Hello, everyone! As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine. This is the thireenth incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, to proffer interesting and entertaining writing and, second, to find 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
More than occasionally, like today, a particular edition will have something akin to a thematic glue, so to speak, that holds together these moments, either that we are sharing now or that have passed along before. Number Thirteen’s would articulate something like this—‘The Imperial Imprimatur of Dixie’s Manifested Destiny.’
Then again, every BTR blast evokes Eros and the libidinal life force energy that is the human brand, a celebration of carnality and ecstatic epiphany, although the shamed and shameful and shameless might quip that all such as this is more like the human stain, ha ha. In any event, thanks for stopping in and the aggregate of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading!
Oh yes, something occurred to me recently in regard to the prodigious outpouring of prose in each Big Tent issue. Substantial numbers of readers confront such a massive tidal wave of text as this and likely just want to flee. Such a reaction is not preordained, however, so long as a specific individual keeps uppermost in his consciousness, clearly centered in her awareness, that all one must do, in order to retain a BTR engagement, is to choose a single story or article and imbibe that.
Or one could skim, listen to Jimbo’s pretty voice, look at the odd and yet compelling graphics, all that type of so on and so forth. Such steps guarantee managing the tsunami in an amicable way, ha ha. So, now: ‘to the ramparts’ and read!
Or, no, not quite. Finally, given the ‘slings and arrows’ that seem so ubiquitous just now, beginning with a snippet of Joseph Campbell probably remains particularly apt: we can, whatever else may be true, ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of our world.’ In the event, the next issue now will be June 1st; both May and June will be one-issue moons.
Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a couple issues ago, the end of an article ‘above the fold’ links to its continuation. Somehow, it’s all so nerve-wracking and gratifying at once, ha ha. And, finally, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Meaning, Creativity, What Comes Next…
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Goddess Guidance on the Social Unity of Youth
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XIV
3. Wood Words Essays—Necessary COVID Speculation
4. Old Stories & New—”Tripping, Or, Back in Hippy Days”
5. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”More Than a Hill of Beans—Young Jack’s First Climb”
6. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Nine
7. Nerdy Nuggets—Israel’s ‘Southern Exposure:’ Apartheid, From Dixie to South Africa
8. Communication & Human Survival—More Ukraine, Part IV
9. Erotic Snippets—”Josiah & His Janey”
10. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”When the King of Games Meets a Prince of Death,” Part 2
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—An Order of Battle to Create Meaning From Experience
This calling, this thing, this sense of duty, this undeniable and ultimately narrative itch, compels me to create. This existential duty, also appears as an insurmountable existential dilemma, inasmuch as one can never succeed—at best can barely approximate—in delineating ‘true meaning’s’ boundaries and central elements.
Just putting one word in front of another seems approximately as difficult as continuing to slog on, step after trudging step of begrudging drudgery, when, on the one hand, Mass Collective Suicide seems to draw nigher and nigher and willing risk of such outcomes gets higher and higher, and, on the other hand, the commanding mandates of monopoly media insist that trying and convicting Donald Trump will save America from Fascism.
Let’s be clear to start. The entire Charade that holy neoliberal pundits glorify in ‘Judge Marchan’s Courtroom’ essentially serves as a sideshow, or distraction, about Existential Duty’s main event, which is to say trying to figure out, and then articulate, and then shift the shit that’s coming down now, a true ‘Send-Lawyers-Guns-&-Money’ moment, on the success of which venture likely hinges whether any youth of today will ever have grandchildren.
The course of empire—either its immolation of civilized life or its own thorough deconstruction and destruction—is the topic of our times, unless we no longer care enough to wipe our asses and try to find a path to that ‘Serene Arena, of a Joyous Life, Well & Potently Lived.’ Of course. Of course. Blah blah blah.
Who’s to say that this is not all madman meandering mediation about more or less mythical murder and mayhem? The saying is apt. “You pays your money, and you takes your chances.”
Oh, wait a minute, the clue phone is ringing! Yes. Right. In relation to a Fascist Turn in America, in the Belly of the Beast, it’s too late. Arguably anyway, anyone who reads Behemoth: the Structure & Practice of National Socialism in Germany will encounter hundreds of paragraphs that chill with their parallels to ‘patriotic politics’ today in the vaunted ‘Land of the Free,’ where mandatory needling is only one obvious Gestapo tactic in the guise of soliciting security.
What a moronic notion: one thing alone is secure, as the Wood Words Essay intones, “Life’s One Certain Journey” does not depend on our willpower. Our likelihood of flowering instead of floundering depends on luck and preparation and whatever forces array against us. Since those who hold themselves out as caretakers also subscribe to the advisability of Mass Collective Suicide brinkmanship, maybe we ought to raise our hands more? Maybe even take more forceful action on our own behalf?
In this vein, happenstance constantly commands that we countenance our precarious mortality. Death outranks even sex as the modus operandi of literature, although Life Force Energies arguably have more force IRL, given that we depend for procreation itself on their consistent exercise, so to say.
However we choose to consider such things, the Ten New Commandments offer up a Second directive: “All Children Receive Priority.” The World Youth Festival, about which we’ll be reading, perhaps, wrestles with this very issue, in a gathering where more than twenty thousand young people showed much greater optimism than all but a small minority of Yankee youngsters.
Ultimately, this sort of consideration can come down to a question of worship. What do we revere? In the current context, clearly among all and sundry imperialists, reverence for death vastly outweighs any adoration of LFE’s themselves.
The aphorism, that ‘healthy grandchildren are the tickets to heaven,’ lays a foundation that almost every commonplace daily interaction with young people undermines and destroys, promising to transition as many of them as manageable to the point that any natural Life Force urge of the procreating kind will be impossible to maintain. Even Miss USA had to ‘step down’ because of ‘mental health issues.’
So, what ought we to worship then? Clearly an obsession with a Father deity alone is anomalous, much more insane than an obsessive Mother worship, all things considered, albeit the reliably more intelligent point-of-view, spiritually speaking, is to venerate the inherent intertwining marriage of masculine and feminine that humans inevitably make of their social lives.
Lysistrata will be under review before too much longer. Aristophanes’ genius is as fresh as going on three thousand years ago. What a premise: so disgusted with offering up their sons and husbands to sate the War God’s thirst for blood, women declare a sex strike. It’s an astonishing play, a critically Chalice and the Blade, Sacred Pleasure sort of presentation.
Not by accident, maybe, do the annals of culture—a young woman’s choosing her lover even if war is ongoing—present conflicts that included battlefields that remain contested territory today, whether the conflict is between Kurds and Turks or involves Turkish fake-Ozempic marketing, whether the skirmish takes place in Yugoslavia or threatens the end of life on Earth.
Putin, in such a context, must provide some interesting possibilities. For close to two hundred years, since at least the purportedly heroic ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ in Crimea, Russia has had an English bullseye on its back. Are the Russians bluffing? Will they just shrug off the Predators that afflict them?
A recent book-perch giveaway illustrates this point powerfully. Palace of Treason illustrates, perhaps perfectly, the old saw, “Projection is the most primitive form of coping strategy.”
The heroine is a Russian traitor who really loves a virile representative of Langley. Evil former Soviets abound and justify her treachery; they try to kill her even without knowing she’s a double agent. In the end, she ends up as Putin’s mistress while the horrible Iranians get their nuclear comeuppance in a prearranged ‘accident’ that destroys plus or minus fifty thousand people in Iran and the Caucasus.
So we’re the good guys, right? Treason my ass. The entire American project seems insistent on proving itself treasonous to the potential for human survival; this book simply exemplifies that spirit.
If indeed blissful ignorance makes a folly of wisdom, Americans are, again indeed, aficionados of affable idiocy. Recent profferals from Information Clearinghouse illuminated this tendency, at once inducing a certain hilarity and definite pathos, given Yankees’ apparent preference for Mass Collective Suicide instead of anything resembling compromise, dialog, or negotiation.
The first item points out an Economist report on ‘striking inside Russia.’ Inevitably, this bastion of monopoly finance and imperial hegemony favors such action.
The second also includes a video but provides quite different fare, from former C.I.A. analyst and soothsayer, Ray McGovern. He points out the complete disconnect between policy pursuits by the U.S. and the realities in Eastern Europe.
A New York Review of Books essay about the work of Franz Fanon and its study puts these matters in a context fraught with insight and difficulty at once. In fact, obviously, this Black Caribbean French Communist was a staunch internationalist, whose revolutionary analysis of anticolonialism’s likely inadequacies seems prescient indeed in Palestine.
The article’s conclusion starkly reveals the source of the caution, even pessimism, with which it treats Wretched of the Earth and its confreres. Communism, despite its constantly fulfilling Fidel’s promised to represent ‘the right side of history,’ is ‘unacceptable’ somehow. Everyone knows this somehow, like the smell of urine on some poor homeless schlepper.
Perhaps we ought again to recollect that, as the drive to a Kiev-orchestrated front row seat at the apocalypse reaches new heights, Leon Trotsky came to the world and changed its course from the confines of his family farm near Kiev, in Ukraine. Ahh, yes. Communism, which is to say Democracy, as in Majority—read Bolshevik—rule is bad just like we have to protect America from too much of anything of the sort.
This is part of what permitted the U.S. to incarcerate a magnificent popular leader like Eugene Debs, who was the first American to run for President from prison, where he got a twenty year sentence—partially commuted—as a punishment for saying ‘war punishes the poor.’ Such a fate might seem grotesque for Americans who don’t know their Zinn.
Thus, lest we forget, as well, the greatest journalistic mind of modern times—one whom Trotsky would defend with his life—is still sitting in Belmarsh Prison, awaiting the hideous fate of terror’s torture in the form of extradition to the United States. Julian Assange faces a fate of slowly experiencing his own evisceration for the high crime of sharing accurate and damning information about imperial warfare—the premeditated butchery of reporters in Iraq by Army helicopter gunners who celebrated the slaughter on camera.
He was working for the Guardian franchise with his Wikileaks schemes. To the paper’s credit, it still actually publicizes its support for his suit, unlike the vast majority of mediated outlets here in the ‘land of the free.’
Other erstwhile ‘liberal’ press outlets, bless their hearts, also contribute sage advisories against fascist predation and false propaganda. New Yorker, for instance, details a Prison Policy Initiative initiative to learn about and upend the profiteering plunder that grasping plutocrats practice in permitting prisoners—guilty or innocent and otherwise—to have contact outside their fellow inmates.
Towns and counties get bonuses for shutting down in person visits so that property owners pay fewer taxes and investors reap the benefits of fleecing the poor with one to two dollar per minute charges for poor quality, or completely dysfunctional, audio video links. That this prototypically predatory politics proves prototypically American might nauseate even George Babbit.
What should we make of our culture in this regard? When, for example, the thundering hooves of a score or more of stallions are pounding toward the roses in Louisville, an hour after the equally thunderous galloping of twenty-odd fillies fill a viewer’s senses, should we sense virility and fecundity?
Hunter S. Thompson and Mohammed Ali are both from Louisville. The Gonzo journalist teamed for the first time with the grotesquerie of Ralph Steadman to report the cupidity, drunken excesses, oneupmanship, and sweaty drudgery of the Kentucky Derby.
Of course, Doc Watson sings of “Tennessee Stud’s” abilities in winning sacks of gold from “the Spaniard’s foal.” Again, the Southern Impetus to expand into Latin lands, where Mestizos now are almost a universal majority in Mexico and Central America, comes forth in all sorts of ways.
Fidel, too, touches on the edges of key cultural territory, terrain that produced Jose Raul Capablanca’s chess mastery from that class of military officers who backed Yankee interests in Cuba. Castro’s lawyering and Che’s doctoring were critical components of the Cuban transformation, a success to spite Gringo supremacist pretensions in view of the island nation’s now having equivalent or superior life expectations.
Closer to home, ha ha, how about them ReDemoPubliCratiCans, with their ham-handed repetition of garbage, in and out, and their established and ‘perfectly’ unmediated ignoring of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? Neither the Times or the Post has done coherent reporting on the Kennedy campaign. They and the entire array of monopolized mediation are no more outposts of journalism than Nazi publications were capable of balanced accounts of Jewish life.
This willingness to mute any notice of a very popular fellow, undoubtedly, emanates from the libelous horseshit that monopoly media proffer about the man who could yet become the United States’ first truly popularly mandated leader since Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt, the man who first recognized America’s ‘official’ existence of modern Russia and thereby contributed to the eternal contempt for him that plutocrats continue to profess. Maybe we might recall how established press outlets viewed FDR.
For instance, Reason magazine speaks of Roosevelt’s ‘War Against the Press’ and views his fireside chats as 1930’s-style Twitter. The New Deal was panned as too socialistic, full of communist infiltrators, and all such blah blah blah.
At once more quotidian and more combative than big-media, Arianna Huffington speaks to the altogether swinish political landscape, in both its corporate and governmental guises, in her ever green and always evocative Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America. She documents the toxicity and morbidity of the vaunted ‘American way.’
“But, hey, even if we have to pick up the tab for being poisoned and sickened, at least once we’re diagnosed we can always take some new high-tech drugs to make us better, right? Wrong. If the disease doesn’t get you, the cure might. The toxic marriage of money and political influence doesn’t end once it’s made us sick—it continues right into the ostensible healing stage, too."
The disconnect comes more recently, in our lockstepped COVIDified times. On the other hand, ‘signs of life’ from the trenches are appearing. The Science & Environmental Health Network’s newsletter gives us a case in point. “The Right to Bodily Integrity and Sovereignty” doesn’t mention MRNA vaccines, but it needn’t do so to make its title’s argument persuasively clear.
Nature, in the event, provides plenty of excitement along the brink of existence. For example, here we see toned and tanned ‘Westerners’ about to meet a sixty foot wave.
Part of the paradox of the present’s passing panoply is that imperial imprimatur posits a human condition in which we orchestrate even more catastrophic culling than a spate of tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, and millennial flooding combined. The leadership of the hegemonic behemoth resembles an institutionalized version of George Hearst in the brilliant HBO series, Deadwood.
This character’s embodiment of pure, unmitigated evil—the self-aggrandizing opinion that going after gold is the only godly and otherwise worthy act that is available to humankind. At a corrupt politico’s suggestion of a political alliance, Hearst’s simulacrum grabs the hapless crook by the throat: “I don’t deign to worry over elections. Either the result bends to my will, or I neuter them.”
Along these lines, Hearst is part of a probable original line of ‘American Exceptionalists,’ from Vanderbilt through Morgan and Rockefeller and beyond, whose beliefs justify mayhem and murder of whatever sort is necessary to deliver maximum profit and ultimate political control. Nevertheless, this is not the sole sort of ‘typical American’ origin story.
Joseph Smith demonstrates one alternative. He was a spiritual man with a lusty enough appetite to wed plus or minus thirty wives. He invented a religion. He twice escaped castration and sent thousands of followers to Utah after his opponents shot him to pieces in his jail cell.
Indubitably, the Mormons to this day are a controversial faith. Church leaders, a council of twelve apostles or something similar, monitor their press more closely than Madonna and Taylor Swift combined. The outsize popularity of the sect stems from the same roots as its detractors note in their criticisms. Insularity, Polygamy, fanaticism are common accusations, alongside of praise for loyalty, industry, and family.
Still, despite the libidinal roots that render those whom Krakauer details as fellow travelers of empire’s direst sway, these kinds of ‘outlying’ interlopers do in fact simultaneously boost and belittle imperial bombast’s inescapable Hubris. Contextualization, in such a context of concatenation and paradox, exigency and anomaly at one and the same time, almost always comes down to how the great reporter—no matter his ingrained and misguided liberalism—ended his book.
“I don’t know what God is, or what God had in mind when he set the universe in motion. In fact, I don’t know if God even exists, although I admit I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty."
“In the absence of conviction,” he continues, “I’ve come to terms that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn’t strike me as something to lament.” One might add, reasonably and judiciously, that a collective consideration of any attribute of reality’s realm can expostulate a ‘scientific theory’ that, in true college-try, best-effort fashion represents what in hell is actually happening.
