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 eighteenth 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 September 2nd; the first one-issue moon ahead 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: Compromise, Contrariety, Class-Conflict, Electing to Try Different Approaches
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Reality, Virtuality, & Electing RFK
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XVIII
3. Wood Words Essays—Mandating Manure As Manna: COVID’s Rescue-Plan For Capital
4. Empowered Political Forays—”Capitalism on Drugs,” continued
5. Old Stories & New—”Resuscitation,” Part Two
6. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”More Than a Hill of Beans—Young Jack’s First Climb,” #5
7. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”Deconstructing ‘Depleted’ Uranium”
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Trying Something New For Our Class Warfare Woes
Every issue, to a degree, embodies novel elements. Tomorrow’s bright and cheery ‘good morning!’ will vary a bit from today’s happy greeting; so too will every embodied heartache, as it actually happens, differ from all previous and forthcoming woes. I mention this to start since I’m a day late, if not a dollar short.
This time, instead of a ‘deer in the headlights,’ my love and I encountered a ‘deer in broad daylight’ that locked eyes with me as we approached at 50 MPH or so, only to hop directly in the center of our lane and stop to await the blow that hurtled it in the ditch to die in the rearview mirror. The surreal scene just got odder when the church parking lot where we stopped, radiator coolant smoking on the engine block, boasted a sign that directed us to “Expect Miracles.” Wow.
To an extent, starting with first principles and all, each of our efforts to attain some semblance of an empowered happy grace transits pleasure’s portals and a persistent pursuit of knowledge, or, perhaps, truth if one inclines to think along such lines. The standard diktat—to accept what we hear and do as we’re told—quite obviously makes any such portal or pursuit inherently unobtainable.
In a sense, of course, for whatever the notation might be worth, et voila! Here we have Big Tent Review to bear witness and assist our seeking, hither and yon. Part of every step that one might take toward happy aplomb, mas o menos indubitably, will entail discourse about, or in many ways a performance of, what on Earth is truly afoot in the here and now.
Whether unfortunately or not, definitely nonetheless, everything in the managed mundane mandates of mayhem and maelstrom that plutocracy’s minions manifest without stint or fail right this very minute militates against any even vaguely participatory performance that dares to critique core components of Standard Operational Protocols. Otherwise, deplatforming would not be a thing, right?
At best, in the ludicrously named mainstream, people serve as props for plutocratic propaganda’s putrid persistence, as it were, ha ha. Then again, I’ve been posting consistently of late on X, one aspect of everyday virtuality that both furthers and undercuts this tendency, as the likes of This Humble Correspondent seek a ‘following’ and some potential for facilitating something useful.
As a matter of course, in so doing, I link to this work and the efforts of others to elucidate matters at hand. For example, “Israel promotes its planetary nuclear Nakba as the leading edge of the Mass-Collective-Suicide-Express, meaning that human survival depends on stopping this, which is only possible with correct comprehension."
All things considered, things seem dicey indeed. NATO’s invasion of Russia with the aim, perhaps, of producing another Chernobyl; U.S.-guided Israel’s blowing Palestinian children to pieces in Gaza; blithe cluelessness meanwhile afflicts all too many citizens on the American homefront, where primary concerns revolve around how to invest one’s lucre most profitably and how to stop mass migrations that U.S. policy makes all but unstoppable without killing everybody on the planet. Ha ha.
No matter the level of diciness, though, a jolly demeanor nevertheless must of necessity accompany redemption of the gifts of grace inherent when one is finding a place of even intermittent aplomb among the living and breathing specimens among us who are in search of consciousness, agency, joyous engagement and similar plausible attributes of a decent existence, well and potently lived. At a minimum, in the event, such as this entry is, which is to say a recognizant summation of pursuing consciousness, may ‘ring some bells,’ so to say.
The basic issue, as always, comes down to which steps to take when and where and how, ha ha. If we lack the organization and interconnection to communicate directly with each other, let alone to act in tandem toward definable objectives, then any real agency on the part of citizens becomes highly implausible at most. Patently obvious in even fantasizing such attainments is the actual willingness to participate politically at all beyond occasional visits to voting stations.
Both the allure of and the distaste for this requisite collaboration to ‘act out’ our present passage flow from this necessarily performative nature of viable human social existence. On the one hand, central to any drama must be some premise that will promise plenty of contested territory and other conflicts of every stripe imaginable. On the other hand, actually staging anything except annihilation must incontestably incorporate compromises, generally a constant flow of give and take and back and forth and all such blah blah blah.
In BTR, the newest Feral Nerd Performance Space in my life and times, this latest incarnation of a ‘show to hit the road’ includes some more or less extemporaneously composed electronic mediation, on one side, and different flavors of more ‘traditional’ narrative fiction, on the other. Even to list the serial installments is bracing.
First and foremost, in my initial presentation of Speculative Documentary Fiction, All God’s Cousins, & Where They’re Bound has been a part of every issue and will remain so till that narrative’s final pages, plus or minus a dozen chapters down the pike. This yarn represents confabulations of both my own existence and the lives and times of closely connected fellow travelers of mine.
The crazed, if imaginary, cataclysm of Mad Cows & Englishmen is also ongoing, along with the materials of Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—both of these would encapsulate novelized versions of ‘realities’ potentially actual in science-fiction of fantasy futures. At last count, seven stand-alone short stories have also come along as BTR passages, albeit they were only comparatively self-contained, since each of these also required at least a couple of episodes to complete.
More investigatory, yet often still speculative threads of ‘documentary work’ have also included lengthy tales. These have brought us to backgammon’s pitches and various ways of examining sex and gender. A three-part look at Wilhelm Reich’s endeavors to uncover in present-day “sexual repression” the source-springs of the modern “mass psychology of fascism” is particularly noteworthy.
Dixie’s denizens have also been standard elements much of the time. Southern tendrils have interpenetrated key aspects of modern history hither and yon. Several such accounts have also examined Mason-Dixon boundaries from varied viewpoints, for instance in terms of the potency of imperial ambition, or the prevalence of manipulated social divisions, or the manifestation of solidarity among the common people that plutocrats seek always to divide and conquer.
In addition, multiple reports about Ukraine have already appeared. More are forthcoming. If any Terran real estate might stand in as geopolitical fulcrum of the current context, these millennia-long battlefields of empire—Ukraine and the Balkans basically—would clearly approximate such a central status.
Similar reporting about Western Asia and Latin America appears too; theirs will be among ongoing fundamental BTR stories. In a sense, one can view the Big Tent expressions of standard prose in one of two ways. Quite a few end up as, incontrovertibly, review-essays of one sort and another. The rest look at one topical matter or other—from the historical to the scientific to the cultural and so forth—and try, if not completely to make sense of the specific eventuality, then at least usefully to explicate it in typical, iconoclastic Big Tent ways.
Furthermore, as a matter of BTR’s standard course, erotic yarnsmithing also typifies every issue. These items, as things transpire, are the most decidedly and authentically au courant of my writing to appear here. I have always enjoyed messing a bit with smut, but it has only, for purposes of tabulation, had adequate enough discipline to demarcate completed pieces in BTR’s paragraphs.
A definite component of a BTR shtick is the interpenetration of all and sundry. Thus, Einstein’s sex drive and Hitler’s interest in art and Joe Hill’s songwriting all have identifiable links to each other, as they do—individually and joined—with sundry institutional and technological substantiations of All-That-Is. And on and on, an infinitely intersecting skein of concatenated cosmic fabric.
All too often, the fascination that I feel for things is in subtle opposition, or at least contradistinction, to that which predominates in the present pass’ plodding evolution, so to say. Neither ‘Pop’ culture’s momentous momentary memes nor opportunistic plutocratic profiteers’ propaganda receive top billing here; they appear, but in a way to demonstrate their hypocrisy, inanity, and insanity.
Bioengineering capacity, on the other hand, now has advanced to the point that ‘Human-Brain-Goo’ in beakers, electrochemically interconnected, may serve as a basis for problem-solving, artificial intelligence as it approaches something at least proximate to a delicately embodied miracle such as each human proffers in one way and another. Inasmuch as warfare is arguably the most obvious example of a ‘problem-solution exercise,’ the potential for mayhem as a result of networked ‘brain-goo’ ought to appear clearly pertinent.
‘Life Sciences’ today, operating in such ways, suggest how deeply-rooted are propensities to make a revenue stream out of anything and everything that is, practically speaking, possible to do. The entire vaccine arena, so saying, occupies center stage in Wood Words Essays this issue, with more analytical deconstructions planned soon enough, ha ha.
Science Direct promises a human version of a new Joint-Goo that will repair much cartilage and soft-tissue injury. Truly, a Cyborg contextualization is in many situations part and parcel of being fully human. This humble correspondent’s hips and eyes attest to this fact.
And, as if by a magical ‘extended warranty,’ life goes on, as freshly daisy-like as a warm Spring midday after a storm pelleted the new tin roof the previous midnight. And these thoughts come to mind; some of them attain a certain sort of embodiment here, come what may.
Americans seem most to appreciate shopping for deals, on the one hand, and chatting about the stuff that money can buy and old acquaintances and family and such, on the other hand. We keep the vile bile of violence at bay, smiling so as to indicate perfect aplomb in ideal community settings, even as intrusions shake the timbers and tear the fiber of these fiercely-held beliefs of equanimity.
Israeli assassins, in the meantime, thereby continue to receive ‘get out of jail free’ cards plus the big bonus for passing-go, in their case the capacity brazenly to continue brutality’s imperial imprimatur. James Balfour, Lenin, Roosevelt, Oppenheimer, they are all part of the same story, and theirs is in fact part of the narrative of our own lives, readers and non-readers alike, albeit those who pay the dues necessary to examine these biographical intertwinings inherently are more likely usefully to make something out what they encounter.
The ‘Jewish Question,’ in similar fashion, actually establishes parameters for much of divide-and-conquer discourse that so characterizes the current context that, at times, little else is likely to have a turn in the daily spin of things. One form of othering or another occupies center stage.
Blacks and browns and whites and Hindus and Muslims and Christians and right and left and blah blah blah, overwhelmingly, say nothing about organic human reality, where every infant’s start might lead to more or less compliant ‘cultural’ acceptance wherever the child might grow to be an erstwhile ‘independent adult.’ Ha ha.
But Brand Chaos thrives on confusion and mayhem, even if potentially ecocidal. Capital’s incarnation of the aphorism that only an ill wind blows no one good is to sell something that either defends against or promotes the chaotic concatenations of corporate headquarters’ directives and ‘roadmaps.’
In this vein, F-16’s have begun to arrive for Ukraine’s use in sustaining the Anglo-American Military Industrial Complex’s forlorn and hopeless attempts to boost again a militarized Keynesian resuscitation of capital’s current proclivity to collapse. Ukraine’s ‘taking the war to Russian soil,’ in addition to confirming how battles revolve around ‘nuclear facilities’ and devices, cannot help but reassert the constant trope here, of a thanatopic hunger for flirtations with Mass Collective Suicide.
Nor are most of Big Tent referrals ‘foreign born,’ so to speak. The ins and outs of domestic affairs circumscribe the primary points of almost all the fiction—based as it is on my well-documented life—and plus or minus half of the reportage of different kinds.
The stock market’s icy tip of the economy’s baleful burg threatens to send our common craft plummeting, no bottom in sight as I write this. Such symptomatic indicators of fiscal pain and suffering, inevitably, only describe the surface of capital’s toxic imperial dynamic these days, a combination of objective changes that disallow American impunity quite so readily and subjective developments that increase popular willingness to resist.
From every tint on the social spectrum, popular uprisings have threatened, ‘left,’ ‘right,’ and whatever in the world lies at the center of things in any given instance. If the upper crust legal, public relations, and mediation machinery fails to tame these miracles of social solidarity among the masses, then other methods, more vicious and hideous, are available to the hegemonic overseers.
When things spiral away from elite ascendancy, fascism’s responses have been both iron-fisted, and gloved in plush velvet, to this worldwide reemergence of the great cycles of boom and bust that have indubitably characterized the pre-WWII political economic experience. What lies ahead, unlike the present and to an extent the past, can never be so assured that we can be complete in our comprehension, and while ‘certainty is for suckers’ under all conditions, the future is immutably more murky than either now or then.
These matters are almost inescapably spiritual, at minimum in the sense that they touch on morality, ethics, and—for lack of a better term—decency. The Golden Rule Reigns Supreme states the First of the Ten New Commandments. More is on the way in these environs; for this very second, I would only note that we ought to be discussing all these things a lot more than we have done.
In the meantime, mediation’s miracles manifest entertainment and enlightenment at once. Such are the purposes of BTR, too, of course, although the masterful efforts of the producers of Ace of Spies would be more than miraculous for the likes of these pages to imitate. The overlap of fact and narrative, nevertheless, astonishes my awareness—a Balkan-born spy whose fate was to be a key intelligence asset for English imperial interests in Russia, where Stalin has him shot and then goes on to play the secret agent’s role himself.
I read so much. The ReDemoPubliCrats raise their partisan flags, as in Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew, which wants to convince woebegone observers that root differences separate the two wings of ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx. Just as Sidney Reilly’s true-to-life origins in Odessa Ukraine suggests one more time art’s imitation of life—and vice versa—so too does Kathryn Davis’ Silk Road lay a foundation for richer, realer, and more salubrious ways to understand China, child-trafficking, human sexuality, and lots more.
Everything adds up. It all makes sense, fits together sensibly and so on and so on.
As I’m patching this Intro together, I find myself living through the seventy-ninth anniversary of both the Nagasaki bombing and Japan’s surrender, both intricately connected. The hapless city’s incineration warned Russia of what furious suffering U.S. militaries are capable of inflicting on enemies. Five days henceforth, the hastily executed terms to cease fighting happened more or less literally overnight after the Soviets declared war on Japan and entered the fray.
Within a few years, of course, our former frenemies had fission weapons, proceeding then to scoop the Yanks in the thermonuclear department, though not for long. Since then, ‘kiss-your-ass-goodbye’ has been common parlance when—as now—conflicts have invited necessary-nuclear-war’s fatuous self-righteousness. ‘Are you ready for that Great Atomic Power? Will you shout or will you cry when the fire rains from on high?’
Citizens barely participate in the machinations of the Modern Nuclear Project, though we obviously pay for their manifestation, as it were, just as we suffer inordinately the consequences of any miscue in the energetic arena of fission’s and fusion’s industrial applications. Boiling water with barely contained critical masses as they erupt would be more laughable than lucrative were not expenditures for energy of service to weapons-makers in their plans.
“Social 'need' for nuclear power comes down to one thing, in other words: subsidizing H-bombs. If we want Mass Collective Suicide, a Modern Nuclear Project is perfect, since it would kill us, on average, with more speed & less suffering. I prefer Sadako Kurihara's path,” which is to say choosing life even in the fire and smoke and toxic murder of nuclear explosions.
