Big Tent Review
Hello, everyone! As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine. This is the ninth incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, interesting and entertaining writing and, second, 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Often, unlike today and last issue, a particular edition will have a theme, or at least a thematic rubric, so to speak. Then again, every BTR blast 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. 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!
Oh yes, something occurred to me recently in regard to the prodigious outpouring of prose in each Big Tent issue. Substantial numbers of readers confront such a 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. Such a step guarantees managing the tsunami in an amicable way, ha ha. So, now: ‘to the ramparts’ and read!
Table of Contents
—Introduction:
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—A Brand New Thing: Current Event Spiral Spread
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter IX
3. Wood Words Essays—Another New Thing: COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way: a Review
4. Empowered Political Forays—A ‘Blast From the Past’—‘Caitlyn’s’ Campaign: TRANSGENDER ‘IDENTITY’ & CONSCIOUSLY SUBSTITUTING SURREAL FOR REAL
5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, PART Nine
6. Old Stories & New—”Faith, Bad Faith, & the Catholic Church,” completed
7. Nerdy Nuggets—The Oneida ‘Free Love’ Community & Its Meaning, Part Two
8. Communication & Human Survival—Internet Origins, War, ‘Pornography,’ Concluded
9. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”We’re All Cousins…” a Biosocial Golden Rule, Part Three
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Premises & Their Promises: Fiction’s Facilitating Fact
At this juncture, readers have returned to BTR’s twice-a-month format. Among Marshall Arts’ ‘best-sellers,’ one of my favorite wood messages spools out its nouns and verbs and their modifiers like this. “Twisting Passages of Paradox—That Every Portal's Invitation to See May Yield Blindness; That Every Taut Muscular Surface Overlays a Slack Sack of Interior Goo; That All Answered Inquiry Activates Additional Querulous Questions; & On & On In Any Aspect of Existence—Pave Life's Pathways One & All, Most Especially That the Capacity to Comprehend This Universal Processing of Interlocking Contradiction Comes to the Fore, If At All, Only Toward the End of One's Sojourn Through These Thickets of Antithesis."
The title of the piece, “Thickets of Antithesis,” has not changed in the same way that each new embodiment of the message itself has always introduced slight shifts, so that no two purchasers will, with only two exceptions out of thousands, ever find themselves in possession of precisely the same lines that pyrography and inspiration have allowed me to burn onto different sorts of drifted wood. Thinking about this, as I’ve been assembling BTR #9, I find myself irresistibly drawn to contemplating the notion of the infinite, since after all any like type of production loop as this will in the scheme of things end up making plausible as near to never-ending stories as will ever accompany an eternal continuation of embodied consciousness.
I daily find myself living astride the seeming contradiction between this infinitude of possibility and the necessity to effect limits on matters at hand that, quite effectively, must be delineated as yet another example of never-ending instances of this, that, and the other. If I could, for instance, ha ha, each issue of this little publication would contain an infinite reach, something that would further frighten readers who already sense cascading presences of ‘too much information,’ ‘too much information,’ altogether too much.
In the meantime, another limitless cornucopia awaits our attention, as the very near future looms with its sometimes subtle and occasionally drastic shifts in how things fit together. In that regard, a thinker from some decades back has come into view, a Russian—and eventually Soviet—scientist who championed the concept of the Earth as a solar-powered biosphere.
“The biosphere is at least as much a creation of the sun as a result of terrestrial processes. Ancient religious intuitions that considered terrestrial creatures, especially man, to be children of the sun were far nearer the truth than is thought by those who see earthly beings simply as ephemeral creations arising from blind and accidental interplay of matter and forces. Creatures on earth are fruit of extended, complex processes, and are an essential part of a harmonious cosmic mechanism, in which it is known that fixed laws apply and chance does not exist.”
Definitely mechanistic, Vladimir Vernadsky somehow managed also to be a brilliant dialectical geologist. In his in some sense deeply-persuasive view, the Earth’s very crust, the capsule’s covering for our ‘pie of life,’ reflects something closely resembling an altogether anthropocene, or at least biocene, impact and set of guiding influences.
How are humanity’s current endeavors unfolding so as to embody Vernadsky’s insights? Well might we pose this query amid the ubiquitous deployment of advanced weapons systems in Ukraine and Southwest Asia; amid the murderous Nazi barbarity of proposed criminalization of abortion; amid the grotesque attack on actual human sexuality that results by privileging Trans-rights and other such; amid the ongoing funding of constantly ‘new-and-improved’ thermonuclear instruments of Mass Collective Suicide; amid all manner of matters that might, subtly and slowly or radically and instantly, change the surface of the Earth that is now our collective home.
Big Tent Review is, considering things in a totally different fashion, basically Ralph Stanley’s rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” “Everywhere I go…All in my house…Out in the dark, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine." Life is about bearing witness to the delicate miracle of embodiment that we all embody in congruent and yet delightfully varied ways. That’s at once the spiritual premise documentary promise of all these BTR emanations.
The refrain is me, in all my glory, ha ha, as well as the hope for this ‘little publication’s bright, shiny luminescence.’ “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine; this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine.”
A significant portion of the spectrum of ‘my little light’ here on SubStack revolves around Eros and sexuality. One cannot simultaneously serve salubrious Life-Force Energies and reject being completely real about our kind. Our ‘life partnerships’ are inherently libidinal and overwhelmingly involve frequent carnal contact among the ‘parties to the party,’ so to speak.
As a result, transformation these days, at least arguably, necessitates something akin to revolutionary developments that are, simply put, impossible to effectuate—barely plausible to conceive—outside a context, to state the point palpably, of persistent, empowered life-partnering in carnality’s pairing spheres. Can we successfully contextualize in this way? Our ancestors did—we wouldn’t be here otherwise. To do so would be joyous, entertaining, and instructive: perhaps only a greater affection for Mass Collective Suicide stands in our way, ha ha.
More on this ‘relationship sphere’ is coming in relation to my own experience at just this juncture in cosmic unfolding, as it were. Suffice it to say that I’m ‘reinventing myself’ through the legerdemain of love and the purposeful potential of partnership. I’m moving closer to my Wheeling origins too. The second video today also tackles a crucial aspect of this sexual subject, in relation to Margaret Sanger and recent Supreme Court Nazification of conjugal outcomes.
Another massive part of ‘my little light’s’ shining as it does, inevitably intertwined with matters of abortion and such, entails a recognition of and opposition to imperial hegemony, or perhaps dictatorship is a fair way to state the case. Yet who among us inquires about, for example, Eugene Debs, the labor organizer, Socialist Party presidential candidate, stalwart advocate of working class power? He went to prison with a ten-year sentence for giving speeches that stated the obvious: rich people and organizations gain from doing battle to start fights that bring wars in their wake.
“And now among other things they are urging you to ‘cultivate’ war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. They could not if they would. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment. Who is it that makes this land valuable while it is fenced in and kept out of use? It is the people. Who pockets this tremendous accumulation of value? The landlords. And these landlords who toil not and spin not are supreme among American ‘patriots.’
"In passing I suggest that we stop a moment to think about the term ‘landlord.’ Landlord! Lord of the Land. The lord of the land is indeed a superpatriot. This lord who practically owns the earth tells you that we are fighting this war to make the world safe for democracy—he who shuts out all humanity from his private domain; he who profiteers at the expense of the people who have been slain and mutilated by multiplied thousands, under pretense of being the great American patriot. It is he, this identical patriot who is in fact the archenemy of the people; it is he that you need to wipe from power. It is he who is a far greater menace to your liberty and your well-being than the Prussian(emphasis added) Junkers on the other side of the Atlantic ocean."
To bring home the powerful prescience that happens when one can see things as Debs suggests, one only needs to change Prussian above to Russian. Of course, then one can giggle or even burst out laughing. Finding humor and joy in the crazed cosmic concatenations of which comical human catastrophe seems to consist is arguably a component of writing, reading, or doing something about what I like to describe as ‘the way things truly stand.’
Participation is a sine qua non of both battling empire and effecting an empowered citizenry. In recognizing the pulsing power of mediation in our lives, we would have little choice—if we are the carefully considering readers who can get this far—but to see, clearly, that neither Facebook nor any other so-called ‘social media’ will, ever, offer any sort of consistent and considered participatory nexus, so to say.
