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 tenth incarnation, as meaty as ever. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, interesting and entertaining writing and, second, 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Quite frequently, like today, a particular edition will have no more thematic unity than whatever glue, so to speak, holds together these moments that we are sharing. 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!
Table of Contents
—Introduction: America’s Crushing of Human Possibility in Today’s Russia and Beyond
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Eros & Relationship in an Era of Thermonuclear Survival
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter X
3. Wood Words Essays—Terror As Policy: Conrad, Balfour, & the Coming of Fascism & War
4. Empowered Political Forays—A ‘Blast From the Past’—‘Caitlyn’s’ Campaign: TRANSGENDER ‘IDENTITY’ & CONSCIOUSLY SUBSTITUTING SURREAL FOR REAL
5. Old Stories, & New—”What Do You Do When They Don’t Give a Damn?”
6. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”Little Red,” continued from #8
7. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Eight
8. Nerdy Nuggets—An Apocalyptic Horseman, Considered Historically and Objectively
9. Communication & Human Survival—Imagining a People’s Activating Media’s Future Potential
10. Erotic Snippets—”Hi Beth; Jim Here:” Virtual Libidinal Community’s Actual Incarnations
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Meaning, Russia, What People Truly Want
Typically didactic, definitely; atypically nerdy, perhaps; I loved playing thought games as a teacher. One of my favorites, especially among my young Korean charges—one might consider Joon-Ho Bong’s “Snow Piercer”, Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, or Chan-Wook Park’s “Oldboy” to imagine the sensibility of a typical cohabitant of a Hagwan Gulag, as it were—was to pose a simple question. “Does the world and what happens to us in it make perfect sense?”
Of course, nine out of ten or so would scoff at the mere conjecture that the madness that these jejune citizens experienced was the result of logical processes in relation to human choices. When I would chuckle, compassionately if still insistently, that in fact “it all makes irrefutable sense—otherwise it couldn’t be happening,” they would, except for the stubborn ones, join me in chortling mirth.
The upshot, I would explain, a helpful note for kids trying to grapple with parental expectations that they ‘test well’ and gain knowledge, is that the universe is not insane, but our thoughts about it, and expectations of it, undeniably are nuts. I pointedly noted that for me, them, and by extension if not then in evidence, all the readers of Big Tent Review, this awareness was great news. If nothing else, it would guarantee that we can, always and without fail, so long as we make an attempt, improve our awareness.”
One might consider such hypermodern miracles of engineering and design as Hydrogen Bombs, for instance. Ha ha. I mean, a series of Driftwood Messages make this point about devices whose main targets have always been Moscow and its Russian strategic assets, all the while these ecocidal engines have always had much more quotidian quotas to fulfill, so to speak, simultaneously underpinning profits and power for the plutocrats of capital’s supremacy.
Here is one such piece’s pondering. “Indisputably, Immutably, Hydrogen Bombs Exist For Precisely a Pair of Practical Purposes, the Profiteering of Plutocrats & the Effecting of Mass Collective Suicide---When We No Longer Fancy Average Folks' Financing Self Immolation to Fatten Trustafarian Corporate Coffers, Then We Will Rid Ourselves of These Grisly, Ghoulish, Genocidal Armageddon Arsenals: Arguably, Failure to Act Along Such Life Affirming Lines Can Only Persist Among Criminally Insane Idiots, Psychopathic Fools Who Deserve the Fate That Awaits Them."
No doubt COVIDification may provide capital an adequately authoritarian harbor in which to dock its dreams of being the only way to organize ourselves. However, this methodology for transferring the slings and arrows of ruling class assault from external to domestic bullseyes has apparently not been enough: otherwise, how explain either Kiev or Gaza? This topic will appear repeatedly as BTR continues.
For at least a couple of decades, in any event, basically up to the accession thirty years ago of an erstwhile unipolar world in which the U.S. acted as imperial center, I translated, organically and dialectically, if also ever so critically, the advisory of my Reserve Officer Training Corps mentor, Sergeant Mineer, about how ‘our country needs a good nickel war.’ In my view, this addiction to Keynesian boosting via supremacy in the arts of mass murder led to a contradiction.
No matter how long capital can drag on its inevitably losing efforts, these would still not be enough to handle the toxic surpluses and profit hunger of the system itself. Under such circumstances, the demonization and dehumanization of Russians and Chinese proceed apace, promising enough plunder to satisfy the greediest of porcine profiteers, as it were. For a time anyway, so long as the restive rabble can be quietly repressed, this is the endgame of the bourgeoisie.
Jack London, in the Preface of his War of the Classes, humorously epitomizes this dynamic, as easily applicable today as when he published it twelve decades back. “The kind old world spun on, coupons were clipped, and larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers. Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what they say, of course, is so—to the bourgeois mind.”
That such eventualities of profiteering’s imprimatur inevitably involve, quite often or perhaps most often, the operations of confidential agents who now operate National Intelligence agencies is as obvious as Vladmir Putin’s KGB origins and his pointing out on Tucker Carlson’s program that his host and interrogator had spook connections of his own. That the CIA is everywhere, what wary and savvy Chileans call “el cia,” almost goes without saying, so that I always can rely on the agency’s putting in an appearance should I so choose.
For this issue, Number Ten, a volume came my way that expressed such potentiality in the most grotesque terms imaginable, as a part of the plausible explanatory background of the murder of Sharon Tate, whose father, after all, was a high-level, highly decorated U.S. Army Intelligence Officer. Many a speculation of grotesque conspiracy and of blowback’s abominations have accompanied reflection on the killings, on Manson and his ‘family,’ and on other aspects of things with a presence here in BTR.
A thorough delving of Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties will appear in these pages soon enough. A back-cover reviewer’s blurb presents a plausible way of encapsulating things. “If your friends call you paranoid, maybe they’re just ignorant.”
Circumstantially, at a minimum, the potential undeniably exists that Colonel Paul James Tate’s activities, or the actions of others with whom he associated in compartmentalized fashion, with Non-Disclosure-Agreements de rigeur for all and sundry, might have influenced the occurrence and timing of the butchery in L.A.’s hinterland of hills and desert.
