Big Tent Review
Hello, everyone! As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine. This is the eleventh incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, that it will proffer interesting and entertaining writing and, second, 'consumers' will show up who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Quite frequently, like today, a particular edition will have no more thematic unity than whatever glue, so to speak, holds together these moments that we are sharing. Then again, every BTR blast evokes Eros and the libidinal life force energy that is the human brand, a celebration of carnality and ecstatic epiphany, although the shamed and shameful and shameless might quip that all such as this is more like the human stain, ha ha. In any event, thanks for stopping in and the aggregate of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading!
Oh yes, something occurred to me recently in regard to the prodigious outpouring of prose in each Big Tent issue. Substantial numbers of readers confront such a massive tidal wave of text as this and likely just want to flee. Such a reaction is not preordained, however, so long as a specific individual keeps uppermost in his consciousness, clearly centered in her awareness, that all one must do, in order to retain a BTR engagement, is to choose a single story or article and imbibe that.
Or one could skim, listen to Jimbo’s pretty voice, look at the odd and yet compelling graphics, all that type of so on and so forth. Such steps guarantee managing the tsunami in an amicable way, ha ha. So, now: ‘to the ramparts’ and read! Finally, given the ‘slings and arrows’ that seem so ubiquitous just now, beginning with a snippet of Joseph Campbell probably remains particularly apt: we can, whatever else may be true, ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of our world.’
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Dixie’s Legacy in the Creating Modern America
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Goddess Guidance on Modern America’s ‘Elections’
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XI
3. Wood Words Essays—Driftwood Messages and Avoiding Armageddon
4. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, ‘After the Deluge’
5. Old Stories, & New—”Mother Led the Way”
6. Nerdy Nuggets—An Apocalyptic Horseman, (Continued, Concluded)
7. Communication & Human Survival—Deconstructing ‘All Ukraine, All the Time’
8. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Slavery, Convict Labor, & Wage Earners Today
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—From Slaveocracy to the ‘New South’
Tout suite, before anything else, I have a correction. I frequently enough get details wrong and am also significantly, occasionally less than punctilious about updating things. I apologize, specifically for the piece on Caitlyn and Bruce, which I wrote at the end of 2015 and edited at the beginning of 2016 and haven’t much bothered with since.
Back then, s/he was always peeking out from store cash register lines—’self checkout’ was not nearly so much of a thing yet. The Wikipedia article where I both confirmed my error and proved my point about writing in the first place, that monopoly media absolutely lionized this fabulously wealthy athlete for spending money to ‘become a woman,’ made obvious in its links that a focus on this materially at best marginal phenomenon had assumed an outsized cultural, ideological, and propaganda importance.
In relation to Caitlyn who was once Bruce? I mean, Barbara Walters, Vanity Fair, and all kinds of additional blah blah blah made Mr./Ms. Jenner arguably the leading news story of that moment in time. This kind of press dripped with adulation for this wealthy fellow who had the resources to cut and paste himself into the part of a womanly beast, a propaganda coup of epic proportions.
Other ideas and contentions in the series here, to me, provide copious ‘food for thought,’ the primary point of BTR. I still have trouble imagining that someone would take such a radical and thankless step, removing a penis in order to carve out a pretend vagina that inevitably requires ongoing, painful manipulation so as to preclude the forming of scar tissue and closing. But hey. That’s just me; I stand corrected, and I also stick by my guns in regard to my main point about transitioning as a combination of ideology and agenda that has little in it to benefit regular people.
Anyhow, goodness, Goddess gracious bless me! Ha ha. Life’s luminous libations allure with their luscious flowing flavoring of everything in existence. Inasmuch as this emanating effervescence amounts to an irresistible smorgasbord of social realization in the here and now, we ought to pray that we might ground our understanding in science and other factual ways of examining everything, disciplines such as biology and other empirical tools to encounter and otherwise process the world and all the rest of all-that-is.
In this regard, transsexuality is an interesting theory with some circumstantial and a modest amount of direct evidence to support the notion that, to a very limited extent, gender is a fluid concept, so that males and females might, rarely at most, share each other’s biologically gendered structures and dynamics and such. This is the strongest ‘statement of a case’ for a transsexual orientation to embodiment’s delicate miracle.
On the other hand, given the assertive insistence that this at best infinitesimal, offbeat phenomenon has some centrally crucial social part to play in our all-too-often cruel, even barbarically monstrous, world, a critical cognition might question this point of view, pointedly, if not altogether obstreperously. Along these lines, Tyler Durden, whose Zero Hedge is a recognizable ‘free-enterprise’ brand, has just republished an Epoch Times piece, “'Gender Science' Was Merely Ideology All Along."
The original item actually reports arguably essential elements of a hideous imposition of anti-scientific protocols on children who were acting as guinea pigs to determine the safety of powerful, occasionally toxic, potentially lethal hormone treatments that would ease these kids’ ‘gender transitioning.’ This dynamic bears a striking, and completely nauseating, resemblance to a recent New Yorker article that documents in Austria the horrific dosing of youngsters with the powerful hormonal analog, epiphysan, in order “to see whether this would suppress sexual feelings in children.”
Wesley Smith of Epoch Times writes about the so-called “World Professional Association for Transgender Health,” which “led the charge” to promote the grotesque idea that “when a child claims a particular gender identity different from that ‘assigned at birth’—male, female, nonbinary, transgender, etc.—that patient must be believed, ‘affirmed,’ and set on the road to an eventual ‘transition.’"
W-PATH’s adherents ferociously affirm “‘the belief that “gender’”—as opposed to sex—constitutes a human being’s true self and that gender ‘identity’ can be known by the child when very young—in some cases, even before starting school.” This bizarre world view constituted a seemingly “unstoppable ideological juggernaut” for a time.
Then, because the ‘beneficiaries’ of these fascist ‘treatments’—that, just as in the Austrian horror that New Yorker detailed, quite likely had anti erotic ideation at their core—began to speak out about their suffering, constituted health authorities have covered their asses and begun to end these sorts of protocols for kids. These new victims of Nazi nonsense helped “the potential medical harm from puberty blocking and performing surgeries on healthy bodies c(o)me to the forefront—in large part thanks to the advocacy of ‘de-transitioners’ who were affirmed in their gender confusion but came to realize that they are, indeed, the sex they were born. The tragic testimonies of young women without breasts and boys with potential lifelong sexual dysfunction exposed the potential cruelty of the gender-affirming approach."
Such critiques come from multiple perspectives in this regard, including those here, in an avowedly socialistic attempt to capsulize reality’s realm. The primary issue in evaluating such reporting has nothing to do with how correct, ideologically, such journalism manages to be; rather, a reader or other observer must strive to determine the soundness of the reasoning and the realism of the reportage in question.
Who cares about woke? Who honestly believes the promoters of MAGA? All that matters is the how, the why, and the what-are-the-alternatives.
The point should hardly need noting that, with an abortion ban plausibly ‘waiting in the wings’ for a center-stage rollout in the United States, other arenas also further support the argument that BTR advanced back in Numbers Six and Seven, delivering Wilhelm Reich’s considered contention that ‘sexual repression lies at the heart of fascism.’ Eros serves as a central source of joy and satisfaction, true enough. But it also forms the foundation of Life Force Energy itself; to dismiss or undermine Eros, which is thankfully antithetical to BTR, ha ha, therefore works against any potential for healthy, not to mention viable, sociopolitical comprehension and relationship.
Thus, no doubt, in an in some ways completely different set of circumstances, the instantaneous U.S. accusations, in relation to terrorist attacks in Moscow, against ISIS—if nothing else ironic, given American genesis of Islamic State in Iraq & Syria forces—ought to cause a moment’s pause to consider: how, in relation to a complex and faraway terrorist murder attack, could an onlooking State-Actor know almost immediately the cruel culprits and other details of the crime?
We might recall that sex slavery and the beheading of adulterous individuals are demonstrable ISIS practice, an apparently contrasting approach to sexuality that shares the same false ideological roots and has exactly the same allure for monopoly media’s infotainment exercises as do most versions of Transylmania. This elicits, for me anyhow, a subtle and scary hypothesis. Perhaps the easy, even eager, uptake of such diverse horseshit as W-PATH and ISIS belief systems results from something that is provably so as regards the Islamic State—that imperial ‘leaders’ acted so as to create and then utilize the Islamic State in Iraq & Syria.’ Maybe truly established sources also underlie the entire ‘gender quagmire’s’ hogging center stage so much.
