Big Tent Review

#23, 12/1/2024

An Ever-&-Always Initiation

Oh, my Goddess! Anyway, hello, everyone! Again, again, blah blah blah. As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twelve-times-annually magazine. This is the twenty-third incarnation, and so persisting with the second annual outpouring, and it’s as meaty as ever.

However, this stance is now history. Starting with #25, I’ll be posting once every two months, plus or minus. Making art, finding other, more direct ways to reach an audience, lots of things make attractive doing my odd more or less 40,000 word explosions six times yearly instead of double that. Ha ha.

Jim’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. As of the coming issue, moreover, we’ll be switching to a generally only-once-monthly posting.

BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, to proffer interesting and entertaining writing and, second, to find 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that, often enough, appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little. 

Quite frequently, like today, a particular edition will have no more thematic unity than whatever glue, so to speak, holds together these moments that we are sharing right now, with its ongoing echoes of our current Mass Collective Suicide Express. Then again, every BTR blast, minimally, ‘in no small part,’ evokes Eros and the libidinal life force energy that is the human brand, a celebration of carnality and ecstatic epiphany, although the shamed and shameful and shameless might quip that all such as this is more like the human stain, ha ha, than our humankind’s grain.

In any event, thanks for stopping in and the aggregate of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading! I’m actually planning some outreach ‘soon,’ ha ha, to seek out at least a few more followers of this flowing flood of problematic paragraphs and sustaining sentences.

Oh yes, something occurred to me recently in regard to this prodigious outpouring of prose in each Big Tent issue. Substantial numbers of readers confront such a massive tidal wave of text as this and likely just want to flee.

Such a reaction is not preordained, however, so long as a specific individual keeps uppermost in his consciousness, clearly centered in her awareness, that all one must do, in order to retain a BTR engagement, is to choose a single story or article and imbibe that.

Or one could skim, listen to Jimbo’s pretty voice, look at the odd and yet compelling graphics, all that type of so on and so forth. Such steps guarantee managing the tsunami in an amicable way, ha ha. So, now: ‘to the ramparts’ and read!

Or, no, not quite yet. Finally, given the ‘slings and arrows’ that seem so ubiquitous just now, beginning with a snippet of Joseph Campbell probably remains particularly apt: we can, whatever else may be true, ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of our world.’ I n the event, the next issue now will be December 1st, the first of many one-issue moons until ‘who knows when?’

Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a while back, the end of an article ‘above the fold’ links to its continuation. Somehow, it’s all so nerve-wracking and gratifying at once, ha ha. As well, for going on a year, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah.

I’m doing my best with this linking effort. It’s happening for the most part, in any case.

Hopefully, as a matter of fact, an extension of this interlinking is at hand. The Table of Contents should now offer a highlighted portal to the writing for each section. BTR aims to be somehow intense and complex at the same time that it supports a ‘user-friendly’ interface.

I’ve got fingers and toes all crossed. Yet another new notion is this. I’m looking for collaborative technical support. Ha ha. I wish myself good fortune.

Table of Contents

—Introduction: Anniversaries of Yesteryear’s All-Too-Timely Concatenations

1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Lessons From Nature

2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XXIII

3. Wood Words Essays—Arch & Ironic, Sometime Iconic; Jokes on Wood

4. Empowered Political Forays—”Capitalism on Drugs,” Concluded

5. Old Stories & New—”An American Christmas Story”

6. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—Sam & Red: Chapter Three

7. Nerdy Nuggets—From the Federal Reserve to G.A.T.T. & the W.T.O.—Part II

8. Communication & Human Survival—Human Stories, Aristophanes to Yevtushenko

9. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A Modern Nuclear Project’s ‘United Front’

10. Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—”’United in Blood’ Against Empire” IV

—Last Words For Now

Introduction—Reflections, Awareness, Memories

This just in: truly the personal is political. One might merely mention Hunter Biden to put a fine, sharp, sickening spin on this common expression. We’ll talk more later. Romanian Supreme Court rulings; Syria’s deposed government and the opportunistic Israel slaughter and invasion thereafter; Trump’s $15 Million dollar damages verdict in his favor; the ‘news cycle’ is overflowing with the Chinese curse about ‘interesting times.’

Even in the face of these daunting prospects, however, a Driftwood Message is at once seasonally and generally apt. “Without Platitude, We Can Assuredly Assert That the Only Attitude Which Deserves the Merest Latitude Is One of the Most Profound Gratitude for Goddess Gifts of Grace & Plenty.” If Hunter doesn’t feel this way, he’s the epitome of ingratitude, ha ha.

My mother-in-law comes to mind as a very different kettle of fish, as Scandinavians are wont to state the matter. A hundred one years ago, Ms. Kinser was a wee six-week old bit of a thing. Through the ‘roaring twenties’ and the ‘blighted thirties,’ she lived, with apples and chickens and a spring, on her family’s farm in the mountainous terrain near Cave Spring, Virginia. She came of age with Tennessee Valley Authority electricity that also powered the ‘war effort’ in which she became a young woman at the same time, college educated to teach others.

Just at that juncture, when the National-Security-State epoch was queuing up, she met and wed a soulful man with an inclination to reach out and preach. She drove a bookmobile while he studied his books of divine guidance, and in his first years in the pulpit, they brought two daughters into the light of day and the realm of reason.

And then came the last seventy years, during which this second daughter and I arced a journey that has powerfully coupled us to plight a troth with each other. What kind of miracle is this? One can only mumble humbly of the highest sort of grace and the deepest sort of the aforementioned Gratitude.

Inevitably, given my process, every Intro shows up, at least to a degree, as a melange of whatever in hell is occurring to me over the course that separates one issue from another, in this case #22 from #23, ha ha. It always starts, by convention as above, with something that shows up, like a frigid period of thanksgiving, at the last minute, mas o menos.

One thought has proved irresistible in its continuing recurrence. It’s the clearly apt aphorism that one cannot ever arrive at a salubrious or even useful truthful awareness if one begins with false propositions. I laugh, literally, as I’m writing, I experience an eruption of mirthful chuckles, to ponder what this implies about 'America’ in the present passage, inasmuch as, again literally, not a single ‘accepted,’ presumptively ‘accurate,’ postulate about life just now, in ‘the 'land of the free and the home of the brave’ is honest or even generally plausible.

As a matter of course, the outcome of such universal blathering of platitude and prevarication is an emphasis on chat, often ‘socially mediated’—not to mention censored—one kind of blah blah blah or another that either proposes nonsense to replace dialog or advances inanity and non-sequitur to compensate for ignorance. In such a context, both historical and contemporary analysis cannot advance beyond the fatuous or the pointless expressions of feelings without any scintilla of real meaning or any iota of essential utility.

One might begin, in this regard, with World War One, a clear underlying initiation of our lives on Earth right this second. It was the first ruling-class martial-exercise that was imaginable as a rehearsal for Mass Collective Suicide, the barbaric epitome of Capital’s bounteous commodified Brand Chaos. The ‘official story’ about 1914-1918 is some mix of ‘hard luck’ and random craziness.

Prohibition and the vaunted ‘roaring twenties’ that ensued therewith, meanwhile, at once goosed the free market with creative consensual criminal mercantile activities—Black Markets, in the idiom—and tainted society with gangster protocols and mundane corruptions. If one were to state the standard characterization about these perfidies, it would probably amount to how ‘bad guys need good guys’ to ‘keep them in line’ and other nonsense of pretentious judgment and historical falsification.

Mediation, Hollywood, and the rise of Public Relations might, as well as any purported documentation could, label the way that propagated plutocratic propaganda has inflected all other elements of life. From Netflix’s ‘Deadwood’ series, the character of George Hearst comes to mind as the news-nuanced brother of William Randolph. Thus, monopoly’s trustafarian elites act as our ‘trusted guides,’ like it or not.

Edward Bernays states the case simply. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” Ooops. That’s some seriously incisive ‘blah blah blah.’ The booklet’s title is apt: Propaganda.

“Our invisible governors,” he persists bluntly, “govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition… we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

‘Lie there and think of England,’ or organize to create popular rule. Those are the only two kinds of choices available to the ‘common herd.’

The ‘Great Depression’ and ‘New Deal’ euphemize a decade and a half of Capital’s possibly-worst-ever crisis and often catastrophic class conflict. In any routine recontextualization of this period, Smedley Butler has no place, ha ha. Fascist upsurges occurred as chance forces of nature, oh my! Revolutionaries were all evil schemers, blah blah blah.

The arrival and conduct of World War Two, along with the consolidation of the Modern Nuclear Project in the attendant Manhattan Engineering District’s ‘ending-of-the-war’-at-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki fairy-tale, most obviously mirrors—oil and cash—geopolitical dynamics that continue till the present passage, even as Mass Collective Suicide—if our vaunted ‘democracy’s’ ReDemoPubliCratiCan gangsters stay in charge—will eventually kill every living human more or less quickly. In other words, the standard perspective is a death sentence.

The rise of the National Security State that we hear, with relentless repetition, happened because of a ‘Cold War’ caused by some combo of confusion and contemptible ‘commonism,’ ha ha, this same murderous, frigid mayhem and attendant ‘security’ actually, as maintaining imperialist terror becomes more and more difficult, has begun to manifest as one attack after another on the citizenry itself, piecemeal, divided conquest at its most expertly developed. Again, the official story equals doom, as the Driftwood says, ‘a Future in Which Drowning Is the Most Enviable Option.’

One might go on at essentially limitless length and depth so as further to illustrate the utter horse manure, putrid and stinking and slimy, that passes for ‘common knowledge’ on the part of America’s media, which, one might infer, is the contemplative and analytical ideological P.R. framework that these monopolized ‘news’ behemoths intend for citizens here. Every local news program, without exception; every CNN broadcast, without exception; every ‘public TV’ documentary or ‘news’ confection, without exception; all of it: garbage in, garbage out, tantalizing lies and slick propaganda is, at best, the universal result.

Even the NGO sphere—Democracy Now and so forth—reflects the financialized agenda of the plutocrats—and their insidious ‘non-profit’ foundations that serve profiteering first and foremost, often exclusively—behind this phalanx of ‘tax exempt organizations.’ Readers who look into BTR’s next issue will hear and see the start of a five-part series about such matters.

I can hear the response of dismissive denizens of passivity and shopping. “You think you know everything!” This nonsense operates well enough as a defensive mechanism, but as rational discourse is, at best, hilarious bullshit. One need only have a ‘head on one’s shoulders’ to determine that all Standard Operational Views in regard to every aspect of social, political, and economic existence, as 2025 is on the horizon, represent some equally nonsensical perspective.

What about Tucker Carlson? What about James Corbett? What about some other independent, ubiquitously Trustafarian journalistic programming? Useful information is available in almost all such spaces, unlike anything from ReDemoPubliCratiCan CIA and banking establishment sources. Yet, again almost without exception, none of these are People’s Networks.

Oh, yes, Elon: OMGoddess, don’t get me started. The best thing to say about X is that it’s not Bluesky. The site formerly known as Twitter serves up echo-chamber cesspools with slightly different aromas and flavors, ha ha. Next issue will initiate a series about these supposed ‘alternatives’—some decent but only very few even vaguely democratic—to ‘manufactured consent’ by means of bombastic bullshit bombardment across the board.

An aspect of this multi-part presentation will examine TikTok, which inferentially may be the best broadly-based option to give people their own ways of communicating, learning, thinking, and organizing for themselves. Any reader who hopes to figure out what’s what ought to stay tuned. He or she won’t necessarily find a ‘perfect solution’ or complete answer, but at least we will all wrestle with useful questions; openminded, openhearted skepticism will be our foundation.

Whatever the case may be, all such purposefully misleading mediation inculcates ideation that serve’s capital’s imperial purposes like magic medicine to cure class consciousness and the concomitant disease of proletarian power. Any other explanatory nexus lies between marginal, or ancillary, and fatuous, or nonsensical.

For Big Tent’s 23rd installment, we’ll start by examining in some detail a central case of the American Social Horseshit that predominates hither and yon among gringos today. Assassinations have always worked like charms for hidden potentates. Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Kennedy brothers: ours is a culture of gangland impunity, where punishment is the fate of common sorts, not of the politically connected and fiscally privileged.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy would just be nearing the halfway mark in his 107th year were he still in the land of the living. Of course, sixty-two years back, when he was almost halfway through his forty-fifth year, assassins shot him up and splattered his brains out, with the most lethal effects the result of rifle fire from in front of him, on the ‘grassy knoll’ that rose along his motorcade route.

Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, along with the documentary film of the same title, likely remains the best starting point for comprehending this plot against humanity and historical tragedy. Whatever Kennedy’s political bona fides and peccadilloes, he had obviously done little more to deserve an extrajudicial firing squad than any other politician, before or since.

Except for one thing, clearly: JFK had threatened to dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency, one of whose Directors was Allen Dulles, an avowed enemy whom Lyndon Johnson appointed to the ‘jumping-to-conclusions’ Warren Commission, where Earl Warren promptly placed Kennedy’s nemesis as the ‘power-behind-the-throne,’ as it were. No other ‘elected official,’ before or since, has so suggested such a determination to act against ruling class interests in like fashion, attacking the C.I.A., a key linchpin of the National Security State.

Speaking of motive—a key to any grave crime, for the most part—a related set of organized gangsters also carried a large grudge against JFK. After all, ‘a promise is a promise,’ even if one’s father proffered the agreed upon deal: JFK wins Cook County in Illinois, and the Kefauver Commission comes to an end.

Instead, after Jack appointed his brother Bobby as Attorney General, the new administration extended and enlarged its ‘organized crime’ investigation. Since the CIA’s inception depended on the same gangsters who still rule the roost, such actors as culprits in this ‘crime of the century’ for the 1900’s are not out of the question.

Among thousands of sturdy sources for such assertions, the work of Jim Marrs must stand out to an extent. More on this subject will be part of next November’s issue, for the sixty-second anniversary of JFK’s losing his head to politics. Crossfire: the Plot That Killed Kennedy and Rule By Secrecy: the Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids arguably should form a part of citizens’ bookshelves everywhere.

The House Committee on Assassinations, of course, proffers more potent imprimatur to this line of reasoning. Almost certainly, the tip-of-the-iceberg Report reported that the spate of political murders that in a sense started with Jack’s brains splattered on the trunk of his limo originated from criminal plotters.

A litmus test for the promises, promises that have come down the pike from our soon-to-be President Donald Trump will be a comprehenisve declassification of the materials on these cases, again, almost certainly conspiratorial killings. I’ll cross my fingers, and we’ll see.

In that vein, what has been gnawing at my guts and my gray matter is how to talk about “the election” in a way that is not, most charitably, a spewing of spurious non-sequiturs. Maybe starting with Florida’s popular cesspools, and their commoditized culture and cornucopias of vomitus, would prove interesting, if nothing else.

Marco Rubio clearly a child of ‘Gusanos,’ will reemphasize Yankee supremacist pretentious presumption while Cubans suffer because of our supremely American tendency to shun anything that eschews maximum profits, even if these attempted brakes on plunder transpire in the name of human advancement or social well-being.

After all, this imperial and anticommunist righteousness, often seemingly quiet and calm despite its vicious presumption of superiority, necessarily accompanies having ‘neighborly relations’ with Cuba that develop along the criminally brutal lines that began with our ‘liberating intervention’ in 1898 and reached their midpoint with a disastrous and ludicrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Recent events in Ukraine evince similar sensibilities.

Without doubt, ‘business as usual’ will persist even as new ways of conducting affairs—given BRICS and Israeli attack dogs and more such unsettling and yet real blah blah blah—also come to pass. Today’s videos will have more to say. And we’ll see, ha ha.

As a matter of course, today results from centuries of all-too-often unacknowledged yesterdays, a past burgeoning with events sensibly central to understanding the here and now. Without exaggeration do I emphasize how the cosmos seems at times nearly to serve on a platter precisely the bits and pieces that help to complete a picture of what’s what.

I came across another such chance appearance as I was assembling my first Spotify playlist that includes Beatles cuts. I love the replay forever feature on the system. As I was adding some more songs, I was using the app’s repeat function to hear “Back in the U.S.S.R.” over and over again, when the ninth or tenth repetition of that “-aine” sound triggered my thinking: “are they saying, ‘Ukraine girls,’ I wondered?”

And of course the answer is yes. “The Ukraine girls really knock me out; they leave the West behind” with their Russian ways. People just refuse to notice more often than not.

Edward Crankshaw’s The Shadow of the Winter Palace offers an entirely different sort of prospect from which to view the entire contemporary charade in Ukraine, all too grotesquely a macabre dance of absurd murder and moronic mayhem. The Anglo and Anglo American imperial phalanx have a centuries-long hankering to dismantle the ‘Russian empire’ for their own devices.

From well before the Crimean War, the entire region—from Upland Greece through the Balkans to Ukraine and the Caucasus—were arenas of contention between Ottoman and Russian ‘interests.’ The British played their divide-and-conquer games throughout, with Netflix’s Reilly: Ace of Spies an instance of art’s imitation of life.

Crankshaw gives plenty of detail from down in the weeds, in no small part stories and developments about minerals and oil, including the Donetsk region where English capital fantasized finding new sources of coal and outlets for metallurgical ‘investment.’ The role of Kiev in the abortive 1905 stab at civil war punctuates ongoing imperial attacks on Russian sovereignty.

Whatever the case may be, as a result of the carnage in Ukraine, a current brutality in which the abortive 1905 attempt by Kiev’s commies to overthrow the czar and ignite a thoroughly Russian revolution remains a significant factor, tens of thousands or more have perished for profit, and millions of displaced Ukrainians—including the Beatles’ beautiful ‘girls who leave the West behind,’ are now on the move, trying to find safe haven, primarily elsewhere in Europe.

This all, inevitably, brings up issues of the movements of people over the face of the Earth, the migration of our kind hither and yon. Drug and resource wars, gangster-state grabs of territory and their ‘softening-up’ genocidal cleansings, a big chunk of Mother Earth is full of malice, wickedness, murder, and woe. Much of Africa; all of Southwest Asia; parts of Eastern Europe; much of Central and South America: every moment might bring carnage and mayhem.

People aren’t idiots. They don’t take Prozac, so neither homicide nor suicide has the appeal that seems to have for most moneybags and militarists, apparently. Therefore, okay, the clue phone again: folks gonna try to get away from all that butchery and vile torture; they migrate. Oh, yeah. Duh!

‘Yeah, but.’ Right? ‘Yeah, but there are, like, borders, you know.” Uh huh. Like the Secret Service protected Kennedy, that’s how borders will protect U.S. citizens; much like the way that Cherokee claims on Appalachia could somehow forestall the Trail of Tears.

“The Artificiality of Nations” is a review-essay by Colin Thubron in the October 17^th, 2024 issue of the New York Review of Books. Every word in it resonates, perhaps a few passages especially so. “For the journalist John Washington, in The Case For Open Borders, to be born on one side of a border rather than another should bestow no inherent right. Borders are mutable; nations are questionable constructs. Yet the place where one happens to be born 'disproportionately determines one's income, wealth, and longevity.”

A Swiss matron's life span surpasses a Somalian females' expectation by a quarter century. Nevertheless, “'(y)ou are where you are right now...because either you, your parents, or your ancestors once migrated there.'” The argument continues. “(N)ations are shaped by an agreed past: a process of selective remembrance and forgetting.”

A film by the inimitable and down-to-earth stalwart director and writer and producer, Errol Morris, addresses these matters from a different direction, that of actual lived experience. Separated demonstrates reality’s surreal look and feel, as if no social progress has transpired since the Romans lined the road to Jerusalem with crucified ‘rebels.’

The ever-useful New York Review has just offered an essay on the new movie. It’s a production, in significant part, of MSNBC, which means that certain sorts of idiots will despise it, while other measures of moronic will fawn over it. One thing is very definite in the whole situation: Errol Morris has integrity. Los Hechos Hablan Por Si Solos.

“Kidnapping children to punish parents is a mythic kind of barbarity. …threatening the bodily integrity of a beloved as an ‘incentive’ for a debtor to cough up ransom. … What then to make of a constitutional democracy that builds such a payment scheme into its very system of justice?”

The depictions are graphic, horrifying; the bureaucracy’s soulless efficiency grotesque, appaling: “What to make of a political regime that explicitly designs an immigration policy for removing children from parents just to ‘disincentivize’ future migrants from seeking asylum within its borders?”

To an extent, such documentation can only command kudos. The family at the heart of the story was fleeing narco-death-threats in Guatemala. As a matter of course, the C.I.A.’s involvement with such activities, up to its neck won’t likely ‘make the cut,’ and will end up ‘on the cutting room floor,’ but maybe something like magic may prove me wrong.

Happenstantially, as I unfurl once again the first bits and pieces of my vast library trove, I stumble—almost literally, as in tripping over the box high up in the lofty heights of my storage unit—on my copy of one of Robert Coles’ volumes of his completely epic Children of Crisis series, Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers. He demonstrates how closely tied—by experience, legal strictures, and psychic coping mechanisms—are the life paths of very diverse people, workers of different colors, religions, language, and nationality.

Coles makes clear the step-by-step process of making this system—and it is totally systematic—operate. Straw-bosses, overseers, police, and people desperate not to be “surplus populations” all try to make a go of things.

“‘I’m not very much of a believer. I’ll admit to that. I don’t mind those ministers coming around; they quiet my people down. But can anyone really believe what they say? My sister, Mary, she’s dead. My other sister, I keep her home in Florida, and she’s sick. She’s got tuberculosis. If I didn’t have money, if I was a poor bean picker like my people are, my sister would be dead—and my brother too.

He also has tuberculosis, just like her! Don’t feel sorry for them! They all get one thing or another, pickers do, the migrant people do. They die because their heads drown in cheap wine. They die from a venereal disease. They die because they’re drunk, and they fall into a canal or get run over. They die from the other diseases that migrant people get. Everybody gets a disease and dies, but migrant people, they get diseases twenty-five years before other people do.

I’m glad I make some money, and I know where to go to get a doctor, and I can pay him, pay him cash. Doctors are like growers; they pay attention to money. If you have money, they’ll take care of you. If you don’t, they’ll tell you to get the hell out of their office. My sister says the doctors are like the ministers, ‘God’s people,’ she calls them. I get a laugh out of that. I say to her, ‘God’s people,’ yes they’re ‘God’s people’ if you have ‘God’s dollar bill’ for them; and if you don’t, then they’re the Devil—worse than the Devil, because at least the Devil doesn’t pretend to be something other than what he is.”

Incontrovertibly, the labor of Hispanic immigrants has paralleled what Coles has illuminated about Black migrants in his work. Recent roof work in humble Roanoke, Virginia, fifteen hundred miles or so from Mexico, provided crystally clear evidence of these sorts of phenomena. ‘George’ was the lithe and leanly muscled, amicably intelligent second-in-command among the seven workers—the crew boss was a burly, crusty, elder who limited his English to an “Uh, Jorge!” if he needed the local lingo.

I’ve got a minimum of a few hundred personally witnessed anecdotes of this type. Life here will fall to pieces without immigrants. Just watch, ha ha.

The impact of these ‘value-added’ labor equations is a subject of an upcoming “Nerdy Nuggets” selection, mas o menos in May. For now, suffice to say that the United States massively and disproportionately gains from the entire immigration system, again, a legislated, planned, and regulated machination of plunder and exploitation, start to finish.

Not one such migratory fowl gets a ‘get out of jail free’ card the likes of that which Hunter Biden just received. Of course, exceptions exist. If one can find a role in some spooky playbook from Langley, Goddess knows, passports won’t prove problematic. The key, maybe, is to see that ‘el Cia’ makes perfect sense in terms of property and profits, banks and bananas, blah blah blah. More prodding and pondering along these lines lies ahead.

This world of optimized corporate outcomes rules most of the planet. In case one wonders, the exceptions are our 'enemies,' in particular China and Russia. Brazil and Iran are 'minor hoodlums' in the view of America's rulers, while massive powerhouses in South and Southeast Asia are at once 'targets' for alliance and potential 'victims' of our antagonists. What a world!

Julian Assange quotes “self-described ‘radical centrist’ Thomas Friedman along similar lines. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

One upshot, as a result, is that this violent and clearly vile kind of response becomes especially essential during periods of crisis. In Eurocentrism, Samir Amin writes lucidly about the sources of capital’s meltdowns. “Today, modernity is in crisis because the contradictions of globalized capitalism, unfolding in real societies, have become such that capitalism puts human civilization itself in danger. Capitalism has had its day. The destructive dimension that its development always included now prevails by far over the constructive one that characterized the progressive role it fulfilled in history."

Amin is one of many public intellectuals, whom honor generall impels to radical views—I mean, why be independent if the empire will pay handsomely for ‘services rendered’ in the propaganda sphere?—who will grace coming issues, always hypothesizing ‘Lord willing and the Creek don’t rise.” In the meantime, Brand Chaos sows its seasonal seeds of carnage and mayhem.

Along somewhat similar lines, unfortunately, one option for a more or less immediate human future is extinction. However, we obviously needn’t generally consider it the only possibility.

One can posit: profits can predominate over personal needs; that is possible, and the result will tend toward concentration camps or thermonuclear war, depending on the scenarios that prevail. Or one can imagine: we can insist, in Solidarity, that we at least attenuate profits to improve popular outcomes, and cause sadness and despond in CEO suites.

So, column A: most likely the extinguishing flames of Mass Collective Suicide; or column B: replacing property’s profiteering as the sole social value. Which should we select? Hmmmm.

Wait. Oh, it’s the clue phone. Hello? Oh, I see. We’d be nature’s most criminally grotesque monsters if we electively, or passively, allowed extinction to be our species’ choice, which, humorously enough, would mean that we deserved the hellish tragedy of an earlier than necessary eternity of nonexistence.

Today’s review—in part about Soviet Nobelist Yevgeny Yevtushenko and one of his novels, Don’t Die Before You’re Dead—makes this point repeatedly. Under the rule of such circumstances, Mass Collective Suicide would represent the biggest blunder in history’s sixteen billion years, ha ha! It would be akin to Magnus Carlsen losing a long chess match to the likes of me.

Do readers even care? It’s sort of laughable, like a surreal Marxist telling of a Seinfeld series, hilarious, dark, lethal, stupid, but in a sanctimonious and self-promoting—as in patriotically imperialist—way of transcribing the tape, as it were. It’s at least as sick as Mad Cows & Englishmen.

Anyone who does cling to the concept of a salubrious future, in other words a citizen who cares, can spread the word. It’s how we started this issue. Getting anywhere useful is utterly unlikely if one insists on starting with manipulative lies and mendacious fraud.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, meanwhile, which also emerged from its dusky, dusty home in a box, led me to its sequel, OMGoddess, literally. The hope—no matter the travesties of travail and treachery—for human life in the future is a powerful inducement to yarnspinning. Thus, this from the original title is quite natural.

A key mid-narrative transition occurs with the canonization—in what would be the twenty-seventh century but for apocalyptic new orders of time—of Isaac Edward Leibowitz, an early twenty-first century Jewish ballistic missile engineer who survived Armageddon’s Flame Deluge to become a wandering Catholic prelate whose calling was to rescue knowledge from other survivors who, because they blamed people like the future Saint for the chaos and destruction that eliminated 95% or so of humankind from the land of the living, wanted to erase both the learning that led to destruction and those who knew and understood these matters. This process of declaiming the good Father a Holy Saint occurred near New Rome, which had by then moved to North America.

A scholar of that future time, skeptical that the ‘wonders and terrors’ of species history were false—that no Einstein nor other geniuses made big bombs; that people did not have machines that took them on roadways and into the air; that people often lived long lives full of plenty; and such ‘miraculous’ similar claims—wanted to examine the ‘documents’ that a humble monk had uncovered when a serendipitous rock slide had revealed an old bomb shelter full of skeletal remains and papers and more. This latter-day professor explains his skepticism to a priest who is part of the territorial leadership. He refers to a passing commoner on the street.

“The scholar was pointing at the shadowy figure of a peasant leading a donkey homeward at twilight. The man’s feet were wrapped in sackcloth, and the mud had caked about them so that he seemed scarcely able to lift them. But he trudged ahead in one slogging step after another, resting half a second between footfalls. He seemed too weary to scrape off the mud.”

The analyst explains to the cleric how the commoner’s lack of cognitive capacity explained his not riding his donkey. The priest acknowledges this. “‘He passes under my window too. Every morning and evening. Hadn’t you noticed him before?”

“A thousand like him.” The scholar continues, “Look. Can you bring yourself to believe that that brute is a lineal descendant of men who supposedly invented machines that flew, who traveled to the moon, harnessed the forces of Nature, built machines that could talk and seemed to think? Can you believe there were such men?”

The learned fellow amplifies his indictment. “Look at him! …Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them. He will sell them anyway, when they are old enough to be useful. Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?”

The Father’s reply is quick: “(t)he image of Christ, grated the monsignor, surprised at his own sudden anger. ‘What did you expect me to see?’”

The latter-day researcher is equally alacritous in response, ‘huffing impatiently.’ “The incongruity. Men as you can observe them through any window, and men as historians would have us believe that men once were. I can’t accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?”

The Catholic’s answer conveys one sort of explanatory wisdom. “‘Perhaps…by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.’”

Whatever grains of truth inhere in such a view, a Big Tent perspective would take a dialectical and historical approach to reach a somewhat different estimate. Basically, a later passage from Walter Miller’s inventive futuristic fable hands over such a more humanistic aspiration, as it were. An Abbott at Leibowitz’s sanctuary awaits the above inquisitor’s arrival.

“Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all.

There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the non-moral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal, and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.”

Ah, yes. Resurrection. Another NYRB mailing has a grounded and patient intelligence in reviewing Tales From the Borderland, a monograph from the former Israeli Defense Forces officer who has taken up the study of Jewish historical experience in the land of his mother, which is to say the lot of the Ukrainian/Ruthenian peoples who lived in first the Austro-Hungarian and then the Polish hinterlands, which have a story, wow.

However, the ups and downs have entailed some of world history’s epic slaughterfests: hence his forebears’ skedaddling. Only maybe 600 original Jews remain. And now, as a matter of course, we are to believe that this mass-murder-mandate permits not a single alternative operationalization of the resources and potential of this rich land, squarely in the heart of some of the most productive land on Earth, ‘borderland’ or not.

The subtitle of R.J.W. Evans’ review evokes a chilling sensation if one has much of a grounding in the relatively recent past: “Making and Unmaking the Galician Past.” This is the territory of some of the most gruesome dismembering battles of Mikhail Sholakhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. This is the butchery of World War One as a horse cavalry operation.

Ironically, perhaps, Omer Bartov’s obviously soulful Jewish identity leads a reader to ponder. Huh. How ‘bout them apples?

The same folks who figure that they can purloin the planet with a combination of Mossad and IDF and the hegemonic imperial phalanx’s blessing—from Damascus to Central America, via Palestinian genocide’s ‘successful cleansing—they are the participants who also order up armageddon rehearsals in Ukraine.

One thing is impossible in reading such material, and that is the whining snivel that ‘it’s all Putin’s fault.’ Once more then, in any event: are scenarios like these our only possible end result? A slippery slope to Mass Collective Suicide? I beg to differ.

Instead, obviously, games of skill and other competitions could help us to settle disputes, with the stipulation—for the love of anything other than profit—that we uniformly have equal social rights and responsibilities. I love backgammon, chess, bridge, Scrabble. I respect poker and Go and dominoes and more, though they’re either too hard or too boring for me.

The endgame, so to say, is that competition is both inevitable and important. Human advance has depended on it. It doesn’t mean—I’m holding my f**king tongue here—that we have to butcher each other like psychotic zombie monsters on the loose. Culture’s optional opportunities give us other choices.

Along these lines, recent brouhaha about ‘social media’s negative impacts,’ especially on young people, is also a kind of contest, in this instance between the right to speak freely and potentate plans to powerfully palpate optimal plunder by controlling not only what citizens may communicate, but also the flow of opinions and data and ideas themselves that are, altogether, both a shaping force and plotted result of the stories that we tell around the fire, so to say.

‘We really want to help these troubled youth.’ Yeah, right. ‘Have ye been techin’ yerself, son?’ Take your Prozac now.

The irony here, if one may use such a safe and understated term to describe such perfidy, is that the same ‘caring authorities’ who want to ‘protect’ youth from ideas also mandate force-feeding children ‘medicines’ that are toxic inducements to pathological responses such as suicide, homicide, and utter alienation from everything even vaguely kindred to community or personal empowerment. Concomitant highlighting of ‘assisted dying services’—on TV almost daily at minimum—has to seem unsettling.

In essence, therefore, as well as promoting a Mass Collective Suicide Express via its Modern Nuclear Project, plutocracy appears to promulgate poisonous dosing of our progeny in a sort of sidebar to what an observer might call a Purposeful Individual Suicide Planning Process. Recent television ‘reporting,’ or, more accurately, misinformation, centers such ideation while advertisements parallel this almost relentless pummeling of the public mind with an attitude toward human life akin to the notion that ‘sometimes you just have to put the old critter to sleep,’ ha ha.

Amazingly enough, though passionate partnership is arguably history’s most potent power—see today’s “Communication and Human Survival”—it barely has a supporting role in any serious drama of mediated and virtual spaces. I watch a lot these days; it’s homework, as well as relaxing mutual appreciation with my lover.

I pay attention to lots more. The closest that I’ve seen is the Inspector and his Missus, the Thursdays, on Endeavour, and this is much more an only mostly friendly master-servant relationship. Except for little matters like murder and plunder and rape, the connection, in the materially compelling series, Rome—perfect as imperial teaching tool—between Titus Pullo and both of his mates approaches a union akin to human.

Obviously, though, the odds are tons better than two in a thousand, ha ha. And, no matter what, the only future for a humankind lies along such a path. Maybe, a la, BTR on occasion, like today—with Rose and Samsen—we ought to create and share a healthy intersection’s potentiating glory, ha ha.

In a similar vein, our kind’s honoring of Life Force Energy has meant that—prior to today, unfortunately, all too often in the belly of the beast here in America—men and women have played the part of lovers for each other, so that, almost without exception, our ancestors have left us the magnificent legacies of the here-and-now because they coupled and copulated and cohabited and constructed communities together.

Along many other tangents than the day to day are our loving relations our foundation, the source of whatever groundswell individuals’ days and nights might collaboratively construct. Children, gardens, great grandmas, and online magazines are all part of what is possible through relationship. All that is conceivably available emanates from interconnection. Period. Paragraph.

Our capacity to express adoration for each other is clearly adaptive. ‘Through thick and thin’ would prove an insurmountable obstacle otherwise, ha ha. A more archly ironic way of stating the case would be to suggest that one might just as well find someone whose quirks and peccadilloes were at least plausibly tolerable to one’s sensibilities, not to mention one’s analytical or cognitive sense of how matters actually stand.

In any event, perhaps the truly adorable aspect of the entire dynamic is that each of us has the potential openminded, openhearted ardor to find at least one lover and comrade and partner whom we simply adore—an Aphrodite for me, an Eros for thee—in so doing realizing a key aspect of human community for at least ten thousand years or so.

The very thought, “we have chosen each other!” so resonates the psyche and succors the soul that it serves as a foundation for all lasting human conjunction. This cries out for a taste of #24’s Woods Word Essay. “Swimming Together Through It All” is the title of one version.

“However Titanic The Typhoons & Tsunamis That Fate Percolates For Us To Endure, So Long as We Can Continue Together Our Swim Through it All, Gale & Downpour Alike, the Sidereal Pulse of our Carnal Conjunction & Our Adventurous Routines of Joyous Jumping Frolic Will Incline Us To Smile in Style Through Every Trial That Might Pile Upon the Days & Nights as We Sail Through Storm & Flood.”

Lysistrata sets a stage, or establishes a stage, for Sam Cooke and Donovan, who appear in the “Communication & Human Survival” item on tap for today, along with the Russian author of the epic Babi Yar. Culture circumscribes the outer limits and inmost depths of individual battles for beauty and joy. How do we want to go about our participatory parts? Hmmm?

