Big Tent Review

#19, 9.2.2024

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 nineteenth 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,’ ha ha, 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 17th; 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 happening for the most part.

Much easier, in the event—I have now only occasionally failed at this interlinking, thought it remains always 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: Anniversaries, Actualities, Chaotic Karma’s Concatenations

1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Goddess Guidance About Diseases & Their Treatment

2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XIX

3. Wood Words Essays—Resilient Ecologies Versus Fearful Societies

4. Empowered Political Forays—”Capitalism on Drugs,” continued

5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, Slaughterhouse: Coups & Grace

6. Old Stories & New—”Resuscitation,” Part Three

7. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—Sam & Red: Chapter Two

8. Nerdy Nuggets—Color, Sexuality, & Southern Consciousness

9. Communication & Human Survival—Limiting Oppression With Popular Pedagogical Protocols

10. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”Deconstructing ‘Depleted’ Uranium,” Part TWO

—Last Words For Now

Introduction—When Terror Goes Around & Then Comes Around

‘Be A-dult, not a dolt,’ or so I tell myself. Still, I simply must begin with a spiritual note. Gulp. One of favorite playlist sequences combines three versions of Billy Bragg’s “Do Unto Others” with two covers of the Louven Brothers “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself.”

In any case, here again are Ten New Commandments, Number One of which concerns this ‘Sermon-on-the-Mount’ imprecation that the Nazarene delivered to his followers, to wit this. “1. The Golden Rule Reigns Supreme." Pretty easy; congruent with common sense; likely to call forth a response from anyone who is paying attention, “Oh, that’ll never happen.” I nevertheless refuse to give up, ha ha.

So here’s the rest of the story. “2. All Children Receive Priority.
3. All Who Work Are Welcome.
4. All Who Work Are Equal.
5. All Who Work Have Responsibilities & Rights.
6. All Who Work Receive Benefits & Provide Support for Others.
7. All Who Work Own Everything That Labor Transforms.
8. All Who Work Are Family.
9. All Beliefs, Congruent with the Golden Rule, Are Welcome.
10. All Other Matters Are Negotiable."

Here’s a hypothesis. Lacking something akin to the moral fiber and spiritual soul of these suggested codes of conduct, humankind is doomed, quite likely soon—as in the next few minutes or the coming few years—but definitely over the next century or so. Maybe I’m wrong; but I’ve got data and reasoning on my side, but of course that matters not at all except in the context of an ongoing dialogic exchange.

Nonetheless, in a wildly different development, well might I say, well, Christ! Political neophyte Jimbo would, quite simply, never even have guessed that a candidate for high office to whom he had sworn a BTR affiliation, so to say, would have in turn designated all his allegiance as a Trump endorsement. Oh, Christ!

A friend has just sent something arguably of crucial importance, something moreover that shows, for those most dubious of Donald Trump’s political integrity, so to say, a certain ‘commitment to truth and revelation’ on the part of the all-too-readily reviled Bobby Kennedy. This material states that Trump, in the event of his election, has promised to release all JFK assassination files, tout suite.

RFK’s warts, meanwhile, now add a hateful attitude toward the inevitable result of U.S. imperialism, which is to say the mass migrations of Russell Banks’ epic, Continental Drift. The upshot is essentially inescapable: Empire equals dispossession, which guarantees people’s moving away, anywhere, in order to avoid barbaric imperial chaos, the empirical consequences of which dynamic have always—for thousands of years—been the footloose population’s ‘descent’ on the belly of the beast, whether Rome or Babylon or London or New York City.

Such patterns propound the putrid bigotry and inevitable alienation that so typifies ‘first world’ urban society just now. How could the outcome be otherwise? Colonizing wars’ causal catastrophes are so cataclysmic that to imagine that mere walls can attenuate concomitant migrant incursions is, at best, laughably absurd.

So why do we put up with it? Ah, yes, the benefits—the cheap bananas, the all-too-willing servants, the war machine’s ‘strategic minerals’ at ‘affordable prices,’ on and on and on. But the end result is a Ukraine eruption every five to ten years, or more, on average. Where will it all end?

Catapulting daily along the rim of the bottomless canyon of eternal extinction, well might we listen to one of history’s most magnificent warriors. Smedley Butler smuggled himself into the United States Marine Corps, underage and officially unwelcome, to charge over Cuba’s hills in 1898 till the Corps expelled the fifteen year old interloper.

When he reenlisted legally, he rose through every commissioned rank to become the Commandant of what he termed ‘America’s most agile fighting force;’ en route, he won two Congressional Medals of Honor for bravery, turning down two other nominations for the award that were, he insisted, inadequately valorous. If any combatant ever earned an untrammeled right to speak about war and warfare and an accurate assessment of combat’s complete context, such a designated spokesman might well embody General Butler.

This stalwart martial maestro, twice a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery under fire, described himself as a “Gangster For Capitalism” in his stint atop the Corps. He wrote War Is a Racket and delivered it as a lengthy speech throughout the country. What did he mean by racket?

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I], a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill."

The ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx exists as a combination of bag-man and muscle, in the parlance of soldier Smedley. The former Department of War, now an Orwellian Defender, ha ha, is the backbone of both ‘party’ wings.

Thus, one should, no matter what, carve forty-eight minutes out of a day or a week so as to view RFK’s ‘throw-in-the-towel’ speech. It is a thumbnail elucidation of the problematic prospects of elections to ‘solve our problems,’ so to say.

As part of this assessment, the thermonuclear brinkmanship of American policymakers—particularly from the Democratic wing—comes up for consideration, as these leaders uniformly flirt on a daily basis with Mass Collective Suicide. Is this the ‘will of the people?’ Do people know or care? Inquiring minds would like to know.

As the Kiev’s catastrophe continues to cascade toward the oblivion of Mass Collective Suicide, the now basically immutable fact that only direct NATO information can pull Zelensky’s—which is to say, Capitalism’s—cojones from the fire ought to be terrifying like the knowledge would be scary that the big, soulless fucker pointing a pistol at one’s head fully intends to pull the trigger. Then again, maybe all will be well.

In returning to this endeavor over and over again, no doubt some will ascertain, this humble correspondent is responding to two critical existential inquiries. First, ‘How shall we live in Brand Chaos’s apparently immutable imprimatur?’ Second, ‘How can we truly delve and know useful information?’

Big Tent Review proffers a Commandment performance, so to say, as part of a response to the initial interrogatory. All of the fiction here, and a fair amount of the reporting, definitely include moral and ethical hypotheses and judgments, though I’d willingly discuss any errors in a fair forum. LOL!

Answering the second question has been a persistent Big Tent shtick. Epistemology was my minor in college, ha ha. Moreover, I advance a credible rubric for making as close an advance on Truth as the Goddess, in all her mystery, will ever permit mere mortals to attain. Capiche?

In other words, the second poser is a lifelong affliction, ha ha. Still, although I’ve yet to contextualize them in an ‘authoritative fashion,’ the lot of them present but not defended, the Ten New Commandments do nevertheless offer guidance. In particular, “The Golden Rule Reigns Supreme” ought to ring bells, as in bringing to mind the music of Billy Bragg and the crooning of the Louvin Brothers. Living mostly in alignment with those precepts has made joy’s jubilation much easier to engender, as it were.

As a young creature, barely sentient, I favored September over all other calendrical contenders, as it were, with October’s ascendancy my most preferred, monthly extension of a lunar cycle. Truly too, nature’s cycles persist despite whatever invidious or insidious patterns pertain in the here-and-now.

That said, Autumn here brings Spring to Southern climes; opposition, polarity, and paradox rule All-That-Is even as ‘common sense,’ inevitably an adaptive attribute, nonetheless seeks common cause with hunky-dory uniformity despite the foolish impossibility of such perspectives. How and why this matters stands as a central element of each Big Tent Review.

For example, one could consider Gaia’s seasonality, which seems so securely anchored as to be no more mutable than sunshine, which, by definition, will endure till doom’s direst tolling. Yet, on dozens of occasions, what has appeared as given for millennias of millennias has, apparently of a sudden in a way that ought to shiver one’s spine, completely shifted, thereby delineating so-called polar shifts on our fair planet.

In such a context, the concept of a ‘learning curve’ might take on a new urgency for any sentient critters. Being able to predict and prepare for such eventualities would axiomatically mark an inbuilt boundary between potential survival and certain extinction. Ha ha.

Such whimsical reflection flows from August nighttime temps in the forties, sweet loving connection, and my love’s mom in her attempt to resilienate after a century of resilience. At the same time, dire straits loom at every angle, ‘mass shootings’ at home and Yankee-financed-&-orchestrated slaughter abroad merely a portion of grotesque eventualities on the verge of material manifestation, as it were.

In this vein, my perambulations about Ethos and Logos, in conjunction with recollections of my love for Autumn, lead to this happy-sad sort of state. In these paragraphs, the more philosophical assessments about how things stand show up a lot more than groovy, gooey, yum-yum-yum.

A favored Driftwood Message Art missive echoes such central observations about the here and now. “We Adhere As If Glued to Screens That Persistently Parse Panoplies of Bombastic Bullshit & Putrid Punditry, Thereby Evading the Soulful Introspection & Avoiding the Collective Engagement on Which Depend Our Kind’s Continued Viability, Altogether One of the Most Ironic, & Idiotic, Instances of Willful Ignorance to Afflict Humanity During Days When Vast Plenty Mingles With Direst Danger & Technical Magic Mixes With Mutuality’s Meltdown."

The Modern Nuclear Project’s Biosecurity State certainly appears both proximate in time and space and parallel as life’s imitating Art, with The Hill, the Times, the Post, and every monopolized portal of mediation—without exception; even the only credible ‘organ’ of the lot, the Guardian, plugs a Uranium Economy—illustrating BTR’s points about this matter. Ubiquity and scope prove the centrality of these arguments.

Compromised culture, fraudulent ‘expertise,’ erstwhile moral and religious ‘leaders,’ essentially every politician on the planet, all suggest that ‘Nukes Are the Future,’ even if it kills us all. It’s a system, but it cannot work. If I live long enough, I look forward to the “I told you so’s” that would preface banning nukes and trying to survive cleaning up their ‘waste streams.’

I live for epiphanies, such as a thought about ideology and its deep influence on material relations and the like. Race is, except as a precise, if and only if, synonym of species, and as such it cannot cause anything in the biosocial sphere outside of other factors. One cannot, in other words, ‘hate the inferior race’ because we’re them and they are us.

All that said, the clearly most racialist thinkers gravitate toward the Democrat-Wing and Black Lives Matter. Big Tent Review openly despises White Supremacy; it covers Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and on and on and on. Whatever the case may be, the Democrats are proto-fascist financiers, and BLM has made and continues to make grave political errors in which I have zero interest in participating, even as I also reject any kind of Nazi ubermensch beliefs.

At this juncture, my support for RFK seems a tad absurd. I would find unsurprising to discover that Bobby’s dropped out, which means that the ruling class has a plan, possibly, or, like me, they’ll be making things up as they go.

And indeed, so it is, though now those in charge won’t allow his withdrawal, believing he’ll hurt Trump and eviscerate his endorsement of the Donald. I’ll never again vote for a ReDemoPubliCrat, so I’ve got not dog in the hunt, ha ha.

Christopher Busby has been making an appearance in these pages. He said something sage that might resonate as the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant may, or may not, remain a target for Ukraine’s ‘invasion of Russia.’ He was answering my question here, in our interview, about why monopoly media and government so resisted clear proof of DU horrors.

“Three things, really, are going on; the primary one is that if people are dying in Fallujah, then it raises hosts of questions about other operations with nukes, your President's so-called 'nuclear renaissance and so forth. If the risk model that we see here is even close to accurate, then all nukes must shut down."

Along similar lines, a friend shared with me that one of SubStack’s dandy doctors, Ana Maria Milhalcea, updated folks on Reiner Fuellmich’s case. His travesty of justice reflects what happened to Julian Assange.

In such fraught and murky and dangerous realms, when the proverbial shit seems about to hit the fan in a big way, propensities and inclinations unfold in their most extreme forms, so that otherwise stellar reporters like Ryan Christian and James Corbett make their predicted, and yet unexpected, respective Libertarian turns, blah blah blah.

Suddenly, we learn, individual liberty will solve our problems. We need no people’s politics. It will just get in the way. Socialism and communism never work. Again, blah blah blah.

And how about Kamala and ‘them Democrats?!’ Does the ReDemoPubliCratiCan phalanx even exist? That’s a dandy question, to paraphrase Richard Nixon. I’m able to make general predictions. I’ll study up. We’ll see.

I like to say that ‘snow’s a coming’ at this juncture in Sol’s spinning us about in a big ellipse. The Mad Cows & Englismen installment today has a section on the mellow magical allure of Fall. It has ever been a season of ch-ch-ch-changes.

At least equally pertinent in this calibration of another September is the fateful date only nine days hence. Very obviously indeed, the murdered Salvador Allende, who faced down the fascist phalanx of the CIA’s Pinochet creature and died for his courageous stand.

On the chance that some are unaware, in addition to the above, the BBC’s “The Other 9/11,” offers a damning very-much establishment perspective on the CIA overthrow of Socialist Salvador Allende, though they don’t mention Kissinger’s famous challenge to democracy, to wit rulers needn’t put up with socialist urges among the masses.

This is our government, we are responsible, what goes around comes around. Maybe we’ll pay attention before we learn how hellish payback can be.

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Goddess Guidance on Disease & Society

‘Making Voodoo topical’ would be a staunch critic’s most generous characterization of this specific spot, as it were, on the regular Big Tent calendar. Much of what Big Tent Review has on offer consists of historical facts and current data, exploratory hypothesis and analytical speculation.

This has been true in the realm of public health, for example, about which both historical and contemporary accounts have shown up. In particular, we’ve also examined repeatedly ‘Life & Love & Art in the Time of COVID.’ The utter nonsense of most official accounts about these events is only disputable by morons—whether corporate, governmental manure at issue makes statements about disease origins, the efficacy of masking, the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, or any other point.

Certainly, though, not every health crisis story can possibly be utterly bullshit. Right? The new flu bug must really be awful, correct? And Monkeypox truly must represent a profound threat to human society. Isn’t that true?

We’ll be looking at information and statistics here, of course, as usual, yet we also end up embracing the ineffable, asking for Goddess guidance in general inquiries about responding to natural afflictions such as disease, which in most cases exemplify predator/prey dynamics that are ludicrous to approach as zero-sum encounters. This point is actually critically important.

Axiomatically, any embodiment of a biosphere will implode and end if one of its life-forms consumes everything that it does not destroy. People should think about this: in relation to, say, cockroaches or ants or silverfish or spiders, whatever exact bug repulses one or another of our kind. We cannot eliminate them without exterminating ourselves, more or less simultaneously.

I responded to a Tweet about such ideas like this. “The necessities that you catalog are apt: all of them do, however, relate to social processes of plenty and public health, meaning that we'd better have some clarity about the factors that produce, for instance, plentiful food and salubrious living conditions."

Obviously, I certainly hope, that doesn’t mean we want to organize our ambit through things so as to make conditions perfect for roaches, or whatever. But maybe my thoughts ought at minimum factor in to our ruminating about such things.

And that brings us to the Tarot Question for today’s Spiral Spread. “Given the ubiquitous interconnection and interdependence in any viable biospheric space, so to say, how might we usefully think about disease?" Whether we like the fact or not, all the pathogenic creatures among us are fellow travelers: at least, let’s ask what they fucking mean? In the parlance of the street, ‘Know what I’m sayin’?’

In the event, the array that spreads across the table certainly reveals a suggestive potential as regards the quest. The Essence comes along as Oomphala’s Queen of Pentacles. Past Developments presents Daedalus at his most prideful, in the Four of Pentacles, with sweet Iris’ Temperance as a mirror of the Here-&-Now, and Midas’ majesty for Likely Future Prospects, in the guise of the King of Pentacles. Dionysus’ The Fool follows as an embodiment of Opportunities, No-Matter-What. Hecate’s super-spooky The Moon establishes Problems-&-Prospects, from which emerges, as if by nature’s mandate, Poseidon as the upwelling of the Ace of Pentacles.

Just like in recent issues, delving this larger delineation follows below-the-fold. Before getting there, another query, more incisive and focused for today’s purposes, will deploy a Past-Present-Future rubric to palpate this interrogatory. “As regards Monkey-Pox specifically, what insights or ideas might be salubrious to consider?"

In this triptych, the Eight of Pentacles points to a past of apprenticed achievement, not altogether a friendly thought in relation to fiddling about with biological agents in order to sow chaos and mayhem. … (continued below the fold)

All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)

(Chapter XVIII ended thus. “Midwife-assisted deliveries before and after the birth of Carly's boy baby on May Day, 1978, were the predictable upshot of this eventuality of the modern moment. What with the chaotic mayhem of the first months of motherhood, revelers missed the annual Baster bash till 1979, but that, as so often is the case, is another story for another time." Here is a link to the previous selection.

Today, we hop ‘across the foam to continue following Gordon, whose bright and hilarious personality has made him a popular visitor among his handlers and mentors in the capital city of Yugoslavia. He is learning English and enhancing all his winning attributes.)

CHAPTER XIX

***

Irina worked for a relatively obscure, and definitely peripheral, department in the State Security apparat in Belgrade. Translation & Instructional Services operated out of the Institute for Languages. Hers was not a glamorous job, like her boss’ was, who wined and dined all manner of interesting prospects, men and, much more to his liking, women, from Southern Africa through Southern Asia, anything that the Indian Ocean touched or that his linguistic legerdemain “with languages of the darker corners” encompassed.

But she had a date with destiny ahead of her, or likely enough so, she anticipated. She’d majored in African Languages and English and American Literature—“Echoes of the African in Lillian Smith” had been her senior honors paper title—at University, after all.

She also had cousins in the United States. They corresponded, even “talked long distance” once each year. Such connections, lucky or unlucky as the case might be, could jump off or crush a career.

Because she identified her future occupational track as a trek through American English, she had appreciated the young and unexpectedly thickly muscled—not to mention thickly endowed, whom she had dubbed after he referred to himself as “a little fireplug” as “my little fireplug with the big fire hose”—Morris in this regard, though he was now half a year “been and gone,” she articulated in English, shrugging and smiling with a sigh, as she sketched her future with her pen held high, like a conductor completely in tune with her composition.

This new mission, she repeated to herself many times a day, “It could be my big break,” spitting out the alliterative ‘b’s’ with a grin. Her task, to instruct a young African assassin in the niceties of the Anglo-American tongue, fit very neatly with what had transpired in her life, especially since her divorce. She had heard the gossip about this Black youth’s size—only just over five feet tall, compared to her nearly six foot frame. She had listened to two colleagues as they marveled at his sense of humor, regaling her in astonishment that anyone with such basic linguistic limitations could so effectively convey jokes, whether in Serbian or Zulu or English or Dutch, as if the spirit of Charles Chaplin himself had reembodied among us. She looked forward to finding out the truth of these whispered tidbits.

Just now, on the first Wednesday in April, as Belgrade bloomed in a warmer and sunnier than usual early Spring, and the majestic Danube flooded past a mere two kilometers or so outside her open second floor window on Revolution Boulevard, she also conjectured about whether rumors of his alleged lethality—with five key kills in less than a year and numerous martial arts kudos to his credit, supposedly—were accurate or overblown. So far as she knew, her ex-husband’s boasts notwithstanding about what he had done “more than once, I assure you,” on the border with Bulgaria, she had never “ever met a real killer,” someone whose training and trade, so to speak, were to target and assassinate other people. The prospect at once unsettled and fascinated her.

She only knew how relieved she felt to have won this assignment. She only felt relief that the uncertainty and anticipation were about to end. Within the hour, he would knock on her door, and then fate would have its way, which as she told herself repeatedly, “was always the only way that anything could be.”

In the event, he didn’t knock but just waltzed right in, literally dancing into her cubicle with two cups of coffee and a tiny flower arrangement—a single red rose and four crocuses, the latter of which appeared as if freshly plucked, which Irina hoped was not the case, since picking from urban gardens could “land one in the soup,” she thought to herself as she took the blossoms from him with a grin and tried to detect mud on his dark brown hands that looked both delicate and worn. He presented his floral gifts with a bow, before he also handed over the caffeinated libations. “Name’s Gordon! Or ‘Little Tyke,’ if you like.”

These eight words, which he had rehearsed obsessively while watching episodes of American television—Gunsmoke, Bonanza, 60 Minutes, and of course, Star Trek, whatever he could find on the telly in his dormitory—so as to adjust and Americanize his accent, he delivered with such an arch aplomb, such a dapper turn of his head, that Irina exploded in laughter. When Gordon’s chuckle bubbled forth, its infectious tones resulted in their both losing themselves in mirth for almost precisely five minutes.

He had drilled those lines all during his nine days in the Yugoslav capitol, in expectation of someone’s teaching him whom he would want to impress, and “really reach, if you know what I mean,” with his eagerness and keen capacity for the endeavor. Though for a quarter hour or so this apparent skill caused Irina to misjudge what he could understand or produce, his ploy enchanted her in exactly the way he had hoped otherwise, as they wiped their eyes and regarded each other as half of a strange and yet possibly intoxicating pairing, “like a little black cat and a sacred white lioness,” he thought; “like a little black bear and a white tigress,” she advised herself.

