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, now FOUR-times-annually magazine. This is the twenty-fifth incarnation, thus persisting with Big Tent Review’s second annual outpouring, and it’s as meaty as ever.
“Jim’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.” I just dropped that in, from the SubStack Buttons feature.
However, BTR has evolved. Starting with #25, I’ll be posting once every three 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 four times yearly instead of triple that. Ha ha.
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 their inescapable 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 methods 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 June fifteenth, the first of many that will appear quarterly, 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: Actually Navigating—Not Just Watching—Our Ever More Interesting Lives
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Calling on the Goddess? Epiphanies, Engagement, Thought Food
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XXV
3. Wood Words Essays—Cosmic Hum, Universal Yum!
4. Empowered Political Forays—Unheralded Work, Now ‘Heralded:’ #2
5. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—Sam & Red, Chapter Four
6. Old Stories & New—”Lu-Lu, Or, ‘Don’t You!’”
7. Nerdy Nuggets—’Health’s’ Political Economy & the American Medical Association
8. Communication & Human Survival—More on TikTok:
9. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—From ‘Peak Oil’ to Climate Change—Initial Assessments
10. Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—Cultural Foundations of Uranium Dreams
11. Adding Things Up, Step By Step—Panama & Greenland, Via Havana & Santiago
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Secret Agents in Our Own Designs, on Our Own Behalf
This Just In—David Harvey represents a rare combination of wisdom and wit, insight and instigation, reflection and hearkening. He is what one might call a grassroots public intellectual at the same that he very aptly fills the shoes of an established Marxist researcher and academic. He examines social contradictions in terms of economic crises, and vice versa.
He writes, for instance, of an impetus to “invest in asset values instead of production,” a socioeconomic approach that guarantees bubbles that “create all kind of profound difficulties…such as vast and growing social inequality.” More and more we are entering a simulacrum of a ‘rentier economy,’ full of Ubers to drive us to our appointments with euthenasiaists, as it were. Ha ha!
Whatever the case may be, one may elect to cut the Gordian Knot of the Existential Dilemma by investing everything with a self-created—if not altogether self-selected, since, as Marx pointed out, we don’t select our original circumstances—construct of meaning, with which we go about the errors and trials, the triumphs and tribulations, of our daily rounds.
In a large sense of things, this is one key measure of this whole Big Tent Review shtick. I’d go nuts—or, ha ha, maybe I am crazy and I’d ‘go sane’—if I wasn’t at least trying to make sense of things. After all, as I always asked my students, ‘Does everything that exists together make perfect sense?’
Universally, almost all of them responded, often with a sardonic roll of their eyes, ‘No! Duh.’
But of course it does all add up, and perfectly at that. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, ha ha.
The miracle of grace that marks my grinning passage through all that is means that, more or less every day, I have the privilege to fulfill my First Existential Duty, the creation and sharing of beautiful ideas, and live thereby in a state of divine delight, the Second such personal promise, salubriously intertwined with my love and partner in all manner of schemes and dreams and daily beams of inquiry and insight, even simultaneously as we join together, constantly, to serve to shape and direct a Third Existential Duty, being in service to commodious community and communion and convivial collective collaboration. Ha ha.
For us, part of that service is in relation to my 101 year old mother-in-law, to whom I often serve a bourbon-and-ginger-ale mix before dinner. I asked her recently if a specific version of this confection was to her liking. “You mean,” she offered with a sly grin, “can I swaller it?”
Being more than a hundred years old must be at least a bit addling—so many memories, reflections, and protocols to keep straight and about which one may prove likely to ponder and worry. Almost indubitably, this proximity to a state of at least mild confusion will become more likely if everything falls apart, as when six inches of snow and ice cause a power outage, and my love and I realize the physical burden and fiscal balloon that result from generating our own electricity, thanks to the technical elegance and finely-tuned engineering of a new Generac, whole-house device.
A few days under this ‘prepper’ rubric clarifies how ‘turning things on and off’ at the flip of a switch or the touch of a button is precious and complicated, despite the instantaneous simplicity of the acts—turning a microwave knob—that initiate whatever is the specific operation in question. Suddenly, when we’d burned completely through our daily allotment of propane and a good bit more, the fireplace became much more than a largely decorative and aesthetic social ritual.
Electrical capacity’s return from Appalachian Power, soon enough, miraculously enough and yet mundanely enough, returned us to these days of modern times. Again, in the thinking of Dr. Pangloss, the ‘best of all possible worlds’ must ever remain the one that we now inhabit.
Yet we must also recollect Candide’s final response to his theretofore tutor and ideological master. ‘Yes, but we must tend our own gardens!’ And here we stand, ready again to grow something glorious out of as often as not grotesque seeming circumstances, ha ha.
My favorite quip quite frequently amounts to one version or another of this placard, so to speak. “Without Platitude, One Might Well Mandate the Only Attitude For Which We All Show the Merest Latitude Is One of the Most Awestruck & Profound Gratitude.” As a matter of course, it once graced a piece of Driftwood Message Art.
The mangled-leg deer that comes to visit would likely agree wholeheartedly, despite an injury that may only prove surviveable if the lower rear right, below the knee, becomes vestigial and falls off. Ernestine suggested that we call a ‘wildlife vet,’ something that I had considered without knowing where or how to turn for assistance of that sort.
Its enthusiastic eating—even driving other four-legged kin away to protect its untrammeled access—of the deer-corn I scatter proves this. It’s a thankful creature.
All kinds of animals have been showing up, in reality, in my dreams, in my stories, all unbidden and unexpected, yet palpably some sort of flesh-and-blood exemplar of something. The Black Bear that I hit, and the youngster bears that have robbed my love’s bird feeder; the deer that I hit and destroyed, the three deer that entertain Ernestine; the deer that I feed—including the wounded one; the huge hawk that marked my pathway the first time that I visited my love at her mom’s, the massive carrion bird, or possibly eagle that glided above me as I exited through the ice, wondering if I’d plunge to my doom; the murders of crows of late, the ravens in my dreams.
I can’t help myself. I feel as if Mother Nature or something like the Goddess is trying to make some point. I’m not certain what that instructional notion might be, but I’m remaining open to a listening attitude.
My true love’s childhood friend, with whom she attended elementary school in Richmond and with whom she has maintained a six-and-a-half decade friendship, has lost her mate; such is all our fate obviously, yet I can’t help but me moved and also just grateful for the magic and merriment and mysterious allure of my own life and times. Always, under such circumstances, I am likely to call to mind Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s novel, Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, which is a summative proffer of advice, in my estimate of how matters stand, ha ha.
Then again, I often enough feel that I will never bridge the gap between being adult instead of a-dolt, ha ha. Inevitably, in the event, my sense of well-being suffers, of having a sense of aplomb, come what may. After all, I can think of so many things that I’ve royally failed to accomplish, so much that I just can’t really figure out or articulate, that a ‘why-bother’ fatalism seems inescapable.
Nonetheless, lingering in such a state of mind thankfully proves untenable, even if for some perverse reason, one like me might want to tarry in the doldrums for reasons always more psychic than practical. It’s like a joke, right?
‘You can have two choices. Number one is to live with graceful aplomb, joy, and purpose. Number two is to live in despairing misery. And your choice is obvious: at least misery makes for interesting stories and reasons to complain.’ Ha ha. Always, merely marveling at things as they evolve seems sidereal to me, a practical necessity in which I am an ongoing and ever-seeking practitioner.
Thus, Practice in and of itself is crucial to any joyful attempt to navigate life’s shoals and deep currents. Here I am again, then, seeking to instantiate the ambit of my Three Existential Duties.
A piece of Driftwood Message Art arose from its squirreled-away stash with an apt idea in this regard. “Art’s Stab at & Thrust Toward Understanding & Truth” is its nerdy title.
“Whether Stabbing at Higher Understanding Or Thrusting Like a Knife Out of Darkness to Sever Falsity’s All-Too-Frequent Sole Centrality, Art’s Arcing Aspiration, If It Is to Be Other Than Fatuous Folly, Or Arcane Non-Sequitur, Must Center Around Showing Participants in Culture’s Shadowy Charades Some Aspect of Themselves & Their World That They Might Otherwise Overlook, Misinterpret, Or Deny.”
Now that an actual ‘free human being,’ mas o menos, occupies the seat at the helm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, those of us who recognize the idiocies and lies of calling sadness a disease might well have our ‘day in court.’ Whatever the case may be, Bobby has already called out the gangsters in charge of dispensing Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor poisons as medicine, putting them and the mediated thugs who are their flacks on notice that a different ruling rubric may well be at hand.
In the event, a new Big Tent Review story appears today, the basis for my favorite completed screenplay, Lu-Lu, with the same short-fiction title here in #25. Given the realities of youthful existence these days, in which ‘attention’ is, quite inanely at best, supposedly in ‘deficit,’ and in which adults are constantly in what ends up being an often sinister diagnostic and prescriptive mode, the tale ought to be required reading for everyone who resides in our part of North America.
This yarn’s premise revolves around psychosocial interventions on which people regularly embark in order to conform—or seek to induce their offspring to follow the rules—to completely fatuous beliefs about their bodies, their psychological wellness, and their libidinal foundations, so to speak. One of my more spiritual postings on X dove right in to these matters.
“I wrote along congruent lines in my last Big Tent Review issue. Imagining the viability and vitality of archetypes like the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine, or of Mother Goddess and Life-Force Energy, one has no choice, if one wants to be rational, but to conclude that while social equality for men and women is a sine qua non of long-term survival, asserting biological equivalence of male and female is false.
At the same time, the biological differences do not determine the social protocols that permit equality to persist. That is a political matter.
Time out of mind, rulers have divided men from women so as to control both. One might think of Lysistrata, a primary aspect of Big Tent's recent #23. In these crazed times, how could matters be otherwise than to have women plotting against men and very much vice versa?
People will turn on each other until they unite and turn against their 'masters and betters.' In order to stand together, however, people must have access to honest discourse and thinking and reporting. James Madison's advice is apt, when he pointed out that "[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both.”
Mass Collective Suicide makes more sense to profiteers than does any version of Mass Ecstatic Epiphany. Widespread ignorance is critical, therefore, to the Captains of Capital, who can only thereby dragoon people into sitting down, shutting up, and doing as they're told.
To accomplish this may prove especially plausible when those who ‘lead the way’ orchestrate dosing children, often their own, with grim, brain-control drugs. In a sense, then, the story above, “Lu-Lu, Or, ‘Don’t!’” which exemplifies just such a premise, serves as a documentary yarn about the precursors to these insane and decidedly insalubrious protocols-for-Pharma-profit-maximization.
Much more materialistically and biochemically, I have also Tweeted of late about the connection between antidepressants and Mass Collective Suicide that is likely showing up now in England, so that calls to give nukes to Ukraine mirror a death wish very much congruent with deeply ingrained habits like taking ‘medicines’ that lead us to fancy destroying ourselves and everyone else as well.
I even responded to none other than Thomas Sowell, who also sees the troubling trend of having an eighth of the population gobbling down these grotesque Thanatopic Chemicals. One must imagine that the erstwhile conservative recognizes that the standard operational approaches hinge inevitably on error, opportunism, and self-deception.
“Americans have repeated so many lies, so much manure, for so many decades and so much profit to the high and mighty, purveying fatuous falsehoods to others and themselves, that they are more easily manipulated than any other people on Earth. The idea that sadness is a disease, curable by a magic poison that destroys the libido and otherwise messes up the psyche, is madness of such bleeding idiocy that one can hardly believe it.
But then: oh yeah—they also believe JFK's death resulted from a single gunmen; that we wanted to 'help the Vietnamese;' that anticommunism is 'fighting for freedom;' that 9/11 happened because of whack-jobs with box-cutters. Blah blah blah.
Perhaps most importantly, sex-shame so infects this culture that prudery inflects the lives of at least a big plurality of the populace. Guess what? That guarantees epic and ongoing melancholy and despair.
Guess what else? The family physician is happy to give a referral to ubiquitous sources of free samples for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, which are among the most self-destructive and habit-forming chemicals here in Gaia's green gardens.
It's perverse, really, a trap of insidious, invidious viciousness, but one that makes a lot of shareholders happy. One gets hooked on substances that make erotic satisfaction, on which happiness depends among healthy adults, almost absolutely impossible, most especially for young men.
Except, oh yeah, Viagra. Unfortunately, heavy use of this little pill ruins a fellow's function permanently, so back on the path to permanent pathos we go. Well, at least we have antidepressants to tide us over till medical-induced Parkinson's or suicides do us in. Ha ha.”
The confirmation hearings for Gabbard and Kennedy, as well, illuminate this looming sense of the ‘popular possibility,’ the ‘upstart, upsurge Alternative For America’(AfA, ha ha). Despite the horror of Bernie and Elizabeth—crashing, burning, writhing liberal monstrosities—RFK in particular has super-high levels of real popularity. Spontaneous outbursts of applause occurred, in the U.S. Senate, under the most grotesque conditions of Woke attack, for Bobby as he took the hostile questions completely apart, again and again and again.
Moreover, a promised comeuppance has come to pass. Both Tulsi’s and Bobby’s confirmations mustered the ‘Advice & Consent’ of the U.S. Senate. Putin and Trump have conversed and agreed to terminate NATO’s, and the imperious neoconservative Hegemon’s, egregious Ukrainian-Coup-Project; apparently! Only as an apparition may this prove to be so.
For prodigious insight into this case, one may readily turn to all sorts of sources. Pepe Escobar and Glenn Greenwald and Scott Ritter and Jeffrey Sachs spring to mind as the Equinox draws nigh. I had not heard about Glenn Diesen before this year, at least, so far as I recollect. A Norwegian political scientist and quiet genius, he both reveals hidden documents and other sources of knowledge and finds just the people to interview who have the most incisive and comprehensive insights into factors that underlie the here and now.
His exchange with the Swiss super-sleuth and diplomacy-expert extraordinaire, Jacques Baud, brings forward all the background regarding Ukraine—in regard to Maidan, Minsk, the role of the RAND Corporation in regard to Russia, and much more—underlying information to induce actual understanding instead of speculation and other forms of inference and guesswork.
Here are just a few samples of this soft-spoken operatives legerdemain. Like a clever trial lawyer, he takes apart an apparently innocuous video in which French President Macron his salivating at having a ‘Minsk Agreement’ ready to go. He shows—using the document itself—that the actual parties to the terms are Lugansk and Donetsk, and other ‘separatist’ Ukrainians, on the one hand—who demand autonomy and respect—and Kiev on the other, which is intractable in its RAND-inspired ‘undermining’ sallies against Moscow.
When an interrogator presses Macron about the parts of Ukraine that want protection, he finally erupts. “We don’t care about the separatists!” This means, irrefutably, either that he hasn’t read the agreement or that he had no intention that France honor its provisions. In either case, no doubt, he was merely acting, like Smedley Butler, as a ‘gangster for capitalism.’
As to the RAND corporation both it and its ideological overseers at the Council on Foreign Relations will soon enough, as I live and breathe, attain their own place in BTR’s growing annals. Colonel Baud highlights Extending Russia, a 2019 playbook for disrupting or even demolishing the Russian Federation. Here is the merest tidbit of such ‘thinking’ on the part of America’s preeminent, purported ThinkTank.
“Facilitating the flow of both financial and human capital from Russia to the West could not only weaken the current regime by depriving it of resources but also bolster the economies of the United States and its allies at the same time.” For his part, the Swiss interlocutor and modest diplomatic denizen points out that “six measures to weaken Russia” are part of RAND’s Report, and one of them is to encourage sneaky Ukrainian incursions. ‘All Ukraine, All the Time’ is still operative, apparently.
An ancillary case, geographically and in terms of the interests at odds with each other, just now reveals that Slovakian orthopedics M.D. Peter Koplar is preparing to release a ‘bombshell report.’ He believes that he can provide plausibly dispositive research evidence that MRNA
I’ve already written and thought about it all too. I’m not sure what to make of this fellow. He’s tagged as a ‘conspiracy nutjob’ and slavering national supremacist, but I’d wager from the look of him that these accusations are at best quite partial in their distortion of matters. In any event, I am certain of my own conclusions as in I’d bet double or nothing, baby, double or nothing, that the ‘established story’ about COVID is manure at best, and that Jeffey Sachs and many others speak accurately about the entire pandemic-industrial-protocols, so to say, in ways more or less congruent with Dr. Koplar.
Here’s what I’ve already posted. “What Peter Kotlar is disclosing is criminal activity. This explains his defensive posturing, though monopoly media's and corporate flacks' attacks likely contribute to his bulldog mien.
Specifically, he is demonstrating vast fraud, possibly the largest such con-job in history, on the one hand, so as to 'boost sales' of 'biomedical product lines.' On the other hand, this fellow asserts https://hickeyj.substack.com/i/144260128/wood-words-essayscovids-concatenated-creation that he can demonstrate a basic case for conspiracy: to commit said fraud and, in so doing, inflict grievous injury and death on untold millions of people. I'd be nervous too in his shoes.
Then again, we should all be concerned, inasmuch as all-too-many people have swallowed the ludicrously stupid and vicious COVID-Pandemic whopper 'hook line and sinker, as it were. So saying, a piece of Driftwood Message Art may have something useful to impart.
“Knowledge & Human Interest” is its title. For the inherent reference in the title, one can check out the similarly-named book by Juergen Habermas, not an ‘easy read’ but worth the struggle if one really is interested in our ‘interests,’ ha ha.
“Truly, Knowledge Should Compel Human Interest—What ‘Irony,’ Such a Safe Term, As Understated As It Is Nonconfrontational, That Every Agenda That Society’s Self-Selected Rulers Ratify Goes So Completely Against the Grain of Grassroots Comprehension of Matters-At-Hand That These Entitled, ‘Expert’ ‘Leaders’ Inevitably Elect to Protect Their Power By Fostering General Cluelessness, Close to Complete Ignorance About Key Aspects of Our World’s Inner Workings."
Whatever the case may be, Patricia Nye's “COVID, Tango, and the Lagom” way remains a go-to resource for citizens seeking insight and possible remedies to what the fascist opportunists and profiteers who have promulgated these crimes-against-humanity have done to us.”
In such a context, a totally unexpected and completely irrefutable aspect of the present passage is the broadening of imperial projection via proposed neo-colonial ‘acquisitions’ and a beggar-all approach to commercial concatenation with games of Tariff Poker that are no-limit and no-exit simultaneously. That this cannot solve the fundamentaal contradictions that King Capital faces is patently and humorously obvious.
Moreover, ‘smart-money players’ are betting on a collapse in the relatively near term, way before, say, the next Presidential contest in the U.S.A. I’ve been predicting that too, ‘unless the bourgeois find some clever way out of the trap that they have set themselves,’ since 1971 or so, LOL!
However one chooses to phrase this, as things have panned out, a freefall in the equities market as the tenth of March came and went through the eleventh, with a five percent drop in value just ahead, turned into a rally as The Hill and other monopolized mediators announced a reversal of a very brief ‘ban’ on weapons and other means of ‘destroying Russia’ and any of its sympathizers hither and yon.
Again, the ‘racketeering influenced and corrupt organization’ operation in Kiev that remains under Brand Chaos control continues. It’s morphing, and out of the attendant complexity may emerge something more like ‘peace’ and less like gruesome slaughter, but that is far from certain, what with ‘10,000 British soldiers ready to deploy’ and celebrate the initiation of a new line of the Mass Collective Suicide Express.
In that regard, this little bit is reasonable to ponder. “The conclusion is inescapable. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics played a central role in saving, at minimum, a significant portion of humanity from Auschwitz conditions and worse.
People like Henry Ford and the multiple plutocrats and banksters and death merchants who financed the National Socialist German Workers Party's monstrous farce in all its death-worshipping horror plotted and prayed that a mobilized, fascist Germany would 'strategically defeat' Russia.
This connection with the here-and-now—in the attempt to dismember Russia via Ukraine in similar fashion as Hitler's hordes intended—brings up an apt question. How long are regular citizens going to put up with false and defamatory and self-destructive relations with the Russian Federation in order to salvage some semblance of imperialism's imprimatur?
Since King Capital daily dallies on the precipice of thermonuclear Mass Collective Suicide, this is a necessary inquiry to address if said citizens want to have much of a chance to thrive, or even survive.
In that context, an appeal to a new human ethos makes sense. Hence, perhaps the Ten New Commandments are worth a look.” The proposition, in any case, has repeatedly appeared on X, on my behalf, ha ha.
I’ve been promoting TNC shamelessly of late. I ask myself: ‘what can I do to promote reason and dialogue and survival instead of insanity and solipsism and extinction?’ And one answer is something like posting TNC, which, objectively would promote social revolution and human survival if it caught on. Such approaches have the limitations of every longshot.
From the social-media-promise to sociopolitical reality is a bit of leap, for instance and to say the least, but just hoping for such transformation feels more salubrious than worrying—moment by moment—about machinations of Mass Collective Suicide that appear proximate to the central purpose of plutocratic plundering profiteers. Well over three-quarters of U.S. optional spending every year goes to murder and its acolytes.
In this vein, I submitted a bit of commentary on an X thread in which Dugin and Alex Jones spoke in airy terms about ‘enemies’ at home and abroad. “Perhaps particularly when things seem to be going a bit better—less immediate apparent threat of Mass Collective Suicide and such—we ought especially to seek an as-exact-as-possible precision in our articulation of our understanding of what is happening.
Although I feel tremendous sympathy for Professor Dugin's loss of his daughter to barbaric imperial murder machinations and respect the dogged journalism of Alex Jones, the upshot of what they're saying is pretty vague, really.
Of course, Russia is not the enemy. Of course, the United States has unleashed barbarism on Ukraine. Of course, for one reason and another, the Russian Federation and the U.S.A. are ready to come to terms about the future of this decidedly mineral rich terrain.
I don't buy that the explanation for these decades of profitable plunder is satanism or lack of moral code, however. No sir. Murder and mayhem were both lucrative and planned, at once plutocratic and presumed.
Now, I understand. People are skeptical of narratives. Still, thinking about what has transpired as a story is natural and adaptive. So what do the facts and feelings on display here mean?
In some senses, the whole American Century idea is crazy. At absolute minimum, the last twelve decades—since 1905 in Kiev, till Zelensky's fate unfolds in either escape or assassination—have constituted a Russian Century and then some.
In that context, in fact, every imperious imperial assertion of impunity has occurred in reaction to the Russian tune. Now, quite plausibly, Russia's policies will win out. So what do we make of that?
As was the case for the Bolsheviks, whom many people despise and yet who won because a significant majority of the Russian people—right up to the liberation of Berlin in 1945—chose to follow them, Civil War may be preferable to Mass Collective Suicide. Then again, since the former could readily render the latter, perhaps—in tune with Professor Dugin's impassioned recognition of the truth of our oneness—we ought to seek ways to negotiate a way past our mutual enemies, whom so far I have been the only one to name—moneybags, corporate boards, 'captured' bureaucracies, blah blah blah.
Can we agree about that? If anyone or anything is the embodied enemy of all humanity, one can only imagine that such a designation would apply to the aforesaid operatives, who, when all is said and done, are actually ‘in charge’ of everything.
I mean, right? I mean, since, after all, they've orchestrated this butchery, this Brand Chaos Murder & Mayhem Machine? That would have to be the source of the problem, so to speak.
If not, what else? Inquiring minds would like to know.”
Of course, I'm open to the idea of spiritual transformation. To my way of thinking, the religious 'mainstream' has too long ignored the Goddess, but that's just me, perhaps.
In any event, one upshot of these inclinations on my part is recently promotion of the Ten New Commandments, which came to me in a true-life Moses moment. In a sense, all we need is the First: 'The Golden Rule Reigns Supreme.' From that, we can deduce all the rest.
Ukraine is once again ubiquitous, as my AUAtheT YouTube channel idea expresses at once ironically and tragically. All the absurdities and hypocrisy of American imperial imprimatur that William Appleman Williams delineates and critiques in Tragedy of American Diplomacy—about which, stay tuned below—show up in bright relief in Balkan politics today.
While the people of Greece and Serbia are initiating what could end up actually revolutionary transformation, for instance, the folks at Duran always make well-grounded presentations about Russia, without losing any of their grassrootsy imprimatur. Recently, Alex Christoforou, reporting from the heartlands of the Greek uprising, spoke of the hideous idiocy emanating from France in regard to Russia, hideous and idiotic anyhow for those disinclined to invite thermonuclear war.
Alex Mercouris laughs wryly in summing up. He mimics the Donald. “I’m speaking with Putin; my team is speaking with Zelensky,” who is, Mercouris almost weeps with mirth, switching to his own persona, “out, simply out” of any central loop in the whole situation, meaning that Washington ‘moves’ may end up being mundane or much worse. Mercouris reports from London and talks battles and ballistics and tactical realities.
If the American fighting machine could actually fight, war for the aim of ‘actual imperial victory’ would likely seem inevitable. Taxpayers pay enough to expect such ‘victorious actions,’ even as our primary practice looks more like lend-lease than the Battle of the Bulge. As noted in various previous BTR episodes, after all, U.S. Government fiscal disbursements are overwhelmingly part of some sort of death-wish administrative apparatus.
Military Keynesianism rules our roost, even if Elon hopes to make this process ‘more efficient.’ I Tweeted as much recently.
“Among its many 'accomplishments, '1947's National Security Act created the C.I.A., the N.S.A., and the National Military Establishment.
Two years later, amendments changed the N.M.E., which had itself replaced the honestly named War Department, to the now familiar and still utterly false Department of Defense.
So that's the first thing. The language that we agree to use is disgusting, at best. Brand Chaos' mass murder machine receives 'defense spending,' as if funding death machines and invading armies represents a sacred case of 'the right of self-defense.'
And yes, even on paper, the imperial plunderers atop the administration of cash-for-killing here spend more than the other 'major powers' combined. But that paper trail is inadequate.
In addition to the close-to-trillion that DoD receives outright, the Department of Hydrogen Bombs—whoops, excuse me, the Department of Energy—gets roughly half of its $52 billion annual outlay for purposes of one or another sort of Mass Collective Suicide modality.
Oh, yeah. Then there is the small matter of $325 billion for 'Veterans' Affairs.' That's a double-duh 'defense expenditure.'
One can find further billions that go to the Military-Industrial-Complex in one fashion and another. Can anyone say "Debt Service?"
Furthermore, while the total U.S. budget approaches $7 Trillion, only $1.75 Trillion is other than Social Security, interest on deficits, and other required disbursements, and thus discretionary.
Therefore, even most charitably, funding the Mass Murder & Mass Collective Suicide Express expends over seventy five percent of America's annual operational government expenditures. This military Keynesianism experiment has failed to deliver either prosperity or security.
What now? Inquiring minds ought to care about being part of the process of answering that question.”
I had been thinking about the wonderful idiom that makes Golden-Ruled-thinking out to be fantastical despite its salubrious necessity in support of survival and such. ‘I know where the bodies are buried,’ preferably with a bit of a mafioso lilt, apt for all manner of storytelling that I suck down, and apt for the unearthing of perfidy that I daily exhume from humanity’s many available archives, including my own library and blah blah blah.
In this vein, a chance encounter with “FICTION AND NONFICTION FROM NYRB CLASSICS” allured me with the title, Skeletons in the Closet. I’d never heard of the author, one Jean-Patrick Manchette, yet he and I share many commonalities, both in our thinking about how things actually operate and in our hopes for social improvement, empowerment, and still further blah blah blah.
This excerpt shows the author’s ‘hard-bitten’ side. He was a follower of Reds and radicals, supposedly, though what he shows here is mainly a casual familiarity with the fascist murder machine that lurked behind ‘French civility’ from the ‘30’s through the Algerian civil war and beyond.
“Two men march into the office. A white man, leather-jacketed, throws a glance at Butron and, deeming him inoffensive, turns to the tape recorder. It finishes rewinding, the tail of the tape whipping through the air. The white man stops the machine.
The other fellow, black, wearing a blue cap and Royal Navy jacket, stops in front of Butron and produces a Spanish Astra pistol with a silencer. Butron can no longer control his natural functions. He wets his trousers.
The black man fires, the bullet piercing Butron’s heart and exiting under his left shoulder blade, leaving a hole the size of a tomato. His heart has exploded. His head slams against the wall and bounces forward, finally landing on the carpet.
He continues to urinate for three or four seconds after he dies. ...Later, (after the coroner confirms the ‘suicide’), (t)he killers shake hands with the police.”
Along altogether similar noir-&-gangster lines, my goddess-lover-sweetheart and I have been entertaining the entry of a ‘new-favorite-series’ into our regular evening routine. Peaky Blinders epitomizes perhaps that combination of realistic history and gangsterland adventure, murderous fury and carnal passion, that, to put matters mildly, is hard to resist.
One of the series’ strengths was its depiction of how political operatives and operations often involve playing-both-ends-against-the-middle ploys and double-crosses and extortionate racketeering. In England at the time, the gang question in and around Birmingham and Liverpool and the Midlands intersected with the potential for a Red Revolution that might mimic 1917 in Russia.
BTR has written extensively about the Communist victory in Russia, the Russian defeat of the Nazis, and such. The same period of upheaval in the U.S. has received a mention in passing hither and yon. We’ve developed little—other than brief mention of Reilly, Ace of Spies—concerning Europe at that moment of a tilt toward revolt.
In any case, the corruption at the heart of English society in the Netflix series might bring to mind a certain Presidential administration that emerged from Arkansas and bankers friendly to William Jefferson Clinton. Thomas Shelby could have fit right in to that scene.
Another Tweet brought a certain light to this notion. The ‘subject’ in question, was an unretouched photo-image of Chelsea Clinton, holding a clearly retouched sign, which asserted her receipt of $84 Million. The assertion dealt with Federal Agency for International Development funding that definitely went out to all and sundry hither and yon, at least now and again.
“So this is classic. Here's an obvious Nepo-child—we could all be so lucky, under apt circumstances, unlike today's grotesque, monopoly-mediated array—who, unless she's an idiot or really weird, undoubtedly benefits from her proximity to power or FAMILIArity with fame, ha ha.
But contemplating tens of millions in her coffers sends a surge of rage through me, like one of the chimps that throws fecal matter at the dispenser of treats who persistently favors other recipients over its precious self. So I figure, 'oh, this is just irresistible. I've got to say something.'
Only WTAF? The claim turns out to be preposterous. The Clinton Foundation has tapped into the IV Feedbag at the U.S. Agency for International Development, but no evidence is available to suggest that it ended up in Chelsea's 'secret accounts.'
So the Plutocratic Propaganda Debunking Machine goes into motion. A decent chance at some useful discussion thus recedes in the rearview mirror.
That hopefully helpful conversation would concern the aforementioned Bill-&-Hillary nonprofit and like expressions of tax-exempt ruling class hegemony.
As granny said, 'a word, to the wise, is sufficient.’”
The central issues of the here and now often revolve around the actions—as noted a bit further on, often orchestrated from banker’s boardrooms, Langley and Pentagon conference rooms, etc.—of so-called ‘non-governmental organizations,’ NGO’s, non-profits. It’s George Soros and Air America in tandem; it’s Black Lives Matter meets the Azov Battalion.
While the stories that these ‘color-revolution’ aficionados paint are uniformly, and most charitably, fraudulent schemes, this ‘sector’ is of tremendous influence and import in how things function at various social levels. This entire arena demands savvy exploration.
Thus, Joan Roelofs—superstar investigator of non-profit accounting and scamming and service to empire—will put in a star-turn in these pages sooner rather than later. For today, one might first want to take note of The Trillion Dollar Silencer, in which she develops her primary thesis, to wit, that by paying off all manner of ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ ‘activists,’ in aggregate up to her title’s noted sum in bribes, King Capital derails, forestalls, or at least distracts rational organizing for actual transformation.
It’s a compelling hypothesis, at least likely correct in its broad outlines, about which we’ll speak a bit more below and a lot more in later installments, Lord willing and the Creek don’t rise. The ingenuity of the acolytes of empire and exceptionalism are no doubt so clever that they’ve managed to avoid the consequences of crisis for more than half a century.
Quite likely, the American people and, in some cases, even Yankee banksters and plutocratic racketeers will quite soon be nodding along to the old saying. ‘Paying the piper is about to play; what goes around, comes around.’
Given that robbing Peter to pay Paul will no longer work so well, that most of our precious ‘investment strategies’ are tanking, that King Capital can only impose its imperial will by insisting on more murder among American citizens, that toxic social and natural environments will only grow more poisonous, thinking along spiritual lines will be a sensible response. Maybe we ought to ponder the historical memory banks.
For example, in surveying the lives of Americans before the arrival of Europeans, one finds that they have a very Big Tent mentality in relation to their insistence on reality, ha ha. “In daily life, the Cherokee acknowledged the spiritual significance of their local rivers, streams, and ponds with a ritual called ‘going to water.’
Each morning at daybreak, Mooney wrote, a party of Cherokee would be led by a healer down to a running stream, where the group would face the rising sun and immerse themselves completely in the flowing water, enacting a kind of rebirth. This ceremony of communion touched on nearly all spheres of social life.
Going to water, Mooney concluded, was ‘a part of the ritual for obtaining long life, for winning the affections of a woman, for recovering from a wasting sickness, and for calling down prosperity upon the family at each return of the new moon.’” This invigorating recognition of our reliance on elemental forces appeals to a Humble Correspondent who has spent seven decades, since his Grandfather first dipped his toes in Big Wheeling Creek as June of 1955, and my second birthday drew night, following waterfalls in the Southern Appalachian massif.
Discovery is ever imminent in these perambulations, sometimes actual, sometimes documentary or literary, sometimes altogether otherwise. As an inveterate waterfall enthusiast, I am ever wont to in-the-flesh encounters.
In the realm of the real, a recent visit to Thomas Jefferson’s old haunts in Charlottesville took my love and I close enough to Crabtree Falls to make a visit to this truly monumental little trail a mandatory part of our itinerary. We met, oddly enough, among the dozen people whom we encountered, only one other bloke—an older fart than me, LOL!
Everyone else was female, including three young campers with their dogs out for a jaunt in the snow to view the cascades. What’s up with that? It may be random, yet probably some narrative possibility exists herein in regard to our present passage.
In the historical documentary and storytelling arena, meanwhile, Mark Twain, for instance, has several chapters in Innocents Abroad that detail his visit to Crimea in 1867. I rediscovered this—having read the work in my sophomore history tutorial as an undergraduate—as I was making my way, hit and miss with the index and the Table of Contents, through Yalta: the Price of Peace, by S.M. Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian.
A dour anticommunist, and rabid anti-Stalinist, he has hardly produced a work even close to nearly as magnificent as Gar Alperowitz’s Atomic Diplomacy, which looks at the same eventualities as Plokhin, essentially of ending World War Two and thereby inaugurating Brand Chaos and the consolidation of the Modern Nuclear Project.
Even though the Ukrainian’s take on Yalta is at best one-sided and flawed, his description of FDR’s and Churchill’s entourages—as they made their ‘Grand Tour’ way along Crimean byways past vistas of sea and mountain and villages, ‘Potemkin’ and otherwise, with burned hulks of Nazi tanks littering the scene—was in fact magisterial. He quoted Twain, who also took the Tour to produce his wonderful instantiation of one of publishing’s darling nooks, the writerly travelogue.
“To me the place was a vision of the Sierras,” where Mr. Clemmons was once a prominent resident. “The little village of Yalta… .is covered with great parks and gardens of nobelemen, and through the mass of green foliage, the bright colors of their palaces bud out here and there like flowers. It is a beautiful spot,” where, eighty years hence, the Churchill and Roosevelt families would be domiciling while the bargaining began for an altogether nucleated future.
I had to find Innocents Abroad and see what else was there. It will merit its own BTR slot eventually. Several chapters encompass the Black Sea and are worth examining if only as a result of the contested claims there that might easily exterminate humanity’s presence anywhere on the planet. Maybe one can find succor there to avoid such an outcome, or perhaps it will only be a lark, whether our kind continue or not.
Before moving along today, we’ll offer a bon mot from America’s first world-famous humorist as he wanders through Constantinople, now Istanbul. What with Gaza and Iran and Kurds and Ukraine and Black Sea geopolitics and the remains of British Petroleum in Brand Chaos, these lines may have utility as well as interest.
“Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.
Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their parents, but not publicly. The great slave marts we have all read so much about—where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural fair—no longer exist. The exhibition and the sales are private now.”
We’ll leave Twain’s two Crimean chapters for his next appearance. In the meantime back in this hemisphere, ‘from Greenland to Panama,’ as in this issue’s final essay, an inundation of brilliancy from William Appleman Williams will appear below. His never-much-more than staunchly liberal conclusions notwithstanding he displayed imperialism in all its grotesque and gruesome finery of bloody murder and fake facilitations of ‘democracy.’
Readers may find a couple of Williams’ volumes below, dissected and excerpted and contextualized, blah blah blah. Anyone unfamiliar with his work is missing something critical for comprehending the ‘American Way’ today.
Here’s what I’ll pray will be a tasty, epitomizing quotation from the still standard textbook that he edited and compiled, The Shaping of American Diplomacy: Readings and Documents in American Foreign Relations, 1750-1955. “Much of what seems confusing or contradictory about American foreign relations can be understood better if one uses certain techniques of study.
Such a toolbox of ideas will not provide an answer for every questions or a solution for all the difficulties of the present and the future. But just as a great many useful and beautiful objects can be maddee with a few carefully selected tools—if the craftsman knows how to handle them—so also can much be learned about foreign affairs if the available information is organized and interpreted in the proper manner.
In studying the history of American foreign relations, then, it is helpful to look at a series of events or any given policy from four different points of view.” Those who peruse this may stay tuned to find out the particular foursome that Williams has in mind.
Stating stalwartly how things actually stand, irrefutably, in any case, must form part of any such attempt to put things in motion that have so far in this ‘First Amerikan Century’ of a ‘Thousand Year Reich’ been rare enough to add up to any ‘progress’ at all. We’ve seen plenty of spectacle and heard unending streams of inflammatory rhetorical bombast about little more than blah blah blah.
This lack of even a hint of lasting useful transformation, or progress, must be some part of recent polls about ‘how Americans see our society.’ Ha ha. “I toda so,” again and again have I said the same thing, what, ‘survey says,’ our opinions are of ourselves in the here and now.
The question was simple. “Which of the following comes closest to your opinion about our nation's political system, even if none are exactly right?” “It has been broken for decades,” Door Number One, got nearly three fifths of the votes. Door Number Two, “It has been broken only for the last few years,” received almost three tenths of the ballots, with only nine percent left for “It is not broken,” Door Number Three. Apparently three percent of those queried were non-responsive.
At just this juncture, quite plausibly, a recap of my introductory video from #24 ought to be apropos. I was contextualizing the meaning of the then-still-pending Presidency of Donald Trump. To begin, our new President, whether with cagey foresight or otherwise, rejects the ‘status quo ante’ that has, more or less, persisted since Nixon’s removal of the world from a gold-standard monetary policy and the various ‘oil-price shocks’ that followed Tricky-Dick’s transitional forays.