In the aforementioned Ace of Spies series, Sam Neill’s character Reilly is a handsome, humorous, thoroughly charming gangster, a forerunner of the military monstrosities of gangsterism that now delineate ‘an American way’ at the highest levels of governance. I posted another recent Tweet that states a case about this, apropos at this August juncture of memory and reflection almost eight decades beyond the most grotesque single criminal act in human history.
“The U.S. waged Earth's only atomic war, so far. It incinerated a quarter million civilians primarily as a warning to Russia. It has also initiated use of Depleted Uranium weapons, arguably another Weapon of Mass Destruction. The U.S. is a gangster-state.”
Smedley Butler, who has made merely the briefest of appearances so far in these Big Tent pages, famously summed up, “I was a gangster for capitalism.” Since he was the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, his would indisputably count as an expert opinion about such things. He battled for the ‘battle-star-imperialists’ on three continents.
As the unfettered fury of fanatical imperial policy apparently points to eternal warfare in the guise of fascist infiltration of every realm of the ‘free enterprise’ machine, one has little choice but to consider, or even to conclude, that business-as-usual capitalism will inevitably devolve to Nazism of one sort or another. Such a hypothesis must at the least look like a keeper, in terms of making a credible stab at explaining bourgeois culture.
In any sort of ‘final analysis,’ we must accept as given that certainty about the realm-of-the-real is the fantasy of suckers and idiots even as we do daily seek the ineffable attainment of comprehension’s totality. The best that we can expect in regard to knowledge, in any case, would come down to accurate and plentiful facts and data; reasonable inferences and widespread discourse; and a democratic environment for dealing with options and necessities.
Such an optimal outcome will inherently prove impossible except inasmuch as something along the lines of a BTR people's-mediation-process comes to culture’s forefront, so to speak. Without a way to engage with far-flung factual developments, unbreakably intertwined situations will soon add up to incomprehensibly random eruptions, perhaps entertaining but ever impossible to understand.
What shall we do next, then? My course, whether heroic or pathetic, remains clear: Number 19, deer interventions notwithstanding, is due on Substack on September second. Autumn and, eventually, snow are coming.
A friend of mine whose extraordinary story will soon enough be part of the work here liked to intone at the end of meetings and such, “The time has come to take a stand!” Indeed. I’d also add that to some extent, rather than anything like occupying Wall Street, we ought to be figuring out how to occupy our own living rooms in helpful, healthy, and astute fashion.
Well might we pose a query to ourselves. ‘What the heck are we supposed to do now?’ In the words of Jackson Brown, “I may not have the answers, but I believe I’ve got a plan.” For me anyhow, as stated above, it starts with sharing this BTR effort again in a few weeks. I’d love to hear from anyone with a tidbit to impart, a bone to pick, blah blah blah.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Reality, Virtuality, Electing For the People
‘Making Voodoo topical’ would be a staunch critic’s most generous characterization of this spot, as it were, on the regular Big Tent calendar. If ‘things are truly coming to a head,’ so to speak, like a toxic zit about to spew stinking poison, then if ever an electoral diversion mattered, this should be the cycle.
In the words of FDR’s first Presidential campaign ditty, ‘1932, it won’t be long, when you cast your vote, please don’t vote wrong,’ a version of which shows up on Jorma Kaukonnen’s “Blue Country Heart” album. “Bread Line Blues” is the name of the tune, a hit then and now and full of instructive lessons for regular people anywhere.
“The latest news has struck me funny; Says you have no friends, if you haven’t got money.” It laughs at this notion dismissively. “Now with all of us good folks in distress; I’ve gotta get something off my chest.” Common people can help themselves, the lyrics assert, if they ‘don’t vote wrong.’
Whatever the verity of this view, however elusive the logic of such views, the wildly popular single formed part of the spell that ended Hoover’s technocratic monstrosity and made the way for a ‘New Deal’ of some sort. Ninety-two years later, in decidedly different electoral circumstances—in the 1930’s, for instance, the ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx had not yet totally consolidated its preeminence—in our AI arena full of thermonuclear ecocidal impulses, ordinary voters do have options other than the traditional Deep-State-Duo of differently colored dancing puppets.
One need only contemplate the sophisticated and vicious hit jobs that iconic cultural outposts have been posting about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to consider that his candidacy might represent a kind of threat to SOP impunity, perhaps even plutocratic persistence. Vanity Fair’s faux reportage, filled with speculation, carefully crafted half-truth, and innuendo—‘maybe those weren’t his hands, but what if they were?’—has such a creepy vibe that one might stop supporting RFK merely to avoid icky, icky feelings.
The article’s specific allegations make clear the candidate’s humanity, like everyone’s a flawed expression of divine perfection, ha ha. Is Bobby such a bad actor as to be hopeless? We’ll be finding out as time tells its tale.
New Yorker’s assessment was more of the ever-popular ‘he’s a conspiracy theorist’ trope, believing that vaccines might be insalubrious and—as reported by various peer-reviewed scientists—contribute to the epidemic of autism that is claiming as many as one in thirty live American births now. Oh, yeah, he also thinks—like the House Select Committee on Assassinations and other eminently credible sources—that other than the ‘usual suspects’ played insidious, invidious parts in his uncle’s and his father’s assassinations.
Broadcast and other corporate ‘news’ outlets have widely picked up both stories. Something’s up, and the assault on this specific Kennedy—notwithstanding grassroots coups in the endorsements of Russell Brand and Joe Rogan—might just derail his candidacy, given the ferocity and aforementioned noisome gastric impacts of these attacks.
I remain staunch, yet I’m very happy at this juncture that I don’t have any more wagers that pick him as even a long-odds victor in November. That said, whatever his chances in the coming outcome, one might pose a dandy Spiral Spread inquiry for the Goddess to ponder, to wit along these lines. “No matter the final electoral tally, does RFK’s candidacy contain any nuggets of nuance for concerned citizens to consider?"
The array that dropped on the table could easily evoke a spooky interpretation, starting with an Essence in the form of the back-biting inner sisters of the Four of Cups. The next three cards, delineating Past Influences, Present Passages, and Likely Futures, yielded, respectively, The Chariot, The Star, and The High Priestess, Ares, Pandora, and Persephone in turn, three powerful Major Arcana exemplars.
Completing the sequence, the Eight of Swords shows up as No-Matter-What, Opportunities. The Nine of Wands, in the meantime, occupies the Problems & Prospects spot, followed, to end, with the Three of Wands as a Synthesis of all the rest.
As is BTR’s consistent practice, we’ll deconstruct this sequence in some detail below the fold. First, however, again as has been typical in this ongoing column—I never would have imagined one of my writing shticks as a Tarot gig—we’ll pose a triad question, in the event, as a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis sequence to examine this: “Whoever becomes the next POTUS,” to adopt the ubiquitous acronym, "what ideas or insights ought an average voter and citizen keep in mind as the crisis-ridden current context continues to evolve?”
This issue’s pair of posers obviously have more than a thing or two in common. I’ll hope for some useful contrasts and amplifications nonetheless. As matters came to pass, the triptych Thesis elicited the Two of Swords and its brush with horrific tension. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)
(Chapter XVII ended thus. “One could only sleep with Marie Antoinette so long as she knew nothing of one’s closeness to Robespierre." One of Lou’s luscious libidinal Tuscaloosa escapades ended, conveniently enough, with adequate finality to finesse altogether issues of ‘what next?’ Here is a link to the previous selection. Today, we extend Lou’s and Danielle’s relations to include the sororal background, as it were, of a character who would play an important role in the future volumes of All God’s Cousins that take place in Atlanta, ‘uptown down South.’)
CHAPTER XVIII
* * *
While the notion of female life free from male intervention has graced the human canon since at least the belief in and legends about Amazons, with either magic or miracle the basis for conceiving and bearing children into the world—abandoning the boys to standard society in many cases—only in relatively recent interactions have women had the wherewithal to make this otherwise merely narrative construct a social reality; even before the technological legerdemain of petri dishes' provision of a ground for artificial conception, real women in different places and times have used all manner of modalities, at once brazenly bizarre and strangely apt, to deliver the necessary seminal key to unlock their fructification and initiate the gestation from which, so far, every human being who has ever lived has emerged into the world.
“Did you get the backup basters?” Judith Astey Kant eyed her girlfriend, her life partner, Carly Hayes—“damned happy to have a schicksa and not another Jew”—with that combination of wry humor and suspicion that comprised much of Judith's nature. Her deadpan implied that this seemingly odd query were the most natural thing in the world, as natural as air conditioning felt in the dripping August swelter of Central Florida's panhandle after the technology's coverage began to approach ubiquity.
Her sister, Samuella Kant Gladden, without needing much prompting, would explain to all and sundry in their fallen-gangster environs, “Judy never did get along so good with boys.” That she meant by this that her sister had been raped and impregnated by their synagogue's 'favorite son,' when Jude was but a big-busted lass of fourteen, only a year after her Bat Mitzvah, was not necessarily part of her standard story mix—with the exception of for such future good buddies as Lou James—but the fact was there to discover, for those who were lucky listeners, or for those who were willing to probe.
Judith's dating experience, thereafter, predictably disastrous, led to what her classmates would describe as a cloistered high school life in Miami, where she dreamed each day of escape not to the nunnery but to the ramparts. That she would in fact abscond with herself to the Sunshine State's capitol, at first to Florida State University's psychology department and then to greater Tallahassee, had more or less been predictable, given her love for the Ruby Fruit bookstore and its attendant community of more or less open lesbians and absolutely, not to mention justifiably, fanatical feminists, a context with which the gifted adolescent Judith became familiar on class and affiliation treks to the FSU campus for, among other ventures, a Summer Young Women's Spirituality retreat in 1971, when she had her first girlfriend soul kiss, and a Stop Rape Now conference, which took place during her '72 senior year in High School, that as a phenomenon of resistance and insistence was a cutting edge development both in the South and for this now eternally vigilant daughter of South Florida's rackets and outer social limits upper income brackets.
Ruby Fruit's was not for the most part a Joyce Carol Oates scenario nor altogether a pagan womyn's scene, neither completely obsessive nor exclusively ecological, but it did enfold the fiery and furious—if generally also quiet and withdrawn—young Judith Kant. She worked as a regular employee of the book shop from her FSU freshman year onward, even after she was receiving so many requests for consulting that she had to raise her rates to over a hundred dollars a ninety-minute session in order to fend off burnout and maintain something akin to a sane personal life, a milieu that embraced her communal sorority of bookish feminists and scholarly dykes.
This collective lifestyle of relationship and self-examination also included her leading several Ruby-Fruit forums, the outgrowth of the store's commitment to ongoing and piercing criticism of male supremacy and its role in America's imperial and imperious spectacle of atomized individuality and fetishized sexuality. Her favorite session had been literary—"Sappho’s Sweet Womanly Sustenance”—the last session having gathered around eighty attendees, all but two women, all but a few with their pits unshaven, ha ha.
Her beastly flowering in college, as she had never appeared to do in her South Dade High School sinecure, she quickly adopted the goal of becoming Doctor Kant; before her first semester was fourteen days old, she had announced, under the beaming tutelage of Professor Dobbins, that she fully intended to attend Berkeley or Columbia for her doctoral studies.
Her audience—the seven women who comprised two juniors, four seniors, and a masters-in-psychology candidate, who were her fellow students in the 'advanced' Sociology seminar that she had talked her way into joining, “Slavery, Color, & Female Sexuality in the Not-So-Solid South”—beamed with approbation and, for the most part, seethed with jealously. Only Prof Peggy failed to feel how constrained were all the beaming beatitudes back and forth in the session.
After the Florida State early-admissions letter announced the school's scooping up of the youthful scholar, however, her supersonic alacrity in completing her undergraduate and masters degrees, which she accomplished a decidedly non Seminole season short of four years, or alternatively, in fifteen continuous semesters, derailed this original vision for her future. Garnering a Ph.d and joining Shulamith Firestone and Catherine McKinnon and Adrienne Rich and other strong-solidarity 'queer theorists' remained an honorable calling through life’s coursing crazed conniptions.
After all, Judith joined these intellectual mentors in, among other things, their opposition to the incisive and blistering feminist critic of fetishizers-of-the-feminine, also Sapphic in her calling on occasion, Camille Paglia, who, unlike many of Judith's erstwhile 'colleagues,' not only liked men generally but also recognized the cultural, anthropological, and historical necessity of both masculine and feminine energies. Her abandoning her scholarly sinecure had nothing to do with leaving behind her core conceptions of matters at hand.
Moreover, she retained her connections to all her radical guides, both actual and textual, as it were. These 'extremists' stayer her preferred companeras, but her calling ended up at once more rooted and more parochial than scholarship, a commitment to local knowledge and grassroots activism rather than intelligible insights into arcane or otherwise obscure corners of the feminist canon.
She became a leader on the ground, in other words, not in the ivied environs of seminars amid the hallowed halls of whatever campus might seek her out. This transition toward action in a community context was simple in its unfolding reality. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Finessing Crisis With Vaccines & Such
To an extent, almost everything in one’s life—or in our ability to grasp and articulate our joint existence—comes down to a working hypothesis, more or less resonant and certain. In many cases, such a predictive overview is more uncertain, or more pertinently, more general than at other times. Such less specific hypothetical speculation would of necessity include any complete explanation for a topic like COVID 19 over the past four years or so.
And this conclusion makes essentially indisputable the following summation of how things stand on a different issue, the credibility of erstwhile expert and relentlessly promoted views. A piece of wood makes the case, basically that all official accounts of the conveniently redefined pandemic of the past three years are at best a composite of nonsense, falsehood, non-sequiturs, and partial truth.
“‘Baaaa,’ Sing the Sheep, ‘Oink, Oink, Oink,’ Snort the Pigs, ‘Moooooo’ Low the Cows, As All These Animals Move Along, Isolated Herds, Under Watchful Warders’ Careful Gazes, Toward Their Intended Destination, Whose Looming Sign Awaits Just Over the Horizon, ‘Auschwitz, Hiroshima,’ Or Some New, Heretofore Barely Conceived Home to Torture’s Implicit Impunity & Deliberate Dispatch; People Who Want to Arrive With These Dumb Driven Beasts to Enact Their Own Personal Pangs of Culling & Slaughter Need Do Nothing Other Than to Continue to Follow Along, Amiably & Silently, As Admonished & Directed By Their Overseers in Varying Guises, From Drovers to Judges—If, However, Some Folks Do Not Fancy Mass Collective Suicide & a Virtually Orchestrated, & Reputedly Profitable, Human Extinction, the Time Is Quickly Passing For These Dissenting Strays, Non-Compliant & Ferally Free, to Awaken, Take Notice, & Organize For Action About How Things Truly Stand, Concerning Which a Sufficient Starting Summation Might Aptly State That Nothing Whatsoever That Their Erstwhile Shepherds, Imperial Plunderers All, Propagate, Mandate, & Recommend Can Possibly Be Trustworthy, Or Likely Even Useful, For Purposes Other Than Planning the Populace’s Orderly, Lucrative Enslavement & Extermination."
Obviously, as a matter of course, the intertwined assertions in this message raise issues of whether they represent an accurate estimation of empirical reality. That I say so, or that many purchasers of pieces from this Life-&-Love-&-Art-in-the-Time-of-COVID category agree with my opinion, doesn’t mean much.
