Big Tent Review
Oh, my Goddess! Anyway, hello, everyone! Again, again, blah blah blah. 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 sixteenth 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, often enough, appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Quite frequently, like today, a particular edition will have no more thematic unity than whatever glue, so to speak, holds together these moments that we are sharing right now, with its ongoing echoes of our current Mass Collective Suicide Express. Then again, every BTR blast, minimally, ‘in no small part,’ 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, than our humankind’s grain.
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! I’m actually planning some outreach soon to seek out at least a few more followers of this flowing flood of problematic paragraphs and sustaining sentences.
Oh yes, something occurred to me recently in regard to this 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 August 16th; the next one-issue moon will, most likely, publish in November.
Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a while back, 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. I’m doing my best with this linking effort. It’s easier said than done.
Much easier, in the event—I have mainly failed at this interlinking, thought it remains my intention. BTR aims to be somehow intense and complex at the same time that it supports a ‘user-friendly’ interface.
I’ve got fingers and toes all crossed. Yet another new notion is this. I’m looking for collaborative technical support. Ha ha. I wish myself good fortune.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Memory, Bearing Witness, & Storytelling’s Answer to Enculturation
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Cultural Contexts & Human Evolution
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XVII
3. Wood Words Essays—Bearing Atomic Witness: Exploring Carbon-Free/Nuclear-Free Futures
4. Empowered Political Forays—”Capitalism on Drugs,” continued
5. Old Stories & New—”Resuscitation”
6. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”More Than a Hill of Beans—Young Jack’s First Climb,” #4
7. Nerdy Nuggets—Diving More Deeply Into ‘Jewish Questions:’ From Marx to Zion
8. Communication & Human Survival—”Don West, the Highlander Center, Popular Education”
9. Erotic Snippets—Sororal Pirates, #1: Grace, the Glorious & Gory O’Malley
10. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”When the King of Games Meets a Prince of Death,” Part 5
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Memory, Bearing Witness, Enculturation
Let’s begin with a little list. Israel’s so-called ‘Defense Forces’ continue to assassinate plus or minus seven hundred Palestinians a day, most of them innocents. The United States orchestrates this macabre death dance, embodying Manu Chao’s “Politik Kills.”
NATO persists in pummeling Ukraine, delineating both Gringo strategic desperation for a continued hegemony over world trade and Anglo-American tactical tenacity in seeking to achieve the longstanding vision of dismantling Russia. The ‘News Hole’ has less to offer in this regard than in the period up to the Donald’s losing the top of his ear, yet the Bilateral Security Agreement Between the United States & Ukraine remains the law of the land, with the announced mandate of a Ukrainian NATO membership, with all of its promises of guaranteeing World War Three.
‘New’ COVID strains appear many times a day on local news broadcasts, with sinister threats sprinkled hither and yon of masking, lockdown, and still further ‘miraculous vaccines’ like the ones that have killed millions and failed to protect such Corona victims as Joseph Biden. We should remember the final words of COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way. ‘I only hope that the people of the world will not permit their leaders to do this again.’
Much of the ongoing news feed gnaws persistently at what happened in Donald Trump’s brush with martyrdom. People like the handsome gangster, Barack Obama, with equal persistence state the obviously laughable proposition that ‘violence has no part in the politics’ of a nation that assassinates well over a thousand innocents a day, on average, time out of mind.
Meanwhile, electoral politics presents a parade of drama that amounts to no more than a charade, at least in terms of the fakery around the ReDemoPublicCratiCan ‘contest.’ I’m supporting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whether his campaign is ‘realistic’ or otherwise. Such shifts at the hustings, after all, have reshaped Yankee politics in the past, for example before our country’s last Civil War, ha ha.
Many at the apex of established denizens of commerce’s and finance’s mandates, a typical label for the likes of BTR is that such critical commentary is “anti-science,” a contention simultaneously laughable and ludicrous. This kind of bombast combines red-herring’s with idiotic straw-men argumentation.
Despite all these demarcations of idiocy’s most intractable propagandizing, beautiful things happen simultaneously. A six-part documentary about the Grateful Dead is one fine example. ‘Based on a biography mainly truly told, in the meantime, the series, Reilly: Ace of Spies offers a nearly irresistible contextualization of Anglo-American imperial plans in such places as Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans, and Europe generally.
One could go on. Monopolized mediation of our culture, at one and the same time, emphasizes mainly ‘lone nuts’ and individual psychopaths to explain things, both of which ideas, inasmuch as they contain even a tiny modicum of credence, are part and parcel of inculcation, enculturation, and attendant brainwashing blah blah blah. Can anyone even remember Bowling For Columbine?
Oh yeah, what about the insidious role that toxic Antidepressant medicines play in murder and mayhem, with their hastily recounted side-effects of ‘homicidal and suicidal ideation’ at the end of every commercial break on their behalf? More than a hundred million U.S. citizens imbibe these poisons as ‘mentally healthy.’ Our political class kills with such nonchalant impunity that the wonder is that more people aren’t ‘depressed’ enough to take ‘medicines’ that likely contribute to the carnage.
Nevertheless, at the same time that this brief litany of wailing and woe might meander, unabated, to become a lengthy listing indeed, life's miracle of grace must humble and astonish the sensibilities and senses of even the most sentient sentinels of humanity's social experiments. Here we are again, then, undertaking to take a step toward making a difference by increasing our understanding of what may be, and what definitely are not, reasonable explanations for whatever is happening right now.
As things stand, right now comes on the cusp of an annual commitment of mine. The “Wood Words Essay” today deals with this is some nerdier and historical detail, one upshot of which is that a TON, or in the parlance of the street, “a shit-ton” of songs have shown up in my queue about matters of nuclear mete, so to speak.
As well, an incisive and thought-provoking thesis also landed alongside all these tunes. Soothing the Savage Beast: Songs From the Cultural Cold-War, 1945-1991 offers magnificent insight and monumental documentation. Shellie Clarke does a service here for humanity, whether or not enough people notice.
To begin Chapter Three, “Learning to Love the Bomb,” she writes, ‘“Produced during the McCarthy era, music that suggested a downside to massive American nuclear power was at risk of being considered pro-communist, and the witch-hunt and blacklisting that pervaded the entertainment industry made record companies and radio stations reluctant to promote anything that might land them in the crosshairs of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
A 1950 government document asserted, ‘The free society attempts to create and maintain an environment in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers. It also explains why the free society tolerates those within it who would use their freedom to destroy it,’ yet widespread anti-communist propaganda helped persuade the American public of the importance of supporting censorship and blacklisting measures.
One 1950s tract warned Americans, ‘The REDS have made our Screen, Radio and TV Moscow's most effective Fifth Column in America...,’ and stated in plain terms that patronizing entertainment produced by ‘Reds’ was ‘aiding and abetting communism, and helping to destroy America." Truly, as in the reactions to Nicolas Madura’s win in Venezuela, ‘projection is the most primitive form of coping strategy.’
The Hispanic Western Hemisphere has already played a supporting role in BTR’s ongoing litanies of explicating concatenation, as it were. Mid-September, for instance, offers up a briefing about the ‘original 9/11,’ the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende with omnipresent assistance from Gringo political captains, especially those who operate from CIA Headquarters in Langley.
As a matter of course, in the context of crisis and catastrophe for many communities of cousins, an utterly expected collapse has come to pass, and Joe Biden will not vie to keep his finger any longer on the ‘nuclear button.’ The hopes of many longstanding ‘Democrats’ thus come to fruition, as noted soon enough.
The start of August includes arguably the two most critical anniversaries in the calendar for promoting human survival. Avoiding Mass Collective Suicide requires us, somehow or other, to avoid a second atomic war, after U.S. hegemons launched the first one seventy-nine years back.
At once monumental and meaningless, both accommodating and courageous, John Hersey’s Hiroshima attempts to remember one of the key events—perhaps the crucial occurrence—in all human history. The slender little missive ends by examining human prospects in terms of an accurate account and astute analysis of August 6th, 1945, despite the frailties of, and manipulated faultlines between, the particulars of any given process of recollection.
The author is referring to one of the narrative’s primary interlocutors, upon whom Hersey relied in constructing the scope and specifics of his yarnspinning exercise in the volume. “His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty."
My stake in this has, more than fifty years now, remained stalwart. I have vowed to Gaia and Jesus that each year I will speak and act so as to engender some greater awareness of and concern about what came to pass as an August sixth, 1945 morning greeted Hiroshima, Japan. This awareness and concern are amplified in the here and now by the simple fact that Earth’s atomic armaments now exceed those seventy-nine years ago by many thousands of times, with vastly speedier means of delivering them readily available far and wide.
So, what’s up with all this. Most people want to avoid Mass Collective Suicide, not to indulge it. Why do people permit such a state of affairs? Merely posing the question, which might even seem naive, evokes thoughts about the intersection of leadership, empowerment, and democracy, remembering that this last term means rule-by-the-people.
James Madison wrote to a friend and colleague about this point, back in 1822. “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
In the plausible eventuality that species survival, if not the integrity of Gaia’s green garden’s entire ecosphere, hinges on a nuanced knowledge of the realm of the real, a category that necessarily must include ourselves and our societies, then very obviously indeed do our prospects seem grim in relation to these matters of atomic-power’s Modern Nuclear Project and its insistence that fusion and fission must circumscribe everything else in existence. Not that people are queuing up to consider such a context, quite the contrary, they seem to think that shopping will salve their wounds and save their souls.
Jackson Brown’s magnificent work, “The Pretender,” comes to mind. “I'm gonna be a happy idiot And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim…To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie…In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender."
Just as in the poet’s telling, life’s byways and highways unfold with perfect precision, so a ‘future of murder,’ to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, must inescapably follow from a past that is our everyday routine right this second. Can we ever really participate in this dynamic of the ongoing creation of All-That-Is? Can we ever help to make ‘true love a contender?’
A simple, salubrious ‘Yes!' is possible to answer both these questions. However, actually turning such a response into action necessitates a recognition that we have no choice but to seek a broad understanding of how things all fit together. In other words, if we want affirmation of personal power and passionate partnership, we have to figure this shit out, as it were.
Whatever else this process entails, one central component will always be the ability to find the points of intersection between seemingly separate issues. Thus we arrive at a primary Big Tent premise: casting a wide net may often prove impossible, barely even conceivable, yet only by doing so can we ever even barely approximate incisive, concrete awareness of matters at hand.
The Ace of Spies story noted above samples such serendipitous potential. The actual agent in question came into the world in Odessa Ukraine, worked for the British Empire while acting as a multimodal double agent as well now and again. His purposive pursuit of petroleum predominance fits in with matters of energy and otherwise central concerns of contemporary capital.
So saying, despite its hopes, BTR has had nothing to say about key elements of human existence. Via Africa and otherwise, this issue returns to matters of ethnicity and such. Perhaps the words of Patrice Lumumba will proffer potent and resonant ideas. Courageous even as his murderers in the highest positions of authority plotted his slaughter.
Firmly material in his most spiritual seeking of freedom, he noted, “A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue." Otherwise, people were wont to fall prey to all manner of plotted divided conquest. “These divisions, which the colonial powers have always exploited the better to dominate us, have played an important role — and are still playing that role — in the suicide of Africa”
In a year, now, of Big Tent Review, contextualization, readers have visited Czech Uranium mines, Ukrainian national and revolutionary struggles, Israeli and Palestinian combat-readiness, Cuban and other Latin-American upheaval, and, in the parlance, shit-tons more. In coming issues, more about this century and a half “scramble for Africa” will be part of Big Tent tables and texts.
Even in the storytelling here, far-flung venues appear on a regular basis. Angola, the Balkans, Australia, and the Philippines are a few of these fictional settings that have come and then faded into background. Our erstwhile national ‘identities’ do not explain our common humanity; they do, however, alienate us from each other and solidarity’s succor, on which species viability almost certainly relies.
BTR puts this all together so as to illuminate interconnections that can lead a thoughtful citizen at least to imagine resistance to empire’s eternal imprimatur. Sometimes, these linkages are merely implicit and commonsensical, but as often as not they are irrefutable and presented in documentary form.
Inevitably, perhaps, this persistence—stubbornly imagining actually accomplishing the impossible assignment of rendering comprehension of All-That-Is in everything imaginable—must plausibly seem a little loopy, if not altogether lunatic. If, however, even a modest modicum of an instinct inflames us to elicit a future where our offspring’s offspring can thrive in coming centuries and even millennia, then, at the least, we must seek knowledge no matter how elusive is any comprehensive comprehension, as it were.
In any event, clearly, this intellectual labor of writing things down so as to create another Big Tent Review does serve to induce an introspective dynamic, at minimum, and, again, so long as useful nuggets of nuance or understanding come to the fore, we might keep reading and, however is possible, keep playing along.
At the same time that any true understanding cannot help but give way to new ideas, accurate awareness must reconfigure the old in light of recent additions. Thus, Biafra predicts Donbass as Sandanistas celebrate close to half a century of ascendancy for a party of the people.
Warren Zevon’s epic of empire, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” makes the definite contention that we’ll ‘hear the belch of Roland’s Thompson Gun’ everywhere, “in Ireland, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Berkeley,” where even ‘Patty Hearst heard the burst.’ Mao Tse Tung spoke incisively when he said, “Justice grows from the barrel of a gun.” Roland wielded his Tommy-gun in Biafra’s seeking something other than oppression as a colonized section of Nigeria’s oil-soils, so to say.
“Battling the Bantu to their knees,” in the event, “to help out the Congolese,” alludes to vast historical and archeological terrain. Abantu is the plural form, people, who largely in Central and Southern Africa for millennia were Africans. And the point is?
We ought, for one thing, to notice how language distorts and denigrates. Readers may, after all, remember that the now derogatory term, Bolshevik, means Majority in Russian, even as anticommunism is the heart of imperial arrogance on the part of American proletarians.
Carnage is the commodity in which Brand Chaos specializes. Its ubiquity belies the miraculous marvels of my life now, suffused with love and service and learning in spite of the cataclysmic nature of the here-and-now.
Without question, we must view all such matters of carnage and chaos close at hand, on the streets of Dallas sixty-one years ago, at political rallies recently past, and in the cultural effluvia that palpates popular notions on the likes of Netflix. Breaking Bad lasted five thrilling seasons to make a point that is irrepressible and ubiquitous in Capital’s corporate propagation of sophisticated cultural propaganda: ‘everyone’s a psychopath; we can only grin and bear it as we enjoy the storytelling exercises that reinforce this grotesque ‘explanation’ of our human condition.
One cannot have a cloth without threads of some sort or other. When the individual strings of various yarns become numerous in any given fabric, almost automatically, a definite intricacy and complexity pertains that can be difficult to imagine, as a whole, given all the concatenations and contradictions in the myriad, interwoven strands of the real.
What the above blah blah blah means relates to how most humans have actually lived in the world for plus or minus ten thousand years, which is to say culturally, a thought that occurs to me as Joni Mitchell’s iconic song, “Twisted,” plays for the fifth time and I seek the wellsprings of the lyrics. The refrain is perfect.
“My analyst told me
That I was right out of my head
But I said, ‘Dear doctor I think that it's you instead
Because I, I got a thing that's unique and new
To prove it, I'll have the last laugh on you
'Cause instead of one head
I got two
And you know, two heads are better than one."
Music, and in particular folk music—which is to say songs, anthems and ballads, and so on and so on—percolates heatedly through much of my day. Its emanations inform everything I do, and this impact has grown over time and will keep expanding.
Sound’s musical intonations at times only occur inwardly. Sight and scent and taste and touch take over, for example, in countless instances of reading each day while only background murmurs are audible. Once again, we say hello to Culture, humankind’s arbiter and source today.
This is not some sort of neutral space, however, a vacuum in which any and all perspectives and approaches are of equivalent weight. On the contrary, enculturating Nationalism and Supremacist beliefs, as without exception each issue of BTR has completely condemned, must always alert ‘consumers’ of what will destroy our kin and kind here on Planet Earth.
In this vein, multiple examples of recent readings touch on such studies of our proclivity to harm ourselves. The newest New Yorker looks at fundamentalist intentions, although the article fails to connect this to monopoly-money’s ministrations, “to return the nation to God.”
These texts nudge us toward more nuanced awareness about such things as CIA operations against Cuba. Of course, having already noted such facts, BTR commits to showing more in the near future.
The imperial paradigm emerges repeatedly. Its persistence demarcates the falsity and lethal potential of our false consciousness about situations like sanctions against Russia and mandating more murder in Ukraine.
Obviously, too, the conflation of democracy with elections is as real as is the inability to grasp, and act on, the essential unity of the ReDemoPubliCratiCan phalanx. To ignore electoral politics may be nonsensical, yet assigning primary import to this particular—apparently contested—arena is, at best, hideous ignorance. As Bob Lefsetz and others powerfully prove, however, these traipses down pathways to a truly trapped view of things can be quite entertaining.
And then, some exemplary lyrical poetry silently plays in one way and another. This reading of life’s tantalizing tortures and twisting glories characterizes countless anthems along Life-Force-Energy forays.
I live for the resultant epiphanies. In my sometimes unfortunately lengthy “stupid phases,” ha ha, these magical moments of comforting clarity may more or less disappear, alas. Still, on occasion, plausibly palpating thoughts do bubble to the surface. Just a couple days back, when my love and I were practicing recreational logistics, I recognized her astute Process Orientation, which is something for which I have a certain intellectual acuity, even as I lack many practical attributes of a good planner.
Whatever else may prove true, this commitment to doing something, and in at least a semi-disciplined way, will never diminish in my passage or these pages. Every piece here stands for this point.
A New York Review of Books essay delineates estimably this intricate skein of contradiction and contextualization. In “Agreeing to Our Harm,” Marilynne Robinson posits palpation of predictable nonsense but cannot affirm socialism’s necessary solidarity as any sort of surcease.
Once more, nearing a culmination of this cacophony of contemporary context, I pose for myself and my readers, the ‘Head Red’s’ query, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ For me, clearly, ha ha, this work is one reply.
Then again, in the idiom, I can well hope for bigger fish to fry. Who knows. As I live and breathe, I’ll keep slugging, Goddess knows.
Upcoming reviews of the work of Paolo Freire circumscribe a necessary foundation for anything akin to progress. He might not like BTR, or he might find it creditable, but a Pedagogy of the Oppressed is precisely a primary purpose of everything here.