Put more incisively, maybe the C.I.A.’s spooks and ‘confidential agents’ of banking and capital looked with grim approval at such phenomena as mangled children and butchered Syrians. The Agency’s bloody hands are all over much of whatever butchering and mangling is going on; again, this is undeniable.
I’m still reading Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. The author never wavers from the forthright admission that he cannot prove that Manson was a CIA asset of some sort, a psyop ‘mind-control’ event that either went awry or operated as planned, yet the circumstantial evidence is damning indeed. That the work of the various spooky shrinks who surrounded Manson used hypnosis and other methods to affect behavior is undeniable; that this fits neatly with The Britannica Guide to The Brain’s chapter, “On the Cutting Edge of Brain Research,” certainly bears a closer look.
What of the campaign of the latest iconic Kennedy? BTR will report more directly on RFK’s effort in coming months. Today’s Tarot Nuggets explore both electoral politics generally and this fellow’s endeavors as a political animal who affirms as given knowledge the Central Intelligence Agency involvement in the murders of both his uncle and his father.
The upshot is simple, if likely discomfiting to all and sundry who actually believe that regular folks can vote their way to victory. Such an idea can be humorous, if darkly so, as in imagining that shooting lots of bullets can win a war without the logistical support and planning on which ‘successful’ war ever depends.
H-bombs once more appear in these pages in their dark, ultramodern, starring role, a happenstance that illuminates, hypothetically anyhow, the persistent insistence that humankind adopt a Uranium Economy at the behest of the Modern Nuclear Project. The approach that BTR is thus far deploying, about most really complex and technical subjects like this, involves a process of contextualization, in which key facts and basic arguments about these topics entwine with varied elements of our popular panoply—from fiction to physics and beyond, ha ha.
Whatever the case may be, one core fact to consider must remain that Uranium is a metal that generally has devastating consequences on living things, especially beings as complex and multilayered as is the elemental basis for the entire Atomic Age, as it were. For me, starting with the likely impact on my health and well-being is sort of automatic. Call me selfish, LOL! Duh.
Furthermore, today’s issue continues the discussion of disease, society, and microbiology with a recap of Number Ten’s examination of the ‘Spanish Flu’ that prefaces a briefing about Bubonic Plague and a second contextualization in these entries here of COVID absurdities, in somewhat similar fashion as noted just above. As a matter of course from day to day, our worries or hopes or concerns or questions are apt to be evocative when they circumscribe life’s inevitable dying moments, or they demand what we might make of it all, or they call forth any beautiful blah blah blah that one might prefer.
One definite takeaway from this work is conceptual, but with practical, material potential for impact. Human health is inevitably social. Often—and many would say close to always—in any ‘disease’ process, the shape of society is a determinative factor in influencing how things turn out. Etiology and epidemiology exist in equipoise with equity and agency, in other words.
As a matter of course, ‘all Ukraine, all the time’ is back on BTR’s radar. The evidence is clear, wherever one looks. Meanwhile, my sweetheart has introduced me to a Ukrainian pianist, Valentina Lisista, a genius-magician at the keyboard, a woman who celebrates a citizen’s right to speak honestly about such murderous impunity as is occurring in her land of origin, an impunity that denies her people a chance to sort matters out for themselves, without the death-dance of “American Aid.”
According to Google she has “touted herself as having become adept at ‘unmasking fakes published by Western media.” In the aftermath of her insistence on fact, nuance, and history—instead of ideology, manicheanism, and profiteering—practically every monopoly media outlet vomited all over her or made fun of her now appearing only in Bulgaria. Only that bastion of decency and reporting regardless, The Guardian, provided even a modicum of measure.
“Lisitsa said she never posted any threats or anything else illegal and she had not been planning to make any political statement during the concert. She said her Twitter activity was borne of a feeling that the coverage of events in Ukraine had been skewed in favour of the new government in Kiev."
Probably part of what this musical prodigy perceives is that a falsely inflated nationalism can never truly correspond to the needs and realities of the here and now, which is to say that everything networks with the rest of the world. The idea is similar to the radical anthem when it intones, “(t)he Internationale unites the human race.”
Perhaps that is one basis for why, as Guardian’s brief does its duty to acknowledge, she has a ‘huge online following’ that generates millions of views for her brilliant and emotionally massive piano mastery. The people, too, may see the fraud in Kiev for what it actually represents, which is to say a predatory Balkanizing empire’s machinations in favor of mayhem and murder in service to Mammon.
“Stand up all victims of oppression; for the tyrants fear your might. Don’t cling so hard to your possessions, for you have nothing if you’ve no rights. …Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.” And, clearly, “let no one build walls to divide us, walls of patriot or walls of stone… .We’ll live together or we’ll die alone.” At last, “the Internationale unites the world in song, the Internationale unites the human race.”
The capitalist may connect the world, even the cosmos, but only socialists or social-anarchists can express solidarity with the vast majority who are one’s comrades, so to say, and ‘unite the human herd.’ An interesting eruption is happening just now in the corporate arena along somewhat similar lines. The Department of Justice is suing Apple Computer of monopolistic practices in the smart-phone marketplace. Huh! Really, WTF?
Really. What’s up with that? Apple must in some way be ‘noncompliant,’ ha ha. Quite plausibly, we’ll gain a measure of insight by considering an orienting quotation from Tyler Durden’s Zero Hedge.
“Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government."
What this little reportorial gem then proposes to explain this entire set of circumstances is that Apple has, purely for business reasons, refused to cut off podcasts for ‘spreading misinformation’ that was actually as close to accurate as anything other than All-That-Is itself. Yes, indeed. Stifling popular propaganda, for the foreseeable future, will remain a top priority of money’s minions.
That litigation is inherently important because it establishes a record, a paper trail, a repository of stories and actors and accusations and more, ought to be clear. A lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration by Ivermectin prescribing physicians plays a supporting part in today’s Nerdy Nuggets.
The Federal appellate action at issue came from the Southern District of Texas, for which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is the arbiter. This said Fifth Circuit contained all of Deep-South Dixie until 1981, when a new Eleventh Circuit came to include Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, while Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, in eye opening fashion perhaps, added the Panama Canal Zone.
In matters of law, religion, culture, and political blocs, the South has a generations long hold on the annals of America, to deploy a common way of phrasing the situation. Well might an observer ask for an accounting of how the former Confederacy’s pull has remained so powerful. In particular, perhaps, possibly people who decry a ‘Trumpian America’ ought to ponder these ways of looking at the way things actually stand.
As a matter of course, one must recollect the old saying, ‘As the South goes, so goes the nation.’ At the least one must keep track of how a solidly Republican, reactionary phalanx now from below the Mason-Dixon line grew out of a solidly Democratic, populist, or at least often more so than not, South from the late 1800’s to Nixon’s initiation of his ‘Southern Strategy’ in both of his Presidential election bids.
The Democratic Party embodied the fiercely jingoist faction of empire, and the role of Southerners has remained monumental—in Congress, in the military, in the clergy—in fostering, facilitating, and fighting for imperial preeminence, the United States’ Manifest Destiny to rule the planet, blah blah blah. At the exact same moment, radicalism and populism and even communism has erupted from Planet Dixie, in direct if not perfect opposition to the paeans to empire.
An overview of my unfinished Master’s Thesis is one way to continue a conversation about the South. Its title expresses a truth of which many have lost sight, so far as I can tell: “A Working Class World—Birmingham, Alabama From 1900 to 1930." The people themselves, their trials and triumphs, their temptations and tribulations, are the defining elements in human existence. A nuance, perhaps a caveat, of such a conclusion is that the vaunted populi may never yet have found its own vox, so that contextualization and control simultaneously emanate—as propaganda and oppression—from the mouths of various purveyors of the divide and conquer schemes on which all ruling class schemes of persisting preeminence depend.