Second, because of his own skills and experience and proclivities, he styles himself as an operator, someone who can encounter any situation or opportunity or deal and assert, “I can do better in,” or get more from, or squeeze additional equity out of, any given operation. Furthermore, while ideologically blind or somehow systematically myopic hagiographers and critics both portray ‘the Donald’ as a force of nature that exists and acts exclusively on his own individual behalf, he clearly serves as an operative for forces other than himself in his operations as the aforesaid dexterous operator.
Throughout his privileged provenance in affairs of commerce and state, moreover, Donald Trump has always acted as a talented performer in our postmodern ‘spectacular’ society. Only such a ‘true-influencer’ could keep his job, for fourteen seasons, as host and heartbeat of his deal-making program, which only survived one additional set of episodes without his presence on the set.
The ‘performative perquisites’ of this new trustafarian ‘leader’ on top of the imperial pyramid, as noted, are in service to something bigger than himself. In part, the nature of his ongoing extemporaneous wheeling and dealing demonstrates, more or less indisputably, in whose and what interests he is actualizing his industrious bits of alluring legerdemain.
What many now are calling ‘capital’s polycrisis’ circumscribes the patrons for whom ‘the Donald’ is angling and whose benefit he is ever seeking most assiduously to succor. Donald Trump may not have a clue of either the path or the destination, yet he very forthrightly notes that he’s not treading, nor expecting, to perpetuate the paths that have typified things since Nixon’s already noted ‘exit from gold.’
He’ll really, truly ‘fight enemies,’ win wars, and expect to create an External Revenue Service to replace the IRS role in relation to the U.S. Treasury. In a sense, he tints imperial exceptionalism in eerily luminescent bloody hues of a ‘Great Again’ ‘Golden Age,’ whose tariffs and sanctions and takings from Panama to Greenland will carry us to Mars and beyond.
With an omnipresent American military machine to back up such bluster, one might make more of his vague promises to reinstate America as the indisputable potentate in the intricacies of a ‘New World Order.’ Very much on the other hand, one must wonder whether the bullying threats that attend Trump’s establishing again America’s vaunted greatness can withstand a world in which industrial, technological, and martial might are much more evenly distributed, nationally speaking, than at any time since the late eighteenth century’s uprisings and revolutions.
I communicated with the estimable Scott Ritter along these lines recently. “You could easily name your account differently, say @GreatScottRitter. I'm serious: you're brilliant, principled, relentless, and real.
However, this posting is uncharacteristic of such greatness for at least a few reasons. Calling Trump a 'narcissistic megalomaniac' sounds great, very au courant and all, like you'd keep a copy of Christopher Lasch's "Culture of Narcissism" in your bedside bookshelf. But it's a lousy way to try to explain socioeconomic phenomena with multiple geopolitical and political economic and socioeconomic roots that are pretty obvious.
Calling the Donald a 'peacemaker' is another such boneheaded notion. A dealmaker? Okay. But his investiture into the Empire's and King Capital's slimy, gruesome Israeli creature is lifelong, so, again, this is not a smart choice of explanatory device, as it were.
Then we come to how 'the price of oil,' if it rises catastrophically, might somehow be antithetical to 'American interests,' which is to say the imprimatur of Brand Chaos and imperialism. This not only shows a lack of awareness about the whole history of the oil business, where keeping prices up was always a primary problem, but it also looks at 'interests' in a naive way, to say the least. Plutocrats have always salivated at the possibility of being the latest, greatest Merchants of Death, as Senator Nye showed, almost a hundred years back, with some of the same real estate in question then.
In a sense, what I would say to you is what I've been saying since I gave up on ReDemoPubliCratiCans back when McGovern's campaign caved to the gangsters. I told you so.
One might go on. The ahistorical and decontextualized conversations that such threads as these promote ignore Mossadegh; our 'favorite butcher' in Iran, Reza Pahlevi; and the 'theocratic compromise' to which dear Ronnie, every realist's favorite President before Donnie, acceded in 1980. Nor is that all.
Mostly though, brilliant people like you need to start realizing that no 'great leader' can save us from a Brand Chaos/King Capital commitment either to fascism or to plunging from the precipice of a Mass-Collective-Suicide war. Only organized average people can save ourselves.
Such a course may be too little, too late, but even a real minuscule chance is better than reliance on fatuous fantasy when the stakes are this high and will likely become more precious and costly still.
In this vein, the Ten New Commandments would be a decent start. That would certainly make your brilliance shine.”
Blah blah blah. One might recall how Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss liked to pronounce ours ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ since so much seems possible to achieve. As the upshot of Trump’s and Putin’s three hour call may be a ‘let’s give the killing a rest’ break in the action, perhaps the plutocrats and whatever social force BRICS represents can find a way to divvy things up so as to avoid necessitous Keynesian militarism’s ‘crisis economic rescue services.’
And certainly, here in the Appalachians, as Spring bursts forth in forsythia bushes and frolicsome birds and hungry, rascally rabbits, a sunny view of matters at hand is easily defensible. Looking at the world from Smith Mountain Lake as I returned from a chilly, drizzly sojourn to retrieve my inadvertently abandoned ‘winter coat,’ one might readily nod at the plausible assertion of the superlative status of our special solar system and our place in it.
Awe can only initiate the sensibility of blessed glory that is available in my oh-so-lucky existence. Then again, I am practicing the Ten New Commandments every day, doing my best to live a principled life in service to knowledge and service to others. In part, a positive attitude attends a principled approach to the achievement of social equality—socialism or barbarism, all of that jazz.
Whether mainly fortune’s caprice or otherwise, I’m playing the part that I preach is available to us all, every Palestinian resistance fighter, every Israeli Defense Force mercenary or patriot, every dragooned Ukrainian embodiment of cannon fodder, every Russian soldier, and so on and so forth. Easier said than done, definitely, but such a course is not an impossibility; otherwise, acknowledged geniuses would not likely have quite consistently given it their wholehearted support.
Albert Einstein, as a matter of fact, in the discourse that occurred over Israel’s formation, contributed valiant criticism along the lines of the Sermon on the Mount, even as he agreed in principle to the possibility of creating a 'homeland for Jewish people' in Palestine.. A Middle East Monitor MEMO made this point powerfully four years ago.
“Ten years before the state declared its ‘independence’ in 1948 on land stolen from the people of Palestine, Albert Einstein described the proposed creation of Israel as something which conflicted with ‘the essential nature of Judaism.’ Having fled Hitler’s Germany and eventually becoming a US citizen, Einstein needed no lessons in what fascism looked like.
When the leader of a group under the rubric of the American Friends of the Fighters For Freedom in Israel reached out to him for support, he responded briefly and directly. “When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine, the first responsible for it would be the British, and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks.”
He concludes quite conclusively. “I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.” The great physicist, socialist, and pacifist also “spotted the flaws and fault lines in 1946 when he addressed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on the Palestinian issue.”
Once more, he speaks with straightforward language. “The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties and a narrow-mindedness and a close-heartedness. I believe it is bad.” He is persuasive in his insight about English imperial impulses to ‘divide and conquer.’
“If people are united with each other and they come to the idea that they do not need the foreign rule, then they want to make themselves independent. Every country with a decent standard of living will have, of course, its idea and will strive forward. So an enduring rule is not impossible if you reduce the burdens of the people. That is my thesis.” With facts and reasons on his side, he might persuade any but an English extortionist or other racketeer.
Dear Dr. Albert also authored and attained prominent cosigners for a New York Times letter that appeared on December 4th, 1948. It began fiercely, without equivocation. “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’… closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”
He describes mass murder on the part of ‘Jewish activists’ that would poison the Nation at its birth and ruin any chance of a socially amicable or just future. The finishing touches on the body of the missive makes this irrefutably palpable.
“(T)he IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”
Einstein’s ‘genius’ co-signees included none other than the unsurpassed princess of ethical philosophy, Hannah Arrendt. Her ‘banality of evil’ contentions are part of the language of the present pass. The 1948 text matches her ideation.
“The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.”
Here we meet kith and kin, lineal forbears, of Mr. Netanyahu and his oversight of Israel’s vicious monstrosities in the here and now. Indubitably, in that regard, recent indicia that ruling class banksters and their political stooges are even more forcibly emphasizing social discipline is showing up throughout the ‘free world,’ from Couer de Alene to Kiev, Ukraine, and multiple other conjunctions in between or otherwise hither and yon.
Lynching will always be close at hand under these sorts of circumstances, though accomplishing its lethal ends will entail all sorts of assaultive and murderous modalities, as it were. Bombs delivered by supersonic killing machines, snipers in helicopters, drones operated by technicians who must never taste of the death that they deal, ‘peace officers’ who all too commonly offer a coup de grace, the means are as numerous as the ‘bells and whistles’ of the international arms trade.
“A Boot on Your Neck & a Gun in Your Ear” speaks to what the implications are of these types of situations. Given Gaza, Syria, Ukraine, Somalia, Yemen, not to mention Texas and Florida and on and on, perhaps all citizens everywhere not blessed with a portfolio of equities or beneficent familial nepotism might sit up, stand up, rise up, and take notice.
“If One Intends to Resist an Oppressive Condition, Then One Had Better Elect to Do So Before One Finds a Boot on the Neck and a Gun in the Ear, Since, at That Juncture, Resistance Will Likely Prove Futile.”
In these times, a significant portion of such repressive efforts attack women, alas. The easiest targets for ReDemoPubliCratiCan Divide-&-Conquer Legions must, almost axiomatically, remaine the apparently biological basis for seeing people as having different interests, wanting different things, and all the primarily false blah blah blah that typifies erstwhile ‘liberal’ commitments to ‘diversity.’
As we will see a few paragraphs downstream, these methods eviscerate abortion rights in many cases. Just to be clear: as Wilhelm Reich makes clear at the outset of the Fascist Project, criminalizing abortion—the guillotine, often enough, in Germany—represents a core component of Nazi politics. Big Tent Review will be providing a five part series on the politicization of women’s bodies, and in particular asserting social rather than individual control over reproduction.
For now, an amazing New Yorker articulation about birth-rates and children evokes a profound ‘gulp’ response from any reader paying a mere modest modicum of attention. “The End of Children” evokes a particularly nauseating human future, in which, whatever big bangs might occur, we will disappear as a species with a whimper. Childbearing in Japan is just over half of the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman of age, as it were.
The pregnancy-rates in Seoul, supposedly, are now less that one third of this hypothetical population-regeneration-minimum. Clearly, these matters cut ‘close to the bone’ indeed. As noted, a big series is upcoming. Till then, multiple baskets of facts and data are available to illuminate this ‘birth crisis:’ the numbers of American men and women on anorgasmic and libidinally ruinous SSRI antidepressants is one such; the legislative and administrative hacking away of abortion and birth control access is another; the massive reach of ‘virtual sexuality,’ with its annihilation of childbirth since no real sex results; OMGoddess, we might make a list of the top hundred such aggregates of information, just about the ‘costs and benefits’ of ‘regular families,’ and barely scratch the surface.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ article also looks at the ‘leftist’ ‘celebration’ of recent dramatic reductions in the U.S. birth rate. A pair of erstwhile progressives wrote a baby-boosting book, which has caught hell, likely much of it deserved. As one critic observed, “(O)n some level, perhaps not always a conscious one, the millennial pro-natalists are trying to convince American women that the freedom they lost with Roe v. Wade was not worth having.”
Given the stakes for reproductive autonomy, Donegan’s reservations are entirely comprehensible. Most left-leaning Americans are similarly distrustful of the pro-natalist discourse. Leigh Senderowicz, a feminist demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me, ‘There is fundamentally no way to do this that doesn’t end up treating women’s bodies as a tool.’
According to the U.N., countries with pro-natalist policies tend to be less democratic. A baby-bonus initiative in Italy’s Piedmont region was given a name and logo that seemed an awful lot like an homage to Fascism.”
Moreover, obviously, more enticing methods are available for keeping people quiet till they can no longer speak up. The already cited Joan Roelofs The Trillion Dollar Silencer makes this point incisively, that ‘foundation backing’ and other ploys of the voluntocracy throw perquisites and money and social support in the direction of ‘women’s studies’ and ‘women’s rights,’ especially when they focus on domestic violence or so-called ‘awoken’ views of matters lesbian, gay, and transexual, one of those categories—like race—that does not exist(one in a million cases of hermaphroditism notwithstanding)except as a social and political ploy, a tool for managing the ‘body politic.’
No matter what, in any case, we might recollect the brief Big Tent series about Caitlyn Jenner. One can make a sociopolitical decision to ‘stand with transitioned individuals,’ but the rationale for the choice can never be a broad social impact since less that one in two hundred people, at most, are in the ‘supported’ cohort. Contrasting this with, inter alia, improved childcare options, better nursing care delivery, reform of the grotesque Pharmaceutical-Industrial-Complex’s attacks on mothers and fathers and families, just depicts this social controversy for the weird distraction that it is.
In a related note, can anyone spell USAID? The thing is, the Agency for International Development is a complex topic of global reach, in which social benefits and social enervation and even collapse comingle, in which ‘career civil servants’ of high ideals and credible commitment to human improvement are likely a majority despite the fact that the entire USAID charade exists in part to give C.I.A. agents plausible covers in very sensitive areas where very serious geopolitical conflicts are evolving.
Whatever comes to pass on the stock-exchange, one analyst’s assessment seems apt indeed. “The insinuation that women are at fault for the demographic crisis has turned gender friction into gender war.” While the particular reference was to Korean, similar conclusions about ‘gender-relations-generally’ here in the land of the free and the home of the brave are readily at hand, as we shall learn in detail in due time.
Nor is that all, of course. As mentioned in passing above, the above-referenced dearth of infants coincides, and not in the least by happenstance, with the elimination of all funding and most other support for birth control, what people often euphemistically call ‘family planning,’ when what is actually transpiring is a social liberation and empowerment of women to have their own way with their bodies and their sex and their lives, if such planning-rights exist, or a destruction of the social equality of women in favor on Nazi nausea, if government undermines or eschews these basic human rights.
As this year’s international women’s day recedes in the rearview mirror, we could ask ourselves where women are the most optimistic about the future, and Russia and China are in the upper echelons of that list. In precisely those places that, in one way or another, make the biggest fuss about ‘women’s rights’—even though, in the case of the United States, the Equal Rights Amendment hasn’t even become part of the Constitution despite a necessary majority by any fair measure—or that, in a different fashion, rationalize criminalizing the female to ‘protect the vulnerable’—Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia come to mind—in those exact localities, local conditions are quite likely to be unfavorable for women—higher maternal mortality and infant mortality, lower indicia of thriving babies and attendant blah blah blah.
One might continue eternally without, one may pray, becoming altogether interminable in delineating these generally disputatious developments along the Sacred Pleasure dividing line that separates social reality from social pretense. Women must attain actual social freedom, or by hook or by crook, the human project will likely end badly.
Whatever the case may be, and very much decidedly on the other hand, life here in Virginia’s Highlands has given me a sinecure in a heavenly space. No doubt, privilege and luck play primary roles in this gracious goodness for which I have such boundless gratitude. Then again, I kept looking, despite slings and arrows that might have deflected other, less persistent, participants in life’s panoply of exigency and uncertainty.
In the meantime, a little trick that I tried for a time is now possible again. As I’ve mentioned, when Firefox crashed on me a while back, I lost all my precious tabs, ha ha, so that I could no longer do a five-pack quick-look about a sequence of such slots in the ongoing production line. That capacity is now officially rejuvenated.
Now appearing are the ‘first five’ in a newly robust litancy of these inquisitive openings. This astonishing volume provides the historical and political context of the RAND corporation, which shows up in two articles today. Alex Abella’s subtitle is especially evocative: The RAND Corporation & the Rise of American Empire. This modest acronym for ‘research and development’ is a handmaiden to any expression of an American ‘Deep State’ and, along with the Counsel on Foreign Relations, will soon be the subject of a BTR series.
Here, in relation to several requisite dives into ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ one will find an early ‘Artificial Intelligence Research Archive,’ the result of a search that we’ll discuss quickly below. A different kettle of fish entirely shows up in a Wired article that indicates that FaceBook’s Meta—or perhaps vice versa—is burying a book that pugnaciously criticizes the Zuckerburg and company operation at multiple levels. Another item comes along from the ever helpful top-five-journalist-ever list entry, Matt Taibi. He presents an easy to follow, brass-tacks orientation to managing to have one’s own Freedom of Information Act pipeline.
The final citation in today’s little sidebar emanates from the genius intel operative, Jeremy Kuzmarov, who publishes Covert Action Magazine. His title states his case: “Revolt of the Rich: Wealthy Elites Have Waged A Fifty Year Class War—and Won.” Furthermore, he knows where both the pertinent bodies and overturned opportunities are buried. Reading along these lines simply must consider his POV.
Where shall we place our attention then? To what will we turn our intentions? Such are a pair of inquiries ever apropos for a Bit Tent approach to things. From the Modern Nuclear Project’s insistence on the viability of retaining Mass Collective Suicide as a policy option to the gruesome attacks percolating on erotic expression and Life-Force-Energy, a close look at official American social-policy choices is a sobering prospect indeed.
Death machines make up three quarters of our annual operating budget. Every other commercial on Lawrence Welk, some nights is for one libido-destroying ‘medicine’ after another. We promote extinction and wreck the most basic and intimate and humanly essential chances to connect.
This polarity—Eros & Thanatos in essence—ever defines the flirtation that fascist devolution of King Capital requires. Keeping people apart who are happy lovers will likely prove impossible. One result is simultaneously hideous and hilarious moves to manipulate alienation into the driver’s seat. Another is that those who miraculously escape these traps simultaneously celebrate and share, as in a Big Tent yeehaw!
A piece of Driftwood Message Art, inevitably, echoing last issue’s Wood Words Essay, offers just such a juxtaposed contextualization. It is a new piece, recently joining the ‘new queue,’ as it were, entitled “Fabulously Fortunate Encounters.”
“Only Via Pulsing Pleasure’s Torrid Portals Will We Ever Manage a Journey to the Shores of a Glorious Life, Joyously & Potently Lived; What Fabulous Fortune That We’ve Encountered Each Other to Plot a Partnership That Truly Pursues Conjugated ‘Connubiation’ in Every Day & Kiss & Frolic That We Share.”
Eros blossoms no matter the toxic social soil, regardless of the stringent strictures of impressed depression. We wouldn’t all be here otherwise; it’s the design of the wellsprings, so to speak. The main initial inquiry in this regard, perhaps, is ‘what form shall this designation take?’
Bourgeois ideologists trumpet their ‘feminist’ credentials even as they crush erotic engagement and bolster ‘alternative lifestyles,’ ‘being happy while single,’ and so forth. A recent post on X made such a stand, in regard to how much better Cuba had it under the banksters, the sugar trust, and the casino gangsters. My reply was affable enough, if not at all supportive.
“Ah, the wonders of the 'free market:' of course, Havana in the 1950's had a glitzier 'free enterprise system,' and the Nazis manifested their brothelized sex industry as engineered coitus factories.
Commodifying the body—organ sales, the offering of our flesh on the market as with these young women—goes with capitalism. Hence, perhaps, a more bottom-line reason for the reactionary hatred of social equality.
Life-Force-Energy will find an outlet, come what may. The only issue, in some senses, is whether people will stand for themselves, or continue to fantasize mimicking 'Seattle's favorite son,' Mr. Gates, by putting themselves on the market without, however, having his ten million dollar trust fund as a 'fallback position,' ha ha.”
Anyhow, here at home, my life unfolds as a process of interrogating nature and investigating culture. In so doing, I’ve encountered an irresistible snippet from who knows when. I took a screenshot of a briefing about a book by Alan Watts, the famous super-hippy and guru type fellow. Nature, Man, & Woman: a New Approach to Sexual Experience clearly speaks of a likely congruence with Big Tent premises.
His evocation of a ‘spiritual sexuality,’ a centering of the sacral erotic, anticipates Riane Eisler—of many Big Tent appearances. Ongoing installments of such grounded ways of grasping our greedy passions and salubrious embraces will always lie just ahead, as well as likely gracing the last issue. In essence, at least in the pages of Big Tent Review, a Holy Chastity is a laughable contradiction in terms.
Moving right along, searches are yet another sort of mechanism for inquiring of the cosmos what in the hell is happening. Boolean algebra and a certain contextual savoir faire are the only prerequisites. If one had a retinue of nerds, some of my sallies after sense could keep a score of researchers digging more or less forever.
Here’s the most recent instance: <"artificial intelligence" OR ai origins OR history OR background OR beginning analysis OR scholarship turing OR babbage OR wiener>. It’s a marvelous exemplar, yielding 13,200,000 connections and droolingly delicious invitations from the first page onward. This Stanford portal was especially irresistible. The authors take the reader from Babbage’s ‘difference engine’ to Turing’s conceptualization of thinking electronics, all the while acting as a gateway to more access to important knowledge and useful speculation.
In addition to sprinkling these attempts to act as an epistemological interlocutor over the course of the Introduction and elsewhere in this edition, here are a smattering of additional examples over the unwinding of the past forty-eight days, ha ha. If others found such endeavor as interesting as I do, I could spend a million years tapping out my queries and typing up results.
This little seeding of seeking ‘only’ received 95,600 replies, yet oh my goodness, what fecund soil: <"rand corporation" history OR background OR origins "military industrial complex" OR empire OR imperialism "cold war" OR anticommunism>. This was what led to the monumental Soldiers of Reason, a wry titling of the ironic idiocy of believing that one’s backing of empire can become, via erstwhile ‘research reports,’ indisputable and immutable.
So often, a dynamic procedure of discernment delineates my cases of self-discovery, in which an ‘unknown-unknown’ part of the cosmos falls into place. Thus, this, with its 88,600 hits, took me to previously undiscovered intellectual fields: <"albert einstein" israel founding OR formation OR zionism critique OR objection OR rejection dispute OR controversy OR conflict>. Learning of Hannah Arendt’s principled objections to Zionism introduced me to another ‘hiding-in-plain-sight’ element of Israel-Palestine.
I encountered an ‘old friend’—from the ‘90’s recently. It led to this inquiry: <"julian jaynes" psychedelics OR psilocybin OR mushrooms consciousness OR "human brain" OR cognition review OR explanation OR scholarship>. With just 10,100 links, this string nevertheless might keep me going for the next year or so. One review of Jaynes Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was worth the price of admission. And it wasn't even in support of my POV, despite its meaty utility.
Appropriately, along a parallel path, the Searches that I use as daggers often may not apply directly to, for instance, #25, but some e-mail or X posting will beckon for refutation, and off I go. Such sallying forth is always entertaining; it is sometimes Earth-shaking, at least to nerdy boys and geeky girls.
Once again, a ‘popular’ item from the Marshall Arts table speaks to this process of sifting and discovery. “Piercing Veils of Ignorance” is its altogether sweet title.
“From Time Immemorial, Our Sort Have Launched, in Order to Pierce Veils of Ignorance & Nonsense That Otherwise Attend Awareness, Analytical Projectiles That Depend For Their Penetrating Power on, Among Other Things, the Open-Hearted Ardor & Wide-Eyed Wonder With Which We Examine Existence's Sidereal Array of Interlinked Riddles & Opportunities."
Every story states a conundrum that at the same time opens a path to apprehending a way of ‘squaring the circle’ or otherwise synthesizing contradictory, yet equally indisputable truths. This is one of the many reasons that attempts to squelch narrative can only result in replacing the suppressed material with whatever mixture of nonsense and horseshit and distortion and half-truth that the masters-&-betters elect to promote.
Books too delineate the adaptation and design of our lives here. At least as a process of perusal, I am reading ‘many books a day,’ although only very rarely indeed in the here and now am I a careful attentive reader who harvests without a prior agenda.
Thus, when I finished Michael Connelly’s Brass Verdict thriller—another Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller case—I realized the indisputable fact of my dupeitude, which is of course the root of dope, ha ha. I’m as naive and idealistic and optimistic as is possible for one who still ‘lives and breathes.’ Like loads of Reds, I love the gritty, grassroots social reality of a good mystery yarn.
Inevitably, old hippy that I am, I groove on information and episodes about psychedelics, which act as a counterpoint to the grim psychotropic ‘medications’ with which the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex doses hapless saps hither and yon, all too often as in the case of my love’s cousin, so as to manage their ‘aggressive behavior’ in intolerable social conditions.
Two works, How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan, and Orange Sunshine, by Nicholas Schou, came my way of late in this to me close to all-important arena. They will both play large roles in the near future. Their subtitles incisively illustrate their interest, respectively, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, and The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and ACID to the World. The latter of the two, the documentary, just bursts with critical intelligence.
Every beginning has an ending, and vice versa, naturally. So too today, then, a new volume with invaluable material about Ukraine has come along life’s highway. It propounds Kiev’s sense of a uniquely Ukrainian Slavic sensibility.
Russia, as well, has managed to embody a nationalist spirit that grounds itself in the notion of the absolute social and political equality of nations. Thus, a volume like Yalta: the Price of Peace can only irritate as a proposition because the author is openly anti-communist and thereby cannot have anything positive to report about the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the book is full of gems, learning anew of Twain’s visit to Crimea just the tip of the iceberg.
The buzz on the web is that big changes lie ahead. As I and likeminded others follow leads to find a way out of a Mass Collective Suicide maze, perhaps this will prove to be another big rescue operation on the part of the denizens of King Capital, one of whom sits in the vaunted Oval Office, often with another particularly prickly plutocrat at his right hand.
A friend asked as we were conversing one evening, after my love had retired and I continued my tap, tap, tapping habit, “So, Jimbo, what do you think of el Trumpo now?” Although such as this is always an apt question, its answer must likely remain predictable, if not altogether mundane.
I grow more certain by the day that Trump’s inability to extricate his King-Capital team from the multiple, intersecting, pending crises that afflict the human condition will mean that, more and more, the cost of said catastrophic situations will be borne by those who have the least resources, the worst health, and the fewest prospects. At some point, we may want to imagine an improved future that does not depend on voting for ‘different politicians.’
Another Message might meditatively mediate a transition here. Last issue’s Tarot essay dealt with mental illness and counseling. Recollecting Einstein’s quip that a dandy definition of insanity was doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, readers can examine “Electoral Power’s Oxymoron.”
“Electoral Politics Is to Actual Community Power Roughly As Advertising Is to Honest Grassroots Communication: Lacking a Vision, Strategy, & Plan For More Robust Popular Empowerment Processes Than Elections Proffer, Humanity Will Soon Quite Likely Attain Its Apparent Objective of Mass Collective Suicide, Either Rapidly Via Thermonuclear Extinction, Or More Slowly, Through Any Number of Mechanisms of Progressively Worsening & Ultimately Lethal Ecological Catastrophe."
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Finding a Way to ‘Make a Difference’
‘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 even as they do 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 inquiry, with, from each card, specific flashes of insight 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 both healing of lingering wounds and salubrious for ongoing contemplation of how to proceed.
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 ‘have coming’ or otherwise inhereit from ‘masters and betters,’ our current BTR 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 Biden and their minions.
For my part, I’ve always had a strong ‘process orientation.’ If one makes the right lists, follows the recipes rendered from facilitators exactly, and otherwise stays within the lines of what constitutes ‘acceptable work,’ things will pan out. That this point-of-view amounts to mundane half-truth at best matters not in the least, in so far as my proclivities go.
Today’s question runs on a track parallel to my default ways of thinking and acting about everything. It imagines a citizen much like a reader. “How can I manage my learning curves,” such a one might ponder, “so as to make my life easier and better?”
Such a question probably occurs, at least at some point, to most people who become ‘consenting adults,’ as it were. It basically comes down to preferring possible ecstatic empowerment over alternatives less potently joyous. Duh, right?
At the outset, we’ll state the initial question like this: “What, for a Common Sense participant, so to say, are some observations and insights about creating procedures—even using a Tarot Practice, perhaps—to seek out guidance, direction, optimal moves, and perhaps most especially knowledge?”
Even such a general query can, under appropriate circumstances of education and abundance, elicit the potential for both action to take and knowledge to gain that are possible, in part, as a result of said guiding observant insightfulness, ha ha. And then, like magic, doing something and finding new facts and ideas in turn support further wisdom and awareness.
For example, in one case, useful ideas about the surreal belief in ‘antidepressant’ toxins can at once affirm a definite Big Tent inclination to assert that the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors(SSRI) ought henceforth be classified as a poison and suggest new ways of articulating such ideas. The chart here provides an incisive case in point, obviating any need for additional blah blah blah.
In another instance, one may encounter evidence of fiscal difficulties at the World Health Organization, facts and testimony and reasoning that show indisputably that a pharmaceutical industrial complex has manipulated, or outright controlled, this erstwhile defender of public health. In so doing, again, both a more realistic understanding occurs because of new data, and additional insights also become more accessible.
In the event, an astonishing array of seven plucks formed the outline of this Spiral Spread. I had to lie down in glory for a moment to contemplate it. Anyhow, the Essence launched with Ace-of-Cups’ loving-connection energy.
The temporal triad brings forth Daedalus’ energy at both the beginning of his crafty, grounded journey, in the Two of Pentacles, and the culmination of present-day achievement and security, in the form of Ten of Pentacles, with a future prospect to mirror Aphrodite’s relational upsurge with the assistance of Perseus’ Knight of Cups.
The three substantive cards represent a spindoctor, Big Tent triumvirate, in that each stands for aspects of my character for the last fifty-five years, from age sixteen and the Vietnam debate topic till now. No-Matter-What, Opportunities yield’s Poseidon’s earthshaking pull, The Tower; Problems & Prospects bring’s Chiron’s Centaurian passion for learning and teaching; the Synthesis offers up a top-three-Jimbo pluck in the form of Dionysus’ The Fool.
This altogether happy unfolding elicits in my breast a sense of the same gratitude that I feel for my love, all the while that these are merely ‘pretty pieces of paper’ and an arcane, and arguably ‘woo-woo,’ interpretive nexus that is totally a ‘taken-on-faith’ approach to extracting something meaningful. What’s up with all this mumbo-jumbo?
In what has become our standard Big Tent approach, the fleshing out of this leading line of inquiry will await expression Below the Fold. But we have a more focused follow-up, to wit this. “How about some thoughts concerning actually establishing a 'counseling practice' that includes Tarot?”
And the hits just keep on coming. I deploy my go-to sequence, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. The first position proffers Zeus’ measured wisdom and fiery leadership in the person of Zeus’ The Emperor. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)
(We’re actually approaching an ending here.
Chapter XXIV closed like this. “‘”
In today’s posting, we remain in Alabama, where Lou’s days and nights revolved, then as now, around books and study and hypothesizing and, inescapably, Eros and drugs. Today’s Chapter, in its entirety, might have served as an anecdote for one or another pieces of the long series just passed, “Capitalism on Drugs.”)
CHAPTER XXV
***
The rock and roll of intense erotic abandon, a natural narcotic for all human hurts and healing boost for personal growth, forms the sexual part of a cultural triad that flows from drugged states as often as not, a sourcing and activating of creativity and understanding that percolates in the context of all manner of environments or arrangements other than the erstwhile standard one of a marriage of one man and one woman, albeit the conscious choice to go against that particular grain has for the duration of its imprimatur come at a significant cost to the couples who have elected to live thus, wild and free and experimental in the face of life's lusty riddles and raucous longing.
Jackson and the 'Snake Lady' threw the most outstanding parties, whether Mary was in attendance or not, as she definitely was on this evening, resplendent in feathered flotsam and streaming silk and not much else, her moon-faced smile at once a mask of merriness and confusion.
The estimable Maxine Normand, the sauntering scintillating serpentine mistress of ceremonies, might rank as Tuscaloosa's primary feminist, femme fatale, iconoclastic wonder woman, or some other expression of an iconic female, depending on whom and when one asked for such a listing. Jackson would have chuckled with bubbling mirth in response: “All of the above, yeah, all of it.”
The friends' intimacy inevitably, ultimately, contributed to Jackson and 'Merc's' split, her aforementioned confused mien eventually a portal to inexpressible anger and its attendant sadness, despite Jackie's and Maxie's occasionally deigning to include Ms. Mary in their festivities as a partner in eliciting ecstatic transport. The dynamic markedly upended Mary's otherwise even-tempered style, especially inasmuch as the two martial artists, master and mistress, never tried to hide their comings and goings, as it were, often fueled by just the sort of loving spores as graced the party for the community's 1977 Day of the Dead celebration. The brew at these festivities never even approximated any standard punch, packing a wallop disproportionate to the foul and bitter taste of a cupful going down the gullet.
Jackson would greet all and sundry with his most genteel sparkle whenever he was not ensconced in the throes of rushing bliss in one of the nooks that Maxie and he had for their own purposes. Ms. Normand, meantime, wandered about bare-breasted and sporting a tiny strip of white cotton round her waist and bisecting her bushy loins, with one of her serpents—generally one of the three cobras rather than the more aggressive reticulated python—wrapped about her neck like a boa, then through her thighs, and in general available for viewing, fondling, and the unavoidable trepidation of some of the tripping celebrants present for the affair.
Lou and Danielle had just arrived. They received Jackson's bows with laughter and waved to Maxie, Lou in tank top, sandals, and linen shorts, Dani in a simple sheath that highlighted both her nipples and her prominent Mons as she moved about. They had given each other permission to wander and ponder orgiastic and individual erotic possibilities before they fulfilled their promise to spend most of the evening with and most of their energetic enthusiasm on each other.
No matter what, the first order of business was to imbibe some tea and begin their journey to the starry realms of sparkling nighttime delight. They both did so and then kissed, with Danielle's unexpectedly providing Lou with a luscious smooch, much to his aroused satisfaction, full of uninhibited tongue and salivation.
The next hour and sixteen minutes unfolded in predictable fashion, at least from the point of view of a primatologist who might have undertaken to study the lovely couple of erstwhile open-relationship advocates on their appointed rounds. Lou was a decidedly Beta male and therefore approximately as likely to accumulate a harem as the runt of the litter would be to challenge the top dog in a pack when the little fellow was merely a pup.
He did manage to neck for a few minutes with his now-and-then paramour, Marilyn Harvey, who had closed her bookstore an hour early to “witness the debauchery,” as she stated the case with a rolling laugh to Lou, that she had heard took place during such intermittent events. When she felt his “quite public and unashamed erection's” expansive presence between her legs, however, and saw that her friend's psyche had taken a turn that she did not understand, “or necessarily approve,” she gave him a last little kiss and headed back to Another Roadside Attraction “to wrestle with a fresh shipment of inventory.”
From this sweet but very partial exchange of loving eruption, Lou ventured a bit of chatter with Rob, who had also decided not to venture on any sojourns for the evening, perhaps because of his conflicted feelings over what had recently transpired between him and Lou and Danielle.
Thus, for most of the time prior to his reconnecting with she whom he called oratorically “my most decidedly and indubitably important significant other,” Lou ended up hanging out with Mary, Jackson's housemate and common-law-marital partner, who evinced all the evidence of being a female version of Lou, one who simultaneously felt such trepidation and need about things that she rarely, if ever, scored a connection for herself that her Alpha-Maximus sweetheart managed to manifest consistently, if not constantly, his own personal Zen eternity of “whenever I want, you know?”
Despite her obvious goddess wiles, then, she and the handsome but delicate, masterful but meek, Lou talked of this and that, always skirting the edges of the issue of Eros' entangling tentacles and their own alienation from that blissful state on occasions such as this.
Danielle, very definitely on the other hand, flitted about the room with the panache and aplomb of a hearty and just-molted social butterfly. She had warned Lou that she “even invited my little Kama Sutra Hindu,” Yatish, the only of her retinue of male acolytes who rivaled Lou's handsome and hirsute mien. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Innumerable Universalities to Consider
Given the mundane mysterious meandering that manifests this humble correspondent’s more or less magical mental machinery, one would anticipate that a ‘categorical cultural imperative’ would impel the creation of a cognitive mapping of Philosophy/Psychology/Spirituality. What I mean by this, or, as I like to say when I get in a groove with my love, “The thing is,” an observer can only discover his pathway or uncover her calling if he can place himself, can locate herself, in the whole shebang.
I do this echolocation on myself constantly, in part by expressing ideas in Driftwood Message Art categories like the one just above. In the event, my thought patterns have always tended toward nerdy philosophical notions of one sort and another about our understanding, our psychic patterns, and our thirst for a core moral interpretation of the universe and ourselves.
A subset of this entire array, a microcosm in some ways, has from the start remained what we might call the Cosmic Queue, pieces of art whose messages have pondered overall patterns, the infinitude of the stars, the human thirst for ‘total awareness’ despite the real risks, and definitely the impossibility, thereof. Perhaps the most palpable instance of this sort of Message Art, “A Daunting Process,” states the case incisively.
“A Truly Daunting Prospect, Living with Total Awareness, Would Deliver Both Ecstatic Thrills & Noisome Chills, At Once Embodying a Great White as it Filled its Maw With Gore & Tore Its Prey Apart, & Experiencing A Tuna's Terror As It Felt Its Killer's Teeth Rend Its Own Passionate Pulse to Pieces.” I’ve watched people shudder in empathetic horror at the mere inkling of such an idea.
From another viewpoint, a different message might even better account for the best possible intro to this nerd-central subject area. An aphorism from my youth came to mind when I was fixing and finishing this piece for its textual imprint. “All-That-Is in a Single Grain” is the subject line, as it were.
“Only Such a One May Hope to Be Happy Who Can See the Entire Cosmos' Spinning in a Grain of Sand, & Who, in Apprehending the Entire Universe, Recognizes the Parameters That Exist As Well in One Little Bit of Random Sandy Silicon.” An earlier version of this missive, under the heading, “Universal Grains,” also went to market.
“Just As the Sagacious Observer Might Examine a Grain of Sand & See Our Universe’s Totality, So Too Can a Clever Interlocutor Make a Map of the Complete Cosmos & Understand How It Mirrors & Parallels the Same, Single Bit of Silicon.”
Still, the search for totality is more than alluring; it is irresistible to someone whose wiring resembles the unfortunate fellow who hankers in spite of all rankling warnings to the contrary for precisely that totality of information that would inescapably prove impossible despite its pulsing power to pique appreciation’s poignant punctuations, ha ha! Here’s a thought in that regard, entitled “Triumph’s Universally Inherent Collectivity.”
“The Cosmic Canvas’ Continuous Call to Craft One’s Most Piquant Portrayals of Joyous Potency, One’s Most Soothing Scenes of Felicitous Fortune, Normally Encounters Standard Mediation’s Corporate-Sponsored Chaotic Cacophony, From Mundane Madcap Mayhem to Brutality’s Baleful Bane, Without, Generally Speaking, Alluding to Omnipresent Options For Delightful Denouement That Solicit Sublimely Salubrious Solidarity-Forever, Ever Ours to Claim Whenever We Choose to Highlight Inherently & Universally Collective Triumph Through Frantic Fury’s Fiery Trials.”
