Oh my! 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 twenty-times-annually magazine. This is the sixteenth incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, to proffer interesting and entertaining writing and, second, to find 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that, often enough, appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Quite frequently, like today, a particular edition will have no more thematic unity than whatever glue, so to speak, holds together these moments that we are sharing right now, with its ongoing echoes of our current Mass Collective Suicide Express. Then again, every BTR blast, minimally, ‘in no small part,’ evokes Eros and the libidinal life force energy that is the human brand, a celebration of carnality and ecstatic epiphany, although the shamed and shameful and shameless might quip that all such as this is more like the human stain, ha ha, than our humankind’s grain.
In any event, thanks for stopping in and the aggregate of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading! I’m actually planning some outreach soon to seek out at least a few more followers of this flowing flood of problematic paragraphs and sustaining sentences.
Oh yes, something occurred to me recently in regard to this prodigious outpouring of prose in each Big Tent issue. Substantial numbers of readers confront such a massive tidal wave of text as this and likely just want to flee.
Such a reaction is not preordained, however, so long as a specific individual keeps uppermost in his consciousness, clearly centered in her awareness, that all one must do, in order to retain a BTR engagement, is to choose a single story or article and imbibe that.
Or one could skim, listen to Jimbo’s pretty voice, look at the odd and yet compelling graphics, all that type of so on and so forth. Such steps guarantee managing the tsunami in an amicable way, ha ha. So, now: ‘to the ramparts’ and read!
Or, no, not quite. 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 July 15th; the next one-issue moon will, most likely, publish in November.
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. And, finally, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah. I’m doing my best with this linking effort. It’s easier said than done.
Yet another new notion is this. I’m looking for collaborative technical support. Ha ha. I wish myself good fortune.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Paying Attention Rather Than the Reaper’s Grim Piper
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—The Question of ‘Atomic Power’
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XVI
3. Wood Words Essays—Love’s Inherently Problematic Exercise
4. Empowered Political Forays—”Capitalism on Drugs”
5. Old Stories & New—”Tripping, Or, Back in Hippy Days,” III
6. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”More Than a Hill of Beans—Young Jack’s First Climb,” #3
7. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Conclusion
8. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”When the King of Games Meets a Prince of Death,” Part 4
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—When ‘the facts speak for themselves,’ & Otherwise
Trump’s been shot. Zelensky’s floating peace proposals. Biden bucks up and bumbles still. People hunger for meaning and ponder whether a more carnal thirst might, just conceivably, find a satisfying completion dead ahead, always assuming the the Mass Collective Suicide Express does not arrive first at its all-too-plausible final destination that looms on the event horizon.
The Spanish conveys precisely the same thought, “Los Hechos Hablan por Si Solos,” as does the Latin, ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur.’ No matter this clarity of the real, of course, if most people ignore the ‘clue phone’s’ incessant ringing, then the speech under consideration will ‘fall on deaf ears.’ Do facts speak? That must depend on how well-tuned our ears happen to be.
Atomic materialization, the science of the super-small sources of the biggest bangs, is clearly on display: Kyiv’s reactors; Russia’s threatening bluster; Israel’s thermonuclear arsenal; the universal Western condemnation of any move in this direction by Iran; whose ‘Presidential finger’ ought to touch the button-of-boom, as it were; Germany’s planned H-Bomb-capable Tomahawks; how the nation can afford further trillions for WMD’s but have little or nothing to improve schools. The Modern Nuclear Project is indeed omnipresent, as it is in #16’s unfolding here.
Along such lines, wondering what in hell can guide me through the threaded intricacies of contemporary sociopolitical concatenations, I recollected something interesting, something worth a few thoughts. It involves the work of Frederick Soddy, he of The Interpretation of Radium and its disclosure of the incomprehensibly huge energy stores in engineered aggregates of the element Uranium.
He ended his days with a different scientific interpretation at the center of his ‘research interests,’ so to speak. Of course, his background—from one of Britain’s wealthiest family combinations of altogether aristocratic capital—automatically favored a turn toward the political economic contentions that are near the beating heart of capitalism, whether the skin and bones happen to be Neoliberal or Neoconservative.
BTR readers have already heard mention of H.G. Wells’ fictional response to Soddy. In the event, The World Set Free also foretold the chemist’s change-of-direction, inasmuch as not only would ‘atomic bombs’—which the fabulist formulated on the basis of the Nobelist’s magnum opus, in 1913, no less—win all future wars, atomic power’s ‘peaceful’ face would also foster such cheap and irrepressible prosperity that ‘socialism would no longer be necessary.’ Ha ha.
This is a more staid narrative expression, perhaps, than that in The Great War Syndicate, which Frank Stockton bestowed as an estimation of an Anglo-American imperial future thirty-odd years ahead of Wells’ prescience about Soddy. Whatever the case may be, the Anglo-American Syndicate’s Motor-Bombs approximated nukes whose electrical lethal legerdemain took place without atomic physics.
The savvy adroit depth of the writer who created “The Lady Or the Tiger,” in any case, clearly placed political-economy’s crisis-cascades at the center of his premise, more or less congruent with Wells’ yarn thirty-five years afterward. Perhaps an instance of life’s imitating art, or something similar, the emphasis in Soddy’s ‘mature’ work on the political economy and science of energy also addresses these problematic matters of Science, Technology, & Society.
An astute observer might readily render recognition that Frederick Soddy was correct: access to energy via the portal of scientific understanding is the doorway, in turn, to the development of modern political economy. One thinker summarizes this quite accessibly.
“Soddy was a complex iconoclast often derided for dealing with what seemed to be disparate interests. What, it could be asked, could monetary reform possibly have to do with radiochemistry? But to make sense of Soddy, the question must rather be formulated in the other direction: What fundamental concern did Soddy have that enabled him to embrace holistically a variety of seemingly diverse activities? The answer can be given in a word: energy. And the way in which Soddy dealt with this issue involved him directly with social economics as well as with the social responsibility of scientists."
This scientist’s popular opus of political-economy proffers a catchy title. Money Versus Man posits a “New Economics” that he initiates with a page from John Ruskin’s classic of the liberal POV. “‘Consumption absolute is the end, crown, and perfection of production; and wise consumption is far more difficult than wise production."
Soddy’s premise for his Novel Economy revolves around energy. “The harnessing of the inanimate power of fuel and waterfalls to do the work of the world had abolished the iron law of scarcity of Nature." While the idea appears alluring, why in hell do so many live in desperate conditions of, at best, negative equity?
Soddy proposes that the answer is explicable. “(M)odern production is so powerful that when it gets going, those in charge become afraid of it and what it will do," again a notion of obvious resonance and appeal. The upshot is an unfortunately all-too-obvious propounding of the Modern Nuclear Project that after all began with Soddy’s earlier scientific best-seller.
Whatever else is true about Big Tent Review, it verifiably does not intend to fetishize the Modern Nuclear Project, a social trajectory toward social repression, or any of the other regular BTR beats that this effort pursues, journalistically speaking. My work accepts as central that the fascist direction of modern capital is no longer avoidable; all that is problematic in the here-and-now, therefore, can only discover true solutions via a successful social revolution in favor of social democracy.
In other words, this conclusion, or altogether falsifiable hypothesis, is possible to garb in slightly different garments, to wit this. ‘No commodity or group of commodities can solve the social catastrophe that attends the supremacy of for-profit commodity production.’
I affirm without qualification, whatever the case may be, that “atomic power” might remain a necessary element in humanity’s socioeconomic and political existence. I oppose such a choice, but I neither deny the potential for my own profound error nor insist that stopping nukes would fix everything else.
Other interlocutors, however, have nothing except these kinds of reified fixations to give. The list is close to endless of things that will putatively save society, or save individuals without reference to society: salvation will come from diet pills, MRNA vaccines, antidepressants, electric cars, X, FaceBook, organic food, fluoridation, replacements for fluoridation and other ‘forever chemicals,’ genetic engineering, cheaper computers, smaller and more powerful phones, so-called small nuclear reactors, one could go on, if not infinitely, then at least so long as capitalism persists. Production-for-profit delivers novel commodity streams to allay the last installment’s perfidious ills, in somewhat analogous fashion as it can only give fascist answers to political problems.
The endgame of all such ideation, if the BTR thesis proves defensible, will always come down to the “atomic power” which the Louvin brothers sing on their “Weapon of Prayer” album. Will it, as they say, ‘blot out the works of man?’
Not necessarily: “There is one way to escape and be prepared to meet the Lord;
Give your heart and soul to Jesus, He will be your shield and sword.
He will surely stand beside and you'll never taste of death,
For your soul will fly to safety and eternal peace and rest."
Explicity, if inexplicably, ha ha, this song advances as its solution to ‘the mushroom of destruction’ a talisman of Rapture that will mean avoiding extermination, functionally and empirically equivalent to the Ghost Dance that the Sioux hoped would save them at Wounded Knee. Such false ‘charms’ dot the destructive successes of imperial and colonial conquest. This fetishization now inheres in ruling-class technos far and wide, perhaps in no sphere more so than in instances of the Modern Nuclear Project’s promises of surcease through the atom’s intervention.
Number Seventeen upcoming places a discourse about these matters in a central position, as an annual fulfillment of my promise to the Goddess back in college, that I would every year bear witness to the ecocidal frenzy that Hiroshima and Nagasaki inaugurated. Here is the second overall H-Bomb Message along such lines that Marshall Arts sold.
“Irrefutably, Immutably, Hydrogen Bombs Exist for Precisely a Pair of Practical Purposes, The Profiteering of Plutocrats and the Effecting of Mass Collective Suicide ---When We No Longer Fancy Average Folks' Financing Self Immolation To Fatten Trustafarian Corporate Coffers, Then We Will Rid Ourselves of These Grisly, Ghoulish, Genocidal Armageddon Arsenals: Arguably, A Failure to Act Along Such Life-Affirming Lines Can Only Persist Among Criminally Insane Idiots. Psychopathic Fools That Deserve The Fate That Awaits Them."
The Louvin Brothers whose singing we’ve heard were one of the countless performing acts that brought a cultural lens to viewing these nuclear nuances. A sidebar in next month’s discussion will investigate this sort of phenomena. Some of the singers were potent critics of Modern Nuclear Project hegemony, in essence providing something like an antidote to a reliance on sacred amulets.
Tom Lehrer is a magnificent magician among such as these. His “We’ll All Go Together When We Go,” “So Long, Mom! I’m Off to Drop the Bomb,” and “Werner Von Braun” are iconic, each meriting additional mention next issue. Here, though, we center the “MLF Lullaby,” about a proposal sixty years ago to ‘share’ nukes with Germany, much as the U.S. again plans to do in the near future.
His lyrics are pithy and witty and sobering at once. “Sleep, baby, sleep, in peace may you slumber; no danger lurks your sleep to encumber. We’ve got the missiles the peace to determine; and one of the fingers on the button will be German." Jokingly, he lobbies for ‘making peace like we did in Stanleyville and Saigon,’ long before the U.S. carnage in Southeast Asia. Our cultural archives burst with fresh perspectives to counter, or complement, policies that self-anointed experts promote as fait accompli—hence next issue’s materials from such sources.
Still other commentators, pundits all, do focus powerfully on social inquiry—they promise no easy cures from new ways or new things—yet cannot leave behind a divergent sort of voodoo, one based on supremacist or exceptionalist beliefs. Even the naming of such dynamics is frequently full of falsehood and fixations on special effigies of redemption or amelioration.
BTR has already written about the idiocy that is the most generous estimate that one can make about relying on Racial Categories for anything but a pretense of an iconic expression of the source of things, in a word a fetish. “We’re All Cousins, After All,” which appears in issues 7-9, posits an altogether science-based “Biosocial Golden Rule.”
Obsessing about “radical Islam” is another classic examples of this sort of ideation, in this case as clearly crazed paranoia. Saudi aristocratic plutocrats of petroleum notwithstanding, these interlocutors insist that we find that branch of Abraham’s teaching that is Muslim Evil with a capital “E.”
Another such in the here and now, more ubiquitous than any other quite likely, is the lionizing of ‘Climate Action’ and the demonizing of ‘Climate Denial.’ An in depth report on the origins of ‘Climate Thinking’ is upcoming in Issue 19, centering the foundational work and telling times of M. King Hubbard, whose 1956 paper, “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,” remains a key document to understand this entire realm in 2024.
That ‘politics’ is today a category that 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.
Seeing Trump, or the GOP branch, as the problem or solution is voodoo. Seeing Biden, or the ‘Democratic’ branch, as the problem or solution is at best seeking to mandate mania, or a maniacal mindset. Preference is one thing: one needn’t, though, become a maniac in order to choose chocolate or vanilla.
Further delving into any sphere of Polis may reveal true polarity, delve deep division, or show real differentiation and choice. The Azov Battalion is an indisputably different sort of entity than Russian soldiers in Crimea or ‘recruits’ in Ukraine. Looking at the United States, on the other hand, each and every divergent political perspective will only very occasionally, or even rarely, show up on CNN or Fox News or any other corporate outfit, say WaPo or the ‘paper of record.’
We could easily mention dozens of additional fascinating forays into these effigies that oversee modern existence and overrule independent or accurate understanding. Each case would reveal paradox and anomaly aplenty. Okay, okay, blah blah blah blah. That’s enough for now, however.
Indubitably, these treks through ‘thickets of antithesis’ via the Internet’s mediated marvels often enough seem a bunny’s bounding along a path only to deviate randomly so as to bounce into a different burrow. As I note in the pages of ‘Quiet Jack’s’ Conclusion below, a Philosophy of Interconnection completely circumscribes Big Tent Review, so the ‘bunny run’ is a way of exploring that in every Intro.
After all, I started out as an Epistemology major long ago and far away. In trying actually to ascertain ‘how we can know what we think we know,’ a Philosophy of Interrelations/Interconnection asserts a bedrock for discovering anything useful. One must explicate and clarify its relationship to other matters—nuclear reactors in terms of both antidepressants and pornography, for instance. The sum of important intersections is knowledge of what is at issue, in other words.
If one thing leads to another—and what else explains All-That-Is?—then the answer to every ‘how in the world’ inquiry is simple to state in its essence: “Step by Step.” Similarly, the response to all and sundry ‘But Why’ queries comes down to the simple notion that the outcome in question is logical.
A piece of Driftwood Message Art punctuates precisely this point. “But Why?” is its title. “Fundamental Questions--As Often As Not, Some Would Say, the Most Basic & Centrally Important Lines of Inquiry--Start With the Intonation of a Skeptical Or Otherwise Incredulous, 'Why?' in So Doing, Interestingly Enough, Circumscribing Interrogatories That Universally Share Exactly the Same General Answer, to Wit, 'Because the Eventuality Or Situation Or Result at Issue Makes Sense Under the Circumstances, a Realization, By the Way, That Mandates Our Most Thoroughly Inquisitive Responses in Regard to Said Circumstances' Origin Stories, Basically a Set of Marching Orders Applicable Any Time That We Find Ourselves, in All Seriousness, Asking, 'But Why?"
Does this missive apply or assist in the here and now? It seems germane from where I sit. Trump’s injury, Zelensky’s leadership, Israeli bomb sorties against civilians, and blah blah blah hither and yon call upon us to inquire as to ‘said circumstance’ origins stories.’
Whatever the case may be, what transpires on our screens and feeds and electronic textual communiques, not to mention our phone calls, almost never amounts to honest reporting or skeptical inquiry. Those scenes and sounds and scripts and such appear as identifiably prepackaged nuggets, at minimum much of the time.
Ryan Christian is an honorable exception. Anyone who appreciates an option to apprehend, as it were, should listen in. He has zero agenda other than participatory pursuit of comprehension. He maintains nothing about these incidents other than a skepticism that will ever be always essential to comprehension.
Nevertheless, the ‘problem of Trump’ is like ‘the Jewish Question’ that Marx pointed out was meaningless except as an examination of what was problematic about Capital’s expanding imprimatur. In such a view, well might an analyst turn to Behemoth to take a deep look at “the Structure & Practice of National Socialism,” Franz Neuman’s incisive combination of scholarship and reportage.
A three-part review of the monograph, eighty-two years old and as relevant as tonight’s breaking news, is forthcoming here at the Big Tent. Especially in relation to media’s propagation of powerful propagandizing campaigns, and in regard to industry’s and finance’s seizure of the actual administration of governance, the German experience parallels America in the here-and-now.
‘Agency Capture,’ which Robert Kennedy makes a major point of contention for his campaign, is nothing other than Mussolini’s ‘corporatism’—or Von Neuman’s Behemoth—as the essence of the Fascist Project, as it were. Again, this underlying understanding may prove a sine qua non of making even a basic attempt to ascertain, let alone fully achieving, a clear idea of what most likely might be true.
The upshot, obviously, mandates the realization that Donald Trump is no more the villain than he is the hero. Even more obviously, such a conclusion applies to Joe Biden. American imperial capitalism is the at minimum the primary source of the Nazi nuance that seems to cling to the current context like an evil, noxious fart might linger in a closely packed elevator.
In the midst of this ‘Presidential Campaign Circus’ in the land of the free, Pepe Escobar’s witness from Moscow combines the ineffable with the sublime, the surreal with the hilarious. He talks leadership, comparatively speaking. “If you have a guy like Vladmir Putin,” announces the estimable Escobar as his face breaks into a 'superstar-appreciation' grin of helplessly mirthful good feelings, “it's a completely different ballgame."
Here I am finishing up this latest assignment when, seemingly, someone tries to shoot someone in the head. I recollect vividly and shamefacedly being a third grader, studying verbs, when Mrs. Peterson returned from the office in tears to announce President Kennedy’s death. I was nonchalant as a ten year old.
Navigating these whorls and loops of my personal experience of ‘thickets of thorny antithesis,’ then and now, has led me to inundations of information about November 22nd, 1963, about which more follows in a few paragraphs. Conspiracy theorizing in such a context is more than merely adaptive; it is a defense mechanism on which our personal and group viability may hinge.
Another item of Drifwood Message Art echoes the essential duty to find a path through these briar patches of life. “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."
Polarity and contradiction have always been existential necessities. Our social lives otherwise make no sense whatsoever. Nevertheless, the absurdity and grotesque distortion of what is taking place—in politics, in film, in law, blah blah blah—probably has never before come close to the ‘eternal-bizarro-world’ of right this minute.
What in hell accounts for this preeminence of the odd? Property’s imprimatur is clearly a part of the process. Confusion, uncertainty, and doubt inevitably set emotion on a path to fear, especially when potshots proliferate, bombs blast babies to bits, and politicos mouth off psychotic non-sequiturs like practiced gangland assassins.
