Big Tent Review

#26, 7/16/2025

{The first song is a selection from Ded Prez, “Propaganda,” the second song a bit from Billy Bragg’s “Help Save the Youth of America,” from themselves, ha ha}

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-sixth 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 50,000 word explosions—about twice that this time, alas—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 at least a degree of thematic unity, a variety of whatever glue, so to speak, can hold together these moments that we are sharing right now, with their inescapable ongoing echoes of our current Mass Collective Suicide Express. Then again, July 16^th is a very big deal in any MNP timeline. Thus, for now, that theme is that inherent interconnectedness and mutual mirroring appear among all the topics and facts and blah blah blah.

And what of Gaza? What could possibly be more garish and gruesome than a carefully orchestrated, fully mediated genocide that every G-7 ‘free-world’ leader, without exception, rationalizes or shrugs off? While BTR can’t offer much yet in the way of explanation and explication, other than its smattering of topical tidbits about the situation, THC and all his kith and kin stand in solidarity with Palestinian people even as the cabal of gangsters in charge of the Israeli state seem determined to obliterate the entire ethnic group.

As well, every BTR blast, minimally, ‘in no small part’—in the teeth of all the wickedness and woe that our present passages reveal—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 BTR’s consistently massive tidal wave of text 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 October fifteenth, the second of many that will appear, approximately anyway, 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, though a fellow with my schemes and dreams could, for certain, use a few executive producers.

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 happening. 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: Whither Humanity Amid Rebirthed ‘Great Powers?’

1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—What Do We Worship So As to Revere Life-Force-Energy?

2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XXVI

3. Wood Words Essays—An Episode Instead of a Theme, Or, Reestablishing a Queue

4. Empowered Political Forays—Before Mossadegh And Today’s Mandatory Mayhem

5. Old Stories & New—”A Red Star For Captain Brimm’”

6. Nerdy Nuggets—Contextualizing ‘Depression’ and Its ‘Medications’ in Our Annals

7. Communication & Human Survival—Luminous Illusion: Free Information & Consciousness

8. Erotic Snippets—”Ecstatic Life Force Energy’s Nuances and Living an ‘E.L.F.E.N. Life’”

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, II

—Last Words For Now

Introduction—A Modern Nuclear Present Pass’ Random Epiphanies

This Just In—For the fourth time, ha ha, I just changed the date of publication for the current Big Tent Review. At first, I was going to do Bastille day as a kickoff. Then that was impossible, ha ha, and when I figured ‘the Ides of July’ instead, I realized. “Well, the sixteenth is one of the most important days in history,” something indisputably true for any rational sojourner here among us, and all because of its place in the Modern Nuclear Project itself.

Moreover, I’d originally projected ‘publishing’ by mid-June. Whoops. Anyway, so the Trinity Test—the first explosive demonstration of fissioning Uranium as a Weapon of Mass Destruction—happened eighty years ago.

Then, I realized that this month’s Iran account, about which more later—both in the Intro and in the last piece of the current collection—basically centerd on ‘Iran’s nuclear program.’ And of course, in any such context, what about Israel and its ‘small thermonucler arsenal,’ only capable of a hundred million casualties or so?

That query, in turn, made me think about the sense of a nuclear donnybrook ahead in Ukraine, both as reactors become scorched-earth targets of opportunity and as likely Hiroshima sized ‘tactical-nukes’ have joined the menu options for strategice defense or defeat. Overnight, the situation sent us, conceivably, from a few minutes to a few seconds before midnight on the Bulletin of the Atomic Veterans Doomsday Clock.

And that’s not all, not even close. Perhaps most noteworthy of these various others was my realization that the ‘Climate Narrative’ today—a yarn that has turned into an intellectual biography and geological treatise about an in-general very-little-known Serbian scientist and the world-defining theories that he propounded, which now bear his name as Milanković-Cycles—likely has an MNP agenda at or near its very core in the contemporary arena.

In the meantime, the Modern Nuclear Project’s climate coup is in full swing. The signs are even more ubiquitous than the gloating headlines about how ‘boutique-nukes’ are going to fuel A.I.’s new age of marvels and mayhem. Weapons systems are in vogue again as well. A selection of items, come what may, illustrates this on any given day.

They come in a steady stream from bunches of my ‘subscriptions.’ Just to list a few handfuls or so over the past month would occupy pages, which induces me to demur, since today’s MNP continuation beckons below. So, instead, I’m just inserting a dozen or so links in this paragraph(I could have gone on, basically ad infinitum)for anyone who delights in such unanticipated congruency as has been appearing.

In any event, a ‘fair and just polity,’ at least if one is a billionaire—and we should all aspire so to be, right?—is, supposedly, readily at hand. One important development, of course, will promote this ‘free-to-profit',’ and altogether propertied translation of a ‘fair and just society.’

Artificial intelligence, powered by mighty micro-nukes, will prove the salvation of society in service to wealth and privilege, which is not only how it should be—ha ha, not—but also how it must inevitably turn out. After all, those who make the algorithm fix, or at least predispose, the outcome.

The only question, as is so frequently true in these ‘latter days’ of ours, is whether people will communicate with each other so as to work together to act on their own behalf. The logical answer, ‘probably not,’ had better prove incorrect, if we want to live through the carnage with the merest modicum of aplomb.

Nearly the latest hypothesis about the strangling tentacles of the Modern Nuclear Project involves Iran. This seems especially plausible if Paul Craig Roberts is interpreting the Russian Federation’s statements correctly. The idea goes like this.

‘Only nations too-powerful-to-destroy, and abject servants of London’s and New York’s and Washington’s imperial machine, will ever be permitted now to acquire the necessary infrastructure of nuclear weapons production.’ In stating the possibility, one can only see, again, that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are economically and technologically the same phenomena operating in tandem, the Nuclear Fool Cycle writ large.

The actually most recent speculation about the future development of the MNP is, alas, substantially darker, though not as bleak as the Mass Collective Suicide that could be in store for humankind. Terran use of fission for any purpose, no matter what else turns out to be accurate, amounts to a death wish. In any event, here’s the conjecture.

The ‘indispensable’ political-economic entities of the planet need to demonstrate so that people can understand how ‘nuclear war is just regular war with more powerful weapons; we can live with this, and, to protect our national interests, we must do so.’ Once again, I hope that this is just wild and crazy guessing about what will not come to pass. How much radioactive, explosive, insidious toxicity humanity can take may be something that we are about to discover, much to our lethal chagrin.

At the same time that this chain of reasoning seems very persuasively reasonable indeed, my own days and nights up in the hills unfold like a magical dream at once calm and passionate; with my love and her almost 102 year old, still lucid and feisty, mother; not to mention the regular process that produces both this spooling blah blah blah and all my other cultural conjectures and reflections.

Of course, my cultural array amounts to little in the scheme of things. The litany of manure in service to gangster-plutocrats and their dreams to scheme their way to an eternal perch atop the human heap acts as a tidal wave to sweep away the middling effect of any mere ripple that This Humble Correspondent can craft.

What in the name of a heavenly Goddess’ Life Force Energy can stand up to, let alone overcome, such a death wish approach as now exists to energy and culture and human existence itself? Interestingly enough, a recent issue of Smithsonian provides one clue. An ‘Eroticized Goddess Approach’ might prove ‘just the ticket.’

Margaret Ithell Colquhoun, for instance, the artist and surrealist who had the audacity to promote occult knowledge while knowing full well that such views stamped her as ‘persona non grata’ among the pillars of artistic production and performance, her entire performance of artistry expresses an alternative pathway. Moreover, she was devotedly erotic—even openly sexual—in her paintings and narratives.

This artist’s strange story, to a significant extent just surreal, brings to mind a series of smaller items of Driftwood Message Art. They may not explain any path to surmounting aforesaid social suicidal impulses, but they decidedly do provide provocative prods to imagine proceeding in different fashion.

Here is one of a pair of these Love Charms. “Thriving on a Diet of Consciousness & Kisses, We Swim Together Through Nourishing Seas to Satisfy Appetites at Once Salacious & Psychic, Equal Dollops Ecstasy & Epiphany.” The title in this instance was “Consciousness & Kisses.”

“Ecstatic Epiphany” served as the ‘subject line’ for another version. "Linked Together, We Swim Through Salubrious Connubial Seas Where We Thrive on Repasts of Kisses & Consciousness, Satisfying Cravings at Once Salacious & Psychic, Equal Helpings Ecstasy & Epiphany."

My love and I are so lucky to have found each other that the probability of our connection approaches impossibility. Yet, day after day, here we stand. Friends, stalwart comrades, mates, lovers, and soul's companions all at once, we cavort merrily in furtherance of our fruitful fostering of both greenery and intelligence, both food and nutritious thought, blah blah blah, more or less ad infinitum.

We are so bonded that 'till death do us part' is our measure, with our mutual commitment to each other's liveliest expression of our embodied miracle the insurance for the bond, which itself is in some senses its own force of nature. Yumminess hums in our routine thrums of hither and yon, full of ‘kisses and consciousness,’ ha ha.

We have the literally marvelous fortune to observe life’s passing panoply with rapt attention and hopeful appreciation of how things actually operate, altogether in every move finding some way of serving or boosting or facilitating Life Force Energy. No other way of being could even plausibly compare to this; ecstasy and epiphany flow with a tidal force, as inevitable as dawn after darkness and dusk after daylight.

The only attitude toward this gushing grace of Goddess goodness is an astonished gratitude at the fortune that has allowed my life to reach such a juncture. If I could share this fate, I’d be like Emmylou and Mark and wish “love and happiness, for you,” whomsoever that particular use of the second person singular described, ha ha.

Not only do my love and I manage to manifest such magic, but we also find ourselves immersed in social networks—familial for the most part, but also neighborly and collegial—in which these sweet ethical dimensions seem to hold sway. Occasionally, we even manage to extend the parameters of a conversational space, a la Habermas below in today’s “Communication & Human Survival” episode, beyond our dynamic duo’s daily doses of said same.

This potential for community, indisputably, exists everywhere on our fair planet, among every clan and tribe and cohort that is living and breathing in the here and now. All too many people, glued to their screens that advance propaganda and screeds about all the mean people whose deeds deserve punishment, blithely ignore this commonality of communal feeling’s potential for more or less complete fruition.

However, This Humble Correspondent keeps discovering more possibilities to manifest merriment instead of mayhem, to mandate the mellifluous instead of cacophony, and all such potentiation of triumphand grace instead of trials and tribulations that allow us to complain. We persist, after all.

In this vein, babies are cropping up everywhere. They are astonishing creatures, of course, for all the reasons that Noam Chomsky points out. They acquire language to express their wonder; what a miracle this wiring that we have!

At a restaurant in Lincolnton, North Carolina, little K ruled the roost and met her social cohorts and contemporaries, depicting that incredible toddler combination of amazement and presumption—wide-eyed at a new acquaintance’s regard and recognition, knowing that she and her freshly minted friend will find a high time together.

In a real sense, therefore, my life suggests an anomaly that many others likely experience as well. While we happy campers, smiling with jolly aplomb, sing the chorus of life’s ecstatic dance, ‘the only dance there is,’ we see misery and mayhem and murder as mundane manifestations of everyday eventualities of how matters actually stand, especially in service to war and profit and the supremacist forces of King Capital that these tendencies benefit.

In all these emanations of glorious and grim, woeful and wondrous, I find myself more and more attuned to a truly Goddess orientation, something that my intuition suggests will either find a way into popular consciousness or observe ruefully the evisceration and likely elimination of humankind. In this vein, my Driftwood Message Art marks a track toward promulgating Life Force Energy’s essential elements in human survival.

I’ve finished another big piece, perhaps the largest DMA ‘canvas’ ever. Its message delineates my life’s unexpected, unanticipated, though ever sought present passage. Somehow or other, I am living this miraculous marvel of meaning and love and hope, yet I claim no credit except to say that I’m doing my best to make a difference in favor of human survival and all attendant blah blah blah. It’s like my job, or, if one thinks like I do, my ‘Existential Duty.’

I Tweeted about it recently. “Day by day, the glorious gift of embodiment’s delicate, delicious, dramatic miracle is ours to savor and succor. Instead, all too many of our nine billion cousins elect to pop antidepressants or otherwise mask their life’s particular expressions of problematic by blaming something for their ignoring how all the woes and wonders amount to this sweet magic of the Goddess’ Life Force Energy.

A new piece of Driftwood Message Art mirrors the truism that the best possible outcome to any human path will always remain an ‘interesting set of problems to solve.’ ‘Birth, Death, Planning, Intention’ is its title.

‘Life’s Lengthiest Sojourn Starts With a Birth That One Does Not Plan & Finishes With a Death That, Under Standard Circumstances, One Does Not Invite Or Intend; in Between Emerge the Daunting Difficulties, the Crazed Concatenations, the Somehow Both Sublime & Mundane Scenes of Everyday Routine, Inevitably Arenas of Ongoing Action & Potentially, Quite Reasonably, Realms of Useful Or Even Critical Choice Where, Just Possibly, One May Discover a Path, Full of Honorable & Passionate Purpose, That One Desires to Pursue.’

Praise be, lucky me!”

In this context, for-the-most-part living a glorious daily epiphany and jubilation appears to be all but impossible, since all the while monstrosities multiply and the Mass Collective Suicide Express has humanity among its contingent stops, so that we will eventually immolate ourselves unless we get a grip on citizenship and end such things as the Modern Nuclear Project and other aspects of Militarized Keynesianism in all its death-dance manifestations. Yet here I stand, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to boogie so as to boost humanity’s staying power, and all similar blah blah blah.

Our altogether carnal incarnation means that we can only achieve whatever measure of happiness and well-being might be accessible—with luck and good intentions—if we respect and in some sense adore our bodies. Embodying our love defines social and interpersonal relations, unless someone has a better idea.

But of course, ‘it’s all political’ is undeniable too. The central issue to consider is what constitutes power relations. Do people really believe that politicians determine social and economic outcomes? This Humble Correspondent thinks about this sort of shit constantly; I just can’t help myself.

Thus, another interaction on X revolved around party politics, which is one of those, ‘OMG, don’t get me started’ topics, ha ha. A Big Tent POV on these matters has remained pretty consistent, since, as in most things, if my analysis and evidence add up to comprehensible conclusions, then I’ll probably so conclude, at least till someone shows me the ‘error of my ways,’ as it were.

This is one of my initial sallies in a little of the old ‘parry and thrust’ about the whole Democrat-versus-Republican facade. “Starting from a likely indisputable premise that the ReDemoPubliCratiCan two-party fraud presents the same choices to people in different clothing, as it were, a citizen, a seeker, a critical thinker has little leeway except to deduce, quite simply, that only a people’s movement can act as even a barely plausible guarantor of human existence.”

That sure makes sense to me and mine, ha ha. My final little dart in the string went like this. “Indeed. It's the ReDemoPubliCratiCan phalanx, large and in charge since the 1940's at latest. Those years were also important in regard to national indebtedness.

The Bretton Woods protocols made the dollar the global 'currency of account' for transactions in key commodities like oil. This meant, every nation would buy dollars so as to function.

In other words, the USA could always sell its 'debt instruments.' That is changing however, which means more than double national income in money owed could become problematic. Or, worse that merely difficult, truly depressing, in economic terms as well as emotional.

The point is that this is part of the system's design. The single party's two wings will both grapple with money meltdowns soon enough, the upshot that in serving their moneybags masters, politicians will seek to extract payments-due from citizens rather than seeking any sort of corporate recompense.

That ‘politics,’ in corporate mediation, has become a branch of the Entertainment Industry means that Presidential elections have roughly the same heft as inquiring ‘Who shot J.R.?’ at the end of season whatever in the ‘hit series,’ Dallas. Thus, the entire ReDemoPubliCratiCan fraud of a ‘two-party-system’ provides fecund soil for flowering fetish in all its forms.

The RDPCC Phalanx exists as a combination of bag-man and muscle, in the parlance of soldier Smedley Butler's holy book, War Is a Racket. The former Department of War, now an Orwellian Defender, ha ha, is the backbone of both ‘party’ wings.

Obviously, too, in this vein, the conflation of democracy with elections is as real as is the inability to grasp, and act on, the essential unity of the RDPCCan behemoth. To ignore electoral politics may be nonsensical, yet assigning primary import to this particular—merely apparently contested—arena is, at best, hideous ignorance.

Would that a few words to the wise would suffice. I'll cross my fingers.”

One way to approach how the world works and what the heck is happening is to see the forces in play as a constant contest. Nothing else makes sense; otherwise, the whole idea of ‘protest’ would not be such a major part of every news hole ever. Warfare would not form the primary business model, with Brand Chaos executives as the central operators, like a Peaky Blinders gangster-run dystopia.

Whatever the case may be, the following lists the ‘order of battle’ for King Capital in the current context. The import of geopolitics and any research-and-development functions aside, little else matters more, in the socioeconomic realm of the here and now, than does recognizing how these functions shape and demarcate most people’s daily existence.

I sent this in an e-mail to a pal. It was in response to a WTF about Ukraine and Palestine, arenas of mass murder that are making lots of our cousins uncomfortable every day—those whom they don’t eviscerate or annihilate, anyhow.

“Monopoly merchants and their fiscal sidekicks operate according to eight basic principles. Number one, and overwhelmingly the most primary, is to maximize profits.

Number two, and close to centrally important as well, is to defend and wherever plausible expand 'private property rights.'

Number three is to subdivide every process and product as much as possible, so as to create more items or services to sell and thereby extract greater profits from each aspect of production.

Number four is to negotiate and operate cartels whenever competition or political conflict threatens either one or two.

Number five is to own or otherwise control all major media companies in existence within the 'free-market' sphere.

Number six is to own or otherwise control, as wholly-owned subsidiaries, all governmental functions that take place within the 'free-market' sphere.

Number seven is to operate these wholly-owned governments according to 'sound business practices.'

Number eight is to define 'sound business practices' in terms of numbers one and two on this list, and nothing else.”

Okay, okay, okay. And my point is? I guess it comes down to this. People don’t look all that happy; they don’t overflow with grace and gratitude. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I’ll bet you! Ha ha. Today’s article about antidepressants is bracing along these lines.

Given this premise, I can’t help myself, once again. I start thinking, ‘what could help out a bit?’ And what occurs to me, repeatedly, is that the only way to solve a problem—except by blind luck, which is a fickle mistress for sure—is to understand it and envision, strategize, and plan some sort of response. Big Tent Review, at minimum offers opportunities to understand, unless folks prefer confusion and ignorance, of course, or monopoly media’s relentless renderings of falsehood, nonsense, and non sequitur.

My life is glorious, in other words, but I want to come to something like a comprehension of why this doesn’t seem to be the case for many people. I’m super lucky, I know this, I shout hosannas of thanks to Goddess glory. But I’m happy to talk about things, hoping against hope that discourse might make a difference, just as one of today’s interlocutors—Juergen Habermas—insists is accurate.

So. ‘My point is that instead of blocking and blunting actual connection about core issues, we ought to devise ways to put our heads together and make the world a better place.’ In a sense, it all comes down to participation and empowerment; one of my shticks, over the years, has been Community Based Participatory Research, after all is said and done, ha ha.

In this vein, the local paper hereabouts offered readers an opportunity to participate in a contest. One only needed to write a limerick about marijuana to qualify. Who could resist?

Often, folks have adhered to a creed: ‘We abhor all of those who smoke weed.’ The reason they say, Foggy minds rule the day When happy stoners are joyous indeed. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Altering one’s consciousness will always remain central to the ‘human project,’ an end result that everybody seeks, at least now and again. Mushrooms, fermented fruits, psychedelic seeds and flowers, our kind have gravitated to these means to achieve results along these lines. Of course, this has shown up again and again here at BTR.

Recognizing this pleasuring process as a necessity, in a Big Tent way of scheming things, has two obvious components. The work here mainly delves the intellectual half of things, but plenty of carnality comes to the fore as well. What about spiritual wisdom? Sure, that too. Let’s go. Learning, loving, and soul make for a sublime trip-the-light-fantastic through existence.

Four new articles appear in #26, come what may. THC probably has only a couple dozen nonfiction and only slightly more than a handful of ‘previously published and produced’ expressions remaining—at least for purposes of already written and ready to put in place, of THC’s indubitably humble correspondence—so to say. Episodes One through Twenty-Five have nearly ‘tapped me out,’ ha ha.

That means that, to make new confabulations of fact and speculation, of fictional narrative intermingled with social and emotional soothsaying, This Humble Correspondent will likely have a lot of ‘i’s’ to cross and ‘t’s’ to dot, or no, vice versa, ha ha. Hence the half of #26 that delineates reportage or journalism or analysis contains the already-mentioned quartet of novel reports, eighty percent of today’s total.

“Politics & Personal Empowerment” this issue gives center stage to a deep dive into the background of what is happening in Iran, the place of Persia’s millennias old people and culture. Most people with any political literacy whatsoever—optimistically, slightly more than one out of a hundred Americans, ha ha—will be capable of calling to mind the 1953 coup; they will have heard of British Petroleum; the vicious and venal ‘administration’ of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the mass-murdering ‘Shah of Iran,’ will ring a few bells.

But the imperial and regal evolution of these matters will mean little or nothing: the Qajar Dynasty, the Constitutionalist Revolution, the assassination of the penultimate Qajar King, as it were, what exactly Concessions were in the imperial realm of ‘business as usual,’ none of this will bring even a blip to even one in a hundred thousand gringos, a majority of which enthusiastically desire to ‘bomb Iran back to the stone age,’ or something similar.’

That this is sad and pathetic doesn’t matter much. That this willful ignorance amounts to suicidal behavior, however, a quite plausible complete human destruction, does add up to something important. We can still save ourselves; such a path, though, requires an awareness that goes beyond one percent of the populace having a vague sense of the roots of current crisis.

Edward Browne, a Cambridge University student of ‘Arabs and Islam’ plus and minus 125 years back, can launch a reader on such a path toward a more complete consciousness about our present passage in Persia. He wrote a beautiful book, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, which tells the tale in question in #26 in such a way that England’s perfidy and profiteering, which built the foundation for the horrors of the here and now like a contractor executes a subway contract, are as clear as well-buffed crystal. He honored Iran before it carried that name.

“Of all the ancient nations whose names are familiar to us Persia is almost the only one which still exists as an independent political unit within her old frontiers (sadly contracted, it is true, since Darius the Great caused to be engraved on the rocks of Bagastana or Bisutun, in characters still legible, the long list of the provinces which obeyed him and brought him tribute), inhabited by a people still wonderfully homogeneous, considering the vicissitudes through which they have passed, and still singularly resembling their ancient forbears.”

Though repeatedly battered and broken, split and divided among conquerors, the Persian people persisted and in some sense triumphed, if only to manage to reassert their constitution as a distinct and unified populace of dozens of nationalities, an overwhelming majority of whom are Islamic, and whose cultural sophistication and poetry remain wondrous jewels of the human legacy.

At the same time, the entire social setting was an aristocratic nightmare of corruption and selling-off local assets to the highest English or Russian bidder, or acceding to conquest at the hands of superior British or Muscovite force. The people were poor to the point of starvation; the demography was over three-quarters agricultural; the nation was well beneath what people once called ‘Third World;’ a Harem lay at Persia’s sociopolitical center till the Twentieth Century.

Iran, now an industrial powerhouse of ninety million people, what Pepe Escobar has said Chinese analysts describe as “a strong spear but a weak shield,” has risen from the prostration and exploitation and truly primitive condidtions that the essay in this issue details. The particular path of this rise—neocolonial, dictatorial, operated according to gangland principles, and today for going on fifty years a Theocratic State, an ‘Islamic Republic,’ arose from the ashes of the collapsing dynastic forms under review here in Big Tent Review.

While collective survival may end up hinging on a willingness to learn about these things, my particular intersection with the region has always started with personal encounters. Hot tea, a Persian ‘football’ teammate showed me—as we battled away in Tuscaloosa’s triple-digit heat—turned out to be a coolant option that truly worked like a charm. He had lost a brother to a Pahlavi hitman.

A once-upon-a-time sweetheart’s brother was a midlevel oil company functionary, an executive of international affairs for Shell Oil, one of those who brought home half a million in salary and 1-5 mil bonus in the late nineties. Every rig, every field, was an armed camp. He was frank in his position: ‘we own it, we can defend it, Shell Oil is critical to American prosperity,’ blah blah blah, impunity and imprimatur combined.

As old as I’ve gotten, almost all my stories end up with these elements of ‘personal experience, or anecdotal analog, to coin a phrase. So too here: anyone who skips down to this essay will encounter enough anecdote and incident, documentation and fact, at least to stab at a wider, deeper understanding, the sort of insight that all citizens should share.

“Nerdy Nuggets” in #26, in the meantime, brings to the table a wry title that speaks about the emotional reality of right at the moment: “Sad? Here, Take This” adopts a similar strategy as our Iran prospectus today. How did this obsession with finding chemicals, not to elevate mood, but to flatten affective response and eliminate emotions, take hold? What came before? An initial storyline takes shape here.

In a sense it defines a cyclical expression of the aforementioned—and necessarily revered by all who honor Life Force Energy—pulsing pleasuring processes that show up concomitantly with the use of psychoactive plants, or entheogens. That practice standards today among ‘mental health professionals’ instead quite literally prescribe the opposite, with quite literally nauseating evisceration of pleasure and ‘sadness’ in one fell swoop, merely shows one of the dancing dialectics in play in this realm.

Whatever the case may be, the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors class of ludicrously-named antidepressants will ever command the focused attention of this Big Tent Review and merit, as well, a close inspection by those who value either their own health and well-being or the stalwart salubriousness of their society. These toxic ‘treatments’ are just about ubiquitous as a way of administering a blunting effect to sadness, with over one American in ten counted among Fluoxetine’s partakers.

A “Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits” from #15 came along, for example, with inquiries about “Medicating Melancholy,” a look at “All That Jazz” from the Biomedical Pharmaceutical profiteering phalanx, so to say. It obviously proffered Goddess mediate notions but offered up factual details and analytical discourse on the side, as it were.

In #26’s issue, a massive examination of this most-popular ‘medicine’—one that weaves into its chemical structure Fluorine, arguably the most potent elemental neurotoxin in existence—occurs below It includes the usual mix of history, contemporary analysis, and personal experience with which I create the whole Big Tent ball of wax as it were.

Today’s essay of mine suggests a provocative proposition. Given all the facts, one must at least wonder whether the entire ‘Depression Crisis’ acts as a cover for expression of a primary purpose of those who hope for King Capital’s eternal hegemony. After all, ‘depressed people’ won’t be able to trust and love each other enough to form the Solidarity Bonds that might lead to human liberation; ‘depressed people’ will be extremely unlikely to prioritize discovering the links in the chains that enslave them; blah blah blah.

The experience of Gary Greenberg is exemplary in this regard. The Book of Woe is one of his books on the subject of ‘mental health,’ from the point of view of a pracitioner of erstwhile psychotherapeutic intervention whose interest and particularly pointed observations and analysis flows from his own encounter with Depression Industrial Complex Kinetics, so to speak.

Manufacturing Depression, another Greenberg offering, flowed directly from his ambiguous and decidedly contrary-to-reality results when he signed up as a ‘victim’ for a study of the ‘illness.’ He now advocates a reality orientation that Americans ought to follow for optimal salubrious outcomes, ha ha.

Amy Goodman interviews him on Democracy Now! and introduces his segment of the program with Jimmy Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” and a montage of revolting print ads for ‘pharmaceutical fixes’ to everyday emotional experience, as if societal ‘Mama’s Little Helpers’ now wore lab uniforms. She asks whether we can really “assume that our sadness can be explained by a disease called ‘depression.’

On the show, Greenberg “argues that…(as a disease), it’s largely been manufactured by doctors and drug companies as a medical condition with a biological cause that can be treated with prescription medication.” Goodman’s interrogatory legerdemain teases out of the author that one consequence of these dynamics is that ‘people will be much less likely to engage with their real-world social problems,’ develop a sense of agency and personal power, and so on.

Mad in America, by Robert Whitaker, also appears Below-the-Fold, accompanied by an in-depth search for the sources of this technocratic affliction, one that masks likely true causes of ‘how we’re doing,’ and, mirroring other aspects of how authorities now diagnose social life’s ills, offers a profitable prescription that neither addresses the symptoms nor even touches what lies beneath them. The volume’s subtitle is apt.

Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill states a case all on its own. Thus, the director of what became “Mind Freedom International,” David Oaks, applauds. “Mad in America is a dose of truth therapy for a seriously disturbed mental health system. . . . This courageous book made me want to stand up and cheer.”

A marvelous portal to resources introduces Oaks and a “Psychiatric Survivors Movement,” a nifty contextualization that will soon receive its own place here among BTR’s copious contents. We might listen and garner useful direction.

“The psychiatric survivors movement arose out of the civil rights ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the personal histories of psychiatric abuse experienced by some ex-patients. The key text in the intellectual development of the survivor movement, at least in the USA, was Judi Chamberlin's 1978 book, On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System.” A taunting and twisted tale indeed appears in #26, one that a majority of Americans, at a minimum, might benefit from perusing.

Media, typically, also come under scrutiny again in our pages. In some senses, mediation’s monopolized mix of the mundane and the mendacious circumscribes ‘everything that’s wrong with America.’ This is not Big Tent’s nutshell notion, but we do pay attention to such things, from Upton Sinclair to Robert McChesney by way of George Seldes’ Facts and Fascism.

Big Tent Review goes farther. We want a People’s Media Movement, no matter how moving and masterful our criticisms of monopoly mediation might be. Issue #4 brought this point directly to the fore, so to say.

Along such a track, truly envisioning a popular press and more, this tidbit, from #26’s profiled Juergen Habermas, ought to pique our interest. “The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based on Ideas—in other words, knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.” Can anyone pronounce ‘Free-Enterprise’ versus ‘Dialectical-Historical-Materialism?’

Habermas is difficult. Nevertheless, he is fascinating and essential. His insistence on empowerment, agency, and democracy perfectly parallels This Humble Correspondent’s practices and beliefs. In a sense, dear Juergen, as he becomes a centenarian, can help us to answer the question that concludes ‘Terrorist Babies.’

“‘What Would Need to Happen to Induce the Far-Flung Members of Our Fractious, Factional Clan to Treat Each Other With Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect?’” A grassroots, participatory free-speech movement constitutes a plausibly partial answer, or at least a plausible response, one which readers will find accessible in “Communication & Human Survival” in the present BTR episode.

The final new article this issue deals with climate. In particular, and in that mystical and almost spooky way that is so frequent in my ‘artistic process,’ ha ha, the matter most centrally in question today is the work of Milutin Milankowić, who happeed to be a war-stranded Serbian when such eventualities were already part of the Intro here, though a bit further down the page, as it were.

This fellow’s life is definitely storybook material, a NetFlix series—or much better yet a SerbFlix hit—full of accomplishment and setback and general twists and turns to end up at one center of the modern condition, which is to say all sorts of concerns about climate. Also, he was a super-genius, a polymath, and a practical inventor.

His ‘profession’ was civil engineering, at which he so excelled that some of his designs and building projects still serve as exemplars, albeit in ways that I don’t exactly know, except second hand. He whipped up some specifications for load-bearing beams, the patents for which made him fabulously wealthy.

He also had cultural appreciation aplenty, with a few accomplishments mixed in. He found geology so fascinating that he essentially gave up his extremely lucrative career to return to his family’s Serbian roots as a Professor at the national university in Belgrade. There his obsession with key questions about glaciers—why they recede and then advance, back and forth, without a rhyming reason to account for it—started him down his life’s true path.

This would be around 1911. Soon enough, handsome, wealthy bachelor that he was, and who was also a ton of fun, he found an Austrian life-and-love-partner, another genius and also very well-to-do. Together, they plighted their troth and wed.

Their honeymoon plans started in nearby Austria, outside urban Vienna where he’d done his civil engineering work and where his spouse had come into the world. This was approximately mid-June 1914, less than a month before Archduke Ferdinand met a Serbian assassin’s bullet as he rode in an open motorcar.

Then, as a matter of course, all Serbians—at least all of the males older than children and younger than tottering ancients—were detained, to be incarcerated for the war’s expected few months’ duration. The grotesque gyrations that ensued from this juncture, scary and hilarious, dangerous and weird, are just incredible. Readers can find out ‘the rest of the story’ in the “Odd Beginnings, New Endings” section below, BTR’s first serving from its ‘Understanding Climate’ menu, ha ha.

Almost on cue, multiple critically important—or at least mind-bendingly fascinating and surreal—additional outbursts from those atop the heap erupt into view. Donald Trump labelled ‘Epstein inquiries’ as boring, for example. My response is worth noting.

It went out to none other than Jackson Hinkle, the chairman of the American Communist Party, who appears much more outside the United States than within at this juncture. “‘Palling around with pimps is boring, eh? I thought it added up to being an accessory, in the event before, during, and after the fact.

Of course, a true class-analysis of prostitution wouldn't focus on prurient men who want to have sex with young girls. It would home in on the 'intellicence' and military industrial sources of all such mixtures of 'white slavery' and male supremacy.’”

Along an ancillary track, another social mediator with a huge following reposted the pre-Maidan meddling of the cretinous John McCain, to which I responded with a memory from almost twelve years ago. It was one of those ‘can’t make this shit up’ moments.

“In astonishing ways, at least to me, ha ha, this imperial skullduggery has very often involved a personal turn. Here, for instance my brother-in-law and his wife—as part of a national fundamentalist Christian group at their church—‘visited’ Ukraine around this time, looking for an orphan to adopt.

I spoke to my wife before the Maidan shit hit the fan about the potential in such efforts to serve an ‘intelligence’ purpose, especially given Arturo’s background—another story, ha ha. He and his spouse were there in October, 2013, but ran into delays when what McCain talked about was ‘going to town.’

They ended up bringing back two HIV positive pre-teen orphans at the end of January, and—although my ex hated the thought and shrugged off my conspiratorial mindset with a derisive laugh—I stated near certainty that at minimum, my in-law’s experiences would have been of interest to folks in Langley, blah blah blah, again, particularly considering my in-law’s ‘naval intelligence’ roots.

The kids? Again, that’s another story, sparkling but sad for the girl, tragic for the boy, alas. Just like the cretin from Arizona, with his privileged Navy roots—which in a weird way Arturo shared—the idea that we’re ‘there to help’ is at best, and only then very occasionally, opportunistic half truth.”

Here’s a section of an e-mail that went out to a former student. I also posted another version. It’s more akin to a ‘meaning of life’ capsule, or something similar.

“More than anything else, people want two things. Or, at least, I’ll wager with anyone who is honest and hasn’t recently attempted suicide, ha ha, nine dollars, up to ninety-nine bucks actually, that I can convince him, or prove to her, that I am correct.

I offered any of my students back in the day, as you may remember, five bucks if he or she could convince me otherwise. One clever lass got the five dollars, but it was on ‘a technicality,’ ha ha.

This pair of ‘most-desired qualities’ are personal power and happy aplomb, or power and happiness if one prefers. ‘I bet you!’ Still, I’m willing and eager to wager.

It all starts with caring for and appreciating one’s body and its incredible adult functionality as athlete, dextrous denizen of this or that occupation, and love object. The potency that everyone has available, if tapped, permits the said gleeful unfolding of things, as it were.

Because of the power of said love-connections, many people conflate love in particular with empowerment generally. That’s probably a slight error but better than many alternatives. You were one of these, many years ago, as a senior in high school.

Thus, the whole ‘antidepressant’ nightmare—which, I warn you, destroys the capacity to find these jolly joinders of bliss—is a grotesque ‘sport of nature,’ as Nadine Gordimer entitled her novel. Anyhow, I just wanted to share, blah blah blah.”

Other Tweets and e-mails and various and sundry cases of blah blah blah have taken flight from my brain and fingers over the past four months. They’ll keep showing up in these inaugural paragraphs, as seems mete and proper.

This search, as a case in point, got 38,800 results, mostly ideological in nature: <"gender studies" "primary school" potential OR benefit harm OR counterproductive>. What I was seeking has to be clear: cultural context about the parameters and importance of LGBTQ considerations and concerns. I wrote this.

“Okay. Let's be clear. People have every right to their opinions; hell a huge number of folks—I've read as high as twenty percent—believe the Earth is a circular disc of some sort.

But those opinions must never become the basis for instruction about a factual sphere in which those opinions don't amount to much. Data is difficult to come by, but I've estimated the number of 'gender-nonconforming' members of Earth's nine billion kin at maybe 45,000,000 specimens, which would be about one in two hundred.

So what's the big deal? Those nonconformists ought to have a right to their opinions about themselves. But seeking to impose those beliefs on others will bring intense civil strife. Clearly, for very different reasons, issues about matters transsexual upset diametrically opposed believers.

So-called 'liberals' despise notions of imposed 'traditional standards,' even if the imposition occurs tacitly; they may or may not support 'sex-education,' however, either of the ‘inclusive’ or ‘exclusive’ sort, so to speak. So-called 'conservatives' generally speaking reject any school-based discussion that touches on sex; they may or may not tolerate a 'non-cisgendered' presence in schools.

What to make of all this depends on one's approach and orientation to the world. Clearly, the entire topic area fascinates much of the populace.

We are sexual beings, like the fact or not. Almost a hundred percent of this population of carnal creatures 'identify' as either male or female. Could this foster different 'teaching moments?' That would have to be a big, boisterous 'duh!'

Should these things be a separate part of the formal curriculum? In Primary School? I can imagine childish versions of Kristin Lavransdatter or other famous stories to encourage contemplation of these more-or-less libidinal aspects of biological questions.

But centering this sort of stuff as its own unique curricula would be like teaching 'Harems-&-Eunochs' as an alternative approach to helping youngsters grapple with ‘the sociology of marriage and family’ generally. At best, it seems like a super-weird choice that almost certainly involved sketchy motivations.”

My searching encounters hither and yon elicited a review of and trailer for a new film—in which the legendary auteur Emil Kusturica plays a part—concerning repression against Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine, perhaps with a pointed allusion to similar experiences at different locations in the former Yugoslavia. I’ve always been a big fan of his and found this summary that brought to mind my own feelings.

“‘Underground’ is a 1995 film by Emir Kusturica, set against the backdrop of the Yugoslav Wars, though it doesn't directly depict the conflicts. Instead, it uses the historical context to explore themes of love, betrayal, and survival in a surreal and allegorical manner. The film's narrative follows two friends involved in black market arms dealing during World War II and the subsequent post-war period, highlighting the absurdity and cyclical nature of violence and political manipulation.”

As I wriggled down rabbit holes, contemplating an upcoming article on NATO’s clearly illegal war against Serbia, I encountered a piece by Dave Straman that ably deconstructs the setting and motivations of U.S. promulgation of impunity in its campaign of terror against European peoples who cavil at American hegemony.

I also encountered a largely horrifying ‘report’ that justified mass murder for imperial ends, published in 2016 by the vaunted Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Despite its obvious and indefensible biases, the hundred sixty pages and then some still contained facts that damned ‘the West’ and testimony that would serve as ‘admissions against interest’ in a court of law and hence probative.

Finally, my few Serbian sallies led me to another Emir Kusturica film, Black Cat, White Cat—the literal translation of which is “Black Pussycat, White Tomcat—a romantic thriller that contained the song, “Long Vehicle,” about preparing to travel to a faraway land, ha ha. In the film, this is merely next-door Bulgaria, but the thematic link to the wider topic of migrating for fun and safety and profit is apt indeed.

A sidetrack from my investigation in #26 about the dangerous prescriptions for the fluoxetine-based, affect flattening ‘mental-health cure alls’ led me to Aldous Huxley. Soma seemed at once similar in effect to, and opposite in action from, Prozac and its various kin. The Doors of Perception opened again to reveal marvels of insight and interconnection—the latter, happenstantially, one theme of this issue.

This one is from a Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Scientists’(MAPS) excerpt from Huxley’s little treasure. “The German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus(in 1886), to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science.

To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors(ha ha, immigrants again)to the New World, ‘they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.’

Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly, and yet is less toxic, than any other substance in the pharmacologist's repertory.”

This in turn led me to my bitty, ever-ready multimedia stash about psychedelics, entheogens, and so forth. I ended up looking with some care at Diamonds From Heaven: LSD And the Mind of the Universe, a delightful volume by Christopher Bache. The parameters of the work seem congruent not only with a Big Tent orientation with entheogens—all hale Terrence McKenna!—but also with astute political economic assessments of ‘drug-wars’ and pharmaceutical patent-medicines.

In his Introduction, entitle “73 Days”—for the instances over two decades in which he imbibed and took exploratory trips of the most profound sort—he writes, “We are on the verge of rediscovering that psychedelics have not only great therapeutic value, (but also)great philosophical value.” This is a powerful lure to the author, since his ‘field’ was philosophy of religion.

After completing his dissertation read Stanislav Grof’s Realms of the Unconscious, which “in one reading…convinced me that when LSD is taken in a therapeutically structured setting, it can safely be used to explore consciousness with beneficial results. …(W)e could come to know not only our own mind{an antithesis to depression anyone?}but also the mind of the universe itself,” in Big Tent terms Life Force Energy.

One cannot read the litanies of such materials that MAPS produces and remain oblivious. The ‘war on drugs’ is at best in yet one more way an utterly criminal fraud and counterproductive exercise in ‘crowd control,’ ha ha.

Ultimately all such warfare devolves into more or less naked ruling class aggression against, or more or less inchoate desperate defensive responses from those who don’t belong at the tables of the high and mighty. This is Class War, in other words. Examples show up every second of every day.

Dismantling education is a better phrase to describe the current ruling-class efforts, through the machinations of a trumping, trumpeting President to ‘dismantle the Department of education. Ignorant masses are not at all necessarily stupid, but, inevitably, they are massively more pliable and readily-manipulated.

Attacks on women’s rights, particularly the innate freedom of a female’s own choices about what to do with her often uncooperative body, is also upcoming, a topic, in any case, about which a Big Tent Review series will start any issue now. Such anti-feminist and anti-feminine elements are the most underreported aspect—in my multilayered, multifaceted, 800-e-mails-per-day news stream, anyway—of this inevitably class-based oppression of the plus or minus ninety percent or so of women who are workers of one sort and another.

Cuts and taxes may bring to mind ‘governmental efficiency departments.’ Then again, The Hill’s analysis has zero to do with ‘efficient markets’ or otherwise elegant policy. It’s about more for the rich, less for the poor.

“With the GOP’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ headed to President Trump’s desk for signature Friday, wealthy Americans are poised to receive significant tax breaks partly offset by steep cuts to social welfare programs. …(N)early 60 percent of the tax benefits would go to those in the top quintile of annual incomes, or about $217,000 or more. Those households would receive an average tax cut of $12,500,” compared to plus or minus a few hundred bucks, on average, for the four-fifths in the lower quintiles, ha ha.

What about Bobby though? He’s got the regular American’s back, right? The Real Anthony Fauci yet resonates with its accuracy and the keenness of its indictments. In fact, since I’ve yet to examine the monograph in depth, a delving, diving review will soon be appearing here.

As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK has participated in this ‘orgy of cutbacks.’ If not a leader in what is impossible to view as other than a very biased-against-working-people evaluation of spending choices, he is a willing and even, at minimum rhetorically, enthusiastic participant in said same.

He posted a query on X, however, that was apt indeed, about the efficacy of purported COVID vaccinations for youngsters. My response was typically visceral and biased in its own right, albeit for rather than against hardworking regular folks. I referred to my Wood Words Essay on the topic.

“These MRNA inoculations merely represent one aspect of, on the one hand, American society's ignorant—and if willfully so, stupid—attempt to 'protect' kids from the only thing that can make them strong, which is to say Mother Nature, OMGoddess!!!

On the other hand, these cretinous, vicious 'medications' signify the ultimate triumph of profit over people—killing our own offspring for the sake of plutocrats who already own and oversee everything. If we continue in this fashion, the dustbin of history awaits.

For those who like data, check out infant mortality vis a vis the number of childhood vaccines. Only idiots fail to make the connection.”

Where can one find a ‘public’s opinion’ that is not, overall and in essence, an outcome of outright oppressive, purposeful output of the mix of propaganda, nonsense, and mendacity that is the regular ruling-class ‘information and infotainment’ process? That’s an interesting query, ha ha.

In a plausibly related and clearly relatable development, New Yorker magazine’s ‘daily headline’ for April 27th is at once a howler and horse manure. It poses the stentorian query, “‘When Are More Americans Going to Speak Up?’”

It’s hilarious if only because of the ignorant presumption. First, the assumption of encouraging people to speak out is simply false: ‘sit down, shut up, do as you’re told’ is the only popular line of the here and now. Second, the idea that people are in fact following this directive—which the article blithely ignores—is also arrogant idiocy. One need only know how to look and listen to see that this is so.

So what they’re really asking is more like this. “Why Are Regular Citizens Not Joining the Queue to Accede to the Neoliberal Agenda That We Here at the New Yorker Want Everyone to Affirm?’ LOL! At least I giggle.

The various forms of speech and speaking out that accompany protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement fascist protocols are excellent examples to prove other than a largely passive population. I posted about this in relation to the overall issue of immigration.

“‘Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.’ This Japanese proverb epitomizes one Donald J. Trump, ha ha.

Nancy Sinatra got it right, in her ‘walking all over’ tune. We are, first and foremost, walkers, ambling and perambulating and wandering and rambling hither and yon throughout history.

Our ancestors walked to and from Africa. They stepped through the steppes of Asia and clambered across the mountains into the Eurasian spaces. They even organized themselves, in part, to find a path to trod into the Americas, walking the length and breadth of two continents—a ‘new world’ indeed—after that.

The idea that immigration is a threat would be laughably absurd if it were not so stupid and vicious and tragic. So what is going on?

The ways that gangsters and banksters and other ‘elite operators’ manage things is pretty straightforward: divide-and-conquer in the social sphere; various stock-and-bond cons in the only ‘marketplaces’ that matter to imperialists; buy politicians and own the media so as to forestall as much critical thought as possible that people might otherwise manifest on their own behalf.

That so many people still buy this nonsense, paying out their life’s blood and their children’s futures in order to serve the people who’d just as soon cut their throats, is simply bizarre. But hey. Bizarro World is fun, right?

Is that why so many people are on antidepressants? Inquiring minds want to know.

Maybe an accurate apprehension would include this idea. If one fails to ‘love his neighbor as himself,’ then he’ll never much be able to care for his own well-being.”

In a somewhat similar way, I responded to a prompt from ScienceGirl on X. A screenshot posed the simple query. “What is the biggest scam that society accepts without question,” or something of the sort.

“In general, in any society—and this reality makes perfect sense from the POV from those atop the heap in a particular case—the hugest foolish nonsense that prevails in a specific instance is that 'only OUR way of life is now possible.' ‘Yep. It’s always been like this and always will be, so get used to it!’

People, which is to say "society," might grumble and gripe and grieve about the details. Yet, thanks to the 'evil genius' of Edward Bernays' Propaganda recipe, they have received such thorough inculcation about the rectitude and inevitability of our bourgeois bounty that they more or less take for granted Hitler's 1,000 year Reich right here, right now, forever.”

Angry dispute and furious disputation, in any case, are likely as prevalent just now as at any juncture in humanity’s punctuation of planet earth. A useful video for thinking about disagreement and how to handle it appears here.

The estimable Noam Chomsky notes, much in tune with Big Tent today on Habermas, that the ‘land of the free’ lacks any accessible space or even context for discourse in which to wrestle with complex topics and inevitable attendant discord. In so doing, the good professor errs egregiously about the empirical reality of SARS-Cov-II, but that needn’t detract from his general point.

Media and discourse; democracy and conversation; human choice and enforced compliance—all such ideas lead, ineluctably, to none other than Juergen Habermas. Can we attain even a simulacrum of an ‘ideal free speech community’ that permits positive social blossoming instead of ugly bombast and boisterous manipulation of vox populi? Reading certainly helps in this regard, ha ha.

Books flow through my life, in any event, a mighty stream of fascinating material—from drivel to gospel truth; from clearly erroneous, if not outright false, to seemingly, actually, quite likely true; from mythically mellifluous melanges of character and incident and action and, as often as not, mystery, to tired and hackneyed and ‘high-production-values yawners that are also anti-personnel weapons to deploy against all independent, which equals rebellious among the high-and-mighty, evaluation of matters at hand.

I pull out the thirty or forty volumes once a day or so that are in the current queue, as it were, and pick up something to ponder for a few pages. More than two months ago, when this BTR instantiation was in its infancy, ha ha, I spent half a day just dabbling in this way.

Toward the end of the process, Murakami set his hooks me again, this time with The City and Its Uncertain Walls. His infectious, modest narrative lures the reader into an ‘imagination-game’ with the narrator.

I’ve also Tweeted about the volume at least once. “In different ways—more thoroughly and compulsively, or more sketchily and opportunistically—I am always reading, maybe three or four books a week or so, as I live and breathe, ha ha.

Another one of Murakami's novels, The City And Its Uncertain Walls, is currently underway, one of the fictional queue, as it were. It took a minute to hook me, but he's come through again.

Almost halfway through, the narrative reveals that one of the key characters is a ghost. Literally, it serves as a guide to the narrator, in his job as a small-mountain-town librarian who has 'reclaimed his shadow.'

In the first exchange where Mr. Koyasu reveals his wraith's nature, he says something interesting about awareness. ‘Consciousness is the brain's self-awareness of its own physical state.’

I'd change that just a bit. 'Consciousness is a brain's self-awareness of its body's physical state.'

Murakami resolves—and then reconstitutes—the paradox with reference to soul. The specter speaks. ‘Yes, I guess I have thought about the soul. But the more I think about it, the more mysterious it becomes. Even after I died and became a ghost—or perhaps I should say because I became a ghost—I understand it even less.’

He continues. ‘(W)hat I've learned after dying is that you can't see the soul with your eyes or touch it with your hands. You can't use it to do anything special. ...(W)hat we actually can rely on is consciousness, and memories.’

Anyway, I had to share. I wonder. The whole notion of 'Artificial Intelligence' falls to pieces on the rocky shoals of consciousness; can we even imagine a 'soulful robot?'”

At one point, this prolific genius provides a potent, occasionally emphatic, capsulization of alienated ennui. “I simply felt that this reality wasn’t suited to me. It was the same as saying the air in this place wasn’t right for my lungs. Stay here any longer, and I’d choke. So I wanted to off this train as quickly as I could, at the next station—that’s all I wanted. It was necessary, what I had to do.

But if I said that to my boss (and to my colleagues, too, I imagine), they wouldn’t understand. The visceral sense that this reality isn’t a reality for me, and the deep sense of estrangement that it produced, wasn’t something that I could share with anyone else.

In such a state of mind, the protagonist withdraws: no books, no music, no media, no intimate human contact whatsoever—just clerks once in a while. He sleeps half of each day and lays abed in a stupor the other twelve hours, staring at the ceiling, looking for messages of guidance.

He recalls his separated shadow. “Many times I asked my shadow, Where should I go now? Predictably, he never replied.”

If this doesn’t resonate, This Humble Correspondent can only chuckle. “Bless your heart,” OMGoddess!

Barbara Kingsolver’s works, in the words of one prominent online reviewer, ‘live rent-free in my head.’ Demon Copperhead is no exception. In fact, one might level a stern critique against parts of the narrative, but she always spins the yarn of class war in ways that are difficult to deny and hard to stop reading at once.

Another recent Tweety tidbit made my sense of this clear. She doesn’t make her sensibility part of the narrative, but whatever her feelings, the facts ‘speak for themselves.’

“Oftentimes, the clearest articulation of real-world class relations comes from fiction. People experience oppression and conflict personally, but they sense, hidden beneath individual veneers, patterns of plunder and exploitation.

Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, which she has patterned on Dickens' novel about David with a similar last name, depicts the all-American reality of King Capital's murderous profiteering in Appalachia.

A brilliant 'social studies' teacher shows a film about the big coal strike of 1920-21. "Obviously we loved teachers showing films: nap time, makeout time if applicable. But this one, Jesus, you needed to see how it comes out. Men calling a strike, the company calling in the Army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we've got guns too.

Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over the mountains, fighting in regiments.

They wore red bandanas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us Rednecks, that goes back to the red bandanas. Redneck is badass."

The deep lesson of the tale comes through when a girl from a mine-owning family, wealthy, a big ninth-grade clique leader, 'Queen Bettina,' says the real problem is that people don't want to work. If that sounds familiar, well duh!!!

The teacher lets the 'conversation go rogue' a bit and then asks kids to think about why no well-paid jobs are available other than in the mines. The general sense is that it's just the fate of places like the hills.

And the teacher completely refutes this idea with evidence that is as convincing as it is ubiquitous. "What the companies did, he told us, was to put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines.

Not just here(in Lee County, Virginia)also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of Eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, all company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only.”

The teacher told a tale and made his argument all but irrefutable. While not the only story; not the whole story, it must form a central part of any tale the telling of which might yield a productive and accurate apprehension of how things work in real life.

One item in my voluminous pile of literature and reportage, In the Garden of the Beasts, has been underway as a reading assignment for several months, and I’m less than a hundred pages in. This duration and paltry progress are not functions of disinterest on my part or poor execution by Erik Larson, the able author.

Rather, it results from the ugly, horrifying realities that the book reveals. The subtitle speaks volumes: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. And, voila, another interconnective thread occurs in relation to Israel, Iran, all that jazz.

Another of my social media posts posited some points about these things. “To put matters mildly the origin-story of Zionism is an interesting one. Its facets reach deep into humanity's own origination as more than a merely naturally-historical species. However, perhaps two more recent points about this evolution of Zionist thinking and action are most particularly pertinent to develop.

The first concerns what Karl Marx wrote about in his essay, ‘On the Jewish Question.’ He proposes that, while only a revanchist, and a foolish one at that, can deny equal rights for people of the Jewish faith, Marx's own by the way, this elevation of citizen over religion and property will fail to overcome capital's contradictory need both to 'free' people so as to recruit their muscle in service to more and more monopolistic enterprise and to ensnare everyone but the most successful capitalists into relations in which the only thing that one is 'free' to do is sell one's labor for lower and lower returns.

The second important notion looks at Zionism's progenitors and sees the obvious utility of a political ideology with which the world's banksters and gangsters, its imperial captains and commercial commanders, can at one and the same time promote Britain's control over the Suez Canal and provide a base of operations in what is still the richest oil producing territory on the planet.

