Big Tent Review
Oh, my Goddess! Anyway, hello, everyone! Again, again, blah blah blah. As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed eighteen-times-annually magazine. This is the twentieth incarnation, so just starting the second annual outpouring, and it’s as meaty as ever.
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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 October 2nd; the first one-issue moon ahead will, most likely, publish in November.
Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a while back, the end of an article ‘above the fold’ links to its continuation. Somehow, it’s all so nerve-wracking and gratifying at once, ha ha. And, finally, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah. I’m doing my best with this linking effort. It’s 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: Natural Orders Will Prevail
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Of Moral Codes & New Commandments
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XX
3. Wood Words Essays—Gifts & Challenges: the Eros of Partnership
4. Empowered Political Forays—”Capitalism on Drugs,” continued
5. Old Stories & New—”Resuscitation,” Part Four
6. Communication & Human Survival—Mediating ‘Immigrants’ & Their ‘Invasions’
7. Erotic Snippets—”The Survivor Effect,” Number 2.
8. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”Deconstructing ‘Depleted’ Uranium,” Part THREE
9. Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—”’United in Blood’ Against Empire”
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Nature’s Nurture Summons Impunity, Not Immunity
This Just In: from my love, via the local Roanoke paper; a review, “Hiroshima Revisited With Witness Accounts,” an overview of M.G. Sheftall’s Hiroshima: the Last Witnesses, referring to the aging and demise of the last handfuls of survivors from August 6, 1945, gives a stark warning. The essay’s author, Yuri Kageyama, closes with a quiet sobriety. The author’s “book tells (survivors)stories, in all their ruthless violence and gory pathos, but, most important, as a cautionary tale about the perils of nuclear warfare.”
Gaia’s gaze, at once penetrating and implacable, ought to instruct any sentient creature about what is at stake in capital’s ecocidal plunder in service to profitability and plutocracy. Then again, obviously, apocalyptic gloomy doomsaying has proved quite a popular pastime since the beginning of any sort of record of anything at all.
Succeeding in life, from a reasonable viewpoint, might readily amount to assembling a puzzle that one creates while putting the pieces in place. Things fit together; that belief is my obsession, ha ha. Discussing how they do so is what BTR does.
Sometimes, as today, a certain processional of developments gives at least a subjective boost to confidence, or at least hope, that most everything is explicable and all that blah blah blah. What a shame if it all now blows itself to the hellish eternity of nonexistence.
Seers—motivated by insight and intuition or bombast’s bellows—and other attendant madmen or prophets with agendas either similar or randomly divergent have predicted Armageddon’s proximity time out of mind. At the same time that skepticism therefore has loads of appeal, one can nevertheless with utter certainty declare that never before have our collectives of cousins possessed such an expansive thermonuclear capability to bomb it all to hell, so to speak.
This is the context that I see, not the future that I seek, but the likelihoods that peek forth from the comings and goings of life’s movers and shakers, while a few scribblers like me jump and shout about anomalies and traps, and most folks focus on matters at once more mundane and more ‘materially grounded,’ so to speak. Whatever the case may be, here comes another Big Tent Review, hoping to help make sense of things at hand.
Big Tent wellsprings gush forth from the twin duties that a sentient citizen has, on the one side, to inquire about, more or less, what in hell is up on the far flung skeins of humanity’s planetary fabric and to share, on the other side, what one discovers or reasonably infers from one’s querying. Will such as this make a difference?
Whether the answer is yay or nay, the necessity of the mandate remains. One must seek to find a pathway—documentary, testamentary, intuitive, statistical, empirical, all the tricks of epistemological trades—toward an accurate understanding, some useful approximation of the truth. Under such circumstances, often enough, one’s seemingly random textual encounters appear as rich lodes of ore that interconnect all the apparently discrete mine shafts of human history.
By happenstance, whatever the applicability of this little metaphor, my new crop of readings includes Wikileaks, a bit of a gem by none other than Julian Assange himself, with an evocative subtitle indeed, When Google Met Wikileaks. Altogether, the decade or so old volume, which only recently—thanks to the perspicacity of my sweet love—came my way, circumscribes precisely the witness that BTR purports to bear about mediation, ‘intelligence,’ empire, and more, albeit with massively more depth and specificity than I would likely ever proffer, at least in the contemporary ‘realm of the real.’
I ought already to have mentioned, along the lines of different vistas about Israel and Palestine, Robert Penn Warren’s Wilderness, but I go into a bit of detail below, so there we have it. Assange’s work includes just fascinating interviews that he gave to none other than Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and a company cofounder.
Here is a sample of what one might discover in Julian’s little jewel. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first. One way of looking at it is that it’s just business. For an American Internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing, and let politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. …It it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original ‘don’t be evil’ empire.
But part of the resilient image of Google as ‘more than just a company’ comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. …Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise—a magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries—for creating a utopian future.
The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into ‘corporate responsibility’ initiatives to produce ‘social change’—exemplified by ‘Google Ideas. But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s ‘philanthropic’ efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of U.S. influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi were running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.”
Along a slightly different track, here’s an entirely New Shtick, one which will adorn BTR now a couple times an issue or so. This for-now novel device consists first of a list of a handful, more or less, of links that lie adjacent to some node of Big Tent or Marshall Arts output.
However we characterize the present passage through problems and prospects, vast quantities of fascinating tidbits come my way with nowhere to go. Thus, I’m initiating this occasional shtick in this regard, with a hope of moving some of that intellectual product along the information pipeline, so to speak.
Something catches the creator’s eye, and, voila. The first in line in the initial group is from MIT Technology Review, with more along the lines of Assange’s ‘free pass,’ to wit, “Chatbots Can Persuade People to Stop Believing in Conspiracy Theories,” all powered by A.I. and hence very cheaply done. The Washington Post’s wannabe instantiation of an erstwhile ‘national newspaper’ sits adjacent to MIT, illuminating projection’s most primitive form of coping strategy,’ in “Russia Throttles YouTube, Popular With Kids, Celebrities, and Dissidents.”
The article blithely overlooks the vast swath of cancel culture here, from matters of sex to matters of physics, from pharmaceuticals to farming, and on and on and on. But oh my! Putin tries to eliminate the Russian People’s Will to Resist. Julian almost magnetically drew these two out, eight or nine down the queue from Gmail. What could be next?
And I don’t normally put pieces from Deadline Hollywood in the mix, but Anna Politkovskaya’s name caught my eye, she who hates Putin and loves freedom, blah blah blah. Seven or eight days back, this nestled right up to Cambridge’s and D.C.’s profferral, with this title: “Anna Politkovskaya Movie ‘Words Of War’—Starring Maxine Peake, Ciaran Hinds & Jason Isaacs—Gets U.S. Deal Out Of TIFF Market; Sean Penn Aboard As Exec Producer.”
The heading above tells the tale. Operation Mockingbird is no longer necessary, perhaps, since C.I.A. money—which is to say, financialized ubiquity everywhere—owns all media. Even iconic programs, such as the named Toronto International Film Festival, serve corporatocracy’s imperial imprimatur. Is the comely flack’s story of interest? Surely so.
But I’ve got lots of leads much more fetching, except to plutocrats: Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are just the first two in this pack of grassroots truthseekers to complement whatever is veracious in Politkovskaya’s plutocracy-palpating telling of things. Much more in tune with standard purview, RT—which once was Russia Today and is at least among equals in any competition for ‘world’s best news outfit—comes along next.
Its article, “Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic: Why Has Zelensky Purged the Ukrainian Government?” amplifies the narrative in its descriptive subtitle. “Over half of the country’s ministers have been dismissed. Why did Vladimir Zelensky decide to gut his team during an ongoing conflict?”
Though the news flash makes clear that—whatever the exact parameters of the answer—an apt response centers on imperial instruction, this idea doesn’t obviously connect with Julian’s work, until one reflects. This obviously insane—or at least unlikely—move got the barest mention in ‘Western Free Media,’ as usual with an outlying exception in Britain’s Guardian franchise. Again, Google’s get-out-of-jail-free card continues to operate. Hmmmm.
The final element in today’s quintet is a C-Span hearing of the House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on the ‘Weaponization of the Justice Department’ in its participation in criminal complaints against Donald Trump. Jim Jordan’s thoughts about bias are certainly likely. After all, any agency of government will reflect its governors of the moment, at least since J. Edgar left the Bureau.
Still, Stacey Plaskett’s impassioned opening statement for the Democratic wing of the ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx, with its posture of bickering siblings still dependent on the familial fountain, is worth the price of admission. Justly and insightfully, she condemns this coddling of a GOP billionaire while the likes of Sonya Massey faces summary execution for the crime of being a mistake in her own kitchen. That the speaker’s own DNC sugar-teat has done less than nothing to stop such carnage against innocent citizens indicts not just her.
No sirree. Not a single nuanced, deeply reflective, contextually complete ‘mainstream media’ account of this phenomenon exists. Or maybe we could find one such; or two. But one must concede the point; nothing is done, and no media outlet attacks the constancy of juries and prosecutors in ‘loyally’ letting killer cops off the hook. Once again, ‘Google gets another free pass.’
And these excerpts and reflections show just one fragment of the current lexicon, as it were. Both Robert Penn Warren and Boris Pasternak tell tales—Wilderness and Dr. Zhivago—in which Jewish culture and identity play important roles. Hmmmm. I certainly didn’t retrieve Penn Warren’s yarn from the book-exchange box with the understanding that it would reflect Big Tent perspectives about all the ‘Jewish Questions’ so at large on our planet today.
The yarn that Warren spins here delves ‘revolutionary’ Europe, the Civil War, immigration, and ‘religious identity.’ Adam is a nonobservant Jew who finds himself crippled, facing conflagration, and wondering what he had achieved in his “fur die Freiheit” struggle for the Union.
“He stared at the rifle, lying there absurd and lost like a toy. Yes, he thought, staring at the rifle. He would do it all again.” As stated below, in the immigration briefing in the issue, ‘thus comes the voice of the traveler whose dreams pull him along. Nothing will stop him.’
Pasternak’s novel, in also contextualizing Jewish experience, paints an epic portrait of Russia’s early twentieth century. The film was testament to Hollywood mastery. Did the C.I.A.’s backing of the author unfairly influence the presentation of the case? Who knows?
And so what? Nothing in Pasternak is incongruent with human thriving and survival—or, in other words, with Democratic Socialism—even if the book threatened Soviet governance, or at least these governors perceived it as a dire thrust at the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A complete review essay about the book and movie is forthcoming, in which we’ll look into publication as an Operation, as in Mockingbird.
I’ve got stacks and stacks of material that ends up ‘on the cutting room floor,’ which makes me a little sad because they have so much to offer and I have lots that I’d like to add as well. New Yorker speaks of an Austrian billionaire who is playing around with the idea of citizen trust funds; Wired presents the political economy of OnlyFans and the communistic proclivities of Keanu Reeves; Vanity Fair gives Melinda Gates a forum to discuss giving. Wow. ‘And there’s so much more.’
These days, of course, books and other ‘printed matter’ merely count as a few drops in the oceanic media bucket that pours its contents on our heads, or into our brains, each and every minute that flows by in the grand river of temporal flow, blah blah blah. Music, for instance, so beautifully and powerfully addresses all the social issues, sometimes falsely and opportunistically, but generally with a store of popular wisdom and common experience.
Thus, right now, in Tom Lehrer’s “We’ll All Go Together When We Go,” I’m hearing ‘this one may more accurately be termed a survival hymn.’ “Universal bereavement, yes an inspiring achievement, yes, we will all go together when we go.” My Hiroshima offers some hopeful comfort and dozens of instances of ‘advance I todaso.’
In regard to culture and influence, I have recently developed a Twitter habit, on X, ha ha. Some of these bon mots will start cross-pollinating, starting right here and now. For instance, here is a Tweet that went out to some sort of Slavic sojourner, who had just posted a poster of a pro-Russian filmmaker and journalist, from Chile originally, who died in fascist Ukrainian custody.
“The CIA murdered Victor Jara, who sang despite hacked off fingers, & also likely killed Gonzalo Lira; from Neruda to Lira, Chilean scribes risk all against the inherent injustice of vicious social inequality, hence siding with Russia against Kiev's Nazis.” The republication of my long missive about all this was already on the page, today, when the original post appeared on X.
What are the odds? My Chilean American ex; my lifelong study of ‘Monroe Doctrine’ imprimatur in service to empire; former in-laws who adopted two Ukrainian children while on a ‘Christian visit’ during Maidan; now my first introduction to Gonzalo Lira extrajudicially butchered for accurate reportage. It all feels fated, as if maybe something decent might come of it all. Who knows?
That this is taking place on the anniversary of CIA brutalization of Chile, the murder of Salvador Allende, the disappearance of ten thousand or so readily-disposed poets and workers and believers in human progress, like Victor Jara and thousands more, well, such a coincidence feels portentous. Of course, this is all speculative, but as Sting might sing today, I ‘hope the Americans love their children too.”
No matter what, all of this production includes the small part that BTR plays in its unfolding daily dalliance. In that regard, quite generally do I feel the sense of energized engagement that makes of existence a sweetly satisfying experience, although on some occasions I find myself instead incomprehensibly inhabiting a space and time of enervated lethargy and anxious ennui, sort of a “Worried Man Blues” meets a “Orphan Girl" vibe.
Oddly enough, in the thrall of everyday ecstasy, I can’t call the other to mind; and vice versa, possibly an attribute of my forget-my-head-but-for-its-attached sinews sensibility or maybe just concomitant with any ecosphere’s mundane manifestation. Whatever the case may be, here I am again, bearing witness, wondering about dialog, feeling so much gratitude for Goddess grace that I feel as if I’m bursting, even as the world’s top gangsters try to ignite the planet, alas.
My life erupts with love, people support each other, discourse is constant, constructive, and critically probing, and production continues on the multiple fronts that are part of things here and now. While nature throws bear and deer and more at the front bumper, soccer dances me through the paces two or three times a week, the games that I’ve adored still instruct, my lover and I thrill each other, and this Zen instant feels almost manageable as a practice of presence.
Part of what typifies life this second, for the most part, is a material bounty unparalleled in history. Not an organ that would promote taking anything for granted—after all, death remains the only certainty—Big Tent suggests that praising be in some fashion must encompass a substantial swath of anyone’s emotional standard, so to speak. As I’m fond of saying, in tune with a Driftwood Thank You Message that graced a handsome arboreal splinter, “Without Platitude, the Only Attitude For Which We Have the Least Latitude Would Be One of Greatest Gratitude.”
More than anything, I praise Be for the ability to take ideas apart, which—even as I all too generally leave “Happy Union Grammar Nerd” bits—relates to the capacity to disassemble and reassemble sentences about the problems and prospects that emanate from our days and nights navigating each day’s nuggets of nuance and steady stream of blah blah blah.
In any event, I know that the standard-American view of almost every important issue is both false and pernicious to popular empowerment. Nowhere is this more true than in relation to Ukraine, where the surveyors estimate up to $20,000,000,000,000—that’s twenty trillion—of mineral wealth in Kiev’s subterranean territories. Here’s a Tweet on that point, in response to a correct assessment of policy insanity on the part of America’s CIA banksters.
“The iconic “King of Hearts,” comes to mind. Ukrainian lands have acted as human portals since before Rome's imperial age; one key in Kiev's contextualizing 'Western' futures https://hickeyj.substack.com/i/136797166/odd-beginnings-new-endings is willful ignorance's gruesome grip on people's understanding of matters at hand”.
Furthermore, no doubt, upcoming interactions with nature’s seasonal array of micropredators is all too likely to encourage further policies that seem bizarre and stupid until one realizes how profitable such lunatic practices have become. More is coming, in that regard, about ‘mental health medications’ and the pharmaceutical industrial complex generally; Dr. Martha Angell will take another star turn, and so will Robert F. Kennedy, who has written authoritatively about none other than Anthony Fauci.
Peter McCullough’s expert witness, along with the likes of James Corbett and Jeremy Hammond’s gifted journalism, may not be enough to discourage the biosecurity steamroller from inaugurating more lockdown, more coerced death shots, additional restrictions on the barely-any-longer-credible Bill of Rights. What happens then?
Every attempt to encapsulate biosocial exigencies as a series of signs, all imagery and blah blah blah, inevitably indulges triviality and error. Nonetheless, the vaunted goal of ‘Food For Thought’ arguably applies hither and yon, hopefully an accomplishment that BTR manages in different ways. Maybe nourishment for the spirit may even prove plausible.
A reader of such an underutilized resource as Julian Assange’s When Google Met WikiLeaks, noted above as in the current reading queue, will definitely realize that part of the plutocratic plan entails extensive ‘soft-power,’ a gently-throttling censorship, for instance, rather than Hitlerian strangulation. The simple profferals here are a small step, but they certainly seek to mirror and amplify more potent voices.
Always courageous and perspicacious, Russell Brand recently nailed this nugget relentlessly while a guest on Bill Maher. This is actual critical thought, right in the face of the Manufactured Consent monstrosity. Every English speaker around the globe should watch this twice a day.
Mint Press News, the promulgator of this delicious link, pretty perfectly palpates any progressive mediation effort, one of several collective expressions of independent radical thought and analysis that is essential for any actual popular advances to come to pass. One such advance would be stopping the state murder of an innocent man in Missouri next week or so.
I Tweeted about it. “Like in Dixie, https://hickeyj.substack.com/i/142689233/odd-beginnings-new-endingssouthern-socioeconomics-and-survival criminal law keeps slaves down; travesty's purposeful, relentless persistence evokes Native Son as ugly parody since Williams is innocent. Either we all wear nooses, or we stand & end this murder here that mirrors empire's slaughter abroad.”
In the meanwhile, erstwhile Liberal outlets—another dualism close to useless, especially now, is that between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’—such as Alternet have amped up their All-Trump-All-the-Time messages of hysteria, bringing to mind Upton Sinclair’s experience, running successfully as a Democratic Party nominee, in the early decades of the ReDemoPubliCratiCan Phalanx, and having the entire machinery of his own party turn on him and rescue the campaign for the Republican Party champion. Sinclair’s booklet on the topic, I, Governor and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future, sounds like it could readily apply to certain actors on the political scene today.
End Poverty in California, in any case, branded as socialist or worse—according to elite prayers, heaven should save us from the dreaded Bolsheviki of majority rule—ended up not a failed experiment, but a discarded idea, even as it mimicked some of what Roosevelt was trying in his attempt to save capitalism without another world war. In any case, Marx’s quip looks prescient.
In Trump’s steamrolling by the most established core of his establishment party any observer can see the obvious analogy with Upton Sinclair’s facing similar ‘treachery’ from the Democrats as Donald has been countenancing from the GOP. If every annal of historical repetition starts as tragedy and shows up a ‘second time as farce,’ then one might suggest that the reverse could also make perfect sense.
Nevertheless, life goes on. The question is whether we’ll start creating a People’s Mediation Movement among our less than plutocratic ranks. Here’s a neat clue; if anyone hopes to see such a PMM miracle, then he must stop watching CNN and Fox, and she must ditch MSNBC and cut way back on NetFlix.