The next two months, five or six, even seven days a week—in every possible environment: churches, parks, cafes, theaters, homes, libraries, “the basement of the Institute,” at Gordon’s dorm room, an idyllic introduction to Spring and Summer in the center of Yugoslavia, unlike anything he had experienced in the Transvaal or Jo’berg—they worked on English at least three or four hours, as many as twelve or fifteen hours, each and every a day. Irina particularly liked Beatles songs and African American literature. Gordon preferred network television and Hollywood movies, as he had in South Africa.

Though his polyphonic vocal sense was completely bizarre for the task, Irina forced him to learn “Here Comes the Sun,” inasmuch as Abbey Road was her favorite album of music ever, and her diminutive charge seemed to have ensconced the sun in Belgrade with his own presence, well before the dry heat of July and August was due. She foisted on him such gems of ‘Black Power’ as H. Rap Brown’s Die, Nigger, Die! and whatever she could lay her hands on from other Black Panthers or American Black radicals. She had him reading both Black Boy and The Souls of Black Folk at one point.

“I’m not trying to convert him, for heaven’s sake; he might better teach me,” she lectured herself. She just wanted him to have a wide awareness of what working class life was like for Blacks in America, in case the decision to focus his instruction on American English was something other than an institutional tic or a party-line fetish for which she could never provide a rationale. … (continued below the fold)

Wood Words Essays—Resilience Versus Terror

As always, this is a Marshall Arts proposition, whose “guaranteed kick in the ASSthetic” in three of four Driftwood Message categories emanates from combining culture and the clash of classes in contradiction to ‘pluralist’ notions that different ‘interest groups’ divvy up society and agree on ‘what being American means.’ Such blah blah blah will ever remain ‘beyond belief,’ albeit it arguably undergirds all ‘commonplace’ success in comprehending the way the world works.

Today’s profferal merely advances one instance of this pattern, in a topical sweater that basically covers our erstwhile corporate torso in its buffing up the opposition between propagated Terror propaganda, on the one hand, and a Resilient way for individuals to navigate their lives, on the other. A piece of wood from that illustrates this process of analytical categorization sets the stage, with a message entitled, “Nonconformity’s Needed Wizardry."

“Far Too Frequently, the Wizardry That We Need, Though Easily Accessible, Does Not Seem a Viable Option Because It Fails to Conform With the Primary Plutocratic Protocols of Maximized Plunder & Complete Control: Unless Common Folk Respond to This Ruling Reality 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’ Agendas of Militarized Mayhem, Mediated Manure, & Psychotic Chaos, &, of Course, the Tidy, Reliable Profits That These Eventualities Have Heretofore Delivered."

The rest of #19’s Wood Words installment will explore this polar opposition: how authoritative fear and terror tactics ignore or even disdain organic resilience against ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ The notion may sound modest, if not mundane, yet our species’ viability may depend thereupon, so to say.

A mere Thought Charm can launch this cascade of meaning’s exploration. “Giving Matters a Mere Modest Morsel of Attention, We Readily Discern That Gaia's Glories So Often Arise From Broken Bastions That We All, to an Extent, Consist of Leftovers, Castoffs, Discarded Materials That Nature Uses to Form Us & All the Rest of the Cosmic Swirl."

In a sense, then, this concept—of an inescapable context of interrelation, integration, and mutually necessary connection—acts as an inception of the cultural cornucopia that is forthcoming today. Modern society’s masters suggest that separation and its analytical achievements must define our mediation of matters at hand; this absurdity now governs us all, with barely a sentient whisper against such thinking, whether the setting is ‘isolated’ lockdown or communities that contain nothing except separated individuals.

Perhaps a poignant preface, or premise, for persisting in this vein will emerge from one Marshall Arts sales encounter, where my rocket-scientist dad was an acquaintance that the buyer and I shared in common. It was eerie, whatever else may be true. In sending a calligraphy placard for the message that the space-bloke bought, I noted this.

“What were the chances of an elder Rocket Child's meeting a NASA guy to serve up deconstructive words about rocketry's social nuances?  Apparently, along the lines that any non-forbidden event is compulsory, they were one.  Anyhow, here are the lines from the art itself.”  In the event, “Influencing Nature's Forms” was the item’s heading, and I repeat its message here again ‘below the fold.’      

"Engineered Norms Now Influence All of Nature's Forms So Fully That Today, Not Only Are All Gaia's Gifts, No Matter How Grand Or Magnificent, Inseparable From Cultural Products' Copious Impacts, But Every Sacrament & Each Holy Relic of Erstwhile Spiritual Ascendancy Also Emanate Empirical Account Ledgers That Resolutely Reduce the Entire Array of Earth's Resources to a Fuel Supply to Energize Humanity's Fiery Heavenward Trajectories That, in Ways As Palpable As They Are Paradoxical, Could Instead Soon Rocket All & Sundry to the Hellish Reality of an Elected Extinction's Eternal Nonexistence."

Obviously, this is far from the simplest of sentences. Its challenge nonetheless may be necessary to attempt for those who would live decently. Mother Goddess may or may not appeal spiritually, yet practically, separating the rest of the biosphere from Homo Sapiens, and as primarily enemy entities, at best hilariously guarantees our own absolute elimination from life’s sweet and sour panoplies here on Earth.

Related perspectives offer additional ideas in favor of holistic thinking instead of supremacist views of humanity’s natural position atop the biospheric heap, as it were. Such a theme, or if one prefers moral or ethical vision, appears in many Marshall Arts missives. One instance is “Beastly Human Eyes.”

“Just As the Eye of Any Beast Exists to Assist an Organism's Navigating Its Environs & Fulfilling Its Necessities, So Too Does the Homo Sapiens Capacity to See Foster Our Happiness & Empower Our Facility, All the More Reason to Reject a Tragic Embrace of Blindness That Always at Least Largely Aims to Channel Or Pacify Emotions &, Ever in Appropriately Docile & Predictably Profitable  Fashion, Slavishly Rigidify Ruling Management Protocols & Imprimatur.”

No doubt, this complete thought will also bemuse or even bewilder readers. On the other hand, perhaps it too says something important and meaningful enough to merit the grammatical muscle, as it were, to struggle to understand. In any event, mandatory ignorance is practically omnipresent in the here-and-now, especially as regards matters of life and death that most merit the closest inspection.

In some ways, the following version of a popular Marshall Arts text, often gracing a tiny toy coffin, delightfully delineates the dynamic at the heart of today’s essay in such perquisites of the Delicate Miracle of Embodiment. “Double-Edged Benefits” is more or less an ongoing titular heading for this idea.

"All Breathing Beings Accrue Death's Inevitably Double-Edged Benefits, Assisting With Functional Requisites Like Respiration, Perspiration, Even Aspirations of Inspiration, For Not Only Does Doom's Fell Swoop Sweep a Clear Path Where the Young & Strong Can Chance Prancing Their Dances, But Every One of These Callow Beasts, in Their Turn, Must Also Kill to Live, If Not to Eat As Such, Then to Defend Dietary Preferences, Not to Mention Themselves, From Legions of Wily Predators, in Toto an Everyday Embodiment of Comprehensive Complicity in Eradication's Frequently Extemporaneous Exterminations, a Pattern That Thereby Establishes Existence's Most Piquant Conundrum: Though We Naturally Cling to Life As Ferociously As Famished Infants Feed at Mother's Breast, We Must in Some Fashion Come to Grips With Demise & Dissolution, Even Our Own, Even Our Children's, With a Measure of Grace, Due Any Key Element of Gaia's Grand Array."

Paradoxically and yet quite obviously, each participant in humanity’s comings and goings, so to say, detests mortality’s claws, finding the inevitability of an ending often a truly terrifying notion, at exactly the same instant—and most especially in these purportedly free North American realms full of brave people—that almost all of these erstwhile intelligent beings worship the grim reaper’s visit as a portal to heavenly blissful eternity. Hmmmm. Need I invoke a wry blah blah blah?

If nothing else, such bizarre anomalous awareness will make the clear thinking of the ‘spirit of adventure’ impossible to attain. Another relatively well-liked Driftwood Missive, at least implicitly, illuminates this punctuation of every unfolding present since time began. “Seas of Struggle, Oceans of Opportunity” is its Yin-Yang ‘subject line.’ 

"In Earth's Almost Infinite Ranges of Ridges, Seemingly All Layered With Riches; in Gaia's Vast & Often Vexatious Valleys, Not to Mention Our Planet's Arrayed Arroyos,
Rambling Ravines, & Gorgeous Gorges, Inquisitive & Acquisitive Wanderers Will Often Evince an Inclination & Manifest the Means to Vend & Wend Their Ways & Their Wiles & Their Wares to Nearly Innumerable Oceanic Portals From Which, in One Way & Another, They Can Sail Forth Through Seas of Struggle That Are Also Oceans of Opportunity."

The beating heart of this ode-to-the-spirit-of-enterprise, a sensibility that allegedly activates ‘free-market’ aficionados’ core consciousness, is that we all—and especially in seeking growth, expansion, endeavor—rely utterly on natural norms and feral forms that ‘business-as-usual’ tries to manage in such fashion that these necessary prerequisites diminish or even altogether disappear.

“Epic Adventure, Narrative Nuance” implies this pointedly.  "Even Rough Confabulations of Gaia's Grand Array Contain Indicia of Epic Adventures Or Form a Firm Foundation For All the Glories & Grief of Narrative's Natural Nuance."

Everywhere on Earth, empowered happiness adheres in successful venturing. Then again, as suggested above and definitely delineated in John Prine’s “Paradise,” extractivist imperialistic ‘entrepreneurs’ and other enterprises seem to support scorched planetary policies from the Amazon’s riverine networks to Alabama’s Mississippi connections and beyond, from Ukraine’s Don River killing fields to Danville’s deadly animal shelters.

Occasionally, Marshall Arts’ missives have flowed from a decidedly definite sense of an Appalachian setting as a sweetly salubrious, not to mention defensible, slice of Gaia’s grace. “Both Impediment & Protection” states the subject-at-hand.  "At Once Impediment & Protection, Our Sweet Appalachians Harbor Vast Troves of Gaia's Grace, Not Only Minerals & Other Ready Resources, But Also the Most Marvelous Manifestations of Life's Multifaceted Miracle." … (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 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," so much so that it leads to politics even more corrupt than its own falsity.

Part One is here. This is Part Two. And Part Three has also passed. Today’s fourth episode in our exploration centers on poppies, whose natural history in identifiable ways parallels our own.)

By Way of Introduction

For several centuries, as the feudal age came to pieces and the epoch of commodities and long-distance trade took shape, the precursors—and in some cases the same constituents—in the thick of this topic came to the forefront of both awareness and action in the social and political spheres. An essential text() in this regard, at once gently wise and rigorously scholarly, is The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics.

Professor Richard Hines recognizes implicitly that the attempt to minister to our varying hurts and bruises with potions, while inevitable given our natural trial-and-error tendencies, often enough leads to a different and less salubrious quest. The attempt to treat our lives as afflictions to cure will destroy both all chances to live fully and every potential to discern what is causing a particular individual’s sense of ennui or melancholy or angry petulance, whatever the case may be. This profound dichotomy constantly appears in the experiences of drug users and the social attitudes toward the chemicals themselves.

“Taken together, stimulants, hallucinogens, tranquilisers, and painkillers provide every extreme of love rush and death wish, of opening and closure, of rebuilding and demolition, of exterior energy and interior implosion, the pursuit of destiny against an attempted suspension of the future. Drugs are full of dizzying contradictions and incongruities. They illustrate the maxim of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr…that profound truths can be recognised by the fact that the(ir) opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities, where opposites are absurd. Any substance that has the power to do good also has the power to do harm. …

(A) history of drug-taking… .tells the story across five centuries of addicts and users: monarchs,…wounded soldiers,…exhausted laborers, high-powered businessmen, playboys, sex workers, …the victims of the ghetto, and happy young people on a spree. …Although it is primarily a history of people and places, it is also the history of one bad idea: prohibition.”

To start off the central assessments of this narration, one might focus on different individual plants; or one might examine a single group of herbal and fungal psychotropic ‘medicines’ that have appeared, in different configurations, in every folk tradition; or one might seek to categorize the Earth’s entire range of such flora and look at least briefly at most or all of the different groupings that comprise the whole.

Given the broad foundation that this narrative has already created, an approach similar to the second one above operates in this introduction, a basic investigation of how one set of ‘magical goods’ came to occupy a paradoxical spot, at once demonized and dismissed, despite its ancient presence in human affairs, fully rationalized as a plantation commodity. In moving this essay forward, therefore, the focus in the introductory sections will be on poppies and the multiple forms that people have developed from this lovely flower.

Before beginning at the beginning as it were, a note about where we are now might act as a warning. In relation to this blossom, half-truths, prejudice, and purported clinical exactitude are ubiquitous that have zero to do with deep understanding. Even worse, the present detestation of a flower and its products, which have in many ways made humanity’s long term prevailing possible(), has also become an accepted norm. In any view that moves beyond the biased pretense of ‘criminal-justice’ and ‘therapeutic’ bureaucrats, these ways of contextualizing poppies seem, most charitably, like some combination of vicious insanity and opportunistic mendacity in favor of the madness that rules the routine roost of the here-and-now.

These distortions prevail now despite the ancient lineage of the joint ventures that humans and poppy flowers have conducted. To say the least, excepting the inquisition and its attendant witch-hunts, no thoroughgoing disallowing of plants and their attendant shape shifting chemistry has found widespread application until the past century and a half or so.

“The role of opium in the ancient world is well attested. There are references to it in writings from Egypt, Assyria and Greece. Egyptian medical texts list among opium's many uses its sedative powers to alleviate the pain of wounds, abscesses, and scalp complaints.

For the Romans too it was something of a panacea, being used to treat elephantiasis, carbuncles, liver complaints, epilepsy and scorpion bites, according to Pliny. Opion is Greek for poppy juice. It is dedicated to Nyx goddess of the night, who is shown distributing it to youths in repose in a cameo. Almost every major writer of antiquity, from Hippocrates’ recommend(ing) poppy wine on, mentions it.”’

The following subsections of this overall narrative will take readers on a trek of discovery. The ambit of the sojourn will focus on Eurasia, and to a lesser extent on the Americas. The temporal limits of this section of the report, in the main, cover plus-or-minus four hundred years, from the 1400’s to the 1800’s. Those who listen here will hear themes and motifs that resonate powerfully with the experience of the ‘Wars-on-Drugs’ and promises of ‘therapeutic intervention’ that are omnipresent in the early Twenty-First Century.

THE LONGSTANDING PART THAT POPPIES HAVE PLAYED

We have already noted the thousands of years or more that people have employed poppies as therapy and adjunct to recreation. Again, this correlation of the human prospect and a flower’s range has transpired ‘time out of mind.’

In particular, these potent posies have impacted homo sapiens’ lives throughout Asia and parts of Europe. Briefly detailing this correspondence once again will serve as our starting point.

Authoritative summations lay the groundwork for the relationship asserted here. “Regardless of level of development, most societies have used drugs for religion, recreation, and medicine. Discovered and domesticated during prehistoric times in the Mediterranean basin, opium became a trade item between Cyprus and Egypt sometime in the second millennium B.C.

The drug first appeared in Greek pharmacopoeia during the 5th Century B.C. and in Chinese medical texts during the 8th century A.D. Inferring from such slender evidence, it appears that opium farming first developed in the eastern Mediterranean and spread gradually along Asia's trade routes to India, reaching China by the eighth century A.D. Once introduced into China, opium gained a significant role in formal pharmacopoeia.”

One overview states this notion with great particularity in relation to society’s and culture’s development to ‘advanced’ levels. “Humans have always searched for ways to relieve pain.

Opium was probably the first drug that early peoples discovered, and one of the oldest civilizations cultivated opium: the Sumerians, who lived six thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent—the area surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present‐day Iraq.

They valued hulgil(the plant of joy) for its ability to relieve pain. They introduced opium to the Assyrians, who in turn shared it with the Babylonians.

The Babylonians passed on their knowledge to the Egyptians. The opium poppy was historically indigenous throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Egyptian records show that trade in and consumption of opium flourished under several pharaohs, including King Tutankhamun. Archaeologists have found opium‐extracting equipment in the tombs of pharaohs, for whom it was to help harvest poppies in the next life.”

On both sides of the Mediterranean, the psychotropic latex of the bloom worked wonders, serving as balm and aid to euthanasia at the same time. A physician and historian of science writes in Biomedicine International about the multifaceted aspects of opiates in ancient Egypt.

“Opium was used to make people sleep, to relieve pain, and to quiet the nerves because it acts on the nervous system and psychic functions. Even today, the etymologies of the twenty or so alkaloids it comprises, among them morphine, thebaine and heroin, sometimes recall Greek beliefs and Egyptian places.

The Smith and Ebers Papyri show medical applications of poppy plants: to cure breast abscesses, to calm crying children, as eye drops and in ointments. Composed of many grains, poppy capsules were believed to have aphrodisiac properties and were a symbol of fertility.” … (continued below the fold)

New Fiction Series

Mad Cows & Englishmen(sequelae)

(PART TWO—The Culling’s First Cut. {As the author of this new volume in the series, I have elected to continue in the third-person rather than the first-person POV from my original diary entries.} In the last section, Thomas Hawkins, having lived through his contest with Norman Bates, came face to face with the frenzy and feisty frolic of his future, discovering its unexpected difficulty, quotidian routines, and hoped-for divinity.

In the event, he became a functionary in what had already, even in its early stages, become the greatest engineering of mass murder in human history, the first follow-up iteration of which begins today. This is the final thought of the previous chapter’s description of the opening episode of serial slaughter. “How could people keep from dying of despair or otherwise dispatching themselves in the face of such despicable, seemingly irremediable, circumstances? Next Up: Year One, Post Plague—Pregnant Pauses.")

Slaughterhouse: Coups & Grace

Mad Cows & Englishmen: 1 CEPP(CURRENT ERA, POST PANDEMIC)

From the Future, a Prologue—Pregnant Pauses, Indeed

This new set of transmissions is happening as victory, short of some cataclysmic plutocratic scorched-earth abomination, lies just ahead. Amid pools of luminescence from reading lights, scattered among the cots and coverings of the encampment, sleep apparently remains elusive for many participants in this latest—and, one can only hope, not the last—incident of humanity's dramatic destinies. No better instant is imaginable to enhance composition.

So saying, for specific acts and scenes of Homo Sapiens span on the stage, a vast swath of everything that has happened lies below the surface, behind the curtain, transmitted from the past, or otherwise out of view of the audience—whatever metaphorical descriptor we might choose to use. Recognizing this, a teller of tales—true or false matters not at all, inasmuch as both of them contain their opposite, ha ha—must determine both what Context is essential to the 'case at hand' and how to insert this necessary background into the flow of matters at hand on the page.

Thus, to offer a case in point, one must acknowledge the inescapably erotic elements of any individual's animal nature. The fine thinker from a century ago, Dr. Wilhelm Reich, agilely advances this point in much of his work.

Whatever the case may be, Thomas Hawkins and his housemates occupied the safest perch from which to watch the unfolding monstrosity of orchestrated slaughter and extermination while they indulged their carnal congress. Altogether, they depicted a coterie of cohabiting, concupiscent collaborators, most of whom soon enough became co-conspirators in search of continuing a capacity for a human future in spite of basic social mandates to promote ongoing murder and mayhem.

Another contextual cue for readers mandates that everyone, without sentient exception, must exercise a minimum of skepticism about the stories that monopoly media and the corporate state ask people to accept as accurate depiction of matters at hand. Dr. Chomsky was merely most prominent among Thomas' contemporaries who insisted on this quality of doubting 'official explanations.'

Part of storytelling is to help readers and viewers and such manage successfully what early 'lit-crit-shit' theorists—whom I studied in grad school, long before my peripatetic course to become a political journalist of pinkish tints, what the ignorant would in the past have called far-left—were likely to term a “willing suspension of disbelief.” The narrator's task, in this way of thinking, is humorously at odds with itself on the best of days.

At the same time that this very account depends on a skeptical audience, its prerequisite as a story will always entail expecting participants to stifle their skepticism. Ha ha. 'Performers of comedy' probably encounter this conundrum every day, as have the creators of this particular narrative extension about what, for almost a decade now, people have been navigating, quite likely the most difficult human passage ever, a cantankerous melee that may soon finally come to a close.

No matter the laughable contradiction at its core, this endeavor to make memories and reflections into chapters, which in turn add up to a credible accounting of history's most monumental mayhem, is continuing, with one Chapter about the 'first culling cut,' already posted, and an additional interlude about years one-through-nine, Post Pandemic, beginning with what follows this overview and then persisting till completion. Documentation, in any event, proceeds more persuasively when the characters in question are clearly named.

Hence, in the end, this Prologue serves as a Dramatis Personae of this cohort, which they collectively came to refer as the 'Hawkins Harem Household.' Such a naming-exercise becomes a necessity especially inasmuch as, almost as a matter of course, the factional and decidedly explosive relations among HHH members soon enough began to resemble some kind of crazed concatenation of melodrama and tragicomedy. Though no murders or suicides took place—nor did the Copper-Bots ever cart off anyone to an anonymous, rapid, termination—the squabbles and skirmishes at times seemed to portend pendant carnage or at least bountiful bloodshed.

So then, the cast at hand consists of three already-named participants. Thomas Hawkins, the 49 year old male in the melee, needs no introduction. Eighteen women used him as their consort during these years, only two of whom left the premises during the seasons that followed, as this litany of lust and domesticity will in time reveal.

