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 SIX-times-annually magazine. This is the twenty-fourth incarnation, and so persisting with the second annual outpouring, and it’s as meaty as ever.
However, this stance is now history. Starting with #25, I’ll be posting once every two months, plus or minus. Making art, finding other, more direct ways to reach an audience, lots of things make attractive doing my odd more or less 40,000 word explosions six times yearly instead of double that. Ha ha.
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 once-every-two-months 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 January 16th, the first of many that will appear once every two months, 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: Never the Same River, Never an Equal Sun
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—’Mental Illness’ & Spiritual Bloodletting
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XXIV
3. Wood Words Essays—Partnership’s Passionate Potentiation of Ecstasy
4. Empowered Political Forays—Iconic, Unheralded Work That Figures Things Out: #1
5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen: Year Two, PP, ‘Where Do They Go?’
6. Old Stories & New—”An American Christmas Story,” concluded
7. Nerdy Nuggets—From the Federal Reserve to G.A.T.T. & the W.T.O.—Part III
8. Communication & Human Survival—What If TikTok Provides the Only Answer?
9. Erotic Snippets—”Hercules, eh?, Or, Omphale Finds a Bargain”
10. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A Modern Nuclear Project’s ‘United Front,’ 2
11. Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—”’United in Blood’ Against Empire” V
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Changes & Transformation: Steering Chaos & Confusion
This just in: as often proves true, I’ll be turning first to a ‘regular correspondent’ for these opening paragraphs. “Eyes Wide Open” is a forthright, grounded, and fact-based YouTube operation—one that examines spooks and spoofs, so to say—that presents compellingly argued and beautifully presented video stories, for today dealing with the redoubtable Bush family, they whom Russ Baker artfully portrayed in Family of Secrets.
The video-portal’s mission, in its essence, revolves around the more or less eternal search for a way to comprehend our sapience so as to make sense of, and to empower, our lives. Such efforts might take all manner of narrative salients, the hopes of which on the part of EWO revolve around revealing how spies and their ploys underlie much of the worst aspects of empire and its imperial attempts at impunity and imprimatur.
Thus, bankers’ ‘confidential agents’ in Poppy Bush’s past made sure that doing business with Berlin’s Nazis didn’t suffer inordinately while the societies that hosted these financial operations were in a brutal pitched battle with Germany and its allies. He was in the loop at the outset of the foundation of the Central Intelligence Agency, remaining so deeply in the background—though on crucially important ‘operations’—that his appointment as its Director brought forth doubts from the gallery.
In the event, some of this work is available further down the page, so to speak. The narrator/producer’s style and substance is, to state matters honestly, enviable. I’m envious, for certain. Each installment is essential citizenship training.
Readily could we render a take on California’s conflagrations along similar lines. Perhaps, quite plausibly, the first order of magnitude in covering a terrain approximate to understanding would be to ‘know the deal,’ generally, and not to indulge superstition or other foolishness in order to name reality falsely or, anyway, to use meaningless metaphors and fanciful factition to finesse an obviously accurate account. In standard news nostrums, we hear a combination of blame and woe.
‘Blame the governor!’ ‘No, no, it’s the bureaucrats.’ ‘Sorry, no, it’s climate change.’ Blah blah blah. Poor suffering homeowners talk to viewers after we see hundreds of incinerated houses and torched streets. Dead people show up as scorched statistics. Animals have suffered too!
From Baja to San Jose, the West Coast shows anyone who hangs about for a decade or so an undeniable ‘Phoenix Ecology,’ in which new life literally rises from the ashes of hellish flames. This is irrefutable. Nevertheless, not a word of this inescapable fact comes to the fore, so that every analysis or suggestion at best combines nonsense with non-sequitur, a theme in regard to monopoly mediation here in these pages, by the way.
The cycle of things from Baja to North of Los Angeles, and inland to the Sierras, not only includes unavoidable cycles of fiery conflagration, but it also then turns the deep ashes of all that has burned into watery slush that carries the houses that didn’t go up in flames down the mountains in floods of slurry and boulders bigger than the homes that they’re bumping downhill. Back and forth it goes.
The only way to avoid intermittent catastrophes the favored results of which are more hand-wringing ‘blame and woe’ is to manage the locus of development and limit its scope. ‘Why, that sounds like commonism! Private property is sacred,’ ha ha. Again, except at the margins of matters, where a minuscule Big Tent Review and its ilk try to ground our investigations in the real, bullshit and gory fluff is the order of battle.
John McPhee’s marvelous reportage, in a two-piece New Yorker series that served as a template for part of his iconic work, The Control of Nature, only constitutes Required Reading if one prefers an opportunity to understand rather than further inundations with tsunamis of manure. I mean; I’m just sayin’! “Los Angeles Against the Mountains” makes requisite that we acknowledge that fighting fundamental geological processes is some combination of absurdity and stupidity, IRL quite probably a balancing of greed and false promises.
Accusations of conspiracy theorizing notwithstanding, what is going on hither and yon looks so fishy, if one puts on the tinted glasses that monopoly media want us to follow. Things have burned and washed away over and over again periodically, and standard sources don’t mention this pattern. Our wealthy potentates have sold ‘national interests’ downstream whenever doing so padded the bottom line, even as they defend their mass-murdering imperial forays by appealing to the same ‘strategic interests’ that they’ve undermined in order to profit.
Jack Abbot’s little gem, In the Belly of the Beast, comes to mind. Contemplating what Citizenship even means in the context of plutocratic imperial divided-conquest class society, one can well imagine a systemic prisoner’s unhinged rage, which Abbott beautifully transfers to the page.
In a sense, Abbot’s dissection of alienated rage and internalized loathing calls to mind the present passage for anyone Palestinian. So saying, what should a citizen say or do to ameliorate, if not completely to upend, such idiotic viciousness toward other humans who—without exception—are our cousins or closer kin?
Okay, okay, okay. I can hear it now. “What about ISIS in New Orleans?” What about the exploding Tesla in Las Vegas? Was Musk a victim? Or was he to blame?
Such concatenations of existence, hurtling death machines and exploding trucks and completely predictable wildfires and more, merely extend and extenuate Abbott’s incisive assertion of inherent alienation and anger. In the event, no such state of nauseating fury is currently my cross to bear, so much so that equanimity’s favor feels like a fate-fostered discipline that Jimbo will ever struggle to perfect.
I live in a streaming cascade of sweetly salubrious connection. I get to help out in maintaining the fabric of a family-community interface that is sweeter to see than any such network with which I’ve had the fortune to associate.
Of course, being very wary not to make any early gloats, I acknowledge the fraught forces intrinsically at work in a world of H-bombs and genocide. Nearer to hand, a close local kin has started working as a police officer. Who knows what corruption or conflict might erupt on either the local or wider stage?
Biden pardons Fauci. He lets his son, and then the rest of his family, have ‘get out of jail free’ cards. The State Department operationalizes ‘eternal alliance’ with Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. Trump promises to make Israeli ‘self-defense strategies’ even stronger and more strategic, difficult to imagine since Israeli already has one of the largest arsenals of thermonuclear weapons in existence.
Still, what wonders! An ideal depiction of this dynamic process of embattled ingratiation and conflicted contemplation popped up from one of Marshall Arts’ boxes of partially completed Driftwood Message Art. A worn and handsome—albeit broken—ladle had ‘drifted’ my way, irresistible in evoking something about mutuality and beneficence. “Spooning Life” is its headline, so to speak.
“To Consider the Cosmos As a Spoon Can Seem an Apt Metaphor For the Breadth & Plenitude & Nourishment of What the Universe Daily Ladles Up For Us to Imbibe & Experience, Even As Our Own Gleeful Grasp of These at Once Personal & Collective Processes, Or Our Sorrowful Sensibility of Them, As the Case May Be, Overlooks Or Otherwise Misses Out on the Historical & Internal Attributes of What We Seek & Ponder & Use, an Understandable Oversight, Quite Likely, But One Which Guarantees That Anything Akin to Comprehension Must Remain Elusive Since, Whatever Our Surface Awareness, Whether of Succor Or Disaster, It Demonstrably & Inherently & Universally Results From What, Lying Beneath the Veneer, Flows Out of the Past Like a Mighty Flood's Transformative Inundation to Manifest the Melange of Our Moment's Mingling of Madcap Mayhem & Memorable Merriment.”
At the same time, a joyous Solstice Season of Holy Day celebrations has just passed, and, no matter what else may be accurate, a complete commitment to love and affection and care remained the order of the day throughout the many weeks of Christmas here in Virginia’s mellifluous and gorgeous highlands, where gracious mountainous curves arise from one’s ambit at every turn of the horizon, with each cloudscape a play of light and shadow and soothing gray or the bonniest blue imaginable. Here I am, bearing witness from such a privileged position of mutuality and mirth.
This is kin’s intersection with history. Fate conjoins with karma and delivers miracles that collect close kindreds of grace. Absolutely and ineluctably, I get to keep learning, keep engaging, keep hoping to make some semblance of a positive impact.
Thus, on the home front, 2024’s ‘holiday seasonality’ has unfolded around hearth and family’s outstretched engagement, so to speak, with plenty of Trans-Siberian Orchestration of minstrelsy’s manifestation, as it were. I am a new person to all of these folks, even to an extent—in the world of linear space and time—to my love whose soul has so bonded with mine that my breath catches to contemplate the fact.
And they’re new to me, ha ha, Mr. ‘Born-a-Critic’ in person, ha ha ha. But the whole period—from turkey to wrapping paper and beyond into Yule-log encounters—has flowed by like a familiar stream that, in salubrious and always navigable fashion, carries my love’s and my particular kayak a little further downstream. I am astonished, stunned with love and admiration and something like real hope here in Appalachia.
Time will tell. How could anything be otherwise? a question that my dear mother-in-law knows in her bones every day as she revels still in the delightful luck to remain, after more than a century, a living and breathing sapient creature. Lawrence Welk and “The Great British Baking Show” wile away some hours, with intermittent doses of psychosis from CNN and ‘local news,’ each source with its ubiquitous pharmaceutical outreach in favor of some hyper-medicated dystopic enervation of human potential.
Pharma’s ferocious insistence that we ‘take our medicines’ and ‘pay for the privilege’ dominates almost all ‘mass-market’ advertising spaces, the ones that I see in any case. Some of them are for this, some for that. A huge number are for the sorts of ‘mental illnesses’ that arguably don’t exist or are primarily a basket of symptoms that stem from toxic environs. A lot of them are about the medical problems of getting older.
Actually, lots of people are wondering the same things that I am. Why are half the commercials for meds that we can only get with a prescription? Ads for aspirin are nonexistent. It’s just odd or nasty, maybe both. Here’s a search that got 70,800,000 draws: <television medicine OR pharmaceuticals OR drugs commercials>. This came through with 43,200,000 links: <television medicine OR pharmaceuticals OR drugs commercials text OR script OR transcript>.
One could do a century long shtick just about television drug commercials and barely scratch the surface. Some of the scripts are just bizarre: asthma ‘medicine’ that causes shortness of breath as a common side-effect; acne prescriptions that frequently cause outbreaks of blemishes; urinary drugs that cause kidney disease.
The most rational explanation is that monopoly mediators have agreed not to allow honest reporting about the pharmaceutical industry in exchange for a few measly billion a year to run pointless, dead-end come-ons. In any event, the texts are hilarious. My plan is to do an essay that just focuses on these bizarre anomalies, pushing cures that kill and such as that.
Here’s a tweaked sample. “Possible side effects may include: depression, general discomfort, headaches, blurred or distorted vision, loss of balance, dry mouth, numbness, periodontal disease, lockjaw, tremors, heart palpitations, varicose veins, liver damage, kidney failure, loss of taste, loss of smell, loss of sight, early Alzheimer’s, cardiac arrest, and, in extremely rare cases, death.” Blah blah blah, promising to make everything better with chemical commodities that one can’t even buy without doctors’ directives.
Thomas Szasz, who is a medical doctor—in a just magnificent presentation in his video, “The Function of Psychiatry”—addresses this point, illustrating the role of information and misinformation in the unfurling of various occurrences of Mass Collective Suicide of one sort and another. He says that people who fail to inform themselves will end up “dead ducks,” his adorable accent enough to take the edge off the chill of his argument.
He gives a very personal example, asking, ‘Why am I sitting here now? Why wasn’t I killed in the war, in the Holocaust?’ The primary difference between his family and the hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews who expired in the camps or on the side of the road with a bullet in the back of the head was that his folks paid attention and split the scene, in part as Szasz acknowledges because they were well-to-do and could drop and run.
Still, tens of thousands—or more—similarly situated procrastinated, much like I might have done, alas. The point is to look around every day and be ready to take action based on what shows up in one’s field of vision. The good doctor’s focus, however, is not murdering fascist dictators.
Quite the contrary, he wants to take on the ‘mental health establishment,’ as we see in today’s Tarot Reading review and elsewhere. He and R.D. Laing and Wilhelm Reich, for a seeker like This Humble Correspondent, all occupy heroic places in the pantheon.
So, as the dust from two dozen issues settles, here goes, ‘as I live and breathe,’ in what could provide the general Big Tent Review publication schedule moving along time’s lines into futures at once imagined and undreamt. I’m beginning this process of drafting and crafting—with hopes of being deft and crafty—the day that I posted at two in the morning, ha ha.
In a strategic gaming sense, the present passage along every lane of life’s many highways is full of volatility. One might have the ride of the century and find epiphany’s multiple miracles pulsing merrily all the while, or one could readily encounter gridlock and smash-ups that induce misery and threaten mayhem’s potential for catastrophic collision and the carnage of collapse.
In the meantime, miraculously and magically, my Virginia Highlands existence daily induces outpouring of gratitude to the Goddess. Not only are the hills and rills and spills of nature’s thrills an ongoing uplift for the eye’s sight of and heart’s delight as beauty pours forth from sky and earth, from the stars and the seemingly billions of birds who come to our feeder.
The deer come to visit, and the transition to a new herd animal and lean-meat food source evolves in real time. A few bowls of seed corn a few times a week is adequate so that the critters barely scamper before I scatter the kernels that could easily bind their fates to my will, ha ha.
I have officially extricated myself from all but my driftwood storage unit, which I will navigate to close within the next few months. My love and I were going to travel to the vicinity of Newport, Tennessee, where she has a bevy of aunts and uncles, along with first, second, and third cousins. My last storage unit is nearby too, the Driftwood unit that I’m paying more a year to rent than twice as much ‘raw wood’ would fetch.
Snow, sick vaccinated people, and general doldrums delayed the gathering a couple of times. We’ll know soon enough if fate impels us toward Tennessee in the near future.
Asheville is pathetic, but the human capital there remains top notch. Every trip there has emphasized how tenuous are a large number of people’s lives in the aftermath of a ‘weather event.’ They’re living on the street; their jobs have disappeared; they lost a ton of whatever they had in a rain-fed gale’s flooded aftermath.
What occurs to me as a dark and ugly aspect of what is happening stems from my knowledge that these halcyon environs sit near the center of America’s H-bomb production complex. In 1983, the Department of Energy proposed building a high-level nuke waste site a mile of two below Marshall and Hot Springs; the local sentiment was so outraged that over a thousand people showed up to a little hearing.
The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League resulted, about which more will come later. The DoE backed off, but I’ve heard niggling rumors of persistent interest. The timing for such a nauseating pitch—eternal poison in return for some jobs and infrastructure—could hardly be better.
Until a half year’s span before the deluge’s demonic drench, as it were, I was part of Asheville’s avalanche of cultural drones, hither and yon, seeking places to leave a few traces of both their hearts and their arts. In rooting through detritus from my past, the ongoing deconstruction and constructions of an archival approximation of my life and times and heart and soul, I came across a ‘poetic’ parchment, separated from its attachment to some photo of mine.
Its title, “Autumn’s Perch,” as the very season transitioned to the chillier quarter, seemed interesting enough to cause me to post it here, an aspect of all this blah blah blah. I haven’t a clue if it manages coherence, let alone aesthetic pulchritude, ha ha.
“Fall’s harvest is kin, perhaps, to a throne That looks backward and forward in time, On the one hand viewing a just fled prime, On the other seeing an icy new tone.
Thus Autumn is wont at once both to moan. Of pending privation, night’s bitter chill, And to grin at Summer’s boon paradox: Truly, the season starts with an equinox, When light & dark, cold & hot all have their fill And Winter’s scene yet looms to stage its crone As leaf-stripped star of sackcloth and lime.
Logical then that some shall detect a shill In these two-way months that straddle a fence: Duplicity’s crime in fact may so strongly incense That always November, as light’s Holy Day pends,
Loneliness stalks like a butcher’s blade after the bone.”
I mean, WTAF? I have never, at least since my ‘prize-winning’ third-grade ode to General George S. Patton, considered myself any sort of poet—maybe for good reason, right? Then again, though I don’t know what if anything I intended in streaming such a screed, it strikes me as having something that still stings my attention to take note.
Then again, my entire existence, as my eighth decade of being a Participant-Observer in the panoply of my life and times, seems to flow from one epiphanic moment to some other. The sources vary, from encountering unearthed archival flotsam to gobbling up new books from a recent outing, from loving the loving that lovingly epitomizes my days and nights of all the routines of love’s libations, ha ha.
Several recent volumes have sent volleys of meteors through my New Moon New Year nights. I’m leaving for the end of this first queue the three that offered the most thrilling, chilling, and eerily perfect sense of parallel with my life purposes, Big Tent sensibilities, and my iconoclastic fascination with particular topics, for example Life Force Energy and its erotic pillars, so to speak; or the Modern Nuclear Project and concomitant propagation of Anticommunist propaganda; or Empire’s vampire policies in relation to other nations of the Americas.
On the other hand, one little oddity—if only because it came at me via a sidewalk book exchange—offered up several jewels even as I remained skeptical about the author’s bona fides, integrity, jada jada jada. Ishmael Jones, eh? ‘He,’ whoever he really is—if indeed he’s not just a bot—wrote this, which comports with demonstrably accurate information.
“The Agency was given virtually unlimited billions of dollars by Congress, and it had to figure out ways to spend it. It was difficult to deploy case officers overseas, so the Agency began deploying them to assignments within the United States. The agency raised the pay and benefits for employees assigned to domestic posts almost to the level enjoyed by those serving overeas.
(Abroad), (t)he Agency had (offered bonuses)…where conditions were more difficult. The new pay and benefit packages for domestic service encouraged employees (instead) to stay in the U.S. Domestic stations lost their status as dumping grounds and actually became sought-after assignments. Some offices in the U.S. were reportedly choosy about which employees they’d take.
The quality of new hires had always been high. The Agency employed many Ivy Leaguers, perhaps because its predecessor, the OSS, was a desirable alternative to the infantry for those with language skills and high IQ scores.
The percentage of graduates of prestigious schools remained high; at a conference I attended at HQs, all of the eight colleagues I shared a table with were Ivy Leaguers. No Agency recruiter could go wrong who hired an Ivy Leaguer. The quirkiness in the Ivies’ admission policies meant that graduates often had the foreign travel and language skills the Agency prized.”
One of the key additions to any ‘Library-of-the-Real’ in existence would be the work of University of Chicago and Harvard scholars, respectively, John Mearshimer and Steven Walt, whose The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy not only grits on the very grain of gringo scheming, but it also remains the authors’ unflinching assertion that Israel’s primacy in imperial plans is indisputable, something that AIPAC and friends would never permit a moment’s prime mediated airtime, as it were. An upcoming Jewish Question installment will review and deconstruct the volume.
Priscilla McMillan produced another resuscitated volume. The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race mixes a certain romantic naivete with sharp reporting. The work touches the Modern Nuclear Project, about which a relatively lengthy series will begin in #25.
A final tome from the elder trove, so to speak, takes in Eros’ civilizing and unsettling tendencies. #23 merely alluded to Claire Douglas’ Translate This Darkness: the Life of Christiana Morgan, and then only in passing. Today, on the other hand, she and several contemporaries help to fill in the blanks in thinking about mental health and erotic love, which, in any event are likely inseparable, ha ha.
Two recent additions—one from sturdy and yet unsteady Barnes and Noble, the other from a gloriously stodgy local used book store—also have made their marks. Another Life Force Energy item, A Woman of Passion: the Life of E. Nesbitt, 1858-1924 gives Julia Briggs’ account of the writer who refused to sugar coat her kids’ stories and wrote for adults as if human females were half the mature populace.
And I could not resist Haruki Murakami’s newest. The City And Its Uncertain Walls furthers the authors forays into magical realism, joining Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude in the seven episodes that were magnificent and a final sequence that gagged and galled a watcher like me. In regard to Murakami, he’ll get his own center stage spot soon enough.
A troika of other new acquisitions had especial resonance. What are the odds that titles encountered at random and acquired without planning or reflection should pack such prolific punches? In any case, the aforementioned Modern Nuclear Project was front and center atop the heap, followed by female desire and human sexuality and then Chile, and Pablo Neruda himself, who so suffered at the fate that befell Victor Jara.
Francine Prose’s Vixen is first among equals in this threesome. It opens on a Brooklyn family scene on June 19th, 1953, when I was twenty-five days old and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were a few hours away from their judicial murder at the hands of the Modern Nuclear Project’s fiercest imperial defenders.
The footloose and recently-graduated-from-Harvard son of the Jewish New Yorkers in view goes on to get the assignment from the publisher where he’s working to edit a novel with the same title as Prose’s book. “The previous year, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for allegedly selling atomic secrets to the Russians. The horror of the electric chair and the chance that the couple were innocent had ignited outrage in this country and abroad. Protesters took to the streets in sympathy for the sweet-faced housewife whose only crime may have been typing a document for her brother, David Greenglass.
But according to the manuscript that landed on my desk, the Rosenbergs(in the novel, the Rosensteins)were Communist traitors, guilty of espionage and treason, eager to soak their hands in the blood of the millions who would die because of their crimes.” OMGoddess! The journalistic passages from the volumes initial pages, in which flacks speak of the ‘guilty couple’s’ passion and describe the two bouts of murderous current necessary to still the heart of Ethel, which didn’t want to give up on her two sons for anything, embody three of the prime themes of Big Tent Review, to wit the toxicity of a society that uses H-bombs as central organizing tools, the eternal potency of passion’s most elemental Life Force Energies, and the part that Anticommunism has played in modern American history.
Then came the salaciously titled What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, about a poet whom I haven’t read since High School, much to my detriment, given my proclivities. Daniel Mark Epstein’s subtitle explains all: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The author makes as clear as dry Winter skies that this woman, in the healthiest and happiest fashion, had no shame about how much she appreciated and recognized all the warts of her complete commitment to connubial bliss.
Millay will lead the pack when we do a literary review of erotic works and literature that contains substantial sexual content, as it were. Given my proclivities, such an endeavor is altogether impossible to forestall too much longer.
Perhaps the leading book of the lot this issue is autobiographical. Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs link seamlessly with the just finishing Chile series. He was a Communist candidate for President before he fled a likely death sentence for the tint of his politics. His magnificent Nobel Prize lecture takes readers on that particular sojourn through darkness into light.
Furthermore, Neruda’s unswerving social optimism made him a lifelong Communist, to the very end. His political participation arguably peaked during Salvador Allende’s campaign for and term as Chile’s President. Not only was he a leader in the coalition that eventually brought Allende to Santiago’s infernal Operation Condor swirl, but he also advised the poor fellow to the assassination on September 11th, 1973.
Another ‘find’ from my recent, unraveled trove of stuff—paper and ink and flotsam and jetsam—was Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, a book that probably improves on the lame mundanity of the film by the same title. Leo Tolstoy’s thoughts appear, just after the author’s dedication, to a former editor. In a brief epigraph, a Tolstoy quotation offers us epiphany about the human condition, should we have the grit to hear it and learn.
In 1897, the great Russian wrote, “(t)he most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” Ooops!! Ha ha.
By the time that this posts, a real inauguration will likely be at hand that has nothing to do with Donald Trump’s nearly octogenarian hand on an iconic Bible in the grasp of Chief Justice John Roberts, whose skilled working class family background proffers a perfect promise of ‘making America great again,’ ha ha. In the event, I hope that I do not find compelling the necessity to deliver my favorite response to events.
“I told you so” would mean that Trump had indeed turned, that no ‘rescue of the working class’ would be forthcoming, blah blah blah. I expect to need to speak this line repeatedly, but I can still pray that I misunderstand somehow, or that the Donald, who undeniably pisses off bunches of the political class’ so-called liberals, can simultaneously be a favorite of the plutocrat financiers and moneybags militarists and someone who salubriously addresses socioeconomic problems and avoids Mass Collective Suicide.
Along with Dave Chappelle, whose shtick is almost always worth the time, I certainly wish the President luck in doing healthy things for people without provoking mass murder in the process. How could one hope otherwise?
In the event, I’ve also unearthed Irving Stone’s Jack London: Sailor on Horseback, which ‘fictionalizes’ a brief biography of the fierce socialist and fiery critic of capital and its so-called ‘liberal’ champions. London’s entire arcing life’s array addresses the crazed concatenations of social class and economic exploitation and opportunistic ‘investments’ in ‘foreign adventures’ for lucre and loot and plenty to plunder.
And while the good old U.S.A. ideally exemplifies empire’s now dual predatory focus—at home, with plotted evisceration of Social Security’s disability programming and more; and abroad, with another close-to-trillion outright expenditure on America’s primacy in the death trade while ‘Veterans Affairs’ and Energy alone vault the amount for war above this half-the-Federal-budget benchmark—where this will lead in the immediate future is anybody’s guess. Thinking along such lines brings to mind another Jack London classic, Class Struggle.
I carry a copy with me hither and yon. It speaks to this matter of pending tomorrows. “Out of their constitutional optimism, and because a class struggle is an abhorred and dangerous thing, the great American people are unanimous in asserting that there is no class struggle. And by 'American people' is meant the recognized and authoritative mouthpieces of the American people, which are the press, the pulpit, and the university.
The journalists, the preachers, and the professors are practically of one voice in declaring that there is no such thing as a class struggle now going on, much less that a class struggle will ever go on, in the United States. And this declaration they continually make in the face of a multitude of facts that impeach...their 'optimism.'”
One possible soon-to-be-right-now moment, duh, could be the recognition that oppression in the here and now, without exception, results from property’s perquisites and profit’s promotions. Furthermore, overwhelmingly, the negative impacts of these oppressive conditions fall most often and most severely on working people.
Billionaires don’t die at the hand of trigger-happy coppers. Nor do they experience the ‘free choice’ to forego food rather than medicine, or vice versa. Theirs is very seldom the lot to return crippled from Afghanistan. Their life expectancy is decades longer than the less than seventy years that low-wage workers can hope to have. It’s class warfare wherever one looks, although another dodge of the rulers is to blame the foreigners, the Russians, the Cubans, the Chinese, blah blah blah.
I mean it’s hilarious. I can imagine a George Carlin shtick. ‘So, hey! We all got problems, right? Well, guess what? We now know for certain the cause of our problems, whatever they are. It’s Putin. Yep; that Russian asshole’s responsible for all America’s misery.’
Of course, then comes that Carlin look, the one that says, straight on, ‘You can’t really be this stupid, right?’ before he launches into the “But he loves you!” deconstruction of another idiotic premise that God is a ‘little man who lives in the sky.’ Really, it’s precisely congruent with labeling Putin as Satan’s emissary and every Russian save the eleven or twelve percent who didn’t vote for him as hounds of hell.
Stone, in his ‘life-novel’ of a Sailor on Horseback, gives us a peek at this exact same dynamic of blame and attack from twelve decades ago. London was addressing a group of businessmen near his Bay-Area home turf. They were shame-faced and even slightly receptive at first to his harangue about their ignorance and bigotry about any semblance of ‘real socialism.’
Then, however, he began to talk about Russia, which, in its second Capitol city of Kiev one hundred twenty years back, was rising up with murderous fury against the Czar and his functionaries. “Jack (so) horrified the businessmen of Stockton, by telling them that the socialists in Russia who had participated in the 1905 uprising and killed several Czarist officials were his brothers,” that these sturdy bourgeois “jumped to their feet, storming at him” and crying for blood, prosecution for treason, prison, or worse.
The links that make an imperial chain, a garland of stinking, rotted husks, are as fresh as they were to Jack London in 1907. The world says that thinking along these lines might lead to useful epiphanies and solidly founded insights. It’s at least plausible, eh?
Can anyone explain Crypto, let alone fully explicate it? Here’s what I would guess. BitCoin is a combination of dodge and trick. People believe in it the same way that they fantasize happily about perpetual motion and ‘limitless energy loops.’ That said, I’m not really sure, other than profits therefrom helped to pay for a generator for us here, in the event of an Asheville-level-event hereabouts.
I’ll be writing about it eventually. Now, I’d recommend that folks listen to a real journalist—even if he and I would likely disagree about tons—and a true democratic knowledge seeker. People’s lives may hinge on close attention.
Cuba, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine: at best the score is tied—Imperial Gangsters, 2; People-Power Scrappers, 2. This is one of those cases where ‘what we don’t know can kill us,’ as in a collaterally damaged future of daily carnage and mayhem to feed the hunger for profit and power that proves irresistible to the ruling-class-rich.
Here at home, in the meantime, a Tweet spins the yarn.
“Rule by plutocrats is the American way. Murdering half the working class with the complicity of the other half is part of that process.
Anybody who expects something different likely combines delusion and entitlement, not to mention stupid and vicious chauvinism of all the flavors thereof.
How should we respond, those of us who are not psychotic? Talking to each other and planning meaningful action to resist the fascist phalanx, despite all the drones, is probably a first order of business, blah blah blah.”
One of my aphorisms from the ‘70’s has stayed fresh, from back when the butcher Somoza was, according to the revered Jimmy Carter, ‘our good friend in Nicaragua,’ where Sandinistas have managed to remain participants in a people-power campaign that the U.S. has repeatedly sought to sabotage.
The titular name is “A Boot on Your Neck & a Gun in Your Ear.” Its logic is persuasive. “If one wants to resist an oppressive condition, then well should one wish to start doing so before one finds a boot on his neck or a gun in her ear, because, by that juncture, resistance is probably far too late.”
In all of these intricate concatenations of cacophony, something does exist that one has little choice but to call ‘the Divine Feminine’ or something of the sort. Goddess energy, the generative principle in all its delicious and grotesque fruition, from conception to agonal gulping’s mysteries, gives birth to and guides each instantiation of ecstasy and agony that we encounter. To deny that something congruent with this opinion must be a foundation of one sort or another just seems stubborn, if not altogether obtuse.
Inevitably, inasmuch as these emanations of Goddess energy, on any given occasion, do actually constitute something like a stipulated agreement that identifiably feminine powers play parts of proximate causation of matters at hand, sexual activities circumscribe nature, culture, humanity. ‘Fucking is the life force,’ whether or not one likes the fact as much as does any kind of BTR perspective whatsoever.
The volume that most recently furthered such a viewpoint popped out of one of the boxes from my Hot Springs work space, the second half of its evocative subtitle altogether noir in its allusion: The Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circle. That would be Carl G. Jung, a founding voice of ‘depth psychology.’
Her ‘passionate analysis’ with this ‘founding psychoanalyst’ set the course of her life in many ways as a beautiful, brilliant, libidinally charged woman who could make things happen. Claire Douglas wrote Translate This Darkness as a biography of The Life of Christiana Morgan, referencing a quotation from Marguerite Duras.
“Women have been in darkness for centuries. They don’t know themselves. Or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness. Men don’t translate. They begin from a theoretical platform, already in place, already elaborated. The writing of women is really translating from the unknown, like a new way of communicating, rather than an already formed language.”
People gravitate toward any honest consideration of libidinal aspects of human cultural persistence. One author who notes this dynamic noted this by alluding to Ulysses. “James Joyce invented new words to make the antagonistic sentiments in the male-female relation understandable: ‘Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of a constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental female organism, passive but not obtuse.’”
Of course, this scholar also promotes a certain male/female dualism that is itself worth examining critically and completely. Nevertheless, the basic stipulation would remain. Sex: desire, attraction, fulfillment, fruition, and whatever other blah blah blah seems apt, these erotic impulses in some ways impel humanity to exist as it does, in a world where, miraculously or otherwise, a Big Tent Review comes to pass that insists on paying due attention to this ineluctable mandate of our continuing viability.
Translate This Darkness tells the tale of a woman whose life course affirmed this element of everything, this hunger that, wanton or woebegone, undergirds the sapient social universe. Ms. Morgan might well have paid for her claiming her concupiscent propensities. Her sympathectomy may have ruined her at the root chakra, from what I make of the operation; perhaps we’ll see.
In fact, hers stands as one of many fiercely brilliant womanly passages that have marked academia, psychoanalysis, and the intelligentsia’s contemplation of what being human actually means. One of these ferocious others was the indomitable Anais Nin.
A masterful mistress of lit-crit-shit stated the case like this. “Anaïs Nin’s writing sometimes forces, sometimes cajoles us into asking:
Why are there such different standards for sexual conduct when it comes to men and women?
Why slut-shaming but no male equivalent? Why slut-shaming at all?
And what is it that feels dangerous when we read a woman writing, fearlessly, about sex?”
And as a matter of course, BTR wonders about what she doesn't ask, “why the 'discomfort' with sex in the first place?” Obviously, the at-once punctiliously prudish and perniciously prurient American intellectual discourse, mirroring the Driftwood Message that closes this issue’s Tarot articulation, plays its role of undermining, if not altogether ruining organic and salubrious libidinal sensibilities.
In this vein, Frank Baum’s mother-in-law served as one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent ‘middle-class’ feminists and women’s rights advocates. Moreover, unlike her cohorts Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, Matilda Gage wanted a totally expansive incarnation of female empowerment: suffrage, activism, ownership, and basically every ‘human right.’
Moreover, as the author of Women, Church, & State, a magnificent tome full of insight and admonition apropos in the here and now, Gage established herself truly as what Gloria Steinem asserted, ‘the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their times.’ Her testimony ought to rock the boat of anyone who finds social equality an already-attained proposition.
“These old Christian theologians found woman a prolific subject of discussion, a large party classing her among brutes without soul or reason. As early as the sixth century a council at Macon (585) fifty-nine bishops taking part, devoted its time to a discussion of this question, ‘Does woman possess a soul?’ Upon one side it was argued that woman should not be called ‘Homo;’ upon the opposite side that she should, because, first, the Scriptures declared that God created man, male and female; second, that Jesus Christ, son of a woman, is called the son of man.
Christian women were therefore allowed to remain human beings in the eyes of the clergy, even though considered very weak and bad ones. But nearly a thousand years after this decision in favor of the humanity of the women of Christian Europe, it was still contended that the women of newly discovered America belonged to the brute creation, possessing neither souls nor reason.
As late as the end of the sixteenth century an anonymous work appeared, arguing that women were no part of mankind, but a species of intermediate animal between the human and the brute creation. (Mulieres non est homines, etc:)Mediaeval Christian writings show many discussions upon this point, the influence of these old assertions still manifesting themselves.”
Why such insanity? Sexual proclivities, Life-Force-Energetics, whatever one chooses to call this sine qua non of all human existence, it is not evil; not ‘original sin;’ not ‘nymphomania;’ not ‘the evil essence of woman;’ blah blah blah. To call our libidinal nature bad is—at best—a stupid and Satanic trap that guarantees misery as the most optimal outcome. It is, in other words, psychotic horseshit, if one hues to optimistic credos.
But surely such manure manages, oh so fucking conveniently, to demonize pleasure and thereby crucify the female, insodoing neatly guaranteeing that regular working people remain divided from each other, exactly as outlined in the old Russian quip that “if two neighbors are tussling with which each other, ‘the first question to ask is when did the last Englishman visit?’”
Inevitably, in such a view the Anglican headwaters of imperialism’s mighty moment in the here and now makes English involvement in the Modern Nuclear Project a test of the theory, ha ha. At least in this regard, the aphorism passes muster, a la Soddy, Rutherford, Wells, and others.
A brief passage from A Canticle For Liebowitz makes a point about such matters in a way that ought to chill the bones of any sentient creature who loves his own life and has perhaps lovingly appreciated the life of any other fellow traveler. The priests and the ‘bookleggers’ of the order of Saint Liebowitz were preparing for a new initiation of Lucifer’s nuclear ambitions.
“The Order conformed to the times, to an age of Uranium and steel and flaring rocketry, amid the grow of heavy industry and the high whine of star drive converters. ...The genetic festering is still with us from the last time that Man tried to eradicate himself. ...(P)erhaps they did know(then what would happen)but could not quite believe it till they tried it—...they had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the stillborn, the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it.
Now—now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums, now they know—with dead certainty. ...Only a race of madmen could do it again—”. Indeed. Such an oh-so-human race are we, apparently.
Possibly, the second or third message ever that I inscribed, on a bizarre panel of drifted plywood that remains yet unillustrated and unilluminated, could offer applicable admonitions to whatever a hopeful observer might say to both the purposeful progenitors and the hapless dupes of such systematic suicidal impulses. “Connected Basements & Attics” is its name.
“Any Man Who Hides Secrets in the Closet of His Soul Will Have a Basement Full of Terror in His Psyche: to Soar His Life to the Height of His Dreams, He Must, Somehow Or Other, Set His Secrets Free.”
The books that have lined up to join my limitless queue of ‘items to be read’ include Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics, a slender volume that at once irritates and illuminates. Spengler was one of history’s surliest pessimists, not that atypical of defender’s of all the petty bourgeois nonsense that constantly falls apart in trying to instill ‘freedom’ and ‘will’ and thought’s-rule-of-reality as imprimaturs of human life.
A constant influx enters the stream, so that the flow floods the banks of my studio and spills all about me.
How to Find Your Own Voice, a writer’s literary guide; Woody Allen’s most recent screamer, Mere Anarchy, with its allusion to William Butler Yeats; An American Martyr in Persia, just one of those stories too impossible to be untrue; In the Garden of the Beasts, a fact-filled political biography about America and the Nazis; Saramago’s The Elephant’s trunk and Fuentes’ The Good Conscience, oh my! One could just go on and on. Maybe we should give our reading more engaged notice, so to say.
An item of Marshall Arts’ output is apt. Here’s my e-mail to the buyer of that sweet effort at messaging. “Here are the lines from your new piece of Driftwood Message Art. ‘Tomorrow's Horizons’ is the title.
"Flagellating Floods & Tempestuous Tsunamis Await Us in All Likely Manifestations of Tomorrow on the Horizon, the Key Issue in Regard to Which Whether We Extend Helping Handles to Increase Our Own Chances, Or, Instead, Childishly If Not Idiotically Imagine That Individual Survival Might Improve As a Result of Cowboy Fancies of Purely Personal Preparedness."
Another version also sold, with a new piece on the shelf and awaiting illustration and tint. “Considering Cowboy Fantasies” was its titular ‘subject line,’ ha ha.
"Tsunami's Tempest & Flood's Flagellation Await Us These Days in Any Likely Scenario of Tomorrow That Looms Just Ahead, the Most Pressing Issue in Regard to Which Whether We Extend a Helping Handle & Thereby Expand Our Own Chances Or, Instead, Idiotically Imagine That Individual Survival Might Increase From Cowboy Fantasies of Purely Personal Preparedness."
Not only is ‘the personal always political,’ but also the political and social and economic foundations of personality are its only sources. For the most part, in its most rooted expressions, our emotions and beliefs and schemes have little or nada to do with ‘who we truly are,’ which emerges from the aforementioned background of Polis and its good friends in economics and society.
So here we are, prefabricated and assembled-in-motion simultaneously. Karl Marx said something along these lines, to me a very compelling idea. ‘People make their own history, but they do not do so under self-selected circumstances but under conditions created in and transmitted from the past. The weight of all dead generations presses like a mountain on the minds of the living.’
No doubt whatsoever exists, meanwhile, that huge changes lie ahead. Everybody is showing their edgy nerves: Jeffrey Sachs is cussing in frustration, for heaven’s sake. From Joe Rogan to James Corbett, grassroots commentators are shouting for us, regular citizens and others wont to shrug, to open our eyes and stand up, if only to ask a few questions and make our presence known.
The standard damming process which has held back popular discontent and discomfiture is giving way. The spillway is about to become a flood plain again. Nothing will long stay sacrosanct and immune from transformative energies.
Among the shifts could be many good things, for example real people-to-people connections between Cubans and Gringos. I wrote on X about a gigantic Cuban protest to demand just such transformation.
“Indeed. The grotesque monstrosity of imperial murder and mayhem, the gangster protocols of Brand Chaos, have ruled the roost here for far too long. Amerika's Nazi approach to the world, so far, has not caused breakdown in the day to day here in our ‘homeland,’ ha ha.
However, can one imagine a gathering of an equivalent proportion of the U.S. population to demand social justice? That would mean that this cruel, stupid excuse for 'policy' would come to an end.
As Fidel stated the case in 1954(or was it '53), at the end of his trial for the first attempt to overthrow Batista, ‘history will absolve me.’ Nothing will ever exonerate even the most 'liberal' U.S. ‘leaders’ from their homicidal butchery, at the behest of their corporate and fiscal masters, in search of still higher profits and ever more concentrated ownership of the world.”
Spengler writes of a “will to power.” While BTR adheres to the axiom that happiness and personal empowerment are the two operative general motivations for every non-psychotic and compos mentis human alive, the approach in these pages doesn’t focus on ‘individual will.’
In thinking along these lines, perhaps inevitably, the idea arises that something like an index exists that arrays experience along an axis that ranges from the greatest misery, short of an agonized death’s doomed destiny, to the most potent pleasure, short of eternal orgasmic ecstasy. Happiness would appear increasingly impossible as one approached immiseration, just as such a joyous state would seem inescapable at the more blissful end of things.
That said, how might an individual actor usefully view the connection between a carnal experience of pleasure and an emotional sense of happy aplomb? This strikes me as both a fascinating and hopefully helpful question.
Moreover, an aptitude in such a vein undoubtedly intersects with Big Tent Review’s insistent centering of Eros and an erotic realm that serves as source for art and literature and culture generally. How could the generation of creativity somehow separate itself from generative principles generally? Such sundering would make no sense whatsoever.
This is an ancillary point of a recent Harper’s essay. “The Painted Protest” evokes the itch to isolate that its subtitle makes explicit: “How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art.” A gallery-at-the-edge-of-the-cult experienced a tsunami of attacks as a result of this ubiquity of alienation in the unfolding of all the yesterdays and todays and tomorrows that have shown up of late.
Incoming media, printed matter, supplement and amplify this unending electronic stream, all of it so fascinating that a single day’s new rabbit-hole invitations might last many lifetimes of a journalistic or literary probing of All-That-Is. One might just go on and on.
Whatever the case may be, another recent arrival among my periodicals also connects with the current issue. Catalyst, a Jacobin quarterly, includes in the just-arrived Volume Eight, #3, a lengthy examination of Harry Braverman, whose Labor and Monopoly Capital makes a first feature appearance in today’s installment.
One of the tabs that went up in a puff of squirting electrons, so to speak, was an Axios essay or something similar, an article about ‘how bankers feel about Trump, something along those lines. The answer is simple: Great!!!
And so. And so. Ha ha. The sense that life is a game is having a head-on collision with the ineluctable awareness that playing war-games and such illuminates the limitations of such ways of thinking; if ‘winning’ destroys all life, well, what of it? We won the game. Didn’t we?
Process pointers have completely collapsed in #24, at hand. I’ll hope that things are not too disjointed, and that absent components like X posts and more are not too sorely missed, ha ha. Life’s adventure gives me these things. I share them. And round and round we go.
A litany of links this issue is missing in action. Eerily enough, Firefox repeatedly crashed—probably due to my tsunamis of tabs—so all my lovely tabs ended up scattered irretrievably, blah blah blah. Then YouTube stopped playing, a difficulty that I’ve failed to solve so far.
Yet another Introduction, therefore, comes to its particular closing, with a few notes on “artistic process” from an estimable interlocutor referenced above, Peter Porosky. “Public Influences are those events which comprise the society in which the artist lives, all past and present events as they form what is called history. No matter that ninety-nine percent of this history remains forever unknown to the artist. It still crucially affects what the present offers to the artist in terms of life's imageries.
