David Arthur Walters

2010-11-13T07:02:00.001-08:00

THE PRODUCT
by
David Arthur Walters

Jim Jones stretched, yawned, yanked the covers back and sat up in bed.

“Here I go again,” he moaned inwardly, “another Monday and still no job. This job-hunting business, what a nightmare! I don’t want much of anything, but the rent’s past due, and a man’s gotta eat. Most of all, I've got to save face, that’s what the Japanese do. What would everybody think if I wind up sleeping in Ala Moana Park? Damn it all, anyway!”

Hung over from getting stoned the night before, Jim stumbled into the kitchen, put the coffee pot on and sat down at the kitchen table, where he began to peruse the Help Wanted Ads. He had been frantically seeking employment for six months now, and had yet to receive a single positive response to his numerous applications. Even McDonald’s had turned him down. This week was crucial, for he had spent most of his savings since he had moved to Hawaii; he had only two hundred dollars left to his name now, and he especially regretted having spent money this week on a case of Primo and a lid of Kona Gold.

What a depressing sight, Jim morosely observed, scanning the ads for the fifth time. Not one lousy job here that I qualify for, dammit! I've practically got three-strikes against me, anyway, he thought, what with being a haole and an eighteen-year old high-school dropout, not to mention the dismal Hawaii economy. And I came here for a better environment! Things aren't as pretty on the ground as they might seem in pictures...what was that I was dreaming last night?

Oh, yes, I had been arrested, for a very serious crime: I had triplets. It's just fine for a woman to have triplets, but no, I had to go and have triplets. The police held me in jail, and then there was the trial. Guilty as charged, they said, and due to the serious nature of the crime, I was sentenced to death. I'll never forget that execution chamber: there were twelve other men sentenced to die that day, yet I was the first to enter the chamber because my offense had been horrid in the eyes of the judge and my peers.

We were all taken to an enormous building, a luxury condominium-complex, took a ride on the elevators to the twenty-third floor. My legs went all rubbery. Why me? Why me? A door was opened, and we were welcomed into an apartment by... God! The strangeness of that apartment! It was furnished with great rough-hewn stones arranged in a circle about a single marble altar. Our guide passed out little slips of paper to the prisoners. I looked at mine.

RULES AND REGULATIONS
NOTHING IS ALLOWED
THE ASSOCIATION

"Thank you for coming. We've been expecting you," said the waiting executioner as he fondled a small, black bag in his hand. Pointing at me, he said, "Please step over here, sir, and lie down. Now, com one, what on earth could be the matter? Don't you trust me? Come; lay yourself down on the table. That's it," he continued, while delicately extracting a small syringe from a black bag – the syringe was filled with a green substance

The other condemned men had by that time gathered around us in a circle; they were leaning on the stones, paying close attention to what proceeded. A guard stood smiling by the door as he carefully polished his gleaming machine-gun with a crimson handkerchief.

"Now I'm going to give you a shot," the executioner said. "Don't worry; it won't hurt you at all. You may look away if you wish. I assure you, Mr. Jones, it will be of no use to resist. You shall go on a little journey, and you will be born again in Hawaii," said he, and I felt the needle prick my skin.

I could see the faces of the other men staring quizzically at me. Why did I believe him? He was sending me to a black box, that's what he was doing, I thought, yet I believed I would surely be born again, and I even felt sorry for my executioner because there was no future for him except executing people.

Surely the others would not go along with this: they would be forced to die. Why was my will so weak? Why didn't I put up a fight? And then….

And then Jim Jones recovered from his reflections on his dream as he inhaled the pleasing odors coming from the coffee pot. He poured himself a cup, lit a cigarette, and returned to the Help Wanted Ads. He was wide awake now, and soon forgot his wild dream of the night before. Suddenly, without warning, it leapt out at him, a very small ad tucked in between "Bookkeeper" and "Broker":

Self-motivated, ambitious

young men and women

needed for rapidly

growing organization.

No experience necessary.

Unlimited Opportunities.

Call Bob Fortunato

808-999-9833

“That means me!” Jim affirmed aloud, strode to his phone and dialed what seemed to be a magic number.

"National Product Corporation, Shay Lee speaking. May I help you?" a sweet voice inquired.

"Yes, I would like to speak to Bob Fortunato, please."

"You are calling about the ad?"

"Yes."

"Hold on, please. I'll connect you."

"Thank you," Jim replied, relieved.

"Bob Fortunato here!” a man answered exuberantly. “What may I do for you today?"

"Yes, Mr. Fortunato, I am glad to see your ad in the paper today, because I am a self-motivated, ambitious young man, immediately available for employment."

"Have you any experience?"

"No, in fact, I don't know exactly what...."

"Good!" Mr. Fortunato interjected, "How long have lived in Hawaii?"

"A few months, and I plan to…."

"Excellent! Come downtown for an interview."

"I'd be delighted. What time?"

"Ten o’clock this morning will do. We're at

2001 King Street

. I'll be looking forward to meeting you, Mister ah…."

"Jones, Jim Jones."

"I'll be glad to see you, Jim Jones.” Mr. Fortunato hung up abruptly.

Jim Jones' heart thumped with joy. This was his big chance. This is it! He hurried into the bathroom, shaved, dressed, and admired himself for a moment in the mirror... “Go get it, Jim!” he commanded. “The job is yours!”

Jim managed to find a parking space for his battered old Toyota on a street five blocks away; he parked and walked nonchalantly to

2001 King Street

, noting that business must be good since he saw quite a few people entering the front door.

"I'm here to see Mr. Fortunato," he informed the receptionist.

"You're here about the job?"

"You’re psychic. I'm Jim Jones. Mr. Fortunato is expecting me,” Jim declared proudly.

“We’re a bit overbooked this morning, Mr. Jones. Will you please step through that door and join the others?" she pointed toward a door at the end of a long corridor.

"The others? Uh, right, thank you."

Jim complied, swallowing his pride as he walked down the hall. His heart sank at the very idea of competition. He was even further dismayed when he stepped into the designated room and found that it was filled with about fifty persons in the various stages of filling out applications. A woman at the door handed him a blank application, and he sat down with the others and proceeded to fill it out. There was not much to the application, just blanks for name, address, telephone number, previous employer, and amount of cash or credit immediately available. Eventually all the forms were completed and handed back to her.

"Please wait for a few minutes while we review your applications," the woman instructed. "Then Mr. Fortunato will speak to those of you whom are qualified," she added cheerfully, and bounced out of the room.

Here we go again, Jim Jones mused discouragingly. There's not a chance for me with so many other people to choose from, he thought, as he twitched nervously in his chair. He borrowed a cigarette from the fellow sitting to him, and struck up a conversation. A greatly agitated woman ran into the room while was chatting inanely with the fellow.

"Thank the Lord! I can walk again!" she stridently exclaimed. "Oh, Mr. Fortunato, Mr. Fortunato, are you Mr. Fortunato?" she asked Jim. "

No ma'am," Jim answered, feeling somewhat complimented.

"Good Heavens!" she shouted. "My arthritis! My God, I've been healed! I can walk freely again. Oh, you darlings, you must all work here. Where is the young lady that came to my house with the Product? I owe her my life! I'll owe her everything I have. Mr. Fortunato, God bless him! Please tell me, Where is he? May God bless his heart! I saw his picture in the brochure!" she finally shrieked, and ran from the room.

"Good Lord, how about that," Jim's new acquaintance remarked. "What's with her? What's the Product?"

"Damned if I know," Jim returned, puzzled by the turn of events.

"Hello! Hello! Please let me have your attention!" a booming imperial voice filled the room.

Jim turned about and studied the speaker, a plump, squat, red-faced man, elegantly dressed, sporting expensive jewelry on both hands.

"Thank you very much! I am Bob Fortunato. And this is your lucky day. You have all qualified. We have a position available for each and every one of you. "

"Sir,” an applicant interjected, "What kind of position is it?"

"A position in the highest paid profession in the world," Mr. Fortunato replied, his audience twittering at the prospects. "What does it matter what kind of position it is as long as you can fill it and make a lot of money in the meantime? Ha, ha! If any of you have any objections to getting filthy rich, now is your opportunity to leave," he boisterously suggested, glancing about the room expectantly.

Nobody budged. Mr. Fortunato began to pace back and forth across the room, back and forth, pausing to light a huge cigar, back and forth, puffing and puffing, filling the room with a cloud of pungent smoke. He pulled up abruptly, reached into his trouser pocket and took out a wad of bills, fifties and hundreds.

"You kids see this? This is two thousand green dollars. It represents my earnings for yesterday morning. I ask you, now: Does everyone here have the nerve it takes to get rich? The Product is everything. Money is nothing! That's why there is never enough of it in my account. Money is nothing to me. That's why I have money to burn. Watch this carefully, I'm going to put this fifty-dollar cigar out, throw it away, and light a better cigar, a hundred-dollar, illegal Havana cigar, with this one hundred dollar bill. See that? How do you like that?"

The applicants were dumbfounded by the flagrant display and the waste of what they believed to be wealth. They glanced at each other apprehensively as he became increasingly excited. His face was lit up like a Christmas tree. His hands sparkled with gold and gems as he jerked them up and down with each phrase spoken.

"I'm telling you, kids, you can be filthy rich with ease. I am a multimillionaire, and just two years ago I was collecting unemployment checks. But don't take just my word for it. Geri, come in here, Geri, and hurry up, we need you!" Mr. Fortunato called down the hall. A pretty young lady soon entered the room.

"Geri, how much money did you make yesterday?" he queried.

"Five hundred dollars, Mr. Fortunato, five hundred dollars. Oh, I'm so happy, soooo happy..." she began to weep openly.

"All right, Geri. Go back out there and place some more Product. Your money is right outside there and people are just dying to hand it over to you," Mr. Fortunato declared, turning to address the applicants again.

"There, you see? Five hundred smackers in a single day, and wait 'till you here this: Geri is just one of our average Product placement gals. I tell you, it's absolutely fantastic. You there," he pointed at Jim, "isn't that just fantastic?"

"Yes, five hundred dollars in a day sounds fantastic, but may I ask what the Product is?" Jim inquired.

"The Product? Oh, yes, the Product!"

Mr. Fortunato opened up a closet door, brought out a faux leather black bag and held it aloft triumphantly, for all to behold, as if it were a little Ark of the Covenant.

"This is your kit. One will be placed with each one you one prior to your leaving the room. As you can see, it is tastefully inscribed with the company name, National Product Corporation. Inside this kit is your success formula, all the privileged information you need to become a millionaire. On the top you will see your training manual. Listen carefully: Do not vary from the manual, for our approach has a proven record of success. Most importantly, you will find, underneath the manual, samples of the Product, like this one. Isn't this Product cylinder nicely labeled and distinctively designed? The Product took many years to develop. And here it is. It is not available in stores. We began to offer it to the general public just last year. For every order of Product you place in the home, you will receive..."

"Pardon me, sir," Jim Jones interjected. "What is the Product?"

"What? Ah, yes, the Product. The Product is a completely natural substance tested in our research laboratories, where it was discovered to meet many of the essential physical and mental health needs of the public. Yet, as you can see, it is simply a fine greed, excuse me, green powder. By mixing one tablespoon of this power, I mean powder, with a quart of ordinary tap water, a person will obtain a well balanced natural supply of the Product. In other words, all one has to eat is one tablespoon full of the Product to become healthy; and wealthy, too, if he or she becomes a distributor like you. But never mind the details right now. Your placement training manual will fill you in on the necessary details, and we have a hot line you can call with any questions. Let me assure you that..."

"Excuse me. Has this product been scientifically proven as some sort of cure-all?" Jim interrupted again.

"Scientifically proven?" Mr. Fortunato repeated in an incredulous tone. "Of course, we do not make any false claims. The Product is of the best quality. The Product works. The Product is economical. The Product if used rightly will save the family many hard-earned dollars. The Product if properly utilized will satisfy many of the basic health needs. No human being should lack the minimum daily requirements so he can be free to pursue his fondest dreams. The Product, the Product, the..." Mr. Fortunato stammered with pent-up enthusiasm.

"Excuse me. Mr. Fortunato,” a young woman waved her hand for attention, "does the product cure diseases?"

"Young lady, again, we are not allowed to make such claims, but we know you are qualified to do the right thing," he assured, then paused reflectively. "Listen carefully, now. If the Savior Himself were to come down to Earth to bring us glad tidings, He would be arrested for fraud. Or, even worse, He would be completely ignored. You see, people resent success. That's why there is so much money out there to be earned and burned, just waiting for something like the Product to come along, something that can be held in the hand and used, then mixed in water and swallowed. Put it in their hands, let them feel the weight of it, permit them to taste it, and they won't give it up for anything.”

“But are there cures?” someone spoke up.

"Oh, yes, customers testify to cures, but never say cures. Technically speaking, we aren't allowed to show our customers the testimonies of thousands of people who were, ah, helped by the Product just last week, and who are now leading healthy lives. Just look at me for your proof. I didn't have to give up my Havana cigars, my German beer and sausages, my cognac, or anything else for that matter. None of that stuff can hurt me now. But do you think I can tell everybody that? No. So just stick to the formula in your kits, and tell people they are what they eat and the Product is the best thing to eat because it's what they need. Look at it, uphold it, contemplate the benefits," he shrilly commanded, holding a glass cylinder of the Product up as if it were the Torch of Universal Prosperity.

"Mr. Fortunato," another person queried, “when we go out to sell the Product..."

"Sell, did you say sell? We're not selling the Product. We're placing it with qualified people along the distribution channels illustrated by the chart on the wall over there – a copy is in your manual."

"That looks a little like a pyramid," someone offered.

"But if we're giving away the Product, how are we to make any money for the Corporation?" Jim persisted.

"I daresay you're confused, son. You will not be giving away the Product. You are going to make a great living for yourself placing the Product with qualified persons.

"What will our salary be?" someone inquired.

"Salary? There is no salary. Salaries are for slaves, my friends. You are not going to be employed by the Corporation. If you think positive and act accordingly, you shall all be independently wealthy businessmen and businesswomen. A kit will be placed with you, and then you're on your own, truly free men and women. You will receive the net proceeds of your own placements and a percentage of the proceeds for the Product your placement team distributes. Your manual makes all that very clear, so read it carefully. And as I said, you may call the Help Desk for personal assistance."

"I’m afraid I don't understand all this," Jim declared.

"There's always one, thank God, to motivate me," muttered Mr. Fortunato under his breath, then, out loud, "Have no fear! Think positive and you'll understand. Listen up. As I said, the manual provides all the information you need. It describes how you will recruit other independent contractors, and how you will receive percentages and bonuses according to what they place in the homes plus the net proceeds and bonuses on what you place on your own. I say to you here and now, climb the pyramid – scratch that – climb the steps to the stars. Think BIG! When you get up in the morning, tell yourself that you are a millionaire, over and over, and with the Product, you shall be one many times over for sure. "

"Is there only the Product? Is that all there is?" a man sitting behind Jim quizzed.

"No sir, the prospect automatically becomes a member of the corporation when he receives an initial supply of the Product. Membership in the corporation adds great value to the Product. Our corporation is unique. It is not a dead body. It is a living, growing organism. Everyone who uses the Product to their advantage is a cell in the corporate body. Our corporation is not impersonal. We are all part and parcel of the corporation because we eat the corporation's food, and we are what we eat."

"What does it cost for us to get started?" a voice ensued from the rear of the room.

"That is what is truly remarkable about our corporation. Very little start-up capital is needed. The attractive National Product Corporation kit, including the manual and two product samples, requires a small investment of only two hundred dollars. So step right up here; Sally will make sure you get your kits before you leave. Then go out there and roll in the dollars. Remember, dollars are only a sign, a sign of how happy our customers are."

Jim Jones stood numbly in line in front of the table that had been set up for the purpose of placing the kits and collecting placement money. He had his doubts, but he got in line because almost everybody else did, and because he thought this was his last chance for a job. One person did get up and leave, a fellow who shouted something about "blasphemy", much to the amusement of nearly everyone present. Jim signed the form and counted out two hundred dollars, the last of his money, took his kit to his car and drove away with it. He ran out of gas three blocks from his apartment. He pushed his wreck of a car onto the curb, and walked the rest of the way to his apartment, where he found an eviction notice on the door.

"This is it,” Jim told himself. “I shall do what I must do or die trying. No more doubting for me. I’ve got to think positive, to think big, and be proactive. I'll make it. It doesn't really matter what the product is, not when you're in the highest paid profession in the world."

Honolulu 1974

2007-02-03T08:24:00.000-08:00

An extensive response to Pope Benedict's University of Regensburg speech can be read at:

LOGOS I
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=24532
Prologue
The Light of Reason & The Fractious Fault
Hereclitean Structuralism
Doomed & Redoomed
The Goddess of Margins
Virgin Sacrifice on the Margin
Paul of Ephesus
The Science of Mysteries
Dividing the Spoils

LOGOS II
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=24792
The Relatively Absolute God
Historical Criticism
All Systems Are Doomed by God
Germanic Historicism
Absolutely Speaking

LOGOS III
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=24904
Works of Good Faith
Nothing is Perfect
The Papal Jihad
The Golden Days of Reason
The Sticking Point
The Decline of Logos
The Constrasting Crusade
The Ambiguous Balance

LOGOS IV
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=25235
Violent Verbal Intercourse
The Egyptian Logos
Spelling the End of War
Lovespell
Poetic Love
Speaking of Ignorance
Forged by Enmity
Merely Academic Love
The Universal Love of Mo Ti

LOGOS V
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=25637
The Social Psychology of Reasonable Love
The Fine Art of Loving
The Actual Practice of Love
The Battle of the Sexes
The Difference Between Faith & Love
Turkey Talks

LOGOS VI
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26021
God's Virgin
The Greek Way
That Woman

LOGOS VII
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26546
Mother of God!
Twelve Anathematisms
A Hypatian Excursus
An Aside On Three Historians

LOGOS VIII
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26755
The Infernal Quibbling
Back to the Nestorian Controversy

LOGOS IX
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26947
The Assumption
Mary's House of Love
The Quiddity of Love
Having Sex and Violence
Note on Oral Intercourse
Genitalia et Rationalis

2006-12-29T11:54:00.000-08:00

Gothism Today

Gothism, or the Goth subculture of our contemporary youth, and Gothicism, the cultivation of the aesthetic aspects of the Gothic period, have attitudes in common, such as a romantic penchant for the macabre and grotesque, but Goth culture recently acquired an even more sinister reputation than Gothicism as a result of the real gratuitous violence at Columbine High School: the evil doers had dabbled in Goth culture, hence Goths were condemned by way of association. American Gothism has waned considerably since then: its blatantly morbid aspect was no longer merely amusing or reluctantly tolerated by parental authority. Innocent young Goths were suspected of having at least a propensity to act out their favorite scenes of wild and wanton violence. Many Goths went underground while others simply outgrew the faddish cult. The events of 9/11 seemingly sealed the tomb, but the wooden stake was not driven home in the heart of the matter.

Gothism was a handy scapegoat; we certainly would not want to blame everyone, for then what would we do? And let us not blame the Establishment either, although violence is deliberately cultivated by the Establishment and its media; scenes of small-scale mayhem and murder are explicitly depicted, and such is the tolerance of the audience that it wants ever more and is more easily provoked to clamor for the massive organized terrorism of war. Explicit scenes of sexual intercourse, considered a dirty thing even between consenting adults, are popular but must be reserved for Off-Off Broadway showings, so to speak.

Hardly anyone in the cowering mass wants to be associated with domestic terrorism nowadays. Police brutality is tolerated to a certain extent; it is viewed as an aberrant or politically incorrect but natural exercise of the legitimate monopoly on violence; many of the victims probably deserved the abuse anyway; and would-be criminals would behave better if they had greater cause to fear the consequences of misbehavior. Is not the police power organized for the greater good through a consensus of terror? Does not a monopoly on violence establish fearful order?

The same may be said of the flattening effect of the military power exercised abroad if only larger and larger surges of troops were sent in to terrorize terrorists. The rules of engagement might be changed to specify that anyone found on the streets with a gun or bomb must be shot dead on sight; if the same is found hidden inside a structure, all the occupants must be executed along with a few neighbors for good measure. Soldiers subject to the stress of war should be immune from prosecution for war crimes including rape and murder because they could not help it or were just following orders. Of course torture must be legalized; the resort to dungeons and torture chambers is nothing new: it is a traditional practice, regardless of the laws against it if any. We cannot help but note that the almighty military power of the only superpower and its allies has not restored any semblance of order to Iraq after plunging it into chaos; the hit-man who had established and maintained the consensus of terror brought to ruin is to be executed at any moment. Ironically, hanging not decapitation is the method of capital punishment adopted in Iraq. Still, the Goths of the future will have no lack of gory details to exercise their imaginations on –at least the hanging will be filmed for posterity.

Since the Columbine murders, Gothism has gone the way of the Patriot Movement after the Oklahoma Bombing. The Goths of yesteryear are wearing combat fatigues today. The highly organized terrorism of the United States, designed to fight fire with fire and to get revenge in the name of god and nation on terrorists both real and imagined, and to spread consumer democracy to boot, was wildly popular after 9/11. But now that the shocking and awesome world war on terror has proven unprofitable in terms of lives and dollars, the overwhelming majority would renege on their commitment to massively organized terrorism. Therefore the self-righteous Commander-in-Chief, widely suspected of being a pathological liar, is hawking the long-term advantage of legalized murder and mayhem and the destruction of livelihoods: The cost of winning the war someday is an investment in world peace. No matter how costly, the war must go on or the nation will lose its credibility for violence; it has already wasted its honor and political capital. The pseudo-conservative politicians are democrats when the people are for their military misadventures, and they are Burkean republicans when the demos is opposed; in neither case is the voice of the people the voice of the arbitrary god whose name is cited in chambers.

In any event violence in entertainment still reigns supreme over love stories. In the years to come many movies will be based on the last war no matter how bad the cause or outcome was, and thus will the appetite of youth for violence be whetted while hormones are raging and the brain’s reasoning power is temporarily forestalled. A poor young man can then legally be all he can be; maybe he can get an education and go off on a killing spree. A young woman can behave like a traditional man and follow suit. A woman may be no match for a man on the ground, but put her in the cockpit of a jet fighter and he has met his match – during an interview with a female fighter pilot, an anchorman did not raise the issue of female combat, but speculated on what might happen to her plane went down and she fell into enemy hands – may god forbid!

Unfortunately, few people are aware of the subterranean link between relatively isolated incidents of domestic violence such as the Columbine killings and the massive foreign violence of wars such as the pre-emptive or unprovoked war on Iraq. The audience bemoans high-school casualties; the trench-coated suicidal killers are duly cursed – true Christians like the Amish would forgive and pray for them and console their families. But respectable people are proud of the body count of an enemy designated to play the subhuman role. Patriots may then vicariously vent the aggression legislated against at home – fictional violence does not serve the purpose. They count their own soldiers as heroes instead of murderers because soldiers are licensed to kill according to what is really the law of the jungle despite its “humane” conventions: international anarchy prevails. The nice ways of war take a greater toll including the collateral damage from massive bombings of densely populated areas – high technology, low morality. In the final analysis, the civilians who deserve the leaders they elect or fail to assassinate deserve to be killed. The war on exploited peasants and committed communists in Vietnam would not have been a glaring exception to the idolization of warriors if Vietnam had been quickly “turned into a parking lot” for consumer democracy by a mercenary military force.
We have cause to repress the work of the devil lurking underground rather than face him or her in the mirror. The scenic picture of people happily consuming and producing and producing and consuming is rather superficial and constitutes a denial of reality, but who wants to face reality, especially the reality that too many human beings love violence? Therefore the law is established by force: we contract not to kill one another absent the authority that absolves us of blood-guilt. Not everyone is content with the peace. Not all criminals feel guilty: perpetrators of abominable crimes have confessed that they felt a tremendous sense of relief as the deeds were done.

In times of relative peace and prosperity we notice that one seemingly random act of violence against fleeting happiness follows another. Prophets remind us that the sense of security under prosperity is false and makes doom imminent, but prophets do not get much press because they have a “negative mental attitude.” The established media fans the fires, raising the worst things and people above the best. A bored and desensitized people want not peace but violence now, and will have it in the name of the sword-wielding, so-called god of love who advised them against it while dividing instead of uniting them. Fear might cause a novice to vomit and faint at the sight of blood and death; but we may grow accustomed to the operating room and morgue and battlefield, and might even enjoy the scenes – viewed remotely, without personal risk to ourselves, we might think the awful is really awesome or sublime.

The sight of human blood makes sadistic masochists feel good – we should not ask them to do unto others what they would have done to themselves. Killing makes sadistic killers feel powerful; they have conquered their fear of death by causing others to die first. On the one hand, every individual would persist forever it could, and without impedance; but then individuality would be lost in the Total. Every anarchist by definition would be his own arche, but that would not do – the anarchist, then, to save anarchy, might become a hyphenated-anarchist, an oxymoronic anarcho-Christian, for example, with Jesus as authoritative model. Anarcho-Communism, another self-contradictory compound, would subserve society, whatever that might be. Only philosophic anarchy works because the mind can run wild without doing too much damage, but then again philosophy depends on social terms and questionable authority, so it is not as free as we think. Authoritarian governments arise to organize terrorism to contest the anarchistic terrorists whose “ism” does not really matter. Otherwise, pending the institution of absolute love in place of relative strife, havoc and panic would run amok until the world is awash in the blood and the gruesome gore the Gothic kids merely imagined in their dissident response to homely authority.

Deny it as we may, we know very well what lurks underground, beneath the placid countenance of domesticated peace. Contempt and even hatred for the social scene that is supposed to be good; the scene that requires individuals to lie to be good or else be cast out and even to perish. The obscene of the Goths and other unkempt dissidents was a protest against the official scene, the Scene of Clean sometimes referred to as the Big Lie. The obverse of the scene, the obscene, is the so-called spiritual or romantic protest by the 'noble' individual and by 'aristocratic' groups of 'nobles' against the hypocritical social restraints of the materialistic mass, the self-hating, competitive 'bourgeois' or middle class who preach physical and moral hygiene, godly brotherly love, and even immortality, but who are actually, at least from the obverse perspective, bags of filth with dirty minds; conservatives who cannot mind their own sexual business and get their heads out from between other people’s legs; conventional people who unwittingly love the devil, who hate and murder their brothers en masse, and who, instead of going to heaven, rot in graves if they are not cremated or otherwise disposed of.
Since the young are engaged in a struggle to distinguish themselves as individuals and since that struggle is typically a rebellion against homely authority or small-scale homeland security, we should not be at all surprised or shocked by the postmodern Goth culture that threw the awful truth in authority's face. Each generation has forms of protest, and similar forms appear. Each form has its significance. The foundation of Gothism in fact is as old as the hills. The experts who deny any link between our recent Gothic youth culture and the inspiring Gothic period following the Black Death are mistaken; they do a great disservice to children who should know about the positive aspects of that period as well as the positive influence of modern Gothic literature on the Romantic periods. Mind you that when we went out into the field and interviewed our Goths we did not find Columbine killers. We found confused teenagers, of course, many of them intelligent and introspective, interested in music and literature, uninterested in promoting political ideologies. They were mishandled by authority and seem to have melted into the crowd. Beware, however, when the Sun goes down on the Big Lie.

Young rebels turn to adults for their identifications; the more exotic and oriental the better. For instance, our own Goths took interest the noble Arab knight whose designation 'arab' means 'noble,' and whose poetry inspired poets to wax romantically in the West. It was not long ago that Western men dreamed of participating in desert jihads waged by ruthless freedom fighters on camelback; and they went on to seize a goodly portion of the settled world –capitalism, on the other hand, finds its tutelary fathers in the pirate culture. It is with that threat to the commercial caravan in mind that conservative social scientists urge the immediate 'modernization' and 'reformation' of Islam, that it might put its Allah in a transcendental closet too, and join Protestantism in bourgeois feel-good faith; that is, faith in Anything Goes - as long as there is a profit in it. If it were not for the religious particularism of fundamental Islam that contradicts its pretensions to universality; if the propagandists focused on the general protest against bourgeois, capitalist culture; - titanic homeland security would no longer be able to recognize the face of evil and would soon be overwhelmed by the evil empire it conjures while fanning the flames under the smoke signals in order to fatten payoffs.
Considering that it is really up against, the terrorist within, Homeland Security shall fail. Not much has changed since the building of the latest bureaucratic Titanic. There is confusion onboard. Security is scarcely better now that everybody is supposed to be watching; the aim of the security game is to milk the holy cash cow dry for private profit. Chairs and people are shifting around on the deck. Some people make fortunes in the security business while others complain that they do not have basic equipment. People with clearances continue to live the Big Lie, while thousands die needlessly at war.

The Goths warned us about the Big Lie, about the patriotic hypocrisy, but we thought they were obscene. What patriotism? There was no Pater overlooking his brood with a loving eye. There was scant brotherly love or neighborly love. Indeed, experienced security agents denied that widespread brotherly love could even exist. Of course not, for everything is done for the want of money, according to the competitive, American way, which we think is only human. We have good reason to be paranoid, for everybody, not to mention Nature and God, is out to get each and every one of us. We must make sure every good thing is scarce if it is to have any value for those who would accumulate the most of it. If food grew on trees, and if we could live in peace under them, not enough people would want to produce the mountains of trash and junk we are sold on having. Life and liberty is confined to the pursuit of property and the god behind the Almighty Pater - the Almighty Dollar.

The appearance of the neo-romantic Goth culture was a counter-sign of the materialistic times. Of course Gothism is not really as dead as we have suggested. Goths still haunt and flaunt our civilization. They still show little respect for matter that grows putrid without the creative spiritual and intellectual life. They do their best to be individuals instead of just talking about individualism and rushing off to war. They are indeed cynical and critical; but Goths are tolerant critics since they need diversity to be Goths. They might have a morbid disposition, they might find the world a bit depressing, but they are not Columbine killers. Everyone ought to have a Goth around the house from time to time.

© David Arthur Walters

2006-08-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

I MIGHT BE MOSES

I managed to trade my blue collar for a white collar once and for all. My office career saved me from having to actually produce or sell things. I studied primers on management and discovered that managers are not supposed to actually do the dirty work but should get others to do it. Yet I was not fully committed to management given my inherited proletarian disposition. Mind you that my kind of proletariat had just learned to read and write; he likes to protest and does not plan on seizing the factories quite yet.

If only I had lived the life of the most middling bourgeois, steadily advancing to a middle management position while investing a portion of my income in a diversified portfolio, I would now be comfortably retired, free to write to my heart’s content or to go sailing instead. Yes, I might have a boat in my driveway, or perchance, by virtue of the Dot.com mania, a modest yacht in the harbor. Even a career in the military and the right Fidelity funds would have made me a more substantial man today in terms of waistline and wealth.

But I really did not want anything, not even that yacht some men would die for. Indeed, I saw such a man and yacht shortly after I took up double-entry bookkeeping in Honolulu. The gentleman had apparently retired to live his golden years in Hawaii. He was heading his craft towards Ala Wai Yacht Harbor in heavy seas, and the waves heaved the vessel into the boulders alongside Magic Island. He jumped overboard between the boulders and his vessel and tried to push it off the rocks; each wave threatened to pin him against the rocks. We kept yelling for him to climb out of there, offering him one end of a pole, but he persisted and was crushed by his beloved hulk. I did not admire his heroic effort at the time: I simply thought he was a foolish man, and observed a pair of large frigate birds circling overhead as if they were a sign of something or the other..

In retrospect that frustrated sailor has my deepest sympathy. I was indubitably a fool myself, perhaps even more foolish than he. Everyone must have something to live for besides life in itself; that is to say, they must have a way of living or living is for naught, and that way is of course limited to something or the other. That my thing is metaphysical and his thing was physical does not make me a better man than he nor any the wiser. Those of us who are so fond of the profound depth of our inner lives as we worship the vanities of our vanity should pause to consider the contents and reaches of the universe, in respect to which our inner profundity is exceedingly shallow or vapid.

Still, my favorite things are of the mind. I write therefore I exist, and I exist all the more when I write stories about myself, such as this one. I lived well below my means no matter how much I earned at a job, and for good reason: I wanted to buy time to write stories. Yes, I have perused and enjoyed the ocean-going literature, but I have never coveted a real yacht nor have I sailed let alone been on one. Suffice it to say that I wanted an ideal, a golden ark, if you please, that would carry soulful seeds for the implantation and evolution of my most grandiose dream – nothing less than the mental salvation of humankind, in which kind I mercifully included scribbling myself. I even wrote of writing myself to death to that altruistic end. Wherefore I did not cast my lot with the greedy bourgeoisie, whose mechanical institutions were efficiently and effectively grinding human beings to dust, leaving them to eat pig-ear sandwiches while their masters lived high off the hog – may Sacred Scripture forever forbid it with a pox on the swinish bourgeois if not an Armageddon!

Only bookworms can live on books alone. Today’s books are poisoned for preservation, the caretakers caring not for the Worm in their urge for property. Unable to live on the pages I read and wrote, I stooped to keeping books of account to support my spiritual calling. Yes, I confess: I was a lowly bookkeeper for my miserable keep. I mean I counted other people’s filthy lucre. Yet I was redeemed because I never really wanted their burdens. It simply was not my calling to grimace at a desk under florescent lights, as they habitually do in the infernal commercial quarry where they are crushed daily by the virtual rocks in their heads – Sisyphus never had it so badly in Hades. But whatever my calling is, an office job has been my lot.

Ironically, I have a knack for business, providing that I do not own it. I might have been Pharaoh’s scribe in a previous life, rising in the ranks from superintendent of tomb construction to chief keeper of seals. If the legendary Moses actually lived in Egypt, he might have been an ancestor of mine. I might be him reincarnated, ordained to become the greatest lawgiver the world will ever know if not a bestselling author. Shall I memorize the Decalogue and grow a long beard? Oh, no, it is too difficult to remember ten things and perchance divine why the injunction against murder is sixth on the list when one is distracted by the wonders of this wide world of ours. Ah, who knows how I will turn out? That my beard turns gray is no doing of mine!

2004-08-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Sacred Power of Innovation
by David Arthur Walters

"Theory without practice and practice without theory are of no avail." Pythoagoras

For Gary Forsee

Harvard professor Michael Porter worships the idol Competition with his book, Competition, a popular self-help business-success book designed for members of the dominant minority who lack the innovative powers of the active creative minority who established private capitalism. Professor Porter's collaboration with businessmen on practical projects has been fruitful; however, given the disjunction between words and deeds that plagues the race, it is doubtful whether Porter's book will have many positive results.

The founding fathers of the first great businesses in America were men of deeds, not words. They certainly were not university professors. One or two of them had college degrees and a few were illiterate. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. That is not to say that teachers are useless - quite to the contrary. But innovative businessmen who created the myth of self-help and competition seldom listened to business professors. Since then, the growth of large commercial modes of action has fostered the rise of the masters of business administration cult. The MBA cult is derived from the Jesuit order of self-examination and -denial and blind obedience to the system; the Jesuit regimen was abstracted and adopted by European military academies and was eventually passed on to today's highly regarded business schools.