How can one participate? The process must begin, at its conception, more or less, with engaging oneself. After one has come to terms with one’s own fatalism, despair, and self-serving self-righteousness that ‘it’s not my fault; it’s not my fight,’ one can ponder the ever evanescent inquiry, ‘What is to be done’ to manifest the shifts that, in the words of Sam Cook’s song are “gonna come” whether we fancy the change or not?
As different BTR effusions have already noted or implied, only some sort of revolution in human affairs can salvage Homo Sapiens’ prospects in their present habitat, here on Earth with its miraculous Biosphere. Recognizing that this means that we must, in some sense, seek to make transformation happen may seem to evince an incredible, even hopeless, eventuality perhaps, but a necessity nonetheless, which is only possible as a widespread, deeply rooted social movement.
“Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything.” This is how the original Driftwood Message Art missive might state the case. Hell’s bells, as mama Kassy was wont to say, I’ve even been considering a ‘Church-of-the-Ten-New-Commandments,’ a move congruent with now living in a town whose name means peace, the achievement of which, duh, depends on justice.
Here’s a gross exemplar of injustice, monstrous and murderous. A clear American asset on the Russian political scene, with below five per cent popularity in his homeland, Victor Navalny now illustrates that the imperial obsession with crushing Russia must outweigh all other ways of imagining peace and prosperity and amicable human affairs. The simple search, <Navalny death commentary>, uncovers over thirty million citations. By contrast, thirty thousand times the human carnage in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the form of the easy inquiry, <Israel Gaza fighting>, yields a mere threefold increase in interest, or just over ninety million attendant links.
Delusion, madness, willful ignorance, the usual suspects in the American psyche and operational standards, as it were, are not merely on display in a sideshow such as the mediated consideration of an unpopular Russian politician’s death. All one need do to ascertain the accuracy of these accusations is to consider whether, for instance, Viktor Navalny’s recent demise is more, or less, important, not to mention interesting, than the laughable conclusion of suicide in the case of Jeffrey Epstein’s corpse in his ‘maximum security’ Federal Prison cell. Imagining the Russian’s passing as more worthy of attention is just laughable to anyone who is in touch with reality, anyway, ha ha!
I mean, the idea truly is laugh out loud funny. I guffawed when the thought came to me, somehow both farcically ludicrous and homicidally culpable. To wit, this: ‘What would happen if the same resources and attention had sought answers to the ‘suspicious circumstances’ of Epstein’s end?
I might propose this promising premise in reply: basically, focusing on Navalny-murder in the context of Israel’s depredations, which #9 here analyzes through the lens of Tarot Readings, appears as some kind of psychotic joke; even ‘mano y mano,’ Navalny’s doom induces many fewer important insights than will high society’s pimp’s supposedly managing to strangle himself exactly like a murderer would choke him to death.
No indeed. Nor will we hear, as monopolized media focus on the relentless ‘outrage about Navalny,’ a single monopoly media analysis of the crimes against Julian Assange, whose entire critically important story emanated from his daring—conceptually precisely like Debs when he pointed out superpatriots’ warmongering ways—to make a public spectacle of U.S. forces butchery and gangsterism in Iraq.
Similarly, as further expanding Gaza slaughter threatens, not even a ‘mention in passing,’ to use Debs’ artful phrasing, will emerge from corporate cartels’ manifestations in media, so to speak. This very failure at least to examine-the-obvious represents strong circumstantial evidence that ‘Assange’s punishment’ is foreordained because, unlike Navalny and unlike monopoly media, he kept his reportorial promise to present the facts and let people make up their own minds.
Along similar linese, a fellow citizen sent me a link recently. He took RT’s reporting seriously, whereas I see the narrative as at least partially ‘tongue-in-cheek.’ Kiev’s Nazis basically promised to ‘stand shoulder-to-shoulder’ with Gringo soldiers in their battles with Beijing! The article and my buddy concluded that American policy makers appreciated this ‘solidarity exercise.’
My interlocutor’s view of all this was that such absurd idiocy could only happen in America. While I can understand such a POV, I responded differently. “However, another view on this matter is possible. The premise of this simply cannot be that Kiev's tools and fools would start or fight a 'war' with China, ‘in the trenches.’ That's just silly, like a child's shout that 'I'm the King of the World!'
Instead, the point is that in a 'Spanish Civil War' situation, say, or in a Santiago on September 11th, 1973 situation, say, or really, say, in any case where imperial soldiers, loyal fascists all, were helpful or even crucial in supplementing or replacing United States troops as such, these 'Razov Battalians' and their ilk would act as 'off-book' special forces to participate in whatever martial mayhem or general dirty deeds that Washington might pursue. As an aspect of this, indubitably, these Azov murderers would go anywhere that their puppeteering masters might direct them.
My guess is that the most likely deployment of any mercenaries like this would be much closer to home than we might imagine. I would wager nine dollars that the next few years, or even the next few hours, might prove me correct in my estimation, basically putting Ocham's Razor into practice, ha ha.
Whatever the case may be, to me, the whole point of the grotesque monstrosity that is Imperial American Ukraine Policy is that it may continue, but it is not mandated from the cosmos. How might we transform this horror? If people inform and empower themselves, then many different ways of managing things would become potential choices, moves or other action that will never happen under today's 'leadership.' Before popular governance could ever plausibly come to pass, we might want to find out, 'how will this new rule work out?'
The short answer would probably be that empowering the regular people of Ukraine to sort things out, replacing puppets and gangsters with a new 'People's Soviet,' or whatever one wants to call it, would end up being the outcome that we want. My sense is that empowering regular people here, in the U.S.A., with accurate context and process, to comprehend Ukraine and its true conflicts, is likely some small help in making democracy in Ukraine possible again, despite the present imprimatur of our Nazi puppets.”
Can one project a future in which Azov Battalion Nazis and imperial-Israeli-fascists fight as literal comrades? Perhaps not: at the same time, today’s initiation of formal BTR discussion about the I-P nexus establishes a foundation for observations of noteworthy convergences between Yankee policies in different sectors of the Anglo-American Phalanx, whether European or Asian or otherwise.
Today’s Wood Words Essay, meanwhile, presents a review in which an independent voice is on display, that of Patricia Nye in “COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way.” This soulful introduction to the present pass inevitably encounters the conundrum of combating carefully constructed propaganda.
Even to suggest contemplating such an idea will likely lead to scoffing rejection by those who don’t realize how repetition and manipulation have made a science of getting people to think and act as instructed. The Marxist critic, Theodor Adorno, wrote about this in a 1954 issue of the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television.
“How to Look at Television" was the title; ‘not on its surface’ was the advisory. “The ‘hidden meaning” emerges simply by the way the story looks at human beings; thus the audience is invited to look at the characters in the same way [as the story] without being made aware that indoctrination is present. ... th[e] message is hidden only by a style which does not pretend to touch anything serious and expects to be regarded as featherweight. Nevertheless, even such amusement tends to set patterns for the members of the audience without their being aware of it."
The rights of transsexuals carries more weight than is worthy of the freight in the prospect of embodied creatures who seek to enact a fantasy, as it were, of gender transubstantiation. A social libertarian, like this humble correspondent, would never critique, for ‘moral reasons,’ the five personal acquaintances who have dabbled in this sort of legerdemain, or to contend that they were violating nature’s nostrums.
Such criticism might be defensible, but I have zero interest. Similarly, I would never judge s/he who is now Caitlyn Jenner, penis still attached according to authoritative reports. On the other hand, tons and tons in Jenner’s story necessitates the most critical sorts of deconstruction imaginable, a bit of which shows up below.
In contextualizing Oneida’s proto-free-love experiment in terms of present social reality, Number Nine acknowledges how short-lived and apparently less than central were the machinations of John Humphrey Noyes and his adherents in the Oneida Community. Then again, and especially considering the recent series on Wilhelm Reich and the “mass psychology of fascism,” the core of which is sexual repression, much in the erotic sphere in these times of ours makes Noyes and his fellow travelers seem akin to the Goddess’ tools of loving relation in comparison.
Huffington Post, in the meantime, serves to conclude BTR’s examination of the America Online phenomenon, from governmentally orchestrated fiscal and technical backing to the never-say-peace defense of empire that Huff-Po ‘liberals’ advance with enough enthusiasm to cause Al Haig to make a happy turn in his grave. The merger of ‘progress’ and regression followed closely on the heels of board Chair Haig’s demise. Go figure!
The final piece of the missive with the original “We’re All Cousins, After All,” moniker rounds out the reportage, as it were, in #9. Deconstructing ‘race’ might, in the end, permit a reconstruction of what being human could mean in a collective hope to finesse Mass Collective Suicide.