These public influences have thus contributed to the private influences which form the artist's singular personality and personal history. Both heredity and environment conspire to produce the identity known as painter, poet, or composer.”
And so it goes!
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Mental Illness? More Like Spiritual Leeches
‘Making Voodoo topical’ might state a staunch critic’s most generous characterization of this specific and, as it were, tidy spot on the regular Big Tent calendar. Big Tent Review’s proffers ever offer historical facts and current data, along with attendant exploratory hypotheses and analytical speculation. Per usual, such elements appear today too, juxtaposing, in the event, empirical and conjectural perusals.
For now, these first paragraphs—explanatory and contextual—will vary little, if at all. For first time visitors, this matters not a whit; returning readers can skip ahead to the heading below: ‘Today’s Readings.’
A Needed Overview
I have realized for some time the ethereal disconnect between my own sensibilities about these profferals and how they must feel, or read as the case may be, to observers. Something potentially of interest—vaunted ‘Food For Thought’—is perhaps occurring, but it often lacks contextual connection between day to day reality and the images and ideas that show up in each ‘Reading.’
Therefore, I’m giving a broad summary of what these seventy-eight cards suggest, based on the philosophy and approaches of this particular approach to the Mantic Arts. In the event, The New Mythic Tarot’s programmatic method—at once scholarly and gentle, provocative and unassuming—proffers the authoritative substrate for everything that appears in these pages. So where does that leave matters?
One can only begin at the beginning. “These picture cards seem to invoke elusive memories and half-known associations with myth, legend, and folklore, and imply—despite rational objections—some kind of story or secret that cannot be logically formulated and which slips away the moment that we attempt to define it too rigidly.”
The pack that more or less typifies Tarot today is close to six hundred years old. It consists of two kinds of cards. One subset of twenty-two items deals with monumental mythic figures and problems; the larger group of fifty-six cards contains four narrative cycles that track four different exemplars of the Hero’s Journey.
The Major Arcana
Here we encounter ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical exemplars of psychic phenomena, ones that track the life passages and concatenated common experiences that every human undergoes, as well as the very often shared symbols and descriptors of core common components of every individual’s inner experiences of the delicate miracle of embodiment. From the Dionysian ‘step into the void’ of The Fool to the Ouroboros’ symbolizing constant completion and regeneration, these entries speak to overarching commonalities of our species’ sojourns—consisting of course of thoroughly individual forays—through ‘thickets of antithesis.’
This aggregate narrative arc makes perfect sense in the order that it appears in this Mythic Tradition of the Tarot, yet it might function with equal facility or foster similar fruition in many other ways. The Mythic Tarot purposefully “attempt(s)to restore some of the original simplicity and accessibility of the Tarot Cards,” in so doing promoting the notion that “humans were proud co-creators in God’s cosmos and, as microcosmic reflections of their divine source, had the power to transform not only themselves but also the structure of the world and even the divine realms.”
Universal symbols—like Mom and Dad; ubiquitous moral lessons—like love and balance; and key personal passages—like sacrifice and transitions; offer up plausible purposes’ powerful potentiation of a specific sojourn through All-That-Is. The Major Arcana are primary building blocks in this interactive process of query and discourse. Everything begins with curiosity and query, with specific flashes of insight from each card possible to pluck, as it were.
The Four Suits; Minor Arcana
These fifty-six cards, fourteen from each suit, in turn exemplify four arenas that in many ways can summarize the meaning and feel of sapient embodied Hominid lives. In large part, at least arguably, love, thought, creativity—especially in team-building, and material well-being demarcate all of humanity’s living legacy of agency and world-making.
THE SUIT OF CUPS—Here, Aphrodite is the ruling Goddess. Her jealous suspicion of any mortal’s surpassing her glory and glee initiates the meeting of Eros and Psyche, whose fated marriage marks the arc of the numbered cards in the Cups, with Goddess-favored exemplary, legendary lovers in the higher ranks of the suit, where these iconic personalities symbolize deeper delving of the depths of desire and completion in the realm of relationship.
THE SUIT OF SWORDS—Athene guides this arena, where conflict and cognition delineate the arc of Orestes’ experience, from recognizing his murderous Father to avenging him by slaughtering his own Mother, Clytemnestra, who for her part had dispatched her husband Agamemnon for his treachery. Athene’s appeal to an open, balanced mind is the heart of this arena, again with representative star-turns in the honor cards.
THE SUIT OF WANDS—Zeus himself starts out Jason’s team-building journey, which, from Ace through Ten, follows the hero’s path in his epic search for the Golden Fleece. The Emperor of the gods’ font of cosmic creativity circumscribes the material in this case, as usual with different entities, each to illustrate more about creativity and its inherent concomitant, leadership, to fill in the honor slots of the array.
THE SUIT OF PENTACLES—Potent Poseidon palpates the pursuits in this most material of living stages. The tragedy and redemption of the world’s first craftsman and capitalist, Daedalus, creates the rising action and climax of the sequence of the suit from Ace to Ten, which in aggregate emphasizes health and wealth, with mythic figures of this earthy domain, which Poseidon oversees along with the sea, standing in for the Page through the King.
A FEW ADDENDA—The New Mythic Tarot describes the deities and adventurers who form the symbolic and active elements of this tradition—Greek immortals and heroic mortals—as “(a)moral yet containing profound moral truths,” figures who “predate and permeate our modern religious symbols and permeate the art and literature of the entirety of Western culture.” The resonance of these symbolic and mythic and psychic components of Euro-American civilization ought to be obvious; in any event, the ‘Mantic Arts’ on display here do have a certain appeal, a certain je nais se quoi.
Whether one buys this system or not, one can play a thought game with the Goddess. Who wouldn’t be willing to hear possibly useful advice and ideas about Love, Cognition, Creativity, and Wealth & Well-Being? Probably for almost everyone, on certain ‘special occasions’ anyhow, such fantastical speculation will prove to be appealing, and possibly somehow healing and salubrious.
TODAY’S READINGS
Thus, we’ve arrived at today’s expression of this hypothetically divine play. Inasmuch as critical thinking undermines happy acceptance of what we inherit or otherwise ‘have coming’ from ‘masters and betters,’ our current contextualizations, if ever they manage the miracle of popularity, ha ha, will ‘ruffle feathers’ among the king roosters of our human chicken coop. That’s okay though.
We’re in good company, after all. Writers and other cultural producers in every conceivable medium, when they pull no punches in pushing pudenda-palpating permutations, cause clenched-tooth consternation among supposedly moralistically inclined, and already mentioned, ‘masters and betters,’ people like the messieurs Bush and their minions.
Anais Nin is merely one such, as today’s Introduction points out, insodoing paralleling aspects of #23’s extensive initial lit-review. The true nature of our ‘perpetual prurience,’ the inherent polymorphous perversity of most folks’ wanton wanting, is hard enough for people to admit much of the time, and thus it preordains at minimum a judgmental attitude toward the likes of this venerable author of erotica and effluvia.
Nin’s Henry and June is a case in point. “Thus Nin searches for older men in her life to replace this father figure and re-enact or imitate the incest desire. As seen in the passage, her older lover Henry takes on the role of the surrogate father and lover.
Incest also occurs between Anais Nin and her cousin Eduardo, who is part of her actual family, ‘Eduardo, my own blood,’ and who is also her lover. She notes, ‘He was the first man I loved.’ He is described as her childhood love or first lover.” Like them or loathe them, such ‘playing-doctor’ exigencies ubiquitously mark popular passages.
As last issue’s take on “Communication & Human Survival” asserted, ‘sex and violence undergird every act of human storytelling worthy of the name.’ Part of the allure is in confronting our disgust and self-loathing at our sexual selves, even as the hunger hangs on like a thirsty flea, LOL! As if bemoaning Life Force Energy might somehow strengthen and fortify our souls and psyches as they seek more of what we simultaneously crave and condemn.
These sorts of works, often enough at ‘literature’s’ sketchy fringes, thereby address #24’s Tarot temptation, so to speak. Emotional wellness, mental well-being, however one categorizes or describes this realm of human endurance, cannot present anything other than grotesque fetid swamps full of lethal creatures unless we come to friendly terms with Eros in our lives.
Almost universally, either libidinal longing’s fulfillment or its yearning, yucky continuation elicit the daily daunting difficulties that comprise embodiment’s ongoing delicate miracles. Whatever one’s luck and evolved sensibility of aplomb, then, heartbreak, along with the aching pangs of unrequited wanting, occasionally will effect an altogether enervated sensibility in each person’s passage.
Inevitably, we complain or at least give voice to frustration, disappointment, piquant hope’s fierce persistence, and all manner of similar romantic blah blah blah. What would wise counsel suggest? Graham Greene’s observation in Loser Takes All, a punchy novella, is apt. He describes friendly parry and thrust between a couple.
“‘Oh yes, (aging and thickening)would(make a difference)’, she said. ‘You know it would,’ and the talk suddenly faded out. She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.” Yet we do crave sage suggestions.
In the event, and in any case, the entire ‘Tarot tradition’ concerns something akin to the analyst’s couch, an evocation of shamanic interventions over the millennia of human navigation of the rocks and depths of the shoals of time and space through which our matter’s energetic flight has been streaking its twirling arc up the funnel of the cosmic swirl.
Furthermore, in its every incarnation, this twisting traversal of time and space evokes elements of mothering from start to finish. Our very emergence is a gendered labor, as is nursing any infant; at many a crisis point, in extremis, we all might, as if by reflex, call out for our Moms. So too today then.
Joseph Campbell himself contextualizes such perspectives. In Transformations of Myth Through Time, for instance, he spends several pages considering Divine-Mother artifacts from plus or minus 20,000 years ago. Culture’s evolutionary formulations live in these ‘figurines.’
“Many of them suggest very strongly counts of the lunar cycle. So maybe, out of the women’s concern for this rhythm that they will have recognized in their own bodies, we come to mathematical and even astronomical reckoning. …The whole magic of the woman is brought here into one cycle.”
A bit later, he continues, quoting from Chief Seattle’s ‘concession speech,’ agreeing to ‘sell’ indigenous lands. In granting this exchange, the great leader asks, “‘(w)ill you teach your children what we have taught our children, that the Earth is their Mother? What befalls the Earth befalls all the sons of the Earth.’”
This Native-American wise-one is emphatic. “‘This we know. The Earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that connects us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.’”
More recent evocations along similar paths will appear in a lengthy examination below the fold. More or less the lot of them emerged from coming across one of my unearthed volumes—or unboxed is more accurate. Examining the heiress inheritances of Christiana Morgan, she who bonded so deeply with Jung and then went on to make a mark—but not a name—as a psychologist, led me to an entire coterie of such women.
They long predated the iconic work of Riane Eisler, or of the magisterial Joseph Campbell himself, and their thinking moreover espoused many similar models and methods in which feminine energies were at once psychically central and intrinsically instrumental. As a matter of course, such ideas lie at the heart of Big Tent operational standards, as it were, in which Goddess grace governs the cosmos.
R.D. Laing may, in terms of credentials and other ‘badges of authority,’ be first among equals in this coterie of thinkers about ‘modern mental medicine,’ who, as it were, eschew judgment’s labeling frenzies in favor of an integration of relationship and interrelationship in figuring ‘how we tick.’
Laing prefaces an edition of The Divided Self sagely indeed. “A man who would rather be dead than Red is normal.” One reviewer called this, one of Laing’s many works that are mandatory in any masterful ministration of a canon, ‘a treatise on psychiatric problems that made all others seem fragmentary.’ Laing starts us out along such a course.
“Freud insisted that our civilization is a repressive one. There is a conflict between the demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive energies, explicitly sexual. Freud could see no easy resolution of this antagonism, and he came to believe that in our time the possibility of simple natural love between human beings had already been abolished.
Our civilization represses not only 'the instincts', not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men(a la the upcoming Herbert Marcuse), it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.
In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.”
Well might one go further. Dr. Thomas Szasz and a coterie of female psychoanalysts, among others, provide just such additional fodder, below-the-fold just ahead. In the event, ongoing themes and general parameters of a BTR methodology appear hither and yon among exemplars of human intellect and understanding.
Before further layered contextualization and attendant blah blah blah about our anti-shamanic psychic practices in these days of modern times, however, what about the reading? What’s our Tarot question for the present Big Tent Spiral Spread?
An inquiry along these lines might evoke interesting ideas. “How can cognitively capable and emotionally agreeable people relate to monopoly media’s obvious and widespread propagation of ‘concerns’ about ‘mental health?’”
In the event, with requisite shuffles and cuts and soulful concentration, the array hit the table just like this. First of all, only the second time in some thousand Readings, three cards Jumped out at me in the midst of the process, in this case during my more or less meticulous shuffling and meditating. Such ‘plucks,’ though not as intentional as the Spiral Spread in its own right, inform and apply to the entire intertwining that the ‘divining’ entails.
Here, the first triad-Jumper-card in view was Hades and the definition of Death. His dark countenance covered Orestes’ terrified self-censorship, in the form of the Two of Swords, at the irrepressible conflict between his parents, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. The bottom of this triumvirate of horror and hostility was the Eight of Swords, in which Orestes—pursued by the Furies for his performance of Apollo’s bidding to ‘avenge his father’—once more experiences even deeper nauseated disgust at tomorrow’s prospects. Next, as if on cue, the Essence continues this gruesome sequence with the brutal murder that occurs in the Three of Swords.
Nor do things lighten up much for the present BTR Tarot temporal triad. Past Developments show Psyche’s breaking her promise to Eros—in the Five of Cups—and thereby say a bit about betrayal. Present Passages gives up the top of the mythic arch for the frequent Swords today, the Ten, in which Athene rescues the fatally hopeless Orestes from the implacably furious Furies of femininity and fate by ‘inventing the jury on the spot.’ Likely Future Developments offers another deliciously unexpected coincidence, the Four of Cups, Psyche before she goes back on her vow, conversing with her envious and jealous sisters who ply her with horrible speculations about the ‘monster mate’ who would remain ‘eternally unseen.’
The in-this-case ten-card continuation continues with tricky, fickle, irresistible Aphrodite—the Ace of Cups—and her portents of potential loving connection, insodoing representing a decidedly upbeat No-Matter-What, Opportunities. The penultimate spot, Problems-&-Prospects, yields a portrait that has become quite a common, recent Big Tent symbolic interlocutor, Jason and his inspired leadership to create a heroic team in the Four of Wands. The Synthesis for #24, finally, proffers the at once generous and oh-so-dangerous Poseidon, whose Ace of Pentacles portends material possibilities of momentous potential.
A yes-or-no conclusion about this type of attempt to untangle propaganda from actual helpful advisories might state the matter like this. “Aren’t these avalanches of images, about ‘improved’ cognitive and emotional response, little more than superficial pablum, basically advertisements of a sort?” While one answer is obviously an irrefutable affirmative, reasons in alignment with today’s unavoidably cavalier speculation amplify the plausibility, nevertheless, of ‘reading something meaningful’ into this specific fall of the cards.
The symbols alone ought to chill the bones and raise the hackles of anyone who is paying attention. The three Jumpers, provocatively goose such an interpretation. Readers can rest assured; more lies ahead to deepen this delving of our quest.
Before additional processing of this spread comes forward, however, as has typically remained the case of late, #24 will first pose and respond to an inquiry for a triptych template. Today’s trio will offer a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis rubric for examining matters of interest.
This second question in question might make some sensible amendments to our sense of things along such lines as these. “What are some useful thoughts about our ‘spiritual’ needs and nostrums in the current context?”
And here, the template yields another second showing, Aphrodite’s Ace of Cups and its emotional upwelling as the Thesis. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)
(Chapter XXIII closed like this. “‘Entonces,’ Pama later told her adolescent children, Alvaro and Patricia, ‘la radio no se apagaba.’ Alvaro the elder kept trying though, turning and twisting the knob as the color suffused his neck and face, ‘the red of rage that was his signature so often,’ till, with a snort of derisive laughter he pulled out the service .45 automatic with which he and his son would ‘blow up’ rats on the morrow, and fired one complete magazine into the dash of the car. The trusty conveyance's engine and operational components never seemed to suffer, but the radio never again refused to desist in its static-laden dissonance.
As little Alvo, never yet one to fear noise, especially from his Papi, after a brief moment of wide-eyed shock volubly applauded the explosions, Pamela recoiled in horror, screaming in two short screeches to express her terror. Crossing herself reflexively, to herself she said as the tears came to her eyes, ‘Podria haber sido una monja.’
Her husband cackled, as if he could read her thoughts. ‘Mira donde señora! You wouldn't have nearly as much fun if you were a nun.’ And, more to the point of this overall narrative project, Lou’s future spouse would not have had the ‘conceptual force,’ as it were, ever to enter this cosmic scene.”
In today’s posting, we turn and return to Alabama, where Lou’s days and nights revolved, then as now, around books and study and hypothesizing and, inescapably, Eros Even the subject for today’s “Empowered Political Forays,” Harry Braverman’s famous volume, shows up in today’s Chapter.)
CHAPTER XXIV
***
Louis thought, very explicitly, the following thought. “Could anything be more random?” He'd been thinking a lot about chance, as he stood at the 'New Arrivals' table of Another Roadside Attraction, pondering the sudden influx of cash into his pocket from his backgammon 'lessons' for the svelte and hungry senior, Richardson Richards, whose quotidian origins belied his grandly resonant name.
He'd been looking over a copy of Labor and Monopoly Capital, certain now that he could afford it, not only because of his BG winnings but also since he'd managed to convert both his graduate fellowship stipend into a pound of pot and that amount of consciousness-altering weed into two quarter pound and seven ounce transactions, thereby more than doubling his and Danielle's available cash, not counting gambling windfalls, when the callow fellow who'd been cleaning the plate glass at the front of the store crashed through the window and sat up staring at a gusher of blood from just South of his groin. Louis stared too. Then, without any conscious cognition, he dropped the book and sprang toward the shocked and bleeding bloke.
As one would expect in such circumstances, Lou did not think much of anything about what was transpiring. Panic was one type of response, in which case the nineteen year old worker who still hadn't made a sound and continued to gaze at gushers of blood that had reached the counter display in front of the cash register—where Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins; a new edition of I'll Take My Stand in juxtaposition with another, equally pristine version of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; along with chapbooks and slender volumes of poetry by John Berryman, all peeked out from their now blood-spattered glass-sheeted casings—would quite likely quickly suffer cardiac arrest as he bled out. Another sort of engagement would be purely professional, but that required pro training and substantial practice, neither of which had been part of Lou James' experience.
The third kind of behavior to exhibit in the event, leaving aside the hideous idiocy of the shrug and erstwhile uncaring flight into the clear light of a Tuscaloosa Autumn day, was the impromptu manifestation of action that was a combination of common sense and, in this case, Reserve Officer Training Corps instruction, which rated the mandate to “Stop the Bleeding” as incontrovertibly most critical in any situational extremity of this type. “Clearly, the only two ways to staunch a bloody geyser were to use a tourniquet or direct, firm, unrelenting pressure, and you cannot very well tourniquet someone at the hip, but it's not like I came up with that idea,” he later told Danielle.
No indeed. He did, however, find himself sitting astride the increasingly worried young man, from whom, with a look of compassionate regard and caring concern, Lou had extracted the name Martin Griswold, before he took his t-shirt, wadded it into a pillow, and, having examined the wound to insure as much as possible that no dangerous shards of glass remained, pressed on the fountain of dark bloody flux with a wild rigor. “Does this hurt?”
“Yeah, it kinda does,” the pasty, hapless sufferer had said with a quietly plaintive whine, the color slowly draining from his face to leave behind a stricken pallor.
“Well, that's okay, because otherwise you might bleed to death.” Lou had smiled at Martin till the youth looked him in the eye and nodded, just as both of them heard the keening wail of an approaching ambulance and thought, more or less in tune with each other, “Maybe we'll all live through this after all.”
Just a minute and a few seconds more passed, and then a crew of three Emergency Medical Technicians were on the scene, tearing off Martin's pants leg with practiced precision and hooking him up to a plasma drip and wheeling him out the door, with an inflated pressure bandage that took over Lou's function in this particular 'blink of an eye.' The leader of the E.M.T. trio returned prior to a final move toward the hospital to take Lou's name. '“Good work there; you could have saved his life.”
Narrative freak that he was, the estimable Mr. James imagined a dark premise from what could otherwise bring a moment of elation and positive feelings about an actor's humanity. “I hope he doesn't grow up to be a mass murderer, or the cretin who starts World War Three. Now that would make a good Twilight Zone episode.”
Its siren again a time-splitting cacophony, the rescue vehicle lurched onto University Boulevard and pulled a U-turn as Lou simultaneously watched it recede from view and brooded about the last several months of his own very fledgling existence. His year and two month 'internship' at Bryce, originally of only a single season's duration supposedly, had culminated in a somewhat spectacular dismissal in mid-August, which in turn had yielded his American Studies graduate school 'provisional' admission and finagling some funds for his thesis on Birmingham, research for which he was gathering like a clever squirrel could manage to hoard nuts in a time of bountiful predators and copious acorns.
Meanwhile, his 'open relationship' with Danielle had undergone marvelous and difficult developments. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Evoking Ecstasy, Potentiating Passion
Love & Erotic Passion names the Driftwood Art category for today, in the event the most popular vector for Marshall Arts’ profferals. Just as in biotic existence, as it were, we all, without exception, bloom from erotic eruption—the ‘Virgin Mary’ notwithstanding—so too this Carnal Categorization delimits the pulsations at the central beating heart of cultural evolution.
Some readers may recollect Riane Eisler’s thinking in this arena of human affairs. Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body was the subtitle of the thinker’s monumental Sacred Pleasure, in which she hypothesized something akin to a social evolutionary choice that can move either toward Partnership or toward Dominator models.
“In comparing partnering and dominating systems, Eisler analyzes the androcracy (governance of social organization dominated by males) of Indo-European and other societies, versus greater orientation to the partnership model (as distinct from matriarchy) for the social organization of Neolithic Europe and the later Minoan civilization that flourished in prehistoric Bronze Age Crete.” At least multiple similar samples of historical human development cast our kind as lovers first and foremost.
Whatever the case may be, this dynamic process of coupling and uncoupling, recoupling and decoupling, contains many aspects, facets, or elements. For example, one might envision Eros via a lens of Polis, in which policy and justice and such all share the spotlight with lusty liminality. Another subset would put its emphasis on the multiple chances for pain and betrayal to appear while stars-crossed fate impels connection, come what may. There’s always romance as well, of course.
A mirror to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience comes to mind. ‘Variations of Themes of Eros,’ or something similar, would inevitably have many units to purvey before a complete unspooling of such a bundle of yarn might even approach ‘comprehensive presentation.’
For purposes of #24, though, the most graphic and intense expression of passionate embraces comes to the fore. “Let me be your beast of burden,” croons Mick Jagger. “Come on baby, light my fire,” blasts out Jim Morrison.
“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, She was the best damn woman that I ever seen. She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies, Knocking me out with those American thighs. Taking more than her share, had me fighting for air, She told me to come, but I was already there.
Cause the walls start quaking, the earth starts shaking, My mind starts aching, and we are making it,
And you, shook me all night long; yeah you, shook me all night long.” AC/DC and the rest of the popular culture canon contextualizes this energy. Its ubiquity means that it pulsates in every nook and cranny of us and the human culture in which such ‘earth-shaking’ encounters mark the origin stories of all and sundry here among us.
To an extent, the Goddess mandates such salacious, suggestive prose in all the forms and formulations of a Marshall Artist’s ‘guaranteed kick in the ASSthetic;’ otherwise, She would not deliver such deliciously curvaceous and suggestively sinuous sculptings of time and tide, ha ha.
All on its own, the very Driftwood appears both sexual and sensual, like a nude massage between strangers, overseen and introduced by Mother Nature. Some pieces more favorably suggest copulation than the most aggressive instances of sexy—or perhaps sexist is more apropos—advertising and ‘marketing.’
What is more, decidedly, any reader might hearken back to #’s 4 and 5, in which the review and assessment of Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism advances as its central culprit in such developments the many machinations of sexual repression. As a matter of course, Marshall Arts and Big Tent Review exist to counter such thanatopic death wishes, so to say.
Last issue’s literature-review makes a related point, essentially that Marshall Arts is in good company, as in All of World Literature, in highlighting sex as one of the central pillars of plot, characterization, and moral or ethical or spiritual or thematic development. This does not appear in categorical terms, perhaps, yet its persistence is no more deniable than King David’s lusting after Bathsheba.
In fact, this little search—<"king david" lust wife>—garnered 454,000 hits all by itself. Eros rules; any other opinion is at best silly.
The different variations on ‘the love theme’ are part and parcel of this section of Big Tent Review, with today’s material embracing the most pugnacious, salacious, and curvaceous expressions of this ‘categorical imperative’ in favor of connubial connection and raucous, randy relations. Though now but one of four sections of a complete Marshall Arts setup of a Feral Nerd Performance Space, Love & Erotic Passion constitute nearly half of sales.
Though a deluge of delicious delight lies just ahead, we’ll begin with a more nuanced expression of passion, in titular regard, “Love in the Time of COVID,” which entered my love’s Holy Days stocking as a statement of our experience, via Unjected’s bringing us together in the first place, and our claim to its more or less ‘everlasting presence’ in our ongoing life-and-times evolution. Here are those lines, containing plentiful juice yet also reaching out to express a wider view of life.
“Even in an Erstwhile HyperCOVIDified context, Our Love, Despite the Mandated Manure That Overflows Most Monopoly Mediation, Vaults Us Daily Through Superheated Portals of Vulcanized Ecstasy at the Same Time That Whirlpools of Social Misery & Economic Ruin Close at Hand Call on Us to Expand Our Loving Collective & Embrace Various & Sundry Comrades With Whom We Can Evolve the Organized Radical Ardor Essential to Revolutionize Society & Sustain Species Survival, Not in Spuriously 'Secure' Isolation, But in Intentional Salubrious Solidarity.”
Calligraphy placards are part of the process, and my Drifted Wood ‘love gifts’ to my sweetheart have not yet produced these for our ‘home gallery’ of messages. ‘Better late than never’ has long stated one of my favorite ways of phrasing things, in any eventuality where I commingle procrastination with dutiful attention.
Whatever the case may be, here we go, emphasizing at this moment the raw and licentious, the whimsical and lubricious, the delicious and altogether plighted-together-as-one. Life has brought us here—every single Homo Sapient creature among us—in just this fashion. Nature will eliminate us if we insist on prioritizing Mass Collective Suicide’s exorbitant machines of death at the cost of these ultimately Feminine principles of pleasuring and desire.
First on tap will often appear ‘items in the queue,’ wood that lacks images or coloration or both. So too today.
Thus, here we are! At the ready, in this initial placement, are several new pieces and their lissome curves in wooden formations. “Salubrious, Often in Seemingly Cylindrical Fashion, at Once Salacious Sensibility & Frisky Frolic, Our Love Affair Has Delineated Our Lives, Through Cycles of Gain & Pain, Upheaval & Uplift, As a Roundabout Romp That Ever Engages Our Angling, Energetically & Enthusiastically, For Erotic Epiphany & Climactic Glee.”
Yes indeed. “Cylindrical Epiphany” was that title. Even a side order of ‘Climactic Glee’ can burnish a day with a dandy shine of candy and fantasy. A Michael’s discount-bin heart launches another barrage of boisterous bliss with “Drinking Another Kiss.”
“With Souls Blazing Bliss, Our Hearts Palpate Pulsing Potent Passion Each Time That We Lock Our Lips to Drink Another Kiss.” Yes. That’s what I’m talking about, ha ha.
Here’s a little found-frog confection with a dripping stream of steamy loving lustiness, entitled “Frolicsome Affinities.” “Love’s Luscious Libidinal Libations Allure Us So Fetchingly As to Facilitate an Instant Familiarity With Our Affinity For Frolicking Like Infatuated Frogs.”
This one, “Plumbing Holy, Cavernous Chasms,” graces a piece of wood to which delicate prudes would point with accusations of pornography. It practically slithers its contextualization of copulating frenzy.
“To Seek the Sacred Reaches of Our Souls Together, We Follow Unfolding Swirling Whirls, & Plumb Holy Cavernous Chasms, That Overflow With Magma When Our Mutual Miracles Materialize Magical Molten Meltdowns; If, Moreover, You Share With Me the Piquant Pulsing Power of Your Poignant Passion, I Jump a Cosmic Jig, &, Miraculously Once More, Dance Through Heaven’s Gate to Eternal Effervescent Presences of Our Embraces.”
“Whatever!” names this next Love Stick. “Whatever in the World Fate Might Will, I Pant in Anticipation to Await Life’s Looming, Loopy Spill of Our Newest Grand & Glorious Gleeful Thrill Together, Tangoing in Tandem Toward Further Felicitous Twirling of Our Continuing Connubial Conjunction’s Ecstatic Combustible Cosmic Swirling.”
This diminutive Love Chunk, a bit larger than a mere Charm, came to me from jettisoned construction castaways. “Ecstatic Eruption” expresses its headline. “Our Love’s Notches Grant Grooves to Gaia’s Grand Goddess Grace, Where Gleeful Abandon Rises to Greet Ecstatic Eruption in the Superheated Streams of Our Steamy Beastly Feast.”
“Breaking Every Fast With Boisterous Bounty” gives a subject heading to an especially suggestive stick. “With Opened Heart & Mind & Arms, Your Embraces Break Every Fast That I Undertake, &, Through the Magic of Your Enthusiastic Engagement’s Ecstatic Eruptions, Deliver a Glorious, Gleeful Beastly Feast With Which We Succor Ourselves on Love’s Ambrosia & Sustain Salubrious Sensibility of Our Ever Imminent Erotic Emanations.”
For readers of adequate vocabulary, these words ought to prove arousing. Such is their purpose, no matter what.
In any case, Below-the-Fold, readers will meet up with another handful of these as-yet-unfinished erotic emanations. The line-up now contains several dozens of these instances of Marshalled Artistry, ha ha.
But the litany of the erotic items to satisfied customers far exceeds those 'in process.' Evocative of that greater extent, everyone starts out just bursting with a lively libido’s elemental driving energy, after all; most of us finish with similar longings that are only slightly more comprehensible when we exit than they were when we entered this realm via one ‘portal to paradise’ or another.
Thus, “Portal to Paradise” might well boost the bounty of beneficent erotic abundance that is available to all and sundry among our kith and kin. “The Most Glorious Portal to Paradise Merely Echoes the Sounding Joy of Your Pounding Passion As It Pulses Anew Our Grand Passage to the Ecstatic Conflagration That Ignites When We Renew Our Ongoing Erogenous Embraces of Each Other & Epiphany.”
One might follow such a missive with a brief blessing, larger than a mere Love Charm, like this, “Wholly Holy” its titular heading. “Your Wholly Holy Feral Form’s Comely Curves, & the Sweet Beastly Priestess Feast That We Share Therefrom, Soothes & Succors Me Body & Soul, Nourishing All That Is Seeking in My Psyche & Inflammable in My Flesh.” Oh my goodness, a fast-breaking juicy delight is at hand.
“Wholly Material Holiness” delves a related repository of randy, raunchy sweetness. "Your Holiness Is Wholly Material, Your Spiritual Blaze Burns With Bounteous Pulses of Blood & Sweat, Your Sweet Release Alights All That Is Seeking in My Psyche & Combustible in My Flesh."
“Betokening Tantra” is another diminutive piece full of luscious litanies. "Each Lusty Tantric Token That We Bestow on Each Other Elicits Another Grin, Further Glee, & Epiphany's Gracious Sweet Release That in Turn Encourages Additional Embraces To Trace Afresh Our Salacious Trove of Pleasure's Treasure & Ecstasy's Euphoric Eruption."
The very taste of gushing grace emanates from “Glory’s Guiding Glee.” "May You & Gaia Let My Tongue Become a Feather To Stoke Your Pleasure For Us to Measure at Our Leisure As Our Salacious Embraces Array Grand Goddess Grace & Its Glories of Groovy Gliding Glee."
Along a kindred course, “Overflowing” brings forth one version of a popular ‘Love Bowl,’ so to say. "Everyone's Personal Cup of Sensual Pleasure Persistently Overflows Its Lips, Yet in Instances of Your Carnal Caresses of Conjugated Bliss, This Exquisite Ecstatic Eruption Surpasses Episodic to Create a Volcanic Cauldron, Flashing Epiphany, That Ushers in Nirvana's Euphoric Combustible Flush."
“Feisty Fiending, Soulful Longing” touches a nerve perhaps even more sensitive. "Your Glorious Chortles of Climactic Glee Erupt & Vault Me Through Everlasting Instants When Convulsions of Nirvana's Nuptial Nuance Allay Feisty Feral Fiending & Soulful Lusty Longing."
Passion Panels of different shapes and sources account for most of the products of passionate palpation that grace the tables in the Feral Nerd Performance Space, yet occasional Homily Love Sticks also take their bows at center stage. One popular such item grew out of slips of wood that suggested titular “Summoning Fingers.” Here are three versions, ha ha.
“A Single Beckoning Finger Summons Me to Your Ever Green Inclinations To Engage & Delight ourselves in the Leaping Frolic of Our Every Adventure.” And, again, “A Single Come Hither Gesture Signifies Both a Summoning to Indulge Anew Our Ever Green Inclination to Frolic in Each Others' Embraces & a Beckoning to Renew a Robust Reckoning of Our Mutual Relations of Jovial Social Junction & Ecstatic Connubial Combustion.”
This is most salacious indeed of this ‘best-selling’ threesome. “A Single Summoning Finger Signifies An Irresistible Come Hither, Alluring Us to Indulge Afresh Our Ever Green Inclination to Frolic in Each Others' Arms, a Beckoning to Reckon Again the Ecstatic Convivial Combustion of Our Connubial Conjunction's Carefree Carnal Bliss. ”
As noted above, much smaller, briefer blissful bantering finds homes among Love Charms in the Marshall Arts mix. A few of these, at just this juncture, a sojourn among the tiniest expressions of passion in the mix here, will precede further exemplars from the both hundreds of purchases and the extensive in-process queue’s contents.
All tolled, at least a hundred of these ‘tiny tots’ are now a part of Marshall Arts’ commercial flow. Here, in the event, is an initial example. “Whenever We Align Our Embraces & Activate Ecstatic Adoration, We Reignite Matter's Persistent Potential for Cosmic Carnal Combustion.” …(continued below the fold)
Empowered Political Forays—’Outliers’ Who Figure Things Out
(This section of Big Tent Review orients readers to what we can describe as ‘realms of existence’ that concern citizenship, agency, authority, along with other aspects of how ‘political power grows from the barrel of a gun,’ in the evocative words of Mao Tse Tung. The longest series in these BTR pages dealt with the ever green theme of Capitalism on Drugs. A thematic summary about those materials may be apt to repeat.
“In examining matters of contraband’s convolutions of consciousness, in a world of markets and commodities and opportunistic legislating of this protocol or that rule of procedure, we touched simultaneously on hugely important impacts that ‘drugs’ have had—at times medicinally, at times otherwise—on social and economic spheres of influence, so to speak. The surreal environments that have resulted—making war on hemp plants!—entertain and intrigue, our eyes dancing as our minds fly, even as they sometimes seem no more friendly than a live high-tension wire that whips and dances and sparkles before out faces.”
For the next two issues or so, along quite a different contextual track, we will examine the work of bootstrap scholar and lifelong highly-skilled worker Harry Braverman. His seminal creation, Labor and Monopoly Capital, forms the foundation for what appears today: summary, assessment, evaluation, historical context, etc.
In #25, readers will learn of the present-day impacts of, and considerations in regard to, Braverman’s masterwork. Thus, in a minimum of a pair of briefings, we’ll understand both something about his primary points and at least a bit about contemporary thinkers’ opinions and theories about, and use of, the insights and import of Labor and Monopoly Capital and its core ideas.)
Figuring Things Out With Harry Braverman: Labor & Monopoly Capital in the Here-&-Now
PREFATORY REMARKS
Labor and Monopoly Capital serves as a Thesis for contemporary life. The book and its author argue that, by studying skilled labor meticulously, engineers and other agents of fiscal monopolies figure out machine-designs that permit Capital to co-opt skilled work and permit anyone, in some cases anyway, to produce the outputs of master machinists, welders, and other highly trained and knowledgeable and crafty operators.
Taylorism, ‘scientific-management,’ automation itself, all depended on the profiteering protocols of the high-and-mighty ‘owners of capital,’ who calculated closely indeed just how much extra loot, or profit, they might extract from an ‘average unit of labor’ thereby. Perhaps the central notion of Braverman’s conceptualization of matters at hand is that we all too often think of all these relationships—of appropriation, exploitation, expropriation, and proprietary imprimatur—as foreordained or even inevitable, which, even inasmuch as believing so is reasonable, does not explain or delineate the relationships themselves, their evolution and imposition and such.
This alienation of output and process from the producers who proceed with said process and create said output is primary to the plans of capitalists at the monopolistic pinnacle of things, something that, on reflection, could hardly be otherwise. Any firm that ‘out-competes’ its competitors, almost by definition, focuses obsessively on ‘getting more blood from a stone.’
This imposition of draconian drudgery does not unfold by chance. Nor is such a state something that owners can impose by fiat or mandate as a ‘command performance.’ Incontrovertibly, to the contrary, much—and sometimes all—ruling class attention that centers on production begins and ends with disempowerment of labor in order to reorder work-life and maximize the value-surplus that underpins the very extraction of any profit.
Braverman illuminates this. “Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are not adequately controlled, because they retain their grip on the actual processes of labor. So long as they control the labor process itself, they will thwart efforts to realize the full potential inherent in their labor power.
To change the situation, control over the labor process must pass into the hands of management, not only in a formal sense but by the controls and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance.” That last phrase speaks volumes: “including its mode of performance.”
Anyone who has attended an ‘assembly-line’ production feels the impact of those words in his bones, senses the daunting difficulty of the attendant ‘dexterities’ in her muscles and sinews. The ubiquity of this intimate proximity to brutalized mechanized-drudgery, all sanitary and solicitous simultaneously, sparkly and technologically ever-so-slick, makes Braverman’s resonance impossible to deny.
For certain, following such a scheme degrades arguably the most human activity, that of productive effort toward an identifiable end, or labor. Thus we have the subtitle of the book: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.
Again, L&MC addresses this fundamental issue. “The transformation of working humanity into a ‘labor force,’ a ‘factor of production,’ an instrument of capital, is an incessant and unending process.
The condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work; and since the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical, intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always remain to some degree a threat to capital.”
In a new Introduction to the iconic effort’s latest edition, John Bellamy Foster firms the foundation for belief that Braverman and his work establish benchmarks and otherwise express clearly parameters for defining fundamental rubrics of the here-and-now. “This unique background as a socialist intellectual who had been a worker and an activist within the productive core of world industry, one who rose by dint of his political struggles and intellectual brilliance to executive positions within two important presses, gave Braverman unique qualifications to take on the difficult task of stripping the veil away from the capitalist labor process.”
Foster now writes for Monthly Review, where he has served as a celebrated editor, the same press where Braverman acted as chief for a time. Whatever the case may be, Labor & Monopoly Capital presents an iconic centerpiece of Harry Braverman’s oeuvre, writing and thinking that will help anyone who wants to estimate options more intelligently and accurately.
PART I—LABOR AND MANAGEMENT
In his forward to the original edition, Paul Sweezy makes explicit that he and Paul Baran, in their Monopoly Capital—a must-read in similar fashion as Braverman’s volume—did not touch what to Marx was of the most critical importance, “the labor process” itself. This admission underlies Sweezy’s admiration for the incisive arguments that today’s Dr. B advances in regard to the ways that people do in fact work together to make and do all the things that are necessary to our mutual habitation of our Terran terrain, so to speak.
Braverman introduces his book with a powerful deconstruction of the very ‘bourgeois sociology-of-work’ that he demonstrates is fundamentally flawed and as often as not utterly false. A series of six chapters follow, as part of the overall Part I Unit in question. Five such unit-entities, alongside fore and aft bits and pieces, comprise the volume.
At the outset, one key to his entire analysis is avoiding the reification of technology, as if mechanical ‘wizardry’ determined things instead of being itself the result of certain socioeconomic relationships. “Within the capitalist firm it is the social forms that dominate technology, rather than the other way around,” wrote Braverman in a footnote that dissects the true foolishness of standard assessments. In a social cosmos of amicable nerds, just the Introduction would be worth a little series.
Who knows? In any event, Braverman entitles Chapter One, “Labor & Labor Power.” The author quotes from Marx about what he wants to say concerning human labor, working people, and society. The central point revolves around the central place of said labor in social existence. Yet what is this ‘labor,’ really?
"We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells.
But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.
He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.'" Whatever else is true, Marx was reason’s chief poet during his productive lifetime.
A key initial theme concerns a specific understanding of alienation. In this view, this core Homo Sapiens capacity—the creative envisioning and accomplishment of ‘useful outcomes,’ ha ha—becomes an intermittent, or even at-will, property that people of means may purchase and do with as they will.
Braverman provides a transitional bridge from this consideration of bought-and-paid-for, alienated labor power to matters of how such a ‘property-owner’ might employ his or her new product most optimally and profitably. Chapter Two is “The Origins of Management.”
“The coin of labor has its obverse side: in purchasing labor power that can do much, he is at the same time purchasing an undefined quality and quantity. What he buys is infinite in potential, but in its realization it is limited by the subjective state of the workers, by their previous history, by the general social conditions under which they work as well as the particular conditions of the enterprise, and by the technical setting of their labor.
The work actually performed will be affected by these and many other factors, including the organization of the process and the forms of supervision over it, if any.” In an ad hoc way, if not altogether purposively, this serves as transition to the question of these 'supervising formulas,' or management protocols.
Historical examination makes clear that ‘managerial expertise’ has always entailed nothing less than the manipulative use and comprehensive control of other people so as to maximize both output and compliance. The examples are legion. One outfit’s “Book of Laws has survived from (an) enterprise(of Ambrose Crowley): 'The firm provided a doctor, a clergyman, three schoolmasters and a poor relief, pension, and funeral scheme, and by his instructions and exhortations Crowley attempted to dominate the spiritual life of his flock, and to make them into willing and obedient cogs in his machine.
It was his express intention that their whole life, including even their sparse spare time (the normal working week being of eighty hours) should revolve around the task of making the works profitable.'
In this method of total economic, spiritual, moral, and physical domination, buttressed by the legal and police constraints of a servile administration of justice in a segregated industrial area, we see the forerunner of the company town familiar in the United States in the recent past as one of the most widely used systems of total control before the rise of industrial unionism.”
Capital’s apologists uniformly downplay such clearly visible dynamics. ‘They’re just natural; concentrated efforts make technique more important; blah blah blah.’ An analytical upshot, obvious and indisputable, yet, despite its relevance, too-seldom developed, might state its case like this. Managerial manifestations require this dispositive sayso like proving water's two atomic components requires such techniques as electrolysis.
“It was not that the new arrangement was ‘modern,’ or ‘large,’ or ‘urban’ which created the new situation, but rather the new social relations which now frame the production process, and the antagonism between those who carry on the process and those for whose benefit it is carried on, those who manage and those who execute, those who bring to the factory their labor power, and those who undertake to extract from this labor power the maximum advantage for the capitalist.”
In other words, the wellspring of ‘good management’ is a multilevel capacity to amplify exploitation and extraction of product from orchestrated effort. The control of labor results from class conflict, congruent with Clausewitz in Braverman’s telling of the tale. Owners rule; workers obey, resist, and rebel simultaneously.
These battles end up as often as not playing out on a field in which division-of-labor is the turf, so to speak. Chapter Three, therefore, “The Division of Labor,” makes subtle and incisive points about this factor in matters at hand.
Any level of societal social aggregation has produced a 'general division of labor.' Not so an 'industrial division of labor:' “no society before capitalism systematically subdivided the work of each productive specialty into limited operations. This form of the division of labor becomes generalized only with capitalism.” For any sense of craftsmanship or ‘pride-of-work’ or even basic agency, this is catastrophic.