Our general form of learning is, as Thorstein B. Veblen explained in The Higher Learning As An Expression of the Pecuniary Culture, a development of the early learning which "consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to the training required for the domestic service of a temporal master.... What was learned was how to make one indispensable to these powers.... Propitiation was the end, and this end was sought, in great part, by acquiring facility in subservience...."

The fundamental function of today's pragmatic professor is to reinforce the current myth of reality in vogue, in marked contrast to the professor of liberal education, whose modern obligation was, at least prior to the installation of the mathematics tripod, to buck systems, under protection of his tenure. The current myth: Students are solitary, autonomous individuals who can succeed providing they take the hardheaded, realistic approach, and compete to fit into the system. Conforming to the "reality" of "how things actually work" as defined by received authority is the practical thing to do. The illusion of democratic individuality divides the mass into units, conquering them while conforming them to mass production and consumption of standard products. Competition organizes the mass into a few winners and many losers, creating the illusion that only winning and losing count and not the persons themselves. Furthermore, the competition cult fosters the fear of failure and provokes guilt feelings, further reinforcing conformity to external quantitative standards, rendering useless qualitative concepts of internal integrity and human dignity.

The professional system is in fact a trap or box that encourages adjustment to its parameters as professed by "impartial" or "value-neutral" civic leaders, who are in fact political ideologues hence exemplars of bad faith. The "objective" system preached tends to stifle human creativity and innovation. Therefore it is not surprising that people inside the box are anxious, including the human engineers who have lost their ability to innovate because they too have been engineered. Individuals inside the system exhibit the sort of behavior we see in crabs when put into a basket without a lid to restrain them. They compete with each other, try to tear each other apart, instead of simply climbing out of the basket; the wasteful competition creates a great deal of wealth for the crabmasters. A few crabby individuals sense something is profoundly wrong with the system; they proceed to point out the fact that the cage has no lid. Others begin to question the symbols embedded in the trap. The challenge must be met lest everyone crawls out of the box and production falters.

The zoological philosophers know how to respond to the challenge: they learned a very important lesson during their hog-farming days. Piglets tend to bite each others tails and ears off and otherwise damage the stock. A hog farmer found a diversionary occupation. He picked up some discarded broken bowling balls and put them in the pens for the piglets to play with - the problem was solved. In human society, books help to allay the anxiety and reinforce the current myth of reality, especially self-help books - help-others books are unpopular in our self-help culture for that would contradict the illusion.

Now if business leaders would write down two or three of Professor Porter's suggestions and practice them, his book might be influential. If only they would innovate by first disillusioning themselves of the trap they are in!

Professor Porter's ideology, or rather the pragmatic anti-ideology he professes, is exceedingly familiar. Ideology does not matter, he says, when it comes to seizing competitive advantage. What matters is What Works; those who want to succeed must find out what works, then do it. The right information is crucial to success and can be found by those who are not blinded by conventional thinking. The professor looked around and discovered what really works if one wants to take advantage of competition: innovation. Who would have guessed it in our regressive neoconservative state? Thank you!

Professor Porter's notion reminds us of the advice from people in cubicles to "think outside of the box." That is very difficult thing to do when one has been boxed-up all one's life, especially if the box is comfortable. After all, a CEO who rises to the office on the top of the box and who is paid multi-million dollar salaries often gets a high grade for conformity - there are exceptions. Innovation is a product of curiosity, and too much curiosity killed the cat. The chief role of institutional leaders is to provide symbolic reassurance that all is well with the institution; to that end they appear to be working very hard, to be on top of things or in control. That process is not conducive to productive innovation although a leader might develop excellent acting skills and apply them innovatively.

In any case, a coffin plushly lined with conventional thinking might be very cozy indeed. Success makes many "winners" arrogant and dismissive, makes them believe they are invincible geniuses lording it over a superior civilization. They are mistaken; their once glorious civilization has become exceedingly superficial and one-dimensional; their shallow personalities do not compare favorably with the average personality of "undeveloped" countries. In America, an innovative self-educated man who ran away from home at an early age and grew up on the streets because he did not want live in the trap might do a better and more innovative job than the highly paid CEO and the university professor. Of course he might wind up in jail if he believed and practiced the innovation preached but not practiced by those conservatives who would conserve at least the vestiges of good old principles of piracy on the high seas and the innovation required for those ventures.

However that may be, Porter's thinking is hardly innovative. But neither are the ideas of many of today's business, political, and education leaders. That is the very problem alleged. They are apparently in sore need of a reminder to innovate in order to take advantage of their competitors, even if they already have an enormous advantage. No matter how big the fish are, they should not rest on their oars in shark-infested waters, but should upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.... Apparently the upgrading should take place no matter whether the user wants the upgrade handed down from the engineers or not; for without the upgrades, there is no turnover; without turnover, the water stagnates; - wherefore let customers welcome change, let them be the door mat for other people's changes, or else lose their jobs producing things they do not really need so they can pay rent and interest. Heaven forbid that they produce and distribute plenty of what everyone needs and only work twenty hours a week for other people.

No, ma'am, I do not believe Porter's book boosting the competitive myth will help much in itself; but some of its suggestions might be reinforced with good effect. Paralyzed executives might hang the sign INNOVATE! all over the place. Of course that commonplace sign, just like the Ten Commandments posted on the walls, will eventual be completely ignored. Therefore leaders should take advantage of subliminal techniques, and have inaudible positive suggestions to innovate pumped over the corporate PA systems. Self-suggestions to innovate should be chanted before having sex and once again before going to sleep, and again in the morning, and again before lunch. An innovative man used a constantly flushing toilet and a relatively inexpensive recorder to record suggestions whispered over the gurgling water - he reproduced the recordings and sold thousands of them.

Professor Porter's anti-ideology ideology of What Works smacks of the old jungle-law maxim of zoological ethics based on the mistaken identification of man as an animal. Might makes right. So let's fight. Let us admit that the success formulas are all platitudes. The author, Porter, a highly credentialed authority and spokesman for the ruling minority, has decked out the platitudes in fashionable clothes and is replicating them for emulation below. Other than his special spin, his book, like all such books, is plagiary pure and simple. But he is clever enough. His borrowed anti-ideological ideology makes the whole affair more appealing since it allows an intellectual to make the most absurd anti-intellectual claims with impunity while prevaricating for the ruling side - long live the plutocracy!

In fact, the anti-ideological authority can promise something for everybody no matter what their ideology might be. Hitler was a genius at prevarication and ambiguity; he admired not only Luther's nationalism but his genius for ambiguity and his resort to "god's mysteries" to justify absurdities. A good bible can be used to justify or condemn anything, or so I was advised by a prominent Moody Bible School graduate.

Porter repudiates commercial catholicism in favor of parochial nationalism, but he lacks Hitler's and Luther's vulgar powers of persuasion. I do not mean to imply that Michael Porter is a neo-Nazi or a neoconservative 'fascist' ( loosely speaking, someone who believes in right-wing authoritarian government). Fascism and Red Communism in my opinion was a phase of the modern scientific-industrial revolution. The prevailing myth of the old order was no longer suitable; the lag resulted in a tectonic shift, to revolution and war. No doubt Professor Porter, proponent of competition for the sake of progress, knows that his good empire has much to thank the evil empires for. The modern tools and techniques resorted to grew out of technological advances, hence were not "fascist" instruments per se. It is not fair to associate today's corporate executives with the evil doers of historical death-camp fascism. Still, the similarities should be at least alluded lest liberal promises are broken and the train of thought winds up in a concentration camp.

Like Professor Porter, Italian Fascists. German Nazis, Russian Reds and American Pragmatists renounced metaphysical ideology for the sake of what positively works at the time in quantitative, productive terms. Hitler laughed at the pessimists in 1942, and said, Where would we be now if we had listened to them? An attempt was made by Giovani Gentile, an Italian philosopher and educator, to formulate a suitable fascist philosophy of action. Machiavelli was favored by German professors. Professor Max Weber, whose sociology is lauded today, popularized the notion of the world-power-state a few years after Bismark unified Germany. Machiavelli of course wanted a final peace: he believed that devious and brutal means to the final end are justifiable only when necessary; if not, one should at least maintain the appearance of ethical propriety.

Napoleon, German National Socialists, Nazis, Italian Fascists and others believed that national competition would lead to world domination by the best nation after the people of the world were freed to submit. Germany was out to save the world for the best culture in the world. Leftist professors familiar with fascism at the time observed that fascism is the perfection of capitalism - fascism did not renounce the profit principle or private property - provided that big corporations produced both profit and property to bolster the nation.

General staffs and boards of directors alike take advantage of technological innovations to compete with and smash the competition. Of course good generals and CEOs would like the competition to surrender short of all-out war, for what is wanted is victory, not the costly destruction of resources. But Professor Porter seems to want perpetual economic conflict rather than a final solution of perpetual peace. What? Is not the final cause of competition the eliminattion of competition? Competition is a great thing when we feel we want a piece of the action, but when competitors move in next door after our store is established, we might not care for competition very much.

In any event, Professor Porter advocates "ruthless improvement", "unusual effort", "dogged determination in the face of harsh criticism" - many of his devotees adhere to the 'Ignore Naysayers Doctrine.' Improvement requires a challenge, adversity, pressure, he writes, and if none of the above are at hand, a strong competitor must be found to compete with, a fight must be picked, a pre-emptive strike made which will make innovative competition necessary, and so on, because that is what really works. Parochial differences must be exploited and sustained locally. National differences are the most important of all differences to be exploited.

Again we find nothing new, novel, or innovative in the concepts dished up by Porter. Ruthless fanaticism is nothing new, and it tends to stifle creativity and cultivate ignorance by ignoring questions and criticism: curiosity, the drive to question, is the source of innovation. Indeed, the professor's model is the parochial European model. European civilization is Faustian in its attempt to manipulate nature, isolate and atomize individuals under the pretext of freedom, foster local loyalties and rivalries via parochial nationalism. Anti-cosmopolitan, anti-catholic, anti-humanist, parochial European civilization takes violence for granted, even relishes it to resolve "moral log jams", and resists international functional alliance - for instance, international labor organization. However, each nation is an empire frustrated: nationalism would substitute a particular nation for the empire, the best nation being, of course, a culture; namely the anglo-saxon culture which is the mythical culture of many of Professor Porter's symbols.

For Professor Porter, competition, not cooperation, is the key word. Vice poses as virtue. Cooperation in the form of corporate mergers, strategic alliances, collaborations and the like, no matter what their rational end might be, are anathema. We have just cause to sympathize with his apparent antipathy, but we suspect his motives as we hear politicians advocate small business while providing contracts, incentives, and handouts to huge corporations. Allegedly, supranational cooperation, cosmopolitanism, globalization are the worst of all cooperative evils. Cooperation, according to Professor Porter, is simply a pervasive global fad, something to be "sharply limited" by government. Competition should be deregulated, but there must be stringent anti-cooperation or anti-trust laws in place. It is a mistake to think competition is wasteful and that efficient cooperation creates economies of scale.

Compete! Do not cooperate! If you do cooperate, strictly limit your cooperation to relatively unimportant matters and do not assign your top talent to cooperative tasks.

Professor Porter's antipathy for cooperation renders him leary of Totalitaria as the end-all of political and economic competition. After all, the end of competition would end the cause of innovation and the obsession with the growth of gross national production. We recall that President Clinton's Surgeon General defined mental illness as the failure to lead a productive life. Well, if production does not increase exponentially and even faster than population growth, people will go mad and run amuk if not starve to death - never mind the fact that much of America's productive powers are wasted on wants rather than fulfilling needs.

The vested interests want compound growth ad infinitum. Their executives and other power elite must always strive for dynamic, "innovative productiveness", or "sustained productive growth", and not static products. Forget the durable product that lasts a life time, the 'Union Made' or 'Made in the USA' product. Upgrade, upgrade, and upgrade to the nth power. The constant struggle for "competitive advantage" must be the moving end in itself. Well, then, we hope that the geometric progression is in those intangibles which are conducive to mental health, lest people run amuk or the world becomes buried in garbage, trash and junk.

Professor Porter does advocate the maintenance of environmental standards as he defines them. But he does not regard infrastructure, general education, and health care as the crucial factors for the realization of competitive advantage. Of course special technical education, apprenticeship programs, university research connected to trade and industry, trade associations, and private investment are important factors.

We see nothing innovative in Professor Porter's education department. Universities are now led by persons who promote the myth of tools and techniques, that the culture may be structured to suit the wants of the political-economic system of the military industrial complex, not the complex internal needs of the human being. Thanks to Harvard, education is now seen as an outside-in process. The university is a sort of brain, and the brain is a general tool which, in humans, grew large through the invention and constant use of tools. The university is an economic tool. All students must be linked to the machine. And they should not mind that, for money speaks louder than words: they are interested in material success, hence economic institutions have a higher immediate influence on the young than do educational institutions. Students therefore are education to adjust to the system; which means to specialize, to mirror the analytical activities and skills needed for science, technology, industry, and for that the educational discipline, designed to preclude whatever might disturb the process, dulls the faculties Porter allegedly promotes: innovation, creativity, crucial activities rooted in curiosity, dissent, skepticism, questioning, fantasy and the like. In the holy name of objectivity, the student must ignore inner experience: subjectivity, soul, spirit, romance, myth, contemplation, daydreaming and the like. Yet, corporate recruiters insist that these recruits, trained to competitive obedience are "the brightest, most creative and talented people." Many of them care less about their courses of study, and got their credentials just to be a success. The credential proves they can obey long enough to "get it." Of course competitive sports spectacles and heavy drinking relieves the stress, therefore plenty of entertainment must be provided once they are hired - entertainment districts with sports bars, restaurants, preferably next to a sports arena, lofts and office buildings.

So much for specialization. We need it, but we go overboard with it, and stifle innovation. Nevertheless, we can safely leave the general thinking cultivated by general education up to the vested interests and their executives, politicians, business professors, newspaper editors and the like. Incidentally, when it comes to innovative productiveness, Professor Porter has a low regard for the importance of such factors as national endowments, relative currency valuations, interest rates, and, of course, at last, the labor pool. The government, he says, should know that both the hands-off and the hands-on approaches are mistaken; yet when we examine the specifics he provides, he obviously favors the hands-off approach. Generally speaking, the government should serve as a catalyst and challenger, he says. How? Do not intervene in factors such as currency and markets. Reject managed trade. Deregulate. Promote sustained investment in business. Promote specialization. Enforce strict product safety, environment standards, and anti-trust laws.

What should business leaders do? Innovate and upgrade, seek rivals and strong competition, believe in change, and locate the best home base for your Diamond of National Advantages.

What? diamond? Every pragmatic business book must have some sort of geometric figure drawn around a few simple points. In fine, the business leader should discover what his resources are, what the demand for his product is, what industries are related to and might support his business, who is rivals are, and he should know how is business is structured and what his strategy is.

Of course that is not all. That only scratches the surface. I leave the rest up to the innovative student of the American Way who can make some productive use of it.

Coupons

2004-08-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Man: Animal or God, Both or Neither?
by David Arthur Walters

I recently opined that 'time' is not a substance or thing, but is effectually an adverb signifying a kind of changing. My muse objected with, "Are we then to reduce this subject to mere semantics?"

A Polish engineer and professor by the name of Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) founded the art of General Semantics in America - his notions are elaborated at length in his tome, Science and Sanity. Professor Korzybski believed habitual thinking was lagging behind the logic and language of modern science, hence he drew on relativity theory, quantum mechanics, colloidal chemistry, neurology, and mathematics for his reform program. Linguistic reform would, in his view, restore sanity to society. He is best known for his notion that language is a map, not the territory itself - of course an accurate map is necessary to arrive at the destinations desired; and the "indexing" notion, that we should keep in mind that a general term denotes multiple particulars; for instance, all men are not the same: there is man-1, man-2, man-3, man-4, et cetera. Of course a particular man differ in time, hence Hitler-1930, Hitler-1942, et cetera.

The study of meanings, or the relation between language and things, and how those meanings influence behavior, enjoyed a burst of popularity. People were fed up with the metaphysical vagaries that fostered ignorance and signified excuses for economic and political exploitation leading to depression and war. Scientific management tempered by social justice was posited by the experts. If only the social relations of individuals were scientifically engineered by enlightened technicians, the miserable history of humankind would stop repeating itself.

Absurd political religions justifying exploitation by irrational power elites, particularly the "vested interests" or "parasites" who live "to get something for nothing" under the cloak of "monarchy", "republic", or "democracy" would be replaced by a technocracy led by sociologists; the technocrats would apply the lessons of natural science to human society so that humankind might realize its social ideals; wherefore "utopia" would no longer mean a good place that was really no place, but would be engineered and realized.

To accomplish that scientific objective, precise scientific language would have to be employed. Of course mathematical language, so valuable to mechanical engineering, would be the model language for social engineers. It is essential to know what one is talking about if particular objectives are to be obtained. Language has largely evolved into so much nonsense. Inceessant chit-chat provides human beings with the feeling of society, the feeling that they belong, the feeling that they are in touch with one another and not thoroughly alienated by their individuality, but it is otherwise not very useful except to those who use it to manipulate people in order to subjugate the many in favor of the few. If humankind is to progress, if liberty and justice is really for all people, scientists and engineers must know, first of all, the nature of the beast they are dealing with. In other words, What is Man? The answer must not only be meaningful but must have the correct meaning if it is to be useful. That is, the language must reflect the reality.

Human beings repeat their lamentable history despite their good intentions, not because the race was deliberately doomed by an evil spirit but because they are confused. Humans have native intelligence without thinking. Yet it is the facility for symbolic action or thinking that distinguishes man from intelligent animals - pigs, dolphins, apes and the like. He can learn from mistakes and think things out before he acts. He is, more often than not, confused by muddy thinking, therefore he must strive to think clearly and correctly, at least where vital interests are concerned. Thinking correctly is a scientific project, a social project. Thinking and linguistic communication are inextricably bound: we must think and speak correctly. The meaning of language, the relation of language-thought and reality is crucial if the human race is to achieve positive goals.

The need for meaningful scientific discourse is felt most acutely during troubled times. Semantics was hardly an obscure and boring province for experts during the Great Depression and world wars: the word spread among the students, was taken up by the general populace and became almost as fashionable as psychoanalysis. Like all fashions, it fell out of vogue. Just as people grew tired of being psychoanalyzed by the man and woman on the street, popular semantics became so much boring talk about talk, and the province was returned to those pedants who are customarily obsessed with systems.

Professor Korzybski founded the modern course of study called "General Semantics", but he did not invent general semantics. During troubled times, the Warring Period in the ancient East, Confucius took up the study of Rectification of Language. People were so confused, he said, that they no longer knew what the names of family members meant. Since people did not know what was meant by 'father' and 'mother' and 'son' and 'daughter' and so on, they were neglecting the familial duties of their roles. Confucius helped straighten things out for quite awhile, but eventually innovators grew bored with the traditional pedantry of their Great Teacher, and revolted.

Protagoras expounded on Correct Speech during troubled times in the ancient West. He believed correct speech had healing power. He was concerned with tenses, moods, and word endings; for example, with the fact that the word for helmet was feminine instead of masculine. At one point Plato ridiculed his pedantry and obsession with systematic thinking. Only 20 lines written by Protagoras are extant. Ironically, Plato gave Protagoras a bad name by attaching his name to the secret doctrine of subjective relativity. However Protagoras was not an objective idealist or a phenomenalist: he was an agnostic empiricist who knew and admired Pericles, wrote a constitution, and said, "Man is the measure of all things, those which are, that they are, those which are not, that they are not." By 'man' he meant Man or humankind, not individual men. By 'that' he recognized the objective existence of things, that they are, not 'how' they are - or how they are not, which would be ridiculous. His concern with correct language and objective verification gives the lie to the unprincipled subjectivity put in his mouth by Plato.

Socrates, who lived about the time of Confucius, had good reason to repeat the Delphic maxim, "Know thyself," during troubled times. His research led him to conclude that he was the only person who knew that he did not know himself. People thought they knew themselves, but careful questioning revealed they were confused and did not have the faintest idea of who they were. Certainly, if we want to know what we can effectively and efficiently do with ourselves or anything else for that matter, we should what that something is.

What is Man? Well, some say, "Man is an animal."

"Wrong," insisted Alfred Korzybski. Man is not an animal. Confusing him with animals by linguistically identifying him with animals is a grave mistake; to posit that he is part natural animal and part supernatural entity compounds the error. There is nothing supernatural about man: man is within nature, not outside of nature. His higher ideals are not supernatural, they are natural to him; the linguistic effort to divorce him from his ideals and to entrust his welfare to ignorant people or to criminals is wrong and dangerous - we add that the threat to moral progress is even worse given the ability of high technology to destroy entire populations if not the human race. References to supernatural agencies are expressions for or signs for ignorance. The dogma and casuistry, the worship of power and the theological rationalizations of power have served to justify all sorts of crimes against humanity.

Figuratively speaking, man at present is a juvenile delinquent who justifies his economic and political crimes by absurd reference to arbitrary supernatural agencies including states, the deities of political religions, and by reference to the mistaken and unethical tenets of zoological ethics - the jungle law of might is right, the will to power, the territorial imperative and the like. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, for instance, bases wealth not on the objective principles of the phenomena of wealth but rather on subjective observations of the phenomenal of selfishness, adhering to the assumption of zoological ethics, that man is an animal.

Smith's theory, says Korzybski, is false, and its stringent application would be disastrous in the long run. The same can be said of the related neo-Darwinian interpretations of the "survival of the fittest," yet another confusion of man with beast. Those who bark "survival of the fittest" bark an animal language.

"Where there is 'survival' there must be victims, there has been fighting," said Korzybski. "Survival of the fittest" justifies crimes including murder. Of course killing is not a crime for animals, but murder is a crime for man. The repeated suggestion that man is an animal serves to promote and perpetuate such crimes.

Korzybski will soon say what man is, but first he would rid man of his identification with brutes. In fact, one of the pet peeves of his General Semantics is the 'is' of equality or identity, a relation reinforced by the static either/or logic, that A is either A or not-A, hence cannot be both A and not-A at once. Such an identification in the moral sphere is a gross oversimplification of reality, and promotes knee-jerk reactions, leaps to faith, jumps to conclusions by ignorant and fearful persons with low tolerance for ambiguity, often with vicious results. Unfortunately, the constantly repeated statement that man is an animal suggests that man belongs to the animal class and all that implies. The repeated suggestion serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Spiritually inclined people found an alternative in notions of divinity, yet when they failed to advance from religion to science, they wound up on thornier paths than Brother Rabbit.

Now it might be said by atheists that Korzybski's notion of what man is not, is not very scientific, and that his divorce of man from animal and god is "merely semantic." Materialists laid claim to the unified view that matter is at the bottom of everything, and that the forms of nature are the result of complex relations of elements. Julien la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the once scandalous Man a Machine, reiterated the ancient materialistic prejudice that nature is a unity and is due to the chance interaction of matter and motion. Nature is not the creation of an intelligent and moral agent, but is a product of blind forces.

There is no natural "plan" for man, averred Dr. La Mettrie. Nature's laws are arbitrary; society needs rational laws to subsist and arrest return to the nature state of animals. "Truth" does not lead to virtue; philosophy does not result in morality; but philosophy does show the necessity of conforming to the state's rules. Man is, by chance, a thinking machine enslaved by passions. In essence, contrary to what the quacks say, there is no difference between man and brute. Further, man is an anti-social and amoral animal who is naturally determined to commit "crimes" and "sins" because crimes and sins are necessary for his well-being. Happiness is organic and is disturbed by inculcated "remorse," a symptom of disease. The criminal is not free to choose his course of action.

The well-constituted individual whose natural passions are not too anti-social and who is aware that his selfishness can be realized in society is no problem for civilized society. Criminals should be pitied by the fortunate intellectual elite who are naturally liberated. The intellectual elite accepts the truth, that man is an amoral animal, a relativist machine, not as a matter of conscience but because it is true. The conduct of vulgar imbeciles, on the other hand, is regulated by religious and moral guilt, remorse, and physical coercion. Criminals should be harshly punished for good social effect - they should not be condemned for their natural determination. Ordinary persons are excluded from intellectual liberation by their own mutual fear and contempt; fear-religion, until unleashed in violent episodes, may restrain the natural inclination to crime - challenges to religion and conventions terrify ordinary people and might result in violence. Anti-social populations need legal coercion and despotism to keep them in good order.

Sages should retreat to epicurean quarters; philosophers, however, should be activists and do what they can to improve society. The man who does not philosophize, Dr. Le Mettrie said, is no better than a donkey. And Dr. La Mettrie was contemned for his views, called a crude mechanist and an anarchist, but he was in fact more concerned with psychology than physiology, and he was in fact an advocate of altruistic projects. As a doctor he adhered to the views of Hippocrates, including the perspective that nature, when left alone, often has a healing power far superior to the doctor's power - especially the ivory-tower quacks Hippocrates and La Mettrie liked to ridicule.

Another pioneer of modern materialism, Baron Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (1725-1789), by discrediting man's contrived illusions gave, conversely, more credit to man's ability to improve himself. Holbach was confident in nature's healing power. Material particles circulated among plant and animal and "dead" kingdoms of nature; the elements are naturally combined into forms and dissolved, hence the apparent transformations observed - this is an instance of the classical "elemental" theory rejected by Korzybski. Baron Holbach's ultimate element was the "fiery particle." Now man can help remedy his ills by returning to nature's laws, taking care not to personify nature or its properties as if nature had a will of its own.

If only man understands nature, he will be a lot better off. Although man is part of nature, apparently his portion of nature includes unwarranted defiance against nature, much to his ruin. Therefore we have a sort of romantic return to nature as an antidote to religion, upon which much of the blame can be placed for the disastrous divorce from nature. Religion is corruption, disease; part of the cure requires the very names of god to be surgically removed from thought and language. The theological definition of 'god', the Baron said, forgetting his previous statement that man needs mysteries, is the definition of Nothing. Morality is to be deduced from the rational recognition of the means to happiness; in other words, we may reason out how we can become happy by examining the causes of misery and happiness. For instance, we might proceed to study ritual, a form of the religious disease, by conducting statistical studies of hysterics in mental hospitalss.

"Man is unhappy merely because he misunderstands nature," Baron Holbach indited. "His mind is so infected by prejudices that one must almost believe him to be forever doomed to error; the chains of illusion in which he is so entangled from childhood have so grown upon him, that he can only with the utmost trouble be set free from them. Man disdained the study of nature to pursue after phantoms, that, like will-of-the-wisps, dazzled him and drew him from the plain path of truth, away from which he cannot attain happiness. It is therefore time to seek in nature remedies against the evils which fanaticism has plunged us."

"We only see so many crimes on earth, because everything conspires to make men criminal and vicious. Their religions, their governments, their education, the examples before their eyes drive them irresistibly to evil in vain; then, does morality preach virtue which would only be a painful sacrifice of happiness in societies where vice and crime are perpetually crowned, honored, and rewarded, and where the frightful disorders are only punished in them who are too weak to have the right to commit them with impunity. Society chastises in the small the excesses that it respects in the great, and often is unjust enough to condemn to death those whom the prejudices that it maintains have rendered criminal."

Baron Holbach gives us cause to hope that correct thinking and speaking - in alignment with natural law - will save humankind from itself. We expect him to quote Pythagoras, and say that theory without practice and practice without theory are in vain. But he does not say that. Man tends to act in accord with his feelings, he says, and not in accord with what he thinks, if those thoughts are at variance with his passions; hence thoughts themselves, no converted into action, are harmless. Let men think what they will; the truth or error of their thinking is not dangerous in itself. Judge men by their actions.

Not only does Baron Holbach leave us with muddled thinking, his discourse gives us cause to suspect that man's portion of nature might be naturally perverse. Yet surely the recognition of that perversity and how it leads to misery, and an understanding of natural forces and a correct definition of man's nature, communicated by correct thinking and clear language, will set humankind on the right path to an agreeable salvation. If we can scientifically manipulate or engineer the conditions in just the right way, the unnecessary "excesses" can be avoided, and we can be, at least, generally prosperous and happy to boot. Man might be a member of the animal kingdom, but he is the king of the kingdom and might become the loving god he wants to be, as can be seen by his projection of the god of love on an ideal man, who, when he returns to men, will have no further cause to suffer their foolishness.

Yes, man might be classed with the animals, but he is a peculiar subclass of his own, and Professor Korzybski was right to make a semantic distinction, and given the proper procedures man shall now go where no man has gone before, to the realization of ever higher and higher collective ideals.

Not so, claimed Robert Ardrey in African Genesis, for man is an animal. Here we go again. The ideal of human engineering, to use science and applied technology to eradicate evil from human society, is the "romantic scientific fallacy." Man is not a god who can manipulate conditions in order to realize his innate goodness, argues Ardrey, but he is an animal whose nature dooms him to miserable viciousness.

Yes, animals can learn from their environment, therefore human animals can be conditioned by the manipulation of economic and political factors. However, crime, war, economic exploitation cannot be eradicated by resort to environmental manipulation. Aggression is inherited. Animals will compete not because they want to compete, but because they must compete over something. If there is nothing to compete over, they will compete anyway: they will compete like the cuckoos: cuckoos do not nest and are polyandrous; they do not compete over mates or territory; they just compete. And that reminds us of the frustrated scholar who observed that there is no justification or reasonable explanation for human warfare: war just is, period, end of sentence.

As for competition over things, Freud was wrong to limit human competition to family and sex, claims Ardrey. Territorial proprietors, for instance, are universally hostile towards neighbors; for example, hierarchically ordered baboon societies of one-hundred members compete for status and territory.

In the final analysis, the social factor, the Oedipus Complex, and the so-called emotional or internal causes of aggression do not explain aggression. After all, prehistorical fish were organized into societies. Systems of dominance are characteristic of most animal species; animals are "patriotic" and are devoted to each other in self-defense. "The mentality of the single Germanic tribe under Hitler differed in no way from that of early man or late baboon," Ardrey opines. We add that recent studies indicate that certain animal species engage in "wars." Tyrants are rare in societies, Ardrey claimed, and they are usually dealt with by their own, aristocratic class, by means of "palace revolutions." The lower classes remain below. The ideal that sons established law to replace a murdered father's tyranny is improbable and is sheer bunk. As for sex, a bird views a snake with horror but has no penis.

Taking up evolution, Huxley, Darwin's propagandist or "bulldog", believed that competition was between individuals organized into gangs. Darwin himself posited sex as the sole cause of male competition. Darwin recognized amity and altruism in animals, yet said he could find no fixed principle in the evolutionary process to explain the altruistic principle, yet he observed in Descent of Man that, "No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, or treachery were common.... (A tribe) superior in patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, sympathy, mutual aid and readiness to sacrifice for the common good" would naturally be selected over a tribe without those qualities.

The question as to whether or not the amicable qualities are inherited, making for a dual, amity-enmity nature, remains unanswered. Spencer suggested an ethic of external enmity in contrast to an ethic of internal amity; in other words, hate-based group-love.

In any case, the evidence shows that man reacts more to the environment than he shapes it; that he is not originally good, but is a carnivore who uses weapons to wage war. He is obsessed with acquisition of wealth and status, yet given wealth and status he will still fight like an animal over trivialities or over nothing if need be.

In fine, man is an animal, not a god. Science and applied technology, economic and political systems will never uproot and destroy the cause of his misery or his original sin: he is an animal condemned to fight for his living whether he likes it or not.

Well, then, we might suppose that man would not be virtuous without his viciousness, or that his vice is his virtue. Let us then raise the idol of competition on the altar above the bloody arena and let the best man win.

Was not Korzybski correct? Men have confused man with animal. You can take the man out of the animal, but you can't take the animal out of man. Whom is to blame for the confusion? According to Plato's Protagoras, the gods fashioned mortals out of the elements and ordered Prometheus (forethought) and Epimetheus (afterthought) to equip them with the properties appropriate for life on Earth. Epimetheus begged Prometheus: "Let me distribute and you inspect." Okay. Epimetheus distributed among the brute animals various magnitudes of strength, swiftness, and size, along with equipment for burrowing, flying, swimming, and such. He clothed the creatures with different kinds of skins, hairy and bare, making sure the hooves and calloused skins were under their feet. He distributed all sorts corresponding environments including appropriate foods. In short, he distributed everything to animals.

"Prometheus came to inspect the distribution, and he found that the other animals were suitably furnished, but that man alone was naked and shoeless, and had neither bed nor arms of defense.... Prometheus, not knowing how he could devise man's preservation, stole the wisdom of practicing the arts of Hephaestus and Athene, and fire with it (it could neither have been acquired nor used without fire), and gave them to man. Thus man had the wisdom necessary to the support of life, but political wisdom he had not, for that was in the keeping of Zeus."

So man is an other animal. Generally speaking, human beings are initially endowed with the manly and feminine arts, wisdom of course being a feminine attribute. Hephaestus, originally an Asian fire-god, was popular in Athens as divine smith and god of craftsmen. He fashioned ornaments, shields, and weapons among other things. He took to wife Aphrodite, goddess of love, who made a fool of him. He was a comic figure: had a powerful upper body, but was lamed because he allegedly offended Zeus. Athene spring from the head of Zeus. Supreme goddess of Athens and goddess of cites, Athena was necessarily a virgin because no man was good enough for her. She was goddess of wisdom, peaceful pursuits, spinning, weaving, prudent and defensive warfare, and the like. Incidentally, Athene invented the flute but threw it away because playing it distorted her face.

As we can see, not only is man confused with animals, he is confused with supernatural or immortal gods - another pet semantic peeve of Korzybski. "Now man," writes Plato, "having a share in divinity, was at first one of the animals who had any gods, because he alone was of their kindred, and he would raise altars and images of them."

Absent the political arts including the art of last resort, the art of war, the primitive humans had a serious problem; namely the wild animals who wanted to eat them. Wherefore the gathered together in self-defense, learned to make war on animals, and eventually founded cities. They did not yet have the higher political art, of good government, hence they dealt injustly with one another in the cities and began to destroy each other.

"Zeus feared that our entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes of mankind, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the uniting bonds of friendship." Hermes asked how reverence and justice should be distributed, to a few skilled experts, as other crafts are distributed, or to everyone?

"To all," answered Zeus, "I should like them to have a share; for cities cannot exist if a few only share in justice in reverence, as in the arts. And further, make a law by my order that he who has no part in reverence and justice shall be put to death, for he is a plague of the state."

Plato supports the truth expressed by myth, explaining that "all men actually do regard every man as having a share of justice and of every other political virtue.... They say that all men ought to profess justice whether they are just or not, and that a man is out of his mind who says anything else. Their notion is that a man must have some degree of justice, and that if he has none at all he ought not to be in human society.... And I will now endeavor to show further that they do not conceive this virtue to be given by nature, or to grow spontaneously, but to be a thing which is taught, and which comes to man by taking pains. No one would instruct, no one would rebuke or be angry with those whose calamities they suppose to be due to nature or chance; they do not try to punish or to prevent them from being what they are; they do but pity them. Who, for example, is so foolish as to chastise or instruct the ugly, the diminutive, or the feeble?"

Plato speaks of justice, reverence, piety, self-control - ideal behavior, collective or social ideals. Reward good deeds, punish evil deeds; praise wrong, blame right. The lessons are available to all, that they might learn self-control. And they fail to do so under pain of exile or death. Reverence is "to fear" - to fear gods or persons, including the ideal representative of the community: the god, the leader. All that must be performed sincerely and with great respect, with piety.