People are apt to buy anything in such a situation, if it purports to proffer relief from the craziness. They may certainly be less likely to feel socially adventurous in a context of frenzy’s fringe of terror
What is the only way to a viable future of plenty? First of all, we have no guarantees along such lines; the fury of nature, God, randomness, the ‘implacable gaze that underlies Gaia’s Grand Grace’—all this potential for explosive, perhaps ecocidal, eruption of cataclysm—is real.
However, inasmuch as this sort of future is not immediately mandatory, the likes of BTR posit an existential duty along these lines. Undertaking understanding and pursuing partnership are the first pair of obligations. The Third Existential Duty is as follows: “We have a mandate to participate in creating sustainable social transformation.”
This, after all, is the point of everything that BTR puts on the plate, to find viable ways to avoid the mass collective suicide with which our kind is toying every single day. Not that I want to play 'Debbie Downer,' on the contrary, I am a jolly bloke, but that I care enough about embodiment's multifold miracles to want them to persist."
Hence, the answer to a quest for plentiful futures is easily stated as a general proposition. ‘Only Solidarity on the part of average people can overthrow the divide-and-conquer imperial mayhem that currently contextualizes our global human interconnection.’ Something like that seems pretty definite. It states an operationalized Third Existential Calling.
Like most clear-cut necessities though, it’s all ‘easier said than done.’ Still, maybe one BTR contribution might tap into the ‘Love Thy Neighbor Thread,’ so to speak. It would surely surpass sucking-up to the rapture as an exit strategy.
From the Louvin Brothers tune of that title to Billy Bragg’s magisterial “Do Unto Others” and on to a special parish for the Ten New Commandments, readers and actors can obviously at least imagine the “Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect” on which humanity’s future must rely. Neither silence nor belligerence can deliver the goods.
Every entry here, without exception, stands in opposition to any sort of quiet surliness. Every breath brings a whisper of grace. Every kiss succors the soul. Each dainty interrogatory yields a dozen decent leads toward awareness and engagement.
As well, connecting the dots has never been more enjoyable. The little miracles of interconnection that pop up as I’m ambulating information’s current web, as it were, astonish me every day.
I could easily start a ‘random connections’ column. In a sense that is what happens, in part, here at the outset. A deep dive into the Afrolachian origins of country music; finding a Marshall Arts approach to cultural meaning in eighth century China, via a fictional historical gem, Silk Road; reconnoitering a glorious garden despite potentially globally-warmed heat waves; seeing more and more credence for Russian perspectives on Anglo-American empire; I might go on for pages.
Just as circumstantially notable as all of this is, so too do the arcs and vectors of everyday existence contain reminders and prods, so that a physician’s random placement in my YouTube queue led me to review the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963 from multiple perspectives, a couple of which I had never before considered.
In the event, between now and December, BTR will offer up at least four thorough briefings about different elements that show the lie that has typified governmental accounting from the Warren Commission to the aftermath of 9/11, right up to Biden Administration practices right now. Here are a few of the candidates for the queue.
Except very vague What’s My Line memories, I would have otherwise drawn a blank on Dorothy Kilgallen, arguably one of the most important of all history’s most significant reporters. Her bread and butter were Hollywood and Broadway.
On the other hand, she was the only investigator to interview Jack Ruby: twice. She asserted that she was zeroing in on New Orleans mobsters with a Cuban Jewish Mafia connection to account for the assassination itself. She had copious files, plenty of publishing deals, and lovers and family and friends.
“Undetermined circumstances” caused her death, on the eve of her dispositive trip down the Mississippi; a mixture of barbiturates and booze put her to sleep for the rest of eternity. Whatever the truth may be, she was, as her biographer Mark Shaw stated the case, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much.
Every folder, every tape, every single sheet of scribble disappeared from her home after her death. No criminal investigation ever happened. WTAF?
Rush to Judgment also demonstrates that thinking sorts questioned things from the start. “Mark Lane’s book …was one of the earliest and most effective critiques of the Warren Commission. Lane, a lawyer from New York, previously campaigned to represent Oswald before the commission. He was a staunch opponent of the Warren Report and announced months after its release that he would write his own book that would expose it.”
The efforts of Lane and others from the immediate aftermath of the murder will definitely form one chapter of the BTR examination. One can perhaps too blithely blunder into fetishistic neighborhoods here, but the truth must ever seek the outing that Lady MacBeth so succinctly suggested
New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison also sought to rescue the former President’s ghostly presence as a victim of history. The National Archives has most of his files, and collaborators, historians, journalists, and records of the abortive trial of Clay Shaw also are replete with detailed evidence of CIA and mob—and they were in terms of personnel the same thing—involvement in Kennedy’s killing.
The C.I.A. itself, an organization with extensive archival resources, has a hundred twenty page file on Garrison. Here’s a sample from a Baltimore Sun Moscow Bureau article. “An American defector who claims he was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency said today that President Kennedy was the victim of a ‘wide conspiracy’ in which the CIA was involved." Fastened seat-belts will be a must.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations, in measured and balanced language, found ‘in all probability’ that a conspiracy did in fact lie behind Kennedy’s killing, unsurprising to anyone with even the vaguest intuitive understanding of firearms and ballistics and the labyrinthine passages of human motivation. The National Archives has the report itself and related documents.
As well, Congressional Records, hundreds of articles, and dozens of books parse and ponder what the Church Committee and the House Select Committee uncovered. For those who are fit for the journey, this is a portal to purposeful sociopolitical comprehension despite all the hurdles and obstacles that mar a clear pathway toward a fair and honest accounting of the closest approximation of truth that we will likely ever know.
As alluded to at the outset this issues, these aggregations of apt attention always emanate from the realm of the real, from verifiable facts and demonstrable actions, not from Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole adventures. At the same time, life some days seems to consist of nothing except one ‘can’t-make-this-shit-up’ interludes, so belief in the bizarre may seem impossible to belie.
My love and I recently talked out this problematic aspect of contemporary life, by considering the relative neologism, Kafkaesque, which emanated especially from the short-story, “Metamorphosis,” about a poor sap who morphed into a cockroach. I’ve left Hot Springs, the Central Headquarters of the Surreal & Dangerous, to realize that surreality is now more universally ‘the American Way,’ ha ha.
Oh my, the case of Scott Ritter rivets attention along these lines, as he reveals that this posted List of the Center For Countering Disinformation, a May, 2022 entity that serves the office of the President and works with Ukraine to identify “information terrorists” like him and Tucker and Russell and Sachs and McGovern and other journalistic exemplars. Ritter’s a ‘convicted sex offender’ who has zero hesitation in sharing the whole story.
Given the explosive exigencies immediately at hand—hundreds of thousands of war dead, Mass Collective Suicide brinkmanship, an enormous ongoing subsidy to Kyiv’s war machine—his doing so suggests that he values reporting more highly than he worries about humiliation or attendant blah blah blah.
Listening to The Last American Vagabond, with the eminently sensible Ryan Christian’s second several hour show on the Trump shooting, just reemphasizes this trajectory of the strange and scary and scandalous and, very much, askew to such an extent that every official account can only seem either random nonsense or purposeful propaganda. Is that the only way for media to act?
Big Tent Review says otherwise. Trying to fashion a ‘fabric of the real,’ to cast a net widely enough to gather interesting and pertinent points, these are important tasks for any commentary or contextualization or news or history of the lives and times that in sum make up our own existence, both individually and collectively.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
Every one of these ‘readings’ could form a phalanx’s narrative thrust toward multimediated infinity. In the event, we’re in a phase here—perhaps a permanent choice—of letting my rambling ruminations rule the roost. So too today, fundamental issues of longstanding concern formulate the quest for inputs from the Goddess. ‘Atomic Power’ is an instructive metaphor in this regard.
The Introduction mentions one grassroots expression, or estimation, of this phenomenon in its most catastrophic form. This is Verse Three of the classic Louvin Brothers Song that appears above in the Introduction. “The Great Atomic Power” comes from the duo’s Weapon of Prayer album.
“There's an army who can conquer all the enemy's great band;
It's the regiment of Christians guided by the savior's hand.
When the mushroom of destruction falls in all it's fury great,
God will surely save his children from that awful awful fate.
Whether such thinking is merely optimistic or brutally fatuous matters less than that the Modern Nuclear Project evokes the intervention of the Nazarene not as a peacemaker—heaven forbid—but as a catalyst for special treatment for special Christians, who will ‘fly to meet their savior in the air’ and thereby avoid vaporization or lethal irradiation. Voodoo, anyone?
Perhaps, in this context, a true believer might ask of the author of the Sermon on the Mount, ‘What would Jesus do’ under the circumstances of this existential threat to all human existence, for all eternity, a Mass Collective Suicide that would make lemmings’ annual self-destruction seem amateurish in comparison? Positing adequate responses is ‘easier said than done,’ for sure.
Whatever the particularity of an individual’s understanding of such things, however, the indisputable reality of Hydrogen Bombs—between ten and twenty thousand of them around the planet—means that an ongoing potentiation of cataclysm will always be close at hand. A mere ‘finger on the button’ might unleash ecocidal insanity.
Human culture showcases literally countless situations in which human groups have deployed newly conceived and constructed artifacts so as to advance conquest and supremacy. ‘Atomic power’ first referred to bombs, a solitary one of which original nukes, weaponry that now would seem barely credible as ‘tactical’ toys, might readily dispatch hundreds of thousands of fellows to funereal furnaces and toxic tombs.
Many are the facts and persuasive are the arguments about how this Modern Nuclear Project could eliminate our kind’s viability here on terra firma at the precise instant that, till that grim eventuality actually happens, this same specific political economy of science and technology must assume a guiding role in capital’s inescapable current context. The image above, which begins this section, presents the seven card Spiral Spread that gave the Goddess’ guidance in the case under consideration.
In the event, here is the exact question in question, as it were. “What are some useful or otherwise interesting insights or ideas about the Modern Nuclear Project."
The array that resulted came down as follows. The Essence showed up with Apollo’s bright Sun. Then Past Influences yielded the Four of Swords, with Narcissus’ Page of Cups in the Present Passage and Ares’ The Chariot as an exemplar of Likely Future Developments. No-Matter-What, Opportunities provided Aristaeus’ Page of Pentacles, followed by Problems & Prospects in the form of the Chioscuri Twins’ Knight of Pentacles. Finally, the mysterious and uncannily powerful High Priestess came forth as the reading Synthesis.
Without much doubt, this array contains potent images and ideas that can assist in our grappling with today’s quest. While a thorough discussion will await, below the fold, I’d point out that one could readily read these cards as either auguring strong support or unshakeable opposition to the Uranium Economy that is arguably a crucial Modern Nuclear Project element, a way of life that may only be possible if we find a way to ‘live with Hydrogen Bombs’ without the aforementioned Mass Collective Suicide.
As is the BTR inclination, before offering additional explication of a materialization of the atomic-era that this Spiral Spread suggests, we pose a more focused question that elicits a triptych of cards, today along the lines of a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis array, to wit this. “How should human cousins consider the universal imperial policy of expanding, improving, or otherwise extending the reach and impact of potential thermonuclear devices?"
Given such revelations and reflections as we’ve been pondering, about technos and rule and mass murder and such, maybe a second missive to the Goddess along these lines might make some sense. The United States alone ‘invests’ ten billion a year or more merely in upgrading and maintaining its WMD stockpile. What of it all then?
Adopting a triptych in response brought forth what seems at first blush a pretty-clearly-cryptic sequence. The Thesis revealed the Three of Wands. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(And now for some context! We have encountered a score or more of players in this drama of lust and work, of learning and woe, of lamentation and wonder. Lou and Danielle stand at the center of this cast and crew, gathering around them in Alabama and elsewhere in the South cousins and their capers from the corners of the globe. In each chapter segment readers have witnessed modern life unfold as a mostly documented fiction, a telling that embodies Technos and Logos and Polis in its ineffable redolence of the human condition.)
A Science, Technology, Society Interlude
So what’s going on here? We have, via the magic of textual mediation—in its latest incarnation, after many stages of development since we “found our voices,” so to say—seen a couple handfuls of characterizations, which we might stipulate hint at, minimally, a few things both about people whom we know, and about the things that have happened as we and these other real people have interacted.
That’s what stories do. They guide, illustrate, confirm; they teach and ponder; they quest and question—and so on. They’re not real, but a venerable approach to them, to this social technology of human survival, not so popular now but still one way of going about the narrative project, is to imagine them as mirroring, reflecting, or in some way paralleling what happens in all our intersecting worlds.
Having that be meaningful, in this realist tradition, requires, if nothing else, getting real. And that necessitates a question. How does it all actually work? The dozens, hundreds, billions of human beings who are important in other people’s lives—our lives—all are swimming in the stream of life, having ‘launched’ not on their own volition but as a connection between a man and a woman—for the most part, up to now, anyway.
As Jackson Brown intones in his magnificent song, “For a Dancer,” “Into a dancer you have grown, (f)rom a seed somebody else has thrown; (g)o on ahead and throw some seeds of your own.” He echoes themes of this STS interlude when he finishes the stanza.
“And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go, (m)ay lie a reason you were alive, (b)ut you’ll never know.” We intuit and ascertain; we seek sense and sensibility amid our artifacts and understanding. We at least ought to honor the Existential Duty to attempt an apt assessment of it all.
A piece of art that some North Carolina producers have created, Marshall Artists both of them, ha ha, states the matter like this. “One’s Longest Journey Begins With a Birth That One Does Not Plan, & Ends With a Death That, Normally, One Does Not Invite: in Between Lies a Realm of Inevitable Action & Potential Choice, Where, Just Possibly, One May Find a Purpose That One Has a Passion to Pursue.”
That’s probably a little ‘New-Agey,’ at least a bit imprecise. But it does suggest the complexity and uncertainty of what we do. It calls for a dose of humility in our trying to figure things out, even as we cross our fingers and hope to discover the perfect pathway for our own, inevitably both individual and interconnected, courses along the cosmic causeway.
Humility of this sort is far from hopelessness, however. And one element of all of our relationships, both with each other and with our still at least occasionally green, green hills of home, out of which particular piece springs everything that happens, is the matter of mediation with which we started this section.
Modulating our voices, learning to sing, creating rhythm and rhyme—the multiple ‘tricks-of-the-trade’ that have evolved as integral to storytelling—have all persisted for at least plus-or-minus thirty thousand years—cave paintings from all over the planet, some at least this old, simply are inexplicable if not in significant part as narrative markers. And while these ‘ancient communicative technologies’ do in fact still form part of the craft of creating yarns, spinning threads both credible and compelling, hyperlinks and the electromagnetic spectrum and all manner of different ‘coding’ capacities have definitely added layers to what our ancestors were capable of doing in their yarnsmithing modes.
In other words, Technos has become an inseparable part of whatever mixture of the comedic and the tragic that one wants to convey. Moreover, lying behind the ‘action on the page,’ as it were, have always lurked the multiplicity of inventions and artifacts that have always been a part of the telling of the tale—the bright blades of the Ionians in Homer, the pendent arrows and piercing spears of the depicted hunters at Lascaux and elsewhere, and so forth—but at no point more than now.
In the waterfalls of words thus far, therefore, and in the cascades to come, one nexus for interpreting these vignettes and interactions and storytelling interludes will be to consider aspects of the science and technology that have influenced—and in some senses, formed—the societies in which all our characters are coming into their own inside the story, as well as—in some way reflectively—in the lives that people like these are well and truly leading in the here and now and recent past.
For example, one might see Lou’s and Danielle’ matriculation at Harvard, their both dealing with hypermedicated ‘patients,’ and plenty more in this light. So too would Gordon’s soccer training, the weapons and surveillance that the Apartheid regime used against his family and him, appear more clearly via such illumination. Of the characters here—in terms of Jackson’s martial arts studies and Mary’s nursing classes; in relation to Alyson’s accounting skills and her family’s airline industry roots; in regard to the source of Heidi’s personal trust-funded inheritance from dental inventions; as an aspect of Richard’s fondness for getting high and paging through pornographic texts; as a part of all Morris’s work skills and his and Justina’s varied modes of travel; and on and on and on and on—all manifest in no small part through the intervention of scientific instruments and instrumentation.
The same would be true of every made-up man and invented woman in the vast cosmos of literary production: from Juliet to Forrest Gump; from Uncle Tom to Orphan Annie. Basically, one way to vocalize the point is like this: “This shit doesn’t just happen!!” Ever since we’ve been human, our tools and knowledge and labor and general awareness about production and deployment of things have served as prime movers in everything’s occurring just as it has, in actual existence as well as in concocted patterns.
Perhaps the most crucial realization about all this is that our minds and our very beings as conscious entities express themselves in some type of tandem—a tango or boogie of some sort—with the technologies and technical capacities that have so integrated themselves in our heads as to be taken for granted on a regular basis. As the all too often caricatured Professor McLuhan stated the case, “The medium (has become) the message.”
For example then, to start with, we’d have to acknowledge that science itself, as a concept or process or central activity—through engineers, programmers, and literally hundreds of millions of semi-skilled and highly skilled technicians of one kind or another—has perhaps the leading role in organizing and developing the lives that we lead now. “Hell’s bells,” as my mother would say, even in ‘literature,’ science fiction of one sort or another has become more and more prominent over time, particularly in the more slickly produced and capital intensive forms of the literary arts: moreover, dead ahead lies ‘virtual reality.’
We’ve already conducted a minimal tour of the scientific, or at least technical, underpinnings of the characterizations in All God’s Cousins. A parallel text, ten times as large as or larger than the whole of this unfolding giant volume, might deepen such an assessment without doing more than scratching the surface of the variable intersections of human existence and what we’ve called Technos.
From birthing to teething to schooling to feeding to preaching to televising to playing to every possible gerund that might give the shape of active nouns to human existence, science is a principal element, often enough absolutely the primary component, of ‘what makes things tick,’ though this little technological idiom no longer resonates so much, inasmuch as Liquid Crystal Display screens require no springs’ tocks and ticks, the audible mechanical inner workings of time past, which might just lead us to ask, “How can we see the structure and dynamics and conflicts and engagement of things, how they all tick, in the cosmological complexity of the present passing instants of our lives?” …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—Love’s Inherently Problematic Exercise
Again today we contemplate Love & Erotic Passion, oh goody, oh yummy. And yet, no matter its allure, the human capacity for and manifestation of a love life cannot help but encounter—even under the most clement conditions—conundrums, kerfuffles, and chaos.
That love obviously maintains its stout durability cannot be open to serious doubt. Right? We’re clear on that Life Force Energy essence; correct? No matter that half of the folk songs that speak of everlasting love involve killing a faithless or inattentive or otherwise at-least-momentarily unappreciated sweetheart, loving connection remains the wellspring of human existence.