Tom Lehrer just quipped, in his intro to “Send the Marines,” that the escalation in Vietnam and Dominican intervention in 1965 was making ‘people feel like Christian Scientists with a bad case of appendicitis.’ Only now it’s ten times worse.
I’ll repeat myself again. The Wood speaks. “Immutable, Indisputable:” “Indisputably & Immutably, Hydrogen Bombs Exist For Exactly Two Pragmatic Purposes, Further to Engorge Plutocratic Profiteers, on One Hand, &, on the Other, Further to Hasten Mass Collective Suicide; If Citizens Ever Tire of Financing Their Own Incineration Further to Fatten Trustafarian Corporate Coffers, Then They Can Rid Themselves of These Gruesome Armageddon Arsenals, Grim & Grisly & Ghoulish; Arguably, a Failure to Act Along Such Life-Affirming Lines Will Only Continue Among Criminally Insane Idiots, Psychopathic Fools Who Deserve the Fate That Awaits Them.”
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Goddess Goodness Guidance
‘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. Such elements appear here as well, juxtaposing, in the event, the empirical and the conjectural.
As well, morality and all its ineffable minions put in regular BTR appearances, whether in the form of examining Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism or last issue’s presentation of the complete Ten New Commandments or other items hither and yon in these pages. What should readers make of, or expect from, such spiritual pathways, ethical in form and moral in purpose?
The question may be apt, at bare minimum, or even centrally important. Perhaps a creed of some sort has proven pertinent or even primary in history’s repeated reforms and transformations of social dysfunction and systemic crisis. Christianity’s initiation could be comprehensible in just such a fashion.
One could intone ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ and remember 1789. To declare independence is also possible to view as invoking goodness and fairness and justice and so forth. So too did the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the last century have their own versions of ‘socialist ethics’ or ‘communist appeals to reason,’ what were essentially codes of conduct that appealed to majorities, Bolsheviki in Russian.
Before proceeding to the ‘questions for today,’ in this regard, a few words about work might be helpful, inasmuch as the phrase, “All Who Work,” begins six of the said Ten New Commandments, in the event mandates Three through Eight. A common objection is something along the lines that ‘some people can’t work.’
However, such a view is unsustainable if one considers the case calmly and common sensically. For example, one might recall the name for the process of birthing a child, which is to say labor. The name for any unfortunate tiny one who cannot participate in this grimy drudgery is simple: stillborn. Life begins when mother-worker and baby-worker, often joined by midwives and other helpers, participate purposefully in the ‘task at hand.’
Furthermore, if one’s brain operates, then one thinks things. Intellectual labor seems oxymoronic only to those whose ability to deploy intellect is limited, perhaps even untested, ha ha. Thus, as easily as that, sentient existence requires work. Further forays into Ten New Commandment territory, looking at background, implications, and attendant blah blah blah, appear now and again, moving forward.
For the moment, this chain of ideas suggests—to bejewel the here-and-now—a major pendant, so to say, a Spiral Spread query for Goddess Guidance along these lines. “How might people usefully ponder their relationship to moral credos or codes-of-conduct?" Openended and yet recognizably specific: just as we want our questions to be.
As the cards fell, this array appeared. Odysseus’ King of Swords put in a welcome appearance as the Essence. The Past, Present, Future triad, meanwhile, came on the scene as Athena’s Ace of Swords, first, Jason and his lover, Medea, in the Five of Wands, second, and Daedalus as supplicant in the Six of Pentacles. The recently popular Hercules, in the guise of Strength, occupied the key position of No-Matter-What, Opportunities. Embodied in The Lovers, the evocative, eerie, and thrilling story of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera—in their revenge premise ‘beauty contest,’ with the hapless, handsome Paris as judge—marks the reading’s Problems & Prospects, while a two-time appearance by Penelope produces the Synthesis, again in the potent expression of the Queen of Wands.
As has proved to be the BTR approach, a full illumination of this evocative spread of pretty paper follows below-the-fold. Before that happens, the Big Tent process has evolved to produce a three-card-sequence that addresses in some way either a more particular or more general issue in relation to the subject matter at hand, in today’s case this realm of righteous thinking and such.
Along these lines, such moral pondering yields a more focused Past-Present-Future array more particularly about the Ten New Commandments. “What are some ideas or insights about the Ten New Commandments?” That's super basic and general, but again, it's about something identifiably specified, ha ha, this story's minor decorative pendant, in the event.
Sometimes, accepting a rosy consummation, so to say, proves more difficult than does the job of facing equivocal or even grim feedback. Though we’ll defer most of the interpretation of this interlude till below-the-fold, it does suggest, as concerns these TNC matters, an altogether beneficent arc through the cosmos.
I insist, despite my occasional craving for a ‘gulp’ response, on enthusiastically affirming this 'read' of things, with Penelope's Queen of Wands as Past, … (continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)
(Chapter XIX ended thus. “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.”" Here is a link to the previous selection.
Today, we return to North America to meet a future Lou best buddy twenty years or so prior to that later development. He is a wild child in his own life and wild card in every ‘community’ to which he has the slightest connection.)
CHAPTER XX
***
Young Richardson couldn't enumerate all the ways that clued him, but “I've got a clue; believe me.” The old woman, Mrs. Fisher was her name, with her flashing diamonds and heavily rouged and wrinkled visage, looked down on him in a way that she didn't his older brother Don, in so doing disrespecting Rich in all his burgeoning glory as a sixteen year old god.
He was, after all, his school's “winningest quarterback ever” and therefore, as surely as night follows day bound for the varsity spot next season.” This and the fact that North Dekalb High's Junior Varsity football squad had won their division that year and come within a game of reaching the “State Finals for all of Georgia, which we could've won,” certainly encouraged his high opinion of himself, but his father's quiet appreciation of his younger son's grit and wit and “unwillingness to take shit” amounted to even more powerful inducement not to tolerate, past certain limits, discourteous or dismissive behavior from others. Mrs. Fisher, in the youth's estimation, had definitely exceeded these limits.
“That old lady's husband,” pliant and barely sentient, went along with this condescending condemnation. “He's probably a dickless wonder at this point,” Rich reasoned, not excusing him but not as visceral in his condemnation either as he concluded, “poor fucker.”
His dad had warned him that “people will judge you for the fact that I divorced your mom.” He didn't say what to do about this other than 'grin and bear it,' so his second born son, Richardson Thomason Dyson, who worshiped his father for his discipline, for his firm resolve to mold his sons, for the pistol that he carried as a result of his status as “a God-damned FBI special agent,” tried his best to maintain an attitude of detached amusement; after all, he was clearly superior to the people whose judgments so rankled him, “intellectually, physically, and morally, by God,” a being to whom he often referenced but seldom truly believed to exist.
The primary reason that Emily Walton Fisher looked askance at the otherwise estimable—at least on any surface level that she saw—Richardson was that, unlike his older-sibling-by-three-years, Donald Martin Dyson, Rich resolutely “refused to suck up to the old busybody,” who delighted in “sticking her nose as far as she could into everybody's business.”
“Who the hell she thinks she is,” Richardson would posit to himself, was not at all clear or justifiable, given that “she and her spineless spouse didn't even have a two bedroom condo, let alone a three bedroom place” like the Dysons occupied. Of course, she did sit on the Doraville Deluxe Condominium Board of Directors, “just like dad did—hell, he was the second guy to buy into the place—till he left.”
His mom's vodka habit and generally antisocial mien prevented her having any such position of authority, no matter how paltry or meaningless, so, in Rich's view, “the old biddy sticks it to me 'cause” Richardson would forcefully correct her any time that she implied something about Rosemary Dyson. “She's not dumb enough to insult her directly, but she constantly snubs her, asking about dad, asking about my fucking aunt and uncle, but not saying a thing about my fucking mother.”
Richardson would not let these diminutions pass. “I stick up for my Mom, even if she does act like a loser, a lot.” This was not his only assessment of the psychological and social basis for his sour interactions with she whom he now sometimes termed “an otherwise totally unimportant nearby Condo resident.”
He could articulate at least a handful of his theories, “like my not being an ass-kisser,” to accompany his conclusion that “that old lady hates me because I won't let her degrade Mom.” Such estimates of matters as these are, almost always, wrong, of course—something Rich would acknowledge instantly if challenged—both too simplistic and too Draconian.
But the fact remained: Emily Fisher openly showed her disdain for the athletic, affable, brilliant, and mercurial Richardson Dyson, and such clear condescension was, to say the least, “not a viable option” to the young scholar and athlete and “leader of people, too, just wait.” Just as Don was “way too much an airhead and a pussy hound to let” anything like the opinion of others bother him, Rich was “way too proud, maybe, but deservedly so,” he thought, “to not let it get under my skin, the way she disrespects me.” … (continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Libidinal Partnership’s Challenging Libations
Today, we return to the ‘most popular’ Driftwood Message Art category, to wit “Love & Erotic Passion.” Given the infinite variety of human erotic experience, this topic will appear again and again, and on and on. One way to render the realm of loving, arguably the most soulful and useful way, is to examine the partnership potential of passion and caring and carnality, in other words to ponder how love and mutuality can incarnate one’s own sustainable, salubrious, salacious slice of Heaven on Earth.
As a preface to this point, one may insist—quite reasonably—that, at minimum, parallel standards of honesty and ethics and such must apply in all one’s human relations affairs, or whatever one wants to label this social arena that makes us what we are. Quite correctly too must an observer see that this angling for partnering is a key instance of our seeking to participate in sweetly luscious society-building, so to say.
One of the first Marshall Arts Driftwood Messages ever, a variation of which my sweet youngest sister bought, embodies this notion at the foundation of Eros and Polis at once. It’s an idea both simple and supple, perhaps. “Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything!” A common motif over its many iterations is a human hand of many, many hues.
Yet well may we wonder what can actualize such a ‘Sermon-on-the-Mount’ sensibility, for joining hands and hearts and habitats with a lover must, merely as a matter of course, inherently strain this angelic soulful expression. Moreover, however we manage to deal with conflict, keeping one’s own counsel may often enough seem vastly superior to discoursing freely about the critical contents of one’s cognitive core, so to speak.
As a counterpoint, therefore, “Deception’s Doom” stands at the front of today’s actual queue, a sobering dose of caution about incautious catastrophe, as it were. "Almost Inevitably, Scratches & Nicks, Cracks & Chaos, Wounds & Their Attendant Scarring, Which All Committed Relationships Elicit, Induce One of Two Sorts of Effects: If Amicably & Honestly Navigated, & Then Negotiated Honorably, Such Daunting Difficulty, No Matter Its Delicacy Or Even Dire Danger, Will Generally Strengthen & Deepen & Heal the Passion & Engagement That True Lovers Share; If, Though, Evasion Or Nonchalance Or, Worst of the Lot, Deception Pervades the Partners' Responses to This Falling Out, Woe Filled Waters Must Unavoidably Loom Dead Ahead, & the Gloomy Doom of Dissolution & Demise May Soon Indeed Afflict the Theretofore Merrily Bonded Pair."
Inevitably, to some extent anyhow, identifiable autobiographical links connect all of these messages to my meandering among the mazes that mark our turns through things. This piece of wood, in particular, involved others outside the ‘theretofore merrily bonded pair,’ others in the event who had noticeable—perhaps nefarious—parts to play in ‘Doom’s Gloomy Dissolution & Demise.’
And truly, the trials and triumphs of a couple’s connections to wider social networks often, if not altogether generally, predispose preposterously putrid or passionately purposeful outcomes, as the case may be. A version of this view evinces an ongoing theme in this subcategory of the overall Marshall Arts love scheme. Here’s a nice followup to the first missives ‘precautionary principle,’ so to say.
“Sweet Friendship’s Soul Conjunction” is its name. "The Pointed Pulse of Our Potent Partnership Would Yield But a Paltry Punch Did We Not Always Leave Off Wheeling & Dealing As Faithful Friends Whose Social Soul Conjunction Vastly Outweighs Any Exclusively Economic Interests That We Share."
Madonna’s “Material Girl” comes to mind, ha ha. That money and health and food and home matter is duh-to-the-power-of-duh territory. That lasting connection may seem less than congruent with optimized cash flow, maximized monetary gains, or expanded equity in whatever game one makes of one’s existence, must at times appear uncertain, or worse.
People often enough use such estimates to annihilate relationship. The following item of Driftwood Message Art was a commission from a friend, sort of a wedding proposal gift, in this case gleefully accepted, albeit the union that resulted soon enough foundered on rocks vastly more connected with psychic than with mundane matters of lucre and sustenance and such.
“Closing Doors Cannot Open Hearts” is its name. "We Both Know—Maybe Too Well—How Easily One Can Close Doors So As to Feed Fantasies of Safety & Freedom: of Course, This Precisely Postulates How Miraculous Is Our Freely Made Choice to Open Together a Portal to Some Close Encounter With Eternity, an Approximation of Everlasting Ecstasy That Only a True Partnership Such As Ours Can Deliver."
As I’ve been fond of saying for a couple decades or so, “love is a choice!” One needn’t elect to engage and adore, but one may do so; it is always available as a possibility if one opens heart and mind and speaks clearly. Unfortunately, vast quantities of twenty-first century existence work to destroy any true potential for clarity and openness: cancel-culture, widespread censorship, official mis and disinformation always the ‘default position,’ and all kinds of additional blah blah blah.
“Clement Crescents & Tricky Deceptions” responds to this multiplicity of mediated phenomenal manure in the present moment. “Love & Friendship's Clement Crescent Envelopes Our Mutual Relations & Forms a Rugged Wedge That Supports Partnership & Undercuts Error Or Weakness Or Dissolution, a Social Phalanx That Cannot Take Shape in the Glare of Television's Hidden Agendas & Tricky Deceptions.”
The conclusion is as brief and pointed as Frederick Douglass’ incisive aphorism. “Life is struggle.” Yet Eros can thrive, and the libidinal alternative remains ever apt, available if one decides. Driftwood Message Art repeatedly affirms this conclusion, in any case.
“Dancing Delight” does this, for example. “Our Dancing Delight, At Once Wondrous Waltz & Tempestuous Tango, Rockets Us Each Day Toward That Mixture of Pulsing Passion & Psychic Serenity That Sustain Our Continuing Trajectory Together to Another Destined Dalliance On Life's Daunting & Yet Dreamy Dance Floor."
Most adult partnerships, if nothing else, emphasize issues of Eros and passion and play, a piquant and poignant palpation, which inevitably commingles all the dire dangers and alluring effervescence of erotic conjunction and ecstatic embrace. One cannot escape the contradictory eruptions when Polis meets Eros, no matter the mediating potential of Logos and the calming contributions of Ethos.
“Sublime & Dangerous” suggests this impassable connubial polarity. “Love's Ministrations, Ever As Sublime As They Are Dangerous, Invite Enamored Adventurers to Plunge Naked of All Defense Into Frothy, Passion-Lapped Pristine Waters of Venus' Virgin Coves, Even As Ecstasy's Thrall Beckons Other Smitten Swimmers to Dive Into Shark-Infested Depths of Murky Desire That Simultaneously Threaten Imminent Bloodbath.”
Surely, this individual experience of contrariety and risk continues unabated even when mated souls engage each other, even when the fieriest passion erupts ongoing explosions of encounter and epiphany. Persistence under such fraught conditions would necessarily prove a sine qua non of any truly partnered pairing.
No matter what, such stalwart loyalty must typify any erstwhile profound libidinal coupling, for example as suggested under the torrid title, “Molten Magma’s Melded Souls.” “Music That We Make During Our Mated Meandering, Whether in a Major Or Minor Key, Whether Cantata Or Concerto, Dirge Or Ditty, Bluesy Ballad Or Banjo Jig, Sings of the Melded Souls That We Manifest When We Compose Another Kiss to Yield Our Molten Magma's Melange of Succor & Syrup That We Sample Anew Each Day That We Tune Up Our Torrid Tantric Tango."
Ah, but this is hardly the half of it, ha ha. … (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: “Thus, not only does this conceptualization(of intertwining ‘development’ and ‘prohibition’)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," gross hypocrisy that practically guarantees politics even more corrupt than any Prohibition’s own falsity.
Part One is here. This is Part Two. Part Three has also passed, along with Four. Today’s fifth episode in our exploration continues to examine the opium-and-poppies congruence, whose natural history in identifiable ways parallels and illuminates our precise present passage.)
THE NETWORKING OF EMPIRE—PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION
Of the tens of thousands of powerful and fascinating sources that might guide the student in this area, a recent monograph assumes pride of place as a reference. History of the Opium Problem: the Assault on the East, 1600-1950, stands as the Dutch author’s magnum opus(), a deeply researched and profoundly thoughtful and staunchly thought-provoking monograph that shows equal measures of originality, erudition, and intelligence.
He documents Portuguese and Dutch and Italian endeavors. “The British and the French went further, with the important assistance of American smugglers and their clippers. From their ‘possessions’ in China and Southeast Asia, certain innovations in opium management were introduced.
They exported, furthermore, to the other side of the Pacific, the U.S.A., and the opium snake started to bite its own tail. Both are largely responsible for leaving a heritage of present production centers in Southeast Asia and the Middle East of world-economic importance. A new cycle of exploitation and repression of the minds of the people started, which could eventually be followed up by (Ahmed) Rashid’s ‘drug epidemic.’”
The analyses that predominate in this arena of drugs and empire and lucre present as central several aspects of this evolution of the bourgeois ascendancy. One was the simple availability of astounding profits that increased an individual’s or collective’s proceeds over other ventures’ gains by substantial margins in almost all instances. Moreover, opium, so valued was its presence in an exchange, acted as a substitute for the species of currency that Chinese merchants were otherwise liable to insist on receiving.
These same factors would later entice the English as well, of course, though earlier national networks laid the basis for what England executed over the century and a half from 1750 to 1900. A summary of Dutch historical experience in the 1600’s makes this case. It points out that engaging with opium trade permitted bypassing a need to produce hard cash, since poppy’s derivatives always found a market, ‘as good as gold.’
“Wijbrandt van Warwijck mentions the profitable trades in the Indonesian archipelago in his Noticiën ofte memoriën voor Capiteyn Witte of 1603. He includes opium in the list of items traded with Banda, Moluccas, and Atjeh. Governor-General reports in 1613 noted that ‘the Moluccas, Siam, Pegoe (Burma), and China are places where the trade in opium is profitable for the (Dutch East India Company).
In a description of the Indonesian archipelago from 1656 it is stated that in Brunei (Kalimantan), opium could be traded for gold dust and that in Jambi and Palembang (Sumatra) pepper could only be bought with opium or Spanish reels (silver). François Valentijn, a seventeenth century clergyman living in the Dutch East Indies, reports from his stay in Cochin (Java) in 1664 that opium is seen there as ‘the most important kind of profitable business.’”
The Dutch experience handily illustrates the way that European national force impacted widely dispersed parts of Asia during this period of capital’s early development. Malay, Indochinese(), and Indonesian traders formed cartels, organized joint ventures, and generally made plays to participate in this lucrative trade that stood at the center of so many varied transactions. Thus, one way of summarizing the initial potency of opium as an item of exchange was in its dual advantages of profitability and fungibility. It reliably boosted capital and acted as a grassroots ‘currency of account,’ so to speak.