This issue’s fictional, or at least more creatively non-fictional, articulations continue two long-standing parts of BTR while advancing to its end a three part series the title of which still makes me grin: “Faith, Bad Faith, and the Catholic Church, Or, How I Masturbated My Way to Mental Health." Mid March’s #10 will have more confabulated storytelling, whatever the case may be.
The current installment starts with the continuation of the anchor volume, All God’s Cousins, & Where They’re Bound, taking the reader to Asia and the ‘other side of the world’ before returning to Appalachia. As well, the final bit from Mad Cows & Englishmen’s prefatory pages appears below, from which will flow another continuation of this in many ways COVID-like epic adventure.
Again, in the meantime, the ‘fate of Ukraine’ is driving American policy possibilities in seemingly imperious fashion, such that even contemplating ‘abandoning those Nazis’ to their desserts is harder to contemplate than is risking the extermination of the human species. More original reporting about ‘Little Russia’ is forthcoming.
Till then, one might consider that among erstwhile media ‘heavyweights,’ only Tucker Carlson has accepted his inevitable sacking and reconfigured his figuring to persist in pointed inquiry about what is happening in Kiev’s national environs. Congress’ every machination—from shutdown to border issues to Palestine—contains clear Ukrainian components. Thousands of miles away, hapless residents watch as untold billions line the pockets of the ‘business interests’ that include Hunter Biden and the sabateurs of the Nordstream Pipeline.
‘Evil Putin’ is on the lips of every newscaster who can find an excuse to mouth the phrase or something similar. I would just remind BTR readers of a thing or two. Twenty out of twenty-one 1918-19 New York City espionage defendants, a la Julian Assange a hundred years ago, were Ukrainian nationals. They were promoting the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution in the streets of New York, for which ‘treachery’ they all received ten year sentences, commuted to deportation back to Russia, specifically Kiev. The implicit meaning of these events, given the tens of billions in treasure going to ‘Ukrainian separatists,’ ought to be clear to all but the severely retarded among observers.
Speaking of Kiev’s secessionists, Leon Trotsky mentions how elements among Ukraine’s citizenry in 1917, “Ukrainian separatists,” had thrown in their lot with the soon to be triumphant Germans, to whom the Russians were busy surrendering so as to advance revolution and reduce the carnage among the Slavic working classes and peasantry. Years before, Trotsky, who was born and grew up in and around Kiev, received a special invitation to serve as a war correspondent, during the 1912-13 Balkan conflicts, for New Ukraine, in some ways the only authoritative and honest voice on that precursor to World War One and the collapse of the Ottomans.
After the Soviet withdrawal from the ‘Great War,’ much of the Russian Revolution ran through Ukraine, especially Kiev and the Donbas, about which Trotsky also reports at some length in his autobiography, My Life. Altogether, readily available food-for-thought proffers appetizing bon mots to nourish a profoundly skeptical attitude to the suicidal smorgasbord that Anglo-American imperialists intend to lay out for humanity to consume as it expires in the thermonuclear aftermath that a general war in Ukraine would make, if not inevitable, at the least quite probable. Russian roulette, anyone?
“Pearls Before Swine,” the always sardonic and droll comic strip, proffers some parting insight in its February 11th panels. Emperor Rat addresses ‘subjects,’ who. have been grumbling grumpily with “questions about…taxes (for) war and very little on your cities.” It mentions “one standard of justice for street…dealers and another for pharmaceutical” enterprise. It acknowledges “cash and gifts” that yield “favorable treatment” as yet another “valid concern.”
Rat then asks about some great uproar, ‘off camera and outside the frame,’ so to say, crushing his skeptical subjects when they turn to look. “Distraction is the key to good governance,” he concludes to a dour and despairing pig.
As a matter of course, no doubt, skepticism about the motives of rulers must outdate written records; I may have been ‘born a critic,’ but everyone, or near enough to all of us to discard the exceptions as freaks or outliers, worries that others are getting more stuff, better deals, or more favorable treatment. Too many people have siblings, classmates, or other coventurers to have a result that finesses such petty jealousy, snarling imputations of favoritism, and all that kind of routine blah blah blah.
In such a context, where practically speaking everybody is apt to accuse the powers that be of being kinder to others than to ‘my particular, extra-special, precious self,’ finding ways to keep people at each other’s throats is not rocket science. Most of us try our hands at machinations of ‘playing both ends against the middle,’ figuring out how to keep more for oneself by having the rest of the crowd fighting over trivialities and non-sequiturs. If lots of people aren’t grinning sheepishly, they’re likely either hiding something or at least a tad obtuse.
As for myself, I keep lobbying for some sort of solidarity in spite of the seeming impossibility of ever facilitating such legerdemain successfully. That’s what the Ten New Commandments are about; that’s the premise behind the entire Driftwood Message Art shtick; that’s why I write all this stuff here in the ‘holy pages of SubStack.’ Obviously, “obvio po,” as last issue’s Pablo Larrain or various well-known fellow Chileans might proffer, that’s the reason that I’m in search of a couple hundred—or, maybe twenty thousand—readers who are also supporters. I’ll hope to hear from folks.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
Here we go again, right? Or not, inasmuch as an entirely new feature—Current Context Spreads, anyone?—unfold here. A ‘heads up’ launches everything, to wit this. I’ll be addressing tons of the more substantive Israel-Palestine contradictions and contextualization in BTR’s longest video ever, above. For those who find these topical endeavors important and interesting, a dip ‘below the paywall’ is highly recommended if not mandatory. Today’s installment, Geology’s Imperial Geographies: ‘Asia Minor’ begins here and now with a query to the Goddess, along these lines: “How might an inquisitive citizen usefully consider the slaughter in Gaza and Israel?"
I might have entitled this ‘Geography’s Imperial Geopolitics,’ ha ha. Apparently my vaunted ‘nearly infinite loops’ appear as well in this space—Southwest Asia, the Middle East, Palestine, Syria and Transjordan, Canaan and Yishrael, whatever label one attaches to these lands of ancient feuds and fecund human felicity in close proximity to each other, the sweetest harvests and the bitterest banes of human history, all of which ends up delineating patterns of alternating lethal conflict and imperial ‘peace.’
Well might an imperial citizen these days, replete with ‘exceptional’ privilege and the tendency for ignorance attendant on seeing CNN and Fox News as the media landscape, listen to the grounded wisdom and incisive assessment that Nassim Taleb proffers about this entire kettle of fish, inasmuch as he is a genius Lebanese thinker and businessman, as well as a generations-long resident of the region. His down-to-Earth common sense subsumes any ideological identification that might reasonably apply to his other intellectual work, dealing with ‘Black Swans’ and ‘long tails’ and other concatenations of capital’s contradictory contrariness.
Dr. Taleb rejects out of hand that some simple-minded dualism can account for the current carnage in these ancient, contested arenas. “If you understand nothing about the problem (like D.C. pundits) and have no skin in the game, then everything is seen through the prism of geopolitics. For these ignorant pundits, it is all Iran vs. Saudi Arabia, the U. S. vs. Russia, or Mars vs. Saturn.”
His nuanced views would be a huge step in the right direction of ‘coming to terms’ with ‘I-P realities’ without flirting with Mass Collective Suicide. His work is a credit to the strength of the Medium model of mediation, so to speak. He draws an analogy which every U.S. resident who fancies a non-Apocalyptic future should consider: a comparison of the present pass to ongoing butchery in Taleb’s native Lebanon
“I recall, during the Lebanese war, noticing how the local conflict…metamorphosed thanks to the press into an ‘Israel vs. Iran’ problem. I described in The Black Swan how war journalists who came to Lebanon got all their information from other war journalists who came to Lebanon, hence they could live in a parallel world without ever seeing the true problems — absence of skin in the game does wonders in distorting information. But to those of us on the ground, the objective was to make things work and have a life, not sacrifice our existence for the sake of geopolitics. Real people are interested in commonalities and peace, not conflicts and wars."
Returning to the matter at hand in this BTR section, which is about the present predominance in Israel/Palestine of murder and mayhem, the array of cards that showed up is certainly interesting, yet such is arguably always true given the pretty pictures and mysteries of meaning and interpretation. And my interpretive stance is, charitably put, a stretch, right? I’m asking people to imagine that the Goddess of All-That-Is has spoken to us about Israel and Palestine through this BTR oddball’s Tarot spread.
