Oh my! Anyway, 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 fifteenth 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.
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, and in many ways especially this issue, 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 July 1st; both May and June will be one-issue moons.
Oh wait, one more thing. Starting a while back, the end of an article ‘above the fold’ links to its continuation. Somehow, it’s all so nerve-wracking and gratifying at once, ha ha. And, finally, the PayWall has come down, for now, all that sort of thing, blah blah blah.
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Finding Ways Through Thickets of Antithesis to Useful Ideas
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Medicating Melancholy, All That Jazz
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter XV
3. Wood Words Essays—Existence’s Life-Force Likelihoods
4. Empowered Political Forays—Dodging ‘Identity’s' Idolatrous Idiocy
5. Old Stories & New—”Tripping, Or, Back in Hippy Days,” II
6. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”More Than a Hill of Beans—Young Jack’s First Climb,” #2
7. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Eleven
8. Nerdy Nuggets—Israel’s ‘Southern Exposure:’ Apartheid, From Dixie to South Africa
9. Communication & Human Survival—More Ukraine, Part V
10. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”When the King of Games Meets a Prince of Death,” Part 3
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—Managing Impossible Attempts to Account For It All
Julian Assange has been my roll model since I learned of his important part in the formation of WikiLeaks. Would that I could have done more to ease his burden, this hero of the modern world’s worst and best tendencies.
That this meritorious cousin is free after so may years must count for something, yet it does not augur transformation. His forced guilty plea represents a club to batter truth-seeking whenever it inconveniences imperial imprimatur.
This is one way of exploring the nub of things, perhaps. Usefully to explain any social circumstance inherently requires a set of theories, or explanations, for how and why social reality exists both in general and in relation to the dynamics and patterns that necessarily and inescapably underlie the particular interactive occurrence in question.
In other words, not a single case of tabula rasa, no matter its precious, vaunted philosophical utility, has actually ever existed. As I’ve always noted to students and readers, “Context Is King.” Simple thought experiments both particular and general will demonstrate this point conclusively. For instance, one might imagine that pubescent moment that most people have experienced, the very first occasion in which one ‘thinks like an adult,’ utilizing grown-up reasoning processes and such.
On the verge of one’s new life as a mature human being, one will often feel as if a great adventure lies ahead that is altogether new, without precedent, all of which emanates from this ‘blank slate’ of reason’s initiation in a particular life. Oh, yeah? What about the year or so of mama’s breast or some nutritional substitute? What about the tolerant correction of various elders during the ‘terrible twos?’ What about the innumerable interactions with peers and more senior folks prior to that first truly ‘rational’ ‘ah ha!’ moment in life’s passing panoply?
What about Julian Assange?
If even the most portentous stage in a given life fails to approximate, let alone embody, a clearly defined ‘personal identity,’ then what might we make of ‘identity politics?’ Ha ha. Family politics? Yes. Community politics? Also in some way this will always be true. Cohort politics? Quite likely also inescapable.
After all Politics itself, as a category—or sui generis—evokes the old saying of ‘a form of corruption that works.’ And it inherently concerns how we distribute things, at once whatever we produce and ourselves as well. This should be ‘duh-to-the-power-of-duh’ territory here.
Opportunistic engagement is inescapably the foundation for most of our lives. A critic such as Jimbo has toted the barges and lifted the bales hundreds of times to pay the rent. Such efforts have a certain romantic je ne sais quoi, as in this piece of Driftwood Message Art.
"From Earth's Uncounted Ranges of Ridges Seemingly All Ready to Emanate Riches, From Gaia's Vast Arrays of Arroyos, Ravines, & Other Valleys, Not to Mention Gorgeous Gorges, Inquisitive, Acquisitive Adventurers May Forward Themselves & Their Ways & Their Wares to Nearly Innumerable Oceanic Portals Where, in One Way & Another, They Can Sally Forth to Cross Seas of Struggle That Are Also Oceans of Opportunity."
This manifestation of the everyday formulates sublime moments of psychic peace and material plenty here in the halcyon lands that, nonetheless, also sit squarely, awaiting digestion, as it were, in the belly of the world’s present imperial beast. What might we make of it all? That is the question over which competent capacity for both proximate and general contextualization reigns supreme. In none of these quotidian interludes, however, does my identity—as a pinko, a heterosexual, a Euro-American, whatever—amount to so much as a hill of beans of mass in the balance scale of life.
‘What does my participation in a meal with my love’s century old mother mean?’ This query comes to mind as an easy example. I can’t make any sense of it without at minimum a minimal background knowledge about both human society in aggregate and my specific social setting in particular. Without these principles and critically considered contemplation about them, any answer to this sort of inquiry will result in at best entertaining blah blah blah. Again, though, identity contributes zilch.
As a matter of course, we would affirm that nothing suggests that ‘interesting blah blah blah’ is detestable or otherwise wrong. One might, indeed, maintain that a significant portion of contemporary mediation amounts to little more than this.
A conversation that ensued during another recent gathering, a four-generation cookout, illustrates this point. My love’s wise and estimable elder sister and her skillful mensch of a man had just seen a local, magnificent production of “Cabaret” and were planning to go again.
As they are watching—sans theory or grounded study of how matters actually stand—they can nevertheless feel the powerful pull of literature that illuminates what is at stake. They would go a third time if the run extended its overwhelming local success at positing useful perspective.
Later, for instance, along similar lines, we will encounter the monumental masterpiece of monetized production, “Breaking Bad,” which my love and I often enough imbibe after we’ve supped together and tucked in Mother for her twelve healthy hours abed, as it were.
As a matter of criticism, this program ponders perhaps the most potent paradox of capital’s insistent imprimatur, so to speak, atop the human heap. Amid plenitude unimaginable at prior points in history, impoverished spirits and depressed psyches appear practically omnipresent precisely in proximity to empire’s most powerful expression.
The quip that Carlos Fuentes attributes to Ambrose Bierce is apt. “Pity poor Mexico; so far from God, so close to the United States.”
Latin elements are forming a regular part of Big Tent Review now. This will likely continue indefinitely, albeit liberation movements have progressed since the assassination of Che and the concomitant rootedness of communistic practices in Cuba as a sole outpost of anti-imperial sentiment.
Such a dynamic stands Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth on its head to an extent. The psychological aspects of repression and empire fade in importance as actual rebellions unfold—in Nicaragua, in Venezuela, and, at least intermittently, elsewhere—and very different sorts of battles evolve compared to introspective skirmishes.
Still, given obvious multigenerational dimensions to my particular here and now, the psychic realm is much more applicable to me and mine. I offer what I can and hope for the best.
Another question might be a bit more fraught. ‘How should I think about attempting helpfully to dispose of the accumulated detritus of my life while I salvage books and shelves and intellectual product?’ Having just returned from Asheville, where I’m going again tomorrow, I am approaching a point at which I’ll give away ninety percent of my household goods and personal effects, keeping only books and shelves and ‘archival materials.’
In such a context, of sweat and glee and drudgery and beauty and more, one inevitably has many opportunities to partake of consciousness alteration. I’m not talking about coffee either. The batterings to which I subject my seventy-one year old bones induce plenty of instances when—without hemp products—I might just fall to pieces.
Commercial TV’s advertising excrescences provide bracing instances in contrast to my barely-legal use of cannabis commodities. I’ve had ‘medical monstrosity’ hurled at my head for at least the past quarter century. Not that I’ve ever wavered in a skeptic’s doubts about, especially, any prescribed psychotropic substance.
Inasmuch as fucking is the life force, of course, many of these ‘medicines’ are toxic sludge in service of death. Today's Tarot item examines the most noxious case of this.
Thomas Szasz, a medical doctor and psychiatrist, in some sense may epitomize aspects of the present passage with his masterwork, The Myth of Mental Illness. At least a couple of his books will form a context for review in future issues, perhaps especially Pain and Pleasure.
His overview of this arena packs a powerful punch for anyone who is practicing paying attention. His mentor was Alfred Adler, who will soon enough be taking his own star turn in these pages. This is a trenchant summary from the good Dr. Szasz.
“In short, I believe that the aim of psychoanalytic therapy is, or should be, to maximize the patient's choices in the conduct of his life. This value must be entertained explicitly and must be espoused not only for the patient but for everyone else as well. Thus our goal should not be to indiscriminately enlarge the patient's choices; this could often be achieved easily enough by reducing the choices of those with whom he interacts. Instead, our goal should be to enlarge his choices by enhancing his knowledge of himself, others, and the world about him, and his skills in dealing with persons and things."
The Politics of Experience stands as R.D. Laing’s ineffable brilliance in deconstructing and demolishing the pretense of typical pyschotherapeutic modalities. He attacked not only the brutality of the institutional process but also the entire ideological back story in defense of such categorical judgment as a schizophrenia diagnosis.
“What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism—can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?”
He continues. “The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.
No one can begin to think, feel or act now except from the starting-point of his or her own alienation. We shall examine some of its forms in the following pages. We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral or mature one takes oneself to be."
White Rabbit speaks to these matters of noisomely medicated 'mental health.' It offers a bracing precis about LSD from Alan Watts, for instance.
“I trace myself back through the labyrinth of my brain, through the innumerable turns by which I have ringed myself off and, by perpetual circling, obliterated the original trail whereby I entered this forest. Back through the tunnels—through the devious status-and-survival strategy of adult life, through the interminable passages which we remember in dreams—all the streets we have ever traveled, the corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the womb, the fountainous surge through the channel of the penis, the timeless wanderings through ducts and spongy caverns.
Down and back through ever-narrowing tubes to the point where the passage itself is the traveler—a thin string of molecules going through the trial and error of getting itself into the right order to be a unit of organic life. Relentlessly back and back through endless and whirling dances in the astronomically proportioned spaces which surround the original nuclei of the world, the centers of centers, as remotely distant on the inside as the nebulae beyond our galaxy on the outside."
In tandem and furthermore, BTR # 16 will begin a series, “Capitalism on Drugs,” that shows how uncannily central black markets and ‘controlled substances’ are to the operation of modern capital, at least since Prohibition in the United States. Arguably, the fulcrum that these dynamics defined showed up significantly earlier, in the two Opium Wars and before.
At the same time, the world might easily appear a depressing place indeed, what with grotesque ‘Bilateral Agreements’ that lionize perfidy and mayhem, murder and madness, in service to imperial profiteering and plentiful helpings of the most poisonous substances on Earth. ‘Changing one’s mind,’ under such circumstances, might clearly seem better than any alternative.
A recent New Yorker report, in the event renders dramatically our kind’s current proclivity to process various precipices underneath which might wait various ways to fulfill what some have the weird notion is an intractable destiny of Mass Collective Suicide. Still, the account of a University of Chicago ‘Doom Seminar’ provides instants of both humor and hope.
As one annalist would state the case, ‘in the long run, we’re all dead.’ Still, the existential duty of human consciousness, in terms of a BTR point of view anyhow, is to seek the succor of understanding and to take steps toward acting on what we learn.
In this context, only a mass movement may save our asses, and that looks less likely than the birth of a new Baby Jesus who fixes everything without inducing a climactic rapture of only the elect: with all others toasted, roasted, and left as irradiated dust. Oh my, there I go again, all Debbie Downer. Something good could still happen.
So, for example, maybe Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might make amends. Who knows? His tweets on ‘X’ make him out as the only politician in the United States who is completely compos mentis. Despite willful inattention from corporate media’s gangsters and garrulous idiots, he will win a fair contest. Bet me.
Whatever the case may be, I’ll count this as the sole case in my life and times—with the possible exception of my adherence for a few years to Barry Commoner’s Citizens Party—in which I’ll be participating purposefully in an electoral campaign.
As will ever be the case in my life, the ongoing experience of a spindoctoring nerdy Appalachian, new books illuminate the edges, as well as the central components, of All-That-Is just now. I could go on while going off.
A recent John Le Carre volume, unknown to me, is a romantic comedy from the spymaster of Smiley’s People. The Naive & Sentimental Lover implies, quite likely, that Le Carre—like many of his Public School cohorts—was bisexual. Who would have thunk?
Edith Wharton shows us another face of the boohoo bluster of bourgeois lives in The Custom of the Country. So much—in relation to sex and cash and capital and personality and more—in the novel is prescient in its insight that one hardly knows where to begin.
A suitor of the protagonist, reflecting on his social standing, has this to proffer. “Nothing in the (Family) tradition was opposed to this desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been the rule...that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should 'live like a gentleman'—that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish between private and 'business' honour.”
Indeed. The entirety of the narrative stew, in fact, might boil down to this: occasional delicacy in personal, which is to say amorous, affairs and inevitable, ‘natural’ rapacity in capital’s commercial imprimatur.
A compilation, White Rabbit, shines a broad-based floodlight on all the ways that people like to ‘get high’ and move outside the bounds of their routine rounds of transiting round and round.
Among the contributors was none other than the anarchist artist and animated yarn-spinner, Jean Cocteau. He was an poppy enthusiast with a horror of needles who again and again ‘rehabilitated’ his addiction and then unbilitated it, ha ha.
“Don’t expect betrayal from me. Naturally opium remains unique in offering a euphoria superior to that of sobriety. I owe it my perfect hours. It’s a pity that instead of perfecting the process of detoxification, science doesn’t endeavor to render opium harmless.
But here we come back to the problem of progress. Is suffering an obligation or something lyrical?" Blah blah blah and ha ha ha.
Silk Road is something entirely different, from the Eastern fringes of China’s empire in the ninth Century of our present era. Children suffer enslavement, a theme in human affairs, eh? Women encounter rapine and murderous mayhem. Survivors try to make something of whatever options are before them. It’s the human condition.
One might continue, no doubt, ad infinitum. Instead, I’ll hope to entice a few readers to consider the fiction, commentary, and reporting in today’s BTR installment. Bon chance in any case.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
This seeking of Goddess guidance, or whatever one likes to call it, clearly exemplifies just the sort of point that the Intro makes near its outset. We cannot truly envision our psychic aplomb or mental distress outside some sort of framework that posits our consciousness as comprehensibly a conscious search for comprehension, so to put the case, even as, ultimately, all such attempts must inevitably fail to facilitate a full fruition, as it were.
Whatever else one might imagine as factual about, as it were, matters self-contractual in this regard, ha ha, the constancy of change must rank as an inescapable part of all that exists. Thus, one might insist, here’s a clue. Ups and downs are inevitable; joy is one aspect of things, and so is melancholy. An obsession with depression, given these circumstances of inevitable and necessary fluctuation, must seem at minimum a bit odd.
One might consider all manner of surveys these days. ‘Have you had periods of depression?’ ‘Have you had thoughts of harming yourself or others?’ Variations on this theme, put bluntly, come forward in every imaginable official contact that an ordinary fellow or lass has with figures authoritative, bureaucratic, or in any sense official.
A new driver’s license brings up such matters; a visit to the doc-in-a-box does as well; commercialized media simply explodes with solicitations for ‘treating’ depression, along with offers to help alleviate the side-effects of these supposed medicines. Inasmuch as I once worked in a ‘mental institution,’ after the Wyatt v. Stickney decision that mandated ‘treatment plans’ and decried a poor standard of care and forced labor, I’ve witnessed tardive dyskinesia up close and personal, even, plausibly, in that the use of Compazine on me as an anti nausea may have instigated a bit of a tremor.
