Changes abound, as always, even as patterns cycle in and out in the delicate miracle of embodiment dance. 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 twelfth 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.’
Oh wait, one more thing. Starting now or even last issue, the end of an article ‘above the fold’ links to its continuation. Somehow, it’s all so nerve-wracking and gratifying at once, ha ha.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: How Does Contemporary Truth-Seeking Work?
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Intelligence Versus Intelligence; Agency Versus Agency
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XII
3. Wood Words Essays—”Culture, Agency, & Media in the Scheme of Things”
4. Old Stories & New—”Mother Led the Way,” Part Two
5. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—Sam & Red, Chapter One
6. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued,
7. Communication & Human Survival—More Ukraine, Part Two
8. Erotic Snippets—”The Survivor Effect”
9. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”Coal Creek Wars,” Part Two
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—
Or perhaps this belongs here. Changes abound, as always, even as patterns cycle in and out in the delicate miracle of embodiment dance. Anyhow, the overall milieu is one of improvisational action and extemporaneous thought in service of certain Existential Duties. We all arguably have them.
As I’ve noted before, my first Existential Duty is to ‘create and share beautiful ideas.’ As a matter of any course that I might set to attain the exalted state of said beauty, I would need to clarify what facilitates, or constitutes, such achievement.
So? What does foster beauty’s meaningful expression, meaning’s most mellifluous beauty? While any simple answer to such inquiry will be laughable at best, a recent entry in that sweet, sustaining bastion of liberal thought—the New York Review of Books—makes the point incisively, in an essay that the author entitles, “The Trouble With Reality,” which examines a new book by John Hopkins’ literary genius, William Egginton.
This new work, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, illustrates how three iconic thinkers and creators tried to evade hubris, and in the words of the book’s author, William Egginton, thereby “share an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think that they knew God’s secret plan.” Why spin yarns at all, after all?
Eggington, in interrogating eternity’s eternal material incomprehensibility, basically bumps against Heisenberg’s uncertainty about, Godel’s incompleteness of, and Einstein’s alluring summation in regard to an all-that-is that closely enough approximates infinity as always to remain at best a theory or equation about things rather than representing it all as such.
In such heady realms of hypothesis and speculation, what should one make of the quotidian and yet utterly predominant tendency for discourse to devolve toward debates about ‘which side is best,’ ‘what nation truly expresses affinity with an almighty entity,’ and other attendant ‘compare and contrast’ exercises that make nothing of anything outside the annals of history and the interests of homo-economicus? Again, in the Western Hemisphere, such inquiry inevitably touches on matters of genocide, conquest, and plunder.
Another New York Review item examines the nexus of relationship and polarity that intermingles the lives and times of ‘Gringos’ and ‘Latinos,’ for instance, a pattern that appears, quite likely, to take its most tangible form in regard to Cuba. Whatever the case may be, Cuba’s past and present, its culture and communism, its part in the panoply of colonial object and revolutionary subject, will soon put in a first appearance of many in BTR’s installments.
The NYRB essay author, a Latino, proffers a difficult to dispute notion in his title. “The Truths of Our American Empire” may indeed assume the premise, but it is nevertheless almost irrefutably the case.
In the event, not by happenstance, quite plausibly, did the slaveholding rulers of Dixie look with covetous desire toward Havana and the Caribbean, where a slaving substance seemed as much a part of the landscape as Everest delineates a Himalayan high point. This intersection of labor and empire, exploitation and conquest, ubiquitous everywhere, reached the level of apogee here in the Aamericas.
Therefore, arguably, no matter the arena of central concern in the U.S.A., it will have noteworthy and nuanced ties with the Confederate States of America and its slaveocracy’s Civil War destruction and postbellum Reconstruction. To state the case as it currently stands, in the event, I have yet to find an exception to this conclusion, whether the realm under review is religion or sports, politics or production, literature or loving, murder or majesty, mayhem or mundane routines.
Homicidal harrying of human affairs clearly contextualizes the here and now: Gaza, Ukraine, Iran are just the obvious cases of this. Murder and mayhem mundanely manifests both virtually and actually, as a matter of reality alongside culture’s conflicted cornucopia.
I’ve finished Tom O’Neill’s investigative masterpiece, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. He speaks forthrightly, in terms that eloquently demarcate a BTR POV. “(W)hen someone claims I’ve ‘found the truth’…I get anxious. My goal isn’t to say what did happen—it’s to prove that the official story didn’t. I’ve learned to accept the ambiguity."
Sage advice indeed, applicable in almost every single arena of conflict and concatenation in this ‘delicate miracle of embodiment.’ How powerfully these horrifying killings resonate stands in stark contrast to the millions whom American ‘arms’ slaughtered in Southeast Asia; such recognition gives another point of view from which to ponder a filmic tour de force like Quentin Tarentino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which fantasizes Brad Pitt as enough of a ‘tough customer’ to put an end to Manson’s minions and their mayhem.
The auteur, however, either cannot or will not envision a similar response to what was happening on the other side of the world while Manson’s slavish servants were butchering Sharon Tate and her unborn infant. Tarentino may rank as a first among equals as a movie maker and electronic storyteller, but Bowling For Columbine shows up the maestro in terms of providing comprehensible explanations for what is transpiring.
What goes around comes around, in other words. Or, in the way of speaking of Little Tree, Forrest Carter’s part Cherokee Appalachian, one will struggle and likely fail in trying simultaneously to make war and make love.
The realms of Eros in our lives, meanwhile, regularly rear their heads, like the deer out back as they ruminate among the kernels of corn and shake their ears at the sounds of Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions that penetrate the walls and vibrate the windows here and alert the beasts that an omnivore is close at hand, albeit the Boss’s announcement that he “dance(s) with the gallie with the hole in her stocking,” strategically placed and all to proffer soul-shaking access, refers to an even more elemental aspect of Life Force Energy than does the stag’s recollection of culling and predation in its genetic memory. Having seen multiple iterations of politicized assaults on erotic potentiation, as it were, one must ponder what such mediated manifestations are accomplishing.
Deadwood, for instance, with all its decontextualization and sometimes apt and at times clumsy contextualizing efforts, readily, repeatedly references, in every episodes, the role of brothels in the settler-colonial project that extended throughout the so-called Louisiana Purchase and beyond. Nor is this all: various of my online and actual papered subscriptions also constantly call attention to this fact—prostitution, akin to violence no doubt “is as American as cherry pie.”
Especially has this been the case on the various frontiers that the likes of Frederick Jackson Turner hypothesize have forestalled the social ossification that typifies more established societal systems. Those who settled the West, then, brought to the fore the primary mobilities that have continued resonance in the colonizing refrain to ‘Make America Great Again.’
In mentioning settler colonial ventures, one cannot help but consider Palestine’s current concatenations, an imperial crisis of easily conceivable catastrophic consequence. Israeli drone retaliation, as one example, could readily render Western Asia and Mediterranean spaces as irradiated hellholes. Thinkers around the planet are pondering these matters. How about readers? My renderings relentlessly report on such affairs, come what may.
In that regard, nearby Virginia Tech springs quickly to mind. Steven Salaita’s plight is one of those implausible narratives that astonish and instruct at once. His fate, facing fraud and facetious nonsense despite undeniably proper academic bona fides, hearkens back to the plight of African Americans in Dixie or Jews in their confrontations with pogroms.
The different tidbits of which different ones among us are unaware overlap and form a map of intersecting ignorance and knowledge that, in sum, delineates something akin to reality’s totality, albeit none of us have ongoing, easy access to this comprehensive gridwork. Nevertheless, well might we strive for this ineffable meeting of the minds which forms the only grounds on which mutuality’s melange may blossom.
Culture concatenates the social whole. Sometimes, even monopolized media sees the potential or reaps the rewards from a truly realized reality orientation. Just the opposite is also all too often true.
What, then, is Netflix in all of this? Not only does it provide ‘orientation’ to a simultaneously quite false and clearly true account of ‘gold in them thar hills’ but it also offers up irresistible confections like Queen’s Gambit and Unorthodox. But then this: in math, the three-body-problem explores the boundaries between knowledge and speculation, between fact and faith, between projection and actualization.
As a series, The Three Body Problem exhibits all the signs of being a ‘soft-power’ operation that aims not so much at enforcing a ‘party line’ as in simplifying and totally trivializing China while further implanting and affirming that the world’s number one economy is an ‘enemy of the West’ and its holy Science. Whether ironic or intentional, or perhaps clueless, systematic technical acuity, humanity’s bent for a real Natural Philosophy, does not in the least, in the first episode anyhow, receive anything like a nuanced or even honest accounting.
One commentator offers the idea that this series is a ‘soft-power’ projection of U.S. hegemony, displaying facetiously false and bombastically puerile representations of Chinese life during the purported Cultural Revolution. Nor is the series viable as a yarnspinning process in relation to technology and society.
Viewers hear ‘research specialties,’ without any grounding or context, straight from National Science Foundation Request-For-Proposal respondents’ papers. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, and with almost zero consequences IRL as it were, physics stops governing things. The real life exceptions to this ‘breakdown in universal laws,’ ha ha, are, on a case by case basis, scientific entrepreneurs’ seeing a digital readout of their pending demise if they don’t repent and, making the stars flicker and fade and glow in a single instance so as to demonstrate, in the phrasing of the filmmakers, the cosmos’ ‘winking at everybody.’
A piece of Wood Art makes a related point. “Erstwhile ‘Endless Frontiers’ Indeed" is its title, redolent of ‘nuclear energy’ and Vannevar Bush’s work on the Manhattan Project all at once. “Well Might We Fantasize Crafting Craft That Can Promise Us Access to & Mastery of Science’s Allegedly Endless Frontiers, Simultaneously As an Unblinking Cosmos, As If in Reply, Could Easily Be Gestating Some Lethal Leviathan’s Monstrous Mystery Or a Daunting Demonic Dervish’s All-Tolled Evil Afflictions, Or, Much More Likely, Something Wicked & Wayward in Our Treatment of Each Other That Will Otherwise, No Matter How Unexpected Or Unintended, Delay Or Destroy Human Dreams of a Destiny Manifestly Atop the Universe’s Biological Heap."
The eclipse’s pendency may be activating the squirrels and other beasts about. Along similar lines, religious practitioners predict, vis a vis Revelation and like apocalyptic manuscripts, percolating eruption of divine judgment in these routine passages that nevertheless remain mystifying and magical. In any case, many a source proffered prognostication along such lines, while even more commonly did the universal reporting of Sol’s tricks provide a little ‘breathing room,’ maybe, for both avoiding the material, messy contradictions of everyday life and for leaving examination of such conundrums off to the side so as to let folks unwind a bit from constant high anxiety.
However we envision everything in aggregate, the more we know, the less we see clearly how it all hangs together. The appeal of computational machinery to assist us in our attempts to catalog and categorize and so on and so forth resides in the sense that is inescapable, an overwhelming chaos, if one tries to imagine managing this all-that-is totality with merely individual mental machinations.
Few topics excite the same chill, faint and yet fostering fixated attention, that the phrase, and actuality, Artificial Intelligence does. At the same time, a quite credibly critical skepticism is apropos about the I.Q. of such smart things among us; after all, who’s programming these devices?
Along like lines, one might recall a soon-to-be-profiled personage in these pages, Vernor Vinge, whose “Singularity” reveals him to be a witty character in the current context. Moreover, his fiction, as in The Great Peace War, reveal a dialectical mindset that perfectly parallels much of BTR.
In the abstract for his essay on computers that replace us, he is quite direct. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented."
In relation to Number Twelve at hand, several ongoing elements of BTR reportage are once more display. Just below, the initiation of another ‘Goddess-Current-Events-Advisory’ unfolds.
Today’s Wood Words Essay tackles additional tempting attributes of media’s acting as culture’s social agent, so to say. This ubiquitous dynamic is in some ways the central problem of the twenty-first century, CE, so to say.
Ukraine is once more front and center. We’ll soon be examining the life and times of Leon Trotsky, just one more Ukrainian as Russian as borscht’s version of beet soup.
Dixie’s predominance is also on display, in the follow-up to last issues’ Bibliography of the South. The Coal Creek Wars and the Convict Least present central aspects of the region to this day.
Among the non-fiction entries this issue, BTR sends along a new Erotic Snippets series’ inaugural piece, to wit “The Survivor Effect,” introducing Pearl, the post-apocalyptic pachyderm midwife. All God’s Cousins greets readers with an institute equally as perfidious—and with the same operating principle—as “Behind a Locked Door,” the New Yorker profile that has shown up in the past two introductory essays here.
Number Twelve also begins the new Goddess-chaptered sequence about the marriage of Red and Sam; Rom-Com it’s not, but it may tantalize nevertheless. As well, a new piece of the “Mother Led the Way Puzzle” puts in an appearance, along with the penultimate item in the initial Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss chronicle.
Thus, BTR ushers readers into the final forty percent of the first year’s annual aggregation of ideas and yarns, analysis and conjecture, full of interconnection and contextualization and always plentiful blah blah blah. Where shall we go now?
Such an interrogation may never do more than establish the groundwork for extemporizing ‘whatever comes next.’ Excellent extemp, in any case, always centers what is necessary for understanding; we may never fully master all the key components of reality’s array, yet that inaugural duty to pursue intellectual elegance and create pretty depictions with equal force necessitates that we make the attempt, to wit this issue, ha ha.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
As I am ensconcing myself in Virginia’s Highlands, at this point apart from Western North Carolina for over a month, I will continue my recent practice of turning ‘Goddess attention’ toward some element of world affairs, a necessity inasmuch as my new environs Tarot ‘clientele’ is thus far slim indeed, since, if for no other reason, ha ha, the Marshall Arts tent has not yet grounded itself in any regular local venue.
Having just finished Chaos, Tom O’Neill’s legerdemain about Charles Manson’s ‘granddaddy’ of homicidal mania in California in 1969—when, instead of finding his destiny as a rock star with friends, from the Beach Boys to Crosby, Stills, ‘Charlie’ used his mental machinations to orchestrate murder and mayhem among the high and mighty, all to foster a ‘Race War’ in America—I’ve just started—chain smoking spy missives as I might the newest novel by Alan Furst, a review of whose works is close at hand here—a swan song of the great German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte. Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA; a confession from the profession, will ever evince a work, at once exhaustive and incisive in its presentation, that represents a keystone of any reasonable understanding of contemporary communities and their interconnections and interdependent evolutionary development.
The very potential for mediation inescapably presents at least aspects of a capacity to deconstruct and truly posit how matters actually stand. Thus, the few radical sources among the incoming at BTR—as well as regular referrals, so to say, from the ‘liberal’ press with slightly fewer ties to banksters and gangsters than is the pattern among monopoly media generally—particularly emphasize this omnipresent power that ‘confidential agents’ deploy in the everyday routines of the here and now.
Altogether, these happenstantial narrative encounters, again and again, with Langley’s spooky minions compare all-too-equivalently with ISIS’ again providing a substantial filling for the News Hole, so to say. In that regard, inasmuch as intelligence cannot, given certain agendas’ preeminent place in imperial imprimatur, match up much at all with Intelligence, and that personal agency’s beneficence contrasts with corporate agents’ all too bodily predominance over most centrally important social relations—say between workers of different nations, or, in the false yet perfidiously alluring parlance of operational embodiment of matters at hand, between regular people, all cousins, of erstwhile different races—a query to the Goddess along the following lines might make sense.
“How might a citizen usefully understand, and possibly act upon, such institutional forms as Intelligence Agencies?" A thought game of plausibly epic narrative proportion could come forth from such a quest, as in today’s seeking nuggets of rational nuance and subtle sensibility about spies hither and yon in our midst.