In addition to multimediated storytelling, I recognize daily my undaunted devotion to ‘lifelong learning,’ as it were. I can imagine a movement for Elder Education, For Everyone’s Elucidation, or perhaps something more elegantly crafted. Blah blah blah. I’m out there, pitching, come hell or high water, ha ha.
One way of encapsulating this inevitably lengthy briefing about the here and now is to return to the ineradicable core-components-of-consciousness that underlie how we think and act about things, fostering one sort of response and all-but-prohibiting another. So saying, in relation to the vaunted ‘free marketplace’ that is the erstwhile holy-grail of capitalism, it doesn’t exist.
Everything is one sort of cartel or other, or an outright monopoly. Money owns and overrules all else. Ironically, the very plausibly salubrious potential of a ‘free market’ world can only come to pass, ever, if citizens around the planet, including here in the ‘belly of the beast,’ manage, somehow, against all odds, to bring about something akin to Democratic Socialism instead of shrugging and defaulting to the inherent plutocratic tendency just now to a fascist turn.
As I’ve done often enough, I’ll finish with a wood message, which I repeat again in the pages below, that emphasizes a requisite of survival, popular engagement’s most democratic deployment. Its title, “Selling Science,” is suggestive enough.
“Having Ever Risen in Tandem With Expanded Knowledge & Its Application to Policy & Practice, Living Standards, & Their Ineluctable Universal Appeal, Have Assured That Capacities to Predict & Control Nature Have Grown Apace, Eliciting Sales of Science & Its Legerdemain to High Bidding High Rollers, Who Now Control Both 'Public' & Corporate Campus Labs That Engender & Then Engineer Often Predetermined Consequential 'Truth' That Potently Promotes Paymasters' Profits, Altogether a Ubiquitous Dynamic That Transpires in No Realm More Clearly Than That of Public Health & Social Welfare.”
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Culture, Context, Interconnection
‘Making Voodoo topical’ would be a staunch critic’s most generous characterization of this spot, as it were, on BTR’s regular calendar. This invocation of the Goddess, whatever else it may suggest, definitely matches my sensibilities.
I have come, in utterly intuitive if plausibly persuasive fashion, to the conclusion that ‘worshiping the feminine,’ or something similar, is one key to salubrious existence here in Gaia’s Green Groves or Saule’s Sanded Outcroppings: that, in other words, we must grapple with attempts to achieve real gains attendant on truly practicing values—relationship, pleasure, peace, harmony, ad infinitum?—that correspond in myth and culture, annals and history, to the leadership or elevation of women. In any case, Tarot fits this perspective to a ‘t.’
Moreover, literally nothing that I do predisposes the evidence that appears in answer to any inquiry. It’s random, and if Gaia’s guidance represents the mother-in-charge, then Ran-Dom may well serve as an exemplary masculine counterpart. Or, perhaps, ‘femininity’s mystique’ ever emanates from fortune’s fickle and ineffable fingerings. In any event, I like ‘taking intelligent and intelligible chances.’
This ‘Holy Tarot Process’ also gives me a chance to practice a certain sort of writing—the Horoscope or Advice or Relationship column, essentially. For someone like me, that option—a funky, regular gig—must prove more or less irresistible, ha ha. As I’ve pointed out, and will continue to highlight, I claim no credit and yet seek to take all the responsibility for the narration that results here; it’s food for thought about important issues, whether ephemeral or profound or any combination of like qualities.
In this scheme of things, one might agree that, whatever else it stands for, this Big Tent evolution expresses a commitment to grassroots mediation, a stance in favor of a basic culture of, by, & for the people, in Lincoln’s words. A piece of Driftwood Message Art reflects this idea with a skein of pondering and proposing.
“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." BTR’s calling is to serve the people, in other words.
The iconic novelist of the English language, by birth a Polish ‘refugee,’ Joseph Conrad spoke wisely about the necessary vectors to succeed in all these meandering sectors of surreality and superstition, supposition and presumption. “One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance."
Hence, this week’s inquiry ensues, as always with a happy heart even if I gulp to begin. Mediating culture, enculturation-for-the-people, so to say, must impart a measure of empowerment that might manifest transformative make-believe, from piquant movies to meandering podcasts. Here’s a question along such lines that will deploy a typical Spiral Spread: ‘In relation to creating a real people’s media, what are some interesting or useful things to consider?’ Something like that ought to do.
In the event, an especially spooky array puts in an appearance. The Eight of Cups serves as apropos Essence, with an equally pertinent Past in the form of the Three of Swords. A jolly Present Pass appears via The Hierophant, with Persephone’s eerie High Priestess as Future Developments. The always daunting Tower takes the No-Matter-What, Opportunities spot, with the magical tragic music of Morpheus, the King of Cups standing in as Problems & Prospects. We exit with a Synthesis in the mythic figure of Jason in the Two of Wands.
This then is the interpretive order of battle. All rationalization must amount to some type of explanatory sally, so to say, yet not all apt explication need default to rationalizing away reality’s rule.
Here, in a sense anyway, lies an inherent paradox of mediation. Every story’s canny or dramatic reflection of reality must falsify the source, if only through simplification via selection of what to show. Axiomatically, an exact, complete copy of the original event or idea under review is unobtainable. ‘The rest of the story’ ends up, to borrow a popular phrasing, on the cutting room floor.
As has become protocol, a more or less comprehensive explication of this primary inquest follows ‘Below the Fold.’ This realm of mediation is an aspect of the human condition about which—at least since Gutenberg—a decidedly limitless curiosity has been for many centuries the status quo, so to say. If actions speak with more volume than do promises, then people’s seemingly-ever-adhering attention to one sort of screen or another—he says, while tapping away—suggests this central part that our interlocutory devices and dynamics are presently playing.
Given a motivation to eat and play, work and frolic, going on nine billion of us would struggle to make ends meet, let alone manifest amicable meetings of mind and body and soul among ourselves, if we did not have these obviously hard-wired networks in place. Logistics alone would become an impossible morass. We have no choice but to find our screening time fascinating, in other words.
With this intense interest both undeniable and utilitarian, therefore, we can credibly look for a triptych spread in this vein to consider a quest such as this, in the event with something with a Past-Present-Future orientation. ‘Realizing the manifestly massive mass of monopoly mediation, what are some helpful nuggets of nuance about how a shoestring reporting project might find an audience?’
Who knows? Here goes. Past Preludes yields the uncomfortably accurate Five of Swords. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(Having disposed of our most recent search for context, the king of textual testaments, we return to the narrative stream. Although Lou’s life embodies Technos and Logos and Polis in their ineffable redolence of the human condition, his personification of this process has ever revolved around Eros, where it cavorts once more herein.)
CHAPTER XVII
He had definitely fantasized about such entanglements—ever since he and Chester Brewington had shared Penthouses and other naughty pages too long ago to remember exactly. “That’s an odd thought,” he thought: “from circle-jerks to ménage a trois.”
“Managing a trio will be tricky,” he quipped with a grin. His heart traipsed through a murky, cloying fog in his chest. Tricky triads; ticklish and tantalizing temptation; freakish orgasmic frenzy: or perhaps merely awkward inanity would result—better that than any number of horrifying disasters that, imagination having always been a strong suit, Lou could well conceive.
He quite likely could not have asked for the invitation that he had received. Holly Spost was a busty, wild nurse woman from the highest functioning ward at Bryce. They had seduced each other before Danielle had cavorted with Yatish, and they had bedded each other shortly after that enabling eventuality. She found him fetching; he found her satisfyingly multitudinous in the most climactic fashion.
He chuckled, nervously actually. Debonair he was not. “My fantasies have never involved big carafes of wine” like he was bearing this night, either, let alone vials that contained four grams of shrooms, tickets for a lovely journey into the realm of intoxication of which he had been utterly innocent till Jackson had introduced him to Snake Lady, and he and Ms. Danielle had ‘tripped the light fantastic’ together, a la mode and in dripping frenzy.
Or rather, he corrected himself, his fantasies had delved just such ‘delicious’ possibilities, but he had neither clue nor courage enough to puzzle out how such eventualities came to pass. He thought of what Bonnie Blaylick had asked him, matter of fact in her lissome beauty and cheerleader’s strength, when he was but a callow lad of eighteen, in other words a mere six years prior, as the then epochs-more youthful Louis kissed and stroked and pawed at his young friend on their second date, senior year at Thomas Jefferson.
“What do you want?” As if she were gently holding off an overly affectionate puppy, she had asked as she made a move for, to coin a phrase, an ‘arms-length transactional moment.’
Now, like then, he wasn’t anything like certain that he’d express himself coherently in an answer. “Lots of pussy!” Possibly true, but how banal. “Undying worshipful devotion!” One receives as one gives. “The most gratifying orgasmic frenzy possible.”
Considered in the realm of the real, as a poor boy whose solace had always typified the poor boy’s solace, every orgasm was as sweet as the queen bee’s personal nectar stash, and, since Bethany in Colorado had shown him the magic of female explosive potential, with its accompanying wild melee of heated intercourse, as it were, this engagement of mutuality had remained the beacon that guided his loving.
“It’s not about what you want,” he’d tell himself like a drama coach might prep an actor for a tough scene. Compulsion for Eros aside, he could relate, on both a ‘theoretical’ and a sensual plane of being, so to say. But then, when the hunger was on him, Lou was without any other element of the sea of life with which to float, from which to moisten his lips and spill forth his own ululations of delight. Such a position of dependent longing, to say the least, made him nervous.
His ‘trips’ prior to Tuscaloosa—collegiate gardens on Mescaline, acid treks at eight thousand feet in Colorado—had, save for the ubiquitous slurpy stoner kisses that accompanied all sorts of marijuana highs, been chaste. He had even felt, almost an intuition, which was the manna on which his mind operated, that sex and psychedelics would somehow never mesh very well. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Both Carbon-Free & Nuclear-Free
This issue’s section-effort here continues a half-century of bearing witness. I’ve become an aficionado of the atomic and subatomic. I rail at the lethal ineptitude of social aggregates that try to thrive and excel by first improving their capacity to kill everybody in existence many times over and then, second, justifying this ecocidal social choice by extolling the ‘power-producing’ possibilities of the lethal legerdemain and technical torture of nuclear energy that our betters and masters long ago promised, in one way and another, would be “too cheap to meter.”
People a bit older than this humble correspondent may actually remember Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech, which sought to demarcate the Modern Nuclear Project as a ‘consecration of human life’ instead of as an arbiter of Mass Collective Suicide. This brittle nonsense never added up: the pretense—that a shift to reactors from bombs would somehow obviate Armageddon’s dire dangers—was always at best a false premise.
Notwithstanding such slick, and admittedly mainly factual and somewhat charming, propaganda as what appears just above, General Electric’s nuclear profiteering made articulating such a P.O.V. in this production all-but-inevitable. Too much was at stake to view the whole system as anything other than both completely benevolent and inescapably inevitable.
I call the entire process the Nuclear Fool Cycle. It contains at least seven distinct phases, each of them toxic and dangerous, with the least problematic component of this septet the sculpted, gleaming reactors that contribute plus-or-minus twenty percent of national electrical gigawattage, as it were.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of two descendants of the original Atomic Energy Commission, mentions nine components of the industrial processing of fissionable chemicals. Interestingly enough, two of those involve ‘deconversion’ and ‘reprocessing,’ which demonstrate the oft-noted universal tendency in these pages of large-scale capitalist enterprise to turn ‘waste’ into both recycled and altogether novel commodity capacities. That leaves the ‘seven steps’ that I learned long ago and far away, more or less unchanged.
The initial move, mining, has made multiple sites around the globe into barely remediable septic sloughs. The second stop along the fission highway, milling, converts the Uranium ore into a molecule with six Fluorine atoms for every big Uranium nucleus; only a few former factories along these lines have shuttered their operations, and they are ‘forever-deadly,’ at least till further notice.
Then comes enrichment, mostly a modest increase of the U-235 isotope but occasionally a massive concentration for purposes of nifty Weapons of Mass Destruction. The fourth step is fabricating fuel rods for use in reactors or H-bomb cores for more insidious and self-destructive purposes. Just as Uranium’s earliest processing necessitates ‘forever chemicals,’ so too do they linger in the later stages, till metallurgy manifests pure Uranium at about this conjunction in the cycle’s spinning.
When the fifth destination in this dynamic comes along, the assembled Uranium delivery modalities either inhabit thermonuclear warheads or they have become part of a massive nuclear power station, as noted above in some ways the least noxious part of the entire pathway. These places very effectively boil water to supply electricity, generally for several years running without pausing to refuel.
Each reactor in any grid is, given the aggregation of slight operational risks or the exigencies of political conflict, as the case may be, a timebomb, in ironic mimicry of a missile in a sub or a silo, the timing of which to detonate is very precise indeed, under the right circumstances for atomic war, which is to say extinguishing circumstances for the human race. But until the detonation happens, things can seem almost pristine.
The sixth station in the Nuclear Fool Cycle Express, for practical purposes, is the terminus, inasmuch as ‘waste disposal’ is, most optimistically, still an utter fantasy. This sixth scheduled component of a ‘nuclear-fuel-itinerary,’ so to speak, entails deep-water pool storage of these even-more-forever-than-forever chemicals that astute commercial scientists do manage to mine for dangerous but decidedly profitable goods and services.
By this juncture, a society will have arrived at the seventh difficult passage that attends being any sort of committed Nuclear Fool, which is to say now owning more or less eternally deadly waste for which one has no safe disposal plan in place. In some senses quite obviously, to conceive ‘throwing things away’ at all is inane at best, and more likely bordering on some measure of insanity.
Whatever may be the case, the more morbid and recalcitrant any particular leftover might seem, the more costly or even inconceivable might the disposal of such a substance appear. Many people, critics and defenders of ‘atomic power’ at once, view this last conundrum of the dynamic as most damning. The difficulties, with every new use, can only grow ever larger and less tractable as ‘undisposed waste’ piles ever upward. And that’s not even all, really.
In addition to this ‘final’ problem with the seventh phase of the Fool Cycle, creative capitalists—following their ubiquitous druthers—keep finding ways to divert a waste stream into ‘productive’ commodity cycles. ‘Medicalized Radiation’ is the most visible example, and, who knows? This may be the least noxious piece of the whole puzzle, perhaps.
Depleted Uranium Munitions & Bombs, as DUMB as humanly possible, are an entirely ‘different kettle of fish.’ Several series of articles and videos are forthcoming about the DUMBshitting of humanity via D.U. In essence, making DU ordnance a battlefield protocol vastly increases the likelihood of Elliott’s estimate coming true.
“This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
To an extent, in any event, all of my interest and activity about these matters has emanated from the revelations that Gar Alperowitz clarified in his iconic work, Atomic Diplomacy, a text that graced my Sophomore History Tutorial in Cambridge, if I recollect correctly. This yet-pertinent assessment told of what truly prodded people at the top to promulgate the first true Weapons of Mass Destruction, with which U.S. chieftains tried to bully the world into accepting a unipolar world order.
As things transpired thereafter, other threads held sway. Science cannot long remain secret. Every nation on Earth with adequate technical, economic, and industrial capacity can build fission-plants that boil water as well as crafting weaponry that utilizes the same sources of power to create engines of destruction strong enough to blow ourselves to kingdom come.
Thus, in this vein, as we take up the first actual Driftwood Message Art missive that graces Marshall Arts’ Feral Nerd Performance Space, we have overseen a briefing about what matters atomic mean and how they happen in our sociopolitical spaces and such. And we have learned of the ongoing inevitability of ‘atomic power’s’ two-faced appearance, a font of electrical magic on the one hand and demon-seed for thermonuclear extinction devices on the other.
The primary present instantiation of this ongoing messaging process speaks directly about this complex reality of atoms and geopolitics, of power-plays and profits. “Indisputably & Immutably, Hydrogen Bombs Exist For Exactly Two Pragmatic Purposes, Further to Engorge Plutocratic Profiteers, on One Hand, &, on the Other, Further to Hasten Mass Collective Suicide; If Citizens Ever Tire of Financing Their Own Incineration Further to Fatten Trustafarian Corporate Coffers, Then They Can Rid Themselves of These Gruesome Armageddon Arsenals, Grim & Grisly & Ghoulish; Arguably, a Failure to Act Along Such Life-Affirming Lines Will Only Continue Among Criminally Insane Idiots, Psychopathic Fools Who Deserve the Fate That Awaits Them.”
This compound-complex word conglomerate has multiple clauses, in fact, precisely four. It makes verifiable claims, arguably demonstrable. It affirms Sadako Kurihara’s exclamation at the end of her magnificent poem, “New Life.” …(continued below the fold)
Empowered Political Forays—Capitalism on Drugs: the Political Economy of Contraband From Heroin to Ritalin & Beyond, Continued
(In the triptych of ‘sex and drugs and rock-and-roll,’ the middle element’s cognitive and emotional impacts arguably carry the heaviest load, at least in terms of commodity production. Michael Ruppert’s police investigator bona fides are convincing indeed that at minimum a trillion and a half dollars of human output represent contraband—its production, distribution, consumption, and celebration. Here, we amplify what ended last issue with this: “‘Although it is impossible to date these discoveries with precision, it can be concluded that spiritual consciousness first began to evolve over 100,000 years ago, and this gave birth to the first heavenly cosmologies over 20,000 years ago.' (As a matter) (o)f course, psychoactive plants and their ritual use attended every step in this evolutionary journey.")
A compilation that looks at science and technology as a hundred thousand year continuum recognizes the use of hallucinogenic plants as a technique worthy of mention. It proposes that a rational contextualization of human advance would have no choice but to consider the inclusion of such activities, which in any event almost certainly accompanied humanity’s relatively rapid spread to every corner of the planet outside of Antarctica.
Another recent study has noticed the central role of herbs and other plants in the production of magic and knowledge, empirical medicine and divination. From the highlands of Northern Europe and the British isles to the New Guinea wilds, such rubrics have appeared, schematics that in multiple ways evidence ancient roots.
In practice, social problems have led groups, from the dawn of the human day, so to speak, to “consult healers, who usually belong to distant communities and even non-[ethnic] groups. These ‘dream men,’ whom we would label mediums, enter altered states of consciousness through the rapid inhaling of tobacco and the use of other plant materials that produce trances and hallucinations. Information is also gleaned from dreams. Such diviners are then able to identify” correct courses of action or guilty parties or complex compromises as a result of such chemically-mediated foresight and insight.