Thus does a 'Father-of-Zionism'(literally, Israel's founding documents declare him, ‘the spiritual father of the Jewish State’)such as Theodor Herzl write in his novel, Alt Neuland, about the grinding down of literate, educated Jews from the standard operations of predatory, competitive capitalism's 'business-as-usual.'

‘The result was an unfortunate surplus of trained men who could find no work, but were at the same time spoiled for a modest way of life. They could not, like their Christian colleagues, slip into pubic posts; and became, so to say a drag on the market.

Nevertheless, they had the obligations of their ‘station in life,’ an arrogant sense of class distinction, and degrees that they could not back up with a shilling. Those who had some means gradually used them up, or else continued to live on the paternal purse.

Others were on the lookout for eligible partners, facing the delicious prospect of servitude to wealthy fathers-in-law. Still others engaged in ruthless and not always honorable competition in pursuits where genteel manners were requisite.

They furnished the curious and lamentable spectacle of men who, because they did not want to become merchants, dealt at ‘professionals’ in secret diseases and unlawful legal affairs. Some who in their need became journalists trafficked in public opinion. Others ran about to public assemblies and hawked worthless slogans in order to make themselves known in quarters where they could make useful party connections.’

Herzl helped to bring about a Zionist Congress and elaborated a vision for a Judenstadt in Ottoman Mediterranean Asia. He died at age forty-four, a decade prior to the Balfour Declaration, but his efforts won the favor of Britain's imperial masters, after both the Germans and the Turks rejected his proposal.

And the rest is history. These annals do show, however, how the imperial impetus is the pulsing heart of both the Zionist Project and the Apartheid-state of Israel. Thus, opposition to the latter will prove pointless without joining it to a united effort to overturn the former.

Would that my grandmother's quip were ever true. 'A word, to the wise, will suffice.’”

Here's Trotsky following a related line of reasoning. “Now more than ever, the fate of the Jewish people—not only their political but also their physical fate—is indissolubly linked with the emancipating struggle of the international proletariat.

Only audacious mobilization of the workers against reaction, creation of workers’ militia, direct physical resistance to the fascist gangs, increasing self-confidence, activity and audacity on the part of all the oppressed can provoke a change in the relation of forces, stop the world wave of fascism, and open a new chapter in the history of mankind."

While I might continue all too interminably about the volumes that tempt me, an ‘ever widening gyre,’ as the poet quipped, we’ll move along to see what comes next in this altogether introductory sector, ha ha. War and other forms of exercising impunity

Winding down, in the apparent pressure-cooker that is human conflict in Southwest Asia, the lethal shit-show shitstorm has continued and even increased. So we’ve already seen with tons more to come in Empowered Political Forays. Regarding relevant matters thereupon, a final note seems apt.

In all of this, a dance of destruction, murder, deal-making, and diplomacy has been ongoing. The high-and-mighty are negotiating our future, or so they likely imagine, or, at least, hope. For example, we might look at the oft-mentioned ‘hour and a half long phone call’ between Putin and Trump.

I would wager a small sum that the apparently insane and yet blithely managed attack on nuclear weapons delivery systems only on display because Russians play by the rules had little or even no role in the conversation between the two. My money is that Donald was checking in about Iran and Vladimir was making sure of acceptable limits on Israel’s lethality-leash.

Such a hypothesis, in the event, with Iranian authorities in on the fix quite plausibly, asserts a completely congruent causal and conceptual arc between such a state of how things might truly stand and the BTR-argued ascendancy of the Modern Nuclear Project. Thus, interrelatedness increases, anew and anon, as it were.

How about ‘them tariffs,’ then? Don’t we need some more about ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and all its fraudulent fluff in service to imprimatur and hegemony? ‘All in good time, my pretty, all in good time!’ Ha ha.

Concluding is always easy, in some shape, form, or fashion. A couple additional masterful mediations are apt to mention, just to spotlight so to speak, as the end of this beginning comes into view.

The first is an eerily prescient and insightful—like a really marvelous unfolding of a Big Tent Review fabric—Korean series. Stranger looks at policing, social intelligence absent affect—better known as alienated ennui—and the ubiquity of corporate corruption of commerce and politics. The show managed two seasons before, most likely, an overseer’s ax fell.

The second, even more potent to THC, was a single season Japanese beauty. The sweet sounding Giri-Haji translates as Duty-Shame, which fits even more seamlessly Big Tent protocols and practices. In the event, it concerns a truly soulful, and still dutiful cop who must venture to London to find his hitman brother and return him to the other side of the world, all the while navigating the truly shameful territory of new longing in an arena of sadly failed relationships. Again, OMGoddess!

Another recent Twitter morsel amplifies this point of the Japanese series under brief scrutiny here. So long as we lack that combo of organizing principles and actual organization that underlie all effective social effectuation, so to speak, we cannot do our duty without shame.

“Really, only one fact is important to establish, at least from a grassroots perspective. 'Neither the Russian Federation nor the Russian people are enemies of the American people. Constitutionally, only a declaration of war allows governmental authorities to countermand this fundamental legal truth.

So the question might arise. 'How can we help people to seek the truth and know their power?’”

One might just go on, forever. Having only included maybe a billionth of all that seems apropos, though, perhaps this will do. After all, it all hooks up to everything else, so casting a little light can go a long way. No need to add more to a tardiness that just such an attitude of wanting totality can cause to be truly never-ending.

Another reason this is late, anyhow, though it accounts for only two days or so among thirty or so, ha ha, is that my earwax wackiness acted up again fiercely, for the first time in whatever forever adds up to more than a decade. This delivered not only epiphanies aplenty, which is concomitant with a body’s struggling with hoped-for success to heal, but also more ‘food for thought’ about mechanized medical practice.

The mechanical bot that the doc-in-the-box assistant used to ‘irrigate my ears’ just about killed me, and added additional proof that machines will always try to enforce a never applicable ‘uniform standard of care.’ I ached and gloried simultaneously.

I also gained access to more functionalist sorts of plausible insights and useful propositions. For example, my battered and beleaguered inner ear inflected my throat and nose as soon as I left the clinic where the machine had nearly done me in. And I thought of food, for which my belly hungered but my mouth found repulsive even to ponder.

A thought such as this took shape. ‘If the ear, nose, mouth, and throat form the upper reaches of the alimentary canal, from which incoming deliveries of food and hydration proceed to their processing and distribution to far-flung bodily outposts, and then on to disposal and elimination in one way and another,’ something of the sort, ‘then on a similar track one might view the hands and the feet as the organically-attached agents of the eyes in their service as portals for the reception and transmission of necessary data and plan to the brain.’

Who knows? Another little dart formulated itself like this. ‘To be brilliant and sick is a difficult trick.’ Not that I’d ever assert sidereal achievement, but that I am always seeking such eventualities, if only because of the beauty of such shiny sparkles.

No matter what, another issue is ready to launch. As will ever prove true, it helps to emphasize, perhaps even to assert boisterously, that insodoing I manage to effect, or at minimum to demarcate, all three of my Existential Duties, ha ha.

However one wants to ponder the first of these ‘callings’ of mine, to create and share beautiful ideas, an ongoing theme has emerged so clearly today that I’m stating it with emphatic insistence so as to finish things up. I may not really have mentioned it much so far.

This notion of the moment is what Bertell Ollman calls the ‘philosophy of internal relations.’ Everything intersects, if one searches at all, with everything else. Thus the Modern Nuclear Project shows up in Serbia’s depleted Uranium toxicity from U.S. and NATO use of the illegal ordance; examining psychedelic medicine as part of considering ‘depression’ leads to Iran; another Serb is the father of ‘Climate Science,’ one rationale for which is the overall hegemony of an MNP, Uranium Economy agenda—on and on and on, universally, without exception.

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—’Managing’ Armageddon, Or, Awaiting Doom?

The current Topic For the Goddess deals with what can only seem to be, on the part of ‘movers and shakers,’ an openeyed choice to wear the garb of brinkmanship, the blustering threat by the ‘exceptional hegemonic power,’ ha ha, to deploy nukes to confront Iran’s assertion of self-defense. Not only this, but today’s offering also manages to touch on the question of a Uranium Economy under the guidance of a Modern Nuclear Project. We will search for portents and probabilities hither and yon.

‘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 following heading and link: ‘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 marriage, and other experience of transition; offer up powerful potentiation of—and for any specific sojourners trek through All-That-Is—one’s path as a purposive journey. 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

Last issue dealt more explicitly with Goddess questions, specifically in relation to how much, and in what fashion, a personal Tarot Reading process or practice might serve Life Force Energy and other Gaia dynamics at the heart of life’s complicated dances. The background for the queries in #26, on the other hand, chillingly center on issues of existential viability among our sort.

After all, the agents at the helm of what C.J. Hopkins calls GloboCap and what Big Tent often terms King Capital and Brand Chaos are at once contemplating and rationalizing in advance choosing to deploy Hiroshima-sized ‘tactical nukes’ against hardened Iranian targets. A backgrounder about these monstrous matters arrives in today’s “Empowered Political Forays” essay.

Whatever the case may portend, good news is not likely a top contender. Amplifying the likelihood of species extinction via thermonuclear cataclysm must inevitably, as much a matter of course as water’s path downhill, attend U.S. actions in the here and now.

A leader who serves as a repository for the evil tendencies we see among ourselves predicted a ‘thousand year reich,’ something to which plutocrats often evidently accede, what with Bill Gates and Paul Allen as spokesmen for 800-year investments in micro-nukes and maestro Trump at the head of the imperial phalanx and at the brink of human extinction or imperial ascendancy or setback, depending on how things work themselves out.

Undoubtedly, Donald Trump will blister viewers with his bluster about his acts of war, which violate the U.N. Charter in multiple ways—not that American hegemons care much about such as that. However, his strategic calculations must remain questionable, whatever his tactical aplomb. Questions about endgames, real objectives, the potential for catastrophe, allies and enemies, appear never to have come up for discussion.

Today’s question, then, comes to the fore in this fashion. ‘What insight and guidance might we who believe in Life Force Energy and the Golden Rule gain from a Spiral Spread inquiry about the current Murder Games and their risks of the Brink of Extinction so as to gain imperial advantage?’

In the event, the array duly appeared in the standard fashion of shuffle and reflect and pluck. The Essence starts off with the optimistic potential for cognition in even the most horrific circumstances, with the Ten of Swords. The Temporal Triad begins with the intrepid Page of Wands as Past, plops down the horrifically apt Three of Swords for our Present passage, and delivers the equally plausible Eight of Swords to suggest likely Future prospects.

Then, another downer card, the Four of Cups, drops on the table. The Devil, with all its evocative emanations of ‘being human,’ defines the Problems & Prospects slot. Finally, a thematic crescendo, the pointed peril of the Two of Swords culminates a Synthesis of the entire sequence.

Clearly, the only way to describe the spread is as heavy shit, in the hippy parlance of my high school days. Still, one must eat what the table serves or go without, so delving the matter at hand can only take what comes and try to make sense of it.

However, as is our standard practice in these Big Tent configurations, a more comprehensive assessment of these seven cards awaits below-the-fold. Now comes the Past-Present-Future triptych about the entirety of the nuclear phenomena that intertwine with each step of this period’s eruptions of mayhem and chaos amid all the trappings of war and terror.

The sense of contradiction and double standard, of hypocrisy and self-righteous falsehood, is practically ubiquitous. Los hechos hablan por si solos, as the saying goes in Spanish.

Given these facts in regard to American policy and pronouncement—deadly deeds deployed while demanding impunity—well might one inquire for ideas and directives from the Goddess in relation to the whole Modern Nuclear Project, which for more than eighty years has remained the ‘strategic orientation’ of the Empire’s banksters and gangsters and shadowy plutocratic plotters.

As matters came to pass, the Past happened along as The Emperor himself, with all the hints of glory and tyranny that…(continued below the fold)

All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)

(We’re actually approaching an ending here.

Chapter XXV closed like this. “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.”

In today’s posting, we venture even further South than deep-South Tuscaloosa, to )

Chapter XXVI

***

Leo Tolstoy's observation, that every unhappy clan's suffering exists as a unique sort of experience while happy families are in some sense all the same, stands as one of the most incisive bits of literary insight ever; what the great Russian raconteur didn't say was that all this misery, without much in the way of exception, in turn revolves around Eros and attendant erotic desire, obvious and indisputable given that the core truth of human existence is that fucking is the life force itself, meaning that every particular pulse of familial anger and angst, despair and devolution, neurosis and psychosis, centers on sundered or otherwise askew sexual energy, the mating dances and pleasure seeking of seemingly individual men and women whose tangos and psyche play always—even, in the form of baster-based exchanges, among homosexuals—create the basis for bearing the future into the present in the form of the infants who will bury one set of all these singular and yet kindred conundrums when they inter the corpses of their parents as a part of all-too-familiar and final rites of passage for the particular persons who were never merely themselves but part of that great chain of families that stretch back to the first mothers and fathers of our kind.

Kate definitely was of two minds. On the one hand, graduating with a major in Spanish would never have given her the linguistic and cultural immersion that she experienced every day for weeks—or even months—at a time as she followed Hector and his team around Mexico. On the other hand, this was no way to end up with the degree that Mama Kassy insisted both of her daughters would garner, “no matter what, no questions asked. Period. Paragraph.”

“When I left school and married Hector because I thought I was pregnant, mom just about shot me. We didn't even speak till many years and then some after that, when we all reunited in San Antonio,” Kate James recalled just shy of half a decade later to her brother Tommy John, who was visiting her after his first marital meltdown. Their filial pairing most obviously reflected their mom's bipolar gift, both of them brilliant and physically godlike—much like Kassy Fox—and yet, also like their maternal parent, capable of spectacular disaster and depression that delved the depths of the Pacific's darkest trenches.

“I was the youngest of four, so I had three deflector shields between me and Mom.” Kate also had plenty of the family proclivity for intelligence and athletic prowess. “After all, I got to watch,” and that meant that she could see what worked and what didn't when dealing with a crazy mother and therefore plan a lot more and “get better results than my hapless older sister and brothers, especially poor Louis, who was always on point and,” never much of a trickster, “pretty clueless besides.”

One time, she later regaled her older sibling Lou to illustrate this point about her sneaky ways, “even though she'd told me never to use her favorite rocking chair—it was our only decent piece of furniture—I was rocking away like a little post-toddler rock star, and the back broke, the headrest or whatever.” She laughed and shivered to recollect the utter terror she felt at the time, “only six years old but deeply aware” of her transgression and what it would cost her “in emotional capital, so to speak.”

“I was crying up a storm and trying to form some kind of response to this disaster.” As luck and trial and error would have it, she hit upon the simple mechanism of melding the three-pronged top piece back in place so that “the cracks fitted together and you basically couldn't see that anything was wrong.”

One of her earliest lessons in treachery and false witness followed, when her eight year old sister Patricia, “much more cautious, much better at following all the law laid down by Mom,” came along and “obviously without thinking about it, barely nudged the chair with a little shove of her elbow.” When the back practically flew off its precarious moorings and clattered to the floor, Kate, who had positioned herself to watch over things “till Mom returned or something else happened that let me off the hook,” emerged from the sidelines.

“Whoa! Man! Is Mom gonna be pissed or what?” Her eight year old sister “just melted, man, but it was survival of the fittest, so I just promised to back her up about how she'd barely touched the rocker and left her to twist in the wind,” altogether a veritably tour de force in gamesmanship by an unheralded, gangly six year old girl.

As proved to be the case for brother Tommy John as well, athletics served as one conduit for Kate's flowering while she extricated herself from the webs of fury and dependence that surrounded mother Kassy's connections with all of her children, the former a product of a specific mother's peculiar psychic distresses, the latter an inevitable attribute of parent and child relations generally. “This was all before Title IX had trickled down to Thomas Jefferson High School, so I had basically two choices—track or volleyball. Running was boring,” so volleyball was her ticket.

Basketball, soccer, and any number of other games might have had a shot had she entered the scene a little later. As matters worked out, though, both because she got “almost all A's and way above average test scores,” she could have gone to a university practically anywhere in the United States.

College, however, was like everything else for Kate. “I wanted to be comfortable; I wanted to know people already.” For years, she'd been visiting Tommy John in Seguin, “whoa ho, party hearty!” So Texas Lutheran, “after I graduated two years early and they gave me a full scholarship, like a complete free ride,” became her only realistic option. “Because I got out of high school when I was only fifteen, I was only a year behind my brother, which was really great for a bunch of reasons.”

Mainly, these included all the common sense rationale for not setting a freshly-minted sixteen year old girl without a lot of experience free on a “wild and wooly liberal arts campus in the middle of hippy days.” She later confided to her husband, “I couldn't talk to Patricia,” her elder sister by two years but off to the University of Pennsylvania already a year ahead of Kate because she had graduated from Jefferson one year ahead of schedule, “because of all her fucked-up experiences with men and all,” which emanated from Patricia's being a pre-pubescent sex toy for a neighborhood fellow, “a deacon at St. Matthews, the whole nine yards,” when the older sibling was only nine years old.

For Kate on the other hand, young men were “just incredibly alluring from when I was twelve at the most.” In other words, she shared the family tendency—from mother and father to two older brothers—for sexual intensity, a huge appetite for erotic intimacy. “Thank God, Mom did give me plenty of practical advice about boys, no matter how nutty she could get.”

“But I was also a little nervous,” because of everything that Patricia conveyed about males and their feckless recklessness. “So even though I would neck with reckless abandon at volleyball tournaments,” for example, and anywhere else such opportunities presented themselves, “I hadn't gone much further than that when I found myself, six feet tall, built like a goddess, and strawberry blond to boot, set loose in a South Texas sea of men from all over the planet.”

Hector's qualities, cute and godlike at once, “became apparent before the end of my freshman year,” since the women's basketball coach, “the friendliest lesbian I ever met,” tried to seduce her away from a singleminded focus on volleyball alone and “had me working out with the b-ball team after they didn't make the small college playoffs in April.” Hector, as the stalwart if not all-star center for TLC's men's team, “caught my eye the first day I was there practicing with the ladies squad.”

She would laugh for years when she talked about how she engineered their first encounter. “I made sure he knew it, too, that I noticed the hell out of him.” She described her future husband as “like a perfect pecan praline, sweet and brown and as nice to look at as to taste.”

“Riding my man,” as she referred to their lovemaking, was not her first experience 'in the saddle,' inasmuch as “I partied with T.J.'s friends,” who were all very friendly indeed with their stud flanker's knockout sister, and didn't share Tommy John's best friend's wariness about her youth. That “young gentleman, Mr. Ricky Widdington was the only one of the lot who didn't try to screw me,” and in the event she had sampled some of those wares before she settled on “seducing the hell out of Hector Gonzales.”

This only took place …(continued below the fold)

Wood Words Essays—Recent Additions, #1

As noted above, big process shifts have taken over, or at least taken place in, my creative endeavors. I’m actually drawing now, not altogether competently but maybe with a capable workmanlike amateur’s combo of inventiveness and enthusiasm. That said, quarterly BTR deadlines are ever-so-much-less completely consuming, so several ‘queues of the new’ are taking shape day by day—or at least week by week, ha ha.

As part of this unfolding evolution of my ‘artistic’ existence, new art in various phases has therefore begun to aggregate. In today’s offering and next issue’s profferals as well—roughly half the total in each case—I look at four groups of this new outpouring of effort.

The second sector, so to speak, consists of pieces that already have underpainting and in many cases the beginning of their ‘all-the-pretty-colors’ instantiation in the Marshall Arts system. They are mainly smaller items from each of the four categorical sections that compose the entire MA approach.

The third sector too covers all these types and varieties of messaging. It includes a bit of a bigger collection, as it were, the largest number of Driftwood Messages among the four segments on display today. These are the works that have received their final renderings, so that they are now ready for the layering and tinting procedures that lead to the finished products ‘ready for sale,’ ha ha. A handful of these come to the fore here in #26.

The fourth grouping, as large a mixture as the completely-drawn-but-nothing-else, gathers together worded wood, as it were, that I’ve begun the task of illustrating or rendering as intermingling images with the words. Every piece of this dozen will appear next time, their unifying qualification that none of these yet amount to elements that are quite ‘ready for paint,’ ha ha.

In any event, Marshall Arts illustration, as it were, often repeats its depictions. For example, all these works in #’s 26 and 27, save one, have a YinYang symbol; various of them have hearts, many have mountains and psychedelic sunshine and other wild and freaky images.

This final compilation of the next two Big Tent appearances happens also to have among its ranks the oldest piece of Driftwood Message Art in existence. Because of its size and difficulty of working its surface, it might have languished till I were ‘dead and gone,’ LOL!

Then, the Goddess graced my life with a loving connection that isn’t supposedly possible in our cynical and torturous travail of mundane daily murder and mayhem. In any event, this lucky miracle has meant that mountains of additional outpourings will be forthcoming; insodoing, this encounter with a panel that was the first to have burned letters on its front and back—which happened over twelve years back—has brought to mind another piece that I let languish for almost ten years.

This is the only DMA example that, with well over two hundred hours in it, has a higher than $1,000 price tag, ha ha ha ha. Its missive is just too perfect for today’s essay, so free association’s gift presents it to readers now.

After it cascaded through raucous rapids and over wild water's precipitous falling, a standard wooden oar floated into my life, evoking a message for me as, with wonder, I pondered its weathered, simple, oaken beauty. “One Certain Journey” is its titular heading, so to speak.

“Life's One Certain Journey Requires Not a Single Stroke to Effect Everyone's Eventual Reunion With the Cosmic Womb—All the More Reason to Praise Be for the Means, Along With the Patient Persistence & Steady Strength to Employ Them, to Paddle Through Interesting & Meaningful Passages, & All the More Reason to Pray for the Wisdom & Courage to Row Toward Useful & Generous, & Thus Potentially Happy & Powerful, Channels in Which to Wend a Way.

QUEUE NUMERO UNO

However all that adds up, what about the first ‘bag-of-tricks’ for today’s start? The initial set one could label ‘Heavy-Hitters Ready For Finishing,’ or something more or less quotidian, ha ha. These are—from a Marshall Arts POV—larger and pricier pieces that have nonetheless sold repeatedly and thereby earned ‘return tickets,’ albeit always with at least slightly different wording, with exactly a single exception.

Before—as matters work out—enumerating our contemporary quartet, # 26 will spend a moment to consider this sole outlier, quirky in the simplicity of its message and in the uniformity, as well, of its illustrations. “Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything.” If that doesn’t induce at least a flurry in the breast, perhaps the listener is taking too many SSRI antidepressants, ha ha ha.

The message, at once parallel with the notion of a human family and the healthy concept of comity and collaboration and community that includes all and sundry, whoever they may be, is arguably—like the asserted fact or not—a key human survival tool. The consistent illumination-strategy for this effort will always be a human hand, viewed first from one side and then the other; the fingers—in fact each joint—have ever shown different shades of humanity’s many flesh-tones, and the palms and wrists are also varied in the hues in view.

Labor of this sort has always been my hope, so gratitude is my everyday attitude for more reasons than a loving partner and sweetly loving connection to family and friends. I have arrived at a juncture in my life, where my First Existential Duty flowers every day, basically without any hitches. I get to shape and share often beautiful ideas.

And so it is with the one now absolutely finished ‘canvas’ in this original lot. Its iconic message and extensive size made me skeptical over the two year sabbatical that I’ve taken from these endeavors. I might have let it slide still longer.

But then I realized that it delineates my days and nights, that it defines my present path, and that, therefore, it needed to become a primary duty. “Birth, Death, Planning, Intention” is a clunky title, but its summary is tidy. If anything demonstrates my diligent and disciplined commitment to communicating, this frantic frolic of rainbow hues might be first among equals. Here’s that DM from psyche’s murky depths.

“Life’s Lengthiest Sojourn Starts With a Birth That One Does Not Plan & Finishes With a Death That, Under Standard Circumstances, One Does Not Invite Or Intend; in Between Emerge the Daunting Difficulties, the Crazed Concatenation, the Somehow Both Sublime & Mundane Scenes of Everyday Routine, Inevitably Arenas of Ongoing Action & Potentially, Quite Reasonably, Realms of Useful Or Even Critical Choice Where, Just Possibly, One May Discover a Path, Full of Honorable & Passionate Purpose, That One Desires to Pursue.”

Matt Taibbi recently called optimism ‘the last taboo.’ In an age when markets require cynicism in order to maximize alienated impulse buying, this quip is arguably apt in all circumstances, against which Driftwood Message Art offers occasional bulwarks of resistance, as it were.

“Bedding Down in the Dark,” meanwhile, gives insight about an essential ancillary quality to even the staunchest well wishes about living with gratitude over Goddess-given blessings. One may think of this additional aspect of healthy happiness as a willingness always to see ‘both sides of every coin.’

“Fondly Fancied They May Be, & Are, Yet No Matter Their Innocent Simplicity & Seemingly Supportive Benevolence, All Treasured Thoughts of Rising Toward the Light Inescapably Necessitate the Willingness to Lie Down in Darkness.”

An adjunct to this simple note, with all its Jungian and Taoist overtones, comes forward from, in many ways, the signature Marshall Arts manifestation of colorful ideation. It is yet another ‘Old Standard,’ anyhow, made fresh in the most recent version of the sole piece that consistently presents the same title, so to say, just as in the latest case. Here’s the novel text in that present presentation of “Terrorist Babies.”

“Inescapably, All Human Cousins Begin As Infants—All & Sundry Americans; All Russians; All Chinese; All Israelis; All Palestinians; All Adherents of All Spiritual Traditions & Perspectives; All ‘Liberals;’ All ‘Conservatives;’ All Communists; All Socialists; All Capitalists; All & Sundry ‘Terrorists;’—Establishing an Indisputably Universal Biosocial Context, the Ominous Ongoing Reality of Which Ought to Require All Inquisitive Citizens, With the Utmost Urgency & Diligence, to Inquire, ‘What Would Need to Happen to Entice Almost All the Members of Our Factional, Fractious Clan to Treat Each Other With Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect?’”

Finally, this foursome also counts among its members a Seasonal MA ‘best-seller.’ It complements an advisory long among This Humble Correspondent’s favorites to proffer to students to ponder. “Eternal Seasonal Renewal” is the headline, ha ha.

“From Welcome Rains & Melting Snows, Spring’s Torrential Freshets Cascade Grinning Greens That Inaugurate Summer’s Searing Salubrious Succor, Which Then Blossoms to Plumb Gaia’s Autumnal Harvest in All Its Fecundity of Fruitful Plenty, From Which Flows Winter’s Frigid, Windy, White, & Wispy Blizzard of Bare Necessity, Awaiting Anew the Vernal Return’s Eternal Renewal.”

Having launched another Wood Words recounting with a brief colloidal compounding of ‘big ticket’ newcomers, one might as always wonder about the tsunamis of wordy, nerdy consideration of display. And really, who’s to say, ha ha?

QUEUE NUMERO DOS

Whatever the situation is, now we move on to that second aggregation, with ten in its basket a little more numerous than this quartet. “Accurate Technique in Modern Life” initiates this double handful. …(continued below the fold)

Empowered Political Forays—From ‘53 to ‘79 in Iran: Background

PREFACE

Visitors from a different galaxy would entertain essentially infinite inquiries about human endeavors—strange, frantic, fearful, fickle beasts that we are, at once felicitous and ferocious. A primary interrogatory that such distant-sojourners could pose in the here-and-now might well go like this: “Why in the world do the ‘masters of the game’ so loathe and fear the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran?’”

A more evocative way of phrasing the question ought perhaps to elicit the historical dynamics in play. ‘How has this ancient land and people evolved to a fractious and frightful current context so dangerous that nuclear world war is a real possibility?’

Always, as in duh, the way-things-are springs from long gone sources in the past. So how and why and that they are this instant as they appear flows also from yesteryear, yester-century, and yester-millennia often enough. Perhaps in no geographic sphere of human concern is this more so than in the core components of what was until recently the realm of the Qajar Dynasty and its Pahlavi offshoots, in other words in the territory of Persia’s Iranian nation.

The tagline for this article could go like this. ‘What happens today in Iran mirrors a pattern of conflict of at least centuries’ duration, in which the perquisites of English capital’s minions, with America’s ever reliable support, have contended over Persia’s geo-cultural space with the representatives of the Russian Federation, which was itself also once a mighty imperial phenomenon.’

One might delineate the case more precisely by demonstrating that these martial encounters have transpired as they have because of the assistance, or manipulation and machinations, of British Petroleum and its Yankee oil company cohorts. In essence, what the masterful historian and interlocutor Roy Casagranda points out, in the video in today’s Introduction, remains ever important.

British aristocrats, financiers, and industrialists atop the Anglo imperial heap saw clearly at the end of the nineteenth century that oil would dominate the coming period of time. Since no natural oily largesse was then obvious anywhere adjacent to Britain’s islands, these clever, upper-crust cookies began to review their knowledge of classical cultures.

In particular, these elite denizens of foresight were looking for evidence of the use of oil in lamps, which they found in plentiful quantities in Southwest Asia and the Caucusus region. The widespread deployment of oil lamps was a clue in these investigatory processes, prospecting for oil with archaeology as it were, as documented by this contemporary professor of the Modern Middle East.

Thus, before World War One’s slaughter inaugurated our modern age, when science and industry govern carnage and chaos, English capitalists and their allies across the Atlantic foresaw as a necessity maintaining hegemony over what is now Iran, Iraq, and the Saudi Peninsula. To an extent, Sikes-Picot merely formalized what they’d already decided: ‘we don’t want to share with anybody.’

After the CIA orchestrated the 1953 song-and-dance—the third installment in our very own BTR ‘Iran Job’—that destroyed Iran’s stabs at achieving democracy, the petroleum diplomacy of ‘Western interests’ such as British Petroleum occurred in two phases, obviously. The first period extended from the reinstallation of the Shah to the uprising in the country that inaugurated the theocratic takeover of Tehran’s reins, so to speak.

The second chapter of this story in some sense started with the so-called ‘Hostage Crisis.’ The very real war-of-attrition between Iraq and Iran followed in train, a chance for petroleum’s plutocrats to make Saddam their favorite while also having operatives in place who worked against the Iraqis, in other words for the Ayatollah’s forces. It was classic gangland politics on parade.

The nuclear-development-and-proliferation farce that has in some senses predominated since the ‘90’s would serve as Part Two of Chapter Two. Since analyzing this matter so intricately and inextricably intertwines with the ‘strategic’ dreams of imperial imprimatur on the part of the Modern Nuclear Project, this topic will have its very own place in an upcoming BTR—‘all in good time, my pretties, all in good time!’

The preceding prologue should provide a minimally adequate background for us to continue seeking a deeper and fuller understanding of the entire situation in Persia now, so as better to answer the question posed by our bemused aliens at the outset of this section.

INTRODUCTION—Personal Touches

#26'’s installment in what will inevitably become an ongoing series might start, as I am wont to do, on a personal note, with Roxanne and her little harem of Africans at Harvard. She was Reza Pahlavi’s niece, and a burka-baby she was not. I and half the other straight blokes on the Crimson campus craved her attention; even a smoldering glance might bring on a shivering fit.

Though I was nothing if not painfully shy about deepening any connection, she auditioned for a play that I was directing, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Like many of the well-heeled Trustafarians on the Charles there in Cambridge, she lived a high life, full of parties and all the things that Islam disliked, ha ha.

Such blatant and flagrant abrogation of ‘traditional values,’ a choice that I well understand and often enough affirm, may have played some small part in fomenting opposition to any continuation of the Pahlavi regime’s criminal enterprises on behalf of Langley and BP. I was long departed from my undergrad days when the shit hit the fan in Tehran, but that crazed upheaval recalled the divine Ms. Zand poignantly to mind.

Or we could ‘interview’ my friend Ron’s best pal, Sid. He and Roxanne are cousins, although Sid’s ‘deep pockets’ probably made up but a fraction of my college starlet’s cash on hand—just the cocaine that she seemed to have at beck-and-call would elicit this view, ha ha. Unfortunately, as well, Ron’s buddy has come to the conclusion that the real problem is “the Jews,” or the ‘global Jewish conspiracy,’ or ‘Jewish finance.’

Hating people for their religion is bad enough in its own right. When one holds anything akin to such a view so as to finesse, evade, or otherwise overlook the American imperial imprimatur at the heart of the matter, which I infer is definitely the case in Sid’s choices, then this is more than mere capricious prejudice.

It must serve as an alignment with King Capital in one way or another. It’s also congruent with another fallacious perspective, that Israel ‘owns’ the U.S., rather than vice versa. Anyhow, I didn’t go looking to find a ‘friend-of-a-friend’ who had come from prominent Iranian stock and wanted to add things up in this fashion.

Whatever the case may be, the chapters from my life that have centered on Persia have been among the most bizarre and boisterous that I’ve come across. As has often proven so when especially insane interludes have come and gone, some of those in this sphere have involved my brother. For anyone who doubts his bona fides, the chapters about him in All God’s Cousins are uniformly ‘based on true stories.’

He was incontrovertibly a badass, a ‘corporate contractor’ who had completed both Ranger and the Navy’s Sea Air & Land courses. My sibling’s exploits were all on-the-books, whether as a Royal Dutch Shell employee, a twice-National-Champ flanker, a trainee for some sort of Tricky-Dick special ops team, or otherwise.

In particular, he spent eighteen months of his two year corporate stint in the Persian Gulf. Twice, he jumped out of low-flying helicopters at night—about sixty feet or less from the foam—into the waters off Iran. Once he was only two miles out; the second case, he’s not sure, but they dunked him way off the beach; he had to swim over ten miles.

On land, his job was what he called being an ‘up-close-guy.’ He didn’t have to shoot anybody or otherwise do whatever a target ‘had coming to him.’ His task was to make sure that no security guards interfered with whatever outcomes were planned.

In another case, he was serving primarily as a ‘roughneck’ oil derrick worker, with ‘added responsibilities’ off-site on the side. This was also in Iran, where, my brother’s being the bloke he is, he picked up a bit of the lingo and had himself a dandy time.

He and a co-worker, another American mercenary, were in country in the middle of January, 1979. Whoops! The two of them ran or walked over a hundred miles—beginning on the same day that the Shah left, January 16th, our Mom’s birthday—over hill, under dale, till they found the beach where ‘emergency pickup services’ were available and, thereby, lived to tell the tale.

His last visit involved planting a charge, with two other guys, down an oil well. Something went wrong, he nearly died from a thigh torn open to the femur, blah blah blah. Like I say, in any case, my existence has intersected with Iranian life.

Inevitably, my status as a certifiable ‘Red Menace’ also came into play. My group of radical ruffians bore the title, Communist Labor Party. A scholarly, perhaps brilliant, Party-pamphlet viewed petroleum as the central concern of imperial potentates, a conclusion of supremacy that I doubted, given the nature of the ‘strategic weapons’ that arguably have replaced oil in importance.

Nevertheless, on three occasions that I remember—and quite likely more—meetings, seminars, teach-ins, and other conferential encounters revolved around ‘distinguished Iranians’ who imparted their personal and scholarly testimony about the inevitability of Khomeini in a context where the imperial position never wavered: the contemptible, corrupt killer who was America’s puppet must stay in command.

I might also mention my soccer habit, which began, in any case, with my becoming a card-carrying pinko. Not long on scholarly dialog, perhaps, these acquaintances from the pitch nonetheless definitely spoke up over the course of hashish-fueled rants, insodoing illuminating the social breadth and depth, and to an extent political-economy, of those who despised the Shah and blamed America.

A whimsical anecdote will round out our traipsing along memory’s lanes. At a Tuscaloosa soccer game deep in Summer, mid August, with temps above a hundred on the Fahrenheit scale, we were all suffering. The heat and humidity were like layers of smothering, sodden, scorching blankets.

We were playing a team of Iranians and Iraqis, LOL, a couple years before they began butchering each other as ‘proxies’ for imperial imprimatur. They were suffering less, and at halftime somebody—maybe Jim Clifford, the affable beefy British giant who played left midfield—pointed out their being already conditioned to these conditions because of their homeland.

Muhammad, our own Iranian, left wing, scoffed. “No. Dey know how to stop da heat.”

He and Jim didn’t exactly view each other as mates, so he sneered back, “Oh yeah? How’s that.”

“Dey do like I do. Dey have two cups of scalding tea before da game!” Everyone laughed, but several of us—because it was like an experiment, if nothing else—tried this trick at next Tuesday’s practice. Voila, it worked like a charm; then the Summer passed, and I forgot all about it, till this little ‘assignment’ arose, and I recalled.

A POST-WWII PRECIS—1945-53

In oh-so-many ways, 1945 was a watershed year. Anyone with even minimal awareness understands the ‘global circumstances’ in play, Berlin, Hiroshima, blah blah blah. The end of the Second World War constituted a ‘return to the status quo ante’ for the Pahlavi regime, which had been placed in limbo to assure Persia as a delivery route to the Soviet allies of the U.S. and England.

The dictatorial oversight that Britain exercised during the war years, with assistance from the Soviet Union, was indubitably and indisputably a dream-come-true godsend for the adherents of making petroleum extraction in the region purely a British concern, ha ha. However, as scheduled, English forces began withdrawal on March 2, 1946, unlike their Soviet counterparts, who remained to blockade parts of Northern Persia from reintegrating under Tehran’s hegemony; Stalin conceived ‘breakaway provinces’ of Kurds and Azerbaijanis.

This defined the ‘Iran Crisis of 1946,’ when the government of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi filed the first-ever ‘country-complaint’ before the United Nations Security Council. The U.N. disposition in Tehran’s favor, combined with ‘diplomatic pressure’ from the Yanks and the Brits—and also joined with agreements to foster the primary Soviet goal of oil concessions—led to Russian departure before Summer, a ‘first victory’ for the ‘Truman Doctrine’ of containment and all that jazz.

When the ‘Red-exit’ perfected the MI6 and Langley setup of Reza Pahlavi’s rule, the first order of business, according to several modern Iranian historians—as well as congruent with different CIA documentation—was to neutralize Tudeh, the well-established and powerful Iranian Communist Party. In fact, doing so matched completely George Kennan’s famous Foreign Affairs assessment of U.S. ‘Cold War’ strategy.

“Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet foreign policy.” In the event, the marginalization of the Reds proceeded apace, even as the himself ‘to-the-manor-born’ Mohammed Mossadegh began his rise as the key leader of a Nationalist opposition to royal rule in Persia.

Part of his platform, wildly popular, was nationalizing Iran’s oil assets, which predictably was less appreciated among the oil execs, anticommunist crusaders, and imperial plotters who—in Washington and London—schemed how to keep control of the region’s energy abundance. This in turn inaugurated groundbreaking legal action before the International Court of Justice, in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case, which, on ‘technical grounds,’ the judges ruled favored the Iranian case.

The upshot of all of this, with the election of Mossadegh an accomplished fact, was that the capitalists and imperialists of America’s ‘new world order’ were more than ever worried about finding ways to manipulate matters to their own benefit, especially regarding a continuation of the 1930’s Concessions rather than needing to negotiate new arrangements with a National Oil Company. Purely for profit-promotion, if for no other reason, finding an ‘equitable, corporate solution’ to this situation was of paramount importance to the bankers and industrialist and empire-backers of the so-called West.

How to ‘manage Iran,’ obviously, has entailed the use of agents in much the same way that C.I.A.-chief Allen Dulles suggested to President Dwight Eisenhower on March 1, 1953. America’s number one spook was frank in his estimation of things.

“(T)he Iranian situation has been slowly deteriorating. The result has been a steady decrease in the power and influence of the Western democracies and the building up of a situation where a communist takeover is becoming more and more a possibility.”

He references an earlier note to Truman that said Tudeh ascendancy was unlikely in 1953. “However, even the present crisis is unlikely to be satisfactorily compromised without a communist Tudeh victory. Of course the elimination of Mossadegh by assassination or otherwise might precipitate decisive events except in the unlikely alternative that the Shah should gain courage and decisiveness.”

Interestingly, as explored a couple of episodes from now, Dulles then references the ‘religious fanatics’ who seem to be gaining traction. Obviously, from a denizens-of-empire-and-impunity POV, such forces are orders of magnitude preferable to Reds.

National Intelligence Estimate # 75, to President Truman a bit more than a year previously, had only a slightly less punctuated pugilistic point of view. “The Mossadegh Regime will probably continue its pressure on the U.S. to persuade the U.K. to agree to Iranian terms in the oil dispute and will be quick to criticize any signs of what it considers U.S. support for the U.K. It will also continue to request financial assistance, arguing that withholding of U.S. aid increases the danger of ultimate Tudeh(commie)control.”

This and other documentation makes fascinating reading indeed in a briefing and bibliography of the Truman Presidential Library. The Oil Crisis in Iran, 1951-1953 yields more than its share of such imperial jewels that represent the settings with which hegemons bedecked their appeals for ‘exceptional’ impunity.

One might go on. And on, ha ha, yet inasmuch as the third installment of this, BTR’s own, ‘Iranian Job’ will be arriving no later than #29, we can let ‘sleeping dogs’ lie for the moment, though their ferocity is both important to understand and fascinating to observe.

In the event, the very next Persian Parcel, so to speak, will investigate first Iran’s fate during the martial years of 1914-18, and second the installation of Reza Pahlavi’s father as overseer in the interwar period thereafter, along with a third section about the Second World War, when Tehran hosted Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill—the ‘Big Three’—for their first discussion of the post-carnage order of things. To say the least, both domestic and international relations during this mere three decades or so were frantic and torturous.

Torture, however, proved to be the defining characteristic of the Shah’s regime after 1953. Like so many of ‘our good friends,’ Pahlavi disappeared his opponents as he confiscated the wealth of his nation and plundered the ‘gifts’ that America’s military Keynesians showered on him. As is ever true, this all did not happen ‘out of the blue.’

Below the Fold, a substantially vaster array of evidence and incident come forward to examine the warp and woof of the litany of threads that connect a seventy-two year old coup and a forty-six years back rebellion to the hundred-fifty odd years prior to the industrial exploitation of Persian oil. This material, in its turn, will appear as two sub-chapters, or something similar. The pair of these two soon-to-be-unspooling factual yarns in turn intersect with our own experience of Persia’s persistent present pass impact.

The initial section just ahead along these lines concerns events and issues prior to a key juncture during the half century or thereabouts of Naser-a-Din’s almost half century of suzerainty as the penultimate Qajar dynasty Shah. His reign ended with his assassination. Halfway through his 1847-1896 rule, he in essence inaugurated purview of Persian perquisites by the Brits.

IranicaOnline memorializes the pertinent point here. “The history of Iranian oil agreements began with an unprecedented concession granted by Nāṣer-al-Din Shah in 1872 to Baron Julius de Reuter… . The concession, which covered the entire territory of Persia, gave Reuter the exclusive rights and monopoly, for seventy years, to exploit all mineral resources including, but not limited to, coal, iron, copper, lead, and petroleum, and to construct and operate roads, railways, telegraph lines, water canals, irrigation systems, and customs services.”

Pretty sweet, eh? “Reuter’s concession was cancelled a few years later because of strong political pressure and opposition from the Czarist government, as well as a number of eminent Persians. Reuter never accepted the cancellation of his concession and repeatedly filed claims for compensation. Eventually, as a result of the intervention by the British minister in Tehran, Nāṣer-al-Din Shah granted a new concession to Reuter in 1889, which became known as the Bānk-e Šāhi (Imperial Bank of Persia) concession.”

The second array to follow, albeit without the overarching thermonuclear concerns of the present passage’s problematic combination of bluff and bluster, on the one hand, and missiles and bombs, on the other, deals with decades that followed this original Concession and culminated in dipping big-oil’s toes into the vast pools of petroleum on Iranian territory. So as to date things aptly, this would be roughly 1872-1910 or a tad later.

To come to terms with what is happening in Iran today, whatever the case may be, requires something like the historical divination that this articulation articulates. The song asks an apt question. “Would you rather…(continued below the fold)

Old Stories, & New—”A Red Star For Captain B.”

* * * * * *

I can’t entirely remove myself from this little story. My three older brothers and my younger sister and I, of course, have been arguing—for too many years, I might add—about who should actually get Daddy’s medal.

Since its receipt in the first place only happened because Daddy was such an excellent shot, and I am the only sibling who excelled at marksmanship—in college at Appalachian State, I won the North Carolina University Women’s Championship twice, and once I was a top-five finisher at Nationals—it follows—does it not?—that I have a strong case to make in my favor.

I say yes. Reasonable people, if they know the background, would agree. So here I am, looking for an altogether reasonable audience to listen to the tale and judge my proposition.

Our father, George Martin Brimm—a relatively common ‘peasant’ phenomenon in the ‘land of the free’—started hiring himself out, in Knoxville, for trench work and heavy lifting as well as a farm-kid’s common-sense fixit facility, just before he left behind his parents’ acreage in tobacco and corn on his fifteenth birthday. Only eventually did he find his way to the Navy and the sea and, in some views of the matter of our lives and times, to an even more standard course.

In advance, apologies for the back and forth in time and space. It’s complicated, and this is how it all came back to me when I decided to do this, as a brief for my case for his award, if nothing else.

In the period when he won his pretty, lacquered, crimson Star, a full decade after he quit his family’s sharecropped eighty-nine acres of East Tennessee, he often enough entertained self-congratulatory thoughts, something that he had learned to permit himself, especially if he had more than one glass of cognac remaining.

‘How do I know these things,’ you might inquire? It’s a fair question.

I have all his letters, you see, and Daddy liked the way I could shoot, so we talked about this: a lot, over the years. I needn’t embellish a bit to make my argument persuasive. In fact, I’ve left lots out. Anyway, here goes.

**

His pen and paper, in the little basin that made their helter-skelter scattering in the pitching swell less likely, beckoned to him. “What should I say to my beloved today?” he asked himself, only slightly tipsy, though between the trough and the crest of every wave cycle he experienced moments of deep inebriation.

“Look how far I’ve come.” So far North, in February, even at the first bell on the afternoon watch, the light faded in big gulps, minute by minute.

‘Skipper George” still had a chance for shuteye before he returned to the wheelhouse for both of the ‘dog watches;’ he always skipped dinner anyway, similarly as in his tenant-farming youth, dreaming of ocean adventures, when a big breakfast and giant lunch were mandatory, while as often as not, starting at age nine or so, a liquid diet of one sort or another prevailed for the evening meal.

That much would be safe to convey to Mary Alice, or so he believed, she whose kisses had cemented the foundation of delicious in his core, so that he could no more not communicate something to her—no matter the delay or the potential for censorious intervention—than he could will himself to stop defecating, or eating.

With ‘Cap’n Brimm’s’ unerring sense of what mattered in any given circumstance, furthermore—here on board his second command posting—he had formed a strong working bond and, he liked to imagine, a real friendship, with his Boatswain’s Mate. He and Charles Thomas agreed about the Winter waters that they were so far traversing: “up here, there’s two kinds of conditions—rough seas and hurricanes,” a comment worth a grin, for now, every time one of them said it.

Whatever the preferred nickname, Daddy Brimm ‘let it be known’ that he was in solidarity with the lowliest, hungry seaman, but in reality he with equal consistency always had trouble keeping a seafaring evening meal where it belonged. The very idea of supper made him want to heave.

That thought brought forth a bubbling chuckle, picturing chunks of Chow’s mystery meat gleaming pinkly on his still-starched dress whites, in the garb of which he had just been admiring himself. “Look how far I’ve come.”

Info about his nausea, on the other hand, or even worse the formal outfit that merited precious space in his yawing Captain’s-Quarters, would be deleted by the designated readers who surveyed every letter that the sailors of this aging, leaky freighter sought to send.

Technically, he was the Chief Officer of His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Halifax, which like every other bucket of bolts in the convoy had its own bowdlerizing redaction crew that processed the mail that would be flown to North America from wherever they docked on this occasion.

Last trip, they had ended up in Talinn, new to the Soviet state though it was, and in the fortnight of leave that he spent with his affianced sweetheart thereafter, he had learned what ‘higher authorities’ had diverted from her. From their censorious acts, he discovered that he had to invent ways to share his heart and his travails without breaching the plausible deniability of his actions and whereabouts.

***

George M. Brimm, a clever lad, as a United States Navy O.C.S. Ensign, had decided—or at least felt a powerful sense of certainty about so inclining—that he would not jump at just any run-of-the-mill post. No Sir!

That was one lesson of Officer Candidate School, after all, always to aspire to more glorious things. Just as on his last stint, he would wait for some perfect peril, something that would garner him the notice necessary to move toward, if not likely to fulfill, his childhood fantasy about joining the admiralty.

Thus, “danger and accolades,” yes, but he’d already experienced that on his inaugural outing, so he would now always whisper to himself by adding, “and more.” “Along with,” he would think then, “automatic promotion.” He fancied himself ‘Captain material’ and dared not, in his still class-bound soul, aspire to more than fantasizing about higher emoluments, more stripes and stars, all such evidence of ambition beyond the station-in-things that he believed to be appropriate to his origins.

Even a little bump might, nevertheless, help in moving him toward the carrier that he quite richly imagined would be his, maps strewn about his very own command-and-control center, a heroic vision with an improbable promotion to Admiral on the near horizon. As the Nazis pummeled Europe and prepared to fulfill their primary purpose, to destroy communist Russia, Brimm was seeking something that would, one more time, let him exercise the command that a ship’s captain must ever hold sacred.

Monitoring two bulletin boards on base in Newport News: “Combat Postings” and “Special Operations;” he was looking for an assignment that would combine both, not altogether a rare occurrence as he walked into the anteroom to the Junior Officer's Mess on November 22^nd, 1940, a little before six, four bells on the Morning Watch, when the dining area opened for breakfast.

And there it was. As a battle-ready offer, it involved one more Baltic run on a lightly armed freighter that would deliver key supplies to the Soviets again, who would soon enough become England's and Canada's—and a few months after that, America’s—Russian comrades in arms.

Moreover, it said quite boldly, “Return Operatives Especially Welcome,” and since he’d taken the previous run to Talinn, when they had experienced exactly one clear day the entire voyage there, with but two slivers of blue overhead on their return to Halifax, and he liked gray skies, if only because they discouraged bombers, he skipped breakfast to lock in the chance. He was first in line when Petty Officer Moran showed up, just as the Watch’s last bell chimed, at 08:00 hours, to start processing ‘applicants.’

* * * * * *

He stood up for himself too, bless his heart, when Moran sent him down the hall to the ‘admissions committee.’ He insisted they give him his J.G., and they agreed. If he lived through it, the Navy would formalize the promotion.

If he didn’t, well, that would be something else entirely. That was the deal. As we mostly already realize, as a matter of course, it’s all so very complicated.

I’m sorry for the interruption, but… (continued below the fold)

Nerdy Nuggets—’Depressed?!’ ‘Here, Take This!!!’

Willful ignorance is, except for boredom, the least forgivable sin. Perhaps the worst sort of such already execrable behavior—self-deception that is at once lazy and lethal, enervating and toxic—results when we interact with so-called medication that has little more to do with healing than does dosing gonorrhea with arsenic.

The examples of this sort of madness are—in the hypercommodified present pass—too numerous to enumerate. However, today’s particular little dip into amplifying our awareness will initiate its narrative with another trip down memory lane, to the hallowed halls, ha ha, in Cambridge, where Student Health Services provided me, completely gratis, almost instantaneous relief from several instances when, for one reason or another, projectile vomiting took over my nauseated body and hurled me into the coiling agony of expelling the contents of my all-but-empty stomach.

Compazine was the pharmaceutical miracle on offer, and like some sort of erstwhile innocent charm it stilled my heaving misery. I asked at one point for some pills to take home, which thankfully, apparently, was not part of the promotional package.

In my early thirties, I developed tremors that perfectly describe the onset of Tardive Dyskinesia, the ludicrously-named ‘Movement Disorder’ that results from all manner of ‘psychotropic medication’ that in one way or another impacts and alters a body’s utilization of Dopamine. As a comment on X stated incisively, ‘side effects are an organism’s way of reacting to being poisoned.’

Thanks to the Goddess, I fought off terror at an early-onset Parkinson’s, which, in the event, would have ended my little run decades ago. The shakes have kept on, basically as they were forty years back. Still, at most four doses could be the source of this; I can barely even imagine someone like my Mom or others of my close acquaintance who have relied on these ‘doctor-prescribed cures’ for decades.

Moreover, I still remember—so vividly that the imagery enters my dreams at times—working in the late ‘70’s as a Patient’s Advocate at Bryce Mental Hospital. When I pointed out the zombification that resulted from daily dosing of the institutionalized saps on the wards, I received the message in no uncertain terms, loud and clear, as it were: ‘don’t bother, shut up, it’s none of your business.’

In that vein indeed, ‘medically induced Parkinson’s’ has for some time remained a primary source of new sufferers who exhibit symptoms of the disorder. Interestingly enough to give pause to This Humble Correspondent, many of the same corporate entities that, then, marketed and profited from the ‘medicines’ behind the current symptomology, now, have brought to the marketplace more drugs, so as to ameliorate the consequences of previous scrips with different prescriptions.

The litany of ills that happen because of the natural happenstances of contemporary psychopharmacology is not endless. Then again, ha ha, the whispered gush of each pharma ad’s ‘possible side effects’ almost always ends with something akin to ‘including death!’

This hideous situation, an exercise in the grotesque, arises from an inculcation of a curative mantra in the popular consciousness. First, since medical problems are biological, they must have their sole real causative source in the body. Second, ‘experts’ alone can understand this. Third, friendly drug companies want to help. Finally, people should ‘take their medicine,’ ha ha.

A recent critic wrote about this in relation to such problems as ongoing sadness. “More commonly, however, the assumption of diagnostic psychiatry that mental illnesses stem from disorders of the brain leads to a search for ways of changing neurochemistry. The use of various psychopharmacological agents now dominates the psychiatric profession.”

Whoa! “Pervasive educational and advertising campaigns urge those sufferers who are not yet in treatment to recognize that they have genuine disorders that should be relieved through medication and therapy. Pharmaceutical companies, as well as mental health professionals, have seen an explosive increase in demand for their products.

In the decade between 1985 and 1995 alone, the number of prescriptions for psychotropic medications soared from about 33 million to about 46 million. The brand names of medications such as Prozac have become as generic as ‘kleenex’ or ‘xerox;’ three of the seven most prescribed drugs of any sort are antidepressants.”