The convict lease system is just one example of this, one that shows up today and was altogether central to my thesis. Thomas Duke Parke, a Birmingham physician of both ethics and acumen, deplored a system that rented incarcerated men who were ‘race criminals’ and jaywalkers to the Tennessee Coal, Iron, & Railroad concerns that became a major part of Morgan’s ‘steel trust.’ The companies, more or less literally, as an apt student in Germany noted and copied, worked their charges to death.
Crushing unions by intimidation, murder, and propaganda was an intended result of such actions. Not for nothing were the United Mineworkers of America the first ‘mainstream’ worker’s federation—the International Workers of the World also welcomed all and sundry—to insist on Blacks and Whites in the same organization. Nothing else would break the bosses’ stranglehold.
In multiple other ways—rock and roll, spirituality, literature, blah blah blah—Southern events and seers and producers have participated in and molded American life and the modern age. Can anyone say “Dolly Parton,” oh my Goddess? That our planet’s H-bomb production breadbasket basically brackets the Tennessee Valley Authority’s model of Germany’s Ruhr armory provides ‘icing on a conceptual cake.’
Today, finally, returning to a trade-union theme, the American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations has taken up the cause of ‘organizing the South’ in a thorough fashion, so to speak, with yet another drive to bring the United Autoworkers to Volkswagen’s Chattanooga operation. They’ve lost each certifying drive heretofore; could such an outcome concern the class allegiance of a corporate union? It’s a thought.
Initially, the formation of which AFL/CIO centered on Communist organizing in steel, rubber, textile factories, and elsewhere, particularly in mining, many of which campaigns took place in the South. Therefore, obviously, we can see one reason for the richness of material for my thesis about Birmingham, with its natural cornucopia of everything necessary to produce high quality steel—coking coal, iron ore, limestone, all in close proximity to a disciplined workforce that would resist organizing because of White Supremacy’s especially fierce grip in the Southern U.S.
We’ve listened to Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglas. Martin Luther King has become a carefully wielded icon of America’s freedom despite official involvement in his grotesque assassination. As upcoming intantiation of things will document, whether under color of law or extrajudicially, violent and deadly repression against workers has much more typified the South than any jurisdiction North of El Salvador, a Latino region that, we shall soon see, has long expressed both the slaveocrat’s and the plutocrat’s drooling fantasy of dominating our fair planet.
Just a closing Mason-Dixon note might grace us with a pathway to this inaugural completion. Probably a few readers out of a thousand would know the name Jamil Al Amin. We will hear of official perfidy about his invidious case here soon enough.
Possibly, a few dozen more from a thousand-reader sample might recollect the name H. Rap Brown. After all, he was a ‘famous Black Panther,’ an organization of critically important thematic impact in U.S. history—a group whose logo emanated from the civil rights struggle of none other than Lowndes County, Alabama, right across the Tennessee-Tombigbee river development from Mississippi’s cotton fields. The title of his provocative, and brilliantly written, volume is a legend: Die, Nigger, Die!
The fascinating and central component of Brown’s life and times is that he’s the same human being as Jamil Al Amin, the ‘notorious cop-killer’ who perfectly filled the State’s framed facilitation of trial and judgment. Once again—so goes the South, there goes the nation.
All right, not quite finally. We wouldn’t ever want, of course, to overlook sex. “Strange Fruit” is a song. Strange Fruit came out as Lilian Smith’s ‘scandalous’ novel about the marriage of a Black woman and White man, years prior to the crucially important legal action that led to Loving v. Virginia. No doubt, this iconic Supreme Court decision will soon enough appear in these pages, as will various publications and endeavors of the author of the luminous essay, “Are We Not All Confused?”
In any case, one cannot ponder spiritual and ethical and moral territory without a thorough rendering of the realms of Eros and libido. This is how we’re wired. No matter the territory, the Goddess and her ways will hold sway.
In its delving story’s muse, Number Eleven has three profferals. In general, the supply of material—yarns that I’ve composed over the years as part of my ‘existential duty to create and share beautiful ideas’—is close to limitless, bottomless, or otherwise inexhaustible, almost without exception in some sense a ‘literature of the erotic or libidinal.’
All God’s Cousins, as a matter of course, presents its newest selection. Chapter XI in the event brings us back to Danielle and Lou. They are navigating dire straits that many relationships have also faced.
Then, Mad Cows and Englishmen breaks new ground, in an imagined future not altogether different from our present passage of culling and slaughter and attendant mayhem’s blah blah blah. The lucky Thomas Hawkins moves from a ‘very near future’ to only slightly more distant moments that are nonetheless radically and irremediably transformed. The thirteenth century or before would probably rank as more likely than any ‘return to normal.’
For today’s installment’s last fictional foray, a new presentation of an old tale comes forward. “Mother Leads the Way” could serve as an anthem of empowered feminist thinking and action. Furthermore, it expounds on an oh-so-believable tale of family dynamics in a daddy-centered household that contained ten males and only three surviving females.
As is inescapably true of anything that I produce, I fully intend—hoping not to be didactic or, Goddess forbid, hectoring—to emphasize an idea, to promote a theme, to recommend specific actions, no matter the fact that all such matters cannot help but devolve to another unspooling blah blah blah. Every story, and especially here, tells a tale of navigating one’s way through all and sundry conundrums and opportunities in whatever terrain one happens to find oneself inhabiting, so to say.
So then! What should we make of the further flood of input that suggests comprehensive additional skullduggery, with a decidedly Slavic flavor, on the part of our precious assets of agency from headquarters in Langley? What outcome ought we hope would happen in this year’s electoral arena? Should we consider, as a part of ‘Top Five Possible Results,’ that Mass Collective Suicide would be a top contender for the quintet?
As ever remains true, inquiring minds want to know. No doubt about it, knowledge naturally necessitates inquiry, openmindedness, and an inclination to amicable argumentative exchanges hither and yon.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
Life, oh my Goddess! Was Rudyard Kipling the one? “I’m sure we should all be happy as kings?” Ah, yes, we live in a networked age; I can check. No indeed, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote those lines in his “Child’s Garden of Verse.”
Reflecting on this truism about joie de vivre in the context of our collective delicate miracle of embodiment, citizens of the United States are witnessing, hither and yon, a level of hubris and intentionally misleading misdirection unparalleled in the crazed annals of humanity—so that Roman emperors’ depredations and Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism seem merely mundane in comparison. We might, therefore, as a change of pace if nothing else, all wonder what in the name of hell, as my mother liked to say, we can do to improve, or at least ameliorate, the concatenations of mayhem’s most murderous machinations that are transpiring at home and abroad, so to speak.
The depredations and slaughter of empire are omnipresent. How can we elect not to continue such vicious carnage? As one famous Red stated the case, What Is to Be Done?
Probably a substantial plurality of people would draw a ragged sigh and intone that more of us ought to vote, George Carlin’s biting insights notwithstanding. And this ‘election year,’ according to all monopolized media, is one of history’s critical hustings crossroads, as it were. In the event, I posed this quest for the Goddess to consider. “How might ordinary citizens profitably and sustainably consider, and possibly even participate in, perhaps even recontextualize, the politics of voting?"
To emphasize again, I claim no credit for how cool some of these arrays are in terms of eerily addressing the here and now, and today’s Spiral Spread is no exception. Today’s set of cards is super evocative and interesting, a veritable smorgasbord of ‘Food For Thought.’
Before we embark on recounting the ‘Spread’ and imagining its meaning, one cannot help but ascertain that electoral battles have often been literally martial in character, a brief characterization of an instance of which begins just a few paragraphs from now but appears primarily below the fold. Along these lines, Hitler’s ‘victory’ in becoming chancellor, in a sense, was inherently epigrammatic of contemporary 1930’s German society’s overall conflicts, just as America’s forthcoming chief executive dog-and-pony-show will ‘fit the times,’ and fights, at hand for us, so to say.
In any event, here are the seven Spiral Spread exemplars that fell from my fingers for this search. In first position, the Essence epitomizes eerie is as eerie does, ha ha. An Ace of Swords, representing pointed punctuation indeed, proffers Athena’s always apt interventions, which, we can only hope, are apropos for our favor and not the flavor of our doom.
