as a used condom’ in light of Israel’s crisis.

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 final 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 Five— — —(The Homily Stick that has started us out here remains apt, to wit that “The Needle of Consciousness Will Penetrate Next to Nothing If Our Thirst for Knowledge Does Not Outweigh Our Fear of Honesty.” We are wrapping up and concluding this exercise in reality orientation for readers wise enough to find a few words sufficient for starting a path to enlightenment.)

TSUNAMIS FROM CAPITALISM’S COLLAPSES

As noted at the outset, the brevity of the next two components of this argument result from exigencies of time and space. Much more remains to develop above. Even more so is that true below.

The ‘received wisdom’ in 1914 was that war was impossible. Integration would prohibit it. Except it did not do so. Among the topics and evidence important to consider here are the following.

In Economic Consequences of the Peace, for instance, John Maynard Keynes—a technical expert at the Versailles meetings to dictate terms to the German belligerents, gave a prescient warning about particularly Britain’s and France’s attempts to extract reparations from Germany: another war before the end of the 1940’s.

The Kellogg Briand Pact, which ‘outlawed’ war in the late 1920’s and ‘30’s, is not likely to contextualize as a joke, yet ‘what could they have been thinking?’ is the sole sensible query given such a surreal POV. In no small part, the point of this exercise was to defang communist criticism that capitalism’s contradictions relentlessly impelled nations and people to organize mass murder and warfare as highly lucrative “business propositions”

The Merchants of Death ideation, both as an independent scholarly explication and as the result of the Senator Gerald Nye extensive committee hearings about the banking boons that resulted from financing Europe’s war, have basically demonstrated the rectitude of the communist perspective. Ferrying fascists to safety from Ukraine certainly fits such a calculus perfectly well.

The Manhattan Project, as a prototypical embodiment of conjoining State and War and production, finds in the Ukrainian confrontation of the world’s two leading thermonuclear powers further stark warnings about how cavalier is the present approach to potential for Mass Collective Suicide.

The Marshall Plan, which both unleashed the productive capacity that had burgeoned from the corpses that war created and acted to forestall Soviet involvement with Western Europe’s imperial states, left Kiev’s jurisdiction in a state of dire ruin.

The governmental reorganization —DOD, CIA, NSA, AEC, & more all began between 1945 and 1950—that put into ongoing practice what the Manhattan Engineering District had foretold, were in part dependent on opportunistic recruiting of both native Ukrainian Nazis and Germans who had practiced their depredations in this ‘gateway to conquering Russia.’

This short overview, then, establishes a three-part intersection that prevailed throughout this time and space: economic crisis, technological and organizational development, and the political commitment to warfare-Keynsianism. A continuation of these forces still marks the here and now, especially in regard to fatuous falsehoods about what is today transpiring in Ukraine. (continued below the PayWall)…

Last Words For Now

By happenstance, perhaps, many BTR issues will maintain a certain thematic orientation, if not complete uniformity, in today’s instantiation at least a general examination of Eros and its drive to relationship that occurs today in the midst of America’s ‘exceptional’ imperial pretense so as to create perhaps history’s nastiest ‘love landscape’ ever.