Big Tent Review

#22, 10/17/2024

An Ever-&-Always Initiation

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 twelve-times-annually magazine. This is the twenty-second incarnation, and 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. As of the coming issue, moreover, we’ll be switching to a generally only-once-monthly posting.

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 yet. 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 December 1st, the first of many one-issue moons until ‘who knows when?’

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. As well, for going on a year, 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, in any case.

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: Fakery Amid the Here-&-Now’s Crockery of Shitty Insanity & Non-Sequitur

1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Instruction, Tutelage, Learning Curves Toward Human Survival

2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XXII

3. Wood Words Essays—Political Power in the Realm of the Real

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

5. Old Stories & New—”Not Yet Forgotten,” Part Two

6. Nerdy Nuggets—From the Federal Reserve to G.A.T.T. & the W.T.O.—a Precis

7. Erotic Snippets—”Lise’s Multiplications, Or, The Scientist & Her Sigmund”

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

—Last Words For Now

Introduction—Alas, Yet Another Plea to Avoid Mass Collective Suicide

This Just In—Chris Hedges reports on the ‘split’ among the planet’s plundering plutocrats, with ‘corporate’ forces on one side with Kamala Harris and ‘oligarchic’ billionaires on the other ‘team’ with Donald Trump.

A recent AppalachiaNerd Tweet responds to the estimable Mr. Hedges. “So what does the evidence of this presentation mean. The answer, in aggregate is quite simple, to wit, 'Despite many indications of a definite fragmentation among the rulers of the roost, this Board of Directors of Cap-Inc. does agree on certain things, such as a temporarily immutable commitment to promote the Zionist Project, and an undying operation to dismantle Russia.

And the point is? Thugs and gangsters are ever imperial tools; one way of viewing the present pass is as an option for either socialism or barbarism. Perhaps a more apt way to characterize matters at hand is as posing a choice between an organized working class democracy and an increasingly murderous and desperate gangsterism on the part of minions of the rich who apparently prefer at least potential profit so strongly that they willingly skirt the plausible unfolding of Mass Collective Suicide.

A piece of Driftwood Message Art, ‘Primary Plutocratic Tools,’ states the case.” In the event, today’s Wood Words Essay includes this message, a dandy missive for readers to consider as they peruse matters at hand.

Like the fact or not, things are about to explode in our faces, irretrievably tip the scales, and/or similarly express whatever metaphor for disaster one might otherwise prefer. The direst wars have mostly erupted from currency fights, and a third or more of the human population—and substantially more than two thirds of the world’s productive capacities are preparing to begin a payment scheme that will, to put matters gently, plummet the power of the almighty dollar.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa: these ‘named partners’ are just the start. Notably enough, the origin of the acronym BRIC was Goldman Sachs, a term coined so as to promote ‘alternate investment strategies’ such as Exchange-Traded-Funds.

Now, of course, with the inaugural BRICS process just completed, and a slick and successful gathering the upshot, the potential has become a near certainty that U.S. trade bullying—sanctions, blockades, etc.—will yield a gargantuan response, with as many as half the nations of the world, and much more than half the world’s output capacity, now members or applicants to this new movement. Trade wars mean higher prices, lower volume, smaller profits.

Currency conflicts portend massive inflation and all manner of thuggish international behavior in response. A Nordstream pipeline bombing every month? Israeli carpet bombing of civilians forever? As in the past, such tensions make war’s option inescapable.

Will such eventualities, unfolding as this publication is ‘hitting the streets,’ so to say, doom humanity? Without a single doubt, such is one possibility, adding to the already overwhelming stress on human thriving that attends billions of displaced people, threats of thermonuclear exchanges, and more and more depressed economic conditions for working people these days.

The ‘split’ to which the estimable Mr. Hedges refers above, therefore, might more reasonably appear as a result of this shift in how we do business with each other, how we pay our way, as it were. At minimum, such a summary statement is more down to earth, more likely to get at the geopolitical nub and class conflict going on than is a conclusion that ‘corporate’ power is attacking ‘oligarchic’ power or vice versa.

Indisputably, in any event, human thriving, and likely survival as well, includes certain necessary developments, one of which is the displacement and replacement of the representatives of the social classes that now rule the roost. One may not view such a conclusion with complete comfort and aplomb—what about my stuff? what about my rights? blah blah blah—but its factual basis does not hinge on one’s accepting it. Making any useful changes in the current context, on the other hand, very much, irrefutably, does depend on getting rid of this centuries-old hegemony of money and royalty.

Social Europe is a prototypical ‘liberal,’ ‘leftist’ publication. This means that it purports to further meaningful dialog with leads such as this. “No one knows how the US presidential election will turn out. One possibility is that the Trump bubble will finally burst, allowing for a return to normalcy in America and around the world. But it is also possible that the United States will lurch toward a radical militarised authoritarianism that would establish a new norm for despots elsewhere.”

I mean, wow!  Clinton; Obama; Biden: “normalcy.” The fascist creepy crawling of U.S. government and social entities has been moving forward since at least the end of the Kennedy administration. A very conservative estimate of America’s imperial slaughter over the six decades since then puts the toll at an average of upwards of three or four million murders during the course of every ten years; Barack Obama was arguably the worst. “Normalcy?”

Would that mean that we would feel safely protected by the likes of “Baghdad ain’t shit” Marine Corps General John Kelly? He’s taken to calling his former ‘supervisor’ a Fascist, which is likely true but not exceptional among the political class in the United States. Capital has no choice but to boost some sort of Nazi solution, since the system isn’t delivering for its owners, let alone the rest of us.

In a context that emanates from such sources, ‘bursting bubbles,’ ‘return to normalcy,’ blah blah blah, phrases like “the global left,” “right-wing plots,” “the lesser of two evils,” “Democratic totalitarians,” and other commonplace combinations of jargon and non sequitur appear so ubiquitous among supposed stalwarts of ‘social justice and human progress’ that one cannot help but doubt the soundness of allying with such purveyors of nonsensical falsehood.

Whether they are acting as trollops or morons, or are, despite plenty of tutelage, merely ‘mistaken,’ such as these—even with studly names like Jacobin—cannot, at least likely or usefully, participate in plotting pathways to possible futures. Useful reporting is still common, praise be, but leadership? Not from a Big Tent POV.

Goddess knows that I don’t know the exact road, or directions, to justice and decency, to a renewed devotion to living like human beings, but the whole premise of BTR is that one can only have a mere ghost of a prayer of finding such a route in the right direction, as it were, if we gain some semblance of an accurate understanding of how things work. In the first place, such efforts often involve a clear recognition that almost nothing of what one might call the established bureaucratic or corporate or so-called progressive messaging is reliable.

Starting from a likely indisputable premise that the ReDemoPubliCratiCan two-party fraud presents the same choices to people in different clothing, as it were, a citizen, a seeker, a critical thinker has little leeway except to conclude, quite simply, that only a people’s movement can act as even a plausible guarantor of human existence. A piece of Driftwood Message Art proposes an idea that shows absolutely that none of our one-party/two-wing evils is any better, or ‘less bad.’

Its title is “Mandatory Mutuality, Salubrious Solidarity,” and it says this. “No Matter How Daunting Or Apparently Unobtainable Our Attempts to Mediate Mandatory Mutuality & Salubrious Solidarity, at Least Such Objectives Can Conceivably Come to Pass in Time & Space, Unlike All Notions of Solely Solitary Achievement Or Purely 'Personal' Empowerment, Which Unavoidably Devolve Toward Some Combination of Futile Nonsense & Fatuous Self Flagellation.”

As a matter of course, a similar point is possible in relation to arguments about nationalism and its reactionary nature. Again, exactly who among politicos of the RDPCC stripe are internationalist? Try naming one; finding a few is an futile and absurd impossibility.

The only politicians who can sing the Internationale without nauseating their listeners are from ‘America’s enemies.’ Putin is a Russian patriot; Xi obviously promotes China; Maduro likes Venezuela best; yet the likes of these have actually followed diplomatic and engagement pathways that assert the equality of nations, rather than the exceptionalist supremacy of one unipolar power.

Human problems will never amount to one or another nation's imprimatur: all supremacist nationalism—and thus all ethnocentrism—inherently brings fascist solutions, which is to say war and mass murder, in its wake. Ending such dynamics has never resulted from overthrowing the emperor but only from comprehensive Solidarity among the oppressed on their own behalf.

To make this fit on X, I had to cut a bit. “One nation's imprimatur is not the key issue: all supremacist nationalism yields fascist solutions, war and mass murder, in its wake. Ending such dynamics never results from overthrowing the emperor, but only from comprehensive Solidarity among the oppressed on their own behalf.”

At the same time, headlining the problems of the day as ones of “monsters” named Zelensky or Netanyahu—or Trump, or Harris, ha ha—is at best pathetic. Here I am again: being a critic. I follow the intention behind this headline.

Monstrous events are happening that these two puppeteering politicos support as they plunder people for their own and corporate sponsors' enrichment. But unless the 'lizard people' trope has more empirical backing than I realize, their mothers and fathers 'created' them in standard fashion. Moreover, they both started out as infants who may have been 'cute as buttons.'

Perhaps our meaningless articulations undermine our understanding? What the f**k is 'the West,' anyway? West of what? Instead of 'othering' these two cousins, maybe we might call things a rational name for a change of pace, to wit this: “Zelensky & Netanyahu: a Pair of Predatory Plunderers Annointed & Elevated By Their Plutocratic Capitalist Sponsors.”

It's not that difficult to describe things as they are. If nothing else, such language makes our choices clearer between, say, empire and solidarity; or Mass Collective Suicide and popular empowerment; or social justice's peace potential and continuing divided conquest to enrich those who already own everything.

The old saw still holds. One can never arrive at an important insight, let alone a useful operational plan, when one starts from and stubbornly clings to demonstrably and indisputably false premises. It just can’t be done, ha ha.

The notion of ‘mistake,’ as noted in the Realest White Man in America shtick that calls a mistake either an unavoidable accident or someone’s asking permission to continue victimizing the innocent, is generally malapropos in political discourse. Repeated mistakes have an easy definition: Policy.

In the event, belief in the ubiquity of ‘accidental error’ underlies practically all social pathologies in the here and now. For example, one might refer to any number of past numbers of BTR—in assessments of Depleted Uranium, leasing convicts, massive health disparities, murderous imperial practices. The ‘official story’ is that, but for miscues, everything is dandy.

The most interesting way to manage ‘mistakes’ is in dialectical fashion, where things turn into their opposites and then keep changing, which of course is what things do, like actually. “Normalcy” is nonsense, ha ha.

Here’s a Tweet about that. “Americans believe generally that 'yes is yes,' 'no only no!' This common understanding must fail to avail us of useful knowing. My Driftwood Art Messages address such matters, alluding to different ways of endeavoring to see, in essence dialectically.”

The likely largest potential for catastrophe in contemporary capitalism is in resistance to this aspect of nature’s way. Things change, evolve. Our only part can be to make them workable, better, blah blah blah. Saying ‘this is how they are, and they’ll stay that way’ is at once foolish and suicidal.

As well all such notions of miscue or accident make profit’s imprimatur much, much easier to maintain. The day needs to come when social equality and the Golden Rule are the bottom line that we seek, as in the Ten New Commandments once more. In different ways, claiming mistake is a cover.

“Cover number two is that since certainty is impossible, the uncertainty most appealing to industrial interests somehow becomes more acceptable than any other uncertainty. The way this works out is that any mistake of the nature, 'this toxin caused this harm,' is utterly verboten—insistence on this sort of 'accuracy' in fact provides much of the foundation of U.S. legal interpretations of science, as codified in the Daubert principle that for the past twenty years has made any attempt to hold corporations responsible for toxicity next-to-impossible.”

Another instance always asks a participant to examine himself for prejudice, to admit bigoted thoughts, and to recognize that such thinking is inherently moronic. Having moronic ideas is fine: everybody does it; I have dozens of moronic notions in any given day. Clinging to them is another matter.

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

Whatever the case may be empire’s depredations continue in ‘Greater Palestine.’ The underlying complexity is so far from ‘evil Israelis and Palestinian victims,’ at the same time that murder must end, or we’ll all end up dead.

From its inception, any erstwhile appeal to Zionism has served first the English and then the Anglo-American imperial phalanx in its insistence on controlling Southwest Asia, the so-called Middle East, the 'Holy Lands' that for centuries were under Turkish rule and which Capital's kings insistently asserted belonged not to the people whose homes had been there for centuries but to the plutocrats instead and their corporate conglomerations of cartels.

This is what the nation of Israel represents, a colonial outpost of money's mastery over everything on Earth. As the Marine Corp's “most colorful commandant” stated the case, “War Is a Racket.” Today, Jerusalem's 'leaders' are racketeers, pure and simple.

Yet the people of Israel or another matter. The New York Yeshivas’ protests—if that’s not AI trickery or something of the sort—demonstrate the complete mendacity and monstrosity of official State policy in Asia.

The Modern Nuclear Project is proving me correct in my assessment on every front. Obviously, maybe life would be more joyous and empowering under the rubric of a Uranium Economy with lots of H-Bombs to make Mass Collective Suicide ever so much more efficient and pain-free. “Try the New Vaporization Treatment. It’s 100% Pain Free!” Ha ha.

“On Friday, the court agreed to settle a dispute over plans to store nuclear waste at a Texas facility for 40 years.  Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, has vocally opposed the dumping site, licensed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Whatever the court decides could affect plans for a similar facility in New Mexico, whose Democratic governor also opposes storing spent fuel in the state.” This showed up as one of The Hill's quotidian gems.

Big Tech and Amazon have, simultaneously, bet the entire pot to boost atomic energy. Microsoft’s Three Mile Island purchase: my goodness, even I wouldn’t have guessed.

Modular, so-called micro, reactors—as if a little H-bomb were really a thing—are all over the place. Fusion power, like little H-bombs, right? That’s the happening thing. The Nuclear Fool Cycle is humanity’s death sentence, come what may.

The All-Trump-All-the-Time obsession train, whatever 'side' one takes, is at best absurd, although the parallels with Upton Sinclair's 1934 California governor's race is astonishing; the Democrats then and GOP now turned on the 'party's' candidate and formed a solid phalanx for finance capital. At the same time, advocating for this billionaire, mainly by pointing to other moneybags—RFK and Musk—who support him, is, quite possibly, more insane and definitely equally as inane.

This is Glenn Greenwald and Jeffrey Sachs about 'sacrificing Ukraine.' The barbaric carnage, the soulless indifference to suffering and death, it is grotesque.

Their work is excellent even as it ignores absolutely, without even a smirk or a shirk, the elephant in the room, which is to say that the entire noisome charade seeks to give an inescapable guarantee of imperial capital's continuing imprimatur. One response that occurred to me elicited some ideas.

I just started a new essay, “Long Shots and Endgames,” which will introduce Big Tent Review's #23. It starts with an observation that will win assent as to its veracity from all and sundry, save for the moronic and the mendacious, perhaps.

“Practically speaking not one 'recommended' or 'popular,' which is to say monopoly-mediated or otherwise SOP-approved, candidate or program or policy-change or reform or agenda or legislation or litigation or other 'acceptable' way of addressing our grotesque and self-inflicted crises will make anything, anything at all, even a tiny little bit better.

And yet a significant chunk of our attention and endeavor affixes on just these foolish non-sequiturs, these meaningless ways both to keep profits high and to pretend to help people while instead enriching their oppressors. Well one might inquire: 'So, chump? How does it feel? Huh?”

Different social results require different social relations, not new ways to fleece the suckers whom the ruling class take us to be. That said, something akin to the Ten New Commandments would be a step in the right direction.

Regular people might then readily rule the world and fulfill Robert Louis Stevenson's quip about being 'as happy as kings.' Apparently, we prefer to fight among each other and fulfill Jay Gould's boast that he could always 'hire one half the working class' to butcher the other half. Maybe we ought to consider a 'change of pace,' ha ha.

To make up #22’s platter of random, consecutive links, here are nine pieces to purvey: the first concerns dear Paulo Freire. The second is yet another instance of James Corbett’s masterful deconstruction of aspects of empire.

Here’s a Marxist take on Zion; whoa! This astonishing portal at Brown University takes the visitor to primary Latin American documents, as in Fidel’s closing arguments in his treason trial. This is a damning indictment from the National Centers for Biotechnology Information. Here’s a New York Review of Books take on agency.

This presents some rah-rah for A.I. This is some of Ryan Christian’s genius. And here we have some of the toddler days of the Modern Nuclear Project. Under such ecocidal circumstances, in which technological choice destroys fertility and worse, being fanatically antiabortion is a sickness, equally as twisted and sinister as someone’s electing to make abortions mandatory.

Oh my Goddess! We’re letting Mother Nature down. We should be chagrined, if not altogether ashamed.

The comprehensive attack on Eros in the vaunted—and nonexistent—West ought come as no surprise to any actually observant observer in the here and now. Infectious songs like “Atom Bomb Baby” notwithstanding, Mass Collective Suicide’s utterly inevitable Thanatos can only extinguish erotic potential, and in the eternally longterm forever at that, ha ha.

Nonetheless, Life Force Energies must immutably prevail in the hearts and minds of any who might gravitate to a Big Tent point of view. It makes more sense. It is more joyous and gracious. Living well is only possible in the context of something like a victory over vicious evisceration in service to further engorging those who run everything already.

Profiteering plutocratic plunderers rule most of Earth, especially North America, where divide-and-conquer trickery and false promises of safety and security adequately distract and confuse folks enough to keep them manageable, which is to say compliant about harming themselves. Systemic imperial capital calls the shots, ha ha.

Before acceding to Elon’s Premium status, a few cuts proved necessary. “Profiteering plunderers rule, especially North America, where divide-&-conquer trickery & false promises of safety & security distract & confuse folks & keep them manageable, or compliant about harming themselves. Imperial capital calls the shots, ha ha.” That left me only a single character more.

Prior to culminating #22’s starting-heat, a series of recent Tweets on X will prove of wide-ranging interest if not of complete blah blah blah. They can all be lengthier and wordier now because I ‘bit the bullet’ and paid for Premium access. I’ve interspersed them above, and here, as apropos.

Propaganda is pointless without a theory, an ideology. But such intellectual elements are empty without social practice in support of the theory. Ideology and theory, as indispensable as they are prone to nonsensical reification—who hasn't slept through a ludicrous 'free-market' reference by cartel's plutocratic mediators?—only assist our efforts to survive and thrive if we ground them in how the facts of yesteryear have evolved to create our own equally actual dilemmas and thereby proffer stark choices about continuing human viability in the future.

Anarchy as a theory—or Libertarianism—is, at best, problematic. Its overarching premise is ludicrous, after all, since history cannot find a single supporting example of a civilization without governance.

At our level of assessment, the only apt questions are about who shall rule and how they will organize themselves to do so. A piece of Driftwood Message Art, “Sharp & Pointed,” punctuates this point.

“Whether One Seeks Pointed Weaponry With Which to Battle Existence's Exigent Circumstances Or Sharp Implements to Wield in Performing Surgical Healing Miracles, One Can Only Anticipate Results of Deluded Fantasy Until One Understands That All Such Endeavors Necessitate Conscious Collaboration & a Consciousness of Social Solidarity in Service to Humanity to Achieve Potent & Salubrious Fruition.”

