Big Tent Review

#21, 10.2.2024

Oh, my Goddess! Anyway, hello, everyone! Again, again, blah blah blah. As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed eighteen-times-annually magazine. This is the twenty-first incarnation, so persisting with the second annual outpouring, and it’s as meaty as ever.

Jim’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 17th; the first one-issue moon ahead will, most likely, publish in November.

Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a while back, the end of an article ‘above the fold’ links to its continuation. Somehow, it’s all so nerve-wracking and gratifying at once, ha ha. And, finally, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah. I’m doing my best with this linking effort. It’s happening for the most part.

Hopefully, as a matter of fact, an extension of this interlinking is at hand. The Table of Contents should now offer a highlighted portal to the writing for each section. 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: Finding a Felicitous Track Through Life’s Treacherous Forest

1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Thoughts on Networking to Avoid Mass Collective Suicide

2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XXI

3. Wood Words Essays—Epistemology’s Knowing Ways

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

5. Old Stories & New—”Not Yet Forgotten”

6. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”Deconstructing ‘Depleted’ Uranium,” Part FOUR

7. Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—”’United in Blood’ Against Empire” II

—Last Words For Now

Introduction—Finding Our Way, With Luck, Away From Armageddon

This Just In: from Matt Taibbi, via SubStack, in a note about the just-finished “Rescue-the-Republic” rally this past weekend in the District of Columbia. Russell Brand, RFK and Tulsi, and plenty more, including an articulate and truly spiritual Mr. T. himself, spoke or performed in favor of a recommitment to democracy and freedom, not to mention human survival.

The great journalist continued, speaking in his intro note appreciatively of a good friend who shared his recollections “about the journey we’ve traveled from “If I Had a Hammer” to John Kerry’s “hammer it out of existence” (at the World Economic Forum—above) tirade against the First Amendment. In other words, we went from If I Had a Hammer to If They Had a Hammer.”

My recent hometown of Hot Springs has suffered baneful blows from storm and flood. I’m giving what I can from afar yet insist, whatever the case may be, on reversing the ‘support for Ukrainian people’ in the form of Mass Murder, so as to effect real help for suffering communities right here in our own land, which, of course, we ‘liberated’ from its original ‘owners and inhabitants.’

“‘In life’s deadly joyous dance of doom & delight, we can choose love” in reply, “we can follow a Golden-Ruled path toward facilitating Life-Force Energy, or we can mimic Israel [or, as the case may be, Senator Kerry], swallow Prozac, & wait for Mass Collective Suicide’s grimmest of reaper’s inauguration of a hellish eternity of nonexistence.’ This thought, speaking of effective hammerings, occurred to me one recent night, after a predawn dream of struggle and hope.

I amplified it a bit but then had to cut it back again to make it fit on X, leaving out the full-stop at the end of the sentence. As things have unfolded, I like how the enlarged version resonates. “In life’s deadly joyous dance of doom & delight, we can choose love, we can follow a Golden-Ruled path toward facilitating Life-Force Energy, or we can mimic Israel's assistant imperial insistence on eternal plunder, swallow Prozac, & wait, blunted & placid & numb, for Mass Collective Suicide’s grimmest of reaper’s inaugurating a hellish eternity of nonexistence.”

Even daring to conceive ‘a Golden-Ruled path’ brings to mind Einstein’s quip when asked what he felt about democracy. “I think it would be a good idea,” ha ha. As for our ‘betters and masters,’ their methods decidedly present no kind of holistic highway to justice and peace.

My daily Tweet habit has become another disciplined word-honing process, allegedly as a counterpoint to this bourgeois negligence and perfidy. Who is to say what such habits are worth? On any given day, I send out anywhere from two to ten darts-of-ideation on X’s website. Just as here in Big Tent territory, so too when I’m Tweeting, I’m a rank amateur and interface neophyte, truly a ‘rebel without a clue’ a fair amount.

The forces of ‘sit down, shut up, do as you’re told!’ absolutely cannot win the likes of a spindoctoring ‘Humble Correspondent’ to such a fascistic point-of-view. Still, never an expert or a comprehensive fact-finder—I affirm being suggestive, letting the facts speak on their own behalf—I often enough sigh and wonder, ‘why bother?’ Ha ha. As if I could stop.

God knows, furthermore, and very much on the other hand, the things that I want to say feel as if they might have useful notions to contribute as geopolitical conflict comes down to a death match over whether U.S. hegemony will remain eternal. Here’s a Tweet that could play the part of a potent prod to perspicacious chatter.

“Brand Chaos specializes in carnage, as its promoters—con-men all—practice America's true religion, anticommunism. Majority becomes an insult if stated in Russian. We must resist Capital's Modern Nuclear Project and its promise of Mass Collective Suicide.”

On another occasion, earlier the same day, I reemphasized these points about a self-destructive ruling cadre. “To remain atop the heap, quintessential financiers and 'entrepreneurs,' mediate the imposition of a Collective Suicide Wish that is simultaneously laughably insane and mandatory, an absurd tragedy that only social solidarity among the masses can forestall.”

In any conversational space, discourse routinely concerns matters that amount to mindless chattering. X has plenty of that, but it only rarely actively prohibits truth-seeking or soothsaying. “USMC commander Smedley Butler jettisoned his career & wrote War Is a Racket. Twice awarded the highest Honor for bravery, he boldly & baldly described decades as “a gangster for capitalism,” albeit with a level of integrity that Biden & Zelensky are incapable of showing”. To make it fit, I had to leave off the full-stop to finish.

In regard to these sorts of observations, the possibility exists, in fact, that Capitalism has Eight Core Commandments. One would be this: ‘Defend & If Possible Expand Property's Already Hegemonic Rights & Perquisites. Then comes Two: Maximize Profits, Regardless of Externalities & Such.’ To put matters mildly, this much should be obvious. The rest determine every element of our social lives more often than not.

‘Three is a process key: Break Everything Into Smaller & Smaller Components & Compartments. Four follows apace: Turn Each Component/Compartment Into New Commodity Streams. Five augurs finance's tyrannical rule: Own All Government Entities. Six takes the next logical step: Operate These Governing Apparatuses As Wholly-Owned Subsidiaries That Follow 'Good Business Practices,' Referencing #'s 1 & 2. Seven addresses mediation: Use Information & Media to Marginalize Or Coopt Opposition. Eight manages opponents who escape marginalization or cooptation: Imprison Or Liquidate, Make War on, the Stubbornly Non-Compliant.’

Is this truth? Who knows? It makes sense to me, a way of stating things in the vein of Pearls Before Swine, in Rat’s inimitable flat-out forthright fuckery.

In the middle of all these shifts and subtlety to support the property system, where to start is only rarely perfectly obvious. Then again, we must always ‘begin at the beginning,’ ha ha. Aristotelian tripartite contemplation basically comes down to just that: beginning, middle, end. It’s ever the arc of any yarn.

Are such decisions arbitrary? To say anything other than, ‘in some senses, at least, of course,’ is at best fatuous. Narrative consists in making such choices, at the same time that nothing other than history and randomness appear akin to determinative in nature’s arrays of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The cosmos, clearly, consists of much more than our constructs, however. Ultimately, the reason that we do these things, make these things up ‘from whole cloth,’ as it were, is that they help us. Storytelling is adaptive. One can say the same thing about conversation. Duh, right? It’s one form of mutual support.

Unfortunately, albeit as naturally as dirt, treachery and betrayal are also quite prominent components in the human ‘bag of dirty tricks.’ What’s a being to do? It feels like an ugly paradox indeed, to want goodness from our narrative forays and yet put lucrative, or otherwise selfish, relations forever ahead of such attainment.

A way to finesse the conundrum, generally speaking, seems easier to discern. Eyes open; heart calm; mind clear: one may follow and seek out those who also adhere to the Ten New Commandments or something similar. One also tries to figure out how things stand and, in a sense more indispensably, how things operate, how they evolve from a definite—if never definitely definable—past to a palpable present.

Just in case anyone hasn’t recollected specifically, the aforesaid TNC, in all their glory, lie just ahead. This is how I stated the case a month ago, mas o menos. “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.’

Discussion of such matters is, to put matters charitably, elusive. Discourse about the basis for human life on Earth, for all too many participants in the charades of identity in place of democracy, feels fraught with risk, as well as much less satisfying than new phones and trips to fancy places that require comfortably-padded bank accounts. The upshot is that we spew chat about non-sequiturs, sports and other commoditized trivialities, and bullshit, thus evading, if not completely avoiding, any really probing exchanges about how things are going just now in the whole human project.

At a home-baptism recently, I actually had a brief humorous exchange about this with a fellow, Andrew, whom I’d never before met. Detecting a British twang, I inquired whether he might hale from the South of London.

“Way South,” was his drawling reply, “down near Antarctica, actually.” Yes indeed. His home is on the island of Tasmania off the Australian Continent’s Southern coast. His first feint in my direction, which in retrospect was bold if not altogether brave, was to ask ‘what I thought about the elections.’

Ha ha. I didn’t want to cause any ruffles in the evanescent purpose of the day, so I was a little circumspect, but in a way that made very clear that I considered the whole electoral circus a manipulative and mostly fraudulent sideshow to the exercise of imperial power. His nod was sympathetic.

“I’ve been in America two years now,” he smiled and shook my hand, “and I’ve never had this conversation with another American.” I laughed. He shook his head affably.

“All my friends,” by which he meant non-native U.S. residents and foreigners elsewhere, “think it’s just crazy.”

“About how impossible it is to have a conversation?”

“About how pissed off people get,” and he rolled his eyes and held up his hands to ward off fisticuffs, “if you just, you know, dare to…,” he was searching for a word.

“Disagree with them,” I finished.

My concluding comment brought gleeful guffaws from us both, and we parted fast friends. “Among my acquaintances,” he said, “we’ve learned…” not to delve the depths of anything other than sports and gossip.

By design, quite effectively, such societal filtering practically guarantees that folks will rarely if ever discuss all the forms of toxic imperialism in our everyday lives. Mass Collective Suicide notwithstanding, encouraging existential exchanges is just so stressful to the psychic sensibilities that most people use to keep their oars straight and their rudders on course.

After all, the Modern Nuclear Project’s denizens, plutocrats primarily, have always—from decades prior to fission’s confirmation, for example in H.G. Wells’ 1913 ‘novel of the future,’ The World Set Free—believed nuclear wars would indeed be winnable, an epitome for the whole concept of LOL!

That “Atomic Power”—as in the Louvin Brothers’ marvel, “The Great Atomic Power”—has always revealed paradoxical, not to say pathological, anticommunism, makes such a view of victory particularly vile villainy, inasmuch as it almost guarantees eventual Armageddon. And how does capital respond? With all-encompassing monopoly cultural mediation that offers one version of ‘safety in Jesus’ and another version of ‘American Supremacy,’ and so on and so on, with a few cautious ‘gulps!’ thrown in to keep the cognescenti calm and at bay.

“There’s an army who can conquer all the Enemy’s great band, It’s the regiment of Christians, guided by the Saviour’s hand.”

Without a hint of qualm, the Bristol boys promise that people will be able to “rise and meet their Saviour in the air… .and never taste of death.” No wonder the rapture so appeals to so many: it’s been front-loaded, again and again and again, and, yet again.

And without a hint of irony, Wells concludes his novel of the late 1940’s, written in 1912 and 1913, with a backward glance at the ‘primitives’ who were conquering the future with fission energy ‘both peaceful and martial.’ “A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that ‘believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the obvious in things.’

Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.”

‘Invincibly blind to what is obvious’ indeed, overlooking that winning equals Mass Collective Suicide. Once more, it makes for dark comedy, a la Dr. Strangelove, but it seems catastrophically suboptimal as a social strategy.

In my chatter with my new acquaintance from Down Under, the Ten New Commandments did not come up. Honestly, I wonder if such inclusive spirited principled context and conversation, even among people of widely divergent POV’s, might make a difference.

Lacking a moral/ethical foundation, in any case, such issues of dialog, discourse, or other exchanges of information and belief seem formless and theoretical or utterly everyday—as in ‘breakfast past’ and ‘dinner tonight,’ or something similar—in their subject matter. Rectitude and wrong simply don’t come up, except as occasional judgments that have little to do with evidence or reason.

Thus, even a semblance of any ‘theory of justice’ is lacking. Such an ethical foundation would necessitate a ‘reality orientation’ that is simply impossible even to imagine in our ahistorical, ‘postmodern’ world. The true scope of individual existence makes mandatory the sort of nuanced understanding of collective complexity, something that, perhaps with some aplomb, a piece of wood proffers.

“Impossible Simplification” is its name. “The Dimensions of a Life, Like a Universe of Many Galaxies, Is Impossible to Capsulize Simply: Both the Potency & the Paradox of Mediation Spite This Clear Impossibility of Simplicity, Yet Human Reality Will Ever Remain That Storytelling Has an Influential & Adaptive Role Among Our Kind Even Though the Most Random, Convoluted Drama Is Uncountable Orders of Magnitude More Uniform, at Once More Elementary & Pure, Than Even One Humble, Networked Actor’s Vast Cosmic Extravaganza.”

The saga of C.B. Strike is now an evolving part of my love’s and my media play, ha ha. The series is gritty and replete with reprehensible ideological blinders but so good-hearted and large-minded about the human condition in the process that it is at once infectious and irresistible. Harry Potter’s author is an executive producer and script consultant, in part possibly because she identifies with the burly yet balmy bloke who acts as primary protagonist.

A series of novels precede the electronic mediation, also authored by the irrepressibly inventive and cognitively exceptional J.K. Rowling, albeit via the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, a surname about which she has fantasized since a child! An ‘alternate identity,’ one might even say, ha ha.

The detection in which P.I. Strike and his winsome cohort indulge is as wonderfully clever as it is basically believable, albeit with a so-far predictable and not altogether pleasant premise, or at least whispering, about class and character. It’s well worth the time unless one inclines to avoid almost all such mediation; in that case, the verdict is still pending.

The key filter, one might say, for yielding the core components of an examined context—a television series, for example—is a discernment about what one might call ‘socially real relationships’ among the diverse characters in the cast, so to say. Whenever such an instance of storytelling passes this specific sniff test, quite probably, it will reveal players in the drama who are at once insisting on authenticity from each other and trying to navigate official, which is to say bureaucratic and imperial, officiation of whatever the heroes are seeking.

Implicitly, therefore, fulfilling social potential—or if one likes better, the social justice that depends on social equality—must have a significant impact on what a given program is representing in the cultural landscape. One polarity that appears repeatedly, almost universally, in these mediated endeavors is that between liberation and compliance.

The vast majority of such programming has a ‘public-relations’ purpose in support of one pole or the other. ‘Red propaganda’ will come down on the side of liberation through solidarity; one can see this from before the Battleship Potemkin’s travails.

Capitalist constructs, on the other hand, arguably follow something along the lines of Eight Elemental Mandates. In this way of thinking, today’s above-noted possibility that something similar to Capitalism’s Eight Core Commandments rules the roost will make rationalizations like the following feel familiar. ‘Everybody knows that socialism doesn’t work.’ ‘All the communists want is to control us and ruin our way of life.’ Blah blah blah.

Rarely does anyone—other than this humble correspondent, of course—stop and say, ‘hey, wait a minute! Does everybody really know that?’ Moreover, ‘is that actually all they want?’

In the event, such a way of imagining how things function fits quite neatly with all manner of empirical and analytical endeavors to describe humanity’s present passage. Inevitably, all sorts of investigators show up in BTR’s hoppers, many of whom are unfamiliar but whose methods and results are congruent with and sympathetic to Big Tent contextualization.

A recent ‘find’ of this sort is the work of Edward Sard, a made up name, much like Pablo Neruda—whose new moniker appears in the second piece of the Victor Jara essay below—chose his name both to be a tad elusive and to express his political inclinations. Sard, for his part, a radical, maybe revolutionary thinker, in the mid-1950’s named his version of military Keynesianism the “permanent war economy.”

For decades, he had written under five different pseudonyms, producing works that guide Democratic Socialists to this day. With a cadre of comrades, he entered the Socialist Party to carry on work along lines congruent with the thinking of Leon Trotsky, who at that point—in the mid-1930’s—was avoiding Stalin’s murderers in Mexico. His mentoring helped to formulate ‘Trotskyist’ party apparatuses that also persist in the here and now.

“Already in 1937 the Trotskyists and their supporters were expelled and at the turn of the year they formed a new organization, the Socialist Workers Party. During these vicissitudes (Sard’s) star rose. The Philadelphia Y.oung P.eoples S.ocialist L.eague convention in September 1937 had elected him as the national officer responsible for education.”

Infighting among radical factions ninety years back? And the point is? Two things: Sard, whose given name was Solomon, navigated to a POV that must have some meaning among latter-day activists and citizens who recognize that militarism and imperialism forms the central conjunction of contemporary political economy. A “Permanent War Economy” looks like as reasonable a label as anything else imaginable, Whitney Webb’s genius—the National Security State—notwithstanding.

He also wrote this. “It is commonly thought that fascism is resorted to by the capitalist class solely because there is a threat of a proletarian revolution. The experience in Austria proves conclusively the contrary. The economic necessity for fascism is based on the falling average rate of profits to such a low point that it is necessary to drive the price of labor-power (wages) down below its value.

In order to do this, all those organizations which help to sustain wage levels (trade unions, cooperatives, political parties) must be crushed. This is the first act of every fascist government and shows that, while the threat of proletarian revolution may be a secondary factor, capitalism will not resort to fascism unless economically it has to in order to preserve profits, without which capitalism ceases to exist.”

Once more, if this doesn’t rattle some cognitive cages among the cognoscenti, they’re not paying much attention, ha ha. His biography tells a radical’s tale of rendering meaningful accounts of the world as it is.

Moreover, his opinions and assessments resulted in significant part from his prominent position inside the formative ‘permanent war bureaucracies’ that came into being in the 1940’s. He’s not only a dandy theorist with solid credentials for his beliefs, but he’s also a participant in the empire’s war machine, at that time in a struggle that ‘united’ Soviets and Yankees against Nazis, or so the story goes.

Additional texts grace this month’s batch of books, and other media, on parade. Atop the pile sits a slender volume by Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions, a weird and hilarious novel so far. This Nobellist rocked my world with his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, in which Jesus’ last words from the cross still echo around my mind’s caverns and canyons. “‘Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.’”

The premise of Death unfolds from a small European country’s suddenly undergoing a total cessation of mortality. Anybody with even a little imaginative force can conceive of odious, nasty, revolting, and otherwise grotesque consequences of such a happenstance. Updates are forthcoming.

Cold Sassy Tree was a book that I intuitively avoided. I knew nothing of the author, Olive Ann Burns, yet the title somehow seemed contrived, so, in other words, I had a prejudice of some sort. Now, however, I’m appreciating something about the South that C. Vann Woodward himself thought important. ‘Yankee calculation’ about property predominates, especially in the ‘best of families.’

A few chapters in, this line just flowed by. “I knew my mother thought the marriage was a scandal, but this was the first I guessed that she saw Miss Love as a scoundrel, a villain, out to steal hers and Aunt Loma’s inheritance.” Family networks in community are on display here, so far effectively and intriguingly done.

Recently too, after a pause, I again picked up Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country, a novel that could, in some ways of thinking, parallel or even preordain Burns’ little jewel. Although the social set and setting differ markedly, both books entangle family, property, and marriage in thickets of conflict and deception.

Here are lines that illuminate similarities and dissimilarities in the work of Burns and Wharton. The one, a few paragraphs back, looks at intention as it formulates collectively; the other, just below, views ‘desire’ as purely an individual sensation, whatever social elements might also motivate characters in conflict.

