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 thireenth incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, to proffer interesting and entertaining writing and, second, to find 'consumers' 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.
More than occasionally, like today, a particular edition will have something akin to a thematic glue, so to speak, that holds together these moments, either that we are sharing now or that have passed along before. Number Thirteen’s would articulate something like this—‘The Imperial Imprimatur of Dixie’s Manifested Destiny.’
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!
Or, no, not quite. 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.’ In the event, the next issue now will be June 1st; both May and June will be one-issue moons.
Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a couple issues ago, 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. And, finally, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Choosing Rational, Salubrious Electoral Models, Not Personality Politics
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Looking, Amicably, at Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Campaign
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XIII
3. Wood Words Essays—Cuba, Castro, Communism: Contextualizing Contemporary Culture
4. Old Stories & New—”Mother Led the Way,” Part Three
5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, Slaughterhouse: Executing Extermination
6. Nerdy Nuggets—’Gain-of-Function’ & Human Expectation
7. Communication & Human Survival—More Ukraine, Part Three
8. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”When the King of Games Meets a Prince of Death”
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Elections, & What We Collectively Elect to Try
The world seems close enough to topsy-turvy to discomfit even the clueless or the preternaturally calm among us. Even if some species-ending event is not barreling down life’s byways toward all and sundry, the chances that privation, starvation, and brutal carnage are at hand seem all too palpable to ignore with a shrugging aplomb.
Then again, the bright Spring sun shines down out of cloudless blue skies, the girls soccer team takes apart its opponent with well-oiled precision, folks talk about the rising cost of mixed drinks, everyone plays with the most popular baby girl in the Virginia Highlands. Two pecan pies are on the sale rack. What’s to worry?
As a matter of course, in this now ‘Blue Bastion’ of the Old Dominion’s ‘aristocratic’ allegiances, one must consider BTR’s nostrum about the U.S.’s following Dixie down the primrose path to empire’s hellish ends. After all, yesterday—April 30th, if I recollect correctly—was the one hundred forty-ninth anniversary of a botched summary execution, albeit a few driving hours West of here in Nashville.
The rope that the literally howling mob intended to strangle Jo Reed, or break his neck with a fracturing snap, instead itself broke at a frayed section and plopped the beset astonished fellow into the Cumberland River and a chance to flee and live to plight flight or fight another day. That’s one version anyhow.
He may also have had the misfortune, after playing fisticuffs and daggers with a policeman had ended with the arresting officer’s death, to exit his jail cell under the control of his executioners, who simply shot him several times in the face and head and only then hung him, just to have the fractured hemp drop the corpse into the Cumberland’s current, from whence the limp form of Mr. Reed did in a sense ‘escape’ further notice of his former fellows and wardens and persecutors.
This either-or story tangle deserves a film, a Netflix series, a string of novels, all of mediation’s throbbing thrusts at eternity. Quite likely, if merely as a point of information, undertaking such an endeavor would elucidate what actually took place almost a century and a half ago.
Hmmm. In a sense, what drives my awareness is that old aphorism that ‘what goes around comes around.’ I mean, when I think about directing, in my first, utterly failed theatrical production—which ties into the likely overarching theme of BTR in general, to wit, the inescapable net of sexuality that carries humanity as surely as a biological web of life encapsulates the biosphere generally—the honest-to-Goddess niece of the Shah of Iran, America’s chief number one Imperial Butcher for many years, I simply cannot comprehend how miraculous are the informative details that lie at the boundaries of all-that-is so as, at minimum, to offer enticing and incisive clues about ‘how matters actually stand.’
In the event, that age old play—"She Stoops to Conquer,” nonetheless—that I got a few hundred dollars from Harvard to put together concerned precisely this erotic aspect of human existence, precisely in regard to an imperial erstwhile potentate princess’ love choices; her African American lover, as he attended every rehearsal, related that her family abhorred their affair, albeit without the disinheriting direction that Marshall’s low-country-gentry father took in relation to “that slut Veronica” in “The King of Games Meets the Prince of Death.” That plutocrats and potentates propel their progeny toward appropriate choices thus appears as a case of Life’s Imitation of Art and vice versa, ha ha.
The shah of Iran, for those unfamiliar with the situation, inaugurated a vicious killing spree against the people of Persia, all at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency and British Petroleum, beginning in 1953 with the carefully orchestrated overthrow of both the elected Muhammad Mossadegh and democracy as such on the Iranian Peninsula. After a quarter century of corruption and mass murder in service to imperial imprimatur’s agendas, Persia’s populace rose en masse and sent the ailing elder Pahlevi packing.
Almost simultaneously, back in the Western Hemisphere that plays such a prominent part in today’s #13, ‘el Cia’ was orchestrating Jacobo Arbenz’s downfall in Guatemala, from the murderous impunity of which rose both Fidel and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, not to mention much of this specific issue of Big Tent Review. And here I am, rambling along in my fashion, stringing things together with blah-blah-blah’s epiphanies and inanities at once. That my ex, Alicia, recently returned to her collegiate conversion to Islam, via Catholicism, voodoo, and out marriage, has repeatedly come to mind, for instance.
Religion, obvio po, acts as both a unifying fixative and a dividing wedge in human affairs. I still cross myself—‘in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost’—if something intensely scary has just turned out well enough to make me ‘thank God’ in my peculiarly Catholic fashion, just like Augustine predicted, a ‘Catholic for life’ after my South-Texas bilingual childhood in the shadow of the Church.
My pagan sensibilities lie deeper in psychic space. I still ‘touch wood’ as a reliable self-soothing reflex. Nobody indoctrinated this; it just has always felt righteous and right. Religion interfaces with spirituality, which, in turn, has zero need of even a hint of doctrine and its inevitable ‘pissing contest of the gods and goddesses.’ Liberation Theology, its deconstruction a coming attraction here, with its Southern fried Latin roots, perhaps comes closest to bridging that gulf between churches and holiness, so to speak.
Jon Krakauer is in some senses at once an exemplary investigator and the epitome of an Establishment journalist. In that way he mirrors a bit the Mormon church, an outlier even as it now acts as a hub of empire throughout the world. Whatever the case may be, his Under the Banner of Heaven is magnificent reporting about the precise opposite of any freedom-fostering gospel.
Sex, power, polygamy, and the populous progeny of Homo Sapiens lie at the heart of the volume. Often enough, BTR covers the same territory, to wit All God’s Cousins, & Where They’re Bound. As ever with the iconoclast natural philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I maintain that we should ‘neither weep nor laugh, but understand.’
Both Past and Present inhabit each other in some way or other. All possible Futures, some of which are now yesterday and right this moment, flow into being by virtue of paradox and contradiction, the serendipitous necessity of each apparently impossible instant of the delicate miracle of embodiment. Natural Philosophy, a scientific bent, requires some measure of discipline in seeking to see, yet that is the human calling.
Recognizing rational reasons that underlie dreams of a truly freeing revolution—or, Jihad—and reading Krakauer’s contextualization of the Latter Day Saints and their ‘fastest growing’ sect on Earth both, therefore, produce almost a surreal coverage of today’s installment, from ‘Hawkins’ Harem’ in the continuation of Mad Cows & Englishmen to ‘that slut, Veronica,’ who makes her appearance as part of the final piece in the current puzzle, so to say.
Anyhow, slavery and liberation, or more generally bondage and freedom, lie at the center of America’s existence. As anyone will attest who has been following along, a la Harriet Jacobs Slave Girl tour de force, the raw stories of this ‘land of ours’ compel attention—often with a mixing of horror and hilarity that makes the attendant storyline almost irresistible.
Deadwood Dick’s is yet one more entry in this telling panoply of storytelling’s mysterious allure. His is the salted and earthy grassroots of human mediation. Born into slavery near what is now Nashville, he migrated westward with horse and farm sense aplenty, to become the iconic ‘American cowboy,’ who could rope and ride and tame and shoot as necessary
His is the quintessential intermingling of Southern history in its exuberant expansion to incorporate the world, along similar lines as some of what appears in today’s “Wood Words Essay.” The Latin overlaps just bubble to the surface, unstoppable eruptions, at once miraculous and unavoidable.
“The 16-year-old quickly adapted to the life of a cowboy, showing excellent skills as a ranch hand, and practiced so often with a .45 revolver that his shooting skills also became very good. Earning a reputation as one of the best all-around cowboys in the Duval outfit, he soon became a buyer and their chief brand reader. In this capacity, he was sent to Mexico several times and soon learned to speak fluent Spanish.”
Nat Love, a/k/a the said Deadwood, was a consummate navigator of the “wild and woolly West” until he became a Pullman Porter; his journeys in some sense resemble a prototypical proletarian path—from farm to frontier to factory to cannon fodder, more or less. Moreover, he became a prominent wordsmith, a propagandist of possibility, so to speak.
On a divergent note, one might wonder what such a one as he would make of Israel and Palestine, were he still with us. The threat of self-immolation there would, indubitably, test even a hero’s creative problem-solving techniques of an amicably-wielded gun and rope and horse and such.
In contemplating such a counterfactual—Deadwood Dick Visits Palestine—one might note that so-called commies, ‘leftists,’ and assorted erstwhile ‘Marxist Leninists’ whose one-side reading of Lenin leaves Marx mainly out of the picture all are indubitably behind the recent meme to Globalize the Intifada and in so doing conceptualize a way in which we might, mostly, all lead human lives. That’s the thing about radicals: even if they’re obnoxious, critical curmudgeons, they want what is best, what is optimal, what is possible, for human thriving and survival.
In this overall context, I—one of these rascally radicals—at times feel floated toward flirting with the notion that the Goddess herself intends that I start bearing a ‘prophetic witness,’ at age seventy no less, toward the necessity of what might render most readily as a marriage between Jesus and Gaia, so that the Goddess and the Nazarene can conjoin and thereby co-create a human context in which the urge toward Mass Collective Suicide does not become insurmountable. Inevitably, such terrible reverie brings to mind the Ten New Commandments. It’s the BTR spiritual perspective, after all.
Should I speak more of how all that came to pass? I know that I’ve mentioned my personal Burning-Bush-Interlude before. I’ll wait again for the full story. I’ll hope that I don’t hear too many sighs of relief that we’ve all avoided that particular tangent, if only momentarily, ha ha.
In any event, a powerful narrative force bubbles merrily to the surface out of every stitch in the fabric of my days and nights. Even watching Lawrence Welk brings forth such experiences, for example when the squeaky-clean chorus sings “One Toke Over the Line” as if such puffing were a way of inhaling Jesus and rectitude at one and the same time.
More and more in this unspooling revelation of fate and choice in these days of modern times, full of astonishing interconnection and interdependence, ideas seem ubiquitous about the dangers and rewards that may percolate from Artificial Intelligence. ‘AI’s costs and benefits’ have become germane elements in almost every corporate press release, from all of the myriad sources of such ideation.
These nuances and nostrums about technology and society, about mechanism and motivation, have long simply intrigued me. If humans manage the trick of not extinguishing themselves, certain voices among the nerds and geeks and intellectual elite will resonate with their prescience.
In fact, Vernor Vinge, in his iconic, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” noted that the British mathematician John Irving “Good proposed a ‘Meta-Golden Rule,’ a la the First New Commandment, which might be paraphrased as ‘Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.’ It's a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don't believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe."
The difficulty, stubbornly ineluctable, is that ‘intelligence’ always includes sneakiness, subterfuge, manipulation, cheating, and all the components of crafty folks’ ‘winning ways,’ the smart set, as it were. The BTR response is to trust the process, to ‘trust Mother Nature’ to render a route through all these thickets of conflicted antithesis toward the mutual mingling of joy and aplomb in Ralph Stanley’s rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.”
This apparent directive to ‘let my light shine’ recalls to memory how the darkness inherent in fluorine so perfectly opposes any eliciting of illumination and thereby points my attention at the many stories of this ineluctably most toxic of chemicals, narratives that, since my youth, have marked my meandering over hill and over dale. Both my Dad and Douglas, for example, argued for accepting—at least not worrying too much about—fluoridating protocols that, in retrospect and in prospect, are not one bit better than criminal insanity of some kind.
Almost as if by design, ha ha, sophisticated practitioners of corporate apologetics turn the impossibility of certainty into a defense of profiteering’s business-as-usual. Even these opponents of critical thought cannot help but acknowledge the potency of their opponents, since to do otherwise would make them laughable.
“Faced with uncomfortable data, (critics say), water fluoridation proponents have attacked and obstructed fluoride research. And rather than allowing the scientific debate to flourish in the open, dental groups and some public health experts have targeted researchers who study fluoride and brain development, in a pattern that some characterized as suppressing important science."
Fluorine is also at the center of worries about PFAS poisoning of waterways, as the same source notes. All a BTR follower need do is layer in the Modern Nuclear Project’s dependence on Fluorine, the similar dynamics in play in today’s Gain of Function analysis, and then add a dash of chemical warfare and chemotherapy’s origins to the mix and tie it all up with a conceptually binding bow. It all fits, gulp!
The nerd in me, that part of my personality that Kassy Hickey quipped was “born a critic,” capable of pretending either complete comprehension or the dreaded “Christ Complex” that Catholicism simultaneously promoted and demoted, had at least to inquire, ‘What’s at the center of all this bullshit?’ What connects Krakauer and Mullahs and Jerusalem and fluorine and Presidential politics with the lines that spool out in the yarns of the Big Tent Review?
Of course, the simple answer is easy to state: ‘Eros is the central organizing principle of All-That-Is,’ the Goddess writ large, so that ‘fucking is the life force’ impels deep grappling with our sexual selves. For reasons that, to the shortsighted and willfully ignorant, refer to one version or other of ‘Nature’s way’ or ‘God’s will,’ many people—and perhaps a vast majority here in the ‘belly of the beast’—feel profoundly nervous, if not altogether grossed out, about speaking along such lines.
‘Besides,’ a typical tourist in the now might insist, ‘nothing could be further afield than issues of sexuality and Eros vis a vis questions about Fluorine’s industrial hygiene footprint, so to speak.’ What’s the point then?
A key aspect of derailing both community connubial conversation, as it were, and release of irrefutable worried expertise in relation to fluoridation and other chemical compromises with the deadly element is a replay of The Doubt Factory’s peeling away the absurd epistemological layers that endlessly emanate from profiteers’ pretense that, inasmuch as a God-POV is impossible, ‘we can’t really know, and everything is okay, within limits,’ and all similar blah blah blah.
A hero of the suppressed Fluoride Report stated the case clearly, if also diplomatically, when a fifth ‘research-review’ was the order of the day despite the first four’s having affirmed the team’s results. “‘After 17 years in the industry, I’ve seen efforts to modify messages to fit commercial interests,’ he wrote in an email to NIH colleagues that May. ‘I wasn’t party to that there, and I’m not game to do that here.’"
What of the death throes that Fluorine portends? Purportedly, the ‘sudden discovery’ of miraculous chemical combinations would ‘relieve us’ of cleaning duties and usher in ‘better living through chemistry;’ now, these substances are number one suspects in epidemic dementia of various stripes. Yet research into this issue remains paltry, for example, in comparison with the tidal waves of cash and prizes attendant on running labs to study ‘gaining such new functions’ as higher mortality, greater tranmissibility, and so on and so forth.
Circumstantially important in this regard is how core components of modern rulers’ agendas depend on Fluorine—the Modern Nuclear Project and aircraft metals in particular. The cooptation of American dentistry into a fortress of falsehood’s fiercest defense expresses how ferocious are the forces of oppression and control.
Harry Truman’s ‘miraculous’ Presidency, meanwhile, truly demarcates the reactionary electoral turn that followed the ‘New Deal,’ which fully and fiercely bureaucratized corporate rule in Washington, a move toward the ‘neoliberal’ order that—even in the halcyon days of Kennedy’s ‘Camelot’—has not much deviated over the last eighty years. ReDemoPubliCratiCan political machinations have thus, since ‘give-’em-hell-Harry’ was in the White House, yielded one fascistic functionary after another, whatever their differing partisan stripes might suggest, a pattern of conflation and obfuscation that RFK, Jr. may for the first time in almost a century have some opportunity to ameliorate.
Hypothetically—or the more adventurous would declare, “almost certainly”—a rubric to make sense of these strands would come most readily to the fore from one of BTR’s initial projects, the presentation and selective deconstruction of Wilhelm Reich, and in particular of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The conclusion is impossible to refute: sexual repression practically guarantees a Nazi social sensibility.
One enters tough territory here, of martyrs and mass murder, of glorying in extinction and grasping at every possible material excess. As if by an instinctual, bourgeois defense-mechanism, many folks turn to the works of such ‘shadow-magicians’ as Carl Jung. Soon enough, we’ll be looking into his famed Red Book here, yet another of meaning’s wandering tributaries.
All of this flowing riverine flood of contextualizing cacophony leads, in the mediated here and now of these paragraphs, to the contents of BTR’s #13. Not to dive too deeply into arcane numerology, but thirteen has always felt like the luckiest number to me, ha ha.