Whatever the case may be, actually popular, populist, proponents of Solidarity are also omnipresent around America and the world. We’ve explored Eugene Debs, Wilhelm Reich, Jean Luc Godard, and many others who have contributed worthy moves toward human thriving and survival.
Rod Serling also exemplifies this potential for ‘American Originality’ in support of something other than plunder. A tough-customer paratrooper, he nonetheless found warfare one day of grinding, bloody horror after another, though sometimes the absurdities were close kin to humor.
Another such, whose audience is as much American as anything, presents his chess analysis as Agadmator and is the planet’s most popular commentator on the Royal Game. A Croatian, he somehow also seems an utterly original American exemplar.
Paul Morphy is an additional ‘champion,’ albeit the brevity of his reign atop the world chess heap was briefer even than Edgar Allen Poe’s literary ascendancy. Chess, clearly, is much more a Russian kind of game—strategy and tactics clear for all to see, instead of the poker plays that characterize so much of American ‘foreign policy.’
In fact, various chess threads run through the Russian Revolution’s successful struggle for communist forms in Ukraine. Alexander Alekhine played in Kiev and Odessa before and during World War One, while in the Tsar’s Army, from which post he worked against the Red Army and, disregarding his position as World Champion after he defeated the Cuban, Jose Raul Capablanca, received a ticket to a firing squad as a result.
However, one of the final arbiters of this decision was none other than Leon Trotsky, a lifelong chess player who recognized his name and brokered a conditional pardon. Legend tells of a life or death chess challenge between the two men.
Bradley Kincaid, whom Jimmy Martin lionizes in his “Grand Ole Opry Song,” wrote and performed “On Top of Old Smoky” to show the guts and nuts behind iconic bits of American culture. The “false-hearted lover” of he, whose “horse is not hungry, and
won’t eat your hay,” who is seeking to marry as in the song, at least metaphorically, serves as one bracing reply to any purely polygamous POV.
Fellows definitely like to frolic, so much so that as youngsters many of them have a ‘sow-the-wild-oats’ standard that would sit well with the Mormons, so long as the attendant reaping were in a marital field. Old timey music inherently underpins feckless and unfaithful masculinity at the exact same time that its woebegone heroes must suffer the loss of fickle females who change their minds.
Listening to such rooted downhome voices is possible in such documentary efforts as “The Origins of Bluegrass.” Bill Monroe produces another marvel along this track.
One of the most masterful promoters of Mountain Music was Bascom Lunsford of Madison County, North Carolina. His mountain music and clogging get-togethers became a national craze. Music Makers of the Blue Ridge “crosses hell on a rotten rail for a good song.”
In the event, May is a month of many birthdays, including my brother’s, Karl Marx’s, John Kennedy’s, Bob Dylan’s, and mine, ha ha. Interestingly enough, the Japanese have a more grounded way of enumerating anyone’s age. They add a year for the forty weeks in utero.
Americans judged themselves more harshly. Appalachia has always been a target for derision. “As victims of heredity and alcohol,” sermonized the New York Times, these Appalachians “must change or perish.” “I got a girl in Doggett Gap, she don’t mind sitting in her sweetheart’s lap,” sang Bascom Lamar Lunsford in response.
In the unfolding of things, issue Fourteen touches on many of the scattershot notices on display here. Half fiction and half non-fiction as usual, the World Youth Festival in Eastern Russia, recent COVID Lab-Origin research developments, a prologue about ‘Israel and the Souths of the Planet,’ more Ukraine deep background, and an extension of the “Prince of Death” series are this issue’s Reports. The Yarns represent All Gods Cousins again, with a pugilistic fellow in the spotlight. More ‘Quiet Jack,’ an additional long-lost short story, a new, rejuvenated Fairy Tale, and a first instantiation of Historical Erotica round out the field.
Here we have arrived again, via strange and dangerous dreams and changed and, often enough, deranged arrangements. Much of what we think of as the Civilized World—reliable roadways, consistent electricity, functioning Internet and telecommunications—could disappear in the course of an unfortunate afternoon, along with some hundreds of millions or more of initial casualties, possibly even worse than in Mad Cows & Englishmen.
In such a context, how would agriculture and food distribution fare? Would banking and other exchange requisites, like money, function smoothly? The United States of America and its NATO minions seem almost relentless in driving the world toward a nuclear brink that would take care of all those money surpluses, maybe. Just think of the reconstruction contracts! I mean, if anybody lives through it all in shape to ‘make investments pay.’
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
The human herd now numbers between eight and nine billion members, truly fulfilling the Biblical mandate to ‘bear fruit and multiply,’ ha ha. Of this mass of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a huge proportion are young, roughly a third or so of people under age twenty. Something like that.
Anyhow, recently, none other than Vladmir Putin addressed a substantial crowd of twenty-thousand such exemplary youth, from all over Earth but probably especially from all over Eurasia. Amplifying a point about social equality, he said, “So, we are all born equal but the question is, do we grow and develop under equal conditions. The answer is, unfortunately, not. This is the greatest injustice in today’s world order.
If you ask me what can be done for everybody to live and to grow under equal conditions, unlocking their talents for the benefit of their loved ones, their family, their country and perhaps humanity as a whole, I do not know. But what I do know for certain is that we all must strive for it. Only by striving for it will we make the world more transparent, just, democratic, sustainable, balanced and safe.”
As I wrote in my journal, “I can say nothing but ‘Amen’ to that, brother.” The way that things have transpirde, this reflection of the second of Ten New Commandments, that “All Children Receive Priority,” is also the topic of today’s pair of Tarot sessions. The question for the Spiral Spread is simple. “How can we seek insights about fostering social equality among young people?”
Stringently indeed do I contend that such a premise is indisputable by anyone not idiotic or clinically insane. Future prospects add up to how youngsters fare. Tossing aside the lives of these youthful specimens amounts to undermining thriving and likely survival: to wit, opposing the fostering of equality for these reservoirs of humanity’s potential is, at best, most charitably, nuts.
That said, I point out ‘for the umpteenth time,’ as my Mom liked to say, I claim no credit for any canniness or utility that comes from the cards, albeit I must take responsibility of misdirection or nonsense, ha ha, both of which are, as with everybody among us, part and parcel of my propensities. The sequence in response to the inquiry of the day, at minimum, to me seems portentous and powerful
The array that appeared, in fact, gave me another case of the ‘spooky chills.’ Perhaps I’m susceptible thereto. Who knows? In any case, this is the ‘order of battle.’ The reading’s Essence plops down as Orestes’ Two of Swords; Past Influences tracks the Dioscuri Twins in the Knight of Swords; Present Passages yields Daedalus’ apprenticeship in the Eight of Pentacles; Likely Future Prospects gives up Athena’s jury for Orestes in the Ten of Swords; No-Matter-What, Opportunities projects Helen of Troy as Queen of Cups; Problems & Prospects delineates Hades and Death; Finally, Synthesis presents Narcissus and the Page of Cups.
A fuller explication of these seven positions follows below the fold. In general, the predominance of the suits of loving relationship and balanced thought—Cups and Swords—is worth noting. True love and critical thinking are as likely as not the two primary building materials for fashioning from a child’s transition to adulthood a sweet and salubrious life.
In any event, a second question, as is regularly the case in Big Tent Review, ponders a related query to the one above. To wit, one might state it thus: ‘How might youth and their chosen mentors best activate, perhaps orchestrate, a broadening and deepening of socially equivalent chances for children the world over?’
This quest to the Goddess inevitably yields some thoughts to contemplate deeply. The choice of rubric may matter less than the tripartite fact of a particular approach. That said, the Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis method seems especially suited to any interrogatory shot through with contradictions, concatenation, and so forth. So too here. …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(Readers may recall )
CHAPTER XIV
Morris almost always experienced a combination of thrill and regret when he ran into yet another huge thug who looked at his diminutive and unpretentious form and believed that he had “nothing to worry about” from such a ‘pipsqueak.’ He had come to Istanbul because Justina had wanted to visit Italy and Greece, and he had an inclination to check out Turkey and tour the Balkans, and he had a guttural compulsion to continue his tour of this woman who, wherever they had gone since they had sailed from Caracas—from whence he was certainly glad for his having endured a Gulf Oil rig so as to attenuate any paranoia about skirmishing at sea—attracted the eyes and engagement of large, muscled men who thankfully so far had not known the first thing about fighting.
“So like I said,” the fellow stated, placing his arm between Morris and Justy and flexing his triceps, “why don’t you tell little Junior here to go to his room, so you and I can get to know…”
Morris had him in a wrist lock in about a second and a half, the accomplishment of which cut off the lug’s boastful challenge in mid stride. Morris said nothing, though he laughed as if to say, “Dumb fuck!”
The big guy almost squealed. “Let me go! Ouch!! You let me go, you little fucker, or I’ll…Owwww!”
Morris laughed again and spoke. “What’ll you do then, dumb fuck, other than get your ass kicked?” He released him.
The correct answer would have been, “Not much.” He and his lover exited the little bistro outside Istanbul for their boudoir, with the hyper-muscled form of the latest version of ‘Mr. Slick,’ prone and twitching drunkenly on the barroom floor.
No matter how many times Justina witnessed this little bantam who was her friend as he tore into an always much larger man, she didn’t figure that it would stop being “totally hot” for her. In a sense, of course, what with the inevitable calculus of penalties and rewards that works beneath the surface even more powerfully than it does up front, these reactions were setting up some random, as yet undisclosed, large lummox for a thrashing, not quite as often as not but often enough, whenever Justina and Morris sashayed out into the night to drink and converse and socialize and dance till the sweat dripped from them as if they had been bathing,
Sicily had been “semi-civilized;” Rome and its environs such a constant battle that Justina orchestrated an early exit, leaving two days of their already paid-for stay to languish; Athens a big improvement over Italy’s capital city. Meanwhile, scavenging around the Ionian countryside was also similarly not as likely as Rome, from the recent past, or Istanbul, in the then-near-future, to deliver the delights of bar fights and mano-y-mano frisson in relation to fisticuffs. Unlike his opponents, Morris knew very well indeed how to conduct “hand to hand combat,” as he termed it.
Having made certain that his ever-present network of friends and contacts would offer up suggestions and leads as to how his tour of Islamic Western Asia and the erstwhile Socialist Balkans could contribute to his omnipresent hunger to take stock of the world and find a pressure point to which he might apply a political karate chop, he was ready, after recognizing the “Americanization of urban life in Turkey,” to venture toward Tito’s Yugoslavia and adjacent ‘Communist’ country, just to see if any vistas were available any longer in which capital’s primacy was less than total. Whatever else he discovered, he hoped to learn still more about the frenzy that was possible with the woman who, for the moment anyhow, was his love mate.
Bryan had introduced them, early in 1974. He and Morris had been part of a threesome on a rig—Challane the other combatant—that had taken on all comers: the Klan, the family networks, the works council that was a poor imitation of a union—all of the corruption and favoritism, none of the benefits.
They kicked butt because they knew how. They did their jobs because otherwise they’d not be able to put in the long shifts and bring home the fat payday take from their “ten days on in the gulf.” They got their gigs on the rigs in the first place because Bryan’s father “was somebody in Gulf oil circles, a geologist by training whose technical expertise was indispensable enough that his son and the boy’s friends could get and keep their roughnecks’ positions if they produced and could “stand the heat,” in the kitchen and otherwise.
During his “fifteen days off,” back in Mobile, 112 miles away from the never silent and always rocking platform where trouble and travail were ubiquitously more likely than not, even during their twelve hours away from labor and drudgery each day, Morris liked to think that he “was always rocking too,” in ways that completely ignited his youthful enthusiasm: he danced, he fucked, he partied, he and 'Justy' became as bonded a pair as he’d ever experienced. Neither of them had mentioned love, let alone brought up an alien topic like marriage; nonetheless, the real sense of a deeply set hook, of an intricate tie, had grown apace. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—COVID’s Concatenated Creation
The newest category of Driftwood Message Art—Life & Love & Art in the Time of COVID—serves to circumscribe the human experience of the anomalies and insanity of our peculiar interlude in human affairs. The aphorism that ‘art imitates life, as well as vice versa,’ remains eternally apt, no doubt about it.
As a thoroughgoing radical, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, I will always assert a pugnacious certainty that repeated eventualities that just happen to create windfall profits and bowing and scraping sorts of compliance must, as an almost statistically verifiable fact, stem from planning and process at the highest levels of governance. Nothing else quite makes any sense.
Thus the missive, “Baaaa, Moooo, Oink!” “Baaaa, Sing the Sheep, Moooo Low the Cattle, Oink-Oink-Oink Snort the Pigs, As All These Animals Move Along, Isolated Herds, Under Watchful Warders' Careful Gazes, Toward Their Intended Destination, Whose Looming Sign Awaits Just Over the Horizon, 'Auschwitz,' 'Hiroshima,' Or Some New, Heretofore Barely Conceived Home to Torture's Implicit Impunity & Deliberate Dispatch: People Who Want to Arrive With These Dumb Driven Beasts to Enact Their Own Personal Pangs of Culling & Slaughter Need Do Nothing Other Than to Continue to Follow Along, Amiably & Silently, As Admonished & Directed By Their Overseers in Various Guises, From Drovers to Judges—If, However, Some Folks Do Not Fancy Mass Collective Suicide & a Virtually Orchestrated, & Reputedly Profitable, Human Extinction, the Time Is Quickly Passing For These Dissenting Strays, Noncompliant & Ferally Free, to Awaken, Take Notice, & Organize For Action About How Things Truly Stand, Concerning Which a Sufficient Starting Summation Might Aptly State That Nothing Whatsoever That Their Erstwhile Shepherds, Imperial Plunderers All, Propagate, Mandate, & Recommend Can Possibly Be Trustworthy, Or Likely Even Useful For Purposes Other Than Planning the Populace's Orderly, Lucrative Enslavement & Extermination.”
Of especial interest in BTR’s particular and plausibly helpful consideration of the present, still ubiquitous COVIDIFICATION of matters at hand, one might want to originate investigation by asking about the ‘origins’ of this erstwhile novel virus. As I’ve been focusing on Big Tent Review, Driftwood Message Art production has, to say the least, slowed down. It will pick up again, however, and representations of a COVID origin story will grace some work on these lines.
We should state at the outset, however, that no real controversy exists about a substantial possibility of manufactured origination of COVID. Various documentary and testamentary sources prove the point that at minimum a reasonable probability exists that this quotidian pathogen was as virulent as it was in part because of bioengineering, or in grant-speak, Gain of Function(GoF).
Today’s effort in relation to Marshall Arts’ ideas will interweave different of its oh-so-groovy sentences about the present pass with an initial speculation and documentation about wherever and however on Earth this pandemic began. “Selling Science” is the title of a COVID Charm that has, in turn, sold five variations on the theme.
“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."
Getting down to cases straight away, an observer such as I would quickly recognize, well before the World Health Organization’s very definition of an actual pandemic suddenly changed in February, 2020, that participants in the World Military Games included personnel from many places whose ‘battle stations’ brought them into contact with the epicenter of the outbreak of the first Sudden/Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome cases, in none other than Wuhan China.
Bat caves are one thing. A center for ‘Gain-of-Function’ research, one that used bat viruses—Corona Viruses—in its work is something altogether more momentous, portentous, and evocative. Now, clearly, what with Congressional Hearings and such, this should have long since been ‘old news,’ yet how many Americans have even given such matters a passing thought?
Well, a House of Representatives Committee’s Report, An Evaluation of the Evidence Surrounding Eco-Health Alliance, Inc.’s Research Activities, pulls no punches. “This interim staff report, the second in our series, seeks to provide evidence and information regarding the government’s funding and lack of oversight of gain-of-function research, EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., and the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Another outreach from the House’s Oversight and Responsibility Representatives makes clear an apparent disbarment or disqualification of Eco-Health Alliance and Dr. Peter Daszak. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services punctuates this penalty against GoF scofflaws. “EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Peter Daszak should never again receive a single penny from the U.S. taxpayer."