Another piece of Driftwood Message Art, as has often been a Big Tent practice, will lead us a little closer to Shalom, for now. “Repurposing” is the name of the missive. “Earth’s Planetary Plenty, a Cascading & Frequently Cultural Conucopia, Contains All the Fated Formulas & Forms That Folks Can Formulate, Along With Innumerable Other Grotesque Surprises & Salubrious Gifts That May Simultaneously Amaze & Imperil Us; the Rationale For Artistry, the Function of Craft, Must Forever Facilitate Repurposing Bits & Pieces of This Existential Bounty, Even If Worn Out Or Torn Asunder, to Manifest Schemes & Necessities That Our Potential & Our Dut Call Us to Dream Into Reality So As to Meet the Nostrums & Needs of Each New Day.”

We might all recall Alicia’s advisory. “Curiosity is the Antidote to Despair.” Going through the motions is part of practice, or in the parlance, Praxis.

Money, in the event, far from the root of all evil, is the sum of our collective labors. What we do with that fact, what we do with ourselves in relation to others in light of that fact, can lead to a disgustingly rooted malediction among human beings or to the well-earned capacity to celebrate each other and insist that justice and peace and love are possible, if we’ll only seek to understand and talk about it with each other.

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Popular Education, Anyone?

‘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 hypotheses and analytical speculation. As usual, such elements appear today as well, juxtaposing, in the event, the empirical and the conjectural.

Anyone who has done these sorts of things—whether Ouija boards or Tarot cards or otherwise—must acknowledge that a Reader will always find a thread in what appears. Our nature is to make stories out of events that reflect only-very-rarely definitely delineated interconnections, at once anticipated and unanticipated, among all that transpires. In this BTR section, therefore, as things ever unfold, storytelling naturally emanates from whatever shows up—‘food for thought,’ no matter what else the case may be.

Goddess Guidance is the BTR name for it all. For most of Big Tent Review’s 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. Today, a blending of the ‘personal and political’ is coming.

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 ‘gristle to gnaw,’ any such openended, openminded, openhearted endeavor as this has much to recommend it. The subject, as in the practitioner, of these quests for insight, frequently comes down to being an interlocutor and general representative for Marshall Arts.

Human hunger for knowledge, the 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 enticing. Whatever the case may be, some dynamic that ‘interrogates the cosmos’ is a quintessential component of humankind. Just such interrogation, in the event, summons the question for today.

Inasmuch as learning inherently underlies effective agency, one focal point for a cultural endeavor along the lines expressed in Big Tent terms must ever approximate something akin to a nexus of education. So saying, therefore, how’s this publication doing? We’re basically looking for criticism and guidance, ha ha, an openness to tutelage and correction, blah blah blah.

In that way, then, this issue's Spiral Spread poses a related query as well, at once more general and more expansive. Basically I am seeking—and believe that all ought to seek, alongside me—insights about the import of and potential for what we might call 'Dialogic Educational Engagement,' or something similar; perhaps ‘a learning curve for survival’ would be a useful way to state the case. How ‘bout them apples? Hmm?

The fall of the cards, in the event, proceeded as eerily as ever, alas and hurray, ha ha! The Essence rose up in the form of Strength, Hercules and the lethal Nemean Lion. The temporal triad then came along, a Past palpated by the Queen of Swords, mighty Atalanta; the Present Passage as an embodiment of Orestes in the Six of Swords; and likely Futures as Persephone’s epitome of The High Priestess. No-Matter-What, Opportunities then shows up as Mars himself as he drives The Chariot. The final pairing gives up Athena’s gaze in Justice, as Problems-&-Prospects, and Jason and Medea’s confrontation with the dragon’s guardianship in the Five of Wands.

Readers may recollect that #19 included a beginning of an ongoing examination of the work of Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed expresses a template and plan for Popular Education, an absolute sine qua non of democratic empowerment. A few lines from that articulation of things is apt in the here and now.

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

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

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

As has typically transpired here on BTR, before any thorough deconstruction takes place of the sequence of seven cards a few paragraphs above, this issue offers up a Past-Present-Future triptych that addresses a more limited matter, to wit this question, one which I feel almost immodest in posing: ‘How might courses or experiences about specific topics, such as the Modern Nuclear Project or Southern history or whatever else might be of interest, usefully develop with the participation of an entity such as Marshall Arts, hopefully along with its Big Tent Review sidekick?

Inevitably, in any case, in all my reincarnations of reinvention and redemption, I have sought just these kinds of potential interactions of dialogue, dialectic, and—for lack of a better name—grassroots education. Given this arc through time and space, therefore, a Past, Present, Future rubric seems a perfect fit.

As things panned out, little nuggets came to the forefront, percolating tidbits of cognition’s conflicts and loving-relationship’s potential for longstanding connection. The initial spot in the sequence shows us a shrouded Orestes as he stealthily sneaks along toward his destined duty. … (continued below the fold)

All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)

(Chapter XXI closed like this. “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.’”

This issue, we encounter again the terrain of Eros and its intersection with Polis and Ethos, so to say. Political cohorts like Lou’s in Tuscaloosa are at least as old as the Aryan’s swooping from the highlands with their steel implements to crush matriarchy and the Goddess, plus or minus ten thousand years ago. Still, the particulars of this new instantiation of the old story are pretty intoxicating, even as they show in a different way precisely the lesson that Rob learned at the end of Chapter XXI.)

CHAPTER XXII

***

Dr. Kallie Sands had no need of such effluvia as the country music lyrics, “Ladies love outlaws, like babies, love stray dogs.” Not only did she have a hundred graduate credits in developmental and criminal psychology and other coursework about the pathologies of human consciousness, study that provided both explanation and theory to account for matters like transference and identification and such, but she was also a committed Marxist, someone whose political sympathies were very much in favor of a social comprehension of ‘outlawry’ and yet resisted any romanticization or fetishization of the condition.

Nevertheless, every time that she heard the song at comradely gatherings, a quarter-century or more henceforth, she nonetheless smiled and blushed. On June twenty-fourth, 1977, as fate’s fickle fun transpired, she found herself across a table from a shackled ‘client’ of hers, David Thibodaux, who was serving twenty-years-to-life for bank robbery, and neither lyrics nor theoretical knowledge prepared her for what was about to happen to her, through her, at the utter core and in every pore of her being.

Kallie was no more a naïf than Jesus was a prude. While acting as the captain of her High School cheerleader squad at the pinnacle of Birmingham’s suburban social pyramid, she kept in touch with acquaintance Broadway Joe and even became his lover while he, and then she, defined part of the culture of the Crimson Tide a decade prior to the present moment of a 1970’s early Summer. She had always liked strong and cocky guys who weren’t afraid of her sexuality or their own cocks.

Thinking along these lines had inflected her private moments of late in regard to Prisoner L#8j739, whose life before and at the maximum-security prison where he bided his time was the object of her attention and her job. She figured that something clinically explicable, as well as alchemical—in relation to her own wild streak and so on and so forth—was going on and that ‘that was that.’

“I mean, what else could come of it?” she queried herself, just before she started their third session interview.

“So where we left off,” she whetted her lips and brushed back her bushy black mane as David hung his russet head, “was when we were talking about your father’s death, when you were sixteen.”

“Fifteen,” he shot back, without raising his face to hers.

“Oh,” she blushed, both at her error and the ferocious intensity of his presence in their work together, “yes, of course, okay, fifteen.”

“I said I was almost sixteen,” he purred, raising his eyes to hers, smiling and brimming with tears. “Last time, right?”

What a kiss followed that look! She would catch herself from buckling at the knees now and again for years afterward. She came twice that first day; and they hadn’t yet actually made themselves ‘accessible’ to each other, not to mention not having stripped off their clothes, let alone having sucked or fucked or otherwise done much that one normally associated with sex and orgasm.

“Especially more than once.” Kallie was matter of fact about her needs; she liked men who were as big and strong as ballplayers, “but with the smarts and quick moves of the backfield.” She had never cottoned to linemen; “they were always too sweet.”

Nor could she stomach intellectuals. “I can stand a liar, but I can’t stand pretense.” And, no matter what, “God knows every egghead in the universe has to trot out his pretensions now and again.”

Not David Thibodaux, however, not for decades anyhow: after she had climaxed a second time, as his hands wandered over her groin and belly and breasts like ferrets hungry for a hidden mouse, and they kissed like hungry tigers, he picked her up, quite literally, and held her at arms length before he sat her down in her chair with a peck on the neck and a final melding of their tongues and lips. “My daddy didn’t just die; I smothered him after he’d come home drunk, before he could wake up and knock the shit out of mom and me again.” Now the tears were loose, marking tracks down his freckled face.

While his mother watched sit-coms, he might murder his daddy; while acting like a pilot or a mercenary or a wildcatter, he might rob banks just like he learned from his first cellmate; while in a situation that challenged him, he might act the rascal and the plunderer and the thug, or conversely the moron and the angel and the innocent, whenever he needed to behave in whichever fashion. But even as he assumed varied parts like a duck might land on a different surface of water with equivalent aplomb, be it a pond or a river or a lake or the mighty ocean itself, nothing about him pretended on the inside, which made his act, whatever it was, all the more convincing.

She had had a difficult time coaching herself about their tete-a-tete—so much for two hundred fifty individualized therapeutic encounters, a requirement for her license and this job, a training regimen that seamlessly inculcated self-awareness and self-criticism. Pot hadn’t helped; liquor had helped, but only as long as she stayed drunk; nothing had returned her to the “therapeutic center” that she had, despite her Marxian skepticism, truly trusted as a “material force in the whole healing modality of psychotherapy,” as she’d stated the case in her dissertation.

She couldn’t quite bring herself to announce, flatly, “that will never happen again,” but she knew to the uttermost core of her professional being that such a pronouncement, more than expected, was a sine qua non of avoiding a long slide into opportunism, self-serving rationalization, and, of course, malpractice. “Yes indeed, he was pretty. Yes indeedy, he was virile. Most certainly, I crave more.”

Still, the matter was so simple: … (continued below the fold)

Wood Words Essays—Expansive Political Purviews

Compared to Americans, most Earthlings have a more sophisticated and useful understanding of politics. For Gringos, political awareness all-too-often comes down to voting alone, mas o menos. An odd and yet iconic piece of Driftwood Message Art speaks to this Yankee deficiency. Oft-quoted here, it bears repeating.

“Avoiding Electoral Catastrophe” is the title of one version. “Electoral Politics Is to Actual Community Power Roughly As Advertising Is to Honest Grassroots Communication: Lacking a Vision, Strategy, & Plan For More Robust Popular Empowerment Than Elections Proffer, Humanity Will Quite Likely Attain Its Apparent Objective of Mass Collective Suicide, Either Rapidly Via Thermonuclear Extinction Or More Slowly, Through Any Number of Mechanisms of Progressively Worsening & Ultimately Lethal Ecological Catastrophe.”

In this view, ‘electoral rubrics’ inevitably represent preselected ‘choices,’ completely antithetical to average people. This altogether simple essential response has rarely if ever gained much traction in the erstwhile ‘land of the free’ that we inhabit. A piece of Driftwood Message Art, which is ready for its fourth installment, pointedly addresses this failure-to-coalesce on the part of humans here.

“For a Change of Pace” is one of the titles. “The Concept of Solidarity, at Times As Ineffable As the Holiest of Ghosts & in Other Instances As Fiercely Tangible As a Howling Wall of Flame, Can Seem Little More Attainable Than Waltzing Naked Among Stars, Yet Its Achievement, Upon Which Human Survival Likely Hinges, Requires Merely the Minor Mundane Miracle That Wage-Earners Elect Not to Commit Mass Collective Suicide in Service to Plutocracy's Profiteering & Choose Instead, For a Change of Pace, to Act in Their Own Best Interest.”

Ha ha. A premise of such reasoning, quite obviously, is that people, regular folks, can in fact formulate forms of address, so to say, that in one way or another circumscribe a people’s bureaucracy, an administrative apparatus truly ‘of, by, and for’ average humans themselves, in the event truly popular governance.

One obvious corollary of the notion of institutional power itself must rest in the idea of agency, which is to say of individuals’ powers, both as any one person’s potent expression and as collective manifestations of mutuality, solidarity, or other manifestations of unified intention. In the realm of polis, these embodiments of agency’s multifaceted possibilities often comes down to citizenship.

Thus, if ‘justice comes from the barrel of a gun,’ then one must insist that one’s own friends and family and comrades wield the weapon, as it were. Recognizing this, decidedly, does not mean that one ignores the irony, not to say paradox, that any embrace of violence entails. On the contrary, it opens the heart and mind to understanding this peculiarity at some level. “Paradox’s Socioeconomic Thickets” offers such an instance.

"Inextricable Contradictions & Their Complex Swirl of Intersecting Synthesis Define All Conundrums of Social, Economic, & 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."

The very idea of actually operationalizing social management with kith and kin astonishes the senses. The pull of ‘how we’ve always done things’ is strong; the desire to ‘pierce the veil’ and see truly how things work is fraught with worry and shame; one can only hope to govern oneself if one can at least imagine participating daily in presiding over one’s various networks and collectives and aggregations of others.

“Claiming Our Seats” tells a version of this tale. Quite plausibly, we ignore these advisories at our most mortal peril.

“We All Simultaneously Want & Woe Chances to Claim Chairs at Society's Bargaining Table: on One Hand, We Know That Equity Mandates Such Assertions; on the Other, We Feel So Much Safer Assuming Roles of Children, Whom Powerful Parental 'Leaders' Will Protect, Thought This Notion Amounts to Nonsense That Only Our Own Purposeful Participation Can Dispel.”

Almost by definition, politics necessitates that one collaborates on everything with friends and comrades. To an extent, such necessities appear incongruent with what one might call a ‘have it your way’ mentality, that individual and self-contained heroics are what make history, ideation much emphasized in advertising and propaganda that is so ubiquitous that almost every mediation begins to resemble more or less sophisticated PR campaigns.

“Fruitful Mutuality, Alienated Individuality” asserts this point both implicitly and explicitly. Moreover, once more, Grandma’s wit is apt that ‘to the wise a word is sufficient.’

“Fruitful Mutual Bonds” is an alternate heading. “Life's Organic Cycles Make Familiar & Fruitful Mutual Bonds of Friendship & Fraternity; How Tragic & Lethal That Contemporary Morays So Emphasize Alienated Individual 'Triumph', The Toxic Joke of the Ubermensch, That No True Comity of Souls Can Ever Dare Contravene & Discard This Moronic Mediated Model of Isolated Identity & Purely 'Personal' Achievement.”

Many aspects of a deep critique of ‘Cults-of-the-Individual’ remain germane to human thriving and surviving into an undefined but still in some ways definite future. Our very ways of thinking may often prove determinative in bringing to pass a range of evolutionary possibilities: thought is a kind of material, like coin and stock in essence.

For instance, “Marvelous Destinies: Requisite Mutuality” proffers a dandy expression of the earthy potency of habits of mind. Some call this realm ideological, perhaps apt.

“Multiple Meanderings Might Manifest Manana’s Marvels, Yet Insistently ‘Individual’ Forays Can Never Deliver Such Delightful Destinies, Any More Than Purely Personal ‘Responsibility’ Will Ever Likely Elicit Anything Except the Baleful Delusion of Blaming Various Hapless Victims: Inescapably, Both Accountability & Achievement Will Always Remain Collective; Most Charitably, All Other Views About Such Matters Amount to Willfully Ignorant Nonsense.”

Another attribute of the collaboration that must ever illuminate our social work is how we propose to turn today into tomorrow. Some kind of plan, or at least a hoped-for outcome, must axiomatically be part of governance, by definition a set of non-random outcomes. “Underpinning Epic Endeavor” is one such Driftwood Message.

“Whether One's Grand Vision Entails Taming, Maybe Slaying, Some Grotesque Monstrous Beast, Or Organizing a Perilous Ascent of Some Titanic Peak, Or Undertaking Some Altogether More Radical, Even Revolutionary, Heroic Task, Any Such Glorious Labor Can Only Manifest As Material Reality If an Individual Adventurer Enlists Allies & Assistants, A Network of Social Potential on Which Epic Endeavors Ever Depend.”

In this context, following the rules makes perfect sense if one has participated in shaping them. On the other hand, following the crowd will only be even remotely defensible if the gaggle of congregants in question are, in one way and another, one’s actual mates in the scheme of things. Sometimes such organized assertions of one’s beliefs better be close to a top priority.

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

Our shared conveyance, this dear Earth that sustains us, was not of our design. The beneficence of culture, however, enculturates frequent forays into improving how things operate. Inevitably, all like attempts to ‘tinker with how it all functions’ depend almost completely on resources, cognizance, and performance.

This triad-of-empowerment, for its part, hinges on matters of social standing, what some might call status when in actuality power is the defining characteristic. This capacity to ‘project force,’ as it were, in turn depends almost exclusively on wealth, especially, perhaps, in the form of official expenditures.

Obviously fiscal control and official endeavor associate with a social setting in which an identifiable social set sets the scene and calls the shots. The label, ‘Ruling Class,’ in the event, seems perfectly plausible. As a matter of course, this mete and proper ‘calling a spade a spade’ determines that all society, therefore, amounts to class society. … (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 as birth and death. The last section of this overall narrative puzzle wrapped up with these thoughts: “‘(An ongoing) counterinsurgency (Drug War) 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. If nothing else, we could make lots of fascinating films, ha ha.

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.’ 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. The issue before last brought a fifth iteration, while #21’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.)

The social and legal history between the Opium Wars’ faux Free Market mandates and the initiation of the here-and-now after World War Two is an upcoming presentation. For today, having considered Prohibition and Pharmaceuticals, and plenty more last time, we’ll start out by fast-forwarding to the 1950’s and official ‘analyses’ of one sort and another, deficiencies of which were de rigeur, as already documented in relation to matters like the Opium Wars themselves and Opium use in the Americas.

Before proceeding to the completion of this series, however, a precis, or perhaps a very brief briefing about Portugal would serve readers’ purposes, if what they seek is a nuanced awareness of what is at stake in these matters. As a matter of course, I have a very positive and very informed opinion about this, which, for now, I’ll take off the table.

I did a simple search. <portugal + “drug laws”> was it. I purposefully picked a link, from Skeptoid, that I inferred might be negative or at least highly critical. Instead, I got ‘balanced journalism’ and subscribed, since in the main such an outcome is the best that one can expect.

This was the dandy summary. “The best way to characterize the first 20 years of the PDPM … is to note that it has had some major, though somewhat narrow, successes. Importantly, it hasn't failed anywhere; all of its outcomes have been either favorable or neutral at worst.

Portugal's policy was implemented in a resource-starved test environment, among a population with a strong element that opposes it. It was done in a country that had a drug problem that was unusual due to Portugal's unique history, and may fare better if implemented in some other countries, and may fare worse in still others.

It has suffered from international pushback, but has also inspired plenty of international imitation. The results, as defined by a number of metrics, are not as good as many of us might hope for; in others, they are. But that it's been able to produce results ranging from positive to neutral, with really nothing in the negative, says a lot for it; and that it produced these results under tough conditions says more.”

MK-ULTRA & Other ‘Experiments’ in Psycho-Social Control

In the midst of this unfolding intersection of empire and contraband and spies, in any event, the ‘cowboys’ of the Office of Strategic Services—with their utility-players on-board from the criminal networks of Prohibition gangsters—gave way to the mandates of a National Security Act and a Central Intelligence Agency. This bureaucratization, however, did not in the event mean an abandonment of fantasies of truth-drugs and chemical assassination protocols.

Through two acquaintances, I have a rich and direct experience of documenting the army’s and CIA’s treating its soldiers and random citizens as experimental targets. In any case, this is yet another situation in which readers should definitely ‘stay tuned,’ as additional efforts in this arena will definitely happen given time and tide that keeps everything afloat.