As ever, this inaugural interrogation elicits a Spiral Spread, elliptical enough to induce my ‘inquiring mind that wants to know’ into plucking forth a Clarifying Card to suggest something more lucid about matters than an otherwise murky array might make possible. The Essence, in any case, presents the Three of Cups.
The remainder of the Spiral Spread came down as follows. Respectively, Past Influences, the Present Passage, and Likely Future Developments drew forth the combative Seven of Wands, the dour yet determined Hermit, and Aphrodite’s challenge in the Seven of Cups. No-Matter-What, Opportunities yields Odysseus’ King of Swords, with Bellerophon’s Knight of Wands’ follow up as Problems & Prospects. The seventh card brought forth a rarely pleasant pull in the guise of the Five of Pentacles as the Synthesis.
My role, as will appear below the fold when I act as interlocutor of this sequence, faces me with a job that left me wanting to gulp in consternation, although I would not have found the task in any sense daunting; my active imagination is omnipresent as a remedy for odd turns, so to speak. In any event, the very next item in the suit of Health & Wealth showed up as a Clarifying Card, the Six of Pentacles.
As will often be the case here in these pages, before we seek more fully to narrate this sequence, we will examine a trio of cards that address a question clearly related to the initial inquiry, but more focused. Three-packs of this sort offer obvious chances to triangulate everything.
Today’s triptych will follow the tried-and-true Past-Present-Future modality. The query for this sallying forth into the realm of smarts-and-empowerment versus spooks-and-their-agencies brings up citizens’ potential to be ‘secret agents on the battlefields of life,’ in some ways akin to the life and times of this humble correspondent.
Here is what I ask, in any event. “How can people effect personal empowerment instead of the 'agendas of spies?'" Or, do spies inevitably triumph in ongoing litanies, always inherently social in their presentation, of politics and production?
Perhaps we could substitute ‘confidential agent’ for the word spies. In that regard, public relations, advertising, consulting of every conceivable kind, and more would indubitably play powerful parts in palpating every possible present passage under our purview, so to say.
Then, if we switched out triumph in the follow up above and put powerfully influence in its place, we would, pretty clearly for those who open their eyes, inaugurate another BTR duh moment. Nevertheless, the interrogatory for the Goddess has some potential to blossom in spite of this indubitable influential phalanx of capital’s myriad practitioners of espionage and its allied arts.
Whatever the case may be, the Goddess offered the Nine of Swords to effect Past Influences. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(In Chapter XI, readers had returned to Lou and Danielle, as they negotiated the straits of defining a ‘good-for-the-goose, good-for-the-gander’ version of bonding with benefits, so to speak, or perhaps one might say, instead, with additional beneficiaries, ha ha. Now, as the panoply continues, we meet another jejune incarnation of one of Lou’s later fellow travelers; interestingly enough, Richard’s experience, at an actual, scandal-ridden youth ‘mental health’ facility outside Atlanta, parallels in large measure the heroine’s travails in New Yorker’s recent “Reporter at Large” section, “Behind a Locked Door.”)
CHAPTER XII
“What the fuck?” The beam pinned him to the wall as he sat up, his brain full of white spikes that disorientated his vision, limited by the light more than by the dark.
He thought immediately of the tiny pipe on his bedside table, of the magazines in the drawer, and of other ‘evidence’ of his youthful peccadilloes. “I can’t let mom see those,” he said to himself, as if at some submerged level of awareness he knew what was transpiring, still almost sleepily though, despite the sense impressions of reveille that the invasive bright bustle of the instant delivered.
Two sets of strong hands, not gentle but not yet rough, took hold of both his arms and pulled. “What the fuck?” he repeated.
“Get dressed.” The light hid the speaker, somebody at least a few years older than Richard, much larger, and, he intuited, just like the dudes who now had him in their grip, quite a bit stronger.
“What the fuck?!” He resisted, and the hands intensified their insistence.
“Richard, these men are here to help.” The voice was his mother’s, from outside the doorway, clipped and almost a whisper, bitter and mean as usual, now with a hint of sadistic satisfaction present as well.
“What the fuck?!!!!” He fought to pull free and began to kick.
The force of the blow spun his head. He never saw the open hand that smacked him. The thwack still resonated inside his head as a second passed by.
“You slapped me motherfucker; what is this????!!!! Dad!!!” His scream was a panicked shriek.
“You said there’d be no violence.” Promises, promises.
Richard Smithfield wouldn’t describe what his assailants had done as beating him up, not in any real way. “I didn’t fight hard enough for that,” he acknowledged to himself, as he wondered ‘what if?’ in the back of a large van, in a backward-facing seat. Mentally and physically, the runty adolescent was a much bigger handful than he seemed.
In the end, they had taped him up and carried him through the kitchen into the three-car garage and from thence out through the automatically opened bay to a white General Motors conveyance with plenty of capacity for him and six others, with room to spare. He had noticed the time, 2:14, as four sets of hands stretchered him from his room, and seen also how black his affluent street was with no moon, and streetlights fifty yards beyond the house.
Before they had spirited him away to haul off “like a load of garbage,” his abductors had taped a clean pair of socks in his mouth. “Just temporary big guy, so you don’t get any cracker ideas of squealing like a nigger,” said the leader, the one who, Richard wanted to impress indelibly in his consciousness, was the one who had “slapped me upside the head.”
Inside the vehicle, “like a little church bus, your honor,” he imagined testifying; “yes, they were forcing me,” someone had blacked out all the windows but those at the front. He had seen next to nothing on the few occasions that he’d turned enough to notice that they were exiting one roadway or turning onto another. He couldn’t even guess his location.
To the East, he reasoned, lay Savannah; to the Northeast, Athens and, everyone said, “loads and loads of pussy;” to the North and Northwest, the massive fortress of Atlanta and environs, where, he noted, “I’m going to go to college, to Tech, like dad;” to the West, Columbus and the nastiest parts of Alabama across the river in Phenix City, where youngsters from Macon who could drive might, on special occasions, sally forth to dally with prostitutes and other ne’er-do-wells.
Jacksonville, he knew, and the biggest piece of what he termed Florida’s big dick lay Southeast; to the South, the Gulf and his revelries at Spring Break near Pensacola beckoned him to recall—“that’s only two months ago,” he remembered, in so doing clinging to the fulfillment of what just-now seemed an almost impossibly far-fetched prophecy, that he would enter and complete his junior year at Alexander Stephens High in standard form. To the Southwest stretched the Chattahoochee and swampland, full of alligators and places to bury whatever sins had characterized this section of the plantation South. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Dependence on Culture’s Mediation of Agency
In every ‘Wood Message Category,’ some semblance of a ‘cultural cast’ comes forward. What precisely one makes of this dynamic unavoidably varies. The point of the observation, however, put simply, is to take a stab at understanding’s clearest expression of meaning.
This is a basic restatement, perhaps, of my First Existential Duty, to shape and share beautiful thoughts, or ‘understanding’s clearest expressions of meaning.’ As a matter of course, such a path toward being an operative for myself and the rest of the common human herd entails daily developments over every hill and in every dale of all the fields of human endeavor. Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, therefore, along with politics and religion and everything else, intersect with and inflect this Marshally Artistic comprehensive congregation of humanity’s life and times.
This dynamic of interconnected inflection, as it were, may appear with special force, especially in the United States, in connection with the South and its historical manifestation of racialist theories and approaches, ‘White Supremacy’ and lynching, for example. Such centrality is on display through varied Wood Words Messages among Marshall Arts’ many profferals of arboreal messaging, so to speak. The often evoked “Every Human Cousin” is a clear example.
“Without Exception, Every Human Cousin Starts As an Infant: Every Single God-Fearing Christian; Every Allah-Loving Muslim; Every Torah-Toting Jew; Every Non-Attached Buddhist; Every Reincarnated Hindi; Every Wild Wiccan; Every Godless Atheist; Every Single Terrorist, & So on & So Forth, Establishing a Ubiquitous,
Indisputable Biosocial Context the Dire Daily Reality of Which Ought to Require All Inquisitive Minds, With the Utmost Urgency & Diligence, to Inquire, 'What Would Need to Happen to Induce the Far-Flung Members of Our Fractious, Factional Clan to Treat Each Other With Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect?"
Here is another, definitely the most totally topical along these Southern lines. “Dixie at the Heart of History” is its moniker. “From Rock & Roll to Imperial Imprimatur, From the Ku Klux Klan to the Communist Party, Nothing Has So Circumscribed Central Elements of Contemporary Human Existence As Has the South, the Former Confederate States, Dixie, an Aggregate Dynamic of Influence & Interconnection at the Very Heart of the Entire Anglo-American Hegemonic Project."
In this vein, Southern cultural output clearly underpins any social contextualization of things. Not by accident, perhaps, does one of the iconic White Supremacist short stories in Charles Chestnutt’s collection, The Marrow of Tradition, tell the tale of a White troika’s plot to undermine an African American newspaper during the immediate post-Reconstruction period.
The yarn’s title, in the event, is quite telling. “A White Man’s ‘Nigger’" presents the plot by the three Anglo-Saxon protagonists as a conscious response to Black rights and participation in the sociopolitical arena. The former planter’s leadership steers the conspirators toward ‘giving the publisher,’ an African American activist, ‘enough rope to hang himself.’
This sort of allusion to murderous methods represents the ‘low-class’ White man’s view that an immediate appeal to rope and brutal termination should happen in the next instant or two at latest. While his ‘social better’ believes the African-American perpetrators of their own views in their own newspaper could well deserve complete extermination, he envisions a long campaign of entrapment and stringing-the-former-bondsmen-along before striking them down, in essence letting boycotts and threats and arson run their course before resorting to more premeditated protocols of the noose and its peremptory mayhem.
One upshot of this, obviously, is that Whites of all stripes often, even generally, have historically viewed Blacks who claimed their own media and messaging as dire social threats to be dreaded and doomed. Thus did Martin Luther King, in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” decry White apologists who advised ‘going slow’ in any real insistence on change.
He answers a false yet insistent critique about ‘outsiders’ who ‘do not belong,’ explaining multiple tangible ties to the ‘Harlem of the South.’ “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."
This propagation of propaganda surges up in writings and sermons of Dixie’s denizens, a radical rousing of popular will for civil rights and common people. Sometimes, the ‘people’s voice’ is humorous, sometimes angry, sometimes merely thought-provoking, as in Lilian Smith’s stinging title, “Are We Not All Confused?”
More than only occasionally, the progenitors of these missives of liberation faced violence, from the merely morbid—as in the crippling savagery that gave John Lewis a lifelong limp after his long walk for justice across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, well before he served as Atlanta’s Fifth District congressman—to the always lethal lynchings of union activists and any sort of ‘Red.’ Furthermore, the complicity of established authorities is irrefutable in such assassinations as, on the one hand, the rifle shot that went into MLK’s head in Memphis fifty-four years ago this month and, on the other hand, the automatic rifle fire that cut down the quartet of victims who died in Greensboro, North Carolina on November 3rd, 1979 at the hands of Klan gunmen who acted with total impunity.
In environs such as these, agency’s dependence on mediation measures out the necessity of manifesting a People’s Media, a Popular Information Network Project or something similar. For richer or poorer, better or worse, BTR aims to instantiate just such a grassroots program of communications magic. This goal also inherently defines a significant portion of Marshall Arts’ Driftwood Message Art pieces.
One missive that straddles the Politics & Personal Empowerment and Philosophy, Psychology, Spirituality categories particularly encapsulates moves toward such an apparent miracle of populism and knowledge. One might hear echoes, in the event, of Noam Chomsky, whose nearly centenarian wisdom keeps proffering portals to powerful expressions of grassroots assessments of empire’s exigencies. The specific missive’s resonance ought powerfully to resonate, in any event, right down to its title: “Consenting to Distorted Manure.”
“Established SOP Mediation of Matters Manufactures a Smooth Surface, a Veneer of the Real, That At Best Represents Plutocratically Propagated Imperial Propaganda; If We Consent to the Manipulative Distortion of This Demented Nonsense, We Surely Deserve the Disempowerment & Destruction With Which Our Willingly Bowing to Such Bullshit Makes Us Complicit.”
The intertwining of media’s imperious ‘agencies of empire,’ obviously and meanwhile, also undoubtedly influences popular beliefs, habits, and attention in relation to all sorts…(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New
(In this deliciously complicated psychic stew of superstition, male supremacy, and propagating procreation’s primacy, ‘the Sergeant’ runs afoul of the contradictions of his own nature; his dependence on his own children, and the wife who bore each of them into the world, flummoxes him. As well, his own prudishness, an unwillingness to embrace sensual pleasure for its own delight unless he could do so ‘naked and on top,’ as it were, in the act of conceiving a child, meant that the woman that he loved would shun his touch.)
The sergeant went on to explain, indeed, the mysteries of condoms and clean living, assuring us that we could master our urges, that we needn't "act like tomcats around bitch felines in heat." He laced his speech with images of the farm we all had witnessed, from the foaling of a recent calf to the trip to the stud bull that had resulted in that issue. But the medical and proscriptive content of the lecture came obviously, in retrospect, from the army, where he received similar formalized warnings.
Not one of us at the time recognized any of the irony inherent in this situation. We were too thrilled at this initiation into manly thinking and responsibility, too happy to be lazing in such introspection instead of slaving away in the fields. At the end of the Sergeant's drilling, all of us stood and hitched our pants with a new meaning, even five year old Michael, barely out of diapers, practicing his macho strut.
* * *
None of us foresaw that the sergeant's views about prostitutes would present him so soon with a nasty dilemma that he had not faced with his previous substitute-lover, who more resembled a concubine, settled and available to 'husbands of a certain need, than she did a 'common prostitute.' A week prior to detailing his fictitious plans about poker games to the family, Matthew Jr. accompanied Daddy to George Thompson's machine shop, a sprawling and angular structure filled to overflowing with lathes, punches, presses, and sundry other machines that could shape and bend metal and wood. Along with many other farm kids, my second oldest brother occasionally worked in this shop, helping to make miracles out of the mayhem that could afflict farm equipment, cars, and other machines necessary to our lives.
That day, Matthew Jr. heard daddy tell Mr. Thompson, "George, my plumbin's backed up from here ta Pensacola, 'n I feel like I'm tryin' to pass Johnson's creek after a gully washer." S ince Matthew Jr. realized our water was working just fine, he and John hypothesized that night in bed that the "sergeant needed to fuck, somethin' awful." When Papa presented his plan for mythical poker a few days later, he confirmed this diagnosis.
The crazy thing about this whole condition, the sergeant's cruel dilemma, was that he could only feel safe about sex with 'professional women,' outside the bonds of marital bliss, so to say, if he behaved in the fashion that he repudiated with mother. Rubbers, or even less intrusive forms of birth control Madeleine had mentioned, kept him from enjoying lovemaking with his mate; but the only way he could remotely fancy sex with "dirty whores" was if he used this same "protection" he fought so hard to avoid in his marriage. Matthew was notoriously stubborn, but he had to see how foolish he appeared in this context.
Having something put him in the position of appearing foolish, in the Sergeant's view, ranked with insubordination as a cause for lethal hostility. And on top of having to confront his own idiocy day in and day out, he hadn't experienced a satisfactory ‘clearing of his pipes’ in several months. The old boy could turn mean, like a dog that had begun to foam from the mouth, at any moment; we young boys watched every step we took as balmy October advanced toward the cool of November. …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
(Today’s selection offers up a starting chapter of a second series of ‘fairy tale’ recontextualizations, in thirteen units, a stab at storytelling that reveals in such ancient yarns connecting layers, perhaps, of the entire fabric of mythos and psyche and human awareness. Soon, readers will encounter another fabled character here, he who made a deal regarding beans that seemed foolish yet made his fortune. But that’s for a future installment, after we’ve launched this look at a marriage for the ages, that of Little Red and her steady, stalwart mate, Sam the Woodsman.)