That makes sense. Each annual Terran transit around Sol’s fiery distant solar fury contains thirteen moons and a day or so extra for special celebration, cavorting, and contemplation. Catholics burned adherents to this particular way of seeing things; in the sense of merchandising results, the faithful had plentiful reasons to believe thirteen an unlucky integer indeed.
Whatever the case may be, today’s issue contains non-fiction about Tarot’s electoral take, a Wood-Words juxtaposition of Southern history and Hemispheric bilingual empire, an overview of chemical warfare’s ‘gaining additional killing functionality,’ still more Ukrainian investigation, and, finally, a look at Backgammon and life that blends research outcomes with speculative fiction’s documentary potential.
All God’s Cousins dives into psychology’s place in presently passing matters of purposeful concern. “Mother Led the Way” comes to its bizarre and yet inherent conclusion. The killing machinery of Mad Cows & Englishmen inaugurate the ruling class’ belief in an absolutely essential slaughterhouse among ‘useless eaters’ and other routine riffraff.
So here we go, into another bumpy, bumptious bounty of boisterous banter and badinage, as often as not equal parts analysis and whimsy. What now? We’ll wait and see and hope for the best, neither weeping nor cackling but seeking as comprehensive a comprehension as Gaia’s grace grants.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
Initially happenstantially but now inescapably, Tarot’s graceful if occasionally elusive discipline characterizes my passage through matters at hand, seemingly ‘so long as I live and breath,’ a favorite Fox-family aphorism. Recently, as a result of relocation and reconfiguration, this engagement with the so-called Mantic Arts has taken a decided turn toward current affairs.
So too today, in a Presidential election year, one might readily wonder what Goddess energies and insights might offer in relation to this contest that Americans so enjoy as a distraction from positing positive action in their lives, ha ha. The humor here results from the ultimately irresistible allure that such gaming theory as elections provides to the voters, erstwhile participants who have no more to do with matters as they unfold than spectators matter in the outcomes of chess matches.
Does this year’s Presidential battle make a difference? Its billions of advertising dollars, its saturation of the mediation of politics, and more make any answer to this question some sort of affirmative reply, yet the question of how these attributes affect us is far from obvious, since whoever claims victory and the presidency, Dickens notion of things probably applies in regard to these actual contestants’ views that the point is “clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes that things in general (have been) settled for ever."
However we think about things, we could imagine posing for Goddess consideration and grace in regard to an inquiry along these lines. “How might a citizen usefully consider Robert Kennedy’s candidacy and campaign?” Are things truly ‘settled for ever,’ as Dickens intoned with jocular cynicism?
A recent Smithsonian articulation of matters illustrates how powerfully real such ‘useful considerations’ might become. “Taking Up the Torch” tells the tale of working class youth who in 1860 created the “Wide Awake” movement, at once an antithesis and reflection of ‘Make America Great Again’ sallies, in both cases something at minimum a semblance of actual social movements ancillary to electioneering.
The article’s subtitle makes a crucial point: “The Untold Story of the Youth Movement That Helped Elect Lincoln & Spurred Civil War." Author Jon Grinspan’s word choice here reveals the way that this seminal development has had little ‘coverage’ in spite of its central import. Not only is this movement little known, but it also proffers the primary, erstwhile electoral, impetus for the emergence of a supposedly ‘Republican’ Party that continues to cavort and concatenate to this day.
In the event, the cards articulation of matters at hand suggests fascinating narrative potential, if nothing else. This emerges clearly when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announcing his candidacy last October in Philadelphia’s former ‘Wide Awake’ environs, states to burgeoning uproar, “something is stirring in us that says, ‘it doesn’t have to be this way.’”
Atilanta’s Queen of Swords states an Essence ideal for this effort at interpretation and leadership. She is the one for whom only the fiercest dedication to truly independent life will prove acceptable; she, after all, is the warrior princess who slays any suitor incapable of besting her in a foot race, a choice that suggests the epitome of strategic thinking and ‘playing to one’s strengths’ while maintaining a fervent insistence that one’s own path must, indeed, be one’s own.
The presentation and representation of this Spiral Spread continues below. Evocative and provocative thoughts inhere in the Tarot process itself. Still, the results can bring a tingle to the spine, a sense of hair arising on the back of the neck. Today’s topical toast certainly had that effect on me as it appeared from my seven-card draw.
As usual, however, the first part of this issue’s posting closes with a Triptych Question that, today, will deploy a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis rubric. “How compatible could participant hopes for a better world be with being part of this electoral process?”
The Thesis for the sequence begins with a bang. The Ten of Cups connection and contentment, the reunion of the divine and the carnal, the deification of the concupiscent, so to say, conceives quite a launching pad for affirmation. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(In Chapter XII, readers had an encounter with a dark corner of our collective psychic and institutional existence. In sum, Richard’s experience of familial kidnapping and incarceration gave him a unique navigational perspective, as it were. Now, as the panoply continues, we meet another jejune incarnation, now manifestly female and fecund, of one of Lou’s later fellow travelers; interestingly enough, Angela’s four year old son would soon enough grow to become one of the most reliable workers in Lou’s logistical endeavors, while he and his mother cut a caper through a certain sector of the South for a time, ha ha.)
CHAPTER XIII
Angela Carnes, a ghostly slip of a girl-child with her silvery blonde mane atop a petite blade of a body, held 'little-Mikey,' who was anything but tiny, to her right nipple, which was the least sore of the two, still nursing him past his fourth birthday because “it's the right thing to do.” “After all,” she reasoned, “we all start out this way,” giggling in the moment, “with our mouths full of titty.”
“I started out like this.” Her mother, the fashionable and ethereal Georgina Carnes, nee Thomason, had weened her ten month old daughter peremptorily, “the first time I bit her.” Angela basked in the reflection as her own post-toddler boy suckled and then nibbled. “No teeth, Mikey,” she singsonged to him as he paused and grinned. “That's when she cut me off,” she remembered, “not because I used my infantile incisors, but because I giggled.”
Such an action perfectly characterized her mother, in the Rogerian terms with which she often contemplated such matters, as an ideally passive personality but for her loathing of being the butt of anyone's laughter. “Mama started out this way too.”
This reflection pursed her mouth from its pleasant half smile, however, as she proceeded to ponder her father's initiation. “Even daddy began his scheming ways with his mother's breast in his face.” Or, she reasoned, “with all their money, maybe his mother hired someone to take over those duties.” That could explain some of his proclivities, “both for pussy and for all his schemes.”
That she was so much like him she accepted with a placid shrug, as the half smile returned to her features. “So be it. At least no one will accuse me of trying to seduce my son.”
Angela's momentary reveries on breastfeeding, at 2:33 in the candlelit morning bedroom that she shared with her lover, and Mikey's father, eventually focused her attention on the now-snoring Richard. “Even this young fellow,” she ruminated, “wouldn't be here but for some woman's breast.”
She wondered at her own proclivity for large bosoms. “I could've been a L.U.G.”—or Lesbian Until Graduation—“but for this talented boy-child here,” snuffling in his night’s first set of post-orgasmic dreams. A blush crept up her neck, the way it flushed when she came.
Her mind turned to Marsha the big and buxom, self-styled dyke, who played forward for the Gator's varsity women's rugby team, a product of Title IX that had benefited Angela with some of her most angelic climaxes ever. That girl could move a strap-on like no mere man she'd ever encountered.
To this then fifteen year old, “certified child prodigy” sophomore, sexual release was a given. She had doubted, though, that “any other human being would be able” to generate the same feelings as her own hands and spit. “Marsha devirginated me in that department, oh my!”
Soon thereafter, a few months before her “sixteen years old and street legal” starting line for “getting pregnant, so I can have the grandmother experience before I'm forty, with any luck,” she first encountered the godlike Richard Witt, who was “just dominating this game of Ultimate Frisbee,” a pastime at which she came close to professional excellence and exceeded the bounds of professional competitiveness, “though always with a smile, an honest smile” that promised an ass-whooping straightaway. “I knew right then, this was the guy” to impregnate her; “whether he was anything else remained to be seen.”…(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Dixie & Cuba: From Casinos to Commies
As I have moved in the direction of manifesting a lifelong commitment to storytelling, one iteration of which I declaim as my First Existential Duty—to craft and share beautiful ideas—my life has ever emanated theses about things. Part of being nerdy, perhaps, is this fancying the potential to propagate hypotheses that palpate reality, summing things up, as it were.
Interesting, maybe, in its own right, such a thought definitely proposes one bright thread of what I could, should I want, call my artistic process, in relation both to Driftwood Message Art and the unfolding Big Tent Review. Whatever the case may be, my life’s arc, so to speak, spins my shiny yarns with a decidedly and simultaneously Gringo and Hispanic slant.
Only a few pieces of wood present this cultural intersection clearly. One of this handful of exemplars constituted Marshall Arts first ‘big sale,’ over five hundred whole dollars, LOL! As things worked out, moreover, this exchange transpired in the shadow of the Alamo, under the auspices of the Catholic calling that still reigns as the faith leader in and about San Antonio, Texas, where I went to High School and first grappled with the paradoxical and yet definitive mantles of patriot and revolutionary.
This specific piece of drifted arboreal splinter had once been part of a ladder-back chair, before an upstream Laurel River flood claimed it and delivered it into my eager hands. The title of its missive, “Desiccation’s Delineation,” unfolds as the first stab at a Marshall Arts bilingual text.
“Anything old enough ends up dried out and full of holes; still, through desiccation, rot, and collapse, measures of strength and beauty and meaning miraculously remain, Or, en Español, ‘Cualquier cosa lo suficientemente vieja, termina seca y lleno de hoyos: sin embargo, por medio de la desicacion y el deteriorio y el colapso, cierte medida de fortaleza y belleza y significado milagrosamente prevalecen.’”
Taking the step—from highlighting linguistic and cultural connectivity in American social evolution to putting the Cuban Revolution and similar eventualities at the center of America’s current expression of a vaunted Monroe-Doctrine contextualization of ‘our backyard’—may seem quite a leap. However, one might consider certain ineluctable facts, truths which often emerge on the peripheries of matters at hand.
For instance, one might compare search results for the following inquiries, the first of which should—if the wellsprings of Gringo sensibilities stem from 1776—elicit a clearly more extensive pattern of citation. In the event, the exact opposite is true, quite fitting as well in relation to the historical patterns of interpenetration and interconnection that conjoin Dixie and Hispanic America.
Thus, this string yielded 5.8 million hits: <"george washington" OR "james madison" founding fathers>. Meanwhile, <fidel OR che icons OR symbols> garners almost fifty-five million links. Even adding the qualifying adjective, “contemporary,” before icons delivers only a million fewer citations than do the potent patriarchs of the entire 'American way.'
In a sense, as a matter of course, this functional hemispheric conjunction mimics the various ways that ‘national identities’ provide a perfect foil for plutocratic potentates’ persistent fantasies of clockwork division and conquest of the common herd. In this vein, “Electing Extinction” might merit a closer look.
“Until This Moment's Natural Historical Passage, Extinction Has Exclusively Resulted From Ill Fortune, e.g., Random Rocks From Afar That Extinguished Happy Reptilian Hegemony; Only Humans Have Set a Course to Exterminate Themselves, Seemingly Because They Exhibit the Fortitude For Mass Collective Suicide But Lack the Gritty Persistence Necessary to Afford Amicable Mutuality & Honorable Solidarity."
Equally pertinent as recognizing nationality’s tricky traps, quite likely, is a general orientation toward art and culture that favors the deeply grounded roots of understanding’s necessary corollary to a human duty to seek meaning’s most accurate mandates, as in this message, entitled quite simply, “Art’s Purposes.”
“Either Art Serves Society, Or, No Matter Its Aesthetic Acuity, It Is at Best Absurd, Worthless Save to Privileged Patrons & Connected Collectors; Either the Arts Are, in an Evolutionary Sense, Adaptive, Or, If Not, Then Those Social Aggregates That Back Such Activity Are Just That Much Less Likely to Manifest Thriving Citizens Whose Offspring in Turn Survive---If, on the Other Hand, Beauty & Representation & Story & Craft & More Do in Fact Foster Human Viability, Then Those Societies That Fail to Further Artists & Their Efforts Will, in Direct Correlation, More Likely Extinguish Themselves, &, in the Thermonuclear Present Pass, Bring About Humanity's Overall Extinction As Well."
In today’s complex sociopolitical ‘melting pot,’ the Yankee-Latino intersection appears to revolve around drugs and human migration. If only as a result of geography, much of this juxtaposition inevitably involves the South. What about the historical record? What does it offer up? …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New
(Last issue, we left the boys, wary and more than merely a little despondent, if not quite despairing, driven to drudgery and denied their annual dose of delight, as the Sergeant wrestled with his demons and his lack of consortium, so to speak. That this fault in his routine was his alone, except for those who might, like a militarist, justify rape and plunder is noteworthy, though perhaps not as much so as the strength of character that permitted Madeleine to stand up to, no matter what else may be true, the man whom she still considered her beloved husband.)
From four o'clock one Saturday morning until 9:30 that night, two weeks before Thanksgiving’s one-of-two annual holidays, Matthew Porter Sr. led seven sad and angry boys and his equally depressed self through the onerous, wearying, and dangerous business of pulling lighterd stumps from the earth. John came within a hair of losing his left leg in the tractor chains. Extracting a lighterd stump, a colloquialism for the petrified, waterlogged swamp remains of a big hardwood or cedar, multiplied the exhausting task of exhuming a normal tree.
Lighterd remains had roughly the same hardness as sandstone; plowing or chopping them up was impossible. We had three choices, dynamite, hand tools, or tractor and chains. We applied different techniques depending on the circumstances.
Leeches, snakes, holes in the wetness that could hold a little boy, and our own implements constantly threatened to do damage or mortal harm. On this particular Saturday, we man and boy-handled one small petrification, and loosened another stump with the tractor. What was left of this ancient tree had a central trunk over three feet in diameter, and several root stems spread out four or five feet further, underneath the sloppy mud.
We pried and wrestled and cursed at this massive excrescence for thirteen hours. Swampy leavings slimed all of us, worn out and angry, when Daddy called the day. The chains attached to the tractor had stretched in the dark ooze and snatched off John's pants without anyone seeing my big brother's danger. He stood in his mucky underwear with only a welt to show for how close he’d come to serious injury, mutilation, death.
Driving home across the fields at 9:00, boys sat and hung from every edge our little International offered. Not a word passed among us. I whistled, and Michael hummed some radio dribble; bitterness so consumed us that communication shut down entirely. Mother had a huge meal for us, but half of us didn't eat or wash before bedding down. The thought of rising before dawn, to tangle again with the rooted mire, dispirited us that much.
Of course, even a brief rest can invigorate boys used to work. We had the old giant of a lighterd next to the stream that ended our property by 5:15 next morning; a cheer rose from our crew on yanking it finally free of the sucking mud. But our game display lasted only a short while; dull anger and futility settled on each of us as we awaited my father's return with the breakfast that he left us to retrieve giving us a morning break. We stood, sat, and lay silently around the floor of the bottom-acres shed.
"We oughta tie 'im up and run off."
Michael, my five year old sibling, could have had no real notion of what he proposed. He probably got the idea watching cartoons the Saturday before, when he ran a slight fever and stayed behind from the day's labors. Nobody said anything for nearly a minute; nobody breathed either, because we were all thinking about it.
"Yeah," emerged from John's mouth like a long and well-savored belch. We could always count on his agreeing to little jokes we might play, like the time four of us had tied the wheel of the tractor down so that it turned ceaselessly in circles, then hid, hoping to confound and amuse the Sergeant.
But any pretense of mild trickery disappeared when Matthew Jr., serious about farming and obedience, added before the wind of John's affirmation had settled, "I learned a 'Scout' trap the other evenin' that might catch the old fart." We all had the basic farm child's knowhow regarding devices. Rigging something to hang the old man up was plausible.
Matt's idea was ingenious. …(continued below the fold)
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(sequelae)
(PART TWO—The Culling’s First Cut. {As the author of this new volume in the series, I have elected to continue in the third-person rather than the first-person POV from my original diary entries.} In the last section, Thomas Hawkins, having lived through his contest with Norman Bates, came face to face with the frenzy and feisty frolic of his future, discovering its unexpected difficulty, quotidian routines, and hoped-for divinity. In the event, he became a functionary in what would soon be the greatest engineering of mass murder in human history, the first iteration of which follows along today.)
Slaughterhouse: Executing Extermination
Dialectical aficionado that he was, Thomas, with the tantalizing tutelage of Ms. Folger and Dr. Winston to light his way, soon recognized the enormity of what was at hand. He also realized that he hadn’t the stomach for it, a fact that he communicated in terms of an ‘efficient development of human resources.’ He had come to terms with the absolute accuracy—albeit from an entirely different, bizarre, and alluring source—of a jocular maternal threat, which his Mom had been wont to deliver with a sardonic grin.
“You can be replaced!” Fully accepting this as a fundamental nostrum allowed him to speak his mind, whatever the outcome of doing so might be.