Although readers may today expect—after all, a Big Tent formulation is its source—only a slightly smaller profusion of aphorisms and other ways of using a single sentence to express complex ideas, this realm will always be one of my favorites, in which cosmology revolves around uncertainty’s inevitability in the universe’s rule of incompleteness. In the event, a new Message, inspired by my love, can be cast as transition from the fiery and frolicsome offerings that appeared in #24’s Essay.
“A Cosmic Feather’s Measures” is its title. “Across the Fathomless Expanses of Time’s Grand Spaces, the Cosmos Has Made My Tongue a Feather to Pluck Your Pleasure, a Rocketing Pulse That We Treasure at Our Leisure, Beyond Every Measure of Universal Yum at Our Ever-Imminent Beck & Call.”
A ‘mapping-function’ of this delving of desire’s cosmic depths is possible to conceive. “Carnality’s Cartography, Desire’s Geography” expresses just such a notion, as an allusion to even more comprehensive completion.
“Cartography of Carnality & Geography of Desire, No More Conducive to Comprehensive Mapping Than Would Be Creating a Complete Cosmic Atlas, Nonetheless Determine the Psychic Canvas of Any Specific Sojourner, As Well As Activating Everyone’s Drive to Fulfill Her Needs Or Sweetly to Suit & Succor His Fancy, in Aggregate an Everyday Expression of Primate Propensities to Seek Libidinal Release & Erotic Engagement, Whether Wanton Or Woebegone, Whether Ecstatically Elastic Or Otherwise, on Earth As in Heaven’s Universally Yummy Expanses.”
Ha ha. To feel the fascination inherent in every felicitous affirmation of totality and interconnection is to inhabit a heavenly realm indeed, especially in any libidinal context.
Much less heated, but equally full of resplendent wonder to nerdy sorts who resemble me, several similar missives explore a ‘physics joke’ about one of the corollaries of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. “Unexpected Artifacts” is the titular expression of the most recent version.
“Our Cosmic Cradle Rocks, But in Rarely Detected, Barely Detectable Fashion, in So Doing Nonetheless Incubating All the Stuff of Galaxies & Stars, the Earth & Us; Vast Spans of Energized Matter in Transit Contain Such Nearly Infinite Expanses of Time & Space That This Magnificent, Mysterious Process in Turn Practically Guarantees the Manifestation of Both Every Conceivable, Strange, Unexpected Artifact, & Its Contemplation.”
Very similar, a little simpler, “The Cosmic Cradle” covers the same terrain. "The Cosmic Cradle's Rocking, Rarely Detected, Barely Detectable, Has Incubated the Stuff of Galaxies & Stars, the Earth & Us: the Vast Span of Matter & Energy in Transit Contains Nearly Infinite Reaches of Time & Space That in Turn Yield Both Every Unexpected Artifact & Its Contemplation."
Along different and yet congruent tracks, another DMA item speaks to the varieties of life forms here on Earth, as well as to almost unimaginable bounties of embodied magic among the stars. Literature is full of this inquisitive, introspective speculation about life’s formulations and formulas. Here is “Cosmic Contemplations of Living.”
"Each Bit of Nature's Bounty, Though It Alternates Appearing As Exotic Fauna Or Phantasmagoric Floral Form, May Illuminate Contours of a Human Soul As It Flows Toward Contemplation of Cosmic Concatenations in All Their Endless & Infinitely Fascinating Variety."
Another, categorically distinct, composition examines one plausibly infinite set—all the stuff from which a cultural creator might craft artifacts—in relation to another, the ‘cosmic concatenations’ about contemplating the universe’s components. The title is apt: “Castoffs’ Mastery of Meaning’s Cosmic Immensity.”
“In Countless Ways, We May Procure Copious Commodified Castoffs, Crafty But Broken, That Typify Current Contexts, Yet However We Happen Upon Them, & Whatever Their Present Passage’s Dings Or Disabilities, We Face a Choice in Shaping a Specific Piece’s Precise New Purpose, Either That We Try to Foster Meaning’s Attempts at Mastery, Or That We Eschew Interpretations & Act As If the Cosmic Nub Neither Requires Rationality Nor Mandates That We Seek, No Matter the Searche’s Ultimate Futility, to Manifest This Interlocking Essence of Everything in Existence.”
Many of these Messages summarize matters of the way that matter itself ‘manifests’ the lot of us. These expressions may mostly amount to intuition and common sense, albeit they also quite likely mimic or even model material biological reality in all its varying omnipresence, as it were.
“Surface Paradoxes & Unerring Conjunction” spins such a yarn. “Somehow Or Other in the Course of Things As They Naturally Unfold, the Insides & Out of Everything in Existence Seem So at Odds at Times As Positively to Make War on Each Other, Simultaneously As, They Axiomatically & Unerringly Conjoin to Create All Matter in Motion Toward All Manner of Energetic Explosion.”
And indeed, matter’s twinned equivalence to energy’s own expression is demonstrable in various ways, from the subatomic to the galactic, ha ha, even if we can’t yet even figure out gravity’s role in everything. Here’s a Driftwood Message Art title that explores this terrain: “Gulping Thirstily For Understanding.”
“From Mundane Spurned Morsels to Almost Infinite Intergalactic Ebbs & Flows, Everything that Comes to Pass Throughout the Cosmos, & in Our Own Everyday Affairs, Makes Perfect Sense, an Inevitable Prod to Primate Propensities to Promulgate Cognition’s Comprehensive Comprehension, Notwithstanding How Any Such Attempt Truly to Perfect Understanding, While As Firmly Founded in Homo Sapiens As Thirsting For Drink & Gulping For Breath, Is As Futile As It Also Must Remain Adaptively Central to Our Thriving & Survival.”
Another artsy item returns its focus to the sorts of oddities and tidbits that fascinate this Driftwood Message Art creator with their variety, seemingly endless in their presentation of representative shapes and forms and images of suggestion and mimicry. Appropriately mysterious, the title is "Insights About the Inscrutable.”
"Even the Strangest Castoff Fragments of Flotsam Or Jetsam Can Signal Some Special Spectacle of the Cosmic Arc, Or They May, Via Lenses & Portals That Can Appear Any Day, Serve Up Insights About Otherwise Inscrutable Vistas in Existence's Vast Array, in Any Case in So Doing Illuminating the Human Drive & Duty to Notice, Explicate, & Account For All That Materializes in Our Lives."
Thus, quite clearly, the spindoctor’s First Existential Duty plays a key part in this cosmology of categorization, as it were. Whether one adopts such a creed for oneself or not, again, obvio po, Marshall Artistry enthusiastically embraces just such beliefs and practices.
Along a like path, another fun concept materializes from this maelstrom of manifestations, so to speak, although the emanation of the infinite in question defines a more regular geometry, as it were. “Ascertaining Innumerable Appurtenances,” in the event, formulates a headline.
“Even the Most Humble Panel, Haughtily Discarded Remnant of Nature & Labor, Presents at Least Two Faces With Which to Ponder & Parse & Interpret Ever Imminent Paradoxes, Cosmic & Psychic & Social Alike—of Light & Dark, Selfless Sacrifice & Tawdry Treachery, Gain & Loss, Altogether Always Another Opportunity to Learn & Grow By Seeking to Ascertain Innumerable Appurtenances of All-That-Is.
In one way and another, a single infinite potentiation invites us, participant-observers all, to bear witness to infinity’s seemingly ubiquitous applicability to everything, an infinity of infinities, as it were. Such a notion, no matter how sophomoric it might appear in the end, flows from the classic conundrum of ‘never arriving’ when one perpetually covers ‘half the distance’ to one’s destination.
"Listening to Poetic Advice" offers up a related thought to ponder. Even our internal considerations of everything can appear unlimited if we allow our minds to wander in contemplation.
"How Often Do We Linger at Life's Always Liminal Crossroads & Ponder Which Path to Take, Perceiving, Perhaps, the Poet's Wisdom About Our Inability Ever to Return to Whatever Precise Intersection Has Come Our Way, in Light of All of Which We Might Usefully Mandate Even More Attention to Such Cosmic Corporeal Conjunctions."
Culture itself can concatenate the musicality that ministrates the most cosmic orchestra’s concert. An abandoned piano, breaking apart while hung up on a rock in the Ivy River, gave up one of its keys and elicited such a point in the fullness of time, in the event with the titular status of “Humanity's Orchestration.”
"Conjoining Crackling Cacophony's Clashing Chords Can Cause Crashing Crescendos of Cascading Symphonies' Sonic Epiphanies; So Too May We Manifest Consonance's Magical Mellifluous Melange When We Mingle Otherwise Obviously Dissonant Voices: Such Audible Expression Circumscribes a Sublime Simulacrum of Natural Nuance, Blending Modest Forms & Humble Materials to Initiate Instances of
Soaring Acoustic Eruption That, in Their Turn, Reflect Humanity's Unprompted Scoring of the Orchestration of the Music of the Spheres."
And so we turn toward whatever combinations of notes and chords define any tune that marks our days and nights. Indeed, to stand beneath the spinning intergalactic wheels of interwoven universality, one may come to ephinanize in like fashion as does “Comprehending Any Cutting Arc.”
"The Most Poignant Potent Punctilious Pulse, As Sharply Cutting a Thrust As a Shooting Star's Arc Through High Desert Night, Quite Likely Results From Some Whirling Vortex of Magma & Minerals Or From Some Former Stormy Sea's Buried Bottom Or Even From Verdant Rainforest's Fecund Floor, So That to Cultivate Or Even Apprehend Incision's Slicing Scythe Necessitates Knowing the Sort of Seedbed From Which Has Flowered the Particular Cutting Edge in Question."
Upon even a modicum of reflection, or, one might state in the alternative, “the thing is,” any robust conceptualization of everything in existence requires the same historicity that the above message suggests. Perhaps inevitably, most attempts to express the complex skeins of the universal warp and woof end up lengthy, if not altogether convoluted. On the other hand, simplicity’s ‘soul-of-wit’ abbreviation can happen.
Such Thought Charms, however, in fact, mainly correspond to size: tinier items are more charming. Many of these squeeze in quite intricate ideas nonetheless. For example, "Ideal Impossibility" comes to mind.
"Never, Except at the Atomic Or Molecular Level, Do Nature's Nuggets Embody Their Existence As Anything So Perfect As Ideal Geometric Forms, a Fact of Life That Ought, Perhaps, to Warn Us About Potentate Plans to Promote a Managed Perfection That Eliminates Roughened Edges & Existential Imperfections to Yield One-Size-Serves-All Nonsense That Has Only Purported Efficiency's Expanded Profiteering to Recommend It."
These sorts of approaches to making a bit of colored, arboreal fluff have proved a sturdy stalwart in the panoply of this particular Marshall Artist. “Broken Bastions That Form Us All” serves as another exemplar in such a vein of tiny complexity.
"Giving Matters a Mere Modest Morsel of Attention, We Readily Discern That Gaia's Glories So Often Arise From Broken Bastions That We All, to an Extent, Consist of Leftovers, Castoffs, Discarded Materials That Nature Uses to Form Us & All the Rest of the Cosmic Swirl."
The multiple streams of Ponder Panels, Homily Sticks, various Charms, and more delve matters in such a way as to evoke cosmic themes, universal panoply, or other emanations of infinite reach. Ultimately, hundreds of these Marshall Arts manifestations, in dozens of subsets, are possible to parse and peruse. …(continued below the fold)
Empowered Political Forays—Heralding the Formerly Unheralded
Big Tent Review #24 provided a fairly comprehensive overview of the work of Harry Braverman, who so thoroughly deconstructed ‘scientific management’ over the course of his magnum opus. Here’s how that essay ended.
“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 Labor & Monopoly Capital’s subtitle advances in regarded to degradation and deskilling.
“‘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.”
Anyone with room temperature cognitive capacity will recognize Braverman in many aspects of their observations about how everything fits together. Intuitively satisfying sense accompanies any openminded reading of L&MC. Today’s articulation looks for a sense of how scholars, activists, theorists, and workers are using Braverman’s iconic pathfinding work in the here-and-now.
Before initiating this process, however, today’s installment will lay out the skeleton of Labor and Monopoly Capital, so as to assist in seeing the context and implications of criticism and kudos for the work. All of this either comes from #24 or shows up as some sort of screenshot from the book.
“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.
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. …
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. …
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. …
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.”
BRAVERMAN IN BTR #25
Et, voila! A student of such things as the springs of social life in labor or the sources of our particular societal form in monopoly capital will discover several threads that run from the first edition’s issue of Braverman’s master work. Braverman’s amazing life story and the grip that his work exerts on the imaginations of any who have ever had to rely on ‘selling their labor power’ in a capitalist system means that his effect on intellectual life will long remain a potent force.
Multiple ways exist of looking at those who have studied Harry Braverman and his Labor and Monopoly Capital. These approaches include the following, in every case a mixture of the work of critics and comrades: a general group of reviewers and interrogators start out; next up, readers will meet those who examine Braverman’s ouevre from a ‘classical’ perspective of one sort or another; after that, a fascinating sidebar and another entire spinoff, the ‘Labor Process Debate’ comes forward; following this set of discourses, we have a dissection of Braverman that bases itself on class-analysis; the penultimate group consists of material from the journal that Dr. Braverman edited, Monthly Review, and additional ‘mainline’ Marxist circles; last on our list is work from Matteo Pasquinelli, who takes Braverman into ‘the age of A.I.’
Inevitably, some of the same authors appear in different sub-sections, so to speak. For instance the estimable Marxist social theorist and thinker, John Bellamy Foster, shows up in various arenas. So saying, we’ll now ‘consider the cases,’ as it were.
The first tranche of commentators, those who might easily fit in other categories but who showed up in unusual ways or approached things in ways that might belong to several groups, include some excellent work by undergraduates and graduate students. “Dehumanization By Mass Production: the Cause of Worker Dissatisfaction?” offers Lisa Duong’s take on things obviously near and dear to Braverman, as in his subtitle, the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.
“Over the past two decades, the average annual workload for employees has grown by one hundred and sixty-three hours. As times progress, it seems more and more is expected of employees (witness the influence of “total quality management” and continual quality improvement programs). These ever-expanding workload expectations imposed by higher-level management tend to amplify the experience of degradation felt by lower-level workers.”
Andrej Markovcic writes in his wonderful infographic, Labor & Monopoly Capital at Fifty, that various SOP skeptics of Braverman swallowed the notion that a 'service economy' would make 'brain-workers' more prevalent, that the lack of union growth indicated placid class relations, and attendant blah blah blah. “(T)his (all) was taken by capitalism’s apologists as evidence that capitalists were willing to compromise and give workers a greater say in the enterprise.”
The intrepid researcher rejects this view. “In retrospect, those, like Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, who warned that these programs were a trap, were tragically proven correct. Labor- management cooperation and faith in 'win-win' outcomes made unions complicit in the 'management by stress' of their own members.
Today, working people have ever-less control over their working days. Private-sector union membership remains a shadow of its former self. The labor share of national income continues to fall. In the post-industrial economies, workers have been liberated from the assembly line, only to be shackled to GPS trackers.”
The above profferal, from Dollars and Sense’s December, 2024 issue, closes poignantly. “Despite predictions to the contrary, capitalism continues to be defined by the unreconcilable interests of those who sell their labor-power and those who buy it. Labor and Monopoly Capital will remain relevant as long as that conflict remains.”
In the year 2000, Social Thought and Research published an article by William and Clifford Staples, “Rereading Harry Braverman’s Labor & Monopoly Capital—20 years later.” The authors make a key point: “Braverman wasn't just writing about craftsmanship, he was a craftsman.” He took very personally the derision and humiliation that ‘scientific management’ entailed.
“Specifically, he showed how jobs that once required the worker to conceptualize as well as execute a task have been reorganized into, on the one hand, a mass of jobs requiring little or no conceptualization, and on the other hand, a much smaller number of elite managerial and technical jobs that require little else.” The authors-Staples, brothers, echoed Braverman about their own coming of age. Crafty jobs, skillful jobs, meaningful, challenging jobs had all disappeared.
“The unskilled, blue-collar labor market that we faced upon graduating from high school (Cliff in 1971 and Bill in 1975), was a world that had already been strip-mined of skill by the capitalist managers who had, by then, been hard at their own labors for a more than a century. Having herded all the craftsmen under one roof in the 19th century and beat up on them throughout the 20th, by the 1970s the job was pretty well done, and all that was left was some mopping up in those few trades that had proven either too difficult or too unprofitable to destroy.”
Michael Burawoy, a superstar sociologist, wrote about L&MC for a 1996 issue of Contemporary Sociology. “A Classic of Its Time” at once accepts how Braverman dismantled and reconstituted sociological conceptions of work and workers, of status and class, all the while recognizing that the work was, perhaps, ‘too objectivist.’
Despite this critique, however, Burawoy closes with this: the book’s theses and their impact have “coincide(d) with the separation of intellectuals from the working class. Labor and Monopoly Capital described the eclipse of the industrial craftworker, but it could as well have been about the eclipse of the intellectual craftworker who unites the academy with the working class, who resists the intense professionalization of the university, who refuses to package the lived experience of workers for scholastic consumption.
Once an artisan, now an organic intellectual, Braverman strove to refute his own thesis, to be an exception to his own laws. And here lies Braverman's crowning and lasting achievement: As a product of the unity of mental and manual work, Labor and Monopoly Capital proclaimed itself against the very tendencies it so persuasively described.”
John Bellamy Foster, meanwhile, Braverman’s colleague and acolyte at Monthly Review, incisively summarized the heart of what L&MC brought to the forefront in illustrating the conflicts and contradictions of wage-earning, automation, and international structures of production for profit. “(T)hinkers on the left like Corey in the 1930s, Mills in the 1950s, and Braverman (most convincingly) in the 1970s, saw the evolution of the labor process that as the key to understanding the whole process of class formation in the United States.
Building on Marx’s historical dynamic, Braverman’s analysis ran directly counter to the interpretations of Galbraith (1952: 118, 154) and Bell (1960: 33, 42) who saw the new middle class of white- collar workers as forces of stability in U.S. society, transcending the polarization between capital and the working class. For Braverman the new occupational sectors, originally associated with higher skills and higher status, and with a ‘new middle class’ of salaried workers, were themselves being subjected in turn to the relentless degradation of their working conditions, and thus integration with the old, production-based working class.”
Writing in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, Foster and his coauthor give readers “Braverman and the Structure of the Working Class.” Their subtitle from 2014 is suggestive: “Beyond the Degradation of Labor.”
A final voice among these ‘friendly critics’ might …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—Sam & Red, Chapter Four
Readers may recollect that this present project originated in a lengthy retelling of the original “Little Red Riding Hood” fairytale, in which things unfolded in ways both congruent with and yet distinct from their telling in the original yarn. While remaining true to the spirit of the faded remnants of the primal tale, decidedly Feminist sensibilities characterize our Rose Wolfsbane
From this beginning, the LRRH rewinding that culminated with the union of our pater and mater familias, as it were, has initiated this Sam & Red saga here. A dark foreboding hangs over the family, now including three young ones. A fortune-teller’s long gone predictions, if they end up an accurate forecast, leave our hero with little time left before his expiration date.
In the event, the previous lunar installment ended in this way. “At the last possible instant, instinct took over. The onrushing beast seemed not to feel the bolt between its eyes, even as a spume of blood sprouted like an orchid from its brows. Then, after rearing back violently, though without a sound, it fell so that its right forepaw severed Sam’s littlest toe from his foot as if cut by a razored blade.
As Sam regarded this obvious phenomenon, awaiting gushing crimson and painful agony, he paused and nodded. ‘Not much blood at all,’ he thought, at the precise moment that an initial wave of wracking severed loss sent him reeling a step, then two, in the direction of the two daughters who clung to each other and hid in the lee of a tall beech, where until this moment, they had made not a sound, a silence that Camille broke with a shriek of worry and love. “Daddy!!!”
The bleating cubs, to say the least, seemed disinclined to leave their mother’s hide behind. Thus, Sam orchestrated herding his kids homeward, finding them some crusts to nibble, and then, taking two little pails of milk back to the cubs, led them thenceforth as well with the cow secretions as a lure, guiding them to the family’s barn-sized shed, where he enclosed them for the night and waited.
Rose, snowshoes and ski-poles attached, returned before the highland’s completed early twilight. “We must not eat it!” she exclaimed spontaneously upon learning the salient facts, though neither she nor her husband could imagine what they might decently and reasonably make of the whole set of circumstances, beginning so long ago with his and his brother’s implicit bargain with that equally-so-long-ago bear.
‘The only way I can keep that promise,’ Sam explained to his astonished yet still skeptical wife, ‘is to nurse those cubs until, …’and as his lover’s eyebrows arched with an affirming, ‘Yes, and then?’ he blinked, repeatedly, shrugged, and grinned through tears.
Thereafter, our divine Ms. Rose quite soon had taken up pencils with a powerful purpose, twofold in fact. However, while the couple enacted a telling of this tale of service and redemption and arduous effort, this process took their loving libations and dutiful attentions into a Fourth Moon, and hence substance, both of and for, a subsequent recounting.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Our Red, or Rose if we prefer, had, as a way of coping if nothing else, taken up a daily diary habit since her oh-so-beloved husband’s recent dealings with the inevitably ominous, if only purported, fact of his final annual ambit before he reached the still-frisky age of thirty. She could not help but pose the question.
“What shall I do if my dearest lover dies before ten more moons have passed?” Her lips curled to hurl spittle and bile at all the goddesses and gods that might possibly be responsible for everything; in her open-minded, open-hearted way, however, she didn’t really care that much what had created everything.
She existed. And that alone was such grace, such brilliance, such joy, that she didn’t question it but for the occasional moments—she was looking on the wall, above the mantle, where hung the glossed and mounted tail from earlier iterations of her life’s unspooled yarn cycle, when she was contemplating all of the difficulties that nature at times sends to visit—the occasional moments when worry waved an enthusiastic hello and she sighed and shrugged in acknowledgment, as she waved back.
She loved her life. Each breath that she shared with her husband was as a gift from the elemental place where winds emerge to move everything of air about, at times in so doing ripping up living things to dash against the rocky ravines of their alpine home.
Each walk that they took together tempted them to treasure each other again, even in the snow, even on the track they’d taken to make a burnt offering of the wrathful Mother Bear that Sam had recently slain. His emotions had been delicate indeed, following that course so untoward his true intentions.
And that, of course, brings us to the two bear cubs that now were part of their freehold high in the hills, adjacent to the great Mountains themselves. Rose wanted to wonder what to do, but she had never thought of ursine creatures before, despite sweet Sam’s experiences and promises, as sorts that she might want to help any more than she would any of the great Goddess’ grand critters.
She assumed that they would get along. When they didn’t, she had to force herself to care about their well-being. Further, as often proved the case in such situations of schooling herself, she took up her sketchpad and set her mind to think fondly of the progeny of the beast that would have slain her husband and children without the first thought of her thereby devastated state-of-mind.
Sam had known—woods-wise as he was, both intrinsically and through experience—that the two snowy siblings would not long cohabit amicably without their mother’s riveting presence. By the second night of their confinement in the wooden cave that Rose and Sam created for them, ‘Mikhail’ had so battered and intimidated his more diminutive sister, ‘Mathilde,’ that the girl cub cowered in the corner furthest from a feeding station perch.
The good Missus Woodcroft fussed at Mikhail as if he were a wayward boy child, in a tone at once placatory and threatening, though the sensibility did not translate easily into bear-speak. He only cocked his head inquiringly if Rose approached him. Sam, meanwhile, ever analytical and practically opportunistic, fetched a rope that would restrain him, without altogether hogtying him.
Before day’s end, unfortunately, upbraided and scolded though he might be, the burly adolescent ursine had utterly sundered his hempen ties, as if a gnawing blade had persisted in letting Mikhail loose to harry his sister. Given the value of a single decent coil, a day’s labor by Red and he and children in twisting together strands of twine that Sam brought from market, neither of them wanted to try again straight away. They sighed then, simultaneously.
All at once, Rose brightened like a dawn’s first direct rays of sunlight. “You watch, husband!” She spoke with authority while her lover kowtowed their aggressive, elder, male visitor. She brandished her pencil and produced her layered pad of linen-paper canvases. “I’ll think of something!”
By their third dawn together, in fact, the truly, lusciously rosy woman of our tale had designed a halter. She sketched it with the same implement that she used to make the original record from which this telling has emerged in modern form.
“Yes!” Sam exclaimed when he looked, immediately recognizing the purposive utility that his spouse, as brilliant and scintillating in thinking as she was wild and wanton in love, was holding out for him to see, at least quickly comprehending what was up so soon as he stopped glancing at her leonine state, her night’s shift discarded by their rumpled bed where she had been completing her drawings after their first candlelit break in another ‘First Quarter Moon’ night of loving libations.
Her nudity always stunned him, yet her persistence in presenting her drawing returned him to a sensible response, and his affirmation erupted from his lips almost as enthusiastically as her naked flesh elicited other sorts of incantations and emanations of delight. He had taken the pad into which she had sewn a dozen panels of sturdy paper, a heavy stock that she had learned how to formulate all by herself, by fits and starts of trial and error.
Looking at her drawing while still oh-so-aware of her furnace of flesh, he stated outright, “I will make it before dawn,” then setting her tangible crafty efforts aside so that he could gather her ample carnal gifts to his now also naked torso. Their joining lips electrified them both, though they knew not of the physics or chemistry of this greater heatedness that typified these ecstatic embraces of each other, epiphany, eternity.
Sam could always refresh himself afterward with minimal sleep. It had been a gift that he shared with his Father’s brother and his Grandfather. He teased his brother continuously, gazing fixedly at his sibling’s sleeping form with wide eyes’ brightly shining till William’s own eyelids fluttered and opened to regard Samson’s staring with a start, at which Sam’s ever-ready chortles would bubble anew.
With Mathilde awaiting rescue from her fiendish, selfish sibling, Sam slumbered only a few hours after Rose’s rosy, loving glory had glittered with glee, and she had drifted into dreamland’s dramas with her strawberry curls nestled in his shoulder. He slept deeply and dreamed about making things; he woke prepared, a smile on his lips and a plan in his brain.
Like all but the most meager alpine farming domiciles, Sam’s and Rose’s homestead included a well-laid-out shed that contained the necessities for shaping and repairing, or crafting, implements and devices—an anvil; two bellows for different sorts of fires, atop two small but well-knit ovens; all manner of tongs and hammers and stocks of wood and metal and leather; these and other things were available to our hero.
The inside would heat quickly if he needed fire but otherwise stayed just slightly warmer than outside, which in this case was far from friendly, for, even though the blanketing snows of the wintry half the year had remained at bay since the New Moon brought us to this Chapter, the shrill shriek of the most insistent North wind had been howling for days. He had gloves that left his fingers free.
“So long as I work hard enough,” he chuckled slightly in spite of how frigid he felt, “I won’t lose anything to frostbite.”
And in cutting the leather, piercing it with honed and sturdy awls, selecting and bending sapling branches to line the bib, then attaching four unbreakable strands together to make a puppet of whatever wore this little breastplate, he labored his thumbs and their offspring till he sweat inside the fur that covered his palms.
“My brother wouldn’t believe this,” Samson laughed as, later that morning, he prodded Mikhail to repeat the dance that Sam had taught the beast. “I have no choice. I must show him.”
Both his and Rose’s families, for the most part, lived little more than a day’s ride, or a longer day’s dutiful march, from the meadows and brooks and stands of birch that formed the fringe of their very own nook in the Great Mountain’s crook, where flowed a true nymph-of-the-Goddess brook, the banks of which supported a stout little bridge that led to their only road to elsewhere. …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—“Lu-Lu, Or, ‘Don’t You!’“
(The origins of this story take me back. It was the first tale that I ever truly completed. Moreover, it seemed to me then—and still does—almost a perfect exemplar of a mandatory morality tale about families and children in a medical-model Anglo-American tradition. One can go back before laudanum.
Children once were a collective effort. One need only think of a learned novel such as Kristin Lavransdatter to drive this point home. However, times change and, with the rise of the commoditized life of bourgeois existence, offspring often devolve to a status of a ‘line-item accounting’ entry, often enough ‘in the red,’ so to say.)
So let me tell you. Don’t interrupt, even if you feel you must. Let me finish; then you can ask me anything. That was our agreement, right? You remember, right? After I covered for you all those times and then paid the bill, that was how we left it. You’d listen if I asked.
I’ll take that little nod as assent. Okay. We’re comfortable now in our little cozy enclave, you have your favorite cushion, I’ve got my cigarettes, just in case, so here goes. Grandma Betsy—Elizabet—saved my life. I’ve heard her words in my sleep.
“Don’t you…Goddamn do dat to dis chile!” That’s what she said, all the while most probably—I was barely there after all—picking tobacco from between her teeth. You know granny. She looked like me, scrawny and tough, but with more skepticism, you remember, like a bad attitude sometimes, but with a cigarette dangling smoke and ash.
That was 1950. I was six, and you were not yet close to mental or carnal conception. From what Papa told me later, anyway, Grandma repeated herself, with even more emphasis. “Don’t you…Goddamn…do dat…to dis chile!!!” She was, obviously, addressing our mother, about me.
I was only six, like I said, so I don’t really recollect much at all. I was off the chain most of the time. I remember that well enough.
You didn’t come along till I was sixteen and off the reservation permanently. You ended up more like Mama, just a perfect little beautiful doll like ‘Lovely Loreen.’ Even your name sounds elegant: Briggitte.
Don’t you give me that look. You know what I’m saying little sister; just look at you in your designer stretch yummy pants. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.
I guess, maybe, Mom didn’t want anything to do with more children—till you, anyway, ha ha—after I turned out like I did. I know, you’ve ‘heard stories’ and all, etc., etc., etc., even if never the whole crazy situation. In a nutshell, I was surely if not altogether purely a wild little thing.
Had I gotten loose here back in the day, in your super-spesh carrel, for example, I would have ruined your little study, plummeting Tiffany asunder and trashing polished-oak here, there, everywhere. Yes, indeed. I was a holy terror.
You’ve only listened to a few specifics prior to this. I only remember bits and pieces directly myself, shadows of recollection, but both Mama and Papa have confirmed all the pertinent particulars, whatever you want to call it. You can ask them.
To give myself a little break, though, I wasn’t truly malicious about things. I didn’t want to hurt anybody or destroy things, except for once or twice, but boy oh boy could I get mad. I hated to be ignored; that’s God’s truth.
And I was clumsy too. Still am. A klutzy artist who likes to drink and get wild. In Loreen’s unexplored depths, our blessed maternal unit still blames me.
But we both know what was really going on. Mama’s admitted as much; you’ve heard her. I memorized what she told you, two Christmases ago. She’d finished half that bottle of rum herself.
“I had you, my little angel, knowing what a child could be, but your poor sister,” me, in other words, her fighting urchin, Louise-Ann? Mama found herself young, pregnant, and unprepared, but figured she’d find a way to hire out the mothering. Instead, I earned my nickname.
To put it mildly, in other words, farming me out didn’t work very well. I wasn’t her ‘pretty little girl’ at all. And I had some brutal tricks. Let me tell you. The first, dear God, started when I was three, or at least that’s what Mama’s said.
And just the look on her face when she initially admitted as much, in those therapy sessions that she suggested seven, eight years back, tells me why I chose this approach as my SOP.
The setting was our big, formal, ‘living room.’ You remember, where none of us ever lived. It felt like a stadium when I was little, where I could play to the crowd, ha ha.
It’s where Mama entertained her most especially esteemed guests. You know. The set she intended to join despite her roots in the local Frenchie muck. And what did I do?
It makes me laugh. I was a three year old at that point, but with wickedly wise ways of knowing any weakness. When I streaked through the foyer from the kitchen, I burst on her and a quartet of other stylish, proper matrons, every one of them wrapped in slips and girdles and plentiful cloth separating air from flesh.
I, on the other hand, was naked and florid, pink from exertion, and shrieking my nickname like a banshee, laughing the whole time: “Lu-Lu, Lu-Lu, Lu-Lu, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
God knows for sure that our dear Mama despised public nudity almost as much as she detested humiliating spectacles of disobedience. Before you came along, she would make a scene whenever Papa took her down to Toronto and they unveiled a new statue in the altogether. Yeah, it’s pretty funny.
And my little stunt was hilarious, but I now know that Loreen then—for at least a quick minute—wished me dead and buried. Now if there’s one thing Mama hates worse than ‘lewd displays,’ it’s when anyone at all—and especially her kin, and most especially me—willfully wrecks her plans.
Our Ma would make a good murderess. She exacts blood from those who cross her. She does not believe in compromise; any conflict is a fight to the death.
Right, it’s a laugh riot. But it’s also scary. Maybe a year after my first naked craziness, with daily routine mayhem and stress in between, I pulled my first big act of social sabotage. Yes, yes. I’m laughing, but it was just grotesque.
It’s just that I was just so clearly operating according to my needy little strategy, much like the Wicked Witch. “I’m gonna get you, and your little dog too!”
Anyhow, the thing is that Loreen’s always been high on Canada Day, right? Well, in 1949, July 1 was a Friday, so her annual soiree was especially huge. I saw some of Pa’s pictures; there were at least fifty of those big rectangular metal tables on the lawn, each with its own pristine, blinding white linen covering cloth.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry. Just picturing it all again, it’s hilarious. There everybody was, sweating like caged beasts, frantic and furred with finery, lots of really vivid red, of course, the color of revolution, right? And also our Canada.
Every table had a centerpiece, but the huge bunched-quartet set-up in the middle? My God, it was like something at the Academy Awards. That was where the Premier, of all Quebec, was sitting.
Maurice Duplessis was basically a pudgy fascist who wanted women pregnant and in the kitchen and figured we needed feudalism again for everyone but for him and all his rich cronies. He was the absolute pinnacle of Quebecois society: wealthy, entitled, in charge, the social registrar as much as the official leader.
As such, you can be sure, he epitomized everything to which Loreen Bertrand aspired. Surrounded by bankers and bigwigs—you know, that was right when Papa’s biggest coups were happening—there this guy was, Duplessis, with our own Mama next to him and Pa on her other side.
And Aunt Michelle, right? Well, she was maybe fourteen then, and her job was keeping a bit in my mouth and a leash round my neck. Excuse me. I just can’t help laughing. You know?
Because that was exactly as possible to accomplish as delaying sunrise by an hour. Ha ha ha ha. Anyhow, so I’d gotten loose, and there was Michelle running after me, with that look she still has sometimes—I may have put it there first, God knows—of pure terror, like she’s about to vomit uncontrollably.
Hundreds of people. I still picture it and howl sometimes. It’s a miracle I’m still alive, but there I went, like the Roadrunner, right? I was always lickety split, won all the races, greased lightning, that was me.
I went straight through to the middle in about three heartbeats. In one beat more, I’d climbed onto the giant central table set-up. And of course I was screaming, my usual. “Lu-Lu, Lu-Lu, Lu-Lu, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
And everybody, everybody, even Mama, had that look. WTAF? Horror and uncertainty both stared back at me, people all wondering, ‘Wait. What’s happening? Is it supposed to be like this?’ That scene is actually the very first thing I remember clearly.
And there, right there in front of me—I can still see it—was the cake, taller than I was. Uncut. Untasted. Creamy Lemon. Waiting to be grabbed and spoiled, ha ha ha. I know. ‘What could I have been thinking?’ But in I dove.
I got through to Mama. That was it. I wanted her to notice me and know my power, rescue me from my willfulness with her love. Oh, oh, oh, I was a hard one to tame. I was the willful source of mortification.
And actually, right after that, almost, I did it again. Labour Day that year, 1949 I’m pretty sure, was a Thursday, so another gigantic to-do, inevitably, though I’ve seen no pictures of that one.
Mama had guards this time—that was the first party where Papa paid for ‘ushers,’ ha ha—in the aisles who had specific instructions to apprehend any unattended female child on the loose between the tables. Little tactical witchy thing that I was, I struck elsewhere.
Mama had sacked Michelle, of course, but Mary—you don’t know her, our cousin—didn’t have any better luck. I got loose and wreaked bloody havoc on the show. Once again, my own dear mother had hateful thoughts that regretted my birth, ha ha.
Basically—just so you see the scale of things, you know, a benchmark—I knew that the spiked punch was a big hit. It was one of Pa’s naughty recipes. And those enormous crystal punchbowls!
That was my target. I crossed the line with that one. I needed correcting, ha ha. That’s when Ma started looking for her ‘expert’ intervention, despite my renewed contrition, ha ha.
Afterwards, every time, Loreen would badger me to admit my wickedness. Yes, I giggle about it too. But she was relentless. And in so many words, I did, obviously, ‘admit my wicked ways.’
My automatic response, eventually, after Mama was about to explode like a rotten tomato thrown in your face, became a tight-lipped, “Yes Mama.” And that’s all I’d say. And, for a couple years after my first ‘streak-out,’ she bought it.
Only when she started to insist that I “really mean it” about being less a hellion did she figure out that her five year old daughter was lying on purpose. That was right after that Labour Day fiasco, when she saw what a little liar I was, and she started pestering our dear beleaguered father about this new guy, Dr. Schmidt. Mama believed in her heart that solutions like medicine were there if we just asked.
You also know, very much on the other hand, Thomas Bertrand. Just like me, he disliked doctors. And like anyone with good sense, he really hated spending pointless money.
Still, eventually, Loreen wore down our Pa. Two months after my sixth birthday, Mama and I had an appointment, on March 3, 1950, to look at ‘treatment options.’ …(continued below the fold)
Nerdy Nuggets—Flexner’s Report & Compartmentalized Medicine
The phrases ‘snake oil salesman’ and ‘patent medicine,’ in their origins, speak to a similar context. While one could premise untold volumes on this sentence, perhaps its central element would remain capitalist production and marketing of ‘cures,’ on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a centering of the realm of property and ownership in such a bourgeois setting, even when the specific arena of concern is wellness in one fashion or another.
As a matter of course, ‘herbal remedies’ and ‘natural healer’ suggest a different tone and background, full of plant lore and burning witches. In the event, today’s essay here presents a briefing about one aspect of well-being in the modern realm: in essence, how medicine as a profession became somehow an abstraction of, or even a counterpoint to, healthy living.
In this vein, a background summary might be apt. While a certain superficiality and vagueness must ever attend such a description as characterizing the United States ‘as the central research laboratory of modern, so-called free enterprise,’ one may—especially for purposes of introduction—ask for a recognition of the many ‘grains of truth’ in such an outlook. Ours is, after all, the very birthplace of ‘selling snake oil,’ both in scholarly and popular ways irrefutable, if not immutable as a common way of seeing things.
Inevitably, given this applicability of a ‘marketing framework oversight,’ so to say, personal health—which is indisputably interesting and important to the vast majority of persons—must become a locus of these marketplace phenomena. What this meant, in some sense, as the U.S.A. assumed its ‘manifest destiny’ atop the plutocratic heap, to coin a phrase, is that lots and lots and lots of ways of ‘selling healthy habits and outcomes’ came to the fore.