Then again, putting my money where my exercises in speech take me is one way that I circumscribe such possible points of contention. From the long-winded sentence above, any reader may choose any assertion therein that seems unsupportable, or even false; we’ll work out a way to present a debate—any expert who wants may stand in for negating the ‘controversial’ contention(s), and this ever-hopeful humble correspondent will present the case for affirming the declaration.
The entire sensation will produce voting about which perspective seems best. And with at most two exceptions among all the imputations-of-fact in that missive, I’ll wager that at least half of the audience agrees with me. I trust that people will see truth when it is available to examine.
Really and truly, this still does little to support a sense of basic veracity in the compound/complex grammatical confection a few paragraphs back. Therefore, just for fun, this note will document three of the embedded factual claims and, thereby, assert further that a preponderance-of-the-evidence legal evidentiary standard would, whether they were implicit or explicit or some combo, decide in favor of all three of these allegations.
Because it comes to bear on what came before, I present the last component of this trio first. “Nothing Whatsoever That Their Erstwhile Shepherds… Propagate, Mandate, & Recommend Can Possibly Be Trustworthy." The ellipse stands in for ‘imperial plunderers all,’ also demonstrable but a much more massive and complex skein.
First, let us accept a modest poetic license. “Nothing Whatsoever” is rarely defensible, yet the same spirit of the sentence survives quite nicely if we replace the offensive phrase with ‘Nothing Close to All COVID 19 Info.’
How about them masks, eh? And the attendant mask mandates, obviously? The evidence is simply dispositive. No credible case exists for masking under most circumstances that made such execrable requirements mandatory. ‘Period. Paragraph,’ as my Mother stated such things.
And the social isolation protocols so popular among ruling Yankee elites? Vaccinations for infants and children? Reliability of COVID mortality data? Myocarditis’ having nothing to do with MRNA shots? The list of wrongheaded—whether intentional or merely stupid—official statements(one would hesitate to call them beliefs because of the insult of applying that label to anyone with a functioning neuron or two)could go on for pages, in terms of different examples of fraud and error.
Were one to look at specific instances, tens of thousands of volumes would be necessary. Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci is a barely discernible drop in the ocean of potential indictments. Peter McCulloch now has a small regiment of credentialed authorities to enhance and expand his almost innumerable litany of malpractice, malfeasance, and misinformation on the part of bureaucrats and businessmen and bankers—some of whom also have had the gall to call themselves scientists—in charge of ‘managing COVID.’
Hence, in our taking things step by step here, one of the three assertive clauses in the initial wood message of the day, to wit that most or at least much of what government and corporate spokespeople say, or research, about COVID 19 is horseshit, stands as proven till someone can show otherwise.
The remaining pair of points appear below the fold, which will be coming up as a prompt soon enough, after some more Driftwood Message Art. Here’s a thought, for instance.
“Isolation & Silence, Toxic & Lethal” is its punchy ‘subject line.’ “Perhaps Some Abandoned Relic, If Reformulated Artfully & Pointedly Enough, Can Provide a Modicum of Guidance in a Context of Apparently Almost Universal Falsehood & Horseshit, Proffering an Antidote to the Toxic Isolation & Lethal Silence That Society’s Trustafarian Plutocratic Masters Now Relentlessly Mandate For Everyone Save Themselves & Their Coteries of Bought-&-Paid-For ‘Expert’ Minions."
At its foundation, the motivation that money’s mandates use to get compliance is fear—death, job loss, shame, harm to others, lasting loss of functionality, and all kinds of other terror prods are part of the established propaganda and persuasion toolkit. The actual applicability of the so-called facts underlying these scare-tactics would make human existence on Earth a causality violation.
That we’re here proves an ability to bounce back and a regular readiness to manage nature’s ‘slung arrows of rotten luck,’ as it were. “Existence’s Inevitable Wounds & Tumors, Nicks & Scratches, & Other Indicia of Wear & Tear Must Imply—Unless We Fancy an Ever-Diminishing Decline Into Doldrums of Doom Rather Than Salubrious Survival—Some Sound Basis For Strength & Health: So Too All Natural Norms of Disease & Predation; We Wouldn’t Be Here Otherwise Because Our Ancestors Would Never Have Lived Past Infancy.”
So then. How ‘bout them apples? What’s the next substantive point from the Message that started us out? …(continued below the fold)
Empowered Political Forays—Capitalism on Drugs: the Political Economy of Contraband From Heroin to Ritalin & Beyond (Continued)
(Sex and drugs seem nearly as closely wedded and birth and death. The last piece of this broader narrative puzzle wrapped up matters like this: “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."
Part One is here. This is Part Two. Today’s third episode in this exploration continues with more insight from Joseph Campbell and then looks at the historical record further to amplify our human propensity to manage our intensity with psychoactive plants.)
Yet another aspect of Campbell’s outpouring of mythic restatement and interpretation remains the synthesis that the mythologist weaves from all these concatenations of the human pass through this veil of tears. In his summative Flight of the Wild Gander, he shows how close-to-omnipresent are these initiations that deal out experiences that quite often entail use of one mind-twisting chemical or another.
“But now, in every primitive society on earth—whether of the hunting or of the planting order—these inevitable imprints and conceptions of infancy are filled with new associations, rearranged and powerfully reimprinted, under the most highly emotional circumstances, in the puberty rites, the rites of initiation, to which every young male(and often every female too) is subjected. …A fundamental motif in such ceremonials is that of death to infancy and rebirth to adulthood.” The great mythologist suggests that grottoes and caves—filled with ancient art—almost certainly were theaters in which these kinds of activities played out.
In the Primitive Mythology volume() of the series, The Masks of God, Campbell concludes that in essentially all cultural, spiritual approaches to human existence, myths and their component rites and ‘magic’ contribute indisputably to the pleasure principle, the power principle, and the desire for ordered and systematic sustainability. He goes on, however, to argue persuasively that the shamanistic, transcendent expressions of mythic acts produce a ‘higher-level’ of awareness, an expanded consciousness on which human advances have likely always rested.
“(I)n the earlier periods of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic gatherers, hunters, and primitive planters, a sense of awe before the closely watched wonders of the animal and plant domains had produced the mimes of the buffalo dance and the sacrificial seed. Through such half-mad games and plays ordered human societies were constellated in which the mutually contradictory interests of the elementary and social urges were resolved.
And the higher principle according to which they were thus resolved was not in any sense a function or derivative of any one of them or of their combination, but an actually superior, superordinated principle sui generis…that principle of disinterested delight and self-loss in a rhythm of beauty…which used to be called, more loosely, spiritual, mystical, or religious. The biological urges to enjoy and to master (with their opposites to loathe and to fear), as well as the social urge to evaluate (as good or evil, true or false), simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer experience supervenes… . The mind is released—for a moment, for a day, perhaps forever—from those anxieties to enjoy, to win, or to be correct, which spring from the net of nerves in which men are entangled.”
Campbell’s capacities to excavate the human psyche so close to roots of consciousness emanated from those of earlier writers such as James Frazier, whose classic, The Golden Bough, styled itself, in similar vein as Malinowski, as a study of magic and religion. Even a brief bibliography here would contain dozens of authorities and thousands of links that prove beyond doubt that prohibition has never prevailed as a regimen for managing these materials that in contemporary practice are part of a huge complex of repression and death and falsification of the real in support of the upper class sectors of society.
Emile Durkheim was one of the pioneers of what we might call historical and scientific sociology, a sort of technocratic mythologist who developed his documentation through direct observation or records of rituals and practices. Inevitably, such depictions as his bring to the fore mythic traditions and elements. To Durkheim, this seeking after oneness was everywhere, emanating endlessly in nature and appearing ritually in human society.
“Moreover, the object of this communion is manifest. Every member of a totemic clan contains a mystic substance within him which is the preeminent part of his being, for his soul is made out of it. From it come whatever powers he has and his social position, for it is this which makes him a person.
So he has a vital interest in maintaining it intact, and in keeping it, as far as is possible, in a state of perpetual youth. Unfortunately all forces, even the most spiritual, are used up in the course of time if nothing comes to return to them the energy they lose through the normal working of things.”
He sees this interaction with the plant and animal worlds, in some ways as controlling and in every sense as trusting the fruitfulness of the Earth, as a foundation for certain traditions of waste, even of sacrifice. Complex and ecstatic rituals here emerged, in much the same fashion that Durkheim and multitudes of others illustrate and thereby also characterize the human attempts to manage and trust our species’ own fructification. Of course, life would cease were even a small part of this reliance on bounty ever to prove fallacious.
In the constructed scripts of these visions, people would ‘taste’ the gods and give up of themselves and their harvests so as to mimic what actually took place in the fields and forests. “Here as elsewhere the artifice was born to imitate nature. …(I)n fact, we have just seen that in an important number of societies the totemic sacrifice…is or has been practised.
Of course, we have no proof that this practice is necessarily inherent to totemism or that it is the germ out of which all the other types of sacrifices have developed. But if the universality of the rite is hypothetical, its existence is no longer to be contested. Hereafter it is to be regarded as established that the most mystical form of the alimentary communion is found even in the most rudimentary cults known today.” …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”Resuscitation”
(The starting section’s selection came to this conclusion. “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." The story’s interlocutor has introduced himself, his journalistic companera, and the book that he has written about his revival from nearly two days as a drowned corpse. He has also described the dire conflict that his rejection of heavenly hosts has caused.)
“'Where's the magic,' indeed!” I laughed and paused. “You may readily believe this occurred to me before I entered the silence of my watery grave.” I even thought of the YouTube channel: “Irony in Extremis,” ha ha.
“Yet here I am, a writer with a book, pleading for attention, for just a modicum of thoughtful consideration, practically the opposite of ironic. If ever a tale of love and redemption pointed out a future for our kind, this one does.
Not because I've written this guide do I beg my readers' indulgence, but because, by the terrible grace of whatever guides the cosmos, I have been, perhaps, the first definitively to experience such an awakening from the long cold sleep of a dreamless night that is death."
********
As always the applause was modest, albeit I sensed a deep psychic stillness in a few listeners, which I found so gratifying. More often each time I read, a growing gallery of folks attended who obviously were about to succumb to the reaper: there the palsied old fellow with the respirator, there the young woman with the chemo-glow, maybe eight or so others here in Atlanta, all of them with brimming eyes and a paradoxical patina of hope.
It looked like hope in any case, as I paused prior to speaking again. To me, just the notion that people might choose something other than religious pap represented a powerfully positive sign for our kind.
*********
"Hey all! I hope that some of you will stay for my broadcast remarks. Since that shooter in Chicago tried to kill me, I'm on all the stations.
You know you've arrived, in terms of intellectual credibility, when even C-Span sees fit to give you the time of day. There's even a lonely stringer for "Free Speech Radio News," bless her heart. I understand they pay really poorly, for hard, hard labor. …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—
(Chapter Four ended in this fashion. “" Jack had trusted to gravity to bring his loot and provisions and tackle safely to Earth. All that remained was to return himself, secure his Ma, ascertain George’s adequate dispatch, and bring about a ‘fated reunion,’ a thought much to the young man’s liking in ways theretofore altogether novel. Would such salubrious passages come to pass? Our young Jack certainly had all the necessary qualities for such heroism; we shall see.)
More Than a Hill of Beans
YOUNG JACK’S FIRST CLIMB, a Prologue
Chapter Five—Extrication Instead of Extirpation
“Oh my!” This is all Katrina said when a much diminished ball of Jack's sturdy twine plopped in the moss near the ever-moist tendrils of their Forever Tree. Immediately intrigued, she began the ambit from her garden, past their cottage and across the sparse grasses toward the message from on high, “from my son,” she thought with a flutter of her heart.
Before she'd taken more than three steps, however, a much more resounding thud sent her into a stutter stepping little leap, accompanied by a squealing peal of alarm. When she saw that the source of this sound was a large tawny sack, likely leather, curiosity again easily mastered her fear, even when a third thump announced the arrival of Jack's own pack.
She approached slowly, however, craning her neck to peer up along the ascent of Terraria toward her ever-present crown of clouds. She didn't want some heavy thing from on high smacking her in the head.
When she felt safe enough, she first gathered her boy's remaining skein of slender rope and placed it in Jack's rucksack, which had some heft from the tools that Jack took with him hither and yon. Atop these lay his knife, strands of some cut vegetable cord or other astride the blade. She wondered, “what's this mean?” though her mind soon followed her eyes to rest on the blond, bronzed pouch, or poke-bag, modest and yet, somehow, as Katrina's moistened, parted lips attested, irresistibly intriguing.
Before she had a chance to examine the big bag that most baldly captured her attention, however, a scattering patter of tiny bits of debris dusted her scalp, so that she ducked her head between her shoulders and scurried once more aside from the base of their Tree.
Shielding her eyes and face with a gnarled mother's hand to her brow, she peered as if to pierce the sky and see what fate was coming her way. She almost thought she could make out something, though she could not say what, or even if what she fancied was any more than fancies. She sighed as her soul seemed to rise from her chest toward the clouds at the crest of their Tree.
Could she have perched among Cloud Tree branches in Cloudland, where Terraria joined the sky, she would have sat there, legs wrapped about some slender upper trunk, and gazed down on her son, thinking when she did so how grown and capable a young man her boy had become. He was rubbing something into the bark of their Forever Tree; that much seemed clear.
Her handsome lad was nervous too, or so she would have noticed had she seen. And indeed, young Jack turned aside from his slathering task to sniff the air and listen with greater intensity than ever before in his life.
Just as he tasted the air and sampled the breeze, waiting for just the instant when he would begin his descent, at that precise moment, Elma May bolted upright from her seat, crying out in a snort of terror. “Oh!” she cried as if she'd forgotten to make certain of the first step in a long stairway down into darkness.
Her exclamation did not emanate from the agony in her wrist, which George had snapped with a flick of his fingers when he realized her part in the robbery that had befallen him, but from a very different realization. “I didn't warn him,” she thought, envisioning the sweet fellow whom she so fancied might rescue her from a fate as a drudge and coconspirator of such a vile creature as Giant George.
“I didn't tell him what a sneak that monster can be.” She reflexively flexed her elbow to prepare for an self-admonishing snap of her fingers, but then her scream shook the rafters, the roil in her guts flooded her throat, and sweat sprung out all over her face and torso as the throb in her arm felt like an amputating chop with a dull, heavy axe.
Jack jumped and focused. He reached for his right wrist as a fist in his chest roughly grabbed his lungs and gagged his breath. “Ouch!” was all he said, holding his right hand with his strong and skillful left, realizing that something odd, and a little portentous, was channeling through him.
Truly, he could have benefited—likely in life-saving fashion—from knowledge that Giant George, whatever his slow and seeming clumsy ambit, could be quite the quiet sneak thief, especially in terrain he regularly traversed.