That love and murder so comfortably cohabit, of course, suggests the necessity of beholding this central component of sentient existence in all its delicate complexity, rife with both passion and conflict. In the event, much of the Love-&-Erotic-Passion department at the Marshall Arts tent illustrates or alludes to a blend of bickering and bounty, frolicking and fighting.
Many of these messages of navigating negotiation, managing mayhem, and calibrating conflict emanated from the marital life and erotic foundation of the Marshall Artist himself, in other words my own days and nights of love and ennui, in the event with Ms. Alicia in Hot Springs, ‘Central Headquarters of the Surreal & Dangerous.’ This is one such in the litany of those missives of mayhem and mutuality.
“Generally Speaking, Nicks & Scratches, Notches & Grooves, Wounds & Scars That Happen in All Committed Relationships Can Have One of Two Sorts of Effects: If Honestly & Amicably Navigated & Then Honorably Negotiated, Such Problematic Passages, No Matter Their Delicacy Or Even Daunting Danger, Will Likely Deepen & Strengthen & Heal the Passionate Engagement That True Lovers Share; When, However, Nonchalance Or Evasion Or, Worst of All, Deception Pervades the Partners' Responses to Such Falling Out, Dire Straits Almost Certainly Loom Dead Ahead, & the Gloomy Doom of Dissolution Itself May Soon Enough Afflict the Theretofore Merrily Bonded Pair."
The purchaser of this piece ended up playing some part in Alicia’s work and social life, an existence in which, obviously, I played some role larger than a bit player’s brief ambit. Altogether, the whole scene was as interesting and fraught as the text itself, at least for anyone with more or less advanced reading skills, ha ha. I’ll save a fuller discussion for some later moment, however. Oh my Goddess, it’s quite a yarn.
For now, we’ll consider spinning a subtext of probably a big majority of the problematic scenes in erotic unions throughout history. Resources, money, such as these are key. Thus, this Love Charm’s idea is apt for all who would manage this kind of concatenated conniption: "Our Passion's Ecstatic Eruption Will Ever Douse Lucre's Dark Shimmering Allure."
Without such an allegiance to ecstasy, in any event, finessing the need for Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” would proved difficult. The intersecting histories in this song of capital’s collapse, Southern crisis, and amicable family life’s difficulty are certainly interesting to note. “Believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot, if you don’t have the Do-Re-Mi:”
“Passion’s Parabola’s” states the case at hand more generally. "Ample Arcing Parabolas of Passion, Our Salubrious Connubial Combustion, Fashion Formidable Barriers to Keep Stormy Seas at Bay, While Our Soaring Geometries of Joy Also Mark Our Embracing Again Climactic Moments of Ecstatic Epiphany."
The upshot is obvious. Potent passion’s pulsing power proves a core component of lasting love. Hence this: "Bracelets of Desire Link Our Embraces to Form Looping Layered Salacious Litanies, Enfolding Our Destiny of Joy & Delight, Whatever Array of Daunting Days & Noisome Nights That Fate Delivers to Our Door."
As a matter of course, a primary purpose of loving pursuits is partnership, which happens to be the theme of the next segment of our Love & Erotic Passion series. Nevertheless, some of the altogether woody ideas among Marshall Arts’ prolific output cross-pollinate multiple categories, showing up hither and yon among this quartet that deals with the overall category.
This is an example. Its title is ‘Longing For Lifelong Habitat.’ "Our Moonlight Dreams, Through Downpours of Joyous Jubilation & Veils of Weeping Woe, Raise Their Sturdy Turgid Trunks & Blossom Bounteous Beastly Branches That Entice an Amicable Passage Over Both Treacherous Tarns & Salubrious Seas Where We Hope for the Harbor of a Habitat For Which Long We've Yearned & Where Our Values & Desires Form the Very Bricks of the Village That We'll Now Inhabit As Long As We Live."
Multiple additional Sticks and Panels and Charms contain these sorts of Emersonian multitudes of meaning. Almost inevitably, some of these pieces entail grappling with matters of politics and society and the rough-riding erotic energy that results. …(continued below the fold)
Empowered Political Forays—Capitalism on Drugs: the Political Economy of Contraband From Heroin to Ritalin & Beyond
(This lengthiest of my earlier essays starts here and will follow in episodes that may appear in an uninterrupted stream if the crazed concatenation of current events permits. What follows certainly provides a plausibly helpful undergirding for installments of Breaking Bad, which have been percolating their punctuation of America’s Brand Chaos for over a decade now, five seasons of spiritual and carnal sojourns that delve the paradox and contradiction of Yankee imperial imprimatur, not by accident in the heartland of New Mexico, where the grand theft of the continent originated in part because of new commodified expressions of contraband of one sort and another.)
OVERTURE
As we might find to be true more often than we’d think at first, a popular song’s lyrics capsulize some of the central issues of today’s essay. Jorma Kaukonen, of Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane fame, sang these “Prohibition Blues” lines (
), except for one or two instructive alterations that show up for purposes of this investigation.
I’ll tell you brother, and I won’t lie
What’s the matter with this land:
Toke at will and vote it dry,
And hide it if we can.
The rich they party, and they all get high,
And they call it society.
But if they catch you with a joint, good morning penitentiary!
We live with the split personality() that these lyrics from Blue Country Heart illustrate. This affects us spiritually. It colors our ethics and whatever sense of integrity that people have. It means that, psychologically, we are both as often as not living against our better selves, and unable to avoid states of deeply experienced, almost insufferable, anxiety and stress and panic—not for nothing is ours ‘the age of terror.’
In no other realm than in relation on the one hand to contraband and on the other hand to so-called ‘medications’ do these tendencies more profoundly express themselves in the contemporary arena. We live with these contradictions and little hypocrisies() about ‘substances’ and ‘medicines’ almost every second that we breathe.
Reports and analyses from sources as diverse as Interpol() and the United Nations(), on the official side, and private think tanks like the Soros Justice Initiative() and the Drug Policy Alliance(), on the Non-Governmental Organization side, detail and document such complicated skeins. Often enough, scholars who have served to advance agendas of ‘fighting narcotics’ or ‘developing treatments’ have opened their hearts and their files to reveal the venality and profiteering at the root of such duplicitous policing battles() and pseudo-scientific ‘healthy-living’ campaigns().
These and many other decidedly suboptimal effects—combining repression and malfeasance—of what lying thugs call ‘The War on Drugs’ or that self-serving ‘authorities’ label diagnostic and therapeutic intervention are not the heart of our problems, however. This core conflict appears as a three-part dynamic that rules the present moment, an overarching ubiquity that confronts us with a choice either to accept it and live in misery or to face and deal with it and transform the world.
Despite their intricacies, these interlocking and interdependent components are fairly easy to state. First, a ruination of civic virtue or political comity occurs; second, individual alienation and ennui become widespread enough to appear essentially indomitable; third, and finally, elite representatives intervene to dispense ‘cures’ for our blues. Though expansion of this assessment follows, in which multiple subtexts and sidebars proliferate, its rudimentary statement is straightforward enough.
The first part of this pattern consists of the corruption, and ultimately the destruction, of every single thing of a civic nature that we say that we value. That which might be honorable in service of governance all too often ends up tarnished and fraudulent(); police, soldiers, politicians, administrators, doctors, lawyers, every field and profession that stands for social management or improvement devolves into frequent bribery and double-dealing and brutality.
The Drug Enforcement Administration worries about Central Intelligence Agency enforcers(). The Mexican State police and the Chicago/Atlanta/Any-City-or County-USA cops all include key components() that are ‘on-the-take.’ The only exceptions are jurisdictions that have followed a decriminalizing path, and for the most part even these venues insist on a ‘medical model’ for dealing with most social friction.
The entire ‘Defense’ establishment also contains huge blights, so that from Vietnam() to Colombia() to Afghanistan(), black markets in drugs have become central to ‘freedom’s’ foreign policy. As analysts like Robert Parry make obvious, Iran-Contra’s cocaine, assault-rifles, and money-laundering troika is a tiny tip of a massive iceberg of coldly calculated murder and contraband(). Bless Rand() Paul’s Libertarian heart, full of fantasies about markets and freedom, he nonetheless sees these difficulties as if he were scanning them through clear glass. Rotten, violent gendarmes will always remain so long as drug-war protocols prevail.
Moreover, every element of individual rights, whether it concerns privacy or trust or some other aspect of appreciating personal responsibility and human development, dissipates and eventually disappears, so that the snitch and the victim proffer the supreme expressions of our social relations(). Elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities dole out strong drugs as if they were vitamins or candy. They explicitly insinuate that ‘good sons and daughters and good friends’ tell() on parents or acquaintances who do not follow regimens that either prescribe or proscribe certain chemicals.
When the students become dependent on, or decide that they hate, their own force-fed substances, and a marketplace develops in selling the pills and potions, police swoop in with paid informants and arrest the now ‘criminal’ youngsters, whom they offer leniency in return for participation in this noisome “money-making machine.” Voila! A ‘Meth Epidemic’ emerges.
And the same is true for every contrabanded commodity, from pot to Ecstasy via cocaine and the Opiates. Inner city and suburban and rural academies and communities, obscure institutes and elite universities, all have their well-established underground distribution networks(), the chief principles of which pay protection money to narcotics and other enforcement agencies.
Tens-of-thousands of times each year in the U.S. alone, citizens lose their money or their property to seizures() in these arenas that involve no charges. Because someone has cash or goods that in one way or another elicit official attention, such a hapless person faces arrest and loses coin or cars or whatever the raiding authorities believe is easiest to resell at auction or divvy up among themselves; only those who suffer this fate and who also have the resources and courage to engage in lengthy, complex, and expensive legal actions can sometimes retrieve what was rightfully theirs.
Furthermore, quite commonly, additional erstwhile honest transactions in our lives—in our schools, in our factories, in our service organizations—also suffer from the taint of these corrupting strokes of proscribed ‘drugs’ and prescribed ‘medicines.’ Principals get grants() to hire substance-abuse-counselors and psychologists and heavily-armed police, so long as they practice ‘zero-tolerance.’
Illegal suppliers and licensed doctors both make sure that construction sites and assembly lines can hire employees() with the necessary stamina and aplomb to carry out draconian drudgery for fifty hours each week or more. Churches and YMCA’s and ‘social welfare’ organizations of every stripe garner more funds and greater approbation if they too make themselves a part of this pipeline() of delivering ‘medicines’ and prohibiting herbs and emoluments that have been part of human culture for thousands of years but which have now ‘scientifically’ transmogrified into poison and criminality.
Most nauseatingly, perhaps, bankers and other finance-professionals take in plus-or-minus a trillion dollars each year, up to five percent of the entire world economy, as currency and other fungible assets that result from drug dealings or controlled substances of one sort or another(). And this does not even take into account the not-quite-as-massive but still vast income that results from licit psychotropic substances() that governments promote as fervently as they pretend to want to interdict the coke and crack and pot and speed and ice and ecstasy and skag and so on and so forth that their agents duplicitously and hypocritically and opportunistically conspire to finance and market.
The second element of this woven quilt of deceit and pretense reveals itself as a passive, and in the end utterly resigned, psychosocial demeanor, a universal shrug() at the possibility of decency and kindness. In one sort of coping mechanism, people focus on their diagnoses rather than on the organic and social causes of the symptoms that they experience.
As just one example, in any given year, ‘patients’ fill plus-or-minus two hundred million anti-depressant prescriptions() in the United States; tens of millions of these are for children and young adults, who as ‘minors’ have no option but to swallow additional hundreds of millions of doses of methamphetamine derivatives(), to ‘treat’ their deficient capacity to attend their lives.
Supplementing the copious literature about such a pass, I have personally witnessed such situations—as a parent, as a tutor, as a teacher; as a random observer or acquaintance or friend—so many times that I couldn’t possibly count them all. With only a few instances that go against the common grain, the way that the subjects of these uncontrolled ‘experiments in social control’ have responded is to become knowledgeable about the fakery that passes as science in their cases, so that to me or juvenile judges or probation officers or school counselors or whoever else is at hand and interested, the participants are capable of mouthing the official verbiage—occasionally ‘science,’ but more likely pablum—that underlies their labels and their ‘treatments.’
In a seemingly divergent fashion, that in fact links unmistakably with this initial psychic pattern, folks also manage this social swamp by blaming() the ‘behaviors’ and choices—more often than not on the part of young people or ‘addictive personalities,’ otherwise on the part of ‘gangsters’—of their children or compatriots or shadowy underworld figures for the way that society increasingly seems to fall to pieces() in a morass of violence and chaos. Once again, in no fewer than thirty cases—as in being able to list the parties and places—I have seen such incrimination and casting of aspersions on human beings who had no more power over these situations than did those who were pointing accusing fingers.
Multiple accounts(), in growing numbers, evidence this demonization of the individuals—again overwhelmingly young and more often than not ‘of color’—who are undeniably the victims of a ‘prohibitionary’ scheme that has nothing more than a fantastical connection to human good or social benefit. This so clearly typifies the current context, and is therefore so common, that it as often as not escapes notice or comment. Except on the part of critical ‘outsiders,’ thoroughgoing critique of these eventualities is very rare indeed.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of this pattern is also an aspect of the precipitous decline in civic rectitude that readers viewed just above. This dark schema, an ugly mosaic, appears when—despite an almost infinite variety and volume of incriminating facts—citizens feel chary about accusing and holding accountable() either their erstwhile ‘employees’—in other words, politicians, administrators, and police—or the rich gangsters whose operations behind the scenes are what manages this system’s daily routines.
People probably have complex reasons for not insisting on confrontation-with-the-powerful in these matters. They likely hate the thought that their patriotism has so little of probity to support it. They almost certainly hate to feel like such chumps. They definitely detest how little they know and understand and how small that arrogant experts make them feel if they seek to intervene.
Perhaps most obviously, however, this recalcitrance about speaking out starts with fears for their personal safety: jail, injury, or death has certainly been a clear outcome for others() who have been unable to contain their outrage and anguish. Everyone of my acquaintance can think of confirming cases in their own quotidian experiences of current contexts hither and yon.
In case anyone fails to note, this missive will state quite directly one idea that inherently flows from this assessment. These first two prongs of this examination of our present life and times mean that neither personal power nor happiness will be possible for almost all common folk.
Our sons and daughters will go to jail or die. They will lapse into terminal sadness and intractable alienation. T hey will assault and kill themselves and others in a manner that has never before been a part of human history.
In the United States, prisons will oversee() plus or minus three people of every hundred, almost all of these incarcerated prisoners behind bars or otherwise in the thrall of a ‘prison-industrial-complex’ due() to a ‘War-on-Drugs’ or something similar that is, most charitably, criminally insane, all of which destroys most hope of citizenship or mutuality. Every relation of diverse cultures or nationalities will have about it a threat of hatred or dehumanization; organized criminal networks will characterize both government and commerce(). The potential for democracy or human solidarity in such a pass will approach zero.
Victimization and misery will prevail everywhere. Since the two things that these rubrics destroy—personal power and happiness—are the two things that every sentient body on Earth wants more than anything else, we might imagine prioritizing analysis that pays attention to these matters.
In any event, if we do not elect to act on our own behalf, those who rule the roost fully intend to ‘come to our rescue’ in regard to the sadness and castration that the dynamic itself brings to pass. This third component of the current scheme of things, then, the pharmaceutical-industrial-complex’s fascination() with, fetishization of, and—increasingly—forceful prescription of—various ‘medicines’ for various ‘disorders,’ will further the ruin and horror in our lives at the precise moment that it also makes this ruin and horror seem okay, seem not-all-that-bad, seem not too depressing.
The profits() from this aspect of the enterprise, like the take from illicit markets, will be huge. While proclaiming their dutiful concern for other humans, the practitioners of these schemes, literally and figuratively, will ‘make a killing.’
From before Thomas Huxley() to beyond the Rockefeller Institute(), behind-the-curtain ‘authorities’ have created knowledge and networks that serve up ever more of these substances and analyses. Professional agents insist on Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals that, at the very least in relation to mental health, have little() more rigor in their imprimatur than did any Grand Inquisitor’s accusations of witchery or heresy or demonic possession.
The predictable results are apparent in all aspects of contemporary culture. Zombies and vampires and terrorists and sociopaths—in all sorts of ways inseparable from erstwhile ‘fiendish’ habits—dominate everywhere one looks.
Both their ‘opponents’ from the laughably false ‘criminal justice’ sector, and their ‘saviors’ from the traitors to Hippocrates who fill our scrips, with a pretense of righteousness and actual hypocrisy of the most venal sort, pay their way with our taxes and cloak themselves duplicitously in ‘best-practices’ that supposedly emanate from incontrovertible data, knowledge that much more often than not is at best merely self-interested doublethink. Hope, which our canons tell us ‘springs eternal in the human breast,’ for many people takes a permanent powder.
Perhaps we want to live this way. If not, we might elect to consider the research and thinking that this essay embodies and presents.
It certainly does not hold out any single simple prescription for fixing things. Nevertheless, it does proffer argumentation and facts that could start many conversations, a necessary step in the old directive: “Physician, heal thyself!”
Jorma Kaukonen sends us forth from this initial sally into today’s topic. Each verse of the song defines a unit of the present pass’ unfolding panoply of problematic prescription and proscription.
Pro-hie-bition has killed more folks
Than Sherman ever seen.
If they can’t get whisky,
They’ll take to dope, cocaine and morphine.
This whole country it sure ain’t dry,
And dry will never be seen.
Pro-hie-bition is just a scheme, a fine money-making machine. …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”Tripping, Or, Back in Hippy Days”
(Part Two finished in this way: “All was a seamless mesh of exertion and experience. Excepting Russ's remarks as we finally aimed toward the interstate, I don't recall a single word spoken during the day.
He said, ‘It'd be so cool 'f we could do this every year, from now on.’" The rigors of induction lie ahead. Gulp.)
I didn't see or hear from Russ for three days after he left me in my parent's driveway at midnight Sunday. I thought that this silence certainly confirmed my worst fears. Since then, I've gotten a clearer idea of just what took place between the predawn hours of Monday, and Thursday afternoon, when he picked me up as I left school.
He didn't linger with Charlotte, dropping her off amid kisses and conspiratorial guffaws. He must've told her all about his loony 'plan,' since she hadn't exhibited any signs of remorse after we coupled-off Saturday night.
Upon returning to his cramped studio, bedding and books stacked amid chemicals, papers, and photo lab, he laid out meticulously the required paraphernalia for his venture. After winding and setting his $2 clock, he lay down for a zen nap of pre-programmed dreams.
Rising to jangling metal at 5:00, he consulted his list of admonitions. I saw this cheat-sheet later. It spelled out the requirements for meeting the military-industrial-complex and winning a reprieve.
"1. Don't try to be funny.