After reviewing Plato's Protagoras' Great Speech, how would we clearly distinguish man from "other animals"? By the moral (mental) faculty that enables him to learn arts and crafts, including the art of living together peacefully, and the ability to pass the information and lessons on to succeeding generations. The sciences purpose to know what nature is and how it works, and are prerequisite to technical applications of acquired knowledge; they are best known by experts, pursuant to an efficient division of labor. As for getting along together peacefully, the art of harmonious living must be learned by all. And it is fair to say that there will not be much progress in that practice without scientific knowledge of the nature of the beast - excuse me, I mean the distinctive nature of man.

Alfred Korzybski believed the faculty for continuous improvement is not derived from a supernatural source but is innate to man. Since the origin of the race is rather remote and obscure, to say the least, we hopefully have no good cause to quibble over myths today. When the Greeks said, "Know thyself," they referred to man's limits, his definition. Since then many men and women have pushed the envelope, sometimes to far with disastrous results: reality melted the waxen wings fashioned by Daedelus; he and his son Icarus wanted to escape from the labyrinthine laboratory inhabited by the half-animal, half-bull Minotaur - Daedelus' only genetic engineering experiment.

Korzybski said that "Know thyself" does not command man to know (feel) himself intuitively, the way a fish "knows" itself, but instructs man to reflect and reconsider himself objectively, to analyze human nature in order to arrive at a realistic synthesis of what man really is. He did just that, and concluded that man is not an animal but is a "time-binding" being; that is, he can accumulate, store, and communicate knowledge. Animals can move but do not have man's reasoning power; they are space-binding creatures. Plants, unlike animals, cannot move, but are energy-binding.

"This stupendous fact is the definition of the mark of humanity - the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly," quoth Korzybski. "We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression."

Comparative disparities in the progression of science and culture result in "jumps" - violent readjustments - economic swings, revolutions and wars, etc. No doubt the traditional resort to space-binding, zoological ethics, the wasteful fights for territory according to jungle law, especially evident in the lawless international arena today, can be attributed to the cultural lag. "Time binders can not use 'animal' logic without degrading themselves from their proper status as human beings - their status as established by nature. 'Animal' logic leads to 'animal' ethics and 'animal' ethics and 'animal' economics; it leads inevitably to a brutalized industrial system in which cunning contrives to rob the living of the fruit of the dead." And, we reiterate, brute violence.

The "free" press, unfortunately, holds out a promise of freedom that it does not advance because it sells out to vampires (my term). "Unfortunately, the press is often controlled by exploiters of the living powers of the dead.... The press, which is itself the product in the main of the dead, is made a means for the deception and exploitation of the living." Indeed.

Despite the fact that the free press has sold its freedom, there is a remedy: "The only remedy is enlightenment - not revolution." Professor Korzybski envisions general seminars for everyone - doctors, artists, professors, laborers, businessmen, etc. Man must not only be intelligent and skilled, he must understand himself in context, understand that the true man is of a higher dimension than space-binding animals and energy-binding plants. Humankind has a natural capacity for perpetual progress, a heritage of collective ideals inherited from the efforts of previous generations, men and women who persevered despite cultural lag and whose class-motive certainly was not the selfish motive put forward by regressive political and economic thinkers who rely on pig-philosophy, wolf-politics, dog-psychology (my hyphenated terms) et cetera. Just as we can see the dead alive in our own faces, we may observe that our progress is based on the living powers of the dead.

"The wealth of the world is in the main the free gift of the past - the fruit of the labor of the dead." This capital belongs to the race; it is, like the earth, a treasure to be employed by engineers for the public benefit. A patent is not something to be held by the inventor forever, and neither are the benefits of the invention to be hoarded and inherited by a few that they may lord it over the many. Mind you that humankind has three fundamental powers: sun-power; the power of the living; the power of the dead. Human engineers using these powers must be held accountable and subjected to the same severity as would bridge engineers.

Korzybski certainly did not intend to turn human beings into machines. He would free laborers not only from slavery to their passions but from physical slavery. We do not want control of the laborer, he said, we want control of his muscular power, but almost all mechanical work can be replaced by machines, while man cannot be replaced. To use men as tools or instruments is "repugnant, stupid and short-sighted," he said. Tools do not have the autonomy of their maker. The power of all men to produce wealth for all under wise direction must be released. "Much more is to be gained in exploiting nature aimfully... than exploiting man all the time and nature occasionally."

Like all engineers who want predictable results, Korzybski has faith in the precise language of mathematics, and in what Ardrey rightly or wrongly identified as the "romantic scientific fallacy."

"Human logic - mathematic logic, the logic natural for man - this will show us that 'good' and 'just' and 'right' are to have their significance defined and understood entire in terms of human nature.... Human Engineering will eliminate 'wild-cat schemes, 'gamblers and politicians.' It will put an end to industrial violence, strikes, insurrections, war and revolutions." Thorstein Veblen might add that it will put an end to the enormous waste generated by capitalists and entrepreneurs who profit by impeding production: holding out, creating false scarcities, cornering markets, etc.

Human Engineering to just ends would naturally require a just definition of justice, and just how that might be calculated to the general satisfaction of humankind in accord the nature of the race remains to be seen. If we take up zoological ethics and hold that justice is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we encounter the usual problems with quantification, particularly with how to quantify qualities. If we take human nature as derived from sensibility and assume that happiness is pleasurable, we might not discover in our nature a universal basis or general laws that might be employed to please everyone or "make" them happy.

Indeed, that was the problem encountered by another great reformer, Destutt de Tracy, the French Ideologist whose influence in America was felt through Thomas Jefferson. The natural premise, that morality (mentality) is rooted in sensations, as per Locke, Condillac et al, depends on the truth of the Sensational Premise: that everyone has the same sensation of the same object. Tracy was eventually forced by his studies to conclude that language is generally qualitative, rather than quantitative like algebra, hence inherently imprecise. Said imprecision wrecked Tracy's reform project; he wanted to rid humankind of its bad habits of thinking and metaphysical rubbish by reducing language to its simplest terms and making the relations between them more certain, that they might be employed correctly. Human language would then serve its natural function, of satisfying human needs. The virtue of algebraic languagge is that is symbols are sufficiently precise for operations to arrive at definite conclusions. Alas, grammatical operations are qualitative and its signs will not and can not arrive at quantitative precision; attempts to do so leads to even more complex, vague feelings. Even so, some beneficial reform is possible - complete reform is impossible:

"A complete reform is almost impossible," wrote Tracy, "for too many habits resist it. To change completely a usage... would require a unanimous consent which... would be a real revolution in society."

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the improbability of arriving at a mathematic definition of 'good, just, and right', perhaps general rules of healthy social behavior can be induced and applied experimentally after the collection and analysis of relevant data. But Korzybski seems to reject the possibility of the mathematical definition of social terms, and contradicts the possibility of defining 'good, just, and right', for he tells us that nature does not know 'capital' or 'capitalism', 'labor' or 'communism' etc., but only knows 'space', 'time', 'energy', etc.

"Human logic points to human ethics and human economics; it will lead to a humanized industrial system in which competition will be competition in science, in art, in justice: a competition and struggle for the attainment of excellence in human life," wrote Professor Korzybski. Although he struggled to free man semantically from the constant self-demeaning suggestion, that man is an animal, the professor cannot quite cleanse his language of terms such as 'competition' and 'struggle', terms that suggest that man is in fact an animal. A better choice of words might be 'cooperative effort', but that smacks of 'communism; our current myth includes the Idol of Competition and requires us to compete to do good, howsoever good might be defined by received authority. Alas, there will be arguments over the definition of good; the pressure to win the competition will result in guilt feelings, jealous feelings, hard feelings, etc. Wars might be waged to save humankind from bad manners, and to save the world for the best culture.

Human logics - there are several - can save us from making many mistakes if properly employed. The static logic of either/or has its drawbacks in certain contexts, and can pave the road to hell when people insist on doing one thing or the other. We might dismiss Alfred Korzybski's course in general semantics as "mere semantics," but that would be a mistake. If man is a member of the animal kingdom, say, a glorified ape, or if man is partly divine, or X , and his X is temporarily imprisoned in an animal body, we should take both his animal and divine nature, as we might understand it at the time into account. We should know what "time" is if man's unique faculty is "time-binding" - we are not wholly satisifed with Newton's definition of mathematical time, for time is not something that "flows", but we know what "subjective time" and "objective time" means. And we know what Professor Korbynski means when he insists that man is not a brute animal or a supernatural god or a combination of the two. There is something special about the idea signified by 'man', although we cannot precisely say what that is. And for Alfred Korbynski's intangible capital contribution to the dialectic we thank him very much.

E

Quoted Sources:

The History of Materialism by Frederick Albert Lange, transl. Ernest Chester Thomas, New York: Harcourt Brace 1925

Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie's Discours Preliminaire, by Ann Thomson, Geneva: Libraire Droz 1981

Manhood of Humanity by Alfred Korzybski

African Genesis by Robert Ardrey

2004-08-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

Poetic Genius and Enthusiasm

All the categories in the world, whether they be seventeen hundred or seventy thousand or more, shall be dead issues without the Poetic Genius to inspire them. And with that inspiration there shall be no limit to the possibilities. For no conceivable taxonomical scheme can name all the future arrangements of evolution, not as long as Life presses against the dead definitions the schemers would impose to contain the world for their prejudices.

Only the Poetic Genius, who is possessed at once by the past, present, and future, has direct access to the transcendent Cause of all creation. Hence only the Poetic Genius has the gift to prophecy according to the Causeless Cause he calls God. By God he means the infinite Subject of subjects, ineffable in itself, unknown except indistinctly by innumerable predicates - all predicates belong to God and to God nothing is inconceivable. He means Freedom for Heaven's sake. He means Love. And what is Love? Love is your Life. That is what the Poetic Genius means by God, and that is why he urges all to put aside the virtual suicide of the death religions to truly live as a True Man. And by this expression, Man, he also means Woman, for Ma is the root of Man - her access to the ground of prophecy is most intimate.

The Poetic Genius is the First Man possessed by God. Therefore he is the first Enthusiast, the very Adam of Enthusiasm. He is the Free Spirit incarnate within whom the Life of Man proceeds. Again, "Man" is from "Ma", or she-who- measures-out, thus Man is "He-who-thinks", hence the Poetic Genius is the very impetus of the life of the mind, the founder of all the arts and sciences of culture and civilization. There can be no true enthusiasm or god-possession without Poetry. Absent Poetry, we are left with the feigned enthusiasm of publicity and advertising designed to stimulate the production and consumption of sense objects. Or we have the religious and political hypocrisy and sophistry of power mongers. In a word, what we have without Poetry is blasphemy!

William Blake was certainly an enthusiastic poet. He was a popular enthusiasm - his poetry advocated the freedom of every man. Each True Man is competent to reveal the future. "Every Honest Man is a Prophet," he said. Blake enthusiastically supported the French Revolution at its outset. He fostered an abiding hatred for Biblical literalism and the religious and political Establishment of his day. As far as he was concerned, the authoritarian interpretations of the Bible were "abominations," priestly corruptions of poetic tales. We find this text on Plate 11 of his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous sense could perceive.

"And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.

"Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.

"Choosing forms from poetic tales.

"And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.

"Thus men forget that All deities reside in the human breast." (sic)

False religions contemn Desire, Blake observed. His sentiments were at odds with the rationalized theology of orthodox monotheism. As far as he was concerned, the one-god Moses experienced on Sinai was an encounter with "forms of dark delusion." Blake also addressed in his peculiar way the dark delusions of Norse mythology.

Blake's Holy Bible was a bible of myths, and it influenced him to make some myths of his own. Los, his personified Creative Imagination, says in Blake's Jerusalem, "I must Create a system, or be enslav'd by another Man's,/I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create."

The Sun stands free of received authority, observed the poet, and it needs no darkness to distinguish it. Yet he was unenthusiastic about the Enlightenment's metaphorical sun, called Reason, for he felt that scientific Reason's reifications restrains Desire even more than the rationalized traditional religions. Indeed, Blake's adopted arch-enemies were Bacon, Newton, and Locke, sensationalists misled by their senses to false beliefs. Man is not limited by incoherent, finite sensations of matter; no, Man craves the Infinite, therefore Man has the Infinite within, Man is infinite.

Blake's Desire is not sensual: the essence of his idol of desire is spiritual, not material. That is, Blake's Desire is the motive that results in sense experience, not the sense experience itself. And the Poetic Genius enjoys a mystical experience beyond sense experience. Blake is of course a mystic: the work of Jacob Boehme, the mystic and shrewd businessman whom Hegel said was the founder of German philosophy, had a major influence on Blake's mysticism.

In one of his first illuminated (engraved, printed and then colored) books, There is No Natural Religion (c. 1788), Blake argues that since science is only concerned with the evidence of the senses, it is limited by a fixed ratio to the sensible world, therefore:

"If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and still unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again." And, "He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is."

He reiterated that basic concept again in All Religions are One (c, 1788), 'The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness':

"As none traveling over known lands can find out the unknown. So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more, therefore a Universal Poetic Genius exists."

Moreover, "The poetic genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius."

Responding to the charge that his work was vague and obscure, the master said, "That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato."

Blake certainly would not have an elite aesthetic cult of poetic geniuses, or a priesthood of poets established, some sort of literary elite who falsely believe that they and they alone have access to God. Every man, he said, has poetic genius available to him according to his lights, his honesty, and his ability to become true to his Poetic Genius.
Although Blake was appalled by the authoritarian abuse of religion and scripture during his time, he held fastly to his belief that the holy testaments were the work of inspired poets, and that such inspiration is available to every Honest Man:

"The religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation's different reception of the Poetic Genius which is everywhere called the Spirit of Prophecy." And, "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) so all Religions and all similars have one source. The true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius."

In sum, within each man is the true Man, and he is the Poetic Genius, the source of all true religion, the religion of Life and Love and Liberty.

Our sentiments may differ from Blake's. Some of us might feel threatened by perspectives other than our own in matters of faith, and may therefore be provoked to indignation and contention by Blake's radical ideology. Lest we get too upset over the overturning of certain apple carts, we should remember that, unlike his associate Thomas Paine, who enjoyed making a mockery out of scripture, Blake saw it as a valuable myth and made more myths out of it. And unlike Paine and other radicals, Blake hated deism, atheism, materialism and the like idols of the late Enlightenment. He also hated dogmatism.

In fact, Blake was a profoundly religious man. And he was of course influence by the ideology of his revolutionary time. The French Revolution promised freedoms not enjoyed under England's aristocracy, and many Britons got their hopes up for radical change in their own country - William Pitt (Jr.) would bury the dissident movement and it would remain underground until the 1830s. During the 1790s, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, josiah Wedgewood, Thomas Paine and other radicals met regularly at the house of Blake's employer, the radical publisher, Johnson. Mary Wollstonecraft, as we know, actually went to Paris to enjoy the Revolution, including the Terror, and fell in love there with an American, Captain Gilbert Imlay, passing as his wife. She later the philosophical anarchist, Godwin, and was mother to Mary Shelley. She is best known for her Vindications of the Rights of Women (1792), a work followed by Paine's Vindications of the rights of Man. Blake of course illustrated a few of Wollstonecraft's books. Wherefore, when we consider Blake's opinions on religion, we must keep his company in mind, and the mutual hatred for the established church and state at the time, a time of great spiritual anxiety for Blake.

The poet eventually lost his faith in the regenerative power of Revolution; he believed it was just another one of Orc's (Blake's Spirit of Rebellion, in America) revolts against Urizen (Blake's divisive god, from horizein, "to divide"). He also became dissatisfied with his theory of dialectics, that, "Without contraries is no progression," and that progress is derived from a synthesis of Good and Evil. But he held to his premise that, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."

In any case, many of us will agree that Blake was at the very least an enthusiastic poet, and that to abolish poetry from enthusiastic endeavors would be not only blasphemous but would be a threat to the happiness and very existence of the human race. The race may survive for awhile as an ant-like army encased in its technological armor, but sooner or later the terrain will shift, leaving it in the lurch, a terrible lurch it cannot withstand without the virtues of poetry.

xYx

2004-07-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

Antonia - Tribute to Matthew Lewis

Surely nothing more pure than thee
Slumbers in Mother Night's embrace;
Surely to-night no fuller Moon
Resembles well thy sweet pale face,
Framed by locks fair and confidence
Of your faithful midnight prayer.

Yet, in a cave by jealous Moon,
Reside three Fates dressed all in white,
All of them daughters of black Night:
Clotho the Spinner loves to spin;
Lachesis draws what has been spun;
Atropos severs life's frail thread
Suspended between gloom and gloom.

Whose beck and call Fates might answer
Is often hotly contended;
But rest assured, Antonia,
While in your precious innocence
Rest may so easily obtain.
For, restless in his bestained bed,
Ambrosio twists and turns with
Lust and guilt against his poor vows.

Ambrosio, Ambrosio,
Whom conscience has torn asunder.
Lies concealed in his monkish cell;
But not from mannish Matilda,
Demonessa, urging him on,
Nor from his holy Deity,
Counseling virtuous restraint.
Hence Aye and Nay dance in tandem
Until vile incestuous rape
And foul murders are committed
And duly punished by Devil
Doing God's will as commissioned.

Then, only then shalt thou molder
As thy mother Elvira molds
Whilst Ambrosio, cast into
The chasm of hopeless despair,
Impaled upon the hellish rocks
So far below the gaze of God,
Slowly fulfills his Agony.

2004-07-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

First Toynbeean Meditation

Life goes on. I am still working on Vol. VIII of My Suicide Note - an Elaboration of My Favorite Theme: Nothing, Something, Nothing. I paused over coffee this morning to revisit Arnold Toynbee's Study of History - in ten volumes plus Reconsiderations.

Toynbee's Study might appear to some students as a labyrinthine maze of incongruous tapestries, yet his theme is quite simple. Indeed, the most cutting criticism is that Toynbee knew where he was going and how he would get there before he started his arduous trek, then continued on that course over the years as if he had learned nothing new along the way.

First of all, we have the Beginning, or the Source, and we continue on from there to the End, or the Goal. And during the course of his universal history, Toynbee did learn a major lesson: he encountered a Crisis in the Middle, whereupon he turned from Civilization to Religion as the proper unit of historical study. Now the Source and Goal is God, and the middle is History. According to Toynbee's Study, "History is a vision of God's creation on the move, from God its source towards God its goal." Therefore let us begin our meditation with the end in mind, In the Name of the Past, the Present, and the Future, as ONE.

As Toynbee flies over History in his Platonic Chariot of the Gods, he resorts to his own Platonic myth, that of the Ledge: Humankind is climbing God's mountain from ledge to ledge; the ledges above and below are invisible except from the advantageous vantage of the universal historian who serves therefore as our guide and prophet.

"In earlier volumes of this book, I have compared the situation of mankind in the present age to a climber's pitch. Below us lies the ledge that our pre- human ancestors reached in the act of becoming human. In the Age of the Civilizations mankind has been making a number of attempts to scale the cliff-face that towers up from the ledge reached by Primitive Man. The next ledge above, unlike the ledge below, is invisible to climbers who are striving to reach it. All that they know is that they feel compelled to risk their necks in the hope of gaining the next ledge and in the faith that the endeavor is worth while."

We proceed to the Goal for its own sake, yet we have a utilitarian motive, the fear of death: the "wages of sin is death." And the original sin is the sin of pride in self or the self-love identified by the holy fathers as the ultimate adultery or cheating on God. Thus the law or reasoning of human nature is contrary to genuine self-discipline: the power of the human mind is therefore antithetical to the power of the spiritual soul. Since the emergence of self-will and -consciousness, our progress (some would call it regress) towards merger (unity) with the In-Dwelling God that (not who) is our ultimate Goal has be minimal:

The human power that has increased is not a human soul's power over itself. There is no evidence of any increase in that within the time over which our records extend. So far as one can guess, human beings are no better, and saints are no more frequent in the present-day world than they will have been in, let us say, the Lower Paleaolithic Age. The power that has been accumulating and increasing in collective power over both human souls and non-human nature. Now that mankind's collective power is within sight of becoming able to extinguish all human life, and perhaps all life of any kind on the face of the planet, the works of righteousness are being demanded of us urgently, not only for their own sake, but by our concern for self-preservation."

It would be amazing if Toynbee had not meditated on the ambiguity of his position that, on the one hand, his "higher" religion is one of direct individual revelation whereby, in his quest for freedom from human authority, the individual has in fact rebelled against the collective and its representative men. That very rebellion is based on the sin of individual pride or self-love; the Devil hates socially conditioned humans, loving only Nobody in Nowhere. Of course the contradiction can be smoothed over by the objective reference to God deplored yet utilized by Toynbee as, apparently, a rhetorical device - he referred to himself as an "ex-Christian" and an "ex-believer."

God's mountain is Within - God is "In-Dwelling." Toynbee was influence by Jung, hence the mountain's Jungian aspects such as the collective unconscious and primordial archetypes, are noticeable. Man has gone from the worship of Nature to the worship of Man and is now getting in touch with the spiritual Reality "behind" all phenomena by means of a "higher" religion. Humans emerged from sub-humans into self-consciousness and self-will, where they are tormented by intellectual and moral relativity. In 'The Next Ledge' of his Reconsiderations, Toynbee declares that:

"(human nature's goal is) to transcend the intellectual and moral limitations that it's relativity imposes on it. Its intellectual goal is to see the Universe as it is in the sight of God, instead of seeing it with the distorted vision of one of God's self-centered creatures. Human nature's moral goal is to make the self's will coincide with God's will, instead of pursuing self-regarding purposes on its own."

In my own words: After our necks get stuck out, our job is to prepare our heads for the axe. As for the Beginning and End of progress, I am unable to make heads or tails of it as everywhere the tail is in the mouth of the Snake; mind you, Toynbee says it is a Wheel rolling forward. Whether the Unknown is "behind" or "ahead" of the Universe, I cannot say. Nor do I know whether we are ascending to a summit of omniscience or descending to a subconscious hypostasis of blissful ignorance: in the interim, I for one shall climb up the triangle of induction and climb down the triangle of deduction at once with the double-triangle, the "Star of David" as my guide. Toynbee was on the right track, the rolling track of poetic fiction, I think, so let us proceed In the Name of the Beginning, the Middle, and the End, as ONE.

No doubt Toynbee's materialistic affection for structural complexity can be perplexing. And his fact-laden, empirical method can be rather boring not only because of his prolixity but because of his abstract elevation from the scene. Nevertheless, the layout of his metaphysical airplane is assuredly familiar. As we have seen, the passenger who has conducted preliminary investigations has comfort in knowing his flight plan despite the complexity of the dirty details passing by below. The flight from Reality to Reality might take each passenger over eighty years; therefore, rather than rush to his destination, he is advised to keep the world tour in mind as he takes little jaunts into chapters having subjects which might interest him from time to time. There is plenty in store for him at History's bar. To slake the passenger's thirst, Toynbee pours facts into a prefabricated glass through which the world is observed; and at times, according to the best pessimistic tradition, it is observed very darkly. In the final volume of the Study, under the heading 'The Quest For A Meaning Behind The Facts of History', he quotes Gibbon's famous phrase that History is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of Mankind," and he cites the "All is vanity" of Ecclesiastes. And here is something from Herman Melville's epic of the monumental struggle between the forces of good and evil, Moby Dick:

"The Sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the Moon. The Sun hides not the Ocean, which is the dark side of this Earth, and which is two-thirds of this Earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true - not true, or undeveloped.... The Gods themselves are not forever glad."

Philosophy, who is still Queen of the sciences, notwithstanding the scientific contempt for her divine graces, is poetry. Toynbee above all spins a philosophy of history. He views the facts of history poetically - his passion for poetry is obvious although, when stated in his own words, it is prosaically posed and done so in a whale of a history with a moral lesson coursing the deep. In his reflective Reconsiderations, he confides his mystical experiences as an historian: he is miraculously transported to certain scenes entirely obscure and trivial to the layman, but of magnificent import to the mystic historian.

In any event, for those of us who would embark on the universal voyage, whether by land, sea or air, Toynbee reveals our destination and warns us of the dangers along the way; for example, in the leading paragraph to "The Quest..."

"The meaning behind the facts of History towards which the poetry in the facts is leading us is a revelation of God, and a hope of communion with Him; but in this quest for a Beatific Vision that is visible to a Communion of Saints we are ever in danger of being diverted from our search for God to a glorification of Man; and this sin of associating the creature with the Creator precipitates the man-worshipper into a continuing fall from idolatry through disillusionment to an eventual depreciation of Man which almost as excessive as the adulation to which it is the inevitable sequel here."

We are in familiar monotheistic Space here, a fictitious enterprise which will surely alienate people who need to worship something in particular: indeed, Toynbee, the religious historian of our age, alienated many pious people. Ironically, Toynbee, the subtle iconoclast, like the great encyclopedia pioneer Pierre Bayle, found fewer logical obstacles in Dualism than in monotheistic religion; but Toynbee objected to Zoroastrianism's conclusion, that good is finally triumphant over its evil twin. As Bayle fearlessly said, Reason is an acid that eventually eats through its own foundation; therefore I ask, How can the dialectic cease short of dropping into Nothing?

Nevertheless, I must pause to agree in the opinion that life requires a contest between two distinguished forces, portrayed by the imagination as good and evil entities, say, God and Devil - that the dichotomy along the continuum is fictitious is neither here nor there, but is conducive to leading a creative life. There must be some mistake in the translations and interpretations of the old texts taken from the cowhides. Indeed, why would Zarathustra take back his greatest gift to humankind, the clear distinction between God and the slanderous Liar? Finally, Evil had been identified not as some shortage or vacancy of positive Good, but as a real entity in itself. Zurvanism, the Zoroastrian cult which made Time or Zurvan father of both Good and Evil, was a Greek corruption rightly put down in Persia as a most pernicious heresy. But the Devil had his way with the Parsis in India who, under monotheistic pressure of the Mogul Muslims, allowed the Devil to be whisked away and confused with God again, hence now they consider themselves along with Christians as monotheists. But are they really monotheists? Is not Satan the only true monotheist, the Evil One who loves only God therefore hates Man? Therefore must not Satan be contested? We leave the cavilling to the litigating theologians with this maxim in mind: He who ignores evil is good for nothing.

However that may be, Toynbee believed higher religion is the only means to achieve a peaceful universal order. As we know, by "higher" religion he meant a direct, individual relation to God. Toynbee himself was an agnostic who believed in an unrestricted spiritual Reality. He had no faith in idolized churches or nations or, for that matter, in idolized Man. Man is his own worst enemy. He tends to exalt himself over God because he was apparently exalted by God to lord it over the creation; and in the lordly process man begins to idolize Man as God incarnate; he eventually forgets God and thinks Man is self-created - which is another way of saying the same thing. Either way, Man falls short of the Absolute Power he worships, then despises himself for what he is, even if he is a humanist who professes love for abstract humanity - yet another sin of pride, albeit perhaps not as grave as the love for humanity crucified: since agnostic Toynbee does not own an anthropomorphic god, it is hardly surprising he also disowns humanism; it seems hypocritical for those who worship God in human form to despise humanists altogether.

In any case, whether we study History with a short or a long attention span, we understandably seek a Cause for what has transpired in hopes that knowing the Cause will be useful if not entertaining. Even professors with inflated minds will confess in weighty tomes that brevity and simplicity are the essence of science if not of life. And what could be more simple than a single Cause for all effects? If "God" does not exist, at least "God" is a favorite symbol for optimistic pessimists who unconsciously want to exist ad infinitum. Idealists want an ideal reason or Cause for complexity, an ideal meaning of life. Humane idealists want human ideals to be real, with human superiority given to the Ideal of ideals which allegedly informs and encompasses the material details, In the Name of the Cause, the Force, and the Effect, as ONE.

As we have seen, Toynbee has much more going for him than his voluble volumes of facts followed by his afterthoughts. He has the Cause of volume in mind; to wit: God. Toynbee's personal, unrestricted and seemingly impersonal spiritual Reality is, nevertheless, for many believers the Eternal Almighty-I, Omniscient Unity of Consciousness, the Universal-I of "i think therefore i am"; the Capital-I who does not have to think the Universe in order to be Being, in order to be I AM WHO I AM. Be that as it may, can we justly blame the historian of a universal history for coming up with God? for coming up with avowed order instead of disavowed chaotic disorder? with God instead of the unruly Devil? Surely the individual relation to God demanded by Toynbee is something besides his relation to unrestricted Reality, which methinks would be total disorder or chaos; to wit, Nothing. Well, never mind that; even the devout atheist can reflect on his own psychology of memory, discover he has perceptions or intuitions of things upon which he makes judgements concerning their respective relations, similarities and differences; ranks things according to his preferences; and with his generalizations of particulars in mind, with his memory on hand, he faces the future and conducts his experiments.

Again, can we justifiably castigage Toynbee for taking the process of generalization to its logical conclusion: the unprovable absolute presupposition it proceeded with as its Leading Principle? After all, the leading principle of a line is its non-dimensional point, and the point is found throughout the line. Can we blame him for being a theologian instead of a historian because he comes up with an indefinite spiritual God instead of the decadent materialistic Devil who constantly leads us on to deceive us yet again and again, proving in his unmitigated hate for humankind that he the Devil is the only true monotheist in his unadulterated love for God? The Devil divides us for war with slander; since Nothing is perfect, it seems the perfect religion would be the worship of Nothing, which is finally achieved in the utopian State of Absolute Rest - as the homely Utopians say, cognizant of the ambiguous etymology of Utopia: There is no place like a good place."

Speaking of the monotheistic Devil, does not that Devil give us diabolical cause to wonder at the prophecies of Toynbee and holy men who ambiguously warn us about the human brand of love which is based on self-love? who admonish us to love indefinite God only, not the individual who is to be saved by direct revelation? Nor are we to love collective human society to be saved by contractual socialism, But is not all love self-love at its root? Even altruism is self-love. As Swedenborg said: "Love is your life." Do we fear death therefore instinctively love death to appease death and thereby save ourselves from destruction: do we call death "God"? Do we, like Faust, contract with the Devil that we may have some little happiness in the life between deaths? Well, then, if death be God, we should not love God too much. Maybe we should take the one and only God with a grain of life.

As they employ their mallets rational or irrational to destroy every particular definition asserted as a universal, the destructive pessimist and the iconoclastic prophet say the simple, unitary explanation is for Nought. In the final analysis, there is a perverse truth to their mutual assertion of Nothing under illusory, variegated veils, a Nothing which in negation has rebellious power over All. For what is the difference between Being stripped of all we can say about it, and Nothing, about which only silence suffices? Hardly anything at all, except faith. Faith is a great feeling. Life demands feeling.The faithful have a vague, incomprehensible feeling that God or Nothing really exists. True faith needs no herd-gathering defense. But since faith is usually mingled with fear for its loss, what often follows in the wake of faithful feelings are various, unsatisfactory ethical definitions, theistic and atheistic, all supported by a generalized feeling, an oceanic feeling sometimes called Love.

Some say God is love; others insist Love is god: there is a serious dispute between the two parties to that difference, and for very good reason. In any event, there is nothing more pleasing than a feeling of security based on Love, in contradistinction to the fragile security of the political contract made in response to hate, to the war of all against all which might unexpectedly break out in a nuclear blast through a breach in uncertain etiquette at any moment. If humankind were only to love itself in a love of all for all, Law would be superflous. Yet this may be an impossible dream given the very human nature Toynbee reminds us of: it is our nature to make differences, to be different. What? Are we to give up our humanity, are we to die in order to live free of ourselves?

Neverthless, Toynbee's arid abstractions bring him to favor universal Love as the felt Goal of humankind. For Toynbee, Love is "the only god that we know from human experience." Regardless of the consequences, we should devote ourselves to "that" (not who) without which there is no God. "I believe that the dweller in the innermost sanctum of a human being is identical with the spiritual presence behind and beyond the Universe, and I believe that this ultimate spiritual reality is love," quoth Toynbee.

If we boil off the theosophies, then the essential experience of many modern religions might be described as a pleasant, almost mindless, cosmic feeling. Psychologically, Toynbee's universal history of civilizations culminating in higher religion appears to be a recapitulation of his psychic genesis from the oceanic womb towards the painful realization of his inevitable demise as such. He provides his justifications for the inevitable extinction of the human burden ("I think and will therefore I am") by subconsciously reasserting the original cosmic feeling of oneness with the womb and the postpartum vestiges of motherly love.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud reluctantly admits there is an "unusual" non-pathological state called "love" wherein there is no apparent demarcation between ego and id, nor between "I" and "you", when, "against all the evidence of the senses" we believe we are "one" and are prepared to act on it. But this personal love, which should not be "stigmatized", is, again, peculiar and momentary, and obviously not to be universally realized. Freud, as we know, made much of the "illusory nature of religion."

As for the discontentedness of civilization, Freud's sympathies are with Toynbee and the rest of our anxious lot. Yet Freud says he personally had no experience of the "sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, 'oceanic' feeling", mentioned by a self-proclaimed friend of Freud's who agreed religion is an illusion as Freud had defined it. Yet the friend insisted everyone who feels this "energy", which is the subjective basis of religion, has a right to call himself religious. Freud did not deny that others felt what he did not feel, but as a scientist he was rather worried about the scientific or objective interpretations of same, that they be scientific rather than subjective delusions or common illusions. Interestingly enough, he says of the illusory ego:

"Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such an experience is deceptive, and on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entitywhich we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of facade - this was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic research...." Emphasis added In the Name of the Superego, the Id, and the Ego, as ONE.

Jung sloughed off Father Freud and delved deep into that Unconscious Mental Entity with at least a thousand and one names. Toynbee followed suit - Jung was his favorite psychologist. Toynbee says the subconscious is "the organ through which Man lives his spiritual life," and it is our quest to obtain a "vision of God, the Dweller in the Innermost." In this quest he names as guides, Jesus, Francis and Buddha, whom he claims are not guides to ascetic rejection but guides to accepting Love.

My impression of Toynbee's religion is that he used religion to hang his hat on Love. After the French Revolution, certain philosophers of humanistic love recommended the Restoration not of the King but of God for the good of the people the people were runing amuk against. But Toynbee is no outspoken Machiavellian, although he desires the same end as Niccolo: Peace. He sincerely loves God. His unrestricted Reality is God. God is freedom and freedom is his frequent cry. He wants freedom from national wars due to the worship of national idols. He wants freedom from the threat of a climactic, mutually assured destruction of all social boundaries, the sado-masochistic nuclear meltdown of our differences. To that end, he wants frightening Cold War duality to end in the safe and secure monistic pluralism of a universal federal government with a basic constitutional structure similar to that worshiped in the United States.

Furthermore, Toynbee wants freedom from the psychological conditioning converting civilization into a high-technology insect society. "Conditioning is an attempt to destroy human nature itself," he avers, complaining about the "devilish devices" of psychologists. He fears we might in our supposed great leap forward find ourselves clinging to a sub-human ledge so desperately that we become paralyzed or arrested there. Fortunately, he says, the conditioning might not turn us into insects; for humans are more like stubborn mules than compliant sheep.