He also told ‘Sweet Janice,’ flat out, a more acute version of what he earlier had spoken to ‘Doc W.’ “I’ll kill myself and some of my fellow executioners if anybody tries to put me in a spot to participate.” He let her know that he meant nothing imperious, let alone personal, by articulating such a statement. “Just making sure: forewarned, forearmed, all that jazz; kill me first, if nothing else.”
In the event, while he and his eighteen lover-women adjusted the protocols of their bedroom and household operations, they all heard via one grapevine or another that irreversible steps had already set in motion what was to be the most extensive ‘culling of the human herd’ to occur for at least a few tens-of-thousands of years. In the sacred BioSecurity programming of the present pass, predictably, a virus would provide proper provenance to authoritative potentates for their murderous plans.
The glaring headlining of what was at hand blared forth in Pearl-Harbor-Typeface from our love-compound’s New York Times subscription for the Sunday of the final Halloween, which was, on the day in question, as always ‘celebrated’ at October 2027’s culmination, or sixty-four days BP, i.e., Before Pandemic. “New Influenza Strain Lethal in Over Half of Mongolian Cases” screamed that particular title.
The predictable follow-up delivered the kill-shot, so to say. “Vaccine at least four weeks from availability,” soberly offered the subheading. Our household soon learned of our exemption from the shots because of ‘demonstrable immunity.’ This was our line in circumstances that necessitated discussions that, literally, as everything turned out, never happened.
Still, the preparation was noteworthy as both the facade of ‘liberal’ openness and assistance maintained its grip on almost everybody except, of course, on the most skeptical of committed communists, and the orchestration of compliance with vaccine protocols proceeded apace from every hypermediated pore of the corporate social phalanx, predictably effective even among half or more of the aforementioned Reds. This continued facade of Liberalism made more palatable the all-too-predictable drumbeat of demands to be jubilant about jabs, so to say.
And this inoculation would be the most ‘advanced technology in all history,’ available only by reservation. The avalanches of ‘only a few spots left’ pronouncements, in the event, began on the Day of the Dead, less than twenty-four hours after the overall onslaught itself started.
Naysayers among Dr. Winston’s colleagues’ prediction of ‘lingering COVID fatigue’ notwithstanding, an astonishing 4.8 billion people signed up for more or less binding ‘subscriptions’ for the hypodermic’s load, which in retrospect had long been in the works as a mix of manufacturing capacity and logistical legerdemain. Inasmuch as only five billion robust doses of the innocently innocuous H1N5NV shot were ready to go at the initiation of the process on Monday, November 29th, just after the last impression of an imperial Thanksgiving weekend, any greater participation would have been meaningless anyway.
Safety, security, protection, and such defined the ideas that pulled people to participate; meanwhile, communication about obedient integration, versus exiling all skeptics, served to push the cautious to permit the puncture, so to say. Thus, the essence of the entire culling project, its central Nazi core, was a joining of boosted biosecurity and coerced, if not altogether compelled, compliance.
Whatever their moral and functional deficiencies, as it were, fascists often manifested miraculous abilities in the sphere of logistics, an essential element of managing to pull off ongoing mass murder. The S1NPP—or Stage 1 New Pandemic Plan—predicted “no less than four billion prophylactic vaccinations” by December twenty-first of the last year, Current Era, emphasis added, ha ha.
For the numerically inclined, accomplishing such a feat would entail delivering two hundred million or more inoculations daily between the final December first and the Northern Hemisphere’s Winter Solstice. So called Pandemic Clinical Services in the vicinity of London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome, as well as in and around California’s and the Eastern Seaboard’s extensive megalopolises anticipated delivering at minimum at least a million jabs seven days a week.
The technical requirements for the volume of engagement, as it were, demonstrated that cached vaccine supplies, inoculation stations, temporary morgues, and much more were in place months or even years in advance of this period, even if the eventuality itself—of a new flu bug—was, in fact, just a matter of time in nature’s ‘taking its leisurely course’ instead of, in actuality, a fully-designed-plague-treatment interface of one sort or another.
In any case, a few of the technical aspects of the entire scenario, epochal emanations indeed, present readily entertaining and elucidating details. For example, all these injections’ engineered gender-specificity had to function without failure, in spite of a lack of experimental proof or operative expression of such a technique. The key, in the lab, had been to build on already extant biological tendencies, such as the way that various disastrous autoimmune responses obviously differed in frequency between men and women.
In one more ‘technical requisite,’ lethality and attendant immobilizing morbidity needed to approach or slightly exceed fifty percent of the potential population of ‘unfortunates,’ which is to say those whose flesh sharpened needles pricked. Significantly lower rates of death would swell the ranks of the officially anticipated resistance to later phases of the overall campaign. A killing proportion too close to all of the vaccinated, on the other hand, would reduce the ability of the upper crust’s impresarios to maintain their vaunted reserve army of those willing to do anything to have another meal, another few mornings and evenings, another chance to rise and shine for even brief time.
The archives of this planning process includes multiple ‘White Papers’ that noted, even among the original National Socialist true believers, a recognition that much sought after lebensraum could easily go too far and remove key servile and slavish sorts who would prove instrumental at once as menial servants and as willing cannon fodder participants, so to speak. The proving ground for perfecting this fifty-fifty mortality rate, in retrospect, were the various MRNA COVID immunizations, which only led to death among fewer than one in twenty of the recipients.
A latency period was another sine qua non. Research, dating from just after the ‘current era’s’ twenty-first century roared into place, had shown some promise in delivering just such male-versus-female differentiation. Labs in Southeastern China, Western Ukraine, Northwest England, along with off-the-books bioweapons facilities in Maryland and Colorado, had all estimated the potential for such engendering of sexually varied outcomes.
However, doubts about reliability and timeliness ultimately sent the scientists of death down a different pathway. Radio-frequency activation, as many COVID-critics had been predicting, was relatively simple in design, if also much more exacting and expensive as a matter of process.
Whatever the case may be, the use of receptor metals in the serum stock did facilitate a radio-pulse-activated guarantee of what had only been possible at the fringes of the COVID debacle, the so-called “Vaccine-Associated Enhanced Disease,” a ‘gain-of-functionality’ to otherwise enhance the objective of enough carnage yet not too much.
In the event, the goal was two billion Male corpses of all ages, with Female casualties as much as fifteen percent or so of almost forty percent of the men and boys on planet Earth, whose remains would often become part of a shadowy “New Arctic Development Initiative” in which bundled human cadavers, quick frozen meat, would “form icebergs to help stave off further sea temperature rises,” according to early official statements. The evolution of things after the wildest New Years Eve ever, in the first months of 2028—or in Current Calendar Nomenclature Moons 1-4 P.I., or Pandemic Interregnum—beggars, or makes infinitesimal, any attempt at description. …(continued below the fold)
Nerdy Nuggets—Gambling More Than We Can Lose
Gain-of-Function Euphemisms For Mass Murder
“I loik chicken!” barks Norman Bates, the foil of the first section of BTR’s Mad Cows & Englishmen. And, in truth, so do I. I like chicken too, better than any other meat except its larger fowl cousin, the turkey that Benjamin Franklin proposed as our national bird.
Whether karmically inspired or otherwise, this intersection of mammal and avian, of purportedly tamed primates and domesticated, winged livestock, could serve as both a premise for BTR’s presentation of a narrative, entirely confabulated, of human slaughter and as the underlying vector for how the biosecurity state is plotting to direct the course of things in real life over the next period of time. This is not a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Along with Michael Ruppert, I believe in “conspiracy facts,” and, more to the point, I am openminded enough at least to speculate about these matters.
BTR has already made a powerful—one might proclaim even largely incontrovertible—case that the mortality of the so-called Spanish flu—a notable irony indeed, in that name, since Spain was one of few jurisdictions that actually reported sickness during the period—should be viewed as casualties of World War and attendant horrors of this mass murdering mandate of the high and mighty. One might almost note a complete turnabout in the present passage’s directives and dictates.
Whereas in 1920 inducing a fear of nature served to keep people’s attention at bay from the ordered carnage of war, in 2020 promoting terror of natural viral cycles acted as an inducement to ignore toxicity and ignorance and plunge needles into our flesh in order to stave off the course—which is to say the inevitable spread of airborne respiratory viruses—that life’s ministrations make mandatory. People acted like puppets and will pay the price for the rest of time. Plutocrats played on popular fears like Hitler appealed to antisemitic prejudice.
The official COVID account is laughable, albeit humor of the darkest sort given the millions of lives on the line and the hundreds of billions of dollars in profits that are at stake. What went on at Wuhan? What’s the background on Fort Detrick? How likely are people to follow instructions during the ‘attack of the next virus?’ If these machinations of mass murder are keeping us secure, why aren’t we happier and healthier? The questions that people pose receive no clear answers. Many of the most important queries are rarely, if ever, asked.
In the event, mandating that science lead the lethal charge of empire has resulted in having all knowledge and all of matter—chemistry as weaponry—become components of the direst imperial arsenals. Weather is weaponized; media is a tool of mendacity and mayhem; viruses and bacteria are implements of doom and guarantors of vaccine compliance. Citizens forego critical thought and comply obediently.
The point of this introduction is to make some arguments and provide historical and conceptual context. Clearly, a good starting point is to recognize that America has from its beginnings been a place of genocidal programs of theft and enterprise—slavery and eliminating Indians merely point to the most obvious examples.
In the present fiscal environment, more than half of the national spending of the U.S.A. finances death and destruction, the largest imperial presence in all history. Yankee ‘defense budgets’ regularly exceed the expenditures of the next ten largest military presences.
The Manhattan Project’s model still forms a key pillar of this edifice of militarism. Science and technology exist to make money and help martial predominance in favor of ‘American interests.’ Science: the Endless Frontier is actually pretty limited; belligerent jingoism, constant aggressive saber rattling, insistence on America’s exceptional status—these are what we buy with our ‘scientific’ creativity.
Frank Stockton’s The Great War Syndicate postulates a technical finesse of the horrific endgame of ever improving technologies of extinction. Robert Oppenheimer theorized the same thing about nuclear weapons. The idea is irresistible: we needn’t make peace because we’ll buy machinery that will make fighting us impossible. It’s never worked before in history, nor will it serve us well now.
Moreover, biochemical warfare must inevitably epitomize Martin Luther King’s warning that our ‘bombs would explode in our own homes.’ William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay helps in feeling the shape of the social reality under consideration. The main character is returning from European battlefields in 1920, more or less, after a period of convalescence.
He is slowly going blind, his breathing is labored, he bears hideous scars. He is likely a chemical warfare victim, not to mention suffering the unintended consequence of the flu virus that rode on war’s coattails. Untold thousands of those who served led miserable lives and died young as a consequence of their wounds. Soldier’s Pay was an early fiction from the great Mississippi literati; it should be required reading for those who hope to avoid delving these matters of scientific industrial slaughter.
Mustard gas was an inaugural choice of scientific warmakers. It was one of many agents that came to the fore during the debut dance of industrialized chemical death in World War One. Every ‘great power’ ultimately followed the French and German programs to promote these poisons.
“The most commonly used gas in WWI was ‘mustard gas’ [bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide]. In pure liquid form this is colorless, but in WWI impure forms were used, which had a mustard color with an odor reminiscent of garlic or horseradish. An irritant and a strong vesicant (blister-forming agent), it causes chemical burns on contact, with blisters oozing yellow fluid. Initial exposure is symptomless, and by the time skin irritation begins, it is too late to take preventative measures. The mortality rate from mustard gas was only 2-3%, but those who suffered chemical burns and respiratory problems had long hospitalizations and if they recovered were thought to be at higher risk of developing cancers during later life."
A future Nerdy Nugget will examine a particularly catastrophic case of mustard gas’ explosive dispersal in World War Two, when a German bombardment of a recently captured Italian port scored a direct hit on a boat that carried as many as two thousand mustard shells—which were only on board to provide ‘prophylaxis’ against Nazi use. The presence of these weapons, a ‘secret,’ killed and maimed only American soldiers and Italian civilians; their story proffers a bracing lesson for people who can learn.
Anniston, Alabama, near the heart of Dixie, became the home of the nascent U.S. chemical weapons program. Cancer, heart disease, endocrine disorders, hideous and frequent birth defects and degenerative disorders, these were a few of the effects of this new ‘science of war’ via poison; only they did not afflict enemies but residents, employees, and soldiers who came into contact with the deadly agents.
Of course, the purported purpose of most Gain of Function and other biological weapons research is to know how to handle the bad guys’ plans. What if Putin launched Smallpox rockets? Leaving aside the ineluctable fact that ‘projection is the most primitive sort of coping strategy,’ one simply must inquire what must be the extent of the gall that could permit Gringos to impugn the motives and plans for killing of other nations and peoples; given the facts of history and all.
The Tuskegee Syphilis experiments are important to note as a way of putting in perspective how homegrown are the potential destructive purposes—agendas of genocide, more or less—that U.S. leaders and scientists willingly practice on our own citizens. All of the intentionally infected were Black; none had consented to these protocols.
A summary from History magazine states the case clearly. Promised treatment for ‘Bad Blood,’ the participants were infected and ‘observed.’ “The men were monitored by health workers but only given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947, some 15 years into the study. PHS researchers convinced local physicians in Macon County not to treat the participants, and instead, research continued at the Tuskegee Institute."
Given this background, this litany of science-in-service-to-destruction, what can we expect but ‘functional gains’ that threaten ecocidal setbacks of the entire human prospect? Thus, facing up to threatened influx of ‘new strains’ of an avian flu that might initiate ultimate extinction—actually engineered for improved virulence and lethality—feels almost as logical, as much a matter of course, as dawn’s coming at the end of the night. How ought we to proceed in this context? …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Ukraine As Imperial Hubris: III
(We ended the last selection with a litany of the cultural accomplishments of Ukraine and its Communists among the Bolshevik revolutionary transformation of Russia and its multiple ‘national’ satellites, so to say. In sum, the linkage between the two places might readily—but to an imperial plunderer—make them, nationally speaking, more or less indistinguishable. Bolshevism played a big part in this connectivity and its appearance as a pair of nations.)
And children in the merest village had schools. They learned to read and write and think and plan. The party provided mentors to its up and coming members. A key ally of Stalin, Dmitrii Manuilskii, advised young Nikita Khrushchev, as he was finishing his tour-of-duty in Kiev. The pair were fellow Ukrainians, from similarly salt-of-the-earth backgrounds, but the elder communist, an intellectual and trained writer, instructed his junior about the overview that one had to struggle to obtain, and undertones that one had to strive to notice, in order to thrive as a proletarian leader.
The period that Bolsheviks encountered at this juncture, in contrast to the carnage of World War, contained a respite from the intense mayhem that characterized the prior pass. Soon enough, at the finish of the decade or so following the Soviet consolidation of political power in Russia and its outlying regions, the dynamic of decline again appears unstoppable. But before this vortex of pain repeated its body blows to social equanimity, a time of relative calm, of optimism, even if full of struggle and difficulty, prevailed.
In the Ukraine, though one might examine many participants’ lives as typical of this pattern, one would find few likelier candidates for exemplification than the aforementioned Nikita Khrushchev. Though Moscow under Stalin’s rule was, as noted above, highly suspicious of Kiev, in the event, the young rising party star had a good year or so in Central Ukraine, his homeland.
“Despite my forebodings, I must admit that my year in Kiev turned out to be very satisfactory. I have many pleasant memories of that period. I found it easy to work there. The people seemed to like me and trust me. I’d even say they respected me.”
But the boon of this brief interlude of relative harmony, in which amid the fermentation that has typified Ukraine at every period equilibrium was more pronounced, affected much more than politics. The shooting of Eisenstein’s film in Odessa, in which the movie master made of his crowds a ‘caviar’ of the masses, which he then brought into focus with his extreme close-ups, exemplifies this interweaving of play and politics and culture.
“The force of “The Odessa Steps” arises when the viewer’s mind combines individual, independent shots and forms a new, distinct conceptual impression that far outweighs the shots’ narrative significance. Through Eisenstein’s accelerated manipulations of filmic time and space, the slaughter on the stone steps—where hundreds of citizens find themselves trapped between descending tsarist militia above and Cossacks below—acquires a powerful symbolic meaning. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the agitational appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible; when the film was exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous.”
Filmmaking and literature and art and theater enjoyed an upsurge during these years as intense as any earlier renaissance. In a sense, a cultural fertility that matched the fecundity of the land came to the fore as never before. As Ukrainians joined Russians in a communist experiment, vistas opened and walls came down, quite the opposite effect from what observers have come to expect of ‘comrade Stalin’ and so forth.
BTR readers have already had a sample of this blooming of human potential. The review of French auteur Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt in Number Three notes that the filmmaker named his organizational efforts after a ‘father of Ukrainian film,’ Dziga Vertov, although this maestro was also Russian even as he in powerful ways shaped Kiev’s cinematic evolution.