After all, our Jack had planned his final tactical foray, so to say, on the basis of waiting for the crashing and thrashing of George's approach, replete in his mind's eye with the shrieks and gnashing of teeth that would accompany the giant's ogling Jack's jaunty posture on the cusp of his clamber toward terra firma. Now, he looked all about him with a growing alarm, bordering on a panic that he had never before felt but which gripped him so fiercely that his breathing came in baleful gulps.
He lacked very important information. What saved him, in the end, was good fortune, a force which Jack always sought to claim as his guiding light, in this case in the form of the booming bass timber of one of George's most resonant farts. …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Depleted Uranium: an Initial Primer
As an entry point for studying the toxicity, plausibly ecocidal horror, of the Modern Nuclear Project, ‘Depleted Uranium’ is unbeatable. This is true on so many levels, from Public Relations to public health, from science to storytelling, from political economy to political gangsterism, at this last of which the ‘land of the free’ most especially excels.
The specific articulation in the paragraphs and pages that follow dates from ten years back or so, albeit they have more than stayed relevant, with a truly pointed pertinence, in the present passage through life’s fraught fracases and varied veils of tears. Thus, one still finds lopsided majorities of nations and citizens thereof who would rid the planet of the so-called ‘depleted Uranium’ that is equally toxic and lethal as its ‘enriched’ isotopes.
More to the point, perhaps, U.S. use of such ordnance has never come close to being a requisite of prevailing in a martial dispute. The U.S. technical superiority no more requires DU munitions than Roman supremacy in its wars necessitated crucifying all opposing combatants.
In the event, ‘American values’ apparently advance mass murder as a mainstay of Empire’s supremacist presumption. The winner writes the history and makes the rules, but hell to pay can end up the outcome regardless. A hideous example that would exact fierce karma costs would be rumored possibilities of supplying Kiev with such monstrosities.
The juridical and ethical stance in relation to these matters is not up for question. The vast majority of nations have decried these weapons and demanded their abolition, even if such insistence lacks the teeth even to nibble at the imperial behemoth’s hide.
Part of the problem in this sphere is the way that ridding ourselves of these wretched horrors requires abrogating one of capital’s primary precepts, to wit the fierce hunger to turn waste into new commodities. To an extent, this realm as well as any illustrates the impossibility of making profit’s increase congruent with people’s thriving and survival.
Whatever the case may be, the grotesque butchery and vile depredations of using Uranium weapons remain regular redoubts of U.S. practice. Without doubt, such tactical choices make any sort of ‘strategy-for-human-survival’ difficult to attain, if not completely ‘out of the question.’ If murderous despair is our favorite choice, then we’re surely on the right track, but not otherwise.
A Depleted Uranium Doom Machine
Reality Orientation to Criminal Accessory to Homicide
LEGAL FICTIONS AND MORAL TRUTHS
For most people, the word 'accessory' brings to mind nice hand bags or belts. However, the term also has legal significance, as in 'accessories' to criminal activity such as that which has accompanied the imperial actions of the United States Government.
Such an accusatory tone may sound a bit harsh, emanating from a known radical. Therefore, this sojourn can begin with one of the miscreants who returned to the path of righteousness. Smedley Butler was the commanding general of the Marine Corps in the 1920’s. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor in the decades prior to that. He speaks with authority about imperious militarism.
“There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger men’ (to point out enemies), its ‘muscle men’ (to destroy enemies), its ‘brain guys,’ (to plan war preparations) and a ‘Big Boss,’ (super-nationalistic capitalism). I was a ‘Racketeer’ in this outfit.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force -- the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a gangster for capitalism.”
As U.S. citizens, we all inhabit the gangland capital of planet Earth. Thinking about JFK, Nicolas Maduro, Julian Assange, Bernie Sanders, and every other sociopolitical ‘newsmaker’ leads ineluctably to pondering gangsterism’s ascendancy and whether that will be something that we continue to choose.
In this regard, in perusing the article before them today, folks will need to think about what being an accessory to murder means. After all, if the U.S. government is participating in criminal activity, then citizens could be accessories before the fact or accessories after the fact. The former is a more serious charge, but in the case of murder, any involvement is, by definition, deadly serious.
I make these points because today's article contains damning evidence that the government of the United States of America, acting with impunity in the face of growing documentation, has operationalized weaponry that kills with indiscriminate effect and over an uncontrollably large area and period of time. I refer to Depleted Uranium(DU) ordnance, which continues to destroy the lives of both non-combatants and soldiers on all sides, even as folks are reading these lines.
Recognizing this underscores an important idea that I have spent much of my adult life advancing. Essentially, this is the notion that a 'responsible' citizenry is impossible outside of a context of advancing a democratic take on science policy. The reasoning is fairly straightforward: essentially, folks can only take responsibility for that over which they exercise some real dominion.
Common people's lack of agency is a primary basis for not holding ordinary folks accountable for 'crimes against humanity.' But in a moral realm, looked at ethically, citizens who are capable of recognizing reality have some kind of duty to empower themselves, either to foment action that saves lives or to derail activity that decimates random cousins indiscriminately.
Forcing the government to abandon DU weapons would save millions of humans; continued usage of these morbid missiles guarantees that a slaughterhouse atmosphere, albeit one that unfolds slowly and with maximum pain, continues into the foreseeable future. ‘Silence gives consent,’ alas.
In very short order, within the next year or so, no 'fix' of the horrifying facts will be possible. The existence of huge increases in mortality and morbidity in communities adjacent to the battlefields of Iraq is incontrovertible. That DU is a definite cause is not so readily demonstrable, but the probability may approach 'one' that DU will in fact end up being a primary, perhaps the only, culprit for the rampage of cancer and other killing effects that have appeared in such communities as Fallujah.
The evidence is so overwhelming that, despite the inability to prove absolutely that DU weapons are weapons of mass destruction(WMD's), the likelihood is high enough that the DU weaponry and attendant policies employed by the U.S. government do in fact constitute WMD's. “According to local doctors and citizens, the U.S. forces employed internationally banned weapons in their operation, including white phosphorus and depleted uranium (DU) ammunition that led to catastrophic levels of birth defects and abnormalities due to contamination.”
This is reporting from the Chinese outlet, Xinhua. The article adds, “(a) local doctor in the city told Xinhua on condition of anonymity that there are no official figures about the overall situation of birth defects in the city, but a study conducted in 2011 showed that out of every 1,000 newborns, some 147 were born with birth defects. The researchers also found that the number of breast cancer cases in females increased 10 times compared to the number in 2003."
Again, I assert that only an inherently imperialistic reader will be likely to resist these sorts of conclusions when confronted with the data that Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, and Entesar Ariabi reveal in their peer-reviewed article, "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009," which appeared Summer 2014 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The empirical trend or tendency of their intellectual labors is not difficult to follow.
The ‘cat has long been out of the bag’ in this regard. Robert Heinlein rather eerily demonstrates the point that awareness has for decades been ubiquitous that nuclear arsenals and targets would be one core component of military matters now. Heinlein disbelieved the promise of the atomic energy’s explosive potential, articulating his perspective in 1941, well before the Manhattan Engineering District even existed as America’s bureaucratic cover for its plans to rule the roost with the biggest bang available.
Yet the science-fiction writer and Navy Intelligence operative, in “Solution Unsatisfactory,” foresaw with perfect clarity how deadly poisonous Uranium effects could nevertheless be weaponized as ‘deadly dust.’ In a sense, his vision has come to parallel the realm of the real, where fission/fusion circumscribe the strategic parameters of modern warfare, and where tactics of invasion and kamikaze raids now focus on ‘nuclear-power plants,’ and U.S. ordnance commonly conveys Depleted Uranium munitions.
As a matter of course, recent epidemiology and Public Health have affirmed Dr. Busby’s and his colleague’s research. A meta-analysis from 2021 is typical, showing that the vast majority of included studies found likely causal connections between DU exposure and negative health outcomes, even as the compilation’s author is very cautious indeed about seeing things as the underlying research has tended to look at everything. Busby remains active in the field even now, an elder statesman, as it were. …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
A little grassroots ‘research agency’ that I conceived and operated primarily served to justify many of my Late PrePeeCeeistine and early-Internet rabbit hole adventuring. Its name has always appeared to me as a lovely descriptor, so to say: WriteRightWrite, a homonym for a common expostulation in response to some trenchant and yet obvious statement of the indubitable. Whatever the case may be, I’m still at it.
The unfolding of everything and the twining twists of this publication are, come what may, a reflection of reality as well as the inherent, truly twisted contrariness of even the most soulful and compassionate consciousness. As is my wont, I’ll respond to these mirror images with the words that graced a piece of Driftwood Message Art.
It gets its title, “Thickets of Antithesis,” from its final words. “Twisting Passages of Paradox—That Every Portal's Invitation to See May Yield Blindness; That Every Taut Muscular Surface Overlays a Slack Sack of Interior Goo; That All Answered Inquiry Activates Additional Querulous Questions; & On & On In Any Aspect of Existence—Pave Life's Pathways One & All, Most Especially That the Capacity to Comprehend This Universal Processing of Interlocking Contradiction Comes to the Fore, If At All, Only Toward the End of One's Sojourn Through These Thickets of Antithesis."
The point of Big Tent Review is navigating these thickets. Of necessity, this means discourse, ha ha. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
—Below the Fold—
The unfolding of everything and the twining twists of this publication are, come what may, a reflection of reality as well as the inherent, truly twisted contrariness of even the most soulful and compassionate consciousness. I’d love to hear from folks; I’m interested in collaborative adventuring. Let’s go!
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
The Antithesis stated its case with the ever-eerie Wheel of Fortune. A Synthesis then offered up the Six of Pentacles. Before the reading’s three primary cards even appeared, in the event, a Jumper leapt from the deck in the form, for the first of two appearances in the course of things, of the Nine of Wands.
What might this all mean? The purported ‘mainstream’ journalism examined above gloriously fulfill their function of spreading malicious, disturbing, even disgusting accusations about a clever, lucky cousin so as to induce in potential followers a state of such profound anomie, or cognitive dissonance, that doing nothing is preferable to ‘choosing sides.’ This is, precisely, the operational outcome of benighted Orestes’ homicidal parents’ standoff in the Two: the tension is insufferable but the boy clings to it so as to forestall frightening forays into any active ambit that must, with no exceptions, palpate bloody battle.
This “state of paralysis” surely seems a resonant statement about the current context, especially in relation to absolutely unstoppable “impending conflict.” Mythic Tarot’s textual prompts appear positively spooky about electoral affairs today. “The emotional tone…is an uncomfortable state of precariously balanced calm, beneath which there is great tension and anxiety. It is the state of knowing that something must change, but being terrified of doing anything to inaugurate the change, preferring to blind oneself rather than risk the conflict which must, eventually, happen anyway." Indeed.
The Antithesis, in the form of Fortune’s unfolding of foretold Fate, implacably expresses the cycles in things, the ups and downs, the shifts and transformations despite every ruling rubric’s arraying imprecations against any change. This, as a hopeful augury, is a plausibly apt capsulization, unlike Orestes’ Two just above. A change of luck, overdue, cannot help but be in oppressed people’s favor. Right?
At the same time, Fortune’s Wheeled Cycle, as it were, must ever be terrifying as well as tempting. Fate, karma, and comeuppance always bring a flutter in the chest to any other than the Forrest Gumps among us. After all, in the parlance of the priestesses, “Fate does not come to meet us—rather, we turn to meet our fate.”
From irrepressible conflict to taking our chances, whatever folks end up thinking and doing in relation to an erstwhile Trustafarian hero named Kennedy, no less, this dynamic—of being willing to break open the embattled necessities that we so fiercely and simultaneously find ways to evade—could well demarcate an aspect of our only viable approach to survival. If nothing else, per usual, this is ‘food for thought.’
The Synthesis too is just chillingly apropos to what many people are feeling about things now, this election and otherwise. Daedalus’ journey, at the juncture of the Six, has taken him through the errors of egotism and the egregious loss that these miscues create, to arrive at the prospect of seeking succor and support from new patrons, so to say, an obvious affirmation of popular longing for a potential replacement for ‘usual-business’ processes that have governed us, time out of mind.
Again, this applicability has nothing to do with what, as some kind of discrete thing in and of itself, an RFK Presidency might do. Not at all; instead, it highlights how setting aside the ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx serves as a crucial step—arguably anyhow—in humanity’s charting a course to survival, which can only happen if we find ways to discuss everything that propounds our problematic presence in the annals of the now, conversations axiomatically absurd in the context of the false dualities of the One-Party-State.
Whatever his flailing failings, this Bobby in question has a history of permitting discourse from every source. Russell Brand and Kamala Harris? Ha! Joe Rogan and Donald Trump? Another joke, even if vaguely comprehensible as a kind of staged non sequitur. RFK not only needn’t ‘save us.’ He cannot provide even a semblance of salvation. That’s our job, a central task in species’ flowering that the desiccating toxicity of ReDemoPubliCratiCan practice positively prohibits, but that we can prove by claiming for ourselves after a Kennedy miracle.
My Mother liked to intone, at life’s ongoing crises: ‘any port in a storm.’ The tsunamis of today are, at least historically speaking, unprecedented. We find a way to set aside ‘business-as-usual,’ or, most probably, Homo Sapiens persistence will collapse in one way or another. This inescapable possibility makes this Reading’s Crossing Card, the Nine in Jason’s suit of leadership and team-building, an especially poignant punctuation.
Its promise of ‘strength-in-reserve,’ at just the juncture when catastrophic collapse seems otherwise incontrovertible, is one that we must pray will potentiate the resolve and resilience to persist, even in the snapping fangs of fickle fate’s mix of fuckery and treachery and despair. All of us can, as we live and breathe, ‘keep at it,’ ‘not give in,’ etc., etc. etc.
To reiterate, the query that the Goddess ‘answered’ through my shuffles and plucks with this triptych-turned-quatrain assumed nothing about any sense that a Kennedy victory—or defeat for that matter—was, in any way, either truly requisite for our well-being or clearly destructive of our benefit. Rather, the question at hand is what we ought to learn and do from the fact of this ‘expansion of choice,’ however POTUS pontification resolves itself.
I’d say that Gaia has delivered. Though I’m a storyteller who never refuses an opportunity to spin, as it were, this is my story, one to which I will stick like glue until someone has a better interpretation. Similarly, the Spiral Spread from above-the-fold has no investment in a successful Kennedy campaign outcome. It merely looks for a bit of guidance-from-the-ether about how citizens should relate to this experience of a widening of choice and all such attendant blah blah blah.
Here are the cards, repeated from the previous section. The array that dropped on the table could easily evoke a spooky interpretation, starting with an Essence in the form of the back-biting inner sisters of the Four of Cups. The next three cards, delineating Past Influences, Present Passages, and Likely Futures, yielded, respectively, The Chariot, The Star, and The High Priestess, Ares, Pandora, and Persephone in turn, three powerful Major Arcana exemplars.
Completing the sequence, the Eight of Swords shows up as No-Matter-What, Opportunities. The Nine of Wands, in the meantime, occupies the Problems & Prospects spot, followed, to end, with the Three of Wands as a Synthesis of all the rest.