Investigating these kinds of phenomena and then labeling them as shamanism, meanwhile, has become both a popular and important corner of the scholarly enterprise. Many anthropologists and archaeologists who participate in this undertaking have noted the obvious longevity of these practices and the concomitant probability that drug-induced hallucinations accompanied such designations of ‘guiding spirits’ within the clans or bands from which we and our immediate forebears have sprung.
The capacity for this kind of ‘second sight’ is “of great antiquity,” probably hundreds of thousands of years at least. As a South African professor stated the point, “The widespread appearance of shamanism results not from diffusion but…from universal neurological inheritance that includes the capacity of the nervous system to enter altered states and the need to make sense of the resultant hallucinations within a foraging community. There seem to be no other explanations for the remarkable similarities between shamanic traditions worldwide. It is therefore probable that some form of shamanism…was practiced by the hunter-gatherers of Upper Paleolithic Europe.”
More recent scholars, putting into practice advances in forensic science—dating and identifications of molecules and more—can now say without equivocation that aboriginal human networks from tens of thousands of years ago frequently engaged in devotions that involved heightened consciousness, often including hallucinatory and other states of arousal. Such evidence comes from around the planet.
It indicates the role of such ‘expanded awareness,’ for example in The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, in the production of magnificent artistic output tens of thousands of years old. It countenances the probability that imbibing one or another psychoactive plant or fungus contributed to, or formed a bedrock of, the rites both that defined early social development in aggregate and that related to the use of these grottoes and caverns so filled with an evocative, creative mystery that astounds us to this day.
From the Americas, one finds that these patterns have characterized past human groups from the Amazon to Mexico at the very least. Psilocybin and Ayahuasca’s use are, at a minimum, thousands of years old.
Such practices were medicinal. They as elsewhere frequently pertained to both carnal relations generally and to the sexual initiation of pubescent members of the social group. Some data indicates that these substances played a part in the rites of human sacrifice that came to characterize Aztec and Mayan cultures at the ends of their ecological ropes.
From throughout the European neck of the Eurasian land mass, artistry of different sorts proves the presence of organically induced hallucinations. Graves have contained residues of psychoactive materials placed with the corpse, as in cannabis at a burial site in Siberia.
“Buried with the 'princess' were six saddled-and-bridled horses, bronze and gold ornaments—and a small canister of cannabis. She is not known to be a 'princess', as her name implies. Experts are divided over whether she was a poet, healer, or holy woman.” …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”Resuscitation”
ANNUNCIATION
July 13th, 2027
“These days, half the headlines make me feel like,” I type, “what's his name,” I say, thinking, “in the Bhagavad-Gita.” Watching quietly, over my right shoulder, as I write this, her laugh tickles my ears as she whispers, "Arjuna!" I look up from the 'Ready Resuscitation Blog' that she created for me.
"His name...," Eva gestures as I smile.
"Right. I always forget that;" acknowledgement, nodding, "You are the best, baby..."
"Beautiful friends," smiling now, "you know, like you said, Jimbo" As grandmother liked to say, ‘a word, to the wise, is sufficient.’ Right. Beautiful friends.
Ah, yes. Indeed I did. Anyway, where was I? Okay then, here goes.
So then, like Arjuna, I as often as not sense that I’m part of the gaggle of protagonists who are getting ready to raise their arms and drop their swords to commence the slaughter for that greedy bastard, Krishna. On any given day, all the cousins, almost around the clock and around the globe, are ready to lock and load and rock and roll.
With Gulf Wars, 9/11, and systemic economic meltdown a generation past, everybody feels this barely-contained, percolating tension. Every city crowd, every gathering of people who are the least bit strange to each other, even if the Dalai Lama himself has keynote responsibilities, feels like the end of a cattle drive, when the steers smell the finish and fear is a fist around the heart.
No wonder, as matters stands, that so many hapless folks also seem obsessed with "the afterlife." They sense ‘an angel band’ that will intervene on their behalf. They cling to hopes of ‘a better life’ where they will be present and accounted for ‘when the roll is called up yonder’ and they all ‘rise to meet their savior in the air,’ oh my Goddess.
This is where my story comes in. I’m Jim Lewis, and I have personal, first-hand, I'm-betting-my-resuscitated-life definitive, documented data about all these issues of heaven and hell and eternity that, collectively, are all so Au-courant and soulfully evanescent and all that sort of blah blah blah.
I could offer countless kinds of 'po-mo' details about setting and psyche here, but what are they compared to this magnificent material of experience, the very stuffing of nirvana versus nothingness? No matter how the shit hits the fan, I have to honor what happened, how I came back; I have zero option other than bearing witness.
I've died, I've returned to life, I've written a book—moderate-nothing sales, until that idiot Robertson, 'Pat Jr.,’ bless his heart, declared Jihad against me—and lately, as a result of my fed-on-controversy success, I've been doing the book tour deal. The media hipsters were all just filing their nails before their stories, at least until last month in Illinois, and now here I am back in Atlanta, where I started. I'll just say up front that home town turf has never felt so foreign.
Anyhow, that's the set up. Ms. Free-Speech-Radio-News, my journalistic muse and confidant, a combination of acolyte and mentor, my marvelous companera, Eva, is still here, taking advantage of her exclusive access, assured of the continuation of our wonderful 'friendship,' and keeping watch over me, another miracle in the chain of serendipitous circumstance that this whole scene suggests.
The lucky accident of life beckons us to accept it all, whether we have the stomach for it or not. Part of acceptance is memory, which is what I'm doing right now, with this peek into events via the aforementioned ‘Ready Resuscitation Blog.’ …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—
(Chapter Three ended thus. “In the event, a shrill shout shrieked and pried big George's sleepy eyes wide. ‘Thief, thief, thief!!!’ it cried, a litany of larceny that accompanied our hero on his mission to persevere and meet Elma May again." She and our hero had fulfilled their fated frolicking, his first such experience, the luscious libations of which preceded Jack’s indeed thieving the Giant’s, George Mortimer’s, hefty sack of gold and scurrying for a safe exit and a reunion with mother and home, where he might hope to punctuate an initial ‘hero’s journey’ with glee and glamor, as it were, in preparation for a settled, permanent life connection.)
More Than a Hill of Beans
YOUNG JACK’S FIRST CLIMB, a Prologue
Jack followed no clear formula in beating his hasty retreat, though surviving inherently meant keeping the Gold and making his return to mother and home. Instinctively, he turned not toward the pathway that he and Elma had boobytrapped but away from the direct route to the top branches of his Forever Tree, which they had similarly prepared to prove an obstacle, or worse, to their cannibalistic antagonist.
As wildly excited as he was, which is to say similarly focused as he was at his birth, he maintained the same calm that he had felt at every step of this journey. His entire life had given him the strength and acuity to wrestle and maybe manage most any impediment that the cosmos might randomly plop in his path.
As he ran from the house, he slowed to a steady trot and remembered Elma's words, following their final kiss, about George-the-Giant in pursuit. “He's not fast; he doesn't change direction quickly; whatever, however, he's relentless,” she had said, her face a grim grinning mask of reality orientation.
His half-smile at this memory cut to his most alert attention when he heard the whoosh of rush and flesh through the great door that was now some hundreds of meters behind him. The trees shook, and clever, calm Jack reflexively gagged a little at the roar that followed after a few seconds pause. Yet he did not stumble, even as he switched his gait to run backwards and watch what his pursuer was doing.
At just this point, Jack was entering the more heavily forested terrain that blanketed the Cloud Kingdom all roundabout the mansion. George, howling and snapping his fangs furiously, didn't even try to cast eyes on Jack; like wolves, he hunted by smell, and he unerringly turned toward Jack's escape with a nose as flared as a crimson orchid blossom over a howling mouth that grated into a grotesque and hungry gaping grin full enough of fangs to rend and tear even a hunky callow hero.
George did not so much begin to run as he did to launch himself directly toward our gazing hero, a terrifying sight that became less troubling when the Giant paused to gasp and gather himself for another leap. Jack smiled to think, “if I didn't need to sleep, he'd never catch me.”
George’s shrieking and screaming did not abate, and this too reassured Jack. “That'll take loads of energy to keep going with, ha ha!”
Our fellow did not know about the tacks that were one source of George's outraged bellows. Elma didn't want to encourage complacency on her young friend's part—the beau, basically, with whom she hoped to replace the boorish ogre, George—nor did she want him to worry about her instead of focusing on an escape that would deliver George's demise, an eventuality to which her runes had potentially alerted her.
Our boy, intuitively guided through any wilderness he'd ever encountered, steered a path through CloudLand that was masterful. Whenever he saw overhanging SnowBerry bushes, or any kind of pale brambly thorny spot, he slipped through it, listening for George's snarling outcry to echolocate the Monster's progress. This was fun till the angry groans altogether ceased, all at once, far enough behind him so that he didn't exactly so much worry as wonder.
The young fellow eventually stopped in a thicket to consider things and get a new set of inspired moves from the ether. He in one way and another realized that he was putting a type of plan into practice, to wit to wander about enough to wear his 'relentless' pursuer down a bit and only then backtrack toward his exit.
He nodded his head and grinned, a happy face that became a beaming smile when he saw another Scrimmel—or perhaps it was the same, the very one that he’d encountered when he first arrived—upon leaving his temporary brushy bailiwick behind. He could just hear, distant enough to feel something akin to safe, the thrashing crashes of a pursuer much too large for a quiet amble through the underbrush.
The silly-looking creature moved rapidly and readily enough on its way, turning to examine its follower and 'give me an absolutely knowing look,' Jack later remembered repeatedly. He would tell listeners: “It winked at me!” although most disbelieved this. Completely taken aback by whatever was transpiring, just when the critter melted into the foliage, Jack used this momentary oddity to spur his changing course, back toward the big house and Elma.
He certainly did not plot out in advance, en route to escape, stopping in to say 'hello' again, yet that's just what he did. Predictably, she was aghast, paling before she blushed at his obvious manly appreciation.
“But you!” was all she managed before he nodded and mouthed, almost a whisper, “remember what we've planned.” Then, a finger to his lips to blow another kiss and nod affably, he scurried off.
The roar that he heard as he entered the woody fringe en route to the Forever Tree sent him leaping and twisting with a defensive snarl. The Giant's resounding cry was not only much closer than our sojourner anticipated, but it was also positively exultant in its boisterous vehemence. Without needing to confirm what he sensed, Jack knew that George had sighted him, perhaps having more sense as a tracker than the youngster would have credited to the big oafish monster.
Ever ready to adjust his route, Jack did so. …(continued below the fold)
Nerdy Nuggets—Jewish Questions’ Deeper Dives: From Marx to Zion
(In Issue #15, readers encountered—courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive, a truly invaluable resource—Karl Marx’s 1843 periodical response(in On the Jewish Question)to another journalistic examination of Jewish claims to rights in Germany at that time. As noted in that posting, a nine part series on Israel’s place in the global pantheon of people and power is coming. Today’s work extends the assessment of Jewish life in the middle-to-late 19th century, when the emergence of Zionism as an ideology first took place.)
Karl Marx published his article on ‘Jewish Interrogatories,’ the religion of his family, in response to Bruno Bauer. Marx’s motives were social, however, not personal. Bauer opposed giving Jews the rights of citizens; Marx mocked such bigotry as either stupid or ‘missing the point’ of what citizenship means.
This was in 1843. The initiation of Marx’s work thus began in the years just prior to the insurrections that occurred throughout Central and Eastern Europe in 1848-49. In this context, interrelated conflicts and continuing and consolidating bourgeois rule, primary tools in the rulers’ tool chest always included divide-and-conquer ratchet sets, so to speak.
In precisely this vein, here is an excellent deconstruction of Marx’s and Engels’ capsulization of how to stop turning people against each other on the basis of intertwined issues of religion and culture and citizenship. “Since the rights of man and citizen include freedom of religion, what grounds can there be for excluding Jews because of their religion?
Since the rights of man include rights of egoism, what grounds can there be for denying civil rights to Jews because of their alleged egoism?
Since citizen’s rights abstract ‘political men’ from their social role, what grounds can there be for excluding Jews because of their allegedly harmful social role?
Since money in modern society is the supreme world power, what grounds can there be for denouncing Jews for allegedly turning money into their God?"
Robert Fine’s and Philip Spencer’s Antisemitism & the Left starts with context generally and history. The authors assert about early Communists that they “rejected Bauer's entire argument, and most importantly insisted that there was no Jewish Question at all. For Marx, Jews were absolutely entitled to the same rights as everyone else. The key question was not what Jews did or did not do but what was going on in the wider society.”
These scholars’ subtitle serves as an understated mix of irony and adjuration. On the Return of the Jewish Question could be the subject-line, much of the time, for the past century of human existence.
In any event, this book offers an excellent foundation for finding what one might label the parallel development of Marxism and Zionism. Before persisting with further explication, comparison, contrast, and so forth, BTR now provides at least a pair of background points, each provable as such and inferentially inseparable from Marx’s essays and his joint work with Friedrich Engels.
First: as a ‘culture-of-literacy-&-numeracy,’ Judaism reliably filled a social reservoir of functionaries—Jews—who could keep books, write instructions, collect taxes, and all manner of other functions that required the aforementioned ‘literacy-&-numeracy.’ This has remained true, from Occident to Orient, from Africa to the Americas, throughout the vaunted ‘Current Era.’
Second, as capital’s ascendancy in the mid-nineteenth century became unstoppable, as attested by the above-noted uprisings that started in 1848, ever-prevalent prejudice against Jews became perhaps even more pronounced. Marx’s argument with Bauer instantiates this assertion and acts as a necessary initiation to root structures of these questions, and their ‘return.’
A novel from the mid-1800’s exemplifies these contentions. It speaks of typical conundrums then for “middle-class Jewry,” educated as ‘professionals’ who were ready to do all the dirty work.
“The result was an unfortunate surplus of trained men who could find no work, but were at the same time spoiled for a modest way of life. They could not, like their Christian colleagues, slip into pubic posts; and became, so to say a drug on the market.
Nevertheless, they had the obligations of their ‘station in life,’ an arrogant sense of class distinction, and degrees that they could not back up with a shilling. Those who had some means gradually used them up, or else continued to live on the paternal purse. Others were on the lookout for eligible partners, facing the delicious prospect of servitude to wealthy fathers-in-law. Still others engaged in ruthless and not always honorable competition in pursuits where genteel manners were requisite.
They furnished the curious and lamentable spectacle of men who, because they did not want to become merchants, dealt at ‘professionals’ in secret diseases and unlawful legal affairs. Some who in their need became journalists trafficked in public opinion. Others ran about to public assemblies and hawked worthless slogans in order to make themselves known in quarters where they could make useful party connections."
Since Altneuland is the fictional output of none other than the Father-of-Zionism, Theodor Herzl, this is more pertinent than some random prejudicial, and hypothetically ‘literary,’ exercise in yarnspinning. Thus, in fact, we may readily render how difficult discourses to punctuate the paradoxes and potential of ‘political-emancipation-versus-human-emancipation’ were part-and-parcel in the overall process of the emergence of the Zionist Project, which of course continues to include our current context.
Let’s make a short etymological stop. Let’s be clear. The term Zion, as applicably appears in the ‘biblical’ Mount Zion, is concomitant with—and possibly coterminus with—the 'wadi Sayhun,’ a portal into ancient Jerusalem. Likely root words in Hebrew and Arabic both refer to citadel and express the clearly concomitant idea of a sacred city.
In some sense then Zionism, in seeking to effect a Zionist Project, imagines embodying the vaunted city-on-the-hill in actual terrain. Not coincidentally, some ideologues and other erstwhile holy individuals look upon the United States of America as exactly a ‘city-on-the-hill’ enterprise. In any event, such an observation makes clarity sensible indeed about some root-structures of the apparently ineluctable connection between Yankee and Israeli ‘masters and commanders.’
On the one hand, in such a Project, the motivating forces obviously stem from the well-trained and socially affluent ‘professionals’ to whom Zionism Founder Herzl alludes in the quotation above. But this particular ‘forefather’ purposed his life, in some significant part, as a search for patrons. Universally, he found them in Empire’s most central and sacred halls. …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Don West, Highlander, Popular Ed
(Most of what appears here above-the-fold first showed up in the world, though they may now be a purloined posting on the Web, as part of a series of 500-word snippets that I produced for the Examiner online back when such work yielded a penny a word or so, ha ha. Broken links notwithstanding, it’s in some sense one of those ever green stories on which human elucidation hangs tight, so to say.)
“Seventy-eight years ago—which is to say, now, ninety-two years back—Don West, Myles Horton, and James Dombrowski had just embarked on the odyssey of the Highlander Folk School, which played key behind-the-scenes roles in supporting civil rights, labor rights, women’s rights, and environmental justice in the South between 1932 and 1962.
Highlander’s monumental endeavors came to a temporary dead end then when Tennessee revoked its charter and seized all HFS properties because of ‘ties to communists,’ emphasizing that America’s primary religion is anticommunism. Of course, students now almost never hear about HFS, even though its progeny, the Highlander Research & Educational Center, still operates in a Smoky Mountain, New Market, Tennessee home.
Least heralded of this legendary School’s founding trio, Don West plays the lead role in today’s BTR material. West’s North Georgia youth included lessons in Radical Republican anti-bigotry at his grandfather’s knee. He attended Berry College in Rome, a wild collegiate saga involving Ford family money and all manner of radical Reds.
When West fulminated a mass rally against the campus screening of "Birth of a Nation," which included false and bigoted depiction of African American rapine as justification for the KKK, Berry expelled him. He went to Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, where he led a protest "against campus paternalism," which also culminated in his expulsion, though his fellow students succeeded in gaining his reinstatement. Upon graduating, he enrolled at Vanderbilt's Divinity School in 1929.
James J. Lorence writes about this period of matriculation. "As a student West visited Danish folk schools inspired by N.F.S. Grundtvig, a Lutheran prelate who advocated curricula based on tradition and cultural heritage." Because this visionary Dane "believed in the wisdom of the ordinary people above the educated and elite, and thought that it was the ordinary people who were capable of enlightenment," the schools that he facilitated, like Highlander, have fostered social transformation toward justice, equity, inclusion, and democracy.