The primacy of the purely personal approximation of perfection guarantees that—in spite of the biggest sales potential, bar none—mediated nuggets of erstwhile ‘entertainment’ almost never truly represent serious relationships with much more than stuff or money. The exceptions will be subject to inspection soon. A single example tells a powerful tale.

Tennessee Ernie Ford and others suggest a working class life, a miner’s, toil and travail, in a much-covered song, one that he wrote and made iconic, to wit, “Sixteen Tons.” The song sold 400,000 45 records in eleven days, and just Ford’s version tops twenty million paying listeners—not including Spotify and such.

That these themes of class conflict and exploitation are so successful cannot explain the diminution of their share of the storytelling businesses that supposedly cater to our concerns and preferences. This sort of semi-censorship ends up being ubiquitous.

Abortion remains very much a central issue, for instance, in the puritanical, judgmental, sex-shaming expressions of an All-American-Way, so to say. The potent witness of The Handmaid’s Tale—as book and more—forces us to wonder why this social conflict—in which roughly two-thirds of people absolutely reject prohibitionary regimes in terms of terminating pregnancies.

Women will end their gestation when their lives and well-being depend on it. A government or so-called ‘societal leadership’ that seeks a long term suppression of this right will inaugurate chaotic mayhem at best. This is why Atwood’s novel and the electronic expressions thereof have in all probability reached billions of people.

Copulation and frolic are as much our lot as the Binobos. We can no more ‘escape this alive’ than evolving into an oxygen-free environment will ever happen, under any circumstances. Ha ha.

An obvious consequence of all of this, obvio po, is families. The vaunted family unit, in one form or another, has definesd the ubiquitous origin point of every human so far. Nothing approaching Aldous Huxley’s industrially-inseminated and robotically-raised urchins and youth—a la Brave New World—has thus far come to pass.

How are families in America doing? Many manage to thrive, but the data is grotesque insofar as we hope to position our progency in potent places of purposeful accomplishment. America sucks on every indicator from infant mortality to inculcating capacities constructively to calculate things like A.P. Calculus. This cannot, in any likely evolutions of everything, lead to prosperous villages and healthy residents in them.

Inevitably, a key hope for human community will always remain an experience of well-being for the resident citizens. Yet how can a Homo-Sapiens aggregation manifest the conditions for collective and individual health and wellness, joy and strength? However one tries to answer this query, one response is obviously nonsensical or worse, to wit that ‘only if we take mandated medicines can we flower.’

As many as two thirds of new Parkinson’s cases are pharmaceutically induced. The ‘prescriptions’ that Pharma Phalanx firms use to bribe monopoly media universally end with a litany of jumbled rapid warnings, “including death.” The indicia of a truly disordered society—fifty percent obesity?—are simply omnipresent.

What is health, anyway? Can one ever experience well-being if one lacks a healthy body? Such questions, unfortunately, don't appear much in our speculations about and indictments of what Marcia Angell described as a 'Pharmaceutical-Industrial-Complex.'

And what of resilience and the empowered balance that nature guarantees to any critter that manages to survive the trials and travails of laborious birth and delicate infancy? Again, except in the work of erstwhile 'right-wing' medical practitioners, such ideas are few and far between.

Just to keep things straight, a recap can be helpful to start. In a nutshell, diseases are at most—except in rare exceptions—mainly a cofactor in morbidity and mortality. After all, pestilence isn’t even one of the original four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear in order in Revelation as Conquest, War, Famine, and Death itself.

Some authorities liken the first of these riders, on a white horse, to plagues of one sort or other, but the text is clearly about conquering on the part of at least proto-human actors, not demise—or conquest—by then unknown agents of disease. This point, important if not central, impels us to ponder this matter because in fact, as well as in popular imagination, the causal elements in human mortality clearly delineate social components rather than what we might term ‘biological mishaps.’

I've written about the great influenza epidemic that afflicted people for years at the end of the world's first named global war. My grandfather, only twelve at the time, nearly succumbed. To emphasize the garish, gargantuan horror of SARS-CoV-II, H5-N1, and so forth, pundits point portentously at this Ur-Flu's carnage, a maddeningly fatuous and utterly false assessment that synchronizes aptly with corporate needs for profit's eternal increase.

For our purposes here, then, the notion is easy to summarize neatly. “World War One, not a Spanish flu virus, was the likely largest factor in a wave of up to fifty million or more deaths in the aftermath of that now long ago ‘Great War’ that all the ‘Great Powers’ undertook for purposes of plunder, profiteering, and plutocracy.”

Similarly, societal dislocation—war, impoverished and persecuted migration, starvation and hunger, imperial oppression of as much as a substantial minority of the entire species—accounts for the impacts of this SARS-CoV-II respiratory virus. Whatever the pathogen's origins, in other words, healthy societies and their resilient citizens would have experienced little difficulty in thriving through any illness that would likely result in any particular case.

As a general summation of fact, therefore, the primary sources of our greater contemporary longevity and reduced disease have been in providing plenty of less rotted food and less polluted water, with plentiful fresh air and chances for salubrious shelter and rest nearly of equal import. At the same time, the favorite part of the ‘story of Public Health’ for those in charge concerns technical advances in medicine and surgery and pharmaceuticals and such.

In many ways, the most central and important components of modern existence entail some piece or other of the broad arena of Public Health. A Driftwood Message Art sentence proffers an easy exit for this broad overview of these issues.

Selling Science is its title. “Having Ever Risen in Tandem With Expanded Knowledge & Its Application to Policy & Practice, Living Standards, & Their Ineluctable Universal Appeal, Have Assured That Capacities to Predict & Control Nature Have Grown Apace, Eliciting Sales of Science & Its Legerdemain to High Bidding High Rollers, Who Now Control Both 'Public' & Corporate Campus Labs That Engender & Then Engineer Often Predetermined Consequential 'Truth' That Potently Promotes Paymasters' Profits, Altogether a Ubiquitous Dynamic That Transpires in No Realm More Clearly Than That of Public Health & Social Welfare."

In such a context of slippery salespeople and insidious ‘treatments,’ a la my love and my meeting on Unjected, the social hegemons of Facebook’s vomitus desperately hope that dissidents will feel daily like delusional dolts. “Be adult, not a dolt,” I quip to myself. ‘Am I crazy?’ seems all to frequently appears a rational belief. Such nonsensical crap persists because profits surpass pathological potentiation.

Without a single doubt, psychic aplomb—the euphemistic mental health wellness—is important. Especially is this true today, when the means of individual dispatch are not only innumerable but officially sanctioned, even encouraged. My advice to plutocrats notwithstanding—euthenize yourselves—“I Shall Be Released” seems an apt anthem for the present passage.

Here’s a clue. Delving that particular organic aggregation, so to say, nothing so undermines a sense of joie de vivre and cosmic enthusiasm as does a grotesque and unnatural sex shame. If only to affirm experimental attitudes, maybe we might try things differently, honoring and encouraging pleasure principles rather than pain’s palpation at every path’s turning.

Almost as a matter of course, then, a BTR POV entails considering matters of men and women, male and female, coupling and copulation. The undeniable origination of these data-points is in the fruition of gestation in a live birth, the overwhelming majority of which—99%?—come from connubial conjunctions, often enough—and always electively—frolicsome and felicitous in their frenzied joyous frisson.

Eros and Libido are the only qualities congruent with human survival on a planet with plus or minus nine billion specimens with a more or less robust sexual appetite. This is an inherent condition of our continued viability. “Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything,” a precursor to the Golden Rule; in addition we should readily recollect, Ten New Commandments number ten: “All Other Matters Are Negotiable.”

Ha ha. I’ll hope that this all adds up.

In the course of assembling yet another Big Tent Intro, this Marshall Artist gets to dive down a plethora of rabbit holes, basically something akin to Jimbo-in-Wonderland on almost a daily basis. Each such episode involves searching, about which more later, not for more conclusions, more opinions, more expertise, but for a grasp on more probing and incisive interrogation of nature and culture.

‘Why am I so fat?’ ‘How come I’m so creaky?’ ‘Why do my taxes help to murder people who are my cousins and could be my friends?’ These are the kind of posers that I pose to myself every single day. As the evidence accrues, the likely accurate reply is pretty simple: ‘the schemes and gaming trickery of capital as it seeks to make profit’s ascendancy seem to appear inevitable and eternal.’ Ha ha. Get used to it?

What shows up is happenstantial and, often enough simultaneously, providential as in the growing gaggle of lawsuits against the expansion of the use of Fluorine in human culture—all to serve the Modern Nuclear Project, no less—despite its gruesome impacts, largely neurological, on the human condition. That Uranium Hexafluoride plays a cental role in human culture is just undeniable. What follows consequentially, going forward, may, just conceivably—for a healthy change of pace—depend on our acting in our own best interest.

One of the more important thinkers whose name and work we’ve barely breathed is Norbert Wiener, he whose Human Use of Human Beings appears in next month’s Introduction and more. For the moment, we might just consider this math aficionado’s take on entropy.

“Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability.” The import of this awareness concerns the work and other sorts of effort that are possible to devote to ‘the human use of human beings.’

No matter what else is true, an undeniable attribute of any healthy social setting is plentiful energy for people to use as electricity, as process and ambient heating and cooling, and so on and so forth. A sampling of recent BTR interlocutors make this point, with Frederick Soddy’s at the head of the class because of je ne sais quoi and professional proficiency—all those Nobel Prizes and the like.

The A.I. summary is neatly packaged. “Frederick Soddy's central argument regarding energy and society is that human economies, based on finite natural resources, are fundamentally constrained by th e laws of thermodynamics, meaning that our ability to extract and utilize energy is limited, unlike the seemingly limitless growth potential of money, leading to an unsustainable mismatch between ‘real wealth’ (natural resources) and ‘virtual wealth’ (financial capital) if not carefully managed; essentially, we cannot continue to consume resources at an exponential rate without facing ecological collapse."

Soddy has shown up several times in these pages. He will have more to say, given time and tide. His point invites refutation. Until someone can overturn it, however, I’d stipulate its general accuracy.

In that regard, M. King Hubbert, we learn today, started out as an authoritative proponent of the ‘inevitable necessity of the Modern Nuclear Project. Both from his experience of duplicity and dirty dealings on the part of industrialists and their financil backers, on the one hand, which is to say the U.S. Government and its ‘friends in high places’ on the stock exchange and the like, and from learning of the suppresed potential of truly renewable energy sources, Hubbert ‘switched teams.’

That is quite a story and will be part of the next few issues here in the land of ‘big tents,’ big hearts, and big dreams. The litany of lethal attributes of forays into fission and fusion notwithstanding, the only actual issue of import may well be H-bombs: get rid of them, and the entire MNP comes to pieces; keep them and wait for the Mass Collective Suicide Express to arrive, whether in a scheduled stop or guest appearance.

So saying, ‘what now my lovelies?’ Always an apt query, perhaps it especially resonates now, as the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ teeters on the verge of cowardly kowtowing oppression. When in the course humanity’s eventualities folks face such fierce struggle and its promise of ferocious fighting, what is to be done?

Mr. Ulanov, the thinker whom most people know as Lenin, asked just that question. His answers still apply, unless citizens instead favor some version of Auschwitz or Hiroshima as the SOP future. We must rein in empire, increase our collective solidarity, and increase a people’s media.

One description of a Big Tent approach to things views the entire program here as a ‘seeking-process,’ or something of the sort. That said, I’ve always found search engines and such research tools fascinating. I would have been doing a ‘Recent Interesting Queries’ section here before now, except that I didn’t realize that Google still had easy access to the number of citations that had proved responsive to a search.

My erroneous belief is somewhat humorous. The clue-phone all too often goes unheard in my little world ha ha. Google embedded the information, and I, figuring some sinister and conspiratorial purpose, assumed that the company had simply ended its practice of making that data easily accessible.

In a sense, every assumption is an inference, one of the key ‘thinking words’ in my earlier life as a coach for Korean and Chinese students. One can wax eloquent at some length about the verb, ‘to infer,’ and its additional iterations in other parts of speech. The source of deduction must occasionally be factual, eh?

In that regard, here’s a regular BTR feature. The following links occurred in conjunction with each other at some point; they now feature among my 1,100 open tabs, plus or minus, LOL! What do they imply? What can we infer therefrom? Such inquiry is, plausibly, creditable.

Here are seven from a brief scroll into the past, from more or less six or seven weeks back. For the most part, they are self explanatory, so that little extra contextualization is necessary, even if each one could lead down an infinitely extensive rabbit hole, ha ha.

Numero Uno: <My half-a-world-away comrades at Countercurrents are congruent in their excoriating Mass Collective Suicide>. Nihon Hidankyo deserves ongoing Nobel Peace Prize equivalents.

Numero Dos: <This is from Yves Smith and collaborators at Naked Capitalism, sensible discourse about Palestine>. Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff ought to mandate close attention.

Numero Tres: <The legal sites to which I subscribe bring misogyny and murder to the fore over and over again>. This kind of story is Standard Canon all the way, perfect for today’s “Communication and Human Survival” articulation.

Numero Quatro: <This is just one of Quoras daily delights, about ‘correcting Einstein’>. Science geeks unite!

Numero Cinco: <This Quartz profferal about the megabucks nuclear technocracy is instructive, if also complicit>. The Modern Nuclear Project may indeed be unstoppable, but survival may yet win out instead. More is coming on these matters, in any case.

Numero Seis: <Here’s a link that shows why I stopped my Atlantic subscription, a quite likely pharma hit job on psychedelics>. Readers might compare and contrast the monumental work of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies.

Numero Siete: <This is one of Jon Rappoport’s little reportorial gems on Substack>. BTR’s trans-fetish materials are perfectly congruent, at least on the facts.

Additionally, an avowed common introductory practice is to present interesting searches that have underpinned assembling this outpouring of words and images and ideas and love. Ha ha. ‘Answers require questions,’ and all that.

In any case, here’s the first search for this issue: <fluorine OR fluoride alzheimer's OR parkinson's OR neurological research>. Much to my surprise, this yielded just 90,000 hits shy of serving up three million links. People are paying some coin to attention’s charges, ha ha.

The link between this most toxic of the Goddess’ charted periodic gifts and dementia is incontrovertible. Most people find the prospect of death by such means especially nauseating. A forthcoming article about the history and litigation of fluorine is at hand: next issue, actually.

A second search concerned a big chunk of this issue, which revolves around Greek myth and legend and ancient historical practice. It made 316,000 connections: <maenad OR "wild women" greek OR roman OR ancient drama OR myth OR legend OR story>.

Now clearly, ‘wild women’ like my sweet lover—and the import of said female desire in the whole course of human survival—are part and parcel of the entire Big Tent project. Both accounts about Wilhelm Reich hinge on the necessity of venting womanly erotic needs, in one way or another, salubrious or fascist as the case may be.

Yet a third search also emanated from the ‘Greek focus’ herein. It applies to the Tarot Reading in #23, where the King of Cups, as Orpheus, plays a prominent part. It found 132,000 citations: <orpheus eurydice deconstruction OR exegesis OR analysis OR interpretation>.

Anyone can see the psychic impact of this question of ‘faith enough to persist without constant reassurance.’ These inner workings of myth and legend, thereby, retain their universal applicability and interest. One might ask: ‘“Were I to retrieve my beloved from death’s eternal ‘underworld,’ would I be able to do as Hades commanded and not look behind?”

Now, a fourth and—for today—final delving of the cosm is this: <jfk assassination fatal OR lethal shot OR wound>. Ah, yes, the fact of a murder conspiracy by those who still ‘lead’ our ‘nation’ might make sense to explore. Congress thought so, even as the unavoidable conclusion—for anyone who reads the material—made these politicos antsy as often as not

I’d be nervous too, in their shoes. Hell, I’m nervous in mine. As I wrote in last month’s Snippet journal, November 22nd is hereby Conspiracy Fact Truth Day. “In spite of trillions of messages of monopoly media horse manure about 'lone gunmen,' random accidents, and simple mistakes…at least a significant majority of citizen observers come to the obvious conclusion that almost all important matters of governance and power entail secret cabals of capital's captains who, in covering up their plotting, also manage to steal as much plunder and profit as possible in every instance of their conniving chaotic thievery, mayhem, and murder.”

In the Eurasian geopolitical arc that includes Ukraine at the North and Palestine in the South, such concerns remain ever apt. How about them apples in Syria? If the ruling class can’t have Ukraine as an outpost against Russia and a bulwark of mineral treasure, what other targets can possibly suffice instead? A collective gulp is in order whenever such an interrogatory flashes in the collective brainpan.

An apt question must remain, ‘How in hell has this all happened?!’ Put another way, ‘Why have things turned out so monstrously and corruptly and with such a calculated mix of profiteering and plunder?’ A piece of Driftwood Message Art points the way, perhaps, to an accounting of comprehension.

“A Question of 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?'

As regards the perverse flirtation with Mass Collective Suicide that routine relations with Kiev’s gangland toadies entails, I posted on X.

“This is the prototypical policy-by-propaganda protocol of the plutocratic plunderers—monopoly-corporate-capitalists is an alternate name—whose erstwhile 'strategic objectives' actually include only one thing: maximum profits.

However, obtaining top-level, bottom-line gains in a world where capital's hegemony has caused catastrophic contradictions such as ecosystem collapse and Lysistrata-level gender wars is much easier said than done.

So what's our poor, pitiful bourgeois to do? Ah, I know!

They'll suggest 'geopolitical moves'—murderous thieving conspiracies is another name—that will boost key profits in similar ways as 'biosecurity moves'—murderous thieving conspiracies also names this process—make sure that critical financial and pharmaceutical ’interests’ ever achieve superprofits appropriate to their continuing predominance.

The wonder of all this is twofold. First, all too many people affirm the bullshit—murdering Russians and Ukrainians is necessary and intelligent.

Second, even as cognitive dissonance makes affirming the manure more improbable, folks remain passive about their having become accessories to mass murder that daily discovers plenty of ongoing opportunities to trigger Mass Collective Suicide. It's like a really sick, twisted joke.”

Many people just can’t be bothered. ‘Ukraine again? If I hear one more word about that little weasel Zelensky, I’m checking out of here!’ A close confidant’s sibling speaks along similar lines; I could name a hundred acquaintances who approach ‘current events’ in like fashion.

The trouble is that I can’t help myself. I’m a mirror image of that hapless little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” ‘Look at that! They’re naked!!!’

Despite the tendency for prophets, if they gain any audience at all, to face censure in their home territory, I can’t help myself. The things that just pop up to make clear the connections that a Big Tent approach suggests are just so fucking interesting. ‘Know what I’m saying?’

Today’s introductory mantra exemplifies this notion. Whatever one’s opinion of the result, in other words BTR’s #23, the topics and subjects and objects and facts and ideas here—assassination, sexual partnership, war, prosperity, and numerous other expressions of empirical and analytical blah blah blah—must fascinate all and sundry who have not deadened their lives in advance.

In that vein, readers for whom this summation resonates might start today with “Communication and Human Survival,” which includes some thoughts about a Soviet Nobelist. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose novel, Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, admonishes this materialization of ‘deadened lives.’

A Tampa Bay Times review is evocative. "Empty pedestals are frightening,” Yevgeny writes.

“They are frightening because the people who will be placed on them may turn out to be worse than their predecessors." The reviewer notes, “Only Palchikov, the hapless aparatchik has a ‘happy end,’” in part because he has a mantra, “the quote he repeats throughout the novel. ‘It's from Lermontov's short story, Taman, his wife finally remembers: ‘Where it won't be better, there it will be worse, but it isn't far back again from bad to good.’”

The entirety of this million words or so of aggregate BTR mostly comes down to an evaluation of collectivity in pursuit of a journey ‘from bad to good,’ that the hourly inescapable necessity of collaboration in turn makes equally inescapable a very concrete and historical requirement that the ways and means of governance will, in fact, govern matters at hand. Liking the fact, or not, has zero bearing on the outcome.

Inasmuch as human choice exists, therefore, either a collective evolution will miraculously become the people’s own effort, or we will face an imposed and likely ecocidal concatenation of corporate plutocracy’s election. Since the Modern Nuclear Project and its inextricably intertwined Mass Collective Suicide Express are the upshot of a hundred years or so of ‘corporate plutocracy’s elective hegemony,’ we’d equal our idiocy in swallowing CNN and such in the here-and-now if, going forward, we accepted such ‘leadership.’

As obviously as dawn, in such an aggregate context of inescapable interconnection—even if the attendant, fiercely fostered libertarian afflictions are dearly bought and deeply felt—the concept of anarchy has no credibility save as thought experiment or fairy-tale, an idea that I’ll follow up anon, now that I think about it. The accuracy of this assessment incontrovertibly applies for the past ten thousand years or so.

Before that, people did in fact practice something like a ‘matriarchal anarchy.’ Riane Eisler, in “Communication and Human Survival,” highlights this notion. But we are now, without any real choice except extinction, creatures of Social History. We cannot imagine a future that does not evolve from these intertwinings of historical context.

Inevitably then, a Big Tent deconstruction and reconstruction of this entire field of inquiry is forthcoming. For today, with so much water already under the bridge and vast stretches of river just ahead, we’ll merely examine some sensible ideas from a supporter of anarchist thinking as he writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, whose estimable contributions are always worthy of attention, even as the equally valuable Marxist Internet Archive would be at once more incisive and more scathing.

This query elicited 1,470,000 links: <anarchy OR anarchism practice possibility OR impossibility OR viability philosophy OR analysis OR explication critique OR rejection OR criticism>. One of them is Andrew Fiala’s “Anarchism” entry, a sympathetic and useful and thorough overview of the case for such a POV.

An apt scholar, Professor Fiala acknowledges that three of five objections to anarchic practice are unanswerable for ‘fundamentalist anarchists,’ so to speak. The idea is utopian, incoherent, and “toothless.’ All are compelling critique, with incoherence, perhaps, most potent.

“This objection holds that a political theory that abolishes political structures makes no sense. A related concern arises when anarchism is taken to be a critique of authority in every case and in all senses. If anarchists deny then that there can be any arché whatsoever, then the claim contradicts itself: we would have a ruling theory that states that there is no ruling theory.

This sort of criticism is related to standard criticisms of relativism and nihilism. Related to this is a more concrete and mundane objection that holds that there can be no anarchist movement or collective action, since anarchism is constitutionally opposed to the idea of a movement or collective (since under anarchism there can be no authoritative ruler or set of rules).” More or less, that is that.

Thus, here again we find ourselves on the cusp of launching a Twenty-Third Big Tent Review. I’m answering a calling here, if only for the sake and succor of my own soul. My life is aburst with love and meaning. Why exactly should I bother, or even care, about ignorant fools who deserve their fates?

The simple answer serves well enough. As Ben Franklin quipped, ‘either we all find a way to hang together, or, most certainly, we shall all hang, separately. I want to figure things out, with at least some infinitesimal potential of such a miracle’s including, for the first time in our kind’s kinetic trekking through things, a truly human future.

A brilliant yet bitter scholar in the pages of A Canticle For Leibowitz is speaking to an audience of ‘Leibowitzian’ monks about pending social transformation. “And how will this come to pass? …In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. …by violence and upheaval, by flame and fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.”

He surveys his listeners, who murmur a protest at such a fate. “It will be so. We do not will it so. But why? Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united.

Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last till the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges.”

Of course, we might instead choose to adopt an 'as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be world without end, Amen!' kind of view. Is that what we want? Inquiring minds want to know.

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Popular Education, Anyone?

‘Making Voodoo topical’ might state a staunch critic’s most generous characterization of this specific and, as it were, tidy spot on the regular Big Tent calendar. Big Tent Review’s proffers ever offer historical facts and current data, along with attendant exploratory hypotheses and analytical speculation. Per usual, such elements appear today too, juxtaposing, in the event, empirical and conjectural perusals.

A Needed Overview

I have realized for some time the ethereal disconnect between my own sensibilities about these profferals and how they must feel, or read as the case may be, to observers. Something potentially of interest—vaunted ‘Food For Thought’—is perhaps occurring, but it often lacks contextual connection between day to day reality and the images and ideas that show up in each ‘Reading.’

Therefore, I’m giving a broad summary of what these seventy-eight cards suggest, based on the philosophy and approaches of this particular approach to the Mantic Arts. In the event, The New Mythic Tarot’s programmatic method—at once scholarly and gentle, provocative and unassuming—proffers the authoritative substrate for everything that appears in these pages. So where does that leave matters?

One can only begin at the beginning. “These picture cards seem to invoke elusive memories and half-known associations with myth, legend, and folklore, and imply—despite rational objections—some kind of story or secret that cannot be logically formulated and which slips away the moment that we attempt to define it too rigidly.”

The pack that more or less typifies Tarot today is close to six hundred years old. It consists of two kinds of cards. One subset of twenty-two items deals with monumental mythic figures and problems; the larger group of fifty-six cards contains four narrative cycles that track four different exemplars of the Hero’s Journey.

The Major Arcana

Here we encounter ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical exemplars of psychic phenomena, ones that track the life passages and concatenated common experiences that every human undergoes, as well as the very often shared symbols and descriptors of core common components of every individual’s inner experiences of the delicate miracle of embodiment. From the Dionysian ‘step into the void’ of The Fool to the Ouroboros’ symbolizing constant completion and regeneration, these entries speak to overarching commonalities of our species’ sojourns—consisting of course of thoroughly individual forays—through ‘thickets of antithesis.’

This aggregate narrative arc makes perfect sense in the order that it appears in this Mythic Tradition of the Tarot, yet it might function with equal facility or foster similar fruition in many other ways. The Mythic Tarot purposefully “attempt(s)to restore some of the original simplicity and accessibility of the Tarot Cards,” in so doing promoting the notion that “humans were proud co-creators in God’s cosmos and, as microcosmic reflections of their divine source, had the power to transform not only themselves but also the structure of the world and even the divine realms.”

Universal symbols—like Mom and Dad; ubiquitous moral lessons—like love and balance; and key personal passages—like sacrifice and transition; offer up plausible purposes powerful potentiation of a specific sojourn through All-That-Is. The Major Arcana are primary building blocks in this interactive process of query and discourse. Everything begins with curiosity and query, with specific flashes of insight from each card possible to pluck, as it were.

The Four Suits; Minor Arcana

These fifty-six cards, fourteen from each suit, in turn exemplify four arenas that in many ways can summarize the meaning and feel of sapient embodied Hominid lives. In large part, at least arguably, love, thought, creativity—especially in team-building, and material well-being demarcate all of humanity’s living legacy of agency and world-making.

THE SUIT OF CUPS—Here, Aphrodite is the ruling Goddess. Her jealous suspicion of any mortal’s surpassing her glory and glee initiates the meeting of Eros and Psyche, whose fated marriage marks the arc of the numbered cards in the Cups, with Goddess-favored exemplary, legendary lovers in the higher ranks of the suit, where these iconic personalities symbolize deeper delving of the depths of desire and completion in the realm of relationship.

THE SUIT OF SWORDS—Athene guides this arena, where conflict and cognition delineate the arc of Orestes’ experience, from recognizing his murderous Father to avenging him by slaughtering his own Mother, Clytemnestra, who had dispatched her husband Agamemnon for his treachery. Athene’s appeal to an open, balanced mind is the heart of this arena, again with representative star-turns in the honor cards.

THE SUIT OF WANDS—Zeus himself starts out Jason’s team-building journey, which, from Ace through Ten, follows the hero’s path in his epic search for the Golden Fleece. The Emperor of the gods’ font of cosmic creativity circumscribes the material in this case, as usual with different entities, each to illustrate more about creativity and leadership, to fill in the honor slots of the array.

THE SUIT OF PENTACLES—Potent Poseidon palpates the pursuits in this most material of living stages. The tragedy and redemption of the world’s first craftsman and capitalist, Daedalus, creates the rising action and climax of the sequence of the suit from Ace to Ten, with mythic figures of this earthy domain, which Poseidon oversees along with the sea, standing in for the Page through the King.

A FEW ADDENDA—The New Mythic Tarot describes the deities and adventurers who form the symbolic and active elements of this tradition—Greek immortals and heroic mortals—as “(a)moral yet containing profound moral truths,” figures who “predate and permeate our modern religious symbols and permeate the art and literature of the entirety of Western culture.” The resonance of these symbolic and mythic and psychic components of Euro-American civilization ought to be obvious; in any event, the ‘Mantic Arts’ on display here do have a certain appeal, a certain je nais se quoi

Whether one buys this system or not, one can play a thought game with the Goddess. Who wouldn’t be willing to hear possibly useful advice and ideas about Love, Cognition, Creativity, and Wealth & Well-Being? Probably for almost everyone, on certain ‘special occasions’ anyhow, such fantastical speculation will prove to be appealing, and possibly somehow healing and salubrious.

And hence this regular selection of ask-and-answer at Big Tent Review: doing this work as part of my regular process of creativity and production regularly makes the tensions and uncertainties of my oh-so-personal ‘delicate miracle of embodiment’ more manageable, if not altogether malleable, ha ha. Life is much bigger than even the most glorious portals of mediation all mixed together in a maelstrom of meaning’s possible manifestation. Nevertheless, here we go again.

Anyone who does these sorts of things—whether Ouija or Tarot or otherwise—will acknowledge that Readers will always find threads in what appears. Human nature makes stories out of events that, only-very-rarely indeed, definitely delineate clear-cut interconnections, whether anticipated or unanticipated, among all that transpires. In this BTR section, therefore, as things inevitably unfold, storytelling naturally follows whatever shows up—‘food for thought,’ no matter what else the case may be.

Goddess Guidance is one BTR name for it all. For most Big Tent Review’s installments, this probing of the ether about matters at hand, instead of delving a client’s query or some aspect of my own life and times of more or less purely personal interest, has focused on wider-world problems and options. So too today.

Mother Nature, or in the parlance of one who would acknowledge in a slightly different way a likely essential feminine component to our world’s evolution from long ago to the here and now, Goddess Energy has given many indications of late that things in general have shifted toward a harsher set of ‘standard settings,’ so to speak. That these variations have likely social and cyclical and hidden elements, obscure at least to our limited capacity to comprehend, seems incontrovertible.

In the event, here are my Tarot Instructions, although part of me always wants to pose some simple ‘yes or no’ question that will, also always, elicit nothing useful. The process, for whatever it may be worth, is not fortune-telling, ha ha. For the most part, reality-based, which is to say empirical, predictions will win out in regard to such simple quests for a mere affirmation or denial.

This issue's Spiral Spread, meanwhile, in effecting the wider-world net of inquiry that Tarot casts, will be examining portents and possibilities, problems and prospects, in relation to public health and personal well-being in plausible intersection with RFK's nomination to head Health and Human Services. If one thinks of a truly popular ‘leadership-from-below,’ one may lay a decent foundation for imagining one of the prerequisites for human survival, Popular Education, an attempted exercise of which will ever show up in these pages.

In the event, the lay of the land, and of the cards, appears almost iconic, something that we will examine much more thoroughly below-the-fold. The King of Cups delivers Morpheus as the Essence. The temporal triad elicits Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and Orestes in the Two of Swords for the Past, Moomali’s The Fool for the Present tense, and Aristaes’ Knight of Pentacles for Likely Futures. The Four of Wands gives us Jason and his entire adventurous team en route to epic endeavor and collective capacitation, a powerful notice in relation to No-Matter-What, Opportunities. Problems & Prospects reintroduces Clytemnestra, her husband, and her son one step along life’s byways in the Three of Swords. The Synthesis yields the nonpareil Hermes, as The Magician, to finish up.

To complete this initial search for meaning, this issue will as usual examine a related notion. Health and well-being—or ‘life expectancy’ as expressing what one might expect from one’s passage—will never lose their topical appeal.

A Past-Present-Future layout will seek insights and ideas about creating credible connections and projects for grassroots well-being and mediation here in the Virginia Highlands. Standing for Past Portents, so to speak, the epitome of potency appears in the form of The World and its representation of Ouroboros’ cycles in human history.

Present Passages, meanwhile, takes a turn as…(continued below the fold)

All God’s Cousins(Ongoing)

(Chapter XXII closed like this. “Besides, a deeper game was in the works here. It may not have amounted to much, in the scheme of capital’s ‘solid-South’ mastery. But who knows?

‘Plenty of agents in the ‘30’s thought the South was ready for revolution.’ If Methodist sisters and Black auto workers and teachers and lawyers and professors and nurses and poor-people’s activist and plenty of others all started planning and scheming, maybe we just might make a revolution.’

The government of the United States of America, in any case, took no chances even as it oversaw the freeing of a few prisoners, if necessary.  No one, certainly not Dr. Sands, and definitely not David Thibodaux, was going to argue with that.”

This issue, we head more than 4,800 miles South, not to mention 331 miles East of Tuscaloosa to the passes of much higher mountains than Tuscaloosa approached with its fringe of foothills: from the Appalachians to the Andes.)

CHAPTER XXIII

***

Both of them had been smoking, more or less like miniature factory chimneys—his fiery spire masculine and tricked out in a plaid, long-sleeved shirt and khaki pants and little else despite the bitter dry frigid Andean air, hers feminine and bundled in leather and wool that covered her head to toe, with fingers ensconced in two pairs of gloves to keep the cold at bay—for most of their climb, riding the barely improved road past three thousand meters, snaking along on the way over a gable near the techo del mundo that was one of Chile's legacies to humankind.

Alvaro's mien, grim and nearly as fierce as his grip on the wheel of the relatively new Fiat, startled when the tip of his most recent cigarette dislodged and flew toward the back seat, where his “hijo de dos años” gurgled and bounced on their way home. He automatically cut his eyes to the rearview to make sure he hadn't ignited his son.

Just a few minutes prior, for her part, Pamela had closed her eyes, in and out of a soporific state after a night in Los Andes when she had been up and down with her son, changing and nursing and fussing and then “fumar, fumar, y mas fumar,” and “had spent most of the rest of the night playing 'Jack and Jill,'” tirando in the local idiom, “with my crazy, crazed, sex-mad husband,” who also happened, she admitted with a Joan Baez grin, to “make me feel more excited and alive as a woman, as a lover, than that American who had been twice his size ever made me feel.”

She hadn't yet confronted Alvo, given the way the evening had gone, with the rumor that Susanna had shared about his just-completed fortnight far to the South, as the Antarctic Autumn plummeted Chile's nether regions toward wintry darkness. She had a sense—“no soy huevona; no soy una idiota,” she proffered to herself with a shrug as she spit out a piece of tobacco from between her lovely teeth—of what she would learn had taken place among “another bunch of drunken sailors” more than a mile or two below the Antarctic Circle.

Pamela, wide-eyed, exuded a little sigh, nodding, “...porque manana, moriremos” before she worried her lip and gave a small laugh. “Well, who knows?” Just now, huddled down in her seat as they cleared the pass, she looked like a lean puppy curled up to keep warm, exhibiting small, involuntary, almost spasmodic, movements that served as a window to her dreaming soul.

Perhaps she wished, nestled in Morpheus' lair, that she had joined her uncle, “el radical,” when he had jumped the fence at the Cuban embassy four years prior, on September 11^th, 1973, the day that “el CIA” and the junta and its minions overthrew an elected Presidente who kept becoming more and more popular among Chileans. She wasn't immune to recognizing that things were worse, that social justice was in fact an estimable goal, though she might just as easily have been dreaming about horses or rabbits, “con ir a nadar o ir de compras.”

Alvaro, for his part projecting his own proclivities onto his always more-or-less practical and otherwise pure-as-driven-snow mate, had just gotten over a two year flap over Pama's friendship with his nearest brother, Jorge. He still might boil over if he thought about it much.

“Tres años,” thought Alvaro to himself. Actually, since that was the end of September, 1974, “it was precisely a thousand ninety-nine days ago.” He prided himself on exactitude, on keeping track.

“I have decided to write you because there are various things I want to say to you,” he had communicated in a letter that he left for her when he had returned to his quarters for a night in Valparaiso. Almost placidly, he proceeded to congratulate himself that, “first of all, con plena tranquilidad y satiafaccion mi etapa de celos paso a la historia,” an assertion at which Pamela exploded with laughter upon reading. “Historia my ass,” she thought, he'll never stop being jealous.