Moreover, as those outside monopoly media’s sway can already attest, the CNN’s sacrosanct Prince Fauci has also gotten an earful from Congress, emphasized in their telling of things. “Dr. Fauci repeatedly played semantics with the definition of “gain-of-function” research in an effort to avoid conceding that the NIH’s funded this dangerous research in China."
Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci provides a cautious ‘minimal position’ on the matter at hand, the manufacturing capacity—a la Germ Warfare—that may have played a large role in this ‘new disease.’ ‘We must at least countenance the potential that such a view is true, so we must also have completely transparent investigations of these questions, tout suite!’
One could spend several nerdy careers deconstructing more definitively this COVIDified dynamic as it first emerged in its definite SARS-CoV-II viral formulation. In any case, we’ll find out more below the fold, though one thing is as obvious as are all the connections between daylight and starlight. A connection between GoF and COVID is very plausible, even likely, yet we can’t be completely positive about this.
A piece of wood that I gave my glorious nymph at our nuptials has a useful idea in this regard. “Truly, Knowledge Should Compel Human Interest—What ‘Irony,’ Such a Safe Term, As Understated As It Is Nonconfrontational, That Every Agenda That Society’s Self-Selected Rulers Ratify Goes So Completely Against the Grain of Grassroots Comprehension of Matters-At-Hand That These Entitled, ‘Expert’ ‘Leaders’ Inevitably Elect to Protect Their Power By Fostering General Cluelessness, Close to Complete Ignorance About Key Aspects of Our World’s Inner Workings."
But why? Well ought we to inquire about the ruling class psychology. Ha ha. We’ll be getting there if humankind can keep from leaping over the Mass-Collective-Suicide brink, and, as well, I continue to find a way to row round life’s glorious pond.
“Life’s One Certain Journey Requires Not a Stroke to Effect Our Eventual Reunion With the Cosmic Womb—All the More Reason to Praise Be For the Means, Along With the Patient Persistence & Steady Strength to Employ Them, to Paddle Through Interesting & Meaningful Passages, & All the More Reason to Pray For the Wisdom & Courage to Row Toward Useful & Generous, & Thus Potentially Happy & Powerful, Channels in Which to Wend a Way."
All tolled, nevertheless, the one-word interrogatory about motives, reasons, explanation, explication and such is apt indeed. WTF? The gangsters in charge cannot again gain, over everything, a greater ‘command’ of All-That-Is than they currently have. Still, asking ‘why’ gooses us to gainsay the ignorance and nonsense that we seem so blithely and collectively to embrace as if such addiction to falsehood and foolishness were our dear Mothers’ titties.
This speaks to how our erstwhile masters get away with their shenanigans. Whatever the motivations of imperial plutocrats and whatever the common sense of people who go along with this program, the methodology of control should be pretty easy to spot. “Glued to Screens That Parse Persistent Panoplies 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 Instance of Willful Ignorance to Afflict Humanity During These Days of Commingled Miraculous Opportunity & Direst Danger, Mixing Technological Miracle With Mutuality's Meltdown."
I’ve written fairly extensively about the ‘Intelligence’ aspects of social media, from its nuclear warhead inception to its DoD legions of online trolls. Tyler Durden, no matter his erstwhile worship of ‘free markets’ and such, is a crackerjack reporter. Recently, he has filed an update, with Mockingbird and MK-Ultra and more ever likely to lurk in the background.
Indeed. What else might we prioritize to mention about the appearance of COVID as a guiding principle of existence? The general point, alluded to above, is ineluctable: the vast majority—quite possibly approaching one hundred percent—of credible scientists and technical experts would either agree or admit that gain-of-function machinations may likely have played a key part in this never truly even close to Novel experience.
Pertinently, perhaps, readers may remember last issue’s Nerdy Nugget in this regard, in which background and history of biological and chemical weapons generally was under review. However detailed and damning our indictment, the current context of chaos and mayhem grew out of those conscious investments in more efficient murder mastery, the intermingling of gain-of-function and empowered profiteering, the bullseye subject matter of Germs: Biological Weapons & America’s Secret War.
But all of this only gets us close to the center of the swamps of evidence and incident in regard to COVID’s ‘first coming,’ like capital’s savage angel of salvation. Only those inclined to believe or disbelieve in altogether conspiratorial ways of thinking should read on, with the caveat that I agree with Michael Ruppert about such things. …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”Tripping, Or, Back in Hippy Days”
"God damn! ya wouldn't believe what happen' ta me 't the park las' night, ridin' ma bike—a couple a' hippy chicks 's smokin' a big joint, right on top their car."
"Yeah?"
"Uh huh, 'n they invited me up!"
"And?" Russ grinned knowingly at me from the driver's side of his red-interior Rambler, a push-button transmission that muted the difference between his perch and mine.
"Well, uh, that's 'bout it I guess..." I must've colored some, because he laughed out loud his wild 'ha ha ha!' cackle. He was three years older than me, graduated from Robert E. Lee the year before. I was still in the middle of my junior curriculum, one of four or five "long hairs" on campus, though not yet a pariah or anything like that. Actually my hair was hardly over my collar. But with Fort Benning and all, Columbus, Georgia's standard perception was generally that anything past your ears made you a "hippy."
Some folks didn't mind that at all. Once last Summer, looking for a laborer's job on the base, a busful of soldiers, heading out for maneuvers, passed me as I trudged along. August heat and dust made a muddy delta of my face and arms as the sweat flowed off me. My mane was a limp, wet rag, so I looked like a low-life junky. I glanced up as the bus went by. Four or five mean-looking square-heads were giving me the finger. At the same time, a couple of guys, no more than a year or two older than I was, flashed me peace signs that they accompanied with subdued smiles. One grunt just gave me a comic wink. Hippies even had supporters in the army.
Russ was one of the half dozen real 'flower children' I'd met by 1971; they practically barred him from graduation for having hair down his back, but his dad, an army seargeant with 28 years in the military, hired a slick lawyer. The principal said OK, he could have his diploma so long as he tucked his golden locks up under his cap. He did drugs by the bushelload, said he believed in free love, had the craziest girl friend in the world, and was a philosopher in the vein of Bob Dylan on the “Bringing It All Back Home” album.
He was also one of my best friends in town; we all talked about "git- tin' out," "makin' it," "doin' somethin'." To us, Columbus was just the most backward place on earth. Downtown, bustling when I was very young, had atrophied. Even Davison's closed. Not even a movie theater survived the onset of malls and suburbs. The best jobs were on the base or at one of the two or three big plants. Paper mills and prostitutes were about the highlights of civilian existence. Like teenagers all over, we struggled to define what we thought was the essence of civilization. We didn't find much of it in our immediate surroundings.
Most days, Russ'd pick me up at school, we'd smoke a joint, or go down to Riverside Park to watch hippy chicks and talk life outside 'CaDUMBus.' He worked at a pawn shop because he knew more about cameras than most of the folks around, and the owner, an old redneck, didn't mind Russ's wild ideas or the braid that came to the middle of his back. He only worked ten to three, so he'd fetch me at 2:45, after he "took a break at the end of the shift" and I got a 'work release' pass from 6th period study hall.
Tuesday, November 9th, 1971, was a glorious Fall day in middle Georgia, air so crisp it had the brittle quality of the crystal trinkets our moms collected. The light had a sheen to it, a blinding brilliance which the newly colored leaves highlighted like a jewel's glittering facets. As I'd told him my story about the girls who'd invited me to smoke with them, the shadows from the ROTC armory had engulfed us, so that the light outside was even more brilliant and intense. Friday upcoming was a holiday, Veteran's Day, and he and I, my girl friend Vickie, and a friend of his, Charlotte, were going up to the mountains for the weekend in Russ's old Rambler.
"Wull, guess what happen' ta me taday."
"What, Playboy wants ya ta do a centerfold on 'hot military mamas'?"
"Nope...I got ma induction notice for the army, s'posed ta be there 7:30 Monday morning."
He turned away. I looked like he just kicked me in the nuts. "Nahhh!" over and over was about all I could say to his quiet affirmation.
"Yeah, man, my number in last Spring's lottery was "5". I knew they'd be callin' me sooner 'r later."
"But," my mouth hung open long enough for a big fat fly, ready to die before Winter swept Indian Summer aside, to enter and depart, "ya never tol' anybody..."
"What difference would 't a' made?"
"I do' know; what a fucking bummer! Ya tol' Denise yet?" Denise was his main girl friend, a real fruitcake who lived with her mom in Texas during school and with her dad, another NCO lifer at Benning, otherwise. Two summers ago, she'd been a Janis Joplin rock 'n roller; last summer she'd been a consummate hippy chick. Summer coming up she'd be different.
"No, I haven't told her. No need, I'll get out of it."
"Right! What'll ya do, go to Canada? Ya can't get away from the army, specially not this late, you shoulda done somethin' last Spring, 'r Summer at the latest."
"Don' worry, man, let's go down to the river. I'll get out of it."
Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
(Number Fourteen introduces a second ancient ‘Fairy Tale,’ like “Little Red” here reformulated as an introduction to a more substantial storytelling exercise of characters and their conflicts and conjunctions.)
More Than a Hill of Beans
YOUNG JACK’S FIRST CLIMB, a Prologue
CHAPTER ONE—Not so long ago, nor so very far away, as to be entirely strange to us today, a mother and a son lived together in the countryside, surrounded by a many-hued green landscape of trees and hills and rivulets, a verdant grazing ground for their comely cow, and their very own brook that, normally, chattered as well as babbled quite close at hand. Such beauty and bubbling bounty did not make their lives easy, however.
In fact, the only way that this small family survived the dire-wolf death of the husband and father of ma and her boy was to house-train their ruminant resident so that they could stay warm enough to function over the six to eight months of alpine Winter without needing coal or wood or peat or other items that they could ill afford to heat the cottage or stable. Then, one year, even as the snowmelt remained, the Spring rains failed, Summer's skies stayed stubbornly azure and thundered not at all, and an Autumn devoid even of dew caused the forage for their Sadie—a fine bovine beast and the sole source of milk and cream and butter and cheese on which parent and child subsisted—to wither and die.
At the end of the ensuing lean, frigid, wintry interlude, with Sadie's udders nearly as dry as her once-rich pasture, with her ribs like an accordion that rose and fell with her breath, Mother told her son very clearly how desperate their situation had become. To some extent, that her son's smiling eyes ever showed his amicable aplomb eased her heart, if not always her temper, even as his 'not-to-worry' optimism made her want to weep with hope simultaneously as she might also cry out with frustration.
“Jack, my dear boy,” she said with a sigh in her voice and a tear in her eye, “our larders are all but empty, our granary—such as it is—has no more than a bushel of meal left for us and Sadie.” At forcing this pronouncement from her throat, she could no longer stem the flooding emotion of dread and doom; like a baby she bawled, her weeping the only wash her face had felt in weeks, ending in whimpers of anguished woe.
Her sense of despond burst forth once more, a cascade of glistening salty flow that she impulsively imbibed, as she stated her sense of matters at hand. “I fear that we have no choice: we must sell our Sadie and shift our efforts elsewhere to survive.” Disconsolate sobs further shook her shoulders.
Jack's manner remained his signature combination of happy-go-lucky optimism and fierce determination to make the best of things, his primary means of managing his Mom and her many moody interludes. “You shan't worry long, Mum.” He smiled and danced a bit of a jig as he took Sadie's halter in his strong left hand and stroked her wizened muzzle with his right.
“She's the best milker in the territory,” he continued, “and I'll soon make a fine bargain that will give her, and us,” palpating his chest with his strong young fist as he spoke, “more than merely plenty to eat.”
This promise of a future other than starving privation burst the dammed waters of her emotion yet one more time. She sent forth her only boy with a smile at once a tragic rictus mask and a passionate plea for joyous hope despite all of the arrows and spears with which fate was assaulting their tiny, isolated farmstead.
Before he sallied forth, not knowing how far or how long he must travel, he stopped at the rustic outbuilding to which Katrina had referred as a 'granary,' looping Sadie's line over a lanyard and taking their sturdy ax, which Jack kept sharp enough to shave should he ever have enough beard to scrape and which he wielded deftly to dice up a pair of stakes—from an oaken piece of fuelwood—to anchor Sadie's rope in the event of a night or two on the road.
Bidding his half-famished slip of a maternal unit a last farewell, Jack backed away through the hard-packed desiccation of their courtyard to the little gate that ushered him and the now haltered Sadie under the outstretched boughs, at the height of eagles' flight, of their 'Forever Tree,' an upland fir whose ever green crown high above perched atop the arrow-shot trunk that touched the feet of the sky and scraped the Mother-Cloud, ever-white, never-failing, that gave birth to every storm that pelted their peaks with rain and snow and hale and sleet.
This arboreal miracle, which had not even slightly shrunk, let alone shriveled, from the drought that had afflicted this little family, grew from a trunk now broader than the cottage that human and animal alike had now long occupied. Jack always started any journey with a visit to what he knew as 'My Coniferous Castle's Keep, where irregularities in the uplifting bark formed a vestibule in which—even now, moss and moisture sometimes, as today, puddled wetly in the dark.
He had deeply worshipful feelings for this life form that had remained, since his Father's passing, his most stalwart and companionable redoubt, a fortress against want and care even if he rarely, since childhood tales at his daddy's knee, thought overmuch about the arboreal legend that surrounded this hoary pine. His feelings needed neither imprimatur nor mythos to warm his heart.
On this occasion, to inaugurate his search for succor amid deep need, Jack filled his small sack, in which he carried just his knife, a bladder of muddy fluid, and a single biscuit for his fare, with some fluffy clumps of mossy chartreuse. As he plied mile upon mile from his home, to encourage Sadie in her stumbling, starving sorrow, he fed her moistened bits of this gift of greenery amid the sun-blasted landscapes that he descended toward the tendrils of trade that reached towns thereabouts.
Astoundingly, and, he thought, perhaps miraculously, these mere morsels managed, in some measure, to revive their cow, so that her coat almost shone and her eyes held a brighter regard than for many a season. Jack also boosted his own sensibilities by holding tiny tidbits of moss between his teeth and tongue, which he would then offer to Sadie with another portion for her to chew in her cud.
He felt nearly as optimistic as his morning presentation to his mom when he spied ahead the first crossroads, which he intended to take to the left, steeply downhill into dry and dusty haze. However, before he had descended even a hundred strides down the slope, a voice came to him from rocks off on the right, the cliffs upward that led to caverns reputed to house strange companions to people's presence in these ancient highlands, nearby and yet rarely encountered neighbors who purportedly possessed magical powers. …(continued below the fold)
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—X
(Somehow or other, the entire experience will end up bringing Jack comfort and joy, while his enemies suffer the direst injuries and lose everything that they schemed to achieve.)
The omniscience thus far palpable herein is impossible fully to continue. For just as a wild and bucking cloud mass rushed to cover the moon when the wagon and its three captors and a prisoner crested Witch Mountain and began the descent into Faerie Glen, so too has a rough and fiercely held veil prohibited any furtherance of our otherwise perfect knowledge. Clearly, an intense instant of storm transpired: rain, sleet, hail, lightning and thunder from that midnight have entered the records of many a household adjacent to that fateful highland road.
But exactly what causes yielded the dire and grim results that greeted Richards and Kinnealy may never enter our annals with the certainty that we can ascertain in the case of the other elements of this record. The official riders, who, having set out at a gallop, could not avoid slowing markedly in the teeth of a thunder booming surprise so brutal that it threatened to dismantle their horses' obedient minds, only resumed their hunt after the storm's surcease, ambling atop their still skittish mounts into Faerie Glen when Luna's brightest smile again glittered upon the scene.
From their stalwart presence in these minor machinations of the empire this night, both gendarmes present would rise to higher station. In ways obvious to any observer, their encounters on that wintry eve altered their inner fate as well as their outer fortune, the merest mention of the meanderings of those brief hours enough to bring the color of high colic or wild drunk to either man.