Criticism of such views is clearly the established paradigm. O’Neill is absolutely fanatical about not claiming too much, at recognizing how inevitably speculative are conclusions when the perpetrators of chaotic machinations admit up front that they lie, destroy records, and otherwise stonewall attempts to shed light on things. That a huge part of Intelligence’s erstwhile intelligent manipulations of matters at hand revolved around race, with its ever-ready handles to give a life to divisive conquest, merely makes the book’s work even more compelling.
Whatever the case may be, this much is simply incontrovertible, echoing Martin Luther King’s prescient admonition that ‘the bombs that we drop in Vietnam will explode in our own living rooms.’ A culture that promulgates, delegates, celebrates, and generally administers violent carnage so as to protect imperial imprimatur generally, on the one hand, along with specific ‘strategic assets,’ on the other hand, will without exception experience exactly the sort of ‘blowback’ that Warren Zevon characterizes in his spirited, spooky song about professional spooks, “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner,” in which Patty Hearst’s machine gun bursts originate in the CIA’s ‘wanting Roland dead.’
Things make sense. We get what we deserve. What goes around comes around. Does Sharon Tate’s murder somehow reflect, or perhaps even parallel, the brutality and butchery in Gaza, another ‘intel-scheme’ with loads of potential for consequential developments that only sadistic insanity could ever intend? The thoughts that such questions suggest are totally speculative, but they are neither insane nor idle.
When mass murder is a way of life, seemingly random carnage might ever be close at hand among practitioners of such a pathway through strife. Again, did this affect Sharon Tate and her eight month old fetus? In the sense that MLK evoked, the answer must remain that such an imputation is irrefutable. In any wider or deeper sense, one may not now prove this indictment, yet just such a charge might be forthcoming, or, at least, could be supportable in the realm of the real.
Tom O’Neill says as much, even if it is in measured, diplomatic, seemingly speculative prose. In essence, or in other words, Americans spend their lives investing non sequiturs and nonsense and noisome manure with iconic importance. Can we keep up this foolish fostering of infelicitous falsity? In economic terms, the idealization of mayhem can look like a going concern; in political terms, it certainly helps to keep at the division and conquest on which empire depends.
In the social arena, however, such efforts must appear at minimum likely to falter. After all, equally applicable to BTR’s ongoing propagation of meaning amid mayhem are all the ‘twisted-sister’ depictions of human sexuality and its inculcation as a barely tolerable evil practice that must elicit insidious social repression. The unavoidable offshoots of such ideation have come to the Big Tent Review, in the serial presentation of the work of Wilhelm Reich, whose Mass Psychology of Fascism documented the role of sexual repression in any expression of Nazi ideology.
A recent New Yorker “Reporter at Large” item, “Behind a Locked Door,” tells the tale of a middle-aged female, successful and stalwart, who is seeking to come to grips with her adolescent institutionalization, an incarceration that specified that she must keep her hands at her sides and never let them stray. Where might they wander? The answer is obvious, even as its promoters feel chary to say so aloud. It’s another attack on human sexuality’s self-pleasuring propinquity, a tendency that almost every human who has ever lived has shared to some extent.
The author of the memoir had much more to her account than this shamed oppression of carnal urges. Her work declared unequivocally that speaking out had helped her come to terms with everything, even as she specifically recognized the anti-erotic components of her personal lockdown.
Thus, bearing witness, that we are all prurient and sexual, is part of human liberation, quite plausibly essential for our viability. Many chapters of All God’s Cousins highlight this point; other elements of Jimbo’s Big Tent have also done so, an emphatic, entirely sacral spotlighting that will persist.
This obvious intertwining of the erotic and the sacral is everywhere in culture, one reason for the popular quip, “Sex Sells!” Such a witnessing took place in Roe v. Wade, when Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion for the majority noted that almost all religions—even Catholicism till a century ago or so—viewed the designation of personhood as a status that accompanied live birth.
He stated the obvious and showed how putrid any such clear tendency otherwise would be when he wrote as follows. “It has been argued occasionally that these laws were the product of a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct. Texas, however, does not advance this justification…and…no court or commentator has taken the argument seriously. The appellant and amici contend, moreover, that this is not a proper state purpose at all.” Indeed; yet it lurks behind the scenes, this revulsion of the repressed a part and parcel of Nazism’s nastiest incarnations, whether German or American.
Along similar lines, and yet altogether differently, the Ten New Commandments offer options for honoring outcomes that have nothing to do with denial, zero connection with demonizing our flesh, not a single attribute that depends on despising our natures. Over time, this accidental codification of sacred thought, albeit with no clear-cut eroticized elements, replete with my own ‘burning bush moment,’ will have multiple iterations here in BTR.
In actual fact, I’ve been half seriously considering starting a first Church of the Ten New Commandments as part of my outreach for an audience. I almost never follow through on such ‘grand plans,’ but this one is certainly at least as rich as Elmer Gantry as a literary or filmic premise. Mine would be a chapel in which the preacher would never need to steal, LOL!
This mantle of spirituality touches matters of worship and doctrine. Though I honor Goddess Life Force Energy as well as the Nazarene’s promise that ‘the kingdom of God is at hand,’ truly something that we can grasp right this second, I am utterly ecumenical in envisioning extensive holinesss. I would hazard a guess that this type of positing is as immutably human as are our primal pleasuring propensities, so to say.
No matter what, arguably if not ineluctably, all things spiritual inescapably entangle our most convivial and primal carnal connections. In this regard, the Goddess’ presence as dispenser and receptor of all that is orgasmic and ecstatically felicitous comprises one huge ‘talking-point’ in favor of paganism’s concrete materialization of the real.
I have often pondered something akin to a SPAARAS process, Sex Positive Advice About Relationships & Sexuality. The central import of honoring Life Force Energy, after all is said and done, must ever revolve around different ways of sharing, moving, or otherwise imparting those emanations back to the Goddess via our connections with ourselves, each other, and all of nature in its wild and wanton perpetuation.
In any event, one obvious aspect of much of Big Tent Reviewing is something along these lines. Stories advise, admonish, assess, divulge, reveal, explore, and ever so much more in regard to erotic interconnection in history and the here and now.
How about this issue then? All God’s Cousins introduces a former priest who has just consummated his third set of marital nuptials. His guides sent him toward the priesthood so as to improve his chances of never having to rest his libido, about which handsome prelates never needed to worry.