The point of making such a fatuous contention was, pretty clearly, to introduce his most recent manic fear about his wife's fidelity, what with 'projection's being the most primitive coping strategy' and all. Pamela had enrolled in a brief business administration course, figuring that neither extra income nor additional skills would hurt her any. Since Alvo was often absent and could not help her come and go, and even, as the day before, when he was present, he resented having to drive her hither and yon, his wife had gratefully and graciously accepted a ride home one day, “sola con Jorge,” Alvaro's closest-in-age younger brother.

When she discovered her husband's fuming feelings about this, she had tried to reassure him. “I could never trust Jorge with even a little kiss. Remember that he tortured me with those snakes when we went to the zoo,” creatures that to Pamela made Satan himself seem like a friendly companion. In fact, she explained, “he was trying to make up to me for scaring me so bad about all that.”

“Sin embargo,” this so brazenly violated the eldest sibling's code-of-honor that, despite being 'finished' with jealously, he had to write his wife about it and insist that it never happen again, not because it showed either untrustworthiness or a proclivity to stray, that would make him “una estupidez,” because his woman was so clearly good and loyal, but because it made him look bad. In the future, they would need to recruit another rider.

“Of course,” Monica regaled her children and friends in recounting the “whole nutty thing, that his brother was fair enough to be mistaken for gringo, that he was a full five and a half inches taller, and that with his broad shoulders and good teeth, like mine, people said he should be a movie star?”

She would smile and finish up, exhaling a puff or two for the many years that remained of her tobacco habit, “No se trataba de eso. Nothing at all.” She giggled to think of it. “He always said that he just wanted to be discrete.” She took on his voice, choking with mirth, “Valoro la discrecion!”

Except for a couple of cases when Alvaro was safely at sea and the light was safely low, this is how they had undertaken to keep her from having to take Santiago's buses to and fro while the young Commander was away soldiering. Only when Jorge had shown up last year, just after the beginning of Summer for an Andean New Year's Eve celebration, with a gorgeous blond goddess, and fiance, in tow, a woman whose possessiveness was very easy to see, had Alvaro's constant oversight about his brother receded into the past.

Besides jealousy, 'conquered' or no, the other obvious ingredient in the junior officer's thinking and reacting to whatever life served up—whether the inexplicable assassination of “mi puto padre” exactly twenty-three days before “El General, his excellency Augusto Pinochet” assumed command, meaning that he was starting the process of a coup that would kill ten thousand people, plus or minus, whose only crime constituted support for a socially just government, or a stepsister “who I got hot for, ai, yai yai, and who then seemed to get hot for me, whew!!” or something else altogether—was that he truly and completely honored his own horniness, a nod, or perhaps a bow, to the “nature and responsibility of being a man,” which, if it meant anything, meant seeking to “sell one's irresistible allure as a male to every woman whom I meet.”

He naturally suspected, even if his male supremacist cockiness prohibited his fully believing it, that “a fine goblet of woman like Pama” would be like him, willing to try all comers, so to speak. Thus, he watched her like an alpha wolf might prowl the periphery of his territory, always on the lookout for brothers and cousins who might try to mount one of his females. In the human social realm, this implied that he would monitor his beautiful wife very carefully indeed, whether in relation to “fucking Jorge” or more distant masculine cousins.

“Te tengo en la mira,” he nodded. “I've got to keep her in my sights.” According to Pamela, ever the pragmatist, macho men universally acted jealously. Such an explanation, perhaps too easy, nevertheless might help to comprehend one Alvaro Anaya.

In this vein, in truth, one of the sources for Alvo's envious watchfulness in the longstanding uproar over Jorge came from his own feelings for Mia, his wife's eight-years-junior sister, who at nineteen was much more in tune with his wild side, and all involved would affirm was even hotter, than was his lawfully wedded. …(continued below the fold)

Wood Words Essays—Just Joking! Or, Really, Not

Every piece of wood presents, in one form and another, a punch line, an ah-ha moment that might easily also serve as a giggle interlude’s ‘ha ha ha!’ The imagery that accompanies particular items prods this process of presenting a ‘punchy’ idea, but often enough the words on their own ought to work in this way as well.

Put simply, these Driftwood Art Messages serve as jests, jabs, ironic plays on words that intend either humor or an absolutely obvious and yet utterly unexpected linguistic continuation. The lyrics of “Sweet Violets” come to mind.

“There once was a farmer who took a young miss in back of the barn where he gave her a lecture on chickens and horses and eggs and told her that she had such beautiful manners that suited a girl of her charms a girl that he’d like to take in his washing and ironing, and then if she did they could get married and raise lots of sweet violets, sweeter than all the roses, covered all over from head to toe, covered all over in sweet violets.”

Back in the day—when I was ‘majoring in bridge and backgammon and poker’—if a duplicate partner’s hand was wildly weaker than I’d expected, I might quip when dummy came into my view. “What is this, a joke?” Having a sense of humor about matters at hand, even if mainly consisting of corny gags and word play, arguably makes much easier managing emotional and material darts and spitballs with aplomb.

Perhaps a dandy intro to this sphere of Marshall Arts’ Guaranteed Kick in the Aesthetic comes forward from a recent X posting. “Mass Collective Suicide is an irrefutable fact, in the shape of 15-20,000 Hydrogen Bombs which imperial potentates are inviting into the 'public sphere,' so to speak.

If people continue to permit such insane promotion of profits over any option for a decent human existence, we certainly deserve the fate that awaits us.

A Driftwood Message on the verge of completion speaks to this point. “Facts, Faced” is its title. A driven nail protrudes from the little wooden Ponder Panel.

“Even If Pointedly Perilous in Their Penetrating Potential, Prompting Painful Or Even Possibly Lethal Encounters, When Faced Squarely, Facts Are Easier, Both to See, & to Take.”

“The Cosmic Cradle” counts as a plausible follow-up, similarly from the Philosophy/Psychology/Spirituality section. “It’s a physics joke,” I tell Feral Nerd Performance Zone visitors, more or less true, if only on the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ha ha. I’ve always enjoyed how this one ‘reads.’

"The Cosmic Cradle's Rocking, Rarely Detected, Barely Detectable, Has Incubated the Stuff of Galaxies & Stars, the Earth & Us: the Vast Span of Matter & Energy in Transit Contains Nearly Infinite Reaches of Time & Space That, in Turn, Yield Both Every Conceivable Strange, Unexpected Artifact & Its Contemplation."

Quite plausibly, thinking about anything with robust attention will turn up anomalies, oddities, euphemistic turns of phrase that might merit a snicker if not exactly merry peals of laughter. Things all fit together, no doubt, but we must inevitably see the hilarious incongruity once we start asking questions.

This seamless conjunction of each little bit of All-That-Is nevertheless does necessitate inquisitive norms, a point which a Discount-Bin wooden letter ‘Q’ makes in its missive. “As Fatuous As Such Fancies Must Ever Appear, People Far Too Frequently Hanker For Answers Without First Formulating Intelligible Questions.” Ha ha. Or, as the case may be, ah ha!

The Marshall Arts Love-&-Erotic Passion category also contains exemplars of Driftwood-Message punchline practice. Anyone who has wrestled in the trenches of love’s merry ministrations will know the combination of tension and release inherent in the course of all true loving connections. One such stick has sold nine or ten versions, a ‘top-of-the-charts’ performance in my bailiwick.

I wrote to this buyer, for instance. “Here is the missive from the Homily Love Stick that you bought.” “Worming & Snaking a Way” is its headline, so to say. 

"Optimistically, at Least Plausibly, Given a Minimal Modicum of Decent Luck & Adequately Assiduous Due Diligence, I Might Manage to Worm My Way to the Sacred Central Chambers of Your Heart, &, With Your Own Fair Measure of Fortune & Pluck, You Could Succeed, Sneakily Or Otherwise, in Snaking Your Way to the Secret Sections of My Soulful Psyche As Well."

“This is the message to 'calligraphy' and ship with the 'wood worm.'"  So I wrote to my original Marshall Arts collaborator, Alicia, when someone else had bought a similar stick, with this iteration of the missive that we needed to mail to them.

"I Might Just, Conceivably, Given Dogged Due Diligence & a Decent Modicum of Luck, Manage to Worm My Way Into Your Heart, &, With Your Own Fair Measure of Fortune & Pluck, You Could Succeed, Sneakily Or Otherwise, In Snaking Your Way to the Center of My Soul & Psyche As Well."

Changing verbs and adjectives, altering the order of the clauses and phrases, switching pronouns—especially among first and third person—all make coming up with different words for the same idea relatively easy. Whatever the case may be, one may see these ‘repeating-motifs’ again and again among Marshall Arts output of bits and bites of culture’s cornucopias.

Along somewhat similar lines, this communique went out to a buyer who’d purchased the sixth or seventh instantiation of an, ‘ahhh, cute!’ outpouring of adoration. “Thank you so much for visiting us again.  Your support keeps us going.  Here is the message from your new piece of Driftwood Message Art.  

The title, “I Can't Hide,” might readily apply to us all. "I Might Almost Daily Deign to Cast My Die to Design Dissimulation of Actor & Spy, Or Gaming Plays of Artifice & Subterfuge to Lie, Or Dreaming Up Diligent Deception to Keep on the Sly, Yet No Matter What I Try, I Can't Hide My Heart From You."

I'll hope that your sweetheart finds this message, entitled "Love's Sharks," enjoyable.  "Always & Forever Both Sublime & Dangerous, Love's Merry Ministrations Allure Amorous Adventurers, Naked of Defense, to Immerse Themselves in Venus's Virgin Coves & Their Ever Pristine Waters, Even As Lusty Longing Lures Other Smitten Swimmers to Dive Into Shark Infested Depths of Murky Desire,That, in Their Turn,
Threaten Imminent Bloodbath."

Dozens of Love Trinkets and Love Charms have entered the wider sphere from the Marshall Arts tent. Many of them also embody quips and jabs, jibes and silliness. The following twosome is typical enough.

The first is more jocular. “You Lob Love Bombs That Send Me Shell Shock, Jolting My Heart to Jump With Joy & Leap With Stunned Delight.” The second is more winsome. “Like Fish Out of Water, Without You, I Can't Find Any Portal to Get in the Swim of Things.”

Paralleling and then blooming out of this ‘Garden of Earthly Delights,’ another Ponder Panel speaks to how all of this burgeoning palpation of passionate engagement leaves our sensibilities. ‘Stunned With Love,” says one message from the Driftwood-Muse of loving intersection. A ‘natural development’ from such a turn, so to say, might appear in the form of this artifact.

“Emotional Energy's Psychic Thickets” is its metaphorical statement of the case.   "Emotional Energy, Flowing Through Us Like Groundwater's Springs Gush Beneath Even Seemingly Arid Dunes, Determines, Often Enough, the Psychic Thickets That Sprout Up on the Surface of Things, a Prime Reason For Wise Counsel That One Always Acknowledge & Seek to Apprehend, & Never Ever Ignore, Even One's Most Uncomfortable & Unpleasant Feelings."

A glorious piece of discarded cedar develops an intricate expression of a similar perspective about the fiery feelings and fierce actions that flow from the existence of a force like passion in our lives. “Only One Permissible Complaint” is a complex yet elegant exemplification of this point about the intersection of love and desire and empowerment in Homo Sapiens’ collective ambit through time and space.

“As We Meander Or Maraud Through Sometimes Malignant Mountains, Equally Malevolent As Magnificent, & There Encounter Energetic, Enigmatic Monstrosity, Along With Unanticipated & Occasionally Enervating Mayhem, We May Manifest a Mental Map That Guides Us to Gather That Existence Ratifies As Valid But One Complaint, Which Is to Say Some Issue Or Exigency That Our Own Action & Attention Cannot Address & Ameliorate, Curtailing If Not Curing Affliction, This Sole Well-Grounded Gripe Possible to Grasp Along These Lines: ‘Life Is Too Short,’ a Clear Corollary of Which Will Likely Ever Remain the Duty Or Mandate to Grab Hold of Each Moment So Fully & Fiercely That Only Feisty Feasting Desire Spins the Skeins & Schemes, the Dramas & Dreams, of Lives With No More Room For Dread’s Boring Despair Than an Infant’s Famished Howling Hunger Would Make Way For Distracted Shrugs of Ho-Hum Disinterest.”

As a transition to further affirmations of philosophy’s firmest ironies, …(continued below the fold)

Empowered Political Forays—Capitalism on Drugs: the Political Economy of Contraband From Heroin to Ritalin & Beyond (Concluded)

(Sex and drugs seem nearly as closely wedded as birth and death. The previous section of this overall narrative puzzle wrapped up with these thoughts: “Inevitably, assembling the sort of case that this report does has all of the appearance of a criminal conspiracy. A nearly thirty-year-old memoir of the drug war, by a participant in the action on both sides of things, would laugh at the idea that a label of ‘conspiracy theory’ would foreclose the kinds of investigations that we need to be making. ‘I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories,’ Michael Ruppert was fond of quipping before he killed himself; ‘I offer people conspiracy facts.’

Crossing the Rubicon is a densely documented and persuasively argued prosecutorial opening statement(), an indictment of the powers-that-be—presenting actual formal charges against Presidents and corporate heavy-hitters, from a former chief police investigator of just such matters—that contends that ‘drug-wars’ and ‘intelligence’ and military-prison-industrial-corporate-and-imperial-complexes rule the world through venal and duplicitous means that citizens will either hold to account or suffer the results of their failure to insist on responsibility and accountability. In Ruppert’s estimation, the price of impunity is mass collective suicide.

Are people willing to consider discussions about such matters? As always, even as it runs short, time will tell.”

Part One is here. This is Part Two. Part Three has also passed, along with Four. The issue before last brought a fifth iteration, while #21’s sixth episode in our exploration follows up the opium-and-poppies congruence, whose natural and social history in identifiable ways parallels and illuminates our precise present passage. The seventh section of this lengthy iteration was last issue.)

Some Conclusions to Consider

Sometimes the very volume of evidence and argument that more or less powerfully commands us to alter our default attitudes and take real stands in their stead—in other words, to address and transform social sickness that threatens our very survival—instead induces us to throw up our hands, to light a joint or look the other way, to see the massive scope of mendacity as proof that we cannot ever do anything to help switch off the horrendous systematized mechanisms of crime and deceit that presently run our world. Cynicism may not always win out, but at least resignation—the wry shrug of passivity, overcomes any disciplined or ongoing move to reform matters.

While such a point-of-view may seem difficult to finesse—“What should a person do? Declare himself chief enforcer of the League-of-Global-Justice, or something?”—one thing is undeniable. Continuing on this course of subterfuge and hypocrisy and corruption and, most of all, profiteering must in the end at best either maintain the evil concatenations that typify the present pass or, more likely, accept that these venal vicissitudes will exponentially grow in the near future.

Such a surmise is no more than an application of the first law of thermodynamics, after all. An object in motion will keep going on its present path absent force to counteract that momentum and direction.

In confronting such an apparently indisputable likelihood, one may ponder one’s children, one’s parents, one close friends and relations. Will they—or their children and parents and close friends and relations in turn—be able now to persist in an environment of cruel commerce and everyday cheating? The way that today’s social tendencies are evolving, toward heightened conflict and deepened exploitation and so forth, such a question must quite likely elicit, in terms of individuals’ options, a negative answer. “No, we can’t assume that the chance to follow the road that we traveled yesterday will be possible tomorrow.”

At the level of geopolitics—which is precisely where these drug-war-and-contraband-patterns grew to their present potency—the issues involved are even starker and direr. Will a world with plus-or-minus fifty thousand thermonuclear weapons be able to continue in the presence of the inherently intense contradictions and tense paradoxes of a social environment in which ‘just-say-no’ distortions and criminal networks that at once purvey and condemn drugs predominate?

These first paragraphs of a first concluding section merely establish a certain groundwork. ‘The stakes are high. We ought to act as if our kind’s future mattered to us.’ In such a way of thinking about things, several closing points might be worth considering, including Six very sturdy deductions.

AN INITIAL DEDUCTION

Bringing secret or otherwise hidden information, decisions, studies, and developments to light must become a priority, an objective about which a majority of citizens already agree, in essence that transparency in the realm of both so-called ‘drug-crimes’ and self-serving intellectual property regimes represents a sine qua non for justice, humanity, happiness, empowerment.

Proprietary secrets rule pharmaceutical practice. In camera proceedings and inaccessible proceedings and settlements all too often finish off lawsuits(), in which victims of legal drugs collect a few million dollars to compensate them for the mayhem that has flowed from fluorine-and-serotonin-purveying chemicals. Criminal networks that include police and courts operate not only with impunity, but also behind a veil that they maintain because our ‘security’ requires such deception and hidden agendas.

Of course these methods have not been working. Nor do they make sense, even as a proposition. Maybe we ought to try something different.

A SECOND DEDUCTION

In a related notion, the capacity to discuss these matters vanishes as the willingness to deal with reality disappears and in its place arise different sets of propagandistic fantasies and self-serving half-truths.

Both ideological fancies and persistent distortion undergird the plutocratic agendas of upper class actors who no more honor proscription and prohibition of felonious ‘schedules’ than they themselves partake of the prescribed poisons that they foist on others and in so doing purposefully muddle the thinking of a significant fraction of the populace at large, particularly among young people. As difficult as imagining such developments might seem, we nonetheless need to fancy a social movement that starts and perseveres with constant conversation and mutual instruction about these matters.

The current context, one in which horseshit is the main course day after day, can only further the hideous mire in which we now find ourselves. If we want different outcomes, we’ve got to countenance different inputs.

A THIRD DEDUCTION

In relation to the first two points, fetishization of expertise inevitably blocks popular participation, so people who care about majority rule have zero choice: the elevation of self-selected, if highly-trained, experts to serve the profit agendas of those with the money and the networks of power behind the scenes must cease forthwith, and a democratic dialog must ensue in its place.

One needn’t be a biochemist in order to recognize bullshit. One needn’t have a doctorate in psychology in order to understand the ongoing manifestations of human psychic patterns, from longing to ennui and beyond. One needn’t universally fear trollish dominance of every conversation in which grassroots opinions and inquiries come to the forefront.

To start with the obvious, our own ignorance gets in our way. Yet with only a few exceptions, each of us can learn. Each of us can instruct ourselves and, in discourse with others, gain insights and capacity. At the very least, such ideas are worth a passing glance.

A FOURTH DEDUCTION

In a general way, a failure to decriminalize plants and permit their elective utilization by adults will eliminate the potential for a future that is human; it may in fact destroy altogether every possibility of a human future.

I have close relations who have died because of alcoholism and drug-addiction. As fate would have it, literally hundreds of my friends and acquaintances have harrowing tales to tell about life in the fast lanes of expensive contraband and cheap thrills. I have written a volume of unpublished short stories, Drugs & Guns & Living in America, that convey the complexities and difficult nuances of ‘controlled’ and controlling substances.

Nevertheless, if reason and reality are to guide us, any conclusion other than this one will guarantee our destruction. Courses of criminalization and prohibition will always make matters worse, except for the ‘kingpins’ and thugs in charge. …(continued below the fold)

Old Stories, & New—”An American Christmas Story”

(This yarn, based as it is on a true incident from my early, third Home State, was one of the first pieces of short fiction that I finished, along about 1990, mas o menos, in the event before I had come to as complete a comprehension of matters at hand as arguably is true in the here and now.

Whatever the case may be, a modest modicum of mundane and menial ministrations of holidays that no longer circumscribe Holy Days comes first, in #23’s initial piece of a two-part puzzle. The interlocutor is the main character’s valiant, dutiful daughter.)

My father, Charles Moran, made me swear I'd repeat this story to everyone I know. "Listen, 'Punk,' you've got to promise you'll go over all this a bunch of times.  It's important."

He'd become more than a little obsessed, his hair longer and wilder than ever, his six foot frame even leaner than when he was crazy about running that marathon in Cleveland.  I was around for lots of this, home from the "salt mines" in Georgia, hanging out with folks and friends.  But daddy insisted that I listen to him tell the tale again anyway, from start to finish, so I'd be sure to get everything right.

We sat waiting for my flight to Atlanta, sipping 90-cent coffee before Starbucks  existed outside of Washington state, as the murky light of a wintry dusk filtered into the Cincinnati concourse, while he went over all the crucial details.  Before I left, he asked me, very much a concerned tutor with his prize pupil prior to a big exam, "you have it all down, right Alicia?"

***************

A promise is a promise, especially to my dad.  But no way will I run my mouth about this to a million people.  I'll just write it all out, get somebody to make copies available.  I'll keep my word, and never have to make a sound.  I don't know, honest to God, whether this story is important or just nuts, but if you get this far, keep reading.  Finish the damn thing.  My dad will rest easier.  And he could be right.  It might be important.

Like every event on the contemporary scene—at least from the Watergate hearings through 'Operation Iraqi Liberation, roughly in the center of which span this particular scenario unfolded—audio-visual techno-culture played a huge role in this little interlude. 

What my father termed "a precious video" was actually of prime import, arriving Wednesday, two days before Christmas. Typical Ohio River December weather accompanied delivery: a driving, freezing rain, the kind that bites through layers of clothing and skin to reach bone.   The water came in great gray sheets, the combined forces of wind, wet, and cold too intense to allow looking ahead.

As dad retrieved his treasure, he momentarily regretted not ordering copies for his fellow deacons, and for our pastor, Dr. Richard Milton.  When he originally saw the solicitation for "A Christmas Carol," NOW AVAILABLE ON VIDEO, he conjured up a grand fantasy: using Dickens' magic and the hidden positive potential of television, he'd insinuate social consciousness among his rich Episcopalian cohorts.  

All the elders would receive and view their own cassettes. Irresistibly, openhanded generosity would result, lending much-needed funds and assistance to local good works.

Charles shivered while he played this vision out in his head.  A blast of wind led a stream of icy water down his sweater.  As events transpired, the hesitation in ordering multiple copies was a stroke of good fortune.

Old money, solid status,' would be the best description of our family's congregation.  Members owned the car dealerships and the "better shops," local and franchised.  Normally they belonged to the Kenwood or Hyde Park clubs, impeccably manicured palaces where the workers--outside of the pro shop--still avert their eyes when addressing an affiliate or guest.  These folks embraced conservatism like the Ayatollah trusted Allah.

Nobody was really a 'scrooge', though.  At least once a year, everyone in our circle gave something to dad's ongoing solicitations. He milked money from shopkeepers, bankers, and businessmen like only one of the club can do.  Father used to say, "one man doing right will change the world overnight."  He liked corny rhymes like that a lot.

He always became most fixated on fixing things around Christmas, and Dickens' video presented the last opportunity for exhortation before another year graced the calendar.  He considered, then rejected, having several showings, so he could repeat his pleas to greater numbers.  As the experience unfolded, this was another lucky decision, avoiding further multiplication of his humiliation.

* * *

Ultimately, Charles invited thirty-odd friends and associates in addition to Pastor Milton.  He sent out a laser-printed card, bearing his own rendering of the dove,

Requesting your presence, in the midst of this Season so filled with Love and Joy, yet so sadly marked by Want and Hunger Despite our own Prosperity, FOR AN EVENING OF UPLIFTING PERUSAL OF DICKENS' GRAND WORK: A CHRISTMAS CAROL.

"Lord, Daddy, I can't believe you sent this to Deacon Williams and the others.  They're about as interested in the 'plight of the poor' as they are the mating habits of Peruvian birds."  I laughed as we drove home from the airport, but I was at least half serious.  Charles flashed a cognoscente’s grin, which promised, 'right will prevail, you needn't worry, I understand how these things work.' …(continued below the fold)

Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—Sam & Red, Chapter Three

(Chapter Two concluded in this way. “Unconcerned with these human hopes and horrors, the waning moon soon enough waxed once more, and the time came when Sam and Red realized that the fourth child, whom they’d invited to join them, was not yet forthcoming. Their connubial joining became even more combustible; every chore flowed like a well-watered brook, the children ventured their most delightful adventures; Spring came and promised its most exuberant entangling of stormy pronouncement and sunny reply.

As Luna again waxed toward her most buxom bounty, this iconic couple that many locals called ‘our very own A-Dam and E-va’ had another night of palpating passionate pleasure thanks to MaMaHeather’s attentive assistance. Sam, plying his wife’s sweet furry lips while their eyes danced edenically, composed himself to wait, so that he could speak his heart’s holiest helping of sagacity.

‘Each day, you see, every moment that we share,’ he held her gaze as his passion peaked and Red moaned mellifluously, ‘will be for me, and probably for thee with any luck at all,’ he nodded, and so did she, in climactic glee. Emotion’s flooding spills provided a poignant completion: ‘enough eternity for anyone’s lifetime.’”

Now, we will be exploring a third lunar cycle during the flowing flight of the couple’s tenth-year-plus-one of marital union, marking as well the number-three moon of Sam’s thirtieth year. Their journey in this instance begins with an unusual—but much more likely than rate—blizzard on the ‘Day-of-Equals,’ marking the first day of Autumn.

Here we have Chapter One. This takes us to Chapter Two. For a look at the completion of the “Little Red” story cycle itself, a reader may navigate to this link. )

CHAPTER THREE

“Daddy, daddy, daddy!” shouted the three offshoots of Sam Woodcroft and his beloved Rose, nee Wolfsbane. Little Sage stood astride his strapping sisters’ shoulders. “Let us go play!”

The child cast his arms wide toward the whited blanket that was descending in thick, frozen folds across their ridge and fields. His sisters’ eyes glowed even more than their brightly beaming cheeks; as they bounced, he rolled like a practiced skier on steeply-pitched slopes.

Camille and Dahlia, despite over twenty moons that separated their birth pangs, stood, as springy as twinned sturdy saplings with their roots deep in rich soil. Their brother kept his foothold like a seasoned mariner can ride a high tide’s wildest swell. Their dear Dad danced like a thickened dervish delighted with his dainty sojourners.

Though warm enough in their snug yet still roomy cottage, the ghostly glow of milky flakes accumulated as drifts that muffled the shrieks and laughter of toddler and sprites. As a stunt, Sam staggered unsteadily under his threefold burden, giving them all a good shake amid their howls of hilarity and cries of “Mommy!” to which Sam replied with a hearty ‘amen!’

“And why, then,” Sam growled with a giggle, “do you ask your Father, instead of my sweet absent wife? Why not wait for Ma?” He roared with a jovial jollity and lively levity that pealed his booming baritone off the walls. “Answer me that!” he bellowed. He twirled them all in a soaring loop.

“Because you let us!” they squealed in unison. Then, with gusto, from three childish throats, “Pleaaaassseee?”

“Ach!” he glared and grinned at once. “You’d have me let your mother return from Gran’s to your icy bottoms?” His eyebrows rose as he held each child’s glance in turn as he perambulated their home. He challenged them. “Ehhhh??!!”

“Yesssss!!!!!” Again, their chorus of cries burst forth as a symphonic screech, happy and shrill and bursting with breathless joy. They bounced; their Father rocked them as if he had become a storm-tossed frigate captained by urchins.

As a conception of the tenth moon, the first of Autumn’s often blustery days and chilly nights, these were his favored days in any annual transit; “snowdrifts were the coverlets for my mother’s belly as I slept under her heart,” he once announced, poetically, to Red. That deep snow and frozen frigidity normally arrived later in the season did not shift the general predilection in favor of chilled and frosted windy flow.

His thoughts began to turn to his own life, all the while that his tender touch and tremulous tenor suggested his embodied, irresistible recognition that these little ones now constituted his personal ‘meaning of life.’ “Arrrggghhhh!!!” he roared once more, as the shrill, piercing darts of his babes’ voices bounced off the ceiling.

Suddenly, as his children clambered up and down his legs and trunk and clung with stubborn glee to his outstretched arms, he recollected play with his brother on a snowy day long since passed and gone. …(continued below the fold)

Nerdy Nuggets—The Bank That Owns Us, & International Avatars, II

(The first installment of this little series showed how Depression’s catastrophes then translated into the carnage of WWII, all of which set a certain sort of stage for new ways that blended the old with evolving nuance and ‘the American Century’s’ continuation. These are the final paragraphs from last issue.

“Without a doubt, therefore, as combatant armies put to death as many as 100,000 soldiers and civilians from 'the other side' each day of military operations, all of the allied forces were joining together to observe and give imprimatur to fiscal and monetary arrangements that incorporated prewar and intra-war activities and inputs from 'enemies' along with the forty-four nations of the 'allied cause.' Though this manifestation of money's sway did not directly invoke German and Japanese signatories, its development did emanate from prewar critiques from the ruling elites of both nations, even as powwows among all parties were part and parcel of wartime actions.

The reader, in this regard, can note and file the subtitle of Higham's book, mentioned above: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949. As the butchery's certain end—the military defeat of Germany and Japan—drew nigh, all manner of strategists of empire began to formulate principles and procedures, always congruent with and sometimes flowing directly from 'tainted' sources, for monitoring and otherwise riding herd on multinational money-issues in war's aftermath.

Prominent among these were establishing protocols for the International Monetary Fund(IMF) and the World Bank(WB), both part of the powers-that-be today.” Hence, here we are, ready to continue anew, ha ha.)

Any reader not plugged into the fact of the resonance of these matters with key conflicts and concatenations in the world today might take note. Every trope about the depredations of ‘the Great Reset’ and plotted ‘New World Orders’ represents in some sense a throwback to ideas that have been prevalent in one form or another since the New Deal or before.

Currency, trade, tariffs, sanctions, these and other aspects of how human productive activities actually function as international processes, what one might usefully label national monopoly corporate finance operations, have—in the views of various radicals, activists, and advocates for working people—increasingly approximated nothing except maximizing capital’s profits.

The voices of participants, on the quarter century anniversary of massive protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, note the continued relevance of their actions in 1999. “Today’s economic and trade landscape is even more complex and fraught than it was in 1999. The unchecked power of multinational corporations, environmental degradation, and worsening income inequality demand that we revisit the critiques raised during those protests.

We must continue to ask tough questions: Who really benefits from current trade policies? How are workers—especially in marginalized communities—impacted by trade agreements? How can we reshape policies to ensure fair, equitable, and sustainable outcomes for workers across all sectors?”

Perhaps, therefore, in relation to the vaunted ‘Battle in Seattle’ in 1999, over the arrival—finally, from the perspective of financiers and other hegemons of capital—of a World Trade Organization that would promote, and as necessary enforce, solidly pro-profit policies worldwide, citizens now might ponder what we ought to be doing. It’s a query worth considering.

The parallels between then and now are close to comprehensive. Thus might we listen attentively to these interlocutors of continuing popular empowerment. One such defined the WTO (as) a little-known institution that was helping drive a corporate agenda worldwide—slashing labor standards, environmental standards, social programs, and anything else that could get in the way of profits.”

And the SOP remains indeed the Standard Operational Approach, as fiercely as or perhaps even more fiercely than in the past. Even at Bretton Woods, some grassroots awareness existed of the way the ‘Merchants of Death’ used ‘the invisible hand’ of the ‘free market’ to promote class and family and institutional interests in completely corrupt fashion. Again, we might take note.

“As we approach this anniversary, the need for trade justice that centers workers is more urgent than ever. With recent election results still settling, we are reminded that the challenges we face today—rising economic inequality, corporate-driven trade policies, and environmental degradation—are interconnected. The lessons from 1999 still ring true: when workers stand together, in solidarity with allies across sectors, we can shape a future where trade policies serve people, not just profit.”

Again, the skirmishes over these matters—in Seattle and now—were merely continuing a more than century-long struggle over trade and society, over power’s economic underpinnings, essentially over whether people or profits would rule. What happened in New Hampshire thereby represented one waystation on big-money’s march to have its way in everything.

*Bretton Woods Blue-Prints(Continued From #22)

Even before the the months and months and months of work in the plush shadow of New Hampshire’s imposing Mt. Washington, as well as in the shadowy halls of Washington and London, the Americans and the British had been discussing the terms of the postwar order. Much of the framework for operationalizing matters occurred even prior to U.S. direct entry into the conflict.

"The Atlantic Charter, drafted during President Roosevelt's August 1941 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a ship in the North Atlantic was the most notable precursor to the Bretton Woods Conference(BW). Like Woodrow Wilson before him, whose 'Fourteen Points' had outlined U.S. aims in the aftermath of the First World War, Roosevelt set forth a range of ambitious goals for the postwar world even before the U.S. had entered the Second World War.

The Atlantic Charter affirmed the right of all nations to equal access to trade and raw materials. Moreover, the charter called for freedom of the seas (a principal U.S. foreign policy aim since France and Britain had first threatened U.S. shipping in the 1790s), the disarmament of aggressors, and the 'establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.'"

Here then, not only can discerning observers see both the United Nations in utero and the concomitant monetary arrangements that the war yielded, but they can also detect, at least in broad strokes, the entire economic interrelationship that has characterized the sixty-five years since 1945. One needn't create a Milo Minderbinder to recognize that ministrations and planning of tremendous savvy and strategic scope were in play.

"Throughout the war, the United States envisaged a postwar economic order in which the U.S. could penetrate markets that had been previously closed to other currency trading blocs, as well as to open up opportunities for foreign investments for U.S. corporations by removing restrictions on the international flow of capital."

For nearly two years, much of the ongoing energy of this work centered on Bretton Woods, a little forested resort in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Part of the purpose of such get-togethers was to muse about the 'division of the spoils,' as Keynes named the process at Versailles a quarter century before. As well, and more crucially, the meetings outlined the parameters of what structures and processes might manage capital's conflicts more beneficently than fire-bombing and mass-immolation were doing while negotiators gathered.

Principals assembled together for a final signing ceremony in the Summer of 1944, where the U.S. plan propounded by H.D. White won out over the more 'Keynesian' proposals advanced by the master Keynesian himself.

Keynes, though suffering from the final stages of congestive heart disease, was among those attending throughout the conference, as the leader of the British delegation. Even as he was 'not long for this world,' acceding to his White-Russian wife's advice not to insist on his opposition to gold, Keynes vision again seems prescient, inasmuch as the world has operated, according to standards such as he advanced, since the original BW accords fell apart in the early 1970's.

FDR, though not present for most of the work personally, arguably encouraged an inclusion of his "Economic Bill of Rights" into the negotiations; perhaps his ruling class bona fides, given all he had seen, no longer allowed him to strut the necessary pirate's edge that more 'pragmatic' rulers wanted writ large in New Hampshire, or perhaps some more obvious public-relations purpose accompanied this little-known but progressive expression of American social democratic possibility.

In any event, literally nothing from this innovative articulation of human economic justice made its way into the actual output of the efforts in New Hampshire. Contrary to what reactionary and arch-conservative critics of the BW process like to maintain, Harry Dexter White's U.S. position, a completely craven kowtowing to established financial interests, carried the day in contravention to the vision of Keynes, at least until such juncture as the Nixon-era removal of the Gold Standard as the underlying protocol of international trade, exchange-rates, etc., an assessment of which is forthcoming

Canada's July 7, 1944 Ottawa Citizen candidly dissects the purposes of and forces in play around the meeting in New Hampshire, mentioning the differing agendas of various stakeholders not in attendance as well as the hopes of Keynes and Canadian ministers to address the economic vacillations of gold and currency that had so tangibly contributed to earlier impulsion to conflict. Such sources ought to become habitual points of perusal for citizens who want to comprehend the current context.

This semi-official organ of Canada's elites warned pointedly about 'free-market' opposition to the new fiscal arrangements—an antediluvian ideological view that is again now 'all the rage,' simultaneously as radical and social democratic critics also take shots at the system—in stark terms, as the death toll from WWII passed the hundred million mark. In passing, the annalist may note that Keynes shuttled back and forth between Ottawa and New Hampshire for much of this period.

"Conflict at BW is dangerous because a breakdown in these discussions would presage a trade and exchange battle in the post-war years that would do much to nullify the efforts to establish an international political order. Fortunately, some, at least, of the United States representatives...are as concerned as are the British and Canadians that the prejudiced opposition within the U.S. would, if successful, damage the interests of their own country as well as start the nations again on the economic war path."