2. Don't force yourself to be 'crazy.'
3. Let every action emerge from your center.
4. Do exactly what they tell you.
5. Do no more than what they tell you.
6. Show no fear, or you're going to be a soldier for certain!"
He did some breathing exercises on the mat he'd quilted from Indian Tye-die material. He drank an entire half-gallon of water. Then, with a final deep inhalation and a stretch of his jaw, he ate two hits of the remaining window-pane LSD.
His alarm indicated a few minutes before six. He had almost another hour until dawn, during which he'd complete most of the 70 mile drive to downtown Atlanta, where he would introduce himself to the military machine.
The big clock on Rich's downtown store—still brick and mortar in 1971—read 7:28 when Russ left the parking lot. Across the street, between Charlie's-News-&-Tobacco and a storefront covered by dreary, weather-stained plywood, stood the induction center for the United States Army. Open since 7:00, the waiting room inside already contained a score of young men ‘reporting for duty.’
Tied in a single braid, Russ's hair lay neatly down his back as he approached his fateful meeting. He wore freshly-washed jeans and a white shirt he bought last Thursday for the occasion. He carried nothing except an old mayonnaise jar. With the exception of his locks, he looked as all-American as a July Fourth picnic, albeit on a day where the gray and frost of Winter had gained a commanding position over the bright warm mornings of Summer.
Inside his head, not even a veneer of normalcy remained. There, a cauldron boiled that might make an interloper think of a voodoo ceremony. Occasionally, this internal ferment appeared on the surface. Crossing the street, Russ paused a full thirty seconds on the center stripe to control a series of rolling belly laughs. He crossed the line between civilian and military authority with almost a minute to spare before the government's deadline. His smile didn't fade, even as he paused in the center of the reception area to look around him.
Only a couple of his fellow future servicemen had the presence of mind to notice that Mr. Russell Miller was not a routine teenager on the verge of becoming a soldier. …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—
(Chapter Two ended thus. “The sounds of skirmishing between them stopped. 'Come on, George. Let me go. I can't feed you otherwise.' Genuine guffaws erupted at how rapidly she found herself at liberty.
As had been true with Jack, her tone was affable enough. 'Stew, beef, and mead, as usual, right?'‘” Elma May had been addressing her kidnapper and master and man-of-the-house, while Jack awaited, folded on himself inside the ‘big-feast’ oven, whatever might come next in the way of a chance to take salubrious flight.)
More Than a Hill of Beans
YOUNG JACK’S FIRST CLIMB, a Prologue
CHAPTER THREE: Gold’s Tempestuous Tenacity, Or, Unexpected Fellow Travelers—Given these conditions, a safely secreted observer would understandably anticipate that the turn of young Jack’s mind would be toward escape and survival and fear, or even abject and total terror, imbued with the image, en route to his current quarters’ cramped trappings, of those mutilated hanging bovine carcasses, an imagining that included the scent of how he might smell when roasted.
Instead, however, our Jack nearly lounged as he grinned and contemplated the bouquet of ‘Elma May’ and marveled at her ability to navigate matters at hand. “That’s what I try to tell Ma,” Jack said to himself, adding a wrinkle of rue to his besotted, plausibly incautious or even unwisely grinning visage.
Would his utterly unexpected crush on this completely unanticipated woman reduce the pain of his conceivably looming extirpation? Or would it somehow make his living through it all more likely and lively and lovely? And what of sinister, killer George?
Our Jack, of course, did not think of things in any fashion of this sort. He never acquainted himself with fear. Furthermore, he had, as matters actually stood, never had occasion to experience infatuation before, yet he intuitively sensed something, as he, amid the ongoing process of George’s feeding time, repeatedly kneaded the words that his first-ever ‘love interest’ had stated, about the potential of their ‘fated conjunction.’
And what an ongoing process this masticating marvel was, full of the cacophony of crockery and ladles, hissing bursts of bubbling sauces and melting stews of meat and stock. The slap of meaty slabs and the joyous gurgles of inhaled feasting several times widened Jack’s eyes in the gloom.
Additional iterations of the initial ‘stew, beef, and mead’ must have happened out in monster George’s mansion, since Jack cocked his head in wonder when he detected a fourth profferal of service in that regard. “What can he be eating now?” Our hero asked himself with a modicum of nervous movement? Still, whatever his perception of peril or pain, his mind again took up the matter of the meaning, or mystery, of meeting Elma May.
Other noises, unfamiliar except in long-gone memories of childish slumbers, pierced his ovenly perch, of two beings in fierce grappling with each other, of occasional giggles or exclamatory ouchy cries, all of which, in this particular case, ended with a giant, or perhaps ‘a Giant’s,’ cry of agonized triumph or release.
A hush then fell: huge rooms, high ceilings, no movement, no sound. He stopped breathing to listen, his thoughts a feral frolic on fate and flight and fetching his new friend home.
The dull roar that sundered the silence and snatched away his fond fancies uncoiled the spring Jack’s body had been preparing, so that his head hit the roof of his tiny cavern with a dull thud of brick and dust in an unusual encounter with bone and flesh. So captivating was this crescendo of noise, however, that the young fellow barely even felt this impact.
“What could it be?” The query inherently turned his thoughts to Elma May, to whether somehow this cacophony might indicate danger or duress.
The rumble resembled close-at-hand thunder, though without a lightning bolt’s punctuating crack, just an ongoing thrum of a big pig’s nasal snorting that, eventually, Jack recognized as snoring, just before Elma’s wild-eyed gaze measured him through the blasting cone of light that her opening the oven door induced.
The face that greeted her blazed with wonder from the cinders and shadows, some kind of adoring flush of flashing abandon in Jack’s eyes and grin, nearly as wild as Elma’s own mien. She chuckled silently, rubbed her face, and extended her comely copious palm and fingers to ease her soon-to-be-rescuer’s extrication.
Ever eminently practical, Jack first checked out the many paces that lay between him and his exit, through the kitchen and great hall to the front door that, all on its oaken own, could easily have covered Jack’s whole cottage home. As flowing as a brook’s brisk descent, Elma almost floated and soundlessly opened that portal—proffered from some long-felled Forever Tree—in readiness for rapid departure. When she turned from this dutiful task, she faced him and waited, wanting to seek his recognition of her complicity in whatever came next.
At that precise point—as he thought about losing Sadie, trusting the beans, encountering maternal wrath, and acquainting himself with entirely new and strange matters at hand—he erupted in mirth, stifling his noisy peals of laughter with both fists. Her teeth flashed a fierce grin of fiery affirmation of mischief’s grandest glee.
More or less directly in front of where he planted his feet after his stint among the ashes of aromatic incineration, no more than ten quick paces away, rose the gnarled bone of a bovine haunch from a plate covered in gore, a bloody basting that, as well, beset the beastly bearded face of the monstrous sir George Mortimer. He sat almost upright, except that his shuttered eyes and sonorous snores greeted the ceiling instead of present company and all.
“There is very little that will wake him before dark.” Elma's voice was full and resonant, not a hint of whispering or discretion as she came straight up to Jack and, extending her pretty hand, stroked his hair and cheek, with tenderness so sweet and wooing that he nearly staggered in response, till she widened her eyes so as to emphasize the antic comedy of their odd confrontation.
Her touch was fond and exploratory at once. “There are exceptions though,” she sighed, continuing, “things that will waken him straightaway.” She fixed his eyes.
Removing her caress, her pointing finger lingered in a loose arc that took Jack's focus to the well-formed sack that sat at the foot of Georgie Mortimer's stunned and statuesque block of bone and brawn. “Why, it looks like it could hold coins,” said the clever young interloper.
“Gold actually,” stated Elma May matter-of-factly. …(continued below the fold)
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—Conclusion
Well then. Our first representative of these New Folk Fables came to an end with words like this. ‘(T)he forces of the world consist of vastly more than dry canons of a crusty God; they must also contain implacable busses of a goddess who can bring each of us forth from a like union of hard and soft, salty and sweet, fire and fuel, thunder and storm.'
This is the only BTR section for which I lack multiple continuations for whatever has started things off. I can only turn to my dreams to help discern what comes next. Until then, only introspection about the meaning of this little yarnspinning exercise will fill this part of the erstwhile BTR panoply, as it were. This Conclusion is the first such inner journey, a summing up and more.
The story is straightforward. An affable, if fairly self-contained, fellow in ‘Old Ireland’ created concoctions, puttered at wizardry, and frolicked erotically. In this last realm of activity, he encountered complications that essentially upended, and seemed to threaten the very existence of, his sweetly balanced and pleasurably productive life.
Molly—his longtime paramour in the yarn, despite her all-but-official status as a wanton Viscount’s mistress, an on-call siren—could not resist a double-standard in regard to her soulful ecstatic connection with ‘Quiet Jack,’ in part because she realized that he would eventually abandon her for that same viscount’s daughter.
This stew of contradiction and its inherent contrariness lays the basis for the action of the story, a combination of beating, abduction, and miracle. I’m comfortable if this text means little more than spinning a ‘sex-positive’ yarn. Such a fabric is especially useful in a venue like twenty-first century America, when sexuality seems either an obsession or a curse.
“Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss” also elucidates a vision of what might constitute a productive relation to nature. Love acts are at the heart of much of what members of our kind live to embody. The flow of the Derry, the thunder of its cascades, the persistence of pastured grasses and forested trees and the perennial cycles of light and dark and hot and cold and so on and so forth, and on and on, all such natural elements will ever reveal irreversible undergirding in the entire delectability of the miracle of embodiment, as well as in whatever modest melange of marvel is present in the story.
As I am scribbling this slight slip of a missive, I am making up what I want to say as I go along, organizing as I write. Next up was to be a section, possibly a few paragraphs, about how collective efforts of different sorts necessarily underlie everything in the human realm. This Ecological Driftwood Message was to begin this little portion of things.
“Grotesque & Salubrious Cornucopias” is its name. “Earth's Planetary Plenty, a Cascading & Frequently Cultural Cornucopia, 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 & Needs of Each New Day.”
Then, I was going to add some additional blah blah blah, hopefully fun, possibly instructive. Again, a few paragraphs could ensue.
Somehow or other, however, I instead remembered a dream from last night and decided first to announce that, in the process of that recollection, which I had been conveying to my love, I just came up with a new series for this section. It was a Eureka moment, for sure.
Thus, ha ha, the interlude was not long in which I had created only a single example of any type of narrative that forms part of my creative collection—just to be clear New Folk Fables is a case-in-point of a “type of narrative.” I’ll talk more about this new thing below the fold, if only as a personal-brainstorming-session.
Now, what about those paeans to collectivity that lay like nuggets in the narration of ‘Quiet Jack’s’ adventures? Well, first, one must note that—even as he lives alone and seems pretty self-contained but for his amorous adventuring—Jack always opens his arms and hands to the potential for trading, mutuality, even collaboration, although he primarily operates as a truly sole proprietor of his own confections and creations.
At least one other thematic component to this tale emerges from even a superficial reading. This is Jack’s commitment to social equality: he insists on applying the Golden Rule to women as well as men, for example, only experiencing a modicum of manly arousal in the company of strong and accomplished females; moreover, not once does he kowtow, or even bow his brow, to any of the petty noble tyrants or representatives-of-the-crown in his vicinity.
One could add to this bit of textual interpretation in many ways. In all such exemplary explication, so to say, a reader would inevitably discern at least one consistent expression in this regard. Nothing is just itself, on the contrary! …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”King of Games: Prince of Death”
(Our second installment of this series came to its finale with this line. “We were paying for five dollars a point: ‘something meaningful,’ Marshall had suggested when the matter arose at the outset, at the Pitkin County Pub where we met, after my abortive match with the Sheriff, Hunter S. Thompson." More context of the Game of Kings and the King of Games unfolded. And here we go, a real gambling marathon just ahead.)
Wine and snacks graced the first five or six hours of our tete-a-tete. The first joint wafted its Panama Red aroma around midnight, just after he’d spun a platter from the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and a Spindoctor chortle at the song had indicated that pot would meet with approval.
“Now, if you’re up for it,” Marshall announced, offhandedly, setting down his dice cup, before pausing with an implication of naughty, naughty. We were in the midst of a complicated game, the sort that the Spindoctor favors. An inquisitive look invited the rest of the sentence. “We can have a little treat.”
Hunter Thompson’s work had not yet graced a Spindoctor nightstand, nor was his political campaign for mayor yet on the radar of the naïve and uninitiated. But everyone new that the ‘treat-du-jour’ in Pitkin County, Colorado was cocaine that seemingly entered the region daily on any number of private jets that screamed into the rarefied airspace here from all over the world.
“Ooooh, he’s a virgin!” Veronica giggled at my admission that this would be the first time that I’d done a line.
“Well then,” Marshall pronounced quietly, with a wicked little smile, “we’ll have to be gentle with him.” We all laughed.
Veronica said something in what sounded like spot-on, unaccented French, and laughed at Marshall’s coloring a bit. His retort, also in nearly perfect French, but with a hint of South Carolina up country, turned her giggle into a thoughtful smile. “Well, we’ll just have to see.”
Four or five lines went up the virgin nose, and callow fingers coated callow gums with the dregs that the rolled hundred dollar straw left behind on the mirror. Veronica and Marshall partook in equal measure, polite hosts that they were.
And the early morning, well past three, proceeded to dawn, at which juncture Marshall’s arrears amounted to forty-two points, down from over sixty an hour earlier. The final game of the night, to those unfamiliar with the game, would be difficult to convey in all its perfection and horror.
Marshall had affirmed early his propensity for accepting doubled stakes whenever he held the ace point, even if other assets or possibilities were absent, a rarity among those who didn’t want to lose their asses in the tallying of the score. This game ended up as a contest between a Spindoctor prime, which absolutely prohibited escape, and half-a-dozen Beatty checkers on the one point.
More to the point of imagining Marshall’s winning chances, not horrible if he held a strong inner board to contain any of Jimbo’s unluckily captured last-minute checkers, the Beatty home board had collapsed onto his one, two, and three points, which meant that his hopes of victory were minuscule at best, while his potential to lose a double or triple game were substantial.
The cube, on Jimbo’s side of the board, meaning that he alone could use it next, stood at the somewhat lofty height of thirty-two, which on its face made this game worth a hundred sixty dollars, with opportunities to double or even triple that, under any circumstances of Jimbo’s removing his checkers prior to Marshall’s taking anyone off the board. And this phase of the game had begun, with all the probabilities decidedly in the Spindoctor direction.
For reasons that concern the disadvantages of having an odd number of checkers remaining, in spite of his near-guarantee of winning, and high likelihood of gaining some multiple of the cube value, Jimbo elected to redouble to sixty-four. He was busy tallying that the expected seventy-four points would yield an hourly rate for the twelve hour session of nearly thirty dollars an hour, not bad wages for a bell hop whose room was free, up the mountain at Snowmass.
The only problem with these computations was that Marshall had snatched up the proposition without expression, though he did grin when Jimbo jumped at the sixty-four cube that nestled opposite him across the backgammon board. “It’s your roll,” Marshall noted levelly.
Again, the details here will mean little to non-backgammon players. The upshot was that the Spindoctor reached a position in which—against an absolutely perfect defensive position, which Marshall had long since buried on his lower points—his equity would be 95%; the actual series of rolls was so unbelievable that this situation remains the number one example of hideous impossibility become possible in the course of half a million games or more of the Game of Kings, what the brilliant analyst, Barclay Cooke, called “the cruelest game.”
Anyhow, when Marshall turned the infinitely expandable doubling device to 128, Jimbo dropped and paid off a hundred and ten dollars—the twenty-two point difference between his plus-forty-two and the value of the dropped cube—before exiting into a light snowfall in the Aspen morning, just shy of seven o’clock and dawn.
In the course of the wild madness of that last game, Jimbo had wondered if he would receive payment even if he won. He considered the possibility that this was a clever cheater—after all, Marshall had admitted his prowess as a juggler and a magician early in the evening, after Veronica—indiscreetly, perhaps, given the dour look that her lover had shot in her direction at that point—had suggested that he provide a display of his proficiency with “your new wooden balls, sweetie!”
Whatever the true situation may have been, the Spindoctor had sworn never to seek this fellow out again. He assumed that Marshall would not call. Yet he did, quite soon in fact.
“I know I was unbelievably luck that last game,” he drawled over the phone. When I said nothing, he continued, “and I’m sure that over time you’ll make a tidy profit playing against the likes of me.”
Again I had nothing to offer in reply. “But I’d really like to learn to be a better player.”
In the aftermath of this first follow-up, under the prodding of ‘that slut, Veronica,’ the clever Marshall had cheated to win his game, though I never had a hint—other than the overall unlikelihood of the sequence itself—that the result was a dishonest one.
He paid me back and promised never to repeat this performance. I figured that this was by far a better outcome than what I experienced during the bout that we battled after I ‘popped my coke cherry,’ as Veronica stated the case.
So for eight months or so, till the end of July, our unlikely duo played backgammon four or five times a month. And indeed, for such a one as the Spindoctor, the five thousand dollars and a little bit that he banked was well worth the time, though toward the end, Mr. Beatty was a massively more formidable foe than he had been at the beginning, and Jimbo’s good luck was the only reason that he won till he left to return to Massachusetts.
His departure from the Front Range, to return to college and actually study history for his final year at Harvard, followed less than two months the conclusion of their series of ‘lessons.’ He rarely thought of Marshall Beatty, except in recalling the “bad beat” of the one improbable game. Till much later, he never heard a thing about what he has since learned. (continued below the fold)
Elijah Wald is the genius in question in the video.
Last Words For Now
What can I say? I needn’t say a thing, but I can’t help myself. I want to provide some piquant provocation to complete things. Life is sweet. Time is short. Maybe something useful can come of all this. The yarns still seem worth the price of admission.
—Below the Fold—
Whatever else proves to be true about existence’s ‘delicate miracles of embodiment,’ we can certainly rest assured that serendipity’s appearance merely requires a certain narrative facility. No doubt, every talented liar can spin a yarn from whole cloth and blah blah blah.
Then again, the reader’s job, or the viewer’s, or the listener’s, is to measure the story against the happenings and perception of social reality in all the mundane day-to-day unfurling of our lives and times. What meets experience and makes it more sensible, more resonant, more meaningful, produces if not a solution to the Existentialist Dilemma, at least a first step or two en route to learning, even knowledge.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
The triad continues with an Antithesis, in the form of the Five of Pentacles, that will ever illuminate losing positions. The initial array ends with the Seven of Cups as a synthesis, anomalous if not altogether weird. Even though I can always come up with a story in some shape, form, or fashion, I sought a Clarifying Card here, which hit the table with the Three of Pentacles.