These sorts of things did not happen like Bolshevist comic books, but they did happen. The life and art and career of Oleksander Dovzhenko was also illustrative. As definitive cultural output, his stories and drawings nearly matched his movies at the time. He found Ukrainian folklore captivating, and drew both filmic and written narratives from these sources. Criticized for overt nationalism, the party shortened his leash, and he ended up in Moscow. But he never abandoned the themes of conflict and polarity that defined his birthplace. One of his most popular novels was Ukraine in Flames, published in 1943.
Nor was his even close to a unique example, though as early as 1927, film studios named in his honor opened in Kiev. Hundreds of performers, producers, writers, and artists of all sorts flowered under the Soviet regime in Ukraine. Many were Jewish, as in the case of Grigori Kozintsev. He excelled at both theater and film, his still-captivating most masterful achievement, an iconic production of Hamlet that he had directed theatrically and made into a film. Others who turned to art were Romanian, or Polish, or Cossack, or Russian, though Ukraine took them all in. Nationalism was palpable, and it was also a façade, a chimera, fatuous nonsense.
Kozintsev summed up these points incisively himself in 1965, speaking of his youth in theater near Kiev. “What we were doing then we were doing in the cold and famine of a devastated country. The conditions of life were very hard. The State, occupied with a full-scale civil war, was undergoing enormous difficulties. Yet the dominant sentiment was the affirmation of life. The young artists felt life in all its richness and color, and artistic forms seemed naturally to take on the artistic forms of a great popular carnival. In the middle of every kind of privation a sort of fair was going on. The young artists bore the common fate gaily, so fine did the time in which they lived appear to them. If this atmosphere is forgotten or neglected, then the art of those times remains incomprehensible.”
Education, too, developed explosively. In part, this was, as always defined the background—and occasionally the foreground—of Russian life after 1921, a result of Party decisions and inputs and supports, which applied in Ukraine equally as in Moscow or Siberia or Korea.
Most to the fundamental point, both primary and secondary education far surpassed what had transpired under the gaze of nobility and factory owners. The careers of some of the world’s top writers and filmmakers and scientists are just a few of the tangible expressions of this massive transformation in the community strength that communism brought to education’s foundations in Ukraine.
Kira Muratova came of age in Kiev during World War Two and went on to world renown as a screenwriter and director. Stansilaw Lem, a pathfinder in literature, grew up in Lvov in the 1920’s and ‘30’s and went on to an iconic status as a storyteller and master of science fiction.
Moreover, the same expansionist dynamic applied to college and technical education. New academies flourished. More venerable universities expanded, even as the Party saw in them hotbeds of nationalism. This upsurge of capacity-building and empowerment certainly completely differentiated post-revolutionary from Czarist Ukraine.
Meanwhile, industry advanced apace. In part this reflected Russian concern at what, almost before the ink on the Versailles treaty was dry, Soviet leaders viewed as the inevitable coming of another World War. A key focus in these industrial expansions were in Eastern Ukraine, as noted above. But real acceleration of development was largely across the board throughout the region.
This emphasis on industry obviously dovetailed perfectly with the theory and practice of communism, which in actual fact completely depended both on enlarging the presence of workers, of wage earners, of commodity producers, and on fostering their social, economic, and intellectual contributions. This increase in the number and power of workers happened everywhere, perhaps less so in the Ukrainian fields than elsewhere, but nonetheless an identifiable pattern in the coal and metal trades in the East, in the cities, and along the many waterways overseen by Kiev.
Nor did agriculture merely revert to earlier patterns. Dmitri Manuilskii’s career early on, and Trotsky’s work too, to an extent, embraced the encouragement of small peasant holders and the suppression of the pre-revolution dominance of large landowners of one kind or another. And production for the most part burgeoned, though the surplus of key commodities for purposes of trade still, echoing Tolstoy’s critique, lagged far behind the standards of Western scientific farming. …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Skill Game Cultural Interludes
(This yarn from the deeper spaces of my brief and yet all too voluminous transit through things delves one of the strongest inclinations that I’ve ever had, which is to say to test my understanding of skill and chance in games that I fancy. Chess and bridge came first in my life, yet backgammon, ‘the game of kings and the king of games,’ arguably is first-among-equals now, joined by Scrabble, although finding decent competition in this newest of the pastimes that I fancy is arguably harder than in any of the others. In any event, much of the depicted action in my portion of the tale actually took place, with names altered and blah blah blah.)
When the King of Games Meets a Prince of Death
Gamboling Amid Gamblers Indeed
The nature of narrative is to nurture the spin of everything in the cosmos so as to tell all the twists and torque and tension and torture that underlie even the most mundane and placid surfaces. That said, when one steps back from certain stories, an honestly simple central message emerges, a notion that intersects with and helps to account for literally everything in the tale, even as the wacky hairpin turns and upsurges of brutality and mayhem seem to indicate intricacy and complication that would seem almost impossible to unravel.
To some extent, this prevalence of a predominant pattern is present in today’s telling, which concerns at the level of the basic plotline one of the most marvelous pastimes that humans have ever devised, albeit backgammon is less popular now than it has often been historically. The core component of the yarn that the Marshall Artist Spindoctor proffers here flows inherently from the nature of ‘the King of Games,’ to wit that managing risk will always confront those who take chances with precipices at which David Bromberg’s advice, in “Diamond Lil,” would be apt to keep uppermost in one’s mind: “A man should never gamble; a man should never gamble; a man should never gamble, more than he can stand to lose.”
Nonetheless, in some senses as a matter of course, every breath that we take is such a wager: whether in crossing the street or staying on the sidewalk, whether in diving in or jumping in or simply wading in little by little, whether in kissing and telling or hoping for discretion, no matter the conjunction that an actor confronts, issues of life and death can come to the fore whatever choices one makes. Thus, the best that anyone can hope for is to manage the inherent dangers that the world dangles in front of us, with the allure of spun sugar to the hungry infant, so as to maximize one’s joy and potency, so as to optimize one’s interactions with oneself and others, and so as to minimize the likelihood of pain and carnage as the steps that make up every journey unfold while we perambulate along life’s highways.
Looking at the life of Marshall Beatty, as the Spindoctor has come to know it—not from God’s perspective, by any means, but with a measure of eyewitness and hearsay and circumstantial knowledge—one might suggest that this dear fellow, whose charm and looks and intellect and passion were lovely, if not legendary, to behold, may indeed have overstepped the bounds of balancing the maximizing and optimizing of the positive with the minimizing of the negative. But such a judgment is not the purpose of conveying this account.
This rationale, quite frankly, is that the combination of event and context in the saga itself compels a richly detailed telling and an appropriately amazed consideration of ‘how the deal went down,’ as it were. In the event, before readers consider the dark pass that this scion of significant wealth confronted in Southern France thirty-odd years ago, a setting of the stage seems apropos, itself in a series of interludes that provide first an overview of the game of backgammon, second a very partial but nonetheless indicative account of how the game has shown up in literature and other mediated litanies over the years, third a précis of Marshall’s life before he became a wandering gambler, and fourth how he and the Spindoctor spent an Aspen year together in which backgammon was a central organizing principle of their relations.
All of these factors, as observers may soon enough note, so constrained the course of events thereafter that one would find most other resolutions of this drama implausible, if not unsatisfactory. Whatever the case may be, perhaps the witch of the west stated the case most reasonably: “All in good time, my pretties, all in good time.”
A GAME OF DICE & CHECKERS, & ALL THE CHOICES IN THE UNIVERSE
Two dice for each player; fifteen checkers arrayed on twenty-four slender triangular landing points; movement that happens along these points according to the pips on the dice, tossed from a cup; rules that permit blockade, capture, recirculation; and over all a race to the finish, which more or less beckons ineluctably as possible for either side to win under most circumstances: these elements, plus a doubling cube that both increases the cost and skill that the game requires, on the one hand, and speeds up action, on the other hand, constitute the game of backgammon. …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
Every day’s journey reestablishes perhaps life most important lesson. Inasmuch as no one—nor even everyone, in aggregate, like a mind-meld forcefield—can command the future, the present mandates that we attend it and not our theories and prejudices about it.
Making things up as we go is inevitable; we should try to excel in this realm of credible make believe. Our stories, our ideas, our perspectives, our analyses and other nerdy nuances, ha ha, all entail some such process of invention of especial attention to the ineffable, ineluctable here and now and our emerging intentions therein. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves running into moving trains or otherwise experience catastrophic encounters of one sort and another, ‘thrown under the bus’ in one way or another.
In a sense, this calling to communicate creates the certainty of error and falsity. No matter the accuracy of such a deduction, what choice do we have? A piece of Driftwood Message Art speaks. “Like Infants to Maternal Milk, I Am Drawn to Those Who Seek the Truth, Yet, In Noontime's Glaring Glow & Moonrise's Silver Sable, I Flee in Abject Horror From All Who Assert That they've Uncovered Its Everlasting Essence: Nothing So Enervates & Extinguishes Any Search for Accurate Awareness As Does the Inherently Erroneous Notion That One Has Attained Complete Comprehension of Either the Universe as a Whole or Any Intricate Piece of the Cosmos' Essentially Infinite Puzzle." Still, to try is the only path to fruitful living.
A final point of information might be useful. Both May and June will have just a single issue, so that the next two installments will be on the first of June and July.
—Below the Fold—
Yes, indeed. This seemingly endless transcription of knowledge and belief, of ideas and facts, feels as if it could actually accrue comprehension’s kin if not its comprehensive knowing. Of course, that is nonsense: not an atom in the drop in the bucket from the ocean ends up clear and complete; still, it surely does look like a compelling collection, a feasting of ‘food for thought.’
The Documentary Fiction, however much its mere guesswork misses the mark, also yields nuggets of nuance and glimmers of understanding’s glory. Altogether, maybe we might share it more. Who knows? Greater miracles have come to pass.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
In relation to the appearance of Psyche’s Love Suit, not for nothing do Yankees’ oh-so-modern and yet oh-so-repressed libidinal sensibilities so often appear in contemporary electoral combat. Signs accuse Donald Trump of ‘screwing Stormy Daniels’ and ‘trying to get in bed with Putin,’ a darkly hilarious image for certain. Gary Hart, Johnathan Edwards, Bill Clinton, and both RFK’s father and uncle aroused just such prudish prurience on the hustings.
Just now, recordings, which reveal that Robert-the-Elder and his brother Jack both cavorted with Marilyn Monroe in compromising circumstances, as it were, are part of the eternally commoditizing mediated shit-show of the here-and-now. Do we ascribe to such ethical foundations as ‘not burdening the son with the father’s sins?’ To say otherwise is to show ourselves as, at best, mendacious and in some sense murderous ignoramuses, since the canon is clear: the son bears zero responsibility for Dad.
One might as well maintain that the future causes the present passage. For our purposes, today’s Antithesis gives us the card of Justice, a delicious polarity for certain between, on the one hand, the inescapable give-and-take of reunion and relationship that typifies both the marriage of Eros and Psyche and every other connubial bond in existence, and, on the other hand, the chilly incisiveness, an invitation to alienation, of Athena’s intellectual cutting edges in this pluck that simultaneously illuminates cognition’s competitive edge and the way that thinking can sunder us from others and even from our own essential natures.
Enter the quotidian Synthesis of the ever-optimistic Three of Pentacles. Indubitably, ‘resources are available’ to us in regard to our public official’s campaigning for office, in similar fashion as legend details the success of Daedalus as the world’s original technician and businessman. Moreover, as in the myth, this winning availability serves up merely a partial manifestation of the health and prosperity that lie near the very center of the purpose entire political process.
The Spiral Spread that started us out will now unfurl its further array of ideas and possibilities. Here is the ‘order of battle,’ so to speak, following Atilanta’s power-feminine’s leading the charge. Chronos’ double-edged timely engagement with a Hermit’s requisite solitude suggests the actual Past of both the asker and the asked. The Six of Wands elucidates a Present Passage via Jason’s initial capture of the Golden Fleece, with Orestes gaining a capacity for calm future reflection in Likely Future Developments’ Four of Swords. No-Matter-What, Opportunities places Helen’s alluring mystery up front in the form of the mysterious and irresistible Queen of Cups. The follow-on is more poignant still, in the form of Ares with The Chariot and obvious Problems & Prospects in relation to ‘competing inner drives.’ Athena takes center stage once more in a Synthesis of the Ten of Swords, ready to initiate jury systems and their emphasis on facts and balanced thought.
This sequence allows an obviously appropriate configuration of matters. ‘Considering a new Kennedy campaign usefully,’ the upholding of ideals and forethought and discourse are certainly part and parcel of the Queen of Swords. For at least the Past century and a half, being out of the supposed ‘two-party ambit’ has meant playing the part of an outcast critic. Now, though, along the lines of Kennedy’s noting an awakening of mutuality and engagement, something akin to public acclaim is, irrefutably, happening in the Present moment. Easily too might an observer imagine Future prospects that revolve around intellectual, or at least cognitive, summarizing of matters at hand. Helen’s presence is an outlier in the spread, perhaps; then again, how else would one contextualize today’s political upheaval other than as an alluring, mysterious combination of attraction and uncertainty, Opportunistic consideration of which almost goes without saying. Similarly, the War God’s mandating the mastering of paradoxical inner contradictions and objectives serves as a dandy statement of Prospects & Problems or vice versa. In the end, Athena’s defense of Orestes, by turning over his fate to ‘Wide-Awake’ jurors, also proffers a powerful completion to this storytelling endeavor.
Kennedy money; Kennedy mystique; two assassinated forbears: what fodder for yarnspinning; what plausibly pertinent ‘food for thought.’ How seriously ought we to take all of this? As backgammon buddies such as one of today’s BTR heroes at times tragically have stated the case, “You pays your money, and you takes your chances.”
In any case, the utter horror of ‘established’ Democratic Party voices at the grassroots growth of RFK’s new endeavor to sit at the helm of the United States of America is obvious. This reaction’s intensity and ubiquity fill baleful headlines in such liberal bastions as the New York Times, erstwhile ‘neutral’ titling in such Times’ properties as the ‘middle-of-the-road’ chronicle of Congress, The Hill, and openly delighted notations from the so-called ‘right flank’ of Breitbart News and its kindred compatriots of reactionary propaganda’s propagation.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Junior, whose Children’s Health Defense is no more anti-vax than the Centers for Disease Control, states his “Declaration of Independence from the Democratic Party,” the proletarian masses on display at his rally roar their approval. They give more tepid approbation for Kennedy’s follow-up, asserting his sundering of connection with ‘all other political parties.’
Such quieter backing is clearly congruent with a skepticism along these lines, as if, after the Wide Awakes ushered Lincoln’s Republican candidacy to the White House, the new chief executive forswore all connection to the very forces that got him to the winner’s circle. In fact, of course, the spontaneous and decidedly martial squadrons of youth against slavery and the Democratic Party’s alignment therewith were at least as central as any other social outpouring in bringing to the forefront the most profound conflicts and contradictions at the heart of the whole ‘American Idea.’
In regard to today’s primary Tarot inquiry, Kennedy’s campaign statement is almost certainly truthful, about how “painful it is to me to let go of the party of my uncles, my father, my grandfather.” The mention of Joseph Kennedy, Sr., RFK, Jr.’s grandpa, is especially apropos. Just as this bootlegging, stock-jobbing, founding impresario of vaunted ‘Kennedy mystique’ was totally in line with a ‘New Deal’ Democratic upsurge, so too is his grandson comparably congruent with a more ‘independent’ experience today.
Joseph, Sr., after more Wall Street fraud than will ever see the light of day, became the veritable fox with oversight over the henhouse. RFK, Jr. may not fulfill BTR’s victory prediction; that remains to be seen. But that his campaign augurs an incontrovertible inauguration of some new politically partisan expression is, if nothing else, itself an indisputable fact of our present Polis, a reality that circumscribes the Goddess’ answer to the initial quest, in regard to a ‘useful consideration of RFK’s campaign.’
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
Skipping backward from that, as she surveyed the boudoir that she would soon “abandon for good and proper,” Angela recalled “the first one, the first boy, that clerk of my daddy's who knew way too much about me, like where that mole was.” His swooping in and breaking her hymen “in a heated rush, let me tell you,” led “step by step, like a dance,” to her cutting her father off to the point that she now told anyone who was interested, “I don't care if I see him again till hell freezes over.”
Again returning her intentions to the matters at hand, she side-stepped for half a second to shake her head at the methamphetamine analog prescriptions that littered their nightstand, doses that she had received from one of the university's “fucking psychiatrists,” who had “'diagnosed' me as having Attention Deficit something or other.” Her attitude toward this significant aspect of erstwhile practice in her field of endeavor was clear. “ADD doesn't exist; it's a manufactured construct that helps the bottom line at Daddy's firm but not much more.”
She never sold the pills unless she'd overspent her monthly check from her grandfather's own pharmaceutical legacy, which was rare. Otherwise, she gave them out as party favors or around exam time.
In relation to the aforementioned present pass, she had known for some time that things would come to this, with her leaving in the dark of the night, in point of fact since at least the first week of her senior undergraduate year when she found out that Richard had indeed fallen into bed and the throes of passion with her classmate, Lucinda, to whom she had bragged about her paramour's amorous abilities. “It didn't take her more than a week to show me what was what.”