Not impossible, therefore in some sense compulsory, okay: but is right now, today’s exact sequence, that case? Who knows? I’m a storyteller, and I can fit a narrative to the eight items that showed up, the seven from the Spiral Spread and only the second or third ‘Secret Jumper’ in doing this for several years; a ‘Secret Jumper’ happens when the last pull for the Spiral Spread comes out as a pair.
The Essence, the first position of seven, yielded Odysseus’ King of Swords; Past Influences delivered up the Four of Swords, while the Present Passage presented Bellerophon’s Knight of Wands, and Likely Future Developments offered the Four of Cups; No-Matter-What, Opportunities gave us the Seven of Cups; Problems & Prospects proffered Hercules’ embodiment of Strength, with a sweet finish: first The Empress in the Synthesis position, then The Hierophant as the Secret Jumper. This last development covers the entire layout.
What can this mean? It’s as often proves true very evocative indeed. Odysseus, “the wily one” in legendary litanies, as the sovereign of cognition’s designation of Swords, signifies the Central presence of or need for ‘strategic leadership’ in situations of complex and apparently intractable conflict—meriting in this instance at least a modest wow response. The Four from the same suit portrays Orestes at a moment of calm in his crazy crisis of murderous parents and homicidal ‘duties,’ illuminating how, in the Past, in relation to our investigative look, perhaps clearheaded thought and incisive analysis smoothed otherwise frightfully fraught circumstances. The Knight of Wands, the suit of creative imagination, displays as a current context Bellerophon as an exemplar of creative triumph, without the egotistical hubris, hopefully, that the hero showed in his conquering the Chimera. The Four of Cups—the suit of Psyche and Eros and love’s conquering all by acceding to relationship’s ups and downs—strikes an odd note in regard to Likely Future Developments, yet one may readily weave it into the yarn: the set-up for Psyche’s betrayal of her promise not to investigate her new husband’s ‘true identity’ too closely, this item depicts the beauty’s sisters, whose jealous speculations make Psyche dubious about Eros, or at least increase uncertainty that she was already feeling. Certainly, all manner of parties to the I-P catastrophe have agendas that could cause them to sow doubt about motives and plans of everyone else involved. The Seven of Cups, representing how critical is the task of navigating loves’ many choices, is another less-than-obvious entry. Again, however, as people on the ground, in the parlance of Professor Taleb above, are more interested in finding harmony’s common ground, even if the circumstances might be dire indeed, then picking out precisely how to precipitate cooperation and placid mutuality could look much like Aphrodite’s challenge in the card to Psyche.
The final three cards pluck forth very powerful potential for purposeful comprehension. Problems & Prospects might ever revolve in significant measure around Strength’s call to balance conflicting inner drives and harness them for aplomb and empowerment despite all the forces to the contrary—how to mix ‘aggressive expansion’ with ‘communal sharing,’ to permit Israeli and Yankee insistence on resource access with ancient Palestinian agricultural and communal rights, and on and on. The Empress, meanwhile, delivers a powerful Synthesis with evocations of mothering and nurturing and finding ways to facilitate freely flowing feeling in a common community that can withstand the fractures and fissures of faction and fighting.
The Hierophant, Chiron, with his portent of learning and instruction and finding new ways to think about contrary relations, is an absolutely hopeful ideal to envision. As much as anything, new filters, transformational conceptualization, breakthrough social ideation as powerful as microprocessing was for technological development, such eventualities as these must match necessity’s oh-so-essential mothering of invention in this space of mayhem and brutality.
Obviously, this narrative induces a ‘consider the source’ response from anyone who knows me and who has even the merest modicum of skepticism, basically everybody who knows me, ha ha. The Reading brought forth such feelings from me. Goddess knows.
I was plotting a plotline that fit the facts, based on ‘random plucks,’ rather than pondering the entire factual array so as to hypothesize. Given that my Feral Appalachian Nerdiness means that I can always spin a ‘believable yarn,’ this inherently selective ‘once-upon-a-time,’ which can readily exclude indisputable data and events that less obviously fit my little storytelling exercise, gives me plenty of ‘food for doubt’ about my interpretive choices, as it were.
Thus, although the cards as pulled do in fact create a possibly useful and satisfying discursive repast, so to say, about ‘October 7th’ and its aftermath, I decided to pose a follow up interrogatory. I elected to examine a Past-Present-Future trio also, with a slightly more focused question to lead the way: “How might one usefully examine the history and background of the present Israel-Palestine carnage?” The answer from the ether may be apt indeed. (continued below the PayWall)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(Alyson’s bloody, brutal, slightly comic introduction to a ‘Chinese work ethic’ notwithstanding, her youthful strength and joie de vivre soon saw her partying like a rock star in ‘the ATL,’ where she will show up now and again subsequent volumes of All God’s Cousins. Still years from her encounter with Lou James, she lived as a worker bee in the context of all manner of radical politics and strange shenanigans in ‘Uptown Down South,’ a ‘city-too-busy-to-hate’ with multiple strings of “missing and murdered children” on its books as unsolved crimes. While police and investigators would make little headway on these hateful developments, local activists and intellectuals were laying the foundation for something akin to a revolutionary reform movement via reporting, organizing, and networking in relation to all sorts of issues, the upshot of which was something like a ‘community defense initiative’ for the South, centered in Atlanta. This chapter introduces a star reporter and supporter of Radio Free Dixie, one of the central players in these struggles, although our Ms. McCallister was not yet a part of the WRFD core operations at the time of this tale.)
CHAPTER IX
Heidi McCallister wanted to see her husband again in person; the ‘big news’ that she’d conveyed wanting to talk about in the long-distance call from Manila, on her way to Angeles, was, as she emphasized over the phone, life-altering. And while she had fairly frequent chances to view him on the little screen, whenever Australian Embassy business might warrant an “official diplomatic statement” or something similar, she could hardly convey what she hoped to say to his pixilated image. Thus, in Luzon’s June steam bath, in lodgings where the a.c. was spotty or nonexistent, she rehearsed the lines of love that she wanted to project into her altogether complicated partnership.
Theirs, like so many marriages over the millennia of human existence—more than a few of which Heidi herself had studied before she quit her doctoral program in Women’s Studies at Emory to marry Conrad—had not resulted from either an irresistible individual romantic inclination or from family tacticians who hoped to cement some advantage by a strategic sexual union. As her main advisor when she was at the University of Sidney for a year, where she met ‘Connie,’ made the point, pregnancy could serve either to cement or unravel bonds that consisted—as hers and her husband’s did—of “more or less proportional parts opportunism, chemistry, affection, and pure chance.”
During her three semesters in Australia, she had sojourned four times to the Philippines, at first to interview prostitutes, either women at Clark Air Base’s notorious ‘red-light’ district in Angeles, or those who ‘serviced’ the soldiers who came to the island for leave from Vietnam whose two weeks of R & R was SOP. Until she became more familiar with the country, she avoided the massive Subic Bay complex that had for almost three quarters of a century served as a ‘crown jewel’ of American imperial presence in the Pacific. Going there, she learned, was “a good way to get yourself killed,” at least “doing the work that you want to do,” one of her Marxist comrades had opined.
By her second visit, she had befriended this Domingo, diminutive and by ‘all-American’ standards almost effeminate but a wild man in bed, who also happened to define his existence as a life of a committed revolutionary, whose “sole purpose in life” was to “overthrow U.S. dominance, impoverishment, and imperious murder of his comrades and fellow Filipinos.” His leadership in the New People’s Army centered in the hills to the North and East of Angeles, off the primary rail and road routes to Dagupan and points still further North.
They met at a party in Manila, something stiff and genteel, where the hidden agendas and unstated assumptions established the basis for tentative and awkward interactions. But he had been in a PhD program in Sydney too, an inevitable topic of interest to them both, before he had dropped out “to advance more tangible social goals.”
He said this without pretense. “I think I understand,” Heidi had responded. He nodded. “I’m hoping to do some good, socially, you know, as an academic.” She wasn’t precisely defensive, but the premise was nevertheless clear, like polished glass, and it was self-protective.
He smiled and waited. “Yes, of course,” he said after a time, when she said no more. Into the silence that lasted still a few more seconds after that, he interjected, with a little laugh, “Except that that’s largely impossible of course.”