Given that such monumental manifestations of measuring mental meltdown have devolved to the routine idiocy of The Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, well might an onlooker ponder, ‘what precisely is happening in these impassioned debates about mentally ill, or unhealthy, individuals who constitute such a substantial section of the human horde, so to say?’ Whatever the futility of ever finding a firm and complete reply, nonetheless, one must acknowledge a few things.
In the first place, saying that something is a disorder, or a disease, must have some meaning beyond blah blah blah and a touch of the blues. In other words, if Depression is a disease, then, as with any such expression of nature’s bounty for good or ill, it must reveal its cause, course, and resolution. It must amount to more than a basket of symptoms that are, at best, no more explicit and definable than the are ineffable and ephemeral.
Second, obviously so long as one considers things semi-rationally, all maladies integrate into complex ecosystems. Humanity’s now-nearly-nine-billion specimens, for instance, represent a vast food supply indeed for all manner of micropredators. This web of life, and inherent resilience in the bloody teeth of it all, is part and parcel of the whole shebang, so to say.
Moreover, third, the relative virulence and prevalence of pathogenic or similar problems and dynamics almost always directly results from social circumstances, which include the state of material knowledge and the capacity to produce prolific plenty of all the elements of Homo Sapiens modern experience. If, then, Depression has become a priority concern, what are we missing about societal relations that promote well-being enough to reduce this outbreak of pathos and enervation?
A piece of Driftwood Message Art speaks to these matters. Well might we come to like conclusions.
"Fondly, If Also Fancifully, We May Frequently Fantasize Fashioning Wands to Whisk Away Our Worries, All the While Overlooking, Or Even Willfully Ignoring, How Our Own Patterns of Thinking & Acting Entangle Us So in Gloomy, Gruesome Grooves of Grievous Despond That, Could We But Release Ourselves From the Strangling Grip of Such Self-Destructive Dynamics, We Might Immediately Recognize & Readily Garb Ourselves in the Garments of Our Dreams."
Thus, from a slightly different angle, instances of ennui or despond are inescapable, given that life’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ prove alike inherent to occasions of conflict and crisis and everyday routine good fortune all mixed together. How we respond is really the only issue. Moreover, our responses are indubitably one aspect of a social network of inculcation and control.
A framework for awareness, perhaps, therefore, might pose a quest to the Goddess and her cards along these lines. “What are some insights about the way that social protocols today make depression a central element of what’s wrong with everything?"
As will inevitably be true of any cascade of cards in the hands of a narrator such as I, the seven elements of the Spiral Spread here present, or represent, food for thought about this inquiry. In the event, the sequence that plopped down is as follows.
The Essence came up as The Chariot; Past Influences yielded The Emperor; a Present Passage elicited Judgment; Likely Future Developments then gave us the Seven of Cups; No-Matter-What, Opportunities followed up with the Six of Wands; Problems & Prospects provided a penultimate Ten of Wands; the Synthesis culminated with the Two of Swords.
An assessment follows below the fold. Whatever the case may be, we will be interpreting plausible magic attendant to the cards above by considering this background context of 'mental illness’ and how our society has been reacting to this purported biological dynamic that, in its rich and rueful reality, ought to be as easy to delineate as are the roots and regular appearance of tuberculosis, diphtheria, or the plague.
In this vein, just as clearly as United States politicians tend to offer carte-blanche support for Israel, established, licensed, permitted purveyors of health care recommend medicine to treat any and all ‘outbreaks’ of ‘depressed moodiness,’ even as melancholy of this sort or otherwise must as a matter of course appear now and again in any life. Incontrovertibly, ‘bad moods’ are less that perfectly pleasing and can prove a disastrous impediment to a decent existence; at the same time, making an intermittent or even somewhat persistent emotional state a matter of intense medical intervention only makes sense if we understand what in hell is causing all this malaise at least as well as we have plumbed accurately the sources of such indisputable and exemplary pathogenic states as TB and so forth.
To say the least, grappling with sadness and despondency could readily prove most salubrious if we delved the daily depths of social difficulty that so often typifies modern experience. Stuck in traffic; fending off insults or pushy demands; witnessing friends who insist on treating each other, or us, or themselves, poorly; finding ourselves on the wrong side of the income-outgo/upkeep-downfall divide; struggling with family battles or disputes; trying to find allies and comrades in our work and home lives whom we can trust: the potential for sad cases is almost limitless, and given that every birth leads to doom, one can imagine that a tilt toward downheartedness or even despair must seem unavoidable.
But affixing an allegedly ‘scientific,’ and clearly medical, label to these matters and then prescribing chemical curatives may, in the event, provide ever-less-than-minimal amelioration and zero succor in these concatenated outbreaks of troubling tempest and anxious eruption. When the agency of dis-ease rests in our social arrangements, antiobiotics and vaccines axiomatically could well have paltry impact.
Various iconic scientists also have promulgated such empowered pondering over the years. R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience agrees with Bertell Ollman in centering alienation as the central ‘conception of human life under capital’s imperial imprimatur.’
“Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities.” This ends his beginning. “We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially human, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.”
Thomas Szasz’ Myth of Mental Illness is more incisive still. His Epilogue includes thus. “In desperation, the(rebuffed) long for the security of stability—even if stability can be purchased only at the cost of personal enslavement. The other alternative is to rise to the challenge of the unceasing need to learn and relearn, and to try to meet this challenge successfully. (The ‘clinician's’) problem is the dilemma of someone so far withdrawn from life that he fails to appreciate, and hence to participate in, the everchanging game of life.”
His conclusions are pretty fucking awesome too. Number ten, perhaps, in particular, packs a punch. ‘There is no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary psychiatric interventions. They are crimes against humanity.’" However we view this point, mediation’s magical properties, given modern methods and means of its broadcasting, may measure the boundaries between ‘voluntary’ and mandatory.
After all, advertising propagandizes for those with the money to place ads. Without exception, a gigantic chunk of what shows up in television programming of various sorts flogs the audience to buy a pharmaceutical product. Quite often, the underlying afflictions are more or less mental cases.
All of these in-any-event often-enough mandated medications reveal vicious, possibly lethal ‘unintended consequences.’ Ruined livers, kidney malfunction, and more—’homicidal and suicidal ideation and acts,’ anyone?—are ‘rare side effects’ that an ever rushed and quiet finale mentions while images of happy aplomb finish the show, as it were.
Under conditions and consciousness along such lines, we would of necessity expect a critical skepticism to prevail in this Tarot-attempt to demarcate a demonstrably large and labile swath of our individual and collective emotional health and vitality. We could label it a will to thrive perhaps.
However, before turning to the interpretation of the Spiral Spread above, one might ask for a triptych that examines a query in this form. “What are some ideas to consider in regard to the safety and efficacy, perhaps especially for young men, of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor" class of so-called ‘Anti-Depressant Prescriptions?’”
As at the poker table, ‘the cards speak’ …(continued below the fold)
All God’s Cousins(continued)
(Readers may recall that I began last month’s serial transition with these same three words: (r)eaders may recall. Then I forgot to write that pathway prose, so to speak. Thus I have precis from the past two issues to parse and so as to locate today's characters in their ongoing context, as it were. Number 13, then, presented the young and independent Angela Carnes flight with her son, Mikey. Number 14 takes us from oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico to Serbia, via the Mediterranean, with Morris and Justina and all their steamy and combative ways.)
CHAPTER XV
“I'm pretty sure this is illegal.” Don, only a week into the first semester of his third post student-teaching school year, laughed, and his student, Kaitlyn, giggled too, thought her merriment didn't impede her snorting another line from her compact's mirror.
“Go Tigers,” she whispered through her post-coital looping grin, naming the mascot of her South Gwinnett High School football team. Really, all the Tigers teams bore the moniker. Everybody knew that football was it, when the subject was sports in the South, however, with only basketball occasionally also noteworthy. “Like in Asheville, where my cousin's from, but not here.”
While Kaitlyn Jones offered this mild, soto voce critique of her school's cultural quotient, Don “praised God, every day,“ that he'd “gotten the hell out of Rome” and come down to Atlanta, a relative social haven for any place South of the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, he wondered if he shouldn't go farther still, or even abroad. On some days he positively ached “with just how ignorant the whole situation here is” in what “H.L. Mencken, God bless his soul, called the 'Sahara of the Bozart.”
“I may look like a redneck; I may talk like a redneck; I may even sometimes act like a redneck; hell, I don't know, I may smell like a redneck, but motherfucker, I read, and that means I don't think like a redneck.” He acknowledged to himself, nodding, “Yeah, but you lust like a redneck, just like one.” He nodded again, “Don't you?”
By the time he left high school, thanks to music generally and Rome High School Band in particular, Don was “very hip to how easy it was to get laid,” which had been his number one priority “since I was twelve years old, more or less.” Still, he marveled at how he had been right about the possibilities in the here and now, which is to say Fall Semester, 1976, “with a Georgian running for President,” to have loads of drug-addled, mind-bending sex with his students; he never even had to do anything.
He just waited, just like when he was a freshman in Athens, just like in grad school there. Sooner rather than later, somebody who found his facility with a saxophone fascinating, “somebody with an independent streak” and who “loved music like life,” would proposition him. He felt absolutely positive that such a young woman would only be his accomplice, never leaving him to play the role of the cruel seducer.
But this was disingenuous, of course, for he was being seductive. Funny and irreverent, he referred “more or less blatantly to a love of partying.” On top of everything else, he really did help many kids, “the ones who aren't just hopeless,” to understand math; he offered one-on-one tutoring in his classroom every day for ninety minutes after classes.
Eventually, one of the nicer looking girls, “one of the ones who was quote, popular, unquote” came on to him. “Funny, helpful, attentive, that's me, and they're lonely, 'popular' my ass.” “They can't resist,” he'd told more than one friend. “They always ask about how hard all that blowing has to be; I just tell 'em it's my lips of velvet steel, you know, to make 'em laugh. Then I tell 'em it's really all breath control, like in swimming. I let 'em know that I can teach anybody how to blow a sax or anything else.”
He laughed as, with a glance at himself in his boudoir mirror, he blew his visage a kiss and put on his “game face,” with its devil-may-care, knowing expression. To younger, hipper females in search of experience and pleasure—many of them corporate transplants and living in Atlanta's “boring suburbs, quote unquote”—his country Rome lilt must have appealed to them with some combination of the exotic and the transgressive. After all, he argued, “they want, more than anything else, to be bad, you know, to fuck.” On top of all this going in his favor, with his doe eyes and wild grin, the “average rating I get from these hotties is 'cute as hell.'”
Whether Don's estimation that wild and wanton women would favor sexy saxophonists might serve as any sort of universal guide to female sexuality, it had so far worked for him. …(continued below the fold)
Wood Words Essays—’What’s It All About, Alfie?’
Whatever else one acknowledges as an apt attributed of humankind, Eros and the erotic must swirl at the center of things. Thus, quite likely, has the most popular Wood-Art category ever remained Love & Erotic Passion.
BTR’s next four installments will delve different levels and ways of expressing this central component of human thriving and survival. Today’s set of Messages-of-Lusty-Abandon sample the most salacious, sweetly heated, frankly sexual couplets from the wood, so to speak.
Because Marshall Arts has created a lot of material, the aggregate of such messaging could fill many ‘articles’ of equal length or heft as this one. No doubt, whenever the fancy strikes me, using the Messages-of-Lusty-Abandon label, I will post updates and additions to this initial profferal, with the caveat that no such slippery dripping of love’s most carnal libations will occur before the other three Love Sub-Categories have their day in court, more or less.
In any event, here is a first example. "To Flex Your Heart in My Hand Or Melt Your Love in My Mouth Opens the Cosmos to Reveal All the Glories, the Occasionally Grotesque Grandeur, of Existence, Till the Chilling Thrills of the Thrusts & Spills of Our Sweet Sweaty Bounty Substantially Surpass Those Instances of Torturous Terror When I Ponder My Mere Mortality Despite Apparent Hints of Eternity in Our Embraces."
While these lines’ juicy emanations ‘poetically’ predominate, such Wood Art Messaging addresses matters of how our libidinal biology’s bordering Bonobos builds a binding basis for our lives as fertile and feisty adult Homo Sapiens. This theme ought ever to persist near the front of the queue in these sweet and sticky thickets of love.
Once one tunes into this cosmic channel, the idea is immutable. Here’s another tidbit. "The Cosmic Curvature of Your Lips Kiss Me With Blazing Bliss Hot Enough to Sear My Soul & Melt My Mind, Though I Emerge Fresh & Whole & Hearty, Ready For Further Rounds of Pounding, Pulsing Passion, Replete With the Magical Flashes of Your Bussing Bounty."
It’s our design. We’re built to copulate, repeatedly, daily, as we live and breathe as dear Grandma Fox liked to put the case.
Sex positive barely scratches the surface of this deepest pool of humanity’s source- springs. "To Plant Love's Blade to the Utter Hilt Delivers Eruptions That Succor the Soul, Tilt the Psyche, & Melt Flesh's Feisty Fiery Grip Into Slippery Streams of Dreamy Drama's Spilt Spumes of Beastly Dripping Feasts."
We might as well seek to evade the necessity for sleep as to finesse the utterly essential role of sexuality in our lives. Practically speaking, physically and spiritually, we cannot make ourselves otherwise except in the most monstrous fashion.
This connubial core completely contradicts any completely woke agenda’s concatenations of ‘identity.’ "A Complementary Salubrious Cylinder Sustains True Lovers' Sweetest Sensual Succor, Providing Portals to Paradise the Exploration & Celebration of Which Have Ever Been Central to Human Existence."
Coming to terms with these things is, no matter how we may try to extricate ourselves from prudish grooming, easier said than done. On the other hand, tragic wastage indeed characterizes the unlucky hordes who cannot ‘come to grips’ with these inherent carnal constructs in our consciousness.
These instances of Driftwood Message Art establish one boundary line to any full fruition of a fellow traveler’s fate. "Riding Our Salubrious, Salacious, Sizzling, Slippery Love Groove Delineates a Vortex Divine, Eliciting Ecstatic Epiphany, Our Personal & Also a Universal Portal to the Birth of Bliss, Yielding Joyous Jumps to Jellied Juicy Junction, An Eternal Stream of Steaming Molten Mutuality."
Jellied Juicy Junction is the only reason any of us exists. Like it or not, this Life Force Energy engages the heart of humanity’s inhabiting a healthy happiness.
Overheated? Well, certainly hot enough to inflame passion’s pulses. Experience speaks in this tongue if given any choice at all. "You Engulf My Love in Blazing Bliss, Drenching Our Jovial Jig in Divine Libations That Pour Forth From Sweetly Heated Portals of Pulsing Poignant Passion in Ever Imminent Instances of Ecstatic Eruption."
The metaphors themselves graphically suggest the many ways to achieve these states. However one hopes to contextualize everything, the inherently genital and jubilant eruption that we all long for ties us to this Root Chakra’s foundational human play.
“Pleasure's Personal Cups” expounds bounteously on this theme. "All People's Personal Cups of Sensual Pleasure Will Often Persist in Overflowing Their Lips, Yet in Exquisite Instances of Your Inflamed Caresses of Conjugal Eruption, These Ecstatic Emanations Surpass Merely Episodic Ignition to Create a Volcanic Cauldron That Flashes Epiphany As It Unleashes Eros' Euphoric Combustible Flush."
Here, in “Ecstasy's Fruition,” a tamer and more ‘masculine’ take on this dynamic comes to the fore, as it were. "Your Gaia Goddess Glories, Flowing & Glowing, Ignite & Light Me Afire to Fly, With Rockets' Tempestuous Thrust, Toward Fulfilling Fruition & Erupting Ecstatic Engagement."