A few comments about this luscious menagerie of female agents would help set the scene, so to say. All of them had at least a passing connection with a worldwide informal 'movement,' very much au courant among plutocrats as a way of coopting communists and radicals of various hues, that called itself a Mainstream Feminist Majority. A sidebar about the group's history is forthcoming, in regard to a sequence of meltdown moments in Year Two, Post Pandemic.

Moreover, all of these women were childless, yet planned on propagating given time and tide. More than half had aborted a pregnancy. All but one of them admitted bisexual experience, if not deeply seated propinquities. All were ambitious and at least pretended a potent passion for anticommunism, especially pertinent in an HHH environment, where the lone man was very much a self-described Red.

Finally, before viewing the roster as such, a needful note about naming things might serve. The soon-to-be-introduced PPGA had been arguing about finishing its Thirteen Moon Project for years, but for purposes of this first annual volume, the BP month names in English will prevail.

Jan Folger, 46, is precisely the competent and willful vixen, privileged and potent, who has, in the previous Chapter, already earned a sultry reputation of fierce feminine effulgence. Furthermore, she maintains the appointed link with the PPGA, the Post Pandemic Governing Authority.

Marianne Wilson, 43 and another trustafarian female, who has proudly designated herself a 'pussy-powerhouse,' is practically if not officially Jan's second-in-command. She acts as a Recording Secretary whenever they all meet in common and chairs the PPGA-mandated House Committee.

Angela Costanza, 39 and the only other of the crew to have come from high-privilege, had been Jan's lover in the decade that had led to this present passage, though they had occasionally shared men from the universities and think-tanks where they had often worked as colleagues; in the realm of an HHH 'administration', she rounds out the onsite 'Central Committee,' so to speak.

Becca Kinovsky. 37, shrugs off the label of 'Thomas' Pet.' Before Pandemic, or simply BP, she was not only an Olympic Bronze Medalist in boxing who also had two martial-arts black belts, but she had also ascended to the upper echelons of the Rockefeller Foundation, which ironically had contemplated, or even plotted, much of what would transpire in the HHH epic, and from whose institutional sinecure five of these flowers had blossomed into their PP parts.

Carey Corey, 24, would serve as an ideal 'pretty younger sister' in bygone days: as such she fills the role of 'patient listener' as often as not. Fair, freckled, calm, quiet, yet with a decidedly naughty gleam in her eye, she'd graduated law school at 22, more or less concomitant with Thomas' meeting Norman; rumor had it that she had been mistress to a Rockefeller great-grandson mistress while working on Becca's team at 'the Institute.'

Wanda(Wicked Wanda)Martin, a 28 year old ‘wiz-kid,’ is the sole female in this entire array who has no bisexual interests whatsoever, not that she minds watching, or she'd never have made the grade. She is also the most 'qualified' 'HHH teammate,' in the parlance of the place, with a Ph.D. in both astrophysics and epidemiology to complement her MPH degree. She knows more sex-science than even Thomas himself.

Alicia Bianchi, 33, other than Mr. Hawkins himself, is the only of the arrayed community whose roots are working class—mother an African-American factory worker, father an immigrant Italian carpenter. She also networked her way into Rockefeller-interest employment after quitting high school, getting her G.E.D., and then writing best-selling 'motivational materials,' mainly videos that she produced and narrated.

Denise Donaldson, 25, would have missed HHH pathways altogether but for her much-older CEO husband's succumbing to the first MRNA jab, an eventuality that finessed another requirement for 'house membership' when the shot caused her to miscarry the fetus that she and spouse John Donaldson had conceived in November 2020, or Year Eight, BP. A former ballerina, she leads the House Fitness Program.

Katherine(Killer Katrina)Cooper, at 30 both seeming older and looking like a teenager, comes from a stockpile of soldiers. She is the 'chair' of the veteran's group 'on campus, burgeoning with the sort of friendly confident leadership that her Father, the former U.S. Army's second Black Lieutenant General, had developed so powerfully that the Corps considered 'Cooper-Commander' a high compliment.

Mary(Mother-of-God)Miller, 26, is another veteran, one who appears ethereal but whose slender athleticism and keen eyesight had made her an excellent marksman—the second best in the group—so that her Military Occupational Specialty had been sniper, a task at which she had so excelled that the former Central Intelligence Agency had snagged her and dispensed a license-to-kill that she had utilized on eleven occasions.

Patricia Renahan, another 30 year old military brat with a wild disposition, followed her brother into Smedley Butler's Marine Corps, ultimately becoming the staunchest radical in the HHH bunch—'as if General Butler came back with a sex-change,' she liked to quip when she wanted Thomas to come like a rocket, a quality she appreciated in a man almost as much as she liked wrestling big fellows into submission in less amorous fashion.

Mildred(Misty Milly)Malinowski is the one foreign-born household member, at 24 one more youngster in the group, originating in Poland and then trekking to America via Ukraine and Bosnia. A more or less observant Jew—'a member of the tribe without the portfolio of a synagogue,' she would suggest—in these modern times, she keeps her status throughout her stay as, in the words of Top-Mama Jan, the only HHH 'sectarian practitioner.'

Diana Trevic, at forty-seven, the elder of the entire group, had heretofore always identified as lesbian, albeit she pretty quickly adopts Thomas as 'only the second man of my acquaintance who is really and truly worthy of the LWAD designation,' an acronym that inflected her Sociology Dissertation and that only 'Ms. Innocent, Wicked Wanda,' does not acknowledge with a chuckling recognition. When Diana finally gets pregnant, in Year Three, PP, she is the first HHH aficionado to depart their 'family.'

Tatiana(Tarty Tat)Adler, “29 forever,” stands six-foot two and considers herself “a jock, through and through,” having found her way along snaking Ivy-League pathways with scholarships in track and soccer to become a coach who 'liked sex too much to be safe around a bunch of hot jocks,' was picked up when she was paying off student loans by temping for Dr. W.

Cathy Cropper, even at forty, eerily resembles almost a twin of copper-toned Kathy Cooper, though Ms. Cropper shows a much creamier Africana tint in her skin and has none of her 'double's' Jamaican accent. An enthusiastic 'social anarchist, she also sports the only 'radical pedigree' in the House that holds a candle to Thomas' alphabet-soup of 'Leftist' bona fides, thereby co-chairing the People's Committee that begins meeting and commenting just prior to HHH's Winter Solstice ball.

Vivian(Vixen Viv)Valenti, '31 and still horny,' has the most capacious salacious appetite in the commune that celebrates and, for the most part, insists on such libidinal attitudes. She's also an automatic communist, more or less, and so doubly a favorite of Thomas.

Amber Thomas, the youngest youngster in the coterie, at 22, has just finished her psychology doctorate, working at night when she had a break from sex play. 'Even though I'll never have a practice,' she likes to smile, 'I'll just bet that I'll make myself useful with all the nuttiness here.'

Beverly Brand, meanwhile, 44 and a lifelong crack shot as well as New Age darling, does charts and cards for all her friends, and she's one of those people who can manage friendly relations with almost anybody who's not actively psychotic; her presence, as 'Dr. Thomas' partner,' more or less, has a very soothing effect on HHH disputation. Thus, when she aborts her third pregnancy in her first six annual Household circuits, and is 'transported for reeducation' early in Year Seven, PP, contrariety and conflict become almost deadly at times.

The 'Hawkins Household Harem' domicile could readily have made architectural history. A sprawling brick hacienda, nearly ten-thousand square feet, spread out round a massive courtyard from which rose, as if twined, a giant ancient Beech tree and a spiral-staircase-belted tower that, so far, still exceeded its arboreal companion's height.

The action that this score of randomly connected humans activated over almost a decade of ambits about the sun was as quotidian as kisses and as uniquely crazy as childbirth, an eventuality, in truth, that the powers-that-be fully intended to result from the coitus and completion among this group of comely cousins. While sexuality circumscribes a species pleasure response—even if twisted by social mores—sex obviously concerns procreation, a sort of creativity that HHH would excel in demonstrating.

The foregoing prefatory material applies to all nine volumes of this Mad Cows & Englishmen serialized saga. Several other books also have introductory remarks, specific to the happenstances of the specific passage that the volume in question includes. Lest anyone have forgotten, the foundation for this story, perhaps as for so many others in humanity's pantheon, is mass murder of the most cold and soulless sort, as ever justified with pontification and punditry aplenty.

A Spring Sprung to Bloom Baleful Abomination

Unsurprisingly, the 'Ladies of the House' had all but synchronized their periods, with Thomas their diligent and delighted dandy, by the Spring Equinox gala of glorious gushing glee. Somewhat surprisingly, on the other hand, not one of these eighteen fecund females had theretofore gestated, in spite of often literally daily practice in pursuit of promoting both pleasure and just such an end as a ‘bun in the oven.’

Some research has shown that very high stress levels, as for instance might appear when the murder of two billion male cousins is afoot, inhibits viable impregnation. Whatever might explain an initial season of 'barren wombs,' as it were, all at Hawkins House, which everyone eventually called HHH, knew that frequent fructification was 'coming soon, ha ha,' or so they'd quip to each other.

The only operative question, or at least the inquiry that made their first five months together much easier to maintain as 'smooth sailing' among themselves, was simple. “Who will be first?” One evening, up atop the House Tower just after the rising of Spring's first full moon, ‘Vixen Vivian’ had motivated Thomas to focus his manly attentions on her in the mild air of a starry April night. He was truly the ideal candidate for his position; she barely had had to 'twist his arm.' … (continued below the fold)

Old Stories, & New—”Resuscitation”

(Part Two ended with this thought. “'DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE IT IS FOR ANYONE FUNDAMENTALLY TO CHANGE?'" The story’s interlocutor has continued his two-tier explication, presenting his own presentation to an audience at a bookstore, on the one hand, and delving the eerie way that his experience calls ideas of an Afterlife into question.)

It's not as unlikely as a tau neutrino, or a cat that reads Shakespeare. But none of us is likely to meet, in an entire lifetime, more than a handful of people who have utterly transformed themselves.

The analogy to dieting may be laughably apt. Before going down with the ship, I would gain ten pounds, lose five, and so on, in a never-ending cycle. So too, many people embrace practices and perspectives that lead them to feel ‘transformed,’ only to discover that they have barely budged from their core psychic presentiments.

The categories of people who are relatively likely to undergo basic change include those who have died, or nearly so, and then returned. I am one of these folks, a revenant if you will, and that is why I'm here today, to sign a few books and deliver this talk. Appearances notwithstanding, I have undergone a complete metamorphosis from the man who looked just like me last year.

The facts of the story are straightforward. All the details occupy only one hundred and fifty pages of Resuscitation: The Story of a Revenant Who Lost His Soul and Found a Life.

I and twelve other hardy people ventured forth July 1st, two summers ago, on the ultimate Arctic cruise. We consisted of downsized over-fifty sorts such as me, with lots of time and good retirement benefits, along with a smattering of trust-fund kids and internet wizards with way too much money, and precisely two scientists on sabbatical. The four crew members quipped that we were on the 'iceberg-and- borealis-circuit.'

We ate better than imperial titans. We debated and teased and deconstructed almost every imaginable topic. Some of the couples played at swapping. We lapped each other up and found our lives oh-so-sublime.

A week into our fortnight run, at 9:30 in the evening on a day of endless light, something took a huge chunk out of our ultra safe double-hulled ship. We sank so quickly that we barely had a proper chance to panic before we submerged, when, at least for me, the water numbed so fast that even my terror froze, into one long, dreamy scream.

I expired without pain. Just like they say, drowning doesn't really hurt. Eventually, I just let go and breathed in the brine. … (continued below the fold)

Classic Folk, Rejuvenated

(Today’s selection offers up a second chapter of a second series of ‘fairy tale’ recontextualizations, in thirteen units, a stab at storytelling that reveals in such ancient yarns connecting layers, perhaps, of the entire fabric of mythos and psyche and human awareness. Readers have just encountered another fabled character here, he who made a deal regarding beans that seemed foolish yet made his fortune. Now, we’ve returned, further to examine this marriage for the ages, that of Little Red and her steady, stalwart mate, Sam the Woodsman.)

Those who have been perusing this unfolding storyline may remember that Sam had come to me, very much in a state of dread, as Sage Samaria Woodcroft, his son, entered the world and joined his sisters—Camille and Dahlia—fresh from his mother’s draconian drudgery in pushing forth his presence. His father saw and shed tears simultaneously ebullient and enervated, laying his hand on Sage’s squalling head and thanking his wife for her heroine’s holy efforts before he left Red to her nursing, his daughters to their billets, and came in search of my assistance.

Soon enough thereafter, they embarked on a celebration of their union. They rode to Divining Rock to pose questions—each one’s interrogatory a secret to the beating heart of the asker—and love the night away, before they ended with as close to a bickering bedtime as had ever befallen them.

Red & Sam—Wild Hearts Married in Wild Woods—Second Moon’s Sooth Saying

Soldier and woodsman that he would ever be, so long as he lived and breathed, Sam started up first from his slippery dreams and drifting slumber. He had water boiled and biscuits warmed over coals before Red's eyelashes began their fluttering's foretelling of her turning her fiery gaze on her mate, insisting that he speak.

He knew. He had prepared himself. After he’d tendered her cup of tea, she had taken it and pointedly drunk not a drop, all the while glaring at him with that combination of loving regard and stern inquiry that he found incontestable. Responding without a detectable pause, he blurted out. “You've forgotten!”

Her widening eyes offset the blush that crept from her breasts to the ragged hairline above her brow's astonished contraction of denial. “No, I...,” she started in less than an instant, looking inward and pausing as she did so. “What?” she asked, confused.

And indeed, she had buried away the conversation from so long ago, when she was still the ward of her own mother, years in advance of her own shouldering the maternal mantle with her adoring husband, who over time became her beloved, and from whom now she hoped never to part till long decades of loving partnership had passed between them. When he mentioned the soothsayer from his birth and coming-of-age, Red fainted before Sam even mentioned the venerable Heccalah's reading of his fate on those occasions.

She remembered with such force that the thought of losing him, and soon, swept her into a swoon. Scooping her limp form, succulent and warm, into his buffed and abundant embrace more or less instantly revived her. “No!!” she shouted instantaneously, laughing through her tears and weeping through her mirth. “No, no, NO!” she insisted.

Holding her at arm's length, he agreed. “I too hope as much.” When she continued to leak salty streaks, he added, “I so enjoy your company, good wife.” His wry smile spoke quietly, as did he. “You asked, however.”

They clung together through her sobs as they fueled further intimate fires to facilitate their morning and their journey and their discourse. Howling glee had no sooner rousted the doves and pigeons in the attic, so that their fluttering wings punctuated the couple's sounds of soulful satisfaction, than their conversation began its course, defining their day and demonstrating how lovers can contemplate mortality without fleeing in terror from each other's potential for termination.

Packed and mounted and riding within a quarter hour's passage from their fierce fondling, their chatter was the stuff of nerves and uncertainty. They both asked if they'd remembered the water, for instance, giggling at themselves in the event.

Rosy, as if the mare knew of their concerns, ambled at an amiable walk for most of the morning, during the first hours of which Red mostly clung to her man and voiced one message of adoring regard after another, to which Sam’s response was his erect manly valor and ongoing nods of affirmation and an unshakeable posture of engagement, turning to her in the saddle despite the brisk breeze and the perilous footing. The pair perched on their pony with greater than a ‘Sam’s-length’ between them, on the withers, and the bouldered track that they trod.

They began actually talking after their first stop, overlooking the precipitous pathway toward home, the heights of the Goddess’ mountain behind them, innumerable snowy grey ghosts on either side. As Sam watered Rosy and fed her some oats, Red cried softly in a mix of alarm and intrigue.

By her side in a quick prophylactic shake of Rosy’s tale, Sam stared in astonishment to see a mother bear, brown as a bean and rotund as a barrel, leading three tawny cubs into the wild. “I wonder where papa is,” he smiled in her ear.

“Oh!” Red turned to gaze at him. “You should have seen!” She described the largest ursine being that either of them had ever encountered.

Rose Woodcroft, nee Wolfsbane, gazed up at her strapping spouse with that mixture of impertinence and amorous interest that always roused him. She had long realized that his former appearance of being laconic or standoffish had only been the shyness of the suitor.

“Well, what of that monster papa, then?” He waited to see the knowing in her look. “Mother would carry on, wouldn't she? If he ceased to be?”

Her lashes brushed further saline flow, although she laughed in reply. “True enough.” She shoved him invitingly. “That doesn't mean she'd wish for any such thing, however.”

He shrugged as his glance darted away from the lift of his brows to evade locking eyes with his lover and mate. She went on. “And, we must agree, since I saw this giant vital beast,” pausing, “that it hasn't yet departed.” At his wry nod, she finished for the moment. “And he mightn't depart at all, any time soon!”

“Yes. Yes! We will hope and pray,” said Sam with instinctive mirth. The wind punctured the silence for many moments, till Rosy nickered at them, noting that noon was passing. Sam's gaze had kept burning to measure her soul, as hers had his. “Yet he might, eh?”

When she dropped her chin and raised her shoulder slightly, he completed his introductory remarks. “And what then?” So began, after a few slurpy kisses and suggestive sighs, the discussion that occupied the remainder of their slow canter to Red's Mother's cozy home. 'What then?' indeed. … (continued below the fold)

Nerdy Nuggets—The Loving Case: Color, Sexuality, Consciousness

A substantial portion of this Above-the-Fold material is fifteen years old or so, as with a fair amount of my journalism and popular history more or less ever-green as cultural explication. The Lovings—a hunky White bloke and his captivating Black/Indigenous, wild and wily, younger-woman lover and wife—upset the White Supremacist apple cart without ever attacking the true roots of such a phenomenon in modern day colonial and imperial imprimatur.

The central component of this sort of oppressive eventuality, or at minimum quite credibly the core point, might well be to support White Supremacy, an obviously ideological function. How ideology operates in enculturation, political economy, public administration, is important to parse, though perhaps not today, ha ha.

If nothing else, though, one can look at the endless streams of garbage on X, in which the wicked wellsprings of the Loving’s plight do appear—about literally every topic imaginable, from Ukraine to Caracas to Aurora, Colorado and beyond—an admixture of anticommunism blended smoothly with supremacist thinking hither and yon. As suggested, in the fullness of time, fleshing out this thought will receive its fifteen minutes—or a bit longer, ha ha—in the Big Tent spotlight.

In any case, the underlying context, readers may remember, was a ‘Civil Rights Movement’ that had emanated from the ‘amens’ and amenities and other efforts of Communists, as with MLK’s ‘attendance at a Commie school,’ an eventuality that has gotten apt coverage here in BTR’s pages. In a sense then, the signs of the protesters were accurate: the couple’s sweet marriage was a “Communist plot.”

Thus, if for no other reason than narrative intrigue—not to mention accurate accounts of matters on ‘the surface of things’—inquisitive readers may find the fortitude to appreciate such nuance. Below-the-fold will offer plentiful space for pondering such patterns.

Here’s a notion. Maybe exactly this sort of rich loam of drama and conflict, a steamy juicy stew of sex and pugnacity, ought to inform our litanies of ‘hit media series,’ so that Loving v Virginia would offer an alternative to Breaking Bad, if not a replacement for that compelling set of seasons. The specifics of the lives of the plaintiffs are simply aboil with horrifying, very plausibly completely telling, eventualities of epiphany and tragedy.

Richard Loving’s death certainly epitomizes the latter condition. A ‘drunk driver’ ‘ran a stop sign’ and smashed into the couple’s car, killing Mr. Loving and leaving Ms. Loving blind in her right eye. ‘Born a skeptic,’ as mama Kassy intoned, I doubt explanations like this—random and simple—even though they may be true.

Here’s what makes my suspicions so far unanswerable. In any easily identifiable fashion, the vaunted Internet search mastery reveals zero about who did this, the particulars of the crash, or any investigation or supposition or rumors at the time. Under the circumstances, that’s anomalous, to say the least.

No matter how tragic, or even quite plausibly evil and conspiratorial, this sundering of human potential would prove to be, Richard Loving’s life and actions stand as a testament for all and sundry. He represents what each of us, almost without exception, has witnessed in his own life, has experienced in her own struggles.

Whatever the case may be, a friend, who was also a reader, in fact did write me of his personal experience of miscegenation and its purported proscription. His lionizing LBJ and then Barack Obama feels identifiably ironic and definitely discomfiting to me, and likely to others as well. Nonetheless, the broader point about a broad impact is ineluctable and important at once.

I note this, in part, because the ‘thickets of antithesis’ so bemuse many observers that they prefer to chat about property values and Walmart’s newest bargains rather than even contemplate having a forthright conversation about such matters as this half-century old Supreme Court case. Still, here we are, in a BTR environment where discursive engagement merely awaits a little attention, as it were.

Again, whatever, Tom, my friend, almost mirrored the beginning of my little article. “In 1962 in California I married Elvie Moore, a nice woman from Detroit I met in the U.S. Navy. She was of African and native American descent, I was a Vermonter of English, Irish and Finnish descent.” He continues with a naivete that would have made Richard and Mildred smile, if not outright giggle, though Tom was heartfelt enough.

“It is still incomprehensible that our simple, loving marriage was seen as illegal in some states. The experience with Elvie of learning about segregation was an eye-opener for me, coming from a state with a very tiny percentage of people of color. I changed from Republican to Democrat and thrilled to listen with my wife to Lyndon Johnson's speech when he had succeeded in getting the Civil Right Bill passed and he uttered the words, We shall overcome.’