Another element of this puzzle of power was logistical, even as geographical matters repeatedly made further impressions on socioeconomic relationships. The logistical expressions of opium worked both for small-scale, individual enterprises and shippers and on much higher levels, in relation to imperial plans and global strategies.
In relation to the former, merchants who would later have more or less absolute social cachet and political imprimatur started out humbly. But for the super-profits that associated with opium, for instance, the Astor family() might not have ruled New York society so fully for going on two centuries.
As with all logistics issues, the election to load opium was in part a matter of convenience. How to minimize runs devoid of cargo; how to maximize the return per load; how to make new routes and venues part of the firm’s regular retinue—these were the sorts of benefits that transporting poppy products permitted. Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean() led ineluctably to South and East Asia; a triangle developed in this way that reflected the more common triangulation of slaves and sugar and rum(), yet another cradle of capitalism that involved controlled substances().
Nor were the Astors the only American plutocrats to establish themselves via opiates. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, made the fortune that he bequeathed on FDR while running Russell and Company’s fleet of opium cutters, which in turn created the superstructure for the Sassoon billions that had blossomed from Baghdad banking roots to blanket the world with power on the basis of over and over and over again making the month-long voyage from Calcutta to Canton, in one direction with a load of fragrant opium, on the return laden with tea.
The Churchills, the Clives, and many more titled estates either came into being or avoided history’s dustbin because an opportunistic forebear had made a pact to sell opium to China and facilitate the transfer of tea to the British Isles and Europe. This story of commerce and wildness and lusty travel toward imperial rule appears in lyrical and evocative fashion in Amitav Ghosh’s recent novels, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, solidly research-based yarns that elicit from fiction potent correspondence with fact().
And this allows readers to reflect on the higher logistical plane on which opium also operated. Piracy and plunder and clever logistics had allowed England to co-opt or displace Spain and France and Holland and Portugal in the Americas(). In the form of tobacco and coffee and sugar and rum, furthermore, this imperial coup had depended() on consciousness-altering goods only slightly less intoxicating than Palaver’s alkaloids.
Unfathomable riches came forth from the soil and toil and blood of Africans and Native Americans, loot and lucre with which England and Europe… … (continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”Resuscitation”
(Part Three ended with this thought. “But my faith, the yearning for spirit—separate from gore—vanished as I awoke with a shrieking gag of terror and became an unremitting materialist." 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, very much on the other hand, delving the eerie way that his authentically lived experience calls ideas of an Afterlife into question.
Parts One, Two, and Three have been coming along for a few issues now. Today’s piece of the puzzle culminates this introductory briefing for a work that, like so much of the yarnspinning that happens here, might quite readily result in epic saga cycles, an almost everlasting narrative spin so long as enough of us live and breathe to pay attention.)
Most people have trouble accepting such a view, and of course some reject it out of hand. I understand. After all, I too, for the better part of five decades, accepted as axiomatic that spirit was separate from and in some ethereal way superior to the materiel, as it were. of skin and blood and bones and such.
Given the sadness and discomfort that this abandonment of earlier beliefs brought ot me, not only do I sympathize, but in the true sense of the word, I also empathize. The views I have no choice but to accept are harsh, but their reality, I now contend with my life on-the-line every time that I speak, is the factual foundation for the miracle of our actual biosocial existence.
Those who would enforce an opposite view want their eternity in heaven, and pray that I spend mine in endless hellish pain instead of having an endless nothingness await. Since consciousness has arisen in our species, the stark face of this truth about our final fate has fed life after death fantasies that are impossible to sustain in the face of what happened to me. More importantly, though, these fantasies absolutely prohibit dealing with the actual potential that exists in the life that we do have, now and not hereafter.
I have intimate personal acquaintance with this dynamic—this repression of the reality of grace’s potential by a sense of shame or guilt or horror at humanity’s inevitable imperfections. After I returned, I wanted to kill myself for months. I felt, surviving the ordeal, that I had harmed my drowned and truly dead former love-mate.
She too had gotten the treatment that revived me but to no avail. My inner loathing of myself would not let me go till a basic epiphany subsumed my being and started this whole book process.
Realizing that, truly, I had returned from the dead, I came to comprehend that I only began an honest existence when I recognized the finality of death. As nine billion people face today's multiple intersecting crises, overwhelmingly, we look to soul sources for salvation.
My experience, however, suggests that a generalized acknowledgment of a radically carnal creed would better serve us: that the capacity to feel a measure of ecstasy in miserable moments; the sense of some heat at the core of that which is coldest; the ability to love and nurture the children who are our only organic link to anything akin to everlasting existence necessitate a frank admission of the facts of life and death, instead of clinging to the notion, and insisting on the primacy of the chimera, that a 'soul' inside of us will continue to live after us.
When the Nazarene claimed that ‘the kingdom of God is at hand,’ my understanding now teaches that he did not mean ‘about to happen,’ but instead wanted to convey that our own actions and handiwork made a heavenly existence available for much of any ordinary person’s passage through matters at hand.
To those whose hearts I wound with these words, I apologize. These ideas contradict as well the way that I lived before I died for the first time. But as much as I hoped and prayed for the face of God to appear to me then, nothing came; nothing except nothing.
The mystery of death will always be with us. And people's faiths are their own, to nurture and develop as they see fit. I just ask anyone willing to listen to consider: perhaps the time has come for a change. Perhaps in fashioning some sort of meaning out of living in the omnipresence of death, we need to seek our magic in blood and our power in science.
If, truly, lived glory is solely accessible through a soulful and respectful grokking of life as a death trip in which the journey allows Life Force Energy to manifest that add up to more than any death could ever take away. It’s like a ‘Bottom-Line-Life Bomb,’ maybe. Ha ha.
I'll leave you with these ideas for the moment. I've got a surprise announcement, a real doozy, but it can wait until I've dispensed signatures, answered questions, and we've sucked down some coffee and wolfed a few cookies and such. Thanks very much!" … (continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Explicating Immigrant ‘Invasions’
These days, the sense is as palpable as it seems imminent, as sinister as it appears unstoppable, that a conspiracy is unfolding, of invasion and violation by hordes of others, somehow or other different from the perfect angelic natures that our kith and kin bring to the fore—no matter how laughable that POV may seem to anyone who understands biology. No doubt, nonetheless, from an anthropological perspective, a certain degree of clannishness goes with the terrain that humans inscribe with their presence.
We are clannish creatures. If we can agree on a reasonable definition of clannish—something like a primate or Homo tendency to favor kin or affiliation networks as a source of comrades and companionship and community—this would be a fact that all and sundry would likely stipulate. If nothing else, it instantiates the sensibility behind the present promotion of various and sundry “Nepo Baby” notions.
Furthermore, powerfully propagated and promoted propaganda pervades every single enculturating experience on Earth these days. Even if one family or small group evades the constant influx of inputs, they cannot evade the ‘Eye-of-Sauron’ infiltration of their lives to yield an information-archive of outputs. ‘Isolated’ indigenous groups thus somehow end up on the covers of glossy magazines: magic.
This purposeful mediation includes a particularly sinister element that dovetails with a plausible human proclivity to glance askance at outsiders and oddballs and such. Not only are they different and weird, or so these tropes develop the point, but they also are nefarious, violent, criminal, or otherwise evil. In environs of what we might call ‘stable geography,’ where people stay put and make do, such ethnocentrism, innate and inculcated alike, might merely evoke merely benign cultural influences.
When the very structures and processes of organized human existence promote instability—mayhem and carnage and fear, for instance—folks who live through repeated assaults on peace and reason will flee; this is historically irrefutable. Russell Banks brilliant novel, Continental Drift, depicts at once the shimmering allure and the grotesque aggravation of such expressions of ‘the human race in motion,’ as it were.
Here’s a sample: “Haitians keep on coming and many of them are drowned, brutalized, cheated, and exploited; . . . [and] men in three-piece suits behind the desks in banks grow fatter and more secure and skillful in their work; . . . [and] young American men and women without money, and trades instead of professions, go on breaking their lives trying to bend them around the wheel of commerce." Anyone who fails to hear some ‘ringing bells’ is at least as ‘deaf as a post.’
Also, as noted in the Introduction above, I’ve been reading Robert Penn Warren’s Wilderness another tale of migratory wandering in search of an ‘American dream,’ in which a Jewish young man, despite a ‘mulefooted’ deformity, wants to follow the ways of his dead, to-the-ramparts and radical father, but in the youth’s own way, by having a boot fashioned to straighten his gait and thus allow him to gain free passage to North America, where he can fight “fur die Frieheit,” and gain U.S. citizenship.
He is Jewish, however, and, through many trials and tribulations discovers how his co-religionists have made fortunes off of slavery even as they support its decimation in favor of Union. For penance, and to discover what to do, he plunges forward toward a guerilla military service, since the Union Army won’t have him.
He ends beaten, nearly broken, having killed a man for the first time, and shoeless to boot, as a consuming forest fire approaches his hillside Virginia perch. “Adam Rosenzweig crouched there. …(H)e had begun to feel, with a slow, dawning sense of awe… .(h)e might be able to rise and do what he would have to do, as he had done what, in the compulsion of his dream, he had had to do. Yes, he had only done what he had had to do, he decided, good or bad. He decided that much—slowly, carefully, painfully,…bend(ing) to lift a weight beyond his strength because there is no one else there to lift it. Yes, he was only human, he thought. Yes, and if necessary, he would do it all again, he decided.
He stared at the rifle, lying there absurd and lost like a toy. Yes, he thought, staring at the rifle. He would do it all again.” And thus comes the voice of the traveler whose dreams pull him along. Nothing will stop him.
Banks’ sojourner, on the other hand, speaks of the trekker who moves because forces of that rifle explode all about his head and drive him to find some place to stand and live instead of only having the option either to dye in bloody, fiery carnage or to waste away in starvation and dysentery. One immigrant’s story stems from the inauguration of empire while the other’s is branching the dying limbs of imperial self-immolation.
Maybe a note from the Union’s Commander in Chief, from his Second Inaugural Address, in fact, might speak to this dynamic. I’ve substituted Empire or Imperial for “slave” and “slavery” and such. On Autumn’s cusp in 2024, as in Winter 1865, perhaps, “(n)either party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.
"Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American Empire is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South (America) this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the Imperial Victim's one hundred and sixty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'
‘With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’"
Last issue also had a few things to say about migratory patterns and attendant blah blah blah. It will serve additionally to initiate my long-lost precis of this topic. Humility aside, Lincoln might approve.
“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,” one can only implore that actual citizen-to-citizen dialog happens again in the United States, despite the odds against such a realization.
Furthermore, of course, actual conversations must happen between those whose passports testify to their own sacred citizenship and the Clandestinos and Desaparecidos who grace the ghostly poignant lyrics of Manu Chao. Well might they wonder, along with these ‘disappeared’ beings, “Cuando llegare?” “When do we arrive?”
Slavery, exploitation, and theft have much more obviously marked American history than have liberation, generosity, and recompense. Unless one is obtuse indeed, this contention is a Los Hechos Hablan Por Si Solos moment, simply irrefutable. For anyone who tries to finesse the self-destructive, self-righteous hypocrisy of those who would crucify border-breachers, he might insist of such arrogance: “Let’s ask a Cherokee!” Or she might adjure, “Why don’t we give back Texas and the rest of the lands that we stole?”
Many years ago now, I wrote the brief little note below for the Examiner website as a precis for pondering these issues of people in motion and people in search of safe and secure homes, all in the context of twisted-sister history that most folks insist they should desist from learning. The essay’s handful or so of paragraphs remain potent in further introducing BTR’s first consideration of this top-of-the-tier concern for many citizens these days.
“Immigrant ‘Invaders’ in the Days of Our Great Great Grandparents” was its title, from Autumn 2009, if I remember correctly. “These days, along I-20 from Atlanta to Birmingham, State Troopers seek out ‘illegal immigrants,’ trying to catch and eject them from ‘America.’
Eighteen decades ago, along substantially the same route, the leaders of Georgia—who had recently inaugurated the country’s first ‘Gold Rush’ in Dahlonega—and Alabama—who were readying river valley properties for slaves to work—were preparing to throw out local native inhabitants so that the conquering European immigrants could do whatever they liked. Those who like ironic history will love today’s story.
In mid October in Alabama, the local Choctaw Indians were finishing preparations for the first Indian Removals, approved by the U.S. Congress in May, 1830. Nitikechi, the Choctaw leader, was to call the forced relocation ‘a trail of tears and death.’
Famed French commentator de-Tocqueville wrote his mother about this situation. ‘Americans of the United States… .reasonable and unprejudiced, and great philanthropists to boot, have taken it into their heads, as did the Spaniards, that God had given them the new world and its inhabitants in full ownership.’
He described ‘an air of ruin and destruction’ as the U.S., ‘reasonable’ in its processes, carried out this ‘final and irrevocable’ eviction of Alabama’s rightful owners, including a 110 year old woman, starving to death, surrounded by grandchildren. ‘To leave one's country at that age to seek one's fortune in a foreign land, what misery!’
In Georgia, meanwhile, across the Northern reaches of present day metro-Atlanta and stretching into other jurisdictions, authorities were preparing to dismantle Cherokee settlements. The Legislature, having made communicating with Cherokees a crime, was planning to divvy up these properties among eager Whites when missionary Samuel Worcester, whom the gendarmes had chased into Tennessee the previous Summer, returned to bury his deceased daughter.
Catching Worcester in Gwinnett County again, these ‘police’ arrested him and brought him to trial in September, 1831. He was en route to Milledgeville in mid-October, where a judge had sentenced him to spend ‘four years at hard labor’ for the offense of talking to the legal owners of Georgia.
This travesty of justice resulted in one of America’s most famous Supreme Court cases, Worcester v. Georgia, that both ordered the preacher freed and demanded that the Peach State respect Indian property. President Andrew Jackson defied the High Court, however, and led his crew of U.S. immigrants on their merry way, throwing out the original inhabitants from throughout the South."
In fact, Georgia’s response was even more ‘treasonous.’ … (continued below the fold)
Erotic Snippets—”The Survivor Effect,” Number Two
“Staying Horny While Hiking, Or, P-L Blue-Ridge-Parkway Pipelines”
They were, putting the case mildly, an unlikely couple. Not so much physically as psychically: she was petite and fair; he was stout and swarthy, yet, as ‘better halves,’ they fit like peas moistly nestled in a warm pod. Martagena was a materialist, however, Sir Charles a fervent metaphysician in realms at which—at least inwardly—she scoffed with a measure of derision.
What she labelled “our congressional work,” in any event, paved the way to longlasting potential in their connubial conjunctions, replete with conflagrations and tsunamis, so to say. Neither one of them had any apparent inclination, in spite of the sweet glee of their gatherings, to cement their coupling exuberance onto anything even modestly kin to persistent cohabitation.
He considered her a slob slightly less than she judged him a “spiritual control freak,” but continuous proximity would inevitably cause sparks to fly and tempers to flare. This was especially so since they both were young enough, and still wild enough, to enjoy, for its own superheated sake, a good raging exchange, even if such exercises ultimately yielded little better than foolhardy venting.
To imagine that they would create an ongoing shared fiery freewheeling intimate habitat—a home for the soul forever and the body for as long as they lingered together—was a sojourn that they had never before contemplated as a continuous arrangement. That they did enjoy their come-hither connections, voraciously and vociferously, did not signify even a semblance of permanence in their bunking collaboratively, again even though they now seemingly shared, in some senses anyway, a common ship of fate.
Yet embark they had, on a three-week bike trek that Charlie, realizing his lover’s inclinations, had named ‘our inaugural Southern spelunking tour,’ promising that it would ‘soon enough be one of our annual events.’ They promised to make every cave a grotto for cunning linguistic exercises, full of phallic protrusions and vulval entries to paradaisically heated streams.
She loved fucking, regardless, but she especially reveled in finding odd declivities in which to nestle and nuzzle and frolic. Inevitably, she fancied caving as a result. “I get so wet,” she gushed during one of their initial conversations about all of this.
Why she found caverns sexy wasn’t anything so easy as the allure of deep, mysterious holes from which life poured forth. No such blah blah blah was at work, or, in any event, she didn’t find such a thought even slightly satisfying.
“It’s the smell,” she thought to herself. Whatever else may be true, her inclinations to descend saved her life, and the persuasive power of her pussy prompted a fine figure of a fellow to follow her underground on the fateful day that, by the magic of mutual assent, people all and sundry now referred to as ‘the Leveling,’ with attendant labels of B-L and P-L as a consequence.
For his part, whatever his G.U.R.U. facade, Charlie was a typical, simple, if ‘highly evolved,’ bloke. He wanted to gain aplomb by providing pleasure. He sought the succoring of the spirit in the steamy surcease of the flesh. He probably resembled Augustine when that ancient worthy still fondly facilitated his long-ago automatic abandon with his lover and concubine.
Our two modern day protagonists had started their tour by cycling into Luray’s famed environs from the Days Inn off 81 in Winchester, their vehicles safely tucked away in an adjacent weedy lot whose owner was one of Charlie’s acolytes. Marta had brought both bicycles, outfitted with four overlapping side-saddlebags more or less stuffed with all manner of glamping gustatory grubbings, various survivalist provisions, honeyed lozenges, supplements, vitamins, and all sorts of additional cosmically groovy blah blah blah.
Moreover, the heavy-duty frames managed to fit, directly below and slightly behind the seat in ergonomic, perfectly balanced, and unobtrusive fashion fully five gallons of water, in a pinch almost an individual’s weekly supply. She smirked only slightly when, on a different sort of lubricious tack, as it were, she averred that ‘you’re going to need that extra hydration once I wind you up.’
Given that they both fondly fancied fucking on psychedelics too, they inaugurated their entire leisurely process—albeit physically rigorous and generally unrelenting, especially over uphill stretches of their ambit—by gobbling down some rare organic Mescaline that Sir Charles had scored for their stores. They were hallucinating in the aforementioned Luray Caverns, one of the oldest stops on any ‘Standard American Cave Tour,’ as it were, and actually stayed the night in the deepest gloaming of plying parry and thrust that either of them had ever experienced.
Their feisty frenzy at the New River Cave Nature Preserve, two weeks hence, was the second overnighter that they pulled, all inside as Marta chortled the interlude, underground and with only some coverlets and each other to keep their fires alight. When they interlinked their two ‘69 foam pads,’ they had adequate padding for various daisy-chain interlinking intercourse play, fucking, sucking, licking, and sticking to each other with warm dripping slurpy fury. And so the night passed.
Just over another week later, they still had two stops on their ‘tour de force,’ slated to finish at the Pinnacle Natural Area Preserve—with an ‘afterthought’ foray to Gap Cave in the Cumberlands also plausible—when they arrived after a newly mandated early afternoon closing in suburban Roanoke. Completely inflamed and yet also close to dropping from twenty-two straight days of libidinal extremity, they almost took another commercial room before Marta remembered a ‘super-secret special spot,’ “literally not two blocks from downtown Salem.”
In whatever way we recall all of this, however, on the fateful day in question, literally as 1,159 thermonuclear warheads were en route to the continental United States—812 of them actually detonated—Marta and Charlie were bumping and grinding enthusiastically in an eerily lit anteroom to the Dixie Caverns main chamber, near Salem, Virginia and—though they only met immediately prior to this crazed expedition—stating, shouting joyfully, a clearly ‘everlasting affinity’ for each other.