Yet their willingness or ability to convey what they confronted in the Glen there and then, beyond the seemingly endless spinning of the upended wagon's wheels, which figured prominently in the report that they both signed, could not have differed to a greater degree. Deputy Kinnealy, for his part, not only remained tight-lipped no matter the prodding or pleading for his thoughts or recollections, but he also huffed and puffed like an asthmatic in a smoke house, reddening like sausage hung there to cure, whenever the smallest hint of interest in that night came to the fore. Not once in fifty years more of service to the County did he digress about what he saw and felt when he cantered just past the witching hour through folded moonlight into doom's shadow. …(continued below the fold)
Nerdy Nuggets—A Hypothesis in Lieu of the Product That Follows
In general, quite likely, people are much more prone truly to study and seek clarity about their automobiles than they are to investigate and make a clear case about their sociopolitical circumstances and conundrums. Perhaps in no arena is this more obvious than in relation to Israel’s creation and current imprimatur in historically Palestinian environs. Of course, students are an exception to an extent.
Understanding fuel injection, or the exigencies of oxygen sensors, or other such attributes of our vaunted internal combustion epoch, therefore, interests or even captivates, although their impact on our lives is at best ephemeral in any long-range interpretation of matters at hand, while examining how matters actually stand in regard to perhaps the primary potential source of Armageddon—to the extent that some idiots among us even celebrate their seeking such an outcome as a portal to fucking paradise—among us is only of interest to the delusionally suicidal. In this vein, Israel fulfills the paradox of the past that lives on.
My intention in regard to this entry has, unavoidably, shifted, since my procrastinating ways prohibit the necessary fact-finding to make a case. However, instead, I’ll state incisively my operating hypothesis and, for the most part, be done with today’s profferal ‘above the fold.’ The actual article’s articulation, as, again, intended in terms of today will then follow on July first, for Big Tent Review’s # Fifteen upcoming.
The first step, for now, is stating the Premise. Only a rooted Marxist assessment of anything makes sense: history, empirical reality, contradiction—the BTR formula of dialectical historical materialism. As things turn out, Karl Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question” a hundred eighty one years ago and predicted that the United States would be pivotal in grappling with the underlying issue of wondering about Jews, which is to say wrestling with the relationship between ‘political emancipation’ and true ‘human emancipation.’ Karl Marx, by the way, was a Jewish Commie.
The Hypothesis is that the rectitude and chilling insight of Marx’s prescience inherently leads to what we might call, a la the “Emancipation Proclamation,” a Southern Sidebar as a key component of understanding this so-called Jewish Question that in the modern moment appears as an issue of Israel and Palestine. The South—not just Dixie but the Global South that stands in for all humanity in emancipatory considerations of the here and now—at least hypothetically, will show up as central to surmising what in hell is up in Palestine.
The investigation will take us, via Dixiecrats as the attack dogs of Plutocracy, to South Africa, to the H-Bomb breadbasket at the heart of the Confederate States of America, and to the invidious, unavoidable universalization of ‘Southern,’ KKK norms of police state functionality under Israeli Defense Force tutelage. We’ll see plenty more, too, in regard to imperial genocide in the tropical and Southern Hemisphere’s American nation states and who knows what all else.
Anyhow, here we are then. We’ve a premise and hypothesis and initial research orientation, the fulfillment of which will hit the presses a month hence. Here’s a tidbit from Marx’s mouth that ought to set any intellectual’s mouth to watering, so to say.
“Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business deals.
‘The man who you see at the head of a respectable congregation began as a trader; his business having failed, he became a minister. The other began as a priest but as soon as he had some money at his disposal he left the pulpit to become a trader. In the eyes of very many people, the religious ministry is a veritable business career.’" …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Ukraine As Imperial Hubris: IV
(Last issue brought us closer to the present pass, with patterns that have repeatedly appeared to bind Nazis to attempts to attack Russia via Ukraine.)
Nurturing Nationalism & Fascism, & Soviet Responses
While a decade-long fertilization of the fascist curse was occurring in the West, moreover, a parallel seeding of the ground took place on the fringes of Russia. Even inside the Soviet state, agents operated to lay the basis both for upheaval in the present, and, whether intended at the time or not, for future collaboration with Nazis.
England’s ‘safe houses’ in the Ukraine were a good example. They provided escape routes for agents or ‘assets’ that Western governments and leaders of empire wanted to debrief after their missions or interview about their dissatisfactions, longings, and so forth.
From Poland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, as well, and especially Germany too, agents arrived whose purpose was to appeal to nationalism, to make promises of freedom and riches, to vow to honor God’s grace again and return it and obedience to a ‘legitimate’ order to their proper places at the social center. Always, these sallies looked upon Russians and communists and Jews altogether as the enemies to vanquish, as the parties to blame and victimize.
The memories from the prior period made such concerns palpable to those who lived under Soviet imprimatur. After all, Poland’s invasion had only happened a decade or so before. The Soviet Trust scheme, moreover, had only worked due to the way that expatriate elites, supported by their European patrons, had fiercely committed themselves to disparaging and destroying the Soviet Union.
This was the context for the emergence of one of the most ‘heroic’ Nazis in the annals of the aficionados of race and nation and Volk. Stepan Bandera actually incubated in Poland—though now Ukrainian territory—the movement that continues its supremacist actions to this day in Ukraine. He organized almost as relentlessly against the Poles as he sought to undermine and assault all that was communist, any who espoused Marx and Lenin and Stalin, as well as those who were Jewish or otherwise ‘impure’ in their roots and blood.
Nor was Bandera a lone wolf or some sort of unique giant of this social strain. Various other groups, parties, and actors were also prominently present in and around the land putatively ruled by Communist Kiev. In fact, these reactionaries spent nearly as much time arguing with and challenging each other with angry debate as they did in undermining or attacking Reds and Jews and other ‘imperfect’ specimens. Thus the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists bickered incessantly—at the same time that it collaborated in pogroms and murder—with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or the UPA, which was an offshoot in the first place.
Also pertinent at this juncture were the ways that Germans and their functionaries, who often turned out to be businesspeople of diverse nationalities, facilitated these processes. These were years in which Teutonic ‘tourists,’ about whom spies elsewhere even then joked because the schemers dispatched from Munich/Berlin were so obvious, ambled about seeking contacts with the right sorts of dissenters and disaffected folks.
In any case, in different ways, the Soviets responded in kind. They penetrated and sought to subvert or destroy the fascist bands. They made gestures of solidarity and support to ethnic and religious populations that the Nazis targeted. Not only did Russian agents reach out to fascist targets, but they also threatened those to whom the nationalists were appealing.
Furthermore, they sent their own, Red operatives abroad, to Berlin and Vienna and Paris and London and Miami and New York. In this way, these ‘prewar’ years continued the ‘postwar’ grappling of the 1920’s and readied for the storms that loomed on the horizon, foreshadowing the chill of ‘cold-war’ to come.
In this shadow-boxing struggle, among the pugilists in the ring of history, so to speak, were the organizations, many of them exclusively Ukrainian and almost all of them inclusive of members from Crimea or Kiev or Kharkov, of émigrés in far-flung locations around the world. These networks occasionally ventured to plant operatives in Ukraine or made ‘cultural visits’ or in some way or other sought to make contact and advance plans to weaken Soviet power.
In the midst of all this, at the other end of Europe, Spain’s Republican government was collapsing as a result of hidden German and Italian support for the fascist Franco. Under the leadership of Dmitri Manuilskii, a member of the Politburo, the Soviet Union, in addition to providing armaments and military advisers, both backed Solidarity Brigades in support of the Republican state and offered homes to Spanish refugee children and orphans.
Manuilskii was Ukrainian, from the other side of the Polish border near where Stepan Bandera came into the world, from a poor family whose paterfamilias was an Orthodox priest, whose son became a chief leader and intellectual of the atheistic Soviet Union. In 1937-8, Comrade Manuilskii oversaw the placement of the Spanish youth, a substantial portion of whom came to Ukraine to start, a few of whom stayed there. He was also an ardent Stalinist, having penned The Great Theoretician of Communism in Stalin’s honor.
Such motifs, signatures of a dialectical dance of animosity and belligerence on one side, opposed to solidarity and networking on the other side, defined the region as the Autumn of 1939 approached. While the world witnessed blitzkrieg for the first time, when industrial ordnance and delivery systems field-tested in Galician Spain made the attrition of 1916 obsolescent in Galician Ukraine—then part of Poland—Russia out of desperation and Germany out of opportunism made a devil’s bargain.
The Soviets shipped over a million Poles to Siberia. They put comrades and Jewish activists and party members, mainly from Ukraine, in charge of the realm that had threatened to overrun Kiev a mere eighteen years prior to that early Autumn. They fought off and retaliated ruthlessly against Ukrainian nationalists, whether they belonged to one of the chief organizations or were merely independent minded about their identities.
Though everyone with a brain then knew—and how much more so now must a modicum of intelligence make this point clear—that Slavic blood and Teutonic blood would soon spill in a death match between the Communist and Nazi systems, the two sides parlayed both to ‘carve up’ Poland and Finland and the Baltic States and in general to offer to the world the pretense of a conjunction between Capital and What Is To Be Done, on the one hand, and Mein Kampf and International Jewry, on the other hand.
But of course such an alliance was no more real than a fighter’s feint of vulnerability and trusting confidence that invites a killing blow, only to elicit a deadly counterpunch in reply. …(continued below the fold)
Erotic Snippets—”Josiah & His Janey”
“I’ve asked you not to call me by that name.” He had stopped unhitching his suspenders to speak sternly, although his erection’s pleasing presence persisted in protruding from the folds of his pants like a miniature dervish’s dancing.
Ever able to play the coy coquette, even as I calculated outcomes to yield the surrender that I sought, I blossomed with a blush that, under my nearly sheer house-shift’s satin, made my bounteous bosom, still perky and apt, bounce in just the way that he appreciated. “Why Josiah!” I laughed, naming him as had his Mother, “don’t you refer to your followers as the inhabitants of the Holy-Ark-of-the-Angel, Moreni?’”
He paused still. “And haven’t you guided them, indeed, in just the way that Noah himself led the creatures to his long-lost bark? You’ve said as much.”
His braces bounced on my quilt a blinking eye from his revealing his handsome chest, as smooth as the wild Indian he claims as a grandmother. I often then wondered, ‘whyever do you, with your holiest-of-all halo, continue to patronize my talented pussy’s pouting lips?’
“After all,” I would think, “I'll never be your thirty-third wife!” I thought of myself, Jane Edison, as the world’s first truly free woman. Today, after all that has transpired, I laugh and shed a tear at the thought.
I now also believe I understand, however, why such a spiritual man would maintain his ties with a stubborn infidel and harlot; at least the Magdalen was a part of the true fold. No no. I’ve never become Mermon; I’m far too skeptical for that. However, I decidedly was a member of the feminine horde who would find the marvelously endowed Josiah Smyth’s ministrations an irresistible inducement to offering up womanly joy’s highest measures of connubial ecstasy.
That such assiduous and athletic amorous expressions of Eros were my ‘stock in trade,’ so to say, never counted against me with Josiah. That I gushed and frothed and moaned and bucked, spitting like a cat and keening like a boiling kettle, was enough to settle in my lover’s mind that I was one of the entourage who worshiped before his throbbing altar with just the measure of adoring surrender that rendered me a member of his personal flock.
Also, of course, he was my lover more than my client. He only paid the first time and then not so much as I would normally command. That was our bargain. “If I usher you to an audience with the almighty,” he had confirmed again and again during the course of our initial encounters, “then you must accept my mastery in our ministrations as merely my due for the holy hosannas of joy that I bring you!”
This I understood implicitly, from the outset. It is nearly as palpable today, with Josiah long gone, shot to rags. He was a rare eagle among the human male’s murder of crows. His ferocious fealty for the felicity of female flesh, and his especially tender feelings for any woman who felt tender in her turn toward the slippery delights of her secret skin, were much more akin to lightning than the flow of energy through our new electrical cording.
This uncanny electricity made Josiah so sparkle, as a bauble easy on the eye and delivered direct from heaven, that resisting his allure could feel difficult even at a distance. Up close, and with the added inducement of his sweet blandishments of soul and fire, any icy resistance melted away like the odd June snowfall’s watery disappearance under the gaze of midday sun. So I discovered. He was, indeed, masterfully a man.
In spite of myself—she who had seen the claimed mastery of now scores of puffed up fellows, who mainly proved themselves at best prurient, and much more often, terrified at the commanding presence of pussy over their pulsing captains’ cocks—I blushed on these occasions, another inducement for my Mister Smyth to show me his ‘rockets’ red glare,’ since little so aroused him as the blush of naughty awareness.
In other words, to summarize my sensibility on that penultimate encounter which we shared, as always on my veranda only a literal stone’s throw from the apparently placid and yet ever might Mississippi, I was always salvageable, according to my holy horned beast, because I assured him that his was the only stout manly staff from which I derived on any consistent basis my complete womanly pleasure. This was only a small lie, since most men, even those of experience—like each and every one of my Mississippi Riverboat captains—occasionally grew lazy or nonchalant about awaiting a wanton woman’s fickle pleasure. …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—
(Last issue introduced this missive, a story at once of a particular popular pastime and of a gambler’s pushing his luck, while today’s effort examines more of the cultural background that encapsulates the ‘King of Games & the Game of Kings.’)
BACKGAMMON IN FICTION & FILM
Backgammon is decidedly not primarily an Anglo-American pastime, though the import of the doubling cube is definitely an American addition to the contest. One need only visit Ankara or Athens or Cairo or Jerusalem to see the heartlands of the game, the name of which varies but often includes a variation of the Persian, “Shesh pesh,” for “Six-five” on the dice; Israeli terminology uses “shesh-besh,” Old Turkish for the same quantity.
“Istanbul panorama and skyline” by Ben Morlok
Naturally, then, Turkey’s Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk includes references to the game in both his fiction and nonfiction. What he makes clear is that the game has woven itself seamlessly into the fabric of Turkish life, playing as routine a part as family meals or conversations among neighbors about television or politics.
It contextualizes infidelity and slowly requited love in The Museum of Innocence. It serves as the foundation for a lesson in memory as the main character’s father ponders tactics “in a tight spot,” in The New Life. It appears repeatedly as a signpost of Istanbul’s and the nation’s mores in The Black Book and elsewhere. In his account of Istanbul as a place, which he subtitles Memories of a City, he mentions it just once, to show that he has little of his fellow Turks’ passion for the game—he and his mates use the checkers for imaginary games of soccer that they play with marbles.
Surely, innumerable other writers and storytellers from the Levant and Southern Asia bring the ‘king of games’ into their yarns. Via such characters and characterizations, it has traveled to the New World as well. Jorge Amado’s Gabriella, Clove, and Cinnamon plays out a story’s thread in which the main character, Nacib, has traveled from Lebanon and brought backgammon to Brazil’s equivalent of the ‘wild West,’ where a coterie of gamblers and roustabouts play the game regularly, possibly even obsessively, in his pub.
BG contextualizes their competitive and friendly relations, at once an outlet for their flirtatiousness and their acquisitiveness. It is a constant presence in the bard’s estimable tale of chance and will, longing and love, business and predation.
While his better-known meditation on love and human affairs, Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands, does not bring the ‘king of games’ explicitly to the fore, the deceased spouse, whose wagers and carousing are the stuff of legend, was a gambler extraordinaire in a milieu in which backgammon was a regular presence. It also shows up in Amado’s other stories, such as Tieta: the Goat Girl and Tent of Miracles.
One might easily pursue backgammon’s cultural impact on every single Mediterranean culture, after which one could delineate the worldwide spread of the game from this creative cradle. That will be labor for a later project, however, here and now our task an attempt to account for why a South Carolina Episcopalian became such a devotee of the skirmishes that are omnipresent on the board.