“(T)he detailed division of labor destroys occupations considered in this sense, and renders the worker inadequate to carry through any complete production process. In capitalism, the social division of labor is enforced chaotically and anarchically by the market, while the workshop division of labor is imposed by planning and control. ...While the social division of labor subdivides society, the detailed division of labor subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and against humanity.”
Capital's academicians shrug off such ideas and accusations. 'All human ‘societies’ divide tasks. Crafts, industry, whatever, they only vary by degrees.' This is bourgeois theory.
“On this level of abstraction, obviously, nothing can be learned about the division of labor, except the banal and apologetic conclusion that being 'universal,' each of its manifestations is probably inevitable. Needless to say, this is precisely the conclusion that bourgeois society prefers.”
Almost every task in the socioeconomic marketplace becomes another exercise in button-punching and protocol practice. Creativity and inventiveness are not only absent in general, but any actual case of the appearance of such qualities of intellect represents a threat that necessitates its elimination; few are the workers whose jobs evoke their human intellectual abilities.
“Meanwhile, the relatively few persons for whom special knowledge and training are reserved are freed so far as possible from the obligations of simple labor. In this way, a structure is given to all labor processes that at its extremes polarizes those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing. This might even be called the general law of the capitalist division of labor.
It is not the sole force acting upon the organization of work, but it is certainly the most powerful and general. Its results, more or less advanced in every industry and occupation, give massive testimony to its validity. It shapes not only work, but populations as well, because over the long run it creates that mass of simple labor which is the primary feature of populations in developed capitalist countries.”
Inasmuch as Chapter 4 …(continued below the fold)
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(sequelae)
(PART THREE—Congested Gestation, Contested Inculcation {To repeat, as the author of this new volume in the series, I have elected to continue in the third-person rather than the first-person POV from my original diary entries.} In the first section, Thomas Hawkins, having lived through his contest with Norman Bates, came face to face with the frenzy and feisty frolic of his future, discovering its unexpected difficulty, quotidian routines, and hoped-for divinity.
Last time, the personalities, logistics, and ongoing ambience of a group marriage that consisted of eighteen fully-realized-female-erotic beasts and one highly appreciative but occasionally frantic and frequently exhausted fellow unfolded during the first four seasons of the year after the noted Culling. In the event, this man, our very own Thomas Hawkins, became a functionary in what had already become a process of coping with the greatest engineering of mass murder in human history, the second annual iteration of which ‘documentary’ process follows along today.
In the event, the prior incarnation of this yarn showed readers the emergence of factions, the management of such contrary agendas, the intended fructification of human copulation in the form of pregnant women, and particular instances of the frolic-frenzies that the Hawkins Harem Household celebrated with gusto. Here’s how that ‘chapter’ in this cycle ended.
“Year One of this new way of mating and making do thus closed with an erotic frenzy fueled by tension, a prevailing emotional tenor closer to angst—a generalized anxiety about mutuality of purpose and regard. No other partying through parting would, in any event, supersede this Vernal Bacchanal, not in this hailing the return of the light, so to say.
Overall, without much question, this fraught brief interregnum of the human project concentrated more comparative carnage than what had ever before occurred, what with the forced, or intractably induced, dispatch of two-thirds to three quarters of Homo Sapiens cousins. And its describing workable chances for humanity’s remnants all hinged on Year One.
The appearance of this narrative, if nothing else, attests to some sort of staying power. Now and again during the flashing human arc through biosocial space, patterns that have felt immutable shift, and everything requires new contemplation, new planning, new protocols, ha ha. And, all afresh, what comes next happens along and comes next. An ‘author’ might hope that an audience might implore, “Pray, tell!” to which the response would be, ‘wait and see, wait and see, stay tuned!’”)
That initial Prefatory segment, lengthy though it may be, is not quite enough. The Cast of Characters will also appear at the beginning of every chapter’s description of an annual ambit. Today as well, a brief for Thomas Hawkins appears for readers who have not yet sampled the original chapters of Mad Cows & Englishmen.
Dramatis Personae
Jan Folger, 46, is precisely the competent and willful vixen, privileged and potent, who has, in the previous Chapter, already earned a sultry reputation of fierce feminine effulgence. Furthermore, she maintains the appointed link with the PPGA, the Post Pandemic Governing Authority.
Marianne Wilson, 43 and another trustafarian female, who has proudly designated herself a 'pussy-powerhouse,' is practically if not officially Jan's second-in-command, and a jolly bisexual as well. She acts as a Recording Secretary whenever they all meet in common and chairs the PPGA-mandated House Committee.
Angela Costanza, 39 and the only other of the crew to have come from high-privilege, had been Jan's lover in the decade that had led to this present passage, though they had occasionally shared men from the universities and think-tanks where they had often worked as colleagues; in the realm of an HHH 'administration', she and her socioeconomic bona fides round out the onsite 'Central Committee,' so to speak, handling ‘executive functions’ and all.
Becca Kinovsky, 37, shrugs off the label of being a 'Thomas' Pet.' Before Pandemic, or simply BP, she was not only an Olympic Bronze Medalist in boxing who also had two martial-arts black belts, but she had also ascended to the upper echelons of the Rockefeller Foundation, which ironically had contemplated, or even plotted, much of what would transpire in the HHH epic, and from whose institutional sinecure five of these flowers had blossomed into their PP parts.
Carey Corey, 24, would serve as an ideal 'pretty younger sister' in bygone days: as such she has, as often as not, filled the role of 'patient listener.’ Fair, freckled, calm, quiet, yet with a decidedly naughty gleam in her eye, and an explosive sense of humor, she'd graduated law school at 22, more or less concomitant with Thomas' meeting Norman; rumor had it that she had been mistress to a Rockefeller great-grandson mistress while working on Becca's team at 'the Institute.'
Wanda(Wicked Wanda)Martin, a 28 year old ‘wiz-kid,’ is the sole female in this entire array who has no bisexual interests whatsoever, not that she minds watching, or she'd never have made the grade during the Vetting Process. She is also the most 'qualified' 'HHH teammate,' in the parlance of the place, with a Ph.D. in both astrophysics and epidemiology to complement her MPH degree. She knows more sex-science than even Thomas himself.
Alicia Bianchi, 33, other than Mr. Hawkins himself, is the only of the arrayed community whose roots are working class—mother an African-American factory worker, father an immigrant Italian carpenter. She also networked her way into Rockefeller-interest employment after quitting high school, getting her G.E.D., and then writing best-selling 'motivational materials,' mainly videos that she produced and narrated as a late, pre-pandemic ‘social influencer,’ a phrase that she always mouths with a sardonic roll of her eyes.
Denise Donaldson, 25, would have missed HHH pathways altogether but for her much-older CEO husband's succumbing to the first MRNA jab, an eventuality that finessed another requirement for 'house membership' when the shot caused her to miscarry the fetus that she and spouse John Donaldson had conceived in November 2020, or Year Eight, BP. A former ballerina, she leads the House Fitness Program.
Katherine(Killer Katrina)Cooper, at 30 both seeming older and looking like a teenager, comes from a stockpile of soldiers. She is the 'chair' of the veteran's group 'on campus,’ burgeoning with the sort of friendly confident leadership that her Father, the former U.S. Army's second Black Lieutenant General, had so powerfully passed on to her daughter that 'Cooper-Commander' served as a high compliment of esprit de corps and leadership in the 101st Airborne Division, from which both he and his daughter launched themselves into Army lives.
Mary(Mother-of-God)Miller, 26, is another veteran, one who appears ethereal but whose slender athleticism and keen eyesight had made her an excellent marksman—the second best in the group—so that her Military Occupational Specialty had been sniper, a task at which she had so excelled that the former Central Intelligence Agency had snagged her and dispensed a license-to-kill that she had utilized on eleven occasions.
Patricia Renahan, another 30 year old military brat with a wild disposition, followed her brother into Smedley Butler's Marine Corps, ultimately becoming the staunchest radical in the HHH bunch—'as if General Butler came back with a sex-change,' she liked to whisper when she wanted Thomas to come like a rocket, a quality she appreciated in a man almost as much as she liked wrestling big fellows into submission in less amorous fashion.
Mildred(Misty Milly)Malinowski is the one foreign-born household member, at 24 also part of the group’s core of youngsters, originating in Poland and then trekking to America via Ukraine and Bosnia. A more or less observant Jew—'a member of the tribe without the portfolio of a synagogue,' she would suggest—even in these modern times, she has maintained her status throughout her stay as, in the words of Top-Mama Jan, the only HHH 'sectarian practitioner.'
Diana Trevic, at forty-seven, the elder of the entire group, had heretofore always identified as lesbian, albeit she pretty quickly adopts Thomas as 'only the second man of my acquaintance who is really and truly worthy of the LWAD designation,' an acronym that inflected her Sociology Dissertation and that only 'Ms. Innocent, Wicked Wanda,' does not acknowledge with a chuckling recognition. When Diana finally gets pregnant, in Year Three, PP, she is the first HHH aficionado to depart their 'family.'
Tatiana(Tarty Tat)Adler, “29 forever,” stands six-foot two and considers herself “a jock, through and through,” having found her way along snaking Ivy-League pathways with scholarships in track and soccer to become a coach who 'liked sex too much to be safe around a bunch of hot jocks,' was picked up when she was paying off student loans by temping for Dr. W.
Cathy Cropper, even at forty, eerily resembles almost a twin of copper-toned Kathy Cooper, though Ms. Cropper shows a much creamier Africana tint in her skin and has none of her 'double's' Jamaican accent. An enthusiastic 'social anarchist, she also sports the only 'radical pedigree' in the House that holds a candle to Thomas' alphabet-soup of 'Leftist' bona fides, thereby co-chairing the People's Committee that begins meeting and commenting just prior to HHH's Third Winter Solstice ball.
Vivian(Vixen Viv)Valenti, '31 and still horny,' has the most capacious salacious appetite in the commune that celebrates and, for the most part, insists on such lusty libidinal attitudes. She's also an automatic communist, more or less, and so doubly a favorite of Thomas, whatever ‘factional fiascos’ might unfold among all and sundry.
Amber Thomas, the youngest youngster in the coterie, at 22, has just finished her psychology doctorate, working at night whenever she carved out a break from sex play. 'Even though I'll never have a practice,' she likes to smile, 'I'll just bet that I'll make myself useful with all the nuttiness here.'
Beverly Brand, meanwhile, 44 and a lifelong crack shot as well as New Age darling, does charts and cards for all her friends, and she's one of those people who can manage friendly relations with almost anybody who's not actively psychotic; her presence, as 'Dr. Thomas' partner,' more or less, has a very soothing effect on HHH disputation. Thus, when she aborts her third pregnancy in her first six annual Household circuits, and is 'transported for reeducation' early in Year Seven, PP, contrariety and conflict become almost deadly at times.
Thomas Hawkins, 42, he whose ‘casting’ for the part had at once been more fraught and much earlier than that of most of his comeradas, with whom he nevertheless shared such joyous and luscious comeraderie, was, in his earlier BP life, an itinerant, “very minor,” public intellectual who made his way with contract ‘reporting’ assignments and various other ‘performances’ and productions, his favorites, often enough, ones that entailed playful sorts of frolicking perambulations, much akin to his Hawkins House Harem role.
In other words, in some sense, he was kin to some sort of poorly paid spy, a ‘spook without portfolio.’
Year Two, Post-Pandemic: “Where Do They All Go?”
Each of the North American Authority’s 354 sectors contained exactly twelve Harem Households. HHH in turn belonged to one of four such aggregates in what now went by the simple name of ‘Capital City Core, Southeast Mountain Vector’—the former Greenville, South Carolina, geographically speaking, by chance the least damaged urban enclave in all of Eastern North America.
In the course of his first set of thirteen regular, annual meetings with Dr. Winston and eleven nearby ‘team leaders,’ all men who held positions similar to Thomas’ ‘Harem leadership,’ ha ha, the estimable Mr. Hawkins believed that he had deduced, almost incontrovertibly, that Dr. W. and his co-conspirators had set everything up, on these and other premises, with the primary purpose in mind of producing future fighters or replacement soldiers. He more or less immediately articulated this to what he quietly quipped was his ‘personal bevy of babes.’
“It explains it all, the whole handed-down-from-on-high vibration,” he told Jan early on. She was not nearly so certain but admitted the proposition’s fundamental probability, if not its certain probity.
“Yes, yes, yes, dear Thomas, you are probably right.” As he beamed at the balm of her tone of praise, she finished, a grin splitting her pretty face, “again!”
Once this view became more or less ‘received wisdom,’ she and he and most of the rest of the Harem posited dispositively that ‘before the coup’s big cut, the major domos had salted away plenty of adolescent young men who had the requisite talents to fill the militia’s ranks till the ‘big baby making operation’s offspring grew up.’ Again, only a conclusion along these lines made any sense.
“We’ve all at least heard about the plans” is how Angela Costanza put the matter at one of the first open HHH Executive Committee brainstorming sessions. “Dr. Trevic worked on the fifty year plan, I think, what was the name of that thing?”
“Our First Half Century,” piped up Diana-T herself, naked and furry before all and sundry, every declivity a sprouting thicket of brunet bush. “They project that point in time, 2076 or so, as something like ‘the first decade without culling,’ more or less,” which everyone agreed, most probably, meant that the masters and commanders had to have a viable supply of males for soldiering ‘at least till that juncture,’ again with the special-emphasis-italics provided by Dr. T.
Not quite a year later—in other words establishing the setting for today’s unit—in a more intimate setting, on the final Sunday of Year Two’s inaugural moon-phase, Thomas reiterated this kind of thinking. “They fucking know all the research from Russia and China; it wasn’t just infanticide that explained the preponderance of boy births after the big war.”
The planners in charge “knew they’d get loads of males from us, and they knew that at most they could count on ten years or so average useful output from their original goons.” He was talking to his “boss lady” as she ground away at him, firing up and priming her pumping mechanisms for another ejaculation between his sweet lips, but first listening very attentively to the points that he made while she screwed up her enthusiasm to screw him some more.
After every return from his mandatory monthly, manly get-together, always in a new helicopter, a different chopper from the one that picked him up, he and Jan Folger, the ‘Queen Bee’ in Thomas’ glossary, had a tete-a-tete that defined another glossary entry, ‘Sweet Debriefing.’ Always, for seven moons past seven years, Jan and he were naked within seconds of their ‘scheduled encounter,’ their chemistry like immersing elemental sodium in chlorinated water.
He always returned before seven from each lunar phase’s final-Sunday meeting. The scripting for Household activities, often enough of each hour of each day, came down from the Governing Authority’s Central Committee itself, though the actual day-to-day unfolding was more often than not extensively extemporaneous.
The seven-to-nine timeslot on the Fourth Sunday of every moon was sacrosanct, however: Debriefing of Consort By Team Leader stated his orders. The Common Calendar merely mentioned a “Std. C/TL Debrief.”
In fact, Thomas and Jan spent every one of those late evenings—the Debriefing itself and then the nine-to-six overnight hours as a Fourth Sunday became a First Monday—ensconced in each other, fucking like ferrets in heated, rutting conjunction. And as they came and consumed and consummated again and again, soaked as Jan drenched them repeatedly whenver he “gobbled up my glory nob,” they would talk about their situation, basically whenever their mouths were not otherwise engaged.
“So they’ve got Pre Pandemic kids, all inoculated, more than enough, right?” He was pumping away, readying a few million swimmers while he nibbled her neck. “These recruits fill in the blanks till our spawn are mostly grown up and ready to fight.” He allowed himself a wormhole to fill with his juices as soon as he saw the lights of recognition and agreement in the deepsea blue eyes of “Boss Lady.”
Their coitus and climax, for instance—“every time,” he insisted—and Jan’s three pregnancies in eight years, and “our figuring everything out and participating,” without notable exception were “part of the program.” So too their individual selection and grooming and prepping for “the slickest, sickest sexy assignment in history,” what in sum had propelled these nineteen human beings to make some sort of life, together: that too had emanated from intention, albeit not their own.
Whatever the case may be, Thomas started out each day with as many french kisses as he could induce his eighteen sweethearts to offer. He frequently enough considered, as HHH became as much a definite thing as the phases of the moon, that he would never have ‘met the challenge’—or so he laughingly was wont to describe things—but for the pacifying exigencies of pregnancy.
As a gestating lass’ third trimester approached the insane eruption of childbirth, she would be ever-so-likely to find herself generally disinclined to frolic, the opposite of the Household spirit. Furthermore, this diminution of desire would hang round her till she finished nursing her infant, or perhaps a bit longer. Thus, our Thomas got some rest, some time alone, a chance to think: ‘I’ve as many as five or six decades to go, with luck; what shall I make of myself?’
On the second morning following the equinoctical frenzy that ushered in this new year, for instance(described in some detail in #19), weeks before the aforementioned Debriefing dalliance with Ms. Jan Folger and immediately following his regularly scheduled daily triad of sensual massages and ecstatic releases, the program’s solo bloke had just finished a solitary cheese-and-crackers luncheon snack.
Thomas recalled how yesterday, New Year’s Day in the new scheme of things, had been the Household’s first free time in eighteen months—no assigned duties, no scheduled copulations, blah blah blah. He had slept with the slender Ms. Kinovsky; they had frolicked together on a private picnic in thickets on the grounds where a Household gazebo offered shelter and bedding.
During his solitary noon break, sharp cheddar and crunchy crackers on his tongue, he had begun to ruminate on Becca’s spreadeagled loins from the previous day. Theirs was to be his first scheduled ‘Frolicksome feast,’ another glossary phrasing, of 2PPM#1, or Two-Post-Pandemic, First Moon. Basically, he always wanted to be with her, to have her companionship be part of the company in question, no matter who or what else might be up for grabs.
Ha ha. He had no compunction in saying so. She was his favorite: joined, they visited spaces of such ineffable cosmic grooviness that eternal bliss became a prototypical standard of care, as it were. Even without their seventeen dutiful, diligent helpmates, these two would have continued keeping their nest a spotless crucible of connubial surcease, as it were.
In the vein that ‘cleanliness conjoins godliness,’ that their environs sparkled with stylish touches and glittered with gleaming brilliance certainly made their loving ways much easier to manage than would have been the case had they all dwelt in filth. Sex is cleansing only if everyone cleans up, in other words.
Their communal ‘Domestic Routine,’ to serve the fruition of this purpose, formulated part of the weekly itinerary, a half day of divided labors every seven days. This freeform joint effort might have graced upscale home-&-garden magazine covers BP: ‘Unusual Commune’s Cleanup Routines.’
In the event, some members, like Thomas, initiated and finished off-the-beaten path scrubbing routines; Jan Folger, an Alpha’s alpha, had a group of seven—herself with six others, neither of the Executive Committee members part of her Home-Ec crew—who ‘thouroughly and punctiliously cleaned and maintained the entire first floor.’
Their home place, in any context, would have been noteworthy—polished, spare-yet-comfortable, pleasing to eye and to feel—if not altogether magisterial, full of magic and royal riches. The inhabitants maintained a merry aplomb, therefore, further enriched by pleasure’s persistent palpations.
Congruent with such a pass, the 'Hawkins Household Harem' domicile could readily have made architectural history. A sprawling brick hacienda, nearly ten-thousand square feet on each of the three levels, spread out to surround a massive courtyard, from which rose, as if twined, a giant ancient Beech tree and a spiral-staircase-belted tower that, so far, at its spiked-minaret topping, still significantly surpassed its arboreal companion's height.
If the pattern of the previous Moon—so far still unnamed, except for its numerical designation as the thirteenth and last of this period’s annual sojourn—held, residents might enjoy this opulent and comforting space without constant reminders of carnage and mayhem. Daily death counts were no longer streaming forth electronically, more or less regularly, on the half hour, for example. Neither bomb runs nor drone’s buzzing overhead formed an ongoing background soundtrack.
Over the course of the this first yearlong PP passage, fifteen household pregnancies had resulted in ten boys and five girls, Mother Nature’s demographic adjustments, as predicted, kicking in to support ‘new age’ policy postulates. None of these newborns had stayed at HHH beyond each babe’s ‘semester’ of nursing and bonding, an idyllic interregnum of lying-in for moms and fattening up for nursing babes.
Then off they went, much to many—but not all—mothers’ bitter chagrin, to the wet-nurse center that took the three-to-four-month-old infants of the entire region and suckled them till their fourth birthdays, when ‘new age’ discipline and education practices took over, something that generated inevitably mostly ignorant yet universally interested discourse among the pining mothers and their jointly espoused mated man, Thomas Hawkins in the flesh.
No matter what, these Successful Copulation Outcomes, as noted, offered the erstwhile indefatigable and yet clearly frayed-at-the fringes-Thomas-Hawkins occasional respites from his enervating and yet irresistible conjugal duties, a source of bliss and glory, but also just too much to manage over the course of a lifetime that could last seventy or eighty years even after the climactic and catastrophic Culling that launched what Thomas labeled “this little joint-jelly-project of ours.”
“It’s probably all over the top,” he thought, at the same time that his mother’s ‘old college try’ never lost its appeal, given that his adoration of females emanated both psychic and carnal manifestations. “Maybe, anyhow,” he’d grin to himself with a satisfied weary sigh of self-reflection, “I can keep it up,” he chortled.
Thomas, worn to a frazzle and worried about infighting that he didn’t really get much of the time, welcomed each triumphant insemination. “I’m, like, trying to be some sort of all-time-champion knocker upper,” he joked, weeping and worn, at the end of one acid-soaked fuck-fest.
After their latest free-for-all, for example, in like fashion, Thomas had emerged from a final ‘Daisy Chain’ of seven flowery females, in which he was again playing the gleeful bee, to state, “I have been to the mountaintop!” His Southern preacher’s persona pulsed through their orgy.
Three hugely pregnant comrades, Marianne, from the Exec; ‘Wicked’ Wanda; and ‘Commie Cathy’ were all preparing to burst babies onto the scene, in anticipation of which they had arrayed themselves comfortably so as to ‘critique the show.’ Eight nursing recent mothers, gathered in pairs and trios to help hold off the chilly air of Southern Appalachia’s first full day of Spring, played the audience to their gestating threesome’s chorus.
Thomas continued his impromptu soliloquy. “So now’s the time: I will transition, ladies, and be just ‘one of the girls!’” Arms flung wide, hips sashaying gaily, he threw himself into a mosh pit of pussy. The generally multiorgasmic women all lying about in the afterglow screamed with laughter at the idea, watching their most macho man, purportedly on the verge of giving up his ‘manhood.’
Infants and fetuses grow stronger from such mirth. What that boosted bodily power might serve to accomplish was anyone’s guess. They all knew that theirs had been, whatever else might be true, a truly blood-soaked unfolding, annual orgiastic interlude.
Still, they had survived the carnage. Their Schedule arrived weekly from HQ, on PPGA letterhead, the ‘courier’ a bot of no particular ‘gender affiliation.’ Five highly-structured days preceded a BP ‘weekend,’ time in which ‘members of the pod’ might make their own arrangements along ‘agreed-upon lines’ of pleasuring procreation, whatever the size of the instantiating indicia thereof, ha ha.
With exceptions for ‘occasions,’ and sometimes—more or less randomly, so far as one might tell—in instances designated ad hoc, at the last minute, in midnight e-mails, an ‘order-of-the-day would mandate the strangely stated stricture that ‘All Scheduled Activities Are Hereby Void’! The Empress-of-Eros herself, Ms. Vivian Valenti, declared her opinion on these apparently chance passages in their communal existence.
“Those are the best orgies!” Spontaneous combustion may or may not be superior, but her fellows were uniform in acceding to Viv’s ‘qualitative’ assertion.
Anyway, the recorded calendar in general left a minimum of two days out of every seven in which extemporizing was standard, so that a frisson of diplomacy and mutual regard required that they compare calendars and play fair, instead of plying favorites, as it were. Over the course of their first six seasons together, most everybody had gained some kind of fundamental awareness about everyone else involved; their inescapably mutual salacious ministrations notwithstanding, they were like a gargantuan band of ribald siblings or concupiscent cousins.
In addition, once every thirteen weeks or more, from on high as mentioned, the command arrived to have “glorious unscripted celebrations” during one-to-three days of attendant ‘general leave’ from the Scheduled Routine. Thomas had trouble truly believing that these ‘out-of-the-blue’ commandments were altogether unscripted. He wasn’t the only one.
After all, the three ExecComm members filed weekly reports; no matter how shadowy, real people were orchestrating matters at hand, and they had more and more information with which to develop their schemes. As to agendas, hidden or otherwise, who was to know? At some level, the fact of each participants’ continuing to ‘live and breathe’ was the primary point to consider in evaluating anything.
Each of their seasonal celebrations shouted hosannas at this luminous luck, a orgiastic explosion of living through it, even when ‘it’ entailed murdering, and then freeze-drying, more than half the available pool of fresh meat. This polarity—primally juxtaposed opposition between breathing bonhomie and bleeding out one’s entire blood supply—inherently energized an ‘eyes-wide-open’ sensibility, at least congruent with labels that relatives had affixed to Thomas—who sometimes still used his journalistic name, This Humble Correspondent—to wit, “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!”
At the same time, not one of them could unaffectedly affirm that the ways that they adopted seemed possible to persist, let alone essentially salubrious for humanity’s overall condition, so to speak. “Where do all these babies go?” Carrie asked, her plaintive plea a counterpoint to a trio’s tryst with Becca and Thomas on the ‘New New Year’s Day,’ 2-PP.
Therefore, not surprisingly, they all suffered bouts of ‘guilty conscience,’ not only in relation to the choices and protocols that had established their privileged place in the entire ‘new age’ rubric, but also in regard to the infants whose fates they could no more parent than Thomas Hawkins could serve as an adequate husband to eighteen wild and wanton women.
Human ‘social ingenuity’ has often appeared perverse. “Polymorphous Perversity,” as Thomas liked to quip about his often bathing in the juices of multiple pudendas, “is a real thing, anthropologically speaking.” Anyway, regardless of how seemly caution might appear in dealing with mass murderers who made Nazis look like unambitious amateurs, every one of HHH’s aficionados entertained at least occasional thoughts of rebellion, of vengeance against grotesque injustice, blah blah blah.
The outcome was inevitable. Whatever residents’ recognition of their own complicity in and benefit from vastly extensive and massively cruel crimes against humanity, some of them, at minimum, would consider resistance of some sort a duty, ever assuming that such a process would naturally only prove plausible on the basis of understanding ‘how things actually stand.’
Since all members of the crew of nineteen—Thomas and his entire ‘Harem’—were significantly ‘smarter than the average bear,’ in the idiom of century-old cartoons, making intelligent inferences and drawing intelligible conclusions would happen as a matter of course among them, especially since they would discuss these things in the pairings and other arrangements of the group. Discourse, after all, is likely a mandatory source of complex knowledge of any kind.
In other words, they had ideas. All of them, whether passionately or timidly, analytically or emotionally, each of the lot felt compelled to examine her conscience, or his, as the case may be. Quite often, whatever the indicia, or however severe the degree, of complicity in any individual’s lot in life, these ruminations and opinions were quite critical of the whole ‘scheme of things,’ as Harem-Master Hawkins repeatedly made clear in his original narrative.
For a good while, even as a second Spring’s maenadic rites burst forth like Appalachian green after a few warm April days, no one had ever shared anything specific along these lines. If Jan heard even a whisper of any criticism that might suggest conspiracy, she could be summarily shot or dispatched in other grotesque fashion for withholding such information.
Even as she continued to erupt effusively in Thomas’ mouth—hers some of the drenching sustenance that the Harem-Master insisted kept him from needing big helpings at mealtime—during the afternoon that they allotted each other during every lunar passage, her thoughts strayed to these dark thorny thickets of the omissions and lies that they were all living together. Ever the empath, Thomas intuited what was what.
Indubitably, ‘administrative matters’ was always one way to avoid actual conversation about verboten topics. Still, eventually, tongues wag what minds ruminate. Nature takes its gestational and its conversational course, ‘in the natural course of things.’
Almost inevitably, horned and hungry libidinal beasts that we all are, the procreative urgings are uppermost in our minds, foremost in our fostered sensibilities. The ‘new age’ agenda inherent in these arrangements of flesh and bone certainly fit with focus on erotic libations. Moreover, Thomas Hawkins and his eighteen lovers also affirmed the primacy of these sensations of soulful surcease and ecstatic erotic release. Mr. Hawkins was a true epicurean in regard to feminine proclivities and declivities.
Again, he especially fancied the dense, bushy charcoal thickets of the esteemed Ms. Kinovsky’s luscious loins; “the scent of fecund forest mixes with her frisky feistiness in furiously alluring fashion,” he wrote in his journal, right before he mentioned something else of critical import. “This woman,” he began, “whom I so dearly love,” to which he added juicy parenthetical detail about ‘passion’s poignant pussy pulsations, “is the one of us with true integrity.”
Real fidelity likely portends one pricey proposition after another, each of these sallies as dangerous as swimming among sharks in order to hitch a ride on a dorsal fin. Nevertheless, given the totality of what humans are, Becca’s qualities qualified her to take the inaugurating swing.
Spring’s Flings Sprung With Schadenfreude, Stunned From Astonished Silence
In any event, Becca was the first of the nineteen of them to voice such thoughts aloud to another. They’d all had ideas, frequently heroic, vengeful, vile, and violent. Speaking to Thomas as they both approached a shared peak moment, Becca truly voiced it though, the inaugural articulation: “At some point, no matter how good you are at all this—” she was cooing to her lover as she came, “no matter how sweetly we may all feel,” at which point she paused to allow her climax to spool out her gutsy gushing.
After a half-a-minute’s ministrations of molten merriment, she picked up seamlessly with a grin, looking like nothing other than a lithe and wanton, likely lethal, pirate, astride strapping Thomas, her hands on his shoulders, pinning him so as more sweetly and completely to impale herself on his phallic effusions. “We’ve got to make some attempt to find a way out of this criminal sanctuary that we’re nestling in.” She spoke like what she was, as a matter of course, a nerdy intellectual, but then she cackled with glee.
“I mean,” it’s hilarious! “We all fuck and come and eat healthy food and sleep in each others’ arms in very sturdy, very comfy beds.”
Thomas’ look did not obviously convey his ability to see said hilarity. “Well,” he started, without much clue as to what to say next, dutiful if nothing else. He had stalwartly insisted on not feeling guilt for whatever combination of fortune and facility had succored his survival.
“And we shower in the blood of others not so lucky.” She held her hands as if framing a shot. “It’s surreal comedy, right?” She took his deer-in-the-headlights look as agreement or at least permission, ha ha.
“We shower in their blood; it’s piped in, right? We butcher them for our roasts and stews and discuss ‘the best cuts.’” Again, she spread her hands to suggest a tableau or montage of images. “Grotesque, but presented right, you couldn’t help but howl or spew laughter.”
“Heh, heh.” Thomas was thinking. Then, as if on cue, he did indeed begin to sneeze and belch his mirth, merriment not at the scene that his lover had painted but at Becca herself, her absolutely wild and radical heart and soul.
And Becca just rocked herself, pivoting on her loins locked to the man who just ‘got it,’ as it were. She smiled and laughed softly, though her eyes were fierce with a certain sort of shock at it all, a look that bordered on raging and ranting and otherwise ‘beligerating’ about how matters truly stand.
And that quality, of being simultaneously merry and radical, was precisely what Thomas wholeheartedly adored about her. Thus, he began to grow, so that they both chortled and growled at each other as they launched just a little more frolicking and kissing and cavorting through shifting embraces hither and yon.
“You know,” he said, with a slight groan of ecstasy’s initiation of its most piquant agonies, “you might have said, earlier, ‘we’ve got to fight a way out of this abattoir’s sanctuary,’ however you put it.” He paused and flipped their ‘beast with two backs’ over, so that Becca straddled his lap, grinding and rotating for a few moments to settle themselves into a new posture.
“You know what I’m saying?” he gasped a little.
“Yes,” she grinned her sweetest fierce focus. “Yes, I do!”
“And that’s a super important distinction is all I’m saying. Before we fight, we better sure as shit find a way to win.” He smiled to show a mouthful of happy teeth.
“Oooooohhhhhh,” she cooed as she started to orgasm again.
“I mean, it’s not like us; with the fuckers at the top, we only get the one chance.”
Luckily for them all, in addition to her sensual skills, her indubitable diplomatic deftness, Ms. Becca Kinovsky also was a natural born…(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”An American Christmas Story”
(This yarn, based as it is on a true incident from my early, third Home State, was one of the first pieces of short fiction that I finished, along about 1990, mas o menos, in the event before I had come to as complete a comprehension of matters at hand as arguably is true in the here and now.
Whatever the case may be, climactic scenes during family Holy Days show up now, bizarre, hilarious, horrifying. #23 presents the concluding piece of a two-part puzzle. The interlocutor remains the main character’s valiant, dutiful daughter.
At the festivities that set the story’s stage, the first part ended in this way. “Folding tables surrounded the magical screen, draped with appropriate bunting and snacks. Enough seats for at least thirty people filled the space. Throw rugs and giant pillows provided additional vantage points, a good thing since over forty folks eventually stomped in from the snow.
The audience consisted of several clusters. Non-traveling family members paid their final compulsory call before Easter. In addition, St. John's senior catechism class accompanied Reverend and Anne-Marie Milton. Friends of mine or other sibling pals comprised the third set of filmgoers.
This crowd had gathered to receive Dickens' sobering message, yet exhibited a bright and prosperous visage. Talk leapt from group to group. Family news competed for attention with inconsequential but avidly conveyed trivia. The stale air rang with chatter, but on only a couple of occasions did people actually touch something intimate or sublime in each other.)
Since my job was the VCR, I got to eavesdrop on the few interesting conversations. The 'youth-of-America' contingent brimmed with restless energy. The dialogue oozed lust for cash and status.
“I'm not kidding you, my father lost one hundred thousand dollars in October," an old classmate conveyed to friends, punctuating for emphasis the massive sum. His demeanor suggested, 'hey, no big deal, this year he'll make a killing,' even as he continued, "all I got for Christmas except for stocking stuffers was a tuition guarantee."
Later, much to Thomas' chagrin, a former flame of mine tried to seduce en masse all my brother's potential female companions. "I don't care what anyone says," this interloper blustered, "Peru and Bolivia don't have the facilities to deliver top quality toot. It's either Colombian or it's shit."
None of the listeners needed their elder to explain the subtleties of the drug trade. "Just-Say-No" was about as popular with this set as prohibition had been with our grandparents. They knew more about the politics of narcotics than they did about the upcoming presidential primaries.
Sex and drugs, sex and money, the will to dominate and make a fortune—these were underneath all the talk about cars, jobs, cocaine. Dad stressed this afterward to me.
"You take it all for granted, the opulence, everything, but it won't save you, 'Lisha. Your only hope is commitment to something solid, and the people you love." He wrote in his journal what he thought about the way we related to each other at the party. "Our conversation rarely rises above idle chit-chat, sounds not so much addressed to each other as uttered to fill a void inside ourselves."
This idealism, unfashionable on the surface, was precisely what we craved from Charles Moran. We talked one game and longed for another. Dad's noble faith couldn't save us, in and of itself, but it sure as hell beat empty cynicism and greed. His introduction of the movie showed him at his very best.
"Friends, brothers and sisters," he started just like Jesse Jackson or something.
"Don't forget brother-in-laws!"
"All right, brother-in-laws as well. I needn't tell you that I have no intention of delivering a sermon...."
"Go ahead, it'd do us all good!"
He waited for the laughter to subside before launching a heartfelt plea for consciousness of the contemporary crisis. He finished masterfully, merging reason with emotion. "Across 150 years, Charles Dickens speaks to us of a time very much like our own, despite the obvious differences in geography and technology, a time in which relationships with things overruled the relationships among people. …(continued below the fold)
Nerdy Nuggets—The Bank That Owns Us, & International Avatars, III
(The first installment of this little series showed how Depression’s catastrophes then translated into the carnage of WWII, all of which set a certain sort of stage for new ways that blended the old with evolving nuance and ‘the American Century’s’ continuation. Part II carried this forward by examining how a push for a ‘World Trade Organization’ in many ways culminated in a ‘Battle in Seattle.’ These are the final paragraphs from last issue.
“Patrick Hearden's Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order During World War II, lays out the free-trade and "open-door" polices that Cordell Hull and others maintained assiduously for the benefit of U.S. industry and capital generally. A more Marxist perspective on this phenomenon of 'free-trade' promulgation as a combination of opportunism and ideology, occurs in "The New Age of Imperialism," by John Bellamy Foster.
A review essay of historical inputs such as William Appleman William's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy depicted the broad range and deep applicability of 'free trade' to U.S. policy and process. This literature review maintains that an ‘odd assortment of people has nevertheless shared, however obliquely, the conviction that the Open Door policy is the keystone of twentieth-century American diplomacy.
Elected policymakers, for example, as well as the bureaucrats they ushered into positions of influence, have used it as the intellectual vantage point from which to view and deal with the world.’” Hence, here we are, ready to continue anew, ha ha.)
Readers, at least those with the stubbornness to stick with this humble correspondent in his perambulations, now have a credibly coherent basis for comprehending the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and to a degree the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and how they grew out of the Bretton Woods process that was itself the culmination of decades of wrangling over how the ruling financial establishment was going to manage the earth's affairs.
This understanding remains applicable until the end of the 1950's, which is where the next installments pick up, with a fifth section to look at the World Trade Organization itself, and its purview into the present moment. Finally, an outline appears that rounds out this series, examining what the 'New World Order' might look like, and how it might operate, if transnational finance capital has its 'druthers.'
INITIAL CONCLUSIONS
Complicated and intricately interwoven skeins of dialectical conflict and development underlie what transpires on the social, political, and economic surfaces of the world. While this humble correspondent would never seek to imply that his views and assessments provide comprehensive knowledge or 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' he persists in suggesting that both the ways that he organizes the approach to understanding, and the specific facts and relationships that he unveils, are useful—perhaps even essential—to anything akin to even the most basic recognition of how the workings of past worlds have yielded our collective present.
Several points seem apt in considering this complex and yet still maddeningly partial presentation of today's events. First is that an observer simply must look for the class conflicts that occur behind and beneath the main stages, on which a Lord Churchill contends with the bank-robbing 'man-of-steel' from an Eastern European version of Georgia.
J.M. Keynes was merely in the middle, ideologically and practically, of those who recognized this critically important piece of any intelligible attempt at intelligence regarding economic policy and and behavior. In an essay addressing an earlier version of stagnating employment opportunities,' for example, he said, "The true socialism of the future will emerge, I think, from an endless variety of experiments directed to discovering the respective appropriate spheres of the individual and of the social, and the terms of fruitful alliance between these sister instincts."
Unfortunately, despite all manner of brilliant insistence on this point, politicians all too frequently, and technical experts almost universally, ignore or overlook this point. In yet another incisive piece of writing acknowledging his 'liberalism,' Keynes pointed out the consequences of such avoidance, decidedly antithetical to 'business better' fetishes of the corporate-social-responsibility set.
"The transition from economic anarchy to a régime which deliberately aims at controlling and directing economic forces in the interest of social justice and social stability, will present enormous difficulties both technical and political. I suggest, nevertheless, that the true destiny of New Liberalism is to seek their solution."
Second is that an awareness of political economy simply must inform any attempt to suggest what policies, protocols, problems, or prospects are important or necessary. THC has repeatedly made this point. Perhaps another plea from Harvard might emphasize this contention in a firm enough fashion.
"When the history of the current financial crisis comes to be written, the battle of the index entries will surely be won by central bankers not politicians. The name Bernanke will appear on many more pages than Bush, King more often than Brown, and Trichet will trump even Sarkozy. Most of the time, central banks strive to be dull places; the people who run them relish their obscurity. But when crisis strikes, the limelight shines."
If this is not stringent enough, then the potency of Mr. Higham's 'I-was-there' incision ought to sway even the most blindly anti-idelogical ideologist. He shows that, when one has access to data, every seeming technocratic economic output results from complex measures of class interest, financial greed, and political pirateering. He is speaking of Hjalmar Schact, whose supposed centrism made him ideal as Germany's central banker, at least until he threw himself wholeheartedly behind the little mustachioed Austrian corporal with a bug up his behind about Jewish folks.
"Sensing Adolf Hitler's lust for war and conquest, Schacht, even before Hitler rose to power in the Reichstag, pushed for an institution that would retain channels of communication and collusion between the world's financial leaders even in the event of an international conflict. It was written into the Bank's charter, concurred in by the respective governments, that the BIS should be immune from seizure, closure, or censure, whether or not its owners were at war. These owners included the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York (among whose directors were Harold S. Vanderbilt and Wendell Willkie), the Bank of England, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other central banks."
Third is that hidden agendas, concerning empire and profit and market-predominance at the very least, simply must be something that those who would understand these matters seek to bring to light. Every single honest accounting of such matters as these importunes that onlookers cut through camouflage to find such always-extant concrete expressions of bias and greed and 'lust' for power.
Even so stalwart a sycophant for capital as Liaquat Ahamed, the broker who penned Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke The World, notes this tendency. He intersperses literally every section of his addictively readable tome with the guidelines that hid away behind the surface pronouncements, often referencing the sacred anonymity of such weird monied men as Montagu Norman, head of the Bank of England, to further exemplify the hidden agenda.
Even so viscerally bourgeois a publication as the London Times, in its adulatory review of Ahamed's volume, cannot stay away from the behind-the-scenes plotting that rules the surface. Such is so much the case that denial is an awful sort of folly. …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Navigating Social Mediation
Social media has its roots, literally, in spooky operations of erstwhile ‘intelligence agencies.’ How could its underlying realities be anything other than, often enough, oddly opaque? The planned ‘banning’ of TikTok aptly illustrates such a dynamic, even as I will be learning about this assertion as I write, ha ha.
One way of thinking about such miraculous manifestations of human ingenuity—whether Instagrammatic or TikTokish, or otherwise—is that they result from singular identifiable sources, so that one should, at minimum, prove able to develop an astute investigative process to reveal the nature and extent of these source-springs, as it were. A search such as the following might elicit interesting citations: <tiktok background OR backstory OR history analysis OR investigation OR scholarship>.
Et, voila! An interesting ‘phenom’ occurred as I plowed my way into this particular ‘rabbit hole.’ When I first tried the search, Google uncapitalized all my conjunctions; I got 8,000 citations and then some.
I noticed what had happened, however, recapitalized everything and instantly received 24,092,000 more hits. This seems interesting in and of itself.
Inevitably, since I am what I am, in the idiom of Popeye and reality, I also searched along these lines: <tiktok background OR backstory OR history ban OR illegal OR prohibit analysis OR investigation OR scholarship radical OR marxist OR socialist>. In so doing, I found 585,000 possibly helpful encounters at hand, the first pages of which brimmed primarily with nausea and invective, with a slice of socialist realism and liberal valor in favor of free speech on the side.
One such, a bit of a jewel from the New Yorker, published about a year ago. The title is expressive. “The Misguided Attempt to Control TikTok” makes clear that—were America truly a constitutional democratic republic—government bans of a social media site would prove utterly impossible. Case law and the Bill of Rights would overrule every such an ‘act of Congress.’
Though the Supreme Court may not want to make decisions that support free speech and democracy these days, readers might pay attention to what Jay Caspian Kang wrote about this in his article. “‘The whole point of the First Amendment is to give ordinary citizens the power and the tools to decide for themselves what information to listen to and what ideas to find persuasive,’ (the Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University) told me. ‘That’s the foundational principle of the First Amendment and a foundational principle of any democracy—that the power to decide what information to access and listen to and how much weight to give it are left to the ordinary citizen and not to the government.’”
Further exploration of some of this fun stuff, where the ‘shit hits the fan’ and all, will await later sections below the fold. The largely accusatory negation of a TikTok world is likely noteworthy on its own behalf, what with projection’s primal underpinning of finger-pointing, name-calling, and general aspersions-casting, a treat available in a bizarre Guardian articulation of things.