FOUNDATIONS OF BLACK MARKETS & CAPITAL ACCUMULATION

All of these developments illustrate ongoing expressions of the patterns in play throughout this narrative, at least those that have accompanied capital’s rise as the definitive organizing principle for sustaining society. Like so much of what transpires in these arenas, however, the facts and events remain a purposefully secret story, hidden away behind smokescreens and official impunity.

The upshot is that since ‘black markets’ are so fundamental to corporate operations, so profitable to those ‘leaders’ who are truly ‘players,’ so commonplace for those with ‘seats at the table,’ they are as much a part of the standard operating procedure as Engine Charlie Wilson’s off-the-cuff derision that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” With up to ten percent of the world’s entire productive activity invested in and intertwined in contrary-to-‘policy’ contraband activity, in any event, any fantasy of just snapping our fingers and creating a transparent and honest system is at best fatuous.

That said, a dream of a human prospect in which our productive projects actually serve our own interests is valid. Such thinking is the basis for this labor here, upending and taking a clear look at what we mean when we say drugs, what we do when we criminalize plants, and so on and so forth.

Whatever else one makes of all of this drug-war rhetoric and such, the tables have definitely turned, at least in a geographic sense, from where things stood at the time of the Opium Wars. The borders of the United States—for example, in ‘Decision 2024’—are the lines to cross in plying alienated, terrified masses of people—who all too often don’t want to look in the closet or under the bed, as it were—with massive doses of commodified toxins that could show up, in a different context, as plant accompanists to the human symphony.

Perhaps the most insidious expression of any ‘War-on-Drugs’ socialization appears in the development of those sinister and twisted dark markets that illuminate the deeply pathological sorts of ideation that are inherent in such a nexus of hypocritical crusades and hyper-profits. Diverse scholars note such a deleterious conjunction in any event.

Snuff films, child pornography, human trafficking, and the fetishization and criminalization of pleasure that turns increasingly violent and deadly, in any case inextricably intertwine with ‘designer drugs’ and pharmaceutical intervention that stand in stark contrast to human society’s longstanding psychoactive proclivities. Once again, we’ll be looking for more soon enough.

FOUNDATIONS OF COUNTERCULTURE

Lest one imagine that, unlike the seamier aspects of political economy in relation to unjust enrichment through smuggling of one sort or another, the ‘counterculture’ that emanates from underground drug sales and usage is in the main more magical and lyrical and cool, a further example from Afghanistan offers a sobering counterpoint. Sick and twisted, in other words, brings more sick and twisted in its train.

The consequences of drug-culture for women do not end at the doorstep of hyper-sexist societies either. Mick Jagger was speaking a truth that continues to touch nerves in the lyrics of “Mama’s Little Helper.” Women, whether a la The Stepford Wives or The Three Faces of Eve() or otherwise have always represented a locus for the pharmaceutical marketer’s focus().

Yet in music and popular culture and expression of every sort, the formula has been accurate. …(continued below the fold)

Old Stories, & New—”Not Yet Forgotten”

(This contest entry 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.

Here’s how we ended up at the end of #21. ‘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?’”)…the carrot-topped youth asked as she came closer and, despite her natural sympathy, pursed her lips in the sort of judgment that she tended to judge harshly in others, or in herself whenever she thought about it closely enough to catch herself out. “Was it her daughter, for God's sake?

That would be terrible.” Reflexively, she crossed herself, like any Jewish girl would do if she had attended St. Theresa of Avila's elite school for young women in Chicago, as she finished the automatic reflex, glancing at the candles that she had left guttering when she had visited last Tuesday.

27. When she approached the vehicle, however, spade in hand that she had intended to use to 'plant' some tough but nice artificial flowers in the frozen soil around the shrine, just as she realized the car was an aged Jaguar, seedy and worn but as sleek as an elegant old lady, it gave a burp and roared off, belching oil and water vapor in bright clouds.

28. Strangeness and wonder suffused the moment as the firmament above mirrored the contents of her spirit. The sun split into fulsome rays as it sank toward the skyline between competing banks of clouds, alternating peach and pink and electric gray. Hannah shook her head, both to clear her thinking and to bring herself back to the moment.

29. Scatterbrained or not, capable of procrastination or not, too much on the plate or not, she retained her workmanlike commitment to finishing up what she called 'the infrastructure' of the current version of “my ongoing brand new deal.” That took less than the fifteen minutes she had budgeted for it, so that she had launched herself toward the classroom before the sun had entirely disappeared on its mid-January circuit away from the fortieth Northern hemisphere parallel that bisected Michigan hereabouts.

30. Posting flyers in Dawson Hall and the Admin Building before class was easy enough. Hannah had a standing pass from all three of the organizations on campus that she helped to lead, to post whenever and whatever. She'd even finished her newly assigned poster on time.

With Professor Kamiskey and the twenty-three of twenty-five classmates who showed up for their penultimate late Friday Winterim gathering, more discussion ensued of problems and their necessitation of solutions. She even managed to work in a nugget from her student teacher paper conference, where, almost as if she were admitting something a little naughty, Professor Kamiskey had acknowledge “Marxist tendencies.” A key intellectual trick, Hannah pointed out in class, “is seeing the freedom in necessity.”

31. A meeting of the campus Young Socialists followed, which, as Chair of things, she promised never to allow to carry on longer than an hour, plus one fifteen minute extension; discussion of grassroots culture and engaging 'real workers' in making things better tied right into all of that, obviously, though Hannah made sure everybody else had a chance to have their sayso too. Noteworthy elements of all of life's impossible necessities were grist for the mill in their conversation, before she headed home and let herself into her building, vaulting up the stairs to meet her sweetie and take what the evening offered. Charlie had kept his promise too; dinner was waiting, even the candles that he had vowed to find.

32. That had all happened four days ago, on Friday afternoon and evening. Weekend snow had not kept her altogether away from her 'duties,' at the same time that she wondered exactly how religiously she would be treating her Maria sorties in a month, or a year. Once or twice a week could easily turn into once or twice a month. Or less in the snow.

33. Next Tuesday's first light had carried a late Winter thunder boomer into town; all traces of frozen white had washed away when she stopped by the wall on the way to class. She congratulated herself on her use of the Helmsman spar urethane glossy spray on her crafty transformations of Maria's installation. So far as she could see, even where the seepage had caused a bit of sodden surface on the signage of the 'headstone,' neither had the colors faded nor the lines collapsed in drooping, dripping blurs that quickly make letters indistinguishable.

34. Just as she was smiling at these salubrious results, with a farting flurry that drew her attention away instantly, the Jaguar that Hannah had ascribed to Maria's mother pulled up behind her. Out barreled the female form, tall and angular, her face a sharply etched blending of seamless planes that might easily look 'sad' if seen from the side, or in shadow. But it wasn't sad, not at all, at least not now.

It was, if anything, ebullient, as if the athletic giantess in front of her had just discovered sugar cookies or lollipops or something else sweetly unexpected. Hannah, without thinking, bobbed a bit of a curtsy, to which the Jaguar's driver replied with praise: “Your work is so beautiful,” which she stated in Slavic tones as 'Bee Yutiful.' The woman's teeth grinned at her even more. “You must be the art student whom,” and here she formed her hands into the most devoutly interlaced steeple imaginable, “I was praying to the God the other day would come to help me some more.”

35. This response at first made her feel that sense of 'Whoopsy-Daisy!' vertigo that had happened to her once or twice, a ha ha, 'we're not in Kansas anymore' kind of moment. Then it made her laugh out loud, peals of new understanding that diminished to chuckles of recognition. The woman extended her hand. “I'm Martina.” Her accent was decidedly Russian or something like that. “Have you heard of my gallery, Happiness Above All?”

36. She ignored Hannah's negating shake of her head. “In Moscow, we would say, 'Schast'ye Prezhde Vsego;' that's easy, yes?” Hannah gulped, nodding, as her new friend, Martina, bubbled with a “Da, da, da, da, da! Very easy,” before stating her name.

When the stunned open mouth that she addressed remained silent, she persisted. Pointedly repeating her introduction, she grinned more widely to proffer, “So, I am Martina, Martina Rostov.” …(continued below the fold)

Nerdy Nuggets—The Bank That Owns Us, & Its International Avatars

For at least the past century, the production, trade, accounting, and social rules and regulations of capitalist enterprise have overseen everything human on Earth. How does all this work? Significant aspects of an answer revolve around the operations of central banks and international organizations that exist as a mirror of large scale monopoly enterprise.

Today’s first installment of an inaugural three items, which as a triad examine what one might call the guiding political-economic institutions of our fair planet, broaches the topic at hand by looking first at the founding of the Federal Reserve and second at the how World War and Capital’s competitive campaigns thereafter established a League of Nations, the failure of which in turn brought even worse carnage and in so doing laid a basis for a General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade that has over time become the World Trade Organization. Such things can be drier than dust, so a rich depiction of context is a must, ha ha.

Cartels, corporate skullduggery, industrial spies, all the tricks and traps of production, marketing, and consumption would mean very little at all without a stream-of-value to carry the various exchanges along. Money has served not only as a linchpin for most local, everyday mercantile reciprocation, however, but it has also defined the life’s blood of the entire worldwide organism of human creation, acquisition, and enjoyment, in particular regarding nation states’ carrying on large-scale trades.

A clear and definite structure for the functioning of financial affairs has been in place, in some shape, form, or fashion since at least the Italian city-states of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A default process of conducting these kinds of transactions through overarching national banks began to appear by the eighteenth century—the Bank of England was slightly ahead of schedule with its original 1694 Charter—but had come to characterize almost all ‘developed countries’ by the middle part of the 1800’s.

Contrariwise, American resistance to National Banks is well-known. The reliance on such forms by law, legislation, and administration notwithstanding, America’s famed ‘middle classes’ have utterly loathed these types of arrangements.

Whatever the case may be, the following paragraphs, till just above the Fold, provide a precis about the formation of a designated U.S. central banking system. Rothschild was right: control of a nation’s money ineluctably delivers control of the nation itself. More on these issues is forthcoming, yet this should serve as an evocative and helpful first look.

All History Is Important and Interesting: The Bank That Owns America Few people can answer the question, “What exactly is money?”  Slightly more than eleven decades ago at this point, savvy fellows who had clear ideas about money were meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, pretending to be duck hunting, traveling incognito, generally acting like men of mystery as they discussed redesigning U.S. finances around an independent central bank now known as the Federal Reserve.

Interestingly, history books rarely mention such interesting phenomena.   Minneapolis’ Fed office has written about it, however, as has a recent Atlanta Constitution article and thousands of web-based conspiracy-theorists.  Michael Whitehouse, a Fed economic historian, presents many germane elements of the tale.

The U.S. faced bankruptcy in 1907; but for gold and cash that J.P. Morgan advanced, what was even then the world’s biggest economy would have imploded.  Paul Warburg, meanwhile, one of Europe’s richest scions, had moved to America to marry another financier’s violinist daughter and, just in time for this cataclysm, take over her father’s bank—Kuhn-Loeb.

Men like Morgan and Warburg wanted banking systems that could avoid ‘panics’ rather than depend on profitable but scary bailouts.  Politicians, especially well-off Republicans, wholeheartedly agreed.  One such was Senate Finance Committee Chairman Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter had married J.D. Rockefeller’s son.

Many citizens, though, regarded very suspiciously a banking system established by bankers—like appointing foxes to operate chicken coops.  Nonetheless, the crisis-induced National Monetary Commission sent Chairman Aldrich to study such institutions as England’s central bank for almost two years.

This fabulously rich ‘gentleman,’ Rockefeller’s father-in-law, had the job of formulating a new system.  But Whitehouse explains: “Aldrich was ‘bewildered …and… faced … the difficult task of writing a highly technical bill while… harassed by the daily grind of his parliamentary duties.’”

So Warburg and Aldrich and additional financiers: Benjamin Strong, head of Morgan Trust and early Fed Chairman; Henry Davison, another Morgan partner, reputedly J.P.’s most trusted lieutenant; Frank Vanderlip, present for Rockefeller’s First National City Bank; and some others spent a ‘duck-hunting’ holiday on a Morgan-owned island to pen a Congressional bill for Aldrich.

Essentially, three years later, this strategy yielded the Federal Reserve Act, instantly confirming cities like Atlanta as regional powerhouses, anointing them Fed Districts and giving them committee memberships of almost unimaginable power.  A private financial institution that nonetheless had ties to the government, the Fed received regulatory and market tools that gave bankers money management of the entire U.S., which, perhaps inevitably, meant managing much of everything else on the planet as well.

The rest, as they say, is history. A journalist, William Greider, has composed several exemplars of erstwhile ‘arts of annals.’ The one most applicable here, Secrets of the Temple, showcases the author’s dogged and assiduous work to bring actual Fed economic policy to light in an accurate and entertaining fashion—comic, melodramatic, and tragic at once.

Another Greider masterpiece, Who Will Tell the People?, this time about how Washington works, tells a related tale to his tome on the ‘Bank of the United States.’ A reviewer of this latter book noted how naive and well-meaning most citizens are, ironically advising them against reading Greider’s work.

Her conclusion fits perfectly in regard to Secrets of the Temple. “If you too are that kind of hopeful citizen, do not read Greider’s book. It makes clear what suckers we are. …You’ll get too mad.”

For all its power and influence, however, the central bank of the United States of America, whose admitted “constituents” are the most propertied and wealthy members of society, only represents one link in Capital’s multinational orchestration of imperial oversight. World War Two’s catastrophic cataclysm gave birth to the way that monopoly enterprise governs everything.

The Bretton Woods agreements, now in tatters as a result of U.S. sanctions and the formation of a robust BRICS counterpoint, formed the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—the World Bank—and the dreaded-by-all-but-plutocrats International Monetary Fund. A key to actualizing this financialized elite administration was a general protocol to protect so-called ‘Free Trade.’

Non-trillionaire propertied sorts among Americans, in many ways then as now, have preferred trade blockades to any sort of true ‘free-trade’ arrangement. Thus died U.S. participation in the League of Nations, and since German reparations were essential to repay U.S. bank loans to World War One’s supposed victors, a Second World War soon enough manifested yet more carnage and mayhem.

Congress nonetheless rejected an International Trade Organization in the mid-1940’s, albeit a more limited General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades did pass muster and lay a foundation for another attempt to carry on planetary commerce on a universal ‘most-favored-nation’ status. However, this new instance of a ‘trade organization’ for all of Earth did not succeed in taking tangible form to which ‘exceptional America’ would adhere until forty years later.

The Control of Trade, a Key to Plutocratic Political-Economic Governance Our initial piece of a multi-part puzzle examining the World Trade Organization and capital’s related organizational brethren finishes laying the groundwork for considering the organizational form of the WTO itself by …(continued below the fold)

Erotic Snippets—”The Scientist & Her Special ‘S.’”

The Father of thermonuclear weapons was Frederick Soddy, whose Interpretation of Radium predicted an energy potential of ‘a single pound of Uranium’ adequate to ‘fuel the city of London for a century.’ Naturally enough, he thereby launched an ever more frantic—as it became ever more likely possible—search for the doomsday devices that we now call ‘strategic weapons’—an omnipresent possibility of thermonuclear Mass Collective Suicide that largely underlies ongoing BTR reportage about the Modern Nuclear Project and such.

The atomic bomb’s Mother, however, was definitely Lise Meitner, she who famously deduced the potential eruption concomitant with a neutron-induced “chain reaction.” From a ‘well-to-do’ Viennese Jewish family, she attained only the second female physics doctorate at Austria’s premier flagship institute of higher education, to become one of the most creative and descriptive subatomic investigators of all time.

She lived to be eighty-nine. She escaped Nazi imprisonment and likely elimination. When she was mere months past her sixtieth birthday, she published “Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons” in Nature magazine. The paper, which she coauthored with Otto Frisch, her Danish Collaborator after she fled Berlin, demonstrated that a single ‘slow-neutron,’ in an array of the radioactive metal, would likely fission a Uranium atom that it impacted and release thereby several new slow neutrons that might do the same thing among nearby unstable clusters.

In any case, the divine Dr. Meitner was also—although this fact is neither widely known nor widely discussed—a fully realized female, a true denizen of explosive completion in her ‘personal physics’ as well as in the wider material realm. A work of Driftwood Message Art from the present pass illuminates this dandy Danish woman’s soulful central libidinal ideation. “Ecstatic Elasticity” is its title.

“Cartography of Carnality & Geography of Desire, No More Conducive to Comprehensive Mapping Than Would Be Creating a Complete Cosmic Atlas, Nonetheless Determine the Psychic Canvas of Any Specific Sojourner, As Well As Activating Everyone’s Drive Fully to Fulfill Her Needs Or Sweetly to Suit & Succor His Fancy, in Aggregate an Everyday Experience of Primate Propensities to Seek Libidinal Release & Erotic Engagement, Whether Wanton Or Woebegone, Whether Ecstatically Elastic Or Otherwise.”

The concept that demonstrated a future in which fission might seem foreordained came to her, in one sense, at predictable moments. As this narrative was unfolding, in Fall, 1922, she had already for many years playfully proffered to female inamoratas a phenomenon which she named “my chain reaction potential,” replete with flowing floods. Still, in yet another sense, this knowing happened at an ever ultimately odd or even anomalous moments, inasmuch as her Life Force fucking fostered a catchy naming of fission’s facilitation of human incineration and toxic devolution.

Is this the epitome of ‘erotic irony?’ S. himself might have called it ‘the divine Satanic Union of Eros and Thanatos,’ or something similar, had they carried on at greater length.

Alas, although Hilda learned of these things, S. never found out his ‘secret lover’s’ inner life in relation to their carnal enthusiasm. Lise so epitomized discretion that only now, a century after the fact’s initial frolicking unfolding, will the world learn of the true ‘birth pangs’ of the atomic age. Readers may view Hilda Doolittle with “her physicist,” more than a decade and a half before Dr. Meitner published her paper on Uranium’s fission potential, in the event, at just the juncture that their merry womanly menage was about to expand to include a man, and a bearded psychoanalyst at that.

“Oh, but you must meet him, my love!” Bawdy, boisterous, sleek, and stacked, Hilda laughed her usual wicked cackle while the pertly petite Lise ‘suited up’ to mirror a woman prim and celibate all the while she had just permitted her own pleasuring ‘at the right hands’ and insisted on being so pleasurable in reply that her lovers would keep their secret, as Hilda always did, in order to have access to such bliss.

An American who came to Vienna via London, seeking psychological assistance that one provider in particular proffered both professionally and famously, Hilda for five years—from 1919 through 1924—spent Autumn and Winter in Vienna and Spring and Summer in London. The two brilliant and strong-willed women—one a slight elf, the other a tawny giantess—met and bonded; Lise even abandoned her precious lab on occasion to take a sojourn to what she confided to her diary was another “steamy English holiday.”

“So?” Lise smiled slightly as she gazed out at a December Viennese snowscape. “You meet on Tuesdays and Fridays, no?”

“Yes. Lunch at his office from 11:30 to 1:00.” Hilda always hoped that her triumphant smile might merit a little spat; for her, nothing ended lusty lovemaking like friendly bickering.

Ms. M. would have none of it. Her beaming visage became her own grin of victory. “Gut!” She pursed her lips as she fondled her brass exit knob, stating quietly yet clearly, “I’ll drop in on you two some Friday. The lab, you know…,” she winked and departed.

Precluding Hysteria— Hilda had always proved prone to a palpating heart, hyperventilation, and other indicia of the anxiety that might whirlpool into a downspout of hysterical terror. She knew how especially delicate her state of mind could be in these circumstances if she had failed, and regularly, to fulfill her female longing.