And that effort requires us to dig into England’s uptake of the ‘game of kings,’ which has for several centuries been a noteworthy phenomenon indeed. In no less a central tome of contemporary mores and thinking than Vanity Fair itself does backgammon make the scene again and again and again. Becky Sharp is a taskmistress over the board, as is Lady Jane Grey, who learned at her grandfather’s knee.
Becky Sharp – Vanity Fair
One of Ms. Rebecca’s ‘admirers’ upbraids her about her avocation. “He took Rebecca to task once or twice about the propriety of playing at backgammon with Sir Pitt, saying that it was a godless amusement, and that she would be much better engaged in reading…any work of a more serious nature; but Miss Sharp said her dear mother used often to play the same game…and so found an excuse for this and other worldly amusements.” …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
Okay then. Here we are once again, at the middle point of an unfolding wordy waterfall. Life is so rich. Completely to extinguish it seems so tragic, yet my fate appears ever to be that of a fairly forthright and accurate prophet who finds little purchase in his own land. Alas and alack.
I remain good-humored. If fireballs and Mass Collective Suicide are to define the culmination of the human condition, I can only say, as ever, “I told you so” and hope that slivers of hope remain in the ashes.
My life, in the end, has been such a blessing from the Goddess, such an opportunity to opine about “the greatest Commandment of all,” along with Billy Bragg, such a divine journey toward conjugation and conjunction, that I find every day even further astonishing instances of this ‘delicate miracle of embodiment,’ with sunny soccer, chances to play with clever infants, lusty loving as honeyed as Mother Bee’s main hive, and whatever additional blah blah blah might add a basting or boosting of able estimation of matters at hand.
—Below the Fold—
‘Once more, dear friends, into the breech!’ One might say much here. But, as always, the thing speaks for itself as well.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
In the event, Odysseus appears as King of Swords to define a Thesis. Then comes Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, an Antithesis in the form of Temperance. The Synthesis that caps this triad turns up as Morpheus’ King of Cups. Eerily evocative are these pretty pieces of paper.
A reading of this second inquiry certainly feels quite congruent with the ‘meanings’ associated with these cards. The suit of Swords emphasis on cognitive acuity and balance reaches an apogee in the King; Odysseus, ‘the wily one,’ fosters a commitment to strategic thinking and incisive intelligence, while aware of the cost that can accompany such qualities, if nothing else risking the loss of emotional engagement, empathy, and attendant blah blah blah.
With sidereal clarity, almost a celestial luster, Iris’ temper, an insistence on maintaining ties and freely flowing feelings of mutuality and cooperation, inherently represents a powerful opposite to Odysseus. In this vein, in seeking to succor social equality among young people, the ‘good strategy and tactics’ worthy of a ‘wily one’ might necessarily mandate awareness and facilitation of ‘felicity forever,’ so to speak, because, after all, an essential element of social justice is free communication and regular relationship.
Synthesizing this pair basically necessitates Morpheus’ musical mellifluence in the crowning card in the suit of Cups, which in the scheme of things promotes the primacy of loving partnerships hither and yon. The evocation of the ‘wounded healer’ here warns against so insistently serving others in this way that one foregoes one’s own pleasuring and partnering and so on and so forth.
All this twines into a single thread quite naturally. If we boost strategic acuity, insure openhearted connection’s possibility, and supersede the limitations of stewardship, we’d be charting a plausibly navigable course toward greater social equality where, arguably, it is most critical, among youngsters.
Coming back to today’s Spiral Spread, we return to a more probing narrative palpation of the original question, in regard to social equality of youth as such, or in general. To review, the template was this: an Essence initiates the Two of Swords; Past equals the Knight of Swords; Present equals the Eight of Pentacles; Future equals the Ten of Swords; Opportunities equals the Queen of Cups; Problems/Prospects equals Death; the Synthesis ends as the Page of Cups.
As always, a credible narrative is available to construct. Without exception, potentially palatable ‘food for thought’ will garnish our plates as a result. For instance, we can well view the central dynamic of contemplating social equality to revolve around a profound tension at the grotesque inequities and constant inequality that mark everyday existence now, realities that we often see as an inevitable status quo that we have little choice but to accept as is, even though, willy nilly, it must transform.
Our yesterdays, in this regard, have definitely emphasized clever querulousness and a general inclination to ‘enter the fray,’ as it were, in this case as harbingers of change away from systematic suppression of equal rights, a transformation that requires conflict and destruction in support of reconstruction along better lines. The here-and-now in relation to the question at hand also obviously must entail a willingness to acquire new skills, to serve apprenticeships for justice, so to speak. Tomorrow as an extension of this arc in time, with reasonable certainty, would then culminate in an end to old ways and the creation of new processes to support essential new, more socially equal, ways of conducting ourselves.
In this evolving development of matters at issue, delving the mysteries of what we may term Helen’s Divine Feminine in its palpation of paradox and necessity could always prove an important option to posit. Furthermore, given the conflicted volatility that such variance from standard procedures always cause, something must end, some previously sacrosanct practice or principle must in some sense fade away and die, so as to permit the upwelling of the sustaining substance of social equity and decent fairness. Mixing this all together might not at first blush favor Narcissus, especially in contemporary contextualization.
However, this demonstrably narcissistic orientation “May also be seen as an image of self-discovery, for loving another must spring first from recognition and value of oneself,” or what will happen is “a sad and often fruitless exercise in seeking in the other what one has not yet discovered within.” No matter what, the upshot appears as a commitment to manifesting mutuality’s union with empowerment, as a prerequisite of any realization of youthful potentiation, so to say.
Do processes and dynamics such as these, what many folks consider metaphysical interfaces, what Tarot teaches as the Mantic Arts, serve any other than a fanciful purpose? The answer to that will hinge on the asker, as a matter of course. However, the central rationale for storytelling may well approximate a testing of premises about how we ought to live. The cards, as if by magic, thereby engrave a course to consider, a route to render that, empirically if not altogether logically, seems almost always to emanate from the conjunction of inquiry and attention in Tarot.
In sum, when we undertake these kinds of experiences, which always begin inquisitively, our questions illuminate simple choices that we never gainsay good advice in making. The artistry in Tarot’s manifestation of a Mantic Art comes from this dialog with judgment’s dialectical delineation of things. We hear of equality as a moral mandate; inquiries provide something akin to both affirmation and guidance. We make of it a useful yarn in support of optimal social realization.
Will the vaunted, never extant, ‘level playing field’ manifest a social miracle that ministrates human survival? We can never know if we never seek such succor. Manufacturing the marvels of a Martian colonial collective would be child’s play, perhaps, in comparison.
Whatever, the case may be, this type of work or play or whatever concatenation of human variety that Tarot is allows us readily to simplify and select salubrious options in regard to matters at hand. Would overall improvement of individual actualization make for a better world? Oh. Well, duh! Asking these questions and taking these steps toward understanding bring us to a juncture where seeing the obvious is not so difficult as it apparently otherwise proves to be.
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
So he told Lou after they had first met, two years later more or less, at a juncture when Morris was drinking a bit. Whatever else has proven true about Sir James, Esquire, he has always manifested this willingness to listen.
“And then Bryan’s dad transferred to California,” which meant that “we lasted less than a month more out in the Gulf.” Justina had just finished her degree in ‘management science’ at the Mobile campus of the University of South Alabama. Morris had dropped his college program the previous year.
“Going to Europe was an obvious choice. I had this professor there, at USA, who got me books on the Balkans and gave me some names, people I could look up, etc.” Morris pronounced it “eksetera,” a favorite of the working class South.
“We just had to make enough money to let us handle the sleeping and eating and transportation till we first got there; the rest would take care of itself.” That took till early Spring, 1976, to arrange, and now he and his lover rattled along while she slept on his shoulder as the Istanbul-to-Belgrade line of the Orient Express clattered its way through the outskirts of Sofia, just when the sun was rising over the plain to the East for the year’s longest day, and the hint of the mountains there glimmered as the shimmering rays rose toward full light.
Justina slept through anything. He’d started out of a quick snooze sometime after four, when pressure and sound intensified, and their car's night bulbs dimmed for an instant as they entered some tunneled cutout—a heightening of the pitch of the percussive drone of the steel wheels along the tracks, a sudden jabbing whoosh—a shifting of sensation that woke the ever alert little warrior and caught him in the middle of a dream about flying and falling into an ascending orb of light.
Now he saw the real dawn, with Sofia just ahead, omnipresent factories and warehouses, along with churches that almost looked like mosques more and more prevalent, as the diesel sped along with its four-car Oriental Express compliment, ranges of still verdant hills blushing in the distance as the yet swollen streams that they forded gushed beneath their onrushing push North. His sweetheart had announced her initial estimate of their accommodations—“plush!”—and nestled into the seats and fallen into dreamland like a well-fed cat; he’d just had time to kiss her—which she liked, almost insistent, though it made him feel a little bit anxious—before she went under.
Just prior to his own brief immersion in the sea of sleep, the speeding train, having taken all manner of curves in the nearly full-mooned darkness, crossed what he knew must be the Maritsa River, where he searched in vain for Luna’s reflection in the flow on their only such breaching of its rush to split Turkey and Greece and enter the Adriatic. The diesel had screamed for some reason, as if it too were baying for the moon to show its face in the waters. He drifted, though he had always slept lightly, ready to jump at the merest hint.
After leaping into consciousness as their carriage bored into the mountainside, in two and a half hours he’d read through most of the CIA’s Yugoslavia Country Study, which John Slaughter had given him, with a little envelope slipped between page 199 and 200, at the USA history offices the day ahead of his and Justina’s one airplane ride of the journey, to Caracas from Mobile International.
“Just go to Belgrade University,” John drawled; “everybody knows where it is. Professor Abromovich is the chair of Political Science, but he’s real interested in the Klan.”
Morris’ nerdy Alabamian instructor would present a paper there in Spring 1977, after his first sabbatical began in January. “He may have a note for me; or not. Doesn’t matter.”
The daylight haul through the Balkan Mountain splendors, after their twenty-two minutes and a few seconds at Sofia’s decidedly old-timey station, “like we were on a movie set,” whispered Justina, passed in a whirl. Every time she saw some bit of natural magnificence, where watercourses had carved gorgeous gorges through storied limestone or the trees marched up the slopes in ordered files, almost martial, she squeezed his thigh.
He’d squirm, wishing like hell that she’d agreed to a sleeper car. “I don’t want to spend all your wages, Morris,” counting her pennies just like the little middle-class girl that her persona mimicked until she began to dance, or to kiss.
He thanked God that none of the six males—three of them alone, two as a pair—who shared the car with them, despite giving his girlfriend many looks, had come on to Justina. He in some real way hated to do battle when he was sleepy, especially when what he wanted first was a sweet time alone with his woman.
In the event, he even napped an hour or so as they rolled into Yugoslavia. He instantly embraced wakefulness again when a series of quick blasts on the engine’s whistle shattered his slumbers. He instantly noticed the change in architecture, from a much-more-recently Ottoman land to the European stolidity of the lower Danube. Justina nibbled his ear. “We made it,” she purred, while a blush crept up his neck and passed his little Lenin goatee.
He met Professor Abromovich the next morning, entering the glorious façade for the University of Belgrade with a smile on his lips and a bandana round his neck, “just like a cowboy” the affable teacher had quipped. His English was good, if very British.
He accepted the note from his colleague five thousand miles to the West and asked about Morris’ reading of the Klan’s influence on Southern history, vis a vis its declining impact on the contemporary scene. “It’s behind the scenes,” Morris had corrected; “not disappeared, just not clearly visible.” He inhaled another Marlboro puff: “Nixon’s whole strategy was to use Klan logic to win Southern votes.”
They talked for forty-five minutes when a soft knock intervened and a gentle push opened the office door. A chiseled blond giantess stood in the entryway. “је тај састанак особља и даље на за поподне?” she asked, her Serbian a clue for Morris that men who wore bandanas fit right in.
“This is our friend’s student from Alabama,” Tomas replied. “We were just talking about the KKK and its role in American social and political life.”
“Ah!” She brightened. “Our friends in the African National Congress believe that your Ku Klux Klan”—Morris smiled, shook his head, and with his hands denied possession—“is a model for the repression that is fostered there.”
“Yes,” Morris exhaled and offered her a cigarette, which she took with a smile, as he continued, “well, my professor in Mobile believes he can show that there is a clear line between Klan work and Nazism in Germany.”
And so they delved into matters of merit for enough hours to pass the lunch break with no more than cigarettes and shot of Ouzo each to tide them over. Morris felt almost impossibly blissed out.
A huge difference between Belgrade and South Alabama, which, competitor that he was, he simply adored, was how much more he lost at chess in Yugoslavia. His explanation was simple: “Workers don’t play much in the South, and American rich kids were soft in the head.” Thus, every victory was sweeter.
And the rooster’s bickering and false poses of macho bullshit simply ended. He neither noticed their going nor rued their departure. Justina, perhaps, had a more complex reaction.
Truly though, he considered himself almost at home among the Serbians. The life along the riverfront, as wide as the Mississippi and much more developed, was vivid and one shout away from song or struggle. They fought, just about other things than "some pretty woman."
Politics—from Vietnam to Africa to NATO’s latest dust-up with socialism—was ever-present in conversation, whether the occasion was a gathering around a televised football match in a pub—Serbia had just lost the bronze medal in the European Cup before a home crowd June nineteenth, which, Morris explained, was a holiday of some importance among African Americans in the U.S.—or a picnic upstream or downstream from the city. This discursive expansiveness, which when he was present occurred on two fronts, one English and one Slavic, further buoyed Morris as his twenty-seventh birthday drew close to hand, and he wondered if they’d throw a party.
As he had in Sicily and rural Greece for weeks at a time, and for six days in Istanbul, he worked construction in Tito’s land, the Serbian love affair with English adequate to make enough people capable of conversing to let him function at certain workplaces. Needless to say, as with most things that he did, Morris had a high degree of mastery as a carpenter, as a builder. Were the language not an issue, he would have had his pick of supervisory positions.
In the event, an astute site manager would never let Morris go, inasmuch as he could solve almost any problem of either craft or technique. At least this indispensability would be the case till Morris insulted too many of his coworkers for their “bourgeois bullshit” or led too many exoduses to the local public house.
As July crested, his birthday was now the day after tomorrow. Professor Abromovich promised to provide a keg of ale and “as much wine as we can quaff.” Morris had bought a blue peasant dress for Justina, which he knew would set off her eyes and make her sizzle.
As things worked out, however, he was working enough, playing chess enough, drinking enough, talking politics and socialism enough, that—despite the fact that he still thought about Justina as the hottest expression of the divine feminine that was manageable, so to speak—he spent less time with her, had less ‘contact,’ than at any point since the day that they first met and found themselves entwined and enthralled.
So he hadn’t noticed or paid much attention when the “Dutch dude with the hash pipe and the harmonica,” who had been playing gigs at some of the local cantinas, had almost instantly expressed an interest in Justina’s company. She pestered her ‘bantam’ incessantly to let her know when they would move on, toward Amsterdam and Paris.
For his part, he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to Mobile from Belgrade. “I sure as shit don’t want to mix it up with all the petty-bourgeois of Western Europe in the City of Light and the ‘City of lighting up,’” he explained in various ways now and again.
Thus, while the timing sucked—years later, he would still reminisce, “I can’t believe you jumped ship on my fucking birthday,” to which she would respond with a shrug and a sigh—the note that began, “Dear Morris” was not altogether a surprise. He was not a lad to mope, not yet anyhow, not with so little at stake and the fire in his heart so fierce and torrid.
In the event, Katrina Yurivich, the ‘chiseled blond’ from Linguistics, was one of the revelers at the celebration, and a newly-stoked pair of transitional objects they soon became. She had just recently divorced her smuggler spouse and won custody of her two girls, aged six and two, Tanya and Ivana.
She told Morris of her plans to build an African Studies program in tandem with her work in Linguistics. They made slow and often drunken love. The Summer had two weeks gone when he wrote to her, his own “Dear Irina” notice.