One aspect of this was that medical doctoring became a pinnacle profession, so to say. Ambitious people wanted to be doctors. Masses of people listened very attentively to whatever M.D.’s had to say. In the U.S., one result of this was an unprecedented proliferation of medical schools, which is where Abraham Flexner comes onstage.
Abraham Flexner’s skills included a host of useful requisites for life in modern times. He founded a school so profitable that it made his fortune. He married well, one of his former students who came from a wealthy family and whose literary successes funded her husband’s graduate work, which led to his now legendary reportage that, among other things ‘professionalized’ medicine and its inculcation as a discipline.
The so-called medicalized miracles of modern life had already begun during Flexner’s lifetime. His restless intelligence took stock of such matters hither and yon. Thus, perhaps, one might logically view the author’s follow-up project as almost predictable, in the form of Prostitution in Europe, to which the “Chairman of the Bureau of Social Hygiene” in New York—none other than John D. Rockefeller—contributed the Introduction.
One could easily continue and cite his brilliance at contextualizing social problems and at building sociopolitical coalitions, not to mention helping to insure productive positions of influence for relations and friends. This man of humble Jewish origins, the first in his family to attend university, had the distinction of having none other than the aforementioned oil-industrialist as a personal and professional and friendly acquaintance.
Moreover, as already alluded to, he championed women’s rights and whatever other ‘best-practices’ of liberalism that must form a part of any honorably human future. As such, that the head of the Carnegie endowment was also in his circle is not surprising, a familiarity that led proximately to the decision by the Foundation to commission the document that in many ways made modern medical practice what it is to this day: a product of licensing, pharmaceutical products, and surgical magic born of war.
As will often prove the case in such situations of social advance, Flexner’s facility, his achievements and success and prosperity, corresponded with responding to—if never completely addressing—various social crises. One such, in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, particularly in North America, was that too many charlatans proffered ‘healing services’ after attending so-called ‘medical schools.’
Part of the issue, according to Flexner’s way of thinking, was how to get rid of the ‘diploma-mill’ establishments altogether. Inevitably, this POV dovetailed quite neatly with various Rockefeller initiatives in what one might call biosecurity capitalism, a farsighted awareness of important sources of future profits and power.
The good professor said as much himself, in 1910, to preface his famous report as it hit the presses. “The curse of medical education is the excessive schools. The situation can improve only as weaker superfluous schools are extinguished.”
That Flexner was brilliant, if not indisputable, is an indisputably smart money bet. Moreover, he fiercely sought to share his thinking and activities in ways that might lead to general progress and social improvement. He articulated such approaches, often for little or no money or other gainful end. Here is one such case, from almost three decades beyond his monumental, world-shifting report on teaching doctors.
“We live in a world that would be helpless without electricity. Called upon to mention a discovery of the most immediate and far-reaching practical use we might well agree upon electricity. But who made the fundamental discoveries out of which the entire electrical development of more than one hundred years has come?”
In answering this query by naming Michael Faraday, he goes on to divide the great laboratory physicist’s career into two parts. “Four years later a second and equally brilliant epoch in his career opened when he discovered the effect of magnetism on polarized light.
His earlier discoveries have led to the infinite number of practical applications by means of which electricity has lightened the burdens and increased the opportunities of modern life. His later discoveries have thus far been less prolific of practical results.
What difference did this make to Faraday? Not the least. At no period of his unmatched career was he interested in utility.”
One might take issue with this last paragraph. If true, he was one-of-a-kind, in my experience of the world. So far, not a single human in my substantial sample would ever renounce ‘all interest in utility’ in his or her volitional activities. The odds of a large sample’s showing that kind of bias—a hundred percent to nothing—are basically also zero.
This yields a plausibly prescient proposition. What if conditions encouraged everyone to delve the depths of nature and nurture and how things work? In such halcyon environs, we might well discern the means to deconstruct the various rubrics that serve to bind us and, from how we come to understand them, these rubrics, we manage to construct something more beautiful and potent and enjoyable.
Pondering matters in this way, we would once more contradict Abraham Flexner’s enthusiastic proposition that King Capital’s most enthusiastically promoted scientific efforts have ever been unconcerned with such utilitarian matters as profit and defense of property rights. One might even assert, baldly, a willingness to wager a small sum—somewhere that such activity is legal, ha ha—that one could devise a very persuasive frame for the hypothesis that Faraday wanted or otherwise appreciated wealth or other gain as a result of his efforts.
However, in the Harper’s Magazine article in which Professor Flexner, then at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, propounded corporate science’s ‘freedom of inquiry’ as the only way to go, he also recognizes the necessity of acknowledging a powerful premise that resonates powerfully right now. This proposition posits that cognition plays a central part in our ongoing viability, irreducibly as organisms and, arguably, collectively as a species.
“In the atmosphere that envelopes the world today, it is perhaps timely to emphasize that the part played by science in making war more destructive and more horrible,” he begins. He cites the pure motives of Alfred Nobel without irony at this point.
Flexner finishes the sentence so as to the reveal himself as an ignorant stooge at best. He asserts that this ‘technology of horror and destruction’ “was an unconscious and unintended by-product of scientific activity.”
I highly recommend that any reader who finds Flexner’s contention even vaguely plausible consider the incisive arguments of today’s essay, “Cultural Foundations of Uranium Dreams,” which dispositively demonstrates that warmongers have always and ubiquitously found science’s warmaking ‘contributions’ to be mouthwateringly essential to capital and its colonial/imperial high-and-mighty guidance of the planet’s plunder.
This does not apply directly to Flexner’s role in transforming the face of medical education, yet we might consider something of evidentiary value that we mentioned just above, the collaboration with the Rockefeller’s and their corporate plutocratic colleagues hither and yon. In this scheme of things, inherently, those who predicate their ‘careers’ on summing matters up—which is what Flexner’s report was, right?—will have patrons, employers, or other ‘supporters-&-followers’ upon whose support their efforts depend.
Thus, if—unlike our hypothesized Faraday—Abraham Flexner had no ‘interest in utility’ in practicing his particular brand of reportage and summary-of-options, then he, rather than the ‘father of electromagnetism,’ was a unique specimen in this regard.
Furthermore, these sorts of connections clearly could matter in regard to science-&-war discourses if for no other reason than that the Rockefellers proved the primary source of funds and other assistance for much research in the ‘medical arena’ even as this largesse intersected with big-bang discoveries like the fissioning of Uranium, a research interest that was so alluring for Rockefeller foundations that they financed, at least in part, every single particle-physics laboratory on our fair planet, one upshot of which is that thermonuclear Mass Collective Suicide now threatens all and sundry.
The subtitle of Flexner’s best-known work, as often proves true, can guide an observer to make apt assessments. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching clearly demonstrates that instruction is part of the process. Nobody who participated in all of this could conceivably eschew all ‘utilitarian purpose,’ surely.
Moreover, here—as in his work on European sex-work—the volume’s introductory material emanates from the most-high indeed. Henry S. Pritchett presents observers with a longstanding Massachussetts Institute of Technology President, who thereafter spent almost a quarter century at the helm of the already noted Teaching Foundation.
In initiating Flexner’s most well-known work, he writes, “(i)n making this study the schools of all medical sects have been included. (S)o long as a man is to practise medicine, the public is equally concerned in his right preparation for that profession, whatever he call himself, —allopath, homeopath, eclectic, osteopath, or whatnot. It is equally clear that he should be grounded in the fundamental sciences upon which medicine rests, whether he practises under one name or under another.”
Andrew Carnegie’s wealth would, thereby, influence or even control a key realm for the successful operation of any modern society, which is to say health-care and the practice of medicine. This highlighting of a problematic inadequacy of standards of knowledge and instruction began like this, in regard to the top five issues.
First, “(f)or twenty-five years past there has been an enormous over-production of uneducated and ill trained medical practitioners. This has been in absolute disregard of the public welfare and without any serious thought of the interests of the public. Taking the United States as a whole, physicians are four or five times as numerous in proportion to population as in older countries like Germany.”
To effect salubrious transformation, “(t)he development which is here suggested for medical education is conditioned largely upon …first… the creation of a public opinion which shall discriminate between the ill trained and the rightly trained physician, and which will also insist upon the enactment of such laws as will require all practitioners of medicine, whether they belong to one sect or another, to ground themselves in the fundamentals upon which medical science rests.” Such a POV seems common-sensical enough.
Then again, a coming installment will look closely at the powerful impact of Cuban practitioners in raising public-health outcomes and delivering care to very poor places around the world, and in beneficent and demonstrably health-promoting fashion. So much has this proven so that medical students from North America and Europe, as well as Latin America and Africa, are now receiving certifiable board-level instruction at the island nation’s medical schools.
As regards Abraham Flexner’s other most renowned ‘statement of conditions,’ the above-referenced Prostitution in Europe, another prominent emissary—in the person of Mr. Rockefeller—penned the prefatory remarks. He too, as the Chairman of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, was most interested in efficiency and control. This institutionalized approach to urban issues “was created as a result of the work of the Special Grand Jury, which investigated the white slave traffic in New York City in 1910. It was organized only after a thorough inquiry had been made, involving conferences with over a hundred leading men and women in the city as to the relative value of a public commission as compared with a private organization.
The opinion prevailed that a permanent, unofficial organization, whose efforts would be continuous, would probably be more lasting and effective; the Bureau of Social Hygiene was therefore established in the winter of 1911.” Rockefeller finishes his short into in this way.
“Without raising any question as to how far European experience is significant for America, the author describes prostitution in Europe and discusses the various methods of handling it now employed in the large cities of Great Britain and the Continent. The subject is a highly controversial one.
For this reason, its investigation was assigned to one who had, on the one hand, previously given it no critical thought or attention, but whose studies of education in this country and abroad had demonstrated his competency to deal with a complicated topic of this nature. Mr. Flexner was absolutely without prejudice or preconception, just as he was absolutely unfettered by instructions. He had no previous opinion to sustain; he was given no thesis to prove or disprove.”
A contextual web has taken shape. It illuminates the manner in which vast wealth assumed a decisive role in establishing parameters for crucial questions of social control and public welfare. A competent educational entrepreneur thus served the function of a beard, taking on the surface appearance for authority from more deeply seated sources of imprimatur at the very heart of capitalism.
If for no other reason than that it illustrates this hegemony of the super-rich, considering such emanations of authority as Flexner’s reports might give us clues about how society actually operates, how moral and practical standards of care come to pass, and so forth. In every such case, perhaps without exception, the guiding hand of Mammon manipulated the machinery of the social evolution of social control.
The result was a more ‘authoritative’ capacitation of physicians, at least in terms of a Carnegie or Rockefeller Foundation perspective. Interestingly enough, Americans now, and as we shall see in part because of a fetishized insistence on what we can call cartel-based medicine, are some of the unhealthiest people on Earth. Furthermore citizens here are absolutely the least robust ‘advanced’ population in the whole world.
Whatever understanding we may infer from these facts, one obvious conclusion is that, in much the same way that Sinclair Lewis portrays the main character in his novel of doctoring, Arrowsmith, as a bellwether of the modern doctor, the origins of contemporary medical practice occurred in these bureaucratic cauldrons where, no matter than Abraham Flexner’s name will always occupy the byline, the lubrication of fiscal bounty paid the piper and called the tune. …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—A Navigating ‘Social’ Follow-Up
(BTR’s first TikTokish installment began with this revealing paragraph. “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.”
Following the perusal and fairly thorough assessment of the litigation about this ‘Commie-App,’ last issue’s material ended along these lines. “Some Initial Thoughts About Follow-Up” was the section heading.
“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, then, 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.”)
As already acknowledged, repeatedly today as well as in general, I am the very epitome, the clear expression of a definition, of a naif, one who is capable of the silliest and vilest Pollyannaish tendencies imaginable. Nonetheless, one may gladly recall Mark Lane’s quip as he is dismantling William F. Buckley over the Warren Commission’s fraudulent recounting of JFK assassination.
“Two or more persons acting in concert to effect an illegal end” is the 'textbook' definition of 'conspiracy,' according to the ever-affable radical, litigator, rabble-rouser, gadfly, and film-maker. Could various actors in this drama—not in as ‘thrilling’ a manner, obviously, as the plot to murder a President but still clearly fascinating in all sorts of ways—be conspiring toward illegal gains or illicit ends? That answer is one big duh?
Can one prove it? Not yet, any more than one can so far disprove such an accusatory postulate. What I’m doing today, first of all, or perhaps primarily is better, is following up the Supreme Court’s refusal to enjoin the U.S. Government from shutting TikTok down, along with Donald Trump’s window of reprieve, and so forth, and in addition setting a Big Tent stage for a forever series on these seemingly central issues of ‘Social-Media’ in the here-and-now, thereby describing the present passage in what will, hopefully if far from certainly, be a useful and incisive fashion.
Secondly, I’m going to relate at least a bit my own frustrating or fantastic experience in trying to become a TikTokker myself. Since this has, for the most part, been a lame manifestation of any au courant capacity on my account, the process will happen more quickly, in fewer pages, blah blah blah.
Jimbo & TikTok
Because so little happened, we’ll examine this second aspect of things straightaway. Figuring out how to bring up my profile took me a few days, ha ha. I only got eighty characters, so that was tough. “Oh my. 71 radical years, mainly in Southern Appalachia;” that was the first stab.
The day before I found my way here, I noticed that the ‘AI Context’ for a search on the question, “Can you use tiktok on a laptop computer?’ included a warning that I had been overlooking for a week or so. ‘This possibility, while true, means less functionality for creating or uploading’ the videos that are the heart of the experiential nexus, alas.
I also managed to find out that the site was pretty prescient about my interests. “For You” presented a video of a staged encounter between a uniformed female Gringo copper, imperious and accusatory, and a wheelchair-bound Black kid, who can’t convince this ‘arresting officer’ that he couldn’t possibly be the thief whom the police are seeking.
“Explore” was pretty predictable, pets and pussy, exercise and shopping, nature and innuendo, blah blah blah. None of it had much appeal to a nerd like me. I tried searching for “Ukraine,” and the system froze. Who knows? I will figure this out, assuming I continue to ‘live and breath,’ ha ha.
I also checked out “LIVE,” which suggested that an upgrade or switch to ‘mobile’ might be necessary to do anything here. At best, “Messages” will contain nothing till I become more functional. “Upload” at least offered the option to ‘select’ or ‘drag’ a file of this kind: more later, maybe.
The above, basically nonexistent, ‘experience’ defines the extent of my start as a TikTokker. My intention is to learn a bit and find a way to participate more fully, an idea that I might readily render as applicable to my laboring away on SubStack, X, and all that jazz. I also have some youthful TT aficionados who, with luck, I can recruit as tutors and consultants and such
Procedural Dispositions Again
All righty then! On to the material-reality-briefing we go, as it were. The U.S. Supreme Court has no more to say. If the USG wants to do so, shutting down this ‘commie contrivance’ in our part of North America is perfectly permissible.
But wait, there’s more. Even as ByteDance—TT’s ‘parent’—was shutting things down on January 19th, Donald Trump was displaying his deal-making propensities, as well as the truly astonishing breadth of his interests in ‘what in hell is going on.’ He promised to ‘pause’ the closure, a vow that he kept the day of his inauguration.
TT opened up for its users once again, and a month later, Apple and Google and all the usual suspects again made downloading the app available. In the meanwhile, Donald and his minions went looking for a buyer who could get fifty-percent TT ownership and ‘patriotic oversight’ of data collection in place of leaving that function in the hands of ‘commie rats,’ ha ha.
Atop the list of potential purchasers have been Oracle and Microsoft, with Apple also one of the possibilities. A look into this process, possibly completely emblematic of how monopolized mediation actually operates today, will be forthcoming, a third installment of the pair of appearances already appearing, last issue and today.
For BTR #25, this section will give a bit more context and offer excerpts from President Trump’s Executive Order and then ‘call it a day.’ As to the former, The Verge provided the clearest and most extensive update, although it was, nevertheless, extremely superficial in analytical, political-economic, or evaluative terms. “The ban law is still on the books as politicians and business leaders work on what to do next, and the clock is ticking on the current extension.”
The execution of this EO did not offer a number, in the event, although the title showed an appreciation of the subtleties of the situation. The mandate styled itself as an “APPLICATION,” as in the noun for applying something like a law, “OF (THE) PROTECTING AMERICANS FROM FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATIONS ACT TO TIKTOK.
After some boilerplate blah blah blah, Trump writes, “I have the unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions. To fulfill those responsibilities, I intend to consult with my advisors, including the heads of relevant departments and agencies on the national security concerns posed by TikTok, and to pursue a resolution that protects national security while saving a platform used by 170 million Americans. My Administration must also review sensitive intelligence related to those concerns and evaluate the sufficiency of mitigation measures TikTok has taken to date.”
After this appeal to part of his base constituents, he takes what is likely an accurate swipe at the Biden blokes who orchestrated this entire charade. “The unfortunate timing … of the Act—one day before I took office as the 47th President of the United States—interferes with my ability to assess the national security and foreign policy implications of the Act’s prohibitions before they take effect.
This timing also interferes with my ability to negotiate a resolution to avoid an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform while addressing national security concerns. Accordingly, I am instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.”
At minimum, the behind-the-scenes perambulations would be quite a show. Seriously, while it might not match Peaky Blinders brilliance, one can totally sense performative potential and audience outreach that would have Netflix already making plans but for the likely ‘united front’ of monopoly media against those ‘rotten commies from China’
Additional followup in this inevitably geopolitical realm…(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Fetishizing the Weather
For fun and ease of completion, I’m leaving the text below, which had served as a space-holder for whatever I would discover to say on the general topic of ‘Climate Change.’ I still need time to complete this ‘discovery,’ ha ha. But what’s here was pleasant enough, to me, as a careful and attentive reader of Big Tent Review, so I’ve left it for next issue or perhaps #27 instead.
You know, like an experiment. I’m mediating existence as I go. Here’s a new wrinkle.
So the ubiquity of the story is astonishing, if one thinks about it even a little. Still, its outlines are easy enough to sketch. ‘The climate is warming, and it’s your fault, you little privileged pig, with your cars and your airplanes.’ Therefore, ‘we’ve got to “cut carbon.”’
This premise, for anyone who has made the entire Big Tent journey, will be familiar inasmuch as the futuristic apocalyptic revolutionary sex farce in these pages, Mad Cows & Englishmen, hinges on just such an eventuality, the reduction of emissions. Norman Bates incredulous question, “Cow farts?” shows his healthy skepticism that methane from cows was truly the prime source of humanity’s dire prospects.
Still, all my own informed-opinion-doubt notwithstanding, let’s not quibble about bullshit. Let’s stipulate, shall we?
Stipulation number one
Stipulation number two
Quod Erat Demonstrandum, the only solutions to the problems at hand—from rising seas to hotter temperatures and lower rainfalls, on the one hand, too much carbon in the air, on the other hand—are the development of fraternal social equality that shares and works out the best coping mechanisms for all and sundry, in relation to the first and the ending of imperial, plutocratic political hegemony, in relation to the second.
MORE TO COME
Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—Yet Another M.N.P. Overview
As even the briefest acquaintance with This Humble Correspondent makes clear, equally as even reading a small slice of Big Tent Review obviously confirms, exploration of and attempts to understand what I call the Modern Nuclear Project have long remained central to my erstwhile raison d’ etre, blah blah blah. No doubt, however, my approach to things has often been quirky or ‘off the beaten track’ and so at least slightly ‘off the cultural radar.’
This hasn’t changed, ha ha. On the other hand, a review of the facts that I report and the reasoning that I apply to those facts, so as to make sense of them and such, has stayed as relevant and provocative as ever, from when I organized a debate on ‘nuclear energy’ in 1979, grad-school Tuscaloosa to when I helped to jump start the Jobs With Peace/Nuclear Freeze Campaign, long ago and far away in Atlanta.
The debate was an unbelievable hoot. By sheer happenstance, three days prior to the scheduled encounter, one of Three Mile Island’s reactors experienced a partial meltdown that threatened a huge chunk of the most primo real-estate in the world, from the District of Columbia to New York City and beyond.
The Department of Energy had to pull the pair who were to meet Professor Ed Passerini and me toe-to-toe, face-to-face, all that sort of thing. Instead, two shifty PR flacks from Langley showed up, or so I’m guessing. They did little more than mumble during their time slot, though one of the pair, more or less as a dare told me that I couldn’t possibly really understand how either reactors or H-bombs worked.
I made a couple of quick sketches on a napkin and, after Dr. Passerini acceded that I had the overall concepts correct, I passed this on to the DOE’s ad hoc representative. The entire audience seemed to hold its breath; the silence was as profound as ever I’ve experienced in a large hall like that.
When the stand-in looked up, he smiled at me. “You’re lucky!” he claimed.
“How’s that?”
“If you’d shown this to anybody else, I would have had no choice but to arrest you.”
When we finished, my ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ to close out the evening, our position in the fracas—Resolved that the United States declare a unilateral moratorium on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons development” received a standing ovation that continued for several minutes.
Whatever the case may be, the following is an only slightly updated version of a lengthy look at the parameters of matters nuclear from roughly fifteen years back. Only the names of the ‘interested parties’ have changed even marginally.
The first five pages of the sixty page OpenOffice document, interestingly enough, consists of searches, some of which I’ll retry in the here-and-now, just to compare and contrast and all. Anyway, this will likely end up being a five-to-six-part series with lots and lots of interesting data and at least a handful of plausibly useful, important contextualizations of the entire subatomic, thermonuclear, and human social realms.
For example, anyone paying more than merely minimal attention to ‘current events’ will hear or see persistent pronouncements, or reports, in which the ‘official story’ supports the ‘indisputable human need’ for nuclear weapons and both fission and fusion energy’s energetics, so to speak. And of course these ‘authoritative’ conclusions may even be accurate, or at least reasonable, even if, in the aggregate and until further notice, “I beg to differ.”
And that’s another real thing, since the central point of what Big Tent Review does is starting and then informing conversations in intelligible and intelligent fashion. As noted, that’s the real thing. It’s all hush-hush, hidden away—as in a justification to murder Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to withhold JFK’s autopsy results, and so on and so on—“Born Secret,” like in Thomas Moreland’s article of that title that provides the basis for a forthcoming essay.
Like many of my ‘projects’ over the years, this one was difficult for me to finish, at the same time that its arguments and empirical profferals have well stood time’s taunting tests. It’s also part of the dark heart of human life today that we ignore at our most mortal peril. Here we are, again, at a sort of ‘word-to-the-wise’ sufficiency.
Financial & Social Imperatives
The Political Economy of the Nuclear Age
PART ONE—Class Foundations of the Modern Nuclear Project Culture
OVERTURE
The present process, of which this is an initial statement of five—a number that might easily become fifty, or five hundred, or whatever—develops a narrative that necessitates greater complexity than each(LINK) of the first(LINK) four(LINK) Spindoctor installments(LINK) here on Contributoria. Nor does even a cursory glance at these earlier articles suggest that any Spindoctor production inclines toward simplification, meaning that what follows may end up displaying tortuous whorls indeed.
Precisely because the current attempt at deconstruction of what we can term the Modern Nuclear Project expresses so many arcane and intertwined elements, this report begins with the simplest possible synopsis of what will follow. To wit, the following hypothesis or theoretical articulation underpins everything else that flows in its wake.
The contemporary contextualization of what one might call Imperial Capital originated in conjunction with and has become completely dependent upon the capacity to comprehend and manipulate matter and its realities at the atomic and subatomic levels. The recognition of this dynamic has multiple important implications. For today’s purposes particularly, it means that, whatever the objective basis or truth of the Nuclear Project’s conclusions, its supposed necessity, accuracy, rationality, efficiency, and utility are primarily matters of the class interests of those who rule Imperial Capital.
Moreover, it means that whatever the drawbacks, dangers, or even lethal inevitabilities of the Nuclear Project, it must remain a core aspect of the plans and needs of these rulers; as it was in the beginning, so it will continue until such a time that some other manifestation of social power takes command or calls the shots, as it were.
In other words, the ruling class plutocrats and technocrats in charge of things will try to get what they want, and, overwhelmingly, they want the Modern Nuclear Project, no matter either public opinion or dire consequences.
Of course, one of many problems with starting so simply, or perhaps baldly, is that an observer almost has no choice but to doubt that all of the intricacies of something like the politics and science and social relations and history of energy, with a focus on atomic chemistry and physics, can possibly fit inside of or under the umbrella of such a basic rubric. The primary method and purpose of this section of today’s essay is at least to summarize some of the vast array of components of matters nuclear that in fact do dovetail elegantly with this relatively rudimentary thesis.
In a sense, Frank Stockton offered an excellent summation of the sociopolitical pieces of today’s puzzle in his fanciful novel, The Great War Syndicate. He wrote this in 1889, more or less, fifteen years or so after James Maxwell definitively expressed the interconnectedness of light and magnetism but several years before the Curies were uncovering radioactivity, over a decade before Frederick Soddy and his colleagues were laying the basis to deduce actual workings of atomic structures, almost two decades before e=mc-squared, and a half century prior to a wealthy financier’s delivering a fateful letter to Franklin Roosevelt, a missive that called for a new kind of weapon—syndicated in every sense—that would consign ‘conventional warfare’ to obsolescence.
Readers will have the option of seeing Stockton’s imaginative labor in greater depth in the introductory section that lies ahead. Now, we might just note that he depicted weaponry that resembled atomic ordnance in many of its particulars, destructive machinery, moreover, that had totally depended on a ‘syndicate’—as the title attested—of wise financiers and industrialists for its formulation, production, and deployment. These shadowy and insistent plutocrats intended with their mastery of destructive technology to put into place a ‘New World Order’ in which their imprimatur would be impossible to challenge.
“The unmistakable path of national policy which had shown itself to the wisest British statesmen appeared broader and plainer when the overtures of the American War Syndicate had been received by the British Government. The Ministry now perceived that the Syndicate had not waged war; it had been simply exhibiting the uselessness of war as at present waged. Who now could deny that it would be folly to oppose the resources of ordinary warfare to those of what might be called prohibitive warfare.
Another idea arose in the minds of the wisest British statesmen. If prohibitive warfare were a good thing for America, it would be an equally good thing for England. More than that, it would be a better thing if only these two countries possessed the power of waging prohibitive warfare.”
To anyone who has studied the development of what in this writing we term the Modern Nuclear Project, the language here recalls both the formative years prior to the Manhattan Project and the early attempts, no matter how self-serving and duplicitous, of the Atomic Energy Commission and its cohorts in England after the United States had waged the first nuclear war on Japan. Stockton’s prescience in this vein appears simply astonishing.
“No time was lost by the respective Governments of Great Britain and the United States in ratifying the peace made through the Syndicate, … the basis of which should be the use by these two nations, and by no other nations, of the instantaneous motor, …for both Governments felt the importance of placing themselves, without delay, in that position from which, by means of their united control of paramount methods of warfare, they might become the arbiters of peace.
The desire to evolve that power which should render opposition useless had long led men from one warlike invention to another. Every one who had constructed a new kind of gun, a new kind of armour, or a new explosive, thought that he had solved the problem, or was on his way to do so. The inventor of the instantaneous motor had done it. …(continued below the fold)
Adding Things Up, Step By Step—Panama, Greenland, Mars, All of It
Where matters actually stand on planet Earth, our beloved and only home, is that humanity is experiencing a period of giant revolutionary potential, a strong possibility of fundamental changes that stems from the necessity of just such basic reformatting of the ‘who and the how of things.’ Will ‘regular people’ participate in this coming, likely profound, overturning of previous standard operational protocols?
Time will tell, no doubt. Hubris, whatever the case may be, certainly represents an all-too-frequent component of America’s altogether manifested destiny of imperial imprimatur.
Thus, William Appleman William’s magnificent work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy(TAD) could serve as a dandy starting point for erstwhile perambulations of ‘Yankee Knowhow’ and Brand CHAOS to the South, in Panama, to the North, in Greenland, and, in the dealmaker’s parlance, ‘anywhere else we want to speculate, say, like in the Gaza Strip, or Ontario or the rest of Canada. A trio of quotations from the fronting pages of Williams’ first chapter, “Imperial Anticolonialism,” ground the reader in a truth that applied with unstoppable force until the 1970’s, though its presumptions still establish an imperialist America’s ‘foreign interests.’
John Kassom a Congressman from Iowa, stated the case evocatively in 1881. “We are rapidly utilizing the whole of our continental territory. We must turn our eyes abroad, or they will soon look inward on profound discontent.”
Albert Beveridge, a stalwart bootstraps advocate of an ever-expanding American commercial dominance, expressed an equally insistent opinion of Uncle Sam’s unstoppable rise. “American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.”
The London Times, meanwhile, not in the least representative of any American heartland or laboring class-interests, had this to offer its readers as the Twentieth Century dawned. “Even protectionist organs are for free-trade with China, where freedom is for the benefit of the American manufacturers. Even ‘anti-imperialists’ welcome an imperial policy which contemplates no conquests but those of commerce.”
‘Free-Trade,’ in slightly altered garb, is another version of the already familiar topic of frontiers, and ‘the frontier thesis in American history,’ which have made some appearances already here in BTR. Today’s essay integrates this exploration into explication of the here and now: annexing Canada; taking over Greenland; taking back ‘our canal’ in Panama; opening ‘Trump Gaza.’
A slightly later speech by the estimable biographer, politician, and imperialist quoted above by Professor Williams, Mr. Beveridge, delivered a “March of the Flag” address that incisively summarizes the combination of outreach and impunity that has come to characterize ‘the American way.’ “Soldiers of 1861! A generation has passed,” he begins, without a hint of General Smedley Butler’s “gangsters for capitalism” ethos.
He continues, nevertheless, speaking of some of the same plots of plunder that our oft-quoted Marine Corps Commandant mentions disparagingly in his War Is a Racket presentation. Beveridge intones, “and you have reared a race of heroes worthy of your blood—heroes of El Caney, San Juan, and Cavite, of Santiago and Manila—ay! and 200,000 more as brave as they, who waited in camp with the agony of impatience the call of battle, ready to count hellish hardship in the trenches the very sweets of fate, if they could only fight for the flag.”
Beveridge does acknowledge the likes of Butler’s critique. “The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer, ‘the rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government.’”
Justifying such patronizing chauvinism is easy, even if it has zero connection with either justice or any ‘pursuit of happiness,’ not to leave out with the empirical reality of rougly equal capacities among all and sundry cousins here. After all, “(w)e govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent.”
This vein of bigotry and supremacist chest-thumping, of rationalized terror in defense of ‘liberty,’ but only real freedom for money and trade, along with property’s untrammeled primacy, is the true theme of both Beveridge’s speech and all U.S. standard policy options over the intervening hundred forty-five years. Whether one finds him captivating or disgusting, the ‘grains of truth’ in his thinking when he spoke in 1881 ultimately evaporated in the butchery of ‘the Great War,’ the victory of the Red Army in Russia, and all manner of catastrophes in the century that has followed.
His nostrums are even more nonsensical in Ukraine today. Yet the pull of his pablum remains a powerful pulse in psyches in the ‘home of free and land of the brave.’ He could be a speechwriter for our present President, who wants to acquire the Northern half of the Western Hemisphere for his potentate representatives of King Capital.
“Shall we abandon them, with Germany, England, Japan, hungering for them? Shall we save them from those nations, to give them a self-rule of tragedy? It would be like giving a razor to a babe and telling it to shave itself. It would be like giving a typewriter to an Eskimo and telling him to publish one of the great dailies of the world.” One can hear echoes of this “March of the Flag” in Donald Trump’s offer to turn Gaza into a luxury resort, to ‘rescue Canadians’ and their resources, Panamanians and the Canal that bisects the Isthmus.
His prediction of ‘flag-marching’ American supremacy is half truth and pure bullshit. “Think of the thousands of Americans who will pour into Hawaii and Porto Rico when the republic’s laws cover those islands with justice and safety! Think of the tens of thousands of Americans who will invade mine and field and forest in the Philippines when a liberal government, protected and controlled by this republic, if not the government of the republic itself, shall establish order and equity there!”
The ‘liberal governance’ of Havana and Manila, at the bases and brothels of the Brand Chaos empire, certainly ‘invaded’ our conquests with prostitution and gansterism. The wonders of ‘free markets’ heaped blessings on profiteers and left Filipinos and Cubans with two-thirds of the American lifespan, if our new adherents were lucky.
Naked self-interest supposedly justified regular folks’ support for such ‘plundering policy protocols.’ “What does all this mean for every one of us? It means opportunity for all the glorious young manhood of the republic—the most virile, ambitious, impatient, militant manhood the world has ever seen. It means that the resources and the commerce of these immensely rich dominions will be increased as much as American energy is greater than Spanish sloth; for Americans henceforth will monopolize those resources and that commerce. . . .”
Do we imagine ‘slothful’ Greenlanders too obtuse to welcome American rule? Do we believe that we can tell anyone, anywhere, and especially in ‘our backyard,’ to sit down, shut up, and do as they are instructed? Perhaps citizens today in Havana, Caracas, Managua, even in Panama City, even in Manila, may take issue with such an estimate.
This sort of vision, in any event, is clearly congruent with the hubris and hypocrisy and delusion of true tragedy, a theme that the good American patriot’s masterful volume on ‘American Diplomacy,’ noted above, invokes in regard to Yankee effusions of ‘defending American interests.’ A brief overview of the book follows apace.
Before contemplating a few snippets from the beginning and end of TAD, readers will be able to view the chapter titles in sequence, which ought to tell a tale in themselves. To begin, “Imperial Anticolonialism” is suggestive in perfect fashion to balance the mix of sanctimony and entitlement in U.S. practices.
Chapter Two, “The Imperialism of Idealism,” is an ideal followup, inasmuch as ‘making the world safe for Democracy’ has acted as both excuse for depredation and celebration of profiteering. Thus, Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency mulched the Merchants of Death while ‘promoting freedom.’
The third section, “The Rising Tide of Revolution,” serves up warnings and invitations, both completely redolent of the here and now as trade-war will, supposedly, act as apt replacement for free trade. Williams quotes, and we should devotedly attend, the Council of People’s Commisars from revolutionary Russia.
“The peace which we propose must be a people’s peace. It must be an honest agreement, guaranteeing to each nation freedom for economic and cultural development. Such a peace can only be concluded by means of a direct and courageous struggle of the revolutionary masses against all imperialist plans and aggressive aspirations.
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolution has already declared its peace programme. We have published the secret agreements of the Tsar and the bourgeoisie with the allies and have declared them not binding for the Russian people.”
The fourth Chapter, “The Legend of Isolationism,” is another dandy grand slam summation. One need only listen to the Marine’s anthem—“From the halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli”—to evidence the myth of a ‘self-contained’ Yankee-trader development.
In “The War for the American Frontier,” meanwhile, we encounter a nuanced and dispositive take on how the ‘manifesting’ of such transcendence formulated imperial watchwords hither and yon. A quotation from the Fifth Fortune Round Table Discussion on the U.S. and War, in 1940, gives a dandy orientation to this point. “What interests us primarily is the longer-range question of whether the American capitalist system could continue to function if most of Europe and Asia should abolish free enterprise.” Ha ha.
Chapter Six then takes readers to the realization of how crises that inevitably define bourgeois ‘boom-&-bust’ lead to mandatory militarism. Thus we have this title: “The Nightmare of Depression and the Vision of Omnipotence.”
The last subsection in TAD’s essay, “The Impotence of Nuclear Supremacy,” takes us to the cusp of the present pass. Our arrival is coterminus with the growing influence of those who would prefer Mass Collective Suicide to even the most compelling and collectively beneficent social reform.
We will close this briefing by referencing two of Andrew J. Bacevich’s ‘elements of TAD’s Weltanschauung,’ which the reviewer in question defines as a “‘defintion of the world combined with an explanation of how it works.’” Bacevich is retired military and a prolific historian in his own right.
According to him, America’s embodiment of this fancy German word includes these two pointers, along with mutliple others. First comes “(a)n insistence that American values are universal values, leading to this corollary: ‘other peoples cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States.’”
Additionally, this will also prove true. U.S. pundits will espouse “A self-serving commitment to the principle of self-determination, informed by the conviction that ‘all peoples must ultimately self-determine themselves in the American Way if America itself is to be secure and prosperous;’ or to put it another way, only when ‘historic American principles were honored by all’ would world peace become possible.”
In addition to the section of today’s episode that follows, which interprets WAW’s The Great Evasion, others of William’s works will help us to formulate the second half of this essay, below the fold especially. Among these, Empire As a Way of Life and The United States, Cuba, and Castro are particularly noteworthy.
In the end, this today—among history buffs and anti-imperialists—long-honored scholar needs more than ever to become a ‘topic of conversation’ among regular citizens. Our survival may well hinge on such awareness; our thriving definitely will do so.
Along similar lines, the Marxist Internet Archive excerpts an article by Williams in the American Socialist magazine. Especially pertinent in our current context of demonizing Russia and blaming China is the following.
“(T)he Russian and Chinese experiences in particular, dramatize the value for Americans of a re-analysis of the relationship between radicalism and war. Perhaps the wrong lesson has been learned—and much too well. The accepted conclusion seems to have been that war is necessary for basic reconstruction, and this confines both the Left and the Right in a theoretical and programmatic straightjacket.
Radicals tend to wait for the war, even though they squirm at the prospect, while the Right tries to avoid it by policies which insure its outbreak. Thus the Right goes off hunting the Snark of security, and the Left, uncomfortable in its reliance on war, sheepishly trails along.”
However we seek contextualization, I’ve written at at least modest length and depth about these matters before. Today’s BTR introduction of this storied radical historian begins with a predictably convoluted examination of the work of Karl Marx himself, the thinker whose investigations most people either purposefly or haplessly ignore, in the first case because of inculcated anticommunism, in the second case because navigating chats that don’t touch of issues of revolution and class is much easier than vice versa.
Whatever the case may be, Karl Marx is missing from ‘standard American consciousness,’ much to our detriment. The common plutocrat response to this willful ignorance is to seek to pulverize liberalism as ‘Marxism,’ a fatuous and false exercise that is nonetheless ubiquitous.
In a sense then, practically the entire facade of America’s ReDemoPubliCratiCan fantasy-world emanates more or less directly from the evasive maneuvers that people reflexively make to avoid mentioning subjects that might bring communistic thinking to the forefront. Obvio po, such cognitive and psychic contortions cause discomfiture and enervation, even disgust.
The following section of today’s new article is what I wrote in 2009 about all this—Marx, a great Marxist, and social life. It is more relevant now than ever to any who would hope to finesse capital’s consideration of Mass Collective Suicide as a reasonable solution to the latest free-market fiasco to afflict us.