Four other components of Number Ten touch these tantric nerves as well. Old Stories & New gives us Trip Mosby, perhaps the quintessential present-pass villain; Classic Folk, Rejuvenated delivers a Preface to the coming novelization of Red’s and Sam’s marital life; New Folk Fables brings readers to the cusp of Quiet Jack’s triumph through trial and tribulation; and Erotic Snippets takes a slice of life from the virtual world made veritably verifiable, so to speak.
In BTR’s present installment, in addition to these erotic, or at least exotic, evocations of storytelling, both Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits and the concluding piece of the Bruce-&-Caitlin-show in Empowered Political Forays also dispense nuanced nuggets about our carnality and our politics. We could characterize this pair as a Propaganda of the Intimate, on one hand in alignment with, and on the other hand in opposition to, how we orchestrate our libidinal lives in the here and now.
The remainder of #10, this time the narrative nonfiction, includes two new items. As a matter of course, these supposedly novel appearances ineluctably touch on or otherwise entail many of the topics and themes that we’ve been gnawing since August, 2023 started things off
The first piece comes along in the Wood Words Essay, an intertwined concatenation of the actual inception of modern spycraft in a Joseph Conrad novel, the origins of contemporary Israel in a World War One ‘Declaration,’ the boosting of fascism and war as part of this life’s imitation of art and vice versa, and plenty more too. If the body-count were not so high, nor the torture so painful, an observer of everything might easily fashion the entire charade as a bombastic, sarcastic farce.
The second, a Nerdy Nugget indeed, appears toward the end of the issue. It demonstrates that disease and war and social pathology must ever intersect and play off of each other. Although the focus of the essay is on the humorously named Spanish Flu—reports of such lethality elsewhere violated censorship practices reminiscent of YouTube’s and FaceBook’s constrictions of journalism and commentary with the convenient misinformation labeling thereof—its precepts and insights apply with equal force in our own hyper-COVIDified context.
And that friends, is a wrap of the present Introductory invitation as it were. It’s plenty, as always—if too much then with apologies, if imperfect then with the acknowledgement of shared humanity and all its flaws, if amicable then with BTR’s typical intentionality of hope and appreciation. Blah blah blah.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
Again, ha ha, I am seeking guidance, an existential duty in my estimation of things. In #10, the question that I pose is complex and multidimensional; will Tarot proffer nuggets of nuance? ‘Food for thought’ is a guaranteed repast, in any case.
Here’s the query. “What are some insights or enlightening thoughts about Eros and relationship when all of us are coexisting with the imminent ecocidal eminence of thermonuclear weaponry?”
This particular humble-inquisition-of-Mother-Gaia-Goddess originates, almost certainly, in the amazing grace of my grand good fortune in encountering a life partner’s sweet embraces amid the grim horizons of what I once termed, in these pages, “the bleakest love landscape in history.” Perhaps our forebears, heartier and more in touch with source energy, could intone with true intention, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”
Today’s quip would be different, no doubt along these lines: ‘Worry, whine, and take toxic antidepressants, for we’d hate to notice that we’re all preparing to murder each other.’ In such a context, of chemical castration and pharmaceutically induced anorgasmia, an environment of fraught erotic connection becomes a realm that readily renders relationship irremediable, if not altogether irredeemable, at a minimum seemingly so. The question for Mother Goddess in Number Ten, in the event, stems from such sources.
In ‘letting my heart come through my fingertips’ with this interrogatory, I plucked an astonishing array. It lacked any Major Arcana, as if the primary portals to pertinent purpose had shut down, given the willful ignorance of our collectively suicidal intentions in the here and now.
Instead, it served up seven exemplars, each as apt as imaginable, every one an honor card, perhaps because these iconic depictions most clearly mirror the arguably royal, truly heroic, human responsibility to take care and pay attention in regard to Eros in our lives, lest we otherwise dance past the edge of a cliff of doom from which no return will ever be likely. In the event, the Essence presented Penelope, she whose undying commitment to a living connection with Odysseus was so ferocious that she withstood the threats and imprecations and blandishments of scores of false suitors and lying would-be lovers, who wished only to shoulder the King’s mantle and dispatch her son, leaving relationship’s honorable intersection eviscerated, in sum, like today, threatening to explode a thermonuclear device to poison the foundations of any true marriage, any meaningful melding of mind and soul.
The second position, as always in these Spiral Spreads, demarcates Past Influences. Ever important, the profferal here is some sort of minor miracle, at minimum. …(continued below the PayWall)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(All these subplots, oh my Goddess! Yes indeed, we all contain multitudes of the experiences of others as they collide with our lives. So too today, in #10, having moved from Detroit to Atlanta and from Sydney to Manila to Canberra to Atlanta in the past two chapters, do we move in diocesan fashion from San Francisco to Atlanta in bringing forward a former Jesuit Priest, one about whom Lou’s mother would have intoned, soulfully, “what a waste!” had he remained part of a celibate Catholic cohort; of course, had he done so, he would never have set his trajectory to play important parts in Lou’s future, all of which, in the fullness of time, may yet receive due notice.)
CHAPTER X
The sense of merriment was palpable despite the all-but-deserted state of the departmental suite. Maria Callas' and Giuseppe di Stefano's “Libiamo” spilled stereophonically forth as the athletic professor and former Jesuit mouthed the lyrics and swayed, stemware brimming with golden liqueur, like a sodden actor on the main stage. Next to the Candler School of Theology in the new office that he occupied, still almost antiseptic in its spare and gleaming surfaces, he perched himself on his recently acquired Danish Modern work station, ancient Latin tome in hand. While La Traviata wove its web of campy sweet tragedy, “but with a real sense of a stalwart working class consciousness through it all,” Dr. Bianchi's stream of consciousness carried him far from his search for “evidence of ecological ideation among early Church elders.”
Instead, he remembered Justina's last kiss, so like the hot mouth-to-mouth proletarian play of his teenaged years, and wondered what kind of cohabiting couple they would make when they tied the knot just after the Fourth of July. He looked at the calendar. “That's exactly one hundred eighty-seven hours and twenty-three minutes from now.” He grinned at his capacity to do a calculation like that in his head. Then he turned to a more practical question about the pending ceremony.
He was marrying “a real doctor this time, a lapsed papist like me.” His wry smile about his “first Roman Catholic bride” led him to ponder a further irony.