“Now, at last she was having what she wanted—she was in conscious possession of ‘the real thing;’ and through her other, more diffused, sensations, Ralph’s adoration gave her such a last refinement of pleasure as might have come to some warrior Queen borne in triumph by captive princes, and reading in the eyes of one the passion he dared not speak.”

Julian Assange’s compilation, as well, details impassioned people in networked array, albeit When Google Met Wikileaks uncovers a political economy of networking in a context of core conflicts between governing authorities of one sort and another, on the one hand, and activist proponents of individual empowerment through accurate awareness, on the other. One of the documents that Assange’s work compiles is the author’s review of The New Digital Age, Google executives’ self-promotion of the notion that all is happening in perfectly ordered technocratic fashion.

Thus, Google naturally and beneficently sides with the State Department and the National Security Agency. “Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and, so ‘The Future of Terrorism’ gets a whole chapter.”

From such a focus must ever erupt authoritarian, possibly fascist, foolishness, as Assange’s scholarship documents nearly as well as his personal encounter with prison walls and psychic torture. I’m only halway through the book, so more will follow about the efforts of this stalwart defender of humanity’s collective duty to understand things individually and vice versa.

That the estimable servant of human survival recently spoke, at a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, is a testament to human durability. Assange clearly has survived an ordeal which would have amounted to termination-time for most of us.

The complete text of his presentation is available, thanks to the sturdy work of Consortium News. Whatever interpretation one imparts to this event itself, that the process has transpired must excite all but the willfully obtuse or the preternaturally plutocratic. A profile series about Assange is in the works. In the event, he offered a critical early insight during his testimony.

“I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”

Just to encapsulate an obvious conclusion, the line of whistleblowers who have sought to help human knowledge and obliterate obfuscation—from before Daniel Ellsburgh to well beyond Julian Assange—represents a squadron of Life-Force-Energy defenders whom we ignore at our peril. Their valor validates various versions’ valedictories in favor of interconnection and mutuality.

No matter what, in the event, the multi-tiered nature of knowledge is part of what underlies the Big Tent Review. One could readily continue. A primary point is that everything fits together. For example, Ukraine’s Nazis plunder in favor of terrorist ascendancy in Syria, while El Salvador’s President touts Yankee-style law-and-order campaigns, at just the point that BRICS-inaugurated currency changes are redefining world orders old and new.

Imperial imprimatur, a hegemonic order’s hubris that it can bend all humanity to its self-righteous self-importance, underpins everything concatenated in the world today. That could hardly be otherwise, since the very label ‘ruling-class’ would then meet with dismissal and derision instead of bringing forth considered nods of agreement.

So saying, perhaps now will act as a good time and place for the new ‘Randomized Knowledge Shtick’ that last issue’s Introduction began. To jog readers’ memories, every issue’s Introduction will feature a series of websites from one of my endless open queues of tabs in Firefox. Today’s seven links all lined up like ducks in a row, though I did omit four music videos that I opened in the midst of it all.

Almost a prequel to the Nordstream bombing and Ukraine imbroglio, A Peace to End All Peace sounds so much like today’s hellish and harsh attacks on truthtelling and informational exchange that it ought to scare people to distraction. This is so because the book also powerfully explains and enlightens about the first World War to use that name.

A website that serves humanity, ratical.org, has among its efforts in favor of our kind gathered important pieces of the work of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. Regular readers have already heard from General Butler, who claimed that his tenure culminated his longstanding role as a “gangster for capitalism.” His testament is a key document for human understanding and freedom.

The portal to YouTube below led to three of the recorded song videos that I set aside without inclusion here. Its title is gut-wrenching given the ongoing remembrance below about 9/11/1973 in Chile, el Gulpe: “Cameraman records his own death [La Batalla de Chile (1975)]—Patricio Guzman.”

In this article, the Guardian franchise places the Modern Nuclear Project in an unintended difficult light, not the purpose of the writing, which was to focus on Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant operators in the skirmishes of war with Russia. The incursion into Kursk by Ukraine, a likely purpose of which was damage to or capture of a Russian plant, certainly looks more fraught in this light.

My friends who are educators indicate that COVID protocols cataclysmically impacted schools, that—especially in the U.S., where the diminution was most damaging—were already at best barely maintaining decent standards of learning and intellectual empowerment. Articles like this lay a foundation for figuring out how to proceed.

This altogether lovely little report from the American expression of the Conversation delves the development of empowered emanations of female sexuality as a consequence of social developments after the beginnin of the 1900’s. As BTR followers will recall, repression of these life-serving energies inescapably portends fascist eruption, a pattern that the work of Wilhelm Reich so amply demonstrates.

This gruesome ‘true-crime’ briefing brings to the fore the hideous and insidious way that misogyny so pervades American society that its viability might just suddenly evaporate. Women’s rights to security and personal safety are nowhere at once so viciously violated and promoted as essential as is common in America.

Now many weeks old, this short report may be the first monopoly/‘mainstream’ acknowledgement that apparently serious threats of total conflagration were coming forth from Russia about U.S.-led attacks on Russia via the Ukrainian proxy. People who champion a prospect for human thriving might thereby pay attention.

Another component of such rumination is what one might term ‘Mistake Theory,’ ha ha. This type of POV, when it shows up, acknowledges erroneous or even evil intentions and choices, yet it begs forebearance, because, purportedly, all the insalubrious or villainous outcomes were merely instances of mistaken activities.

The current scene, in some senses as a matter of the course of social class in human affairs, is full of predatory instances of these altogether ‘accidental’ depredations. Practically speaking, modern societies are fairly likely to embrace ‘Genocide-R-Us’ types of policies and pogroms, so to speak.

Ukraine, obviously, bursts with this, as minimum tens of thousands of Ukrainian youth and civilians have paid the ultimate blood-price for imperial insistence on Kyiv’s availability as a jump-off point for attacking Russia, as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization outpost, all tidily laid out in a recent Treaty, all official. The Russians’ Special Military Operation has won the war on the battlefield.

Apocalyptic policies aside, human societies must conceivably have the potential to avoid provoking Mass Collective Suicide. Centuries of geopolitical conflict notwithstanding; a century of ideological infighting no longer applicable, supposedly, ha ha; capital’s entire greedy gusto for new chaotic disasters, purposefully to resuscitate profitably, merely given as a backgroun S.O.P.: mass murder in service to an Anglo-American Empire needn’t demarcate the sole possibility for organizing people hither and yon in the vicinities of the Western Slavs and “Little Russia.”

Israeli actions, in the meantime, have become so execrable that almost every peep from the United Nations’ 79th General Assembly meeting has condemned them. Benjamin Netanyahu is a tough customer, however, and has doubled down on absurdity: that Israel is a victim in the region, a bizarre twist of the entire facade of Jewish Questions from time immemorial.

Lebanon is now under attack. Iran has carpeted much of Israel with a ballistic barrage. Israel’s thermonuclear arsenal is a clearly massive strategic reserve, a further indication of the Modern Nuclear Project’s key placement at the center of everything in the here-and-now.

In that context—exploding electronics that injure or murder whoever has a pocketful, targeted assassination that cares not at all about ‘collateral damage’, on and on ad nauseum—some sort of dire brink appears inevitable, one of those situations of a selected track’s leading our collective train to a doomed destination. Disastrous developments might improve the present passage’s sense of a devolutionary spiral.

The electoral front at home, like a sick mirror, reflects these two primary hot spots on the superheated global stovetop. Regular people everywhere are, in the idiom, ‘sick to death’ of mass murder in the name of either ‘holy Zion’or opportunistic Russophobes, as it were. That getting a spare billion for the homefolks is as difficult as finding teeth in a chicken, whereas politicians almost throw cash at Ukrainian gangsters and Israeli spooks, makes for some weird and altogether irritated electioneering.

Trump fetishes square off against Kamala pretensions. The ‘American Century’ may definitively be ending, and the cast of characters for the ‘final season’ include suitably garish and grim players. Whatever the ‘winning team’s’ constitution on November 4th, very little in the monopolized, Pharma-besotted mainstream mediation space is occuring in the way of forthright reporting, either about the formal electoral arena or about things that really concern the people, citizens and voters and more.

Big news from the Modern Nuclear Project is always cropping up too, on time and over budget, indicia of how critical this particular piece of ‘infrastructure’ is, exemplifying MNP projections of longterm, if not eternal, ruling every rubric of humanity’s planetary habitats. Bill Gates’ interests are buying Three Mile Island. Micro-reactors are all the rage despite horrific costs and all the horrors of every step of the Nuclear Fool Cycle.

And, obviously, ‘superpower’ H-bomb habits—strategic weapons arsenals—both boost the thermonuclear bottom line and, via Mutually Assured Destruction and otherwise, allow for what one might term the ‘ultimate imperial super-bullying experience.’ Uncle Sam at his finest, far surpassing the slave trade and indigenous genocide in contemporary killing megatonnage, the U.S. will have its way.

Whenever the present passage yields its due and whatever that manifestation turns out to be, we haven’t yet totally ruined the prospects for a relative Garden-of-Eden history for our future representatives, as it were. But any type of tomorrow may prove out of reach unless imperial plutocratic power ceases to be the sole social life potentate.

In such a vein, a fundamental question is arguably accessible. How much longer can America’s utter impunity and arrogant imprimature remain at the human helm? The fierce insistence on ‘American exceptionalism’ is ringing more and more hollow, as sanctions seem the only tool in the diplomatic chest other than carpet bombing and behind-the-scenes skullduggery.

Alexander Dugin is a Russian patriot who doesn’t accept a plutocrat-friendly unipolar planet. He highlights clan-orientation as a way to ponder our pass. Thus, his preference for an old-style conservatism and ‘traditional values’ makes complete sense. A Tweet of mine may be responsive.

“Clannishness is indeed innate, as, indisputably, is the awareness of its toxicity. Otherwise universal primordial practice would not have required males to mate outside the clan and, wittingly or no, thereby avoid incest's devolutionary tendencies.” Unlike most folks, Dugin has probably heard of the Westermarck Effect.

This fascinating phenomenon—that very frequently children raised together from infancy struggle to consummate conjugal relations—may suggest that humans organically seek diversity in sexual mixing, so that social practice along similar lines reflects deeply seated biological/psychological propensities.

Whatever and whenever the case may be, however, it certainly offers further sweetly suggestive cicumstantial evidence about how central are Life Force Energies in our cultural affairs. In some sense, no doubt, this centrality in turn underlies the BTR persistence in centering sex in any search for sociocultural comprehension.

A quip from the iconic Education of Little Tree—that, basically, simultaneously fighting and frolicking will always prove problematic, if not impossible—needs to remain uppermost in the minds of those who would improve chances of species flowering over the course of coming years and more. Powers-that-be prepare eternal wars; the Life Force can only suffer therefrom, perhaps lethally and eternally.

Another profferal on X dealt with a similar concern. “Rather than just waiting around for what will never be and, meanwhile, fighting fire with fire, we can promote Golden-Ruled morality as a grassroots standard operating procedure. Eventually, a 'tipping point' in favor of human survival may prove plausible.”

A ‘that’ll never happen attitude,’ even if very reasonable, cannot maximize human benefit. Most either-or statements are suspect, or simply false. Yet this ‘do-unto-others’ protocol likely does substantiate one pole of possible human futures, the opposition to which—one form or other of realpolitick—includes almost all other potential outcomes in these social struggles.

Every issue starts out in this rambling way, an attempt at inclusivity that can offer near the completion of matters at hand fond memories of the life and work of Kristoffer Kristofferson. His music pulses with the harmony and discord that punctuate both Cold Sassy Tree and Custom of the Country, running the gamut from gentle courtship’s cautious caresses to lascivious lust’s feisty fulfillment. May he rest in peace.

As will often end up the case, a piece of Driftwood Message Art aptly palpates these pointers about collaboration in a struggle for human liberation. Its lines have appeared before in BTR’s pages, and they will do so again. “Primary Plutocratic Tools” is the title.

“War & Terror Serve As Primary Tools in Plutocrats' Standard Practice of Their Pyramid Dreams to Remain Ever Atop the Human Heap: Only Consciousness of This Class Warfare, & Stalwart Solidarity in Reply, Can Avoid Otherwise Irreversible Bludgeoned Drudgery & Put Mastery of Nature, Which Only Labor Can Create, Truly at the Service of the Masses of Humanity Instead of Enriching Only This Rigged Game's Self-Appointed 'Masters.’”

Well then! We’ll sign off with a precis about C.J. Hopkins current experience of ‘New Normal’ in Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles. He had the gall to put a swastika’s ghostly image on the cover of his book that makes a powerful case that Germany’s government is in fact pursuing fascist practice hither and yon.

This pointed choice resulted in a charge of violating erstwhile ‘fascist promotion prohibitions,’ ha ha. It really is like a joke, right? A little icky and sickening, but farcical. Miraculously, the trial judge acquitted him.

Unfortunately, alas, in Germany, prosecutors can appeal criminal verdicts that find defendants innocent. Here, such double jeopardy is, thus far, not even possible in the very belly of the beast. The appeals court overturned the acquittal, so now Hopkins has only a last plea before Germany’s highest tribunal between having to pay dearly for his misdeeds, which is to say the bound-in-duty actions of anyone who has the courage to call herself a citizen, of anyone who believes in his citizenship, behavior that would mean that, what, we all belong in the hooskow with C.J.?

Another view is possible. We must organize ourselves so that never again will Julian languish in prison, nor will any artist or activist or investigator face the farcical and yet nauseating experience that the estimable Mr. Hopkins is undergoing. As granny always liked to say, ‘a word, to the wise, is sufficient.’

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Goddess Goodness Guidance

‘Making Voodoo topical’ would be a staunch critic’s most generous characterization of this specific and, as it were, tidy spot on the regular Big Tent calendar. Much of what Big Tent Review has on offer consists of historical facts and current data, along with attendant exploratory hypothesis and analytical speculation. Such elements appear today as well, juxtaposing, in the event, the empirical and the conjectural.

Goddess Guidance is a name for it all. For most of Big Tent Review installments, this probing of the ether about matters at hand, instead of delving a client’s query or some aspect of my own life and times, of more or less purely personal interest, has focused on wider-world problems and options.

Elections, empire, Israel, and more have formed topics of inquiry in a process that, in aggregate, constitutes an expression of the Mantic Arts. If only as ‘food for thought,’ any such openended, openminded, openhearted endeavor as this has much to recommend it.

Our hunger for knowledge, our indelible desire to delve understanding’s depths, such as these require dietary or aquatic choices, so to say, that are alluring or aromatic or otherwise engaging. Whatever the case may be, some dynamic that ‘interrogates the cosmos’ is a quintessential component of humankind.

Along these lines, today’s inquisitive effort more or less combines a factor of special import to me with something that also resonates much more broadly in how things are going at large. The overall focal area for this moment in time is apt for anyone who ponders human survival as a desired outcome, to wit, outreach and engagement and action to have some impact on the sociopolitical arena.

The Spiral Spread for #21 might delineate such a path in this way. ‘In the arguably central realm of networking and engagement, what are some useful or core ideas about improved performance in this historically difficult realm for Old Jimbo?’ The sequence that spilled forth elicits yet another iconic and altogether spooky array.

In the event, the Essence yields Psyche’s pleas to Aphrodite in the Seven of Cups. The temporal lode this time brings a Past in the form of Hades and Death, followed by Orestes’ stealth in the Seven of Swords, and Psyche again, about to encounter Eros for the first time in the Two of Cups.

No-Matter-What, Opportunities, meanwhile brings the fatherly potency of Zeus to the fore as The Emperor, with ancient Demeter’s Earth mother, with her Empress, as a stand-in for Problems & Prospects. The wrap-up comes with a Synthesis in which Orestes loathes all future prospects in the Nine of Swords.

Per our usual parameters in this portion of the BTR pantheon, a full explication of what we might garner from this erstwhile randomly arrayed spiral of pretty paper awaits readers below-the-fold. As much as any of the Readings that have happened for this portion of Big Tent’s every issue, however, the narrative that follows from these cards—again, forthcoming in a few paragraphs—is both clear and provocative.

As for the T-A-S pull in #21, perhaps this would do. ‘Given the track record, or at least the potential, of a Feral Nerd Performance Space, what are some thoughts or insights about ways to incorporate a 'live element, 'or interconnect an already extant extemporaneous endeavor, into the work of the Big Tent Review?’

Even more so, the cards command an eerie attention. The Thesis, for example, … (continued below the fold)

All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)

(Chapter XX ended with these lines. “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.’" Here is a link to the previous selection.

Today, we return to Tuscaloosa to continue deepening a connected comprehension of Danielle’s and Lou’s lives in relation to Southern universities, grassroots radicalism, lots of free-loving, wild-living ways. We also encounter an important historical figure, one Dr. Humphrey Osmond, whose credits include being one of the first to synthesize Lysergic acid diethylamide, or, in the tone of the street, Acid.)

CHAPTER XXI

***

“No, no, no!!” His mane of wild and wispy white bobbing as he spoke, the doctor, whom Rob had named “the mad scientist” on first sight, well before the young intern had introduced himself to the estimable Dr. Osmond, continued, “Just call me Humphrey; you see, we’re colleagues now. Do tell me about your research whenever you like.”

Rob’s opening and closing his mouth, a perplexed scowl affixed to his face, invited the wizened scientist to interject his own thinking again. “Just yesterday, you see…,” as he launched into a detailed—at once hilarious and astounding, full of mystery and simultaneous insight—recounting of his latest ‘small trial’—“they’ll only authorize small trials you see, so they can pooh-pooh the results”—with four of the sorts of ‘patients,’ or as Rob and Lou agreed was more appropriate to the actual conditions on Bryce’s still operational ‘rehabilitative plantation,’ ‘inmates’ who populated all the back wards and some not so far from sight in the great sprawling campus’ hallways and wards, great ten thousand square foot enclosures where beds and ‘therapy’ enclaves of couches and televisions and nurses stations all intermixed in one gigantic, high-ceilinged aggregation of cacophony and madness.

In West Alabama's very own Bedlam, the heavily English-accented Canadian researcher, Humphrey Osmond, was a legend. As an analytical chemist, those in the know opined, only he and a few others could possibly have been up to the task of synthesizing the rye-bread ergot fungus that had turned out—as Hoffman had intuited as early as 1939—to hold not only the secret to the gonzo outbursts of peasant riots and village orgies in the mild, wet Winters of thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe, but also to encapsulate Lysergic acid diethylamide; or, simply, LSD or ‘acid.’ “Doctor O., our very own ‘mad scientist,’” had never sought nor received credit for this prodigious achievement, but Rob had the information “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

He hadn’t been sure at all about Lou’s estimate that “this guy has to have tripped a thousand times, minimum.” His eyes were “just so wild,” in their wide-open wonder at all that passed in front of them; “even his hair,” white and spiky and multidirectional, “was trippy as hell.”

Rob distrusted such surface indicia, however. His ex-wife, on the surface, had been crazy about him. So he’d asked, using the honorific despite the estimable therapist's admonitions. “Uh, Dr. Osmond...?”

Lou had been right; and then some. “Oh my! What a bold inquiry.” When Rob had blushed and indicated that he needn’t even think about saying more, the dear fellow had just raised his frequently admonitory finger as his tongue played over his lips and he calculated.

“I have kept track, you see, but I sometimes do lose track. Just a minute, then.” Actually, only ten or twelve seconds went by, Rob figured later, before Dr. O. responded, “So, since August 18, 1947, you see, I have conducted self-experimentation-dosing a grand total of two thousand two hundred and twenty-seven times.”