West identified with this when he encountered this North European model, in the process also solidifying his intention to work with Myles Horton. West only remained officially on board and on staff in Tennessee for a year, however.
He came back to Georgia, where he promoted locally-based and student-centered education in Hall County during WWII. Later, teaching at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, he faced constant denunciation for his ‘communist sympathies’ from the Atlanta Constitution’s famous liberal editor, Ralph McGill.
These attacks drove him from Georgia, but he and his wife eventually founded the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia. It still carries on West’s work, validating community values and encouraging a critical view of the way society works. Though students may never have heard of Don West, just such fascinating characters are readily accessible, proffering invaluable lessons about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Most folks likely associate the likes of West, and his work, with radicalism, activism, protest, reform, or Leftists of different stripes for whom ‘peace and justice and civil rights’ and such are of paramount import. However, whether one supports and agrees with these efforts at transformative connection, what they inevitably must entail, as a sine qua non, is an approach to learning that sees it as a lifelong reeducation away from the norms which socialization relentlessly inculcates to all and sundry save the elites and their privileged progeny.
Highlighting this point is part and parcel of BTR, here today perhaps for the first time as a specific articulation of things. Readers may count on many follow-up inquiries, for example in #19, on September 1st, in an initial presentation about Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Now For Highlander
Returning our focus to the Highlander Center itself, its central role in Southern history, congruent with a Big Tent approach, means that it must have outsized influence on world history as well. In the event, various arenas of sociopolitical relevance became, more or less, a persistent part of Highlander’s curriculum for organizers, activists, and soulful believers in social reformulations to make our lives more dandy and salubrious.
Especially in relation to militarism, labor organizing, and civil rights, Highlander has acquired a reputation, whether for good or ill depending on where on the socialist-fascist spectrum one finds oneself. The above photo pointedly evokes one of these instances. …(continued below the fold)
Erotic Snippets—A Sorority of Pirates, #1: Grace, Gory & Glorious
Joni Mitchell perfectly intones a key notion about many men, certainly most American males in these days of modern times. “I know you don't like weak women, you get bored so quick…And you don't like strong women 'cause they're hip to your tricks.”
Long ago and far away, none other than our very own Quiet-Jack, who left his laconic ways behind at Witches Glen, was but a retiring-and-yet-inquisitive boy when he now and again found himself under the care and narrative attention of his great aunt, none other than the famous pirate-beauty, Grace O’Malley.
Jack’s love for the woods and his hankering for words both grew substantially as a consequence of his sessions with his great-grandfather’s sister, who shared her pipe and her lore with the boy, starting before his eighth birthday, on the longest day of most years in their ambit if the Lady’s green groves. Still a child, not yet even a master of seven Summers, he was a bit of an herbal, agricultural, crafty prodigy, someone whom all the local farmers wanted to lease now and again from his pa.
He was also very, very interested in understanding the complex contours and contradictory nature of human relationship. Inasmuch as his story in these pages results from such manuscripts as my hoped-for Graceful sagas will ascertain, I will turn the tale at his point over to Grace herself, or perhaps we might say to her textual ghost.
“My name, for English readers, is Grace O’Malley, though I was born into the world called differently. I have come to write of my exploits and errors, my loves and battles, in significant part because of my clever young grand-nephew, for whom I have long played at the role of tutor and mistress-of-crafty knowing in Our Lady’s myriad ways.
Readers at just this punctuation point may or may not know of my hefty tome’s title—A Miracle of Grace: the Times & Trials of the Lithe & Wily Pirate Princess of All the West, & of Her Loves & Lethal Afflictions. This volume covers my entire life as a woman, from when I negotiated a trading-sailor’s position with my own Father to the very cusp of today, when my skin is no longer so milky smooth, and my sunset-hued hair is now a silvery mane.
In my relations with my great niece’s son, our first two years or so together, only months after my final High Council’s Gathering over Elizabeth’s taxes on tar and rope, we combed the seashore like my first suitor liked to comb my hair. We also worked my brother-in-law’s dairy, Erin, who married sister Ellen.
Other times, off into the woods we would go, up past Derry’s Falls and on up into the lands of wild outlaws and wilder womenfolk. As I seem to recall, my callow Sean-Erik, who would snap his teeth at anyone who called him other than Jack—though always finishing his pearly-whites in a big grin—first made me understand his precocity when he was between nine and ten years and he came to me with a wry and burning visage.
I couldn’t help but flutter at my serious young man; to this day, I recall his exact words. They rested on what we had long been discussing, the forlorn distaste that all true Celts felt for Britannia’s drumbeat to make Christian faith as inborn to Ireland as bountiful fodder for cattle and other ruminants. Not yet even a decade of experience beneath his handsome sash, he never the less abjured all Catholic sentiment and instead adjured that we live according to the Goddess’ good grace instead.
“My dear Aunt Grace," he began, always proper and formal in his initial address, placing his hand over his heart so that I bit my tongue to keep from laughing aloud, or weeping salty tears down my furrowed chin. I nodded for him to say more.
“I know that you have long been the Lady’s favorite,” he glanced to make sure that he’d overstepped no forbidden hedge to separate men from women. I laughed merrily and, again, bid him persist with his suit. “And, well,” and here he paused to pull his hand across his moistened lips, “I’m as sure that I’m in love with a lass as I am that my name is Jack, and that only my friends may call me Jackie.”
And, I must acknowledge, the ensuing years, till my dear laddie moved further South, and a healthy ride inland away from my seashore, proved my most joyously satisfying employment with a male of our kind, even more so than—though in decidedly different fashion from—my fiery connubial conniptions with the lover for whom I threw aside my second husband. My fetching nephew’s first adoring feelings went forth to a Vicar’s daughter, though I warned him about ‘girls of the Church’ instead of women of Our Lady.
Whatever the case may be, though in this final section of my autobiography of the feistiest of Irish females I do not intend primarily to chronicle my prodigal nephew’s youthful love affairs, telling the overall course that his callow kisses took will achieve two ends in the tale that I do very decidedly intend to tell, which is to say the course of my own carnal appetite’s fulfillment in a long and frolicsome sojourn. So be it.
In so doing, I thereby tie my telling to the actual relation of teacher to pupil that I long maintained with Jackie, whom I knew—straight from Our Lady’s lights on his behalf—would be a man of great influence for a livable Ireland, no matter the vicious treacheries and uncertain allegiances of British forces of different strokes and stripes. In particular, as a matter of course, these altogether most English of intrusions were at once Jack’s ‘cross to bear’ and opportunity to shrug off the yoke of Rome.
*****IN the event, I taught him eight lessons that my own luscious life illustrated so clearly that I could, with due modesty to a youth who was also my grand-nephew and my favorite, convey useful thoughts with which he might guide his loving lights toward his feminine favorites. Also in so doing, I lit all the candles at the table of love’s best-remembered libations, so that I could then write them here, not for Jack but for readers and listeners who might enjoy such tempting tales. This was the first edict of the lot.
#1—Always try to know what you want, & try to find out what she wants. This was what I told my Jackie as regards his adoration for Amelia, the wicked vicar’s elder girl, who, at more than three years my youthful laddie’s senior was a sage observer of males and thereby recognized his aforementioned precocious tastes for the sorts of blushes and kisses that most boys only enjoy a little later in their lives.
***HE was always a wise young man; would that I could say that of my second husband, whom I will detail more fully anon. My own background as a strapping lovely lass who could out-wrestle all but one of the young men of her acquaintance provided me with some of the insights that I shared with Jack at this early stage of his amorous adventures.
My older cousin, who arranged my first marriage after he tested my fires himself, was at that time the only young man of my acquaintance whom I could never best in the clinches. He was such a fine young mannish specimen that I could barely keep my hands off him, touching that I justified as competition instead of congress.
My persistence in seeking such a victorious outcome, given his manly gifts and my own feminine enthusiasms, inevitably brought a very different conclusion to our contests than a grappling victory on my behalf. Charles was my only lover whom I did not kiss first, and frequently at that, moistening the erotic dough, so to say.
How our clothes came off was not obvious to me then, nor have I determined since exactly the means by which our naked young bodies began flashing and thrashing through impassioned embraces that will never be entirely out of fashion. Charles already, when we consummated our delving the Lady’s favorite dance, had a fiance close at hand; we both were farm children, so we knew how to avoid consequences that would have threatened his promises.
Eventually, though we were afire for each other daily, his father sent him to sea, just after my strong young special friend introduced me to Richard, whom I would soon enough wed. Unfortunately for Charles’ intended, and perhaps for me, his ship was one of the few sloops to sink when the Armada came, and not a one of those poor sailors survived.
*****IN the end, rather quickly really, the recounting of the lessons that would have helped me made releasing Amelia’s grip on the boy decidedly easier. She agreed much more convivially to depart our jolly green arena when she realized that delicious descents to hellish realms of lusty abandon would not be hers for the taking, at least not for her.
#2—Never lose your heartfelt appreciation for the little joys that you bring each other; kissing, touching hands, touching faces, gentle nudges. Whatever fulsome frolicking that Jack and Amelia had gotten up to, soon after her departure he was taking many walks, and even a few rides, with lithe little Lucy, whose father bred horses. She had less experience with whatever my nephew had been savoring with his new ‘dearly departed,’ so this second instruction seemed useful.
***JACK was ever a boy of the senses, and while my first love, before Richard, had favored overpowering me, and had little fondness for fondling and capturing each other’s joys outside of heated copulation, my new husband was the strongest advocate for womanly pleasure whom I’ve ever encountered. I miss him; believe that, if nothing else.
We had no formal, final carnal knowledge before our wedding, yet—oh my goodness—we knew each other very well indeed but for that last threshold. I was to sea many times before our marriage ceremony—once with my Father to the warm waters of the bright Mediterranean. After our joining, however, so long as Richard lived and loved me, my primary oceanic experiences were in my husband’s arms.
He and I treasured our time in bed, not to mention in the grasses around our sheds or in the hayloft for our horses, or, very occasionally, among the incoming waves along our rocky strand. Richard stashed his longboat there, which he would navigate by oar with his own two hands whenever duty called him away. Really, introducing me to piracy was nearly the most important thing that he left me.
Our only child was stillborn, a girl. He was the most competent seaman I’ve ever known, yet Mother Ocean, sister to Our Lady, claimed him for her own chambers before the third year of our wedded bliss came to a close. My piratical endeavors followed this tragedy for me that may have satisfied some unknown need of Mother Atlantic. …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”King of Games: Prince of Death”
(Our fourth installment of this series ended with this line. “When he first met the Spindoctor, he had been recovering from a period of ruin, against an at least somewhat inferior poker player who had immeasurably more money than Marshall did." Their contest and its anomalies transpired. The upshot was an ‘instructional nexus’ from which Sir Beatty emerged a world-class hustler on a gambol to venerable Mediterranean gambling at the world’s wealthiest watering holes.)
Nice Gilbert Bochenek
In Southern Europe, where Marshall set down roots to run his operation, he was playing again against lesser opponents, in terms of their capacities on a game-by-game, or even a session-by-session, basis. But these scions of aristocratic and plutocratic wealth much more heavily dwarfed Marshall’s paltry few hundred thousand dollars in seed funding than a mere ten-to-one edge; as well, as noted, a coterie of these hungry young bettors were soon flitting around the parlors and cafes where Marshall would meet his foes, whom he hoped, consistently, to transform into his marks.
In such a situation, according to Levinson, the hapless challenger in Marshall’s position “is in effect playing a single game against an adversary who is immensely rich, and if he continues, his ruin becomes certain.” This is what a youthful Mr. Beatty had encountered in an Aspen poker game already and what he sensed as the looming possibility in and around the villas where he played in Monte Carlo and the environs thereabouts.
What happened next is uncertain. Quite likely, playing tight and setting strict loss-limits for a time, Marshall made some money; he was the superior player in every chouette or head-on-head session that he entered.
But as noted above, the Spindoctor’s friend back in Pitkin County, sixty-five hundred feet above sea level, had on different occasions acknowledged his honed abilities as a magician. Also as pointed out previously, in the hideous session that came down to a huge game that Marshall won that November six o’clock morning in 1974, the Spindoctor had wondered whether fancy handed dice manipulation might have been a factor in the million-to-one adverse result, a supposition that the estimable Mr. Beatty eventually all but confirmed outright.
In any event, the deployment of such legerdemain became at least an occasional weapon in Marshall’s arsenal. And his rate of winning rose apace. He was, within six months or so, well on his way to a million dollars ahead of where he had found himself when he and Veronica first rented some rooms and began their enterprise in Southern France.
If he had spent his victory money conservatively, no doubt, the totals would more likely have exceeded two million dollars or more ‘in the black.’ But he loved lavishing gifts on Veronica more or less equally as much as she loved these lavishing ways.
He swore that he would forego further fraudulence as soon as he had banked a million dollars, a fund a thousand times the maximum single point loss that he could experience. Whether such a turning over a new leaf would have happened is anybody’s guess.
While he was minding his interests and scamming his increasingly discomfited rivals, they no doubt were checking up on him. Whether or not they discovered his having lost his inheritance, they certainly came to know that the reason that they didn’t play at Marshall’s home was that he had “cheap lodgings,” his generosity toward Veronica in the nature of clothes and jewels and other personal accoutrements rather than in terms of expensive rent.
Furthermore, these at least generally sophisticated men of business and the world, to a man ‘to the manor born,’ knew either intuitively or empirically the edge that they should have had as a consequence of their favorable capital position. And they would have noticed Marshall’s shift in mien, to an almost sublimely confident belief in his victory on any given day. Something had to explain that change, and the elucidation was clearly not a rich uncle’s generosity.
Perhaps more relevant still, having grown up with backgammon in their nursery schools, they would also have discerned the slight uptick in Marshall’s double-sixes and other long-odds victories. It needn’t have been constant or blatant to be observable. Once more, an explanation was necessary.
The conclusion, under those circumstances, would have turned a whisper into a chorus. “He must be cheating.”
And the clock would have begun to tick on Mr. Beatty’s life expectancy. Perhaps he bought Veronica, unannounced, a big insurance policy. He almost certainly would have detected his foes’ suspicions, his psyche’s fine-tuning to such things at an almost preternatural level after the Kool-Aid incident in Columbia twenty years prior.
But his hands were indeed ‘faster than any eye,’ apparently, because no one could catch him in the act of manipulating a die in his favor. “What can we do?” the frustrated accusers clearly must have asked. …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
What in hell should we do? I needn’t say a thing, but I can’t help myself, perhaps in heaven’s name. I want to provide some piquant provocation to complete things. Life is sweet. Time is short. Maybe something useful can come of all this. Whatever the case may be, for me, the yarns still seem worth the price of admission.
—Below the Fold—
Whatever else proves to be true about existence’s ‘delicate miracles of embodiment,’ we can certainly rest assured that serendipity’s appearance merely requires a certain narrative facility. No doubt, every talented liar can spin a yarn from whole cloth and blah blah blah.
Then again, the reader’s job, or the viewer’s, or the listener’s, is to measure the story against the happenings and perception of social reality in all the mundane day-to-day unfurling of our lives and times. What meets experience and makes it more sensible, more resonant, more meaningful, produces if not a solution to the Existentialist Dilemma, at least a first step or two en route to learning, even knowledge.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
Present Passages then presents us with the all-too-frequently-fated face of Chronos, in the guise of The Hermit. Unfolding Futures finally festoons Athena’s sternly reasonable countenance in the card of Justice. What might we make of all that?
Let’s see. Without doubt my own personal efforts at grassroots mediation have encountered Daedalus’ litany of loss, which the Five here suggests. Oh, well. I’d especially shrug, with whatever measure of hopeful resignation I could manage, in relation to understanding today’s depiction, standing next in line, with The Hermit, as the medium for a message.
Chronos comes to the fore as an all too common card when I ask about my engagement and all such optimistic blah blah blah, ha ha. It suggests solitary soldiering for as long as proves necessary. Alas and alack, so be it, ha ha. A jolly attitude is best: ‘funny-is-money’ thinking will always win out in the end. The Titan himself failed to accept his fate, the main reason for the ennui in his disposition.
This reading’s Future pluck has also been a frequent participant in my ‘outreach for guidance’ via the good Goddess’ graces. Athena appears here, she who in myth first conceived of a juried-approach to dispute resolution. The subtext bursts with pulsing resonance: we must seek “cool recognition of the necessity of battle to uphold and preserve truth." Balanced impartiality must define the core of any constructive contextualization of All-That-Is and this whole’s inescapable exigencies.
Though as usual, I’ve posed these thoughts as general in their application, they apply with extra force in my own adult existence, circumscribed as it has been by the calling to propagate pro-people propaganda. BTR is merely the latest example, ha ha.
In regard to this exemplification, the initial query above also applies to me, if not with quite as much force as the current triad. What then of this new Spiral Spread? To aid transition, if nothing else, I’ll repeat the order-of-battle from above-the-fold.
“In the event, an especially spooky array puts in an appearance. The Eight of Cups serves as apropos Essence, with an equally pertinent Past in the form of the Three of Swords. A jolly Present Pass appears via The Hierophant, with Persephone’s eerie High Priestess as Future Developments. The always daunting Tower takes the No-Matter-What, Opportunities spot, with the magical tragic music of Morpheus, the King of Cups standing in as Problems & Prospects. We exit with a Synthesis in the mythic figure of Jason’s admirable early efforts to ‘conceive a new and powerful. creative venture’ in the Two of Wands."
At once depicting a daunting descent toward devilish difficulty and auguring possibility if the seeker truly searches, body and soul, so to say, Psyche here abandons certainty’s rigid insistence in attaining amorous engagement and agrees to descend toward Hell so as to fulfill the potentiation of love’s passionate perquisites. Loving connection is one way of expressing mediation’s purposive mandate, even if such salubrious sensibility does not sustain any sort of ‘easy row to hoe.’
The temporal triad in the reading begins with Orestes, in his trials with his parents Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, both murderous, father as an opportunistic gangster, mom as a vengeful fury. The upshot of this all-too-special Past as a completely embattled Three is that many irrepressible conflicts mandate sundering; certainly, as noted several times in these pages, since before Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, such necessary separation has characterized the emergence of such an overarching monopolized media that only by a revolutionary and radical development of grassroots production can anything akin to truly ‘popular press’ come to pass.