“I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd let another Jesuit marry me though;” he chuckled outwardly and finished his thought, “not for the third time.” After all, he reasoned, “it would be too much like tempting fate, like some sort of crazed Irishman, all devil-may-care and insouciant,” which he distinguished in an ineffable intuitive sense as decidedly different from his own amicable and measured Neapolitan savoir faire, “tempered with good California know-how, of course.” Thus, a friend from Morehouse, a Unitarian revolutionary of the sort that he seemed to attract “like shit draws flies,” would oversee his orchestrating Mendelssohn's Wedding March yet again.
On the cusp of this third set of nuptials, not counting the marriage to Christ that he'd had annulled, so to say, he was in a jolly mood for recollection and reflection, aided by the Camus Cognac he'd been sipping before and after his only Friday class. Whenever he flew to conferences or interviews or merely for the joy of being a working class kid who could now jet around the world in comfort, he bought a minimum of one bottle of the venerable brand, “Le Grande Marque,” for which he'd developed a taste as a feisty postwar San Francisco teenager whose uncle ran a Bar, Amore, on Haight Street, where the fog was like a chilly pillow for the drunks who peopled his youth.
Ever since he had flexed his muscles and run errands for Zio Carlo, alternating between bouncer and courier, Vincente Allesandro Bianchi had liked “drinking fancy. With every taste, I still toast Albert Camus,” whose only connection with the venerable Cognac was a name that the ever-studious young California Italian had worshiped as an icon of all that was au courant and savvy. “I share his taste for complexity doused in shame, laden with irony.” He giggled again; “ours is a tasty, vinegary-sweet signature, without ever being bitter.”…(continued below the PayWall)
Wood Words Essays—Conrad, Balfour, Coordinating Boon in Palestine
A new version of “Terrorist Babies” will soon grace Marshall Arts “Politics & Personal Empowerment” section. Its text may be instructive as to how matters truly stand, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Alabama, in Appalachia, everywhere.
“Inescapably, All Human Cousins Have Begun As Infants So Far—All & Sundry Americans; All Russians; All Chinese; All Adherents of All Spiritual Traditions & Perspectives; All ‘Liberals;’ All ‘Conservatives; All Communists; All Socialists; All Capitalists; All & Sundry Terrorists, Establishing an Indisputably Universal Biosocial Context, the Ominous Ongoing Reality of Which Ought to Require All Inquisitive Citizens, With the Utmost Urgency & Diligence, to Inquire, ‘What Would Need to Happen to Entice Almost All the Members of Our Factional Fractious Clan to Treat Each Other With Amicable Regard & Mutual Respect?’"
Furthermore, to punctuate the obvious applicability of this little note to Israel’s propagation of carnage in Palestine, one might also notice how thermonuclear destruction lurks at the heart of this entire dynamic, just as H-Bombs are a huge component of why, or at least how, Ukraine’s mayhem may also initiate our species annihilation. In any case, Israel is one of seven or eight nations on Earth with this capacity to use fission to fuse mass destruction.
The Marshall Arts Feral Nerd Performance Space includes plenty of ideas about Politics & Personal Empowerment. Although the lineage is not absolutely obvious, this group of messages do echo an all-too-frequently overlooked little gem of Joseph Conrad, whose Under Western Eyes, readers here may remember, we’ve already considered as an exemplary epistle of Russia and ‘the West.’ After all, one can obviously see in contemporary agendas of social control an ‘All-Russia, All-the-Time’ blame game in progress.
The Secret Agent was probably the first full length spy story. Published in 1907, as the Ottoman Empire—much to Britain’s delight—was coming to pieces, and Europe’s ruling classes were setting a table for worldwide conflagration, the book put Germany in England’s crosshairs. A spook for Germany in the event, as well as a purveyor of pornography, no less, plays at the beginning of the book the role of a protagonist whose ties to England, apparently, are less than robust.
Quietly, yet clearly, the author sets the stage for what is happening and what is to come, an agent provocateur whose task is to ‘pinpoint the police’s attention,’ where the agent desires it to focus. “He made no sign of greeting; neither did Mr Verloc, who certainly knew his place; but a subtle change about the general outlines of his shoulders and back suggested a slight bending of Mr Verloc’s spine under the vast surface of his overcoat. The effect was of unobtrusive deference.
‘I have here some of your reports,’ said the bureaucrat in an unexpectedly soft and weary voice, and pressing the tip of his forefinger on the papers with force. He paused; and Mr Verloc, who had recognised his own handwriting very well, waited in an almost breathless silence. ‘We are not very satisfied with the attitude of the police here,’ the other continued, with every appearance of mental fatigue.
The shoulders of Mr Verloc, without actually moving, suggested a shrug. And for the first time since he left his home that morning his lips opened.
‘Every country has its police,’ he said philosophically. But as the official of the Embassy went on blinking at him steadily he felt constrained to add: ‘Allow me to observe that I have no means of action upon the police here.’
‘What is desired,’ said the man of papers, ‘is the occurrence of something definite which should stimulate their vigilance. That is within your province—is it not so?’"
And indeed, this ‘stimulation of vigilance’ has remained centrally important ‘within the province’ of confidential agents since the days when they worked for banks and rich lawyers instead of for governments and their ‘intelligence agencies.’ Without question, of course, Conrad’s story does not touch on Palestine or even the wider ‘Middle East,’ where agents provocateurs are utterly ubiquitous.
Its applicability, in the event, revolves around how the default position in Palestine became the ‘establishment of a Jewish homeland,’ a la the brief note from Arthur James Balfour, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, to Walter Daniel Rothschild, who, though he showed little talent for his family’s banking business, was more or less the leader of English Zionists, who had been fiercely lobbying for this outcome, which also gave England a sure foothold on territory immediately adjacent to the Suez Canal perhaps at that time the number one critical capital component of world trade and the social control that depended on it. Whatever the case may be, the Balfour Declaration established, very much along lines congruent with Conrad’s novel, the most highly ‘stimulated police vigilance’ possible in the territory that now includes both Israel and Palestine, the Gaza Strip included.