He laughed uproariously, at his exactitude perhaps, at the insane ups and downs that such a roller coaster implied, at life from the other side of such a wild and wily ride. Then he announced, very soberly. “You’ll have to join me sometime.”

Over the course of his remaining months on Bryce’s ‘campus,’ the actual direction that Rob’s relations took with this “crazy man,” at once wise and openhearted and compassionate, amounted to what his friend Lou, ever the creator of clever captions, called a “therapeutic modality that you couldn’t get, most probably, at any price, let alone for free.”

To the at-the-end-of-the-Summer-soon-to-be-just-out-of-college Rob, Humphrey was a “grandfather figure, though about as much like my daddy or the other men in my clan as a longhorn bull in a rodeo is like an albino deer Cherokee spirit animal.” It was all tantamount to having one of the most talented psychotherapists on Earth become one’s own personal coach in “figuring out how in hell life works, fuck, in determining what the important inquiries are in the first place.”

This all included a question that in all its intricacies and perambulations perplexed Rob now, undoubtedly: his divorce was exactly three years old in a week, on July 3, 1977, his personal day of liberation and loss, and though he knew that he’d been responsible for much of the wreckage, he just couldn’t make much sense of it, “psychically or psychologically,” even though “that was the only reason I chose this stupid major in the first place, to figure out what in God’s name had happened to my marriage,” though such an endeavor was not altogether easy, let alone straightforward, in the hidebound, reactionary, and behaviorist professional culture of Psych-Department politics of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s flagship football university. In the event, sensing things salubriously and intelligently in the psychic realm “becomes much more fluid, much easier and more plausible, when one approaches things psychedelically.”

Or at least “our mad scientist” purported as much, with a fare thee well and a “don’t you know?” Rob acquired a “ten year stash” of acid in the bargain, which, now and again, as apropos, served to rev up or tune up or otherwise improve spiritual and social and interpersonal interaction and investigation. He'd more than merely occasionally break out in wild laughter when he thought about things, improvising a Londoner's brittle prattle with his South Alabama drawl. “Don’t you know?”

He maintained ever after, in any case, that he might very well have found himself “sucked under by the whole scene at Bryce,” where the pretense of ‘helping’ justified a comfortable income and “the great benefits” that accompanied being White and on staff” there, while ‘patients’ had their drug protocols adjusted to balance “the occasional need to nail them to the fucking chair” and the ongoing beneficence that all among the ‘upper staff’ but Dr. O. and Dr. Watkins—both hired by the Federal Court along with Lou and Danielle after the travails of Wyatt v. Stickney—accepted was the inevitable due of the pharmaceutical outfits that peddled Thorazine and all the other ‘medicines’ that the hapless residents of the place took on a daily basis. Instead, the day after the strike, before his supervisor could fire him for honoring the picket line, Rob “quit and headed for the woods.”

He didn’t see a lot of Humphrey after that, even as, “I swear to God, that man would have talked to me at two in the morning the day before he died.” That’s how much integrity and generosity this purveyor of acid and assiduous counsel managed to manifest to those who came close enough to know him. … (continued below the fold)

Wood Words Essays—But How Can We Know?

Always, these Marshall Arts missives utilize a categorized approach to thinking about things. And grammatical: BTR aims for perfect usage. In that vein, I long offered folks who would visit the tent, the vaunted Feral Nerd Performance Space about which today’s Tarot guidance has a bit to say, a five dollar discount if they could identify a grammar miscue. I got a pass on spelling mistakes.

The five dollar bonus was equivalent to an hour of art-labor. The price of every item was the number of hours of work in it, roughly, times five. Thus, reading Tarot was a vastly more lucrative pastime than inscribing and coloring interesting wooden forms that nature and culture constantly provide, ha ha. But Driftwood Message Art makes me proud, not in any arrogant way, but as in ‘I’ve done something interesting and helpful,’ something like that.

It all amounted to an elective insistence on my part, a calling or compulsion to discover, simply to discover, much as one little Thought Charm stated the situation. "To Gaze at Gaia's Green Groves Is Innate & Insatiable, Truly to See & Seek to Discover Only the Result of Diligent Determination & Lifelong Discipline."

And such paths paid my way for many years. I honor the ideas that have come up. In every category, my intention has always been to encapsulate some nugget of the hypothetical, and arguably quite likely, truth about something, or even, gulp, everything. Along just such a path, the broadest Driftwood Message classification, Philosophy/Psychology/Spirituality, demarcates my intellectual roots. I have ever considered captivating the question of how we can gain actual knowledge.

Today’s essay, in the event, revolves around the Epistemological Question itself, how to examine and operationalize, as it were, the processes of learning reality. ‘How can we know what is true?’ This underlies everything in today’s profferals, albeit other aspects of the ‘life of the mind’ remain a part of the mix now and again as well.

Inherently, in no small part, this ‘search for accuracy’ necessitates ethical considerations. Does one have a civic responsibility to ‘speak the truth?’ I’d delightedly take the affirmative side of that debate, in the event.

One of my favorite pieces of Wood Art—perhaps the only one that I secretly would be ecstatic never to sell—can start us out. Photographing these things challenges me, but some images are available here. “Drawn to Seeking” is its title.

“Like Infants to Maternal Milk, I Am Drawn to Those Who Seek the Truth, Yet in Noontime’s Glaring Glow & Midnight’s Silvered Sable I Flee in Abject Horror From One & All Who Assert That They’ve Uncovered Its Everlasting Essence: Nothing So Enervates & Extinguishes Any Search For Accurate Awareness As Does the Inherently Erroneous Notion That One Has Attained Complete Comprehension of Either the Universe as a Whole or Any Intricate Piece of the Cosmos' Essentially Infinite Puzzle.”

Furthermore, this specific adherence to openheartedly sharing one’s openminded seeking forms a foundation in my life’s sweet and miraculous partnership. So much was this so that I parted with another preferred Wood Script as a gift for my glorious sweetheart and representative of Gaia in my days and nights. Its heading, a simple “Knowledge & Human Interest,” rivets my best intentions.

“Truly, Knowledge Should Compel Human Interest; What Irony—Such a Safe Term, As Understated As It Is Nonconfrontational—That All Robust & Rigorous Awareness & Understanding Fly So Directly in the Face of Every Agenda That Society’s Self-Selected Rulers Ratify That These Same Privileged, Entitled ‘Leaders’ Elect to Protect Their Power By Fostering General Cluelessness, Close to Universal Ignorance, About Key Aspects of the World’s Inner Workings.”

That message came from my frequent reading of the iconic and difficult Juergen Habermas. His opus, Knowledge & Other Human Interests posits a viable species persistence as truly requiring what he calls Ideal Free Speech Communities, a conceptualization that he amplifies in “Communicative Ethics.”

Habermas’ ideas are very methodical, so one can completely lose one’s way in the deep underbrush of thought and language and action that he presents. Still, one key component is the place of society in relation to all of us individual specimens. “The social world is inextricably interwoven with the intentions and beliefs, the practices and languages of its members,” says Habermas, forming a context that must lead, if all are honest and equal, to something like the following POV.

“The discourse principle provides an answer to the predicament in which the members of any moral community find themselves when, in making the transition to a modern, pluralistic society, they find themselves faced with the dilemma that though they still argue with reasons about moral judgments and beliefs, their substantive background consensus on the underlying moral norms has been shattered.

They find themselves embroiled in global and domestic practical conflicts in need of regulation that they continue to regard as moral, and hence as rationally resolvable, conflicts; but their shared ethos has disintegrated. The following scenario does not depict an ‘original position’ but an ideal-typical development that could have taken place under real conditions.

I proceed on the assumption that the participants do not wish to resolve their conflicts through violence, or even compromise, but through communication. Thus their initial impulse is to engage in deliberation and work out a shared ethical self-understanding on a secular basis.” Certainly, such an approach appears quite congruent with a First New Commandment's Golden-Ruled rubric. Under such circumstances, in the event, the ideas of “Noxious Expertise” resonate powerfully.

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

Along similar lines, Driftwood Message Art admonishes those who readily accept authorities’ attempts to force feed factual-fakery so as to ease mandatory protocols and process orientation—’deadly’ disease demands ‘effective’ ‘vaccinations,’ ha ha. Responsible citizens resist. “Laminated Veneers of the Real” makes such a case.

“Established SOP Mediation of Matters Manufactures a Smooth Surface, a Veneer of the Real, That at Best Represents Plutocratically Propagated Imperial Propaganda; If We Consent to the Manipulative Distortion of This Demented Nonsense, We Surely Deserve the Disempowerment & Destruction With Which Our Willingly Bowing to Such Bullshit Makes Us Complicit.”

Alternate pathways are palpable. No matter its difficulty, the disciplined demarcation of the real is accessible to all and sundry. Wood Messages make clear both the difficulty and the possibility of these routes to understanding, these roots of awareness. “Sisyphean Travail” is one such item.    

"Without Fail, We All Learn Afresh, Sisyphus' Fated Travail Remains Ours to Share: Still, Duty Bound, We All Renew Vital Vows to Seek Higher Planes of Consciousness That, Through Inevitable Setback & Defeat, Can Yield Environs Where We May Ponder, & Discover How to Develop, the Clearest Straightest Expression of Our Own Possibilities & Opportunities."

Again, this kind of typology, as it were—insistent epistemological persistence, perhaps—stands as a sine qua non of this passage in BTR’s 21st capsulization in this erstwhile arboreal category. “Consciousness’ Core Magic” makes this connection between ethical promises and empirical mandates in the everyday human project.

“From Firstborn Infancy’s Furiously Laboring Chances & Emergent Grace to Death’s Doomed Destiny & Agonal Gulps, All of Us Find Ourselves Cast Upon the Shores of Space & Time By That Combination of Fate & Will & Randomness That Rules the Cosmos; the Core Magic of Conscious Awareness Is That All People Can—an Utterly Unexpected Option, Both Miracle & Duty—Attain a Perch Where We May Purposefully Ponder & Seek Actively Both to Apprehend & to Impact the Vast Intertwining Intricacy of All-That-Is.”

Such messages sometimes allude to a different way of endeavoring to understand, which is to say dialectically. A genius of Communism, Georgi Plekhanov, offers a brief overview about these things in “Dialectic and Logic,” a precis of this premise that All-That-Is represents an eternity of contradiction in motion and that, critically therefore, comprehension requires a capacity to recognize and render such often apparently impossible polarity.

On the one side, acknowledges the affable philosopher and math geek, the ‘laws of material existence’ do hold sway. A thing cannot be itself and its opposite; no opposite of a thing will be equivalent to it: in any case that requires either a thing or everything else, compromises are untenable. In this view of matters, which—again—Plekhanov accepts as useful and necessary and forceful, “yes is yes, and no is no.”

At the same time, the point of examining the realm of the real is not to make nice, balanced mathematical formulations. That ultimate purpose is a purposeful understanding of nature in all its dynamic becoming what will be from what is now, which in turn has flowed from ‘then and there.’ No notion of the real can fail to account for this dynamo of motion and flux. Inevitably, and particularly in existence’s complicated skeins always, therefore, on the contrary, “Yes is no, and no is yes!”

A lengthy quotation can, in one fell swoop, summarize the persuasiveness of such a perspective, illustrate nature’s ways in this regard, and bring ironic matters right to center stage that allow for a humorous certainty that dialectical processes are likely first among equals in any attempt to ‘catalog consciousness’ as more or less correct. “Would the reader like to know how dialectic has secured a recognised position in biology? Let him recall the discussions regarding the nature of species that were aroused by the promulgation of the theory of evolution.

Darwin and his adherents declared that the various species of one and the same family of animals or plants are only the differentiated descendants of a single primitive form. Furthermore, according to the theory of evolution, all the genera of one order are likewise derived from a single primordial form; and the same must be said of all the orders belonging to a single class.

On the other hand, according to Darwin’s adversaries, all the species of animals and plants are completely independent one of another and only the individuals belonging to a single species can be said to derive from a common form. This latter conception of species had already been formulated by Linnaeus, who said: ‘There are as many species as the Supreme Being created in the beginning of things.’

That is a purely metaphysical conception, for the metaphysician regards things and concepts as ‘distinct, unchangeable, rigid objects, given once for all, to be examined one after another, each independently of the others.’)… The dialectician, on the contrary, Engels tells us, regards things and concepts ‘in their connection, their interlacement, their movement, their appearance and disappearance.’ This conception has made its way into biology with the spread of the Darwinian theory, and has come to stay, whatever rectifications may be made in the theory of evolution as science advances.”

The very forms of life, in other words, contain innumerable opposites. Every being negates itself from before birth till after death. Nothing could ever continue otherwise.

Many items in the Marshall Arts storefront, so to say, contain exactly this tendency for affirmation to imply negation and vice versa. If one is willing to accept one’s own mortality, precisely these necessary contradictory concatenations pulsate convincingly in the everyday traveler’s awareness. How else… (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: “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." Part of the ‘new riches’ of Yankee land, in other words, flowed from poppies, albeit with even more profit from other consciousness-altering and decidedly botanical goods.

Part One is here. This is Part Two. Part Three has also passed, along with Four. Last issue brought a fifth iteration, while today’s sixth episode in our exploration follows up the opium-and-poppies congruence, whose natural and social history in identifiable ways parallels and illuminates our precise present passage.)

In these poppy-production-and-distribution schemes, “Britain's most daring rivals were the Americans. Barred from bidding at the Calcutta auctions, Yankee traders loaded their first cargoes of Turkish opium at Smyrna in 1805 and sailed them around the tip of Africa to China. Through these efforts, Turkish opium remained an alternative to the Bengal brands until 1834 when the Yankee captains were finally allowed to bid at the Calcutta auctions and abandoned the long haul around Africa.”

And poppies too came to the Americas. By the period immediately prior to the Opium Wars, the flower and its uses were a well-established part of rural life and social practice. Thomas Jefferson was merely first among equals of the so-called founding fathers who grew and processed poppies.

An anthology, Drugs and the American Dream, includes half-a-dozen entries that concern the prevalence of non-addictive opiate use in early nineteenth-century America. “Whatever the cause, a relatively high level of opium consumption was established in America during the nineteenth century. This appetite for narcotics calls for some examination if only because opiate addiction has been described in the United States as ‘un-American’ or ‘non-Western.”

And while poppy crops for export never achieved viability, literally hundreds of sources at least, likely many more, take note of physicians and healers and gardeners and country-folk in the late 1700’s and throughout the nineteenth century who created their own elixirs and emoluments with the help of poppies.

Nor did these experimental proclivities prohibit looking beyond Papaver somniferum. They never experienced much success, despite relatively rigorous searches.

“In spite of this finding, we repeatedly find people experimenting with other plants that bore latex, with hope of getting that sense of enlightenment that only true opium provides.  The most famous such plant in American history is the wild lettuce plant, Lactuca sativa, which was actually the domestic Lactuca probably imported from Europe some time during the 17th century and since taken to the wild by the end of the 18th century.  Other so-called opium substitutes over the years have included other plants in the Opium family, and even some unexpected inebriants like Skunk Cabbage.”

A Quaker healer in 1789 wrote, “From history we learn, that in the several provinces of Asia, it is the large white poppy only that is cultivated for the purposes of collecting opium; but from the trials that I have made, I am of the opinion, that it is a matter of indifference which species or variety of the plant is cultivated for medicinal use; as they will afford, when tapped, a juice that is similar as to quantity and colour and every other respect, whether fresh or dried.” The author also attests to the calming and spiritually elevating aspects of moderate opium use.

A Medical Doctor wrote of his application of a theory about arousing those who were potential victims of opium’s “soporific effects,” in other words of overdosing and dying. Though his diction differs from a contemporary clinician, he might otherwise be communicating about a novel treatment in a big city E.R, using shock to wake the comatose user up.

“Yesterday I had the opportunity of putting my principles to the test of experiment, when called to see (a) wife…who had, about two hours before, taken an ounce of laudanum and then lay in a deadly stupor from which all the efforts of her friends were insufficient to awaken her. Attempts had been made to get some vinegar into her stomach, but, I believe, with little effect; nor did I succeed much better in attempting to give her a dose of white vitriol.

I then procured a small switch and applied it pretty freely to her arms and shoulders, which were defended only by a thin linen covering. I also applied some strokes to her legs. In the course of a very short time, indeed almost immediately upon the application of this remedy, she roused up and begged me to desist.

She continued for a time, much confused, with involuntary turns of laughter. (Despite various ministrations), it was nearly an hour before she could be made to puke: however, finally she puked, and by the assistance of frequent draughts of warm water, her stomach was pretty thoroughly evacuated.” She lived.

That all was not sun and roses becomes clearer still when one considers the fate of an unlucky genius such as Edgar Allen Poe. Prior to his death, which might well have been due to an overdose, a friend wrote about an incident in which the poet and short story wizard gulped nearly an ounce of laudanum.

“Instead of returning to his hotel, Poe bought two ounces of laudanum… Poe then swallowed about half the laudanum. It is a solution of powdered opium in alcohol, weaker in opium content than morphine or heroin. In Poe’s time it was administered through cotton earplugs to hallucinating patients in mental hospitals, but was easily obtained and also widely used as a tranquilizer.

The drug works quickly, producing maximum respiratory depression in ten minutes, and its peak effect in twenty minutes. The ounce or so that Poe said he took, equivalent to about 300 milligrams of morphine, represents some thirty times the average dose.”

Another prevalent, though definitely less lethal, characteristic of America’s drug habit was the popularity of patent medicines. As well, practitioners often deployed ‘legitimate’ drugs in ways that we would now view as malpractice or quackery.

“Morphine was first separated from opium by European chemists in the early 1800s, and was found soon after in the United States, where it began to take the place of opium in patent medicines. Physicians believed the new opium derivative to be non-addicting, and hoped that it could actually cure opium addiction in patients. Doctors prescribed the new opiate often.

Prevalent medical opinion held that the addiction process occurred in the individual's stomach, and that ingestion of an opiate was responsible for addiction. The hypodermic needle and syringe were introduced in 1850—greeted as a boon by physicians who hoped to use morphine injections to kill pain and believed that the injection process itself would eliminate the addiction problem.”

In essence, this ‘non-professionalized’ pharmacopoeia was a worldwide phenomenon. It fit perfectly() with U.S. mores and habits, but it appeared also throughout Europe, in Latin America, as well as in Asia() and the Pacific and Africa.

One component of this early globalization was the way that East Indian and West Indian trade came to orbit around substances that were habit forming. In terms of immune response and otherwise, a lifelong sugar habit—the Western Hemisphere’s contribution—might easily be more noxious than a decades-long relationship with poppies.

But in any case, the crux of imperial dominance was characteristic in both cases. Literal slaves fueled the industrial expansion of the United States, with sugar and its analog rum, along with tobacco, key pieces of a triangulated trade rubric, while metaphorical enslavement boosted the already growing British manufacturing colossus from well before its Victorian peak.

Given the present pass, in which authoritative pronouncements basically from birth thrust terror and threat on those who might otherwise hold opioids in some repute, that our lineal ancestors found opioids not only pleasant and gentle but also healthful and therapeutic is something that our history courses ought to teach. This would serve, if nothing else, as a useful bullshit reduction.

OPIUM WARS AS INEVITABLE OPPORTUNISM

In this context of opportunism, profiteering, competition, and widespread imbibing, had England not sought to impose imported opiates on China, such a negation of opportunity would certainly have seemed miraculous from “this nation of traders.” All the pieces were in place to make this play in this chapter of the ‘game of empire.’