When 'Great Evasions' Promote Empire’s Invasive Primacy, Imperial Citizens Need Beware
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In a fantasy realization of the perfectly integrated expression of the ideal and the material, a person could 'dial-up,' via his 'cranial linkage,' whenever he wanted to make a wager. Depending on the interest among other potential 'takers' online in the ether, he could then discover what his expected 'loss' or 'gain' would be for a particular proposition. But that's not going to happen, unless I write the science fiction yarn.
That said, I'd bet a small sum that dear JustMeans readers{fifteen years ago, or so, along with those who encounter BTR in 2025}, if connected to appropriate instrumentation, would show at least a slight rise in physiological indicia of stress were someone to advance the simple interrogatory sentence, "Who wants to talk about Karl Marx?"
Perhaps folks can see what I mean. In addition, I'd happily 'put my money where my mouth is' again to venture that at most twenty per cent—and quite likely a vastly smaller proportion—of JustMeans aficionados, not to mention other readers, have ever read an entire volume by the German thinker and communist whose statue looms so magisterially over Highgate Cemetery on the fringes of London. The point here is to make a couple of notes about ignorance and fear.
On the one hand, obviously, being fearful about the unknown makes perfect sense. 'Is that the bad kind of red and yellow and black snake, or the good kind?' 'Is the ax murderer going to find me in the closet or the basement?' Add to such pragmatic worries about our ignorance the general propensity to abhor uncertainty, even though it is the only honest condition we are permitted in regard to complicated matters of interpretation, and the cold sweats about ghosts and goblins and Karl Marx appear totally logical.
On the other hand, of course, generally speaking, the 'material basis' for worry, as it were, can be a straightforward matter of study, either to confirm or unravel: 'Yep! Red and yella will kill a fella.' Or, 'Nope! Red and black's all right for Jack.'
More pertinent to the matter of Uncle Karl, maybe we would find, 'Well, he's a monster! He wants to cut mothers into pieces and feed them to their children,' or something equally grotesque.
Or, our examination might show, 'Well, he says some bizarre things, some interesting things, and seems to go on and on, but other than taking a strong stand in favor of wage-earners vis-a-vis business owners—which he admits, and tries to demonstrate is reasonable—I can't see much that should make a student fear the fellow.' Thus, this essay seeks, first of all, to proffer folks an overall introduction to one of history's greats, Karl Marx.
"Well now, I never!" my grandmother would say when a suggestion seemed particularly uncalled for. "Why in the name of heaven, here when I'm interested in sustainable business and corporate responsibility would I want to learn about that?" And the answer is simple.
"No other single thinker—not Freud, not Darwin, not Keynes, not Einstein, not Gandhi, nobody, has more useful things to say about the combination of social, political, and economic travails that trouble our collection of seven billion cousins {now nine billion} on the planet right at the moment." That ought to proffer a strong basis for investigation.
Of course, these are assertions. And the asserter is a 'Marxist .' Furthermore, plenty of other important ideas and occurrences are absolutely necessary to study too. Well, duh, double duh, and triple duh.
Just on the basis of forty three essays{plus twenty-five issues of Big Tent Review} that have contained some hypothetically useful information, inquiry, and ideas, however, one would think that if the humble correspondent who had produced such a tsunami of text said, 'this might be important,' that folks would say, 'Oh, OK, tell me about it.'
In any case, I can't do anything about willful ignorance, other than to comment that it's not likely to be a winning strategy in a political dogfight. Don’t others hear the baying of the unleashed hounds?
Political economy forms the framework for understanding Marx, though it's not where he started his odyssey as a thinker. Especially following the publication of one of his easier-to-digest volumes, The Communist Manifesto, just as revolutionary upheaval looked like it was about to upend European politics, and then didn't, Marx's work focused on dissecting and being able to speak intelligently about the political economic underpinnings of society.
However, this was a practical decision, as opposed to a philosophical proclivity. He sought much more definitely to unravel the conundrums of commodities, wages, capital, price, and profit—the specific results of capitalist political economy—than he did to speak abstractly about human power and the necessities of life.
Thus, while one can say that political economy does concern the way that power relations and productive relations always intertwine to produce social groups, and vice versa, Marx during the 1850's and 1860's was especially seeking to state clearly and accurately how such relations reproduced themselves under the conditions of capitalism then prevailing.
And of course, different, but still identifiably capitalistic relations continue to churn out more commodified life, more production based on wages, more markets that penetrate every sector of existence, and a further elevation of finance to the guiding role at the center of political and economic life, the same trends that Marx recognized and articulated in his primary intellectual labors. But Marx never was deterministic in his views about these basic matters of production and power.
This is why propositions about social class lie at the heart of Marx's work, even though he spent so much effort nailing down and detailing the inner economic and political machinations of capital. Most basically, this social ideation revolves around the notion that key relationships—among different sets of people, between those people and the way that they eat and provide for themselves, between members of a specific group and the natural world or society, and so on—all vary predictably, even as they tend to produce similar psychological evolution in the direction of alienation.
This observation would, therefore, predict such likely social facts as these. No Fortune 500 CEO's are likely to face prison time for crack use; a child attending an inner city school with lots of broken windows almost certainly breathes many more toxins in a day's imbibing of atmosphere than does a child in a suburban school with all its windows intact, and moreover the former child is astronomically more likely to have an unwillingly unemployed parent; an enlisted soldier facing regular incoming fire almost always comes from a family in which both parents are wage-earners, whereas a member of the general staff, with a near certainty, has a parent with a larger 'stake' in life.
Even more significant, for Marx and Marxists, this regularity and predictability concerning social relations, which boil down to definable 'class relations,' are not just descriptive, but evaluative as well. Thus, in a certain context, such as Europe late in the eighteenth century or the United States as the secession crisis unfolded, capitalists at all levels of society, many of them small shop owners and producers of handiworks or manufactures, take noticeable stands for social improvement—such as eliminating or attenuating, in the former case, the power of kings and queens, and, in the latter case, the political hegemony of slaveholders.
In other contexts, this same set of actors—say today, in the United States, for instance, is overwhelmingly likely to stand against 'progress' and for rolling back such elements of former 'progress' as public schools and social security. Huh. So Marx, in other words, predicted Donald Trump and DOGE. Wow.
When one looks at working people's organizations, one finds that almost all aspects of 'middle class life'—minimum wages, safety rules, universal suffrage, overtime pay, an eight hour day, and so on(again, this is a nearly universal tendency)—originate in either trade unions or among communistic groups. JustMeans readers, {as well as those on Substack}, might check out the programmatic elements of the aforementioned Communist Manifesto for an eye-opening learning experience.
Again, however, even a brief glance at Marx's work disposes of any accusation of 'determinism.' His famous quip, "I am not a Marxist," was to distance himself from such mechanistic ways of thinking about society.
In fact, his philosophical origins always informed his practical interests. And his philosophical roots were in the recognition of the dialectical dance that many thinkers associate with Hegel.
Dialectics, which has shown up on several occasions for readers to ponder (INTERLINK, CBPR), serves a dual role in Marx's output and input. In the first place, he started out as a philosopher with a particular interest in dialectics.
As I've noted before, an easy way to comprehend this terminology, of "(d)ialectical development, is (as) a scientific notion, perhaps not as widely popularized as the theory of evolution, through natural selection, of adaptive individual differences, but nonetheless firmly grounded in reality and, at least at the most basic levels of physics and chemistry and other empirically observable descriptions of all-that-is, incontrovertible. That protons and electrons dance a balance, that catalyst ever ignites its opposite, that male and female do a 'Red-Queen' tango throughout nature, and on and on and on, are not matters of dispute."
I go on to note, "Such a view, that '(t)he laws of dialectics, which have arisen out of the investigation of universal processes of becoming and modes of being, apply to all phenomena,' is arguably accurate in every realm. 'Although each level of being has its own specific laws, these merge with general laws covering all spheres of existence and development.' …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
In much the same way that I stated last issue, “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.”
Quo Vadis? Quo Vadis? Quo Vadis? Whatever the case may be, 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.
This too, from #24, also remains apt. “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.”
In other words, I’d love to hear from people. Blah blah blah. A word will suffice, to the wise. Again, January’s thoughts will serve us once more.
“‘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.”
Welcome again to the first half of our Big Tent Review.
—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)…
To serve as a pole to this godly imprimatur of certainty and attainment, Zephyr’s West Wind and the breathily discursive Page of Swords comes forward. The final card of the three, The Lovers, drops Paris and his triad of Goddesses into our mix.
This is far from roses and hearthfires, nor is the final card particularly clear as a completion to this attempt to get a bead on things like ‘building a following as a counselor,’ yet the triptych very powerfully does evoke Zeus’ invocation of ‘making something manifest in the world.’ A Big Tent approach to ‘wise-counsel,’ history and the here-and-now and paradox explained, would be a lovely eventuality.
Moreover, this god-king also evokes something akin to a defense of the Divine Masculine, certainly a worthwhile occurrence in a world the practically emasculates such a potential, as it were. This ‘balancing of natural forces’ must ever seem and enlightening thing, very much in alignment with Zeus’ power-symbol of the lightning bolt, the symbol of the most powerful punch that the cosmos can create.
Zephyr’s presence has received the name over the course of my ‘life-as-a-Tarot-Reader’ of the ‘Gossip-Card,’ since it advances the cognitive necessity of managing a propaganda campaign of one’s own in life’s battles and befuddlement. No doubt, the most common way that many people manage this omnipresent possibility of speaking one’s own truth is through withdrawal and, to put matters gently, caution. Timidity along these lines among ‘common folk’ is practically ubiquitous.
Instead, the Page here encourages “the emergence of new ideas and true, independent thinking” in favor of one’s own needs and hopes, one’s schemes and dreams, for a better life and attendant self-improving blah blah blah. A punchy narrative thrust thus emerges here: masculine material manifestation meets nascent propagandizing on one’s own behalf, something along those lines.
And then The Lovers: being careful about erotic and relationship choices is at the heart of the message whenever this card puts in an appearance. Once more, this doesn’t obviously provide a compelling finish to the arc of awareness that begins with worldly creation via clever self-promotion.
A closer reading does offer some compelling possibilities, however. Paris’ travails after he chooses Aphrodite, and Venus and Hera plot his downfall, represents, perhaps, “the problem of free will versus the compulsions of the instincts.” Life-Force-Energy’s influential imprimature notwithstanding, something like an adviser’s role in relation to others must benefit from deliberation rather than wanton wanting, from leading with the mind and not the loins, ha ha.
The textual support for Mythic Tarot also articulates this pluck along these lines. This card, “when it appears in a spread, augurs the necessity of a choice of some kind.” Although, this crossroads ‘usually deals with love issues,’ one can see how all manner of elective outcomes might demarcate and otherwise form the foundation of a creative process that centered on utilizing Tarot.
As always will be true, a summation comes readily to the lips or the fingers, as the case may be. ‘In imagining a potentiation of such a healing modality as providing Tarot-based advice, one may readily believe that fatherly, avuncular support from the universe for such a move might well be forthcoming. Of course, having such a happy outcome might well hinge on one’s having developed a powerful, even sophisticated capacity to ‘toot one’s own horn,’ as it were. What synthesizes these two disparate points-of-view—trusting supportive cosmic attention versus propagating personal propaganda, basically—could be sage persuasion about pending love-and-relationship preference, tidings that seeking just this sort of new direction can front-and-center portentous penchants on our parts to take steps contradictory to how things stand, which, whatever one’s longing for advance and improvement, also must have a special place in our hearts and minds.’
A reader may, along with this humble correspondent, fancy fostering a Netflix series that follows the path that this Reading suggests. A deeper delving of today’s Spiral Spread can now unfold along standard lines. First, we’ll slip in the final paragraphs from Above-the-Fold in this regard.
“At the outset, we’ll state the initial question like this: “What, for a Common Sense participant, so to say, are some observations and insights about creating procedures—even using a Tarot Practice, perhaps—to seek out guidance, direction, optimal moves, and perhaps most especially knowledge?”
Even such a general query can, under appropriate circumstances of education and abundance, elicit the potential for both action to take and knowledge to gain that are possible, in part, as a result of said guiding observant insightfulness, ha ha. And then, like magic, doing something and finding new facts and ideas in turn support further wisdom and awareness. …
In the event, an astonishing array of seven plucks formed the outline of this Spiral Spread. I had to lie down in glory for a moment to contemplate it. Anyhow, the Essence launched with Ace-of-Cups’ loving-connection energy.
The temporal triad brings forth Daedalus’ energy at both the beginning of his crafty, grounded journey, in the Two of Pentacles, and the culmination of present-day achievement and security, in the form of Ten of Pentacles, with a future prospect to mirror Aphrodite’s relational upsurge with the assistance of Perseus’ Knight of Cups.
The three substantive cards represent a spindoctor, Big Tent triumvirate, in that each stands for aspects of my character for the last fifty-five years, from age sixteen and the Vietnam debate topic till now. No-Matter-What, Opportunities yield’s Poseidon’s earthshaking pull, The Tower; Problems & Prospects bring’s Chiron’s Centaurian passion for learning and teaching; the Synthesis offers up a top-three-Jimbo pluck in the form of Dionysus’ The Fool.
This altogether happy unfolding elicits in my breast a sense of the same gratitude that I feel for my love, all the while that these are merely ‘pretty pieces of paper’ and an arcane, and arguably ‘woo-woo,’ interpretive nexus that is totally a ‘taken-on-faith’ approach to extracting something meaningful. What’s up with all this mumbo-jumbo?”
In a sense, here we see the general form of the specific question today. It even embeds the idea of a Tarot Practice. In addition, it examines issues of how one goes about what we might term ‘knowledge-acquisition in service to community, humanity, and similar valuable options for our species.’
Interestingly enough, given the conundrum with which we’ve grappled as to the point of The Lovers to culminate the T-A-S triptych, the Essence in the seven-card spread is the Ace-of-Cups, the goddess who won Paris’ golden apple and set his father’s kingdom on a course to destruction. Nevertheless, the central motif for answering this combination of epistemological inquiry and engagement protocol, at least so far as the cards’ speaking for themselves, points to the upsurge of Eros, the libidinal boosting of relationship and connection.
Perhaps one may suggest that facts and data mean little on their own. Guidance requires an opening of one’s heart and soul. “Thus the Ace of Cups implies the begining of the great journey through the realm of the heart, where abundance of feeling erupts and drives the indicidual into a relationship.” In this case, the ‘relation’ in question would not be a marriage but a real soulful intersection nonetheless, in which knowing would form a vector in the direction of wisdom.
The three pulls for Past, Present, and Future, meanwhile, offer a grounded, common-sense configuration for contextualizing the kinds of adventures in cognitive and social exploration that the interrogatory here pushes forward. Yesteryear’s happenings most decidedly mirror the past few years of my days and nights of schemes and dreams, ha ha.
The Two in Daedalus’ suit, the array of material well-being and health, suggestive of an acquisition or bequest or lucky break, heralds a time—similar to mine in 2022-23, when I first encountered these MythicT cards—when resources and cash will be available like never before. True, that, enough said.
Similarly, the Ten, also of Pentacles, makes a fitting portrait of my and BTR’s Present Passage, axiomatically thereby expressing a foundation for responding to this query about a type of ‘diversification,’ ha ha. This cosmic plop “portrays a situation of permanence that outlasts the life of a single individual.”
Very much the Goddess guidance seems aptly to apply. “(T)he Ten of Pentacles suggests a period of ongoing contentment and security, and a sense of something permanent having been established, which can be handed on to others.” We’ll see. I asked, and things feel congruent with such a prediction.
Likely Future Developments turns up the card to which I opened my guidebook before I laid out the Readings themselves. Moreover, the Knight of Pentacles has long been ‘my card.’ Since shortly after I began this leg of my journey through things, Perseus, astride his horse and en route to his destiny of delving and facilitating the Divine Feminine, has shown up more frequently than any other card, with the possible exception of two other popular plucks, The Devil and The Fool.
The upshot of these repeated appearances is the Mythic Tarot contention that this legendary heroic figure played an important part in ‘Western culture’s’ arguably having made some peace with the Goddess, since his path through mythos always fostered the hopes and needs of women, beginning with his Mother. This would without question constitute a plausible, not to mention most welcome and altogether dandy evolution of ongoing tomorrows’ manifestation of today’s question in regard to a desire, and plausibly a duty, “to seek out guidance, direction, optimal moves, and perhaps most especially knowledge?”
A Big Tent emphasis on sexuality, and in particular the primacy of female satisfaction, and an attendant, and radically passionate, Feminism also palpate parallel tracks as would any Big Tent expedition into the realm of ‘seeking’ just above. Whatever the case may be, the ‘timing template’ of this sequence is almost perfect, from a BTR-friendly POV.
As a robin flits to a branch to look me in the eye, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Canon Rock” blares at me as I type, and the perfect blue sky and mountainscape meets my gaze whenever I look up, I can only completely affirm, with utter confidence, that the three substantive pulls yield an even greater fit with what, given who and what I am—what Big Tent Review means—a ‘seeking process’ at the heart of this inquiry would create, were it to happen.
Thus, these ‘omens of the morrow’ are inherently plausible, ha ha. In first place then, with No-Matter-What, Possibilities, Poseidon’s fierce appearance in The Tower expresses what my writing and thinking and activism have always stood for, which is to say the “breakdown of existing forms.”
This Tarot viewpoint is neither politically nor socially the same as mine. Whereas I and my Big Tent believe that avoiding Mass Collective Suicide indubitably necessitates destroying ‘existing forms,’ the ‘Mythic’ tradition adopts a more ‘spiritual,’ or even psychological idea, that ups and downs and cyclical shifts inescapably induce such eventualities. It’s a subtle but important difference about which one might speak at much greater length; another time, perhaps.
In any event, this much rings with the true peal of a mighty bell. “The Tower is a structure of false or outgrown values, those attitudes toward life which do not spring from the whole self but are ‘put on’ like costumes in a play to impress the audience.” In the hoped-for ‘search for knowing’ here, “something within (society as a whole may have) reached boiling point and can no longer (exist) within such (wholly false and self-destructive) confines.”
The Problems & Prospects slot, if anything, is even more precise. The Hierophant epitomizes the ‘wounded healer,’ or for our purposes now, the ‘wounded seeker,’ who wants to ‘teach the world to sing a different song,’ one in which the Golden Rule and the Ten New Commandments come to the fore.
The entire ‘learning curve’ that Chiron, who is the embodiment of this Hierophant, expresses instructs me about myself. “(O)nly through applying spiritual teaching in ordinary physical life can it be rendered valid,” and, furthermore, “the written word” must remain of prime import, as the means of the “revelation (that) communicates the will of the divine.”
On this goes. “(I)nsurmountable limitations or wounds within us…make us question and open the way to a greater understanding of the higher laws of life. …We are neither wholly beast or wholly divine, but a mixture of both, and must learn to live with both. Out of this mixture comes the wisdom,” which today’s inquiry at minimum hopes will embark on a journey of exploration to discover or uncover, ha ha. An encounter with Chiron’s temple of teaching allows The Fool to “seek answers to the enigma of himself and the meaning of life.”
Of course, this self-same Fool emerges from the mix as the final pull in the array. His often truly frantic travails in the mists of myth fit with the notion of a ‘wounded healer’ just above, his the chance of being “Twice born, the god of light and ecstasy.” Knowledge, wisdom, all such flow from this portal.
The Mythic guidance is quite blunt. “Dionysus, The Fool, augurs the advent of a new chapter of life, (in which a)risk of some kind is required, a willingess to jump out into the unknown.” As so often in my experience, ‘the spirit is willing in spite of any fleshly weakness,’ ha ha. ‘We shall see, my pretties; we shall see.’
A single sentence summation is readily accessible. ‘At the heart of this answer to the question of the day lies Aphrodite’s Ace and its initiation of loving relationship, from which a natural evolution has led from a Past of fortune’s favor to a Present of its secure consolidation, and quite reasonable a Future of its continued manifestation in favor of Divine Feminine Norms; this sequencing suggests clear requisite developments, first to eviscerate the false formulas and institutions so ubiquitous in contemporary social relations, second to serve as a nexus of knowledge, instruction, and tutelage, third to willingly move along such a path despite never being able to articulate certainty or security in so doing.’
No matter the nuances, the overall thrust is ineluctable. Such a course as today’s question suggests could readily appear as a ‘life-calling’ for a spindoctor with a Big Tent sensibility. In this unfolding potential, the ‘practice’ in question would draw from and feed into the Review itself but would inherently also move outward to that realm, IRL, that is so easy for an introvert, and an INTJ expression of that status at that, to put off or otherwise try to finesse.
In any event, if that’s not all Food For Thought, I couldn’t begin to say what would be, ha ha. I truly live in a state of exploding astonished gratitude about it all; that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
“I just wanted him to see what freer thinking get-togethers looked like. I didn't expect him to stay,” she giggled, though she had pined for him to attend, a wish that in the event failed to materialize.
Carl, however, a few months and a few days after his wild ride with Danielle to New Hampshire and their return to an equally tumultuous triad in Lou's and Danielle's apartment, was very much present and accounted for, along with his buxom gymnast girlfriend Henrietta, a dapper little girl-child from the Philippines, who, when she witnessed the flirtatious and increasingly altered cha-cha-cha that her man and Danielle performed, stalked off through Maxine's door into the night.
His Bostonian brogue at once light and pointed, Carl quipped with a snort, “She'll get over it. I'll hook up with her later,” which he pronounced “latah,” before he and Danielle went for a “walk in the garden,” the acre and a half of overgrown forest and truck vegetable rows that surrounded Maxine's two story ancient structure in Northport, where, luckily, not even a whiff of the nearby paper mill afflicted the revelers.
Returning flushed and merry twenty-three minutes thereafter from their canoodling embrasure, Carl gave a soulful buss goodbye and trotted off in search of his Henrietta. Danielle then went through the room like a consummate professional consultant at the year's most important trade show, stopping to shout with glee and give a big hug and kiss when she encountered Harold, one of her Chukker Nation Public House conquests and fellow worker at Partlow when she was there.
Harold was a drinker; a drinker who could become quite insistent. He persisted in insisting that Danielle needed to come home with him. Her smiling protestations, which Lou watched out of the corner of his eye, soon turned to that snappish expostulation that he knew so well. He grinned, whispering “Watch out, Harold!”
Mary's blank inquiry, “Do what?” was Lou's first time to hear that lowly, lovely Southern idiom, and he turned to her with a big smile and laughed. “Oh, nothing,” he said, his countenance both merry and rueful, and then to himself, “just my sweetie getting hit on by one of her other blokes.”
Danielle's “No!” rang like a shot through a waterfall, cracking so loudly that the sensation of the cascade's thunder receded, if only for a moment. Then came, through the clutter of the renewed cacophony, “You're drunk, Harold, don't be an asshole.”
Not quite two minutes later she was by Lou's side, rosy and brimming with energetic kisses for her “main man.” Both of them had undergone an initial set of psilocybin's rushes of gushing electric current up and down their frames. “Let's go home!” Lou suggested.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Let's,” low and a little wicked.
Before exiting they gulped a shot glass more tea each. Like twined tumbleweeds, they drove home; their hands and mouths worked each other over at every stop. As they readied to open their ancient Beetle's doors, Lou couldn't help himself. He asked, “So did you and Carl fuck out their in the yard.”
She laughed. “Don't be silly; I knew I was waiting for you.” S he paused, lucid through the electrochemical surge, saying “Besides it would have been indiscreet.”
Opening the door, she acknowledged, “I did give him a nice blow job though.” Her humorous spicy lilt, a combination of Morocco, Catalan, Alsace, and Boston, had just the right tonality.
Lou laughed. “My monster goddess.” He was clear, mostly, that so long as she still adored him, still wanted to fuck him, still would seek him out as a preferential partner, then her wantonness was what he needed if he were to be able to explore his own parameters, so to speak, sowing oats both wild and free in the process.
At just that juncture, as if she read his mind, she first used what was to become one of her signature come-ons. “I am telling youuuuuuuuuuuuuuouuouuuuu!” laughing and kissing him; “fuck me till I'm blueeeeeeueeeuuueee!!”
Candles lit, sage smudging their room and king-sized bed, which itself anchored not to a frame or any headboard or footboard, after they had rattled a couple of such conveyances to pieces, but to the floor itself, they succumbed to her summons. Through the foundations of their rattletrap student ghetto home, their sleeping platform now obviously connected to the entire Earth, which they were almost always in the process, with each other's assistance, of trying to move.
And so this night, as Dia del Muerte unfolded into November's continuing march toward wintry chill, again and again, as the guttering light and smoky scents blended with their musky flows of passion and pleasure, they plumbed the depths of connection that two fit primate bodies can manifest, perhaps particularly under the influence of the sorts of chemical cocktails that Jackson and Snake Lady were wont to cook up together. Danielle's kisses, uncharacteristically wet and sloppy and therefore particularly to her mate's liking, arousing him to keening moans of ecstasy, combined with the juices of climax from her labia, which over and over painted Lou's lips with the menstrual flux that happened to be part of this particular conjunction.
Just as the sun's rays crested the ridges that rose to the East toward coal country and Birmingham, Danielle's final wild frenzy erupted for their encounter on this occasion. She drew her lover deeply inside, and thrashing her head back and forth, showed her teeth in abandoned exaltation, laughing and weeping simultaneously in explosive release.
Noticing the rising light, they too rose, a bit creakily from their exertions and lack of slumber, and made their way to the stately campus oaks on University Avenue to greet the new day and the sense that, despite the travails of their relationship choices, they were a team to be reckoned with, a partnership for the ages to come that so desperately needed collaboration and cooperation and mutually attentive joy to combat the alienating insanity that were the 'mainstream' response to capitalist contingency. They returned to their moist and fragrant pallet, where, despite fatigue and bone-deep weariness, they loved once more, allowing Lou to have a spill that did not come close to matching hers in its intensity but that nonetheless elicited his own cascade of mirth and tears.
* * * * *
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
As a whimsy, to initiate such consideration, we might examine little Love Charms that deal with this embedding of universal elements in even the most grounded and carnal explosiveness. Here’s one: "Our Love's Wings Describe a Cosmic Spark to Reach a Heavenly Arc."
Then too, loving libations may be as likely as—or more likely than—anything else to evoke the infinite in the first place. Among the many messages that agree is this one. "Our Wide-Eyed Ardor Flashes Sparks From the Stars."
Multiple of these miniature sculptures of time and tide went through more than one iteration. Love & Erotic Passion has steadfastly stayed atop the Marshall Arts charts, so to say.
Yes indeed. “Passionate Pulsars' Pull” even merited a title each time that a new version rolled off the production line. Thus, "A Pulsar Pull, Your Passion Captures the Elastic Orbit of My Heart's Flaming Comet."
A slightly divergent expression followed. “My Heart's Flaring Comet” put it this way. “Your Pulsar Passion's Pull Has Captured the Elastic Orbit of My Heart's Flaring Comet.” This message actually ended up with five variations, ha ha.
Yet another bitty bite of swirling splinter added this quite similar diminutive note to. “Whenever We Align Our Embraces & Activate Ecstatic Adoration, We Reignite Matter's Persistent Potential for Cosmic Carnal Combustion.” Love rocks the eternal, eh?
All four of these Driftwood Message categorical imperatives contain these slender sorts of statements. Even a smallish wooden confection contains facets adequate for statements about something. Philosophy, Psychology, Spirtuality is no exception.
Another piece, carved up by the river to appear ready to launch into space, echoed this appearance. "Our Thoughts Can Proffer Steps Toward the Stars."
An ecological imperative often motivates such work. Thus, this: "As All Energized Matter Starts As Starshine, Revering the Sun Sounds the Soul of Salubrious Sense."
The twists and turns in some of these figures foster an awareness that things go beyond what they first seem to be. Nuance inherently initiates turnabouts, as in this little notation. "Each Atom, Every Star, & the Entire Cosmic Whole, Ebb & Flow With Pulsing Paradox."
"Axiomatically, the Arc of Things to Come Must Pass Through Here & Now," says another Thought Charm. In so doing, art imitates life’s sagacity, that only the present passage connects us—past and future, come what may—to the flow of existence that has included us.
What with Mars and the moon and a massive expansion of a ‘frontier thesis’ in history, this tone of messaging should surprise no one. I like to say that I ‘listen to the wood’ to determine what to inscribe; perhaps these arboreal offshoots tune in to the here-and-now, ha ha.
Elon Musk isn’t the only ‘leader’ to assert that humans have no option but to migrate toward space. Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End might make a different contention, that “the stars are not for man,” yet the idea is popular, particularly among plutocrats, ha ha.
“Humanity's Seeds” headlines this example. “All Rockets That Launch Interstellar Searches Must Carry Any Offal & Carrion of Earthbound Failure With Them, So That Only Such Endeavors As Spring From Social Comity & Political Accord Can Ever Hope Successfully to Spread Humanity's Seeds.”
A similar text emerges on a larger Ponder Panel. "Daunting Dilemmas & Their Solution" implores that citizens avail themselves of sage awareness of the agendas, hidden and otherwise, in play in such ideation.
"Entrepreneurs, Whose Actual & Erstwhile Enterprising Acuity Almost Always Emanates From Inherited Fortune & Other Profound Privilege, Encourage Us to Look to the Stars As a Frontier That Will Somehow Resolve Humanity's Most Daunting Dilemmas Despite How Earthbound Failures, Offal & Carrion, Will Unavoidably Attend All Such Expeditions: Only Such Endeavors As Spring From Social Equality & Political Mutuality Can Ever Hope Successfully to Spread Homo Sapiens Seeds."
Along a slightly different axis-of-consideration, so to say, one might encounter a morsel with the title, “Science’s Erstwhile Endless Frontier.” This alludes to Vannevar Bush’s founding of the National Science Foundation and to the article that the estimable scientist and administrator of capital wrote for Atlantic Magazine.
“As We May Think” predicted today with altogether spooky prescience—people sitting around their little boxes that were their mediated lives. Soon enough, both Bush and his Atlantic essay will proffer another basis for Big Tent thinking and writing. The Driftwood Message title just above, in the event, leads to this textual completion.
“While We Fantasize Crafting Ships That Promise Us Access to Science's Erstwhile Endless Frontier, an Unblinking Cosmos, As If in Response, May Be Gestating a Leviathan, Or Daunting Demonic Dervish, That Will Otherwise & Unexpectedly Derail Or Destroy Our Dreams of a Destiny Atop the Universe's Biological Bounty.”
Inevitably, all such thought-processes take us down pathways into the biosphere, into the arenas in which life can exist. Because of our inquisitive natures, we wonder, ‘what’s up with all of this?’ “Gaia's Ecological Imperatives” proffers one reply.
"By Definition, What Lies Beyond the Horizon of Our Energetic Motion of Matter Through Space Can Never Be Certain; Still, We Can State With Absolute Assurance What Can Never Appear There, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of Perfected Perpetual 'Security' & Exceptional Engineered Escape From Nature's Norms & Gaia's Grave Implacable Gaze That Mandates Adherence to the Goddess' Guidance, at the Cost of Inescapable Decline & Ultimate Doom For Any Society That Fails to Abide By the Basic Ecological Imperatives of Life on Earth."
Ultimately, the point almost goes without saying, all such inquiries about ourselves and the boundaries that define embodiment of any sort flow from a more general, a more widespread, in cases such as the spindoctor a more utterly boundless curiosity. Alice’s “curiouser and curiouser” is a favorite literary line.
Yet how should we go about these monumentally monstrous forays into the thickets of antithesis that characterize our cosmos? After all, even the most guileless child will ascertain that utter certainty about any complicated problem is closer to impossible than one chance in a hundred. “Open-Eyed, Open Hearted” gives erstwhile ‘methodological guidance.’
"Our Analytical Projectiles, Which We Launch to Pierce the Veil of Ignorance and Nonsense That Otherwise Attend Awareness, Depend For Their Penetrating Power On Such Factors as the Wide-Eyed Wonder & Openhearted Ardor With Which We Ponder Existence's Shimmering Array of Interlinked Riddles and Opportunities."
In essence, Life-Force-Energy mandates that we try to make sense of even the most ineffable and draconian circumstances. We do not seek to believe we will ever exactly find, but to know that wilfull ignorance amounts to stubborn stupidity, so we must try, despite the all-too-frequent visage of futility in front of us, to map the world in our minds in some useful shape, form, or fashion.
This brings up a popular issue these days—again, I might add, the duality that some people apparently accept as even plausible that our cognitive, behavioral, collective universe must be the result of either ‘free-will’ or ‘determinism.’ Taken to even a hint of extremity, such a topic will be at best worthlessly idiotic and, much more likely, toxically enervating.
However, it does point out that pondering will and fate is part of our existential duty to seek knowledge, eh? “Choice & Chance” argues this assertion, in any case.
Both Choice & Chance Flow Through All Life's Groovy Conduits, in Some Roughly Equal Measure Underlying All Potential For Sweet Fruition in Our Ventures, Whether We Seek to Ford the Flood Or Wade the Shoals of Time's Tidal Tempest, an at Once Exhilarating & Enervating Dynamic Process Where, We Might Well Inquire, "in Our Sojourns, Which of These Two Omnipresent Original Causal Factors Do We Want to Emphasize, & How?"'
Ultimately, this more or less completely empirical estimate of existential parameters will lead to profoundly moral, perhaps spiritual, emotional and sentient environs. “Duty-Bound” evokes such a response unless I’m much mistaken, ha ha.
"The Comprehensive Curvature of Even a Tiny Cosmic Slice, a Mere Galaxy's Complete Extent, Must Ever Remain Well Out of Reach of Even the Most Powerfully Expressed Collective Human Ken, Let Alone Within Some Lone 'Genius's' Inquisitive Grasp; Nonetheless, We Cannot Help But Seek—We Have an Existential Duty to Imagine—the Capacity Not Only to See & Feel & Know Everything, From the Cradle to the Grave of All-That-Is, but Also To Understand How Our Own Inputs Might Serve to Grow Grace & Glory's Glimmer Despite the Infinite Ineffability & Ineluctable Uncertainty of Existence."
Some of Earth’s crop of nine billion participant observers have a bit of a ‘gulp’ response to discourse such as this. Morality may even be too intimate an exercise for some, and spirituality would cause their instantaneous exit.
Still, the earthy voices of cosmic crooners correct such timidity. Billy Bragg’s “Do Unto Others” has already featured in BTR’s pages, as have the sage advisories of the Louvin Brothers in their beloved song, “Love Thy Neighbors As Thyself.”
"Whether Oar Or Wing Or Sail Or Steam Powers the Craft of a Cosmic Dream, Its Driving Purpose Impels Some Soulful Vision That Must Ever Deliver the Largest Likelihood of Fruition If It Simultaneously Facilitates Necessary, Generous, Socially Useful Ends, Ones That Expedite the Golden Rule Rather Than Gaining More Gold."
Here’s one direction that such thinking as all of this can take. First, we see that we can agree on at least one principle, the Golden Rule. As the Tenth of the Ten New Commandments establishes, “All Other Matters Are Negotiable.”
So we have to begin to talk about all this among ourselves. Why don’t we have prevailing ways that large majorities would choose to prevail? Well, that’s obvious, right? They’re that way by design, or something similar. “But Why?” covers just this ground.
"Fundamental Questions—As Often As Not, Some Would Say, the Most Basic & Centrally Important Lines of Inquiry—Start With the Intonation of a Skeptical Or Otherwise Incredulous, 'Why?' in So Doing, Interestingly Enough, Circumscribing Interrogatories That Universally Share Exactly the Same General Answer, to Wit, 'Because the Eventuality Or Situation Or Result at Issue Makes Sense Under the Circumstances, a Realization, By the Way, That Mandates Our Most Thoroughly Inquisitive Responses in Regard to Said Circumstances' Origin Stories, Basically a Set of Marching Orders Applicable Any Time That We Find Ourselves, in All Seriousness, Asking, 'But Why?'"
Again echoing the last Big Tent Review, some of the more extensive Sticks and Panels of the Marshall Arts inventory of ‘eternal’ ideas, and ideas about the eternal, have aluded to the lusty litanies of love that every soulful one of us celebrates somehow. “Flexing Your Heart” is a juicy example.
"To Flex Your Heart in My Hand Or Melt Your Love in My Mouth Opens the Cosmos to Reveal All the Glories, the Occasionally Grotesque Grandeur, of Existence, Till the Chilling Thrills of the Thrusts & Spills of Our Sweet Sweaty Bounty Substantially Surpass Those Instances of Torturous Terror When I Ponder My Mere Mortality Despite Apparent Hints of Eternity in Our Embraces."
Perhaps Eros inherently courts eternity. After all, the country saying is that ‘grandkids are tickets to heaven.’ Anyhow, the cosmic samples from Marshall Arts love lists probably offer more heated emanations than appear on average, ha ha. Such a conclusion definitely applies to “Over & Over & Over Again.”
"Just As the Universe's Boundless Whirling Eruption Has Unfolded All Its Twirling Curvature From a Tiny Container's Big Bang, So Too Does the Wild & Wanton Wonder of Your Volcanic Carnal Forge—at Once, Magma's Eros, Fiery Loving, & Molten Ecstasy—Explode From Your Compact Package of Gaia's Goddess Glories, a Clear Difference Being How Readily You Unfurl This Swirl of Electric Pulsating Passion to Galvanize Basking in Blissful Flames Over & Over & Over Again."
Passionate palpations and ecstatic eruptions evidence, if not altogether prove, that life contains all the glories of grace if we relate to each other amicably. ‘Period. Paragraph.’ At least so said dear Mother Kassy, my secretarial wizard Mom.
“Adaptively Repurposed Craft” follows up on this contextualization of loving potential. We do see horrors around us, some of less consequence than a deer that dances around with a crippled hind leg, others as noisome and vile as another dalliance at the verge of Mass Collective Suicide.
"The Cascading Cornucopia of Planetary Plenty Here Contains All the Fated Forms & Formulas That Human Consciousness Can Imagine, As Well As Untold Other Glorious Gifts & Grotesque Surprises That May Simultaneously Amaze & Imperil Us; the Function of Craft, the Rationale For Artistry, Must Ever Include the Repurposing of Bits & Pieces of This Existential Bounty to Meet the Necessities & Schemes That Our Potential & Our Duty Cause Us to Dream Into Reality So As to Match Emergent Needs & Nostrums of Each New Day."
A final Thought Charm addresses the implicit necessity that collaborative human intelligence will end up taking shape in something. Any such process of assuming a definite social form involves technique; culture cultivates machines, in essence. A coming Wood Words Essay looks at these dynamics of Science, Technology, & Society.
“Whether Coming Or Going, a Given Technology's Impact Extends Outward Far Beyond Its Own Singular Track to the Entire Social Realm.”
Perhaps if only for transitional purposes, today’s essay can point out that these STS conundrums will invite wider participation from outside Marshall Arts next issue. Thus, we can close with a reference or two from outside the boundaries of colored wooden ‘crafts.’
Julian Jaynes starts his magnum opus at full gallop. “O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all!
A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do.
An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it?”