This, on the other hand, with the ‘Subject Line,’ '“Eruption's Passionate Libations,” may state a more feminine casing of the joint, ha ha. "You Engulf My Love in Blazing Bliss, Drenching Our Jovial Jig in Divine Libations That Pour Forth From Sweetly Heated Portals of Pulsing Poignant Passion in Ever Imminent Instances of Ecstatic Eruption."
“Gloriously Regenerated Adoration,” a Love Charm, briefs us further along these lines. "We Spurt Through Volcanic Fissures, Ablaze With Blessed Lusty Bounty, to Erupt Again Our Superheated Geysers of Gloriously Regenerating Adoration." …(continued below the fold)
Empowered Political Forays—Homo Eroticus
I have ever been wont to say in the course of a conversation of any duration, “(i)t’s how we’re wired.” As noted at this issue’s start, not to mention in its ‘Wood Words Essay,’ and in various of the fictional accounts in today’s BTR as well, fucking is the life force, whether we accept that or not, whether we appreciate that or not, whether we invest in that, in our own lives, or not.
This entire discursive arena is scientifically fascinating, a repository of Nature’s reliance on Eros in the human sphere and in turn an inescapable upshot of the human condition. However, because time is pressing, if for no other reason, this particular piece will display almost exclusively my personal observations and opinions in this setting of sweet succor and ecstatic release.
Evidence and scholarship will define subsequent episodes in what will become, with luck, a nearly never-ending series that only my own inevitable mortality will end, although its Sacred Pleasure foundation, in Riane Eisler’s wording, guarantees that continuation along similar lines will end up coequal with humanity’s accomplishing its own persistence. Not for nothing is Mass Collective Suicide the antipodal polarity of sexual fulfillment’s ongoing grace—a Thanatos versus Life Force death match, as it were.
This belief in Eros’ primacy, again a demonstrable remonstration among reasonable sorts, offers a pathway for entering, so to say, into this ever-enticing arena of humanity’s essential nature. Perhaps, just as sex itself represents a turning point toward the complex forms that, given time and tide, eventually evolve consciousness, so too does the establishment of erotic consciousness serve as, quite literally, the “Portal to Paradise” that Driftwood Message Art never tires of illustrating and contextualizing.
This primal passionate potential, in such ways of thinking about things, pulses at every beat of the post-pubescent heart. Immutably, sexual energy is part and parcel, even as, also indubitably, the intensity or depth of such energetic dynamics vary, both within and between individuals. From Biblical exegesis to a deconstruction of porn’s purviews, whatever variations may transpire in this realm of Life Force Energetics, it pulsates at the heart of the human condition.
As a way of initiating an expansion and deepening of this conversation, a concomitant observation—equally as scientifically ineluctable as the rest of this, or so I am willing to debate with all comers in every conceivable context—ought to be apt here. Any organized orchestration of contrary conventions will always serve various nefarious purposes, of which we will discuss a couple and possibly mention a few others. …(continued below the fold)
Old Stories, & New—”Tripping, Or, Back in Hippy Days”
(The first section ended with this. “She smiled again as she pulled the sheet over her nakedness, ‘go fuck yerself, Miller.’" The characters have learned about the ‘induction interview.’ Russ had managed things, more or less. Ennui was somehow effervescent.)
"Well then, that's settled. We're on the trail in ten minutes." He exited, and I fumbled for my shorts, recognizing that the need to piss and the warm proximity of the verdant Vickie was having a decided effect on my anatomy. She sleepily munched her roll and stretched, grabbing my hind end as I exited our lumpy double bed.
Half an hour later, just as Cap'n Russ had outlined, our party made a hard left turn at one of the tiny rivulets that trickled into Talulah Lake, a Georgia Power Company body of water that served both hydroelectric and tourist purposes. The brightness of the foliage made the lake seem a body afire as we turned away toward the reds and oranges and high yellows of the forest. We stopped to breathe easily amidst the first copse of pines we encountered, the cool silence reminding me again of the cathedral contained in even the smallest stand of woods.
Nobody'd said much to this point, but the effort of the walk, and the impact of the beauty around us had a mellowing effect on the three of us preoccupied with Russ's hard luck. Charlotte slipped her arm around his waist, bumping her hip into his every other pace for the past several hundred yards. Vickie and I let our fingers explore whereever a convenient hold opened as we ascended the slope, first one then the other of us leading the way. By the time we stopped, we grinned salaciously at each other between light kisses and giggles.
I could tell Russ liked this turn of events. He had that self-satisfied look of his, lips pursed, eyebrows slightly raised. Before long though, he had us back on the march. For a while, the joker even called cadence, chanting out some crazy couplet the Rotsy boys would sing. "I had a date with the captain's daughter, HAWNEY, I had a date with the captain's daughter, BABE!"
The remainder of the sojourn struck me as a gorgeous non-sequitur, except for one conversation, which occurred near the last ridge we climbed. We'd gossiped back and forth about school scandals and mutual friends, when Vickie mentioned that Charlie Monroe, head of ROTC, had asked her to get him a date with her older sister, Lu Ann, who graduated with Russ's class and was finishing up a nursing course at Columbus Area Tech. We all knew the Monroe family; Charlie was a "junior" whose daddy had started the city's biggest construction company. His brother was in law school and his sister married a city councilman's son.
"Is he 's stuck-up 's he seems?" I guess I was a little jealous; he was good-looking in his bemedalled uniform. Maybe he wasn't after Vickie's sister.
"No, but he's super straight. Tol' me he's joinin' up before college, so he wouldn't miss anything in Vietnam. Said we had to stop China 'n Russia, or they'd take over everything."
Russ and Charlotte both snorted at this, and I sort of shuffled my feet. "Vickie, the Vietnamese got a thousand years of fightin' fer their in-dependence behind 'em. They don't need no Russians, 'n they hate the Chinese." Charlotte knew stuff, and she listened to people who knew even more.
"Mr. Crocker said whatever people think about the war, its their duty to do what their country says." We'd had a discussion in last week's U.S. history class about Kent State. I didn't exactly agree with this, but I didn't want to abandon my innocent honey either.
"'At's a crock, Bob--from 'Mr. Crocker'--'n you know it. Darlin'," Russ turned with sweet intensity to Vickie, "that slaughterhouse is about oil and rubber and power. Got nothin' ta do with patriotism 'r duty. Greed 'n money, pure 'n simple. Anybody says diff'rent's either a fool 'r a liar. Or both, like Agnew." He popped his chin and his belly out, wrinkled up his face, and started a neanderthal prance that made us all laugh. And that was it. Vickie may not have raised her consciousness, but she had to admit that people she liked didn't agree with her parents or people like Charles Monroe the third.
I shook my head to myself when I reflected how this perspective would blend in with "today's army." But then we were trotting down hill, and Russ didn't let up the pace for what seemed like miles. …(continued below the fold)
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
(Number Fifteen continues this second BTR ancient ‘Fairy Tale,’ one that like “Little Red’s” ongoing formulation, here reformulates itself as an introduction to a more substantial storytelling exercise of characters and their conflicts and conjunctions. Chapter One came to a halt with this question. “What was it?” )
More Than a Hill of Beans
YOUNG JACK’S FIRST CLIMB, a Prologue
CHAPTER TWO: An Altogether Unexpected Meander—As had ever been true for the lad, just at the beginning of dawn's early light, Jack woke with a clear head and a glad heart. Still, he was not made of stone: he knew that he must find a way to make the magic of those beans happen—that’s what it was—or he would find his days filled with harassment and his nights bursting with sleep-deprived sighs.
That morning, in any event, other than an insistent urge to pee, Jack wanted, as ever, to taste the early day's sweet airs and take the measure of things at hand. Their Forever Tree had extended its verdant crown to Heaven with such a firmly-grounded and stalwart straight sturdy, strapping stalk, in part, because Jack had always gifted the tree's roots with his day's first stream.
At first, awash in the bliss of this primal release, sighing with relief, he did not notice. The twining vine that circled gracefully upward, however, with a chartreuse embrace along the dense dark chocolate of their Forever Tree's ever-ascending trunk, finally grabbed hold of his attention and fixed his eyes in ardent astonishment.
As part of his routine, he always exited his doorway with a flask and day-pack; 'you never know when a mission might summon.' Or so Jack believed, grinning greatly at the thought, that life was an adventure for which one ought to prepare at-a-moment's-notice plans for departure. He stretched his strong and limber limbs to embark on circling their arboreal miracle, offering his daily outpouring of gratitude to all that the Goddess had given.
After he thanked the tree and the seed and the sky and all of it, he received apparently enthusiastic permission to his specific request-of-the day, for the next instant witnessed his vaulting along the vine like a creature meant to climb, up, up, up, till his dexterous arms and pumping legs had diminished to nothing in the haze. All the while he was scurrying upward, Jack pondered what he'd meet in the land beyond the clouds that finally drew near, and through which he passed to breech the perpetual puff of white fluff atop their Forever Tree.
Different legends and tales from the puffy, fluffy, misty past of great great grandfathers and their long gone foremothers spoke of great danger above, grotesque monstrosity that might occasionally descend into the hills and plunder secretly, accounting for lost cattle and missing persons. Other tales insisted that vast wealth and unimaginable opportunities awaited above. Some yarns combined both sorts of thinking or spoke of an impassibility into the places beyond our earthen home.
As everything came to pass in his present day reality, though, coming out the other side, the young climber paused, hesitating nearly a quarter of an hour before being willing to put a foot on the 'floor' atop the cloud's misty body. 'What if I fall right through?' he asked himself, having trekked plenty of little peaks where substantial clouds had proved no more truly substantial than moist air.
'What if goblins jump out to gobble me up?' he contemplated, paralleling some of his recollections on the long clamber up Forever Tree's barky hide.
What decided him to proceed? …(continued below the fold)
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—XI
(Our last installment concluded with this line. The scene had “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." The deputies’ dispatching their duties had confronted them with all the carnage and mystery that constituted terror, in other words.)
Insodoing, after extracting Morgan's leering corpse from the dispatching arms of Master oak, and carrying poor-Christian-Ricky's weighty pieces, all barely subsuming a tenuous, continuing connection as a dead body, to deposit next to the extreme gesture of Billy's hand, which was all they could access of that departed soul's material being until further assistance was forthcoming, our two officials sought, as best their trembling breasts would allow, to shape the scene that confronted them into the coherent prose of their inevitably pending report. As they reached a point at which they believed the rickety contents of their narrative might withstand at least a cursory scrutiny, however, the single most confounding happenstance of an already singularly bizarre evening struck them fiercely anew, full in their faces.
For, finished with the most gruesome aspects of their labors and having completed sharing what they thought would be apt to report, they searched for their horses, which had joined the draft beasts in grazing the goddess' sweetest grasses. There, they found our fine, and heretofore so frequently laconic Jack, sitting and smiling an impossibly bright full-toothed smile. The astonished deputies, speechless and wide-eyed, both noted simultaneously that, in spite of his gleaming, toothy grin, our lad Jack was weeping, tears streaming from his eyes to moisten his still blood-smattered beard. All round him, where before both men swore that they had seen uprooted molars and fangs, now grew snow-white 'princess petals'.
The subsequent developments so unsettled young Kinnealy that he spoke not one public word about the entire affair thereafter, his hurried signature on his senior, Richards', report the only statement that he ever made. For his contribution, Richards, even as he moved up and out into the Imperial bureaucracy, sagely gave voice to the occurrences that obviously unhinged his cohort.
"He started to sing," averred the garrulous official, the wild shine in his eye almost always enough to cause his audience to beg him to tell more, even if that meant shelling out for further libations. And, like good Jack following his capture and miraculous rescue, Richards could belt out a song so it took hold of the listener's innards. "'The parting Glass',” an observer of such an instance might later share with a friend, “I swear to God, start to finish."
Adequately stoked or provoked, ‘Her Majesty’s’ good terrier would then merrily sing the same verse that emanated from Jack’s lips long ago: …(continued below the fold)
Nerdy Nuggets—Israel, Dixiecrats, Apartheid: Birthing Neoliberal Neocons
Israel’s statehood is a fact both historical and contemporary. Saying otherwise is obvious nonsense. This indisputable empirical reality, however, has not long been true. In a context of ongoing potential for world war and Armageddon, not to mention persistent manifestation of genocidal results, starting by stating the obvious makes some sort of sense.
Also obvious is this: Israel decidedly did not exist before 1948. How this undeniably massive shift came to pass is, quite reasonably, must remain of paramount import in attempting to avoid Mass Collective Suicide. Today’s essay approaches this issue with a twofold emphasis: first is the role of colonialism and empire in the modern process, a ‘Southern Exposure’ to the question of Israeli statehood; the second is a two-prong deconstruction of an often pilloried antebellum document, “On the Jewish Question,” a modest and early essay by none other than Karl Marx, the original ‘Commie-Jew,’ on the one hand, and hopefully incisive analysis of more recent comments by another such ‘Commie-Jew,' Leon Trotsky just before Stalin’s hitman struck him down.
In this version of a “Nerdy Nugget,” the second task takes the starting position. Marx wrote his relatively brief essay as a critique of the work of Bruno Bauer, who was a fierce critic of ecclesiastical power along Hegelian lines. He had been one of Marx’s mentors until Marx and Engels espoused their communistic turn, from which Bauer, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, recoiled in horror.
Marx, born a Jew, nevertheless viewed the Jewish cultural context in terms of commercial primacy and financialized fiscal political pull. Yet his is an intricate and subtle argument along such lines.
“Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community. This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois [i.e., as a member of civil society, ‘bourgeois society’ in German], ‘life in the state’ is ‘only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule.’
Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen [„citizen‟ in French, i.e., the participant in political life] only sophistically remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the merchant and the citizen [Staatsbürger], between the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the merchant and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen."
These are templates that potentially apply with huge force to current affairs. In any event, Marx and Bauer agree that repression of Jewish people was worse in Germany and elsewhere, even as the construct of Statehood had from its earliest iteration wedded itself to the currency imprimatur of as-often-as-not Jewish keepers of account, as it were. Bauer is clear and specific, as here.
“The Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who may have no rights in the smallest German state, decides the fate of Europe. While corporations and guilds refuse to admit Jews, or have not yet adopted a favorable attitude towards them, the audacity of industry mocks at the obstinacy of the material institutions."
Across the Atlantic, argued Marx, “Only in the North American states—at least, in some of them—does the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a really secular question. Only where the political state exists in its completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of the religious man in general to the political state, and therefore the relation of religion to the state, show itself in its specific character, in its purity."
This constituted at least one phase of human liberation. “The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state as a state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by political means that private property is abolished as soon as the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished, as has occurred in many states of North America.
Hamilton quite correctly interprets this fact from a political point of view as meaning: ‘the masses have won a victory over the property owners and financial wealth.’" Jewish leadership and participation in this process, spiritually and materially, is something for which Marx proffers illustrative examples.
As we will see in summary form Below the Fold, this view is congruent with Jewish roles in slave trading, the conduct of commerce in the direction of a Confederate States of America, and more recent outreach into the Western Hemisphere by inevitably more Occidental Jewish families and other Torah-toting denizens of Capital’s obvious overall imprimatur.
Marx ends his essay with a dialectical dance complex enough for a dissertation or two. Still, this final sentence might raise a few hackles in the here and now. “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism."