As has become operational standard in this section, as it were, we’ll first assess this triad, today with its clarification as a fourth pluck. The initiation in this instance, Jason’s and his comrades’ Three of Wands, implies an early stage of some quest’s fulfillment. Eisenhower’s Atoms-For-Peace pretense for the powers-that-be could easily seem appropriate to attempting popular uptake of the Modern Nuclear Project at the beginning of the vaunted ‘Atomic Age.’
Not only did fake narratives of ‘friendly-power’ help to justify megadeath expenditure of our mutual treasure, but necessary outlays for ‘peaceful atoms’ also served to defray the fiscal impacts of H-bombs. This is plausible for sure, and arguably persuasive.
These sorts of booster bumps of public acclaim happened in all ‘atomic powers.’ ‘Happy atoms’ coexisted with deadly particles, salubrious structures with noxious toxicity. A clear-cut Antithesis to such a view certainly might notch nicely with the litany of loss and woe that defines Daedalus’ Five of Pentacles.
Indeed. Instead of “too cheap to meter,” the cost of fission-electricity has remained higher than all standard alternatives. Trillions of tax dollars have pursued nuclear weaponry, meanwhile, that only succeeds if we never, ever decide to use the ‘atomic option’ in war, at the same time that the deadly dust of Depleted Uranium—about which we’ll soon be hearing more at BTR—has become a horrific addendum to the ‘arsenal of democracy,’ causing untold cancer and other carnage among living creatures.
The Synthesis pull seems, to state the case gently, a little out of place. Psyche’s multiplicity of love choices in the Seven of Cups looks discordant, at best, in terms of expressing either acceptance or rejection of the utility or necessity of spending trillions of our treasure for newer and ‘more efficient’ thermonuclear mechanisms.
Then again, maybe a jolly affection for our energy choices should be part of what we’re wanting in these types of decision-making exercises. In any case, the Three of Pentacles’ does offer some Clarifying interpretation, insight that might meaningfully suggest an availability of resources and support for some kind of grassroots movement to attain socially democratic and participatory management of these ways and means of energizing ecocidal machinery for mass destruction.
So then; that’s interesting, at least arguably. What of our Spiral Spread? For purposes of continuity, I’ll repost the sequence from above the fold that answers our more general Modern Nuclear Project interrogatory.
“The Essence showed up with Apollo’s bright Sun. Then Past Influences yielded the Four of Swords, with Narcissus’ Page of Cups in the Present Passage and Ares’ The Chariot as an exemplar of Likely Future Developments. No-Matter-What, Opportunities provided Triptolemus’ Page of Pentacles, followed by Problems & Prospects in the form of the Chioscuri Twins’ Knight of Pentacles. Finally, the mysterious and uncannily powerful High Priestess, Persephone herself, came forth as the reading Synthesis."
What’s up with all of this? An Essence of our solar source, a safely distant fusion furnace that is the wellspring of living matter and any and all consciousness that its evolution permits, is at once quite canny and, perhaps anyway, a little chilling. The functionaries who have insisted on nuclear options, from the Curies to today’s Energy Department big-bang scientists, maintain a sense of inevitability and even certainty that humanity’s future will depend on fission and fusion techniques.
The Four of Swords as a prequel, with its important election of solitude to consider everything, could readily indicate the erstwhile ‘isolationism’ of the United States in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, a separation that nonetheless established the foundation for the ‘nuclear inauguration’ of Yankee tutelage that soon followed. In the here-and-now, on the other hand, Narcissus’ eliciting a gentler and more positive self-regard might amplify our storytelling along many paths, in this little essay as one way of stating a key element of seeking citizen responsibility instead of corporate plutocracy as the prime mover of our collective lives. A Future in which The Chariots’ explosive inner battles are paramount seems incontrovertible, and perhaps particularly so in relation to the entire realm of the ‘atomic powers’ with which we’re actualizing our many-faceted communal and collaborative existence.
In our age of a palpably poisonous plenty, the Page of Pentacles powerfully proposes ubiquitous availability of the material means to advance our agendas, however we in the end formulate them. Again, whether pro or anti-nuclear, in other words, we’ve got access to all the means and ends that we need to bring about the results that we are pursuing.
Problems & Prospects in the twenty-first century, likely particularly in relation to nuclear questions, perfectly parallel the Knight of Swords evocation of times of upheaval, in which reason and balance must temper pugilistic propensities if we are to survive our own natures. As an apropos Synthesis, too, the High Priestess’ oversight approximates an ideal: truly, people now must seek in intuition and other, less-than-fully-conscious fashion ways to chart a course through “confusion and bewilderment” to “the womb of the unconscious in which the secret of (our) real purpose and the pattern of (our) real destiny are contained.”
Depending on our analytical propensities and purposive actions, Armageddon’s annihilation and ambrosial beatitude are both available. The future is ours to claim, come what may.
As things transpire, a big portion of the STS Interlude in All God’s Cousins today also plumbs issues of human well-being in a world replete with nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and opportunistic commodification of atomic waste streams left, right, and center. While this materialization of nuclear knowledge and atomic eventualities is indisputable, this currency does not necessitate any mandate of physics that the future will depend on fission or fusion except in regard to the prevailing primacy of our near-at-hand cosmic furnace.
So far primarily in ad-hoc submissions, BTR has been parsing these themes of fission and fusion and human viability. From #1, nearly a year gone, a review of the magisterial Oppenheimer stated the centrality of these sorts of thoughts. “Finally, for purposes of keeping this review-essay in the realm of a briefing, the prime point of the Manhattan Project was world-ruling supremacy—never a defensive response to a hostile world, let alone a shot at ‘saving lives’ and ending World War Two."
“Nerdy Nuggets” from #2 also evinced an atomic theme. “That ionizing radiation causes cancer increase is beyond debate; the operative issue about this fact probably hinges on what one does with this knowledge."
While mere mention of these types of matters has characterized every rendering of BTR, issues Six, Seven, and Eight present a three-part assessment of the origins of the Internet in fears that America’s ballistic missiles would prove vulnerable to Soviet satellites. The upshot pulses with paradox—the origination of contemporary social life in seeking atomic ascendancy.
Along such lines, Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings might readily render a rubric for pondering these questions of Technos and tempest, of armament’s underpinning and Armageddon’s embrace. Having contributed to the war effort in the early 1940’s with a statistical approach to optimizing antiaircraft fire, he thereafter steadfastly refused to participate in any process that emanated from the ‘Department of Defense’ that the war power named itself. His work reveals a quiet horror at the prospect of atomic extinction, a revulsion that appears repeatedly.
Professor Wiener’s God & Golem, Inc. even more incisively addresses the queries and themes in #16’s BTR. He viewed the compartmentalization of research as a ploy to assuage guilty feelings among those who ‘ought to know better.’ He provides a wry assessment with which to culminate our current context of bureaucratic imprimatur’s inescapable evisceration of responsibility as regards reactors and radiation and such.
“Once such a master becomes aware that some of the supposedly human functions of his slaves may be transferred to machines, he is delighted. At last he has found the new subordinate—efficient, subservient, dependable in his action, never talking back, swift, and not demanding a single thought of personal consideration."
A ‘leadership’ emerges that, even in regard to Hydrogen bombs, defaults to some sort of mechanistic or otherwise algorithmic decision-making. “This will unquestionably be the manner in which the official who pushes the button in the next (and last) atomic war, whatever side he represents, will salve his conscience."
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
…In a general sense, in any case, each chapter of this fiction will offer a diversion along the lines that this inquiry has invited in this subchapter. More particularly, one way to accomplish something akin to a cogent reply to this question is to look at somebody’s story, somebody who was instrumental, whose pioneering work and authoritative voice made him or her a beacon in relation to the implementation, so to speak, of science in the current era. One such somebody is Vannevar Bush.
Most readers have never heard of him. But he succeeded—as a spokesman and administrator for government, elite universities, business, and ‘philanthropy’—in implanting the idea that “Science (is) an endless frontier,” the capacity to explore and understand and utilize which is the only—as in no other option, period—way that humankind can thrive, possibly survive. Bill Gates definitely studied the man closely; his ruling class roots mandated this focused attentiveness. In this vein, paying attention, a theme of this issue, is not a sin, nor need it be boring.
In standard fashion, Franklin Roosevelt began his November 17, 1944 letter to Vannevar Bush, requesting an explication along the lines of Science: the Endless Frontier, “Dear Dr. Bush.” He continued, making multiple points critical to a comprehension of our current context.
“The Office of Scientific Research and Development, of which you are the Director, represents a unique experiment of teamwork and cooperation in coordinating scientific research and in applying existing scientific knowledge to the solution of the technical problems paramount in war. Its work has been conducted in the utmost secrecy and carried on without public recognition of any kind; but its tangible results can be found in the communiqués coming in from the battlefronts all over the world. Some day the full story of its achievements can be told.
There is, however, no reason why the lessons to be found in this experiment cannot be profitably employed in times of peace. The information, the techniques, and the research experience developed by the Office of Scientific Research and Development and by the thousands of scientists in the universities and in private industry, should be used in the days of peace ahead for the improvement of the national health, the creation of new enterprises bringing new jobs, and the betterment of the national standard of living.”
The good professor began his more or less ‘Executive Summary’ of his compliance with FDR’s petition like this. “Progress in the war against disease depends upon a flow of new scientific knowledge. New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature, and the application of that knowledge to practical purposes. Similarly, our defense against aggression demands new knowledge so that we can develop new and improved weapons. This essential, new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research.
Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.”
A few dozen pages hence, prior to transmitting a hundred fifty pages of appendices, Bush initiated his concluding chapter in this fashion. “(T)he effective discharge of these responsibilities will require the full attention of some overall agency devoted to that purpose. There should be a focal point within the Government for a concerted program of assisting scientific research conducted outside of Government. Such an agency should furnish the funds needed to support basic research in the colleges and universities, should coordinate where possible research programs on matters of utmost importance to the national welfare, should formulate a national policy for the Government toward science, should sponsor the interchange of scientific information among scientists and laboratories both in this country and abroad, and should ensure that the incentives to research in industry and the universities are maintained. All of the committees advising on these matters agree on the necessity for such an agency.”
Half a decade subsequently, the National Science Foundation was born, which, to this day, elicits and fosters today’s science establishment with requests-for-proposals and substantial funding that ends up creating a significant amount of the ‘bottom-line’ conditions for the existence of U.S. research universities. While certain connections of this process to the story at hand are obvious—Danielle’ and Lou’s university work, Heidi’s family-affiliation with Emory, etc.—every single human life on the planet, now and for some time past, has included an erstwhile stamp-of-imprimatur from the NSF.
A key component of comprehension is essential here. Though both Bush and FDR bowed enthusiastically to peace, the overwhelmingly primary focal point of scientific endeavor has remained weapons of war and domination, in one way or another, at exactly the same time and in many senses in exactly the same way as the overwhelmingly primary focal point of the entire imperial economy has also continued to revolve around warmaking and other pretenses of ‘defense.’
Along similar lines, just as in the case of these deeply influential intellectual and administrative outcomes, so too definitely more important than all the interesting and insightful things that Bush said or wrote were the actual agendas that he participated in bringing to fruition. Another of these ventures, which we could term the Modern Nuclear Project, flowed very concretely and directly from a more readily investigated program, The Manhattan Project, the largest and arguably most crucial exercise in mass murder ever.
Volumes One and Two of this set integrate as characters some of the principal participants in this vast transformation of the world as a perquisite of monopoly capital’s rule, as a condition of its continued existence. Much more minimally, contemporary accomplices in this massive criminal endeavor also appear.
Henry De Wolf Smyth is one of these earlier cast members in the panoply of All God’s Cousins; with his Ivy League and ruling class ties resplendent, he marched toward the first public relations release regarding nuclear issues, the triumphant Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. In that same year, 1945, Tom James wondered if he’d achieve anything like the escape velocity from coalmining or pipefitting or roughnecking that seemed his likely future, which the various ‘complexes’ of modern life helped him to realize and thereby lay the basis for Lou’s presence here among us now.
This tiny amplification of energy in one life was an aspect of the MNP. Much more extensive developments were omnipresent in America, and elsewhere too.
To appreciate the scale of the shift in life and existence here on Earth that has resulted from the Modern Nuclear Project, one need only reflect on the present day presence of billions of pounds of Uranium metal, primarily in formulations that today’s P.R. sorts have termed “depleted,” and then note these lines from Chapter Six of Smyth’s earlier propaganda set-piece.
“At the end of 1941 the only uranium metal in existence was a few grams of good material made on an experimental basis by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company and others and a few pounds of highly impure pyrophoric powder made by Metal Hydrides Company. The only considerable amount of raw material then available in this country was in the form of a commercial grade of black uranium oxide, which could be obtained in limited quantities from the Canadian Radium and Uranium Co.”
The reason that the organization and achievement of ‘atomic energy’ serves by itself to illustrate the nature of contemporary reality is straightforward. This ‘project,’ whether we glance only at the early 1940’s or expand our point of view to include the plus or minus two centuries of the electromagnetic spectrum’s elevation to first among equals in science, lies at the center of modern life—its commitment to profit, to a particular social set’s continued imprimatur, to the militarization of all that is, to as much faux ‘secrecy’ as humanly possible, to narrowly-drawn technical expertise as the foundation of all that is worthy of the name ‘knowledge,’ and so on and so forth, literally ad infinitum.
In this vein, a lengthy quotation from the military leader of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, is apt. It comprises the forward to Smyth’s book.
“The story of the development of the atomic bomb by the combined efforts of many groups in the United States is a fascinating but highly technical account of an enormous enterprise. Obviously military security prevents this story from being told in full at this time. However, there is no reason why the administrative history of the Atomic Bomb Project and the basic scientific knowledge on which the several developments were based should not be available now to the general public. To this end this account by Professor H. D. Smyth is presented.
All pertinent scientific information which can be released to the public at this time without violating the needs of national security is contained in this volume. No requests for additional information should be made to private persons or organizations associated directly or indirectly with the project. Persons disclosing or securing additional information by any means whatsoever without authorization are subject to severe penalties under the Espionage Act.
The success of the development is due to the many thousands of scientists, engineers, workmen and administrators both civilian and military whose prolonged labor, silent perseverance, and whole-hearted cooperation have made possible the unprecedented technical accomplishments here described.”
Lou will soon enough brush up against the notion of “by any means whatsoever,” emphasizing in passing by doing so that the ultimate purpose of the ‘highly technical’ continuing machinations of the Nuclear Fool Cycle circumscribe the inevitable mass collective suicide of nuclear weaponry. Smyth, in his final substantive chapter, made this plain at the outset of the ending, as it were.
“The entire purpose of the work described in the preceding chapters was to explore the possibility of creating atomic bombs and to produce the concentrated fissionable materials which would be required in such bombs. In the present chapter, the last stage of the work will be described the development at Los Alamos of the atomic bomb itself. As in other parts of the project, there are two phases to be considered: the organization, and the scientific and technical work itself. The organization will be described briefly; the remainder of the chapter will be devoted to the scientific and technical problems. Security considerations prevent a discussion of many of the most important phases of this work.“
From President Truman’s early adoption of the view that atomic bombs constituted American power’s “ace in the hole” to the ‘gamesmanship’ in yesterday’s newest placement of nuclear weaponry on the borders of China and Russia, plutocracy’s predominance has depended on these “weapons of mass destruction and indiscriminate effect.” A billion pages would be inadequate to convey the terror and criminality that such attitudes and actions purvey.
Perhaps a simple recollection from Chief Harry himself will suffice to move us forward. “Byrnes had already told me…that the weapon might be so powerful as to be potentially capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale. And he added that in his belief the bomb might put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”
Megadeath as the sum of Earth’s fate, however, in any case until the sun expands into a red giant, is not Homo Sapiens’ foreordained end. Many observers, whose social and economic and political base, in a word, do not so seamlessly intersect with all the money in the world, massive monopolistic enterprises, the ruling individuals of the ruling classes, and so forth—all of which were omnipresent in Vannevar Bush’s or Henry Smyth’s or Harry Truman’s transit, along with those of their coconspirators in the Modern Nuclear Project—again, many of these proponents from the grassroots have a decidedly different, even diametrically opposed, viewpoint about such matters as we’ve briefly considered just now.
Of the untold thousands, or tens of thousands, of unsung heroes who have stood up to the nuclear plutocracy, who include by the bye some of our own actors here, we might take into account the thoughts and arguments of three women, scientists and interlocutors for justice and survival. This will leave out many shamanic or spiritual critics, often enough ecologists in their ‘day jobs.’
However, at least equally important in the nuclear arena have been the scholarship and understanding of multiple honestly independent authorities in such matters as the nature of radiation and the historical evolution of mass extinction. Alice Stewart is the first of our witnesses.
Her biographer called her The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Stewart’s conclusions, basically now accepted as authoritative if not incontrovertible, excited snarling condemnation from the policy wonks at the top of MNP’s food chains in the U.S. and Great Britain, from whence the estimable Dr. Stewart originated. Her favorite aphorism was simple: “Truth is the daughter of time.”
She demonstrated that the use of x-rays on young children or in utero would have measurably deleterious consequences at much lower dosages that commonly accepted. Her research also validated such conclusions in relation to the atomic bomb ‘demonstration project’ at Hiroshima, a mass murder that kept on killing, via its at times almost undetectable radiation doses, for decades beyond the detonation in 1945.
An obituary for the almost-centenarian Stewart pointed out the doctor’s prescience when she declared, “Good people are seldom fully recognised during their lifetimes, and here, there are serious problems of corruption. One day it will be realised that my findings should have been acknowledged.”
The eulogist continued in a way that, for now, aptly marks our nod in Dr. Stewart’s direction. “Stewart's entire life and career were devoted to social medicine, to the improvement of the lives of others, and to the bitter battles that have to be fought to ensure that findings contrary to policy or received wisdom—however important these may be to public or worker health—are investigated in a balanced and adequate way and, where necessary, acted upon.”
Helen Caldicott is the second of our expert observers. Trained as a medical doctor in Australia, she has subsequently received over twenty honorary doctoral degrees and a nomination for the Nobel Prize from Linus Pauling. Caldicott’s introduction to the possible ‘downside’ of nuclear deployment was her reading of On the Beach, in which Australia is the last outpost of civilization to fall from the radioactive death cloud of a thoroughgoing thermonuclear exchange.
Early in her career, she acted as a technical advisor and advocate of Australia’s international litigation against France for the latter’s South Pacific atmospheric weapons tests, as well as alerting unions and workers groups to the dangers of the Uranium mining that is common in parts of the Aussie Outback. She has remained a stalwart Cassandra, willing to keep talking about the dangers that she sees despite the calumny that ‘established’ scientists and bureaucrats have heaped on her.