All of these chemicals have negative metabolic and organ-system impacts. Most of them are hideously habit-forming. None of them have proven more effective than sugar pill palliatives.

In such a context, what could possibly induce otherwise healthy creatures to ‘medicate’ melancholy with inescapably insalubrious consequences, outcomes in many cases almost evil in their implicit congruence with erotic dysfunction and loving disconnection? Given the ubiquity of these sorts of ‘side-effects,’ one almost must inquire whether these outcomes are the purpose rather than an ‘unintended consequence.’

Not that such a premise ‘must be true, but the aphorism is undeniable. If something happens over and over and always yields the same results, and if multiple reports of this correlation indicate that it must be so, and no one either prohibits or even investigates the connection, then the results at issue are quite likely in fact intentional indeed.

In considering such a possibility, one might want to highlight the scope and depth of what we could call the affective landscape of the mentally medicated. None other than the International Network for the History of Neuropsychopharmacology has released a monograph, From Melancholia to Depression: a History of Diagnosis and Treatment.

The author, Thomas Ban, summarizes key data. “Between 1938 and 1955 several reports indicated that the prevalence of depression in the general population was below 1%. Comparing these figures, as shown in table 1, with figures in the 1960s and ‘70s reveals that even the lowest figures in the psychopharmacological era (from the 1960s) are 7 to 10 times greater than the highest figures before the introduction of antidepressant drugs.”

One unit from the book, especially, plays a big role below-the-fold: “the Treatment of Melancholia and Depression.” The first portion of this overall section, though not designated a chapter, bears a title that in and of itself offers evidence of at best maladaptive ‘mental-health-treatment modalities,’ as it were: “From Opium to Chlorpromazine.”

Perhaps what makes the entire arena under present purview most anomalous, most galling really, is how despicably and miserably all the new methods and ‘medications’ have performed. “Unfortunately, advances in medical science have not led to a decline in depression in either country {England or the United States}. (Moreover), there is little evidence that the overall societal burden of depression has decreased.

In contrast, the application of public health techniques, coupled with antibiotic medications, led to a dramatic decline in morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases in industrialized countries in the twentieth century. Along the same lines, early interventions for the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease precipitated a decline in morbidity and mortality from heart attack and stroke.

Why have we not seen a similar decline in morbidity and mortality from depression?” That’s a big double-DUH coming from the assembled multitudes, ha ha. Especially these suboptimal ‘treatment outcomes’ would seem to make no sense whatsoever, unless the nearly universally proffered medications were themselves worse than worthless.

Given this worse-than-tepid performance, what could provide a reasonable hypothesis to explain the way that more-than-occasionally noxious and toxic, sometimes even lethal, substances have become so commonplace in trying to dissipate or disappear ‘negative emotions?’ Basically, addressing this inquiry is the point of #26’s installment of Nerdy Nuggets.

To accomplish this explication, to start, and likely primarily for this first episode on this specific topic, we’ll be examining the history of the use of substances that, in today’s world, have become, in some places, an almost omnipresent palliative for feelings of fear, anxious worrying, and all sensory stabs of sadness and despair. Readers will learn how these capsules and tablets and injections became marketable drugs, and how people have used them, and doctors have prescribed them.

The next step, number two, will be to figure out how Mental Health became the starring-role player that it presently passes itself off to be, seeking a grasp on the parameters and purposes of promoting the primacy of a biological and organic rubric to account for all the mental disorders that seemingly affect people these days.

Another portion of this narrative, the third, takes a shot at presenting an emotional atlas, or even census, for different prominent places in today’s terran terrain. Given what this feelings-geography shows, we’ll make some comparisons and contrasts among the national actors involved.

The final section will…(continued below the fold)

Communication & Human Survival—Free Speech & Human Viability

Two of my favorite classes in college were epistemology courses. Inasmuch as this year’s Reunion in Massachusetts was my class’ fiftieth, Harvard has been springing to mind a lot. In the event, the stories of my ‘adult existence,’ which began in Cambridge, for the most part, have also been bringing themselves forward in my mind, like little cameos of Jimbo’s social history, some of which have formed BTR chapters of All God’s Cousins.

One upshot is that sociality necessitates intricate signalling that will ever, eventually, evolve language, which is reasonable as a result to view as a central pillar of existential endeavors to achieve a viable, managed human endeavor. In this indisputably practical way of thinking, as our kind have extended their ever incomplete, yet always greedy, attempts to control nature, we have also sought to amplify our articulation, so to speak.

The end result is that only via mediation’s miracles do we attain something like sociopolitical potency, as it were. As anyone who plows through any of BTR’s now twenty-six issues knows, this humble correspondent finds analyzing communities and how they communicate endlessly fascinating.

For my anniversary College Annual, I wrote about my life’s work as very much a minor-key intellectual, writer, and cultural savant. “Fifty years. In the overall scheme of things for one of our kind , this is a lengthy span, yet in cosmic terms, it does not amount to a person's ocular muscles' first millisecond's preparation to blink as a proportion of a century-long existence.

I started out with one premise: 'my back will support my wrist in anticipation of a different future.' I've ended with another: 'trying to figure out how matters stand is a duty, despite the impossibility of the task,' ha ha.

I've written countless unpublished words and, depending on the definition of 'publish,' from twenty thousand to twenty million in some formal presentation somewhere in the planet's multifaceted mediascape. I've been making and purveying Driftwood Message Art in my Feral Nerd Performance Space for the past dozen years or so.

I've played enough chess and backgammon for several 'average' lifetimes and am still willing to make a foursome at bridge on the spur of any given moment. Like most 'modern day citizens,' I've sojourned virtually much further than even our continent-hopping ancestors could manage, in aggregate, over thousands of years.”

I rarely mention another of my college classes: basic linguistics with Noam Chomsky, to whose knowledge and insights and wisdom I’ve been listening daily for the last month or so. If folks have heard of Chomsky at all, which all but the ignorant and benighted have done, they are most likely to have at least a vague familiarity with Manufacturing Consent, a foundation for understanding propaganda, mediation, and citizenship all at once in the context of imperial imprimatur and ‘Sacred Property.’

Though more on Chomsky is coming next time, to the present effort, #26 brings the work and thought of Juergen Habermas, he who has posited the adaptive necessity of “ideal free speech communities.” This philosopher, whom one prominent activist scholar called “a leading contender to be the greatest living public intellectual,” generates millions of hits in multiple searches about media and mediation and democracy.

David Langwallner, a prominent European public interest lawyer and scholar, provides a useful precis about this ‘giant of philosophy and democracy.’ One could find thousands of other intro tidbits hither and yon, but this one fits our purposes to a ‘T,’ as it were.

“In essence, Habermas recovers the substantive aspects of rationality, and puts forward a theory of practical reasoning and political deliberation. He regards reason as emancipatory and an antidote to dogmatism, compulsion, and domination. The substance of law is particularly important to him…(so much so that)(p)art of the Habermas project is to elevate the space of public deliberation and the Rule of Law above Postmodern scepticism.”

Implicitly, in a Habermasian view, knowledge without democratic debate and participation, will always tend to devolve toward self-serving propaganda and self-congratulatory imperial half truths. Thus, his book, Knowledge and Human Interests, advances as a central thesis an at-least-likely revolutionary set of ideas, at the same instant that it emphasizes how initial and provisional are the concepts, and—critically—the theories in play.

“Forty Years of Knowledge And Human Interests: a Brief Appreciation” capsulizes how ‘a resuscitation of philosophical reflection,’ especially at the margins of antimony and contradiction, provided the core of this work. The author, Laurence Hazelrigg, sums up.

“Habermas was invigorating not only because of the stellar display of thoughtful heritage and an integrated process of argumentation that both built from and carried forward critical inquiry but also because the display carried much promise—regarding, for instance, capacities of self-governance, self-responsibility, and the like.”

This good student of Juergen persists to say that true knowledge must ever be a process that in some identifiable way connects with the actions that we take to shape our lives. He notes that Habermas provides a way to deconstruct “not just that ‘things happen’ but of how ‘things happen,’” a theory of knowledge that takes empiricism’s promotion of factuality’s primacy as a competitive, contested starting juncture.

“Knowledge and Human Interests offer(s) encouragement that this road (i)s negotiable, that it could take us to better, more efficacious understandings of how we achieve knowledge, formulate interests, make worlds, and in the process further our emancipation from the dead hand of past times—or, as Kant put it, pursue maturation, responsibility, and self-autonomy.”

Rarely will any listener find Habermas’ missives easily digestible: never has This Humble Correspondent done so, ha ha. Nonetheless, apt social and intellectual operators have stuck with their attempts to eke things out, as have I.

The final narrative in Knowledge and Human Interests occurs as an Appendix, which contains a presentation that the author made several years prior to the book. In this lecture, Habermas lays out his intention to dissect the notion that reality is just this surface that we can know in the same way that we clearly just grok a hornet’s sting.

He notes the allure of this ‘common-sensical’ way. “The systematic sciences of social action, that is economics, sociology, and political science, have the goal, as do the empirical-analytic sciences{physics and such}, of producing nomological knowledge,” which is to say an axiomatic understanding of things that allows people to see and articulate what is intuitively obvious.

Inevitably, however, one’s interests—the entire array of inculcation and study and reward that make up a life, and especially a ‘life of the mind’—irretrievably dispense with any uninterested way of achieving awareness that amounts to universally acceptable data. Thus, conversation is the only course to consensus.

Habermas’ appended material is absolutely the best place for anyone not steeped in philosophical debate to begin Knowledge and Human Interests. It establishes ground rules: the necessity of theory, the way that opposition must have a place of honor in any seeking of truth, and more.

At the outset, the book sets itself the task of clearing the decks, basically teasing out how people can carry on honest and honorable discourse, in a process that is at once reliable and ethical, as the back and forth between parties navigates a pathway to a social and political achievement of something akin to a fair consensus. Hence, Habermas begins, “If we imagine the philosophical discussion of the modern period reconstructed as a judicial hearing, it would be deciding a single question: how is reliable knowledge possible?”

The book does not, therefore, deliver easily digestible benchmarks for what ‘truth’ looks like or how it operates. Nor does Knowledge and Human Interest define the parameters of a ‘reality-production process,’ except to say that it must ever be a disciplined and openended and multisided conversational exchange; the example of psychoanalysis runs through the volume in this regard.

Furthermore, Habermas insistently points out that these nearly four hundred pages are merely an inaugural analytical slice, a shaping of examination-processes into their core components. The rest of his life’s work fleshes this out, in other words. The specific title is just what he calls a prolegomenon, ‘a purely prefatory aspect of intellectual, analytical efforts and processes that aim at soothsaying.’

Obviously, however, since half the title notes the import of interest, the situation cannot help but be one of contrariness, contradiction, and intellectual battle. Embracing this need to intertwine the contrary with consent lies at the core of things.

“If the framework of empirical-analytic inquiry(the ‘hard sciences’)were that of a transcendental subject, then measurement would be the synthetic activity that genuinely characterizes it.” If one ponders that momentarily, Habermas’ conclusion is ineluctable.

“Only a theory of measurement, therefore, can elucidate the conditions of the objectivity of possible knowledge for the nomological (which is to say measuring) sciences.” Again, though I added the emphasis, of course! And none of the public relations pronouncements have a thing to say about this.

“In the context of communicative action,” very much on the other hand, “language and experience are not subject to the transcendental conditions of action itself.” The ebb and flow of data and incident are at the beck and call of sentences and their use in rhetorical speech.

“Here the role of transcendental framework is taken instead by the grammar of ordinary language, which simultaneously governs the non-verbal elements of a habitual mode of life conduct or practice. The grammar of language-games links symbols, actions, and expressions. It establishes schemata of world interpretation and interaction.

Grammatical rules establish the ground of an open intersubjectivity among socialized individuals. And we can only tread this ground to the extent that we internalize these rules—as socialized participants and not as impartial observers.”

Habermas posits a ‘knowledge-constitutive interest’ around which paradox pulses, no matter what, and conflicts result that concern how language-games can lead to different conclusions depending on the origin and evolution of the exchanges in question. Similar arguments in approximately the same spaces can evolve very differently.

“‘Cognitive interest’ is therefore a peculiar category, which conforms as little to the distinction between empirical and transcendental or factual and symbolic determinations as to that between motivation and cognition.” Indeed, or so I posit anyhow.

“For knowledge is neither a mere instrument of an organism's adaptation to a changing environment nor the act of a pure rational being removed from the context of life under contemplation.” Knowing emanates from desires and decisions governed by indubitably interested parties whose parries and thrusts in their turn also arise from these sames wants and needs.

A piece of Driftwood Message Art states the case in corollary fashion. “Compelling Human Interest” is one title.

“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."

Habermas is hugely popular. He epitomizes the possibility that a critical, purposeful, joyous, and powerful popular culture can emerge from a story like his own, from Hitler Youth brigades to recognition of and resistance to Nazi atrocities. With very few exceptions, those who actually get to know the fellow think the world of him and hope that Habermas is right to be optimistic about the human condition in spite of all the factors that undermine such a faith.

Various searches illustrate this point. This complicated string, for example, hoovered up 231,000 citations from the ether: <habermas "mass media" OR "corporate media" OR "corporate communication" public OR popular OR "people owned" OR "publicly operated" OR "publicly owned" OR "community owned" democracy OR participatory OR "community based">. Wow. I scanned the first three pages of the general material and the ‘scholarly articles.’ It’s a life’s work, ha ha.

This only slightly more basic set of terms got almost one and a half million results: <habermas life work interpretation OR analysis OR scholarship>. Admittedly, Einstein to start in the search gets twelve times as many hits, while FDR at the beginning garnered an eightfold increase.

But Chomsky, much better known among Americans and more easily apprehended among readers, as it were, only brings in eighty percent as many links as did the difficult to decipher German. Whoever he is, whatever he’s ‘really saying,’ Juergen Habermas must matter to massive masses of those who seek mastery of thought, so to say.

Again, the fact bears emphatic repetition. Real people, in the real world, love Juergen Habermas. As his Wikipedia entry states simply: “Habermas was a famed teacher and mentor,” with dozens of prominent students and followers, and untold hundreds and hundreds like This Humble Correspondent, ha ha.

Thereby then, this essay’s foray into the realm of arcana and complexity and contrariness is a justifiable one if nothing else. It’s interesting to me and hopefully to a reader or two as well.

‘Artificial Intelligence’ provides an incisive summary of what Habermas has done. “Jürgen Habermas's work highlights a tension between the ideal of a public sphere in democracy, where open debate and rational-critical discussion are paramount, and the realities of mass media, particularly its commercial and corporate forms.

He argues that mass media, often driven by profit and catering to consumerism, can undermine the public sphere by prioritizing entertainment and consensus-building over critical engagement. This shift can lead to a decline in meaningful public discourse and a weakening of democratic participation.”

Readers now encounter, to end this first half of today’s informative overview, a sketch of what is coming below the fold in our ongoing examination of this central public intellectual. First, another book selection appears, from one POV his magnum opus: The Theory of Communicative Action. Second, a “Public Sphere” explication follows up, naturally if not inevitably, an important component of any digestion of this particular fundamental volume in Habermas’ writing and thought.

Third comes a Media-Ethics discussion in which the very possibility of democratic formulations of a ‘Popular Media Arena’ creates a mandate. Fourth, and finally, a selection of aggregators and explicators show up and usher us along to whatever comes next in regard to another one of Big Tent Reviews’ Key-Thinkers-&-Icons, ha ha. …(continued below the fold)

Erotic Snippets—“Ecstatic Life Force Energy Now, Yes”

PROLOGUE

Some people actually believe that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ These same sorts probably also accept that ‘giving in too easily is a turnoff.’ Things like that appeal to folks on occasion, platitudes full of nonsense and non-sequitur along with whatever grains of the true in them that have justified their longevity, ha ha.

‘Au contraire,’ LJ will contend. Or however you say it, spell it, blah blah blah. LJ has ever intended to embrace embodiment’s delicate miracles with Ecstatic Life Force Energy Now and, insodoing, lay the basis for wild and joyous encounters with an ELFEN existence. This will surpass any merely elfin experience, no matter how delicious and sublime, or so he contends.

What this means when we ‘come down to cases’ today entails introducing everybody to Lou, the narrator’s close acquaintance. Lou, or LJ, has a checkered history with sex and relationships, but since he thinks about them all the time anyway, he figured that he might turn up some trade, or clientele, some cash in one way and another, with the help of his knowledge and insight, that sort of thing. Though he would never toot his own horn, the shoe fits pretty well; he’s better than a decent counselor.

Of course he’s got to call it coaching, just like on the sign: no degree or license, no need for malpractice insurance. He researched the whole thing of getting a billboard back in the day—another story, with none other than Ted Turner in it. Anyway he kept up with the rates and mandates, all that sort of thing.

But he never had enough loose cash to feel altogether comfortable about putting down a twenty-grand-or-so bet on his idea of being somebody whom people might trust with their psyches and secrets. He knew for a fact, and with a chuckle of admission, that he’d’ve never survived as a psychotherapist: for him, erotic contact with clients would sometimes be, not forbidden, but mandatory.

Ha ha. That’s right. He provide multimodal counseling services, so to speak, both talk and walk, as it were, at least for the ladies. The sign itself at least plausibly reflects this. Its background glows a light and yet very bright pink. Colorful letters graphically represent both the textual and underlying message: again, talk and walk.

Almost half the space was filled the text, “Coaching And More Empowerment.” The initial letters bled red into the air. Atop this phrase, two delicate curly-cues covered half the line each.

Below that, in multicolored neon pastels, came the cursive calligraphy slogan: “Ecstatic Life Force Energy Now,” also with the highlighted letters a mix of colorful eruptions. LJ contended that his advertisement ‘was perfect for Asheville,’ since it liked to parade its libertine activities as a cover for the old American sex-shame story.

Well, anyway, the sign even exists at all because Lou orchestrated a coup. He stuck up for himself when his spouse of seventeen years jumped ship in toxic and treacherous fashion, chasing Phil all over Madison County and blaming LJ for ‘not wanting kids.’

Lou got the house for its original price; he sold the house for substantially more. He thought about things for a minute. Then he put half his profit into a sinking fund for signage, so to speak.

He had no idea if he had much chance of succeeding, but he always managed to rub two nickels together and get a dollar. He figured this would be his final chance to show the world what he could do. He was readying for his sixtieth birthday, when all is said and done.

Up and running now for just six weeks shy of two years, he had reached the point five months ago when his incoming clients’ fees left him a small stipend after paying for everything—rent, utilities, that sign, blah blah blah. For now he would put this into replenishing his ‘sinking fund,’ which he estimated would take two more years.

But enough of books, business, and bottom line elements of being a ‘grassroots sex and relationship coach.’ Already, he had many tales to tell.

None proved quite so epic, however, as did his many years of on-call advisory connection with Eileen and Kathleen, who first showed up in his airy studio and ‘coaching enclave’ at just that juncture when he had nearly two years of experience under his belt.

CHAPTER ONE

“Johanna referred us!” Eileen was the shorter one, svelte for all that, with barely a whisper of hips to offset her curvaceous upper torso. “Chipper,” he thought: “she’s definitely chipper!” He could not quite suppress a grin.

Kathleen’s calm calculation, not dour but not welcoming either, offset her paramour’s joviality. She was taller than LJ, with the sort of pelvis that commanded connubial attention, while above the waist she showed off an athlete’s sculpted womanly curves.

He cocked his head at Kathleen’s elusive quiet. ‘Clearly,’ he thought with a broad smile that he bestowed on her, ‘the little one wants to be here more than the big one.’

“So, good!” He teased out of them the reason for their visit. As far as he could figure, this came down to one part curiosity, about the sign, mainly, with a dash of wonder that a guy was doing this; with two parts a loggerheads between these lesbians about matters carnal and social.

They bantered about blokes, about sexuality, he managed to ‘bookmark’ the three points in the recorded session when they couple bristled at each other, though only one was noticeable, and that mutually growling moment was just silly—about which one of them had lobbied for an appointment. He had already suggested that much of this initial encounter would be about ground-rules, defining expectations, and seeing their mutual fit, so to speak.

In thirty minutes, LJ uncovered that Kathleen resisted having more than one orgasm at a time and never exceeded two. Eileen was an admitted ‘sex-crazed skinny dyke.’ K. liked to hang out at home and do crafty things, build shit, nesting priorities, blah blah blah. E. was like the aforementioned Johanna, a party animal who practiced being a dancing butterfly rather than a fly on the wall, ha ha.

He summarized to make sure that he had understood what they were angling to get from their work together. “So you guys basically are a ‘match made in heaven’ in a lot of ways—this is how y’all see things most days. But you have some differing POV’s about sex and pleasure, about other people versus a home life, and maybe about shopping and money.”

He arched his right brow with a practiced thespian glance. “Is that about right?”

They both agreed: money and sex were the main things that they wanted to navigate, better, with the help of a ‘coach.’ He nodded.

Eileen perched on the edge of the loveseat like a falcon about to plummet and pounce, or maybe more like a disco queen about to leap to her feet. Kate sat way back on her side, legs drawn up, protective and watchful.

“I’m going to talk for maybe five minutes, okay?” They both nodded; Kate also shrugged, ha ha. “All right then. The thing is, sex is scheduled maintenance,” he said. “Making love feels like a deluxe psychophysical tune-up,” a grin to finish.

“Yes, well we feel like that, I think.” Kate’s smile plastered her scowl. “But…”

“You don’t have to design yourself around this basic biology of survival, but it’s still the real story,” LJ’s practiced shtick dripped from his lips. “Two bodies,” his pause brought a slight smile, “or so,” a grin, “in the contortions of wrestlers together, trying to pleasure each other, especially genitally.”

“As to money,” switching gears, “that’s definitely a ‘different kettle of fish.’” He loved his Norwegian aphorism’s, from his intimate acquaintance with a Voodoo Viking Love Goddess.

Then this: “I’ll spend part of next session talking about how to understand ‘cash and prizes’ in a way that is not all privilege and resentment, compulsion for more, worry about destitution.” The women shifted on the sofa, exchanging a quick loaded glance.

Another minute or so introduced the notion of fetish, of objectification, of the difference between relationship and ownership, and more. He let them know that he wouldn’t be lecturing about any of these “inevitably hot button topics,” but he wanted them to have a basic vocabulary to start, and so on and so forth, “blah blah blah.”

He noticed Kathleen’s lengthy, muscular legs, apparently shaven clean or even waxed, as they unfurled to bring her torso forward to nod and give a half-smile to the universe. Eileen, meanwhile, pulled back in her seat, wrapping her bejeweled arms around her own hirsute calves and bony knees.

He said a bit more, a little abracadabra flourish, and wrapped with his standard finish line. “We all have triggers; don’t we? Well, sometimes the only way to control them, or cope with them anyhow, when and how they’re pulled, is in this sort of process.”

Now he waited. They had forty more minutes to fill in the hour and a half slot, and Lou definitely believed in the meaningful content of ‘the silent spaces’ in every interlude.

He always noted the time, to a second, that this silence endured. Very occasionally the indicator was basically ‘not at all,’ which meant problems, but probably pretty obvious ones; he suppressed a smile.

The dam burst, so to speak. “Forty-six seconds,” he wrote on his pad. In essence, a brief experience of eternity: then, Kathleen was weeping, almost howling but also obviously sheepish, blinking away tears and shaking her head like a wet terrier. Eileen was laughing, having returned to the edge of the loveseat to bounce and chortle, till her eruptions tailed off in titters.

In the discourse that ensued between the two, which was not any sort of ‘breakthrough therapeutic gem’ or even anything vaguely similar, but merely an unblocking, a release of jammed energy, that sort of thing, Lou dropped in three bits of suggestive guidance, as well as two questions when the pace faltered enough to permit hints of glib chatter.

As usual, whether miraculously, manipulatively, or otherwise, after a half hour, the tempo slowed and tapered toward quiet. Both women literally drooped, bedraggled as if they’d just had their first boxing workout with a heavy bag. Their spontaneous embrace allowed him to nod and call the session a wrap. Once again, he had high hopes that good things had begun.

Before hugging and some completely unexpected tongue from Kate, who colored crimson as if she’d shocked herself silly after, he gave them their homework, which consisted of his self-published Love & Compatibility Survey. “Your assignment,” he laughed, “is to do this together and then have sex.”

Then came the embraces, the unanticipated kiss and more or less fond farewells. “I look forward to our next session,” Eileen said as she took her lover’s hand, and, Lou was certain, though he did a double take, “she winked at me.” …(continued below the fold)

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Fetishizing the Weather

Let’s start over by repeating what began the abortive takeoff of this articulation in #25. “So the ubiquity of the story is astonishing, if one thinks about it even a little. Whatever this ubiquity implies, the idea’s 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.”’ Or, at least, so say the members of the jetset upper classes who contribute vastly more than their share to this expression of burdensome emissions.

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, that diminishing these gaseous emanations is of critical import. 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 empirical-opinion and informed-doubt notwithstanding, let’s not quibble about bullshit. Let’s stipulate, shall we? That’s always how rational people start things off.

Stipulation number one: (This and the next one are new, along with a few things elsewhere) A definite trend is undeniable. Average temperatures, for plus or minus the last half century seemingly, are rising, and still noticeable additional increases may well lie ahead.

Stipulation number two: (As above) As a consequence of hotter weather, sea levels will rise, and other profound changes will occur around the world, all of which will have dire consequences for people in many, and—if only because of our common, always now interconnected courses—likely all communities.

Stipulation number three: (All new) People are causing at least part of the current increased heat and loss of snow coverage.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, the only solutions to the problems at hand—from rising seas to hotter temperatures and lower rainfalls, on the one hand, or, if one prefers, from 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.

The emphasis on ‘only’ above is critical. Only someone who favors world war could offer evidence and reason to disagree. ‘Kill them all, and let God sort it out’ is the attendant attitude: Mass Collective Suicide, in other words.

Given that this QED is accurate—and I’d bet, a lot, that a citizen’s jury would find in favor of the proposition—the once-more only people who harp on the stipulations while studiously avoiding or even ignoring the provable implications are, almost certainly, con artists who either have a ‘protection racket’ in favor of their preferred and wholly-owned fixes to the ‘climate crisis’ or have some other kind of con-game to offer.

In the latter vein, pure extortion is always possible. A kind of ‘Advance Fee’ or ‘Bait-&-Switch’ scam could also be in play, all of which are in evidence these days in marketplaces at once commercial and political.

As noted in the Introduction, the happy fraudsters who encapsulate the notion of Climate Coups are approaching the world just now with climactic glee. As a matter of course, their merry ministrations come in the form of warnings and insistence that ‘reducing carbon’ is a key to survival.

Then again, the forefather of modern ‘climate science,’ and a true genius in the bargain, was Serbian Mulitin Milanković, who merits a substantial page on the official Tesla website as well as plenty of notice elsewhere. He helped to lay the basis for much present speculation about these things by positing what our conversations presently call Milanković cycles.

That he was Serbian bears noting, if only because the U.S. and NATO, despite copious worldwide condemnation, bombed and terrorized the nation in 1999, under Bill Clinton’s leadership. Since militarized excrescences account for a vastly higher proportion of ‘climate impacts’ than almost anything else, this experiment in mass murder and the Depleted Uranium arm of the Modern Nuclear Project might stay prominent in our thinking as today’s story encapsulates a slice of Serbian history.

Moreover, the well regarded scientist conceived significant portions of his overall ideation while he stayed in an Austro-Hungarian prison camp in Croatia at the beginning of World War One. ‘The problem of glaciers’—their rise and fall like a mysterious tide—constituted the heart of the specific issue that Milanković wanted to address.

In some way, the margins of today’s telling about this progenitor of ‘climate science’ are more interesting and evocative than the subject matter itself—Serbia, ‘Great Power’ warmongering, and NATO bombardments all rolled into one oddly compelling narrative notion. That said, this biographical and conceptual part of today’s article awaits the arrival of Below-the-Fold for its unfolding.

For right now, I have no choice but to ‘bear witness’ personally, ha ha. I’m old enough to remember, in the event, a lot more snow in my first thirty-five years than in the past two decades in particular. Some of the earlier largesse was in the Rockies, where ‘July, August, and Winter’ was an accurate statement.

A look at temperatures and snowfall for this period would likely affirm the ‘scientific consensus’ that parallels my individual observations. To reemphasize, however, we can accept that these sorts of data correspond to actual reality.

That meteorological tendencies shift—both long term cycles, which are pretty well understood, and less lengthy patterns, not so well explained—is obvious. Moreover, the conditions that happen because of these cyclical undulations instigate inescapable and substantial changes in different geographical spaces. Glaciers, a special interest of Milutin Milanković, are probably the most dramatic case in question.

As well, catastrophic geological cataclysms also alter weather patterns now and again, sometimes for such a lengthy period that the so-to-say scheduled advance or retreat of glaciation switches course. Volcanoes come to mind in this regard, if not much else.

That said, the likelihood that we in our ‘petri-dish’—an entire planet, after all, in which humans have some ability to improve sustainability and renewability—have consumed all available resources on Earth is zero. The weather won’t change that.

Still, monopoly media’s preferred message has become a relentless litany. ‘We must capture carbon before it enters the atmosphere and makes things worse.’

Also popular are tropes like these. ‘Experts agree that we’ve got to try different ways to reduce atmospheric heat-enhancers and maybe amplify atmospheric conditions that reflect or block sunlight’s source for these growing temps.’ Research is omnipresent; miraculous cures for ‘too much carbon’—instrumentation, geoengineering, and more, in the tone of a used car come-on—accompany everyday news and commentary.

Nonetheless, the query is apt indeed. ‘So what?’ The credibility of all ‘interventions’ is well-known: roughly, the reliability, even the viability, let alone the safety—of the machinations for reducing human impact via a commoditized amelioration—amounts to approximately zero.

Given time and tide, Big Tent Review will keep a series going on these matters climatological. For the remainder of this particular piece, we will be looking first at the life and work of the astonishing Serbian whom we’ve already encountered briefly above.

Second, we will examine the contention that ‘this is not normal climate change’ and see if that makes a dime’s worth of difference. Third, and finally for the inauguration of this continuing endeavor, we will give a briefing about what paleoclimatology is and what it tells us. …(continued below the fold)

Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—Yet Another M.N.P. Overview

PROLOGUE

Inevitably, perhaps, as the terran cosmos, so to speak, insists on affirming the existence and imprimatur of the Modern Nuclear Project, countless examples emanate, as if from the ether, of its omnipresent impact in modern times. While we will only mention a handful from the past few days, they are all so spectacular that they demand a place on the stage, as it were.

Just in time for today’s Iran report, Portside has provided a most provocative piece about ‘Atoms For Peace,’ Eisenhower’s public-relations program for nuclear power, which, as the article notes, provided the financing and construction support for building none other than Iran’s first experimental reactor. In an issue that expresses its theme as interconnection, this article is difficult to top.

Then again, another bolt from the blue dropped into one of my Iran searches about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear plans. This dissertation deconstructs Israel’s nuclear program as an exercise in duplicity and complicity, especially in regard to the Zionist agenda and U.S. ‘atomic energy officials,’ respectively.

The title alone is so suggestive as to be all but irresistible to the likes of This Humble Correspondent. Governing Nuclear Ambiguity at Home and Abroad combines case study and investigative analysis in its Critical Analysis of Israel’s Unique Bargain With the Bomb. It bears only a mention right this instant, since a coming article examines Israel’s achieving its thermonuclear ambitions in typical Big Tent detail.

And, of course, today is the eightieth anniversary of the test that quite literally shook the Earth. Vicki Leslie, a successful ‘influencer’ film auteur, has started a ‘nuclear film club’ through her Substack. She spoke of their first selection, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a sci-fi B-movie classic.

“And on the 80th anniversary of the first ever nuclear bomb explosion on earth—the Trinity nuclear test at Alamogordo on 16th July 1945—-it feels like a particularly pertinent choice, dealing as it does with the impacts of nuclear weapons testing. Kudos to that.

Global Research commemorated the day by reprinting Fidel Castro’s most passionate warning about thermonuclear consequences. The interview took place in 2010, as if he were predicting this juncture fifteen years later. “Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict. …(in which) the ‘collateral damage’ would be the life of all humanity.’”

George Washington University’s National Security Archive is a documentary godsend, or Goddess gift, ha ha. Today’s mail included recapitulation and key, unclassified documents—some remain “top secret,” to this day—about the first nuclear explosion at Alamagordo, New Mexico eight decades back exactly. The people at the top of the ‘chain of command’ knew generally the horrors that they were unleashing, though they were merely curious as to the precise extent and impact of this gargantuan death force.

“The test at Alamogordo confirmed that an implosion weapon could be successfully detonated for use in the war with Japan, yet it would have possibly unexpected environmental consequences that would be studied in the years ahead. The Trinity Test planners prepared for possible adverse public health effects but did not know how far radioactive debris would spread, and the biological and public health impact of low-level radiation remains a contested issue.

During the years after Trinity, researchers with the Atomic Energy Project at the Medical School of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) collected evidence to help determine whether the fallout produced a health hazard. While the studies drew no firm conclusions, a 1951 report by the Project found that there were ‘many potential long term insidious hazards from the present low level contamination which is the focal point of these studies.’”

Providing a different, in many ways deeper, expression of the Modern Nuclear Project’s primacy, the National Academy of Sciences has just issued a report and announced a heavy-hitter’s workshop about ‘new nuclear opportunities. “The recent completion of Plant Vogtle, the largest nuclear energy plant in the United States, has sparked new opportunities for building next-generation nuclear reactors to produce reliable, clean energy. However, significant barriers to nuclear deployment include technical challenges, regulatory hurdles, and investment risks that complicate decision-making timelines.

Building on recommendations from the consensus report, Laying the Foundation for New and Advanced Nuclear Reactors in the United States, this workshop aims to explore pathways for new nuclear development in the United States.”

LAST ISSUE

(Part One of this series ended with these paragraphs. “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 useable 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.’”)

TODAY’S CONTINUATION: Part Two

Novelists and scientists, visionaries and savants, the top-echelon purveyors of culture’s cornucopia, as we remember from last issue, saw precisely what was coming, if in general terms. Atomic weaponry might not be hand-thrown, as in H.G. Wells’ novel from #25, The World Set Free, but its decisive strategic value was as clear to Frederick Soddy’s author-friend as it was to Curtiss ‘nuke-em-till-they-gloy’ Lemay in his time atop the nuclear-war-command heap.

And despite all manner of propagandistic thinking that Loomis’ cyclotron steps were ‘purely’ for research purposes and that practical applications such as weaponry played no part in these men’s thinking, their own words and the context both of the times and of the types of research involved significantly contradict such naïveté. And another magnificent monument to the wills of the mighty and well-born followed its logical path to both greater capacity for power and amplified ability for mass destruction.

Not for nothing were people suspicious of science and technology as these new gadgets of mayhem began to show up on various drawing boards. Not by chance were the patrons of early nuclear research wealthy private individuals.

As Loomis fan Jennet Conant stated the matter, “In the 1930’s, raising large sums for scientific research was a daunting task, (since) during the Depression, there was limited public sympathy toward underwriting the expense of scientific knowledge. The technological advances that for so long fueled the industrial machine had manifestly failed, and the country felt not only betrayed by science, but deeply ambivalent about its impact on their lives.”

Karl Marx was in this realm as in so many others far-sighted beyond almost all other thinkers. “John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’

That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value.“

Though steam was the prime mover of machinery when Capital was first complete, Marx foresaw the critical role that electricity would play. “Once discovered, the law of the deviation of the magnetic needle in the field of an electric current, or the law of the magnetisation of iron, around which an electric current circulates, cost never a penny. But the exploitation of these laws for the purposes of telegraphy, &c., necessitates a costly and extensive apparatus.

The tool, as we have seen, is not exterminated by the machine. From being a dwarf implement of the human organism, it expands and multiplies into the implement of a mechanism created by man. Capital now sets the labourer to work, not with a manual tool, but with a machine which itself handles the tools.

Although, therefore, it is clear at the first glance that, by incorporating both stupendous physical forces, and the natural sciences, with the process of production, modern industry raises the productiveness of labour to an extraordinary degree, it is by no means equally clear, that this increased productive force is not, on the other hand, purchased by an increased expenditure of labour.”

Leaving aside all questions of plausible mass extinction, of hideous swaths of disease and disability as a result of radiation, the immense empowerment of capital vis a vis labor that results from the Modern Nuclear Project would seemingly set up an antagonism between labor generally and nuclear mechanisms. At least, if Marx’s ideation is logical, such an opposition would inhere in the nature of the relation at its inception.

“When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses.

History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated for a long time on 2½ d. a day. On the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India. The Governor General reported 1834-35:

‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’

No doubt, in turning them out of this ‘temporal’ world, the machinery caused them no more than ‘a temporary inconvenience.’ For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent.

Hence, the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism. Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour.”

At the same time, among those workers, often technically trained in the military or who possess four-year engineering degrees from accredited universities, who directly operate nuclear power plants, or construct them, or work at many of the phases of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, such a revolt or uprising against these massive and overwhelmingly powerful mechanisms is nowhere in evidence. Harry Braverman provides a framework() for understanding such a lack of protest among those who have the closest connection with the Modern Nuclear Project.

Those with higher skills—those who displaced craftsmen and designed the instruments that replaced their tools—commanded significantly higher incomes. They often formed a pool from which occasionally emerged those who would rise into the upper levels of society.

Smart moves in marriage and the marketplace did permit such occurrences, even if they were rare. But one requisite of such ‘opportunity’ was a slavish commitment to whatever ‘project’ capital presented, no matter its problematic or even seemingly self-destructive nature. In such an arena, no wonder nukes did not engender much doubt, let alone outright opposition.

The ‘miracle’ of the American Century is in fact, at least in some sense, the rise of the scientific and technical trades, which Braverman points out expanded almost in exact proportion as janitorial occupations grew larger. Both fields consisted of plus-or-minus 50,000 employees in 1900; both comprised one and a quarter million or more jobs by 1960 or so.

Clearly, the hosannas due to the U.S. colossus must accept janitors along with lab nerds and pocket-protected nuclear engineers. Labor & Monopoly Capital evokes the analysis that places both of these social phenomena in the context of an overall political-economic and sociopolitical process, the coming of monopolized markets and monetized business’ more or less total control over every aspect of social and economic existence.

The rise of science itself occurred in response to this mandate of a depleted ‘industrial revolution,’ which could only revitalize and overcome such eventualities as the Depression of 1893 with the potent boost to production and enlargement of market’s penetration of existence that scientific knowledge seemed to promise. Braverman points out that Germany for more than half-a-century paved the way for the Anglo-American juggernaut in this regard.

“The story of the incorporation of science into the capitalist firm properly begins in Germany. The early symbiosis between science and industry which was developed by the capitalist class in that country proved to be one of the most important facts of world history in the twentieth century, furnished the capability for two world wars, and offered to other capitalist nations an example which they learned to emulate only when they were forced to do so many decades later. The role of science in German industry was the product of the weakness of German capitalism in its initial stages, together with the advanced state of German theoretical science.”

In the shadow of these transformations, Germans led laboratories in England and the United States, even in France, from the late nineteenth century onward. Moreover, only the vicious Aryan supremacist thinking of Nazism drove thousands of highly skilled technicians and thinkers from Germany and Europe into the research centers of Great Britain and America in the 1930’s.

In essence, fascism forced the Modern Nuclear Project to come to fruition across the English Channel and the Atlantic, despite the fact that Rockefeller funding was literally worldwide() in its scope, and many of the breakthroughs that seeded Lawrence and Compton and Bush, at MIT and Berkeley and Harvard emanated from German scientists and their close allies whose most gifted researchers were often Jewish or socialist or both, or worse, even redder in their political leanings.

The drive to mechanize predated this eruption of science, of course. Braverman summarizes Marx’s method in seeking the socioeconomic underpinnings of this longstanding process. “This initial step, removing the tool from the hand of the worker and fitting it into a mechanism, is for Marx the starting point of that evolution which begins with simple machinery and continues to the automatic system of machinery.

Like all starting points for Marx, it is not fortuitous. Marx selects from among a host of technical characteristics the specific feature which forms the juncture between humanity and the machine: its effect upon the labor process. The technical is never considered purely in its internal relations, but in relation to the worker.”

Braverman contrasts this approach with more technocratic thinking. “In engineering literature, by contrast, the worker tends to disappear, which accounts for the fact that this literature is written almost entirely in the awkward grammar of the passive voice, in which operations seem to perform themselves, without human agency.”

Science, and especially the delving of the electromagnetic spectrum, clearly accelerated and intensified mechanistic potential. “The study and understanding of nature has, as its primary manifestation in human civilization, the increasing control by humans over labor processes by means of machines and machine systems.”

But for Braverman the critical point is where control resides, and how this control expresses itself. He elegantly displays the political content of the social development of advanced machines and their electrical, chemical, and even atomic accompaniments.

“But the control of humans over the labor process, thus far understood, is nothing more than an abstraction(which)must acquire concrete form in the social setting in which the machinery is being developed. And this social setting is, and has been from the beginning of the development of machinery in its modern forms, one in which humanity is sharply divided, and nowhere more sharply divided than in the labor process itself.

The mass of humanity is subjected to the labor process for the purposes of those who control it rather than for any general purposes of ‘humanity’ as such. In thus acquiring concrete from, the control of humans over the labor process turns into its opposite and becomes the control of the labor process over the mass of humans.

Machinery comes into the world not as the servant of ‘humanity,’ but as the instrument of those to whom the accumulation of capital gives the ownership of the machines. The capacity of humans to control the labor process through machinery is seized upon by management from the beginning of capitalism as the prime means whereby production may be controlled not by the direct producer but by the owners and representatives of capital.”

While science as a whole is in play as this managerial mechanization of total control occurs, and every aspect of existence comes under the scientific scrutiny of technicians and empirical programmers, one would be hard-pressed to discern a more perfect fit for the needs of capital for ideal techniques and technologies than what results from the Modern Nuclear Project. Inherent centralization, untouchable basic operations, necessarily total policing, and many more characteristics of H-bombs and atomic water heaters attune these particular mechanisms to the imprimatur of owners and their managerial minions.

These affinities become exceedingly noteworthy in an environment where otherwise the attributes of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle begin to approximate a Nuclear Fool Cycle. No matter the apparent irrationality, even insanity, of ecocidal wastes, of irreversible possibilities for mass collective suicide, and the complete evisceration of liberal fantasies of any sort whatsoever, the perfect fit of fission and capital’s monopoly frisson means that every Chernobyl will elicit a renaissance, every Fukushima a new reactor design, and so forth.

Herbert Marcuse foresaw such madness, all dressed up as the most reasonable rationalizations imaginable, in his brilliant but difficult monograph, One Dimensional Man. “(A) totalitarian administration may promote the efficient exploitation of resources; the nuclear-military establishment may provide millions of jobs through enormous purchasing power; toil and ulcers may be the by-product of the acquisition of wealth and responsibility; deadly blunders and crimes on the part of leaders may be merely the way of life.

One is willing to admit economic and political madness—and one buys it. But this sort of knowledge of ‘the other side’ is part and parcel of the solidification of the state of affairs, of the grand unification of opposites which counteracts qualitative change, because it pertains to a thoroughly hopeless or thoroughly preconditioned existence that has made its home in a world where even the irrational is Reason.”

In terms of the socioeconomic, and technocratic, justifications for embracing atomic energy, just as Marcuse suggests, authoritative backers have touted both its efficiency and necessity—and blithely shrugged off its murderous meltdowns and apocalyptic games of ‘chicken’—in relation to human society’s reliance on external sources of power. In various ways, a political-economic assessment, like what we’ve been attempting here, of this kind of point of view must make the perspective seem, if not solipsistic in its self-interested clamor for more for those who own most everything to begin with, at least dubious as a rational analysis of the deep rationale that underpin such strategic social choices.

In so ordering our thinking as to assume a critical stance about these seemingly rooted tendencies, we would conceivably lay a foundation for elevating justice or equity or even equality over the absolute tyranny of the fastest, most powerful mechanism. And that of course would be a dangerous subversion indeed, from the point of view of capital and its firmly gripped imperial imprimatur.

An adjunct to this unshakeable commitment to the role of technique in capital’s development under increasingly plutocratic conditions, a way out for some social actors who shudder at the idea of actually confronting bourgeois hegemony, is a variation on the idea that ‘the rich are always with us,’ and ‘of course great wealth will determine the course that society takes in its development.’ While such a conception concedes a key aspect of this report’s argument about the Modern Nuclear Project, that finance and its imperial imprimatur have been the guiding force in this arena, the observation trivializes the investigation that comes to pass.

After all, that great wealth and power guide social development goes without saying. Therefore, the only pragmatic rejoinder is to manage a set of relationships in which common people have some expectation of a place or a prospect in regard to this inevitable hegemony of plunder and plutocracy—or however else one chooses to label inherited right and privilege to guide the course of society.

Among the core difficulties with such a conceptualization, one might consider at least the following several points. Many more might be plausible to reveal in a fuller recounting, but these few show the serious shortcomings of a proto-‘Biblical’ view of Midas-worshipping billionaire magnates.

In the first place, such an outlook basically rejects the potential for social transformation. While a description of any physical process as changeless is absurd, apparently some thinkers fail to examine social matters with the same logical rigor and empirical common-sense that they would see as obvious in more routine natural settings.

Such assumptions are not only likely dangerous because they may preclude positive adjustments of human difficulties but also plausibly lethal because they force human beings who must reflect the realities in which revolutionary change is a given to consider tools at their command—such as hydrogen bombs—to effect these potentialities when stringent political reaction makes no other recourse seem possible.

A second reason that believing in something like the Modern Nuclear Project just because rich people do is at best risky revolves around either a polar opposite or an at least more pluralistic set of ideas about how human social relations have heretofore actually come to pass. Certainly, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and George Soros and other wealthy trust-funded aficionados of nukes might nod in agreement with Ralph Nader’s only half-in-jest screed, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, but either the world might more objectively emanate from those who “plowed the prairies, and built the cities where they trade, dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid,” or humanity’s social substance conceivably has resulted from complex contrariety, dances of wonder and woe among multiple participants. In either case, just to shrug that the scions of lucre must have their way could miss out on real social possibilities.

Finally, for now in any event, to accede to such an all-too-seductive bowing to the powers-that-be ineluctably denies that reality is knowable, that science even exists, that consciousness is something that can evolve. And of course, any or all of these propositions might be true: perhaps reality is not even vaguely comprehensible; science may be a pretense; consciousness may represent nothing except an endless repetitive loop of a single set of ideas that we propound in slightly varied fashion.

But one needn’t choose such a fatalistic worldview. Both because it is more exciting and because it is possibly vastly more empowering, one can proceed as if understanding, systematic knowledge, and consciousness are a responsibility of the human condition, especially when these objectives concern something as important and otherwise inaccessible as the Modern Nuclear Project.

Scientific Justifications & Criticisms of Mandated Politics

One basis for doubting that such an optimistic template might ever work out is that those who purport to have the greatest understanding, the most rigorously-tested and carefully-organized objectivity, and the clearest concept of manifesting a ‘helping’ attitude toward the rest of humanity—in other words, scientists of one stripe or another—have so firmly bought into the Modern Nuclear Project for the most part. Among engineers and techies and those who can perform regression analysis, for example, probably the largest proportion support a nuclear future, whereas among the rest of the common herd, more oppose such scenarios.

Perhaps one of the clearest spokesmen for these ways of thinking about these matters is Vannevar Bush(), though his colleagues from M.I.T., Harvard, the Carnegie Foundation, and corporate America could also join the queue for the title of nuclear ‘flack-in-chief.’ Certainly, that he led the Manhattan Project from start to finish makes him especially apt as a nuclear and technological cheerleader.

Bush’s lengthy essay, Science: the Endless Frontier, in any case remains a key component for any citizen’s useful summation of the present pass() that conjoins technology, government, monopoly business and finance, and the intelligentsia. …(continued below the fold)

Last Words For Now

In much the same way that I stated two issues back, “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, determining 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.

Another ‘lovely thought’ has come along in this regard. It occurred to me while I played with my soccer ball and gushed a couple of quarts of sweat. “The divine and elegant, truly impeccable, ordering of All-That-Is, in just this instant of awareness, allows us to see the threads of Its yarn as simply a random array, at the same time that It calls us to try to discern the holy pattern of Life Force Energy more wholly so as to better our own chances as well as to buttress the fortunes of kith and kin hither and yon.”

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 indeed. 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)…

accompany such a pluck. The Present Passage followed up with the ineffable mystery and irresistible allure of the Queen of Cups. The capstone came like a thunderclap in the form of a prospective Future over which Hades has primacy with the insistence of everyone’s most thrilling pull, the card of Death.

These three random selections illuminate Tarot’s allure and mystery. How can such a perfect portent of what one intuits is true about things show up without the slightest intention other than an openness to whatever the Goddess gives? That’s arguably, and obviously, unanswerable, yet the ‘tale of the tape’ is hard to rebut.

Both as image and interpretation, Zeus’ card as yesteryear looks hard to top. The power of the lightning bolt, the throne of rule, the eagle’s insight, the crown’s command—all are suggestive as surface representation of atomic energy in all its perilous promise of profit. The seat of power, the potency of imperial imprimatur, the domineering predominance of this mix of knowledge and regency, all of these clearly circumscribe the ‘evolution of nuclear physics and engineering’ out of more or less well-known past circumstances.

And voila, what now, my pretties? Helen’s embodiment of the Divine Feminine’s unfathomable depths and indeterminate paradoxes, along with her concomitant commitment to love and passion regardless of those truths, explicitly circumscribes much of the experience and all of the duty of a Life-Force-Energy proponent in the current context. It’s enough to induce chills of simultaneous recognition and denial.

And so. What else could we expect? Out of these explosive bolts, which our bundling of Gaia’s bounty bolsters, come both electricity and incineration, and at once also toxicity and temptation. In relation to the Modern Nuclear Project, this clear definition right this moment of a harsh order of battle can only imply a series of tomorrows in which one way or another, in complete alignment with Hades’ predilections and prognostications, something must give way, it must end, it must cease and desist; none of which, by the way, precludes termination of even the most terminal sort.

Stated most baldly, a good summary might go like this. ‘Original imperial thermonuclear paradoxes give common people little choice but to love and collaborate to effect a non-lethal future, which extinguishing eventualities might nevertheless be looming just ahead unless we can find a mete measure of humanity in common to dismantle the demonic forces that we have learned to unleash.’

So saying, we’ll now repeat the Spiral Spread question and pluck from above-the-fold. “Today’s question, then, comes to the fore in this fashion. ‘What insight and guidance might we who believe in Life Force Energy and the Golden Rule gain from a Spiral Spread inquiry about the current Murder Games and their risks of the Brink of Extinction so as to gain imperial advantage?’

In the event, the array duly appeared in the standard fashion of shuffle and reflect and pluck. The Essence starts off with the optimistic potential for cognition in even the most horrific circumstances, with the Ten of Swords. The Temporal Triad starts with the intrepid Page of Wands as Past, plops down the horrifically apt Three of Swords for our Present passage, and delivers the equally plausible Eight of Swords to suggest likely Future prospects.

Then, another downer card, the Four of Cups, drops on the table. The Devil, with all its evocative emanations of ‘being human,’ defines the Problems & Prospects slot. Finally, a thematic crescendo, the pointed peril of the Two of Swords culminates a Synthesis of the entire sequence.”

Let’s talk about this one then. #27’s prior discussion, which finished with Hades’ hellish hallelujah, certainly fits all-too-neatly with ‘Murder Games on the Brink of Extinction.’ Does it not?

Considered most optimistically, the best possible outcome of such machinations of the high and mighty would promote protocols in which people brought a collective, clever cognitive capacity to bear on the issue of human survival amid H-bombs’ central spot on modern power’s plate, so to say. In this vein, Athena’s wiles and wit in the Ten of Swords, in which she saves Orestes by impaneling creation’s first jury, is certainly a sublime ideal.

The then-now-later spots, meanwhile, seem altogether spooky in their applicability. Phrixus, the intrepid Page atop the ram that became Jason’s golden-fleece, represents a surge of creativity and a willingness to explore new options with strange helpmates. The film, Oppenheimer, whatever its flaws, brilliantly depicted just this type scenario of intermixed power-games and nerdy idealism, of technology and passion, at the dawn of our ‘uraneous’ age.

Then, to express our day-to-day today, the ether yields up the grotesque bursting of the puss and tension of inherently conflicted scenarios that shows up in the Three in the Goddess’ most pointed suit, Swords, as if Gaza and Tehran and all the murderous dancing of bomber fleets and drone attacks and missile barrages—not to mention Ukraine—make unavoidable the social upheaval that is appearing on the streets of leading cities under King Capital’s oppressive, direct purview.

Tomorrows and their days after, meanwhile, call forth the third pluck from this suit of cognition and contrariness, in this instance the Eight of Swords, another difficult transit for young Orestes, caught on the horns of a dilemma fiercer than almost anyone else will ever have to face. Its prognosis, feeling incapable of acting because every direction that one might take can be costly or fatal or both, feels like ‘making up in a mirror’ for an ongoing theatrical production. In any case, such future predictions in a ‘murder-game’s’ dynamics certainly appear to suggest plausible developments.

As for spot number five, No-Matter-What, Opportunities, the Four of Cups has the decided aroma of rot and duplicity, of jealousy and greed, that attend Psyche’s sisters as they seek to poison their sibling’s feeling for a husband who will only meet her ‘in the dark.’ Mediated suspicions of vaguely sinister ‘enemies’ from Iran to China, from Cuba to Moscow, are like the counsel of the ‘jealous sorority’ that afflicts the heroine of this Suit of love and relationship.

As in geopolitical spheres, so too in our realm of seeking to figure things out, this card might highlight “all our mean and petty suspicions and doubts of others, (which) form the seeds of all betrayals.” Thus, “(t)here is a feeling of being let down or cheated, although the one who does the cheating is usually oneself because of one’s unreal expectations.

This dissatisfaction can lead to longstanding, unexpressed resentment, or it can lead to looking more deeply at the relationship, a harder path because previous assumptions and fantasies will then be challenged.” Mythic Tarot’s guidance continues, very evocative indeed.