And Toynbee would be free of much more besides. In the end I think Toynbee would be free of everything, but only by virtue of a natural death after a vigorous life including a great deal of independent thinking, reading and writing. Until death, which we cannot directly experience while living or dead, civilized life is a sort of virtual suicide, of rebelling against oneself as it were, of freeing oneself from all obstructions to universally independent yoga with the In-Dwelling Love. Yet asceticism per se is not the goal, says Toynbee; I think he means to focus is on the verb or endless means: on loving, a process called "Love."

May we therefore all dwell equally in the light of Love and be free from our wars over superficial differences. But, to confound us, the oracle speaks the maxim,He who loves everybody equally loves nobody in particular. Therefore, if we be lovers of equal light, we might, for example, mark the poet Paul Valery's words to see what we might glean from them:

"The physicists tell us that if the eye cold survive in an oven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see... nothing. There would be no unequal intensities of light left to mark off the points in space. That formidable contained energy would produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equality of that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder. And what is that disorder in the mind of Europe? The free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. That is characteristic of the modern epoch." ('The Crisis of Mind').

Are we actually living in the Theatre of the Absurd instead of visiting it, that we can posit equality and inequality as equal? Valery's propositions are good food for thought, but cancel each other out when digested, adding up to the chaos or Nothing he would deplore. Nevertheless, we go on bowling on different lanes, pausing to complain, when the score is unsuitable, that the lanes are unevenly oiled - and maybe they are or maybe not, but Nothing is perfect.

Incidentally, a friend of mine rants at length for and against the same thing not knowing he is harping on the same subject under different names. Is he mad? I mean insane? I think not, for if he were consistent I would be very worried about him unless he were well aware of the ambiguities of his positions.

Now Valery complains that people who think differently are subject to a kind of equality. Those of us with a superior cast of mind, or who have climbed up the slippery, bloody slopes to the apex of one pyramid or another, know equality is a very bad thing. But are we not to think independently for ourselves? and might not our thoughts be dissimilar and contrary? While pondering the Next Ledge, Toynbee declares, "Our free selves are ours to be used by us, not for self-centered purposes of our own, but in God's service." Who? Sometimes I think everyone wants to have it both ways, then wind up with Nothing in the end.

Valery and Toynbee had a similar, universal perspective on History. They saw civilizations and their idealistic abstractions sinking into it its abyss. Valery said Babylon has become just a beautiful vague name. A poet or an enthusiastic historian might wax poetic about Babylon and other idols long gone. Today many of us think the disasters that sent the ships to the bottom are not really our affair - who needs History when we have Science? Those senile fools from desert caves and mountain caves and other secluded studies who dare posit the Cause of causes are shouted down because every fast-talking city slicker has many mouths and only one deafened ear, and total disrespect for extended traditional rhetoric or much ado about Nothing in voluminous virtual suicide notes. Most of the holy men have moved into the city where they became salesmen. Farmers used to call the cosmopolitan hucksters "con-men" or "hypocrites" - no wonder so many took up acting careers - and now the experienced hypocrite has talked himself out of faith in his own product - Toynbee wanted freedom from advertising.

Freedom indeed! Like moths to the Flame, freedom fighters, wanting Freedom from everything except God or Nothing, fly into the Sun. Of course only fools worship fool's gold. In his 'Meaning Behind the Facts of History' - meaning God -Toynbee referred to Jalal Rumi's verses for Sun worshippers; hence I am moved to quote a related verse from Rumi:

"The Sun, by command of God, is our cook: 'twere folly that we should say it is God. If thy Sun be eclipsed, what will thou do? How wilt thou expel that blackness from it? Wilt thou not bring thy headache (trouble and pain) to the court of God, saying, 'Take the blackness away, give back the radiance!' If they would kill thee at midnight, where is the Sun, that thou shouldst wail (in supplication) and be protection of it? Calamities, for the most part, happen in the night; and at that time the object of thy worship is absent." (Mathnavi, Transl. Reynold A Nicholson).

Who is afraid of the dark except those accustomed to light? We are still imprisoned by our senses, hence trapped by figures of speech. We are in a metaphorical cave, as it were, wanting illumination; we see some escape into the sunlight; since all life naturally worships the Sun, we fly to the Sun. But what does the blind man know of the "light" in contrast to the "dark" he lives in? Yet he has the feeling upon which space depends: he knows the vacancy between touch and touch. He cannot see the Sun, but he can feel it, relate the heat within to the source without; and he just might love the felt Sun much more than a confounded metaphysical index for Being or Nothing.

Sun-worship is as old as life itself: life IS Sun-worship. Akhnaton is known as the Sun-worshiper par excellence if not, according to Freud, the Pharaoh who rediscovered primitive monotheism and inspired his priest Moses with it. In fact, Akhnaton forbade the perennial worship of the Sun per se, in favor of "Heat-in-the-Sun" and Light-in-the-Sun. Today, he might reword his philosophy to state that the perceived forms of energy should be regarded as the manifestations of the Original Cause. Yet note the felt importance of the effects without which the Cause is good for nothing or god of nothing. By the way, the discoveries and inventions of our modern solar physicists would certainly fascinate Akhnaton and provide him with even further verification of the wonders of Aton. Enthusiasts have credited him with the discovery of the "principle of equivalence" of heat, light, and other forms of energy, as well as the equation of matter and energy set forth in the modern theory of relativity.

Love is the "fire" between the poles. Zoroastrians are called fire-worshippers, yet Zoroastrians did not worship the fire itself but kept the fire lit because they believed fire to be the purest element; and why is that? Probably because real fire, which like the Sun provides heat and light, is at the origin of both material and spiritual civilization.

Before I fly into the purest spiritual or material flame to Nothing as far as my "I" is concerned, or fly to personally meet the Transcendental Chef, I shall see what else I can cook up here and now. If, instead of the actual Sun, the holy man would give me Nothing, I will give Rumi right back to himself, as follows:

"He (the ill-fated man) has forsaken the world of sunshine and moonlight and had plunged his head into the pit, saying, 'If it is true, where is its radiance?' 'Lift up thy head from the Pit and look, O miserable wretch!'"

Thus ends this morning's dawning reflection over a pot of coffee on Arnold Toynbee's universal history. I still feel a need to fully express a good reason to live, a meaning of life, a simple explanation for it all. I must get back to outlining the ninth volume of My Suicide Note. But now I am so hungry I could eat a horse, so I must go out and get something to eat.

xYx

2004-06-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

[Excerpt from No Hard Feelings]

VIII. Legs Ballone

It was a muggy morning in Flatbush. Paul Bowman, the greatest author the world will ever or never know, heard his roommate, Billy O'Malley, get up at five o'clock sharp. Billy had returned home from the hospital two weeks before, almost fully recovered from the injuries he had suffered as the result of the bathroom ceiling collapsing on him as he sat on the toilet. Billy was an air-conditioning mechanic - business was brisk this stifling summer. Paul heard him getting ready for work: water running, toilet flushing, rattling in the kitchen, keys jangling, the fiddling with five locks, the front door slamming with a boom resounding in the carpetless hall - a dog yelped in response.

Paul had the spare bedroom. It was more like a storage space, bare of furniture, stacked up with boxes. The walls were stained brown with leaks from the bathroom above. Paul had just enough space for his suitcase - he practically lived out of it - and to stretch out on the floor on top of two blankets - he hoped to find a discarded mattress soon. Now that Billy was gone, Paul got up, sweaty and stiff, paddled his bare feet across the living room, and flopped down on the couch under the window fan after he turned it on to 'HI.' Despite Billy's A/C installation and maintenance profession, there was not an A/C in the apartment, and Billy did not like to run the fan at night because, he said, it was "a waste of good electricity because nights are usually cooler than the days."

Paul enjoyed the air rushing over his naked and unusually hairy body. He soon dozed off to the whirring of the fan, and began to dream. The dream had a window looking out upon a gruesome ritual. Three obese priests were cutting open their bellies and pulling their bloody intestines out, cutting off pieces and dumping them into a basket. Then a black snake with a shark's head arose from its own coil in the basket; it was covered with scales that looked like human teeth; it writhed wretchedly to a Blue's tune one of the men was playing on a harmonica. Another priest was ringing a bell while the third priest, who had taken up a cigar, blew smoke rings into the air.

The phone was ringing. Paul woke up with a start, shook his head, stared at the phone. It kept ringing and ringing - he got up and strode across the room to answer it.

"Hello."

"Paul, my boy, is that you?" The voice sound odd, somehow misplaced.

"Yeah. Who's this?"

"John, John Wilson, Senior."

"Oh, you sound strange, like in a tunnel or something, sir."

"Don't sir me, son. I'm on the speaker phone. Junior's here with me."

"Hey, Paul, it's me. Good Morning." Junior's voice was muffled.

"Good Morning," Paul said back, frantically trying to collect his thoughts. "Hold on just a minute," he asked, stalling, put the receiver down, grabbed one of Billy's KOOLs from the pack in the fruit bowl on the kitchen table and lit it. This is the call he had been waiting for, or so he thought: Senior would be his patron, sponsor his writing, maybe put him in a nice crib in the Village, like he said he would if he liked his work. But wait, Senior had read his dance reviews and said over and over that it was "shit", "shit", and "shit", that he didn't like it. So why is he calling? Paul, perplexed, picked up the receiver, and said, "Hi, I'm back, had to turn off the stove."

"Junior and I were just talking about that shit you sent me to read, right Junior?" said Senior.

"Right", came the muffled voice from the background.

"We were saying that stuff was really a load of crap, a lot of shit, if you don't mind my saying so."

Paul's heart sank then rose in anger. He'd heard all this before several times, and was not going to put up with it again. Senior, he was convinced, was a jerk, some sort of wealthy and jealous masochist who likes to go around encouraging artists with hints of funding, then calling their work shit, rubbing their faces in it over and over.

"Senior, if you don't mind my saying so, you, and your son, are a couple of ....."

"I was saying to Junior," Senior interjected, "this kid would be a great author if only he'd take my advice and write about eating out of the dumpster and finding half-eaten hamburgers and hotdogs, and crummy nude photos of Madonna in there, jacking off on them, throwing them away not knowing they are worth a fortune. Or about the dancers on the beer diet, and those weirdoes, like the guy, the guy, or that whore you mentioned, the one with the rubbers - who was that?"

"Oh, you mean the prostitute who had been receiving semen-filled condoms in the mail from a retarded pervert who started paying her child support because she wrote and told him she got pregnant and had his kid."

"Yeah, hot damn, that's it!" exclaimed Senior. "Write something with popular appeal, a novel with stuff like that in it, something real people can enjoy instead of that pansy-assed dance-review shit, that shit you sent me. I mean, why did you send me that shit, anyway? Never mind, forget about that shit."

"Dad, he might write about that choreographer with no legs," Junior suggested.

"Yeah, what about that successful guy you mentioned? Write about him."

Senior was referring to Legs Ballone, well known in esoteric dance quarters as the father of the Lyrico Technique. Legs Ballone had been a brilliant dancer at a young age, but he got his legs crossed practicing a dance routine on the subway platform while waiting for a train at Times Square. He fell off the platform in front of the No. 2 Flatbush train and lost his legs as a consequence. Yet he triumphed over that enormous disadvantage. He went on to dance, leglessly, on his arms, swinging his trunk around, astonishing his students with the grotesque, surreal beauty of his dance - on rare occasions he performs at the Gothic Village Dance Theatre. And, by means of a special contraption he invented, his choreographic prosthesis, he trained some of the world's foremost performers and choreographers. Although an article or two appears about him from time to time, he is relatively unknown except in the closely knit dance world, where his Technique has cult status. The Lyrico Technique is based on the disciplined coordination of mechanical and spiritual principles. The dancer learns to move fluidly through the various lines of the Platonic solids, through the 'Universal Poses.' He never "strikes a pose" as such, but strives to "never stop moving", and to "feel the fire of the forms between the poles." Once the dynamic is mastered, so that the student is no longer "doing technique", but is "really dancing," once the execution of the movements has "educated" or "drawn out" the "cosmic inner state", the intense feelings expressed by the "Per Former" allegedly have an extraordinary, subtle influence on members of the audience, rendering them slightly susceptible to suggestion.

"Write about him," reiterated Senior. "Yeah, that's right, write about that legless dance master you talked about. Write me a good success story, I want to meet that guy, by the way. Write it out and leave it with Doreen at the bar. And have a few drinks on me while you're there, and one of the burgers too. Tell her I said to put it on my tab. Me and Junior will look it over, and I tell you what, if it's as good as I think it's going to be, you won't be sorry."

"I was going to do a story about him in the first place," Paul responded into the mouthpiece, "but I decided against it."

"Why?"

"I wanted a fresh angle on him."

"Success is always a good angle, fresh or not" Junior remarked.

"But everybody in dance knows about the terrible accident, how he overcame it, the people he's trained. I wanted a fresh angle. And there might be hard feelings."

"What the hell for? What is this shit? Are you going to bring me a good story or not?"

"Yes, I mean, I want to. I don't know about the accident thing," Paul mused over the phone. "I think he would have been a great dancer without the accident. Three of his students got the wrong idea and were hurt badly - one got killed."

"Killed?"

"Killed. It was horrible. The Lyrico Studio was scandalized. The whole thing about how Legs overcame his injury made some of his students think the injury had made him great. Three of them jumped in front of the No. 2 Flatbush train together. One was killed. The other two didn't lose their legs - one is in a coma and the other is a paraplegic."

"Damn! What a story, son. Dancers must really be dumb," said Senior.

"Paul, tell dad about the IBM dancing machine," Junior requested.

"You mean the ICM."

"What's with that things? I don't remember what you said about it," Senior remarked.

"It's the Isocohedronic Choreographic Machine. It's a cube inside a sphere. Legs straps himself into it with a remote control and navigates. The computer records the motions. Legs edits the information and uses it to produce ballets in the form of computer graphics and Labanotation print outs. He can also use the machine to teach on the spot."

"Why not just use a computer in the first place?" asked Junior.

"It can't be done by computer alone. The Master Pilot must strap himself in and actually feel the motion. Anybody will not do. An experienced and intuitive artist is essential. Only Legs has mastered the Machine, or so he says, but he's training his protégé, Senor San Francisco, to master it, and thousands have been educated in the subsidiary application, the Lyrico Technique."

"Is the Machine patented?" asked Junior.

"No, there's only one, unpatented, and he keeps it close to home, well secured. Legs is afraid it will fall into the hands of the government and be used for political purposes. The Soviet ballet company, the Kirov, offered to buy or rent it some time ago, then the CIA showed up."

"CIA? Why would the CIA give a shit about pansies prancing around in tights with their crotches bulging?" queried Senior.

"According to Legs, the KGB put the Kirov director up to it, and the CIA picked up the scent. They caught onto him after he choreographed that piece for William Starret, the one where Bill rolled across the Russian stage on a skateboard. It's like I said, the Lyrico Technique itself makes an audience vulnerable to suggestion, but the influence is slight, so they figured they would use the Machine to choreograph ballets, to be performed while radioing subliminal commands to the audience, which would supposedly be most effective in conjunction with baroque music, especially some of the adages. The CIA code name was Project Adagio."

"Dad, I told you, this is a good story!"

"Boy, I think you're right, by golly! Paul, write that up, bring it down to the Village tomorrow or the next day at the latest, give it to Doreen. You wanna bring a date, go ahead, it's on my tab, but make sure you leave the story, you hear?"

Paul covered up the mouthpiece on his phone, held the phone out, and shouted "Yeah!" But his scruples suddenly gave him pause again, and he said to Senior, "I'm afraid if I write about Legs, there will be hard feelings."

"Hard feelings?" said Senior.

"Hard feelings?" echoed Junior.

"Hard feelings. I can't write unless I tell the whole truth, and publication of the truth about the humungous master, I mean the great master. might hurt his feelings, and I happen to love the guy."

"What the hell our you talking about? You mean there's more? Great, then tell it. Do you want to be a brilliant author or a dumb dancer? Then screw him! Tell it all. Hey, what did you say, that you love him? Were you screwing this guy? That's even better."

"No, no, not that, but he's gay."

"Gay?"

"Well, he was an idol with the women until the accident, and after that only men would love him, so he turned gay."

"People don't turn," Junior's muffled voice was heard. "They come out of the closet. It's like you said about wanting a fresh angle - Legs would have been a great dancer without the accident. People are what they are. Character counts. If you are evicted from your house and wind up on the street, you will become a drunk or a monk according to your character."

"That's right," affirmed Senior, "take me for example, I'm a drunk and I worked my ass off, and I deserve every million I got because this is how I am, doing what I want to do. Now let's stop yacking on the damned phone like women. This guy Legs sounds like a tough man, and there will be no hard feelings. We'll get him to sign off on it, anyway, so he doesn't sue, and get some pictures, promote his thing too. But it's gotta be good. Write it up good and don't be pussy footing around about it. Give me the meat, the hamburgers and hotdogs, stuff people like. Hang up Junior. Good bye!"

The phone went dead, just like that, leaving Paul hanging on to the other end, dumbfounded.

2004-06-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

Ideal Customer Service and Support

Read all about it, the new gospel is finally out! People who focus on Ideal Customer Service and Support will progress to unprecedented prosperity in the New Economy!

Ideal Customer Service and Support was the key to prosperous progress in the Old Economy too. Of course the Regressive party had complained about the Old Economy. They referred to the right impediment to progress when they said that the progress of the Industrial-Scientific Revolution was breaking up the traditional family. As is usually the case with Regressive Conservatism, its irrational argument against Progress is the best argument for same. And that is just as it should be, for Progress is inevitable. That is a fact; we should just accept it and get on with an increasingly better life, particularly a life without unnecessary family burdens.

Yes, the family has already served its purpose and now stands in the way of further progress. Ideal Customer Service and Support has gradually rendered the family obsolete. Thousands of people are leaving their families every day for Ideal Customer Service and Support, and they have a very good reason for doing so: Ideal Customer Service and Support is superior by far to familial relations. Indeed, Ideal Customer Service and Support beats a family any day. For example, single people who rely on Ideal Customer Service and Support are never lonely. They are truly alone, all-one, or at-one with microcosmic aloneness, while Ideal Customer Service and Support waits on them hand and foot.

Now is the time to get ahead, to outsource your family services, to downsize your family to your microcosmic Sole Self. Once you have withdrawn from your addiction to family friction, you will lead an unimpeded life, a healthy, joyous, liberated life with Ideal Customer Service and Support.

Please take my word for it: I speak with the authority of personal experience. I am not a selfish man simply because I live in Aloneness: I am always ready to generously offer people advice for their own good. Wherefore, for the benefit of those of you who are not yet aware of the virtues of living free of the clog of a family tied to one's leg like a log, I shall identify a few advantages of being Completely Single, a Category of One, All to Oneself, a Total Individual:

1. A Good Customer is always right and never wrong. Who needs a family when he can be a Good Customer?

2. Ideal Customer Service and Support is always courteous to the Good Customer. First of all, you are treated with smiles. Concern for your welfare is always expressed. You are carefully guided to whatever might suit you. There is no back talk, just 'Yes, ma'am' or 'No, ma'am'. Furthermore, you may leave the premises any time you want, without making phony excuses, without getting a hard time for doing so, without a lot of sulking and so on. Instead, you will likely receive a 'Have a Good One!'

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4. This may seem like a minor advantage, but while you are out shopping or being serviced by Ideal Customer Service and Support, you will acquire many casual acquaintances who frequent the same businesses. If by chance you run into one of them outside of the usual business setting, say on the street, nothing more than a casual 'Hi' is required, and not even that if you don't feel like it - if you happen to run into the acquaintance back at the same shop, you can always say, "Gee, I didn't recognize you in those circumstances, so sorry." And most importantly, you will not have to make friends with casual acquaintances and eventually invite them into your home, where they are certain to inconvenience you.

5. Now imagine the savings you will realized by ridding yourself of the expense of psychotherapy. As you know only too well, the severest mental problems are rooted in family relations. In fact, some social scientists have specifically identified the nuclear family as the root of all social evils, and they have recommended that the family be abolished by political decree - Japanese progressives are still somewhat conservative, and prefer to rent family members and mates from Japan's Ideal Customer Service and Support. Of course, many therapists, to keep their business going, still rely on selling the nuclear family as necessary for mental health. But there are plenty of progressive therapists willing to replace your friends and family for a very reasonable investment in their lifestyles. Some of them come very highly recommended. Caveat emptor!: Psychology is to Physiology as Astrology is to Astronomy, so be sure to demand genuine Ideal Customer Service and Support.

6. Being a Good Customer is better than having a mother, father, uncle, aunt, sister, brother, wife, husband, cousin, and so on and so forth. You will not have to remember relationships or their relative roles. The hated hierarchy of authority can be dispensed with, for Ideal Customer Service and Support will decide what is best for you before you even want it! Ideal Customer Service and Support always knows what is good for you before you even ask for it.

7. Again, there are No Strings Attached! A Good Customer can just walk away from a group anytime without having to pay alimony or child support, without having to be a deadbeat dad on the run, or a runaway wife or child. Instead of supporting a family, your Ideal Customer Service and Support family supports you!

8. For Good Customers who love to vent and act like jerks or worse, they may do so and even get away with murder if they like, for Ideal Customer Service and Support provides the appropriate therapy. Aggravated Good Customers will be soothed, calmed down; they will receive a sincere apology, a replacement, a refund, or something free to pacify them, perhaps cool blue or pink pacifiers for their vacant warehouse parties. By the way, Your Truly sometimes calls AT&T Customer Service and Support just to complain; I am pleased with the service although it is not yet Ideal Customer Service and Support. Still, I have actually complained about AT&T service for a whole hour at a time; sometimes I was awarded a concession, sometimes not, but that's not the point when you need a babysitter. By the way, if someone does not appreciate jerks for customers, jerks can just go somewhere else, where they are unknown, hence they will not have to feel guilty at all.

9. Hassle-free Aloneness is also well-served by Take-Out and Order-In. Remember, anything whatsoever can be ordered-in now, just-in-time. The Internet is an indispensable tool for the perfection of this wonderful feature of Ideal Customer Service and Support.

10. Another wonderful aspect of being a Good Customer: there is always some virtual authority to be appealed to if you are not completely satisfied. One can appeal right up to the CEO, take the company to court, and pray to one's favorite god. This all makes life very appealing for those who miss family conflict.

11. Finally, please note that, absent a family, you will not be subject to those strange colds and diseases that kids bring home from school. If you work at home alone in Ideal Customer Service and Support, your chances of catching diseases other than mental diseases from Good Customers is rather remote.

The foregoing are just a few but not all of the advantages flowing from Ideal Customer Service and Support. Now you might wonder how Customer Service and Support is to be paid for. There are many ways to pay for it. One way, what we completely independent entreprenuers call The Best Way, is to be an Ideal Customer Service and Support Consultant! An important perquisite of The Best Way is, You don't have to live with those you serve and support. The Best Way Daytrading Program is also available to support Ideal Customer Service and Support. Families are a drag on daytrading, but The Best Way frees the daytrader from family that he, she, or s/he may rise to the top of the Wheel of Fortune. The Best Way Daytrader does not have to provide Customer Service and Support to investors. All he, she, or s/he has to do is follow the Seven Best Way Steps outlined in the Program.

Well, there you have it, something to think about when your husband gives you hell for not having dinner ready when you just got home from work yourself, or when your wife slams down the food on the table with a dirty look, et cetera - you know how it goes. Think about it. Come to your senses soon, for Ideal Customer Service and Support can replace your family if you would only wake up an smell the coffee in the computerized coffee pot!

The Living End

2004-06-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

Making love not war

"Perhaps it is superstitious to equate thoughts with deeds even though that equation has been sanctified by holy men", I thought as I composed an article in my head while walking down the crowded street, avoiding the aggressive pedestrians who were walking right at me with their heads down. "I'll bet unimaginable hysteria and social chaos would follow from the immediate translation of all thoughts into deeds. Sometimes I'd like to punch or even shoot a few of these suits who don't give a damn about anybody, who just walk right at other people as if they don't even exist. I don't think I would, but I think of it. And if the violent ways of thinking fostered by our media are communicated often enough, maybe the reviled suits and ties will be eagerly exchanged for guerrilla camouflage and machine guns war will break out wherever convenient enemies can be found."

I considered that most if not all people often harbor violent thoughts that could be converted into harmful deeds, even atrocities given the suitable situation. There is, of course, the social contract not to take such actions, yet if the circumstance changed in a certain way, the compact might be easily forgotten. After all, if one promises to give up his natural equal right to kill people at will in exchange for their promises not to kill him, doesn't that mean a potentially unmitigated evil still lurks under the facade of civilization, no matter how advanced? Are we not just a shout or a scream away from a breach of promise, from panic, murder and mayhem? Perhaps the president could declare war on some enemy to make the killing legal. Does Albert Camus' plague bacillus or Deanna Jones' deadly evil virus lurk in the cracks of civilization?

I decided to take a random sample of one person to gauge the veracity of my suspicion, to see if we have a good reason for paranoia, for thinking that people are out to get us in the worst way. In these matters, a single chance interview of the social macrocosm represented by the microcosmic person should suffice for a metaphysical theory. After all, early psychoanalytic theories were often established upon the analysis of one patient's behavior. And after numerous sessions on the couch, the patient sometimes became a psychoanalyst too.

I approached a young, sophisticated New York woman on Broadway. She was in fact an ideal model for the Manhattan cosmos, very well arranged indeed. I asked her right up front if she ever had visions of killing people.

"Of course I do, almost every day. Yesterday, a man jumped in front of me and took my cab. I envisioned slitting the jerk's throat with a knife," she declared matter-of-factly.

"Are you afraid, yourself? I mean, aren't you afraid someone will rape or mug you, or that maybe somebody will stab you for just bumping into him in the crowd?"

"No, not at all," she responded, smiling. "I'm not afraid of what people will do to me, but what I might do to them. People are so rude, I think about killing someone almost every day."

"Are you married?" I just had to ask - with an interviewer's objective disinterest, of course.

"Nope."

"Well, as a woman, don't you feel weaker than men? Aren't you afraid you'll be taken advantage of? With all the mean people around, wouldn't it be wise to be under the protection of a man?"

"I'm single and I'll stay that way," she emphatically declared. "I'm stronger than men. They're emotional weaklings. They eat out of my hand. I can have anything I want," she confidently concluded. Considering what I had seen and heard so far, I believed her.

It suddenly occurred to me that people, of which I am certainly one, harbor another sort of aggressive thought besides the violent one I had in mind at the outset of the interview, a kind of reflection on a passion that, when acted out, leads to productive consequences. I felt a tremendous urge coming over me. We had a drinks at a pub on West 57th, then went to her place on West End.

In order to keep my professional status intact, I must save the rest of my interview with the tough-minded but attractive young woman for a novel, where the full truth may be revealed by means of fictitious composite characters in contrived circumstances.

2004-06-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from The Fungus Man - Retardo E. Culo strikes again!

"Jim, meet Doc Handley. Doc, meet Jim Jefferson,"

Thus did Manny introduced me to Doc, who extended his right hand to grip mine like a vise. His hand had a thick, grotesque thumb and only one finger, the index finger. I glanced to see if his left thumb was equally large, but instead of the hand I had expected, he sported a prosthesis, lifting it up and waggling it at me as if he knew what I was looking for. Another peculiarity I took mental note was his ears, or rather his half-ears: cartilage was missing on each of them - the edges were jagged, as if bitten off. He was a muscular man, bald but for a long white queue tied with a small bow of black silk, drapped over his shoulder and down the front of his black silk shirt, which was fastened with white death's-head buttons. He had a matching Fu Manchu mustache, presided over by a Hittite nose and steel-gray eyes.

"Hi, Jim, it's my big toe."

"Hi, uh, excuse me?"

"You were wondering about my thumb. It's my big toe. Gangrene got the original, and my left foot to boot, but I managed to save the right one, so I took its big toe and made a thumb out of it."

"Oh, I'm sorry, but I'm glad the doctors managed to...."

"I managed the surgery myself, with Manny operating."

"Oh. Pleased to meet you."

"Your pleasure is mine."

"My man!" Manny affectionately exclaimed, throwing his arm around Doc's shoulders. "What's up for supper?"

"I thought we'd have plasmodia pancakes."

"Great! I love 'em. Jim, Have you ever had plasmodia pancakes?"

"Can't say I've even hear of them. Plasm? That's an old term for basic substance of life isn't it?"

"Good call, Jim," Doc said. "That's protoplasm. The plasmodium constitutes the main vegetative phase of the life cycle of slime mold. It comprises cytoplasm or cellular protoplasm with multiple nuclei."

"So we're having slime for dinner?" I asked, incredulously. I thought of the slime mold I had found on my lawn once. It didn't look that appetizing, looked more like dog puke or dog diarrhea.

"Jim," Manny interjected, "how 'bout a glass of Kool Aid?"

"Why, sure," I accepted.

"I'll get it," Doc said, and walked over to the refrigerator - his gait was certainly graceful considering the fact that his left shoe was filled with a prothesis. "An old acquaintance of mine, Retardo Culo, gave me his Mexican Myxomycete recipe."

"Retardo Culo?" I queried.

"You know him?"

"I know a Retardo Culo, a Doctor Retardo E. Culo. He was my chiropractor but he got busted. Good chiropractor, bad insurance thief."

"Gee," Manny interjected, "that name is familiar, something about the E. Oh, yeah, I met a guy in San Diego, a pot dealer by that name, but people called him Mister E, or just E - he carried glossy black business cards with a large gold 'E' embossed on them, on its back with the arms sticking up. Weird cards. He was a friend of Paul the Grass Man, from New York. "

"I'll be," said I. "That's gotta be the same man. He had a gold 'E' on the sign outside his door."

"He said something about getting a chiropractic certificate," Doc added.

"He never got one but went into practice anyway," I advised. "What a small world.... Hey, this Kool Aid is good," I took another swig and smacked my lips. "I thought the FDA made 'em get rid of the Root Beer flavoring. So Culo gave you the mixo, mixed, mix...."

"Mexican Myxomycete pancake recipe."

"Mexicans eat that stuff?"

"Sure. They like it best with chocolate in the afternoons, or with cayenne in the mornings."

"I hear Mexicans eat so much cayenne that the buzzards won't eat them," Manny put in.

"I don't know about that, but I do know gringos aren't too familiar with plasmodia. There was a big alien scare in one Texas border town when plasmodia appeared there."

"The slime-mold must have been in Moronia, Texas," Manny chimed in and giggled like a girl - the man is getting silly, I thought to myself, but I was beginning to feel rather odd too as time went by, slightly giddy.

"No joke," Doc persisted. "The sporulation probably occurred on the Mexican side of the border. The sporongia ruptured, releasing the sporongia mass into the surround. A freak wind carried the spores into Texas and by chance into the right environment for release of amoebae, which formed plasmodia, frightening the inhabitants."

"Whoa, you're over my head a bit," I said. "You're talking about slime mold, right? A plant?"

"And animal. The Myxomycetes are usually classed with fungi, and fungi with plants, but a fungus is really not a plant."

"Fungus I like," I pronounced - Manny nodded affirmatively. "We got some cool alkaloids out of them in the old days, and I love mushroom and cheese omeletes, but I never heard of making slime mold into pancakes. Oh, yummy, mommy, Doc Handley's Slime Cake!" But I envisioned dog barf again, and felt like barfing. "So you're talking about spores here. Maybe the Mexicans got alien spores from outer space!"

I don't know what came over us, but at that juncture we all busted out laughing hysterically. "Oh, oh, wait!" I got ahold of myself. "I remember the ergot thing, the thing called sclerosis!"

"Sclerotia," Doc corrected. "That's the hardened hypha or purple fungus body that replaces the rye flowers. That's ergot, though. Slime mold can grow to large sizes as it migrates for food, and, when it starts to starve, it will thicken in spots and rise up into sporongia, or fruiting bodies, to sporulate, or it might dry up and harden into sclerotia, and rest dormant for years - that's how I keep it, then I grow plasmodia on filter paper wet with nutrients."

"So, Doc, what wakes them up?" I asked, emptying my glass of Kool Aid.

"They love oatmeal."

"Oatmeal?"

"That's right. Oatmeal flakes."

"Ha, ha, hee, hee, that's so funny!"

"They really feel their oats," Manny's huge huge belly bounced up and down.

"Mexican plasmodia from outer space!"

"Hee, hee, so we'll get spaced out!"

"Hey, you guys!" Virginia appeared at the back door in a towel. "Jim, Manny, come on! Come get in the hot tub!"

.... to be continued

2004-06-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Professor of Love

Everyone has read a self-help or a popular psychology book or article at one time or another. Few people would be hard-pressed to recall the name of an eminent psychologist or psychiatrist along with a few psychological terms that have passed into common usage. That is not surprising in a society that stresses individuality instead of sociability, a society of individuals who are often relatively distressed with familiar relations as well as discontented with the restraints of a civilization often perceived as a highly organized rat-race.

Popular psychology gets plenty of public attention but sociology gets hardly any at all. Once in awhile the media calls our attention to a statistical study. We do not find a pop-sociology or help-others section in our bookstores, and nobody seems to care much about sociology, really. Just Ask almost anyone on the street, "Who are your favorite sociologists?" Does she rattle off, "Well, let me see, now. Hmm, There's Ludwig Gumplowitz, Albion Small, Lester Ward, William Graham Sumner and, uh, Pitirim Sorokin." Who? Nobody knows. And what a crying shame that is.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Pitirim Sorokin's name in my local newspaper on May 3, 1998. Professor London of New York University, at the outset of his article entitled Culture so degraded, outrage is absent, briefly mentioned Professor Sorokin's theory, that our culture is in an "advanced sensate stage" - a culture where sensual pleasures predominate. Professor London then presented a twenty-five paragraph manifesto of his moral sense of our cultural degradation. He did not mention Professor Sorokin's remedy for degradation:

Love.

Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) became professor of sociology at Harvard in 1930. We might call him a professor of Love, for he dedicated a great deal of his research to the study of Love and its effectiveness. For instance, in The Ways and Power of Love (Boston: Beacon, 1954), he devoted his fourth chapter, 'Power of Creative Love,' to summarizing "a vast body of evidence in favor of the enormous power of creative love, friendship, and nonviolent, non-aggressive conduct in human affairs and social life" in response to "the bias against all theories that try to prove the power of love" in this 'Sensate Culture' where "we are prone to believe in the power of the struggle for existence, selfish interests, egoistic competition, hate, the fighting instinct, sex drives, the instinct of death and destruction, all-powerful economic factors, rude coercion and other negative forces, theories that are considered the last word in modern science", and are even adopted by chambers of commerce as mottoes commemorating the negative forces that "made America great." Professor Sorokin then provides overwhelming historical evidence of good works, to prove that "love begets love and hate produces hate."