A potent Wood Message punctuates this point. Entitled “Impossible Necessities,” it makes a relatively simple statement. “All Who See Clearly Recognize That Homo Sapiens Social Endeavors Have Persisted Because Agitation From Below Has Repeatedly Arisen to Resist Ruling Rubrics That Have Insistently, Almost Universally, Regimented Murder & Mayhem Rather Than Even Contemplating, Let Alone Ratifying, Even the Most Compelling & Rudimentary Societal Reform; As Plutocratic Capacity to Control Or Crush Insurgency For Change Has Become Almost Irresistible, …" (continued below the PayWall)
Empowered Political Forays—Caitlin’s Campaign & Its Surreal Solipsism
Well then, here we are in the present pass when, whatever critique that we might provide about societal pathology in contemporary America, such criticism would never suggest for even a second that transsexuals were receiving, at least in all and sundry mass media realms, even an iota less than their fair share of human rights and social potential. The first two segments of this partial but still factual presentation of Bruce Jenner’s ‘transubstantiation,’ so to speak, have revolved around questions of scope, and attendant pondering of the always apt challenge, “So what?!”
This very brief part three delves other instances when these sorts of matters have percolated to the surface of my life. In so doing, they lay the basis for delineating social equality’s reality in the world’s swirling realms of the real. “So what?” indeed!
One could easily turn to a Nobel Prize laureate like Sigrid Undset, whose Kristin Lavransdatter and Master of Hestviken series ooze erotic fervor and every sort of twisting and turning of the masculine and feminine that are today au courant. Or one might delineate how Geronimo, when he was leading the Apache resistance, used cross-dressing tactics to instill terror and foster mayhem among gringo and Spanish cavalry alike. Or one would be able easily to locate manifold mythic traditions that have bent gender’s ‘natural’ appearance: father’s assuming mother’s garb at rites of passage can be de rigueur; maenad fury at prying men’s participating in their ritual abandon forms the stuff of legend and drama. These and countless other examples are readily accessible, any one of which is at once juicier and richer than the innuendo and pretense that are the primary material of the Caitlyn shtick.
Furthermore, and finally, in the course of a life fairly full of incident and experience, I personally have encountered transgendered people, in contexts that compelled interest and attention, though no one had the public relations muscle and hustle to command a Vanity Fair or Time Magazine cover. My first long term sweetheart, dear Doris, when we broke up in a burst of gory glory, ended up with a fine fellow who within a decade had taken Bruce’s route for himself, albeit two decades ahead of Ms/r. Jenner. Doris’ partner kept his ‘equipment,’ but otherwise he lived as a woman, so that his two sons had, in a complicated sort of way, a birth mother and a father-mother as well.
In another instance, in one of the many logistical interludes that formed a part of my ‘back’s supporting my wrist’ strategy for almost a quarter century, a good friend whom I moved for the third or fourth time promised me a rare treat “for your story files,” as she put the case with a knowing nod. After I had assembled the bed and attached all the mirrors and such, she ushered an extremely striking woman into our midst. She was at least six foot three inches tall and extremely well-proportioned. She was once a he, my friend explained later, something that I had almost instantly surmised, though I wouldn’t have guessed that s/he had served as a flanker for the Atlanta Falcons, a pro-bowl candidate, moreover, whose orientation was gay.
Of course, as a fully cut transsexual female, he was for a time a ‘straight woman’ even as he hadn’t started out, as a little baby boy with a National Football League future, as a female of any sort. Some of the details of the regimen that s/he followed, as an original male whose penis now was compost, and whose scrotal presentation was, presently, of a ‘vaginal opening’ that would become scar tissue without regular ‘exercise,’ are a bit daunting to consider. …(continued below the PayWall)
Old Stories, & New
“What Do You Do When They Don’t Give a Damn?”
I grew up around farmers and farming, so I almost know what I'm talking about when I say that the idea of an idyllic rural heart-land is a crock of shit. More to the point, I recently tried to turn a score in the stock market into a peaceful pursuit of husbandry in South Georgia. My experience there should make a skeptic out of even the most devout champion of the bucolic in American life.
I didn't approach the deal like a naif, if that's what you're thinking. I recruited my brother-in-law, recent degree in ag-management’s adorning the wall of his study. We found a property with 250 acres that had proved lush in the production of seed corn, complete with all the out-buildings necessary for the preparation of top quality hogs. Most important, I had a practical lock on participation in a contract to supply half the military East of the Mississippi with pork, thanks to a friend in a position of authority at Fort Gillem in Atlanta.
What I didn't factor into my thinking was Trip Mosby and his family. They own much of the property and control most anything political in the area around where we were going to be raising pigs for profit. His uncle is chief of the Superior Court judiciary, for example, and his brother-in-law's the County Sheriff.
Both John, my sister's husband, and I anted up ten grand or so to buy the property we wanted. And we started shopping for contractors to perform the necessary improvements, and for suppliers for irrigation equipment, tractors, and other implements necessary to carry out the operation we envisioned. Both of us were living part-time on the farm, part-time with our families back in Peachtree City, South of 'Hotlanta', uptown down South.
The first intimation of our doom came from Charlie, the owner and main clerk of the hardware store we were using in Damascus. Like just about everyone else we'd had any dealings with in the area, he'd been cautiously enthusiastic about our arrival and in general genial about our prospects to do whatever great things we wanted. But when I told him that we not only planned to sell pork but that the military was our prospective buyer, he gulped, noticeably. His look was that of a man with a bee in his shirt, afraid to swat it, afraid to let it alone.
"What is it Charlie," I couldn't help but ask, "you look like you just sucked down a horsefly."
He forced a chuckle out, but wouldn't say anything else. When John finished getting what we'd come for, though, after we paid, Charlie addressed me with a simple admonition, not obviously related to his earlier demeanor. "Y'know, Mr. Lewis, I was you, 'fore I bought any sows, I'd pass what I planned by Mr. Trip Mosby. ...If I was you."
John and I exchanged a glance, and I asked, "Who is this...Mr. Mosby?"
"He just sells a lotta hogs, and, uh, he, uh, was the first from round here to, uh, ya know, sell to the gov'ment."
After this little chat, my partner and I asked around about the estimable 'Trip' Mosby. Opinions varied as to his morals, his outlook, the kind of fellow he was deep down. But everyone acknowledged his and his clan's sway over local politics, and almost all of our contacts had a story to illustrate their particular view.
We found out he had homes in town and on the farm, and that supposedly a different woman and children occupied the different domiciles. He had purportedly shot a man in the face who opposed selling materials to him at the price Mr. Mosby named in advance of meeting. He seemed a tough, avaricious, and calculating man.
The characterization that we heard over and over, however, was at least as unsettling as any of the specific recollections, though they were bad enough. Charlie, from the feed and supply store, had mentioned this attribute on the day he initially told us about 'Trip.'