His visa had expired. He did, or so he decided when an uncharacteristically brisk October fourth left him shivering through a night that he spent alone, miss the Gulf Coast. And so Morris left a loving letter, reversed his course, and headed home. Next Up: Chapter XV.
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I believe in conspiracy facts.” Ruppert’s origins are as a police and drug enforcement detective, a coming big topic here at BTR, clearly connected to today’s pondering of this ‘legal drug issue.’ In any event, the entire arena of Breaking Bad—the realm of pharmacology and contraband, of voodoo vagaries and herbal emoluments—is, at once comically and tragically, replete with hidden agendas, corporate coups, and the omnipresent hegemony of gangsters.
In an entirely unexpected instant of serendipity, the newest Vanity Fare reveals, without at all meaning to do so, the perfidy, corruption, thuggery, and fraud that comprehensively accompany any powerfully promoted pharmaceutical development, the more successful the direr and darker this omnipresent downside. “Shots in the Dark” takes the reader into the dankest dungeon’s of capitalized ‘medicine.'
That this article deals with the the Ozempic cost and distribution scandals of mismanagement, skullduggery, and other ‘usual suspects’ does not keep the piece from pulling aside the ‘Wizard’s Curtain’ in this realm generally. Again, grotesque thuggery and profiteering are the order of business and the order of battle.
Anybody not paranoid has given up paying attention. Among the never dull tidbits that any quick overview will bring to the fore, observers might consider the following: John Leake’s reporting about National Institutes of Health GoF admissions; Dr. Peter McCullough’s related research and investigation; Rand Paul’s grilling of Anthony Fauci is so dramatic; Dr. Michael Yeardon’s International Criminal Court case is another wildly fascinating grassroots attempt, albeit by a former Pfizer Vice President.
One could extend this listing a thousandfold without losing momentum. In fact, here is a link—following this search, <“gain of function” OR gain-of-function>—that unlocks just over six thousand, four hundred such citations in the Internet Archive’s database.
Gain-of-Function is akin to a cruel, lethal joke. At minimum, we might note that a potentially quite dangerous bird-flu variant is a GoF candidate. What could go wrong? Children’s Health Defense can imagine some problems.
As Senator Paul maintains, we are ‘messing with Mother Nature, and she will bite back.’ Here is a Driftwood take. “Our Swim Through Earth's Streams May Only Evolve Toward Harbors & Habitats That Life's Flow Permits: All Attempts, Automatically Some Sort of Greedy Grasping Fraud, to Manufacture Or Otherwise Manifest a Human Presence That Places Our Kind Somehow Above Or Outside Gaia's Grand Plan Will Foreordain Disaster, Barely Conceivable Chaos & Carnage, &, Eventually, Our Complete Extinction As Ignorant Fools Unfit to Survive."
No doubt, as in ‘duh to the power of duh,’ disease afflicts humanity, although we might recall, again, that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, ‘in order,’ are Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. Perhaps resilience even then meant something, in spite of plagues and rumors of plagues.
Thinking along these lines may have been extant. “Homo Sapiens Coevolution With Mother Nature's Innumerable Norms of Affliction & Predation Necessarily Testifies to Robust Human Resilience Against Fierce Killers Large & Small."
Of course, in the parlance of monopolized media’s dependence on pharmaceutical firm advertising billions, the notion of immune-building, of not overreacting to natural cycles, everything that COVID, Tango, & the Lagom Way illuminated as Sweden’s ‘pandemic response,’ is simply out of the question. They’d rather investigate ‘Martian pathogens’ than suggest that relying on one’s robust good health could, even conceivably, be a valid option in meeting an airborne respiratory virus.
What we do receive are foregone conclusions. Mandates are always likely to be in season soon. Get a shot; take a pill; don’t listen to the rushed, hushed verbiage of “life threatening” side effects. Toxic blah blah blah is uppermost.
“Out of Context Useless Yapping” indeed are many of these one-way discourses. “Any Canvas That One Prepares to Portray Image, Idea, Or Endeavor Will Evince Only Useless Yapping, Utter Inanity, If It Lacks Adequate Context Or Presents Falsehood As Accurate Awareness, Cautionary Counsel Indeed in This Age of Ubiquitous Prepackaged Propaganda That Scheming Imperial Plutocrats & Opportunistic Profiteers Masterfully Mediate to Manipulate the Masses of Humanity So As to Advance Their Own Self-Righteous Self-Serving Agendas."
Are we responsible for ourselves, in this most basic civic sense? “Far Too Often Do We Hurry to Partake in Plotted Protocols That Have Little to Do With Our Best Interests & Real Needs, Or Even Cost Us Dearly, All to Serve the Entitled Assertions of Pompous Privileged Plutocrats Who Always Shamelessly Exploit & Manipulate Us Like Dumb Driven Beasts en Route to Slaughter."
An important tangential notion concerns the demonstrable utility of fearmongering. “Obsessing About Any Specific Phenomenon's Pointed Peril Promotes Panicky Pusillanimous Despair That, at Best, Ignores Innate Capacities to Resist Or Adapt, Thereby Almost Inevitably Promulgating Both Plutocratic Profferals of Profiteering 'Protection' & Eternal Potentate Fantasies of Fostering Marshalled Sheepish Order & Bovine Obedience."
As regards solutions for problems of public health and individual wellness, nature abides and life provides. “All Too Often, the Wizardry That We Need, Though Readily Available, Does Not Appear As an Option Because It Fails to Align With the Fundamental Plutocratic Protocols of Maximized Plunder & Complete Control: Unless Humanity's Common Folk Respond to This Ruling Reality Responsibly & Collectively on Their Own Behalf, Now Normalized Concentration Camps Are the Best That They Will Likely Experience, Timed Decline Into Blood Sucking Torture & Gloomy Misery So As to Serve Militarized Mayhem & Psychotic Chaos & the Reliable Tidy Profit That They Produce."
People accuse me of being ‘Debbie Downer.’ Huh. Go figure. Better bleak than false, better critical than craven, that’s how I see things. I’m not recommending a ‘paralysis of analysis,’ however. We’ve got to find a path to actual engagement.
In other words, what should we do about all this? “Necessity's Undulations & Uncertainty's Opacity Provide Society's Self-Selected Masters Ample Options to Promote Protocols That Proffer Profiteering As the Sole Rational Social Choice, a Propagandized Process of Plunder That Promises Morbid & Mortal Outcomes Aplenty Till Common People Focus Both Fiercely on Understanding Reality's Realm & Intently on Organizing Themselves to Resist Manipulation & Mendacity That Serve Mammon's Entitled Privilege."
Well might we inquire about the main takeaway from this entire contextualization and analysis of COVID and its more or less original ambience. “Humanity Has Always Swum With Sharks & Bathed in Waters Bursting With Virulent Microscopic Monsters; While Promoting Prophylactic Caution in This Context Is Understandable, Only Robust Resilience Proffers Persistent Potent Protection, Since All Other Attempts Completely to Exterminate, Isolate, Or Subordinate These Predatory Fellow Travelers Will Either Backfire Balefully Or, More Or Less Rapidly, Diminish & Then Eliminate Our Kind As Well."
The end result might sound like this. ‘Biological warfare and Gain-of-Function research overlap, to put matters gently. A very good chance exists that the sometimes quite lethal SARS-CoV-II virus resulted from GoF work. Litigation is ongoing, and the occasional criminal case has crossed swords with SOP COVID power brokers. Similar sorts of investigations into the Science of Mass Murder are ongoing in relation to other infectious agents, from Ebola to the Flu, about which new variants various authorities are voluminously warning of ‘future Pandemic’ risks.
This context makes clear what is at stake. On the one side lie corporate control and plutocracy’s maximized profits. On the other side stand the potential for democracy and community-based health care. If democracy and community are qualities that we support, social goals in sum, then completely ending GoF would, if nothing else, serve to boost these objectives.
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
…The young Mr. Miller, after all, did have quite a local reputation. Wiry and plain-faced, quiet and average-size, you wouldn't expect he'd be a hell raiser. But he almost got a dozen of us killed two years back—he'd been a senior—leading a genuine protest against Vietnam and everything. He didn't do it just to be cute either. I'll bet he was the only white boy in middle-Georgia who'd read Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Then, before his graduation, he just about gave our principal, Mr. Johnson, apoplexy. Mr. J. used to coach basketball. He gave lectures about character being as important as winning, but victory being more important than anything else. He still butch-cut his hair and still wore the same frames on his glasses as he had in college. He sent out a memo that March threatening not to graduate "certain students" because of "improper grooming." Russ's dad cut short that shit, with a reputation for successful lawsuits a well-known part of his presence, but Russ wanted to score some points on his own.
He was the main photographer for the yearbook, a recorder of tradition with the sensibilities of Abbie Hoffman. He elevated wizardry with a telephoto lens to an art form and had some crazy close-ups of all the administration. After the run-in with Mr. Johnson, he'd found a particularly silly shot, where the old guy looked like he'd gotten a bug up his nose. He blew this up to the size of a wall poster, broke into the principal's Buick and taped it so the poster peered out the windshield like a Monty Python gimmick. Then he put red and yellow pom-poms all over the car and draped a hand-lettered sign over the hood. The banner was banal but to the point. It said, "QUESTION AUTHORITY!" How he did all this, undetected, while attending classes, he never said and nobody else ever figured out. He was crazy, but he had the resourcefulness of a barn-yard mutt.
His personality wouldn't impress the military authorities, especially since he believed in pacifism and social justice, not just as hip words but as guidelines for living. When he led our 'protest march,' a bunch of football players started shoving him around, calling him "nigger-lover," "commie-fag," and other common denominators of anything different. He didn't panic, didn't fight back, and even helped one of the fuckers pass trigonometry.
Russ Miller in the army'd be a tragedy on the order of a rock 'n roll genius overdosing on bad drugs. They'd start by cutting his hair and stripping him naked. They'd kick his butt and try to break this streak of unconventionality with whatever size hammer they felt was appropriate. "He'll prob'ly git lots KP duty," was what my father said. "They'll work him jus' like ya would a stubborn mule; ya know, ta change his liberal attitudes." What I thought was it'd be like tying boulders to a dragonflies wings while it was in midair.
The prospect depressed me, but I was pissed at him too. He had to know this ruined our weekend . The trip was going to be the first time Vickie and I ever really had a whole day alone with each other. We managed to tryst together for a few hours now and then—in the woods, back of my old Dodge, wherever we could get close and private. But this time we'd really get to spend the night. With this hanging over us, we'd all be as tight as a fat boy's pants. That's what I figured anyhow.
When he dropped me off that evening, he told me offhandedly, "Ya know buddy, I made them reservations for Tallulah Gorge the week I drew my lottery number. We're gonna have a helluva time!"
* * * * * * *
"What's both'rin' ya sweet cake?"
Vickie knew something was distracting me. I barely responded when she'd opened her lips, painted with honeyed gloss. She was nearly six feet tall, a beauty with long dark hair and a performer's poise. Now, hands in each other's pockets for the ride to North Georgia, deepening dusk making the back seat our own cocoon, I hardly noticed her subtle gyrations, or the heat emanating from her middle.
Vickie's normal effect on me was the same as that of water on the sodium we immersed in Mr. McLendon's chemistry class. I ignited at the merest hint of her interest.
"Mah baby worryin' 'bout his head?"
She tussled my locks. Whereas she'd done hallucinogens dozens of times, I'd only tripped once. Her experiences ranged far and wide. Once, in afternoon gym class, Coach Dawson frothed at the mouth with the promise to expel Vickie and her cohort Lisa. Like serene monkeys, they both refused to descend from the rafters of the gym after a rope-climbing exercise. Other occasions included legendary drama club orgies, where even Columbus's creamiest youth got naked and bizarre.
The only time I'd tried anything, a hit of "pure, organic mescaline," according to the seller, I discovered myself—separated from my friends—wandering lost on the wooded edge of Fort Benning’s Military Reservation, stoned to the point of total incoherence. My buddies found me wandering down a logging road with a pen knife in my hand, singing "Ripple." I was afraid I'd run into wolves.
I hissed a denial to Vickie's question, smiling at her perceptiveness at the same time. "Its," I swear I'm not always as slow as my mouth, which stayed open for about half a minute before I said, "nothin'.....Nothin's wrong." I looked as innocent as I knew how.
"Liar!" She pinched my balls so I sat straight up, and she laughed, deep peals coming from her throat. I instituted interstitial rib massage. She squirmed away and I followed, while we both laughed and reveled in the contact.
"What ya'll lovebirds doin' back there? Yer steamin' up the winda's 'n makin' 't hard ta steer. Ya know mah defrost don't work now."
"This harlot's assaultin' me 'cause ah'm worried 'bout your ass. Charlotte, he tol' you yet what's happnin' Monday?"
Charlotte Beatty was a perfect counterpart for Russ. Just out of Junior College, she worked as a dental assistant. She was small, lithe, wore thick glasses, and looked like she'd never done anything more dangerous than skip Sunday School. But Russ swore she loved to scream and shout during sex, had become the first girl in her school to try drugs, and generally broke every taboo her sweet Southern accent said she should honor. She was sharp, too.
"Not a thing," she drawled. "Whatchu hidin' sweetie?"
Silence merely highlighted how, in an instant, we all focused our attention on Russ. The engine's muffled roar, the rushing hiss of air passing at 70 miles per hour, these lulled the senses only slightly as the seconds passed.
"You sure got a big mouth Bobby. It's nothin' baby, just got a little interview with the draft board Monday, 'at's all."
I watched the two women react to this diminution of the meaning of Russ's impending fate. Vickie just sat straight up next to me, pulled her chin into her neck and widened her eyes in comprehension. Charlotte's hand, stroking Russ's hair, stopped in mid-caress. She cocked her head, opened her mouth to speak. All that came out was two words, barely breathed, separated by a short pause. "Nooo!" And then, nodding slowly, "Yes."
***********
Next morning dawned with the sort of bright, mountain Autumn weather poets write about. The beauty pained all of us but Russ, because everybody felt apprehensive, uncertain, afraid for his ass. I felt righteous. "Just like I thought, this is gonna ruin everything." Vickie and I hadn't even petted before drifting into fitful slumber. And I hadn't heard any sign of Charlotte's vigorous enthusiasm either.
Russ had indeed reserved our "suite," over six months earlier.
"Didn't know 'f we'd see ya 'r not Mr., uh, Smith, since we hadn't heard from ya. Almost rented the room earlier." The proprietor, bent like a well-used spoon, peered out at us from behind a partition, his wire-rimmed eyes squinting to take in our youth and apparent poverty. His "Mr. Smith" hadn't even elicited a smirk, just a wistful smile that played across Charlotte's features.
"Damn glad ya waited, sir. This is just what we wanted."
Just what we wanted turned out to be a room in a little, ramshackle tourist motel that almost overlooked Tallulah Gorge, at that time one of the unsung attractions of the Southeast. Russ rousted the lot of us from our dreams just after sunrise. He shoved buttered rolls and water at each one in turn and proceeded to outline the day like a drill sergeant to a platoon on its first overnight excursion.
"We'll head out by the rim of the lake first thing, then follow one of the feeder streams up into the hills for a few hours. We'll hike back here for some late chow, take 'er easy for a bit, get the rest o' the shit out the car, specially the 8-track, 'n then head out for a couple hours along the top-o'-the-gorge-trail. Anybody got any questions?"
Charlotte smiled, or somebody might have taken her meaning wrong. "Yeah, who 'lected you? Ah don' remember votin' mahself."
"Oh, sweetheart, I wouldn't deprive you for all the tea in China. Tell us, how would you propose we go about the day?"
She smiled again as she pulled the sheet over her nakedness, "go fuck yerself, Miller." NEXT UP: Part Two.
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
“Well now, isn't it Jackie?!” The tone teased him like a knowing taunt from a jocular uncle. “And where are you bound today?” A rustle among the stones revealed a gnarly gnome—clad in pristine threads that sparkled with gold and silver—who puffed away on a pipe half as large as his head.