The Central pull here, evoking unrequited affection’s envy and vicious slanders in response, brings out Psyche’s jealous sisters, who turn her against her ‘monster’ husband. The upshot ought to be easily apparent. In the event, textual ideas contextualize potent points.
Mythic Tarot advisories here are a bit chilling, literally for me. As backbiting from our ‘masters and betters’ becomes relentless, we wrestle with “a feeling of being let down or cheated, although the one who does the cheating is usually oneself because of one’s unreal expectations." This last point is particularly pertinent: so long as they remain human, politicians will exhibit all the frailties of our kind; propaganda to produce revulsion and rejection because of said humanity irreducibly plays us, under the best of circumstances, for morons or idiots.
If we expect electoral campaigns to be pristine, we’re no better than childish fools. For sure, this is a central lesson. The temporal threesome from the reading then proposes that Ares warlike propensities point out profound tensions in our collective Past that we have in some shape, form, or fashion wrestled so as to bring about a present where Pandora’s prayers-of-prevailing give us a sense of possibility despite the harsh contrary evidence, all of which at least allows an inference of Future Prospects, in the eerie garb of Persephone’s rule of the feminine realms of the Underworld, that might conceivably be survivable or even salubrious, so long as we can navigate murky straits where clarity and certainty are not only unlikely, but also altogether impossible.
As such a temporal template plays out, we may No-Matter-What expect tribulation aplenty, the deepest and most daunting sorts of conundrums to contemplate, Psyche’s veritable descent to Hades to save her marriage, challenges that are nevertheless ones that we can succeed in resolving if our commitment matches our innate capacities. Our general chances, meanwhile, would seem to rely on a repeat performance from Jason’s Nine of Wands and its potential for necessitating ‘end-of-our-rope’ energy adequate to prevail.
As a Synthesis, Jason’s earlier experience in his heroic journey, of finding authority’s unexpected support for his heretical ventures, must seem a ‘best-of-all-possible worlds’ sort of potentiation. It lays a foundation, if nothing else, for eluding Mass Collective Suicide.
Here’s a one line, inherently complex Spiral-Spread summation. ‘We need to be wary about hidden agendas behind attacks on whatever we’re liking, or even sometimes merely considering, for example an ‘Independent’ vote; our political past erupted from fierce inner struggles that have yielded a present pass of Hope in the teeth of troubles, tenacious and terrible, in the everyday lives of common folk, implying omens of a Future that will emerge from unseen resources and renderings within us, developments that will confront us with necessary and profound challenges that we have no choice but to undertake in pursuit of what we desire, a general evolution of Prospective Problem-Solving in which we must ever count on having a little extra energy left over in our struggles, a reliance that, in its inaugurating this resilient ferocity, might well lead to public approbation of altogether novel power-politics and public-policy arrangements.’
Capiche? Whatever the case may be, Bobby Kennedy has taken a stand and is advocating for a future that does not unavoidably devolve to a slightly different version of ongoing affliction, a process that American pundits laughably label a ‘Two-Party-System’ that is much more redolent of a Two-Farce-Circus, or something of the sort.
I have no attachment to his victory, inasmuch as I know with utmost certainty that his ‘leadership’ cannot resolve the difficulties that delineate our otherwise privileged and plentiful life courses. In other words, we, the people, must show ourselves to be capable of responsible stewardship; RFK’s candidacy permits our palpating such programs. As so often proves true, a Wood Message offers an appropriate exit.
“Insidiously ‘Safe’ Electoral Selection” is the title. “Almost Simultaneously, We All Both Want & Woe Options to Take Seats at Society's Bargaining Table: We Insist, Accurately, That Equity Mandates Such Assertions, Yet We All Too Often Feel Safer Assuming Roles of Children Whom Powerful Parental 'Leaders' Will Protect, Though This Nonsensical Notion Is Only Possible to Dispel Through Our Own Purposeful, Principled Participation."
‘A word, after all, ought to be sufficient to the wise.’ Undoubtedly, we might put this thought in our pipes for a little enlightening smoke.
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
Because Judith's status as a focused and fierce young stalwart of the newly inaugurated Women's Studies movement brought her a certain limelight, and as a result of her effectiveness at finding resources and solutions for the women who noticed her on that brightly lit stage and reached out to her for advice, before her final term as an undergraduate had concluded, she founded what she would ever afterward call, even as its name and operational protocols evolved this way and that, her Feminist Family Practice Center, or FFPC, a decision which caused her to continue straight into a self-designed FSU masters program in counseling, psychology, and women's studies rather than taking Columbia up on its offer of a teaching fellowship and tuition waiver.
Her clients' troubles included unwanted pregnancies, rejected lovers and husbands, and workplace discrimination. Her clientele incorporated enlisted personnel from nearby Eglin Air Field and the only slightly further afield Pensacola's Naval Air Station; she even won an honorable discharge and a disability stipend for a raped Fort Stewart First Lieutenant, from Georgia, who wandered into Judith's purview just a week after her second suicide attempt; single mothers who had discovered their desire to explore life without toxic partners were among her proteges; upper crust junior high and high school girls who wanted, as much as possible, to avoid involving their parents and their preachers in decisions about bringing a gestation to term formed a bedrock of her FFPC practice. Multiple other cohorts and groupings of women in need sought her out and persist to the present day in seeking her assistance and succor.
Carla Hayes Blackman, the wife of a prominent criminal attorney legendary in local circles for a wandering eye and multiple erotic partners, began to bring Judith 'referrals,' primarily the aforementioned young women of privilege who had seemingly insoluble difficulties—the clear majority were pregnant and didn't want to be—within a month of the FFPC opening party in December, 1975. A “slow bloomer from a sheltered home”—her father, Richard Hayes, had inherited central Florida's largest lumber company—the rotund and jolly Mrs. Hayes-Blackman neither dressed nor acted like Judith's regular comrades; her wardrobe was strictly Saks and other New York clothiers, she shaved her armpits and legs with a smile and a shrug, while her demeanor circumscribed a quiet finishing school chic.
In point of fact, Carly, who mostly enjoyed what sex she managed to seduce out of her peripatetic and skirt-chasing spouse and had only experimented with being a Lesbian Until Graduation till the middle of her own FSU Senior year, when she met Tom Blackman, who was due to graduate the university's Juris Doctor program in May of 1972, did not instantly throw off her heterosexual traces to join Judith in a life of adherence to Sappho and service to woeful women.
Though their friendship was instantaneous, their occasional flirtation after they began to have coffee together, and once in a while cocktails, took over a year to evolve into a love affair whose passion invoked the mind and the spirit as much as, perhaps more than, the vulva and the clitoris. The scandalous nature of their mutual devotion, which led to a society divorce and plentiful legal discovery that inevitably became fodder for local gossip and back-biting and alliance-building, came closer than anything else in Judith's Ruby Fruit life and times to an Oates narrative, a la Solstice.
Erotic effervescence did not serve as a foundation for what they called “our marriage in all but name,” however. From the outset, theirs was an 'open relationship,' with Judith drawn to kinky girls and Tallahassee's well-known and storied wild-womyn encounters, while Carly once or twice a year indulged her affection for one or another of the men who regularly sought her company and consortium.
Nevertheless, their heartfelt connection's strength—a deeply rooted and wide-ranging social and intellectual partnership—was unshakeable. Such a couple as these two formed as naturally gravitated toward having kids as bees buzz most frequently about the sweetest blossoms among the poppies.
They thus ended up at the front lines of the female members of the species who, not only surreptitiously and soto voce but also openly and defiantly, as campaigners for women's complete and independent humanity, declared that they would bear and rear offspring with as little involvement of men as possible. In Samuella's telling, “they wanted to be mothers together like they wanted to be together in everything.” When one of Carly's flings was female, she invariably bedded one of Judith's flames, “for example, in case you think I'm pulling your leg about this.”
In the relations that formed their rich and complicated lives with each other, socializing was, if not constant, a many-times-a-week occurrence. In such a context, graphic design was one of Judith's hobbies. “My flyers never fail to deliver the goods,” which is to say scads of unshaven females and a smattering of the men who wanted to be as deeply in touch as was possible with the wild and wanton women who were “willing to stand up and stand out in our patriarchal present moment.”
Therefore, the neon green and wildly decorated poster at Ruby Fruit and elsewhere—for a “First Annual Tallahassee Baster Bash”—was a signal to the Leon County cognoscenti that another Kant Caper was in the works. The announcement at its final line, “Invitations Absolutely Required” induced curiosity, but merely casual interest did not lead to the necessary paperwork, formally printed, that permitted a bearer entry to the evocatively named party.
Given this designation that the entire soiree involved basters, Judith's query to her sweetheart four hours on the dot from what Ms. Kant termed “our opening ceremony” was arguably apt. In the event, Carly rolled her eyes and suppressed a sardonic grin. “Yes, dear, of course,” was all she said though.
Three hours fifty-nine minutes later precisely, the fifty chosen guests all stood nervously in line, without a single exception—Samuella explained, “She let every single one of them know that they were shit out of luck if they were more than sixty seconds late.” These would be bashers had little certainty about how the night would turn out, even those who were in the know about plans and intentions generally in that regard, but they certainly hadn't anticipated signing a nondisclosure agreement that Tom Blackman had drafted for his ex-wife.
Despite the nastiness of her divorce fight, “he was never one to hold a grudge, that Tom,” said Carly, who laughed when she talked about how getting him interested in sex was easier since she'd left him.
But sign the would be merrymakers did, since otherwise they could not gain entry. The crowd included thirty women, ten of them heterosexual and libertine or stubbornly independent or perhaps merely curious and curiouser, and twenty men—an unheard of male presence for a Kant caper—half hetero and half homosexual to “show that I don't discriminate against the boys because of how they swing.”
The occasion itself, though merry indeed were the sights and sounds that transpired throughout the night as developments developed to bring about ever scantier dress and yield ever more orgiastic, as well as multiply orgasmic, behavior, served entirely utilitarian purposes. Eighteen of the thirty female attendees conceived that night, and not one of them had sex directly with a man to accomplish this erstwhile coupling end.
The basters served a phallic function, ejaculating on command the ejaculate that the twenty men on hand provided throughout the evening, using all manner of modalities to elicit the semen that impregnated the attendant females. Judith would recall how wild, even frantic, the fucking and sucking and fondling became.
Samuella would chuckle when describing her sister's rolling laugh about it all. Perhaps because she valued the sense of agency that the act entailed, “she almost ended up with a cock in her mouth, the first time since she was fourteen.”
Of course, of course, the two co-hostesses were among the women in the mix who greeted the dawn with a 'bun in the oven.' Judith shuddered at the possibility of bearing a boy into the world. “I couldn't have stood it,” she recalled with pursed lips. “I would have aborted the little creature.”
Carly definitely hoped to carry a boy home from her labors more or less forty weeks hence. This sort of balance characterized just about every aspect of the couple's lives. While Carly hugged and bussed every one of the forty-eight 'outside' participants in the affair, just as dawn painted the semitropical Panhandle scrub horizon that surrounded the home that they had purchased jointly, Judith snored lightly in her bed, snugly air-conditioned and dreaming of a growing life inside her womb.
Midwife-assisted deliveries five days apart after the birth of Carly's boy baby on May Day, 1978, were the predictable upshot of this eventuality of the modern moment. In the chaotic mayhem of the first months of motherhood, the annual Baster bash did not have its next installment till 1979, but that, as so often is the case, is another story for another time.
*****
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
Okay, so the second reputable data-point from the piece of wood that started with sheep and pigs and cattle presents these assertions: COVID protocols give a “Home to Torture’s Implicit Impunity & Deliberate Dispatch”. Moreover, these same methods have delivered “Virtually Orchestrated, & Reputedly Profitable, Human Extinction".
As in the first case, here too, I’d modify the argumentative tone a bit, to state something like the following, again completely congruent with the arguments in the Message. ‘COVID protocols have caused ongoing excess morbidity and mortality, a profitable dynamic in which none of the perpetrators face consequences for their culpability.’
Again, the evidence is lopsided in my favor. One might start in such cases, often enough, with the work of Marcia Angell, whose revelations about pharmaceutical profiteering and perfidy have defined her career as a doctor who also served as the dean of Harvard’s Medical School.
Taking into account legislated zero liability for vaccine injuries, Angell’s assessment of the ‘dangerous Food & Drug Administration’ would, almost by itself, be adequate to ‘carry the day’ in relation to this point. “But there is growing evidence that the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER, pronounced “cedar”), the part of the agency that regulates prescription drugs, has become the servant of the industry it regulates. This has resulted in the sale of drugs of uncertain benefits, some with serious side effects, and in the agency’s failure to respond promptly to evidence that a drug is dangerous."
To an extent, Dr. Angell’s career has centered around critiquing, even condemning in specific instances, the powerful and ultimately corrupting influence that drug companies exercise in relation to both legislation and governance, in regard to both standards and oversight. She has scores and scores of entries on her CV, as well as having the administrative chops to oversee one of the world’s largest and most prestigious medical schools. Her testimony serves as a gold standard in seeking clarity about most public health issues.
Nor is she the only one to offer such analyses. I’m only introducing one other prime mover of this sort at this juncture, an avuncular and altogether humble genius, another people-oriented physician with more published articles in nephrology and cardiology than anyone else in the history of medicine. Peter McCulloch could have mimicked the ‘silent majority’ of well-to-do members of the portion of the elite that includes M.D.’s.
Instead, at first patiently, as if reason could move those whose choices came to pass as a consequence of self-interest and toeing the line that the upper crust delineated for all and sundry, the good Doctor punctuated persuasive perspectives about the anomalies, or outright fraud, in the SOP representation of COVID’s causes and concatenations. Only after hounding from some quarters and utter silence from most colleagues did McCulloch become activist, and occasionally more than a little peeved, that idiocy and harm went hand in hand in today’s ‘practice of medicine.’
One can find hundreds, even perhaps thousands of authoritative statements from this stalwart champion of ‘medical freedom’ and open dialog. He documents all of the sickening and lethal approaches that our ‘betters and masters’ mandated with ‘sit-down, shut-up, do as you’re told’ presumption. One focal point of his critique concerns the ‘epidemic of myocarditis’ that has followed the ‘mass-inoculation program’ that was the ruling rubric’s primary response to this airborne respiratory virus with similar outcomes and virulence as moderate-to-severe influenza infections.
“TrialSite News first featured this paper reporting the authors’ conclusions and noting the high-rate of occurrence with mRNA vaccines. In the COVID-19 crisis we have learned to look at the data and the analyses ourselves because there are usually very important results downplayed by the authors—this time it is vaccine myopericarditis mortality. A 9.6% case fatality rate for a vaccine side effect largely in young healthy men is astronomical and clinically unacceptable."
Nor are these the only criticisms that one might make as regards the cataclysmic health consequences of MRNA shots. For starters, however, in keeping with the proposal to ‘win an argument,’ as it were, this will do for the second point. Further Life-&-Love-&-Art-in-the-Time-of-COVID message art can help us further to ponder this perspective that establishment ‘Pandemic Protocols’ have had clearly dubious and almost certainly insalubrious consequences.