One thing is clear. Inasmuch as SCOTUS has ruled against TT, when this ‘ban’ goes into effect the day before the Donald’s inauguration, this move will be a profoundly disturbing step further to consolidate the fascist trend here in the ‘land of the brave and home of the free’ and vice versa, and, as usual, blah blah blah.
By Way of Introduction
Without a First Amendment—a more or less sacrosanct freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to petition officialdom and receive an engaged response—the United States of America would not exist, at least not starting in 1788. The reason is clear, inasmuch as any assertion of democracy or popular power without such ‘freedoms’ is, at best, meaningless pretense.
Much more likely, undermining such fundamental wellsprings of liberty stems from murderous malevolence, or at least opportunistic cupidity, of one sort or another. Could this possibly be true in the case of TikTok’s legal case against the U.S. for the upcoming disenfranchisement of the whole platform?
Stated another way, could prohibiting a particular brand of electronic communication so violate First Amendment protections as to constitute an ‘act of war,’ a ‘step too far,’ or other metaphor for overreaching official intervention in citizens’ lives? After all, in a Bill of Rights, the protection of speaking and gathering would intuitively, and likely analytically, truly be of the first, or highest, level of importance.
Hmmmm. I had projected an article about TikTok before the passage of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act(hereafter, the Act) last April. I wasn’t following plans for legislation but knew of the app’s origin and attendant controversy—filthy commies, blah blah blah. How could I resist?
When the Act passed, I did what I too frequently like to do best. I procrastinated. Part of my intention in writing was to see if the TikTok might be something that I could use in some way; now, such learning might be more or less pointless.
A teenage niece of my love—a ‘niece-in-law,’ perhaps—is an aficionado, a young soccer player and ‘good kid’ with zero pinko proclivities discernible on the surface of things. The idea that ‘dirty Red Chinese’ had brainwashed youngsters like my fourteen-year-old ‘niece-in-law’ seemed on the surface super farfetched.
And that returns us to First Amendment territory. This application of Federal authority to this Internet application, to protect me and my acquaintances, friends, mates, and cousins from rotten Oriental Reds is weird, really crazed and addled, at best. A fuller discussion of these upper-class-gangster moves is coming below the fold, and at least one follow-up on this case will be forthcoming in new Big Tent episodes.
But seriously, I don’t have overseas enemies outside of the ranks of the bankster-thugs and psychotic hit-men who oversee some of America’s ‘projected imperial power’ hither and yon. All my chief adversaries are the ruling class apologists and functionaries who believe that risking Mass Collective Suicide in search of higher rates of profit is a dandy idea. Again, can we get real, if only for a change of pace?
Before proceeding to this attempt at discourse about the general context and this specific case before the Supreme Court, which is evolving as I compose these lines, a few matters require a bit of amplification, definition, etc. First, TT is a part of the ByteDance corporate aggregation.
BD is indubitably a Chinese corporation and China is one of four official Foreign Adversaries of the U.S.A., ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,’ right? That means that this entire set of eventualities of a TikTokish nature probably has some geopolitical components, like who is going to build the new Panama Canal and additional blah blah blah.
Second, TT is a Social Media sub-conglomerate. Huh. Think about it. Do other such aggegations of Capital come to mind? I mean, we could Google it or see if it showed up for sale on FB Marketplace, ha ha. So, yes, friends, back to Adam Smith we go. Whatever else is going on here, components of corporate skullduggery, cartel ‘competition’—authorized monopoly is the epitome of successful competition—and like exemplars of gangster-marketing-tactics also more than plausibly comprise a portion of what is happening in front of ‘nine learned Justices’ in Washington.
Third, a few legal definitions, of ‘bills of attainder’ and ‘ex post facto laws’ and such, will be helpful, at least in navigating the cultural swamp of propagandized and often meaningless news about this matter. Therefore, a ‘bill of attainder’ is any law or statute or, in the parlance, “enrolled bill” from the legislature, that in its paragraphs and pages, and inevitably regulations, requires an individual or aggregate to abandon property, pay fines, or otherwise suffer commercial or monetary loss.
These were very popular back in the days when ‘Americans knew their place’ and remained colonies, ha ha. A law that works ‘ex post facto’ seeks to punish someone for some past deed that at the time was not illegal, and hence not a misdeed, so to say.
‘Petitioner’ means TT and China, in some way; ‘Respondent’ means USG and monopoly finance and its media representatives, in one fashion or another.
A Writ of Certiaori requests the Supreme Court to review a lower court’s decision. In this case BD and TT petition for such another look at things. The U.S. responds. Interestingly, “(t)he word certiorari comes from Law Latin, meaning ‘to be more fully informed.’ A writ of certiorari orders a lower court to deliver its record in a case so that the higher court may review it.”
Amicus Curiae means ‘Friend of the Court,’ most generally including a lawyer with the requisite high-court bona-fides. Such a barrister-headed congregation may file a formal argument about the suit in question, a Brief that supports one side or another, a collection of which Amici Curiae Briefs accompany the arguing and deciding of ‘important cases.’
Fourth, as explored in an earlier BTR series, among the many texts that have tantalized and taunted mediation, basically in every Big Tent issue, media means money and monopoly, and cash and cartels always operationalize spying as a primary aspect of staying atop the heap. In a sense, this realization—monopoly media always means spooks are at play—shouldn’t, in theory, effect an inalienable right of freedom of expression, so whatever the ‘division of loyalties’ among social media giants, this taking sides by corporate forces can’t end my absolute Right to participate in amicable communication acts, as it were.
Additionally, for example, who is Brian Firebaugh? Or even et al.? And what in heck is BASED Politics Inc.? Wow. Sometimes, this shit is so epic, like a perambulating Hobbit story. Mr. Firebaugh is the named party of the group of eight TikTok content creators who joined the company’s litigation against the United States Government. He’s a lanky Texas cattle rancher near Waco.
BASED Politics Inc. ends up being the Liberty Justice Center, a complicated melange of money, missions, litigation, and propaganda. The only label which might be apt could be ‘Constitutionalist.’ The group’s adherents sued TT independently and became part of the company’s action, since everybody was seeking the same Declaratory & Injunctive Relief.
Liberty’s arguments ring true to anyone who appreciates free speech. “‘There’s a popular—and wrong—stereotype that TikTok is just a platform for trending dances. The fact is that millions of Americans use TikTok to exercise their right to free speech, seriously discussing important political and social issues. The First Amendment protects that right, but the proposed TikTok ban would trample all over it in a misguided effort to protect Americans through sweeping acts of censorship,’ said plaintiff Hannah Cox, co-founder of BASED Politics.”
The ever ready follow up, concerning other parties or participants about whom we ought to be aware, is always apt. Who knows? It’s fluid and evolving as I go.
There now. We ought to be ready to explore. We might keep this in mind, from the vaunted ‘paper of record’ two years back, as we consider things. “For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.”
The Legal Landscape
After the April 24th signing of the Act, TikTok’s clock was ticking, and the company duly filed suit in Federal Court. What follows here initially was, in law school anyhow, called the Procedural Disposition. Logically, such an overview would commence with the passage of this legislation: otherwise, no ‘cause-of-action’ would have ensued.
In the District Court for the District of Columbia, the default venue for this sort of action, the company owners sued the U.S. on May 7; on August 2, the U.S. sued and stated a claim that the owners had violated the Childhood Online Privacy Protection Act, litigation not directly connected to the ban or TikTok’s response to it.
On December 6, the the Apellate Court trio for the D.C. District upheld the ban. Its order, ninety-two pages long, was primarily pro forma, as is almost inevitable in such documents, yet it also provided plenty of pertinent pointers about these sorts of issues: the right to communicate, the applicability of the First Amendment, what ‘standard of review’ to apply, and more.
Here is a relevant excerpt about that third item in the list above. “Under intermediate scrutiny, the Act complies with the First Amendment ‘if it advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests.’ … Under strict scrutiny, the Act violates the First Amendment unless the Government can ‘prove that the restriction furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.’
Oral arguments before the Supreme Court began on January 10th, two weeks after President-Elect Trump called for a ‘ninety-day-pause’ for him to try to work out a deal that would be a viable compromise. The Justices had granted a Certiorari request on December 18th, two days after TT and BD filed for the hearing. As predicted, a week after initial question-and-answer sessions before the arrayed, oh-so-elevated Judges, the nine of them affirmed the U.S. position, that destroying a ‘Red-Chinese menace’ mattered more than freedom of expression.
Many interested observers, as friends of the court, filed Amicus Briefs for the opposed sides. The Respondents’ team was slightly larger(9 to 8), despite how the idea of suppressing free exchange of ideas and culture is inherently noxious. The American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, Zephyr Teachout, States Attorney Generals, and heads of a Congressional Committee on ‘Communist China’ were prominent supporters of the U.S. position.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Knight’s free-speech institute at Columbia, Social and Racial Justice Community Non-Profits, the Cato Institute, and a plethora of constitutional law professors accounted for most of the Briefs in line with TikTok’s complaint and request for a constitutional declaration and permanent injunction as redress therefore. Below the Fold, we’ll look at contentions and requests from both sides of the contest.
After the S.Ct. granted Certiorari, four additional briefs came down the pike, three for TT, one of which came from a bastion of legal liberalism, while Senator Mitch McConnell spoke against the free-speech position and in favor of shutting the commies down.
This exploration of where things stand, legally speaking, might well approach a conclusion of the section with the venerable ACLU, whose last-ditch Amicus Brief was both passionate and learned. “‘Taking away Americans’ free speech rights does not make us safer; it endangers our democracy,’ said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at ACLU. ‘
The next administration must immediately work with Congress to fix or repeal this flawed legislation. No one should be stripped of their ability to express themselves, especially on a platform that brings together such an immense, vibrant collection of voices from around the world.’”
Finally, then, having consulted an erstwhile liberal source like the American Civil Liberties Union. …(continued below the fold)
Erotic Snippets—”How Much Is He, Then?”
The slave market and the cattle pens, where bidding took place amid the cacophony of lowing bovines and shouted human offers, had been adjacent operations time out of mind, since the grandmothers of our forefathers had been still salt-and-pepper-haired elders with their young charges, our parents, at the hems of their togas. In the midst of dusty-speckled smoke than pierced both sunshine and shadow, the salacious sovereign mistress sashayed toward her favored vendor’s stall.
“As it was in the beginning, so may it remain, amen, ha ha,” Omphale smiled at the memory. Even as a child, she remembered, “I was that way.” “Even children today,” she thought, wrinkled their noses in disgust and whined about the stink.
This gruesome aromatic mixture had remained despite ‘wiser heads,’ with sinuses as sensitive as our Princess O, who suggested something different. Anyone, even of royal blood, who proposed change was, when all was said and done, a suspicious character to many in positions of command as central to things as kings themselves.
Or Queens, not to mention a future Queen whose sculpted belly and stalwart pulsing thighs would draw men’s attention as a cove draws in the sea, a royal mistress whose budded lips commanded kisses to join adoring orbs to sheline violet eyes that blinked with bliss. Even such a one might tire men, of high or low station, with endless complaining or too freely expressing her ‘helpful suggestions,’ no matter how apt they might be.
Omphale had, none the less, from her earliest gambols amid the buying and selling melee—animal flesh readied for the butcher, and human flesh on the auction block as individuals or pairs or entire families—turned her nose up at the stench. “Why, we have to strip our new servants and scrub them down in the Meander before we can properly dress them and let them inside.”
Her family had meat delivered by one of her deceased husband’s nephews, Tomasce, a strapping lad whose bullish attributes his ‘aunt-in-law’ had, very literally, come to appreciate with a great measure of gushing glee. Now that ‘Tommi’s’ rich, jealous new wife was massively pregnant, she hoped to renew their dalliances; “perhaps this afternoon, after he brings the beef and pork, I can sample my favorite cut.”
She smiled to herself once more as she surveyed the first of three chattel-platforms. Its Ukrainian ‘residents,’ a family’s females from their looks—two tow-headed children, three blond and buxom maidens, and a white-haired yet still youthful matron—didn’t hold her attention. She felt nervous around such fair folk despite her noble lineage, as if she were pondering a proposition to imprison fairies or nymphs.
The second platform was empty. She started, dropping her leather sock full of silver coins and nuggets into the dust, at what she saw in the third tableau, when she continued her initial ‘survey of the goods’ at her favorite market. To notice him dredged from within the rumors of her own godly forebears, a ‘granddaughter of the mountain itself.’
Seized by sight indeed she was, in any event, utterly riveted in her gaze. The sole occupant of this particular stage seemed himself as much a mountain as a human male, a bristling hillock as sturdy and sculpted as something Olympian, his musculature akin to the ravines of such a hillside, bristling with the strength of stones out of which sprang tufts of hair as feral and matted as steeply sloping laurel thickets.
Arousal never strayed far from Omphale’s warm, centered, scintillating womanly essence. In fact, meeting this Herakles—or so said the crude sign tied haphazardly to the anchoring pole for the slave’s nude bedecking on wily Patrinus’ sales deck—was in any honest accounting only the third in her routine, ongoing litany of wanting on this exact marketing day.
However, although these erupting desires more than merely occasionally elicited wanton washings of fulfilling flow fulfilled, so far on the morning of this shopping sojourn, she had been chaste, except in her thoughts, which remained ever salacious in searching for further perfection of her swollen appetite, so to say. She had no more created this gargantuan greed that thrummed in her guts and hummed her pudenda than she gave birth to this manly fellow, before her in the flesh in all his glory.
Yet how he reached inside her. Nipples became insistent for the cupping of hand, for the sweet chalice of hungry, heated mouth. Despite some beast-hide’s—was it a Lion’s?—despoiling his obscenely glorious nudity, the fleshy and nostril-flaring aroma of this mysterious mister moistened her, so that she could feel, every few moments, a slight dribbling of syrup from her source.
Was he flesh or confection? Was he the product of a sculptor or a woman? Her color rose to inflame her breasts and throat at such questions, all the while her steady drip, drip, drip of desirous delight did indeed dribble paths down her goosefleshed thighs.
His manhood, placid in its modesty, draped obediently down his thigh while his eyes fixed almost entirely inward, though an antagonist might well fear crossing the path of that ferocious glare. She sought his eyes anyway, though his penis, with its single, unblinking visage beneath its lidding, drew her still nigher.
Patrinus, skinny giant that he was, grinned and giggled at the Princess’ infatuation. “Heh, heh, heh! He's quite the specimen.” Her proprietary acquaintance laughed, as one would who treasured sweet moments in the maelstrom that otherwise typified such a calling as trading in human flesh to provide servants and slaves and concubines and, even, if rumors were true, surreptitious sacrificial offerings.
Omphale gaped a few moments more, truly awestruck, before inquiring, as offhandedly as she could manage, “so, how much is he then, eh?” Even a King’s daughter must pay to pave a way through prospects and problems: she knew of the two-sidedness of this truism too.
Recently, on the one end of things, she had the day before the day before faced a herder who demanded two kopits of gold each for two mares, when she knew by common custom that a single kopit would, at any other market in Lydia, for any other customer, have commanded two or three coppers in change for the both of them.
Earlier in the course of Athena’s moon, at the Goddess’ festival and frolic, Omphale served as one of Athene’s ‘sacred virgins,’ an honor, certainly, but one which other women with much less amorous experience and expertise, women with no more sensual or explosively erotic fire, were welcome to pursue merely by showing up with appropriately willing attitudes and licentious behavior. Omphale had to pay.
Not that she didn’t have her fill of fun during her dutiful three nights, quite the contrary. One elderly patron, with more cattle than sense, so exceeded his limits of libations from fermented grapes and glorious females that, as this prurient princess entertained to engage his thrusting embrace, his heart burst and left him pulsing, tumescent, and dead, oozing out his final essence inside her channel of glee.
Herakles’ cost, given these circumstances, proved immaterial. She would have him, and so she did.
She had caused quite the stir as she led this studded stable-prize homeward. Even Tomasci, hulking and mighty though he considered himself, scurried away from his delivery of beef without asserting a single claim to his elder lover; only her own staff then filled the quarters where she would treat this manly, herculean glory to his ‘initial processing.’
She shooed away all of her retinue of handmaids and connubial cohorts—those who prepared and then shared in her conquests, as well as those who acted only as servants—leaving herself with a still shackled and manacled man-mountain. The soothing yet scalding steam of her volcanically heated bathing pools, replete with scents of myrrh and frankincense, suffused with various libidinally liberating lotions and potions, soon had the pliable giant hero—”my hero,’ she thought with thudding pulse and pulsating pussy—washed and willing, if not yet wildly as wanton as she would will.
She commanded him to stand still as he exited the bath, and, responding to her real longing, his cock rose in a gyrating cycle of excitement. “Lift me!” she ordered him.
He did, and for several screaming minutes, she rode him as if he were her designated stallion. “Come now!” she growled, and she felt his gathered climax splatter inside her as she shrieked with glee and released explosively and, momentarily, lost consciousness, so that she surfaced to see concern and wonder crease his feral, chiseled features.
She knew that her womanly readiness meant that she was likely pregnant. “He really will be my stud,” she chortled. Dismounting and gentling him as she might a draft animal, she laid him out on an adjacent divan. She noticed then.
Her name translated as navel, attesting to her central role in her people’s peaceable prosperity. This Herakles had a strange remnant of his mother’s umbilical tube. It protruded as if a handsome little mushroom were blooming from his belly.
In any case, as she tickled the slight knob atop his belly’s button, that portion of his outward flesh that she most treasured rose in response like a rearing stallion, so that she could not contain a breathy “Oh my” that brought blushes to her new charge’s bearded cheeks. Not that she rejected lovers with endowments less fulsome, precisely the opposite.
“It is the womanly art to make up for daintiness on her paramour’s part!” She loved the thought of her skill in that regard. “Besides,” she pondered as she feasted on his stout member’s dancing vibrations, “so many muscle-bound men are skinny in their sex,” and she did like a fellow who could carry her weight with easy aplomb.
Still, she much preferred some mighty girth to give birth to her bushy loins’ most mellifluous, merry mirth. Whatever this Herakles’ skills as a personal swordsman, she had complete confidence that she’d have him trained, and entrained with her in tow, before a week was passed with him as the most frolicsome feature of the sleeping quarters where she would install him as a permanent fixture. …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Hubbert’s Nukes Do a Flip Turn
(As noted last issue, “This particular delving of energy’s depths emanated from an occasional ‘assignment’ that I had for a brief ambit in 2010 and beyond. It was a gig about ‘corporate responsibility,’ one of those hilarious oxymorons—like ‘legal ethics’—worthy of a giggle at the turn of a phrase. Inevitably, I wanted to point out that this would ever remain an ‘unclothed emperor scenario,’ inasmuch as the only duty capitalists comprehensively will countenance is the siren call of more profit.”
The first episode ended in this way. “At least speculatively, therefore, the second component of the story is to see what impelled Hubbert to overturn his strong inclination in favor of fission. Developing this point will await the next ‘telling of the tale’ and what follows that.
Nevertheless, the reality that the Modern Nuclear Project has come to be as our species’ Carbon Age has aged is undeniable. How has this happened? What does it mean? These are questions near the heart of a Big Tent methodology, as it were.
A piece of Driftwood Message Art examines “Pandora’s Promise” in this regard. "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."
As always, perhaps a ‘word to the wise’ will suffice.”)
PEAK OIL OVERVIEW, HISTORY, CONTEXT
Arguably, the first step in trying to understand all of this—what, in a rich and robust contextual sense, Peak Oil ought to signify to us—should be a simple definition of the phrase. The idea, after all, is applicable to many situations involving energy use, growth, and dynamics generally inside of a finite system, or dealing with finite factors, from an inception to a completion.
Peak Oil is a point in time. That time—whether one calculates it as a second, day, year, or decade is just a formatting choice—separates the process of extracting oil from the earth into two equal parts. The first half includes the period in which half the available supply of oil has been sucked up, burned off, or otherwise removed from the ground. The second half defines the time during which people locate, dig out, and use up earth's remaining petroleum.
Peak Oil is thus also a bifurcation of a production process. This splitting is expressible as a function, in math terms, of rates of extraction over time. Thus, as the snarky debunker above noted, Peak Oil is a fact unless people stop using it before gobbling up half, or unless we all disappear.
Here's a Jimbo's Nerdy Dictionary definition. "Peak Oil (N-Phr.)-1. The point in the process of oil production when half of the oil on earth is gone or used up; 2. In practical terms, an amorphous point at which, given all sorts of exogenous factors, an observer or participant estimates that people have depleted a large portion of earth's oil, roughly a half that is recoverable at 'reasonable,' 'acceptable,' or bearable cost."
Someone like me, or like a JustMeans reader, might at first nod, or shrug, depending on one's 'N.Q.' ( Nerdiness Quotient), and say "And your point is???" On the other hand, given the trillions of dollars and billions of automobiles and so on at stake if people can't find oil fairly easily, we might also acknowledge a frisson of tension that would inevitably accompany conversation on the topic.
As a way of recognizing this, a reader might imagine a story-telling premise. "The hero discovers that his life is half over." Or, "The heroine learns that she has used up half of the oxygen in the mine that she is trying to escape." Anytime someone says, "Your time's half up (or 'your stuff's half gone)," the 'half empty' palpitation is at least equally likely as the 'half full' grin; thus, leaving aside obvious social and political concerns about economic justice and so forth, the Peak Oil brouhaha is natural, probably unavoidable.
Before seeking to understand the current day snarling snake-pit that the Peak Oil discussion has become, we would do well to look at the initiation of the idea that oil's diminution was on the horizon. The assessment that I offer in this regard will necessarily be, at the absolute outside, highly provisional. Obviously, to tell this story with anything even vaguely resembling complete complexity would require monumental resources and tons of time. Neither are available, so this severely limits the effort here.
HUBBERT’S WORK—PERSONAL, PROFESSIONAL, OPERATIONAL DETAILS
Nonetheless, Marion King Hubbert did give a speech (), entitled "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels," which despite its title represents a culturally agreed-upon initiation of Peak Oil Contemplation. At the time, the incident made a 'lot of waves,' about which we will learn a bit more below.
Over time, world events—such as OPEC's formation, wars and rumors of wars, oil-shocks and rumors of oil-shocks, and the persistent oil-firm priority of keeping prices and profits high—unfolded that amplified the vibrations, so to speak, of those original waves. And, in the way that folks and institutions are wont to fashion a narrative, 'Peak Oil' became a 'phenom' that sprang, so to speak, from 'Hubbert's peak.' This portion of this piece gives readers a chance to put Peak Oil into at least a minimally rich frame of reference.
Definitely central in any interrelated compilation of both Hubbert's 1956 paean to a nuclear future, and the present Peak Oil controversy that has an organic link to that seminal text, is an assessment of Hubbert's work leading up to his March presentation at the American Petroleum Institute meeting, just a stone's throw from the Alamo in San Antonio. For one thing, he had not suddenly come up with the ideas underlying this paper.
On the contrary, since 1948, at the latest, he had been putting forth the idea that humanity faced an inevitable and thus foreseeable crisis, in which population increase, decreased available energy resources, and the laws of nature would not yield pleasant results. These themes, which he continued to advance and hone until his death at 86, in 1989, must have been a key component of how he viewed the universe.
In a 1949 article in Science Magazine, he presented significant chunks of his 1956 paper, minus the material on nukes and some of the technical calculus and statistics with which he supported his later iteration. Again and again over the years, related and similar ideas appeared repeatedly—in papers that he wrote, courses that he taught, scientific agendas on which he toiled.
Furthermore, he had, immediately prior to the invitation to make a presentation at API "on the overall world energy picture," added to his melange of geological work at Shell Development. This new assignment as much as anything else opened up Hubbert’s social and professional life.
Long friendship with Pratt had its consequences, however. Here’s an excerpt.
“...perhaps a few weeks or a month before the date of the meeting, with the Shell managing director, Mr. Schapers, whom I'd met several years before in Mirakabu [unclear], where he was an operating engineer, also in Mirakabu, came by and briefly visited me. I showed him my diagrams of the oil situation. His only remark was that he hoped that I would not in fact go overboard like Weeks of Standard of New Jersey had been doing.
Doel:
That's an interesting comment.
Hubbert:
Well, Weeks at that time had been progressively increasing his estimates.”
Almost a decade more followed at Shell in which he stood by and refined his numbers and tweaked his insights. Inevitably, Hubberts thinking upset apple carts of other fruit-vendoring technocrats, engineers, and scientists.
The beginnings of his participation in science wars and technical infighting followed apace, still at Shell, when Kennedy came to power. His place in the scheme of things felt solid, if not altogether secure.
Raids on his files, plundering his access to admin support, and general deception and backstabbing occurred soon enough, however. Though wounded by mendacious treachery, he never offered up the integrity of his searching soul.
The jump to academia and his continued presence in the policy arena, despite the headaches and heartaches that this byzantine experience brought to him, were M.K.’s approach to making his way. He was ever inquisitive.
Independent elder years blessed him with the ability to do as he pleased, lecturing, maintaining a continuing Cassandra presence, and a turning toward Gaia and away from the likes of Edward Teller and the PR hacks in charge of the nuclear establishment. All of this and more spools by, dripping contextual clues and overflowing with narrative benchmarks.
An amazing resource, at API, replete with documentation and detail, covers his whole 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, two months back or so, at this point, brought us Part One. As a matter of course, a fourth installment in this five part series just continued a ‘first stab’ at this ‘America’s backyard’ subject. Heck, ha ha, people might even benefit from knowing these things.
A second selection, in the event, embodied in part a continuing exploration of Empire’s “Open Veins of Latin America.” Part Three focused on Chilean literature, culminating with paragraphs from Peter Kornbluh’s, The Pinochet Papers. Part Four, just past, proceeded from Kornbluh’s indictment to a broader understanding of a generalized formula of predation and destruction throughout the region, with various policy and practice pointers about pursuing plundering imperial projects with impunity.
It ended with these notes from a U.S. State Department cable that Che Guevara was busily distributing shortly prior to his assassination in Bolivia, which today at least occasionally resists imperialism and supports democratic socialist alternatives. “‘In every respect, (despite the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation), the member states of the OAS are now less hostile toward United States intervention in Cuba than before the invasion, but a majority of them—including … more than half the population of Latin America(in Mexico and Brazil)—are not willing to intervene actively or even to join a quarantine against Cuba. …(Especially), (a)s long as Brazil refuses to act against Castro, it is probable that a number of other nations, including Argentina and Chile, will not wish to risk adverse internal repercussions to please the United States.’”
As the rambling cable draws to a close, it expresses why a nation, like Gould, might want to hire ‘half the working class’ to destroy the other half. “‘The most immediate danger of Castro’s example for Latin America might well be the danger to the stability of those governments that are at present attempting evolutionary social and economic change, rather than for those that have tried to prevent such changes, in part because of the tensions and awakened hopes accompanying such social changes and economic development. …
The Alliance for Progress might well furnish the stimulus to carry out more intensive reform programs, but unless these programs are started quickly and soon begin to show positive results,…they will not be enough of a counterweight to increasing pressure from the extreme left. The years ahead will…witness a race between those forces that are attempting to initiate evolutionary reform programs and those that are trying to generate support by the masses for fundamental economic and social revolution.’”)
A FIRST DEDUCTION
Of course, Che was not Chilean. Nor were clear violations of international law against Cuba attacks on Chile. But these evident admissions impel the thinker to a first inference that flows from this essay: the decimation of Salvador Allende and allies like Victor Jara both intended to hurt and sought to undermine Cuba’s revolution, and by extension the possibility to obtain social democracy in Latin America’s ‘real world.’
In similar fashion as the poet and singer whose profiles appear here, Che was the loathed serpent in capital’s faux edenic garden, where at least the rich lived like emperors and empresses, and more or less everything was on sale for the ‘right price.’ He was Fidel’s comrade and persisted in advancing the idea of a hemispheric armed uproar against gringo wealth and hegemony.
Moreover, real links joined Havana and Santiago. One of Che’s chief financial advisers in restructuring Cuban agriculture and industry was the Chilean, Carlos Romeo. A member of the inner circle of Chile’s national bank under both Frei and Allende, Romeo demonstrated both technical excellence and socialist fervor in his practice of economics.
Pablo Neruda also promoted the Cuban revolution as a model; more importantly, he foresaw that the consciousness of Cuban success would free his countrymen and working people around the world from any slavish devotion to ‘free markets,’ which were never free, to commoditized models which ultimately impoverished workers to exactly the extent that they enriched the owners of everything, to holy righteousness that suppressed the true spirit and lusty wonder of human life.
And Victor Jara himself formed friendships in Cuba. He and Silvio Rodriguez sang together. Cuba received him as a distinguished guest. He also traveled more than once to the Soviet Union.
Moreover, even though Cuba’s more-or-less victorious uprising against capital’s various ‘mobs’ depended on armed and aggressive action, Cuba’s leadership in general suggested that Chile’s citizens commit themselves to a peaceful path to social democracy. Such statements were often enough completely explicit.
In 1971, “(s)tanding shoulder to shoulder with President Salvador Allende, Castro advised workers that Chile was not Cuba and that, in light of that country’s history, a parliamentary path, not a revolutionary one, would represent the ‘Chilean road to socialism.’ The result was the disarming of workers, who were thus unable to undertake an independent revolutionary struggle and were left unprepared for the military and right-wing parties led by the infamous General Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew Allende and installed a dictatorship that killed tens of thousands of workers.”
Finally, two of the people that this essay’s developers interviewed about this matter also mentioned the importance of Cuba. One of these has requested anonymity. Monica Hayden, the other, had married the son of the naval attaché, Arturo Araya, Junior, whose murder on July 27, 1973, may have been the first strike against those members of the military who eschewed the coup. She pointed out that her former father-in-law had often worked with the Cubans and had that very evening returned from what he described, immediately before an assassin cut him down, as a “critically important” dinner at the Cuban Embassy.
In all kinds of ways, therefore, both the emanation of Chile’s Marxist moment and its evisceration by a U.S. organized terrorist operation resulted from, or at least felt the substantial influence of, Cuba’s inputs. That attacks on Allende also assaulted Castro is clearly evident. And such interconnections form the heart of what we can conclude about empire as seven billion cousins approach the third decade of the second millennium of the present pass.
A SECOND DEDUCTION
Closely related to the initial culminating thought, we ought to acknowledge that anti-communism guarantees anti-solidarity. The applicability of this idea to Latin America stems from events well before Augusto Pinochet’s murderous rampage. Pablo Neruda’s flight from his native land was a clear case of anti-communism. These tendencies became particularly powerful under the aegis of the young CIA during Eisenhower’s two administrations.
Even earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.’s ‘fanaticism’ in invading the nascent Soviet Union in order to “strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle,” U.S. leaders noted the utility of anti-red thinking in Hispanic America. Republican Secretary of State Frank Kellogg made this point with crystal clarity in 1927.
“The Bolshevik leaders have had very definite ideas in respect to the role which Mexico and Latin America are to play in their general program of world revolution. They have set up as one of their fundamental tasks the destruction of what they term American imperialism as a necessary prerequisite to the successful development of the international revolutionary movement in the New World. …Thus Mexico and Latin America are conceived as a base of activity against the United States.”
This sort of attitude had practical implications. In Chile, as we have seen, the CIA shortly after Cuba’s consolidation of its independence initiated sophisticated and potent actions against Allende’s 1964 campaign, based on the notion that he was communist. Recent scholarship has explored this situation in some detail, explaining precisely how such activity harmed solidarity among workers and other groups that might otherwise have found easier methods for working together.
“In order to prevent Allende’ selection, the U.S. government massively intervened in Chile’s 1964 presidential election (in the form of) the Scare Campaign. The Scare Campaign was a multimedia propaganda blitz that used fear to convince Chileans that they should vote for Eduardo Frei and against Salvador Allende. Working in conjunction with Chileans, the U.S. government developed, designed, financed, and implemented the Scare Campaign.
The campaign attempted to convince Chileans, especially women, that Allende’s triumph would lead to the destruction of the family and the undermining of women’s roles as mothers. By incorporating ideas about femininity and masculinity into its efforts to oppose Allende, this U.S.-sponsored propaganda campaign engendered anticommunism in Chile.”
Other analysis demonstrates that in the run-up to and aftermath of the murder of Allende and Jara and more, the CIA’s operations targeted staunch Catholics. In the event, many priests and churches were among those that facilitated people’s accepting this barbaric coup as ‘the lesser of two evils,’ given their inclination toward anti-communism that the U.S. had specifically amplified.
The practical upshot is simple, therefore. If the best interests of U.S. citizens is that Chilean citizens despise and turn on each other, then we should encourage anti-communism. Otherwise, we should fight it more or less religiously.
A THIRD DEDUCTION
Out of such ideation emerges an acceptance of the necessity of internationalism, and in the context of this storyline the absolute primacy of multilingual capacity, the ability to sing in many tongues, so to speak. This is, thus far in any event, a mostly pragmatic and common-sense perspective. …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
Well, ‘hell’s bells,’ as Mama Kassy often exclaimed with a rueful smile, how about them apples? Whatever else may ring true, I clang the klaxon of Life Force Energy resolutely, and as resonantly as I’m able. In exercising some new protocols, and seeking to figure out various ongoing crises of access and electronic performance, determinging precisely when and how and where to take the next step is a clear case of ‘easier said than done,’ ha ha.
What, more or less exactly, can we make of all this? ‘So full of a number of things,’ proclaimed the poet, the world should make us ‘happy as kings,’ though one might doubt the veracity of the premise, ha ha, whether ‘rich as Croesus’ or otherwise. In any case, whether from Goddess Grace, the good Lord’s mercy, or some other instance of amicable marvels of All-That-Is, Big Tent Review reflects the merry ministrations of a more or less cooperative, collegial cosmos.
For at least a few years, I’ve been saying that human happy thriving hinges on marrying the Lord to the Goddess of All-That-Is herself. I’m about the worst marketing/outreach coordinator imaginable, yet I can crank out product: stories, ideas, scripts, productions, blah blah blah.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, ha ha! Without doubt, the producer of such an intricate, involved output, which in the event proposes radical—even revolutionary—ferocity in thought and deed, would prefer noticeable measures of audience engagement, mutual seeking, reader awareness, and attendant blah blah blah.
Whatever the case may be, here we are, once again proving prescient the titular quip of Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are! Yes, indeed. So then, as ever and always will stay true, I’d just adore the good fortune of hearing from a few folks as regards the issues that show up here and elsewhere in every Big Tent Review.
‘Sit Down, Shut Up, Do As You’re Told!’ Thus shriek, or spit through gritted teeth, all the vaunted ‘masters and betters’ of the ‘only way,’ the capitalist way, the direction of plunder and chaos and profit aplenty for the powers that be and some dystopic nightmare or other for the rest of us. Is this the only possibility?
Inquiring minds hunger for hope and thirst for reason. We need both hopeful and rational attitudes and actions, in the event, to grapple with answering this question.
—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! After all, we’ve ‘no time like the present.’
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
Aphrodite’s at-times elusive magnificence notwithstanding, the Wanton Goddess made flesh, the Antithesis packs a punch even more powerfully monumental, Ouroboros’ effusive completion in the guise of The World. Gentler and more pleasantly placid, the Synthesis gives us Narcissus’ sense of self-discovery and self-appreciation with the Page of Cups. Wow territory again; like WTAF Wow!
A simple summation here is actually quite easy to articulate. ‘Human spiritual needs and expressions right now express an upwelling of potential for loving relationship, perhaps more so than ever before. All that human cousins want and need is available to us, tout suite, today, without waiting. All that is necessary is that we care for ourselves enough to examine our hearts and be willing to live according to those precepts.’
Card by card, we can unpack this a bit further. In many people’s Tarot quests, the Ace of Cups is a beloved pluck indeed, since the augury of an upwelling of affection and readiness for loving relations are what they hope to discover in the ordinary course of things. As the text states, Aphrodite here “implies the beginning of the great journey through the realm of the heart, where abundance of feeling erupts and drives the individual into…relationship(s).”
As regards today’s triptych inquiry, whatever we hold holy—our spiritual core, perhaps—at just this moment can encounter powerful forces in favor of affectionate connection with others, so as to delve and further develop these matters. As suggested already, this ought to deliver portents of hope, maybe even gloriously gleeful aspirations.
From that sublime Thesis, we traverse reality’s rocky face to encounter a Synthesis even more mellifluous, maybe even magnificent. The World is an epitome, a pinnacle, an awareness of accomplishment, of achieving both emotional and practical hopes and dreams. All the great oppositions, the prime paradoxes, the most contrary conundrums “are in this card portrayed as joined, living in harmony within the great circle of the world snake, which is an image of inexhaustible life.”
In such a view, our spirituality must as a matter of course be expansive, fulsome, ever striving for greater unity and completeness. Thus, a sort of opposition to the eruptive force of the Ace of Cups does show up here, but as an even more mighty manifesting of spirited connectivity and divined intersection with others to establish a sacrosanct core of human values.
One way of seeing the Synthesis pull, as a general rule, is to look at it as a pathway to integrating whatever polarity the first two cards might express. In that vein, Narcissus’ Page of Cups is pretty perfect. His back story exemplifies many prerequisites for initiating relationship, in similar fashion as his doomed fate establishes a kind of bedrock for something akin to a completed comprehension, or a comprehensive completion, of a partnership so begun.
One cannot connect with others till one gains regard for oneself, at the exact instant that this self-regard must transform—or die—before one can appreciate others adequately enough to percolate lasting love. The applicability of such a notion to questions of what can call aspirations of ascendancy in the realm of All-That-Is ought to be obvious. This card synthesizes “a renewal of the capacity to love, beginning with love of self after a time of hurt and withdrawal. This delicate quality must be nurtured, or it can rapidly vanish.”
Before moving on to the expanded Spiral Spread that plopped down today, let’s consider a bit more about Thomas Szasz. Each time that he wrote or spoke, he addressed matters of obvious and applicable import concerning psychic well-being and moral craving. Explicitly and relentlessly, he gainsaid even the plausibility of any reasonable, let alone salubrious, template of human life in which ‘mental illness’ could serve as a primary component.
In The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and Mental Illness, the author quotes Albert Camus in a frontispiece. “But slave camps under the flag of freedom massacres justified by philanthropy or by the taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence-through a curious transposition peculiar to our times—it is innocence which is called upon to justify itself.”
Additionally, Szasz’s thinking pulses with the powerful precept that places human sexuality squarely in the center of social affairs. He shows this with thrilling perspicacity in his dismantling of the idea that proscriptions against ‘witchcraft’ could somehow become defensible if they proposed ‘unhealthy practices,’ instead, as a legitimating source of the original condemnation. The prior “explanation,” in Szasz’s ideation, “had to be replaced by one equally universal in its potential application, but more worldly in its imagery.
If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, this time she gave birth to a full-fledged genius: She proposed that madness is due to another heinous act—masturbation. So, I submit, was the myth of masturbatory madness born. The ‘illness’ known from the eighteenth century on as ‘masturbatory insanity’ thus constitutes the new product manufactured by the new breed of manufacturers of degraded humanity, the physicians, and particularly, the alienists (or psychiatrists).”
This is also from The Manufacture of Madness. “This view was adopted, virtually unaltered, first by the Church, and then by Medicine. The result is, that, as Kinsey puts it, 'the proscriptions of the Talmud are nearly identical with those of our present-day legal codes concerning sexual behavior.'”
Earlier in this study, Szasz artfully addresses the ‘scientific’ views of that ‘father of psychiatry,’ and especially of American psychiatric practice, Benjamin Rush. "‘The excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct, which could not be removed by reason nor restrained by government... The extensive influence which these opinions had upon the understandings, passions, and morals of many of the citizens of the United States, constituted a form of insanity, which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing by the name of anarchia.’"
Szasz’s naturalistic dissection of the diseased perspective that ‘sex is of the devil,’ or, alternatively, that sex is dysfunctional and can be cured, is as thoroughgoing—in this monograph and elsewhere—as is the work of Wilhelm Reich, whose Mass Psychology of Fascism put “sexual repression” at the head of the list of what supports a Nazi mentality. Moreover, in positing a “therapeutic state” as a guiding rubric of politics generally, he placed himself decades ago ahead of the curve that has yielded our current context.
Szasz does not agree, quite likely, with aspects of a BTR view, in which sexual expression and pleasuring serve as social glue at the heart of every individual’s psychic development. However, he scathingly rejects any idea that human sexuality demarcates some sort of ‘treatable medical condition,’ a POV inherently more creditable and reasonable than what has become almost ubiquitous among ‘authoritative voices.’
Szasz contextualizes his viewpoint most incisively with a 1980 imprint that, in the U.S., bore the title, Sex By Prescription; interestingly enough, the British edition had a heading at once more informative and quotidian: Sex: Facts, Fraud, & Folly explores the exact same text as its cousin across the sea, the one subject-line evocative, the other an assertion about conceptions, true, false, silly.
One might term the great psychiatrist’s assertions as those of a nuanced and knowledgeable libertarian. He sums up his beliefs, especially in regard to human sexual responses, near and dear here at the Big Tent Review. “Because all public education is an affair of the state, the advocates of sex education support, above all else, an expansion of the scope and power of state intervention in our personal lives. In a world where we are increasingly controlled by the state, the last thing we need is to have the state program our sex lives for us, too.”
Szasz will sooner, rather than later, merit his own deconstruction in these pages. For the present passage, one can accept that this incisive thinker’s critiques must form part of the foundation and underpin the intellectual template of social beliefs about matters both ‘mental’ and spiritual. How might the Goddess give us food for though? Well, let’s see.
Moving toward one such examination, this paragraph and the six following repeat elements of what happened above the fold. “An inquiry along these lines might evoke interesting ideas. ‘How can cognitively capable and emotionally agreeable people relate to monopoly media’s obvious and widespread propagation of ‘concerns’ about mental health?’
In the event, with requisite shuffles and cuts and soulful concentration, the array hit the table just like this. First of all, only the second time in some thousand Readings, three cards Jumped out at me in the midst of the process, in this case during my more or less meticulous shuffling and meditating. Such ‘plucks,’ though not as intentional as the Spiral Spread in its own right, inform the entire intertwining that the ‘divining’ entails.
Here, the first card in view was Hades and the definition of Death. His dark countenance covered Orestes’ terrified self-censorship, in the form of the Two of Swords, at the irrepressible conflict between his parents, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. The bottom of this triumvirate of horror and hostility was the Eight of Swords, in which Orestes—pursued by the Furies for his performance of Apollo’s bidding to ‘avenge his father’—once more experiences even deeper nauseated disgust at future prospects. Next, as if on cue, the Essence continues this grotesque sequence with the brutal murder of the Three of Swords.
Nor do things lighten up much for the present BTR Tarot temporal triad. Past Developments show Psyche’s breaking her promise to Eros—in the Five of Cups—and thereby say a bit about betrayal. Present Passages gives up the top of the mythic arch for the frequent Swords today, the Ten, in which Athene rescues the fatally hopeless Orestes from the implacably furious Furies of femininity and fate by ‘inventing the jury on the spot.’ Likely Future Developments offers another deliciously unexpected coincidence, the Four of Cups, Psyche before she goes back on her vow, conversing with her envious and jealous sisters who ply her with horrible speculations about the ‘monster mate’ who would remain ‘eternally unseen.’
The in-this-case ten-card continuation continues with tricky, fickle, irresistible Aphrodite—the Ace of Cups—and her portents of potential loving connection, insodoing representing a decidedly upbeat No-Matter-What, Opportunities. The penultimate spot, Problems-&-Prospects, yields a portrait that has become quite a common Big Tent symbolic interlocutor, Jason and his inspired leadership to create a heroic team in the Four of Wands. The Synthesis for #24, finally, proffers the at once generous and oh-so-dangerous Poseidon, whose Ace of Pentacles portends material possibilities of momentous potential.
A yes-or-no conclusion about this type of attempt to untangle propaganda from actual helpful advisories might state the matter like this. “Aren’t these avalanches of images, about ‘improved’ cognitive and emotional response, little more than superficial pablum, basically advertisements of a sort?” While the answer is obviously an irrefutable affirmative, reasons in alignment with today’s unavoidably cavalier speculation amplify the plausibility of ‘reading something meaningful’ into this specific fall of the cards.