That was over two years nine months ago now; Michael had been still an infant, and she hadn't yet become the youngest approved Ph.d in psychology that 'the go-get-'em Gators' had ever produced. Free associating despite her internal insistence to “focus girl, focus,” she remembered fondly the one member of the football team who had stumbled into a night-owl shift that she had taken at the student-staffed Mental Health Crisis Center. “He was gay as a goose,” she cackled, “and with all those buffed young men let loosed in the showers,” she drawled to herself in her best Maryland shore accent, “who wouldn't have had just a little bit of a crisis?”
Meanwhile, the man with whom she'd created Michael Whitney Carnes, Richard Witt, or “Dick-Witt” on occasion, lay splayed on their water bed, naked and slowly swaying from Angela's exit from the connubial pit a few minutes before. As he snored slightly and his head turned this way and then that, his eyelids danced with pleasant episodes or garish nightmares, while his penis, not quite flaccid nor completely erect, rocked back and forth with what she admitted with a grin were captivating gyrations; she had recently partaken fully of that marvel of an instrument as Mikey had slept his mother's and father's fucking away, before the drawn out few minutes that she was nursing her now sleeping boy.
Angela knew from long experience that she had at least three hours before her lover and 'baby-daddy' rose to any state of consciousness capable of awareness of his surroundings. At other times, she had rued that she would often affect men like that: “What luck, fuck 'em and they fall asleep, just when things ought to be the most interesting and labile, lascivious and open, like a Georgia O'Keeffe Flower.”
Richard knew nothing of Angela's other liaisons; of that she felt sure. “For each of his fuck-interests,” she smiled and nodded, “I got me one too.” These ended up being, almost by default, fellow Ph.d. students, from other universities, whom she met at conferences and like psychosocial gatherings of the psychological tribes. Thus she had met Martin, he of the talented tongue and glib mouth, whom she fully intended to meet again, if only because she loved the Bay Area, even if she wouldn't live there, “for all the tea in China,” what with the “slews and slews of men just like my daddy,” who lived in and around San Francisco, well-heeled cads, “fuckers without consciences.”
She considered. “What about Richard? Does he have a conscience?” She concluded, “he's probably still too much a boy for such grown-up appurtenances,” trying out the newest “fancy word,” one of the ones that she was slipping into her reports of late.
Anyhow, now was time for the letter. She had not married Mr. Witt, nor disclosed almost anything of true interest or importance about her past, a trick that she learned before earning her doctorate in psychology in record time but that she had excelled in manifesting throughout her mandated sessions with all manner of other clinicians in the program at the University of Florida. She had shared herself and her cache of ecstasy with this friend and co-parent, repeatedly in the manner of giving her body and her passion, selectively in terms of the four-thousand hits that she had obtained, so she told herself, via 'purely legal' channels, from Iceland, where treatment with MDMA was legitimate.
Her Mikey seemed firmly ensconced in the land of Nod, her husband deep in Morpheus' lair. She was showered and serene, completely at ease with herself and what would for most people be an earth-shattering decision. The pen and paper in front of her awaited her beck and call. Hi Richard!
When you get this I will be gone, and Mikey will be with me. I should say right away that this is goodbye, for now and for always. You shouldn't come looking for me but should accept what you know in your heart is true, which is this is best for me, for Mikey, and for you!
She thought for a minute or more, as she circumscribed a florid heart around 'you' in her missive, about how when she was only sixteen she had seduced this boy, the one with the lean hips and long fingers like her father, with her father's look on Richard's face when he regarded her, but not her father as a smart-guy, a manipulator, a bastard.
You're way too much like my dad, whom you never asked about, not that I would have told you anything useful. He and I haven't talked for over eight years, since I was 15. Also, I'm nothing like your mother, so I'd never be able to trust that you'd not run off with some beauty who was more in keeping with what you're used to. I know about Lucinda and Sherry, by way of illustration; I may not know about others.
In many ways, she had set him up with both of her fellow matriculants. Her abilities to be exactly like her father, sly and cleverly manipulative toward precisely the ends that she intended, astonished her, at once delighting and frightening her no end. She had, without exaggeration, terrified her potential in-laws, the divorced and yet indistinguishable mother and father of young Dick-Wit. She giggled at all the ways that they were perfect copies of each other.
Did you know that both your parents offered me money—your father offered me a lot of money—if I'd just have an abortion or give Mikey up for adoption and disappear? Well, I'm disappearing and no one has to pay me. I think you did know but never told me, I wonder why.
Like a lot of rich kids—not all, but a substantial proportion—she never gave money much thought. She reflected on it now, though, and in so doing also basked in what she conceived of as “a slice of heaven pie,” the city where she would soon be setting up her ultra-lucrative, ultra-healing practice.
You know that grandfather's money is enough for me and our son. But I'm going to make a lot more than that, I assure you. Michael Whitney will have everything he needs. Where we're going, people aren't like they are here, at least not all of them. They don't believe in a better world in the future, they believe in it now!
She struggled, “at least morally if not practically,” with the penultimate pointer. It went against her grain, in spite of all her fear and loathing of her own Papa.
You won't be able to see our little guy for a while. I've got a document for you at the bank. It's in an envelope. It guarantees you regular visitation after Michael Whitney turns eight.
And that about capped things off. She grinned like a beast about to take its favorite run in search of adventure and prey.
While I'm at it, before I say farewell for all time, I want to repeat one more time. Don't come trying to find me. You won't like what you discover, and all that will happen is I'll keep Mikey and you'll have to pay, unlike now. Just think. I've let you off the hook. I still really like you; you're a sweet, sweet man in so many ways. But our time together is over.
She 'signed' with her initial, an “A” with an angel built into it but with a little devil's tail at the finish. A deep breath escaped her as she fought down the longing to laugh, effusively, with wild abandon and lots of noise. Then she remembered something else.
P.S. I left you all the money in the bank. I had plenty of cash on hand. DON'T WORRY ABOUT MONEY!!!!
“Now,” she said in a whisper. Then, simultaneously, “Oh shit, yeah.” She was thinking of the sorority sister in one of her seminars, the one to whom she had described Richard's wiles in some detail, who “thought I was plain nuts not to get married quick.” She had warned that “somebody might steal him away, you're not careful.”
P.P.S. You know my fellow student, whom you think is 'classy like your mom,' Daphne? I've spoken to her fondly about you. Don't tell her you heard it from me; just say 'a little bird told me,' but she likes you a lot.
Finally, without further delay, she put all of her money on the table, took the keys to the Dodge, and gathered “little Mikey” to her breast, cooing to him that “we’re going on an adventure, Mikey,” at which he smiled and nodded. Before they cleared the door, he'd fallen back asleep on his mother's strong and slender shoulder.
Tints of lavender and pink, with just a hint of orange, winked at her and her son between the live oaks as she turned the key and prepared to 'dart' away. Then they were gone, “leaving Gainesville behind forever, really, forever,” pointing the Dart toward Atlanta and a vast new age of monumental success that would indubitably provide all that she would ever need materially, even though she knew how much she would struggle to find the balance of repose and adventure that would let her know that she'd found a relationship, and a home, where she would stay and neither want nor have to leave.
Not to mention a ten year older Michael. Such a lad, no longer in any sense a 'little Mikey' despite Angela's continued use of the pet name, might encounter trials and troubles: such should perhaps be predictable, but then, “psychology's not an exact science, is it?” Next Up—Chapter XIV
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
The entire saga, all too obviously, would amount to a life’s project for many universities’ history and social anthropology faculties; and then some. Nevertheless, from Destiny’s Manifest ministrations Westward also flowed grasping intentions to the South, in regard to Spain’s former colonies, ‘free’ soon after the United States but unfavorably situated versus the Gringos industrially and financially, and, therefore, militarily.
Multiple cases of this typified the antebellum period. Several of these will call forth BTR segments of one sort or another—in regard to the Texas wars for independence, the Mexican American War, and various diplomatic snafus, deals-with-the-devil for territory and oversight, all manner of historical tale-telling and blah blah blah.
This dynamic, of Dixie’s domineering inclinations to the South, came down to whether slavery or ‘free labor’ would rule the future. Filibusterers, or Freebooters, mixed piracy and mercenary armed intervention. Both as fantasy and as a practical recognition of the force of Lincoln’s proscription of ‘half slave and half free,’ Dixie’s strategic thinkers—the upper class’ theorists of race and empire—increasingly foresaw Latin expansion as the key to their own well-being.
One briefing stated the case very simply. “In a bid to acquire new lands for slavery a filibustering expedition was launched from New Orleans in 1851 to secure Cuba for the South. After this failed, extreme southern nationalists supported the efforts of William Walker, ‘the gray-eyed man of destiny,’ to extend slave labor into Latin America."
For the moment, readers might especially benefit from considering the life of the just-mentioned Tennessean, William Walker, who fantasized making a fortune and entering potentate ranks via his orchestrating a takeover of the recently ‘free country,’ Nicaragua. He succeeded for a year, appointing himself President before a Central American army backed by Vanderbilt and others ousted him, permitting his escape with the proviso that he never return. When he ignored this prohibition, he died while tied to a post, at the hands of a Latino firing squad.
This almost medieval sensibility truly divined the essence of “The Knights of the Golden Circle,” a group primarily consisting of Southerners, albeit a Cincinnati merchant founded the organization. Their plans included reopening the slave trade, turning the recently revolutionary Spanish ‘republics’ into post-secession plantation colonies of the South.
Their failure marked the end of the old regime, in which slavery was integral to a continuation of ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ An important monograph sums up the result of such efforts and beliefs. Its routine subtitle is helpful to contemplate: The United States, Latin America, Europe, & the Crisis of the 1860’s.
It highlights the paradoxes that would be hilarious were they not so vicious and brutal. “In an ironic twist, instead of insuring the future of Southern slavery, secession marked the death knell of the South’s dream of creating an empire for slavery in the Western Hemisphere."
The modern epoch in some senses began with the Spanish American war and the U.S.’s stretching its imperial musculature, as it were. Intervention became, in the parlance of the Black Panthers, ‘as American as cherry pie.’
A Harvard publication states the case incisively. “In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century."
Furthermore, and especially pertinent to today’s thematic sensibilities, the entire Gringo political process has hinged on Southern politics and Dixie’s White Supremacist governance, even as grassroots organizing against such depredations were also ‘Southern fried’ in many cases. For example, counting slaves—who were not allowed any rights of voters—as fractional people, and disfranchised ‘free’ African Americans as whole citizens absolutely guaranteed that Southerners would dominate the halls of Congress and America’s facade of freedom.
This litany of an oppressive, never truly reconstructed Confederate States, as a political cat’s paw of plutocrats, banksters, and other potentates, could readily go on and on and on. And on. Readers may rest assured that the resistance to these forms of dominance that Hitler himself studied closely will also appear in these pages.
“English, Spanish, & Auto Mechanics” is the most topical Driftwood Message that considers these sorts of things. “To Live Comfortably in the Land of Uncle Sam, One Must Have Skill, Or Access to It, in Three Arenas—English, Spanish, & Auto Mechanics: Surpassing Expertise in One Realm Might Unburden the Necessity of Overarching, Overall Mastery, Yet Only Someone Who Can Navigate Each of These Capacities Will Ever Likely Prove Much of Either a Political Leader Or a Social Butterfly."
Whether in relation to territorial control or commercial hegemony, moreover, this admixture of linguistic ambidexterity and mechanical acuity has represented the wellspring of the vaunted American industrial might that first oversaw U.S. predominance in this hemisphere and then inaugurated an Anglo-American empire that ruled the planetary roost—though in much more sophisticated and financialized fashion—from which England’s sun-never-sets colonizing enterprise had previously operated.
Smedley Butler rose to command the United States Marine Corps. He led in many cases largely Southern troops in his forays around the globe. This appeared near the beginning of his masterpiece, War Is a Racket. “I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912."
This overview merely introduces the first century-and-a-half or so of this murderous hegemony. ‘Given time and tide,’ as my Mother liked to state the thing, readers will learn much more.
Specific reporting on the original 9/11, the C.I.A.-orchestrated Chilean coup, is soon forthcoming, with further analysis of Cuban Communism, the theft of a ‘Panama Canal’ from Gran Colombia, coca’s hegemonic role in the land of Marquez, and much more, also down the road. In essence, this pending material will amount to Parts Two through ‘n’ of # 13’s introductory essay here, in which the coming focus will primarily highlight post-World-War-Two developments, when the iron boot of militarism, sinister psy-ops of ‘el CIA,’ and ascendant, truly religious anti-communism acted to cover for supporting well-trained fascist, Latin latifundia in their constant and commanded wars on their own populations.
A series about the School of the Americas—a training camp for butchery and counterintelligence state operations that occupied a corner of Fort Benning’s vast complex outside Columbus, Georgia—is also definitely in the works. Annual protests there, led by SOA-Watch and promoting a folksy combination of liberation theology, Marxist geopolitical analysis, and rock-ribbed conservative anti-imperialism, so demonized the School For Dictators that its name changed, becoming the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a WHISC to stir counterrevolution to the boiling point.
Another item of Driftwood Message Art punctuates these thoughts about empire, vis a vis the United States and its neocolonial and yet, in Michael Hudson’s words, Super-Imperial relations with the U.S.’s ‘good neighbors’ to the South. Its name, “Profitable Catastrophe’s Promises," speaks for itself.
“Its Redoubtable Facade & Seemingly Impregnable Phalanx of Organized Exploitation & Fascistic Propaganda Notwithstanding, Capital's Present Imperial Passage Remains Rotten to the Utter Core: Continued Human Survival Will Prove Impossible in Such
a Context of Profitable Catastrophe, Guaranteeing Our Emiseration & Enervation, &, Sooner Or Later Our Species' Barbaric Incineration in History's Dustbin."
Whatever the case may be, in the ‘modern context’ of the last eighty years or so, as readers will soon learn in some detail, the Cuban Revolution proved the key turning point—following mass murder’s impunity in Guatemala and elsewhere in the 1950’s—in all this process of repression to serve capital’s supremacy. And for that entire period, and for the hundred fifty years prior to that, propertied and connected politicos from South of the Mason Dixon Line served as the primary proponents of imperial reaction, racialism’s nonsensical theorizing, and militaristic mayhem in the event of any hint of rebellion against ‘Brand Chaos.’
In his trial for fomenting revolution against Fulgencio Batista, the banker’s and casino’s and ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx’s puppet, Fidel Castro took the stage, professionally, as an attorney. The record of his defense of himself is one of the most dramatic documents of modern history.
He finished with a simple flourish, a gauntlet thrown down against White Supremacists and Confederados all and sundry. “Send me (to prison) to join (my fellow fighters) and to share their fate. It is understandable that honest men should be dead or in prison in a Republic where the President is a criminal and a thief.
I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
He diagrammed in the dust a noose-activated counterweight-draw-trap. We stored thick gauge rope all over the shed for hauling everything from lighterd stumps to dead animals. Thomas, a prodigy with knots, scrambled up to the roof beams and attached an end of some four-hundred-pound hemp to a couple of two hundred pound sandbags.
These sat in the rafters for just the purpose of occasionally lifting, for inspection or disposition, something from the floor of the shed. Tommy then made a professional loop at the other end of the rope and placed it in the dust. Richard, two years older than me, quite strong, and nearly as large as Matthew, agreed to push the sand bags from the beam at John's signal.
"Just listen for me to cough, like this," and he made a stage ahem, "brace yerself and knock those bags off. We'll get Daddy like a pig in a net."
Amazingly, no one sounded a cautionary note. The actual configuration that we had devised could easily dislocate a knee or even break a neck, if it worked; and if even little Michael had brought up the results of a botched attempt, probably none of us could have convinced the others to go along. But our inarticulate fury at being cheated from our 'shore leave' impelled us.
The Sergeant always set the table on the old oak stump we dragged around for meetings and play, and we maneuvered it directly under the beam that carried our snare. The vertical hang of the rope caught none of the light of the fading moon or predawn horizon and was invisible.
We finished preparations minutes before seeing the single headlight of our aged two-stroke tractor chugging down the slope. Thomas, the best liar of our group, said he'd tell Daddy that Richard was whizzing if asked. We had only a few minutes until the lone lamp and puffing engine filled the shed.
"Lord! Lord!" was all I could think as I noticed how brightly the thick strands of our net stood out in the harsh electric glare. Discovery might as well mean death, as far as I could tell. But none of my coconspirators flinched; Matthew Jr. helped daddy carry bags of food to the tree trunk, Thomas responded "pissing in the woods" smoothly to the Sergeant's inquiry about Richard's whereabouts, and less than two seconds after John brought up some phlegm our father hung suspended, his feet a yard from the ceiling and his nose four feet from the dirt floor.
The near dark and our own leaping hearts kept any of us from seeing whatever expression of amazed befuddlement graced my father's face. Other than rope rasping wood and the "humph" of Daddy's lost wind, no immediate significant disturbance took place. A bag of food merely ended up in the dust, and particles of dirt rose from the ground where he had stood a few seconds before.