“Thriving Despite Peril” is at once admonition and affirmation. “To Obsess About Any Particular Phenomenon’s Pointed Peril Inescapably Promotes Pusillanimous Panicked Despair That Ever Ignores Innate Abilities to Adapt & Thrive, As a Result Almost Certainly Promulgating Both Plundering Plutocracy’s Opportunistic Promise of Profitable Protection & Everlasting Potentate Plots & Schemes of Manifesting Marshaled Sheepish Order & Placid Bovine Obedience."
Another notation in the queue of ‘beautiful ideas’ that I’ve burned into wood is this one, whose heading is “Engineering Externalities.” “Reality’s Arenas Reveal Such Twirling Twisted Whorls of Sinuous Swirling Switchbacks, Replete With Time-Tested Turnabouts & Undulating Serpentine Complexity That All Grasping Fancies of Greedy Racketeering That Fantasize Engineering a More ‘Manageable’ Natural Order, Complete With Ever-Burgeoning Profit, Will Always Prove Fatuous & Foolhardy to Pursue, Engendering Instead Ever-More Insidious Externalities, Ever-Expanding Entropy, &, Given Time & Enough Stubborn, Unhinged Insistence, Eventual Human Extinction."
Here is a simple idea that one of my COVID-Charms offered. “Homo Sapiens Coevolution With Mother Nature's Innumerable Norms of Affliction & Predation
Necessarily Testifies to Robust Human Resilience Against Fierce Killers Large & Small." Its title too is very basic: “Coevolution’s Necessity.”
And that brings us to the third insistent avowal that we will extract from our first Marshall Arts item of Driftwood Message Confection above. One string of words depicted citizens who might comply with herding or other restriction, “As Admonished & Directed By Their Overseers in Varying Guises, From Drovers to Judges". Such phrasing needs no modification, although one could state it much more emphatically than do these lines.
This gaily-tossed gauntlet, as it were, would be ludicrous to dispute. One need only think about the popular phrase for the ‘established’ order right this second. ‘Cancel culture’s’ obstreperous deplatforming of critics hither and yon, which in moderation yields removing individual posts—of which six billion were deleted in just the second half of 2020—more or less irrefutably proves the point.
One readily might render the underlying reality of these sorts of actions. A tiny fraction, less than five percent on the surface, faced rejection ‘for cause,’ in other words for violence, graphic sex, ‘hate-speech,’ and similar ‘valid’ rationale for a ‘cease-and desist.’ The vast majority, by inference, exited for ‘spreading misinformation’ that was at least frequently verifiably accurate and almost always contained arguable, reasonable points of view.
In any event, additional messages address these fascistic tendencies of the ‘drovers & judges’ who want to protect people by shutting them up and mandating emiserating ‘medicines.’ This idea bears the humble name of “Knowledge’s Interest.” “Truly, Knowledge Should Compel Human Interest: What Irony—Such a Safe Term, As Understated As It Is Non-Confrontational—That All Deep Robust Awareness & Understanding Flies So Directly in the Face of Every Agenda That Societies' Self Selected Rulers Ratify, That These Same privileged Entitled 'Leaders' Always Elect to Protect Their Power By Fostering General Cluelessness, Close to Universal Ignorance, About Key Aspects of the World's Inner Workings."
The ineluctable effects of such proclivities will be that we fail either to understand or ameliorate our afflictions. “Failing to Conform" tells such a tale.
“Far Too Frequently, the Wizardry That We Need, Though Easily Accessible, Does Not Seem a Viable Option Because It Fails to Conform to the Primary Plutocratic Protocols of Maximizing Plunder & Completing Control: Unless Common Folk Respond to This Ruling Rubric Responsibly, in a Word Collectively & on Their Own Behalf, Now Normalized Detention & Isolation Are the Best Social Outcome That They Will Likely Experience, Orchestrated Decline Into Marginalized Misery & Always Anxious Alienation, Gloomy Prospects Indeed & All to Serve Our Masters' Demanding Militarized Mayhem & Mediated Manure & Psychotic Chaos, &, of Course, the Tidy, Reliable Profits That These Nauseating Eventualities Have Heretofore Delivered."
As a closing statement, many of the entries in the book-of-COVID-items, so to say, could serve as a evocative exit. Till next time, ha ha, this one will do. “Only Resilience Truly ‘Protects’” is its title.
“From Long Before History’s Still Merely Dawning Awareness, Human Beings Have Swum With Sharks & Soaked in Salty Salubrious SeaTs Awash With Virulent Microscopic Monsters; Although Proposing Prophylactic Caution in This Context Can Seem Perfectly Sensible, Only Robust Resilience Promises Persistent Potent Protection, Because Every Attempt Completely to Isolate, Subordinate, Or Otherwise Exterminate These Predatory Fellow Travelers Will Either Backfire Balefully Or, More Or Less Quickly, Enervate & Then Extinguish Our Kind As Well."
What should we conclude from all this? For certain, Big Tent Review insists of ‘mixing-it-up’ with powers-that-be narratives that are as invidious as they are omnipresent in the current context.
Undoubtedly, also, we might expect that the fiercely defended fallacious awareness will ultimately so disempower people that the various mechanisms of Mass Collective Suicide will come to seem irresistible. The only answer to such a future’s plausibility, or even inevitability, must approximate some viable, widespread embodiment of human Solidarity despite all the divide-and-conquer bullshit that plutocrats proffer in order to keep us apart.
A message from outside the COVID sphere, from the Politics-&-Personal-Empowerment section, offers a closing thought of enough punch and pertinence to permit a ‘happy ending.’ “Democracy’s Daunting Necessities" is the titular label for this specific instance of Marshall Arts output.
“Clear Vision Recognizes That Human Social Successes Have Only Persisted Because Repeated Agitation From Below Has Arisen to Resist Ruling Regimes That Have Universally Opted to Foster Homicide & Chaos Rather Than Ratifying Even the Most Rudimentary & Compelling Societal Reform; As Potentate Capacity to Crush Or Control Upheaval For Change Has Become All But Irresistible, Continued Homo Sapiens Viability Rests on Widespread Grassroots Organizing For Participatory Democracy Despite the Apparent Impossibility of This Necessity."
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
Nor would we finish with Durkheim were our goal to make a complete case for a certain bonding of social ritual, and its religious manifestations, with psychoactive plants. We might at the least mention such diverse investigators as Sigmund Freud, and Franz Boas, and Marija Gimbutas. In other words, as at every step in the spinning of this web of understanding, we might easily present loads more here.
However, Campbell’s and these sorts of assessments generally do not place the substances in play today under the analytical lens in their own right. More recent researchers, following a path that Huxley() and Leary() and McKenna and others walked before them, on the other hand, do examine this explicit ethnobotanical intersection carefully. They confirm—and we might add thousands more citations—that this link is—if not ineluctable—omnipresent(), and, therefore a non-random aspect of our having ‘conquered’ the planet, as in E.O. Wilson’s Social Conquest of Earth.
Robert Winzeler, in his Anthropology and Religion: What We Know, Think, and Question, provides an overview of this way that hallucinogens and “altered states of consciousness” have served as foundations to mythos and religious feeling. Though merely a part of his whole spectrum of analysis, this joinder has appeared repeatedly in the realm of the real, and has become widely considered, and frequently accepted, among scholars.
A longstanding expert in these matters, Ralph Abraham, develops the thesis that the very ancient, Paleolithic emergence of geometric capacity—which shows up in art and tools and artifacts—stems from the use() of hallucinogens. “In this article we tell the story of the earliest geometric motifs we have found. This reveals the birth of geometric thinking in the ambiance of psychedelic shamanism—religion, art, and mathematics were born together in the youth of our species.”
A very recent authoritative, perhaps dispositive, introductory summary of these matters culminates in the contention that this metaphorical embrace between psychedelics and human culture was more or less a one-to-one correspondence(). In “The Consumption of Psychoactive Plants in Ancient Global and Anatolian Cultures During Religious Rituals: the Roots of the Eruption of Mythological Figures and Common Symbols in Religions and Myths,” the reader notices that this phenomenon extends worldwide, a “fact(that) has been underestimated and even unnoticed by many historians and anthropologists, because of the quasi-ethical trends of ‘anti-drug-brain-washed Western Societies.’”
Moreover, in the current moment, dozens of forums explore these multidirectional causal and correlative and combinatorial factors and facts that seem to twine consciousness and psychoactive plants and mythic ritual into a whole in the manifestation of the Vaults of Erowid(). If nothing else, such widely available sites() of thinking and research() and discussion make inexcusable any assertion that these problems are viewable through only one microscope, especially such a self-interested and antithetical-to-human-experience lens as the law and ‘science’ of a latter-day ‘War-on-Drugs.’
In terms of the myths themselves, these psychic tools of human development often—some would say almost comprehensively—include instances of potions and lotions and substances that are key elements of the stories. From the precursors of recent editions of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or other ‘fairy tales,’ to the collected expression of Greeks or Romans or Chinese or Australians or North Americans, indications() are, to say the least, more than occasional that tobacco, blue lotuses, coca leaves, several kinds of mushrooms, different formulas for ‘poison,’ and much more acted as a core prop of the varied storylines themselves.
Directly to the point of contention in today’s analysis, literally countless mythic tales or legendary accounts either directly involve or with near certainty imply the at least occasionally core import, and critical impact, of what police and authorities now would undoubtedly list as ‘controlled substances’ on felonious ‘schedules.’ The reasons that such myths survived, that these stories have never died, is both that people told them to each other and—implicitly—that these tellings assisted() human collectives themselves to survive and continue in kind.
At the very least, when ‘law-enforcement’ regulations collide with our lives, we ought to begin to introduce this evidence of our forebears’ pathways into the social dialog about our encounters with the law. In so doing, we establish a basis for a transformation of this entire realm, arguably a prospect that would immeasurably improve the human condition.
HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
In addition to archaeological, anthropological, and mythic data and argumentation that posit this deep human connection to drugs, the use of which now constitute felonies, historical documentation from the eras prior to the present also contain evidence to bolster this case even further. Because, based on the above presentations, the foundation for this perspective seems more than solid enough to move forward, we will be briefer here.
Some of the clearest historical references to our kind’s predilection to ‘get stoned’ are literary or artistic in nature. Poets, playwrights, songwriters, and more have, since prior to the dissolution of ancient empires, presented material that shows intoxication as one among many natural states for our kind of creatures.
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata speaks() frankly of the allure of strong drink and may imply the delights that other substances proffer. Nor are comedies the only Greek texts that convey such sensibilities. Having mentioned the great dramatist’s wildest comedy, I’ll note again that a deeper delving of its gifts is just ahead in BTR.
“The Greek drama began as a religious observance in honour of Dionysus. To the Greeks this god personified both spring and the vintage, the latter a very important time of year in a vine-growing country, and he was a symbol to them of that power there is in man of rising out of himself, of being impelled onwards by a joy within him that he cannot explain, but which makes him go forward, walking, as it were, on the wings of the wind, of the spirit that fills him with a deep sense of worship. We call this power enthusiasm, a Greek word which simply means the god within us.”
William Graves at the beginning of this section wrote about the likely link between Dionysus and psychotropic mushrooms and other potions. A clear telling of the tragic outcomes of such unleashed frenzy showed up in Euripides eerie play(), The Bacchae, in which the wine-and-potion god lets a king face a grotesque fate at the hands of tripping women who will brook no men in their rites. Elsewhere as well inebriation in different forms played a part in dramatic narratives.
Two thousand Summers subsequently, A Midsummer Night’s Dream tells a story that is only the clearest case in Shakespeare of references to longstanding love-and-transformation rituals that, many interpreters agree(), in that case surely depended on psychotropic mushrooms. In the bard’s output otherwise hundreds of scenes contain drunkenness or carousing of one sort or other that depend on grapes’ and other plants’ and altering substances’ impacts on human consciousness. Shakespeare’s sonnets also have a similar tale() to tell.
Whether one draws on Chaucer, on texts from the Continent or from Muslim regions or from South Asia or from China, the motif() is ever-present: characters seek out, and settings delineate experiences that put the players in, altered states. Mostly, of course, the references are to alcoholic beverages, but plenty of other mind-warping concoctions come to the stage at least occasionally, for brief moments when psychedelic light shines forth.
The art of ancient civilizations, especially in relation to mushrooms() in the area that is now Mexico and Central America, but also in regard to different types of chalices that might once have contained different ‘flavors’ of elixirs, the pots and frescoes from Greece and Rome and Persia and ancient India and various dynasties in China and Japan, all depict or otherwise indicate() instrumentalities to facilitate sacred highs that were part of these cultures. In sum, four thousand years or more of such ‘texts’ testify to this conjunction of plants and shifted states in the early instances of historical humanity.
Pictures in the form of drawings and paintings portray such matters quite simply and clearly. Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for instance, repeatedly shows the ways that carnality and wine and various other plants intersected with human carnal desire.
One chronicler(), drawing on a plus-or-minus thirteenth century fresco at a thousand year-old Italian cathedral, has discovered a representation of Jesus in which obviously the erstwhile Nazarene was purveying, imbibing, and storing mushrooms. The context of the depiction is equally straightforward, that the transformation of awareness would attend this sacred food.
However, documentary materials and recorded assessments also contribute to our understanding during the different historical epochs of the last plus-or-minus six thousand years, years during which the ability to inscribe speech has established boundaries for history. Without exception, the seats of ancient power and medieval rule, if a written language was present, illustrate this conjunction() that people have had with transformative ambrosias and meads and more.
This was the case in Japan(). Korea() also reveals such materials, as does China() in much greater volume. Hindu() and Buddhist() texts from South Asia also attest to potions and lotions of magical potency. As well, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and, more recently Muscovy and Europe of the Middle Ages and various Islamic venues all uncover similar records that reveal the ubiquity() of drugs in the human condition: blue lotus, cannabis in multiple forms, the fly agaric mushroom, Soma’s transporting fumes and draughts, and more give voice to men’s and women’s initiation, and continued choice, to imbibe and ride ecstatic or energized waves that resulted from drinking and smoking and eating magic plants.
More ancient sources include the first historical accounts of the likes of Pliny, who writes now and again in his multi-volume natural history about mushrooms as divine foods for reasons that were nutritional, medicinal, and psychotropic. These elements of life and culture at the time were part of the taken-for-granted warp and woof of social existence.
“(A) Babylonian passage about ‘divine prostitutes’ recorded they used pine seeds in rituals which Pliny explained were mushrooms or fungi. Hallucinogenic mushrooms, probably of the species Amanita Muscaria…by nature grow around pine or fir trees and may have been considered the fruit of the tree.”
Earlier sources() still also contain such clear references and easily deducible conclusions about the connection of entheogenic plants and human culture. This was true everywhere in ancient civilizations: “For example, La droga en el Antiguo Egipto noted pictures of the following psychoactive plants on the tomb walls of Egyptian Pharaohs and their bureaucrats: (1)the lotuses Nymphaeaalba and Nymphaeacaerulea, which contain the psychoactive alkaloid apomorphine; (2)Lactucaverosa, a substitute for opium with mild hypnotic effects; (3) the poppy Papaver somniferum, from which opium is, of course, extracted. It is therefore not surprising that ancient Egyptian priests were designated by the Egyptian word sem for plants, or that these priests contemporaneously served as physicians.”