Those who have been perusing this unfolding storyline may remember that Sam had come to me, very much in a state of dread, as Sage Samaria Woodcroft, his son, entered the world and joined his sisters—Camille and Dahlia—fresh from his mother’s draconian drudgery in pushing forth his presence. His father saw and shed tears simultaneously ebullient and enervated, laying his hand on Sage’s squalling head and thanking his wife for her heroine’s holy efforts before he left Red to her nursing, his daughters to their billets, and came in search of my assistance.
Red & Sam—Wild Hearts Married in Wild Woods—Inception; the First Moon
Because his heart has ever remained stalwart and true, he would never once begin to rue his son’s arrival, yet a long ago foretelling relentlessly held his attention and made of his emotional state something infelicitous if not altogether frantic. Maybe readers recall Hecate’s local seeress, Hecallah, had done a birthday reading for the then youth Sam’s coming of age, when he began his seventeenth year among us.
No doubt, many readers will deduce, or even recollect, the substance of this now many-years-past prediction, one which the local witch-of-wonder had proffered when in the throes of ‘messages from the Goddess.’ Its essence is something that many people have experienced now and again, an augury of mortality or portent of doom that, almost inevitably, can come to resonate relentlessly in the corners of a consciousness.
‘Will I really die before I hit thirty?’ Sam didn’t want to believe this, let alone embrace it, but the notion filled his thoughts like undiked flood waters.
Sam was in the thrall of such thinking when last readers followed him, as he sought counsel and hope in my attention and advice, “Marvalo’s Marvels” my proponents would call them. In our counsels, we had reached the only useful way that a recipient of such dire straits can navigate their storms, to wit, to breathe freely and joyously now and wait to see whether the ever malleable shape of tomorrow will assume one form or another.
A marriage to such a pert and pugnacious exemplar of feminine pulchritude as Rose’s budding Little Red made of such a dutiful approach to matters at hand a series of joyous days and torrid nights, candle lit and full of passion and glee. For her part, Red’s memory had not so tenaciously clung to painful portents that had troubled her mate, her lack of awareness a fact that Sam came to realize, swearing to himself that he would not impose recollection on his lover, his wife, his glory.
For a time, Sam’s personal protocol of avoidance and dissimulation seemed to operate in beneficent operational fashion, as it were. Red’s Mother would often watch the couple’s trio of little miscreants, who would play games around their own mom’s childhood home and wear their grandmother nearly to a frazzle. Once, as this first moon’s update was coming to a close with the full rising on the night’s horizon, when the youngsters were to remain with their grandma for three full days, Red and Sam availed themselves of this parental hiatus.
Carrying minimal clothing and a sack of biscuits, they mounted their stout steed, Rosy, together, for a trek to the top of Divining Rock, high amid the misty peaks that loomed over their mountain-meadow home. …(continued below the fold)
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—IX
(Nearing the culmination of this first telling, observers of Jack’s travails have borne witness to Eileen’s loyal ferocity to her lover, in spite of a father willing to try to beat her into submission to his wishes. In the event, legal process intervened in favor of this lad of the Irish soil, which so unmanned Sir Robert Thompson that he fell face first in the sucking mud from a literal stroke of apoplexy. This lightened his daughter’s burden as regards her loved one but replaced it with poignant pity for her Father’s tragedy.)
Sir Winston, recognizing the weight of Eileen's emotions, permitted long moments to pass thus, with only the wind and the moon and distant echoes of unseasonable thunder from the direction of Witch's Mountain to touch their outer senses. Finally, though, he spoke, suggesting that he retrieve "a physician and a cab," to which Eileen readily agreed, so that he rode off at a brisk trot to leave her alone with her thoughts, her hopes, her fears, and the shell of dear Dad.
Before we visit the wondrous miracles then transpiring in the Faeries' Glen, nearly the final skein that this yarn creates, a bit of a detour is necessary, lest reader imagine that a naive, or even a traitorous, view of Irish-English relations inheres here. England's cruel colonialism is incontrovertible, of course, so why, an astute observer must ponder, do England's agents look so kindly on such a fine lad of the Gaelic tribe as our Jack Higgins at roughly the same time as the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh and other treacherous pirates carved up and otherwise plundered Eire as best as they were able?
Fully to respond to such queries being no more plausible than fully describing God's mind at a given moment, the assiduous pupil of history's lessons ever notes that only subtle, complex, and partial inferences may ever resonate with the rich stew of chaos and imbroglio that characterize our daily experience of life's unfolding "sleight-of-time.” Thus, at minimum, any true participant in dear Ireland’s poignant ‘peccadillo’d’ passages might ‘find some business to do’ with Gentry and the locals ever assigned the role of one sort or other of Commoner.
An observer might also expect, occasionally, intercourse to beckon with those Traveling clans who embody Irish ‘Gypsies,’ as it were. We have no need to think much of such just now, as a further adventure of Dear Jack himself centers around a complicated connection with one of Eileen’s distant cousin’s, who, through marriage had joined these wild and wily sorts.
So saying, in any event, stout Jack felt no more fealty for the churched and 'Spanistified' darlings of the local indigenous ‘upper crust,’—Commoners except for a very few exceptions, primarily through marrying Britain somehow— than he did to whatever Queen or King might grace fair England's throne, but because of his own particular endowments and proclivities, he found himself drawn to all manner of intercourse with all the parties of interest in Ireland, which set of fulcrum's connections made of him the ideal agent for all of the stakeholders, meaning that, clever lad that he was, he could act in his own behalf and countenance any manner of relation that involved his manifold stock-in-trade without sullying his soul or selling his oath for other than what it was, a fair exchange for whatever a manifested moment held out as possible.
Without doubt, this very openness to constructive ‘intercourse’ with all and sundry of his fellows had played some small part, or more, in running him afoul of those whose, ‘gifts of engagement,’ so to say, were more modest or, out of shame or shyness or otherwise, more attenuated that our dear Jack’s magnificent marvels. His life, in other words, might obviously have had much more stringent limits, much less expansive wonder, than had been his combination of delight and doom under the circumstances of his talented ministrations hither and yon. …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Again, Ukraine—Part Two
(In the first section of this multipart investigation of Ukrainian reality, readers gained both an overall overview of ‘the meaning of Ukraine’ and a series of snippets about what factors particularly characterized the realms ruled from Kiev during the restive and crucial first decades of the twentieth century. The upshot of these insights and anecdotes is that the nationalist elements in the mix of radicals and critics who opposed continuing Tsarist predominance was relatively small; even tinier were ultra-nationalist, Ukrainian separatist thinkers and actors. In this vein, communist Leon Trotsky played amicable chess with anarcho-syndicalist Jacob Abrams in Mexico, where they both opposed hyper-nationalists of all stripes.)
Where one finds an even more striking unanimity, in a similar vein to that which prevailed among variously shaded ‘Reds,’ is among the established authorities. Capitalist and landed, aristocratic and bourgeois, all agreed that rooting out these hideous monsters of democratic upheaval was a priority of the first order. Their chroniclers shovel out the largest portion of the period’s annals of 'tarred-and-feathered' composted manure, as it were.
One might write innumerably more volumes on this topic. However, the story of a single man provides an excellent précis of the point at hand, both in terms of the vile, visceral violence that elites visited on their ‘inferiors,’ and in terms of the way that those ‘subhuman’ strata took matters decisively in hand. An especially incisive summary of a prototype of the stalwart Czarist civil servant, Pyotr Stolypin, comes forth in Edward Crankshaw’s The Shadow of the Winter Palace, which lionizes the bureaucrat’s firm resolve to commit as many homicides as necessary to ‘save Russia’ and suppress revolt.
Stolypin for some time worked as the Czar’s secret-police and ‘security’ enforcer, “Minister of Internal Affairs” and more. He oversaw mass executions in Kiev() and throughout both urban and rural regions of Mother Russia and ‘Little Russia’ both. In Ukraine’s cities, partisans referred to the fate of the noose as a gift of a “Stolypin’s neckties.”
‘Liberals’ railed against the executions of thousands of dissenters. Stolypin’s reply that such action was above the law was worthy of Henry Kissinger or Heinrich Himmler. "’But courts-martial are not a legal institution,’ Stolypin replied. ‘They are a weapon of struggle. You want to prove that this weapon is not consistent with the law? Well, it is consistent with expediency. Law is not an aim in itself. When the existence of the state is threatened, the government is not only entitled but is duty bound to leave legal considerations aside and to make use of the material weapons of its power.’"
But ‘official’ sanction was never the primary means of the political reactionaries and social revanchists. The “Black Hundreds” gangs that enforced order with methods perfect for the ruling class were putatively independent expressions of patriotism and nationalism, much as the ‘Right Tendency’ killers today present the same face to public scrutiny.
However, just as today these fascists and ultra-nationalists are indistinguishable from the International Monetary Fund and its hangers-on, so too in the early Twentieth Century these aggregations of thuggish viciousness were part of the police’s tactical response to upheaval. At a trial in Moscow that was dealing with violence against radicals and Jews, an investigator of the court “states that pogrom proclamations, which Witness Statkovsky alleges never to have seen, were actually printed at the print-works of the secret police, where Statkovsky is employed; that these proclamations were distributed all over Russia by secret police agents and members of the monarchist parties; that close organizational links exist between the department of police and the Black Hundreds gangs.”
One could easily write thousands of monographs on this subject. But the point is clear. Pyotr Stolypin and his ilk represented the conscious murdering agency of class repression in Russia and Ukraine.
As such, he met an end that fit this role. In 1912, at the Kiev Opera House, where he was attending a celebratory performance for the Czar, with Nicholas in an adjacent box, a social revolutionary police double agent shot him dead. At no level were these fighters pacifists; neither among the proponents of capital and nobility nor among the people’s champions, whose actions largely, perhaps overwhelmingly, took place to serve a class rather than a nation.
In this context, splitting up the revolutionaries of Kiev and Kharkov and what we now call Donetsk, and so forth, from the insurrectionists who called Moscow or the Caucasus home, or wherever, makes no more sense than stating that the hydrogen in the water of the great lakes is a more special or unique brand of the lightest element than what prevails in the Black Sea. These revolutionaries were the ones whom the majority of the people admired and followed.
Leon Trotsky’s early life, whether one views the recounting from detractors() or admirers(), illustrates this perfectly. Ukrainian Cossacks and Jews and nationalities of all sorts were likely to be internationalist and radically rebellious both in their outlook and in their actions.
Nikita Khrushchev also completely illustrates this point. His memoirs should be required reading for all those who want a license to talk about Ukraine. He began reading Marx and Lenin and Trotsky because of a sympathetic teacher whose revolutionary proclivities extols decades later(). A key step in this process was his conscious rejection of his mother’s passionate religiosity. His teacher, an atheist, encouraged his agnosticism and materialism.
Following his father into the mines, he joined a union and participated in his first strike at the age of eighteen, which resulted in his sacking. His pipefitting skills—the same as my grandfather—nonetheless made his services indispensable, and because of this, he avoided the call to the carnage of the frontlines in World War One.
He refused the continued occupational sinecure of the mines when the nascent Nazis of the White Army rose against the Bolsheviks, however. Fighting at first in the far Eastern regions of Siberia, he ended his part in the successful destruction of the counterrevolution near home, where he experienced nation building first hand, as readers will soon enough discern. The point is that this son of Ukraine was a fighter and a worker and a socialist and a Russian and an internationalist, at the same time that he was deeply and intrinsically Ukrainian. His first wife died of malnutrition-related disease there, his children came into the world there, his family roots remained there.
We might find not scores or hundreds or thousands of such examples, but millions. A failure to countenance this is willful ignorance, which unfortunately goes hand-in-glove with mass collective suicide and ought to be something that we discard.
A final example to consider among these countless instances is that of Rodion Malinovsky, a machine gunner in World War One, a stalwart soldier who rose through the ranks in the Red Army during the civil war, and a key leader during Russia’s annihilation of the Wehrmacht during the 1940’s. His story began like those of many others, humbly and in straitened circumstances, in the city of Odessa. …(continued below the fold)
Erotic Snippets—”The Survivor Effect”
“Life goes on.” Our mothers and fathers, grandparents and friends, any who have experienced or witnessed the loss of a loved one, are wont to repeat this little aphorism. And, as a matter of course, this dynamic of all life has impressed itself, through repetition and example, on all of us.
Fornication, in other words, speeds healing and ameliorates grieving. We crave contact in the context of catastrophe, another way of stating the point.
But what about if a more massive culling of the herd erupted, or a gigantic attenuation of ‘normal human capacity’ came to pass, as after those SARS shots? How do things work out under such circumstances as those? This meandering series of narratives, what I’m calling “The Survivor Effect,” offers contextualization along these lines.
Inevitably, axiomatically, Eros must remain at least as central a part of successful coupling post-clusterfuck as pre-clusterfuck, “last man/woman on Earth” threats notwithstanding. How could things stand otherwise? As I like to quip to curmudgeonly comrades, who often enough look well askance at my topical pronouncements in this vein, “It’s how we’re wired.”
Unfortunately or randomly or altogether otherwise somehow, one who through merit or miracle lives through such hinting-at-holocaust, such moves toward manifesting Mass Collective Suicide, will find herself or discover himself in the midst of vastly reduced chances to choose accomplices or take lovers with whom to pass a night or plight a troth. Under such circumstances of restrictive diminution of other ‘fish in the sea,’ in idiomatic language, how would one who emerged from the mayhem react to options to mate, in whatever form that might take?
One view, perhaps an aspect of such a yarnspinner as Cormac McCarthy’s perspectives in a story like The Road, would be stoic withdrawal, barely discernible openness to coupling or other ways of making peer-connection a central feature of daily life. But this would not be the sole, or even perhaps the primary, method that people would make their own.
‘Eating, drinking, and merriment’ could contextualize such a postmortem, postbellum sort of environment. In such a way of proceeding, merely encountering another, finding a plausible partnering option, would appear as a sacred duty, an honor of mandatory motion toward joining and jolly delight.
However one might want to view such matters, this element of being duty-bound to conjoin and connubiate, as it were, totally typified the comings and goings, and coming again, of Janice and Ronald. Prior to the ‘Great Leveling’ that swept away some ninety-five out of a hundred humans in North America, Janice Folger, the granddaughter of the heiress who fell to the butcheries of the Manson Family, would never have seen Ronaldo Kilavsky as anything higher than a handy, handsome servant.
Sometimes, as she neared her climactic peak under his ministrations, this thought would occur to Janice, much to her delight, since it slowed her orgasm and made its flashing pulses all the more intense when her floods inevitably broke. “Who is this bronzed, brown creature who pleases me so?”
Her joyous noise unto whatever might listen eventually erupted, in any event. Often, in such circumstances, she would have mounted her hunk of manly burning love and found herself gazing down on his swarthy glistening plying of her naked flesh, astonished that such a one as he could have bedded and in practical terms wedded such a jewel as she had always considered herself.
Their first meeting illuminated clearly their theretofore, Before-Leveling, malapropos interactions with the likes of one another. A clerk at Patton Avenue Package, the retro A.B.C. outlet where Janice purchased most of her libations, Ronald found himself with the unenviable job of informing his testy customer that her favorite lager was no longer in stock.