Leon Trotsky, another radical Jewish socialist, from Ukraine near Kiev at that, considered these matters at a remove much closer to contemporary reality. He spoke with horrified compassion of capital’s, and especially Germany’s, crisis as composing an ultimate excuse to scapegoat Jews.
“Decaying capitalism has everywhere swung over to an exacerbated nationalism, one part of which is anti-semitism. The Jewish question has loomed largest in the most highly developed capitalist country of Europe, in Germany.
On the other hand the Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument adapted to modern-culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come. Now the nation cannot normally exist without a common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate to us that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question."
He simultaneously both abjures striving Jewish advocates from relying on ‘promises in Palestine’ and adjures hopeful Jews, with whatever sort of religious experience that was characteristic in a particular circumstance, to fight for socialism. “Once socialism has become master of our planet or at least of its most important sections, it will have unimaginable resources in all domains.
Human history has witnessed the epoch of great migrations on the basis of barbarism. Socialism will open the possibility of great migrations on the basis of the most developed technique and culture. It goes without saying that what is here involved is not compulsory displacements, that is, the creation of new ghettos for certain nationalities, but displacements freely consented to, or rather demanded by certain nationalities or parts of nationalities."
“You ask me if the Jewish question still exists in the USSR. Yes, it exists, just as the Ukrainian, the Georgian, even the Russian questions exist there. The omnipotent bureaucracy stifles the development of national culture just as it does the whole of culture.
Worse still, the country of the great proletarian revolution is now passing through a period of profound reaction. If the revolutionary wave revived the finest sentiments of human solidarity, the Thermidorian reaction has stirred up all that is low, dark and backward in this agglomeration of 170 million people.
To reinforce its domination the bureaucracy does not even hesitate to resort in a scarcely camouflaged manner to chauvinistic tendencies, above all to antisemitic ones. The latest Moscow trial, for example, was staged with the hardly concealed design of presenting internationalists as faithless and lawless Jews who are capable of selling themselves to the German Gestapo."
Here, the great thinker of social democracy and internationalism is alluding to his own plight as a political creature at odds with Soviet leaders who have ordered his death. In the event, that soon enough came to pass.
The slaughter of millions of Jews and reds and gypsies and more unfolded in the aftermath of Trotsky’s own assassination at the hands of Stalinists who focused on eliminating Trotskyists in part by accepting temporary, tactical rapprochement with Nazi Germany. As ironic as this may seem, it persists as a matter of immolating tepid allies rather than uniting to attack those at the helm of empire.
More to the point of grotesque and occasionally humorous contradiction, neither the wildest Zionists nor the most supposedly revolutionary Palestinians can see fit to contextualize these matters with anything akin to thorough honesty. However, no false equivalence allowed, the empire’s functionaries in charge in Tel Aviv are giving the most thoroughgoing National Socialists of mid-Twentieth-Century Germany a ‘run for the money’ indeed as, at least ideologically, the most comprehensive fascists in history.
This obviously abbreviated briefing might yield an infinite library to examine what these admittedly Pinko thought-leaders thought about these now-Zionist and Palestinian battlefields. However, such efforts are not how we’ll conduct today’s inauguration of this clearly core component of existential risk in the modern context.
Instead, what follows is an ‘order of battle’ for determining what we could clearly call a Southern Connection to the Vaunted ‘Jewish Question.’ To an extent, as a matter of course, given the preferences and attention of our Big Tent Review, this hypothesis that ‘Southern Exposures’ suggest a contextual core of modern Israel and all its attendant conflicts is a contention to which a certain predisposition is undeniable.
Readers ought to be skeptical. Nevertheless, they should also have the openminded willingness to consider nine entry points for evidencing, or even proving, this analysis of things. …(continued below the fold)
Communication & Human Survival—Ukraine As Imperial Hubris: V
(Number Fourteen conveyed how Soviet Communist general and genius Rodion Malinowsky, from the Donbass originally, “carried out a massive night assault with the help of three armies and two corps – it had never been done in military practice before." We left as the tides of war were turning.)
“…As Commander of the 3rd Ukrainian Front he smashed Nazi troops near the towns of Melitopol and Nikopol, crossed the Southern Bug River and liberated his hometown of Odessa. Malinovsky managed to isolate German forces in the Crimean Peninsula from the rest of the enemy’s troops. For these heroic deeds Malinovsky received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.”
The turnaround changed history. “The annihilation of the Sixth Army, which had conquered Paris and invaded huge areas of Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine, marked the beginning of the end for Hitler and the start of the Red Army’s advance towards Berlin.”
But the cost staggers the imagination. Such sacrifice is beyond the ken of most inhabitants of the ‘free world.’ “The colossal total of nearly 27 million Soviet military and civilian dead in the Second World War was more than twice the death toll of all Americans, Britons, Commonwealth, French and even Germans combined.” And a minimum of five-to-six million of this sum were human beings from Ukraine.
In other words, though, the Russian army’s losses amounted to such an extensive bloodletting that only by conscripting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians could the battle against the Nazis continue. And more than occasionally, Ukrainians proved willing conscripts.
By late Fall, 1944, the final crushing of the Nazi colossus was at hand, with Russian and Ukrainian soldiers leading the way, joined by partisans at each step whose forebears still overwhelmingly loathe Nazism even as prominent and favored minorities, excused by former Soviet allies, will trot out one or another of the Austrian Corporal’s collaborators now and again. Of course, this is precisely what has happened recently in Odessa and the Donbass, even though people in those places still recall Babi Yar and the fall of Berlin both.
Rescuing Nazis & Cold War As an Intended Consequence of ‘Allied’ Victory
Western Europeans remember Anzio, Normandy, and the obliterating tonnage of industrial bombing against the German heartland. And these were mighty expressions of the human capacity for war and destruction. But all who study the Second World War will acknowledge that the attrition of the struggle in the East was what defeated Hitler on the battlefield, just as the communist-organized resistance movements—for which Ukraine was one template—slipped a sharp blade between the third and fourth ribs of the Nazi system behind the lines.
One might recoil in horror or nod in wry recognition that, even in the midst of this victory—as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin planned the postwar order at the Czar’s Winter Palace in Crimea, one of the supreme ironies of all time was coming to pass. This entailed the already mentioned pre-ordained Catholic sanctuaries, which hid top Nazis away from Soviets’ grasp, in conjunction with the British and Americans, who had espionage networks throughout Ukraine and Eastern Europe that were, for the English, decades old.
The spies and Ivy League gentlemen of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, though newer to the territory, showed themselves to be quick studies, with ready access to money and resources that locals found more than modestly attractive after years that saw cannibalism compete with starvation. These three ‘stakeholders’—Yanks and Limeys and Papists—joined hands, while standard civilians struggled to stay alive and soldiers still faced imminent death by trauma or disease, to usher from Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe tens of thousands of Nazi leaders, scientists, and functionaries.
Why did this happen? …(continued below the fold)
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—
(Last issue continued this missive, a story at once of a particular popular pastime in the overall cultural context and of a garrulous gambler’s pushing his especial luck, while today’s effort explores a possibly predictable upshot of such scenarios and more, so much more. We ended on this note about the end results of this yarn: his more pliable sister’s “husband had become general manager of the Beatty complex of mills in and around Greenville and Spartanburg by the mid 1970’s," while he cavorted round the world with ‘that slut, Veronica.’)
…Marshall himself could have run a course that led to such a track as well. He had performed well academically, in 1964 entering the University of South Carolina’s Columbia campus with a scholar’s repute, albeit his tendency to prefer French and Comparative Religion to Math and Business no doubt seemed malapropos to daddy Beatty.
But such choices were not enough to cause a complete alienation of affections. An eventuality of that sort required something like Veronica, whom Marshall took home for Thanksgiving in 1966, en route to his second semester of junior year at the Palmetto State’s flagship university.
The senior Sir Beatty needed no further information than her straightforward gaze and her childhood in a trailer park to know that she was an “opportunistic golddigger,” according to Marshall. “He told me that I had exactly one month to get rid of, quote, that slut Veronica, unquote.”
Marshall was a lover and a fighter apparently. Despite his training in gentle diction and obeisance, “I told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck himself,” steel in his drawl still nearly a decade after the fact.
He received papers from the family attorney within a week stating that he had a right to his clothes, personal effects, bedroom furniture, and the horse of his choosing from the family stables. Other than that, he was on his own, and sister’s line would be the only ones to experience the family’s largesse.
Though this is dramatic enough to cause all manner of narrative potential, it would not likely in and of itself have thrown together two such oddly matched birds as he and the Spindoctor were in tandem. Marshall and Veronica both truly belonged in South Carolina, where a lawyer’s life or something more academic might have come about for this beautiful couple that put passion and its promise above fealty or lucre.
But something oddly grotesque, and weirdly hilarious, transpired at the end of Summer break before this pair’s senior year in Columbia. Fine young animals that they were, they played competitive tennis regularly. They would then lounge about Veronica’s apartment on days when neither of them had to work at their waiter-and-waitress positions, where they joined wit and decorum to rake in the tips, no doubt.
On the day in question, consumed by a powerful thirst after three sets, Marshall quaffed an entire quart of tea before he opened up the backgammon board and suggested a few games. According to his recollection of the moment, the light sparkled and the dice dance before Veronica’s roommate began shrieking, hysterical and disconsolate, from the kitchen.
When Veronica managed to calm the young co-ed enough to get something from her, she sobbed, “Somebody drank all the Kool-Aid!!!” Marshall says that he heard this as if from a distance, and that the full impact of what she then related struck him as both odd and obvious, somehow.
The ‘tea’ that he imbibed had been a concoction for a later-in-the-day late Summer orgy, laced with roughly sixty hits of LSD. “I was sure that I would die,” he said, matter of factly. “I was sure that I should have killed her, but I couldn’t focus.”
Veronica laughed when she spoke of this eight years subsequently. “I ran out in the hallway after him, shouting, ‘Marshall, don’t go!’” But he was a quick fellow and following a track from which deviation was not an option.
The Spindoctor has written at length elsewhere about this incident, one of those amazing congruences that couldn’t possibly have happened in spite of its all-too-tangible reality. The upshot was that, two days later, after Veronica and a friend had camped on the campus quad and watched Marshall’s third floor window obsessively the entire time, remaining awake in shifts, the panes of this privileged single-senior’s-domicile exploded and, first, Marshall’s top-of-the-line speakers, and, thereafter, everything else in the room—that which fit on its own intact and all else chopped down to size—came pouring out to land on the quad before a gawking and amazed crowd that gathered to watch.
When campus cops and municipal police broke down the door, Marshall stood in the center of an absolutely bare space, naked except for the fire ax that he had so recently deployed on furniture and other things that would not exit the window as a single piece. He was White, if tanned, and a Beatty to boot, or things might have ended much worse for him.
The authorities got a strait-jacket on him before he went ballistic, however, and he spent the next eight months at Babcock, the most mental ward of the State Hospital on Bull Street, near downtown Columbia. An aunt wanted him transferred to a private facility, but Marshall was coherent within a week and wanted none of that. He refused to open the dozen or so letters that came from his father, one of the reasons for his lengthy stay, given how “clear and Zen I got within a month.”
One result of this adventure, however, was that neither he nor Veronica finished their degrees. She basically was with him every day of his ‘commitment,’ and they had left the South for good within twenty-four hours of his release.
They traveled throughout North America for a couple of years before they settled in Aspen, where Marshall got his real estate license and they became notorious as both lovebirds and gamblers. More or less, this is where a Spindoctor entrance occurs. …(continued below the fold)
Last Words For Now
As I quipped Below the Fold last issue, ‘(o)nce more dear friends into the breech!’ Once again, I’m barely meeting my deadline. I surely do trying to get my head straight issue after issue. The world asks us to converse and contribute, blah blah blah.
—Below the Fold—
Wow! Life’s full container of interesting things ought to make us all happier than kings, yet, since kings are decidedly among the least satisfied of fellows, what might this mandate usefully mean? Perhaps the beating heart of ‘a life worthy of royalty’ must be the satisfied sense of agency that comes from having something like a true power to inflect one’s own days and nights during our brief ambit through all-that-is.
True sovereignty may in the final assessment consist of purely a capacity to interpret and then navigate a course through things that deploys maps of meaning that are ever tentative and meandering and which we must, nonetheless, seek to manifest if we are to express any comprehension of the human condition. It’s my story, and I’ll stick to it.
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—(continued)…
The place of the Past makes way for the Six of Wands. Present Passages yields up the Seven of Cups. Likely Futures completes the trio with the Nine of Pentacles. At first blush, what these cards may have to say about ‘Depression’ and the use of particularly noxious ‘medicines’ for its treatment is far from obvious.
Taking at face value, as a prima facie good thing, the drive to derive ‘food for thought’ from these chance selection of images and text, as has very generally been true, the potential psychic and material nourishment from this process looks much greater on reflection than it did in the original manifestation. The dramatic fit between the three plucks and the multiple issues involved doesn’t instantly grab ones attention and command a particular statement of the case, so to say.
Still, Jason, in the sixth card of the suit that embodies his travails and his creative team-building to ameliorate these trials, has had an initial triumph over the dragon of material reality that has in human affairs so often over the years held back anything akin to true achievement. Just so, despite the flesh-and-blood-and-treasure costs of two world wars, the defeat of Nazi primacy in the 1940’s did in fact bring to the fore a time when self-reflection, collective insight, and relative peace allowed communities and individuals to ponder and try actively to facilitate joy and aplomb.
That could certainly delineate a period when considering how to understand and improve enervated feelings could take place. With bullets flying and bombs falling and bodies bleeding and exploding, this luxury of self-improvement and self-regard would quite simply prove impossible. Even as the craters and cadavers remained to repair and inter, more reflective and introspective potentiation would likely seem reasonable, if always far from certain.
Thus, in contrast to the most optimistic battlefield scenario, ‘victory’ and a pacified practice of mass collective suicide would establish an environment in which, with the best of intentions and some degree of awareness, people and their social aggregate might imagine happier, less catastrophic interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.
New-Age, cosmically groovy, and otherwise inaugurally helpful modalities have—in some shape, form, or fashion—typified the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and beyond. Self-Help is a real thing from out of those passages of history’s telling, a rooted basis for thinking about widespread anxiety, alienation, and anomie, clear-cut underpinnings of a ‘fugue-state that receives the moniker of Depression or any of its related DSM ‘diagnoses’ of “mental disorders.”
This confident optimism of ‘the victorious’ is the soil from which contemporary grappling with Depression has erupted. And anyone who doubts the productive potential, at minimum, of the everyday in the here and now simply hasn’t recently been inside a grocery store or hospital or had occasion to navigate Interstate Highway systems hither and yon. The world is awash in bounty.
In environs of more-than-enough, therefore, we wonder about sadness and dosing many of its individual manifestations with selected mind-altering drugs at the exact moment that we ban or make much more difficult to obtain other entheogens and emanations of nature’s pharmacopedic cornucopia. And this makes Psyche’s imploring of Aphrodite in the Seven above an ideal stand-in for just this moment.
More than ever before in human affairs, instead of physical constriction and bodily privation, almost all humans have plethoras of possibilities for parsing their problems and palpating perfection’s near approach. This card mirrors this abundance of choice in love and relationship, inherently applicable to questing as here to untangle and make sense of tsunamis of despondency today. We have more choices than we know, but we must make choices and weigh matters with dollops of mind and soul and heart’s spirited thumpings, not with weak and mealy-mouthed kudos of compliance.