“Thus, the Four of Cups, the card of discontented feelings and emotional dissatisfaction for no apparent reason, is both negative and positive. It portrays all our mean and petty suspicions and doubts of others; this forms the seed of all betrayals. Yet it also portrays a mysterious intelligent force at work within the individual, which somehow knows there is further to travel.”

Such an under-all-circumstances gift might not be first on our list of requests, but just this ‘hard row to hoe’ may be essential to our surviving the thermonuclear murder games ongoing just now. The Problems & Prospects conjunction at that point delivers none other than Dionysus, the goat-horned symbol of which we make a culturally satanic expression of The Devil.

Not an interpretation of evil, however, but of humanity comes forth to guide us here, an assertion that while we project our own sinister motives and worries onto others, we may only find something calm and sublime and hopeful, not to mention helpful, by accepting that such concatenated psychic and moral and ever political spectacles—whether they unfold inside or explode on a wider stage—are merely an aspect of embodiment’s delicate miracle, which we must manage or perish.

To offer a Synthesis as true capstone, the cosmos lays down another from Athena’s suit of cognition and conflict, in this case the Two of Swords, the nauseating stab of which specifically forebodes the Eight in the suit that portends our future potential and such as that, blah blah blah. As with that later stage of Orestes journey, here he also loathes the thought of coming conflict.

So much is this so that, although he could well take sides, or choose one option, instead he tries to balance the competing demands of reality when the tension among the possibilities is unavoidable, so that only by taking a stand could one ameliorate a worsening of the outbreak of conflict that must come in due course, come what may. This points to another one of those eerie Tantric Tarot congruencies: just such a psychic state as this appears in many people’s daily lives.

Or so I would wager. The preferred option at all social gatherings—we don’t talk about the sensitive things, like Israel, Ukraine, migration, or COVID, for example—is for discourse about shopping, travel, church, or food. A variant of avoiding choosing sides, whistling past the graveyard, is just this sort of trivializing of conversation by refusing to engage with trying to figure things out and substituting ‘chat’ in its place.

Anyhow, here we can again start with, “in other words.” The Goddess’ promise in such a Mantic Art as this, Food-For-Thought, appears as quite a feast here, at least if we want tasty and nutritious ideas to consider as we ponder “Murder Games & the Brink of Extinction.”

‘Both given and in spite of the murderous machinations of the lives that we lead together here on Mother Earth, only clearheaded, calm, and honest human ingenuity can sustain a future that is other than catastrophic. That’s the Essence.’

‘Past evolution of these killing concatenations has emerged from “the best intentions,” ha ha, and with plenty of creativity in developing and selling the importance and even necessity of all these murderous modalities, as it were, which has, whether unfortunately or inescapably, led to a Present Pass where the core of the current crisis is erupting in hideous and insidious ways at once, the result of truly irrepressible conflicts’

‘The Future could readily look like a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum, where nevertheless, one sort of damnation or another must remain inevitable unless we put on our thinking caps and use our heads for something other than hatracks. Ha ha.’

‘Whatever happens, however, we can process that which is bitter and vituperative and violent in the gaming of mass-homicide so as to examine our doubts and suspicious judiciously and recognize potential for growth and transformation, negotiation and compromise, despite the ill-temper that these monstrous ministrations of martial might well always induce. Such processes will ever be accessible if we open our eyes.’

‘In seeking appropriate Life-Force-Energy and Golden-Ruled responses to planned imposition of war and terror, our Problems & Prospects will likely revolve around a recognition of a common humanity that is forbearing with and helpful to ourselves and others, if for no other reason that we’re all only human.’

‘Finally, a Synthesis of this attempt to read the cosmos in the cards will insist that we admit the absolute necessity of present polarized opposition and find a way to make things right—even if we must choose sides—in relation to that unavoidable contention about unfairness, injustice, imbalance, and gangland rules, among other things.’

This question is difficult indeed to answer with even a somewhat simple single sentence. This is the complex core of modern life, the way that empire pits people against each other in ways that are vicious and venal always, and stupid, on top of that, for all concerned save the profiteers and potentates, the banksters and the politicians.

Such an intellectual repast as this ought to be an everyday occurrence in one way and another. The Big Tent belief is clear: we all ought to pay more attention and persist in daily discussion and discovery about these sorts of matters, of life and death and empire.

All God’s Cousins—(continued)…

in the weeks before her seventeenth birthday, almost four months from their initial introduction, since “he was on the shy side, to say the least.” In fact, “he was nervous as hell around me. Word had gotten around that anyone who fucked over Tommy John's sister would face” the lethal young man's unleashed fury. “Finally, though, when we were both back in San Antonio,” where his family owned a prominent rug business that he was going to join as “top accountant, I got him to help me with the algebra course upgrade the school let me try after I almost got a 'C' second semester.” She chuckled about it all when she finally was able to “tell mom everything. Basically, it was really easy after I got him all alone and in helping mode.”

Their affair, the stuff of TLC legend in her telling, “was definitely gonna end at the altar. We truly, honest-to-God, loved each other.” However, because of Kassy's vituperative attitude toward weddings before cap and gown ceremonies, “we decided to wait till after I graduated, a year behind him.” As well, to be real about what was happening on campus at Texas Lutheran, Kate's central role on the school's national championship girl's volleyball team was another good motive to stay, “at the exact same time, no less, when my brother was the star” of the school's second national small college football crown.

Quite plausibly en route to another shot at the volleyball laurels, “we saw each other whenever we could that first semester of senior year,” after Hector had gotten not even a nibble from the N.B.A. scouts and had washed out of every free agent tryout that he'd tried. “He was committed, as in fanatical,” about making a play for the big leagues from Mexico's less than twenty-year-old experiment in professional basketball. “When I saw him for a few hours one time at the beginning of December that year, we weren't as cautious as we usually were about birth control, meaning that we couldn't be bothered to go buy rubbers when we only had maybe two or three hours together,” so that “when I missed my period right before Christmas, I thought we were fucked for sure.”

Neither of them would even consider an abortion, and “he said he'd kill himself if I had the baby 'out of wedlock,'” so Kate quit school just a few months before receiving her diploma, scuppering TLC's chances for a second repeat championship, and risking “hell and high water with my mother for all eternity as far as I knew.” When miscarriage or false pregnancy or whatever was really going on revealed that she needn't have acted so precipitously, “it was a little late for second thoughts.” And besides, “we were on tour with the recently inaugurated Las Aguilas de Nogales by then, and it was just way too much fun to back out of anyway.”

In Mexico, the team excelled for the first time in three years of franchise history, “what with their 'centro gigante,' which is how the local radio talked about him.” This made her laugh, since “at six seven, he was only middling tall enough to play forward in the U.S., and the only NBA camp he lasted more than a couple sessions with was trying him out as a guard.”

“Mexican basketball had only been around since the early sixties, I think, and winning was the only way to survive. An average of two teams a year just disappeared, especially if their home city was just an overgrown cowtown like Nogales,” surrounded by arid mountains full of tiny marijuana farms and slightly larger cattle herds, where for some reason “just about everybody loved basketball, of all things.” The Eagles schedule was brutal. “We played ninety games in under six months, and then playoffs.”

What became clear before Hector's second full season ended was that he didn't have the knees or the back for pro ball. “But that first complete schedule? We still had hopes. I'd give him massages and then we'd make love most of the night.” Kate chuckled to her sister Patricia, before the elder sibling cried T.M.I. and cut off such intimate intimations, “believe me, he still had a spring in his step then.” And his work ethic, his dedication to teamwork, his not blindingly fast but utterly relentless play of the game, were “second to none, according to Kate. That was the one way that Hector was like T.J., in that unswerving enthusiasm for doing his best.”

On the domestic front, back in San Antonio, where the household patter was “probably sixty-forty Spanish to English,” Hector's status in his clan differed from Kate's in hers. Their families were in many ways polar opposites, though they shared the Catholic faith and a belief in education at all costs.

Moreover, they also both started out with two boys, though Ignacio, Hector's first-born sibling, was “a total hard charger, just like T.J., while Hector was much more like Louis, more introspective and a little bit shy.” Three girls had rounded out the Gonzales gaggle of little ones, similarly as Patricia and Kate were the final installments of the 'James Gang,' but these superficial similarities stacked up against massive divergency on other fronts.

A 'traditional' housewife, Lolita Gonzales, nee Montoya, “ran the household with a steady grip but didn't say much.” In that way, of course, “she was just about the exact opposite of Kassy James, nee Fox.” Ignacio Gonzales senior, meanwhile, was a good-looking and sociable pillar of Bexar County's Mexican business community, “who whatever else he was, was also really, really discreet,” so that “their family tragedies were all hidden behind closed doors,” again about as far afield from Kassy and Papa Tom James, “except in the looks department,” as one can imagine.

Kate immediately grokked and adhered, “with total enthusiasm, to a normal family,” loyal and fun-loving and stable, “at least so far as I could see on the surface of everything. I'd been hungry for that essentially forever, more or less like all four of us in the James gang were in our different ways.” In Hector, she saw a “talented, beautiful, sweeter-than-honey, and diligent guy” who would stand by her through thick and thin, even as she had already had begun to experience brief interludes of the “moody swings” that she had witnessed in Kassy during daughter's two decades.

Hector's gifts rested on a steady and basically decent personality. “He was plenty smart whenever he got around to thinking things through, and his heart was never anything other than a hundred percent pure.” Nevertheless, his modest aims “not even for one single second went beyond hoping to play professional basketball and serve in the realm of familial endeavor as a second fiddle to Ignacio, Junior, “who was a certifiable expert in undermining his 'little' brother's confidence, which under the best of circumstances couldn't ever fill even half of his six and a half feet.”

In the 1977-78 season that they spent “more or less half our time in busses and ancient, slow, and scary airplanes,” the youngest James child knew “without even a little doubt that Hector's burning desire for me just filled me up with a burning desire for him.” She also saw clearly that “my sweet stallion of a husband wanted more than almost anything else to have just a single shot at a National Basketball Association career.” Ignacio II, back stateside, was acting as his brother's agent. Kate “sent him every clipping, everything I could find that talked about “la sensacion de Tejas,” even though she “never trusted 'Iggy' as far as I could throw him left-handed.”

Whatever the case may have been, Kate's own ambition was indisputable and ineluctable. “I wanted to be rich. Anything else was second best. Hell, we were National Champions in volleyball, I figured I was as smart and pretty and deserving as anybody else on God's green earth, my husband's family had money and a decent business, why shouldn't we end up millionaires?”

On January 15^th, 1978, Las Aguilas guaranteed themselves first seed in the Western Division playoffs “that were still almost two months off.” Kate recalled much later, with a little blush, “we partied long and hard that night, not fifteen miles from San Diego, and I french-kissed that little guard from Guatemala, the first time I'd had another man's tongue in my mouth in over three years. I was, however, more than a little drunk, and Hector, bless his heart, never held it against me for a second.”

Nogales' date in the Federal District was “basically only a day away from when we turned out the lights on group festivities” the morning of the sixteenth. “After I'd smooched little Jorge, though, Hector was wild for me when we got back to our room. We must have done it four times before we collapsed around noon.”

By that time, the team had already departed for Mexico City on the circa 1945 military transport plane that management had chartered for the season. “The upshot was grim. Hector and I had to pay almost five hundred dollars, one twelfth of his annual salary, minus bonuses for the playoffs and all, to catch a commercial flight, Aeromexico, from Tijuana to the capitol.”

After the fact, the arcs of life and loving in that brief span “felt like a fulcrum around which all our lives turned.” Kate contended that she “knew when we lifted off next to the border that I was pregnant for real, this time, not another 'false alarm' like at TLC,” which had sent them off on this “wild goose chase for fame and fortune” in the first place.

“That meant that I was less than three months along when the Nogales Eagles fell from their sky of dreams in the semi-final round. The last shot by Mexico City Federales' pesky little forward” was a three pointer that was the final blow against Las Aguilas, whose twelve point lead “with only four minutes left had just evaporated when Hector went down with his first knee injury” from the close, “and illegal as hell,” checking that he faced from Federales players inside the paint.

Hector's best quality as a player and a lover, anticipation, had anyhow already served him well. He hadn't been nearly as forward about his hunger for his gorgeous wife since the marathon love-fest in Tijuana in January. “He somehow also knew I was preggers, even before I bought the test-kit to make sure.”

“I was never one of those gals,” Kate would later confide to Kassy, “who wanted to screw more after I was knocked up. I got sick, but I still wanted to eat just about everything. After she had pushed little Aaron out, however, “almost ten pounds of bitty baby,” two weeks and a day before the Eagles second season was set to start at the beginning of October, “whew boy, it wasn't long before I couldn't get enough loving. Lactation on average might reduce longing, “but not with me, no-sirree. I was hot to trot, more or less twenty-four/seven.”

Nevertheless, even though the decision would at a minimum attenuate their physical availability to each other, they elected to “give Nogales a year more, one more shot at a championship, even though I couldn't be their mascot this time, what with shitty diapers and constant howling for titty by my bouncing boy.” She didn't articulate much about her feelings at that juncture, though she did admit to her Mom that this period “was when I could no longer deny that I was manic-depressive, or bipolar or whatever you want to call it.”

“Frankly, I just looked forward to the likelihood that Hector would come back to his thriving rug business and make us enough of a fortune to buy a big old slice of American pie.” Ignacio, “possibly because he fancied me, but, hell, we only flirted,” was uncharacteristically decent, financing, “with an America's Pass, or AmeriPass,” a weekly Pan-Am flight from Mexico “so that I wouldn't go stark raving crazy with lust” and the loss of consortium that attended professional athletes' marriages.

Luckily enough, Kate's confidence and beastliness often enough won out over her frequency-shift mood swings. “We were fine young animals, me and Hector and Aaron too.”

She missed Kassy. “I had so many questions about how to be a happy lunatic, like Mom was more often than not,” not to mention what she needed to know about lithium and other 'medicines,' their curses and benefits, “the stuff that none of the doctors ever mentioned, even though it was there, in the fine print. I sure as hell wasn't going to swallow anything on a regular basis that was going to make me fat.”

After “mom got in touch again, thank God!” Kate notes, she came to believe “Mom'll see; I'll show her,” nursing her “glorious young god of a son,” laughing through her tears. In the event, the first thing that Kassy said when she first laid eyes on little Aaron, a month before Las Aguilas de Nogales washed out of the playoffs “in the first fucking round,” much to Kate’s and Hector’s fiscal chagrin, Kate's mother greeted her first grandchild, courtesy of her youngest daughter, in a fashion that completely confirmed Kate's prediction.

“Mom, like, burst into tears and practically shouted, 'oh he looks just like me.'” *****

Wood Words Essays—(continued)…

“Technique, Or Any Standardized Formulation of Technical Acuity, Establishes One Pillar of Homo Sapiens Predominance, Which Originated When Crafty Ancestors Shared Methods That Yielded Multiple Craft Traditions, Almost All of Which Now Mainly Exist Just As Engineering Norms That, Embedded in Ubiquitous Commodified Cornucopias, Hide the Knowledge & Ability That Forebears Once Possessed & Practiced to Permit Cultural & Social Viability, Altogether a Present Pass of Plenty & Convenience, at Once Cheap & Profitable, That Could Prove Problematic, Inconvenient Indeed, Should a Context Ever Reappear That Valued Capacity & Skill & Knowledge Above the Expensive Privilege of Shopping For Bargains.”

Typing these words again, which I hadn’t examined in a while, gives me chill bumps. As I like to say, ‘it’s a thought,’ in the form of an advising sentence that might be worth more than a mere glance.

A bit lighter ‘philosophical fare’ also emerges here. “What Goes Up” states a case, in the event.

“Even When the Most Phenomenal Epic’s Soaring Arc Through Things For a Time Manifests Only a Steady Upward Trajectory, Eventually That Spectacle of Ascent Returns Matters—Even When the Tale Itself Delineates the Most Heroic Sojourn Imaginable—to a Narrative Environment’s Background Energy Levels, a Plausible Corollary of Which Observation Might Be That, in Such a Context, Every Happening, & Every Human, Reveals Pertinent, Pulsing, Personal Histories the Twists & Turns & Ups & Downs of Which Concatenate Every Moment in Existence’s Unfolding, Ever-Shifting Evolution.”

Complicated and yet obvious, perhaps it ‘goes without saying,’ alas. Nevertheless, now that’s it’s said, and en route to being done, maybe it merits at least a nod and a smile, ha ha. As with this next in the queue, “Divine Inspiration,” we may want to provide welcome to all unexpected presents, as it were.

“When, As Part of Gaia’s Gracious Generosity, Unanticipated Fellow Travelers Grant Us Necessary Useful Gifts, We Must Celebrate Such Selfless Sharing & in Turn Give Their Profferals a Palpable Form For Others to See; When in Addition a Particular Generous Contributing Pair—Lovers & Comrades & Partners—Give Such a Sweet Confabulation, One Is Almost Duty-Bound to Frame Such a Happenstantially Beneficent Exchange As a Call Again to State Clearly Eros’ Divine Inspiration of All-That-Is.”

That little message has, even with Marshall Arts immutably mysterious measuring stick, a bizarre background indeed. As I was beginning to burn the words, a couple approached the Feral-Nerd-Performance-Space where I toiled.

Enchanted, and both of them erstwhile artists, they begged me to let them take a stab at illustrating the wording with their own imagery. I could only say, ‘yes,’ and voila, the rest of the text followed apace.

Not so the next item, ‘manufactured driftwood’ from Michael’s discount bin. It states a second, very lengthy installment of one of my personal favorites among the tsunamis of ideas on the wood. “Suppressed & Wasted Possibility” is the title in this instance.

“Beginning With Every Human Life’s Laborious Outset, a Grave Awaits As a Certain Setting For Everyone’s Swan Song Final Scene; Despite This Destined Dance Toward Doom, Anyone May Grasp the Psychic, Private Grace For a Joyous & Jubilant Inner Being, Whereas Socially, Unless One Freakishly Favors Mass Enervation & Immiseration, One Must Fiercely Foster & Relentlessly Demand the Comprehensive Social Equality on Which Hangs Everyone’s Having Prospects For Essentially Equivalent Chances to Attain Prosperous & Healthy Longevity: Thus Even Today People Everywhere May Embody Personal Happy Aplomb, While in Contrast, & Most Especially So in the ‘Land of the Free,’ Only Those Born to Princely Privilege Or Royal Riches Stand Much of a Chance Either to Achieve the Vaunted ‘Dream’ of ‘Middle-Class’ Comfort Or to Avoid an Early Funeral, Similarly As Primarily Plutocratic Progeny Have More Than Minuscule Likelihood of Ever Garnering the Wealth & Resources Necessary For All Individual Actors to Accomplish Even a Significant Fraction of Their Potential, Altogether a Context of Suppressed & Wasted Possibility That, If It Continues, Will Climax in Humankind’s Everlasting Elimination.”

Another sentence with countless clauses comes along, as bursting with terms as many a book’s average page, ha ha. Does it bear repeating? That’s according to taste, obviously, for which no account ledger will every serve as universal standard. Still, in Big Tent terms, it’s clearly Food-For-Thought.

So then: three pieces with a nerdy, wordy approach, from the Philosophy, Psychology, Spirituality bin, so to say. Then a single bit, albeit not in the least bitty, from the Politics & Personal Empowerment array. As things work out, the next six in this second grouping all belong in the Love & Erotic Passion lineup. “Connubial Cornucopia” comes first.

“No Matter the Rot & Decay That Ever Mark Reality’s Realm, Connubial Cornucopias Can Always Create Ecstasy’s Conjugal Conflagrations & Thereby Engender Ongoing Eruptions of Erogenous Frisson.” Ha ha. We can put that in our pipes and smoke it!

Anyhow, next up we have “Triangular Temptations.” “Your Delectable Desire Describes Such a Tempestuous Tempting Triangle, at Once Pulsing Portal to Gaia’s Molten Core & Bower of Bonny, Beneficent Benediction, That a Partner Can Only Ponder How Best Powerfully to Palpate This Presence of Ecstatic Eternity’s Beckoning, Awash in Waves of Connubial Bliss That Bless Our Boisterous, Bony, Bouncing Bounty.”

Truly and fully do these emergent Love Darts emanate from my sweet love’s attentions and intentions: so too with the subsequent offering. This one we call “A Feather to Measure.”

“May You & Gaia Guide My Tongue to Become a Gliding Feather For Your Gleeful Glory, Delving to Measure the Volcanic Reservoirs of Your Pleasure to Their Uttermost Depths of Desire & Delight.”

Tantalizing and tempting to consider, such ideas accompany the hours and days and ongoing seasons of my path now, immeasurable blessing indeed. So too does “Arrayed Emanations” deliver such notions.

“Like Lily Petals in Salubrious Morning Sun, Our Love’s Lips Burgeon With Blossoms That Swell & Open With the Light & Heat of Our Passion’s Palpated, Arrayed Emanations.”

Whatever the elegiac elegance of now, it has arisen from troubled waters in Eros’ passage through my life and times. Thus, “Axiomatic Optimism” also ended up ready to ‘bring to the table,’ as it were.

“No Matter How Bedraggled & Woebegone a Particular Amorous Passage May Appear, Axiomatically & Inherently, Its Life-Force-Energy’s Affirmations Must Imply, For All Actual Erotic Adventurers, the Fostering of Further Felicitous Connubial Conversations, Full of Fiery Ecstasy & Climactic Epiphany & Passion’s Pulsing Poignancy.”

One might call this art’s prediction of experience, ha ha. The final artistic output in this partially-painted category has a similar origin story in a past that hopefully anticipated a future made present today. “Lovelier & Loftier Tomorrows” foretells precisely such a miracle.

“No Experienced Lover Will Ever Doubt That Every Sweet Relationship’s Healthy Heated Fervor Might Sooner Or Later Confront Apertures Rough to Navigate & Painful to Pass, Notwithstanding That Long Litanies of Lusty Connection Also Illustrate How Even the Most Foully Pitted Passage in Any True Friendship Eventually Finds a Fissure From Which to Facilitate Still Loftier & Lovelier Expressions of Sweet Mutuality & Enamored Regard.”

QUEUE NUMERO TRES

The final five for today constitute not quite half of the completely illustrated set. This quintet will culminate our current meanderings, beginning with “Tempting & Terrifying Totality.”

“Living With Absolute & Total Awareness Would Guarantee Both Gruesome Chills & Thrills at Once Glorious & Hideous, Simultaneously Embodying Tigers & Sharks As They Sated Their Bellies With Gore & Tore Their Prey Asunder, & Experiencing a Lamb’s Or a Tuna’s Terror As It Felt the First Piercing Pain of Its Killer’s Teeth Prepare to Rend Its Own Passionate Pulse to Pieces.”

Maybe it just has this impact on me, but this idea causes my skin to crawl and my heart to skip a beat or two. Less daunting, but still alluring, a message of empowerment mixed with libidinal libations, so to say, comes next, entitled “Aspiring to More.”

“Whatever Particular Prerogatives Delineate Our Purposeful Passion’s Present Passage—Fortress to Defend, Or Upend; Precipitous Slope to Ascend; Pyramid to Erect; Or Tablet to Fill With Hard-Won Wisdom—We Instantiate Endeavors As a Resolute & Loving Crew of Two That Is Always Seeking to Become Three & More.”

This more fully philosophical production presents a favorite theme: renewal and repurposing. The titular heading here is “Meeting New Nostrums & Needs.”

“Earth’s Planetary Plenty, a Cascading of Frequently Cultural Cornucopias, Contains All the Fated Formulas & Forms That Folks Can Formulate, As Well As Innumerable Other Grotesque Surprises & Salubrious Gifts That May Simultaneously Amaze & Imperil Us; the Rationale For Artistry, the Function of Craft Must Forever Facilitate Repurposing Bits & Pieces of This Existential Bounty, Even if Worn Out Or Torn Asunder, to Manifest Schemes & Necessities That Our Potential & Our Duty Call Us to Dream into Reality So As to Meet the Nostrums & Norms of Each New Day.”

The concluding pair in this Wood Words installment are purely erotic in their passionate orientation. The title of the first is “Echoing Carnal Bliss.”

“Entwined in the Willowy Welcoming Wonder of Our Wild & Wanton Wanting, Emanating Ecstasy’s Enigmatic Flow & Glow of Gliding Glory, We Reach For Each Other Anew As Universal Mandates Echo Our Carnal Bliss With a Vow Never to Miss the Succor of Yet One Further Kiss.”

Yes, and again yes! A brilliantly evocative river-sculpted splinter finishes today’s tale of the tape, so to say. “Ongoing Climactic Access” is this last title in question.

“Like a Dolphin From the Deep May Follow Its Mate to Make an Atmospheric Leap, So Do I Jump a Jolly Jig & Pant in Anticipation As I Prepare to Pursue Palpating Your Pleasure As the Primary Expression of My Own Particular Path to Husband Our Passion & Yield Additional Peak Experiences of Gracious Goddess Goodness in Granting Ongoing Access to Gaia’s Climactic Glee.”

Whatever the eventualities of this moment in time, perhaps these randomly plucked presences of Marshall Arts ministrations will help make meaning or merriment manageable. That, anyway, is a large part of the intention at hand.

Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…

swing on a star, and be better off than you are?” We could, of course, Americans and Iranians together—be happier, healthier, more prosperous, much fuller of aplomb about and appreciation of nature’s wonders in allowing us embodiment’s delicate miracle. “Or would you rather be a mule?” If not, then nerdy or not, it’s time to ‘go to school,’ like the song says.

THE CENTURY BEFORE IRANIAN ‘CONCESSIONS’

An unexpected and fascinating tidbit from ‘deep time’ showed up in #26’s article about antidepressant idiocy in the context of longstanding human use of ‘light-enhancing’ entheogens. As a Soma substitute, Prozac just sucks so bad that it makes one’s skin crawl. “Oh my,” I wrote in my notes.”

Oh my, indeed. “The Indo-Iranians were an ancient people who had their homeland somewhere in Central Asia. About 4,000 years ago they split into two distinct groups. One group, the Indo-Aryans, moved south to the Indus Valley; the other became the ancient Iranian peoples.

Both preserved a vast body of religious oral literature which was only later written down. These scriptures are the Rig Veda and the Avesta, of the Indians and Iranians respectively. Both works describe rituals in which a plant with hallucinogenic properties was consumed.

The plant was called soma by the Indians and haoma by the Iranians. Although some of the descendants of these peoples still perform their rituals, the identity of the sacred entheogenic plant has been lost and non-psychoactive substitutes are now used in place of the mysterious soma/haoma.” In India, okay; but in the Islamic Rebublic? As suggested, fascinating.

Returning to the present itinerary, to summarize the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the consolidation of Qajari rule occurred, in which the Turkic Qajar clan displaced the still omnipresent Zand band. A ‘professional military’ became a necessity to replace clan-based fighters who stood zero chance against Russia in an 1804 incursion, one of many during that period.

Or, in any event, such a sales pitch certainly benefitied arms merchants and consultants who would serve as imperial spooks at the beck and call of British authorities for their insightful reports. Given the erstwhile Napoleonic times and English rulers’ true appreciation of India as the crown-jewel, ‘professionalization’ would sound alluring for sure.

“(T)he Crown Prince, ‘Abbas Mirza, believed that the best solution would be to reform the armed forces along European lines.” The French got the first contract, but the British ended up with the final cut, so to speak, between 1810 and 1815, the final period of the Napoleonic wars.

England viewed Iran at this time as a ‘buffer’ against Russian designs on India, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a threat with designs of its own on Afghanistan. The machinations of the British in this regard ranged from the mundane to the belligerent, from telegraph construction to warlike declarations and acts.

At the level of how political reality then actually was, how administration and governance and such really took place, a typically sobering picture comes into view. One scenic example comes from near the beginning of the earlier period, more or less 1800, and one from the very end of the later period, which is to say 1910 or so.

“Napoleon had indeed first considered taking India from the British by way of Persia, then entering into an alliance with the Qajar king against the Czar. A century later, after the Triple Entente, France paradoxically obtained the agreement of its Russian and British allies to avoid reciprocal weakening by dividing Persia into ‘areas of influence.’ Disregard for Iranian national sovereignty reached a high point when the agreement was negotiated in Saint Petersburg, with the Persians being informed after the event.”

More of all this anecdote and reportage comes along as we go. Blah blah blah.

In the event, fearing a Franco-Persian alliance to ‘take away India,’ the English imperial piece-de-resistance, London’s minions force-fed a new treaty, which rid the region of any official French role. Of course, the transactional lubricant, which some might consider payoff or extortion or both, would end up being money and goods.

“In January 1810, the newly appointed Ambassador to Persia, Sir Gore Ouseley, was authorised to provide an annual subsidy of 200,000 tomans. However, not all of the payments came in the expected form: in May 1810 ‘Abbas Mirza complained to Sir Harford Jones, Ouseley’s predecessor, about receiving payment in the form of tobacco and sugar.”

Bribes to clannish aristocrats were a longstanding British tool, after all, although this sum—supposedly two billion gold coins annually—readily rationalizes England’s desire to substitute alternative commodities. Furthermore, however much Great Britain might fancy a Persian colony, insuring a pliant regime at the emerging nation’s helm was a necessity.

This concatenation thus understandably became even more complicated as a result of arms trading that served many purposes at once. It supported a key production sector back in ‘jolly-old,’ it forestalled French hopes for a ready market in the region, and it set boundaries that a commercial competitor, Russia, might otherwise cross.

“The British also began exporting weapons to Persia. An invoice received by the Acting Resident at Bushire [Bushehr], William Bruce, in November 1812, records 17,000 new muskets bound for Bushehr from India aboard the East India Company’s ship Lord Minto.

By the end of the war, ‘Abbas Mirza had received a further twenty cannon and 1000 sabres as a gift from another British envoy, Brigadier-General John Malcolm. In addition to transporting weapons, the British also established an arsenal at Tabriz for the production of cannon, gunpowder, and ammunition.”

The English helped train and guide Persian forces against Russia’s soon-to-be-successful attempts to cement the Tsar’s control of the Caspian. One high British officer died on one such expedition.

When Napoleon’s invasion of Russia began, however, England reconsidered such active efforts against its imperial competitor. After all, if the Corsican’s ambitious incursion succeeded, Britain’s chances of emerging champion against the French would fall precipitously.

We have thereby developed one way of conceiving the period and the place of early Qajar Persia. Clearly, something akin to ancestors of British Petroleum and its ‘interests’ comes into focus. That much should be clear.

A summary briefing might also begin with the period of Persian unification after various collapses of Islamic imperial capacity in the late middle ages and early Renaissance. Perhaps a South Asian’s apt assessment, from Aligarh Muslim University, can guide us.

Entitled, “BRITISH COLONIALISM IN QAJARI IRAN AND ITS IMPACT ON ISLAM,” its introduction constitutes the rich soil of a small Persian imperial garden plot, from which we can garner insights about the emergence of modern, dynastic, and unitary Persia, which began in the late sixteenth century.

“This unification process continued under Qajar (1779–1925), Pahlavid (1925–1979), and the modern rule, started in 1979, known as the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran.’ As it was the period of western colonization and various Muslim countries came under European powers’ control, Iran also came under the influence of these foreign powers, especially the British and the Russians.”

Adam Malik Khan’s incisive briefing will help us in both today’s Below-the-Fold subchapters. For now, he notes the conflicted chaos that inaugurated the rule of the Qajars, a clan with ancient lineage indeed—from the Sassanid period centuries prior to the eruption of Islam throughout Western Asia.

In 1779, a time of many upheavals—almost an ‘nth World War,’ ha ha— “While the Qajars were ruling Iran these countries not only put their impact on it and its people but also interfered in the affairs of the country, got various concessions, and exploited its resources. It’s worth mentioning that Britain always played a diplomatic role in Iran by signing treaties to get more and more concessions.”

Even then, or shortly thereafter, the then denizens of empire and enslavement in the United States were grappling with a cultural sensibility that has in some form persisted to just this second and beyond tomorrow. “With the Constitution of 1788 the panorama changed, and once again Muslims were necessary to abolish the Test Oaths or the Religious Test.

Spellberg entitled very well this chapter: Could a Muslim be President? With the Protestant fear of the Pope and the Great Turk—in the past the two heads of the Antichrist—the Test Oaths were considered a protection.” Jefferson and others looked at this attitude as a problem that broke with the religious policy of the status quo. Muslims were converted into a weapon to argue the pro and the contra of the reformation.

“Spellberg transmits the inner sense of the debate in this chapter. The chapter concludes with an epigraph about well known Afro-American Muslims: Ibrahima Abd Al-Rahman and Omar Ibn Said. Their lives and their adventures contrast with the intense political debate, being both—in words of Michael Gomez—‘Founding Fathers of a different sort.’”

Now of course, this is at least in part reified non sequitur. Then as now the ‘tension’ or ‘conflict’ served to divide people from each other who shared similar interests, even as the respective class relations have fundamentally altered in radical ways. In this divide-and-conquer sense of things, however, every historical evolution of a holocaust of clashes must have a cultural component. The book about ‘Jefferson’s Qu’ran’ exemplifies this.

Very often the background for assessing these facts—at least in ‘Western thinking,’ whatever that is, ha ha—revolves around depictions and descriptions that the promoters of this type of thought call “Orientalism.” As has appeared before in Big Tent pages, travelogues could, easily enough, represent a historical storytelling cottage industry, ha ha.

A review of a scholar’s work along these lines had this to say. Too often, analyses are “choosing to foreground visual forms of contact rather than individual and dialogic interactions.

In an article about the British in Persia during the Qajar era, Yann Richard offers a historiographical analysis of the common defects of ideologically charged historical narratives of the period. He goes on to show how the diaries and unofficial accounts of French and British residents can serve to rewrite this contested history.”

In any event, the coming of the Russians and the English amounted to more or less successful conquest, or, at minimum, intervention on very favorable terms, ha ha. “To these defeats, were added an imposed humble apology for the assassination of ambassador Griboyedov and the display of British arrogance in obliging Iran to relinquish its claim to the Persian city of Herat at the 1857 Treaty of Paris.

Iran felt caught in a stranglehold between two imperialist powers, barely succeeding in balancing out their rival hegemonies.” The author here is showing one face of what one must call a mixture that combines imperial strategy with colonial opportunism, or something similar.

As Persia sought to maintain its traditional trade and administrative domains, and its possibilities in the Caucusus fell to zero, any contested arena that might have an impact on England’s India plans would excite a strong impetus to prevail among Britain’s hegemons.

Thus, as early as 1838, Brits landed a regiment at Bushehr. Insodoing, they expected to pressure the Iranians to negotiate their forays into and eventual occupation of Herat, an accusatory finger in Persia’s far Northeast, which for a hundred seventy years has been an Afghan province, a key buffer against unfriendly designs on the Subcontinent—today Pakistan and India, both, by the bye, brainchildren of empire, as it were.

The Qajar Shah’s forces did not engage England at this juncture. Instead, local leading citizens formed a people’s posse imposing enough to ‘drive the English back to the sea,’ ha ha. Persian resistance prevailed.

“By the mid-19th century, Britain became deeply involved in Persia’s political and economic affairs. The British had consolidated power in India and feared Russian expansion. An Anglo-Russian rivalry, known as the Great Game, was an ongoing contest.

The British East India Company’s conquest of Sindh(1843) and Punjab(1849) brought British influence directly to Persia’s eastern frontier, increasing the country’s importance as a buffer state between the two empires. British anxieties over Russian-Persian influence in Afghanistan culminated in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842). Although it was a disastrous military intervention, it reinforced Britain’s determination to curtail Persian ambitions.

This policy became evident in the Anglo-Persian War (1856–1857), when Britain swiftly retaliated against Persia’s attempt to reclaim Herat. A successful naval blockade and inland campaign forced Persia to sign the Treaty of Paris(1857), renouncing claims to Herat and recognising Afghanistan as a British-aligned state.”

In this later martial mayhem, the British again seized Bushehr, along with various other Persian coastal assets, as it were, collecting them like they were chips with which to advance the purposes of their geopolitical and commercial programs. That purpose—defense of plausible approaches to an attack on India’s Northwestern provinces—was a constant lodestar in these decades of Anglo-Persian parry and thrust.

Karl Marx even wrote an article about it for the New York Daily Tribune. His assessment offers his standard astonishing capacity to see the heart of the matter. His commentary remains applicable all the way to the here and now.

He contextualizes the entire affair, with his typical wry brilliance, as a case of the ‘British wolf having its way with the flocks of Persia.’ He focuses on Article VI of the April, 1857 Treaty of Paris, which ended the less than six-month-long period of warfare.

“Art. VI. stipulates that Persia agrees to ‘relinquish all claims to sovereignty over the territory and city of Herat and the countries of Afghanistan;’ to ‘abstain from all interference with the internal affairs of Afghanistan;’ to ‘recognize the independence of Herat and the whole of Afghanistan, and never to attempt to interfere with the independence of those States;’ to refer, in case of differences with Herat and Afghanistan, ‘for adjustment to the friendly offices of the British Government, and not to take up arms unless these friendly offices fail of effect.’

The British Government, on their part, engage ‘at all times to exert their influence with the States of Afghanistan to prevent any causes of umbrage being given by them,’ and ‘to use their best endeavors to compose differences in a manner just and honorable to Persia.’”

The language is simple, but Marx makes it plain. “Now, if this article is stripped of its red tape, it means nothing beyond the acknowledgment by Persia of the independence of Herat, a concession to make which Feroukh Khan had declared himself ready at the Constantinople conferences. (More pertinently), by virtue of this article, the British Government is appointed the official intermeddler between Persia and Afghanistan, but that part it was, since the commencement of this century, always acting.

Whether it be able or not to continue it, is a question, not of right, but of might. Besides if the Shah[f] harbors at the 'Court of Teheran any Hugo Grotius, the latter will point out that any stipulation by which an independent State gives a foreign Government the right of interfering with its international relations is null and void according to the jus gentiu, and that the stipulation with England is the more so, since it converts Afghanistan, a merely poetical term for various tribes and States, into a real country. The country of Afghanistan exists, in a diplomatic sense, no more than the country of Panslavia.”

That ought to make certain things clear. In addition to occasional scoops such as Marx’s scintillating briefing, sometimes, gaining unpaid access to materials means relying solely on footnotes, LOL!

While colorful, revealing anecdotes abound about this 1770-1870 century, ranging from the heroic to the horrific, the social, political, and economic realities of this pre-oil phase of British influence, if not outright oversight, are fairly easy to state. Qajar clan control, centered on the institution of a supreme-Shah, was something that English interests constantly, cleverly, and successfully—for the most part—fostered with cash, prizes, and sometimes dark conspiracies of assassination and social mayhem.

One author makes the end result of this extremely clear, even though he all-too-often earlier failed to see it, passed it by with a shrug, or actively denied its primacy, ha ha. “Concessions imparted monopolistic rights to foreign investors and entrepreneurs over entire industries or specific projects in exchange for monetary compensation. They were widely used throughout the Middle East.

In effect, the concessionary system outsourced industrialisation to foreign actors, who generated considerable profit for themselves. This process, in turn, rendered Persia more dependent on its imperial neighbours, as both empires pressured the Persian government to grant concessions to their respective subjects.”

Leonardo Davoudi’s Persian Oil mainly deals with the later period, but his introduction shows how the shah’s family’s networks of control, in which bribery and so forth were instrumental, all essentially flowed from English or Russian donations and attendant negotiated monopolies. He sums up in illuminating fashion.

“Persia was never formally integrated into a foreign empire but, informally, it had been partitioned between Russia and Britain. The concept of ‘informal empire’…is invaluable in understanding the dynamics facing Persia in this period. …Britain’s imperial influence over a territory could range ‘from a vague, informal paramountcy to outright political possession’.

Britain’s formal empire was thus merely the tip of the imperial iceberg, as British imperialism took different forms depending on the region. The formality of imperial control varied according to a number of factors, which included the commercial value of a territory, the solidity of its existing political structures, the degree to which its elites were willing to collaborate with British designs, the ability of its indigenous population to undergo economic transformation without direct control,” and more.

Under the circumstances, beginning before the middle of the nineteenth century, after a period of fifty years or so of moves and countermoves, “Persia was independent in name only, as the scope of its sovereign action was impeded by the two strangulating informal imperial influences of Britain and Russia.”

Later on, well after the Concession to Reuters and the consolidation that this grant suggested, another British imperial overlord summed up the situation in Persia, the ‘cooperation’ of which had made telegraphic communication between London and Bombay possible, among other things. This description begins to fit what is now Iran in the 1850’s, what with convenient assassinations, readily accepted payoffs, and all the rest of Empire’s traditional stratagems.

“Lord Curzon, who was viceroy of India at the time, accurately summarized this situation when he stated that ‘within the limits of a nominally still existing integrity and independence so many encroachments upon both these attributes are possible, that by almost imperceptible degrees they pass into the realm of constitutional fiction.”

To an extent, this all results from what one historian labels “the imperial system” and many students merely call imperialism or the dynamic unfolding of Anglo-American Empire. However we finalize our views about this period, an inevitable component of this complete context is a trade relationship in which England invests and profits, even as Persia buys and finances the bottom line benefits to London’s financial and corporate and aristocratic moneybags.

For the British, the organization and orchestration of the world’s trade in different commonities often originated in relation to their India ‘holdings.’ Thus, in one case, the advance of the ‘nineteenth century’s Internet,’ which is to say the almost instantaneous communications that telegraphy made possible, Britain cooked up plans to string wires and lay cables worldwide to deliver more or less real time info from far afield to the owners and power-brokers along the Thames.

Samuel Morse elegantly stated the technology’s implications. “This mode of instantaneous communication must inevitably become an instrument of immense power, to be wielded for good or for evil, as it shall be properly or improperly directed.”

AI’s summary for a simple search—<England telegraph history worldwide india>—is also quite tidy. “The telegraph, initially developed in England, played a crucial role in colonial administration, economic control, and communication within India, particularly after its introduction by the East India Company.”

Though it arrived late in this essay’s first focal century, in the 1860’s, its completion marked a watershed moment, as a History Workshop capsulization makes clear. “Operating in Iran and the Gulf from 1862 to 1932, the Indo-European Telegraph Department (IETD) served as a vital communication link for the British Empire.

On completion in 1864, the IETD’s landlines and seacables became the final piece connecting India and Britain via telegraph, linking the IETD into an expansive network of national and commercial telegraph networks that stretched from the Ottoman Empire through continental Europe and onto Britain. Established in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Rebellion in 1857, the IETD was primarily intended as an intragovernmental communication highway for officials to exchange information between Britain and India, and consequently, to the growing number of diplomatic sites situated throughout Iran and the Gulf.

Initially placed under the Public Works Department in India, the IETD largely retained its status as an independent bureaucracy with its own internal hierarchy. The IETD and its network were divided into two sections: the Persian Gulf Section (PGS) headquartered in Karachi and the Persian Section (PS) headquartered in Tehran.” One might go into much greater detail; perhaps another time.

For now, we may just note that prior to British moves, telegraphy in Persia barely existed. Finally, we may note another Indian scholars bald assertion.

Telegraphy “practically saved the Company’s Govt. during the mutiny of 1857 by quickly transmitting the news of the movements of the mutineers and sending SOS for military reinforcement. After the mutiny, when the administrative control of India passed on from the Company to the Queen’s Govt., a pressing need was felt to telegraphically connect England itself with India.” The ‘saving graces’ had all remained local to the Subcontinent.

The writer concludes, after noting initial failures of sea cables, that “laying a direct, dedicated overland telegraphic line between England and India, which is easier to maintain, (took place via) the British Indian Govt.-owned Indo-European Telegraph Department (IETD), which had already been operating telegraph systems in Persia (Iran) and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) in the Middle-East, collaborat(ing) with the Siemens group of companies (based in London and Berlin), (forming) the ‘Indo-European Telegraph Company’ (IETC).”

IETC’s engineer Ernst Werner von Siemens made some important technological innovations that enabled a continuous transmission of messages from London to Kolkata via Prussia (Germany), Russian empire (Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia) and Persia.”

Iranica Online also serves up an examination at once both pertinent and pointed in its detail and compelling in its narrative components. In particular the details and nuances of the necessary wheeling and dealing in such a project emerge here.

Oil came late to this thoroughly imperial process. For example, after the the Persian uprising against Tobacco shenanigans in the late 1820’s, Britain again combined commercial control of Opium so as to induce profound social leverage inside the boundaries of present-day Iran and then some.

A dissertation title, “The Most Sovereign Of Masters: The History Of Opium In Modern Iran, 1850-1955,” reflects this complex skein of data and analysis. The author’s thesis is complex and subtle. He maintains that the rise of ‘industrial dependency’ on ‘Western’ providers led, at one and the same time, to planned and opportunistic entry into the trade of opium, which has resulted in large-scale opium usage in Persia to this day.

“The cultivation of poppies for the purpose of opium production was not a modern phenomenon in Iran, but rather an industry with a significant history. … (O)pium production became one of the most important, if controversial, industries of Iran, responsible at times for 10% of the entire annual revenues of the Iranian government.”

The situation there sounds like Afghanistan during recent American occupation. “For many peasants, the success of the opium industry brought a stable source of income on which they could count from year to year. Many of the big merchants, landowners and industrialists in Iran made their initial fortune by trading opium.”

A telling quotation marks the outset of the work. “Judge me not harshly, O thou who hast never known sickness—ay, and for a while partial blindness—in a strange land, if in my pain and my wakefulness I at length yielded to the voice of the tempter, and fled for refuge to that most potent, most sovereign, most seductive, and most enthralling of masters, opium.”

As things transpire, this originated with E.G. Browne, as a consequence of a late 1880’s residency, yielding his memoir, A Year Among the Persians. His is very clear that the development of the ‘drug industry and trade’ in what became Iran both resulted from the destruction of much of the land’s handicraft production and intersected with struggles and negotiations with British producers—almost a monopoly at times— in India.

As an afterthought, one may usefully reflect that Browne was also a chronicler of the Bab and Bahai people and practices of Persia, about which, over time and with luck, Big Tent readers will be hearing much more. This story, too intricate for much mention in today’s efforts, is arguably as important as any others from the region.

We can finish this session with a congruent thought indeed. “A useful comparison may be made here between two contemporary historians—the Iranian Fereydun Ādamiyat and the Englishwoman Ann Lambton, both of whom died in 2008.

Both were diplomats defending their respective countries’ interests, while their judgements on Iranian history were scholarly, well-documented and supported with arguments. The former systematically reversed the disparaging picture of Persians found in British sources.

Admittedly, corruption existed but this was essentially the fault of the corruptors and of imperialism; the heroes of political modernity from Amir Kabir, executed in 1852, to Moshir od-Dowla, were victims of imperialist agents, and it was through them that Ādamiyat’s Iranian readers had regained their lost pride.”

THE FIRST DECADES OF IRANIAN ‘CONCESSIONS’

As much as possible, This Humble Correspondent boosts the notion that parties to conflict should speak for themselves, through their own mediating circumstances. Such a path looks like the only ethical one under whatever circumstances prevail. Iranica Online will thereby initiate this second subsection with a quick look at one of the last such instruments of optional exploitation, so to say, which was for petroleum, the commodity, anyway, at the center of most people’s attention.

The mineral riches of Mother Nature—metal ores, coal, plus all of human industry, forests and farms, everything but the gold and silver and precious stones from mining—almost universally redounded to a single party, a news magnate, banker, and leader in the telegraphy industrial sphere. He was perfect for Persia’s style of payoff and favoritism; Persia would be his plum.

This contract, the so-called Reuter Concession, binding Iran and Iranians to certain ‘responsibilities’ in regard to industry and commerce, more or less begins this period. George Curzon, English aristocrat and once leader in the House of Lords, sums up the meaning of things. His writing is so evocative and provocative, yielding several gasps of astonishment, that it deserves complete quotation.

“When published to the world, it was found to contain the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of, much less accomplished, in history.

Exclusive of the clauses referring to railroads and tramways, which conferred an absolute monopoly of both those undertakings upon Baron de Reuter for the space of seventy years, the concession also handed over to him the exclusive working for the same period of all Persian mines, except those of gold, silver, and precious stones; the monopoly of the government forests, all uncultivated land being embraced under that designation; the exclusive construction of canals, kanats, and irrigation works of every description; the first refusal of a national bank, and of all future enterprises connected with the introduction of roads, telegraphs, mills, factories, workshops, and public works of every description; and a farm of the entire customs of the empire for a period of twenty-five years from 1 March 1874, upon payment to the Shah of a stipulated sum for the first five years, and of an additional sixty per cent of the net revenue for the remaining twenty.

With respect to the other profits, twenty per cent of those accruing from railways, and fifteen per cent of those derived from all other sources, were reserved for the Persian Government.” This grotesque gratuity in favor of wealth and privilege merits this stringent condemnation from a denizen of wealth and privilege, an ‘admission against interest,’ in legal parlance and thus prima facie believable, admissible, blah blah blah.

Paul Reuter interweaves another strand—in addition to Iranian oil, in other words—of today’s BTR proffer. He was one of industrial-scale telegraphy’s founding fathers.

Moreover, his primary claim to fame, as a publisher and news-provider, provides the rationale for any Big Tent existence whatsoever, to mediate information and cultural product and so on. That all of this comes together in Iran, a ‘World-War-Three flashpoint’ at the moment, simply amazes This Humble Correspondent.

In the event, his expertise in the Internet-of-the-past and his media mogul status met in Iran. An anecdote from the above-cited Wikipedia sketch may provide a nice analogy. It concerns an instance in which delays plagued an important section of Europe’s telegraphic infrastructure.

“Speedier than the post train, pigeons gave Reuter faster access to financial news from the Paris stock exchange. Eventually the telegraph link was completed and the pigeons were no longer necessary.” The right to build and control Persia’s entire telegraph system was in some way akin to those carrier pigeons, till it was all built and operational, when Iran’s aristocratic racketeers—with their fat payoff fees in the bank—would also, conceivably, ‘be no longer necessary’ either.

One fellow’s bonanza, whatever combination of victory and venality it may present, does not a nation or a culture make, of course. Yet, as promised, this should be telling, if only in the sense of conveyeing to readers some useful matters regarding profits and perquisites.

However one chooses to contextualize this entire set of scenarios, the role of a clan’s unquestionable supremacy must appear as a part of the drama. The head of this royal band must be a star player in some sense of the phrase. And so it is.

A useful introduction to Naser al-Din Shah Qajar comes from Wikipedia. A ‘reformer’ of sorts, in the sense anyhow that he sought to consolidate rule in Tehran, build a national military, and oversee all significant commercial ventures on Iranian territory. He was well-rewarded for making himself the sole, absolutely essential recipient of graft and bribes and all. It was a cheaper deal for the British and Russians, ha ha.

Various other texts reveal ins and outs of this often primarily triangular set of relations. One scholar, with ample documentary and circumstantial evidence to support his argument, contends quite clearly, Shah Qajar “was accused of selling the nation to ‘foreign investors.’”

He concludes in the way, as regards London’s and Moscow’s rivalry. “(B)oth were warily watching each other in order to protect their respective regional colonial possessions, but they were inclined toward cooperation rather than war.

Iran was likely spared the indignity of being formally colonized because the region functioned as a buffer between these two empires. While there were periods of conflict and provocation, the Russians and British also brokered arrangements that increased their authority in their respective spheres of influence^.”

Another chronicler draws a student’s attention to a 1907 deal between the Limeys and the Cossacks, so to say, actually two branches of the same royal family as titular societal ‘leaders.’ “In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Convention was signed between the British and Russian Empires, expanding their spheres of influence in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.” More on this follows below, a deeper dive.

“In Persia, the Convention divided the nation into three distinct zones. The northern region, encompassing cities like Tabriz and Mashhad, fell under Russian influence. The southeastern area, including Sistan and Baluchistan, was designated for British influence. A neutral zone was created in the centre, covering parts of Isfahan and Yazd, where both powers agreed not to interfere.”

The true beginning of the oil epoch, in any event, began with the D’arcy Convention, yet another combination of smiling gangsterism and tantalizing offers of cash and prizes to the Shah and his favored followers. Persian Petroleum, one subtitle of which reads as The Imperial Origins of the Iranian Oil Industry, richly documents the predatory and corrupt practices that were ‘ordinary imperial courses of doing business.’

The D’arcy Concession itself is an appendix. Its words speak for themselves. In particular, Article 3 gives a peek at the grotesque and garish self-serving, self-dealing interactions between the Qajari family and ‘English interests.’

“The Persian imperial government grants all uncultivated lands belonging to the state, free of charge, to the concessionaire, that his engineers will deem necessary for the construction of all or a part of the works mentioned above,” it begins. Again, no doubt is possible here about the lopsidedness of these terms.

It continues, “As for cultivated lands belonging to the state, the concessionaire will have the right to purchase them at the market rate of the particular province. The imperial government also allows the concessionaire to purchase any other lands or buildings necessary, with the consent of their owners, on conditions that may be mutually agreed but without it being allowed to overcharge for said properties.”

What a sweet deal for the English Lord. Though “Holy Places” were not up for grabs, everything else was part of a forced-sale auction. The British had the money, the political leverage, and all the necessary technical means. The entire instrument reinforces such analysis.

Article 6, in the meantime, ‘conceded’ Russian primacy in the North but gained a monopoly for development in the South. “Notwithstanding what has been set forth above, the privilege bestowed by this deed will not extend to the provinces of Azerbaijan, Ghilan, Mazandaran, Asdrabad and Khorassan, on the express condition that the Persian imperial government shall not grant any other person the right to build a pipeline to the rivers of the south or to the southern coast of Persia.”

As noted, all of Leonardo Davoudi’s endeavor in Persian Petroleum helps to prove the central case: British capital, at the start of the twentieth cenury, held such control over much of what is now Iran that it exercised something very much akin to sovereignty over those portions of Persia. Anyone who cares to see will recognize parallels between English actions against Iran’s interests then and American moves to limit or derail Iranian plans now.

Ervand Abrahamian, “widely recognized” as a leading modern Iranian annalist, primarily writes of the period following World War Two. However, his History of Modern Iran starts, forming roughly a quarter of the text, with precisely our second segment, the reign of the final Qajars and the beginning of ‘oilogopoly,’ ha ha.

Abrahamian’s monographic summation represents a clear and convincing picture of just how things stood at the cusp of the Qajari collapse in 1921, just after the ending of today’s way of timing things. He writes compellingly in his Preface, “This book is an introduction written primarily for general readers perplexed by the sound and fury of modern Iran. It tries to explain why Iran is often in the news; why it often conjures up images of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” insodoing covering the final twenty years under review in this BTR installment.