The next five cards plop down some potent paper. The Magician’s guiding lights show up as Past Influences, with the pathos of Prometheus to delineate today as The Hanged Man, followed by Likely Future Developments in the form of the ominous Four of Pentacles. No Matter What, Opportunities offers a sigh of relief in this array’s dark pathways, yielding Theseus’ King of Wands before Hades puts in an always nerve-wracking Problems-&-Prospects as the card of Death. Perhaps in this instance, the allusion is especially poignant—important endings feel ever so proximate in the here and now.
Similarly, the Three of Swords presents an all too palpable exemplification of a Synthesis in which underlying tensions must, unavoidably, come to the surface, as when blackheads ripen to richly pregnant pimples, ready for bursting creamily on skin that may be ready, or not, for such activity. Wow. Just wow.
Providing a precise summation of a narrative possibility for this plucking exercise follows below the fold, immediately prior to reporting the results of another inquisitive interlude. Readers might stay tuned, ha ha.
As will happen fairly typically here in BTR’s Tarot work, the Goddess’ input will appear about some two, or occasionally three, related topics, today in particular an apt interlude for assessing the decidedly optimistic but plausibly pathbreaking candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. We will state the interrogatory itself at this juncture: “how might RFK’s campaign somehow be helpful, or successful, for the common people of this land, who are yearning for a real leader, one like the Russians have?"
Before examining any upshot of this inquisitive process, however, I wanted quite briefly to document the obvious observation above that American elections have ever been fraught, perhaps altogether ferocious battlefields as often as not. I wrote about this while still in Atlanta, in a briefing entitled “One Hundred Five Election Cycles Ago in Georgia,” a miniature review of the monograph, Adams Versus Jefferson, by John Ferling.
“210 years ago, Atlanta did not exist. Cherokee still controlled North Georgia against Savannah River encroachments. Census takers counted almost no Native Americans, living where Atlanta now sprawls, but they noted 60,000 slaves among 162,000 Georgia souls. …(continued below the PayWall)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(All these subplots, oh my Goddess! Yes indeed, we all contain multitudes of the experiences of others as they collide with our lives. So too today, in #11, having moved in diocesan fashion from San Francisco to Atlanta in bringing forward a former Jesuit Priest, do we reconnect with Lou and his sweetheart, about to embark on a substantial ‘opening’ of their relations as they navigate grad school and ‘mental health work’ toward their antics in dear wretched ‘Dixie.’)
CHAPTER XI
“Il est, comment puis-je dire, un peu sauvage.” Danielle admitted this into the phone, a bit rueful but then giggling, ‘Tres sauvage, vraiment.’ Savagely wild Lou James was, ‘truthfully.’
Her big sister, married to a Yale professor and very much a part of the hippest scenes of the initiation of contemporary America, was a natural adviser here. She and her tenured fellow were inveterate ‘swingers.’
‘The only department more incestuous,’ in French incestueux, ‘is the Psychology,’ Frederique noted, putting her article in front of the non-count, abstract noun as the French were wont to do, while her aural ‘smile’ came across the miles as an obvious aspect of her thought. ‘And they’re less than half the size of Economics.’
Danielle’s sister, only three years younger than their brother, Francoise, was thirteen years Lou's sweetheart’s elder, meaning that Frederique had come into the world in the Summer of 1939, just before the Vichy regime took hold, much to Danielle's father's liking. Prior to all that politics, however, after war's much-anticipated explosion on the first of September the year of Frederique's birth, the little Alsatian petty bourgeois household had gathered itself together and scooted to Tangiers with infant girl and toddler boy in tow.
Theirs was in almost every way a different globe from the one that Danielle and Louis had inherited and were inhabiting. Thus, Fredi could counsel her little sister not to worry and enjoy whatever came to the fore, so to speak. ‘How do they say?’ Dani's sibling clucked her tongue as she brought the idiom to mind: ‘Eat, drink, and be merry?’ She paused. “Don't you think?”
‘I mean,’ she seemed to be winking over the line, her voice redolent of glee and multiple orgasm, ‘there are compensating advantages’ to going with the flow. ‘So long as you really care for each other…’
And on this score, nothing was amiss. Here’s really the only issue—and it had inhered in her connection with Louis from that first February night when he had kissed her.
‘Too much tongue,’ she had told him then. They had spent at least fifteen minutes in which the erstwhile feminine virtuoso of the pucker had instructed her new male compañero and denizen of ‘French kissing,’ though he spoke only English, how to provide a satisfying buss for a partner who didn’t care to drink his saliva.
But kissing probably results from a genetic programming that permits a range of responses. At one end arguably congregated those who kept their lips pretty firmly sealed even as they might enjoy placing them all over their partners. Danielle was closer to this part of the array.
On the other side of the spectrum, tongues like rolling stones, ‘sticky fingers’ always a prelude to a lick, were those who wanted to swap spit and wrap their bodies strongest muscle with their sweetie’s in a never-ending dance of copulating copperheads. And Louis was quite proximate to the furthest reach of this portion of the range of values.
The upshot of this tangible tangent of difference between these two lovers, who were seeking to create a real partnership, was that at the very least a difference in proclivity at the front end, and top end, and point of first contact in matters of lust and lubriciousness could not count as a point in their favor. They did have sex though. They had lots of sex.
Moreover, for the most part, Danielle found these intersections of what a therapist might call ‘contact’ fairly satisfying, …(continued below the PayWall)
Wood Words Essays—Evading Thermonuclear Extinction
Incredibly enough, the world’s supply of abandoned wood has served to create several thousand pieces of Driftwood Message Art, a fairly common and quite persistent theme of which is easiest to state as a phrase that I’ve invented, as far as I’m aware, “Mass Collective Suicide." It’s horrifying and hilarious at once.
One such missive, replete with a fiery mushroom cloud among its illustrations, echoes some of Tarot’s Goddess gifts about electoral matters: “Electoral Politics Is to Actual Community Power Roughly As Advertising Is to Honest Grassroots Communication: Lacking a Vision, Strategy, & Plan For More Robust Popular Empowerment Processes Than Elections Proffer, Humanity Will Soon Quite Likely Attain Its Apparent Objective of Mass Collective Suicide, Either Rapidly Via Thermonuclear Extinction, Or More Slowly, Through Any Number of Mechanisms of Progressively Worsening & Ultimately Lethal Ecological Catastrophe."
Is the fate of Homo Sapiens going to parallel Tom Lehrer’s song, “We’ll All Go Together When We Go?” We may hope otherwise but the U.S. spends much more than D.O.E.’s minimum of thirty billion a year or so on making, upgrading, deploying, and readying Hydrogen bombs. What these Weapons of Mass Destruction might do is one thing; what they are capable of doing, by design and honed intention, is a certainty: each such device has the necessary yield—such a friendly term—to dispatch hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings to their everlasting ends.
A key piece of Witness Wood—part of my annual promise to speak out about nuclear matters—has stated the case in this fashion. “Irrefutably, Immutably, Hydrogen Bombs Exist for Precisely a Pair of Practical Purposes, The Profiteering of Plutocrats and the Effecting of Mass Collective Suicide ---When We No Longer Fancy Average Folks' Financing Self Immolation To Fatten Trustafarian Corporate Coffers, Then We Will Rid Ourselves of These Grisly, Ghoulish, Genocidal Armageddon Arsenals: Arguably, A Failure to Act Along Such Life-Affirming Lines Can Only Persist Among Criminally Isane Idiots. Psychopathic Fools That Deserve The Fate That Awaits Them."
In such a context, what’s a friendly little puppy to do? As it were. Well, to start with, said amicable bitty beasty has to seek clarity and understanding. As will often end up the case, a story, one that will appear now and again in these pages, provides a dandy place to put our raft-in-search-of-knowledge into life’s stream in regard to these matters that Big Tent Review labels the Modern Nuclear Project.
Frank Stockton wrote “The Lady, Or the Tiger,” one of my two or three favorite yarns from my early and middle years of schooling. He also authored The Great War Syndicate, an overview and contextualization of which is forthcoming. This novel basically posits the social benefit of a imperial cartel’s new weapon’s war-ending capacity, essentially by making armed hostilities ‘unthinkable’ because of the guaranteed losing consequences. Thus, everything would stay as it is, altogether ‘businesslike.’ Large scale conflict would come to an end.
Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities echoes this assumption of eternal dominance. “There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever."