Professor Sorokin edited and contributed an article to Forms and Techniques of Altruistic and Spiritual Growth (Boston: Beacon, 1954), a Symposium of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In its introduction he defines 'altruism' as the standard of conduct stated in the Sermon on the Mount, and 'spiritual' as the identification of a person's true being with the supra-conscious, ineffable being, and identification that makes the body and mind an instrument of the immortal self. Various essays in the symposium discuss the techniques of Yoga, Sufism, Islam, Christianity, Zen, and others, the scientific significance of those techniques, and provide scientific methods for converting enemies to friends. In his own article 'Dynamics of Interpersonal Friendship and Enmity', Professor Sorokin discusses his empirical social study of friends and enemies, concluding therefrom that the best way to make friends and overcome enmity is by doing Good Deeds. He claims that Good Deeds are more effective than words, counseling, preaching, and psychoanalysis: "The prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount for transformation of enemies into friends are scientifically valid; they are not mere preaching of noble precepts, but the most effective scientific techniques for the purpose."

In Explorations of Altruistic Love and Behavior (Boston: Beacon, 1950), Sorokin argues that Love is more ontological than emotional; that is, Love is the essence of Being because it is "the highest form of a unifying, integrating, harmonizing creative energy or power." Love is therefore the Universal Force counteracting the strife that ends in death and decay. Only by the power of Love can a person be in harmony with others and not subject to being overwhelmed by their numbers. In his chapter titled 'Love: its aspects', Sorokin adumbrates an economic theory of Love. He sets forth Five Dimensions of Love - Intensity, Extensity, Duration, Purity, and Adequacy - and provides examples of "uniformities" within and between the categories.

For those who have a penchant for numerical operations, in the tenth chapter of Explorations, one may refer to Nicolas Rashevsky's paper, 'Mathematical Theory of Egoistic and Altruistic Behavior', with algebraic equations relevant to constantly varying mutual satisfactions.

Unlike Professor London, Professor Sorokin does not recommend outrage in response to the degradation evident in the vulgar aspects of our culture. Again, he recommends Love. He is all too familiar with outraged people and their outrageous conduct. He experienced five years of outrageous revolutionary behavior. Sorokin was secretary to Alexander Kerensky in 1917. He was eventually arrested by the Communists, sentenced to death, released at the last moment due to the influence of friends, and, later on, banished. His scientific findings on revolution may be found in The Sociology of Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967). Yet, if we want to get to know him personally, we should read his gripping Leaves From a Russian Diary and Thirty Years After (Boston: Beacon, 1950). A sample:

"What do you think they will do with us?", asked one of his fellow prisoners.

"Probably you will be liberated very soon. But I did not explain what I meant by 'liberation'....If at the hour of their liberation, instead of the joyful faces of those they love they see the tragic face of Death, the final agony will be comparatively short. It takes just an hour to go from here to the place of execution...."

Later on, this blunt entry in the diary: "I am to be shot." And further: "Seven young men were brought in today....tomorrow they will be executed. They know it. Three of them are silent....they are praying. This prayer is the last deepest token of life, and the highest and purest manifestation of Spirit. Their 'self' is now only spiritual, their eyes see the depth of Truth and their bodies are nothing but garments seen by the others and felt not by them."

Professor Sorokin was released from prison and restored to his university post, but he was prohibited from teaching so he conducted research in the field; he studied the famine brought about by the efforts to eliminate cultural degradation in Russia. There were no animals left in the field - no cows, pig, crows or rats. Cemeteries were dug up for food. Bodies had been locked in storage bins to keep them from being cannibalized until such time as decent rites could be performed. One woman reputedly sacrificed her own child, boiling and eating its legs. That is what happens when outrage is organized to fight perceived degradation, a fight that inevitably requires the violent suppression of all opposition to its definitions.

Sorokin wrote up his report on the famine, then managed to get out of Russia. The Communists destroyed his report, and, as he began publishing his works in other countries, they had cause to regret they had let him slip out of their hands.

The Professor of Love said his revolutionary experience had taught him three lessons: we must affirm life no matter how hard that life is; only duty can make life happy; and hate and cruelty can never have good results. Moreover, revolutions are bound to fail, because hate inspires more hate. On the other hand, love draws more love. Love is creative. And all this has been scientifically proven. There is only one kind of good revolution: a holy war against death, disease, hate, misery, insanity and destruction. Therefore we must stop the fight of war of all against all and start a holy war of every one against inhumanity and evil. For that holy war, the Professor of Love highly recommends the most formidable weapon of all.

Love

2004-06-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Most Elusive Butterfly
by David Arthur Walters

The Greeks likened the human soul to a butterfly and called her Psyche and made her the beloved of Eros. He took her as wife under the condition that she not look at his face during his nightly visits. But Psyche, prompted by her sisters to suspect that he was an ugly monster, was persuaded by them to light a candle one night, wherefore she beheld a most beautiful being. Alas, Eros, awakened by a splash of molten candle wax, discovered that his command had been disobeyed. He vanished, leaving Psyche to suffer many trials and tribulations until she, thus purified by suffering, is reunited with him forever.

The metamorphosis of distrustful Psyche from blind Lust to enlightened Agape - the ultimate union in loving friendship - has its apt analogy in the metamorphosis from lowly cocoon to the angelic butterfly. Therefore the struggling soul or fleeting mind is referred to as an "elusive butterfly."

That old Greek myth, derived from an even older folktale, survived the centuries because it expresses the truth of the existential contradiction between "reality" and "imagination" which moves life expectantly forward to the wedding of mind and body in passionate embrace. Along the way there are many high peaks and low valleys for the "over-sensitive" soul who rises from depression to mania, where she is relieved of her burden at the glistening peak for a brief moment, but then the Stone rolls back down into the dark pit where she must follow the Stone, like Sisyphus, to take up the Stone yet again. Sisyphus, who cheated Death and was therefore sentenced by the gods to the repetitious Task which he performs willingly to spite the vigilant gods, is the model prisoner. The Stone he rolls up and down is the Sun, therefore the performance of his Task enlightens all who are free of his most onerous burden.

But Sisyphus has hardened to the Task over the eons. We mere mortals rarely enjoy his resolve, nor do we in our habitual rounds illuminate many of our fellow creatures.

Now everyone has experienced the ups and downs of life; but a few people, driven to extremes, feel them even more, as if the gods were angry at their defiance of gravity and exaggerated the heights and pitfalls in these ecstatic/melancholy souls for man's own damned good. Most of us have some sanctuary in massive normality where we are allowed the comfort of the middling road; a few others are given a roller coaster ride and made to suffer even more for human willfulness; the wax affixing their wings is melted by the Sun during their grand imaginative flights, plunging them into the abyss of despair. Whether all this is by material accident or divine design or both, we shall leave the doctors of science and divinity to decide in their laboratories and oratories.

In fact, the nosological doctors have long been doing their best to sort out the different species of elusive butterflies in their respective precincts. Learned men have always noticed a marked propensity for gifted prophets and poets to be quite mad at times; even uneducated laymen have noticed mental abnormalities in many of our most gifted artists. Indeed, I prefer my artists a little mad, don't you? For their inspired art has more feeling and originality, something refreshingly sincere and insanely novel about it, as if it were inspired by the gods who are quite arbitrarily mad themselves, or at least not quite rational when we merely moral mortals reason on them and their immortal immorality.

I think many artists are enthused or "god-possessed" men or women who need to practice their art to overcome their high flying contempt for mundane reality and their grave depression. Art hopefully allows them to level off their flights of imagination and curb their steep declines by being somewhat "normal." By that I mean engaged and employed, being at least creatively useful in order to participate as "productive members of society." I believe art keeps many artists out of mental hospitals, prisons, and morgues, and otherwise serves the community well by providing a vicarous life to those engaged by other occupations. Indeed, the spirit of art is the inspiration for all human endeavor. Therefore it disturbs me when I see talented artists unable to develop or pursue their novelties for lack of real social support. Grants are all too few and too little, and there are too many fortunates who look to the costs rather than to the benefits of supporting artists with what they require the most: ample time to appropriately respond to their respective muses.

Now I do not speak of every Tom, Dick and Harry who fancies himself a painter or writer. Tom, Dick and Harry are content to dabble in the arts as hobbies, thus they are blessed with a well-balanced life. I speak of those who are possessed by the Urgent Idea, those whose psyches have been fatally struck with the abiding urge to create yet who suffer imprisonment in regular jobs that do not afford them with the time they need to pursue their higher calling to the end it demands. To add to their woes, many of them despise the normal, bourgeois pursuit of money and curse the hands that clutch it, so they never get the wherewithal from business or appanage from patrons to buy their freedom. I recently found such an artist, a young American writer who happened to be sorting pig semen files for a prestigious Iowa law firm.

Amy Hillgren Peterson

I speak of none other than Amy Hillgren Peterson, an author whose first published book, Elusive Butterfly, is still available at Amazon.com.

Amy received her BA cum laude in English. She has worked as a public affairs specialist, Spanish translator, private investigator, legal assistant and freelance journalist. In 1999, the law firm where she worked as a high-level paralegal assigned her to a case involving a dispute over techniques for artificial insemination of pigs with genetically engineered swine semen. Her task was to create a filing system and to organize swine semen charts, a clerical task far beneath her skill-level. Although there were several people handling hundreds of boxes of files, Amy was accused of losing or misplacing crucial semen charts, whereupon she flew into a rage and was fired.

Amy threw herself into her book. I encountered a sample chapter on the Internet. I was charmed by her passionate intelligence. She is obviously a "street-wise" intellectual, a rare butterfly nowadays, just the sort of author I emulated when I was a young man with high hopes for a creative writing career. I was a bit surprised to see such sensational yet idealistic work from Generation X. Amy is, according to her bio, "sensitive, arrogant, kind, bipolar, intelligent, passionate, resourceful and cool." I believe she is right on all counts, with one reservation regarding cool, when she loses her cool.

Elusive Butterfly is Amy's novelized memoir. It has not gotten the attention it deserves. It has received much favorable criticism, although several complaints were voiced about production and editing quality. Only one critic, an anonymous Internet identity using 'thedoc' as his handle, trashed it, and in such a rude manner that his virtual reputation as both medical doctor and lliterary critic was utterly ruined. He castigated the author in lewd terms for the revelation of her college escapades and for her romantic characterization of bipolarity. He took umbrage with and quoted the following excerpt from Elusive Butterfly, one which I personally find to be a beautiful expression of the Eros and Psyche dialectic:

"(we) make love at midnight and again at dawn. I know, even as I lay beneath him, that I'm letting sex masquerade as love, but inside the parenthesis of the moment, I make them one and the same. In the half-light of early morning with adorations whispered in my ear, I can convince myself that when two bodies merge together in an act to produce a third, if only his can sink far enough into mine, we can create a perfect whole: me."

To that, 'thedoc' responded: "It is this insipid romanticism of casual sex and idiotic female neediness that really disgusted me about this book!" Then he went on a rampage of disparagement to which the Internet writing community responded vigorously in defense of Amy.

A commentator who identified himself as Leonard Marks, Phd., castigated the bad critic as follows:

"Your obvious obsession with 'slutiness' defines you as a monogamous misogynist, and begs for a therapeutic deconstruction of your social conditioning. The possession of one woman as private property is a crime against modern humanity. Not until women are factually loved regardless of their superficial characteristics will the monogamous misogynist (who is in his self-deprivation; i.e., self-hate, really a misanthropist) be freed in LOVE. In fact, calling this marvelous woman a 'slut' works against your vile intent, as it makes her even more attractive to true men of genius. I suggest that you approach as many 'sluts' as you can with a repentant heart and engage in promiscuous discourse with them. As for Peterson's writing abilities, judging from what I have seen she is the best author around, with exception perhaps of the Bald Guy."

In his review of Elusive Butterfly, 'thedoc' also took Amy to task for the her following statement:

"...bipolar disorder provides a mixture of the transcendent and the trashy in one soul. It has been described as a cycling from kaleidoscope to pitch darkness and back again. But within even a manic episode there is the experience that pushes the limits of the soul..."

From cocoon to butterfly - so what is the hostile critic's problem? He says it is because "Amy makes bipolar disorder look like fun." As if those who are bipolar do not know what it is; as if those who are bipolar have a choice, as if those who are not bipolar will want to be bipolar and have the chemist make it so!

We all have our butterflies which are at once abilities and disabilities. Amy has her butterfly. I have my kite. You have your own contraptions. So let us use our wires and waxened wings, levers and pulleys and strings and other things to fly anon. Writers, pick up your pen and write.

But just as Amy was really beginning to rock and roll with her writing, she ran out of money and had to take a job. She wrote a pained article as a consequence, entitled 'Failure--The Gravesite of Dreams.' It was not a masterpiece by any estimation, but it pierced the heart of all obsessed artists who have experienced or who fear the experience of a brutal, time-stealing, soul-crushing day job. In part, she wrote:

"I had to do this (take a job).

"I'm no longer a writer.

"Sure, it's seared into my soul and as I cry into my keyboard I miss it like a dear friend. Or a twin.

'You can still write for fun.'
'Do some writing on the side.'
'Writing can be your hobby.'

"Oh, sure, okay, I could do that right after I request a public flogging. Or I could slice out my heart with a spoon. It would be less painful.

"I have failed as a writer, and since it once defined everything I am, I don't know anything any more and certainly have no purpose in further prevarication.

"Rest in Peace, soul of mine."

-E-

Quoted: Peterson, Amy Hillgren, 'Failure - The Gravesite of Dreams', Australia: WBM, Copyright 2001

Most Elusive Butterfly
by Amy Hillgren Peterson

New Book!
The Swedish Lie
by Amy Hillgren Peterson

Amy Hilgren Peterson

2004-05-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

Please view historical Fiji photographs

Note on the useful worship of Power

"We wish for no other God than Germany." Hitler

We do well to separate church and state, but they are essentially inseparable no matter how formally we separate them. The essence of god and state is one; namely, Power. We find religion in politics and politics in religion. Broadly speaking, religion organizes the worship of Power while politics distributes or regulates its exercise. We might correctly say, for example, that Communism and Republicanism are religions with the same god differently distributed. The worship of Power is universal; the form of worship changes, is expressed dogmatically and is rationalized ideologically or theologically.

Christianity is rooted in Jewish revolts against an alien empire. The methods of the original enemy were adopted during the struggle - enemies are defined by one another. Effective loyalty was eventually transferred from caesar or king and pope to sovereign State and People. By virtue of "natural law" or the law natural to humankind - reason, and by virtue of the universal craving for power inherent in the will of individuals to persevere forever without restraint, Power became more broadly distributed over the population. Power is the essence of god and state, and it is the currency funding the historical progress of liberty. Politics, the moral (mental) exercise of power, which is necesarilly social, forms the distributon. We find the gist of this crude observation wherever power is the subject of discourse. For instance, we excerpt the following from Friedrich Meinecke's Machiavellism:

"Power is always and for ever part of the essence of the State, but it alone does not constitute the whole essence; for justice, morality and religion from an integral part of this essence as well.... One may say that power was certainly the most original and essential permanent factor in the essence of the State, but it is not and never will be the only one.... Treitschke repeatedly continued to announce that the essence of the State was nothing else but power, thereby limiting it an corrupting those countless people who in life's struggles hanker after simple maxims, and causing them to overestimate and revere simple power, and thus see the basic problem of the State in much cruder forms...."

"The English spirit, which had been altered by the religious movement of the seventeenth century, showed an increasing tendency to change the sword of the naked power-policy, which England always pursued, into the sword of an executor of the law - whether summoned to the task by god or by justice and morality. This was indeed, as has frequently been observed before, the most effective kind of Machiavellism, which could be brought by the national Will of power-policy to become unconscious of itself, and to appear, not only to others but also to itself, as being pure humanity, candor and religion. As a rule, this unconscious expediency in political conduct, this political instinct, is lacking in Germans. Bismark... yielded to the German tendency to call things by their proper names, and to recognize unashamedly the State necessity of power-policy, outwardly robust, but without inner cynicism, from a deep feeling of responsibility for the State as a whole....Thus it is true to say about all his conduct, even the boldest and most ruthless of it, what Ranke said about Frederick the Great's conflict between morals and politics: The hero must be justified at least in his own eyes."

It behooves us to note that the urge to the whole is just that, an urge, a motive, a will to power. The great mistake of the German objective power-state idealists was to conceive of the State as an animal, as an individual man in its own right - the best man-state in the world of course. The whole is really not either the idolized state of being or the becoming process. The deity is the unknown Power which can only in definite effect be conceived as a multiplicity - as if the Universe conceives itself as a multiplicity because one object alone without another to compare it with is incomprehensible. The original evil or sin of the formal subject-object diremption (divorce) precludes in this world a final unity or redemption of subject-object in a return to original unity. The pessimistic perspective, that of belief in original sin, stems from the irrational (no ratio) or one-sided intuition that the whole alone is good; therefore it follows, as long as humankind consists of separate individuals, that there must be evil from the very moment of conception.

That a whole is a whole of parts is ignored. It is as if the individual, in its love of the whole, hates its own self or own power because it is limited or definite, and would, consequently, in its craving for absolute power and love of the possibility of its own extinction, sacrifice its particular representation of universal power and return its form or body to the elements. Individual freedom, then, according to the pessimistic viewpoint, is the root of all evil, for the individual will is contrary to the whole, which will ultimately absorb that individual no matter what its limited form might be. For a person to claim that he has a free will, and that he voluntarily conforms to the necessity of his extinction is a self-contradictory admission of defeat. Of course the passion for sex and violence may be rationalized or justified as necessary to the moral and physical progress of the species, the danger being that technological advances might make the premature extinction of the entire race possible.

Ethical religions and politics are in their moral aspects forms of renunciation or virtual suicide. The civilized individual altruistically sacrifices private selfishness to the greatest public good in the sacred name of the most powerful deity who dominates the world, or in the name of the highest good overlooking all, or in the name of the whole which is essentially unknown through the unreliable senses. Virtual suicide comes highly recommended by rulers regardless of their religion or lack of it. Even faithless rulers, concerned solely with power in this world rather than in the imagined next world, take advantage of spiritual religion if political religion does not suffice. Why? because it really works, because it can be employed as an effective tool for the manipulation of the faithful.

It is possible even for atheists to be saints; say, of the Compassionate Order of Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, fictionally canonized by Miguel de Unamuno. Wherever Christianity might be professed, adroit references to the suffering of Jesus on the Cross can move Christians to make certain sacrifices, even their lives, in the name of god, in order to obtain the promised land in this world, and, where that is failing, in the imagined next world. Renunciation for the sake of Power is a convenient thing in cases of war, including holy wars fought by holy warriors led by holy men. Witness how and why Augustine and Luther and countless other religious authorities gave the sword of Jesus to the ruling political authority, and how they justified that gift with sophisticated arguments and casuistic stretching of scripture, and, when logic failed, by reference to "God's mysteries."

Imperial or colonial powers employed mysterious firepower and religious power to terrorize "natives," whom they presumed to be their cultural if not racial inferiors. For instance, Methodist missionaries did not try to rid Fijians of their belief in ancestral spirits, but defined the spirits as hostile "demons" instead, to be kept in check, of course, by praying to the omnipotent Almighty Terrorist, "Jehovah," whose representative on earth said, "Love thine enemies."

The term "enemies" (na meca) is ambiguous; it might mean non-Christian "people" (tamata), "kin" (veiwekani), "devils" (tevoro) and so on. The indefinite enemy is disrespectfully addressed, directly, as "you" (iko), meaning, enemy people, unnamed kin and ancestors, unspecified devils, inexplicable sickness and the like; that is, anything evil.

Malicious invisible beings frighten Fijians by putting curses on them. Prior to conversion to Christianity, evil spirits and demons could be called upon by means of formulaic sayings, then bargained with and otherwise controlled. But since the advent of alien Others and their Christian god and exploitative ways, the Fijian power over their own history in the form of ancestral spirits has declined. Constantly threatened from without and from within, they have lost Power; more specifically, power over their selves and other properties - the loss of land is their greatest fear. Their non-Christian ancestors have been demonized by the Christians. And the demons persist as demons at the behest of a Christianity whose god, to be god, needs a satan to constantly cast out. Fijians have been cast by Christians as powerless actors who must pray to the terrifying Jewish god for relief. Instead of getting rid of enemies, they must love them. It is not difficult to ascertain the underlying Christian strategy: the Fijian is to love the despicable Other, the Christians, must accept them, must love them. That sort of love is self-hate-based love. Anthropologist Matt Tomlinson concludes a research article on Ritual, Risk, and Danger: Chain Prayers in Fiji, as follows:

"The reason that the enemy was identifiable only as an ambiguous 'You' was because the enemy was not only ancestors nor sickness: The enemy was ultimately Christianity itself, in its role as a historical force which has gained authority over and against chiefs by literally demonizing the past."

Tomlinson refers to Joel Robbins' (1998) study of struggles of the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea with Christianity. The Australian Baptist Mission focused on desires rather than spiritual ancestry: desire and willfulness were formerly necessary attributes of sociability, but the Baptists deemed desire automatically sinful. "The local result," reports Tomlinson, "has been a ritual focus on naming, controlling, and occasionally extinguishing desire. In Tavuki village (in Fiji) where I lived, 'desire' is not seized on as quite so problematic, but the past's echoes of dangerous curses that haunt the powerless present create a similar unease that demands to be addressed."

One might crave omnipotence, yet power unlimited by anything at all is nothing at all. Relative freedom is always from something in particular. Power exercised has a direction; its deliberative exercise is moral (mental). Beneath the supreme power or potentate, whether that power or person be spiritual or secular, it is hardly surprising that many people find themselves anxious, in a double-bind somewhere between freedom and slavery, god and devil, saint and sinner, billionaire and pauper, and, within the class of holy men, somewhere between the obese pope in his fine cathedral and the naked sadhu who has been standing beside the Ganges for twenty-seven years with one arm in the air. The progress of civilization, again, depends on virtual suicide. It depends on the psychological implantation of a "conscience" or overseer, a virtual or introjected authority to terrify the resurgent evildoer within, that he might not rise up against the real powers without. Hence the person lives in perpetual conflict, somewhere in between good and evil. He may spiritually revolt against his masters without, but he dares not physically revolt against them. He may worship the relevant form of Power in their churches, but he may not safely revolt against the political control of that power.

Quoted:

Meinecke,Friedrich, Machiavellism, the Doctrine of raison d'etat and its place in modern history, transl. Douglas Scott, New Haven: Yale 1957

Tomlinson, Matt, American Anthropologist, March 2004

2004-05-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

David Dellinger

We mourn the victims and express our solidarity with their wives, husbands, children, friends and relatives. We have to put this destructive terrorism into a real perspective, senseless as its horrors are. Killing innocent civilians in other countries would do no justice to those killed in this country, and will not bring them back to life. Launching a war that destabilizes regions or leads to a further escalation of violence would be a grave mistake with unforeseen consequences. It would not increase our safety and might increase the likelihood of more terrorist attacks. Instead we should strengthen the efforts to strengthen non-violence throughout the world. - David Dellinger - Public Broadcasting Service

David Dellinger passed away yesterday. Dave was the foremost, longest living and most consistent advocate of revolutionary nonviolence in the United States.

"I am an old man," Dave declared during the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Dave was fifty-three-years old at the time. The prosecution accused him of being the "principle architect" of the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago - scene of the notorious police riots. However, Dave's behavior was entirely nonviolent and was in fact consistent with peaceful assembly and other constitutional civil rights available to all people in "this great nation of ours."

The events of the amazing Sixties are still relevant to today's continuing struggle for freedom. They should be carefully studied lest the lessons Dave passed on to us from his predecessors be lost along with our precious freedoms. I had that in mind on Inauguration Day 2001, when I wrote the oft rejected little article below, Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

An inauguration day calls for an augury or divination from the flight of birds or from the bowels of sacrificed animals, wherefore I am moved by the flight of certain song birds and my distaste for fat, liver and kidneys to ponder on what Inauguration Day 2001 spells for the world.

People Without Borders who joyfully experienced the Sixties now sadly contemplate the new century because they believe greedy, self-righteous war mongers have been unwittingly given a renewed license to devour people in the Name of the Nation and the Invisible Hand. Therefore I believe it is high time for People Without Borders to remember their roots with a renewed declaration of non-violent war, not the violent war of impersonal rapine and murder on the powerless and poor practiced by the enemy, but a loving war on the selfish grounds of hate, the domestic enemy within us all. We must not stand passively by and suffer a new reign of greed and bloody war. We must fight back with the power of Love.

Our victory depends on the active exercise of the power of Love. So how can the war against war and poverty be waged? Many are the ways of Love to be found by each and every one of us. Some of us recall personally inserting flowers into the gun barrels of soldiers.

Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing, it seems. We heard Where Have All The Flowers Gone? sung at the Great Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Dave Dellinger, the old man of the Chicago Eight, said that the record of that trial would be a rallying point for a new generation who would not put up with tyranny, "will not put up with the facade of democracy without the reality."

Dave is still very much alive. Many of us who were less than half his age at the time feel almost dead and gone now, especially those of us who "sold out" and "dropped in," into the private "fascist" organizations we despised. Indeed, Where have all the flowers gone? And how do we grow them again? A sense of humor might help. I have looked over the transcript of the trial for clues. The following excerpt is just one of many that I found, but a precious one to contemplate:

KUNSTLER: Now, what did you do at that press conference?

COLLINS: Well, (sings), Where have all the flowers gone....

COURT: Just a minute, young lady.

COLLINS: ...where have all the flowers gone?

COURT: We don't allow singing in the Court, young lady.

KUNSTLER: That is what she did at the press conference.

COURT: You asked her what she did and she proceeded to sing.

KUNSTLER: That's what she did, Your Honor.

COLLINS: That's what I do.

May the singing of the question, Where have all the flowers gone, be our oracle on this Inauguration Day, a question each of us should answer before it is too late. Flowers come and go. Some bloom earlier or later and longer than others. We can only hope that people stop to smell them, then take care to grow a few flowers of their own.

2004-05-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

King Carlos and Queen Amelie
Please Visit Necessidades Palace

Devilish Details

Nearly a century has passed since the 1908 Lisbon assassinations. Some historians familiar with the murders consider them to be of no great moment. After all, King Carlos was a minor king of a small impoverished nation. In fact the entire year of 1908 seems rather unimportant in comparison to the world-shattering events soon to come. Besides, political assassinations were passe around the turn of the century, hence the killing of a president or tzar, a prince or king, was rather commonplace. Nevertheless, we are mindful of Leopold Ranke's dictum, that all historical moments are important in some way because they are equally near to God. Wherefore we are bound to find something of interest everywhere in human history, especially if we dig into the devilish details presumably presided over by the Supreme Being. One devilish aspect of a detail is that it is related to countless others. So many of them seemingly stand in a cause and effect relationship that superstitious people have been led to believe in an ambiguous world spirit, or in the existence of gods and devils summed up as God and Satan, personal entities allegedly behind all the scenes or at least dually innate in alienated human beings, hence present everywhere in universal history. Innumerable details led up to the slaying of the King and the Crown Prince of Portugal in an open carriage on the streets of Lisbon on February 1, 1908. Reference to even a few of them might bore us until we realize that we are talking about ourselves again, in another context.

Portugal became an independent monarchy in 1139, when Alfonso Henriques assumed the title of king. King Carlos was born into the Portuguese House of Braganca, the dynasty that ruled Portugal from 1640 to the fall of the monarchy in 1910. England mourned King Carlos when he was assassinated in 1908. England and Portugal were very old friends. In fact, there would probably be no Portugal absent England's frequent meddling and occasional interventions. The advantages to Great Britain were ample: an excellent foothold on the continent; superb Port wine; Brazil's developing markets, her brilliant diamonds, glittering gold, smooth coffee and sweet sugar. After all, besides companionship, what are friendships for?

King Carlos was personally popular at the English court. He was a handsome man with polished manners and he had diverse interests and skills. He was a marine biologist, bullfighter, skilled marksman, accomplished artist, sculptor, patron of the dramatic arts, and master of seven languages - he helped his father translate Shakespeare. Furthermore, the friendly relationship between King Carlos and King Edward VII was cemented by blood.

King Edward was the son of Queen Victoria and Duke Albert of Saxe-Coburg (Bavaria). King Carlos's father was King Luis of Portugal, the son of Maria da Gloria (Maria II) of Portugal and Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. When Maria II died in 1853, at the age of thirty-four, her eldest son, Pedro V, was a minor, therefore her husband Ferdinand governed as regent for a few years, hence the Portuguese house was technically the House of Coburg-Braganca. But the Portuguese did not care to use the Germanic reference. Neither did the British care much for Germans in their ruling house, despite the fact that Albert was an inspiration to their great Queen. When Edward succeeded to the throne, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was, correctly speaking, the royal house; however, in 1917 George V proclaimed "Windsor" to be the surname of Queen Victoria's descendants.

Economically motivated historians claim that Maria II's son, Pedro V, was the most attractive of the later Bragancas because he was keenly interested in the industrial and material improvements that Portugal direly needed after it had been wracked by Napoleonic invasions and civil wars. Maria II had managed to resolve the constitutional struggles that took place after the War of Two Brothers, the war between her father, Pedro I of Brazil, and his brother, Miguel. But Maria II died in 1853, at the young age thirty-four. Alas, in 1861, her promising son, Pedro V, also died an early death at age twenty-four. He was succeeded by his artistically inclined brother, King Luis, Carlos' father.

King Luis entertained his court with performances on his violoncello and translated several of Shakespeare's plays. In keeping with an old Taoist adage, it is said that he did not do very much during the twenty-eight years he reigned, yet he got a lot done. At least the country grew wealthier due to its industrial progress.

Equally important, Carlos' father is credited for advancing Portugal's cultural renaissance. High culture had suffered a terrible set back with the French invasion of Portugal in 1807. As the French advanced into Lisbon, Maria I and her regent Joao fled to Brazil with the court and a retinue of about fifteen-thousand persons, on thirty-six ships escorted by British men-of-war. They took the bulk of the most valuable cultural artifacts of Portugal with them; what they did not take was looted by the French if not stolen by the English and Portuguese defenders of Portugal.

King Luis died in 1889. When Carlos took the throne on October 19, the modern imperial scramble was going full steam ahead. Germany, recently united under Prussia, was already vying for a place in the Sun in order to save the world. Several countries still had kings, but monarchy was going out of style - its vestiges were certainly not appreciated by Portuguese "republicans" - democratically inclined radicals. Not only was Carlos a king by accident of birth, he was otherwise flawed to begin with as far as the republicans were concerned. He had his father's looks: blond, teutonic, and stout, he looked like a handsome German field marshal. And he had a Catholic queen, a princess of France, his beloved Amelie. To make matters worse, the branch of the House of Braganca which ruled the independent Kingdom of Brazil was overthrown on November 15, 1889, by anti-monarchist bourgeois liberals, and a republic was established there.

As if all that were not bad, Carlos' personal prestige was dealt a severe blow in 1890 when he capitulated to Great Britain's Ultimatum in the Rosy Colored Map Affair. The Ultimatum and capitulation were due to a conflict between the colonial interests of Great Britain and Portugal. Portugal wanted to connect its Angola colony in West Africa to its Mozambique colony in East Africa by grabbing the area in between. But Rhodes in South Africa had his eye on the same land, which a Portuguese minister had painted pink to graphically illustrate the concept of a giant, coast-to-coast Portuguese empire in Africa. Things came to a head in Africa in 1889. A British offofficials sent to Africa to order Serpa Pinto, the Portuguese surveyor who was tracing out a route for a railroad, to back off. He refused to withdraw. Britain issued an Ultimatum, the purport of which was to get out of the disputed area or else. Carlos made a wise decision - he backed down. Financially strapped Portugal had been trying to bite off more than it could chew anyway. Nevertheless, this double-cross from the historic ally and Carlos' subsequent capitulation infuriated many Portuguese people - it was in sum a national disgrace, a grievous blow to Portugal's pride and further inspiration to republican nationalists. They accused King Carlos of selling out to Great Britain, of using his royal relationship with the British Crown simply to maintain himself on the throne.

"The effect of the ultimatum," Young explains, "in weakening the monarchy was combined with a strengthening of the Republican movement by the fall of the Emperor of Brazil, and this from no personal fault or political defeat of the constitutional monarchy, but from a preference for the Republican principle.... Republicanism was no longer a mere protestant principle and a profession of an unknown faith, but a political progamme and a procedure for reform. Just as the American Revolution contributed to our (British) national liberties at the cost of our imperial possessions, so the collapse of a Portuguese Empire in South Africa and the conversion of a Portuguese Empire into a Republic in South America gave a moral stimulus and a political status to republicanism and reform in Portugal."

Carlos inherited yet another problem with his crown, perhaps the most crucial one of all: political-party Rotativism, the rotating system in the Cortes (Parliament) whereby the two dominant parties, the Regenerators and the Progressives who took turns governing and exploiting the kingdom.

After the French Revolution Portugal's political struggles took the typical dynamic form of a flying bird: left wing-central body-right wing. The absolutists on the far right wanted no constitution at all. The chartists or moderates in the middle wanted a liberal constitutional monarchy granted by the monarch. The radicals on the left, the 'republicans,' wanted a constitution embodying the principles the French Revolution - liberty, equality, fraternity. After Miguel and his Miguelites - the absolutists on the extreme right who wanted no constitution at all - were finally defeated in 1834, the political bird drifted a bit to the left flank and political conflict continued between the two constitutionalist factions, the chartists and the republicans.

The chartists wanted the liberal charter that had been granted to them in 1826 by Pedro when he abdicated the throne of Portugal in favor of his daughter Maria da Gloria providing, of course, that she marry her uncle Miguel and that he accept the charter. But Miguel took the throne and did not want any liberal baggage so he tossed it out - his betrayal provoked civil war, the War of Two Brothers. The republican faction wanted the radical constitution which had been drafted by a constituent body in 1822. It was intended to be an interim constitution until such time as the monarchy could be abolished. In fine, one constitution was a gift of the monarch, while the other constitution was a demand upon the throne. Not only were heated words exchanged over the relevant issues but a great deal of blood was shed as well, usually after one political leader or another made a 'pronouncement.' Finally, the net result and main achievement of Maria II's reign was a modified version of Pedro's 1826 charter and the discontinuance of violence.

Thereafter, under the formal constitutional monarchy the chartist party or conservatives were called the Regenerators, eventually led by Ernesto Hintze Ribeiro. The ostensibly more liberal party, the Progressives, were headed by one Jose Luciano de Castro. But there was really not much difference between the Regenerators and Progressives, and many people were getting sick and tired of being routinely exploited by "the ins" and and "the outs." That is, under the rotative system, the two parties took frequent turns governing the exploitation of the kingdom. There was little chance for radical political reform short of revolution or tyranny. Not that Portugal was lacking in radicals on its left wing - the term 'radical' was reserved for the 'republican' constitutionalists who had been nearly squeezed out of the Cortes.

A period of stable corruption ensued as the Regenerators and Progressives rotated governments. A Regenerator cabinet headed by Ernesto Hintze Ribeiro and Joao Franco took its turn at government from 1893 to 1897. The government began with liberal reforms in mind, but it soon turned dictatorial because of the growing criticism of the monarchy: a harsh crackdown on the press and a prohibition of public asassemblynsued. The elected portion of the House of Peers was abolished. The Progressives in the House of Deputies refused to vote, hence an all-Regenerator Cortes. An apparent plot to kill the king was discovered. A severe decree mandated secret trials of political dissidents and their transportation out of the country upon conviction. The unpopular decree resulted in a backlash that forced the Regenerator ministry to resign in 1897. The Progressives were in, then out in 1900.