It is a thrill today seeing Barak Obama as president. I looked at the pictures of him in India yesterday with Michelle and tears came to my eyes. Good finally happens because of those words written in our Constitution, but one must have patience, much patience." The imminence of history’s pages looks impossible to ignore under these sorts of conditions.

That my buddy’s consciousness is only slightly more elevated than those that ‘well-meaning White preachers’ held in relation to MLK—they also counseled patience as he awaited release from the Birmingham jail—is hardly the point. What is crucial is the real-world prevalence of these patterns, which interventions such as lawsuits can in fact positively impact, even if true human progress will require a manifestation, eventually—if survival ends up being more appealing than Mass Collective Suicide—of active and organized and ultimately relentless social solidarity among common folk.

In any event, here is the Examiner piece from long ago and far away. “For the South, William Faulkner said, ‘(T)he past is never dead.  It’s not even the past.’  One hundred forty-three years ago Clarke County, Alabama proved Faulkner apt for Tony Pace and Mary Cox.

    This pair apparently cohabited as loving wife and husband.  Unfortunately for them, Alabama and most U.S. States in 1881 proscribed Black/White marriages, outlawing miscegenation completely.

    Thus, they faced charges of ‘Living Together in a State of Adultery or Fornication.’ The penalty, were ‘wrongdoers’ both White or both Black, was a $100 fine or six months in jail; if the accused were differently colored, however, consequences ranged from two up to fifteen years in the penitentiary.

    These defendants, upon conviction, received the minimum sentence; both appealed.  A sympathetic White barrister took Pace’s appellate case pro bono and argued that the evidence was insufficient to establish continuity of relationship—legally part of the fornication charge.  Cox’s lawyer contended that she should be released on a technical point. 

    Alabama’s high court affirmed both convictions, and John Tompkins paid all fees and undertook to appeal Pace’s imprisonment to the U.S. Supreme Court.  He believed, even though recent opinions had retracted much of the Fourteenth Amendment’s proscription of unequal legal treatment, that he could convince Chief Justice Stephen Field and thereby free Tony Pace.

    Alas, such was not to be: the Court’s holding unanimously agreed: Pace must complete his sentence.  Though 150-years or so seems relatively distant from hateful attitudes, such misanthropy as Pace v. Alabama remained the law throughout the South until another couple, this time Virginian, faced prison because they dared to marry.

    ‘Tell the Court I love my wife,’ Richard Loving instructed his lawyer.  In 1967, the Supreme Court finally overturned this vestige of vicious color prejudice.  Open-minded people cheered the result. 

Commonly, such bigoted views seem merely useless ‘erroneous ideas.’  However, historians disagree; harsh, inhuman laws, going against ‘What Comes Naturally,’ serve critical ideological and political ends.  Julie Novkov, for example, leaves students with sage words to consider when they examine seemingly ‘mistaken’ past wrongdoing.

‘The struggle against miscegenation was… a struggle to establish and maintain whiteness as a(n easily identifiable), separate, and impermeable racial category. … A black man with a white wife, (or vice versa), not only had the potential to produce racially ambiguous children but also undermined white supremacy, and thus whiteness itself, by openly melding black and white into the most fundamental unit of society, the family.’

In the jousting-for-dominance particularities of 2024, what should we make of this decades-past identifiable attack on ‘White privilege’ and other such divide-&-conquer machinations of the high and mighty? Big Tent Review exists, in no small part, so as to answer this query, as already amply expressed over the past year or so. … (continued below the fold)

Communication & Human Survival—Popular Education, People Power

Paolo Freire has become an icon of human liberation. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed has probably come to undergird more university-level Education Departments than all other thinkers combined, from Dewey to Skinner and beyond. As an initial profferal, today’s tidy little briefing introduces this hero-of-humanity.

Today’s installment, in other words, is just a start, very bare bones. A first follow-up to provide depth, and flesh, for this skeleton will follow on October 17th, if not before.

Here is material from the Table of Contents. “Chapter One…reveals the justification for a pedagogy of the oppressed,” based on “the contradiction between the oppressors and the oppressed, and how it is overcome."

Chapter Two rejects “the "banking" concept of education as an instrument of oppression” and offers “a critique(that elicits) the problem-posing concept of education as an instrument for liberation." Freire insists on making the “attempt to be more fully human.”

Chapter Three introduces the core concept of “Dialogics—the essence of education as the practice of freedom.” In this view, “dialogics and dialogue(mix),” and “dialogue becomes the key to search for program content… .(that can help) awaken critical consciousness."

Chapter Four juxtaposes “antidialogics and dialogics…the one the servant of oppression, the other the foundation for liberation.” Of special importance are the antidialogical approache’s “characteristics: conquest, divide and rule, manipulation, and cultural invasion;” in contrast to “the theory of dialogical action and its characteristics: cooperation, unity, organization, and cultural synthesis."

One might make special note about the monograph’s dedication. Freire offers it up “To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side."

Freire’s prefatory materials are rich as well. The “Publisher’s Preface” to the 30th Anniversary Edition, for example, extols slight changes in language. “This revised thirtieth-anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed thus represents a fresh expression of a work that will continue to stimulate and shape the thought of educators and citizens everywhere."

The Introduction comes from a once youthful collaborator in Freire’s worldwide efforts, who found that “(r)eading Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave me a language to critically understand the tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and ‘deferred’ dreams that are part and parcel of living a borrowed and colonized cultural existence."

In the meanitme, the Foreward details the personal experience of Freire’s odyssey, teaching illiterates in the Brazilian outback to read and act on what they learned, earning him exile and lifelong depredation by reactionaries and anticommunists who used ideology to cover up their practical goal of profiteering through the stupefaction of universal immiseration. Pedagogy’s classic status emanates from the text’s having ‘outlived both its own time and the author’s.’

Freire’s own Preface stands as a monumental gem that gleams with a concise and precise fire, the knowing that knowledge is a social process that necessarily predates, or at least accompanies, transformation and empowerment. Only five pages, one might read and learn from it a thousand times.

Perhaps its most central point concerns conscientizagao, which “refers to learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality," despite a ubiquitous tendency for many participants to fear the very freedom that they seek.

The rise, everywhere, of sectarianism that places comrades at odds, of factionalism that serves the divide and conquer schemes of rules, is one result of this timidity toward self-liberation. Such trepidation “confuse(s) freedom with the maintenance of the status quo; so that if conscientizagao threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself."

Popular Education elicits a sensibility of learning and delight, at the same time that actual circumstances often seem at odds with even the potential to ‘teach new tricks to old dogs or young.’ In fact, literally thousands of ongoing Freirian experiments are evolving as these words hit the page. Freirian methods are burgeoning even as the vast majority of ‘formally trained’ teachers know nothing of these miraculous, revolutionary methods.

Still, Freire’s is neither primarily a ‘teacher’s manual of practical tips’ nor a rabble-rouser’s justification for helping oppressed populations to gain powerful ways of defining and seeing social reality. Freire persists in linking belief with common sense.

“We must not negate practice for the sake of theory. To do so would reduce theory to a pure verbalism or intellectualism. By the same token, to negate theory for the sake of practice, as in the use of dialogue as conversation, is to run the risk of losing oneself in the disconnectedness of practice. It is for this reason that I never advocate either a theoretic elitism or a practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory and practice. In order to achieve this unity, one must have an epistemological curiosity—a curiosity that is often missing in dialogue as conversation."

Additional material along such a course might in turn add dozens of critically important points. A few of these follow, with much more thorough amplifications yet to come. … (continued below the fold)

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Depleted Uranium: an Initial Primer

(Part One of this ‘Initial Primer’ series ended with this point. “‘It sounds crazy,’ (Dr. Busby) 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." The research and writing of this piece, since it happened many years ago, received an update in Part One, which showed in part that the horrific and insidious health consequences of DU have, if anything, worsened over the past couple decades.)

Just a note about one point might deepen readers' comprehension. As Dr. Busby explained, Uranium specifically, and radiation generally, is really hard on Y-chromosomes, so that whenever radiation impacts women of child bearing age, the number of male births, normally at a level of about 1.05 boys for every girl, drop much lower.

In Fallujah, the live birth ratio was 82 boys for every 100 girls. If that doesn't make a few hearts skip a beat, people of even the most minimal empirical, scientific literacy just aren't paying attention.

I also inquired, "Are all of the noted negative developments possible to associate with DU?"

"If you assume either Uranium or radiation, absolutely. And because the sample size" is related to significance in different ways depending on the whole sample and the nature of the study, here "the statistical significance would be just astronomical."

I want to emphasize, no, that's not right: I want to drill home into the brains of readers that we are witnesses here to long-term effects that are just beginning to manifest. They may not worsen in terms of absolute numbers, but they will continue for generations. Moreover, Dr. Busby is doing work on much larger swaths of the human prospect, in relation to Chernobyl and the nuclear power stations that much of Europe is indicating it will soon abandon.

This is a pattern—of noticeable health outcomes in the presence of radiation—that repeats. It's going on here in America, too, as I will participate in demonstrating, though we haven't acknowledged it yet because we haven't acknowledged the data that many sources have uncovered.

Just as, in Iraq, no one wanted to ask the questions because everyone in charge was afraid of the answers that they would find, so too here and elsewhere a lack of complete proof supposedly ‘proves’ that nothing is amiss. And these are the same 'leaders' who want to bring us a 'nuclear renaissance.' Can anyone say, 'Make mine renewable, please?'

WHAT'S AT STAKE

"The thing is,” Dr. Busby continues, “Uranium, DU, attaches to cellular DNA; it's got this affinity for" the double-helix. According to Dr. Busby this was "first noted in 1961, when researchers started using Uranium as a stain, because it would preferentially color DNA."

I ask out of genuine interest, and because I will be writing more. "Would you anticipate similar modalities of disease or morbidity among vets? Would such results surprise you?"

"It depends almost completely on the type of exposure. If these effects were the result of some wacky neutron-generating device, then no. But if DU is the culprit, and it's aerosolized, with dust and smoke and such, then similar outcomes would indeed be expected. Kidney cancers too. Gulf War Syndrome is likely part of this."

Kids and families could easily face problems too. An investigation that Green Audit did with "Britain's Nuclear Test Veterans association looked at kids and grandkids, it's on our website, and we found a nine-times increase in congenital effects.” Critics are eager to point out about such self-appointed sampling procedures, he noted, that "’Only the sick would join, so it could be biased’—and that's possible, possibly valid."

But he goes on, relentless about not letting the powers-that-be off the hook. "Nobody has done a proper study, you see," obviously, he suggests in some part, because they fear what they'll discover. He absolutely insists that the lead investigators need to develop a model that foregoes selection bias.

"The obvious way to do that is, you'd have to at least get off the official list of victims to do a truly 'random sample.'" But people are always unlikely to get back to researchers, so they have to get big buy-in or try a lot of people; and it gets bloody expensive."

Dr. Busby was particularly forthcoming when I posed the sort of question that would be so easy to deflect, which, in most cases I would need to follow-up repeatedly in order to obtain even a semblance of a complete response.

"What is the most likely explanation for the resistance to such thorough examinations as you and your colleagues have attempted to carry out?"

"Three things, really, are going on; the primary one is that if people are dying in Fallujah, then it raises hosts of questions about other operations with nukes, your President's so-called 'nuclear renaissance and so forth. If the risk model that we see here is even close to accurate, then all nukes must shut down." … (continued below the fold)

Last Words For Now

It always comes down to this! Yes indeed, just as every saga contributes to an ageless, never-ending thread as eternal as the cosmos itself—another realm of inquiry entirely, the metaphysical, as it were—so too each little knot in the yarn must have Aristotelian components, its beginning, middle, and end, in general terms, its transitions, in order to be even slightly in the vicinity of a comprehensible narrative.

Is the accuracy of this assertion, in itself, enough justification to keep reading? Fortunately or not, the answer to that question is a clear, “No.” However, equally true is the realization that human survival quite probably will prove contingent on folks’ willingness to converse and learn with each other.

Mass Collective Suicide does not in the least constitute humanity’s inevitable fate. Not every Christian believes that Jesus wants to rapture us to paradise via insidious ruptures among the species fold, so to speak.

One thing is obvious, however. False premises lead to false conclusions and untenable actions, a grotesque thought in a context of tens of thousands of thermonuclear death machines. BTR attempts to manifest miracles that find ways from falsity to veracity in key areas of social and political relations, such arenas as appear in Ukraine, Gaza, the 2024 election, matters of Public Health, and on and on through the Big Tent melange on display in each and every issue.

—Below the Fold—

As I’ve said before, 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)…

Then, in the slice of the Reading that encompasses Today, Jason's mid-passage triumph wins public acclaim in the name of the Six of Wands. Rounding things out comes Orestes' experience of utter horror at what he takes to be a vicious, torturous Future in the Nine of Swords.

If not particularly warm and fuzzy, or really even slightly friendly, at least these three pulls do predictably depict discernible descriptions of the here-and-now. Apprenticeship unavoidably involves the uncertainties of starting out, of seeking a not-yet-mastered mastery, as it were. One might readily render Daedalus’ Eight as the emergence of biotechnology’s promises of biosecurity over the past half century or so, an exemplification of a learning curve in regard to ‘ending disease’ and other nonsensical expressions of humanity’s ‘mastering’ of Mother Nature and Gaia’s Grace.

Overruling the natural order—ending death’s existence, say—will with near certainty prove impossible. Nevertheless, almost also as a matter of course, a plenitude of technique and tempting commoditized tidbits elicits some degree of appreciation in relation to ‘advances in medicine,’ ‘tastier temptations,’ ‘safer private spaces,’ and numerous other cases in which knowledge and technology seem now to be providing adequate or even ample answers to existential dilemmas hither and yon. Thus, Jason’s Six, with its acclimation from others, establishes a narrative arc that quite credibly demarcates people’s different and yet largely positive feelings about those arenas of life in which science, technology, and society join to promise well-being.

Spookily congruent with BTR contextualization, Orestes’ Nine and its terrified ‘certainty’ of dire futures suggests that, perhaps, growing numbers of citizens or participants have decided doubts that all is even vaguely hunky-dory, so to speak. A reference passage is apt. “The Nine of Swords is a deeply psychological card, for (its) morbid fantasies of a doomed future often spring from guilt about the past."

What could account for this guilty conscience? Ha ha. Maybe inattention, to the point of complete cluelessness, about the actual political-economy of healthy living could stir some modicum of melancholy self-blaming. It’s a thought anyway.

Now, following protocol, responsive to the question of ‘disease and society,’ as it were, we return to the initial seven-card sequence, referenced with this repetition of an earlier paragraph. “The Essence comes along as Oomphala’s Queen of Pentacles. Past Developments presents Daedalus at his most prideful, in the Four of Pentacles, with sweet Iris’ Temperance as a mirror of the Here-&-Now, and Midas’ majesty for Likely Future Prospects, in the guise of the King of Pentacles. Dionysus’ The Fool follows as an embodiment of Opportunities, No-Matter-What. Hecate’s super-spooky The Moon establishes Problems-&-Prospects, from which emerges, as if by nature’s mandate, Poseidon as the upwelling of the Ace of Pentacles."

If ever an exemplar of interconnected interdependence were clear, she might, to state this exemplary Essence, manifest as Oomphala, a legendary Queen whose reign combined longstanding prosperity and peace precisely because her rule relied on recognizing the need “for the individual to learn about the full expression of his sensuality, the value of the body, and the importance of those pleasures that enhance and enrich life.”

In down-to-earth terms, sensually and materially, this could serve as one defining component of resilience. The clue phone is ringing here, since only mutuality’s intention to achieve interdependent interconnection can fulfill these pleasures, meaning that our healthy response to disease must base itself on collectivity, not on personal practices or individual interventions.

Time’s dart in this reading starts with a second card, of four total, from the suit of health and money, well-being and prosperity, the only suited appearance in this specific sequence. Daedalus’ Four expresses the fallacy, generally speaking, of responding to risk or rupture by ‘circling the wagons’ and trying to keep hold of all one’s cash and prizes. This overcautious selfishness in turn is the consequence of fearing one’s inability or diminished capacity to ‘take care of business’ in an adaptive way, very plausibly an experience of self-doubt applicable individually and collectively in the U.S.A., for instance, since at least the 1970’s.

Yesterday’s intense tensions have circumscribed a topsy-turvy pathway to a current context in which, in terms of any practical sensibility, one can manage more of less mellifluously, so that, when the message from ‘on high’ is to mellow-out and manifest a merry acceptance of ever-friendly and helpful mandates, lots of people will go along. Such tolerant attitudes indubitably fit Iris’ patient persistence in pursuing Temperance, the card of freely flowing feeling and the avoidance of conflict, even as people’s compliant go-with-the-flow consists of, more and more, conflicted and altogether contrary emotions and experiences that accompany attempts to exact the Rainbow Goddess’ ‘balanced heart.’

Despite this temporal arc’s origin in selfish doubt, its passage through a ‘live-and-let-live’ Present, what with ubiquitous ‘interconnecting interdependence’ therein, certainly might elicit Likely Futures in which plenty predominates, so that Midas’ erstwhile touch, as the King, would offer a logical and welcome upshot. Whatever the real risks of greedy excess in Midas’ yarn, his augury must include at minimum many chances to amass fortune and delve delight. Time’s course in the Reading, in sum, looks like a fearful start, a calmer now, and many possibilities for tantalizing tomorrows, despite unavoidable, ongoing disease and affliction.

So far, so good. What Opportunities prevail regardless? Along such lines, Dionysus’ Fool also appears as nearly a perfect continuation of the tale, so to say. The ‘leap-of-faith’ must necessarily underlie any non-trivial movement through life’s omnipresent ‘thickets of antithesis.’ Without an always potentially Foolish willingness to ‘pays the money and takes the chances,’ new chapters, growth of all sorts, and true maturation can never take place.

The penultimate pluck, meanwhile, brings forth Problems & Prospects in the guise of Hecate, who from her ancient underworld perch, oversees The Moon, magic, and enchantment. Hers is an environment of the ineffable, where certainty is at best humorous, where anxiety and confusion can readily reign. Still, this arena of foggy and maddening murk contains nuanced nuggets, from dream, intuition, and the core capacity to accept the unknown as full of passionate potential, a quality of hopeful awareness on which any empowered and joyous personal upsurge depends.

The Reading’s fourth card from Daedalus’ array, in the form of Poseidon’s Ace, proffers today’s particular Synthesis. From Oomphale’s legendary husbanding of well-being to Poseidon’s portended upwelling of resources and energy, navigating our way through nature’s fellow-traveling monsters—germs and all the rest, for example—merely demarcates the organic potentiation of resistance that we carry inside ourselves simply as survivors of long lines of forebears who have also thrived and survived.

A potent tangent thereby emerges among this Spiral’s final three places. As regards ‘thinking about disease in a context of interdependence and interconnection,’ one could state things like this. ‘A willingness to proceed, and seek to prevail, is always useful and always available, even when its yield is neither clear nor certain and thus requires our most incisive intuition, although we may hope for, or even count on, a cosmic material cooperation with our ventures that results from reality’s ready rendering of our resilience.'

Whatever else transpires, these colorful bits of image and ideation have delivered a Goddess Guidance that outlines a coherent set of contextualizations, in essence an argument about our endeavors to attain healthy abundance that could just conceivably be useful, even important. As ever, ‘a word, to the wise, should be sufficient.’

All God’s Cousins—(continued)…

More in tune with his inclinations, they would watch Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son on the television at his dorm. After the second occasion of his laughing till he cried, his panting glee a high-pitched hiss, she had Orlov in the technology-and-media division, whose offices full of crowded clutter in the Institute’s basement more than slightly resembled Fred’s and Lamont’s junk shop on the program, pirate as many copies of individual programs as he could, which worked out to be over five hours of video that Irina and her eager student could peruse on Sony’s primitive early system.

Also on their queue were the initial albums of Richard Pryor, of which That Nigger’s Crazy also titillated Gordon as if he were a child in the thrall of a father’s tickle. “You must see, Gordon, or rather, hear, how perfectly he talks exactly like a White person, so you can’t even tell the difference.” He nodded: he did see, or hear. “That is true mastery,” she said; “that is your goal.”

Since, as Irina’s teaching told her, “to listen only is no good, no good at all; you must speak also,” a minimum of twice each week they would wend their way through Belgrade’s warrens, on foot, from the houseboats and shops that floated along ancient waterways that had people on them ten thousand years prior to these broad, tourist-filled boulevards' magical manifestation to the tiniest, shadowy alleyways full of grime and “the real Belgrade, its true essence,” the loping giantess led the scampering and diminutive African. Alternately, nearly as often, they would ride via the trams that were the stand-ins for the city’s oft-promised but never delivered subway system. Mainly, they alone, among the numerous passengers, would converse with each other, volubly and with joyful gesticulation, during these sojourns.

“You must practice your voice and your accent, so that you can mimic both the scholar and the hustler who lives in the middle of the ghetto streets. Like this funny man, Mr. Pryor, you should be able to sound like a White man or a Negro.”

Gordon never challenged her lectures, which never hectored him or, from on high, condescended to him. Nodding and watching her like the Black Panther that she had decided he really was, he drank in her instruction. And on the occasions that she would put him in proximity to English speakers, he could show his progress with greater or lesser facility.

Irina knew quite well where to find American tourists on whom they could try out routines and practice lines. More times than she could count, one or another of her comrades from the counterintelligence monolith a few blocks West, toward the banks of the wicked Sava, had ambled into her office over the years. Without exception, he—or in the one instance when a woman colleague had accosted her, she—would talk for “almost ten minutes to the last second,” about non sequiturs, “so much idle chat.”