Current Contexts gives us Charon, an absolutely perfect exemplar of a populist upsurge of reporting and production. Embracing new philosophical foundations is apt—as in BTR’s proposing that present evolution’s particularity hinges on historical reality, both past and present rooted in conflicts of one sort and another. So too, purposefully seeking knowledge, a search for the truth at ease with the fact of never precisely finding it must keep going no matter apparently hopeless odds and blah blah blah.
Future Forms, in the meantime, even if discomfiting to an extent, yields Persephone’s High Priestess and what must seem basically a mandate to accept an intuitive track through difficulties, in which murky pathways toward “undeveloped creative potential” are the norm. “The seeds of change and new potentials wait silently in the womb of the underworld before they are given over to the care of the Earth Mother and brought to birth in the material world.”
A ‘breakdown of established norms,’ Poseidon’s signature in The Tower, once again gives just an ideal statement of ongoing Options, No-Matter-What, as it were. From the perspective of hyper-bourgeois plutocrat purveyors of monopoly’s mandatory mix of nausea and non-sequitur, the passage to a new world is like some sort of grotesque monstrosity, in which crisis compounds conundrums in ways that look as if cataclysm lies just ahead.
Precisely such contextualization portends enough upheaval to make capital’s mediated endgame, at best, mean the survival of even fewer mega-concentrations of wealth’s cultural hegemony and all its bullshit blah blah blah. This ‘breakdown’ automatically manifests many chances for real community reporting and creation in place of Hollywood’s and Madison Avenue’s and FaceGooAm’s actual and Internet ascendancy that in their varied formulations delineate the past hundred years or more.
Morpheus, meanwhile, as the indicia of Problems & Prospects, shows a sublime sensibility indeed, albeit with a dark twist. For Brand Chaos and all its militarized mayhem’s murderous profiteering, a healing media would combine being an oxymoron with being traitorous to the very primacy of profit that promotes this bottom line as the sole purpose of our existence.
For the rest of humanity, Morpheus’ musical and mellifluous powers can indeed show us how to live without despair no matter with what challenges nature and special interest confront us. The sour tinge to things, as a matter of this card especially, results from the way that many such healthy modalities end up being themselves wounded in fundamental ways, a word-to-the-wise who undertake this difficult journey into future forecasting and world building.
Jason’s Two of Wands in the Synthesis spot allows an optimistic estimate to close, if nothing else. This portrayal from the start of Jason’s trek demonstrates an encounter with the sources of intellectual and social solidarity in the manner of a visionary and innovative potential for production, for a true people’s project. In this vein, maybe, our calling to collaborate in building a popular cultural collective may “coalesce in a particular vision, although just how that vision might be achieved is not at all clear.”
To start is a step; necessity nudges us to create what will manage to serve humankind’s needs for fun and understanding, step by step thereafter. Jason stayed the course and found the resources and wit to bring justice and fruition. What more can one ask than the capacity to postulate a calculus of human creativity for species’ thriving and survival? A real people’s media, et voila!
Whatever else may prove estimable to estimate, so to say, this array clearly charts a course toward popular mediation as at core a plausible process, no matter the obstacles that attend any particular evolutionary development of the whole concatenated, chaotic morass of mediation. This is our burden and our bounty in this birthing of new methods and manners with which to sustain inquiry and knowledge, reflection and engagement.
In the event, not feeling utterly doomed seems like a victory of sorts, ha ha. Given my optimistic proclivities, on the other hand, I’ll almost always seek a roadmap that points toward possibility instead of the opposite. These tendencies mean that, in any empirical or everyday expression of a ‘Tantric Tarot Quest,’ I will discern definite hope, another gift from my Granny, always to palpate a hopeful approach, however dire things may seem at any given point in time.
Closing things out, I turn to one of my personal heroes, whose work I also often criticize, since, after all, I was ‘born a critic.’ Another intermediator whom I admire and simultaneously critique, Amy Goodman, conducts this interview with Vijay Prashad about Noam Chomsky, my aforementioned hero. This proffers a sweetly multilayered manifestation of media’s managing a vision, at minimum, of real possibility in the face of despicable circumstances, an inspired imagining of salubrious paths even if putrid happenings predominate in the here and now.
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
Twice now he and Danielle had shown the error of that estimate of reality. In his view, the marvel of such intoxication had been how much more oral and plain outright joyous his love’s interests had become, in a word, under the influence. For his part, these occasions elicited the closest to eternal love that he had ever touched, a pulsing without release that encouraged ever higher quantum jumps into the ambitious ambit of fucking without end, inasmuch as each instant of contact carried on as boundlessly and proceeded as effortlessly as flying from one’s bed in orbit around our orb in a sweet full moon dream.
In any event, as recollections and conceptualizations such as all of these and more percolated, he found that he had arrived. Tuscaloosa’s moist mid-September daytime swelter had, by the third hour after sunset, transmogrified into something much crisper, if not altogether chipper and Autumnal as of yet. The hour was late enough that he encountered no one in the parking lot or along the walk to the entryway.
Holly had said that Molly—this was just too trippy—would “be spending the weekend anyhow,” so that he should come over whenever he dropped Danielle off for her flight in the direction of four days in Boston. And here he was.
Gulp. His life had, over about three years, whatever his overall status as a vaunted ‘public intellectual, centered on the infinite reaches and limitless depths of his own erotic proclivities, along with a bit of study about and ruminating on human sexuality generally.
“If they want this,” he quipped to himself in his actually-practiced upper-crust British accent before he buzzed Holly’s unit out past McFarland Boulevard—away from campus and the “quarters of sin” that maintained around the quad, the quarter moon high above and, how fortunate, the third nine hour turn at the paper plant on a maintenance shift throughout the evening and therefore not in a position to gag bystanders with oxides of Sulfur—giggling a bit, he finished, “how could you call yourself a gentleman and refuse?”
He cocked an eyebrow, nodded at his thespian intonations, and sighed, then giggled. “Really!”
Upstairs, in the scheme of things, could hardly have evolved more like a rich stew of steamy yum. They barely tasted the wine.
His and Holly’s kiss hello ended with a full-throttled embrace in front of Molly on the sofa, who watched them like a cat watches its masters have sex: with a quiet interest and a question about treats. They perched on opposite sides of this Mistress Moll after, who responded to her friend’s “formal introduction” of and to Lou by delivering a light kiss to Holl’s throat, the sugary rush of “Ripple’s” lyrics a throbbing confection in Holly’s homemade light show.
At some point, between twenty-five minutes and twenty-six centuries after they had eaten respective measured fungal draughts, the little trio, diminished to one point of light in a vast, flashing cosmos of toasty tangerine fluorescence, had become a kissing snake that undulated over my relatively new lover’s pit group, our skin at one with the velour of each individual wine red couch component. A joint immersion in a steaming shower stall followed and then however many hours in the bedroom that transported their interlocked embraces till four-thirty-eight in the morning was ticking off Holly’s jolly rounded alarm clock.
Molly, now encased in a svelte pink silk negligee that covered everything but hid nothing, curled up on the corner of her friend’s monumental California kingsize bed, her eyes opening and closing as might a sated sleepy cat along similar lines as she considered herself, each blink like the passing of a lighthouse flare as dawn approached. She soon enough started snoring slightly.
Holly wanted one more go. She sat, loosely splayed in a lotus that allowed her to stroke her own thighs. She too became decidedly more intrigued with the mouth and tongue as the sweetness of the psiloscybish rush faded along with the now guttering candles by the bedside.
Lou’s experience, as always, was as if eternity had become a tangible number that one had merely to mention to manifest. He drank her in; she engulfed him and the entire world with sweaty aplomb and gave back again and again as she did so. Their thrashing finally pulled forth the spilling moment from this twenty-four year old recent Harvard graduate, and as they panted toward a resting heartrate, they noticed that Molly’s eyes were drinking them in.
After such unfolding dramatic expressions of what is possible—Lou had arrived home, having orchestrated the necessity of his exit early in the encounter, wanting time to ‘gather his thoughts,’ he told himself—the return, on the morning after or the morning after the morning after, to the actual can cause discomfiture or even chagrin or worse. In this case, however, fate intervened to make any such difficulty, however mild, inconsequential and irrelevant.
Holly had called, languid and affable in her mien over the phone, to suggest that they meet in the Westernmost lot a half hour before work and then go to the employee lounge and share a cup of coffee. Instead, they encountered a picket line, full of shouts and cries of solidarity and justice for the orderlies and maintenance crews and ubiquitous hundreds upon hundreds of underpaid and disrespected ‘hospital staff,’ eighty-two percent Black, who actually ran the ‘hospital’ for the, so-called in Lou’s case, ‘professional staff,’ ninety-three percent of whom were, like Holly and Lou, very Gringo indeed.
Holly shape-shifted when this scene confronted her. Her smile expressed a rictus sneer. She shrieked at the picketers, over and over and over again, “You should be ashamed!” as if nothing else occurred to her.
The response from the line—“Show a little solidarity, sister!” “’Shamed o’ what? Needin’ not to starve?” and all manner of indecipherable attempts to negotiate common cause—caused the woman with whom Lou had so recently been ensconced in connubial bliss to melt down, flowing into a persona at once judgmental and reactionary, a meeting place where George Wallace and the country club set could stand as one.
When Lou made clear that he was turning around, that he would honor the marchers’ pleas for comradeship, or whatever the hell else one might call it, the look that his never-again paramour shot at him would have frozen his gonads had he a big investment in their ‘relationship.’ She said only, simply, her voice between a sob and a hiss, “You should be ashamed!!!”
He didn’t reply, as well he might, that a little analysis and honesty might cast the imprecation back in her direction. He merely saw clearly that they were through.
One could only sleep with Marie Antoinette so long as she knew nothing of one’s closeness to Robespierre. Next Up—Chapter XVIII
*****
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
“Even in the fires of hell, as life’s blood seeps away, We will bring forth new life, even unto death. A birth to tie ourselves to Earth, even as we go. Life is our vow, life is our will.”
The subject of the wood piece above the fold, Hydrogen Bombs, is telling. As the dates that mark the world’s first nuclear war draw nigh, we might, emphatically if we favor human survival, reflect on this idea.
Moreover, an updated version of this third, basic Marshall Arts thermonuclear articulation, much more in tune with the history and public relations of ‘atomic power,’ is also on the table these days. Art along these lines arguably ‘serves society,’ at least inasmuch as—both as a pointed text and a colorful artifact—it posits truly delineating discussions of such matters among ourselves.
This second overview idea echoes Alperowitz and others who point out the ineradicable realities in play in this arena. The historical terrain is not really contested. Things have happened more or less as this piece of Driftwood Message Art asserts.
“Naturally Enough, Despite the Nauseating Nature of This ‘Normality,’ People Bend Backward to Believe That Their Betters & Masters Have Citizens’ & Others’ Best Interests at Heart in Their Erstwhile ‘Strategic’ Decisionmaking, in No Instance, Perhaps, More So Than As Regards U.S. Authorities’ Rationalizing & Justifying the 1945 Choice Instantly to Incinerate Or Lethally to Irradiate Hundreds of Thousand of Japanese Residents of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Two of Only a Handful of Japan’s Urban Areas That American Forces Had Barely Bombed, in So Doing Preparing to Examine, Evaluate, & Ascertain Most Closely & Clearly the Exact Destructive Force of the ‘Ace-in-the-Hole’ That Anglo-American Policymakers Had Then Already Planned, Whenever World War II Should ‘Happen to End,’ to Deploy in Order to Intimidate Wartime Ally, the Soviet Union: the Indisputable Factual Basis of This Brutal Imperial Logic Notwithstanding, America’s PR Impresarios—& the History Books That They Produce in League With Their Corporate Publicity Specialists—Promote the Falsehood & Fantasy That a Desire to End the Fighting & ‘Save Lives’ Guided Officials’ Thinking When They Inaugurated Our Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction of Indiscriminate Effect Against All & Sundry Among Living Things, Altogether Fomenting the Vilest & Most Self-Immolating Conceit of the Present Pass, That Nuclear Weapons Can ‘Protect Us’ Instead of Guaranteeing, Sooner Or Later, the Mass Collective Suicide That We Deserve Since We Have Permitted Plutocratic Plunderers to Operate a Protection Racket, Purportedly of Course ‘For Our Own Good.’"
This is nearly too many clauses to count, ha ha, again as a complete thought with two independent clauses, this time connected with a colon. If anyone asks, that number would be plus-or-minus fourteen, and the sentence, consisting of its pair of subject and verb completions, thereby gives the readers a subject and predicate duo—extra credit for correctly identifying them all.
In any event, grammar is easier to pin down than is political economy or sociopolitical eventuality. The regular rendering here under the Big Tent is that the Modern Nuclear Project is a top priority of bankers and capitalists and impresarios of all persuasions. If circumstantial evidence too voluminous to catalog were not probative enough, we can readily build a more direct case, in relation to established imperial, military, industrial, and financial operations and institutions that again and again view a future without nucleation, as it were, inconceivable.
I have some direct evidence directly at hand, in part because I once played poker with one of the two Microsoft plutocrats who saw fit to make a distressingly demented ‘documentary’ about how nukes are swell. I made a message on wood in response, to wit this.
Pandora's Lessons was the title. "Pandora Taught That Secrets Won't Stay in Their Boxes, Coming Always to Light, With Results Quite a Fright, So Perhaps We May Deduce That Some Billionaires' Slick Production, 'Pandora's Promise,' Which Disregards the Nymph's Lesson, Consists of Little More Than Self-Serving Propaganda & One Sided Manipulation."
In the present moment, one may surmise with ease, the response of rulers to any bill of particular charges against using fission to boil water or vaporize human beings is that without the atom’s energetic radiation, Carbon’s dreaded presence will make things too hot to handle, climatologically speaking. Upcoming essays here will explore two avenues for considering such perspectives.
The first will examine Arjun Makhijani’s masterful Carbon Free, Nuclear Free, a 2007 monograph, and ongoing project, that ought to command the widest possible audience. The second is stodgily technocratic, from one of the unsung heroes of Energy Economics, as it were. M. King Hubbert composed Nuclear Energy & the Fossil Fuels for a 1956 quarterly meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in San Antonio.
The work is in many ways the birthplace of peak oil and global warming worries, linking them intractably to fission and fusion solutions. When, two decades hence, Hubbert switched tacks and became a staunch proponent of renewables, especially those based on the sun—a fusion reactor safely removed from its beneficiaries—he rapidly found his career in tatters. He stuck to his guns, as it were, because of the fraternal problems of irradiating waste streams and thermonuclear extinctions.
Here’s an idea that is congruent with Hubbert’s warnings. Its title is descriptive: “Annihilating Our Kind Through Planetary Dominion.”
“Concentric Circles of Thermonuclear Shock Threaten to Overlap and Annihilate Humanity, Especially Since Nuclear Fools' Fantasies Remain Rooted As Ruling Plutocrats' Plans for Planetary Dominion.”
Despite the immutable catastrophic actuality of even a minor thermonuclear exchange, people—this humble correspondent included, no doubt—imagine escaping the fiendish fury. The first video of the day might present such a notion in an almost glowing, not to say radioactive, light. Entitled “Failed Fantasies,” the Wood Message at hand suggests a reality-based POV.
"No Matter How Remote Or Seemingly Impregnable, Even the Most Formidable Fortification Will Fail So-Called Survivalists' Fantasies in the Face of the Ecocidal Fury of Thermonuclear Holocaust."
Here’s another take along similar lines. “Suicide En Masse” is its name.
"Inasmuch As Nothing Lasts Forever, Countless Species Have Come & Then Gone During Life's Plus Or Minus Billion Years in Earth's Amicable Yet Implacable Environs; Always Before, Though, These Disappearing Acts Have Resulted From Brutal Fortune, For Instance the Unexpected & Uninvited Asteroid From Outer Space That Terminated Dinosaur Predominance: Only Humans Have Embarked on a Course to Exterminate Themselves, Apparently Because They Manifest the Fortitude For Mass Collective Suicide But Lack the Persistent Grit Essential to Maintain Amicable Mutuality & Salubrious Solidarity."
As a matter of course, these inherently technological developments have without exception depended on verifiable knowledge about the universe’s core components, as it were. Natural Philosophy formed the basis for the rise of science-based societies. Readers may or may not recall BTR’s brief mention of Vannevar Bush’s Science: the Endless Frontier, yet this explication of things founded the National Science Foundation, which to this day only tangentially recognizes the ubiquitous political and economic roots of scientific enterprise.
“Selling Science” tells just such a story on a little piece of colored wood. “Having Ever Risen in Tandem With Expanded Knowledge & Its Application to Policy & Practice, Living Standards, & Their Ineluctable Universal Appeal, Have Assured That Capacities to Predict & Control Nature Have Grown Apace, Eliciting Sales of Science & Its Legerdemain to High Bidding High Rollers, Who Now Control Both 'Public' & Corporate Campus Labs That Engender & Then Engineer Often Predetermined Consequential 'Truth' That Potently Promotes Paymasters' Profits, Altogether a Ubiquitous Dynamic That Transpires in No Realm More Clearly Than That of Public Health & Social Welfare.”
Some reports from the monopoly media suggest that many citizens almost celebrate this ongoing existence of the most thoroughgoing existential risk. Such a fatalistic or fiercely fanatical frenzy of rapture worship needn’t end up humanity’s fate, though it obviously may define our collective future.
“Amity, Enmity” proffers a little Political Thought Charm that advises us in these matters. "Given How We & All Our Manifested Mundane Marvels Might Vanish Forever Because of Some Middling Morning's Thermonuclear Meltdown, Perhaps, For Now, We Ought to Value Amity Over Enmity."
Today, this article enunciates an overarching intention of Big Tent efforts, to notice how established norms and nostrums navigate society toward primarily nuclear solutions to social exigency. It also serves as my annual installment to testify, ferociously if not dispositively, about the import of August 6th and 9th and the responsibility that we all bear in regard to that importance. As my granny liked to say, ‘a word, to the wise, ought to be adequate.’
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
From East Asia, one finds evidence of marijuana gathered in quantity from five thousand years or more ago. Moreover, hallucinogens have a many sided and ancient lineage in Japan. “Magic mushrooms references in Japan are often referred to as dance-inducing(Odoritake and Maitake) or laughter-inducing (Waraitake) mushrooms. These “laughing mushrooms” are the subject of a number of folktales as well as the names of ancient dance forms in Japan.”