Whatever Stockton’s motivations in composing his ‘war-syndicate’ confabulation thirty years after Dickens’ examination of empire and revolution and heroism, his very act of creation provides decent circumstantial evidence that bigwigs and moneybags and impresarios galore have shown substantial interest for at least a century and a half in weaponry to facilitate battlefield dominance. Such a notion certainly dovetails nicely with the ‘settled for ever’ comfort in command with which Dickens began his tale.
Stockton’s Motor Bomb, the super-weapon in his explication of war’s syndication, so to say, is merely a fantasy that machines might boost one set of humans’ mastery over everything else in existence. H.G. Wells 1913 fable, The World Set Free foresees a victorious Anglo-American alliance at the end of a “Second World War” in 1948, in which victory depended on hand-thrown “atomic bombs” that burned unquenchably and, as in Stockton’s work, thereby made war ‘inconceivable.’
The difference between the two marks the intersection of the Modern Nuclear Project with the ages-long upper class fancy of everlasting imprimatur as a result of some unbeatable bullet, to coin a phrase. In many ways, Frederick Soddy’s work The Interpretation of Radium is the original holy writ of this MNP. Soddy and Wells were close friends; Soddy did speaking tours among the cognoscenti.
In his book, earthshakingly, Soddy imagines the energy potential of a single pound of pure Uranium. …(continued below the PayWall)
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)
Precarious Prequels & Insidious Sequels
Planned Prunings & Revolutionary Seedings
The following pages combine two threads, many years apart and after a hiatus from Norman’s and Thomas’ death match in the London suburbs in 2027. They in aggregate serve to introduce the newest output in this onrushing series.
2029
I’m writing now two years post vaccine. If I live through things, this record will remain secret until I release it to culminate rebellion’s transformative magic. I rarely feel guilty—an inculcated papist, I do not traffic in mere guilt. I always feel lucky as hell. I always try to ‘figure things out’ and ‘consider the big picture.’
I may have mentioned that I’ve joined the ranks of the slurpers who almost invariably begin to drool upon surviving treatment. Nevertheless, doing an unctuous turn to a ‘T,’ I’m dubbing and providing voiceover, appearing as on-camera ‘talent,’ and otherwise serving our World’s New Ordering of our social affairs.
As noted in Number Nine’s completion of the ‘first folio,’ more or less, the ‘crapshoot’ of ‘free market’ societies leads to fraught circumstances, prone to catastrophe. Yet here I am, knowing where all the skeletons are buried, quite literally, though the legacy of these bones is no pretty tale; one may rest assured.
That said, I cannot provide more detail yet about how things stand, what has been ‘set in motion,’ as the saying goes. I have a job. I have my eyes open. The suffering attendant on sudden, massive depopulation is inescapable, but my circumstances as ‘expert witness’ for ‘doing our best,’ and a bloke on top of that, means that I haven’t personally had to participate in said pangs of culling and slaughter.
…Yes. Again. Hello again. So I cope. I try to think about how societies of humans might better match nature and stand for what I like to call Life Force Energy. It really comes down to a decision—some would say among many different pairs of options—to honor, at least slightly, sharing over getting rich. What steps could we take to fashion of our social aggregate an actual community of affable neighbors, people who delineated just such an appreciative and generous attitude?
Once more. Yes, yes. Again, hello. I may not write for a time. I worry about taking a shot to the back of my head, or a quick-and-painless shot-in-the-arm, several times each day. Paranoia is ‘standard operational protocol,’ in London’s parlance. Bon voyage. Wish me luck. Ha ha. I’m not nervous, I’m not nervous, I’m not nervous!
2036
The italicized text below constitutes what I projected seven years back, after I had survived for twenty-five months into 2029, till I finished the original pages of Mad Cows & Englishmen, the presentation of my initiation into the ‘surviving cadre,’ so to speak. In my imagination, my character is wrapping up his final editing of the epic adventures of Tom and Norm and how, in part, in these escapades, Tom survived by eating his mate.
“As I finish reading this ninth chapter now, many years hence, I sense the immediate pendency of a final accounting for the pathways that have led to this juncture. Thus, knowing that I may easily end up just another ‘casualty’ of the revolution, I wanted to make sure that everything above was as accurate as possible.
I also have three more sections, one that encapsulates the period from Norman’s serving as my dinner to my just-finished meeting in the woods with the Council of Revolutionary Women’s Committees. Another will cover forthcoming years of inevitable civil strife as they unfold in real time, at least as ‘I live and breathe,’ ha ha. Finally, many, many installments from now, Goddess granting, I’ll offer my own simple views about how people might live amicably and adventurously and munificently with one another in spite of nature and fate and all the varied ‘slings and arrows’ imaginable therefrom."
Nine years. Is that enough to count as “many?” The entire passage, in any event, might have been a thousand decades or a few hours. Life is like that: afternoons in which millennia come and go; millennia that might as well have been a few minutes, or a lazy, apparently barely consequential, midday’s bucolic interludes. In any event, as has often proven true, I got a lot of things right.
My name is still Thomas Hawkins. Both an aggregate-plastic-and-zirconium name-tag—created from a new material that is purportedly indestructible and that I must wear on penalty of imprisonment or worse—and the flashing ‘digital I.D. on my wrist, attest to this fact. I suppose in the fashion sense of the long gone epoch that ended ten years ago or so, I am a nondescript sack of beast or meat, or perhaps beast and meat is most adept.
Still, I’ve ‘aged well,’ as once was said. I feel twenty-five years younger than my three quarters of a century of play and toil, of temptation and terror, performing mental tricks and libidinous legerdemain as Thomas Hawkins. Were teletransporting possible, my friends from 2015 would find me recognizable, completely without any sense of style but obviously me nevertheless.
On the other hand, I’m about as different from the fellow who cavalierly undertook to report on “Benton Higgins’ screamer” back in 2027, if memory serves—which I as often as not doubt, as if my entire existence amounted to nothing other than a nightmarish virtual reality in which my own past and choices played at best a tangential, if not altogether marginal, part in manifesting the specific contours of a definite ‘here-and-now—as a bystander might countenance as even vaguely plausible. Sometimes I awake from disturbing, dramatic dreams that seem more palpable than an actual life that all too often enters surreal surroundings, suffused with simultaneous horror and hilarity.
But I acknowledge the necessity of reality orientation—time and place and proprioception and all. Time has flown; time has crawled; I have been as awash in women as ever I might have masochistically fantasized, ha ha. One who wishes to hear more may stay tuned for following chapters.
So then. What have I been doing with myself as nine Terran transits around our sweetly salubrious star have been transpiring? For one thing, fulfilling Augustine’s prediction of being a ‘Catholic for life,’ I have struggled not with any guilty conscience—that’s why good Catholics go to Confession and get the blessings of the Sacrament—but with a sense of shame, with all its attendant despair. I’ve been a witting and all-too-willing collaborator with the most gigantic mass murder in the annals of our kind.
On the other hand, hungry for life and breath and joy and frolic as ever, I’ve chosen again and again to persist in my attempts to survive with as much thriving as permissible under the circumstances. So this is the deal. …(continued below the PayWall)
Old Stories, & New
“Mother Led the Way”
"Matthew, that's enough."
Although this simple pronouncement had resounded from Madeleine’s lips at nearly 11:00, everyone in the house, except the new baby and the youngest two boys, heard my mother's announcement through the sheetrocked plaster that separated our four rooms from each other.
After an hour of bickering standoff, she had practically given the man a cease and desist order; and until that moment, every child among us, or at least the eight of us who had progressed to the comprehension of coherent thought, assumed that even God Almighty was aware that no one ordered our father, Sergeant Matthew Porter, to do anything.
Mama didn't give the sergeant time to spit, however. She just took her pillow and a quilt, arose from the conjugal bed, and left. She only went to the guest room, a large windowless closet with a hollow pine door, but as soon as she stepped inside she threw the bolt.
This sort of behavior had become increasingly typical of mother over the past year or so, especially since she had carried Jessica, her thirteenth pregnancy in seventeen years of marriage to her blade-thin and whip-hard farmer man. Mama's defiance challenged my father at a level other than the physical. He could have taken the entire house apart with his hands had he wished. But her impudence—backed up by the ultimate threat, of abandonment—thwarted direct response.