"The thing about Mr. Mosby...he just don't give a damn!"
The day I first met 'Trip' Marshall Mosby, I sat at a dark little table at "Gertie's Cafe" for an hour and eleven minutes past the time we fixed for lunch. I just about kicked the counter I got so steamed, but every time I prepared to leave, Gertie wrung her hands and told me, "no need to hurry off, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Mosby's always a little late."…(continued below the PayWall)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
Today’s selection offers up an epilogue, or summation, for an initial ‘fairy tale’ recontextualization, on the one hand, and a prologue, of a ‘what then?’ initiation of the yarn’s plausible continuing development, a stab at storytelling that reveals in such ancient yarns connecting layers, perhaps, of the entire fabric of mythos and psyche and human awareness. Soon enough, BTR will reconfigure young Jack, the giant-killer, interspersing this new child’s story among the new chapters about Red and her Woodsman.
Red & Sam—Wild Hearts Married in Wild Woods(Continued from #8)
My readers, those who can listen to my words, have witnessed the iconic joining of these two exemplary representatives of Divinely Feminine and Divinely Masculine power. I am Marvalo, instructor in the Mantic Arts of none other than Rose Wolfbane, better known perhaps as Red Riding Hood, or Little Red.
What follows this briefing serves as a recording, so to say, of the legend that these two, Rose and Sam Woodcroft, inscribed in their lifelong connection. They confronted together the core questions of embodiment’s delicate miracle. I know. I watched them and, through my process of Reading Goddess Cards, advised their seeking to meet each other more fully and lusciously and forgivingly.
For prefatory purposes, perhaps, we might pose these very central and yet very personal questions more generally, to wit along these lines. ‘Given our often altogether fragile grip on a thriving survival, how should any two lovers plot a course toward purposeful lifelong union?’ Or, instead, one might interrogate existence like this: ‘How should a couple that truly intends a committed life together handles instances of separation or even betrayal?' More positively, one might query along these lines: ‘How might or ought a bonded pair seek to balance the course of cognitive and carnal conversation in their affairs?’ One might extend this litany of inquiry indefinitely.
As will often work out to be true, a piece of Driftwood Message Art from the distant future offers up an inscription that may circumscribes important information in formulating an approach to all such inquisitive probes. “Every Beacon a Blade to Wield & Spear to Dodge, Every Wave a Chance to Rise & Surf & in So Doing Risk Drowning, & So on in Each Dalliance With Embodiment's Dark Dervish Divinities That Might Also Deliver Dissolution & Demise: the Only Operative Inquiry in Regard to These Inescapable Existential Paradoxes, 'How Shall One Live in Such a Context,' Will Ever Remain the Sole Query That Can Even Conceivably Yield Some Semblance of Sense & Purpose That, Though Always Uncertain & Never Complete, May in Turn Permit Anyone's Transit Through Things to Enter the Realm of a Joyous Life, Well & Potently Lived."
Well then, assuming that such an eventuality, a Joyous Life, Well & Potently Lived, is uniformly an existential hope, or even a duty or a calling, a living and breathing Homo Sapiens specimen can readily specify certain sine-qua-non elements of such an exalted state. One of these, particularly pertinent as Prologue here, expresses how our mythic characters clearly narrate an embodiment of the paradoxical and difficult necessity of coupling successfully for any full instantiation to come to pass of said ‘joyous days and nights of living and breathing,’ inherently an exercise that reaches whatever its climactic gleeful completion permits, so to say, in carnal and collaborative tandem.
Having declared as much, maybe we should ‘come down to cases,’ to use a grassroots phrasing of the matters at hand. How might Sam and Red best complement each other while also collaborating and indulging ecstasy’s ongoing connubial eruption in their marital embraces of engagement and epiphany? I can ask this, without being coy, because in a sense I know the answer.
As a seer who helped Red herself achieve an almost overarching capacity to delve the concatenations of evolution’s unfolding in our lives, I learned of the couple’s marital conjugation through the many years of their joining—which started when Red was 16 and Sam 21—that flowered before even the coming initiation of a second primary narrative, which covers only a period of 13 moons, from the New Moon at Red’s twenty-fourth birthday celebration till just shy of one year later, when Sam was a few months past his twenty-ninth annual transit’s giving way to his thirtieth orbit.
Before I dig into these details of the years prior to the aforesaid second primary narrative, however, I want to reveal a bit more about my process. I follow the Goddess’ guidance in applying the great Tar-Oh Te tradition. When Red first applied to me to teach her, I knew all these people, but only peripherally. In the event, she was but twenty-one; she had just born Sam a second daughter, and he was embarked on a daunting journey to the East that would take him a year and test their union with its greatest difficulties, just as he finished his second Goddess-Cycle of years.
To determine whether I would take on this tutelage of our little community’s most famous female representative, I asked her to pluck three cards. They gave me the answer that I sought. …(continued below the PayWall)
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—VIII
(Like Quiet Jack, introverted Jimbo has lived through the transition, at least so far. When this thought occurred to me, I burst out laughing in merriment. And when last we left our hero, he was still breathing, albeit with at best unenviable prospects. En route to discovering Quiet Jack’s intended terrible fate, Viscount Thompson and his daughter Eileen, at once glorious and distraught, encounter the ‘authorities,’ which is to say England’s constabular officials. Their interaction, which concerns our last-seen-unconscious protagonist, is not in the least friendly. How will all this play out?)
"Yessss! I see now," piped in Thomas Kinnealy, bouncing in his saddle with enthusiasm.
"And of course you might think so," admitted Officer Richards, reaching into his breast pocket to retrieve stiff parchment, "but as you can see here," at which he waved the paper before Viscount T's nose while his horse, sensing perhaps the discomfiture present, pranced a mincing little stutter step, "Constable O'Brien, who has been so ill recently with the grippe, has been good enough to deputize us to act in his stead, specifically requesting that we find this Mr. Higgins so as to retrieve some elixir of herbs that Master O'Brien takes an oath is the only medicinal that has eased his illness."