Two cards therefore, if perhaps unexpectedly, do indeed traverse a segment of social progress in relation to palpating and empowering personal well-being. From a past of victorious ascent to a present of plentiful options could serve as a vector for almost every aspect of current existence.
In this regard, looking into the meaning of the Nine of Pentacles must lead to a cautious optimism or at least a belief in potentially beneficent and healthful outcomes. Does such potentiality fit with S.S.R.I. antidepressants?
I have a strong bias, merely empirical, against affirming such a congruence. Magically enough, textual interpretation also puts more emphasis on interactive and self-reflective paths to personal aplomb than it does on any sort of ‘magic wands,’ pharmaceutical or otherwise.
The whole point of this card is a satisfaction that does not at all necessitate external validation. “(Its) satisfaction is dependent upon nothing and no one outside oneself." Once built, it cannot be destroyed, even if the pile of wealth were to be taken away. …(M)ore than a card of worldly achievement,…(o)n a subtler level, it implies the finding of a deep and permanent sense of self-value, which has been earned by the hard work of meeting life’s challenges on a material level and, somehow, surviving them all.”
In other words, one might extemporize, ‘a future is attainable in which aplomb and empowerment could easily circumscribe the living opportunities of most human cousins.’ Thus, well might we ask, ‘how well would medications like these Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors—which have among various horrific side-effects the evisceration of the human sexual response—support such a world, one that succored lives of happiness and personal power?’
“Not at all!” would be my summation. “Not at all.” Nonetheless, unlike those who now lead the charge for a biosecurity authoritarian dictatorship, I’d thoroughly enjoy talking it all out. The point of Big Tent Review is multifold, albeit one definite, maybe determinative, element of this work—a la, “Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits”—is support for the simple concept of majority rule.
This view inevitably conflicts with the sorts of technocratic approaches that medical models require, with erstwhile experts to lay down the boundaries of acceptable behaviors. Letting people learn, lead, and legislate is a radical concept, one on which, perhaps, human survival hinges. Blah blah blah.
Now, what about the Spiral Spread from many paragraphs back? A restatement, from ‘above the fold,’ would be in order. “The Essence came up as The Chariot; Past Influences yielded The Emperor; a Present Passage elicited Judgment; Likely Future Developments then gave us the Seven of Cups; No-Matter-What, Opportunities followed up with the Six of Wands; Problems & Prospects provided a penultimate Ten of Wands; the Synthesis culminated with the Two of Swords."
The question boils down to wondering what in the world is up with making Depression some kind of central linchpin of modern social conflict. ‘It’s a mental health issue’ serves as a trope that undergirds how officials see many or even most societal scuffles, murder and mayhem at home and abroad, with loads more blah blah blah as well.
To posit a response to the inquiry: The Chariot evokes inner struggle—often enough externalized, or projected—as the substrate of whatever is going on, just a perfect counterpoint to the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its reification of these social dynamics as ‘natural;’ The Emperor gives a portrait of pasts in which patriarchal boosting lay the basis for everything, including guaranteeing that men would have more options for fame and fortune than women did, a preferential elevation of ‘masculinity’ that itself only proved occasionally plausible because imperial butchery of different sorts—'liberating’ native lands, colonizing ‘colored’ societies, on and on—delivered the tidy, reliable profits that upper classes commanded as birthright.
Given such a background, Judgment may quickly culminate in a big gulp response as our collective Present Pass since, after all, desserts for past karma could instantly seem to amount to precisely a grotesquely woeful, quite likely out and out Depressed network of social actors—nothing so exacerbates sadness as culpability in crimes against humanity; Likely Future Developments gets a tad spooky, if only because of the odds against pulling the same Seven of Cups as purportedly offers insights about our triptych’s Present, again this specific card and its emphasis on individual choice and personal effort clearly aligned with a useful and potent way to envision evolving a livable future.
The final three draws in the array appear even more poignant and purposive in relation to our general inquiry about sadness and salutary social intersections. Opportunities provides another ‘repeat customer,’ the Six of Wands that filled in for the Past in the triad above; here, even more smoothly and fulsomely does a manifest fit with the interrogatory look rational—after all, what could better prove the pudding of rejecting medical voodoo than public validation for more salubrious ways? It’s a theory that does not violate reality’s realm, in any case. The Ten of Wands for Problems & Prospects likewise manages interpretive congruence with contemporary social reality, inasmuch as it highlights an ‘imprisonment that flows from a slavish dedication to admitted successes of previous methods,’ and then proceeds to insist that creativity requires combating, rather than acceding to, ‘mandatory’ compliance measures that are all ‘for our own good.’
No more fitting emanation than the Two of Swords is possible for the Synthesis position. Its horror at inevitably pending confliction is ubiquitous and undeniable since September, 2001, if not significantly before that. Looking back, a ‘Third World War’ might emerge from a people’s history of the early Twenty-First Century. In regard to these matters of well-being and happiness, in other words, we can no longer avoid taking sides, unless we want to try to ride the tension and hide its irremediable psychic cost.
However, making such choices makes informing ourselves requisite. The research is clear enough for anyone who looks. Without additional examination of any sort, although such extra effort would also bear fruit, the litigation record alone is incontrovertible of payouts to SSRI victims in exchange for nondisclosure agreements. Blah blah blah. For anyone who is paying attention, great Gaia has spoken in support of exactly this kind of critical, and hopeful, conceptualization of the future of a happy human herd.
We end up, now, having pondered a pair of questions about, and small elements of an intellectual history of, the notions of melancholy, hysteria, breakdown, what we today more often than not term an alleged mental illness that goes by the generic name of Depression. Allegations, constituting at least an indictment of SOP perspectives, have appeared here, matters that are easily checked and verified about these supposed ‘disorders of the mind.’
I stand by them as assertions that I will document in detail, and extensively expand, soon enough and frequently enough to make any rational mind and compassionate heart question the need for, or even bare utility of, this particular class of pharmaceuticals, the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. My Reading of the Goddess’ POV is that this feminine, life-force principle also repudiates these drugs, much more dangerous in the long run than all the Fentanyl and Methamphetamine in existence.
These are not the only ‘Death Force’ drugs that denizens of capital try to force down our throats, but they are arguably the worst, ultimately the most insidious and invidious substances to ever come down the pike as remedial therapeutics. Instruments of torture and control, of alienation and division, of terror and distrust, such characterizations add up: if these products are medicine, then they guarantee our ultimate elimination as organisms inadequate to the curative.
Perhaps a few words that garner Gaia’s grace, from Mythic Tarot, for example, could proffer more generous and gainful guidance than the corporate sales manual that DSM-V has become. From this plausibly more enlightened, and decidedly gentler and more jovial, viewpoint, our connection with ourselves and others can assist in facilitating an “enjoyment of good things, which does not depend on (external) agreement or validation to provide pleasure and deep satisfaction."
All God’s Cousins—(continued)…
…And he liked—no he loved—to give head while playing some of his collection of sax solos, primarily jazz but with “some mind-fucking classical pieces too.” Invariably up to this point, he indicated in no uncertain terms, the response “from the elect, mind you, I don't know a thing about average,” had been licentious and multiply orgasmic, without fail.
He hadn't limited himself to seventeen and eighteen year old secondary-school students, far from it. “I am, after all, fucking engaged to be married,” and still had a healthy appetite for spur-of-the-moment adventures “with girls of any age who love to party.” The quality and the volume of their coming, “like tidal waves of female pleasure,” had convinced him that such outcomes would define his path through life: “the nerdy little musician with the healthy cock and the able lips who can always make 'em punch the button again and again.” High school lovers were merely part of a healthy mixture, he reasoned.
He smiled and twirled about. “He shoots, he scores!!” Climbing back into his king-size bed, he grinned wolfishly at his student, who had been watching him for a bit apparently.
In regard to climaxes, this very Ms. Jones had definitely not “proved the rule,” except otherwise than exceptionally. He assured his eleventh and twelfth grade math students, in any event, that this was “not a very reliable axiom.”
In the present pass, meanwhile, nimble little Kaitlyn, who played flute and occasionally twirled batons for Band, had moved from Hoovering cocaine to gulping down his growing erection, spreading her legs and writhing for more attention.
One thing followed another. They satisfied each other. In the aftermath, he smoked. She alternated packing “more toot in my flute” with playing with her make-up in the mirror.
As always, he also thought some more, “obsessively if you know what I mean,” about what he was doing here. In his maneuvering these sorts of trysts the only other “hard and fast rule” than that “they cannot be sixteen or younger—they don't exist for me”—was that the girls had to be dandy students, “at least a strong B+.” Whether paradoxical or not, he had zero compunction about fucking “good looking women only five years younger than me,” but he would “not raise anybody's grade by a single point.” He made this “absolutely clear,” and so far this little protocol also had worked out okay.
On the other hand, Donald Richardson Arnolds understood with perfect clarity how “repute and gossip in high school work. I mean, everybody knew Amy Manning,” the head cheer leader his senior year, “was balling the coach, and most people knew she had to get an abortion.”
He had already had one situation that he referred to as a “close call, if you catch my drift.” His first such sweetie, Mary Lou, was “the only one of the lot who was a nice girl; she may have been a virgin, at least technically, if you know what I mean.” She probably “fell a little bit in love with me, poor thing.” In the gymnasium parking lot after a Friday night pep rally, one that was a command performance for him according to Assistant Principal Mitchell, Mary Lou “threw her arms around me and hugged me very profusely.”
On his bed, with his third Pall Mall down to the filter, he shook his head at the memory and arched his eyebrows as a ragged sigh escaped his saxophonist's lips. “She'd been drinking, which is polite talk for 'drunker 'n hell,' and she was with her friends.” Don, as gently as possible and with a sweetness that in the end saved his ass again and again, soon thereafter broke up with this initial love match.
Since then, he had kept an eye open for the “naughty girls, the quote unquote morally suspect femme fatales. I can guarantee they won't femme-fatale me, no-sirree Bob.” Still preliminary to his “decision to turn atheist,” the twenty-five year old Don's well developed Southern Baptist moral ethic—“I'm a sinner, but I'm a happy sinner, by God; no guilt-complexes allowed”—kept him chipper and for the most part without qualm or care about his sex life.
“But that don't mean I'm a complete idiot.” He knew that trouble could loom up “at practically a minute's notice.” The knocking on the door made him jump at the proximity to this exact notion in his mind. “It was way too loud for the cops. Besides, they'd use the doorbell to his “nice two bedroom in the big complex” that, at three hundred bucks a month “was a pretty decent deal for Doraville,” about halfway between his classroom and downtown Atlanta, where he'd go “every weekend, to drink and party.”
The pounding increased in tempo if not in volume while he was ruminating “in a cocaine haze” about everything. “Hey, Kaitlyn, somebody's at the door. You're not by any chance expecting anybody, are you?”
She looked over at him, “a calculating female if ever there was one,” and shrugged. “It might be Michael,” her baseball team boyfriend—“I can't stand beefy boys,” she'd said on more than one occasion. “I'm supposed to meet him at midnight. What time is it?”
When Don announced “quarter past twelve,” she made a whoops face and scooted toward the front door. In the event, Michael Snodgrass had reassured him. “I know you could get in big trouble, Mr. Arnolds, but you don't have anything to worry about from me.”
He later learned that her being “allowed to continue her fuck-buddy relationship with their math teacher” had, in a transaction that he hardly dared consider carefully, “been part of the deal for me to date him.” Anyhow, Kaitlyn headed off for more fun and games with a “slightly less illicit tang,” and Don, failing to find anyone who answered his “witching hour booty call,” had settled in to finish the cocaine and play some saxophone, which he'd do till somebody struck the ceiling with a broom or other noisy stick.
He'd only finished two more lines of the powder. He'd barely begun riffing his way through “Julian Adderley's 'Never Will I Marry,'” when the phone rang. “Maybe somebody's booty-calling me” was his first thought.
Unfortunately, instead his caller was one Lawrence McCall Jones, the gifted Kaitlyn's long-suffering father. “The man's a captain or a major or a colonel or something, special fucking forces, a stone-cold killer, you could see it in his eyes, the man had no soul.”
His was not a message of comfort or amity to South Gwinett's math instructor. “He basically threatened to eviscerate me, literally and slowly if he ever heard again, from anybody, that I was having carnal relations with his daughter; that was how he put it: 'carnal relations.'” Supposedly, this warning went into excruciating detail.
“Listen, basically I'm a coward. Not only was I breaking up with his daughter” before he clocked in the day after the Columbus Day holiday when they had “assignated our asses off,” according to Don's recollection, “but I was sure as hell finding a new job next year, hell next semester if I could manage it,” because “everything this guy promised to do to me was credible, like he knew how to do it and had done it before.”
In advance of any such move’s coming to fruition, Don made some resolutions. “I promised some things and others I just sort of expressed an inclination toward, if you follow my thinking.”
He said something akin to this, on that occasion. “I know this much. I will never lay hands or lips on another high school student as long as I live.” He crossed his heart and shook his head with firm resolve. “I don't care if I have to cut it fucking off; I'm never going through that again.”
One may wonder, as a mathematical matter, if this prediction is valid, or even viable. But one thing is irrefutable. Don Anderson fully intended to be through with younger women, at least if they were his students, “at least if they're still in fucking high school!” Next Up—Chapter XVI
Wood Words Essays—(continued)…
"Birthing Bliss" starts out our ‘below-the-fold’ sojourn, repeating themes infinitely alluring in their ongoing repetition. "Riding Our Salubrious, Salacious, Sizzling, Slippery Love Groove Delineates a Vortex Divine, Eliciting Ecstatic Epiphany, Our Personal & Also a Universal Portal to the Birth of Bliss, Yielding Joyous Jumps to Jellied Juicy Junction, An Eternal Stream of Steaming Molten Mutuality."
A similar message suggests a Marshall Arts marketing insight. When an Erotic Missive finds a buyer, I’ll often replace it with related but not exactly the same wording.
"To Ride With You Through Our Slippery & Salubrious Love Groove Opens a Divine Vortex of Ecstatic Epiphany, a Universal Portal to the Birth of Bliss, From Which a Joyous Jump to Juicy, Jellied Fusion Flows, Our Eternal Stream of Irreversibly Yummy Conjunction."
Juiciness is a core component of all this. “Our Tantric Dance's Tango Jig Touts Juicy Torrid Jellied Total Joy That We Deploy With Epiphany Both Climactic & Coy."
Love Charms fore and aft yield these expressions of salacious and irresistible solidarity. "I Swim Through Juicy Seas to the Joyous Jellied Jewels at Your Heart's Molten Core."
The flow of the syllables may mirror arousal. "Sweet Beastly Feasts" entitle one to something akin to this. "Your Wild Wanting, in Wanton Waves, Washes Away Quotidian Woe's Concerns to Ignite Meandering Magma's Conflagration, in Which I Dance a Torrid Jig's Delight at Our Sweet Beastly Feast's Flaming Feral Ferocity."
Once more, a little editorial abracadabra brings us “Willful Worship” and a follow-up. "Grand Goddess Glories Blaze So Beautifully & Bountifully From Your Magma Melt Embraces That I Bond Obediently to Your Wild & Wanton Ways & Dutifully Worship My Beastly Priestess & the Feast She Yields."
Art’s headwaters often enough seem to blossom from a title like “Blazing Bliss.” "Could I But Capture on Some Humble Panel the Sweet Sacred Curve of Your Lips, From Which a Simple Sip May Reveal the Complete Beastly Feast of Your Feisty Loins, I Might So Inflame My Senses & Succor My Sensibilities That I Would Easily Catch Fire Till I Rose, Blazing Bliss, From the Ashes."