The symbols alone ought to chill the bones raise the hackles of anyone who is paying attention. The three Jumpers, provocatively goose such an interpretation. Readers can rest assured; more lies ahead.”
And so we arrive at ‘just ahead!’ As repeated already, these images and their attendant implications induce an eerie sensibility, or even a strong ‘gulp response.’ Death, though its portents needn’t be lethal, nevertheless wield a wake-up call’s clang and clatter.
Hades symbolically expresses the finality that faces everything. Endings may not be irreversible, yet they must come, come what may. The universe could not function otherwise. As the lead ‘crossing card,’ it embodies that combination of mandate and threat that, in some ways, probably characterizes culminations hither and yon.
The next two pulls, mysteriously or otherwise, elicit the same idea in a lot of ways. Both the Two and the Eight of Swords highlight horror at what is coming down the pike. The difference between this pair of plucks that loathe looking at tomorrow comes down to, in the former case, a vast unease at a pending conflict that one might hope and pray would dissipate if ignored, and, in the latter case, terrifying torment at an unavoidable, ugly duty or Hobson’s choice that one faces, come what may.
The Seven-Part Array, then, today’s Spiral Spread, has a daunting trio of crossing cards that affect it. Nor does the first half or so of this rubric look any friendlier. The Essence, for instance, starts everything up with the Three of Swords, which depicts Orestes’ mother and her lover in the act of slaughtering the young Prince’s father, Agamemnon. The center of the picture, then, is of the looming doom of the Two in the process of happening, conflict’s bloody eruption and the fact of facing such dire and fiery ferocity.
The triad that illuminates this Reading’s issue, in terms of time, produces Past Developments as the Five of Cups, where Eros wakes up to Psyche’s breaking her promise ‘not to peek,’ thereby representing a yesterday, or yesteryears, in which betrayal laid the basis for what has since unfolded.
The Ten of Swords follows this with a Current Context that brings the fourth pull from the ‘suit of cognition,’ where conflict both causes and requires a sharpening of sapient skills, in this case the pinnacle of the suit’s numbered sequence, in which human inventiveness, with Olympian assistance, saves Orestes from destruction.
From this flows Likely Futures in the form of the Four of Cups, which depicts Psyche’s ‘home life’ with her jealous sisters, who savage her unseen husband and, in the event successfully, encourage their beautiful sibling’s overturning her vow not to try to see Eros in, from the god’s perspective, all his overwhelming glory.
The next two profferals from the cosmos, or perhaps the Goddess, present potential outcomes much more hopeful that what has so far appeared, so that, despite the horrific realities of the question’s central context, one might hope to accomplish something helpful with these ‘cosmic tidbits.’
In the first place, No-Matter-What, Opportunities, shows us today’s ‘repeat performance.’ As ever, Aphrodite’s Ace of Cups augurs amplified psychic intuition and emotional energy in connection with our question, regarding mediated ‘mental-health’ messages. By opening up to and perpetuating new relationships, we might accomplish great things in favor of lives where our emotions are matters primarily of grace and gratitude.
Problems & Prospects gives up—in Marshall Arts experience—the ever popular Four of Wands, in which Jason’s cleverly-crafted team-building reaches the point where a truly fresh creative venture is truly happening, if only at the beginning of the hero’s journey in regard thereto, as it were.
As just above, the portent of such a view must elucidate a significant likelihood that, on the one hand, collective engagement can constructively encounter ‘mental health’ machinations of manipulation, and, on the other hand, must show a capacity to continue and expand its manifestation of this ongoing confrontation with propagated propagandized perspectives about any sense of calm, joyous wellness.
The Synthesis, Poseidon’s Ace of Pentacles, initiates the suit of both material well-being and bodily well-being, or health, which arguably would prove most salubriously possible in environs that reject the idea that standard human practice indicates mental ‘illness.’
In context, then, perhaps, one might readily posit Goddess guidance to the effect that nature’s inherent and inevitable nurture means that we can thrive in healthy bodies and experience consistent daily delight in our mental state, in all of which salubrious sensibilities the prescription of strong ‘medications’—with long lists of toxic, even lethal, side effects—is strongly contraindicated.
Television would need an entirely new ‘business model’ to replace Pharma’s bribing advertisements that proscribe any investigation of the pharmaceutical industry that would explain, or at least explicate, its routine operations. We might imagine how strength and clarity would allow us to become so powerful that the ‘law of the land’ strictly prohibited all advertising of the sort that takes place today in the constant barrage of spots for this or that ‘new medicine’ that we cannot even purchase by ourselves without prescription.
So there we have it, an echo a bit downstream from #24’s Introduction and its initial Pharma-Shtick, ha ha. Moving mellifluously toward the logical conclusion of such thinking—of happy and empowered citizens who completely transform the context of corporate governance’s preferred mediation about health and well-being—a true people’s-media momentum could come to pass, even, possibly, as a part of a true people-power mass movement.
Anyhow, blah blah blah. We might condense this Reading, so that it readily read along these lines. ‘In what we might term the joined arenas of health and media, in relation to seemingly mandatory ‘mental-health’ messaging, overarching issues—the necessity to End certain practices, the necessity of facing unpleasant conflicts, and using our heads about doing our duties as citizens—impact our consideration about Goddess Guidance, which itself revolves around the purging possibilities of conflict’s inescapable eruptions.
A Past marked by betrayal on the part of authorities, a Present in which we can gain the insight necessary to solve our problems despite how intractable they seem, and a Future evolution of things troubled by attempts to undermine our belief in ourselves and promote mistrust of others, such Temporal tempest appears perfectly parallel to All-That-Is in the here and now.
Notwithstanding the daunting aspects of all this litany of woe and oppression, which we must rouse ourselves to meet effectively, we can count on loving connection among ourselves in support of and solidarity with our own best interests, if only so as to provide a ‘change of pace,’ ha ha. Prospects, along with plausible Problems, attend the wonderful fact that we can create effective teams to advance a truly human agenda instead of more profiteering plunder and personal putridity. A Synthesis of all that is on display in these cards would be that the natural resources, inner and outer, are omnipresent for us to utilize in achieving a masterful and merry robust resilience!’
At least a few addenda would serve our purposes in regard to these ten cards and their portentous mutual conjunction. Each of them demarcates ‘editorial space’ that Big Tent Review’s upcoming issues will fill, as it were. Here, we state them very briefly, though expanding them interminably would easily be imaginable.
First, all obdurate separating of ‘mind’ and ‘body,’ an ever-present necessity in every suggestion of ‘mental illness,’ must at least elicit thoroughgoing analysis, explication, and critical dissection. Second, all Medical Models are similarly suspect as a way of grounding our libidinal and psychic navigating of life’s always-likely dangerous straits of love and attachment—to put matters baldly, lovemaking is never a sickness. Third, and the basis for the rest of what follows below, sexual release and Life-Force-Energy are synonymous, at least to a degree, and we forget this to our dire endangerment, blah blah blah.
Thus, readers have traversed terrain that, as often will prove true in such specific and documentably accurate illuminating instances of everything, inculcates insistent inclusion of elements of sexuality and carnal connection. As my Feral Nerd was always wont to exclaim in a Marshall Arts Performance Space, “it’s how we’re made!”
Many additional voices from the history of thought and action in relation to ‘mental health’ affirm this centralizing of Eros and erotic energy. In first place in the here-and-now, more from Thomas Szasz will start us off. He and Wilhelm Reich might always grace the top of any list of ‘authorities’ who speak for all humanity in this regard.
A passage from his original “Myth of Mental Illness” research essay, a combination of clinical report and literature review and more, potently punctuates this point. Szasz contextualizes this by mentioning an actor, playing a part in a Psychology Experiment, who demonstrates “perfect mental health.” We’ll return to this experimental nexus momentarily.
First, let’s look at what is universally acknowledged to be central to a happy aplomb. The performer would portray someone who “was happy and effective in his work; he established a warm, gracious and satisfying relationship with the interviewer; he was self-confident and secure, but without being arrogant, competitive, or grandiose. He was identified with the parent of the same sex, was happily married and in love with his wife, and consistently enjoyed sexual intercourse. He felt that sex was fun, unrelated to anxiety, social-role conflict, or status striving. This was built into his role because mental patients allegedly are sexually anhedonic.”
As to that fully-replicable attempt to create knowledge via ‘tests of nature,’ in conscious contradistinction to ‘powers-that-be-trickery,’ a more thoroughly affirmative approbation of BTR’s positive positioning of Eros is impossible to imagine. The Chief Investigator at the University of Oklahoma was Maurice Temerlin, assisted by his wife and lifelong collaborator, whose Master of Social Work aptly complemented his Psychology Ph.d.
The Temerlins were often a team, in fact. Clearly connected to this study that so destroys any fatuous fancy about insisting that ‘sexual perversities’ like nymphomania, sex addiction, and more, even existed, they also advised and served as intellectual guides for a project that sought to avoid, or at least clearly apprehend, fetishizing psychoanalytic or other erstwhile ‘scientific’ therapeutics that can easily devolve into foolish voodoo or self-abnegating cults.
“he concept of a cult has been associated … with tightly knit, deviant religious groups. Their practices have been analyzed in terms of Chinese thought-reform techniques, the physical alteration of the central nervous system, the development of an ‘indoctrinee syndrome,’ the effects of charisma, attachment to the leader, a socialization process, group dynamics and formation of group fantasies, and mind control.
A spiritual ideology has been commonly seen as a powerful binding force for participants. Cults are described as using powerful and deceptive methods for bringing converts under their control, making them compliant servants, depriving them of independent judgment, separating them from family and friends, and exploiting them financially and otherwise. These practices challenge respect for individual autonomy which is a fundamental value in Western culture and, as such, is a touchstone of ethical codes in all professions.”
In other words, such cultish concatenations closely track modern ‘mental health practice.’ Despite this deeply skeptical POV about ‘psychoanalytic SOP,’ which has at once proved salient and provided deeply penetrating points and particulars, this conjugal couple garnered fortune and fame because they ‘adopted’ a pair of chimpanzees to raise as ‘family.’ This episode suggests contrast and conundrum that cannot help but intrigue an interlocutor of the animal and the spiritual, for instance a Big Tent reviewer.
Anyway, I had intended to give much more from Szasz’s incisive guidance about ‘living well despite malign social influences,’ insidious impacts that he most often viewed as arising from social dominators of one sort and another. This initial rabbit-hole, though, proved so captivating that leaving it behind is difficult enough, let alone digging for further caverns of consciousness from this captain-of-psychology’s critics.
Onward we go nonetheless, to consider many feminine voices from, so to say, this ‘field operation in service to humanity,’ an attempt at beneficent understanding that innately includes all of the ways that we all embody Eros’ orgasmically ecstatic attributes. Anything else, in the way of a narrative attempt at exposition, is sick, truly an epitome of a dangerous ‘mental condition.’
Sabrina Spielrein is arguably the progenitress, so to speak, of this deeply rooted expression of libido as Life-Force-Energy. Her essay, “Destruction As the Cause of Coming Into Being,” offers a constructive deconstruction and integration of the ‘Eros of Civilization’ in the works of Freud and Jung and others of their male colleagues. One might extract dozens of pointed bon mots from the lengthy argument. She starts simply.
“Throughout my involvement with sexual problems, one question has especially interested me: Why does this most powerful drive, the reproductive instinct, harbour negative feelings in addition to the inherently anticipated positive feelings? These negative feelings, such as anxiety and disgust, must be overcome to use the drive appropriately.
Naturally, an individual's negative attitude towards sexual activity strikes especially to the core of the erotic. Several investigators have sought to explain this opposition as a result of our manner of child-rearing: We attempt to keep the drive within bounds and teach each child to consider the fulfillment of sexual wishes as something dirty and forbidden.”
This subversion of Life-Force-Energy yields at best pathetic results; otherwise, we wouldn’t be here, ha ha. Its ubiquity, especially among the cultural constructions here in ‘the land of freely brave or bravely free,’ as the case may be, is simply indisputable, except by uptight morons: being uptight or moronic alone is not enough ammunition to load up a truly all-American fear-and-loathing in regard to sexual energy.
Prominent women thinkers and therapists, such as Spielrein, led critical counterattacks against such insane idiocy, insisting on nuance if not outright negation of prudery’s primacy. As another early exemplar of this tradition, Lou Andreas Salome, established a feminist analytical approach to delineating and understanding the emergence of any human specimen’s specific sensations of sexual Life-Force-Energy.
Her 1916 article, “‘Anal’ and Sexual,” appeared in the German Imago, a journal whose subtitle translates as Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Humanities. Salome began by pressing prudes for their automatic enervation at any mention of childhood or other ‘regressive’ expressions of Eros.
“For some time now, it has become almost common practice to view the Vienna School’s emphasis on regressions to the anal stage as a kind of backwardness – as if, instead of moving on to an objective discussion of actual problems, one insisted on delving into the most unpleasant family gossip. This gives us all the more reason to believe, however, that it is precisely this point, perhaps more than any other, that still awaits a final resolution—not least because it is the point people most often fall back on when vilifying Freud for bringing up the sexual factor. His notion of ‘infantile sexuality’ especially has always raised a great deal of resistance, but it still calls forth less revulsion than anal sexuality.”
Christiana Morgan, again, belongs in this mix during the first half of the Twentieth Century. As will bear repeating, we’ll be following her, more in her own right, in a later essay. Biographers, friends, lovers, describe her as ‘beautiful, wild, passionate.’ Untamed and confused would serve nicely as well.
Interestingly enough, she idealized her earthy father as an exemplary manifestation of Divine Masculinity, viewing him as "a ground maker for creation. A rebellion and a rebellious person . . . an abundant personality, ardent, zestful, passionate, optimistic. He was a wonderful fusion of the austere and the blythe."
A Woman of Passion indeed, earlier on in the scheme of things, Edith Nesbit married her husband when she was one of two or three women who were carrying her spouse’s fetuses in utero. He and Edith’s best friend went on to have children together that the dutiful wife dutifully adopted. This capsulizes a most elemental expression of such phrasing as, “(i)t’s complicated.”
As prolific as she was gifted, her tales told of tempests of class conflict located just below the surface of things. “‘But how badly you keep your slaves. How wretched and poor and neglected they seem,’ she said, as the cab rattled along the Mile End Road.
‘They aren’t slaves; they’re working-people,’ said Jane.
‘Of course they’re working. That’s what slaves are. Don’t you tell me. Do you suppose I don’t know a slave’s face when I see it? Why don’t their masters see that they’re better fed and better clothed? Tell me in three words.’
No one answered. The wage-system of modern England is a little difficult to explain in three words even if you understand it—which the children didn’t.
‘You’ll have a revolt of your slaves if you’re not careful,’ said the Queen.
‘Oh, no,’ said Cyril; ‘you see they have votes—that makes them safe not to revolt. It makes all the difference. Father told me so.’
‘What is this vote?’ asked the Queen. ‘Is it a charm? What do they do with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the harassed Cyril; ‘it’s just a vote, that’s all! They don’t do anything particular with it.’
‘I see,’ said the Queen; ‘a sort of plaything.'” Ha ha.
Instead of whimsy, Andrea Dworkin inspires dread, if largely as a problem of projection, in many men with an interest in the sexual realm. Along with others whose fate presents them here, she will have her own ‘day in court,’ a chance for facts once more to ‘speak for themselves.’
In one of her most celebrated and reviled works, Intercourse, her section headings are telltale signs. “Intercourse in a Man Made World” comes first; then comes “The Female Condition;” finally comes “Power, Status, & Hate.” As analyst and writer, Professor Dworkin dwarfs lesser thinkers and penslingers.
She speaks of the life and work of Leo Tolstoy, whose prose she deeply admires, although with a tone, perhaps, of judgment about the great Russian’s behavior and attitudes, for example toward one of his lovers, to whom he alludes in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” “It combines an unfinished short story, ‘The Man Who Murdered His Wife,’ with a story told to Tolstoy by the painter about a stranger he met on a train, who was distraught with marital troubles; but its basic text is the Tolstoy marriage.
The story is autobiographical, as is much of Tolstoy’s fiction; and in The Kreutzer Sonata he uses the details of his sexual intercourse with Sophie, what the biographer Henri Troyat called ‘his periods of rut,’ to show his feelings of deep repugnance for the wife he continues to fuck—and for the sex act itself.
The repugnance is not only rooted in ongoing desire, but also in satiation, it too being real, a discrete phenomenon, and aversive. The desire is not free-floating or abstract, in the way of French philosophy. There is a real woman, Sophie, on whose body, inside whom, it is expressed; and when he is done with her, he puts her aside with rude indifference or cold distaste.”
Dworkin shows both her recognition of Tolstoy’s prose powers and, in gently ironic tones, of the reality behind the narrative. “The story is dense, passionate, artful, crazed with misogyny and insight; the real woman was diagnosed in 1910, the last year of the Count’s life, as ‘paranoiac and hysterical, with predominance of the first.’” Whoa! One could easily go on and on in this rich loam of earthy soil, as it were.
Riane Eisler, though, might also cast light on our desire more richly and potently to undertake an understanding of our erogenous desires. In The Chalice and the Blade, for instance, she writes appreciatively of ancient psychic and erotic sophistication. “In Minoan Crete, the entire relationship between the sexes—not only definition and valuation of gender roles, but also attitudes toward sensuality and sex—was obviously very different from ours.
For example, the bare-breasted style of dress for women and the skimpy clothes emphasizing the genitals for men demonstrate a frank appreciation of sexual differences and the pleasure made possible by these differences. From what we now know through modern humanistic human psychology, this "pleasure bond" would have strengthened the sense of mutuality between women and men as individuals.
The Cretans more natural attitudes toward sex would also have had other consequences equally difficult to perceive under the existing paradigm, wherein religious dogma often views sex as more sinful than violence. As Hawkes writes, "The Cretans seemed to have reduced and diverted their aggressiveness through a free and well-balanced sexual life.
Along with their enthusiasm for sports and dancing and creativity and love of life, these liberated attitudes toward sex seem to have contributed to the generally peaceful and harmonious spirit predominant in Cretan life.” Dr. Eisler might altogether avoid the obvious, ‘Duh!’ response out of kindness, so we will as well.
In any eventuality, given time’s and tide’s cooperative continuity, a longstanding Series will come forth to initiate perspectives, and with luck perspicacity, on these often female and all-too-often mostly unheralded pathfinders in human psychology and the search for the ‘mental health’ that #24’s Readings render as a rubric for ruminating about these matters. Certainly, as the hideous advertisements in today’s Introduction clarify completely, a bit of attention to these precise components of contemporary passages must be mandatory among those who hope to avoid a chaste and miserly misery.
Last issue’s “Communication & Human Survival” essay largely centers on ‘sex and violence’ as the themes that engender most of literature. In that vein, the work of a pair of poets can usher us toward a Conclusion today. Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of those who has entered the realm of canonical wordsmiths without necessarily being a ‘bankable commodity’ in her own right. But she celebrated nature’s connubial heat, not to mention her own passionate engagement.
In “I Too Beneath Your Moon, almighty Sex,” the poet serves a feast of kisses and love’s luminous libations. “I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex, Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat, Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks Of neighbours sitting where their mothers sat Are well aware of shadowy this and that In me, that's neither noble nor complex. Such as I am, however, I have brought To what it is, this tower; it is my own; Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought From what I had to build with: honest bone Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought; And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.”
Pablo Neruda has played a big part, meanwhile, in several other Big Tent series. As a bard and a Red, he fits seamlessly into these pages. His was an appetite apropos for specimens such as we all, at least at some point, aspire to be. His lustiness became central to his written output, just as his writing encouraged his sensual and sexual passions.
“My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.”
This sweetly heated couplet appears in one assessment of the poet’s concupiscent verse. “Early Neruda was a force of passion and sensuality. Where the poets of today write, ‘You know my motivation, given my reputation, but tonight I’m fucking you,’ or ‘My dick so hard, it make the metal detector go off,’ Neruda wrote, “I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire. My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide in you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.”
A piece of Driftwood Message Art, as often happens, might serve as both amplification and counterpoint for today’s Readings. Whatever ‘thoughtful nourishment’ might be available in the preceding paragraphs, a Goddess Guidance may emanate, in any case, from this piece, titled “Toxic Fantasies of Ideal Mates.”
“Often Enough, People Imagine 'Ideal' Mates as Infantile in Basic Features, Physical or Psychic, a Puerile Understanding Indeed, Both Prudish & Prurient, That Festers Falsity, Fostering Misery For Such 'Lovers' & Immiseration For Their Claimed Beloved Ones, All the More Reason For True Lovers—Fiercely Feral in Championing Their Beastliness—to Celebrate Gaia's Goodness in Allowing Them to Honor & Indulge Their Wild, Wanton, Wanting Ways.”
For the moment, we might recall words that James Joyce wrote in Ulysses. They apply with special force to the entire arena of existential aplomb that contemporary society contextualizes as ‘mental health.’ “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
…She had returned a day early from an outing with one of her 'boys-on-the-side,' the laconic and ironic carpenter from New Hampshire, Carl, who had ridden with her back to Boston when she visited Monet and Papi for ten days that she allotted herself away from her Public Administration studies, to discover Lou about to embark on a wild night with a 'friend' of Rob McDowel whom he had met at the little hippie pub, the Chukker, where she had become another discarded sorority girl who for indeterminate reasons found herself drawn to “love-junkies and hippies and radicals instead of button-down business types.”
To say that this turn of events, the sundering of “my only night of love for all of Danielle's absence,” disappointed Lou would have been akin to saying that nuclear war might cause disappointing prospects for humanity's flowering. “I had been in the process of discovering just how unseductive a nerdy, basically shy and obstreperous at the same instant, nervous-Nelly kind of guy could be.”
Thus, having, from his perspective finally, returned to his and Danielle's apartment for luscious copulation with a clearly ready, willing, and able young woman only to learn that his most significant other was already returning from “nine days and not ten of what I couldn't help but imagine was sex-drenched play” on the New Hampshire side of Route 128 where Danielle's parents now lived, seemed a crushing defeat for his having “some semblance of recreational equity.”
That Lou had brought their marriage-in-all-but-name to such a state was not as pertinent, on the Summer evening when he would get a long-sought chance to sow some wild oats, as was the perplexity on Julianna's face, the disappointment in her last kiss. Thus, when, in the extemporaneous fashion that had always been his modus operandi if not his forte, he asked her, “would you like to go to bed with us?” and she had replied, without more than a moment's hesitation, “Well, yeah! That would be fantastic,” Lou was uncharacteristically assertive and straightforward in bringing this to Danelle's attention.
While their triad of lovemaking was hot and wild, after Danielle had orgasmed on his thrust with more volubility than ever before in their now approaching two years together, and he enthusiastically turned his cock's attention to the utterly captivated readiness of nineteen year old Julianna, his lover and partner wilted at the prospect. The night continued for a time, but the rest of their congress was that of a slowly deflating hot air balloon, spiraling ever earthward instead of rising on heated, loving winds toward stratospheric and repeated release.
Within a month of this eventuality, in the meantime, Rob McDowel himself came a calling with some of Humphrey's lysergic acid diethylamide and the three of them dosed and began their ascent to the stars, and when Rob's 'date' for the soiree checked out of their planned inner sojourns, the three friends fell into a male-dominated triangular clench, in which Danielle expressed delight and they all shared some wild passion but Lou's climax led to Rob's cleaving to Danielle so as to elicit the glorious moans of wantonly woman delight that had precisely the same effect on Lou as Julianna's sweet keening had had on Danielle twenty-eight days beforehand.
Days later, at Danielle's prompting, he and she ended up on their king-sized mattress with Sophie, who had just broken up with her Thai guru-in-training, and Louis did little to encourage free-flowing ecstasy precisely because he wanted no more two-boys-and-a-girl action, “thanks all the same.”
Standing in the window at Another Roadside Attraction, picking up glass shards while the store's proprietor was dealing with inquisitive coventurers from up and down the street, as well as with a couple of the retired professoriate who were her primary patrons, Lou chuckled to himself. “It's fucking ironic as hell,” he said to himself. “Even when you get what you ask for, it's never likely to be exactly what you intended to request.”
This thought brought to mind Harry Braverman's argument, at the beginning of Labor and Monopoly Capital, about the dialectical perversity of rising productivity and declining personal power, another instance of ironic eruption indeed, which in turn caused Lou to consider the massive aggregation of fact and incident that he was uncovering about how plutocratic insiders had managed to plunder and profit from Birmingham's multiethnic workforce in some of the most insidious and invidious ways imaginable, one of which would end up as the premise for Lou's first three act drama, If I Could Go Back, about a Black math savant who, as a result of saving his brother from a police raid on a 'Harlem-of-the-South' den of iniquity, himself ended up in the clutches of a fascist, brutal, murderous convict-lease-system that evolved into a profiteering re-enslavement of uppity Black workers in order to garner super-profits for steel barons and their Wall Street backers, in particular the man at the pinnacle of United States Steel, J.P. Morgan.
This sibling hero died at a coalface, in the hands of his captors, whose overseers were receiving a dollar and pennies a day from U.S. Steel's Tennessee Coal and Iron facility for this particular victim of a work-'em-to-death-and-get-another scheme. He had been searching for contextualization, and, voila, as he staunched spurting sanguinity, so to speak, it all occurred to him.
The entirety of this unfolding ideation about personal exigency and social depredation, “another geeky intellectual reverie,” had occurred within ten minutes of the ambulance's departure that, Lou hoped, would be pulling back the teenaged Mr. Griswold from “his brush with the brink of doom.” That brief interlude also happened to be precisely how long his cleaning up broken glass had taken.
“Don't worry about the window; we'll just air the place out for the next day or so.” Marilyn Harvey, the owner of ARA and the often-ignored daughter of Ann Sexton, who came into the world 'illegitimately' a year before Anne Harvey's marriage to the soulful Boston scion, Alfred Sexton, laughed at the thought of “battling the musty smell,” as she put the point, “by nearly slicing off that poor child's leg.”
The book shop's proprietress, whom Lou had propositioned because he loved wild women more or less uniformly, and the red hair, freckles, and literature that Marilyn manifested everywhere in her life and form, had turned down Lou's offer of conjunction with a nervous giggle. “The whole situation,” by which she meant Lou's and her pal Danielle's “love contract,” “seems a bit too complicated for my poor brain,” she had said at the time, just before Danielle's departure for New England with her dapper and jolly woodworking lover, Carl.
Now, four months hence, she put a hand on Lou's arm. Her voice a quiet mix of emotion and admiration, she said, “What you did was heroic.”
Louis James snorted with disbelief and launched a disquisition about necessity and immediacy and always having been good at “making things up as I go” when he realized that this woman, for whom he had always felt intellectual affinity and “pure, unbridled lust” had not yet removed her hand, warm and firm in its caress, from his arm. Rather than hide his growing erection, he turned toward her as she leaned in for a gentle kiss.
“I'll just close up the shop a little early today,” she offered afterward. “Perhaps you'd join me for some wine and cheese in back,” she posited, as Lou's dumbfounded nods brought forth further bubbling laughter from Marilyn.
They did share some libations of the grape and chips and brie. But mainly they loved away the next four and a half hours on Marilyn's sturdy fainting couch in her storeroom and studio, managing to encapsulate a substantial proportion of The Kama Sutra in their first encounter.
As the estimable Mr. James prepared to depart, aglow with a sheen of satisfied astonishment that his new lover shared, naked and but for her strawberry blond bush practically hairless despite her being one of the non-shaving females that Lou preferred, she raised herself from her languid prone pose to place her hand once again on his arm. “I can tell already that this will indeed be quite complicated,” she clucked and chuckled at once in her almost British-accented Bostonian tones and diction, “but for here and now anyway, it's well worth it.”
*****
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
Under the right circumstances, that brief statement will bring me scintillating shivers of yum! By their nature these ‘brief sagacities,’ in the tune of David Bromberg’s “Traveling Man,” present Marshall Arts messaging at its most incisive. “Love's Tentacles Enfold Me In Your Blissful Bounty of Gleeful Glory.” Si!
Love Charm #3, for today, has this to say. “Come Whatever Will, I pant in Anticipation At Another Sweet Chance to Twirl Through Life's Spill With Yet One More Luscious Thrill of Our Cosmic Coupled Swirl.”
Eros is a more likely ‘soul of wit’ than any mere perfunctory brevity. Still, we might find a brief for kissing and frolic in these little tidbits from the troves of piecemeal professions of Marshall Arts’ erotic fervor.
Thus, for example, this may dangle some delight. “To Dance Our Daily Jig So Enlivens Our Senses & Percolates Our Passion That We Are Ever Likely to Come to a Bubbling Boil & overflow Our Lips With Love's Luscious Liminal Libations.”
In another version of today’s offering, we’ll see more; here’s a penultimate for us to ponder now. “As Hungrily & Joyfully as Infants Feed, We Lap Each Other Up & Blend Body & Soul In Dawn's Jolly Dancing Dalliance & Dusk's Musky Pulsing Thrust of Passion & Bliss.”
Wow. Sign me up. In the sweetly salubrious here and now, my love instantiates such sublime instances. “The Arc of Our Love Tracks Flaming Arrows of Delight, Coursing Darts of Passion, Both Darkest Night & Dawn's Honeyed Light.”
These smaller confections comprise a huge Marshall Arts repository that manifest as Love Charms, Thought Charms, Power Charms, and more. The ones above merely comprise the first half dozen in the queue, so to speak. Passion’s particular and omnipresent pulsing just forms a linchpin of Marshall Arts product, period, paragraph, as my Mom liked to say.
Some of these sinuous castoffs of Gaia’s arboreal goodness so writhe as to suggest incomparably interconnected, intertwining slithering of bodies in mutually melodious lovemaking postures. Confronted with such salacious evidence, one would need to go out of one’s way not to see a certain lusty bawdiness in such a fragment.
“Engulfing My Love in Tidal Torrents of Blazing Bliss, Energizing My Senses With Magma’s Molten Flow, You Drench Our Jovial Jig’s Carnal Conviviality With Luscious Libations That Pour Forth Pulsing Poignant Passion From Piquant Portals Whenever Imminent Instances of Climactic Conflagration May Spark Ecstasy’s Exotic, Erotic Eruptions.” Nothing if not sincerely concupiscent, it is far from alone in that status.
For instance, here we have, “All the Glories:” “To Hold Your heart in My Hand Or Melt My Love in Your Mouth Opens the Cosmos to Reveal All the Glories, the Occasionally Grotesque Grandeur of Existence, Till the Chilling Thrills of the Thrust & Spills of Our Sweet Sweat Bounty Substantially Surpass Instances of Torturous Terror When I Ponder My Mere Mortality Despite the Hint of Eternity in Our Embraces.”
A definite emphasis on spiritual carnality, on the sacral reaches of pleasure, also delineates some of these Ponder Panels and Homily Sticks. Thus we might posit “Sacred Circles.”
“Both Tantalizing & Taunting, Sacred Circles of Our Torrid Tantric Tango Mirror Erotic Potentiation Everywhere of Superheated Divine Delight Among Human Cousins Who All Too Often Eschew Engaging In This Feisty Frothy Frolic of Blazingly Blissful Conjoined Combustion, Mainly Because They Worry About Heartache, Dependency, & Other Unavoidable Aspects of a Fulfilling Life.”
Furthermore, explicitly highlighting the healthy well-being that is one promise of passion’s punctilious pursuit occurs often enough among these arboreal confections. Not by happenstance is this same thought central to the mission and manifestations of Big Tent Review; “Basic to Being” is only one good example.
"When Our Feral Flames Flow Together to Penetrate Ecstasy's Cosmic Core, Which Then Palpates Our Central Personal Soulful Pulse, We Enjoy a Dancing Dalliance As Ancient & Sanguine As Blood, As Molten & Irresistible As Magma's Meandering, & As Basic to Our Beings As Air & Water & Food."
Yes, indeed, ‘love’ does make the world go round. It makes us come round. Pound for pound, it’s more penetrating than Plutonium, more glorious than wealth, a central, key subsidiary to a healthy life, blah blah blah. ‘If it ain’t got that swing, it don’t mean a thing.’ Ha ha. “Wanton Wanting’s Snaking Pleasures,” for instance, makes the case.
"The Flowing Forms of Our Torrid Salsa Waltz, Cylindrical & Salubrious, So Glow With Gliding Molten Glory That We Approximate Primate Snakes, Sweating Our Way Through Joyous Mating Dances, Entwined & Oblivious to All But Pleasuring Each Other's Wild & Unbridled Wanton Wanting."
The movement of the spheres, the force-fields that govern gravity and motion and matter, all reflect the carnal cosmic pull that sweet suggestions of slithering syrupy kisses have for healthy human beings. This is heavenly territory, without doubt.
Here then is “Divine Vortex:” “To Ride With You Through Our Slippery & Salubrious Love Grooves Opens a Divine Vortex of Ecstatic Epiphany, a Universal Portal to the Birth of Bliss From Which a Joyous Jump to Juicy Jellied Fusion Flares, Our Eternal Stream of Irreversibly Yummy Conjunction.”
A sense of pending explosion, of pent up energy that will find an outlet, no matter what, of volcanic forces that underlie and overrule all else in the end, this is the yarn with which loving connection spins the human web. Not for nothing is fire, the most explosive burning conceivable, the favored metaphor for erotic conjugation.
“Proximity to Everlasting Ecstatic Combustion” ignited as such a note. “To Bend to the Bounty of Your Gaia Goddess Glories Promises a Pilgrim Like Me Proximity to Everlasting Ecstatic Combustion, An Eternal Present of Fire & Delight In the Ongoing Presence of Your Embraces.”
These are realms that, ultimately, grace and gratitude rule, where egotism for a moment melts before a more elemental power of being. Adoration rules, and life and breath depend on its continued worship among our kind.
“Sweetly Cherished:” “The Sweetly Cherished Chalice of Your Lusty Loving Overflows With Such Poignant Pulsing Passion That Pointed Piercing Blazing Bliss Daily Throbs & Thrusts With Our Connubial Conjunction in Our Gaia Goddess Consortium Prancing.”
Among its many roles in our lives—most importantly procreation and recreation, ha ha—this primal, adoring instinct to couple, or more, narrates the tales with which we delineate, if not altogether define, our entire lives. “A Lusty, Salacious Love Story” quite warmly and enthusiastically expresses this view.
“If Our Joyous Jumping Days of Delight Our Frisky Frolicsome Nights of Desire Serve Up Even a Modest Cue, the Core Contextualization of All-That-Is Amounts to a Love Story That Fate & Fortune Present As Alternating Faces of a Comedy Or Tragedy in Which, Whatever Else Comes to Pass, We Have the Luck to Succor a Wider & Wiser, at Once a Brighter & Fierier, Conjunction of Erotic Abandon & Lusty Affection Than Has Ever Before Seemed Plausible.”
Almost small enough to be a Charmed tidbit, “Dancing Libations” culminates the primary pieces of art under review today. “Dancing Together, We at Once Imbibe the Bubbling Libations That Percolate With Our Waltz & Pierce The Deepest Essences That Gaia's Grand Goddess Grace Permits Us To Palpate in Each Other's Embrace.”
A recent New York Review of Books article demonstrates a decidedly different development of what one might term ‘the boundaries of Eros.’ Try as she might, the author of the review, Elaine Blair, cannot shake loose from an ethic that views women as ‘victims of sex’ and men as ‘predators for sex.’ So to free oneself would require one openly to affirm a licentious human sexuality as inescapable and reject any restrictions on ‘non-assaultive passionate engagement,’ so to speak, between consenting adults.
Consent is the title of the two books under review, in the event. Both memoirs deal with a forty-to-fifty-year-old man and a teenage girl, in the French case only fourteen. A thorough refutation of this ever-so-clever, ideologically pure yet intellectually fatuous attempt to make sex a matter of blaming blokes and pitying female victims will emerge in time. For the moment, we can just note that—despite both memoirists’ themselves acceding to their agency in gaining their sexual initiations—the view of Eros’ role in human affairs here is vastly different from a BTR POV.
As a sendoff, contrariwise, we might well choose to consider an item that currently graces my love’s and my mantle at ‘Mom’s space,’ where we daily dally in the grace of helping a centenarian to enjoy her ongoing place in things at large and at hand. “Personal Palpations & Pleasures Dearth” is the title, and may it ever be so, ha ha.
“Rarely, If Ever, Do Purely Personal Palpations Pulse Pleasuring: the Pleasures of Conversation; the Pleasures of Companionship & Joint Endeavor; the Pleasures of Touching, Hand in Hand, Flank to Flank, & More; the Pleasures of Kissing Confections; the Pleasures of Erotic Fulfillment—All Depend on Interpenetrating Interconnection, in Aggregate Not Just the Succor of a Single Day, But the Daily Dalliance of Valentine’s Feasting With My Sweet Beastly Priestess, From Dawn’s Early Light to Midnight’s Releasing, in & Out, Up & Down, on & on, Seemingly Ever Increasing.”
And we could go on. And on. And, eventually, we will. These messages manifest meaning’s carnal core. They are irrefutable and implore our attention; we ignore or downplay them at our most mortal peril. Till then, 'you must remember this!' Kisses and sighs launch all human highs, ha ha.
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
presents readers with a treatise on “Scientific Management,” a summary of Braverman’s POV might be that Managers, as subalterns of owners, originated in navigating Division of Labor so as to scientifically extract the maximum surplus from every single ‘labor input.’ Maybe, under the circumstances that modern capitalism promotes peremptorily, citizens and working folk need to see that ‘science’ has at minimum two faces, one philosophical, the other sociopolitical, a perspective that Braverman develops delightfully in this section.
“(So-called ‘scientific management’) starts, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, not from the human point of view but from the capitalist point of view, from the point of view of the management of a refractory work force in a setting of antagonistic social relations. It does not attempt to discover and confront the cause of this condition, but accepts it as an inexorable given, a ‘natural’ condition. It investigates not labor in general, but the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital. It enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.”
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the ‘father of Scientific Management’ and—whatever his personal charm and winning personality—very unpopular among workers in the workplace, ‘men with whom he was collegial and friendly’ otherwise, formulated theories that now define the heart of ‘business management practices and priorities’ while he participated in or observed big battles such as happened at Midvale, about which more is coming, and at Western Electric in the 1930’s. He served as a ‘straw boss’ for the ‘shareholders.’
The famed Peter Drucker himself lauds Taylor’s comprehensive contributions. “Scientific Management has both basic concepts and easily applicable tools and techniques. And it has no difficulty proving the contribution it makes; its results in the form of higher output are visible and readily measurable.
Indeed, Scientific Management is all but a systematic philosophy of worker and work. Altogether it may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”
Chapter Five, then, illuminates “The Primary Effects of Scientific Management,” which would be fun to hypothesize in advance—as higher profits, further worker dissatisfaction and other difficulties, and plentiful propaganda in Capital’s defense as ‘the best of all possible systems,’ for instance. Property’s overall ‘industrial purpose’ first of all separates all manual operations—as much as humanly possible—from any mental, or calculating, content.
“A necessary consequence of the separation of conception and execution is that the labor process is now divided between separate sites and separate bodies of workers. In one location, the physical processes of production are executed. In another are concentrated the design, planning, calculation, and record-keeping. … The physical processes of production are now carried out more or less blindly, not only by the workers who perform them, but often by lower ranks of supervisory employees as well. The production units operate like a hand, watched, corrected, and controlled by a distant brain.”
So that’s a telescopic look. The development on which Braverman centers attention is that of the inherent deskilling—the dissipation of apprenticeship and the relocation of knowledge in the hands of managers who are most often one sort of engineer or bean-counter or another.
He contrasts the long early history of capital in which ‘regular laborers’ made huge process contributions, submitted patents, and so forth, with what has transpired in the day-to-day here-and-now. He cites a prescient editorial from the International Molder’s Journal, which “summarizes this process of dumbing down workers.
The editorial goes on to point to the separation of 'craft knowledge' from 'craft skill' in 'an ever-widening area and with an ever-increasing acceleration,' and describes as the most dangerous form of this separation the gathering up of all this scattered craft knowledge, systematizing it and concentrating it in the hands of the employer and then doling it out again only in the form of minute instructions, giving to each worker only the knowledge needed for the performance of a particular relatively minute task.
This process, it is evident, separates skill and knowledge even in their narrow relationship. When it is completed, the worker is no longer a craftsman in any sense, but is an animated tool of the management.”
The final portion of PART I states a meaty mouthful of ‘food for thought’ in its title: “The Habituation of the Worker to the Capitalist Mode of Production.” One of Braverman’s earlier ideas, from Above-the-Fold, continues in a fashion that circumscribes the author’s development of his intricate, reality-based argumentation.
“At the same time, the habituation of workers to the capitalist mode of production must be renewed with each generation, all the more so as the generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within the matrix of work life, but are plunged into work from the outside, so to speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve.
The necessity for adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form, for overcoming natural resistance intensified by swiftly changing technology, antagonistic social relations, and the succession of the generations, does not therefore end with the ‘scientific organization of labor,’ but becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society.”
In the scheme of things, an ‘Industrial Management,’ ‘Industrial Psychology,’ and ‘Industrial Sociology’ approach to Business Administration generally incorporated the premises of Scientific Management as core values; moreover, these creative academic methodologies contributed both propaganda and practical process to the owners who brought their ‘departments’ into being in the first place.
These new archetypes of supervision are seeking to effect “conditions under which the worker may best be brought to cooperate in the scheme of work organized by the industrial engineer.” This cooperation must occur in spite of the entire degrading, degraded reality of almost every job, at least those that pay wages.
“As it presents itself to most of the sociologists and psychologists concerned with the study of work and workers, the problem is not that of the degradation of men and women, but the difficulties raised by the reactions, conscious and unconscious, to that degradation. It is therefore not at all fortuitous that most orthodox social scientists adhere firmly, indeed desperately, to the dictum that their task is not the study of the objective conditions of work, but only of the subjective phenomena to which these give rise: the degrees of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ elicited by their questionnaires.”
Inside any corporate mechanism, the operating engineers and accountants rule; personnel management, human relations, and so forth, are decidedly ‘low on the totem pole’ of organizational control. “‘In the beginning, in most organizations,’” wrote the prominent authors of a book on organizational management, “‘the personnel director will have no active role in the conduct of an operations improvement program.’"
One classic instance of said OIP(Operations Improvement Program) would be the continuous assembly line. Braverman tells this story like no other, a conflict that threatened, because the skilled operatives who had done the work previously so despised the new methods, to destroy Ford Motor Company’s ability to produce cars.
One commentator brings this point home like a powerful punch to the gut. “So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”
This tendency of people to ‘vote with their feet’ combined with the union movement that Ford—fascist that he was—loathed like a believer hates Satan to bring about the iconic “$5-a-Day-Man” campaign that set the stage for moneybags’ victories in the battle that this habituation process entailed. The campaign itself is classic as a ‘confidence game,’ a conquest-through-division, and more.
Furthermore, it—and others like it—succeeded. A disciplined, tractable workforce came into existence that capital could mostly use as it commanded. But this fact does not override the fierce opposition below the surface that working people feel to their own fates under capitalism; obviously, as well, the promised ‘industrial security’ of good wages and plenty of work has essentially evaporated, though things remain passive, if not completely placid, on the surface of things.
“But beneath this apparent habituation, the hostility of workers to the degenerated forms of work which are forced upon them continues as a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive for a greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity. It renews itself in new generations, expresses itself in the unbounded cynicism and revulsion which large numbers of workers feel about their work, and comes to the fore repeatedly as a social issue demanding solution.”
In relation to each of PART I’s chapters, therefore, readers have received a more or less thorough overview, a depth and breadth also available for PART V. In relation to PARTs II-IV, we will be presenting an even briefer precis of Braverman’s efforts, which, in any case, will continue to appear in the these pages now and again, willy nilly, as it were.
PART II—SCIENCE AND MECHANIZATION
Four chapters comprise this element of the narrative. Braverman’s titles combine the evocative with enough precision to yield a taste of his intellectual smorgasbord—historical, technological, social, philosophical. “"The Scientific-Technical Revolution” completely clarifies the likely relationship between theoretical comprehension and mechanized modalities, as it were.