Even early Christian mystics might give the onlooker glimpses of this chemically induced riot(). Recent scholarship disposes of arguments against the prevalence of psychotropic rites among the first Catholics. The monograph, The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judaism and Christianity is one of many potent sources that document these ideas.
“Jan Irvin … has captured what we might call an ‘anthropology of clarification’ regarding whether or not mushrooms, and mind-altering substances in general, played any role in the development of not only Judaism and Christianity but the total culture in play at that time. It is now recognized in many academic communities (anthropologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists) that sufficient evidence exists of the importance of these substances, both textual and visual, to say ‘yes’ in very large letters. It is no longer theory.
The questions Irvin asks are these: ‘If mind-altering substances did play this major role, then how would this affect our interpretations of the Bible and the Qur’an? Would this shed light on the origins of mystical experiences and the stories, for example Abraham hearing voices and Ezekiel’s convenient visions? What would this suggest about the shamanic behavior of Jesus? What impact would this have on organized religion?’ These are bold questions. This is a very useful volume for those interested in the Holy Mushroom and the politics of truth.”
Furthermore, Islamic culture adopted usage of Cannabis that was almost two millennia old in the Subcontinent. For a century and a half or more, this was a matter of medicine, with warnings against overuse or mixture with other herbs.
But “by late in the ninth century…the use of hashish as an intoxicant had surfaced in Islam. …(I)t was first consumed by members of religious Persian and Iraqi sects located at the Eastern periphery of the Islamic empire which bordered the central steppes where the plant had its origins. And there was little cultural opposition at first because the holy Koran, which formulates in detail all the activities of daily Muslim living, does not forbid explicitly the consumption of Cannabis, although it proscribes the usage of fermented beverages.”
More recently, as Europe’s imprimatur has expanded to encompass the Earth, over and over and over traditional medicines and tonics became part of a commodity pipeline that served both to profit interlopers directly and to make ‘energized’ work forces easier to expect. In his Open Veins of Latin America, Roberto Galeano very explicitly develops this point in regard to coca.
“(I)n Inca times…coca was then distributed in moderation; the Inca government had a monopoly on it and only permitted its use for ritual purposes or for those who worked in the mines. The Spaniards energetically stimulated its consumption. It was good business.
In Potosi in the sixteenth century as much was spent on European clothes for the oppressors as on coca for the oppressed. In Cuzco 400 Spanish merchants lived off the coca traffic; every year 100,000 baskets with a million kilos of coca-leaf entered the Potosi silver mines. The Church took its tax from the drug. …(T)he bishop, canons, and other Cuzco church dignitaries got most of their income from tithes on coca. …(T)he Indians bought coca-leaf instead of food: chewing it, they could—at the price of shortening their lives—better endure the deadly tasks imposed on them.”
We will soon see much more of this tortuous intertwining of human beings’ desires to shift their inner state and the agendas of rulers to wring more work and coin from people so as further to enrich themselves at their vassals’ expense.
Some contemporary indicia that pique the sorts of interweaving of plants and consciousness that typify Homo Sapiens are at least as much literary as scholarly in nature. No example might excite such passion—positive and negative—in this regard as the texts of Carlos Castaneda.
Whether one demonizes or lionizes this, if nothing else, interesting author, however, that he was in fact a trained anthropologist is not controvertible. One admirer noted that whether as a brilliant anthropologist or a gifted novelist, Castaneda had made a mark on culture that resulted from his recognition of how consciousness, especially in the crucible of plant catalysts, was anything but a linear, constant construct.
All manner of commentators note this benchmark in Castaneda’s writing. Thus, that the deployment of Peyote and other plant and fungal capacities for transformative power were central in the world that Castaneda portrays is unarguable, as is the fact that these substances indisputably both are now and have been for untold thousands upon thousands of annual returns key accompaniments of the human journey, whether as Mescalito or in more routine terms.
“The education of a sorcerer, as Castaneda describes it, is arduous. It entailed the destruction, by Don Juan, of the young anthropologist's interpretation of the world; of what can, and cannot be called ‘real.’ The Teachings describes the first steps in this process.
They involved natural drugs. One was Lophophora williamsii, the peyote cactus, which, Don Juan promised, revealed an entity named Mescalito, a powerful teacher who ‘shows you the proper way of life.’ Another was Jimson weed, which Don Juan spoke of as an implacable female presence. The third was humito, ‘the little smoke’ a preparation of dust from Psilocybe mushrooms that had been dried and aged for a year, and then mixed with five other plants, including sage. This was smoked in a ritual pipe, and used for divination.
Such drugs, Don Juan insisted, gave access to the ‘powers’ or impersonal forces at large in the world that a ‘man of knowledge’—his term for sorcerer—must learn to use. Prepared and administered by Don Juan, the drugs drew Castaneda into one frightful or ecstatic confrontation after another. After chewing peyote buttons Castaneda met Mescalito successively as a black dog, a column of singing light, and a cricket like being with a green warty head.
He heard awesome and uninterpretable rumbles from the dead lava hills. After smoking humito and talking to a bilingual coyote, he saw the ‘guardian of the other world’ rise before him as a hundred-foot high gnat with spiky tufted hair and drooling jaws. After rubbing his body with an unguent made from datura, the terrified anthropologist experienced all the sensations of flying.”
Some observers have approached Castaneda as an investigative project, the results of which are far from pretty: ritual degradation, cultish erotic exploitation, and obsessive attitudes toward conquest abound in many accounts. Whatever the case may be, that drugs—which a sojourner has contextualized in the present based on ancient usage—stood at a central spot in these eventualities is as obvious as the heat of the sun on a bright equatorial day.
As always in regard to such data sets, one could go on if not forever, then at multivolume length. To close out this section, we might note that the sphere of folk stories, now in the form of historical documents but stemming from ancient tellings in the oral tradition, is simply replete with references to the elixirs and mixtures and drugs that either impeded or facilitated heroic action or characters’ capabilities to overcome their problems.
Of the thousands, or tens of thousands, of such particular texts, a few are worth noting as exemplary. At the same time, one might as easily have selected almost innumerable others.
Many folk-tales from the British Isles and Northern Europe contain a central character, Jack, who robbed and killed giants because of his wit and daring. The boy of the beanstalk was only one of these, but what might one make of those beans? Their magic() certainly empowered some miraculous tricks and transformations. In any case, the loutish giant’s indiscriminate drunkenness certainly contributed to his demise.
Another fairy tale of obvious renown, “Little Red Riding Hood,” also had dozens or scores of forms in historical times, although its roots probably extend much further back, beyond any veil that we might imagine as historical. In these yarns, a young girl, but pubescent obviously—that’s the red hood’s standing in for the menarche—has, at least in several incantations, to ply() the wicked wolf with a stupefying mead in order to escape his clutches.
Many additional titles, not nearly so well-traveled as Jack and Little Red, also let readers see such references to wanton or wise magical brews and substances. Whether one views Celtic yarns like the struggle between Taliesin and Avigddu over a magic potion; or Doctor Phantom’s series of hallucinatory adventures in his search for the “elixir of life,” a venture that ended in his death; or one listens to any of the almost countless variations on the tale of the ‘Moon Rabbit,’ who is also seeking obsessively for a magical mixture that can solve all life’s problems, not least of them death; or literally countless other historical installments of the mythic tradition’s folk manifestation, drugs and coming-of-age often enough loom large.
At this juncture, therefore, on the cusp of introducing and examining the main body of facts and events that make up this narrative of human ‘highs’ for the past several centuries, we have discerned a triangular construct that underpins all of what we now label contraband, from Heroin to Ritalin and beyond. This threefold context moreover conclusively proves that ‘controlled substances’ are akin to air that we breathe or food that we eat or kisses that we dispense to those who are our loving companions and erotic partners.
These heretofore overwhelmingly herbal or at least plant-based materials, now overwhelmingly ‘illegal,’ are very probably irresistible at the genetic, hormonal, molecular level. They are indisputably a huge part of human culture and social interaction for plus-or-minus a hundred thousand years, most likely much longer than that. In terms of the modern turn that homo sapiens have taken—toward agriculture and government and social-classes and medicine and media and so on—these ‘drugs’ are historically verifiable as prevalent, popular, and purposeful in literally innumerable cases prior to the present epoch that capital and its commodities seem to rule by magic or fate or insidious class warfare.
Thus, we begin an examination of drugs over the past few hundred years in confrontation with a paradox. Items that are natural, inherent, and inescapably a part of human activity bear the label of criminality and evil.
Most analysts explicate this deep anomaly as some sort of ignorance. Or they find that entire social systems exist in profound error. Or they label it insanity. Or they seek to justify or excuse the clearly conclusive evidence that the paradox is present and contend that these ancient practices and proclivities are in fact awful and worthy of ‘treating’ as both crime and sickness. Probably more often than not, observers use combinations of these explanatory schemes.
This essay proceeds very differently. To start, it adopts as essential a threefold investigatory approach: that historical evidence and reasoning are central to comprehension; that political-economic assessments also lie at the heart of what has happened and is transpiring; that analyzing the underlying social realities and relations of drugs must form a part of any clear and accurate view.
This report then posits that persuasive argumentation—if not outright proof—is possible in regard to this apparent paradox, argumentation that completely gainsays all of the above typical ways of perceiving these anomalies. This argument is complex but is nonetheless possible to present in relatively straightforward terms.
First, the seeming contradictions that erupt from ‘drug-wars’ and such in fact form a systematic mechanism of political, economic, and social control. In actuality, these expressions of contraband and controlled substances work out to be central to the functioning and imprimatur of capital.
Those who rule this ‘system’ deploy their machinations in two ways, both of which yield—from the point of view of those in charge—multiple salubrious results. The initial way that the system manifests is in regard to various administrative possibilities in the realms of governance and production and so forth—police, trade, empire, ‘markets,’ and more. Another fashion in which this system’s characteristics show up is in connection with a promised expression of health and well-being—addictions and disorders and curative intervention and much more.
Second, this system evolves so as to create planned and directed understandings of the entire process among the citizens and workers and social beings who inhabit the societies that embody this schematic. Especially now, this array of popular awareness either accepts that ‘drugs are bad’ or, at the least, acknowledges that the criminal constructions of their rulers are, if not right, then inescapable. At a minimum, social practice inculcates one or both of these two attitudes or institutionalizes similar types of norms and values.
Third, because of the inevitably contrary and arbitrary and counterfactual and hypocritical eventualities that the system entails, it constantly falls apart and fails, so that one sort of systemic oppression replaces a fallen one, which those at the helm suddenly discover to be ‘in error.’ Prohibition proceeds for a generation or so, and that yields a war-on-drugs that lasts another few decades or so, and variations on this dance of death typify social life as if its hideous tangos and venal waltzes are part of some rooted, if not divine, order of existence.
In one view, this interwoven triptych looks as if it will forever predominate. Indeed, if the families and networks that have ruled the planet for the past plus-or-minus five hundred years continue to hold sway, this horrific and brutal dynamic will almost certainly persist in one shape, form, or fashion. The ‘system’ will prevail because it works ‘like a charm’ for those in command.
Yet a different conceptualization of the future is still plausible. From this perspective, a much wider swath of families and networks will develop and contend for power. They will insist that the experience of the hundred millennia or more prior to the past few hundred years exhibits a more viable and human and excellent consciousness of our species’ tendencies to want to alter consciousness itself than do our current conquistadors’ beliefs and practices.
How such radical transformation could all work out exactly is not the purpose of this article to develop. It already has more than enough to do. Nevertheless, to deny that a more democratic power and social structure could win out, in so doing overturning the obviously dysfunctional and righteously self-serving ‘wars-on-drugs’ that have so far wielded control, may very well come down to a denial that a human existence, or even human survival, is possible.
More to the point, whatever evolution, or revolution, might be imaginable is only conceivable in the context of a correct understanding of the current scheme of things. We cannot rationally converse about things that we see in fundamentally flawed fashion. The subsequent sections of this work seek to overthrow such false constructions of nature and society and allow readers to view these matters according to facts and realities that in the present mediation of such affairs are either absent or so distorted as to be more or less unrecognizable. Next Up: Part IV
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
Anyhow, I just wanted to say that my 'speech' for the cameras is a little didactic, almost stentorian, unfortunately. I'm not trying to be a know-it-all; it was just my luck to be in that place, to know. So here goes."
*********
One of the amazing things about the electronic visual media that predominate now is the manner in which they, among all the ways of recording we humans have devised, cut out all reality in the moment, except for the reality that they intend to project. On that dim, fluorescent afternoon, the arc lights caught fire, the cameras and microphones thrust their demands in my face, and the dreary Winter's chill, the icy wet, the protesters shrill noise, all disappeared as the spotlights crackled, hummed, and fixed me in their blinding beams to assist in recording the following words.
**********
"Hello, and salutations. Folks are here to get books signed, except the TV crews of course. The controversy, the sense of an historical moment---proof of the non-existence of God, whatever---it's all pretty interesting.
Authors who babble incessantly are not the norm, but that is what I'm going to do. It's the main reason I wrote Resuscitation, to be able to reach out to real people and make some real connections that might make some real difference. As the song says, 'I was blind and now I see.'
My name is Jim Lewis, and I'd ask everyone to take a close look at me. A 'typical, fifty-something, freaky-fitness-nerd' is what a lot of people think, given the frame, the glasses, the pocketful of pens; 'Maybe a teacher or a lawyer.'
Given my emotional state, my outlook now, such a view really unsettles me, because nothing inside of me is routine anymore, or anything like it used to be. I've had difficulty conveying this transformation, as if I'd had a really nice nap, then awoken to inhabit a different universe.
Compared to every second I lived prior to what I wrote about in my book, not one second presently resembles anything before. So I've begun starting these 'chats' with a question. To wit, after appropriate dramatic hesitation:
'DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE IT IS FOR ANYONE FUNDAMENTALLY TO CHANGE?' How many of us ever conceive of our six-year-old, fifteen-year-old, or thirty-something selves as identifiably separate from whatever we call ourselves, and in so doing sense that somehow we are? Is such transmogrification even close to a common occurrence? Next Up—Part Three
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
In the event, the miasma nearly knocked him over. He staggered as bile trickled up his throat from the smell, some combination of rank rot and sweetly moldering meat. Without a single coherent thought, without a single glance backward or about, he slashed once at the bean’s seeded vine, sundering it at the instant that he grabbed below the cut, at once sheathing his blade, and began his hand-over-hand swoop earthward, half scramble, half tumble.
The roar almost loosened his grip. He had only moved a matter of meters toward ground when he heard the thunk of a gigantic hunk of flesh's smacking in free fall against the cloud ground near the portal.
“That worked,” chuckled Jack as he continued his combination of shimmy and hand-over-hand along the vine. Just prior to the clearing around where Terraria penetrated the land of the sky, he had strung a double strand of his sturdy twine around strong young bushes, and, quite clearly, George had tripped on it and planted his face in cloudy mud.