Here, in their putatively penultimate underground cavorting on their ‘first annual cave trek,’ they had navigated toward privacy in one of the forums that Marta knew well. They had to ‘jump the turnstile,’ because of their late in the day arrival, but Marta knew all the tricks, and Charlie was always up for adventure.
Having shed their clothes like Autumnal leaves in a gale drop their foliage all about, the two-backed beast that cast its undulating shadow on dripping limestone walls, illumination courtesy of ‘authentic’ battery-operated ‘torches,’ dallied a merry prancing dance of daunty frolicking delight. They knew that their expedition was coming to its close, yet they had the enthusiasm of healthy virgins who had been longing to leave innocence behind.
For this glorious expression of ecstasy, their yelps and cries and giggles and groans keened a sweet soundtrack, so to speak, for the adventure that took them from peak to peak. Martagena later did recollect, in her most empirical cognitive core, ‘a slight vibration that deviated from background,’ in actual fact the incineration of Knoxville at one such juncture and, at the other, the utter annihilation of Pittsburgh—where an aggregate twenty-odd megatons exploded more or less as one. On the day itself, she had, instinctually, categorized such phenomena as a different sort of ‘earthshaking experience,’ ha ha.
Blissfully unaware of the ‘big-bang without,’ their ‘big-bang within’ delivered that reliable ecstasy that indicates Life-Force-True-Love or whatever other label one might like. Thus, well in advance of their discovering the fix in which fate had landed them, they had made a mutually internalized pact that, in the words of the marriage song, ‘no man should tear asunder.’
For the first time hand-in-hand, an especially intimate conjoining for both of them, they neared the exit to find that rock-and-roll concatenations did not explain the cacophony of sirens and bells and horns and human screams that created a hideous sonic design as they approached the oval opening. Alarmed, yet not yet at all terrified, they snagged a woman, bereft and frantic and barely clothed, and asked her what was happening.
“The bombs, the bombs, the bombs, the bombs!” she wailed with a shrieking howl, pointing toward the sky and tearing her hair as she continued her flight, her piquant squeals a counterpoint to the symphony of misery that palpated the late Summer breezes. Now they knew. And of course this left them with multiple problematic decisions to deal with the day’s unrequested yet all-too-well-deserved developments.
In the ordinary unfolding of Charlie’s antinuclear activism, one of the subplots, so to speak, that he had found irresistibly compelling was possible places on the planet where one just might avoid a bit of the toxic and most deadly components of thermonuclear war. Now, they had two weeks—“the absolute minimum we must stay inside,” Marta had insisted, to let the fallout fall down—to ponder what to do.
They had a lot less sex, yet they still fondled and freely feasted on each other. Mainly, they considered whether ‘trying to survive would be worth the effort.’
Furthermore, to facilitate worthy judgment about such momentous ruminations, a truly serendipitous mixture of essential factors had coalesced in their finding themselves entwined with each other, ensconced in a safe place with filtered air, reprovisioned thanks to Marta’s wanting always to ‘worry the world into existence,’ and provided with already downloaded maps and other items—after all, they had reasoned, ‘maybe we’ll lose our signal’—that could guide their thinking till batteries drained or generated electrical current again became available.
The maps and some of Charlie’s geographical knowledge established cornerstones for a ‘survival guidance,’ a way forward once the great culling’s completion had crescendoed out in the great, wide world. “I don’t know—can’t know—if all speculation in favor of the Hot Springs Crescent is true,” but, he assured his lover and, for all he knew now, the ‘last woman on Earth,’ everyone in Charlie’s ‘talking circle’ believed that a time-out-of-mind wind pattern meant that neither the billion pounds of megadeath in Erwin, or the radioactive debris from 8,669 Hydrogen bombs—only two thirds of them hit targets; the remainder exploded in the atmosphere or in a close orbit to the globe—would for the most part bypass the areas near Hot Springs, North Carolina because of the unique features of that scene’s riverine ridges and valleys and several salubriously serendipitous microclimates.
Analyst that she was, Martagena made some rough calculations—statistical epidemiology can conceivably model just about “any biospheric phenomenon, or so Charlie’s sweet practitioner asserted. ‘Bitter-enders’ that they both were, not at all inclined to ‘go gentle into that good night,’ they chewed it all over and plotted their plans as best they could manage.
“Overall,” she assured him, “there’s at least five hundred square miles that will mostly avoid most of the most toxic fallout wind patterns.” When he stared, she muttered, “I mean if your data has any validity at all.” She was about to keep at her discursive nerdiness when he laughed, and she paused.
“You sound like you’re pitching a dissertation topic to your academic guru.” His impish grin hung on his face as if painted. She joined in his merriment; they kissed. Their conversation continued, as always combining carnality with thinking caps.
While some of the local rockhounds ascribed the ‘mantle of protection’ that characterized the Northeastern borderlands of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to mineral-based expressions of ‘rising to some higher light,’ Marta could see the grid and recognize a plausible pattern—of diverted West winds, Easterly winds almost always askew, and practically no air from either due South, toward the Bomb Plant in South Carolina, or from directly North, where nineteen nuclear power stations were now seething charnal pits for a few centuries or much, much more.
However differently Sir Charles and Ms. Martagena might delineate their pass, their passion, and their awareness, their shared craving never swerved from following the tracks available to seek continued conjunctions of gushing glory. That required their survival, obviously, in regard to which a specific ‘choice-of-venue’ decision was obvious. … (continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Depleted Uranium: an Initial Primer
(Part One of this ‘Initial Primer’ series included an update, since the research and writing of this piece happened many years ago. This demonstration of horrific and insidious health consequences of DU, all of which persist, have, if anything, worsened over the past couple decades.
Part Two ended with the following paragraph. “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.")
A more contemporary reality orientation needs to include some additional points. Next issue will start with these. For now, a few truth-seeking notions are notable in the continuation of the text from #19.
…From an entirely different angle from that of our ‘electoral entertainment,’ considerations about the nature of epidemiological knowledge and proof—expediting an epistemology of science that is socially real—may seem a nerdy consideration. On the other hand, Dr. Chris Busby indicates how closely tied to healthy children, for example, are such matters of methodology.
"These(common sense but often hidden notions) are the methods of science. Those who seek to apply these methods to the examination of a number of contemporary questions might be understandably confused.
A good example... is the question of increases in childhood leukemia associated with nuclear sites. According to all of the routines of science outlined above it should be now universally conceded that low-level radiation exposure to man-made radioactive substances released from nuclear plants, like what Sellafield, Dounreay, and Cap de la Hague cause, increases the risk of child leukemia."
But even to suggest this as possibility invites the derision and assault of nuclear trolls seemingly as ubiquitous as blogs about business. Brave bravos and tough soldiers have faced such mincing attacks with an equanimity born of battle hardening.
The responsibility for the facts of life, and for learning the multiple dimensions of ethics and justice in terms of modern technical forms, must inherently involve teaching and learning. We know so much, and yet what we need to have learned has so far eluded us.
Some upsurge of popular education must transpire that lets us join in solving these problems together when we can get along enough to do so, at the same time that we learn what forces to resist when the only 'unity' possible is false and counterproductive. As one of the forms of 'Transition,' the Trapese Popular Education collective, stated this point.
"In the 21st century we face unprecedented ecological, social, and climatic crises. ...(P)opular education, is vital to much needed, meaningful radical social change. An education where we relearn co-operation and responsibility, that is critically reflective but creatively looks forward—an education that is popular, of and from the people, such a ‘learning curve’ is the only geometry congruent with survival.
(Such) education aims at getting people to understand their world ... so they can take back control collectively. ...'Its curriculum comes out of the concrete experience and material interests of people in communities of resistance and struggle. It is focused primarily on group as distinct from individual learning and development. It assumes a direct connection between education and social change'"
If we can hear, such a view, which Dr. Busby and his colleagues affirm in full, is the tocsin bell of sustainability pealing away. A few assumptions may have to peel away as well. But a humane existence is inconceivable otherwise; mere survival arguably may depend on just such a process. … (continued below the fold)
Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—”’United in Blood’”
(The original title included the phrase, “Against Empire.” It also presented a subheading, to wit this: “Neruda, Jara, & Chilean Culture’s Social-Solidarity Impact.” As a matter of course, this seven part series is only the beginning. People might even benefit from knowing these things.)
OVERTURE
As always, one might present the nub of today’s script simply. One chronicler has stated the matter under consideration like this: “The division of labor among nations is that some of them specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throat of Indian civilization.”
The winners are frequently easily recognizable, among them the likes of Henry Kissinger and Citibank; Richard Helms and the Central Intelligence Agency; the Guggenheim interests, the Rockefeller interests, and the panoply of well-heeled conquerors who dot the modern prospect. The losers often seem less obviously noteworthy or famous—Salvador Allende, Victor Jara, and Rene Schneider simply don’t have the same name recognition as, say, Richard Nixon does.
Those whose lives the winners snuffed out, sometimes in a hail of bullets and other times through hunger and more protracted forms of attrition, had many different hopes and dreams. Though one might easily have chosen differently, this essay focuses on some of those ‘losers’ who believed in social justice and social democracy, particularly in Chile during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The ‘winners,’ on the other hand, possessed a much more uniform consciousness and set of goals. They sought profit over all else; most importantly, they organized to crush the merest hints of any workable expression of sharing, of mutuality, of popular empowerment. They organized themselves in trust-funded operations that served a single purpose: the promotion and persistence of monopoly empire. Understanding these points about the commonly-held attitudes among history’s victors is at least half the problem of understanding why these travails have played out as they have.
As always with the Spindoctor’s profferals, this article is lengthy. One may alleviate the burden by noting that the analysis here occurs in many sections. One a day, or one a week, might seem more manageable than any idea of gulping down the whole in one slurp.
With very few exceptions, the dramas and conflicts, the heroics and horror, that took place in and around Santiago Chile during the thirty years from 1960-1990 did not happen to the readers of this document. Thus, in order to dig into the heart and soul of these struggles for human decency and the battles of the above ‘winners’ against them, one needs a willingness to identify with both sides of the ‘class war’ that unfolded in these environs plus-or-minus forty years ago.
Identification with those who prevailed is much easier, since they own or control, along with most everything else on our fair planet, the means of production of information and knowledge. They hold the keys to the secrets that they still hide away. Identification with those who lost, often dying for their actions and beliefs and songs, presents a thornier problem. We have to try harder to see and feel what they underwent.
Such empathy, however, clearly does depend on imagination. Verses like these necessitate a fierce delving of plausible meaning, for example, while we fight to maintain our composure and avoid nervous distraction that borders on fear.
“How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment.”
One might picture a large stadium in one’s mind’s eye, at the cusp of a Southern Hemisphere Spring, ten days from the Vernal Equinox. The pitch has a huge table in the very center, its top splotched with mottled blood and pieces of flesh, patches of hair and tissue. At all the exits and facing the stands are uniformed men, most carrying assault rifles, all their faces grim and sleep-deprived except when the occasional joke or comment elicits derision and cackles; a few gather in groups around .30 and .50 caliber machine guns. They point these instruments of management and death casually at the stands.
These weapons have already killed a few score of the many thousands—some say only 5,000 or so, others that more than 10,000 were present, under arrest and awaiting their fate—who face their captors like cattle that are conscious of hamburger. One of the men among the captives, in what would be a sparse crowd for either a soccer finale or a ‘friendly’ with visiting gringos, seeks to give comfort to those present. Though fear constrains his voice, he sometimes leads songs.
At one point during the third day of this ‘spontaneous’ upwelling of fascism that took place in Santiago de Chile in the period after September 11, 1973, this man, whose name is Victor, approaches one of the commandantes with a request from an ailing comrade. The officer, at first impassive, grins with sadistic glee when he recognizes the speaker, mimicking a simpering guitarist, eyes arched inquisitively.
Victor’s face blanches. He must sense what is pending. At a signal from their leader, soldiers seize him by the elbows and lead him to the central stage.
Seated at the grimy table spattered with slime and fluid, he finds himself surrounded. Two men restrain him from rising. A third man extends his right arm, a fourth his left, into the bloody mess on the sturdy wooden surface where he sits, trembling. Another teniente smacks him in the head each time that he balls his fists. Ultimately, he splays his fingers, and the pistol-whipping stops. … (continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
“Nous sommes arrivés", or ‘We have arrived again.’ Ha ha. Life’s ever robust and yet oh-so-delicate miracle of embodiment invites a sojourner’s engagement and input about all that is happening, all that we scheme, each magical realization that we dream might define our delighted sensibilities about our transit. Yet we must beware!
Only in fantasy does will assume primary position, over objective reality, over history, over the agendas of everyone else in existence, ha ha. Given this complex intertwining of factors, in any event, understanding understandably defines an essentially primary precondition for effective action on one’s own behalf. Thus comes the fluff and glory of a Big Tent’s production.
Here, in the meantime, readers who have made the grade, ha ha, will see today’s final instance of the new, Random Link Litany Shtick, a feature that in this last iteration will always in fact be a ‘randomly selected’ grouping. Ready, set, read: the first bit, and here the only one, so late at night, emerges with a science policy genius’ take on how “The Scientific Establishment Is Turning Science Into a Tool of Oppression.”
Jay Bhattacharya, no lightweight, teaches and provides intellectual leadership from his perch at Stanford. Well might a citizen who likes the idea of survival pay attention.
—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)…
…Daedalus' Nine of Pentacles for the Right-This-Second, and, standing up for future forecasts, Hermes' tricky triumphant initiation of the hero's journey as The Magician. This provides, or perhaps more minimally permits, a fairly astonishing narrative nuance in relation to the interrogatory of the day.
Penelope’s story resonates powerfully regarding the actual fiery, ‘burning-bush’ origins of the Ten New Commandments. The staunch spouse of wandering Odysseus, she represents “warmth, constancy, loyalty, and the creative sustaining of a vision,” a description that must pretty obviously epitomize the interactions with Gaia, or whatever was occupying my brain like the Romans occupied Gaul during the week or so after my own personal “burning bush experience.”
Just in case, here’s how #19 more or less implied today’s ‘conversations-with-the-Goddess’ moment. This will provides dandy reference point both for all that remains, and to an extent, for what’s already passed, ha ha.
“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.’"
Where Penelope enters the picture, to pose a portrait, is in my response to the incessant obsession with having had this entire series implanted in my brain. Even if I feel ineffectual, and a little silly, doing so, I still indeed persist in pursuing passionate TNC propagation. And, once more as with the good Queen, that I do so is a dandy deed.
Perhaps most telling, this fierce insistence on actualizing something has in fact yielded a present passage through All-That-Is in which this little Storytelling exercise—and multiple others, now and again, ha ha—unfolds so as to substantiate and call for us to shout ‘Hallelujah’ for the potential that human life might operate based on something like these Ten New Commandments themselves. If not celebrating a fruitful harvest, it definitely notices a plentiful yield in the field, as it were.
Daedalus’ Nine, in the event, proffers ideas about this contemporary arena. And again, the news is happy and soothing. At the heart of this juncture in the arc of his story, our kind’s legendary first craft master can deservedly appreciate his own endeavors and attainments. So too with my sense of this TNC pearl, so to say.
The Nine “is a card of reward and achievement in one’s own eyes, and we know that even if no one else acknowledges the value of what has been achieved, it is worthy because we know it to be so from within.” Thus, “(m)ore than a card of worldly achievement,” Daealus’ yarn here emphasizes “finding a deep and permanent sense of self-value, which has been earned through the hard work of meeting life’s challenges on a material level and, somehow, surviving them all.”
The story of the world’s first craftsman and business operative marks the suit of Pentacles and thereby might indicate that a truly operational and grounded TNC presence could evolve and bloom in real life, ha ha. As I’ve said over and over again, even to myself almost as often as I toss out an ‘I told you so,’ “it’s a thought.”
To an extent, the trickster and messenger Hermes then augurs the rational concept of Future Prospects that mirror the God’s ever salubrious spirit and potency. How could the situation be otherwise when the pluck for Tomorrow gives us the colorful card with the subtitle, more or less, of “Hidden Talents” or “Undiscovered/Undeveloped Potential?”
Hidden mysteries? Hermes “(t)hus…is the child of both spiritual light and primordial darkness, and his colors—red and white—reflect the mixture of earthly passions and spiritual clarity which are part of his nature.” He ended up with the profound gift of divination, “worshiped at crossroads where statues called Herms were erected to honor him and invoke his blessings on the traveler, the wanderer, and the homeless.”
In such a context, the evolution of a TNC must appear propitious indeed, particularly inasmuch as “no matter how lost or confused we might be at any point in life, there is something within which has the foresight and resources that are often hidden from consciousness but which can divine what direction to take and what choices to make.” In seeking to facilitate a TNC existence, as a consequence, “Hermes, The Magician, points to potential skills and creative abilities which have not yet manifested.”
Altogether, this strongly suggests a hopeful cast to the triptych inquiry of the day. On the other hand, the seven-card question from above the fold asked about having a good approach to creeds and codes and such. Along the standard pathway in these Goddess perambulations, here are the cards that came along in answer.
As the cards fell, this array appeared. Odysseus’ King of Swords put in a welcome appearance as the Essence. The Past, Present, Future triad, meanwhile, came on the scene as Athena’s Ace of Swords, first, Jason and his lover, Medea, in the Five of Wands, second, and Daedalus as supplicant in the Six of Pentacles. The recently popular Hercules, in the guise of Strength, occupied the key position of No-Matter-What, Opportunities. Embodied in The Lovers, the evocative, eerie, and thrilling story of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera—in their revenge premise ‘beauty contest,’ with the hapless, handsome Paris as judge—marks the reading’s Problems & Prospects, while a two-time appearance by Penelope produces the Synthesis, again in the potent expression of the Queen of Wands.
To begin, Penelope's wandering husband, Ulysses himself, comes along as the strategically gifted and ever wily King of Swords. “Foresight, cleverness, strategy, and guile” are a likely upshot, a powerful prod to considering these ethical aspects, as codified in some shape, form, or fashion, seriously, as if the process might be meaningfully useful.
The sound is of a clarion’s calling for “meet(ing) within oneself the ambivalent gift of intellectual leadership and strategy.” Vibrating with the accessibility of the obvious ambivalence, so to say, nevertheless, the necessity of implementing “inspired ideas about how to develop things in the future” also seems apt in fact and apropos in intention. Whatever its roots in spirit, these Ten New Commandments could embody an exercise in ‘how to plan a decent fucking future,’ or at least pose a posture to which one might suggest a reasonable and healthy alternative.
The code/creed query’s temporal sequence brings into view a Past in which Athena’s rising up with the Ace in Odysseus’ suit, which, in telling Orestes tragic tale, demarcates a powerful truth. ‘No matter what, the only aspect of a personal endowment on which one can have some measure of a guaranteed reliance is one’s brain, so using cognitive capacity is the measure of the suit of Swords.