“Science is the last—and after labor the most important—social property to be turned into an adjunct of capital. The story of its conversion from the province of amateurs, 'philosophers,' tinkerers, and seekers after knowledge to its present highly organized and lavishly financed state is largely the story of its incorporation into the capitalist firm and subsidiary organizations.
At first science costs the capitalist nothing, since he merely exploits the accumulated knowledge of the physical sciences, but later the capitalist systematically organizes and harnesses science, paying for scientific education, research, laboratories, etc., out of the huge surplus social product which either belongs directly to him or which the capitalist class as a whole controls in the form of tax revenues. A formerly relatively free-floating social endeavor is integrated into production and the market.”
Braverman highlights this conclusion. “The contrast between science as generalized social property incidental to production and science as capitalist property at the very center of production is the contrast between the Industrial Revolution, which occupied the last half of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth centuries, and the scientific-technical revolution, which began in the last decades of the nineteenth century and is still going on.”
Machines led to scientific principles, not vice versa. The development of the steam engine is a typical example. “How much of this development was owing to the science of heat? All the available evidence indicates that it was very little. …
In the preface to (Robert Meikelham’s 1824) book Descriptive History of the Steam Engine, he wrote, 'We know not who gave currency to the phrase of the invention being one of the noblest gifts that science ever made to mankind. The fact is that science, or scientific men, never had anything to do in the matter. Indeed there is no machine or mechanism in which the little that theorists have done is more useless. It arose, was improved and perfected by working mechanics—and by them only.”
“The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Worker” shows the totality of the effects of these processes on average folk. Electronic circuitry, personal and network communication, health care delivery and product, Artificial ‘Intelligence,’ the list comprises most of contemporary existence.
“The scientific and managerial attack upon the labor process over the past century embraces all its aspects: labor power, the instruments of labor, the materials of labor, and the products of labor. We have seen how labor is reorganized and subdivided according to rigorous principles which were only anticipated a century ago. The materials used in production are now so freely synthesized, adapted, and substituted according to need that an increasing number of industries practice substantially altered manufacturing processes as a result of this fact alone.
The instruments used in production, including those used in transport and communications, have been revolutionized not only in respect to the power, speed, and accuracy with which they accomplish their tasks, but often act to gain the desired result by way of entirely different physical principles from those traditionally employed. And the products of production have themselves been freely transformed and invented in accordance with marketing and manufacturing needs. Taking nothing for granted and nothing as permanent, modern production constantly overhauls all aspects of its performance, and in some industries has completely reconstituted itself more than once in the space of a hundred years.”
“Machinery,” in the meantime, cannot have escaped this tsunami of transformation. In fact, this chapter is so intricate and critical to follow that it will elicit its own investigative assessment in a coming BTR issue, the fourth element of a thorough evaluation of this incredible guidebook to modern life or Part IV in the Braverman Saga.
In any event, the author makes clear that machinery’s appearance as ‘natural,’ and ‘inevitable’ in exactly the oppressive formulations that characterize industrial workplaces, is a total obfuscation of reality’s actual orientation, in which closely studied processes to design new devices have always worked from the sole premise of maximizing output per worker so as to improve profits.
Nothing else matters. Property sits atop the human heap, and its mechanisms serve only owners’ interests. The purpose, in fact, from a banker’s POV is to reject all ‘liberating potential’ of modernization since that would reinvest control in working folks themselves. Thus, he ends the Chapter in this fashion.
“The chief advantage of the industrial assembly line is the control it affords over the pace of labor, and as such it is supremely useful to owners and managers whose interests are at loggerheads with those of their workers. From a technological point of view, it is extraordinarily primitive and has little to do with ‘modern machine technology.’
Nevertheless, in such barbarous relics is found the seat of ‘scientific knowledge’ and the basis for technology. Apologists for chattel slavery, from Greece to the American South, used to argue that the labors of their fieldhands and domestic slaves were necessary so that they could preserve and develop art, science, and culture. Modern apologists go further and instruct the workers that they must keep to their places on the ‘industrial assembly line’ as a precondition for the development of a science and technology which will then devise for them still better examples of the division of labor.
And it is truly in this way that workers, so long as they remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies, work every day to build for themselves more ‘modern,’ more ‘scientific,’ more dehumanized prisons of labor.”
“Further Effects of Management and Technology on the Distribution of Labor” provides a fascinating dialectic that illuminates the rise—till Artificially ‘Intelligent’ replacement eliminates these jobs as well, anyhow—of the clerical work force, among other things. Degraded labor may become so cheap that it ‘outcompetes’ machinery!
“The point at which the worker is cheaper than the machinery which replaces him or her is determined by more than a mere technical relationship: it depends as well upon the level of wages, which in turn is affected by the supply of labor as measured against the demand.” One might note that the ‘minimum wage’ has remained stagnant for a decade and a half, and that furthermore, “The real value of the federal minimum wage in 2022 dollars has decreased by 46% since its inflation-adjusted peak in February 1968.”
Braverman continues exploring this specific ‘machine-paradox.’ “And the supply of labor, including the size of the reserve army of workers hunting for jobs, depends in part upon the mechanization of industry, which transforms employed workers into surplus workers. Thus the very rapidity of mechanization, insofar as it makes available a supply of cheap labor by discharging workers from some industries or putting an end to the expansion of employment in others, acts as a check upon further mechanization.”
PART III—MONOPOLY CAPITAL
Here, the reader finds four more pieces of this puzzle, central to Braverman’s book. Since this is half the point of the work in the first place, examining one essence of human life in relation to monopoly structures, we might again look for resonance and reality orientation. Since this entire middle section will provide the basis for a third installment about Labor & Monopoly Capital, today’s briefing will remain brief indeed.
To begin, “(S)ince it has been generally recognized that, as Lenin it in one of the pioneer treatments of the subject, ‘the economic quintessence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism,’ it is the latter term that has proved most acceptable. The most substantial recent discussion of this new stage from the Marxist point of view is found in Monopoly Capital, by Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy.
For this section of Braverman’s monograph, “Surplus Value and Surplus Labor” offers an initial Chapter heading. Surplus Value, as the foundation of profit, has massively increased in volume under monopoly business’ oversight. In perfect sync with Braverman’s arguments, this has meant a concomitant rise in ‘useless eaters,’ or Surplus Labor.
“But at the same time the proportion of the working population occupied in agriculture, which amounted to approximately 50 percent in 1880, had by 1970 sunk to less than 4 percent of total employment. Since agriculture, together with manufacturing, construction, and their accompanying extractive industries, occupied three-fourths of the population in 1880 and by 1970 had fallen to only about three-eighths, the mass of labor to be traced is indeed huge; millions of jobs for those who, ‘freed’ from agriculture and ‘freed’ from manufacturing industries, are nevertheless occupied in some way in the social division of labor.
In tracing this mass of labor, we will be led not only to ‘newly formed branches of production’ in Marx's sense, but also, as were Baran and Sweezy, into branches of nonproduction, entire industries and large sectors of existing industries whose only function is the struggle over the allocation of the social surplus among the various sectors of the capitalist class and its dependents.
In this process, capital, which ‘thrusts itself frantically’ into every possible new area of investment, has totally reorganized society, and in creating the new distribution of labor has created a social life vastly different from that of only seventy or eighty years ago. And this restless and insatiable activity of capital continues to transform social life almost daily before our eyes, without heed that by doing so it is creating a situation in which social life itself becomes increasingly impossible.”
“The Modern Corporation” persists in developing this notion. Braverman proceeds from a point ancillary to his main argument, albeit critical to general awareness, to wit how militarism “is of course one of the chief ways in which the abundance created by modern production is absorbed, drained off, wasted, beneficially for capital though with great injury to society.”
The sheer scope of the wealth of ‘accumulated capital’ has, as an underlying aspect of that material plethora, yielded world-spanning enterprises under the control of a handful of putative producers, often enough further concentrated in ever-smaller numbers of similarly extensive financial firms. Braverman launches from this awareness into a capsule presentation of the historical actualities of corporate growth in the United States.
“From this brief sketch of the development of the modern corporation, three important aspects may be singled out as having consequences for the occupational structure. The first has to do with marketing, the second with the structure of management, and the third with the function of social coordination now exercised by the corporation.”
Thus, “within the manufacturing organization, marketing considerations become so dominant that the structure of the engineering division is itself permeated by and often subordinated to it. Styling, design, and packaging, although effectuated by the producing part of the organization, represent the imposition of marketing demands upon the engineering division. The planning of product obsolescence, both through styling and the impermanence of construction, is a marketing demand exercised through the engineering division, as is the concept of the product cycle: the attempt to gear consumer needs to the needs of production instead of the other way around.”
As to structuring, “(m)anagement has become administration, which is a labor process conducted for the purpose of control within the corporation, and conducted moreover as a labor process exactly analogous to the process of production, although it produces no product other than the operation and coordination of the corporation. From this point on, to examine management means also to examine this labor process, which contains the same antagonistic relations as are contained in the process of production.”
Corporate policy represents initial ‘social planning’ in many ways too, though clearly ‘liberal’ options bring corporate-approved government oversight into the mix. “The expansion of governmental functions of social coordination in recent decades is another expression of this urgent need, and the fact that such government activities are highly visible, in comparison with those of the corporation, has led to the notion that the prime exercise of social control is done by government.
On the contrary, so long as investment decisions are made by the corporations, the locus of social control and coordination must be sought among them; government fills the interstices left by these prime decisions.” These are just critically important ideas, of course, to which we’ll be returning with both more extensive scope and greater depth.
“The Universal Market” gives us the prime focus of the coming Part III of the Braverman Saga, which centers on Monopoly Capital. “How capitalism transformed all of society into a gigantic marketplace is a process that has been little investigated, although it is one of the keys to all recent social history.”
Though much more now will not be our purpose, one might think of how little of the necessary parts of our thriving and survival that anyone actually makes by himself or even substantially by herself. “The universal market is widely celebrated as a bountiful ‘service economy,’ and praised for its ‘convenience,’ ‘cultural opportunities,’ ‘modern facilities for care of the handicapped,’ etc.
We need not emphasize how badly this urban civilization works and how much misery it embraces. For purposes of our discussion, it is the other side of the universal market, its dehumanizing aspects, its confinement of a large portion of the population to degraded labor, that is chiefly of interest.”
“The Role of the State” shows the extent of this phenomenon. “In the most elementary sense, the state is guarantor of the conditions, the social relations, of capitalism, and the protector of the ever more unequal distribution of property which this system brings about. But in a further sense state power has everywhere been used by governments to enrich the capitalist class, and by groups or individuals to enrich themselves.
The powers of the state having to do with taxation, the regulation of foreign trade, public lands, commerce and transportation, the maintenance of armed forces, and the discharge of the functions of public administration have served as an engine to siphon wealth into the hands of special groups, by both legal and illegal means.” Enough said!
PART IV—THE GROWING WORKING CLASS OCCUPATIONS
This time, just two specific components make up this more exclusively descriptive itemization of the author’s inquiry. The Chapter titles speak volumes. “Clerical Workers” can serve to account for my mother, as a functionary, in tens of millions of similar instances—over decades hundreds of millions or billions of times.
Taylorism, or Scientific Office Management(a textbook from 1917), finds hospitable terrain in the ‘admin workspace.’ Despite nuances of ‘executive functions,’ these millions are, primarily, nothing but proletarians, ‘workers of the world’ and blah blah blah.
“Service Occupations and Retail Trade” is yet another arena—especially as Artificial Intelligence makes better and cheaper robots, for instance—that will command deeper inspection, independent of Labor & Monopoly Capital. “The giant mass of workers who are relatively homogeneous as to lack of developed skill, low pay, and interchangeability of person and function (although heterogeneous in such particulars as the site and nature of the work they perform) (includes a) huge concentration … to be found in the so-called service occupations and in retail trade.”
The vast majority, at minimum three-quarters, of new options in ‘the labor market’ now devolve to these ‘dead end jobs.’ Inasmuch as these matters—since they constitute so much of what counts as ‘opportunity’ today—also mandate the broadest scope and the deepest analysis, the current essay will only be presenting this ‘hyper-mini-precis,’ so to say, ha ha.
PART V—THE WORKING CLASS
This Unit highlights the social-class elements that essentially elucidate every aspect of socioeconomic reality. Four Chapters also organize Labor & Monopoly Capital’s final section. The opposition between wage-earners and property has become truly universal, or at least interplanetary in planned scope, ha ha.
“The Structure of the Working Class and Its Reserve Armies” develops this idea at the outset. “This working class lives a social and political existence of its own, outside the direct grip of capital. It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctures, and conflicts of social and political life.
But since, in its permanent existence, it is (unavoidably) the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work, and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital. It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.”
From this, “the formal definition of the working class” emerges “as that class which, possessing nothing but its power to labor, sells that power to capital in return for its subsistence.” Problems abound, obviously, and thus ‘reserves’ are essential. “Under conditions of capitalism, unemployment is not an aberration but a necessary part of the working mechanism of the capitalist mode of production. It is continuously produced and absorbed by the energy of the accumulation process itself. And unemployment is only the officially counted part of the relative surplus of working population which is necessary for the accumulation of capital and which is itself produced by it.
This relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army, takes a variety of forms in modern society, including the unemployed; the sporadically employed; the part-time employed; the mass of women who, as houseworkers, form a reserve for the ‘female occupations;’ the armies of migrant labor, both agricultural and industrial; the black population with its extraordinarily high rates of unemployment; and the foreign reserves of labor.”
This ‘surplus of available human workers,’ gulp, establishes absolutely immiserated core components of contemporary communities. “Finally, the immense reservoir of subemployed labor holds on its lowest levels the pauperized layers of the population, that bottom sediment which is drawn into employment only infrequently, sporadically, and at peaks of ‘prosperity.’
‘The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class,’ Marx wrote, ‘and (thus of) the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.’ Alternative ‘explanations of homelessness’ and more might benefit from this thinking.
“The ‘Middle Layers’ of Employment” designates but one more offshoot of this Braverman initiation, a fifth part, or Part V in the Braverman Saga, the first of which is happening in the here-and-now. From engineers to contractors, from doctors to druggists, many erstwhile ‘employees’ have not only a different status from ‘average’ wage-slaves, but also a different structural relationship with the corporate machine.
As much as close to twenty percent of the laboring-age population, these folks are modern capital’s answer to the disappearance of small manufacturers, locally-owned stores, and ‘mom-&-pop’ operations generally. Over time, the holders of these new categorical privileges suffer from the same systemic attacks as all the petty bourgeois have experienced.
“(C)apital, as soon as it disposes of a mass of labor in any specialty—a mass adequate in size to repay the application of its principles of the technical division of labor and hierarchical control over execution by means of a firm grasp on the links of conception—subjects that specialty to some of the forms of ‘rationalization’ characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.”
Above all, Braverman rejects out of hand mechanistic ways of characterizing these ultimately dynamic processes of historical evolution based on real-life conflicts and compromises. As he quotes the iconic historian, E.P. Thompson, “‘If we remember that class is a relationship, and not a thing, we cannot think in this way.’”
“Productive and Unproductive Labor” goes into the weeds of technical economics, considered socially. We could spend ages here. A few ideas will need to suffice for now, however.
“To hire the neighbor's boy to cut the lawn is to set in motion unproductive labor; to call a gardening firm which sends out a boy to do the job (perhaps even the same boy) is another thing entirely. Or, to put the matter from the point of view of the capitalist, to hire gardening labor to maintain his family's lawn is unproductive consumption, while to hire the very same gardening labor in order (that someone may) realize a profit from its work is to set in motion productive labor for the purpose of accumulating capital.
These now largely ‘commercialized operations’—lawn care is just one example—follow employment patterns generally to a large extent, though one key difference persists. “(Marking) out these various characteristics of commercial labor, outline(s) the problem as it exists in all its modern dimensions. The unproductive labor hired by the capitalist to help in the realization or appropriation of surplus value is … like productive labor in all respects save one: it does not produce value and surplus value, and hence grows not as a cause but rather as a result of the expansion of surplus value.”
“A Final Note on Skill” returns us to reflect on Labor & Monopoly Capital’s subtitle, to wit, The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Braverman’s, Marx’s, and Big Tent Review’s beliefs about ‘degraded or deskilled’ workers completely contravenes the standard operational view, as it were. Braverman masterfully puts this in perspective.
“Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific knowledge, clearly the ‘average’ scientific, technical, and in that sense ‘skill’ content of these labor processes is much greater now than in the past. But this is nothing but a tautology. The question is precisely whether the scientific and ‘educated’ content of labor tends toward averaging, or, on the contrary, toward polarization.
If the latter is the case, to then say that the ‘average’ skill has been raised is to adopt the logic of the statistician who, with one foot in the fire and the other in ice water, will tell you that ‘on the average,’ he is perfectly comfortable. The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers.”
Braverman takes apart the notion of ‘skilled,’ ‘semi-skilled,’ and ‘unskilled’ labor in a beautiful presentation. He dispositively delineates the actuality of the thesis that his subtitle advances. “‘What happens to unskilled labor under Scientific Management?’ ask the Gilbreths in their Primer on this subject. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were the perky performers who undertook to operationalize and then market scientifically managed precepts, protocols, and perceptions: in other words they produced propaganda, ha ha.
"‘Under Scientific Management there is no unskilled labor; or, at least, labor does not remain unskilled. Unskilled labor is taught the best method obtainable.... No labor is unskilled after it is taught.’ The instruction of the worker in the simple requirements of capital: here, in the minds of managers, is the secret of the upgrading of skills so celebrated in the annals of modern industrial sociology. The worker may remain a creature without knowledge or capacity, a mere ‘hand’ by which capital does its work, but so long as he or she is adequate to the needs of capital, the worker is no longer to be considered or called unskilled.
It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find ‘upgrading’ in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians. ‘Training a worker,’ wrote Frank Gilbreth, ‘means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.’ Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?”
As a provider of Marxist art, I would end on this critical note. “So goes the logic of the capitalist mode of production, which, rather than threaten the hierarchical social relations by which it accumulates wealth in the hands of the owners of society, prefers to leave the worker ignorant despite years of schooling, and to rob humanity of its birthright of conscious and masterful labor.”
New Fiction Series—(continued)...
conspirator. “I got my sister’s and my mother’s scheming ways,” she emphasized to Thomas now and again. For his part, dear Thomas was a bad liar but a clever trickster. In both chess and backgammon, he made up traps constantly, extemporaneously. They’d make as dandy a team as they did a coupling connubial confabulation. Their agreement was, simply stated, comprehensive.
Nor did their memorializing their Vernal plots take long. Actually, but for minor changes, their three guiding principles remained the same till—hope against hope—the utter elimination of the apocalytic regime. First, ‘Don’t even contemplate making—or even coming up with—a sales pitch; second, ‘Identify & seek out what is necessary for victory; third, ‘Only speak what is essential now.’
Love a while, then scheme for a bit: thus their frisky fucking and teasing tongue play played out fondly in the middle of their coming to terms with being a ‘revolutionary cabal under construction to overthrow the motherfuckers in command.’ They required protocols, and so protocols they provided.
Essentially, according to the ‘Initial Operational Protocols’ to which they agreed with a come-covered handshake, they would seek at first, emphasizing the security of their ‘revolutionary cell,’ safely to add only a single co-conspirator per season. Second, they would hold aside for each other ‘sacred space’—minimum four frolicking hours per week—that was now doubly holy, since they were joining not only each other but also a realization for potentiating a people’s future in place of the plunderers’ paradise of the present pass.
Third, they would religiously vet those whom they termed ‘candidates’ in a ‘Sacred-Space-Threesome-Hour,’ a luscious loving come-hither that they vowed to work out at least once each week during one of their scheduled ‘Sacred Sessions.’ They so totally committed to memory their roster that they could instantly have a ‘personnel evaluation meet-up’ at a moment’s notice; for a week, every time they kissed intimately and intensively, they began with a litany of the whole roster, which Becca impishly set to the music of an old tune, decades BP.
“Banana, Hosanna, sweet Janna,” started the ditty before it rattled off all seventeen females present-and-accounted-for in their homestead. Becca danced the whole routine. The point of knowing exactly their entire circle was obvious: they had to narrow options and focus on making plays that allowed things to evolve as they ought, toward a new recruit.
Two obvious choices, Wicked Wanda and Becca’s old Rockefeller cohort, Carey Corey, were at once impeccably perfect and palpably problematic. That the wild and wanton Ms. Martin had no liking for licking inevitably contraindicated prioritizing her. This had to be a network, one which could hardly help having huge erotic elements in the ordinary course of things. A ‘straight woman’ was just unlikely to do, under these circumstances, if only because of putatively likely lesbianic proclivities about playing cheerfully together in sandboxes and such.
Carey, on the other hand, would just have seemed the ideal collaborator but for her having caught the special attention of the erstwhile ‘ruling triumvirate’ at HHH. “Jan Folger would sell her capable cunt to get close to the Rockefellers,” exclaimed Thomas, and while the management committee might conceivably ‘join the revolution,’ he and Becca were of one mind that a favorable disposition to precisely those plutocrats who had conceptualized and co-created the current context would be ill-advised, especially at the outset.
As pregnancies ‘came and went,’ or grew and then expelled their new grown creatures—mostly boys again—Becca and Thomas pondered options. They were trying, in a sense, to gravitate toward the woman in the coven, so to say, who would as naturally conjoin with them as they constantly kissed their mutual adoration and commitment to a future in which justice would be other than a joke.
The Central Committee was out. Till they could find a partner to test the waters, the military-threesome of Cooper, Miller, and Renahan was off-limits, their ‘kissing up and making nice’ last Summer notwithstanding. Becca was wary of trusting them at all, albeit Thomas strongly intuited that they’d soon enough come to the team.
The loners and the oddballs—Alicia, Mildred, Denise, for example—were also out of the question, although Thomas truly blessed the blossoming of frenzy that these shy, loner types would bring to him on occasion out of the blue. Especially Denise: Thomas brought to mind her husband, a fact that he discovered when she called him ‘Edward’ once playfully, transported out of herself and backward in time.
They had made a workable congregation based in no small part on intelligence’s ubiquity throughout their numbers, yet both Becca and Mr. Hawkins shied away from any of the coterie of ‘professional nerds’ in the crew. Thomas stated the matter aloud: “the intelligentsia makes up the intelligence services that helped orchestrate the whole deal,” and they both signed off on waiting on any of these sisters till later, probably much later.
In the midst of these uncertainties, hesitations, and false starts, from the very time that Becca initiated their songfest to know their housemates and select from among them, they both posited a special potency to the form and spirit of the giantess in their company. They’d only trysted as a trio once with Tatiana Adler.
The experience was so explosively sublime that each of them instinctively shied away from too quickly following up. Of such fire were factions made and angry antagonism born. Other alternatives were slim to none, however, and one night as they were completing one of their Sacred-Orgasm-Banquets, as slumber heavied both Becca’s and Thomas’ happy, heavy eyelids, they simultaneously whispered a name, ‘Tatiana,’ as they gained access to Morpheus’ lair.
When they awoke from their catty catnap, they eyed each other and saw the reality that might have felt like something from dreamspace. They needed no further articulation.
In the end, theirs was a great call on the matter. Still, the Solstice was at hand, without an obvious how in evidence about making this specific addition to their pairing. At least they’d yet worked up insufficient courage or wit to ask in some shape, form, or fashion. They both wanted, for reasons strategic and salacious, to approach Tarty Tat; she was such a specimen.
Only an inveterate loser would fail to choose her first in any gaming battle for victory. Yet they had hesitated, and now their first season was receding in the HHH rearview, with no new comrade on board.
Discontented Summertime & Salubrious Dissension
A la Steinbeck, right? Tatiana mentioned the book when she and Becca had spirited Thomas into the ‘Alpine Chapel’ that graced the ridge above their home with a dense coniferous copse in which the light was positively Cistine. They were, already, all three naked in the commune’s favored ‘menage-a-trois trysting spot.’
All of their companions still lay asleep from the glorious rigors of the previous evening’s planned and plotted orgiastic epiphany of celebration and surcease, a ‘volcano for a night’s light’ Mildred had quipped. Becca, Thomas, Tat had planned nothing, though they all intuited something about the day, a looming upsurge of the mindreading legerdemain for which the Revolution would one day be famous, or from the perspective of the deposed demimonde, infamous.
Almost all of the eighteen Household ladies had learned to squirt from each other. Only a few youthful holdouts were not among the elect, of whom Tatiana A. was one.
For brunch, Sir Hawkins and Dame Kinovsky taught the honestly divine Ms. Adler to ejaculate, kneeling in tandem before Tatiana, who had splayed her pussy for alternate licks from the two of them while she dangled at an angle from a Laurel’s branches that rose above a convenient bed of mossy foam. Tarty Tat, as usual, swore that she would ‘pee in your mouths, you two!’
They let her urinate again, then. “I still…” she gasped as they resumed their tag-team tonguing of her channel and clit. “I’m gonna pee!!” she insisted, peels of laughter a follow-up.
Thomas had one leg around his shoulders; Becca situated herself similarly on Tat’s left, the light as honeyed and warm as the flow from between the initiate’s thighs. “I swear now.” She held her breath, relaxing her belly and tensing her butt, moaning as she writhed before laughter exploded from her mouth as she released her flow to shout, “I’m peeing!!!”
But urination was not the emanation. The glories of womanly spurts so intoxicate most of those who discover them that neither Thomas nor Becca found surprising this youthful Amazon’s insistence—when they were preparing Tatiana to send a renewed flood that they intended to share between them; spoils of victory, ha ha—that Becca instead save Tat’s savory effusion and transfer it to the athletic nymph’s own mouth.
No sooner said than done, this excited the lithe goddess-like creature to lift Becca into her place among the branches, a cradle or hammock for luscious licking libations, where she and Thomas now took turns with Dr. K’s dusky bush, till she too drenched the forest’s floor and her comrade’s throats twice before, on the third try, she also wanted to sup from her own cup, as it were, first from Thomas’ and then from Tatiana’s toothy, tonguing hole.
After uncountable hours of eternity among the leaves and branches and grassy-flavored breezes that nestled their multiorgasmic connubiating, ha ha, two things had happened. The first was some kind of magic, serendipitous and, in retrospect, a little spooky, and at one and the same time preordained.
As they dressed for their Household return, blushing with her inability to contain herself, Tatiana laid her left hand on Becca’s shoulder, stroking Thomas’ bearded cheek with her right. Blurting with a whisper, she spit out quietly, “I want in!”
Eyes widened, quick glance exchanged, Hawkins and Kinovsky nodded their acceptance. That was that. Tatiana continued. “We’ll go into a little more detail next time,” which brought additional solicitous smiles and affirming chins, though they all sensed that they all already understood, and explicitly at that, what was transpiring.
The second aspect of their completion and return was that the Household was now awake and very well aware of their threesome’s absence, along with the unavoidable meaning of that exited conjunction, so to speak. As people in the old days, BP, liked to offer after having described someone as decidedly gay, ‘not that there’s anything wrong with it.’
License was strictly a matter of consent alone; otherwise, ‘anything goes’ was the mantra. Nonetheless, both as a matter of posture and intonation, arrayed around their sprawling eating area, where yummy edibles, pre-prepared yesterday, circumscribed a delicious smorgasbord for all and sundry, the assembled multitude displayed a certain cool distance, or even mild distaste toward our new Revolutionary Cell of thinkers and lovers and fighters.
Who would even whisper complaint at the glowing satisfaction of our newly enamored and socially bonded crew as they entered? Not one would do so. Yet most did think. Probably the most popular griping idea would articulate a version of ‘and why wasn’t I invited?’ or something along those lines.
And then, of course, the ever popular, ‘I didn’t see them setting the table’ and such would also be a likely typical flitting thought. Less pleasant and more personal notions of equity and inclusion would also be present.
Unanimous, whatever ‘evolved feminines’ were present in the room, would be at least an inkling of a shrinking, blinking, tight-lipped interjection toward Sir Hawkins: ‘that bastard.’ Even Thomas himself, remembering advice from his last moon-meeting about dispelling dissension by addressing its roots, Thomas stopped, stood tall and still, and prepared his inner aplomb by accepting the truth. “I am one lucky bastard.”
Passion ever opts for pugilistic practices when envy blinks its reptilian gaze at a situation. While factions IRL, as the socially mediated would say, BP, tend to parallel the social divisions that originate them. But HHH was back to primitive communism again; no one was less, and executive functions notwithstanding, no one ruled over any other. And Thomas Hawkins was the only bloke, OMGoddess.
Still, like in a cloistered middle school, cliques are no more avoidable than is flatulence. Putting humans together is like tamping a delicate digestive system with beans; folks just fart gossip, much of it malicious or, at minimum, a wickedly enjoyed sangfroid stew. Whatever happens, little injustices or even inequalities impassion the resentment that feeds factional foments.
At Hawkins Harem Household, without noteable exception, heat and sweat for the most part delineated the timing of factional outbursts. So too in this second season, as if supernaturally aware of this tendency, the PPGA dropped a ‘drop everything and party’ paring of the weekly schedule into this simmering brew of cattiness and skirmishing. Can we talk about uninentional consequences?
I mean, unless we turn into Conspiracy Theorists, ha ha. The very ‘stress-relief valve maneuver’ on PPGA’s part—proffering authoritative governance indeed—if that is what the ordained orgiastic carnival was in fact, elicited the ‘stress response’ that ‘authoritative governance’ wanted, according to its transmissions of data anyway, to avoid as antithetical to social calm and, soto voce, birthing babies.
The folks in charge of things were no dummies. They too practiced Fully Realized Erotic Beasthood. They also continued to conduct the most extensive orchestration of human slaughter in human history. One would assume correctly that they thought closely about all the things that might go awry in their tawdry, homicidal, inventive handling of humanity’s social crisis.
Social chaos defines crisis. Calm supports sinuously salubrious social salutations, so to speak. In practical terms, all the honchos atop the heap had read Federalist #10. Unlike Madison, they had no use for factions, so their social policy revolved in no small part about ameliorating them, if not precluding them altogether.
However one examines the entire situation, the coming months at Hawkins Harem Household would witness a bizarre set of pissing contests, several sniping festivals of insult(something that Thomas loathed since he only thought up the clever responses later), and one buffed-up bluster of confrontation that—in a less ‘evolved’ context—might well have brought fisticuffs or even worse.
In the Scene that nearly unfolded like projectile vomiting, the two sides—this year two triangles, one our ‘sleeper cell,’ the other the outsider trio, Denise, Alicia, Mildred—faced off after a volleylball game ended. Thomas praised Killer Katrina’s serve, not realizing that Ms. Cooper had earlier said that the Pope had been part of what caused recent deadly dread, to which Mildred had objected briefly but strenuously before stalking off into the woods.
When Mildred practically spit that Cooper’s serve wouldn’t even work as ‘dummy practice,’ she called it with a Slavic lilt, the six principal antagonists were ‘off to the races’ in no time. Amber Thomas saved the day. She shimmied her way into the midst of the sextet, two of them with spittle flying from their lips, and—after she forcibly fostered an embrace with each in turn—announced, accurately.
“Ya’ll know I’ve been appointed as ‘campus mediator,’ ha ha!” This was true; the entire team was aware of this, from last Summer. The energy instantly cooled.
She continued. “So these six have been bitching at each other for weeks. We’re doing a group-therapy till further notice, first thing, Saturdays.”
Quite pertinently, when Mildred and Alica retained their pouts, and even Denise’s normally placid gaze remained cloudy, Cathy Cooper’s two companeras, Mother Mary and Ratty Patty, stood up simultaneously. “She’s right, we need this,” said Mary, which Patricia punctuated with a penetrating stare at her good friends, Alicia and Mildred.
“Ya’ll had no cause, now!” She gave them her comedy-shtick ‘googly eyes,’ and when Alicia tittered, Mildred guffawed and then wept a little.
Whatever the case may be, our triadic epitome of resistance, had hoped to follow this game with an appeal for a new member. Either Patricia Renahan or Mary Miller would be the hoped-for enrollee in their radical enterprise; that was before all the brouhaha, however.
A fourth ‘recruit,’ obviously could easily turn into a pair, if the sense of alliance was accurate. The two followers in the Military Threesome looked like they very badly wanted someone to ask them to play, or dance, or fuck, or fight. As weird, and way too public, as things seemed, however, our Revolutionary Triad ended their warm season cautiously.
Another Ugly Autumn Upheaval
Factions were functional, obviously. That’s how Amber opened the second GTG, the acronym for any scheduled Group Therapy Gathering. “Cliques aren’t bad. They’re natural, and they can help clear the air.”
That was also the session in which she had each of the five females among what she called ‘the mutually hostile,’ though the affable Thomas objected that he had no hostilities and in fact brimmed with love for his lovers, sit for five minutes each on Thomas’ lap while he held them lovingly. Then—these were all ‘open groups,’ and normally a few or even more others sat in and observed—she had all the women present strip off their clothes and form a tight circle so that “Mr. Hawkins here can get naked and take turns sitting on y’all’s laps.”
That was thirteen women, six of them pregnant, two taking a break from nursing, and the five formal group participants, none of whom were presently expecting or nursing, though Alicia and Denise had born fruit right before the Vernal Equinox’s New Year’s big time bash. What followed was one of the most erotically charged encounters that many of those present had ever experienced.
Finding ways to manage conflict manipulatively was always a gift that Thomas appreciated in a woman. Thus, that he and his five Group Members spontaneously adjourned to one of the four top ‘Orgy Rooms’ in the house, where they disported with each other wantonly and wildly till closer to dawn than any of them had planned, going into things, made him adore Amber Thomas—she’s not even twenty-four he’d repeat in amazement—beyond reason’s reach.
Not that the underlying discomfiture and disgruntlement totally disappeared. For most of Autumn, they stayed on alert, wariness and skepticism—opposite of the Household standard of Openminded Openheartedness—as likely as not to be the response of any of the six who ran into one of the ‘opposite three.’ Even Thomas: he held no grudges, but he fled from pissed-off women, unless he had loads of backup, so he reacted like a cat walking across a hot blacktop road, picking a delicate path.
But the icy veneer of unconcern and disregard had broken under the expert ministrations of what Thomas called “our mundane miracle.” The unscripted gifting of climactic glee was just a start; that was Amber’s POV regardless. “Healing cannot happen without loving connection.”
Amber would be the key, they all realized, to navigating any such unfolding of dire straits and flickering infighting ferocity. Not yet did they move forward freely, however. Further ministrations would prove indispensable. Somehow, though, everyone anticipated and assisted making up with lots of kisses in the end.
Alicia was pregnant again, before Winter’s glorious grin greeted their darkened-Solstice revelry. Mildred would conceive that very night. For that midwinter ‘marti gras,’ in fact only five of eighteen females fulminated frolic that night. Seven were nursing and ‘perfectly happy to watch.’ Six of them, not including Alica however, were pregnant enough also to choose to sit things out.
“We are a cradle for human renewal,” shouted Thomas toward the end, sashaying a declamation that brought huzzahs and affirmation from all and sundry. However, the statement planted a seed, redolent of the planting ceremonies that they had now been conducting for nine of their agreed-upon-Goddess’ seasons, with a plenitude of placentas one consequence.
A tempest stormed among them afterward about babies, in the event, and, perhaps paradoxically, the Valkyrie Vixen of the Military Threesome led this upsurge of witnessing and complaint. The core question poses a tough poser—“Where do they all go?” Thomas hadn’t yet asked, though he had now twice alluded to housemates’ concerns in his previous monthly get-togethers; other men in his position uniformly agreed that this was a touchy matter.
Jan had been reporting this irritant in their psychic lives in her quarterly PPGA presentations since before the first woman among them missed her menses. “You cannot just ignore the social basis of much of human biology, especially in relation to mating behavior.” She spoke up now.
“I’ve written about his for my past eighteen reports,” presenting a more ‘conservative’ assessment of her POV, which she had made clear for two and quarter years now, not merely eighteen moons. “The word that I get is that we’ll all see sooner rather than later.” She didn’t note, remaining diplomatic, that she was dubious that they would gain avowed satisfactory insight. She was aware in her bones that anything akin to participatory democracy, outside the grounds of the Household, was simply fantasy, at best.
Professor Trevic almost instantly gave voice to a theoretical foundation for the dialectical transformative potential under review. She mentioned Friedrich Engels as an insightful student of the natural history of families and sex roles and all of it. She’d memorized some passages.
“But the communistic household implies the supremacy of women in the house, just as the exclusive recognition of a natural mother, because of the impossibility of determining the natural father with certainty,” a point for a pause and some chuckles from everyone, picking up where she left off, “signifies high esteem for the women, that is, for the mothers. That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurd notions that have come down to us from the period of Enlightenment of the 18th century.”
She paused for effect and, moistening her lips for a moment, went on. “Usually the female portion ruled the house; the stores were in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pack up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey.”
Now everyone howled with laughter. Thomas was always a good sport, yet he could no more suppress a practically purpling blush than he could forego tasting vulva if an eager lass from the circle presented it to him. “I could go on. Believe me.” Diana Trevic was the most radical of them all, in theory.
The rebel troika staunchly supported their ‘fearless leader’s’ becoming part of their planned uprising, but she made every one of them nervous, especially Thomas, whose experience of politically opportunistic intellectuals was remarkable for its eerie unpleasantness. All of them realized, because Jan had made clear that certain lines needed to be respected or ‘an invasion of killer bots would commence tout suite,’ that they couldn’t make too much of any grumble or even grievance if they wanted to stay alive, let alone healthy and happy.
Cathy Cropper, of the People’s Committee and its populist ilk, seconded the professor’s points. She had ever been a grassroots red feminist; she could rattle off all the important tropes.
“I’d just echo Diana’s helpful recitation by pointing out that, from time immemorial, people have only survived because women helped each other. If we were part of some ancient clan, nine times out of ten we wouldn’t even be the primary teat for our own infants; it was shared labor, just like the midwives really participated in the labor of birth itself.” Looking surprised that she had spoken as if with a prepared text, she smiled a self-deprecating grin. “Know what I’m sayin’?” she grinned.
They mostly tittered, and everyone at least shrugged off making more of the issue now. Thomas and Tatiana and Becca nodded in unison but without making any sort of connected signal.
Their little committee wanted to become four. They had each, elliptically and they hoped securely, spoken with both Mary and Kat about ‘some sort of something or other that we can do together,’ without any obvious winking or nudging, just outright interested in dialogic engagement, blah blah blah.
Both had responded appropriately, even enthusiastically. However, both had insisted that the other potential recruit in the process—about which neither of them knew a thing formally—also ‘join up’ at the same time. Such a move caused a certain worry in Thomas especially. “We don’t want to get ourselves neutralized by being too greedy.”
But they’d talked about it in between orgasms and frolicsome felicity. His two lovers had quieted Sir Hawkins concerns for the most part.
In electing not to add two recruits, they realized, they might be adhering too slavishly to theory when action was the primary requisite for success. “Besides,” reasoned Tatiana as they cavorted, “getting the other one will be loads easier if we’re already talking about a majority on the team.”
The three of them knew for certain, in the event, that military muscle and ‘fighting fettle’ would prove inescapable elements of any vision and actualization of a viable rebellion. Thus, finding themselves en route to solidifying Solidarity with the most martially gifted grouping in the Household, they felt as if they were following a path that mandated their attentive pursuit.
In the event, at the end of the eighth moon, just after one of their two annual-feasting-days—what all still remembered as a ‘thanksgiving ceremony,’ Tatiana escorted Mary and Becca walked arm-in-arm with Ratty Patty up to the property’s ‘hot-tub gazebo,’ where Thomas awaited and a successful and succoring recruiting operation, sweetly salacious and drenched with dripping jubilation, was all set to unfold.
Wonders of Winter Await a New Vernal View
Appalachian cold can inhibit warm feelings, yet the GTG was formally disbanded since the six members of the group had ‘surpassed the counselor’s goals,’ in the terminology that Amber Thomas used with a wink and a nudge. The Solstice orgy had further punctuated the bonding relief that had occurred between the two little groups.
Mildred took turns with Becca on Thomas’ cock, as often the case pinned under an onslaught of pussy, in this case of five women of their place who had recently been fervidly contrary to each other. In the meantime, Tatiana necked and throbbed with Alicia while Denise rode Mr. Hawkins’ freakishly talented face, and all of them alternately moaned with ecstasy or keened to keep climax at bay for just a moment more. Or Alicia squirted from Thomas’ cunning linguistic thrills as Tat and Denny sixty-nined back and forth. And so on and so forth, released, relieved, replenished.
And three became five. They now managed to spend ten hours a week in each other’s company. Two hour-long slots were always connubial: this was their duty. Four hours or so went to study, everything from Engels to organic farming, from Spanish to map-reading, and all manner of flotsam and jetsam of human knowledge. The remaining interludes of their commingling included very sophisticated martial-fitness-training—how to kill with one finger and more, according to close combat specialist Mary Miller—and whatever else might seem helful in advancing their mutuality and the potential of expanding their little banded bonhomie still further.
Since the culling, in the evolution of All-That-Is, snow had become more common. Jan never responded to any of the common contentions that the people-in-charge were ‘shifting the weather to protect the meat supply.’ Whatever else may be apt, this lowering of ambient temperature out of doors had made boosting boisterous and bumptious bounty much more heatedly enthralling. They turned to each other and sought to bring surprise and succor to their mutual endeavors.
‘Coming to a head’ can, in such a context, be taken in several ways, clearly, ha ha. Cathy Cooper and Thomas Hawkins had probably fornicated together less than any other pair in the palace, as it were. This was not a matter of chemistry; for Sir Hawkins especially, her coppery, steamy sex, the amber plenitude of her bushy loins, the tangy taste of her squealing squirting release from any friendly oral pleasure process, all were precisely to his liking.
Rather, they both sensed this profound physical longing, a pulsing throbbing cosmic hum, at the very same instant that they realized that they probably agreed about roughly zero of the things about which most couples like to feel at least minimal congruence before they get naked and open all the portals that people can palpate. For both of them, this all came down to a sort of enervated sense of worry and avoidance, so they’d not made moves to couple except when fate fostered their fondling, as it were.
Theirs was not the only duo so attenuated in Hawkins Harem Household. Still, she had been looking for just this kind of opportunity, she would say later, when Killer Kat caught up with him just after dusk on the full moon, which shown through the wintry branches and showed their steaming breath while they embraced hello. He was alone, and she clearly had a rendezvous in mind, as, he admitted happily, he had also been considering as a crucial step for some time.
The temperature outside the tower’s four high windows, through which the moon’s amber glow illustrated their wanton waltzing with each other through climax and glory, was in the teens; well below zero on the Celsius scale. After they had slurped and thrusted and configured themselves for a few syrupy volcanic exchanges, however, the windows became so steamy that only a fraction of the light came through.
As they lay together afterward, on the love couch, adjacent to the water fountain, the only two fixtures in the rounded stones of this trysting spot, they spoke for over an hour about ‘what they had always feared they would detest’ in the other, only to find their loving ways a common ground. She asked to join them as he slipped inside her and gathered her up for a final frenzy of fucking.
And so there were six. Positing a trio of pairings, given the circumstances—‘just in case!—now seemed not just plausible but essential. They had exceeded their quota.
Moreover, their ‘surreptitious alliance’ was obvious to all, in essence if not in its specific components. The common view was that they were all trying to find a way to ‘fight for the infants,’ not altogether false but clearly only a small piece of the revolutionary pie.
And then Becca was pregnant. Thomas loved her even more, which he had believed an impossibility. They all felt as if they had taken the right course, come what may.
Beverly was the sole holdout. She had miscarried at the beginning of the year. She had the quickest reset of all the most merrily multiorgasmic females; she was healthy; she had ‘always planned on children,’ BP. She was the first of the Household to state openly her fealty to “our Household’s moral center and spiritual core,” by which she meant the half-dozen of them who now made a ‘Phalanx for Progress’ throughout the Harem.