“What do you mean you don’t have it anymore?” Her tone, personally abrasive before he had given her much cause—having merely let her know that ‘we don’t carry that one now’—darkened his already copper-toned skin, though for him the spike in his temperature was the alerting factor that let him know to be cautious, because he was already in a pissed-off physical state.
“What’s not clear to you, ma’am?” He articulated the honorific with the condescension of a youth who was trying to pacify an obdurate elder. Janice, noticeably older than the hunky clerk whom she just wanted to smack as soon as she set eyes on him, heard the insult in his lilt and snorted out an angry guffaw.
They gaily detested each other for months, till Ron got his dream job at the Zoo up off the Blue Ridge Parkway. He wanted to ‘slap her silly;’ she wanted to tie him up and ‘horsewhip him.’ She knew how to whip a horse too.
Within an hour of encountering each other Post-Leveling, nevertheless, she was gushing so fulsomely that she felt, for the first time, that she had earned the message on a piece of art that she’d purchased from a gypsy-driftwood tent prior to the Big Bang. “Everyone's Personal Cup of Sensual Pleasure Persistently Overflows Its Lips, Yet in Instances of Your Carnal Caresses of Conjugated Bliss, This Exquisite Ecstatic Eruption Surpasses Episodic to Create a Volcanic Cauldron, Flashing Epiphany, That Ushers in Nirvana's Euphoric Combustible Flush."
“He drank it all, too,” she thought with a shiver as she considered their unexpected and intense tectonic connection. The whole scene was impossible, except P-L.
Their meeting, for example, itself was so unbelievable as to have been hilarious in any other than a P-L confluence. …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Coal Creek Wars, Part Two
(Remembering the bibliographic briefing from last issue, well might one wonder about this ‘New South’ that we’ve been inhabiting lo these many decades, up to a century and a half since the end of a ‘Reconstruction’ that rebuilt things along similar lines of class and color and conquest as had prevailed theretofore, in other words, under slavery. Today’s instantiation states a ‘first take’ on what the South is, how observers might understand such things, and all related blah blah blah.)
With just a modicum of encouragement, a much longer and more thorough examination of this vicious, bloody piece from Dixie’s past would be possible. That said, today’s topic has remained a little explored and less discussed chapter in the reality that has brought forth the present moment in the United States, with inequality’s skyrocketing manifestation and a festering, suppurating poison therefrom ready to explode from the wounds and pain that common people feel every day in their lives.
Most of the sources for this story are in newspaper and labor and history archives. A handful of books, as well as a few dozen journal articles and such, deal with the particular events discussed here. Karen Shapiro’s 1998 monograph is particularly noteworthy in this regard.
A New South Rebellion: the Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coal Fields, 1871-1896 offers crucial contextualization for comprehending this essay. For example, it shows that the events of the 1890’s capped a quarter century of struggle that in turn extended from Reconstruction and the military occupation of the South to the heyday of ‘redemption,’ with the Dixiecrats again firmly in control.
‘Below the fold,’ a few pages hence in the original, although last issue in this instance, many more citations have appeared, leading to further source-materials for readers to contemplate. In that way, folks may explore a wide variety of additional evidence that is accessible online, both about the ‘Coal Creek War’ itself and about the history and political economy of peonage, prison labor, and other issues inevitably intertwined with that brutal struggle.
WHAT TOOK PLACE
At the end of the Civil War, revolutionary changes took place throughout the former slave states. From Eastern Kentucky South through Tennessee and Southwest Virginia and into Northeast and North Central Alabama, the nature of this transformation led to the creation of one of Earth’s most productive and profitable mineral and manufacturing regions.
A ‘sketch’ from a popular weekly magazine summed up all of this. “Before the war there were a few small furnaces in this now busy district overlooked by Chattanooga's mountain… . The first coke furnace was established at Rockwood in 1868 with Northern capital on Southern credit. … [by]members of the wide-awake commercial class. … The Chattanooga District, so called, is in the centre of a region of iron ores and coking coals of 150 miles in diameter.”
The author continues by sighing at the unfortunate “poverty of the planters,” without noting that their penury had resulted from their primary property’s becoming a group of wage earners. These stalwarts, former slaves, he characterizes in this way: “the shiftlessness of the Negro” led planters “to favor cotton as the easiest crop to handle on shares and borrow money upon,” but that ‘stern oversight’ could make a profit from Blacks in the mines and factories. That many of these workers ended up being prisoners was just a fact of nature.
From a liberal, or Constitutionalist point of view, the industrial relations characteristic of these developments were ‘unfortunate.’ From a more radical perspective, these interactions between labor and capital, especially in extractive pursuits, were ‘par for the course.’
In any case, employers sought to cheat the men who mined coal by systematically paying for less tonnage than workers actually produced. Furthermore, rather than paying in cash—U.S. currency—as required by law, almost all owners—at least on occasion—paid in scrip, spendable only, or primarily, at high-priced, low quality company outlets. “Saint Peter don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go,” sang Tennessee Ernie Ford in one of the best selling singles in the history of recorded sound, “I owe my soul to the company store.”
Wage earners resisted these inequities and racketeering behaviors. They demanded their due. But, for the most part, especially after the ‘grand compromise’ of 1876, which spelled the end of Reconstruction and Federal oversight, employers acted with impunity. And if workers threatened to organize, as they did again and again in Tennessee, an uptick in misdemeanors always promised a ready supply of prisoners on whom to practice ‘stern oversight.’
One hundred twenty-three years ago—July, 1891—from Chattanooga to Knoxville and Westward into Central Tennessee, union and unorganized miners joined hands with each other and extended their hands to prisoners who were dying in droves to keep the lid on coal-mining unions and workers’ rights. Then, like now, the Prison Industrial Complex benefited some of the largest corporate forces, by supplying a cheap and disposable labor force.
The primary contractor in the Tennessee Convict Lease system was the Tennessee Coal, Iron, & Railroad Company. The largest employer in the South, one of the top industrial firms in the nation, capitalized from New York and Europe, TCI in 1907 merged with United States Steel interests, a few years after J.P. Morgan’s firm had gobbled up the Carnegie interests, to form the largest industrial company on earth. Other outfits, mostly smaller and marginal, also employed prison-labor—often ‘sublet’ from TCI, but convict-leasing’s origins and primary beneficiaries were the gargantuan companies at the pinnacle of the industrial pyramid.
The United Mine Workers of America, the first union to insist that Whites and Blacks had to join the same organizations to fight for their rights as workers, was the primary labor nexus of leadership in the region. The Knights of Labor, with its secret codes and handshakes and radical rambunctiousness, also played a major part. Many workers joined these organizations in practice, even if they were not dues paying members.
One interesting aspect of this upheaval was that the miners were plus-or-minus ninety per cent White and the prisoners were almost one hundred per cent Black. Another fascinating piece of this story was that the union and unorganized colliers, with allies from community businesses and local agriculture, repeatedly confronted the militias assigned to oversee the prison-mines, and forced the release of the Black men incarcerated there. The victorious coal miners in such cases packed the jailed workers off to the State capitol or to Knoxville in the company of their keepers. …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
Well then, we’ve done it again. We’ve cobbled together plus or minus twenty-thousand words of reportage, history, storytelling, and off-the-beaten-path sojourns into culture, technology, and both the Romantic and the Mantic Arts, ha ha! What now?
For one thing, for the moment and till further notice, I’m removing the paywall and encouraging people to make donations. Of course, I’d love boatloads of money so that I could make films and other cultural magic out of the stories that come my way or show up in my dreams or other interludes of imaginative reverie. What can I say. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
What, then, are the main themes in all this Big Tent Review exposition? The newest to appear is the necessity of understanding and acting on the role that The South has played in modern society, a second expression of which idea will soon appear in the form of ‘An Introduction to Cuba,’ or something similar, an articulation of things South of the Border that will show the transmutation of Agri-Gangsters into Casino Crooks as ‘agents of capital’ both via espionage and otherwise.
Similarly, we have encountered the Modern Nuclear Project, the confrontations among SOP and radical ideologues, the importance of media, and all types of storytelling here in BTR. The world’s stages command performance of all the mysterious manifestations of empowerment; with time enough and tidal sway, we’d cover them all.
Earlier, in the Introduction, I’ve written about Existential Duties, and probably not for the first time in all BTR'‘s cascades of paragraphs and punctuation. Perhaps the most beautiful idea conceivable is a thriving human survival in the midst of mutuality and merriment. Is such an exalted state even possible? Even posing the question serves to present, in one way and another, my second and third Existential Duties, about which more will be forthcoming, without fail.
—Below the Fold—
Okay, okay, okay. So it’s the same but different, just like always, just like every time that we examine our lives and histories and all that blah blah blah. Patterns show up repeatedly, but they’re never quite the same. A Driftwood Message offered a morsel in this regard.
Its title is “Circles & Wheels,” or “Engaging Circular Allusions.” “As Incisive & Precise As It Is Elegant & Provocative, an Almost Ideal Allusion to Existence in the Universe, the Circle, Or the Wheel, Evokes Cosmic Cycles of Birth & Death, Gain & Loss, Creation & Destruction, & So on & So Forth: It Is Merely Nearly a Perfect Metaphor--Errancy on Which the Possibility of Life Itself Likely Hinges--Because No Revolution of All-That-Is Will Ever, Despite Countless Parallels, Return Everything Precisely to Any Prior Point of Origin.""
Anyhow, not-the-same, yet-similar, here we are.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
Then, for the Present Pass, a bracingly apt, and undeniably sweet visitor shows up, Jimbo’s exemplary card in service to human liberation—the Knight of Cups and Perseus’ mission, about which more below. Bellerophon brings the Knight of Wands forward once more as Future Prospects, possibly as perfect a pluck for tomorrow as is Perseus for today. A Follow-Along Semi-Jumper appeared as well, the sometimes tough Five of Wands.
Whether thankfully or merely serendipitously, this array nails up narration that readily renders an answer to the question at hand—about how to empower folks in relation to Intelligence’s ruling roosts just now. The Nine in Orestes tragic suit, where categorically only our cognition can light a way forward when things are darkest, will rarely if ever be a favorite response from the ether.
Nonetheless, the sense of utter horror at waiting for tomorrow—whether the inception is the Great Depression, the depredations and heroism of World War Two, or the ongoing monstrosities of Cold War and adhering again and again, at least momentarily, to the very brim of a plunge toward Mass Collective Suicide—a path, so that grotesque fear and anxiety are preferable to electing one course over another, feels like a familiar face of the unfolding of yesteryear’s decades. Reasonably and realistically, dread’s complete primacy rested on a foundation of willful ignorance: granted, yet that was surely part of the package.
The list of murderous ventures, all in our names, only begins with the tens of thousands in Iran in ‘53, the hundreds of thousands in Guatemala beginning shortly thereafter, and the likely tens of millions of casualties that resulted from erstwhile intelligent disposition of forces from the spooky shades of the CIA. Nothing so undergirds a state of frightful terror as does a guilty conscience, a status indistinguishable from being a ‘patriotic American.’ As a matter of course, similar ideas about ‘personal responsibility’ are part and parcel of this particular Tarot pluck. Like the fact or dread it, this is our collective yesterday and the decades prior to that.
How in the devil—as in truly Satanic forces of power’s imprimatur—can this scary factual picture lead to such a sweet instantiation of Today and its siblings as the Knight of Cups? A clearly applicable reply is as easy to pronounce as is Riane Eisler’s iconic title: Sacred Pleasure’s clarification of Dominator Culture as the inevitable offshoot of patriarchy and its in-turn Male Supremacist roots.
Along these lines, our mythic Knight’s ‘championing of the feminine’ might obviously be a key component, perhaps altogether the primary part, of any constructive deconstruction of seven or eight decades of the anguish of existential dread. Answering the horror of fascist masculinity’s rictus grin with a Mother-Goddess grace, pure and simple, fits the facts and facilitates more felicitous forays, so to say.
Is such a course in regard to Intelligence’s predatory potency intelligent? If this stance is in fact a sine qua non of survival, then necessity’s rule of free choice comes into play; an affirmation is thereby unavoidable. If this perspective is in some sense ‘only one option,’ then whether we are acting with smarts depends: as likely as not, one core factor is the level of hubris with which we manifest whatever heroism is essential to make a case.
Thus, Prospective Futures would remain assiduous in like fashion as the Knight of Wands’ ability to keep his ego in check after slaying a marvelous stand-in for Langley’s legions, the dreaded Chimera and its capacity to kill at will without miraculous interventions of one sort and another. If, however, dispatching the beast only switches out gruesome gargantuan predators, setting another monster on the throne, so to say, full of puffery and pride and self-congratulation, an observer, participant, and victim of such a charade must shrug that ‘the new boss and the old’ look very similar indeed.
Our Semi-Jumper, meanwhile, impacting all realms, depicts Jason and his sweetheart, the evil king’s daughter, against the dragon. Our ongoing struggles with ‘making ends meet’ and such must regularly feel as if we were battling a fire-breathing material reality, often enough morning, noon, and night, or Past, Present, and Future.
Today’s installment of a mantic arts Nugget exercises a Dealer’s Choice, ha ha. Rather than emphasizing the Spiral Spread, which now will merit only a brief summary statement of potential meaning, Number Twelve looks closely at an easier-to-interpret spread of cards. In any event, here is said interpretation, however stretched to the point of implausibility it may be, of the seven plucks that start Above the Fold.
Starting with Psych and Eros’ union to assess taking on the CIA is most likely the opposite of obvious. Still, this Three of Cups augury of union and partnership is the sole plausible path to an empowered popular response; we’ve got to get along with each other, LOL! The Past as an embodied instance of ‘battling the agendas of others,’ Jason’s and comrade’s fate in the Seven of Cups fight to the death, is practically perfect as an exemplar. The Hermit’s ‘necessary solitude’ seems a bit brutal about the Present, but truly and truculently, most people want nothing to do with critical conversations in this context. The Seven of Cups offering of Aphrodite’s multiple love choices and grueling tasks in the Future, similarly as with processing of the Essence, is possible to express in a utilitarian way. Odysseus’ crown of Strategic Thinking and fierce commitment to truth is another perfection, this time for the Opportunities portal. The sixth position’s eliciting wit’s capacities and hubris’ dangers in the Knight of Wands is at least close to as apt.
The Synthesis also looks too real to deal, as it were, what with the egotistical oversights that lead to Daedalus’ catastrophic and nearly fatal losses when murder might all too readily come home to roost. With enough that is less than clear, I’ll often look for some degree of Additional Explanation. Here, that brought forth the Six of Pentacles, a ‘port-in-a-storm’ possibility for one adrift to seek new alliances and patrons and the like in seeking to navigate life’s trials and tribulations toward triumph, if possible, and potential, come what may.
In aggregate, how might BTR best contextualize its role as interlocutor here? In down-to-Earth terms, what are some useful juxtapositions with ongoing reality that are possible to state about these Readings? I would probably start, as BTR, ha ha, by noting my longstanding documentary interest in espionage and propaganda and all that blah blah blah.
This fascination means that in this field I’m always reading what is credible, verifiable, or, at minimum, reasonable to argue. I’ll start with my most recent narrative acquisition along these lines, a monumental effort of vast social importance by Whitney Webb, whose phenomenal energy and courage, grit and intelligence, is a testament to humanity’s capacity to survive in spite of all odds.
The title of her two volume set is a little unnerving. We all worry about things, so that One Nation Under Blackmail evokes commonly enough at least a slight gulp response.
Her subtitle invokes even direr dangers and insidious psychic threats. “The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein," a detailed roadmap that is congruent with BTR’s ongoing navigational sketch of the way that matters actually stand in the social world of the here and now.