This time Joao Franco took no place in the Regenerator cabinet, preferring instead to stand back and criticize Hintze in the CoCortesThen he seceded from the party with 25 deputies and formed a liberal splinter party. Hintze was infuriated: until his death in 1907, he did everything he could to crush Franco. The rotating parties continued to roll along regularly exploiting the countryside after Carlos took the throne. Hintze gerrymandered voting districts so that voting in rural areas would outweigh republican voters in the two major cities of Oporto and Lisbon, and party bosses went about drumming up support from eligible voters in the country towns, from local magnates and clergy.

As far as the largely illiterate and apathetic masses were concerned, the political agitation was a lot of malarkey about nothing. Most of the proletariat did not see anything in it for the working man. As for the peers, the revolution they contemplated to overthrow Franco was of no avail to them since the king was on his strong-man's side. Franco, figuring all the factions would offset each other and amount to nothing much in their divisiveness, was confident of the future. But trouble was brewing among some of the more hot-headed members of the proletariat, as well as among urban professionals. Disgruntled republican intellectuals were cultivating seeds of dissent at the university in Coimbra. The most notable dissidents were Professor Teofilo Braga, and the idol of republican students, Senhor Bernardino Machado, and, of course the noted poet, Albilio Guerra Janquiero. A slightly respectable Republican Party was afoot, and there was a Socialist faction formed as well. Joao Franco, via his brand new Centro Regenerador Liberal party, spoke out against the rotativism of Hintze's Regenerators and Luciano's Progressives. Franco's new agenda was called Franquismo - the Republicans took advantage of its liberal aspects. So in 1905 there were five political parties: Regenerators, Liberal Regenerators, Progressives, Socialists, Republicans.More dangerous to the monarchy were the conspiring secret cells of the Carbonari. Membership therein was rumoured to be rapidly rising - everybody and their brother were at one time or another suspected of belonging to a Wood Shop. Hintze was out again in 1904, Castro's Progressives took another turn at the trough, but their stay was brief because of Luciano's deteriorating health. Hintze was back as Prime Minister in 1906. He asked the king for a dictatura or period of dictatorship to stabilize the country. Carlos obviously believed that Hintze would not be a good strong man. "Woe betide those who can only rule in such a manner," said the king. His letter of refusal was tantamount to a request for Hintze's resignation. Hintze resigned. Joao Franco, whom many people believed was an honest, loyal, courageous, and resolute man somewhat along the lines of the classical true conservative, Cato, was called up to head the cabinet. He cut expenses right away and abolished sinecures; of course the old Regenerators and Progressives were duly outraged and called for his resignation, which he immediately tendered to the King, who, of course, refused it and gave Franco the dictatura he had denied Hintze. Wherefore the Cortes was dissolved and the "temporary" dictatorship established for the purpose of reform.

George Young opined that the Portuguese nobility and gentry with failing to follow a long-standing tradition to "fufulfillheir function, as in our (Great Britain's) constitutional history, and act as trustees in the transfer of the sovereign power from the prince to the people." He believed that Carlos was honoring "cosmopolitan concessionaires or those too politic politicians who were looked upon by the public as robbers and traitors." As for capital shortage in poor Portugal, Young played the Jewish card and mentioned the "passive invasion" of Jewish German bankers: the PoPortugueseing could not rely very on them because a collapse of the Portuguese monarchy would only add to their advantages in Africa.

"Under the monarchy," wrote Young, "rotativism seemed likely to have a long reign, and in consequence the Cortes was quite useless even for dealing with the one pressing political problem. This was no less than the question whether Portugal could pay its way as a nation. If it could not be made to do so, then obviously it could not hope even to maintain its position as a sovereign State, still less to make good its pretensions to be a world-empire."

The political world, motivated by greed, rotated around money. King Carlos himself was described as a cynical man who was devoted most of all to sensual pleasure. Jean Finot, who was in Portugal for awhile, claimed that Carlos "sought oblivion in orgies sufficiently innocent, but which in Lisbon, a large provincial town, were thought the fetes of a Nero. In truth, he was bored. He courted all the pretty women, and was always dreaming of foreign travel," and he says, "Brave to a fault, Dom Carlos used to walk about the streets of his capital alone without an escort, everywhere meeting looks of hostility, indifference, or even disgust from passers-by. Thus he threw in the face of his people an insult which the longed to avenge in his blood."

However that may be, Carlos was well aware of the threat to the monarchy; he sympathized with the complaints below. He was corrupted by ministers who persuaded him to use devious devices to take more money from the public coffer to support his royal needs than was budgeted. He took the "bribes" against his better jujudgmentand he took steps to curb corruption elsewhere, but he was weak. His Prime Minister Franco was "the strong man" and was in effect the last monarch in Portugal. Franco, Portugal's "Cato," became the villain of the drama - Carlos looked on and lost his life. A contemporary historian, Vincent de BrBragancaunha, stated, "The assassination of the King and the Crown Prince stands as proof of the political mistakes committed by Franco, which the country cannot easily forget or forgive."

King Carlos refused to see representatives from the Cortes after it was dissolved. And he ignored the clamor of various other distinguished petitioners. During an interview with a reporter from the Paris Le Temps, Carlos declared his confidence in his dictator:

"He and I are quite of one mind," Carlos said. "We work together, and he is completely in my confidence. There people are mistaken who think that I do not intend to keep him in power. I am quite satisfied with him. Everything is going satisfactorily. The present state of things must continue - the interest of the county requires it."

Even worse, Carlos criticized Portugal during the interview, implying that the Portuguese national character was a dishonest one. Needless to say, this gaffe enraged the Portuguese public the most.

While Carlos talked, Franco was hard at work. Municipal elections were postponed. A decree was issued reforming the upper house of the Cortes, the House of Peers, setting aside the rights it had enjoyed for many years. Franco had been out of politics for awhile but when he returned to work for the King he said he had strong democratic instincts; however, the more his reforms were resisted, the more repressive his measures became, until, in Cunha's words, his "recklessness was positively criminal." Decrees were issued in January 1908 suppressing papers and imprisoning opponents of his policies. Allegedly at Franco's behest, Carlos signed a decree authorizing dissidents to be transported to Africa on a moment's notice. Carlos did have his reservations: he reportedly said upon the signing of one such repressive decree that he was probably signing his own death warrant. His queen, Amelie of Orleans, a highly educated woman and staunch royalist, also had her doubts. Francis Gribble quotes her: "Franco is in the right, I suppose, but he is very clumsy in his methods." Just before he was assassinated, Cunha reports that the king had a presentiment of his fate:

"He asked Franco if it was safe for him and his family to drive through the streets of Lisbon. But the dictator spoke so confidentially that the King relied more or less on the personal pledge given by his minister for the safety of the Royal Family. So far from taking the ordinary precautions, Franco even allowed the King to enter, with the King and the Princes, a two-horse open carriage that was to drive them to the Necessidades Palace."

We can imagine Franco's shock when he heard about the ignominious assassinations that ended his dictatorship. Jean Finot said that the news reached Franco during a diplomatic party at the French Delegation. The courtiers and ministers avoided him. He, pale and haggard, exclaimed, "They have killed my King and they have killed his Minister!" Queen Amelia reported said to Franco, "There - you see your handiwork!" And Maria Pia supposedly said, "You promised to release the monarchy from its tomb, and all that you have done has been to dig the graves of my son and grandson." More gossip: Carlos' brother, the Duke of Porto, reportedly got into a fight with Franco, rolling around on the floor of the Council Chamber after slapping him in the face and yelling, "Franco, Franco, what have you done to my brother?"

Franco resigned immediately, removed himself to Genoa, and never returned to public life. Joao Franco, a rich man who led a Stoic life, a man with a reputation for incorruptibility, courage, energy, and good intentions, was a precursor of the top-down state socialism or national socialism that was advancing in several European countries. Jean Finot wrote:

"The dictator took no one's advice.... Franco became the real master of Portugal, a master the more to be dreaded because he held in his hands the whole political and administrative life of the country. On one occasion he said to me: 'Our country has suffered and suffers still from administrative corruption. There is too much extravagance and too many abuses. I shall have to reform much of the machinery and get new laws passed; and when some years hence people see what I have accomplished they will excuse my brutalities and violations of the Constitution.... You must do violence to the ground before you can sow it....' I had an opportunity of conversing with several opponents of the dictator. All admitted that, detestable though he was as a politician, his personal character was not open to attack. He prevented others from enriching themselves at the expense of the state, but he did not enrich himself. They told me many lively stories of this plunder of the state to which Franco had put an end."

Vincent de Braganca Cunha, writing about the outrageous sinecures, said that Franco had "proceeded to deprive the State parasites of all imaginary posts so infamously monopolized by them. The corruption was such that a gentleman appointed Minister of Portugal in China had for two years drawn 2,400l a year without leaving Lisbon." Moreover, entitled ladies were getting money for the imaginary task of searching females at the custom house, and so on. George Young relates, "Joao Franco, a somewhat sinister personality... nor the less courageous and cynical King Carlos himself... set valiantly to work enforcing economies, most of them well advised - one or two of them ill-advised, such as the increase of the civil list in substitution for 'irregular' advances." The civil list listed funds alloted to the monarch; in other words, Franco openly gave the King a raise; and dubious transfers were otherwise made. George Young writes, "One might define Franco as a fiscal reformer who engaged in corrupt practices; and the inevitable result of this dual activity was that he made two sets of enemies - the one by his corruption, and the other by his economies."

Franco's King and Crown Prince were dead. Franco was the fall guy in the service of a king who had full confidence in Franco's crackdown on corruption and republicanism, a crackdown that made enemies on all sides. It might have worked given popular support and better luck. Much can be said for democratic methods when the time is ripe for them, but Portugal was not ready. The monarchy finally fell to the republicans in 1910 - Queen Amelie and King Manuel II fled to GiGibraltarn the yacht Amelia. The situation deteriorated even further and the virtual chaos was not brought under control until the Salazar dictatorship (1926-1974), which was the longest-lived authoritarian system in western Europe's history. Despite the backward-looking aspects and brutalities of the Salazar Regime, the social progress it did achieve was remarkable.

XyX

Sources for the 1908 Lisbon Assassinatons series:

Cunha, Vincent de Braganca, Eight Centuries of Portuguese Monarchy, New York: James Pott, 1911. I have not yet found any bbiographicalinformation on the historian Vincent de Braganca Cunha. He was an excellent writer - I highly recommend this particular book for its lucid narrative style and presentation of interesting information about the Portuguese.

Gribble, Francis (1862?-1946), The Royal House of Portugal, Port Washington: Kennikat, 1970 (first published 1915). Francis Gribble was British. I have been able to find little biographical information on him, which ssurprisesme because he was an excellent, prolific writer, whose many works appear throughout the world. His witty remarks are often worth quoting. He wrote biographies of romantic figures, including Balzac, Dumas, Shelley, Rousseau, Madame de Stael, and George Sand, Madame Collete, and others.

Young, George (1872-1952), Portugal Old and Young, Oxford: Clarendon, 1917, George Young served from 1896-1914 as a diplomat - secretary, attache, charges de affairs - in Washington, Athens, Constantinople, Madrid, Belgrade, and Lisbon. He was an authority on Ottoman law. In 1930, Young was aadviseron international affairs to the Labor Party.

Finot, Jean (1864-1935), 'The Lisbon Assassination', (A.D. 1908), article in The World's Great Events. Jean Finot was a journalist and sociological researcher and writer. He was born in Warsaw as Jean Finckelhaus. In 1890 he founded Revue des revues in Paris. He is the author of the still controversial book, Race Prejudice, wherein he exposed the absurdities of pseudo-scientific racism. He spoke out against the racial viewpoints which helped lead the world into the Great War. He expressed approval of Tuskegee and other black schools.

One Hundred Years of Portuguese Oceanography, In the Footsteps of King Carlos de Braganca, ed., Luiz Saldanha and Pedro Re, Lisboa: Museu Nacional de Historia Natural, 1997

Nowell, Charles E, A History of Portugal, New York: Van Nostrand, 1952

Nowell, Charles E, Portugal, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,

Saraiva, Jose Hermano, Portugal, A Companion History, Portugal: Carcanet, 1997

Livermore, H.V., A History of Portugal, Cambridge: University Press, 1947

Anderson, James M., The History of Portugal, Westport: Greenwood, 2000

Current Literature, New York: Current Literature Publishing Co., 1908 issues

The Encyclopedia Britannica

Collier's Encyclopedia

2004-05-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

The 1908 Lisbon Assassinations

King Carlos of Portugal and his son the Duke of Braganza had an appointment with Death on Saturday, February 1, 1908. One of the most arbitrary public-security laws in the history of Portugal was published that morning in the Journal Officiel. The new law was designed to rid Portugal of radicals opposed to the dictatorial policies of the monarch, King Carlos, and his Prime Minister turned dictator, Joao Franco. The decree provided for special tribunals and the immediate deportation of political criminals to Africa.

King Carlos and Queen Amelia along with their sons Luis Filipe and Manuel returned to Lisbon on that fateful Saturday afternoon from a short visit to Vila Vicosa, the seat of their ancient House of Braganza. The royal family disembarked at about five in the afternoon from the ferry-boat Dom Luiz, which had carried them from Berreiro to the Terreiro do Paco, They were greeted by Cabinet Members and dignitaries, then got into an open carriage and headed for the Necessidades Palace.

Joao Franco had always been careful to secure his own person, frequently moving from house to house, yet he provided inadequate security for the royal family that day. The King's usual reckless bravado was really to blame for the lax security. Queen Amelie was well aware of the dangers due to the political turmoil: she had repeatedly opposed the exposure of her sons to the dangers of the conspiracy in Lisbon. In any case, riding in a landau with lowered hoods was certainly not the wise thing to do in view of the political circumstances exacerbated by Franco's crackdown. Among other things, suspected Carbonaris were lurking about with concealed weapons. The route to the Palace was crowded with spectators. The royal family were sitting ducks.

As the royal carriage approached the corner of the Praca do Commercio up the street from the Arsenal, a young assassin, a Lisbon cashier named Alfredo Costa, stepped from the crowd, jumped up behind the carriage and fired a pistol at King Carlos. Queen Amelia tried to beat down the assassin's arm with a bouquet of flowers that her little god-child had given her on the quay shortly before, but to no avail: one of the assassin's bullets passed through her husband's throat, severing the carotid artery - King Carlos, vigorous and in his prime, was killed instantly.

Amelia placed herself in front of her youngest son, Manuel, looked squarely into the revolver aimed at him, but the shot was not fired. A struggle took place. According to the conflicting reports, a policeman either shot the assassin dead or ran him through with a sword. At that point the Queen's lady-in-waiting, Countess Figueiro, tried to take her proper post in the carriage, but Amelia cried out, "Get away! Get away! I don't want you to be killed too!"

The coachman whipped the horses - the carriage lurched towards the corner of the arcade. Shots rang out from the crowd. Amelia turned and found her first-born son Luis Felipe mortally wounded, struck in the face and chest. The fatal deed was reportedly done with a carbine wielded by a black-bearded assassin, an ex-calvary sergeant and dismissed village schoolmaster named Manuel Buica - he had been lurking behind the pillar of the Ministry of the Interior. Because four chambers in the Crown Prince's revolver were found empty, a report credited him with firing at the assassins four times, perhaps wounding or killing one of them - another accounts stated that he did not get a single shot off. The bearded assassin took aim again and fired, slightly wounding Manuel in the arm. At this juncture the King's brother, the Duke of Oporto, and aides de camp rode up with sabres drawn. Everyone believed to be an assassin was reportedly hacked to pieces - an innocent bystander was allegedly killed in the process.

The carriage hurried to the medical department of the marine Arsenal where King Carlos was declared dead on arrival. Crown Prince Luis Felipe expired minutes later.

Hence on that terrible day eighteen-year-old Duke of Braganca became King Manuel II. The next day Manuel promised to uphold the Constitution, and he soon proceeded to dismantle the repressive machinery of his father's regime. The regicides, allegedly members of Carbonari cells, were tried in secret and executed - numerous aggrieved republicans staged a demonstration on the graves. The number of assassins involved was unclear. Some time later a third man, Jose de Alpoim, tried to take credit for the killings, but he, a known braggart, was given little credence.

2004-05-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

Please visit Queen Amelia's National Coach Museum

Dona Amelia d'Orleans, per Graca de Deus, Rainha de Portugal

Carlos searched for a wife before he took the throne of Portugal. Too his good fortune he found a beautiful princess of France in the person of Amelie Louise Helene, Duchesse de Orleans, daughter of the Comte de Paris - heir apparent to the throne of France.

The Orleans line had become a collateral branch of the House of Bourbon following the marriage of Louis XIV's brother, Philippe I (1640-1701). After the Restoration of the French monarchy following Napoleon Bonaparte's Republic and Empire, Louis XVIII and Charles X of the Bourbon House ruled. The French Revolution of 1830 disposed of Charles X. The Bourbon candidate for kingship, the so-called "miracle child" who had unexpectedly been born after the assassination of the Duc de Berry, was passed over, and the July Monarchy of the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe of the House of Orleans, was established. That bourgeois monarchy prevailed from 1830-1848, until the French Revolution of 1848 gave Louis-Philippe due cause to abdicate in favor of his young grandson, the Comte de Paris; however, Louis Bonaparte Napoleon, wrongly believed to be a moron who could be disposed of at will, was wheeled in to temporarily head up another Republic pending the resolution of certain troubling political issues; shortly thereafter, by virtue of a coup d' etat, the so-called moron became Emperor Napoleon III. He ruled over booming times until the disastrous Franco-Prussian war proceeded in 1870, whereafter the Third Republic was established (1870-1940). The remant of the main Bourbon line perished in 1883, hence waning Bourbon hopes as well as that of other Legitimists rested albeit in vain with the Comte de Paris of the House of Orleans.

Wherefore when Carlos met Amelie she well endowed in several respects. Besides being a very rich noblewoman, she was a classic beauty. True to her class, her bearing was self-confident and poised. A photograph catches her with a secret Mona Lisa smile. She appears to be a pleasant, mentally active woman, accustomed to getting her way, probably a match for any man, certainly not a coy or wilting woman but rather a fine lady who nevertheless might like to wear pants and play the tomboy when afforded the opportunity to do so discreetly. As Queen of Portugal, Amelie was noted for an impossibly slim waist for her age, in stark contrast with that of her increasingly portly husband. Besides being the best dressed woman in Europe, she was the only member of European royalty who had a doctor's degree - the persuasive queen undoubtedly had a boundless influence over her husband's mind. Amelie was described by her contemporary, Francis Gribble, a British biographer of romantic personages, as the subject of a strenuous education, dignified but "also brilliantly clever, exceedingly accomplished, and endowed with the indefinable charm which causes people to be styled 'sympathetic'.... At the same time, she displayed the shyness and timidity generally evinced by young people of superior merit in the presence of those who are at once grandiose and commonplace."

Gribble recounts that a German prince had his eye on Amelie but she was too patriotic to oblige a German. Her husband-to-be had a handsome German appearance but was also Portuguese by birth and nation. We learn that Amelie preferred to live simply. She loved to leap her horse over walls and to walk on the seashore with her husband. Depending on the critic, she was either a pious do-gooder or a bigoted fanatic, either charitable or extravagant. Gribble relates:

"The Queen encouraged the re-establishment of the religious order in Portugal; and there is unhappily only too much evidence to show that, when religious orders come in at the door, all prospects of thorough-going reform fly out the window. Or that, at all events, was the view of the new school of reformers then arising in Portugal: the earnest and clean-handed anti-clericals from the University of Coimbra - men in whose eyes the buzzing monks and cackling nuns were like a plague of flies settling on a carcass."

George Young, a diplomat, writes: "The queen, whose piety and philanthropy had never won her any popularity, was suspected of being in the hands of the Jesuits, those traditional traducers of Portuguese national liberties."

Despite the prejudices against her, Amelie was undoubtedly popular in some quarters, not only among Catholics but with the victims of tuberculosis and their families; in fact, she led a crusade against the disease: in 1899 she sponsored a private foundation of free clinics, hospitals, sanitariums, and a preventoria. The Queen loved poetry, art, and music, and was of course a patroness of the arts. For example, her personal patronage was deeply appreciated by Guilhermine Suggia (1885-1950), the "Queen of Cellists", one of the first women to make a career of playing he cello. After Amelie heard her play, she sent her abroad to study in Leipzig.

According to Jean Finot, a French journalist who visited Portugal, the Portuguese favoured King Carlos' mother, Maria Pia, over Queen Amelie.

"(Queen Maria Pia) is a 'true queen.' Above all, she is majestic. A true daughter of kings, she is good-natured and generous. The other queen? Still young and distinguished-looking, she brought with her to Lisbon a royal, a divine beauty. She is without doubt the most beautiful women who has ever reigned over Portugal. Ever since she came she has tried to win all hearts. Amiable and prepossessing, she is careful to ignore, not to accentuate, distinctions in rank. She is as economical as the dowager is prodigal. Nevertheless, the Portuguese prefer Maria Pia. Queen Amelia is a Clerical, which offends the people."

Amelie was heroically inclined. Germany and Sweden awarded her with their respective medals of honor for saving the life of a drowning fisherman. The poor man had been injured trying to save his overturned boat, whereupon Amelie jumped into the water fully dressed, swam out and rescued him. The Queen appreciated the same sort of heroism in others: an unemployed cobbler, who had been awarded medals by the humane societies of several countries for saving seventeen lives from drowning, applied to Queen Amelie for a job at the customs house, where he would have the chance of saving more lives while earning his daily bread. Amelie kindly granted his request, but he died before he could assume his post. Furthermore, as we see from the reports on the Lisbon assassinations, she tried to fend off her husband's killers with a bouquet of flowers, then interposed herself between the assassins and her son.

2004-05-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Passion de la mer

Sometime a man's hobby or avocation tells us more about a man than his official business. King Carlos did not choose his royal vocation, he was born into it.

Portugal is a small nation with a long and illustrious history. Portugal looks out upon its oceanic vocation from 300 miles of coastline. King Carlos gazed upon the vast ocean as well, but for him, landlocked as he was by his destined duties, the sea was an avocation. King Carlos had a passion de la mer.

King Carlos proudly possessed a series of recreational yachts, each named after his beloved Queen Amelia (Amelie). The yacht Amelia I was 35 meters in length; Amelia II, 45 meters; Amelia III, 55 meters; Amelia IV, 70 meters. The first three yachts had sails; the first two had compound engines; the last two had triple expansion engines to reduce coal consumption.

As can still be seen from his lavishly illustrated catalog of the birds of Portugal and his loving sketches of his yachts, Carlos was an excellent artist. Besides his sketches, we may view photographs of the yachts - every one of his Amelias is beautiful. An old saying has it that possession is nine-tenths of the law. The king possessed the royal yachts, but there was some confusion over who actually owned them, the nation or the king. Of course there are ample precedents to cite for the idea that a king owns his kingdom and everything in it, but times were changing in a revolutionary or liberal direction.

Not every king or queen of Portugal was wealthy. Quite to the contrary. Although Portugal was once the richest nation on Earth, she invested little of her wealth on public improvements at home, and she had a long record of wasted fortunes, wars, civil strife, natural calamities, epidemics and so on, to the point that some of her monarchs had to go to a great deal of trouble even to find a bite to eat. Carlos inherited the usual deficit: his house, the House of Braganca, was pinched for funds. The king's ministers resorted to several stratagems to aid the king financially, one being the sale of the king's current yacht and the queen's carriage house museum, among other things, to his kingdom, a creative accounting manuever which soon became part of a national scandal because socialist analysts figured that the king had done something fishy; to wit, that he had done nothing more than sell the nation's own property to itself and pocket the proceeds.

Now I have done quite a bit of accounting in my life, but I am not certified to make a competent judgment on the transaction. I durst not say the king was a crook; no doubt he relied on expert advice; but with our post-modern accounting scandals in mind we can imagine how fishy the transaction smelled in those days. Still, we should not imagine that the king was a selfish man entertaining himself and his guests with expensive pleasure cruises designed to grind his poor subjects further into poverty. There was an altruistic reason for the fact that the Navy-staffed Amelia's were getting progressively longer in length: King Carlos needed more room for his laboratory. You see, Carlos is known as "The Father of Portuguese Oceanography." Between 1896 and 1907 he went on a series of oceanographic cruises along the southern Portuguese coast. In 1897, the King had published the preliminary results of his 1896 cruise, introducing his study with this statement:

The numerous oceanographic researches that foreign countries carried out in recent times with such auspicious results, the importance of these studies for the fisheries industry, one of the most important in our country, and the exceptional variety of bathymetric conditions of the sea along and off our coasts, suggested to us last year the idea of the scientific exploration of our sea, and to make available, by regular work, not only a knowledge of the fauna of our continental shelf but also that of the abysses that are found in certain regions only a few miles off the coast, a situation almost unique in Europe.

Carlos collaborated with only one scientist, a man who had immigrated from New York as a child, one Albert Arthur Alexander Girard. Girard served as the king's expert for the Fisheries Commission. Carlos also associated with a blue-blooded oceanographer, Prince Albert of Monaco - Albert called Carlos "Le monarch savant."

As we have seen, the king's main oceanographic interest was in fish. If the biology and ecology of fish were better understood, he believed, then the knowledge acquired would be a boon to Portuguese fisheries. Wherefore he used bottles to study the currents, drew his bathymetric charts, used beam-trawls and dredges to collect specimens, and so on. He was particularly curious about the depletion of fish caused by the steam crawlers off the shelf - Portuguese fishermen were still using sailboats in those days. A sardine crisis in 1902 off the French coast caused the French to believe that the sardines had fled to Portugal, but Carlos pointed out that there were several possible causes for such dramatic shortages, and reported that he had noticed no increase in sardines in Portugal. In 1904, the King published an extensive study of the sharks of Portugal. His sea-faring scientific activities were known to the public through various national and international exhibits - the specimens he shared with museums still exist.

The King referred to his scientific studies as "mon repose et ma recreation." At least his repose and recreation were good for his kingdom. Of course the impact was small in comparison to the global impact of his most illustrious predecessor, Prince Henry the Navigator, who established the first geographic institute in 1418. Prince Henry rarely sailed, and then not far, but his hobby gave Portugal a scientific foundation for the discovery of that half of the world which Europeans were unaware of.

When King Carlos sailed his yachts, the glory days were over for monarchs. Portugal's kingdom was drawing to a close. Portugal barely mourned the loss of their King and Crown Prince after they were assassinated by conspirators. A few terrorists did the deed: the Lisbon assassinations were not part of a concerted plan to overthrow the monarchy.

King Manuel II

The latest yacht Amelia served as a getaway vessel for Queen Dowager Amelia and her son Manuel II, the last king of Portugal, who assumed his father's throne after his father and older brother were murdered. King Manuel not only repudiated his late father's severe measures, he also promised not to misappropriate funds.

Manuel was simply too young and inexperienced at eighteen years of age to rule. A pundit remarked that the new king was "an orphan not an heir." He was reared for the most part at his mother's estate, Villa Vicosa, and he often visited his grandmother, the Countess of Paris, at her chateau, Villa Manrique, in Andalusia nearby. He was a pleasant young gentleman. He liked to hunt, and was an excellent shot. He loved horseback riding. He chased the famous giant bulls across the plains, and he was chased by them in turn. Amelia, an accomplished horsewoman and horseshoer - she complained that blacksmiths were ruining horses - was wont to accompany him on his later hunting expeditions, in part because she feared for his safety. She had taught him to ride when he was little, "dragging him through forest and fen." He learned horseshoeing to please her. He did not have, however, her fondness for poetry, painting and literature. Manuel delighted in playing skittles - ninepins - and was a good tennis player. We find this interesting note in Current Literature

The Portuguese character is noted for its refinement and for what old-fashioned novelists were wont to term sensibility. Gentleness is its "note" and King Manuel has that. But he has no taste for the arts and literature. This, opines the Paris Gaulois, may tell against the young monarch in so literary and so artistic a court as that over which the late Carlos held sway. Society at Lisbon, and Manuel must live in it if he means ever to rule, is extremely blue stocking in a Latin, feminized way. At the court of Lisbon everyone tries to dazzle everyone else. There are innumerable men of superficial elegance, superficial talent, and superficial science. Peers dabble in poetry, dabble in biology, dabble in culture. Nobody studies hard and all live high. The ladies are the best dressers in Europe and they expect their hands to be kissed by the men, who must go down on one knee when they do so. Manuel is not of this breed. He is the bonnie sailor boy type, laughing and vigorous, who has learned sincerity and bluffness in the navy. He would never dream of translating Shakespeare into Portuguese, as his father and grandfather contrived to do between them. Like his father, however, he learned very early to speak both English and French fluently, to say nothing of his native Portuguese and his second mother tongue, Spanish. He has his father's smile of good humoured complacency and extremely blond hair, forming a fringe around the brow. But in most respects he is a great contrast to the unfortunate Dom Carlos.

Manuel II ruled Portugal in name only - his mother was in charge. Queen Amelia's sister, Princess Waldemar of Denmark, said the widowed Queen Amelia was acting "as the man of the family." Her attempts to combine leaders of the opposing parties into a "Ministry of Concentration" in order to achieve a reformed constitutional monarchy failed. The old Rotative System returned in full force, with two, almost equal parties taking turns dividing the spoils. There were the same old intrigues. The secret Carbonari cells were still armed. Plots were hatched to kill the King. The fall of the monarchy was such a foregone conclusion that reporters, anticipating the event, had arrived in advance of the fact.

Now Manuel had furthered his education in Paris. Soon after his return, his friendship with a dancer scandalized the nation. Francis Gribble reports on the affair without mentioning her name. The friendship was supposedly a true friendship; that is, not for money. But the dancer advertised the romance at every opportunity, right down to showing off the garter given to her by the King during one of her visits to the Palace. The public would normally not be surprised to hear about some such rumor, of dancing girls and perhaps even an orgy or two in the Palace. But the newspapers had a field day with this particular love affair, giving the radical republicans - now a Republican Party filled with 'Puritans' - more ammunition. Hardly anyone opposed the revolution when came in October of 1910. About 100 men were killed and another 500 wounded. It might easily had been put down were it not for misinformation delivered to Manuel and Amelia about the status of the revolt. The royal Palace was shelled by Manuel's own warships. Both Manuel and his mother resolved that it was the King's duty to die in Portugal rather than to flee. Then they fled on the yacht Amelia. And that was the rather absurd fate of Portugal's eight centuries of monarchy.

2004-05-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Bad News

The news of the assassination of the King of Portugal and his eldest son the Duke of Braganca on February 1, 1908, reached London the following day:

'The news of the murder of King Carlos and the Crown Prince of Portugal reached London on Sunday, February 2, 1908, and was received with astonishment as well as horror. Little attention had been paid by the general public to the progress of the struggle, and there had been no thought that the enemies of the Dictator might turn their vengeance from him to the Crown. The murdered King was popular at the English Court, and had repeatedly visited Great Britain. Sympathy was expressed universally, from the Court downwards, and on Monday, February 3, notice was given in both Houses that an address to the Crown would next day be moved expressing the "indignation and deep concern" of Parliament at the murders, and praying His Majesty to signify to the King of Portugal their abhorrence of the crime, and their sympathy with the Royal family and the people. In the Commons this address was moved (the members uncovering) by the Prime Minister, who depicted in vigorous words the indignation and horror everywhere shown at the murder of "the kind, manly, friendly King - an outrage on humanity redeemed only by the courage of a woman.' Mr. Akers-Douglas, in the absence of Mr. Balfour, added a few appropriate words on behalf of the Opposition. In the Lords a similar motion was moved by the Marquess of Ripon and seconded by the Marquess of Landsdowne. The Annual Register 1908 London: 1909, Longmans, Green & Co.

The English public has good reason to be astonished by the assassinations. The public were relatively uninformed of the progress of the struggle because the news was censored beforehand and was difficult to get out of Portugal. But the courts of Europe were apprised of the volatile situation well before the murderous deeds were done. Queen Amelie of Portugal (Princess of Orleans, daughter of Louis Philippe, the Count of Paris) was in England in 1907 for the marriage of her sister, Princess Louise of Orleans, to Charles of Bourbon:

Throughout the wedding festivities the Queen of Portugal, who, the London papers say, kept up a constant communication by telegraph with Lisbon, seem grave and preoccupied. Dispatches from her husband's capital told that the situation both for King Carlos and the dictatorial premier whom he persists in maintaining at the head of affairs had become one of extreme difficulty. Each day witnessed an addition to the number of monarchist politicians who made declarations "in a republican sense," abandoning their former support of the King. The only method of dispatching press news from Portugal last month was to proceed by train from Lisbon to the frontier and telegraph by way of Madrid; but for the sake of the queen of Portugal the rigors of this system were relaxed. Her majesty got news so serious on the even of the wedding, says one account, that she referred jestingly to the possibility of making her home at Wood Norton in the near future.... Current Literature vol. XLIV 1908

We are further informed by Current Literature that "the Queen of Portugal made her visit to Wood Norton for her sister's wedding the occasion for presenting her husband's side of the case to her family." Gossips had it that the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, would meet with King Carlos at Wood Norton, where they would discuss the instability in Portugal The Spanish king had reportedly tolerated Portuguese dissidents to operate in Spain, a sort of dissidence which he would not tolerate if his own constitutional monarchy was at stake. Since Carlos had stayed behind in Portugal, his queen allegedly took up the matter with him when the Bourbon family conferred at Wood Norton, from whence they went on to Windsor, where a total of five Queens and three King "discussed the Bourbon crisis in every aspect."

She (Queen Amelie) won to her way of thinking not only all the Bourbons but it is said King Edward herself. Don Carlos has seen reason to feel aggrieved at the freedom with which revolutionary Portuguese juntas are permitted to agitate in Madrid. Spain is a constitutional monarchy. Alfonso XIII claims to act always within the limits of the organic law of his kingdom. Madrid, however, is the news center of Portugese revolt. The extent to which the influence of the Queen of Portugal was exerted in England to terminate her husband's embarrassments from Spanish sources is one of the most delicate topics connected with the great family gathering of the house of Bourbon....

Stories of the imprisonment of the crown prince of Portugal by his own father, of the discovery of republican conspiracies in the army and of the contemplated flight of Don Carlos from Lisbon, in connection with the rumours of what may have been said at the Bourbon family conference... leave the whole subject of the month's events in obscurity. It was impossible for even the best equipped newspapers in Europe to get uncensored dispatches out of Lisbon. The suspension of the newspapers continued with the sanction of the King. It is thought significant that among the organs thus punished are various Roman Catholic, clerical and conservative journals. At the various Portugese legations in Europe it is maintained that the month's rumours have to do with nothing more serious than measures against anarchists and republican agitators. This sort of talk is pronounced "silly" by that sincere friend of the Portugese dynasty, the Paris Temps. The King, it says, is "outside legality" and the question is now when he will return to "legality."