From before the dawn of history, various hallucinogenic or otherwise intoxicating plants were present in China as well. Wherever one looks in these particular ‘cradles of civilization,’ their forebears took part ritually in gatherings at which participants took into their bodies the basis for transformed consciousness and vision.
From the Pacific and South Asia, we have already seen extensive documentation regarding cultures and peoples of Oceana. India attests to ancient usage of Soma, a plant-based substance that led to reputedly almost omnipotent experiences. “The identity of the ancient plant known as Soma is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the field of religious history.
Common in the religious lore of both ancient India and Persia, the sacred Soma plant was considered a God. When Soma was pressed and made into a drink, the ancient worshipper who imbibed it gained the powerful attributes of this God. The origins of Soma go back into the shadowy time of prehistory, back to the common Aryan ancestors of both the Vedic Hindu religion of India and the Persian religion of Mazdaism.”
Thus, when plus-or-minus five thousand years ago, Aryan conquerors came on the scene in the subcontinent, they brought with them an already well-formulated and long-practiced drug dynamic. This ‘Soma’ included many aspects of the soon-to-predominate culture. It related religiously to the powers of the gods to grant strength to believers. It related to political control. It informed the musical tradition of Rig Veda.
“A significant number of its hymns sing the praises of soma, a psychoactive potion that was made and consumed during a ritual sacrifice. Using 108 bricks, a hearth was constructed in the shape of a bird, within which priests would build a fire. An animal, tethered to a post was beheaded and the main part of the ritual began.
The priests would lay out a leather mat and place upon it two circular grinding-stones. A certain plant was crushed between these stones with an admixture of milk or water to make an inebriating drink which was then consumed.
As this process allows no time for fermentation we must infer that soma (also called amṛita “immortality”) was a decoction of a psychoactive plant, and not alcohol. Alcohol was certainly known to the Aryans but it was allowed only to the caste of warriors and kings (Skt., kṣatriya).”
The entire globe proffers scholarship, investigation, and knowledge of the folk roots of many of the drugs in the pharmacopoeia, a substantial portion of which served ‘ritual’ purposes and other ways of affecting consciousness. General accounts of the origins of language, religion, and culture now treat the contention as close-to-established theory. Such life forms as psilocybin and tobacco and coca and on and on and on, acted as a conduit to humanity’s unfolding persistence.
Moreover, the intake of these transformative lifeforms probably predated culture and anatomically modern humans as such. Its tendency is a much more deeply embedded phenomenon. According to some scholars, this pattern stems from the following of ungulates and the partaking of the fungal forms that proliferated in the herbivores’ stools. Such dietary choices likely came before primates en masse migrated from Africa and continued through successive waves of wandering that underlay the manifestation of people more or less just like us.
That such thoughts constitute components—and arguably core pieces of the overall construct at that—of science, of scientific knowledge, discomfits many folks. This is arguably especially true in the United States where at best puritanical positions all-too-often stubbornly continue. One recent scholar, whose works illuminate the inevitable conjunctions of magic, religion, and science, of actual awareness and fingers-crossed mumbo jumbo, speaks eloquently about these things.
His thoughts establish a sort of benchmark for this essay’s contention that a widespread and revered practice of psychoactive and psychedelic ritual emanates from every social sector of the world, past and present. Their ubiquity in his estimation both is only possible inasmuch as they worked for the peoples involved and proves that the substances themselves were part of a complicated web of problem and need, of human possibility and consciousness. He takes us from China to Europe, from Africa to Australia, from the Pacific islands to the Americas.
“[M]any Northwest Coast people…do have so intense an emotional feeling[about nature] that ‘love’ is the only word[for it]. …[They] feel that the trees, animals, and rocks of their areas are home and family—living spirit persons… .the result of thousands of years of having to take forests and animals seriously. If one has to interact with plants and animals over time, one cannot help developing emotional and moral feelings toward them.
Humans simply do not remain neutral about things they have to take constantly into account. Interactions construct our world. Our very selves are born of interacting. Interactions with beings we take seriously are powerful emotional events, and, indeed, more than that; …Our selves are the products of our interactions… .
In the cases noted here, these Native American peoples must depend on the forests and animals, and must be responsible for caring for them. …A worldview grounded in this sort of involvement does not lead to cutting the world into magic, science, and religion. It leads, rather, to cutting the world into ethical versus nonethical behavior, into local versus nonlocal place, into factual versus nonfactual claims, into effective versus ineffective ways of living and working, into prosocial versus antisocial behavior(remembering that animals and plants are part of society), and into one’s immediate social world—including animals and plants” and everything else.
In such a context, one engages with all that nature proffers. One does not generally reject, let alone criminalize, those things that have through immemorial practice expressed rites of passage and transformation. To do so would seem not only bizarre but also immoral, perhaps wickedly insane.
Again, one could continue. However, perhaps the finding should seem plausible enough without venturing further. Currently-‘proscribed’ plants have served as chosen and beneficent coventurers on the paths that human ‘traffic’ has followed. Strong medicines, stalwart tonics, and useful stimulants that our ancestors have utilized ‘time out of mind’ are now the basis for ‘life-in-prison’ or worse.
MANIFESTING MYTHOS
In addition to this litany of both inaugural and contemporary anthropological assessments that make the point that humans seek out ‘expanded’ awareness, a process that has served as an adaptive attribute of our kind’s survival, multiple myths and other expressions of humanity’s early(Paleolithic or prior) narrative-bent also portray such usages. As above, one might take a few lifetimes merely to delve a substantial proportion of such accounts.
Perhaps a mere précis of such items will serve to make our point: that people and psychoactive flora have coevolved, that our ‘wiring’—as we would see in our tales about ourselves—repeatedly uncovers that this swirling dance of a human consciousness, which incorporates various sorts of psychoactive stuff in its twirling turns, is inherent, no more a matter of choice than is drawing breath.
No chronicler of mythos in human culture is better-known than Joseph Campbell. His writings again and again touch on these aspects of our kind’s development. He conveys literally untold thousands of anecdotal portraits of human ritual and event that demonstrate the conjunction, even though he himself does not emphasize the revelation, of psyche and psychedelia, of human psychology and the ministration of ‘altering’ herbal concoctions, so to say.
He writes of a legendary couple from Southwest Asia who manage to live through their intended sacrifice because their stories and perhaps their comestibles so stupefy the ‘guests’—later, this yarnsmith’s words were “like the hashish that makes people happy when awake; then (they) became like the hashish of a dreamer“—who had come to arrest them that these erstwhile executioners slept past the dawn-hour appointed for the seizure to take place. Perhaps readers may note that this unfolds in a fashion that parallels Scheherazade’s legend.
“But when the sun rose and the tale of Far-li-mas closed, unspeakable astonishment filled the confused minds of all; for when those who remained alive looked about them their glances fell upon the priests—and the priests lay dead upon the ground.
Sali got up and prostrated herself before the veiled king. ‘O my king!’ she said. ‘O my brother(who was on a schedule himself for upcoming elimination)! Akaf! Throw from yourself the veil; show yourself to your people and offer up your offering, now, yourself! For these here have been mowed down by the Angel of Death, Azrail, through God’s command. …And since that day, there have been no more human sacrifices in Napata.”
Campbell presents a slough of tales and facts that suggest elements that contributed to the replacement of matriarchal, matrilineal groups with patriarchal and patrilineal standards. The primordial power of woman never completely disappeared, yet certainly the tales of the gods themselves illustrated the elevation of the male godheads to pride of place in the Olympian and other orders. In this scheme of things, the oversight of growing things—like herbs and mushrooms and grapes, oh my!—and the places where they dwelt nevertheless generally fell to the goddesses.
An exception to this gender tendency of course is Dionysus. And all of the versions and outlets of his multifaceted story certainly mesh with the thesis here, since his particular manifestation of divinity embodied a chaos that clearly invokes and uses all manner of elevating concoctions.
The search, for example, < religion OR myths OR gods OR deities OR dionysus OR dionysos OR bacchus "altered state" OR "altered consciousness" hallucinogens OR hallucinogenic OR psychedelics OR amanita muscaria OR "magic mushrooms"> garners well over 20,000 citations, whereas a wider net, <prehistory OR paleolithic religion OR magic OR gods hallucinogen OR hallucinogenic OR "psychoactive plants" OR soma>, yields up just short of a million, seven hundred thousand hits.
Campbell, for his part, also notes in multiple places the way that drugs may have played a role in Paleolithic and early Neolithic practices of human sacrifice; at other times, more frequently, he pictures the use of stimulants and potions and alcohol and possibly much more as an accompaniment of such scary rituals. Nor do these rites equate with entertainment. They are at the core of the way that identifiable people constructed their identities—how they conceived children, reared young people, prescribed or proscribed all sorts of behaviors, and so forth.
In an observed case of such a ‘death orgy,’ in New Guinea, after riotous rites in which betel nut and palm wine, at a minimum, are constant, “(t)he particular moment of importance to our story occurs at the conclusion of one of the boys’ puberty rites, which terminates in a sexual orgy of several days and nights, during which everyone in the village except the initiates makes free with everybody else, amid the tumult of mythological chants, drums, and the bull-roarers—until the final night, when a fine young girl, painted, oiled, and ceremonially costumed, is led into the dancing ground and made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs.
With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates cohabit, one after another; and while the youth chosen to be last is embracing her the supports of the logs are jerked away and the platform drops, to a prodigious boom of drums. A hideous howl goes up and the dead girl and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted, and eaten.”
In one way or another, this stunning tableau is a scene that played out—from equatorial Africa and the Americas and across the Pacific through Micronesia and South Asia—again and again. Its horror forces one to ponder why such things happened; not to justify them, obviously, but to comprehend from whence we’ve all come.
“The leading theme of the primitive-village mythology of the Dema is the coming of death into the world, and the particular point is that the death comes by way of a murder. The second point is that the plants on which man lives derive from this death.
The world lives on death: that is the insight rendered dramatically in this image. Moreover, as we learn from other myths and mythological fragments in this culture sphere, the sexual organs are supposed to have appeared at the time of this coming of death. Reproduction without death would be a calamity, as would death without reproduction.
We may say, then, that the interdependence of death and sex, their import as the complementary aspects of a single state of being, and the necessity of killing—killing and eating—for the continuance of this state of being, which is that of man on earth, and of all the things on earth, the animals, birds, and fish, as well as man—this deeply moving, emotionally disturbing glimpse of death as the life of the living is the fundamental motivation supporting the rites around which the social structure of the early planting villages was composed.” Next Up—Part 3
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
I’ve got another reading in a couple days. Fingers crossed, full of praise for the dandy delight that the delicate miracle of embodiment had made miraculously manifest in my existence, I’ll be stalwart in my stubbornness. Ha ha.
*************
July 15th, 2027
I knew that the midweek afternoon crowd—over 150 at the Peachtree Road Borders Cafe, not including security, media, various gawkers more or less clueless—represented success, at least from the business perspective of booksellers. Still, given the extremely sharp stick in fundamentalists' eyes that my story represented, I knew that the hazards of success might prove significant.
More than this, I knew that Borders, for all of its trendiness and upscale pretension, needed courage, along with a profit motive, to host this gig under the circumstances that prevailed. Capital craves consensus at exactly the same time that it cannot exist without constant controversy, a perfect foil for my little monograph, on a table with other ‘best sellers’ near the front entrance.
I knew furthermore, ironically if one leans in that direction, that the thousand Peachtree Road Baptist Church protesters boosted my sales with their frothing rants and wild-eyed threats, railing at my blasphemy beyond police cordons across the frosted six lanes of Peachtree. I knew that they needed their ardor, given the shivery conditions in which their anguished outcries occurred, although my tale suggested that the beliefs underlying their passion tied them to a doom even more frigid than this Appalachian winter storm.
And finally, I knew that I was neither dismissive nor nervous, nor even particularly interested, about whatever risk I entailed from baiting the human loathing for the inevitable mortal freeze that ultimately cradles each of us, pointing out that every hot hour that we exist is potentially the prelude to an eternity on ice. My unanticipated survival created an incontrovertible calling, come what might.
All this knowledge percolated through my brain as I looked at the sleet descending in dark sheets outside the second floor plate glass, thirty feet above the sidewalk, less than a hundred short yards from my Christian detractors. To the day, this was all taking place eighteen months after Doris and I had flown to Reykjavik to begin the Arctic cruise we had always dreamed of taking, "before the ice all melts."
I smiled, to think of the similar immersion in frigid fluid that my opponents were now enduring, in order to discount the implications of my emersion from polar waters equally frosty as the sleet today. Since my frozen dunking a year and a half before, I had, literally, not had a single chilly moment.
Parallel to my multi-tracked pondering of this, my reading approached its end, from the last chapter of my just-released 'tell-all' expose of death and revival—"Jim Lewis' gauntlet to Creationism," the Times had called the book. And now, thanks to the hypertextual marvels that are part of the basis for what I call, in my work, "our quantum-consciousness-jump," readers everywhere can read my remarks, and at the same time know my thoughts about them at this later moment.
From the edge of awareness, barely audible to my observant self, the words tripped off my tongue, from page 169 and the final few paragraphs of the fifth-printing's afterward. The poet in these lines speaks of a world where joy and rationality are, universally, the choices of most social participants, or citizens, if one wants to think in such fashion.
********
March 20, 2025
"Just hours before, my wife and I had been laughing at the passing icebergs, swilling Scotch, and slurring Ogden Nash: Some say the world will in end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice, well
Ice is nice,
And would suffice.
And then we drowned, in cold dark water. When I recognized this pending finality, my estimate of it all, ever ironic, made me grin: ‘Where’s the magic in that?’”
I raised my gaze from the page to a smattering of clapping. Every reading suggested at best a tepid appreciation for my now inescapable prospect of persisting in propounding a ferocious carpe-diem insistence, so to speak.
Figuring that some of what was unfolding was unsettling to listeners, to say the least, I always waited before continuing with my remarks and any formal call and response with the crowd, as it were. Seeing no waving hands that demanded attention, I continued. Next Up—Part Two
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
In the event, he headed in a straight line from George's rear door, at a ninety degree tangent from both a return to his climb back to ground and the extemporaneous pathway that he had just been taking. The flora here was much more like a series of thickets, out of which at irregular intervals emerged the sky trees with their greenish gray and milky leaves.
Automatically, Jack scampered more quickly over any even slightly open ground, thinking, correctly as matters transpired, that this thicketed terrain would slow George's progress. In the silence that marked his meandering trot along, he again felt the clinging concern that he couldn't hear clearly where his nemesis was precisely.
“How could I get him to make some noise?” The query answered itself when he stumbled and he dropped his sack full of lucre. Giggling at the watery viscosity of the mud in which his nose had planted his face, he opened eyes to rise and notice a pair of golden orbs adjacent to his treasure-sack.
Coins in the bag amounted to an uncountable mass of riches, minted and in mint condition. He sensed that George would notice a well-placed nugget. Jack guffaws rang from Cloudland’s tree-trunks when he pictured the teeth-gnashing that would accompany the ogre’s encountering a second, or third such intentional distraction, cleverly displayed with one of Jack’s frayed extra socks! He watched in his head as the Monster ripped the cloth to shreds in his teeth. Again, he laughed.
For a passage of a quarter hour, he invented centuries-in-advance the notion of 'designing' environs, an exterior designer, ha ha, placing three of the precious hunks of specie, crafted and golden-gleaming, in almost-impossible-to-miss natural pedestals—a rock, a knot, a lap of moss—where they would seize a greedy wanderers eyes. He clapped when the gold-and-green glow of this last place impressed his look with its alluring glory.
Whatever the cost of his choice, he liked the way that it tipped some cosmic scale in his favor. When he heard, not so near as to induce any temporary wave of nausea yet clearly closer than would make an escapee comfortable, George's first triumphant yelping roar, he clung to this strategic sense of things, indubitably worth much more than the triad of currency's value to him.
A merely rudimentary familiarity with numbers and their magic meant that Jack had no notion that he'd lightened his load of lucre by less than one percent. He didn't concern himself with such ideas anyway. He embraced the elation that he would be safe in continuing just to trot along rather than at minimum intermittently sprinting to exhaustion in order to savor a satisfactory distance from the beastly creature than intended to make a bloody meal of him.
As much as anything like a heartily healthy sense of flight-before-fighting, Jack felt as he cantered on his uncanny course a deep awareness, almost a recognition of having been before in just the glades and glens through which he was jogging, almost as gleeful as if Elma were running at his side and holding his hand in the way that her memory held his heart. His soul leapt and plunged if he passed a place that seemed so utterly familiar that it must be close at hand to the little shack that he shared with his Mother.
Evidence also abounded, in the course of things, that the Giant had trod these tracks before. Most interesting, at least for optimistic future reference, was evidence of other caches that George had buried hither and yon, cloudy earth and bush that showed a scrabbling evidence of more or less recent digging.
Then, again stopping almost in his tracks, the first shell appeared, pearly in its luminescence and tempting in its sinuous shape, though he gathered himself gaily enough to persist in his pursuit of escaping his pursuer. Only after he detected, further back this time, the Ogre's furious bellowing of pain and gain at once did Jack pause, when a fourth of these apparent gifts-from-the-sea appeared along his way.
“What is this then?” He picked up the halfshell gingerly to answer his inquiry, turning it over truly to wretch in recognition. What he dropped as if it seared his fingers had not come from any distant oceanic shore. No, these were neatly halved skulls! These had been youngsters such as he, albeit less fortunate or facile, whose ends had been far less felicitous than the facilitated denouement that he intended for himself and Elma.
Inferences intruded on the noisome business as he noticed additional indication here of recently turned sky-soil. “It's not the body.” Of that Jack was sure, inasmuch as Elma had assured him that not even his bones would remain should George ever get his teeth into our lad. The Giant's greed outweighed his lazy ways, yet interment must ever inherently count as drudgery, only likely for one who much preferred to feed than to labor if something cherished was so entombed.
The crack from at most a few furlongs back caught his breath with a bear's monstrous slash, sending Jack once more forth all focused in his serious seeking of survival's surcease. He bolted at the same instant that George chuckled deeply, believing that he would soon eat his fill of fresh boy.