A five-to-ten part series about her book is starting May 1st. We needn’t go too deeply into things here, therefore, other than to note that she is an award winning investigative reporter whose integrity has yet to be questioned. She begins her book, in any event, with a former CIA agent, Bruce Hemmings, whom she quotes from a 1990 source.
“Who are these people? They are the group that is popularly called the Enterprise. They are in and outside [the] CIA. They are mostly Right Wing Republicans, but you will find a mix of Democrats, mercenaries, ex officio Mafia and opportunists within the group. They are CEOs, they are bankers, they are presidents, they own airlines, they own national television networks. They own six of the seven video documentary companies of Washington, DC and they do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and lied to."
In tune with her title’s clear implication, Hemmings closes with this flat assertion. “They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes."
I’ve been mentioning Tom O’Neill’s Chaos a lot of late, having just finished it. Its subtitle speaks volumes. “Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties." Countless times, the investigator delivers: Operation Midnight Climax is just the most captivating and bizarre, that combination of the surreal and the dangerous that is simply irresistible—a Tarot examination of which graces BTR’s next issue.
Near the start of his Epilogue, he makes a crucial point about this work of communication and understanding. “My goal isn’t to say what did happen. It’s to prove that the official story didn’t." I’ll quip that I would have boldly italicized “prove” in this little extract.
Udo Ulfkotte is ‘another kettle of fish,’ as my Norwegian friends like to say. A deeper dive into his work awaits us ahead, before June 1st if possible. Critics accuse him of noxious nationalistic sentiments; more clear-cut hypocrisy is hard to imagine. He was a professional reporter; he died suddenly on an unexpected heart attack; he made all manner of criminally libelous accusations about media businesses and the journalistic practitioners thereof in a Deutsche Republik that helped victims of such claims facilitate recovery against falsifiers, including as much as two years imprisonment for each written indictment.
What’s his title? Ah, yes, from today’s Intro: Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA; a confession from the profession. Ulfkotte supported his indictment till he died. He was a professional reporter who turned the tables on the distortion and falsehood that comprised his professional career, full of perquisites and careerism in fealty to empire. We’ll find out more soon enough.
Finally, for now, though BTR has already evidenced CIA criminality in different ways, one may hope that readers might have an at least partial awareness of certain key aspects of documentation and analysis. 1964, 1976, and the mid 1980’s, for example, all contain troves of officially collected facts that generally acknowledge or otherwise demonstrate Official malfeasance or criminal negligence, acts that at times incontrovertibly happened intentionally, in furtherance of National Security and Intelligence operations, frequently enough under cover of ‘task forces’ right here at home, as with the aforementioned Operation Midnight Climax, which ended up being a low-rent version of Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislane Maxwell’s CIA-Infused honey-trap endeavors six decades hence.
Just as a hypothetical, hypermediated game, for example, albeit in a quite separate and more tragic sphere, one might imagine what narrative arc to make of a scenario like this: ‘Commission’ to investigate assassination includes incontrovertible political enemies of the murdered politician. This delineates Godfather territory, no doubt, yet it also matches known realities from the past.
Thus, might one posit that—not to mention George Herbert Walker Bush’s whereabouts on and about November 22nd, 1963—much has yet to come to light about the hit on John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That the Warren Commission’s gave seats, for instance, to Allen Dulles—whom JFK sacked from the CIA—and Dulles’ protege and soon to be Agency Director, Richard Helms, neither of whom disclosed Agency contacts with both fall-guy, lone-assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and with Oswald’s miraculous murderer, Jack Ruby, approximates a much more venal development than the most noisome Game of Thrones betrayal. Such parameters to reality’s realm render citizens’ outraged responses mandatory.
Concerning everything here in aggregate, perhaps listening to indefatigable bulldog Tom O’Neill would make sense. Regarding figuring things out, he admits defeat, “(b)ut I haven’t stopped trying. If there’s hope anywhere, it’s in the documents. I remain shocked by the state’s lack of transparency. For reasons I can’t understand, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, federal bureaus, and other outposts of officialdom continue to suppress their files, even as they claim they have nothing to hide.”
In addition to these piles and piles of evidence and analysis to illuminate an at best dark sojourn toward justice, Marshall Arts’ Driftwood Messages might also assist a salubrious manifestation of human possibility. The following verse is merely one of many from the queue in this regard. “Sacred Duties” is its name.
“In an Age of Putrid Punditry & Hypocritical Authority, When High Bidders Dictate Holy Writ & Scientific Certification, Propagandized 'Expert' Barrages Bombard Hypothetical Citizens, Who, As a Result, Often Lose Sight of How Honest Answers Absolutely Require Probing Questions & Inclusive Dialog, an Engaged Learning Process Only Attainable Where Neither Chauvinism Nor Presumption Prevail & Where, Crucially, Both Critical Thinking & Participation Are Sacred Duties That Vastly Outweigh Standard Commandments That Mandate Fealty, Loyalty, Or Any Other Form of Subservience." As my grandmother Fox liked to state the case, “a word, to the wise, is sufficient.”
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
He gulped. “Nahhhhh! They wouldn’t do that; I haven’t done anything yet.” He thought about this purported fact, one to which he clung with tenacity. “Not really.”
Then he spoke up. He hadn’t so far said anything over the course of their hour and a half on the road. “Is it possible that we could stop so I can pee?”
The big guy, the one who had skewered him with the light in his face, his nemesis till eternity, Richard swore, reached in a bag and handed him a jar. He held it out to him casually, as if this were a common response to a request for a bathroom stop.
In any case, the expressions on all five of the faces that stared at him revealed their recognition of his innermost thoughts. Not that any attempt to scamper away, like a rabbit, from these buffed and burly fellows would likely have come to much.
“But I could’ve raised holy hell,” he knew, as did they. Rich demurred from unzipping and letting go while his captors looked on. He hadn’t had to urinate that badly when he asked.
He wanted to ask where in hell they were heading. Yet he didn’t want to inquire either. He was smaller and weaker and less disciplined and experienced than any of his jailers; that did not override his guttural drive to have the upper hand, to be in charge, and he loathed communicating from below, which was one reason, no doubt, that his mother had intervened so intrusively in his life.
He would deny till someone threatened to kill him or at least thoroughly kick his ass—“and that would be extortion, wouldn’t it?”—that he had actually assaulted his mother. “What happened was,” he thought, pantomiming that he was making his case to the court and its jurors, “she grabbed me and shook me.” With deadpan seriousness, he finished the recollection, “And so I grabbed and shook her too. That’s all.”
In a sense, anyhow, he felt almost one hundred percent certainty of where his next stop would be. Not that he could state the precise location, or the name of the place, he couldn’t. But he had heard, largely rumors in terms of specifics, but very clear in regard to generalities, of two boys, and one girl, up to a few years his senior, who had disappeared, a few months or the larger part of a year apart, over the past six or seven semesters, as he had risen from seventh to eighth and then to ninth grade, before he finally entered and finished his first year of high school in decidedly desultory fashion.
None of these three ‘missing persons’ had been his friends. But they had been like him, from well-to-do—or in the case of one of them, “rich-as-shit” families, Anglo, and resident in Macon’s southside enclave of white privilege and old money.
They had taken to drugs, sex, or other sins of rock and roll that had induced parental intervention, or so the deductions of onlookers concluded. And now, “they’re being rehabilitated, like they’re going to do to me,” he thought, “vanished into thin air.” He made a mental sign of something going ‘poof!’
He remembered two occasions vividly. In each, an adult—one of whom was his vile mother—spoke quietly to a friend about what was taking place with the ‘missing children.’ “It is for his own good.” In one case it had been “her,” “her own good.”
When the van stopped moving, he woke with a surge of energy and rose as if to bolt. Once more, multiple pairs of strong hands took hold of his arms. Darkness still reigned, but the glimmers of a Southern Midsummer dawn touched the Eastern horizon that was visible through the front window of the Chevrolet behemoth.
His ‘initial reception’ took an hour and a half. Natural luminosity leaked into the “intake processing unit” well before the final formal check on his intake list had received its mark. He had learned that his mother had signed away his rights, which would have been impossible in another few months, after he had turned sixteen.
“But now, they get to keep me as long as they want,” he had understood from the forms and the lectures that he had received and processed. At the end of it all, at least temporarily defeated, he had inquired of the nurse, a stout and sleepy female whose shift ended at eight, his tone as close to sweetness and light as he could manage, yet typically imperious too: “Wouldn’t it be a great idea if I could get some sleep? I didn’t get hardly any sleep, you know.”
When neither the R.N. nor his minders assented but instead eyed him with some combination of dismissal and disdain, he said, affably but with a pushy tone of threat, “It’s abuse not to let someone sleep.” Two orderlies had him by the arms as he persisted, “I mean, it’s torture.”
But since sleep-deprivation was part of the drill, an integral aspect of inculcating the protocols of Analakee, the name that he had learned for his new ‘home,’ his desire to slumber would remain on hold, as it were. His next stop was the office of the whole facility’s director, in the words of one of the women whom Richard had overheard one time, “a real genius.”
This came back to him at the precise moment that the well worn linoleum became a carpet plush enough to be a “Green at the Master’s,” where Richard’s father had promised to take him before he finished high school. “Well, if he’s so smart, he’ll really like me.” He almost smiled at the idea. He tried mightily to convince himself that all would soon be well.
As if the guard on point—“my personal bouncers quartet,” Richard was already calling them—had read his mind, “young Mr. Musclebound” interjected, turning to regard his prisoner directly, “the Director doesn’t meet just anybody.”
“Yeah, you should be honored,” said “Friar Fatso” from his position behind Richard and the two fellows whom he had yet to name, who firmly, if not painfully, held his upper arms in a guiding hand.
“Fat chance, fat fuck!” Richard answered in his head, even as he felt an easing of the obnoxious nervous tension in his stomach, which had thus far felt as if he had just eaten something greasy and disagreeable. Maybe he’d be okay.
As Mr. Musclebound knocked on and then opened the solid mahogany door to the “Director’s Suite,” a whisper came to Rich’s right ear. He couldn’t tell whether the tone was sympathetic or derisive: “He only ‘interviews’ the badasses, to beat the crap out of ‘em right at the start.”
“So stud,” the bulky, older man intoned, silky and sinister at once; “you’re a tough guy, huh?”
This was the second thing Director Potter, “You can call me Dr. Potter or you can call me sir, but don’t you move from that spot,” had said, as he indicated with a forceful gesture that Richard was to stand on a substantial mat; “fucking things made of rubber,” he noted in his mind. The young man had nodded at the snap of authority in his interrogator’s voice: “I want to have that ‘tone of command,’” he reflected, ruminating innocently, “when I grow up.”
He had also noted, but refused—almost snarling at the notion—to consider the meaning of a piece of what appeared to be leather or rubber—“It looks like my mom’s dildo,” was as far as he’d taken the issue, which was an alarming enough admission—that Dr. Potter repeatedly struck on the palm of his right hand—“pop!” “pop!” “pop!” as he circled Richard, who was, as directed by the Director, “standing on the Astroturf,” or “whatever in hell it is.”
“Pop!!” The sound, so close to his ear, transmitted almost kinetically as well as via airborne energy, would be one of his final flashes, at the end of his days; he felt certain of that. He’d never heard anything quite like it, though the technical acoustics of being beaten with a rubber cudgel seemed unimportant in the arena of pain that he was now experiencing.
“Ow!” he reached for the part of his upper left arm that was least accessible to his right hand’s comfort. He did a little dance but did not stray from his position.
“Any question that is put to you, answer without delay.”
“But sir, I,” Richard began. “Pop!”
“And, any time a staff member is instructing you, don’t speak unless spoken to directly, except to answer without delay.” His voice retained its combination of steel and molten smoothness.
Richard wanted to run, to fall down and cry. He definitely intuited the purpose of the rubber mat: “I almost peed myself twice,” he would remember.
After the good Doctor P. thwacked him again for failing to answer the original query, and again for an uttered expletive that he cautioned with a “no cussing, ever,” imprecation, and again for this and again for that, over the course of the next forty-two minutes, the young man whose misfortune was to learn this rough trade without support or recourse endured thirty-six blows to his buttocks, his arms, his back, the fronts and backs of his upper legs, and his calf muscles lower down.
“About once a minute, according to my calculations,” Dr. Potter stated as he summarized the meaning of this encounter for the youthful Richard Smithfield. “You don’t ever have to come back here under these circumstances. In fact, I can tell that you could be a young leader here.”
The psychopathic smooth operator, who was paying himself $900,000 per year plus a bonus, and who was a genius at reeling in his victims, even stroked his young victim's seething shoulder at that point with fatherly regard and the knowing touch of someone who couldn’t quite get the hang of chiropractic college, but had sailed as fluidly through his behavioral psychology doctorate program as if he were the reptilian beast that was the first to discover that water both drowned mammals and ripened them up for nibbling. “It’s all up to you. Now maybe you should sleep on it, and you can let me know.” Next Up: Chapter XIII
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
of additional, more or less categorical, manifestations of critique and comprehension about ‘how things actually stand’ in the world. Ukraine, abortion, Palestine, sex and gender, Uranium’s imprimatur, and many more issues show up as regular participants in the BTR showcase.
Possibly, empire’s predominant prospectus might articulate the issue-set most congruent with the South, in terms of capsulizing Culture, Agency, and Mediation in the pages here. Almost incontrovertibly, the story of Steven Salaita pronounces with near perfection this intersection of a potent, grounded, cultural mediation of agency that persists with its Southern flavoring.
After all, he worked in his field, Indigenous and Palestinian Studies, from a tenured post at Blacksburg’s Virginia Tech campus. One of his many books, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, has interconnected Virginia’s history with that of his own West Virginia roots, albeit via Palestinian and Jordanian parents.
Following the fraud and duplicity that stripped him of a ‘tenure transfer’ to the University of Illinois at Champagne/Urbana, he headlined an Ivy League program, “Native and Palestinian Activism in the Age of U.S. Imperialism." A Cornell history professor introduced him, in part, as follows. “Empires lie, distort, and deceive; they always have… .acting in the name of security and, most laughably, democracy, …to initiate a continuous war on all humanity.”
“Institutional violence” in such ongoing conflict can, clearly, originate with a fiery cross-burning or planned property expropriation, whether the locus of the theft is a slave’s body, a Sioux’s hunting rights, a Palestinian farmstead, or a prisoner’s labor. Salaita himself, for a time driving a school bus instead of teaching college classes, suffered from, in many senses, a similarly severe expropriation.
His story in this matter, even as it circumscribes the ‘liberation’ of America’s lands from their original residents and intersects with the world’s newest “settler colonial project” via Israel’s SOP, establishes multiple dots in need of connection in regard to enculturated mediation and options for agency. Not only is his personal saga a splinter of the colonial endeavor; his is also a legacy of doing everything punctiliously in academia’s ‘publish or perish’ purview, close to a dozen monographs and multiple additional journal articles, lectures, everything exemplary of a mediator in the arena of knowledge creation.
None of this saved him, however. He tempted fate by having the temerity to speak his mind and live his convictions, via Twitter, in regard to Israel/Palestine. Balfour’s ‘balance’ with Nakba didn’t matter; nor did rampant murder and eviction, brutality and impunity, on the part of Israel toward its land’s primary original residents. All that mattered was Salaita’s garnering the guts to suggest that a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions approach to resisting Israeli power could state a possible case for the activities of activists, as it were.
In describing his ordeal, much of his initial commentary has everything to do with process. He does not argue rights or their violation, violence against locals or resistance to routine rottenness by ‘indigenous populations,’ or any other substantive piece of this complex puzzle in which policy serves to fuel empire’s insistence on avoiding any accountability, whether among the Pawnee or the Palestinians.