There at the helm of society, on the one hand, stood the same families and corporate networks that still hold sway, with their old aristocratic clans that have lent their imprimatur to the validation of webs of money over all else, and on the other hand, had arisen a smattering of nouveau riche interlopers whose reach has now extended over the course of as much as half a millennia to bring about a melding of blue-blood and cold, hard cash that seemingly intends to fulfill the Austrian corporal’s promise of a thousand-year reign.

The particularities of these conflicts have filled the pages of tens of thousands of articles and monographs and popular histories over the past one and three quarters centuries. The key argument that this essay advances is that those conflicts were logical extensions of the predatory and profiteering practices that preceded them, just as they were logical predecessors of the predation and plutocracy of empire that succeeded them.

The First Opium War, in terms of economic history, is all too easy to characterize as some sort of ‘mistake.’ … (continued below the fold)

Old Stories, & New—”Not Yet Forgotten”

(This was a contest entry at some juncture over the past decade. This specific story resulted from a prompt that required a tale of exactly fifty paragraphs; the numbering remains to proffer a sense of ‘cinema verite,’ as it were, in this two-issue episode.

I’ve still got a year’s worth of these bits and pieces, from the four decades or so that precede our current context. Thematically, who knows? Every confabulation intends some socially real imagined environs that contains ‘food for thought,’ or more, for our own here and now.)

1. Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background: Rejoice!

2. Its vibrant coloration, each day seemingly freshly painted, even as Winter's grip still grasped all the cityscapes hither and yon, contrasted with the sagging, neglected grave where the very name on the 'tombstone' had faded to illegibility below the iridescent and italicized and insistent capture of the wall's mediating potential. Hannah's red hair, which the tie for her pigtails barely contained—as if springs of fur were trying to break loose and explode—shook again upon viewing this spectacle that she could not help but judge as pathetic.

3. “No matter how much I tell myself, 'Don't judge, girl,' I can't seem to help myself.” From hard experience, Hannah had come to know about pointing single fingers at others: three more digits always pointed back at the accuser.

One of her mantras has long remained, “lest ye be judged,” from her early, familial Bible-thumping days. Reflexively, she touched her backside where she had often enough felt a switch over issues such as this, her 'high-hatted and high handed' condemnation of others.

4. “Mama said, 'If you don't like it dark, girl, light a candle.'” She sighed, knowing that her boyfriend, Charlie, not to mention her friends and family if they heard a word, would give her grief for opting to take on yet another 'Pet Hannah Project,' as if the world needed one more.

5. She snorted a little at this criticism. If it were altogether true, why did she win all those prizes as a debater and speaker? Everything depended on making something up, something credible and interesting enough to arrest a listener's, or viewer's, attention: “'Pet Project,' my ass,” she nodded, reaching into her now laden rucksack to retrieve gloves and hand shovel, setting aside the sturdy broom and dustpan that clung to each other like nervous servants on the lord's and lady's first day back from months abroad.

6. She no more had a plan than a strolling heart attack victim would have a speech ready to intone as she prepared to die on some random sidewalk. She certainly could have dressed more warmly; before she sashayed out to the bus-stop, Charlie had quipped, canting his head skeptically, “Where did you say this thing was? The Bahamas?”

But Hannah had pure intentions: prettying things up, showing some respect. Anything else would just have to rely on imagination, or fantasy, and fate's lucky cast. Besides, she knew she'd warm to the work.

7. Her first step, along these lines, was to brush off, then use her handy-dandy hand-wipes to clean around the name that had faded from the sidewalk shrine's 'headstone,' really just a repurposed electoral sign, a come-on from some now long-forgotten local 'campaign' that now sported barely discernible lettering of a name. Hannah extracted her special archivist's spray from a smock pocket; “there!” she exclaimed aloud. “That's readable.”

8. Maria: one of her favorite names; she mouthed lines from her mom's collection of old musicals. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Hannah mimicked Julie Andrews, not caring whether a pair of home-boys, sauntering along, noticed or not. “That's me,” she reflected; “the neighborhood nun” on another goody-goody pathway.

9. The sun had already passed its zenith when she first arrived. She had flummoxed herself, at home earlier, because she was focusing so much time on this volunteer 'assignment' when she had more than enough major projects due, at work, at school, in her own more engagingly outreaching organizing endeavors. On site, however, her focus was that of a hawk as it observed an errant squirrel just large enough as a snack for its brood.

10. Losing track of time was a Hannah specialty. She had, therefore, decided to bring her magic chicken along, a totem of an owl actually, that kept time incrementally up to an hour at once. It had just gone off a second time, ringing metallically in the milieu of mild breezes and background car sounds along what she had decided to hazard calling “Maria's Memorial Wall.”

A sigh escaped Hannah's promise to stay positive, to 'keep on the sunny side,' for fuck's sake, even when the “storm in its fury broke today.” “Maybe Maria's Memorial Chapel Wall would serve.” Then she settled herself to examine her handiwork. She smiled, remembering a section from her professor's lecture the day before.

11. Her 'Winterim' Business Law class at community college had been talking for weeks that 'no right without a remedy' was truly the most righteous concept going. … (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 persisted with the story. Last issue’s Part Three ended with the following paragraphs, the second one a prospectus for additional material. “And most germane to our exploration today, (establishment concern about radiation) 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 America’s 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."

In tune with this, today’s continuation begins with some of this further contextualizing. Both updating and deepening ought to result.)

The use of language, in subtle and practically-speaking unnoticeable fashion, to obfuscate and ‘lead the witnesses,’ as it were, represents a key and often overlooked trick of master propagandists. “Depleted” in the phrase of the day, for instance, nicely underlines this idea.

When one thinks that something is depleted, that is sad or bad, not likely glad in general. But when a foul and nasty substance—something lethal and lasting, like a deadly metallic, radioactive toxin—depletes, that must delineate an improvement, a notion about Uranium that would seem idiotic, or, more generously, disingenuous: tricky bastards.

So saying, we might think about this last, somewhat lengthy section of BTR’s first investigation of this specific Weapon of Mass Destruction along these lines: “Depleted Uranium Death Spirals: the Impact of the Institutional Perfidy of Profit on the Honorable Soldier's Consciousness.” Truly, such a conceptualization appears completely congruent with the center-staging of the entire Modern Nuclear Project, which has been orchestrating the ascendancy of eternally lethal ordnance since at least Robert Heinlein’s short fiction foray into ‘Deadly Dust.’

In particular, this utilization of D.U. dovetails perfectly with a wide array of contemporary expressions of the incongruous, if not totally anomalous, present passage among Gaia’s still-green, if all too often suffering, groves of grace. Russia’s readiness to threaten nuclear escalation; the horror at the likes of Iran’s and North Korea’s ever managing to manifest persistence in this percolating together of industry and and warfare in its ultimate, strategic configuration; the constant miraculous rescue of completely bankrupt ‘peaceful projects’ in the atomic realm.

In any case, as a persuasive origination-point for these matters of fission’s side hustles and byproducts, the story of M. King Hubbert’s 1956 presentation to the American Nuclear Society is unparalleled. An initial ‘deep-dive’ into the paper and Hubbert’s professional life as a geologist—the progenitor at once of replacing carbon and of blaming its burning of ‘climate problems’—is in the queue for the next few issues.

The great engineer and competent scientist ended by not fancying a Uranium Economy in the least. We’ll learn much more about this, and other aspects of an erstwhile ‘geopolitics of fission and fusion,’ in issues ahead.

* * * * *

Uranium only accounts for at most one part out of fifty thousand or so of Earth’s constituted elements. The complementary output of Plutonium must up this a tad, but it remains infinitesimal, albeit magic in its strategic potential, a fact since at least Frederick Soddy’s famed prediction of powering London for a century with a pound of the stuff, ha ha.

As a ‘technical overview’ of this whole topic area, readers can peruse an agglomeration of data of this kind. “Prior to the last seven decades, humanity's uptake of Uranium was minimal—some ceramic glazes and a few other applications delimited Uranium's use.

Albert Einstein's 1939 letter—really more the intellectual product of Leo Szilard—changed all of that. The Manhattan Engineering District emanated directly from the Uranium Committee that resulted from Einstein's Presidential audience. The Manhattan Project in turn marked the institutional inception of Vannevar Bush's vision of an "endless frontier" of science; thus, Uranium, practically virginal in its intercourse with human culture, acted as the gateway for new commodity production and never ending expansion.

Hundreds of new industrial facilities, a single one of which at Oak Ridge used up fifteen per cent of the nation's electricity, came into existence to serve Uranium's inauguration as the monarch of modern metals. With each new kilo of enriched U-235, easily fissionable and hence, among the new Uranium elite, preferable to the vastly more common U-238, the new emperors of instant annihilation produced fifteen kilos of leftover Uranium, stripped of much U-235 and hence 'depleted.'

As this toxic, volatile, and not readily useful material accumulated, in the form of Uranium Hexaflouride powder, the eager creativity of capital's magicians--engineers, marketers, accountants, and more--considered what might turn this 'waste product' into yet one more profitable stream of stuff, permitting the manufacture of salable commodities for one marketplace or another.”

In any event, using a applicable subtitle from another DU essay, we could ‘state the case,’ as it were, that these facts help to make: “Conceptual and Political Economic Parameters for Contemplating DU.” So here goes with Part Four, concluding the starting Depleted Uranium sally from Big Tent Review.

A Few New Prefatory Remarks

This humble correspondent is reaching out for strategic connection again. In fact, waking up one morning of late, he conceived of this work in a way that might be interesting to consider, as a Strategic Consciousness Of Political Economy(SCOPE). His outreach inquiry is simple: "How's it going?" If the answer is "Fine! Thanks all the same," then most of what follows will never be read.

However, if the reader considers the question seriously, and the answer is something like, "Man, this shit's serious, and we don't seem to be getting much traction," then folks might note, by taking one paragraph at a time, like a long and necessary journey can only take place a step at a time, that THC has something to offer. This SCOPE notion is one example; it rocks, because in almost everything that folks are doing, it is lacking, as in utterly absent, a clueless ignorance of conceptual ideas.

Such a lack of strategy, about political economy in particular, and oriented toward conscious application at that, will doom all the best intentions on earth. That said, not even a hint of panacea is present here. This humble correspondent is a seeker, not a knower. He will be suggesting engagement around forms of community that he calls Peoples Information Networks, Popular Action Networks, and Cultural Action Networks, but more of that later.

For now, anyone who is still following along may observe that this series, a first of four planned about Depleted Uranium, does in fact exemplify what THC believes a Strategic Consciousness Of Political Economy ought to contain. In this vein, the selection of Depleted Uranium(DU) as an initial focus is deliberate. Without a clear view of how this issue fits into the wider scheme of things, popular political progress will prove practically impossible. That's the upshot of this work, in any event, which this humble correspondent now invites his cousins to continue.

By Way of Introduction

Questions lie at the heart of every story; at the heart of every big story lurks an equally substantial question. Thus, today, a huge query stands behind this prefatory piece of a nine-part series, of which these four chapters constitute the first. "Why would a government, which purposefully prides itself on being a bastion of democracy and justice and righteousness, consciously continue an abomination against democracy and justice and righteousness, by making a clearly horrific ecological choice, a path proscribed by a substantial majority of nations—to use Depleted Uranium(DU) in its weapons?"

"Delusions and dehumanization"LINKED VIDEO

Indeed, ‘Delusions & Dehumanization’ are, according to Dennis Kyne, veteran and stalwart, self-taught expert about DU, at the center of America's tortured choices regarding this prototypical poison of the atomic age. Kyne is one of four compelling figures who will show up in the quartet of long series about this topic: he is a colleague of Doug Rokke, who is the personality at the center of this first set of segments, inasmuch as his was the stance that brought the noisome criminality of DU to light first.

Three times recently, this humble correspondent(THC) has developed lengthy accounts in which readers have encountered direct depictions() of the ravages of Depleted Uranium(DU), or mediated accounts() of those travesties, or epidemiological and epistemological explorations) of DU's real-world impacts. As noted, four more overall narratives are also on track, the first component of the first set of which appears here.

Especially in upcoming sections of this first set of pieces, DU appears as an epitome of the precise opposite of social justice. Forthcoming materials will also introduce heroes who are fighting, increasingly, not just for equity for soldiers, but also generally for human rights over plutocratic profits.

Major Doug Rokke, United States Army Retired, for instance, represents part of the edge that U.S. forces have prototypically had on the battlefields of the world. As observers shall see in some detail, especially in the sixth and seventh sections of this first-of-four multi-part series, instead of valuing and validating the tremendous burden that this soldier shouldered, and then responding to his well-formulated leadership, the United States Government ejected him, continuing to hope that, by impudence and silence, it could so dispirit him that he would give up and slink away.

The unfolding nine-string instrument that begins playing here will therefore provide two especially compelling sets of answers to the query posed above—explaining capital’s ‘need’ for DU's use despite its grotesque criminality, and illustrating how one man's heroism in fighting it is representative of the struggles of many suffering soldiers and stalwart civilians. For the most part, however, these fascinating aspects of the yarn occur in parts three-through-seven of this present prose sequence.

Today, though folks may dispute THC's assertion that DU is so terrible, or they may clamor, 'tell us about the heroic-struggle-stuff first!' THC will just reply 'wait and see!' For now, turning to the sociopolitical reality that underpins this tale is the task at hand. What follows merely provides a brief depiction of a framework for examining Depleted Uranium that makes possible a functional discernment of its role in contemporary reality.

Before perambulating down the trail toward a partial justice that Major Rokke sought to blaze, a few points about these particular underpinning interconnections, ever of interest and import to this humble correspondent, seem apt to emphasize. After all, an overarching reason that THC continues to slave away is to create useful understanding—that is to say, comprehension that permits action.

And without much doubt, unless citizens recognize two points, their understanding of these or most other problematic events will, at the least, lack much activating potency. The first is that, as is the case in all present-day issues, military and imperial links tie together the material under review here.

The second is that capital’s irresistible impulses to extend the horizons of commoditization are also central to the interlinking web of the overall tale. This initial section of this series therefore proffers a very selective summary of these two points, as well as articulating a couple of closely related ancillary ideas of especial interest.

A Few Notes About the Roman Pretensions of the U.S.A.

In considering the unfolding perfidy of this story, THC asks readers to consider that imperial necessities impel the creation of DU weapons, whatever the consequences. Those who familiarize themselves with THC's meandering expositions will note repeated instances() of the imperial thread that binds together() contemporary reality, both in terms of local affairs(I) and the broadest possible conception of global development(). Integrating DU into such a pattern is one purpose, and result, of this series.

In the annals of humanity thus far available, never before has an empire maintained control through primarily peaceful or amicable means. On the contrary, in fact, as the potency of such iron-booted rule has grown under capitalism, in many ways its application to the hinterlands has become more and more toxic and lethal. William Appleman Williams is only an iconic, and really relatively mild, advocate of such critique() that has shown up in the output of the likes of THC. Avoiding an ongoing continuation of such devastating predominance is one purpose of trying to grasp the stories that THC brings to the table.

Logically, one aspect of accomplishing some simulacrum of equitable liberation from the multiple phenomena that propound the continuation of tyrannical and centralized norms of power must be the issue of comprehending empire and then widely communicating that comprehension. Often, in pursuit of such insight, the student encounters titles like this—"Lenin's Imperialism Reads Like It Was Written Yesterday," which turn out to be highly enlightening about the questions at issue even as they fairly frequently take a common citizen outside her comfort zone.

Like it or not though, one cannot simultaneously duck confrontation with the powers-that-be and seek a way to deconstruct their potency. In other words, ignoring evidence of imperial dominion stands in the way of both democratic knowledge and action. This humble correspondent contends that even a cursory glance at his previous work and the cited works of others demonstrates the existence of imperial constraints on citizens and democracy everywhere.

In this vein, being able to free themselves from the evil effects of DU requires folks to examine whether DU plays some key part in the maintenance of U.S. world dominance. In turn, this requires not only, first of all, grappling with defining and describing imperialism at the current moment, but also, to follow up, figuring out how people-power might interact with such dominant political forms. … (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 second installment in this seven part series just continues a ‘first stab’ at this ‘America’s backyard’ subject. Heck, ha ha, people might even benefit from knowing these things.

Last issue, in the event, ended with these paragraphs, having set the stage for seeing empire’s “Open Veins of Latin America.” “Vanderbilt reacted with typical efficiency to (William Walker’s) 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.)

More and more, like England after Waterloo, the United States needed an “Open Door” for its industrial and agricultural products and ‘freedom of access’ to natural resources in foreign jurisdictions. Miraculously, in less than a century, the tiny thirteen original states had spanned North America, and the Stars & Stripes prepared to take on the task of governing the world.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s note about the ‘frontier’s’ role in all this process, equal parts fantasy and description, resonates still. He spoke of the way that Americans saw themselves, to an extent, and totally articulated how ‘Uncle Sam’s’ rulers wanted to present the ‘home of the free and homely brave,’ ha ha.

“Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn.

The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broad-cloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue.

Restaurants, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on.”

However, the inevitable offshoot of such a dynamic was the ‘restless’ search for, even necessary acquisition of, markets and resources outside the ‘small-village’ ambit. After all, this sort of development ended domestically with the ‘closing of the frontier.’ In this context, voila! All manner of divided and ‘underdeveloped’ polities lay close at hand, ready for propositioning or even more aggressive incursions.

Thus, war with Spain became an inevitable crusade, righteously defended in the name of liberty but operationalized in terms of industrial plantation agriculture and the decimation of grassroots, legitimate liberation movements in Cuba and the Philippines.

And the seeds that promised revolutionary growth in Cuba thereby percolated in fertile soil. None other than Che Guevara spoke of how this ‘duty’ in relation to Havana and its surrounds had played out as a historical pattern.

“(W)e all know the nature of that duty. (T)hat same duty took to account a sovereign nation, which is Mexico, for its expression of indignation at the violent and bestial economic aggression unleashed against Cuba. This duty of the United States is the same duty that compelled it to assassinate the patriot Sandino and put into power in Nicaragua the justly hated Somoza.

The duty of the United States was to give arms and planes, first to Batista and then to those who continue his work. …Thus do the rulers of the most powerful nation in this hemisphere understand their duties. These are our ‘good neighbors,’ those who would defend us, who place a military base on our soil and pay us two thousand pesos a year for it; the sower of atomic bases on all the world’s continents, the barons of oil, tin, copper, and sugar—the heirs of monopoly.”

Through all of this maturation of empire, from the first presence of U.S. Navy forces off Chile in the 1820’s, as part of the regime of various trade necessities—in California and Asia both—to the massive investments far to the North of Santiago that took place as World War was guaranteeing at least temporary demand for Chilean Nitrate and copper, Washington’s relations with the slender Republic that stretched from Peru to Antarctica were relatively benign. Nothing disturbed a surface bustle that dealt with commerce and resources and a tendency to ‘leave well enough alone.’ At the same time, knowledge of such developments is less than sparse.

“Few however have pursued contemporaneous U.S. capital flow into overseas frontiers such as those in Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere. ‘The Americans who invested in Chile were interested in any good proposition,’ notes Wilkins, ‘whether it lay in the arid lands bordering the Andes, in the Russian Caucasus, in Northern Mexico, or in the hills of Montana.’

By 1914, the Guggenheim mining group had spent $169 million in getting the Chilean mines off to a roaring start. …By 1929, U.S. investments in Chilean copper and Venezuelan petroleum had surpassed American efforts in both of those industries in Mexico.”