And very well has the early course of every new cosmology illustrated one truth that Athena makes clear. Because its upwelling ‘threatens the old order, conflict is inevitable.’ Thinking produces skirmishing, at a minimum, as it frequently has, for example, under the canvas of Marshall Arts Feral Nerd Performance Space when, as one example among many, people responded more than a bit equivocally about the idea that Billy Bragg advances, that different Commandments from the original ten in Genesis.
Just in terms of a punctilious progression of perspectives, Jason’s movement through the arc of his heroic sojourn to the middle spot, the Five of Wands, is as logical and clear a destination—with Athena’s goading—in the inherently conflicted creativity and team-building that a TNC Project, or anything akin, necessitates. The potent presence of womanly wiles and fealty of Medea must remain a central segment of Jason’s hope for success here.
His 'courage and vision alone would prove inadequate.’ “She knows how to find the dragon’s lair, and how to overcome it. …(she epitomizes)the mysterious feminine power of intuition and instincts…a gut sense of timing and a feeling of how the laws of the material world operate.” ‘Struggling with the dragon of material reality’ is eerily apt for certain.
Similarly, Daedalus’ having passed through perils of his own creation to arrive at a new possibility for patronage—the Pentacles present us with the material struggle for health and wealth—delineates an undoubtedly fine Future completion for most anything of a TNC Project sort. After all, “(s)ometimes good luck crosses one’s path, and although one cannot plan for or expect this, nevertheless it often occurs just when our fortunes are at their lowest.”
All in all, a timing of this uptake of code and creed by our kind, in the layout that the Goddess has given, looks quite favorable, or even better. No-Matter-What, Opportunities, meanwhile, follows on with Hercules monumental grappling with inner struggle in the card of Strength.
Here, the legendary strongman is dealing with the Nemean lion, whose pelt and power make it impervious and lethal simultaneously, viciously irresistible except to the wiliest and most powerful attack. Symbolically, this could stipulate an ongoing, indomitable willingness to wrestle with the inner monsters that so often threaten to upend or otherwise destroy whatever of spiritual beauty and ethical honor we might propose.
A perfect counterpoint, Problems & Prospects garners The Lovers and Jason’s understandable but ultimately cursed ill-suited and dishonorable choices in love. Undeniably, whether one examines Mormons or Popes, Buddhist Monks or shape-shifting Sikhs, the allure of lusty abandon or the glittering gains that may seem accessible via opportunistic and selfish partnering arrrangements have typified every ‘faith-tradition’ that has ever been.
As if guided by mysterious magic indeed, Penelope’s Queen of Wands occupies the Essence spot in the reading. Thus, a direct TNC question began with the wild and winning womanly cohort in the form of Queen Penelope, even as a broader reading about morality and mores and more started out with her husband, the equally clever Odysseus, only to finish with Lady Penelope’s creatively sustaining loyalty and wile in support of honor and interconnection’s unshakeable integrity.
Hence, an intricate restatement is reasonable, along these lines. “Creativity and cognition guide this array, with a plausible future foray into the seeking or dispensing of patronage. The King and Ace of Swords—strategy and new schools of thought—anchor the initiation of matters at hand. The Lovers card placess foremost a penultimate emphasis on choices in love and partnership, followed by the initiating King’s loyal spouse, the Queen of Wands, as a completion. Current contexts elicit a battling with material reality’s inescapable conundrums, Jason's combustible combat with the Five of Wands materialized Dragon, a successful navigation of which could yield the already mentioned possibility of patrons in the Six of Pentacles, altogether a sequence and dynamic in which always we will face the option of overriding instincts of rage and egotism by taming our beastly selves in service to higher aims, Strength for real, so as to amplify and asservate inner life and morality’s manifestation.”
A wise shamanic guide of my acquaintance, whose iconic ‘coming of age’ offers up both horror and resilience in the next Book of All God’s Cousins, once wiled away a few hours with me in a spiritual discourse congruent with today’s quests in this column. Long ago and far away, we were discussing the existence/nonexistence of any clearly obvious Godhead, or Goddess, as the case may be.
“Jim,” she finally said with a mild smile, “I cannot say now, or ever, if God does or doesn’t have some kind of living place in the universe.” At my nod, she continued. “Nobody can.”
And again I agreed. “But I am absolutely certain,” she said with a chuckle, “that the human Psyche has a God-shaped-hole right at its heart.” Can anyone really argue the point? Even atheists can’t help cursing.
The issue percolates down to a typical rendering of chaos and crisis and calamity’s cackle in reply, an inevitable pattern in existence that commands us to explicate everything as ‘divinely inspired’ in one way or another. Can we turn such thinking toward our own enlightened empowerment? That is, whatever our answer in given circumstances, the inspired purpose of our digging so deeply to delve religious glory and spiritual epiphany.
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
His neighbor, whom he never called by name, referring to her instead simply as “that old lady,” or, occasionally, “that old bitch,” had, on top of all her other unforgivable sins, “been willing enough to talk to” his mother when she tattled on him about the cigarettes, “twice, the bitch,” and now, finally, he would “get even for all of it.” He laughed: “teach her to fuck with me.” He took a final drag on the afternoon's third smoke: “at least it's not pot, at least not much,” he said resolutely, “not like Don,” who, “so far as anyone would notice, was stoned every waking moment of his life.”
Though narcing on his Winstons had set him in motion, his whole relationship with the admittedly human but undoubtedly nasty Mrs. Fisher had rankled him for years; now he stood on the cusp of exacting a measure of comeuppance. The March light was waning; 'Spring Forward' was still weeks away. He counted on dusk and indications that she'd given him that “she can barely see her own nose under the best of circumstances” to effectuate his little trick.
And stunt it was, more like a scene from the movies that he swore he would one day make, “like Brian de Palma but even better,” than any routine prank or malicious vandalism that most teens would see as payback for the likes of the grievances that Richardson had with Emily. Following Hollywood's doctrine that “funny is money,” Richardson had, though hardly yet a 'young adult,' a very sophisticated sense of humor, and an even more nuanced feel for troublemaking generally, all of which he put to fine use in the current case.
If things had happened differently, just slightly, and the police had become more involved in the affair, investigators would have discovered that the multitalented Rich had storyboarded “the whole thing, start to finish, just like real directors do.” He even had a crew: one of the sweet lovelies who wanted his body, “a senior and a nice girl too,” very much liked kissing him, though he acknowledged “not being into girls all that much,” which “she took as a sort of a challenge, you know, to get me interested.”
She was also more or less studying costume design through her participation in the Drama Club. “And her parents are like rich as shit,” with their four metropolitan Atlanta landscaping companies, for which Richardson had worked the Summer after ninth grade, because “they paid by how much you did,” and output would never be an issue for him. Their means also meant that “I didn't have to feel guilty for asking Annie “to make me a really lifelike and life-sized puppet, which she did, no questions asked,” basing the golem's physiognomy on Lennie's character in Of Mice and Men, a novel that the sophomore advanced English classes had just finished reading.
“I'm going to shock the shit out of that old lady.” Richardson broke into cackles when he thought of how his ploy would play out, waves of mirth an accompaniment to the “fear and dread I'm going to shove right in her face.”
Early in the little storyboard playlet that Richardson had created to plot out his “most excellent joke on that old bitch,” one of the cards, placards that he had illustrated himself, contained a dialog that demonstrated how closely the young 'director' paid attention to what people said. The overbearing female in the quartet of panels is taking the car keys away from her husband, as basically transpired in real life, when she said something like the following, the exact wording of which appeared in Richardson's sequence too. “You can't see straight, and you'd probably have cardiac arrest if you hit anybody,” she says in the final frame.
In his mind's eye, he kept seeing this set of images, while he mouthed the line under his breath with “just the right know-it-all-old-lady tone,” as he waited in the weeds adjacent to Doraville Deluxe Condominiums' driveway. He couldn't completely control his laughter, so he was thankful that the weather had turned cold enough both to give him repeated shivers and to guarantee that that old lady would have her big Lincoln's windows up and not hear a howling banshee, let alone little old me.”
The dummy, or as Richardson preferred to term it, “my personal puppet of fun and games,” was already in the tree that he had selected to spring his Surprise!, “a big live oak that was probably older than Doraville,” and whose massive limbs overhung the condo's only entryway.” At Richardson’s signal from the hedges opposite, where he could judge the Lincoln’s progress toward the couple’s turnoff to their unit, his co-conspirator—“dumber than a sack full of wrenches but game for anything and very nimble for a lineman”—could push the “very life like form” that Richardson's schoolgirl acolyte had designed and assembled into the Fisher vehicle’s path.
“I knew she’d freak,” he remembered ever after with a satisfied chortle. In the event, “the Lincoln practically stood on end when 'Lennie' dropped into her path from up above.” Even over his voluble hilarity, laughter so raucous and explosive that he couldn't stand right away, even as he heard his right guard's high-pitched squeals of delight, “I heard them inside the front seat, like 'What the Fuck??!!! It was perfect; so perfect.”
In the end, however, “hubby did in actual fact have a heart attack, thought his wife’d killed somebody.” The passenger door opened, “and he like staggered out, clutching at his chest,” before he dropped, apparently dead, into the parking lot.
While Tony Robbing, Rich's offensive lineman cohort, hightailed his bottom out of the oak and on his way anywhere but here, while “that old bitch sobbed over her husband like she actually cared,” and while the hapless sufferer himself lingered between life and death, the young perpetrator went straight to the clubhouse, “always open till eight,” and “called several ambulances” before he also contacted the police. This decent behavior, despite his indisputable culpability for the possibly deadly consequences of his trick, probably saved John Fisher's life and definitely disposed Doraville's finest, who were on the scene just before the first ambulance arrived, to view the still juvenile Mr. Dyson more sympathetically.
Even after his father threatened that he'd wash his hands of the whole deal, which Richardson “bet was a big old bluff,” the boy refused to give up his accomplice, who as a result remained a loyal backup for the rest of his days. Earlier, before John Dyson had done his duty to police protocol and tried to get his son to give up his criminal accessory, the six foot four dad had laid his card on the desk of the investigator whom DPD had assigned to look into the incident.
That after his name, the embossed business card had announced, “Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” caused Sergeant Martinez, “the first Mexican on the Doraville Force,” to sit forward in his chair and then stand up with an extended hand to his “colleague from the Bureau.”
Not only did Agent John Dyson spring his son “within less than forty-five minutes,” but he also kept his ex-wife in the dark about it. “That's why I had them call dad; she'd have gone ballistic, and I'd have ended up grounded for life.” Not even his brother found out exactly what had happened, though he wasn't so stupid as not to know that his father had in some way just bailed out his do-gooder brother, “a fact that probably made Donnie smile for the next month at least, since he was a terminal fuck-up compared to me otherwise.”
For his part, John in one way looked upon the incident as further proof of his second son's brilliance and acumen. “He can do anything, practically speaking, and be successful at it.”
He nonetheless parted with words that at once were forgiving and gently admonishing. “Plenty of women deserve a lot worse than what that old horse's ass got,” Rich's big dad said with a tight-lipped glare. “But what about her poor sap of a husband?”
The young, future superstar’s father, an imposing interrogator and presence generally, let the question hang in the air. “He lived, but he could've died. And son, you have to remember that that would have followed you till the end of your days. He'd've come back to screw up your life. You can never bring back the dead, but they'll never leave you alone either.” Next Up—Chapter XXI
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
A similar initiation of thinking can lead to many significantly different outcomes. “Firmest Foundations" is one such title, in any case.
“As We Wander Hand-in-Hand on Our Random Daily Rambles of Joyous Jumping Frolic & Drenched Divine Delight, Each Sweet Cave of Our Congress Flashes Flaming Fiery Bliss to Become Another Sweaty Cove Where We Glory in Gaia's Grand Goddess Grace; Nonetheless, a More Modest Merry Melding of Mind & Soul Forms the Firmest Foundation For Our Continuing Cosmic Conjunction.”
This mutuality of regard—psychically, cognitively, spiritually—serves as the sticking potion in relationship. This does not require continual agreement; nor does it inhere everyone’s constant collaboration; nor that a couple always socializes as one. Yet the welded melded hearts and minds of a passionate pairing absolutely guarantee the palpation of a ‘charged-social-particle,’ so to speak, a sociopolitical dart that upends alienation, isolation, and despair.
The heart of the matter, thematically, boils down to something basically akin to interdependence. Two can in fact readily render oneness only because the basis for unity exists already, a fact never socially accurate before the past few hundred years or so, with Capital’s ascent to sit atop the human heap’s habits for inhabiting our planet, so that, perhaps, to produce the newest social mediation devicse, ore from Colombia mixes with fuel from Arabia and chemicals from Australia in factories in South Africa staffed and managed from New York and London.
“At Precisely the Juncture That Winged Fate Has Flown Us Together With the Fiery Fury of Our Pulsing Poignant Passion, Fickle Chance Has Repeatedly Signaled That We Seek to Extend Our Own Salubrious Solidarity Among Scores & Scores of Querulous Strangers, All In Order to Foster the Felicitous Harmony On Which Lasting Social Viability Hinges In Communal Settings Where Slews of Sojourners Benefit From the Grotesque, Exploitative, Systematic Inequality That Most Savagely Sunders All Credible Options for Amity & Peace.”
Such a complex and contrary societal skein formulates a social fabric full of concatenated conflicts so rooted and complicated that their unraveling may seem impossible. Nonetheless, principled approaches to achieve social equality either do exist, or humanity’s continuation will turn out unlikely at best. We must, in the event, seek to bring such plans and schemes for a fair deal into the realm of the real.
“Radical & Primordial at Once" provides an apt headline along such lines. “As We Wend a Way Through the Complexity & Tumult That Mark Our Corner of the Cosmos, Our Grand Partnership Brims With Such Transformative Passion That We Encapsulate Revolutionary Zeal Even As This Radical Ardor Inflames Earthier & More Primordial Fires, Voluptuous & Volcanic, Where Our Embraces Ignite the Sacred Congress That in Turn Fuels Our Unshakeable Commitment to Social Justice & Solidarity Forever.”
Paired promises to promote a more or less universal search for truth and justice may or may not prove palpable enough to rule the human roost. One thing seems certain, however.
Lacking a pugnacious and perspicacious commitment to such values, and attendant outcomes, Homo Sapiens thriving rapidly becomes as impossible as our species’ surviving seems improbable. Since the basis for boosting beneficent community, at least very arguably, must remain merrily bonded coupling arrangements among men and women, this togetherness thereby attains its rightful pride of place at the forefront of human hope.
Two different versions of a favorite missive develop this idea. Life’s battlefield dynamics show up in both messages. To avoid fighting is about as practical as fire without oxygen. The only questions are which fights to pick and how to assemble winning squads of friends and lovers and comrades and strangers to shift awareness, take action, and thus act as a salve for our kind’s salvation, so to say.
“Love’s Typhoons & Tsunamis” ended up the headline for both items. “Whatever Oceanic Typhoon or Tsunami That Fate Unleashes, So Long as We Can Continue Our Swim Through it All, the Pulsating Starship of Our Connubial Congress & Our Everyday Adventures of Joyous Jumping Frolic Will Let Us Smile in Style At Every Trial That Might Wile Away the Days & Nights That We Sail Through Storm & Flood.”
This was the later iteration. “However Titanic The Typhoons & Tsunamis That Fate Percolates For Us To Endure, So Long as We Can Continue Together Our Swim Through it All, Gale & Downpour Alike, the Sidereal Pulse of our Carnal Conjunction & Our Adventurous Routines of Joyous Jumping Frolic Will Incline Us To Smile in Style Through Every Trial That Might Pile Upon the Days & Nights as We Sail Through Storm & Flood.”
Various brief notes also explore such territories as these, emphasizing joyous carnality in the teeth of Brand Chaos’ militarized mayhem. “The Whirling Swirl of Twirling Together Nourishes Us, Satisfying Hungers Carnal & Psychic With Consciousness & Kisses, Equal Portions Ecstasy & Epiphany.”
This little gem too, even more so, covers similar ground. “Daily Daunting Difficulties & Nightly Nuzzling Nuptials Mark the Mayhem & the Merry Glee That We Encounter All Mixed Up on the Salubrious Loving Grooves of Our Slippery Sliding Sojourn Together.”
Shifting the focus to the conflagrations that constantly burst forth these days, other particular Marshall Arts pieces center the problematic and ponder the passion that these patterns of putridity nonetheless percolate. The choice to love and couple accompanies life and breath, part of human essence, maybe natural selection’s design, or something similar.
"Love's Response to Exigency" tells such a tale. "Sweeping, Swooping Madcap Mayhem, Relentless & Unforgiving, Remorseless & Ubiquitous, Unleashes Exigent Existential Circumstances—Unavoidable Snake Pits, Self-Detonated Booby Traps, & more---& worse—That Our Love's Miraculous Marvels Manage to Meet With Such Ardor & Aplomb That We Encounter Yet Another Rationale to Leap & Frolic in Mutually Ecstatic Embraces."
Acceding to the accuracy of the idea that ‘love is ours to choose,’ a misanthrope might inquire, ‘ah, but is it the only choice?’
“No, of course not. That would be so silly that not even someone so falsely guided as one who hates himself and everybody else would believe such a thing. It is, though, demonstratively and indelibly, the best choice.” About that, the Wood and I agree.
“Perches, Aeries, Nests” highlights such an argument. "What Grand Goddess Glory to Gain a Pretty Perch From Which to Ponder Life's Parading Passage; Grander Still to Claim an Aerie Where One Might Measure the Contours & Delve the Depths of One's Own Heart; By Far Grandest of All to Nurture a Nest to Succor Afresh Our Soul's Melding Again Magma's Molten Merry Meandering."
Others, one’s sweetest sweetheart, oneself, all occasionally require forbearance for their sins, as it were. Some might say that acceptance, or even toleration, is a better label for the quality of ‘letting bygones be bygones.’ Or maybe the actual issue is one of awareness, in the sense that the mysteries of both mayhem and melding always ask that we pay attention and learn something.
Whatever the way that one states the matter, politics requires forgiveness in like fashion as does love. This next artifact of wood and words and paint speaks to these two expressions of human existence, both ardor and governance.
"Guaranteed Openings," states its heading. "In Like Fashion As Any Unfolding Relationship, No Matter How Sweetly Endearing & Emphatically Amicable, Eventually Encounters Regions Rough to Navigate & Painful, Perhaps, Perilous, to Pass, Even the Most Rotten, Wretched Passage in Any True Friendship Will Soon Enough Reveal an Opening to Flow Toward Still Lovelier & Loftier Experiences of Sweet Amity & Mutual Regard."
All in all, plausibly, ecstasy and epiphany determine, or at least measure, the attainment of a decent life, well and potently lived. Joy and understanding provide as stout a basis for an evaluating an achievement like this as do any other imaginable quality or qualities that we might put in their place.
Perhaps a simple Love Charm makes this point most poignantly. “Close Together, Face to Face, We Form Such Tight Circles of Mutuality & Desire That, Despite the Inescapable Delicacy of Embodied Bonds, We Seem to Sustain Embraces That Might Endure to Eternity."
Inescapably, in any final assessment, nothing in nature or ourselves warrants a winning endgame, to coin a phrase. We can do our best. Passion and paradox will nonetheless so inflame our senses and sensibilities that only reason’s cool synthesis offers optimal access to optimistic biosocial futures. In the tone of my mother at her most ironically incisive, one must ‘use one’s head for something other than a hatrack.”