The view that Keynes' ideas predominated, given both how the specifics of the conference left marks on paper, and even more so how the interpretation of the accord garnered practical exposition, seems strange. Clearly he was a participant of extensive influence. But, equally obvious is that the entire record and institutionalization alike were at the behest and with the final say of the USA, orchestrated willy-nilly from Wall Street banking and investment houses.

A New School for Social Research economist gives a balanced articulation to this point. He essentially summarizes the outcome of this critical turning point. …(continued below the fold)

Communication & Human Survival—Storytelling’s Life Force Millennia

Prefatory to today’s textual unfolding, a brief—in the form of a December 2024 Harper’s extract—appears for us to ponder, as the magazine’s excerpt from Richard Beck’s recent Homeland profferal. “In his 2005 book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis pointed out that, since the Seventies, the world’s poor countries have urbanized at a rate that puts Europe’s nineteenth-century urbanization to shame.

But whereas those European experiences of urbanization were part of an industrial revolution that saw growth accelerate dramatically, the more recent urbanization of what used to be called the Third World has occurred in places where economic growth is either low, slowing down, or nonexistent. Megacities have grown so much not because they are hotbeds of economic opportunity but because the best way for people to survive when they cannot find secure, salaried labor is to live near as many other people as possible.

The term for (those) who live in this global archipelago of slums is ‘surplus population.’… Because the(y) are not technically unemployed, th(eir) surge in ‘informal work’ is not reflected in standard economic data. But it defines the gap separating the world’s rich countries from its poor ones. …

The United States believed that the problems facing these states could be kept more or less at arm’s length until September 11… .That’s where the expanded war on terror came from. It might not solve the problems facing a low-growth world, but it could at least insulate the United States from the effects. The war on terror is a tool for managing the very surplus populations that the end of American-led economic prosperity helped to create—people whom the United States now finds itself unable and unwilling to help.” This, then, contextualizes yarnspinning in the here and now.

Herewith, to follow up, begins a Big Tent overview of literature’s hypothetically paradoxical play in culture’s task of contextualizing things: it both buttresses and undermines powers-that-be schemes and themes. What follows, far from glamorous, is a shambling, rambling amble through brambles of ambitious ambulation, in search of an initial origin story for a sense of tension between writers who tend to subscribe either to aristocrats and their reaction against, or to revolutionaries and their mandates for, equality’s foundation for justice.

Blah blah blah. Thus, we have here a two-fold process, ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand,’ not to declare a winner but to define this dance that pits ‘victory’ against ‘liberation,’ empire versus democracy, and so on and so forth. This literary lambada goes back ten thousand years and more.

Here, then, comes a crammed-full itinerary of iteration, hopefully without a crumbling facade. We’ll slam down dozens of dramas and their varied formal formulations of denouement without causing any slumbering or stumbling, ha ha. Word play will burgeon with something meaningful the result; that's my story here, in any case.

Whatever else one thinks, an acknowledgement of a simple fact is ineluctable: storytelling is adaptive among our sorts of beings. This forceful impact on our successes and well-being does not play out in a simple or one-sided way, however. Understanding a dialectic of manipulation and empowerment that percolates into people from cultural sources in some senses circumscribes a wider comprehension of the entire human social program, from the caves to the raves a mediated affair.

Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel defines that form’s function as the creation of “‘a full and authentic report of human experience.’” Today, however, as Louis Menand points out in his New Yorker review of Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction—an account of 20th Century’s novelized contributions, as it were—“‘(a) sense’” exists, “‘of the novel as both mattering immensely, as being a crucial way of getting certain things right, but also misbegotten’” to a degree that this anomie “‘haunts the novelists of (Frank’s) book.’”

Most incisively, war and women serve as the two thematic anchors of the arc of BTR’s present essay. The latter stands as the proximate source of every life that enters the world so as to become human; the former serves to winnow those who arrive according to sets of protocols that are difficult to speak, let alone comprehend, clearly, accurately, and comprehensively. A kneejerk characterization might quip in reply, ‘sex and violence!’

No matter its truncation of a ‘complete picture,’ such a perspective—one that centers on mass carnage and humanity’s females—can demarcate much of the storytelling that has characterized our kith and kin over time. Writing of ‘Western’ mythos and its origins, Riane Eisler echoes such ideas.

“These myths are, of course, products of a radically altered psyche, a psyche appropriate for a radically altered world. It is a world in which the act of life giving has been appropriated by male gods and male priests; in which actual physical birth (being of the flesh and female) is devalued and even denied; in which neither life nor woman are any longer affirmed (much less considered sacred and holy).

It is a world in which gods must die, kings must die, and sons must eternally kill fathers (as in the Greek myth of Oedipus, which Freud made the basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex) to attain possession of both women and power (which is now equated with violence). In short, it is a world in which the destructive principle (what Freud called Thanatos, after the ancient Greek personification of death, especially as expressed in violent aggression) is primary.”

So saying, one can imagine a different dance, at once more melodious and lyrical, as well as jolly and generous, a sweet mix of spiritual and cognitive interpenetration to ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.’ Does such a ‘literature’ exist? Maybe one can locate such a canon, if one has the correct tuning-fork, so to say, the “Song of Solomon,” the poetry of Sappho, even a few more standard stories than the Solomonic canticles from the Holy Bible itself.

As a normal course of cultural expression, moreover, folklore and legend and such contain significant selections in which heroines and heroes adopt more collaborative and less combative approaches to ascending narrative pathways toward epiphany. This may prove especially true, as the readings for this article appear to indicate, when the ‘tall tales’ in question originate from the deepest forests of time past, when the predominance of the ‘masculine’ power to inflict pain and death were both less potent and less ubiquitous.

Somehow or other, in thinking about things along these lines, I recalled that Robert Heinlein’s masterpiece, A Stranger in a Strange Land, got its title from an Old Testament allusion. A quick search revealed the accuracy of my memory. “Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, ‘I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.’” The boy’s name sounds similar to the word stranger, or foreigner, in Hebrew.

That’s not all, however, inasmuch as I completely misremembered Exodus: 2-22 as a verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Unfortunately, even the essay entitled ‘Seventeen Verses That Use the Idea of a Stranger in a Strange Land,’ or something similar, didn’t include the science fiction master’s Martian chronicle. I doggedly insisted on my having remembered correctly, at least for an hour or so of hopeless foraging that nonetheless brought forth all kinds of interesting bits.

For example, the messages of this mistaken ‘source’ are utterly compelling as aids to pondering these matters of sex and violence and storytelling. This is from “Ecclesiastes,” Chapter Two. “Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.

The wise man has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness; and yet I perceived that one fate comes to all of them.

Then I said to myself, ‘What befalls the fool will befall me also; why then have I been so very wise?’ And I said to myself that this also is vanity.

For of the wise man as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise man dies just like the fool!

So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a striving after wind.” Religious scholars consider these ideas literally Solomonic in that the legendary King supposedly authored this specific holy book, so to say.

The subsequent Chapter, meanwhile, is famous in gestating a popular folk song. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: —a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; —a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; —a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; —a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing… .”

And so forth, ending with these very positive pointers: “I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; also that it is God's gift to man that every one should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil.” For “Ecclesiastes,” this is as good as it gets.

Chapter Seven offers some grim observations indeed, to start, with some eerily wise counsel and simple sage advisories at the end. “A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death, than the day of birth.

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for this is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” This is the grim part, ha ha.

Then this: “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Be not quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.

Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.

Wisdom is good with an inheritance, an advantage to those who see the sun. For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money; and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it.” Amen.

Having dispensed with matters introductory in nature, we’ll now turn to the litany of early literature for today’s little sally into deconstructing such mediated dalliance. As Patricia Nye pointed out many issues back, “People are mostly made up of stories.” In that regard, Joan Didion—from whom we’ll be hearing more below the fold—published a collection nearly twenty years back that states the matter succinctly: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.

Long-Past Mediated Polarities

Lysistrata has of late acquired all manner of resonance. Various All-Trump-All-the-Time sources have been making copious threats about instituting Aristophanes’ sex strike in the here and now. Whatever transpires, this enchanting tale of feminine resistance and the heat of young love stands on its own as iconic yarnspinning indeed.

The upper-crust women of Athens, mimicking their patron Goddess’ cognitive precision, elect to take radical action against their royal husbands’ willingness to embrace war and horror and murderous woe as their default policy option. With a full awareness of the importance of Eros to their mates, these matrons stage, quite literally, a sex strike, in which they make sacred vows to withhold connubial bliss altogether till peace reigns.

Aristophanes ‘comic antics’ are anything but exclusively lighthearted, however. Self-contradiction and pathos abound. “By sacrificing dramatic logic Aristophanes establishes a major theme at the start of the play: the disruptive effect of war on family life. It is partly to cure this ill that the women's action is directed, and the success of this action at the end of the play enables husband and wife to return home together in an atmosphere of peace and reconciliation.”

Lysistrata lectures the idiots. One such case “recalls Lysistrata's justifiably angry reply to the proboulos' assertion that women have no part in war (588). Their very great part is the bearing and sending forth of sons as hoplites (589f). This manifest truth is declared immediately following Lysistrata's explanation of political reform in terms of a typical household task (567-86). And similarly at 648-55 women's fundamental role in home and family is made the basis of their claim to participate in public life, and by a pun on (Greek) is linked to the conduct of civic finance.”

A pair of undergrad theses spar over Aristophanes’ motivations and perspectives on the work. One disparages: just as males ‘controlled their mates through degradation,’ Lysistrata herself “controlled them in her own way just as men controlled their wives.

When they are in the Acropolis, many women try and escape to their husbands, but Lysistrata catches them and persuades them to fight against the sexual weaknesses that have such a hold on them, 'You wacky women, you miss your men, of course you do, and they miss you. Think of the lonely and lustless nights they’re spending. Be good girls, have patience and bear with this a little longer.'”

Another finds nuance: “By presenting Lysistrata the way he did, Aristophanes was able to make several different types of commentary on war society. ‘Insofar as the release was motivated by acceptable civic ideals (peace and solidarity) and achieved in humorous fantasy (wives determining policy), it was safe and festive, cohesive rather than divisive. But insofar as it was a valid expression of people’s real war-weariness and an expression of social discontent that had no other public outlet, it was also fair warning to the people’s leaders that public patience might not last indefinitely.”

What is indisputable are the elements of plot—sex and war; loving relationship and murder—that have continued to resonate over twenty-five hundred years. A Law Review explication finds the ‘antiwar stance’ of the play to be incontrovertible. “It demonstrates that while many of the experiences of women and girls in war are similar to those of men and boys, there are important differences.

Existing inequalities between women and men, and patterns of discrimination against women and girls, tend to be exacerbated in wartime. There are circumstances in which women suffer harms of a different kind and to a different degree to men or in which certain harms primarily affect women. But if women suffer the impact of conflict in ways men do not, they are also a key to the solution of conflict, as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata shows.”

The Bacchae too, another profferal from the ancients, this time by Euripides, at its core examines war and empire—and the very different responses of men and women thereto. Archaeologically, anthropologically, and historically, the play represents a tipping point in human existence, something that Dr. Eisler states clearly: “In other words,” she argues in investigating ancient rituals of birth and death, “as it still is for us, death was for our Neolithic ancestors an important religious theme, and like most people today, they too performed religious rites for the dead.”

At this junction, she develops a primary punctuation of her work in general. “But here again we confront the problems in interpretation we have been examining. For the failure of most scholars to consider women significant has served to obscure the importance not only of women but also of sex in prehistoric burial customs and rites.”

In a related thought, Euripides might have elected to name his brutal drama The Thracian Women, for this Greco-Turkish-Romanian homeland served as the sanctuary of fierce Amazons who worshipped Dionysus and rejected those, like Orpheus, who—no matter how ‘spiritually’ or emotionally justified—preferred men to women, buddy-bonding to Life-Force connection. In fact, ritual sacrifice was something that the god himself taught, even as others—such as Aristaeus the beekeeper—instructed that in particular human sacrificial slaughter was malapropos at best.

What to make of these ‘tatooed women’ may depend on the observers inclinations, ha ha. Even the briefest stroll through the World Wide Web’s ‘library stacks’ demonstrates this point. The search, <bacchae interpretation OR analysis OR deconstruction feminist radical OR marxist>, for instance, while yielding only 6,750 links, included many useful works in its initial array, providing context and analytical acuity at once.

In contrast to the near-paucity of interest about the playwright’s graphic work of, quite literally, murderous butchery, here’s a search that commanded a huge output of linking results: <amazons interpretation OR analysis feminist radical OR marxist>. Almost 1,200,000 hits happened. Euripides’ dramatic productions often centered on matters Amazonian, so to speak.

Another of his works, The Trojan Women, bleak and relentless, nonetheless has a powerful pulse at its heart. “But the living drama for Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.”

Hippolytus, also one of Euripides dire tragedies of doom and self-destruction, while centered on divine intervention’s insidious role in human affairs, makes many of the primary characters of more obviously warlike texts part of the central dramatis personae of this dark saga. Moreover, the main character—the son of Theseus and, most likely, the Queen of the Amazons’ sister, Antiope—makes a conscious choice in favor of chastity, yet another life-force denial that leads to mayhem.

The epic originale, as it were, The Ilyad, in the meantime has plenty of compelling female characters. However, they include no protesters in the vein of Lysistrata, with the possible exception of Cassandra and Helen, ha ha. The erotic indiscretions and infidelities that underlie Homer’s tale, however, are themselves literary ubiquities, more or less as a matter of course—again, ‘sex and violence.’

Of course, Helen’s and Paris’ fated tangle was only one among a multitude of legendary lovers whose often forbidden and always licentious encounters very frequently elicited social chaos as erotic accompaniment. Hera, Queen of Olympus and jealous of the spawn of Zeus with his mistresses, famously drove Heracles, or Hercules, into such frothy madness that he murdered his wife and children.

Amazonian wiles and wit and warlike wonders might make the naming of the Bezos empire seem a puzzle. And what of the world’s second longest river? Whence the name? Well, of course! Franciso Orellana led Spanish treasure hunters on an expedition in search of the mighty river’s sources, during which they availed themselves of multiple opportunities to profit from indigenous folks, at times egregiously so.

Warned of these interloping conquistadores’ plundering ways, as the Iberians proceeded ever deeper inland and upriver, local peoples greeted them with shows of forceful hostility, skirmishing in which the women participated side by side with their fellow men. ‘Artificial Intelligence’ states the matter like this.

“Orellana and his men came across a tribe of Tapuyas women warriors who fought alongside the men, as was the custom for the tribe. Orellana described the women as being very large and tall, and armed with bows, arrows, and shields.” Did this happen?

The majority of commentators seem to countenance such a telling of Orellana’s encounters. Obviously, we are unlikely ever to know for certain. Indubitably, however, in any event, the sense of blistering conflict—a fierce defense of home and turf—in which female locals played some violent part is palpably plausible, given what we know of the human condition as such.

As in the case of Thracian or Trojan or Maenad women, whether as fighting troops or as domestic guardians, the violence is ubiquitous and, while it makes for good drama—from the Iliad’s literary inception onward—this apparently irreversible juxtaposition of human attraction and feminine wiles of different sorts—serpentine locks and wandering sensibilities and decapitating trickery and more—clearly marks the surviving samples of early literature. This dynamic, what Professor Eisler calls Dominator Culture, certainly doesn’t represent the only show in town, so to speak, as we’ll soon see in different ways.

Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, a spooky, unrelenting gem by Elaine Pagels, shows how the stranglehold of Male Supremacy advanced in the New Testament in dialectically opposed fashion to its imprimatur in the days of Lysistrata, Cassandra, and so forth. Chapter Four, “The ‘Paradise of Virginity’ Regained,” illuminates this turn toward denial, with its roots in Augustinian moral codes at least as much as in anything Biblical.

In alignment with Emperor Augustus Caesar’s criminalizing of Eros BCE, Roman ascetics smoothly transitioned to become followers of the Nazarene, particularly after ‘Pope’ Augustine’s famous Confessions supplied the Catholic armory with intellectual, explanatory weapons to denigrate pleasure, sex, and the Goddess. Pagels paints compelling documentary portraits.

“Ascetically inclined Christians even projected their idealized celibacy back into Paradise, as we shall see, and turned the story of the first marriage into a story of two virgins whose sin and consequent sexual awakening ended in their expulsion from the ‘Paradise of virginity’ into marriage and all its attendant sufferings, from labor pains to social domination and death.

The renowned teacher and bishop Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331 — 395 C.E.) declared, ‘Marriage, then, is the last stage of our separation from the life that was led in Paradise; marriage therefore ... is the first thing to be left behind; it is the first station, as it were, for our departure to Christ.’”

The absurdity of such views notwithstanding, Professor Pagels conclusively demonstrates the Augustinian erotophobic triumph over the entire Catholic Church, a stance that the author does not condemn, perhaps because she never experienced a ‘have ye been techin’ yerself, son?’ inquisition by a clearly perverted Father O’Brien confessor.

In the event, without intending to, Adam, Eve, & the Serpent makes quite obvious the way that this Bible and its ‘victorious’ sectarian proponents are all practitioners of a paradoxical prudish and projectile-accusatory defamation of the Life-Force Energy that is indisputably a huge part of any competent analytical description of ‘human nature.’ For example, one may ask, “Why did Catholic Christianity adopt Augustine's paradoxical—some would say preposterous—views?

Some historians suggest that such beliefs validate the church's authority, for if the human condition is a disease, Catholic Christianity, acting as the Good Physician, offers the spiritual medication and the discipline that alone can cure it. No doubt Augustine's views did serve the interests of the emerging imperial church and the Christian state… . For what Augustine says, in simplest terms, is this: human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves, because our very nature—indeed, all of nature—has become corrupt as the result of Adam's sin.”

Whatever else is true, the Bible damns itself most grotesquely and incisively, at least from any POV which holds Life-Force-Energy as iconic and sacred. One can find such contemptible indicia all too often in the Old Testament and more than merely occasionally in the Nazarene’s books. Chapters 30 and 31 from “Numbers” may most hideously exemplify this literary malevolence, a noxious admixing of murder and male supremacy.

The upshot is easy to state. The former section’s passages annihilate female agency, even individuality, as anything other than husband's or father's consenting silence; the latter commands a slaughter fest against the Midianites, almost all of whom are butchered, except for the prepubescent girls who are ritually purified as raped concubines for Israel's warriors.

Well might a man who wants a happy empowered existence ponder the impossibility of such under these sorts of ‘Moses Mandates.’ It’s all matter of fact. “These are the regulations the Lord gave Moses concerning relationships between a man and his wife, and between a father and his young daughter still living at home.”

This too is illustrative. Moses' fury with his troops erupted from their being merciful and allowing most women and children to live. “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

The lines that did originate in Ecclesiastes and seem most extra especially applicable here state in various ways that we cannot likely ever discern ‘anything new under the sun.’ Can anyone say, “Gaza?” These yarns all spin similar contextual skeins of conquest and empire, plunder and profit, all the while clearly discernible differences do indeed differentiate their lot from other expostulations of meaning and adventure, what we might call a ‘counter-canon’ of the sort about which I’ve inquired above.

Where can we turn for examples of this mediated popular ‘underground?’ Occasional iconic offerings—the aforementioned Sappho’s love poetry, perhaps—reveal this countervailing canonical space, so to say. Primarily, however, folklore—even as, frequently enough, its profferals are equally as false or as fatuous, or as imperial or as imperious, as the accepted litanies themselves—will act as a repository of different methods to attain human engagement, mutuality, collectivity, and so on and so forth.

These exemplars of ‘populist reportage,’ as it were, would constitute approaches that embody a more naturalistic and partnering path, what Riane Eisler has at her Partnership Institute called “the partnership way.” “Given this view of sexuality as the vitalizing principle of the universe, it should not surprise us that there are so many pregant figures in prehistoric art.”

Such feminist conceptualizations of social equality and celebrations of human intersection, as inherent elements of species viability, make biological and social sense. Eisler continues. “Indeed, viewed from the perspective of a system of worhip that focused more on the power to give life than to punish and kill, the virtual absence of the pregant female body from the art of recorded history…seems strange—in fact bizarre.”

Most more or less literary cases of this sort, that center women’s lives and experiences and loving ways and wiles, are from the past hundred years or so, although earlier pathfinders—Wollstonecroft, Shelley, blah blah blah—do exist. A pair of noteworthy ‘moderns’ paint pictures of social existence—and particular the love relations of men and women—from these earlier, more rustic, more ‘primitive’ periods.

In the event, the character of Kristin Lavransdatter encompasses the Goddess, the temptress, and the Amazon. Though it is a tale of long ago, lovingly crafted with assistance from the author’s Scandinavian-history-and-culture professor papa’s archives, it came into the world less than a century back. All three volumes are equally gripping—or more so—that the latest Netflix thriller.

Kristin Lavransdatter’s cast of characters navigates Norwegian/Scandanavian life as Christian modes replaced pagan formulations. In relation to even earlier days, another author from Norway—Jostein Gaarder—creates the perfect novelized construct for a former student of linguistics and theology, That Same Flower: a Letter to Saint Augustine.

Having heard from said Saint a few paragraphs ago, this eerily convincing fictional recounting of a missive from Augustine’s passionate and concupiscient concubine and common law spouse, Floria Aemilia, to the new ‘Bishop of Hippo’ takes a stab at the sort of calling-to-account that Heloise makes to Abelard not quite a thousand years after Floria’s pretend annals.

“Floria's letter not only reproaches Augustine for treating her so badly, but also expresses her general alarm over the kinds of doctrines he is formulating. She points out that his worship of 'Abstinence' is far more severe and unrealistic than St. Paul's advice that it is better to marry than to burn.

'You think God loves eunuchs and castrati above those men who love women,' she declares. She notes that his condemnations of other sensual pleasures, from the sound of music to the smell of a flower, show contempt for God's creation.” Juxtaposing Augustinian instances of self-righteousness, as they appear in his above quoted beliefs, with his licentious liveliness, one might conclude that contempt and hypocrisy were among the Saint's primary watchwords.

Sigrid Undset’s heroine, Kristin, however, in many ways mirrors aforementioned folklore. The Yellow Fairy Book and its three multihued companions contain multiple examples of such yarns, tales in which women, despite coming to life in a ‘culture of warlords’—similarly to Kristin’s Viking experiences—so fully manifest social power and individual agency that their feminine sensibilities seem central to ascertaining what’s what in a particular age.

One such story, of Iroquois provenance miraculously enough, eerily tracks Orpheus’ musical quest to the underworld to regain his beloved spouse. “The Dead Wife” is much more mundane in its plighting a plaintive tale of loss. The young fellow’s loving spouse catches cold and dies in the night.

The distinction between the two narratives is profound, however, as well as quotidian. As noted already, Eurydice’s demise arises out of imperial fancies of male hegemony, albeit with an acknowledgement of, perhaps, the Great Mother’s anger at murderous rapine on the part of Aristaeus, her theretofore favorite beekeeper.

In the Iroquois snippet, this unnamed fellow and his unnamed lover hunted together, made a home together, and were in all things each other’s equal and complement. Such a thought would appear absurd—or, vis a vis Lysistrata comic—in Athens’ male-chauvinist context.

Moreover, the man needed no journey to Hell to state his case. His revenant wife notes, “‘The Great Spirit felt sorry for you, because you would not be comforted, so he let me come back to you, but you must not stretch out your hand to touch me till we have seen the rest of our people. If you do, I shall die.’”

A truly sympathetic deity reigns here, though not too generous, not unqualifiedly ‘supportive.’ And the admonitions are about a necessity for social, communal validation, not about individual faith that one’s possession, a woman, will follow faithfully behind into the unseeable future. Predictably, he cannot keep his arms from enfolding her, and she departs forever.

Thematically and emotionally and psychologically worlds apart, the two yarns arc the same essential story about love and sex and death. From a humanistic POV, in any event, “The Dead Wife” much more palpably palpates a human heart whose hopes hanker for connection to a much greater degree than they worry about ownership or dominance.

Other accounts from Andrew Lang’s classic compilation also reveal this otherwise absent quality of social equality among different people, women and men alike. They reveal the likely truism that only those who cooperate with Mother Nature can win both animal and vegetable kingdom’s assistance in building homes and hopes in Gaia’s green acres. Perhaps most importantly, the mythic magic that such seemingly random recitals manifest softens protagonists’ hearts and yields spaces in which forgiveness and true loving connection can come to the fore.

“Fairer Than a Fairy” and “The Magic Ring” are a pair of Yellow Fairy Book’s fanciful features that display these winning attributes of caring awareness and connective mutuality among all living beings. Animal familiars, honorable intentions, and open communication with beloved others are ever present.

“The Magic Ring,” in particular, shows a multilayered nuance that induces even the creatures of humble heroes to show mercy and thereby gain advantage. “Now one day it chanced that (the stalwart youth’s favored cat) had gone down into the cellar to hunt for mice and rats, and seeing an especially fat, well-fed mouse, she pounced upon it, buried her claws in her soft fur, and was just going to gobble it up, when she was stopped by the pleading tones of the little creature, saying, ‘If you will only spare my life I may be of great service to you.

I will do everything in my power for you; for I am the Queen-Mother in theKingdom-of-Mice, and if I perish the whole race will die out.’

‘So be it,’ said Waska (the cat). ‘I will spare your life; but in return you must do something for me. In this castle there lives a Princess, the wicked (and only subsequently penitent) wife of my dear master. She has stolen away his magic ring. You must get it away from her at whatever cost; do you hear?’”

And so things transpired. Debts of betrayal paid, honor and right restored, and more or less total respect and amicability available for all and sundry, the once-abandoned prince reunited with his chastened, haughty princess, and they lived sweetly in each other’s caring embraces.

One might go on interminably. The folktale cache has remained vastly larger than the literary trove, at least till Capital’s relentless innovation of new commodities—like printing presses and books and the entire mediated socioeconomic colossus—have basically buried the fairy-tale tradition beneath essentially infinite sale-racks full of narrative eruptions.

The argument is not ‘fairy-tales good, standard canon bad!’ It is that plus or minus half of folklore implies or states a partnership approach to life; mutual conjugal enjoyment; respected female agency and participation; and plenty more. These qualities, basically without exception, are absent from Homer and those men who followed his tale-telling exploits.

As has often proven true, a Driftwood Message might close this first section of today’s articulation here. “Escaping With Our Lives” is its titular heading. We might usefully bend an ear.

“Uniformed & Regimented Despite These Qualities’ Central Part in the Chaotic Wreckage & Carnage That We May Have Just Barely Escaped With Our Lives, We May Survey the Recently Corpse-Filled Ditches That Mark Whatever Designates Our Downfall, Whether in the Way of Waterloo Or As Other of Nature’s More Mundane Miseries, Without Ever Learning the Lesson That Only Negotiation & Compromise, the Immutable Rules of Mutuality’s Methods, Can Impart the Thinking & Approaches to Rescue Us From Repeating the Monstrous Mayhem of Victory & Defeat Over & Over & Over Again.” …(continued below the fold)

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—Hubbert’s Nukes at the A.P.I., 1956

This particular delving of energy’s depths emanated from an occasional ‘assignment’ that I had for a brief ambit in 2010 and beyond. It was a gig about ‘corporate responsibility,’ one of those hilarious oxymorons—like ‘legal ethics’—worthy of a giggle at the turn of a phrase. Inevitably, I wanted to point out that this would ever remain an ‘unclothed emperor scenario,’ inasmuch as the only duty capitalists comprehensively will countenance is the siren call of more profit.

Imperial war machines, mass-murder for hire, butchering millions of innocents, these are complicating factors in regard to this basic foundation of all mercantile relations in the sphere of monopoly finance capital that we all now inhabit. However, the centrality, in this general context, of petrochemicals and carboniferous fuel stocks is quite simple, a core component of all modern monopoly enterprise.

Frederick Soddy’s ‘Energy Economics’ merely reflected how the British came to understand, an awareness that Germans and Yankees and more too took to heart, the way that modern militarism absolutely requires oil. Carbon, fossil fuels, chemically combustible rocks and fluids that appear naturally, whatever one names this dynamic, its preeminence in modern life is hard to refute.

Many geologists have, thereby, served as key employees in what has appeared as a behemoth of big-oil and bigger banks and their militarized industrial complexes. It has ‘worked like a charm’ to maintain ‘supply-and-demand’ in a profitable equilibrium at precisely the juncture that it makes Mass Collective Suicide something akin, ultimately, to inevitable. In the end, is that a viable magic?

In prefacing this fifteen-year-old assessment, I began with a search. <“M. King Hubbert” “Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels” 1956> yielded only 2,950 hits, but many of these were marvels. Artificial Intelligence summaries were also quite helpful.

For now, we might just note that Hubbert appears most frequently online in relation to organizations and individuals whose focus—for want of a better descriptor—amounts to Climate Change imprecations of one sort and another. The depletion of carbon in rock and fluid and gas, and the burning of such stocks, thus establishes an obvious basis for theorizing—if not proving outright—that atmospheric carbon’s signal of declining stores of ‘fossilized fuel’ will also culminate in climactic catastrophe.

Thus, the roots of our tropes about ‘global warming’ lie in conversations about hydrocarbon economies and Peak Oil, decades of discourse that, among other things, made clear the fiscal and corporate-governance ties between the two ‘energy sectors’ that Hubbert mentions in his title. What this means might include much of the political-economic chatter of the present pass, although most centrally, perhaps, prevailing empowerment of the Modern Nuclear Project would stand out.

M. King Hubbert was, by default in such a situation, a supporter of the established view that nukes are necessary, no matter how dystopic, evil, suicidal and such. He spoke in this vein in the Spring of 1956, in San Antonio, Texas. “(T)he world appears to be the threshold of an era which in terms of energy consumption will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that made possible by the fossil fuels.

As remarked earlier, experimental nuclear-power reactors are already under construction in several parts of the United States, and in the United Kingdom, the U.S.S.R., and elsewhere, and nuclear-powered submarines are in successful operation. It will probably require the better part of another 10 or 15 years of research and development before stabilized designs of reactors and auxiliary chemical processing plants are achieved, after which we nay expect the usual exponential rate of growth of nuclear-power.”

Of particular import, therefore, is to note at the end of these prefatory remarks that Hubbert shifted markedly by his later years, from a proponent of nuclear energy as inescapable, to a staunch advocate for solar solutions of one sort and another. A quip from the estimable rock-hound—in a nifty little paper chock-full of useful tidbits—states things incisively: “Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.”

As the week of the ninth anniversary(which today would be the twenty-third)of the WTC’s 'end of the world as we knew it' and the 117th—now the 131st—Labor Day unfolds, more than ever we might agree that uncertainty rules everything, at least if we get deeper than the surface, as these posts that have generally addressed some aspect of renewable energy (Carbon Free, Nuclear Free, for instance) have made clear. In the conversations that matter the most, arguably nothing matters more than keeping in mind a certain skepticism and doubt.

I mention this because today's offering concerns the notion of Peak Oil, about which many thinkers have strong, or even unswerveable, opinions. Unfortunately, however, any recalcitrant defense of certainty in the Peak Oil debates is at best pretentious nonsense.

Readers may note that I profiled an expatriate journalist, Greg Palast(INTERLINK), who proffers scathing criticisms of Peak Oil backers. Nevertheless, I am decidedly not saying that Greg Palast is pretentiously nonsensical or vice versa. As my article about his work states in straightforward fashion, he ends up criticizing the use of the concept while acknowledging the possible veracity of much Peak Oil data about the availability and accessibility of liquid fossil fuels.

The boundary between a contention that certainty is possible and an acknowledgment that we cannot be sure often looks a little blurry. When a prominent Peak Oil debunker puts his position in this way, "DISCLAIMER FOR IDIOTS: This site officially accepts that oil is finite, and will peak someday," one may legitimately doubt that this person is open to discussion. But we cannot be sure.

And that's the practical implication of seeking the truth without being positive that its revelation is now manifest through something either that one has discerned, or that one believes wholeheartedly. One will, more or less eagerly, talk about it and continue, despite the omnipresent risk of the paralysis of analysis, the truth-seeking process.

For those interested, as I am, in the nerdy, geeky bowels of this issue, even a cursory review of ideas epistemological demonstrates that wrangling about certainty lies near the heart of discussions about the present-day philosophy and methodology of science. A recent discourse on this topic has suggested that an insistence on 'Truth' stems from "(A)n irrational fear of the unknown (which causes) 'Humans (to) believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown.'"

If this sort of ideation, grappling with how we can responsibly go about increasing and using our knowledge, resonates with a reader, he or she can find copious resources of explication online. For instance, here, here, and here appear efforts that proffer satisfyingly complex access to more data and information about these 'ideas epistemological.'

My grandfather proffered another way of thinking about these issues. He differentiated various levels of untruth: "Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics." As a proponent of rationality, I constantly appreciate and invoke empirical aspects of the world.

And in all but a small proportion of the arm-wrestling about the propriety and utility of Peak Oil, the contenders hurl data at each other as if their charts and graphs, resplendent and power-pointed as they are, will subvert all opposition. But data are not reality; all the probabilities in existence about, say, the potential for economic meltdown or a doubling of oil prices, do not come close to an adequate description of what constitutes economic well-being or the determination of commodity prices. …(continued below the fold)

Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—”’United in Blood’”

(The original title included the phrase, “Against Empire.” It also presented a subheading, to wit this: “Neruda, Jara, & Chilean Culture’s Social-Solidarity Impact.” #20, a month ago now, brought us Part One. As a matter of course, a third installment in this seven part series just continues a ‘first stab’ at this ‘America’s backyard’ subject. Heck, ha ha, people might even benefit from knowing these things.

A second selection, in the event, embodied in part a continuing exploration of Empire’s “Open Veins of Latin America.” Part Three, which focused on Chilean literature, culminated with these paragraphs. “Nor does(Peter) Kornbluh focus only on the early days of Allende’s regime and the attempts then to unseat the nearly-elected President. Both in his book and his various other writings on this massive crime against humanity that the United States orchestrated, he details the way that U.S. operatives and their counterparts in the Southern Cone established the necessary protocols for either a ‘surgical removal’ of Allende, or, if he refused to cooperate, his assassination.

In his just-published article, this careful scholar notes, “A May 1973 memorandum to CIA Director James Schlesinger noted that the agency had ‘accelerated efforts against the military target’ in order to ‘better monitor any coup plotting and bring our influence to bear on key military commanders so that they might play a decisive role on the side of the coup forces.’

Moreover, the CIA was not the only part of the U.S. government bringing its influence to bear. The U.S. Department of Defense also maintained contact with the generals. Indeed, a full year before the coup, U.S. military officials met with Pinochet and his aides in the Panama Canal Zone. A declassified intelligence report recorded Pinochet’s belief that Allende ‘must be forced to step down or be eliminated’ and a clear message from U.S. Army officers in response: the ‘U.S. will support [a] coup against Allende with ‘whatever means necessary’ when the time comes.’”

In other words, as Victor Jara sweated over his ‘toastmaster’ duties and his wife worried about implicit threats to their lives, the U.S. was one hundred percent behind the conspiracy to torture and maim and kill and ‘disappear’ those who stood for social progress in Chile. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of pages from the State Department, the CIA, earlier investigations such as the Church Senate Committee Hearings, and more, further amplify the vicious impunity with which the ‘leaders of the free world’ have conducted themselves toward our ‘good neighbor’ to the South.)

These records, likely now representing a majority of the once uniformly classified and unavailable documentation of U.S. and Chilean elite-perfidy, are far from all the assessments that indict the Nixon, Kissinger, Pinochet oversight, along with the entire array of lower-level personnel and institutional arrangements that characterize the ‘Military-Industrial-Complex,’ the ‘Intelligence-Establishment,’ or any of the other descriptors of United States empire. While we needn’t explore anything like a complete range of such items, a few additional sallies toward understanding do implore citizens to take note and pay attention.

The stalwart folks at School of America’s Watch convey to the interested researcher that plus-or-minus one-in-seven of Chile’s officer corps in the 1970’s had studied at the so-called School of the Americas. The nickname ‘School of Assassins’ was in large measure a rational descriptor. Augusto Pinochet was not one of them, but the U.S. has named a building at the ‘campus’ in his ‘honor.’