That such an agenda in fact typified the U.S. imprint in the region generally is obvious on the surface. Its placidity and businesslike amicability were only skin deep, however. “Banana Republics” is not merely a catchy phrase. Dozens of military invasions took place in the half century from the end of the U.S. war with Spain and the rise of Chile’s “New Song” and Salvador Allende’s dream of elected socialist power.

Eduardo Galeano speaks eloquently to such contentions: “After invading Panama, (George Herbert Walker Bush in 1991)…declared, ‘The world is a dangerous place.’ This pearl of wisdom has remained over the years as the most irrefutable justification for the highest war budget on the planet, mysteriously called the ‘defense budget.’

That name constitutes an enigma. The United States hasn’t been invaded by anybody since the English burned Washington in 1812. Except for Pancho Villa’s fleeting excursion during the Mexican Revolution, no enemy has crossed its borders. The United States, in contrast, has always had the unpleasant habit of invading others.”

Thus, a ‘Good Neighbor’ façade held little in the way of promise for social progress or popular power. In 1919, while he was advocating a League of Nations to assume the ‘duties’ that nations risked war in assuming, Woodrow Wilson stated the foundations of such ‘friendly’ viciousness succinctly. “Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?” … (continued below the fold)

Last Words For Now

What a world! That’s one of my common expostulations to myself. Also, this: ‘What is this? A joke?!’

Yet, as epiphanies accumulate, this much seems clear. Love is a choice. Could it be the elective attitude of the vast majority of cousins? In fact, such an outcome must be theoretically possible, and in that context, the question then pops up, insistent and obvious: ‘how then shall we all live together?’

The Golden Rule appears as an apt answer, and, perhaps, the Ten New Commandments. As I’ve said now and again, these matters have undeniably spiritual components, ha ha. Blah blah blah.

I’m serious yet flippant. The paradoxes of pride and predation notwithstanding, one may, if one can, find the inner resources and robust physical prowess to live in this way. Such is my path, as I live and breathe still, seven decades in the rear view mirror.

Whatever the case may be, trepidation makes sense, since opposition is no more dispensable in social life than oxygen in mammalian biology. After all, what is the Golden-Ruled reply to a brandished bludgeon or a slashing knife? Quotidian conflict too can make collars hotter than the melting point of gold, ha ha. I’ll stick to my love, but it’s easier said than done as a societal program.

—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)…

presents us, for example, the epitome of the brilliant yet wounded hero of relationship and connection, Orpheus as the King of Cups. The Antithesis punches a potent opposition to this lord of song and culture, in the form of Hercules in his struggle with his internal beast, in Strength. The Synthesis, meanwhile, manages a truly mellifluous, even magnificent, conjoining of these two polar opposites, with Demeter’s standing in place for this union as The Empress.

I certainly could never have plucked symbols more apropos; I can hardly conceive choosing more appropriate messages on purpose, before the fact, to yield ideas that support the direction that this inquiry hopes to go, toward empowerment and engagement in the cultural enterprise of performance that Marshall Arts has been incarnating, going on two decades now. Orpheus’ lyre symbolizes, in the event, an audible instrumentation, to coin a phrase, the way that our tonal and musical output give a finishing touch to all that we convey to each other.

Such regal abilities join poetry and song as synonyms of meaning’s healing sounds. Orpheus in fact both embodies the drive to perform loving service and affirms, and fosters, loving relationship, his the charming assonant intonation that caused Hades to reanimate the poet’s deceased Eurydice. Of course, that didn’t work out so well, since the reunion depended on his trusting just that.

The initiation of a Reading, therefore, makes a clear stand for the strongest possible expression of necessity in regard to relationship, connection, conversation, at the same time that something in the process, perhaps, inhibits rich fruition, or performance, of this emanation of networking and mingling and community-building. Self-doubt, as well as lack of trust in the cosmos, may be in play in a negating way.

Hercules, in his battle with the Nemean Lion, pushes to the forefront an insatiable appetite to wrestle with inner demons. The lesson of his triumph, however, does not invoke conquest but harnessing and integrating the beast’s energy into one’s personal and collective enterprises to live fully and happily. Thus, in potent messaging that promotes Marshall Artistry, so to say, as a communal exercise, much of what will either strengthen or weaken such cultural and social efforts will result from grappling with matters psychic and psychological.

Thus, a juxtaposition is present between an external situation that mandates what the query here seeks, on one hand, and internal inclinations that are not so obviously in tune with such an outcome, although even this latter egocentrism—under the circumstances of taming these oh-so-demonic energies by interconnecting them with personal and communal evolution—may yield a powerful boost to the hoped-for developments of communication and team-building.

Demeter, in truly Synthesizing fashion, continues this smooth narrative spinning of things. The epitome of mother-love and nurturing continuity in communal connection, she in turn epitomizes the human capacity for mothering and mutuality, no matter how harshly Gaia’s green groves may seem at any given moment.

Thus, in aggregate especially, these symbolic capsulizations of human psyche yield an accessible and evocative reply to the original question. First, fostering a Feral-Nerd-Performance-Space’s further evolution is readily available and may axiomatically be important to promulgate; second, however, such an effort would benefit from, and might well require, intense inner psychic or spiritual work. The upshot of everything, or finale, definitely could demonstrate exactly just the sorts of nurture and mutual interrelations that do in fact demonstrably fiercely facilitate such opportunities for performing in order to activate solidarity.

In the meantime, from above-the-fold, here are the points at issue in today’s lengthier layout. “The Spiral Spread for #21 might delineate (inquiries of this kind) in this way. ‘In the arguably central realm of networking and engagement, what are some useful or core ideas about improved performance in this historically difficult realm for Old Jimbo?’ The sequence that spilled forth elicits yet another iconic and altogether spooky array.

In the event, the Essence yields Psyche’s pleas to Aphrodite in the Seven of Cups. The temporal lode this time brings a Past in the form of Hades and Death, followed by Orestes’ stealth in the Seven of Swords, and Psyche again, about to encounter Eros for the first time in the Two of Cups.

No-Matter-What, Opportunities, meanwhile brings the fatherly potency of Zeus to the fore as The Emperor, with, once more, ancient Demeter’s Earth mother, with her Empress, as a stand-in for Problems & Prospects. The wrap-up comes with a Synthesis in which Orestes loathes all future prospects in the Nine of Swords.”

While this sequence may not be as readily rendered as today’s triptych, it nevertheless arcs a sweet evocation of connection in times of grand puffery and grotesque putridity, when any moment might be the initiation of humankind’s final few fortnights as a collection of viable communities. At its center, this longing for relationship’s loving libations is flowering to yield many plausible blooms.

Thus, in the suit of Cups, itself centering on lasting loving’s liminally luminous and inescapably relational intersections, Psyche in the Seven finds the Goddess willing to guarantee reunion’s finest fruit, and in various ways at that, in the event underlining the centrality of choice in settling on some actual instance of sweet unity in ongoing partnership. What an eerie and yet altogether normal and comforting thought: this move to declare and seek eternal interdependence could happen in many diverse ways, albeit we’d best consider carefully the fashion in which, specifically, we put one step after another in pursuit of the overall objective.

The sequential elements of this rubric start with Death, insodoing implicitly supportive of a conclusion that, so far as concerns the origins of the dynamic in the middle of this inquiry, some earlier pattern conclusively ended prior to the issues at hand herein. The complete sundering of Marshall Arts, the collapse of marital union, leaving North Carolina behind, and more mark the most recent phase of such culmination in my days and nights of love and error, ha ha.

Next up, absolutely spot-on in the parlance of the English, Orestes appears in the Here-&-Now, in disguise, armed to the teeth for vile villainy, and proceeding toward fulfilling dark deeds under cover of darkness. The suit of Swords, in harmony with an attempt to enlist, recruit, or persuade, makes the case for cognitive calculation in spite of conflict or even conflagration.

“Guile, tact, diplomacy, and wit” are the hallmarks here—no buffed bullying or merely rational force will do. As a textual guide expresses the case, “life may require us to develop such attributes, even if our natures dislike this obvious cunning.” Indubitably, in the idiom, the shoe fits nicely.

And what about tomorrow? Future Prospects suffuse optimistic if still rudimentary potentiation en route to something akin to a Solidarity Network, possibly even a Worldwide Solidarity Network, ha ha. The Two of such a momentous later-on returns the observer to the suit of Cups, where loving relationship is always uppermost.

Psyche, condemned to death because she dared to glow with greater glory and glamor than Aphrodite herself, fatefully and fortunately met Eros just after he had nicked himself with one of his potent pricks in favor of adoration. Rather than enamor a monster to love her so much that it would eat her and leave not a trace to discomfit the jealous deity, the God-of-Love in person found himself irresistibly infatuated, thereby implying powerfully the prospect, in a particular questioning pursuit, of attaining some semblance of true union and permanent plighting.

An eternal Option in this situation, as in No-Matter-What, radiates a ‘dialectic of Jimbo,’ to turn a phrase, by presenting great Emperor Zeus—the Father God of many ancients—in this position. The geist here is what we might call a ‘Father-Principle’ of making a mark and materially contributing to solving problems at hand. How perfect! A caveat would recognize that self-righteous certainty can all too often happen in this context of perfecting performance, so to speak.

In turn, this all proposes Problems & Prospects that perfectly punctuate an ideal counterpoint, literally, with Demeter’s repeat appearance as The Empress. Thus, ethereal advisories contrast the duty to create and the danger of too much attachment thereto, on one side, with the ultimate Tarot affirmation of nurture and bonded boosting of loving connection, on the other side. The Emperor and the Earth Mother’s embodiment make a powerful pair to effect the Reading’s conclusion.

As a Synthesis, eerie and spooky ideation again takes center stage. While I ponder imminent Mass Collective Suicide as a consequence of multiple instances of plundering profiteers’ plutocracy, I ask myself if I’ve done enough to affirm Life-Force-Energy’s sustenance. In other words, on Sunday, Monday’s likely litanies include innumerable opportunities for Armageddon or ecocide in some other guise.

In such contextual environs, ‘dread for the future’ is merely accurate, or at least all-too-plausible, forecasting. Thus, poor Orestes’ plight, in the Nine of the quarter-of-the-deck that yield’s cognitive contrariety, the suit of Swords, is utter horror at what to expect of the morrow.

Like everything in existence, this contains plenty that is helpful or otherwise positive, especially inasmuch as life will never long approximate a ‘bed of cherries or roses’ or any similar blah blah blah. If nothing else, this card asks for reflection about how evasions or uncorrected miscues from the past are in play in making things tough, in so doing giving sojourners a chance to learn from experience and rectify error.

‘Food for thought’ is an understatement. Follow-up, predictably, must appear ‘easier said than done.’ Nevertheless, I pose the question because I’d actually like to know, so I’ll try to use some of these morsels and crumbs to expand the endeavor in some shape, form, or fashion.

As ever, we can consummate a summation, in the event like this. ‘Many pathways are open to effect outreach programs with amicable regard and mutuality in service to Solidarity. The current developments stem from a period in the past three to five years during which an earlier Modus Operandi was operational; the current context is one in which delicacy, finesse, even subterfuge may be necessary to build a viable team, an outcome that, if successful could yield an initiation of warm and lasting partnership or interconnection.

Always, a driving purpose and important opportunity will remain accomplishing something lasting in the realm of the real, whereas ordinary and ongoing chances and risks may well revolve around inculcating an ethos of committing to connection even when the choice to do so often enough seems unappealing or worse. Wrapping up the present prospectus deals with a grim fact, that whatever the future holds will ineluctably include much that is trying or filled to the brim with tribulation that mustn’t stop the search for conjunction because human viability requires just such an actually interlinked popular politics.’

Come what may, the possibility, at least, exists that Homo Sapiens viability hinges on the abilities of citizens or their surrogates to take solid stands in support of salubrious solidarity, no matter the manipulative elite machinations that can split and sunder one set of social actors from another. Can we ever leave behind, in this regard, a ‘that’ll never happen’ sensibility and embrace instead irrepressible insistence on the Wood Words instantiation of “Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect”?

If nothing else, in this vein, one might parse the potential for meaning or action that occurred in Upstate New York last Saturday. Diane Sare took her campaign for a U.S. Senate seat there, amid an overall tone of Libertarian economic and Socialist social values. Still, the still avowedly Democratic Socialist Monthly Review brand termed operations on hand as an ‘attempt to revive the antiwar movement,’ twenty-two years to the day after the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s huge London protest March against pending pummeling of Iraq.

With an overall voice of substantiating survival, in any event, the entire process—right down to the way that monopolized media ignores everything attendant on these outpourings of grassroots upheaval—could readily replace BTR as the inquisitor regarding this issue’s interrogatory. Luminaries of resistance and free speech, of profound reform and grassroots activism, and more showed up and made quite a showing of hope and human heartiness.

Stipulating that language lovely enough, thinking enticing enough, and conjunctions jolly enough might indeed wear Big Tent garb, therefore, the notes—from on high, or down below, or from wheresoever they happen to emanate at minimum—seem to contend that the only rational choice to maximize our kind’s thriving survival must include large dollops of effective teamwork and the networking relationships that inherently underlie such collaboration. That’s my story; I’m sticking to it, and, as always, ‘a word, to the wise, should suffice.’

All God’s Cousins—(continued)…

“I was never going to be a psychologist anyway; it was too much bullshit, and I was too much a working class peasant” from the wacky, snaky sand dunes of South Alabama. He had put himself through college “with carpentry and knowhow” and little projects for faculty wives, “without a cent of debt to anybody,” even saving however many thousands he had squirreled away for “a down payment on my love nest with Nicole,” which, since she didn’t know that he had been salting the Ben Franklins away, “she couldn’t ask for even if it might have crossed her mind if she realized.”

The next thing anybody knew from the corner of the student ghetto where Rob had hung out as often as not, he had bought himself five acres “snuggled up to Walker County and a played out coal lease,” adjacent to the National Forest and a “generally sluggish” tributary to the Black Warrior, “as full of mocassins as it was of bream and catfish.” His daddy gave him an old Airstream that was rotting with rust and gathering dust down in Baldwin County.

He had earlier acquired from his tough-as-leather sergeant and father the central craft skills that would let him build a compound around the old, silvered trailer, spotted with corrosion and memory. When it was a combination of feed storage and dusty decrepitude, “back on the farm, that’s the first place Jessie-Ann had sex with me, showed me what a stud I was, before we threw it all away.”

Mr. Acosta and Mr. Dempsey, too, had played their role in the tutelage that let Rob make a way through life by combining the knowledge in his hands with the agile strength of his mind, the one as “the only Mexican teacher, of so-called shop skills, in all the history of Baldwin County since at least as far back as Ponce de Leon,” and the other “the toughest, most irritable, most judgmental, least open-minded, funniest, wickedest, and second richest farmer” in all the sandy soil “anywhere within a hundred miles of Pensacola.”

From George Acosta he learned fine-finish carpentry and organizational finesse. From Walter Wallace Dempsey III he garnered electrical skills, practical mechanics, machinists’ tricks and techniques with “every sort of motor or tool or piece of equipment smaller than a power plant turbine,” finding out how to utilize all the panoply of machines that let such work happen; he also realized that he “didn’t ever want to feel about Black people and women and ‘colored’s’ generally as that old bastard of a bigot did,” even though Rob gave him all the credit for being real and refusing to tolerate “bullshit from anybody, from liberal politicians to reactionary Klansmen who only wanted to feather their nests.”

All the lonely ladies of Tuscaloosa and Walker Counties and a fair number of the betrothed or otherwise attached females as well, or so Danielle would learn in the course of time, came to know of Rob McDaniel and what he could do. “He could put you to work, he could teach you to build things, and, if you were really lucky or cooked him something nice just the way he liked, he could do other things that were more fun with the lights out.”

He never talked much about all this, not in public anyway. He'd quip about his monumental endowment, with a Chaplin wink, “My little White-boy pecker hasn't had any exercise in at least three years.”

Yet word had a way of getting out, finding its way round the town. He’d never let on to more than that “Melissa’s my friend; she lets me do some work on her barn for her now and again.” “Jean's my buddy; she teaches me how to cook in exchange for some silly little cabinets.” And so on.

Seriously ‘old school’ in his relations and attitudes, he had kept a tight rein on himself after Jessie-Ann had discovered his ‘more than merely workmanlike’ affiliation with Professor Dawson, “the hottest Sociology professor in Alabama,” a discovery that unfolded, “like a slow motion train wreck,” in the most unfortunate fashion possible, so that, despite her newly-afflicted-with-childbirth gymnast’s body, Jessie Ann “went on a tear that just had to be seen to be believed,” after which “I was basically finished in the sack, and that was that” in the marital department, “forevermore.”

At least with Jay-A, at least for a while longer while he carried a torch that lit up a possible future when she came back to him, “I’m not man enough to marry” was his motto. He played basketball every Tuesday and some Friday nights and weekends. He could hang with the varsity players in pick-up games despite his never topping five-ten, “even in thick-soled shoes and a little bit on my tippy toes.”

His predilection for round-ball was how he’d been caught out with “the delicious Dr. D.,” one night when he was supposedly on the court but was actually playing a different sort of game. “And then I got that Goddamn virus, as if making my wife into the most vengeful bitch in creation wasn’t enough punishment.”

For the better part of a decade, he would refer to himself with the same words and the same tone of bitter remorse, as if a twenty-three year old had just uncovered that “his daddy was the devil and his mama was a whore.” “Damaged goods,” he’d say, his lips almost a snarl of pain while he’d try to laugh it off.

And one upshot of that mayhem was all ‘A’s’ in the rest of his time as a Crimson Tide student; another was a hunger adequate to venture on the journey to know his own mind, even if his own soul still scared him, which endeavor necessitated that he be willing to approach enough of a madman to help him discover what he needed to about the world and himself so as to begin to heal; a third was a recognition that his own scholarly spirit didn’t belong in an institutional setting; a fourth outcome was an adequately fierce work ethic and fiendishly perfectionist skillset to permit him to become a ‘hot-commodity’ among those who wanted just about anything built or “not quite as many things fixed.” In the end, a bit later and in the fullness of time, it led him to Lou and Danielle with whom he came to terms with “a country boy’s appreciation of Karl Marx.”

For now, as the midway point en route to 1978 beckoned, he was comfortable with his friends. “I’ll never marry again,” he thought, though anyone with a brain could have guessed that that wouldn’t last. He missed little Jennifer, the daughter who suckled at her mother's breast through the turmoil of dissolution and divorce, the gestating bit of life who had impelled him actually to marry Jessie Ann “before I was a bona fide high school graduate,” way too much never to move so close to another woman as to bring such a miracle forth again.

Still, he never did have another love affair till two years later, five years after his marital termination, at which juncture he had become a communist and “finally finished talking once or twice a week with Dr. O., our ‘mad scientist.’” He surely, truly, and “with indisputable precision and exactitude,” learned how “the personal is always political and vice versa, like it or not.” Next Up—Chapter XXII

*****

Wood Words Essays—(continued)…

will we explain the manner in which a life-fully-lived ends in everlasting physical collapse? Or that the equivalent clear brightness of dawn and dusk yield such opposing upshots of glare and gloom? As Plekhanov rightfully, and playfully, contends, nature’s very movement—evolution, whether at the macro or micro levels—evinces just this essence of polarity’s meandering toward movement to manifest the ups and downs and ins and outs of every single one’s breathing moments.

“Calls to Cognition” juxtaposes the requisites that the great Russian Red believed defined knowledge, at least so far as mere human capacity can create such an august status. History, contrariety, and materiality make up this triad, what one might label as Dialectical Historical Materialism.