In England, before her brother had told of reading about the ‘Austrian doctor with the miracle analytical cure,’ every professional whom she consulted in the U.K. had hiked her skirts and diligently delved her ‘hysterical release’ with different versions of a vibration-based therapeutic, as it were. “I didn’t detest it,” she acknowledged to Elise, who permitted only her most intimate companions her original name, “but I wanted something that I could believe in, independent of my cunt!”

“S. would never have stooped to such animal ministrations had I not insisted.” Hilda giggled at her contradictions, that, apparently, her womanly parts played some real role, after all, in sustaining her beliefs; simply said, she’d developed a wicked case of transference and wanted the ministrations of her therapist outside the limited domain of her masturbatory fantasy life. …(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.” #20, a month ago now, brought us Part One. As a matter of course, a third 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 in this way, as part of a continuing exploration of Empire’s “Open Veins of Latin America,” with Pablo Neruda in possession of the microphone, as it were, while he spoke to his wife. “‘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.’”

[And then this]. “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.”)

Core Matters—Poignant Paradox & Pointed Protests

Chile’s outsize cultural impact has already had a turn on this essay’s stage. The work of Mistral and Neruda and others worked as antidote to heartbreak, even in the most woeful evolution of the world’s twists and turns. This literary and artistic heft represents a multidimensional fabric that serves to support both Chilean society most specifically, Latin society with almost the same degree of clarity and completeness, and the wider world more broadly speaking.

A few additional notes can assist in launching this narrative’s central sections. In each case, elements of the life and labor of Victor Jara are also part of the web that this briefing describes.

Frank sexuality and sensuality, as already alluded to, form a part of Chilean consciousness and enculturation. That this happens in an arena where strict Catholicism holds sway is less paradoxical than one might imagine.

Isabel Allende, the assassinated President’s niece, not only composed entire novels through which a strongly feminine earthiness and lustiness expressed itself, but she also spun out briefer yarns that were even more graphic. “Toad’s Mouth” is one of these.

It tells the tale of a vast sheep preserve in Chile’s South, practically inaccessible and owned by a pair of married British investors. With few exceptions, all of the locals are men, strong but lonely, whose sole sexual outlets are either autonomous or bestial: both sheep and skinned seals serve on occasion.

Into this realm comes a powerful dervish of a woman. She serves as confessor and consort to all of these men. The particular customer of any give moment depends on who wins the games that she invents, one of which involves tossing a coin at her vaginal opening as she sits in a circle with legs spread wide.

She gyrates her hips in such a way that only rarely does a man gain a blessed hour or two with her as a result of this contest. Along comes a slender, diminutive Argentine, taciturn and fierce of mien.

He has arrived in search of her. He has an intuition that she is his mate. In the game, he pitches his coin with such accuracy that she accepts him as her partner for a couple of hours or so.

They do not emerge from their embraces till the long afternoon and evening and night have yielded to a new dawn. She packs her things and the newly inaugurated couple ventures forth toward a joined fate.

Strongly feminist and strongly anti-machismo are the lines of Allende’s stories. This quality matches Mistral’s work, as already noted. Many other feminist and lusty women also share these attributes with the author of House of the Spirits.

One other especially notable is Maria Bombal, whose metered paragraphs burst with longing. She gives voice to a woman’s fierce desire, which, if unmet evokes complete chaos. Such emotional and spiritual passion characterize her two brief novels and also intertwine with every line of her astounding short story, “The Tree.”

She ends this abbreviated mythic paean to music and carnal love almost with a manifesto. “They had stolen her intimacy, her secret; she found herself naked in the middle of the street, naked before an old husband who turned his back on her in bed, who had given her no children. …Lies! Her resignation and serenity were lies; she wanted love, yes love, and trips and madness, and love, love.”

A powerful contextualization of intuition and the average person’s capacity to see and to seek is also readily apparent in both Chilean music and literature. While as ever one might find dozens or even hundreds of cases to exemplify this, two writers offer exemplary insights about this aspect of the Chilean Canon.

Robert Ampuero’s detective novels, literary gems, display this all-consuming yearning for knowledge. Only his most recent installment in a multi-volume series is available in English, as The Neruda Case. Undoubtedly, some kind of epistemological motivation is inherent in the detective genre, yet the contours of this longing is especially provocative in this series.

“If Cayetano’s case is driven by the poet’s quest for closure, the novel also reexamines the disjunctions between political philosophies and personal politics during that long tour from country to country. The closing chapter, returning readers to 21st-century Chile, provides an ironic and potentially redemptive coda to the book’s vivid depictions of troubled histories.

Closely related to all this, Cayetano’s musings on detective fiction quickly show how the investigative techniques of first-world novels don’t apply to the uncertainties of the Latin American landscape. Unlike in the rational and logical world of Maigret, ‘in Latin America — where improvisation, randomness, corruption, and venality were the order of the day — everything was possible.’”

Much better known, already dead though he just barely attained his first half century, Roberto Bolano also manifested—in the chatter and chants of an astounding variety of voices—the common folk’s perspectives on life. Such a capacity is ubiquitous in The Savage Detectives, 2666, and Chile by Night.

In a different formulation of what Chile has to teach us, Roberto Bolano—or for that matter Isabel Allende, whose work the youthful Roberto attacked with brutal vitriol —might easily take center stage. For now, a few further lines will do that this additional masterful yarnspinner from the Andes served up as forthrightly as he might announce his name.

“What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?” …(continued below the fold)

Last Words For Now

Ah, yes! Here we are. Some installments have issues complex enough to make issuing, for instance, #22 much more difficult than whipping up #21, say.

Floods at home, bloody hell abroad, and then the BRICS gathering: people are actually trying to live powerfully and peacefully together.

My life is a miracle of grace. My love, her mother, the little creature two generations below us, all the cats and glorious gardens, the beautiful, if dry-as-a-bone, Autumn, chances to think and play and love.

What a world! Magnificent and monstrous at once, as my own little one nears his thirty-fourth year, what should I say. Happy birthday, let’s make a better world, let’s help each other instead of pretending that our cousins are our enemies.

—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)…

Of course, the young Lord’s obligatory task is the most loathsome crime that Greek culture proscribed, killing his own mother, who had in turn murdered his father and earned thereby the son’s equally homicidal mission, mandatory and inescapable. Orestes’ story defines the suit of Swords, with the Seven the exemplar of Past initiation of such ‘educational’ ventures as today’s quest exemplifies, as it were.

Present Passages delivered Orestes as well, in the form of the Six of Swords, a reversal of the order plausible enough, as we’ll soon see, in terms of what the cards in question likely indicate. Future Prospects, meanwhile, takes us down a different path from that which Agamemnon’s and Clytemnestra’s progeny plotted, in the form of the first fortunate union, under Aphrodite’s tutelage, of Eros and Psyche in the Three of Cups.

What to make of all this is easy to articulate but not at all obviously simple in its implications. Orestes’ Seven, standing for the flowing streams of Yesterday, embodies the cognitive roots and social necessity of “guile, tact, diplomacy, and wit.” Back in pre-Marshall Arts times, long ago and far away—after undergraduate training launched my more or less revolutionary hopes to make manifest cultural accomplishment for common folk—these qualities were utterly essential in advancing various interpretations of this goal of gaining access to popular education about empire and the Modern Nuclear Project.

Jobs-With-Peace by itself, the Nuclear Freeze on its own, and the pairing of the two in conjunction—from the late 1970’s and on into the 1990’s—would never have risen from Atlanta’s drawing boards without everyday tactful sneakiness that made the messaging of things less offputting to people whose entire enculturation had implanted ‘patriotism,’ which is to say loyalty-to-imperial-imprimatur, as deeply as any neural network.

Things have changed, even as plutocratic patterns have persisted. Despite the perfidious ubiquity of the Modern Nuclear Project’s insidious toxicity, the MNP’s presumption has continued that it will remain the central operating system, so to speak, of the entire capitalist empire’s overall approach to life on Earth. Every day serves up, to any but those who refuse to look closely at what is transpiring, new evidence of this dynamic of invincible hegemony.

Under such circumstances, the Six from the suit of Swords suggests, in the Here-&-Now, the succor of a tranquil mind—nuclear energy is a joke, and thermonuclear war is extinction—in the very fangs of the most fraught conditions of a Uranium Economy’s complete subservience to a fascist phalanx’s plans for predominance. Similarly as with Orestes’ having the burden of fulfilling a matricidal duty, a blow against one foundation of Greek ideology, my path—and now the sojourn of Marshall Arts as well—inevitably repudiates fissioning Uranium for steam and relying on H-Bombs for ‘national defense.’

This is casting down a gauntlet indeed. The aggregate evolution of understanding that the ‘heart of capital’ lies in the Modern Nuclear Project actually occurred gradually, as I researched and studied the nooks and crannies and dived down fascinating rabbit holes of this incredible ‘history of scientific endeavor.

The components of the tale are legion: Frederick Soddy’s grocery fortune as the initiation of his Nobel-chemist and energy-economist interest in Radium; Rockefeller’s ‘medical’ mandate in the same regard, funding what would soon become weapons labs hither and yon, every single one around the planet; H.G. Wells’ little novel—The World Set Free, ha ha!—about saving capitalism with hand-thrown ‘atomic bombs’ and ‘too-cheap-to-meter’ atomic electricity; the massive Solvay behemoth’s occasionally annual conferences where Einstein and a few dozen other nuclear-physics aficionados gathered to talk of the avowed atomic human future. The list might almost be endless.

Obviously, all of this preceded the Manhattan Engineering District itself and the dawn of ‘strategic weaponry.’ And it leaves out what will soon show up here in BTR, the origins of carbon concern, peak-oil, and ‘climate-narratives’ via the organized oversight of the American Nuclear Society and the brilliant M. King Hubbard. And now, as if completing some intricate narrative loop of conspiracy, madness, and idealism, the widespread boosting of nuclear-electric ‘solutions’ in order to serve ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as the most recent bourgeois-salvation-sally-rally, so to say.

A rich Present Passage, then, brings a significant shift in Likely Future Prospects. The Three in the suit of Cups implies beneficent conjunction, caring connections, and possible initial partnership. “A new dimension of life is unfolding, and the first part of the journey has now been achieved.” As Goddess-Guidance notes, celebration is the order of the day.

One should realize that, while happiness flows freely in such situations, here merely a first step is passing. Only a mix of firm commitment—no problem, baby!—and clear-eyed comprehension of common components of the realm of the real will permit a celebratory attitude to continue, yet the potential is redolent of true success.

A single sentence can more or less readily summarize these plausibly poignant pointers about persisting with a Marshall Arts learning project, so to speak. ‘From a Past necessarily guileful due to still-formulating comprehension of things, we have arrived at a Current Context in which knowledge allows for something like calm pugnacity in making a case against Capital’s crowing demand for thermonuclear eternities, a process which might well yield the loving community engagement to support sustainable human thriving and survival no matter the poisonous treachery of our Plutonium Past.

Here are the paragraphs to renew readers' recollections about today's seven-card compilation. The magic of digital allows for seamless 'cutting and pasting.'

“In many ways, then, this issue's Spiral Spread poses a related query, at once more general and more expansive. Basically I am seeking—and believe that all ought to seek, alongside me—insights about the import of and potential for what we might call 'Dialogic Educational Engagement,' or something similar; perhaps ‘a learning curve for survival’ would be a useful way to state the case. How ‘bout them apples? Hmm?

The fall of the cards, in the event, proceeded as eerily as ever, alas and hurray, ha ha! The Essence rose up in the form of Strength, Hercules and the lethal Nemean Lion. The temporal triad then came along, a Past palpated by the Queen of Swords, mighty Atalanta; the Present Passage as an embodiment of Orestes in the Six of Swords(for our purposes, again); and likely Futures as Persephone’s epitome of The High Priestess. No-Matter-What, Opportunities then shows up as Mars himself as he drives The Chariot. The final pairing gives up Athena’s gaze in Justice, as Problems-&-Prospects, and Jason and Medea’s confrontation with the dragon’s guardianship in the Five of Wands.”

Well, this shit is incredible, once one suspends disbelief’s insistence skeptical suspicions. It is so perfect. Something is at work here, though my empirical background remains perfectly intact. As an overview, a certain Marshall Artist might anticipate unavoidable introspective intensity that might impede or sustain the course in question, followed by fraught yet fine and fierce engagement that culminates with necessity’s ever-looming confrontation with material reality’s fire-breathing beast.

The avatar of powerful capacity, Hercules augurs “the problem of containing the fierce and powerful beast within us, while still preserving those animal qualities that are creative and vital.” Oh, my, Goddess. I begin to epiphanize, truly. This feels like a piquant evaluation of much of my life, ha ha.

As The Fool’s proxy here, I can feel an enabling aptitude. Perhaps I too am “deal(ing) with…ferocious egotism” and emerging with “trust in myself and integrity toward others.” What grand grace that would be, and is!

Atalanta’s Queen, meanwhile, describes an ideal depiction of my Past in relation to attempts to engage a public and develop an instructive conversational praxis. The royal female warrior’s ferocious grasp on remaining independent and superior, devoid of anything so soft as attachment, adds up to an impossible idealization of things, which can only ever blossom in relationship and practical, ongoing engagement.

The choice of ‘praxis’ to delimit my past work reveals my reifying tendencies, ha ha. Theories, theories, theories! We don’t want to practice them too quickly, no sir. In retrospect, Atalanta is unsurpassed as a descriptor and critique of the origins of Marshall Arts, which has decidedly evolved these earlier tendencies in a positive direction, mas o menos.

Anyone who knows me might agree. I and my work are “image(s) of the aloofness and untouchability of the mind,” a place where feelings and relationships receive, to put matters mildly, a certain devaluation of their true worth. Anyhow, that was then!

In the Here-&-Now, Orestes returns for a second visit as the pointed and sharpened Six in the suit of cognition. How perfect is that? Daunting daily difficulties notwithstanding, many of them measurably mortal to all humanity, rectitude renders a ‘cool, calm, collected’ mien in the face of mayhem’s at best madcap manifestations. I don’t pretend to know exactly how to proceed, but proceeding is an implacable pursuit toward the engagement on which viability hinges.

In terms of plausible Futures, my favorite spooky card shows up, glorious Persephone, with her wild wanton wanting to delve all the depths of meaning and experience, both surface and ‘from-the-underworld’ unconscious destinies and designs. Then again, one must acknowledge that part of Demeter’s daughter’s spookiness stems from her plasticity, that combo of uncertainty and portent at once that means it’s arguably applicable to so much, everything in essence, that any meaning that it has, other than a counsel of patience and staying in touch with dreams, might apply always and thereby as a result quite rarely indeed in easily accessible fashion.

Our concordance indicates a ‘hidden world, fertile and full of undeveloped creative potential’ that points to “(b)oth creative potentials and destructive impulses…hidden in the darkness of the unconscious.” Or this: “an image of the natural law at work within the depths of the soul which governs the unfolding of destiny from an invisible source, and which is revealed only through feeling, intuition, and the night-world of dreams.”

Options, No-Matter-What gives us the warlike Ares, potently pure in combative spirit. This reflection of Hercules is certainly interesting, if nothing else, as an interconnecting narrative twist. Here too, in any event, an inward aspect of life’s combative concatenations illuminates a large portion of every scene.

Despite the seeming contradiction between energies simultaneously aggressive and inward, as textual guidance begins, “Yet Ares and Aphrodite are drawn together, as though the instincts of strife and relatedness are in some way secretly connected.” This altogether Dialectical demarcation of matters gives a sturdy boost to useful ideas, ‘food for thought’ for sure.

Whatever the situation proffers, the whole point of a Marshall Arts Engagement Process, so to say, is—as the Wood Message says—’to rock the boat’ and participate with people in gaining the knowledge and awareness that will ready us to defend ourselves. In some fashion, therefore—what with its felicitous grappling with impulses of aggression and all—this is another ‘spot-on,’ pull, to use the British idiom.

All righty then! What’s next? Ah yes, ‘trials-&-triumphs,’ in essence, for the purposes of which we encounter, and seek assistance from, the austere and assiduous Athena herself. Wow! I mean, really. The introductory Guidance material packs a punch.

‘Athene’s owl reflects a clarity of vision that allows for seeing and hunting truth in the dark.’ Ha ha. Her “black and white patterned floor suggests the mind’s capacity integrate dark and light into an orderly and coherent design.” And, “(t)he scales symbolize the capacity to weigh one things against another and arrive at an impartial judgment.”

Much of the entire entry provides a combination of cautionary counsel and how-to-guide to a Dialogic Educational Engagement Process, some of the material at hand DEEPly moving, LOL! Near the close, it presents a powerful Problems-&-Prospects perspective. Honoring the ethical principles of fairness and truth-seeking are sweet keys to the ‘more perfect union’ that the human mind and spirit conceive, at the same time that allowances are necessary to emotion, whose ‘logic of the heart’ is also requisite to attend.

To wrap up this reading, Jason’s Five in the Wand department—accompanied palpably by Medea—brings us to the suit of creativity and team-building, a wonderful theme for the efforts at the forefront of this interpretive dance. This midpoint in Jason’s arc through the numbered cards expresses the intense fighting at the heart of all great ventures, the struggle with material reality’s fiscal and physical limitations.

Especially descriptive this is of Marshall Arts, in both its triumphs and its travails. Feisty feminine input has also proved effervescent at every stage of the unfolding evolution of things DEEP in nature. It’s not a ‘happy’ Synthesis, perhaps, but it is most assuredly real.

A complicated complete thought is readily available in regard to the inquired-about Dialogic Educational Engagement Process, to wit this. “Harnessing instinctual energies lies at the center of this query, a temporal arc for which takes us through a perhaps frosty idealism to a calm and analytical current capacity to arrive at a murky yet hopeful day after the morrow, in so doing yielding ongoing options to work aggressively and joyously under circumstances that permit creative application of cognitive capacities even as material needs will often require input before much progress will prove possible.

And, having come thus far, here we are. Deconstructing the Modern Nuclear Project and avoiding its attendant flirtations with Mass Collective Suicide are inherently part of, as it were, the general operationalization of procedure in this essay. A bit of important detail has emerged here, as it has in every BTR installment. Much more is forthcoming.

A pair of Driftwood Art Messages that I’ve rarely had occasion to use create a constructive conclusion for today. They both had ended up ‘lost in the shuffle,’ even as they have much of import to purvey.

Here's the text from the “Pandora's Promise” coffin art, a direct missive to Bill Gates and Paul Allen about their fatuous film, Pandora’s Promise. "Pandora Taught That Secrets Won't Stay in Their Boxes, Coming Always to Light, With Results Quite a Fright, So Perhaps We May Deduce That Some Billionaires' Slick Production, 'Pandora's Promise,' Which Disregards the Nymph's Lesson, Consists of Little More Than Self-Serving Propaganda & One Sided Manipulation."

I'd forgotten this message as well, astutely instructive in regard both to matters of fission or fusion and to DEEPer program prospects as well. “Choice & Chance” is its title. “Both Choice & Chance Flow Through All Life's Groovy Conduits, in Some Roughly Equal Measure Underlying All Potential For Sweet Fruition in Our Ventures, Whether We Seek to Ford the Flood Or Wade the Shoals of Time's Tidal Tempest, an at Once Exhilarating & Enervating Dynamic Process Where, We Might Well Inquire, ‘in Our Sojourns, Which of These Two Omnipresent Original Causal Factors Do We Want to Emphasize, & How?'”