Richard broke the silent breathlessness with a whoop of, "God Damn! Woud'ja look at that!" And then all of us, down to gleeful little Michael, who laughed until he cried at an image more dramatic and hilarious than any cartoon, started to cheer and yell in triumph. Pithy gems like, "We got 'im!" filled the air, until a high pitched howl, something like the sound a big hog makes right before someone cuts its throat, displaced our childish voices.
"YOU BOYS!!! DAMN, ya'll KNOW yu'll NEVER..." But no one listened. We danced and rolled around on the floor, hugged and congratulated each other merrily. The Sergeant, undoubtedly turning purple from lack of oxygen and general consternation, realized that he had overstepped some indefineable leadership boundary when he denied us our holiday. Too late, he began after a fashion to negotiate with us.
"JOHN! You could go to Boysville for this!"--Only dancing laughter in response.
"Matthew, you know how much I love you boys and this farm."--Silence
"Todd, boy, look at me," he appealed to me directly as he twisted around a sort of arc that took in all of us. "I promise ya', boy, if you get me down, we'll all go to the beach 'til Tuesday."
But the time for repentance, by him or us, had passed. The silence that greeted the continuation of his beseeching gave each of us pause. What happened at this point? I finally asked out loud, "So wha' da' we do now?"
John, always opportunistic, answered immediately, "Keys're in the pickup, I've got money in my coat. We'll drive to Pensacola 'n spend the day at the ocean, like we was s'posed to." The tractor had us in the yard in a quarter hour, and we were headed South five minutes after that.
Noiseless bottled-up tension alternated with jubilant celebration. We'd left our father swinging and struggling, begging and then promising doom to us; John's ferule ears picked out his shouts until we were seconds from the house.
As usual, the weather was as fine as could be, though the context muted our enjoyment of this particular sojourn. We talked among ourselves until we convinced each other that he couldn't very well kill all of us, so long as we stuck together.
We used John's money to eat a big lunch near the city, including pie for dessert. Then we drove down to the shoreline and parked and pondered for the rest of the afternoon. No great games this trip, just fear mixed with satisfaction, and wonder at what we'd done, and the inevitable uncertainty about how to proceed from the juncture at which we now found ourselves.
An hour before dark and two and a half hours from home, we just piled in the truck and headed back. Other than a solidarity we couldn't begin to name, we had no plan or excuse. I figured the Sergeant would beat hell out of each of us in turn, especially John and Matthew, and that we deserved some punishment. But a hot sense of justification filled me, nevertheless.
John parked the old Dodge truck next to the garden before 9:00; Daddy and the Buick station wagon were missing. Mother sat at the dinner table alone, and watched silently as we filed by to our rooms. "Lord knows what the Sergeant told her," Matthew whispered to me after we undressed and got under our covers.
* * *
The next thing I remember, our father was turning on lights and rousing us. "Come on boys, holiday's over; time to get to work again."
John's assessment proved accurate; he couldn't kill us all, or punish all of us to any effect. So we continued. None of us thought we were masters of our fate as a result of our rebellion. But the whole incident ushered in a new stage of labor relations on the Porter farm.
And spousal relations as well. With all that blood rushing to his head, the Sergeant saw the sense of what his wife and mate was arguing. He'd lose too, if she died trying to bear yet another child to add to the brood. She won't tell me to this day what type of birth control she uses--"That's none yer business, Todd"--but we had another day and a half of holiday the next weekend.
Matthew and Madeleine went off with each other in the Buick, kissing every few seconds as they headed out the gate to the farm road. They both returned satisfied, drawn from lack of sleep, quietly smiling from mutual embrace, ready to start over since they couldn't go back. Next Up: Something Entirely Different!
New Fiction Series—(continued)...
The aforementioned licentiously crazed New Year’s bash came a day early for Thomas and his ilk, the surviving ‘competitors’ who would serve as breeding stock and human roosters among groups of twenty females or so in days to come, after this initial initiation of their duties culminated with this first ‘official’ party-till-you-drop interlude. Dosed with erotic entheogens and slick stimulants, the nineteen members of Hawkins’ specific Household Unit did indeed party tempestuously, akin to savage beasts in seasonal conjunctions of rutted ferocity.
Janice, wearing nothing but anklets of bells that jingled merrily as she cavorted, seized the initiative—pinning between her muscular thighs their grouping’s only man, Thomas, whose propensity for tripping had always been his favorite amorous pastime anyway—and pointedly played the part of impresario as she lined up her fellow female housemates to take turns mounting the face of the enthralled and truly captivated fellow underneath her loins while she rotated on his rod and readied him for his first ejaculation of the party.
In the event, candles all alight and every surface a reflection of sidereal glowing mist from sticks of incense, Thomas in fact did come in very timely fashion, so much so that he would have passed out but for his simultaneously feasting on Becca’s sweet pudenda, the eighteenth and final oral application of their party’s first hour. Her orgasm was one of those punctuating moments that, just at this instant of their simultaneous release, he realized that he might, during his death throes, replay from his mind’s eye.
The final tableau was a flower of fucking, a few hours before dawn on New Years Eve itself. Eighteen petals; he was the bee, flitting from one opened ovule to the next, only this time he started with Becca, over whose sweet completion he wept in joy, albeit with a recognition that consciousness-altering psilocybin and mescaline could account for much of his emotional state’s sense of erotic authenticity.
No one in the household budged before early afternoon next day. Reeking of sex and attendant fluids and scents, the entire domicile slumbered like spent seekers are likely to do in an erstwhile common bed. Thomas’ dreams were of solace and solitude, a psychic bandage, perhaps, for the ravished rapture that could, seemingly, succor the rest of his days.
In comradely fashion, Team-Leader-Jan pulled him from his dream state just past midday and, arms around each other as they ambled, walked him down his hallway to the nearest shower. His ‘operational supervisor’ there informed him that he, along with four other men near his domicile in this ‘sector of operations,’ or ‘operational vector,’ or whatever other bureaucratic label he’d found affixed to communiques of one sort and another, had a command-performance call at 2:30—his helicopter escort had already texted confirmation—with Dr. Winston and his superiors, about whom he had often heard but whom he had never actually seen up close and personal.
His shower was quick; he ducked his head and ran to board the chopper on the lawn, Jan’s pat on his bottom enough to send him forth with a grin, in spite of the precipice that loomed dead ahead. The meeting followed exactly the script that he anticipated, however, meaning that he had every reason to expect weeks or months or the rest of his days of, at minimum, occasional nausea and self-loathing in response.
Culpability must ever appear in context, after all. The entire orchestration of matters meant that anyone ‘in the know’ would also face the direst dilemmas in seeking to ‘act ethically,’ so to say. Moreover, as Thomas’ connection with Becca had already shown in some small measure, accepting and continuing with a charade of being ‘part of the winning team’ was the sole route to resistance; all more open skepticism confronted instantaneous summary judgments of the most final sort.
“Unimaginable chaos,” “Necessary draconian lockdown and martial law,” “Our only option to avoid extinction:” these were a few of the catch-phrases that floated from the lips and screens that mediated the experience of the Survivors, henceforth the official designation for men like Thomas and the women who were their consorts. The ten attendees at this ‘afternoon seminar in slaughter’—or so Thomas termed it—established a pattern over the course of the pre-revolutionary decade. In all subsequent ‘informational forums’ of the sort, Thomas would meet nine fellow travelers, the same ones but for those who quailed or quarreled about anything whatsoever, who routinely simply disappeared.
The copter that returned Thomas and four of his companions to their places, as Winter’s gloaming shaded a new-moon night, was a different beast from the one that started them out. Heavier armor and port and starboard machine gunners in opaque pods were only the most obvious variances. Thomas considered, as he was flying, that such a switch made both practical and psychological sense.
The aftermath of the meeting was also predictable. He barely slept. Not that he’d have any ‘responsibilities’ at this point other than to watch the shit hit the fan, but he both obsessively wanted to see every detailed indicia of premeditated mass murder and predictably hoped to avoid thinking about it all, especially of his part in this panoply of orchestrated horror. Most of how the next eight weeks unfolded had been part of his six-hour New Years Eve briefing.
The announcement, of an “absolutely essential declaration of mandatory Martial Law,” for instance, went out beginning midday in North America, and simultaneously around the globe, on what till later would have been January first, 2028. Authoritative sorts reasoned that the imprecations to ‘stay indoors and avoid contact with others’ would reach the maximum number of citizens at just that juncture.
Part of the overlords’ strategy revolved around diminishing any dissemination of details of the deadly devastation that the denizens of dictatorship had determined were necessary and were plotting to pursue. Thomas had learned at his New Years Eve briefing that the ‘long litany of death’ had begun December 28th, although no mediated notice of proliferating lethal sickness had shown up by the time that those in command put the military in charge of things.
‘Getting ahead of the curve,’ in this case, was an attempt to avoid, or at least to ride in more manageable fashion, the tsunami of freakish, frantic dying that was beginning around the globe, in particular in the ‘more developed regions’ where the recent ‘recommended vaccine’s’ uptake had approached one hundred percent. Avoidance of any sort was hopeless fantasy, at the same time that keeping people separate would, in both obvious and unanticipated ways, make this evolving maelstrom of murder’s most historic mayhem a textbook case of ‘managing disaster.’
In retrospect, anyhow, the ten thousand “surplus deaths” on Tuesday, the 28th—in the U.S.A. alone—ought to have been obvious, possibly were noticeable but censored in advance by the censorious maestros who were orchestrating matters at hand. Such knowledge would never be in Thomas Hawkins’ ambit, but—given his background in media as a writer and erstwhile publisher—he found himself unable to find speculation any less fascinating than fact.
Erstwhile ‘progressive’ radio in London and elsewhere reported from the monopoly media’s script, more or less that “an apparently virulent stomach virus” was striking and causing grotesque projectile vomiting among all who found themselves beset, “seemingly out of nowhere,” at the same time that different ‘misinformation specialists’ immediately noted to their small audiences of ‘free-thinkers’ that the bodies from this affliction began, quite literally in urban centers where ‘sheltering in place’ was impossible to enforce, hither and yon to pile upon one another. Bloated maggoty flesh would soon follow but for long-planned logistical wizardry.
The explosive social force of history’s turn here was inherent in humanity. Thus, for all except a single full day from the next two and a half moons—a stormy snowy Appalachian highlands blizzard, which went as quickly as it came—cannonades have been clattering from ubiquitous helicopters that have been unleashing their thirty-millimeter kill-blankets against the masses of Homo Sapiens who, albeit spontaneously and without a hint of organization, have realized, quite correctly, that they had little to lose in rising up, since death would be coming in any case, in seemingly more painful fashion, heaving up guts and bile and blood to writhe in agonized final throes.
The means of action for making such deaths occur, et voila, all abra cadabra, ended up being the use of pulsed microwave radiation, a force that was straightforward to target here or there, as the tactics of the ‘leadership’ dictated a specific place’s need to trigger autoimmune eruption. In the event, not only did this ability to choose the time of onset make scheduling and sustaining corpse collection easier, but it also allowed the ruling order breathing space to stave off the sorts of massive simultaneous riotous insurgency that could overcome even the harshest repressive measures, that would in fact entice the personnel of oppression to switch sides and repeat the revolutionary consequences of 1917 in Russia.
Even with miraculous technology and meticulous scheming, the sheer volume of bodies and bowels, emptied and covered in the effluvia of dying, made the very success of the operation a horrific nightmare in its gritty, grimy, gruesome garishness. While the chill of Winter might delay nature’s taking its feasting course with dead flesh, this brief respite was a matter of days, a week at most—and, obviously, outside cadavers were more or less immediately at the mercy of crows and other carrion birds, arrayed for months in flocks wherever people were a part of the population, not to mention coyotes, feral cats, and other opportunistic omnivores.
The plan, of course, was what Dr. Winston had told Thomas and Norman mere months before—the caching of a ‘backup food supply’ for survivors who faced barriers at once psychic and physical in feeding themselves in the carnage of this new world. The facade—how collecting and flash-freezing corpses into bundles of eight adults would act as an impromptu buffer against warmer seas—would have seemed comical but for the contents in question, all too recognizable as dear cousins and closer kin. Nevertheless, as noted, this was the planned result of mass murder’s aftermath.
As a matter of course, ‘artificially intelligent’ machinery proved an essential component of the brutal vituperation of the new standard operational protocols, if for no other reason than the likely insurrection that would have transpired if humans took charge of ‘cleaning up the mess’ of their own mass extermination. As a matter of fact, as Thomas Hawkins learned through some of his more technically sophisticated cohorts—and as he inferred and witnessed with the Bot-creature that had pacified, killed, and then turned Norman Bates into a stack of burgers—the United States and several of its closest kin among the family of nations had diverted as much as two percent of America’s gross productive capability to ordering, organizing, and then manufacturing as many as a million Mobile Sentient F.P.U.’s, or Freezing & Processing Units.
This assessment of things combined our household’s scuttlebutt resources, Janice’s and Thomas’ briefings every fortnight or so, as well as decoding monopoly news’ mediated reports on current events, with just a smattering of closely-monitored attention to the ‘underground journalistic’ realm that somehow continued to exist, as if Auschwitz had managed to tune in to an ‘independent camp radio.’ Over the years, as more information has come to light, merely cosmetic corrections have occasionally held water; the situation, therefore, plotted the course of a well-lubricated murdering machine.
Given this background, Thomas often wondered if the entire array of doom and its ongoing delineation was a case of some sort of Computer Coup. Was this an inevitable concomitant of Artificial Intelligence’s imprimatur? Perhaps the vaunted Technological Singularity was unfolding in real time. He recalled the warning words of Vernor Vinge.
“But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the ‘threat’ and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of ‘a machine in the form of the mind of man.’ In fact, the competitive advantage—economic, military, even artistic—of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first."
Whatever the bugaboos and admonitions of such thinking, however, the fact remained. Most household members, possibly excepting Janice and three of her trustafarian gal-pals, had been consorting with their lonely fellow and each other while at least some of their closest family were slaughtered and processed as future food supplies. All of the nineteen—each spoke eventually—were wondering when they might expect frozen ground meat to include some of their kind, if not their kin.
Unlike the collection, preparation, and dispersal of this source of miracle meat, the freezing process itself was ‘old school,’ on the other hand. The refrigeration methods had been around for more than a century. Nature’s closest cold storage—the Arctic, with its petrochemical roadway access and year round sea-lanes—was now under the management of a troika, Russian, Chinese, American, that more or less now owned and operated the frozen North as a wholly owned for-profit deep-freezer enterprise.
As this monstrous, industrial scale human abattoir was coming to pass, the members of Thomas’ collective continued to carry out their libidinal duties—as directed, ten to twelve hours per day, minimum, even if tepid and often enough tame. Discussion though, the intercourse of the mind as it were, irresistibly elicited speculation, argument, such ‘evidence’ as anyone might proffer, and blah blah blah. Everyone wanted to know something for certain, so that understanding might prevail over otherwise inescapable ignorance.
Inevitably, for instance, fifteen to twenty million cadavers each day, often having wept blood and spewed bile all over themselves and their immediate surroundings, spread a sort of terror that is only imaginable as a psychotic dreamscape of hellish horror and sickening sensory scents and suds, so to say. The big screen indicators, in any case, clearly graphed the authorities’ approaching what the household crew had surmised was the plutocratic benchmark of two billion dead males in the initial onslaught.
When the killing-times persisted to the cusp of what everyone present still referred to as March, the collective calculation concluded that this first phase was coming to a close. For seven weeks, the message from the boxes that delivered threads to all and sundry was relentless: daily tolls were compared to annual losses in the World Wars of the previous century.
The female half of the household’s favorite announcer team—in other words a pair that everyone might imagine fondly as friendly guests in our wild times—looked as if she’d had a decent night’s sleep, as if—for the first time since early January—she might have looked human without her makeup. To end her Leap Day presentation, she quipped in the lighthearted tone that had been hers back in the Autumn, as the cataclysm came closer: “Well, Charlie, maybe this thing’s going to let up a bit; that’s what the CDC says, and I think that I’m inclined to agree. What about you?”
Her cohort simply pointed his handsome index finger at the camera, his signature shalom, and nodded. The fade to black brought back music. Each person present took a look inward simultaneously as, with the exception of Mr. Hawkins, she spent a long minute surveying her companions. In tandem, literally linked hand to hand much of the time, nineteen ‘Hawkins Household’ residents had watched the ‘evening news.’ Each viewer was complicit. What was coming would have been obvious to a mule.
The upshot was, within twenty-four hours of what the shadowy announcers called the “culmination of the initial plateau of doomed dying men,” Janice probably spoke for everybody. “Whatever the fuck is ahead, we’re never going back." She took Thomas from behind and propelled him toward the door, a laughing licentious pair. “Let’s head to bed.”