“The Problem of Consciousness” introduces Jaynes’ work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, with these lines. I mean, whoa! Right? Good question. Then again, whatever ‘it’ is, this discerning sentience that lives in us, it always goes on about something. Right?
And without exception among every one of us, that inner grokking is erotic in nature. Huh. The machinations of love arrive at the machinery of societal manifestation via this portal of ‘consciousness.’
Alan Watts’ Nature, Man, Woman punctuates this powerful pulse that lies at the heart of our ‘delicately embodied miracles,’ so to say. He finds Strange that sexuality isn’t the highest calling of study and incarnation, and that, instead, “conventional spirituality rejects the bodily union of man and woman as the most fleshly, animal and degrading phase of human activity—a rejection showing the extent of its faulty perception and its misinterpretation of the natural world.”
His is opinion completely redolent of and attuned to a Big Tent worldview. He deepens his assessment.
“We need to recognize the physical reality of relationship between organisms as having as much 'substance' as the organisms themselves, if not more. Thus however defective its doctrine of marriage in many respects, the Christian Church is perfectly correct in saying that husband and wife are one flesh.
It is similarly correct to think of the members of the Church as the Body of Christ, especially if the Church is considered to be the process of realizing that the whole universe is the Body of Christ—which is what the doctrine of the Incarnation really implies.” More is forthcoming.
At the outset, This Humble Correspondent certainly expected a shorter essay for #25. In “Ode to a Field Mouse,” Robert Burns echoed the hum of All-That-Is when he stated that ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft astray.’ Ha ha.
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
well provide L&MC the most plaudits of this grouping of investigators. Issued in 2022, “The Continuing Value of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital” illustrates how the author had truly ‘broken new ground’ in ways that were as intuitively obvious as they were thereby persuasive.
Quoting a reader in 1974, Bob Carter and Joseph Choonara write, “What Harry Braverman has done, in a series of short and readable chapters, is to continue at the point where Marx left off in his analysis of the labour process in capitalist society in the first volume of Capital, and to show what has been happening to work in twentieth century capitalism. After reading the book, it seems amazing that no one had ever written it before.”
At the heart of Braverman’s contextualization were incisive ideas about the nature of cognitive and bodily capacity. The authors above quote the bard of L&MC, with the volume’s original emphasis.
“‘The simultaneous development of language and culture allows the transmission of advances and hence the development of science, technology, and productive techniques. The potential that this capacity opens out also allows for less progressive developments: ‘The unity of conception and execution may be dissolved. The conception must still precede and govern execution, but the idea as conceived by one may be executed by another.’”
Moreover, critically, the impact of ‘scientific management’ on profit meant that “(t)he more employers were able to successfully implement such policies, the greater the likelihood that they would take over other companies or simply drive their rivals to extinction.”
As with other of these ‘general commentators,’ Chanoora and Carter do have constructive suggestions about L&MC. “(T)his socialization of labour (that dissolved unity of conception and execution) caused the complexity in class relations which Braverman emphasized, but for which he arguably failed to give adequate explanation.
The absence stemmed from his holding two contrary positions on the significance of the separation of mental and manual labour, stating that ‘in the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labor, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human’ (p. 125).
However, this passage is followed by a reference to how the production process is mirrored by a ‘paper replica of production, the shadow form which corresponds to the physical’, with the consequence that production… .has separated the two aspects of labor; but both remain necessary to production, and in this the labor process retains its unity.”
The lengthy and vastly illuminating work of these two chroniclers locates what Braverman teaches about so-called ‘scientific management,’ the complete ‘rationalization’ of any extensive labor process, in the broader streams of contemporary reality’s unfolding at the behest of guiding trends and entitled institutions. “Asset management companies, such as BlackRock, have amassed huge resources (with a trillion dollars under management in early 2022) and invest across whole industrial sectors.
Their power extends beyond issues of shareholder passivity or intervention in particular companies to their influence on national and international regulatory bodies, and their growth can be explained by the relatively unattractive rates of return accruing to manufacturing capital in a period of sustained low profitability across many advanced capitalisms. … ‘(D)ecades of shrinking production of new value have forced capitalists ... to shift to highly profitable financial and speculative investments’.
In this account, with which Braverman would certainly sympathize, the productive basis of the economy, in which labour is set to work to generate profits, remains the underlying fount of financial dysfunction and crises. Moreover, as we have argued, it is also the site of the key struggles of workers that Braverman identified as the means of confronting capitalists and, ultimately, capitalism as a system.”
The second set of Braverman’s reviewers include, in one way or another, more classical ways of examining the issues that arise in grappling with L&MC. Several of these materials are from schools of management, the comrades of capital, the
“Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital tapped into a late twentieth century sense that work appeared ever safer, cleaner and automated, and yet with this, less skilled and ultimately, increasingly degraded. Braverman drew on Marx’s writings on technology and the labour process, seeking to contemporise them for the conditions of the 1970s.
Braverman’s work provoked such heated debate that the term ‘Bravermania’ has entered the sociological lexicon. His analysis on the labour process in late modernity has seen scholars of organization, work and society at loggerheads over an array of issues. While some writers have attacked Braverman for underplaying the potential for worker resistance, others have defended his analysis as more nuanced and ultimately true to its Marxist inheritance.
These debates, which continue to this day on both sides of the Atlantic, are of such significance that they are covered in some detail here as a distinct paper.” In “The Rediscovery of the Labour Process,” the author organizes and examines aspects of both Braverman’s brilliance and his deficiencies.
Chris Smith’s abstract lays the foundation for his provision of nuance and detail, concluding in summary fashion. “There has been a continual renewal of labour process writing, development of new concepts, such as emotional labour or aesthetic labour. There has also been application of labour process ideas to new sectors, such as the creative industries, and new organisational forms, such as the extensive literature on call centres. We have also seen labour process theory being linked to new areas, such as institutional theory or critical realism.
The prospects for labour process writing to continue to develop are good, and the annual International Labour Process Conference and associated book publishing is likely to maintain the domain, as the evolution of forms of control and the continued globalisation of capitalism creates a demand for critical writing which engages micro and macro levels of analysis in a coherent fashion. This is something that labour process analysis in the 40 years since the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital has consistently aimed to do.”
Smith was writing for the Royal Holloway University of London School of Management in 2015. His colleague, Carl Hughes, at the University of Liverpool, developed his dissertation, TECHNOLOGY AND THE LABOUR PROCESS: A POST- BRAVERMAN PERSPECTIVE ON CONTROL AND WORKER RESISTANCE IN THE WORKPLACE, as a way of contextualizing and critiquing L&MC.
Two Chapter Titles in particular are noteworthy. “Theorising Worker Organization and Resistance to the Managerial Imperative For Control” is one, redolent and ripe with nuanced notions about these sorts of issues. Even more so, perhaps, “A Post-Braverman Perspective of Control and Worker Resistance in the Workplace” provides apt guidance about issues of skill and capacity, conception and realization, and more.
The author quotes Braverman as affirming what workplaces such as platforms and Amazon have created. “In the first form of the division of labour, the capitalist disassembles the craft and returns it to the workers piecemeal, so that the process as a whole is no longer the province of any individual worker.
Then, as we have seen, the capitalist conducts an analysis of each of the tasks distributed amongst the workers, with an eye toward getting a grip on the individual operations. It is in the age of the scientific-technical revolution that management sets itself the problem of grasping the process as a whole and controlling every element of it, without exception.” Relevance is unquestionable, rectitude arguable, eh?
Another reviewer from this selection, Frank Elwell, offers a peruser not only useful analysis but also biographical brief. Braverman espoused socialist beliefs his whole adult life. Though he joined the Socialist Workers Party, albeit he experienced first hand the “deep divisions in the SWP in the early 50s.
In 1953, Braverman left (or was expelled from) the SWP and became a co-leader with Bert Cochran of a splinter group, the Socialist Union. It was at this point that he began co-editing and writing for their paper, the American Socialist, under his party name, Harry Frankel. While working and writing for this paper he worked out many of the ideas later expressed in Labor and Monopoly Capital.”
“Harry Braverman and the Working Class” in essence concludes its contemplation of L&MC with a ‘defense of sociology.’ “Contrary to Braverman, however, I do not assert that capitalism is the only force at work causing these changes;… . Capitalism is an economic system that must be placed within the sociocultural web of population, technological and environmental relationships, bureaucratization, nationalism, consumerism, advance of science, and rationalization. These forces—never alone but always in interaction with one another (sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradicting)—are the stuff of sociology.”
In a 2024 article, “Braverman and Labor and Monopoly Capital: a Retrospective,” Chris Smith this time joins with Paul Thompson—on the faculty at the University of Stirling—to give another general, ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘Marxist’ account. They break down what Braverman has given to those who have come along since his own work.
“Principally, (Braverman) suggested that the drive for efficient production is also a drive for the control of workers by management. Managerial control is achieved through monopolising judgement,knowledge,and the conceptual side of work. For Braverman, the history of work in the 20th century is one of work degradation—as knowledge is systematically removed from direct producers and concentrated in the hands of management and their agents.
This leads to the impoverishment and debasement of the quality and experience of work, both for manual and mental workers, who are condemned to execute only the routine and conceptually depleted tasks in the service of capital.” They note that the man who wrote L&MC was willing to ‘walk the walk,’ as when he took a substantial reduction in pay to join the Monthly Review Press because he “wanted to ‘follow the music of (his) youth’ and…return to socialist publishing.”
In this ‘retro’ pondering of L&MC, this researcher pair provide five sections, the last of which, BACK TO OR BEYOND BRAVERMAN, orients readers to a contextual comprehension of Braverman, L&MC, and the tradition, in essence, that the book helped to create. They applaud and add, or modify as necessary, the original ‘degradation of work’ theses that Braverman purveyed.
“None of the above observations renders LMC and the contributions of Braverman irrelevant or of mere historical interest. In the year of its 50th, anniversary there will rightly be numerous celebrations of those contributions and reminders of key insights.
Given the amount of attention paid to the text over these decades, we would suggest that further excavations be balanced by a creative engagement with the live body of work that the text inspired and still being applied to a fundamentally changed workplace and world economy.”
Yet another paper, by prominent scholar Michael Burawoy—hand-typed for his presentation at a “Symposium on Braverman”—bears the evocative headline, “BETWEEN MARXIST ORTHODOXY AND CRITICAL THEORY: COMMENTS ON BRAVERMAN'S LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITAL. He too gives a coordinating organization to examination of the foundational text.
He asks to start, “What is this critical component in Braverman? The subtitle of the book—the degradation of work in the twentieth century—indicates a critique in the obvious sense of the negative connotation of ‘degradation.’ But it involves another element, namely the notion of an alternative to the nature of work as we know it today. … significantly, to an alternative for the future.
To critique, then, is to seek out the unrealized potential in the present and to point to the gap between what is and what could be. Critique declares that what exists is not natural, inevitable or necessary but the product of very definite conditions which are not themselves immutable. Thus, Braverman attributes the degradation of work and the commodification of life in general to the domination of capital.
It is not only that work under monopoly capitalism becomes fractionalized into meaningless tasks but market forces invade all arenas of life turning relations among people into relations among things.” A congruent Driftwood Art Message can close out this section, although we could go on at much greater length.
In the event, “Guarding One’s Heart” states its case in a way that mirrors Burawoy, and, by him, Braverman as well. Human diminution flows from sociopolitical election, whatever the case may be.
“In the Hyper-Commodified Context That Prevails in Expressing Time & Space's Present Unfolding Pass, When the Account Ledger Has Become the Only Holy Book & Nothing Much Matters Beyond Meeting Next Quarter's Margins, Unless One Guards One's Heart With the Closest Attention, Bookkeeping Protocols & Their Brutal Bean-Counter's Bias For Egregious Efficiency's Profiteering Plunder Will Infect, With Their Rejections of 'Sentiments' Like Love, Honor, Decency, Even the Most Tender Relations of Caring Affection.”
For today, the third segment of those who have delved Braverman includes three of the sectors suggested Above-the-Fold. This is that litany, repeated from that juncture. “(A)fter that, a fascinating sidebar and another entire spinoff, the ‘Labor Process Debate’ comes forward; following this set of discourses, we have a dissection of Braverman that bases itself on class-analysis; the penultimate group consists of material from the journal that Dr. Braverman edited, Monthly Review, and additional ‘mainline’ Marxist circles…”
Each of these components of the aforementioned Bravermania could readily render several volumes of concept, context, and critique, so only the most brutally abbreviated presentation is possible here. We’ve already heard mention of an erstwhile ‘Labor Process Debate.’
In this vein, two Italian scholars, mounting a declared defense of capital’s accumulative creativity, want very much to show Braverman in error in any assertion of overarching ‘deskilling’ in the labor process via mechanism of property’s hegemony. “This control, however, takes new forms under regimes of flexible accumulation, and is founded in managerial strategies built on workers’ involvement and participation.
Ensuring workers’ compliance with such strategies requires the creation of the new kinds of subjectivity. The article goes on to discuss the education reforms required to produce such subjectivities, and the transformation of pedagogical processes and teaching labour that are necessary to achieve these reforms. It concludes by reflecting on the implications of the resulting individualisation of workers’ subjectivities for class solidarity.”
All I can say is, ‘gulp! Los hechos hablan por si solos,’ ha ha. Another pair of ‘establishment’ Italians offers this evaluation. “Labour Process Theory (LPT) is a Marxist-inspired theoretical perspective that studies the organisation of work and the agency of workers and managers within the workplace. At its core, LPT frames labour as a crucially indeterminate commodity whose valorisation requires constant managerial control and frames employment relations as the result of a continuous mediation between the inherently antagonistic interests of managers and workers.”
The authors herein capsulize thinking, in relation to Braverman, of what they call an LPT “renewal.” Chris Smith and Paul Thompson once again weigh in along similar lines, in their Sage Publications publication, “Reevaluating the Labor Process Debate.”
A French professor, Runo Tinel, proffers a more historically oriented portrait of this arena in his “Labour process and the division of labour, a reading.” He initiates this investigation by looking at the work of Charles Babbage, arguably the annals’ first ‘efficiency expert,’ whose 1832 book, Economy of Machinery and Manufacture provided Marx’s examination of wage labor with many of its specific intricacies.
To show the vast extent of the reach of this ‘LPT frame,’ one might merely note the piece of the puzzle presented by Ishfaq Majeed of the Department of Sociology at the Aligarh Muslim University in Utter Pradesh, India. “An Analysis of the Labor Process Theory: from Marx to Post Braverman Debate” provides a partial briefing, which demonstrates the interest of Subcontinent business theorists in these matters.
One could continue at great length in this first subsection. However, moving right along, the next element of this portion of the capsulization of Braverman’s influence on contemporary discourse concerns more specifically social class analyses. Most of these works are from the 1980’s, beginning with “Back to Work: Sociology and the Discourse on Capitalist Work,” by Graham Knight.
Two of the articles in this little aggregate are from the current century, one by John Bellamy Foster, Robert McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna. “Monopoly and Competion in Twenty-first Century Capitalism” is—like much of the next subsection—on offer from Monthly Review, where Foster plays the role of editor that was once Braverman’s part.
Somewhat similarly, Science & Society in July, 2017 published “Class, Capital and the Global Unfree Market: Resituating Theories of Monopoly Capitalism and Unequal Exchange,” an articulation that suggests something akin to a ‘geography of social-class’ or something similar. As before, we could say loads more.
However, the third subset for today’s #25 section beckons. In this, material from the last ten years or so, Braverman’s beloved Monthly Review takes center stage, with an assist from John Bellamy Foster again. The selected issues cover the period from 2013 through 2016.
At minimum, as in an installment about ‘modern communications,’ Braverman merits at least a few mentions. Then, a year later, in 2014, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Harry Braverman and the Structure of the Working Class,” Foster and the mentioned-earlier R. Jamil Jonna introduce the entire magazine.
In the final portion of their essay, the authorial pair name this concluding section, “The Right to Useful, Non-Degraded Labor.” And well might wage-earners and citizens generally welcome such a state of grace, even as Capital’s Captains practically prohibit what they insist bottom-line necessities require.
“Braverman‘s analysis of the labor process in Labor and Monopoly Capital was thus an integral part of a much larger argument on the generation and absorption of an enormous surplus of labor under monopoly capitalism. The resulting reserve army was used to leverage still higher levels of socially useless labor—for the unwavering purpose of feeding the accumulation of capital at the top of society.
The great potential of this enhanced productivity to free up labor for more meaningful, rewarding, and socially productive work (along with enhanced leisure) was largely undermined by the very nature of the capitalist juggernaut itself. Crucial to capitalism‘s logic, Braverman argued, was ―the habituation of the worker to the capitalist mode of production, which needed to 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 outside, so to speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in reserve.
The requirement of overcoming the natural-human resistance to capitalism‘s antagonistic social relations thus recurs with the succession of the generations‖ and becomes a permanent feature of capitalist society. During most of childhood and adolescence, it is the creation of market needs—turning individuals into commodity-purchasing machines or consumers—that is paramount.
As the world‘s leading marketing guru, Philip Kotler, declared a decade or so ago: ―Part of capitalism is, it‘s a system where we‘ve got to motivate people to want things so they‘ll work for these things whatever they are, and buy them.”
Labor and Monopoly Capital gets no notice in an imperialism-themed MR from 2015, although the examples worldwide of a bifurcated working class fits perfectly with Braverman’s predicted stripping of skills from workers in lieu of continuous-production machinery. The 2016 edition in this queue glances back at another iconic work, Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, at once a predecessor of and a coequal with L&MC.
Braverman was a contributor, along with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, to The Capitalist System, that evinced perspectives and practical prospects that were the result of contributors’ decidedly—in not unshakable—socialist stances on the pressing issues of the here and now, which in the end came down to comprehending “Monopoly Capitalism in the United States.”
Bob Carter wrote “Defending Marx and Braverman: taking back the labour process in theory and practice” in 2021. He circumscribes the intellectual work about social and workplace struggles that Marx and Braverman have delineated. In so doing, in this final bit for this subset, he helps fellow travelers to comprehend how matters truly stand, as it were, in regard to battles and skirmishes and tense loggerheads, filled with defeat and betrayal.
“All of these developments reflected and deepened the loss of confidence in working-class organisation. However, as E P Thompson stressed, class is a relationship. Though overt mass resistance retreated (notwithstanding events such as the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike), the ‘other side’ of the capital-labour relationship, spearheaded by the state, went on the offensive.
This was, in Ralph Miliband’s terms, ‘class struggle from above.’ The result was the enactment of anti-trade union legislation, which remains intact today, and assaults on the welfare state and living standards.
What follows is largely an appreciation of Braverman’s contribution. This is no substitute for reading the original. His work is both rich and deliberately accessible.
This latter quality is very admirable and reflects Braverman’s experience as a worker and a socialist activist. There are criticisms to be made of his work, but these should not distract from his achievements. Following a summary of some aspects of Labour and Monopoly Capital, the second part of this article looks at the subsequent criticisms of the book, detailing how they developed into the essentially conservative project of the ‘labour process debate.’
This field of academic argument became detached from its origins in Marx’s Capital and Braverman’s work. The labour process debate eventually coalesced into a new orthodoxy stripped of any relationship to class analysis.” Carter insists that both scholars and activists, or those who combine ‘both hats,’ have other options than this manipulated status quo.
A similar analysis and direction punctuate the final segment of this first look at Harry Braverman, indeed an estimable chronicler of wage-earning existence. Matteo Pasquinelli’s Eye of the Master: a Social History of Artificial Intelligence fast forwards Labor and Monopoly Capital to the present tense, or at least such a contention makes perfect sense.
So saying, we will speak for a while about Pasquinelli’s superstar insights into things, even as we discover that a ‘bigger fish to fry’ must be forthcoming in relation to his overall oeuvre. Thus, in #27 or #28, depending on how everything pans out, we’ll go sifting for more gold in a deeply extensive review of Pasquenelli’s genius, both in his Eye of the Master and otherwise.
For the here and now, this estimable Italian’s hope is to reduce the voodoo and other ‘smoke and mirrors’ with which monopoly mediators and their minions describe labor in its relations with capital, the foundation of things, after all is said and done, ha ha. He uses the example of how difficult have proven attempts to create non-catastrophic ‘automatically perambulated automobiles,’ as it were.
“(E)ven the entrepreneur Elon Musk has admitted, after not a few fatal accidents of Tesla cars, that ‘generalized self-driving is a hard problem’. In all its problematic aspects, however, the industrial project of self-driving vehicles has made clear that the task of driving is not merely ‘mechanical’. If the skill of driving can be translated into an algorithmic model to begin with, it is because driving is a logical activity—because, ultimately, all labour is logic.” Indeed.
Following his first reference to Braverman’s core importance in such efforts to explicate modern lives, Professor Pasquinelli summarizes. “When industrial machines such as looms and lathes were invented, in fact, it was not thanks to the solitary genius of an engineer but through the imitation of the collective diagram of labour: by capturing the patterns of hand movements and tools, the subdued creativity of workers’ know-how, and turning them into mechanical artifacts. …(T)his book argues that the most sophisticated ‘intelligent’ machines have also emerged by imitating the outline of the collective division of labour.
In the course of this book, this theory of technological development is renamed the labour theory of automation, or labour theory of the machine, which I then extend to the study of contemporary AI and generalise into a labour theory of machine intelligence.” In advance of his next mention of Braverman, this now-iconic Italian thinker quotes Alan Turing about his proposed Automatic Computing Engine.
“Roughly speaking those who work in connection with the ACE will be divided into its masters and its servants. Its masters will plan out instruction tables for it, thinking up deeper and deeper ways of using it.
Its servants will feed it with cards as it calls for them. They will put right any parts that go wrong. They will assemble data that it requires. In fact the servants will take the place of limbs.
As time goes on the calculator itself will take over the functions both of masters and of servants. The servants will be replaced by mechanical and electrical limbs and sense organs.” Turing was speaking in 1947; if one isn’t sensing goosebumps, probably one is not paying sufficient attention.
The Eye of the Master is required reading, if for no other reason than its dissection of mythos and reification in regard to this newest technological miracle and purported fix for the social catastrophes that our economic and technical practices are percolating. “Mythologies of technological autonomy and machine intelligence are nothing new: since the industrial age, they have existed to mystify the role of workers and subaltern classes.
As Schaffer has remarked, while describing the cult of automata in Babbage’s age, ‘To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.’” This precision in analysis leads to another epiphany.
“Different social groups and configurations of power have shaped information technologies and AI in the past century. Rather than on the ‘shoulders of giants’, as the saying goes, it could be said that the early paradigms of mechanical thinking and late machine intelligence have been developed, in different times and ways, ‘on the shoulders’ of merchants, soldiers, commanders, bureaucrats, spies, industrialists, managers, and workers.
In all these genealogies, the automation of labour has been the key factor, but this aspect is often neglected by a historiography of technology that privileges science’s point of view ‘from above’.” From this elucidating lens for considering matters at hand Pasquinelli again credits Braverman’s efforts, along with feminist theorists of the control of laboring lives as part of a project that often centered on controlling the female body.
We will finish, for now, by laying out Pasquinelli’s clarifying illumination of what this inherent dependence of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ on preceding human labor really means. “The Eye of the Master contains not only a political but also a technical analogy. It signals, somewhat ironically, the ambivalence of the current paradigm of AI—deep learning—which emerged not from theories of cognition, as some may believe, but from contested experiments to automate the labour of perception, or pattern recognition.”
Our final authority for today then proceeds to break down the split origination of today’s all too commonplace extolling of AI’s rescue operation in regard to the social dilemmas that the machinery in question somehow simultaneously threatens to make completely cataclysmic. “Symbolic AI is the lineage that is associated with the 1956 Dartmouth workshop for which John McCarthy coined the questionable term ‘artificial intelligence’. Its key applications have been the Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver—and the array of expert systems and inference engines in general—which were proven trivial and prone to combinatorial explosion.
Connectionism, on the other hand, is the lineage of artificial neural networks pioneered by Frank Rosenblatt’s invention of the ‘perceptron’ in 1957, which unfolded into convolutional neural networks in the late 1980s and, eventually, launched the deep learning architecture that has prevailed since the 2010s.” On this evocative notation ends the body of today’s article.
CONCLUSION
This newest necessity of deconstructing the link between 'productivity' and society clearly shows how essential are these soothsaying adventures, especially in relation to such widespread, supposed palliatives to our problems as capital would have us believe that we will discover in some newly proposed fetish that merely further facilitates plutocratic predominance. In that vein, A Social History of Artificial Intelligence is precisely what, soon enough, we need to delve more deeply.
Again, then, ‘nous sommes arrivés!’ Another essay is complete, once more a ‘labor of love and elucidation.’ Braverman’s import, no doubt, results from his creative and scintillating take on the nature of labor in the context of monopoly enterprise.
For reasons opaque to This Humble Correspondent, many people—and possibly a substantial majority—detest any sort of focus on the parameters of our working lives. Perhaps such a hateful attitude stems from how much they despise their own jobs, and maybe they also wonder, ‘why would anyone consider laboring for a living so crucial?’
Meditating on such matters brings to mind a little exchange with my sweet 101 year old mother-in-law the other day. She likes to watch a trio of deer that often visit her neighbor’s sloping Appalachian yard, something that we were doing as the slanting afternoon sun dappled the lawn and the ruminant beasts.
The conversation turned on her query, in her sweet mountain twang, “So! D’you find out anything new today?” She finds my fanatical insistence on my ‘intellectual efforts’ “inneresting,” which means, more or less, that she thinks that I’m at least a little more than half crazy.
And I mentioned this essay, calling it a chance ‘to show how important work is to modern life,’ mas o menos. With the lilt in her voice that indicated her skepticism, she persisted. “Well, what do you mean?”
I motioned around our little sinecure at the family room table, where she and I and my love were sitting and basking in the golden light of another approaching sunset. “Well, just look at all this plenty,” pointing to books and plates and cutlery and furnishings and the large screen TV on which she likes to watch Lawrence Welk reruns.
“And look at them,” indicating the performers on the screen. All of us would be out there in the weeds and the trees with those deer,” naked as the day that labor brought us into the world I might have added, “if we didn’t all work together to make all the stuff” that fills our plentiful lives.
“Well, I guess you’re right,” she acknowledged, still with a skeptical edge. And this is a key reason why Harry Braverman’s scholarship and insight are such central pieces of puzzling out the present passage that we’ll be returning to his work over and over again.
It’s also one of the most compelling condemnations of Nazism, which in Germany used the truism, “Arbeit Macht Frei”—'work sets us free’—as a way of justifying the enslavement and murder of ‘inferior races’ so as to lighten the labors of the ‘master race.’ Labor is at the heart of everything human, a fact that we ignore at our uttermost peril.
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
As much as Sam trusted his horsed dexterity—after all, he had ridden almost twenty moons on the frontier just a few short years before—he decided that to try to calm his snowy steed, all the while that he kept a haltered, guiding, new leash on a likely highly skeptical Mikhail would be far too crazed a notion. Thus, when he awoke from one of his truly twinned dreams of his brother two hours before daylight, he knew, after a kiss and a cuddle with the ever-smoldering, quilted Rosy, how to proceed.
He and Mikhail had greeted the dawn together, more or less inevitable given that the road down to the dell and up from the valley glade below both arced more or less eastward; the previous days’ Norther had cleared all hint of cloudy cover, so when sunshine started sparkling through the stand of bare, bleached beech on a knob bereft of snow, exactly East of their trail, they both sat to watch the light show while Sam offered his young beast companion strips of dried lamb from a sackful that he was carrying.
Such persuasive reinforcement might not be necessary, but Mikhail generally remained jolly if he had access to food. As the sun painted a molten yellow skein through the naked trunks of the trees, Sam breathed another morning prayer of gratitude for his life and wife and all of it. He wasn’t sure, of course, but even the occasionally cussed young cub seemed reverential at the sight of sunrise’s radiant rays.
Swaddled in sheepskin, with longjohns beneath his leather pants, Sam soon needed to remove his coat to avoid soaking sweats. His charge, like a snowman at the end of a rope, followed the track like a wolf might pursue a clear scent. The moving mound of furry drifted slush didn’t dislocate Sam’s shoulder, but it stayed generally taut against the holder of its halter, as it were.
Mikhail did so, in any case, till he stopped, turned to Sam, and then rose on hind legs, drooling. If his master didn’t immediately retrieve some lamb’s jerky, Mikhail began to bleat, such an infantile sound to emerge from such an already powerful ursine monster that Sam chuckled at the prospect, often enough waiting just to hear and enjoy this unplanned, unexpected chance to grin at life.
In this way, the odd twosome covered uncounted miles and miles, up through firs, down through Spruce groves, along level, rocky runs through massive beech trees that hadn’t yet a glimmer of green, their previous Summer’s leafy gowns now yellowed and browned and still clinging to branches that awaited the eternal vernal return. They had, only half an hour before, passed the boulder that marked the halfway point between the brothers’ farms.
The human half of this odd pairing in the woods remarked to himself that the sun, slanting down from the right, had reached the halfway point in its transit. “We have made great strides my young friend.” He chuckled as he hoped that the lamb would last.
Moments hence, Mikhail heard the baying beasts first, so that Sam had more than full hands in keeping the cub, which now outweighed the stout Samson by at least one stone’s mighty mass, from bolting in galloping panic. Before any catastrophic rebellion could occur as a result of the innate Ursid terror of all packs of canines. That Mikhail’s fearless leader recognized Chaser’s full-throated howl made no difference to the now panicky polar-beast.
When Samson managed to hitch his fiercely crafted harness-and-line to a slender supple young beech tree, he forced his now very cub-like companion to take a piece of leathery lamb, setting the sack itself, already less than half full, well out of reach but utterly in the open. Our hero’s throat then bellowed a feral howl of canine delight, baying joyously.
The change in tone of Chaser and his three comrades, who coursed wildly just ahead of William Woodcroft, en route to what he assumed would be another uncanny, unscheduled encounter with ‘my little brother,’ a phrase which always made him smile, inasmuch as Samson outweighed his sibling by half a stone of muscle and bone. As things stood, he had been loping for miles, since the light but steady west wind had first wafted the twin hints of bear and brother on the breeze.
Now, realizing just how close through the pale-yellow beams and stripped beeches and muscular firs lay the brother with whom he’d been communicating with their cagey pigeons, he stopped to let loose his shrillest whistling call for his dogs to fall-in and assume their position of attention to his face, on their haunches and awaiting their next move. And so it was too.
Having looped them all with one rope, which itself braided in four cowhide leashes of the most fibrous durability, he gave the command: ‘it’s playtime, boys and girls, so don’t bite, don’t bluster, don’t bristle!’ All an observer heard, in the event, was a scintillating, splendid whistling lilt, but that was the message these terriers had all learned by heart.
Awareness of William’s way with “all the Goddess’s creatures” was so widespread that someday he would be legendary. For coming centuries hereabouts, “he has William’s way” was any animal trainer’s favorite praise.
And so, for a time, even as timidly as it all began, they played—two brilliantly human brothers, three canine siblings and their masterful mother, and an orphan shub that packed more muscled mass than all four of the biters whose approach the adolescent bear had so feared. Someone happening upon the scene would have suspected accidental hallucinogenic intoxication, somehow, at the last of the innumerable streams, bright with snowmelt, where he, or she as the case may be, had last stopped to ‘slake the mountain’s thirst,’ as the local idiom stated things.
Or perhaps she, or he, as the case might happen, had stopped to stretch at the rocky outcroppings of a faerie’s ring, where bright red fungal eruptions had tempted a taste. Bill and Sam and Chaser and her children, along with Mikhail, parading and pawing in the cleared spot on two deft hind legs, would have suggested quite strongly the psychotropic propensities of the delicate mushroom blossoms in question.
However these happenings appeared, the brothers recent avian-correspondence had not set any date for this exchange, though William had eagerly agreed to take charge of Mikhail. Thus, Samson again anticipated being a little unsettled by his brother’s eerie ability to show up when Sam had just made, often spurred by one moment or another’s compelling impulse, half his own journey hence to meet his elder, more diminutive twin. So, with broad smiles and shy, downcast eyes, they always considered each other, whenever in company together.
“I dreamed of you, too,” William nodded enthusiastically as Sam spoke wide-eyed of his own ‘meetings-with-Nod’ from his previous night of love and slumber, episodes in which, he stated with awe, “Mikhail there had us both on his shoulders.” Continuing with his own affirmation, ‘big brother’ added, “so I just got up early and came along.”
Figuring out how to order and carry out their parting here—William knew, obviously of Mathilde, and how Rosie was to manage her disposition toward their Southwest flank—was by both custom and necessity easily arranged. They would turn and proceed as they must, for this occasion promising to meet up again before Spring’s passing had halved its journey to Midsummer’s eve.
The track back to William’s huge homestead—which, in the event, he had inherited from Ma and Pa as the eldest of three boys—led along through the woods. These forests—in which they both had cavorted as youths, these forested tracks that were the highest expression of pure and wild—rose in ranks of swarthy spruce up the slopes, up amid the snow and scree.
With a sudden burst, like a shifted stab of air from the glacier’s glaze, Sam’s head filled with a nostalgic notion indeed. “I wonder if this is my life’s last sight of this place.”
Sam’s brother motioned with his head to ‘our Wizard Oak’s Glen,’ where the arboreal, interloping giant towered over the firs and spruce and beech that were almost the only other tree-forms just there. The gnarled spread and sprawl, and the central spire’s sturdy ascent, created a cathedral, “our holiest place with each other,” both had in many instances agreed.
The elder—now leading the bear sans halter or rope or even attention, as he and the canines frolicked in anticipation of their homeward bound as one—noticed his kindred’s winsome awareness. “Don’t you worry, Samson Woodcroft.” At the younger’s gulping chagrin, he kept on. “The future is not written yet!”
When William unleashed his three wolf-hounds, the brothers’ having embraced three times and shed joyous tears at each other’s magnificence as men, the feral energy of this chase—bear leading dogs and master trying to keep up—soon bore the quintet away on their adventure. And, inevitably, quite a sojourn it turns out to be.
In due time, we will return to William’s branch in the stream of this flowing of our tale’s current. For our oft-mentioned Samson Woodcroft’s part, the outcome of this passage was so perfect that its very precision in promoting his plans made him wonder. He very infrequently schemed to achieve some unannounced end, yet—as Rose teased him—he ‘could no more plot a plunder than a babe can balance a blade!’
In this context, conceiving and executing such intention always surprised Sam. “I’ve done it,” he told himself in this case, as he turned round about and, again facing the sunlight but now as it descended to another freeing night, sniffed and smelt snow at the back of the breezy flow that had shifted to the East.
He adjusted his direction, pointing half-West from South, to what was in local lingo the “Precipice Ridge Trail,” and again wrapped his coat about his waist. He had no bear, no hardware, and just three pieces of their last lively-lamb slaughter, one of which he now ate. He gritted his teeth in both consternation and delight at the prospect of his pending four hour run.
In the meantime, as this managing of Mikhail’s fate had transpired to the East of Sam’s and Red’s sweet homestead, Rose Wolfsbane had also risen early, rousting out the younger but almost always less-soporific sororal offspring, which is to say Dahlia, to assist in their preparations.
By their joint departure, both girls carried stout sticks and quick, keen little blades. They had long practiced with their father and mother, using dried grasses—covered with marking pollen—to preen their skills with daggers. Sage not only carried their meat sack, he also had the stoutest stick of the three children, so apt was he to smack any unwelcome happening with a mighty and distracting, if not disabling, thwack!
The prospect of this voyage, bon or otherwise, so excited Mathilde that their younger cub greeted them all while it was trying to gnaw out of her enclosure, from which Sam and Mikhail had departed an hour before the sun’s first light. The bleached creature’s bleated greeting tickled its human audience so that they all laughed merrily, mixing people’s pulses of glee with the little bear’s insistent pleas for going, ‘now, now, now!’
For her part, Rose embarked on their first joint journey homeward since her son’s first birth’s day, clad in her brilliantly aged red cape, with her literally-legendary short sword in its scabbard on her left hip. Both Dahlia and Sage were also lefties; it ran in their Mother’s line. Only Camille shared Father Sam’s strong right-arm’s predominance.
Rose’s elder by a decade, Nicolas, also favored his left, as did two of her much younger sisters. The family was to an extent apprised—they too kept pigeons, as did all their many cousins and other kindred hither and yon. The lot of them may have been the world’s first spies, an essential defense against lupine predators of different sorts that communicated, quite accurately, via an ether of howls that rode the winds throughout the mountains here and there in these parts.
Thus, especially Nicolas well understood both his sister’s history and her stalwart husband’s predilected predicament prior, purportedly, to his own thirtieth birth’s day celebration. But more importantly for this lunar chapter’s unfolding, he had learned, laughing uproariously when he first did so, of Sam’s hapless acquisition of two bear cubs, the brother of which had a wont for depriving and torturing its sororal sibling.
Sam and Red were at once expectant and amazed at the grace of their respective family’s instant agreement to come to the couple’s aid in bearing the almost spooky responsibility of care for these two completely unexpected guests. They grabbed hold of these familial offers with both hands, instantly and ecstatically.
Hence, this day was a denouement of their double blessing. Along such lines did Rose’s party’s portion of the trek begin, a merry foursome whose five frosty breaths painted the dappled forest that showed their trail in the wintry sun’s lighting from behind, as they walked and ran after their shadows and frolicked and raised their voices in “The Wayfarer’s Song,” a tune and lyrical talisman that in only slightly altered form survives to this day.
“I love to wander as I walk, up the path to play and stalk; Wind and rain won’t make me balk, nor snow delay my joy to talk,” all to the tune of “The Happy Wanderer,” whose “I Love to Go a Wandering” has been starting trail-tramps lo these many centuries. Rose had taught the girls more than a dozen such folk ditties. Even little Sage knew half that number.
Time passed so quickly as they sang and laughed that only Rose’s intuitive sense and Mathilde’s risen hackles suggested the presence, lurking from watchful shadows, of anything other than happy prospects as they ambled amiably and adventurously toward a place of which only Camille, among the three children, had even vague memories. Red quickly shed her cape, which folded its magical pleats into a neat package for a slender leather purse.
She darted among her charges, who joined their ample wits and stalwart hopes in prodding Mathilde quickly along their designated pathway. As Red flitted among her little ones, she fed them morsels of nuts and hard, buttered cakes, even as, practically simultaneously, she placed dried lamb-strips into the happy cub’s slobbering maw.
She wasn’t certain why, but she was absolutely sure that, she wanted no part of being out with the youngsters and Mathilde after sunset. Though the sun at times seemed to have stuck itself in a particular crook of one aged beech or another, she somehow felt that they’d made little or no progress toward her first-ever homeplace even after these interludes that seemingly halted time’s advancing motions.
Still, in aggregate, the hours flew along with the miles and, well in advance of any state akin to dusk, even in the deeper swathes of evergreen woods, they emerged from the family’s Spruce Cathedral to behold a well-tended wee home, set at the base of the hillside from which many, many Summers before, as Little Red, Rose had set out to bring cakes and butter and Mead to her grandmother, who had only two years before—from her own modest cottage through the woods and over Grand Creek—passed on to wherever we go.