Heidi did not necessarily agree, though she laughed uproariously, as if he unstopped a bottle of bubbly with his assertion. She intended to show the world some of the truth of the connection between sex-work and the U.S. military. She was even thinking of changing her dissertation topic altogether to examine the potential to build sex-worker and women collectives in spite of paternalism, machismo, misogyny, and what she was beginning to formulate as “the overarching patriarchal impact of U.S. militarism.”
She ticked these pieces of her puzzle palace off on her fingers. He shrugged. “Good luck to you then,” he appeared to say.
In the event, he introduced her to women’s leaders, feminists, organizers among and participants in the sex trade itself, especially around the Clark Air Base facilities, which she learned had nearly as venerable a role in U.S. control of Luzon and the North as had the universally-known capitalization of empire at Subic Bay. In the process, they started an affair that seemed incongruous on the surface, the diplomat’s sweetheart and the communist rebel, but which was both deeply gratifying and perfectly useful for them both, even as she and Connie grew closer and closer.
Heidi McAllister and Conrad Marshall had an ‘arrangement,’ after all. “Ye gut ta know Heidi,” Connie had pointed out before the two of them both fell into bed together for the first time, his accent thick enough though not nearly so obtrusive as what she encountered among many of her Aussie friends, “tha’ Oi’m a bit inclined to like a snog with a fella na ‘n agin.”
Her attitude toward sex had always been free-wheeling, from her proclivities to consider herself “trisexual” in Atlanta—“if it’s sexual, I’ll try it”—to her legacy of beloved men on three continents, and a couple of women in Atlanta, not to mention the males she had embraced now on various archipelagoes. In such a context, her then soon-to-be fiance's perspective that geese and ganders ought to share both rights and responsibilities affirmed already extant inclinations and at the same time furthered her sojourn toward being a powerful woman who took care of herself without, in the process, being anything that she would find shameful or compulsive, or anything that she’d consider evil or insane, about it all.
By the middle of her third term at Sydney, already carrying on consistently with Connie, happily involved with her Red lover to the North of the equator when she happened to have ‘research projects,’ she was wondering about, in fact basically fundamentally doubting the viability of, her entire thesis.…(continued below the PayWall)
Wood Words Essays—An Initial ‘Wood-Words’ Review Contextualization
“COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way” is requisite viewing for citizens who value thriving and survival over obedience and conformity. The majority of the following pages provide a review and assessment of this gem of documentary art. In regard to the cultural expression that such crafty exemplars of honest artistry give us, a piece of Driftwood Message Art tells a complex but essential back story.
“Either Art Serves Society, Or, No Matter Its Aesthetic Acuity, It Is at Best Absurd, Worthless Save to Privileged Patrons & Connected Collectors; Either the Arts Are, in an Evolutionary Sense, Adaptive, Or, If Not, Then Those Social Aggregates That Back Such Activity Are Just That Much Less Likely to Manifest Thriving Citizens Whose Offspring in Turn Survive---If, on the Other Hand, Beauty & Representation & Story & Craft & More Do in Fact Foster Human Viability, Then Those Societies That Fail to Further Artists & Their Efforts Will, in Direct Correlation, More Likely Extinguish Themselves, &, in the Thermonuclear Present Pass, Bring About Humanity's Overall Extinction As Well."
Patricia Nye’s modest genius guarantees the documentary’s success, commercially and artistically. It triumphantly and truly ‘serves society.’ Politically, billions of filmic consumers need to be watching and discussing this brief movie, only forty minutes in length. Here is a link to this elucidating expose of fraud and overreaching and much, much worse in the COVIDified current context.
Before we return to an examination of this video treasure trove, however, today’s treatise both gives an overview of coming BTR output on this overall topic and offers readers a modest list of people who actually have the integrity and investigative acuity to deconstruct what has been happening in this contemporary arena of licentious looting and execrable impunity.
Upcoming Indictments
Over the coming period of time, plus or minus the next year or so, readers will have a chance to play the part of a Grand Jury, determining whether to indict such suspects as Centers for Disease Control functionaries, three-decade National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, various and sundry pharmaceutical executives and scientists, among others. The sum total ill-gotten-gains from these gangsters’ activities undoubtedly exceed trillions of dollars; deaths from their plague on humankind number in the millions, at minimum; injuries amount to as many as a billion or more, out of Earth’s eight billion inhabitants.
To make the case for returning an indictment, BTR will argue that a financial crisis that began in Summer 2019 threatened to destroy the capitalist world economy; that the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation orchestrated Event 201, a ‘simulation scenario’ for a novel MERS/SARS pandemic; that less than two months afterward precisely such a virus did enter China and subsequently the world shortly after World Military Games exercises that included personnel from and action around the Wuhan China pathogen lab where ‘gain-of-function’ research on Corona viruses was taking place with U.S. funding; that the World Health Organization in the next month or so thereafter ‘liberalized’ the definition of a Pandemic so that such a disease process did not have to kill lots of people to meet the former parameters for a virulent epidemic; that shortly after this, the World Health Organization used its newly gained powers in this regard to oversee every major economy in the entire world’s agreeing to shut down many operations to ‘protect people’ from this new virus’ predicted depredations; that monopoly media universally represented this new entity, a second Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus disease, as similarly lethal as the devastating 1919 Spanish Flu; that formal medical responses to this SARS-Cov-II pathogen prohibited doctors or other healers from deploying plausibly helpful medicines to combat disease symptoms; that the mechanism of response for those who visited hospitals favored, much sooner than in other ‘respiratory difficulties’ situations, delivering oxygen via intubation, a procedure with up to a ninety percent mortality rate; that politicians often directed the concentration of the infected among vulnerable populations such as people in nursing homes; that monopoly media universally blamed the economic meltdown that this entire situation eventuated on COVID; that multiple drug companies came up with entirely new varieties of inoculations to treat COVID, none of which had undergone animal testing and all of which also skipped most human field trials; that reporting of deaths and injuries from the virus were uniformly fraudulent; that vaccine deaths and injuries vastly exceeded morbidity and mortality that resulted from infection itself. And that’s just to get us started with the case as such.
Along the way, we’ll view the incontrovertible proof that censorship protocols guaranteed that ‘information gatekeepers’ would inhibit, or even disallow, reports that questioned official stories or otherwise criticized official approaches. Moronic masking, unreliable and inappropriate ‘diagnostic methods,’ and ludicrous lockdowns will all receive their just due. Thousands of eminent physicians, scientists, thinkers, activists, and journalists were ‘deplatformed’ from being able to reach audiences about these things and more through standard channels such as Google’s YouTube and Facebook. Untold millions of others were silenced in similar ways.
This series of COVID reports, probably twenty or more in total, will thereby demonstrate that the Plandemic has been, in aggregate, quite likely the gravest crime against humanity ever and without any possible controversy history’s biggest fraud and most blatant power grab. Despite the plentiful evidence of malfeasance and murder, systematic profiteering from planned terror and mayhem, the perpetrators of this brutality and destruction fully expect to get away with their arguably genocidal actions.
This precis of the case will not proceed further at this juncture. For one thing, I’m moving, and that means that assembling the order of battle and then starting the process of collecting and presenting the facts is just not possible till probably the April first deadline for BTR #11, and subsequent issues.
Two weeks hence, the most illuminating two or three exposes—out of thousands of brilliant efforts along such lines, often banned on monopoly platforms—about what I label Opportunistic COVID Delusion will be on view, of course along with my additions and ideas. BTR#10 will thereby serve as the introduction to Big Tent Review’s criminal charges, outlined above, beginning April 1, against top politicos and financiers and technicians from around our still fair planet.
A Litany of Thought Leaders
So, then: what about today? Here are ten voices to whom readers should be listening, many available here on Substack. This listing could readily include many hundreds more, investigators, scientific authorities, litigators, and scholars who are leaders in their fields and who are for the most part free from the conflicts of interest that, for all save the incredibly credulous, fatally flaw the credibility of ‘standard operating authorities’
Jeremy Hammond: an intelligent reporter who presents all pertinent evidence and makes sense of it; he specializes in Israel-Palestine and public health/COVID issues; incredible integrity.
Dr. Peter McCulloch: a premier expert on heart disease and kidney problems, with hundreds of published papers, who had the courage to dismantle the official story of everything.
Dr. Mike Yeadon: former executive and Chief Health Officer of Pfizer, whose attacks, given his pedigree, are particularly pointed.
Children’s Health Defense & Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: a grassroots demand for answers about, redress of, alternatives to plus or minus forty mandatory childhood vaccines before age ten & a scion of wealth who has been a people’s and environmental legal champion.