The Paris Temps had indeed been inclined to support the "legality" of Joao Franco's dictatorship under King Carlos, as well as the dictator's right to make decrees, as had the London Times. Portugal was formally a constitutional monarchy at the time, but the King and his strong man had resorted to a temporary dictatorship to curb political corruption at the highest levels and to strangle threats to the very existence of Portugal's centuries-old monarchy from below. The wealthy, energetic and youthful (about forty) Senhor Joao Franco, who lived in Spartan simplicity in Lisbon with his rich wife, had been ruling Portugal since May of 1907, "unassisted by Parliament," by virtue of a dictatura or legislative lacuna, which, the Paris Temps pointed out, had been regularly exercised over by successive opposition ministries. Franco's "rule or ruin" methods were favorably described in some European quarters as bona fide imperialism.

Such is a sample of the gossip and news prior to the Lisbon assassinations. Whether censored or not, the well established papers were wont to favor the prevailing authority. Sometimes we are tempted to compare newspaper editors with the priests of Apollo, who were inclined to interpret the pythia's rants favorably; that is, in favor of the party most inclined to win. In this case, the illiterate and conservative Portuguese masses, at least according to the Temps and other papers, favored their King and his dictator. Since the established political parties were biting each other's backs, and the republican faction consisted of thinkers, talkers and dreamers, it appeared from a distance that the current authority would rule as usual.

Even Franco, who was intimate with the situation and who thought he was on top of it, was confident of his ultimate triumph on behalf of his king. Dissidents were doing what they do best in Lisbon and Oporto - talking and writing tracts and poems. The army was subsidized with bribes and double-pay for the officers.

No, Franco might not have seen the assassins coming. And King Carlos liked to show off his machismo, going about with little or no security. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Queen Amelie was uneasy and she feared for the lives of her sons if not for herself and her husband. As a matter of fact, she was at Villa Vicosa, her oasis-estate near the border of Spain, just prior to the assassination. She could have easily slipped over into Spain with her sons in the event of revolution. She did visit her mom just over the border at Villa Manrique, returned to Villa Vicosa, then on to Lisbon, where her husband and eldest son would be murdered before he eyes on the way "home." Yet to the public imagination, all might have seemed well beforehand.

Queen Amelie, rich in her own right, owning the finest private estate in Europe, splendid horses, fancy poultry, adoring husband and sons, seemed the happiest of women when she bade her mother good-bye at Villamanrique and returned to Villacosa.

2004-05-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Metaphysical Revolts

"Metaphysical revolts" are attempts to overthrow the Absurd with rational systems. A God-person or Nature-person does not exist according to human desire. Individuals are aliens even to one another although they can communicate if not perfectly commune. The world is surd or deaf. Praying to gods is as absurd as praying to stones, at least at the gross mechanical level. Sisyphus can not merely will the Stone to the top of the hill at a distance: he must set his legs against the earth and his shoulder against the stone, then heave with all his might. The relationship between man and world is absurd; that relationship is the Absurd. Every logical justification of that incongruous relationship, the Absurd, is necessarily ambiguous hence logically defeasible.

Metaphysical revolts are inherently irrational attempts to rationally deny every rational system except one's own rationalizations, in order to set oneself up as Arche and Archon - Origin and Ruler of the universe. The self-styled Monarch or singular Arche of the Absurd is not really the Head of the Universe. He is a clown who stands on his head, in the sand, with his legs split into a T. His every argument, no matter how extended his legal briefs might be, exposes his genitive foolishness.

An attempt to fully reconcile man and world is theoretically absurd, for every theoretical reconciliation is partial and denies the whole. As every sophist worth his salt knows, every such theoretical argument is ambiguous hence is defeasible by counter-argument. Intellectual calisthenics may be harmless and even useful providing that the dynamic dialectic is always ongoing beyond the propositional pauses for reflection. But an attempt to impose a particular "ideology" or logical system of ideas on the world, in an attempt to remake that world is murderous in practice, especially where the social world is involved, for the thorough reconciliation of the irreconcilable, of the generally absurd relation between man and world, would annihilate the individual, in self murder, or, parts of the race or the race itself, in mass murder. A metaphysical revolt, then, is the rebellion of a part against the whole, or, if you will, a demonic or partial rebellion of an individual or group against the whole person, or society projected as the Supreme Being or God.

When applied to the natural world, the metaphysical revolt tends to violence; when widespread, to revolution. Since the individual, despite its socialization into a person, is categorically an anarch that would persist forever unimpeded if only it could, persons are naturally bound to disagree over into just what image the world should be remade. The whole, or Good, or God, really is their innate freedom, the portion of the Power each individual naturally worships for its own good.

Only unconditional terror and rampant organized violence can enslave people for very long in a particular static order. The objective of such a Totalitaria is the death of life - total annihilation. Although metaphysical revolts often proceed with an ethical profession - of the Whole or Man or Love or God - ultimately there is no contrasting evil that might not in practice be done to obtain the supposed Good. Obedient subjects are wanted but their submission can never be absolute. Since individuals are not really predisposed to total obedience, they must be terminated if they threaten the wanted order. Then the pretext, say, of loving unity, is soon exposed for what it is: a hateful unity or hate-others-based love; a screen for self-hatred; an indication of the "death instinct," if you please; the will to destroy the human race and thus prematurely achieve the reconciliation of alienated man with "his" world.

2004-05-13T11:20:00.001-07:00

Nothing is Perfect

By definition a self-conscious individual is necessarily alienated from its world howsoever that world is relatively defined in contrast. Wherefore the individual's taste for the infinite and the repudiation of the finite in the will to persist forever. Despite momentary satisfactions, nothing is perfect as far as the alienated individual is concerned. When something is thoroughly done or completed, there is nothing to add - nothing remains to be done. But for the alienated individual nothing is good enough, nothing is complete. There is always an intuition of something greater than what might be had, something beyond something; that is, an intuition of something even greater than everything, of something albeit nothing beyond the Thingie. A conscious subject without an objective world would be infinitely conscious of nothing, or unconscious, and would be, in fine, nothing, and therefore no longer be alienated from anything at all. That is not to say that existence is imperfect, but to say that nothing is unflawed by relative existence. Nothing is perfect.

2004-05-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

On America's Crusade

President George W. Bush saved his best for last during a rare press conference:

"One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we're asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course, you can. That's why it's important for us to spread freedom throughout the Middle East.... That's why I'm pressing the Greater Middle East Reform Initiative, to work to spread freedom. And we will continue on that. So long as I'm the President, I will press for freedom. I believe so strongly in the power of freedom.... I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom... is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.... That's our obligation. That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned.... And my job as the President is to lead this nation into making the world a better place.... (W)e are making progress...." (1)

The president has occasionally referred to America's "mission" under "Almighty God" as a "Crusade." And, in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward, he disclosed that his ex-president father, the author of the Bush War on Iraq I, was not the strong sort of man he needed to look to for advice, hence he looked up to his holy father, the patriarchal Father of fathers, for condonation of the long-standing plan to start the Bush War on Iraq II, then he proceeded with his pre-emptive mass terrorism campaign dubbed "Shock and Awe."

The majority of Iraqis were duly terrified even though they had become somewhat inured to previous violence at the hands of Saddam Hussein's coalition and the Almighty Coalition. The latest coalition of course was led as usual by the greatest nation on Earth, a nation the likes of which has not been seen since the Roman Empire. It follows that a terrorist attack on the leader of civilization is an attack on civilization itself, hence it must be responded to. Adolf Hitler, guru of teutonic terrorism, put it this way at a military conference on July 25, 1943:

"Terror can only be broken by terror. One has to counter-attack, everything else is nonsense." (2)

Moreover, the local rule of law as well as the laws of ethical civilization must be suspended wherever suspected enemies of the state might be plotting terrorism, whether or not they are citizens of the state. "Lawyers cannot understand that in exceptional times new laws become valid," Hitler noted on September 14, 1941. (3)

Once an enemy state has been shocked and awed by a blitzkrieg, insurgents usually have to be dealt with, usually without a trial. Anything goes: physical and mental torture, murder - whatever. At a December 1, 1942, conference, Hitler declaimed to his generals:

"This has to be hammered into everyone's head, whatever leads to success is right in the conduct of anti-guerrilla operations. That's the point of departure. If someone does something not exactly in accordance with regulations, but achieves complete success, or if someone is faced by an emergency he can deal with in the most brutal way, he's entitled to use any measure that promises success. The goal must be the annihilation of these gangs and the restoration of order." (2)

To wit: All is fair in love and war. Anything goes for the revolutionaries (terrorists) too. That is why every nation should arm its citizens, providing that they are in military organizations. Not only will they be useful for fighting enemy terrorists, but they might come in handy fighting the thugs in charge of legally organized crime - the political leadership in Rome, Berlin, Washington.... On May 16, 1942, Der Fuhrer said :

"To teach a nation the handling of arms is to give it a virile education. If the Romans had not recruited Germans in their armies, the latter would never have had the opportunity of becoming soldiers and, eventually, of annihilating their former instructors." (3)

Of course a small minority of Muslim freedom fighters (terrorists) fought back against the terrifying mechanized horde that quickly destroyed the state of Iraq. Embedded reporters who were not killed or wounded had a thrilling time, and they reported that Americans are at their very best in war.

Still, a few "criminals" and "terrorists" put up a hell of a fight. Indeed, freedom fighters are wont to fight wherever freedom from empires is passionately wanted. Terrible Hitler thought Muslims were better terrorists than Jews and Christians, reasoning that the Almighty Terrorist of Jews and Christians had made cowards of Jews and Christians. Nonsense. Take the Jewish Revolts to begin with. Observe the Protestant Revolts too. Everybody including pagans and atheists at least secretly love the Almighty Terrorist, the Supreme Anarchist who is beyond good and evil, who represents absolute freedom, the will to power; in fine, Power. Religion, including secular political religion, organizes the distribution of Power - every individual, in its will to persist forever and ever, naturally wants it all. Yes, a small minority of freedom fighters (terrorists) always resist, no matter what. For instance, no more than ten percent of the colonial population - the patriots (traitors) - favored America's war for freedom from the British Empire - less than half of them actually took up arms.

The holy father or personal representative of Power to whom Protestant President Bush turns for advice is obviously not the Pope in Rome, nor is he the only unbegotten son of Power whom the president claimed as his political hero in order to get the votes of the religious right that prefers the war-cult of the Old Testament to the love-cult of the New Gospel. The President really does not turn to a person at all but to the unknown, indefinite, infinite Power. The Supreme Power of powers cannot in any way be limited to anything or incarnated in any particular shape or form. In fact, any particular name for X is rather an insult to its spirit. Every Jew knows that very well; and so do Muslims, many of whom are better Jews than Jews in that respect. Certain fundamental Judeo-Christians are aware of it as well; they prefer the Almighty Terrorist of the Jewish faith before it was toned down considerably and fear converted to love by quibbling scribes who were interested in a better place hereafter and therefore casuistically stretched the more terrifying provisions of the Torah. Thank YAHWEH for that and for the Pharisees who in essence found Judeo-Christianity. In any event, absolute liberty and obedience to the Almighty Terrorist's authorized representatives can only be known through the cultivation of gross ignorance or by crushing all opposition as flat as matzo.

With a few glorious exceptions, when reporting on President Bush's press conference the media ignored his underlying political plank - to use the greatest power on Earth to get revenge for his daddy and to free the peoples of the world for American democracy in the Judeo-Christian name of the supreme being, the Almighty for whom might is ultimately right, whether those peoples like that kind of freedom or not. Of course he noted that he, not God, is the one who made the momentous decision to wage war. Mind you that Hitler swore his August 3, 1934, oath to himself albeit in the name of "God" - "I (Adolf Hitler) swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler...."

That is not to imply that George W. Bush is as shocking and awesome as Adolf Hitler, or that his deity is really the sublimated, anglo-american version of the anglo-saxon war "god" (a pagan term for the supreme being), or that the President will wind up his term with a larger body count (than Hitler) with his more sublime method of freeing the world for American democracy by confusedly invoking the misnamed warrior god of the Hebrews.

In any case, this satirical and cynical sort of analysis of war-mongering, moronic bigotry (foolish by-goddery) is considered distasteful if not unpatriotic by most of the media. The jingo-media sold out the credulous American people in hysterical concert, in the most disgraceful manner, and now, wanting the usual pretexts, it is somewhat embarrassed by the President's mention of the real motive stampeding the national cattle into the present costly ordeal.

Solomon, whose empire shrank, warned fools not to count on their riches to win wars. His warning fell on deaf ears. Every empire would save the world for itself, finds the salvation costly, and eventually falls flat. Once the United States of America was won from the British Empire, some Americans wanted to export their revolution; others wanted to simply bear witness, to be a good example to the world. Now it is said that war, not peace, has made American great, and that Americans are greatest when fighting, for only then is their virtue made visible. However that might be, President Bush is certainly not the first leader who believes America should be on a violent crusade to save the world whether it wants to be saved or not. For instance, we might consider a couple of excerpts from Herbert C.Hoover's book, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958):

"America is the only nation since the Crusades to fight other people's battles at her own gigantic loss. We may be proud of that Crusade even if it did fail to bring peace to mankind."
"Like President Wilson and his principal advisers, a substantial part of the American people even at the height of their emotions believed that civilization had to live with these 60,000,000 Germans and that our purpose must be to disarm them, ban their militarists, require them to pay such reparations as were practicable to obtain, and support the efforts of the good men in Germany to build up their new government of, and by, the people."

It took another world war costing millions of lives to obtain the objective. Germany conceived itself as the world-power-state destined to save the decadent world from itself, then went too far, too fast, and learned some very hard lessons to its and the rest of the world's great cost. Today's Germans know that President Bush is no Adolf Hitler, at least not yet. But they and many other peoples around the world do not like the similarities: President Bush was rightly perceived to be the greatest and most imminent threat to world peace. But he is not so perceived by Americans, for they have not suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of their own Almighty, therefore they do not really know "him" very well. Wherefore too many Americans, resting certain on laurels won so far, would unduly lengthen the string of disasters called Crusades instead of following in the footsteps of such emperors as Frederick II, who won his crusade or jihad with the Middle East without an armed force or bodyguard, but by means of peaceful negotiations.

Frederick II (1194-1250), was the king of Sicily (1197-1250), German king (1212-1250), and Holy Roman Emperor (1220-1250). The Pope kept reminding Frederick of the vows he had taken when he was crowned: to go on crusades. But Frederick was not inclined to crusading right off the bat, for he had plenty of problems at home to deal with. Frederick, by the way, as king of Sicily was quite familiar and friendly with Arabs. He believed he was entitled by marriage to be king of Jerusalem. He finally did prepare to embark on a crusade, in 1227, but he was forced to cancel his plan because an epidemic broke out among his crusaders. Pope George IX would not accept the epidemic as an excuse, and excommunicated the emperor. So what? Frederick thumbed his nose at the Pope and set sail in 1228 to the Holy Land, where he peacefully negotiated a deal with Sultan al-Kamil for possession of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. He crowned himself king of Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. He believed he was a messenger of God, compared himself with Christ, and thought his entrance into Jerusalem was similar to Christ's entry on Palm Sunday.

(1) Excerpt from White House transcript, President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference, April 13, 2004, 8:31 PM EDT

(2) Hitler Directs His War - The Secret Records of His Daily Military Conferences, New York: Oxford 1951

(3)Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 - His Private Conversations, New York: Enigma 2000

2004-05-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

The little hitler in every body

An individual would persist forever and ever if it could, brooking no opposition to its persistence. Nonetheless, lacking resistance the anarchistic individual would not even exist as such, would not be in-dividual or divided into megalomaniacal subject and resisting object. That is, the irrational root of violence is within and is the individual factor of the personal equation - a person is the free-willing individual socially conditioned.

Infants are natural-born revolutionaries. They feel omnipotent at first, and tend to revolt against restraints until they learn that total resistance is futile if not downright dangerous. Yet the omnipotent feeling persists throughout the social development of the individual, and, to one extent or another, the resulting person lives under a certain delusion of grandeur, believing at least secretly that the world is at his beck and call, that he is at least in part its savior. Of course the all-important person's delusion is one of persecution when he feels that the whole world is against him.

An "insane" or unwholesome delusion of grandeur may in certain "heroic" cases take on a "sane" or wholesome appearance, and become a popular illusion. A mirage of an oasis or a hero appears to thirsty or power-hungry travellers. A crowd of individuals, lacking the power of leadership, project their own native feeling of omnipotence or freedom onto an individual, recognizing him as a "great man" or "hero," the very man who can quench their thirst for power. Enamoured by the illusion of absolute freedom, they eagerly forsake what remains of their own freedom, and their idol absorbs every drop.

Adolf Hitler, to take an egregious example, was sincerely perceived by the great majority of Germans as their teutonic messiah. His ascent to power was quite easy, for he was building a shadowy state of disgruntled authoritarians within the purportedly democratic state all along.

Now every school child knows about the Beer Hall Putsch, how Hitler got off easy with a short prison sentence, a great opportunity to write about his revolutionary struggle. And we all know about the Red Scare the Nazis provoked with the February 27, 1933 Reichstag Fire. And of course the threat of Bolshevist terrorism among other emergencies called for the March 23, 1933 Enabling Act - the "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich" - which gave legislative power to the Reich cabinet and legalized in advance decrees that "might deviate from the Constitution." We remember well the July 14, 1933 decree making the Nazi party the only lawful party in the Fatherland:

"The National Socialist German Worker's Part constitutes the only political party in Germany. Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of another political party or to form a new political party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with imprisonment of from six months to three years, if the deed is no subject to a greater penalty according to other regulations."

Many of Hitler's storm troopers were disaffected workers who expected him to fulfil his promise of a social revolution and to militarize the SA. No way. There would be social revolution or any other revolution for that matter, not after Hitler's political revolution. For Heaven's sake, Hitler needed industrialists and big businessmen. Unions had to be dissolved and workers virtually indentured to realize their true virtue - they were glad to have jobs and cheap recreation to boot. In fact, Hitler clearly stated on July 6, 1933, that revolution would not become a permanent state of affairs, that "good businessmen" were quite welcome under his regime even if they were not Nazis - and business prospered despite the enormous bureaucracy set up to rationalize his political economy and to collect bribes.

After President Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler combined the offices of president and chancellor in himself, becoming the Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. On August 19, 1934, 95 percent of registered voters approved of Hitler's seizure of absolute power. He took the following oath to himself:

"I (Adolf Hitler) swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and peole, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath."

A survivor of Hitler's egomaniacal reign of terror claimed that a little hitler exists in every body.

2004-05-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

Forgiving Groundless Hatred

Forgiveness is called for if we are to achieve lasting peace. But what is forgiveness? The notion seems simple enough. However, when we conduct an inquiry, we discover that most people are rather unsure of its precise meaning - individuals who are most certain of its meaning have difficulty reaching an agreement about the proper application of the notion.

The clergyman Horace Bushnell remarked, "The matter of forgiveness by men is so indeterminately thought, or nearly so unattempted by analysis, that we really do not know what is in it, or how it comes, or what it does. We talk of it in a certain loose way, but we have really no moral casuistry by which we regulate our practice in it." (1)

Maurice Materlinck wrote, in a chapter headed 'The Forgiveness of Injuries', "Take, for instance, the word 'forgive,' which appears, at first sight, one of the most beautiful in the language: does this word still, did it ever possess the sense of almost divine majesty which we assign to it? Is it not one of the terms that best set forth the good-will of men, inasmuch as it contains an ideal that has never been realized?" (2)

To achieve an ideal such as universal love on Earth, perhaps we should continue speaking in loose ways regarding the means to achieve love, given the fact that people tend to hate each other and will even do violence to one another over the various dogmatic definitions put into practice by political factions and religious sects.

Krishnamurti was bold enough to say, "Violence is not merely killing another....When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." (3)

With all due respect to Krishnamurti - he declined the appointment to be the Theosophical Society's messiah - our differences do not always result in violence: they are also the spices of life which make life more palatable. Therefore we do more than merely tolerate cultural differences. In fact, we actively appreciate them, especially the highest expressions of art that do, despite the differences in style and technique, beautifully express universal truths. The tragedy arises when men take some part for the whole and organize wholesale campaigns of terror against their counterparts. Otherwise there would be plenty of food and shelter and friends around, lovers embracing, kids playing safely in the yards and streets, and so on and so forth. The partiality is especially tragic when the part murdered for would be trivial if it were not for its symbolic significance.

For instance, the absolute, undivided control over a small piece of real estate, a hill or dome somewhere; better yet, say a holy rock under a sacred dome. And how ironic it is that both parties disputing the high place abjure idolatry! Jeremiah's warnings were in vain. Authors still declare, "There were no idols in the Temple," forgetting that the Capitalized Temple or Capitol Building itself has become the grandest idol or spirit-possessed fetish of all. Thus people with rocks in their heads bang their heads into the wall over the holy rubble, and weep because the wall no longer protects them, while their cousins hurl rocks from their slings. Each participant in this groundless hatred for one's own kind has a piece of the Rock in his unenlightened oyster; how irritating! Pearls of wisdom they are not; nor are they ideals: they are concrete idols. Alas, if only the rocks, since nobody wants to share them or move them, could be dissolved by some sort of acid, or by the magic potion of forgiveness.

Forgive ('let go'). Forgiveness, no matter how loosely the term is defined, is the letting go of hatred and the renunciation of revenge. We have a great deal of political and religious hatred and revenge-seeking in the world. Yet, the most glaring example for us all to learn from is the current episode of the perennial conflict in the Mideast. It is said that those who do not know history are bound to repeat their mistakes; sometimes we have more than due cause to wonder if those mistakes are repeated because everybody has been reading the same pages for too long and are, therefore, by virtue of the power of suggestion, going through the same violent motions over and over and over and over again ad infinitum - hence defining their insanity. In view of the vicious habit to repeat history, we can understand why some emperors and dictators wanted to burn the classic books and to bury the scholars alive.

People seem bound and determined to make a difference and get their identity by fighting over it; otherwise, they would have too much in common to make war over. Israel in its militant form is a regressive reaction formation to German imperialism, the ancient Roman imperialism revisited upon them in its most terrible aspects. When the modern Jews fought back and revolted against the remnant of British imperialism in Palestine, and proceeded to seize Palestinian land, they, like other budding nations in the past, adopted the very nationalistic attitude which the World War was supposed to have rendered obsolete. And their Arab enemies adopted the nationalistic techniques borrowed from the great colonial powers to claim independence from those powers, then employed them against their most admired enemy, the state of Israel. Thus do enemies define each other - in bloodshed. What a shame it is that the animosity of the Arabs is focused on the Israelis with whom they have so much in common, including their blood. Their 'races' are cultural fictions; the ethnocentric, genealogical idolatry is absurd. As for culture, are not Muslim Arabs frustrated Jews? Are they not even better monotheists than Jews?

After all, Muhammad did not want to start a brand new religion: he wanted to bring the Hebrew message to his people. The Jews, however, insisted on quibbling with Muhammad over religious folklore. Alas for unity, there happened to be a number of local variations of the same old stories - including the story of Gog and Magog elaborated by Josephus. A map was laid out for groundless hatred: the gate to hell was thrown open. Even closely related tribes became barbarian hordes to one another.

Given more cooperation and less groundless hatred, today's Muslims would be Jews. Of course Jesus presents a crucial obstacle to unity, for Muhammad recognized Jesus as a prophet, not as a god. Still, Muhammad began his religious and secular career as a lover - during his travels, he overheard a great Christian preaching the love religion and was taken in by the message. We must not think that Islam had its origin in hate. We recall that Muhammad's tribal relatives persecuted him and his followers for years before he took up his first militant jihad. He was not the ruthless caravan robber he is made out to be; in fact, he was the manager of his wife's trading business. He was approaching fifty before the militant jihad began in earnest. He had tried unmitigated Christian love, but there was just too much groundless hatred. Love, alone, did not work. Since there was no emperor to save his faith, Muhammad became his own Constantine.

Muslim and Jew, Arab and Hebrew, the further one goes back in history and into the desert with his camels, the closer one comes to the common origin that spawned a rather iconoclastic and revolutionary lot of noble ('arab') tribes. Why do they not join forces now and provide a better example to the neo-liberal, imperialist infidels who have lost touch with the source of the spirit of freedom?

The old leaders of Palestine and Israel served their purpose with the revolutionary violence of their youth. As natural death draws near, some of them would leave the world in peace; they do not want their young sons to have fingers bigger than warring thighs of the old patriarchs. But it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Still, the young must passionately take up love-making.

What must be done? There are many positive steps that can be taken to resolve conflicts, such as making laws and obeying them. 'Thou shalt not kill' is a good place to start. Some teachers insist the relevant word is 'murder', not 'kill', and proceed to stretch the law to justify the state murders of war and the death penalty. It does seem downright immoral and foolish to forgive and to love criminals - that might encourage crime and lead to the extinction of all those who forgive and love their enemies. Thus the vicious cycle continues, and war on domestic and foreign enemies is justified as necessary for the evolution of morality: then war is the father of all good things.

Nevertheless it is wise to examine the alternatives to violence no matter how extreme; for instance, the 'foolish' pacifist approach of the radical Christians. Of course Christians did not invent love and forgiveness and pacifism. Jews have long had a pacific philosophy or doctrine of non-resistance, not only in the interest of self-preservation, but also because of their altruistic love for humanity.

The effectiveness of primitive survival techniques diminished with technological advances in the hands of ruthless sociopaths. High technology, low morality. is a terrible combination. We are familiar with the tragic scene: Jews standing in line waiting for a place by the trench; a family standing nude before the trench with eyes uplifted, praying even with smiling faces; the Nazis moving down the line slaughtering them. The younger ones wanted to fight, and some fought heroically to the death, for example, in the Warsaw Ghetto. When it became evident that modern technological methods of warfare and execution could destroy the Jewish culture, violent resistance seemed absolutely necessary.

But now the militant response has gone too far. The state of Israel has inherited the brutal features of the very nationalism so many died fighting against in the world wars. Now when we see the tanks rolling around in the rubble of Palestine (and more U.S. tanks rolling around in the rubble of its Palestine - Iraq) we cannot help but think of Hitler and to compare the Shield of David with the Swastika. Palestine is not Nazi Germany. The Palestinians are certainly no threat to the Jewish 'race', as Prime Minister Sharon claimed; he does not represent the Jewish world culture, and if the secular state of Israel were lost yet again, that would not destroy the Bride of the Lord or the Jewish culture.

Even if Hitler's forces of evil were running rampant again, even if Heaven were a gross hoax, absolute pacifism might be a viable approach. If it is better to suffer an evil than to do one, then to die heroically on the cross would be a great honor. We have heard soldiers say, "A life not worth fighting for is not worth living." But some philosophers say, "A life that must be killed for is not worth living, even if it means the extinction of the human race." That is the extreme faith of foolish people. Ironically, soldiers have defended the fools inside that faith provided they remain pacific. If everyone joined this faith, there will be nobody left to defend - a small ceremonial guard would suffice. Everyone would drink from the loving cup then.

Again we ask, What must be done? We want a reasonable answer, not a foolish one. I think Israel should unilaterally declare peace, pull out of Palestinian territory, defend its border, bolster internal security, let the Palestinians apply for security clearances, and, if the bombers slip through and kill thousands of Israelis, take no retaliatory action whatsoever. This would require forgiveness. It would not be the forgive yourself, feel-good or therapeutic forgiveness of popular psychology, the forgiveness that, for example, allows one to forgive a criminal before executing him. No, it would be the forgiveness of something given, something sacrificed, something suffered for peace, in conjunction with reasonable self-defense. And that would be a Moral Beacon unto the world.

E

Notes:

(1) Bushnell, Horace, FORGIVENESS AND LAW, New York: Regina, 1975

(2) Maeterlinck, Maurice, THE MEASURE OF THE HOURS, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913

(3) Krishnamurti, J., FREEDOM FROM THE KNOWN, New York: Harper & Row

2004-05-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

Ford's anti-terrorism proviso

The Ford Foundation has edited its grant contract to include an anti-terrorism provision which specifies that funding will be withdrawn from any university advocating violence. The proviso prohibits the promotion of "violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any state."

Last fall, a Jewish news service accused the Ford Foundation of funding anti-Israeli Palestinian groups. The foundation - endowed with funds donated by Henry and Edsel Ford - has long been disparaged for funding of Palestinian causes. Henry Ford, incidentally, was responsible for the circulation of the hateful antisemitic tract, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, for which Reverend Gerald K. Smith, the infamous bigot and most egregious hypocrite of his time, wrote an introduction. Ford, like many other gullible industrialists, admired the Nazi's non-union leadership program - the Nazi bureaucracy was absurd, but despite the bribery, profits initially soared. Of course the old business ties to the Nazi industrialists, including those of the Prescott Bush family, were immediately forgiven if not forgotten.

Jewish leaders are pleased with the new proviso in the Ford grant contract. In an article dated May 4, 2004, The Wall Street Journal quoted David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee: the new Ford provision is "eminently reasonable," said Mr. Harris. "I would like to think that with or without Ford's language, America's universities would not in any way want to associate themselves with the promotion of violence, terrorism, or bigotry." Nine elite universities, citing the right of academic freedom, have protested against the new language because they believe it is too broad. They are correct.

Any proviso that does not absolutely disapprove of the promotion of violence in any shape or form whatsoever would be ambiguous. If the Ford proviso applied to any organization or person, then the governing authority which ultimately secures the right of contract where the foundation is domiciled, the current government of the United States of America, would certainly not be entitled to a Ford grant. The Bush government of the United States of America state has just employed massive violence to destroy the state of Iraq, and is presently engaged in organized terrorism there to violently impose its kind of democracy on Muslim people as part of an overall, divinely ordained Judeo-Christian plan to free the peoples of the world for American "democracy" whether they like it or not.

The war president of the United States claimed Jesus Christ for his personal political hero during the presidential campaign. Since then he has repeatedly referred to the U.S. organized terrorism in Iraq in bigoted ("By God") terms, as a religious "mission." He has used language such as "my Father in Heaven," "Almighty God," "Crusade" and the like to support his divinely ordained jingoism. Indeed, General MacArthur once said that war is the religious preoccupation of virtuous men.

The established media in the United States would not be qualified for a Ford grant. The media routinely advocated and continues to advocate massive violence and terrorism in Iraq. The established media led the hysterical rush to war, conducted the hourly outcries to destroy the state of Iraq. Of course the U.S. press largely supported the violent closure of Muqtada al Sadr's press organ because it advocated violence against the U.S. occupation in the name of that Muslim cleric's brand of divinely ordained freedom.

Now Iraq and Palestine both look like Nazi-occupied non-states: tanks rolling through the rubble et cetera. They were shocked and awed by the almighty, but they continue to fight back, and the almighty cannot seem to violently accomplish what their own almighty violently accomplished. Yes, only ten percent of them fight back, while the rest want peace - we recall that the traitors - "patriots" because they won - who supported the American War of Independence amounted to no more than ten percent of the population including the revolutionary military forces.

The modern state of Israel should not get a Ford grant: it is grounded in terrorism - the propagandists managed to get the American press to refer to the Jewish terrorists as "freedom fighters." And the terrorism there continues as the United States of America funds the organized terrorism, supplying Israel with weapons to kill the Palestinian freedom fighters (or terrorists) and any innocents who happen to be around at the time.

Violence is naturally terrifying. If violence is supported violence is promoted. No person or organization who supports in any way the violence and terrorism of the United States of America, or of any other organization of person for that matter, would get a Ford grant if the Ford provision were applied universally. If the good American people adopted the Ford proviso, they would not pay taxes, buy newspapers, read books, go to movies, watch television, do business with most companies. Maybe they would be better off in the long run without the hourly promotion of violence. Maybe they would better off if they were not in such an all-fired hurry to get to that "better place" preachers are so fond of mentioning at memorial services.

2004-05-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

When is violence justified?

In the end only the urge for self-preservation can conquer.... Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish." Adolf Hitler

Albert Camus, philosophy student and novel writer, worked with the French Resistance during the war. We are therefore not surprised by his keen interest in violence, in suicide, murder, rebellion, revolution, war, or by his struggle to answer the question, When, if ever, is violence justified?

Camus was an atheist. God is deaf to our pleas simply because no personal god exists to hear them. Neither is Nature or the world a person: the natural world is surd or deaf to man; the world does not care one way or another for humankind, wherefore the relationship between man and world is absurd. But that is not to say that life is meaningless or that the world is not worth living in. Man is on his own and must decide what to do with his life. Man is a moral creature. Camus was a moralist who found the natural world pleasing in many respects; for example, he liked to play soccer on a sunny day. He was educated by Catholics hence he was unavoidably influenced by traditional Christian morality; that is, he was a Christian atheist.

Limited violence, Camus thought, is justified under certain conditions. People have a natural right to unite and in their solidarity to defend themselves against violence and organized terrorism. For instance, Jews enjoying a game of soccer on a sunny day would be justified in defending themselves against a violent assault by a gang of anti-Semitic thugs or anyone else for that matter. On a much larger scale, fighting the monomaniacal plague of totalitarianism best represented by Hitler was justified. Most of us would agree that World War II was a just war for all of those who fought the nazi and fascist aggressors.

Although Christ said something about turning the other cheek, a study of Christian literature informs us that "just" wars are traditionally defined as defensive wars, not one-sided conquests. That groups have a natural right to self-defense and that such a right originates in the individual's right to live is a nondenominational, plain and simple, commonsensical truth. But it is not as simple as it seems. For one thing, the question of who strikes the first blow might not matter: pre-emptive strikes on mere suspicion are allowed although not necessarily condoned. The natural right of the individual is its dog-eat-dog right to survive. The exercise of that right might under some conditions include killing others for food or other means of subsistence; if others have no food, they might be slaughtered and eaten.

But few of us live in a primitive state of nature; we have so organized our families, clans, nations and states to resolve internal conflicts; yet those conflicts are never fully resolved, and the nations themselves struggle in an international jungle pending the institution of a global state or "one world order."

"Nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possess the force to take it.... (If present holders object), then the law of self preservation goes into effect, and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take." Adolf Hitler

If a particular government fails to provide needy people who are not able to find work by regular means, for those who are not able to obtain security or food and shelter if not a job, they have a natural right, instead of defending that government, to repudiate it and resort to crime, which is a revolt against the state, and even to organize the violent overthrow of the government in order to survive. After all, a man who has a duty to work and no attendant right to work or to subsist, has a right to starve, or to rob and to kill if he must do so to survive.

On the government's side of the equation we discover no absolute, theoretical limit to the sovereignty of a state organized by the people for their own "welfare," other than the ability of dissenters to defend themselves against what they perceive as undue encroachment on their natural rights. The government responsible may take all actions deemed necessary to secure the welfare of the governed howsoever that welfare might be defined by the duly constituted authorities. At the very least people should not want for security, for work, food and shelter, no matter what the form of government might be, providing that they do their duty and are obedient to the point of picking up arms to defend the state - the defense might include conquest for resources or pre-emptive strikes against plotting "enemies of our kind freedom." Those who refuse work or who revolt might be imprisoned in concentration camps or otherwise disposed of. Ultimately, as Kant duly noted, "The ruler has only rights against the subject, no duties." Hegel, who identified the state with a world spirit or ruler of the moral universe, insisted that the state "has the supreme right against individuals whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.... for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges."