“Inextricable Contradictions & Their Complex Swirls of Intersecting Synthesis Define All Conundrums of Social, Economic, and Political Existence: Only by Grappling With These Seemingly Impenetrable Thickets of Paradox—& Collectively at That, Despite the Aggravation—Can Those of Us Who Do Not Inherit a Seat at Life's Bargaining Table Hope to Conduct Truly an Exercise in Salvation, Envisioning, Strategizing, & Then Planning Our Survival & Thriving Together.”
“Communal Survival: Vision, Strategy, Plan” is that item’s title. Axiomatically, the building blocks of lasting libidinal relations in turn form the foundation for any coordinated expression of true community Solidarity.
In a world that hurtles down multiple tracks toward thermonuclear annihilation, and BTR’s oft-threatened Mass Collective Suicide, this ever-available survival-strategy—which is what loving partnership connections amount to—perhaps ought to be a priority for people who don’t fancy a frequently vaporized extinction so as more fully to facilitate plutocracy’s profiteering plunder. The idea is ‘food for thought,’ if nothing more.
As will always be the case, ‘a word, to the wise, ought to suffice.’
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
…initiated a manufacturing capacity that would soon enough rule by main force() but which in these initial stages of commodity production also depended on mercantile methodologies. Had opium not found the market that it did in China, which fostered a sustainable tea habit in the British Isles, at a minimum a different and less colossal() British Empire would have been the result.
Thus, a chain of essentially logistical links—ports and docks and ships and shipyards and banks and counting-houses and more—by chance and arbitrary choice yielded what took shape as a grand strategy of empire. And if poppies were not the piece-de-resistance in this process, they certainly had a huge amount to offer.
In a related sphere, geopolitically, one could hardly overstate the gigantic influence of opium in the development of capitalism, the evolution of modern Asia, and the path of the bourgeoisie and colonialism in countries like India and China. In a real sense, the fiscal desperation of agents of the East India Company led them to overthrow established regimes in the subcontinent, to create schematic ways of producing and negotiating exchanges for opium, and to utilize the profits from those trades to consolidate the control of India as a colonial nation—in some ways mirroring events in Italy and Germany a century hence.
As well as these business and strategic pieces of the mosaic in which the genus Papaver played such an outsized part, particular commodities and the trade relations surrounding them also came into the picture. And in every instance, until dispersal overthrew seed-export-bans, every such nexus stated a geographical fact.
Tea, for example, was a key element in capital’s early, mercantile stages. English workers and peasants and gentry all developed an almost fiendish taste(), one might say an addiction, for the bitter brew, appropriately laden with sugar from the Americas(). And China’s head-start in producing tea trees stood it in good stead to dominate that marketplace.
This craving for a product that for a time mimicked a natural monopoly caused year after year, as the eighteenth century continued, English trade deficits() that in lean times were barely manageable. Piratical looting aside, England’s leading lights as well as the East India Company’s board were constantly hoping to manifest ways of doing business() that would impede the outflow of cash, that could reduce the outgo of capital.
Serendipitously, a confluence() of tobacco and opium had an especially desirable taste, a touch to the palate that those who liked either nicotine or opiates or both often enough found irresistible. And upland Appalachia and elsewhere in the slave economies of the American South proved nearly as apt for the production of addictive leaves to smoke as China had shown itself apropos for the growing of habit-forming leaves to brew. Thus, though in so doing it violated Chinese official proclamation and practice, England’s joining of two intoxicants, or the profferal of the stronger substance on its own, by the early 1800’s at the latest() had turned an ongoing loss into a permanent surplus.
Multiple investigators note additional combinations of socioeconomic and political economic factors that sound especially noisome notes to the student of history. England had through duplicity and force overthrown or subverted all sayso but its own on the subcontinent. It had imposed a colonial administrative monopoly on every aspect of poppies and its products. It was diverting to the other side of the world millions of pounds of surplus value().
And yet the humble farmers who were providing the labor and land and seed to fuel this economic miracle were dying on the vine. “At the time of growth and development of the opium monopoly in Bengal from 1773 to 1856, the economic condition of the poppy farmers…had deteriorated and tension had erupted between the local zamindars(landlords) and the colonial authorities.
This conflict aided in the eventual uprising of 1857, also known as the Indian ‘Sepoy Mutiny.’ In an attempt to further control the private cultivation of opium poppies and the free trade in opium, the government adopted the Opium Act of 1857... .The colonial drug laws applied a double standard, as they allowed the imperial authorities to appropriate revenue from the state-run opium monopoly, while pushing the private traders to become involved in the contraband trade.”
Thus, at the same time that the Second Opium War came to the fore, and Britain was consigning untold millions of opium-smokers to their slow and lowly fates while butchering a few squadrons of Chinese in the process, British mandates were approving the once again opium-fueled slaughter of tens of thousands of Indians who dared to resist England’s imprimatur. Empire’s ugliness should never have erupted from so beautiful a flower.
A young scholar has carefully documented the background and expression of the Opium Wars in such a way as to note how transformation and expansion of imperial plans create an environment of social contradiction and political tension. In 1834, as the monopoly position of the East India Company in the opium business came to an end, a massive upsurge in participants and product occurred, just as the Chinese were insisting that ‘enough’s enough,’ as it were.
Of course, such contrariety took place in the context of longstanding relationships of profit and conspiratorial collaboration too. In fact, entire sectors of eighteenth-nineteenth-century Indian society consolidated their ties with each other and with other groups—both in China and England, for instance—as well as enhancing their commercial viability, on the basis of opium. The Parsi community in Mumbai, impresarios of which retain wealth and influence to this day, with roots in Persia, was one of the few Subcontinent’s ethnic groups that successfully found a niche in the drug trade.
The kin and organizational linkages that underlay this coup against the East India Company’s monopoly forms the plot line for Sea of Poppies, and scholars recognize that both the narrative in the novel and the commodity exchanges and elite-relations of the historical trade are telling the same story. One of the upshots of the entire affair was the enrichment of Mumbai, producing “a capitalism that despite the constraints of colonialism could be a little bit more modern and a little bit more generous to the common Indian.”
In this vein, Amar Farooqui’s most recent collection of investigative essays calls itself Opium City: the Making of Early Victorian Bombay, one of many such assessments that notes the congruence between progress and decimation to so speak. Networks that produced addiction and dissolution on the one hand, created black-market super-profits and modernity on the other hand.
One expert source, a seminal thinker in this historical arena, notes the conjunction of mega-profit, British productive efficiency, and the inevitable rise of competitors as the rubric that defined the heart of this commodified eventuality at the heart of early capitalism. “The system's success was the cause of its downfall. The vast profits of the Britain's opium trade attracted competitors.
Moreover, the Company's steadfast refusal to raise Bengal's opium exports beyond the quota of 4,000 chests per annum left a vast unmet demand for drugs among China's swelling population of opium smokers. As demand drove the price per chest upward from 415 rupees in 1799 to 2,428 rupees just 15 years later, the Company's monopoly on Bengal opium faced strong competition from Turkey and West India.”
To an extent, the solidification of opium as the key to China was the result of more mundane occurrences, such as the importance of silver in Chinese culture and political economy, a factor that earlier paragraphs also noted. Not any inherent metallic ‘magic’ was the causal spark here, however, but rather the struggle() that two empires—one rising and based on wage-labor and commodities, the other floundering and based on a vast landed peasantry’s produce that spread out over five percent of the Earth’s land surface—joined to garner the riches of a ‘new-world’ and thereby elevate one of two distinct ‘old-world’ elites to run the Earth’s affairs.
To imagine the sorts of developments under discussion here most tangibly, one need only think of the actual flows of labor and goods and cash in the world economy of the time. Slaves plundered() from Africa sweated for the Earth’s bounty of tobacco and sugar and coffee in a ‘New World()’ where conquerors worked indigenous inhabitants to death in order to extract silver and gold() from shafts sunk into the ground.
Half a world away, comparatively ancient farming practices() yielded rice and spice and tea aplenty, for which Europeans had increasingly insistent cravings. From the perspective of the savvy merchants of England and France and Spain and Italy—as often as not former pirates or other masters of ‘primitive accumulation’—parting with less specie in the process of exchange() was, to put the case mildly, highly desirable, since factories and mines and facilities to engage former peasants in textile and coal and metals and weapons production() necessitated hard currency to blossom.
The humble poppy flower proved a key ingredient in this centuries-long process. By offering opium or other inebriating products of the poppy directly(), or—most seductive—by mixing() opium with tobacco, each of the major mercantile powers of Europe gained profound leverage in its oriental trade. In the process, new alliances with the recently overthrown families() of India and Indochina and more solidified both these methods of doing business and the linked alliances that further entrenched the power of the corporate and kin groups at the forefront of these processes.
Nor did some mystical Oriental border contain the effects of Papaver somniferum. The poppies intense and extensive impact on British culture is a well-documented story. “In the eighteenth century the British Society of Arts awarded prizes and gold medals for growing the most attractive Papaver somniferum.
By the nineteenth century many babies in the United Kingdom were being soothed to sleep with a sleeping preparation containing laudanum. British Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-98) put laudanum in his coffee so that he could speak better in front of Parliament. British writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were addicted to opiates like laudanum, while author Charles Dickens calmed himself with opium.”
Thomas de Quincey was thus just one of innumerable yarnspinners whose work emanated ‘under the influence,’ as it were. And though the tendency to the throes of horrific habituation may itself have been a product of clever commoditization(), Confessions of an English Opium-Eater does not present a pretty picture for observers to gaze at().
“The reader is aware that opium had long ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it was solely by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it, that it kept its hold. Yet, as other tortures, no less it may be thought, attended the non-abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was left; and that might as well have been adopted, which, however terrific in itself, held out a prospect of final restoration to happiness. …I saw that I must die if I continued the opium; I determined, therefore, if that should be required, to die in throwing it off.” And this was the product for which Britain’s vaunted principle of ‘free-trade’ was to test its imperial mettle and slay the Chinese imperial way of life.
Notwithstanding troubling social trends in any case, opium assumed the role of the keystone for English capital. An article from Monthly Review has summarized this dynamic. “The opium trade was of vital importance to British Imperialism at this time. It was one corner of an Eastern triangular trade that mirrored the eighteenth century Atlantic slave trade.
The smuggling of opium turned a large British trading deficit with China into a substantial surplus, paying for British tea imports from China, for the export of British manufactured goods to India and for a substantial proportion of British administrative costs in India. The opium trade was ‘the hub of British commerce in the East.’”
A Chinese scholar depicts these developments as in many ways “shameful,” inasmuch as they involved clear-cut predation and routine corruption. More practically, they at first undermined and ultimately eviscerated the Chinese protocols and techniques that for a millennium or more had made Sino elements of power first and foremost() over land and peoples that made up plus-or-minus half the world.
In some tangible sense, the imposition of these new practices in conducting trade, backed by new systems of production and evolving networks of interconnected social relations of rule, doomed() any but fantastical hopes of continued Chinese hegemony. Whether these systematic innovations operated in the form of smugglers or of legitimate ambassadors, whether through frontal assault by force of arms or through religious and cultural engagement, the rise of Europe—of an English empire, for example, on which the sun never set—was like a burgeoning light that comes from an inevitably imminent conflagration.
POPPIES IN COLONIAL & EARLY NATIONAL NORTH AMERICA
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic among the gifted traders and ‘entrepreneurs’ and holy Pilgrims in English America—all steeped in the blood of slavery(), heir-apparents to this nascent Anglo system in the fullness of time—were having their own initiation to the range of commodities that emerged from this process. Thus, tea was part of a nexus of conflict with ‘Mother England’ herself; tobacco proved a staple cash crop() throughout parts of the slave-labor regions of the British colonial colossus; sugar and rum and slaves formed a triangular rubric() for the expansion of New England and mid-Atlantic upper classes. And Yankee traders, as noted above, plied in a profitable if limited two-way competition with the English. Next Up—Part Six
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
**************
Only the ten members of the audience who seemed hospice ready remained to listen till the end of my ramblings, along with three of the media reps who, with the exception of the wan, 'Goth' FSRN stringer, showed no interest in follow-up inquiry. I promised 'Ms. Free Speech' as extensive an interview as she desired, after I gulped down some tidbits and my caffeine limit, during the adjacent process, at the other end of Borders’ voluminous second-level space, of signing a hundred-odd copies of my book.
Before I imbibed anything, though, or escaped to provide autographs, the young chemotherapy waif approached, a stitched indentation that marked her skull a sign of the cancer that would likely consume her. Her benighted companions stayed back, around whom paced my "security consultants," between the two of them seeming to look every direction at once.
Since the shooting in Chicago, inasmuch as I wouldn't deliver many messages as an unrevivable corpse, I had hired a pair of bodyguards who were among the odd assortment of ex-Rangers who somehow find a way to a secular and progressive perspective on life. They were pros, and they were obviously nervous, albeit I presumed that such was just an occupational hazard, ha ha.
The girl whose malignancy appeared imminently lethal asked what she could do, to prepare herself for eternity. I looked her in the eyes, our gazes unwavering. Though the words seemed pitifully weak to convey what I felt, I sought to communicate that such courage as she evinced, though hard beyond belief to manifest, is perhaps the primary precursor of wisdom.
Thus, I held her hands to speak that her life and courage were so important: "to vocalize, to emote, to demonstrate to everyone the potential for living this moment, even while staring death in the face. That choice would add up to something worth dying for. To stand like that," I started to suggest, was tantamount to a life of such fierce intensity that her own chilly end would not matter—even to her it would not matter—could she but hold on to her fiery present passion.
Before I could fairly begin to articulate all of this, however, the massive windows above Peachtree Road exploded from a rattling burst of ordnance, the clatter of high-velocity assault rifles a counterpoint to the cascade of tinkling glass. The lights went out. And the snowy wind flew into Borders, its cruel bite as bracing as the thought of tumbling bullets, its howling mixed with the screams of the small throng nearby who had been awaiting my signature, which had become slightly famous since I had become the quarry of these other sorts of 'hunters.'
One body-guard went down, blossoms of blood on his polo-shirt, his powerful pectorals heaving. The other, ducked low and not paying any attention to me, looked about wide eyed for the source of the incoming fire. He must have found it, because he squeezed off one short burst after another in the direction of the customer service desk. The wails and screams and panic stricken scrambling of customers and crowd should have drowned out the sound of gunfire, but, somehow, the pings and pops continued to form a staccato undertone to the pandemonium.
Having learned something from my experience in Chicago, and having studied 'duck-and-cover,' elude-and-evade protocols in the aftermath, within a second of the first rounds, none of which seemed to have done more than minor damage—I was seeping fluid down my forearm from flesh on fire, but I was fully alive, senses honed—I was skulking along the floor to hide and, from the hot-food and coffee bar adjacent to the podium I'd been using, survey the damage to my flesh and sinew.
The odd, dark girl from "Free Speech Radio News," head tucked into her shoulders, reached out to pull me behind the cover of the counter. Her already dark complexion having assumed the purple hue of a mad merlot, sweat dripping from her face, she was a little intimidating. I didn't know what to expect.
"Good!” she exclaimed simply, pulling out her little digital jewel of a recorder. "Are you getting used to this?" she asked, a smile struggling to light her visage as she continued breathing heavily.
"Welcome to the new America," I muttered, grinning and figuring, 'Why miss out on what might be my last interview?’
"I'm thinking, like, you know, 'Casablanca?" She was breathing a wee bit easier, still smiling.
"I see," I mused, at once laughing, listening, and raising my head to look around. "A beautiful friendship, uh?"
CORONATION
The presence of this text in front of an audience—all praise the power of the 'innernet'—is indicia that, for now, I have continued to elude eternity's cool repose, our only certainty beyond this throbbing instant. I've found a love for life, she's minding and making the books now, so I can try to keep both of us a step ahead of the reaper for a time, to continue to insist that people pay attention and 'seize the day,' so to say.
What that means in the mundane wear and tear of the day-to-day can only be ‘made up as you go along.’ We can’t tell each other how to live, although we can, and absolutely should, show each other how we have engaged the inquiry, so to say.
Of course, the 'surprise announcement' that I promised in my talk, corrosively interrupted by the Army of God's repeating rifles, remains to tell. It's a devilishly delectable tidbit, full of bizarre conspiracy worthy of a new testament of life. As lucky complexity would have it, however, all of that is a tale for another time.
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
The Governor of Georgia, the lure of Cherokee gold much, much more intense and captivating than any legal niceties from on high, dashed off a flippant and insulting note to Chief Justice John Marshall. ‘He may go free when your honor comes and opens up the dungeon door to let him out.’ A lot of citizens this second would applaud Governor Wilson Lumpkin.
Georgia’s political executive in many ways typified slaveocracy leadership. A wealthy large planter, with over two hundred slaves, he built his career on the issue of ‘liberating’ Cherokee lands for him and his fellow immigrants.
He entitled his Autobiography, unashamedly, The Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia. An avid, inveterate, multimodal White Supremacist—a strain of human ideation that still indelibly stains all anti-immigrant movements and most strong individual opponents of anything akin to open, or at least easily crossed, borders—his ‘purpose in life’ was to help the Cherokee by fomenting “the benevolent control of the federal government.”
He in many ways was the on-the-ground initiator of the infamous Trail of Tears, only one of dozens of genocidal sallies by the U.S. against Dixie’s Native American populations. In the event, most of the indigenous populace of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and Foothills made their way to Oklahoma, or Indian Territory, on foot.
The Cherokee, especially, put up some resistance to this larceny and forced removal. John Ross led the attempt to stop U.S. genocidal acts, focusing in significant part on the ‘treaty’ between Washington and the Cherokee Nation.
“‘The instrument in question is not the act of our nation,’ wrote the nation’s principal chief, John Ross, in a letter to the U.S. Senate protesting the Treaty of New Echota. ‘We are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people.’ Nearly 16,000 Cherokees signed Ross’s petition, but Congress approved the treaty anyway.”
Nevertheless, ambling about on our strong legs is one of the great strengths of our kind, obviously. Cherokee and other Native American ancestors almost universally traveled with stalwart strides and swims and canoes across the icebound and hence drier Bering Straits from Asia to North America. The nuance in this story of mass migration is quite fascinating to follow.
At least three large waves marked the arrival of Asians here, mostly, overwhelmingly so, for the very first time. The most pertinent point in this practically limitless discourse, at least with a BTR sort of slant, emphasizes the profound humanity of these epic human journeys.
A Native American scholar of indigenous and colonial history spoke in a way that anyone who thinks about borders and travel and migration ought to attend carefully. “‘Furthermore, narratives about the first people in the Americas,’ TallBear notes, ‘whether written by scientists or science journalists, tend to focus on very mechanistic and simplistic motivations for the migration, such as a search for food.’ She cites an article in Maclean’s magazine, for example, that presented the earliest arrivals in North America as ‘a bedraggled group that trudged across a submerged Bering land bridge.’
‘Intellectual reasons or reasons of curiosity,’ TallBear says, are ignored, as though these people had no inner life. ‘There’s all this language that paints people on the move and migrating as if they weren’t these fully self-actualized human beings who also had curiosity, who laughed, who had interesting kinship dynamics, who had joy in their lives.’”