His Introduction is equally enticing. “Iran entered the twentieth century with oxen and wooden plough. It exited with steel mills, one of the world’s highest automobile accident rates, and, to the consternation of many, a nuclear program. This book narrates the dramatic transformation that has taken place in twentieth-century Iran,” changes that in some senses began with the Constitutionalist Revolution, in which fellow clerics, fellow Qajar notables, different fellows of every social set, chose sides and fought each other.

The British backed both the ‘revolutionaries’ and the Qajars, just in case. A likely key congruence that Abrahamian illuminates is the discovery of oil, under the auspices of the D’arcy Concession, in 1908, just as the Constitutionalists were consolidating their moves to install themselves in Tehran as Persia’s rulers—meaning, before too long, the first Shah Pahlavi and dancing a primarily lockstep march with British imperial interests.

Another Abrahamian masterpiece, more of a ‘professional historical work,’ comes forth in Iran Between Two Revolutions. Although the purpose of the book is to make sense of the period fifty years to a century following the end of this essay’s span, the historian recognizes how the past shapes us even when it is mysterious.

He begins with a chilling little quotation. “‘The past,’ R. H. Tawney once remarked, ‘reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing.’ Although the remark was made in reference to changing interpretations of European history, it is particularly apt for twentieth-century perceptions of nineteenth-century Iran. The first generation of twentieth-century intellectuals, peering back through the narrow prism of the Constitutional Revolution, saw in the immediate past nothing but a corrupt state (dawlat) oppressing the people (mellat).”

This magisterial monograph delivers the nexus for understanding the sweep of the Persian past that has been coming to the fore in this BTR investigation. For anyone who wants to follow yesteryear in this part of the world, no better guide is available. For now, readers will see the nub of Abrahamian’s perspective in a lengthy quotation from the already cited George Curzon’s Persia and the Persian Question.

“The king may do what he pleases; his word is law. The saying that ‘The law of the Medes and Persians altereth not’ was merely an ancient periphrasis for the absolutism of the sovereign. He appoints and he may dismiss all ministers, officers, officials and judges.

Over his own family and household, and over the civil or military functionaries in his employ he has power of life and death without reference to any tribunal. The property of any such individual, if disgraced or executed, reverts to him. The right to take life in any case is vested in him alone, but can be delegated to governors and deputies.

All property, not previously granted by the crown or purchased—all property in fact to which a legal title cannot be established—belongs to him, and can be disposed of at his pleasure. All rights or privileges, such as the making of public works, the working of mines, the institution of telegraphs, roads, railroads, tramways, etc., the exploitation, in fact, of any of the resources of the country, are vested in him. In his person are fused the threefold functions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial.

No obligation is imposed upon him beyond the outward observation of the forms of national religion. He is the pivot upon which turns the entire machinery of public life.” And suddenly, the D’arcy Concessions makes some degree of sense.

On the other hand, the clear-sighted reality orientation of this Marxist historian lets him show how the Qajar’s absolutism meant nothing, or very little, outside the Tehran district. No standing army, no administrative apparatus, these impediments and more meant that much of the plenipotentiary powers of the Shah and his close kin was, to say the least, a paper tiger. In some senses, after the 1850’s, increasingly, the Qajars bought protection and potency from the English.

Unfortunately for the Persian nobility, obviously, the Brits were long masters of ‘playing both ends against the middle.’ Abrahamian grounds his political assessments in glaring social facts: life expectancy in 1900 was thirty years; infant mortality was plus or minus fifty percent. Life was the epitome of ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ so that English alternatives must have seemed often enough heaven sent.

In the percolating goulash of Persian society, a huge selection of distinct ethnic, religious, and cultural identities and legacies were present. Perhaps the most tragic and hopeful at once were the Bahais, whose persecution in the middle of the nineteenth century has taken a brief turn in prior pages. More on this topic will grace a Big Tent menu soon enough.

For the present, one may note that the Bahais offer various key texts to readers in easily accessible form online. One of these is Edward Granville Browne’s 1910 magnum opus from his perch in ‘Arab Studies’ at Cambridge. In the event, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, remains yet punctilious and provocative as a source one hundred fifteen years after its publication.

The extent of the aristocratic rot, to the good of English businesses and the ill of the Persian populace, shows up with particular force in Browne’s chapter on the 1890 ‘tobacco concessions.’ “Other concessions, all tending towards the same evil result of placing in foreign hands, for a relatively small immediate benefit to the Shah and his courtiers, and to the great detriment of the Persian people, the sources of Persia's actual or potential wealth, belong to about the same period… . But it was the Tobacco Concession which led to the most momentous results, and it is this especially which will now be discussed.”

The author compares the terms of a similarly structured agreement with the Turkish portion of the Ottoman aggregation. It is an ugly business. “‘Advantage was taken,’ says the prospectus, ‘of the experience gained in the working and administration of the Turkish Tobacco Regie... established in the year 1884..., and inasmuch as the rent payable by them (i.e. to the Persian Tobacco Corporation) is only 15,000 per annum, as against 630,000 per annum payable by the Turkish Regie, and the term of their concession is for 50 years as against the term of only 30 years in the case of the Turkish Concession, their business will be entered on under much more favourable conditions." What vicious manure this represented in some ways persists today, a la B-2 delivery options.

As we will see again and again, after managing to shake off the dispensation of the entirety of Persia to Julius Reuter, with the Tobacco deal and D’arcy’s successful looting operation, not to mention similar extortionate freeloading and murder by the Russians in Tehran, Tabriz, and Azerbaijani territory generally, bloodsucking began in earnest, an imperial feast that bore the title of the Anglo-Russian Convention.

The Constitutional Revolution was responsive to such matters, but Professor Browne is no naif about any of it. "So again in the case of Persia, England kindled in the Persians an enthusiasm for a constitution, the formation of a National Assembly, liberty, and the like, and so secured for herself a field free from rivals wherein she might direct her course as she pleased.”

Before leaving Browne’s monumental storytelling search for something akin to a Persian truth, a note from the ‘master of Tehran,’ Tsar Nicholas’ Colonel Liakhoff, will serve as a final dose of the real deal in Persia. He’s writing to his superiors at imperial Russia’s Caucusus HQ in late Spring, 1909.

“On the 26th of May (June 8) H.M. the Shah summoned me and the First Dragoman of the Legation to (the palace). In an intimate conversation the Shah expressed his agreement to our former proposals—of which I had the honour at the time to inform your Excellency—to abolish the Constitution, disperse the Majlis(Congress), and, by means of a whole series of manoeuvres, so as to escape the insistence of the European Powers, to return to the former absolute form of government. To which he added that in asking for a plan of further action he would request that there might be as little bloodshed as possible. To this I ventured to remark that in a contest bloodshed was unavoidable and indispensable.” Oh my goodness!

Another volume, much more recent, promises to deliver another prominent historian—fully Persian instead of suspiciously Armenian, ha ha, and a different flavor of Red, to boot, a Trotskyist—who offers his readers Iran in the Twentieth Century. Muhammad Reza Ghods also devotes about a quarter of his work to the period under review here.

The iconic figure Leon Trotsky speaks this book’s operning lines. “The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events. In ordinary times, the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists—kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists.

But in revolutions, the masses break over the barrier excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside the established representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgment of moralists. . . . The history of revolution is for us first of all the forcible entry of the masses into the political arena.” Ghods delivers on the implied promise.

He teases out the complex linkages and contrariness among language, ethnicity, clan, faction, and class in a society without navigable rivers, divided by mountains, and by an industrial standard, altogether rudimentary if not primitive, an ideal setting for manipulation by a ‘Western-oriented,’ so-called nobility.

“The Qajars' system of government both reflected and contributed to the fragmentation of Iranian society. The Qajars, a minority Turkman tribe from the Caspian region, had no real power base in Iran; they attempted to legitimize their rule by ‘Persianizing’ their court's ceremonies and administration.

The Qajars kept their throne by manipulating one rival faction (tribal, religious, or racial) against another. They formed marriage ties with most tribal and local leaders; the royal harem became a microcosm of the fragmented society.”

Qhods quotes Abrahamian’s estimate of Iranian abjection at the start of the 1900’s, when 80% of the population was peasant or, in essence, some sort of Cossack, all country folk, and two thirds of the urban dwellers were working class of one stripe or another. He continues his analysis.

“It is a tribute to the Qajars' skill at manipulation that they were able to retain the throne for so long with such frail bureaucratic and military structures. Their position as ‘supreme rulers’ of the country was due entirely to their able exploitation of Iran's social fragmentation.

Ervand Abrahamian has described the Qajar shahs as ‘despots without the instruments of despotism’: ‘The Qajar dynasty ruled nineteenth century Iran with neither the instruments of cocrcion nor the science of administration, but with the practice of prudent retreats and the art of manipulating all the possible variations in the complex web of communal rivalries."

As oil flowed, as worldwide conflict loomed, as ‘modernizing’ methods contrasted with traditional schemes of bribery, extortion, and payoff, the upshot of this situation—in which ‘non-royal’ Persians of means had only land for capital and a tasted for manufactured goods—ought to seem obvious. “While the comprador bourgeoisie benefited financially from their political and economic dependence on the two great foreign powers, they became acutely conscious of their awkward position.

They were exposed to Western political ideas, often traveling and sending their children to Europe for education. However, the personal nature of the Qajar rule denied political participation to this rising class and threatened their financial status. This new bourgeoisie eventually sought to create a strong, centralized government that would promote Iran's economic and political independence.

A modern Iranian state could limit the shah's concessions and arbitrary tax impositions. Thus this new middle class allied itself with the traditional bourgeoisie of the bazaar, or central market,” an institution increasingly rent with crisis as oil and industry—all owned by foreigners—advanced in importance.

Thus, Iran in the Twentieth Century illuminates a process full of contradictions, of social flashpoints over economic inequities and brutal inefficiencies, in which the true governors of Iran came from London or Moscow or some acolyte of Russians and Brits. Nor were the two European overlords particularly generous, even to the prime recipient of their largesse of corruption and hush-money.

“Whenever I want to travel to the South, the Tsar's ambassador objects. Whenever I want to go to the North, the English ambassador objects. To perdition with a kingdom where a king cannot traverse his own country!” Thus spake Naser-al-din-Shah Qajar, a few years prior to his assassination.

The Bahai purveyors of data and thought also dispense a version of Iran in the Twentieth Century: A Political History, a fact that, once more, acts as a clarion call to investigate the various prominent and yet minuscule religious and ethnic minorities in an overall scheme of Shia Islamic dominance. That is definitely ahead, given time and tide and our avoidance of an Iranian-or-Ukrainian-or-Palestinian-induced ride on the Mass Collective Suicide Express.

For a page or more now, we’re going to look at Russia’s role, under Tsarist imprimatur, during this erstwhile ‘revolutionary period.’ In general, any objective observer must recognize that in terms of geography, geology, and kinship, Russia would in some capacity—so long as it exists—be a prime mover in Persia.

A recent title, as has happened multiple times in this essay already, extends its reach back in time because doing so is essential. Anyhow, The Evolving Russia-Iran Relationship offers an evocative subtitle to amplify our look here at this brief’s portrayal of past developments: Political, Military, and Economic Dimensions of an Improving Partnership states a case!

Sometimes these veins of useful ideas concern the Russian part of matters. At other times, the POV shifts to Persia. The wider geopolitical and socioeconomic context also can come into play.

From the United States ‘strategic nonprofit,’ the Center for Naval Analysis, comes an apt recognition of parts of what we’ve been reporting today, with a twist in the current context. “Although Russia has historically provided Iran with many sought-after industrial goods, the relationship has now flipped or at least begun to balance out.

Iran now provides Russia with vital industrial goods that help Russia address wartime constraints. Such support helps prolong Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine. Furthermore, closer Russia-Iran economic relations have led to Iran instructing Russian officials on how to evade sanctions. This type of collaboration can affect the long-term viability of the sanctions imposed by the US and other Western nations.”

For purposes of further writing that mirrors today’s historical, geographic, and geopolitical analysis, the researchers at CNA offer methodological advice. “Our framework takes cues from the general diplomatic, informational, military, economic (DIME) framework, which is widely used in political-military and strategic analysis to delineate the core set of ‘instruments’ or dimensions of ‘national power’ available to states.

For the purposes of this report, a tripartite political-military-economic division is used to structure the overall characterization of the relationship.” Under such a rubric, one can well imagine the short-shrifting that occurred among the triangulated interactions over time between Great Britain, various incarnations of Russia, and the now aristocratic, now nationalist, now populist editions of the Iranian state.

Here’s a huge understatement in that regard. “Historically, there have been many impediments to their relationship. Have Russian and Iranian officials put these aside in the interest of strategic cooperation, and, if so, what contextual factors changed to allow these adjustments to occur?”

Moreover, the numero uno “Major Relationship Constraint” amounts to the readily recognized fact of a “History of Moscow’s occupation of Iranian territory,” ha ha. As incisive as it is direct, the report disarticulates the various threads of the historical record. One of these is the deeper past, prior to the plus-or-minus fourteen decades of our Big Tent Review item of the moment, on which we’ll focus attention for a bit.

Doing so will insert here material from the dates of the previous section, but readers may be able to sort it all out. “Early contact in the medieval period evolved into a longstanding rivalry over the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and stretches of Central Asia from the 1700s through the collapse of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. Earlier points of tension included a brief Russian-Persian War from1651–1653.

Further wars occurred with some regularity, including the Russian-Persian Wars of 1722–1723, 1796, 1804–1813, and 1826–1828. These wars led successive Iranian dynasties to cede large swathes of territory in Transcaucasia to Russia.”

Again, additionally, local insights can help delve toward rooted relations at their outset. In this way of reasoning, geography and trade will trump more mundane agendas or scheming machinations. Thus, the restoration of even more ancient ties followed the loosening of the Mongol grip on the region in the mid sixteenth century, which induced lively exchanges of silk and other fabrics, as well as foodstuffs and spices, for Russian firs and ores, along with paper and leather goods and prized European wools.

Significantly, according to a prominent Persian aggregator, “Tsar Ivan IV revived trade between Iran and Russia via the Volga-Caspian route and initiated Russian penetration of the Caucasus and the Caspian area.” This should provide a clue concerning which party acted as gatekeeper and which needed an entry code, so to say, in this engagement anew with territories for some time inaccessible. Still, till the early 1800’s these Russian moves to manifest mastery did not pan out.

Iranica Online also surveys the medieval and early modern periods that followed Tsar Ivan’s maneuvers, yet doing so uncovers the same litany of war and skirmish, even more so, up till the initiation of the Qajar rule at the end of the eighteenth century. However, “Russo-Iranian Relations up to the Bolshevik Revolution,” the encyclopedic entry in questioon, also notes the significant seventy year gap in active Russo-Iranian conflict—between the 1720’s and late in the century—that CNA also described.

During those decades, both Russia and Persia—at the same time that they solidified and expanded diplomatic and commercial connections with each other—in this interregnum focused on warding off any further Ottoman expansion. On the other hand, the research offering’s main focus falls on the Qajar Dynasty’s rule, the same 140 year span that we are examining now.

Aga Mohammad Khan Qajar, who was captured and castrated as a boy when his father was in constant combat with Afgan and Khan clan leaders, along with the occasional Zand, who were all seeking to capture or neutralize the neutered young man’s dad, Mohammad Hasan Qajar. In relation to his fate as a castrati, Encyclopedia Iranica notes this: “hence Moḥammad’s title of āḡā, which was commonly given to senior court eunuchs.”

Unable during fifteen years of ‘protective custody’ at rival Karim Khan’s court to make headway in placing the Qajar family in a position to rule Persia, he was able, after Karim’s death in 1779, to escape to the steppe on a regular ‘hunting trip’ and assemble allies to make a breakthrough in the 1780’s. His clan collaborators and hired, or conquered, additional soldiery more or less achieved a sovereign status in what is now Northern Iran, with significant negotiated control to the South, by 1789, the official beginning of dynastic ascension by the Qajaris.

Catherine the Great had spies throughout the region over much of this interim period and plotted to nip any such Qajar consolidation in the bud. Thus, “(i)n 1781 a naval expedition under Count Voinovich attempted to establish a fortified trading post near Ašraf; but the Qajar chief invited the officers to an entertainment, took them prisoner, and obliged them to dismantle their fort and sail home.”

After this, diplomacy ruled, in short order delivering to the Russians a monopoly on the centrally important trade in both spices and the silk. But for one outbreak of hostilities in 1796, near the date of Aga Khan’s demise, the early Qajar years avoided open warfare with Russia, till the long war of 1806-1813 proved a turning point in favor of Moscow, for the most part.

In any event, as readers have already witnessed, here and in the previous section, Russia has for centuries been a key antagonist to and collaborator with Persian upper echelon forces. Stating matters simply, Russia and Persia and England participated in a three-way, centuries-long dance for power, profit, and perquisites in the territory of modern Iran and surrounding lands.

To sum up, without too much repetition hopefully, the reader may turn to further lucid material from Iranica Online. The vaunted treaty between London and Moscow basically divvied up Iran, made arrangements for the two ‘great powers’ in Tibet and Afghanistan, and warned Tehran’s erstwhile administrators to keep hands off designated Afghan territories.

“On 31 August 1907, the most extraordinary and humiliating event in Iran’s relations with Russia and Britain took place. The Anglo-Russian Convention was signed, which divided Iran into spheres of influence and reconciled the differences between the governments of Russia and Britain. Though the preamble of the agreement mentioned the integrity and independence of Persia, the Iranian government was not even informed about the convention.

According to the first article of the convention, the northern and central areas of Iran were reserved for Russia, with Britain promising ‘not to seek for herself, and not to support in favor of British subjects, or in favour of the subjects of third Powers, any concession of a political or commercial nature.’” Oh my!

Fred Halliday’s monograph is another ‘must-read.’ Iran: Dictatorship and Development hit the streets just before Reza Pahlavi made his ignominious exit. The “Author’s Preface” contains a nugget of all who undertake a more of less Big Tent stance concerning our search for knowledge and awareness.

“While the stance of this book is antagonistic to that of the present Iranian government and its international allies, and is written in solidarity with those opposed to it, the analysis is that of one independent and necessarily isolated observer. It does not represent the views of any one section of the Iranian opposition, and it is probable that all of the Shah's Iranian opponents will find something in this work with which they disagree.”

He starts with demographics and geography, a snapshot of Persia’s lands and people. Wildly uneven population density, continuing nomadic populations, and ethno-linguistic diversity are three key features. Halliday’s historical materials echo information already noted, but with his own stylistic and analytical bon mots.

Mentioning Dr. Roy Casagranda again makes sense as well. His presentation near the outset of #26 remains an insightful and incisive overview of what’s on tap here today. He makes many points similar to Halliday’s work.

Often enough, technocratic thinking—either petroleum economics or imperial ‘International Law’—take key parts in the complicated dramas of extracting minerals and energy from Mother Earth. A University of New Mexico Resource Journal states this clearly, as in this legal briefing.

“A concession agreement, according to Professor A.A. Fatouros, is ‘an instrument concluded between a state and a private person and providing for the grant by the state to the individual of certain rights or powers which normally would belong to and be expected by the state.’ The first of the concessions dates back to 1901 when William D'Arcy, a British citizen, obtained a concession from Muzzaffaraddin Shah to explore oil in Iran.” Again, more nuance appears, as well as just a bit of redundancy, perhaps.

“‘The D'Arcy concession… .was awarded by the corrupt and inexperienced’ Shah (Muhammad Ali Shah Qajar) of the Qajar dynasty, who was dependent on foreign support for his survival, (after the assassination of his father in 1896). In 1909, a British company (the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, subsequently known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and later simply as British Petroleum) was formed to develop oil fields in the south of Iran under a 60-year concession.”

A quartet of sources, three able monographs and a Stanford portal to Iran studies, deal primarily with the politics and techniques of petroleum extraction and refining and such. The first, We Fight For Oil: a History of U.S. Petroleum Wars, emanates from an ‘admitted conspiracy theorist,’ Dr. John Coleman, who posits an Illuminati that pulls the strings worldwide.

Nevertheless, the volume is well-researched and shows the naval and financial roots of the turn to oil, with several chapters that deal explicitly with Persia or “Persian oil,” ha ha. For example, the British Navy’s John Arbuthnut Fisher, who became First Lord of the Admiralty, foresaw the use of oil to fuel Britain’s maritime predominance, as Coleman notes, “probably taken from the fact that since 1870, Russian ships on the Caspian Sea had been burning ‘oil sludge’ called ‘mazut.’”

Coleman posits a link between this eventuality and Julius Reuter’s seeking a monopolistic access to, among other things, petroleum exploration in Persia. The author notes the touch-and-go nature of D’arcy’s endeavors before they ‘struck oil.’ “By April, 1908, with the venture close to collapse, oil was struck at 11,800 feet, the first discovery that was to eventually turn Persia (Iran) into the greatest oil producing country in the world. In 1909, a pipeline was run from the oilfield to a refinery that was built at Abadan. William Knox D'Arcy had pulled off a coup that rocked Standard Oil to its foundations.”

This reference to Rockefeller’s companies evokes Ida Tarbell, whose monumental history of Standard Oil will merit its own review-essay here soon enough. Dr. Coleman also suggests the political economy of petroleum when he notes that Lord Palmerston himself delineated matters in this fashion.

“‘We no longer have permanent principles, but permanent interests which we pursue to the exclusion of all else.’ This was an attitude that would be supported one hundred percent by Winston Churchill, who added, ‘We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the oil which we require.’”

Coleman begins his first chapter that deals with ‘Persian questions’ by showing one upshot of D’arcy’s last-gasp success. The Ottoman Turks began exploring for petrol in what is now Iraq. The English response was to be expected, ha ha.

“The British sent oil experts disguised as archeologists from the Palestine Exploration Society to spy on the developing oil fields. The spies arrived in Mosul and helped to establish the Turkish Petroleum Company in 1912,… .(a)lthough…in actual fact Turkey was not part of the company.”

In fact, the story is as nakedly and grotesquely exploitative as it sounds, with characteristic extortion, plunder, and gangster operations omnipresent top to bottom. Coleman concurs.

“The historical account of the petroleum industry takes us through the twists and turns of ‘diplomacy’ (lies, false promises, mendacity, double-dealing, political pressure, bullying and unfair robbery) of Iraq's lands and oil, coveted by all nations, but particularly by an industrialized oil-starved imperialistic Great Britain, that has busied itself in Iraq and Iran's internal affairs for almost a century, seducing, cajoling and wheedling concessions, one after another, based on promises never kept and threatened by an iron fist concealed in a velvet glove.

With the discovery of rich crude oil deposits in Iraq and Iran, a prolonged state of conflict with the U.S. and both countries has continued for the past 95 years.”

Another monograph, Toiling For Oil tells The Social History of Petroleum in Iran. Touraj Atabaki, as a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History, develops a richly detailed, grassroots perspective on this otherwise often enough merely ‘industrial and technological’ arena.

As with other sources for #26’s article of the moment, Atabaki primarily deals with more recent developments. However, his Introduction and first chapter are worth the price of admission and then some. Chapter One’s title expresses in a phrase the impact of oil on Iran: “Oil Discovery and the Formation of a New Iranian Society.”

The author makes his priorities clear. “While the colossal scale and significance of petroleum, along with its undeniable economic and strategic ramifications, are beyond dispute, the intricate complexities intrinsic to its extraction and processing, contingent upon the diligent labour and expertise of both men and women operating within the multifaceted sectors of this industry, have often been overshadowed and underestimated by scholars.” The social emergence of modern Iran is on display.

Atabaki notes the imperial imprimatur in play, yet he also demonstrates the societal forces that erupt from corporate and imperial interests on the loose. “The Anglo-Persian/Iranian Oil Company, wielding an unchallenged monopoly over oil mining, production, and marketing, embarked on an extensive labour recruitment campaign within the region.

The primary source of this burgeoning workforce was the tribal-pastoralist communities and the village-based labouring poor. These new workers were introduced to a regime of advanced industrial labour discipline, a transition that was instrumental in cultivating the initial segments of the working class within the Iranian oil industry.”

The period under review in this essay ends with what one scholar describes as “‘a Bird That Lost Its Feathers,” providing as a subtitle the identification of the first Shah Pahlavi as the dupe or accomplice of British Petroleum. Iranian oil’s enrichment primarily lines the pockets of Europeans and Americans, in other words.

Nadereh Chamlou, a World Bank economist and an Iranian-American intellectual powerhouse, makes a powerful presentation for an Iranian-Studies program at Stanford, one that dovetails with this sense of a bird’s losing its ass, as it were. The video is another of the insertions in today’s BTR introduction. Chamlou highlights conflicts in the early 1930’s.

“A new agreement was reached in 1933 that addressed many of Iran's demands while extending the concession for another sixty years, the latter leading many to criticize the deal and using it as an important pretext for the 1951 nationalization. What this agreement did or did not entail is essential for understanding the events that later shaped a critical turning point in Iran’s history.”

The 1933 oil grafting gangsterism, whatever the case may be, markedly originated in earlier practices. Dr. Chamlou makes this argument pointedly near the beginning of her lecture, which is a good reason to give it its due in these pages.

A ‘so-what?’ summary might examine Machineries of Oil: an Infrastructural History of BP in Iran, the final member of the quartet under consideration at this juncture. Dr. Katayoun Shafiee, an Anglo-Iranian professor at Warwick University, differentiates her effort’s methods from the standard, insodoing delineating the rationale for her mention here.

“One way social scientists explain the development of this energy system is to think of oil as a natural resource that affects political systems, social and economic orders, and state formation from the outside while simultaneously blocking the emergence of democratic forms of politics. Such an account reduces oil to its economic properties as a rent while ignoring the materiality of oil infrastructure in shaping the state and the powers of the transnational oil corporation.

Machineries of Oil avoids this account of an inside and an outside to oil operations. It does this by following the transformation of oil through the machinery of oil operations, from the initial development of the Anglo-Iranian oil industry in the first decade of the twentieth century to the company’s dramatic departure and subsequent return as BP during Iran’s oil nationalization crisis over fifty years later.”

An authoritative text that emanates from the prestigious Economic Research Forum as Working Paper 771 gives us yet another evocative title, here more concerned with the socioeconomic impacts of petroleum’s extraction, refining and use: “ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF OIL INCOME AND THE IRANIAN ECONOMY: A CURSE OR A BLESSING?” Retaining the all-caps usage seems only reasonable, given the provocative inquiry.

The pair of Anglo-Iranian professors who wrote this little technocratic missive give the only sensible answer: ‘it has been both a curse and a blessing,’ apparent from the outset of things at the end of the period under consideration here. Their ‘economic expert’ response is worth noting.

“In order to promote growth, policies should be devised to control inflation; to serve as shock absorbers negating the adverse effects of oil revenue volatility; to reduce rent seeking activities; and to prevent excessive dependence of government finances on oil income.” Such eventualities would be nice to effectuate, ha ha.

An investigation of the litigation that British Petroleum brought against Muhammad Mosadegh’s government in 1951, alluded to a few paragraphs above and elsewhere, provides one apt way of capsulizing this way of considering the history of oil, in a wider and more comprehensive way of considering things. A briefing in that regard, from the Seven Pillars Institute, may embody an oxymoron along the lines of its Mission Statement.

“SPI is the world’s only independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3), non-partisan, think tank for research, education, and promotion of financial ethics.” Oxymoronic or not, their summation is direct and on-target.

“During the period in question, the British were unable to come to terms with their imperial decline and could not appreciate the strength of popular opposition to their control of the oil industry in Iran.” To lay the basis for the upcoming article in this series, and to undergird this essay itself, we can listen in again. A rational observer then “concludes that British behavior was intransigent, outdated, and insincere, which provoked Iranian demands and ultimately led to the nationalisation of the oil industry in Iran.”

Empire, oil, geopolitics, law, society: what else is there? Ah, yes. Banking inevitably was a part of this process too, so much so that all nations that aspire to anything akin to an ‘independent existence,’ so to say, must have at least a measure of control over its own financial infrastructure.

A London School of Economics investigator orients readers in the case of Persia with his quotidian and utterly establishment, yet workmanlike, presentation. In the event, “The Imperial Bank of Iran and Iranian Economic Development, 1890-1952,” has this to proffer.

“A final reflection takes an Iranian government perspective. The nineteenth century Shahs had originally sought the assistance of foreign businessmen such as Reuter to modernize their economy. Although they preferred a railway to a bank, they had persuaded a group of British capitalists to establish a bank, and transfer sufficient skills and resources to Iran to ensure its survival.

This institution had given Iran a modern banking system; facilitated trade; issued a paper currency; financed the government; mobilized savings; and provided a cadre of skilled Iranian bankers. When, from the 1920s, Iran had developed sufficient resources to have its own bank, the services of the Imperial Bank were unceremoniously disposed of. In a long-term perspective, at least, Iran did well from this foreign direct investment.”

One might compare this altogether self-congratulatory way of thinking with the bare facts that start the article. “Between 1889 and 1928 a British bank served as state bank and bank of issue of Iran (usually known as Persia until the 1930s), and held a virtual monopoly of the modern banking sector of that country. The Imperial Bank of Persia was one of a large group of British ‘overseasbanks’ founded in the nineteenth century which pioneered banking and established branches all over Asia, Australasia, Africa and South America.”

How can one possibly not perceive the opportunistic exploitation of this slightly more modern version of the vaunted ‘imperial system?’ Such views, if taken at face value—as a gift from the captain’s of commerce and finance to the benighted commoners of ‘underdeveloped territories—truly beggar the imagination.

And, voila! The political economy of pertroleum meets the sociopolitical elements of imperial machinations in and around the beginning of the twentieth century. The picture, of sneaky tricks and blatant corruption, with growing popular outcries, portrays Russia and England and Iran in a taunting tango of tempest and torment.

A thesis from the University of Washington, by an Iranian-American student, gives a tidy social capsulization of such dynamics. Khuzestan, the locus of the first Persian gushers, witnessed the on-the-ground manipulations of English officials and oil executives so as to find key complicit actors for bringing about the businessmen’s and bureaucrats’ preferred results.

The student’s conclusion is simple to follow, her arguments and evidence highly persuasive. “(T)he Oil Syndicate’s presence initiated this grab of power between the tribes and the rise of Reza Khan, ultimately leading to the loss of sovereignty of the Arab tribes of Khuzestan, and the rise of a few Bakhtiyari elites.” The Netflix series might merit the title, “The Sheikh and the Landlords,” or when ‘royal blood’ is not enough.

“By using the Political Diaries of the Persian Gulf, I elucidate the complex tribal dynamics of the Bakhtiyari and the Arab tribes of the Khuzestan province during the early twentieth century. Particularly, these tribes were by and large influenced by the oil prospecting and drilling under the D’Arcy Oil Syndicate.

My research questions concern: how the Bakhtiyari and Arab tribes were impacted by the British Oil Syndicate exploration into their territory, what the tribal affiliations with Britain and the Oil Syndicate were, and how these political dynamics changed for tribes after oil was discovered at Masjid-i Suleiman. The Oil Syndicate initially received a concession from the Qajar government, but relied much more so on tribal accommodations and treaties.”

This local focus perfectly illustrates the multilevel machinations of English capital and their imperial government counterparts. They bribe the central authorities, and schmooze with and seduce local potentates at one and the same time. They set all these actors in motion, often against each other: what a system!

Broader examinations of these imperialist norms and capitalist forms are ubiquitous, and some of them fit nicely with the work unfolding here today. One such is from an Anglo-Iranian superstar, Ali Gheissari, whose recent contribution to Durham Middle East Papers almost elegantly circumscribes the period and themes under discussion here in Big Tent Review.

Many researchers, like Professor Gheissari, adopt a ‘great-game POV’ of one sort or another. These materials may still yield many useful nuggets to deconstruct these kinds of empire-friendly narratives. This particular piece, the 2023 Anne Lambton Memorial Lecture, speaks volumes with its title. “Unequal Treaties and the Question of Sovereignty in Qajar and Early Pahlavi Iran.”

“But such (friendly to imperial hopes) views were seldom shared by those who were operating outside the parameters of the state and in general were also dismissed by common opinion. Consequently, signing of major treaties and concessionary agreements often fed directly into a nationalist counter-discourse bent on questioning Qajar legitimacy—as can be seen in, for example, the violent reactions to the Turkmenchay Treaty of 1828 or during the Tobacco Concession protests in 1891-92.”

And there we have it; almost, anyhow. The narratives of empire have plenty of data to damn hegemonic pretensions. The facts articulate inescapable conclusions about domination and resistance, about propaganda and seeking accurate awareness.

From the opposite side of the table, as it were, we can finish up this section with a statement of Professor Ghods, from his classroom in Colorado. This is from the Preface to his cited work, which is an outstanding conceptual outline for the essential blending of family, clan, network, class, language, religion, and more in any rational depiction of Iran.

“Drawing on documentary sources in seven languages as well as on extensive personal interviews, this work transcends the traditional boundaries of research. I hope that it will help to enable Western readers to understand the history of my troubled country.

Although finding people who had witnessed or participated in the events discussed here, convincing them that I did not belong to any (potentially hostile) political organization, and obtaining their permission to be interviewed was sometimes not easy, I considered it vital in order to gain a fuller insight into history. It should be borne in mind that the fact that I have presented the views of this wide spectrum does not imply my adherence to any one of them.”

These might contextualize, at least in substantial part, just dandy marching orders for studying any complex ethnic, political, and socioeconomic stew, as it were.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Democracy Now might serve to start us out. The show deals with developments immediately prior to U.S. B-2 bomber attacks. Amy Goodman begins by interviewing Mohammad Marandi, Tehran University Professor of English Literature and Orientalism. As one might expect, he is blunt and potent in his take.

“‘There’s nothing sophisticated about slaughtering everyone in an apartment building to murder one or two people,’ says Mohammad Marandi about the strikes. Marandi, who has remained in Tehran, was part of the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations in 2015. He calls Trump’s threat ‘an act of terror’ but emphasizes that U.S. and Israeli vilification of Iran has ‘united the country more than ever before.’”

An essential follow-up is available from a Seymour Hersh Substack posting, also from before the unleashing of America’s top bombers. He starts off by clarifying the ‘chain of command’ in the ‘order of battle’ that is yet unfolding.

“The United States remains Israel’s most important ally, although many here and around the world abhor Israel’s continuing murderous war in Gaza. The Trump administration is in full support of Israel’s current plan to rid Iran of any trace of a nuclear weapons program while hoping the ayatollah-led government in Tehran will be overthrown.”

Hundreds of pundits, both the authoritatively persuasive and the propagandistically opportunistic, are speaking out about all of this. Such articulation, following the news hole’s shifting frenzies, cannot help but serve as a ‘matter of course.’ BTR intends to include only actual authorities with tidbits to teach necessary lessons.

“The Iran Trap” lecture in the Introduction, when Professor Xiang Xueqin schools those who can learn, makes very clear, in a Clausewitzian sense, how the hubris of overextension and ‘too many wars at once’ could drive nails in an imperial coffin capacious enough to contain the heretofore indomitable Anglo-American phalanx. He offers an ‘hour-well-spent’ for those who are willing.

The obvious ‘upping of the ante’ in Iran, replete with complications of subterranean depth, has exploded onto the scene since I began assembling this essay: hence the addition of this third section. The arcane overlapping of agendas, plots, conflicts, secrecy, and bombast makes accurate awareness and complete knowledge for any ‘average citizen,’ to say the least, an unlikely outcome.

However, what is always readily accessible in such circumstances is a POV and factual foundation that activates powerful ‘bullshit detection devices,’ ha ha. The work of Paul Craig Roberts, almost on a daily basis, dishes out such material to all and sundry.

The former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, Roberts recognizes the realpolitik that underpins these events. In that vein, he stringently criticizes Iran for what he views as its pussilanimous response to recent continuation of longstanding insults and assaults.

“Iran had the strategic advantage over Israel and could have wiped Israel out. Instead, the hapless Iranians sat passively on their butts, gave a gratuitous demonstration of their capability, thus putting Israel on guard without doing any damage to Israel.

Next the Iranian government failed to see the many indications that it was about to be attacked (again, and again) while it wasted its time in ‘peace negotiations,’ and had an important part of its leadership decapitated and its oil fields set on fire. Talking about doing oneself in, Iran takes the cake.”

POTUS Trump certainly signalled American intentions. The estimable RT, an actual news service, ha ha, quotes the vaunted ‘supreme Ayatollah of the free world,’ LOL! “‘I think it’s been excellent,’ Trump said, commenting on the attack.

‘We gave them a chance and they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard. They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there’s more to come. A lot more.’”

The hubris here, while nauseating, is certainly nothing new. It inaugurated the Truman Doctrine eight decades back and has stayed in lockstep with United States ‘leadership’ and policy ever since.

The often brilliant and always competent Chris Hedges weighs in as well. In the event, his on-topic postings most recently began with his profferal of an interview from last year with the always affable and unflappable geostrategist, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. The upshot is obvious: ‘war with Iran will be disastrous,’ bringing catastropich failure and collapse to whatever persists of the erstwhile ‘American Century.’

Inevitably, in such situations, historical views will remain ever important, if not altogether dispositive. A few examples follow to round out our winding down, as it were.

The first alludes to the period just following the second section above, relying on U.S. State Department records. Then, as in 1950, when the memo issued—and in some senses as today—Gringo potentates worried that ‘Russian subversion’ would threaten and ultimately undermine ‘U.S. interests.’

More pointed still, “Soviet Politics and the Iranian Revolution of 1919-1921” explicates the historical roots and then-current aspects of this point. “Iran’s attraction to Russian Rulers is centuries old. Tsarist rulers and statesmen looked to Iran for geographical and political reasons. Later, economic factors”—trade, oil, the usual suspects—came into play.

While Anglo-American views were unrelentingly single-minded in their hostility, Soviet survival hinged on a more insightful response, taking into account at minimum half a dozen intertwining complications. “The Soviet intervention in Iran of this period both resulted from and revealed the unresolved dialectic of conflict among these forces. …(Attendant)reevaluation played no small role in stimulating an overall shift in Soviet tactics and aims abroad,” in which amicable Iranian ties were indispensable.

A second point, from the more recent past, perceives Israel’s role in the Modern Nuclear Project as a contemporary political economic and geopolitical linchpin, as it were. Ali Diskaya’s dissertation will eventually provide bedding for more exploration of Tel Aviv’s nuclear history.

For today, the author’s incisive abstract highlights the hateful hypocrisy and inane idiocy of present-pass policies about these issues. “In 1967 Israel secretly crossed the nuclear weapons threshold and became the Middle East’s first and thus far only nuclear-armed state.

Over the years, Israel’s strategy of total nuclear secrecy evolved into a unique policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity’ (neither confirming nor denying the existence of nuclear weapons), providing the country with an existential nuclear deterrent, without making it (too) explicit, a position that could invite sanctions from the global nuclear nonproliferation regime or encourage a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”

The third, and for now final, pointer from the annals hearkens back to the MNP’s fatuous ‘Atoms for peace’ mix of fantasy and falsehood under Eisenhower. As a ‘carrot’ in American attempts to ‘contain Soviet expansion’ into America’s world-spanning predominance, the U.S. offered research and demonstration reactors to ‘neutral states’ like Iran.

Tehran received this ‘gift’ very shortly after the coup that will become the center of attention in BTR’s third ‘Iran-Job’ article, a few issues hence. This sort of commerce, of course, must appear irresistible to the denizens of King Capital, even as the the inherent facts of MNP oversight of modern ‘free enterprise,’ and perhaps of more still, means that such ‘purely peaceful’ fission forays must, incontrovertibly and eventually, take a turn toward weaponization.

In any case, this cavalier memory lapse—that Washington launched Tehran’s journey on the nuclear pathway—must look pretty typical of such instances that combine dissimulation and duplicity. “‘We gave Iran its starter kit,’ said Robert Einhorn, a former arms control official who worked on U.S. negotiations with Iran to limit its nuclear program.

‘We weren’t terribly concerned about nuclear proliferation in those days, so we were pretty promiscuous about transferring nuclear technology,’ said Mr. Einhorn, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ‘We got other countries started in the nuclear business,’” whom—in Iran’s case—we now bomb with assumed impunity.

The United States itself, meanwhile, in the current architecture of world affairs, so to speak, retains a commitment to a hegemonic suzerainty that, in the view of many analysts and practitioners of said affairs, is no longer sustainable or even practically manageable. Multipolarity is all the rage, as must necessarily seem apt as a unitary dynamic rises and then declines.

Can humanity survive this new instance of a Persian impulse to chart a course incongruent with Yankee perquisites? Time will tell. No matter what, understanding Iranian realities via a historical perspective may provide central components of such comprehension.

Old Stories & New—(continued)…

…this seems important to emphasize, both his high self-regard and his hopes. He was not an egotistical man, very humble in fact, unlike Mother. So he’d rarely, if ever, mention his own exploits, whether trivial or triumphant.

Not, by the way, that the then-future Mary Alice Brimm did not have her own excellent qualities. She was also a crack shot, for instance, though she saw me as a competitor, unfortunately, more than as a comrade. Anyhow, just more data for the data-bank, that sort of thing: now, back to the closer-to-hand background we go.

**

From the beginning, as things worked themselves out in the event, this follow-up sortie was like his previous undertaking in very few ways. Especially after the first week of plowing through monstrous, wind-whipped waves had passed, everything happened differently, from the weather to the ‘excitement’ characteristic of being at sea in wartime.

The earlier venture had been almost eleven months prior, after all, and in a war-shrouded atmosphere, a lot of events could be stuffed into a short period. Not all of them, in his case, were merely meteorological, or even martial, either.

For example, in relation to the woman to whom, technically, he was not yet ‘lawfully-wedded’ as her husband,’ he had discovered—on their last outing and rendezvous before he again ‘jumped ship’ and went to sea with Canadians—that she was pregnant with their first child. After all, even their four parents had already advised a ‘caution to the winds’ approach.

If ‘all is fair in love and war,’ how much more so would that be true when both mixed in tandem? Ever the thespian ham as well as athletic adventuress, his Mary Alice had whispered to him as she had clasped him close, “strike, fair captain, while the iron is hot,” and he had succeeded in doing so. Whatever came of his rambling adventurism, he thought, he might at least leave a little something behind to remember him by.

Knowing she was likely carrying a babe inside, she nonetheless encouraged his wanderings. She not only wanted his advancement too, but she also demanded that he want to climb success’ slippery ladder as well. Because his new assignment was another ‘special posting,’ it entailed anew a “Temporary Reassignment,” NOA, “NOT OFFICIALLY ACKNOWLEDGED,” with Canada's ‘Merchant Marine.’

Officially, therefore, he admitted while pursing his lips at all the implications, he was no longer a Lieutenant, J.G., in the United States Navy, a promotion from his lowly status as just another ensign, an outcome for which he had bargained manfully. In the end, in fact, his negotiated promotion happened before he embarked on this latest high-seas adventure.

Shipboard life, for all its majesty and thrill—to both of which he swore complete allegiance as much as to any truly patriotic impulse—was, undeniably, mainly, superbly mundane. In general, shipshape, in his estimation of that status anyhow, seemingly meant ‘according to SOP’s routine once more.’

Inevitably, therefore, despite being exactly where he liked—at sea for yet further sailing along Mother Ocean’s hidden tracks—he also itched for more human experience than a command in the Arctic, headed for the Baltic, would ever likely deliver. Charles Thomas did not play chess, a simple combative clashing with a real opponent the absence of which, as often as not, he experienced with a mix of physical ache and mental anguish.

Of course, Chow played, better than his Skipper actually, but cooking for a crew of twenty-three was plenty more than a full-time job, and since ‘Cap’ already drooled at the memory of repasts that he and his wild lover had shared—blueberries, for instance, or really fresh eggs, as additional fruit of their passion—he was chary indeed to divert his cook’s attention from transforming their freighter’s meager pickings into sweet meals.

More than anything else, however, he missed weekend passes to Virginia Beach and Raleigh, where he and Mary Alice frolicked like love-struck rabbits in season. They laughed at the notion, though also thanking God that neither one of them was particularly modest, let alone prudish.

Thankfully, another ‘guaranteed delivery’ in his notes to his lover were his generally tame, yet heartfelt and heated, allusions to their cavorting ways. He found ideas of their libidinal libations, on most watches, much more alluring and arousing than thoughts of any merely culinary dish that he’d ever eaten.

In any event, a big advantage of avoiding a trip to the Officer’s Mess, one which would like as not leave him a heaving mess, was the chance that so missing out gave him to write something to clear his head and calm his nerves. Then again, he had to stay focused, or every word would end up burned or shredded or whatever his ‘advance readers’ decided to do with verboten verbiage.

In fact, also very much unlike on the first journey, during which the good ship and crew, under George Brimm’s calm guidance, managed an average speed of barely ten knots, covering 3,500 stormy nautical miles in forty one days, on this ‘veteran voyage,’ again in the end to Talinn, the last big blow that they encountered was about to hit when he used a thirty-minute ship’s bell to pour out his heart to the woman he adored, who was now probably two and a half months pregnant.

Thus, he spoke of his longing. He wrote of weathering epic storms. He tried to find salacious ways to express his adoration and primarily offered up corn-syrup instead.

*

Dear Mary Alice, he had begun on February 22^nd, 1941, during the crazed heaving gyrations that resulted from the gales of frozen rain and sleeted pellets with which Mother Nature was pelting the entire convoy. He continued.

I had the most interesting experience earlier today, while the most horrid blizzard howled in my ear. I was practicing, you see, trying to remember, despite the stormy conditions, exactly what we had said to each other during definitely the most torrid time I’ve ever spent with another human being.

Of course, I don’t want to shock you—or, worse, bore you—with details, so I thought I’d just continue the story that I’ve been telling. You remember: a fellow whom I know fairly well says that he has fallen so far in love that it leaves him breathless.

He had this girlfriend when he was twelve who taught him to kiss, a teacher of whom his true love apparently approves. He wonders at her comment about ‘fellows who don’t know a thing about the tongue.’

That’s where we left it last time, according to my recollection. We’ve navigated his childhood and youth to arrive at his having the time of his life during times much like our own, if I’m not much mistaken.

Like me, interestingly, he always wanted to go to sea. Perhaps in time—sooner rather than later​?—we may both have our wish. Even more amazing, my friend often also skips his dinner because he prefers to recall dining with, or on, his affianced mate.

Coincidentally, again like me, he heard from his Mother’s Father ‘never, ever, ever to shoot a hawk.’ Just as with my Paw-Paw Tom, his granddad considered such an act a sin against creation.

They were farmers too, though. Maybe they had the same dilemma that I might have on the farm here now. I’ll continue in my next letter, closing with a sigh and a shudder at the spark of our lips. Yours, G

As things stood, this was his third letter of this second voyage that, officially, did not exist and would never be admitted. As was frequently the case, a scribbled postscript followed.

P.S. Please say hello to your parents and give them my best regards.

***

All the parental-units approved the match. They had not only encouraged a fearless seizing of love between the two, but especially their complement of Mothers had also stated outright, quite independently, that their offspring should elope at the earliest opportunity.

George Brimm became an ensign from the ranks while all this was unfolding. After he enlisted in 1938, aged seventeen years, he spoke freely, in his words, of desiring ‘responsibility and advancement.’ Everyone knew that war was coming and Seaman Brimm had the leadership qualities of a quiet, competent, cagey soldier, who would become an officer who cared for the men under his command.

Thus, in maybe the Navy’s first experimental use of the concept, his superiors enrolled the young enlistee in an Officer Training Project, or OTP, that soon enough became the standard U.S. Navy OCS program. He so excelled that he graduated a week early, which facilitated his participating in then-novel technical training in the use of Sonic Navigating and Tracking, or SONAR.

Weapons courses, leadership seminars, and language classes in German all followed, all at Newport News, where his love of aircraft carriers first took off. His initial Officers’ Quarters flatmate, Fred Taylor, and he formed a fast bond.

The more socially gifted and connected ‘Ensign T’ took his newly commissioned ensign-friend home on a weekend pass, to go sailing and relax, to little Jacksonville, North Carolina, where, happenstantially, among the activities was a picnic along the New River at which buddy-Brimm met Mary Alice Taylor, his friend and fellow officer’s elder sister.

The rest is likely just nature taking its course. Weeks later, before the holidays in 1939, she had relocated herself to an apartment in Virginia Beach.

From Newport News—where her Uncle, Captain Winslow Taylor of the U.S. Navy(and father to George’s comrade in arms, Fred)had encouraged Mary Alice to speak to his own spouse of two dozen years about the family-possibilities of a Naval life—the two lovers launched what would end up their forty-three year nautical military marriage.

The family grapevine had conveyed that ‘Princess Mary’ had finally—she was twenty-four, after all—set her cap on a man. Thus, Aunt Mathilda was forthright.

“You’ll have more love and fun than is possible to imagine.” The main problem with the arrangement is that “some casualties are inevitable, so you’ve got to prepare yourself.”

She smiled when she added, “and you’ll have to learn to keep out of trouble when your sailor is at sea.”

Mary Alice Taylor wasn’t greedy or particularly picky. Nor did she insist on pedigree or other sorts of foolishness to define what makes a worthwhile person. She liked George Brimm just fine. He was a good kisser. She’d figure out how to love him and knew, more or less instinctively, that he would provide for his family in just the way that she wanted for hers.

He had great aspirations, after all. Moreover, he knew with clear certainty that his wife-to-be was more ambitious still. It didn’t frighten him; this intrepid acceptance of constant performance checks was the key in many ways. He was ready to be Knight-errant to her Lady Marion, or whatever the case may be.

Thus, in tune with all folks who seriously plan on elevating themselves, he and she always figured things would work out. No doubt about it, they required, or at least relied on, just such fortune as the slaughters and betrayals, the mayhem and butchery, of World War Two was as likely to bolster as to terminate.

‘It’s an ill wind that blows no good,’ the future Captain George Brimm liked to quip to any who would listen. Neither he nor his intended considered themselves idealistic, at least for the most part.

* * * * * *

He’d first encountered his fiance—my Mother, who was baking my eldest brother’s bun in her oven all the while Daddy was composing some of his letters—in a fashion congruent with a pragmatic pairing. At my grandparents’ party, where they met, Mary Alice spirited him off to the dunes above Onslow Beach, and proceeded to have her way with him, albeit possibly only with the indulgence of her sweet lips and hungry mouth and clever fingers.

An athletic young woman, she had rejected three suitors, so far, because she knew that they’d never be able to hold her tightly; she’d slip their leash. She wasn’t interested. She insisted on a male counterpart who was burly enough to ‘hold the reins’ and, as she would often smile to George later, “get me going!”

In this vein, she taught him to play tennis. Once he learned the game, Mary Alice did not once ‘master her master’ in the sport, though she tried ferociously to do so. Competition was second nature to this young officer.

She’d been looking as well for a man who ‘measured up’ to her ambitious social and ‘professional’ expectations, and was, to put the point plainly, cute to boot. And there he was, my Daddy, a competent hunk of burning love for Mary Alice to seduce and savor.

She had him in the palm of her hand, as it were, by dinner on the Friday of the two callow officers’ three-day pass. By Sunday, Daddy and Mother had shared true intentions to wed and mate and breed a brood of fighting Brimms for the world to see.

Ensign Fred Taylor, my Uncle Freddy, lived through the war but lost his arm to a shipboard fire at the Battle of Midway. Till his death, he told the story of that weekend along the New River at the beach, where ‘your Mama showed what she was made of and saved your Daddy’s ass from some woman less gifted.’

**

Along similar lines, Ensign Brimm held firm to his belief that he would survive any ordeal that the world’s concatenations handed him, even good weather. After the above-mentioned ‘last storm’ that his late Winter convoy endured, miraculous in times of war or peace, clear skies greeted the ‘undercover’ J.G. and his shipmates for at least a few hours each day till they reached the cusp of their intended safe-passage’s terminal portage.

Though every seaman present had been ever-watchful of baby-blue firmament overhead, like anxious tuna might look for shark signs, actual enemy aerial overflight only began nineteen days out of Helsinki, four weeks to the day following the final blustery blow that more commonly defined even the run-of-the-mill Winters in these waters. They were still a good six sailing days away, minimum, from the Danish Straits.

Last trip, entering Kattesgat for the first time had fully affirmed George’s addiction to maritime artistry. The most complicated, dangerous waters he had ever navigated, the passage unsettled his innards even as he felt a bit of the delectable nausea of the true love that Mary Alice induced. Inescapably, anyway, they’d certainly be most at risk of being ‘easy pickings’ in such constrained and tricky circumstances.

HMCS Halifax, their aged tub, had precisely one slender cannon with which to sweep the sky for any opportunistic attackers. Predictably, he had excelled in his ‘mounted-gun training class,’ just as he had learning the SONAR or ‘Sprechen-Sie-Deutsch’ that he had yet to use. Thus, he doubted very much any likelihood that he would try his luck against random predatory German aviators, inasmuch as to do so would contravene direct commands from on high.

Though the geopolitical and socioeconomic intricacies of the war were of little interest to Brimm or other ‘ordinary seamen,’ he followed the news—like his Officer Training Class teachings had insisted was ‘essential officer protocol’—and more or less comprehended that Canada and England had issues that precluded for the time being their openly allying with the Soviets. For one thing, technically, the Russians and the Germans remained at peace if not actually any sort of allies.

The convoy’s orders, in the event, had been explicit. “While on missions to supply the Soviets, under NO circumstances shall any member of Her Majesty’s Special Merchant Marine Mercy Mission forces take hostile action, or otherwise engage in ANY combat operations, against Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, or other belligerent Axis forces.”

Part of the ruse of allying with the Russians on the sly—something that the Soviet Union had been bargaining to achieve for the world to see for several years, since well before Munich’s hideous hypocrisy—was to hide the fact of making ‘comrades of the communists,’ so to speak. Neither Canadian nor Yankee upper crust stalwarts, for the most part, ‘hated the Nazis,’ let alone having a grudge against Germany’s ‘new order’ for the world, with its promise of a ‘Red-Free’ thousand year rule for the high and mighty.

All the convoy’s ships, whatever the case may be, had their courses plotted to remain, as much as nautically possible, at the fringes of what constituted assumed Nazi air-force reach. This possibility of inaccessibility was diminishing, however, and would end altogether a day or so out from the Baltic portals that they were seeking.