Instead, he notes the Orwellian absurdity, the surreal manure, that switches the grounds of his illegal firing, from actual issues of substantive political economic and historical dynamics, to fake and facile accusations of ‘uncivil’ social media postings and attendant, alleged undermining of the collegiate educational environment. Nor are Salaita’s travails, the summary execution of his tenure, rare in the propagandized public relations of the here and now.
On the contrary, failure to perform conformity perfectly has led to University Presidents who have fallen like well-struck bowling pins. In “Free Speech on Campus: an Exchange," the author of The Cancelling of the American Mind notes the highly unfavorable contrast between attacks on free speech and academic freedom now vis a vis such assaults in earlier, supposedly more virulent, ‘Red Scare’ and McCarthyist situations.
In a 2022 “survey, one in six college faculty reported their speech had been investigated or punished or that they were threatened with investigation or punishment.” At best, such a factual foundations suggests how firm is a type of ‘friendly fascist’ fashion, in which one can shop till one drops but lose one’s job or social media privileges because one has opinions that violate empire’s operational codes.
In future writing about Steven Salaita’s case and otherwise, many details in this sort of upheaval will emerge, as well as various ‘casualty counts’ in the shooting wars that demarcate the merely mediated ‘incivility’ that defines today’s look at Culture, Agency, Media, and so forth. For the moment, a Wood Word Message punctuates a potent point, so to speak.
“In Plutocratic Standard Practice of Pyramid Dreams to Stay Forever Atop the Human Heap, War & Terror’s Dividing Conquests Have Served As Their Primary Tools: Only a Clear Consciousness of the Class Character of This Ubiquitous Imposition of Brutal Conflict & Its Attendant Expression of ‘Brand Chaos’ & Its Signature Effects of Murder & Destruction, & Skeptical, Stalwart Solidarity in Response, Can Escape Otherwise Irreversible Bludgeoned Drudgery & Place Mastery of Nature’s Mysteries— Which, After All, Only Labor Can Craft—Truly at the Service of Humanity’s Masses, Instead of Enriching Only Our Rotten, Rigged Game’s Self-Anointed ‘Masters.’"
Unsurprisingly, maybe, Germany is a prime practitioner of systematic, mediated oppression of any cultural statement that fails to comport with plutocratic—which is to say in many instances Israeli-State—protocols. A recent New York Review of Books analytical essay made the case like this. “In Berlin the word ‘apartheid’ can get you cancelled faster than the N-word will get you cancelled in New York. Unlike the N-word, ‘apartheid’ is not a racist slur but a technical juridical term denoting different legal systems for different people."
The author continues, demonstrating that cultural cancellations cannot help but castrate facts as well. “In Israel and the U.S., legal scholars are still debating whether (‘apartheid’)applies to those parts of Israel that are within the Green Line, but most agree that it’s a perfectly accurate description of conditions in the West Bank," not to mention the shop of horrors that has come to characterize Gaza.
As everything plays out, a piece of wood might contain cautionary content about this overall context. "Any Canvas That One Prepares to Portray Image, Idea, Or Endeavor Will Evince Only Useless Yapping, Utter Inanity, If It Lacks Adequate Context Or Presents Falsehood As Accurate Awareness, Cautionary Counsel Indeed in This Age of Ubiquitous Prepackaged Propaganda That Scheming Imperial Plutocrats & Opportunistic Profiteers Masterfully Mediate to Manipulate the Masses of Humanity So As to Advance Their Own Self-Righteous Self-Serving Agendas."
In some sense, in all of this maelstrom of word and deed, imperialism is the fulcrum on which American culture turns, whether the pages are popular fiction or academic treatise, whether the setting is urban usurpation at home or rural robbery abroad; or vice versa. Well might one attend to a hell of a storyteller, whose copper lead character is anything but politically correct or even vaguely interested in so-called Cancel Culture.
Readers should listen to Michael Connelly’s description of ‘cop occupation’ of Los Angeles. “Through political opportunism and ineptitude, the city had allowed the department to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization. Infected with political bacteria itself, the department was top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served.
They only ventured out to deal with the dirtbags and, consequently, …it had created a police culture in which everybody not in blue was seen as a dirtbag and was treated as such. Everybody." “From the river to the sea” indeed.
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
Father's state of mind made even more amazing a scene that occurred ten days after his first Sunday "game." Madeleine and Matthew Sr. had slept separately after the night she first bolted herself into the guest closet. But on the Wednesday night a week and a half after declaring he would take solace where he could find it, everyone in the house, except Mama, who was already alert to every such nuance, awoke to hear the sergeant begging her to take him in.
"Maddy, I'm your husband, now; I'm the only man for ya, and I'm about to bust with wantin' to be with ya." Dad went on in this manner, pausing to consider replies pitched to his ears alone, for ten minutes or more. Finally, with a "damn woman! We'll both rot in Hell for this," he stumped back to the lonely bed in the middle of their room.
We boys knew there would be hell to pay, all right, but figured we'd be the ones to suffer it. Not one of us guessed the lengths to which daddy would eventually go in his fury and frustration.
* * *
Every year toward the end of the harvest, in a pact that began when the sergeant dismissed his last hired laborer six years ago, Matthew Porter took his boys to the beach for a vacation. This interlude invariably occurred between the end of the harvest and the beginning of whatever Winter work he had scheduled.
This minor holiday had assumed, by the time of my parent's battle, the importance of Christmas and Easter. Those were the other two days during the year when the Sergeant permitted late sleeping, heavy eating, total silliness, and other trappings of time off. We worked as little as five or six hours some Sundays, and much of the effort we expended on any day involved games and competitions of our own invention.
But for 360 days out of every 365, Father expected and received our labor, particularly from the boys older than five. We went to school, but worked one to four hours before and after, depending on the season and the tasks at hand. The volume of work eventually slowed; a few teenagers produce as much as nine children after all, and relative prosperity allowed us ultimately to purchase a good Ford tractor, a baling machine, and other equipment that lightened the load that we had carried on our backs.
Still, we toiled a great deal more than what middle class Americans deem proper or even possible. And our "beach 'oliday," as Thomas—my brother, the actor—had designated it with a South Alabama Oxford accent, was now sacred. We would have an entire day at the beach, where we created entire universes of forts and palaces, intrigues and adventures, among the rolling dunes, beach grass, fleas, and sun of some undeveloped stretch of Gulf sand and mud. We ranged over miles of territory, as free to wander and scheme as the pirates of our fantasies. Since as early as I could remember, John always led one troop, Matt Jr. another, in all our battles and matches.
This day, for the boys in my family, stood for all that is wonderful in childhood; the possibility to indulge in the joy of pure play, to search for adventure, and to consume bellies full of wonderful food. The Sergeant would fish all day, catch crabs, and bring along shrimp and vegetables. He catered to and demonstrated to us that he was still our provider, as slavishly as he drove us the rest of the year. A monumental feast, entirely of his making, finished the firelight expedition that we became as we tented down.
At the beach, weather had thus far uniformly cooperated with our ventures. Daddy told stories, we played guitars and sang songs, accompanied by wind amid an audience of the stars. We slept ten full hours, arose as the sun painted the Southeast peach or grey, and stayed another half day or more before returning rejuvenated to our normal round of chores and activities. One of the days was a Monday or Friday, so that we always missed school as well. Our world countenanced no greater recreational perfection.
The day after Madeiline's midnight refusal to open her door, the Sergeant held a meeting in the bottomland shed he had recently used as a sexual-manners-lecture hall. The afternoon held all the promise that the most glorious autumn air and light of the Gulf Coast South has to offer.
But Matthew Porter Senior loomed like one of the awesomely big thunderheads that can swoop across those flat lands, blotting out light and threatening destruction. We all reckoned on some impossible week-end task, something which would occupy twenty killing hours Saturday and fourteen hours or so Sunday. We sensed his pain in relation to the ongoing struggle with Mother, a contest where Daddy had few encounters he saw as victories; we anticipated that he would do something abusive to us and himself, in the name of the work ethic.
Instead, the Sergeant conveyed to us that although he had planned on taking our annual seashore outing the following Sunday and Monday, he "just didn't see how we could do it this year, what with all the work backed up on the farm. So, this weekend and next, we're gonna clear that last three acres of lighterd stumps at the lower edge the propity."
Hell, even I figured out that work was not what had 'backed up' on the farm. We all saw how it was: we were to perform the nastiest, meanest, and scariest work around so that Daddy could ease some of the pain of not ruling his roost like some sort of tough young cock. At first, nobody said anything, which is superficially exactly the reaction the Sergeant demanded to his proclamations, barring intelligent questions.
"Ya mean, no 'beach 'oliday?'" emanated from Thomas as if coming from a disembodied statue. His mouth just opened up and said the words, without expression. "God Damn!" escaped John's lips like a little bottle rocket spitting up into the air. Thomas's question was not of the sensible variety, since Papa always made his meaning plain, and my eldest brother's blasphemy warranted at least a skin-searing, head-turning slap under normal circumstances.
"I'm afraid that's right boys," was all the Sergeant said, with a far off tone, eyes on the horizon and inside himself.
Each of us found a way to tell Mother about Dad's decision, but her answer was weary, withdrawn, and uniform. "That sure is too bad, son." She had her own fight and could not carry ours. Our absolute dejection, and the distracted antagonism of my parents, made that night one of the most depressing that a house full of people has ever felt. Next Up: Part Three
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
After all, the sky remained blue, fluffy clouds dripped their cottony white drops across the sky, and at moonrise atop Divining Rock, the Goddess might answer any question that a supplicant posed. Both Red and Sam had their own queries to advance, and they had each other to stay warm in the frigid winds that stormed down from higher, ever snow-clad peaks nearby.
Their children, in the company of their grandma, whom the two girls simply begged to tell them yet one more time of their Mother and the wolf, watched the same yellow moon rise like a honeyed orb as did their parents, albeit the lovers viewed the unfolding lunar drama from a much higher perch. Camille and Dahlia had been taking turns playing Ma and Pa to Sage, already an eager toddler with a wicked sense of humor.
“MaMa Heather! MaMa Heather! MaMa Heather!” The girls shouted in unison as their still barely babbling brother tasted his toes and tried to bend his head to the notch between his knees. Heather Wolfsbane had been plucking her lute and wondering if Luna, or even Hecate herself, might give her guidance about the querulous question that she had for several months been gnawing with a combination of compulsion and consternation.
Since she had been gazing steadfastly at the glowing, rotund face of Earth’s sweet, sidereal satellite, she had not witnessed the streaking shooting star’s comet-like intensity that her grandchild duo had seen, enchanted and awestruck at once, uncertain of this miracle’s meaning but enthralled, come what may. “What child?” asked the elder, scooping up the drifting brother Sage and bussing his toes herself. “What child?” she now proposed to the oldest sibling, Camille.
Both girls were wide-eyed. Finally, Dahlia offered, “the flying star, MaMa!” Heather’s stroking palm paused on her grandson’s back; her breath caught, ever so slightly.
Following a series of queries about its brightness—like a sun, its direction—past the moon, and its color—”red!” sang out Camille; “blue,” rejoined Dahlia; “purple,” added her sister; “white!” chipped in Dahlia again, the widow clung fiercely to her sleeping grandbaby boy and gathered her two granddaughters to huddle in her skirts. She rocked and sang, the wind’s whistle a tocsin of fate.
At just that instant, high in the rocks, inside the single room hut that all the villagers roundabout shared, on a first come, first served basis, if all the rooms at their jointly-owned ‘retreat’s castle keep had occupants—often the case on any full moon, always so when, like today the first complete lunar orb of a season was rising—Sam’s lips plumbed a course along his mate’s beloved neck, pausing to nibble at the plump lobes of his sweet wife’s ‘lovely ears.’
After seeing Dahlia’s ‘flying star,’ they had retired to loving embraces that attached the spaces in their souls to the fated, mated traces that they shared in trudging through all the glee and grace, all the weary waste, of the unfolding of all-that-is. Without discussion, they had nonetheless had a meeting of the minds about any planting ritual in their lovemaking. ‘No more children just yet’ had become their current agreement.
So they loved away their evening, ‘combustion without conception’ in local parlance, till they glowed in their mutually burnishing hugs and kisses that plugged their souls with intoxicated bliss. At a restful juncture in their dalliance, Red lay her palm on his breast and asked, with a playful lilt, “So husband! What do you make of our evening’s astonishment, a full-moon shooting star?”
And as clearly as the well water streamed in streaks of light at sunrise, Red realized that she pierced her husband’s heart with an unintentional dart. “What?” she shivered as she thought to herself. Then, after a pause during which she counted the moments that marked the distance from her love’s last breath, she inquired aloud, albeit nearly breathless in intonation, “What?”
Sam, like many men, was simply a terrible liar. She knew immediately that his demurral was demented and false; moreover, she knew that he knew that she knew. “Why does he evade me?” she asked herself as she massaged the tension in his high forehead. “Tell me husband,” she commanded simply.
But though they played and chatted till predawn’s darkest hour was passing with no more whisper than the night’s flying potent, he wouldn’t reveal what he nurtured beneath his ribs like an expectant mother hopes that her child will emerge healthy and whole. They twice nearly argued, much more unsettling to Red than Sam, who was wrestling, in his innards, with greater concerns.
After Red had scaled a final peak to share with Sam, rivulets dripping down her neck as she shrieked with climactic hilarity, she pulled a spill from her for her belly, so that she could drift toward Morpheus and the equally sweet, if completely contrasting, release of sleep and dreams. Sam, though, entwined with his wife’s sinuous, inclined twining, lay wakeful and still till sunlight flooded their rough-hewn floor.
She stirred and spoke from dreamland, whispers and drool. Finally he drifted as well, salubrious snores finally his fate.
Thus closes the first Moon’s installment in the saga of an annual transit of life through the marriage of Sam and Red, awaiting the coming New Moon’s blooming to engage and enjoy yet another cycle of Goddess Grace. The two were yet a bit wary of each other. They had rarely bickered, never fought, and any wish that one had set a heart on having the other was sure to fulfill.
Nevertheless, Sam had not told Red of his psychic worries and mental woes, although she knew well that trouble brewed and dripped from her great man’s breast and head and guts. “He’ll tell me on the morrow,” Red assured herself, with that womanly confidence that, once earned, is never likely to be spurned.
“I’ll speak tomorrow,” thought Sam. “No need to ruin our first night,” when they had so piquantly and fervently renewed their vows of adoration and mutual service under Gaia’s ghostly gaze. Next Up: a Soothsaying Second Moon.
New Folk Fables—(continued)…
Especially in the particularities of his current context, obviously, no matter the deftness of his bargains and the magic of his potions, as his semi-conscious and bludgeoned body, bound and gagged, had bumped along the Derry Road on the way to High Pasture Gate, his future seemed none too bright. "I'll miss his soup" is what Martin McGhee thought to himself as he gave Jack's lolling head a last 'fare-thee-well", and, not investing himself in any outcome other than his own immediate extrication from this noisome maelstrom, said to the sad, hungover saps in the wagon, "I'll just scout the pasture ahead for any possible impediments, gents," giving his mare a touch of metal from his boots, so that she leapt ahead in sucking mud, all the while tossing her head at the indignity of spurs.
"And that's the last we'll see of him, this night!" intoned Morgan Morgan wearily.
"Aye!" added a grim and laconic Billy Wilder, whose throbbing stump of a digit left him breathless with nausea each time the team of dray geldings twisted the reins in his hands, the only pair of arms that had learned the skills safely to navigate them over the mountain.