Mama loved all eleven of us, nine boys sandwiched between my sixteen year old sister Marjorie—overweight and beset with pimples—and beautiful six week old Jessica. But for years, struggling with the Sergeant had distracted her from loving us, especially after her second miscarriage, which preceded little Jessie by less than a year. Recently, her relations with us had become positively vague.
Marjorie sweat at the responsibility. She knew mother was suffering, but my sister cooked as many meals and did more of the regular household and yard work these days than mama, who often needed to deal with what was eating her rather than mothering us.
Standing up to the Sergeant required enormous focus and fortitude. He didn't hit her any longer, a forbearance for which we boys would have been grateful. I was not long done with my merely toddling-about phase when he last belted her, but both my oldest siblings told me that she hadn't so much as flinched. Nor did she speak to him for over two weeks afterwards. Coldness was a manipulative tactic dad knew how to carry out perfectly, but aloofness in somebody else, especially someone he depended on for as much as he did mother, made him crazy.
He didn't know how to handle it, and his reliance on physical intimidation decreased markedly as a result. He had to communicate to run the farm, so he stopped hitting his wife to keep her talking. Even with us boys, he had became slightly gentler and more circumspect, according to my eldest brother, as if worried the rebellion might spread.
Still, none of us, not even John, my lean and strong-as-a-sapling oldest brother, would have considered giving the Sergeant an order. We made requests. We never went so far even as to tell him out and out what we were going to do. For such presumption he flattened us with a hard right hand, which only John's catlike reflexes occasionally dodged. Mama's actions portended revolution on the farm.
Clearly the woman had good cause for her stand. Mother had suggested to the sergeant that he forego further paternity since her first miscarriage. That was her seventh pregnancy, the little stillborn brother who'd followed 14 months after me, the middle child of our peasant horde.
"Matthew, you've plenty of hands to run this farm. You needn't use me any more as your baby factory." She told me years later that this was her exact phrasing.
The sergeant turned stubborn as steel confronted by a threat that touched so deeply. "Madeleine, it's just not right," was his answer when he felt secure enough to argue. A narrow-eyed, tight-lipped glare, and frequently a blow as well until the last year or so, were his more defensive responses. Once in a great while, we had all seen it, he would woo our mother like a passionate lover. He swept her into his arms and commanded her compliance to his will with passion and persistence. …(continued below the PayWall)
Nerdy Nuggets—Influenza, Plague, & COVID, Oh My!(continued)
Just to keep things straight, a recap can be helpful to start. In a nutshell, diseases are at most—except in rare exceptions—mainly a cofactor in morbidity and mortality. After all, pestilence isn’t even one of the original four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear in order in Revelation as Conquest, War, Famine, and Death itself.
Some authorities liken the first of these riders, on a white horse, to plagues of one sort or other, but the text is clearly about conquering on the part of at least proto-human actors, not demise—or conquest—by then unknown agents of disease. This point, important if not central, impels us to ponder this matter because in fact, as well as in popular imagination, the causal elements in human mortality clearly delineate social components rather than what we might term ‘biological mishaps.’
For our purposes here, then, the notion is easy to summarize neatly. “World War One, not a Spanish flu virus, was the likely largest factor in a wave of up to fifty million or more deaths in the aftermath of that now long ago ‘Great War’ that all the ‘Great Powers’ undertook for purposes of plunder, profiteering, and plutocracy.”
I encourage readers to dispute me. A paramour once found anomalous, in a humorous sort of way, that I could have managed to be both super stubborn and super sensitive; very plausibly the first tendency encourages the insulting ripostes that trigger and exacerbate the second.
Nonetheless, I’m praying for discourse, even if it ends up completely disputatious, ha ha. Just the process of ‘searching for grounds of agreement’ is so healthy, and as last resort, one may call forth a necessary core component of social life, to wit, “There are things about which reasonable people may differ.”
One may extend one’s findings as regards to the so-called Spanish Flu—that its lethality resulted from war and hunger rather than ‘the bug itself’—to take the shape of a hypothesis. Social determinants likely have much more impact than does any organic threat; our morbidity and mortality, our well-being, hinge on our relations with each other as much as, or much more than, on the virulence of a microorganism.
And a lot of folks would respond, having been well prepared for this conversation with gruesome graphics, excruciating prose, and hideous statistics, ‘(w)hat about the plague?” ‘Huh? I bet you didn’t think about that,’ or so my correspondent’s tone, in any given circumstance, might suggest.
So? What about bubonic plague. Just thinking about it makes me a little queasy. No matter that fact, one can interrogate even the fiercest demon, so long as one has life and breath remaining.
To me, search-results are interesting. Therefore, I plead an inability to stop myself. The basic probe, <“bubonic plague” causes>, brings up close to seven hundred thousand citations. Altering the plural noun, substituting history in its stead, increases the basket of responses to almost three million.
And this is the interesting part. Not a single one of the headline thumbnail results among the first few pages made any reference to poverty, famine, war, or other social factors, the “Social Determinants of Health” that must be a core portion of the foundation of comprehending any complex question of Public Health.
So, obvio po! I did this search: <“bubonic plague” sdoh OR “social determinants”>. Only fourteen thousand, five hundred links were available, but this was rich territory, indeed, rabbit hole terrain for the likes of me.
In this instance, thankfully, with deadlines close at hand, I restrained myself. Enough will be plenty, as with this little paper from the Interdisciplinary Association For Public Health Science. “Population Health Lessons From the Black Death" was its title, the author a teacher and practitioner from nearby South Carolina.
Professor Sharon Dewitte writes perceptively and incisively. “Bad health generally results in shorter lives, so declines in life expectancy indicate that growing numbers of people were in poor health before the epidemic. This occurred during a time of growing social inequality and of climate change that resulted in widespread and repeated famines."
She goes on to make her argument even more sharply honed. “Risk of dying from the Black Death itself was highest for people who were already in poor condition because of pre-existing disease or poor diet."
Nor does she shy from making a practical policy pronouncement. “The potential benefits of research on diseases in the past, such as the Black Death, include revealing what makes people vulnerable to disease and death during epidemics so that we can take action to reduce those vulnerabilities. For example, social inequality and poor diet in a large segment of the population prior to the Black Death might have contributed to the very high level of mortality. This insight should persuade us to decrease social inequalities in access to food and other resources today."
At the least, a searcher might supplement Dr. Dewitte’s analysis with equally pertinent insights from dozens, or even scores or hundreds, of other investigtors. The plague’s ugliness depended on ugly social circumstances at least as much as it hinged on a particular pathogens’ especially dire dangers.
Even if all this more or less amounts to a persuasive case, none of this sort of thinking really applies to COVID, right? That’s a different kettle of fish, as the saying goes. Or is it?
Well then. I can’t throw away an opportunity like this. After all, my undeniably largely accurate hypothesis is this. …(continued below the PayWall)
Communication & Human Survival—Deconstructing Ukraine Scams
Willful ignorance is the only true stupidity. That’s my story anyway. Of course, my mother was right. I “w(as) born a critic!” I mean, who would know better, than she who bore me into the world?
The inaugural phase of becoming critical in one’s thinking is to determine, so much as that proves possible, how matters truly stand in any particular set of circumstances. That following such a course is, at bare minimum, apt as relates to U.S. machinations in and relations with Ukraine flows inexorably from such facts as sixty billion projected dollars for fascist, nationalist, often soldier-of-fortune fighters whose erstwhile allegiances are about lucre and empire, with exactly zero identifiable correspondence to the good of the forty-five million human cousins who live in the zone of carnage that is now the Ukrainian nation.
If, as drunken and wanton as Nero as they dispatch slavish vicious minions to murder innocents hither and yon in order to garner still more gold, the leaders of this rotting husk of an empire have their way, many, most, or even all of us—them included, the sick thugs—may end up as painfully plundered as the scores whom their deranged hired butchers slaughtered in Moscow. Or, novel thought, somehow or other we may manifest the miracle of a community of people who merely want to get along decently and honorably and potently, which we have come to comprehend inherently means collectively. And we will seize and imprison the gangsters who are running everything now and do our best to manage the awesome plenty with which Goddess grace has provided us.