“And what are you seeking?” He posed this third question with a grin of recognition and raised right eyebrow that, somehow, seemed to guarantee rich reward.
“Well actually,” the youth began, smiling sheepishly with his cow on a leash, “I'm on my way,” Jack announced affably, before he suddenly stopped, mouth gaping and unblinking eyes that grew wide and then narrowed. “But how did you know my name?”
'And what sort are you then?' he wanted to add as his unshuttered gaze measured this interloper's amazing presence. The honeyed voice was huge compared to the creature whom Jack confronted, barely three stout feet in height and bizarrely clad in waistcoat over and stockings below his iridescent pantaloons, all of which raiment, depending on the light source that illumined them, shifted tints from golden to shimmering violet, via brown and khaki and green and crimson.
Moreover, though downy smooth cheeks and neck glowed pinkly, Jack's unexpected, proto-hominid acquaintance sported a lush bush of ginger hair that curled from his crown to spill over his shoulders and down his back, like a slithering mass of silken serpents. Pulling placidly on the smoking stem between his nimbly flitting fingers, he stared amiably at Jack, whose expression of suspicious wonder seemed pasted on his features, all the while his questions, altogether pertinent, hung in noontime's torrid breath.
“Ah young Jack,” the little leprechaun figure cackled, responding with emphasis to the inquiry posed and in spirited mien to the interrogatory unasked, “it is my fate always to know what lies ahead, what may come my way.” He had approached the young fellow and his milker. “Please, continue, 'on your way' where?”
Jack gazed down on the tough and tiny form in front of him. “Well,” he hesitated, “sir or sire or whatever be the proper way to address you,” he said and paused. At the odd being's blessing, Jack smiled back and took up where he'd left off, “to make the best of bargains for my fine and still young cow here, who is long my and my mother's closest of companions. Perhaps in one of the little townships down the mountain, I'll,” but Jack's new patron, and guide, interrupted him.
“Y' needn't travel all that way, down and then back up!” The diminutive little fellow threw back his shoulders and grinned. “I'll have Sadie from you for my own needs here; she's just what I've been expecting.”
Jack blinked, his mouth an oval orifice of astonishment. “But,” he began, again stopping. Creepiness kept command. “D', D', Did I even speak her name?”
“You needn't worry son, I knew your Da'. He would have told you that all the beasts reveal themselves and do my bidding, including our Sadie-Sue.” And, well might he have added, 'including you, even if such an obedient attitude might prove contrary to interest!'
Yet his venerable sagacity and suggestive capacity would not do Jack any ill; he cared for the boy both for reasons of temperament and reasons of great gratitude to Jack's father, who had once assisted him in circumstances unexpectedly fraught with potentially deadly risk for one of his slippery clever kind.
“I'll even give you a choice about how I make the purchase: generous gold or magic beyond magnificence.” He beamed up at the now thoroughly bemused boy who nonetheless had the presence of mind to wonder as to the amount of gold and the sort of magic in question.
He also couldn't help but ask another question. “Might I inquire, too, how you hope to use Sadie? She's such a good milker if she's fed, and,” Jack blurted out before the bantam man doffed his green tophat in jovial admonishment. “You needn't worry, son. I shan't eat our Sadie.” Jack gulped and smiled. “You may rest, assured of that.”
As they discussed a therefore potentially happy exchange, Jack discovered that the coins on offer were more plentiful by far than what he had hoped. Moreover, as he ruminated to his new associate and trading partner, “Ma would want the golden horde.”
Of course, the miniature man who'd known Jack's father also knew the future, in which magical meandering would play a large part. Still, he said, “Well then,” and reached for the pouch that held payment so as to hand it over, at which our youthful hero protested.
“But what about the magic?” he asked as if transfixed.
“That,” pronounced the little man with merry emphasis, “depends entirely on trust, intention, and a willingness to believe.” When Jack beckoned him to say more, he shrugged. “You'll recall that your Da' often stated, 'if your heart and your gut don't agree, a messy digestion is the best state of mind you'll get!'”
Lost in reverie, Jack at first did not follow the inquisitive midget's logic. Then, as if struck by the idea, he intoned, “Trust about what?”
“My name, you should know, is Grambling; you can just call me Gramp.” The large ocular ovals in his little face gleamed, as green as a wet Spring noonday.
“Gramp!” agreed Jack, with a large smile of his own.
“And son,” the gremlin creature pointed out, “you should always inquire a stranger's name,” he persisted as he produced a second, sprier pipe that lit itself and smelled of delicious herbal mysteries, “most especially and decidedly so, when the newcomer in question is a woman. A word, to the wise, is sufficient.”
“Yes, yes!” Jack blushed enthusiastically, though he knew not what lay nearer to his days than midsummer's shortest shadows.
“Now, as to what we do or don't rely on as trustworthy,” the bit of a fellow replied to Jack's query, “let's leave this scorching barren track and find something more clement and more leafy.” He flipped himself to face into a nook in the standing stones all about, wiggled his fingers to summon Sadie along, and led the way through narrow implacable passages to a hidden glade quite close at hand, where overhanging rocky outcrops shaded a shelter of blueberry bushes and fruit trees, a veritable orchard that not only provided additional protection from the sun's midday pry and a few nibbles of early fruit but also contained a sapphire-emerald pool of such delicious chill that Jack had soon immersed himself in it to drink as Sadie slurped her fill from the bank.
In such startling and extraordinary environs, wondrous and wonderful together, Grambling led their negotiations about what sort of trusting would allow Jack to choose between gold and wizardry. This exchange, which Jack could never recall in complete detail, ended with a statement that he never forgot, however: it became his talisman.
“So then,” said the youngster's new teacher and friend and business partner after a lengthy dialog that left them in late afternoon's lengthening shadows, “in the end, the trust that matters most—or, perhaps, at all—is the trust that you have in yourself, son.” He paused as his garments once again changed color in the glade's gathering gloom, becoming a silvery molten maroon. “If you feel confident that things are indeed as you see them, then magic has the greatest potential to assist you and your mother, whatever her worries, or even her raging, might predict about the matter.”
The most rigorous segment of Jack's return journey was the brief bit of an ascent away from town and trade toward the ridgeline track that led to his homestead. Attached to his wrist, as shiny black as washed coal, a leather pouch contained the handful of wrinkled, reddened, and speckled beans, burgeoning with dainty sprouting tendrils, that Jack trusted completely would make his and his mother's future a bright one.
As a matter of course, nevertheless, approaching the candle now alight in the family cottage, Jack prepared himself for his mother's tongue's scathing screeches, however amazing these smattering of legumes' promised properties, at his election to accept mere beans for their Sadie, a choice that only his newfound self-confidence had facilitated his making. In truth, Jack's ever-bright demeanor had heretofore merely served as a shield with which he kept his maternal parent's dismissive and drear disparaging denunciations at bay.
This familial pattern—a parent who doubts her child because she indeed finds herself irredeemably dubious—may seem familiar to many. In the event, everything soon enough unfolded as he had sensed it probably would.
Katrina, his Mother, started awake from her pallet with a shout as he stooped and strode through their doorway. “What, Jackie?” Strangely, she hailed him as his new acquaintance had done by the roadway when the sun blasted down from directly above. Her tone mixed hope and fear in a tense balancing of forces.
“Back so soon?” When her son merely beamed, she blurted out, “So! You've made a fine bargain for our bovine lifeline; haven't you son?” Her vocal timbre did not quite touch a shriek, not yet. When her boy kept grinning, now nodding, her voice both pleaded and demanded. “Tell me then. What is our bargain?” Her fingers fondly felt for coins to fondle.
The immediate outcome of, and response to, her son's uncannily quick commercial adventure is at once predictable and reasonable. “BEANS?” she cursed, “and not even a damned proper bowlful” that might at least make a meal to allay hunger till another day's new dawning, looked and felt nothing like what the matron Katrina had fantasized, which included adequate largesse to acquire a new churn and even, she caught her breath at the thought, a new dress.
Screaming, as fiercely as any Furie's furious fusillade, she brandished their broom and drove her son out the door he had just entered, into their now brightly moonlit courtyard and past it and their storehouse to the at once comforting and implacable roots of their Forever Tree, in whose lunar shadow she paused, raising her gaze to its branches and the heaven they portended with a palpable imprecation for some why and wherefore of her present pass.
All the while, backing up yet not retreating, Jack more or less calmly dangled his magic leather pouch and invited his theretofore more than occasionally derisive Mother to examine its contents of equally sorcerous beans, which proffer she finally accepted, though in no friendly fashion. She shook the fine dark hide that barely bulged from its paltry 'magic' nuggets and howled abusive barbs at her still stout son: “Idiot! Fool! Foolish idiot!! How could you?” Her voice snapped and crackled with rage. “How...dare...you?!!!”
Her haranguing shouts rose to the level of a squawking roar, though the sensibility of its insults lost all coherence since Katrina's composure had utterly collapsed. Her fingers spasmed revulsion when the beans themselves ultimately fell upon her palm, clutching and shaking as if to throttle their very existence before, with a last bawling bellow of berating slander, she hurled them against the Forever Tree's trunk from whence they fell to the clay and crevices of its roots to glitter in the moonlight.
“You don't deserve a single morsel!”
Strangely, in the very teeth of her agitation’s ferocity, as soon as they had left behind the mountain evening's briskly brandished breezes, Katrina swooned onto her slender mattress of straw and started to snore. Admonished, Jack nodded, agreeing to take no food until he and his beans made some minor miracle manifest, at the very least.
No matter the ground his self-reliance may have gained at Grambling's behest, Jack could not help experiencing that combination—vertigo and hunger—that predictably afflicts any who lack food and face insistent insulting dismissal. He sat for a time before their empty stove. He sniffed just a moment at the herbal cache that his buyer, Gramps, had 'thrown into the bargain,' so to speak, inhaling a scent of Cyprus and frankincense that calmed him adequately enough for our Jack to contemplate slumber.
He tossed and turned a good while in search of a question to fulfill his Pa's counsel for times when sleep proved elusive. A wind's almost keening whoosh caused their Forever Tree's trunk to creak in supplication. “What was it,” he now wondered sleepily, “that the old legends told about our piney companion so straight and tall?” He sighed.
“What was it?” He yawned.
“Wasn't it something about clambering, up and up and up?” He farted. “What was it exactly?” After breaking wind and pondering this final query, he fell into a fitful sleep, full of grasping, pulling, leaping dreams at once murky and sensational, both alluring and alerting.”
What was it? Next up—Chapter Two
New Folk Fables—(continued)…
Officer Richards, on the other hand, who both evinced any real commitment to Catholicism less fervently and played the sage or clown much more willingly, would often turn idle conversation toward what filled his sights in the moonlit glow that long ago midnight at Faerie Glen. "What those equine beasts did to Ricky Wilder, Christ!" He would shake his head and check the attention of his listeners. "They stomped his skull till it looked like rotted pumpkin, stove in and leaking slime." He'd often wait to convey more until someone bought him another round, when he might sigh and wince: "I just hope they got his head first, the way they crushed his torso and all the tenderest points below it."
"His brother, merciful God, had the easier end," noted the voluble official, describing how only Billy's "hand, altogether missing the middle finger, just a bloody stump," was all that protruded from beneath the full weight of "Sir Robert's full ton hay wagon."
Morgan Morgan, meanwhile, endured the least loathsome expiration of Jack's erstwhile executioners. "We finally found him up a tree," Constable Richards would nod, "his eyes as wide as a freshly shucked oyster, his neck caught between oaken branches as stout as a small keg, turned round so his blank orbs stared down at us past his own ass."
The horses that had done in big Ricky, the deputies found grazing peacefully amid clover immediately adjacent to the 'Witch's Stone' that allegedly formed the centerpiece of many an unholy ritual that Luna's rays have illuminated time out of mind. Just there, at the clover's edge adjacent to it, the rescuing duo had discovered Jack, spread-eagled, face up, mouth and nose a bloody mess, "with what appeared to be a full set of teeth scattered about him like hail stones."
For the many decades that Jack worked beside and lay beside Eileen Thompson, he wore round his neck what appeared to be a man's molar, plucked out by the root, the only remnant actually recovered from that night, and at that from the floor of his own kitchen, where he had been toiling away amid glad silences and whistling counterpoints, from under the table where 'witless Charlie' had inadvertently shunted it as he had dragged his wounded body to safety.
In the utterly unexpected eventualities of that evening, which delivered our good Jack a fine, good woman, a skill for speech and desire to make song that he had never possessed, and resources adequate to love well and do as goodness guided him, the two awestruck deputies, their hearts more aflutter with the tremulous mystery of the spot than were their stomachs to the human carnage that they oversaw, gingerly dismounted and, each man appealing to whatever combination of spirits and powers that might ward off so heinous a fate as that which on that full-moon midnight befell the Wilder brothers and Mr. Morgan, began to gather and dislodge the man flesh from which all semblance of the kiss of life had fled. Next up: Chapter XI.
Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…
Very briefly indeed, this characterization aptly underlines the ‘Mormon Story,’ not to mention Joel and Victoria Osteen and all the other Mega Churches out there, not to mention the vicious fascist front that now flows forth from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, all centered on that ‘buckle of the Bible belt’ that lives in Dixie. Here, and in all other congruent theres, the intersection of profit, empire, and Judaeo-Christian theologizing centers on ‘the South.’
We can finish with another Marxian bon mot, fully contextualized. “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions." Next Up—the Thing Itself
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
…War & the Eruption of Unparalleled, Systematic Brutality & Mass-Murder
Even before the façade of the Ribbentrop pact came to pieces, in fact, and for years prior to that, the German Abwehr had been organizing Ukrainian nationalists of any stripe as future militias during the battles to come. And as soon as the Nazis turned the German war machine toward Moscow, all these nationalist factions, but especially the OUN, initiated uprising in Ukraine, particularly in the West, an outburst of nationalist frenzy aimed at Jew and Communist Party member alike. The resulting upheaval and desperation and flight of millions of people, as thousands and tens of thousands died, greased the skids for the Germans as the invasion proceeded, at the same time that the Germans rejected the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists goal of a state of their own.
In July, 1941, as the OUN-orchestrated “Ukrainian Revolution” was unfolding along with German military advances, the Nazis detained Bandera and held him as a ‘friendly prisoner’ under house arrest, at first in Berlin and then at a stockade adjacent to a concentration camp for Jews. While he was under lock and key, through 1944, his comrades-in-arms back in the field formed militias to liquidate Poles, Jews, and Communists.
As one commentator pointed out, “The OUN pursued a policy of infiltrating the German police in order to obtain weapons and training for its fighters. In this role they helped the Germans to implement the Final Solution. Although most Jews were actually killed by Germans, the OUN police working for them played a crucial supporting role in the liquidation of 200,000 Jews in Volyn in the second half of 1942(although in isolated cases Ukrainian policemen also helped Jews to escape). Most of these police deserted in the following spring and joined UPA,” a competitor-nationalist force with which the OUN both often did battle and occasionally joined to carry out joint operations.
Yet another wrinkle in this already wildly complicated fabric tied together with gut string and bloody sinew was the fate of Ukraine’s and Poland’s Catholics. These adherents to Rome had hated Communist Russia but in Poland, where many of the Galician Ukrainian papists had settled, they had been socially well-placed.
With the arrival of the Soviets, this comfortable placement quite quickly disappeared. Thus, the elderly archbishop of the region and his ‘flock’ initially welcomed the Wehrmacht. But as the hundreds of thousands of victims of pogroms and decimation mounted, as many as half were Catholic.
In a deal worked out with the Vatican, though, this gory situation eased slightly. The Church was to become both a booster of Nazism in the event of good tidings in the war and a safe harbor in the event of defeat. This infuriated many nationalists and of course isolated Catholics from Orthodox and Jews and stained them, willy-nilly, with the blood of the dead who either resisted or had the marks—ideological or religious—that branded them for elimination.