"We should just," responded Billy's gargantuan brother, now more verbose than his brother for the first time since their sprouting years of early manhood, "knock him in the head and dig a hole," a dire, dour threat that penetrated stalwart Jack's consciousness in a sadly sickening way. Ricky sat above and behind his brother and Morgan Morgan, facing the bed of the wagon, his boots dangling and bouncing along with the arrhythmic jouncing of their rig, poised just above Jack's beaten head and blurry consciousness, whose greatest frustration was that he felt so battered and bloodied that he could barely breathe, let alone put together an approximation of coherent thoughts that might conceivably begin to formulate themselves into a strategy for survival.
"Just a bit of a ditch's all we'd need," continued Ricky into the frigid dampness of the dripping midnight, half dew and half frost.
"Oh, sure!" spit out Morgan Morgan; "'n we'd all eat roast mutton off the shilling a week ye'd command in Liverpool, eh?"
"Aye,” said Rick's younger brother, though his voice emerged as an agonized hiss. And so their fairly foul conversation carried them on into the night, the wagon wheels slurping behind the sodden sturdiness of their horse's sucking hooves.
Whatever the mixture of the trio's anger at Jack, their weariness of their present drudgery, and their reluctant adhesion to the rule of Sir Robert—their ignorance of the great martinet's fall was of course complete—a hidden and, by most calculations of the ticking of the cosmic clock, childish aspect to their chagrin over their current assignment stemmed from the lore of Witch Mountain and the horror that many Christians felt about the prospect of the goddess getting her due in the event that any unwary non-believer in Her potent ministrations might happen by on a night that the lady's powers were ascendant.
As a fat pearl of a moon, full as a man's beating heart, glistened down on them through broken clouds from high above, Ricky Wilder shrunk into himself again. "May Christ have mercy on our souls," he whispered into the night, faithfully in favor of his teaching, yet faithlessly committing a sacrilege against the Lady of the Glen and the Goddess-Mother of all that is. Next Up: Chapter X.
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
His father was murdered. His mother, nursing soldiers of the Russo-Japanese War, met a countess who liked her. In her new friend’s brother, she married a more genteel servant of royalty, who soon sent young Rodion packing. His stepfather “did not like Rodion and had no intention of adopting him.
So the little boy had to start work at the age of 13, first, at a nearby farm and then, after his relatives from Odessa took him in, as an errand boy in a general store. In 1914 Rodion, then 15 and too young for military service, became a solider on his own initiative. He simply hid inside the train with troops on their way to the frontline. He was found as soon as the train reached its destination. However, Rodion managed to convince the commanding officers to enlist him as a volunteer in a machine-gun detachment. His first battles took place on Polish soil. In March 1915 he received his first award, the Cross of St. George, for fighting off a German attack—he was promoted to the rank of corporal.”
Nothing here suggests a fierce revolutionary commitment, but at the cessation of World War One—he was in France at the time, and he stayed to the end in part because France would not permit soldiers to return to the swaddled babe of the Soviet Union. He had to use his own initiative again to find his way through Japanese-occupied Vladivostok to join the Communist forces.
Again, countless other narratives would permit the same conclusion. Any assessment that Russia was the problem that most Ukrainians experienced, that patriotism was their response, or that revolution was foreign to them, is at best patent nonsense. Not only was the reality of Ukrainian experience vastly more complicated than such a tidy view, but the facts are indisputable that something like a majority of residents either joined or followed the leadership of rebels and internationalists, rather than the adhering to the fantasies and tricky hidden agendas of those for whom nationalistic fervor was paramount.
World War One typifies this complexity. With the help of agents from Russia, Austria, Germany, and France in particular, those who professed aspirations to nationhood and Ukrainian identity rose to control() the State at times. Kiev was, after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in the hands of such reactionaries().
But the uprisings of the civil war against the occupation of Crimea and other parts of Southern Ukraine, by French, Greek, and Turkish invaders who helped the White Army’s attempts to ‘smother the Red babe in its crib()’ soon swept away these followers of the fancies of the past and the itineraries of the rich. Their hold on popular consciousness was never more than chimerical.
The writings of Nestor Markho, the brilliant and ruthless anarchist opponent of counterrevolution(), reveal these tendencies brilliantly. He pointed out how the attacks on Jews that at this point presaged what was to come two decades hence were almost one hundred percent the machinations of the super-patriots and the ‘fatherlanders().’ And when an anarchist or a Bolshevik participated in such an atrocity, “they were without exception summarily shot.”
Marusya, after having ascended to the leadership of her own anarchist army in the service of the Red Army, died at the end of White army hemp. Her compatriots called() her the “Joan-of-Arc-of Anarchy.”
Before her struggles ended however, she had repeatedly ventured behind enemy lines and convinced Cossacks to defect to the Communists. “Cossacks, I must tell you that you are the butchers of the Russian workers. Will you continue to be so in the future, or will you acknowledge your own wickedness and join the ranks of the oppressed? Up to now you have shown no respect for the poor workers. For one of the tsar's rubles or a glass of wine, you have nailed them living to the cross.”
In this complicated, often contradictory, multidimensional and many-sided mélange of repression and rebellion, war and civil war, the different regions of Ukraine underwent varied experiences during these first decades of death and devastation and insurrection. But whether one examines Crimea; or further West along the coast in Odessa; or inland at Kiev or Kharkov or what was then Ekaterinoslav; or snug up to the lands of the Don Cossacks in the industrial and coal regions of the East; or Westward into Galicia, the threads are indisputably the same.
A dominant radicalism vomited on Czarist Russia not because it was Russian but because it oppressed the common people. The nationalists and the super-patriots, often surreptitiously in league with their erstwhile upper-crust ‘enemies,’ were always in the minority, though naturally they ended up being exceedingly popular among the powers that be.
And with very few exceptions the views of those ruling elites overwhelmingly held sway among the large landholders, the bankers, the substantial merchants, and the industrialists. Moreover, and especially pertinent in apprehending the present pass, these local gentry identified ideologically and connected tangibly in both political and economic fashion, with the upper strata of ‘Western’ capitalist society generally.
Fascist Seedlings After Red Victory: Russia, Capitalism, Dual Crises
Even the briefest examination of these events, as here, shows unequivocally an architecture of interconnection between Ukraine and Russia. No doubt, further and deeper assessment would yield additional nuance, marvels of paradox and the unexpected, in addition to mountains of data to support the primary thesis here, concerning this intertwined history and the radical identification that accompanies it.
Another point to note, as this essay develops additional paragraphs about the years 1921-1933, is that crisis bounded previous happenings, dire straits for both Russia and capitalism. Thus, hunger and cholera joined ‘great depression’ at the outset, while typhus and flu and starvation and unparalleled mass murder and social collapse conjoined financial panic and economic ruin at the culmination.
The rout of the so-called White Armies, though they demonstrated Bolshevik political mastery and, at least tentatively, social ascendancy, did not mean that the basis for capital’s detestation() of Boshevism had receded. After all, this ‘White Army’ only existed because of Western support()—both arms and funds, not to mention spies and advice.
Nor did the battle involve only—or even primarily—such advisory assistance. Probably fewer than one in a hundred citizens of the United States, and only a slightly larger proportion of Western Europeans, know that England and its Commonweal comrades, along with Greece, France, the United States, Japan, and even some remnants of the former enemies of the ‘Triple Entente’ joined together to invade the Soviet Union, to seek to end the ‘madness’ and threat that communism seemed to hold out to the agents of the world’s imperial imprimatur.
Winston Churchill, as much as any other leader, embodied the ferocity of this hatred. He spoke quite explicitly: “We must strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle.” He congratulated() Italy’s Il Duce. “(Italy under Mussolini) has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”
H.G. Wells’ Outline of History spoke forthrightly() against what he viewed as this insane rage and loathing. He believed that the United States may have evinced this pathological fury to an even greater degree than Britain.
Certainly, as clever an arbiter of investigation as Upton Sinclair would have agreed with him. In his deeply reported skewering of American media() in the first decades of the Twentieth Century, the author of The Jungle noted, “But the perfect case of journalistic knavery … ‘the case which in the annals of history will take precedence over all others, past or present,’ is the case of Russia. …’All the lying power of our journalism was turned against the Russian Soviets; and if you have read this book without skipping, you know what that lying power is. No tale was too grotesque to be believed and spread broadcast.’”
This detestation led to all manner of tactics against the young Soviet regime closer at hand too. Agents from the war period merely adjusted their caps slightly and continued spying and provoking and so forth. Economic warfare occasionally manifested in trade and such, but especially Germany desperately needed any relationships that was not immediately worth less as a result of reparations; this dependency on Bolshevik New Economic Policy commodities and currency fostered Soviet growth and survival.
Both this inherent need for connection and the infiltration of spies that it permitted affected Ukraine, at once beneficence and affliction. Soviet food supplies in any event depended on this fertile region of large and productive farms. And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, including the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, moved forward, which mortified and further infuriated the upper reaches of capital’s ruling classes no end.
Thus, ignoring counsel to the contrary to show some patience and bide its time, the Polish State, weeks after its creation, with tens of thousands of its citizens languishing from Typhus and a million and a half of its children eating from the bread bowl of the American relief fund, decided to invade the Soviet Union and seize Moscow, though in the event, the Poles decided to seize Ukraine first. Before the Red Army routed these attackers, they gained the outskirts of Kiev, in the event just managing to repulse the revolutionary forces’ counterattack from overwhelming Warsaw, at which juncture both sides were ready to sue for peace.
“Learn Commerce!” Lenin told Khrushchev. But this was not an easy row to hoe in the context of one dirty trick after another, one attempt and then something even more sinister to cause the entire prospect of socialism to come crashing down in a twisted heap of unworkable rubble.
Even the Americans, who had abjured the lure of the Versailles Treaty and the temptations of ‘reparations’ in the form of colonial and imperial perquisites() squeezed from the carcass of the Ottoman Empire or the fragile young Soviet States, took an interest in Ukraine. Our Man in the Crimea tells the tale of an adventurer, Hugo Koebler, a precursor to the Cold Warrior agents who financed ‘freedom fighters’ a generation later, and ‘Maidan fascists’ three generations down the pike.
No less a diligent Cold Warrior than George Kennan himself, in his Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, noted() this obsessiveness and the passionate hatred that accompanied it. Artifice, plot, and conspiracy were all part and parcel of this view that Bolshevism was at least as despicable as espousing the ascendancy of Satan.
Moreover, though the Communists won the civil war, the state of Russia was a mess. Famine was common in Ukraine during 1922 and 1923, for example(). And without trade, both incoming and outgoing, this downward productive spiral would conceivably prove irreversible.
Lenin’s New Economic Policy flowed directly from these exigencies(). Muscovite trade bureaus thus became hotbeds of spies in London and Paris and more(). And agents of capital poured into Russia, in particular to the Russian South, where Caucasan petrol and Ukrainian coal and grain were ever-fungible commodities.
And just as the Soviets sent spies and provocateurs with its legations, such men and women waltzed into Moscow’s and Kiev’s territory as part of the given necessity of exchange(). Relatively obscure monographs and treatments have delved this topic, utilizing the mostly now declassified holdings of the KGB, the American State Department, and the hydra-headed labyrinths of English intelligence in particular().
Moreover, the remnants of the defeated ‘White Army,’ now ensconced throughout Europe and the Americas, remained committed to reasserting their rule and regaining their property and perquisites. In fact, one of the more famous capers of espionage lore involved a Soviet trick(), the Trust, promising that all faithful counterrevolutionaries would discover armies of malcontents at their beck and call should they return.
And return() they did, to encounter firing squads, bullets in the back, or long and bitter imprisonment. One of England’s storied agents, allegedly the pattern() for Ian Flemings 007, was Sydney Reilly, the “Ace-of-Spies,” who had plied the English agenda in regard to oil and commerce in favor of his adopted country from Baku through Crimea and the Ukraine and the Baltic Republics.
He favored the Russian South in part, no doubt, because of the oil and other natural resources, but he could have had other reasons: some sources suggest that he originally hailed from Odessa(); in any event, he was certainly Russian of some stripe. He had become a ‘spy in the cold’ by the early 1920’s but continued his organized subterfuge against the Bolsheviks, nonetheless, with or without the backing of British Intelligence.
He too walked into a trap, thinking that resources and manpower to lead an uprising awaited him, instead of days of dire interrogation in a Moscow basement of NKVD. In the end, a bullet in the back of the head, in woods outside of the Kremlin’s lairs, was his fate.
The up-and-coming Comrade Khrushchev, only thirty years old in 1924, encountered both the internal and the external aspects() of these matters, difficulties that flowed both from Ukraine’s own almost impossible array of dynamics and from Western ‘interests’ that hoped to undermine or even overthrow communism; that such hopes existed is the only plausible explanation for the unheard of delay in the recognition of the Soviet State: the U.S. did not accede to the Communist’s victory until 1934().
As to what the youthful functionary from Donetsk’s coal fields encountered, we might listen to his own recollections. He left his own heartland reluctantly, but his proficiency as an administrator in the coal mines and factories that he knew so well was threatening his boss.
And he ventured() to the Ukrainian capitol. “I’d never been to Kiev before. My own hometown of Yuzovka was a tiny village” in comparison. Straightaway, suitcase still in hand, he went to stand on the Dnieper’s storied banks.
Still, his task was daunting. “The Kiev organization was not considered a very secure outpost of the Party. In fact, the area was notorious as a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalist elements, and its reputation was well-deserved. The local proletariat was weak and unstable; and the intelligentsia…centered around the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences…led…by a nationalist… .There was also a formidable contingent of Trotskyites in the area (all of whom) were sure to regard me as a hopeless ‘Rusak.’”
In fact, much of the tangible trouble that Khrushchev encountered evolved out of tensions between Kiev and the industrial East. Unemployed in the capitol, clerks and other wage-earners paraded with red banners, demanding jobs. When Khrushchev met with them, he pointed out that huge demand for labor existed where he had just left. The response was telling. “’We’d rather be out of work in Kiev than employed in the Donbass.’”
In all of these situations that portray the give and take, the push and pull, between Moscow and Kiev, what was also transpiring were various deep games in which Western policies and its agents—both public and private—sought to undercut or even destroy Soviet power(). In Ukraine, this pattern was as prevalent as, or even more pronounced than, it was anywhere else in the vast expanse of Soviet Russia.
Despite these remaining legacies of the deepest sorts of contrariety and disagreement, however, for a brief span of years, as much as a decade, things flowered, relative to the previous chaos and cataclysm. Literature, film, music, dance, all of the arts and cultural expressions of modern life mushroomed in Kiev, in Kharkov, in Odessa, in all of which cities, for instance, Russia’s chess mastery early on began to come to the fore. Next Up: Part Three
Erotic Snippets—(continued)…
Janice might well have overdosed but for her unintended lover’s intervention. She had learned to her chagrin how sensitive her six horses were to radioactive fallout that survivors had to survive: five of the animals were dead, and, on the day that fate gave humanity a new lease in the names of Folger and Kilavsky, the sixth was spewing blood from its lungs as it expired while trying, dutifully, to carry on.
As she wondered where she might wash her now thoroughly irradiated slicker, he whom she still thought about—after everything—as her ‘dark, nemesis clerk,’ a memory that yet evoked that special itch that she favored so well, “he came riding up on an elephant!” That was his job at the zoo, the ‘pachyderm-keeper.’
Post-coital, he explained, “elephants are practically impervious to radiation’s effects.” Moreover, partially housed in actual caverns, the zoo preternaturally protected the beasts and himself, with, as an added bonus, more food on hand than almost any other venue had available.