The above-noted sightings of aircraft, though so far high overhead and out of reach, portended encounters fraught with fright, if not even direr states. As ship Captain, Brimm knew by the watch-bells exactly when they would enter Nazi airspace. He slept little in the final day, in any case; he counted every one of the entire span’s forty-eight bells’ tolling.

The convoy, just then, was negotiating its array to carry each of thirteen ships through the Straits, a queue-of-passage, so to speak. As if on cue, from the bright blue of midday came a distant whine that became more and more persistent, until a screaming, mechanized eagle—twin engines blaring—plummeted from on high in their midst.

Brimm had insisted on having his Halifax play the part of lead ship, and this brought both of what he inferred were German Junker-88’s to buzz and bomb his outpost. Four ineffectual passes apparently accounted for the deadly duo’s entire armament of substantial ordnance, since at that point they separated and initiated strafing runs that, save for a few holes in the hull, inflicted no damage on the freighter that the Nazis had hoped would sink and block the passage for the other ships in the task force.

Thus, possibly, the German pilots’ poor marksmanship might have resulted in ‘J.G.’ Brimm’s more attentively following the overall order of battle. Whereas the heavy explosives were no longer a threat, however, the pair of harrying bombers appeared to have endless belts to feed into each infernal engine’s twin machine guns.

After the two planes had both made three strafing-runs in tandem, the airborne bullies looked like they were withdrawing. A cheer went up from below deck, in any event, not altogether rousing, yet clearly expressive of a certain esprit de corps.

The Captain did not join in, always wary of any early gloat. Soon enough, back came one of the Junkers. Again the shots were wide of the mark, although watchful American and Canadian eyeballs saw the fifty-caliber shells shred the waves all round them. The pilot had grinned a snarl at them on his last run, turning a lazy loop into a cloud bank, possibly to make yet another pass.

Finally, Skipper George could stand no more pummeling, even if it had thus far missed the heaving, steaming Halifax in but a single, harmless instance. For one thing, he recalled the death and injury during their return trek last time. A popular officer must be able to hold grudges against enemies, whatever the orders on hand.

This, perhaps, explains a more resounding hurrah that resonated from deep inside the riveted guts of their boat when Brimm exited the wheelhouse deck to take the gunner’s seat in the jerry-rigged, single-mount, Bofors auto-cannon, a weapon of similar design to the Swedish-licensed emplacements on which he’d learned naval combat shooting back along the Virginia coast.

For a minute or so, while everyone but Brimm held his breath, this last German seemed to have withdrawn from this tiny yet still terrifying engagement. The keening bomber’s buzz came back at them from the fat cumulus cover, however, on a track almost precisely where Halifax’s chief officer had trained the slender barrel’s thrust.

Starting as the Junker made its screaming approach, twin machine guns blazing, Brimm let loose a firing fusillade in reply that continued as the German receded, though not quickly enough. Skipper’s penultimate shell caught the unlucky death-dealing bomber in the fuselage, just ahead of the disappearing tail that, upon the forty millimeter shell’s impact did a double flip before it fell, flaming, into the sea, the only obvious part of the plane to survive the explosive hit that disappeared the rest of the aircraft in a cloud of smoking smithereens.

Unlike when the unlucky freighter full of tires went down during his first run’s dive-bombing confrontation, after which they took half a day to look for survivors, the Halifax in this instance made but a single perfunctory pass in search of the pilot and crew. The remaining four days before Talinn were overcast except for two nights of clear moonlit firmament. Brimm therefore had no cause for further valor on the firing line.

Would a Court-Martial be his reward for his minor victory? He didn’t know, nor did he much care, remembering one of the freighter Mounty’s immolated sailors from last year, one who had only been sixteen years old when the last life oozed out of him. In such a frame of mind, George Brimm began his newest communication with she who would remain his fiance till someone successfully asserted otherwise.

*

“Dear Mary Alice,” he wrote first in this latest letter, the fifth since Reykjavik on the present run. He had been considering both ‘My Dear Mary Alice’ and ‘Dearest Mary Alice,’ but he had already used both, and he would never be the sort to begin his salute to his fiance with ‘My Dearest Mary Alice.’ So he started simply again with his standard salute.

So you now know the whole life history of my friend, the one so akin to me. I’ll update you about his ventures. Of that, you may rest assured.

Anyhow, we left off last time when I was telling about my recent trek in my firm’s big truck. I’m the driver; my cab-mate is actually my buddy, the one, right? Thomas is his name. We make a good team, when I need to do something other than farm.

And we have twelve other trucks following us! We’re delivering ‘coal to Newcastle’ somewhere, ha ha, up in Canada, if you can believe that. The temperature never gets above freezing so far, but only for the first part of the drive has there been any snow.

Cold and clear conditions make for easier passage in some ways. Still, as you well know, I much prefer overcast conditions.

We’re taking in ore of some sort—it’s hard to imagine Canuck’s needing minerals—but we’re coming back with maple syrup and whisky, so I’ll save some of each for our next love festival. We don’t need the sweet, but we both enjoy the treat! Ha ha ha.

Thomas and I talk constantly about how we pine, he for Eileen, me for my sweetheart and soul’s mate and bride-to-be. I still want to try one of our special kisses for a whole hour without stopping. I’m not sure I can manage it, but I’m gung-ho to try!!!

We ran into some difficulty with the road a day or so back, a blockage of some sort caused by an animal migration, right in the middle of February. I think they were buffalo that were mixed in with cows, with eagles flying lazy circles up above.

Thus, completely out of the blue, I’ve been in the middle of an adventurous Winter hunt, a chance to wander Canadian Woods up near Hudson Bay. The snow is so deep and cold, it might as well be ocean. And no, we’re shooting neither bear nor wolves nor elk nor even the buffalo, not mammals at all. Aerial prey is what we’re after.

Did you even know that Canada’s geese population doesn’t all migrate? Some people believe that these are European birds. Can you believe that? They might be escaping, eh?

You realize for sure, in any case, what a reliably good shot I am. So I bagged the limit, only to learn about some rule or other that may mean I can’t bring any goodies home with me. Heck. I’ve never eaten goose before either.

I’m so happy that the two of us delight in stomping around in the woods. Guns in hand, ready to go! I’m looking forward to my next tennis lesson; I’m going to beat you soon, my soon-to-be Mrs. Mary Alice.

Of course, I enjoy my manly pursuits. You like that about me. Right? Just now, though, I miss your kiss so much that I can barely sleep.

If this bundle reaches you, I will have lived through every deprivation of your affections, despite frostbite, angry bears, and howling wolves who sounded hungrier for human flesh than I am for your kisses. My sweet, soon-to-be wife, I won’t be able to stop myself: I’ll write again tomorrow.

He basically insisted on a postscript. He felt as if he must have forgotten something every time he thought about signing off.

P.S. Don’t forget. We’re going to use the next available long weekend to go to the Outer Banks! We can plan our first duck hunt!!!

***

Anyone who seeks to speak for, and with, the past must, eventually, come face to face with the iffy issues of choice; what to leave in, what to weed out, which direction to explore, which road to abandon, like Frost’s snowy track in the woods, ‘left for another day that will never come back.’ This necessity, in and of itself, is more and more obvious the greater a specific scenario’s complexity.

In some ways, the ascendancy of naval officer George Brimm is the tale of a true working class hero, whose wiles and smarts had earned him a billet in the aforementioned, inaugural Navy ‘OTC/OTP Program.’ However, family played the largest part in the young Lieutenant’s character. His three older brothers had taught him the feistiest arts of ferocity; otherwise, he’d have fallen apart like a cheap Sears tent.

Each elder sibling had exhibited, as if reinventing fraternal hazing rituals anew, that combination of condescending cruelty and knowing instruction that brought forth young Georgie’s own fierce fighting spirit, although he would never display, nor could even pretend to feel, the cocksure certainty of victory and righteousness that Thomas, James, and Dewey appeared to possess.

Beverly-Ann came along three years after George burst on the scene from the practiced loins of his Mother, Marie. The one girl in the Brimm quintet almost instinctively became his sidekick, his ally, George’s teammate against the domination and brutality of the threesome whose own infighting and top-dog competition had little appeal to the young fighter in spite of his feistiness.

Thus, Bev and he formed an alliance—they called it a brother-and-sister treaty—which would last their entire lives. That George named one of his two daughters after her, also the fourth in the birth order, testifies to this longevity and depth of connection.

His younger sister’s fervent loyalty, whatever the case may be, had formed the foundation for his overall relationships with girls and women. It made possible the excellent selection of Mary Alice Taylor, upon whose acumen and initiative his continued ascendancy in the scheme of things depended.

In any event, his was by no means a standard route to becoming a commanding officer on a United States Navy aircraft carrier. Everything in his background helps to illustrate this point, an unexpected rise through the ranks to a nonetheless well-deserved attainment of the four stripes and single star of a United States Navy Captain.

**

Skipper Brimm had believed the Junker operated with a crew of two. When Thomas Charles, a stellar student, corrected him that the actual personnel were four, and then cited the manual’s title, the Mate’s Skipper laughed. “I stand corrected.”

The Boatswain blushed like a shy, well-praised subaltern ought to color. The silence between them, calm and patient, lasted as clouds rolled over the horizon, like a welcome blanket to fend off pesky, ravenous insects intent on having their blood.

“I’ll pray never to have a berth at Leavenworth,” the Captain chortled. “I did ‘wrong,’ maybe so, but perhaps it was necessary.” He looked inquiringly at his second-in-command. “Better to shoot back than to run away. Don’t you think?”

What he witnessed the first time with the young seafaring teenager’s agonal throes established a ‘this-much-but-no-more’ threshold that the Kraut team had crossed. It became ‘the line in the Kattesgatte’ that in some ways defined his career.

He could already be sleeping. Four men were no more. “So be it,” he thought to himself. “Better them than me.”

The undulations of his precious aging tub of riveted tanker lulled him as Halifax encountered some of the Straits legendary surging currents of froth and swell. He thought of the way that he would soon roll in Mary Alice’s arms, ‘Lord willing and the Creek don’t rise.’

The Soviet Air Force wasn’t a match for England’s, America’s, or Germany’s. He knew this for a fact. Yet in this sneaky-phase of the precursors to Lend-Lease, the Russians did have a substantial and preeminent presence in much of the area.

A day out past Bornholm, far from the Polish coast, and ever closer to Estonia, the first communist fighters streaked by the port side, just above the breaker-tops. These slender machines, LaGG-1’s if he remembered his book-learning, didn’t look very lethal, compared to what he’d just witnessed from the Luftwaffe.

Still any amicable air cover would prove vastly preferable to none. For the first night in nearly a week, he truly slept, needing his dinging little alarm to rouse him in the middle of the Morning Watch.

He even contemplated ignoring it for half a second. As he wound the tiny spherical timepiece for the next time that he might need it, he realized that he was more or less completely relaxed, as confident about the sailing ahead as if he were on Chesapeake Bay.

He trusted his intuition, which meant that only random accident of a meteorological or nautical sort might probably upend his and his crew’s and his ship’s success. His smile was infectious. Thomas Charles carried it throughout the ship before Brimm made his Afternoon Watch rounds to be greeted by grins among all and sundry.

Nor did nature fail them further. They steamed into Reval Harbor just as a rare late-Winter, red-sky-at-night dusk served up a starry Northern night. As Lieutenant(J.G.) Brimm looked out from the bridge, he knew that his woman, now over three months pregnant, was wondering about him just as he was about her.

She didn’t know exactly where he was or what he was involved in, although she had some generally apt suppositions, nor could he speak of his ‘mission-of-the-moment,’ which had begun with a wink and a nudge at his ‘decommissioning’ his Lieutenant, J.G. status in favor of a ‘position-without-portfolio’ in Canada’s coastal naval operations.

He was well-stocked with brandy for the first Dog Watch. He had his notepad. He wanted to write before Thomas Charles and a few others joined him to touch wood and congratulate each other as they drank.

*

Dear Mary Alice, began his briefest letter of the cruise. He never scrawled long screeds but still favored more than just a few paltry paragraphs.

We’ve had unexpected and yet truly welcome company. I had no idea so many Canadians were Ukrainian, but an entire trainload of them have stopped in at our latest rest stop.

Apparently, I am the designated instructor to teach them the art of drinking bourbon. As you know, I’ve had some practice, with you!

Please forgive the abbreviated post, but I will think of you till the last drop. As things turned out, in all their correspondence, this was his only missive without at least a minuscule postscript.

***

He hadn't started out as this brilliant Captain, obviously, let alone as the overseer of the swarm of sailors and machines that the Lusitania, his first aircraft carrier, transported around the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, what his Chief Warrant Officer called 'a floating outpost of empire.' No Sir.

His career as a naval officer had truly begun, in some sense, when he realized that to 'get ahead' and 'climb the ladder,' he would need to take more risks than the majority of his fellow Ensigns, most of whom either came from 'connected' family backgrounds or otherwise enjoyed a head start toward the Admiral's star about which, without any exceptions, they all dreamed.

Ensign Brimm’s therefore necessary search for 'extra credit' was, fortunately enough, readily fruitful, given that in 1940 a war loomed ahead with the same certainty as the eventual return of the sun to Arctic realms after the Winter Solstice has come and gone. The narrative here has illustrated the ease with which Ensign Brimm found risky assignments to aid his advancement.

The first rule that every enlisted sailor learns to follow, if he doesn’t want his ‘service’ to be more fraught and daunting than it will inevitably already be, is this. Never volunteer!

Clearly, this advice did not apply to Brimm’s choice to make the Navy a career in the commissioned ranks. He didn’t overdo his eagerness, however. He knew that having the reputation of a toady or suck-up would ruin his chances to lead effectively.

This sensibility, of doing enough but not insisting on doing everything possible, was part of his Danish-Scottish background. His grandmother had called it “the Lagom way.” Adherents of this completely sensible sensibility made excellent stewards and hence marvelous officers as well—thus, in part, the experiences and accomplishments of the Skipper in this case.

**

“Boatswain!” Brimm insisted. “If our good Russian friend doesn’t lower his pistol, you must shoot him. Do you understand me?”

Never had Thomas Charles’ merry acknowledgement rung so sweetly. “Aye aye, Captain.” Lieutenant Petkov’s arched eyebrow did not hide his own smile away.

To himself, our estimable young officer wondered, “What in hell is this?” In its berth, Halifax had emptied with the Soviet stevedores’ practiced efficiency. A few crates of precious machine guns were the final cargo, following several score brand new Willys versions of the original Jeep.

From his wheelhouse perch, Brimm had been watching similar scenes unfolding, involving differing cargoes, all about the harbor acres that housed his convoy. “Not a hitch!” the ebullient flotilla commander had marveled, until this shit, this inexplicable, crappy demand to ‘give up all your remaining weaponry, please.’

Thus, he repeated, ‘what the hell?’ Unbeknownst to Brimm, Comrade Stalin had fixated his attention on combat rifles for troops in the coming Ukrainian frontlines, where many infantry units still only had the more ancient Mosin-Nagant bolt-action model, with a mere three-shot magazine, rather than the updated five-shot reservoir.

Pistols and assault submachine guns were simply not coming off the production lines. Soviet officers felt a certain desperation in their search for reliable automatic pistols; the commanders knew that all convoy soldiers received sturdy forty-fives as standard issue.

The protocol for the previous convoy had been wheedling, bargaining, and bribery. That had yielded almost none of the hoped-for hundreds of guns. Hence, the new order had come down the chain of command. ‘We’ll try threats and extortion instead.’

The seconds passed like slowly trickling drips from icicles in the frigid air on deck. Brimm gulped as he and his first-mate exchanged glances.

Petkov, affable throughout the confrontation, finally sighed, shrugged, and holstered his own beloved Colt .45 M-1911, at this point an almost priceless sidearm. He extended his open palm to J.G. Brimm. “We are in great need, you see,” the Russian offered with an explanatory tilt of his head.

George tore a ragged breath from deep in his lungs. His eyes glistened sympathetic tears. He nodded that he understood and forgave.

“Well then. Well then,” the young Bolshevik Ensign continued. “We will be comrades, friends if you prefer.” Brimm heaved his own sigh and nodded and grinned as his Russian counterpart conceded. No further provisions of either weapons or ‘supplies’ would be demanded.

“We have something too, just for you,” the clever, lanky Slavic linguist continued with lilting enunciation. “We have heard,” which he pronounced ‘heared,’ “about our Dear Comrade’s Messerschmitt heroism!” His pronunciation made it sound like ‘eeroismeh,’ more or less.

Thus did a Red Star medallion enter his life, replete with a citation and ribbon. The text was Cyrillic, although his new comrade provided a general translation. ‘For supreme services to the Soviet people, Lieutenant(J.G.) George Brimm is hereby awarded this Ultimate Expression of Appreciation by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

As things worked out, after the sense of comradeship that ended his first voyage-to-the-land-of-Reds, Captain Brimm, on this run, had brought a case of premium vodka, an item which he had learned Russians especially treasured. When the sense of mutuality and common cause were flowing merrily, he clunked three glasses down and, from one of the evocatively shaped bottles, filled these cups to their brims with clear liquor.

When Petkov realized the enormity of what he was witnessing, he haled to one of the knots of sailors who had been observing them. “Giorgi!” Some Russian version of ‘come here, now!’ must have followed, as another slender officer detached himself and trotted briskly up the gangway to join them.

“So this is George too, but in Russian, of course: Giorgi.” This bright young fellow looked at the little table with a pretty bottle and four glasses on it and beamed as brightly as a clear Baltic June solstice.

“To friendship,” proposed Brimm. “And to a peaceful future for our children.” Thomas Charles and the two Bolshies affirmed this, with ‘amen’ and ‘da,’ respectively.

Glasses clinked, sober smiles followed, and four throats drained the distilled spirits of potato peels—“as our good God intended,” according to Giorgi—to spread a familiar comforting warmth. Savoring bliss shut both Russians’ eyes.

“Oh, true Wodka!” the new young officer exclaimed, bursting into tears. Another shared round left the two Soviets with three bottles and a few shots to share as they saw fit.

They would never meet again. Given his entire upbringing and schooling and training, that such a moment occurred ‘under communist auspices’ marked George Martin Brimm for the rest of his days. Moreover, he knew the personal import of this one instant in a life filled with incident.

No way would he find the lines to communicate the events of the past week. Then again, that’s what a life together was for; he had his special medallion tucked away, no matter what. He’d write one last time before heading home.

*

Dear Mary Alice, once again he began in the standardized fashion that Lieutenant(J.G.) George Brimm operationalized in every posting he ever commanded. His wont would always be that of a steward, a standard-bearer, father, and husband who followed certain procedures in functional ship-shape ways wherever he found himself.

I dream about you every night, honestly, or at least every time that I sleep long enough, not always easy what with the ‘mountain light’ this time of year. Spring is almost here. April showers, if the weather improves, May flowers, and our marriage. Don’t you think?

The farm has been rough-going this season—not enough rain, easy for all the beasts of prey to feast on the chickens and even little ‘baa-baa-black-sheep.’ I’ve told you about how I learned to deal with aerial predators.

Never would George Martin Brimm have shot a hawk, let alone an eagle; really, not just for sport or the thrill of the kill, anyway. But this bad actor had been taking the lambs, so it had to be brought down.

He could talk about things in such a fashion. She’d work it out; she was a natural at codes, hidden messages, that sort of thing. In half a dozen paragraphs that the censors blacked out, he tried, before the communication took a plaintively domestic turn that made the overseers send the letter on rather than destroying the whole thing.

For too long, I fear, I shall not be able to write for a while. You know how relentless navigating the plowing and planting can be. Of course you do.

But in a matter of weeks, with any luck, we will have plighted our troth for good and proper. Till death due us part. And, though neither of us is really very Biblical at all, we will fruitfully multiply.

Of course, all our offspring will be handsome and strong, smart as whips and as lucky as two like us can help them to be. How many children? At least five is my answer, which means four to go after this one!

I’m bringing home gifts & prizes for our little clan too. I’ll surprise you. I wake and drift off to dreams with your kisses on my lips. That’s not all, obviously, but we’ll get to practice our shooting matches soon enough.

His postscript was entirely familial. They would be old hands before their first was nursing.

P.S. If it’s a boy, we’ll name him George Marcus; if it’s a girl, we’ll call her Mary Ellen!

* * * * * *

So, yes, the medal is a family story. Like all kinds of others, obviously, but still, isn’t it interesting? My father: winning a special service award from the Soviet Union—a red medallion from a bunch of Reds!

Daddy very rarely much liked doctrine of any kind. He wouldn’t even be a good Episcopalian for Mother Mary Alice. For heaven’s sake, he would never be anyone’s likely convert.

But he wasn’t a good imperialist either, by the same token, since some silly set of ideas about ‘protecting American interests’ or ‘saving all the little brown people from the Reds’ lay near the root of all the Empire’s propagated propaganda, and he knew it. He’d read War Is a Racket, by Smedley Butler, the Navy’s Marine Corps Commandant for nine years till he quit in protest.

Primarily, like the peasant farmer he started out, he wanted to have a home with a wife and children, only as an ocean-going wanderer instead of a sharecropper, so he could have enough to keep the sharks from circling and plotting to gobble everything up.

Just like Daddy’s family, in the end, there were five of us. We came out in a similar order of battle, only with two girls at the end instead of just one.

As I said at the outset, I’ve left lots out. I could go on, too. Commanding an aircraft carrier—the U.S.S. Saratoga too, one of the first ‘Super-Carriers’— no matter what, kept him busy, learning and leading the Command Center that he’d for decades believed would be his.

Wherever he went, his Soviet medal was with him. It only occupied Mother’s mantle after he died. It’s a pretty thing; it may or may not be quite a story, but it is certainly suggestive.

You’ve almost got to ask. ‘What’s up with a big to-do about Daddy’s Red Star?’ When all is said and done, the thing still came from a bunch of Soviet Marxists who tried to rob him. To put matters mildly, it seems at least a little odd.

Don’t try to get me to tell you what it all means, though. I don’t know; I’ve only got one communist friend, that I know of. He encouraged me to write all this, even though, like I admitted already, I mainly did it to increase my chances of getting the medal.

I also wanted, however, to perform a labor of love for the Father who liked me best and, so far as I know, never once did an evil or treacherous thing to anyone. He was the epitome of the ‘hard-to-find good man,’ truly an officer and a gentleman.

Every Captain who will ever live will tell you that ‘it’s my crew that made me the competent Captain that I am.’ Daddy was one of the ones who really believed it. That’s part of the reason that he always treasured that Red Star.

I understand why. He’d want me to have it. Don’t you agree?

Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…

unveil a briefing about what are the essential elements of well-being. #26’s episode in this newest version of what we might call Pharma gangsters and contraband heroics takes on a huge lobby, an obsessively persistent narrative about ‘healthy brains,’ and plenty of readily available chemistry. Shall we begin?

As often proves true, like with Jorma Kaukonen’s “Prohibition Blues” to intro Big Tent’s “Capitalism on Drugs” series, a cultural nugget—these days often in the form of a YouTube video, ha ha—can serve to start us off. Voila, Kenny Rogers and the First Edition with “I Just Dropped in(to See What Condition My Condition Was in.”

The lyrics provide instructive phrasing for the components of this discussion. “I found my mind in a brown paper bag…I tore my mind on a jagged sky…I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole and then I followed it in…I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind, I saw so much I broke my mind…”

Could drugs be involved? You bet! But such contraband as that to which the song alludes are—so far as evidence is available to determine—free of ‘long term side effects,’ apocryphal evidence about ‘acid flashbacks’ notwithstanding. It’s quite different from a medical-pharmaceutical model of ‘depression.’

AN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE ABOUT FLUOXETINE

Inasmuch as the primary descriptive avenue for this chemical, technically a potent poison, ha ha, takes us down the road to serotonin, perhaps that would be a good place to begin. What is it? When did we learn about it? Blah blah blah.

Here’s the first search with which I sought some useful study of this issue: <serotonin discovery OR background "search for" brain chemistry history OR origins >. In the event, it garnered 310,000 citations and the now-standard ‘AI-overview,’ most of which are at least minimally useful.

5-hydroxytryptamine, the chemical descriptor for this ubiquitous existential molecule, first bore the name enteramine, which it received in 1935 from an Italian researcher, Vittorio Erspamer, who was studying the intestinal tract. A Wiki entry about him reveals that, “Erspamer was one of the first Italian pharmacologists to realize that fruitful scientific research benefits from building a relationship with the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.”

Indeed. So too the Cleveland Clinic’s trust-funded researchers recognized the same molecular disposition in their samples as they were seeking to unravel the secrets of vasoconstriction, the tightening of blood vessels. Artificial Intelligence’s capsulization stated things incisively.

“In addition to its role in the brain as a neurotransmitter regulating mood, sleep, appetite, and (sexual) functions, serotonin also acts as a hormone in the gut, regulating digestion and influencing appetite and nausea.” Ultimately, Dilworth Wayne Whitley, proceeding from uncovering 5HT in ‘mammalian brains,’ ended up hypothesizing the “‘Serotonin hypothesis’ of mental illness.”

The leap from gut to brain, from a happy tummy to a sweet disposition, rings some intuitive bells even among the biochemically illiterate. Too much sugar or too little practically guarantees daunting mental or cognitive impacts, for instance.

And to think this molecule in some way bears responsibility for aberrant behavior, and not the social circumstances of beleaguered miscreants. Clearly, a different view is possible.

Still, the life of Professor Woolley stands as one of those monumental testimonies to human potential. Despite his diabetes and blindness and general enervation that led to his fatal heart attack at only 52 years, he was one of the most prominent thinkers at the famed—and in some ways, perhaps, infamous—Rockefeller Institute, where he was a leader in theorizing and discerning a thoroughly useful neurological interface.

Wooley also fancied LSD, a stimulating alternative to the SSRI ubiquity that has come to pass. Still, his efforts originated from Rockefeller money—the seed funds for the Modern Nuclear Project, the strategic decision to elevate pharmacology over nursing or public health, blah blah blah. Since at least the 1930’s, in any event, these oil money interests had assiduously searched for the ‘keys to neurochemistry.’

Can anyone assert, with a straight face anyway, that the sole rationale for this plutocratic largesse was human health and happiness. Such an absurdity would provoke an LOL response from all but the brain dead. Here in #26, we don’t assert the proof of any ‘criminal intent’ even as we provide plenty of evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, of what must at minimum be conceded are ‘divided interests,’ with profit and hegemony near the top of the list of ‘goals and objectives.’

Not that this is a ‘popular’ view among ‘foundation-dependent’ nerds, ha ha, but this search did bring 2,900 links forward: <"rockefeller institute for medical research" history aspersions OR criticism OR "hidden agenda" OR "profit motive" OR sinister OR "double dealing">. Moreover, the AI look is telling.

“While the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) has made significant contributions to biomedical research and medical education, it has also faced criticism and questions regarding the influence of John D. Rockefeller's business interests and the focus on certain research areas (later specified as an “(e)mphasis on pharmaceutical solutions”) over others.” If not a Q.E.D., this at least qualifies as a “Voila!”

One of the ‘problem areas’ that this summation specifies is the Flexner Report, with which any dedicated BTR reader will already be familiar. Abraham Flexner worked for Rockefeller for three decades or so and clearly understood all about who ‘buttered his bread’ and what that implied.

And that would be along these lines, as proposed by our artificial aggregators, as it were. “The emphasis on a ‘science-based,’ standardized approach to getting a medical education—as advocated by the Flexner Report which was influenced by Rockefeller funding—led to the decline of alternative therapies like homeopathy and naturopathy. These alternative approaches were deemed ‘unscientific’ and pushed to the fringes of healthcare, contributing to a medical system focused on pharmaceuticals.”

The upshot of this initiation of up-to-date modern medical miracles, primarily drug-company-driven, is what arch-conservative Thomas Sowell points out, illustrated by a chart Above-the-Fold. In no other place on Earth are people more dependent on these noxious, and literally nauseating, drugs to flatten people’s affects and pacify them than is the case here in the belly of the beast, where the ‘daily dosage’ is roughly eleven percent of the populace. Only Iceland, at ten and a half percent, comes close.

Three things, in any eventuality, so far define the historical background of the SSRI options with which doctors now dose hundreds of millions around the world and, as a proportion of the populace, even according to SOP-sources, more in the United States than anywhere else but Iceland, Portugal, Canada, or Australia, OMGoddess. First is the influence of big money interests; second is persistence, or even obsession, with finding brain chemicals and figuring out how to manipulate them; third is an insistence, again obsessive, on drug-treatment-protocols as the overwhelmingly primary clinical option.

A PAIR OF DETOURS

Before we return to the main thread of this bulging ball of yarn about pharmaceuticals and emotional health, in which we examine SSRI’s ‘post-market’ developments and more, a couple of additional points are apt, one of them very much a matter of personal testimony with much better antidepressant drugs, with zero ugly side effects and massive salubrious beneficence. Actually, five such are part of my life’s history, ha ha, in any case part of culture’s halucinogenic and psychedelic psyschopharmacopaiea.

My personal cannabis story is fun. That will await another Introduction, however, even as I now have my very own marijuana-card here in Virginia, as noted in today’s initial paragraphs. So that’s one super-mellow, hippy-dippy, sweet stoner way to handle one’s aches and pangs, body and soul, physical and psychic. More tax collections and fewer prisons certainly sounds like good policy and practice; I mean, unless one is a Pharma exec, of course.

My second ‘alternative-interlude’ resulted from a close friendship with a psychotherapist who remains one of the most brilliant women whom I’ve had the honor and pleasure to encounter. She got her psychology Ph.D. when she was twenty from a prestigious clinical program, was rescuing the life-lorn before she graduated, and was charging her clients of means three hundred dollars an hour by the time that we met in 1983.

Back in 1965, when she was completing her doctoral work, she learned about California’s being the first state where people could acquire a new pharmaceutical that she fancied for herself and her patients-to-be. MDMA, or ecstasy, already had a half century background—an article is in the offing—when she, having come from some ways and means so to say, booked a flight to the Bay Area and bought ten thousand tablets.

In the event, she had a ‘lifetime supply,’ an eventuality that the two of us enjoyed on many occasions. For all I know, she has played a part in the present flurries of legalization efforts, as well as contributing her ideas to researchers whose engagement both preceded and informed these same attempts to suspend the U.S. Government’s “just crazy”—her words—opportunistic policy of proscription.

I already knew about the S.S.R.I.-’revolution,’ of course, so I sought to ‘add some context,’ as I’ve ever been wont to do, ha ha. ‘Well, probably the same drug-companies that invented Ecstasy and then collaborated in its proscription prognosticate even higher sales and profits from their antidepressants.’

She would have none of my “little theories.” U.S. mores and mandates were, simply and indisputably, “just crazy!”

Now, anyhow, the worm has turned; my friend’s views, with the patient persistence of erotically endowed nerds, followers of Timothy Leary and Humphrey Osmond and other originators of psychedelic sensibility—not to mention Portugal’s legalizing successes—seem, at minimum plausibly, to be winning a battle about human choice in which the codified approaches were always at best, indeed, criminally insane.

For those who have sampled the ecstatic felicty of MDMA, depression in its throes is simply impossible. My friend struggled with such sensibilities in any case; she was clear that ‘self-medicating’ was vastly superior to what she called a ‘swan dive into libidinal death,’ a phrase that I may have helped her to shape.

The third case, and one which will merit its own in-depth, three part series, or perhaps more, entails looking at Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds paints a portrait, but it is such a pale simulacra of the real deal that one who has done the deed will always shrug and offer the condolences of a little half smile to anyone who wants to find the joyous terror and bizarrely boisterous hilarity and volcanic carnal connectivity of Orange Sunshine, all of which the famed Beatles song asks us to ‘picture,’ on ‘a boat by the river,’ ha ha.

Some of the pages of Acid Dreams and other general instances of psychedelia’s cultural punch have already appeared in several Big Tent issues. And a deeply reported sequence is pending. So for today, a more modest agenda ensues, in which a specific instance of acid in my life completely deconstructs the use of social control agents such as the SSRI antidepressants.

While I occasionally sampled LSD in Colorado and once or twice in college played bridge while tripping, my true initiation into the ritual voodoo magic of blotter in its varied graphical interfaces, and concatenations of Eros and eternity, occurred in Tuscaloosa, where I met Humphrey Osmond, an original synthesizer of the rye-bread-mold analog. Dr. Osmond was a ‘consultant’ at Bryce Mental Hospital, where I worked in a functionally similar capacity much lower on the totem pole, so to say.

My friend was his assistant. Chapter Four of All God’s Cousins, twenty-odd issues back, covered some of the same ground. As things worked out, I got two and four hit gifts from my pal when Dr. O had gifted his befriended assistant with some of the good physician’s essentially unlimited supplies.

This is especially pertinent in today’s installment because we were all working with the in-patients at Bryce, all but a select few of whom had no access to Dr. Osmond’s largely brilliant and hopeful experiments with schizophrenics, comparing the responses of the afflicted to varied interventions, from Thorazine to group discussions about wellness and beyond. Humphrey’s results should have been adequate, in and of themselves, to dispense with other ‘medications’ altogether for many patients.

Especially with Bryce’s adolescent and young adult inmates, Dr. O’s protocols proved markedly better in calming tendencies to ‘act out,’ in providing personal insights to patients themselves, and in showing results that lasted longer than the time between one dose of Thorazine and another. At the same time, these ‘controlled substances’ were opening my eyes and those with whom I consorted to the delicate miracle of embodiment in the context of mortality’s ever-present claws.

A fourth class of psychedelic, mescaline, also forms a part of this past pattern of interpersonal discovery, as it were. An older classmate at Harvard, who apparently could peer into my poet’s soul, took me to the iconic Cambridge Cemetery one Fall night of my sophomore year and, as if offering a holy chalice, presented me with a little tablet.

A grad student and teaching assistant for one of my history courses, he predicted that mescaline would mark a watershed moment. In some senses, he must have been correct, for this was my initiation into the psychedelic realm that soon enough constituted a large part of my psychic orientation to matters at hand.

As to why I received this ‘sacred instruction,’ all I can offer is the following account, which provides some likely explanatory background. It probably started with a specific class.

We had a unit in our social history seminar that dealt with historical patterns of psychotropic substances use. Mainly the talk was of marijuana and opiates, but one class did settle on some readings about psychedelic agents such as various sorts of shrooms and the whole acid-scene at Cambridge a decade or so prior to my matriculating on the banks of the Charles.

Surprisingly, I was the only student—though I’d tried nothing more potent than pot at that juncture—who defended the plausibility of beneficence or even medicinal value in these often originally shamanic practices. One female seminar participant in particular was harsh in her judgments about junkies and druggies, Harvard credentials notwithstanding.

I’ve only had the good fortune to obtain Mescalito’s intervention on only a single other occasion. Much more commonly a part of my habits of imbibing high-sparkle libations, magic mushrooms, or psillocybin, is the fifth case at hand for this piece of #26’s puzzle.

The path of mystery micological substances have long paralleled humanity’s sojourn. This topic too will show up in these pages, given time and tide; for today, a precis will serve to begin.

This briefing starts with Steven Pollock, whose murder remains one of Austin, Texas’ premier unsolved whodunits. A brilliant young mycologist, he fantasized a legal psychotropic empire from fiddling with the genetic architecture of psilocybin. Moreover, he famously sent billions of spores spiraling into the upper atmosphere during a hurricane in order to ‘spread the wealth,’ ha ha.

In Tuscaloosa, the setting for much of my hallucinatory coming-of-age, I benefited from his largesse when my sweetheart and my aforementioned lab-assistant-to-Dr.-O friend accompanied me on cow paddy collection hunts. We would bring back bagsful of shrooms for whatever partying was in the works.

Snake Lady introduced us to this realm of wonder. She threw the bashes to which we delivered the goods, as often as not. She’d wander about wearing a yellow cobra, a reticulated python, and nothing else; wild times were always an invitation away.

The connection with Prozac is simple to declare. As with these other cases of contraband, for a reasonable person—of which I may well be one, after all—shroomy tripping serves as a massively improved ‘treatment plan’ for pathological sadness, vis a vis the grotesque experience of getting hooked on the self-emasculating monstrosity of the SSRI ‘medications.’

A sixth set of stimulants have also colored my days and nights of dreams and dancing, so to say, although I have no inclination to seek them out. These are various versions of the methamphetamines and their derivatives; at most marginally preferable to poison-Prozac’s perfidy, they will likely not be a ‘drug of choice’ for most folks.

Speed can be super habit forming; it messes with cardiac function, but were I given a choice between any sort of such, on occasion—the imposition of dosage protocols something at which I’ve managed to excel, ha ha—and any legal antidepressant, I’d elect crystal meth now and again and say ‘vaya con Dios’ to any sap who elected otherwise.

For established ruling hegemons, obviously, such actual human agency—which we might delineate as real democracy instead of drug-wars’ invidious, venal, corrupt, empire-building crucifixion of community life—would cause deep, if not catastrophic, consternation. Hence, one might refer to the “Capitalism on Drugs” series here in the pages of Big Tent Review.

Suicide, random mass homicides, a la “Bowling For Columbine,” and a self-castrated and pathetic population, given the profit margins, are well worth the risk. In fact, as the Introduction has already intoned, these grotesque impacts on Life Force Energy may be a primary purpose of the antidepressant bandwagon, and hence of the entire charade of a ‘Serotonin Theory of Mental Illness.’

The second little sidebar, which we will now add to the ‘personal witness’ just unfolded, comes from the realm of literature. Brave New World and Island, both by Aldous Huxley, posited societies where widely accessible stimulation was ubiquitous thanks to officially distributed stimulants.

Searching for quotations about Soma, though it yielded but 51,200 citations, led to an entire trove of links that now inform today’s essay. This passage from BNW caught my eye. “(Y)ou can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now.

People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.”

Hmmmm. Prozac, anyone?

Interestingly enough, both the writer’s brother and half brother were dedicated biologists whose studies dealt with brain function, cognition, and other kinds of things that pharma execs crave like a junkie joneses for heroin, ha ha. In all likelihood, this fraternal connection with neuroscience influenced the novelist’s work.

Whatever the case may be, another search shows the extent of popular interest in this issue: <"aldous huxley" brother father brain OR neurology OR neuroscience research OR studies>. That query received just a few hundred fewer than 100,000 hits.

In this regard, with a slight addition, we might again agree that author Huxley’s estimations of Soma completely parallel ruling social expectations of Prozac. “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol (and recreational drugs); none of their defects:” no messy messianic cultishness; no addictive ruination of motor skills or work product; not too much sweet carnal connection and the love and solidarity that, conceivably, might result to undermine obedience to ‘constituted authorities’ and dispensers of the goodies and scrips and such.

Having dipped a toe into this raging river of interest about these matters, Big Tent Review can only express an intention to write about Huxley and Brave New World, coming up with yet another series to ascertain the parameters of the here and now. For the moment, we must see that as an exemplary literary producer, Huxley also shows a deep concern with these questions of emotional well-being and how ‘drugs’ of one sort or another might contribute thereto.

To effect our exit elegantly, we can mention Huxley’s autobiographical essay, The Doors of Perception, which details some of his halucinogenic experiences alongside humankind's inclinations along such lines. He begins thus: “(T)he German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, pubhshed the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium Lewinii was new to science.

To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, ‘they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.’” The God of Happy Aplomb, perhaps?

To punctuate as punctiliously as possible, the point of this detour has been twofold. It has shown This Humble Correspondent’s personal experience of alternatives to Prozac poisons; it has illustrated one among many prominent scribes who have similar messages to deliver.

BACK TO THE MAIN EVENT

How shall we proceed then, to further ground our examination of the roots of SSRI proclivities? If not immediately, at least early in the process, one must take into account what a relatively recent Psychology Today that takes us “from Freud to Fluoxetine.” The title labels itself as a ‘history of Prozac.’

“The search for a drug specifically targeting depression began with the work of the pioneering psychopharmacologist Nathan S. Kline in the 1950s. Kline, director of research at Rockland Hospital in Rockland County, New York, grew intrigued by reports of the psychological effects of the antitubercular drug iproniazid (Marsilid) and began his own investigation of the drug with depressed patients.

His 1957 report with psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow, presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, showed promising results. Kline and Ostow theorized that Marsilid acted as a ‘psychic energizer,’ using Freudian psychoanalytic theory to explain the effects of the drug. (This was important since the majority of psychiatrists at the time were either formally trained in analysis or were analytically-oriented in their persuasion.) With Kline and Ostow's research, a new class of drug was born: the antidepressant.”

For a more general slice of the life and times of making sadness into a disease, the reader has multiple excellent choices. For the remainder of this section, we’ll be looking over a few of these.

In the event, one title, Reinventing Depression: A History of the Treatment of Depression in Primary Care, 1940–2004, speaks volumes. A pair of medical doctors published this monograph through Oxford University Press.

“The central premise of this book is that depression and the current treatment models associated with it are so narrowly defined that only a limited number of patients will seek and benefit from care. Current etiologic models that explain how depression progresses underestimate the roles of society and culture in causing depression and overemphasize biological aspects. These models are too deterministic and fail to reveal how much they have changed in the past 50 years.

This book emphasizes how the definition of depression has changed over time. The definition of depression, which identifies it as an illness that explains emotional suffering, opens a pathway for seeking medical help, and offers a model for providing care is an invention that is less than a quarter-century old.” Contemplating what this added emphasis implies ought to be along the lines of the vaunted ‘word to the wise that will suffice.’

The physician-authors list six ‘primary stories’ that tell of the current contextualization of a medicalized sadness that carries the title of Depression. Four of those involve psychopharmacology, pharmaceutical products, or—if we’re more forthright—SSRI antidepressants.

They warn those who seek to comprehend this arena. “Current labels, causes, and treatments for depression are not the end of this process—they are simply the latest chapter. We can better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the latest reinvention by taking a historical perspective that includes changes in both science and society.”

Gerald Grob wrote his contribution to our litany of woe in 1983. Mental Illness and American Society: 1875-1940 contrasts ‘liberal’ with ‘revisionist,’ often Marxist approaches. The author wants to elucidate how ‘modern, scientific’ approaches emerged from earlier views and methods during the period under review.

In practical terms, this shift paralleled a switch from emphasizing institutionalized settings to one that looked to the ‘community’ for ‘treatment options.’ The nineteenth century paradigm, in Grob’s view, put the blame for ‘bad behavior’ on individuals while later perspectives acknowledged environmental, genetic, and family factors.

A proponent of the former would “recommended a system that divided diseases into the ‘defect psychoses’—psychoses due to autointoxication (which he admitted was unproved)—and the manic-depressive and dementia praecox groups (which were based on ‘symptomatology, course, prognosis, and termination, without regard to the pathological findings’). Charles G. Hill’s presidential address at the American Medico-Psychological Association in 1907 echoed” this POV.

Otherwise, practitioners became prey to the very classification schemes that they invented to justify their diagnoses and procedures. The new ways thus set traps that resulted from labeling that replaced descriptive or analytical awareness.

“Classifications of mental diseases had become so numerous, Hill observed, that there was little room for addition, unless we add ‘the classifying mania of medical authors.’ Such imprecision of diagnostic categories led to endless debate. The need for statistical and epidemiological data, nevertheless, required some form of nosology.

The data-collecting activities of federal and state agencies only magnified the problem; the existence of discreet categories made comparisons either impossible or meaningless. By 1917, therefore, the AMPA and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH} collaborated to produce a uniform classification of mental diseases to overcome the existing disorganization which, as the committee noted, ‘discredits the science of psychiatry and reflects unfavorably upon our Association.’”

Voila! The emergence of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual comes into focus. These roots do not paint a pretty picture about the process. Grob’s chapters on the ‘Mental Hygiene Movement’ and ‘the emergence of the mental health professions’ make particularly telling points in regard to understanding the bureaucratic and political-economic priorities that likely underlie all attempts to classify sadness as a disease.

Robert Whitaker, another annalist of this slice of American life, wrote a precis for the journal, Ethical Human Psyhology and Psychiatry. This article bore the same title as his book about ‘mental illness and the Yankee way of doing business:’ “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing. Rise of Mental Illness in America.”

He starts with an incisive quotation of another writer’s estimate of things. “‘Chlorpromazine (better known as Thorazine) initiated a revolution in psychiatry, comparable to the introduction of penicillin in general medicine.’ Haldol and other antipsychotic medications were soon brought to market, and then antidepressants and antianxiety drugs. Psychiatry now had drugs said to target specific illnesses, much like insulin for diabetes.”

He continues this overview of his longer volume in this fashion, once again with an admonitory twist. “However, since 1955, when this modern era of psychopharmacology was born, there has been an astonishing rise in the incidence of severe mental illness in this country.

Although the number of hospitalized mentally ill may have gone down, every other metric used to measure disabling mental illness in the United States has risen dramatically, so much so that E . Fuller Torrey, in his 2001 book The Invisible Plague, concluded that insanity had risen to the level of an ‘epidemic.’ Since this epidemic has unfolded in lockstep with the ever-increasing use of psychiatric drugs, an obvious question arises : Is our drug-based paradigm of care fueling this modem-day plague?”

Indeed. A final sally for this section arrives from esteemed science writer Whitaker’s complete book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. His expanded subtitle bears a pointed mention to begin: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, And The Astonishing Rise Of Mental Illness In America.

Two chapter titles in Part Three also are worth mentioning. Both “The Epidemic Spreads to Children” and “Suffer the Children” contain stark warnings for anyone who has ever, in any way, parented or sought to manage a pack of youngsters. To describe plus or minus twenty percent of them as mentally ill is deranged beyond belief, in some ways of thinking a crime against the young.

We can listen here to the testimony of one young man, whose careless remark about having violent feelings toward the fellow who sent him to the emergency room led to a life of woebegone horror. “‘They didn't run any tests,’ he says. ‘They just asked me a bunch of questions and started me on a bunch of medicines.’ Since then, he has been hospitalized twenty-five times.

He doesn't like antipsychotics, (even more poisonous than SSRI’s) and so he regularly stops taking them when he is discharged, preferring to smoke marijuana instead, and inevitably that leads to trouble. ‘I get arrested and get sent back to the (psych) hospital, and I'm like okay, it's just a business. The more patients they have, the more the doctors make. But I hate it. I can't stand it. I feel like a slave in a Nazi camp."

We can finish up Whitaker’s profferals, and this section, with a reference to Part Four of his book: “Explication of a Delusion” starts off with the key thirteenth chapter, “The Rise of an Ideology.” We had better listen, if we know what’s good for us.

Whitaker uses the testimony of a medical school professor of psychiatry at the outset. “It was not surprising that medical students accepted the dogma of biomedical reductionism in psychiatry uncritically; they had no time to read and analyze the original literature. What took me a while to understand, as I moved through my residency, was that psychiatrists rarely do the (assigned) critical reading either."

Thus, we’ve arrived at our next step, since this notation paves a smooth path toward comprehending how ‘depression is overwhelming America’ and other such nonsensical ideas.

THE PRESENT PRIMACY OF ‘DEPRESSION’ IN ‘MENTAL HEALTH’ CONCERNS

That this ‘present primacy’ is so remains beyond dispute, at least according to the high and mighty of those who lead the charge, so to say. “In 2017, the World Health Organization classified depression as the single largest contributor to global disability worldwide (7.5% of all years lived with disability), with over 300 million affected. It is estimated that prevalence has increased over 18% between 2005 and 2015.”

Then again, maybe we ought to cast our minds back in time four hundred five years, when Robert Burton first published Anatomy of Melancholy, in the event to such fanfare and uproar that he issued five new editions, with “massive expansions” according to ‘AI analysis,’ over the next twelve years. In other words, duh, a overarching ‘health authority’ in 1621 might have said the same thing that a vaunted WHO expresses now and again in our current context.

Causes and effects are clearly in play. They always are, ha ha. Right? In this scheme of things, the depressed state is the outcome of a series of causes, and in the fatuous rationalizations of the ‘medical-industrial-complex’ of a single primary impulsion to ‘clinical sadness,’ ha ha. That would be ‘brain imbalances,’ low levels of serotonin specifically.

But what if the effect is actually a hidden-agenda sort of cause, ‘in effect’ at least almost a criminally conspiratorial action or policy pursuit? Such just beggars the imagination. Does it not?

Well, the thing is that potentates and impresarios—whether plutocratic or merely psychotic—above all else want a single dynamic to rule their roost. That essential aspect in favor of their persistent imprimatur would be ‘popular compliance’ of something quite like it in appearance, LOL!

We start with the founder of a “Mad in America” process that posits that we might usefully show some anger, justifiable and passionate, about all the labels of being mad here in the ‘home of the brave.’ Monica Cassani speaks from experience, and for souls that feel compassion, she’s a difficult read indeed.

She is relentless in her attacks on ‘psychiatric medicine’ from personal experience. “It’s pretty miserable. And you know what? I’m dealing with it and sometimes how I deal with it isn’t attractive or skillful. Still, I’m dealing with it in ways I wouldn’t be able to had I not done the work and come through what I’ve already come through.

This is how an awakened life is… we learn as we go and sometimes shit happens. We pay attention and understand more and more and we see both the beautiful and the ugly because that is the way life is. Grieving is natural. When we die every one of us ‘loses’ everything. Life is loss as much as it is anything else. It remains wondrous in my mind. What an incredible mystery we are able to participate in.”

The MiA site includes plenty more that applies here today. An article by Peter Gotzsche, another M.D., came out today, as I’m cobbling things together. Its title sums up one explanation for this section’s inquiry about depression’s present imprimature: “Protecting the False Narrative About Antidepressants.”

The author continues, “For almost half a century, psychiatry’s narrative has been that we have effective and safe drugs for depression that fix a chemical imbalance. Even though none of this is correct, and even though the false narrative is harmful for the patients, health professionals, drug agencies, medical journals, and the media are doing their best to maintain it.”

As a psychotherapeutic practitioner, Gotzsche speaks with forthright authority. “Depression is almost always caused by depressing life events or living conditions. As a patient once said to his doctor, ‘I don’t want an antidepressant, I want a job!’

However, most patients are told they are depressed because they have a chemical imbalance in their brain and are then prescribed a pill that is supposed to fix this problem. This lie is very harmful. When patients are told there is something wrong in their brain chemistry that a drug can fix, why should they ever stop? Most patients on depression pills take them for many years.”

Cassani has also started another impressive portal: “Beyond Meds—Alternatives to Psychiatry.” It bursts with important resources for any who actually care about well-being and aplomb, as opposed to labels and compliance, ha ha. She offers multiple ways to view the present depressive impasse that overrules common sense and any standard of satisfaction.

In this space, one of her resource avenues leads straight to Robert Whitaker. Writing in 2010, she notes that the the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic will soon have a new book, “In (which) he chronicles and documents how long-term maintenance use of psychiatric medications can lead to chronicity and further debilitation and even permanent disability. To hear about his newest work you can listen to his latest interview on Madness Radio.”

She documents her assertion about increased prevalence with another bit from Whitaker. “A second way to assess this epidemic is to look at the number of disabled mentally ill in the country. Up until the 1950s, the number of hospitalized mentally ill provided a rough estimate of this group.

Today, the disabled mentally ill typically receive a disability payment either from the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program or the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, and many live in residential shelters or other subsidized living arrangements. Thus, the hospitalized patient of 50 years ago receives either SSDI or SSI today, and this line of evidence reveals that the number of disabled mentally ill has increased nearly sixfold since Thorazine was introduced.”

Inasmuch as depression is overwhelmingly the number one bugbear of those obsessed with ‘mental illness,’ and since on top of that, ‘sadness-poison’—or ‘antidepressants,’ if one prefers—is a favorite for ‘health care professionals’ to prescribe for various other erstwhile disorders, this endless expansion of a ‘revolving door’ of ‘mental disability’ should surprise no one. If not Quod Erat Demonstratum, we might at least assert that we have a winning argument.

Chris Kesser, also at “Beyond Meds,” amplifies this notion in his article, “The Chemical Imbalance Myth.” At the outset he quotes an evocative psychologist’s contention. “A theory that is wrong is considered preferable to admitting our ignorance.”

Kesser recognizes the litany that repeats the idea of a lopsided brain chemistry. “It is, after all, a neat theory. It takes a complex and heterogeneous condition (depression) and boils it down to a simple imbalance of two to three neurotransmitters (out of more than 100 that have been identified), which, as it happens, can be ‘corrected’ by long-term drug treatment. This clear and easy-to-follow theory is the driving force behind the $12 billion worth of antidepressant drugs sold each year.

However, there is one (rather large) problem with this theory: there is absolutely no evidence to support it. Recent reviews of the research have demonstrated no link between depression, or any other mental disorder, and an imbalance of chemicals in the brain.

The ineffectiveness of antidepressant drugs when compared to placebo cast even more doubt on the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory.” Well, it’s official. BTR has another upcoming series subject, in the person of Monica Cassani, a modern heroine of health and self-care.

Another patient-protection-portal, psychrights.org, also puts a magnifying glass to Whitaker’s work. Subtitling his article in Salon “The Hidden Damage of Psychiatric Drugs,” Jed Lipinski suggests a cultural avenue to comprehend the explosion of many erstwhile diagnoses, especially depression.

“A January study showed a negligible difference between antidepressants and placebos in treating all but the severest cases of depression. The study became the subject of a Newsweek cover story, and the value of psychiatric drugs has recently been debated in the pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Salon.

Many doctors and patients fiercely defend psychiatric drugs and their ability to improve lives. But others claim their popularity is a warning sign of a dangerously over-medicated culture.”

Lipinski summarizes in quite a helpful way for us. “Whitaker draws on 50 years of literature and in-person interviews with patients to answer a simple question: If ‘wonder drugs’ like Prozac are really helping people, why has the number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketed from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today?”

Frontiers in Psychiatry, meanwhile, lays out additional explanatory rationale. A recent elucidating title appears here: “Psychiatrization of Society.” The subtitle calls for conceptualization and multidisciplinary research.

“Worldwide, there have been consistently high or even rising incidences of diagnosed mental disorders and increasing mental healthcare service utilization over the last decades, causing a growing burden for healthcare systems and societies. While more individuals than ever are being diagnosed and treated as mentally ill, psychiatric knowledge, and practices affect the lives of a rising number of people, gain importance in society as a whole and shape more and more areas of life. This process can be described as the progressing psychiatrization of society.”