She summed up her dedication. “As a doctor, as well as a mother and a world citizen, I wish to practice the ultimate form of preventive medicine by ridding the earth of these technologies that propagate disease, suffering, and death.”
She contends that “capitalism is destroying the Earth,” and that, moreover, the means to oppose this process politically is difficult in SOP approaches. “Politics is not really politics any more. It is run, for the most part, by Madison Avenue advertising firms, who sell politicians to the public the way they sell bars of soap or cans of beer.”
Caldicott may or may not be correct in any given case of holding out a specific assertion about radiation, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. Hers is a raging voice that demands radical change. Whatever the dispensation of rectitude that a particular idea or belief deserves, however, her powerful evocation of risk has been transformative, in the form of Women’s Action for New Directions, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and other organizations that she has started or led.
And much of what she contends is simply science, though those who profit from radioactivity might fight this fact with all the means at their disposal, which is to say much of the public relations budgets of some of the world’s largest energy, utility, and manufacturing endeavors.
Along these lines, she points to such accepted standards as the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, which has firmly adhered to a no safe minimum dose point-of-view. She abhors nuclear power’s insidious effects and warns especially about the ecocidal impact of a full-scale nuclear conflict. “The massive quantities of radiation that would be released in a war fought with nuclear weapons might, over time, cause such great changes in the human gene pool that following generations might not be recognizable as human beings.”
Third, and last but not least among our astute analysts, is Sister Rosalie Bertell. An epidemiologist from Canada, Bertell labored for decades to bring an independent rationality to conversations about nuclear issues such as radiation safety and the biological impacts of ionization. One biographer incisively labeled the diminutive Sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart as a Scientist, Eco-Feminist, & Visionary.
Despite the fact that she consulted for such agencies as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that her scientific and statistical bona fides were impeccable, and that she was a gentle, blithe spirit, she also encountered vicious vitriol from those in charge of things. She matter-of-factly accounted for such constant ire and continual vituperation.
“Radiation (constitutes)...the biggest lobby ...in the world. It's involved in university research. ..., industries..., the whole medical profession.., the whole military establishment, and the economic and military policy of the country depends on people being willing to handle radioactive materials.”
Till a losing battle with cancer put her down, she persisted. Her legacy, against war and environmental destruction and cavalier endangerment of the most basic, cellular, genetic aspects of our humanity, inscribe a magnificent life. Her words toward the end of her days ought to echo in the chambers of our minds.
“We are part of a great chain of people who care about the Earth, about the life that gives it fruitfulness, and about a world where rights would be respected, children cherished, and peace (might) prevail. We have to be part of something bigger than ourselves because our dreams are often bigger than our lifetimes.”
This rambling perambulation away from the lives of the page may seem anomalous. Nevertheless, as the setting for the unfolding action of this tale takes place in Dixie, which has turned into a veritable H-bomb breadbasket and bastion of the noisome routines of the nuclear power aspect of the Nuclear Fool Cycle, a note about these matters is, at least arguably, apropos. Moreover, the actual lives in our present Volume Three often enough have revolved around these eventualities in one form or other.
Additionally, as will become apparent, some of these actual scientists and experts strut into our playhouse for a scene or two. Equally relevant, the authoritative speakers whose voices are present in these sections themselves have stories, bursting with their own conflicts and contradictions, sets of what we can term ‘literary fodder’ that have already come into view and which will also be a part of the next dozen instances of this portion of the text.
Another “for instance,” for the most part entirely different from but also utterly suffused in the individual stories that are evolving here, bubbles up from any thoughtful assessment of particular arenas of life’s circumstances, in a form that one could label ‘drugs’ or ‘medicine’ or ‘health,’ or ‘drugs and medicine and health.’
At this conjunction in our story, we only mention this matter. It covers grounds that include the opiates and the psychedelics, inoculation technology and pharmaceutical manipulations of every part of the human genome, especially in any sphere that involves the brain.
All manner of interrogatories along the lines of altering consciousness or healing the organism will follow in coming chapters. “Where did the human immunodeficiency virus come from?” is just one of these that profoundly impacts this volume of our series. “What is the natural history of psilocybin?” is another. Whatever the answers to these and similar queries might be, they would need to account for the definite likelihood, on the one hand, that only relatively recently has this little hitchhiking predator shown up in the human ambit, as it were, and, on the other hand, that such substances of altered consciousness have accompanied humanity’s perambulations for many tens of thousands of years.
More generally, future material in upcoming ‘STS’ sections will consider the realm of politics. These pages will proffer an attempt to delineate, for example, what the idea political economy means.
In terms more concrete and definite, reference to the House Committee on Assassinations and to the Church Committee’s investigations of CIA and other federal agency’s utilization of murder and mayhem will appear soon enough. In regard to the monstrosities that marked Victor Jara’s and Pablo Neruda’s and Salvador Allende’s deaths in Chile, in particular, these interludes have a clear connection with some of the protagonists whose work and play are paramount in coming pages.
In some shape, form, or fashion, all of the characters who show up in these pages match, at most junctures in their lives anyhow, a description, perhaps an incarnation, of ‘fine young radicals.’ The stodgy reactionaries and clueless conservatives whom we might have also portrayed are merely boring; the opportunistic hypocrites far too predictable, their love lives too bounded by their prudery or compulsion in relation to their natural selves.
Because the ideals of struggle, the belief in transformative possibility, have consistently fired the souls and stoked the feelings of our panoply of participants, such intervals of considering the political side of things also make perfect sense. From Angola to Argentina; from Chile to China; from Korea to France; from the ‘hoods of Savannah to the ghettos of Los Angeles; from sorority row in Tuscaloosa to high-energy-physics labs in St. Louis: wherever our characters turn, whomsoever fate has set in motion toward their mutual entanglement, delicate, contradictory, vicious, insane, and always weird and interesting political issues intertwine with the lives that evolve in these pages.
Throughout human existence, furthermore, in regard to technique and a ‘science of politics,’ such mattes have depended on technical magic, scientific legerdemain, and so forth. Such sidetracks as these will hopefully not dismay gentle readers; in any event, their utility as tools to see and understand is real, whatever deficiencies the present author may have in bringing these points to the foreground of the telling here. Up Next—Chapter XVI.
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
One specific Driftwood Love Message exemplifies today’s sort of subheading, so to say. Apropos to this claim, “Conundrums of Passionate Conjunction" is the title. Its complex structure may harbor some useful notions, if nothing else.
“Fate's Beating Wings Have Brought Us the Bounteous Wonder & Beautiful Wildness of Our Palpating Passionate Panoply & Amicable Exploration of Life's Ample Adventures at the Exact Moment That Chance’s Fickle Finger Directs That We Undertake the Often Painful Purpose of Seeking Unity With Innumerable Strangers So As to Evolve From Our Salubrious Solidarity a Social Phalanx in Favor of the Peace on Which Human Survival Hinges, Even As Such Mutually Tolerant Coexistence Itself Depends on Sweet Social Justice in a World Beset by Blatant, Brutal Inequalities From Which Plenty of Cousins Benefit."
Further fostering of a ‘partnership-way-in-love-through-trouble’s-trials,’ so to speak, will show up in the next Love & Erotic Passion section, due out in #18 on August 15th. Of the hundreds of Marshall Arts sales in this overarching category, at least a quarter of them, mas o menos, have wrestled in general with odd exigencies and predictable troubles of loving connection.
The remainder of today’s material here will present particular examples of these kinds of creations. This one, “Sublime & Dangerous,” illuminates the capacity for unbounded wantonness in the pursuit of Life-Force-Energy’s enthusiastic fulfillment. ‘Horndogs’ and sluts we may be, but some sense of ethics and integrity must mark even the ‘all-is-fair’ terrain of human erotic connection.
“Love's Ministrations, Ever As Sublime As They Are Dangerous, Invite Enamored Adventurers to Plunge, Naked of All Defense, Into Frothy Passion-Lapped Pristine Waters of Venus' Virgin Coves, Even As Ecstasy's Thrall Beckons Other Smitten Swimmers to Dive Into Shark Infested Depths of Murky Desire That, Simultaneously, Threaten Imminent Bloodbath."
“Social Mayhem on Today's Tawdry Scene",” in the meantime, examines much more collectively the karma that must ever characterize human affairs. While admitting inevitable human corruption and catastrophe, an honest interlocutor must also acknowledge the joy and pleasure that Eros allows us to touch with each other.
"Even As We Grapple With Entropy's Torture & Its Attendant Morass of Social Mayhem, Ecstatic Passionate Grooves & Ennobling Pulses of Grace Characterize Daily
Dalliance in Which We Wend a Way Through Trial & Tribulation to the Embraces That Deliver Alluring Epiphanies of Alternating Gaiety & Glory Amid the Inevitable Fears & Furies About the Routine Rottenness & Omnipresent Fraud That Typify Our Connubial Conflagration in Today's Tawdry Scene."
Another item in the queue bears the moniker, "Love's Response to Exigency." Truly, too, must even the greatest of Goddess glory resplendent somehow come to pass in tandem with trouble and travail, toil and tempest, trial and tribulation—’blood, sweat, and tears,’ or worse, a presence of bitter that can nonetheless never repress the sweet.
"Sweeping, Swooping Madcap Mayhem, Relentless & Unforgiving, Remorseless & Ubiquitous, Unleashes Exigent Existential Circumstances—Unavoidable Snake Pits, Self-Detonated Booby Traps, & more, & worse—That Our Love's Miraculous Marvels Manage to Meet With Such Ardor & Aplomb That We Encounter Yet Another Rationale to Leap & Frolic in Mutually Ecstatic Embraces."
Nor are these passages of poignant, piquant, occasionally painful purpose merely carnal. On the contrary, as “Filling Up & Drinking Down" delineates, intellectual and cognitive capacity also circumscribe these arenas of, at once, luscious and troubling libidinal libation.
"Every Ecstatic Embrace With My Sweet Beastly Priestess Drenches My Heart in Lusty Luscious Loving Libations, Even As Every Wild Wandering Discourse With My Feral Angel Goddess Leads Us to Explore Psyche's Labyrinthine Swirl of Nuance & Paradox, Echoing All the World's Dialectical Dance of Problem & Prospect As We Fill Each Other Up & Drink Each Other Down."
These missives of molten connection and unstoppable adoration, in the snarling, snapping fangs of all fate’s slung arrows, as it were, may represent a key component of humanity’s navigating pathways to survival and thriving. Here is a text, “Dancing Delight,” eminently congruent with that thought.
“Our Dancing Delight, At Once Wondrous Waltz & Tempestuous Tango, Rockets Us Each Day Toward That Mixture of Pulsing Passion & Psychic Serenity That Sustain Our Continuing Trajectory Together to Another Destined Dalliance On Life's Always Daunting & Yet Dreamy Dance Floor."
What of the fear of heartache? How do we manage the terrors of revelation about our hopes and fears and forlorn, occasionally daunting or even despairing ideation? Here is a message, “Hidden Heart,” that posits a response to these interrogatories. “"No Matter How Often I Cast My Die to Rehearse Dissimulation of Actor Or Spy; No Matter With What Artifice Or Subterfuge I Lie; No Matter the Diligent Deception I Try, I Can't Hide My Heart From You.”
A penultimate obstacle to ongoing loving libations must ever appear in the personal peccadilloes that ineluctably punctuate each personality that has ever typified any individuals path through things. “Stormy Centers” speaks to this point.
"Ascending the Steep Ramp to the Sweet Yet Stormy Center of Your Sweaty Soulful Psyche Sends Sojourners Sliding Down Slippery Slopes to Slip Into Salty Salubrious Seas Where Pulsing Molten Passion Blends Epiphany With Eternity."
Without much doubt, death’s doomed dance in every human life can appear as the insuperable boundary that separates lovers once and for all, an irresistible sundering of love’s ministrations. “Honoring the Lost” undertakes a useful address to such sensibilities.
"Inevitable Existential Eradication, at Once Lethal & Mundane, Emotionally Violates Only Those Whom Fate Momentarily Spares: Time's Tidal Tempest Ultimately Vanquishes Grief's Grip & Permits Survivors to Honor the Loss of Closest Comrades & Dearest Kin With a Promise to Renew Life's Throbbing Pulse & Joyous Jumping Thrall."
Of all the amorous aphorisms that grace human language, perhaps none is truer than the idea of the eternity of love. After all, our persistence, till whatever ‘crack of doom’ in the fullness of time may await our offspring’s generation of further offspring, only follows from a social environment in which Life Force Energy can frolic and blossom on almost any occasion of a meeting of eager consenting adults.
As I say, without stint, ‘this is how we’re wired.’ As Cohen’s song incisively summarizes, “There ain’t no cure for love.”
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
Prefatory Matters
The past, in the form of our individual genes’ predecessors and in terms of the collective expressions of human individuality that have held sway for tens of thousands of years, completely determine the real parameters of this discourse and activity. Yet we mostly dismiss or are almost completely unaware of this readily discernible history.
To an extent, at least quite plausibly, our characteristics in the universe of ‘special substances’ are at least somewhat common among other mammals. Cats will imbibe their nip; dogs slurp up fermented foodstuffs; the ungulates have plants that send them spinning on occasion.
Whether any of this activity among our evolutionary kin is volitional, Homo Sapiens in any event in some sense almost universally choose() to or need to ‘get high.’ The ineluctable actuality of this statement is possible to illustrate in many, many ways, three of which form the primary focus today. In the first place, anthropological, archeological, and forensic science point out the omnipresence, over a hundred thousand years or more, of consciousness alteration in the overall species formation of human social bonds. In the second place, mythic and legendary and other early storytelling sources reveal this same tendency. Finally, historical proof also induces the same or very similar conclusions.
Robert Graves(), in his 1958 forward to still-iconic volumes, provides a place from which we can briefly convey all of these contextual components. “Since revising The Greek Myths…, I have had second thoughts about the drunken god Dionysus, about the Centaurs with their contradictory reputation for wisdom and misdemeanour, and about the nature of divine ambrosia and nectar. These subjects are closely related, because the Centaurs worshipped Dionysus, whose wild autumnal feast was called ‘the Ambrosia.’”
He then fesses up: “I no longer believe that when his Maenads ran raging around the countryside, tearing animals or children in pieces…, they had intoxicated themselves solely on wine or ivy-ale. The evidence suggests that Satyrs(goat-totem tribesmen), Centaurs(horse-totem tribesmen), and their Maenad womenfolk, used these brews to wash down mouthfuls of a far stronger drug: namely a raw mushroom, amanita muscaria, which induces hallucinations, senseless rioting, prophetic sight, erotic energy, and remarkable muscular strength. Some hours of this ecstasy are followed by complete inertia.”
Graves goes on to admit that contemporary rituals in Mexico parallel what he describes. He himself partook of these rites, which in the Western Hemisphere utilize psilocybin. The Maenad’s ‘tearing of the heads’ of their victims is easily imaginable as a symbolic beheading of the mushroom itself, which in both ancient Greek and present-day Tlaloc bears the moniker, “food of the gods.”
Terrence McKenna, both much maligned and much worshipped but in any event a credentialed scholar who knew how to gather and present evidence, titled his ‘magnum opus’ with the same phrase. Food of the Gods advances a thesis that hallucinogens, particularly psilocybin mushrooms, impacted human cultural and social development. He essentially sees what Riane Eisler() labels a ‘partnership’ model as having been possible during many millennia when these little fungi were a regular part of human meals.
“The primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies was temporarily interrupted for about 100,000 years by the psilocybin in the paleolithic diet. This behavioral style of male dominance was chemically interrupted by psilocybin in the diet, so it allowed the style of social organization called partnership to emerge, and … that occurred during the period when language, altruism, planning, moral values, esthetics, music and so forth -- everything associated with humanness -- emerged… .
About 12,000 years ago, the mushrooms left the human diet because they were no longer available, due to climatological change, and the previous tendency to form dominance hierarchies re-emerged. So, this is what the historic dilemma is: we have all these qualities that were evolved during the suppression of male dominance that are now somewhat at loggerheads with the tendency of society in a situation of re-established male dominance.
The paleolithic situation was orgiastic and this made it impossible for men to trace lines of male paternity, consequently there was no concept of 'my children' for men. It was 'our children' meaning 'we, the group.'”
Wanton wildness; indiscriminate orgies; explosive expression of music and dance and elocution; sacred ‘partying’ that went on for days and days: these were our ancestors’ annual bows to nature and themselves. Having never attended an ‘ecstasy rave,’ I could not say first hand, but a certain descriptive resonance, based on recorded observations, feels approximately accurate.
In any case, that our type of creatures inaugurated their ‘social conquest of Earth,’ as E.O. Wilson() put the case, in the presence of such activity is unquestionably likely and arguably certain. As often happens when such a point-of-view gets closer and closer to a sure bet, the story or intellectual history of the proposition itself is quite interesting.
Just a cursory glance at this chronicle is possible today, but even this briefing will contain high points, so to say, well worth further investigation. In any event, both sites of collected assessments and individually composed monographs and aggregated materials are now ubiquitous in scholarship, spiritual thinking, and otherwise.
ANTHROPOLOGY & SUCH
Friedrich Engels not only worked alongside and supported financially the lifelong efforts of Karl Marx. He also was, in his own right, a groundbreaking researcher on several fronts. One of them was establishing the social bases and implications of the whole human story, essentially part of the initiation of an anthropological perspective.
In any case, in his Origins of the Family, Private Property, & the State, he drew liberally from Lewis Henry Morgan’s seminal work. While Engels did not himself infer ethnobotanical facts, he certainly implied that the natural foundations of Native American ritual included plants and their use.
“The possession of common religious conceptions (Mythology) and ceremonies—After the fashion of barbarians the American Indians were a religious people.’ Their mythology has not yet been studied at all critically. They already embodied their religious ideas—spirits of every kind—in human form; but the lower stage of barbarism, which they had reached, still knows no plastic representations, so-called idols.”
With condescension but not dismissal, he persisted. “Their religion is a cult of nature and of elemental forces, in process of development to polytheism. The various tribes had their regular festivals, with definite rites, especially dances and games. Dancing particularly was an essential part of all religious ceremonies; each tribe held its own celebration separately.”
Marx himself took up the fascinating challenges that his colleague had laid out. His final work, interrupted by mortality, was largely to be a study of Native American social lives. When he went to his grave, he had already collected hundreds of pages of notes that included multiple entries about employing exalted plants, most often tobacco that councils smoked together in ritual fashion.
As alluded above, Engels based much of his thinking, as did Marx, on the efforts of pathfinding American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan(). Though Morgan’s primary intention was to depict the lineage models and relations of aboriginal power that developed in the Americas, and to some extent around the world, he too also noted and implied that universal holy practices() existed, essentially group rituals and shamanism. Moreover, these were omnipresent in a way that inherently fit human use of herbal and other earthen substances that people had concluded were sacrosanct.