All God’s Cousins—(continued)…

“He is my patient, and I am his therapist.” If they actually fucked each other, if that would even be possible where they met, in one of the few air-conditioned rooms on the whole Angola “campus, this new warden likes to call it,” well then, “everything I learned and swore to God to uphold is gone to hell out the window.” Predictably, her thinking pulled her primarily in one direction, while her feelings, “my cunt, my pussy, my hotblooded womanhood,” she eventually told her sister, Janie, with a sardonic laugh and a puff of a cigarette, impelled her along an entirely different course.

Whatever the case might be, nature had, decidedly, not crafted the animals who make up the human prospect according to professionalized protocols or theoretical constructs. “We act like beasts because that’s what we are.”

Thus, obviously, the very next week and for the twenty-eight sittings afterward, they did, very decisively, consummate “a marriage of mind and body unlike anything I ever thought I’d live and breathe.” That first fuck, he used his fingernail to slit a slot in her pantyhose; after that, she never even bothered to wear undies.

At first, they positioned themselves so as to present Kallie’s back to the wire-embedded view-window in the room’s door. This only slightly modified the oblique POV, across the table, that had been their station theretofore.

Generally speaking, they had a routine; as soon as, fifteen or twenty minutes into the session, having had only minimal contact despite their vital signs’ running off the chart, so to speak—“He literally split one pair of underpants”—David saw a guard’s head look in through the steel mesh that covered the “unbreakable glass” in the window, “I was on my knees with a mouth full of pulsating man.”

He rarely held back, and they’d continue talking after, till the guard punched his clock for the second mandatory check before he opened the door a half hour or so after that. What transpired in each interlude’s final twenty minutes “was a purebred testament to the ornery intensity of human hormones and horniness,” during which frenzies of copulation and delight, she always had to mount him, since he was shackled, and “I had to be the aggressor, having my way, day after day after day.”

Well might a reactionary rube or a liberal poet ask what a communist could possible know about love. “Kallie-girl and this wild, red-headed Cajun from Kentucky, of all places, could have shown them a thing or two or three.”

She was “madly infatuated from the get-go, deeply involved before the end of July, madly in love by the Equinox, completely insane before Christmas, and pregnant by the New Year, more or less.” As to David, “all I know is he cared, motherfucker; if I was sixty seconds late, his face was a mask of terror straight out of an Academy Award superstar performance.”

“A man like him, with a life like his, in a place like that, is ‘love’ even possible in the bourgeois, gallant, knight-on-a-steed sense? Probably not, but he made love to me and kissed my lips and cried into my breasts almost every week,” a stallion every time, “no more complicated below the belt than a stud bull with a hot cow.” And he laughed, and he made Kallie laugh, till “I thought I’d just bust wide open.”

“When he told me how he’d gotten caught, with the FBI rappelling from the church ceiling at his wedding ceremony—he’d had the huevos to seduce the Arkansas wild child of the president of the bank” that he and his bankrobber-partner Charlie had made their favorite port of call—and how she kept pushing away the G-men so that they could say, “I do,” and how he’d winked at one of the agents who’d been to “interview” him at his and Charlie’s river-touring service, right before “he kissed the bride and put out his hands for the cuffs in one grand gesture, my God, I nearly died.” In any event, she “swore I could have peed my pants, I laughed so hard.”

Just before she turned up with a quickening fetus inside, she’d told her sister, Janie “more or less everything.” As the elder sibling, “I sort of provided instruction and entertainment to my nerdy little sister,” but never had the yarn spun out such a fantastical creation.

“This is serious Kal. You don’t want to get another abortion;” the elder child, the “typical preacher’s kid of the two of us,” giggled nonchalantly, but was close to breaking down and crying. “All I got to say, is one thing, sister true,” said Jane. “Don’t forget a pill, sister.” Janie hadn’t been judgmental, but she’d surely been concerned.

In the event, Kallie “must have skipped a day, some subconscious bullshit or other, no doubt about it.” Without equivocation, from her first finding out, she was adamant: “I’m not getting rid of it.”

Janie told their dad, who was the United Methodist Church’s Bishop for the entire Southeastern United States, “in broad strokes, of course, no coarse details, what was happening.” She conveyed to her sister that “she’d never seen me like this, nothing even close.” Support was going to be the order of the day, one way or another.

Kallie had opened an inquiry with the State of Louisiana back in early October, about “the grounds and options and formalities, and God knows the corruption, that might have gotten him an early release.” He was only six years into a twenty-to-thirty year Federal sentence, having ended up at Angola as a sop to a jurisdictional pissing contest: two of the banks that he and Charlie had robbed had been Louisianan, and the Feds could put him wherever they wanted to, so Angola, “to fuck him a little harder, you know,” had been his domicile for a little more than half a decade.

“And the chances were essentially zero. I swear to God, they probably put stars on my file for sure then: ‘what the fuck is this red bitch up to, trying to spring this bankrobber?”

Kallie had acquainted herself with a different set of agents from those that David knew, after she’d first tried to get “the most famous quarterback in Alabama history to sign a letter against the Vietnam war” while she made her own way up the Roll-Tide cheerleader hierarchy. So their “dotting a few ‘i’s’ and crossing a few ‘t’s’ only made sense, one way or another,” when this “known subversive” developed a keen enough interest in a ‘major felon’ to want to vouchsafe his extremely early exit from his “time for the crime,” as it were.

Miracles happen sometimes. The Governor of Louisiana, a ‘colorful White politico’ in a state where ‘offbeat Anglos’ and ‘colorful Cajuns’ had long been a “speciality of the house,” was Edwin Edwards, as ‘devout’ a gambling, whoring, thieving Roman Catholic as one might imagine. But his favorite mistress, one Corinne(hootchie-cootchie) Cox was approximately as devout a Methodist as hizzoner was a Catholic.

Somehow or other, Bishop Sands, whose jurisdiction did not include Louisiana but whose ”ministry covered the globe,” made connections with the Cox family. The estimable Corinne put the squeeze on the Governor, a maneuver to which a Catholic is particularly prone, to put the matter delicately.

“And David was slated for a commuted sentence and out and living in Tuscaloosa with me,” where she returned tout suite after this wonder had come to pass, “within a year of our first session ‘on the couch’ with each other.” Her father had worked such voodoo before: both her abortions—one from her quarterback, another from a “Frat-boy fucker who got me drunk and got my panties off,” had taken place in Birmingham, above-board, despite Roe v. Wade’s not at that time being close to the ‘law of the land,’ “even for well-connected White girls.”

“But this was just too miraculous.” Kallie didn’t really notice, in the thick of things. But Morris, fresh off the boat back from Belgrade, who was a comrade like Lou, noticed right away. And Dr. Paulis from the South Alabama History Department, who was the Labor Leninist’s Southern Head of Security, and Gerold, the Unit Director for their little band of hopeful revolutionaries and radicals, came to the same conclusion.

Even Lou, who had zero ‘need-to-know’ about any of this, conveyed to his, so to say, ‘party-sponsor’ Morris his inference upon hearing the core elements of this new Comrade’s coming to West Alabama. “It was instantaneous,” Lou always recalled.

“This Dave Thibodaux’s a Fed.” Whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation had recruited him, as Gerold thought, with what informed his estimate the awareness of how much havoc these types had wreaked in the Panthers, with whom he had come up in Chicago and Detroit, or he was a Central Intelligence Agency contractor, as Professor Paulis was quite certain, after his studies of the Communist Party in the 1940’s and ‘50’s had revealed first OSS and then CIA infiltration—in his Mobile drawl, he was droll: “the spooks didn’t believe that any two FBI agents had a dozen functioning brain cells between them”—the basic conclusion was inescapable.

“A universally recognized Red, with a unambiguous following, and a richly annotated file, among the powers that be”—so much so that even her father and his colleagues among the Methodists had received visits—“simply could not succeed in gaining custody of a criminal madman or mastermind or Don Juan or whatever the hell he is” without “some basic quid pro quo a part of the procedure.”

This did not necessarily mean that Kallie had to go. On the contrary, the LL Southern troika of Morris and Gerold and Dr. John were in general agreement. “If you can’t shoot an infiltrator, you put him to work.”

They discussed this in some detail with Kallie, “a tactical necessity,” as Morris argued the point. He drew the straw or, because of his martial arts bona fides, volunteered to be an indubitably lethal Dave’s “Party contact.” And they had him passing out flyers, talking about prisons and the proletariat, and generally providing a handsome face for the organization “from Charleston to Memphis, from Louisville to Mobile, from Miami to Little Rock, and everywhere in between.”

Whether this bank-heist Lothario became a literal Robin Hood or instead served as an agent of the State that in all its wisdom knew the “greater good of its definitive need for intelligence about all sorts of things,” was less material than that the organization acted “consciously and consistently to wall him off from any operational information of any consequence.” And he continued to ‘serve two masters’ while he made love to his wife, fathered a second son, and marveled that “an upper-class Louisiana crook had gotten a working-class Kentucky crook out of prison.”

From somewhere on high, therefore, this relationship continued. Kallie-the-Commie kept working. Dave-the-informant made his regular reports.

What if the Edwin Edward’s sweetest illicit sweetheart had not been a Methodist? “What if pigs had wings, so as to avoid bumping their asses when they moved?”

Besides, a deeper game was in the works here. It may not have amounted to much, in the scheme of capital’s ‘solid-South’ mastery. But who knows?

“Plenty of agents in the ‘30’s thought the South was ready for revolution.” If Methodist sisters and Black auto workers and teachers and lawyers and professors and nurses and poor-people’s activist and plenty of others “all started planning and scheming, maybe we just might make a revolution.”

The government of the United States of America, in any case, took no chances even as it oversaw the freeing of a few prisoners, if necessary.  No one, certainly not Dr. Sands, and definitely not David Thibodaux, was going to argue with that.

*****

Wood Words Essays—(continued)…

This division of society into social classes not only additionally undermines any rational reliance on exclusively individual efforts—at least if the task at hand is more complicated than opening the peanut-butter—to address the issues of the day. It also makes clear that class-agendas guide class rule. Realizing as much, in turn, basically suggests quite persuasively that one had better be well aware how the powers-that-be of the ruling class act to further their schemes.

“Primary Plutocratic Tools” establishes this point admirably. "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.'”

A further general ‘statement of the case’ adds to this Marshall Arts political brief, as it were. Its name, “Fakery’s Floods & Their Mandated Immiseration,” reflects the way that mediating agency underlies all large-scale expressions of imperial imprimatur.

“Established Monied Monopolies, & Their Spooky ‘Intelligence’ Agency Pawns, Mediate Manufactured Consent in Floods of Fakery That Seem to Make ‘Voluntary’ Meticulously Measured & Mandatory Protocols That Debilitate Humankind’s Masses While They Further Foster Profiteering Plunder of Ruling Class Individuals & Firms That, in Addition to Already Owning Or Overseeing All But a Minuscule Fraction of the World’s Cultural Output, Also Hold Multiple Mortgages On Every Other Property of, & Property in, Existence on Earth.”

Under such circumstances, one must keep a circumspect, not to say altogether skeptical, attitude about nearly all programs and pontification of those whose rulings people would do well—if they value survival—seriously to consider overruling. Pieces of wood message this notion, calling for persistent precaution and focused ascertainment at once.

“Grand Edifices” is a good example. “Any Grand Edifice Of Imperial Power Precipitates Precisely to Underlying Agendas, Maximizing the Global Profiteering Plunder On the One Hand, & Amplifying the Blunt Dominance & Subtle Hegemony On the Other, Of the Very Social Actors Who Already Own & Overrule Almost All of Earth, At the Same Time That Parading Pomposity, Chauvinistic Chest Thumping, & the False Allure of Both ‘Good Jobs’ & ‘Homeland Security’ Also All Persist As Potent Talking Points In Favor of Such Fascistic Militaristic Display & Its Every Spectacular Show of Force."

Simultaneously as most members of our species would not demand, let alone celebrate, murdering mandates, we almost all worry about contravening whatever ‘rules of the road’ appear as uppermost in the halls of power. Obviously, however, this legislated construction of good behavior and patriotic purview more or less never emerge from among the ‘rank and file’ of society’s legions.

From the point of view of a denizen of upper-crust oversight of everything, only a locus of control among those who own most of the Earth and its contents has any hope of either successful management of societal needs or sustainable development of new ways of producing what people want and require to thrive and survive. This enforced imprimatur of the 'high and mighty's' assertion of dominance underlies chauvinism, exceptionalism, and other ways of suggesting that some should always get their way while everyone else should just follow along as commanded.

Meanwhile, “The Torch of Empire” makes this incisive point, congruent with one of MLK’s trenchant warnings. “Today, An Unavoidable Dynamic of the Torch of Empire is That Imperialism Debilitates Its Erstwhile Beneficiaries at Home In Some Fashion Similarly as it Immolates Its Hapless Victims Further Afield.”

Could we but recognize the connections between mass murder abroad for marshaled plunder’s martial profits, on the one hand, and multiple homicides at home for no apparent reason, on the other hand, perhaps discovering a thread to unravel the fabric of fascistic colonial command would be possible. In any case, humankind’s persistent pondering itself likely hangs in the balance of such discernment. “Rising Repeated Agitation” ponders just such a POV.

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

This punctuation of purposeful plundering by potentates at the helm appears repeatedly on Marshall Arts items, which mas o menos emphasize a Brand Chaos imprimatur that threatens everyone, without exception for the wealthy and powerful, let alone for race, creed, color, and so forth. Such a conceptualization gets the label ‘conspiracy theory’ by those ‘in the lead,’ while the rest of us might call it all, to sum things up, entirely factual conspiracies.

“Profit's Plunder & Lucre's Disaster” straightforwardly states this sort of idea.  "Planetary Captains So Persistently Steer Toward Profitable Plunder & Lucrative Disaster That Humanity's Craft, Our Beloved Mother Earth, Might Soon Founder Or Otherwise Sail Toward Catastrophic Collapse, an Incontrovertible Fact, at Least For Living Beings, That Suggests That Only the Crew's Mutinous Solidarity Can Yield a Future Where Drowning Is Not the Most Enviable End."

Even as open-eyed observers clearly recognize such patterns of putrid potentiation, we might readily plead why or how such insalubrious results so readily transpire hither and yon around the world. As a matter of course, obviously mediated manifestations play a big part in these processes of manipulative machination, at the exact moment that one must insist that ‘these things happen’ because we accede to their doing so, much to our despondency and dereliction.

“Veneer of the Real” makes such an argument directly. “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.”

Thus, in inquiring ‘how is this all even possible?’ we must reflect on what we watch, how we wonder, when we wander from something at least vaguely resembling critical thought. In this vein, media mastery is a frequent topic of Marshall Arts ideation.

“Why Rampant Fakery?” is this one’s name. “In Asking, 'Why Does Rampant Fakery So Feast on the Present Pass?' We Might Recall With a Chuckle That The Vast Majority of Circulated Nonsense Results From Some Form of Corporate 'Marketing', the Same Propaganda & Punditry That Propagate All the News Tsunamis, Avowedly Accurate & Reliable Information, That Monopolized Media Insists We Swallow Without Inquiry.”

If we do acquire a capacity to question, the potential indeed appears palpable that persistent pointed pursuit of truth could lead to different outcomes from the Mass Collective Suicide that otherwise quite likely portends for our sorts. Art’s messaging also addresses this state of the case, so to say.

“Winning the World” is exemplary in this regard.  "If Avowed 'Worlds to Win' Be Possible, What Sort of Strategy & Planning By Common People Have to Show Up to Achieve This Astonishing Bit of Social Legerdemain?"

‘Overcoming alienation’ is one simple response. After all, alienated affections induce almost indelible isolation. Any particular actor feels as if she alone, as if he all by himself, is experiencing the sense of ennui and despair that blossom so balefully, especially here among the vaunted ‘homes of the brave’ among the lonely and craven.

“Fatuous Pontificating Nonsense” provides a context for useful understanding of this dynamic of isolated doom. “Life's Litanies of Linked Destiny So Intertwine That Aloneness Means Nothing, Except As Alienated, Counterproductive Fantasy for opportunistic Ideology Or Advertising's Pushy Outpourings, So That Any Insistent Expression of 'Illustrious Individuality' Equates At Best to An Exercise in Fatuous Pontificating Nonsense.”

Many Marshall Arts pieces take the next step. Even little Thought Charms and Power Charms illuminate avenues that finesse despair and preclude disempowered citizenship. A trio of such as these state the following valorous validation of survival.

"To Stir Things Up Has Become a Primary Existential Duty" says one. Another, more obviously ‘political,’ clearly contends that “Amicable Sorts Would That Ships of Peace Had Equal Ways & Means As Engines of Empires Wiles of Conquest & Doom.” The third of these Charms introduces truly a novel notion in the imperial here and now. "To Avoid Agonized Alienation Needs Navigation Toward Social Justice."

Such a concept is one that real ‘survivalists’ must not only take seriously but also act effectively immediately to effect. In no uncertain terms, our lives depend on it.

Two versions of one Charm’s briefing proffers just this kind of point. "At Minimum, a Graduated Slope Toward Salubrious Social Justice May Prove a Sine Qua Non in Forestalling Social Cataclysm." "A Gradual Slope Toward Salubrious Social Justice May Stand As the Sole Bulwark Against Societal Cataclysm."

Another brief Power Charm punctuates this purpose. "During Seasons of Repression & Revolt, Only Solidarity Can Sustain Us." This takes readers back to ‘pace-changing’ forays from near this essay’s beginning.

What of this erstwhile solid sense of unified mutuality? Of what does it consist? This borderline spiritual query may depict the true center of matters political in nature and empowering for the many of us who generally just do as we’re told. Two versions of this idea, just slightly different, have passed from Marshal Arts to the public, and a third is the works.

“Expediting Golden Ruled Gainsaying of Gold Alone,” or, alternately, “Golden-Ruled Dreams” punctuates precisely this perspective. "Whether Oar Or Wing Or Sail Or Steam Powers the Craft of a Cosmic Dream, Its Driving Purpose Impels Some Soulful Vision That Must Ever Deliver the Largest Likelihood of Fruition If It Simultaneously Facilitates Necessary, Generous, Socially Useful Ends, Ones That Expedite the Golden Rule Rather Than Gaining More Gold."

This kind of thought might yield epiphany. After all, merely by looking inward in regard to this assertion about our well-being, obvious possibilities pop up at every turn, so that we get nervous about ignoring them at the exact same moment that just thinking along such lines gives us a big belching ‘Gulp!’

“Introspection & Engagement”  delves the ‘sticky wicket’ that this concatenation of feeling and experience elicits without much felicity, ha ha. It is a Message that once again justifies its Big Tent repetition in these pages.

"Glued to Screens That Parse Persistent Panoplies of Putrid Punditry & Bombastic Bullshit, We Evade the Soulful Introspection & Avoid the Collective Engagement on Which Continued Survival of Our Kind Depends, at Once Perhaps the Most Ironic & Most Idiotic Instance of Willful Ignorance to Afflict Humanity During Days When Miraculous Opportunity Conjoins Direst Danger, When Technological Magic Mixes Mutuality's Meltdown."

In the vein of ‘God’s kindness in never delivering manageable circumstances that we cannot choose to manage somehow,’ almost axiomatically, we have the applicable mental mastery to gain useful insight and practicable practice about all the fraught spheres of human social existence. This cognition allows us to participate and chart courses through things.

“Knowledge & Its Capacities” illustrates this point-of-view as we approach the culmination of all today’s blah blah blah. Just trying to know is empowering, come what may.   