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

In looking at nature along the axis that Plekhanov suggested above-the-fold, “Twisting Passages of Paradox” achieves a personal, and somewhat emotional, frisson over grappling with these twisty twirls and sinister swirls. The necessity of these efforts, an irresistible nostalgia for ‘thoughts that might have been’ if nothing else, ‘gets under the skin,’ as it were, commanding that we ‘seek truly to discover it all.’

“That Every Portal's Invitation to See May Yield Blindness; That Every Taut Muscular Surface Overlays a Slack Sack of Interior Goo; That All Answered Inquiry Activates Additional Querulous Questions; & On & On In Any Aspect of Existence—Pave Life's Pathways One & All, Most Especially That the Capacity to Comprehend This Universal Processing of Interlocking Contradiction Comes to the Fore, If At All, Only Toward the End of One's Sojourn Through These Thickets of Antithesis.”

Moreover, as already stated, complexity also consistently comes into play in all manner of ‘truth-seeking exercises.’ In any intricate exigency’s actual unfolding, however, it will inherently ‘touch-bases’ with everything else near at hand, since its very existence extends from these very relationships.

“Adding Up” illustrates this. “Each Little Piece of All-That-Is Results from Its Own Unique History, Which, Paradoxically, Only Comes to Pass Because of Its Innumerable Connections With Other Particular Bits of Nature's Bounty; Indeed, Merely to Approximate Comprehension of Any Individual Item Must Seek Sense In This Vast Array of Intersecting Relationships That, In Their Entirety, Add Up, to a Specific Life & Time.”

Taking this developing concept of erudition as a starting point, one might well wonder how to go about achieving the awareness that underlies wisdom. In this task, too, Wood Word Messages have plenty to say.

“A Supple & Open Mind” makes such a statement. “Only If One Manages To Keep One's Mind Supple & Open, Despite All the Shocks of Setback & Betrayal That Encourage One's Inclinations to Snap It Shut, Can, Out of the Blue, As It Were, Flaming Morsels Emerge to Succor One's Soul & Supply The Spirit With Flaming, Dancing Delight.”

Life Force Energy itself often enough intertwines with such attempts to know. In this vein, what we all want appears equivalent to a safe haven to conjoin and connect as we contemplate.

“Perches, Aeries, Nests” embodies this nugget of nuance.   "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."

Even with love in the same camp as understanding, however, managing to manifest vision and its incisive articulation is not only ‘easier said than done,’ but also at once helpful and harmful in achieving equanimity and attendant feel-good blah blah blah. Nevertheless, we really have nothing except this option in fulfilling our human condition.

“Compelling Narratives” tells this tale. “Sometimes, Despite Feeling as Thick as the Densest Mahogany Beam, My Skull Facilitates Transmission, So That I Manage to Imagine Matters As They Actually Stand, A Process in Which, Paradoxically & Dialectically, Accomplished & Compelling Narrative, As Essential & Dangerous as Fire to Civilization, Will Inevitably Both Help & Hinder My Capacity to Think & Act on My Own Behalf.”

At times, these messages soothe the spiritual upheaval that such endeavoring-to-no-avail inevitably elicit. “Duty-Bound to Reach Further” is one such missive.

"The Comprehensive Curvature of Even a Tiny Cosmic Slice, a Mere Galaxy's Complete Extent, Must Ever Remain Well Out of Reach of Even the Most Powerfully Expressed Collective Human Ken, Let Alone Within Some Lone 'Genius's' Inquisitive Grasp; Nonetheless, We Cannot Help But Seek—We Have an Existential Duty to Imagine—the Capacity Not Only to See & Feel & Know Everything, From the Cradle to the Grave of All-That-Is, but Also To Understand How Our Own Inputs Might Serve to Grow Grace & Glory's Glimmer Despite the Infinite Ineffability & Ineluctable Uncertainty of Existence."

Almost instinctually, all of us at times follow circuits—quite likely part of our cranial circuitry—that guarantee instances of error and more generally losing the thread of the skein of sought-after woven awareness, as it were. Sometimes such weakness comes from self-interest; sometimes from laziness; sometimes otherwise.

“Circumnavigation” is one of these notices.  "As Life's Wheeling Dealings Deliver Cyclical Sauntering & Circular Thinking, We Want to Avoid Treacherous, Seductive Circumlocution, Whether Our Own Or Others, Whether Oversimplified Or Needlessly Complex, As We Seek Ever Circuitous Routes Toward Engagement, Equanimity, & Epiphany."

Once at least a minimal monitoring of moronic machinations is present, we can grapple with a basic ineluctable fact. Everything fits. It all adds up. Even our own lives are part of the pattern.

“Perfect Sense” summarizes this altogether ‘factual foundation.’ "From Matter's Mere Castaway Chunks to Its Intergalactic Ebb & Flow, All That Is Makes Perfect Sense, Thus Inflaming Primate Proclivities to Seek Understanding's Definitive Definition, Notwithstanding How Absurd & Hopeless Are All Such Attempts Fully to Define Each Contour & Detour of Reality's Realm."

Whether brilliantly spotlighted or shadily muzzled from definitive delineation, all that we experience awaits our expression of what is happening and how things are likely to proceed and so on and so forth. This remains true regardless of Sisyphus’ hapless attempt to fulfill his impossible task; he did not desist, nor should we.

"Searching For Meaning in a Blaze of Blur" spells this idea out. “Observed in Whatever Blaze of Light Dapples Its Details, Even the Most Spectacular & Varied Scenery Seems a Blur, So That, Despite One's Being Oriented in Time & Space, All the Particulars, the Totality of the Picture, Must Remain a Bit Vague; So Too in Life, Any Attempt to Discover & Present a Clear & Complete Portrait of Things Leads Instantly to the Realm of the Ineffable, the Indecipherable, the Fundamentally Mysterious, Even As Our Common Human Destiny, & Some Would Say, Our Duty Is to Seek the Whole Truth in the Very Fangs of This Paradox of Impossibility.”

However we try to encapsulate totality, it seems at best partial, a faint reflection of the brilliancy of the cosmos as we move through it all. In just this way, perhaps, will random or otherwise unexpected offshoots of everything sometimes fill in gaps, sustaining the hope for completion of comprehension despite its inescapable elusiveness.

“Freaky Fragments' Revelations” has such empirical epistemology to proffer. It implies that our response is a paradigmatic of our particular punctuation of species proclivities, so to speak.   

"Even the Freakiest Fragment of Discarded Flotsam Or Jetsam May Reveal Nuggets of Nuance About the Universe Or Ourselves: Indeed, This Ubiquitous Pattern of Interconnection Among the Seemingly Scattered & Separated Bits & Pieces of All-That-Is Provides Ever Compelling Rationale For Our Primate Proclivity to Seek the Complete Comprehension of Each & Every Odd Cosmic Castoff That, on Any Given Day, May Come Our Way."

And again, in this realm, success is at best a humorous proposition. “Wisdom's Flaming Flagon” palpates this perspective with a shrug of aplomb, accepting the assignment to complete the picture even though its comprehensive depiction would not be possible even with an eternity to finish, ha ha.

“Intelligence Activates Deepened Creativity, Yet It Also Oh-So-Clearly Illustrates a Key Paradox, a Persistent Conundrum, of All Human Existence & the Consciousness that Flows Therefrom: the Utter Necessity of Seeking to Fill Wisdom's Flaming Flagon to the Very Brim Despite the Immutable Impossibility of Ever Doing So.”

Given, then, that these knowledge-discernment dynamics definitely define human experience, a participant in this process must persist in connecting our fancies with the facts of our lives. Our dreams, our chatter, our lies, our speculations at their most outrageous, all connect us to a rooted Homo Sapiens potency in Gaia’s green groves.

“Heartsongs of the Tree of Life” epitomizes this connection between realization’s recognition, as it were, and the construction of narratives, the creation of stories, in so doing revealing the factuality of make believe and vice versa.  "No Piece of Wood, Whatever the Tree of Life Whose Heartsong it Sings, Can Instruct Us How to Live, Yet in Shouldering the Artist's & Storyteller's Mantle, a Creator Can Craft From Just Such an Arboreal Splinter Depictions & Narratives That Do Precisely That, Offer Insights About, & Guidance to Divine, All Existence in the Mortal Coil's Ever Flowing Springs of Wonder & Woe."

As a matter of course, these social activities of sharing stories, whether slickly mediated or simply extemporized, are part and parcel of any probative process of probing how things actually stand. This, indubitably and ineluctably, joins confabulation and consciousness, facts and fables, and always in social rather than solitary fashion.

“Social Economic & Political Conundrums” completes this cycle for today. “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.”

A second installment of Wood Words in relation to Dialectics and matters epistemic is forthcoming. This core component of the cosmos, if nothing else, must represent a key task in achieving even a semblance of ‘reality orientation.’ Thus, the issue will appear again.

Unavoidably, some of the messages here now will reappear there then. As noted at the outset, this wrestling with knowledge and the ferocity of a fundamental duty to seek it out provides much of the fodder for the cognitive canons of the total Philosophy/Psychology/Spirituality segment of Marshall Arts’ works.

Like it or not, one can take tangents that seek an absolutely impossible-to-attain total awareness. Even if one hasn’t yet learned that only such a course can be any fun at all, one might ‘try it on for size,’ as a change of pace upon which individual and collective thriving and survival could plausibly depend.

Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…

Yet the documents produced to attest to this assertion require a counterfactualization of the past that, at the best, ends up advancing the idea that the East India Company’s monopoly, had it continued, would have finessed the necessity for violent conflict. Yet precisely the declining viability of the Crown’s designated and exclusive representative was the cause of the decision to open up Hong Kong and Canton to an untrammeled influx of dealers.

A simple examination of the timeline of the two conflicts produces the not-entirely-astonishing congruence between the Panic of 1837 and Opium War Uno and the Panic of 1857 and Opium War Dos. While one cannot prove that the financial meltdowns that almost always induce saber-rattling and violence among imperial leaders() in this case were a primary or proximate cause of warfare, the notion makes plenty of sense and is worth further exploration, if only because of the pattern’s apparent continuance in the current context.

That’s the clue phone ringing folks. What is happening in Ukraine, ‘Little Russia,’ portends Mass Collective Suicide to ameliorate fiscal strains.

In any event, the deeply-investigated novel, River of Smoke, does document the actual words and actions that resulted in England’s taking up the gauntlet that the Emperor had tossed down, with an armada that they had sent in anticipation() of an appropriate excuse. The intense competition and thinning margins that had accompanied the straitened circumstances of trade after the 1837 collapse were in any event part of the background to Ghosh’s dialogs, which utilize the proclamations that China’s then-‘Drug-War-Czar’ Lin read to the assembled merchants.

“It is common knowledge that you foreigners who come to Canton to trade have reaped immense profits. …Are you foreigners grateful for the favours shown you by the Emperor? You must then respect our laws and in seeking profit for yourselves you must not do harm to others. How does it happen then that you bring opium to our central land…involving (people’s) very lives in destruction? I find that you have seduced and deluded the people of China for tens of years past; and countless are the unjust hoards that you have accumulated. Such conduct rouses indignation in every human heart and it is utterly inexcusable in the eyes of heaven.”

One, along with the British present in reality and in the pages of the novel, might rapidly insist on a reality check. As is the case now in much of East Asia, the ‘police authorities’ in China were thoroughly corrupt(), on the take, and acting as facilitators of illicit transactions. Furthermore, the ‘course of doing business’ at the least might have merited a different approach, one with more salubrious evolutionary potential.

Moreover, in reality and in the narrative, traders would now have to post a bond, which, if they violated would lead to dire results indeed. Not only would current stocks of opium face seizure and the torch, but also “(a)ny ship after this bring(ing) (opium), then her whole cargo shall be confiscated and her people put to death.”

That the British were thugs in this endeavor is without doubt. But they and their Chinese counterparts had done business on just the terms now condemned for a hundred twelve years.

More to the point of power politics, the Chinese were completely unable to back up their threats(). In the event, their ‘humiliating defeat’ might easily have been much, much worse. This is not to excuse or promote empire, quite the contrary. However, it is to urge most stringently that reality orientation and honesty characterize our accounting.

The upshot of the nasty lesson in industrial war that England delivered to the ‘exalted Emperor’ and his cohorts, of course, included the consignment of Hong Kong to the British for more than the next century and a half. This garrison would act as a ‘choke collar’ till Mao Tse Tung ousted the Japanese, the drug-dealing Nationalist Chinese gangsters who were the ‘exalted Emperors’ successors, the Americans, and the English a hundred ten years down the road.

Hong Kong became a British possession ten thousand miles away from London as a result of this mandated mayhem. Recent technical scholarship examines the history of the “Pearl-of-the-Orient’s” growth after the formation of the East India Company’s ‘China branch’ in 1709, growth that accelerated after the First Opium War and England’s clear-cut theft of this particular gem. Thus, as the fortune’s of China’s rulers and people declined, the luster of Hong Kong increased apace.

Moreover, quite obviously, the policies that underlay this seizure applied generally to the British imperial program. Chinese researchers have been articulate and incisive in developing analysis in support of this contention.

The tea trade was in many ways a relatively small element in a behemoth’s economic activity, yet it nonetheless served as a model. The massive acceleration of consumption, and therefore production, after a ‘first taste;’ the orientation of authoritative institutions to its continuation regardless of circumstances; and the clever and duplicitously sly methods for paying the tab all characterize British imperialism’s SOP.

A continuation in many ways of what the initial conflict had left undecided, the Second Opium War had less to do with opium than with the overall issue of untrammeled European and American access to Chinese markets. England in particular—with the U.S., France, Holland, and Portugal looking on and anticipating a ‘most-favored-nation-status’ free-for-all—did want a stipulation of ready importing of opium. But that was far from the entirety of imperial ambition.

True enough, the annual worth of the trade had risen from under two million pounds in 1839 to over five million sterling in 1857. The take would increase to well above twelve million cash by the late 1870’s. Still, the key basis for the second attack on China’s sovereignty is easy to state: ‘England forced the issue because it could().’

Whatever the case may be in this regard, recent research from various sources demonstrates, many of them contemporary investigators from the Republic of China itself, that the confluence of capital and poppy products was lethal to further promulgation of Chinese power. China’s only way to manifest a destiny worthy of its culture, its people, and its innate capacity was to cast off its imperial past and embrace industrialization.

This did not transpire then in any meaningful way. Today, however, just such a transformation has occurred, and the familiar result is the incredible expansion of China’s economic might over the past three decades, with a background of famine and exploitation and revolution in the prior periods of time.

The peddlers of drugs knew that they were ‘merchants of dissolution and death,’ as well as of dreams of sweet surcease. That they realized this contradiction() appears in their attempts, at least on paper, to limit access to opiates at home.

Moreover, they might have managed to continue using smuggling networks to accomplish the aims of the balancing of the tea account, so to speak. East India Company records clearly note that from 1825 on, England was running a surplus that increases in opium imports merely enlarged further.

Instead, the British socioeconomic leaders made some simple, if crude and cruel, calculations. China must kowtow rather than receiving further obeisance from those who would henceforth dictate the terms of business. And ‘the West’s’ initial “turn to Asia” served the intended purpose of enriching the imperial centers of Europe and North America, whatever karma and future drug wars might elicit in the way of apparent historical paradox.

A couple of centuries back, then, those who held the reins fed openly off of the crushing of human capacity that can attend dependency on opium. They flaunted their determination to sell to ‘willing buyers’ in the swamps of the Orient and swatted at fellow citizens at home who crashed and burned from their habituation, as they might shoo away irritating insects that had arisen from the sloughs that they were plying abroad.

To an extent, like the novels of Joseph Conrad, these paragraphs act as a critique of the colonial project of all Europe, in particular of England. The Heart of Darkness is merely a metaphor and yet much more than just an allusion. "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

As readers will discover just ahead, the appearance of different modalities in regard to such eventualities today is deceiving. In various ways, the double-dealing and rank opportunism that attended warfare to force-feed a populace with addictive goods show up today with equal force, if not in precisely the same way.

In any event, rulers still feed on the basis of this evisceration of humanity, only now the hypocrisy is universal, applying to every region of the globe, not just their home turfs. While intelligence and police agencies conjoin with criminal drug enterprises as a matter of course, selected individuals die or face long imprisonment because they elect to buy and sell these plants and herbal analogs.

Moreover, much more viciously than they proscribe opiates and other deadly contraband, those in charge attack the now substantial numbers of inebriants that they cannot patent, which are relatively harmless or even beneficent in their impacts on the human body and psyche. The bottom-line orientation is universal beneath the surface, behind the veil of public relations rhetoric that presents half-truth and doublethink in the form of the establishment’s daily dose of fatuous press releases, outpourings of bullshit that corporate media cheerleaders repackage as ‘news’ instead of as the self-righteous, self-serving propaganda that it is.

Finally, today’s elites complete the weaving of this tangled skein of sacrosanct, selfish duplicity and murder and profiteering with carefully monopolized new drugs that their world-spanning pharmaceutical behemoths impose on people as medicine. One could hardly invent a more sinister set of scenarios. Yet they are as actual as the sun’s shining presence at an ideal distance to bring forth from the Earth what could heal us instead of enslave and destroy us.

Has the time come to confront our ignorance and fears? Will common people realize their own potential and take a stand? Inquiring minds are begging for a response.

Core Matters

The culmination of one epoch in this case has led to a century-and-a-half in which an Anglo-American empire has governed the planet. Just as drug-conflicts bounded this initial transition from one way of managing things to another, so too ‘controlled substances’ and contraband have continued to play central roles in the new scheme of things.

A ‘just-say-no’ attitude has never predominated among regular people. They are much more likely to agree with a chronicler of poppies with a toleration for contradiction. “Whatever the means of consumption, whatever methods of taking the drug have become tenable or fashionable, the fact remains that, well before man had developed into a civilised, social being, he had discovered the precarious magic of poppy sap.”

On the surface, such an interpenetration of social and political life with mind-altering commodities revolved around whisky and beer and, to a lesser extent, wine(). The saloon both actually and symbolically created a center around which life on various frontiers spun(), for example. However, even early in the U.S. rise to globe-spanning titan, other inebriants also came forward as part-and-parcel of the way things work in regard to this ingrained human need to shift awareness and ‘cop a buzz.’

From Patent Medicines to Thought-Crimes

In many ways, no other cultural symbol resonates as deeply in Anglo-America as does that of the ‘snake-oil salesman.’ The ‘spin’ on such ‘medication’ now is that it has always been irrational and exploitative, but other narratives are possible—that, for example, people often choose to distrust ‘legitimate’ ‘medications’ because that skepticism is entirely sensible() and that ‘folk-quackery’ has roots in an herbal pharmacopoeia that serves as a source for much of the corporate medicine chest in any event.

Another aspect of contemporary contextualization of health and wellness and ‘medication’ is that people’s criticism of medicine-for-profit receives a label of something far worse than mere irrationality, whether as conspiracy theory or delusional paranoia. Such name-calling suggests that any attack on corporate expertise is an attack on science(). That such a perspective inevitably borders on scientism, the reification of ‘the idea of science as holy,’ is obvious.

This extension of thinking about drugs to include reflections on pharmaceutical matters represents a key step, to wit, to conceptualize ‘wars-on-drugs’ and supposedly ‘medical issues’ as inherently part of a continuum. That standard reportage almost always separates them is a profound error about which, going forward, further investigation will have much more to say.