Decades hence, after many other intervening investigators had added their assessments, Bronislaw Malinowski also wrote() extensively on these matters, often taking as his locus of observation Australia and the archipelagos of the Pacific(). He is squeamish about some of what he learned.
He labels as ‘boasting’ what indigenous inhabitants have conveyed to him. But the content of what he does include in his writings again and again establishes, in his Sexual Repression in Savage Society and elsewhere, that rites that initiated young people as adults, sexual animals who would sire and bear children, also involved secret rituals, formulas, and holy plants.
A chillingly evocative recounting tells of a legendary sister’s seduction of her brother and how their death resulted from this transgression, even as they discovered a key element of their clan’s magic and persistence. “‘The two are dead in the grotto of Bokaraywata and the sulumwoya is growing out of their bodies. I must go.’ He took his canoe, and he sailed across the sea between his island and that of Kitava.”
The journey and the narrative went on. “Then from Kitava he went to the main island, till he alighted on the tragic beach. There he saw the reef-heron hovering over the grotto. He went in and he saw the sulumwoya plant growing out of the lovers' chests. He then went to the village. The mother avowed the shame which had fallen on her family. She gave him the magical formula, which he learned by heart.”
This same sulumwoya, in his The Sexual Lives of Savages, Malinowski portrays as the basis for a love elixir specifically and for “love magic” generally. Other oils and the stimulant, Betel, also bear mention.
In the years since this monograph’s publication in 1932, hundreds of other volumes and thousands of articles have considered this minty herb alone, at the same time that different scholars, apparently in the hundreds of thousands, have delved hallucinogenic mushrooms and various other growths from Earth’s bountiful stores that have played this role, a central component of erotic ritual and performance, around the world. Most of these volumes eventually touch on the issues at the heart of Malinowski’s inquiry—the borders and connections among magic and science and religion. Inescapably, our examination in this report also ponders such matters.
James Needham, who anthologized Malinowski’s work, gathered a dozen thinkers around him to discuss and inasmuch as possible discern the conflicts and possibilities for rapprochement between science and religion. Though nearly a century old, the discussions in the collection might easily have originated yesterday; truly, they might just as well have come from a hundred years hence, should humanity manage not to immolate itself.
In his introductory passage, Malinowski speaks to what traditional values brought to a so-called primitive culture. Stripped of any lingering supremacist bias, these arguments have power still. And, to those who would overturn a hundred thousand years of human sacred practice in order to achieve some temporary political economic goal or objective of social dominance, they might carry at least the echo of a warning.
Although he is speaking about the coming-of-age ceremonies in the lines below, his point is that the inculcation of the reality of the dependence of the present on past generations lies at the heart of what happens in those circumstances. That these transitional rites involved altered awareness goes without saying: that was the purpose. For our ends, we might at least acknowledge that forgetting, lying about, or otherwise so distorting our past as to make it unrecognizable ought to seem at least of dubious utility given the way that beginnings lay the basis for completion, come what may.
“The primitive man's share of knowledge, his social fabric, his customs and beliefs, are the invaluable yield of devious experience of his forefathers, bought at an extravagant price and to be maintained at any cost. Thus, of all his qualities, truth to tradition is the most important, and a society which makes its tradition sacred has gained by it an inestimable advantage of power and permanence. Such beliefs and practices, therefore, which put a halo of sanctity round tradition and a supernatural stamp upon it, will have a ‘survival value’ for the type of civilisation in which they have been evolved.
We may, therefore, lay down the main function of initiation ceremonies: they are a ritual and dramatic expression of the supreme power and value of tradition in primitive societies. There, they also serve to impress this power and value upon the minds of each generation, and they are at the same time an extremely efficient means of transmitting tribal lore, of ensuring continuity in tradition and of maintaining tribal cohesion.
We still have to ask: What is the relation between the purely physiological fact of bodily maturity which these ceremonies mark, and their social and religious aspect? We see at once that religion does something more, infinitely more, than the mere ‘sacralising of a crisis of life.’ From a natural event it makes a social transition; to the fact of bodily maturity it adds the vast conception of entry into manhood with its duties, privileges, responsibilities, above all with its knowledge of tradition and the communion with sacred things and beings.”
He concludes with this. “There is thus a creative element in the rites of religious nature. The act establishes not only a social event in the life of the individual but also a spiritual metamorphosis, both associated with the biological event but transcending it in importance and significance.”
A modern onlooker might find tempting a phrase like “polymorphous perverse” as a descriptor of these forebears of ours. The types of practices that passed on secrets of sacred acts, that made the sexuality that we treat as shameful a part of a public rite, under the influence of plants with godlike powers, must strike the prudish prudence of “just say no” as positively salacious.
However, such a judgment is far outside of any rooted reading. In the context of often the thinnest of margins of existence, such developments were the opposite of prurient. They were survival techniques that affirmed the need to love and create in the most fundamental way, as procreators in the teeth of beasts and other daunting components of the world and its creatures. In any case, judged harshly or not, this juicy jettisoning of inhibition has acted as an ineluctable bedrock that founds human socialization and coming-of-age.
Of course, dozens of other investigators also contributed to this early outpouring of anthropological ideas. One might go on if one wanted to conduct thorough research in this arena. In any event, the contemporary scene has not only for the most part confirmed the extended outlines of these earlier conclusions, but they also have broadened the scope of study and deepened both the empirical basis and theoretical richness of this area of knowledge, the focus of all of which is a reality-based description of our own nature.
Thus, as such scholars as Helen Fisher state frankly, one upshot of ruminating on these issues is that we cannot avoid the conclusion that humanity’s has been a sex drive that is rich and potent. And this longing to couple has for tens of thousands of years connected with eating, drinking, and smoking what those in charge of today’s societies now insist are criminal acts merely to possess.
Fisher—who absolutely abhors the hideous sexual and neural and amorous ‘side-effects’ of the serotonin-absorption-inhibiting ‘drugs of choice’ of the present pass—may only elliptically make this conjunction about aphrodisiacal effects of various drugs, but others do so very explicitly: the popularly-invoked formulation, “sex and drugs and rock-and-roll,” in fact forms an interconnected threesome that underlies, at many levels, essential aspects() of being human.
One way of thinking about this invokes a deep analysis of language itself, where even a quick look reveals simply countless ways that, for example, psychedelic fungi evoke sexual meaning. Entheogens—plants that bring contact with God or the infinite—in this view act as a catalyst to culture’s deepest delvings.
“This mushroom on the wick is called snuff in English, but ‘snot’ in former times. …In Greek ‘snot’ is muxa but also the nose or nozzle of the oil lamp. The mushroom was linked with nasal mucous because the membrane virile discharges a mucous liquor of magical potency. The lamp-nozzle with its dripping wick carries the same idea with fire involved.”
The metaphor was part of culture’s canon. “Ancient medical writers and Pliny attributed a sexual character to Amanita muscaria. There is a startling association in the complex of words and figures of speech for fire, the nose and its mucous, and mushrooms, and various erotic connotations. The same fossilized figures survive in French, Spanish, and English. ‘Punk’ in English…is the name applied to a powdered fungus…; it also means a harlot who sparks her client. In French, the word for ‘punk’ is amadou. ‘Spunk’ in colloquial English means seminal fluid. It is a doublet for ‘punk’ and both are cognate with Greek spongia/(or) ’sponge ’(and Latin fungus).”
In Spanish, the association is even more graphic. There, “the word for snuff or the burnt end of a wick is seta, meaning mushroom, and also moco, meaning mucous.” In addition to linguistic, one can readily locate scores of citations that employ spiritual, sociological, psychological, genetic, sociobiological, and interdisciplinary ideation to espouse and explain the intertwining of Eros and a plant world as much a part of human engagement with sexuality as is copulation itself. Overall, tens of millions of sources probe these interesting matters.
Not that sexual accoutrements of universal deployment of sacred plants were exclusive or primary in these affairs, quite the contrary, the ritual and therapeutic use of hallucinogens or other botanical specimens that had ‘mind-blowing’ effects impacted many realms() of early humans’ lives. Malinowski and countless other sources have pointed out this truth. People gained confidence from their imbibing. The ‘magic’ applied in the spheres of domestic production, hunting, and dealings between clans, as well as in various healing ways().
As with Cupid’s and Psyche’s play, a truly, massively vast trove of documents deal with the ways that occasional, ritualized, sacral drug use served as a substrate to enculturation, maturation, and different aspects of human life for a hundred millennia(). Such experiences in a real sense made life possible; that is why they were both so extensive and so persistent. Logically, their continued—police and sold-out, so-called scientists might chime in, “intractable”—clinging to human behavior is inviting us still to affirm our lives rather than snuff them out.
A modern scholar synthesizes many of these ideas, in The Evolution of Paleolithic Cosmology and Spiritual Consciousness and the Temporal and Frontal Lobes. Of course, as one of many threads about such conceptualizations makes plain, psychoactive plants and their ritual use attended every step in this evolutionary journey. The general point is important to expand on at some length.
“Complex mortuary rituals and belief in the transmigration of the soul, of a world beyond the grave, has been a human characteristic for at least 100,000 years. The emergence of spiritual consciousness and its symbolism, is directly linked to the evolution of the temporal and frontal lobes and to the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples, and then the first cosmologies, 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. These ancient peoples of the Upper and Middle Paleolithic were capable of experiencing love, fear, and mystical awe, and they carefully buried those they loved and lost.
They believed in spirits and ghosts which dwelled in a heavenly land of dreams, and interned their dead in sleeping positions and with tools, ornaments and flowers. By 30,000 years ago, and with the expansion of the frontal lobes, they created symbolic rituals to help them understand and gain control over the spiritual realms, and created signs and symbols which could generate feelings of awe regardless of time or culture.
Because they believed souls ascended to the heavens, the people of the Paleolithic searched the heavens for signs, and between 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, they observed and symbolically depicted the association between woman's menstrual cycle and the moon, patterns formed by stars, and the relationship between Earth, the sun, and the four seasons. These include depictions of … the 13 new moons in a solar year. Although it is impossible to date these discoveries with precision, it can be concluded that spiritual consciousness first began to evolve over 100,000 years ago, and this gave birth to the first heavenly cosmologies over 20,000 years ago.” Next Up—Part Two
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
He showed no signs of a hangover, for one thing. Nor did he evince the seriousness of purpose of a self-styled patriot. His demeanor, wide-open and friendly, just didn't fit in with what a rational person would expect from a youngster about to enter a process that might easily kill or maim him and would inevitably cut down on free time and money.
A few more fellows, nursing the effects of whatever binge had preceded their arrival, took note of this bizarre newcomer when Russ began to introduce himself to all and sundry. His greeting and salutation were equally simple to all concerned.
"Hiiii," was all he said, accompanied by an arcing wave of his well-formed hand.
The room's atmosphere tensed. Strangers gave each other sidelong glances and seated bodies shifted in response to this unusual display. From the many incoherent murmurs emerged a couple of comments.
"'Is guy's nuts," was the pithy summation of one bleary eyed future warrior.
Another added with a low whistle, "Man, 'at dude's out there."
Before any consolidation of this sentiment could take place, however, a couple of men of military bearing took command of the situation.
They entered from the back of the waiting room and stood under the red, white, and blue "PROUD TO SERVE" crochet that hung in the doorway. The more compact of the pair seemed to survey the room, although his stare was blank with routine.
"Men," he offered with the flat, clipped projection of the parade ground, "I'm Master Sergeant Gonzales; with me today is Sergeant First Class Maxwell." He was taller, with the ambling gait of the rural Southern Piedmont. "We'll be taking you..."
"Hiii..." Russ had moved, swaying just slightly from side to side, directly in front of Master Sergeant Gonzales.
"Hello, son, 'scuse me, but we need to git goan here. Now, men, we'll want you first of all to form a line entering the 'zamination room here," and while Russ stood directly before him with a widening grin of exotic vacancy, Master Sergeant Gonzales explained the procedure the group would follow in order to facilitate the induction.
A couple of guys, grinning to themselves as if in anticipation of a little show, cut in front of Russ, but they were the only buffer between him and the beginning of his army life. The process began innocuously enough, with a filling out of forms and an explanation of what the rest of the morning would hold.
SFC Maxwell said, with only enough volume for the front of the line to hear, that they'd take people in "three at a time, begin with." His high nasal drawl and tight little smile revealed little about the character beneath the uniform, although the signs of nicotine addiction and steady drinking emerged from the edges of this career soldier. Tobacco stained his fingers, and the tiny blood vessels around the nose and eyes took a consistent beating from the waves of liquor he consumed. He passed Russ and the two pranksters who'd joined him at the front of the queue right into the clerks, without so much as a close look at my long-haired friend.
The first stop on the induction itinerary was a large closet of a room, airless and hot. A few rough pine and steel student desks filled the space. Each seat bore scars from the thousands of veterans-to-be and few score martyrs who'd sat their vacantly over the years.
Most of the grafitti was the combination of racial epithet and patriotic dribble that filled the barroom toilets of the South; occasionally some message slightly more profound, prophetic, or pathetic peered out of the jumbled jungle of words. Russ found himself looking fixedly at one of these.
"Lord knows I'm willing to give an eye,
But please Dear God, don't let me die.
W.T.H. 3/68."
Russ shook his head and wondered how the boy'd had time to etch that much out and fill in the blank spaces on the two pages, front and back, that beckoned for completion.
"'E's definitely bawlin.'" One wide-eyed cohort stared at another as he conveyed this information in an awed whisper.
"'Is boy's gotta problem," his partner agreed, also in an exaggerated socco votto.
"No need be talkin' here fellas, just get them forms filled and..." The corporal who acted as the clerk at this first stage of the transition from civilian to military stopped his rote 'hurry-up' speech and stood frozen in front of Russ's chair.
He'd seen silly bravado, he'd witnessed open terror, he'd become inured to the sight and sound and smell of hung-over young men bound for war. But he'd never witnessed anything like the 'hippy' boy in front of him now, head slightly bowed, a flood of tears streaming down his face and pooling on his desktop as his shoulders shook a bit, a mayonnaise jar at his side, lid carefully punctured, containing three of the biggest, hairiest water-bugs that'd ever lived.
"Uh, Sergeant Maxwell?" came tentatively from his lips after a pause of fifteen seconds or so, which seemed uncomfortably close to eternity for all concerned save Russ.
Sergeant-First-Class Mark Maxwell did not appreciate the relief from boredom that breaks in routine offered. He liked getting on with things and finishing his job early and without hitch. His lips pursed to dispel any hint of tolerance that someone might mistakenly infer from his otherwise pleasant features.
"What is it Corporal Carter? We can't have any..." Even more than his subordinate, this survivor of twenty years of army procedure, life, and food had come into contact with the most ludicrous and barbaric situations of human interaction.
Very little from that panoply of experience had failed to respond to a good stiff dose of regimented effort. "Just get on with it" seemed an adequate response to most normal foul-ups.
This situation was from a realm that didn't fit into any of the NCO's assumptions, however. Rather than a combination of smart-ass smirks and pained scowls, rather than some blend of retardation and know-nothing resistance, Mark confronted a clearly befuddled Thomas Carter and two inductees whose slack-jawed expressions put them somewhere at the border between wonder and terror.
But the vista at which his composure visibly disintegrated was the sight on which these three occupants of the room focused their attention. A quietly sobbing Russ, tears a series of rivulets from his desk onto the floor at this point, now held his jar of roaches in one hand while he stroked the sides of the glass with the other, quietly intoning, "I won't let you die," as he swayed slightly back and forth.
A pair of heads from the waiting line of boys had peeked-in at this bizarre tableau after their gatekeeper left. A distant but audible hubbub now entered the "form-processing center" from the waiting area.
"Al, take a look at this wouldja?" The chain of command had no further to go for the moment. Master Sergeant Albert Gonzales was like an orchestra conductor. He rarely sat down with an instrument, and if he did you expected to hear some special noise. He detested any break in the bureaucratic bustle even more, if possible, than his longtime associate, Sergeant Maxwell.
"What the hell, Maxwell?" He stopped short, standing stiffly, as if he'd almost walked briskly over the edge of a cavernous but barely discernible hole, a hole moreover that had no rational basis for being in his line of march. Russ's companions-in-paperwork and their Corporal overseer had not modified their previous demeanor.
Four disembodied heads, a mix of colors and bone structures, all wide-eyed, now looked on from the other room as if waiting for the punch line of a big joke. Mark Maxwell, whose down-home appearance covered up the most efficient second that had ever blessed Gonzales's command, stood more or less relaxed, one arm dangling while the other hooked at his waist to identify with an outstretched thumb the spectacle of Russ weeping over his pet bugs.
Russ looked Albert Gonzales straight in the eye, without blinking. "None of us wanta die," he whispered plaintively.
"Son, why doan ya jus' come wi' me, hya?" The Master Sergeant was both solicitous and firm. To the onlooking heads he intoned with menace, "you boys get the fuck back where ya belong."
To his partner in this affair, so no one else heard. "Calm 'em down, keep 'em comin', buddy; no big deal." The war machine depended tangibly on the smooth operation of processing centers like this one; "keep 'em comin'" was the only real imperative. He elicited the help of Carter with a jerk of his head.
To the athletic pair who'd imagined having some fun with the crazy hippy, he offered, "you're in the army now, boys, get them papers filled an' drop yer drawers. 'Ere's a war on ya know."
Carter had Russ in tow, while Gonzales impelled him gently from behind with a massive hand pressing against his lower back. This trio disappeared beneath the sign announcing "NO CLOTHES PAST THIS POINT", while from the waiting area the firm treble of Maxwell's upcountry twang pealed out that "some men's just born without balls.”
To the silence that greeted this, he said, “We all gonna do jus' fine. Any other pussy's, 'scuse me, ah mean any other you gen'lman got any cry'n ya need ta do?"
The last anybody heard of Russ was Master Sergeant Gonzales upbraiding the unfortunate Mr. Carter. "Christ, Carter, keep 'is moron's pants on wouldja? Damn! Just git 'im back to Dr. Holloway."
Dr. William Holloway, army psychiatrist, took matters quickly in hand. His intake chart on Russ noted "general paranoid ideation," "hears voices," "inappropriate affect," among other indicia of active psychosis. His "preliminary diagnosis" was clear cut: "Schizophrenia, undifferentiated type."
Russ was on the road back to Columbus by 9:00, with the good doctor's "order" to report to a certain Mr. Williams, a psychologist at the Georgia Mental Health Institute, on Tuesday at 10:00 in the morning for further observation and diagnosis.
Russ knew more than the average citizen did about psychological diagnosis. He'd actually read revisions of the psychoanalytic diagnostic manuals they used at GMHI. He followed 'mental illness' in the news. He approached his upcoming interview with Mr. Williams with complete professionalism.