Red’s mother was on her porch and rose with a shout and a clap of her hands as she saw them, and as she regarded Mathilde in particular, a waterfall of mirth cascaded from her joyous jaws. When the four visitors shifted their gazes from Mother and Grandma, they stopped as if the pending evening’s chill had frozen them in their tracks, their little jaws hanging open in awe and even Red’s countenance a study in wonder.
Rose’s brother, in similar fashion as Samson’s elder sibling, had also taken over their family estate when he came of age. Mother Wolfsbane still had her cottage there, from whence, long ago, as noted already, Little Red had embarked on the great adventure that had plighted the fate of her and her mate’s conjunction.
Brethren Nicolas—whose ten year’s advance on his sister had launched him from home many years before her lupine heroism—had risen to great prominence and substantial wealth in their now, thanks in part to his wily dealings, much more extensive realm of mountain fastnesses and valley fortresses much like his own household, with its gated keep and two towers at the front corners of the enclosure.
Camille spoke for the youthful contingent. “It’s a Castle, Mother.” After they moved from their stunned state toward the lodgings where they would spend several days, the gate, with a mighty creaking of its great weightiness, opened, as ever, outward, to greet them.
Though they had countless hours of catching up and learning more about each other ahead of them, the first task—and the proximate cause for the visit—was finding Mathilde a home where she might find some semblance of thriving in her now, no-longer-fully-ursine state. “We must take her under the back gate,” the children’s uncle announced gravely.
‘He was a very tall man,’ thought Dahlia. “Why, you’re even taller than Father,” she said outright, without so much as blanching or blushing.
“You can help me then, my girl,” he said with a quick and lively grin, “since you’re so brave!” He handed her a mask of a sort, which she regarded quizzically before she turned her dubious gaze on her uncle.
“It’s for your Mathilde.” The animals, even the bravest, refused to enter the dank, dark passage that took them to an enclosure more than a stone’s throw behind the gated ‘castle-keep.’ “You three and I will guide her, once we blindfold her and gentle her with little meaty treats.”
They all jumped and shouted merrily indeed at such an ominous prospect under their obviously brave and dangerous uncle’s tutelage. Very few young people can resist such a chance, and no child of Red’s and Sam’s ever would.
“Yes, indeed,” he encouraged his nieces and nephew after Mathilde was wearing her costume and they were all plying it with fatty morsels. “And your Mother can have a chance to speak to her sisters, who insist that they have news for dear Rose to hear.”
Two of her three sisters, all of whom entered our present scenic arena well after our own Little Red’s exit with her beloved, had also greeted the party, though both Kristine and Marion had held back from other than quiet curtsy’s and modest, welcoming smiles. “We must take you to Alice,” the eldest of this trio, almost seventeen Summers and betrothed, for the second time, alas, a tale for another time.
Alice’s very ferocity had so dismayed her first suitor that he paid to leave their plighted troth behind him. Her new love was a soldier, as she was in her heart, and she fully expected to go a-warring with him when they married. These qualities matter in today’s flowing narration because Alice had stayed in the woods while her two younger siblings, all of whose birth’s days separated them by exactly thirteen moons, had come to fetch their most-famed female relation.
“Among the firs to the West?” Red had inquired. Her two younger half sisters nodded in unison, even as they well knew the source of both the question and its tone, since the slaughter that their elder, heroic sister had unleashed among those ancient pines was a primary part of local history and family pride.
“Well then we must hurry. I don’t care how ferocious she is. I would never have lived had I been alone.” So off they scurried, finding Alice hidden above them as they approached, dropping from a firry branch in their midst, her slender saber bright even as she sheathed it in the gloaming.
They enfolded each other, in turn and as a quartet, in fierce and gleeful clutches. “Has he been here then?” Rose had never been one to evade a head-on confrontation. She had practically smelled her old, would-be nemesis as she and the ‘little ones’ had made their way to Nicolas’ snugly safetied hearth and home.
The array of this quintet of visitors, one of them astride dear Red, another a tamed yet supple and agile beast, had made quite an arriving impression. Young Marion, not quite fifteen, especially spoke her passion in just a few words. “You should have seen them, Ali! It was like a saga!!”
In reply, Alice merely lit an impaled pine cone with her flint, holding it aloft to illuminate moss and trunks at her feet. “Here.” She nodded at Marion but changed their topic from one about their social relations to one that concerned survival in its implications.
“Just here.” A huge wolf’s paw had imprinted the mossy surface of a protruding stone the size of a crate of plate. Red remembered with a breathtaking chill having seen this implanted outline of Will’s hind leg before, after she and her mother had done their due and taken his tail.
As things came to be in the present passage, clad in her golden-threaded crimson cape that resisted time’s tidal tempest to look ever fresh, our Rose led a merry march among the darkened black of New Moon evergreens. And they found the additional evidence that they sought.
And then, distant but quite distinct in the chilly early evening stillness, the boisterous baying of many bands of lupine beasts floated to them on the slight breeze, full of hints of snowy days to come. They all stopped their inquiring advances and, acknowledging awareness of their frail humanity, turned and trotted, without another word, toward Nicolas’ gate, though each sister drew her blade as she skipped along in procession.
Ever after, Red could not be certain who first mentioned Will-the-Wolf, and his kin, by their family name. The Lupovs had found power and prosperity in the East, albeit William Lupov had only settled down when he lost his fine and bushy tale as a result of a dose of Mead, administered by stealth by none other than the adolescent Little Red herself.
As they entered the locked and barred door through that gate, a passage for which only five keys existed—three of them in present company—a fourth keyholder awaited them. Nicolas’ hair was most obviously whitening when seen in firelight, though his tone was happy and light as he told of bedding down the children after they had all bathed Mathilde and fed her fish bits to send her off to a nice long nap in her new home.
“I will leave you now. You have many things, as sisters, women, and members of the Wolfsbane line, to discuss before we all take counsel together tomorrow. Perhaps then, as well…”
Rose gently interrupted. “He will come, Brother. I’ll wager ten crowns on it.”
Their collective arrival, so far safe and sound, did not change the facts, yet neither did it explain them. Among guttering candles and mews of wild dreams from children, the four sisters spoke through much of the night. Only when a second stout taper had guttered to waxed wood did the three teenaged conspirators place their counsel to their elder sibling beneath their pillows.
After all the others had bedded down, however, with another New Moon approaching soon, Rose Woodcroft recognized that she had two sufficient reasons not to slumber immediately. She must first see the moon and beg the Goddess for guidance. And, second, she must wait, with patient clarity.
She knew, intuitively even if neither she nor her husband had said anything definitive, that her mate and her love would soon make his way to her. The howls from up the mountain, a far-off but vividly guttural chorus, colored her emotions but did not shake her certainty. She showed the clear patience of her self-command, when, after an hour or so padding the parameters of Nicolas’ tight and tidy keep, she awaited her beloved at the entry to their quarters.
Finally, only three hours from daylight, Sam arrived to greet her and, with the pallor of a ghost, enter the candlelit room that they were sharing; or perhaps, thought Red, he was showing the pale cast of one who had, in transit, encountered a wraith himself. Like he might clasp a clamped vise, he held her close to his heart.
As their breathing settled, their discourse began. Rose, at once attentive and intuitive, rapidly realized that he was telling her nothing of what he needed to communicate. “What is it, husband?”
When his glance confirmed that he was holding back, she pressed him, touching his face. “Come, you know you cannot hide from me. Right? It is pointless! Speak.”
He sighed, acquiescence inescapable. “Well,” he started with a slight chuckle. “Well, you see?” He smiled but obviously felt consternation, his breathing on hold as he waited and she too remained a ready, reliable listener, insistent and yet not pushy.
“I’ve seen him.” Immediately, with a slight nod, she signalled her understanding. “He had been following me,” he stated flatly, rolling his eyes. “Of course, I had known that I was tracked, but…”
“Yes. Of course.” She paused. “And then?”
“He was waiting for me on a boulder along the path, not ten minutes through the spruce forest from here.” Now, they both took a few breaths.
Will-the-Wolf had not said a lot. He wanted to meet them both, “before the first full moon of Spring.” He had a gift for them, “to show good will, he said.”
Sam continued. “He said you could place it on the mantle, under his tail,” our Sir Woodcroft concluded archly, letting the wording and its almost certain suggestion, seep into Red’s awareness.
She could believe neither her blithe aplomb about this fact nor her lack of fear at her husband’s encounter, which had transpired as Red herself had been contemplating her Goddess’ crescent as it floated toward the snowfield atop the crowning glacial snows of Wolf’s Peak, and she sensed her spouse’s approach. That this adversary, this conquered enemy, this creature, had knowledge of her own home’s exact layout mattered not at all, unless, obviously, unless ill will were Will’s intent.
Just three days previously, she had taken in the masterful taxidermy that had preserved the tail to which its original owner had referred so knowingly. “Well,” she spoke her inward thoughts. “I wonder what he has in mind for us.”
Though they loved to enjoy the volcanic eruption of their mirth at each other’s caresses, they also adored the explosive silent passion that they savored on this night. The starlight made them barely visible even to themselves as they kissed and fondled and gobbled each other up in the courtyard.
In the event, Luna’s darkest darkening hours lit the setting for Sam’s and Red’s reunion, as the children all slumbered deep in Nod’s land of dreams, and they affirmed their irreversible intention to attend and attain the peaks of pleasure with each other again and again. When they both had found climactic enjoyment, resting and imbibing the afterglow of their lovemaking, Red again alluded to her old antagonist.
“I do wonder what this is really about.” They both had to know that ‘this’ was not just some spontaneous generosity on Will-the-Wolf's part. Her inquiry hung in the air as they nestled and nuzzled their ongoing fill of each other.
“He said that we must notice and respond to what is happening in the East,” said Sam eventually. If the call to arms happened again, they both considered in unison, it might well come in the Spring, when moving men and their weapons would prove much more manageable, over a lengthier period of time, than otherwise would be the case.
Since, however, manifesting all this potential could only happen after the Winter’s final New Moon, our yarn’s continuation must remain, for the moment, fodder for feeding another tale, the next segment in this saga of Sam and Red and fate. One may rest assured, that, no matter what else proves true, these two will share their burdens and their hearts with each other whether freezing flood or hellish fire be fortune’s best offer. Next Up—a Fifth Moon’s Spring Cascades
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
This ‘Dr. Eroll Schmidt,’ at the time of my first appointment more or less Montreal’s newest doctor, was a recently certified pediatrician who, by all accounts, could work wonders with all sorts of behavioral issues among the young. From Germany, right after the war, right? And he spoke no French, so that sort of limited his clientele, ha ha.
And his ‘newest thing?’ You may have heard. I don’t know, but if not, want to guess? I learned how he ‘diagnosed’ my need for his services. He asked me questions in English, so I babbled back in French that he was stupid. When the imperious young know-it-all had Mama translate, Daddy said, she just shrugged that ‘the little one says you’re stupid!’
So I’ll tell you. His trick was lobotomies. And right there, at that first appointment, he told Ma that he thought it might be “just the thing for your little girl.”
Right! Huh. He was as serious as cancer, but packaged like candy. He was going to install a permanent child-care-solution in my head, right between the eyes actually, ha ha. I laugh now, but oh boy, sometimes I wonder.
I have to give Mama some credit. She didn’t agree straight off. When we spoke of it, I could tell that the idea of slicing away part of my brain had given her pause. Nobody had heard of JFK’s sister at that point, but, for God’s sake, the very idea would scare anybody: ‘I’m gonna fix you up by cutting your brain in half?’ What the actual fuck?!
Pardon my French, little sis. I’ll watch my mouth. But still, think about it: what could she have been thinking?
Only, I think I know the answer. She was telling herself, every day, ‘I didn’t sign up for this.’ I was not compliant, I had an agenda, she couldn’t bring herself to be sadistic enough with her punishments to stop me from behaving as I did.
The temptation of ‘a simple procedure’ was irresistible. I can tell you every word of the conversation in her head. ‘Dr. Schmidt is our doctor now. If he says it’s okay, then why should I worry? Besides, everything will probably work out fine.’ Then, later, after a couple more glasses of wine, ‘and if it doesn’t, at least I’ll have some relief.’ Yes, indeed.
Pa, bless his heart, he was skeptical: to put it mildly, right? He despised doctoring. And bless her heart, Mama knew better than to just insist. After she came to the only conclusion that made any sense to her, she wheedled and pointed out what a sneaky, incorrigible little rat-thing I was, you know how she can be when she’s got her objective all lined up and in her sights.
Maybe Papa should have held out. Then I wouldn’t be holding you hostage here to hear all this.
Anyhow, we’ll never know. My personal ‘date-with-destiny’ was to happen April 1, less than a month after my ‘checkup’ with this supposed expert, the professional, this medical doctor with a license to maim. I had a couple of weeks before they were going to cut up my little, bratty brain.
This is where Elizabet Pardot’s part, the Granny role, gets really huge. She was always close to Pa; after that poor football star almost killed himself, right before the big match, because Ma had jilted him in her typically reasonable way that was also rotten and selfish, Gran never trusted Loreen again, not really.
And, of course, nervous as a cat like he was, Pa didn’t want to talk treason with his Mother-in-Law, no sirree. But he liked her too; they could drink and smoke and talk together. You probably even remember some of that. Yeah. Go ahead, smoke! No, no, I’ll wait, thanks.
So, I don’t know, maybe three days after Ma had decided she was going to do it, Betsy Pardot found out the details. And let me tell you. I’m one lucky camper that she did.
The first thing, next day, before it was even light, Gran waltzed into the kitchen through the back door. Papa’d just left for the store, you know, early bird and everything.
And me sitting their eating cornflakes probably, I was clueless, obviously. But Loreen knew immediately that this was going to be the fight of her life, from her perspective, a fight for the life that was supposed to belong to her, except I kept ruining it.
And this may be my second oldest actual memory of my childhood days. It all started out quietly, almost formally. Granny was polite; even Mama’s tone was nice, neither very typical, ha ha.
Of course, that didn’t last long. And this is what I remember most, how much I enjoyed the show. I poured myself more cornflakes, got up and got the milk from the icebox. When I was back in my spot, quiet and good, not wanting to mess up and miss this, things took a nasty turn.
Back and forth, at least fifteen minutes, their voices rising and full of spite and fury, they went at each other. Every line was a knife that they stabbed in and twisted, like they’d never enjoyed anything so much.
And I remember Granny’s last question, before she went off to her job. “You think I’m through with you, girl?” She laughed. Then she was at the door, looking back with that expression on her face, you know, like she was about to take over the world, hitting her cigarette one more time before she left. “I guess you got another think coming.”
Not only did she harass Mama at home, oh my God! She stood up in church; she’d follow Loreen to the grocery and just start in on her when she was standing there in line. Sometimes I was there, sometimes I heard about it after, some of it I only found out a lot later.
I could see that our Loreen was getting close to cracking after a few of these escapades, especially when it was out in full view of everybody. My God, our Mother hated being humiliated in front of an audience.
She and Papa and I were out strolling one time—I’d been ‘good’ for two whole days. We were right in the middle of of a scene there, some kind of jazz music thing like they still do in February, you know, to make still more snow and sleet seem bearable.
And Mama was almost serene, definitely comfortable, in one of her slinky dresses that Pa liked so much. You know how she fancied herself a jazzy girl. Well, right in the middle of that, basically out of thin air, right?
There was her very own Mother. She had some kind of mouth organ and an outfit loud enough to get everybody’s attention. I don’t remember exactly what she said.
But the point was obvious. ‘This woman, my daughter, is a selfish, hurtful, monster who wants to destroy my innocent grandchild.’ Mama was mortified. Papa was terrified.
I know what you’re wondering. ‘Why did Papa go along?’ He obviously had more than a doubt or two.
Well, come on little sister. We both know why: men, right? When a woman, a real womanly creature, gets close to a nice manly fellow, close enough to ‘gather him in and show him his measure,’ yes, that’s it, exactly. We can both laugh because we both understand perfectly well.
God knows, and I do too, how pleased Mama left Pa when she wanted him to follow her lead. She was as good as it gets, for a man like our dear Daddy. She had him in her hand, in her pocket, all slicked up and ready to finish whenever she needed.
I bring all this up, all these salacious details and all—I know it embarrasses you; and I’m sorry, really, I am—because of how it looks a lot like your marriage too. Am I right? Yes, it is funny. Okay. So I’m just saying; you’re in the driver’s seat with another nice fellow, just like Papa, so that’s why you’re here honoring your agreement.
And that’s a smart decision. You know it is. Who knows when you’re going to need a rich, caring, and generous famous-artist sister to save your crazy, pretty ass? Yeah, yeah, ha ha ha ha ha ha.
So. Mama had daddy in hand, so to speak, or whereever, and she had willed herself to believe that I could be cured of my rotten ruination of her party planning. You still have to ask yourself: ‘how did Ma stand up to Granny?’ That seems like a hard row to hoe, right?
But stubborness—just look at Granny, Mama, yourself, and me—runs in our female line, which is why I’m so serious in how I’m approaching this whole thing with your boy and those so-called ‘attention drugs.’ And antidepressants?
I won’t debate it with you. You know I’m right. So. To get back to my story, why Mama didn’t see reason and give in.
Another thing, almost inevitably, in the whole thing, I didn’t look like I was going to ‘straighten up and fly right.’ One of my classic stunts, in fact, almost sealed my doom. I shudder to think how close I came.
The first—April Fools, indeed—was a Saturday. That’s when old Schmidt scheduled all his ‘special procedures.’ He did two or three every weekend till the 1960’s. Anyway, the day before, Ma had one of her ‘living room’ soirees, and I just—God knows—couldn’t help myself.
I’m serious. It seems funny, till you think about what almost happened. I stripped naked except for my fancy new patent-leather saddle-shoes—girl, let me tell you, I loved those things. Not only did I streak through Loreen’s little get together, I jumped up on the couch, right between two of the ‘special ladies’ mom was always courting, and danced a little jig.
Like I say, that could have gotten me killed. At least, I wouldn’t be your big-shot, rich, big-deal sister. That’s certain. Mama didn’t have one thing to say to me for the rest of the day; she was steel, and I was flesh. Not a word at dinner, not a whisper that evening, Friday, when we always listened to the radio; no kiss good night, barely a glance from Ma before Papa bedded me down with a big hug and tears dropping from his nose: I swear.
Ten o’clock next morning: the big snip was all ready to go. We didn’t even need a hospital. Old Doc Schmidt did it in his office: in a troublemaker, out a zombie. I did so much research about all this. I mean, it just makes me sweat and want to smack somebody to think about what I almost missed. Yeah, yeah, thanks, I’ll have a smoke too. I can always give ‘em up again.
Well, anyway, you know, ‘best laid plans’ don’t always work out, a good thing for me since otherwise, I’d have ended up like that Kennedy sister, institutionalized, zombified, easy to get along with. The three of us—Ma, Pa, and little wildcat Louisa-Ann—walked to the office for my ‘date with destiny.’
I know. I know. It was freezing, exactly, actually. But it wasn’t snowing, or raining, not yet anyway. It drizzled some later, and I remember being glad to feel it on my face.
All I remember thinking, though, was how sad and bad and trapped I felt. I knew I was a dead duck. I knew I deserved it. I knew this would wreck Mama’s life as much as mine, but we were on a track and couldn’t get off.
We heard Elizabet before we saw her. She always had a big voice, and she noticed us before we did her. I think we all had our heads down, grim, even if Mama had enough determination for the three of us.
And there Granny stood, blaring into a bullhorn the second she saw us. I’m a little vague about what she said, but I can guess. You know Granny; she just lets you have it, right to your face. It was probably like this.
‘Here comes my daughter and my granddaughter, and her Pa. They’re coming here today to cut my grandchild’s brain in half. My Lu-Lu is brighter than any penny; not a thing wrong with her.’
She would be using that voice of hers to set the stage—infectious, irrestibly empathetic, that’s what she was. ‘Not a thing wrong with my grandchile except her Mama doesn’t want the bother.’ She didn’t need her little bullhorn device, she could make the square ring if she wanted.
‘That’s right. My beautiful, selfish, heartless, hateful daughter—who has no idea how hard raising a ‘good girl’ is—would rather ruin her daughter’s mind, maybe even kill her, rather than have to miss out on another fancy party.’ I don’t know exactly how long it went on, at least a couple of minutes, which is a lot, considering the circumstances.
And, let me tell you, that’s not all. She had chained herself to the gate of the ‘professional suites’ where Dr. Schmidt had leased his office. There’s even more, maybe. The story I get anyhow is that she had three or four or five reporters on the spot, taking notes.
Daddy stood there with a stunned grin; he ended up half a block behind Doreen and me. He looked like a man who had been on his way to pay off a gambling debt that would cost his entire fortune, only to discover that his creditor no longer existed. I’ll remember that look till the day I die.
And Mama? Let me tell you. She broke like delicate stemware, sister, if you hit it with a hammer. She was balling and squalling. I do remember one thing; she plopped down on the sidewalk, slush piled up all round. She just cried and cried.
And that’s when Papa really became his own man, maybe. He helped her up. He scooped me up into his arms. “You know, Loreeny,”—that’s what he called her when he wanted to be sweet—“let’s just wait!”
He promised to pay Schmidt for the late cancellation. We never went back. Granny saved my ass.
And here, sister, here and now and forever, as I live and breathe, here is the pinnacle of this pitch of mine. If Little Tom, my troublesome urchin of a nephew, ever gets to be just too much, I am on call. I can always work from home; I’m rolling in plenty of everything; send him to me, and I’ll give you a nice respite.
Yes, I’m serious. Stupid poison drugs aren’t necessary. They’ll likely as not finish your son, and—I guarantee—you’ll never have peace again. I’ll step up for him, just like Granma did for me.
So, again, yes; I’m telling you, exactly, what Lizzie Pardot told her daughter, our Mom. “If you do this, I will haunt you till I die. I will come back, after I’m dead, and make your life a living hell, if you do this to this child,” your beautiful boy with nothing more wrong with him than wildness is in error among wolves.
That’s it. Let’s take a minute to breathe. Can I have another smoke? Yeah, sis, let it out.
Right then, good. Me too. We can both have a nice cry. I won’t let you down; you save your son. We have a happy family, in spite of ourselves and all the rest of it.
Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…
What to make of all this explication of a social dynamic is multifold. We will soon enough follow the path into an assessment of the origins of the pharmocapoeia, for example. We’ve already had occasion to venture to capsulize epidemionogy’s origins.
Abraham Flexner inaugurates us into our role of ‘medical consumers’ who have close to no sayso, increasingly noisome health results, and disparate expectations based on social class and social inequality. Acceding to ‘industrial complexes,’ we now encounter the culture of ‘self-help,’ the worship of medical models, the development of biological warfare, the emergence of ‘mental health interventions,’ and countless additional aspects of how unhealthy are our health modalities, all of which might serve to further what we’ve started here, and some of which already bears some semblance of a Big Tent signature.
In any case, some array of such will indeed serve as ‘sequels to Flexner,’ as it were. For today, however, we will be taking a different path, dialectical and delectable. One pole looks at the way that ‘medical expertise’ has come to express monstrous and murderous methodologies, as in Fort Detrick and the Wuhan Institute for Virology, where the general rule and the hopes of such facilities is to ‘gain function’ and thereby facilitate ‘helping patients’ through the means of amplifying microbial lethality.
The other component for today is to offer up the work of organizations like Children’s Health Defense, which has mobilized an alternative to outright ownership of understanding by aggregations of billionaires, even as Robert F. Kennedy too, a substantial CHD patron, also has his roots in money of a gangland stripe via his grandfather’s rum-running and stock-jobbing. The cash has no doubt originated in part from Kennedy coffers, but the energy and the agenda has, unlike Flexner’s brand of reporting, emanated obviously from below.
This merest sliver of a precis of these probably predictable outcomes of the political economic processes that formulated Abraham Flexner’s business and reportorial successes will, sooner rather than later, receive a follow-up fleshing-out. In particular, Robert F. Kennedy’s pair of monographs will take center stage in the next installment in this occasional series.
The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-Up accurately convey the sense of tension and predatory fraud that encompasses the august realm of ‘health and human services’ in the here-and-now. The subtitle of the former covers the ongoing social class elements of the conflicted spaces under consideration: thus, we have Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
The subtitle of the latter, in the meantime, alludes to the monstrously militarized and wantonly warlike constitution of such expressions of institutional ‘mandated medical machinations.’ In the second case, then, we view this chilling heading: The Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.
The message of both of both these books, RFK’s dire journalistic recountings of scientific disaster, is that, in one way and another, we’ve gotten precisely what established political and social forces have fomented. Inasmuch as we’ve permitted this “agency-capture” process to pass political muster and achieve commercial control, we have played a key part in our own harm.
A piece of Driftwood Message Art, as will often prove true, expresses this idea incisively. “Veneer of the Real” is its title. “Established SOP Mediation of Matters Manufactures a Smooth Surface, a Veneer of the Real, That At Best Represents Plutocratically Propagated Imperial Propaganda; If We Consent to the Manipulative Distortion of This Demented Nonsense, We Surely Deserve the Disempowerment & Destruction With Which Our Willingly Bowing to Such Bullshit Makes Us Complicit.”
Robert Kennedy echoes this idea in his first book, about the medical establishment’s avuncular flack, Dr. Anthony Fauci. He starts off with an excerpted quotation from John Abramson, from Harvard's Medical School, who was part of a blue-ribbon health sciences investigation.
“The first step” toward a useful awareness “is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans' health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”
RFK ends his Fauci tour-de-force expose with a prosecutor’s flair. “What I have described in the preceding chapters can seem overwhelming and dispiriting. The forced-vaccine campaign and other cruel actions by Dr. Fauci and his acolytes might seem ‘too big to fail.’
But that is up to the citizens of our country. We can bow down and comply—take the jabs, wear the face coverings, show our digital passports on demand, submit to the tests, and salute our minders in the Bio-surveillance State.
Or we can say No. We have a choice, and it is not too late. COVID-19 is not the problem; it is a problem, one largely solvable with early treatments that are safe, effective, and inexpensive.” That his facts are easily probative is indisputable; that his arguments are persuasive would be obvious to a clever middle-schooler. We can save ourselves and, for patriots like Bobby and This Humble Correspondent, we can, at least plausibly, resuscitate something like the American Dream.
Kennedy’s Wuhan lab expose unfolds from recollections of President Eisenhower’s ‘Military-Industrial-Complex’ speech, Ike’s Farewell Address. In exercising political oversight, “research has become central…more formalized, complex, and costly. Partly because of (this), a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
The former President continued: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. …the danger that public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Anthony Fauci entered the fray in 1968 and rose to the top, where he would use his position “to militarize and monetize medical research and to consolidate the seamless alliancee between government, science, the military and intelligence agencies, and private contractors in ways that would consummate President Eisenhower’s worst nightmares about the threat this cartel posed to democracy.”
The Wuhan Cover-Up closes with a stark warning. “Will the fear-mongering elites unleash another pandemic nightmare upon their subjects? If we do not rise to oppose them, it’s a certainty. Simply stated, there is too much profit in the pandemic game for the entities who reap those profits not fully to engage” in that deadly, lucrative harvest.
A cynic might despair or shrug and plan another cruise. Many will intone about the futility of ‘fighting city hall.’ If such responses hold sway, our future will demarcate what we permit to happen to us and be our own responsibility.
Still, as long as these just desserts bring the general difficulty, social inequity, clinical enervation, and insalubrious health outcomes that they so frequently do bring about, we cannot help but make attempts to seek redress and mount a counterattack in favor of ours and our families’ ongoing well-being. In this regard, the endeavors of such masterful physicians as Bill Mitchell and Marcia Angell are among a substantial coterie of medical practitioners who refuse to align themselves with pharmaceutical-industrial-complex profit goals. RFK names many more ‘authoritative’ heroes.
Children’s Health Defense is an inevitable additional offshoot of this conflicted complexity at the core of current public health disasters and disputes. A posting, or even a brief series, about the organization itself is forthcoming. We might now suffice to state that four of the six main portals to the group’s informational profferals delineate a map of the landscape of public health concerns of the current context: vaccines, toxic exposures, electromagnetic radiations and wireless, and chronic health conditions.
The remaining two entry-points are operational. One presents litigation moves. The other offers up science publications and research projects. The Mission Statement is a clear brief for a CHD POV. “Our mission is ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure. We will restore and protect the health of children by eliminating environmental exposures, holding responsible parties accountable, and establishing safeguards to prevent future harm of children’s health. Protecting Children. Exposing Harms. Seeking Justice.”
The CHD website offers a history lesson that flows from an immutable fact. Almost all parents love their children and want to protect them from harm. Two of the principle mothers involved, “Bono and Redwood, initiated some of the first vaccine-injury awareness campaigns well before even Andrew Wakefield knew about the potential harm vaccines posed to children.
These were some of the moms behind David Kirby’s 2005 book, “Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic.” Redwood, a registered nurse and a veritable encyclopedia of all things thimerosal, and Heidi Roger Kidd, a founding board member of SafeMinds, co-authored “Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning,” a seminal report highlighting the public health impacts of mercury exposure and toxicity.”
No matter how partial our knowledge, no matter how incomplete our theories, no matter how impolitic our ‘unprofessional’ insistence on raising our voices, such a citizen-centered apprehension of the playing field is a vitally important sort of expression of human potential. Without participation, politics is one meaningless exercise after another. Without popular empowerment and grassroots knowledge capacity, no participatory approach will ever prove possible.
These seemingly intractable dilemmas, regardless of the depth of their roots and the clever inclinations of the masters-of-the-game in charge of things among the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and their ilk, demarcate the necessitous boundaries of the only response that a potent populace can mount. An unpatented, and yet patent, blend of public health and democracy is our requisite duty unless we fancy bioengineered nightmares for the foreseeable future.
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
will be coming up over the next few BTR issues. This will wear a mask of a film review, in part, inasmuch as the most popular animated film in human history, Ne Zha 2, has recently been enchanting an audience already in the billions. Moreover, themes and action in the yarn revolve around such ‘dirty commie’ ideas as social justice and social equality.
The unprepossessing hero has the temerity, if not the utter gall, to prevail over his ‘masters and betters,’ arguably in parallel fashion as China’s societal presence is more and more supplanting the hegemony that plutocratic imperial plunderers have taken as granted in the cultural sphere. It’s all ‘pretty inneresting,’ as Ernestine might say.
A Preliminary & Partial Reading List, & a Few Central Concepts, About Comprehending Social Mediation
To begin, I’ll note that the following search received just shy of a billion results: <"social media" oxymoron OR contradiction OR lie OR false>. Following this first dip, meanwhile, even this lengthier search—often in grotesque fashion—got 359,000,000 hits! <"social media" oxymoron OR contradiction OR lie OR false scholarship OR research OR analysis history OR background OR context OR deconstruction>. I minused out “misinformation” and still got 325,000,000 cites.
I acquired interesting bits and pieces, but my mother lode emerged from two other routes entirely. One was my go-to search, with 19,700,000 citations: <"social media" history OR origins OR background purposes OR uses "hidden agendas" OR manipulation analysis OR critique OR deconstruction OR investigation OR incrimination>.
Both this and its more amply rewarded kindred outreach, which garnered 73,400,000 links, yielded thousands of ‘scholarly connections’ to peruse, though—given the BTR POV—those that this second string effected were most informative of all: <"social media" analysis OR criticism OR study marxist OR radical OR socialist>. As is very likely true in all attempts to capsulize a subject from socioeconomic or sociopolitical realms, the Marxists offer the juiciest insights, narratives, and approaches to the topic at hand.
Thus, for instance, the interlocutor quickly encounters Christian Fuchs, whose prolific energy and incisive capsulization of complexity have permitted his production of vast troves of articles and monographs that envision Marxist approaches as useful or even essential in attempts to understand media’s multiple intermixing with social issues and societal evolution.
Not only does he insist on including Marx, but he also goes so far as to assert—in playful tones—that “Karl Marx invented the Internet.” In the introduction to Social Media, Fuchs puts the case like this. “In his work the Grundrisse, Marx described a global information network, in which ‘everyone attempts to inform himself’ about others and ‘connections are introduced. … .Such a description not only sounds like an anticipation of the concept of the Internet, it is also an indication that Marx’s thought is relevant for Media/Communication Studies and the study of the Internet and social media.”
He bases this general conclusion on another case of Marx’s farsighted views. “Marx discussed the implications of the telegraph for the globalisation of trade, production, and society, was one of the first philosophers and sociologists of technology in modern society, anticipated the role of knowledge labour and the rise of an information society, and was himself a critical journalist.”
Furthermore, Fuchs develops this absolutely critical contention. “Marx stressed the importance of the concept of the social: he highlighted that phenomena in society (such as money or markets and, today, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) do not simply exist, but are the outcome of social relations between human beings. They do not exist automatically and by necessity because humans can change society.”
Another from the same author, from 2020, is the weighty tome, Communication and Capitalism, in which he puts mediation’s machinations at the heart of current imperial operations. He describes “the mediatization of society.” “‘By the mediatization of culture and society we understand the process whereby culture and society to an increasing degree become dependent on the media and their logic.
This process is characterized by a duality, in that the media have become integrated into the operations of other social institutions and cultural spheres, while also acquiring the status of social institutions in their own right. As a consequence, social interaction – within the respective institutions, between institutions, and in society at large – increasingly takes place via the media’.”
One might invoke dozens of additional finished productions along these lines. One editor offers a merely partial listing from 2020. Fuchs’ “research interests lie in the fields of Critical Information Society Studies, Critical Internet Research, critical social theory, media & society, and the Critical Political Economy of Media, Communication, & Society.
He is author of numerous publications on these topics, including the monographs Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1 (Routledge 2016), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Routledge 2014), Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage 2014), Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (2015), OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (Zer0 Books 2014), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge 2011), Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Routledge 2008).” We’ll be digging in again, over and over actually, sooner rather than later.
Furthermore, multiple other radicals have also contributed estimable assemblages of the knowledge and argument that the likes of Fuchs so mellifluously proffer. For the moment, we’ll only examine one such additional ‘to-the-ramparts’ collections. The periodical, The Socialist Register, included in its 58th volume “What Is Wrong With Social Media? An Anticapitalist Critique,” by M. Gilroy Ware.
The author quotes Rosa Luxemburg aptly in the missive’s frontispiece. Often enough, “‘(t)he most revolutionary thing one can do is … to proclaim loudly what is happening.’” Well might one nod and intone, ‘probably true, but so what?’
Unfortunately the superficial references in the essay to COVID and climate and ‘conspiracy-theories’ indicate that, no matter the complexity and mutually exclusive agendas in play in the surface of things as they actually stand, we can somehow magically all agree that this mediated inculcation of conclusions is what we should follow rather than pursuing a participatory process of inquiry about what we hope to ‘proclaim loudly,’ in Luxemburg’s idiom.
The useful points in the piece flow from the recognition that the attention-based business model is irreversible under present circumstances. “Every feature of social networks is rolled out with at least a tacit knowledge that many of the things that are best able to command our attention are also those things that have the greatest potential to mislead us, inflame latent social and political tensions that are already in the culture, and exacerbate insecurities and mental health issues that we may otherwise have been able to manage more easily. The intention may never be to harm users but, there is a sinister calculation that the potential for harm is a risk worth taking if it means more of our attention can be commanded and sold.”
Ideas such as this have great appeal. Still, presuming one’s COVID-and-such premises about everything can never countermand this hegemonic oversight based on an engineered addictive allure in our oh-so-clever phones and devices, with their ever-adapting algorithms and blah blah blah.
The best that one can say about such prognostication is what the author offers at the end. “If there is an escape from the power of social media corporations, the market-driven society that facilitates them, or capitalism itself, it is almost certainly one that is collective, creative and collaborative.”
A different tack, at once more grounded and more inquisitive—despite its origins in the ‘dark ages before cell phones and laptops’—comes from Siegfried Giedion, whose Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History insists on seeing the combination of trap and salvation that comes from our human technical acuity. Perhaps if we applied the same materialist approach to ‘social media’ that Giedion applied to manufacturing and mass-communications both, we might make progress. We could at least listen in.
“‘In a Chicago packing-house, hogs, hanging head downwards, moved uninterruptedly past a staunch Negro woman at the curve of the conveyor system. Her task was to stamp, with a rubber stamp, the carcasses examined by the inspectors.
With a sweeping movement she smacked the rubber stamp on each skin. …(I)n an outside observer a strange feeling was aroused: a creature of the human race trained to do nothing else but, day after day, and eight hours each day, stamp thousand after thousand of carcasses in four places’.” He continues, “‘Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing slavery… But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the world, or even to organize ourselves.’”
Along somewhat similar tracks, “Troops, Trolls, and Troublemakers” reveals the extent that ‘organizing ourselves’ all too generally devolves to the deployment of “cyber-troops” by the powers-that-be. “Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns.”
This contextualization calls into question even the most basic potential for individual agency and freedom-of-expression in any socially-mediated electronic sphere. It almost has the appearance of Mona Lisa Overdrive meets He, She, & It, as if technologically sophisticated heroics and amicably machined artificial intelligence are humanity’s only hopes, in which case our prospects are akin to the sheepherder who puts the wolves in charge of pasture-security because he fears unsupervised hay.
An academic publication, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, brings us to the cusp of completion for today. Dallas Smythe’s story is one of those worthy of a Netflix series, ha ha. He was a real radical, not in the least doctrinaire, but fierce in a complete commitment to fighting fascist monstrosity.
His opposition to the Nazi-nationalists in Spain and his natural flair propelled him into a position of some prominence in the American League for Peace and Democracy, which made his life as a professor in McCarthy America almost insufferable. He posited an ‘invisible triangle’ that included audience, broadcasters, and advertisers—obvio, po!—and conceived of the “audience commodity” as well.
His witness of 1930’s class warfare and preparations for World War II made him a lifelong advocate for social justice, so that his F.B.I. file was likely even longer than was This Humble Correspondent’s. He viewed mediation as a tricky terrain that those who advocated social transformation might easily mistranscribe, so to say.
“The mass media of communications and related institutions concerned with advertising, market research, public relations and product and package design represent a blindspot in Marxist theory in the European and Atlantic basin cultures. The activities of these institutions are intimately connected with consumer consciousness, needs, leisure time use, commodity fetishism, work and alienation.
As we will see, when these institutions are examined from a materialist point of view, the labour theory of value, the expenses of circulation, the value of the ‘peculiar commodity’ (labour power), the form of the proletariat and the class struggle under monopoly capitalist conditions are also deeply involved. The literature of Marxism is conspicuously lacking in materialist analysis of the functions of the complex of institutions called the ‘consciousness industry.’”