“It would be like they had a watch that they were timed with in their practice sessions, and they could only venture forth when they had the script and the timing exactly right.” And then, “oh-so-nonchalantly, so obviously faking it, they would remember something.”

“Oh, yes! Irina! I have the silliest little thing that you could do for me.”

And instead of saying, “I’ll just bet it’s some inconsequential afterthought,” she’d incline her head like the dedicated revolutionary that she truly, actually was, or at least hoped to become, and she’d reply, “Anything Comrade Whoever-happened-to-be-standing-there.”

And in a day or two, or an hour or two, she’d find herself in a hotel lobby that turned out to house relatively well-appointed Yankees, where she’d drop off a note to the concierge or some personage whom she’d never see again and had no idea about other than that he was the appointed recipient. Or she’d sit in a bar and someone would give her a password, she’d offer a counterpoint, and some apparently minor exchange would take place, more often than not something documentary for her to bring back to her office, occasionally something slightly stranger than that.

Once she accepted an aquarium or “some similar instrumentality” that had a snake in it. She wondered if the slithering reptile with the tongue that had split would shit out some secret that would save the realm or turn the tide. Tito’s counterintelligence had famously put away thousands of Soviet agents, mostly White Russians whom the Bolshevikis had rescued from firing squads in 1944 or 1945 and sent back to snoop, for Stalin and for a time for those who followed him as well, among the refurbishing ruins of the new Yugoslavia.

Now the Americans were up to tricks not at all dissimilar to those that Stalin and his reactionaries had played. “I must be playing some part in salvaging the revolution;” she would try to keep the cynicism from her face as she considered such an idea. “But I must not be doing such a good job in my contributions to salvation,” she continued, “or they’d recruit me for sure.”

She acknowledged that she was always nervous in such encounters, “sweating like a pig, so they can smell the stink of fear,” as she put the matter critically. But so what? Now she could usher the young Gordon to all sorts of interesting, if utterly random, rendezvous, so that he obtained “real, live practical practice,” to test his command of idiom and his ability to pass as an American.

Mostly, these sallies created no more momentous an engagement than “a chance to chatter with hippies,” or “an opportunity to pass the time with some petty bourgeois,” which generally amounted to much the same thing. In one such instance, Irina was fairly sure, her young and tidy pupil so enchanted a pair of American girls, both White and “obviously well-to-do and probably with instructions from their embassy” to report on “anything particularly unusual or interesting,” that he scored a ‘date’ with them in their elegant hotel room later that night.

Orlov, her superior, had specifically ticked off to her the “only restrictions on young Ngele,” which ended up being just that he have access to no weapons and that he not pass the borders of Yugoslavia unescorted. Apparently, she deduced from this and the knowing nod that her boss gave her, “he was being vetted for possibly high-level spycraft” and so should have “a nice long leash to let him wrap himself in all the trouble he could manage.”

In the event, the next day he looked well worn. Perhaps the slender young African “had rode hard and put up wet,” she giggled to herself. Whatever he had discerned, he would no doubt have faithfully conveyed to Mikhail Orlov in their almost daily fifteen minutes together, nothing of enough moment in any case to reach her ears further.

On one occasion, however, he had enjoyed something very much like a coup. A couple on holiday, well dressed in a way at once artistic and academic, who presented themselves “as Harvard professors, no less”—and, as Irina told herself at that instant, “who knows? They could be that!”—sauntered into a crowded café where she and Gordon were sharing, respectively, dry wine and sweet coffee, on one side of a booth that let them watch the passing pedestrian traffic while their heads suggested an ongoing and inevitably noticeable, given their respective miens and frames and the skins that covered them, tete a tete that was this strange, enchanting couple’s métier, as it were.

“They sat right down with us, like they were on assignment.” They clearly wanted to converse, “such an interesting pair of pigeons we were,” and she took care to pose an initial inquiry that would let Gordon invent with less risk than would have otherwise been the case.

“Well hello there,” she began, in her perfect but Slavically accented English. “I must guess. You are from Chicago, and you are involved in the famous slaughterhouses there!”

They dutifully laughed and corrected her. “We’re both born and raised in Boston,” Charlotte explained.

“Yes, it’s as if we married siblings, you know? Same set, same milieu, same families, practically. It’s almost incestuous,” Charles continued.

Jointly, they finished, “We teach at Harvard.” She practiced sociology; his field was Central European History.

Irina introduced herself as a tour guide whose clientele “ranged from all sorts of Americans to Asians and Africans.” She waxed slightly eloquent about the glories of contemporary Yugoslavia to give Gordon time to “get his story straight.” He did. “He tricked them so much they probably ran straight to their controller and told of their great feat, to have gained such information from such a prominent exile of America.”

He accomplished his magic by not saying too much, which he was able to do by pretending, more or less skillfully, a stutter. “My daddy was a B-B-Bl-Black Panther,” he soon revealed, with an undetectable wink in Irina’s direction.

He also, so often that Irina nearly giggled the last few times, demurred to answer certain inquiries—either too easy to trip oneself over, or too complicated, mainly—with deft plums that must have made Charlie and Charlotte quiver in anticipation. “I’m ‘fraid I c’c’c’ can’t answer that qu’qu’qu’estion; it’s sensitive;” “That’s somethin’ I c’c’c’ can’t really responds to, ya know? T’t’t’ too much at stake.”

In the end, he did convey that “I be Huey N’N’N Newton’s half b’b’b’ brother, know what I’m saying?” Immediately after “this little bejeweled fabrication,” the pair from the Ivy Leagues, “looking like they had a big meeting to get to,” scurried from their table into the setting Spring sunlight that was bathing their booth in a mote-filled magical light.

After this exchange, walking into the dusk, an incongruous couple held hands and said almost nothing. Every few seconds, one or the other or both of them would guffaw or chuckle or giggle or explode in laughter, Irina and Ngele and their bond of solidarity and sublime joy no more predictable than Earth’s position as the third stone that circled a minor fiery orb somewhere in the vastness of space and time.

One other time, they ran into her ex-husband and her brother, a pair of thieves, saboteurs, and smugglers “just like in the old days,” when every border was the only likely source of most profitable business. They too had happened on the couple in a training session near the river at “a dive near the docks where I grew up,” Irina had explained to her pupil. The confabulation on that day had led to a very interesting development in her ‘case management,’ in a venue that, against every expectation, her boss had signed off on for some reason or other and she had let be, without being pushy or “too, too inquisitive,” because, “who am I to question the plans of the high and mighty?”

The upshot of this new wrinkle was that Gordon met her brother and her former spouse and then proceeded to make them a substantial chunk of cash when he joined their football club as a striker. “He did not look like he could fire a rocket from twenty-five or thirty meters, but you can believe me that he did just that for the Visnjica F.C.,” which theretofore “had not won even its sectional playoffs in my brother’s lifetime.”

“They call us ‘sour cherries,’” Tomas, Irina’s former spouse—whose interest included pondering whether she was “sleeping with this black imp”—explained to Gordon during “his orientation to our club and our ways,” through one of the three team members who spoke some English: “because of the name of our town, and because our play is so rotten,” which the diminutive central forward could see clearly with his own eyes at all his initial practices. More than once, their exchanges made the slender Zulu swallow a grin. In any case, in such a context, wagers about games “gave us all the odds,” so for Irina’s family and father of her children, Gordon’s presence proved a godsend.

Unfortunately for the still barely seventeen year old South African, while this did little if anything to boost his English skills and yet led him to see how lovely and lyrical was the Serbian tongue, the relationship with Dmitri and Tomas introduced the callow and still sensitive youth to the seamier side of Yugo working class existence, which is to say to people who were ethnocentric, bigoted, and as likely as not to think and act, racially, as if their skin made them superior beings. This especially hurt the young diminutive Black man when he lost out in his wooing of one lass or other whom he had decided to fancy.

Of all his little liaisons, Shanti in particular won his heart; she went out with him once, apparently at Tomas’ behest. She was Roma, one of the ‘gypsy’ stock that made Slavic nearly synonymous with slavery until sixteenth century Europe’s appropriation of the first installment of the twenty million Africans whose Diaspora fueled every industrial and capitalist revolution of the planet.

“I like dark girls,” he later confessed to Irina, “but she just wanted to think of me as ‘that crazy nigger,’” and she ignored both his lovestruck entreaties and what Irina quipped were “all of his daring romantic ploys.” Irina watched through all this, literally and figuratively, from the sidelines as ‘VFC’ topped the city’s playoffs “for the first time in recorded memory.”

One time, as he and Irina were walking along the moonlit river, practicing English still, he had unburdened himself. “Not everyone likes chocolate,” he said with a level look. “But you shouldn’t hate it without taking at least a taste,” he concluded, a resigned cast to his face, a defeated slant to his shoulders, a bitter warmth to his voice.

She hooked her arm through his and effectively dragged him along the sidewalk, which was uncrowded in the full moon midnight, sharp and bright on the choppy Danube with the glint of stars and streetlights. “I like chocolate,” she noted with compressed lips. “A lot,” continuing, “we’ll take a stroll to my apartment now, if you don’t mind.”

Theirs was never anything approaching ‘a grand passion.’ “I don’t believe in that,” Irina consistently insisted to herself, “not after five years and two children with that ass, Tomas.”

But as much as any man, she dearly appreciated little Gordon, “almost adored him, if I’ve got to be honest,” she admitted. Even her younger daughter, little Ivana who would grow up to be such a big and imposing girl, “took such a fancy to the African,” always wanting to sit on his lap, “that I thought it would break her little heart when he left us,” as everyone involved knew was coming.

Ivana certainly hadn’t reacted like that with Morris, whom “she regarded as a tiny anarchist would regard a stout Marxist.” Thus, when the time arrived, “always too soon, always too soon,” for the youngster from eight thousand miles away to make his way elsewhere, Irina and many others felt a sense of sadness and loss.

“Orlov said he was going to Czechoslovakia to study ordnance and explosives.” He was already a dangerous diminutive creature, she reflected, although she discovered that he’d only killed two people, both White policeman. “He couldn’t do it, when they asked him to ‘eliminate’ fellow Blacks,” even though they had been collaborating with the White regime.

As she waved to the bandana that she believed to be his, as the train steamed away Eastward from Belgrade toward Prague, Irina heaved a sigh. “I only hope that they don’t kill him too soon.”

*****

Next Up—Chapter XX

Wood Words Essays—(continued)…

Another more or less localized, minimalist message suggests the way that reliance and resilience interpenetrate similarly as do interconnection and interdependence. Entitled “Proffered Handholds,” it holds out hope.  "Even the Steepest Slope, Even a Vertical Vortex, May Proffer Potential Handholds to Haul Ourselves Up, Especially If We Have Helpful Allies, to Achieve the Highest Attainments of Our Sweetest Dreams."

And truly indeed, durability and buoyancy require a ‘catch-as-catch can’ mentality as often as not. One responds to the sheer slope’s necessity by finding a way. Instead, according to pharma profiteers, among many other titans of business and their engineering specialists in subduing Mother’s Nature, we should anticipate attack from every front and meet these predatory onslaughts with insistence on subjugating nature. Without question, this is at best laughably ludicrous, as before, promising to promote our own untimely exit as well. Many pieces of wood address this.

“Not Fearful Flight, But Resistant Resilience” is this particular title.   "Focusing Primarily on Particular Phenomena's Pointed Perils Enables Pusillanimous Oversight of Inborn Capacities to Resist & Adapt, Thereby Promulgating Panicked Despair That Ever Promotes Plutocracy's Purposes, the Persistent Potentate Fantasy of Marshaled Sheepish Order & Bovine Obedience."

Terror, in this way of thinking, produces reliable compliance among the human herd that somehow consists—in the age of ubiquitous webs—of isolated, alienated, anxious individuals who respond by sitting down, keeping quiet, and doing as instructed. The Feral Nerd Performance Space sets a stage for deconstructing these dynamics.

"Safety-&-Security's Tidy Profits" is the title of this one.  “Only By Wild & Wily Means, Conjoining Cognition's Miracle With Feral Instinct, Have We Managed to Persist in Ascending the Peaks & Plumbing the Depths of Gaia's Glorious & Grotesque Array, an Innate Intermingling of Nature & Nurture, of Intention & Intuition, That We Ought to Attend Carefully As Self-Anointed Planetary Captains Assure Us That They've Precisely Engineered Mandatory Protocols That Reputedly Deliver 'Safety & Security' While Promising Plutocrats the Tidy Profits That They Demand As a Natural Right.”

“Surreal Protection” tells this tale in straightforward terms. "All Too Often, We Rush to Embrace Protection Rackets That Have Little Connection to Reality, That Cost Us Dearly Or Even Destroy Us, & That Further the Interests & Agendas of Privileged Plutocrats Who Always Shamelessly Exploit & Manipulate Us Like Dumb, Driven Beasts en Route to Slaughter."

To some extent, and likely quite a large extent, these eventualities all stem from the way that a biosocial present arises from an identifiable past ecosystem and augurs a definite, if ultimately uncertain social expression of human life. Governing such processes, in the words of a Driftwood Message, are “Gaia's Ecological Imperatives.” 

"By Definition, What Lies Beyond the Horizon of Our Energetic Motion of Matter Through Space Can Never Be Certain; Still, We Can State With Absolute Assurance What Can Never Appear There, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of Perfected Perpetual 'Security' & Exceptional Engineered Escape From Nature's Norms & Gaia's Grave Implacable Gaze That Mandates Adherence to the Goddess' Guidance, at the Cost of Inescapable Decline & Ultimate Doom For Any Society That Fails to Abide By the Basic Ecological Imperatives of Life on Earth."

In truth, a reasonable capsulization of a method for approaching such an assessment is easy to state, inasmuch as it is a basic element of the overall Big Tent shtick.

“Material, Historical, Contradictory” expresses this more concisely. Its message, at once winsome and ponderous, centers on a to-do list for those who might occasionally manifest something at least resembling sentience.

"Whenever We Wander Among Our Earthly Habitat's Wide & Wondrous Array of Forests & Fields, Fjords & Firmaments, Again & Again We Encounter Similar Forms & Notable Norms That Invite Us to Ponder Patterns That Posit How Things Actually Operate, a Mandatory Call to Comprehension That Can Only Ever Merely Approximate Completeness If We Grasp the Material, Historical, & Contradictory Elements That Always Make Up Everything—Object, Process, Dynamic—That Exists in Gaia's Green Groves."

To contradict mounts an assault on a meaning that another holds dear enough to have memorialized it in a more or less coherent statement. General experience of the world would elucidate an awareness that such different, and always paradoxical, viewpoints would lead to fighting. Contrariety concatenates conflict, ha ha, yet solidarity also remains an arguable sine qua non for human viability.

Along such lines, “Rocking the Boat” has this to say. “Under 'Normal' Circumstances, Injunctions Against Rocking the Boat Might Make Sense; at Other Times, However, As When Our Common Craft Is Full of Holes & Sinking Or Approaching Other Dire Straits, a Failure to Mutiny Amounts to Insanity, Both Tactical & Strategic Lunacy Since Thriving, Or Even Survival, Hinges on Making Lots of Waves.”

So too does “Extinction’s Election” emphasize this point about linking arms to avoid Mass Collective Suicide. “Until This Moment's Natural Historical Passage, Extinction Has Exclusively Resulted From Ill Fortune, e.g., Random Rocks From Afar That Extinguished Happy Reptilian Hegemony; Only Humans Have Set a Course to Exterminate Themselves, Seemingly Because They Exhibit the Fortitude For Mass Collective Suicide But Lack the Gritty Persistence Necessary to Amicable Mutuality & Honorable Solidarity.”

Solidarity’s importance flows from the fact that democracy, which is to say popular rule, is impossible without it, inasmuch as clever plutocrats will, in its absence, expertly deploy devilish divided conquest among ‘separate interest groups.’ Concerning points of contention that are the materialization of contradiction, ‘authoritative’ opinion and information, with shameless corruption, advance as inevitable and indisputable the maximized-profit-and-mayhem agendas of the high-and-mighty ministers of everything that matters.

Notwithstanding such salubrious advisories, these ready ruminations about resistance and resilience and blah blah blah, equally felicitous in our ‘search for truth’ are notions of critique that question ‘constituted authority’s’ ultimate imprimatur. “Fraudulent Expertise” is an excellent example.

“Expertise Mostly Equates to Exercises in Racketeering: the Only Masterful Aptitude Worth a Damn, Except to Profiteers, Acknowledges the Inherently Collective, Inclusive Nature of Creating Both Wise Policy and Socially Useful Knowledge; 'Authority' Otherwise Universally Victimizes embers of the Passive Masses, Who Then Must Consult Other Inevitably Indentured Specialists Whose 'Treatments' For Those Sufferers' Afflictions Dose the Hapless Dupes With Prescribed Poisonous Palliatives and Sickening 'Cures,' Altogether a Noxious Cycle, Frightfully Toxic, That Inescapably Attends Depending on Copious Cults of Self-Serving Experts.”

Determining how to live, unless one defaults to compliance or following along, inherently entails seeing through the plethora of false constructs that purposefully infect our world’s ‘media spaces’ so as to afflict our awareness. Whatever we manage to make of this process of ‘seeing straight,’ such hypotheses would always be inconceivable but for the initial determination in regard to ‘how to live.’

Along a parallel course, another take on vision is altogether more radical and imposing in its imprecation to act, collectively and persistently. “From Below” is its evocative, indicative ‘Subject Line.’

“Those With the Vision to See Recognize That Homo Sapiens Social Experiments Have Persisted Because Repeated Agitation Has Arisen From Below to Resist Ruling Hierarchies That Have Universally Mandated Murder & Mayhem to Forestall Even the Most Rudimentary & Compelling Societal Reform; As The Capacity to Control Or Crush Upheaval For Change Has Become Close to Irresistible, Continued Human Viability Hinges on Widespread Local Organizing For Participatory Democracy Despite the Apparent Impossibility of This Necessity.”

Yet one more warning to evade fear and embrace resiliency’s easy aplomb will serve for today’s installment in the Marshall Arts thicket. It implies dark possibilities in apparently imminently pending futures. “Norms & Forms on Heavenward Trajectories Toward Hell” is its ironically sinister title.

“Engineered Norms Now Influence All of Nature's Forms So Fully That Today, Not Only Are All Gaia's Gifts, No Matter How Grand, Or Magnificent, Inseparable From Cultural Protocols' Copious Impacts, But Every Sacrament & Each Holy Relic of Erstwhile Spiritual Ascendancy Also Emanate Empirical Account Ledgers That Resolutely Reduce the Entire Array of Earth's Resources to a Fuel Supply to Energize Humanity's Fiery Heavenward Trajectories That, in Ways As Palpable As They Are Paradoxical, Could Instead Soon Rocket All & Sundry to the Hellish Reality of an Elected Extinction's Eternal Nonexistence.”

A Thought Charm initiated this rambling assembly of Driftwood Message Art. Another such tidbit can help tidy up our exit today. “To Gaze at Gaia's Green Groves Is Innate & Insatiable, Truly to See & Seek to Discover Only the Result of Diligent Determination & Lifelong Discipline."

As always, ‘where do we go from here?’ remains an apt inquiry.

Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…

The author draws the noteworthy conclusion that little or no signs of addiction as a social phenomenon were visible. This is true despite the fact that the toxic and potentially lethal attributes of the plant were well understood. The Egyptian PharmaKon is the source of our pharmaceutical lexicon and displayed the two faces of the herbalist’s magic, at once healing and potentially deadly.

One would not necessarily be overstating the case to suggest that the capacity to learn about and control such now banned substances acted as a significant spur to civilization itself. Certainly, throughout the ancient world, this would look true to anyone’s examination of social life that penetrated more deeply than a single surface glance.

A brief on this notion, “Exploring the Meaning of Opium from ‘Exotic Plant’ to ‘Forbidden Fruit,’” presents this idea quite plainly in mythic terms. “‘To cut an opium poppy capsule is to enter mythic time, to share in tradition stretching unbroken into prehistory and let the ancient traditions enter history again at the moment of the millennium.’”

CRUSADES, REBIRTH, & CAPITAL’S CRADLE OF THE NEW

While this flower’s range definitely included much of Europe in its realm, the dissolution of Roman imperial networks and knowledge consigned the utility of poppies to a few denizens of local knowledge. Only with the crusades() and other contacts between Islamic strongholds and Europe did the understanding of the power of this flower reemerge. In fact, during the later middle ages, the ability to purvey cures that utilized this floral body of knowledge occasionally led to accusations of witchcraft, “and the poppy became the devil’s flower.”

Some researchers even portray the decline of poppies’ deployment with the rise of witch-hunts. In any case, as the devastation of successive waves of plagues combined with the generally iffy gains but expanded contacts that followed the Crusades, a reintroduction() of opiates to Europe occurred throughout the region.

The effect of these seemingly magical alkaloids among populations that only had had access to them through often-outlawed ‘folk networks’ was astonishing. Dozens of prominent physicians and natural philosophers extolled their use, and—ignoring the risks—charlatans proliferated() who would far-too-readily dispense the now new drugs, furthermore proffering larger and stronger doses among users whose habits reduced the alkaloidal mystery’s punch.

Very rapidly, opioid healers assumed the status of magicians(), on the one hand, and dangerous frauds(), on the other. A two-sided, antagonistic and contradictory at the same time, portrayal of poppies became common, particularly among healers whose ethics exceeded their enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the general attitude was, probably overwhelmingly, positive.