Now, Jack was flying; his feet felt winged in their flight, and of course his head was already in the clouds, ha ha. Quickly, any resonant din receded and then disappeared. He forced his terror from out of his breast.
After all, he didn't want to sprint so relentlessly that he became compliant prey for the Giant's next stew. He felt a chill in thinking about Elma after such an ugly evolution of matters afoot, so to say. As he contemplated life and doom and his lover's presence in either case, he took his first steps on his escape's final tracks, in so doing remembering his intended tasks at hand.
Checking on the trio of traps that they'd set up along the route homeward would slow the spooked-and-yet-hopeful youngster too much, yet he had to know one thing. At the dimmest dip along the trail, with Thunderhead Oaks a chapel's ceiling, he halted. There, invisible, his stout, stalwart string, taut enough to pluck musically—and all but unbreakable—stretched out an invitation to George's tripping collapse into rage’s ranting incaution, if not catastrophic injury.
His inspection finished, therefore, he lifted off like a hungry hawk that hears a rabbit's rustle. He knew how close he was to his next challenge, what he believed would be the beginning of a bounteous boisterous future of plenty and joy.
Cresting the slight rise that hid the upwelling of his very own Forever Tree, Jack's steps stuck to the path, so that the young hero, glowing with sweat and breathing very intensely indeed, more or less instantly stopped there and stood, still as his Alpine arboreal familiar. Grace grew in his booming heart, as he prepared to punctuate whatever fate served on his plate.
Moments later, erect and taut with anticipation, he touched his family's sacred arboreal behemoth. “Terraria,” he sighed, saying her sacred name. Dropping purse and twine and bag followed apace, hoping ma wasn't in the way down below.
Hope, though not the same as calculation, had always been a state to which Jack had aspired; he always wanted to imagine good outcomes and have an optimistic and jolly spirit about all the craziness and occasionally daunting dangers of existence. Worry was worse than wearisome; it was worthless. This is what he would, with Elma's help, show Katrina in their future felicity.
He didn't know what he could do if George successfully evaded, or at least lived through, his and Elma's tricky traps. “Ma can go in the root cellar,” he thought calmly, recollecting his cohort's indicating that George detested beets and fled the scent of them.
“What then?” He sighed and readied himself to cling and plunge at once. “We'll find out soon enough!” Next Up—Chapter Four.
Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…
This statement about the import of imperial matters in this arena is undeniably apt, inasmuch as monopoly media almost ubiquitously declaim that ‘Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism.’ In other words, propaganda is propagating the ludicrous notion that critiquing an ideology is indistinguishable from despising a culture or religion, an idea with mysterious allure despite its indisputable idiocy.
Obviously, to anyone whose heart and brain still function, Judaism does not equal Zionist practices, any more than Islam equates to Jihad or Christianity creates inquisitions as a matter of course. “Tumbalalaika” may be kitsch, yet the song’s immense, impenetrable Life-Force-Energy simply explodes from its every performance, whether Jewish or otherwise.
However, equally incontestable, imperial imprimatur’s emphasis on Zionist practices is something that demands close inspection and a critical response. Can one show this connection, this clear and convincing linkage between Zionism and empire, particularly the two ongoing national expressions of the Anglo-American Empire?
While today’s statement-of-the-matter will induce persistent investigation, so to speak, a provisional answer would likely sound like this. “The answer to this question is a more or less incontrovertible affirmative.” The remainder of this here-and-now article explores this affirmation.
As usual, I’ve been making my path as I amble onward. I was hypothesizing that some semblance of intersecting engagement and agendas existed to connect Zionism with big money, empire, ruling class interests, and all that blah blah blah. Little did I realize how richly the universe would reward inquiring along these lines, so much so that this note in Number Seventeen will be a first installment, ha ha.
In terms of the general proposition that Herzl’s patrons and Zionism’s backers would tend at once to rely on and to represent imperial lucre, one might begin at the start of our Current Era, which in some sense could be dated from imperial Caesar’s crushing the Jerusalem revolt and ‘dispersing’ disobedient Jews around the Roman diaspora. Et voila! Moses Hess shows up, a prolific philosopher, communist, anarchist, socialist and ‘Twin-Father’ of modern Zionism, whose culminating magnum opus bears the flag, Rome & Jerusalem, a volume that introduces Hess as thinker and actor.
Before he died in 1875, he wrote and advocated presciently indeed. “Hess developed a practical plan for the realization of his dream of Jewish restoration. He advocated the colonization of Palestine and the foundation of a Jewish Colonization' Association. He dreamed that Jews, having been settled on the road to India and China, will become the mediators between Asia and Europe. For political support, he looked to his beloved France, the embodiment of freedom and champion oppressed nations. But he also dreamed of a Jewish Congress, demanding the support of the Powers for the purchase of Palestine.”
The original subtitle of Hess’ last major work, The Last National Question, helps to see the overall context most clearly. He writes of his ‘return’ to the ‘faith of his fathers.’
“After an estrangement of twenty years, I am back with my people. I have come to be one of them again, to participate in the celebration of the holy days, to share the memories and hopes of the nation, to take part in the spiritual and intellectual warfare going on within the House of Israel, on the one hand, and between our people and the surrounding civilized nations on the other; for though the Jews have lived among the nations for almost 2,000 years, they cannot, after all, become a mere part of the organic whole."
Fast-forwarding three decades, Theodor Herzl, historian Philip Earl Steele writes, had made multiple pacts with monied power in order to advance what he was beginning to refer to as a ‘Zionist Project,’ mas o menos. Herzl’s correspondent, “Chicago’s William Blackstone, persuaded America’s WASP elite to petition President Benjamin Harrison to convene an international conference with the purpose of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. …also demonstrates that Herzl knew of the (Blackstone) Memorial’s long-forgotten British ‘spin-off’—namely, the Lovers of Zion Petition submitted to the British Prime Minister."
Some of Herzl’s most quoted lines make clear his allegiance to a fully monetized Jewish Nationhood. “I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit among our people. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation and wish to be the most modern in the world."
A quite pointed demarcation of this interconnection of money and Jewish statehood appears in the case of Rockefeller interests. A document released by our Central Intelligence Agency, prior to noting ongoing Rockefeller donations to Zionist campaigns, spoke generally about the intersection of big-money and plans for a ‘new Israel.’
“For some considerable time, the majority of Zionist leaders acted as agents of British imperialism. Many of them, Abba Eban and Reuven Shiloah, for instance, worked in the pay of the Intelligence Services. Down to the end of the ‘twenties,’ London was the chief Zionist centre."
But there was a group of American Zionists, among them big Wall Street magnates, who did not find this situation to their interest. The American monopolies wanted to bring Zionism under their political control and turn it into their own agency, and they used as their chief instrument for this the influence and financial power of the big Jewish capitalists of the United States.
Wall Street undoubtedly had a hand in the decision of the international Zionist congress in Zurich in July 1929 to enlist the participation of American capitalists in the Jewish Agency.”
Nor did this devotion ever dry up. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, founded in 1917 as a contemporary of Balfour’s letter to Baron Rothschild, headlines a speech by John D.’s grandson, the American plutocrat politician Nelson Rockefeller, named in this titular profferal: “Rockefeller Proclamation Hails Israel As ‘One of Our Most Cherished Allies." One could go on and on, Rockefeller money and institutions omnipresent in Zionism’s plans and operations.
Predictably, Rothschild money and influence played some part as well. The financial center of Rothschild organizations rejected direct intervention in this sphere. Those who would see spiritual and holy elements as most wholly pertinent highlight this fact. Here is Hess’ response in Rome & Jerusalem.
Our supporters come from outside and within Judaism, he indicated, among the latter, without exception, an Israeli nation “the fundamental thought of all pious Jews from the time of the destruction of Jerusalem until the present day. And there are such Jews—let it not worry Mr. Kompert, even among the Rothschild brothers."
A scholarly analysis in the grassroots info portal at Quora, details the scores—or likely, hundreds, of pre-Israel Palestinian Zionist developments that various Rothschilds oversaw. The sequence gives a briefing to the question, “What Role Did the Rothschild Family Have in the Formation of Israel." As always, as evermore, more is available, and more is coming.
Furthermore, almost with intercontinental ballistic precision in our present passage's mundane and gruesome everyday, this exact ‘family relation’ among empire and Zionism and the Rothschild clan point to the ‘starting gun’ for the Jewish Homeland Project, which shot went off with the submission of the Balfour Declaration to Lionel Walter Rothschild, who “dedicated himself to the cause” after the plutocrat met one of his other English grantees, Chaim Weitzman, who went on to become the first President of the actual Israeli State.
From a different branch of the family Baron Edmond de Rothschild carried out the sorts of ‘resettlement programs’ that sent tens of thousands of ‘new Jews’ to Palestine. He was acting according to a conscientious expression of conscience that was, not happenstantially, in perfect plumb with British imperial ambition in the collapsing realm of Ottoman rule. He acted “because I saw in you the realisers of the renaissance of Israel and of that ideal so dear to us all, the sacred goal of the return of Israel to its ancestral homeland.”
Moreover, “(i)n the spirit of this vision, Edmond was inspired to support not only the physical and economic needs of the fledgling communities but also the intellectual and spiritual dimension of their activity. For example, he saw the development of The Hebrew University as ‘a great event in the modern history of Judaism’ and actively supported the revival of the Hebrew language. Indeed, Eliezer ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, dedicated his famous Hebrew dictionary to him.”
In the midst of World War slaughters and questions about oil in Persia and Arabia of utmost plutocratic import—‘navies need oil,’ all of that—England’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, acceded briefly and modestly to the formation of an Israel in the lands of Palestine. Limited in scope, it was nonetheless the formalization of an imperial policy that has quite stubbornly evolved over almost 110 years to yield the Nakba-of-the-now in Gaza right this second.
“The Balfour Declaration, for all its vagaries, constituted the first step toward the objective of political Zionism as outlined by the First Zionist Congress at its meeting in Basel, Switzerland in 1897: ‘Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law.’ Theodor Herzl had failed to land such a commitment, either from the Ottoman sultan or from any of Europe’s potentates.
The declaration was the much-awaited opening: narrow, conditional, hedged, but an opening all the same. ‘There is a British proverb about the camel and the tent,’ said the British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann later that November. ‘At first the camel sticks one leg in the tent, and eventually it slips into it. This must be our policy.’ And so it became."
A followup to this overview briefing of the Zionist Project—a title that merely gives a different name for the JHP above—will incorporate more detail about the estimable Sir Balfour as a way of illuminating the links between World War and the ZP/JHP’s work, in collaboration with capital’s creamiest upper-crust, to create Israel as a nation-state on former Ottoman lands that Finance Capital had declared a manifest intention to administer, wholesale, as a franchise operation of Anglo-American empire’s plundering plutocracy. Additionally, the nine-part series laid out in Number Fifteen will begin, sooner rather than later.
In fulfilling these intentions, inherently, ongoing efforts to explicate these matters will suggest, if not outright prove, that Zionism’s capture of elite politics and monopoly banking—or, put another way, elite politics’ and monopoly banking’s devolving to Zionist schemes—lead irreversibly toward imperial war’s ‘final solution’ for everything. Unfortunately, for worshipers of Life-Force-Essences and attendant blah blah blah, this terminal end of things may end up bringing about Mass Collective Suicide.
As I live and breathe, Big Tent Review will continue quilting together this patchwork of the workings of the world. This irreversibly necessitates talking about many things that many people would prefer to avoid or evade. So be it! As a friend from the poker tables at Courier House liked to say, apropos the layered brutal-absurdities and dark-hilarity of this entire realm of learning, ‘Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke!’
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
Martin Luther King, Jr. was probably not a Communist, albeit he inevitably, as a Christian believer—as opposed to a fake-holy-roller—had some decidedly communistic tendencies, a la the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. And as an authentic, truly rooted proponent of social perfection, not only for ‘people of color,’ but also for everyone who suffers systemic oppression, he exemplifies an absolutely unbreakably knotted link between any reformulation of human progress and ‘commie-thinking.’
In the event, Highlander definitely included Marxist and Communist precepts in its founding affect, so to speak. An anecdote to begin a marvelous book about the school makes this transparent, even as it illustrates how any socially progressive activity’s inherent ‘communistic tendencies’ means that this will lead to demonization and defamation in a State religiously insistent that only anticommunist beliefs are worthwhile.
“The name Highlander Folk School has rarely evoked a neutral response, even among southerners who have heard of it only vaguely. Several years ago a friend and I were talking with a college freshman from Sewanee, Tennessee, located about nine miles from the school's original site near Monteagle.
Too young to remember the time when Highlander operated so close to his home, the student seemed puzzled as I recounted its history until I mentioned that the school had come under attack for its interracial activities. Suddenly he brightened. 'Oh,' he exclaimed, 'you mean that Communist training school!'"
Lest anyone forget, ‘civil rights’—as a way to battle the police state, as a move toward recognizing labor-unions, and as a mechanism for dismantling white-supremacist imprimatur—was one of the American Communist Party’s initial overarching prime movers in its erstwhile revolutionary plans and dreams, a fact that appears as powerfully as anywhere else in the iconic case of the Scottsboro boys, nine Black youth who nearly died because they exited a hobo’s train ride at the same time as three White females.
Finding, or at least seeking, ways to battle and dismantle the police-state protocols that have all-too-often earmarked ‘the land of the free,’ HFS participated through workshops, classes, and other chances to communicate and engage with people to succeed in opposing bigotry and prejudice.
“Although the school operated throughout Appalachia and the South, its programs remained rooted in the local community. Highlander shaped its curriculum to fit the needs of its students. It focused not on the symptoms but on the causes of the problems facing black and white southerners, and it both anticipated and responded to larger movements for social change.“
Ultimately, HFS stood for things that necessarily depended on the proposition that improved human lives were the whole point. How could any other central idea more appropriately describe Highlander’s purpose? No matter how controversial, any program or project or priority of the Center served human satisfaction at its core.
“In general, Highlander envisioned a system in which people had more control over their lives, in which they could achieve a higher standard of living, gain unrestricted access to community services and institutions, associate with whom they chose without penalty, make government responsive to the popular will, and exercise individual creativity that contributed to the common welfare. Similarly, brotherhood suggested justice, a respect for individuals, love, and human relationships free of prejudices or barriers that prevented the fullest enjoyment of life."
Unavoidably, basic conditions—like a roof, nutritious food, really gainful employment—will determine how rich an experience of existence regular people may, on average, assess. ‘Standard-of-Living’ issues take some understandable precedence, in other words. And that means looking at how things are going in workplaces for working people,an aspect of which was arguably the first societal scheme in which Highlander Folk School played a part, in support of unions and worker control.
“In 1937 the HFS faculty joined the southern organizing drive of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938). Over the next decade the staff helped organize textile workers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina, directed large-scale labor education programs in eleven southern states, and developed a residential program to build a broad-based, racially integrated, and politically active labor movement in the region."
Without question, in loads of situations on the ground, Communists were the workers with the courage and leadership capacities to win organizing struggles. They and their unaffiliated radical comrades automatically recognized that both color segregation and ‘separate-but-equal’ lies insidiously undermined, and eventually destroyed, any conceivable union’s enduring continuance.
“Although the school operated throughout Appalachia and the South, its programs remained rooted in the local community. Highlander shaped its curriculum to fit the needs of its students. It focused not on the symptoms but on the causes of the problems facing black and white southerners, and it both anticipated and responded to larger movements for social change."
Put in down-to-earth terms, HFS equipped people to stop divide-and-conquer tactics that business and the State always were almost certain to promote, at least as a general SOP. One did not need to be an adherent of Marx and Lenin and others of their heroic ilk to bear witness and live according to principle.
“Frank Adams, author of a book on the idea of Highlander, acknowledges that there is a temptation to cast the school 'in a heroic mold, badgered by men with small minds and governments with mean ways.' Yet Adams proclaims that his own account is 'biased,' for Highlander exemplified his philosophy that 'education should foster individual growth and social change and nourish the fundamental value of complete personal liberty while encouraging thoughtful citizenship in community.'”
No matter what the case may be, the School was at war with established authorities, with the ruling class’ agendas of management and proscription and segregation and so forth. In some sense, Highlander lost this war. And the decisive battle in that ongoing class warfare’s constant strife revolved around anticommunism. No, really! I couldn’t make this shit up.
“But as the school grew more prominent in the struggle for racial equality, southern white segregationists mounted a sustained assault against what they described as a 'Communist training school.' After a barrage of legislative investigations, propaganda campaigns, and dramatic trials, Tennessee officials revoked Highlander's charter and confiscated its property in 1962.”
Red-Baiting had essentially served as the main piece of State and corporate strategy since the 1940’s. In many ways, official responses to HFS struggles exactly paralleled their pronouncements that nuclear war was winnable and would only happen because distant cousins were demonically evil Commies who would all die. Peace and unions were both ‘commonist plots.’ Do people know what I’m saying here?
Back To Don
What of Don West’s foray further North in the Southern Appalachians? He undoubtedly stood in solidarity with Highlander in its fights. On the other hand, he was a hell-raiser who believed in growth-through-confrontation-&-conflict, more or less. Tim Mainline, in an interview that he gave about his Don West documentary, writes about how this manifested in mundane day-to-day reality.
“When I met him he challenged me directly and offensively to explain why I was there. I did not enjoy that. But the result was that I had to supply my reasons—and had to think about them. That was his role: to set up good and meaningful programs and force you to justify your inclusion in them. He was not a creator of comfort. He was a creator of action."
Coming from the Civil Rights Movement, an ordained preacher with an advanced degree, a tough customer, his was a challenge. “He… saw poverty from exploitation as the root of current evils and he worked to get people from many backgrounds to address it with their labor."
Moreover, West’s work overall has ever emphasized arts and culture. His primary way of seeing himself, at least apparently, was as a poet. He has this to say: “Poetry and other creative efforts should be levers, weapons to be used in the people’s struggle for understanding, human rights, and decency."
Don West did not believe in theories, although he certainly theorized in the common parlance, as a preacher and organizer. But he remained ferocious in facilitating real activities and a rooting of transformative plans in labor and collectively engaged and purposeful socializing of one sort and another.