These qualifying notions notwithstanding, strong material incentives, whether in the form of glaciers or droughts long ago, or Hellfire missiles from on high in the present pass, play instrumental parts in the orchestration of popular choices to relocate. In fulfilling those basic needs, even today, the participants in humanity’s non-virtual streaming activities have always needed to walk a good ways to effect their intentions.
As will often prove the case in these pages, composed as they are by a Marshall Artist, a Driftwood Message smoothly inaugurates a deepening of this discussion about migration, immigrants, and other borderline issues that taunt so many folks in the here-and-now. Its title is “Clever Hands, Pedestrian Feet.”
“Whatever Bounty Has Accrued to Homo Sapiens From Evolution's Cranial Gifts, Our Humble Clever Hands, Which Allow Us to Shape & Then Skillfully Grasp Merely Imagined Tools, & Our Sturdy Pedestrian Feet, Which Have Facilitated Perambulations to Salubrious Environs As Well As Passage Through Daunting Danger, Have Played Arguably As Great a Role As Has the Brain in Human Development."
That doesn’t mean that we should abandon cognition, quite the contrary, ha ha! The core component of a clearsighted view must remain historical and analytical, whereas hateful emotions and privileged entitlement are the sole elements of today’s monopoly media ministrations and their mendacious presumption of mainstream.
Thus, the foregoing pieces of # 20’s puzzle illustrate only two now-and-then migratory trends. The first was the most proximate to now, Relocations of owners at the order of conquerors; the second took place over plus or minus twenty-thousand solar transits, beginning roughly thirty-five thousand years ago.
Whatever the impulse to ponder our own manifestations of hundreds of millions of homeless marchers that may want our homes, or so our dark fantasies impugn, these earlier ebbs and flows in the Terran tide of human flotsam must inform today’s talking points, so to speak. Otherwise, we’re at best idiots, and/or, more likely, hypocritical and self-serving tools of corrupt capital’s empire of chaos.
Much of history’s ‘travel plans’ have awaited our own epoch’s past half millennium, so that various centrally important largescale mass migrations have marked this period. One group of immigrants, for example, most definitely neither arrived, nor proceeded once here, primarily on foot. Walking in chains would have proved impossible. African slaves constituted millions of the first Eastern Hemisphere arrivals in the Americas.
This tributary stream of the Immigration Question Mother riever could readily command an equal number of countless volumes and accounts as might what we could call the Early Asian Migratory Pattern. Not to mention the genocidal imposition of marching orders on millions of indigenous Americans during this same evolution of Capitalism’s ‘epic adventures.’ No matter, BTR in this topical arena will continue to analyze and depict and deconstruct the slave trade in its many guises.
Moreover, given time and tide, Big Tent Review will examine several other sectors of this I.Q., ha ha. First, immigration as a complex response to Capitalism’s growth in the Nineteenth Century will show up—factory, mine, and farm labor; civil wars of multiple stripes; religious oppression of different types; these and other factors come to the fore in assessing what most people would consider ‘the classic recounting of immigration in American History.’
Next, Hispanic and Caribbean agricultural labor programs will come under scrutiny, along with the disfranchisement of these same waves of workers back in their homelands. This question inescapably interconnects with ‘backyard’ sorts of issues, along the lines of Smedley Butler’s “Gangster for Capitalism” forays, most of which happened in our home hemisphere.
At minimum a third contextualization will deconstruct specific cases of ‘The Immigrants of Brand Chaos,’ in which bureaucratic killing modalities along the lines of the School of the Americas—now the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation—become completely compelling character’s in Empire’s insidious emanations of plunder in pursuit of higher profits.
Many other telling chapters might happen along in regard to this overall topical arena, the monumentally massive matter of contextualizing humanity’s travels during Homo Sapiens hundred millennia or so stalking from place to place in Gaia’s glades. Many sojourners were more or less sex slaves, for example, a realm at once redolent of BTR bailiwicks like Ethos and Eros.
Well might a hundred Big Tent editions a day center attention on issues of borders and the movements both furtive and purposeful that billions of people each year make across these barriers—rivers, ridges, fences, walls—so as to live life as fate has proffered it. In so doing, maybe we’d establish a bedrock for the sorts of conversations on which human survival likely depends.
Closing with Driftwood Message Art is by no means de rigeur, yet it very often offers a seamless and evocative way of exiting. “A Paradox of Niggling Notches” is the title of one whimsical item that gets a grip on these matters with the incisive awareness of the universality of the dependence on being able to move around hither and yon, as our needs and schemes indicate.
"The Merest Notch in a Putatively Impregnable Redoubt Can Formulate a Fracture That Facilitates Such a Fortress' Utter Collapse, at the Same Time That Similar Cuts in Natural Fastnesses Can Provide the Only Pass Through Otherwise Impenetrable Massif, a Passage on Which Our Own Mandatory Migration From Danger to Delight May Readily Depend."
Erotic Snippets—(continued)…
Clearly—given the options, anyhow—heading first to Asheville, at minimum to look about and check into logistical and social potential in the city, and then on to Hot Springs seemed like a necessary order-of-battle in any survival strategy’s planning process. Farming and gardening had to provide food, or only the cannibals would live longer than very briefly. Still, for nobody knows how long, that kind of outdoor exposure in most places would make radiation poisoning basically inescapable.
Western North Carolina, except in its hydroelectric history, had contributed little to America’s Hydrogen-Bomb-Breadbasket in which the region found itself. Marta and Charlie therefore reasoned that the Smokies had avoided any bullseyes that elicited incinerating missile strikes.
Immediately, B-L, however, Asheville itself had recently brought a ballistic missile production facility to town that effected the duo of abortive megaton fusion devices that would have ruined the lovers’ plans to survive in the area. Neither life nor stories make viable sense without a little luck, ha ha.
The two H-bomb’s with the city’s name on it were two of the roughly one third of incoming devices that missile-defense-shields had diverted or destroyed. If things had transpired otherwise, even the pachyderm grottoes would probably have provided inadequate protection from the attendant twin blast’s cataclysmic crushing blows.
At twice the pace with which they took their now-ancient caving vacation, the cycling enamored intrepid pair hoped to achieve forty miles a day, which would mean arriving in Asheville to reconnoiter five days from departing suburban Roanoke. They had planned on four or five fucking-breaks a day to keep their enthusiasm strong, ha ha, but the limply sagging, often dead, and intermittently blasted dusty-brownish landscapes that they encountered meant that they could only feel safely ensconced enough to copulate while standing and clothed.
In that event, neither of them felt urgently enough that Life-Force hunger needed more than a once-daily encounter, a leisurely exchange of fluids and energy in which they arranged for alternating oral pleasuring festivities, to complement their fornicating pyrography. They lived. They loved every minute, Zen as ever.
At noon exactly—or so, later, said Marta, who seemed authoritative in such matters—having dodged the dead autos and evidence aplenty of rotting flesh en route along the route of U.S. 70 West over the course of four and a half days, they had slowed their brisk descent from downtown Asheville, coasting on Biltmore toward the Blue Ridge Parkway. Feeling a sense of lifted burden—they were now well within the predicted territorial safety-gradient of WNC’s Smokey Mountain Hinterlands, and the air in fact smelled better—they stopped to fondle and, if possible, fuck astride a main railway line through town at the bottom of the slope.
Fulfilling or even exceeding Charlie’s facilitated intuition that Asheville pulsated powerful Pussy-Goddess-Passion, their now truly naked connection, contorting while cavorting, exhibited again and again the way that everyone’s ‘Personal Cups of Sensual Pleasure Are Prone to Overflow Their Lips.’ As they resumed their exploration an hour and four minutes later, they soon enough encountered Ron and Jan, ‘looking like a scene from some Armageddon-Era Cleopatra,’ riding an elephant and telegraphing sweetly and salaciously their jointly-gyrating appreciation for the just completed erotic congress.
The connection among them was ineluctable. They would die for each other. It was love at first sight because death would otherwise rule. Along such lines, readers may recall the final paragraphs of their introduction to this frolicsome and feisty duo, Janice and Ronald, once loathsome to, but now treasured by, each other.
“Sodomy, as in ‘sodimise me,’ the line from Lena Wertmuller’s Swept Away, was not part of any plans that these two intended. The pulsing pussy-penis palpations that they shared were just such a perfect portal to paradise that, live or die, they were experiencing Elysium in each other’s flesh and blood and come.
In six months, perhaps they’d have an infant, if she lived, if he lived, if the little one made the leap into this spoiled and toxic leftover life. Little seemed likely, in any event, to defray their delight in the interim. “Besides,” Ron promised, “Pearl(the pachyderm) is a certified midwife.”
At the entrance to Vanderbilt’s extravagance, the quartet that thereby came into being established what later peoples would call one of the Eight Key Nodes For Post-Apocalyptic Survival. Each of them would remember the moment as utterly electrifying, ‘an instant in which time stopped and every sensation was epiphany.’
When they would perform in later years—singing, music, goofy skits, various unclassifiable shticks—people in audiences, almost like telepathy, began referring to them and their retinue as the ForeRunners FourSome. This outcome in some sense manifested some cosmic mandate, rather than the mere frippery of foolish, fickle fate.
Despite the inherently eerie interconnection, they did not, however, follow some fantasy script in this unfolding concatenation of chemistry and magic. They mated many times each day with their respective mates, but their social time together was basically businesslike, very much in the B-L sense of things.
More than anything else, they resembled a collegial group, a seminar whose topic—our survival right here and now—had a substantial prospectus and even something of a syllabus, for example what Ron presented as the Grotto Protocol Guide, everything from food-&-water to plumbing maintenance and animal care. For a week, this was their fare.
The most piercing portion of this ‘course-in-necessity’ happened in the two sessions after that, which dealt with why in hell not one other person was anywhere closer to Asheville than Swannanoa’s Swannanowhere streets twelve miles away. The short answer was a command performance under the tutelage of “United States Military personnel,” Janice noted several times.
“Dozens of helicopters,” added Ron, “for ten days.”
“Since then, eighteen days ago now,” Jan kicked in again, “nothing.”
She kept going. “Yeah, a week before you guys,” before together, they intoned, “they got everybody.”
From their perch next to each other on an all but new executive sofa that Pearl and her two human collaborators had dragooned from Biltmore Estates, Martagena and Sir Charles, almost simultaneously, set aside notebook and pen, took their mate’s hand, and, as if on cue, intoned, “And that leaves only us,” meaning this aforementioned four participants in some unanticipated and yet inevitable ‘magical mystery tour.’
And from this day forward, their classes in the midst of all the fancy furniture and copious pillows—with still-running water at hand—ended in orgiastic bacchanalia. They switched partners, created what Ron called ‘completely cis-gendered daisy chains,’ generally ate or otherwise imbibed a healthy dose of psilocybin, and thereby punctuated their learning curve with love making’s pleasures and baby-making’s prescriptions
At the climactic conclusion of their first shared orgy of dalliance and delectation, by the grace of Gaia’s fate and the melliflous effulsions of the great Ran-Dom, Jan entered her second trimester with her sated fetal companion just as Marta’s richly fecund ovum split in two to offer up options for the flagellating emanations of both Ron and Charlie to conceive something interesting, an eventuality that, eventually, indeed did proceed to germinate toward a twinned gestation. Whatever the case may be, one upshot of even marginally realized Life Force Energy is procreated emanations, so to say, in the form of squawling infants.
Given the vast prepartum, birth, and postpartum labors that attend this completion of the baby-making process, the initiation of that drudgery—full of dire danger and psychic misery despite the joys of family life and all positive positioning of birth’s wondrous progeny—simply must be not even slightly less alluring than the wildest sex imaginable. Hence erotica’s plausible purchase on empirical probity, as it were.
Jan and Marta soon embodied a ‘best-friends-forever’ sensibility. Charlie and Ron, individuated ‘modern men,’ took a while longer even to extend a modicum of trust toward each other. It wasn’t all petty jealousy macho bullshit, but a lot of it was. Becoming a Quatrouple, to coin a term, is harder than roses and rocket science put together.
Still, as readers will learn in the fullness of time, species viability P-L in significant ways flowed directly from the frothy, fiery, feisty Life Force Energies that this foursome manifested along the French Broad River during the decades that they cavorted and bickered, climaxed and fought, agonized and ecstasized together, a life of fucking and frolic and plenty of dire straits as well.
‘Keeping on the sunny side,’ Charlie penned a couplet that each of his comrades unreservedly affirmed in relation to their respective beloveds, which in this case turned out to be the two women for each man and two men for each woman. Here are those braiding lines. "May You & Gaia Let My Tongue Become a Feather To Stoke Your Pleasure For Us to Measure at Our Leisure As Our Salacious Embraces Array Grand Goddess Grace & Its Glories of Groovy Gliding Glee."
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
ORGANIZATIONAL POSSIBILITIES
Organizational possibilities exist for citizens to manifest in responding to official predation based on bad science and self-serving policies. Since 1987, Chris Busby, with whom I was able to speak briefly, has played a leading role in bringing such democratic technical alternatives to fruition.
In the view of such interlocutors as this humble correspondent, humanity has little choice; a nuclear 'renaissance' will yield at best a slow slide toward doom, so any optimist has to suppose that we'll find a way to follow the lead of intelligent agents who show the rest of us how, by confronting the flaws in science and logic that pervade the approaches of those who want to boil tea with radioactive steam, we can deconstruct the plutocracy. Dr. Busby is such a trend-setter.
His prolific efforts have included some central documents of the coming age of nuclear deconstruction. One of these, "I Don't Know Much About Science: Political Decision-Making Involving Science and Technology,” should become a mandatory 'study-session' for all citizens on an annual basis.
This joint effort, with his colleagues Molly Scott Cato and Richard Bramhall, lays out in step-by-step fashion critical aspects of comprehending science and science policy in society. The article begins by stating the obvious: most people, politicos as well as ordinary folk, do not qualify as science studs.
In a pointed development of many of the ideas that I have long presented about capacitating citizen involvement in science policy, this trio of 'merry pranksters' from Ulster advocates creating an 'oppositional science system' that permits juried involvement by citizens representing all sides. This specifically guarantees that technical experts who oppose nukes or incinerators or GMO food or psychotropic 'medicine' for toddlers or any of the other science-for-profit schemes dearly beloved of corporate headquarters everywhere command a seat 'at the bar,' as it were, and then citizens and their representatives make determinations of policy on the basis of these forensic exchanges.
Moreover, the paper presents just a lovely description of what comprises 'scientific thinking.' The likes of this correspondent might, on a good day, recognize most or all such elements as these cohorts proffer. Certainly, I have some cognizance of the role of experiment in scientific confirmation and the mechanisms that underlie such probative processes. This is a typically American, utilitarian focus.
Bramhall, Busby, and Cato give us a more thoroughly English overview. It is something that every reader might print and hold close. "The classical exposition of the inductive method ...are now called Mill’s Canons, the two most important of which are:
· The Canon of Agreement, which states that whatever there is in common between the antecedent conditions of a phenomenon can be supposed to be the cause or related to the cause of the phenomenon.
· The Canon of Difference, which states that the differences in the conditions under which an effect occurs and those under which it does not must be the cause or related to the cause of that effect.
In addition,... the Principle of Accumulation... states that scientific knowledge grows additively by the discovery of independent laws, and the Principle of Instance Confirmation, (suggests) that the degree of belief in the truth of a law is proportional to the number of favourable instances of the law. (Also present is) the range of analytical methods subsumed within Popper’s Doctrine of Falsifiability. ... the experimental falsification of existing belief structures. Finally to the methods of inductive reasoning we must add considerations of Plausibility of Mechanism."
These authors also analyze the structure and components and use of 'scientific evidence.' They note that the lack of research results that prove causation--a "lack of scientific evidence"--might mean many things that not only do not demonstrate a lack of scientific connection between putative cause and possible effect, but also that may even cover up such connections in the hurly burly of funded research, utilizing what we could call technophilic 'plausible deniability.'
This paper is also where Busby and his fellows discuss the nature of statistical significance and the bias toward eliminating 'type one' errors, those that say, falsely, that a certain factor 'X' caused a certain result, 'Z.' At the same time, the present articulation of 'significance' of outcomes accepts with much more equanimity 'type two' errors, those that propound, incorrectly, that a possible cause, 'Y,' does not yield the expected effect 'W.'
This delightfully practical and incisively argued material then goes on to speak, both fortunately and unfortunately--from my perspective--more intelligibly than I have about the nature of scientific truth and certainty. It refers to Bruno Latour, whom I have had cause to cite on occasion, to get at the actual nature of science in society, observations closely in sync with the perspectives of such rugged scientists as M. King Hubbert, Mr. Peak Oil himself, not to mention such darlings of the Science-Technology-&-Society canon as Professor Thomas Kuhn.
"(Latour) also finds that what is accepted at any period of history is a scientific world-view that consists of a system of ‘black boxes’. ... accepted encapsulations of earlier theory that are then used as machines to understand and interpret new discoveries. ...(H)e finds that as ... more knowledge is included in these ‘black boxes’ it becomes increasingly difficult for any scientists to open up or attack the complex system of connections that maintains the ‘black boxes’... . (Worse), those who are building the present scientific consensus are those who are funded to do the research by those who have need of the results of this same research to make money. It is therefore quite reasonable to assume that this process leads to the construction of ‘black boxes’ which contain false reasoning, false connections, and even false experimental results."
Or as my Grandpa Fox was wont to chuckle, "You're a fool if you leave a fox in charge of the henhouse."
The authors then examine multiple instances in which particular problems of science interpretation showed up in just the way that their model implies would be likely; moreover, they show the difficulties that current institutional technical forms confront in seeking to bridge these systemic disconnects. And their conclusion, that we need an "Oppositional Science System" has to make sense to anyone who believes in either sound science or democratic outcomes: for those who adhere to both, this is 'music to the ears.'
This absolutely essential exposition is one consequence of one of the first independent ventures that Dr. Busby helped to create, the organization Green Audit(http://www.greenaudit.org/about_green_audit.htm). The website describes the group as "ultimately about corporate responsibility. Scientific research and statistical analysis conducted by Green Audit uncovers the truth about statements made by national governments, large multinationals, and the military with regard to the health effects of environmental pollution."
In addition to founding and continuing to advise the Low Level Radiation Campaign, Busby became the Green Party's England and Wales science advisor and parlayed his expertise in chemistry and physics into a growing capacity for scholarship and scientific credibility in the fields of Environmental Health and Epidemiology.
The practical tactics of this most excellent citizen-stalwart have seemed always to move in tandem at two levels. On the one hand, a restless and searching inquiry characterized Busby's presence. 'The buggers won't do a study; well then, we'll figure out how to get it done.' "It's not happening here in England? Perhaps the Germans or the Spanish will play along.' This digging for knowledge, with a keen intuition that present paradigms were false, or at least flawed, was one level.
On a higher playing field, he advanced the political understanding of science, political economy, and the political arena as such. One can find Busby's testimony before scores of governmental bodies; he sought to assist those who were plausibly suffering from and wondering about radiation, from citizens scattered among the far reaches of the former Soviet Union to North Americans who wanted to gain some of his sense of a ombudsman's self confidence, testifying before the World Health Organization, the U.S. Congress, and all manner of bodies both miniscule and august.