An intense and incisive documentary capsulizes some of the different effects of the reestablishment of opiates as part of the European pharmacopoeia. “When the Catholics drove the Moors from Spain and the influence of Islamic traders diminished in the fifteenth century, the Venetians took over the opium trade. Merchants and rulers asked Columbus, Cabot, da Gama, and Magellan to bring back opium from their voyages of discovery.”

“Opium: a Brief History,” the textual offering of the film, tells of Paracelsus’ late sixteenth-century discovery that he could dissolve grains of the drug in brandy, thereby creating the drug-of-choice for the next two centuries, which he called laudanum. The meaning of his new word was rational too, in a region without access to this technique—“something to praise.”

“He claimed that it could treat any disease that caused pain. He even boasted that patients whom pain had restricted to their beds regained much of their former, active lives after taking it. Interest in laudanum surged. The drink became popular as a medicine and for recreational use.”

Across the English-channel, Thomas Sydenham developed a variant of the potion that not only tasted better, using sherry and spices, but also cost less to produce. He was fulsome in his ‘lauding’ of the grace that flowed from poppies.

“’I cannot forebear mentioning with gratitude the goodness of the Supreme Being, who has supplied afflicted mankind with opiates for their relief; no other remedy being equally powerful to overcome a great number of diseases, or to eradicate them effectually.”

In similar vein, people at all levels of society were experiencing a noticeable expansion of the parameters of their experience. The age of consumers was in its infancy() as new spices that were nice and comestibles that were exotic and accoutrements of everyday routines began to include intoxicants and stimulants. Thus, cinnamon and sugar and coffee and tobacco and tea became habitual aspects() of many folks’ daily diets and tastes.

Many of these goods came, over time, cheaply, as a result of brutal conquests() across the Atlantic. But others, from Asia—particularly tea from China()—entered the ports of Europe at dear prices. No matter the bookkeeping details of the innovative relationships, the sense of a widened world was palpable: people received more today than yesterday and, with decent luck, they might get ever more on the morrow. Notwithstanding social consequences that were inherently two-sided—beaten slaves, pirated cargoes, dispossessed peasants, and more—in this environment that boosters inevitably characterized as sunny, focusing primarily on the increase of stuff and its uses as such, this expansion of the range of commodities—including such materials as products of the poppy—defined this early era of opium.

Of the many annalists who have grappled with these matters, early on Karl Marx pointed out the way that ‘the lives of commodities’ informed social relations via both their production and distribution, as well as their use. Fernand Braudel also pointedly insisted on showing how these three aspects of commoditization influenced and at times determined—in perverse and difficult ways—the social relations that accompanied buying and selling and utilizing goods, even though, most people agreed, these items were wonderful additions to the human condition.

One recent commentator quotes Braudel in a way that shows how different ruling actors might manipulate ‘natural’ development tendencies in any marketplace, regarding any particular commodity. “At ground level and sea level so to speak, the networks of local and regional markets were built up over century after century.

It was the destiny of this local economy, with its self-contained routines to be from time to time absorbed and made part of a ‘rational’ order in the interest of a dominant zone or city, until another organizing center emerged; as if the centralization and concentration of wealth and resources necessarily favored chosen sites of accumulation. …The resultant pattern of domination rests upon a dialectic between a market economy developing unaided and spontaneously, and an overarching economy which seizes these humble activities from above, redirects them and holds them at its mercy.”

The author continues to set the stage for this essay’s assessment of the development of the opium trade. On the surface, it appears as mainly beneficent and as a cause of enthusiastic endorsement. Yet it eventually crushed the Chinese, as if by an ineluctable fate such as Braudel just described. The patterns in play are worth noting.

“(T)he element of domination simply cannot be taken out of capitalism. …When I speak of the history of capitalism, I am interested in the political career of capital. To regard the ‘extra-economic’ coercion as pre-capitalist is to miss this crucial point entirely.

This is why (some thinkers insist that) Britain’s overseas activities were never really ‘capitalist.’ …The drive for profit that led the English merchants to corner the slave trade, set up slave plantations in the New World for the extraordinarily profitable production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton were ‘non-capitalist.’ Slavery ‘is a striking example of how capitalism has, at certain points in its development, appropriated to itself, and even intensified, non-capitalist modes of exploitation.’”

This conceptualization helps the observer of opium to ponder how its production, distribution, and patterns of use developed as they did. Nature took a back seat to power and imperial agendas. This was particularly true in regard to China, where opium came to circumscribe trade in general. Various chroniclers attest to this conclusion.

“By the eighteenth century, the long-distance traffic in opium had been transformed into a very different form of commerce than that which had characterized the trade in earlier years. Before the sixteenth century, opium was just one of the many exotic chemicals that made up an element of the traditional long-distance trade.

Generally speaking, traditional long-distance trade seems to have focused on four major types of products, or trade goods. Simply put, these were: exotic chemicals, precious metals and minerals, luxury manufactures, and human beings. Prior to the sixteenth century, these four categories summed up virtually all commerce that moved between major urban centers.

Opium, along with other drugs, incenses and fragrances, alcoholic drinks, resins, barks, spices, and herbs, made up the first category. These were valuable largely because of their scarcity. In most cases, their value was the result of having traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to places where they either did not occur naturally or where the local people did not know how to produce them.

For a very long time opium was valuable because of the ignorance of its consumers. The opium poppy is fairly tolerant of a variety of climates and with little more than labor and care, the drug can be easily produced. It seems extraordinary, in the case of China, that even though the imported drug commanded enormous prices in the early nineteenth century, it was not until 1820 that domestic production of the drug in China began in earnest. Furthermore, it was not until very late, perhaps not before 1860 that local production began to fill even a small portion of the Chinese demand for the drug. Long-distance trade thrived on opaque markets.”

Moreover, the so-called Chinese Diaspora included a large—possibly massive—population of users as well, which is only now coming to light in some cases because of hidden or at least closeted sources. Malaysia(), Indonesia, and elsewhere consumed opium, which they purchased from Portuguese, Dutch, French, or Chinese purveyors. While the sense of dislocation was not as intense as what addiction causes today, still those in political power recognized the problems attendant with widespread imbibing of poppies and their products.

Thus, as important as social trends and public opinions such as those about opiated wonders were, the wider political-economic impact of these new items in the trader’s purview was arguably much more critical. How to balance accounts, how in the new language to ‘capitalize’ on these trends, provided grist for the merchant’s mill. Professor Carl Trocki is only one of scores() of thinkers who articulate this point of view in some fashion, though Opium Empire and the Global Political Economy synthesizes the different components of this argument in an especially clear and hard-hitting way.

He notes that an imbalance in capital flows, that delivered surpluses to Europe and deficits to Asia, and in particular China, formed a likely key piece in the expansion of European colonialism and the different empires of Europe. He goes on to amplify his argument.

“A second hypothesis, which flows from the first, is that the Opium trade laid the foundation for the global capitalist structure, both in its nurturing of European imperial capital and its international merchant class, and also by providing a foundation for the development of indigenous capitalist groups in India, Southeast Asia, and in China itself. It may have been that capitalism would have developed in Asia on its own without opium, but the fact is that it did not.”

While this perspective is not yet ubiquitous, it clearly posits a potent contextualization and contains a vigorous analysis. Moreover, it is gaining ground among the cognoscenti, the historians and social scientists who investigate the coming of capital as the supreme organizing principal of contemporary existence.

The following search is proof of that contention. <poppies OR opium crusades OR renaissance OR "long distance trade" history capitalism OR "capital formation" OR profit>, in garnering nearly eleven million results, yielded more than a million more citations than did a search that substituted “religion OR Christianity” for the first two terms in the initial string. Thus, not only does this conceptualization fit neatly the vast array of complex data that underlie the past’s evolution to the present, but it also matches what huge numbers of other thinkers are thinking these days, as seemingly psychotic wars-on-drugs keep eviscerating human values and simple justice and lots more that we say that we respect and treasure.

The old saw, “if the shoe fits, wear it!” seems quite reasonable indeed. Next Up—Part V

New Fiction Series—(continued)...

In fact, Thomas had liberated himself from clothing before they had fully ascended the spiral stairs to the tower’s crown, where a circular couch invited a reclining sixty-nining, so to speak, that gushed forth floods from the loins that she affixed to his face with her thighs astride his ears and his tongue a slither for her beastly slit while his lips massaged her clitoral mass, a warm and tasty tsunami the result of this wondrous intermingling of Yang and Yin, as it were.

Thomas was never much of a schemer—‘it don’t make now sense!’ he’d laugh—yet he instantly intuited, once they were finished with each other for a minute, that Vivian had accosted him with something in mind other than either copious copulation or pleasure’s deepest palpation, ha ha.

He did not know that his guess was accurate, but indeed, Vivian stood at the exact center of HHH’s first ‘unofficial’ faction, to some participants in any social scene an at best inane and unhelpful construct but apparently inevitable in human social interactions of a certain scale. She and two cohorts—Vivian, an ENFP, more or less introduced her first “pod-BFF,” Patricia Renahan, whom she quipped was “my twin,” to her second “first mate,” Tatiana Adler, whom she liked both because of her imposing stature and because she wasn’t afraid to get in dust-ups about antisemitism and Israel, even though these issues no longer had the least bit of human traction.

Just like in middle school, but with issues, Thomas might say, people found ways to pick sides in what were essentially quarrelsome and competitive clique-building-exercises. This first iteration thereof was comparatively modest—no West Side Story bona fides here—Vivian’s troika versus an unlikely duo indeed, Becca Kinovsky, on the one hand, she who was already becoming Thomas’ “little soulmate,” in Vivian’s figure of speech, and Diana Trevic, on the other hand, whom Viv labeled in her snarky way as “the humble, homely Professor,” though neither of those adjectives necessarily fit the laconically irascible Dr. T.

The three least nerdy and most buffed lasses in the lot ganged up against “the two brainiacs,” the title that Becca and Diana merited from Tatiana Adler, who was inevitably a little defensive about imputations that she had Ivy League degrees purely because of her prowess, so to speak, on particular pitches or courts or fields. Tati especially had a gag reaction to Becca; the slender girl’s boxing Gold Medal seemed unfair, a fluke, less deserved than ‘lucked into.’

Of course, one might legitimately demand to know what in hell these two instances of flexing factional muscles were disputing. Again in like fashion as in middle school muddles, what is at stake needn’t be important at all. In this case, however, a truly Postmodern fabric held together this clash of wills and ideas and chemistry.

That at least was the conclusion that Amber Thomas conveyed convincingly to Thomas as he was assembling this narrative. Amber became 'consultant-at-will' to any attempt to make sense of anything, at HHH or otherwise. The callow Dr. Thomas' psychosocial analysis conceived what she termed 'a pair of mitochondrial clusters' as the initial 'energy centers' at the facility.

The threesome detested identity-driven thinking of any kind, especially if sex was involved, and they were decidedly anti-intellectual. They liked puns and insults that, despite their never surpassing juvenalia, might aggravate, or even humiliate, a nerdy sensibility: ‘What do you call a scholar’s burp? A dirty-nerdy-turd,’ nonsense, but ugly enough to irritate.

The pair, very much on the ‘other hand,’ so to speak, honored Diana's lesbian-diva status—they became staunch lovers in spite of highly divergent chemistry, for example. They also talked in technical academic terms as often as not, undoubtedly at once a mixture of jargon and sophisticated, insightful appellations of the world and its ways.

The rivalry, in any event, nearly became pugilistic, in addition to pugnacious, at just the time when official flyers from on high began naming the days as “still-June.” As a matter of daily itinerary, mid-morning meandering was the order of the moment.

House breakfast’s passing generally saw all-and-sundry’s focus and energies shift to personal proclivities or particular peccadilloes. Becca practiced a routine of yoga and what she called her ‘punch-dancing tango’ two or three mornings each week. She’d sweat like a pro; she liked the quip: “Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies just glow,” thereby emphasizing her own ‘unladylike’ sensibilities with a sly grin.

These exercises always unfolded in their Tower’s trending Westward shadow, though once, during a predawn workout’s unexpected confluence, she and Thomas fucked like beasts in the deserted courtyard, with no shading in the gloaming of early light. Vivian happened upon them in flagrante delicto, juiced enough to join as Becca climaxed with a squelched howl of delight.

When Becca demurred from being part of a threesome at just that juncture, quietly extricating herself and leaving Thomas and Vivian in an odd awkward moment at HHH, normally a den of suave sophistication, chic and wry, Viv so soured at the experience, to put matters mildly, that she in some sense probably assembled her ‘gang-of-three’ in response.

Anyhow, on the bright morning that unfriendly blows seemed ready to fly, Pat, Viv, and Tat happened upon Becca as she was completing her regimen with her supplicant’s ‘Prayer to Mother Earth,’ knees lightly touching and hands a folded temple. Viv, derogatory arrogance adrip in her tone, told the idiotic ‘joke’ mentioned above.

Becca, never one to ‘put up with much,’ rose in a twirling, swirling whirl that, though she would only actually have struck another with concrete intention, caused Viv, who was nothing even vaguely kin to an enthusiastic martial artist, to recoil in such comic afright that her own acolytes cackled with laughter. With a little curtsy that caught their attention, Becca winked at them wickedly as she sauntered away, thereby adding another layer of shame and loathing for Vivian to pick at in her psyche, like it was an especially ugly and cooperative boil that she would now and again squeeze for pus.

The House Solstice bash brought this particular kerfuffle to a head. Jan, an inveterate practitioner of corporate coffee-cup and water-cooler coup plots, had been pointing out to ‘Thomas-the-clueless’ that this underground clash-of-titans was messing with household mojo. When he ‘just didn’t see it,’ she acted on her own, so that, at the group’s second truly grand orgy, for the Holy Solstice, no less, she double-dosed all five of the antagonists and made of them a ‘core seduction team’ for the only man at the party.

Whether the quintet in question was merely ready for a hatchet-burying ‘general release of liability’ or something similar, or Jan’s bit of trickery really did the trick in this instance—all five of them ejaculated in Thomas’ mouth, in the event—they all made nice and promised to be good as Spring’s end initiated the facility’s Appalachian hot season.

Summer's Fecund Heat & Thomas’ Occasionally Hellish Paradise

“Human Liberation Day” was the PPGA’s conflation of many Summer-starting festivities. In this exact case, with the regular Full Moon Report about possible pregnancies a huge hit—at least four female ovens had buns, certified—the libidinal libations of erotic yum hummed at even more vibrant-than-average pitch. This served, during the new version of an old party, as ‘proof of Jan’s meddlesome pudding,’ so to say, when the ‘Solstice-tag-team quintet’ continued, perhaps amplified, its jolly gestures of jellied fusion with the good and game Thomas Hawkins.

Without question, as well, the remainder of the months—Thomas was not the only participant who found a little unsettling that such a naming of time would no longer exist in a year or so—of summery flesh and lengthy light passed in amicable bon homie. As if humankind were not boiling away, rendered as a fat to fire the future, as if they were all playing lawn games, the Household lot laid out gardens, disported and consorted rambunctiously, laughed and conversed and tested the boundaries between stimulation and loss of consciousness.

The upshot was that every vendetta related to Becca and her supporters—Dr. T and Thomas himself—on the one hand, and Vivian and her ‘handlers’ on the Executive Committee, on the other hand, evaporated in this context of shared gestation and ironically insistent confluences of pulsing, and often enough pounding, passion and its pursuit of pleasure’s sweet releases. Thomas, however one parses these prospects, had always performed poorly at holding grudges.

Moreover, this was the precise period during which—when her menses announced that she carried a fetal fellow traveler—Amber Thomas ‘hung out her shingle.’ Her affinity, with and for Thomas, collegial and concupiscent simultaneously, paralleled her worship of he whom she called “my geeky, freaky, nerdy, wordy Dad” a philosopher-without-portfolio much as she was herself a ‘shrink without a practice.’ As things came to be, she and Sir Hawkins would have sloppy sex and then carry on ‘communication seminars’ with Household members.

In the context of such an evolving reality, Thomas made his Tarot-Reading skills available through the lively and affable Amber. “I always needed an agent,” Thomas toasted her at a candlelit midnight dinner in ‘Earth’s last August.’

Given the floods of seasonal sweat that these playmates worked up, that, to coin a phrase, their collective and individual ‘lithe slenderosity’ mirrored a certain slippery psychic sinuosity that they all, often enough, came to share in common as well, should surprise no one. They were outliers indeed, at once perfect and perverse in every sublime and sinister sense imaginable.

One of the first Readings that young ‘Director Amber’ requested was what Thomas called “a punchy demand for clarity.” It reads like this: “What should we expect, given that murder makes all of our lives easier and more fun?"

The Cards, in the event, following a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis template, turned up a pretty piquant tableau. First up was Zephyr’s West-Wind Page of Swords, with its call for articulation, or gossip, to actuate one’s individual and collective benefit. This led to an ideal antithetical view, in the form of Daedalus’ seeking of new patronage and support via the Six of Pentacles; the mingling of these two percolated a potent Synthesis, Jason’s team’s finding ‘strength-in-reserve’ in the following gales of the Nine of Wands.

Mr. Hawkins never insisted on ‘reading too much into a Reading,’ a bon mot at which he always chuckled. But he nonetheless did believe, and shared with everyone at hand—including the dottering Dr. W. himself when they met once a quarter—that actual shared consciousness and salubrious selflessness were the Goddess’ grace.

Only ‘Thomas-the Clueless’ actually believed in the potential veracity of such a happy outcome of “solidarity and mutuality,” one that would last indefinitely, Mr. Hawkins’ goal in all things to an extent. A few of the youngsters onboard even became testy if he pushed his ‘cosmically groovy worldview’ with any passion or apparent purpose.

Theirs had been especially dangerous waters to sail, full of mines like conscription by the Feds, close pal terrorists, and a literally inescapable fate of living on the street if they lacked substantial inherited resources. Thomas, in all such situations, retained his jolly edge, able to play a clownish buffoon or nerdy nebbish as a specific circumstance necessitated.

A more or less equable and usual equanimity remained effervescent among them all, in other words. They had lucked upon a paradisaical experiment that they shared the privilege of palpating, purposely or pointlessly, as any one of their psychic arrays might dictate.

The HHH Equinox party, however, surpassed the wild and heated glory that appeared always to have peaked at such an altitude of fresh and breathless glee that no further expansion would ever be possible. As often happened Thomas had an aphorism about their linked litanies of lucky rolls.

“If pleasure is the target and you shoot,” he would offer with a wry grin while performing a shameless bump and grind, “it just gets to be all bullseye.” Life goes on. Yum. Change follows even as every breath feels as stable and stalwart as a sturdy infant’s first cry out of the womb.

An Autumn of Murderous Bots

Fall’s combination of fecundity—nine were now impregnated, exactly half—and felicitous, if also fearful, peace abroad meant that ebullience positively ebulliated, in one of Thomas’ nerdy neologisms. The weather that they lived at three thousand feet up the Appalachian massif contributed to the feelings of fierce joy that marked their moments for the most part.

Tints of color blushed the leaves on every slope. Swelling bellies belied the sinister belligerence in the world at large. Cooler, crisper air offset cascading thunder’s occasional peltings. On the sociopolitical battlefields, little heralded killer-bots appeared to have won the day amid leaves’ turning and falling along with Earth’s men, for the most part.

Thomas once scribbled a whimsical blog post about feelings Autumnal in nature. It started off with an evocative line: “A Seasonal Falling Elicits Our Joining to Rise & Face With Happy Hearts the Wild & White & Wintry Woeful Wonder Just Ahead.” His experience of the Northern Hemisphere was that, more or less, everybody loves the Fall, no matter what sullen sensibilities might seem sensible, as it were.

Certainly, this specific present pass’ colorful cascade of leaves and breezes both bright and crisp seared the ocular orbs of anyone who regarded this annual regal glory with wide-eyed, openhearted appreciation. Thomas named their initial blooming of ocher and purple and yellow and every possible shade of brown ‘Fall’s Fiercest Felicity.’

If seasonal titillating titles were de rigueur, then Householders could have called this one “'Chemistry's' Unavoidable Impacts” instead. The professions of adoration for, and sworn allegiance to the masculine mastery of, one Thomas Hawkins, for example became an almost daily occurrence.

Incontrovertibly, this obvious avalanche of admiring accolades and lusty allusions would have so inflated the ego of many men that they would have strutted, and worse, insufferably. Thomas wasn’t one of those sorts, however. For one thing, he would, forever and always stay true to a Feminist standard, as it were. All the adoring, most womanly libations on Earth would merely equal the ardor—an inflamed passion’s adulation for pussy—with which he worshiped woman’s wildest essences.

Under all and sundry circumstances, anyway, Thomas continued to Read at the merest mention of a request. These renderings will, if all goes decently, stay accessible to any who would like to review them. The general sensation of optimism among the group’s members would have been impossible outside the HHH environs; none of them doubted this.

That nearly an entire annual half of ‘time’s quartet,’ as Thomas referred to Sol’s annual ambit, had transpired in such a genial flash without revealing further factional infighting had, in the event, so amazed and astonished the HHH ‘Central Committee’ members, not to mention Sir Hawkins, or Captain Hawkins—alluding to Thomas’ piratical nature, ha ha, that they planned to make the idea of comity their permanent Solstice Theme, a notion that, in turn, they were just then bandying about so as to ‘brand the project and boost morale.’ Alas, ‘the best laid plans do go oft awry.’