Forever, love’s vaunted eternal flame, truly is a birthing of the human condition, as in this piece, “Feisty Fiending, Soulful Longing.” "Your Glorious Chortles of Climactic Glee Erupt & Vault Me Through Everlasting Instants When Convulsions of Nirvana's Nuptial Nuance Allay Feisty Feral Fiending & Soulful Lusty Longing."
This is another version of the above, subtly shifted and aptly titled, “Nirvana's Nuptial Nuance.” "Eruptions of Your Gleeful Climactic Glories Rocket Me to Everlasting Instants of Heavenly Hunger's Satisfaction in Convulsions of Nirvana's Nuptial Nuance."
"Betokening Tantra" insistently exemplifies these eminent emanations of Life Force Energy. "Each Lusty Tantric Token That We Bestow on Each Other Elicits Another Grin, Further Glee, & Epiphany's Gracious Sweet Release That in Turn Encourages Additional Embraces To Trace Afresh Our Salacious Trove of Pleasure's Treasure & Ecstasy's Euphoric Eruption."
"Newly Aboil" is another title in this irrepressible primal chain of being. "Our inscriptions, When We Enter the Sacred Circle of Our Congress, Ignite Such Fiery Passion That We Might Imagine Inflaming the World With the Heated Eruptions of Our Kissing Caresses & Ecstatic Embraces; For the Most Part, We Prefer Instead to Douse Our Insatiable Erotic Sparks in Mother Earth's Splashing Salubrious Streams Or in Gaia's Salty Soothing Seas, Waters That Flow Too Through Us As We Stew, Then Cool, Only to Bubble to a Boil Anew."
Thus, only the jaded or suppressed, the beaten or scared-shitless enemies of embodiment will abhor or even abjure libidinal blooming among humankind’s inherently social communities. Such suppression can be profitable, no doubt: the ecstatically-denied denizen of denial is primed to shop. Regular rejuvenation of carnal congress’ connubial conjunction may be a ‘freedom-as-necessity’ element of any reform with revolutionary renderings, as it were.
"Over & Over & Over Again" is, as expressed to start, ‘how we’re wired.’ "Just As the Universe's Boundless Whirling Eruption Has Unfolded All Its Twirling Curvature From a Tiny Container's Big Bang, So Too Does the Wild & Wanton Wonder of Your Volcanic Carnal Forge—at Once, Magma's Eros, Fiery Loving, & Molten Ecstasy—Explode From Your Compact Package of Gaia's Goddess Glories, a Clear Difference Being How Readily You Unfurl This Swirl of Electric Pulsating Passion to Galvanize Basking in Blissful Flames Over & Over & Over Again."
Irrefutably, fucking’s utter centrality to human life has meant that social perversion or alienation or demonization of this energy would elicit mayhem and murder, torture and terror. Psychosexual succor lies at the heart of our species’ well-being; psychosexual repression guarantees Depression as the best-case outcome.
As Wilhelm Reich demonstrated conclusively, fascist fuckery is the more likely result. If jubilation and aplomb, in other words, has more appeal than Mass Collective Suicide, our only choice must chart a course toward erotic fulfillment and away from diminution of this salubrious center of succulent humanity, an almost endless lusty chain of frolicsome feistiness that connects every specific specimen to his or her species roots.
Empowered Political Forays—(continued)…
Before we venture to view the vagaries and devolutionary dynamism of demonizing sexuality, a few additional contextualizing components are especially essential. At its core, the BTR approach is to double down on the quintessential preeminence of Eros, of sexuality, of orgasmic frequent frolic, in any viable Homo Sapiens future.
As punctuated at the beginning of this section, nature is clear on these things, whether one refers to ‘classical’ accounts like those of Lewis Henry Morgan or to yesterday’s reaffirmation of the closest DNA match among our primate relatives, to the sexy and wanton Bonobo bands that offer up wisdom if we manage the openheartedness to listen.
Furthermore, a first-order stipulation must facilitate fierce affirmation that the feminine’s ferocious primacy and altogether friendly influence over affairs of frolic and feisty fucking will ever remain at least as ineluctable as it is ineffable. ‘Female-Led-Relationship’ has always been a huge aspect of everything, whatever mysteries of Goddess mastery are manifestly manifest except among the most monstrous and moronic social aggregations. In other words, womanly wanting is the only winning solution to social discord, whereas its denial exponentially increases conflicts that, in turn, are increasingly catastrophic.
Finally, just in case anyone reads this with a level of intuition not quite equal to that of a fence post, none of this parallels the Firesign Theater bit in which a disinterested adolescent fellow is browbeaten my mama into ‘playing the field’ and plowing it with ‘wild oats’ and such blah blah blah. As suggested Above the Fold, acknowledging the variety of erotic response is a compulsory societal commandment. But this obligation cuts both ways: minimally, a sex-positive POV has every right that chastity does.
Above at the start of this segment of things, a delay ensued in delineating the dangers and idiocy of demonizing the very Life-Force Necessities that can only be central to humanity’s thriving and survival. We might easily make a manifest with dozens of entries at this juncture, though for purposes of economy—and the recognition that the development of these BTR investigations is more or less eternally ongoing—we’ll here, first, very briefly look at two such points, each of which will in later issues receive their own more extensive presentations and, second, provide just a bit more detail and background about a third way in which ‘sexuality’s demonization is societal doom.’
Blocking sexuality, as the Nazis made eminently clear, without exception yields social arrangements that make murdering women mandatory, in that such matters as abortion and contraception become a ground of criminalized necessity. The obliviousness of erstwhile ‘progressive voices’ notwithstanding—in relation to the slightly more than half of humankind that is female in such cases of reproductive choice—this is a ‘die-on-that-hill’ moment; either one embraces, or at minimum allows, women’s equality in determining majority rule in these sorts of disputes or one willingly acts as an accomplice to the fascist precipice over which the human herd might yet commit Mass Collective Suicide. This then, is our first claimed postulate about how rejecting the requisite centrality of the sexual has evil, enervating, possibly ecocidal results.
Our Second sickening sample of the social degradation that accompanies condemning humanity’s erotic heartbeat is in the neighborhood of a super-Duh evaluation. It could easily unfold as a comic shtick: ‘Okay. Yeah. Sex is bad! I mean fuck fucking, right?’ This would be the character of the huckster, okay?
‘Who the hell are you?’ our woebegone everyman player asks. We’re lousy with lassitude and libidinally deprived in our distemper, but we don’t want to initiate a ‘baby with the bathwater’ scenario. We like orgasmic release; we want women to want us. But we’re pretty despairing and all-too-open to suggestion.
This self-appointed impresario laughs heartily. ‘I’m the recruiter for the International Order of InCel Men!’ Ha ha. Friendly fascist bonanzas for impotence producing SSRI’s would ‘go through the roof.’ What could go wrong? Ha ha. Gulp!
As a way of approaching completion, another, third, demonization-definite could be critical to consider. If one compares and contrasts ‘air-time,’ access to socially mediated microphones, or any other measuring methodology, vaunted champions of ‘LGBTQ Liberation’ receive massively more than their ‘fair share.’
This is very simple math, a sojourn duh-to-the-power-of-duh territory. At absolute most, worldwide—and almost certainly even in the altogether apparently freakish United States of America—maybe fifteen percent of humankind fits under the alphabet-suit umbrella in question.
Eight-five percent is well past the beginning of a vast majority. As a socialist with staunch, committed libertarian social values, I am clear. We must accept and in some real sense celebrate all ‘consenting-adult’ erotic arrangements. “You can fuck whom you like, whenever you like,” under such conditions of equity and honesty and all such necessary blah blah blah in this fiercely-feisty field of interconnection at the most basic and compelling level.
That is what I would say and insist that society must learn how to manifest, at least if human survival matters. But I would continue, implacable in seeking a come-to-Jesus confrontation with anyone radically woke about the LGBTQ ‘cause.’ “You cannot, however, ever deflect me from maintaining, with importunate firmness, that democracy overwhelmingly dwarfs this newest version of divide-&-conquer special interests.” Championing sexuality is a Life-Force exercise; championing LGBTQ libidos as in any sense special merely maps an alternate route to Mass Collective Suicide.
Today’s ideas merely introduce BTR’s general follow-up to the foundational sequence of articles about the work of Wilhelm Reich. Readers may, in all cases, rely absolutely—as I live and breathe—on the ongoing expression of this series of Empowered Political Forays. Today’s opinionated overview is, as alluded, just a start. The data will back me up; as my friend, the Islamic Canadian cop, states such a case, “You may believe me or not when I tell you, but believe me when I tell you, because it is true.”
Old Stories & New—(continued)…
…********
The rest of the daylight hours passed in a blur. We fed on good bread and sharp cheese, got all the necessary equipment for our evening's festivities, and hiked along the edge of the biggest canyon East of the Mississippi, according to a brochure from the motel office. Some of the vistas take your breath away: the harsh grandeur of eternal rock gouged away by the relentless action of raging water, the forces of nature in opposition whether they liked it or not.
At least that's approximately what Russ said as we got ready to head back to the room. To me, it was just damn pretty. In view of the fact that the only woman who ever broke my heart was on my arm, the whole package was well worth a four-and-a-half hour drive.
That night was our designated-drug-night. Russ believed in the value of ritual. He'd run us around all day, "like burrheaded recruits" as he put it, so we'd be all cleaned out when we imbibed mind-altering substances.
"It'll make the whole experience more powerful, increase the karma-value of whatever lesson's waitin' for ya." He was after all of us, but especially me, to "drink more fluids, damn it, ya got to flush out the system." A swig of canteen water here, half quart of juice there, I must've urinated fifteen times that day. Russ figured if you pissed half your weight away, you'd really learn something on acid.
By the time we got back to the room, just before dusk around 5:30, I felt cleaned out right on down the line. And I did have that lightly exercised glow about me. I felt warm, limber, almost sublime. I'd have a fine time even if he was about to get his ass shot off in Southeast Asia.
As soon as we were inside, Russ had the eight-track booming, the bass bathing us with the effect of epsom salts on the muscle-sore. I felt as limber as the slinky that Charlotte did tricks with on their bed. Vickie and I coursed around the room to the music pouring from the box; the first slow ballad found us wrapped around each other, soul-kissing and grinding our pelvises.
Charlotte lit candles everywhere, Russ turned off lamps as she went. The mirrors multiplied the flickering lights and expanded the room. Our youthful heat made the place seem positively steamy, even though the brisk mountain Fall promised frost early in the evening. As Vickie and I danced and laughed, Charlotte placed herself in Russ's arms, and his hands massaged up and down her chest as they watched us writhe together.
The return of rock and roll blew our scene apart, each of us assuming the quality of a dervish possessed, bouncing around the room pursued by each other's wildly contorting shadows. When the album ended, we all drifted a bit, until Vickie caught my hand and pulled me to her.
"Let's take a shower sweet cakes."
When we emerged clean and slick, Charlotte and Russ were in bed.
"What have we here?!!" Vickie almost bellowed in her most stentorian tones of cheerleader-captain authority. "Sodomy? Bestiality? Carnal philandering?" I loved it when she played the actress.
"Yeah, don't ya think 'ts 'bout time ya'll cleaned up your act?" I suggested. "We even left ya plenty hot water." Trust Robert Jonathon to make a pedestrian gesture even under the most magical circumstances. Charlotte cracked up. But Russ rescued me.
"He's right now. It's to the showers with us, and we'll all get properly prepared for our trials upon our return." He was bouncing on the mattress now, pulling Charlotte up with him. Both of them unaffectedly naked, their wiry similarity making them look like wood sprites in the dancing half light, I could only think how much more than family I loved this wild man.
*******
Charlotte's hair was still a damp mass as she, Vickie, and I sat in a circle awaiting Russ's return from his car with our stash of high potency halucinogens. Just as he had orchestrated this journey in every other way, Russ established the boundaries in regard to drugs as well.
"Everybody's allowed two hits. You can take as much as you want, however you want to. But no more than two." He gave each of us a little Blue Diamond match box containing the treasure.
"What about you, fearless leader?" Vickie always asked the awkward questions.
Charlotte half smiled, half sneered. "Says he's got a spiritual quest, he'll get high just bein' 'round us."
"I will too. Don't worry children, I'll fend off the narcs."
Trying to get answers from Russ was like trying to pin down a male retriever that's just gotten its first scent of a receptive companion in heat. Some things you just let alone, because you know--if you've got any sense--you won't get any explanation anyway.
"The only rules are: no TV, no alcohol, no light bulbs."
Surrounded by music, we three indulgents selected an amount to begin the evening. Following Russ's lead, each of us retreated to a corner to 'meditate.' I didn't know a thing about it, but Russ said you could get just as high breathing as doing acid. Double-the-pleasure sounded fine to me, so I crossed my legs, closed my mouth, and opened my nostrils wide.
The next hours brought into direct juxtaposition the brightest high-lights and the deepest shadows. The most playful confronted the deadly serious. The first flush of the drug made us into chatterboxes. Even the normally laconic Charlotte sparred verbally over "heavy" silliness, the meaning of life and the nature of perception.
We played strip poker and pranced to the varied music that Russ continued to induce from his magic box. The winner of this card-contest, as always in such things Russ--he knew all the odds--got to choose his victory prize. He took off the rest of his clothes.
"If ya beat 'em, join 'em, 'at's what I always say." He performed a bit of a strip tease that elicited laughing applause from Charlotte, whoops from Vickie, and a pleasantly mild embarassment from yours truly.
The finest aromas of human flesh, like warm dough ready to enter the oven, like a secluded garden after a Spring shower, permeated the little room that our presence and candlelight had so thoroughly transformed. The speedy rush of LSD made slow-dancing a magical melding of well-oiled mechanics, each movement in the flow distinctly felt.
I felt the shift in mood even as Vickie rubbed her warm firm body into mine to the rhythm of the Bee-Gees. The nausea always at the fringe of a trip became more central, as I breathed more shallowly and became aware of a weight on my heart.
"Orthodox barbarity, that's what they expect." We'd entered a tight circle, arms around each other's shoulders as we swayed along. Charlotte was sobbing, and we all had faces wet from tears. "They'll take you in their murder machine, chew ya up 'n spit ya out. You haven't even got a snowball's chance in hell."
Vickie and I nodded and added our choking affirmations to this dire prediction. We felt this sadness so intensely. Russ tightened the three of us together, like wounded children, and did his best to hug us all in tandem. "OK, OK, we needed this, sure we did. But ya'll don't need worry 'bout a thing. I really got a plan; it'll work, guarantee it. We'll all be laughin' 'bout it by Wednesday 't the latest."
The next hours passed in bed. The aromas and noises of young sex, overheated and deliciously eternalized by the wonder of the drug, filled our tiny enclosure. At a final climactic moment, as Vickie and I struggled through our tears for the ultimate purchase, she whispered to me. "Don't ever let 'em take you baby. It be yer death fer sure."
*******
Sunday's awakening went through all the layers of sensation, from enhanced feeling to enlivened smell, until I opened my eyes to a light so diffuse that it seemed to come from everywhere at once. I saw first my young lover tangled in the sheets at the end of my fingertips. Her eyes, puffed with woe, offset the athletic perfection of her form. I saw second the bare bottom of Russ, his waist encircled with an apron, as he made French toast over his portable stove.
To the sleepy smile of Charlotte, whose head emerged from the covers like a well-shaken mop, he promised, "this'll be the best you've ever had honey. Make it with stale bread, soaks up the flavor better."