As a matter of course, such a serendipitous outcome can only have a small sliver of a chance of coming to pass if we are inquisitive enough, daring enough, and dutiful enough to learn something about all these places, events, and patterns that have evolved over time to seem as ineluctable as sunrise and as insurmountable as attaining infinity. And, big duh, here, to learn, we must study. We must actually have an openminded seeking for the truth rather than a parroting of monopoly medias ultimately ecocidally toxic blah blah blah.
That ubiquitous, relentless talking points about ‘valiant Ukrainians’ and ‘Putin’s evil ways’ now define each day’s monopoly-media ‘news cycle’ further illuminates the duty to delve, so to say. That this all occurs in the context of threatened nuclear holocaust, which, in turn, receives at best casual notice and cavalier disregard, might elicit at least a sober willingness to learn before the option of finding out is, in any meaningful sense, no longer available because the pitiful remnants of our kind live in a barely habitable irradiated charnel pit.
The following reporting begins a series of six BTR sections, the final one of which is a documentary and source appendix, a selective combination of search guide and bibliography and archive of the roughly ten years during which I’ve carried out my ongoing examination of this part of the world in relation to Anglo-American empire. As noted earlier in Number Eleven, willful ignorance is equivalent to choosing stupidity, so we ought, perhaps, at least be willing to consider communicating about these things rather than listening to all the CNN, NYT, WaPo alphabet soup of neoliberal nonsense
The original title of this essay was “The Dead Past Lives in Ukraine: What History Reveals About Current Conflicts.” Further subtitles might elucidate how fascism, geopolitics, and ethnicity intertwine in this region that has for many centuries remained one of humanity’s potentially most lethal powder kegs, so to say.
Prologue
What if we wrote about the United States but forgot to mention that slavery was once standard operating procedure? Or about England with no mention or consideration for Charles’ losing his head at a certain point in time? Or about France with neither admissions concerning nor interest in Napoleon? Or, even more pertinently, about Germany with a blithe unconcern for Hitler’s having once been Chancellor and more?
One would imagine that such horrendous contextual gaffes, such hideous historical blindness, might elicit a critique sooner or later. And yet precisely such obtuseness or willful ignorance or hidden agendas govern almost all of the corporate mediation that comes from the United States, England, France, and Germany regarding today’s evolution of Ukrainian crises that could completely eviscerate civilization or even humanity itself.
This article first and foremost offers a corrective to such decontextualized, ahistorical emptiness. These initial remarks give some concrete examples of what has so far been universally absent.
For instance, our narratives of Ukraine must account for the fact that Nikita Khruschev emerged from the coal mines of Donetsk to grow into one of the world’s most powerful Russian communist leaders—a true working class hero, at the same time that emigrant scions of substantial wealth moved to England and Canada and the United States both to flee comrade Khrushchev’s ascendancy and to disparage the diminutive Nikita’s life and work; our stories of Galicia and Kiev must make sense of the truth that Leon Trotsky, he who is the intellectual forbear of a giant swath of present-pass Marxism, was as much as a seventh generation Ukrainian from a poor Cossack family simultaneously as Stepan Bandera came forth from a small farmstead near the Polish border to achieve National Socialist prominence.
Additionally, our conception of the meaning of Ukrainian must not only show the palpable interconnections of such countless undeniable polarities of the relatively recent past, but it must also bring into the light and explain more or less exactly how these events and people and days of life and strife evolved into a current context of similar yearning and struggle, in which miners’ militias chase the hapless mercenaries of mammon out of their lands, and airliners full of helpless innocents explode in midair to litter the fields around Luhansk with the bodies of strangers.
In other words, our thinking about this blessed, cursed land must become more than either a projection of latter-day British imperialists, or a fantasy of American billionaires who insist that they know what’s best for the world, and all others should just shut up and do as they are told. Our beliefs about Ukraine must illuminate matters in these ways, that is, unless we intend our mental emanations to be mere scraps of propaganda, intellectual detritus to serve the power agendas of ‘leaders’ who, apparently, would sacrifice as large a selection of humanity as every single living human being in order to maintain their dominance.
This essay seeks to honor these directives. It does not pretend to be comprehensive; it never promises expertise; it reflects no political itinerary other than that of knowledge, no social project other than that of seeking wisdom. It is mostly accurate and fully honest in its statements.
Mistakes, in any case, are easy to correct. If its interpretations represent error, however, then readers should show how and where and why and provide a more robust explication of the litany of facts that appear here as well as of the innumerable eventualities that are not in these lines. Otherwise, a rational participant in this discursive process will have no choice but to think that the presentation here is persuasive and plausible, whatever the truth, in all of its rotund completeness, ultimately turned out to be.
A Bit of a Preface
Werner Heisenberg was a fascist sympathizer, even though he never joined Germany’s Nazi party. Even as we grapple with his leadership of Germany’s nascent nuclear weapons project, we note that his math and science remain critically important. In particular, his uncertainty theorem contains key comprehension for grappling with any attempt to attain knowledge.
His point about certainty was both simple and intuitively obvious. One cannot simultaneously know a particle’s location, frozen in the time-space continuum, and its momentum, the product of multiplying acceleration times mass, while the little bit of matter scoots along at sub-light speeds.
Journalistic, narrative corollaries of Heisenberg’s postulate ought to be obvious. Try as annalists might, attaining an awareness of certain things precludes adequate focus on other matters.
Nevertheless, just as the fact of uncertainty does not eliminate the need for and utility of scientific investigation of location and momentum and more, so too must historical or social scientific thinkers persist in seeking credible contextualization, despite the ambiguity and speculation inherent in such enterprises.
Introductory Matters
Basically, this section will consider deep paradoxes and noticeable patterns that characterize Ukraine’s experience. The following points, very briefly, are among those that observers ought to note.
The deep geo-historical background of the region shows the inherent power of Ukrainian geography. Alexander the Great’s conquests plus-or-minus several thousand years ago focused in part on Crimea, as did Tatars a thousand and more years further along; Jewish settlers first arrived on Ukraine’s fertile plains even before that. This realization that the realm was an irresistible waystation has thus constantly defined Ukrainian Earth, providing it a sense of fortuitous placement as a fertile stretch of soil and rain and sunlight and, in some ways, a centrally important focal locus of human existence.
The ebb and flow of conquerors and their impact on societies and cultures, in turn, emanated from this confluence of a more-or-less immutable geography and geology. Alexander, the Persians, the Romans, Byzantine rulers, Viking invaders, Rus royalty, invasions of Mongols and Tatars and other Central Asians, Ottoman and then Russian and then British incursions provide just a partial listing of the vast array of opportunistic interlopers who have first vanquished and then intertwined with earlier social components of this place.
The longstanding presence and role of Jewish culture and thinking also marks Ukraine. Its presence was at once independent of, and adjoined to, conquerors whose ‘glory’ and import seem on the surface to have greater potency, yet these more ‘memorable’ contributory elements have no more defined contemporary Ukraine than have its Talmudic threads.
The rise over the last four centuries of Austrian and Russian hegemony, in which Galicia fell under the sway of one empire and Kiev and Crimea and the East identified or bowed down to Czars and Slavic princes, represents the most recent expression of these intertwining patterns.
The simultaneous presence of nationalist, ultra-nationalist, socialist, communist, anarchist forces, as much so as, or perhaps more so than, anywhere else on Earth flows naturally from this sense of Ukraine as simultaneously a cradle and an abattoir of human development.
Each of the points above might coax dozens of stories—novels, monographs, articles, films, plays, music—from bards and thinkers and citizens. However, the point of their presence here is different. They proffer for readers a sense of intricacy and multidimensionality, a background of vast scope that undergirds the narrative focus ahead, which for its part zeroes-in on periods of revolution and World War on the one hand and reaction and World War on the other hand.
A Quarter-Century of Revolution Near the start of the twentieth century, all of these contradictory tendencies and elements in Ukraine’s past again attained a level of ripeness that necessitated explosive development and transformation. While this presentation does not attempt anything like a complete telling, several groups of occurrences absolutely impressed themselves on what was possible for Kiev and its surroundings over the following periods of time, to the present pass and beyond.