Thus, being ‘wary of the early gloat’ instead characterized the results of their ruminations. After all, Federalist #10 was one of Thomas’ foundational texts. Madison’s words can still bring a gulp, or even a gag, upon their presentation. Psychological and sociological awareness were unquestionably a significant aspect of bourgeois consciousness, the final destination of which, at HHH, seemed to be itself in all its tawdry glory.

The fourth President of the now forever-departed United States of America helpfully defined a faction. It would amount to this: “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

The crescendoing vulcanism of HHH planned-partying so typified each formal social gathering at the Household that each such epic fete, viewed from a certain angle or in a certain light, might qualify as the most awesome frolic ever. Whatever the case may be, each quarterly orgy—as well as the eight additional ‘scheduled jamboree jams’ on the Household calendar—had its digitized recording in long term annual MegaDrives; viewers pretty uniformly agree that ‘New Year’s Eve’ One, PP, a celebration that the PPGA would soon designate as “High Holy Days,” was ‘first among equals’ for its drenching crazed concatenations of lustful abandon and energetic extravagance.

As fourteen of the female super-majority were now pregnant, three of them close to term, Diana, who was not one of the ‘lucky girls,’ had become more imperious and misanthropic, ha ha. Close to dawn on the day in question, svelte and buffed from toes below to buxom above, Dr. T held aloft the Household Holy Flagon, pushing her still pulsing pussy lips and pert pudenda forward, a true ‘flower of the feminine,’ to announce, after she had quieted everybody, “I propose a toast to all the Tykes-For-Dykes who will soon join us.”

The few chuckles bubbled forth into an otherwise ‘silent night’ stillness, not necessarily hostile, or even slightly peeved, but very aware, conscious both of the implication of lesbian political preeminence and of an otherwise shared Sapphic sensibility that in actuality was not in the least a majority POV. Diana followed her MC debut by scooping up Becca and Angel-Pussy Angela into a miniature Daisy-Chain of ongoing ecstatic eruption.

To this, a collective ‘Amen’ echoed as everybody in the array ‘had a final go’ of gooey giving glory and all that jazz. All in all, it demarked with delightful fire the frigid Arctic blasts that greeted the event, even as the chill soon enough found a grip on new cliques full of fractious mental and emotional fisticuffs.

Wintry Life Force Felicity Despite Icy Thanatos' Predominance

In the end, despite her wild and drunken ‘HolyDay’ antics, the estimable and clearly Sapphic Dr. Trevic ended up puncturing the calm balance that she had theretofore brought to this first unfolding of faction, in which hateful hissing verbal brickbats again appeared as the ‘weather forecast’ on any given day. She had, for the most part, long restrained her proclivity to propose such a ‘Lesbian-Supremacist Ideology’ as had on occasion manifested among people, particularly academics, for several decades BP.

Nevertheless, she doubled down on her Tykes-For-Dykes perspective over the period in which months would, for some of the last times, find official approval for purposes of dating the human condition. In one way and another, Diana Trevic thereby initiated—though not only Vivian from the original confrontational craziness but also all of the HHH population participated in this new go-round—the second fractious ‘factionalizing’ friction among the occupants of the hacienda in the hills.

Nine to nine was the score. On one side, firmly affirming a preferential positioning of cock appreciation, Vivian’s troika led the way, joined by Marianne Wilson’s Pussy Powerhouse from the leadership tryad, along with Wicked Wanda Martin, Alicia Bianchi, Carey Corey, and Denise Donaldson.

These last three called themselves ABCCDD and promised that any man would meet the Goddess in their clutches. The final member of the Cis Squadron, marksman Miller, liked sex with girls, boys, and any techno-cultural mixing of the two. Still, anything that even vaguely smacked of political correctness made her want to puke.

The other team amalgamated ‘the rest of the story,’ with Camerada Trevic atop the totem pool, so to say. Jan and Angela from the Admin-Clique backed her up. Six others—including most of the vets, who bragged about finding satisfaction in any ‘willing soldier of satiety—provided the rank and file of the Preferential Sapphic Option, which became a PSO thing, almost a creed, throughout pre-revolutionary development toward a true refurbishing of human liberation.

Each ‘team’ had stars, though two of the three Executive Committee Ladies belonged to the Lesbos side, leaving the bureaucratically gifted but operationally hapless Angela Costanza—expertly manipulated from behind power’s proscenium curtain by the demonically clever and really ambitious Amber Thomas—in charge, ‘across the moat,’ to lead the ‘Bisexual Adherents.’ That neither of these somehow spontaneously erupting aggregates knew precisely what the spat was about, ultimately, meant less than that in a context of widespread powerlessness over wider events on the horizon, a fervent agency of the homestead proved all too alluring, what with inevitable personality differences, smell preferences, petty jealousies, and all similar blah blah blah.

The likely outcome of such a configuration came to pass, as things worked out. In such a context, all ‘sense of direction,’ let alone progress, simply disappeared. Wild fucking, childbirth, and seductive orgiastic normalcy notwithstanding, the PPGA mandate of ‘political leadership and contribution from below’—as if ‘Dr. W’ was trying to be a latter-day Pol Pot—was at best a ‘dead-letter’ doldrums.

Such a context cast the lot of tiebreaker on Thomas, a position that he despised since—especially now—he wanted to please everybody, ha ha. While Rome’s 21st Century collapsed into Post Pandemic Year One, the Household coterie cohabited sweetly, and completely orgasmically, in relation to each other but could not yet in the least express anything useful as to matters of policy, protocol, and process and such. At each other’s throats as if that mattered, similarly as secondary school maybe, real ‘progress’ was impossible.

This altogether polarized presence in that then-present-passage clearly attenuated what would, honestly, generally have promoted true progressive thinking given the clearly convivial nature of Household operations, along with an undeniably friendly fondness and fondled friendship over nine years together. No matter what else might be of use to sift, the standoff saturated the Vernal Equinox and its ushering in of a Year Two of cataclysmic human transformation.

In some additional appendices to this documentary record, the still quite callow Amber Thomas, a sparkplug for popular power to rival the great revolutionary leaders of human history, provides a Psycho-Social-Political Materialization that facilitates usable and useful understanding of the entire period in question. She was also the Leading Lady of the final predawn Saturnalia, ‘buns-up-and-kneeling’ as she received Thomas’ ejaculatory contribution for the festivities, while all seventeen of her lady-loves slithered around her wide-open thighs and slurped what was there to taste.

Year One of this new way of mating and making do thus closed with an erotic frenzy fueled by tension, a prevailing emotional tenor closer to angst—a generalized anxiety about mutuality of purpose and regard. No other partying through parting would, in any event, supersede this Vernal Bacchanal .

Overall, without much question, this fraught brief interregnum of the human project concentrated more comparative carnage than what had ever before occurred, what with the forced, or intractably induced, dispatch of two-thirds to three quarters of Homo Sapiens cousins. And it all hinged on Year One.

The appearance of this narrative, if nothing else, attests to some sort of staying power. Now and again during the flashing human arc through biosocial space, patterns that have felt immutable shift, and everything requires new contemplation, new planning, new protocols, ha ha. And what comes next. An ‘author’ might hope that an audience might implore, “Pray, tell!” to which the response would be, ‘wait and see, wait and see, stay tuned!’ Next Up: Year Two, Post Plague—'Where Have All the Children Gone.’

Old Stories & New—(continued)…

When I first revived, almost two full days after I 'passed away,' I sat up with such a start and screamed with such force that I threw completely out of whack my third and fourth cervical vertebra. I thought about the joy I get from visiting 'Dr. Bob,' my chiropractor right here in Atlanta's Virginia Highlands 'hood, for just an instant, before realizing I was no longer fighting the pressure of forty-degree water, simultaneously resigned and terrified that I was on the verge of inhaling freezing liquid into my lungs a hundred feet below the surface of the Arctic Ocean.

Instead, I found myself attached to a variety of sensors and tubes, with IV devices and monitors all around my bed. All over my torso, and covering most of my arms and legs, was a form-fitting rubber suit, through which I felt warm fluid pulsing rhythmically. The entire experience was like some science-fiction vision, and it may well be the final image which comes to mind when I exit this world a second time.

Here I stand now, brimming with vitality, speaking to you, and eager to sign my modest tome, despite nearly two days as a dead man. This miracle resulted from work the Department of Defense has been conducting in resuscitating victims of accidental death in freezing or near-freezing conditions. My friend Jack Danley---I hope he's still my friend anyway; he and everybody else on his team tried to persuade me not to write this book, and they've just about freaked-out about the speaking tour---advised me that for reasons of national security I shouldn't be specific about the methods and protocols that led to my presence before you.

For the most part, however, you'll find the answers in the book. The science is really nothing new, and the fact of my revenance blows the cover off their network and endeavors. Along with my hypothetically complete recovery, two of our seventeen adventurers made their way to a comatose state that never advanced beyond vegetative function. Truly, humans are on the cusp of a new age, but we haven't developed new attitudes to support this transformation.

I have not forgotten to mention, though discussing it is unbelievably difficult, that my wife of thirty-three years was with me on this trek. Ours was not a storybook marriage. We both did some wild things, and we brought each other plenty of pain to balance our joy. But we were lovers from beginning to end, we had a connection I can never explain, that lives in me still like the sun lives in tropical sands throughout the night. She was below and I was on deck when we sank. My return makes this separation at the end, after we had lived through so much together, especially excruciating.

I know indisputably that everyone here now, and every reader of my text, can feel the nausea and fury of my loss. When I looked one final time at my beautiful woman's lifeless flesh, following my own miraculous revival, neither drowning nor attempts at resuscitation had marred the form of what I had adored. But she was---simply and completely--gone, as lost to me as dinosaurs and dodo birds, except inside my head.

Weeping before the remains of my wife, I made a commitment. It parallels the searing necessity of producing this book, and of speaking about it relentlessly. 'Not only will I love again,' I swore, 'but I will seek the fullest measure of passion and relationship each day, every second that life allots me.' Even as I watched my mate interred, I renewed this vow.

Why this is so is the core reason I have written Resuscitation, and it's why I embarked on a speaking tour. I don't need money and neither adulation nor ego-stroking intrigue me in the least. It's why I so blithely accepted DOD censorship of the manuscript. Finally, it's also why the hateful opposition and brutal threats from fundamentalists around the world bother me not at all.

The reason is this. The life we now lead: our breath, our sight, our hunger, our lust, our coursing blood, the unimaginable marvel of our brains and the imaginative capacity that they have; is the sum total of what we have. I was dead forty four hours, twelve minutes, and thirteen seconds. While a corpse, I saw no 'light.' No power came to transport a 'higher' part of me away. No God intervened to salvage the soul that I had hoped lived within me, somewhere, somehow.

Like most Americans, my wife and I were people of faith, even as we reveled in the life of the flesh. These spiritual sensibilities led us to endow the Doris and James Lewis scholarship fund. Ironically, it will continue to help some woebegone Methodist freshman each year, indefinitely. But my faith, the yearning for spirit—separate from gore—vanished as I awoke with a shriek of terror and became an unremitting materialist. Next Up—Part IV

Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...

As a matter of course, their experience of a year apart offered a reasonable reference point for considering these unwelcome reminders of mortality’s irremediable ministrations. At one juncture, as she clung to her mate and lover, admiring his manly curves and clever horsemanship, Red stated flatly, “Even if you do die, my Sam, you will always be with me; that cannot be stopped!”

For the first time since he could recently remember, Sam exploded with the sort of laughter that had ever, once in a while, exquisitely demonstrated his intelligence and fire. Even Rosy pranced with delight and shook her withers with mirth.

“Yes, yes!” he gasped with glee. As Sam regained his composure, he grasped her thigh with a giving grip and added, “That's all I need to know, you know, to be able,...” he paused, giving the mare her head and moving his stout fingers across his body as if he were trying to snag a fly in flight while chuckles bubbled from his breast.

“Oh, my love!” she crushed his strong waist in her ferocious embrace. Her cries keened the mountain's morning air.

Red’s commonly laconic husband often had wonderfully detailed thinking. However, his mouth rarely kept pace with his mind, so that a conversation stopped, and started up again, and so on and so forth, most of the time. He finished his previously interrupted sentence: “…not to feel horrible, terrible, devastated, dreadful, to know that our love can...”

“Of course, of course, of course,” her girlish giggles gurgled as she squeezed him again. “We’ve learned already…”

“Yes.” In gleeful relief, he yodeled, Rosy accelerated to a brisk trot, the gray rocks and coniferous slopes and puffy clouds above resounded tricky echoes of his musical trills. Red cried and cried, her emotions an undammed volcanic freshet that trickled down her face and that she lapped up as she rose to kiss her husband's neck.

In passing an especially mossy, piney glade, where the light's dapples shadowed an almost candlelit atmosphere, necessities other than their lengthy journey overtook them both; they practically plummeted into each other's arms, their passion as potent and timeless as the beginning of All-That-Is in some primordial explosive thunderous blast. When they had finished with each other, naked and aglow, the hours after midday had already ushered in a dusky night’s gloaming under the firs.

Sam carried his lover astride his hips as she plied from him every drop of his most manly yummy juicy. Their blood aboil, their skin dimpled with gooseflesh, they once more separated to become two creatures instead of an arching two-backed dragon of passion.

The next hour's riding ambled along on Rosy's surefooted downward track. Red held her man, and Sam lent his heart and soul again and again to his womanly lover and mate and mother of his children. When the sun hung above the mountain's rim behind them, as their shadows lengthened toward the falling of night's sable, Red asked, directly in Sam's eager ear.

“What of the flame that we saw, husband?” She nuzzled his neck in the way that always lit him up. “Why did such a bright flight through our night give you such a fright?”

“You always ask the best questions,” he laughed. He often said so. He had explained what he meant before, that her mind wormed its way to the center of whatever thicket was presenting thorns to understanding’s easy advance, so that she could lay bare the hedges that harrowed a pathway to knowing.

“Yes?”

“All right then.” He straightened and stiffened, ha ha. “I'll tell you, if you must know.” His voice grinned more impishly than did his mouth.

“I must!” her giggle akin to a cantering, sexy mare.

“When we're on the trail home, then, you'll hear.” His color rose along with the rest of his beastly inclination, yet neither kisses nor comestibles did they indulge, even as they considered the idea seriously enough, drooling with lust, dripping with lava.

The sun seemed barely to have budged, yet here they rode, however, at least half an hour's passage from their lichen-strewn trysting spot. “So!” he began. As noted, Sam's was a dandy divining ability; his cognition was high-functioning indeed.

His hesitation in fueling any fiery discursive filament stemmed from an innate modesty. He hated that people might find him arrogant on the basis of being a fine-looking specimen who had much to say. So he more often than not kept his own counsel.

Yet not now, of course. “So,” he repeated, almost inaudible over the firmament’s windy whistles and the stolid clopping of Rosy’s hooves over their rocky, root-strewn track. “Heccalah told me, these many years back, that…”

Rose, his lover and mate, misread his having halted. “Yes, I know!” She spoke in spirited tones, almost confrontational. “Yet how often have our ‘foretellings’ fallen astray from fortune’s track? How often?”

“Yes, my love, yes, yet…”

“What? What? Speak to me my love!” She laughed while weeping tracked her cheeks. “Yet?”

“Well,” he began, a rueful chuckle. “She mentioned what we saw. She called it,” and here Sam paused to emphasize memory’s precise exactitude, “a ‘streaking flame through a moonlit midnight.’”

“Ohhh!” grunted Red, as if managing a boisterous boot to her belly. Silence reigned, but for wind and hooves, as they continued downward, the now setting orb blindingly bright to their left, or straight ahead, depending on the turn of the trail toward home. “And you think...?”

Sam was as quick as ever he'd been. “No,” firm but without a hint of rancor or vituperation. “No, I know.” He persisted. “She said I could judge her omens by the many things that would come to pass, just as...”

“Ahhhhhh!” Hers was not a satisfied sigh, nor a happy exhalation, nor even a pant of aplomb. She felt the grip of something grotesque, truly for the first time. She wanted no further information, but she could not help herself. “What else…?”

Of the handful of events that Hecallah had long ago prognosticated, five equally eerie conveyances actually, only one pierced Rose Wolfbane like a sabre thrust through her guts. “She said,” noted Sam, almost too quietly to be heard, “that my third child, a son would greet us from the womb on my birth’s day.”

Having told close enough to ‘the whole story’ to satisfy this woman who so adored him that she doubted her mothering at times, Sam concluded so wholeheartedly that she knew—and he realized that she did so—that he and she would live as if they would be eternal, regardless of forecasts or altogether unforeseen circumstances. “Well, sweet wife, I do believe;” he added with unexpected theatricality, “I really, truly do believe that all will be well because of our love.”

“Of course it will, my darling Sir Woodcroft, my Sam!” She wept as would a skinned up toddler, hugging him fiercely as they walked or trotted as the slope and the stones permitted. Their hearts lifted despite the hints of mortality that made then wonder what was coming; they fondled and blended their beings as they rode along life’s high road.

And so their trudge toward hearth and household continued apace, with so much for each to contemplate that neither needed confirmation, affirmation, or the inflammation of their generally effulgent flirtation with each other. In the event, the moon’s ascendancy toward another nearly full expression of nightly Goddess lights amazed them adequately enough to diffuse any descent into despond deeper than the tiniest puddle of mire or morose bits and pieces of blah blah blah.

As they came to the high road, now only an hour from their snug cottage and salubrious farmstead, a moist drizzle, misty and chill, glistened at every hint of light’s occasional emergence from the murk. The husband and wife hung on to each other fiercely when they dismounted to offer Rosy some oats in a clever stringed leather bag.

The band of sprinkling precipitation quickly dissipated and Luna once more picked her way through scudding clouds, till Red and her Sam exited the ‘highway’ and Rosy began to gallop the last stretch before home, at which eventuality both riders burst into bellows of hilarity, a combination of saddle sore fatigue and the funny-bone effect of having to bounce about after more than twelve hours astride a stout mare now bent on a rapid home stretch. The filly’s breath steamed, and her sides heaved when she stopped to slurp snowmelt from the trough, but otherwise a deep silence fell over the Woodcroft barnyard.

“My love!” both spoke at once. Grounded and grinning, they clutched merrily at each other’s arms. “I’ll boil water,” he said.

“A bath,” she marveled. “Yes, the children won’t be here much before supper, so…” Red did not finish her sentence because some score or more of baying wolves punctured the moonlit sable with wild, overlapping choruses of howls. Given the tenor of the discourse on their trek, both of them shrunk inside at the sound, yet Sam—calm in handling his saber and his club—repeated, “I’ll boil water.”

Red dreamed of Will-the-Wolf, who had come to reclaim his tail. A clamor seemed to follow the beast’s bowing down to her. Sharp and insistent, it made her wonder why Sam did not shush it, he who had been dreaming about his mate in such a way that his sleepy experience showed up very well to his observant wife when she came to in a noontime glow through the open windows of their room.

“Mommy! Daddy!” rang out. As did “Daddy! Mommy!” and more. Since Samson could not yet reliably ambulate, only the two girls actually hurled themselves at their beloved parents as they burst into their elders’ room. But toddling and crawling right behind them, the boy attached himself to his rising father’s legs and howled with joy.

Naturally enough, when their jolly yet weary maternal grandparent made her entrance, the children instantly attended her with almost equal frenzy as they had their parents, with shrieks of “MaMaHeather” danced in hallelujah uproar hither and yon. Such instants of loving epiphany count as a ‘good life’s’ sweetest toppings, the rested Mother and Father observers of true, sweet communion.

Mother Heather, however, had something more weighty to convey. “Did you hear?” she asked simply. Red and Sam exchanged a look of both portent and premonition. They both were giving some clear affirmation when ‘MaMa,’ holding Samson Sage to her breast while patting dainty Dahlia’s braids, clarified any uncertainty. “The howls have returned for these three nights.”

Unconcerned with these human hopes and horrors, the waning moon soon enough waxed once more, and the time came when Sam and Red realized that the fourth child, whom they’d invited to join them, was not yet forthcoming. Their connubial joining became even more combustible; every chore flowed like a well-watered brook, the children ventured their most delightful adventures; Spring came and promised its most exuberant entangling of stormy pronouncement and sunny reply.

As Luna again waxed toward her most buxom bounty, this iconic couple that many locals called ‘our very own A-Dam and E-va’ had another night of palpating passionate pleasure thanks to MaMaHeather’s attentive assistance. Sam, plying his wife’s sweet furry lips while their eyes danced edenically, composed himself to wait, so that he could speak his heart’s holiest helping of sagacity.

“Each day, you see, every moment that we share,” he held her gaze as his passion peaked and Red moaned mellifluously, “will be for me, and probably for thee with any luck at all,” he nodded, and so did she, in climactic glee. Emotion’s flooding spills provided a poignant completion: “enough eternity for anyone’s lifetime.” Up Next—'A Third Moon’s the Charm’

Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…

A film, also with the ever-evocative title, “Loving,” eight years ago punctuated this saga. In a review as part of a “Radical Black Perspectives” series, the author presents a man of the house, as it were, who so loved his woman that no machination of mental magic would stand in his way.

“Richard Loving rejected white supremacy when he married Mildred—in contrast to legions of white men who ‘simply’ had sex with black women. …He became a ‘race traitor.’ White film viewers come to see that, after marrying, Richard essentially joined the black community."