The Spanish language training manuals from SOA detailed for enrolled officers the niceties of infiltrating popular organizations, planting agents provocateurs, planning assassinations, conducting tortures of various sorts, and so on and so forth. This was the training for democracy that the U.S. Department of Defense conducted at its facility in Panama.

This imperial bulwark eventually relocated to Fort Benning, in Georgia, where it remains to this day, a target for an annual mass demonstration just before Thanksgiving. The protest opposes teaching ‘public servants’ the crafts of murder and mayhem, and the gathering commemorates the millions of SOA victims, including those from Chile, such as Victor Jara. A lengthy series about what is now WHISC—the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation—lies ahead for readers, in any event.

A substantial spate of publications from the period prior to substantial declassification, as well as additional investigators since President Clinton’s orders in 1999 and 2000 to open up the secrecy vaults just a tad, has also proffered data and analysis of the horrors that U.S. authorities planned and financed against untold thousands of Chilean—and later other Latino—victims.

To suggest the import of what is accessible, for now, we will examine a single such article from Atlantic Magazine in 1982. Legendary investigator Seymour Hersh delivered “The Price of Power—Kissinger, Nixon and Chile.”

Twenty years prior to Peter Kornbluh’s work, with only informants and clever acuity in documentary research, Hersh assembled a powerful case—based on documentation, testimony, and circumstance—that the U.S. had criminally deposed Salvador Allende.

The able author assembles a litany of facts and analysis to show criminal conspiracy, accessory to murder, and general skullduggery on the part of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser. Others too played occasionally crucial but often ancillary or support roles.

One of Hersh’s witnesses was a Navy Yeoman who had just replaced a civilian secretary in an extremely optimum job for finding things out. He assisted the Admiral who acted as liaison between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Security Council.

While this lengthy and deeply reported analysis contains many revelations, this young Mormon enlisted man, in pursuit of a commission and a career in service to his country and his God and freedom, gives readers a dose of the horror and tragedy that have typified American foreign policy for well over the last century.

His superior officer “was deeply involved in the secret Kissinger and Nixon operations against Salvador Allende Gossens…who had astounded the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House by winning the September 4 popular election... . Radford, who arrived at his new post a few weeks after the Chilean election, vividly recalls the sense of crisis: ‘This wasn't supposed to happen.

It was a real blow. All of a sudden, the pudding blew up on the stove.’ Admiral Robinson and his superiors were ‘wringing their hands’ over Chile, Radford says, ‘almost as if they [the Chileans] were errant children.’ Over the next few weeks, Radford says, he saw many sensitive memoranda and Options Papers, as the bureaucracy sought to prevent Allende from assuming office.

Among the ‘options’ was a proposal to assassinate Allende. One such ‘think piece’ ‘discussed various ways of doing it,’ Radford says. ‘Either we have somebody in the country do it, or we do it ourselves. I was stunned; I was aghast. It stuck in my mind so much because for the first time in my life, I realized that my government actively was involved in planning to kill people.’

The options papers had been prepared for Nixon in the weeks after Allende's election. ‘They were exploring ways to get Allende out of there,’ Radford says, and murder was one of the ways. The thrust of this possibility was clear: ‘I don't know if they used the word assassinate, but it was to get rid of him, to terminate him—he was to go.’”

Additional context for what this young recruit discovered about his country was that all of this planning to crucify Chile’s democracy was taking place in “one of the CIA’s success stories” from the 1960’s. The agency had manipulated elections, bought media and politicians with equal alacrity, and generally run the country like a casino for the copper companies and purveyors of soft-drinks and telecommunications services.

From an entirely different background and perspective Peter Winn also has an immense trove of data and insight to convey to willing readers. Studying Chile while on sabbatical from Yale when the coup happened, he might nearly have found himself alongside Victor Jara at the notorious stadium and its killing fields.

He was trying to collect oral histories—of which he already had several hundred—from the just recently dispossessed workers who had maintained control, before Allende’s murder, of the giant Yarur Textile Mill near Santiago.

In early December, “I was denounced anonymously, detained by the Army, and taken at bayonet point to a regimental barracks, where I was interrogated at midnight by its commander. After three days of interrogation and investigation, he informed me, ‘We have no proof that you have committed a crime, exactly speaking, Professor Winn, but talking with workers, interviewing union leaders, all this is very suspicious. We do not want anyone talking to our workers.”

What the courageous academic conveys in his monograph, Weavers of Revolution: the Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism, is that under Allende the nationalized factory at Yarur, the largest textile operation in Chile was succeeding. Despite the concerted efforts of every powerbroker and gatekeeper with whom the company had to deal as a labor collective, wages were up, productivity was up, efficiency was way up, and the enterprise was viable in terms of income and outgo.

Nor were these former wage-earners and current owner-operators alone. Various other firms that Chile had turned over to employees were also making a go of things. This was the context for the march—hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Santiago in support of socialism—in the waning Southern Hemispheric Winter of 1972, exactly one year and one week before the unleashing of well-plotted homicidal mania.

“One month later, a work stoppage by a small group of truck owners in… .the far South…triggered a national walkout and lockout by merchants and manufacturers, professionals and shopkeepers, that rapidly engulfed Chile in a virtual class war, complete with paramilitary attacks and terrorist bombings. At bottom Paro de Octobre…was a ‘general strike’ of the bourgeoisie, intended to demonstrate their power as a class, stop the advance toward socialism, and create the conditions within which Allende could be ousted—by military coup or Congressional impeachment.”…(continued below the fold)

Last Words For Now

Well, ‘hell’s bells,’ as Mama Kassy often exclaimed with a rueful smile, how about them apples? Whatever else may ring true, I clang the klaxon of Life Force Energy resolutely, and as resonantly as I’m able. On the other hand, the audio flailed in the video above, alas. Forgive me, ha ha.

What, more or less exactly, can we make of all this? ‘So full of a number of things,’ proclaimed the poet, the world should make us ‘happy as kings,’ though one might doubt the veracity of the premise, ha ha, whether ‘rich as Croesus’ or otherwise. In any case, whether from Goddess Grace, the good Lord’s mercy, or some other instance of amicable marvels of All-That-Is, Big Tent Review reflects the merry ministrations of a more or less cooperative, collegial cosmos.

Ecclesiastes, referenced above as the unintended iconic learning curve that I encountered through my notoriously faulty memory, provides—supposedly from Solomon’s own quill—sweet Goddess Guidance along these lines, though the doctrinal aspect of the notice appears more Abrahamic in its essence than Gaian.

The folk song sings out from Chapter Three. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:” time and tide for all of it.

Chapter Seven offers a way to find light in darkness, simultaneously as it promotes an altogether tragic and almost hopeful vision. “A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death, than the day of birth.” So it begins.

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for this is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fools; this also is vanity.” These are the first six couplets.

It continues for six more. “Surely oppression makes the wise man foolish, and a bribe corrupts the mind. Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Be not quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools. Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance, an advantage to those who see the sun. For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money; and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it.”

As a typical sort of final salute, a Driftwood Message can culminate this first half of today’s #23. “From Firstborn Infancy’s Furiously Laboring Chances & Emergent Grace,” begins this pretty piece.

It continues, “to Death’s Doomed Destiny & Agonal Gulps, All of Us Find Ourselves Cast Upon the Shores of Space & Time By That Combination of Fate & Will & Randomness That Rule the Cosmos; the Core Magic of Conscious Awareness Is That All People Can—an Utterly Unexpected Option, Both Miracle & Duty—Attain a Perch Where We May Purposefully Ponder & Seek Actively Both to Apprehend & to Impact the Vast Intertwining Intricacy of All-That-Is.”

—Below the Fold—

As I’ve said before, the unfolding of everything and the twining twists of this publication are, come what may, a reflection of reality as well as the inherent, truly twisted contrariness of even the most soulful and compassionate consciousness. I’d love to hear from folks; I’m interested in collaborative adventuring. Let’s go!

Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…

Jason once more, and again in the position of nascent, initial creative success that accompanies the Four of Wands. The Future then affixes the image and ideation, in the Major Arcana proffer of Strength, of Hercules’ psychic skirmishes as he grapples with the world’s woes—in the tough, thick skin of the Nemean Lion—through his own inner battles.

Thus, well might we imagine powerful messages from a template that begins with every fullest fulfillment’s eternal inauguration of ‘next steps’ and culminates with Herculean inner struggle. The backdrop for efforts like today’s initial BTR article, in other words, totally justifies the card that completes the twenty-two images that comprise the Major Arcana.

The World offers itself ‘on a platter,’ as it were, in much the same way that—at different points in yesteryear’s emanations—nature’s fortunes have occasionally seemed to heap their plenty on me, one of the sweet formulations of which was Marshall Arts itself. Any such ‘success,’ in the nature of things, initiates further adventures, projects, conundrums, courses to follow that induce pursuits to gain and all such blah blah blah.

Similarly, Current Contexts almost automatically bloomed from this generous material grace as projects of one sort and another. Hither and yon, therefore, as with the Argonaut in forming his heroic team in the Four of Wands, Marshall Arts is morphing to include a Big Tent, a Southern Appalachian Radical Action Research Archive, and a hankering truly to start things up, in the idiom, though precisely how to get everything moving in some coherent fashion is less obvious, ha ha.

Even as the Present Passage percolates, the Future Portents portal probes a deeper and at times more daunting prospect, one that inevitably confronts any sojourner who ‘seeks to build a movement,’ or anything similar. Just as inner warmth manifests on the bodily surface—as a smile, a posture of welcome, pheromones of connection and desire, and so on and so on—so too do ubiquitous outward contradictions and conflicts have likely inward reflections or parallels.

The end of the reference passage in The New Mythic Tarot resonates powerfully about the appearance of Strength in this slot. “Thus the Fool, having developed the faculties of mind and feeling, now learns to deal with his own ferocious egotism, emerging from this contest with trust in himself and integrity toward others.” Would that it all proves true, ha ha!

The moment has again arrived, then, to ponder the larger array from Above-the-Fold. Thus, “(t)his issue's Spiral Spread, meanwhile, in effecting the wider-world net of inquiry that Tarot casts, will be examining portents and possibilities, problems and prospects, in relation to public health and personal well-being in plausible intersection with RFK's nomination to head Health and Human Services. If one thinks of a truly popular ‘leadership-from-below,’ one may lay a decent foundation for imagining one of the prerequisites for human survival, Popular Education, an attempted exercise of which will ever show up in these pages.

In the event, the lay of the land, and of the cards, appears almost iconic, something that we will examine much more thoroughly below-the-fold. The King of Cups delivers Morpheus as the Essence. The temporal triad elicits Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and Orestes in the Two of Swords for the Past, Dionysus’ The Fool for the Present tense, and Aristaes’ Knight of Pentacles for Likely Futures. The Four of Wands gives us Jason and his entire adventurous team en route to epic endeavor and collective capacitation, a powerful notice in relation to No-Matter-What, Opportunities. Problems & Prospects reintroduces Clytemnestra, her husband, and her son one step along life’s byways in the Three of Swords. The Synthesis yields the nonpareil Hermes, as The Magician, to finish up.”

Can one imagine Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—he whose uncle and father fell to assassins’ gunfire—as a wounded healer, another descriptor for Morpheus? Can one envision him as anything else? Morpheus might easily play the role that hapless yet resilient Bobby has played in the world. The advisories of our ‘Concordance-of-the-Cards,’ perhaps more so than in relation to any other card, highlight the deeply paradoxical nature of this pluck.

On the one hand, our proposed new leader’s Maenads only tore him to pieces figuratively, in mediated fashion. The textual guides note, in this regard, “(t)he King of Cups is a moody and sensitive figure, and often gifted with a great depth of feeling and a rare gift at communicating that feeling to affect and influence others. But this is the relationship of performer to audience… .(one)reason that…the crowd of ecstatic women who follow in the god’s train dismember hi, for in a sense he must first be powerless and metaphorically torn asunder before he can be something other than just a wise counselor” about well-being. Whoa!

The follow-up Temporal Triad, in the meanwhile, brings forth first—to illuminate yesterday—Orestes early travail in the Two of Venus’ suit of the sharpest capacity for cognition and all its conflicts. Here, the young Prince faces his parents’ murderous infidelities and feels an irremediable dread about what is coming down the pike.

What a perfect pull for RFK’s prior bona fides as a masterful ‘boat-rocker’ and ‘tempest-stirrer,’ as it were. I know dozens of people personally who desperately need the nutrition inherent in the ‘food for thought’ here. Tens of millions of Americans, and untold billions around the world, also need to listen to what The Goddess offers up to us here. We all sense that things are horribly awry, but the vast majority would prefer to ignore it instead of trying to learn something, let alone do anything, about it.

“On a divinatory level, the Two of Swords implies a state of tense balance where there is a refusal to fact some impending confliction. A more creative way of handling this situation might be to try to face what lies ahead, rather than attempting to preserve the status quo, which will eventually be disrupted anyway.”

The arena of the Here-&-Now is also some sort of perfection. Dionysus, The Fool, most incisively, symbolizes the way that only by a leap of faith, a metaphorical ‘stepping into the void,’ is any progress or even clear comprehension in any way attainable. One can well imagine the righteous affirmation of those members of the Kennedy clan—the vast majority—who excoriate their relative for his altogether ‘foolhardy’ willingness to buck the behemoth monstrosity that characterizes the scientistic manipulation and mendacity that rules the roost these days in regard to what constitutes health and wellness.

Bobby’s falcons call to mind Zeus’ eagle, which watches over this deity of desire and delight, again quite descriptive of this ‘crazed child of privilege.’ Textual counsel is apt once more as well. “The Fool augurs the advent of a new chapter of life when he appears in a spread. A risk of some kind is required, a willingness to jump out into the unknown. (This) is ambiguous, just as Dionysus is, for we cannot know whether we will enter (some) perception of the divine or end up merely looking foolish. In this way, (and this way alone), amidst ambiguity and excitement and fear,” does a seeker embark on any great journey in the realm of the real.

Res ipsa loquitur seems undeniable, at least in these first three instances. The meaning truly speaks instinctively, intuitively, incisively that an actuality of existence is finally coming to the fore. The future cannot be quite so obvious, of course, since its parameters are inherently uncertain. However, the suit of Pentacles, bounteous health and material plenty, certainly fits RFK’s background, if nothing else.

The Knight, in the event, presents the least ‘heroic’ hero of the entire Tarot. Not to say that the legendary Aristaeus is anything but admirable. His tutelage of husbandry and bees promoted human survival. Robert Kennedy certainly manifests in his career favoring ‘natural solutions’ and plenty of involvement in learning about and managing our own afflictions and affinities, so to speak.

He learned “the arts of healing and prophecy” from the Muses themselves, “an image of the human capacity for industry and diligent service.” A poll of the folks at Children’s Health Defense would turn up voluminous support for this point, if primarily—for ‘future reference’—as a proposition. Like RFK, one might contend that things might easily portend, “Aristaeus embodies that side of us which is humble enough to relate to the lowliest forms of life, and which is always ready to learn more about the varied and complex faces of nature.” If one doesn’t hear some echoes here, one hasn’t been listening to anything other than corporate propaganda’s purposeful promotion of libel’s hope for further profiteering and plunder.

No-Matter-What, Opportunities, meanwhile shows up with another visit from Jason’s Wands, the Four again, with its augury of team-building, leadership, and early validation in a long process of struggle to attain a worthy, honorable, necessary goal. One could wax eloquent here. “The Four of Wands is a card of harvest and reward. The challenge of a new creative idea has been met, hard work has been applied, and now (we) can reap the solid reward that has been earned through effort.”

Problems-&-Prospects moves beyond the arena of the ideal to something more sublime and ineffable, as well as completely spooky. The Three of Swords presents the murder of Agamemnon as a metaphor for inevitable conflict, intense and very possibly violent.

Orestes’ mother, with the help of her lover, slays the young noble’s Father, meaning that the youth’s job is to hunt down and murder his Mom; grotesque problem to solve, no doubt, with the Three at just that juncture when avoiding inevitable combativeness becomes unavoidable. The shit must hit the fan: that irrefutable fact establishes the parameters of the options and downsides of RFK’s attempted tenure.

Then, having begun with the highest royalty of relationship, having passed through the carefree hero’s presence, the Reading arrives at a Synthesis truly hopeful in its legerdemain, literally, in the form of Hermes as The Magician. And what a Guide he is! The last paragraph of this decidedly hopeful contextualization remains instructive.

“On a divinatory level, Hermes, The Magician, points to potential skills and creative abilities which have yet to be manifested. He may appear as an upsurge of energy and an intuition of exciting new opportunities. He presages insight and an awareness of unexplored possibilities. The Fool is blind, with only his animal sense of a meaning to be found somewhere, somehow. But through his meeting with Hermes, The Magician, it becomes clear that the journey is possible, and that one has capacities that have yet to be developed.”

Synthesizing a summary of these seven plucks is interesting, and more. According to Goddess input Bobby Kennedy’s undertaking to become the top bureaucrat at Health and Human Services might well center around issues of self-healing and wending a way through wounds, stemming from a background of dire danger and deep worry to a situation right now that breaks exciting new ground to a plausible future of innovative plenitude.

Ongoing chances for assembling powerful teams and for gaining public support will occur, even as the general opportunities and risks will almost certainly entail deeply rooted and possibly intense conflicts. The outcome of everything could end up decidedly hopeful and salubrious nonetheless because of abilities and ‘magic’ that we may never have utilized before.

It all sounds not only appealing but also obviously rational and conceivable as a set of outcomes. One piece of Driftwood Message Art, “Selling Science,” tells what might pull a participant to ‘back Bobby.’

“Having Ever Risen in Tandem With Expanded Knowledge & Its Application to Policy & Practice, Living Standards, & Their Ineluctable Universal Appeal, Have Assured That Capacities to Predict & Control Nature Have Grown Apace, Eliciting Sales of Science & Its Legerdemain to High Bidding High Rollers, Who Now Control Both
'Public' & Corporate Campus Labs That Engender & Then Engineer Often Predetermined Consequential 'Truth' That Potently Promotes Paymasters' Profits, Altogether a Ubiquitous Dynamic That Transpires in No Realm More Clearly Than That of Public Health & Social Welfare.”

Another Marshall Arts item follows this up and signs off for today’s Goddess Guidance. “Grappling Collectively” is one version’s heading.

"Inextricable Contradictions & Their Complex Swirl of Intersecting Synthesis Define All Conundrums of Social, Economic, & Political Existence; Only By Grappling With These Seemingly Impenetrable Thickets of Paradox--& Collectively at That, Despite the Aggravation--Can Those of Us Who Do Not Inherit a Seat at Life's Bargaining Table Hope to Conduct Truly an Exercise in Salvation, Envisioning, Strategizing, & Then Planning Our Survival & Thriving Together."

All God’s Cousins—(continued)…

Mia had likely saved them all from hopelessly embarrassing circumstances when she pulled a “Pamela maneuver,” she would later laugh, “and married my own big hunk of a Marine” from the U.S. Embassy, from whence at the end of his tour of duty he had carried her away to the opulence and poverty, the imperial sweep and alienated depths of San Diego, where she and “un David para mi Delilah,” as Mia delighted in putting the case, spent the next four years.

The week in the country that they had just completed was to have buried forever this multifaceted monster with green eyes that threatened to turn him into “otro Othello.” For her part, Pamela was to have learned “really to trust him,” not to accuse or suspect or resent or in general undermine “the honorable integrity with which he dearly, dearly loved” his loving and lovely bride of close to four years.

The very next week, the resulting drama, inherent in male-supremacist marriages and perhaps inescapable wherever mammalian jealousy unites with human awareness, erupted in their lives like a volcano, not altogether explosively, but with enough heat and force to pour forth fiery magma to scorch the slopes of their Andean affair. It began simply, almost innocently. “So Susanna tells me that you guys had quite a party down at Punta Arenas before you left that stint down there.”

This all happened when they were visiting Cecilia, Pamela's older-by-nine-years half-sister, who had just that year, the fourth in Pinochet's cruel reign of error and terror, moved with her professor husband into their little brick ranch home, “tan gringa, muy linda, precisamente dieciocho kilometros de Santiago Centro.”

Alvo froze as he prepared them drinks. Pamela's voice sounded a warning that was like a submarine klaxon, “Listo para sumergirse!!”

However, ignoring her failed to deflect Pama, as Cecilia and Patricio grew more and more discomfited, from her insistent, falsely chipper inquisition. “Nosotros queremos saber como todos en el regimiento lo pasaron tan bien!” Such a good time, eh?

Finally, he had snapped at her a simple “Silencio mujer!” before continuing with a snakish hiss that had shivered his wife's innards, “no es asunto tuyo.” Whether she had business here or not, she shut up, very visibly and resolutely, for the rest of their stay—through dinner and into the night—which made, to put the case mildly, for a strained and uncomfortable evening.

That was all days ago now. “Ahora, no necesitamos darnos cuenta de cosas tan pequeñas, tan triviales.” Though he might as well have been whistling past a terrifyingly haunted cemetery, he smiled as bravely to himself as he could muster, whistling the Chilean Navy's song, “.”

Back at their flat in a block of Santiago row houses, very European and chic, the fourth Alvaro was holding his son on his lap, a fifth in the line that stretched almost back to the Pacific War, La Guerra Pacifica. The little lad had quite recently turned two, but father Anaya was promising to show him the rats at their country place in Los Andes on their next trip, just hours hence, where “we will blow them all up just for you tomorrow.

Pah! Pah! Pah!” he shot, his finger a pistol. He hoped, despite Alvaro-the-Fourth’s mother’s much more “pacifist ways,” that his son would join the venerable Anaya naval line. He had nodded as he put out another cigarette and said, “Si! El servicio naval!”

Tonight, quite likely, he’d rue again that he’d married a beauty who “didn’t like to play with me nearly so much as I like to play with her,” who had shared with him when they first began to meet, in spite of the almost incestuous feel to their connection, what with their being step-siblings, at least technically, though she'd been on her year in the U.S. and he'd been attending the Naval Academy simultaneously with her mother's and his father's embracing each other in marriage, that she had dreamed for “almost five years of joining a convent,” till her senior year in High School in Los Angeles.

For his part, though he was capable of insanely wild jealousy, he had never pondered that anything at all in his life could surpass “either the sea or my woman” in importance. The fact that Pamela had married that Marine from “somewhere over their in Gringo Land called Iowa” had nearly derailed their love affair at its inception.

This star-crossed intersection began as a fling between two part-Mapuche negritos that in spite of all the odds had turned fiery and passionately loving “just a month before I married this man who would be your father,” she later told her daughter who was not yet even conceived, let alone born into the world from the wild interpenetration of man and woman, in this case Pamela and Alvaro, her inch-and-a-half-shorter-than-her sweetie whom she would tell when she was pissed, “I could still be a nun, you know.”

Likely as a matter of course, her perspective on the matter of passionate engagement and connubial frequency differed fundamentally from his. She never quite stated outright that she'd married a pig, and “un cerdito con gusto para rubiecitas” at that.

Still, she'd “seen the ways that he looked at the little blonde chiquitas with their fuck-me pumps that made them tower over him and their glossy lips that they licked so wantonly.” What she rued most of all in their entire condition, truth be told is that “I was born little and plump and as dark as coffee beans.”

At other times, she sighed at how she'd fallen into bed with the “big hunk of dumb from the United States Marine Corps,” in order “finally to pierce my hymen and claim my womanhood at the ripe old age of twenty-two.” If only she'd waited or been more “liberated, like my sister Mia,” then she wouldn't have struggled so much in her marriage to Alvaro; or, equally so, when she felt that her husband could not stop himself from playing the 'distant soldier.'

She'd written in her journal just seventeen days ago, less than a day following Alvo's return from Punta Arenas, about how she often felt in her lover's presence, the father of her son, who “wanted more hijas y hijos and the necessary practices to bring them into the world. “Te sentia a ti, a 1000 millas de distancia a pesar de estar a mi lado.” The English idiom, transplanted to Spanish, evoked the same sensation: “Sitting by my side, a thousand miles away.”

Now they were heading back up into the hills for another tryst in the shadows of the mountains, again spewing tobacco smoke like stacks at a furnace's full blast. Young Alvaro the Fifth, whose second birthday at this juncture had just passed two months back, again sat, bright-eyed and full of bubbling life and joy, behind his mother and father as the Fiat sprinted along toward the long climb from Santiago's plain, at six hundred meters, to the close to two kilometer height of their cabin outside Los Andes.

“Por que paramos aqui?” Pamela inquired with a bit of concern.

Alvaro wrenched the parking brake on and replied curtly, “Porque tengo que mear,” exiting the vehicle as he thought to himself, “Ella sabe; ella tiene que saber.” This after all, was his favorite rock from which to let fly a stream of amber into the arroyo below, where they had stopped often enough before so as to permit the same performance.

“Pero las serpientes,” she called, both explaining her trepidation in general and her failure to accompany him and admire his manhood, which she had done the first few times, till she had spied the mating snakes “on the exact place where he was going to stand and pee.” Worms she loathed; serpents she loathed and feared with an irrational passion that she knew without question “bordered my own separation from madness incarnate.”

Returning to the car as its engine ticked in its cooling process, father Alvo opened the back door to chuck his son under the chin and share his manly bond with his boy. Then, in a few graceful moves, Alvaro launched them on their way again, climbing relentlessly for the next forty-six and a half kilometers into the chillier and chillier air of the cordillera.

Once again, Pamela snuggled into her seat to rest, from and for, “the rigors of the night, el servicio a mis hombres,” as she stated the case. Otherwise she would have joined her esposa in continuing to smoke up a storm, their two-pack-a-day apiece habit “undoubtedly profitable para comercio gringo.”

In the event, while Papi gesticulated expansively in the conversations with himself that served to articulate his views, vis-a-vis discourse with his superior officers, his wife, his brothers, and anyone else with whom he came into conflict, he kept lighting a new Marlboro from his previous one. In the meantime, his son, whose internal ideation undoubtedly involved the father whom he feared and worshipped and the mother whom he lustily adored, babbled happily in the middle of the back seat, astride the latest, up-to-date version of a child's safety seat.

When, in the course of opening and closing his window as they all careened along life's precipitous climbing highway, the inevitable ash flew off his cigarette toward the back seat, Senor Anaya Senior preternaturally checked the rearview mirror to make sure that his son was not about to go up in flames.

What he saw was more inflaming still, so that his eyes widened theatrically as he reflexively turned to the slumbering child. That was nearly the penultimate moment in three people's lives.

Unavoidably, as the elder Alvo jerked his entire slender, diminutive torso toward the back seat, the car swerved, with both a screech of tires and Pamela's scream of terror adding to the auditory experience of what was almost a terminal instant. Yet somehow, with uncanny quickness and precision, the father was able to snatch the little rope-thin snake.

This reptilian beast, “con mi mano izquierda, una culebra de un metro y medio de largo,” had coiled itself on the not-yet-toddler Alvo's well-insulated but still warm belly. This required that Father turn his body, and use his non-dominant hand to toss the reptile into the frigid void, and right the Fiat as it approached within a meter or two of crashing through the flimsy guardrail to plummet, “Dios solo sabe” how many meters, down the mountainside.

Though they had a slow crawl, about an hour, up to their cabin after they reached the turnoff just ahead, a great chance for Pamela to rest in anticipation of more nightly labors, she refused to close her eyes again. “Estas loco, marido!” was all that she said at the time.

His look warned her, “una nube negra, a punto de explotar.” But no way was she sleeping “despues que, such a close call with death,” not to mention that she rightly suspected something very much like the harmless but horrifying snake that had had her son in its clutches as the source of this case of one of “my favorite English words, snafu, situation normal, all fucked up.”

Predictably under these conditions, father and husband and exemplary naval officer that he was all fumed in different ways about what in time would only add up to an inconsequential eventuality in long lives filled with more important matters. While he had been merely as tense and wrought up as he normally was prior to their arrival, in other words, given these unfolding developments, he arrived with his cargo and his family at their quarters for the next two days, just after the sun's setting had plunged the steeply sloping setting into dusky near-darkness, like a piece of sprung steel that was serving as a blockade and buffer for thousands and thousands of kilos of force.

“Entonces,” Pama later told her adolescent children, Alvaro and Patricia, “la radio no se apagaba.” Alvaro the elder kept trying though, turning and twisting the knob as the color suffused his neck and face, “the red of rage that was his signature so often,” till, with a snort of derisive laughter he pulled out the service .45 automatic with which he and his son would “blow up” rats on the morrow, and fired one complete magazine into the dash of the car. The trusty conveyance's engine and operational components never seemed to suffer, but the radio never again refused to desist in its static-laden dissonance.

As little Alvo, never yet one to fear noise, especially from his Papi, after a brief moment of wide-eyed shock volubly applauded the explosions, Pamela recoiled in horror, screaming in two short screeches to express her terror. Crossing herself reflexively, to herself she said as the tears came to her eyes, “Podria haber sido una monja.”

Her husband cackled, as if he could read her thoughts. “Mira donde señora! You wouldn't have nearly as much fun if you were a nun.” And, more to the point of this overall narrative project, Lou’s future spouse would not have had the ‘conceptual force,’ as it were, ever to enter this cosmic scene. Next Up—Chapter XXIV

*****

Wood Words Essays—(continued)…

…one might readily turn to psychology—a philosophy of humanity, as it were. Spirituality too—a philosophy of grace’s recognition of interconnection, perhaps—brings an awareness of the topsy-turvy universe, the clarity of which assessments inherently percolate shock, irony, and occasional guffaws at the entire charade and how we seek to rationalize it

A top five Marshall Arts bestseller, “Rising to Light,” expresses this spiritual and psychological dimensions of the wood, so to speak. “Without Likely Exception, All Fond Fancies of Rising Toward the Light Inescapably Necessitate a Willingness to Lie Down in Darkness.”

A like characterization occurs in “Salubrious Muck & Mire,” a title that suggests something akin to the ‘ironic disposition of contrariness.’ It is arguably wise counsel, come what may.

“A Consciousness That Aspires to Attain Heavenly Heights, No Matter How Angelic Its Intentions Or Dramatic Its Dreams, Must Somehow First Root Itself in the Muck & Mire of Some Good Earth.”

Interestingly enough, at least to the likes of me, this capacity to construe interludes of spirited aspirations for moral and ethical epiphany inevitably leads straight to the heart of political matters. As a matter of course, one of Marshall Arts’ categorical imperatives is Politics & Personal Empowerment, a domain in which anomaly and ironical sensibilities likely reign supreme as much so as in any other aspect of life.

"For a Change of Pace" proffers a proof of this point.  “The Concept of Solidarity, at Times As Ineffable As the Holiest of Ghosts & in Other Instances As Fiercely Tangible As a Howling Wall of Flame, Can Seem Little More Attainable Than Waltzing Naked Among Stars, Yet Its Achievement, Upon Which Human Survival Likely Hinges, Requires Merely the Minor Mundane Miracle That Wage-Earners Elect Not to Commit Mass Collective Suicide in Service to Plutocracy's Profiteering & Choose Instead, For a Change of Pace, to Act in Their Own Best Interest.”

Upon its articulation, the message displays an obvious ‘duh-to-the-power-of-duh’ motif. Truly: what a shift we would see were people to stand for their own salubrious security instead of sucking up to money’s monstrous minions; the nostrum about not being able ‘to fight City Hall’ notwithstanding, at times the only way to survive is to contrive a rebellious uprising against ‘how we’ve always done things.’

“Requisite Rocking of the Boat” shows the common sense of such views. “Under 'Normal' Circumstances, Injunctions Against Rocking the Boat Might Make Sense; at Other Times, However, As When Our Common Craft Is Full of Holes & Sinking Or Approaching Other Dire Straits, a Failure to Mutiny Amounts to Insanity, Both Tactical & Strategic Lunacy Since Thriving, Or Even Survival, Hinges on Making Lots of Waves.”

In addition to considering consciousness and action as part and parcel of political pursuits, one can seek out analytical sallies that demonstrate the parameters of said awareness and the motive powers of such activities. Often enough, as today’s topical assessment offers up, these contentions of contrariety suggest ironic humor, if not outright dark slapstick.

“Elective Extinctions” provides a straightforward example of this idea. “Until This Moment's Natural Historical Passage, Extinction Has Exclusively Resulted From Ill Fortune, e.g., Random Rocks From Afar That Extinguished Happy Reptilian Hegemony; Only Humans Have Set a Course to Exterminate Themselves, Seemingly Because They Exhibit the Fortitude For Mass Collective Suicide But Lack the Gritty Persistence Necessary to Amicable Mutuality & Honorable Solidarity.”

For much of the centuries-long period of emergent American and assertive English imperial ambitions, the threats of this oh-so-systematic approach, at least to ‘patriotic Americans’—not slaves, not working folk generally, not immigrants-of-means, not poor women—were minimal. This ‘safety-and-security’ of being Yankee has diminished profoundly, especially during the decades since 9/11’s treacheries.

“Imperial Torch Light” encapsulates this argument. “Today, An Unavoidable Dynamic of the Torch of Empire is That Imperialism Debilitates Its Erstwhile Beneficiaries at Home In Some Fashion Similarly as it Immolates Its Hapless Victims Further Afield.”

Darkly ironic attributes of this thought are impossible to deny. In recognizing the goofy horrors of insidious colonies and crazed supremacist idiocy, many folks of my personal acquaintance have zero ability to explain why these sorts of depredations and degradations are transpiring, just now, with such widespread frequency. The wood has a politically intelligible response.

“In Asking, 'Why Does Rampant Fakery So Feast on the Present Pass?' We Might Recall With a Chuckle That The Vast Majority of Circulated Nonsense Results From Some Form of Corporate 'Marketing', the Same Propaganda & Punditry That Propagate All the News Tsunamis, Avowedly Accurate & Reliable Information, That Monopolized Media Insists We Swallow Without Inquiry.”

Arch Marshall Arts notions fairly frequently conjoin the political and philosophical branchings that represent half the categories that the Feral Nerd brings to the fore in performative spaces of one sort and another. My sense of ‘what comes next,’ for a lot of individuals, is pretty simple: ‘to hell with all that!’ Unfortunately, one rejects any semblance of a fully human life if one rejects being ‘responsible for oneself’ in this way. “Seeking Required” illustrates the notion.

“Observed in Whatever Blaze of Light Dapples Its Details, Even the Most Spectacular & Varied Scenery Seems a Blur, So That, Despite One's Being Oriented in Time & Space, All the Particulars, the Totality of the Picture, Must Remain a Bit Vague: So Too in Life, Trying to Discover & Present a Clear & Complete Portrait of Things Leads Instantly to the Realm of the Ineffable, the Indecipherable, the Fundamentally Mysterious, Even as Our Common Human Destiny, &, Some Would Say, Our Duty is to Seek the Whole Truth in the Very Fangs of This Paradox of Impossibility.”

In one clear sense, dutiful fulfillment along such lines implies service to others, or to the future, or something similar. In turn, an implicit development of this altogether moral point—an inescapable aspect of political life, of course—is finding a way, one of the many tracks that might, just plausibly, lead somewhere useful and helpful and, therefore, fulfilling.

“Life's Longest Journey Begins With a Birth That One Does Not Plan & Ends With A Death That, Under Normal Circumstances, One Does Not Invite; In Between Come The Hurly-Burly Exigencies & Mundane Routines of Everyday Existence, realms of Inevitable Action & Potential Choice Where, Just Possibly, One May Find a Path, Full of Honorable & Passionate Purpose, That One Desires to Pursue.”

For the likes of a Marshall Artist spindoctor, such a trail through the wildernesses of Earth’s biological and geological bounties could easily devolve to the attempt to discover everything, details, essence, all-that-is of All-That-Is. Aside from its arrogance, not to mention dispositive impossibility, handling a feral-looking piece of pretty arboreal splinter shocked me by revealing more appalling conceptualization as obvious as forbidden.

“Daunting Totality” is its heading. “A Truly Daunting Prospect, Living with Total Awareness Would Deliver Both Ecstatic Thrills & Noisome Chills, At Once Embodying a Great White as it Filled its Maw With Gore & Tore Its Prey Apart, and Experiencing A Tuna's Terror As It Felt Its Killer's Teeth Rend Its Own Passionate Pulse to Pieces.”