For these reasons alone, without even thinking about her spooky marksmanship—driving a nail with a bullet at fifty paces—they all knew. Ms. Brand’s miscarrying her first fetus meant that she in particular had received something like a ‘designation from on high,’ “from the Goddess Herself,” mused Thomas, to join and, somehow, some way, to lead them.
Preparations for their third ‘inaugural ball,’ as they now termed their New Year’s Equinoctical orgy, in the event elicited a ‘Sharpshooter’s Jamboree,’ lasting two days in which four women—Killer Kat always led the way, with Ratty Patty and Mother-of-God Mary backing her up, their triangulated appreciation of a fourth side for their carnal conflagration all in this case focused on Beverly, who didn’t in the least fancy resisting anyhow—tried for a day and a half to fuck each other to death, ha ha, not really—Life Force Energy’s resplendence and all.
So maybe, instead, they were exploring fornicating themselves and their targeted acquisition into submission. Bev punctuated the process: as the last hit of acid mellowed, and they by mutual agreement had orgasmed their last till shower and sleep had intervened, she stood, “like a towering Queen,” Kat later would recall.
“She just looked at us,” Captain Cooper intoned, “and we knew she knew.” Her smile just grew and grew while they all sniffed at the aromatic funk of female frolic and release.
“I’m gonna join y’all,” she stated with a matter-of-fact chortle of command. Continuing with her Outer Banks drawl, she reiterated. “Y’all can’t stop me. Next Up—A Third Annual Orgiastic Transit Toward Uprising
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
Along with Dickens, we can opt for addressing each other and our mutual needs, instead of seeking salvation through a barren accumulation of goods. After all, an individual’s wealth, in a community wracked with poverty and depression, is practically meaningless. Perhaps if we look inward and at each other, as the video unfolds and afterwards, we'll find a way to dedicate ourselves to bettering the whole, as well as to personal enrichment.
I am glad to present to you tonight the original film, for the very first time in video, of Charles Dickens', 'A Christmas Carol.'"
Mom's fingers shook and proud tears swelled her eyes as she lowered the lights. The onlookers clearly heard the insertion and descent of the VHS tape into the heart of the VCR. The hushed gloom of the viewing area offset the rush of contradictory feelings that daddy had provoked.
The screen lit up, however, and introspection faded. The standard FBI warning came first—I wondered if the canned threat had ever deflected a pirate. We all anticipated the coming entertainment. A few anticipated enrichment.
The next sequence of screens showed a jumble of credits and aerial views of urban settings. A jazz score—resembling the muzak of an expensive clinic or a cheap sit-com—played along with the flitting images. None of this evoked Christmas, Charles Dickens, or 1850 London. This alarmed Charles, but the discrepancies didn't activate his body until the beginning scene, by which point any hope for innocent enjoyment had vanished.
The opening shot, now backed by jazz as chintzy as a run-down motel lounge, portrayed a supine male torso and legs, completely bare of clothing. The artificial color and grainy quality didn't hide the prominent penis at the center of the screen, which began to lose its flaccidity and achieve a towering erection within a second or so of opening.
Not until turgidity reigned however, and a cooing female voice offered an "Oh, Master," did pandemonium break loose in the dark recesses of the Moran household. Dad—frowning incomprehension, unable to choke out any sound—jumped up and hid the screen with his body as he motioned me to shut off the power.
A simple shriek, the same mindless cry of dismay that emerges when good breeding confronts a very large rat at close quarters, passed the lips of my mother. She reacted nearly as quickly as daddy, though, bringing up lights to dim the lurid pictures prancing across the television.
The rest of the assembly gesticulated and commented as their particular proclivities dictated. Grunts, groans, and guffaws created cacophony, punctuated by scraping and toppling chairs. The innocent "What's that Mommy?" of my four year old cousin Emily started a wave of titters.
Almost simultaneously, several things happened. An ashen-faced Reverend Milton—looking like he wanted a series of strong drinks—and a wryly amused Ms. Milton took their leave, confused teenagers in tow.
An overly solicitous Thomas Moran, escorted by several buddies, approached dad to suggest he view some more of the tape to see if "maybe the Christmas stuff was put after the porno by mistake." Two of mom's siblings departed with condolences, advising against future mixing of the sacred and the activist.
The remainder of the ensemble; relatives, youth, neighborhood friends; milled about the room. A look or a phrase expressed the consensus. "Too bizarre, man, too bizarre."
Sarah recovered rapidly, moving the aimlessly interacting company toward the kitchen, where a small buffet stood ready. Within minutes, only I remained with dad and the flotsam of the sundered viewing. Dimmed lights and soundless test pattern eerily illuminated the random wreckage.
As I approached my father, his form diminished, his face vague with disbelief, I couldn't keep from crying. I wanted to hug him, but I couldn't think of anything to say to make the event seem less idiotic.
* * * *
Few participants in the fiasco placed the evening in perspective. A couple may have had disturbing dreams. Most of us relegated the experience to the realm of wild stories that normally occur somewhere else.
Dad's furious Monday morning phone call revealed the underlying reality that ruined his fantasy. A disgruntled employee of the distributor, Universal Video, acting out a rage for which no other outlet seemed adequate, replaced the original classic with a triple-X feature called "Slave Girls From Outer Space."
Of the 5,000 altered copies, some 800 emerged in Christmas showings like ours. Daddy told me after hanging up, "that's 5,000 fewer liberals George Bush has to worry about, sweetie."
The following day, Rev. Milton's vociferous objections notwithstanding, Charles insisted on a six month leave from his duties as deacon. He needed to work the evening out of his system. He put it to me crudely at the airport: "If I'm gonna be a fucking Christian, I need more than a naked, broken man nailed to a cross. I need a community that has more adherents than yours truly and a priest who's a nascent alcoholic."
Digesting what transpired, he concluded—more forcefully than ever—that we're in big trouble as a country, “let alone as a people.” "Punk, I love this place, I love folks, really and truly, but the water ahead's as rough as anything I've ever heard of."
Always before, dad had mastered the improbably happy ending. He thought he could change the course of history with the force of upstanding character. After the "cosmic joke" hit, irony was about as optimistic an attitude as he could muster. "We've got every single thing we need for a richer and wiser spirit to prevail, but we're so pigheaded, instead we're cooking up disaster and travail."
The isle and center seat on my Delta 727 were a portly, lecherous stockbroker and his wife. "Any interesting holiday adventures?" the gentleman asked, eyes gleaming.
Something in my tone must have warned that further pursuit of this inquiry would prove unsettling to anyone hoping to continue to believe in the 'American Way.' "You have no earthly idea" was all that I offered, but Mrs. Broker shifted uncomfortably while her husband nodded knowingly and tried to decipher the social signals in a way that would let him proceed without suffering any alienation of spousal affection, giving up when his wife's icy smile froze in a glacial Dixie grimace and her breathing ceased until he turned away and suggested that they too had had many unusual experiences.
My sweetheart, a second year law student at Emory, could only see the litigious possibilities. "I mean, it's intentional infliction of emotional distress, a possible conspiracy charge against the guy, Federal jurisdiction, civil and criminal angles, it's so totally cool."
Needless to say, sharing this with my Dad seemed about as useful as trying to put out a blaze with oxygen. The whole deal kept working on me, though, much as it continued to corrode and reformulate my dad's perspective on things. I finished this narrative without a clear sense of ultimate purpose at the same time that I became certain that no other work I'd ever completed was more important to consider and wrestle with and make something useful of, no matter how impossible the task might feel at first.
* * *
Charles calls this evening; Spring’s sprung has long left Emory’s campus, a drenching swelter its replacement. I'm watching Coretta King and George Bush, Sr. on the tube, talk-talking about how great MLK was. Daddy says, "honey, I got it figured. Liberalism is dead." Mrs. King bobbed her head as if on cue.
"But I thought we were liberals, dad," not sure what else to add.
"We need something more tangible than good intentions, punk. We need something that is more like a plan, more full of action, less dependent on feeling good about writing a check. I don't know exactly what, but I'll keep my eyes open for both of us."
I'm more than a little dubious and utterly lost when I give him a tentative, "Okay...?" but then Coretta and George embrace awkwardly, and I figure, "I'll stay on the lookout too, dad; every day. I promise." FINIS—Up Next, Something Else Completely Different
Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…
Fourth is that the past continues in the present: as Faulkner stated this idea, "It's not even past." This humble correspondent's grandparents suffered through WWI; his children may have attempted to avoid the debilitation, or have no choice but to embrace the opportunity, of WWIII(or perhaps it's World War Five by this juncture).
The social aspects of this delving of the annals of history is precisely that citizens can, through the capacity of noticing the development of past into present, gain ammunition for acting in a self-interested, a class-interested, and a human-supportive sort of way. As Howard Zinn persisted in pointing out, "History is a weapon."
Much more might be useful to consider in a fuller explication of such a tale as this, in which the flowing blood of human production follows pathways conceived and elaborated in advance, even as extemporaneous and even spontaneous development seems always to be present. However, for the purposes of the here and now, these finishing flourishes will have to do.
AN INTRODUCTORY BACKGROUND'S AFTERWORD
Many are the litanies of imperial pretension(INTERLINK, SB) that THC has developed(INTERLINK, Coal), both that have examined a very particular case(INTERLINK, Sioux) and those that have sought to view the field of contest with a wider lens, as is the case in this article. In such a world view as THC brings to these efforts, such an interlacing of the individual and the local with the imperial is unavoidable.
Clearly, today's story pertains to a much broader conceptualization of the congruence of finance and empire, for example, than what was apparent in a dissection of the development of Depleted Uranium(DU#1). Given this breadth of perspective, even the most cursory application of the evidence and analysis that are here present to peruse might bring various tangible recent developments into clearer perspective.
Iran's potential for acquiring nuclear weapons, for instance, becomes at least plausibly an abrogation of the financial establishment's control of the most capital intensive technologies of the modern era, whether the purpose of those technologies is electricity or explosive force. This is not to state such a notion as factual, nor even, yet, to advance it as hypothesis, but merely to aver that some connections with the financial world herein developed is explicable in this conflict, in the land that British Petroleum, the CIA, and the World Bank helped to secure for the Butcher of Tehran, Shah Reza Pahlevi.
Similarly, the ongoing imbroglio over Israel and Palestine must reveal such treasures, if students will only look for them. Jimmy Carter's persistent flirtation with the Trilateral Commission is merely one potential portal to this type of relational thinking and assessment.
The multiple martial expressions of America's might in the world of late also illustrate this contention about conjunction. Thus, the imperial domains of Southwest Asia suddenly become hideous threats to American people—which is bogus idiocy at best, instead of showing up as they really are, plums that financiers and industrialists and other plutocrats have for at least a century or two desired to pluck for their own purposes.
And again, an understanding of the world's financial edifices inherently contributes to a richer comprehension of these matters, as Walter Ratterman ought to have recognized when he installed WB-backed solar panels in Afghanistan rather than minding his own garden near Seattle. If a courageous female freedom-fighter from these highlands-beset-by-war-and-plunder can recognize this, then privileged pupils from the cushy imperial center should be able to come to terms with Malalia Joya presents for them in A Woman Among the Warlords.
In these, and many other obvious manifestations of money, markets, and empire—which lurk behind the surface rationale for such conflicts and contrariety as surely as beams lie behind the lace-like facade of a 'delicate' skyscraper—citizens can hearken back to Wilson, Bukharin, and many other past interlocutors of the workings of the world. If the student gets nothing else from such investigations, he or she ought to gain, uniformly and without exception, a critical wariness against ploys to divide and conquer.
Berch Berberoglu is merely one of the more recent, and one of the most intelligent and impassioned chroniclers of this latter day expression of imperial venality. In his Turmoil in the Middle East, he interweaves class factors, the exigencies of empire, and the fiscal and resource impetuses at work, forming the lattice-work behind a facade of free trade and free markets and free enterprise that, to this day, remain the superficial foundation on which Bretton Woods institutions continue to seek hegemony hither and yon.
"(S)ort(ing) out the class forces that underlie political conflicts that have led to civil strife... .this book seeks to map out the dynamics of social change and social transformation." Sustainable business and renewable energy are merely one pair of reputedly 'progressive' tropes that are impossible either to develop or to explain without this sort of analytical practice.
Professor Berberoglu then suggests what this humble correspondent is saying today, that the citizen must work to carry out such an examination "within the framework of a class analysis approach that takes into account the central role of imperialism and neo-colonial reaction as the twin pillars of the contemporary world political economy." Comparing bailouts to abandonment and showing the disparity between ten thousand dead soldiers and several million slaughtered civilians,represent two of the many specific ways that preparing such analysis can fit within the necessary 'framework.'
Franklin Delano Roosevelt summed up the underpinning social wisdom that necessitates an accurate comprehension of money and its multifarious methods of dominion. "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
As is his occasional wont, THC will close this pair of introductory interludes by way of referencing a favorite bit of verse.
"I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said--'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. ...Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.'"
This humble correspondent's mother would often follow such a bit of revealing text with a wagging finger. "A word, to the wise, is sufficient."
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
…readers may return to our vaunted ‘Supreme Court’s’ historical oversight of ‘protecting’ the First Amendment, in almost every single ‘important’ instance of which, from the case law, the Dissenting Opinions contain the ‘free speech’ gems, for the simple reason that the majority—often by a lopsided margin—has almost always crushed free speech in order to protect supposed ‘national security,’ in particular the absolute necessity of promoting Anticommunism. The Abrams case epitomizes these sorts of decisions.
That tussle, which started a hundred six years back might especially connect with TikTokish focal points. Both court battles arose out of disputes about communication. Near the end of World War One, Abrams and comrades threw leaflets into the street, missives that they had been distributing in more standard channels theretofore.
Two of these one-pagers offered slightly different information and advice; still, the essence was stopping intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia, which, technically, had remained an ally of the U.S. The Department of Justice had indicted defendants under the auspices of the Espionage Act, which criminalized all activities that interfered with War preparations and activities against the Germans.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a dissenting opinion in Abrams Et. Al v. United States that celebrates free speech, although he begins with a caveat. “Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises.
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
So! This is the state of free speech in the ‘land of the free,’ ha ha. A two in seven minority in 1921 counts as a free-speech victory. Ah, but we’ve evolved; now, the nine are unanimous. Any claim of National Security against Foreign Adversaries justifies restricting or even prohibiting speech of any kind, substituting the imprecation that this essay sees as the foundation of America’s policed state: ‘Sit down, shut up, do as you’re told!’ Here where we have ‘freedom,’ this 7-2 loss is a free speech victory.
It’s far from the only one: an upcoming article develops both a timeline and a more or less comprehensive listing of key free-speech court battles. For now, an interested observer might turn to a TikTok Brief that favored Petitioners. Senators Edward Markey and Rand Paul, along with Congressman Ro Khanna, authored this anchoring examination of ‘official’ acceptance of attacks on free speech in favor of National Security.
Just below, a bit of a BTR summation in this arena supplements these professional political philosophers, whose expertise is demonstrable in their unexpected electoral successes, which are not exactly congruent with corporate demands for maximum profits and unquestioned compliance. All of them might have run afoul, much like I myself might have done, of the mandatory strictures of the United States.
As stated already along these lines, the Espionage Act underpinned the Abrams case. Eugene Debs spent the better part of ten years in prison for a speech in which he had the temerity to say that ‘rich men made wars for a draft of poor men to fight.’ That was another Supreme Court encounter, in which both Holmes and Brandeis voted with the 9-0 majority in upholding the great socialist leader’s indictment and imprisonment for a decade-long sentence for the crime of giving a talk that articulated the political and economic factors that impelled society to war.
A further indicator of ‘free-speech rights’ from that era, Schenk v. United States was another instance of a lengthy prison term for the criminal act of criticizing the draft. Holmes and Brandeis again sided with the unanimous majority that put Schenk behind bars for sending anti-draft pamphlets through the mails.
As noted, for a different approach to the legal history, readers may turn to the Amicus Brief for TikTok on the part of two Senators and a Representative, mentioned above. Whatever the case may be, in the remaining sections of this essay, a bit more will show up to illuminate these politicians’ argumentation, and the opinions of others as well, about the case. First though, in the terminology of today, WTAF is this thing, anyway?
What TikTokking Actually Does
To elder fogeys, these new modes are at times hard to take, but more generally the problem is that an old fart just can’t push all the buttons in the right order, ha ha ha. The Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, noting that an algorithm guides the site’s “recommendation engine,” summed up the app’s engagement pattern incisively.
“TikTok is a social-media platform that lets users create, upload, and watch short video clips overlaid with text, voiceovers, and music. For each individual viewer, the platform creates a continuous sequence of videos based upon that user’s behavior and several other factors, with the aim of keeping that user engaged. TikTok’s platform has approximately 170 million monthly users in the United States and more than one billion users worldwide.”
An aggregator of content made some insightful comments about exactly why TikTok was ‘beating out the competion.’ “By prioritizing content relevance over creator popularity, TikTok democratizes content discovery, enabling anyone to achieve viral success. This approach has driven rapid user growth and high engagement, fueling the platform’s rise to global prominence.”
Ha ha. Artificial Intelligence agrees. “TikTok's key strategy of prioritizing content relevance over creator popularity, meaning even unknown users can go viral if their content resonates with the audience, has significantly contributed to its widespread adoption and high engagement levels, allowing anyone to achieve viral success and driving the platform's global popularity.” Copycatting abounds, eh?
Meanwhile, here’s a search that rounded up 419,000,000 links: <tiktok posts OR videos type OR sort OR category proportion OR data OR statistics OR breakdown OR percentage>. To wit, this: “According to recent data, roughly 40% of TikTok videos are categorized as ‘comedy sketches,’ 25% as ‘dance challenges,’ 15% as ‘life hacks,’ and 20% as other miscellaneous categories.”
This yields at least a preliminary assessment of what typifies ‘posting behavior’ and ‘viewer preferences’ on the platform. As noted Above-the-Fold, my grand-niece-in-law avidly deploys the app many times a day; my love and I have planned an interview about how our young relative is using the place, but we’ve procrastinated actually having such a conversation.
In any event, many other purposes show up on the stream that has poured forth daily to tens of millions of Americans. For example, history is a ‘popular posting category.’ The contrast with Facebook screams out from the screen.
Among the teachers who have carved out teaching spaces on the app is a Chicagoan who has a pretty fierce commitment to conveying slices of impactful past realities so as to improve young people’s lives in the present pass. “'For me, it’s about sharing this information to empower, to educate and most importantly, to strategize how we can create equitable systems starting at the grassroots level,' Crim said.”
And why TikTok? Again, the inference is irresistible. “When TikTok became popular in the US several years later, Crim began posting snippets from his curriculum on the platform — only this time, (unlike on Facebook/Instagram) more people were paying attention.” Huh. And the powerst that be want to ban this.
As things have panned out, “Crim’s videos have turned him into a mini-celebrity — he said people recognize him while out and about, while his followers across social media platforms include Ava DuVernay, Mo’Nique and D.L. Hughley. In fact, his educational content has resonated so widely that he left classroom teaching to make social media content full-time. He also now works as public speaker and consultant.”
This can’t be the reason for the proscription. Can it? What’s the ugly underbelly that justifies this?
In a darker discovery, an investigator learns of purported prevalence of hate on the site. In the event, the noted darkness is arguably equally as much about the pompous and self-interested presumption of such so-called descriptive reports, which in the most prominently displayed citation of said same labelled a ‘COVID-agenda caution’—such as appears regularly in BTR—as a prominent instance of the hatefulness that TikTok allegedly reveals, quite frequently, in its profferals to its publics.
My niece and her teammates and friends definitely aren’t inspiring, or captivated by, hateful enticement, expression, or reaction. They’re dancing and flirting and finding ways to reach out where their communiques will be their own, since generally speaking, their parents and masters won’t be taking part in the TT frolic. Such observations would, in any event, approximate my take on the entire experience.
Then came the lovely Mexican-food lunch at a popular restaurant where the Latino owners from Johnson City had migrated East to open their thriving eatery in Roanoke. Word of this article’s unfolding came up, and my new friend—we can call him Steve—shyly admitted that, at age 60, he had also begun TikTokking; he looked shy about it anyway.
Across the beautifully illustrated Mexican art-table where we all sat in a red-leather booth, my other new friend—we’ll agree that she’s Shirley—pushed her husband playfully. “Oh, go ahead and show them!” So my love and I got the chance to view our very first TikTok thing, a little in-the-snow amicable video of Steve as he kneels at a snowy gravesite where the headstone reads, “R.I.P. TikTok,” and the dates of its brief lifespan.
He looks levelly at the camera from his kneeling posture and flashes a ‘V’ sign matter-of-factly. Because I force myself to do so, I inquired, “So, when you made that and posted it, how did you feel?” I gave what I hoped was a knowing, sympathetic look, continuing, “Victorious?”
Probably partially because he didn’t want to disappoint me, but also apparently with something like a heartfelt sensibility, he said, “Nahhh. I just did it because it didn’t have anything to do with me, but everybody was talking about it.”
Not the quickest wit in the wicket, ha ha, I failed to ask how in fuck this could be true since he was a ‘player’ in the TT bailiwick, so to say. I will do so for next time, along with any other local snooping about the case that might yield neat or nifty tidbits.
No matter what else appears accurate about TikTok, therefore, its essence, its regular routines, its common comeuppances, do not embody, promote, or otherwise stand for anything violent or insurrectionary, or even anti-capitalist. Undeniably, though, the source waters of the app do rise to the surface in commie territory, even if no attached, discernible Red agenda is detectable.
A Few Political & Economic Implications/Inferences
A recent daily New Yorker article, “What Happened When an Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTok?” is a protypically charming narrative from those geniuses, as it were, of yarnspinning and marketing in Manhattan. The story launched from the wonderfully arch premise that the author’s own ‘fifteen-minutes-of-fame’ virality emanated from artful diatribes, in the long lost days of 2016, against ‘social media addiction’ and so on and so forth.
“I was particularly interested in TikTok, which launched in 2017 and quickly displaced Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for many young people. It caught my attention because it was so common among the college students I teach, and the Supreme Court was in the process of deciding whether the U.S. should be allowed to ban it—or else force its Chinese owners to sell. (A ruling will be released any day now.) So I took a step that would have nauseated an earlier version of myself: I downloaded the TikTok app, while I still could, to find out what all the fuss was about.”
The tizzy in this instance concerns turning loyal—or at least apathetic—citizens into virulent protesters or believers in something sinister, like really radical reform. Thus, the author accedes, “(t)o be sure, there is something disturbing about videos that are so effectively optimized to capture our attention.
Social-media companies are still scarily good at persuading us to keep scrolling; TikTok reached a billion active monthly users faster than any of its competitors. And then there is the grim possibility raised by many lawmakers, that TikTok’s ubiquity on American phones poses a national-security threat from China.”
He doesn’t buy the concept. Nihilism and meaningless goofing compete on the site with in-jokes for geeks or freeks or calculus aficionados—seriously, it’s a twenty second video about mating rituals as ‘derivative-seeking behavior.’ Still, he completely refuses to see the entire concept as more absurd than the fascistic slickness of the fanatical commie infiltrators of mom and apple pie on the ‘popular series,’ The Americans.
Conflict occurs whenever humans interact, its intensity in part a reflection of the intricacy and potency of the underlying social forms whose populaces are ‘fussing about’ one thing and another. In some shape, form, or fashion, many people must choose to participate in these skirmishes and pitched battles of a terrain that seems time out of mind to be a battlefield of one sort or some other. Folks volunteer to fight, in other words, for their own good reasons; they do not need brainwashed fanaticism and logistically impossible conspiracy to justify their choices.
The litigants in this case represent the most extensive and powerful empire ever, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the world’s largest manufacturing power ever. Department of Defense documents openly project very likely, perhaps inevitable, war with China; one would be naive to believe that the Chinese did not entertain similar ideas and protocols.
Each ‘party’—plaintiff and defendant, appellant and appellee, petitioner and respondent, however one states the case—elects to join the struggle as antagonist or protagonist. Inescapably, erstwhile ‘geopolitical matters’ might will remain part of the entire equation. In the event, both the U.S. and TT lined up a lot of cultural and intellectual muscle to support their distinct causes.
Well might one inquire what these two sets of ‘voluntary participants’ represent, or the social sets to which they belong, in the matter of TikTok and ByteDance and the Yankee-doodle political-classes. In the event, all the Briefs in favor of both litigants are now part of the record and are thereby public documents that all may view, blah blah blah. We’ll be considering some pointers from these ‘friends of the Court’ in the next portion of this present piece.
The primary purpose of seeing what is implicit, or what we can guess is likely happening, is to illustrate how obviously huge the interests are in play here. Silicon Valley, the Chinese Communist Party, the United States Congress, the entire fiscal and technical establishment of corporate capitalism—these are labels that affix to the most fundamental ‘movers and shakers’ on all of dear mother, Planet Earth.
Even if the vast mass of humanity doesn’t think in these terms, matters of central strategic value must be in play here, despite the fact that none of the legal filings do more than mention in passing the political and economic potential of this situation to make certain fortunes and break others. In the end, a sine qua non of decent analysis ponders these sorts of deeply politicized pieces.
But more than geopolitical objectives and schemes are also quite likely percolating. In a cartel-driven world where ‘competition’ is for ‘attention,’ Facebook’s capacity to retain its position at the pinnacle may hinge on just the sort of ‘competitive edge’ that allows for victory on the playing field to come from behind-the-scenes machinations that affect the ability of the ‘other side’ to emerge whole from the scrum, so to speak.
In other words, since denying an up and coming competitor access to the American market might hurt that adversarial outfit, finding the political fuel to fire a move to actuate just such a denial—in the garb, say, of a Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—might become a central strategic planning process component. If only because TT’s ‘Western’ counterparts will reap some immediate advantages from such legislation, one must at minimum entertain the possibility that these corporate interests are part of the equation here.
Is such an assertion even vaguely dispositive? Hardly. Watching and listening, as the upshot of the high bench’s decision comes to pass over the next months and more, observers may make a more fruitful stab at making such a conspiratorial case of things at hand.
No matter, the most crucial element of the indictment doesn’t much depend on finding self-interested motives or conspiratorial imperialism at the heart of TikTok v. the United States of America. The issue is one of citizenship and consciousness and other attributes of a viable world network of communities that agree to avoid Mass Collective Suicide by learning to get along with each other.
What Is Truly At Stake Here, Or, What, Exactly, Is a ‘Foreign Adversary’ Really?
The definition from the U.S. Code is so sketchy, so vague, so sinister in a Lex Luther kind of way, that one almost wants to vomit and move on; it’s ‘just another example of malicious mandates so as to manifest monopoly interests.’ Whatever the case may be, here’s the statutory terminology.
“Foreign adversary: The term 'foreign adversary' means any foreign government or foreign nongovernment person engaged in a long-term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or security and safety of United States persons.” Uh huh. So ten-to-thirty seconds of shimmy-and-shake, a billion times a day or so, threatens the United States of America or its citizens or both?
Other than projection’s most primitive palpation of a coping strategy—’I hate you,’ so ‘you must hate me—the oldest ‘trick in the book’ is of assuming the premise. Practically speaking, one hundred percent of the time—more or less, ha ha—disputants among life’s panoply of fights as fierce and lethal as they are furious and fatuous, presume that the premises of their feelings and beliefs are true, instead of scratching their heads and asking if, just possibly, something else might be going on.
In the matter at hand, the underlying fucking idea may or may not be accurate. Do Chinese people—even if we limit this to ‘known Communists,’ that’s plus or minus fifty million folks—wish us badly? How about them Russkies? Everybody knows that the ‘only good Persian is a dead Persian?’ ‘North Koreans couldn’t find their asses with flashlights?’ Come on, people.
If we could introvert our projecting tendency, we might take a breath and wonder. “Do I detest or wish terror for people in specific other places? Or for everybody but me in general? I’d bet every dollar that I could scrape together that such an assertion on most days would make us giggle as we posed it.
‘Duh!’ Obviously, the answer is a huge, resounding ‘NO!!!!!’ for most people, and a head-scratching, soul-searching version of ‘Well know, I don’t think so’ for most of the rest. Therefore, ineluctably, this whole TikTok Versus the United States of America business is a construct, a cobbling together of supposedly organic conflict between Jimbo and his fellow citizens, on the one side, versus Chinese people and companies, on the other hand.
Briefs on both sides have nevertheless offered plenty of arguments and ideas. However, like Arnold said in Terminator, ‘We’ll be back!’ Today, we’ll highlight only a few stalwart TT supporters, or opponents, along with the most salient feature of the assorted Amicis’ primary submissions, as it were.
Supporting the U.S. Government were versions of the ‘usual suspects’ alongside ‘unexpected others,’ erstwhile liberals at that, who collectively eschewed permitting ‘foreign influencers’ to gain free access to ‘the American mind,’ ha ha, in all its glory, hahahahaha! Zephyr Teachout is clearly an unanticipated cheerleader for the very forces that she supposedly opposed as a ‘participant-advisor’ of the ‘Occupy-Wall-Street Movement.’
One commentator attributed his siding with the USG here to ‘the Teachout brief.’ So let’s see. What the statement offers, a briefing that presenting attorney Joel Thayer joins, is fairly straightforward. To wit the following.
‘We’ve always kept the foreigners at bay; our forefathers built it into the system. It was how we protected our fragile citizens—no, no, excuse me, not citizens!—our delicate country from being hijacked.’ Therefore, ‘down with TikTok!’ Right.
Which is okay, even if the history is spectacularly false and the premises about nations are largely just assumed to be true with no need for contextualizing conversations, blah blah blah. The entire construct of the law professors’ submission on Merick Garland’s behalf leaves out anything that might untangle the sense that ‘national security’ is a cutout for ‘private profit.’ As technocratic legalese, it passes muster.
Mitch McConnell does not at first blush equate to Joe Biden, but they are indeed fellow ReDemoPubliCratiCans. As such, one would absolutely expect the legislator’s brief for imperial imprimatur to seem pristine. One would be correct.
“TikTok is a wildly popular social-media application under the direct control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As a result of the clear national-security threat posed by this application, Congress has taken numerous actions to curb its use, culminating in the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024 (Foreign Adversaries Act).” McConnell wants to keep Donald Trump out of the loop for some reason, but exploring that will have to await more information or insight, ha ha.
Over twenty aggregated Amici Curaea joined in one of the Briefs in favor of shuttering TikTok. This set of friendly adjuncts to the Empire’s contentions pertinently illustrate the central role of anticommunism in defending these ‘legislations’ of exclusion, asset forfeiture, and ex post facto criminalization.
The Table of Contents shows an almost ideal sample of facts speaking for themselves. Three of the four section titles make the same point about anticommunism’s imperial perquisites. “The Chinese Communist Party Threatens, and is Threatened by, Free Speech,” points out the initial chapter.
Of course, “The First Amendment is Not an Open Door for the Enemies of Freedom” gives readers a wider context for hating all commies, wherever they might try to hide their anti-American fever. That’s the second installment. Third comes a discernibly legal argument about the First Amendment and free speech.
Finally, we have this: “America is the Bulwark of Freedom and Western Civilization.” As Jeffrey Sachs so precisely punctuates in an appearance at once ironic and iconic on Democracy Now, the two and a half centuries of Anglo-American ascendancy, even viewed in a ‘light most favorable’ to Yankee plaintiffs, represent but a tiny portion of ‘civilized existence.’
Strains of consistent ethnic supremacy and ‘national’ exceptionalism notwithstanding, what most powerfully connects these comrades of the established ordering, in a Dickensian sense, of the eternal ‘order of loaves and fishes,’ is that they willingly proffer as gospel incarnate the necessity of empire and all of its concatenations of chaos and mayhem in service to plunder’s ever-propertied pursuit of optimal profit. We’ll find more to parse on all sides anon, anyhow.
In favor of TT’s and BD’s pleas, for this momentous moment of transitional tempest, we must expect at least a pro forma appearance by the ordinary run-of-the-mill ‘liberals,’ even if they barely fit the name, let alone the type. And so it is! More relating to these ‘traditional leftists,’ ha ha, will follow as we follow this telling with additional contextualization and commentary.
Rand Paul, for his part, is typecast as the representative of and representation for Bryan Firebaugh, all lean and ready to wrestle some cows without rustling a single saddle mount—strong and hard-working and honest, blah blah blah. Yet he’s most definitely not anyone’s ladle of liberality, as it were.
He and his dynamic duo of legislative cohorts, Senator Markey and Representative Khanna, speak forthrightly and fiercely in favor of speech. In the aftermath of the Court’s holding against TikTok, Senator Paul, that night, downloaded the app and encouraged TikTokers to resist, just as he intended to do. He tweeted all this too.
The Brief from this legislative ‘Three Musketeers’ of free expression mentions the treachery of American Government toward dissenters through the Espionage statutes of 1917 and thereafter. “Courts applying the Act held that, though ‘disapproval of war and the advocacy of peace are not crimes,’ such speech was unlawful when its effect was ‘to weaken patriotism’ and dampen recruitment efforts.”
The Brief then appeals to the Court’s ‘better angels,’ like those that supposedly guided decisionmaking during the 1950’s ‘Red Scares’ and the Vietnam war catastrophe. Unfortunately, if one looks past the Robel decision that the argument of Petitioners’ Amici Curaea cites here, for either the Alien Registration Act or the Subversive Activities Control Act that nearly snared Robels and got him fired, the way that United States officials applied the law swept up hundreds of ‘dirty commies’ and convicted most of them.
Two of several benchmark cases involved the entire executive of the American Communist Party—Dennis v. United States and Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board—actions that predictably ended up at the Supreme Court and elicited a strong affirmation of eviscerating free-speech so as to guarantee better battling the forces of ‘international communism.’
Amazingly enough, both holdings consummated their statement of matters with 6-2 majorities. Here’s a tiny sample of the High Court’s reasoning in Dennis and CPv.USA. In the earlier forum, Justice William O. Douglas’ dissent feels like a proposition parallel to TikTok’s contentions. “It would not be a crime under the Act to introduce these books to a class, though that would be teaching what the creed of violent overthrow of the Government is.
The Act, as construed, requires the element of intent—that those who teach the creed believe in it. The crime then depends not on what is taught but on who the teacher is. That is to make freedom of speech turn not on what is said, but on the intent with which it is'said. Once we start down that road we enter territory dangerous to the liberties of every citizen.” Even the ‘dissenter’ here, in other words, is fine with outlawing ‘communist propagandizing.’
The later case is much more direct and universal in its approbation of the complete removal of ‘world-commie-conspiracy’ speech option. “In the Party's argument an effort is made to cast the entire controversy over Communism into the form of an ideological or philosophical difference of opinion.
It is true that there are such differences of opinion in respect to Communism, and controversy does rage in ideological and philosophical circles. But the problem before us deals with government, and government has intensely practical as well as theoretical aspects. Its aspects may be freely discussed in philosophical dissertations, but in the field of action a government must be realistic and factual.
The right to free expression ceases at the point where it leads to harm to the Government. The epigram which has become classic as a designation of that point is ‘clear and present danger.’ When danger to government is clear and present, the right of unrestricted speech gives way as do the other basic rights of liberty and life.”
The Court goes on to say, “The basic theory of Communism (involves) the domination of one world power with all its assets by the Communists, … the declared intentions of its leaders in respect to the remainder of the world, … reflected in the recitations in this statute and, moreover, … historic facts which cannot be disputed. We cannot at the present time treat the program and policies of the world Communist movement as a dialectic debate.”
Upcoming Big Tent Review articulations will continue to expose and criticize this altogether authoritative squashing of socialist and Bolshevik stances and such. Anticommunism, in the event, lies at the central beating heart of the ‘officially accepted American way,’ so to say. This means that, at least as rational conjecture, TikTok v. United States reveals more of the same bigotry, presumption, and elevation of the protection of property and profit to the realm of sacred duty.
Still, Khanna, Markey, and Paul close their missive with a potent ‘appeal to reason.’ “Even if preventing covert manipulation of content rather than rebalancing viewpoints on TikTok were the true motivation for the Act, that interest could not justify a ban that operates as a sweeping prior restraint on speech that the Chinese government might try to manipulate. The ban evokes the English licensing laws that the Founders sought to relegate to a bygone era.” Indeed. In this fashion do Libertarian and liberal sensibilities join forces, as noted above, an expected aspect of this litigation.
Media moguls, on the other hand, are rarer than volunteers for euthanasia, though they do seem to follow a definite arc of favoring familial fiscal futures, so to speak. In some sense, they all do dandy work; they’d have to be idiots not to, with their endowed ability to participate. The Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University, Free Press, and PEN American Center are heavy hitters.
They offer cogent and dispositively persuasive points as regards any intellectually honest belief in Freedom of Speech & Assembly. They start, “While the technology of social media is relatively new, official efforts to restrict Americans from accessing ideas, information, and media from abroad are unfortunately not. This Court’s analysis of the Act should be informed by that history, as well as by the experiences of other societies that have restricted their citizens’ access to speech in analogous ways.”
The four-part argument is seamless, unless, unless, unless, oh yeah, unless ‘there are commies involved.’ Thus the ‘Protecting Americans…Act’ again comes to the fore. “(T)he bill’s eventual lead sponsor, Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Mike Gallagher, published an article calling for a ban on TikTok, which he characterized as ‘digital fentanyl’ through which the CCP can ‘push its propaganda’… .
Two days after introducing the bill in March 2024, Chairman Gallagher noted ‘privacy’ and ‘espionage’ concerns regarding TikTok, but made clear that the ‘most important’ reason for a ban was the possibility that ‘young Americans are getting all their news from Tik[T]ok.’
This BTR installment has already quoted from ACLU’s Appeals Court Amicus Brief for Petitioner. In array with many other stalwart ‘defenders of civil liberties’—the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center For Democracy & Technology, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Progressive Policy Institute, Fight For the Future, and Public Knowledge—these ‘civil libertarians’ launched their last pleadings.
The precis of the final organization on the list is noteworthy. “Public Knowledge is a nonprofit organization that promotes freedom of expression, an open internet, and access to affordable communications tools and creative works. The organization works at the intersection of copyright, telecommunications, and internet law, with a focus on promoting policies that serve the public interest and the interests of internet users.” Clearly, the SOP story abrogates these purposes.
The appeal starts with a catalog of the real damage to real people from actions of the sort that the USG is promulgating. Most damning in this plaintiff-support argument is the third point. “The Court of Appeals repeatedly accepted the government’s say-so where the First Amendment requires proof, and it assumed that Congress weighed less restrictive alternatives even in the absence of evidence that it actually did so. The court at times cited ‘national security’ as a justification for deferring to the government’s hypothetical claims or mere assertions.”
Citing New York Times v. United States, the popularly titled Pentagon Papers case, these pleadings for plaintiffs noted that “the government’s burden to justify an infringement on First Amendment rights is the same in the national security context as in any other. ... In fact, the judiciary has an especially critical role to play in ensuring that the government meets its burden when the government invokes national security.” As a matter of theory, only, one might counter, at least lacking a mass movement to make a ‘higher appeal.’
Perhaps at its root, the TikTok case and decision pose a question to residents, and especially patriotic believers, here in the ‘belly of the beast’ in the ‘home of the free and land of the brave. Will we stand up on our own behalf to assert the right to communicate freely, or will we ‘sit down, shut up, and do as we’re told?’
The majority in Dennis v. United States wrote as if they were projecting forward to ‘Red Chinese’ meddling that ‘true American patriots’ would have to forestall somehow or other. “But there is underlying validity in the distinction between advocacy and the interchange of ideas, and we do not discard a useful tool because it may be misused.
That such a distinction could be used unreasonably by those in power against hostile or unorthodox views does not negate the fact that it may be used reasonably against an organization wielding the power of the centrally controlled international Communist movement. The object of the conspiracy before us is so clear that the chance of error in saying that the defendants conspired to advocate rather than to express ideas is slight.
(Even the dissent) quite properly points out that the conspiracy before us is not a conspiracy to overthrow the Government. But it would be equally wrong to treat it as a seminar in political theory.” Dirty Chinese Reds? That’s what’s at issue now? Extinguishing TikTok adds up to ‘reasonable use?’
Because inquiring minds ought to want an answer, BTR will be following up the start-up explainer about the TikTok lawsuit and attendant advocacy of free expression. In a similar vein, then, a word, to the wise, should suffice.
Popular Information & the Question of Mass Collective Suicide
Wrapping our puny putative mental machinery around the idea that our lives and acts make up social reality is hard to accomplish. It all so often appears to settle on us like a fog, so that resisting, and in so doing conceiving of clear, socially placid skies, seems a little fanciful if not altogether bizarre.
The mandates might almost seem mellifluous. ‘Sit down, shut up, do as you’re told.’ The litany of such orders can feel unrelenting. Antic TikTok videos are conceivable of both terrifying and hilarious chanting marchers who all intone in Baroque tones, ‘Sit Down, Shut Up, Do As You’re Told,’ ad nauseum, ad infinitum, as if no question is even possible to address to Dickens’ ironic Tale of Two Cities pronouncement, before the guillotines go into high gear.
“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 forever.” And this is what the high-and-mighty imperial plutocrats and their potentate politicians think of their position, that it ‘is as it was, will be, forever and ever amen.’
That change is a-coming is the truth. Any other view invites cataclysm, all the while absurd pretention about ‘being the best’ and ‘standing for freedom’ provide cover for mass murder in the name of plunder, propagandized oppression in place of dialog, and every sort of theft and depredation imaginable so as to promote the inevitably false ideologies of supremacy and its attendant ‘profit-at-all-costs’ point of view.
John Oliver—bless his coopted-yet-critical heart—acknowledges just a ‘possible hint of xenophobia’ in Senator Tom Cotton’s interrogation of TikTok’s Singaporean Chief Executive Officer. OMGoddess it is hilarious, but the real issue isn’t ethnic tension, not if one is real. The nubs of the deal comes down to ideology and political economy.
Anticommunism is a bend-over-backwards molding force in establishment American politics, as the sequence from Oliver’s show proves, yet the incisively insistent-on-hints-of-reality comedian and commentator also gives some credence to theories, along with presenting irrefutable facts, about competitive or market-share forces congruent with this litigation and its legislative precursors. In fact, the ha-ha maestro proposes that we accept and believe that dirty Chinese commies intend to harm the American people and their ‘way of life.’
No matter how ‘balanced’ someone of Oliver’s genius can manage to manifest a merry mediation’s ministrations, so to speak, regardless of a liberal assertion that we can accept—or at minimum just ignore—anticommunist and chauvinist justifications for dire, warlike acts, the ‘tale of the tape’ in relation to the TikTok ban is obvious in its irrefutable upshot. America’s governmental hammering will bring war, both with our own erstwhile citizens—half of whom are TT regulars—and with powerful nations and peoples who bear us no ill will but refuse to lessen their own pursuits just because we assure them that our imperial imprimature is unstoppable.
As far as further oppression of Americans goes, BTR hates the very whisper of the possibility. Still, we will almost certainly arrive at our intended destination, a la Auschwitz, step by step and as we all too richly deserve for being ‘passive Summer patriots’ only, in the voice of Tom Paine. We need only find a way to embody solidarity to rule on our own behalf, yet a movement to ‘fight for TikTok’ seems unlikely, at best.
However, eventually, baiting the Russian bear or belling the Chinese Tiger means that conflicts will explode that could easily climax in thermonuclear war. At that point, quite likely, everyone dies, and—as grotesque as the statement sounds—‘instant annihilation will seem the most enviable sort of end.’
As usual, or anyway as is often the protocol, a piece of Driftwood Message Art states this contention’s catastrophic concatenations quite clearly. The title is apt, in relation to TikTok defenders’ needs and deeds. “Asking ‘Why?’” is the title at hand.
"In Asking 'Why Does Rampant Fakery So Festoon 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 That Propagates All the News Tsunamis, Avowedly Accurate & Reliable Information, That Monopolized Media Insist We Swallow Without Inquiry."
Some Initial Thoughts About Follow-Up
This court battle may or may not administer to some actual social dispute between human beings who are foreign to each other according to standard procedural operations, yet this alienation cannot be biologically or historically essential. Believing that people on the Korean Peninsula—or in the city of Beijing, or across the wide expanses of the Russian Federation or along the coasts or through the mountains of Iran—have needs naturally opposed to the required necessities of North Americans is at best laughably absurd. Despite this all adding up to a ‘social media fight,’ the contest has no real social component.