At the mention of dear Jack's name, the solemn Eileen, who had been focusing her gaze inward and far afield for some echo of her lover, visibly once again returned her visage to the present company, rising and stiffening in her saddle, leaning forward, lips parted, a wild widening of her eyes transpiring, transfixed to listen further to the newly deputized Richards, who, as Eileen' father sat his mount, also noticeably nervous, in a state of stunned breathlessness, continued: "And about this fellow, Jack Higgins, we will be only too pleased, following proper procedure, of course..."
"Of course," Kinnealy punctuated with a righteous index finger.
"To question or otherwise investigate matters of interest in a most thorough fashion, I dare say!"
Sir Winston's smile at this performance, while a veritable torch in the midnight moonlight, could not match the warmth and joy of Eileen's whole being when she realized she might possibly dare hope that her man would yet live. …(continued below the PayWall)
Nerdy Nuggets—Death’s Doomed Destiny’s Differentials
Death’s universal doom notwithstanding, no one who is compos mentis actively prefers higher mortality or more likely lethal morbidity than others experience. Yet substantial differences do transpire: certain babies, certain adults, certain sick people, do much worse or much better than their peers.
These varied outcomes, whether salubrious or lethal, originate in social relations of one sort or another, the basis for the Science, Technology, & Society wisdom that the Social Determinants of Health—essentially differentials in class expectations of well-being—are most dispositive in dictating developments on a day-to-day basis. The bit of an assessment here, in a couple of installments or so, concerns instances of virulent epidemics that social conditions have profoundly influenced, especially today in the unfolding of the so-called Spanish Flu.
Spanish Flu Victims As Casualties of World War One
The wholesale murder of World War One—which was really akin to the ‘Eighth World War’ or something—likely humankind’s earliest version of Mass Collective Suicide, was the first such conflict to occur under conditions of industrially efficient slaughter. The New York Review of Books proffered a particularly apt view of the origins of this collectively concatenated carnage, “the greatest catastrophe of all time,” and, irrefutably, at once primarily systemic and systematic in its roots.
Big Tent Review will again and again refer to this period, essentially the inception of the contemporary drive toward complete human extinction. Moreover, the present pass in Palestine, as already noted in the Wood Words Essay above, also has an arterial source, from this same period, that pumps the bile and bane of Britain’s impunity—the Balfour communique and Sikes-Picot in tandem—in offering Jewish adherents other people’s territory as their homeland.
However, the specific task of reporting here, in the current articulation of matters, concerns an aftermath of war that shows up on established radar screens in the form of reports in which a virus takes the rap for tens of millions of deaths from the flu over the years 1918-1920. And of course, such a view makes some sense: micro-pathogens after all do infect, afflict, and readily dispatch some of the unfortunate ‘hosts’ in question.
The ‘official line’ shows up clearly in a briefing by the National Archives, which responded to the gullible query, ‘Did a flu bug actually kill more people than the war?’ The official answer? ‘Oh, yes.’ At absolute minimum, though, another view is possible. In fact the delusion, or at least illusion, inherent in the established accounting, occurs in the question itself, which assumes the premise of an alternative POV.
In this way of thinking, the starting interrogatory would be quite different, to wit, something of this sort. “Did the depletion, carnage, and wholesale suffering of industrial warfare contribute to this pathogen’s fatal impacts?” The only answer that is not a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing,’ is one kind of affirmation or another, which necessitates a follow-up question: “how much did the toll of social meltdown and martial mayhem during the war and after add to the disease’s lethal results?”
Obviously, this is one of those interrogations that will never end with a ‘full confession.’ We may speculate, evidence, document, and reason from now till eternity. We simply cannot know for certain. On the other hand, duty-bound, we can attempt to set the stage for a rational response.
If one examines the issue along a ‘standard pathway,’ almost all of the results will ‘follow the party line,’ so to say. For instance, this search—<"spanish flu" epidemiology OR scholarship OR analysis OR research explanation OR accounting OR causation mortality OR lethality OR virulence>—results in over 200,000 citations, most of them on all the initial pages an expression of a superficial SOP explanation of some kind.
What if we tweak the search? Might we find dissenting, or at least more nuanced, voices? …(continued below the PayWall)
Communication & Human Survival—Seas of People’s Media Acronyms
How about a Grassroots Action & Information Network(GAIN)? Or maybe a Southern People’s Information Network(SPIN) would better suit us. A Virginia Information & Networking Group(VaPING), anyone? I could easily continue, covering NoCaPING, SoCaPING, AlaPING, GaPING, and ever so much more, along similar and very different lines.
Ha ha. As a matter of fact, I will do so, in this wholly subjective but potentially useful or even helpful briefing of what a Mass Movement For Mediated Empowerment might manifest in its coming to pass. So to speak. The premise, in any event, appears ineluctable to an observer of All-That-Is like this humble correspondent, who sees in everything the upsurging potential for insurgency to achieve the social necessity of social evolution’s inescapably revolutionary cast.
How else can the denizens of democracy deign to demarcate their thriving and survival save through a portal of empowerment and participation? In such a meeting of ‘freedom and necessity,’ a people’s mediation is de rigeur, as much a sine qua non as the requisite of organization itself.
As indubitably as Himmler served the Nazis and Bernays the plutocrats at home, as it were, a popularly propagated propaganda must transpire to transpose humanity’s death spiral into a servant of Goddess Life Force Energy. CNN will never ‘televise revolution,’ similarly as neither Fox News nor MSNBC, not to mention neither Alex Jones nor other instances of libertarian ablution or Jesus delineation, will in a billion billion years promote any more than a merely purported popular upheaval and potentiation.
In saying as much, BTR only follows the unavoidable logic of true transformative intentions. As dear damned James Madison stated the case, ‘lacking democratic information, or the means to manifest it, all our political pretense will act as a prelude to farce or tragedy, perhaps both!’ In at least three clearly definable ways, therefore, a movement worthy of the label must contain in its architecture the framing of a People’s Media Project or something similar.
Admittedly, merely saying so and then offering plausibly potent acronyms in support of such an idea does not in other than an initial manner accomplish the necessary end. Nevertheless, this is the milieu and method that we examine now, in anticipation of a future still more fully realized along intended pathways.
Learning & Sorting & Disseminating—People’s Information Networks, of which the aforementioned Southern People’s Information Network(SPIN) is the inaugural example of a tabulating and synthesizing functionality along such a pathway, contribute at once conceptually and practically to grassroots agency, as it were. …(continued below the PayWall)
Erotic Snippets—
In the scheme of things, almost without fail, pussy and its fulfilled eruptions lies at the very center of matters at hand, especially in relation to shifts, big changes, that sort of development. I say this because the vast majority of so-called ‘online encounter opportunities’ are, as exemplars of Eros, at best fraudulent, offering no more to maximize libidinal effusion than do shop windows in Amsterdam with scantily clothed matrons who glare at passers by while darning their stockings.