Somewhat aligned with such a jocular horror, but all-too-everyday, part and parcel of All-That-Is, another piece of Marshall Arts colorful cornucopia addresses the hilarious and horrific junctions of living and breathing. Seeing and feeling, and society’s ministrations as well, all layer in luscious and sensual elements of matters grim and grotesque.

“Twisting Passages of Paradox” is its title’s easily stated complexity. “That Every Portal's Invitations to See May Also Yield Blindness, That Each Taught Muscular Surface Overlays a Slack Sack of Interior Goo, That All Answer Inquiry Activates Additional Querulous Questions, & On In Every 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 Sojourn Through These Thickets Of Antithesis.”

Now then, where should we go from such a fraught passage of wonder and woe? On the world’s ‘production set,’ according to the Bard, ‘all the men and women are merely players’ in scenes that come along whatever we will. In such contexts, “Staging Lives” makes a measure of sense.

“We Might Most Profitably Incline Proclivities in Processes That Lead Us to Stage Our Lives as a Sublime Chance to Seize & Shape Existence as a Series of Dilemmas That We Thoroughly Enjoy & Collectively Benefit From Engaging & Seeking to Solve.”

So? And then? Enjoying our problems may be all well and good, but as with the Wicked Witch’s dilemma in Oz, how to do this—living instead of killing, of course—provides a classic instance of ‘easier said than done.’ Budgeting and logistics and such aside, however, the first job must ever be kindred to a search for accurate awareness.”

“Necessary Impossible Searches” highlights this thinking, dispositively for this Big Tent aficionado. “Like Infants to Maternal Milk, I Am Drawn to Those Who Seek the Truth, Yet, In Noontime's Glaring Glow & Moonrise's Silver Sable, I Flee in Abject Horror From All Who Assert That they've Uncovered Its Everlasting Essence: Nothing So Enervates & Extinguishes Any Search for Accurate Awareness As Does the Inherently Erroneous Notion That One Has Attained Complete Comprehension of Either the Universe as a Whole or Any Intricate Piece of the Cosmos' Essentially Infinite Puzzle.”

I’ve often enough wondered whether we have fellow wanderers on this journey of sapience: dolphins, tortoises, parrots, aliens. Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” gives readers a remarkable miniature of this kind of consideration. Whatever the case may be, machines have yet to take over, ha ha.

“The Evolutionary Leap From Hopping Insect to Homo Sapiens Is But a Modest Move Compared to the Intergalactic Gulf Between a Stone's Nascent Sagacity & a Slime Mold's Sapient Trajectory Toward Humankind.”

Many a Charm establishes a similar perspective. An upcoming expression of today’s BTR regular telling of the tape will take scores of these bitty bits: Thought Charms, Love Charms, Power Charms demarcate the entire mix. Here’s one of these forthcoming ideas, pertinent to the flow right now. “Whether Heavenly Or Hellish, Divinity's Mask Is Ours to Wear.”

Divine fools we are destined to become, if we’re lucky, in the course of things as they flow on paths that we pray we play some gay part in ascertaining. As noted already, this evolutionary miracle requires cognition, an inescapably intellectual aspect of everything that is possible to amplify in innumerable ways.

“Cognition’s Collective Core” is one of them. “However Sharply Piercing Or Stoutly Fashioned, No Individual Arrow of Awareness Can Likely Cast Light on Cosmic Conundrums Till Collective Lances of Consciousness Are As Commonplace As They Are Incisive.”

Unfortunately, or from a more radical POV purposefully, average sorts get in their own way all too enthusiastically. “Wear that mask!” Ha ha ha! As I often enough quip, ‘my best marksmanship is when I’m aiming at my own two feet.’ “Evading Ultimately Unavoidable Necessities” has something, plausibly of note, to say in this regard.

“Glued to Screens That Parse Persistent Monopolies of Putrid Punditry & Bombastic Bullshit, We Evade the Soulful Introspection & Avoid the Collective Engagement On Which Continued Survival of Our Kind Depends, At Once Perhaps the Most Ironic & Most Idiotic Instances of Willful Ignorance To Afflict Humanity During These Days Of Commingled Miraculous Opportunity & Direst Danger, Mixing Technical Miracle With Mutuality's Meltdown.”

Truly, ‘natural selection’ has given us Capital’s commodified accumulation of a poignant plenty that we frequently also use nastily, in malodorous and insalubrious fashion for certain. One needn’t prove a genius of Norbert Wiener’s caliber to see entropy’s utterly implacable face staring out from this all-too-common sense of how things actually stand. “Nature’s Now Engineered Intersections” proffers such a portrait, such a mirror.

“Engineered Norms Now Influence All of Nature's Forms So Fully That Today, Not Only Are All Gaia's Gifts, No Matter How Grand, Or Magnificent, Inseparable From Cultural Protocols' Copious Impacts, But Every Sacrament & Each Holy Relic of Erstwhile Spiritual Ascendancy Also Emanate Empirical Account Ledgers That Resolutely Reduce the Entire Array of Earth's Resources to a Fuel Supply to Energize Humanity's Fiery Heavenward Trajectories That, in Ways As Palpable As They Are Paradoxical, Could Instead Soon Rocket All & Sundry to the Hellish Reality of an Elected Extinction's Eternal Nonexistence.”

Embracing such an endgame cannot be a mandatory choice, the only option, although in the here and now, it is a real possibility. Part of manifesting an alternate outcome to self-immolation must ever involve discourse about how we can make sense of it all, a contextualization that “Meaning Or Nothing” centers clearly for our view.

“However We Procure Copious Commodified Craft That Characterizes Contemporary Community, & Whatever Cracks Or Disabilities Accompany a Particular Piece's Present Pass, We Face a Choice in Turning a Specific Item to Some Precise Purpose, Either That We Attempt to Foster Meaning's Effort at Mastery, Or That We Eschew Interpretation & Pretend That the Cosmic Nub Contains Neither Rationality Nor a Mandate That We Seek, No Matter the Search's Futility, to Reveal This Order of Everything in Existence.”

Once again, though, an honest assessment would find a plethora of self-sabotage in regard to this implicit—and quite likely explicit—human calling, an undeniably adaptive species attribute, to consider consciousness as a work in progress to seek despite its inevitable incompleteness. As a matter of course, this essential sapient characteristic can only show up collectively: civilization, society, all such maturation of our clannishness must be part of this foundation. “Pursuing Authenticity, Honesty, Honor, & Solidarity” reveals one way, not the most pleasant, of pondering such passes.

“Socially, We Generally Greet Each Other While Masking Melancholy With Mystery's Mirthful Sham, Our Bodies Tortured & Twisted Into Shapes Barely Recognizable As Our Actual Selves: No Wonder Then That Society Is So Often Either Fatuous Or Treacherous, a Foxtrot of Falsehood to Gain Selfish Advantage Or to Hide From, & Also to Fight, Attack of the Jealous or Zealous Sort, Altogether An Indictment of Contemporary Mores, the Veneer of 'Polite Engagement,' & Their Evisceration of Almost All Authenticity, Honesty, Honor, & Solidarity, Substituting in Place of These Arguably Precious Precepts Facades & Fetishes of Identity, Objectivity, Patriotism, & Partisanship.”

A sort of summary of this entire essay incorporates some of this meandering message just above. ‘Authenticity and Honesty Necessitate, in Solidarity With All the Ancestors That We Share, Honoring Human History’s Potential to Point Out Pathways That Might Allow Us to Survive and Even Thrive.’ “Intersecting Histories’ Infinite Individualities” parallels precisely this position.

“Each Little Piece of All-That-Is Results from Its Own Unique History, Which, Paradoxically, Only Comes to Pass Because of Its Innumerable Connections With Other Particular Bits of Nature's Bounty; Indeed, Merely to Approximate Comprehension of Any Individual Item Must Seek Sense In This Vast Array of Intersecting Relationships That, In Their Entirety, Add Up, to a Specific Life & Time.”

Et voila! No one can know herself, not one person can understand his arc through space, except as part of an ultimately imperfectly comprehended intersecting interconnection with all flotsam and jetsam, dynamics and processes, fanciful fantasies, and so on and so on and so on, ‘as it was in the beginning and ever shall be, world without end,’ from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

Blah blah blah. Yet digging into these intricacies is a central component of Homo Sapiens’ jobs. Such a process is the precise opposite of how most people live, however. Standard operational protocols apply self-destructive logic both to life generally and to whoever’s specific existence is in question.

And that’s not all folks! Next issue explores Eros’ Life-Force-Energy in action, especially apropos for the blessed likes of this Marshall Artist whose experience inspires the effusive gushing grace of “Glorious, Gleeful, Ever-Imminent,” a new item of art with a message from my own life and love.

“With Opened Mind & Heart & Arms, Your Embraces Break Every Fast That I Undertake, &, Through the Magic of Your Enthusiastic Engagement’s Ecstatic Eruptions, Deliver a Glorious, Gleeful Beastly Feast With Which We Succor Ourselves on Love’s Ambrosia & Sustain Salubrious Sensibility of Our Ever Imminent Erotic Emanations.”

Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…

A FIFTH DEDUCTION

More particularly, fraudulent and double-dealing ‘drug wars’ both serve to stuff prisons, labeling citizens as deficient or criminal in the process, and to establish hidden links among profiteering, reactionary, even fascist groups and authorities and leaders.

Once again, the evidence is incontrovertible, an overwhelming mass of data that proves that, from their conception and birth, all ‘drug-wars’ are corrupt. Out of this morass of hypocrisy and gangsterism grow mirror structures that function according to the chicanery and murder of the bosses in charge of criminal networks. Thus, our police shoot first and question the corpse; our courts’ denizens sigh as they sentence children to death or life in prison.

The upshot—and one can argue persuasively, the purpose—of such repetitive expressions of a system ought to be clear. They disempower citizens. They divide people from each other, so that victims blame themselves and other saps instead of attacking the established order itself.

If we like such ways of life, we need only do nothing, or nod happily as our masters lie and plot to subvert our interests once again. In the alternative, of course, we can cogitate about shifting course and taking command, as unbelievable as such thoughts might seem.

A FINAL DEDUCTION

Though one might go on at length, the culmination of wrestling with these issues could readily dovetail with the previous two deductions above, bringing to an analysis of the need to legitimize or decriminalize drug use a deeply-seated look at how capital’s ideologies and commodities and cash have yielded the current addiction to corruption and brutality. If nothing else, having noticed the way that adaptive human features in favor of The Pursuit of Oblivion have stubbornly refused to go away, we could also recognize how business interests—maximizing profit, guaranteeing stable or expanding markets, finding ‘property’ to convey that no one else may control—have become the basis for twisting and crushing many people’s psychological and social resilience.

In such a view, though it adds yet another seemingly Sisyphean task to an already difficult mix, the student of life who is readying for action will have a choice to ponder. Does she ‘saddle up’ and agree to undertake reforms that require a revolutionary end? Does he hesitate and pray that the evidence that his senses and sensibilities deliver somehow describes systems that might magically melt of their own accord?

Whatever the decision that one makes, ‘time’s a wasting,’ as the saying goes. And every moment that we breathe presents us with opportunities to speak truth to power and otherwise make some difference in these ongoing struggles.

In this vein, the author of this report on occasion has produced political art on driftwood. Each such piece of work contains a message, one of which stated the following point.

“Today’s production pipeline serves up a seemingly endless supply of new & improved commodities, many of which consistently create difficulties, or even disasters, that then seem to require yet further fetishistic commodified fixes instead of the inner reflection and cooperative expansion that provide the only combination capable of improving, even of salvaging, human prospects on our planetary home.”

Such a way of positing matters obviously fits with the present pass. Inasmuch as we can find the courage to recognize this fit and see what it implies, we could easily conclude that capitalism and its attendant necessitation of one monopolistic empire or another will always arrive at a destination equivalent to an insidious paradox of prohibition and prescription.

And if this is a viable belief, then the course of action open to us—unless we want more of the same—is obvious. A move in the direction of Democratic Socialism, of traducing and disempowering the elites who own and run everything, is not only the sole policy course that has the slightest hope of stopping wars on the planet’s people that wear the guise of ‘Wars-on-Drugs,’ but it also might be the only way of regulating ourselves which allows our continued endurance as a life form.

James Mills tour-de-force(), Underground Empire: Where Crime & Government Embrace, begins with this bracing assertion, TO THE READER. “Everything in this book is true. No names have been changed, there are no composite characters, no invented scenes or dialog.”

In twelve hundred pages, the author tells of the torturous and tortuous imperial caverns that characterize drug-and-gun-and-crime-and-cash networks in charge of the routine operation of planet Earth today and for the past several hundred years. Mills happened to have had the martial and intellectual skills himself to work as an operative in this realm. He lived through one series of attempted assassinations and actual double-crosses after another. Treachery and murder and seven figure payoffs were standard operating procedure.

He closes his tome with the thoughts that occurred to him as he bid farewell to the cowboy cop, with whom he had most recently collaborated in this arena of corruption and duplicity, and who still fantasized about ‘getting all the bad guys’ that in turn signed his paychecks. “A few miles South, cocaine and marijuana were on the move, and across the continent and a couple of oceans poppies thrived unmolested. Hundreds of billions of dollars were coursing into vast unseen oceans of wealth—a few drops trickling away to buy weapons, hire terrorists, corrupt governments, subvert nations. And in Washington someone was no doubt planning another media campaign to tell us the latest offensive in the war on drugs.

The Underground Empire was alive and flourishing.”

AFTERWORD

If only in the ineffable sense that All-That-Is must, tautologically, notice All-That-Is, heaven knows that we may be able to continue to live divided against ourselves, miserable and increasingly impotent. At least up to some point, we might foresee our being able to travel along the ugly but, for those in charge, quite profitable path that lies just ahead, with the Underground Empire ascendant and resplendent. Clearly, whenever we venture far past wherever ‘some point’ may lie, at that juncture mass murder and mass collective suicide do in fact become psychically and, potentially, materially more bearable than the bullshit that, this essay proposes, presently passes for engagement and comprehension.

Further constriction of human rights will be one upshot of a route that entails acceptance of the status quo. Further forced imbibing of harsh but supposedly therapeutic chemicals will also follow. Wars-on-Drugs will define a large swath of human existence. Perhaps these scenarios will come to pass by negligent default, though the prospect nauseates those who consider citizenship a worthwhile goal.

To elect to follow such a route, in any case, perfecting future disasters in both psychosocial and ecological dimensions, must by definition come from one or another sort of choice or proclivity. On the one hand, unfortunately, psychosis or some type of instinctive death wish might in fact overrule any other possibility that concerns how to live. This would never be most readers’ or this author’s predilection, but such views have in fact a certain sort of vogue now, an apocalyptic chic, as it were.

Any other than this kind of dark ideation, however—except given the manifestation of the above-mentioned default, the cosmic shrug of medicated indifference or whatever—can only unfold in the presence of an attempt to deepen knowledge and awareness that is both fulsome and, to use the current phrasing, reality-based, in other words something akin to the attempt that takes place in these pages. This, then, is the social, intellectual soil from which a random journalist might harvest a twenty-odd thousand-word thread about ‘controlled-substances’ that seeks to proffer facts and analysis from before the dawn of historical time to the likely headlines from tomorrow’s news.

In regard to that earlier context, a plethora of data and reasoning here have drawn on historical and other scientific revelations about humanity’s past. In the realm of the here-and-now, this overview whenever possible has laid out political-economic—legal, financial, industrial, and on and on—attributes of the multidimensional overlapping of drugs and society.

Having looked at the interpersonal relations that typified precriminalized usage of psychotropics, this writing has also illustrated the social relationships that have resulted from the currently dominant military and medical and imperial models in this arena, an environment in which people and their ‘medicines’ and chemical ‘playthings’ confront prohibition, black markets, violence, mandatory following of ‘doctors orders,’ each other, and themselves.

These data and reasoning do not pretend superiority, let alone completeness. But they do both depict a network of real occurrences and establish attendant thinking that flows from what has happened. They began by stating a hypothesis about all of these observable phenomena. To assure that readers are on the same page, a restatement of that thesis, taking into account all that this narrative has uncovered, might be in order.

In light of the inescapable genetic inclination in favor of drugs that characterizes most people, any and all prohibitions of the plants that get people high will lead to massive corruption, fraud, double-dealing, treachery, violence, and worse; in such environs, most people will either try to force themselves to follow these evil and hypocritical ‘rules-of-the-road,’ or they will live in hope that they don’t get caught, both of which approaches bring lots of rage and a high likelihood of sadness and depression; as the falsity of the system and the anger and blues that it induces inevitably cause repeated crises, personal and political, the primary intervention of those who are governing these machinations ends up as one form or other of ‘miracle cure,’ a new toxic brew both to pacify the furies that people feel in their hearts and to defray social explosion.

At the point that we have reached, one hopes that readers would stipulate that this overall assessment is at least robustly defensible. It ought to cause at least glimmers of recognition about the current moment, while the background evidence and argumentation that has shown up in these pages ought to reinforce this self-awareness.

In that case, the implication appears powerful that changes in policy, in practice, in human organization might quite likely need to take place if the human lot is to avoid cataclysm. Thus, in other words, these paragraphs about the lives that we lead now in relation to contraband mandate a reply from all but the lethally unconcerned. Only to the terminally alienated is apathy a reasonable response.

In the environment that today’s contextualization establishes, therefore, clearly, one rejoinder to this appearance of ongoing catastrophe from regimes of prohibition is to deny that the facts are accurate or complete and hence to contend that they cannot support the beliefs advanced on their basis. Or, one can accept many or even most of the facts but reject the arguments that accompany them.

One other possibility exists. One can contend that, even though the empirical and conceptual aspects of this narrative are largely or at least often most correct, the alternatives to presently prevalent draconian machinations of militarism and imprisonment seem far worse than a continued adherence to a regime that is vicious, even murderous; hypocritical, even demonic; suboptimal, even devastating.

In either case, come what may, a citizen’s silence in the face of this narrative means that its point of view ought to win out. Only listening and speaking that results in a lively debate about these matters can permit a rejection of the evidence and ideas stated here. No blanket denial will do. Too much of a record exists in these lines, and too many developed propositions come to the fore here, both of which necessitate specific and thoroughgoing rebuttal.

Only rich and inclusive discussion about the drug-problem, discourse that insists on deep thinking and comprehensive exchanges, would ever allow one even plausibly to advance the contention that, as bad as prohibition and profiteering pharmacology are, any different approach would inevitably be worse. In any event, whether in part because of such ideation as this report develops or otherwise, a process that involves tens of millions of folks, in millions of dialogs and other learning exchanges about drugs, altered consciousness, and who will take charge of the ‘regulation’ of these matters, needs to evolve in contemporary society, instantly or as soon as possible. These exchanges are as critical to human survival as any other near-at-hand nexus of contemplation and conversation.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the Bleckley Foundation, the Heffter Research Institute and scores of other organizations of scientists and citizens have joined documentarians and producers in various projects that argue for a fundamental shift in how we approach these matters, for example. Why do readers almost never see them in corporate media? Those who consume for-profit news certainly get an eyeful—in both solicitations and storylines—of the advertiser-behemoth pharmaceutical complex.

Mild-mannered and heartfelt interviewees from Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere, experts passionate in both their science and their commitment to a decent and sustainable human existence, who participated in the magnificent documentary film, From Neurons to Nirvana, recently purveyed these issues in stark and yet evocative fashion. We surely should listen: “The government prohibits any of this research. Then they say, ‘Well, you haven’t got any research.’ It is beyond ‘highpocrisy.’”

In arguing for deepening clinical investigation into understanding and using such substances as MDMA, or LSD, or other prohibited materials as therapeutic experiences, these men and women—almost all medical doctors or doctors of philosophy, all either scientists or the most accredited science writers and thinkers—the arguments were unequivocal.

No good reason justifies continued prohibition. Everything except the combination of blind self-righteousness and hypocritical duplicity insists that people make these organic and synthesized psychic interventions available to investigators and citizens, to clinicians and people in need.

“These chemicals induce an opening of the mind; that’s not the way the current therapies work. It’s not a good idea necessarily only to rely on medicines that dampen your desire, that take away the spark of life that you feel,” said one therapist of thirty years.”

Yet, she continued, “the powers-that-be have determined that these substances should be illegal.” She said more too. “To recommend these therapies, you have to be enough of a rebel to go against a taboo. And it’s the nature of the taboo to say, ‘oh, don’t look at that. That’s bad!’” But demonization has nothing to do with science or medicine.

A colleague amplified this point. “The government’s decisions are not based upon scientific evidence; they’re based on a prohibitionist paranoia despite use over tens of thousands of years that has contributed to our survival.”

A psychiatrist stated the case in this way. “We can use these banned substances to enhance spiritual growth. By any measure we’re vastly overdeveloped technologically with primitive emotions that put us and the world around us at risk.”

A philosopher of science laughed as he said, “the message of psychedelics is ‘Wake up!’” from the insularity and deadened feelings that people so often have. He continued, “but then they say, ‘Oh, don’t take these drugs, they’ll change your life forever. But that just shows how little they understand, because that’s the whole point.”

An emeritus professor of neuroscience pointed this out. “They help people to become aware of the multidimensional nature of the universe and themselves. Why would we want to ban that? Science will be much richer for their being available.”

Another investigator noted the correspondence between groundbreaking creativity and insight and using these drugs. “Psychedelics have catalyzed many people to creative enterprise that has absolutely changed the world.”

One collaborator stressed, in impassioned tones, the foolishness of current policies. “It is, at least, extremely unwise to be so scared of these drugs that we make them illegal and prohibit almost all research. Are we so sure that we can solve all the big problems that we’d throw away a tool that could help us with these problems that we’d never otherwise solve?” He and half-a-dozen others, gentle and thoughtful and anything but fancy-free fools, basically begged for a transformational period in the United States.

Instead, will a nation like the U.S.A. keep being able to incarcerate more and more citizens who smoke pot? Who want to trip on psilocybin and make love? Who want to drop Ecstasy and dance all night long? Who want to inject Heroin in order to feed a compulsion?

Will the residents of other places continue to put up with brutalization, corruption, and mass murder in the name of a war on plants and getting stoned? Will parents and students willingly tolerate tomorrow the regime of today, in which their toking and dropping and copping and snorting some things land them in prison while the forces of order simultaneously prescribe toxic ‘medicines’ that don’t work nearly so well as their self-selected methods of ‘self-medication?’

Questions like these demarcate a political limit, in Spanish, of “No passeran!” In this regard, concerning these and related interrogatories, inquiring minds would like to know. Aldous Huxley closed his Doors of Perception() with a lyrical and literary way of thinking about this.

“For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of longevity, (in other words like most of us today), there must be a return to the straw. But the man who comes back (from a jaunt into altered consciousness) through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.” Next Up—The Historical Political Economy of Prohibition

Old Stories & New—(continued)…

He planned his combination community airing and party two days after Christmas.  Sunday wouldn't threaten sacrosanct holiday routines, and it stood a bit removed from the "CLEARANCE SALES" and other commercial madness that consistently characterize the end of the year.

First, however, we all had to make it through the 'feast of Jesus’ birth', as Reverend Milton referred to the yuletide.  At our sumptous, Indian Hills house, December 25th is as middle-American as the celebration could be. Food, gadgets, and football ruled.

My brother Thomas, fifteen years old and achingly aware of all the wondrous things he doesn't possess, received a new car as a combination Christmas and sixteenth-birthday gift.  Nonetheless, his demeanor revealed a youngster nonplussed.  Fortune as great as most people experience in their entire life left him pining what he'd missed.

My 'Karma-Kid' role meant I had to chide this moping adolescent.  In the war zone of his bedroom, Def Leppard and like posters of rage screamed from the walls.  "Daddy should've just spent the money on me—at least I'd have gone hog wild apeshit over it."

"Shut up, slut queen, I know I'm doin' alright.  I just wanted to take a trip with some of my 'home-boys' to Aspen is all.  But I told mom and dad how much it meant to me, what they did."

"You're incredible, Bubba.  You wouldn't know good luck if it bit your dick off."  Dirty talk charmed him as I expected.  He blushed, his defensive toughness vanishing.  His embarrassment tickled me.  I'd made my point.

Ever since my oldest brother toddled about as a two year-old, Charles Moran had sought values other than commodities to consecrate Christmas. He always used simple tactics.  A daughter went with him to collect goods for poor kids.  Each son cooked in a soup kitchen.  He donated money in our names to various charities and left notice of this enforced generosity in our stockings.

Bless his heart, the old guy fought a culture orchestrated from the institutional fortresses of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. "Conspicuous consumption devours the potential for human interaction.  The worship of wisdom falls far short of the lust to accumulate goods."  Daddy's homilies, despite logic and righteousness, matched up weakly to the tube's intrusive might, the constant competition for status among peers, the ever present fetish of new toys that seem to infuse meaning into existence.

Of the five Moran siblings, only the brilliant, favored, and humble Alicia, thanks very much, showed even the vaguest inklings of the passion that stirred papa Charles.  Rather than a thirst for justice and a palpable sense of rebirth, the holidays brought forth from most of us a sullen comparison of 'cash-and-prizes.'  In this, we merely typified middle-class routine.

Christmas and the day after passed like flashbulbs firing.  Nobody but me remembered a single detail.  Sunday's weird and outrageous events, on the other hand, entered the annals of family legend.

* * * * *

Our Dickens film-fest took place in the "battle zone," the 800-square-foot basement expanse containing pinball, billiards, and ping pong tables.  On the evening of the 27th, it served as the family's private screening room.

For the occasion, I sat, as usual, in my own corner.  Next to me, a winking VCR sat atop the ceremony's mediator.  While dormant, our SONY TV—a 50", rear projection mammoth—resembled a well-encumbered but unused billboard, capable of projecting whatever dream or nightmare graced a pilgrim's imagination.  

On its sculpted parabola, every embrace seemed palpable, every analysis tangible, each death immediate and painful.  The characters appeared as flesh and blood, instead of electronic ghosts of made-up artistry in far away studios.  On command, our TV could conjure a world.

Folding tables surrounded the magical screen, draped with appropriate bunting and snacks.  Enough seats for at least thirty people filled the space.  Throw rugs and giant pillows provided additional vantage points, a good thing since over forty folks eventually stomped in from the snow.

The audience consisted of several clusters.  Non-traveling family members paid their final compulsory call before Easter.  In addition, St. John's senior catechism class accompanied Reverend and Anne-Marie Milton.  Friends of mine or other sibling pals comprised the third set of filmgoers.

This crowd had gathered to receive Dickens' sobering message, yet exhibited a bright and prosperous visage.  Talk leapt from group to group.  Family news competed for attention with inconsequential but avidly conveyed trivia.  The stale air rang with chatter, but on only a couple of occasions did people actually touch something intimate or sublime in each other. Next Up—Part Two

Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...

It had been another blowing blizzard on the first day of Autumn, the only occurrence of similar scope, ever. His elder brother by two years had been eleven, so that makes the time just over twenty years back.

Their cavorting had always been epic. They were the stoutest pair of boys who ever sprouted up in their Alpine region that, in the scheme of things, just about overflowed with sturdy, stalwart male children ready to jump and tumble. Their parents had left for a week or so to visit Grannie and Gramps, leaving their bumptious boys in charge of themselves.

Samson’s and William’s own sweet progenitors, albeit Grannie might seem surly if she’d had enough mead or other spirited drink, lived in town, by the river, and the snow only replaced rainfall halfway up their route home. Mother and Father had no definite idea that their youngsters—so early in a season still filled with sunshine—had five feet of snow to handle, higher than the crown of Sam’s towering tow head, although, away from the drifting piles of frozen water, Billy’s nose and eyes did clear the crust.

On their own, as the unexpected flood of flakes fell from on high, stranding them from any venture more adventurous than seeking to melt something to fill a tankard, the boys made the only rational decision. They would play and hunt, since they could not ride and forage provisions, at the same time that they kept a fire alight and awaiting whatever meat they might manage.

Sam had his three weighted throwing daggers; Bill was a fair shot with the family’s smaller crossbow. They couldn’t justify poaching a local cow or other livestock, even some creature of their own. Rabbits were likely to waste bolts and do nothing to fill their bellies. “We’ll likely shoot an elk,” Bill boasted brashly.

“Or a boar would be good,” chimed in the ironically nicknamed ‘little Sam.’ “Or,” and both of them thought of tasty meat that, unfortunately, came with fangs attached that would find nothing quite so satisfying as a taste of young, relatively well-fed and nicely ‘marbled’ manflesh.

As luck would have it, just as the blizzard itself was yielding to bright wintry blue, a buck had lost its way in the generally trackless bumps and hills of freezing white not even a mile from their still lit and warmed bit of a domicile; moreover, Bill’s grip on the crossbow did not waver as the copper-wrapped and bolted arrow flew at the beast, penetrated its haunch with a resounding thwack and neatly perforated its liver, dropping it in its now bloody tracks.

These soon-to-be-well-fed facile young hunters, as best they were able in the chill and the clinging snowy mire, jumped for joy, frosty shouts of misty triumph tumbling from their callow, unbearded chins and projecting into the coldly clarified atmosphere of their mountain home. Immediately, with the two sharp knives that their Father had bestowed on each of them in turn, on their respective seventh birthdays, they set about butchering their meat.

Little did the brash young fellows realize that, as they prepared to leave the antlered prey’s twisting, steaming multihued guts in the snow, two pairs of wary wolfen eyes were tracking every step they took, measuring the distance that boyish antics had taken them from daggers and bows. No. They did not see the watching wolves.

But they heard, sharp and clear from two canine throats, the yelping call to bring other snarling, snapping hunters to the fray that this duo came from the trees to commence. Seconds later, first Will and then Sam saw the two lean, ravening beasts as they darted from the cover of Spruce and brush, drooling with what looked ever so much like grinning delight at some fiendish prospect of gulping mouthfuls of flesh, ripped asunder by lupine jaws.

Well-trained by their master-hunter Father, both youths continued the ambit toward weapons—each carrying thirty pounds of hoped-for future roasting venison—back to back, brandishing their diminutive yet deadly processing knives in front of them. Growling as ferociously as hungry wolves are capable of doing, these two would-be attackers guarded the line to crossbow and standard bow and, most importantly for close quarters, two pointed, elegant daggers, sharpened to a thorn’s point at the end of nearly two feet of tested steel.

The smaller of the wild twosome danced and lunged at Will’s throat before Sam’s slashing strike ended that attack and drew forth a painful yelp along with wolf’s blood to join the buck’s in the snow. Not mortally hurt, its caution nevertheless showed up as a limping gait and wide-eyed fear at the blade that had cut and bloodied it.

In such situations, philosophy or analysis is likely in short supply. When three more barking beasts burst upon the scene, however, both boys drew ragged sighs at the diminution of their prospects.

Not five minutes later, however, a quintet of carcassed canines littered pinkish snow, repleted with globs of flesh and spattered innards. And the first great white bear that either Sam or Will had ever witnessed stood in the center of the carnage, regarding the two human specimens who had just regained their martial property.

What followed was an almost eternal few minutes of “primal negotiations,” as Will would henceforth label the sinister, sickening scenario that touched the hem of twilight. When Sam understood the purpose of the bear’s guardianship over their exit, he dropped his venison steaks, which the gigantic ursine gobbled down in a matter of seconds.

When Bill followed his brother’s suit, their big male rescuer and beastly negotiator stood and regarded them placidly, before it gathered the huge hunk of meat in one paw and then hefted the buck’s carcass with its other paw. It didn’t look back as it retreated, leaving them five big bounties of future wolf-stew to manage.

“Saved by a bear,” panted Will as Sam stood stunned. Back in his snow-fast den twenty years later to the day, Sam repeated his brother’s words. “Saved by a bear!” None of his kiddies heard, or at least understood.

The sense of salvation, of avowal, of unavoidable portent swept over the buffed ‘Daddy’ as he staggered without intent, without any pretense, under the load of his discomfited memory, beneath the squirming wiles of his precious, triadic cargo. The children, in their turn sensing his distraction, settled down, at least until Camille—by two years the eldest and the family’s ‘natural leader,’ like her Mom—spoke with an almost shyly quiet intensity. “Please, Papa?”

Fevered dreams had awoken Sam that very morning, in fact, though he only just then, at his daughter’s prompting, brought the recollection to his afternoon’s awareness, where philosophizing had as little purchase as in the spattered-with-blotches-of-blood fieldscape from seventy-three hundred days back that he shared with dear William, his burly brother. He had awoken that morning to the snow that Rose had predicted before venturing to her Mother’s, rising from his slumbers to the burned image of a giant she-bear on his still-sleepy eyelids.

Without thought, he replied to his now-silent youngsters, who noticed but could not comprehend his momentary consternation. “Yes. Yes. Of course.” He laughed, regaining his self-possession. “Into the snow we go then, little ones!”

He took the still-sturdy crossbow as a matter of course. As an hour passed, full of frolic, antics in which Sam-the-capable-Thespian played the wolf, the bear, the child, all in turn, the sun made its way to hover over the ragged South face of Granny-Bear Mountain, nestled below the still higher peaks of Big Bear Crag and Humpback. Only the energy of occasionally delicate Dahlia would ever be likely to flag first in such a pass, and on this day she simply enthused with their entire charade.

In a way that made Sam shake his head in wonder and recognition, lithe and whip-like little Sage, a broad-shouldered little torch, led their path again and again during their rambles. So too, now.

Dahlia’s sensitive ears heard first. “Baby’s crying, Daddy!” Empathy is always easiest for one who suffers.

The intentions of the huge white ursine mama, however, were unmistakable when she bounded out of the very bush from which a stare-eyed and gleefully terrified Sage had just burst, like a rabbit on the run from a pursuing fox. Sam’s hunter’s eye noted the cub in the background, which had just appeared from the backside of the said brushy perch. His bow arm, as his entire posture, was prepared to deliver nearly certain protection, even against the largest local behemoth.

He fingered the trigger knowingly, ready. Nonetheless, he hesitated.

Again, he thought of twenty years back. The implicit promise was clear. Was there more, something explicit and mandatory that he must acknowledge and follow?

At the last possible instant, instinct took over. The onrushing beast seemed not to feel the bolt between its eyes, even as a spume of blood sprouted like an orchid from its brows. Then, rearing back violently, though without a sound, it fell so that its right forepaw severed Sam’s littlest toe from his foot as if cut by a razored blade.

As Sam regarded this obvious phenomenon, awaiting gushing crimson and painful agony, he paused and nodded. ‘Not much blood at all,’ he thought, at the precise moment that an initial wave of wracking severed loss sent him reeling a step, then two, in the direction of the two daughters who clung to each other and hid in the lee of a tall beech, where until this moment had made not a sound, a silence that Camille broke with a shriek of worry and love. “Daddy!!!”

The bleating cubs, to say the least, seemed disinclined to leave their mother’s hide behind. Thus, Sam orchestrated herding his kids homeward, finding them some crusts to nibble, take two little pails of milk back to the cubs, lead them thenceforth with the cow secretions as a lure, guide them to the family’s barn-sized shed, where he enclosed them for the night and waited.

Rose, snowshoes and ski-poles attached, returned before the highland’s completed early twilight. “We must not eat it!” she exclaimed spontaneously upon learning the salient facts, though neither she nor her husband could imagine what they might decently and reasonably make of the whole set of circumstances, beginning so long ago with his and his brother’s implicit bargain with that equally-so-long-ago bear.

“The only way I can keep that promise,” Sam explained to his astonished yet still skeptical wife, “is to nurse those cubs until, …”and as his lover’s eyebrows arched with an affirming, ‘Yes, and then?’ he blinked, repeatedly, shrugged, and grinned through tears.

Thereafter, our divine Ms. Rose quite soon had taken up pencils with a powerful purpose, twofold in fact. However, while the couple enacted a telling of this tale of service and redemption and arduous effort, this process took their loving libations and dutiful attentions into a Fourth Moon, and hence substance, both of and for, a subsequent recounting. Up Next—Chapter Four

Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…

"In 1943, Keynes forged his... proposal for an international clearing union. In consultation with the Americans, Keynes eventually relented on his idea and accepted the American 'White Plan' for an international equalization 'fund' held in the currencies of the participating nations.