Restive Rebels & an Irresistible Impetus to a Reconfigured Social Scheme Contemporary U.S. accounts of the region’s past point to the agrarian and peasant predominance not only of Russia, but also of Ukrainian lands as a special ‘breadbasket,’ as if that alone explained anything. In fact, a twisted skein of rebellious and revolutionary organizations manifested tremendous social power in Ukraine as the Nineteenth Century became the Twentieth.
A key ingredient in the uprisings that characterized Kiev’s dominions in this period of time was the massive Russian famine of 1891-92, accompanied by cholera and the ultimate deaths of plus-or-minus a million people, mainly peasants and poor Cossacks. A subtitle of a chapter about the disaster speaks volumes: “The Demonization of the Nobility.” …(continued below the PayWall)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Southern Socioeconomics & Survival
This is my actual background, Southern history, with an emphasis on Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and labor in the twentieth century, more or less. The results of all my studious undertakings about this obstreperous arena, Dixie as it were, illustrate the many ways in which ‘Southern annals’ remain centrally important in being able to make sense of the operations of U.S. empire and to comprehend its general hegemony at home and abroad.
I’ve written tons in this realm, albeit probably the majority of pages prior to computer storage options, ha ha. I am initiating this ‘Focus on the South,’ which will come to characterize a key element of BTR, with a blog that I wrote many years ago, when I imagined that I could ‘lead from below’ as a minor union functionary in the United Autoworkers National Writers Union. Then, as now, with the ‘manufacturer’s support,’ UAW was seeking to organize Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee plant.
I wrote to present an example of truly radical, even revolutionary, grassroots solidarity and action, one of those events that, in learning about it, one almost has difficulty truly believing that the whole thing really happened. I mean, the whole situation appears wildly implausible—prisoners in chains who rise up and join with those whom ‘constituted authorities’ have sent to ‘pacify’ them, in so doing embarking on a course of civil uprising that aimed to overthrow the standard operating procedures of predation and oppression against coal miners and other working folks.
This may work well as the stuff of legends or fantasies. It seems less than even marginally likely according to the general surface understanding of ‘the American way,’ so to say. In very different fashion, but with decidedly similar salt-of-the-earth authenticity, the ‘Coal Creek Wars’ show a dynamic in American history that, more or less totally and automatically, dismantles all ideas of ‘patriotic masses’ who blindly follow the ‘grand old flag’ and all attendant blah blah blah.
In the earlier iteration of this effort, I presented the story first. Today, however, I’m starting with the bibliographic essay, which can in at least rudimentary fashion serve to introduce the larger topic of ‘Southern History and Its Meaning Today.’ In some ways, for many people, this sort of profferal will be dry as dust and approximately equally as appealing, LOL!
But like the fact or not, our duty requires that we consider such matters, and our lives may readily hinge on our being able to grasp and use this ‘bigger picture.’ Whatever the case may be, here comes the first of two parts, this one a litany of scholarship and seeking in regard to the way the the former Confederate States of America formulate a fulcrum to leverage deeper and more meaningful awareness of our wider life and times.
The title of the 2011 posting may act as an instructive inauguration, so to speak. Here it is: “Blazing a Union Trail Through the Thickets of Time—Tearing Down the Walls: Global Trade & Local Oppression from the Coal Creek Wars to the ‘Debacle in Chattanooga’".
DOCUMENTATION, ANALYSIS, PERSPECTIVE: BIBLIOGRAPHIC PATHWAYS What follows essentially looks at then and now. On the one hand, a particular slice of Earth’s beautiful places—full of mountains and waterfalls and forests resplendent with the second most abundant ecosystem on the planet—went through a social maelstrom in the past that, to say the least, goes markedly against the purported grain of ‘Southern character’—in terms of skin color and chauvinism, in terms of class solidarity, in terms of not rocking any boats. On the other hand, this same region, still beautiful if almost unimaginably developed and transformed on the surface, at once has a different feel to it at the same time that some of the earlier patterns are also present, if one knows where and how to look.
These sections all proffer citations or links for readers to consider. Not even the merest fraction-of-a-fraction of the available literature in most cases, the leads given here definitely point the onlooker to a path. Following it, she can reach a more nuanced understanding; ambling along its byways, he can attain a richer awareness of contextual and conceptual underpinnings. Over time, this humble correspondent will return here, to update and pare, to add and modify. With luck, some of the observers of this process will do the same.
HISTORICAL MATERIALS A Tiny Selection of Contemporary Documents That Establish Context The American Negro As a Dependent, Defective & Delinquent: this volume, by Charles H. McCord, horrifyingly hateful from the surface to its guts, is one of hundreds of such texts, a fundamental purpose of which was the inculcation of justifications for both White Supremacy and for denigrating citizens of African heritage.
Dixie, or, Southern Scenes and Sketches: This lengthy set of dispatches from Julian Ralph, who contributed especially to Harper’s Weekly, contains a novelist’s eye for telling details and intriguing juxtaposition, ranging from the New England transplants in late-nineteenth century Florida to the Chattanooga District mines, in all of which the same viciously chauvinistic assumptions are resplendent about the Blacks whose labor is the primary engine for the region’s wealth.
The Negro Wage Earner: Lorenzo Greene and the beloved Carter Woodson, who went on to become legendary as a political scientist and sociologist, authored this detailed, scholarly monograph supported by The Association for the Study of Negro Life & History: rich in both data and analysis, it lays the basis for understanding the nature of ‘divide-and-conquer’ schemes, the deeply rooted and ruinous practices of Jim Crow inequality and exploitation, the advances that Black workers had made, and more.
The Marrow of Tradition: This novel, by Charles Chesnutt, developed out of the author’s chauvinistic take on one of the most interesting uprisings in U.S. history, when Wilmington, North Carolina—led by working class Blacks and Whites—seceded from the U.S. for a time, a kind of Paris-Commune in the Heart of the plantation districts, one that occurred, happenstantially or otherwise, roughly along with the final mayhem of the ‘Coal Creek Wars.’
Southern History Classics The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913: Comer Vann Woodward’s work reads like a novel and grips like a psychological thriller, covering the birth pangs of what Southerners now experience as everyday reality.
The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945: George Tindall, even more densely than Woodward, packs his tale with the defining militarism and skepticism, conformity and resistance, that demarcates the world that we’ve inherited from grandparents in essence.
A History of the South, 1607-1936: the freely available version of William Hesseltine’s classic provides a grounding in geography and social and economic relations that remains extremely useful.
Black Reconstruction: an Essay Toward the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880—This is the ‘real deal,’ W.E.B. Du Bois’ masterful assessment of a bottom-up perspective on a key turning point in world history.
Major Problems in the History of the American South: in two volumes, this series collects essential documents and many of the important schools of interpretation about the history of this region that in some senses controls the destiny of the U.S. and the planet.
The Burden of Southern History: Project MUSE’s portal to C. Vann Woodward’s third edition makes aspects of the volume available to Project MUSE members; the work itself is a critical read.
This list of classic Southern Nonfiction truly does have some of the key titles, from W.J. Cash to Richard Wright, via Lillian Smith and many others. …(continued below the PayWall)
Last Words For Now
How should we think about our lives and the world in which we all live? Admittedly, that’s a bit of a ‘big question,’ utterly unanswerable. And yet, each of us has the existential duty, in my way of thinking about things, to seek an answer, or at least guidance, in our pondering of these matters at hand that add up to us and our cohabitants, so to speak.
For example, a Central Intelligence Agency operative, or a spy, in actuality, wrote this to his superior about their operations during the ‘Summer of Love’ in California’s Bay Area. “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards, because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!"
What in the world should one make of this? The query cries out for a thorough investigation, if nothing else, a delving not only of the events at issue but of ourselves, for being ignorant of such important exigencies, as it were. For particular example in relation to ‘Jolly’ West’s communique above, the enthusiastic psychologist’s caseload in some way or other brought him into ‘professional contact’ with one Charles Manson.
In this vein, the words of a French writer—Georges Duhamel, a witness to and chronicler of the carnage and depravity of World War One and its aftermath—are apt to consider: “If anyone tells you something strange about the world, something you had never heard before, do not laugh but listen attentively; make him repeat it, make him explain it; no doubt there is something there worth taking hold of."
This perfectly presents a defense of the many ‘strange,’ barely conceivable ideas that appear in every issue of BTR.
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