Ukraine at that point had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Indeed, the identification of Judaism with socialism and the Bolshevik victory had deep roots in fascist thinking. Not only did mass slaughter occur when nationalist rebels assisted the Nazis in their efforts at annihilation, however, but, at Babi Yar and Odessa, local sympathizers and bigots also aided Germans in the former case and Romanians in the latter instance to murder as many as 30,000 Jews and Commuists in two days outside Kiev and 50,000 Jews and assorted others over the course of a week on the coast in the Fall of 1941.
Some historians maintain that the nationalist thugs helped the Germans to perfect the logistics and organization of these mechanized homicidal operations, which would have seemed admirable, perhaps, were they processing chickens instead of producing human corpses. These collaborators included police officers, the theretofore disfranchised landowners and merchants who had not fled with the White Army when it retreated in defeat, and ‘ordinary’ citizens willing to participate in mass murder in a context that has witnessed at least its fair share of such mayhem. This furious pace of brutal killing did not continue; it could not.
But as Hannah Arrendt recorded in her witnessing of the trial of Adolph Eichman, this viciousness was part of the German policy in ‘the East,’ where the extraction from the population of the maximum product, of wheat and meat, and labor, in the coal mines and metal works, hinged on a practice of terror and brutality that no other period in history has ever surpassed. And these practices of summary execution and arbitrary attacks did persist until relief came.
In the event, some several hundred thousand Jews, mainly Ukrainian, ventured forth with the Red Army in its retreat, many of whom now lie in unmarked graves, others of whom received only leftovers for food and bare or completely inadequate necessities of life as they fled. Conditions were dire, and the enemy was not a benevolent conqueror. The Soviet military capacity could not trade body blows with the world’s second largest industrial producer, nor did liberal conceptions of ‘human rights’ hold sway as the S.S. slit the throats and splattered the brains of whomever they chose to butcher.
In no way had the Soviet retreat abandoned the field of battle, however. In fact, all during the years of German occupation, different bureaus of Russian intelligence ran networks of partisans that made German life ‘at the rear’ as tense and often nearly as dangerous as existence on the frontlines. Soviet-led groups of Jews and other combatants would emerge from the woods and slaughter entire villages that cooperated with the occupying authorities.
They would assassinate or ambush and execute Germans in carefully planned assaults that guaranteed that the Nazis would retaliate massively against the locals. Recruitment to join the underground armies in the trees increased apace.
The life expectancy of these partisans, who included Jews and gypsies and anarchists and peasants as well as more or less dedicated Marxist-Leninists, was never lengthy. Even women would enlist to fight, and they shot and stabbed and punched and played their martial part with as much fervor and deadly effect as their brothers and cousins and other strange men with whom they found themselves embedded.
They fought without hope. They fought without expectation. They gloried in the ability not to expire with a whimper but to exact a cost for each drop of blood that they shed in dying.
But they didn’t have that long to wait, in the scheme of things, despite the terrible toll of even an hour of such horror and oppression. The siege of Stalingrad marked one of humanity’s turning points. For Ukraine, the late Spring and Summer of 1943 would mark another welcome conjunction of Mother Russia and Little Russia. Leading the liberating Red Army divisions was a Ukrainian whom we’ve met earlier, Rodion Malinovsky.
“In February 1943 Malinovsky again took command of the Southern Front—as in 1941. In March Stalin promoted him to the rank of Army General and gave him command of the Southwestern Front, which would later be renamed the 3rd Ukrainian Front. Malinovsky would stay in this position until May 1944.
He drove German troops away from eastern Ukraine, an area rich in coal and other mineral resources. He also once again showed his ability to come up with unusual decisions that could be striking and devastating to his opponents. When his Southwestern Front was taking hold of the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhye in October 1943, Rodion Malinovsky carried out a massive night assault with the help of three armies and two corps—it had never been done in military practice before. Next Up: the Finale in this Ukraine Cycle.
Erotic Snippets—(continued)…
Never our Josiah though. He remained unremittingly relentless in three years of relations between us, ever ready either to suckle and buckle and truckle my exterior pleasure button, on the left hand, or to fuck the special spurting spots inside that unleashed my flowing floods and gushing eruptions, on the right hand. No other fellow surpassed this stew of passion and capacity and appetite, not to mention physique, that our wild American original possessed.
I have often said, only partially in jest, that the Mermon faith came into existence because, in watching Josiah’s fully-clothed intercourse with female acquaintances, or the adherents that they often became, any man would, desperately, long to exhibit just such winning ways of wooing wonder. Indubitably, other men whom I’ve favored have adopted different approaches, once in a while equally disposed to deliver ecstasy’s deepest blissful delights.
Not that even more quotidian encounters completely lacked affirming appeal. I might giggle at the thought, even as I gasped at a particularly probing palpation from my commanding Mr. Smyth’s sweet penis. Often enough, in all honesty, I have forsworn a paying engagement in order to undergo the penetrating undulations of my gifted, garrulous, arrogant, god-among-men.
Then again, I have derived some serious pleasuring measure even from a fellow who could only kiss well, and a different but still overwhelming glory grew in my loins when the occasional sweetheart used his tongue with the same felicitous capacity as Josiah captured with his cock. Still, Josiah’s mouth also worked wonders. I have told him repeatedly. “You, sir, whatever else may be true, are the most well-rounded man imaginable.” I might have added: “at least between the sheets or otherwise skin to skin and sinfully spinning!”
Josiah likes to kneel on his pillowed throne at the base of my stalwart bed. There, he arranges me as a flower in which he will find all the honey that his most feral felicity can facilitate. He quips that this is is favorite inauguration of our conjugation; I delay my climax as long as I can manage because I realize how much the challenge enthralls him.
When I sufficiently beg him not to overflow my waterfall any further, he vaults himself into bed with me, seizing my torso and mounting me on my sturdiest pillows. After his lips again inflame me to the verge of eruption, my thighs spread greedily so that he enters me like a sharp spade into sweetly oozing topsoil. Like many a red-blooded womanly creature, I celebrate stiffened flesh that succors my sucking, slickened hole.
We play the game that he likes best. Josiah tells me that at age nine he encountered two ferrets mating. “They kept at each other for much of my free afternoon.” He knew that he wanted the same. In our time together, these sessions of “Frolicsome Ferret” were the centerpiece of our loving, fucking, sweaty sweetness: one of us on top, astride each other, and then switched; from the side, from the back, administering mutual oral glee, he plumbs my portal to paradise until an explosive eruption shakes him nearly to unconsciousness, from which spasms he emerges with gales and gales of laughing hilarity.
He did not once leave me before some two hours or more had passed. Then again, only once did we greet the dawn together after a night of our ferret-fan-dancing. That was the last occasion on which he seriously sought to convert me into a Mermon who would become merely another wife.
Our time very often also included, especially at the end, after he would come like a cackling cannon, his holding me and rocking me oh-so-gently and reemphasizing that our conjunction had been ordained by God Almighty, and he only devoted so much energy and conviction on me since he didn’t want us to miss out in Heaven what we experienced here—I told him straight out: “This is a part of heaven, right this instant, Josiah. Treasure it!”
Given his ways of seeing things, as a matter of course, of course, he also shamelessly boosted his own import in the overall scheme of things. He didn’t so much boast as try to see himself at the center of life’s big stage. Some of the matters of which he spoke—given his daring incaution and irrepressible enthusiasm to share God’s connubial commands with most comely females—had resulted in wild violence, narrow escapes, and close scrapes with danger and doom indeed. He mentioned Elmyra more than once before I knew all the details.
Following his first speaking to me of Ohio, where his detractors and cuckolds first sought to castrate him, I soon learned that he did not convey such distressing information in order to seek advice or counsel. I did not long try to convey such, in any case, even after Josiah, just across the river in Iowa a month prior to our final meeting, again came within a few moments of tasting the razor in equally deplorable circumstances, tied to a rail and stripped to his essence after a thorough general thrashing.
Not merely to make a scene did I weep then and beg him, even if his following my imprecations would mean sundering us forever, to desist in further advancing his aim, in whatever order fate allowed, to wed and bed some hundreds of lasses local to his territory, of whatever ‘ripe-enough-for-hair-down-there’ age or marital condition; perhaps he believed he could rival the greatest Harems of the Turks and the Hindoos. He laughed and promised me God’s own protection of his holy, sacred, well-hung self.
After the gunplay and murder at the jail, only two blocks from my house, where we had met three nights before his end, I mourned him briefly. My own needs made more than a three day hiatus unprovidential. I still remember him fondly, although I must acknowledge that Captain Higgins is a fine fucker and sweet licker and never insists that God is his prod; he follows some Goddess or other, which he says is needful even though he will never seek a single convert.
Still, whatever the satisfactions of the living, I once in a while quiz myself, like a Lonelyhearts founding maiden, what might have transpired had Josiah and I first met when young, before my Uncle seduced me, or, more honestly, we seduced each other; I certainly knew precisely what I was doing. I’d do it again, yet perhaps Josiah Smyth and Janey Edison might have ‘fucked each other into submission’ and sired fifteen or twenty children, a tiny fraction of those who correctly call the now deceased ‘mighty and strong’ leader their Father-on-Earth.
Might be we would have invented a slightly different kind of Christian tradition. We’d all have worshiped naked. Our holiest rites would be when we paired up in such a state. Our communion cup would have been filled with our fluids, sweat and come and the rest of it.
Josiah saw to my future needs to some extent. He encouraged his well-appointed cousin from Louisville, who refused the Mermon summons, to take up the riverboat trade; he is now one of my patronizing paramours. Every year or so, too, apparently, or at least thus far, I receive other sorts of visitations—Mermon witnesses, missionaries, and emissaries who find themselves passing withing a few score miles—that, in advance, Josiah organized in anticipation of an untimely departure.
I did not mention my dear Mr. Smyth in An American Courtesan Recollects, the first volume of my memoirs. This is merely the first selection of my Mermon Recollections of an Amorous Madam, more delicious encounters of which, as a result, will be forthcoming, the uncensored Mermon Unit of the grand volume of memoirs and mystery of my Goddess-graced life here.
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
Moreover, Thackeray’s The Virginians also includes multiple references to the topic of today’s story. Mr. Marshall Beatty’s ancestors might very well, as the characters in Thackeray’s novel did, have imported their love for and practice of the game from the British Isles many centuries ago. Here is a passage from the narrative that makes that clear in ways that resonate powerfully in relation to the story that we are considering here.
A plantation owner who appreciated gospel singing differed decidedly from his predecessor, “the Colonel…for that worthy gentleman had a suspicion of all cassocks, and said that he would never have any controversy with a clergyman but upon backgammon. Where money was wanted for charitable purposes no man was more ready, and the good, easy, hearty Virginia clergyman, who loved backgammon heartily, too, said that the worthy Colonel’s charity must cover his other shortcomings.”
While British pioneers in statistics and the numbering of the real, as Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk makes clear, were deconstructing the enumeration of permutation and other attributes of everyday probabilities from the habits of dice games, both the highest practitioners and the common herd of storytelling deployed backgammon in their sagas. Jane Austen over and over portrays the game as a combination of tonic and social lubricant, in such works as Emma and Pride and Prejudice and more.
One scholar of Austen focuses on BG’s role in Chapter Eleven of Emma, for instance, where the reader finds this. “Emma spared no exertions to maintain this happier flow of ideas, and hoped, by the help of backgammon, to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own. The backgammon-table was placed; but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary.”
Not only did the board and its routines show up in Austen’s fiction, but it was also at least fairly central in her life. Several biographers have made this argument persuasively, if not dispositively, by referring to parallels between the game of kings in fact and fiction.
“Backgammon is just right for (Mr. Woodhouse), relying enough on chance to offer him an occasional opportunity of victory, especially if the other player is guileful enough to help him win. No wonder it is also the game that Mr. Bennett plays with Mr. Collins(in Pride and PrejudiceI). …
The image of an almost eternal backgammon game with Mr. Woodhouse is all the more powerful because of Emma’s(and Jane’s) native love of intriguing play. …in which game playing is exciting enough to seem dangerous. …As ever, the game brings characters together precisely in order to divide them,” much as one might make of the matter in life itself, now or in the social activities of Austen herself.
As close to a crowning glory among such interlocutors as one might imagine possible, Charles Dickens himself builds his works often enough around backgammon. A mood of despair in A Tale of Two Cities emerges in this way.
“’I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I hope?’
‘No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,’ said the Doctor.
‘I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted against you tonight. Is the tea-board still there Lucie? I can’t see.’”
In Bleak House, Hard Times, Dombey & Sons, and many additional interludes, the masterful Sir Charles weaves BG into the story. It stands for flirtation, for cupidity and other scheming, for the longing for order and the approval of the gods, and for many of the same elements of seeking a muse and amusement that characterize the pastime in the here and now.
One might turn to Fielding or Trollope or any number of lesser lights of the novel in English to make the case indisputably plain. This battle of wits and charming hobby of all sorts of people has had a part both interesting and noteworthy in the lives that we’ve led and that we’re still leading in the world.
None other than one of history’s original true geniuses, whose clarity and farsightedness truly differentiated them from most of us, Charles Darwin himself, was wont to while away a few hours a day at the game, particularly if he were residing at his family’s estate. He referred to BG’s habit-forming contest as a 'tonic for the mind.’ Backgammon has totally infused the lives of innumerable writers and intellectuals of every stripe—a literary pattern guaranteed to continue.
Nor has BG only appeared in print. In fact, though we have barely scratched the surface here, the metaphorical battle—as diversion, pastime, and avocation, and occasionally as vocation, even profession—has come to the forefront repeatedly in movies. Several films use the simple title, Backgammon, to set the stage for all of life’s dramas, from love plots to family matters to psychosocial thrillers. Others include BG in the title as they unfold dramas of love and conflict.
James Bond plays the game with a cheater on whom he ‘turns the tables,’ so to say, in Octopussy. In the wider culture, one can find multiple points at which backgammon appears as an important, or at least well-known, component of how things operate. Perhaps one of the most clear-cut of these sorts of situations is in relation to Playboy’s long love affair with the game, which includes the publication of its very own Book of Backgammon.
To put this brief interlude under wraps, so to speak, readers will have a chance to see what the estimable empiricist David Hume has to offer about our ‘king of games and game of kings.’ His canonical A Treatise of Human Nature states the case like this.
“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? … I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
The Beattie Home
A PRIVILEGED DIXIE-PIEDMONT LIFE & ITS DISINHERITANCE
To return to the main thread of our tale for today, which embodies some of the themes and nuances both literary and more generally cultural, another case of life’s imitation of art and vice versa, Marshall Beatty, if memory serves, was more than a few years older than the Spindoctor, whose ‘retirement ‘has now been ongoing for five years. The year 1945 adheres to memories of conversations from an Aspen condo, over the course of many sessions in 1974-75.
Marshall’s family owned mills near Greenville, South Carolina, in a section of the country where that position meant both significant wealth—one opponent of the Spindoctor’s had to quit our sessions during graduate school when he announced at the start of our final get-together, “I’m gonna have to quit because I’ve decided to marry a mill” who did not approve of gambling and had the promise of a lifetime sinecure to induce compliance—and stringent reaction in matters social and political. According to interlocutors of Jimbo’s acquaintance, Norma Rae presented a comparatively tame picture of attitudes toward class difference and propriety in the land of spinning king cotton.
From this context of wealth and backwardness, the first set of memories that Marshall shared concerned his elder brother, whom his father described as “a fat lazy bastard” before packing him off to military school when Marshall was a young teenager. From thence, his oldest sibling decamped to an asylum roughly two years later, where the first child of the Beatty scion died in 1971 or so, perhaps a suicide.
Marshall’s sister apparently conformed to the necessary strictures of bourgeois existence in South Carolina. At least, Marshall never heard from her directly, and her husband had become general manager of the Beatty complex of mills in and around Greenville and Spartanburg by the mid 1970’s. Next Up: Section Three.