However, several essential aspects of Keynes's clearing union idea were incorporated. In 1944, Keynes led the British delegation to the international conference in Bretton Woods where the details of the system were hammered out.

The American 'White Plan' was accepted, countries would retain fixed exchange rates against the dollar, while the dollar itself would be matched to gold. Two institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), as the International Bank for Reconstruction & Development, were created to oversee the new international monetary system."

*The New Order of Battle

Neil Cohen, a renowned California economist, also sums up what transpired at Bretton Woods. He delves more deeply into the institutionalization that there first manifested itself.

"Finally, negotiators agreed that there was a need for an institutional forum for international cooperation on monetary matters. Currency troubles in the interwar years, it was felt, had been greatly exacerbated by the absence of any established procedure or machinery for inter-governmental consultation.

In the postwar era, the Fund itself would provide such a forum—in fact, an achievement of truly historic proportions. Never before had international monetary cooperation been attempted on a permanent institutional basis. Even more pathbreaking was the decision to allocate voting rights among governments not on a one-state, one-vote basis but rather in proportion to quotas."

Not to be Pollyannish in this assessment, Cohen did note, "With one-third of all IMF quotas at the outset, the United States assured itself an effective veto over future decision-making." He proffers, for those who want, a detailed breakdown of how the system would supposedly work, although he termed "utterly Panglossian" the optimism of its proponents that its utilization would be smoothly automatic, and conflict-free. He does go on to capsulize the structure in an intelligible way.

"Together these four points defined the Bretton Woods system - a monetary regime joining an essentially unchanged gold exchange standard, supplemented only by a centralized pool of gold and national currencies, with an entirely new exchange rate system of adjustable pegs. At the center of the regime was to be the IMF, which was expected to perform three important functions: regulatory (administering the rules governing currency values and convertibility), financial (supplying supplementary liquidity), and consultative (providing a forum for cooperation among governments).

Structurally, the regime combined a respect for the traditional principle of national sovereignty—especially, of course, that of the United States—with a new commitment to collective responsibility for management of monetary relations, expressed both in mutually agreed rules and in the powers of the Fund."

The World Bank, meanwhile, was to finance the reconstituting of a world destroyed, albeit many commentators confused IMF with WB functions.

"If you have difficulty distinguishing the World Bank from the International Monetary Fund, you are not alone. Most people have only the vaguest idea of what these institutions do, and very few people indeed could, if pressed on the point, say why and how they differ.

Even John Maynard Keynes, a founding father of the two institutions and considered by many the most brilliant economist of the twentieth century, admitted at the inaugural meeting of the International Monetary Fund that he was confused by the names: he thought the Fund should be called a bank, and the Bank should be called a fund. Confusion has reigned ever since."

Ultimately, the division of responsibilities between the IMF and the WB today is much easier to delineate than once it was. Basically, the IMF provides the U.S. and—increasingly so—its capitalist cohorts of roughly equivalent stature, ways to manage money and finance among the principal trading nations.

The WB, meanwhile, is available as a 'last resort' of struggling polities, which must agree to bank-imposed 'discipline' in order to receive assistance. It also inaugurates and accepts proposals for 'development,' albeit overwhelmingly these prospects remains of the sort that fit into the master plan of the Fortune 500 and the banks that remain ensconced at the helm of all such systemic expressions of transnational finance and industry.

In the aftermath of WWII, in any case, while the IMF's role evolved quickly to be the guarantor of exchange and transnational monetary processes, at first, the WB, originally the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, extended its financial largesse almost exclusively to England, France, and Belgium. This evolved as the Marshall Plan came into being in 1948, for all manner of policy and strategic reasons revolving around 'communist threats' and the 'containment' of Soviet expansion.

The WB's focus for the next decade or so continued to emphasize other parts of Europe and provided funds, through one or another colonial center, for projects in the colonies that served the needs of the imperialists for raw materials and basic commodities. As one commentator noted, "the World Bank did not fund its first 'Third World' school until 1962."

WB money was also available in order to diffuse conflicts among former imperial powers in areas opened up to capital by the 'free-trade' schemes of the 'White Plan'. Moreover, such funds were often accessible when fear of 'communist incursions' were prevalent, particularly in the Middle East.

*Trade's 'Sticky Wicket' & a Preliminary Summary Assessment

Conflicts clearly bounded the operation of the IMF, just as Professor Cohen indicated many contemporaries of Keynes and White—close 'allies' who fought like cats—were predicting. Moreover, even as the work of IMF evolved out of equal parts theory and maximization of trade, earlier forms such as the BIS continued to influence both IMF and WB operations and approaches.

Trade agreements, meanwhile, as reflected in the commitment to a world free of 'restrictive tariffs,' which in practice meant any taxes that impeded financiers' hegemony, led early on to an attempt to form an International Trade Organization, in Havana in 1948. This so sundered opinion that for the next fifty years, in other words until the actual induction of the WTO itself, a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT) held sway.

While more details about this will await the third and fourth of six parts here, which will cover the period from the mid 1950's to the founding of the WTO in 1994, forty-six years following the ITO's failure to take hold, a general statement of historical context can assist the thinker in linking such matters as the LoN, BW, the IMF, the WB, and on and on and on, including the BIS's Nazi and 'free-world' collusion in the mix.

Patrick Hearden's Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order During World War II, lays out the free-trade and "open-door" polices that Cordell Hull and others maintained assiduously for the benefit of U.S. industry and capital generally. A more Marxist perspective on this phenomenon of 'free-trade' promulgation as a combination of opportunism and ideology, occurs in "The New Age of Imperialism," by John Bellamy Foster.

A review essay of historical inputs such as William Appleman William's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy depicted the broad range and deep applicability of 'free trade' to U.S. policy and process. This literature review maintains that an "odd assortment of people has nevertheless shared, however obliquely, the conviction that the Open Door policy is the keystone of twentieth-century American diplomacy.

Elected policymakers, for example, as well as the bureaucrats they ushered into positions of influence, have used it as the intellectual vantage point from which to view and deal with the world." Next Up—Section III

Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...

The image from above-the-fold originated in a ‘driftwood project,’ “Ninety Paintings in Ninety Days,” for which Alicia provided all the art, and Jimbo did the writing, prep-work, and other sorts of support. The source of the concept was a show, “Turner at the Tate,” in which the English genius artist laid out for all and sundry how deeply ingrained was the imagery of horror, and ‘honor,’ that revolved around Napoleon and his antagonists hither and yon.

Emperor Bonaparte quipped that ‘God favored the side with the superior artillery,’ recognizing the industrial foundation for modern warfare’s ‘victorious’ promulgation’ and thereby undermining all mythic offerings of ‘national superiority.’ Joseph Campbell is arguably the world’s, and almost certainly America’s, leading myth maven, so to say. In exploring mythos, of course, he is always seeking in part to explicate how and why things work out as they do, in an intelligible and intelligent blend of materiality and spirtuality.

His explanation for the carnage and mayhem that predominates in what we might call the Primary Canon in large part comes down to concluding that such were the only reasonable responses to nature’s coursing through us. Portraits of chimpanzees abound.

He sees us as offshoots, going on to opine, “(t)he male chimpanzee is almost twice as heavy as the female. There is no question about physical supremacy. This applies largely to the male/female in the human sphere as well,” referring to Theseus abduction and rape of Antiope, no less, Queen of the Amazons.

Campbell’s view is not only reductionist. “The male body is built for combat, for defense.” His ideas lead to social conclusions, so that “(g)ames of strength, games of cleverness, games of winning” are a province for boys and men. “The winner is top male.” The early phases of ‘strongest artillery’ evolve here, in this way of thinking. Ha ha.

But another view, equally biological, anthropological, historical, sociological, and so forth, provides a powerful basis for what we can name the Alternate Canon, in which the paths of The Goddess concern pleasure more than pain. Biologically, one simply must—if only to be empirically honest—pay loads of attention to the Binobo chimps, somewhat closer cousins of ours than are the Great Chimpanzees that the gifted, iconic mythologist mythologizes for us, as it were.

Without credible exception, every Binobo becomes a ‘sex addict,’ a fiend for the joys of copulation and release. The works of the leading Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal both emphasizes this point and quips about the squeamishness of many scholars about acknowledging this indisputable fact.

“His work raised the profile of bonobos, the species he dubbed the 'make love, not war' primate and called 'peace-loving hippies.' He contended that science’s focus on the chimpanzee as our closest living relative made little sense, and suggested that bonobos were also genetically similar to humans, therefore equally deserving of attention.

De Waal found the establishment somewhat prudish where the subject of sex—a cherished form of recreation for the bonobo—was concerned. At a 2014 symposium celebrating his career, he joked with the audience: 'I talked openly about the sexual behavior,' he said.

'At the time, American and Japanese scientists who worked on bonobos—they knew what they did, but they didn’t talk about it. They were too shy about it!' He noted that Americans would describe bonobos as 'fairly affectionate. And you know, if I were affectionate like that in the streets of New York I would get arrested immediately!’”

In any case, just as the roots of culture cannot avoid being natural, so too we must be able to posit the potential points of conjunction between our propensities and our parables, as it were. One reading of the likes of Riane Eisler—or Dr. de Waal for that matter—hypothesizes a dialectic between partership and domination, a back and forth that certainly fits the inevitably also dialectical structure of every narrative arc, ever. More about Joseph Campbell’s storyteller’s credentials is certainly upcoming.

So saying, even as all of our parables must, by their very essence, palpate paradox, well might we listen to a voice that Jostein Gaarder has created for the earlier cited Floria Aemilia, Augustine’s lover and legal partner before he tossed her aside for his Christian witness. They once slipped away from Monica’s pursuit—Augustine’s demanding Mother, who commanded that he ‘marry well’ and not end in relations of ‘dissipated concubinage.’

“Then, after we reached Roma, you fell into a fever, but I nursed you and prayed for you. I remember how frightened you were of dying. Again and again, you asked: ‘Am I lost now?’ You had not yet found any salvation for your soul.

You write: ‘The fever rose, and I was about to die and be lost. Indeed, where would I have gone if I had passed away then? Yes, to the fire and the torments that my deeds deserved according,’” the future ‘Saint’ would have it, “‘to Your rightful ordinance.’”

His sweetheart’s response is loving but fierce. “But by Hades, Aurel! Whatever is this but distorted mythology? You who have so fiercely ridiculed the stories of the old gods, yet you still go on believing in a God of Wrath who will punish and torment people for their deeds throughout all eternity? It was lucky for you that you did not believe in him when you lay ill in that little room in Roma.”

Predictably enough, the ‘dominator approach’ predominates on whatever ‘best-seller lists’ characterize specific cultural expressions. Therefore, maybe, the erstwhile bias of Joseph Campbell would often override the more nuanced referential framing of human social evolution on the part of Frans de Waal.

More Recent Literary Splits

Now, we ‘fast-forward’ to the two centuries or so of ‘modern times,’ replete not only with persisting forms of storytelling but also with all manner of new mediating techniques. With no doubt at all, one might readily assert, a massive proportion of the present parabola of comedy and drama and reportage and ever so much more simply bursts with the macho, male-supremacist, fight-and-flight, rape-and-plunder ways of contextualizing everything, in similar ways that basically all hegemonic heuristics in ancient times mirrored such machismo.

Nevertheless, for our present purposes, large swaths of contemporary contextualization of our species’ varied experiences stand squarely in the ranks of the ‘alternative canon’ that primarily survives only in folklore from ancient times. In fact, Big Tent volumes will ultimately emanate to illustrate this empirical presence of partnership-path processing of our human being, or our being human.

Today’s Below-the-Fold word-count may not quite equal what came to the front above, as it were. Given time and tide that carry us into a relatively distant future, we’ll create vast troves of ‘lit-crit-shit’ that consider these and other matters of sociopolitical import as regards stories and their substance. As a matter of course, a few such have already put in appearances in these pages.

An early installment of such ideation, for example, characterizes BTR’s #6, in which Moll Flanders instantiates obviously feminist feats on the part of Daniel Defoe. The estimable Englishman was at the forefront during early days of ‘modern fiction and prose,’ and his outpouring of fiction and essays and argument are uniformly of what one would inherently label ‘progressive profferals,’ in addition to including exemplars of English and world literature.

Arguably of equal ‘literary merit,’ albeit entirely autobiographical, Harriet Jabobs’ frank depiction of the conflicts and rapacious concupiscence of slavery shapes a stalwart ‘school of thought’ that utterly rejects male mastery’s inevitability, fitness, and so forth. This is especially noteworthy, perhaps, inasmuch as #7 examines her life and writing.

Where to start afresh is always easier said than done, ha ha. However, Frankenstein must represent a potential expression of such initiating initiatives. In a sense, along with the Jewish folklore confabulations of Golems, many of which were female—or as in He, She, & It, servants of worthy women—this much imitated and reconstituted novel inaugurated—or at least set a stage which Shelley soon enough claimed—the telling of grotesque futuristic tales in which human ingenuity backfired balefully for all manner of social reasons.

Mary Shelley, whose background connects her to one of ‘middle-class feminism’s’ wellsprings—her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft—slashed and burned her critique of patriarchal imprimatur by having her lead characters—alpha males all—utterly ignore, or purposefully repress, the women who formed an important substrate to what was happening in the story. A talented young writer’s honors thesis has an evocative title: “Frankenstein : A Feminist Birth Myth of Morbid Conception.”

“In addition to being an esteemed work of gothic horror, the novel is a feminist birth myth: a perverse story of maternity and a scathing critique of patriarchal dominance over the feminine.” Shelley’s own biography—the teen mistress of the famed poet, three of her four children quickly deceased—undoubtedly contributed to these angry tropes against chauvinistic nostrums and. their taken-as-granted social protocols.

However, she went even further, six years and one month later publishing a much broader in scope and thematically daunting narrative. The Last Man may have been the first dystopian novel; most humans die in a plague epidemic at the end of our very own century. Gulp. It was not nearly as popular as her earlier effort, yet the themes of the disempowered sister, as well as the overarching empowerment of the brother remain central; so too the vague awareness of ecological consequences of social backwardness.

One might readily reflect on the rise of Oneida’s ‘free love’ community in relation to Shelley’s domestic travails and literary triumphs. As the BTR account of the program makes clear, the harsh realities of pregnancy and childbirth, and the draining necessities of child-rearing, did not absolutely necessitate the sorts of monstrosities with which Shelley struggled.

On the contrary, social equality and a more wholistic and nature-based relation to our bodies was accessible as a practice at the margins—as in Oneida—and more and more regularly in rhetorical and fictional forays of practitioners not quite so socially isolated. Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have pulled punches, but the cultural constitution of rapine’s oppression—and the inevitability of resistance to it and struggle against it—was nonetheless obvious in Stowe’s homespun American pages.

Closer to the upper-crust playgrounds of Europe, Silas Marner’s pseudonymous womanly progenitor gives us a glorious allusion, worthy of a wise woman’s wiles. Socially and biologically, our vaunted bourgeois freedom and prosperity yield, on the one hand, liberation of murderous impunity and, on the other hand, wealth that hinges on predatory mayhem. At the heart of this story of vile predation lies a subtext of erotic oppression and sex shame.

Victoria Woodhull, whom one biographer labeled salaciously as Notorious Victoria, spoke and struggled in favor of women’s agency and equality, specifically in regard to this imperious presumption against pleasure and the feminine. A prolific writer and irrepressible spokeswoman for female rights, her Collected Works yield treasures both varied and focused.

She starts her “Principles of Social Freedom Speech” by quoting James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis,” which snaps, crackles, and pops both in response to present political putridity and as regards the two Canons under purview here in Big Tent fashion. “For mankind are one in spirit and an instinct bears along, Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right and wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—In the gain or loss of race all the rest have equal claim.”

The poetic cry against ethnic enslavement and debauchery Woodhull shifts into advocacy for a gendered social equality that encompasses every aspect of human life, erotic and intellectual and spiritual alike. She insists on being “Resolved, That freedom is a principle, and that as such it may be trusted to ultimate in harmonious social results, as in America, it has resulted in harmonious and beneficent political results; that it has not hitherto been adequately trusted in the social domain, and that the woman's movement means no less than the complete social as well as the political enfranchisement of mankind.”

So saying, this ‘notorious Victoria’ as well stands, “Resolved, That the evils, sufferings and disabilities of women, as well as of men, are social still more than they are political, and that a statement of woman's rights which ignores the rights of self-ownership as the first of all rights is insufficient to meet the demand, and is ceasing to enlist the enthusiasm and even the common interest of the most intelligent portion of the community.”

At this juncture, we’ll check in once more with Riane Eisler, whose readings of early human texts—the Olympian myths and their tragicocomic outcomes—echo Woodhull’s and her comrades’ insistent ‘Resolutions.’ The eminent professor of partnership amplifies this perspective with a portrait of one of the Dominator Canon’s underpinning myths, which enters Standard Canon territory via Aeschylus’ dramatic triad about Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes.

The first play is Agamemnon, in which the mighty military master’s wife slays him for his butchering their daughter to curry ‘divine favor’ for his Trojan slaughters. “(Clytemnestra)makes it clear that this is done not merely out of personal grief and hatred but in her social role as the head of her clan, responsible for avenging the shedding of kindred blood. In short, she is acting within the norms of a matrilineal society, in which as queen it is her duty to see that justice is done.”

The second drama, The Libation Bearers, tracks “her son Orestes (as he) returns to Argos in disguise. He enters his mother's palace as a guest, kills his mother's new consort Aegisthus and then, after some hesitation, in revenge for his father's death, kills his mother.”

The third leg of this tragic-cycle, Eumenides, refers to the immortal Furies who hounded Orestes with such guilt and remorse that he would carry out his own ‘sentence of execution.’ On the one side line up Apollo, Athene, and the Olympian newcomers to humanity’s holy pantheon, arguing for mercy and ‘father-right’ justice.

Opposed to this plea for impunity were the Earth and other elder deities, like the Furies, the majority of them Goddesses or other embodiments of the sacred feminine. Arguing the absurd proposition that only a Father hands down a family inheritance to a child, and utilizing Athene’s stratagem—a juried trial—Orestes receives absolution and the Goddesses’ representatives retire to grottoes and caves and out of the way temples. One can almost detect a ‘network shrug:’ “We might have written it differently, but hey, that’s the script.”

Eisler illuminates the way that murder and empire are at one with such a scripting’s diminution of mother right, sisterly mutuality, and any other attempt to achieve social equality. “The Oresteia thus takes us back to a time when there occurred what classical scholars like H. D. F. Kitto and George Thompson call the clash between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures. In our terms, it traces—and justifies—the shift from partnership to dominator norms.

As Rockwell writes, it takes us from 'full consent to the justice of Clytemnestra's case in the first play to a point where her daughter is forgotten, her ghost is eclipsed, and her case is non-existent, because women do not have those rights and attributes which she had claimed.'

For 'if a mighty creature like Clytemnestra, with the provocation she has in the murder of her child Iphigenia, has not the right to take revenge, what woman has?'

Through the lesson of what happened to this 'uppity' woman, even with such just cause, all women are effectively restrained from even entertaining the idea of rebellious acts. Moreover, Athene's role in this normative drama is, as Rockwell puts it, 'a masterful bit of cultural diplomacy; it is very important in an institutional shift that a leading figure of the defeated party is seen to accept the new power.'”

What one might formulate as this literary role in sociopolitical transtion is something that happens repeatedly as these cycles of sagas and dramas and more. Professor Sherill Harbison puts the matter like this, in relation to the pagan-to-Nazarene turning of the tide. “Among the most difficult cultural adjustments brought by the church were those affecting marriage and women’s rights.”

She continues in her Gunnar’s Daughter Introduction. “The Christian marriage…was regarded not as a contract but as a sacrament, and a woman’s consent was required for it to be valid.” Convents, moreover, provided an ‘alternative’ path for women to bloom. “Most radical, perhaps, was the Christian expectation of lifelong monogamy and fidelity from both marital partners, outlawing the sexual double standard.”

Applying such techniques as Harbison uses to rejuvenating elder texts might readily bear fruit in relation to more recent ‘old yarns.’ Frank Baum’s experience is intriguing in this regard, to put the matter mildly. A recent Smithsonian profile illustrates how his work—both his largely failed efforts prior to Oz and the turn toward sequels that followed—emanated in some significant way from the influence of his mother-in-law.

She encouraged his literary turn, and her own authorial interests in witches and the persecution of the feminine must have informed Dorothy and the various witches with whom she interacted. “After male critics branded (‘freethinker Matilda) Gage as satanic and a heretic, she became an expert on the subject of witch hunts. Her 1893 manifesto, Woman, Church, and State chronicled the five centures between 1300 and 1800 when tense of thousands of human beings, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft and put to death by fire, hanging, torture, drowning, or stoning.”

The recent versions of Wicked highlight some of these tendencies to taunt and torment the feminine, particularly if prudish repression does not receive adequate kudos, huzzahs, and general approbation. “The backstories of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good are the subject” of this new cottage industry. “The witch, who is unnamed in the Wizard of Oz, has a name in Wicked: Elphaba, an homage to the initials of L. Frank Baum.”

Now, for something completely different, Colette is almost certainly less troubled in her heart than her fellow novelist from across the channel, i.e., Mary Shelley, and she achieves a similar stance for uplifted women as does Dr. Eisler, the skillful interlocutor who lights a path for the interpretation of such grotesque tales as both Frankenstein and the Oresteia. The mime and performer and author, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, proves a prolific inventor of tales and telling that offer thinkers, not to mention careful readers, another avenue for seeing empowered women who themselves find trails that lead to feminine beneficence without having to bend or abnegate their disinclination to ‘fight fire with fire.’

When this self-styled coquette, who never used much other than the last of her three names, acted, or acted out, or simply proactively lived her powerful life, people paid attention, and a world-touching impact was at times irresistable. What was she doing when such eventualities unfolded?

One was a famed, and infamous kiss with a woman—an actress and aristocrat—who also happened to be her lover. Riots in the streets of Paris—such outrage—definitely ensued, in the event. Again, what were her thoughts as she scripted and rehearsed such risque parts to play?

In a general sense, she was performing—as a woman, openly erotic and playful and arch in scoffing at prudery and oppression. However, her youth when all this began indicates a certain extemporaneous aspect to the evolution of it all. “To help solve her family’s financial troubles, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a writer 14 years her senior better known by the pen name Willy. His literary talents were largely a facade, with ghostwriters producing much of the content attributed to him.”

As if on cue, he recruited his little peach of a wife to be part of his story-stable. ‘Willy’ requested plenty of “piquant details.” Thus, blatantly affirming of her libido and its erotic potential, she worked behind the scenes, even as literate Parisians and aficionados of tall tales generally soon figured out that these ‘daring dalliances’ of desire and delicious defiance, at once bawdy and licentious, were the work of the lithe temptress who was the literati’s merry muse and luscious lover.

Claudine at School was the first in this original series of her recountings. Her husband’s appropriation of her efforts—not to mention their flirtations and consummations hither and yon—contributed to her marital collapse. This, however, showed her how to live and ‘market herself’ without any ideological or political commitments whatsoever.

“Around the time of the separation, Colette embarked on a passionate affair with Missy, a niece of Napoleon III and perhaps the illegitimate granddaughter of Nicholas I of Russia. Like Colette, who included an openly lesbian relationship between a school headmistress and her assistant in the Claudine novels, Missy defied societal conventions, dressing as a man and 'very much [embracing] masculinity' as an identity.”

Independent and fierce and wild, Colette defined female eroticism while eschewing “Feminism” in its petty-bourgeois essence. This woman who embodied culture’s ever current proclivity to catch fire and consume and transform people in the process, thereby likely perfectly portrays an Alternate Canon producer.

Her career, full of performance and productivity and lusty living, accelerated after separation and divorce from ‘Willy.’ Ten years later, Colette published her “1920 novel Chéri, which sold 30,000 copies by the fall of its first year in print… . (It) centered on Léa de Lonval, a courtesan in a sexual relationship with a man almost half her age. In a clear example of art mirroring life, the book came out around the same time as Colette’s affair with her 16-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel.

Again, just a snippet from The Chalice & the Blade’s author could seem salubrious. Although she significantly supplements the point, Eisler cites with favor the research and writing of G. Rattray Taylor, whose magnum opus was Sex in History. “Following the well-known theories of Wilhelm Reich and other psychologists who primarily see patriarchal societies as sexually repressive, Taylor argues that historical swings from sexually permissive to sexually repressive attitudes are what underlie the alternation between freer, more creative and more authoritarian, less creative periods.”

Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier clearly circumscribes many of the thematic and analytical approaches that are the backbone of this essay. It is a story of a passionate and feckless woman, her husband and her married lover, and the facade of finery that overlay their to-the-manor-born milieu.

The climactic taste of Prussian Blue, no matter how bitterly dispiriting, certainly fits the scene. Entitled by wealth if not by lineage, these characters cocreate a kind of calm chaos—seeming serenity overlaying emotional misery. The author thus nicely straddles fences that divide Standard from Alternate Canons.

While Ford was in his lifestyle rock-ribbed gentry, some participants in creating varied successions of ‘counterculture’—Alternate Canon by any other name—were also ‘people of means,’ though—rather than embrace the bourgeois outright—they carved out and somehow inhabited a sort of demimonde that might through time represent a significant aspect of what we could call a ‘common cultural dialectic’ or something similar.

Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans,” very much in this frolicsome vein, brings forward an altogether earthy emanation of this populist, and popular, frank sensuality about grounded day-to-day glories of everyday libations in all their routine renderings. Before the epic sweep of this huge, best-selling tome spools out, Stein starts with the brevity of the timeline that allows ‘creating Americans.’

She then switches to the female act of gestation, a key AC indicator, ha ha. “Some of these, our fathers and our mothers, were not even made then, and the women, the young mothers, our grandmothers we perhaps just have seen once, carried these our fathers and our mothers into the new world inside them, those women of the old world strong to bear them. Some looked very weak and little women, but even these, so weak and little, were strong always, to bear many children.”

Not with an iota of Woke overtone, one can easily agree that diversity indeed demarcates our dandy AC. Stein’s clearly Jewish background, her open lesbian preferences, her consorting with coloreds, her socialistic leanings, her serving to succor social equality, she weaves a lot of strands into work that people celebrated as they did the author’s life. Neither Yankee nor Gringo, she remained a central player.

Speaking of Yankees and Gringos, what of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk? Like many who receive short shrift today, this great thinker and champion of justice, at once journalist and poet, scholar and activist, philosopher and naturalist, the man who wrote lines like these, will on his own fill these same pages sooner rather than later.

“Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. …

Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” From this forethought, Du Bois ushers the reader through songs and sheet music and poetical prose, so as to complement his Forethought with this Afterthought.

“Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed THE END.”

Richard Wright’s monumental master work, Native Son, in some ways better epitomizes this canon—color and sex and oppression and solidarity all mixed together, aggregating hope and terror in the courtroom that proves the gateway to electrocution as ‘justice’s’ most false presentation. He too, however, very soon gets his own top-billing here.

Additions to our Counter Canon would also undoubtedly originate from Latin America, now and in future iterations of this article’s ramble toward a literary and cultural dialectic. For now, a mention of Carlos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo will act as a sample of this coming bulwark through the inevitably feminine realms of ‘magical realism,’ whose first-among-equals practitioner was, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A lifelong radical, socialist and anti-imperialist and close comrade of Fidel and Che and such, Marquez—in 100 Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and more—ferociously facilitated a very alternative way of seeing ourselves and our histories. He wrote poignantly about Allende in Chile, the ‘original 9/11.’ He was simultaneously arch, full of life, and straightforwardly real, evoking ominous portents of dashed hopes and despairing devolution in service to Washington, empire, and capital.

He wrote in the pages of the March, 1974 issue of Harper’s, six months after the coup’s catastrophic collapse of Chilean democracy. “Chile has an earth tremor once every two days and a devastating earthquake every Presidential term. The least apocalyptic of geologists think Chile will disappear in some future cataclysm. …

A Chilean once told me on a Monday that ‘no Chilean believes tomorrow is Tuesday,’ and he didn't believe it either. Still, even with that deep-seated incredulity, or thanks to it, perhaps, the Chileans have attained a degree of natural civilization, a political maturity, and a level of culture that sets them apart from the rest of the region. Of the three Nobel Prizes in literature that Latin America has won, two have gone to Chileans, one of whom, Pablo Neruda, was the greatest poet of this century.

Henry Kissinger may have known this when he said that he knew nothing about the southern part of the world. In any case, United States intelligence agencies knew a great deal more. In 1965, without Chile's permission, the nation became the staging center and a recruiting locale for a fantastic social and political espionage operation: Project Camelot.

This was to have been a secret investigation which would have precise questionnaires put to people of all social levels, all professions and trades, even in the farthest reaches of a number of Latin-American nations, in order to establish in a scientific way the degree of political development and the social tendencies of various social groups. The questionnaire destined for the military contained the same question that the Chilean officers would hear again at the dinner in Washington(that started the Colombian magical realist’s report): what will their position be if Communism comes to power? It was a wily query.”

One could readily speak at length about Salvador Allende’s niece, the brilliant and occasionally mesmerizing Isabel. Her House of the Spirits may express most clearly an AC sensibility. In any event, since she will soon have her own turn at center stage, we needn’t turn up the spotlight any more just yet.

In terms of English-language materials, Virginia Wolff presents a contrasting perspective to Agnes Smedley in relation to women and empowerment and other inherent issues of ‘feminism.’ Smedley would never have loaded herself down with rocks and swam, whatever weight of psyche and spirit that she confronted. Still, Wolff’s yarnspinning clearly creates comfortable accompaniment of Gertrude just above, so to say.

As clearly as any other text, Daughter of Earth, Smedley’s masterpiece, equably and potently sets the stage for a surpassing Alternate Canon. The author and this work are soon to attain the top spot on BTR’s marquee, so we’ll leave matters here for now.

Rope of Gold also fills a similar billing, as it were. And it will find a Big Tent welcome, given time and tide. Josephine Herbst was a rabblerousing red writer much more attuned to reporting than to novelizing, yet she is a dandy denizen of our literary AC realm.

Her Intro to the tale contextualizes this truth in a story that puts women front and center. “State and local governments tried to drive women, especially married women, out of the work force. Private industry took advantage of socially sanctioned discrimination against women to undercut the wages of poorly paid men. Opportunities for promotion and advancement shriveled.”

Herbst is fiercely and yet subtly erotic. “The words looked bloated and deformed with her tears. If there were something she could send him to remind him so he would speak again, she must write. She thought of the time Jonathan had told her of the traveling man in North Dakota and his strange love token of curling hair. She reached for the scissors and pulling up her skirts cut quickly.”

Edith Wharton’s oeuvre too—perhaps as poignantly as elsewhere in Madame de Treymes—places this chronicler of upper class melodrama and tragedy right in the middle of our AC. True love proceeds by way of duplicity and plotted agendas hidden from view, with women’s parts at the heart of every mainstage, all the while the human heart longs for something shapelier and friendlier.

This climactic conjunction near the center of the novella is emblematic. “Durham sat silent, her little gloved hand burning his coat-sleeve as if it had been a hot iron. His brain was tingling with the shock of her confession. She wanted money, a great deal of money : that was clear, but it was not the point. She was ready to sell her influence, and he fancied she could be counted on to fulfill her side of the bargain. The fact that he could so trust her seemed only to make her more terrible to him—more supernaturally dauntless and baleful.” Oh my!

In searching for records of fictionalized social realities of this sort, at once more innocent and more dire, one wouldn’t want to overlook Sister Carrie in any aggregation of this sort. Selling souls, selling bodies, butchering animals with more attention to compunction than in the cases of selling female flesh on the street or slaughtering manflesh on the battlefield: these are axiomatic and thematic in Theodore Dreiser’s works.

He sets the stage cooly and clearly, yet with portents of difficulty’s brushes with tragic outcomes. “She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth.

Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.”

Dreiser contextualizes this for readers in his foreword. “I am frequently asked for the story of the trials and tribulations attendant upon the publication of my first novel.” He goes from despair to hope to despicable imposition of the Canon that he was supposing to supplant. Eventually, if unexpectedly, Doubleday contracted to publish, and did indeed print, a first edition.

“In the meantime (as I was told by Frank Norris himself, and later by William Heinemann, the publisher, of London), Mrs. Frank Doubleday read the manuscript and was horrified by its frankness. She was a social worker and active in moral reform, and because of her strong dislike for the book and insistence that it be withdrawn from publication, Doubleday Page decided not to put it in circulation.”

Confirming his belonging in our Alternate Canon, Dreiser did not cave in. “However, Frank Norris remained firm in his belief that the book should come before the American public, and persuaded me to insist on the publishers carrying out the contract.

Their legal adviser one Thomas McKee, who afterwards personally narrated to me his share in all this was called in, and he advised the firm that it was legally obliged to go on with the publication, it having signed a contract to do so, but that since this did not necessarily include selling, in short, the books, after publication, might be thrown into the cellar! I believe this advice was followed to the letter, because no copies were ever sold.”

Different roads to tragedy exist from that in Sister Carrie, the selling of one’s own flesh and sexual energy on the open market. Imre Kertesz details the mundane and all-too-typical monstrosities that accompany addiction to divided conquest by means of one sort of Holocaust or another. Since his Fatelessness figures prominently in an upcoming followup on Zionism, this much will suffice for the moment.

Andre Gide’s The Immoralist has a similar stylistic bluntness, the flattened affect of the irretrievably psychotic. Tubercular and astonished to find a woman who cleaves to him nevertheless, the narrator discovers his own deficient and amoral standards in colonial French North Africa.

The author dedicates the book to a comrade and marks its initiation with the Fourteenth Psalm: “I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” His Preface states the case simply.

“I present this book for what it is worth—a fruit filled with bitter ashes, like those colocinths of the desert that grow in a parched and burning soil. All that they can offer to your thirst is a still more cruel fierceness—yet lying on the golden sand they are not without a beauty of their own.

If I had held my hero up as an example, it must be admitted that my success would have been small. The few readers who were disposed to interest themselves in Michel's adventure did so only to reprobate him with all the superiority of their kind hearts. It was not in vain that I had adorned Marceline with so many virtues; they could not forgive Michel for not preferring her to himself.”

Gide then closes his prefatory statement with strong evidence to support a claim that he deserves a spot in the Alternate Canon under review just now. “But the real interest of a work and the interest taken in it by an ephemeral public are two very different things. A man may, I think, without much conceit, take the risk of not arousing immediate interest in interesting things—he may even prefer this to exciting a momentary delight in a public greedy only for sweets and trifles.”

In any event, Yevgeny Yevtushenko clarifies much of the thematic or moral components of literary discourse with the title of one of his novels. Don’t Die Before You’re Dead could serve as a common R.I.P. for Homo Sapiens, soon enough, soon enough. Especially in the writing spaces from which journalism and commentary and ‘criticism’ emerge, a seeker is quite likely to discover a resigned placidity that accepts blunted affect and despair with a shrug and complains, not about gruesome social horror but about a lack of ‘medicine’ or other ‘treatments’ to mask such symptoms.

None other than Russia’s first post-Soviet President commemorated the great writer’s sixtieth birthday. “'Today you, one of the initiators of the Sixties movement, turn 60,' President Boris N. Yeltsin wrote in a congratulatory letter to Mr. Yevtushenko. 'Your innate, multifaceted talent arose brightly in the now-distant years of the ‘thaw.’

The civic consciousness of young poets then played a huge role in the spiritual liberation and awakening of the people of Russia.' A gray-haired woman agreed, telling a reporter: 'He was a symbol for us then. Later he was attacked for not being exiled or sent to the camps, for making a career of protest. But not many of us had the courage to stand up to the regime, and he did. You can’t blame him that he survived.”

Marge Piercy, whose aforementioned ‘golem epic’ was just one of the author’s insurgent or even revolutionary textual sallies, has made multiple, all blissfully radical and rowdy, contributions to the ‘Alternate Canon’ at the heart of today’s multiplicity of blah blah blah. In the already noted He, She, & It, the author spins a web of dystopian nightmares of human progress through the hegemony of corporate or religious city states. A custody battle starts the tale, Winter in Nebraska close to a hundred degrees in the shade.