Life force energies had always run like a super-nova current through Thomas’ bones and sinews and bloody pulsing. For all the wear and tear and moral qualms and Catholic schoolboy remnants in his psyche, he was in thrall to Goddess grace, a connubial aficionado extraordinaire. Candled shadows danced, drenching female essence flowed over everything, a score of participants participated and waited for whatever came next.
In the end, the start of what would have been March in the year 2028 of the now defunct ‘current era’ saw a stabilized slaughter process finally drop to background, more or less overnight, so that the sounds of helicopters became, first, intermittent and, then, merely an echo of the wind, interspersed with singing birds and buzzing insects in late Winter’s early Appalachian balm. A natural dawn woke them all with its silence.
Every resident had a personal, actual inbox, as well as SOS texting and command-performance e-mail. Somehow or other, the little cubbyholes in the basement each had identical packages on the morning of what would have been the Ides of March, apt indeed since every box contained a slickly beautiful automatic pistol with a single box of thirty bullets.
Shannon showed the rookies how to load clips. “They must be expecting trouble.” She touched Thomas’ face, her only ‘lesbian-with-a-dick’ friend in forever, or so she swore.
The taut tones of terror again taunted viewers from the screen’s depiction of a ‘news station.’ ‘Charlie and Marie’ depicted gruesome execution of “resistance leaders” in one nightly broadcast after another. Unlike the unplanned, almost automatic outbursts that percolated from the heart of the slaughter, and which airborne controlling forces put down handily, approaching Spring witnessed clearly organized and in some nascent sense strategic assaults on the now firmly ensconced SOP of slaughter.
In the event, uprisings flared briefly and resulted in more mass incarceration and a hundred million additional butchered bodies or so—here the numbers were coy, with no color-coded evening news charts. In Thomas’ monthly briefing, Dr. Winston, visibly aged and palsied beyond patience, acknowledged that ‘regular units of the armed forces’ had been unleashed on the barely armed but now in some way coordinated popular responses to it all.
And, as the ‘Hawkins household’ had been sustaining its succor of sex and completion, bombardment’s boisterous booming boasted that authoritative forces—the only ones who could afford such explosive devices—had everything well in hand. That said, the Hawkins’ harem’s handful of household war-zone veterans, who had—but for Janice and Thomas—the only regular, in their case ‘veterans association,’ contact with the world of dread and drudgery and deadly plague that paralleled the consummation and glee of Hawkins and his ‘harem.’ Polygamous pundits indeed they had all become.
This apparently unnatural, and far from obvious or automatic, lustiness will end up a topic for deeper contemplation. The experience of it—recorded as slickly recorded documentation for all participants—was pretty simple to digress and digest. Becca stated the case. “We were,” she summarized in her narrative, “you know,” she laughed but with bitter recollection, “just trying to eat, drink, and be merry enough to get through the day and into the night without using our pistols on ourselves or each other.”
Thomas went so far, at times, in jest, to refer to their household as ‘the first bastion of our new Latter Day Saints!’ “Big Love” times three! Everyone would laugh; frolic would ensue. The killing time’s ending did not slow the pace of amicable mutual ministrations. On the contrary; coitus was without any interruptus.
Thomas told Janice at just such a juncture. “You know," he said, nibbling her nipple and listening to her giggle with a jump down below, “I can’t keep up a pace like this.” He laughed; she laughed.
“Don’t worry,” she chuckled with a bubbling rumble, “we’ll pace ourselves to keep you throbbing and thrusting.” She made a fencer’s move toward his crotch, and they both guffawed as if merrily, all the while the slaughter weighed on like a sack of sand tied round one’s neck with razored links, so the tears of mirth were also sobs of painful dread.
And thus had days and weeks passed, in which the great paring of men from life sliced off over a third of the human herd’s male component. All those bodies, emptied of bile and bloodied at every pore, how were they to make their way North to their frozen destiny?
The previously described ‘smart mechanisms’ effectively centered on large conveyances, in the midst of which lay computational and mechanical capacities at least equal to the cognitive and dexterous abilities of well-schooled and highly-honed human actors, in fact of many coordinated squads of actual flesh and blood in each of the plus or minus million new machined-minions that the powers-that-be had been stockpiling against the necessities that their plans made unavoidable.
Well might an open-eyed view of all this downpour of blood-drenched mayhem inquire, under the circumstances, how survivors—as one human enterprise after another came apart in the bloodbath—might safely eat the meat that was acting as a reservoir of refrigeration for the polar seas. It would be awash with the viruses and toxins that engineering had insured were part of the entire process.
The answer was clear to the cognoscenti: the pathogens themselves included a fever-reducing mechanism so that the curse of the heaving regurgitation would not induce any temperature rise in the victims. This new virus had its own weakness built in, so that even a modest heating would cook and dissipate its virulence, at even a steam bath’s setting; any more intense baking or boiling destroyed it.
Nonetheless, for a season—and more or less on demand in the future—both planting potatoes and ordering all manner of nut trees “genetically engineered to yield” within five years became the norm. Hunger’s the best sauce, even for cannibals, yet every individual at least toyed with the notion of what would have once been a ‘vegan lifestyle.’ The thought of consuming cousins for daily bread and butter was likely equally as nauseating for all as it was for Thomas himself, who’d already ‘broken his cherry’ when he ate a stack of ‘Norman Burgers’ a year before.
Including the women lost, over two billion had died, nearly twenty percent of the entire population. An additional hundred-fifty million, at minimum, were concentrated in camps to await whatever grotesque fate those in charge deemed appropriate. The disposition of the remainder, save for the scattered lot that shared the luck of the likes of Thomas and his harem, would remain for all and sundry to discover during the immediate aftermath of the initial cut, when a less prodigal yet equally persistent extirpation would proceed apace, as planned.
Thus, then, would unfold Year One, Post Plague, in the new scheme of things, from the Vernal Equinox in what would never again be the beginning of any ‘current era’s’ third millennia to the day prior to the next orbit’s first day of Spring. How could people keep from dying of despair or otherwise dispatching themselves in the face of such despicable, seemingly irremediable, circumstances? Next Up: Year One, Post Plague—Pregnant Pauses.
Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…
In essence, hoping to understand systematic, industrialized murder means trying to follow the ins and outs of commodity production in service to rulers’ interests. The technologies and their production and deployment are matters of logistics and techno-scientific capacity.
Especially when competing empires, geopolitical combinations, and socially revolutionary developments come into play, observers must expect intricate complexity and a ‘martial logic’ in biochemical fighting protocols that have little to do with winning wars and nothing to do with ‘national security’ while the profits of the manufacturers and the ability to have a credible enough threat of retaliation are of absolutely central import. Orienting ourselves to these matters, then, cannot start with a lab in Wuhan or even a storage facility for chemical weapons in Anniston, Alabama.
Instead, in this ongoing series about, on the one hand, the historical and socioeconomic roots of such killing capabilities and, on the other hand, the likely evolution and potential impacts of these murderous methodologies moving forward, readers will begin in this posting with a review of a couple of timelines and a look at seminal events in those timelines or in ancillary aspects of this realm of modern society.
Chemical Weaponry: a Timeline
One can, in a certain way of viewing things, go way back with these attempts to establish a baseline. For reasons of greater technical simplicity and longstanding industrial capacity, perhaps, or because chemical weapons are inefficient and more likely to harm makers than others, a fairly thorough listing is available here in one source.
Inasmuch as the purpose of the report in #13 is primarily to provide background and overview, this single resource will be the sole foundation for this section. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, use of smoke and noxious gasses or other deadly chemicals was rare and without the technical basis for any sort of regular deployment.
Yankees and Confederates conceived of using Chlorine gas projectiles on each other during the American Civil War. Lacking infrastructure and technology, these proposals don’t come to pass.
Shortly thereafter, in the century’s last quarter, all the usual suspects in any genocidal context signed multiple international treaties prohibiting using poison and “poisonous gasses” in warfare. Within a decade from the last of these diplomatic deals, though, World War One was at hand.
The French initiated firing gas shells, but they only shot tear gas, abandoning further use as ‘impractical.’ Germany’s chemical wizardry found outlets on battlefields, however, in the form of chlorine, phosgene, and especially mustard gas, which only saw action in the last year and a half of the fighting.
The inventor of the process for creating the toxins was born Jewish but converted to Christianity as a child. Fritz Haber fled to Switzerland after the war, till talk of war criminal charges faded, and he could collect his Nobel Prize in chemistry. He worked in agriculture and industry as a chemist till the Nazis cut him loose. He died a miserable man.
Much of the contemporary stocks of deadly nerve gasses are the result of Nazi development of these poisons—as insecticides—in the mid 1930’s. Essentially as a matter of course, all nations have used, and killed, their own with these murderous methods, either as experimentation or accident for the most part, except for the cyanide doses that doomed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, ‘perverts,’ and Commies in concentration camps.
During America’s attempt to occupy Vietnam, the U.S. used Agent Orange on the jungle and napalm on whoever got in the way. Then, in 1972, a codicil of the 1925 Geneva Convention against chemical weapons came into force. “The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention is completed. Combined with the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the new accord bans the development, production, and possession of biological weapons. The accord has no mechanism to ensure compliance."
No doubt, this treaty—and diplomacy generally—will provide fodder for coming work on this topic. In this specific instance, this convention particularly applies to what may be a manufactured component of the SARS-CoV-II virus, a ‘gain-of-function accident’ a possible wellspring of the entire COVID ‘crisis.’
Weaponizing Disease: a Timeline
At least slightly more in line with common sense comprehension, an investigator can see almost ancient roots to biological warfare. Intuitively, aggressors presented unwelcome actors or outright enemies with toxic blankets, water, or other infectious vectors for sickening and killing. Louis Pasteur’s theories are centuries ahead of human use of pathogens to destroy opponents.
That said, ready availability of an actual biowarfare timeline, for one reason or another, is limited, the upshot of which is that just such a timeline, including for ‘Gain of Function,’ will become the next installment in this arena, although other interesting and important analyses will also be forthcoming, as noted in the final section below.
In any event, an abstract for a recent Federal research report reveals what sorts of resources are available when push comes to shove in terms of finding things out. The author entitled his work, “Human Experimentation, Modern Nightmares, & Lone Madmen in the Twentieth Century."
“During the past century, more than 500 million people died of infectious diseases. Several tens of thousands of these deaths(roughly one of every ten thousand of the total)were due to the deliberate release of pathogens or toxins, mostly by the Japanese during their attacks on China during the Second World War. Two international treaties outlawed biological weapons in 1925 and 1972, but they have largely failed to stop countries from conducting offensive weapons research and large-scale production of biological weapons. And as our knowledge of the biology of disease-causing agents—viruses, bacteria and toxins—increases, it is legitimate to fear that modified pathogens could constitute devastating agents for biological warfare. To put these future threats into perspective, I discuss in this article the history of biological warfare and terrorism."
Reflecting common people’s concerns, Congress has ‘outlawed’ such research in the U.S., at the same time that at least some of the most dangerous investigations have received repeated exemptions from these types of restrictions. As with the thermonuclear menace, here too human survival may well hinge on human willingness, despite all past evidence to the contrary, to insist on peace among all humans, with a willingness to enforce prohibitions against warfare and the attendant science of murder.
Gain-of-Function, Super-Computers & Drones, Human Survival
The worst case scenarios are, simply put, utterly terminal. Steven King’s The Stand would be a five-star Winter Bahama vacation in comparison. All would die, perhaps a bit more slowly than in the story, but more fully and surely.
A student of nearly eight decades of apocalyptic nuclear weaponry would of necessity need to consider the possibility that producers of these weapons of mass destruction—whether commercial or governmental or some combine, like an ongoing Manhattan Engineering District—are indulging this line of development not to create usable ways of fighting victorious battles but to pad plutocratic arms-makers’ profits and avoid any potential for applying public funds to solve social problems. It all ends up seeming a gigantic con game, a joining of extortion, bait-and-switch, bribery, and fraud so as to enrich cynical gangster patriots.
Such a POV, if true, must appear at minimum slightly superior to Mass Collective Suicide. Then again, such backing for General Smedley Butler’s view—War Is a Racket—does not lay the basis for a friendly social aggregate, a ‘city on the hill,’ or any sort of Golden-Ruled community.
Moreover, in the context of all manner of competitive conflict management that is now deploying so-called Artificial Intelligence and mechanized algorithmic strategy and tactics, one would experience a little tinge of nauseating sickness, that brutal sinking feeling just before puking, to ponder something like a Singularity Machine that could quite literally outsmart other actors and ‘get away with murder.’ Such a situation would very likely lead to an irreversible cycle of mass destruction in which surviving might be only temporary and not at all a better option than termination.
In any case, future episodes about ‘gain-of-function’ and its related scientific techniques of death-dealing will appear in BTR now and again. Among the papers that will show up are the following: a history of Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama; a historical briefing about Fort Detrick in Maryland; an overview of cooperation between ‘Western’ scientists and operations at the Wuhan virological research facility; review of publicly available grant applications for Wuhan Laboratory research; analysis of specific Congressional Hearings and Reports on these topics; a research brief about the Tuskegee University syphilis infection scandals.
Murder profiteering almost surely amounts to a lucrative business model. Nonetheless, Einstein’s warning remains apt to any but the most obtuse. “Either mankind will put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
More down to Earth, from Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht via the National Center for Biotechnology Information, is this advice. It goes against the BTR grain, promoting a warfare state status as a core component of ‘national defense.’ However, the good professor’s historical brief ends with a sobering advisory, after he has pointed out poison’s sociopolitical and military roles time out of mind.
“The current debate about biological weapons is certainly important in raising awareness and increasing our preparedness to counter a potential attack. It could also prevent an overreaction such as that caused in response to the anthrax letters mailed in the USA. However, contrasting the speculative nature of biological attacks with the grim reality of the millions of people who still die each year from preventable infections, we might ask ourselves just how many resources we can afford to allocate in preparation for a hypothetical human-inflicted disaster."
As grandma Fox stated matters, “A word, to the wise, is sufficient.” Who knows? Blah blah blah; maybe we should all wake up and get organized.
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
All was not sweetness and light, however. Despite the dynamic institutional and organizational growth that Soviet rule facilitated in the arts and sciences and humanities, systematic ideological errors were clearly possible. No case illustrates this more so than does that of Trofim Lysenko, who was a Ukrainian, both academically tied to Kiev’s scientific circles and fanatically devote to Stalin—who praised him frequently—made up results that set Soviet biology back decades.
As Lysenko’s impact to an extent illustrates, behind the scrim of this staging of a better life, of happier times, of open passion and human affection, however, lurked difficult political circumstances. Fulfilling Lenin’s prescient warning, Stalin manipulated more and more the varying threads of all the power strands of Soviet life.
As the expansion of the 1920’s reached a zenith and portended horrendous deflation and the mire of recessionary times once more, the still relatively young Georgian Central Committee Chair, having expelled one Ukrainian in the person of Trotsky and recruited many others such as Malinovsky and Khrushchev, foresaw the looming rise of fascism and war as clearly as anyone else on Earth. And for whatever reasons outside this clear-sighted vision, the paranoid Georgian dictator insisted on a period of planned production and collectivization that resulted in horrific consequences in Ukraine.
Stalin’s Ascendancy & Its Effects
Most people who support ‘free markets’ reflexively, who champion ‘freedom’ generally without much critical distance from the meaning of the term, conflate everything Bolshevist into one primal, nasty stew. Thus, Trotsky is Lenin is Stalin, and so on down the line.
This tarnishing brush often enough applies retrospectively as well, so that Marx and Engels equal Stalin. The miasmic cloud extends to any related concept, at least in the mindset that sees the Wall Street Journal and its ilk as ‘balanced’ and ‘fair.’ Thus, in this tortured and duplicitous view, socialism also elicits Stalinism.
And the annalist who would wholeheartedly defend ‘Uncle Joe’ either has a monumentally sized heart or a supremely strong stomach. At the same time that Stalin’s story is a complex one, and much of power and merit emanated from Russia under his leadership, the conclusion is difficult to resist that he was a world class criminal, guilty of dastardly felonies and nasty misdemeanors and, quite likely, crimes against humanity.
Perhaps we might just listen again to Nikita Khrushchev, whose On the Cult of Personality totally condemns Josef Stalin as a leader and admits the many thousands, or more, of murders and other vicious crimes that resulted from his ascendancy to the pinnacle of Soviet power. “Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person.”
Khrushchev continued, “This is supported by numerous facts. One of the most characteristic examples of Stalin's self-glorification and of his lack of even elementary modesty is the edition of his Short Biography, which was published in 1948. This book is an expression of the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader,’ ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations.’ Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens.”
Khrushchev amplified these remarks, summarizing much of his speech, in his memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers. His recognition of the horror and tragedy of Stalin’s imprimatur was palpable. He lost so many dear friends because of the ‘glorious leader.’
No doubt one might make the point that this is a flaw of Bolshevism. But making that point does not make it altogether true. For example, another element in Stalin’s own downfall was his reliance, almost absolute, on Lavrentiy Beriya, whom Comrade Nikita characterizes like this.