"Whatever you say, baby."
I wondered how many times she'd said that so far this weekend. The rest of the day, grey and still without as within, went by in a whirl. Russ had us up and down the gorge practically under the noses of the rangers.
He prohibited "any negative thoughts, or discussion of possible negative futures." What could I say? He was my mentor, my leader, my driver, my supplier. Vickie only brought up the unmentionable by accident, though she had a definite propensity for that. And Charlotte he'd somehow won over during the night, in some commotion of emotion was my guess.
So we traipsed off into the wild explosion of color the canyon had become in the muted light of a cloudy day. I kept telling myself, "'member, yer fluids is depleted by drugs, take it easy." We met no mishap to prevent our checking-out from our hostel, however, bidding farewell to lumpy-beds sweetly-shared and the averted gaze of old wiry-wire-rims and his watchful wife.
Up into the Georgia hills we drove for a few more hours of exploration and exercise. My internal state mirrored my environs. Not a shadow existed to differentiate one thing from another. All was a seamless mesh of exertion and experience. Excepting Russ's remarks as we finally aimed toward the interstate, I don't recall a single word spoken during the day.
"It'd be so cool 'f we could do this every year, from now on."
*******
Gentle fondling was everyone's main occupation on the ride home. Not even desultory attempts at conversation began to divulge our thoughts. I'll tell you, though, I considered--from every angle I could imagine--the wild impropriety of my good friend Russ being trained to kill little brown people ten thousand miles away. Talk about avoiding the draft was easy, success was a lot more elusive.
My older brother, John, reassured the whole family before he went in. He snored; "that al'us keeps ya out the infantry," he'd explained. The next time I saw him, his left arm was a mangled stump, ripped to shreds in some random fire fight in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
Cousin Lewis had only mixed success with his strategy. He joined the air force to avoid induction into the army. He didn't go to Southeast Asia, but became a dispirited heroin addict in Germany before his first tour ended. He shared a prison cell now with two other guys at Reidsville.
The military might not mar everyone, but the general effect was a consistent blend of clap and crushed spirits, horniness, regimentation, and desperation. Russ sure as hell didn't fit in, but I figured he'd either learn or expire, at this point.
******Next Up—Section 3
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—(continued)...
From the gray bush, with leaves the color of stormy clouds, a little creature emerged that certainly looked solid enough to test the ground hereabouts, a hybrid squirrel with eight inch legs that let the strange beast hop like a rabbit, or, standing, to amble about like a tiny kangaroo to pick at berries and nits.
As well, Jack reasoned, 'such a one would certainly also be fat enough—and tastier by far than a skinny lad such as I—for any hungry, horrible thing.' Left foot first, he entered this new terrain.
As Jack followed the now hopping, now dallying Scrimmel—he decided to name it—he recognized that here, above the clouds, he was on an easily noticeable trail, and wonder filled him, that he might as well have been following his path from only yesterday, with Sadie, toward market and, in the event, demonstrably magical beans. He gave not even a thought to his return from his first jaunt so high in the land of clouds, since, from infancy, wherever he went, he had always effortlessly found the same way back that he'd come in the first place. At times, under such circumstances, he intuited and blazed shortcuts through entirely unfamiliar territory.
Anyway, understandably, the now well-fed Scrimmel melted into the bluish blush of the bush, yet Jack, noting that the pathway became still wider as he went, continued onward, to a bluff of cloudscape where he looked out over a hollow to, rising from bushes and trees in which every green tinged its fringes with white and blue and yellow and gray, a pillowed wilderness that nestled a wonderfully sculpted mansion in its folds, a stout turret at each end of the promenade that made a terrace along the central portion of the structure.
It was stolid work; not beautiful, not classical, yet sturdy enough looking. Jack posed a number of questions to himself as he stood, swaying from one foot's prospective retreat to the other's possible advance.
'What of those two fat grazing cows, then?' They didn't augur likely man-eating terror.
'But,' he gulped despite his own enjoyment now and again of buttery beef, 'how about those two new carcasses, hung on hooks and still dripping a bit of blood into bowls beneath' the limbs where they dangled?
In the end, the front door decided for him, opening to present a slender young woman who was taller than two of his mothers stacked one atop the other. 'She certainly doesn't look like the sort who'd make a feast of me,' he considered, looking at her smooth fair form with an approving eye.
Just a second later, he stepped from the leafy froth of the cloudy underbrush and moved purposefully toward the porch stoop where she stood, eyeing his approach with a measured gaze much older than her youthful mien. While she was observing young Jack, likely several years her junior, approaching, she arched her eyebrows and folded her arms across her chest.
“My man,” she intoned as Jack started to climb the five nebulously gray steps to the deck, “likes to lunch on boys like you.” When our intrepid young hero paused and cocked his head with a quizzical grin, she continued, “At least, that is, if he can't have them for breakfast or supper.”
She too smiled, before she extended her left arm in welcome. “I am called Elma May.”
At this, Jack laughed aloud. “Well, Elma May, when we know each other better, perhaps you'll divulge to me your true name. I'm Jack.”
Once she had ushered them inside, Jack stood astonished at how palatial everything appeared, with ceilings as high as a low sky and counters tall enough to double as rough and ready ridges even for a lithe fellow such as he himself was indeed. In particular, however, he noticed the stove and double-oven nearly as large as his and his mother's cottage, emanating heat from one side, atop which sat a blackened pot, large enough to hold a whole pig, that seeped slightly steamy tendrils into the air above, a scent almost like boiled pork but subtly different.
Following our hero's attention, her broad smooth face grinned at him, genial if not gentle. “He was not as clever,” and here Elma paused, for emphasis, “or as lucky, as you.” She continued her eyes-wide admonishment. “Our fates may indeed be bound together, Jack,” she said, referring to recent premonitions about which she'd been ruminating for several days, “yet you should probably return another time when we might converse more freely.”
Although Jack paled to hear of the stew that he had been sniffing, still, he grinned back at her amicable way of orienting their first tete-a-tete. “I'm a good talker; we can start now.” He added, to show he was listening closely. “There's no fate like right this second.”
And so they spoke. While the sun above—the same fiery star that shined on the home that Jack shared with his Mom—inched along the skyway, they learned a bit about each other. She heard of the youth's 'magic beans' and hopes in that regard, of his family and Sadie and the wild hills that he inhabited and more; he learned of her capture and forced service to the giant who ruled this kingdom-in-the-clouds, of her origins far away across many great waters, and of the domestic arrangements and general layout of her unelected household in the sky.
“But I must tell you, my clever and lucky new friend,” and she looked out every window round about the great room of the Gargantuan's fortress, “that this massive monster who now makes a claim to be my man is not nearly so stupid as he might appear.”
She paused before adding this amplifier. “In particular,” she insisted, “his senses are very sharp, especially his ability to smell anything that he fancies tasting.”
She laughed quietly before she concluded; “really, his only weakness as a killer is how deeply he falls right to sleep soon after he eats a meaty conquest.”
“Well...,” began Jack, with an attempt not to show worry in the roll of his eyes, “maybe I ought...”
“Oh my!” interjected his clearly alarmed newest acquaintance. “We're too late.”
From outside, as if floating from afar, came a booming voice , a little like thunder. “Rum Dum, Rum Dum, here I come, come, come.” A cackle like the crackle of lightning followed. “And I'll need some meat to fill my tum.”
“Climb in here, Jack,” the lithe yet large young lass directed, opening the warm door of the oven not alight just right that second. No sooner had she shut him in than he heard a crashing entrance, the great door's smacking with a great crack against the beams that shaped the homestead.
“Fo, Fo, Fie, Fun!” rang out the great, grating shouted song, “I smell the meat of an Austrian!” Jack listened as the fierce, beastly presence drew right up to the door that guarded him from visual discovery and sniffed with a big growl, “Are you hiding another boy in this pot, woman?” His laugh, derisive and rasping, was much more frightening than all the rest of his blistering bluster.
“Don't hold out on me Elma!” Jack could hear her breath catch as the ogre grabbed her. “Have you added another boy to my stew?”
Combative in her tone, she replied, “I've told you that your new spice product was making your nose smell crooked, you fool!”
“I'm no fool! Take it back!!!”
“Ow!” She was obviously scuffling. “Fine. You're a mental giant, all right? I'm just saying, if you make your favorite seasoning from the dried powdered remains of your leftovers, then everything's going to smell like a new boy to you.”
The sounds of skirmishing between them stopped. “Come on. Let me go. I can't feed you otherwise.” Genuine guffaws erupted at how rapidly she found herself at liberty.
As had been true with Jack, her tone was affable enough. “Stew, beef, and mead, as usual, right?” Next Up: Chapter Three
New Folk Fables—(continued)…
"'Oh all the comrades that e'er I had, they'd sorrow if I'd gone away,
and all the sweethearts that e'er I've had, they'd wish me one more day to stay.
But since it falls unto my lot, that I should rise and you should not
I'll gently rise and softly call, ' Good night and joy be with you all.'"
Belting out a baritone so sweet and smooth that it might provide a lullaby for princelings, Richards would convey, the battered Jack, now spry and lively, looked directly at his tormentors' gathered bodies on the ode's third line, and stood to draw deeply the moist air of the glen at the fourth line, before completing the tune "like a maestro inspired by forces beyond the ken of normal men."
Now as if this display were not enough to drive home the passing of strange events just prior to his discovery and resuscitation, when the gendarmerie pair mounted Jack barebacked on one of the drays and proceeded to lead the way back across Sir Robert's now well-traveled pasture, our fair and heretofore famously quiet lad regaled his now thoroughly astonished rescuers with a lively telling of the night's events, replete with regret for the death and damage and loss that had resulted, forgiveness of Sir Robert's nefarious intentions, and an unalterably fervent adoration of the feisty and comely Eileen.
In the event, with Sir Robert himself incapable of either granting or withholding consent, and wilful Eileen so insistent about her communion with Jack that she spoke of "taking him to America should that prove necessary," the most unexpected nuptials of the century in this fine corner of the world had come to pass well before the Summer's high sun had shown on the sparkling Claire or bathed the white ribbons of Derry High Falls in snowy luster. No more sweetly voluble caretaker for the receding Sir Robert is possible to imagine, just as no more torturous outcome to Sir Robert's life is possible to conceive.
Eileen in any event blossomed like well tended garden loam, glowing from the love that she had long sought, now her regular fare. On the very day, as another Winter approached, that she intended to tell her father of the first of five grand children that she would add to his line, she found him before the fire, with his last ember extinguished, his last breath perhaps drawn with the realization that Jack Higgins's lively seed would extend the sway of the Thompson brood.
For the lucky couple, fate granted forty nine anniversaries. Miss Molly, whose fulsome, frolicksome wantonness had served her well, lost the gloss and sweet sheen that had drawn the boys like bees. True to his word, though, Sir Winston provided her a place in his household, where, well into his dotage, he and she would occasionally play the lutes like youngsters still.
While Jack's voice served him as well as his knowledge of love and lore, the goddess's kiss, at the big stone on Witch's Mountain entered accounts of the workings of the world. To this day, those who would honor love and lust and the springs that flow from earthy loins journey to Faeries' Glen to kiss the stone that jack presented his mouth that long ago night, believing, as many of us do, that the forces of the world consist of vastly more than the dry canons of a crusty God, that they must also contain the implacable buss of a goddess who can bring each of us forth from a like union of hard and soft and thunder and storm.
Nerdy Nuggets—(continued)…
As pointed out, each of these portals will merit its own series, given time and tide. Thus, only something akin to a precis appears in the here and now. A simple enumerating method holds sway, perfectly adequate till later.
Number ONE—While maintaining critical distance as a sine qua non, the Nation of Islam’s provenance of The Special Relationship, and its three volumes’ blaming Jews while exculpating Muslims from slave trading sins, does not automatically make casting these aspersions false. A 1995 review in Atlantic Magazine, “Slavery and the Jews,” makes the point straight away in deconstructing infighting that could easily substitute for varied post-October-Seventh pitched battling.
“Ironically, Martin's assertion that ‘Jews were very much in the mainstream of European society as far as the trade in African human beings was concerned" was very close to what many Jewish scholars had claimed some thirty years before.’ This articulation will give an opening for what is to come, second in the queue, as it were.
Number TWO—Prior to, during, and after this commerce in human flesh, Ottoman imperial policy generally speaking gave Jewish residents greater leeway than elsewhere to keep their properties, practice their rituals, and so forth. Then again, this process transpired in part in conjunction with Europe’s Crusading ways, most of the monarchies of which practices at different time expelled entire Jewish populations. A complex, century’s-long dynamic full of nuance and contradiction, this period will likely entail several units in upcoming issues.
Number THREE—A powerful Jewish role in the antebellum South? Well, yes, actually, again a huge topic full of subtle twists and turns and plenty of potent parry and thrust on today’s political stages. “On the other side of the divide, the most prominent American Jewish slaveholder was Judah P. Benjamin. An immigrant from St. Croix, his family moved to Charleston when he was three. He settled in New Orleans and became a successful attorney.
He worked to advance his political career by purchasing a plantation outside of the city in the 1840s. He named it Bellechasse and staffed it with 140 slaves."
Number FOUR—As a historical fiction, the British imperial novel as tour de force, Justine and the three subsequent volumes in The Alexandria Quartet serves as a model for contextualizing the twentieth century fruition of an Israeli State, culminating the Zionist Project itself. This will focus on evidence outside a storyteller’s richly portrayed settings, followed by a review of the four volumes themselves.
Number FIVE—Steven Salaita taught at Virginia Tech, close at hand to my homey habitat in the here and now. His remains a powerful voice for criticizing and contextualizing Israel’s exemplification of a ruthless and rigorous ‘Colonial Settler Project.’ This arguably epitomizes one way of seeing the past three quarters of a century of Israel’s establishing itself as a Western Asian imperial outpost for the Anglo-American phalanx in the region.
Number SIX—Nearly as far South as possible, and clearly also just about as ironic as could be conceivable, the same South African land that has taken Israel to the halls of the International Criminal Court of late was itself an Apartheid state for decades that essentially traded recognition of Israel for technical, logistical, political, and general support for its otherwise almost universally condemned regime. This ties into Israel’s thermonuclear potency too. It’s a big deal, intricate and sticky with complexity’s thorniest thickets.
Number SEVEN—Israeli arms trading with Latin dictatorships is another big element of Zionist foreign policy and its profitable ways. El Salvador, Nicaragua before the Sandinistas, Guatemala, Brazil, Pinochet’s Chile, and more all depended on Israel’s manufacturing might. For decades after Israel’s formation, these relationships helped dictatorship to thrive in the Western Hemisphere.
Number EIGHT—As a market maker, the Advanced Security Training Institute has become a significant player in teaching police tactics to the ‘guardians of ghettos’ around the globe. This martial instructional nexus extends from beat cops to civilian special forces and military personnel in multiple guises.
Number NINE—The book and media reviews that will comprise these pieces are as varied as the already mentioned Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell’s masterpiece of conspiracy and empire in the Eastern Mediterranean to Professor Mearshimer’s and Walt’s iconic yet controversial The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and beyond, and above, oh my. Measuring mediation will thus part of this effort at comprehension in a fraught and distraught context on which human survival could readily turn.
However plausible a particular interlocutor finds the overall hypothesis, each arena enumerated today certainly looks interesting enough—and conceivably of critical import at that—to justify pondering more richly and pointedly. Well might we consider Leon Trotsky’s estimate again. He wrote this circa 1938, but it is, conceivably, equally pertinent on July 1, 2024.