He didn't know what to expect from the little surprises that , as it were, he'd prepared before starting toward home. After a bit, however, once Jack felt very certain that many giant-lengths separated him from the entryway above, he paused at an especially muscular bend in the beanstalk to crane his neck and stare at the now much diminished aperture.
The air, clear as glass and pleasantly cool, opened up into blue sky all about his Tree’s crown of puffy snow. The door to Cloudland appeared as nothing other than Terraria’s piercing of plump cumulus fluff.
And then, he nearly loosened his hold once more, as, with a howl of ragged, enraged pursuit, a predator’s final triumphant scream before snatching up its next meal in snapping jaws of steel, George’s head and fangs and flaring nostrils appeared and, instantly, directed the Giant’s fierce, bloody eyes on our shirking hero. At that point, before Jack persisted in his precipitous, serpentine pathway to ground, as if by some irresistible magic, Grambling's beaming face inserted itself in place of our young fellow's decidedly infelicitous fear.
“Gramp!” spoke Jack in wonder as he forced himself further down the snaking vine toward his home and Katrina, who, at just that juncture, after she had indeed ascertained some semblance of movement near their Tree's milky destination high above, was wondering what in the world was coming her way, and whether it would be altogether safe.
A practical matron, never one to shy from confrontation and defense of self and kith and kin, not to mention home and hearth, she looked about for the scythe, which, though it looked far too massive for a slip of a woman to wield, had served up plentiful wheat and barley with her strong stroke before the great drought had shriveled all their fields. Instead of seeing it, however, she instead laid her eyes on what may well have been the strangest sight ever to fill her vision.
The creature could not quite mark a man, though between its manlike lips, below its merry, manlike eyes, it clasped a puffing pipe in its teeth. Without thinking, automatically, she curtsied slightly, offering a quizzical but not unfriendly 'Howdy do?' to the very Grambling who was the object too of her son's inner attentions far above.
Gramp's smile widened at the slender elder's obviously automatic politesse. Rings of smoke rose as he chortled and puffed at once. “Grambling,” he said amiably. “Grambling. You may call me Grambling!”
While she longed to look another time skyward, the gnome's toothy fuzzy grin captivated her. Again instinctively, she moved toward the diminutive plump fellow, 'or,’ she thought inwardly, ‘whatever it is.' “Do you know me then,” she hesitated, “Sir Grambling?”
In their brief conversation, Katrina learned several things that amazed her. Perhaps most tempestuous to her heart's throbbing pulsations in her breast was the revelation—from the one she was already calling, with a secret smile, a 'Gramly Creature'—that her beloved bovine beauty, Sadie herself, was alive and already starting to revive.
As well, she confronted something that, deep in her soul, she clearly knew at the same time that she fought any acknowledgment of it, for reasons that were so complex that she herself hadn't much of a clue about them. This knowledge that she knew already, so to speak, was that her son had embarked on a hero's journey that might lead to a heroic destiny.
At the precise second that they were finishing, when this elder mother was realizing how little she had known of matters at hand, a voice came floating down from on high. “Motherrrr!” it rang out, over and over and over. She started as if prodded by Jack’s honed hunting blade.
An altogether different noise, thankfully from higher in the sky, in the event quite noisome, soon accompanied Katrina's son's imploring screams. On first hearing this cacophonous blaring bellowing, from the same direction as were emanating her boy's interjections no less, Katrina simply shook her head, much as if an aggressive horsefly were buzzing and biting round about her.
Whatever her momentary distraction, however, she resumed her previous search for the blunt force and sharpened edge of their aged, mighty harvesting tool. Accurately enough, she assessed that her earlier sense of pending emergency had been sage if not altogether reasonable.
Upon Jack's returning to plant his feet on his own ground, of course, seeing his own slight Mother, bent with care for all her might, standing like a stalwart soldier almost unhinged him. But he could no more move her to remove herself than he could hue Terraria with his little whetted edge. And, as George’s rasping rapacity drew nigh, he hadn’t time to try to debate the dame who bore him into the world.
Her reasons for refusing to budge included the aforementioned harvest implement that she wielded as if she embodied a tiny feminine reaper. She stood at an elder's parade rest, not in her prime but armed and dangerous, with experience of how and when to strike.
No sooner had son and mother reached their impasse, than a final screeching outcry announced the proximate arrival of Giant George, about whom Mother knew nothing and son recognized only primal peril and a certain weakness in sapience that the youngster hoped to exploit. In the event, this massive machine of murder did indeed leap from a perch that would have killed many people of normal size and strength.
This behemoth bore no arms. Moreover his enormous right hand hung limp and dangled decrepitly. He'd broken the wrist in Jack's final Cloudland snare. Neither Terraria's slickened bark nor the severed vine had so much as added a single delay to George's fell swoop. Still, his was now but a one-armed attempt to enforce his monstrosity on the scene.
But for George's injured hand, one might indeed be unable to doubt, the victor in their contest would have been the Giant rather than the Matron. Nonetheless, Katrina's womanly grit was a force of nature who shrank not at all at the onrushing beast who saw that she was a truer threat than was her offspring.
Who knows how the skirmish would have transpired if an additional unanticipated wrinkle had come along? Grambling, whose diminutive features had been watching the few minutes of drama that was reaching its climax at this precise point, now leapt in between George and Katrina, in so doing causing the Giant to froth even more furiously at his fated afflictions, a reaction that Gramp completely anticipated. Most importantly, Gramly Creature foresaw that Katrina would sense her opportunity.
As the Monster moved to seize, crush, or otherwise utterly destroy the still puffing figure of the gnome, Katrina raised her stinging, sundering blade at George's right side. The whoosh of the flying threshing blow ended with the unmistakeable thwack of a complete severing of flesh from flesh. George's injured wrist, attached to the arm that in that exact instant dropped bloodily to the ground, moved reflexively to wave farewell. As his life's blood cascaded from this Giant's giant wound, the Monster stalled, staggered, and fell dead.
Whatever the case may be, Grambling had foreseen, in some sense—if only in that his express vision had in fact come to pass—the entirely essential defeat of this plague, this blight, this monstrous murderous manifestation of mayhem from on high. His part in the drama's denouement is merely an oddity in an undeniably, definitely odd enough account without his having played a key 'supporting role,' so to say.
Whatever the case may be, Grambling had foreseen, in some sense—if only in that his express vision had in fact come to pass—the entirely essential defeat of this plague, this blight, this monstrous murderous manifestation of mayhem from on high. His part in the drama's denouement is merely an oddity in an undeniably, definitely odd enough account without his having played a key 'supporting role,' so to say.
Now, in any event, a whale's ton of bled-to-death flesh lay in a heap mere meters from the home that Jack and Katrina still shared. “Son,” said she resolutely to her charge. “We must bury this monster or it will ill betide us sooner instead of later.”
“Don't worry mother!” He stood tall and flexed his willing shoulders and stout forearms that years of farming and hunting had honed much as his long attention to his knife had razored its cutting capacity. He showed his determination by immediately grabbing the family shovel that hung on the side of their little shed in order to show the fervor that he could bring to digging a hole.
Accomplishing this resolution instantaneously turned the youth's attention to concerns much nearer to his heart's desire. George the Giant, as such, would no longer threaten anyone. He was buried and would rot away. But what of she whom he so passionately had begun to consider as a life-love?
He hadn't had a plan, let alone a plot, about a single thing over the course of his life's last week. Yet nothing was the same. And Fortune's Wheel seemed clearly to have turned in his favor, although he paused to ponder whether a better characterization would be that he had stubbornly insisted on trusting both himself and the cosmos to deliver decent outcomes.
That everything would work out to his satisfaction seemed particularly plausible when a golden rope dropped almost at his feet from somewhere far above. How exactly this salubrious and satisfactory future might come to pass will await the unfolding of the next volume of Jack's and Elma May's blossoming union of ecstasy and endeavor.
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
Dr. Chris Busby, a very busy advocate for scientific integrity by means of more robust democratic forms of knowledge creation and policy formation, powerfully embodies many of the underlying themes of this story in the work that he has pursued since before quitting his corporate job in 1992 as a representative for pharmaceutical companies.
For many years, his focus has been on the fallacies which have become standard procedure in connection with radiation's effects on human health. This dissimulation, as he has clearly articulated, consists of several covers for the falsity that presently predominates.
Cover number one is that all radiation is the same. The present method basically looks at the energy imparted from the radioactivity of any sort to an entire organism. An investigator can then compare this 'absorbed dose,' whatever the source and mechanism of the absorption, with known instances when equal 'whole body' inculcation of radiation has taken place. Harm is more or less likely depending on how populations in the past responded to similar amounts of imparted energy.
Dr. Busby's work for nearly two decades has virulently attacked the assumptions of this thinking. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, and in the course of ongoing work that we will be examining today, Dr. Busby and his cohorts have begun the process of overturning this model: governments are accepting a more nuanced telling based on the determination of internal versus external dosages, and on the presence or absence of certain particularly bioactive radioactive chemicals.
Cover number two is that since certainty is impossible, the uncertainty most appealing to industrial interests somehow becomes more acceptable than any other uncertainty. The way this works out is that any mistake of the nature, 'this toxin caused this harm,' is utterly verboten—insistence on this sort of 'accuracy' in fact provides much of the foundation of U.S. legal interpretations of science, as codified in the Daubert principle that for the past twenty years has made any attempt to hold corporations responsible for toxicity next-to-impossible.
A briefing on the Daubert holding is coming, December at the latest, with a series to follow about the notion that litigation can cure capital’s catastrophic consequences for human health and well being. For now, stated most succinctly, Daubert’s precepts contend that
On the other hand, a miscue of the sort, 'this toxin has no discernible impact,' is just part of the cost of doing business. Falsely presuming a substance's benign nature is therefore acceptable, whereas falsely believing a neutral element's harm is a cardinal sin that society must avoid at all cost.
Dr. Busby is doubly a hero. He has participated in proving, dispositively for those who are willing to examine evidence from multiple sources, that 'cover number one' is simply false. And he has been willing to face jail and the jeering of scientific jingoists to advance the proposition that societies do in fact, if they are democracies, have the right to determine that the second sort of error is equal to, or more important than, the first sort of error.
This reasoning underlies the 'precautionary principle' that many erstwhile 'liberals' find appealing. In such a view, we should be particularly cautious in cases when harm could be large and might hurt those who gain little from the risk-taking enterprise. We should increase the burden of proof on those who benefit from new technologies, and they should pay the piper for any modeling or factual errors.
Not to stray too far into a theoretical thicket, perhaps we might recall that the United States Government has maintained a policy of firing DU weaponry on the many battlefields on which it has fought over the past thirty years. Moreover, we can see that the text was introducing the work of Dr. Chris Busby as a critique of these policies of DU deployment. And we were talking about murder.
A 'STUDY IN SCARLET'
The Depleted Uranium story keeps getting nastier. Part of what appears in today's essay illustrates a particularly grotesque aspect of that nastiness. However, additional ugliness abounds, and further reports will be necessary to illustrate these other cases of vicious lies and hypocritical scientific righteousness.
As we examine this peer-reviewed study, about which he spoke to me concerning its construction and implementation, we can recall the vast tsunami of anecdotal data coming from American service men and women and their families about DU’s impact. This has included
I have had occasion to report on those contentions and the health effects that seem to flow like insidious poison from DU weapons deployment. In any event, some of the same complaints and afflictions have repeatedly emanated from soldiers and their kin, as, thanks to the staunch spade workd of Ariabi, Busby, and Hamdan, we will witness emerging from Fallujah.
My first inquiry concerned the origins of the decision to try to do a study such as this. Dr. Busby’s staccato brogue crosses the Atlanta like a rapid fire scatter gun.
"I was approached by Malak, living in London, who has been involved with this issue for years. She was concerned to see, you see. Iraqis and Internationals uniformly said no to any request to study this." So absolutely nothing had been published, he pointed out.
I can well imagine Malak Hamdan risking her life to do this work, if her commitment in real life is even a tiny fraction of the passion that she displayed on camera for her interview on Russian international television news station 'RT.'
She and Chris Busby took my breath away when I first saw them and heard how they had inserted themselves where every cell of the imperial behemoth screamed 'stay away.' "The problem is getting data, you see, but I had done questionnaire studies before, and they'd generated important information. (Malak), though, was primarily responsible for pulling the whole thing together."
I followed up, "You mention in the study the disadvantages of this type of sampling: wouldn't that be likely to understate rather than overstate the problem?"
"Yes of course; what we found were absolutely accurate minimum levels of increase unless people lied, and that's unlikely in general, because people want help but they don't want to be marked with the shame of it, you see. Especially in Iraq, too, since they were giving their identity information and all, they were very unlikely not to tell the truth."
The paper makes clear the hideous conditions that the team of researchers faced. "The authorities have consistently avoided examining the health of communities which have complained of increases in ill health, and little has been done by the international community. Indeed, shortly after the questionnaire survey was completed, Iraqi TV reportedly broadcast that a questionnaire survey was being carried out by terrorists and that anyone who was answering or administering the questionnaire could be arrested."
Still, taking as their control populations similarly sized and demographically shaped cohorts from Jordan and Egypt, of under a thousand households and around 5,000 people, with the Middle East Cancer Registry and national data as their comparison, over a period of a month in the Winter of 2010, they administered the survey to all but one swath of houses, where local suspicion of the process led the researchers to abandon getting data from that neighborhood.
The results are easy to view in chart form. I encourage readers to look for themselves. A few nauseating elements of what they found are these: at least a doubling of the infant mortality rate—"we couldn't get reliable data about the birth defects, because it was so culturally despised, so we relied on infant deaths as a better standard, along with the sex-ratio disparities, of course;" over a four-fold increase in all cancers; over twelve times greater than expected numbers of childhood cancers; nearly a forty-times increase in leukemia for those under age thirty five; over a twenty times increase in all leukemias; dramatic increases, frequently close to tenfold, in all of the studied modalities.
I felt sick when I first read this. I have to ask. Isn't the level of disparities here beyond what is normally apparent in these sorts of studies?
"I've never seen anything like it!" This is one of the few tinges of emotion that I heard from this tough customer. He referred to dozens of studies that he's done, in every area of stress that can result from radiation and other toxins that can result in similar effects. "Only Hiroshima was even close." The leukemia increases in Fallujah were a full one-third greater than what happened in the aftermath of the world's first nuclear war. "Other factors could be present, of course," Dr. Busby put in about this third or fourth 'nuclearized conflict' that the U.S. government is conducting.
And I pressed on this point. "What else might possibly account for such an unusual clustering of ill effects?"
"The only thing would be a specific general toxin. Mustard gas could do this though it was not used, or we'd have seen lesions. Nothing else on this kind of scale is even remotely likely." He paused. "It sounds crazy," he continued, "but I thought that the US may have developed some new weapon, you see? Something with a high gamma radiation level or a neutron pulse." That's how dramatic and unprecedented these rates of grotesque impact were. Next Up: Part Two