“This unbelievable suspicion(paranoia) was cleverly taken advantage of by the abject provocateur and vile enemy, Beriya, who had murdered thousands of Communists and loyal Soviet people. The elevation of Voznesensky and Kuznetsov alarmed Beriya. As we have now proven, it had been precisely Beriya who had suggested to Stalin the fabrication by him and by his confidants of materials in the form of declarations and anonymous letters, and in the form of various rumors and talks.”
A trial found Beriya, this mass murderer of Ukrainians and others, guilty of being an “agent of imperialism.” He suffered the same fate to which he had condemned thousands, Beriya’s entire career that of a murderous ‘enforcer,’ Stalin’s fifth such hitman, though prior to that he had led various Soviet intelligence agencies. “Beria was yet another of these murderers, and in one of his first actions upon ascending to the head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy ordered the execution of five officials high in command in the Ukraine.” He also personally dispatched Trotsky’s murderer on his mission.
Furthermore, we could also recall what Lenin—whose maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew, by the way—had to say about his subordinate’s rise to chairing the Soviet Central Committee. “Stalin is excessively rude, and this defect, which can be freely tolerated in our midst and in contacts among us Communists, becomes a defect which cannot be tolerated in one holding the position of the Secretary General. Because of this, I propose that the comrades consider the method by which Stalin would be removed from this position and by which another man would be selected for it, a man, who above all, would differ from Stalin in only one quality, namely, greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater kindness, and more considerate attitude toward the comrades, a less capricious temper, etc.”
Whatever the case may be, the terror and murder attendant on agricultural collectivization under Stalin created a context of victimization and revenge that continues till the here-and-now. The purges, the tortured conventions, the blatant, self-serving lackeys who impelled much of Stalin’s vaunted paranoia, all the hideous excrescences that the opponents of Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and socialism trot out, are undeniable, but they also are a story that has yet to have its complete telling.
For many current citizens of the Ukraine, particularly those in rural areas, forgiveness will never happen. This does not change the fact that many there still support communism, socialism, the entire ‘Marxian Project,’ as it were.
And whatever the case may be, the situation was never as simple as the Stalin, bad; Capitalism; good’ school of thought would have it. The reader might listen to the brilliant filmmaker Dovzhenko, whose expulsion from Ukraine for nationalism would not make him a biased witness in favor of Stalin.
Yet his benchmark production, Earth, about the collectivization, that bloody success, did tell a revolutionary story: “Thus, Dovzhenko is belittling not only the landed gentry, but also the church—something not uncommon in Soviet films of this time (see, for example, Strike and Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia [1928])—and truly establishing how all pervasive the new workers class is. The fact of a baby being born at the very end cements the idea of the birth of this new order, this new life for all, which the subsequent return to shots of the landscape, and particularly of apples in the rain (cleansing, washing away the old), relates back to the natural order, the natural cycle. Truly has man found his place in the world.”
Industrialization and the preparation for further war, meanwhile, also established capacities that contributed to Soviet ability to resist Germany’s invasion. In the event, the facilities in the Ukraine fell into German hands. Stalin’s distrust, of course, had caused him to make certain that networks remained behind to sabotage and undermine what his stern leadership had brought to pass at such cost.
And this preparedness was soon enough to prove crucial. The section to come tells that tale.
In the meantime, one might reflect about a character such as Stalin, or about an underling such as Beriya. Who gained from this placement? As Khrushchev’s impassioned outcry made clear, the answer was “not, the Russian and the Ukrainian people.”
One particular Individual Topic of Note
Just as Kiev’s denizens in fact came to inhabit everywhere on Earth, fleeing high-handed Czars and crazy dictators alike, so too in literature observers find much of Ukrainian origin that is powerful and insightful. This piece of the present narrative concentrates on one specific instance of Russian literature in this regard, along with a few other examples from around the world.
Jorge Amado’s Gabriella, Clove & Cinnamon, an irresistible novel of wild love and cacao commerce at the end of the gangland days in Bahia, introduced a cast of characters as memorable as it was vibrant and full of lusty abandon. One of them, just slightly more than a walk-on part, was Gregor-the-Russian. Only he wasn’t from Russia. His home had been Kiev.
Barbara Kingsolver’s work has spanned the globe. Her stories often seem quiet, until they explode repeatedly. One of these at first seemingly unassuming yarns that ends up gripping with a fierce stranglehold is her fairly recent, Lacuna. It tells of a man from Asheville, North Carolina who, through strange twists of fate, ends up cooking for and otherwise serving Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera.
Through them, he ends up working for Trotsky, a truly great man in history and the novel, a leader and undying believer in humanity and justice. Undying he was, even after his assassination at the hands of Stalin’s and Beriya’s handpicked assassin.
Others too may join this list, as further research adds to what this author has personally read recently. No matter what, Ukraine’s ‘infiltration’ of the world is clearly a fact, both in reality and in the realm of story.
However, the utility of literature as evidence is perhaps nowhere more powerfully apparent than in Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, a novel of such sweep and power that it carries a reader along to laughter and weeping again and again, till the ragged ending lets us resume our ways in life as if we’ve lived through World War One and revolution with the Don Cossacks and their Ukrainian neighbors.
Ukrainians repeatedly appear and play key roles in the novel, while much of the fighting that forms a central element of the plot takes place in Central Ukraine and Galicia. The main character’s transformation into a communist results from his Ukrainian roommate at the hospital where both are recuperating from wounds to their eyes. Through relentless factualization of their pass and reasoning about it, this wry resident from Little Russia is a fulcrum for the entire story.
“Most terrible of all, Grigory began to think Garanzha was right, and that he was impotent to oppose him. He realized with horror that the intelligent and bitter Ukrainian was gradually but surely destroying all his former ideas about the tsar, the country, and his own military duty as a Cossack. Within a month of the Ukrainian's arrival the whole system on which Grigor’s life had been based was a smoking ruin. It had already grown rotten, eaten up with the canker of the monstrous absurdity of the war, and it needed only a jolt. That jolt was given, and Grigory's artless straightforward mind awoke.”
Sholokhov’s symbolic turn would be useful for many people today to consider. Grigory, who ranks as one of the most flawed and sympathetic heroes of the canon, was at risk of blindness from his wounds. His understanding of the fraudulence that he had accepted as truth helped him to see again.
Few writers, not Crane, not Conrad, not Hemingway, surpass Sholokhov’s ability to describe the horrors of the warfare that Nazis and nationalists so blithely embrace. These words too could help readers not to forget or forego this fact of martial engagement, this carnage of conflict. “His entire face was a cry; bloody tears were raining from his eyes that had been forced out of their sockets. …(O)ne leg, torn away at the thigh, was dragged along by a shred of skin and a strip of scorched trouser; the other leg was gone completely. He crawled slowly along on his hands, a thin, almost childish scream coming from his lips… . No one attempted to go to him.
‘Both legs gone!’
‘Look at the blood!’
’And he's still conscious.’ Uryupin touched Grigory on the shoulder… . (and) drew Grigory along by the sleeve… . Under Zharkov's belly the pink and blue intestines were steaming. The tangled mass lay on the sand, stirring and swelling. Beside it the dying man's hand scrabbled at the ground.”
The aftermath of this event is equally telling. The war’s mayhem, for the Cossacks and Ukrainians, occurred largely on the terrain of ‘Little Russia.’ The survivors of the above engagement, having seen half their number literally cut to pieces by Austrian machine-gunners in Galicia, returned to find Golovachev, the Division Chief-of-Staff, showing off snapshots of the action that he had taken and developed. A lieutenant struck him in the face and then collapsed in sobs. “Then Cossacks ran up and tore Golovachev to pieces, made game of his corpse, and finally threw it into the mud of a roadside ditch. So ended this brilliantly inglorious offensive.”
In the work of Amado, Kingsolver, and Sholokhov, a radical has plenty to watch out for. The businessmen of Bahia might drop an anarchist in a pit after blowing his brains out. Trotsky, in Kingsolver’s astounding work, meets the same end that actually happened to the sixty-one year old Ukrainian-cossack commie internationalist; death by an ice-pick in the brain.
And the Cossacks from the Don region of both Russia and Ukraine felt the ever-looming threat of immolation, whatever side they picked. But their choices did not flow from ideology or patriotism to one or another icon—czarist or Ukrainian, but from chances that represented the hardest sorts of decisions, that might lead to damnation whatever direction one selected. One must recollect: Bolshevik means majority in Russian.
These Scylla-or-Charybdis encounters in turn emanated from the mortal combat over the world’s first State that sought to put wage-earners in charge, that elevated toilers over property owners and inherited wealth. The looming shadow of a Hitler or a Mussolini, the invitation to install a Franco or any number of other reactionaries, had already at the end of this quarter century of revolution in Ukraine assumed a tangible form, revealing the shape of a social monstrosity that needed only a dire enough economic climate in order to manifest itself completely.
The Rise & Fall & Rise of Fascism; from World War Two to 'Containment'
Stalin’s depredations, in retrospect, both resulted from and fed into the evolution of fascism as a strategy to impede and destroy the Bolsheviks specifically and communism more generally. Most pointedly, the central element of the dynamic from the perspective of Russia—and the very substantial pro-Soviet citizenry in Ukraine—
was the preparation for resistance to bourgeois incursions and the Nazi terror that it prepared consciously to unleash(DAILYKOS LINK). On the other hand, from capital’s point of view, in the capitol’s of Europe particularly, the essential component of the process was to foster developments that would eviscerate the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
In this context, a war of barbaric proportions might appear inevitable. In any event, the capitalist economy did what it always does—collapse—and war drew nigh; when it came, it brought with it slaughter on a scale that dwarfed the starvation that attended agriculture’s and industry’s embrace of ‘planning,’ the intention of which had always been the creation of an industrial capacity equal to the pending tasks of self-defense.
Instead of Nazi destruction of Red Russia, however, the opposite took place. R ussian Communism defeated Hitler and the racialist fantasies of an ‘elect Germanic Volk.’ As always, Ukraine’s part in this bloodbath was multidimensional, almost impossibly complex and almost unfathomably dialectical at the same time. The following sections reveal currents in the flow of what happened from the mid-to-late 1930’s to 1950 or so. Next Up: Part Four.
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
An entry from 1916, in the Eleventh Edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, portrays a process that is remarkably similar to what transpires to this day, although the cube was still a decade away from its American inception. “When a player so moves as to place two men on the same point, he is said to ‘make a point.’” This building process was and remains fundamental to the contest, as does the following assessment.
The text continues, “When there is only a single man on a point, it is called a ‘blot.’ When a blot is left the man{or checker}there may be taken up(technically, the blot may be ‘hit’)by the adversary if he throws a number which will enable him to place a man on that point. The man hit placed on the bar{that divides the board vertically into two sectors, out of play}, and has to begin again by entering the adversary’s home table again at the next throw should it result in a number that corresponds to an unblocked point.”
As an exercise in counting, pattern recognition, and strategy, backgammon is indubitably unsurpassed and arguably unparalleled among the ‘board-battles’ that mimic conflict and contention in the real world. One could validate this fact through any number of research strategies: < backgammon strategy “pattern recognition” OR intelligence OR “conceptual ability” counting OR “empirical ability” OR “mathematical ability”> for example, elicits almost 100,000 useful links.
On the other hand, one could simply choose to trust the Spindoctor’s rectitude in this matter, based as it is on almost half a century of experience. If one can keep the effort in perspective as both diversion and practice, few activities have a greater chance of delivering clarity in a wide range of strategic and conceptual capacities than does learning and grappling with as close to mastery of backgammon as proves possible in a given performer’s case.
Perhaps more critical to a clear-eyed understanding of the King of Games are the social issues that elicit any such activities among a wide section of every single populace that has ever existed. For the entire term of the multiple historical records that dot the earth, and in most archeological and anthropological investigations of the previous tens of thousands of years of human evolution, people have competed playfully and yet so seriously as at times to bring forth lethal consequences.
A relatively intricate search demonstrates this well: < games OR gaming OR play competition OR conflict OR contention teaching OR learning OR instructing OR training history OR origins anthropology OR archaelogy study OR analysis> yields a flood of ‘hits.’ Almost fifty million results attend the entry of the terms in Google, for instance.
The meaning of this plethora and variety of interest and documentation is multifold. It indicates that, whatever moralists may say, “You wanna bet?” is an ingrained piece of the human psyche. It shows how learning and teaching inherently intermingle with fun and contests. It proves beyond doubt that some people will avail themselves of superior strategic ability to gain advantages over others. It demonstrates how those whose birthright includes less access to wealth and opportunity will try to use such diversions so as to level the playing fields of existence. One could go on; and on and on and on.
An anecdote about the origins of chess, long ago in India, is apt in this regard. The inventor of the game—or in some versions of the legend, a teacher of the game—had an opportunity to name his reward for creating or instructing others about the way to play.
He made the apparently modest request from the royalty who deigned to give up some of its lucre of a single grain of rice, or wheat, on the chess board’s first square, with a doubling of the amount of carbohydrate on each subsequent square. Invariably, since fulfilling the mandate would have mortgaged the rulers for close to eternity, the agreement never reaches its finish; in many expressions of the story, the king has the genius commoner who made up the contest and the reward put to the sword, while in others he awards the intrepid daredevil a seat next to his highness or a life with his beautiful daughter.
The upshot of such a longstanding mythos at least contains the following notion. Life is full of random inequity and unfair competitions. In such an arena, all activity that helps life’s participants to envision, strategize, and plan are worth a lot, even if they can also cause a ton of trouble.
In any case, as with most forms of gambling and many types of gaming, a multi-dimensional and often contradictory dynamic typifies how the sport takes shape in the world, especially perhaps in the current moment when so much is in flux and under dispute. At least a handful of pointers are worth parsing a little.
One aspect of this free-floating dialectic concerns predation and parasitic behavior. Undoubtedly, some people—and today’s report illustrates this in some ways—take advantage of greater skill or duplicity or other erstwhile playful facility so as to garner the goods and services and cash that others, less capable or ruthless, own and in many cases have worked hard to earn. In this vein, whatever benefits attend such tactical intelligence, it must also reveal pathological effects.
Another dimension altogether is the simple necessity that any group of people will inevitably actualize parameters that allow socialized competition. Whether the ‘playing field’ is primarily physical or largely mental—and in every case, both mental and physical strength and endurance are at issue, such gambols in the realm of gaming must be an unavoidable accompaniment of humanity, if only because never has any group left an impression on the planet of its existence without also providing observers after the fact with some evidence that such pursuits have taken place in that societal nexus.
At least one additional element makes an appearance, in the event as something like a stage for class conflict, or even class war, to occur. This applies immutably to the countless incidents in which the Spindoctor has practiced gaming, especially backgammon. With virtually no exceptions at the outset, a potentiation of Robin Hood has transpired at the table, since basically all of his opponents have had more ‘middle-class,’ bourgeois, or trust-funded roots.
That this point inevitably dovetails with the initial thought is interesting. No doubt, outside of the ivied halls of privilege where the oh-so-lucky Jimbo matriculated, such observations as attend his initial sessions become more complex, multisided, and ineffable. Thus, this view also suggests the dialectical and paradoxical interplay that games such as backgammon universally bring to the forefront.
A penultimate note ought to include the way that the multi-player version of the game takes place. Chouette, any such backgammon skirmish that involves more than two players, most powerfully embodies how groups and individuals must bargain among themselves to balance cooperation and competition, collaboration and individual action.
One final idea bears mentioning here. It concerns the absolute need—for healthy bodies and minds to result—that people have for diversion. Despite this requisite part of human existence, of course, it all too often these days pops up as one rendering or another of the ‘bread and circuses’ strategy of Rome’s most nefarious and plutocratic emperors. Without a single doubt, a game like backgammon appears both positively as a constructive hobby and negatively as a destructive distraction from all that nature necessitates for our present survival.
One might continue this discourse till many volumes had come and gone. Not only is backgammon a nuanced template for pondering how risk and reward, action and reaction, manifest themselves in flesh and blood, so to say, but it also brings out both intensely competitive and remarkably collaborative potentialities. In particular, chouettes combine these components of attack and parlay, of cooperation and throat-cutting, of individual and group thinking and negotiating strategies, in ways that almost perfectly parallel how actual and successful mediation takes place in combative and many-sided disputes.
The original proposal for this article stated the case in arguably a useful fashion. “A characteristic of our globe these days is this spread of human culture to every space that Earth’s land surface graces. Moreover, wherever folks have stayed, they have also played.
Thus, a part of this cultural infiltration of people and their pastimes has been the rooting everywhere of certain games, one of which is ‘the game of kings and the king of games,’ backgammon. From London to Tokyo, from Istanbul to Santiago, from Manhattan to Cape Town, travelers who know BG can find opponents who will at once willingly wile away time and gladly chance their luck in heads-up or group settings.”
For now, having barely skimmed the surface, with a tale to tell that entails thinking about the game, the time to move on is nigh. Still, before encountering the characters in conflict in this item’s story narrative, we might point out a few additional contextual bits about this royal game for royal characters. Next Up: Section Two.