Smythe’s title reflects his thoughts: “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism.” Having heretofor only encountered his work in passing, THC must report that Smythe is magnificent, combining mellifluous phrasing with mandatory ways of conceptualizing and contextualizing whatever happens to be ‘the matter at hand,’ in this case having the down-to-earth characterization of the Invisible Triangle of monopoly-media, advertisers, and audiences, which will always remain one basis for material and dialectical understanding of these interlinked phenomena of ‘our way of life.’
As often happens, now I’ll have no option but to devote an article—and quite likely a series—to exploring this recently-discerned key thinker’s life and times and ideas. Smythe will have a turn on center stage Big Tent sooner or later. He is the sort of student whom one would suddenly realize is instructing the entire class.
Since we will rapidly return our attentive gazes to his work, we might merely today expect the ‘baldest outline of a tale-well-told. Thus, “(t)o summarize: the mass media institutions in monopoly capitalism developed the equipment, workers and organization to produceaudiences for the purposes of the system between about 1875 and 1950.
The prime purpose of the mass media complex is to produce people in audiences who work at learning the theory and practice of consumership for civilian goods and who support (with taxes and votes) the military demand management system. The second principal purpose is to produce audiences whose theory and practice confirms the ideology of monopoly capitalism (possessive individualism in an authoritarianpolitical system).
The third principal purpose is to produce public opinion supportive of the strategic and tactical policies of the state (e.g. presidential candidates, support of Indochinese military adventures, space race, detente with the Soviet Union, rapprochement with China and ethnic and youth dissent). Necessarily in the monopoly capitalist system, the fourth purpose of the mass media complex is to operate itself so profitably as to ensure unrivalled respect for its economic importance in the system. It has been quite successful in achieving all four purposes.”
Until the time arrives for the good Professor Smythe’s own starring role here, we might consider one of the many fascinating tidbits on display in the article under review at just this instant. He is talking about the historical eventualities by which the creation of ‘audiences as commodities’ could take place, and how monopoly capital would react to that unfolding dynamic.
The advent of radio-telephony in the first two decades of this century made possible the use of the same principle which had been proven in the print media. And so commercial radio broadcasting became a systemic innovation of, by, and for monopoly capitalism.
When the pent-up civilian demand at the end of World War II, and the generous capital subventions of a government intent on winning that war had provided electronics manufacturers with shell-loading and other war plants easily convertible into TV-set manufacturing, and when a complaisant FCC could be manipulated into favouring TV over FM broadcasting, TV was approved and largely financed out of capital accumulated from commercial radio broadcasting's profits.”
All wrapped up and tied with a bow: is it all, all too neat? We’ll be hearing more, ha ha, and blah blah blah.
One might go on and on and on, covering many lifetimes worth of aggregations. Truly, media’s manipulations beat near the heart of contemporary capital’s imperial aggregations. Whatever the case may be, from this scattershot initiation at the end of today’s #25 essay, we’ll be starting out the next episode of this occasional series by considering the masterful monograph, The Culture of Connectivity, by the Dutch scholar Jose van Dijck.
Subtitled A Critical History of Social Media, this volume begins by looking at ‘prototypical people of our wired age.’ “Over the past decade, their professional and personal lives have gradually become inundated with social media platforms. Platforms … .enable people…to make connections by sharing expressive and communicative content, building professional careers, and enjoying online social lives.”
Van Dijck’s work “argument focuses not on a descriptive account of how social media affect(s) particular families, but on the need for a critical history of the rise of social media. Such a history is needed to comprehend current ten-sions in the ecosystem in which platforms and ever-larger groups of users operate. By exploring technical, social, economic, and cultural perspectives on social media, we can elucidate how recent changes in our global media landscape have profoundly affected—if not driven—our experience of sociality.”
Big Tent appearances have already been common for media contextualization. It’s one rooted source for the entire Big Tent Review belief in the intersection of “Communication & Human Survival,” as in this two-segment orientation to our current context’s TikTok meanings and moments.
Even though nothing conclusive occurs here today, very much an ad hoc and preliminary consideration of corporate, hegemonic, and popular prospects instead, maybe we can agree that some of the issues seem apt indeed. Possibly, as well, we can affirm that trying to come up with a paradigm, a logical capsulization, an explanatory nexus if not yet a complete explanation, is very much a worthwhile project.
Perhaps a pair of arboreal fragments can proffer a sendoff worth attending. This Driftwood Message will, in the event, offer a stern warning about the here and now, whether ‘TikTokkish’ or otherwise, making the potent point that the parameters of our purposeful ploys to improve our lives, if we hope for them to be other than pointless, require a fanatical commitment to both contextual and factual accuracy. “Mediated Mass Manipulation” is its title.
"Any Canvas That One Prepares to Portray Image, Idea, Or Endeavor Will Evince Only Useless Yapping, Utter Inanity, If It Lacks Adequate Context Or Presents Falsehood As Accurate Awareness, Cautionary Counsel Indeed in This Age of Ubiquitous Prepackaged Propaganda That Scheming Imperial Plutocrats & Opportunistic Profiteers Masterfully Mediate to Manipulate the Masses of Humanity So As to Advance Their Own Self-Righteous Self-Serving Agendas."
Echoing this idea emphatically, we might also take note of “Phantasmagorical Fakery,” which examines the mediators-in-chief in the contemporary realm as a relentlessly acquisitive class of folks who want everything that is to belong to them, coveting more even as they already seemingly have deeds to it all in their safety deposit boxes. Paying attention is the price of admission to a better way of comprehending and contextualizing our lives.
"Established Moneyed Monopolies Mediate Manufactured Consent in Phantasms of Fakery, Acres of Bullshit That Appear to Make 'Voluntary' Precisely Mandated Protocols That Disempower Humanity's Masses While They Further Pad the Plundering Profits of Those Individuals & Firms That, in Addition to Owning & Overseeing Essentially All the World's Cultural Production, Also Hold Multiple Mortgages on All Other Properties of & Property in Existence on Earth."
As both Grandma and Mom liked to say, ‘A word, to the wise, is sufficient.’
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
MORE TO COME
Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—(continued)…
The treaty provided that all subjects concerning hostilities between either or both of the contracting powers and other nations should be referred to a Joint High Commission, appointed by the two powers; and if war should be considered necessary, it should be prosecuted and conducted by the Anglo-American War Syndicate, within limitations prescribed by the High Commission.
The contract made with the new Syndicate was of the most stringent order, and contained every provision that ingenuity or foresight of man could invent or suggest to make it impossible for the Syndicate to transfer to any other nation the use of the instantaneous motor.”
The opponents in Stockton’s yarn were off, of course, as was the presumption of high-mindedness that this preacher’s son blithely advanced regarding the antagonists, but the culminating union was completely accurate. In essence, the upshot—the confirmation of an Anglo-American collaboration to rule the Earth through wildly powerful technical legerdemain that involved weaponizing electromagnetism—was as the British might term it, “spot on.” In any case, his insights and predictions serve to initiate today’s effort, a rhetorical bookend for a way of examining the issues of our time that represents a political economic version of Einstein’s famous equation.
That the Anglo-American Mandate has failed to forestall ‘motor-bomb’ nuclear arms races that threaten mass collective suicide emanates from Stockton’s chauvinism, a naïveté that might seem paradoxical in contrast to the incredible precision with which he foresaw aspects of how the coming decades would develop. In any event, this incisive description of how ‘prohibitive warfare,’ or “strategic armaments,” would rule the future represents an inescapable recognition of an intersection of industry, finance, government, and hegemony, a predictive portrayal of an atomic military industrial complex in charge of everything.
The remainder of this portion of today’s report lays out a handful of elements that thinkers need to ponder when they seek to grapple with the technical, political, and social enormities, not to mention the potential ecological Armageddon, that inhere in the human uptake of this Modern Nuclear Project. Those who ‘butter their bread’ as a result of atomic processes can rail against such a conclusion, but Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are just a few of the eventualities that force any but the fatuous at least to contemplate the ecocidal potential of this course-of-action that syndicates have so ardently syndicated for over a century now.
STS Cues
An initial aspect of the overall rationale for the coming of a nuclear age appears in some detail in the prefatory section that comes next. It also shows up, overall, throughout the present narrative. Most simply, emphasizing this point repeatedly, and now, is necessary because of how central this kind of thinking is to any sort of understanding of science.
This perspective upends most ways that the inculcation of science and technology happen, even in our supposedly ‘enlightened’ times. In essence, a Science, Technology, & Society rubric holds that no historical expression of technical knowledge or scientific ‘progress’ depends primarily on expertise or priestly insights or hard-sought magisterial discoveries of any kind.
Instead, every scientific development emanates from specific social relations that surround, economic forces that underlie, and political decisions that impact things. What sorts of things?
The weapons that people use; the crops that people cultivate and the processing of these plants into food; the structures that people build and the materials that they use for these projects; the energy that people employ and the chemical and physical steps that utilizing this power entails; these and just about every other aspect of ‘civilized’ society depend on some combination of knowledge and technical acuity that do not arise from practical necessity so much as from social convenience for the families and networks in charge of status quo operations.
In other words, therefore, “(a) key framework that I bring to this discourse …suggests that neither knowledge nor machines emanate from 'objective' or neutral labors of unbiased ubermensch, any more than the castles and guilds of feudalism emanated from God's commands. Instead, everything that (exists) results from complex webs of relations that inherently blend social, political, and economic factors in a dynamic interplay of human conflict and cooperation that yields the present from the past, just as the only route to the future is through the now.”
In terms of the conceptual origins of the Modern Nuclear Project, one need look no further than Michael Faraday’s seminal thinking, which impacted Maxwell as much as the work of any other co-venturer in the attempt to unravel electromagnetism. Though Faraday famously refused to help the English government devise chemical killing weapons to use against the Russians in Crimea, the powers-in-charge persistently asked and continued to look for such venal and homicidal machinations.
Such possibilities also permeated the electromagnetic work that James Maxwell carried out, about which much more is soon to come, who among other things first uncovered scalar energy, which “has enormous implications for military applications.” Though these capabilities were not forthcoming in Maxwell’s abbreviated lifetime, multiple actors, Nicola Tesla among them, worked on beam weapons that had destructive potential that at least theoretically might match that of fission and fusion energy.
Closer to contemporary manifestations of different-and-yet-similar EMS developments, in the lee of the Trinity Test and the Atomic Energy Act, one might consider the institutional meaning of the present day Department of Energy(DOE). “DOE began in the Manhattan Project.
That thirteen of twenty four 'Assistant Secretaries' in the department deal directly with nuclear matters should therefore come as no surprise. In terms of spending, a better name for DOE might be the Department of H-bombs.
This fundamental underpinning of U.S. energy bureaucracy by nuclear weapons and nuclear power is clearest in following the names that led to the formation of the Department of Energy under President Carter, himself a nuclear engineer and commander of a nuclear submarine.
The Manhattan Project yielded the Atomic Energy Agency, which was a bomb-maker, pure and simple. This led to the Atomic Energy Commission, which both continued nuclear weapons R&D and vowed fission ‘power too cheap to meter,’ a prognostication hilarious but for the wasted alternative energy opportunities foreclosed by adherence to the false promise of nukes.
The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 separated nuclear reactor issues from technical energy research matters, creating the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Agency. While the NRC has remained the overseer and erstwhile guarantor of civilian nukes, ERDA formed a key part of the skeleton of Carter's DOE, which has continued to operate from its formation in 1977 until today, as noted, in a fashion that is overwhelmingly, and from a historical point of view, unavoidably, biased in favor of nuclear solutions to energy questions.”
A centrally important actor in these predecessors to the present Department-of-All-H-Bombs, David Lillienthal served as the a Director or Chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority from its inception to the Oak Ridge Clinton Engineering Works’ key role in creating the enriched Uranium to fuel the Little Boy device that incinerated Hiroshima; he acted as a legal and science adviser to Dean Acheson, so much so that his name was part of the title of the 1946 report that purportedly sought to ‘internationalize’ the Modern Nuclear Project. He went on, for several years, to lead the Atomic Energy Commission as its first Chairman, till his ‘New Deal credentials’ and other complications resulted in his sacking.
As such, he embodies the ubiquitous predisposition among those who bridge government and business and science to insist on strategies that maximize the concentration of capital in strategic social choices. One would hope that the fact would be obvious that H-bombs and nuclear reactors are two of the top aggregations of all types of power, likely in fact number one and two, and that their deployment will always amount to a ‘strategic’ selection.
Although Lilienthal himself, in his rapturous Big Business: a New Era, presents a clear brief in this regard, a 1954 Northwestern Law Review symposium articulated this point unequivocally. His work as “director of the TVA, and three years as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he testifies, struck the scales from his eyes.
He came to see bigness in corporate and in governmental organization as essential to the achievement of the technological, the economic and even the social possibilities of modern life. Now retired from the active executive role to the analytical and advisory role, he feels he can take a ‘relaxed look at this controversial issue.’ Some may think that they see traces of the convert’s zeal. Far from being a mere apologetic defender of Big Business, Mr. Lilienthal is its militant protagonist.
He not only capitalizes Big Business through the book; he apotheosizes it as a ‘proud and fruitful achievement of the American people as a whole. …a social institution that promotes human freedom and individualism. … Big Business is basic to the very life of the country; and yet many—perhaps most—Americans have a deep seated fear and emotional repugnance to it. Here is a monumental contradiction.’”
Thus, the citizens who serve as subjects in Big-Business’ ongoing ‘science projects’ are often nervous and more-than-occasionally profoundly distraught at their powerlessness and marginalization. Much Science, Technology, & Society investigation examines such input disparities, and widespread anxieties that have no reasonable outlet, as key aspects of how machinery and technical knowledge operate in societies. Again, in any case, these observations without doubt do fit seamlessly with the propounded proposition that began today’s reporting.
Another product of decades of scientific effort—by Dr. Chris Busby, a gadfly English opponent of established nuclear safety protocols—Green Audit provides both a forceful and stalwart website and a respected and sought-after public health service that puts these matters into perspective in regard to the partialities and fallacies of the contemporary atomic establishment. Busby quotes Karl Polanyi in contextualizing the methodologies of diminution and derision that guide aficionados of the nuclear SOP.
“[For] the stability of the naturalistic system we currently accept, instead, rests on the same logical structure as Azande witchcraft beliefs. Any contradiction between a particular scientific notion and the facts of experience will be explained by other scientific notions.
There is a ready reserve of possible scientific hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event. Secured by its circularity and defended by its epicyclical reserves science may deny or at least cast aside as of no scientific interest, whole ranges of experience which to the unscientific mind appear both massive and vital.”
The word on the street directs inquiries to follow the money. While such a basic directive might oversimplify a fair number of interesting phenomena, it is nonetheless a reliable general template. And in any event, the mandate to consider legal and other political economic arrangements, class social interests and patterns, and financial foundations, all through a historical lens, proffers an expansion of the ‘follow-the-cash’ advice that is robust and vital indeed as a method for thinking about such things as the Modern Nuclear Project.
In this vein, a huge portion of what would pass for a ‘history of science’ and everything that has emanated from the Modern Nuclear Project in fact deals with amplifications of motive energy and process heat and advances in the mechanics of killing. Inasmuch as increases in basic knowledge have transpired, the progenitors of all sorts of ‘pure science’ have always, or almost always, also thought in terms of practical applications, therefore, that have served monopoly commerce, imperial imprimatur, and large-scale manufacturing.
The nub of this STS thinking basically comes down to the idea that ‘standard operating procedures,’ after the Stone Age chapters in human prehistory, have at least as much to do with delivering leverage to certain social sets as they do with either such ‘neutral’ concepts as efficiency and optimality, or such ‘pure’ motivations as knowledge and understanding. This kind of deconstruction, as above, must deal with the appearance-of-separation and actuality-of-conjunction between technique, on the one hand—instruments to do things—and theory or core comprehension, on the other hand—equations, laws of motions, periodic tables, and so forth.
In sum then, to this point, the hypothesis with which we’ve begun fits quite nicely both with empirical aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum’s ultimate expression, the Modern Nuclear Project, and a key theoretical construct for making sense of such complicated eventualities. One might further amplify this essentially social and socioeconomic analysis with more strictly economic and fiscal assessments.
The Sway of Monopoly Money
Thus, in addition, one might examine the way that, since plus-or-minus 1900, technology generally has evolved under the rubric of monopoly capital and the way that modern imperialism has arisen in that context. While a significant swath of ‘progressive’ or otherwise empirically real investigators will agree that finance has infiltrated every single aspect of contemporary existence—from religion to drugs to elections to sex to anything that interests anybody—such admissions nevertheless only occasionally inform attempts to explain how the Modern Nuclear Project and its pieces fit together and function on a day-to-day basis.
And even less will analysis generally accede to the way that empire’s commands underlie all such socioeconomic and securitized decision-making. In no realm is a failure to follow the fiscal and imperial imprimatur more likely to lead to error or befuddlement than in relation to the inner workings of the atom and how an understanding of these atomic interactions inform contemporary existence.
In the end, all atomic theory both flows from and leads to machine interfaces. These linkages, moreover, dwarf in scale and cost and impact all other mechanisms that were, theretofore, also inevitable accoutrements of capital’s growth and restless acquisitiveness. While mechanization for at least a century-and-a-half or so might have appeared as simply a seamless part of modern society, a student of such manifestations might discern this deeper functioning, an utterly essential component of capitalization that supersedes by orders of magnitude the uptake of mechanisms that merely attempt to do more, have more, make more.
Most basically, the joining of electricity and magnetism, as a practical matter, has elicited both the most profound and the most widespread expansion of instrumentation in different areas of the economy. On the one hand, no component of modern machinery is more central than the electric motor or the various means by which electricity provides a starting capacity for other machines.
Furthermore, on the other hand, whether one looks at spectroscopy or telegraphy, television or computers, nuclear devices of multiple kinds or robots, Hollywood or the Pentagon, EMS applications show up everywhere as key aspects of the tools and techniques that drive modern existence. This general proliferation of impact, from Maxwell’s foundations through Einstein and Fermi and beyond, is inescapably a core element in contemporary standard operating procedures.
As the editors of Major Problems in the History of American Technology conceive the issue, “America is frequently called a ‘technological society,’ …suggest(ing) that the United States is better known and respected for its technological accomplishments than for its democratic institutions. …
The history of technology is a relatively new field of inquiry within the larger discipline of history. While the…history of science traces it roots to the period of World War I, the history of technology is a child of the Cold War.” Thus, it is an accompanist of Hiroshima and H-bombs.
The editors continue: “Sustained professional interest and institutional support for the subject came only during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, largely in response to the successful Soviet launching of the Sputnik and the widely held belief that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in space as well as in other critical areas of engineering and technological endeavor. …
Historians of technology have long been interested in… .the origins of mass production, the rise of modern management, and the emergence of large technological systems in manufacturing, power distribution, and transportation industries. (These) ‘big technologies’ continue to receive considerable attention.”
Nor does such an evolutionary arc transpire neutrally or democratically or beneficently in any general sense. From their inception as pragmatic expressions of theoretical knowledge, telegraphic, radio, electric power, media, and nuclear instantiation of the dialectic of electromagnetism have served to centralize economic power, to enlarge imperial capacity, and to further both internationally and nationally the gulf that separates those who have and own from those who have not and labor.
Perhaps no individual actor’s story in these dramas more clearly and explicitly demonstrates these points than does the career of Alfred Loomis, a ‘blue-blood’s blue-blood,’ whose specialty revolved around packaging and selling stocks and bonds of early electrical production companies. He had always imagined himself as a scientist, but the need to live up to the manor which had born him caused him first to turn to law and ultimately to finance, in which capacity he and his partner and brother-in-law, Landon Thorne, came to rival the Morgans and Rockefellers as financial titans.
Both Loomis and Rockefeller will show up in greater detail at the heart of today’s articulations of the Modern Nuclear Project. For now, an adequate summation is that the confluence of hydroelectric business and engineering interests with the acquisition of one of the vastest fortunes in history in turn permitted—when he exited daily labor at making money from money—Loomis’ use of family and business connections in the creation of ‘amateur’ science projects that brought Lawrence, Fermi, Einstein, Bush, Compton, and Conant into his intimate circle, where he provided seed funding and guidance to literally thousands of young engineers and technicians and pioneers of nuclear physics and other elements of electromagnetic knowledge as World War Two and the Manhattan Project beckoned on the horizon.
“Loomis’ interest in high voltages prompted him to try his own cyclotron experiments. …He had no trouble laying his hands on one, as he was a member of the MIT Corporation and was quite involved with the high-voltage machine the school had developed. …So when Loomis later heard that Lawrence had succeeded in building a big cyclotron and ‘had gotten a million usable volts out of little seven inch disc,’ he understood immediately ‘just what [Lawrence]was working for and why he was working for it.’”
What Lawrence’s Berkeley recruit Luis Alvarez termed “a perfect marriage” between the equable and curious financier and the shambling giant of a scientist whose drive in nuclear matters was unstoppable yielded over a million dollars from Rockefeller and countless additional collaborations as the committed Californian sought ever ‘bigger-and-better’ cyclotrons to elicit more and more subatomic comprehension.
“Lawrence was thinking of ‘the beam to end all beams.’ …’It would require more than half a million dollars.’ With the active encouragement of Loomis and other big-thinking admirers, it would increase steadily in size and cost over the next year. ‘He was building a cyclotron as big as money would permit him.’” Next Up—Part Two
Adding Things Up, Step By Step—(continued)…
"'So too,' moreover 'at every juncture of friction and change, dialectics is at work in politics.' Only we don't see it, as often as not, number one because we don't make the fundamental choice to recognize its presence and our job to discern it, and number two, because all (sorts of) false dualisms (liberal and conservative; Republocrat and Demopublican) predominate the mediation of consciousness, under the rubric of rulers who don't necessarily want us to begin thinking like masterful dialecticians."
William Appleman Williams had a deep, almost a religious, commitment to historical comprehension. However, he nonetheless also insisted that any historical investigation could, rationally and persuasively, adopt a dialectical-historical-materialist methodology, which necessitates looking at ‘Uncle Karl.’ Such acquaintance in turn requires dealing with dialectics and internal contradiction.
This dialectic engagement pervades Marx's work, from the very beginning to the utter end. But he also wants those who seek to comprehend and affect the world to be able to grasp and employ dialectical methodology as a practical matter, not merely as an intellectual exercise. This is the second way in which Marx insists on a 'dialectical process.'
It is also the final way that he completely rejects formalistic, artificially constructed thought processes. Instead, he grounds himself in the most obvious source of how to understand the basic elements of human existence in any 'present tense.' He first posits that all of these basic elements—the food that we eat, the houses where we live, the way we use our bodies to recreate the means of existence, and to procreate the means of existence, as well as all of our mental and linguistic functions—all occur in a sort of social stew consisting of identifiable political and economic elements, all of which relate to each other.
In this view, everything human is part of the 'material' of human life. Clearly, if push comes to shove, some material will inevitably take precedence—nakedness in a blizzard is simply not amenable to argument or prayer; yet, all of these human relations are material. Their tangible reality, and their interconnections are discoverable and demonstrable.
But this discovery, in any particular moment, abstracted from time, must lead back to some sort of overarching elevation of 'ideas over matter,' of 'theory over practice,' that was ever anathema to Karl Marx. So when I prattle on about how critical the task is for analyzing historical development and relations, I am following a Marxist program. I must say, at the same time, that, in similar fashion as many other 'pinkish thinkers,' I first discerned the outlines of the process and then stumbled upon Marx.
This only happened, I might add, when I left the realm of the public school, where even the mention of Marx's name can bring severe reprimands or ostracism to an instructor, and an attempt to teach a document like Wage Labor and Capital in an objective fashion is likely to elicit a crowd carrying pitch forks and setting up a bonfire around a stake. The number of public schools that have courses in Marx's thinking number zero or close to zero, at the same time that all elite prep schools insure that their charges receive this basic intellectual orientation.
Of course, many folks will have heard that 'communists don't believe in God; they're dialectical historical materialists.' This investiture with history, in fact, represents the fuel that drives an unfolding Marxian conceptualization, which is itself a dialectical, and historically material process.
American history repeatedly shows this flow from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, as some Marxist thinkers are wont to state the rubric. But for the most part, overwhelmingly, except at the highest levels of the academy, where as many as half or more of the practitioners are one flavor or other of Marxist confection, this ongoing back and forth process fails to acknowledge the originator. This is precisely what William Appleman Williams terms a 'great evasion' that has continued, much to the detriment of both American society and the ability of Americans to think.
INTRODUCTION
William Appleman Williams, for anyone who has been anything like a 'regular' in perusing these pages, is a frequent source(INTERLINK, SB) of authority regarding the nature of empire under the auspices of America's rulers of capital and country. Quite certainly, this much was clear above-the-fold. Today’s missive deepens our awareness.
Introduction—Moral Dimensions of a Yankee Demurral In an interview with Duke University's Radical History Review, Williams drew attention to the centrality of cohesive community in his Iowa youth. In all of his writing—as he contemplated the thought-processes of Presidents and the profit-motives of big business and beyond—this sense of community remained a touchstone.
He begins The Great Evasion, his offertory for human survival, with this statement. "America's great evasion lies in its manipulation of Nature to avoid a confrontation with the human condition and with the challenge of building a true community."
Williams examines, in these introductory pages, both the false front and the real purpose of 'frontiers,' the philosophical and epistemological and political compromises and skirmishes that underlie this attempt to finesse the 'city on the hill' that the first interlopers here said they were seeking, and the complete and intentional misunderstanding of Marx—turning him into an apology for all that was wrong with Soviet Russia, in order to eject him from our social conversation.
“Americans have never confronted Karl Marx himself. We have never confronted his central theses about the assumptions, the costs, and the tree nature of capitalist society. ...predicated upon an overemphasis and exaltation of the individualistic, egoistic half of man functioning in a marketplace...that overrides and crushes the social, humanitarian half of man. ...And we have never confronted (Marx's) argument that capitalism cannot create a community in which how much men produce and own is less important than what they make, less important than their relationships as they produce...less important than what they are as men, and less important than how they treat each other."
Marx's Challenges--Again, Beyond the Political and Economic Most readers, due in large part to the manipulations of the commodification of Uncle Karl by capital and in small part to their own laziness, think of Marx as the twin brother of Stalin and the father of Lenin. Folks should make no mistake; many is the time that this humble correspondent has pored over a text by one of those other dyed-in-the-wool Reds and thought how incisive and brilliant were these erstwhile demons of the American prospect.
But Marx constitutes a force of nature in his own right, one which we might investigate with an awareness of how we already have blockades that impede listening and comprehension. And Williams makes transparent that "Marx's asumptions, axioms, and methods, and his broad analysis, rather than any particular or detailed prognostication...are the crucial elements of his contribution."
In spinning a Marxian fabric that more or less matches what I have proffered to readers here today, Williams writes, "Marx's work flowed from the methodological axiom that reality and change could be explained, and prognostications offered, by reference to the tension, conflict, and contradictions between the methods of production and the relations of production." As do I above, Williams emphasizes Marx's recognition as ideas themselves as a material force, though they do not exist independently of the underlying matter.
Williams intends, in this section, to mandate that any consideration of Marx's critiques—about empire, the growing relative impoverishment of working people, and the utter alienation from community—do not employ false assumptions or depend on false leads. Such errant approaches might result from just a few other miscues, Williams suggested.
Readers cannot pillory Uncle Karl for being one-sided or totally negative, because of Marx's many bows to bourgeois achievements. No rejection of Marxian thinking, on the basis of prediction errors, is generally possible on the basis of the incorrect predictions alone; the analyst must debate Marx's perspectives, and not rely on the fact that particular guesses did not come to pass. In the remainder of his book, then, Williams examines the three central elements of a Marxist critique already listed, with an eye to evaluate whether these ideas appear primarily valid or overwhelmingly off base, or somewhere in between.
Markets and Empires Much of Williams' oeuvre as a historian acts as evidentiary and conceptual brief for the notion that the standardized operation of American rule, from very early in the unfolding of the Republic, served to define and consolidate a 'tragedy' of empire in American diplomacy. Therefore, given Williams' powerful grounding in the facts and theory of this work, he more or less rigorously demonstrates that Marx's projections about capital as an international force were comprehensively correct.
A note that Williams points out repeatedly is that the most sacred proponents of the bourgeoisie also recognized this tendency toward empire, starting this lengthy section of the book with an extensive quotation from The Wealth of Nations, concerning the inevitably dominance of manufactures and finance over agriculture and extraction. Keynes, another apologist for slight modifications of the bourgeois paradigm, made this point more concisely. "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
Williams shows the two underlying notions in Marx's core expression that are the predecessors to a Marxian conception of empire. The first, the split that grows ever greater between the metropolis and the hinterland, glares at Americans from the lighted canyons of New York City and Los Angeles, even as the blighted streets of Detroit or Cleveland or Las Vegas invite the populace of those places to contemplate a more communitarian set of relationships to revitalize what has been sucked away from what those cities once were.
The second 'underlying notion,' that the market's growth itself outstrips local capacity to consume production explicates with mathematical acuity the U.S. insistence for one hundred twenty years on a 'free-trade' manifestation of empire, which has in fact replaced the earlier mechanisms of England and France and Japan and more. Globalization and 'free-trade zones' retain their allure at all the highest levels of capitalism, from the IMF to the U.S. State Department, and beyond.
This section of the book proceeds chronologically, displaying the steps—from the internal expansion of the early Republic, and the attendant annihilation of Native American communities, to the outpouring of capital in the aftermath of WWII, when the Marshall Plan and other 'gifts' laid the basis for the American preeminence that, as Williams foresaw, is so spectacularly collapsing on all fronts in the current moment. Williams makes the connections that permit a careful student to view the specific operations of capital, in ways that Marx described, to yield this two century process of growth and crises, resurgence and collapse, which we are experiencing in our lives at this very moment.
Throughout this process, of course, the established POV has remained both that the United States of America will somehow finesse the contradictions that are haunting us again, and, for most of the entire time that Karl Marx was so fundamentally flawed that he had nothing of use to offer the ultra, extra, completely special USA. Anyone who listens to Marx himself can see the idiocy of this second contention. As to the first, whether one observes the Tea Party or the significant chunk of Democrats who complain about America's 'decline,' the first belief appears untenable as well.
Williams closes gently. "The cost of continuing the effort to prove Marx wrong is thus exorbitant even by capitalist standards. Indeed, it wold seem time to honor the old capitalist axiom of cutting our losses and investing our capital in more promising ventures." That Marx speaks to the interrelated world that he described and foresaw is obvious; that we might benefit from including his collection of analysis in our pondering of the current pass is clear.
An Emiserated Proletariat Whatever capitalism has touched, it has impoverished, though at times this has not taken the form of penury so much as ennui and listlessness and the loss of life force. When Williams published this volume, at the very apogee of America's postwar potency, this statement often seemed absurd, despite the pervasive backwardness of the South(INTERLINK, TVA), the recently released evidences of Michael Harrington, and the general prevalence of hunger and depredation in the former colonies of Europe and other 'underdeveloped' regions.
Today, perhaps not so many people would derisively dismiss this Marxian contention about the necessary widening of social gulfs amid the disparity-producing convulsions of capital. Certainly, in looking at Dixie(INTERLINK, Coal), at Appalachia(INTERLINK, BREDL), at smaller communities beset by environmental injustice(INTERLINK, EJN), at Native American struggles(INTERLINK, LSE), and much more, This Humble Correspondent has attested to the nature of present-day emiseration in America.
While my particular work has not focused as much on empire, its oppressive and economically depressing tendencies(INTERLINK, obit) have shown up repeatedly in these pages(INTERLINK, SB) as well(INTERLINK, MOST). Moreover, since this arena is the life work of William Appleman Williams, which constituted a thoroughgoing critique of American righteous buccaneering and murderous manipulation that has never undergone thorough refutation because such a rebuttal is impossible, the reader may well imagine that this longest section of The Great Evasion provides close and copious proof of the evils of empire.
Today, as in 1964, the response from the upper crust to such discussion is to call for better and more extensive administration. "The system, they argue, must be administered as a tightly...coordinated unit," from Afghanistan to the Mexican border, for example, from the U.S.-patrolled border between the Koreas to the DU laced battlefields of Southern and Central Europe.
Williams identifies the nub of such thinking, anti-democratic and presumptuous, that I have ever spoken against. Corporate rule, as now articulated, cannot coexist with democracy and community.
"As th(e) approach(of rulers) implies, most of the(m) are elitists. Candidly or otherwise, they advocate further restricting the areas in which the citizenry exercises significant influence in and upon the decision-making process. ...(T)his attitude of the upper-class leadership (again) raises the fundamental question of whether or not American capitalism...can create an ethical and equitable community."
Capital and Community From Horatio Alger to Corporate Social Responsibility, capital's henchmen and brokers have sought to soften its fierce image of drooling readiness to eviscerate 'the competition,' which includes everyone not on the board of a big firm or in the position of an important stockholder, or the respective family and friends and henchmen thereof. This second longest portion of the volume examines four methods that both capital and its opponents have advanced to reform capitalism and save it at the same time.
The most common and longest standing is one version or another of the rags-to-riches fantasy. It happens too. My father and my sister illustrate its operation in different ways. But when we properly investigate empirical reality, this view is unsustainable, as the stalwart analysis of Gabriel Kolko, and others cited by Williams, demonstrate. For the most part, the rich come from the ranks of the rich; for the most part, these ranks diminish over time.
To give credit where credit is due, the ranks of government do not always disdain such analysis. Part of the ability to govern stems from a willingness to consider what is ugly and find a way to package the ugliness in more palatable terms, or, possibly, to ameliorate what is uncomely and harsh.
The second method for bypassing the persistent downturn into which capital inevitably devolves is through what Williams call 'Feudal Socialism.' In some ways, such visionaries as Wendell Berry and Don Harris emulate this type of approach. Williams, like me, does not decry the spirit of such ideation. But both Williams and I express a skepticism that such 'back-to-the-earth' or other retrenchments can either stand up to the invasive force of capital or provision communities in such a way as to permit seven billion cousins to continue feeding and clothing themselves.
The third sort of 'uprising' against capital shows up as populism. Adolf Hitler was just such a one. So was Huey Long, supposedly. The Populist Party was full of colorful grassroots leaders, and American history generally has a substantial lexicon of biographies and assessments of such men and women.
While under the conditions that cause an actualization of political strength, without either the decimation or the cooptation of class conscious leadership and activism, such outbursts can in fact lead to transformation, or at least to lasting and deeply impactful reform, on every occasion that they have exploded onto the American scene, they have both diverted motion away from real reform—toward despising immigrants or fetishizing metals, for example—and lost whatever political muscle that they initially showed the potential to build up. And, lurking alongside such eruptions, ever some new Adolf seeks to claw and slouch her way 'toward Bethlehem' again.
The final attempt to potentiate fixes to capital's contradictions are the most popular in the U.S., where, despite the lack of an aristocracy, the ruling class arguably maintains the most arrogant and elitist grip on the reins of power. These methodologies often use the adjective 'New' in a tired old way, as in another 'New Deal.' They often also speak in the language of sales and gambling, 'deals' and 'chances' and 'opportunities' and 'options' ubiquitous in the wording of such eventualities.
And only the trollish fringe of the 'intelligentsia' would go so far as to call, as a case in point, the 'New Deal' of FDR worthless. The likes of this correspondent, of William Appleman Williams, and all those of a Marxist bent, can see both the real struggle for progress inside a WPA or a TVA, and the corporatist machinations that, with seemingly irresistible logic, take over such efforts, whether in Food Stamps, Charter School Vouchers, TARP's, or any other manifestation of government largesse to improve capital's operational procedures.
Thus, Williams is able to end this part of his book with Marx's indictment intact. "(T)he capitalist, operating on capitalist principles...has demonstrated the limitations of capitalism.
All the critic is doing is judging the system as created and sustained by its own proponents, and concluding that its acknowledged achievements and benefits include a demonstration that man cannot be defined in terms of his possessions. Marx was absolutely correct in his arguments of a century ago that man does not live by production and commodities alone." Moreover, forty-six years after Williams issued his tome, the 'acknowledged achievements' have worn thin indeed.
CONCLUSIONS My mother used to say, fairly regularly, that "any port in a storm" was a welcome respite. I have struggled, interminably, to avoid the allure of opportunism of one sort or another, so in a subjective sense, I maintain a high degree of wariness any time that someone intones, "Let's try this; what harm could it do?"
On the other hand, as the entire globe reels from pillar to post from the shocks and blows of capital's apparent incapacity just now, an interested observer would have to be fairly obtuse, or incredibly obdurate, not at least to think about ways of framing the present pass that might provide some assistance or insight. Thus, in times of crisis, radicals and persona non grata sometimes receive an opportunistic hey-ho as the gatekeepers mutter about lower standards and cross their fingers that maybe something useful will result.
I, for one, am asking for a deeper engagement.”
As noted above-the-fold, this inserted stream of words about Williams’ Great Evasion hit the presses sixteen or seventeen years back. Perhaps we might attend the volume’s subtitle as a way to persist in this discourse. An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue About America's Future about sums things up, if we give the matter much thought at all. When all is said and done, we need all the help we can get, ha ha.
The sequel to this introductory exploration of the work of this brilliant thinker— historical, Marxist, liberal, conservative, and dedicated to discovery all at the same time, will follow in #27, which will hypothetically come forward around mid-September in the new publishing scheme. We’ll be examining three more of William Appleman Williams’ works at that time.
Empire As a Way of Life, another longform discursive look at ‘foreign affairs’ of the great Yankee behemoth, also has a wonderful subtitle. Published in 1980, as support for the gangster pal of empire in Iran came apart and led to the hostage crisis and the first act of the present pass, it also makes a heartfelt plea: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, Along With a Few Thoughts About an Alternative.
We’ll call another introductory quotation bon mot an adequate send off. It’s from Mark Green, author of Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. “Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we think.”
America in Vietnam: a Documentary History includes a trio of estimable editors who join Williams in creating this relatively brief collection. Whatever else may be true, it is an apt and useful followup, indeed, to Daniel Ellsberg’s courageous manifesto in The Pentagon Papers.
Finally, for our next issue about Williams and his work and ways, one of the scholar’s first books, The United States, Cuba, and Castro will debut and entice us to attempt to make something useful and decent out of the grotesque monstrosity of the last thirteen decades of ‘Cuba policy,’ full of gusanos and assassins to support plutocracy and subvert social progress or reform. A brief selection from Williams’ postscript might when our appetite.
“Long years ago, in a moment of exuberance over the use of American power against a vastly weaker nation, Secretary of State John Hay called the Spanish American conflict a ‘splendid little war.’ That phrase, and the attitude behind it, have haunted the relations between the United States and Cuba for two generations(and now more, of course). And it may be that Hay’s splendid little war will turn out to have been the first-stage detonator for a horrible, monstrous conflict.”
Sixty-three years after its publications, these words still pack a resonant punch, hinting at the grotesque monstrosity that awaits, eventually, if the United States of America continues to insist on what Williams called an ‘imperial lifestyle.’