"Rising Living Standards Have Ever Depended on Expanded Knowledge & Its Application to Policy & Practice Simultaneously As Attendant Increased Capacities to Predict & Control Nature Have Elicited Sales of Science & Its Legerdemain to High Rollers Who Now Control Corporate & Government Campus Labs That Engineer Predetermined Truths & Consequences That in Turn Promote Paymasters' Profiteering, in No Sphere More Clearly Than That of Public Health & Social Welfare.”  

As always, anyhow, here we are. In a Zen sense, this point in any wordy journey might manifest as acceptance, even if not always altogether amiable, ha ha. Jon Kabat Zinn’s work, Wherever You Go, There You Are illustrates part of this. His Losing Our Minds and Coming to Our Senses engages some of the rest.

“Mortality's Personal & Social Interfaces,” an almost penultimate missive of Driftwood Message Art, also elicits a stern yet affable way of grappling with reality’s ever baleful and yet beneficent bounty. This is one of the multiple missives that show up on little easy-to-burn-and-color balsa wood play-coffins, abandoned or otherwise steeply discounted in one arts-and-crafts marketplace or another. The resulting single sentence contains the words from half a page or so.

"From the Laborious Outset of Every Human Life, a Grave Awaits, the Certain Setting For Each Final Scene; Psychically, Despite This Destined Dance Toward Doom, One May Grasp the Grace For a Joyous & Jubilant Inner Being, While Socially, Unless One Favors Mass Immiseration & Enervation, One Must Relentlessly Demand & Fiercely Foster Comprehensive Social Equality on Which Hinges Everyone's Roughly Equivalent Chances to Attain a Healthy & Prosperous Longevity: Even Today Then People Anywhere Can Embody Personal Happy Aplomb, Although, & Most Especially in 'the Land of the Free,' Only Those Born to Royal Riches Or Princely Privilege Stand an Excellent Chance Either to Avoid an Early Funeral Or to Achieve the Vaunted 'Dream' of 'Middle Class' Comfort, Similarly As Primarily Plutocratic Progeny Have Other Than Minuscule Likelihood of Ever Garnering the Wealth & Resources Necessary For an Individual Actor to Accomplish Even a Fraction of His Or Her Potential, Altogether a Context of Wasted & Suppressed Possibility That, If It Persists, Will Ensure Humanity's Everlasting Elimination."

A memorandum of this type inherently highlights a choice. We needn’t concern ourselves, yet, always, we might do so. Should we? The ‘duh’ response depends on recognizing that as we live and breathe, we must move along with whatever measure of aplomb that grace grants us.

“The Only Difference” circumscribes this 'Bulletin-From-the-Frontlines,' as it were.   "Whenever One Ambles Joyfully Toward Heavenly Heights, a Path Unfolds That Might Just As Readily Ride to Hell's Open Gates: the Only Difference Is the Direction That a Traveler Takes, at Times at Destiny's Directive, But Often Enough at the Sojourner's Own Election."

Within each and every sentient human being—potentially almost every single one of us older than infants—lies a latent potential to potentiate a personal empowerment whose roots lie in collective engagement and endeavor. This is more so than ever before. The simplest realization of this altogether lucky fortune of the here-and-now might elicit a vision of almost ecstatic possibility, a seeking akin truly to seeing.

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

Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…

“Resistance continues.” The Electric Koolaid Acid Test may not completely dovetail with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but they both—and hundreds of thousands of other songs and stories and videos and scripts and reality-based dramas and daily plays by pissed-off and fed up citizens also fit into this materialization of rejecting ‘just-say-no’ and ‘wars-on-drugs’—critique, more or less completely, the whole contemporary project of medicalizing mental health and criminalizing individual and cultural manifestations of self-help.

More will appear here in the fullness of time. Interviewing Steven Seagall, whose Above the Law so mercilessly pillories the Central Intelligence Agency’s drug-and-gun schemes, reviewing classics such as The Great Heroin Coup, allowing such wacky cultural critics as Michael Moore and Slavoj Zizek to have a conversation, contextualizing Libertarian and Marxist critiques—a ‘From-All-Sides’ approach—at one and the same time are just a few upcoming projections that touch on this rich vein of human possibility, more-or-less uniformly at a critical distance from such institutional norms as the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, just ahead, persistently promulgates.

FOUNDATIONS OF A PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Having inaugurated this hundred-and-fifty years of prescriptive medicine and ‘substance abuse,’ all in the name of ‘security’ and ‘protection’ and so forth, those in charge have demonstrated that the vision() of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World seems apt. The providers of different toxic Somas seek on the one hand to pacify and stupefy folks, especially any who occasionally rise up to demand answers and alternatives to SOP sops, and on the other hand to imprison or eliminate individuals who refuse to join with the establishment and criminal networks that are, truly, one and the same creature.

As already promised, a deeper examination of the non-governmental organizations, the corporate behemoths, and the government agencies that act as a ‘triple-alliance’ in favor of mandatory prescription of profit-making ‘medicine’ will grace these pages. These new installments will show indisputably that at the same time that they decry and criminalize those herbs and spices that human culture have been employing for their own purposes for a hundred millennia or more, they have truly Patent Medicine to act as a profitable and disempowering substitute.

In particular, the investigation of litigation against Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor and anti-psychotic providers—claimants have filed plus-or-minus seventy-thousand lawsuits in regard to the former chemicals, thousands of them settled for ‘undisclosed sums’—is mandatory. The search, <lawsuits OR litigation anti-depressants OR prozac "product liability" OR negligence settlements OR "settled out of court" "gag order" OR "in camera">, brings out almost a hundred thousand citations, overwhelmingly critical of enforced secrecy.

A definitive political economy, history, and intellectual biography of the backers of Prozac is in the works as well. These matters simply cry out for attention that doesn’t have any corporate backing whatsoever.

Come what may, growing numbers of clinicians dispute this prevalence of profiteering via a self-serving medical model. “The illegal-psychiatric drug hypocrisy in the U.S. is an ugly triumph. It is a triumph of marketing over science. It is a triumph for pharmaceutical corporations and America's ever-growing prison-industrial complex. It is a triumph for those comfortably atop society who would rather Americans view their malaise as exclusively a medical rather than a social problem. And ultimately, it is a triumph of injustice and greed over human rights and a sane society.”

Brain Research & Social Control

As in all the ways of examining these phenomena, so here also an observer sees ongoing expressions of a specific sort of development. This pattern appears as attempts to achieve overarching and total control of phenomena, despite biased results and unexamined assumptions. Such problems constantly appear in the current context.

Most recently, machinations to use social media monitoring to determine ‘mental health’ have shown the internal contradictions of such schemes. These attempts to totalize control grow more invasive and more patronizing. The consequences are worse and worse.

For example, available evidence would suggest that ‘patients’ with mental and mood ‘disorders’ ought regularly to forego their ‘medicines.’ That this is not the ‘state-of-the-art’ protocol of current clinicians is, of course, a huge understatement, since more prescriptions and further interventions overwhelmingly prevail.

More and more, arguably, people are buying neither the prescription to “take your ‘medicine’” nor the proscription of substances with which our forebears have a hundred thousand year relationship, give or take. Both metaphorically and literally, people are not ‘buying’ as readily as once they did.

For instance, the search, <prozac OR antidepressant criticism OR indictment video>, yields ten and a half million results, a huge chunk() of which come from ‘credible’ sources() and credentialed experts(). One series is the work of a former Eli Lilly science-and-marketing-and-administration bigwig who totally condemns the Serotonin project as a criminal scheme against humankind.

The roots of these present methodologies are equally contradictory and also, if one delves deeply enough, readily instructive about the political economic and social goals of the backers of the research efforts themselves. As noted above, forthcoming are deeper investigations of the corporate phalanx that has delivered the research and marketing and legislation of ‘best-practices’ that assume that a ‘medical model’ is sacrosanct. Rockefeller’s ‘investment’ in Medicine had more than the Modern Nuclear Project to recommend it, for instance, with ‘brain and behavior research’ at the top of the Foundation’s hierarchy of interests.

Inevitably, assembling the sort of case that this report does has all of the appearance of a criminal conspiracy. A nearly thirty-year-old memoir of the drug war, by a participant in the action on both sides of things, would laugh at the idea that a label of “conspiracy theory” would foreclose the kinds of investigations that we need to be making. “I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories,” Michael Ruppert was fond of quipping before he killed himself; “I offer people conspiracy facts.”

Crossing the Rubicon is a densely documented and persuasively argued prosecutorial opening statement(), an indictment of the powers-that-be—presenting actual formal charges against Presidents and corporate heavy-hitters, from a former chief police investigator of just such matters—that contends that ‘drug-wars’ and ‘intelligence’ and military-prison-industrial-corporate-and-imperial-complexes rule the world through venal and duplicitous means that citizens will either hold to account or suffer the results of their failure to insist on responsibility and accountability. In Ruppert’s estimation, the price of impunity is mass collective suicide.

Are people willing to consider discussions about such matters? As always, even as it runs short, time will tell. More Coming Soon

Old Stories & New—(continued)…

37. “Oh, sorry!” Hannah blushed. “My name is Hannah, Hannah Rosen. My great grandmother was from somewhere near Moscow, when she was very young.” She seemed to want to say more, Martina waited, politely and expectantly, and then Hannah motioned to Maria's Memorial Chapel Wall, as if to say, 'and this is something my grandmother would have appreciated, right here!'

38. “So, Henneh,” Martina continued, speaking her name like a hair wash that would produce Hannah's actual highlights, “This is very nice, no?”

“It's Hannah,” the estimable Ms. Rosen offered soberly, giving one shot at having her name spoken correctly. “I mean yes, of course, it is very nice,” Martina shot back, responding to the girl's tone instead of to her content.

39. Hannah was busy trying to piece together what had happened here. “She wasn't sad, she wasn't weary, she was just, like, praying for someone to keep doing what I'd started, as if I were, like, a godsend or something.” This Martina operator, according to Hannah's thinking about how the world worked, must have some interest in this wall's “looking spiffy, even pretty, rather than like some blasted out ghetto somewhere between Chirac and Iraq.”

40. As if she could read minds as well as appreciate answered entreaties to the almighty, Martina inquired with a rhetorical expectation, “So! You see how nicely the wall states my gallery's theme, eh?”

When Hannah nonplussed her inquiry, the lanky Russian kept at her line of attack. “You know, it says Rejoice!” Hannah now beamed and nodded. “In Russia, we only practice what you might call 'social art.'

We believe true artists,” and she rolled out a narrative that went on and on for several minutes, with Hannah's wide-eyed attention only interrupted by a handful of 'uh-huhs' and 'sures' and such. When Martina took a deep breath, Hannah interjected a respectful, deeply felt, “Wow!!”

41. “In fact,” the tall and svelte Russian continued, flushed with pride perhaps, “may be half,” which she spit out as 'heff!' “of the artists whom I, um, represent do mainly graffiti or urban-based performances, you know?”

Hannah had only heard of one of them, 'Cracker Jack,' an ebony and ivory duo that interspersed peace messages with Zen identity notes, like one of their iconic constructions that graced the side of her apartment brownstone: “There You Are—Wherever You Go...”

42. Hannah realized just at that moment where she'd heard of Martina's place, only a few miles away. She'd attended a fundraiser there, about ending the butchery in Syria, right before Thanksgiving last year. She mentioned just a little about that, her voice vibrating with excitement at the prospect of cementing ties with a truly 'fellow-traveling' gallery owner.

“A lot of grassroots urban artists are really radical. It's great that you give them a space where they can develop their art and their thinking.” She was about to add something about the revolution's inherently cultural roots, but something in her fellow conversationalist stopped her.

43. Martina looked about as interested in partaking of a political discussion as she would be in experimenting with an outdoor, unanesthetized root canal. One of Hannah's classmates, from a Ukrainian Russian family, had spoken to this point, at least elliptically.

“You got to understand how deeply rooted our cynicism is, even if we can't help but still hope because we're Russian, eh?” The girl, Irina perhaps, had punctuated this. “I mean eight decades of often, let's face it, corrupt at best Soviets, and then ten years of capitalist barbarity before Putin, you'd be cynical too, may be.”

44. “Well, listen here, Henneh is it, right?” She mispronounced her name again, and the affable young woman shrugged and smiled. “I can really sense a win-win,” which came out 'ween-ween,' “situation here. You can believe me or not, but you should believe me when I tell you because it's true, if someone, for a reasonable price of course, a girl like you even, offered to keep this little shrine, uh, joyful, you know?” Hannah nodded.

“I'd make it worth their while; I promise.” She winked, taking Ms. Rosen by surprise and making her giggle, so that the Russian, whom Hannah had already named 'the Countess' in her head, could join the young redhead in laughter and affirm, “It's a deal then.”

45. “You do the PayPal of course, I am right, no?” Hannah couldn't help liking the accent; it reminded her of more than a few members of her Reform synagogue outside Chicago, due East of where she stood near Ten-Mile. The question hung in the air, as Martina Rastov's smile ossified.

46. “Well, yes, it's through my e-mail, I think?” She felt a little flustered. Americans, especially those in downtrodden, decrepit urban spaces, did not normally—unless they were hustlers—move so quickly and easily to talk of deals and payments and God knows what else Ms. Martina Rastov, owner of the 'Happiness Above All' gallery down off Eight-Mile, had in mind for her new business partner, whose sole purpose in doing what she'd done had nothing really to do with art, let alone commerce, and everything to do with the sense of decency and longing for social justice that informed all the various commitments that she'd made, to real campaigns as well as to 'pet projects.'

47. For Martina, patience meant an occasional pause. She gave space here for Hannah to negotiate, for her newly inaugurated art-contractor to speak up about what she wanted, expected, believed, assumed. When nothing was forthcoming, however, the forceful Muscovite pressed on, definitely assertive, probably relentless.

48. “So of course I want to be fair.” Hearing this put Hannah on guard, equally 'of course.' “So I was thinking, may be I can pay for a long time, so I can count on how nice everything reflects on my gallery space, but,” here Martina winked, almost lasciviously, “you could may be give me the volume discount,” which she pronounced 'Bolume Dixcounts,' “since I pay all in advance, see?”

Hannah nodded without thinking. Keeping her guard up was decidedly not second nature; much of the time, everything transactional in an exchange escaped her. Martina filled in the amount in the PayPal window, $360, and Hannah's nod became more vigorous.

As if as an afterthought, she noted in the 'For' section of the transaction, “For Three Year Contract,” handing Hannah her mobile back, slipping free, sliding into the Jaguar, and zooming off all in one smooth motion. A large and well-formed hand bid adieu out of the Jag's receding driver's side window.

49. Ten Bucks a month for three flipping years: Hannah stood there with her gloves off, spade at the ready, i-Phone drooping a bit. “Well, that's sure as hell not what I bargained for.” Nonetheless, she toggled the sharp little shovel at the receding British classic, at the same time forming a little 'bye-bye' with her lips to the six-foot-two Russian driver.

Would she continue her caretaking ways? She recollected her competitive forensics past, how mastery was always about extemporizing expertly. “I guess I'll make it up as I go along again.”

50. Odd and irritating as this unexpected outcome may have been, Hannah constantly referred to it thereafter with something very like reverence. “It was all like a sign from God, almost.” When Charlie or her sister or her mother scoffed or doubted these kinds of assessments, she had a simple riposte that she never failed to deploy on such occasions: “Like the sign says, baby, Rejoice!”

Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…

…examining the deep background of modern trade and financial protocols. As things stand, the precise forces that delivered the United States its Federal Reserve masters also called forth related and allied forms and forces on the world’s larger stages.

From the Depression of 1893-96 to the Panic of 1907 and the multiple intersecting crises that culminated in a World War that—to all but Marxist analysis—was unplanned, unnecessary, a random accident, the always-constrained and never free marketplace of global capital careened onward toward catastrophic collapse. The War’s carnage took care of everything, though at quite a cost, spiritual, political, and fiscal, a strangling debt to the future that individual financiers and firms and banksters could only greet with further mandates and top-down control.

The Central Banking Systems of world powers, of which the Fed is one, in some senses form a neural network to govern our Earth, a kind of dispersed central nervous apparatus, or brain, in the view of Capital’s apologists, more of a sentient cancerous monstrosity for those who would elect a socialistic future over continuing bourgeois barbarity. The timeline for the appearance of such mechanisms is certainly a worthy project, no doubt, though not just yet.

For the moment, however, to look at the subflooring of the here and now, one might turn to John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which he tallied as a guarantee of another, even ‘Greater’ War. German reparations were a fraudulent attempt at the ‘spoils of battle’ to pay off debts by France and England, primarily to the American banks that had financed the first ‘Great War.’

The intertwined miracles of worldwide commodity chains and instantaneous fiscal ‘clearing of accounts’ underlie the tsunamis of stuff that the populations of ‘developed countries’ all own in a massive and glutted overflowing of more of everything. In the bureaucratized and biased ‘administration’ of these flows of goods and services and currency, only highly-honed expertise gains access to making things happen.

Even trained experts and talented technocrats, however, always have, or at minimum represent, decidedly down-to-earth agendas. Obviously, theirs has never been a charge ‘of, by, and for’ any population of regular sorts of folks, if only because these self-appointed, ‘authoritative’ arbiters have ever so blithely ignored what significant majorities repeatedly express as their fondest desires.

Perhaps no set of documents so vividly illustrates this as do the U.S. Senate Hearings that the Special Committee for the Investigation of the Munitions Industry conduced for two years, from 1934-36. Plunder and butchery were, and continue to be of course, a business plan for maximum control and higher profits.

The Nye Committee’s Merchants of Death have superseded the kings and queens and lords and ladies of aristocracy’s rule before our current bourgeois epoch. Still relative newcomers for the most part, they nevertheless have adhered quite faithfully to Dickens’ wry characterization, in A Tale of Two Cities, of French and British Royal eighteenth-century hegemons.

“In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.” Thus does wealth right this second scoff at socialistic solutions and invoke Jay Gould’s promise to ‘hire one half of the working class to murder the other half.’

Along such lines, the Russian Revolution clearly terrified banksters and their plutocratic political allies. This horror at any experiment that might entail a grassroots takeover has for two centuries now remained a primary bugaboo of the high and mighty. Such beliefs belie all commitments to or erstwhile hopes for ‘free trade,’ ‘free enterprise,’ or other expressions of capitalist fantasy. The bureaucratic and administrative functions of monopoly enterprise gainsay all but profit, power, and plunder.

The allied ‘victory’ in the Great War thereby resulted from a need to shut down Bolshevism, a plan that was—to put the case gently—incongruent with the war reparations that massively-indebted France and England imposed on Germany in order to finance the interest on their loans from the United States financial elite. To pay the penalty, Germany could not avoid lively trade with Communists, upon whom Germans had settled their own penalty for surrendering.

Richer and deeper accounts will soon enough supplement this briefing. The point here is to see the origins of modern monopoly trade infrastructure in the impolitic plundering of Germany at the end of World War One, an emergence of such institutions as the IMF from the Second World War that these earlier attempts at redress and justification made inevitable.

The League of Nations was, for example, at best and most charitably, a fraud in favor of aristocratic imperial wealth and its largely European commercial interests, and the ‘rough-and-tumble’ American Robber-Barons wanted no part of this rigged system. Woodrow Wilson’s plutocratic idealism notwithstanding, the refusal of the United States to participate prompted the trade-and-currency kerfuffles that had decimated growth and necessitated shooting at each other as part of ‘protection packages.’

Google’s Artificial Intelligence function puts a radical interpretations of the League like this. It amounted to “a reactionary group established by bourgeois and aristocratic states with the goal of ‘peacefully’ dividing the world among numerous empires.”

In a monograph about trade and war, production and contraction, the International Monetary Fund headlines its core section, “A New Disintegration of the International Economy.” “In every country, the war had been paid for primarily through an increase in state indebtedness, in almost every case financed through the issue of paper currency, with convertibility into metallic money suspended during the war.