Thus, not only did the appearance of Unjected on America’s COVIDified scene really and truly make a space where hearty survivors and skeptics of pharmaceutical poison could gather, but it also, more pertinently to the entirety of today’s yarn, facilitated female frenzy’s need to frolic safely and effusively despite all the cultural baggage of inhibition and disdain in regard to such carnal contact. Inevitably then, as one articulate adherent of the site noted ironically, if also “surprisingly, a fair number of pros are vending their pudenda on the platform” as well, on the surface surprising, since Unjected has proven to be the sole modality for the actual promotion of life-force energy’s essential exchanges instead of serving as another fake instance of Eros in the guise of porn and prostitution and other such occluded opportunism.
But only on the surface: the whole point of profiteers and potentates in regard to the Goddess as she emanates from every woman is to pervert and subvert that energy for the furtherance of profit and power rather than Eros’ insistent energetic eliciting of the Life Force. The pros and their prostituted, prostituting ways were as mandatory for the evolution of Unjected as was its filing tax forms and acting as a portal for sniffing CIA agents in its lairs.
In any event, for the likes of this Wild Irishman, ‘obvio po,’ the entire experience was miraculous, and within a few weeks, a mild-mannered widow had reached into my heart, touched my loins, and joined us together as indelibly as sodium bonds with chlorine to make a salty frisson out of acids and bases. In the event, I wrote one of my first Wood Word Messages to broadcast our conjunction along these lines. “Love’s Luscious Libidinal Libations Allure Us So Fetchingly As to Facilitate an Instant Familiarity With Our Affinity For Frolicking Like Infatuated Frogs." This note graced a piece of castoff wooden icon that looked precisely like a watchful frog, free association ever the source of such expression, may be one of those pieces, despite my proletarian rationale for producing in the first place, that I cannot sell, LOL!
After encountering my new sweetheart, in the parlance of the PR horse manure of the likes of Okay, Cupid or Feeld my last first kiss, the tenor of my outreach via Unjected’s at first easy to navigate channels changed. All along, I had mixed seeking erotic succor with my search for readers and attendant cultural blah blah blah. Now, a codification of my notes of greeting occurred, and many more men—since, for better and for worse, I’m one of those ‘strictly one-way’ sorts of blokes—received invitations to peruse and participate.
At minimum, I must have sent out dozens of such missives, seeking engagement, readers, community connection, social solidarity. While such a shtick, basically peddling my work while looking for love’s bountifully libidinous libations, had, because I had been, after all, nothing other than exactly myself—promotional espousal just part and parcel of the entire package—also characterized my interactions on other laughingly labeled ‘dating sites, none had permitted my cultural cornucopia much traction in the scheme of things.
More pertinent to this particular evocation of a niftily nuanced erotic epiphany, none of these previous avenues to connection had yielded much in the way of encapsulating some semblance of lasting love’s palpating perpetuation, as it were. The first time that I heard Bekki’s voice, it reached down into my throat and tickled my entire torso, from scrotum to sternum, ha ha. Miraculously or mundanely, we these days row a single boat, as best as we can manage, toward continuing adventure and amplified consciousness, a ‘melding of mind and soul’ in the parlance of message art, and the second such encapsulation-of-meaning that I’ve composed to my new lover, my last love.
Therefore, clearly, now my experience is either A.B. or B.B., ‘after’ or ‘before.’ My outreaches prior to encountering this Goddess love gift articulated obviously an erotic openness; since Rebekkiah’s plighting our troth, I’ve been spreading the good news and continuing to pitch my blogging and podcasting blah blah blah, at the same time that I ‘shout from the rooftops’ the Goddess’ incarnation of ‘Good News,’ much more in keeping with the Golden Rule and other Ten-New-Commandments protocols.
Here’s an example. “Hi Emma. Jim here. I went to High School not far from San Marcos. I’ve never been anything other than a driver in Idaho.
Here on these pages, however, through Grace, and Unjected's magic, I have encountered the love of my life in these pages, replete with Grace’s sweet kisses. At one and the same time, I continue to produce my online magazine/podcast, with many topical forays congruent with the interests of members here: <https://hickeyj.substack.com/p/big-tent-review>, especially those, who, like you, enjoy podcasting and reading while they oppose monopoly media's machinations. Then again, I take a pretty radical stand on many controversial topics. In any event, I intuit good fortune ahead for you; love is afoot in a race for you, body and soul. Keep me posted."
I would definitely not have wagered much that my prognostications would prove so palpably accurate so quickly. I hadn’t even imagined that the form of their fulfillment would be so juicy or so bizarre. …(continued below the PayWall)
Last Words For Now
In one way and another, we have encountered further sex and drugs and rock and roll in #10. Modern social existence truly does interpenetrate libidinal, or carnal; biological, or pharmaceutical; and cultural, or mediated realms, arenas in which predictably unfold all the eroticized experiences, mandated medicines, and socially mediated routines that together constitute a hefty portion of the days and nights of actual participants in life’s panoply.
Also central to our existence, of course, is the collective labor that creates the cornucopia of both essential and alluring commodities on which we rely or which we eat or otherwise consume and imbibe, as it were. Without doubt in this regard, the butchered soldiers of 1914-1918, many of whom soon thereafter succumbed to influenza and pneumonia, were overwhelmingly wage-earners. They died, whether entrenched or hospitalized, in disproportionate numbers.
How can people ever work together for their mutual interests and necessities? Of course, we all in one sense, as consumers, already do ‘work together’—everyone pays for basic services. If that is the epitome of People Power, then a bunker becomes the only option in which one will likely live through the coming World War, which is apparently just over the horizon, and, in any case, absolutely requires that everybody else ‘sit down, shut up, and do as told.’
BTR offers its oh-so-modest ideas and stories and statements as an expression of one important element of any Popular Empowerment Process—the realm of media and propaganda, so to say. A People’s Power more potent than ‘consumerism’ arguably necessitates a People’s Media, of which this work here could conceivably be one of the smallest viable components, ha ha.
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