The essay also examined the deep historical record, in which quite conscious alterations of ethnicity took place because it served the power-purposes of masters. In the 17th Century, “Virginia’s law dictated, ‘that which is brought forth follows the womb’ or, in Latin, “partus sequitur ventrem.” In other words, a white, male slave-owner could have sex with—quite possibly raping—a black female slave, but their child was considered a slave, like the mother, rather than free, like the father. Virginia first outlawed miscegenation in 1691, as part of ‘An act for suppressing outlying Slaves.’”

Mediation has repeatedly attempted to grapple with this infectious storyline, as if the universe had cooked up a recipe for laughably undermining the fatuous fantasy of White Supremacy, with an openminded White man by the name of Loving who married his adored Black lover. At least two lengthy documentaries, a cable miniseries, and the feature film from 2016 are among the works in question.

A basic question shows up on the grassroots communication platform, Quora: “Do You Think Racism Is a Tool Used By the Elite to Divide and Conquer?” To anyone who pays attention, this is mega-duh territory, but a lot of people don’t get it, ha ha.

“(I)t’s not the only tool, but it’s an important one. If all people who were not in the elite class stopped hating each other and focused their attention on how few of them ever have an opportunity to join the elite, then numbers will overwhelm the elite. …

What’s weird to me is the way people insist that there is no class struggle, that poor people are just poor and either happy with it, or easily able to pull themselves out of poverty and into wealth. If it happened once it should be able to all of the time. So they play one side off the other. It’s not some vast conspiracy most of the time; it happens so naturally people don’t even notice they’re doing it.

In fact, it’s basically the same as a fundamental principle of warfare: if your enemies are allied against you, your first priority is to create a schism between them."

The technocratic approach, in alignment with said elites’ evasion of such matters, downplays any such idea. Loving v. Virginia is the precise topic of scores of Law Review articles, most of which focus on legal niceties completely removed from meaningful social connection or loving marital relations that finesse color prejudice. Such Con-Law matters as ‘originalism’ are common fodder; so too legal concepts like stare decisis, the supposed following of precedent.

Again, these texts end up far removed from the impact or potential of these actors who saw fit to file suit and seek to defend themselves. They quote Reconstruction politicians who mouth empty phrases full of false promise. “Civil liberty is no other than natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws and no further, and is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public."

Ideologically, along with legalistic technocracy’s arguments, one discovers that the ever-creative denizens of property and profit turn to all manner of identity ‘discoveries,’ such as the possibility to use the Loving decision’s attack on divided conquest to further other, completely unrelated divisive policy-pointers. Thus, Loving underpins recent moves to make marriage safe for gay loving, as it were.

“Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)… extended the marriage right to same-sex couples.” A primary basis for this decision was none other than the action of Richard and Mildred Loving. Ha ha. In the event, SCOTUS now “cast(s) marriage as the most august, central, and specific among a family of freedoms—privacy, intimate association, sexual autonomy, the rights to procreate and not to procreate—traveling together under the banner of ‘substantive due process.’"

Plenty of liberal academics, anticommunist to their synapses, also find parsing this case a fascinating exercise in sweeping aside issues such as class conflict, divide-&-conquer, imperial histories of self-serving supremacist mastery. They attempt these avoidance tactics at one and the same time that they acknowledge them in titles such as “A Nation of Minorities.”

“Nevertheless, a seemingly natural equation of races with socially salient differences had substantially foundered by mid-century, even as applied to blacks and other non-whites. Reflecting but also further catalyzing this break, in 1944 Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, marking a watershed in twentieth century racial thought.

Building on the framework advanced by Boas and other liberal race theorists, and with financial support from the Carnegie Foundation to underwrite ‘a comprehensive study of the Negro in the United States,’ Myrdal commissioned dozens of studies by many of the leading social scientists of the day, shaping the whole into a massive indictment of the systemic oppression of blacks in the United States."

Radical analysis of such matters is possible too. As noted already, as a movement if not as a theory, Civil Rights are inarguably in part a “communist plot.” BTR readers have already had bits and pieces of Franz Fanon’s work, for instance, and he championed fiercely and fearlessly social equality as one foundation of social progress, at least in any direction other than the theoretical.

Moreover, the people involved needed to lead the charge for change, so to say. “If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat. The bridge should not be ‘parachuted down’ from above, it should not be imposed by a deus ex machine upon the social scene; on the contrary it should come from the muscles and the brains of the citizens. Certainly, there may well be need of engineers and architects, sometimes completely foreign engineers and architects; but the local (social) leaders should be always present, so that new techniques can make their way into the cerebral desert of the citizen."

W.E.B. DuBois’ magisterial dissertation, one of his many works that lay the foundation for a future of social justice, truth, and reconciliation, in some senses expresses a touchstone of such efforts at scholarship and comprehension. His are not the sole valiant efforts in favor of freedom and fairness, but he definitely ranks as ‘first among equals’ in this regard.

Decrying White supremacy and insisting on centering the roots of social transformation, the incisive analyst illustrates how policy promoted the former and subverted the latter. “(T)riumphant industry in the North coupled with privilege and monopoly led an orgy of death that engulfed the nation and was the natural child of war… .(A) revolt against this anarchy became reaction against democracy, North and South, and delivered the (former Confederacy and the Republic at large) into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at any dictatorship of labor in the South."

An acolyte of Du Bois, who assesses many works that promote the values that Richard and Mildred manifested in their marriage, offers pointed circumspection about Capital’s Captains as the creators of racialist thinking in the first place. “(A) recent debate on the concept of racial capitalism… asserts that the logic of capitalism forces race into being: ‘[R]acism as a distinct way of differentiating human beings developed with capitalist social property relations and is a necessary feature of this system. … [T]he reproduction of capitalist social property relations through the dull compulsions of the market … makes the relationship of capitalism and racism necessary, and not historically or theoretically contingent. … Race is the necessary and unintended consequence of capitalist competition and accumulation.’"

From a certain perspective, one that BTR shares, ha ha, the primary operative question about every story—without a single exception—is how, or even whether, it contributes to human liberation. An inquiry about the actual lives that we lead must, however, or at least perhaps, precede this inquisitive literary standard.

After all, our individual pathways also burst with tragedy and struggle. We embrace what harms us and face punishment for seeking what serves us. In this way, well might we ask, “How do things so consistently seem to evolve as to leave us stuck in unhealthy, counterproductive relationships that always contradict our thriving and often enough undermine our survival?”

Precisely here do the lives and times of these passionate ‘down-home’ people hold out hopes of healing and other benefits of human freedom that we say we want, ha ha. For, even as idiotically named ‘interracial marriages’ are now ubiquitously legal—albeit, admittedly, still way too often socially proscribed—fear and loathing of hordes of immigrants and evil-interlopers has assumed the ideological and practical place that anti-miscegenation statues held in the past.

A profound psychospiritual truism comes to the fore, both as regards outlawing miscegenation and imprisoning refugees. The old advisory that ‘good advice is hard to find’ comes to mind. In all these dynamics of blaming and othering, as it were, a process of projection is transpiring, embodying the old saying that it is, in turn, “the most primitive form of coping strategy.”

Thus, miscegenation was part of the profiteering practice of slaveholders: they sold their children by such unions. Moreover, grassroots liaisons repeated rejected crazed notions about protective ‘race-mixing bans.’ This has already filled BTR’s pages in the form of an assessment of Harriet Jacobs’ life and times. From every direction, in every conceivable formulation, these proscriptive mandates are not only false, but also utterly, insanely, absurd and pointless.

Similarly, the imperial carnage of Brand Chaos has set hundreds of millions of people in motion, desperate for food, water, shelter, something to make life bearable. Here in North America, like some sort of sinister, dark doppelganger of Oz, lies the gleaming city behind its high walls, guarded at its gates by officious buffoons, teaming with riches even as it impoverishes all the thorny and demon-haunted hinterlands.

As Tom Lehrer has quipped, in relation to Central American ‘evildoers,’ “Send the Marines.” U.S. policy, especially in the so-called Central Intelligence era, has, at minimum, butchered hundreds of thousands of Hispanics.

Moreover, vaunted ‘drug-policy’ has criminalized with one hand while expanding networks of contraband and cash and AK’s with the other. This is undeniably true, yet the Neoliberal/Neonazi phalanx won’t here of taking any responsibility, no sir. ‘Those pesky oppressed refugees should all just go away, or, better yet, as in Gaza, drop dead!’ Big Tent contextualizations of this sort have been quite common.

Along such lines, as well, a little Ten New Commandments missive may offer up an apropos ending. Every single item in that little listing resonates with vital existential arterial pulsation in connection with questions of ‘illegal immigration,’ as if trespass statutes ought to be in force even when one person owns everything, meaning everybody else is ‘born guilty,’ in the vein maybe of thinking ‘we’re all Palestinians.’

In any event, the Golden Rule’s TNC primacy, combined with Number Three’s insistence that “All Who Work Are Welcome” provides a solid foundation for discourse, at least among those who are willing to speak and listen to reason. That said, as a matter of course,

Whatever else proves true, as I live and breathe, more stories about the South and human life are forthcoming; litigation too, along such lines, will have a chance to perform a star turn at center stage, as will ruminations about refuge and migration. The world and all its mysteries are ours to ponder, and, even if we can never know these hidden patterns of potentiation completely, still, the searches themselves are key survival skills, and we often enough gain footholds on a ‘conceivable continents of consciousness,’ so to say, where we actually want to build our homes and stay put.

Viewed expansively, in this vein, Richard and Mildred Loving were immigrants too. They led the migration toward a more human future, one in which freedom might become something other than a phrase empty of most any application in real life.

An admonitory Driftwood Art Message applies with equal force to the Lovings and to the erstwhile drug mules whom anti-immigrant citizens ‘detect’ in every illicit border crossing. “Pointed Accusation’s Perils” is its title.

“Accusation's Outthrust Finger, More Often Than Not, Reveals Or Foretells Malfeasance, Perversion, Or Snitching-For-Hire of Accusers Who Incriminate Themselves by Supporting Criminalization of That Which Is Natural, Even Salubrious, in Human Behavior, in No Realm More So Than in Promoting Divide-&-Conquer Genocidal Urges & Profiteering Hypocritical Travesties That Declare at Best Venally Moronic 'Wars on Drugs.'"

The notion that darker skinned cousins are inferior because of their tonality is at minimum equally evil and stupid as are prohibition protocols. Law as an instrumentality of terror covers a lot of ground.

Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...

One is the centrality of rule by division. Recognizing and then struggling to disenable such plots and schemes is at the heart of both Popular Education and plans to integrate the realm of learning with the arena of human liberation.

Divide & Rule “is another fundamental dimension of the theory of oppressive action which is as old as oppression itself. As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power. The minority cannot permit itself the luxury of tolerating the unification of the people, which would undoubtedly signify a serious threat to their own hegemony. Accordingly, the oppressors halt by any method (including violence) any action which in even incipient fashion could awaken the oppressed to the need for unity. Concepts such as unity, organization, and struggle are immediately labeled as dangerous. In fact, of course, these concepts are dangerous—to the oppressors—for their realization is necessary to actions of liberation."

Another key idea, related to this, is that cooptation of Popular Education often reveals itself by seeking hegemonic control. “The first characteristic of antidialogical action is the necessity for conquest. The antidialogical individual, in his relations with others, aims at conquering them—increasingly and by every means, from the toughest to the most refined, from the most repressive to the most solicitous (paternalism)."

The following search may help uncover the impact of Paulo Freire’s endeavors: <"school of education" OR "college courses" OR "college education programs" freirian OR freirean OR "pedagogy of the oppressed" international OR multinational OR worldwide>. Despite its intricacy and multiplicity, this string called forth almost 150,000 citations.

Veritable Schools of Education are in fact everywhere in these pages. So are grassroots programs. So are individual educators who are deploying Freire’s ideas so as to empower ‘human liberty.’ The tenth page of links included Portuguese, British, and African followers, as well as leaders from Maryland and elsewhere in the United States.

One of the texts ‘deep in the weeds’ here styles itself as a Dossier: 100 Years of Paulo Freire, reflecting his growing influence despite his death a quarter century ago and savage resistance from ruling class quarters hither and yon. It justifies its lionizing ways, even though so many others do the same, using the words of UCLA’s Douglas Kellner, in the event.

“This volume…adds, therefore, to the tribute paid to the philosopher of education, communication theorist, popular educator, university professor, and public figure Paulo Reglu Neves Freire (1921-1997). After all, Freire is—for his perspicacity and the universality of his thought—the most cited Brazilian intellectual reference in the world. His extensive work is marked by his commitment to a Philosophy of the emancipation for the popular classes through education."

Freire ever advanced common popular liberation by contrasting it with the tricks of rulers to keep people in harness. Dozens of useful ideas emanate from Freire’s intellectual leadership. One of the most important follows below.

Manipulation, behind the scenes, seemingly disconnected from practical programs of power or policy, serves as a critical component of Capital’s hopes and dreams to remain ever atop the human heap. Inevitably, especially in the ‘hands-off-yet-hands-on’ environs of neoliberal economic pracitioners of neoconservative imperial predation, such manipulative efforts entail mediated propagation of invidious and sophisticate propaganda, on the one hand, and various electoral machinations that seem to promise, finally, real change, on the other hand.

The practical effects are the creation of phantasms of popular representation, where plutocrats seem to take the side of the oppressed. “The emergence of populism as a style of political action thus coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed. The populist leader who rises from this process is an ambiguous being, an ‘amphibian’ who lives in two elements. Shuttling back and forth between the people and the dominant oligarchies, he bears the marks of both groups"

Freire’s Conclusion revolves around the importance of Cultural Synthesis. In his view, “Cultural action either serves domination (consciously or unconsciously) or it serves the liberation of men and women. As these dialectically opposed types of cultural action operate in and upon the social structure, they create dialectical relations of permanence and change." These practices of the high and mighty always depend on and otherwise follow recognizable ‘theories of domination,’ so to speak.

“Cultural invasion” is one way of characterizing this. Its omnipresence is so total, in fact, that even contemplating, just for instance, musical production that doesn’t move through YouTube’s channeling efforts seems insane. The rulers own all these means of cultural output, yet our collective existence hinges on turning them to our own devices.

Unraveling such things is complex and deliciously difficult, yet one can summarize an ineradicable aspect of activating liberation movements as follows. “Cultural synthesis serves the ends of organization; organization serves the ends of liberation. This work deals with a very obvious truth: just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action.

The oppressor elaborates his theory of action without the people, for he stands against them. Nor can the people—as long as they are crushed and oppressed, internalizing the image of the oppressor—construct by themselves the theory of their liberating action. Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders—in their communion, in their praxis—can this theory be built."

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…

He pauses. "And I don't need to tell you that there's a lot of money on the line there. The second thing is that this information shows DU as a 'weapon of indiscriminate effect,' or WMD, and a legal nightmare could result from that which is just, just incalculable."

His voice doesn't have the same vibrant timber, but he is right in stating that the "third thing would be hurting the war effort, since the power of DU weapons is so massive." He mentions the decimation of elite troops, heavily dug in, at the Baghdad airport in 2003. "That would never have been so easy without these kinds of weapons."

He didn't have much time left, so I cut to the chase. "Ideally, what would happen next?"

"We want to be able to locate the kid cases with birth defects," which they did not have the ability to determine given the sample bias against reporting on this matter. "Then we'd take cell and hair and blood samples and so on, and compare them with kids who didn't have these problems." These studies, he assures me, are, even more so, "bloody expensive."

But in a sense, those who've developed these demonic devices deserve the threat of bankruptcy. "I've been saying for a long time to suspend DU usage: as I said at a conference in 2002, 'this is a highly toxic and radioactive substance; you shouldn't be shooting it around at people."

I ask about other situations in which official sources have so far proved resistant to investigations such as the ones that Dr. Busby has bulldoggedly pursued. "Are you aware of complaints about Vieques? Are any similarities present do you think, possibly?"

"I've been at conferences and heard about it of course. And yes, we need to do some epidemiology there similar to Fallujah. We will share the questionnaire; it is available," though he mentioned that translating it from the Arabic would be necessary.

"What if a community wanted to try to do something similar; are any resources available that provide a 'how to,' or is the involvement of experts essential?"

"I helped a group in England in 2002, and we found a doubling in breast cancer. All the hands-on data came from the community. Everyone pooh-poohed that for some time," he indicated until the cancer registry repeated the same investigation and "absolutely confirmed our data, looking at a 500 house sample."

He was supportive of community-based participatory research. "I almost always think they should go ahead, because the data in the registries is confidential, and this needs to be out in the open. And you don't always find anything," as in an incinerator study that he helped with. "And that can reassure people and let them get on with their lives."

I did not ask this question, because he had already told me what I needed to know at the very beginning of the interview. "How bad is this?"

"What we're seeing in cases like these? It's a breakdown between the science-policy interface, where supposedly 'objective' scientists are like hired guns." He gave me a beat or two, then continued. "And the worst of it, the most serious public health scandal in human history, is the lies that they're telling about radiation exposure."

‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY…’

Our government is involved in an ongoing conspiracy to cover up, at a bare minimum, mass negligent homicide, inasmuch as the avowed policy of the government is to continue using DU weapons.

The citizens of the Republic, meanwhile, face some stark choices. As information becomes more and more widely available, the protest, "Oh, I didn't know about that!" becomes less and less a shield against a charge of complicity. Can we countenance increasing cancers by between fifteen and forty times, depending on the particular malignancy? Can we term 'acceptable' a ten-fold increase in horrific birth deformities? Can we do things of this sort and still retain some slender thread of humanity?

Thus, as things now stand, most folks either must elect to side with the government—and whether this collaboration is witting and intentional or passive and 'unintentional' matters little—or they must find some means to resist a policy of premeditated murder for the sake of profit and empire.

Others may choose more active tools to register their position. Leuren Meuret, for example, another expert on the impacts of Depleted Uranium who left the 'established' side of science, weapons labs, and such, to take a stand for independent investigation and accountability, has gone so far as to testify at a 'War Crimes Tribunal' against America's former Commander in Chief.

Though Barack-the-Magnificent is dearly beloved of many erstwhile liberals, he can read. If he continues for another day the implementation of a deliberately murderous policy, the deployment of this DU monstrosity, then he too is deserving of the same treatment that 'W' received.

Most critically, however, in moving forward toward any prospect for humanity, and hence away from any toleration for DU in the 'marketplace-of-man,' all readers can gain from the incisive insights of Chris Busby. Depleted Uranium exists because, at multiple levels, it serves those who own and manage the world today. If we are to find a 'sustainable business' model, and a realistic political program in favor of renewable energy and other appropriate technology, then we must recognize that doing so must move in dialectical opposition to the present plutocracy.

Such recognition may prove profoundly discomfiting to those whose thinking about entrepreneurship has emanated from the pages of Money Magazine. On the other hand, such a view is socially real; it represents a creative opportunity from the soil of which corporate responsibility might actually blossom.

THE TOP OF THE IMPERIAL HEAP MAY BE SWELL, BUT PAYBACK IS HELL

Despite the popularity, for various reasons, of the philosophy of non-violence, very few people will discount the 'absolute right to self-defense' that any person under attack may assert. And a substantial majority of our fair planet's cousins bear the brunt of imperial assaults on a daily basis. We could do the math.

Certainly, many or most of Africa's citizenry bridle under the sway of oil companies, banks, leaders bought and paid for by foreign business interests. Just as clearly, the coterie of cousins to our South in the Americas would include a majority who viewed the U.S. in imperial terms.

A more mixed result in Asia would still yield vast majorities across the swath of Southwest Asia who felt a prick of hostility at American arrogance. We needn't even ask for such opinions in Fallujah. And even here, in the belly of the beast as it were, though this humble correspondent is just a single voice, I am not alone.

For how long precisely do ‘Standard Americans’ think that they can stand behind a government and expect protection, backed all the while by citizen soldiers demonstrably 'disposable,' as upcoming articles invoking Doug Rokke and others will show?

In such a context, Non-Violent Direct Resistance(NVDR) represents an honorable way to finesse the ugly truth of 'accessorizing.' Even if such stringent straits are too taxing for the individual, one might still stand in solidarity with those who do accept the ball and chain rather than shrug and wear the cape of collaboration.

The cruel, sapping attacks of leukemia and all the other indicia of Gulf War Syndrome, demonstrate the bankruptcy of imperial accounting, which claims that we cannot afford to care for the current crop of veterans, and even if they die quietly, the new herd of fighters for the new wars of conquest will cringe and sicken in equally dire straits as our current soldiery. This all highlights the crying need for more active and more community oriented forms of organization here in the U.S.

The model that Chris Busby and his colleagues can give us, if we'll have it, stems from a Europe that is struggling with many more nationalisms, and many more national minorities, than the United States of America ever conceived of. In many tangible ways, Europe has become as much a melting pot as America displays in her legendary guise. This matter of radiation, which respects no border, which decimates most genomes save those of the Redwood, the algae, and the cockroach, exemplifies the unity that can result from cognition of shared social detriment.

But just as in the Balkans, just as in Northern Ireland, just as in the 'hot spots' that still burn in Europe today—can anyone detect Ukraine here?—Americans must decide that we'd rather thrive by seeing the kinds of unity that we must potentiate than by slurping up a righteous individuation that justifies our assault on some set of cousins or other as expressions of our tribal bona fides.

Arguably even more critical is coming to terms with social class, something that Europe's multimodal embrace of social democracy has permitted while Tea Party idiocy here can bait even the whiff of pink by calling a politician as militantly ‘centrist’ as Barack Obama a socialist. In an election where the opportunistic gangsterism of the ‘Change Presidency’ again has top billing, this last notion could readily be of particular import. Next Up—Number Three