FOUNDATIONS OF A MONOPOLIZED PHARMACOPOEIA

“For the military-prison-pharmaceutical industrial complex,” noted one hip and happy researcher, who might have added police and intelligence agents to his list, “it’s not that they don’t want you to do drugs. They want you to do drugs, all the time. They just want them to be corporate drugs.”

The roots of such attempts to regulate and receive revenue from contraband are not unique to Europe and North America either. Java in the late nineteenth century combined its policing of medicine and contraband, with the recognition that they were often the same. Similar developments took place in Iran(), and one would quite likely find that, as the probing fingers of a grasping medical establishment searched for markets everywhere, every location on Earth populous enough to support a ‘drug store’ would experience similar ‘health policy’ patterns that also pushed criminalized herbs and spices.

A profound difference between these historical experiences in various out-of-the-way places and what British and American societies have practiced for a century-and-a-half and a century, respectively, is in the assignment of oversight to private enterprises in the Anglo-American realm. This took place with the Pharmacy Act in England, less than a decade after the conclusion of the Second Opium War, a congruence that is arguably non-accidental, and occurred a half century subsequently in the U.S. with the American Medical Association’s triumph() in ‘professionalizing’ the role of physicians.

Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth is only one of the literary gems that offers up insights() about this complicated process. Further investigation of ‘legacy charities’ such as the various Rockefeller Foundations() is another angle from which to perceive and understand this overall dynamic more fully.

What would probably emerge is a dialectical dance in which community-based expressions of healing, self-medication with marijuana for instance, have consistently come into conflict with imposed regimes of health and control, in any case a fascinating follow-up to the work that has appeared here thus far.

The human inclination to indulge the ‘light psychedelic,’ so to speak, would be one of the central phenomena to examine more deeply in moving forward. That the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a very establishment-oriented operation, predicted what Humphrey Osmond proved(), which is that LSD can cure alcoholism in plus-or-minus half of those who use it, cannot make sense except in the context of a deep split between what people want and need and ‘just what the doctor ordered.’

FOUNDATIONS OF DRUG-WAR POLICE STATES

A brief article from a Jacksonville professor, “A Short History of Drug Policy or Why We Make War on Some Drugs but Not Others,” incisively establishes an analytical scheme for at least a significant part of the research project that we need to empower as we move along. Hidden agendas, police-state programs, and above-board and subterranean profit-making projects abound.

Such tendencies spanned the globe. In plus-or-minus 1900 Burma, for instance, “’(n)o exaggerated picture of lawlessness,’” was possible since the banditry was so extreme in the promulgation of illicit-drug networks that replaced earlier regimens. That this was also a location where British and French imperialism had coalesced in selling opium to China is simply perfect.

Similar patterns prevailed in Iran, where the century that led to British Petroleum’s coup and the installation of a de facto CIA agent as Shah was a hundred year process of proscribing and prohibiting and punishing what had been a thousand year set of cultural protocols. That such schemes never work is not just ‘beside the point.’ In large part, it is the point.

Nor was Japan, late to ‘open its doors’ to Europe and the United States, wholly exempt from engagement with poppies. Government operations, organized criminal enterprises, and hapless common citizens—both Japanese and ‘foreign,’ particularly Korean—all come into play as poppies and acacia meet.

A recent report from a conservative intellectual provides a précis of a century long practice in this regard, from the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914 to the most recent squashing of whatever citizens’ initiative for justice is the target of the moment, whether in the District of Columbia, Colorado, Southern Mexico, or elsewhere. The patterns that emerge look like interconnecting expressions of the materials here under consideration.

“What has the War on Drugs accomplished? It has not reduced access to illegal drugs. It has not reduced illegal drug use or abuse. It has not reduced the rate of addiction. If anything, the rates of use, abuse, and addiction have increased over the past century. Prison population statistics clearly indicate that it has been used to suppress minorities.

It has also greatly increased the powers of law enforcement and the legal system and reduced the legal rights and protections of citizens under the tradition of the rule of law. It has greatly increased the militarization of the police and the use of the military in police work. It has also led to a significant increase in US political and military intervention in foreign nations, particularly in the drug supply nations of Central and South America.”

Here, as elsewhere in these central pieces of this complex fabric of narrative and fact and dispute, more is on the way. The horizons are limitless, the possible stories are innumerable, the characters are ever-compelling, the storylines have stayed beneath the surface as a matter of design. Thus, here as much as anywhere else in the modern realm, the need for deeper delving is critical.

FOUNDATIONS OF PROHIBITION’S IMPERIAL & MILITARY FORMS

This section of this almost voluminous tale sits at the heart of the work. This is apropos, since an utterly central contention of this effort is that imperial projects and law enforcement protocols and so-called mental-health visions and the repression of people power are in fact—in identifiable and explicable ways—all the same process. They represent different faces of a hydra-headed monster of thuggery against and mugging of humankind, the purposes of which are totalitarian control and the ownership of everything that exists and will ever exist. Capitalism, as one savant, states the case, despises limits.

In this vein, a report from the Drug Enforcement Administration about Southeast Asian opium production might be a good place to start the all-too-brief look that comes to the fore today. In many ways, the U.S. crimes against humanity in Vietnam and Indochina have acted as a fulcrum.

On the one hand, they have leveraged the ‘West’s’ “turn to Asia” that England began with the Opium wars in its ultimate guise. On the other hand, the failure of that brutal murder to win its goal has led to the present pass. In this sense, the Golden Triangle may offer a way of seeing ourselves that few other places would provide.

Moreover, however one views such thoughts, conclusive investigations show the fallacy of blaming particular locations for contraband’s upsurge. “Contrary to popular belief, the poppy has not always been a major cash crop in the Golden Triangle—and nor has the sale and consumption of opium always been illegal.

Prior to World War Two, all countries in Southeast Asia has government-controlled opium monopolies, not unlike the tobacco monopolies today. What was illegal was to smuggle opium and to trade without a licence. Most local addicts were ethnic Chinese, who had migrated to Southeast Asia's urban centres in the 19th and early 20th centuries—and brought with them the opium smoking habit from their old homes in China.”

One might even more thoroughly investigate Southeast Asia, where French and English empires displaced Chinese and blocked ascendant Japanese hegemony. Not for nothing did networks of criminals and spies and financiers make this part of the world a critical zone for their schemes and dreams. Adding the United States, with its dream of a never-ending drug-reich, to the mix, just makes a more compelling yarn.

“When Santo Trafficante, Jr., boarded a commercial jet for the flight to Southeast Asia, he was probably unaware that Western adventurers had been coming to Asia., for hundred of years to make their fortunes in the narcotics trade. Earlier adventurers had flown the flag of the Portuguese Empire, the British East India Company, and the French Republic; Trafficante was a representative of the American Mafia.

While he was traveling on a jet aircraft, they had come in tiny, wooden-hulled Portuguese caravels, British men-of-war, or steel-ribbed steamships. With their superior military technology, they used their warships to open up China and Southeast Asia for their opium merchants and slowly proceeded to conquer the Asian land mass, dividing it up into colonies.

Sanctimonious empire builders subjected millions of natives to the curse of opium addiction, generating enormous revenues for colonial development, and providing profits for European stockholders. Thus, the Mafia was following in the wake of a long tradition of Western drug trafficking in Asia-but with one important difference. It was not interested in selling Asian opium to the Asians; it was trying to buy Asian heroin for the Americans.”

That Trafficante was also a contract employee() of the Central Intelligence Agency was not accident. Precisely this sort of connection, and the thousands of cases that document similar patterns and protocols, must become a priority if democracy’s ghost-of-a-chance is not to collapse altogether into impossibility.

To anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention over the past ten years—or over the past half century if one integrates Southeast Asia() and Columbia() and Panama() into the mix—the case of Afghanistan is particularly execrable. Its presentation as a ‘tragedy’ may be nonsensical, but nevertheless its arc as a story does follow a truly horrifying line.

In the current context, no expression of this conjunction of intelligence, militarism, finance, and empire contains more risk for the United States than does the present ‘border skirmish’ that threatens to explode in fullscale war on the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. A recent chronicler—one of almost countless analysts who are crying out for attention and focus—summarizes this insight in a forthright fashion.

“The counterinsurgency campaign is unquestionably erasing the lines between law enforcement and the military—and even countries. With what amounts to a low-level, unacknowledged war being fought on America’s doorstep, sorting out the tangled interests in play—including whether the public truly benefits—seems a high priority.”

Though continuing now may be impossible, this need not be so in the future. Then, continued examination, further documentation, and expanded scope overall will be the order of the day.

At least, such persistence will come to pass in further iterations of this cultural, anthropological, biological, and ever historical realm of the human condition. To wrap up this particular sequencing of contraband contemplation, a few updates and conclusions next time round things out. Next Up—Part VII, Conclusions, & The Case of Portugal

Old Stories & New—(continued)…

(11. Continued)Yesterday, Laura Kamiskey, her recently minted attorney-teacher, had furthered this idea to include the more philosophical precept that any real problem, “if it's worthy of being called that,” has to have a solution of some kind. And, even as she knew that her mother, not to mention Charlie, would give her hell for butting in and wasting her time and energy, Hannah also saw, as clearly as the project windows opposite glinted in the westering sun, a solution to the shrine's sad, pathetic state of decrepitude. “I just have to put my money where my mouth is.”

12. She'd already done so, actually. Time is money, after all, right? She flushed with something that very much resembled pride as she looked back at her handiwork from the steps of the Metro bus.

The expectation for her to 'get a move on' suspended, or so she felt, as other passengers also took in the transformation that she had wrought for this unknown Maria, whose passing now had more credibility, at least if aesthetic aplomb and clarity were wont to make for greater acceptance.

13. As the doors closed behind her with a pneumatic whoosh, Hannah reminded herself of her Mother's favorite proverb, one she quite frequently found occasion to foist on the red-headed girl child who wanted so desperately, every day, to do things to be proud enough about to bust her buttons loose and swell her bosom with joyous self-regard. “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

14. “I'm not even a little bit 'haughty,' though,” Hannah thought as she sat with a toss of her head, so that her hair caught one the sunset's final shafts and turned it into a lock of golden reddish ringlets. She noticed a pair of Jewish boys in the seats across the aisle just ahead, Yarmulkes perched over their curls, staring at her, something akin to lusty admiration in their youthful eyes, and nearly dripping from their slightly gaping adolescent mouths. “Nice hair doesn't mean I'm haughty,” she considered as she stared them down.

15. Since her two 'official' roommates almost always spent their time at boyfriends' houses, she as expected arrived home first, a luxury that she always used for a quick shower and a little meditative decompression. The note on the door could have thrown a wrench in the gears of that hopeful dynamic, if she'd let it.

Instead, she breathed and nodded: “Don't Forget, Comerada! We Need That Flyer Tonight!!” Then she smiled; only one underline, only two exclamation points. “I must be right on time.”

16. Carmen-Miranda towel wrap and ratty white terrycloth robe in place, she slid into her workstation, where she'd pasted the flyer demand atop all else on her miniature bulletin board, and opened her laptop to find an overflowing inbox. She could only wish it were primarily spam.

Instead, furthering the 'no-good-deed-goes-unpunished' moment, she realized that all her good deeds were once again coming home like roosting chickens. “Everybody wants a piece of me.” Practicing her Zen contextualizations, she grinned a small smile and whispered, “And I can give them all what they need, too.”

17. Only one of the incoming missives demanded immediate attention, even more so than the beckoning poster mandate on her bulletin board. Her Winterim Business Law study group needed an update about the end of term paper that they were cross-checking together. She'd finished composing her reply, in context dovetailing her flyer assignment into the paper's evidentiary base. She was pushing 'send,' with a flurried satisfaction, when the door opened.

18. Charlie was pretty much always on; this was one of the ways that they were alike, where she definitely avoided any kind of 'opposites attract' ideation. Eyes wide, he hunted her to her work station and implored, “Please baby, please baby, please baby,” pausing, just like in Spike's film, “Baby please!”

She grinned and shrugged, wiggling her fingers at him, in their intuitive code affirming that she'd 'completed' her newly inaugurated 'project's first installment. “Say it ain't so!!” She giggled; “Well, it is so!” And, she bent reality slightly, “I'm all caught up with everything else. Now give me a kiss.” Now he laughed. “Resistance is futile; thank God!”

19. After exchanging connubial greetings, she began to whip together food and drink for the both of them, till Charlie emerged, gleaming, from his own 'standing with the steam' interlude. “I wonder what Maria's mother or friends would say, if they saw?”

She posed the question, whisk in hand, as she made one of her frothy cold-season drinks, caffeinated and sweet and creamy, for her sweetheart of many months, who had recently more or less moved in, “at least for now,” they'd just as recently agreed. 'Honey-Bunny' had exited the shower, eagerly anticipating his treat, when Hannah posed her query about her newest 'social love interest.' Immediately, his mien shifted to that of the skeptic, the critic ready to pounce.

20. “What in hell, exactly, do you think you're trying to do?” Charlie was always emphatic, though he somehow generally managed to remain both jocular and charming. “I mean, what did you expect?”

The world, he giggled as he said it, “quite often fails to conform to your fancies, eh?” She smiled, pointing her whip-creamed implement at him sagely. “I'm not expecting anything, Charles; I just wondered how her 'kith and kin' might react, you know, if they saw it.”

21. “Hannah Rosen Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize!” Charlie framed the headline as he spoke it like a circus huckster. “Her work for the poor and downtrodden in the hellish environs of Metropolitan Detroit have recently culminated in what she considers her artistic and literary and social triumph, the Unknown Maria's Holy Hosanna Sanctuary.” He seemed ready to keep up his impromptu banter, before he noticed her giggles, guffawed himself, and shrugged, gulping down the last of his store-bought espresso.

22. She stood in front of him, laughing hard enough to bring a hint of moisture to her gaze. “You make me laugh, skinny White boy!” He grabbed for her, and she more or less leapt into his arms, kissing his mouth and smearing pale coffee confection on his wiry hair, not that they paid much attention to it.

23. Late Winter kisses establish their own rhythm, no more like predictable clockwork than the ending of one of Beethoven's tortured sonatas, which he famously, sometimes for weeks and months at a time, couldn't figure out how to finish. When they concluded in any event, Charlie bussed her nose one last time and then resumed his original tack.

“I'm serious though, about earlier. Do you really think this dead girl's people are going to trumpet your praises round town?”

24. Hannah responded to Charlie's critique of her position matter-of-factly. “One, I'm not expecting anything. Two, I'm not investing a lot of time and resources in this; it's on my way to class three times a week. Three, I just would want someone to care enough about me to make the place a little nice; that's all. Four, I went today; once or twice a week at most is all I'm ever thinking about.” She was as good as her word, too, less than seventy-two hours afterward, following the sun West toward the horizon and her class.

25. Three days later an automobile pulled up and parked beside the concrete wall. The driver opened the door, but did not get out of the car. Although her face was in shadow, it was easy to tell she was sad.

There was something about how she turned away from the sun and rested the weight of her hands on the steering wheel, something about her silent composure, that caused Hannah to sigh. The young girl watched the driver lean out of the car and stretch her hand out towards one of the burned out candles.

26. “What is she, crippled?” Next Up—Part Two of Two

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…

Thus, a second element of freeing citizens everywhere from overarching dictatorial and colonial methodologies is the age old issue of song and fable of 'where we go from here.' Rationally, bringing popular input into play, some upsurge or other of citizen participation, must be the result of whatever choice of direction occurs. An academic in Central Canada sees three ways to conceptualize such an 'education for global citizenship:' "a neoliberal approach, a radical approach, and a transformational approach."

THC would hope that most readers would stipulate that the first of these three choices is utterly bankrupt, in that it accedes to, or perhaps ignores, the impacts of empire. However much the others require discursive definition though, people should stipulate that some method to achieve popular power capable of challenging imperial sway is essential.

Another kind of assessment concerning what to do emphasizes the trickle-up potential of already-extant popular responses to global corporate agendas. "In response(to predominance), social movements are working together, organizing the constituencies emerging from corporate globalization. In the process they are reconstituting political community. What are the key features of these new communities?" such an investigator asks.

"How far do they create new forms out of old, and in particular, what is the fate of nationalism? As state legitimacy falters and is not re-constructed at the international level, social movements have constituted what some have called a global civil society," a concept that at a minimum contains a modicum of hope to cousins in alignment with THC. The applicability of such forms to addressing DU in particular will reappear in part four of this series.

To keep on track, at this juncture, a bit of an internal summary might make sense. A United States, or corporate, empire rules the globe. To resist the expansion of imperial dominion—which includes more and more DU weapons, folks first must seek a deeper knowledge of how empire works, and then figure out how to work together to put that understanding to use.

Political Economy of Commodities in a World Beset by DU Weaponry

As a natural matter of course, therefore, political economic issues, as well as imperial ones, also underlie this story. In this humble correspondent's work, from the humblest portrayals of intrepid entrepreneurs(INTERLINK, BRB) to the broadest summaries of capital's potent purview(INTERLINK, Vogtle #2), THC has presented evidence of the way that political economy influences and shapes the production, policy, and cultural arenas.

No matter the place on the planet—save for a few 'backwaters'(INTERLINK, Vt.) where something like social democracy or 'transitional collectives'(INTERLINK, BDC) prevail, the purchase of commodities and the concomitant force of 'purchasing power' has risen to encompass more and more of human existence. Thus, THC implores readers, as responsible citizens, to consider DU as a commodity that powerfully indicates, at the same time that it obviously indicts, the elevation of commodification over other ways of valuing human possibility.

In everyday reality of course, any plan to retract commodity forms, instantly and altogether, would likely equate to mass collective homicide of one sort or another. Some Marxist thinking is examining interesting methods for socialization of production that centralize communities in the productive process. But even the most radical approaches recognize the inevitable continuity of commodity production in some form for quite some time, at least in any evolution that includes most peoples' survival.

Nonetheless, the way that the fiscal exigencies of commodity production work in any specific case establish the parameters of the situation's difficulties. A key issue in this regard, arguably, is the way that more and more of commodity production abandons any direct connection with tangible, not to mention useful, use-values, instead presenting various forms of death-wish or other devolutionary downward spiral.

One manifestation of this, of course, is the common commodified promulgation of degraded ecosystems through administrative management via ‘environmental protection’ grant-giving. That DU might also exemplify such patterns should be easy to imagine.

In terms of the social horrors that such products as DU present, many critics "thus demonstrate the centrality of capitalist political economy to the construction of the substantive problem (environmental harm) and to the limitations of existing regulatory regimes in relation to this problem." Many other commentators go much further still, speaking more generally of how present manifestations like DU altogether alienate use from value, and then arguing that such amorality and self-immolation are inherent to bourgeois purview.

At the very least, as a way of ameliorating such degradations, inserting local evaluation and general democracy into the commodity nexus would have to yield a better chance of utility, for example specifically concerning decisions about how to handle DU. An added benefit might follow too, of opening up dialogs about what, if anything, might transform capital's ugliness in the matter of the 'story of stuff' in which DU performs such an ugly turn.

Many entities related to ideas and processes already present in THC's work-product, especially emanating from the United Nations, express such ideation about increasing involvement as a form of 'sustainable business.' Other thinkers give extremely radical and thoroughgoing alternatives to these tamer participatory analyses, which often enough presume the possible continuation of an overarching corporate class.

Once again, a brief recapitulation seems reasonable. Not only must a concerned citizen wrestle with figuring out imperialism, but he must also consider the nature of capitalist political economy, and how it affects whatever the focus of an investigation is, here the creation of a clearly harmful product that somehow traduces imperial decision-makers into its ever-widening employment.