Dr. Knut Wiletsky: a genius epidemiologist, snagged by Rockefeller University from his post as German provincial miracle worker, whose wry deconstruction of the real characteristics of airborne respiratory viruses apparently made him a persona non grata in the milieu that he had theretofore ruled.
Global Research & Dr. Michel Chossudovsky: a Marxist information collective and a genius analyst of modern society, Canadian, wide-ranging, with loads and loads both informative and empowering about COVID and the here and now.
James Corbett: possibly the premier grassroots investigative genius, a combination of reporter, prosecutor, professor, also very wide ranging but authoritative and incisive about COVID and such.
Ryan Christian & The Last American Vagabond: another youthful research maestro, who covers COVID thoroughly even as he has the temerity to believe that a regular citizen ought to seek a daily understanding in general of how things actually stand.
Reiner Fuellmich: a very successful German lawyer also a member of the Bar in California, who is overseeing multiple litigation strings from jail, where he has landed for some sort of paperwork errors or something similar.
C.J. Hopkins: an American ex-patriot, Berlin based, very funny, a thinker and reporter and commentator whose wry exposure of fraud and extortion and grotesque distortion on the part of the moneybags upper crust has landed him in legal trouble in Germany, where any image of a Swastika is a crime, such as when he graced his book cover with one in accusing authorities of fascist tactics.
Extending this effort to a hundred, or a thousand, names—stalwart defenders of justice and freedom all—would be no more difficult than typing and organizing such a grouping. The venerable ‘silenced majority’ is speaking about the perfidy and viciousness of the COVID scam every hour; these ten are merely my most consistent sources of data and sanity.
“COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way”—The Film Itself
Perhaps the most critical core component of what Nye’s endeavor reveals only shows up well past the middle of the movie. In Sweden, constitutionally, public health authorities have a free rein to follow epidemiology and medicine to enact salubrious responses to disease or other problems. Only the people themselves can overthrow a selected course of action, out of the question in this case since Swedish citizens overwhelmingly approved of Anders Tegnell’s stewardship throughout this crisis.
As for the vast majority of the rest of humanity, wired into monopoly media’s propagation of propaganda, illusion, nonsense, and lies, these many billions of cousins need to watch the film. They also might note another piece of Driftwood Message Art: “Established SOP Mediation of Matters Manufactures a Smooth Surface, a Veneer of the Real, That At Best Represents Plutocratically Propagated Imperial Propaganda; If We Consent to the Manipulative Distortion of This Demented Nonsense, We Surely Deserve the Disempowerment & Destruction With Which Our Willingly Bowing to Such Bullshit Makes Us Complicit."
This accusation will have special force among any of the film’s viewers, or this essay’s readers, who after their efforts to watch and consider these matters must evince at least a certain skepticism about Opportunistic COVID Delusion. Of course, at the movie’s outset, one can hardly even imagine such issues, as we watch director Nye’s finely sculpted glutei dancing tango with her radiator because of lockdown, “together apart,” she intones ironically. From this whimsical and yet moving inception,…(continued below the PayWall)
Empowered Political Forays—Finishing Initial Trans Ideology Thoughts
(Having taken on the premise that achieving social justice by boosting ‘Trans rights’ is even conceivable, an idea that Bruce Jenner’s experience as Kaitlyn has orchestrated in media spaces hither and yon, we arrive at a continuation of that discourse. The emphasis here is on whether ‘the realm of the real’ is worth pursuing in our conversations with each other, an approach which BTR obviously believes.)
One overall aspect of this section would also be a discussion of commodity fetishism, possibly in conjunction with alienation. This substitution of magic nonsense about non sequiturs for any actual sense of achievement or transformation in real life is a major piece of how capitalism manages its social and psychological difficulties in a fashion that does not threaten the system whatsoever. The assertion that nonsense is a part of the package is as simple as the fact that Jenner has elected to keep her penis, even as she insists that absolutely nothing is amiss in her assertion of a female status.
The overall point of a related, second sort of assessment of the Jenner juggernaut basically adds up to being real about both the sources of the story’s often reaching the top-of-the-fold, so to speak, and being clear about what the narrative will never really be about. Thus, in any event, such focal pieces of Caitlyn’s story have next-to-nothing to do with human rights, absolutely zero to do with social justice, and less than nothing to do with serving humankind generally.
Third, for this initial new blog item, one has little choice but to explore the very definite social imbroglio, with immense potential for real harm, that inevitably attends this very intentional obsession with her/im. For one thing, this genuflection to Jenner provides a flashpoint for conflict that not only can go nowhere, but also must in fact make people want to give up dialog and engagement completely.
For another, more obviously, the capitalization of bullshit inevitably causes a huge opportunity cost, in that little or no mediated space is available for actually crucial problems and issues that afflict, every day, all men or all women, which happens to be almost exactly one hundred thousand times more people, right now, than have undergone, in seventy years, what Caitlyn has experienced of late. Of course, plenty of crucial issues, which receive little or no sustained attention of the sort that Ms/r. Jenner has attained, also affect everybody on Earth, which is to say two hundred thousand times more people on a daily basis than fit in Jenner’s fetishized category over the course of seven long decades.
Again, bringing such discourse to the table does not for an instant question Jenner’s rights to live as a woman, her/is legitimate expectation of decency and respect or at least a willingness to tolerate on the part of other citizens, her/is freedom to promote herself/himself in any way that he/she wants. But it critiques and calls to account all of those who would orchestrate these rights, expectations, and freedoms as centrally—or really even marginally—important elements of the general social dialog about humanity and how we are to live and thrive in relation to each other instead of collapsing and dissolving in fantasies of individual fetish and distorted views of life and psyche and nature.
Fourth, in keeping with this inevitable grappling with nature’s imprimatur, if one wants to foster even the merest modicum of integrity, one must deal with biology, even if that will make probable major shitstorms of contention and abuse. While one can posit masculine and feminine as social categories that aggregates of different people, at different times, have constructed differently, one simply cannot avoid the bedrock reality and necessity of male and female as biological categories that have the same potent essence as categories of plant and animal, of primate and ungulate, of newborn and elder, and all of such elements of nature’s sweet and sour panoply.
Moreover, in the specifically human realm, whatever the role of constructed identities, the overwhelmingly vast majority of men live as men and women live as women. So much is this so that, in percentage terms, at the absolute maximum one two thousandth of one percent of men or women are following the Jenner way, so to say. And such a generous view of the matter would assume that all 36,000 of trans folks from the past seven decades were creating themselves anew now, which the data do not support.
Again, to repeat,…(continued below the PayWall)
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)
PART Nine(The contenders here, as fate would serve up the matter, are at the cusp of discovering destiny’s willful unfolding. Who will die immediately, relentlessly, quickly, to be ‘processed’ accordingly? Who will live, at least temporarily? And, obviously, ‘So what?’ Perhaps most interestingly, ‘What then?’ This is the concluding portion of the preliminary section of Mad Cows & Englishmen.)
The room, a miracle in three dimensions, did give us both a mostly private chance to piss before Plug-Pal-the-Killer-efficiobot delivered a table, a pleasingly aesthetic BG board, some more pink-tinged biscuits, and several carafes of liquid commestibles.
As to the contest itself, I've archived a game by game and move by move analysis for future consumption, should that ever be useful or otherwise apt. Total recall of such situations has always been a trick that I could demo on demand. For our purposes, we can suffice to say that Norman had never learned the rules before, but he still won the first two points.
"Fuck you up," he chuckled, "Plai a gaime of doice wit' a gangster," when the score read Norm with two and Tom with zero. He must have forgotten his oath about gobbling mates, because he even nibbled at a cracker, something which I couldn't bring myself to do again, not yet.
But then, as is inevitably the case in longer battles between experience and ignorance at BG, I racked up a two-cube gammon, a four-cube gammon and a simple win to achieve the next thirteen points for Tom and tide. "The cream will always rise to the top eventually,"my dad was wont to say, and I remembered this, as the gruesome enough scene from our earlier video now unfolded, live and in color, as I bore a grotesque fascinated witness to the entire spectacle.…(continued below the PayWall)
Old Stories, & New—”Faith, Bad Faith, & the Catholic Church,” finis
My hyper-critical approach to discussion, my principled belligerence toward people comfortable with easy answers and certain faith, constantly cut me off from cohorts and made me less effective. I didn’t need years of therapy to reach this level of consciousness.