Her heroine’s original position in the story is one of privilege, despite having an irreparable falling out with her spouse. “She should not be as frightened as she was. She was a techie like Josh, not a day laborer; she had rights. Her hands incubated damp patches on her thighs.

She hoped their verdict would be announced soon. She had to pick up Ari at the midlevel-tech day care center in forty-five minutes, some twenty minutes' glide from the official sector. She did not want him waiting, frightened. He was only two years and five months, and she simply could not make him understand: Don't worry, Mommy may be a little late.

It was her fault, insisting on the divorce in December, for ever since, Ari had been skittish; and Josh bitter, furious. Twice as alive. If he had loosed in their marriage the passion her leaving had provoked, they might have had a chance together. He fought her with full energy and intelligence, as she had wanted to be loved.”

This savvy woman’s programming talents eventually allow her to participate in creating an ‘ideal bloke,’ artificially amplified emotionally, physically, and socially. A related theme, of women’s rights and their frequent trampling, shows up in her Woman On the Edge of Time.

Its premise is compelling, to say the least. “Consuela Ramos, a middle-aged Chicana woman, starts seeing visions around the second time she is committed by the state to an insane asylum. These visions, however much Connie is annoyed by them at first, are unusually consistent: a person named Luciente, unfailingly polite and positive, telling her about a future, the year 2137. Eventually, Luciente is able to pull Connie’s consciousness into something that is either that future, or a very convincing vision thereof.”

Google’s A.I. algorithm says this: “The novel's utopian and dystopian passages are juxtaposed to create a dialectic that contrasts traditional and new conceptions of manhood. The novel's vision of a collectivist, anarchical community in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts is a feminist utopia that proposes new masculinities that value equality, fraternity, and freedom.” Basically, this looks spot-on, in the British idiom.

That these issues of sex and war, sexuality and mass murder, women and carnage in the name of their ‘protection,’ have remained not only omnipresent in literature but also quite commonly classically referential, is simple to see. Spike Lee’s Chirac is, for all of its gushing goofiness, an emphatically interesting restatement of Aristophanes’ twenty-five hundred year old sex-strike-spoof.

Furthermore, even fairy tales are now blooming in mediated expressions of an Alternate Canon. Works of mine here in BTR attest to this, albeit without a mass audience, ha ha. Even feature films prod the edges of the AC boundaries of ‘Little Red Riding Hood & the Big Bad Wolf.’

A totally different type of authorial voice—from the former East Germany’s brilliant Krista Wolf—takes up the cause of Cassandra, in the novel of the same name, in so doing narrowing Euripides focus to one of his four main characters in The Trojan Women. And the only reasonable view, practically speaking, of this admonishing woman’s sense of things is that she understood what her solipsistic brethren and ‘superiors’ failed to discern.

Unintentionally, no doubt, a sophisticated Nation indictment of Wolf for her East German Stazi-Commie past evidences Wolf’s likely belonging comfortably in the AC campground. “Her protagonists, most of them women—from the Trojan prophetess Cassandra to postwar Rita—are blessed and cursed with the ability to see more than the average person. These women don’t come upon the gift of exceptional sight by accident; they see more because they feel more deeply. Karoline von Günderrode, the early-nineteenth-century poet whom Wolf made the tragic heroine of her novella No Place on Earth (1979), discovers for herself the way 'some people become seers: A deep pain or a deep concentration lights up the landscape within.'”

This lesser-known highlight of recent human Goddess energy will be appearing again; we may rest assured. The ‘liberal’ critique above, near its conclusion, has this to proffer. “Though she often reflected on her past and her errors, Wolf always stopped short of wishing she had done things differently.

Even as she wrote about isolated, childless, partnerless and, above all, doomed young women like Cassandra, Günderrode and Medea as if from her own experience, she was herself by all accounts happily married to the same man for sixty years.” A graveside eulogy summarized. “Christa Wolf could say: ‘I wanted no other life than this.'”

As if readers had not seen and heard enough, a stroke of the Goddess brought an earlier-than-expected delivery to the door, Gunnar’s Daughter, Nobelist Sigrid Undset’s first published novel, which I knew would take up the issues of family and power and sex and empire that were part of the Kristin Lavransdatter and Master of Hestviken story cycles mentioned earlier. I figured that I’d open the book and wherever I ended up would have something useful for me.

Gulp! The packing list directed my attention to Chapter 12, where I intuited what was ahead from the first paragraph. “The whole of that day she sat in her bower sunk in great dread and bewilderment, not knowing whether to go and meet Ljot or not. But when it was drawing on towards sundown, she wrapped a dark cloak about her and went out into the yard.”

Betrayal behind, trouble ahead, much more likely loggerheads than loving kindness: hooked like an unwary fish, I confirmed the rape that the above paragraph portended, then read the slender volume cover to cover to affirm, furthermore, that this book too belonged where I believed it should dwell, as a dark telling from the Alternate Canon to warn of the tragedies that must emerge from such ways of relating, in like fashion as pus must erupt from gangrenous flesh.

That the unsurpassed Ms. Undset faced rejection when she could craft this sort of yarn seems impossible to believe. But such was true; along with her father, before his untimely death sent her away from school as a sixteen year old who would help support her siblings and mothers, she studied, among many others, Njal’s Saga as well as the Laxaela Saga that had the only female main character among the lot of such ‘Viking epics.’ In the end, these old Norse legends guided her to fame and glory that established her as one of the finest wordsmith-yarnsmiths in humanity’s annals.

Exemplars of heroic sojourns, tales of this sort bridged the gap between Pagan and Christian Europe, thereby establishing one solid basis for the Alternate Canon of recent centuries. “Throughout the tale the author demonstrates his admiration for the pagan virtues of honor, fortitude, and physical prowess, and the Christian emphasis on goodwill, humility, and conciliation. …(At one point, the protagonist’s attackers)temper their deeds with a Christian gesture and offer those inside(the) burning building a free exit. Njal elects to remain and die a noble death, explaining that he is too old to continue the cycle of vengeance, but he cannot ‘live in shame.’”

The majority of this display of show-and-tell has come down to a decidedly ‘Western’ version of the Canons in Question, so to speak. Ms. Wolf has been an exception, along with the Soviets’ second Nobel Literature Prize winner, Yevgeny, just above.

However, given those Commies’ proclivities to seek to capture cultural cachet, we might encounter still vaster listings when the time comes to spread BTR wings to engage with, just for example, Mother Russia, Maxim Gorky’s beloved communistic manifesto for men and women everywhere, so this present vast smattering will find further expression to add more breadth and scope, alas without swimming so deeply that we drown in details.

As we wend a way toward winding down, a few final selections are in the queue today. As a matter of course, even such an iceberg’s tip as this almost explodes with voluminous titles and plotlines and characters who are grappling with similar struggles as the ‘rest of us’ confront in our daily rounds of tally-hoing and beating discretionary hasty retreats.

One obviously topical remaining response to Beck’s and Davis’ words from Above-the-Fold—in regard to an unequal world in which Uncle Sam’s empire and its apocalytic propensities abound—is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, biblical and dystopic simultaneously. It draws from an Old Testament passage in which a wife—barren, bless her heart—permit her husband’s copulation with a latter-day ‘egg donor,’ ha ha, as she kneels her ‘permission.’ It’s not a ‘lighthearted threesome,’ but it is certainly both kinky and opportunistic, much like Atwood’s rebel-women in her story.

The author also co-wrote the scripts for the magnificent Alias, Grace series on Netflix itself, which came to pass because of Atwood’s novel about a strange and complicated murder case in the immediate aftermath of a putative revolutionary outburst among Canadian workers in the mid-1800’s. An Irish servant, in a millieu of master-servant unfriendly benefits, kills her well-heeled and entitled employer, and an interlocutor wants to know why, and whether some exculpatory approach to the case is reasonable.

William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, meanwhile, offers us a plot that plots the precise parameters of pugilisic hybrid-wars so as to control the megalopolis of slums that would otherwise delineate the empire in which a Gates or a Musk or a Trump are only play actors for a broader imperial phalanx of torture’s terrors and blitzkrieg torments. Moreover, the author sees the structural and economic transformations of the very sprawl about which Beck and Davis warn, an all encompassing blob that has both micro and macro effects.

“We participate, you and I, in the death of print-as-we-knew-it, and should experience thereby an exquisite frisson of ecstasy and dread. So soon, we plunge toward a world in which the word ‘library’ simply means something on the other end of a modem.” In such a context, everyone becomes a research hustler and online sneak, out of self-defense, if for no other reason.

One commentator uses Gibson’s Sprawl triptych, which included Neuromancer and Count Zero along with MLO, as a jumping off point for considering the social frisson on the master’s efforts. “Gibson should be given credit for getting so much right about the tech and texture of the present. Some things he got a bit wrong —betting the farm on Japan rather than China, and not having the Net as an ambient presence in the minds of his characters, rather than a separate all-or-nothing place they have to jack in to visit. But if you think of how awesome his take on corporate power and weirdness was, and the void of politics except as corruption, and the ecological game over—he deserves all the respect available.”

Half a dozen additional Gibson cyberpunk titles—he’s the author who coined the term cyberspace—also fit among the works apropos for an Alternate Canon. Tons of other science fiction, like Piercy’s work too, fits right in here, from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to all sorts of Philip dick short fiction.

As Smedley Butler summarized in regard to many of these fantastical narratives, “War Is a Racket,” one which, both lucrative and lethal, serves as a benchmark aspect of both the Standard and the Alternate Canons under study in this inaugural episode along such lines. Much of BTR’s writing examines this overlapping of war’s convenient Keynesian boosts with catastrophe’s cultural concatenations, including selections that have already blended in Smedley’s ideas.

This essay, along with a fair amount of Big Tent fare, has shown up as a grab-bag, a set of documents to illustrate documentation of an arguable descriptive dynamic that has long been discernible in how things work, how matters stand among the ‘movers and shakers’ who set the boundaries for what counts as story, history, science, and all the other component of enculturation and entertainment and infotainment and blah blah blah.

Scattershot briefings needn’t always end problematically. When an apt or at least arguable assertion that a type of cultural force, not part of any SOP and yet potent and ubiquitous nevertheless, can again and again make a point and leave many other ‘stones unturned,’ so to speak, may create a circumstantial web that ultimately allows for ‘no other explanation’ than that very different typologies correlate with mediation that either supports or undermines elite standard protocols, as it were.

From ‘Feminist Porn’ to virtual spaces in which ‘feminine allure’ is the driving force to all manner of video spaces in which women predominate, the expansion of media’s socializing methodologies have manifested old story lines in modern clothing, as it were. Then again, entirely novel versions of ourselves ‘on stage,’ ‘on camera,’ or otherwise ‘on demand,’ have clearly and consciously carved out new nooks in which more or less completely unique and novel strategies and possibilities for presentation and production.

“There’s no place like home,” yet “somewhere over the rainbow” a man still lurks behind the curtain pulling the strings. As journalists, intellectuals, performers, and producers, legions of gadflies and gainsayers push back against the monopoly media’s corporate behemoth.

Whatever the case may be, perhaps another Driftwood Message trio can culminate our ramblings here. In any case, a Marshall Artist mediation inherently establishes one set of the enculturating beams that undergird what appears here in Big Tent Review, a fact consistently a part of every issue so far.

“Collectivity & Triumph” continues this casting of commentary in terms of particular production protocols. "The Cosmic Canvas Invites Us to Paint Our Most Poignant Depiction of Joyful Potency, Our Most Salubrious Scenes of Happy Fortune, Even As Mediation's Standard Mandates Much More Often Join Established Norms to Screen Mundane Mayhem & Baleful Bane Without Alluding to Ubiquitous Options of Delightful Denouement That Deliver the Sublime Serenity of Solidarity Forever, Always Ours to Elect If We Choose to Highlight Our Inherently Collective Triumph Through Fiery Trial & Frantic Fury."

The ‘Standard Canon’ and some trustafarian producer’s capacity to entertain ‘alternative visions’ is in play, as a matter of course, in almost all mediating, formal productions, stories as commodities. Perhaps a recent New York Review of Books account that looks at a new Netflix series, first, and then undertakes to contextualize three very slick video game offerings from just this moment; these relative newcomers on the socially sanctioned storytelling stage represent the ‘smart money,’ entrepreneurial vision for where narrative will go next.

"Daunting Dilemmas & Their Solution" offers listeners and Feral Nerd Performance Zone visitors a chance to consider such promises of better living through ‘new and improved’ production values. "Entrepreneurs, Whose Actual & Erstwhile Enterprising Acuity Almost Always Emanates From Inherited Fortune & Other Profound Privilege, Encourage Us to Look to the Stars As a Frontier That Will Somehow Resolve Humanity's Most Daunting Dilemmas Despite How Earthbound Failures, Offal & Carrion, Will Unavoidably Attend All Such Expeditions: Only Such Endeavors As Spring From Social Equality & Political Mutuality Can Ever Hope Successfully to Spread Homo Sapiens Seeds."

Whatever else comes to pass, Rosa Luxemburg’s observation that humanity’s fate will encompass either “socialism or barbarism” gives readers a way of comprehending militarism, the disparaging of socialism, the criminalization of female sexuality—or, put in euphemistic terms, making abortion legally inaccessible—and copious other concatenations of social collapse. A final Marshall Arts item, “Vampires, Zombies, Beasts, & Other Imperfect Monsters” speaks to this sort of thinking about things.

"Soul-Sucking Vampires, Brain Feasting Zombies, Insatiable Mutant Beasts: No Narrative of Grotesque Horror Can Match, Let Alone Surpass, the Technically Perfect Monstrosities of Numerous Rationally Planned Modern Weapons Systems & Their Ever Ready Promise to Effect Humankind's Hellish Eternity of Non-Existence." As ever, ‘a word to wise might well suffice.’

Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…

The point of a critique of 'statistics' as a way of articulating being might sound like this: "The chief defect of Empiricism is that it views experience passively, whereas in order to retain a consistent materialist understanding of experience it is necessary to recognise that it is the practical activity of people changing the world which is the condition and source of knowledge. Further, knowledge only arises in and through definite social relations, through which people produce the forms of activity under which experience can be grasped; but for Empiricism, experience is not a social activity, but simply a passive, sensual process."

An especially pernicious perspective is likely to result when one conjoins a passive yet powerful capacity to depict life probabilistically with a sense of righteous rectitude. Anyone who has joined in an online debate of late has witnessed what I am speaking about.

One side sees the other as 'wingnuts,' who in turn view their opposition as 'socialists, or worse.' And each states, unequivocally, 'I speak the truth, but you, sir, propagate prevarication and propaganda.'

Of course, the best result of such exchanges is a mildly humorous pointlessness. But a deeper, and I would hold, critical, failing of such pugilism is the misunderstanding of what a citizen's duty is today. One must find allies; one must increase knowledge; one must involve oneself and one's community in the struggle for democracy. And as already noted, uncertainty inevitably permeates all such labors.

To do any of this work necessitates an uncertain articulation of the issues at hand. Propaganda may be the only, and is definitely one, rational way to name such articulation. Thus, to conflate prevarication and propaganda is either a mistake or a falsehood.

Put another way, seeing oneself as imbued with a God's-eye-view while shouting at one's enemies, 'liar, liar, pants on fire' will always yield, giving things the most optimistic spin, silly foolishness. More likely, it will come to highlight mendacity’s most murderous manifestation of mayhem.

Readers might try on for size the definition that I have developed in order to help my students' comprehension in this regard. "Propaganda: (n)--1. A partial truth advanced for a partial purpose; 2. a purportedly comprehensive but necessarily incomplete estimation of reality, developed by an individual or collective that has greater information or insight or access concerning an issue than is, on average, the case, in order to influence, persuade, or control the way that others less knowledgeable or active think about or respond to the question at hand."

Thinking about things in this fashion induces several salubrious outcomes. First, one can carry on a dialog with people who would otherwise just piss one off. Second, one does not underestimate one's opponents. Third, one does not overestimate one's own verisimilitude. Most important, to me at least, one must always remain aware of the distinction between faith and fact.

In regard to renewable energy, for example, one might consider the potential for electricity from photovoltaic sources as a fact; the potentially small or large cost of such electrification, on the other hand, must always stay a matter of faith, at least until such time as a critical mass of implementation has happened. Therefore, arguments about either the cost effectiveness or lack of competitiveness of PV electricity must appear now as propaganda.

The computer acronym that expresses much of what I am suggesting today is 'GIGO': garbage in, garbage out. To avoid inevitable garbage, thinkers must, first and foremost, identify the purposes of their intellectual engagement.

Having done this for readers in my own regard—extending democracy, strengthening communities, and more are at the root of what I write—I might pose a compound question about Peak Oil. 'How did the concept of Peak Oil become so prominent for a time, and how might a citizen understand and use the idea so as to increase community empowerment and effectuate both democracy and social justice?'

INTRODUCTION

In overseeing the massive topic area that underpins these essays—the intersection of human life with the exploitation of power sources, which touches on just about everything in existence, I recently, and randomly came across a tidbit from an 1893 Harper's Magazine.

I say 'randomly' in that my archival search merely found this datum because someone had seen fit to include in the archival cache a poem that started on a page in which these lines appeared at the top.

Serendipity rivals uncertainty as a ruling force. Readers should consider these sentences closely. They speak to the underlying consequence of fossil fuel in our lives, whatever the import or gravity, or lack thereof, of the notion of Peak Oil.

The "price of petroleum has been so much reduced that for several years it has not exceeded a dollar a barrel, (even as) the quantity has been so much increased that the aggregate value of the product has been fairly maintained. The greatest pecuniary return from the oil production was in 1877, when oil was worth $2.42 per barrel, and the product sold for $31,788,565 82.

Since then, the price averaging a dollar a barrel, the value of the production has been about $20,000,000 a year. Petroleum has been a priceless gift to the American people, not only as a contribution to the public wealth, but it is a great, moral force as well.

The cheap and excellent illuminator has made life in the country a different thing from what it was in the dark days of the past. Now every farm-house has its kerosene lamps that prolong the day of the house-wife, the farmer, and the artisan, making the home brighter and more enjoyable, and giving to children and parents additional hours of recreation, work, or menial culture in every day, so that it would be almost as great a privation to take from the country homes the lamp about which they gather as to deprive them of the bread they eat.

The experiments in the distillation of oil from coal and shales in the years before the reign of petroleum began, proved that a good illuminating oil can be produced by distillation at a price not greater than double that for which kerosene is now sold. The materials from which oil can be distilled here exist in inexhaustible quantities, so that we may have an assurance that in all future time the place of petroleum will be, if not perfectly, fairly well supplied from other sources."

From these expressions of a 'halcyon dawn of all things civilized:' through the crushing of the Ottoman Empire and concomitant conquest of every drop of Middle Eastern crude; and then through the agonizing destruction of Nazi Germany, in no small part resulting from heroic carnage from the air at Ploesti, Romania; still ever onward through the rise of the post-war 'New World Order' colossus of the United States and its attendant international institutions, along with former imperialist allies and adversaries, oil has indeed played a central economic, political, and social role.

And now supplies seem, to say the least, a little scarcer than in the past, at the same time that the overwhelmingly central business problem of the 'oiligopoly' of the Rockefeller consortium and its offshoots has ever been one of maintaining price in the face of a glutted market. On the resolution of such supply-and-demand tensions, quite likely, will a deeper understanding of Peak Oil depend, though we will not parse anything like all such contradictions today.

As we will discern in coming sections, our estimable geologist from above-the-fold, Mr. Hubbert, experienced these contrarieties quite personally. In the span of a quarter century, Hubbert fairly radically changed course, for example, an absolutely amazing aspect of which is that this turnabout is practically speaking unknown, even though the scientist who in some senses laid the foundation for ‘peak oil’ and ‘climate change’ is the one performing this about face.

The point here may be easiest to illustrate by examining, first of all, what this revered petroleum and mineral expert presented in 1956 in his premier paper before an audience at a quarterly American Petroleum Institute meeting. He summarizes everything.

“By about 2 million years ago biological evolution had advanced to where the ancestors of the present human species had begun to walk upright and to use crude stone tools. At that stage (our ancestral) species must have existed as a member of an ecological complex and competed with the other members of the complex for a share of the local solar energy essential for its existence.

The energy utilizable was almost exclusively the food supply derived by the biological system from solar energy by the mechanism of photosynthesis. During the subsequent million or more years the human species progressively devised means of capturing an ever larger supply of the available energy.

This resulted in a slow change in the ecological relations and to an increase in density and geographical spread of the human population, but the energy per capita changed very little. In view of the slowness with which these developments must have occurred, the whole ecological system of which the human species was a member can only be regarded as comprising a slowly changing ecological steady state.”

Clearly, and again in a way that reflects developments in coming chapters, Hubbert began with a view that nuclear would emerge as humanity’s default option. Again, this was so common as to be almost axiomatic at the time. The legendary Hans Bethe, in a 1977 Swan Song, delineated this POV by beginning with Hubbert, though without noting the geologist’s changed opinions.

“No matter what alternatives I look at, I always come back to the conclusion that nuclear power is a necessity, not merely an option. A necessity if we want to make a smooth transition from our present oil- and gas-based economies to the post-oil world. A necessity for North America, but even more for other industrialized countries and for the more advanced developing countries.”

At least speculatively, therefore, the second component of the story is to see what impelled Hubbert to overturn his strong inclination in favor of fission. Developing this point will await the next ‘telling of the tale’ and what follows that.

Nevertheless, the reality that the Modern Nuclear Project has come to be as our species’ Carbon Age has aged is undeniable. How has this happened? What does it mean? These are questions near the heart of a Big Tent methodology, as it were.

A piece of Driftwood Message Art examines “Pandora’s Promise” in this regard. "Pandora Taught That Secrets Won't Stay in Their Boxes, Coming Always to Light, With Results Quite a Fright, So Perhaps We May Deduce That Some Billionaires' Slick Production, 'Pandora's Promise,' Which Disregards the Nymph's Lesson, Consists of Little More Than Self-Serving Propaganda & One Sided Manipulation."

As always, perhaps a ‘word to the wise’ will suffice. Up Next: Part Two

Yet Another Old Thing, Made Fresh—(continued)…

The “Demands of Chile,” the product of a year’s planning that in retrospect one can say definitely involved support from U.S. institutions, were non-negotiable. Either Popular Unity would “reverse its revolutionary course, abandon its socialist goals, and surrender its political project,” or the deluge would ensue.

Salvador Allende died defending his theretofore democratic approach to revolution with a machine gun in his hands. While some of his closest comrades joined him, most of the toilers at the cotton mill demurred at the notion of ‘armed resistance.’ The time for the training and equipping to effect such an eventuality was many months, or even years, prior to Pinochet’s pragmatic execution of mass murder.

Communists had advised against such steps as training and arming the work force to resist the military in the event of a coup “as provocative, and the Socialists and the MIR(Moviemiento de lzquierda Revolucionaria, or Movement of the Revolutionary Left) proved themselves ‘just theoreticians, not practical revolutionaries,’ who failed to prepare for the military coup that they themselves had predicted.”

A few handfuls of plants and firms did resist the putsch. The junta deployed its completely equipped modern heavy weaponry against these makeshift ‘barricades’ one by one and crushed them all.

“Within a week, the illusion of ‘popular power’ had been destroyed, leftist fantasies of a division in the military or a popular rising dispelled, and a military dictatorship consolidated. The fighting was over, but the killing had just begun. During the weeks that followed, some 25,000 Chileans were killed by their own armed forces.”

This would amount to plus-or-minus a million casualties in a nation the size of today’s United States. This meticulous and clearly brilliant and brave young professor explained why these barbaric steps were essential from the perspective of the Chilean ruling class—and, behind the scenes, their gringo sponsors.

Chile’s increasingly organized and militant working class was the only social force that might muster the capacity to oppose the military. Thus, calculated decimation was an important lesson to impart, along with firings and blacklists and permanent unemployment for as much as 20% of the industrial leftists who, unslaughtered though they might be, remained behind.

“The scope and intensity of the repression reflected the extent and depth of popular mobilization in Chile by September, 1973. It was an ironic tribute to the success of the revolution from below.”

Did Pinochet at least ‘make the trains run on time,’ as the pundit apologists for Mussolini suggested about Il Duce? This is in some ways the most noisome aspect of the whole affair.

The moderate and conservative members of the working class, the vaunted ‘shopkeepers’ and small business owners—many of whom nodded smugly at the butcher’s butchery—as well as the young and the old and anyone socially vulnerable, were all, within a decade of Pinochet’s predatory rampage, more or less utterly destitute, with prospects worse than ever before in verdant Chile’s modern history.

How and why this transpired, though, truly describes the parameters of a tragedy. One assessment develops this reasoning clearly and incisively.

“Pinochet, with the help of 400 CIA advisers, privatized the social and welfare system and destroyed the Chilean trade union movement. As Malcolm Coad pointed out: ‘This was achieved through wholesale privatisation, a complete opening to the international economy, fixing the exchange rate artificially low, and pumping in foreign loans during the petro-dollar glut of the late 1970s.

The result was the destruction of national industry and much of agriculture, then near-collapse in the early 1980s amid a frenzy of speculation, consumer imports, and debt crisis. The state bailed out most of the country's banking sector and unemployment rose to an official level of over 30 per cent.’”

And yet still additional sources ought to be on the conscientious observer’s radar screen so to speak. At the very least, such repositories as the following need to be available for examination.

***The Defense Intelligence Agency’s and National Security Agency’s records without any doubt contain masses of still-secret datasets that would help understand processes and protocols in this case.

***Financial, industrial, and media archives that are either miraculously open or possibly liable to legal discovery—particularly among the food processing, copper, and services companies that already show up as part of CIA planning, need to be under scrutiny, and researchers need to develop plans to obtain such records.

***Massive archives in Spanish, not only in Chile, but in other Operation CONDOR States are generally not on the roadmap of English readers; this needs to change, and quickly.

***Cuban and possibly other State-level sources of data also contain material that could completely upend ‘plausible deniability’ in these matters; in addition to discerning what holdings might be accessible in Havana, the records of Bolivia, Argentina, and Venezuela might be caches that a clever researcher might get hold of.

***Court and administrative records from both the United States and abroad, in both civil and criminal filings, are often full of attachments to motions and other pleadings; with the right leverage and plenty of diligence, at least some of such materials might yield occasional treasures.

In considering such monumental tasks as this essay introduces, in even making ourselves aware of the information that exists if we’re willing to ferret it out, the basic question that comes to mind is simple to state: “How much do we want to know about how the world really works?” And we might add, “How badly do we want to find out?”

The Spindoctor not only desperately loves to probe how things operate, but he also can’t help himself: he wants people to start acting like they want to be responsible citizens despite how risky that seems, despite what a complete and utter pain-in-the-ass the whole process can be.

He asks that readers who manage to get this far, at the very heart of this narrative, listen to a young woman from Chile, one of the interviewees for this project. She is the great granddaughter of the junta’s first possible victim, Arturo Araya III, who died on July 27, 1973 with a bullet in his lung, while the ambulance that his in-laws had summoned failed to appear for nearly an hour.

Here is the question that Josefa fielded from us. “As someone born after 1990, what role do you think the dictatorship has in your life, and that of your generation? Does it affect you, and if so, how?”

And this is how she answered. “It affects us tremendously, and for many reasons. More than anything I think it's a thing about a common history, and building a collective identity; we are located in a social context that is marked everywhere by the things that happened during the dictatorship.

Everything from the laws that govern our country and shape our lives up to the fact that the dictatorship left the social fabric fractured. For me, the dictatorship is a very deep wound in Chilean collective memory, perhaps the worst in our history, because it made Chileans confront and seek to destroy each other.

I think that in order to heal the wound much is still missing: it is a process that is not yet even half accomplished. People of generations that did not live through it (nevertheless) live in the aftermath (that it) left and … continues to manifest. We all carry the weight of what happened during the dictatorship somehow—some in more direct ways and others more indirectly, but we all live on(in this world that comes from then) after all.

We know people who had relatives who disappeared as prisoners, or people whose parents or grandparents were involved in the disappearances. (Not just) at a social level, but all areas of the Chilean social life are marked by what happened.”

Resisting State-Sponsored Terror—Inside Chile & Out

Direccion de Intelligentsia Nacional, or DINA, evolved as a result of such institutional expressions of U.S. hegemony as the Central Intelligence Agency, of course. Moreover, however, the already-mentioned Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, the former School of the Americas, continued to provide training to its special agents.

Many socialists and communists from Latin America conceived the Allende administration as an experiment. In such a view, perhaps a non-violent mechanism for achieving fundamental social change would be possible.

This underlay the decision not to arm workers, despite all the signs that the U.S. would support a vile killing thrust against a democratically selected group of leaders, and despite all the evidence of history that then vast numbers of innocents would likely face torture and painful death and disappearance at the hands of plotters and psychopaths and efficiency experts in charge of electroshock and clean-up. That the results of this science project in the political arts do not look favorable to amicable approaches to social change is, to say the least, an understatement.

Nor did the aftermath of the first months of slaughter attenuate such a dire perspective, as Professor Winn made clear above. Two very brief additional bits will round out this section.

One was the inability of the ‘theorists’ at MIR to mount a successful underground resistance to Pinochet’s fascism. Within a year of the putsch, more or less, Miguel Enriquez and other leaders of the organization were all dead or effectively no longer present and accounted for in Chile.

The other was the much wider scope that Chile’s terrorism assumed in the years following its mass killing of its own citizens. This basically concerned such joint ventures as mutual assistance among assassins in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay, which we now know as Operation CONDOR.

The assassination of a Chilean military man in Argentina who remained loyal to Allende, Carlos Prats, caused a significant outcry at the time. Lawsuits against the perpetrators have made their way through the Federal Courts of the United States. Some evidence suggests that various official agents of the United States played roles in the work of the cooperating Southern Cone intelligence agencies.

The second instance of a broadening of the reach of Chile’s ‘terror police,’ the DINA, involved a massive car bomb on the streets of the District of Columbia. The assassination of an opponent of Pinochet, Orlando Letelier, not only severed the former diplomats legs but also killed his assistant, Ronnie Moffitt, and caused crippling injuries to Ms. Moffitt’s husband.

From Cautious Democratic Resurgence to Attempted Truth & Reconciliation

Many generations might need to pass before anything like general or routine comity could be possible. John L. Rector’s The History of Chile concludes with a sober note that, even after thirty years, recriminations between Communists and the “far right” of the U.D.I. continue—if not unabated, then still powerful.

A retired Naval officer from Chile, Arturo Araya IV, also noted this tendency. “All many people want now is to be victims and to blame Pinochet and the government for their problems.” He also mentions how, in his estimation, “almost all” the former adherents of the dictator skulk about “with guilty expressions on their faces, turning every corner as if they suspect they will soon be arrested.”

He himself initiated a lawsuit against the military for its possible role and likely cover-up of the killing of his father, the Naval attaché whose connections with Cuba may have played a part in his targeting. He and others in the family, who had in general accepted Pinochet’s rule when it happened and on occasion strongly backed it, gathered together after Señor Araya had issued a press release that announced the Court’s acceptance of this litigation.

Moreover, the recent trials and possible convictions of some of the men responsible for Victor Jara’s torture and murder have come to pass. His widow, his children, his supporters still honor his life and celebrate such steps as these developments, which they view as something resembling moves toward justice and validation.

Joan Jara, who lost her husband forty-one years ago, has also initiated a civil suit in the United States, applying the Alien Torts Claim Act and other theories. She is seeking damages for the extrajudicial torture and murder of her husband by Pedro Barrientos, who now lives in Miami, one of the lieutenants in charge of the folksinger at the stadium that now bears Victor Jara’s name.

Whatever transpires in such matters, the original amnesties for military personnel that Pinochet negotiated in 1989 no longer apply uniformly. Just now, President Michelle Bachelet—whose father of course was a victim of the Pinochetistas—has announced while visiting Mexico to show solidarity for disappeared students there the sentencing of eleven former agents of the junta. Manuel Contreras, the leading killer among them all—each of whose convictions were for promoting “forced disappearance”—faces 426 years in prison for his crimes.

Yet other interviewees suggest that “nobody is much interested in all that old stuff.” And, no doubt, ‘life goes on,’ as the saying would have us believe.

Still, though one might develop a much longer discourse about this set of issues, even a cursory glimpse of contemporary Chile does prove that some citizens continue to struggle with the concepts of truth and reconciliation. That such a focus persists may offer the only hope for avoiding a repeat of 9/11/1973.

A distinguished Chilean scholar has expressed this idea most forcefully. Manuel Carreton argues that without “an official commemoration, we have no country.” The award-winning sociologist specifies both the what and the how of such a process.” A great need exists for a formal collective memory, transmitted through the educational system, quantified by measures of justice and truth, but also of punishment.”

He completes his presentation with concepts with which arguably every American, whether Northern or Southern in origin, needs to be familiar. “The national conscience must become one about this, one that condemns the military coup and the violation of human rights. Making a purely political assessment of our historical past, and not a moral one, will do more to divide us than to unite us and help move Chile forward.”

Concluding Concepts—Imperialism & Humanity Can No Longer Coexist

Near the end of a long journey, this narrative would hope that readers consider six points in conclusion. Prior to stating those items, the narrator asks folks to ponder a chilling bit of nihilism that one of history’s hypercapitalists expressed over a century before the here and now.

In essence, if we are to avoid eviscerating ourselves, we must avoid fulfilling the prophecy of robber baron Jay Gould. “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

With the possible exception of Costa Rica, the United States has joined with ruling elites in every Hispanic or Portuguese speaking country in the hemisphere so as to cause Gould’s ghoulish prediction to transpire. Che Guevara, in speaking of the U.S. attempts to unseat Cuba’s revolution, articulates this notion in terms that are national in their scope and yet obviously entail one sector of workers’ seeking to destroy another proletarian contingent.

“From the beginning, it was generally understood in Latin America that the United States backed the invasion (at the Bay of Pigs), and that it would therefore be successful (of course, it was not),… a fait accompli… . (Total puppets) Haiti and the Dominican Republic … had already broken or suspended relations with Cuba… .

Honduras joined the anti-Castro camp, suspending relations in April and proposing the formation of an alliance of Central American and Caribbean nations to have it out with Cuba by force. The proposal—which was also suggested independently by Nicaragua—was quietly dropped” when the rest of the hemisphere either vacillated or actively and strongly opposed any such scheme of using the working class soldiers of the hemisphere to snuff the Cuban rejection of imperial domination. Notably, in Chile, “the government found strong opposition in all circles to open military intervention by any state against the Castro regime.”

In these presentations, Che Guevara was quoting from a lengthy U.S. State Department cable that the Cubans had intercepted. Later in this missive, the gringos demonstrate further their playing the role of Mr. Gould in seeking to set one set of toilers against another.

“In every respect, (despite the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation), the member states of the OAS are now less hostile toward United States intervention in Cuba than before the invasion, but a majority of them—including … more than half the population of Latin America(in Mexico and Brazil)—are not willing to intervene actively or even to join a quarantine against Cuba. …(Especially), (a)s long as Brazil refuses to act against Castro, it is probable that a number of other nations, including Argentina and Chile, will not wish to risk adverse internal repercussions to please the United States.”

As the rambling cable draws to a close, it expresses why a nation, like Gould, might want to hire ‘half the working class’ to destroy the other half. “The most immediate danger of Castro’s example for Latin America might well be the danger to the stability of those governments that are at present attempting evolutionary social and economic change, rather than for those that have tried to prevent such changes, in part because of the tensions and awakened hopes accompanying such social changes and economic development. …

The Alliance for Progress might well furnish the stimulus to carry out more intensive reform programs, but unless these programs are started quickly and soon begin to show positive results,…they will not be enough of a counterweight to increasing pressure from the extreme left. The years ahead will…witness a race between those forces that are attempting to initiate evolutionary reform programs and those that are trying to generate support by the masses for fundamental economic and social revolution.” Next Up—Summation & Conclusions