The briefing, by multiple authors, keeps up its assault on the SOP. “According to the World Health Organization, nearly 10% of the world’s population is affected by common mental disorders at any given time.” The scholars here make a list of destructive developments.

“Depression and anxiety (first of all) disorders alone are estimated to cost the global economy more than one trillion dollars each year.” The authors go on to list as their seventh observation that plus-or-minus half of all Americans would ‘qualify’ DSM-IV diagnostic labeling.

“Despite epidemiological research pointing to high, but relatively stable incidences and prevalence of mental disorders, there is clear evidence that more and more people are using in or outpatient mental health services, regularly resulting in the prescription of psychotropic medication. For instance, antidepressant drug consumption more than doubled between 2000 and 2015 in many OECD-countries.”

Definitely more than marginally important as well is the fact that the truly depressing choice to prescribe these Sludge-Toxin-Affect-Management pills can happen as a result of off-brand marketing of a sort, when the vaunted Diagnostic & Statistical Manual defines things so as to make an ‘SSRI(or STAM)intervention’ permissible. An authority of the evolution of ‘mental health protocols’ “describes the reshaping of the DSM-III diagnosis ‘social phobia’ into ‘social anxiety disorder’ (SAD) in DSM-IV, which has been criticized elsewhere as ‘the medicalization of shyness.’

Small changes in wording expanded the reach of this previously rather rare diagnosis considerably. This was embraced by the pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham’s as an opportunity to sell the SSRI-antidepressant Paxil, despite the market for depression having already reached saturation.

Conrad (the noted authority just above) highlights the crucial importance of lawmaking, as the loosening of legal requirements for direct-to-consumer (‘DTC’) pharmaceutical advertising in the United States set the stage for a new marketing strategy with emphasis on television commercials. These turned out to play a key role in creating the ‘anxiety-market’ by raising public awareness for SAD as a widespread and highly debilitating condition.”

The following foolhardy, truly sickening policy decision is yet another telltale marker of how practice has promoted ‘depression’ as the diagnosis of choice in Pharma’s ‘getting its products to market.’ If one doesn’t have a bit of a negative charge against these cretins, one either doesn’t care about intentional infliction of emotional distress or prefers blissful ignorance to empowered awareness.

“A more recent example of top-down psychiatrization, which has been discussed extensively in both scientific and popular literature, is the suspension of the so called ‘bereavement-exclusion’ from DSM-IV to DSM-5. This alteration, which was performed in a top-down-way by the DSM-5 Task Force, is criticized for further inflating the psychiatric category of depression, thus blurring the line between mental illness and ordinary grief while making more individuals eligible for psychiatric treatment.”

Allan Horwitz is another authoritative voice to add to our mix. In his preface to Creating Mental Illness, he writes persuasively about another prevalent pattern at work in these arenas. “From the vantage point of the early 1970’s, it was impossible to predict that the general disturbances of living that troubled these outpatients would soon metamorphose into the specific psychiatric diseases that afflict the clients of mental health professionals today.”

He points out, “Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are the socially recognized experts in classifying and treating these disorders. Some of these specialists employ an array of psychotherapies to understand how symptoms reflect the biographies of their clients.

More commonly, however, the assumption of diagnostic psychiatry that mental illnesses stem from disorders of the brain leads to a search for ways of changing neuro-chemistry. The use of various psychopharmacological agents now dominates the psychiatric profession.”

Horowitz’s research is full of material like this. In and of itself, it presents a compelling prima facie case that the ‘mental health system’ is full of falsehood about illness and fallacious treatments as a result. But for legislation, which makes ‘treatment’ optional or even mandatory, such prescriptive acts might well be criminal.

“Treatments for mental illnesses are no longer directed at a small number of seriously ill persons. Instead, they are aimed at the many millions of people who presumably have some mental disorder.

In the quarter-century between 1970 and 1995, the number of mental health professionals quadrupled… . Each year about 15 percent of the adult population of the United States seeks some type of professional treatment for mental health or addiction problems… .

Pervasive educational and advertising campaigns urge those sufferers who are not yet in treatment to recognize that they have genuine disorders that should be relieved through medication and therapy. Pharmaceutical companies, as well as mental health professionals, have seen an explosive increase in demand for their products.

In the decade between 1985 and 1994 alone, the number of prescriptions for psychotropic medications soared from about 33 million to about 46 million. The brand names of medications such as Prozac have become as generic as ‘kleenex’ or ‘xerox;’ three of the seven most prescribed drugs of any sort are antidepressants.”

Yet another treatment of ‘treatment options’ comes from Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: the DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. “There wasn’t a Prozac pen or a Depakote dealybob or any other Pharma swag to be seen in the lobbies or lecture rooms, sponsored lectures were not listed in the main program, and overall industry funding of the meeting was less than $2 million, down from its high in 2006 of more than $6 million.

The drug companies had been relegated to the basement exhibition hall, where they competed for the busy psychiatrist’s attention with the mental hospitals and the booksellers and the job recruiters and the shiny-faced men and women hawking neurofeedback gadgets” and so on and so forth.

He explicitly demands attention to the most pertinet point. Libidinal loss and a sadsack mentality inevitably go hand in hand.

“Depressed people might be less willing to surrender their orgasms to Prozac if they don’t think they are correcting a biochemical imbalance called Major Depressive Disorder. Psychotic patients might object to a lifetime of taking drugs that blunt their emotions, cloud their cognition, make them gain weight, and shorten their life span if they don’t think they are being treated for Schizophrenia. Parents might hesitate to ply their kids with stimulants and antipsychotics if they believe that they are merely calming them down rather than treating their ADHD or BD (or, once the DSM-5 goes into effect, their DMDD).”

The contrast with ‘drug-war’ fraud and fantasy and imperial profiteering can prove fascinating to describe. But we’ve plenty on our plate for today; more on this—soldiering and SSRI’s, for example, will be available sooner rather than later.

Greenberg also wrote Manufacturing Depression, which could serve as an Amicus brief for plaintiffs seeking relief for having been poisoned with noxious ‘drugs’ to ‘treat’ their life problems as meaningless categories of ‘mental sickness. The volume clarifies several important arguments.

A Harper’s article gives the author’s initialization of his book, as it were. He ushers the reader into the realm of his personal experience of this process. An aficionado of the DSMification of things already, he came to the confident conclusion that his own diagnosis would show his affliction.

“Even if my confessor had gotten my name right, I would still be a little humiliated. I had come to his office at the Depression Clinical and Research Program of the Massachusetts General Hospital, insisting that I would qualify.

I had told him that I figured anyone paying sufficient attention was bound to show the two symptoms out of the nine listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association—sadness, diminished pleasure, weight loss or gain, trouble sleeping, fatigue or malaise, guilt, diminished concentration, and recurrent thoughts of death—that are required for the diagnosis.”

The issue of ‘who gets to play in the Pharma game’ immediately comes forward in this process of ‘depression-discovery.’ He doesn’t have the minor form of the ‘illness,’ but a mild form of a ‘major depressive episode.’ Not to worry: he qualifies for three upcoming drug trials.

“In the process, they turn complaint into symptom, symptom into illness, and illness into diagnosis, the secret knowledge of what really ails us, what we must do to cure it, and who we will be when we get better. This is the heart of the magic factory, the place where medicine is infused with the miracles of science, and I’ve come to see how it’s done.”

Ten percent of DSM comes down to mood disorders, meaning that different ways of expressing emotional dissatisfaction or discomfiture or disorientation may elicit any number of drugs from the fecund imaginations of chemists with a ‘license to proliferate’ erstwhile medications for all the new ways of classifying emotion. Obviously, negativity is disordered in our Sesame Street existence, and we must determine some way of masking such problematic feelings with chemical miracles, ha ha.

The entire discursive dynamic of therapy now amounts to little more than a pop-quiz about any little problem, any niggling difficulty, that might show up more than once or twice, or even at all. Getting a ‘passing grade,’ which is to say, ‘being depressed,’ almost appears a foregone conclusion.

“Not surprisingly, this drug-friendly test quickly became a favorite of drug companies. In fact, it remains the gatekeeper to the antidepressant industry, used by the Food and Drug Administration to evaluate candidate drugs.”

The “Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV” has morphed into the “Structure Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders,” the latest instance of which is SCID-V, which arrives for dining in either a Clinical Version or a Research Version. One leading question after another might elicit from a large section of any population just the answers to mandate medicine, by God, medicine.

“There is no magic to the SCID. To determine whether you meet the DSM-IV criterion of ‘depressed mood most of the day, every day,’ it asks, ‘In the last month, has there been a period of time when you were feeling depressed or down most of the day nearly every day?’ To find out whether you have a ‘diminished ability to think or concentrate,’ it asks, ‘Did you have trouble thinking or concentrating?’ And so on with the lists of symptoms, until, based on your answers, you get shunted, like coins in a sorter, from one chute to another, and you drop into the drawer with all the other pennies.”

The Guardian’s Lewis Wolpert pens a review essay that takes umbrage at Manufacturing Depression, though he offers a precis of the work to start. “Gary Greenberg is a psychotherapist who joined a clinical trial for an antidepressant at a time when he was mildly depressed.

He was diagnosed as severely depressed, got better, and found that his pill was a placebo. His book contains a major attack on antidepressants, and he blames the drug companies for the false advertising of their positive effects. He is also very critical of the concept of depression itself.”

Nor is this the end of the story, or, if one prefers, that’s not all either. Greenberg appears with Amy Goodman, in any case, on an episode of Democracy Now! They get into things on the show, where Ms. Goodman sums up in her standard incisive fashion.

“Well, my next guest argues while depression can be debilitating, it’s also been largely manufactured by doctors and drug companies as a medical condition with a biological cause that can be treated with prescription medication. Psychotherapist and writer Gary Greenberg participated in a clinical trial for antidepressant medication and found that more often than not the drugs failed to outperform placebos.”

Stating facts always makes seeing things a little easier. Whatever criticisms one might level at those who cavil with every expression of an ‘epidemic of depression,’ contravening such irrefutable bits of data as this is not a valid critique.

An altogether different way to ponder the question of this subsection could readily justify hypothesizing the treatments, whatever they were, as the point of the entire diagnostic facade, rather than vice versa. Let’s tease this out a bit. #26’s Big Tent Introduction has, a few reams of paragraphs above, already offered some ideas along just such lines.

Nature has ‘designed us,’ or we and our ancestors—a lineage of thousands of generations—have evolved to experience a sense of wellness, or to cope with bouts during which one complaint or another inhibits well-being and then, in one way or another, grope our way back to something akin to satisfaction. Anything else would, to put matters mildly, be maladaptive.

Natural selection would have elected to discard the entire lineage under any circumstances in which we essentially chose to live in a state of crappy anguish that experts label ‘depression’ and dose with poison to effect a cure. It’s a premise for some dark comedy, but it’s the exact opposite of a ‘reality orientation,’ ha ha.

Yet another way of imagining these questions is comparative. Can we specify, or at least conjecture, where people are happiest and, almost axiomatically, the least likely to suffer so-called ‘clinical depression?’

AN ‘EMOTIONAL ATLAS’ OF EARTH

In considering the task that this subsection sets itself, The World Happiness Index would seem a reasonable place to begin, which is about all that we’ll be presenting at this spot today, other than a few other plausible-happy-aspects, so to speak. As much as possible, we’ll connect these factors with what we’ve seen so far about medicalizing sadness.

The overall thrust of WHI is that, not technological fixes, but social actions and factors are the root source of aplomb and glee. Thus, “(a)nother important form of caring and sharing is the family. Latin American societies, characterised by larger household sizes and strong family bonds, offer valuable lessons for other societies that seek higher and sustainable wellbeing.”

Such thinking emerged from around our fair planet. China, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the list of countries is fairly lengthy that emphasize this prosocial perspective as a substantial impetus to make ‘big gains’ in Population Happiness Quotient, or whatever one wants to call it.

Many of these societies are also practitioners of, or oriented toward, democratic socialist norms and forms. That’s fish for another kettle, but Prozac will never provide these important contributions to the people’s perception of their own appreciative joy.

In the event, a key component of healthy populations and happy families is healthy, happy children. In other words, the development of robust adults may fail to manifest if the tangled roots of troubled childhoods afflict the surviving, more mature specimens. Ought we to have anything to add about the noisome SSRI’s in this regard, with tens of million of worldwide childhood dosage dispensations, as it were?

Well, “Serotonin is also critical during key developmental processes in every organism studied thus far, and exposure to SSRIs during development is believed to cause deformities or other developmental complications in a wide array of organisms, including sea urchins, birds, mice, and even humans.”

How does harming kids fit with ‘world happiness?’ The easy answer is obvious. In any event, Jeffrey Sachs, the estimable head of Columbia University’s Sustainable Development Center, is one of the W.H.I.’s contributors, adding his common sense contributions to things, no doubt.

A healthy planet requires people who appreciate and help each other. That is one of the publication’s conclusions. The text alludes to the bard to emphasize this notion. “Like ‘mercy’ in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, caring is “twice-blessed”—it blesses those who give and those who receive.”

“People who are more socially connected tend to be happier, less stressed, more satisfied with their lives, less prone to depression, more engaged in their communities, and less likely to suffer from disease or disability.” All sorts of other benefits inhere in such an organic wellness model; one would fantasize prioritizing such propensities.

The report continues, “(a)t the same time, social isolation and loneliness are strongly associated with negative life outcomes. The absence of social ties has been linked to higher rates of disease, shorter life expectancies, lower levels of subjective wellbeing, higher rates of criminality, and greater support for authoritarianism.”

Thus, whatever our ‘Atlas’ might indicate about statistics and data and such, participants and observers will likely recognize that social relations are the key to curing whatever ills and woes might attend a particular time and place. Administered poisons likely will prove neither an adaptive solution for individuals nor a beneficent boost to society.

In fact, the simplest developments—but for the ‘forces of the market’ and the profitability of technocratic fixes—much more potently promote bonhomie and satisfaction. The World Health Index’s selections universally affirm this in relation to such activities as potlucks and other dining get-togethers.

“Unlike other social indicators, such as loneliness or depression, the relatively objective nature of sharing meals makes it a uniquely reliable metric by which to compare differences over time.” So too with a caring attitude, less ‘Super-Mario brothers’ and more ‘Thomas the Tank Engine.’

“Much research supports the idea that more compassionate people have higher wellbeing and experience fewer mental health symptoms.” Were a word to the wise sufficient, we’d be all set.

FINAL WORDS ABOUT WELL-BEING & DEPRESSION

Instead of highlighting what E.O. Wilson calls humanity’s crucial components of eusocial attitudes and enculturation, standard practice now is not only to personalize and individualize human growth and awareness but also to make its attainment requisite on technical interventions, especially of the erstwhile medical variety. Psychiatrization, one might label it.

This is also from the ‘Psychiatrization’ journal report cited above. “Changes at the institutional or scientific level often correspond with more subtle transformations, such as the infusion of psychiatric terminology into everyday language (e.g., trauma, paranoid) or the interpretation of life events and personal experiences through the lens of psychiatric concepts (e.g., burn-out, depression). Thus, psychiatrization also transforms the life worlds of people without any personal connection to psychiatry.”

A couple of extra-credit pointers may be apt here. The first concerns the health care system in the good old U.S.A. Here in the land of the free, standard operators have proceeded for half a century or more to guarantee the highest ‘return on investment,’ despite the inescapable association of these profiteering practices with the lowest possible level of healthy outcomes.

An article in The Conversation illustrates this in a recent issue. The author has a great sense of humor. “People often hear that health care in America is dysfunctional—too expensive, too complex and too inequitable.

But dysfunction implies failure. What if the real problem is that the system is functioning exactly as it was designed to? Understanding this legacy is key to explaining not only why reform has failed repeatedly, but why change remains so difficult.”

Profit over people will ultimately have telltale putrid effects. The author, Auburn’s own Public Health lecturer, Zachary Schulz, may contextualize everything gently, he insistently reveals King Capital’s priorities and perquisites at the base of how things stand here in our ‘home of the brave.’

“The system’s architecture also discourages care aimed at prevention. Because Medicaid’s scope is limited and inconsistent, preventive care screenings, dental cleanings and chronic disease management often fall through the cracks. That leads to costlier, later-stage care that further burdens hospitals and patients alike.

Meanwhile, cultural attitudes around concepts like ‘rugged individualism’ and ‘freedom of choice’ have long been deployed to resist public solutions. In the postwar decades, while European nations built national health care systems, the U.S. reinforced a market-driven approach.”

A second last-gasp addition concerns ‘side-effects,’ what a user on X calls a ‘body’s feedback that it is being poisoned.’ If one doesn’t keep a close eye on whatever medical protocols are being recommended, or even mandated, the results could quickly become dire or worse.

Welcome to ‘Side-Effects Central Processing!’ We’ll now take afflicted patients through our dazzling array of prophylactic and ameliorative medication options.

One ‘advantage’ of fouling and soiling human bodies is that they will then appear prone to other problems, like Movement Disorders, that will present themselves to social hegemons and their puppeteers among King Capital’s plutocrats as a more or less lucrative additional opportunity to prescribe pharmaceutical fixes for all infelicity in question. SSRI’s thus prove doubly beneficial, to bottom lines and hegemonic hopes to run everything for tidy commercial returns.

The conclusions lay a firm foundation for such views. “A potential harmful association was found between movement disorders and use of the antidepressants mirtazapine, vortioxetine, amoxapine, phenelzine, tryptophan, fluvoxamine, citalopram, paroxetine, duloxetine, bupropion, clomipramine, escitalopram, fluoxetine, mianserin, sertraline, venlafaxine and vilazodone.

Clinicians should beware of these adverse effects and monitor early warning signs carefully. However, this observational study must be interpreted as an exploratory analysis, and these results should be refined by future epidemiological studies.” Interestingly enough, such investigative sallies have not proven very popular.

Sometimes, ‘mainstream’—or corporate—scholarship cannot avoid reality-orientation notes. As a former employee in a huge mental hospital that specialized in the sorts of routine dosing that we explicate in these pages, I recall very well that Reality Orientation—to time and space and place and such—was a key measure of sanity, more or less.

A recent piece from the Journal of Analytical Research in Clinical Medicine offered incisive conclusions in this regard, comparing how often two sorts of ‘antidepressant medicines’ caused impotence or the euphemistic erectile dysfunction in males. The Fluorine basis for the SSRI’s inhibiting Serotonin’s Reuptake may be the cause, but for whatever reason, Prozac and its brethren had the worst impacts on men’s Life Force Energy responses.

“Unlike many other studies suggesting no difference on SSRI sexual side-effects, the present study showed a reduction in sexual function of men taking citalopram and fluoxetine and the reduction was more prominent with fluoxetine.” Part of the publication deploys a literature-review that revealed differing outcomes among its listed materials.

This one, however, is the first that the authors here—both Iranians, in actuality—note. “In their study, Safa et al. reported 71% decline in sexual function in the citalopram group and 100% in fluoxetine group.” Each of the scrips under scrutiny here are SSRI’s, yet the Fluorine effect more clearly inhibits libidinal activity and joy.

However one views all this, the authors in this case conclude with a decided choice for one commodified pharmaceutical intervention over another. “Given the role of sexual function in individual life, satisfaction, and self-confidence and the effect of SSRIs (fluoxetine and citalopram) in reducing sexual function, it is recommended to use citalopram that has less effect on sexual function decrease, in case SSRIs are selected for treatment.”

Besides, for men whose sex lives no longer exist, we can all thank heaven for Viagra, LOL! Or can we? Priapism may seem dandy as it starts, but it must end up horrifying, if prolonged past a passage briefer than half a day or so.

The little blue pill’s ill-advised overusage, or imperfect administration as it were, can replace diminished or vanished libido with the utter destruction of capacity at the level of the very gears and levers of bodily function. Sometime, in the event, it may ‘cure’ itself, but one will have less than a vanishingly small chance of ever frolicking freely again. What a shame; what a waste.

And that’s not all either. This is longstanding knowledge. Nineteen years prior to seeing our “Comparison of Citalopram and Fluoxetine” above, a quartet of authors anchored a piece via ResearchGate, “SSRI-Induced Sexual Dysfunction,” which advances contentions congruent with those immediately above.

Here’s a bit from the Intro. “This seems to indicate that the neurochemical mechanism involved in the clinical effect of each of these substances may be directly related to the onset, or otherwise, of secondary sexual dysfunction. Extremely disparate incidence of SD has been found, varying between 1% and 96%, although most of the data published pertain to short series reports from patients or to anecdotes.”

Anyhow, these indicia began to show up right away, as early as the 1970’s. “Since SSRIs came onto the market, reports about secondary sexual dysfunction have increased significantly and have triggered a large number of articles.

Placebo controlled studies have revealed a clear relaionship between the use of antidepressants and the occurrence of sexual dysfunction, as incidence is practically nil on placebo treatment. The effect has even been shown in healthy volunteers."

Referring to the checklist that shows up in the articulation prior to the previous one, so to speak, we might go on. And on and on and on. ‘Poison in, side effects out’ might be our motto.

Instead, we’ll begin wrapping up for today by referencing two voices from the past, one—Sigmund Freud—from the past century and a half, the other—Avicenna—from nearly a milennia before our time. What would Sigmund Freud make of all this? In “Mourning and Melancholia,” he speaks very modestly about any general summary understanding of what we now would likely describe with the idioms, ‘sadness and depression.’

Interestingly enough, though the text is over a century old, easily quoting it is difficult. No PDF file apparently permits cutting and pasting the brief passage’s text. This is especially strange given the abstract of a PubMed profferal that spoke of the way that Freud’s briefing has become the prototype for subsequent investigation.

“The author investigates the origins of 'Mourning and Melancholia', which has been the standard work of psychoanalytic reference on mourning since its publication. She notes that the existence of this paper has always tended to be taken for granted and that it is therefore important to identify the foundations on which Freud developed his conception of mourning, which seem to have remained almost unexamined in the literature. …

The author points out that in his essay Freud has far less to say about mourning than about melancholia and concludes that the new view of this founding text accruing from the consideration of all the above factors shows that Freud was relatively uninterested in the normal model of mourning.”

Dr. Sigmund sounds quite au courant with his eleven-decades-old assessment. “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. …(W)ith one exception, the same traits are met with mourning.”

The exception is the self-abnegation, which should seem logical: we cannot be the cause of a loved one’s murder. Freud’s analysis of this is fascinating. All such sad-sack states emanate from a failure of libidinal attachment, almost as if he were a Big Tent Life Force Energy adherent. In the case of melancholia, this upheaval gets turned inward, so that the ego itself bears the brunts of this emotional onslaught.

For the rest, his interest in true exploration, his willingness to recognize inevitably merely partial comprehension, and his insistence that complexity and interconnection demand continued delving rather than a commitment to a single treatment modality separate this pioneer of the psychic realm from the bodily-chemists of the here and now, who all promise to ‘have everything sorted’ with obviously partial, occasionally ludicrous, metalolic explanations.

Well might we emblazon Freud’s final lines on the walls of every pharmacy and psychiatrists’ office. “As we know, the interdependence of the complicated problems of the mind forces us to break off every enquiry before it is completed—till the outcome of some other enquiry can come to its assistance.” The implications for pharmaceutical medicine’s pretense of certainty are far from sunny.

Avicenna, otherwise known by members of his community as Ibn Sina, was a privileged child of a governor during the ‘Golden Age of Islam.’ His Canon of Medicine remained the primary text of ‘Western’ physicians and SOP-healing for four centuries and more; moreover, he was Persian, and his family experienced already the frictions in Islam.

He was a thousand years ahead of psych-ward nurses of my acquaintance who laud hot hydrotherapy to treat sad and moody incarcerees under their care. The ancient Persian(probably the type of Iranian who would fancy fission-weapons, ha ha) recommended “hot water” for any case of melancholia.

“All physicians, sages, and wise men are agreed that the sight of beautiful pictures gladdens and refreshes the soul, and drives away from it melancholic thoughts and suggestions, and strengthens the heart more than anything else can do, because it rids it of all evil imaginings.”

Another ‘prescription’ was to “evacuate the oxidised humour” to dislodge Melancholy. More empirically recognizable are suggestions to ‘induce vomiting’ and engage in bloodletting practices. DSM of the ancients, lacking only electroshocks and psychopharmacology?

Maybe not. He also proposes color therapy and other interventions congruent with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and other, more ‘progressive’ ways of giving psychological support and counsel. Moreover, he concludes along these lines.

“(W)hen the breath residing in the heart is plentiful (as it is when there is plenty of that material from which it is rapidly and constantly being generated) ; when it is balanced in temperament; when it has a luminous, beautiful and bright substance—then there is a strong tendency to joy.

When the breath is scanty (as occurs in convalescents, in long-standing illnesses, and in old persons) ; when it is not balanced in character (as in morbid states) ; and when it is very dense and coarse in substance (as in melancholy and old people)—it cannot arouse joy ; (b) very delicate in substance (as in convalescents and in women), it will not allow of expansion; (c) confused (as in melancholy people)—in all these cases there is a very strong tendency to depression, sadness and grief.”

Ten centuries after the fact, it seems at least as plausible as, and almost infinitely more evocative than, a mechanistic—and clearly self-interested—conclusory ‘hypothesis’ that Serotonin and other biochemical imbalances represent the causitive core of the condition that we label with various stripes of ‘depressive disorders,’ as if the causal factors in play were as simple as understanding diptheria or tuberculosis.

Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...

A THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION OVERVIEW

Habermas published The Theory of Communicative Action in two volumes. The first came out in 1984 as an English version, subtitled Reason and the Rationalization of Society; the second issued in English as Lifeworld and System: a Critique of Functionalist Reason.

“Since the beginning of the modern era,” in the words of the first book, “the prospect of a limitless advance of science and technology, accompanied at each step by moral and political improvement, has exercised a considerable hold over Western thought. Against this, a radicalized nineteenth century consciousness of modernity voiced fundamental and lasting doubts about the relation of ‘progress’ to the realization of freedom and justice, happiness and self-realization.”

He begins Communicative Action’s second installment with reference to this thinking. “As I have argued in Volume 1, the paradoxes to which this conceptual strategy(of abstracting consciousness and its sciences from everyday existence)leads show that rationalization cannot be dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of consciousness. In Volume 2, I will take up the problematic of reification once again and reformulate it in terms of, on the one hand, communicative action and, on the other, the formation of subsystems via steering media.”

In other words, he looks at how real people really talk, and how primarily corporate mediation guides and manipulates these attempts to speak to each other. If we care about ‘thriving and survival,’ Habermas’ template will inevitable seem essential.

One noted researcher both wrote about this and experienced it directly. Ljubisa Mitrovic, a Serbian sociologist and professor at Nis University, contends that Communicative Action establishes “a new paradigm” in social theory. He finds multiple core connections that keep ‘Habermasian’ thinking intact and on track.

“In his theory of society, Habermas distinguishes the social environment or ‘the world of life’ (in which man leads his everyday life by establishing more or less direct relationships with others) from social systems (economic, political, legal-normative) as specifically structured and institutionalized interaction patterns among people.

In the history of human society, social systems grew out of the world of life. The social systems are maintained by the instrumental action exerted upon the external surroundings, as well as by specially regulated stereotyped communicative action with respect to the internal surroundings, to the nature of its members.” Only by dialog do we delineate our lives, as it were.

He then goes further, insodoing revealing the massive scope and immense difficulty of the ‘Habermasian Project, as it were. “Habermas is pleading for the argumentation and communicative action principles. Namely, he thinks that practical issues of the social life of modern (postmodern) society, including the issue of social conflicts, can be solved by rational discourse among people.

Of course, this requires the provision of adequate prerequisites; most of all, it is necessary to abolish compulsion in communication; then it is necessary to develop universal communication ethics and establish adequate democratic procedures among people and social groups.” Indeed, this appears as a ‘tall order,’ as my Mom liked to say, but hey, ‘freedom must embrace nessessity’ in order to gestate ‘mothers of invention.’ Right?

Dr. Metrovic goes on to criticize what he sees as Habermas’ too facile abandonment of the labor-theory-of-value as central to social life. Another writer about Communicative Action may proffer an answer of sorts to these criticisms, in essence viewing the foundation of social labor as in significant part a conversational process.

Roger Bolton, a Williams College professor, “bring(s) together two clusters of ideas… . One is the thought of the German writer Jürgen Habermas, a prominent philosopher whose ideas are meaningful to many of our colleagues who are what I’ll call ‘planning academics,’ that is scholars who teach planning in universities. The other is a cluster of ideas on social capital and social networks.”

His basic argument both parallels and amplifies what Habermas was saying. Bolton references both Communicative Action and Knowledge and Human Interests extensively. For example, he emphasizes the give-and-take inherent in any laborious process of consensus-making.

“One of (Habermas’) best-known ideas is communicative action, in which actors in society seek to reach common understanding and to coordinate actions by reasoned argument, consensus, and cooperation rather than strategic action strictly in pursuit of their own goals.”

He ties such discursive endeavor to the notion of labor as a key component of society in this way. “Some planning theorists believe a desideratum of planning is the encouragement of communicative action to facilitate the production of social capital.

The relevance to planning is suggested by Habermas’s statement: ‘In the case of communicative action the interpretive accomplishments on which cooperative processes of interpretation are based represent the mechanism for coordinating action ….’”

Fordham University’s James Bourke had written a paper that helps to clarify this assessment. He writes incisively along these lines. “A defense of deliberative politics must maintain that discussion of practical questions is not merely an expression of subjective feelings or a contest of wills, but instead a cognitive enterprise with a rational structure. No advocate of deliberative politics has seen this necessity more clearly than Jürgen Habermas.”

For much more practical reasons, even as he clearly supports the deliberative concept, Bourke also finds fault with Habermas, what the Fordham professor may view as a missing ‘ethical dimension’ in the venerable German’s work. He expresses this idea in relation to questions of environmental protection, which almost everybody, in one way or another, views as a central social concern.

Habermas’ beliefs, Bourke asserts, look only at effects on speakers themselves, at ‘human impacts, in other words. “Such arguments, however, markedly avoid a range of considerations that many environmentalists would see as central to advocacy of environmental protection, namely, considerations about the integrity of the environment or of nature as intrinsic goods.

For many environmentalists, we must appreciate the importance of the natural world considered on its own terms, without reference to its relationship to the independently-specified interests of human beings.” Of course, in some sense, Bourke’s sculpting his thoughts in this way is doing exactly what Habermas suggested would lie at the core of all essential ‘communicative acts.’

One might readily continue. Instead, we’ll hold off on further general examination and turn to a fundamental component of Habermas’ ideas, in Communicative Action and elsewhere.

WHAT IS THE ‘PUBLIC SPHERE,’ ANYHOW?

A German colleague of this issue’s estimable philosopher answered this ‘in a nutshell.’ “The public sphere is a discursive arena in which citizens discuss matters of common concern in such a way that the power of the better argument reigns instead of the socioeconomic position of the speaker. This understanding is normative becomes it carries an element of prescription: Communication in the public sphere should engender genuine discussion and help the better argument win.”

For brevity’s sake, we might also include Wikipedia’s statement of the case. “Habermas…defined the public sphere as ‘made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state.’ Communication scholar Gerard A. Hauser defines it as ‘a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment about them.’”

As if we had a citizens’ senate, a jury-of-the-whole, and could not only chat and ponder but also deliberate and decide, we might surpass all use for ‘professional politicians’ and their bought-and-paid-for machinations on behalf of their ‘paying customer’ constituents among the high and mighty. Idealistic indeed, such a hope may be a sine qua non for viable persistence of our sort of creatures.

No less an authoritative source than the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College approved a Master’s Thesis that circumscribed this idea. It was examining Yugoslavia immediately prior to America’s catastrophic intervention there, citing Mitrovic to help the applicant to show the connections between “cultural identity and regional security.”

The cited, well-regarded Serbian academic “begins with the common truth that individuals and social groups have the ‘need for self-identification.’ Further he argues that building the identity constitutes a process of maturing, for individuals as well as for groups.

In his analysis about attitudes and perceptions during numerous surveys, he noticed many controversies and contradictory opinions connected with any possible new regional identity. He concludes (by looking at) difficulties in the process of creating a new regional identity in the Western Balkans. (In particular), he articulated the importance of appropriate behavior,” in context open and extensive discussion, on the part “of political elites and multinational actors.”

The matriculant who submitted this work for Army imprimatur notes a couple of times how issues of democracy of one sort and another were important to analyze. For a fuller understanding of the inherently and inescapably majority-rule norms and consensus-building commitments that Habermas envisioned in this public-in-the-round, an altogether spherical presence, we can turn to others and to Habermas himself.

The above-presented James Bourke, for instance, states quite effectively, even movingly’ if one has This Humble Correspondendent’s nerdy wiring, “The coherence of a politics of democratic deliberation depends on some account of the rational meaning of practical discourses. In order for deliberation to make sense, and, in particular, in order for it to carry the normative and/or epistemic weight attached to it by political theorists, we must be able to defend the claim that the exchange of reasons and arguments in which deliberation consists is a meaningful activity.”

A meaningful activity postulates impact or even adherence to any clear expression of popular opinion under such conditions. Moreover, Habermas himself mandated the aptness of this perspective. “No advocate of deliberative politics has seen this necessity more clearly than Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas’s democratic theory emphasizes the circulation of arguments in the public sphere, through which citizens redeem claims to normative and legal validity in processes of ‘opinion-and-will formation.’ Furthermore, the conception of validity operative in Habermas’s democratic theory is an outgrowth of his broader program of discourse ethics, in which Habermas defends a cognitivist account of morality,” creating conditions when people as citizens intuitively recognize what is a correct course of action.

For our philosopher mentor, these would be conditions under which “normative claims to rightness…can be rationally redeemed through discourse under ideal conditions.” And voila! Something truly meaningful would be the effect of such discursive causal circumstances.

Still, as sympathetically as Professor Bourke presents Habermasian ideas, he insists on a thoroughgoing critique of Habermas’ insistence on a razored sundering of the ‘right and the good.’ This is critical since they can only be separate if reasons may apply to one but not the other, respectively.

This discussion entails grappling with philosophical concepts that nest in terms of art with which very few are familiar—ontology, deontology, hermeneutics, assertoric, and aporia, for example. A fuller investigation of all this may or may not be forthcoming; though This Humble Correspondent probably comprehends them, framing them and explicating their importance is beyond the scope of #26’s articulation here and now.

In any event, Bourke’s stylistic mastery and fundamental logical grasp of Habermas’ entire project—the teasing out the elements of ‘Communicative Action’ through argumentation and evaluation in a ‘Public Sphere’—shapes his final summation, creating something intuitively sensible if not completely delineable in every single instance of deliberative democratic discourse.

“Our linguistic practices themselves can supply secure reasons for our beliefs, without pretense to a God’s-eye view. If we do not need an absolute perspective to make sense of validity, then Habermas’s surrogate for this perspective in practical discourses is not necessary in order to explicate their rationality. Pursuing this line of thinking, a discourse theory of practical rationality might be shifted away from its emphasis on the procedural criterion of consensus under ideal conditions.

Instead, the rationality of practical discourses could be located in the character of discursive contributions themselves—in their status as reasons. Discourse ethics would still involve a participatory and inclusive exchange of arguments from any and all perspectives, with the aim of weighing the force of reasons to believe competing propositions and acting accordingly. The unavailability of a transcendent point of view does not render our reasons arbitrary; it is only by comparison with an impossible ideal that they might appear so.”

“The Future of the Public Sphere in the Network Society” shows up, as a subtitle, to provide potent portals for furthering this sort of discussion. Pieter Boeder has written this for a ‘peer-reviewed Internet journal,’ First Monday, which in some senses posits a ‘Habermasian Discourse Space,’ or something similar. He intends to challenge, if not disarm critics of Habermas who reject the possibility of ‘free speech in erstwhile ideal public spheres.’

“What these ‘skeptics’ fear is primarily the classical argument in mass media research of commodification, the way electronic communications media already have preempted public discussions by turning media content into commodities. …Modern democracy is no longer seen as a system expressing the will of the people, but rather one which offers consumers a series of choices.” Boeder mentions a soon-to-be-profiled thinker in Big Tent Review pages, Douglas Kellner, a UCLA professor of media and meaning.

“Kellner argues that the notion of the information society is the new dominant ideology of technocapitalism. In studying the array of discourses which characterise these new technologies, Kellner is ‘bemused’ by the extent to which they either expose a technophilic discourse which presents new technologies as our salvation, or they embody a technophobic discourse that demonises technology as the major source of all our problems.”

A rejection of manichean thinking is the response. “Kellner attempts an answer how new technologies can either be used as instruments of domination or be used for democratisation, for creating a more egalitarian society, and for empowering individuals and groups who are currently without power.”

Written more than a quarter century back, both Boeder and Kellner are trying to explain how media and capital and society’s ‘vast majorities’ intertwine and what possibilities may exist in those intersections for democracy and popular power. “Kellner uses the term ‘technocapitalism’ to describe the synthesis of capital and technology to point out both the increasingly important role of technology and the continued primacy of capitalist structures.

Kellner identifies the emerging concepts of the information society and information superhighway as the key ideological discourses that legitimate the development of technocapitalism, (where) the concept of an information society or infotainment society is the primary project of the contemporary technocapitalist society.” Again, such language evokes a sense of resonance for purposes of today’s little essay here.

Boeder’s title in this vein seems apropos to mention. After all, “Habermas’ Heritage” punctuates the important possibilites under our purview just this instant. Tens of millions of people worldwide are grappling with these issues over time, perhaps numbers like this on a daily basis.

Here we have a Pakistani take: “From a Habermas Model to a New Public Sphere,” subtitled “a Paradigm Shift.” The authors’ primary purpose is to advance this central Habermasian contextualization to a worldwide stage. They argue for considering a “Global Public Sphere.”

The earliest attempt in this lot to wrestle with this ‘realm of a publicized public,’ so to say, is a collection that Craig Calhoun edited. Titled simply, Habermas and the Public Sphere,” the book contains a treasure trove of history, contemporary documentation and analysis. The volume highlights an anomaly.

“Surprisingly absent from the discussion, at least in English, has been one of Habermas’s most important and directly relevant early works, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, …by far the most historically concrete of Habermas’s major works, (using) synthetic empirical discussions of Britain, France, and Germany between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.”

The compilation actually resulted from a conference on Habermas’ life and work, with chapters representing presentations at the forum. Juergen was there, an active participant and careful listener. His remarks conclude this record, which Calhoun characterizes in this fashion.

“His many comments from the floor and his open and constructive response at the conclusion were immensely clarifying and remarkable for their freedom from vanity and pretense. Even for those of us who disagreed with him, he remains a model interlocutor of the public sphere.”

Another international capsulization, from Portugal, can culminate our sojourn in this section. Its doing so is especially appropriate since the author wants to pose the very question that constitutes the next subsection of today’s endeavor.

“Habermas’s pessimism about the negative effects of mass media maintains an internal connection to the original orientation of Adorno’s critique of mass culture.” Indeed. Jorge Lubenow, the Portuguese author, intended his entry to be a half century’s capsulization of Habermas’s views on media, culture, and democratic conversation.

At the outset, Lubenow speaks of his essay as a tribute. He offers it in this fashion; “In honor of the 50 years of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.”

HOW CAN PEOPLE PARTICIPATE IN CREATING AN ‘ETHICAL PUBLIC MEDIA SPHERE?’

Just over a quarter century ago, in 1999, Juergen Habermas had recently turned seventy and was about to publish an essay in the Denver Law Review in which he made six points about his contributions to legal thought. This is Habermas’ “Between Facts and Norms.” His third contention applies most forcefully here: “The Relation Between Human Rights and Popular Autonomy.”

He demurs summarizing the voluminous complexity of the overall topic but does give a couple pieces of advice. “The first suggestion is to conceive human rights as what is necessary for the legal institutionalization of the democratic process of self-legislation. That is, however, prima facie plausible only for those civil rights—the rights of communication and participation—that empower citizens to exercise their political autonomy.”

Habermas shares provocative notions to nudge people to participate in all his work. So too here. He closes this section with important advisories. “This then is the core of the argument: Without basic rights that secure the private autonomy of citizens, there also would not be any medium for the legal institutionalization of the conditions under which these citizens could make use of their public autonomy. Thus private and public autonomy mutually presuppose each other in such a way that neither human rights nor popular sovereignty can claim primacy over its counterpart.”

He closes his very condensed briefing for legal eagles, ethicists, philosophers, nerds, and citizens with wording that might well assume the form of an admonition. “Briefly, the private autonomy of equally entitled citizens can be secured only insofar as citizens actively exercise their civic autonomy.” Ha ha.

In relation to this sub-topic, which we might call ‘operationalizing agency’ of something of the sort, an important aspect of what Habermas has contributed is ways of thinking about ‘how:’ how we can have such halcyon results; how we might manage the twin tricks of participation and empowerment. For instance, Habermas has conceptualized ‘ideal free speech communities’ as a litmus test for social improvement, and, ultimately social survival, via individual involvement.

Wikipedia again makes a dandy summary available. Three factors must be present, in the event. First is permission and encouragement of input from all actors, citizens, or other ‘stakeholders.’ Third is this: “No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights.” The second has three parts, which essentially add up to a radically libertarian implementation of ‘freedom of speech.’

Habermas’ experience of Hitler’s Youth has made him extremely sensitive about ‘degrading popular empowerment.’ To do so risks giving way to the ‘natural tendencies’ of capital to embrace authoritarian, even fascist, forms, in his view.

One might turn, along these lines, to Habermas’ speech, accepting the Bruno Kreisky Prize, “Toward a United States of Europe.” The rights of Europeans to exercise their human rights and enforce collective capacity hinges on a universalization of the availability of these norms of speech and action; otherwise ‘neoliberalism’ and corporate forces will prevail in diminishing—eventually dismantling—any way of circumscribing a ‘engaged-and-independent European population.’

One commentator notes Habermas’ impassioned pleading. “A large part of the speech is taken up with a dramatic appeal for concerted social and political action in Europe.”

Exemplars of Public Sphere capacitation are everywhere. Numerically small, the numbers of citizens in such sustaining circumstances is legion. Big Tent Review provides one such portal.

Another nerdy champion arrives on stage, as many do, from the halls of academia, as it were. Werner Ulrich describes himself as “a social scientist and practical philosopher born in 1948 in Bern, Switzerland, with a particular interest in the philosophy and methodology of reflective professional practice and research.” His pair of Ph.d.’s come from Berkeley and the University of Fribourg.

“Reflections on Reflective Practice” was one of the litany of bimothly darts that he produced so as to ‘pierce the veils of ignorance and distraction’ that afflict humans, ha ha. “He is known as one of the originators of "critical systems thinking" (CST), by which he understands the use of systemic thinking in the service of reflective practice.”

This denizen of CST worked together with Habermas on practical applications of theories, developing “theoretical attempts to elucidate the general pragmatic presuppositions of communicative rationality, that is, to explain how practice can in principle be rationalized through dialogical means.” After all, occasionally harsh objections to Habermas argue that, whatever the philosopher’s good intentions, common-sensical employment of his ideas is difficult even to imagine.

Ulrich strides purposefully to the plate, so to say, acceding, ‘all right!’ “(T)o the extent it is not practicable without further ado, how might we pragmatize it?” We’ll leave matters here for now, as the web-savvy teacher’s work will act as a foundation for additional upcoming writing along these lines.

Whatever the risks of fragmentation and lack of focus may be, other aspersions cast at Habermas in these ‘days of the Web,’ Ulrich’s presence is a marvel of accessibility and interconnective potential. The aforementioned Douglas Kellner also displays a prolific online presence, albeit without the technical legerdemain and web-based bells and whistles that double-Dr. Ulrich offers to visitors.

Kellner’s prolificity is legendary, and his interest in media and majority-rule inevitably propelled him toward Habermas’ efforts. His first lines of “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: a Critical Intervention” hand over a dandy overview and capsulization of Habermas’ work and its importance.

“Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is an immensely rich and influential book that has had major impact in a variety of disciplines. It has also received detailed critique and promoted extremely productive discussions of liberal democracy, civil society, public life, and social changes in the twentieth century, among other issues.

Few books of the second half of the twentieth century have been so seriously discussed in so many different fields and continue, almost forty years after its initial publication in 1962, to generate such productive controversy and insight. While Habermas's thought took several crucial philosophical twists and turns after the publication of his first major book, he has himself provided detailed commentary on Structural Transformation in the 1990s and returned to issues of the public sphere and democratic theory in his monumental work Between Facts and Norms.

Hence, concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny.” As with Ulrich, we might go on and on and on about Dr. Douglas Kellner, yet he too has his own star-turn upstage, front and center, in upcoming issues, especially in regard to Habermas’ affiliation with the Institute For Social Research, as well as his firm commitment to democratic socialism and unabashed rootedness in Marxist approaches.

Charles Lesch, of Vanderbilt, also has had potent things to say in deconstructing Habermas’ work and imagining its utility in ‘progressive democracy-building projects,’ as in the case of a University of Chicago publication’s 2019 article, inscription, in the event with a ‘call-and-response’ title that tracks the query that underpins this section.

“Democratic Solidarity in a Secular Age?” announces the call with an inquiry. The answer serves up today’s subject personage, positing useful insights as a result of “Habermas and the ‘Linquistification of the Sacred.’

Lesch wants to pursue Max Weber’s project in regard to the loss of religious primacy as a source of alienation and the inability of publics to emerge in which members believe in and want mutual support. He wonders too whether ‘Habermas might be on to something’ in suggesting that respectful, reasoned discourse might combine what Emile Durkheim saw as a ‘reaching for sacral relations and beliefs’ with what Walter Benjamin viewed as the overarching power of language and consciousness.

Emile Durkheim believed that “(s)ociety never stops creating new sacred things,” Lesch notes. He then turns to Juergen, especially in his Theory of Communicative Action.

“Habermas believes that rational discourse itself inherits religion’s moral-aesthetic power, a process that he calls the ‘linguistification of the sacred.’ Habermas’s stress on language, I argue, is partly justified. Yet as I show by tracing linguistification’s roots to Émile Durkheim’s sociology of religion and Walter Benjamin’s theory of language, Habermas’s program for solidarity falls short in one crucial respect.

While shared discourse cultivates a basic interpersonal tolerance, it lacks the power to transport us beyond our narrow interests. Nonrational and prelinguistic aspects of our psychology remain decisive. Consequently, democratic solidarity in a secular age remains an unfinished project.”

Imagining ‘Solidarity Forever’ as a real possibility and then demonstrating its viability as such, in such a vein, may underscore any evolving future in which social justice and human progress are generally even plausible. Lesch lays out three ways that SOP scholars try to account for this quality that many believe disappeared with how secularization, except rhetorically, has come to grips with political hegemony.

In his view, “(t)he linguistification of the sacred furnishes Habermas with a fourth response, a way to acknowledge religion’s historical contributions to solidarity while eschewing both reactionary and neoreligious alternatives. Even so, it has often been overlooked in studies of Habermas’s discourse ethics. I seek to reverse this oversight.”

In laying out how any believer in solidarity has a ‘hard row to hoe,’ he identifies half a dozen key tasks that solidarity’s purveyors must undertake and succeed in achieving. “Habermas sets out to accomplish these tasks by turning to discourse.

With the advent of discourse, norms governing human community moved from being implicit, unarticulated, and embedded in ceremonial contexts to being explicit, articulated, and abstracted from collective practices.” Moreover, conversational exchange permits the flowering of ritually believed mumbling into potentially malleable and transformative rational belief systems.

“For once norms could be expressed in discourse, they could be identified, critically examined, and even contested (an idea that Habermas repeatedly stated outright). They were made accessible to human reason, subject to evaluation for their legitimacy and internal consistency.” Forums for voicing and defending beliefs and conclusions would encourage a process not unlike cross-examination.

Lesch underlines “‘criticizable validity claims’” and how their public airing and repeated consideration can create a truth-finding dynamic in which consensus becomes more than merely a fantasy. This denizen of Vanderbilt will have a substantial further contribution to make in later installments that use Habermas, and this inauguration of his presence in Big Tent Review, as a launching pad.

A well-established Habermas scholar, Lawrence Hazelrigg, ushers readers to an examination of our venerable German philosopher that looks at other important elements in Habermas’ CV. In particular, Hazelrigg has decades of practice in unspooling and reweaving one of Habermas’ central monographs, mentioned Above-the-Fold—Knowledge and Human Interests.

This merits merely a minuscule mention here, inasmuch as that volume plays a much larger part in the next episode about Habermas. Hazelrigg extolled the implications of the work, because it more or less successful managed to formulate “a study not just that ‘things happen’ but of how ‘things happen.’

Knowledge and Human Interests offered encouragement that this road (from discussion to mutual assent by way of learning what is true) was negotiable, that it could take us to better, more efficacious understandings of how we achieve knowledge, formulate interests, make worlds, and in the process further our emancipation from the dead hand of past times—or, as Kant put it, pursue maturation, responsibility, and self-autonomy.”

Though as promised Knowlege and Human Interests will prove central in a follow-up article, critical pointers from the book—from the Appendix at the very end—are essential to any attempt to answer ‘how people can help create an ethical Public Sphere.’ Habermas entitles this thirty-page extension of his tome “A General Perspective.”

He insists that ‘theoretical thinking,’ a willingness to seek ideas to tame facts, is an indispensable part of any soothsaying process. Of course, in ‘pragmatic’ America, this sort of thinking is anathema. Still, following a German idealist sage from the early nineteenth century, Habermas chides these kinds of strictly empirical perspectives.

“The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most immediately acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with energy and ethical significance.”

Thirty years after the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas penned a contribution to the journal Communication Theory. The title first poses a complex question: “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension?” In other words, in hypercommodified propaganda contexts, in which monopolies dominate ‘social mediation,’ does knowledge even matter?

Habermas answers very much with a qualified affirmative. He couches this affirmation in conditions, however, that overturn the dictatorship of corporate profit and monopoly media’s ownership of, practically speaking, all the ‘means of production’ of definitive data determination.

This would be one aspect of his argument. “In the final analysis, we are nevertheless confronted with the prima facie evidence that the kind of political communication we know from our so-called media society goes against the grain of the normative requirements of deliberative politics. However, the suggested empirical use of the deliberative model has a critical thrust: It enables us to read the contradicting data as indicators of contingent constraints that deserve serious inquiry.”

Investigative and analytical reporting, ‘solutions journalism,’ and more are key components of a successful ‘Democracy-&-Knowledge-Deliberative-Project.’ Whether we appreciate the conclusion or not, this will likely prove unsupportable with ‘Infotainment Cartels’ in total command.

The personalization of politics is bolstered by the commodification of programs. Private radio and television stations, which operate under the budget constraints of extensive advertising, are pioneering in this field. Though public broadcasting stations still maintain a different programming structure, they are in the process of adapting to or adopting the model of their private competitors. Some authors consider the political journalism to which we are accustomed as a model that is being phased out. Its loss would rob us of the centerpiece of deliberative politics.”

“‘Political Communication in Media Society’ highlights two critical conditions: mediated political communication in the public sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimation processes in complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains independence from its social environments and if anonymous audiences grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society.”

In other words, he finishes his profferal, we need only ‘do our duty as sovereign citizens’ to foster a more felicitous outcome. Insodoing, we will define “how to make use of a communication model of deliberative politics for the interpretation of empirical findings. The model directs our attention specifically to those variables that explain failures in the maintenance of a self-regulating media system and of proper feedback between public sphere and civil society.”

In his Habermasian overview, Habermas and the Media, published in 2018 Hartmut Wessler helps to focus this type of view in real life. The volume serves as one dash ‘guide to habermas,’ one pinch ‘a how-to-become-a-citizen lesson,’ one part ‘accepting corporate power with a smile and a shrug.’ Very much alas in regard to this last, but who knows?

“His unique contribution to theorizing the media revolves around three core concepts…: the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy. It is no exaggeration to say (1)that Habermas discovered the public sphere as a distinct sphere of social life in modern societies, (2)that he developed a distinctive idea of communicative action by synthesizing vast areas of extant research in linguistics and sociology, and (3)that he is the founding father of the deliberative tradition in democratic societies.”

A key ingredient for actually-participatory citizenship is a substantially stronger commitment to truth-seeking than to ‘winning-the-pot’ thinking. This beating heart of Habermas is ‘what it’s all about, baby!’ I mean, seriously.

“Communicative action is ‘action oriented to reaching understanding’ and as such it is diametrically opposed to strategic action, that is, ‘action oriented to success.’ In success-oriented action we try to move somebody in our direction without their rationally motivated agreement.

We can do this openly or in a concealed fashion. In open strategic action we have two options: We can either threaten someone into complying with our intentions or we can offer incentives. Either way rational agreement is neither intended nor necessary. Threats and incentives are well-known instruments in negotiations.”

The ‘concealed option’ is the corporate-public-relations-department-of-propaganda-propagation—in other words right this second anywhere in the belly of the beast of the ‘free-enterprise’ domain of King Capital, Brand Chaos, the Modern Nuclear Project, and so on and so on, ha ha.

To put matters as amicably as possible, Wessler quite plausibly gives away way too much in his estimation of common-folk benefits from current mediation processes. In promoting the primacy of ‘trusted newspapers’ (like the Times, the Post, and the Journal) as reasonable arbiters of ethical knowledge production, he states an obvious falsehood. Just listening briefly is instructive.

“Quality newspapers have a remarkable potential for deliberativeness. They typically construct relatively inclusive debates around public issues that give voice to actors both from the center of the political system and from its periphery.” I mean, please! When Lavrov and Putin, not to mention RT, have untrammeled if not altogether equal access to America’s ‘media consumers,’ such pretense is at least not completely nauseating. Unlike now, when empire’s perquisites and SOP’s reign supreme.

To wrap this section with a bow, we can hand off the microphone to a young Politics-&-International Relations Star at University of Sheffield. Dr. Peter Verovšek’s essay, entitled “The Philosopher as Engaged Citizen,” may well constitute, at least a provisional ‘artistic mission statement’ for this working class survivor whose experiences of nausea as a ‘mandated Nazi’ punctuated his life at its outset. It represents, perhaps, a sort of autobiography of intention.

“While Habermas’s theory is oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought to realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of public debate through his interventions as a public intellectual. In outlining this approach, I argue that giving the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth and overlooks the contingency, participatory nature, and complicated internal logics of social and political practice.