Technology as a Technique of Dominance that Only Democracy Can Override

Additionally, an ongoing theme in many of THC's articles has concerned the epistemological and opportunistic nature of the drive to magnify the technocratic arcana of scientific endeavor(INTERLINK, 'Hot Air'), and thereby to insulate science from democratic discourse(INTERLINK, Pugwash) and popular participation(INTERLINK, Bibliography). Although many of the interlocutors in these pages(INTERLINK, H.Scheer) have stood up to and attempted to deconstruct such arrogation of the fundamental nature of homo sapiens, the 'mainstream trend' has for several generations remained quite the opposite.

The work of Harry Braverman provides a redoubtable counterpoint to such thinking. "The idea of sacrificing six to seven hours of my day," he said in an interview some thirty five years ago, "in order to enjoy the rest of my day (is), if you'll forgive the expression, bullshit."

He backs up this earthy reference with important wisdom. "Because it will be this vacuum in peoples' lives that more than ever shapes their existence. The more that working peoples' lives are emptied of content(on the job) the more the same thing will happen outside of work."

Whether the worker is an electrician or a soldier, in other words, part of empowerment is dealing with the choices that inform their efforts as producers. To reduce the damage from, or even eliminate the ongoing production of DU, to carry this thinking onward to a useful end, citizens might collectively insist that working people jointly make the decisions about these matters.

Nonetheless, of course, part of the developmental dialectic of modern science has continued to emphasize just the opposite, a disempowerment of common citizens and workers and grassroots communities. Most analysis, of all stripes, supports this thesis. "Technocracy is problematic because it disempowers citizens."

That democratic dialog might assist attempts to manage the devolutionary spirals of humankind just now is only the surface rationale for disfranchising scientific arrogance. Suffice for this juncture that we agree that untold millions of scientists, policy makers, and citizens recognize this conjunction of democracy and participation as useful, if not essential, even, or most especially, as regards an unfolding monstrosity such as the dissemination of DU weapons.

Militaristic Options in the Overall, and the Depleted-Uranium, Scheme of Things

Finally, an ongoing trope in THC's dialogic efforts has remained the intertwining of militaristic muscle(INTERLINK, TVA#2), industrial enterprise(INTERLINK, TVA#3), and financial creativity(INTERLINK, Fed). One way of expressing this is the "combination of military, governmental, and industrial power" that President Eisenhower warned Americans to avoid as he left office to play more golf and hope his grandchildren's grandchildren did not expire in some sort of self-induced holocaust.

Of course, groups like WAND(INTERLINK) keep formulating the hideous insanity of military spending, the way that it guts any hope, not only for peace and general equanimity, but also for anything even vaguely similar to prosperity and community-centered productive development. James Madison, bless his bourgeois soul, summed up a 'radical-liberal' conceptualization of such ideas.

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

Such magnificent empirical work as the Lysistrata Project makes unavoidable the conclusion that, whatever else Major Rokke's search for social justice necessitates, a deconstruction of militarism must be one item that people find a way to manifest. No other conclusion is even vaguely defensible, inasmuch as the suffering induced by DU bullets and missiles is, almost indubitably, a conjunction of war, plutocracy, and imperial hegemony.

A properly in-depth analysis of the deeply strategic underpinnings of these 'pork-barrel,' 'log-rolling' political machinations of militarism must form the foundation for finding a way toward a different political economic future. Whether this ends up formulating some basic reform of capitalism, or, as THC is inclined to believe, requires democratic socialism, remains to be seen. Obviously, many socialists would find themselves inclined to agree with THC.

In any event, from China to Chile, from Canada to India, from England to Australia, the world's money and power buttons are in the hands of the generals and those puppet-masters behind the generals who arrange for the cash and construction. While a publication such as Monthly Review clearly is speaking ideologically as well as analytically in affirming such a point-of-view, nothing in this invalidates its analytical acuity. Those who long for reform-sans-revolution might profitably tune in, especially on a day when military ordnance decisions are a core underlying component of the story at hand.

A key thinker and military-strategist of America's inner-economic circle in 1946, sitting in a bureaucratic policy post opposite Vannevar Bush's science chair "was solely concerned with making sure that the 'military-industrial complex' (not his word) that had been built up during the Second World War did not come unravelled after the war. Ironically, the Army Ordnance Association had been set up for this very purpose in the aftermath of the First World War.

To some extent, ('Electric Charlie)Wilson’s speech was a warning not to let this happen again. He was arguing not for military Keynesiansim but for gearing up for the war with the Soviet Union that most feared was coming. The first author to use the term 'Permanent War Economy,' and to mean by that a form of military Keynesianism that was contemporary capitalism’s only way out, a means of transferring wealth from the working classes to capital by means of government taxation, was Edward Sard." And Sard's vision still predominates around the planet, from Plan Colombia(INTERLINK, BDC#2) to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Even a vaguely thorough in-depth background, about such an issue as the DU morass on the stage in this series, would include significantly more volume and at least a few additional conceptual elements, compared to these prefatory remarks. Perhaps what THC has proffered here, though, will suffice to launch readers to the next step in the process, a literature review about the state of contemporary DU understanding.

In any event, parts two, three, four, and five to come address the history and practical application of Depleted Uranium itself, up to the point that actual munitions flew to their targets, at which unhappy conjunction, in parts six and seven, a narrative unfolds of how then-Captain Rokke faced the task of doing his best to do his duty in an impossible clean-up situation. This initial sequence closes with some policy conclusions and further conceptual thoughts, in parts eight and nine.

For now, a reader who has made the journey this far might ask himself, a thinker who has followed along to this juncture might ponder in her own mind: "How much do I comprehend about Depleted Uranium? What do I know about America's imperial role in contemporary reality? How deeply do I understand the notion of political economy? Keeping in mind these and related interrogatories will help both one's understanding of and one's follow up from these ongoing narratives about this central element in the history of our times. Coming Soon—Stay Tuned

Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—(continued)…

One of the most fascinating witnesses to this ongoing processing of commercial hegemony regardless, and military imposition as necessary, twice won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He served for the better part of a decade as Commanding General of the United States Marine Corps. Then he resigned to write War Is a Racket and seek a different way of approaching the production and control of life’s goods and services.

In fact, Smedley Butler acted very much like a socialist, or even a communist. His fiery populist statements, mostly applicable to Latin America, drew on thirty-odd years of military service. Readers here have met him before, but his words bear repetition.

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. … I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.”

In keeping with Butler’s observations, Roosevelt’s and the American elites’ conception of Latin America was as a repository of resources for the conduct of Yankee assumption of the imperial crown that Britain had worn for so long. This was the nature of the U.S.-Chilean conjunction seventy-five years ago, as World War Two launched an ‘American Century,’ much more modest than Germany’s hoped-for ‘thousand year reich.’

In this manifestation of economic servitude, and all the social stew that accompanied such patterns, that exemplified Chile’s development as of the last half century or so, truly astounding cultural and literary expressions were mushrooming West of the Andes. Not that this was utterly atypical of Latin creativity, on the contrary, the region has burgeoned with film and poetry and music and drama and more for a long century or more. But these gardens of story in Chile were especially fertile in producing their blossoms.

One such set of materials form the subject matter of Sebastian Allende’s work, La Influencia Anarquista en la Literatura Chilena(“The Anarchist Influence in Chilean Literature). A central argument in his efforts revolves around the idea that anarchism and socialism, and even communism, have often conflated in Chilean culture. The ultimate goals of human liberation and worker solidarity transcend ideological niceties.

Another publication, more standard and encyclopedic in its orientation, but redolent of the extent and power of Chilean stories, is a sixty year old volume from Francisco Dussuel. Historia de la Literatura Chilena covers four centuries of tales that have emanated from Santiago and environs, though it does not emphasize indigenous mythology or all sectors of society equally.

A vastly larger compendium of explorations of Chile’s output might appear here. But that would divert us from reaching our goal of exploring the work of Victor Jara and the New Song Movement, both of which were en route to social transformation when the CIA and Augusto Pinochet and company cut off Jara’s hands and shot him dead, in many ways effectively decapitating the movement.

We are going to arrive at Jara’s critically important contribution to human life via an examination of his friend and comrade in struggle to achieve a better Chile, the Nobel Laureate and poet, Pablo Neruda. Amazingly though, Neruda’s was not the first instance of the Swedish committee’s notice of Chile.

Gabriela Mistral was an austere school teacher from a humble family in the dry foothills of Northern Chile’s mining regions, who also, miraculously given her far-from-upper-class roots, served as an occasional diplomat—a not infrequent practice that showed the reverence for culture that at times typified Chile and Spanish-speaking states more generally. “She pushed her way out of poverty and obscurity through publishing poetry and a range of teaching materials for use in schools.”

She wrote simple and ethereally beautiful verse. Often not overtly political, she nonetheless advocated for listening to Bolivar’s advice and decried the depredations of empire and fascism in her region and the Spanish Civil War. Before he died, Garcia Lorca wrote a dedication to her that alluded to her love of land and Leo Tolstoy’s brand of peasant social anarchism: “When you lie still—ay, Gabriela, Gabriela—the Andes will cradle you—as if in a mint—and will make you a clay sarcophagus—that you may always have land.”

She corresponded with wealthy literati elsewhere in the Southern Cone, who sought her out and considered the issues of the day in tandem with her, especially as she acted as one of Chile’s diplomatic corps. She fulminated on the rights of women and children and found herself caught in the grip of uprisings of anarchists and communists and the reactionary counterattacks of the rulers of the established order.

Both her fundamentally progressive mindset and her achieving the highest award in literature—the only woman from Hispanic America and the first Latin American to do so—directs the onlooker to consider the man whose poetry remains more memorable, but not necessarily any more important, in understanding Chile and its cultural gifts to all the world. Certainly, Pablo Neruda would have responded with both joy and grief to her ferocious insistence that justice required radical transformation.

“The whole world has gone astray. Selfishness, lust for power, and ignorance being the reasons why. The greater number of us are a burden on the few, the ones who rule with a startling brazenness and inhumanity. Fear, weapons, violence and concentration camps are turning man into a veritable puppet, stripping him ruthlessly of his greatest possession: his freedom to think and act and his creative mind.”

By Way of a Chilean Introduction—Pablo Neruda’s Revolutionary Spirit

In this context of Chilean magnificence, the poetry and politics and lusty loving nature of Pablo Neruda form a seamless whole. Moreover, his origins, as much so as any Nobel Prize winner ever, illustrate the way that humble roots can percolate a body of work that, so to speak, caffeinates truly radical words, insurrectionary verses that touch on every realm of life.

The hope here is not even to approximate an exhaustive portrait of this poet, both earthy and heartfelt, whose massive output and tremendous love for humanity continue to astonish anyone who notices. On the contrary, a relatively few brushstrokes should serve this narrative’s needs.

The primary purpose of Neruda’s inclusion in this essay is to draw parallels between the lives, literary output, and moral sensibilities of two great creators—one a Nobel Prize winning poet, the other a revered folk singer and dramatist. Chile’s working class, its lusty earthiness, its grand isolation amid astounding natural beauty, the Spanish language, and the dire struggles of wage-earners for dignity and justice joined Neruda and Jara, as if nature had conjoined them at the hip.

Like Gabriela Mistral, Neruda’s poetic name resembles his given name not in the least. His father worked Chile’s rails in the time before trucking, when the only way to traverse almost three-thousand miles was via trains that the British had financed and built. His mother died of tuberculosis before he had reached his second birthday.

He adored his stepmother, ‘Mamadre,’ who adopted the half-sister whom his father conceived with a lover while she was still nursing their son, the future ‘Pablo’s’ half brother. He loved words from the age of ten at least, though his father discouraged him from fantasizing about seeking to support himself with his wrist.

Nevertheless, he began to publish little bits and pieces on the sly, from the age of thirteen on. Perhaps miraculously, in the guise of fate if nothing else, the principal of the girl’s school adjacent to his academy was none other than Ms. Mistral, on the way to a Nobelist’s renown of her own.

She encouraged the fifteen year old, whom she directed to read Russian writers whenever he could. From this guidance came his discovery of the Czech poet, Jan Neruda, whose patronymic he adopted, along with the common ‘Pablo,’ a change of his name that he hoped would keep from altogether alienating his father.

In the event, his talent transferred a soulful passion for life to the page in raging, fiery, delicious, lusty verses that caused his receiving almost instant recognition as a scribe. Following his graduation from University, and the publication of Twenty Love Poems & a Song of Despair, Chile sent him abroad, indulging its more-than-occasional practice of awarding writers with diplomatic assignments—his first posting was to Burma.

In Argentina for a time in the 1930’s, he opened his eyes to the sociopolitical realm, even as he was composing the most abstract verses of his life. He befriended Garcia Lorca and ended up with an attaché’s position in Spain shortly thereafter.

He powerfully propounded the Republican movement. So much so did he support this anti-monarchical cause that Chile recalled him from his post. However, he returned to Europe in 1938 where, from Paris, he helped to find Spanish refugees places to live in the Western Hemisphere.

His popularity was skyrocketing at this point, as was his income, yet he had already begun to circle the Communist cause that was to define the remainder of his life. He served Chile in Mexico in the early 1940’s, returning to Santiago to run for the Senate in 1944 and win, as a Communista.

His criticism of a dour and reactionary President—albeit a man whom he had supported in the election, and whose party won in an alliance with the Communists—contributed to Gonzales Videla’s outlawing the Communist Party and issuing a warrant for Neruda’s arrest. He lived underground for nearly two years, before his comrades and supporters helped him to escape the Andes for half a decade.

He spoke publicly and fully for the first time, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of this experience. He rode through the Andes for as much as a week, crossing icy rivers late in the Southern Winter. Four rural roustabouts guided him through trackless forests surrounded by glaciers and massive peaks. These horsemen hacked trees to mark their return path.

When they passed makeshift bowers that marked some fallen sojourner, they would each cut new branches to add to the bedding for the dead. Crossing a mirrored, snow-fed waterway, his horse nearly shed him as it swam in water over its head. One of his companeros had followed with a lasso in case the poet fell, in waters that had years before swept the young guardian’s father to his death.

Fleeing prison, perhaps demise, he and his comrades came upon a flower-strewn meadow that bloomed with Spring’s approach. There, they encountered a natural chapel that housed an open, ox-skull altar where each of the travelers placed dried fruit or bits of money, gifts that bypassers might find in the dead beast’s staring eye-sockets. They each danced to honor the deity that lived in the bones, hopping a circle around the gleaming bleached horns, with only the sky and the rocks and the wind and the trees and the snows to winess.

Shortly after, they saw a rocky redoubt where entire trees burned more or less constantly to warm and provide process heat for Argentine workers who made cheese at sixteen thousand feet and sang and shared their lives and their food and their wine with Chileans who welcomed the opportunity to douse themselves in volcanically heated baths and treasured the chance to sleep inside, safe from police or soldiers or freezing to death. When Neruda sought to give money to these creators of processed food, his generous hosts, they refused.

He continued his ruminations about what this experience of life had taught about simplicity and solidarity and plenty more besides. “(I)f the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products: bread, truth, wine, dreams.

If the poet joins this never-completed struggle to extend to the hands of each and all his part of his undertaking, his effort and his tenderness to the daily work of all people, then the poet must take part, the poet will take part, in the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the whole dream of humanity. Only in this indispensable way of being ordinary people shall we give back to poetry the mighty breadth which has been pared away from it little by little in every epoch, just as we ourselves have been whittled down in every epoch.”

Throughout his life, Pablo Neruda—who legally changed his name in 1946—openly celebrated the erotic and carnal fires that he and his adored companions lit with each other, in each other, through each other. Darker visions blended with these volcanic expressions of life’s core, forming a fabric of desire and loss, joy and pain, that appeared in much of his work, expressive attributes that he shared with all kinds of other Chilean and Hispanic wordsmiths.

Returning to Chile in 1952, he had become even more staunchly Marxist and committed to the Communist cause, at the same time that he engaged in stern critique of Stalin after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 condemnation of the dictator. All over the world, people translated and bought his poetry. He continued to carry around his copy of Whitman’s Song of Myself, one of his muses.

He ran as a Communist candidate for President against Salvador Allende and Jorge Alessandri, the CIA darling in 1970, siding with Allende in the runoff. A passage from his Nobel speech thirteen years later illuminated such a choice.

“By extending to these extreme consequences the poet's duty, in truth or in error, I determined that my posture within the community and before life should be that of in a humble way taking sides. I decided this when I saw so many honourable misfortunes, lone victories, splendid defeats.

In the midst of the arena of America's struggles I saw that my human task was none other than to join the extensive forces of the organized masses of the people, to join with life and soul with suffering and hope, because it is only from this great popular stream that the necessary changes can arise for the authors and for the nations.

And even if my attitude gave and still gives rise to bitter or friendly objections, the truth is that I can find no other way for an author in our far-flung and cruel countries, if we want the darkness to blossom, if we are concerned that the millions of people who have learnt neither to read us nor to read at all, who still cannot write or write to us, are to feel at home in the area of dignity without which it is impossible for them to be complete human beings.”

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Neruda’s glorious oeuvre graces very few literature courses below the graduate level in the United States. Such a distancing is consciously political on the part of Yankee institutional ‘objectivity.’

“’No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,’ observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime, although many readers in the United States have found it difficult to disassociate Neruda’s poetry from his fervent commitment to communism.”

Agelessly, Neruda’s monumental presentation to the audience in Stockholm serves as a gentle remonstrance to North American ignorance and arrogance. “We have inherited this damaged life of people’s dragging behind them the burden of the condemnation of centuries, the most paradisaical of peoples, the purest, those who with stones and metals made marvelous towers, jewels of dazzling brilliance - peoples who were suddenly despoiled and silenced in the fearful epochs of colonialism which still linger on.”

A secondary rationale for including Don Pablo here is that he too died shortly after Pinochet’s minions ripped Chile’s social fabric to shreds and slaughtered and disappeared thousands of civilians who supported Allende. Since one focus of the Pinochetista bloodlust was on communist artists, many people contend that the fascists killed Neruda in some fashion similarly as they dispatched Victor Jara and so many others.

However this is not likely true. At sixty-nine, Neruda was in a Santiago hospital and fighting cancer.

Inevitably, he encountered mediated presentations of the dance of death that Pinochet and the CIA were delivering to his native land, where his political opponent-turned-comrade, the socialist Allende, had been President when he entered his sickbed.

His wife of many years, the love of his life, recalls some of what her beloved underwent in the twelve days that followed September 11^th. She had returned to his side when he had summoned at one point.

“I dashed up to his room and sat down beside him. I was exhausted with nervous tension. Pablo is very agitated. He said that he has spoken with many friends and that it is incredible that I don’t know what is going on in the country.

‘They’re killing people,’ he tells me. ‘They’re handing over bodies in pieces. The morgue’s full of the dead, the people are outside in their hundreds, claiming the bodies. Didn’t you hear what happened to Victor…Jara?

He was one of those they tore to pieces, they destroyed his hands.’ As I had tried to avoid his finding out about all the hair-raising news those days, he thought I was ignorant of everything. ‘The body of Victor Jara in pieces. Didn’t you know that? Oh my God, that’s like killing a nightingale. And they say that he kept on singing and singing, and that drove them wild.’”

Most probably, Pablo Neruda in the end died a few day later of a broken heart. The clinical record of ‘heart attack’ as cause of death would in that case be accurate.

Pinochet personally forbade any public display for his funeral . For days, despite this ban, thousands of people gathered to honor Pablo Neruda and bring flowers and songs to his grave. Next Up—III