Whatever the case may be, their bivouac on Asheville Zoo’s overgrown, irradiated grounds, exploded with the sounds of their congress. “Oh Christ!” snorted Janice as she came a second time, an unusual event in the scheme of her existence, both before and since apocalyptic aspects of everything. “Great Goddess,” thought Ronald as he rode his own waves, crying out and laughing simultaneously, toward further eruption of his version of the ‘Multiorgasmic Male.’
Before they had fucked each other silly a third time—she rode him with the same authority that she had mounted her only stallion, her initial equine casualty—they had opened up his psilocybin operation in the sub-basement. B-L, she had only once orgasmed during coitus; in the three years P-L, with all three fellows with whom she’d dallied, she lost control quickly, ready to come, and often to squirt, with a few light penile caresses, but never had she descended the red-hot black-hole of constant ecstatic explosion that magic mushrooms delivered on their first day as mates.
That they would not part with each other was immediately clear. They both remembered their erstwhile earlier fury with each other, too, a factor that they each attributed to an erotic attraction unfulfillable B-L because of class and age differences that mattered not even slightly in their newly, and collectively, desperate lives.
She was forty-six; he was thirty. So what? They both functioned, and these functionalities were the life-force source that might conceivably keep them breathing in spite of everything. Over the course of a few weeks, she realized that all of her Driftwood Love Messages seemed to apply to her Ronnie, or so she liked to summon him, while he one day named her “my Jane” as he thumped his chest like a post-apocalyptic Tarzan.
This was week one. “Music That We Make During Our Mated Meandering, Whether in a Major Or Minor Key, Whether Cantata Or Concerto, Dirge Or Ditty, Bluesy Ballad Or Banjo Jig, Sings of the Melded Souls That We Manifest When We Compose Another Kiss to Yield Our Molten Magma's Melange of Succor & Syrup That We Sample Anew Each Day That We Tune Up Our Torrid Tantric Tango."
Crazily enough, anticipating Armageddon, Ronaldo had purchased three of the new i-Pod solar units that Apple had released just before the grand conflagration. He described himself as “a sonic nut.” So they did, in fact, have all the music that they might care to hear while they caressed and careened toward the divine wreckage of another peak adventure.
In the meanwhile, this was week two. “As If Cut From Gaia's Grandest Pattern of Pulsing Poignant Potent Passion, Our Dances Soar in a Scintillating Swirl Toward Delineating Delectable Divinities That We Embrace & Imbibe to Taste the Tantric Treats That Turn Out So Sweetly in Our Titillating Torrid Tangos."
And so on. After they copulated more or less constantly for her now only three-day menses, celebrating bloody mouths and pudendas and fleshy crimson hither and yon, without any discussion or other mutual prompting, they were screwing up their hopes and joining their genitals and pleasuring their sexual senses to create a child.
That was, probably, biologically inevitable. A hopeless monstrosity—given what they’d been through—might be the likely result, but they were built to try and inclined to enjoy the practice ha ha.
For their first few seasons, even two miscarriages did not dampen Janice’s connubial enthusiasm. The drive was too strong. Then she was pregnant, and all their frolicking became still more heated, so that they left each other delirious and slept but little and labored less.
Food was not a problem, likely not for years. The zoo’s caves had been the local NORAD stash, in case the balloons went up, which they did, in the course of things, but with only scattered survivors and no military gangsters in evidence at all. Still, at times, they felt compelled to try to ‘do jobs’ that they’d selected to continue, “just in case, you know?”
With only a single exception, however, they were fucking like insatiable serpents, “like ferrets in season,” as Ron had it, before their first hour was more than a few minutes past. The exception involved taking Pearl, one of the two living pachyderms, out for a stroll, and even then, prior to their return to the compound, they were screwing as if they’d reincarnated as teenagers.
Among the commonalities that made their absolute craving for each other significantly easier to bear was their almost equal adoration for great film-making, not that they either expected, necessarily, ever to have any further options to watch another movie. They thrilled to discover that they both viewed their volcanic passion in a light similar to that which the great Lena Wertmuller had thrown on her characters in the classic examination of class and sexuality, Swept Away.
This sense of affinity only went so far, though. Sodomy was not part of any plans that these two shared. The pulsing pussy penis palpations that they shared were just such a perfect portal to paradise that, live or die, they were experiencing Elysium in each other’s flesh and blood and come.
In six months, perhaps they’d have an infant, if she lived, if he lived, if the little one made the leap into this spoiled and toxic leftover life. Little seemed likely, in any event, to defray their delight in the interim. “Besides,” Ron promised, “Pearl is a certified midwife.”
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
Throughout these shows of cohesion and strength, however, the States’ newspapers almost without exception, and churches and other public councils generally, took issue with the miners, calling them too radical, labeling them as out of the bounds of decency. Though this did not forestall the combatants from continuing to demand basic justice, it did create an environment in which their self-defense and courageous agency appeared to approximate wild-eyed violence and mean-spirited viciousness.
No matter that media and social leaders condemned them, however, beginning October 31, 1891, the up-in-arms miners took things a step further. They had become irretrievably disenchanted with established norms and approaches when Governor John Buchanan, a Farmer-Labor-Alliance Democrat, whom they played a big role in electing, not only failed to find a way to end convict leasing but also led some of the militia units to East Tennessee to “restore order.”
Thus, in mid-Autumn, the rebellion amped up several notches. Over and over again, miners and their cohorts burned down, dismantled, or otherwise destroyed the mining stockades in which these newly-enslaved ‘prisoners’ worked. The protesters then, as before, sent the inmates and their disarmed guards off to Nashville or Knoxville. In several cases, particularly in the last stages of this uprising, the miners set their incarcerated replacements free, some of whom joined this employees’ rebellion rather than fleeing.
Throughout this fight, miners and their allies were aware of the battles in Pennsylvania, the so-called Homestead strike, which was actually a militarized lockout. The miners in Tennessee explicitly recognized a solidarity that went beyond their own interests and communities, even as the defeat of the working-class further North was sobering and worrisome.
For over a year after July, 1891, when large scale direct action began in earnest, the mining district of Tennessee became even more an armed camp than it had already been, off and on, since the end of Reconstruction. A state of something like warfare prevailed. Not until a year or so prior to Tennessee’s ending the convict lease in 1896—the first deep-South State to do so—did outbursts taper off and end altogether in the deep hollows of the Cumberlands, the Smokies, and the Blue Ridge.
WHY THIS HAPPENED AS IT DID
As noted at the outset, a much richer and more detailed telling of this tale could occur, one that portrayed even more richly the concatenations of class warfare and divided conquest in Tennessee. Nevertheless, various central threads run quite visibly through the complex skeins of history here.
In the first place, the conquest of the region in the Civil War evinced a complexity that is all too easy to overlook. For example, many Union military leaders ended up being akin to advance scouts for Northern and foreign—especially British—capital.
Wealthy Ohioans or well-heeled residents of Illinois or other States raised regiments to carry the fight to the Confederacy and then ended up funneling investment to Southern industry even as controlling interest remained outside the region. TCI, Sloss, and Republic Steel all illustrated this pattern. Once they established themselves, moreover, these capitalists elected to elevate the former planters and upper crust of the ante-bellum period to serve as their henchmen and junior partners.
This choice of ‘dance partners,’ as it were, necessitated a ‘disciplining’ of a labor force that had theretofore acted as agricultural laborers almost exclusively. And despite occasionally heroic “part(s) which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America,” at no point did the denizens of conquest favor Black leaders or other champions of social equality with any imprimatur of general industrial or other economic leadership.
In fact, the rough-and-tumble debates that regulated slavery’s end, especially as to the Thirteenth Amendment, left open the opportunity to reinstitutionalize involuntary servitude. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” would any longer be acceptable. But ‘due conviction’ was easy enough to manufacture, and the entire system of peonage flowed from this, in the form of criminalized ‘breach-of-contract’.
Thus, the ‘New South’ clung to ancient forms of oppression even as it idealized a grand upsurge of money and change and all the marvels of modernity. And, until the ‘New Deal’ and the TVA came on the scene(JustMeans/SERMCAP), Tennessee and the ‘Southern Ruhr’ displayed a bizarre mixture of apartheid and free labor, a combination of puppeteer mob-rule and all the promises of ‘freedom and democracy.’ In such a realm, the Coal Creek Wars were at once a wakeup call and a desperate plea for relief.
A final aspect of this concatenation of causation emerges quite clearly from a contemporary account. A Harper’s Weekly book of ‘Southern Sketches’ includes a chapter on the coal and iron district. Its 1895 summation is instructive.
“The whole coal and iron region suffered severely after the Baring failure in London. During three years, the price of iron fell from $12, $14.50, and $15 a ton down to $8.50 or $7.75, by reason of excessive overproduction. Only the few companies that relied on convict labor were able to make both ends meet at those prices.” Of course, the affable correspondent might have noted that all the largest producers of iron and steel relied on convict-mined coal, except for those that had been driven to the wall by the miners of Tennessee.
Dear Julian Ralph, traveling through the entire region for two years, goes on to lament the colonial pattern. The region provides the cheapest and highest quality raw metal, but not a single piece of hardware or stove plate comes from hometown factories.
In an aside, he continues, “The Negro’s brawn and muscle, his cheap labor, and his acquaintance and characteristic contentment with his surroundings are considered as a large element in the prospective growth of Southern coal and iron industries.” Yet, though the larger operators avail themselves of ‘contented prisoners,’ most of the blast-furnaces and mines, relatively small and dependent on their next run’s selling at a profit, strangle in the downturns.
Thus, global meltdowns—like the depression of 1857 that foreshadowed Civil War; like the depression of 1896 that elicited the Spanish-American war; like the panic of 1907 that set the stage for a horrific conflict seven years later; like the ‘Great Depression’ that only yielded to another mass annihilation—also reached down into the homes and workshops of Southern Appalachia, where a ‘Coal Creek War’ was a different kettle of fish.
Here, the working people weren’t at each other’s throats; they didn’t butcher other workers in the name of patriotism. They stood up for themselves, Black and White, and demanded what the law supposedly required, payment for the work that they delivered and real money for their wages. And they burned down the prisons that ended up enslaving all of them.
WHAT COAL CREEK MEANT IN THE EARLY 1890’S
Nothing so threatened the systems of profit and capital accumulation in the Post-Bellum South as the prospect of a union among White and Black workers. The miners clearly had neither sufficient organization nor political strength summarily to overthrow the convict lease; its continuance till the end of the contract term in 1896 proves that.
Nevertheless, the militancy and solidarity of the working people of Tennessee, even if this practical unity did not extend to a social compact or a political transformation, did crush the possibility of a convict lease system’s continuing in the State. And, just possibly, this phalanx of workers both Black and White and unions may have contributed to the effective diminution of much of the metals and minerals industry in Tennessee. Whatever the case may be, Alabama, in the Birmingham District, became the behemoth, where convict leasing continued more or less untrammeled until the late 1920’s.
The lack of commitment to social equality, and the inability to produce a political milieu in which working people’s rights could have equal status with questions of color, did mean that Jim Crow would rise, that populism would fail, and any tingeing of economic relations with democracy would be out of any realistic political orbit. Tennessee for a moment seemed to rise from the Southern mire, only to sink back into the muck. Mountain air might be salubrious, yet it was not miraculous.
Therefore, the insurrectionary character of these events notwithstanding, they would have no immediate effect in terms of reducing the reactionary and backward nature of Southern society. Lynch mobs still arose in Tennessee. The primacy of private property and wealth continued to reign. The upshot of this was a two-tier society in which White and Black, rich and poor, lived according to different standards and codes.
Still, in the memories of the people who were present during the Coal Creek War, and in the stories that their grandchildren recall to this day, these events have some resonance in terms of an existence more equitable and just, in which labor rights are as important as profit, in which one’s skin color is less important than one’s willingness to stand with fellow working people.
HOW THESE LONG-AGO EVENTS MIGHT INSTRUCT WORKERS TODAY
The past has its own integrity. No one, except at great peril, can view the events of yesteryear through the eyes of the present moment. The risk emanates from the fact that one cannot plot a course forward when the road from whence we’ve come is invisible, obscured by false views that seem safe or satisfactory somehow, but have little to do with either the actualities or sensibilities that made up their true unfolding.
At the same time that this is true—we must respect that what happened occurred for reasons that have little or nothing to do with our hopes and fears—our job is to search for patterns that show the real links that always connect past and present, in the same way that our parents’ letters and pictures and other material documentation of their lives will always illuminate the evolution of the lives of their children, which is to say all of us.
One key element that runs bright and clear from the nineteenth century to the present moment is the choice by those in command to use imprisonment in relation to labor and production. Current commentaries speak of an “incarceration nation,” of a “carceral State” that cannot put enough people in for-profit repositories that auction off their labor to corporations hungry for higher profits and wages that approach zero.
Another central aspect of both the earlier and the contemporary process is the way that political forms, supposedly democratic, consistently betrayed the wants and needs of the people purportedly in charge of such electoral arenas. Thus, in similar fashion as Governor Buchanan, who ignored the pleas of those who made his election possible, Tennessee’s crop of ruling polticos now have shot down Volkswagen and others of their own constituencies that wanted to construct a different model of workplace relations. ‘We may have wooed you in the past, but to hell with you now, if you dare to consider unionization.’
A third crucial component of this instructional nexus lies in the role of media and communication. Just as without noticeable exception, the news outlets of the late nineteenth century lined up behind TCI in condemning the miners, so too TV and radio and print media overwhelmingly attacked the UAW’s recent organizing effort as if the devil himself were about to take up residence at the heart of ‘Volunteer’ country.
Finally, what befell the miners and prisoners of East Tennessee—which is to say a return from the edges of uplift and change to the enervation and stress of the status quo ante—must be a dynamic that persists in our own lives, unless we can overcome the incapacities that disabled this powerful people’s movement from lasting and becoming a basis for real social transition. This is no small matter.
Hence, what many pundits are calling the ‘debacle’ in Chattanooga, where a union finally seemed likely to break through to represent Southern autoworkers, in at least a few ways might be analogous to what transpired twelve decades ago in the same geographic location.
Politicians who espoused populist sentiments, and the State that congratulated itself on its ‘American ways,’ subverted fairness and democracy in both time periods;
Prisons, imprisonment, and prison labor—all reliant on a sharp division of Black and White, rich and poor, were somewhere near the heart of social dysfunction and economic inequity;
Wealth and investment from far afield fought to eviscerate every movement for more democratic and collective forms;
Media formed a one-sided wall of propaganda to inundate the workers themselves, and every social network that the people might call upon for help;
The union leadership for the most part was far less radical than the people themselves;
And those folks, despite their willingness to rise up in the most rebellious fashion imaginable, never could articulate a way of thinking about their lives and prospects that differed markedly from established values and tendencies.
Merely noticing such things, and then discussing them with an eye to future action, could help seed potential for basic transformation.
Of course, Tennessee at the beginning of the Twenty-first century also differs profoundly from the Tennessee that characterized the nineteenth century’s end. One cannot substitute Twitter for chewing tobacco, nor can a society in which women have rights and Hispanic immigrants are omnipresent possibly seem equivalent to a society in which women could not even own property and Mexico was a distant, conquered land. And the supportive role of VW, which backed the union’s plans, would have been tantamount to TCI’s voluntarily closing down the convict mines.
The point is not that the two unfolding situations are the same. The point is, however, that the former’s evolution has contributed to the latter’s parameters. In such an incontrovertible context of interconnected development and causation, finding out the connections, the similar dynamics, the ways that what was past continues to exist in the present, has to be something of real potential use in figuring out how to move forward. Next Up: Further South, Extending ‘Dixie’s’ Protocols