“(P)eople like Horton and West helped create an Appalachian 'lineage' of social action which is based primarily on popular education, understood as dialogue, relationship building, and problem posing.” The result of this rooted grounding of community transformation in real people’s communicating, learning, and collaborating is that the Appalachian South Folklife Center is an immovable force in its own environs.
As noted above-the-fold, now and again, Big Tent Review will return to Highlander’s work and its effectuation of a plausibly truly New South. As well, other efforts to foster knowledge and power, freedom and justice, will appear, part of BTR’s ongoing litany. For now, we can offer another Driftwood Message Art bon mot.
Entitled “Experts, Wise Policy, Socially Useful Knowledge,” it parallels Highlander’s fierce affirmation of popular engagement and participatory learning. “Expertise Mostly Equates to Exercises in Racketeering: the Only Masterful Aptitude Worth a Damn, Except to Profiteers, Acknowledges the Inherently Collective, Inclusive Nature of Both Wise Policy & Socially Useful Knowledge; 'Authority' Otherwise Universally Victimizes Members of the Passive Masses, Who Then Must Consult Other Inevitably Indentured 'Specialists' Whose Treatments For Those Sufferers' Afflictions Dose the Hapless Dupes With Prescribed Poisonous Palliatives & Sickening 'Cures,' Altogether a Noxious Cycle, Frightfully Toxic, That Inescapably Attends Dependence on Copious Cults of Self-Serving Experts."
At this moment, in loco parentis for expertise, mediated messages blame foreigners instead of Yankees, and denigrate Muslims instead of their Semitic Jewish kin, but, with the same tone and similar assertions as the red-and-race-baiting of earlier decades, something like the following is how many folks see what’s happening now. “America faces an invasion of immigrants, Islamic terrorists, and communists.” And, just as was true in the 1930’s, ‘40’s, and ‘50’s, it just ain’t so, so to speak. It’s delusional thinking at best.
What is real is that the Anglo-American empire, first, has in some sense ‘invaded the world’ and, second, is now proposing that Americans see ourselves as ‘under attack by foreign hordes.’ Its insanity lends itself to parody, so BTR supports producing a Mass Collective Suicide multimedia comedy that announces in advance its anti-imperialism and attendant blah blah blah. A new Dr. Strangelove could be at hand.
Quite reasonably, any citizen who wants human thriving and survival instead of self-immolation or prison-planet-protocols has little choice but to accept, if not outright promulgate, some kin of the Highlander folk-education-and-action model to deal with this commie-fear-mongering social essence. Especially in times of addictive screens, filled with confusion, non-sequitur, and horseshit, truly community-based learning may represent a sine qua non for species viability.
How can we go about this. Tim Mainline offers a quotation from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which will be the subject of a review in this section in the next month or so.
‘“'Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people—they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.'"
As always, perhaps, we can cross our fingers and note, ‘a word, to the wise, ought to suffice’ in getting us to take a look. Ha ha.
Erotic Snippets—(continued)…
*****AS much as any other, this second lesson would stay close to my heart, ready for my voice, for all my days. Richard and I honored this instruction, one reason he still lives in my dreams and fancies. Jackie’s learning this lesson kept Lucille closer for longer than she might otherwise have stayed. Her personality and its problematic probing of independence inform the next section.
#3—Never fear to love with your entire being, heart and soul; our family are all passionate, no exception, and I would not have one instant of surprise to find out that some of my kin’s girls struggled with this needful part of a love life, although not nearly so mightily as both my first adulterous lover and second husband did. Lucy loathed—even this strong word is weak in her case—feeling dependent on a boy, even one decidedly younger and sweeter than anything else that had come her way. This tendency eventually doomed her grooming Jack as her mate.
***MY second husband was Thomas, partner in piracy to Richard. Thomas knew nought of any likely love learning, numbered or not. However, few women with eyes to see could stop themselves feasting on Tom’s felicitous form.
Missing Richard as I immediately did, my gaze glued so glaringly to Thomas, a full decade my senior, that, in a goodhearted and infectious fashion, he laughed in my face at my longing before he succumbed to the implications of my charming demeanor.
In this manner of standing apart from life’s sweetest conjunction, Thomas was the sole male with whom I bonded who held himself at bay, as it were. I married him nonetheless, when he posed the proposition, even though such an attitude as this distressed me daily. He was so pretty; I was so hungry.
And he was good in bed even if his heart was distant. Whatever the situation amounted to, I couldn’t resist him, even though I couldn’t long stand him either.
*****IN any case, Lucy was, or at least pretended to be, a good Catholic girl, so no strong union with my Goddess-glorying nephew was ever likely. In the event, as Lucy showed herself almost always coy, other little lassies frequently fancied playing with Jack, who only grew more handsome and fetching with the passage of time. Sarah, who may have been part Hebrew—Sally, he called her—was one of these, fully five years his senior and completely a woman when she became my kin’s first actual lover instead of solely his passionate playmate.
#4—Never hold another’s wholehearted loving at bay; this is always hard for a man, as I can well understand. After all, even such an advanced student of the Goddess' tutelage and Our Lady's lessons as Jack himself recoiled from Sally's all-encompassing enthusiastic engagement. Though she fancied him so thoroughly that even this did not initially drive her away, it became the first wedge between them.
***TOM, damn his cowardly arrogance, literally would, when naked of any defense I came to him with my wanton wanting, use his strong shoulders and lengthy arms to keep me distant enough to leave his fat, turgid cock dancing at a distance that, to say the least, I found very discomfiting. Had this been but play, it might have excited even more gushing glory from my truly graceful central soul.
However, these gestures actually summarized the cold heart of this hot, hot fellow. We married in early Autumn, and before the Yule log burned, I was frantic that he found my attentions somehow distasteful, or otherwise judged my appreciation as prurient. Only after I had, very specifically, sundered our salacious relations did I realize that his prudishness, not my wild ways, was at the bottom of our troubles.
I had but twenty Summers behind me at this passage in my days and nights. Had I known what I am proffering to my growing, glowing laddie, perhaps Tom and I would, very probably, stand and lie together still; I like good-looking men, and no one will ever be likely to surpass Tom in this way of considering matters at hand.
*****"CALL me Sarah,” my nephews first true sweetheart would insist when she was angry about things. Jack was not yet eleven—nearer thirteen, admittedly, by the time of their end—when the fractious friction of communication conundrums afflicted the two, who might have made an unlikely but torrid match. In any event, the advice here happened in response to such difficulties.
#5—Talk about everything, talk about nothing, never hold back for longer than a wee bit; Jack managed this—I laugh to think of it—by not talking much, at the same time that, when he did open his mouth to speak, nothing was sacred; nothing frightened him; he neither averted his eyes or closed his heart. With Sally, he simply let too much time elapse between attempts really to have heart-to-heart helpings of talk and temptation.
***I met he whom I designated ‘My Second Richard’—with a chortle, no doubt—right after our Winter’s Fire Festival burning. He never, ever struggled for words; they were his way of escaping either culpability or certainty, as matters unfolded. Anyway, Tom was very much arms-length in our dances, and crazed desire filled me more than I realized till far too late.
Little Dickie, over whom I towered like a slender statue of Our Lady above a cringing boy, found my beauty terrifying, which just delighted me night and day. Thus, I had the task as my mandate to bring our discourse to the most intimate level imaginable.
I never called New Richard by this nickname, since, as a matter of clearly visible fact he was the most slender fellow in his loins with whom I ever cavorted. I like big boys, but ‘Little Dickie’ had tricks to traduce my juicy howls on every occasion of our fond and fulsome frolics.
By this juncture in my life, my second and twenty birth’s celebration had receded into memory’s memoirs. My husband had already replaced me: he would always have women who would hang on him like frost on January’s wet and snowy stones.
I definitely would have kept Dickie close, if only because he had a comprehensive grasp of the legal affairs that I despise more decidedly than I do men who like to whore and yet look on womanly wonders as whorish. But he insisted on moving himself to Italy, possibly because he had heard—so he said to me—that Italian women appreciated diminutive men.
*****MY Jackie never wept, save over his Sally. No matter the emotional elements of angst and ennui, he expressed to me on more occasions than I can count how vastly he valued my counsel to him over the years. Frankly, I’m not sure how long the whole litany took to list, yet I know that we repeatedly returned to each enumerated notion many, many times.
#6—Dance every day, cheek to cheek, flank to flank, joined in the heart without fail, joined at the hip as much as convenient; my Jackie was such a joy. His spirit always made me think of my dear Timothy, who not only comforted my neediness like no man, before or since, but also became my only lover who combined astute pirating with pleasure’s purest palpations and a Dutch-Uncle’s affection for Jack, who began to consort at this point in time with the blinding beauty—Mary Grace was her given name—who would become his wife.
***TIMOTHY came to my cabin aboard good-ship Oh, Grace! when I was dauntingly downhearted, just after my Jack had met and allured this woman of his dreams, who, even though half the men in the County found her irresistible, had cleaved to Jackie like a dry burr clings to velvet. Honeyed Tim, stalwart and buffed, removed his slicker and then stripped down to his powerful pugilist’s muscular magic, just standing there and allowing my desire to deign him grow, a graceful, glorious arc of gushing flesh.
Already naked under my sheer Captain’s shift, I leapt aboard his fine stout crafty cock. No man of mine ever matched his strength. Nor did any man so fully embody these here-listed components of finding and keeping loving relationship. In the stew of men that has simmered my days—a smorgasbord that might seem to form the seam of every wild and wanton woman’s ways—Tim is he whom I would choose as the meat in the soupy, syrupy, sanctity of my sexual shenanigans.
Timothy might not have been my final lover, even had he lived to accompany me through ages of raging engagement in all the affairs of our enterprise. As everything unfolded, I imbibed his sweet syrupy gifts for a longer period than I have any other man’s adoring attention. I’d have him still, had Our Lady permitted.
*****JACKIE married at fifteen, when Mary—he called her by her second name—was almost nineteen. Thus my precious nephew here, once more, stood expectation upside down, so gifted and mature were his deliberations and dandy, candid gifts of connubial and conversational connectivity. He already understood my last two advisories, heart and loin, so to say, yet he also most appreciatively apprehended our discourse about them as much as he treasured any of our sessions together.
#7—Remember that her pleasure is the source of pleasuring you; this also came naturally to my nephew—he always wanted to make me split wide with happiness. To an extent, in at least the carnal sense, this is a trait of being Irish. However I think about all these things, I sense that Jack, certainly by the third year of his marriage and the arrival of his first children, a boy and a girl all at once, had blossomed like a rare orchid’s budding beauty.
***TREASURE immeasurable meets mayhem’s most murderous manifested destinies, sooner or later, in every life. Dear Tim succumbed to a saber thrust, an occupational hazard of piracy. Most bitter for me in this is that he lost his life protecting me from a slashing attack from behind in the midst of our fleecing one of Elizabeth's merchant sloops, within a dozen furlongs of our very own port of call.
I could not bear the thought of ongoing manly sweetness for years thereafter, although the hungry glances of comrades and enemies made clear that I could take my fill, come what might. This is a memoir that insists on accurate witness: in a few instances, I engulfed an eager fellow for a day or two or three, for a heated night’s exchange of flowing fluid’s fieriest furies.
Though I was approaching my seventy-fifth year at this time, I remained a juicy peach between my thighs. Thus, I couldn’t resist. What I never anticipated was that my last love was not just another pirate; no novelty attends that. However, I would never have believed that I would take up with a woman, one as tough and fetching as myself, ha ha.
*****JACK needed neither thievery nor plunder to facilitate fortune’s felicitous and mellifluous molten fires. He had learned all his course through lusty loving with aplomb and affable enjoyment; nor did he break a single statute in the process, at least none that might be deemed felonious. His Mary was a true partner too, theirs a familial familiarity that remained furiously volcanic despite their affable regularity.
#8—Never, ever lose sight of the key fact that the connection is more important than the consequences; oh, this was hard. As I got sicker, Jack trusted me less, keeping hold of his heart and holding himself back. When Mary-Grace died in childbirth, and her family took the twins, Jack set his love-light to glow for all the women of the world. Not till he met the Viscount’s daughter would he again let a woman inside the inner walls of his fortified heart.
***AN ancient womanly crone today, I am yet a dripping feast now and again, especially if my sweetest feminine sister—naughty and nubile—Ann Bonny herself, shares her needs with me in whispers while wine spills down our flesh and our throats and drenches our tongues as they entwine. She likes masculine muscle also. Nor does she shirk from sharing.
I never would have conceived that Grace O’Malley would entertain such licentious behavior as her savory favorite cravings. I’m an old hound, a fierce hoary bitch at a moment’s notice, and I play like a pirate still, albeit I’ve handed off my saber and my ships to Ann and Charles, our favorite fellow to share.
I’m passing eighty years at the next full moon. My strength and joy at this advanced elderly stage of things indubitably has as a prime cause the frisky fire of my luscious libido’s lasting elation. After my day has passed, Ann and Charles and I are going to visit Jack’s territory, where we have set aside three days to eat mushrooms and each other. Our Lady manages magnificence mellifluously still.
*****LIFE went on for Jackie, as it should, as it must. Fortune allowed me to complete his course of study before he left, heartbroken but as steely nonetheless as forged swords from Toledo. He brings his tasty self and his testy talents to his home, while, for my part, I pray that Our Lady will continue to watch over him with compassion and concern for his connubial and conceptual conviviality.
I have written of my affairs—martial and marital, passionate and political, commercial and combative—in journals, to which I have faithfully attended since I was fourteen and seduced my great uncle’s youngest, my second cousin who was simply too pretty and sweet for a girl like me, ripe and yet tart, to resist.
Here, then, near to the end of the overall Miracle of Grace saga, I have succeeded in placing in these passages what I set out to do, which is to say a woman’s chronicle of fierce passion and insistent carnality. I burn, yet I would fight and kill any men who wanted to fry me for my witchy ways, all the while I’d prefer heated give-and-take with many of them that matches more merrily my meandering, appreciative gaze.
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
And the answer, to men who regularly wagered a million dollars a year on casino games, would eventually have been palpable. No one’s hands, after all, could be faster than a camera, an ‘eye-in-the-sky,’ so to speak.
When one day the scene of a chouette shifted to a private room, perhaps at Monte Carlo itself, Marshall would have almost definitely been especially cautious. If the venue had continued in such environs, however, perhaps he might not even allow himself a single coup per session.
Veronica believes—or so she related years later—that ‘they must have maneuvered him to what seemed like just another house.’ She and he had spoken about these matters of ‘defense and security’ in their little sting operation.
In any case, whenever that slip had transpired, those arrayed against him would have had irrefutable evidence that a pattern of behavior was behind their affable and oh-so-courteous adversary’s long string of victories. And once these men had established this fact, which they knew would at some point become common knowledge among future competitors, only one possible end result was available.
Once again, as in the case of the Wicked Witch, the ‘only question was how to accomplish’ the necessary culmination. And the final countdown to Marshall’s ultimate play had begun.
“Col de Braus-small” by Ericd cc 3.0
A Gambol Too Far, a Gamble Too High
Crushed and broken at the bottom of a thousand foot drop, more or less instantly dead of shock and trauma, consciousness obliterated: did the experience contain a moment of recognition as he hurtled into space? ‘Could this possibly have been truly accidental?’ He would have smiled at the query.
Such questions as these are unanswerable in terms of empirical certainty, while they are silly in terms of common sense probabilities. Almost certainly, Marshall had a stunned sense that he had become a victim, even that his victimization was both unavoidable and his own doing; equally so, the eventuality was no more likely inadvertent than a political coup, when an observer must doubt that such a convenient outcome for money simply cannot rationally and probably be a random event.
Well might someone who encounters this story ponder its deeper parameters, its life lessons, its wider social significance or implicit contextual consequences. For example, with enough information about the ongoing love connection between Marshall and Veronica, with further evidence about the Beatty family and its place in mill town South Carolina, with greater depth of insight about the expectations that Marshall had for manifesting his own development and personality, a chronicler could easily express many additional layers of meaning here.
As matters stand, though, a few points have adequate salience to state confidently. Most obviously, to rob the rich and get away with one’s skin, one had best make a score and accomplish an exit without detection: repeated slicing away at the sausage (as the Chilean aphorism states the case, “robarse el salchichón”) of loot that underlies aristocratic wealth, no matter how clever or artful, will inevitably result in eventual exposure, with disastrous outcomes at best.
One might go on in this vein of balancing risk and gain. Though the subject matter involved in this exercise may ultimately merit only a superficial rating, one can with some precision nevertheless express equities and prospects that accompany actions of a certain predatory cast that one conducts against equally rapacious rivals. No matter the short-term benefits that attend this type of purely individual ledger, the bottom line entry will probably read, “Rest in Peace.”
At a more psychological or psychosocial level, thematic elements are also possible to imagine, despite the limitations on the data that are available for this telling. For instance, one can certainly posit that, as Marshall’s little MG arced downward toward rocks hundreds of feet below, his consciousness quite plausibly approximated a winsome wish to have been happier with less cash flow, so that he might have reveled once more in Veronica’s embrace.
Even if he clung, till the final pounding smash-up, to the belief that he simply had to provide a definite well-heeled lifestyle to keep Veronica’s loyalty and love, one can clearly conjecture that, before the physical decimation took place, he might have wondered if such choices were not only worth the cost but also truly necessary. The consciousness that complements such a final scene, almost by definition, cannot be readily knowable: no one can have come back to tell onlookers what it was like.
Perhaps a merely animal response is the final experience of life as regular breath and routine ideation. In such a view, whatever mixture of terror and acceptance, of resignation and horror, that one feels is no more profound than an expletive, like “Oh shit!” or an interjection, like “Ouch!”
For purposes of providing some semblance of closure for a scribe and his readers alike, maybe something like the following will let us exit with a measure of equanimity and aplomb. First, while playing at life as if it were a game is common enough, and as defensible as otherwise, and in case completely unavoidable, the finishing touches in such contesting of matters at hand will ultimately bleed and hurt more than any loss on the board will ever do.
Second, and most relevant in terms of analyzing the societal implications of this tale, this occurrence really did occur, and if one wants to make sense of the world, this particular happenstance must be part of the skein that one ends up creating to reveal the nature of life as we lead it. This brilliant man’s hurtling to his doom is a piece in the contemporary mosaic, a metaphor for all our fates, a nexus of contemplation and instruction to consider for everyone sentient enough to stare wide-eyed at the abyss.