Each side hoped that it would be able eventually to impose that cost as the victor on the vanquished. In 1918, with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk and a subsequent Auxiliary Treaty, Germany came close to realizing its war aim of hanging what Germany’s Secretary of Finance called “the lead weight of billions” around the necks of the Russian people.

The Auxiliary Treaty included a gigantic indemnity. Less than a year later, the Western allies at Versailles more successfully presented German negotiators with a similar demand. In 1921, Germany’s reparation liability was fixed by the London Schedule at 132 billion gold marks: a sum corresponding to almost two times the prewar national income.”

This substitution of predation for responsibility, of plunder for justice, made another massive conflict unavoidable, just as it also delivered the promised brand new ‘Great Depression.’

These failures devolved into currency competition—undercutting to improve balance sheets and more—and trade war. Battles over trade relations have been bloody since well before Queen Elizabeth’s swashbuckling privateers hamstrung Spanish power half a millennia ago. Not only has protracted conflict over buying-and-selling always ended in bloodshed, but these developments also have ever entailed battles over which currency will serve as the accounting standard of the day.

At its foundation, the world’s economic orders after the Great War incorporated as a key player the U.S. Federal Reserve, at the same time that American business interests so hated the idea of enforcing a halter on U.S. enterprise that only a Second World War brought the country to the deals that went down in New Hampshire at Bretton Woods in 1944. Fully another half century had to pass by before the ‘land of the free’ would agree to a ‘New World Order,’ a World Trade Organization that would promote exchange and give all members equal access and rights and so forth.

A later episode about these matters will deal with the political-economic and imperial-military background of this realm, in a series about the League of Nations that starts with Keynes' masterpiece from the Versailles peace conference, evolving from the carnage of the First World War, and the failure of its attendant developments to stave off the coming of World War Two. A pale reflection of such a wider effort is possible from a few prefatory lines of The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Keynes’ observations are, if anything, more trenchant today than in 1920. “We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict.”

What follows here, in essence, is a telescopic selection about, first, how, both during the wide-ranging conflict and even before the U.S.A. entered the fray, monetary and political leaders were establishing the basis for a more far-reaching and capacious set of mechanisms for controlling trade, investment, and the hurly-burly of the commodity brawls that have ever defined capital's imprimatur. Second, today's narrative also relates for readers how these new organizational schemes became operational in the period following the 1918. Third, this article draws some thematic portraits that ought to provide a sense of guidance and framing for the remainder of this sequence and more thereafter.

A signature idea that this series—and the work of this humble correspondent generally—promotes is that certain key management machinations, often initially hidden but always ultimately identifiable, end up as the ones that demonstrate and demarcate how history has unfolded. More definitively, this central idea contains three components.

First, in order to make sense of any decision, any outcome, any set of relationships or conflicts or possibilities that appear in the ebbing and receding of history’s birth of the present passage, those elements of a dynamic that concern imperial priorities and fiscal viability must remain in view, must form a part of the explanatory fabric.

Second, whatever we hope to make of 'human interests,' even the most poignant and pointed paradigm for understanding will fail to account for events, except inasmuch as it centralizes these core aspects of empire and lucre.

Finally, in ways that may be either directly obfuscatory—'top-secret' classifications, for example—or more subtly manipulative—as in intelligence operatives who infiltrate cultural organizations—powerful ruling forces seek to keep these sorts of insights out of sight. Substituting fetish and non-sequitur and various schemes of divide-and-conquer for any honestly material and historical assessment of things is a primary specialty of plutocracy’s perfidious propagandists.

Readers would do well to reflect on these notions as they read, criticize, expand, or discuss this series. Quite likely, whatever does not add up in the world—whatever anomalies just "don't make no sense" as THC's brother likes to say—emanate from the kinds of dynamics that show up here as a fundamental warp and woof of the political rubric that includes such key players of the twenty-first century as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, and their ilk.

The League of Nations never possessed the power of a well-capitalized bank or a determined small country. Its purpose was more for show and virtue-signalling of one sort and another. One cannot really call its work a failure any more than one can say a stillborn infant failed to thrive.

The powerless League merely made the trade and currency skirmishes of the 1920’s more potent, laying a basis for crisis and collapse in the 1930’s. War proved no more avoidable than would crashing to earth when a parachute doesn’t open. Capital’s intramural rivalries became international in scope.

A significant component of this impossibility of viable protocols for international trade resulted from the Russian Revolution. In many ways, Nazism specifically and fascism generally emerged to target the Soviet Union, to bleed and fracture Russia for both geopolitical and ideological rationale.

Behind the scenes, the Federal Reserve’s actions supported demonizing Soviets even as the apparent enemies of ‘free enterprise’ and Yankee pragmatism were autocratic regimes that the U.S. used its market leverage to weaken and undermine—Japan, Germany, and Italy among them.

This complex skein of conflict and profit, of collapse and loss, has returned to haunt us nearly a century after a Great Depression that will likely pale in comparison to what is coming. In the event, the ‘enemies’ with whom America and its adherents would go to war caused even more carnage and catastrophe than 1914-1918. Through this maelstrom of mayhem, wrestling with matters of trade and money stayed central aspects of how things worked.

A thread to culminate today’s briefing and overview will start with a look at Joseph Heller’s iconic novel that has advanced irresistible insights about how things stand. This look at a book moves another volume into view, one which indisputably implies how only ruling class, capitalist, profiteering, plutocratic programs matter to those in charge.

Catch 22 is a clever Keynesian, radical, Marxist, deconstructive characterization of WWII. Whether one likes confronting the conclusions that Heller makes so palpable, their tangible plausibility—Milo Minderbinder's insistence that making the world safe for money agreements was the only possible good result of the carnage—in light of the ongoing interlinks among finance and industry even as national combatants slaughtered each other, is simply irresistible.

More sinister summations of such perspectives are widely available. They are also indisputably accurate. Richard Higham has an impeccable pedigree with which to prognosticate on such matters, inasmuch as his papa was both one of the richest Englishmen in history and a practitioner of the darkest and shiniest arts of propaganda as the principal in one the world's largest advertising and public-relations conglomerates.

His book, Trading With the Enemy, has such vast sweep and pointed detail as to provide the fodder for thousands of conspiratorial films, books, fantasies, etc. Along with Michael Ruppert, however, Higham trades in conspiracy fact, not theory.

His bill-of-particulars against the corporate and fiscal establishment is wide ranging. For purposes of this article's focus on the post-war economic plan, he shows—especially in "A Bank for All Seasons," the first chapter's detailing of the connection between the Bank for International Settlements(BIS) and subsequent financial parameters—that during WWII, Chase Bank, First National City Bank, Dow Chemical, and all manner of governmental and legal experts maintained ongoing relationships with the Swiss BIS—the WWI 'reparations' monster that Keynes so dearly wanted to dismantle—at the same time that BIS was a primary clearinghouse for routine German administration, as well as a repository for looted gold held by Nazi generals and other entities.

In the mid-40's various trials for treason or lesser offenses indicted employees of multiple U.S. banks and other corporations. A few guilty pleas, a few convictions, and many acquittals were the result of such criminal processes. But the court record completely corroborates Higham's and others' more comprehensive demonstration of Milo-Minderbinder-style networks among erstwhile combatants.

Moreover, to this day, a substantial amount of incriminating and explanatory data continues under the protective rubric of 'top-secret' classificatory schemes at the FBI, CIA, and elsewhere. Why, after half a century or more, such a 'consecration' of material should seem apropos is open to interpretation. But common sense, and Occam's position that the simplest explanation that accounts for the facts is most likely correct, suggest that America's and Europe's financial moguls conjoined with representatives of Germany and Japan in arraying matters after the conflict to their mutual accord.

These synopses of such evidence can be hard to swallow. When this humble correspondent presented some of this data in his essay about Smedley Butler, he averred that it was 'the tip of a deep-diving iceberg.' At some point, however, the ties and procedures and agreements and commerce among the imperial powers that were nominally at war, all the while Soviet Russia underwent the worst military battering in the history of human existence, must come into view as the basis for a credible, systematic understanding of the underlying, and overarching, conceptualization of standard business practices.

Without a doubt, therefore, as combatant armies put to death as many as 100,000 soldiers and civilians from 'the other side' each day of military operations, all of the allied forces were joining together to observe and give imprimatur to fiscal and monetary arrangements that incorporated prewar and intra-war activities and inputs from 'enemies' along with the forty-four nations of the 'allied cause.' Though this manifestation of money's sway did not directly invoke German and Japanese signatories, its development did emanate from prewar critiques from the ruling elites of both nations, even as powwows among all parties were part and parcel of wartime actions.

The reader, in this regard, can note and file the subtitle of Higham's book, mentioned above: "An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949." As the butchery's certain end—the military defeat of Germany and Japan—drew nigh, all manner of strategists of empire began to formulate principles and procedures, always congruent with and sometimes flowing directly from 'tainted' sources, for monitoring and otherwise riding herd on multinational money-issues in war's aftermath.

Prominent among these were establishing protocols for the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and the World Bank(WB), both part of the powers-that-be today. Next Up—Section II—'Bretton Woods & New Beginnings’

Erotic Snippets—(continued)…

“I bought him his first device,” Hilda guffawed, even as she pursed her lips to accede to what she called “my complete intention to replace wires and whirring with the man’s flesh” instead, a development that, “in less than a fortnight,” she managed to complete and leave him “naked of further defense, ha ha!”

For her part, Lise had theretofore much preferred ‘a woman’s touch.’ This had been so since her youth, when she realized first the shuddering climactic release that came from her tenderest touches, and had become further ingrained when a sweet girlfriend’s lips had slurped her juicy vibrations to one of her peak libidinal experiences.

She didn’t argue that males had what she called “very versatile equipages,” yet “they are so often such boors.” Neither in touch nor in taste could most men match even a mildly enticing woman.

Ms. Doolittle, though, never had found satisfaction with a man—“they always do far too little,” she tittered—except for the mechanical machinations of so-called ‘physicians’ hither and yon, a couple in North America and another handful in the British Isles. Having married and divorced and wed yet again, therefore, she found herself often inclined to a gag response about her choices: and hence her frequent appointments to harry her hysteria, so to speak.

I Don’t Need ‘Treatment’ So Often As You— Very much ‘on the other hand,’ Lise hadn’t a hysterical bone her body, let alone her bodice. She had discovered the cure with a quiet cousin when they were still barely women. “Tongues of flame bring triumph in the game,” she quipped.

Prior to what came to pass with Hilda and S., she had in fact only entertained any congress more significant than kissing with precisely two males, one of whom was her younger first cousin by eight years and “likely the most gifted boy on planet Earth.” She honestly almost as much preferred her own expert potentiation as she did any congressional relation with another human, especially a “male of the species.” Much more attuned to subatomic particles was Dr. Meitner than she was to any specific human articles.

“Not that they didn't often try me,” she told Hilda. “The married ones in particular” tested her fidelity by offering to break their own. “Dr. Hahn was not only Soddy's equal among the beakers and devices; he also exceeded even Albert's mathematically insatiable horned hunger for human female flesh.” She laughed out loud at her turn of phrase.

However that may be, two weeks before December’s 1922 arrival, surveying the multicolored bricks of another street of Viennese townhomes, Lise knocked on the sturdy black door along Prinz Albertstrasse. She could hardly believe her eyes. “Number ‘69,’” she snorted as she rapped.

The man who answered wore only a loose fitting peasant’s shirt and trousers that billowed beautifully round his waist, a sartorial sweetness that she noticed even as she also recoiled slightly. “He’s really quite old,” she thought to herself. She added an afterthought, however: “quite a nice nose,” reflexively glancing at his crotch to detect a sweeping erection that gave her tingles in the groin.

In the event, she entered the inner orifices of the good doctor’s therapeutic ministrations to find Hilda, “as naked as on her birth’s day,” exuding the roseate glow of recent orgasm. Lise tilted her head and shot her friend, and lover, a small smile of sympathetic complicity.

For her part, when she saw her sweetheart and pal, ‘Hildy’ squealed with glee and leapt to an embrace, her breasts a sandwich for “my Elise’s” elfin face. Dr. Meitner colored only slightly. “Lise,” she insisted. “It’s Lise.”

That first day, the physics specialist received a tutorial in the effects of liquid cocaine on certain aspects of vaginal mucosal arousal. In the event, she so appreciated the unanticipated briefing that she felt compelled to return and expand their triadic repertoire for many more weeks to come, in any event after she had conducted her ongoing ‘experiment in discretion,’ detailed below.

Another Heated Viennese Snowfall— And so things went. Snow, snow, and more snow marked that Viennese Winter’s scene. Looking back over her long life of sweetly discrete and yet fiercely delightful ecstatic flow, Lise might have shrugged. “We only met six times; but what meetings!”

“In the first ten minutes of every conjugation” Lise wrote to herself, “we drank wine, ate oysters, droppered cocaine, and kissed while undressing each other.” Truly, it was all fiery and new to her, although both ‘S.’ and Hilda seemed to have a certain veteran’s savoir faire about their orgiastic encounters.

“Obsessive, Compulsive, & Orderly,” Elise jotted after their first formal gathering to describe this eminent “psychic-analyst, he calls himself.” His was the task of orchestrating the architecture of their interlocking desire on that occasion, tutoring his client and her ‘dear, dear friend’ for their further ‘frolicking appointments.’ “He has chairs and benches and slings and pillows like only a demon, or an angel, might conceive.”

“We formed chains that continually reactivated my own 'chain reaction,'” linking together “in a calculus of coital connection that seemed too extensive for a cosmos, let alone an afternoon romp in the office playroom.” Lise intuited that she would not put her new awareness to much use in Berlin, yet she also felt that this good analyst's “seminars in the oral, the anal, and the genital” would noticeably color her pleasure for the rest of her days.

Each 100 minute time slot thereafter fell to the two female friends to stage: first Hilda, then Lise, then ‘Hildy’ again. For their second meeting, “we will play at being doctors to each other’s pleasure,” announced the lengthy and athletic “Dr. Doolittle” with a bubbling chuckle of mischief and wanting. Their one lab coat, inevitably, was a sweat and cum-soaked rag by halfway through their “ninety minutes of fucking,” how Hilda articulated their “throbbing, howling good time!”

Lise’s directorial debut defined the ordinary glories of sex. “We dimmed the lights, lit the scented candles that I brought, folded out the good Doctor’s bedding, and had at each other.”

She blocked the entire scenario: “first me; then she; finally all three,” thirty minutes each. Quotidian or not, this was clearly their most orgasmic and shriekingly unhinged time, though that may have had something to do with a full moon.

For Hilda’s second go, the rangy beauty had them all speed stripped within sixty seconds of finishing their libations. An ever shifting ‘Daisy-Chain’ defined the first hour or so, multi-orgasmic and glowing with flowing floods of yum.

Then, assuming a complex lotus pose, she coached ‘S’ to sidle beneath and, slowly slip his cock into her tunnel, fucking her rhythmically for the rest of the session, all the while she clasped an inverted Lise in her arms so that her slender nymph’s pudenda just fit her face while Lise’s own mouth dropped to address both the copulating pair at their tenderest moments, as it were.

That was December 28th. They found infatuation with each other much too tame a description of the feral fires that they had been lighting. Somehow, still, it all seemed like dream-sex, hot and wondrous yet not such as would ruin a rest-of-their-lives otherwise engaged. Whatever characterization one might apply to it all, at the culmination of their connubial bliss, as Hilda dressed, she announced, “Well, my good sir!”

Her big grin lighthoused the room. “I declare myself completely cured of hysteria.”

A New Year’s Party to Remember Always— Origins notwithstanding, they only made the journey to this conclusion because Lise’s true masterful trickery made sure of an elective beloved’s discretion. She always found out before any affective, enduring connection might evolve. “Love at first sight is all well and good,” she often told herself, “but I want no bragging by my special friends, especially if they’re men.”

Thus, after their first feisty, snowy, steam-heated, steamy threesome—unscripted though it may have been—she dropped a casual bombshell by announcing that a wife of a prominent friend at the university had “irremediable cancer,” a mixing of tragedy and gossip that was demonstrably false but almost universally alluring. Like a certain sort of spy, perhaps, she then sent a chatty flower delivery girl to visit #69 and share a related secret, that this same purportedly afflicted spouse was planning to visit a certain sanitarium well regarded for its many modern treatment modalities, a fact that happened to be true.

“It was all just to see, you see,” she laid out for Hilda afterwards. “If he had blabbed, I would have nothing more to do with him.” No. He had merely sucked at his pipe and nodded before thanking the bearer of blossoms and wondering at their wintry cost.

From mid-November to New Year’s Eve, then, they disported once weekly after the first fortnight interlude allowed for Dr. Meitner’s ‘due-diligence. In all, they enjoyed four December Fridays before a final two day break prior to Monday, the year’s final day. Inasmuch as that night lashed out with the fiercest blizzard of the still-young century, the trio might well have remained all snuggly and snogging till the streets finally opened up on the first Thursday of 1923.

But the trains were running, and Dr. Meitner had a crucial meeting with her “second Otto” in Berlin. In any case, she had brought snowshoes and a light pack that held her precious journal—“My Chain-Reaction Diary” she called it—two flasks of Courvoisier, a canteen of snowmelt, and a proof-copy of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes, in addition to a complete change of clothes. She would buy more if she needed; she had ample means, after all.

Just in that way then, he, his client, Hilda, and her “very dear friend, Dr. Meitner,” had indeed come to share the most memorable December 31^st that any of them would ever know. “'S.' set aside his practice, which was otherwise simply sacrosanct, and designated twelve ninety-minute sessions for us,”recollected Lise in her journal.

Naked contortions, instructing Hilda in obtaining once again her own reactive chain of orgasmic frenzy, feeling all the ‘ups and downs’ of purified cocaine in liqueur, wondering at the amazing grace of a sixty-six year old lover-man, a magical balloon ride of soothing sensuality and repeated climactic explosion, the wet, white, witchery of two women in their libidinal prime as they writhed and reeled with a physician who remembered his human female physiology, all of this and the flames of heaven combusted in whirling dervish dalliance, a scintillating and sidereal snaking slither of sensation and sensibility.

An eighteen hour day and night of wantonly wild loving resulted, insatiable yet salubriously satiating. Once and for all the wizard of well-being, the author of Civilization and Its Discontents, insisted, “the remaining six hours are for sleep, as it ever ought to be!”

As all panned itself out like a well-worked mined gold, Dr. Freud did not sleep. He lay between the two slumbering lasses whose warm and sex-scented forms adhered to his flanks like pasted paper until the last quarter of the day, and a bit more, had passed and yielded, finally, a whitened-out brightness of blizzard somehow sun-drenched with climactic libations, into the bright glaring shadows of which Lise launched herself shortly before noon to catch her train amid the snow and sleet.

Attentive readers will already have surmised that ‘S.’ was none other than a certain famous Sigmund of legendary acuity in matters sensual and consensual, cognitive and therapeutic. But for the necessity of a permanent relocation to be near the Berlin facilities of her friend and colleague, Otto Hahn,—“the other man with whom I’ve consorted,” she eventually confessed— well, “this thing of ours might have kept on and on and on.”

In truth, she also believed that she had ‘this certain something’ for men named Otto. The cousin who was her first man friend, then Dr. Hahn, and, much later, Professor Frisch in Copenhagen, “they were all named Otto,” a thought that in August, 1939 brought an uncharacteristic crimson flush to her chest and cheeks. She was, as an unchained reactivity was unleashing in labs around the world, reviewing her journals and smiling at a more life-affirming thought than any dream of a nuclear weapon’s ecocidal blast.