As Spring blustered outside the temple, however, I began to feel a profound softening inside myself, an honest willingness to believe, and behave as if, religious faith needn’t tend always to the combination of fanaticism and stupidity. “Nowhere is this possibility more obvious than among Jews,” I ruminated.
Just as these whimsically self-important ideas formed inside my brain, just as my foot began to tap haphazardly to a new atonally nasal song of celebration by Cantor Marcus, I found myself with a Torah in my hand. I never before so fully felt the weight of a tome. I had never, prior to this moment, looked inside this book. I took it as a sign that I should read, an invitation to discover something vital.
I opened the large volume at random and fell headlong into tales of travails between Joseph and his many brothers. This classic story of jealousy, greed, and heroic coping skills enthralled me for a timeless quarter hour, in which all the wonder and mystery of the universe swirled around me. I read a huge chunk of the marvel of Genesis while a daughter of Abraham prepared to say the magic words that would make her a Jewish woman.
“Who could find anything noxious here?” I asked myself. “This is different, more organic and real, than anything I got coming up Catholic.” Once again I conflated fate and randomness. Perhaps this was a cosmic nod at my mellowing out about expressions of religious faith.
But I “was born a critic,” according to my mother and many of the other women whom I’ve known in my life, so I figured, “Okay, maybe. But let’s make sure. Let’s look at one more passage,” just to see if some vile kernel lurks in this compelling drama.
Letting my fingers wander ahead a few pages, the elegance of my surroundings sunk in for the first time that day. Warm, comfortable lighting, ceilings low enough to let a worshiper feel protected, wall coverings and art that calmed and soothed, not an ounce of the garishness emerged, which every Catholic venue trumpets in some way. I was as receptive as I’d ever felt in my life to accept the touch of God, in whatever form it arrived.
And the following story, modified only a bit by poetic license, unfolded before my reading eyes. …(continued below the PayWall)
Nerdy Nuggets—Oneida’s ‘Free Love’ Community’s Meaning Part 2
For more than three decades in the middle of the 1800’s, we have discovered, a star-crossed-in-love preacher, John Humphrey Noyes, recruited kith and kin to construct a truly radical communal free-love-and-joint-property enterprise in New England and New York. Though its members showed themselves to be for the most part libidinally and materially satisfied, the commune’s sole continuing legacy is silverware and other implements of use in kitchens and such.
Today’s culmination of this first BTR contextualization of Oneida, as what we might call an American-Love-Radical tradition first of all, describes contemporary proclivities and pastimes that bring Oneida powerfully to mind. Perhaps in no arena do fabrication and delusion reign supreme as fully as they do in the realm of sexuality’s human face and family’s apparently infinite familiarity. In future BTR bits that deal with the erotic annals of humankind—these include ‘notorious Victoria’ Woodhull, Agnes Smedley, and another pass at the life and work of Wilhelm Reich and a few of his more or less seminal psychoanalysts—demonstrating this mendacity and wilful ignorance will as here begin with historical delving that reconstructs a sensibility of sensuality that inculcation currently deconstructs.
March’s Number Nine’s article examines four aspects of Oneida’s libidinal echoes in contemporary love’s affairs, as it were. These are all things with which I’ve personally intersected and about which, in the fullness of time, I may well write more that analyzes and evidences instead of describes and asserts. In any event, the first of today’s quartet offers up interludes that intersect with some of the more charming stories that I’ve ever encountered; they are sublime and hilarious even as one might venture to believe that they could readily be, instead, ridiculous and nefarious.
MORE COLLEGE
I’m not at all sure that this is a verifiable name, let alone even a vaguely official one. In fact, over time I’ve become absolutely certain that my ‘informer’ about this matter either willfully or unwittingly conflated several actual events into a narrative to explain his interest in the ‘More College House’ in Atlanta’s Grant Park, where my friend and co-worker, according to his own description, was enthusiastically matriculating in ‘Divine Masturbation’ and ‘Ultimate Orgasmic Satisfaction.’
Whatever Marcus was doing at the restored Victorian mansion in Grant Park—where I puttered a couple of times, awaiting as my collaborator finished one of his ‘class sessions’ so he would be able to join me on a job—he definitely became much more confident and joyous during the period of his ‘studies’ and thereafter. When I inquired of him what he was doing that so enlightened his sensibility and lightened his senses, he told me this story. I should have been skeptical, cautious, or at least inquisitive: instead, I swallowed the whole yarn, from the needle to the knot, so to say.
This was all coming to pass just as the Olympics were coming and going from Atlanta, a context in which our Prime Movering efforts found many takers, and we wiled away hours while moving furniture or driving to talk about techniques in which he was becoming a master debater, ha ha. His orientation to me about his ‘study program’ was more or less as follows. The organizational founder, whose very name was a secret to all but the elect in the international structure of everything in regard to this “More College,” in the late 1950’s, had teamed up with L. Ron Hubbard and Werner Erhard to hire a famous Indian guru to help them all in their still nascent and struggling adventures toward fame and fortune.
In the context of this trio’s classes together, they made a wager about who would first manage to create a religion that would generate a mass following. Hubbard’s forays into the phantasms of Scientology, an organization for which the Internal Revenue Service first provided tax exempt status in 1954, ultimately would have designated him winner; if it all really happened, ha ha.
The upshot, however, is something that I’ve confirmed with several other reliable witnesses. I remember two in particular, a lesbian couple—Sarah and Marsha—whom I also knew through Dr. Mary, my famous Uptown Down South chiropractor. They were Marcus’ Grant Park classmates, and, eventually friends, who happened to be on hand and played the More House baby grand and crooned to me one time when Marcus’ classes took quite a while to finish up. All of their courses, I discovered, were teaching them to perfect non coital erotic stimulation so as to relieve personal sexual tension and to help partners and friends also come, so to say, to this exalted state of what one of them termed ‘perfect orgasmic completion.’
The actual background for this erstwhile wager that L. Ron made was that he and his good pal, Robert Heinlein—another erotic explorer, whose Stranger in a Strange Land was a concupiscent tour de force—supposedly did risk, in the 1940’s, a substantial sum on such a question. An authoritative, if not definitive, refutation that any such proposition ever came to pass is now widely available.
Whatever the case may be, that this handful of people in 1996, people whom I knew and with whom I regularly associated, were participating in grassroots sex education and practical erotic satisfaction training is provable. That this offshoot, so to say, of the ‘traditional collegiate experience,’ had offices in Hawaii, metropolitan New York, and intown Atlanta was also demonstrable: I saw letterhead. Would such an enterprising operation have at least some intellectual, or spiritual, connection to shenanigans that Noyes and his followers were pursuing a century and a quarter prior to my buddy’s coursework in Atlanta? That would be an obvious yes. Duh. Male seminal retention, for instance, was a primary component of Marcus’ training regimen, just as with those earlier ‘free-lovers.’
Was this particular phenomenon far-reaching? Probably not, at least in any way easily conclusive. On the other hand, I can assert unequivocally the popularity of this sort of legacy of Oneida. I did a search: it yielded 674 million links: <masturbation OR orgasm OR sexuality study OR course OR instruction>. The Oneida community clearly circumscribed the central importance of, as well as ubiquitous conflicts over, erotic pairing, sexual partnership, whatever one wants to call this core piece of Homo Sapiens’ primary pursuits.
My little anecdote here is the first personal experience among four that I’m sharing in this essay. The remainder will be both more familiar and less hopeful than Marcus’ majoring in masturbatory excellence. …(continued below the PayWall)
Communication & Human Survival—Web Roots & War & Porn, #3
Today’s installment in this four-part series examines the final tableau in BTR’s contextualization of ‘what AOL means.’ Arianna Huffington ‘married well’ and obviously was what my mother and step-grandmother as one would describe as “one smart cookie.”
Perhaps as a first step, giving credit where credit is due would be a good way to start. Arianna Huffington's How to Overthrow the Government performs a valuable service for anybody who both believes in popular empowerment and has an inkling that the rule-of-the-rich has gone too far. The book offers at least a modicum of clear and apt guidance to those who would foment or fuel an uprising from below.
The likes of this humble correspondent would vociferously suggest that 'the book doesn't go nearly far enough.' Less charitable critics, at least equally historically and socio-economically aware, have argued that, analytically and conceptually, the volume is at best irritatingly cautious and generally vapid. Nevertheless, the work offers some useful advice to those who want to return socially democratic political action to the grassroots. At least it conceives of public engagement as a necessary predecessor of political change.