One of the offshoots of this energetic and far-reaching willingness to network and seek both answers and new capacity was the formation, at the behest of leaders of the Green Parties of Europe, which felt certain that present science was partial and biased, of the European Committee on Radiation Risk(ECRR). Since 1996, ECCR(http://www.euradcom.org/) has cut a swath across the technical landscape of radiation science, mounting challenge after challenge to established views, in such a fashion that the sense and logic and fit with data inherent in ECCR's stand have come to dominate much of present-day thinking about low level radiation.
Anyone who decries the real influence that the electoral arena can have on policy and democracy likely doesn't truly understand how such matters work. Though everything that Dr. Busby and his colleagues accomplish points toward a much richer conception of democracy than the mere act of voting--they specifically call for Non-Violent Direct Resistance(NVDR) as apropos in many circumstances, Chris Busby's tremendous achievements have advanced in part through the offices of the Green Party's reaching a certain minimum level of potency in Europe.
In fact, but for the EU's Green Party alliance's decision to facilitate ECRR's start-up, many key components of progress in Eurasia would not have come to pass. The Committee has created groundbreaking work about the toxic effects of Chernobyl(http://www.euradcom.org/publications/chernobylinformation.htm). It has networked with national governments seeking ways to articulate stricter standards regarding radiation protection(http://www.euradcom.org/2009/2009conference.htm).
And most germane to our exploration today, it led Malak Hamdan to realize that at least one renowned British researcher might accept her proposal to find a way to study Fallujah and the vast documentation of human misery available there. What emerges is a political economy of death, wrought by an 'enduring freedom' that placed an imperial agenda above the lives of untold tens of thousands of Iraqi cousins who continue to suffer and die as a result of the toxic legacy of 'liberation.'
I SAY THAT THREE TO FIVE “ON THE GROUND” QUOTATIONS—ONE FROM A U.S. SOLDIER AND ONE FROM AN ATOMIC VET PERHAPS WOULD BE EASY; BUT THREE FROM IRAQIS WOULD, TO SAY THE LEAST TAKE SOME DIGGING. BUT IF WE SENT THIS TO MALAK HAMDAN, I’LL BET SHE COULD FIND SOME APROPOS VOICES TO PROVIDE US.
Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—(continued)…
Already battered and bruised from ‘interrogation,’ he breathes unevenly. He begins to weep. Standing nearby, a man with a machete—or is it a hand-axe of some sort?—whistles a tuneless, psychotic dirge.
At times, the verities of real-politick are so hideous and noisome that even mentioning them—let alone studying them thoroughly—brings on attacks of nausea and vertigo. One simply wants to flee, find a safe haven or asylum that doesn’t require noting and pondering the murder in the name of justice, depredation in the name of ‘development,’ and violent repression in the name of ‘freedom’ that have characterized imperial adventures in the modern sphere, with the United States—its vaunted ‘bastion-of-liberty’ notwithstanding—the leading villain.
On the other hand, an inability to deal with the real—to this day, “reality orientation” is a critical part of how ‘professionals’ evaluate one’s mental health—not only impedes effectiveness, but it might also result in more and more of exactly the types of events that we would rather deny existed. Nowhere in the immediately-prior-to-contemporary ambit—not in Palestine, not in Ukraine, not in the South China Sea, not in South Asia, not in Africa, not in any other geographic location—have such lethal dynamics come into play with more ferocity than until recently they did in Latin America. Not for nothing has Eduardo Galeano described the entire region as a body of “opened veins.”
Whatever social description of this vast Hispanic Diaspora has become apropos in the present moment, the U.S. has continued to persist in seeking to apply Monroe’s righteous doctrine. This shows up in Venezuela, in Argentina, and of course in Cuba, as well as elsewhere.
This Yankee morass of ‘magical’ pleasure and nightmarish torment has endured for a century-and-a-half or more. Over this entire period, arguably no event or series of occurrences has more clearly illustrated this locus of luxuriant horror than did the crushing of Salvador Allende’s idealistic Chilean experiment in electoral socialism. In any case, that outpouring of homicidal conspiracy is the context for the topic of the day.
The particular focus in these pages is the culture of love and optimism in which President Allende’s miracle came to fruition, how that popular expression of music and artistic passion has continued despite the imperial slaying of its primary proponents—men such as Victor Jara. Jara’s magnificent life and heroic death, then, are the center around which this narrative turns as it develops the thesis that this magnificence and heroism continue and are more crucial than ever to human survival.
Before we take an inevitably too brief—and also, for many readers, too lengthy—foray into this realm of art and power in faraway Chile, however, both in the remainder of this section and in the preface that follows, readers may view the violent heart of the brutal patterns that have characterized both this region’s relations with the United States and Latin American society’s internal dynamics generally for the centuries during which colonialism has evolved into the complexities of modern empire.
The overall idea about North America’s Latin American nexus is straightforward. For the better part of two centuries—since at least the War with Mexico—top administrators of the United States, at a minimum the President and the military establishment, have been likely culpable for mass homicide and conspiracy in Spanish speaking countries of the hemisphere. Such indictments may not be incontrovertible and might now and again fail to yield a conviction, but the accusations would be universally reasonable.
Especially in regard to Chile’s destruction on September 11th, 1973, the prosecutorial stance becomes even clearer and more pointed. With virtually no doubt, Richard Nixon is a murderer, a conspirator and accessory before and after the fact. With a similar degree of certitude, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Richard Helms is also a probable murderer. So too, in the same elliptical way, is National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger just about certainly guilty of conspiracy and aiding and abetting homicide.
Given facts both direct and circumstantial, both the result of documentation and eyewitness accounts, even lacking the still vast troves of inculpatory evidence that the U.S. refuses to release, no rational jury would likely find these men blameless or fail to reach a unanimous verdict. In the arena that this essay examines, therefore, with a degree of probability that approaches exactitude, Richard Nixon, Richard Helms, and Henry Kissinger are as responsible for the savage torture and killing of Victor Jara as if they had personally wielded the blade that chopped off his fingers, as if they had individually pulled the triggers that riddled his body with forty-four bullets.
The same would be also almost definitely true of a small army of ‘Yankee’ operatives, from various agencies of empire, who have all—like these ‘leaders of the free world’—escaped judgment. Quite plausibly, in any case, each of the primary actors would also be complicit in crimes against humanity.
These pronouncements are quite specific. They are also, except by those whose fatuous commitment to propaganda and falsehood permits supercilious debate, close enough to indisputable to do as Chile and other jurisdictions have done, seeking the extradition of Henry Kissinger to question him about his role in these sorts of horrific crimes. Or, a scholar might examine Richard Helm’s conviction for lying to Congress about this countrywide torture and slaughter in the Andean nation. Anyhow, along with these more or less exact condemnations, we could also offer a more general statement in regard to Santiago and its environs.
To state this overview succinctly, we might employ a more or less definitive clause here: That the United States Proceeded in Chile as Elsewhere With MALICE Aforethought. This combination of subject and verb and modifiers itself contains an acronym: MALICE—Murder, Antipathy, Lies, Individualism, Conspiracy, Emiseration—that perfectly and more or less completely summarizes the period from 1960 till now in Chile and the so-called ‘Southern Cone. In fact, this is one of the many environments where John F. Kennedy disingenuously called for continuing a “good neighbor policy” that had arguably not existed when Franklin Roosevelt advanced it during the 1930’s and had close to zero correspondence to actuality during JFK’s Presidency or the administrations that followed.
An arguably crucial point in this regard is as follows. As Victor Jara, hands dripping gore and painful beyond sore, croaked out a last song—he had stood, stumps of fingers that spurted blood, and the leader of the butchers had commanded “sing for us now, poet”—in a voice choked with pain and fear, as he stared down the barrels of the automatic weapons that would end his life, he understood these things about empire and power and knew their central place in any future resistance to such events’ transpiring again.
Prefatory Matters—Monroe’s’ Doctrine’ to ‘War’s Racket’ Writ Large in Cuba
The all-too-standard view is that history is disposable, at best. “I don’t care about history. I don’t like history. History sucks.” No matter how toxic or tragic, such perspectives probably resonate with a majority of citizens.
When adults hold such views, this resembles a mature child who despises its parents. In a fashion that an earlier investigation here on Contributoria employed, such an attitude is like a panicked traveler who is seeking directions to ‘Portland’ without knowing where he is. Or, these beliefs mimic the difficulties of one who desperately wants to ‘find the way to Portland’ but doesn’t know where she came from to get wherever in hell she is.
Here we all are, in a world in which one empire-of-the-Americas has inordinate influence over the fates of every living human, and yet we really don’t come close to comprehending how this has all come about. Maybe at least a brief foray into the developments that took us from past to present could serve our interests.
In this regard, vast armies of dedicated scholars might spend many lifetimes deconstructing the conquest of the Americas by Europe. In doing so, the observer would want to account for the significant differences that distinguish Hispanic America from Anglo America.
Unfortunately, accomplishing such a task effectively and briefly is likely impossible, yet a few salient aspects of such interpretative work would at least suggest the parameters that an annalist might establish to examine these obvious differences.
A key element would likely be the relative importance of extractive versus agricultural and then industrial economies, which in turn affected everything in the spheres of production and trade.
The greater capacity for resistance, or at least persistence, of Chile’s Mapuche and the entire region’s indigenous population, is also likely important; one Spanish potentate whom Chilean Indian rebels captured early in the colonial fray, after they slaughtered all the soldiers who had accompanied him in his attempt to assert the continued enslavement of native laborers, may have died as a result of the Mapuche’s pouring molten gold, which he so craved, down his throat.
What one might call this ‘culture of conquistadors’ also probably played a role in establishing a landholding class that practically speaking predominated in much of Chile, and much of Latin America, until the past century or so; of course, the working classes that underlay such a system would differ at least slightly from the ‘regular people’ who formed the masses of folks further North in North America.
One might continue: geography, proximity to Europe and the ease of immigration, the different social developments that characterized England and Spain, and much more would tend to lay the basis for what ended up being quite distinct social and political communities in the Western Hemisphere.
In any event, these sorts of factors would indeed have established foundations for the way that actual relationships evolved as modern times approached and came to pass.
In this vein, from the point of view of the Spanish-speaking Americas, this initiation of the realm of the present, more or less, must emerge from the severing of colonial dominance from Madrid. Over the course of twenty years or so after 1800, every piece of Spanish America broke away from direct European dominance, with a few exceptions like Cuba and British Guyana.
Even cursory glances at the writings of such ‘rebels’ as Simon Bolivar illustrate that this process was not obviously similar to what happened in British colonial North America. In one letter or tract after another, El Liberator wrote of the lack of networks of power, of crushing debts that the means of production would not alleviate, of leaders so venal and greedy that they would likely turn on each other and defeat themselves given time and space to accomplish their natural inclinations. The end result of all these difficulties was an Iberian and ‘Holy Alliance’ counterattack on the erstwhile independent States in the early 1820’s, focused especially on Peru.
“Everything (in Lima) is in disorder; there is no government, no army. President La Mar has always been a godo(a selfish idiot), and most of the army heads have always been godos, and the naval commander at Callao as well. The chief of staff, the commanding officers of engineers, and the commanding officer of artillery are also godos.
In these circumstances…(a) large(r) number of troops (than the 3,000 that Bolivar dispatched) is not being sent for the present because it is impossible. I have no ships, no provisions, and no troops here. We have already spent a hundred thousand pesos, and we are just beginning the enterprise. In order to send the next 3,000, God knows what we shall have to do, for we are burdened with debts, and we do not have the slightest credit.”
Bolivar’s vision was of a United States of South America, and his will that it should come to be was powerful. “(I)t shall be done, cost what it may.” Yet the leaders under his command conspired against each other as readily as—or even more readily than—they united to fight Spanish attempts to reassert its rule. They negotiated separate arrangements with England, the United States, and other rising industrial economies.
Chile’s place in these ventures—plus-or-minus 1823—was complex and not at all uniform. On the one hand, years earlier, Bolivar had considered Chile particularly apt to adopt ‘republicanism,’ especially under the aegis of Bernardo O’Higgins. For many years, Santiago had diligently supported federation and seemed a reliable bastion against Spain’s attempts to overthrow the young republics and to defeat their union.
One of Bolivar’s chief subordinates, J. Gabriel Perez, corresponded with Chile’s plenipotentiary to Peru in May, 1823. He laid out the strategic and geopolitical context that was developing, in which the “United States of North America” might join with Spain and Portugal themselves in recognition of the new rulers.
The complications in this situation centered on demands from Continental European powers—Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the so-called Holy Alliance—that Spain reinstate the Bourbon King and return his colonial imprimatur at the same stroke. “England has authorized her minister in Madrid to conclude an offensive and defensive alliance with Spain… .to induce (it) to recognize the sovereignty of the South American states…(a necessity) if we are to interest ourselves in this tremendous struggle or if she is to provide herself with an immense new market for her industry and manufactures.”
England’s work behind the scenes with anti-Bourbon Spaniards and anti-royalist Portuguese would serve to advance the English imperial domination that had been a primary result of Napoleon’s defeat eight years before. Yet the Spanish in the colonies often enough remained completely committed to another Bourbon ascendancy and to the renewal of colonial plunder that was mercantilist and thereby excluded England.
Bolivar obviously hoped that Chile would provision and maintain a troop contingent in Peru of 2,000 men or more “not only (to) counterbalance Spanish power united there, but…also (to) give Peru greater strength than her enemies and provide more reasons to be recognized and more justification for English intervention on her behalf.” The basis for presuming Chile’s agreement to such requests concerned the Andean nation’s desire for more territory—soon enough to come to fruition—and its ongoing courting of both English and United States commercial links in its seafaring enterprises.
Just two years subsequently, despite Bolivar’s insistence that only a union of the newly independent states could salvage their ongoing viability, Bolivar added a postscript in a lengthy missive to Francisco Santander, the Vice President of Colombia. “Chile is in a state of frightful anarchy. Freire has gone to Concepcion, and Pinto to Coquimbo. The province of Santiago is governed by its intendant. Reports have it that the Chilean Congress will send a deputation to recall O’Higgins,” which would favor the faction that backed a confederation and Bolivar against those whose interests were narrower and more in tune with strengthening North American and British connections.
Though inherently truncated and superficial, these depictions ought at a minimum to create a template for viewing how Latin America developed. Its attempts at union having come to nothing—with United States approval for the multiplicities of jurisdiction clear-cut—its dependence on U.S. and, especially, English capital and markets having increased, these divided nation-states unavoidably fell into the orbit of one imperial ambition or another.
This became especially problematic when, unlike Chile, the just-formed political entities themselves eschewed republican commitment-to-commerce-over-blood and sought to impose monarchies of one sort or another. In Brazil, such moves might prove tolerable to those in Washington whose growing strength ‘manifested an imperial destiny’ that would seemingly encompass the hemisphere and might eventually bridle the entire globe.
But when this longing for royalty took place across a border that gringos increasingly crossed with an intention to own whatever they might purchase ‘free-and-clear,’ in other words in Mexico, then such developments might appear almost insufferable. Moreover, Mexican sociopolitical choices invited European involvement in their monarchical fancies, which U.S. officials unequivocally rejected.
Thus, on the American side, the debates about how to respond to this spate of rebellions and the promulgation of James Monroe’s famous ‘Doctrine’ would mark the coming of a more or less contemporary attitudinal and political nexus toward our ‘neighbors’ to the South. In Washington, no matter the fierce debates between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, regardless of quibbling over how to couch trade with territorial expansion, almost universal agreement existed both that significant, or even critical, “American interests” were at stake in how the hemisphere developed to the South of the U.S. borders at the time and that the capacity to extend force, as in the development and extension of especially naval operations and commerce, would constitute a necessary component of this overarching ‘interest.’
The secession of Texas from Latin America, its annexation by the United States, and war with Mexico manifested destiny in ways that continue to resonate in almost every arena of contemporary American life. That Mexico’s caste and class divisions were vastly more critical in causing the inevitable war with the United States to be an unmitigated disaster than were the military prowess or tactical proficiency of U.S. armed forces is important to note, of course. So too is the point of crucial import that the to-the-death fight over slavery that rent the U.S. in many ways began with the entry of Texas as slave territory into the union; in any case, most of New England and substantial parts of the Eastern U.S. stoutly opposed the war against Mexico.
The end result of the conflict, nevertheless, was the establishment of an ‘Uncle Sam’s’ strategic force that was capable of becoming behemoth, whose territorial extent, growing industrial prowess, and combination of capitalism and social free-for-all for men of European ancestry inaugurated the rise of Pax Brittanica in the Western Hemisphere even as it ultimately threatened to replace England’s rule with its own vigorous combination of bigoted self-confidence and practical productive savvy. In this way, the Monroe Doctrine formed a wedge for British industrial products and capital, on the one hand, and for the ready extraction of necessary resources, on the other hand. Even the ‘scandal’ of England’s offer to purchase Texas could not derail the ‘special relationship’ between U.S. expansionism and English commercial and naval supremacy.
The wild yarn of William Walker complements the tale of Texas, where U.S. agents and opportunistic interlopers combined to bring an on-paper-only Mexican rule crashing down. Walker in 1854 exemplified filibustering that newcomers North of the Rio Grande had field-tested in the early 1830’s, an important outlet for those in the United States who hoped to institutionalize slavery as a key part of Western Hemispheric capitalism.
Walker first led comrades in an invasion of Baja California. When anticipated popularity did not materialize—in other words, no additional mercenaries showed up to fight off the paltry Mexican forces that opposed him—he ‘surrendered’ to U.S. authorities just across the relatively new U.S. California border.
He made his mark as an adventurer in Central America. He and a few dozen armed and trained soldiers-of-fortune allied with local gunslingers to depose and then dispatch the President of Nicaragua in a firing squad. He abrogated the prohibition on slavery and instituted a ‘constitution’ that mimicked the likes of Tennessee and South Carolina.
Viewing Walker’s filibustering as either an aberration or as individualist heroism represents the preferred surface explanation for these events. What actually transpired is much more modern, spookily so.
The issues at hand combined logistics—transportation between Eastern and Western North America primarily—and marketing—determining which products would find a way to consumers and final purchases. Specifically, the owners of the primary delivery operation across Nicaragua deployed Walker to shift the Central American State’s licensing permissions for transiting the Isthmus when Cornelius Vanderbilt’s stock manipulations in New York were eliminating Walker’s employers’ ownership of the company.
Vanderbilt reacted with typical efficiency to this challenge. He oversaw the organization of British and different Central American and dissident Nicaraguan counterattacks against Walker’s ‘Presidency.’ They permitted the dapper Tennessean to exit and warned him not to return. When instead he organized another filibuster and came back, they captured him and shot him to pieces in Honduras.
A half-century later, after a sectional bloodletting imposed a tepid emancipation of African-Americans and revolutionized the productive forces of the U.S. at one and the same time, a continental capitalist gargantuan erupted that had only been nascent during Walker’s day, late in the 1800’s tied together by rails and telegraph lines. In fulfilling this ‘sea-to-shining-sea’ destination, any further expansion, inevitably, had to occur outside Yankee borders. Next Up—Part 2