He kept himself awake Monday with a combination of coffee and speed. He emptied his head of any preconceived notion of craziness. He read a law review article about the concept of "least restrictive environment" and "the right to treatment."
He drank gallons of water and OJ. At about 4:30 Tuesday morning, just as he was starting to mellow out on the amphetamines and caffeine, he took the final three doses of LSD 25 that remained of his stash.
The meeting with Mr. Williams was a complete success. He immediately received a psychiatric exemption from induction. He showed all the appropriate signs of the aftermath of an acute psychotic reaction in the 24 hours of "observation" that he underwent at GMHI.
He left behind a sympathetic staff with only a couple of hippy orderlies cognizant of what was going on. He was back in Columbus Thursday afternoon, a bit hollowed out but ready to retrieve me from school and tell me this tale of madness in the service of peace. He showed me the Melaril 'starter pack' he obtained after his GMHI discharge, along with a "'self-renewing 'scrip' for life," the final psychiatrist in Atlanta had told him.
********
Over the years, this story has generally gotten one of two responses from folks. Either they laugh at how 'crazy' it is, or they think Russ was a chickenshit. I figure it's a pretty wild world these events describe, but Russ was 'crazy like a fox,' as my granpa used to say, when he came up with this idea, and he kept his ass out of Southeast Asia.
Was he a coward? I don't think so. He was afraid, damned straight. But a coward keeps all that inside. Russ owned up, baring all so to speak, to all his fears, before an audience of his peers and his overseers.
He chose life, over death and destruction, and was willing to be called a "pussy" for it. If half the rest of us saw the sense in that, maybe death squads and hydrogen bombs would share the fate of the dinosaurs and other maladaptive organisms. Shit, we might even live in peace, discover the meaning of our own personal versions of paradox and paradise, and have a fair shot at dying happy. If that's cowardly, well, color me yellow, too.
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
Always one to remember the Trojans’ fate, albeit with a wry grin at Paris’ conquest by the glorious Helen, our Jack, possibly because he felt such a strong attraction for this Elma goddess, wanted very much to stare straight down the throat of this apparent ‘gift horse.’ Yet his feelings—which moved his flesh, fired his heart, and commanded his mind to follow his soul and his theretofore unknown inclination to kiss—mandated a more open approach than even this sweet young would ever have been likely to offer up to some odd stranger who happened his way.
In the event, despite her recent skirmishing with the Giant, she also felt an almost alarming allure from our hero’s lips and unlearned loins. Jack responded to her touching his face with a blush and a sigh from unplumbed depths.
In more or less the same fashion that he had given up Sadie for the potentially paltry promise of some beans, in that instance to a creature much more diminutive, the fellow—our hero—could no more reject Elma May’s sweet invitation than he could have demurred from climbing the morning’s vine highway to the sky.
Their mouths meandered like meaty moths in arcs of merry flight before they melded to melt their tongues together and leave all their clothes aside to deduce anew life’s deepest primal dancing delight. In so doing, clearly, they followed the likes of Helen and her cursed beau, not to mention plenty of couples who navigated noxious nuance and sailed sickening straits to thrive and survive instead of battling and dying.
After this unexpected and yet inescapable connubial completion—fate’s call to their witness, in essence—Elma scissor squeezed the skinny Jack between her muscular thighs as she wrapped her arms around him to signal her intention of occupying his heartspace for the foreseeable future, a happenstance that had basically been true, from his perspective, since the lad’s arrival early in the day.
Now, midday had passed, and Jack wondered. “He won’t rise for twelve more hours yet,” stated his new lover, reading him like a picture book from her old life on the manor to which she could never return.
Jack, stunned with lust and loving his longing for her, merely nodded agreeably and grinned. “I’ve much to tell you and little time to say it.” She mentioned their fated joining, a state that he affirmed with enough energetic enthusiasm to allow her soliloquy to unfurl while they in fact did conjoin at the hips for a second interlude of Life-Force-Exchange.
Who knows how the Goddess arranges such things? But she does. Another half hour passed while they boiled themselves into a rendering of eternity, in the occasional interstices of which Elma conveyed things that Jack “would need to know,” she contended, moving forward.
George, the giant, had killed her husband among his rows of barley. She had learned from a soothsayer that she might never bear children. “Wherever we go, people will judge us harshly.”
She also spoke of her relations with the gargantuan George, who raped her so regularly that she barely resisted any more. “I expect that he’ll kill and skin the both of us for his pot,” she noted, just as she was climaxing again, “although my guides say differently.”
Hilariously enough, Jack learned that though his bodily proportions were massive, as a man, “inside his britches,” he had not even a fraction of Jack’s genital gifts. “It’s part of the reason that he’s so evil.” She grinned and wept at once in so saying.
Their discourse amid intercourse presented Jack with much to think about, much that he would treasure, everything that confirmed his feeling of having formed, somehow or other, an unbreakable union, “till death do us part.” He heard of a childhood sweet enough to wrestle with rapine's plunder in her life; he heard of a 'tactical marital union' in which she performed more or less happily and dutifully; he heard of her 'conversations with the cosmos,' a discursive development that had promised something apparently precisely like his very own presence in her life.
Nor were these altogether combustibly connubiated 'informational transfers' all one way. On the contrary, with all the strength in his young and limber limbs, and with all the passion in the hammering of his grand, youthful heart, with every cognitive connection in his clever cranium, Jack bound himself to this welcome womanly invitation with a vow that, in some ways, substantially superseded his promise to serve and protect the recently disappointed Mother whom he might, given his current course, never again see as a living lad.
This context—of carnal connection and complete devotion—also included planning, especially in relation to the stout, laden rucksack and Sir George Mortimer, its owner who yet belched out snuffling snorts of gustatory contentment and slumber so stalwart that a stout spirt, such as Jack powerfully possessed, might opportunistically purloin something right at his feet. Only one fact delivered a daunting demurral to this bold design.
“That bag of his has some damned magic in it,” adding that deadly George, unendeared as he might be, had mad skills in such arenas. “It will shout out as you snatch it up,” she explained. It was one of only two things, in her experience, that could rouse him from the depths of his post-prandial napping.
The other was “any strong scent of his favorite dish,” which of course was our Jack sauteed and served en brochette. Jack erupted in glee, leaping to his feet and just managing to reach the carafe of vinegar that perched at table's edge above his outstretched arms. He doused himself with the stench and guffawed when she flared her nostrils.
Additional wrinkles and quandaries they considered and dispatched. Elma's visage never quavered save when she asked him to give her “at least a year to find my way down to you.”
He chortled and smacked soot from his well-adored day-pack, untying it to reveal a spool of thick twine wider in girth than George's dusty boots. “We'll work out our plans to bring us together; you will see!” Jack spoke with a fervor that he'd never before felt about anything in life, thinking as he articulated this solemn bond, “so this is love!”
Prior to their for-now-final kiss concluded this apparently insane interlude of lusty longing for mutual endangerment, she warned, with an ironic twitch of her still parted lips, “he's quicker than you'd think.”
After swirling her tongue round his with delighted devotion, Jack just set his jaw with as much determination as he could deliver and inhaled deeply to stretch his strong young legs, in so doing slipping out of the pulsing cave-spring cove conflagration that would ever contain his virgin seed. She touched his face and swore: “I've got some surprises to slow him down,” gushing giggles as she said so.
Satisfied that they were as sensible as possible under the circumstances, they departed George's great hall for awhile, making their way to the still dewy exit portal from George's realm. There, they tied twine's twists about the tree with unbreakable knots and launched the entire bolus, now anchored, through the clouds toward home.
They spoke more on their return to the grand Mortimer hall of death. They needed no further covenant to cement their complete commitment to each other, whether victory or defeat, delight or doom, awaited their next moves. Holding hands, their breasts and breathing rising and falling in tandem, they swung aside and passed the gargantuan oaken shield that guarded the Mortimer manse.
Their mutual, hopefully comprehensive, machinations—eventually all-but conclusively contained in one step and then another—thus came to a close. Escape, or evisceration, was as proximate as their immediately pendant inhalations. With a cautioning palm, she bade him a final time to wait as she pulled out a bag from the flushing flesh that bellowed beautifully from her bodice.
She giggled like a wild and girlish child as she poured its ragged nuggets into George's aforementioned boots, at which she replaced her hand's halting-command with a beckoning finger to foster their future. She sighed. Jack smiled as brilliantly as Autumn's clearest dawn.
Giving a wicked wink to punctuate his beaming toothy grin, as rapidly as a deer's dashing jauntily from daunting hunters, Jack grabbed the sack of golden coins, heavy enough to bend his intention fleetingly, and flew toward his Forever Tree and the safety and succor and further kissing confections that it might proffer.
In the event, a shrill shout shrieked and pried George's sleepy eyes wide. “Thief, thief, thief!!!” it cried, a litany of larceny that accompanied our hero on his mission to persevere and meet Elma May again.
New Folk Fables—(continued)…
Everything exists in relation especially to whatever unfolds close to hand, or organically, in addition to connecting, ultimately, to everything that exists in All-That-Is. Such a tendency in the ‘Big Tented’ environs of BTR—to highlight and intertwine life’s nearly limitless smorgasbord—appears here everywhere, as a matter of course, from each issue’s Intro through All God’s Cousins and beyond.
Therefore, for instance, ‘Quiet Jack’s’ craftiness and iconoclastic sensibility, not to mention his salubrious and salacious libido, altogether alarming to local proprietors in his neck of the woods, must sensibly connect with my life, pretty clearly, but also to the wild and wanton ways, full of cultural finesse and a stubborn, insistent sexuality, among the ‘lower classes’ of history hither and yon.
One need only ponder Mark Knopfler’s “Lily of the West,” with its allusions to ‘passionate conversations’ between a faithless female and some bigwig aristocrat to see such a scenario in action in Ireland a century or so beyond ‘Quiet Jack’s’ telling of tales. Here stateside, amid the Celts and Brits and Africans and more who built the Americas, one can find dozens of corroborators of this ubiquitous cultural contextualization of the erotic battlefields that, ha ha, delineate ‘climactic’ class warfare of one sort and another.
Elijah Wald obviously has impeccable intellectual, musicological credentials. A primary project of his, Old Friends—a Songobiography, basically examines hundreds of tunes whose lyrics make the mixture of mayhem and merriment and feisty frolic one of nature’s irresistible mandates. They revolve around the blues and the South, with a plentiful Celtic complement to boot.
Now, as to the above-the-fold dream that suggests a new contextualization for this current expression of a Big Tent Review’s Categorical Imperative, that especial nighttime interlude began modestly enough. In the hours after midnight passed, I found myself and my love somewhere, quotidian and eerie at the same time, where we stayed, prone and resting, through all that I recall of this extensive dreamscape.
As usual, which is to say just as in reality, my sweetheart slept quite soundly, ha ha. At some point, arising out of placid passages and quiet calm, in which I considered the spinning floral blades of a silent ceiling fan, a giant black dog came up to where we reclined; I apprehended its presence instantly, aware and wondering.
Gazing on me with more or less amicable regard, tongue lolling in a dog grin, it placed its paw in the center of my chest, at which I smiled and experienced something like a Nirvana-Instant of one sort or other. After a time, sitting next to me in the interim, the creature repeated its moves, so that our ‘touching exchange’ became like a game.
Then, perhaps later in the night, after back and forth with the happy hound, an even more behemoth tiger, blond and buffed, came to visit. It consulted with my jet-coal canine companion; I heard a reference to the huge cat's claws as I watched with close attention their lively conversation. Clearly, they were well-acquainted and quite friendly.
Soon after this, this new and also affable beast came up to me and displayed its paw, a fuzzy golden globe the size of my head. It then telepathically inquired if it could continue in the fashion that the big black retriever had been following, at which I interjected that only with claws retracted would this be possible. It smiled a cat's mirth and gently wafted its massive forefoot right over the center of my sternum, placing it there softly, a furry warmth of good will.
The dog was likely male. The cat was at least somewhat likely to have been female. These kinds of clues certainly pique my interest. Before I—in the dream and from it—returned to Morpheus’ depths, both creatures approached, the cat closer to my head, the dog to my loins. And that was that.
As dream-driven narratives go—and readers may well believe that I’ve encountered dozens of these situations—this is pretty thin. Nonetheless, I’ve got an interesting premise—geopolitical mayhem’s likely social catastrophes; a wonderful setting in the form of the Appalachian Trail in whose proximity I lived and worked for a couple decades; characters in the form of two ‘Embodied Spirit Guides,’ a more or less fit old bloke who undertakes to survive by walking to Canada with his elder lass, who is much more in-shape for the adventure than is her lover and mate.
Along the way, they encounter would-be assassins whose attacks range from a collapsed-government’s Zombie Drones to mutated monsters to zombified former citizens and more. They also meet allies, even comrades. They lose lots of weight, indulge lots and lots of kissing and cavorting under all the conditions of such an epic trek, generally speaking don’t lose heart, consistently manage to fend off despair, and, ultimately prevail in their attempt to establish, away from the toxicity and blight of the USA, a possible new life in favor of human possibility.
The first installment will probably not show up till November. We’ll see. It will be a fine, fun foray into fantasy unlike anything I’ve ever done. It will teach me things, and give me a chance to keep at the task of fulfilling my First Existential Duty—the crafting and sharing of beautiful sentences—with ‘something entirely different.’ I’ll hope to grow a bit more audience by that time. We’ll see.
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
HIGH-STAKES, HIGH-LIVING HIJINKS & THE WAGES OF SIN
When the campus in Cambridge permitted a Spindoctor’s return, Marshall was ready to feed on hapless aficionados of the ‘cruelest game’ who had the temerity to gamble above their heads. According to more or less reliable accounts, he cut such a deep swath through the caches of cash among such players that he soon found himself only able to find action for significantly higher stakes.
He was cool under fire and had perhaps too little fear of monetary loss. His stake, conservatively, was adequate. He was not, however, naturally cautious; nor was Veronica wont to pinch any coins whatsoever hard enough to cling to them.
And that presented various conundrums. Having made himself mostly unwelcome among the folks who willingly wagered modest but potentially costly sums—stakes ranging from five to twenty dollars a point, more or less—he confronted a landscape that began with playing for ‘quarters,’ or twenty-five dollars a point, and ranged upward from there to games that involved initial bets of a hundred dollars a game or, occasionally, much more.
Not that the potential losses were unmanageable, on the contrary despite the hideous fallout in Aspen’s low-end real estate market in the realm of oil price shocks and stagflationary interest rates, Marshall was far from destitute. He could gamely gamble for such quantities of cash—on a really bad night losing a few thousand dollars or so—without risking life and limb, or his and Veronica’s next meals or mortgage payments. And he kept primarily winning; he was a scrapper, a tactical wizard, and relentless with the cube, even if his races still tended toward rudimentary play—at once too conservative and too optimistic.
However, precisely for these larger and yet still middling amounts, the level of skill was the highest, the competition most intense, the likelihood of encountering some clever shark who could plunder one’s resources the greatest. Nonetheless, Marshall delved into this marketplace and made money, albeit not at the rate that would accommodate the style of life that he wanted to accustom himself to.
Throughout North America, he plied what for most players was at best a slightly profitable hobby into a trade. While the exact rationale for moving further afield is beyond a Spindoctor’s ken, a reasonable guess is that travel and a slower rate of winning meant that his capital pool—a key component of every successful gambler’s labors—was constantly at risk.
At any event, in the Summer of 1984, despite interest rates and general economic strains that made the timing suspect, Vernonica and Marshall found a friend who was in the powder-trade, in which a market niche adjacent to the ski slopes—where a very different powdery substance prevailed—was always advantageous, and who, moreover, wanted a place of his own in Colorado. A cash deal resulted, and significantly more than a hundred grand further padded the Beatty pot.
Immediately thereafter, he and Veronica made a grand tour of Europe and the Mediterranean—Egypt, Turkey, and the Gulf States, among others—where he found all the action that he wanted and then some. He never had a losing streak longer than a week; and he met, for the first time, some of the stratospheric high rollers whose monied roots dipped into Gulf oil and geopolitical royalties that promised unlimited funds to pay.
Apparently, the allure of playing for such an ante proved irresistible. At five hundred or a thousand dollars per point, making twenty points per week—and his ‘profit target’ was more like fifty points every seven days—meant that increasing the personal investment fund that was his aggregate cash position was again attainable.
And the paradox of carrying his suave politesse among such contenders was that for the most part they were not only less capable players than he was but also were a far sight worse than the typical opponent for fifty dollars a point in the United States. Thus, though the margin of safety had to be somewhere between nonexistent and as thin as a strand of hair, Mr. Beatty began to disport way above his head.
He fit in with the social set, no doubt of that. The Spindoctor can imagine the conversational turn when Marshall first broached the subject of stakes in such a context, quiet smile and opaque equability resplendent under all circumstances. “We should play,” he would intone, a smile tickling his lips, his eyes wide behind his tinted glasses, “for something meaningful.” He would pause to gauge the effect of his words.
“Don’t you think?” he would conclude. This is what he had said to the Spindoctor in 1974. Only instead of the ‘nickels and dimes’ option that he pondered in the previous decade, a much bigger pie would be in play.
Facing him, the handsome, bejeweled, slickly attired fellow, as likely as not an actual Prince of one sort or another, would have nodded. “So would you prefer five hundred or a thousand?”
And whatever Marshall initially suggested, the follow-up was telling too. “Pounds or dollars? You’re American, right? From the Southern States, if I’m not mistaken.”
And Marshall would smile broadly at the identification of his accent, even were he using his serviceable French, a lilting drawl so much less noticeable than when he left Greenville with a curse from his father that followed his exit. He’d shrug and tilt his head at the suggestion that he was a hick.
And then he would acknowledge that dollars would be dandy. And for a month, he won a little and lost a little and realized that at this level, the money was affecting his killer cool and capacity to face down brutal redoubles and such.
In such a situation, a little known but ironclad rule of this sort of ongoing battle would inevitably have come into play. The classic text, Chance, Luck, & Statistics, states it as follows: “If two players sit down to an equitable game of chance, the stakes being the same on each round, and if the first has ten times the available capital of the second, then the odds are 10 to 1 that the second player will be ruined before the first.”
Moreover, more unfortunately still from the point of view of the estimable backgammon contender at the center of this story, this deficiency rises exponentially as one faces more and more opponents similarly situated, i.e., with an advantage in terms of capitalization. While Marshall had absolutely never read Horace Levinson’s introductory statistical monograph, he with equal certainty understood the issue intuitively. When he first met the Spindoctor, he had been recovering from a period of ruin, against an at least somewhat inferior poker player who had immeasurably more money than Marshall did. Next Up: Part Five