In the subtitle of his research paper, Verovšek points at once to the twinned self-referential and the social-impact-seeking purposes of the dear German thinker’s entire experience as a philosopher and social actor. “Habermas on the Role of the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life” models what are both aims and, at least individually—not unlike in intent the plodding output of THC—actions for humans who believe in social justice and democracy, participation and debate, despite what Driftwood Message Art calls “the Impossibility of This Necessity,” ha ha.

“My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but also gives the theorist the ability to participate in politics as a public intellectual.” So long ago—LOL!—the Introduction alluded to the happy fit between Habermass and the Ten New Commandments.

If for no other reason that the Golden Rule’s ‘number one’ primacy, this should seem obvious to anyone who considers mediation in a measured way. In order to want, in relations to all of our dialogs, ‘others to do unto us’ in certain fashion, we have no choice but to accept likewise ‘doing unto others’ in every conceivable reasonable conversational space.

RESOURCES TO HELP HANDLE HABERMAS

This final bit of offering could readily render an appendix to this essay, although it is neither as comprehensive in scope or as generous in description as would be the most rudimentary ‘Annotated Bibliography.’ Anyway, it consists of a couple handfuls or so of ‘expert opinion’ on Habermas, on one hand, and, on the other hand, of resource repositories for critique and assessment of the philosopher’s work.

Already cited Above-the-Fold, David Langwallner operates as a conveyance for as an incisive Habermas summation as one is likely going to find. He mirrors his role in founding Ireland’s Innocence Project when he concludes with Ten Reflections, a couple of them ideal for ending our forays today.

“His crucial idea of communicative action and ideal speech invites us to talk in neutral conditions purged of ideology. This has led me to advocate for a world council composed of non-corporate, non-business, apolitical leaders apart from those who are (already) properly rational (like Putin and Obama). Independent think tanks (for all and sundry). Let us talk and argue but not fall out and scream at each other any longer.” That’s number one.

“This is the second idea. All citizen participants should “(a)ccept religion from an atheist perspective, all to their own. Spirtuality is not to be despised, and we need a communication about ethics and morality. A common ground.” Yes indeed. Ten New Commandments or something similar are very much in order.

This is an interview with Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “Philosophy in a Time of Terror.” The clearly contrasting and yet clearly interconnected voices of the two theorists of the human conditions will facilitate a delineation, if nothing else, of boundaries of intellectual engagement and political participation.

This conversations took place after September, 2001. If not one other element of the transcript seized a reader’s attention, the complete absence of any skepticism about the origin and unfolding of events intractably indicates loads of limitations of these thinkers in an age of empire’s utter imprimatur and impunity.

This essay on Foucault and Habermas is also a good beginning contribution. It places both men as inhabitants of a humanistic heuristic, so to speak. As humanists, “ Both readily accede to the value of such things as rights and democratic institutions in shaping and protecting modern critical aptitudes, and both accept the ambivalent nature of rights and democratic institutions in simultaneously constraining and enabling individual acts of non-conformism and resistance.”

Again, observers will note no mention of Empire, which, after all is not at all an ideological point but purely a piece of reality’s realm. “Where they principally differ is on their choice of priorities: Foucault can be understood as a modern-day virtue ethicist fighting to liberate the capacity of individual self-choice and personal self-formation from oppressive conformism while Habermas can be seen as a political theorist concerned with justifying and promoting a more just conception of democracy based upon an ethics of discourse.”

This lengthy offering in the magesterial and monumental Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one of a pair of the most perfected overall contextualizations of Habermas’ role in his century among us. “This entry will begin with a summary of Habermas’s background and early and transitional works, including his influential concept of the public sphere, before moving on to discuss in detail his three major philosophical projects: his social theory, discourse theory of morality (or ‘discourse ethics’), and discourse theory of law and democracy.”

Here we have the second of this coupling of encyclopedic estimates of an interlocutor’s life. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has put little Martin Tennessee’s State University on the intellectual map with a big star, for reasons that include this important compilation.

Returning to roots, James Fieser and his co-editor’s contend, in a grounded and pointed overview, that “Habermas argued that a picture of Enlightenment rationality wedded to domination only arises if we conflate instrumental rationality with rationality as such—if technical control is mistaken for the entirety of communication. He subsequently developed an account of ‘communicative rationality’ oriented around achieving mutual understandings rather than simply success or authenticity.

The Wayback Machine is a gift from the Goddess, or a godsend, depending. Its truly vast aggregation of not-always-accessible-otherwise linkages makes of it a very reasonable place to dive deeply. Writings, Interviews, Explanations, and Discussions are just a few of the areas covered.

This is a second piece of the Wayback way. It connects Juergen to his colleagues, and comrades, at the Frankfurt School. “Habermas’s approach offers the process of Communicative Action for a solution. He implies that implementing his theory, and analyzing it will address the ills created by modern society. On the whole, Habermas’s contribution to the Frankfurt school is significant to say the least. It will undoubtedly be revisited as the philosophical conversation continues.”

Halfway through this emanating mix of collections, a Danish compiler appears, still maintaing the production and analytical categories on display. This missive comes from the ‘recent publications’ queue, issued just after the recent Summer Solstice.

Sage Publications’ “Is It Possible to Form a Rational Identity?” answers itself with a subtitle that shows Standard-Operational-Habermasian Procedures are eminently congruent with themes of ‘idenfication:’ <“critical reading of Habermas’ account of social identity”>. Hmmm.

In some senses, that ‘everybody loves this guy’ likely depends on at least vague outgrowths of such popular tropes. “Taking a normative stance, he proposes a procedural account of social identity within communicative rationality, achievable only in modernity and deliberative democracy.”

This review of already-offered Wessler’s Habermas and the Media sets two women, Brazilian authors, downstage in the floodlight, in no less an ideal sounding a source than the Journal of Public Deliberation. The pair extol Wessler for his polishing Habermas’ “ideal of ‘deep media democracy.’ This ideal, however, is tempered by a recognition of realities.” Other than that, we need ‘say no more,’ not just now, anyway.

No listing of our #26 sort would be complete without its Wiki slot well-filled, even if readers have encountered it already. Whatever one’s sense of the platform, the substance and content are indispensable in some shape, form, or fashion.

The penultimate status belongs to a professor from two of my most adored college courses, which dealt with John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Rawls will very soon have his own link in the Big Tent collection. The site, now only a placeholder(meaning hurry if anyone is interested), has a years-long archive to share.

Finally, the corporate sphere’s careful uptake of Habermas appears here, as The Cambridge Habermas Collection’s first sections. A more-than-modest paywall separates a perusal from the content as such. Still, the gems include a lovely Preface, as well as a complete bibliography of Juergen’s work(or so alleged, ha ha, maybe not 'newspaper articles’), and a wonderful intellectual Chronology of his life.

Part of a single year, among dozens of annual installments in the catalog, illuminates Habermas’ range and impact. We’ll basically end here. The first note is from June, the second and third from October.

“Fur die Lava des Gedankens im Fluss” [The lava of thought in flow], a display of Habermas’s work at the German National Library in Frankfurt marking his eightieth birthday.” He was there, of course, a spry youngster.

The Autumnal instants included these. First is a “Conference on ‘Rethinking Socialism’ in New York. Meets for a public dialogue with Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West to debate ‘The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.’” Then, (a) seminar with international scholars is hosted by the Institute for Public Knowledge, Social Science Research Council, New York University and Stony Brook, to discuss ‘Habermas and Religion.”

We’ll learn more, all in due course, Lord willing—and the Goddess—and the Creek don’t rise.

Erotic Snippets—(continued)…

And then, to end his ‘professional day,’ our ‘counselor-coach’ made some notes. This had always been torture for Lou; he’d much prefer new product to editing, arranging, or wondering about all the ‘water under the bridge.’ Still, he saw the benefits well enough to have confirmed the effort as habitual.

He used stars and check-marks. These are some of the stars from the inaugural session, minus his scribbles over the interim before their next meeting—twice-weekly, Tuesday and Friday, ‘till further notice.’

***Committed to each other. Only E. committed to any intervention. K. a little bit charmed by the end!

***K. has deep-seated negative emotional charge about sex and pleasure. Source probably early masturbation+++.

***E. pretty glib. Maybe has some unstated agenda. Her heart’s in the right place, however; almost certain.

The nuances of their first gathering left him wondering. Would something emerge from all of this other than a merely conversationally therapeutic connection? He laughed. “Lesbians are certainly unpredictable,” he thought, as he pushed himself up and gathered all his bags of books and devices, along with his man-sack and Goddess-Tarot satchel, exiting the scene with a touching of a piece of ornamental wood and a satisfied sigh.

CHAPTER TWO

LJ continued ruminating as he loaded up his Instant Pot for a meaty chili, replete with ground bison. He giggled again as he kept considering the two women. “Good chili always tastes like pre-orgasmic pussy,” or so he thought, anyhow, with yet another chortle.

‘Polymorphous perversity,’ from his perspective, defined our roots, and he had always, in the vast majority of cases where such things came up, so to say, opted to ‘double-down’ on the idea, despite the prurient, prudish, purveyal of eruptions of propaganda to the contrary from the vaunted belly of the beast of empire. Anyone who stayed more than two sessions got The Mass Psychology of Fascism for homework, ha ha.

In the event, the knock at the door made him jump, even though he knew that Laurie was scheduled for a visitation and tune-up. Since she was thoroughly bi in her orientation, he wanted to pick her brain about his new clients, in other words, to do more than just cavort in their conventional concupiscent contortions.

He always talked about his work with his lovers—no particulars, merely impressions and potentialities, so to say. After all, most of his crew of ‘friendly beneficiaries’ had started out as clients themselves, sex-surrogate aficionados like Laurie herself, more than one or two of whom, in fact—such as the ‘Divine-Ms.-L.—remained ‘paying customers’ of CAME.

Whatever the case may be, they had each climaxed a couple times, and were merely necking and giggling in the afterglow, when he mentioned, “I had a pretty wild session today.”

Laurie giggled and slurped his tongue for a long moment before she responded. “Oh, do tell, good sir!” She had attended untold dozens of Ren-Fest gatherings, so she often spoke along these lines.

He played along, extending his hand to cup her breast and fondle the nipple. He kissed her back, saying afterwards, “Well, if you insist madam, if you insist.”

“Oh, I do; I do,” she intoned with a teasing lilt, inserting Lou’s cock into her slickened tunnel to accompany her command.

Eventually, they did speak. In eight months of her own once-or-twice weekly sessions, Laurie had brought along a gal-pal twice, with reliably spectacular result, though she had to admit that Lou’s drug cabinet contributed to volcanic cavortations, to coin a phrase.

Thus, at minimum, “the idea is reasonable,” said Laurie. “You are such a kind bloke; you’d never go all Dangerous Liaisons on anyone.” They would all manage to talk about everything, have a ‘written treatment plan,’ literally it was part of LJ’s CAME Practice Protocols.

Given his decidedly Type-B-Introverted personality—INTJ or INFJ every time—“it’s a damned miracle I have the kind of sex life I do.” He laughed. “I know one thing.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” She laughed at how she loved their taunting, teasing temptations to and with each other.

“There is a limit. I don’t have room for any other than ‘office services’ if these sweet lasses want to add some ‘home visits’ into their schedule.” He giggled, as the kissing that followed trailed a track down Laurie’s neck and back to her ass, where it lingered a bit before he had her legs around his shoulders and his mouth full of slickened snaking labia and clitoral knob.

They spoke more. She gave great advice, as always. He was considering asking if she’d like to ‘join the practice.’ He giggled, though he did not speak out loud what had amused him. “All in good time, my pretty, all in good time!”

When Laurie had come and gone, a while later, Lou did his duty and finished his reporting requirement. Eventually, his fees went lower and lower with longstanding Friendly Beneficiaries. “They help me too much to charge them more,” he reflected again on this occasion.

CHAPTER THREE

Here emerge our pair of lass-liking lasses as they love and lick and think about the ‘sexy beast’ whom they’ve selected as their ‘love-guide.’ “I wonder,” mused Kate. “Mightn’t they accuse us of stalking him?”

Eileen guffawed. “It’s not like he’s big game; ‘lesbian-with-a-dick’ indeed!” She laughed again and drank another kiss before she descended to the bellied fur rising from her lover’s loins.

The partnered-pair had been playing thus for two hours. After arriving home to their two condos, at once upscale on the outside and ramshackle in—especially Eileen’s where they always cooked meals and threw parties and any such that might involve socializing—they brewed tea, ate sandwiches, and took a look at their ‘homework.’

They had started in workmanlike fashion with Compatibility & Love Survey. However, question seven had diverted their attention, to wit this. “Would you rather have wonderful sex or enjoy wonderful dancing?”

In tandem, as cued, they stood and kissed and stripped—one thing, as often proves true, leading to another. Like a python—our six-one, stacked girlfriend—and a black mamba—the sleek and diminutive, brown-as-a-bean sweetie-pie—they joined in a writhing dance that augured life rather than death.

They’d appropriated all the motions, combining their answers to the survey-says request, and they’d both come, like rising from deep water to breathe more deeply still, slowly and deliciously. A quick survey of their Love Chest followed, a five drawer Laurel Crown reproduction that Kate’s father had given them.

Continued contact with these two will lead to a listing of some of the contents therein; for tonight, Kathleen’s turn-to-choose brought forth her favorite Battery Operated Boyfriend, slender and tan, an arched bow, and they just set off fireworks hither and yon for thirty-three minutes of Eileen’s multiorgasmic legerdemain.

“I want you to come again too,” Eileen said with her coyly playful voice, an ‘aw-shucks’ dropping of the chin with eyelashes aflutter. “Is that okay?”

Kathleen rolled her eyes, her neck tilted at the ‘Okay, if you insist’ angle. Her lover needed no further affirmation.

As Eileen guided Kate to spread her eagles in their capacious Love Chair, E’s knees grounded on their puffy kaleidoscopic cushion, she exhaled steamy breath on K’s twitching pudenda. Before she tasted, E said, “Here’s a question,” waiting for her sweetheart’s raising her pelvis to arch her lips toward their intended destination.

“How many ways could the two of us fit our chair if he was kneeling here?” Kate’s low moan launched her lover’s lapping tongue to do its business, with the able assistance of Eileen’s lips and nose and face.

“For desert,” wily, wicked, and wanton Eily warmed a steeped-mushroom concoction that she kept in stock in the fridge. For three hours, they played. E lost count of her orgasms and had zero doubt that Kate was thoroughly engaged indeed.

Straight-A student that Eileen was, she hauled them back to the Survey when the tea’s impact moved from their bellies to their brains. Therein, they spent fifteen minutes on ‘sexual frequency,’ question twelve, and had their only momentary sense of bickering on the next query.

Number thirteen: “How soon is kissing and fondling, and possibly more, apropos? A. Whenever the feeling is strong and mutual; B. No sooner than the second date; C. No sooner than the third date; D. No sex before marriage.”

The pair had almost ditched any possibility of a relationship over this issue. Eileen was libertine. Kate was, at heart, a ‘good Catholic girl.’ On their fourth date, E was getting dressed and preparing her stage-right exit after K had demurred getting naked again, only to realize her pending loss and relenting with ferocious intensity.

On this particular Wednesday at two thirty in the morning, they never really argued. K accepted E’s perspective in general. “You’ve got to leave room for lust and error.” That was one thing. “And like it or not, love-at-first-sight is thing, in real life,” Eileen laughed while Kate’s eyes shone with their shared recollections.

“Anyhow,” E said with a hilarious imitation of a stern countenance, “Friday’s only our second date with bloke. You better watch your ass.” They both howled before coming back to business at hand.

Of the fourteen ‘requests-from-the-test’ that kept them up past four, the last one prodded most deeply the psyche’s of these two healthy, enamored damsels. It actually was before the derailing distraction that number seven had caused.

It was the third ask of forty-three total. “Do you want children now? A. Not much at all; B. At least one more; C. At least two or more; D. Uncertain.” Kathleen had already whispered her wishes elliptically now and again.

For Eileen, “Uncertain” was an understatement. Nonetheless, she found herself strangely moved, at one point laughing when she realized tears were streaming down her face.

“I really love you, you know.” Kate’s voice pulsed with passion’s piercing whisper.

“Love you more!” responded Eily with an amiable shove that ended up on her girl’s toned belly. “Nevertheless,” spoke the scholar of the two, “we must sleep. I’ve got to teach in five hours.” She had a bit more to spare before her 10:30 Wednesday-Monday seminar—this semester centering on Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as plausible adjunct to healthy female empowerment.

So the twosome discussed Lou for just a minute. They both had some sense of interest, if not yet outright inclination. Rushing in to anything would be seriously insane. Still, they wanted to be open to their feelings and fantasies and feisty sense of womanly independence.

They agreed. Nothing was ‘set in stone.’ Friday might be their last time; no mas, no fuss. “Then again,” Kathleen noted archly. “He does know how to kiss.”

EPILOGUE

By ‘accident,’ or practiced chance, the threesome in the story meets at the coffee shop that Lou had mentioned as a favorite watering hole. The time was an hour after his last weekend office visitation, noon-Saturday, less than twenty-four hours after their own second encounter.

“Look who’s here!” rang out Eileen’s alluring, purring alto, dragging out the ‘rrrr’ into a guttural giggling growl. As often happened under such circumstances, Lou jumped in place—almost dropping his order—and then blushed while Kathleen laughed out loud.

By arrangement with friends, and first-ever clients, from Roasted Red Rooster Coffee on Haywood Road, Lou had the ‘meeting room’ at the back for his own purposes on Saturdays, except if Simon and Excelsior got a big-money offer in advance. The female amorosas, so to say, enthusiastically assented to join him in his lair, once they’d gotten to the head of the queue and acquired sufficient caffeinated libations.

For the next hour and then some, they talked about Friday’s follow-up to their first hour and a half. At the same instant toward the end of this prefatory exploration of a plausibly epic skirmish, the women nodded at precisely the same point, as Kathleen trilled in her soft soprano, “We’ve been talking about it all—about you—nonstop!”

Loads of approbation and blah blah blah spilled out. Lou smiled his most deferentially affable Cheshire Cat. Once people feel safe and comfy with each other, he believed, unless they tended to prudish propensities, they uniformly delight in discussing sex and fornication and all manner of fiery, frantic fucking and kissing confections.

For a good thirty, minutes, with an occasional squeezing of hands two and three at a time, along with side-orders of cheek-stroking and head nuzzling, the triad under formation conferred about what these two lesbianic lovers wanted, how all the carnality of relationship succors and sustains us, along with other more mundane—almost administrative—elements of CAME client-counselor relational connections.

“But the homework!” hissed Eileen with delight, halfway through this last half hour or so. “I can totally use that text for my seminar, and it’s a free download, I mean wow!” Kate admitted that she hadn’t read anything yet, “but Eily tells me everything anyway, ha ha.”

Wilhelm Reich’s all-too-infrequently heralded work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, revolves around a key concept, that socialized sexual repression supports imperial or other potentate rule, in particular as ‘free enterprise’ turns toward completely authoritarian models. One might control countries by taking over banks, noted Lou, “but you control people by demonizing and fetishizing sexuality and erotic relations, with yourself and anybody else, from childhood on.”

The core thesis, he said, one might label ‘Sexual Repression to Foster Fascist Forms.’ “Some of the first people Hitler gassed or beheaded were homosexual, right?” He mentioned Cabaret and its ‘documentary content’ with a sway of his chair-bound hips and a rolling laugh.

“So it’s our text, I guess you’d say,” and, after a brief and fertile hiatus, “then we have the other standard options that go with basic talking-heads counseling and such.” He waited and listened to the silent seconds flowing by.

Kathleen rolled her eyes and lolled her head in preparation for being more forward than she was generally wont to be. “Yeah, your stuff’s pretty fascinating; maybe especially all those forms”—she tinted from her cheeks down her neck and to her not completely hidden away breasts, nipples standing to attention as she spoke. “I mean…”

Every client-packet contained three folders actually, the one most likely applicable to them a set of Surrogacy Consent Forms, SCF’s, or as Lou would quip to Laurie on occasion, “Permission2Fuck!” With apt timing and a glint of a glance, Eily noted, “Yeah, we’ve been talking about that surrogate-one.”

Now, despite experience and savoir faire, Lou blushed to his roots at the suggestive and amorous intonation from the one whom, in their second get-together, he began to call, to her face out loud, “our little spitfire.” “Yes, well,” a beaming grin split his face in two, “this is in fact something that I’ve trained to do,” referring to his certification as sexologist and Certified Surrogacy Practitioner.

Kate practically gulped in anticipation. “Do you really have over a thousand tabs of that Pharma MDMA?”

Again, the pregnant pause gestated an eternal fifteen seconds or so. “Yes. That’s one reason none of my participants can be on antidepressants.” Not only did they upend libidinal capacity, but they could also be quite toxic in combination with the ‘Serotonin inhibitors.’

Kathleen took his left hand in her right. Eileen held his right with her left. Both women’s free hands fondled his thigh beneath the bright harem pants that he favored, with predictable priapic results.

Blah blah blah. Nature and nurture and need annealed their metabolism into a single emanation of Life Force Energy. After their warm greeting, their exploratory discourse, and a few fondling forays and syrupy kisses in their very own back-room booth, they all agreed that retiring to the ladies’ ranch, or condo as the case might prove, would be a good move.

They rode in Lou’s Big Red Van, Jackson Brown’s “After the Deluge” blasting from the speakers. “With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge,
In the troubled years that came before the deluge.”

“Some of them knew pleasure,” Jackson crooned as LJ inquired politely, “would you like me to touch you, Eily?” She lifted her skimpy skirt to move her damp panties aside, gasping quietly a little as his fingers found her clit. As she came, and Kate watched, and palpably panted, the verse finished as he pulled up behind their place.

“And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge.”

As a bursting lunar orb broke free of surrounding trees, silhouetted against the passing approach to the Blue Ridge Parkway, they kissed and kissed, swapping split and playing tonsil hockey, leaning against the dusky vehicle, where, eventually, both women spoke their assent, into Lou’s phone, to “an exploratory surrogacy exchange.”

The final scene for the fading afternoon unfolded as some wild and feisty frolic on the rear porch, before, already half naked, they retired, not to Eileen’s standard ‘sociability surroundings,’ but to the couple’s sacred Chapel of Love at Kate’s, to candles and pillows and a firm California King playing field. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

We’ll pick up next time right about here.

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…

THE LIFE & TIMES OF MILUTIN MILANCOVIC

Here we encounter a fellow who was truly an exemplar of his age, as a demographic and social fact in any event. One of seven children, he was first in the birth order, along with a twin sister; three brothers died of tuberculosis. Because of his own ‘delicate health,’ he was home-schooled in his early years, even after his tutor, his father, died when he was only seven.

A Serb at the edge of Austria-Hungary’s encroaching empire—coming of age at times of great tension before another Serbian assassinated the imperial Archduke—he studied in Vienna and got his doctorate in structural engineering at age twenty-five. His consuming intellectual interest, however, despite patents and success and wealth as a civil engineer, remained celestial mechanics and the math of the solar system.

He left his career behind and took a professorial position at Belgrade’s great university, focusing on his interest in the solar system and such problems as ‘mystery ice ages.’ Apropos our own awareness of matter’s meteorological, he wrote, “(M)ost of meteorology is nothing but a collection of innumerable empirical findings, mainly numerical data, with traces of physics used to explain some of them... Mathematics was even less applied, nothing more than elementary calculus... Advanced mathematics had no role in that science...”

In moving to Serbia, he avoided being an ‘enemy alien’ if war broke out, as it did. Unfortunately, however, he married in June, 1914, and went to his birthplace in Austria-Hungary for his honeymoon, facing arrest and imprisonment soon after Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination a month later.

He had his papers and research calculations in his suitcase. Here’s what he said about his first night in jail. “The heavy iron door closed behind me....I sat on my bed, looked around the room and started to take in my new social circumstances…

In my hand luggage which I brought with me were my already printed or only started works on my cosmic problem; there was even some blank paper. I looked over my works, took my faithful ink pen and started to write and calculate…

When after midnight I looked around in the room, I needed some time to realize where I was. The small room seemed to me like an accommodation for one night during my voyage in the Universe.”

Thanks to a smart wife, professional connections, and a willingness not to ‘go to war,’ he spent all but his first six months as an internee, able to work and continue his research, with only a weekly ‘parole meeting’ to impede him. Much of his theoretical and practical oueuvre about planetary climates took final shape in this period.

A Wikibooks entry punctuates this idea. “Geologists around the Northern Hemisphere had discovered strong geological evidence for these previous episodes of ice ages, yet climate scientists had yet to discover a reason why they had occurred. Milutin had wrestled with the idea, and wondered if it had to do with long term cycles in Earth’s orbit.”

Smithsonian Magazine also emphasizes this ‘fortunate misfortune,’ at least from the perspective of human knowledge and scientific awareness. The article’s title is incisive: “This World War One Prisoner of War Solved the Mystery of the Ice Ages.”

“A decade later, reflecting on his time in Budapest and imagining gazing upon the building where he was confined, Milanković wrote, ‘I was her prisoner of war, and in her my four-year longing for freedom would have drained my core, if I had not found refuge in scientific work. ... There, it is the window where I sat for days and, looking at the blue Danube and proud Buda, wrote my first scientific work.’”

Whatever the case may be, Milanković may now represent the most famous thinker about whom almost no one has heard, with the exception of super-nerds and climate fanatics. A symposium about his life and work serves as a dandy resource for finding more.

The scope and depth of this Serbian genius’ ambition is difficult to overstate. He had a sense of the ‘inner workings of our cosmic clock,’ and he wanted to design the ultimate guide to constructing a human timepiece to match. A paper, relatively recent, states the matter anecdotally.

“One story holds that, (when) beginning to think about what scientific issues to pursue in his research, (a friend) proclaimed he would abstain from short (works), and instead write about his ‘entire society, our country, and our soul.’

Milanković, swept up in the moment, replied, ‘I want to do more than you. I want to grasp the entire universe and spread light into its farthest corners.’ Milanković was ‘on the lookout for a cosmic problem.’”

WTAF IS ‘NORMAL CLIMATE CHANGE?’

Lex Fridman evidences the hypothesis that ‘socialist education’ surpasses anything that King Capital can offer. His voice, soothing and reasonable in its open curiosity and lack of judgment, definitely provides sensible guidance to complex problems. The video here, more crucial than even it is lengthy, ha ha, begs again for people to engage in respectful and nuanced conversation, useful advice here even as it also appertains to today’s thoughts on Habermas in the previous essay.

All such should be undoubtedly important to keep in mind if we want to inquire as to the climate of conversations about climate change, global warming, and attendant matters. Illustrating this assertion should prove as easy as finding 276,000,000 links in responding to the following search string: <"climate change" OR "global warming" disagreement OR discord OR dispute OR debate>.

Periods of glaciation and glacial retreat in Earth’s past are as obvious as daylight or cloudy new moon darkness. How accurately to explain this has interested observers for centuries. A recent journal entry provides some background

“(M)athematician Joseph Alfons Ademar (1797–1862) published the first true astronomical theory in his book ‘The Sea Revolution’ in 1842, where he described the changes of the earth’s path around the sun as the main cause of ice ages. Among other pioneers who investigated extraterrestrial causes of ice ages, Scottish scientist James Croll (1821–1890) was particularly important.” The latter scholar was an Oxford janitor or something similar, who gained access to labs and books and showed his true colors.

Milanković, however, must receive credit for codifying these inclinations, so to speak. An already cited article puts the case like this.

“Together, the cycles of eccentricity, obliquity and precession interact to change the total amount of incoming sunlight at different latitudes. When the variables align in just the right way, this can cause a global ice age or cause even the largest glaciers to melt.”

From a Wiki item also mentioned above, we find both how these forces might operate and how our Serbian’s inputs were inaugural in the whole arena. “The best way to explain the axial precession cycle is to watch a spinning top or gyroscope, which tends to wobble during its spin, such that the axis of the spin rotates in a circle when viewed from above. Milutin realized that this cycle could be the clue to unlock the reason for the ice ages in Earth’s past, because it was an example of a long-term orbital cycle, however it was not the only one.”

The Tesla Society’s procession of geniuses includes Milanković as well. Its summary and explication are also quite helpful.

“The Ice Ages which have dominated the Earth's environment for around the past two million years are thought to be caused primarily by orbital fluctuations that, while changing the sunlight received by only a few percent, have major impact on climate systems. These orbital forces include the 22,000 year cycle of precession, 100,000 and 400,000 cycles of eccentricity, and 41,000-year cycles of Earth's obliquity or axial tilt. Scientists are still researching exactly what mechanisms trigger the flux and flow of Ice Ages.“

Milanković’s endeavors along these lines, including his primary ‘thesis statement,’ as it were, receives its star turn as well. “This work was translated into English under the title Canon of Insolation of the Ice-Age Problem, in 1969 by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations and published for the U.S. Department of commerce and the National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.”

The lengthy material then documents both criticisms of Milanković and a general refutation of these naysayers. “Objections were raised in the 50's against the Milankovic theory of ice ages; these objections came mainly from meteorologists who claimed that the insolation changes due to the changes in the Earth's orbital elements were too small to perturb significantly the climate system.

However, in the late 60's and 70's, investigation of the deep-sea sediments and theoretical works in celestial mechanics and climate modelling showed that Milanković's view was correct and that the astronomically induced changes in insolation, received by the Earth from the Sun, was indeed the primary cause for the waxing and waning of the Quaternary ice sheets.”

A Serbian paper deconstructs this process while also demonstrating the author’s recognition of her countryman’s role in getting this particular ball of wax rolling along. “The Sun provides the energy that drives the Earth’s climate system. This energy is in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Variations in the intensity and spectral frequency of incident solar radiation reaching the Earth cause changes in the global and regional climate.

These climate changes are independent of man-made climate change. Milutin Milanković proved that climate changes and periodic ice ages on Earth are caused by periodic changes in the movement of the Earth around the Sun and around its axis. He showed that the geometry of the planet's orbit determines the amount of solar energy that reaches the upper layers of the atmosphere.

Periodic variations of this geometry change seasonal and spatial distribution of insolation. Because of this, the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere changes, which leads to climate change. This theory is actual in modern science because the problem of climate change, or one can say climate crisis, is one of the main problems of humanity.”

An online tutoring site also gives out a useful tutorial about all this. It’s a sign of the ubiquity of the centering of this altogether factual matter, that patterns of weather with natural causes have ever defined life on Earth.

That none other than Columbia University now has a separate ‘University Climate School’ circumscribes the way that a subject of daily interest, yet one which never—at least since Noah, ha ha—dominated discourse has now come to have such a center-stage spot on the schedule, so to speak. Thus, one can turn to this source to buttress the idea that ‘Climate Change is Manmade.’

And it could be so. The Stipulations at the outset of this article ought to be persuasive in proving that the aptness of such contentions has no weight save descriptive potential: only social and political comity can save us, whatever weather lies ahead.

The United Nations is also a part of the entire process now, what with its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its erstwhile authoritative reporting. Even if its projections about “irreversibility” prove true, acceding to such facts does not even slightly change what we’ve just said, even if the titular presentation sounds dire indeed: “Long Term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments, and Irreversibility.”

Plenty of bloggers and more or less authoritative ‘grassroots’ voices also support these beliefs in dire straits as a result of rising temperature, carbon, and blah blah blah. Even a mostly one-sided and judgmental monograph that follows such a path might still prove useful in one way and another.

Equally so, many reasonable people are trying to remain balanced and open, so that rational exchange is possible. One such site, “Ask a Biologist,” makes a case that our very day and time ought to be approaching a glacial perigee, so to say.

Right now, the author says, we’re close to two-thirds toward the largest ‘tilt.’ “The oscillations in Earth’s tilt would result in more severe winters and summers during these long-periods of several thousand years when Earth’s tilt was greater.”

He also makes reference to today’s Serbian stalwart, Dr. Milanković. “While in the library(as an internee), Milutin pondered the effect of Earth’s changing obliquity on Earth’s climate and moved toward explicating a third orbital variation.” Cycles within cycles superimpose on each other.

Plenty of intelligent folks, even ‘climate experts,’ take issue with seeing temperature rise as anywhere close to the key issue for humanity to manage. A professor at San Jose State University, for instance, offers this.

“Recently the most prominent geologist in Australia, Ian Plimer, published a book entitled Heaven and Earth: global warming -- the missing science. In it, on page 23, Plimer summarizes his conclusions concerning climate change” in a way that decries drastic dangers just ahead.

Plimer’s sixth point, though, parallels what we’re presenting here, so let’s listen in to the Aussie’s common sense. “Humans have adapted to live at sea level, at altitude, on ice sheets, in the tropics and in deserts. As in the past, humans will again adapt to any future coolings and warmings.”

Professor Watkins, from the SJSU publication above, also offers another sober reference point. “The French climatologist, Marcel Leroux wrote a critique of what might be called tabloid climatology.” Any hysterical climate will be maladaptive.

The answer to this section’s question is obvious. ‘We can’t be certain of all the particulars, but this much is clear: changing climate conditions are indisputable part of Mother Nature here on our planetary home.’ The debate is interesting, yet a wary citizen, if also wise, will avoid jumping to nuclear conclusions, as the next episode in this series will explore.

When, as stated a few paragraphs back, multiple intersecting cyclical templates are unfolding, complexity is inevitable. Citizens and students and experts alike must take care to remain openminded and curious, ready to be shocked and amazed that things are not as they assumed or believed. Anyhow, one way conversations, composed of propaganda for political purpose, presumably cannot help openmindedness and curiosity to thrive.

Before moving along to the final portion for today, a reader might take a peek at a wonderful summary about things from 1999. It’s really not dated, and the National Aeronatics and Space Administration authors contextualize things in comprehensible and comprehensive fashion.

A BRIEFING ABOUT PALEOCLIMATOLOGY

Whatever we know or think we know about this entire array of facts and analyses, of dispute and accord, that knowledge has its roots in a systematic and scientific apprehension of Earth’s climate in the past.

Canada’s Carleton University puts a respect-the-elder spin on climate science with its look at ancient weather. “Paleoclimatology is the study of past climates. Since it is not possible to go back in time to see what climates were like, scientists use imprints created during past climate, known as proxies, to interpret paleoclimate. Organisms (in the guise of fossils) serve as useful climate proxies.” Cored ice and tree-ring assessment also helps.

The upshot is simple to state. “Past climate can be reconstructed using a combination of different types of proxy records. These records can then be integrated with observations of Earth's modern climate and placed into a computer model to infer past as well as predict future climate.”

One cool method is to measure the amount of heavy-air, and likely heavy-water, oxygen isotopes present in these fossilized bitty life-forms. Lighter versions of our breathable bounty evaporate more quickly from warmer water, an observable bit of data that allows for close-to-dispositive inferences about the dead, preserved creature’s experience of temperature.

The portal at Carleton insists on thoroughness and caution. “Climate has both long term trends and short term variability. In looking at longer time scales, major shifts in climate such as the ice ages are easily recognizable, and viewing a long-term data set can provide the observer with a sense of the ‘big picture’ of the climatic trends.

Short term variations, like a colder than average month, can exist within longer term patterns such as the warming trend over the past 1000 years. The coexistence of short and long term trends occurring simultaneously through time complicates our ability to unravel climate change.”

External links are available here as well. Interestingly enough, except for the video that sits at the entryway to this portal into ‘modern climate science,’ only one other of these—so far anyway—points out the obvious fact that is the subflooring of #26’s article and the entire Big Tent POV, to wit this.

‘Climates change; disasters happen; we’ll never solve them with technology. If they do not end nature’s viability here, we can adapt and survive. This depends on our adaptability, which in the end always comes down to mutuality.

Of course, that won’t stop front-men for empire and corporate flacks from running rackets left, right, and center so as, at once, to keep the technical methods of managing matters under company control, and to convince people that only capitalist’s machinations can, quite profitably obviously, save the day and pull humanity’s bacon out of the flames of hell, ha ha.

Before signing off for now, we’ll look at a bit more about this climate-science ‘what’s-up-&-how-to,’ which practically innumerable additional sources document. One might see here for instance, at a scholarly platform from Heidelberg’s famous university, one of the first collegiate institutions around.

“Approximately 700,000 years ago, a ‘warm ice age’ permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded.

A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection. According to the researchers, this profound change in the Earth’s climate was responsible for the change in the climate cycles, thus representing a critical step in the later climate evolution of our planet.”

We live in this fascinating place. We can investigate deeply and learn broadly. Well-regarded authorities are ever available to delve and ponder.

This is a quite lengthy overview from Columbia’s aforementioned program, with hyperlinks to different useful chapters and summaries from various ‘climate experts.’ For an orientation to established thinking, which is to say establishment perspectives, this is a good place to start.

Before we wind up winding this ‘Climate Note’ down, one other early proponent of prioritizing paleoclimatology is worth mentioning. From Belgium, Andre Berger in many ways ‘carried a torch’ for Milutin Milanković.

A fellow at , he gives a tribute to the Serbian ‘founding father’ of ‘the paleoclimate movement.’ His title instructs the reader: “Milankovitch, the Father of Paleoclimate Modeling.” Now in his mid-70’s he brings us his endeavors from a position as a fellow at the Georges Lemaître Center for Earth and Climate Research, part of the Earth and Life Institute at the Catholic University of Louvaine.

Thirty-three years prior to this 2021 publication, already a heavyweight in the field, and ever thorough in his contextualization, he wrote a bookend for his recent paean to the Serbian forefather. Published in Reviews of Geophysics, “Milankovitch Theory and Climate” operates as a launching pad for the omnipresent climate-crisis conditions that show up daily in monopoly media.

Berger is anything but an alarmist. But his brilliance, and the difficult science and math that underlie what he finds, make of his work a chance to advance all manner of subsurface plans and schemes by the corporate titans who rule the world. Milanković might well disapprove of obvious biases toward King Capital, a clear bent to the business, as it were, but his insights continue to guide where things are tending.

One recent scholarly paper, from scienceofclimatechange.org, elegantly summarized the efforts of Milanković, the study of past climatological conditions, and present prospects. “In its most basic form, Milanković Theory is a set of insolation conditions on the earth’s climate system that have been shown to correlate with features in paleoclimate data.

A decent sendoff, or at least a final quotation and upshot, is available from the science tutor website that appeared in the previous section. “How the Sun Affects Climate—Solar and Milankovitch Cycles” is, if nothing else, workmanlike and graphically engaging. It points out some obvious and overarching data to consider.

“In reality, Earth is dynamic. Our climate is changeable. The history of Earth's climate has been marked by many ice ages and warm spells, some measured in millenium and others in centuries. You may be surprised to find that there are some patterns in this changeability, though. Climate change seems to be cyclical.”

Despite the ‘duh’ elements here, the authors do not make the point explicit. As mentioned, almost no ‘experts’ do so, but it is as plain as day. ‘We can figure out how to survive and thrive if we just get along with each other and stop doing the bidding of the high and mighty who, whatever else appears apropos, seek out maximum profit above all.’

The next article among this climate-grouping, as already suggested, takes on the Modern Nuclear Project agenda that may well lie behind the so-called ‘climate coup’ scenarios propounded by ‘conspiracy theorists.’ BTR adherents have already learned a bit about M. King Hubbert, whose “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels” is a foundation for attenuating atmospheric-carbon and more.

As “Chief Consultant” to the Southern Division of the American Petroleum Institute in Texas, he made his presentation in 1956. He and others were already laying the groundwork, quite plausibly, for a planned ‘energy transition’ in the time span that clearly includes 2025.

When Milutin was finishing college and becoming a civil engineer, a century and a quarter back, the world was a very different place. Yet, somehow, he is now leading a charge to which he might well have taken exception, given his life history of two World Wars, imperial collapse, the rise of fascism, and so forth. This essay indubitably makes no such claim, but it’s one hell of a narrative ride.

Perhaps people will want to give such things some thought. Would that a ‘word to the wise might suffice,’ ha ha.

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

Bush quoted Franklin Roosevelt at the outset of his work. “New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.” Has this vision come to pass? Inquiring minds should count H-bombs and seek to find out.

In a fifteen-year-anniversary edition of his July, 1945 essay—issued prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki but with their incineration clearly forthcoming—an Introduction lays out some of what had transpired from Bush’s recommendations. The report stood as “a classic expression of desirable relationships between government and science in the United States.

Its usefulness and validity today are all the more remarkable when it is remembered that Dr. Bush and his advisers were of course quite unable to anticipate the specific developments that have most profoundly influenced our time, namely, the Korean war and the cold war, the missile and satellite race, the Soviet technological challenge, and the rapid acceleration of space research. Nor could Dr. Bush have estimated, in the final days of World War II, the full growth and direction of the atomic energy effort, including the large-scale programs and peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

But he did anticipate in fullest measure that important developments would occur and that science and science education would be of immense importance in the postwar growth of the United States. The closing words of his Report were strongly prophetic: ‘On the wisdom with which we bring science to bear against the problems of the coming years depends in large measure our future as a nation.’”

Bush spoke approvingly of the introductory analysis. Of particular import was Alan Waterman’s assessment of the transformation that had occurred from the original author’s extremely modest recommendations for centralized military research to the gargantuan expansion of both service-based and central investigative efforts, the upshot of which portrayed a military takeover of much of what universities represented as ongoing operations.

“The military services, who were well pleased with the civilian research performed in the universities under O(ffice of)S(cientific)R(esearch &) D(evelopment) sponsorship, continued such arrangements with the universities by writing appropriate new contracts to continue the work started under OSRD auspices or to launch entirely new investigations. In ensuing years, many contracts of this type were entered into by the military services with a growing number of universities.

The central laboratories originally associated with OSRD contracts, such as the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, developed into the research centers, which, though supported by military funds, are operated by civilian scientists under civilian management. In addition to applied research for the solution of immediate problems, the three services gradually expanded their research programs to include grants for basic research—in general related to their missions but often of a very fundamental nature.”

Whether one investigates the brainchild of Bush, the National Science Foundation, or an elite gathering of the cognoscenti that predates his post-Manhattan-Project efforts such as the National Academy of Sciences, one encounters similarly glowing, or at least de rigeur, accounts of the role of established science—including the Modern Nuclear Project—in having and maintaining a modern and safe and comfortable social presence on Earth. In the main, those who academically or governmentally or commercially hold positions of technical leadership overwhelmingly endorse both S.O.P., technically-driven, establishment, capitalized scientific hegemony generally and the Modern Nuclear Project specifically.

In such a context, imagining a grassroots response to such a priesthood of protocol and secret awareness seems to constitute a daunting challenge, to say the least. However, several factors definitely provide tangible reasons for hoping that just such a popular uprising in favor of learning about, caution in regard to, and even outright opposition to the Modern Nuclear Project might take root and lead to a widespread participatory democratic dialog about humanity’s technical future.

Such technically trained professionals as Helen Caldicott and John Gofman are just two of hundreds who have turned against the largesse and oversight of their atomic masters. Gofman in particular spent decades, after he had worked for twenty years at the heart of the nuclear industrial complex—for the Lawrence Livermore Lab at Berkeley—serving as a stalwart and persistent witness that the Modern Nuclear Project insidiously threatened human survival even should we prove miraculously fortunate in never detonating one more atomic weapon.

He makes this clear over and over again in testimony of all sorts. “Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder. First of all, when you license a plant, you know what you're doing—so it's premeditated. You can't say, ‘I didn't know.’

Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond doubt. I've worked fifteen years on it [as of 1982], and so have many others. It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses.”

Harry Braverman also, albeit in a very different fashion, uses scientific and technical analysis to serve human and democratic possibilities. He does so by helping his readers to understand the evolution of science-in-industry as a tool of management supremacy: commoditizing and monetizing every expression of science as a line item of business; the implementation of ‘scientific management’ in even the smallest details of worker habits and behaviors; the specification of machinery that more and more increased extraction from and output of human minders; the cannibalization of even those job functions—engineers and scientists—that had permitted the rise of technique to its supreme place so that these workers too became mere cogs in a system that operated according to machines and algorithms and computations that removed all decisions from workers’ hands.

In the end, science itself functions in such environs as profit-making in its very essence. “The key innovation is not to be found in chemistry, electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital.”

In such a context, “the reduction of the worker to the level of an instrument” more and more closely approximates the theoretical ideal of such a possibility that the likes of Frederick Taylor and other ‘time-and-motion’ experts dreamed of. “Thus, after a million years of labor, during which humans created not only a complex social structure but in a very real sense created themselves as well, the very cultural-biological trait upon which this entire evolution is founded has been brought, within the last two hundred years, to a crisis, a crisis which Marcuse aptly calls ‘the threat of a catastrophe of the human essence.’”

Moreover, in relation to such an arc of transformation, the weapons and machinations of the Modern Nuclear Project come into focus as just the most perfectly adapted realizations of additional instruments to discipline and control labor’s surly humanity, its recalcitrance, its every move and thought that might undercut capital’s predominance. Braverman paints a grim portrait that, paradoxically, represents the only vision from which a popular transformation toward social justice is possible.

Yet other social and physical science scholars synthesize the analytical foundations that Braverman provides with the social and political economic threads that the Spindoctor lays out in this essay. One of these is Langdon Winner, whose The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology extends a bracing critique of especially the Modern Nuclear Project and its rationalization and monetization of every single aspect of labor and life and nature, till its surreal rationality threatens the ‘catastrophe’ to which Marcuse alluded in Braverman’s note above.

Winner’s “epiphany”—he compares it to Henry Adam’s deification of the forty-ton dynamo at the 1900 Paris World Fair—comes at the end of an elliptical narrative, at once lyrical and incisively empirical and ecological. He has come back to the place of his birth, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, where a power company tour bus delivers him to a beach on which he had cavorted as a youth.

“Although I had known some of the details of the planning and construction of the Diablo Canyon reactor, I was truly shocked to see it actually sitting near the beach that sunny day in December. As the grey whale surfaced, it seemed for all the world to be asking, ‘Where have you been?’ The answer was, of course, that I'd been in far-away places studying the moral and political dilemmas that modern technology involves, never imagining that one of the most pathetic examples was right in my hometown. …

About that power plant, of course, the standard criticisms of nuclear power certainly hold. … (Furthermore), (f)rom the point of view of civil liberties and political freedom, Diablo Canyon … require(s) authoritarian management and extremely tight security. It is one of those structures, increasingly common in modern society, whose hazards and vulnerability require them to be well policed. What that means, of course, is that insofar as we have to live with nuclear power, we ourselves become increasingly well policed.

Sophisticated arguments pro and con on issues of this kind have involved some of the best minds in America. …But beyond the sophisticated studies of scientists and policy analysts concerned with these issues lies another consideration, which, if we ever become incapable of recognizing it, will indicate that our society has lost its bearings, that it is prepared to feed everything into the shredder.

To put the matter bluntly, in that place, on that beach, against those rocks, mountains, sands, and seas, the power plant at Diablo Canyon is simply … . out of place, out of proportion, out of reason. It stands as a permanent insult to its natural and cultural surroundings. The thing should never have been put there, regardless of what the most elegant cost/benefit, risk/benefit calculations may have shown. Its presence is a tribute to those who cherish power and profit over everything in nature and our common humanity.

To write any such conclusion in our time is, I realize, virtual heresy. My colleagues in the science, technology, and society assessment business often counsel me to be more careful, to reword my point of view… . But the plant and its inherent destructiveness are already much more than ‘possibilities.’

They are already in place. More and more the whole language used to talk about technology and social policy—the language of ‘risks,’ ‘impacts,’ and ‘trade- offs’—smacks of betrayal. The excruciating subtleties of measurement and modeling mask embarrassing shortcomings in human judgment. We have become careful with numbers, callous with everything else. Our methodological rigor is becoming spiritual rigor mortis. …

(E)mbarrassing disclosures of structural flaws and shoddy workmanship forced a thorough, enormously costly rebuilding of the plant during the last several years of the project. Some of the plant's engineers and workers still insist that the structure is unsound and complain that they have been harassed on the job for talking to the press about these troubles. To recoup the spiraling costs of the installation, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company has already applied to the Public Utilities Commission for the first of what is bound to be a series of steep rate increases. …

(T)oo much money had already been spent, too much institutional momentum built up, too many careers invested, too many sermons preached from the pulpits of progress to allow any course of action (as) sensible (as closing or repurposing the facility). At present our society seems to prefer monuments … to gigantism, war, and the overstepping of natural and cultural boundaries. Such are the accomplishments we support with our dollars and our votes. How long will it be until we are ready for anything better?”

The brave engineers and wage-earners that Winner mentions felt sick at their turning a blind eye to corruption and the very real potential for grotesque mass murder. Nevertheless, as in all such cases, they must have had to overcome intense distaste and fear to take such a stand. Always is this likely to be true among the beneficiaries of this central tenet of contemporary capital and its empire.

Nonetheless, despite the indisputable fact that technically trained adherents to the Modern Nuclear Project substantially outnumber opponents, one might go on at great length prior to reaching the end of the list of expert detractors of fission-and-fusion as energy and imperial policy. Such thinkers as Arjun Makhijani(), Rosalee Bertell(), Steve Wing(), and dozens of others are merely North America’s sampling of contrarians. Russia, Japan, Korea, and most other national repositories of learning would contribute their own gadflies, insistent that a non-nuclear future represents the best, or even the sole, hope for human thriving and survival.

The Spindoctor, on the other hand, quite clearly possesses the opposite of expertise about anything except grammar. He merely operates as a concerned citizen whose persistent curiosity has in fact persisted for the forty-three years since a long-ago sophomore tutorial introduced him to Gar Alperowitz and Atomic Diplomacy. Today’s profferal both stems from and serves as a powerful argument in favor of rejecting anything that even resembles a requirement that professional authority should become a requisite for considering these matters.

In this vein, a recent blog—both scholarly and popular—conveyed citations and material to suggest that such perseverance as the Spindoctor’s might again rise up from below to manifest political struggle for a democracy that is both informed and engaged. In the event, the analysis that Corey Robin presents in his brief reflects the wider struggle against monopoly capital and empire, both of which are built-in components of the Modern Nuclear Project.

He focuses on the labors of popular and credentialed historian, Steven Fraser, whose most recent monograph, The Age of Acquiescence: the Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power compares our ‘gilded age’ with the first one just over a century ago. Though Fraser’s take on American popular combativeness is that it has ebbed to a low point, he outlines the steps that can initiate a resurgence, some of which are no more ‘radical’ than the type of examination that is occurring here today.

“Steve asks why in the late 1800s, the concentration of wealth and extremes of inequality sparked an explosion of mass rebellion that lasted well over a half-century, whereas today, with some isolated and episodic exceptions, we see, well, acquiescence. Not consent, not apathy, but acquiescence. It’s a word that makes me shudder.

As Steve says, the men and women of the nineteenth century witnessed the violence of capitalist development and managed, out of that hellhole, to conjure and wage war on behalf of an entirely different vision of society. But we live in a ‘windowless room,’ where we it’s difficult to see beyond capitalism. Part of that, he says, has to do with the ‘fables of freedom’ we’re told, where freedom is equated with, reduced to, the free market.”

Vannevar Bush expressed these fabulist notions of freedom in terms of science. The point of today’s essay is that concerned citizens cannot either overcome acquiescence or take on the likes of Dr. Bush on his own terms without an analytical structure that looks at eventualities such as the Modern Nuclear Project in a clear-eyed and comprehensive fashion.

Lacking such a rubric of consciousness and comprehension, we will never even be able either to play a part in discussion, let alone take action that is anything other than reactive and doomed, like latter-day Luddites. Monopoly, empire, government, and expertise have combined to project a strategy and plan for the next thousand years on everybody else.

Our job is to find the data and heart to ponder this Project so as to advance alternatives, unless upon sober reflection we end up agreeing that monopoly, authoritarian norms, and skating on the verge of mass collective suicide are good things or better than all other alternatives or somehow, in any event, inescapable.

Secrecy As Sine Qua Non: ‘Red-Herrings,’ Hidden Agendas, & Glib Ignorance

One of the most intractable attributes of the Modern Nuclear Project also makes discovering its essence—as above, “doing our job…to find the data to ponder” it—difficult or even impossible. In at least half-a-dozen ways, in fact, promulgators of nuclear visions hide away their source materials or otherwise obfuscate discovery of what is happening in the realm of the atom.

Failures to Instruct

The first way that this severing of popular capacity from necessary knowledge takes place is in education. In the United States, propagandizing() or otherwise distorting the scientific process is only a small part of the picture. As well, at least in the vast majority of public schools, science instruction is so weak in comparison to other ‘developed nations’ as to contribute at best rudiments to young people who might ever want to apprehend something as complex and multifaceted as the Modern Nuclear Project.

A Fordham University assessment stated the case like this. “Only a year ago, twenty-six state science standards received grades of D or F from our reviewers, while twelve also earned Cs. Just thirteen jurisdictions—one in four—had standards worthy of honors grades.

Only seven earned grades in the A range. (You can see which in the table below.) As is widely understood, weak standards are not the only—or the most worrisome—problem facing science education in the United States in 2013. Achievement in this field has been dismal.

The most recent appraisals by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, 2009) found barely one-third of fourth graders at or above the ‘proficient’ level in science, followed by a mere 30 percent in eighth grade and an embarrassing 21 percent at the end of high school. Other studies have shown that just 30 percent of U.S. high school graduates are prepared for college-level work in science.”

Arguably as crucial to capacity as science instruction, which in general and in relation to the Modern Nuclear Project is a huge and central topic to develop further, is the ability to think critically. Especially in regard to the choices and patterns that have surrounded the creation of nuclear weapons and power, this skill is paramount.

Paolo Freire’s efforts have acted as seminal guides in this area. As one reviewer capsulized some of Freire’s ideas, “Traditional teaching wouldn’t help (disempowered and needy people) much. It would not make them find root causes and possibilities for change, but would rather fill their heads with other people’s static ideas.

Freire called the effects of this kind of teaching massification. Massified students, he said, have the illusion of being educated, of being free, of being able to understand and control their circumstances. But they are not much more conscious or analytical than their illiterate counterparts. Only those whose critical faculties have been nurtured through dialogue about the issues that matter in their lives develop critical consciousness.”

The count of public secondary schools in the United States that have adopted such an approach to examine and probe deeply fission and its inception as a technical choice is easy to determine. It is a round number, as in zero. Next Up—Part III