That said, the now-thirteen-years-past merger of Huffington Post and America Online was an entirely different kettle of fish. Many honestly and erstwhile 'progressive' and 'leftist' commentators are celebrating this joining, or at least, giving it a 'wait-and-see' nod.
The only close-to-certain thing is that the writers and participants who built Huffington Post didn't see more than a few slender pennies from among the thirty billion pennies, or billion and a half pennies in stock, that changed hands in this bargain. Several already wealthy people, whose political and 'strategic' leadership have, for better or worse, guided the site, did, on the other hand make out like proverbial bandits.
Along these lines, folks would do well to recall how multiple intersecting timelines play key parts in the manifestation of ‘virtual lives,’ which in their extent and impact so characterizes the present pass that many people can no longer conceive an 'unwired' existence. Computers, military and academic laboratories, telecommunications, printing and publishing all have an arc of expansion that, as one type of phenomenon, has yielded the montage of interfaces and devices and distracted human beings who meander over the earth today, both actually and electronically, both as flesh-and-blood and as avatars.
Neither America Online’s Case-and-Haig tag team or the Greek hustler’s masterful machinations ever came close to delineating a participatory or democratic model of knowledge-creation or community building. Instead, what all such developments demonstrate, more or less unequivocally, is that nothing much matters save monetization, so that everything hinges on money’s imprimatur.
The recognition of this interrelated fiscal interdependence is critical to any rational understanding of a phenomenon such as AOL, or its swallowing of Arianna Huffington's self-styled bastion of progressivism, to the tune of a bit more than three hundred million dollars. Neither Steve’s nor Arianna’s hucksterism could have elicited more than a foggy, opiated pipe-dream, except for the work performed on the public dime, as it were. NASA, the nuclear-weapons-lab complexes, major research universities, and the corporate vanguard, without exception either were direct chain-of-command elements of the State in its turn toward monopoly media and orchestrated propaganda. Thus, in all likelihood, AOL and Huff-Po would have withered and blown-away without government dollars.
That said, this sphere of propagated propagandizing and grandstanding self promotion has become a key piece of persisting Gringo hegemony in the ‘free world marketplace,’ as it were. In that sense, with its Democratic Party centrism as its main variety of ‘leftist’ reporting, Huffington Post from its inception could readily have come ‘straight from central casting’ to serve as America Online’s magical Cinderella, an apparently authentic exemplar of genuine popular engagement to proffer credibility to AOL’s dependence on gambling and porn. Both AOL and Huff-Po, in this view, were fulfilling their destined conjunction as flashy and popular fakery that only came together to protect all the investors, which is to say the banks and other piles of capital that intend to remain forever atop the human heap.
Throughout such processes, a pattern has emerged that, quite plausibly, essential represents a central trait of capitalist evolution. Put most simply, defining struggles over meaning, knowledge, and power all intersected with and emanated from the powers of technology and labor that inhered in the conglomeration of recorded speech and the media for presenting it. Advantages in the turf-wars and consolidating frenzies that have characterized both of the players in today’s telling, almost universally resulted from successful—or replicable—networks and paradigms that reached expanding 'publics,' always with plenty of official boosting, backing, and back story, thereby acting to influence, and often to determine, social, political, and economic outcomes.
So where does this enormous media behemoth stand today? …(continued below the PayWall)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A Biosocial Golden Rule, Part Three
Tom Paine’s incisive understanding emerges from his simple titles. Common Sense is an example, eh? A quality almost completely lacking in all Americanized Imperial Discourse, especially among the so-called cognoscenti, this now so uncommon quality of critical thought is only widely available in ‘publications’ or other mediated spaces such as this: sexuality is adaptive; history is necessary to understanding; nonsensical non-sequiturs fail to contribute to public discourse; such obvious points about the here and now are missing in action as erstwhile citizens struggle to comprehend or simply shrug in resignation.
(“We’re All Cousins, After All,” the title of this three piece installation, on the one hand states an obvious fact, except of course when two humans are even closer kin. We indubitably all share grandparents from some past instance of Homo Sapiens generation. We have met Joseph Graves. We understand that ‘race’ is, put charitably, not even close to a biological measure. So what?)
HOW WE LABEL THOSE FACTS MAY BE IMPORTANT
The proposition underlying this section is quite simple. If we have a problem, which all and sundry acknowledge troubles us profoundly, that we label "X," or racism, and then we proceed to articulate that problem, address that problem, and dissect that problem in terms of "X," or "racism," then we had damned well better be certain that "X," or "racism" is something more than a a convenient fantasy, or a sophist's trick.
One thought, in a view most favorable to defendant, ha ha, appears here. Primarily, however, this is all a lot of blah blah blah that accepts the premise that the program's purpose is to examine, a typical sort of propaganda trick to confuse the credulous.
A very different approach, somewhat tongue in cheek but also deadly serious, is a propagandizing screed full of wit and vim, wisdom and wile. Race Traitor--Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity--http://racetraitor.org/ Blah blah blah.
“The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.
The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in US society.
The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of behavior will lead to its collapse.
RACE TRAITOR aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race. It will encourage dissent from the conformity that maintains it and popularize examples of defection from its ranks, analyze the forces that hold it together and those that promise to tear it apart. Part of its task will be to promote debate among abolitionists. When possible, it will support practical measures, guided by the principle, 'Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.'”
HOW TO DECONSTRUCT A POPULAR ERROR
The easy answer to this little problem may be that the likelihood of such a deconstruction approaches zero. 'Racism,' and ideation about the word 'race' that people accept unquestioningly as tantamount to belief, have so deeply ingrained themselves in the psychic dynamic of Americans, along with a bevy of former colonists, former colonials, and academic hangers-on, that their extrication would probably require more draconian surgery than that necessitated by a tumor wrapped around the brain stem and intertwined with the spinal column. Thus, race may remain, even though it ought to go.
Nonetheless, my inclination, evidenced by my choice to post this initial 'off-topic' essay on this subject, is to follow Shakespeare's battler, Henry, in shouting, "Once more, dear friends, into the breech." To give up on this issue countenances a social carnage of unimaginable proportions. Therefore, some sort of programmatic effort…(continued below the PayWall)
Last Words For Now
Okay! Humanity skates closer and closer to a cliff’s edge from which the fall will plausibly be lethal to all who ‘take the plunge.’ Like lemmings, we are scurrying in our supposed leaders’ train, waiting for the final fall, no more interested in human agency and personal responsibility in a lot of cases than we would be if we had a small rodent’s brainstem instead of the Homo Sapiens cranial architecture that we elect not to use so as to follow along placidly.
I’ve quoted the Driftwood Message piece from the “Life & Love & Art in the Time of COVID” category already. I’ll do so again, inasmuch as it readily applies to Israel, Ukraine, and other potential sources of Armageddon energy in these times. “‘Baaaa,’ Sing the Sheep, ‘Oink, Oink, Oink,’ Snort the Pigs, ‘Moooooo’ Low the Cows, As All These Animals Move Along, Isolated Herds, Under Watchful Warders’ Careful Gazes, Toward Their Intended Destination, Whose Looming Sign Awaits Just Over the Horizon, ‘Auschwitz, Hiroshima,’ Or Some New, Heretofore Barely Conceived Home to Torture’s Implicit Impunity & Deliberate Dispatch; People Who Want to Arrive With These Dumb Driven Beasts to Enact Their Own Personal Pangs of Culling & Slaughter Need Do Nothing Other Than to Continue to Follow Along, Amiably & Silently, As Admonished & Directed By Their Overseers in Varying Guises, From Drovers to Judges—If, However, Some Folks Do Not Fancy Mass Collective Suicide & a Virtually Orchestrated, & Reputedly Profitable, Human Extinction, the Time Is Quickly Passing For These Dissenting Strays, Non-Compliant & Ferally Free, to Awaken, Take Notice, & Organize For Action About How Things Truly Stand, Concerning Which a Sufficient Starting Summation Might Aptly State That Nothing Whatsoever That Their Erstwhile Shepherds, Imperial Plunderers All, Propagate, Mandate, & Recommend Can Possibly Be Trustworthy, Or Likely Even Useful, For Purposes Other Than Planning the Populace’s Orderly, Lucrative Enslavement & Extermination."
Next month, if people have not yet eliminated themselves, we’ll look at one of the H-Bomb messages that Marshall Arts proffers as part of its ‘Guaranteed Kick in the ASSthetic.’ Stay tuned!
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