Today’s first look gives a broad and general overview for the most part. For the most part, readers will have seen the official steps and outcomes. They will have read and pondered different party’s and their supporters’ arguments. They will also have gotten acquainted with the regular usages of the app that people have undertaken. A handful of political and economic aspects of the dispute have been under review in preliminary and tentative fashion.
Without doubt, conspiratorial thoughts must accompany any confrontation with the potentially probative presence of these down-to-earth elements of the struggle that appears, on the surface, to be about freedoms and rights to speak and think and such. As always, one can only approach such theorizing skeptically.
Then again, BTR is far from lonely in pondering such dire potential. After all, this evocative search garnered 5,560,000 links: <tiktok facebook competition OR competitors threat OR "market share">.
Facebook and X have a lot to lose. Disputing that is like disputing that money has served as a useful human innovation. Does that mean that the interests of huge companies such as these determine the conflicts of society and, largely, the outcomes of those contrary connections?
On its face the answer must be, ‘No, not necessarily.’ However, one must countenance very clearly indeed that a lack of investigation—in legal parlance, discovery—about such inquiry equates with very plausible inferences that the alleged conspiratorial components are factually accurate, even if well-hidden and meticulously avoided by ‘journalists’ and other functionaries of monopolized mediation.
Erotic Snippets—(continued)…
As things begin, more often than not, so they continue. Even pregnant with their first son, she plotted their course according to a deep knowing. The pulsing power of her womanly wiles was at least equal to her slave-mate’s muscular martial prowess, his dexterous mastery of even the most meticulous hand-and-eye-coordinated outcome, his sweet, manly, explosive essence notwithstanding.
So she told herself anyway. To say that Herakles was not an ordinary slave merely makes a meek mention of bizarre, grotesque circumstances. She laughed to recall their first frolic at home. Her eyes widened as she remembered that Prissy—her father’s niece and O’s second cousin—had been there too, as directed, ‘always to watch.’ They both liked that.
Priscilla had predicted all of it too. She had that gift, much as it wracked O’s nerves. She gasped a little at that note, which had lain asleep in her mind, as she recollected the other.
How she liked to be picked up, yes indeed, to straddle a man like she might a donkey or an oxen, only facing him, as she ground her hips into his prodding prying male maelstrom of pointed protrusion, fully impaled and yet freely enjoying the experience. Such as this was unfolding in her memory now, many moons hence and less than two seasons from her first childbirth, by fated foretelling of this bondsman’s babe.
Even more telling from her foggily casting her thoughts back in time, she had rediscovered both how much she enjoyed watching, and—perhaps most especially—being seen in the thralls of ecstasy. Prissy had described it to her afterward, after her not too eagerly willing handmaid had taken her own time milking moaning merriment from this ‘new slave’ of theirs.
Omphale had ‘lowered herself,’ quite quickly, to inquire of this Herakles creature. While Prissy sat atop his face and O played with his cock between lips nearly as astute as those in her pudenda, she asked him between flicks of her tongue on his tenderest flesh. “Tell me then,” she began, again swallowing his prancing priapus, “how exactly does a man of your talents…?”
She let the question dangle as she brushed his groin with her ample breasts while Priscilla started her shrieking completion. The future Queen was gleeful in her greedy gathering of pleasure and knowing. But she was not selfish; she overflowed with generosity similarly as her loins flooded the floor as her friendly cousin continued to climax.
Still, she wanted to know. And in time he spoke; bit by bit, he abided her curiosity with his oh-so-heroic yarn. She had him wear her own flowing garb and donned his leonine pelt; she took his stout club and brandished it, handing off her needlework, which, to her delighted surprise, he wielded like a talented maiden eager at her pending nuptials.
The story came out much more from sweet performance than from dire threat; she traduced his talking with the seductive suctions that induced his succored speech, so to say. Ha ha. It was far too ugly a tale to be false.
In the event, some evil had unhinged his fury, and a friend of his had suffered the final insult in the offing. His enslavement was part of his punishment, which brought in its train other afflictions—separation from his beloved, O learned, though his heart made room for her persistent presence too; not overpowering anyone or any creature save at a master’s insistence, and many more mandates that he would 'misremember' as she stoked his fiery readiness.
“Or mistress’ directive?” she inquired during one such lesson early in their learning curves together.
Thus she learned how expansive her mandatory ministrations might be. Not only did she own this male beast, but she had also won his heart—or at least the love that lives in a man’s loins’ most liminal libations. Furthermore, he was ingenious and crafty, more creative mentally than with sword and shield, and a stoutly studded stallion atop all else that he had going in his flavorful favor.
And so she had hired his talents to her friends. Lydian handicrafts advanced in marching order with maidenly, matronly, and ah-so-maternal satisfaction. In the second season of her gestating a truly herculean little prince, she gathered round her, in no small part as a consequence of Herakles’ gifts that she rented out, that female coterie who were to smooth and sustain the six decades of her rule.
Herakles eventually even disclosed the various labors that he had undertaken to atone for an earlier bout of rage, in which he had inadvertently murdered the mother of his children, while butchering the three of them as well. He was bloodier than childbirth, no doubt of that. The lion’s pelt was from the famed Nemean creature itself.
The first two killer-cat monsters that he trapped during her birthing process were juveniles. She figured quite correctly that Lydian lionesses would seem little compared to the mythical monster that he had overmastered, and so she had dispatched him on his mission.
The sidekick male of the pride, which she had doomed by designating it as his duty to destroy, almost made its escape, but Herakles was not merely a lethal warrior. He could run all day and sprint like a well-grazed antelope with wolves on its tail.
The final lion, however, was nearly his undoing, for, as quick as her dear, enslaved lover was, this maned male was faster than any other felonious feline in Lydia, or the rest of Asia’s Western expanses, as limitless as they might be. No one had warned him of this fact, however, and perhaps he was ever-so-slightly stunned-with-love from the paces through which she had put him before he embarked on his mission.
“The thought of you saved me.” Bloodied and battered, clawed and clipped, he stood on their threshold with the speedy lion’s head in his grasp, clots of his life still dripping on the tiles. She nearly erupted at the sight, barely restraining the fire with which she would engulf him, the kisses with she would ladle luscious healing libations between his hungering lips and onto his parched tongue.
No matter what, first things first, she needed to clean him. His scent aroused her, but the stench of a mighty lion’s slaughter lair, yet another abattoir—though very different from the one where she bought and paid for her handsome factotum—was like a whiff of nausea while sipping savory delicious stew. She wouldn’t have such offensive odors assaulting her ever famished nose.
Besides, her first successful venture with her “stout virgins,” who were all ardent lovers in spite of their group’s chaste description, had been to begin soap-making near the gates of the city that became Troy. She and her acolytes found traders eager for their wares in part because of the memorable scenes that they’d played in showing its powers.
Not all Lydians celebrated Omphale’s triumphs, though most certainly did. Among the naysayers was the elder brother who would soon enough have become King, but for this clever malefactor’s own particular mother’s lack of royal lineage. He hoped to take by force what he could not gain by law; but for O’s restraint, her herculean lover-slave would have torn him to bloody shreds.
In the midst of conceiving Herakles’ second boyish fetus, while battling her sibling for primacy, her own dear father died and left her as a Queen of less than five and twenty years. The half-brother with whom she had so ferociously quarreled may have had his hand in sending their paternal unit to the afterlife; she was never sure, but it would explain his sudden viciousness and arrogance, however ineffectual he might prove in enforcing such fiery emotional ferocity.
Most of her family, in any case, very much favored her rule. Herakles was only a small part of their support, but his was, nonetheless, a potent devotion indeed.
“Your curves are shapelier than the Meander,” Omphale’s naughtiest uncle was wont to say. Herakles offered alternate verses. “Your sinuous twisting makes Meander's meandering seem more like a hanging string than a mighty river; your flow is sweeter than the goddess' spring from which she has sprung us all as proof of our worshiping your flanks as equal with the riverine banks that bring us muddy soil's sustenance.”
The river’s banks, so often inundated, seemed hopeless for anything other than flax or the grains that preferred to drown to begin their grassy lives. Thus, when Omphale instructed him to declaim his lines from Meander's bluffs—and to a throng of her admirers no less—he both blushed with shame and colored with pride.
Bread and mud were the river’s gifts, though the might water’s origins were clearly mountainous in their cascading rush toward the sea. For most of Lydia’s populace, even the poets, the great watershed was no more momentous than any other of the Earth-goddess’ granted grace.
Herakles, however, saw more of value than anyone before or after; his vision was sweeping enough to view the red clay as more than nuisance or filth or fertile fodder. His greatest invention, a kind of wheel that captured the river’s power to grind corn and pump its own waters forth as directed, he did not completely perfect, but his vision eventuated its eventual fulfillment.
Even this he ascribed to Omphale, whose flanks and flowing form he had just finished fondling to one of her fieriest fulminations. “You are the River nymph made flesh,” he cried, calling for the the ever attentive Priscilla and Madeleine to bring the materials with which he built the bones of Lydia’s initial water-powered milling machination.
Little did he expect, when he sat humbly atop a slave-market platform, that his abilities might soon include ‘womanly skills’ in which his arts would surpass all the female practitioners in his mistress’ thrall. Yet stranger things could be. His life’s adoring emanations, incoming and outgoing at once, attested to this.
Many times, as a matter of course, given his prodigious stamina and natural talents as a pleasing fellow, Omphale had orchestrated their lying together with one or two of her handmaids, whether Priscilla or otherwise uniformly intrigued and enthralled to participate in such antics. On one occasion, when she had received confirmation of her half-brother’s taking to the Aegean in a grain-filled trireme that was sailing to Egypt, she organized a much more extensive festival of frolic.
This night that they all sang his praises, though, that night when other men for the first time joined the orgiastic festivities, Herakles showed himself to be not only supremely generous in sharing but even more than slightly inclined to favor masculine attentions for himself. Its overnight sensation lasted an entire phase of Luna’s light, a quarter-moon’s passing, before everyone was spent.
Given the substantial periods of time during which men would have only each other for company—save for the occasional camp follower or local woman who fancied lots of boys, or had no choice save to face such odds and then try to survive the aftermath—that men, of martial status in particular, might look favorably on a feral fondness for other fellows should surprise only those so obtuse as to believe that our sexual desires are a matter of choice alone. Circumstances that differ demand diverse responses.
Her uncle and, most especially, her Father took warmaking as irreversibly the Lydian way, and they both hearkened to regular opportunities to share wine and their flesh with other similarly situated—or younger, in any case—males of the species. Yet her father had joined the gods.
In the world where she ruled so capably, this would not be Omphale’s way. She in some sense gestated and gave birth to the first ‘peace-through-strength’ campaign, except that it was, perhaps, more a ‘strength-through-peace’ social effort instead.
Her older cousin, her oldest maternal Uncle’s first daughter, had just returned across the Hellespont from near Athens. Apparently, a somewhat hilarious upheaval had just unfolded there, at one and the same time, somehow, a situation in which women, those of high station especially, would only frolic with each other until their ‘overlording masters’ agreed to stop warring on each other.
Many, many, many years ago, more than Omphale could readily remember, O’s cousin’s family had moved their sheep and themselves across the great waters, so, in name if not in blood, they were now Athenians. The lusty strain is the human strain, no doubt, but its presence in the line that included our heroine was especially pronounced and well-developed.
As they were conversing during the first hours of the visit, while candles burned, mead flowed freely, and Herakles lay between them even more naked than they were—since the two women, against the cold, wore woolen socks from the family herds. So ensconced and graciously ingratiated, Lysistrata told of her sly schemes to induce Athenian menfolk to be more peaceable.
“They must have some, or they slay themselves from grief!” Lysistrata laughed, even as she admitted that some of her comeradas proved even needier than their menfolk.
“I have an easier way,” Omphale laughed to her elder relative, at that point. “It is the Lydian way; it is my way,” she laughed as she placed her loins over Herakles’ mouth. “Our way here is to find a way to keep bargaining, keep looking for ways to get along with each other.”
As she gyrated in preparation of a drenching release, she continued. “Of course, when men such as these are for sale and will serve, having things work out is much less bedeviling.”
Lys, who had mounted Herakles’ throbbing penile protuberance when her cousin took his face, intermixed giggles with her gasping glee. “Yes, yes, yes!” she affirmed. “Yes!!!”
All this makes but a single morsel of this mighty meandering tale, a story in which a woman’s herculean strength liberated her people and simultaneously empowered yet further the strongest man who ever lived. Theirs was not till-death-do-us-part, but it was so-life-will-yield-bounteous blessings.
Their first year’s festivities unfolded, therefore, with one babe at her breast and another, against the wisdom of many old wives, growing in her womb. She knew for certain that they would not die next to each other; for one thing, Priscilla had foreseen as much. Whatever the case may be, their trysting played a huge part in the warmth and fecundity of her time as Queen.
In the end, Omphale’s rule proved to be the longest and most prosperous of the realms of the ancient world, a largely prehistoric place where memories lengthened without access to any written documentation. Many more chapters of their years together—today’s narration only encompasses a single ambit of Sun and Earth—lie ahead.
They would yet prove themselves worthy kin of Apollo and Demeter. She knew, from Priscilla’s prognostications and her own powerful intuition, that she had more sons to bear this molten monster of a man whom she had made her own in spite of the mere purchase that had begun their merry marriage of heart and soul.
A piece of art from far in the future speaks elliptically of their perfect union and thereby punctuates our own exit from this stage of the story. “With the Merest Modicum of Middling Luck, Along With Mete Due Diligence, I Might Manage to Worm My Way Into Your Heart, &, With Your Own Fair Measure of Fortune & Pluck, You Could Succeed in Snaking Your Way Deeply Into My heart As Well.”
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
To recapitulate, then, the paper's presentation did take place on a given day, in a given year, as a work product for a definite purpose, in relation to the milieu in which he operated and the world in which Shell Oil, his employer, was doing business. Certainly, we can contextualize Hubbert's output. A picture emerges of a scientist who believes in the numbers he crunches; who has identified with a new technology; who has converged his work with that of at least some colleagues and of at least significant elements of the corporation that has employed his services and advanced his career for fifteen years.
AND A BRIEF GLOSS ABOUT THE SURROUNDING WORLD
As we have seen, facts and events surrounding Hubbert personally and professionally dovetailed with his mounting the podium, after he hung up on Shell Oil's V.P. for marketing, to deliver "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels." With absolute certainty, we can also state that all of these incidentals fit together in some explicable way with the wider patterns and history happening around Hubbert on that stage in San Antonio, even if this essay's manner of fitting them together is inherently hypothetical.
Of course, the world at large was percolating in tandem with the personal and professional events that had led Hubbert to speak out that March day fifty four years ago in exactly the fashion that he did. Just at the time of Hubbert's presentation, for example, the age of atomic power was set to begin(www.ne.doe.gov/pdfFiles/History.pdf), with the opening of the first commercial nuclear power station at Shippingsport, Pennsylvania(http://www.asme.org/Communities/History/Landmarks/Shippingport_Nuclear_Power.cfm).
Simultaneously, the Cold War had come to its first rolling boil, so that an exchange of H-bombs(http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline) did not seem out of the question. Tom Lehrer was still doing math, rather than singing, "So long Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb, so don't wait up for me(INTERLINK)." "Dr. Strangelove" did not yet elicit a shivery thrill of fear and delight up the spines of hundreds of millions of initiates to Stanley Kubrik's ingenious mythos (http://www.nd.edu/~dlindley/handouts/strangelovenotes.html) about nuclear annihilation.
But such eventualities were close at hand, as the emanations of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto (INTERLINK)and the first of 58 Pugwash Conferences indicate. And, Shell Oil had ongoing interests, to put the point mildly, in these matters of nuclear fission and defense contracts (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/VincentPerrieGuinn.htm) and other planetary affairs of finance, policy, and science.
Just prior to Hubbert's paper, Shell and other oil giants had found themselves embroiled in a fifteen year long, possibly benchmark, but little-known litigation often referred to simply as "the Oil Cartel Case(http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Multinational-Corporations-The-oil-cartel-case.html)." A few years following Hubbert's pro-nuclear speech (that now 'defines' peak oil), a non-actionable form of the alleged oil cartel came into being, in the form of OPEC, a circumstance that almost certainly oil companies helped to orchestrate(www.relooney.info/0_New_7624.pdf).
Not that much longer down the road, the 1970's economic nightmare, almost as severe and intractable (www.fordschool.umich.edu/rsie/workingpapers/Papers451.../r452.pdf ) on its face as what we are going through now, burst like a noisome boil. And oil seemed to ooze like pus from the superating sore. Marion King Hubbert's thoughts were akin to a salve, or a purgative, that media and culture and scientific and policy leaders all applied to the suffering patient's social, political, and economic lesions(http://www.oilcrisis.com/hubbert/).
Furthermore, this under-studied but important law suit and the economic downturn of the 1970's were inseparable from a key policy proposition about which all upper-level oil company executives agreed. No one in the upper reaches of this most rambunctious and lucrative aspect of capital disagreed that the most pernicious threat to profit and survival was overabundance and the attendant price competition that transpired among producers(http://www.gregpalast.com/why-palast-is-wrong-and-why-the-oil-companies-dont-want-you-to-know-it/).
As well, the centrality of Middle East affairs, for both business and political entities (http://www.mees.com/postedarticles/finance/iraq/a46n09b01.htm), coincides perfectly with Hubbert's talk. The war that heated the Cold War to the point of phase change was five months away(http://books.google.com/books?id=DJVK9RfMEJAC&dq=1956+middle+east+war&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=xWSGTL6SK8H98AbMleBs&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&sqi=2&ved=0CFIQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q&f=false). Old imperial powers, France and Britain, conflicted with newly liberated colonies, while Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union incisively or manipulatively advanced their own agendas, all under the overweening gaze of 'Seven Sisters,' who controlled the flow of oil.
The Shah of Iran, a notorious butcher of his own people, had just seized power in Iran, thanks (http://www.examiner.com/la-county-nonpartisan-in-los-angeles/us-overthrew-iran-s-democracy-1953-1979-helped-iraq-invade-1980-1988-now-us-lies-for-more-war) to CIA and British Petroleum and MI5 assistance. Relations with Saudis, Iraq, and Iran, so critical to oil company and United States strategy for the better part of a century(http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a7.html), certainly remained central when Hubbert debuted on the cosmic stage.
Through the 1979 immolation of the U.S. sinecure in Tehran (http://www.examiner.com/la-county-nonpartisan-in-los-angeles/us-overthrew-iran-s-democracy-1953-1979-helped-iraq-invade-1980-1988-now-us-lies-for-more-war) and the ministrations creating our very own Saddamic Frankenstein (http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/we-finally-got-our-frankenstein-and-he-was-in-a-spider-hole-by-michael-moore) to the evisceration of that monster's pretensions in Kuwait and the Oil-for-food imbroglio (http://www.slate.com/id/2111195/) that followed, we have arrived at the present pass--post 9/11, as a promised 'century long war' reaches the end of its first decade (http://www.ips-dc.org/books/power_trip_us_unilateralism_and_global_strategy_after_september_11).
Establishing this overview, of the background and circumstances in which Hubbert's thirty three year long inauguration of Peak Oil took place and in which the expansion of and emphasis on Peak Oil has occurred since his death in 1989, ought to cause readers to pause. Peak Oil means nothing except in relation to this complicated fabric.
I do not pretend, in anything like a satisfyingly fulfilling fashion, to articulate that full relational meaning here, although the political economy of the oil industry and the imperial actions of the United States have to become a part of understanding Peak Oil, in my estimation. My hope is to return to this topic, building on what is demonstrable here, in order to develop this richer interweaving of the origins of Peak Oil with an assessment of its social, political, and historical import.
In any event, what we have learned today does set a table for considering Peak Oil in a preliminary manner, at once more personal and more telling about the social construction of knowledge and science. Marion Hubbert may have exemplified a "Boy Named Sue" phenomenon. He started life with a girlish name that he suppressed, to become one tough hombre from a harsh land of Comanche raids and constant drought, in which the discovery of gushers was a way up and out().
He came to a view of the world that saw a fundamental contradiction between the standards of everyday business and any possibility of a sustainable human presence. As a geologist, he helped feed the blip upwards of human progress that he believed also spelled our doom, if continued.
His surroundings--nuclear weapons and the attendant problems of waste that also applied to an incipient industry both in competition with and allied to his own masters--implicitly spurred his analysis. His superiors and other oil industry leaders explicitly encouraged the development of his ideas, at the same time that his expression of them caused a sh**storm, politically, economically, and socially, among the same ranks from which his supporters came.
In the aftermath of this speech, both in his final eight years at Shell and in the hurly-burly academic, policy, and science scenes that took him past his retirement, Hubbert met the vicious Jekyll-and-Hyde face of scientism and opportunistic public relations ideology. He fought against such dishonesty and superficiality until he died, in the process reevaluating his early enthusiasm for nuclear energy and coming firmly to support renewable alternatives.
Certain beliefs--about growth and competition and human fate, characterized at least the second half of his long life. His perspectives on many things shifted, but not his paradigm about how our lives expressed something real. He spoke candidly about this at the end of a long series of interviews about his life and times.
He evinced (), he said, "a simple rational view, discerned from the organisms in the earth and their impressions. As a famous physiologist from Chicago, Antone J. Carson, head of the physiology department, used to shock his audiences with, 'One of these days, I'm going to be a long time dead."
M. King Hubbert's legacy ultimately comes down to what he was doing. At some level, we can make a strong case that an answer to that query is possible. As a human being, he was responding, with as much integrity as anyone might muster, to the human prospect. As an actor, he was playing a leading role in an intricate, improvisational performance on one of life's main stages, the energy prescenium so to say.
On the other hand, a larger interpretation, though I have my inclinations as to how to depict this man and the 'Peak Oil' trope that accompanies his memory, is not yet mete to dole out. As an expression of broader historical forces, we can wait until the hoped-for next installment to say, though we do know that his contribution as an individual integrated, unless we adopt a completely nihilist view, with some overall pattern of commerce and empire and conflict.
In considering the contemporary Peak Oil clashes so heatedly and noisily surging all about us, we might consider sage words that Hubbert scripted for his original paper, following all of the math and statistical models inevitably flawed and surreal. Many of the man's words speak to us, if we take the care to note them, instead of responding to the blather and bother of those who have decidedly different, and possibly less beneficent, agendas to push forward.
"(A)s an essential part of our analysis, we can assume with complete assurance that the industrial exploitation of the fossil fuels will consist in the progressive exhaustion of an initially fixed supply to which there will be no significant additions during the period of our interest." (www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf)
PEAK OIL TROPE #1
A more definitive investigation of the subject matter of the next two sections will await the follow-up to this article. However, a precis of the truly vast literature of Peak Oil discussion, which runs the gamut from foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe through all manner of 'moderate' and slickly corporate iterations to the 'run-for-the-hills' set whom we met recently in my review (INTERLINK) of Michael Rupert's film "Collapse."
As a search, the phrase yields just under a million and a half hits. At least on the first ten pages, a substantial majority of these--over 75%--are one form or other of a warning. 'Human existence is on the line.' 'Much more than oil company profits are at stake.' The argumentation generally includes something like M. King Hubbert's beloved Gaussian charts(), showing the strong correlation between human population increase and fossil fuel usage.
The upshot is obvious, though it ranges in intensity from 'Run-now- or-die' to 'Act-now-or -suffer.' One might view these portals and blogs and information nodes and networks as falling into a couple of categories.
*One sort proffers a pointed call to action, if not to panic. Bloggers galore(http://solveclimate.com/blog/), former colleagues of Hubbert(http://www.hubbertpeak.com/), and opportunistic marketers of products and services to help the benighted cope and thrive(http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/), are typical of this sort, along with Michael Ruppert's (http://www.collapsenet.com) latest offering.
*Another kind models the NGO or academic approach, marshaling great minds and authoritative thinkers to address pending crises related to Peak Oil. The Post Carbon Institute(http://www.postcarbon.org/) is one such enterprise, as are The Oil Drum(http://www.theoildrum.com/), which features Dave Summers in its archives and all sorts of nerdy sorts, and the Oil Depletion Analysis Center(http://www.odac-info.org/), an English NGO that the conspiracy theorists and more populist sites below love to hate.
At one extreme, the calls to action from such aggregations of passion and purpose are millennial. "Dear Reader," intones one such(http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/), "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists, physicists, bankers, and investors in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global 'Peak Oil.'"
Others offer more sober assessments that JustMeans readers and all cautious cousins of the planet ought to consider carefully. Robert Rapier uncovered a classified (http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2010/09/02/leaked-study-peak-oil-warns-severe-global-energy-crisis/) German military report so far only available in German. "This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank ... . shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, that warned of the risks posed by peak oil. ...This report describes potential outcomes that require planning and preparation. The scenarios outlined in the paper are exactly the kinds of drivers that lead me to advocate for greater regional energy self-sufficiency. The report clearly lays out just how vulnerable Europe will be because of its continuing dependence upon Russia for both oil and gas, and notes that Russia will be in a very strong political bargaining position as a result."
As well, such meeting places involve critique and outreach to disbelievers. Richard Heinberg seeks to refute Greg Palast's dismissive attitude in a long post (http://energybulletin.net/node/17914) at the Post Carbon Institute, which he leads. His main message is engaging, however. "But I would greatly prefer it if you would simply acknowledge that thousands of Peak Oil activists around the world are in fact devoting themselves to a worthy cause. Most of them are working hard to wean themselves and their local communities from oil dependency(http://energybulletin.net/node/17914)."
Finally, all manner of media--from newspapers(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all) to broadcast(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7997882/) to web-based(http://cryptogon.com/) to grassroots(http://vtpeakoil.net/), produce journalistic or documentary materials that start from or incorporate Peak Oil thinking. Again, a more extensive consideration of all such products and processes is forthcoming in these JustMeans reports, Lord willing and the creek don't rise.
Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—(continued)…
Is such a multilingual, revolutionary flowering likely. Most people would laugh at the notion. Then again, necessity can make mandatory the seemingly impossible, so the merely implausible must have some place in progressive thought.
The role of cultural outpourings in favor of liberation and justice in one place means that the likelihood of outsiders’ willingness to crush these developments would rise inasmuch as the interlopers lacked the ability to understand the words and stories and songs that were promoting positive transformation. A quick search of the literature finds no expert concurrence that an idea of exactly this sort would contribute to progress.
Related notions, primarily concerning the operation of academia or the ability to follow literary narratives, do find a place in the recent canon. In any event, intuitively and rationally, the events of the 1970’s in Chile argue in favor of insisting that more Americans learn Spanish and more Chileans and other Latin Americans understand and speak English.
No matter what else one believes, anyway, the fact that two disparate bodies of knowledge—both of which contain millions of pages or more of documentation and evidence about the realities and beliefs which surround Santiago in 1973—exist, one Spanish and one English, militates in favor of a radical bilingualism. Nothing else can ever make sense, till the day arrives when the tower-of-Babel itself rises no more.
A FOURTH DEDUCTION
In promoting this deconstruction of Babel, as it were, we would also accede to the utter toxicity of secrecy. Varied pages from history’s annals reveal a few of the cases that evidence such a contention.
One of the ways that the Bolsheviks totally infuriated their erstwhile ‘allies’ against the Kaiser was in bringing to light the many hidden agendas that World War One’s elite combatants had shared. Such revelations undermined the sense of a ‘gentleman’s club’ that aristocrats and plutocrats alike wanted to be able to operate without any requisite naming of names or public scrutiny. Comprehensive histories of so-called intelligence highlight that such presumption always serves as a prominent perquisite of ruling classes, especially in the modern era.
In the current context, multiple non-governmental organizations express their primary objectives in terms of bringing ‘government into the sunshine.’ The entire concept of a ‘Freedom of Information Act’ is that democracy necessitates this sort of access to what is happening.
James Madison states the issue most clearly, though he was writing nearly two hundred years ago. “A popular government without popular knowledge or the means of acquiring it is but a prelude to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.”
In relation to Chile’s past half century, multiple threads portray the hideous results that attend fatuous belief in keeping secrets. The problem is that, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “everybody knows that the dice were loaded.” Citizens are the only parties whom duplicity keeps in the dark, so that regular people fail to realize that the allegations against their leaders are true, that the ‘people who hate us’ have good cause to do so, and so on and so forth.
In the final analysis, a widely reviewed monograph—generally extolled by those who favor democracy over secret arrangements for terroristic control, and hated by so-called ‘conservatives’—exhibits the chilling results of governing-by-secret-agendas. The volume’s title and subtitle summarize this reasoning incisively: Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since World War Two.
Augusto Pinochet himself also indicates the way that secrecy and corruption, hypocrisy and horror, fit as seamlessly as a hand in a custom-made glove. Pinochet—whose murderous ways are now so thoroughly documented that trying to make excuses for the recently deceased homicidal butcher only makes his defenders appear to support killing-in-support of profiteering—enriched himself at every turn of his bloody career.
That this kind of allegation is not allegorical but completely concrete becomes clear when one looks at Pinochet himself. A 2005 “US Senate investigation of terrorist financing discovered that Pinochet had opened and closed at least 128 bank accounts at Riggs Bank and other US financial institutions in an apparent money-laundering operation.
It seems that Pinochet had illegally obtained a $28m fortune during his period as a dictator of Chile.” Moreover, as noted in the section above on the dictator’s rule, this self-dealing was part of the payoff that he received for absolutely destroying the Chilean economy in service to profit maximization.
Without much effort, an investigator could make hay in whatever sunshine might be possible to cast on these dark fields for hundreds of thousands of pages or more. After all, we live in the age that has begun with the initiation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the revelation of Daniel Ellsberg, to mention just a pair of instances at the beginning of the last fifty years, and that has ended, literally over the past few instants, in whatever new leak or cover-up or attempt to hide an agenda makes its way to the headlines of the moment.
The conclusion that democratic citizens could make about such events and patterns ought to be possible to state in a way that ordinary folks would nod agreement. “Since the primary ‘secrets’ in these cases are those that regular people don’t know, and since the harms of such lying hypocrisy almost always affect ordinary people at the same time that they enrich the cognoscenti, we should do away with such governance altogether.”
At the very least, we ought to be debating such propositions. Instead, an absolute presumption of secrecy’s necessity continues. Meanwhile, the entire human race could die in a war that such mendacity makes, ultimately, inevitable.
Without the least doubt, another view entirely might also make sense. We could accede that rich fascist thugs will always practice dark arts of subterfuge and immolation, and that popular resistance to these killers must also therefore deploy the most murderous techniques and hidden methods in order to depose the Nazis and their minions.
If this kind of view appears less than salubrious, one might ponder what we should expect under the circumstances that prevail. In such a context—in which lies and half-truths in favor of the wealthy rule every policy and statute—citizens, at least arguably, have little choice but to revolt. A n absolute ban on secrecy and a complete affirmation of transparency are the only operational decisions that make any sense in the alternative.
In such a case, Victor Jara might have lived as long as his murderers: Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, for instance. Otherwise, simple demands of self-defense turn the artist’s and the humanitarian’s thoughts toward dark and dire deeds indeed.
A FIFTH DEDUCTION
Having attained a vantage which, in most cases, allows our contextualization of reality based on the potential for as complete a compilation of knowledge as is possible, we should praise the power of enculturation and artistic expression and foster persistence in expressing such efforts at storytelling and articulation and depiction. And here, more or less precisely opposite the situation in regard to the third conclusion bubbles up. Instead of finding little or nothing in scholarly and authoritative sources about this point, the flood of data and hypothesis would require a lifetime of endeavor to delve in even a rudimentary way.
For example, one might consider the following search. Storytelling OR narrative OR "literary invention" importance OR critical OR utility, gathers a hundred and thirty-six million citations, more or less. One might refer to last issue’s first BTR foray into literary critique and perspective.
If we are to make sense of the horrors that seem ubiquitous in recent and historical memory, then stories about these matters arguably could serve humanity better than another tale about superheroes or another film about returning from heaven to console one’s lonely spouse. Victor Jara’s and Pablo Neruda’s continued place of honor in Chilean society speaks well of a nation with plenty of problems still and all kinds of potential for backsliding.
How about the good old U.S.A.? Different views are undoubtedly possible in responding to such an inquiry. Whatever the upshot of such conversations ended up being, however, that the U.S. needs a powerfully grassroots-driven storytelling revival—one that looks fearlessly at such subjects as the ‘original 9/11’—ought to be obvious.
A SIXTH DEDUCTION
Finally, in this fashion of generally examining what seems reasonable to conclude, we might pronounce as critical the belief that atonement and accountability, so long as the actors in a struggle still live, can never arrive too late in a process. This is another conclusion that one might spend centuries perfecting.
However, the intuitive moral and ethical voice that drives this author’s thinking makes this assertion feel like a no-brainer. Does a world of victimization and revenge serve us well? If not, then coming up with processes that forestall this cycle of decimation and mass-collective suicide would seem to make sense.
Anyhow, simply searching for data about these things is instructive. Googling "mass murder" OR genocide OR "crimes against humanity" atonement OR "truth and reconciliation" for example elicits slightly more than 400,000 hits. Merely adding one word to this string, the name of a country—“mass murder" OR genocide OR "crimes against humanity" atonement OR "truth and reconciliation" chile—increases the useable results to almost 2,700,000.
Can one infer a clear interest in such processing of human pain from this? Not only is such a deduction ineluctable, but one might also add that the more specific the desire to make amends, the more likely we are to find a tremendous sense of need, a longing to achieve closure, to find a sense of justice, to reach a place where acknowledgment, if not compensation, is available in some shape, form, or fashion.
In addition to these specific effects of a broader and deeper understanding of Victor Jara and Chile, this essay definitely follows a rubric in which three components lie at the core of this sort of work. Every article that has a Spindoctor cast will contain each of these elements, although somewhat expanded and slightly transformed in Big Tent terminology and practice.
First is a deep reporting of what history has to tell us. The past so permeates the present that delving into the records and evidences that yesterday left will always make sense. Therefore, though many readers might object that they ‘just want the facts’ of the here and now—that, in essence, they ‘just want to know the way to Portland’—essays like this one proffer all manner of unexpected and often unexplicated pieces of the long ago, with some thoughts about how their impact continues this very second, and, assuming that people survive, on into the distant future as well.
The second is an attempt always to show the political economic—legal, military, technological, and other related inputs—realm in which any social eventuality unfolds. Thus, the C.I.A. background forms a part of this narrative. The industrial and trade elements of whatever one labels the United States—liberator or empire—also make appearances. The legal aspects of Chile’s and U.S. courts come to the fore at different points as well. One might easily continue.
Third comes a weaving together of the social relations that underlie occurrences—matters of class and caste and color and gender and plenty in addition besides. Certainly, Victor Jara’s sharecropper-parents in juxtaposition to his comrade Salvador’s upper-crust upbringing present definite instances of this sort of examination. The Weavers of Revolution characters in relation to their bosses and the military cadres who oversaw them after 1973 show another kind of this type of effort. And one could mention many other instances.
Coming to these conclusions and activating the general approach that this investigation suggests, obviously enough, will not likely yield instant popularity or overnight success. This kind of work goes against the grain in more ways than a writer would want to list.
Nevertheless, adhering to such systematic rules, and in doing so being able to assert some fairly fundamental pointers to complete this work, does lead to the potential to learn how and why things have evolved as they have. This is true whether one examines the Ukraine, Chile, or any other place or aspect of social life and human political and economic development.
Such conclusions as result in all these matters can be risky in all sorts of ways. Whether one focuses on bringing to light what those in charge would just as soon leave in the dark or invests some hopeful alternative with meaning that elites have little or no interest in bringing to fruition, one takes chances that could be dire in doing this work. Still, inasmuch as inquiring minds do want to know, one may legitimately wonder, “what exactly would be a viable different option?”
AFTERWORD
In a similar vein, everthing in Victor Jara’s statements and actions showed that he understood quite fully what he was risking. But the alternative so sickened him that he kept confronting the potential that he would end up ‘in the belly of the beast,’ so to say.
In 1969, he wrote, “US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of the so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear.
Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song.’”
No magic formula prohibits a resurgence of the homicidal fury in pursuit of power and lucre that characterized the crimes against humanity that took place as Salvador Allende tried to run a democratic government. This potential persistence of demonic depredation remains true despite the lethal effects this would clearly be likely to have on hemispheric comity or even on human survival. In essence, we can collectively stumble toward mass collective suicide, or we can countenance democratic insistence that people share with each other.
The present situation in Cuba remains the most obvious example of this point. The wealthiest and most powerful empire in history has seen fit for fifty-four years to threaten and bully an island nation that, when it revolted against and displaced venal and vicious U.S. puppets, was one of the poorest places on Earth, with the lowest life expectancy in the hemisphere.
The plots to assassinate Fidel Castro are beyond dispute. Government documents admit as much in various forums. Had he dealt with these attacks in the same liberal manner as typified Salvador Allende’s dealings, he very probably would have ended up as the man whom he admired in Chile did: shot in the back, executed for defending democratic transformation.
Meanwhile, Cuba has advanced to be one of the more resilient economies in the region, and its citizens live nearly as long as—and arguably much more fully than—do U.S. residents. Yet, the ‘blockade’ against Communism remains in effect. And since this text appeared fifteen years back, Cuba has continued to struggle and also to suffer.
Fidel Castro, imprisoned in 1953 for seeking to overthrow the plutocratic puppet and killer, Fulgencio Batista, delivered a renowned presentation to the court when he faced twenty-six years behind bars—the title was “History Will Absolve Me.” Therein, he laid out an argument that was analogous to the economic program of Salvador Allende.
“The nation's future… cannot continue to depend on the selfish interests of a dozen big businessmen nor on the cold calculations of profits that ten or twelve magnates draw up in their air-conditioned offices. The country cannot continue begging on its knees for miracles from a few golden calves (which) cannot perform miracles of any kind. The problems of the Republic can be solved only if we (reject) ‘(s)tatesmen’ like Carlos Saladrigas, whose statesmanship consists of preserving the status quo and mouthing phrases like 'absolute freedom of enterprise,' 'guarantees to investment capital,' and 'law of supply and demand,'… .
Those ministers can chat away in a Fifth Avenue mansion until not even the dust of the bones of those whose problems require immediate solution remains. …A revolutionary government backed by the people and with the respect of the nation, after cleansing the different institutions of all venal and corrupt officials, would proceed immediately to the country's industrialization, mobilizing all inactive capital, currently estimated at about 1.5 billion pesos, through the National Bank and the Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank, and submitting this mammoth task to experts and men of absolute competence totally removed from all political machines for study, direction, planning, and realization.”
This process of expropriation and transformation actually happened in Cuba. A nation of fewer than twenty million people, mobilized and overwhelmingly supportive of defending a revolutionary process, has thus far withstood the massed power and fanatical hatred of the world’s premier imperial machine. The lesson that capital learned was stark: under no conditions would they tolerate “another Cuba.”
In fact, much of the violence against human development in the hemisphere—whether under the guise of ‘neighborliness’ or ‘allying for progress’—stems directly from the loathing and fear that capitalist elites still feel toward Cuban socialism. If recent events in Venezuela, Argentina, Honduras, and Mexico—to name just a few obvious cases—provide any indication, truly barbarous upheaval persists as a preferred means for advancing U.S. corporate and imperial agendas.
Moreover, as the reader will have noticed already, a significant—arguably central—aspect of the U.S. decision to foment mayhem and death in Chile, flowed directly from Allende’s and his collaborators’ seeking deeper ties with Cuba. Victor Jara revered both Che and Fidel. Cuban poetry and performance followed Jara’s template, often enough, of “revolutionary music.”
One purpose—and some would argue the primary objective—of the brutal example that Pinochet’s thugs made of Salvador and Victor and thousands of others was to destroy without mercy any hope of emulation of what Cuba had won.
Nevertheless, both in Chile and throughout the region, cultural dynamism reflects the human capacity for resistance and solidarity. Cuba just recently held a conference to increase the reach of local television networks and production, attended by over sixty nations. Rock, rap, and other ‘folk’ music acts from Mexico to Chile and Argentina have railed against imperial preponderance and powerfully asserted human rights and elimination of neo-colonial patterns of dominance.
Film festivals that advance social democratic messaging are occurring more than occasionally in the various localities of Latin America. Literary awards proudly assert the ‘magic’ of Latino fiction and poetry, even as such Chilean authors as Isabel Allende, the niece of the butchered President, articulate a vision much more in tune with social justice than with the dictates of profiteering that ITT and PepsiCo and their financial and corporate cohorts promulgate now as much as they did in 1973.
An interlocutor like Ms. Allende, however, for all her hope in regard to a socially decent human prospect, does not shrink from describing the hideous horror that imperial imprimatur has yielded. “The Cuban Revolution was enough; no other socialist project would be tolerated, even if it was the result of a democratic election.
On September 11, 1973, a military coup ended a century of democratic tradition in Chile and started the long reign of General Augusto Pinochet. Similar coups followed in other countries, and soon half the continent's population was living in terror. This was a strategy designed in Washington and imposed upon the Latin American people by the economic and political forces of the right.
In every instance the military acted as mercenaries (for) the privileged groups in power. Repression was organized on a large scale; torture, concentration camps, censorship, imprisonment without trial, and summary executions became common practices. Thousands of people ‘disappeared,’ masses of exiles and refugees left their countries running for their lives.”
Her uncle, from beyond the grave, also encourages thoughtful participants in social affairs to learn, to speak up, and to act on their own behalf. He consciously presented his plans for Chilean socialism, which the Chilean people chose, and which the United States confronted with monstrous murder.
“Now the question is, ‘Who is going to use whom?’ …(T)he answer (obviously) is the proletariat. If it wasn't so I wouldn't be here. I am working for Socialism and through Socialism.
As for the bourgeois state, at the present moment, we are seeking to overcome it, to overthrow it.… Our objective is total, scientific, Marxist socialism. We already had success in creating a democratic, national government that is revolutionary and popular. That is how socialism begins, not with decrees.”
Bruce Springsteen, for the fortieth anniversary of the original, Chilean, 9/11 catastrophe—in which the attacking ‘terrorists’ are easy to identify and find, though they often remain at large, abroad, in the United States and elsewhere—went to Santiago to honor his fallen friend, Victor Jara. Before a rapt audience that interrupted his Spanish commemoration with frequent applause, he sang Jara’s anthem, “Manifesto.”
Springsteen, struggling to maintain his composure and to remember the Spanish which he had memorized, spoke simply. “’In 1988 we played for Amnesty International in Mendoza, Argentina, but Chile was in our hearts. We met many families of desaparecidos, who had pictures of their loved ones. It was a moment that stays with me forever. A political musician, Victor Jara, remains a great inspiration. It's a gift to be here that I receive with humility.’”
Jara’s words, however, provide the most fitting exit from our assessment of this magnificent human being, who held up the hands from which his killers had just severed his fingers and raised his voice in song. Of course, he knew what that would yield, but he did not falter.
On September 7th, 1973, an interviewer asked him what ‘love’ meant. His response is iconic: “Love of my home, my wife and my children./ Love for the earth that helps me live./ Love for education and of work./
Love of others who work for the common good./ Love of justice as the instrument that provides equilibrium for human dignity./ Love of peace in order to enjoy one's life./ Love of freedom, but not the freedom acquired at the expense of others’ freedom, but rather the freedom of all./
Love of freedom to live and exist, for the existence of my children, in my home, in my town, my city, among neighboring people./ Love for freedom in the environment in which we are required to forge our destiny./ Love of freedom without yokes: nor ours nor foreign.”
EPILOGUE
Quo Vadis, baby? Cuba can barely keep its electrical grip operational; Gaza will probably never come back as a viable community of Palestinians. Ukraine will not ‘defeat’ Russia, and the human cost of losing is at best grotesque; Syria is now a member of the United Nations under the aegis of CIA-trained barbaric terrorist butchers, people who behead teenagers for video audiences, often as former agents of the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.’