“Now more than ever, the fate of the Jewish people—not only their political but also their physical fate—is indissolubly linked with the emancipating struggle of the international proletariat. Only audacious mobilization of the workers against reaction, creation of workers’ militia, direct physical resistance to the fascist gangs, increasing self-confidence, activity and audacity on the part of all the oppressed can provoke a change in the relation of forces, stop the world wave of fascism, and open a new chapter in the history of mankind."
Whatever our present estimates of things as they truly stand, more is coming. The following installment will look at Marx’s and Trotsky’s and other socialists’ works as bookends of the persecution of European Jews and the formulation and flowering of the entire Zionist Project. Next Up: Contextualizing Radical Critics of the Zionist Project.
Communication & Human Survival—(continued)...
Why did Roosevelt delay bargaining at Yalta, in the Crimea? Why did Truman, who took Roosevelt’s place, abrogate the deals that his predecessor had made there? Why did several hundred thousand Japanese face instant death by incineration, or slow demise from radiation poisoning, or a combination of sudden end and torture from blunt trauma? The answer to all of these queries is the same. The United States’ leaders of finance and industry and politics, even if Churchill’s dream of an eviscerated Soviet Union had not quite come true, intended to rule the roost in the aftermath of some hundred-odd million corpses, and these very tough minded men wanted as little communism to follow in the lee of the decimation as they could arrange.
If skilled actors, who had recently committed genocide and killed U.S. and English citizens and followers of the ‘one true faith,’ could help, so be it. If duplicity and fraud and corruption had to accompany such eventualities of dominance and hegemony, so be it. If, even as the stench of death and decay still rose fresh from mass graves and killing fields, the grounds for the next war had to be made ready, by God, so be it.
In this context, the Marshall Plan was another weapon, psychological in nature, so that starving Ukrainians in 1947 would see the largesse of America. The Cold War was a strategy instigated by the United States, whose key tactic, ‘containment,’ operated on the basis of a nuclear weapons monopoly the overwhelmingly primary purpose of which was to check any notion that Stalin might have had to advance beyond where his soldiers had bled and hacked their way to stand in place.
Harry Truman and his advisers in government and academia and industry, including a few White Russians, had thought such things out. Gar Alperowitz’s Atomic Diplomacy is no longer controvertible in this regard. The circumstantial and direct evidence is overwhelming.
President Truman, “(e)ven before taking over the Presidency, …had given the problem (of maintaining control over Eastern Europe and Asia)considerable thought. In a May 16(1945)discussion with the Secretary of War, he recalled at great length talks he used to have with his friend Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah—‘I would point to a map of Europe and trace its breadbasket, with Hungary a cattle country and Rumania and Ukraine as the wheat area” along with plenty of coal on the Donbass border.
One might develop these points at even greater length. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, the rise of military Keynesianism, the willful promulgation of warfare among war weary people in Ukraine, the support for nationalistic and patriotic visions that inherently promoted the very sorts of relationships that had ended in such a death spiral, these and other points—and uncountable stories and vignettes and incidents as wild and passionate and bizarre as Ukraine itself, might yet be forthcoming.
But I’ll hope, though providing these additional details would be enjoyable and would serve to teach even more what is happening and what is at stake, that we’ve seen enough for now. The links are obvious. Nationalism is not some high-flown sweet ideal; it is one way of looking at things. Russians are Ukrainians and vice versa at least as much as they are their own unique categories of identity.
Communism and social democracy are equally as valid as pretend ‘free-market,’ bourgeois profiteering, and, without a single doubt, these more economically equitable means are quite definitely as popular as ‘naked capitalism’—at least on the part of the Earth’s surface that considers itself Ukrainian. For both of these qualities—one about cultural cohesion, one about social organization, quite a few folks in this part of the world will ‘go to the mat.’
Fascism has never won through democratic means. Its deployment is always violent and cynical. Yet it does serve a purpose for those who would continue to ply their trade and extract a healthy profit. Thus, this devilish deal is once again in front of our eyes.
It has penetrated to the center of things because those who would manage the world according to ideological fantasy and fatuous propaganda, all in order to extract the maximum return on a dollar and maintain the maximum extent of their empire, have decided, along with Victoria Nuland, “Fuck the EU!” In light of what we’ve learned here, does that seem like a sound approach?
In the Nature of Concluding Something
Unlike in the natural sciences, where a lack of involvement can mean that an actor cares little more about uncertainty than about the upshot of the curiosity that impelled a look, in the social sciences an ignorant citizen can quite often desperately need to pay attention and seek answers. Ukraine, in the course of a busy afternoon, could be the source of the elimination of every human being from our fair planet.
Most importantly, the relationships and complications that characterized the past live on. What Faulkner said about the American South applies with especial force in Ukraine. “The past here isn’t dead; it’s not even past.” Today’s developments, whatever manifestations ultimately predominate, can only result from intersections with and contextualization of these past decades, now seemingly dead.
In such a network of intertwined threat and depredation, willful ignorance counts as more than inexcusable, to become, truly, a crime against humanity. Whereas absolute assurance of truth may be ever elusive, those folks who hope for human thriving and survival must seek out honest ideas and information about Ukraine, be willing to discuss these matters fully and openly, and then seek to act with each other to salvage our skins if not our souls.
AFTERWORD
Big plusses attend thinking in real terms about the past and its connection with the present. For example, one receives a powerful boost in trying to make sense of multiple contemporary strands that might otherwise seem opaque at best. The following cases are illustrative.
MH-17 is the situation that most troubles people. The recent report about this particular mass murder makes clear that Russians have cooperated fully with the investigation, whereas outside interests—the same ones that arrogated to themselves the right to invade and otherwise terrorize the ‘infant’ Soviet Union, interests then as now well aware of the social pressure points and rich bonanzas attendant on control of Ukrainian space—have neither shared data nor cooperated much with the process; at the least, this should cause a high degree of skepticism about the allegations against Russia that are purposely empty of content.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea is another obvious point to ponder. This was the home where the crew of the Potemkin rose up not so long ago, led by Ukrainians; the land where one of history’s storied yet little-told heroines, also Ukrainian, sacrificed her life, beside her Ukrainian husband on the gallows, in order to drive off local bourgeois and gentry and support the revolution that Bolsheviks had led; and on and on ad infinitum. The notion that this place, somehow, has a grudge against Russia and would only join under threat or vicious manipulation, is at best absurd.
The Maidan uprising and its interlaced factors of hidden agendas, Nazi agents, and fiery rhetoric are additional cases in point. If readers do not see the close correspondence, to the point of identity, between these recent events and a past in which a complex dance that involved more mutuality than aversion occurred between Russia and Ukraine, with various other ‘partners’ looking on greedily, then these perusers need to reread what shows up above.
Finally, while the period is a ‘Dark Ages’ to this humble correspondent, the purported Cold War period in Ukraine would likely prove instructive, if for no other reason than the Premier of the Soviet Union for the first part of that conflict was none other than Ukrainian Nikita Khruschev. He grew up and worked as a skilled laborer and miner in Donbass.
Another, related advantage is that one gets a very powerful bullshit detector. In relation to Ukraine, corporate media have explained all sorts of recent events in ways that are at best nonsensical, given what we know now about the history of the region and how this intertwines with present. Again, a few unfolding developments are instructive.
Just as a nuanced explication of what likely transpired with the downed Malaysian jet—one that at least recognized the possibility of present conspiracies that fit patterns of past racketeering—might be quite satisfying, so too the ‘standard’ mediation of corporate enterprise is laughably inadequate.
A similar conclusion is possible in relation to Crimea, Sevastopol, and so forth.
Nor does the overall ‘establishment’ contextualization of the past year or so escape such a critique. The tropes that show up in America’s ‘Paper-of-Record’ or Jeff Bezos’ new plaything most clearly exemplify this fatuous and self-serving reportage. While the reporting of England’s press, perhaps particularly the Guardian—full disclosure: I will receive payment for this writing from Guardian Media—is slightly more robust and less biased, particularly the British Broadcasting Corporation comes close to equaling the foolishness on the other side of the Atlantic. One might make similar observations about the French, particularly Le Monde, and the German for-profit media as one proffers about the better English papers and websites.
Finally, one gains, by tying together the five decades that happened half a century ago with the present situation a capacity to think about what might be coming down the pike, so to say. Once again, a couple specific scenarios are useful to examine, even though many other possibilities also exist.
The first plausible outcome would mirror what has twice come to pass already—world war of the most total variety; such a thought is, to say the least, bracing. The United States is now on track to spend plus-or-minus another trillion dollars making its present nuclear weapons strike forces even more daunting. Coincidentally, America’s initial choice to wage the world’s first atomic war also has a Crimean connection; Truman’s diaries and other records show his poker-playing strategy—at Potsdam replaced with triumphant pride—while he was meeting at Yalta, delaying and preparing to renege on agreements with Stalin if the Manhattan project delivered what soon enough came to pass at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The second reasonable expectation is that citizens and all of the so-called ‘stakeholders’ will form some sort of critical mass of empowered action to yield a very different result than World War One or World War Two ‘special-delivered’ to our kind; though this seems to offer a reassuring potential, clearly, this reassurance only adds up to more than fancy if people are willing to give voice to critical thinking and act toward accomplishing an agenda that fits such an intellectual stance, vocalization and critical thought that are only possible in the context of a deeper and more honest explication, particularly regarding history, than folks have thus far shown the willingness to engage.
One further benefit of contemplating the world in the fashion that this narrative does has nothing to do with Ukraine. It concerns the way that media and storytelling and consciousness form an evolving neural capacity in the citizen’s brain, in an observer’s heart, in a reader’s overall awareness.
If we fail to tie things up with a bow and package that includes a past from which all our present problems and prospects spring, then we have truly understood nothing. And isn’t such a narrative aptitude, when we are ‘on our game,’ as it were, just what we normally attempt? Inquiring minds ought very much want to cogitate about this inquiry, if only because thriving and survival these days may require such an orientation.
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—(continued)…
A CHANCE SPINDOCTOR ENCOUNTER & AN INSTRUCTIONAL NEXUS
Marshall and Veronica ended up in the Roaring Fork Valley because they had passed through in their sojourns, and they had both skied there prior to any formal family comeuppance for Marshall’s passion for his non-pedigreed lover. The Spindoctor found himself in Aspen for reasons much more random and mundane.
Those rationale stemmed from his experience ‘off the leash and on the prowl’ at Harvard. For several months, fueled by his National Merit Scholarship, he had ridden a wave of beginner’s luck in poker.
Then one night, the battles among the players of seven card stud and draw and their variations just didn’t gel, while five enthusiasts skirmished among themselves in a backgammon chouette, a variation of the contest that permits a theoretically unlimited number of gamblers to fight out their carnage on a single score sheet. An inveterate practitioner of pattern recognition, the nineteen year old version of Spindoctor quickly noted that this was the game that graced the back of cheap paper checkerboards, with their imprecise dice and flimsy plastic checkers.
By contrast, the sturdy briefcase that contained the playing plane at Radcliffe gleamed with lustrous leather points, and a velour rolling surface made the glassy clatter of dice mimic a muted set of bass notes. The twenty-one rolls of a pair of standard dice, in their thirty-six permutations, led to an ebb and flow of positional battlements that appeared almost unimaginably complex and martially delightful to the uninitiated youth who watched with fascination as the ‘captain’s’ and ‘box’s’ seats changed as a sitter won or lost in turn.
Each challenge that grew from the clunky starting position combined racing with capture and blockade, opportunism with the potential for much deeper conceptual strategies. For whatever reasons of disposition or fate, this kingdom of dice, this arena of action’s simulacrum, grasped hold of a young Spindoctor’s psyche with a grip at once fierce and alluring.
In the event, he was playing, for much the same ‘stake’ that he still risks, within thirty minutes of first observing the tides of fortune that ruled the play on that day, as well as during all prior and subsequent matches. Like Charles Darwin, the Spindoctor has always sensed an astoundingly efficient utility in the way that backgammon operates. Yet this may be less Darwin’s observation that the contest served as a ‘tonic for the mind’ than a rationalization of Jimbo’s own fiendish delight, which sported sources both more random and less salubrious.
No matter what, in the ivied halls, essentially, his predilection for gaming had led his administrative overseers at South House in Radcliffe to recommend a hiatus in his studies. He had an ‘in’ for a thespian’s opportunity in New York City, an unpaid twenty-five hour a week course of performance and practice that would have meant working fifty hours a week in Manhattan just in order to make ends meet.
Such, to say the least, did not appeal to an already socially-democratically leaning Spindoctor as equitable or fair. He set out on a trek to Los Angeles with twenty dollars in his pocket. The great Peter Frisch himself set the just turned twenty-one year old Jimbo on the entrance ramp to I-80 across the Jersey line.
The young wanderer, through a truly incredible set of adventures—that involved an MK Ultra veteran’s profferal of a ride from the Iowa-Illinois border to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where he met and roomed with an all-Army boxing champion before a new happenstantial boss’s diet of cocaine and hookers had caused a heart attack and the necessity of finding gainful employment elsewhere than the panic ridden town at the mouth of the Roaring Fork River—did himself end up working around Aspen as a bellhop, a job which he had already practiced while at Harvard for plus-or-minus twenty hours a week. He had never heard of Aspen, let alone that it was a Winter sports and wild-orgy capital of the entire planet.
When an early-season broken leg ended any pretensions of claiming the title of ski-bum, a sport that he literally had only seen from afar anyway in televised Winter Olympics competitions, he began to sniff around for backgammon opportunities. He had money, and he knew how to play the game.
The actual introduction of today’s two characters—a past version of the Spindoctor and a youthful but still elder Sir Beatty—took place through a different player, who had in his turn fleeced Marshall at poker. “He was the better player, but I had more money—just like us at backgammon,” nodded Marshall’s poker nemesis, who nevertheless had the good sense not to continue playing against the likes of me, for whom ‘money-management’ was a strength most of the time.
He made his observation after I’d won several hundred dollars for the second of third time. He had already announced that “our little lessons are through!”
Taking this information into account, I responded, friendly and intent at the same instant, “I’d love to meet him.”
“I’m sure you would.” He smiled, wanly. “He’s a charmer.” So Lee set us up.
And indeed Marshall was charming, six foot two, slender and dapper, smile just so, eyebrows arched with the perfect blend of come-on and irony. Veronica, his mate, was dazzling, a whisper of exotic perfume and huge doses of je ne sais quoi.
Their condo, comfy but not too commodious, overlooked run number something or other, just off of Aspen’s slopes, where they both pretty definitely toned themselves for the six months that had just begun, plus or minus November 10, 1974. Marshall’s ‘day job,’ inasmuch as he ever had one, entailed selling units such as this to young or aging ski addicts; “Everybody who’s anybody’s gonna want a little hideaway in Aspen,” Veronica purred, as Marshall sized up incisively that I was not one of the set to which his love was referring.
So we played backgammon. And I was the better of the pair, at checker play by a fair margin and at the handling of the cube by a huge differential.
But the game is not Chess, or Go. My handsome opponent won at least his fair share of games, though my score inched up through the teens and the twenties and the thirties. We were paying for five dollars a point: “something meaningful,” Marshall had suggested when the matter arose at the outset, at the Pitkin County Pub where we met, after my abortive match with the Sheriff, Hunter S. Thompson. Next Up—Part Four.