“What if he had been Otto Freud?” she asked herself playfully. Elise sighed. “My own chain reaction needed a more certain place in history.” Sigmund’s ‘death-wish’ might often triumph over Life Force Energies, but the language of life named the dynamic, long before nature revealed this deadliest of secrets.

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

This leaves altogether out of the mix the author’s poetry, which he considered his literary life force even as he turned to fiction in order to make money for the family that he knew that he would soon leave behind as a result of liver disease. In any case, this vocalization of the incongruous and wild aspects of everyday life capture a core piece of literature’s magic, in all of which his roots in Chile—he returned from Mexico just in time for 9/11/73, escaping by happenstance—play a powerful role.

A consistent recognition that class and power-relations underlie the nature of story itself becomes rapidly apparent in Ampuero’s and Bolano’s writing, as it also does in Mistral’s, Neruda’s, and other Chileans. Before we move on to the way that these components of the Chilean contextualize the life and work of Victor Jara, we ought to mention the body of work of Jose Donoso.

“Donoso, whose first published stories were in English, could have become a Latin American Joseph Conrad had he adopted English as his literary language. Instead, he returned home and began to craft his intricate, minute, and brilliant fictions about the Chilean Bourgeoisie.”

“The Walk,” an eerie and discomfiting short story that he wrote in the middle of Allende’s brief stay in power, combines themes of psychological and psychosocial oppression that pervade upper-crust life with characterization that grapples with these difficulties like a stubborn wolverine. The spinster sister takes to ambling about with her dog after the beast urinates on the parlor floor. Her perambulations end up with her being out at all hours of the night, returning disheveled and gay instead of like her brothers, who are almost mad with worry and fear of a breach of decorum.

Then, like thousands of Chileans soon enough, she disappears. Her nephew ponders all of this with amazement, a combination of fear and longing that aptly describe what many Chileans were seeking, despite the risks, during Allende’s abortive reign.

Whatever the merits of Bolano’s savaging of Isabel Allende, her work, more so than any other writer’s—with the exception of Neruda and Jara—embraces the political aspects of human life. This is no accident. “The bloody military coup that resulted in the death of her uncle, the first democratically elected Marxist President in the hemisphere, was the confessed turning point of her life. Forced to face and, ultimately, to flee a systematically imposed reign of terror under the Pinochet regime, Allende emigrated with (her family) to Venezuela.”

Out of this nexus of love and loss, hope and terror, have grown lyrical and popular literary labors. Out of this cauldron have appeared her “overtly political (work that) address(es) through a love story the horrors of the ‘disappeared,’ who were taken off by the …authorities to be secretly tortured and murdered, but whose bodies were never returned.”

One could easily continue, but these additions to the groundwork of previous sections will further anchor what we have to learn about the bard from the barnyard, Victor Jara. For his rise to prominence depended on this supportive hammock that Chilean literature and music and culture has provided to its people, despite all the contradictions and tensions and polarities that were also present.

Victor Jara’s Iconic Presence

Once in a while, a man’s life, or a woman’s existence, so crystallizes an age that its narrative can become a key component of consciousness. Victor Jara embodies core themes of contemporary existence in this way.

His dirt-poor rural roots; his soulful transformation of deeply religious teachings into a revolutionary social message; his joyous capacity to sing and perform and communicate with people that led him to attain truly a global audience that included all but fascist social milieus; his rising above the machismo and chauvinism that were a powerful component of his culture, so as to revere women as equal partners; to achieve the insight necessary to identify messages critical to human advance, even survival, and then to show the skill to craft those ideas in accessible ways, in various media, and then to demonstrate the courage essential to voice these views despite threats and assaultive violence; these were all characteristics of this actor and director and folklorist and folksinger and social justice activist.

The youngest of six boys that a tenant farmer and his wife conceived and bore into the world, his was a passage, from the time that he began to walk, of nature and work. His father foresaw that six male children would permit his accumulation of land that would allow for social elevation for his family. As such, he fully intended to deny his youngsters schooling.

This caused a conflict with Victor’s mother, Amanda, who was a wedding singer and a popular folk musician in the region to the South of Santiago where Victor grew up. She knew the power of words and wanted “at least the letters” to be available to her sons.

Whatever manifold complications and difficulties beset the Jara family, the father ultimately began drinking heavily, and fights between the parents ended with the dissolution of their marriage. Existence became economically marginal but never lost fulsome spiritual and cultural joie-de-vivre.

When Amanda Jara took work in Santiago in the early 1940’s, she discovered that she had a natural talent for making spaces and operations functional. Soon enough, she sent for her boys, and the two youngest received disciplined and rigorous training at Catholic elementary schools. Victor showed early acumen and got a scholarship to more advanced education.

What might have been a rags-to-riches story of a more conventional nature unraveled when his mother died when he was only fifteen. Not only did this profoundly afflict the youngster, but it also landed him in a seminary where he appreciated the community and the rigor but was able to discern that he lacked anything like a true calling to be a priest.

Within a fortnight of his exit from this training ground, he found himself under the obligation to serve a stint in the military. Physically, he excelled as a inductee, but his natural shyness and lack of macho made this period extremely difficult.

Upon exiting, however, a series of chance opportunities in the early 1950’s led to his being part of a national choir and having performance options in both theater and dance. His early scholastic training stood him in good stead, and soon enough he had scholarships to the National University, where he excelled both in folklore pursuits and in drama.

In one of his roles as an actor and dancer, he played opposite Joan Turner, his future wife. Shortly after their work together, he received a year’s appointment to England, where he continued to excel, to the extent that more than one theater troupe invited him to remain, six thousand miles or so away from his home.

Even at this point, in his early-to-mid twenties, however, he knew that his calling in life was to serve Chile’s and Latin America’s people, so sooner rather than later he returned to his studies and his homeland. He received offers to direct where he had been studying soon enough.

Upon graduation, his capacity to engage and bring out the best in people led to repeated successes as a director. So much so was he magical in this ability to orchestrate dramatic production that An Appearance of Happiness, one of the first plays that he produced more or less on his own, ended up touring four other Latin American countries.

One of those countries was Cuba, and he immediately recognized that what was happening in education, in agriculture, in health care, and in the organization of social relations generally, were all apropos to what his family and friends and neighbors had long needed on the West coast of Latin America. An affiliation with communism matured into an identification as a Communist.

After the early 1960’s, his theater work became more and more political. His were works that suggested the possibilities for change, the tragedies of reactionary thinking, and the fundamental, core problem of empire—or as he would put it, of “Yankee imperialism.” In the late 1960’s, he produced a version of Viet Rock that ended up being wildly popular, one of several other touring gigs that took him to Western and Eastern Europe and Russia and the United States, as well as traveling on other occasions to various Latin American venues. He even met with and dedicated a song to a Vietnamese delegation in Scandinavia as the war there was turning decisively against the United States.

Parallel to his theatrical labors, he continued to collect and curate folksongs and folk stories of Chile. His voice’s sweet tenor clarity, his glorious good looks, and his natural enthusiasm on stage led to his making contact with such musicians and seminal Chilean performers as Violetta Parra, with whose son Victor formed a lifelong friendship.

Angel Parra purportedly was responsible for Victor’s rise as a folk-singing star. The young Parra had started a club in Santiago—soon replicated elsewhere in Chile—where intimate spaces and freewheeling songfests began to draw regular and enthusiastic crowds.

At one such outpouring of song and energy, Angel supposedly threw a guitar to Victor in the audience and commanded, “Ahora, a cantar!” Before long, recording contracts, international chances to play, and a lifelong adoration of Pete Seeger translated into people’s more commonly recalling him as a songbird rather than an actor and director and producer.

The key point in this regard is that all of this effort was much the same for Victor. The purpose of his life was the engagement with communities, the creation of performance and touching of consciousness in such a way as to impel common folks to develop a regard for their power, an understanding of their lives and problems, and a willingness to try to do things on their own behalf.

Again and again, the still young singer and creator made this clear in his public articulation of his life. He was a servant of the people, and success—with its measures of love and joy, challenge and conflict—was something that he measured in terms other than those of the music business accountant. His was a mission to shift the world rather than to become, in the American paradigm, “rich and famous.”

‘New Songs,’ New Politics—Salvador Allende’s & Unidad Popular’s Social Roots

The huge role that the so-called ‘New-Song movement’ played in the popular embrace of Salvador Allende’s faith in democratic socialism would be difficult to overestimate. While plenty of intellectual Marxists—and even, despite their suspicions of the petty bourgeois, communist thinkers and strategists—supported this longstanding political activist, his Unidad Popular Party was overwhelmingly a working class and grassroots movement that increasingly also drew adherents from among poor rural populations.

A to-some-extent fortunate confluence coincided with this development as the 1960’s came to a close. The Communists had long supported folk musicians such as Violeta Parra, as well as new groups such as Quilapayun, which also affiliated with party goals and played at events and festivals that were radical and progressive.

But only when the party pressed a few hundred Long-Play records and instantly sold them all did this energy become a phenomenon that could truly finance a campaign. After helping to elect Allende, in fact, the Communist ‘label,’ DICAP, was selling nearly a quarter million albums a year. Moreover, after the U.P. electoral victory, Allende’s cultural ministry partially nationalized the primary large commercial recording operation in the country, owned by RCA, which led both to expanded volume and sales—the ‘local’ operation had held down its output to promote North American products—to further inroads by radicals of various stripes in the cultural realm.

A hugely successful annual folk festival, cosponsored by the Catholic University, started in 1968, and this too advanced the Nueva Cancion Chilena further still. As chronicler Nancy Morris points out, Jara from its inception became even more popular than he already was, splitting a significant prize at the first gathering for the Best Song.

Nor did this suggest even a tiny diminution of political fervor or poignant social commentary. Plegaria a un Labrador, or Prayer to a Peasant, was the winning number, and it very explicitly advocated rural/urban working class unity, a strategic goal of import on the part of both U.P. and the Communist Party.

Angel Parra and Victor Jara both had played for Allende through his 1964 and 1970 campaigns, the first one a narrow loss that resulted in part because of CIA propaganda and fiscal support for Eduardo Frei. The rise of a broad based movement stemmed from a mixture of this political connection and the deeply felt working class identification of an honestly community-based musical upsurge. The cultural dimension of politics became central to developing winning coalitions and strategies.

Though one might find reason to explore much more broadly and deeply in this matter of the cultural connection in Allende’s rise to power, one further point bears special note. The party’s rousing campaign song, Venceremos!, or We Will Win!, was addictive in its tuneful harmony and roused crowds of many thousands, or tens of thousands repeatedly during the campaign.

One annalist of ‘victory’ put the case thus. “When the socialist politician Salvador Allende dramatically won Chile’s presidential election in 1970, a powerful cultural movement accompanied him to power. Folk singers emerged at the forefront, proving that music could help forge the birth of a new society.

As the CIA actively funded opposition media against Allende during his campaign, the New Chilean Song Movement rose to prominence, viscerally persuading voters with its music. Víctor Jara, a central protagonist at the time, became an icon in Chile, Latin America, and beyond for his revolutionary lyrics and life. Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún, and other musicians contributed by singing before audiences of workers outside factories or campesinos in Chile’s rural countryside.”

Nor did the fervor of this eruption of popular folk culture diminish after Allende’s ascension to the chief executive’s position. On the contrary, it at least held its own through 1973, acting to expand its lyrical and performance outreach in both theater and poetry and dance as well as song.

Lack of commercial pressure meant that more people were listening, seeing, and otherwise participating in an actual artistic scene, instead of more money flowing to profit centers because of more sales of commodities that had only a random connection to either artistry or human need.

“Within this climate of affiliation with art, popular musicians moved decisively toward the creation of instrumental music with high levels of sophistication. Three factors came together in the rise of instrumental music within the context of NCC: the existence of instrumental music in Andean culture, which fed strongly into the NCC movement, as we have seen, and appeared in the work of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara; the use of instrumental music as incidental music for theater and dance; and the exploration of the possibilities of the guitar, NCC’s central instrument.”

The evidence of this phenomenon—musical, visual, and documentary—rouses a sense of wonder at the power of el pueblo. Astonishment at the capacity of people to mobilize and connect with self-expression and artistic creations, for their own purposes rather than for commerce, offers an object lesson in what the intersection of culture and politics might be.

In the event, one might legitimately advance a thesis that part of what Pinochet guaranteed his Yankee sponsors was that no more of such a nonsensical practice —people-powered, grassroots, not-for-profit art—would occur under Augusto’s august and violent imprimatur. Whatever the case may be, after assassinating the political elite of the Unidad Popular, a substantial number of the prioritized contract killings were against artists, of which Victor Jara’s is the most infamous.

One of the new juntas first acts was the precise outlawing of Nueva Cancion Chilena itself. Artists fled the country as fast as news of Jara’s severed fingers spread—or perhaps Junta thugs had merely battered and broken Jara’s hands.

In addition to providing yet another proof that ‘free markets’ are at absolute best fraudulent poses, a further upshot of this unfolding, CIA-sponsored mayhem, was a complete marginalization of community culture or grassroots artistic participation. “Under the military dicatorship, the task of Canto Nuevo(N.C.C.’s successor) has been to communicate the reality of a people whose outlets for group expression and social interaction have been intentionally and systematically restricted. As such, Canto Nuevo has been inherently dissident and marginalized since its inception.”

As Operation Condor took shape in the aftermath of Washington’s and Santiago’s collaboration in crimes against humanity, the spread of ‘new-song’ camps might have experienced some degree of a tempering of what had appeared to be likely to show up as a wildfire event in much of the region. Pinochet’s thugs and the torture that they practiced do not permit an answer to this question, for what had blossomed in Chile had succumbed to scorched-earth tactics at the behest of Yankee capital.

A Crushing Coup—Murder’s Signature Centrality to U.S. Imperial Sway

As noted above, rational disagreement about the broad parameters of what actually happened in Chile over the decade 1965-75 is impossible. Murder and mayhem, spycraft and sabotage, lies and deceit, fraud and depredation against a democratically socialist Chile established the ‘order-of-battle’ in such a fashion that the United States never deviated from this criminal construction of plunder and plutocracy.

Joan Jara, Victor’s wife and the author of his biography, Victor Jara: An Unfinished Song, summarized that the final authorization for overthrowing Allende, a directive that was a death warrant for her husband, probably resulted not from Unidad Popular’s problems but from the fact that the majority of Chileans were better off despite all-out economic warfare on the part of the U.S. against Chile.

Ms. Jara called U.P.’s gaining of seats and popular votes in Chile’s midterm elections, both of which happened early in 1973, “almost unprecedented” in Chilean history. Moreover, anti-feminist attacks on Allende had backfired, as women were continuing to vote their interests and not reactionary, Church-backed fantasies.

In this context, Victor Jara, though very anxious and ‘out-of-his-element’ as a public speaker, took to the stump to warn of Yankee and plutocrat plans for plunder. “(F)or the first time in his life … he made campaigning political speeches. It wasn't a moment to hang back and say, 'No, I can't. I'm an artist, not a politician.'

It made Victor very nervous because he wasn't used to that kind of speaking, but he was ready to do anything that was useful, and in his own informal way he explained to people why it was necessary, at all costs, to support the Popular Unity government and to prevent the reactionary opposition from overthrowing Allende before his term as President was completed. The rapid rise of fascism in Chile had to be halted.”

But the writing was literally ‘on the wall’ that fascism was the treasonous Chilean elites’ general response to such social improvement. “Djakarta’s coming” warnings sprouted everywhere, spray painted graffiti, dripping blood red threat, “a reminder of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of communists in Indonesia in 1965.”

Peter Kornbluh’s work through the National Security Archive at George Washington University has led the powerful exposition of the U.S. thuggery in recruiting, financing, and operationalizing mass murder in Chile. This is not how Professor Kornbluh would state the matter. He is a careful scholar.

“That the secrecy surrounding Chile and U.S. relations with Pinochet has been maintained for so long reflects both the controversial nature of this past, as well as its continuing relevance to the ongoing and future debate over American interventions abroad and the moral foundations of U.S. foreign policy. The declassified documents in the following pages are, in essence, a dossier in atrocity and accountability, addressing not only the general and his regime, but also the shameful record of U.S. support for bloodshed and dictatorship.”

In the eleven years since he published The Pinochet File, the director of the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project has become more forceful in his accusations. Just recently in Foreign Affairs, he gained access to the establishment forum’s pages to make his case quite strongly indeed. He was responding to an earlier article, “What Really Happened in Chile?” that argued that the entire mess was in the nature of a series of unfortunate events, a combination of errors all around and overreaching on the part of Santiago’s armed forces.

“In (Jack Devine’s) view, the military coup and the bloody Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted nearly 17 years, were unfortunate but unintended consequences. But that is not what really happened in Chile.  …(I)n the fall of 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to orchestrate a military putsch that would prevent the recently elected Allende from assuming office. …

Devine benignly characterizes (this) as a misguided covert action. In fact, (it) centered on a violent criminal scheme. The plan was to kidnap Chile’s commander in chief, General René Schneider, who firmly opposed the idea of a military coup. ‘The CIA was aware of the plan,’ Devine notes, as if the agency were an innocent bystander, simply gathering intelligence on the operation. 

The truth is far more sinister. The Schneider operation was a CIA-sponsored plot: CIA officials pressed the agency’s station in Santiago to come up with a way to ‘remove’ Schneider because he was standing in the way of a military coup. CIA representatives met repeatedly with the conspirators, led by a retired Chilean army general, Roberto Viaux, and an active-duty brigadier general, Camilo Valenzuela.

On October 19, CIA headquarters sent the station six untraceable submachine guns and ammunition in a diplomatic pouch, to be provided to the plotters. The agency also provided $50,000 to Valenzuela to bankroll the operation and thousands more to Viaux to keep the operation ‘financially lubricated,’ as one CIA cable stated. Given the risks involved, the CIA issued the plotters life insurance policies.”

Nor does Kornbluh focus only on the early days of Allende’s regime and the attempts then to unseat the nearly-elected President. Both in his book and his various other writings on this massive crime against humanity that the United States orchestrated, he details the way that U.S. operatives and their counterparts in the Southern Cone established the necessary protocols for either a ‘surgical removal’ of Allende, or, if he refused to cooperate, his assassination.

In his just-published article, this careful scholar notes, “A May 1973 memorandum to CIA Director James Schlesinger noted that the agency had ‘accelerated efforts against the military target’ in order to ‘better monitor any coup plotting and bring our influence to bear on key military commanders so that they might play a decisive role on the side of the coup forces.’

Moreover, the CIA was not the only part of the U.S. government bringing its influence to bear. The U.S. Department of Defense also maintained contact with the generals. Indeed, a full year before the coup, U.S. military officials met with Pinochet and his aides in the Panama Canal Zone. A declassified intelligence report recorded Pinochet’s belief that Allende ‘must be forced to step down or be eliminated’ and a clear message from U.S. Army officers in response: the ‘U.S. will support [a] coup against Allende with ‘whatever means necessary’ when the time comes.’”

In other words, as Victor Jara sweated over his ‘toastmaster’ duties and his wife worried about implicit threats to their lives, the U.S. was one hundred percent behind the conspiracy to torture and maim and kill and ‘disappear’ those who stood for social progress in Chile. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of pages from the State Department, the CIA, earlier investigations such as the Church Senate Committee Hearings, and more, further amplify the vicious impunity with which the ‘leaders of the free world’ have conducted themselves toward our ‘good neighbor’ to the South. Next Up—Part Five