When, if ever, is violence justified? Germans who traded their right to starve under a democratic republic for jobs subserving Hitler believed organized terrorism and mass violence was justified by the conditions as they perceived them. Of course people who abhor violence find no easy answer, especially if they have the leisure to write about the subject. Shelves and shelves of books have not adequately answered the pressing question. Albert Camus, who abhorred the world-state violence of Hitler and fought against it, found time to ponder the subject at great length.

As for highly organized terrorism - wars - a few scholars have claimed that there is no good reason for war, that war is irrational - war just is. Indeed, there is something irrational about violence. It is lop-sided, it hates or ignores the other side, it struggles for a one-sided victory, for the death of the ratio. Of course there is always a better way to do things, to achieve ends mutually, if only the parties would reach a reasonable agreement. Murdering a member of one's own race is a partial self-murder or suicide. However logical the arguments for peace might be, maybe we cannot become a peaceful race because peace is not something that can be willed because it is not our nature to be peaceful, because peace would require an impossible extirpation of a native "will to absolute power." Maybe human beings are natural born killers. If we are that, then human beings have sufficient reason to be paranoid to make pre-emptive strikes here and there no matter how good the intelligence might be - of course some enemies will be punished for one of the crimes they did not commit, but still they have it coming.

Alas for the pacifists, then, for members of the wise species have such a natural urge to violence and an attendant fear of its consequences that they persistently organize terror and kill people merely suspected of wanting to kill them first. Mobsters kill their fellows simply because they suspect them of being traitors, of talking or stealing or plotting to kill them, and they resort to killing the innocent wives and children of their enemies to terrorize their enemies into submission; states legally use the same tactics. And to excuse themselves, the leaders might say that that they are only defending themselves and their kind, and that a life not worth killing for is not worth living. The extremists opposed claim that a life that must be killed for is not worth living. Some pacifists, we recall, said that even Hitler should have been capitulated to, even if that meant a trip to the showers and the ovens.

When, then, if ever, is violence justified? Should we heed Nietzsche's Zarathustra? "Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long." Should we believe Treitschke? "War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an existency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of War.... That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral."

Coupons

2004-05-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

The Ideology Disease

There seems to be something wrong with our Western civilization today, led by the United States of America, the only super power in the world, an empire reminiscent of the Roman Empire. The United States seeks to fashion the world in its own image, with or without the consent of that world, as did the Roman, French, and German empires. The United States wants to make the world safe for its version of democracy whether the world wants it or not, and now its leaders are eager to make pre-emptive strikes and to wage offensive wars far from home to obtain equality under its definition of the law that all liberated peoples should obey. The United States is willing to go it alone and to kill as many people as might be necessary to liberate them from themselves, that all the survivors may become productive members of the New World Order. While the wars to end all wars continue, a few Americans, very few, are becoming increasingly inclined to feel that the arrogant effrontery of the American government, which is enormously popular in the United States, together with the violent action it has taken against the will of the overwhelming majority of the people of the rest of the world, is an inauspicious sign, perhaps of an impending precipitous decline and fall.

We think there must be something wrong with the American ideology, something that is paving the ethical highway to hell. Let us ignore the supposed differences between ideologies, and propose, just for the sake of argument, that ideology itself is the problem. We cannot help but notice that, no matter what sort of ideology a person thinks he adheres to, he is never wrong. No matter what sort of evidence is presented to refute him, he is always right. He is a slippery character armed with bowls of red herrings. What ever the reality might be, he will contrive statistics to suit his ideological prejudice, or he will simply ignore contrary evidence and say, "To hell with the facts, to hell with current circumstances, we must keep the goal in mind, and this is the only way to get there." Yet, in the very next breath, he will speak of adhering to his facts, to his concrete interpretation of reality, and denounce 'utopian' thinking. In fact, his answer to every pressing question is derived from his ideology, not from reality. No experiment or argument will suffice to give him the slightest doubt about his ideological perspective on the world. And he will insist he adheres to it when he acts against it - he cannot see his self-contradiction in the mirror even when his hypocrisy is so blatant that it is obvious to a seven-year old child.

Ideological thinkers seem to be infected with rigid, highly organized illusions. Marx and Engels said ideology is "empty talk about consciousness", that it is "false" and "illusory", as opposed to "real, positive science" and "real knowledge." Engels coined the phrase "false consciousness" as a synonym for "ideology." Americans apparently caught the ideological disease from the French - we understand that Destutt de Tracy invented Ideologie. Napoleon labeled those who practiced ideology, Ideologues, and complained that France had suffered the ideological disease.

"We must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered on Ideology," said Napoleon, "that shadowy metaphysics which subtly seeks for first causes on which to base the legislation of peoples, rather than making use of laws known to the human heart and of the lessons of history. These errors must inevitably and did in fact lead to the rule of bloodthirsty men." (Moniteur - 21 December 1812)

The disease apparently caused illiterate people to think they could constitute a brotherhood of equals under a free republican government. John Adams, a highly educated Federalist, the world's leading authority on the history of constitutions, wrote to Thomas Jefferson about the absurdity of that proposition in his latter dated July 13, 1813. Apparently Jefferson had caught the deluding mental disease some time before during a visit to France:

"Dear Sir.... The first time that you and I differed in opinion on any material position, was after your arrival from Europe, and that point was the French Revolution. You were well persuaded in your own mind, that the nation would succeed in establishing a free republican government. I was well persuaded in mind, that a project of such a government over five and twenty millions, when four and twenty millions and five hundred thousand of them could neither read nor write, was unnatural, irrational and impracticable as it would be over the elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, wolves and bears in the royal menagerie at Versailles. Napoleon has lately invented a word which perfectly expresses my opinion, at that time and ever since. He calls the project Ideology; and John Randolph, thought he was, fourteen years ago, as wild an enthusiast for equality and fraternity as any of them, appears to be now a regenerated proselyte to Napoleon's opinion and mind, that it was all madness.

"... Inequalities of mind and body are so established by God Almighty, in His constitution of human nature, that no art or policy can ever plane them down to a level. I have never read reasoning more absurd, sophistry more gross, in proof of the Athanasian creed, or Transubstantiation, than the subtle labors of Helvetius and Rousseau, to demonstrate the natural equality of mankind. Jus cuique, the golden rule, do as you would be done by, is all the equality that can be supported or defended by reason, or reconciled to common sense...

"... When the French assembly of notables met, and I say that Turgot's 'government in one centre, and that centre the nation', a sentence as mysterious or as contradictory as the Athanasian creed, we about to take place, and when I saw that Shay's rebellion was about breaking out in Massachusetts, and when I say that even my obscure name was often quoted in France as an advocate for simple democracy, which I say that the sympathies in America had caught the French flame, I was determined to wash my hands as clean as I could of all this foulness...."

Of course Jefferson was not convinced by Adams. In his March, 14, 1820 letter to Adams, Jefferson praised the leading Ideologue, Destutt de Tracy, the man who called his science of ideas, Ideologie, as one of the "ablest metaphysicians living." Jefferson included Tracy's Ideology in an outline of a college curriculum he sent to Peter Carr in 1814. Ideology was included in the curriculum finally established at the University of Virginia in 1824:

I. Latin and Greek, higher grade, Hebrew, Rhetoric, Belles Lettres, Ancient History, Ancient Geography.

II. French, Italian, Spanish, German, English (Anglo-Saxon), Modern History, Modern Geography.

III. Higher Numerical Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigonometry, Plane and Spherical Geometry, Mensuration, Navigation, Conic Sections, Fluxions, or Differentials, Military and Civil Architecture.

IV. Mechanics, Statics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics, Optics, Astronomy, Law and properties of bodies.

V. Chemistry, Mineralogy, Geology, Rural Economy, Botany, Zoology.

VI. Anatomy, Surgery, History of Medicine, Physiology, Pathology, Materia medica, Pharmacy.

VII. Mental Science, Ideology, General Grammar, Logic, Ethics.

VIII. Common and Statute Law, Chancery, Laws Feudal, Civil, Mercatorial, Maritime Law of Nature and Nations, Government, Political Economy.

Notably absent from the curriculum are courses we would find today in the department of religion within many colleges of arts and humanities. We recall here that Jefferson abolished the professorship of divinity at William and Mary in 1799 to make way for law, medicine, chemistry, modern languages; and, in 1814, he omitted theology from all future proposals of subjects to be taught. But never mind. Ideology, even if it be false consciousness or illusory thinking, might be more convenient than theology nowadays; the churches do not seem to provide the attractive, viable alternative to secular life as they once did. Yet even atheists need religion, hence they might turn to ideology. Ideology is political theology. Political theology and religious ideology both worship absolute Power, but politics is more concerned with the material distribution of Power. Ideological religions can be just as intolerant as theological religions - people have used them all to justify mutual mass-murder, often in the name of the same god, who, of course, favors the victor.

Therefore, in order to make the world safe from ideology, it should behoove us to inquire into the etiology of the ideological disease. Of course we presume that the disease is not, as some thinkers insist, actually good for us. We reject the presumption that peace is a sort of malaise indicating the need for profuse bleeding, that it is, in English, a malease precedent to yet another healthy outbreak of war to temporarily decide an ideological difference. But we can hardly discover the cause of the ideological disease unless we have some idea of what ideology is. Since our ideology is allegedly a French export, an invention named Ideologie by a French man, and was spread by its carriers contemptuously called Ideologues by Napoleon Bonaparte, we should turn back the pages of history to the Ideologues for an understanding of ideology.

Regarding John Adams' Letter

The Athanasian Creed deemed absurd by John Adams is the doctrine that god, the father, is of the same substance as his son. The Trinitarian doctrine itself was deemed logically absurd since it violated the fundamental law of static logic, the law of identity, that A = A, from which follows that A cannot be both A and not-A. The forms of these arguments actually preceded Christianity, and were based on the natural observation that father, mother, and child were a unity, of one family, from which were projected triunes of deities. The Christological arguments continued the logic-juggling of pre-Christian games - in Bharata, the loser of these games played by wise men had to submit as a disciple to the man who had mastered him, or else be beheaded. The Christological arguments or dialectics, although seemingly absurd and silly, helped develop not only static logic(s) but our modern dynamic logic as well.

The doctrine of Transubstantiation criticised by John Adams refers to the belief that the bread shared at communion is transformed into and therefore is the actual blood and flesh of Jesus Christ - this practice was identified by some thinkers as a vestige of the early human sacrificial or food-sharing ritual, where, to appease the highest power, the food was offered to him first; what he did not take was shared with the others, first his main troop and the high priests, who were the cooks, then with the rest of the population including the poor - to share with the poor was important for the maintenance of the overall ideal. In some cultures the high power or head man was incorporated for his power when he was killed or otherwise died. The highest power of all was of course invisible or spiritual, to whom was offered the smoke and heat from the sacrificial fire. Aromatic materials or herbs were burned on the food for the enjoyment of the one-god or Sun-god - the fire was associated with the Sun, fire being a gift of god, the Sun. The sacred cooking implements and furniture evolved around the primitive campfire. The tripod (ting in China) was a cooking kettle, a bowl for food, a bowl for gambling to determine the will of god, a medium for sacred symbols, a trophy for winning warriors and atheletes, a chair for the priestess to sit on when delivering oracles, etc. Of course the altar was the table of the Lord - the Church once divided it into two parts: male and female. The sacred power beverage was discovered by the cooks who attended the fires while the others were hunting or making war - they drank the fermented beverage at first, but eventually swore off of it to maintain intellectual control. According to this view, the Pope is God's Head Chef. The garb he wears and his staff are derived from the habit of the ancient cave-man hero of 40,000 years ago, who was called Hercules by many peoples. The habit was continued by the ancient Egyptian priests, the Cynics, and so on.

2004-05-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

Are we surd?

Absurd is derived from (ab) 'surd,' defined in Webster's Third New International Dictionary as follows:

surd adj [L. surdus dull-sounding, silent, deaf; akin to L. susurrus hum, murmur - more at SWARM] 1; lacking sense; lacking reason or rationale: INSENSATE, - D.C. Williams 2: VOICELESS - used of speech sounds; opposed to sonant
surd n -s: one that is surd: as a: an irrational radical with rational radicand (the square root of 3 and the square root of 2/3 are surds) b: a surd speech sound c: an unknown or irrational quality (the uncharted surd at the heart of European politics - William Barrett)

Albert Camus used the term 'absurd' as a point of departure, say, for musing on the apparent meaningless of human life in a godless world that is deaf to humankind, as if man, whose necessary virtue as a human being is his reason, were an alien creature incapable of fully reconciling himself with that world.

The human race was committing suicide at the time. Millions of human beings were murdering each other for one "good" reason or another. It was all quite logical, at least for those who needed a rational cause to destroy each other, that they might kill in cold blood, denying all the while that they were motivated by irrational passions. Of course mass suicide for whatever reason would appear to be absurd or ridiculous to a pacific race visiting from planets located somewhere on those nebulous frontiers of outer space where no man has gone before. As the world war progessed, many human beings began to realize that war is inherently irrational - a few astute students of war threw in the towel and declared that there is no reasonable justification for war, that war just is, period.

Now we might disagree with the implication that making war is as absurd as a man gesticulating to the remote person he is conversing with on a telephone. Or, more to the point, that no logical reconciliation is possible between man and world, that there is no such thing as "man's world" in the possessive sense, that the relationship between the two shall always be incongruous and irreconcilable; in fine, that the compresence of man and world is inherently absurd.

Today we would not readily admit that world and man are deaf to one another, that neither gods nor world really give a whit for humankind. After all, we have managed to get along with the world for millions of years. Of course the world is not humane nor a person at all, but surely the world speaks to us, figuratively speaking, and surely we hear it in logical terms, in terms of regular natural law. The regular world hears and responds to us, wherefore we survive, and, thanks to our conversation with the world, we have learned how to survive for longer periods of time in large numbers.

It is only the disorderly natural disasters imposed on our kind no matter what we do that pose an insoluble problem, a problem which superstitious people identified with the gods or a single, terrifying, unknown god of death, a god who does not really give a damn for man although many men worship and emulate him and commit mass suicide in his name. Any absurdity whatsoever, including the mutual mass-murder of war, can be justified in the name of the imitated god of death - the "necessity" of such nonsense is simply another one of "god's mysteries."

But the human species by virtue of its reasoning power has managed to solve many problems and to dispel most of the mysterious spells. Almost all of the unknown natural territory on Earth has been explored and conquered. Nature has lost her charms: Nature is dead. The god of death has lost his mystery, hence God has been pronounced dead. Still death looms ahead for every individual. The death of the individual may be necessary for the evolutionary progress of the species, but whither does humankind or the world for that matter progress but to extinction? Therefore Existence will be dead. Life is meaningless in the long run, and the relationship of aliens to the world is absurd. Therefore it might be said that anything is permitted for the fun of it, that anything goes for the hell of it, let god have the hindmost.

But that is absurd, I think! Death remains the uncharted surd at the heart of life. There must be a better way of charting a course than killing each other over Nothing instead of having faith in Nothing. People are in too big of a hurry to kill people lately, they are in too big of a hurry to die, in my opinion. The world is not deaf. The world will provide.

2004-05-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
davidarthurwalters.blogspot.com

May 6, 2004

Customer Complaints Department
THE KANSAS CITY STAR

Subject: Heavenly Bodies Abused

Dear Sir or Madame:

On April 23, 2004, the following grammatical abuse of heavenly bodies appeared in the Kansas City Star article entitled '$1.5 million buys book that put world in its place':

"Published in Latin in 1540, the book is one of the few remaining first editions of the Narratio prima by... Goerg Joachim Rheticus. Three years before ... Copernicus published De revolutionibus, the revolutionary treatise stating that the sun, and not the earth, was at the center of the universe, Rheticus published Narratio prima.... In 1540... it was scientific and church canon that God's earth, and thus mankind, occupied the center of the universe. Copernicus had know the real truth for years. The Earth spun on its axis and the planets revolved around the sun...."

I have added bold emphasis to certain names which should be capitalized if this generally received rule were followed: Capitalize proper nouns and names. At least the names of heavenly bodies should be capitalized where astronomical objects are the subject of an article. Evidently neither rule was followed in the above case, and it is difficult to ascertain from the inconsistent handling of our dear Earth whether any governing rule at all was applied. Therefore I respectfully request that you examine my brief argument below and cause to have published an appropriate response to this complaint. In the event that you agree with my argument, I believe that the publication of a brief statement of error and correction therefor would suffice, together with an apology for the grammatical abuse of heavenly bodies, if not an apology for insulting the gods or goddesses they are named for, or at least an apology for logical inconsistency whether or not English usage or your editor is at fault. On the other hand, if you find my argument spurious, I urge you to publish an Apologia for the abuse of heavenly bodies.

The name of our planet, 'Earth', appears in the Star article three times, yet is capitalized only once, and then not in immediate possessive relation to an originally pagan name for a supreme deity, 'God', hence it cannot be argued that God was capitalized and not Earth in order to endow God with supremacy over Earth in that special case, as Earth's creator, landlord, or owner.

'Sun' is the English name we have given to the sole star of our Solar System - the name of the system involving the Sun and her associated objects. Of course Solar System is named after Sol; two Roman (not "roman") gods were called Sol (Helios, in Greece) - or we might suppose that Sol was divided into two personas. Sunne is the name of the Saxon Sun-god, while Sunna is the name of the Scandinavian Sun-goddess. The English 'Sun' was feminine and was referred to as "she" until the sixteenth century - "she" was not necessarily personified.

In my opinion, when we use the name 'Sun' for other stars, we should write, "other Suns," not "other suns," just as we would write "other Hitlers" instead of "other hitlers" to designate dictators like Hitler, or "other Marys" instead of "other marys" to indicate other women named Mary.

Mind you, for the sake of argument I ignore the British-led editorial revolt against the capitalization craze that raged awhile back, hence the current British preference for the small case for many things we Americans would capitalize. Still, most British publications follow the rule of good English and capitalize the names of heavenly bodies during astronomical discourse. If the excerpt I referred to above appeared in British journals, the names 'Earth' and 'Sun' would be properly capitalized. Furthermore, that is the usage specified by Webster's International Dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style.

Moreover, 'Earth' is the name we have given to our home planet, and, when referring metaphorically to similar planets of other Suns, we should write, "other Earths," and not "other earths" - if the planet were inhabited, we would refer to it as "their Earth" or "their planet" and not "their earth." If it would please us to refer generically to the substance underfoot for which we sometimes use the common noun, 'dirt,' then uncapitalized 'earth' would do.

Of course, if another planet had satellites, say three of them similar to our Moon, we would write out "Moons" and not "moons."

To stretch our argument to the final frontier, the term 'Universe' is a noun that we theoretically might capitalize since it is properly assigned to our peculiar spacetime system, wherefore we might honor the unique systems besides ours as parallel Universes" instead of "parallel universes."

Likewise, to make an issue of it, 'Mankind' is the name we might capitalize when we designate our species - or 'Man,' especially if Man is made in the image of God and not god.

I look forward to your response, and am,

Yours in truth,

David Arthur Walters
Independent Journalist

See Our Capital Sun
by David Arthur Walters

Alot is Alright
by David Arthur Walters

Min God Spellynge
by David Arthur Walters

2004-05-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

Ideological Tyranny

The "I" is the subject of self-consciousness, but what is the self when divorced from the presumed unity of consciousness? According to the excellent dancer and founding father of Ideologie, Destutt de Tracy, the self is, figuratively speaking, a ballroom dance.

He also describes the self as the whole of sensitive parts extended in space, together with the perception of the duration of those parts in time. Once the whole self is formally divided into subject and object, the conscious subject of self-consciousness might be referred to as a perceiving will that perceives its imagined other or projected alter; but in reality there is no division, nor is there a unity, an individual entity, a "soul" or "subject" or "mind," or an "I" receiving sensations and producing illusory ideas - Tracy identified ideas as perceptions, or syntheses of moral (mental) and physical operations. In any event, our subject is not a mental entity but a mental faculty or power that persists in space. Neoteric thinkers might call it a mental field somewhat analogous to an electromagnetic or gravitational field.

Alas, Tracy's Revolutionary Ideologie or science of ideas was ultimately vanity because Ideologie itself was an ideology in our contemporary sense of the word: a partial system of ideation which set itself up as the ultimate system. Wherefore Ideologie was false at the first instance because it excluded the rest of the whole, the truth of the whole truth. The "Ideologues" and "miserable metaphysicians," as Napoleon called them, hypocritically revolted against partials imposed on the whole as if a particulars were universal, such as God and King, and against the theological and political metaphysics conveniently employed to rationalize orthodox authority and its arbitrary exercise of power.

Yet the Ideologues could not rid themselves of the materialistic prejudices of the middle-class, anti-theological, republican revolution, while, at the same time, ignoring the pressing question of free will with its inherent elitist claim, that of the noble or aristocratic individual, who is divinely or naturally ordained to rule and to exploit his inferiors. Napoleon, who at first supported the intellectual Ideologues, eventually resorted to "romantic" individualism and crowned himself, with the condonation of the Church, Supreme Individual. His policy was indeed romantic to the extent that if followed the policy of those Roman emperors who were generous with bread and circus to ensure a broad basis of power; Napoleon's general rule: give people plenty while taking all you can get.

It is no wonder Napoleon turned on the Ideologues after they helped him seize supreme power. The Revolution was over as far as he was concerned, that was his reason for being. The Ideologues sided with him for their own good, to save themselves from Revolutionary excesses and from the hands of Royalists thirsting for revenge - some of them were regicides - Tracy, an ex-noble, happened to be one of the largest absentee landlords in France. The Ideologues hoped to place France in the hands of a highly educated expert elite that France might be rationally ruled; but the very psychology of Ideologie stressed revolution, movement and resistance, an individual will or libertarian drive common to all individuals, an unavoidably egoistic will opposed to the unconscious will of unconscious instinct and habit.

Even more upsetting to Napoleon than the miserably unromantic, impersonal, and atheistic metaphysical rationalizations of liberty, fraternity, and equality, was the constitution proposed by the Ideologues, providing ultimate power to a plurality instead of an absolute executive, to a revolutionary jury or senate which could at "absorb" at will the chief executive chosen by it - the Grand Elector. Of course Napoleon edited out that particular provision, setting up an independent First Consul - he became the First Consul, answerable to none.

The Ideologues were the tail end of the Enlightenment, and, like their enlightened predecessors, they affirmed, after Locke and his French disciple Condillac, that sensation and reflection thereupon are the basis of all knowledge. Locke repudiated the notion of innate ideas as the source of reflections, but left Christians enough wiggle room to invoke divine intuition. Condillac rooted Locke's reflection in sensation, making sensation alone the common denominator of human behavior and knowledge. The Ideologues, whose Ideologie was a branch of zoology, with due respect to the will and to get things going, added the concept of motion and resistance.

It would seem, then, that Reason is like a dog tied behind Passion's cart, or that reason is just another passion. However, although claiming Condillac as their patriarch, the Ideologues relied on Reason to curb Passion. When Reason failed to bring order to the Revolution, the Enlightenment was followed by the Romantic rebellion, of Passion, with Napoleon as its mighty Hero, Arbitrator, Magistrate - might would once again bring order to chaos and set things right. Blaise Pascal's observation comes to mind here:

"Man is but a being filled with error. The error is natural, and, without grace, ineffaceable. Nothing shows him the truth and every thing deceives him. These two principles of truth - reason and the senses - besides lacking sincerity, reciprocally deceive each other. The senses deceive reason by making false appearances; and just as they cheat reason, they are cheated by her in turn: she has her revenge. Passions of the soul trouble the senses, and give them false impressions. They emulously lie and deceive each other."

Setting aside the fatal flaw or the mysterious original sin of man - a mysterious sin because innocents are born individually responsible for their Flaw - the Ideologues propounded that passions were reinforced desires made habitual - unconscious - and that bad habits were undermining reasonable approaches to life's problems. They strove to analyze habitual thinking, to rid it of mysterious, metaphysical notions, to melt it down to perceptions or those ideas directly related to sensations, and to reconstruct, as it were, an objective scientific language true to nature, and by this means bring about a utopian reconciliation of individual wills. The intellectual elite who spoke the scientific language were supposed to act accordingly, for the social good in moral (mental) harmony, in accord with physical nature of course, notwithstanding the inexplicable natural disorders once associated with God's wrath and miracles. The rest of humankind would naturally follow suit, helped along by the public education of their own, working, species - members of the elite, the governing species, would teach - of course the primary course would be Moral Ideology. Thomas Jefferson, a child more of the revolutionary French Enlightenment than the English reform, was so impressed by the ideological scheme that he translated it from the French and sold it to the United States - Ideology would replace Theology in his university course.

Marx, one of the founding fathers of the most fanatic of ideologies, could not help admiring the Ideologues. On the other hand of the dialectic, he was also impelled to denigrate them as just another sect of upside-down idealists, or so-called Realists who, for all their talk about sensation, toyed with imagined ideas as if they were real even though they did not call them spirits or presuppose a ruling Spirit therefor.

Absurdists are painfully aware of the original diremption of man - the violent divorce of subject and object into hypocritical being - and consequently of the ambiguities inherent in his every systematic rationalization of unconscious prejudices. Again, the Ideologues held that unconscious habits were undermining conscious approaches to life's problems; therefore, if pernicious causes could be identified and weeded out or turned to good uses, all would be well. Thus the dream of environmental determinists, expressed by Tracy the choreographer thus: "Arrange the favorable circumstances, and what you desire will happen without your appearing to be involved."

But you are involved, and so are your bad habits. The analysts were gullible for not suspecting that their own analysis was being determined by the unconscious forces of habit. The very thing they would avoid drove the evasion. Ideologie became then a habit of perpetual analysis driven by the thingie analyzed, hence it is not really scientific or impartial, objective and indifferent and the like. If the ideas analyzed are in motion, in flux, then so are the ideas analyzing the ideas being analyzed.

Ultimately reason is, as the skeptic Pierre Bayle faithfully said without fearing the nihilistic conclusion he had to make, like an acid that eats through everything and drops into an abyss. In our context, ideological analysis as the Ideologues conceived it tends to the dissolution of everything it confronts.

Of course the analysis provides the self-serving analyst with a vague sense of being an "I" central to the analysis. Ideologies no matter how abstract provide the illusion of a central "I" , an Idol or Sol about which other idols orbit by virtue of idolatry. The moral (mental) ideologist, although he claims his metaphysical ideology is based on physical facts, is bound to contradict himself in his struggle to free himself from one fact or another. The libertarian ideologist, for instance, reinforces the tyranny of the very habit he would obviate. Ideological systems are symptoms of a monomanical plague. There is no escape. Metaphysical revolts are futile. Aburdists find a tyrant, either real or imagined, visible or invisible, at the center of every metaphysical revolt.

2004-05-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

The Calvin News Show

Our local television station is supplementing The Ghoul News Show with the The Calvin News Show. So far the The Calvin News Show has been a raving success rating-wise. Its exposure of perverts who prey on teenagers was picked up and broadcasted nationally. That served a good purpose, or so it seems - to precaution or forewarn negligent parents that their kids are at risk.

Of course every parent already knows that the Internet puts kids at risk. They might be sexually assaulted by Internet-prowling perverts, kidnapped, murdered. Whether publicly shining a glaring light in the faces of a few perverts when they show up to meet kids and find a sting operation instead will scare perverts off remains to be seen. We doubt that the shaming aspect of the exposure will do much good.

A few concerned parents when they were teenagers themselves used to hustle queers or johns at bus stations, hotels and elsewhere. Of course they were not exposed on the news, although a small number of their bored, suburban moms were: the moms were taking the train into the city and turning tricks while their husbands were at the office. In any event, the Calvin News Show is not interested in exposing kids who prey on perverted adults, including rock stars.

The Calvin News Show has also exposed teenage partying at parent's houses, and teenage fighting matches. A girl who left one party was apprehended driving under the influence. A boy was so loaded he could not stand up. A young fellow with a good reputation was brutally knifed to death by a murderer when he showed up for what we used to call a rumble. An informal boxing match between two girls had quite an audience at a local school - I was impressed when I saw it featured on television, and thought either one of them could take on Tanya Harding.

Those kind of things happened in my younger days. Killings were rare: weapons were mostly for show - "juvenile delinquents" in my neighborhood usually stuck to fisticuffs, kick boxing and wrestling. As for boozing, the first time I got drunk and went outside, I made the mistake of telling a cop that I was Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and vomiting in the window of his police car after he pulled up next to me and questioned me.

This might seem strange to today's younger parents, but kids in my day wanted to be adults no matter what. About half of them smoked, drank, fought and fornicated to speed up the process. Not all of them followed the example of their parents: for instance, my dad was a teetotaler. There was a big to-do about JDs (juvenile delinquents) in those days, and my dad did not want me to be one. I had to sneak out of the house and through the side door of the movie house to see movies about JDs - war movies and shoot-em-up cowboy shows were permitted.

The social engineers made all sorts of proposals back then to resolve the delinquency problem - it's called an "issue" today. A dissenting report was issued but seldom published, stating that JDs were actually less anxious and more healthy than "normal" kids.

Some of my friend's parents provided kids with a place to party provided that they, the parents, were around and checked in on us every once in awhile. One mother used to bring her daughters so they could get it on with boys in the bedrooms - we had to keep our clothes on to engage in the traditional process called "bundling." If the boys wanted to fight one-on-one to work off tension, boxing gloves were provided. Those memorable occasions were at least loosely supervised by adults. The kids involved, with a few exceptions, were pretty good kids. Yes, there were tragic results, like wrapping a car around a tree every once in awhile. A young fellow drowned in the toilet when throwing up. Another boy gulped too much whiskey all at once and died.

Other parents did not provide a place to party in their homes. Their children went to parties at friends' houses. Others ran off and partied on their own in abandoned houses, the woods, the flats, the hollows - wherever. They got into more trouble than the rest, including heroin abuse, gang fights, rapes, robberies, and murders.

As for the teetotaling pre-teens and teenagers, I did not know any of them very well. I started smoking and drinking when I was ten years of age. Birds of a feather flock together. Besides my dad, I did know one teetotaler after I grew up, and I did not like him very much. He asked me why I drank, and I said I drank to keep from killing teetotalers. I quit smoking and drinking many years ago, or rather those habits quit me. What a waste. But (expletive deleted) happens.

Maybe something I have said here might broaden the perspective of all those interested in the subjects exposed by The Calvin News Show, but of course the producers and publishers are not interested in my views. I guess I am an adult delinquent.

2004-05-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

The Ghoul News Show

Our local television station knows what people are afraid of - crime and unruly nature - so it daily dishes out hours and hours of crime and weather news. Baghdad sometimes seems to be a more civil and pleasant city to live in, at least in terms of body count and icy roads.

Of course, the Ghoul News Show goes over and over the same crimes so that everyone tuning in will know about the baby found in a bag, the single and double- and triple-murders, how many toughs raped the teenager and for how many hours, so on and so forth, the usual gruesome fare that gets high ratings. Yet one wonders if the violent refrain really serves the purposes of repetition, say, of precautioning people: after all is done and said, the crime rate does not go down despite the lurid sensationalism.

A steady diet of local news might turn a man into a ghoul. He will know something is wrong when the sight of the heterosexually paired announcers, the muppet-looking info-babes, start making him sick by association with news content, and he begins to wish that the broadcasting network would regularly rotate them out of sight, bringing in fresh faces, perhaps a few ugly people with grim countenances to match the local news. Of course there is no such thing as an "ugly" human being, but I think you know what I mean.

A COMMENT: This food for thought came in from the managing editor of a local periodical: "Actually, the ironic thing is that the crime rate HAS gone down - precipitously. But despite murder rates at the lowest rates in a generation, the violence never stops on local TV. One of the side benefits of a low crime rate is that police have time to solve old crimes - such as the recent serial killer arrest - which
of course results in even more lurid coverage. Funny, if you think about it."

2004-05-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

An exercise in absurdism

Absurdism is not a cogent philosophy of something or the other. No, it is not one of your typical Isms or Ologys. Absurdism is really anti-ismatic or anti-systematic. Absurdism is is admittedly and proudly unreasonable, illogical, disorderly, and even better. Of course Absurdism is relatively evil if you love Maya and in all seriousness vainly pursue happiness and reconciliation of anything whatsoever in an I-ism or orderly rationalization or some other palliative for individual alienation. And never mind systematic anarchism - the routine smashing of everything with a hammer so that everything not yet smashed will be good - for smashing.

As for rugged individualism, the predicate, ruggedness, does not substantiate the subject or save the individual from universal capital punishment aka salvation from the objective world. Rather, it destroys the individual by definition. Nor is systematic sophistication salvation - the illusory character-armour is more complex but still does not render the individual bullet proof. Furthermore - as if that were not enough - not only is everything perceived illusory, but the "I" itself, the perceiving unity of consciousness, is the most commonplace fiction. But have blind faith in Nothing, for the realization of the foregoing truth shall set the anxious individual free from the domineering "I", oft projected as Mother Nature, Father God, Social Man.

2004-05-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Mystery of Love

To Sara Mosher

An author cannot be in want of a topic for very long. What he really needs if he cannot proceed is not a topic but a motive, perchance mysteriously elicited by a communication from another being provoking his soul into sympathetic response.

A friend of mine who lives thousands of miles away, whom I have never seen nor heard nor touched, sent me a message this morning on the perennial subject of love. She is a strong woman who acts energetically with a purpose in mind. At the moment she is actively interested in loving and being loved, and is presently exploring the possibilities. What struck me most of all within her message was her remark that she wants to be hugged.

I know what she means. I think many of us are like children who want to be picked up and hugged. Human beings amongst other living creatures have a basic need to be held, hugged, touched and such. I have felt that very need myself from time to time, and sometimes very desperately so. I think the early, subconscious memories of being held and lovingly manipulated cause some of us to suffer more than others with the present lack of being caressed.

Nevertheless, I lately discovered that I do not like to be touched any more by anyone in particular. I seem to thrive more on general abstractions. Despite my father's advice, "He who loves everybody loves nobody," I prefer now to love people in their generality, in the abstract, rather than be caught up in with details like hugging and kissing particular people.

Meeting "someone" is about the last thing on my mind now. Some wise old ladies claim that leaves me especially vulnerable to Cupid's arrows. Nevertheless, pending that assault my erotic period seems to be over. The only embrace I look forward to as of late is the embrace of Mother Kali. For me, the great negation or Nothing has become the most positive assertion of All, and the prospect of my own annihilation has made the universal so entertaining that I simply cannot give it up for anything in particular.

On that somewhat "morbid" note I recall how a dramatist and philosopher by the name of Maurice Maeterlinck was a dark and brooding poet of terror, who loved to compose "death dramas" until he met the opera singer and actress, Georgette Leblanc. After she read his transcendental introduction to Emerson's essays - Emerson brought out a shade of optimism in him - she fell in love with him

"I was sure that in all the universe he was the one man I could love," she said, and rearranged her life just to be in position at the right place and time to meet him, and meet him she did. Despite his protestations and his warning that he preferred to love several women at once, they become companions from 1895 to 1918 - marriage was out of the question for her as she would rather walk across Belgium in flat shoes and a short skirt than get married, or so she said,

After the alliance was deliberately forged by Leblanc, Maeterlinck the mystic and Symbolist gradually evolved from Schopenhaurian pessimism, which is, incidentally, not an altogether unhappy affair, to a Marcus Aurelean or Stoic optimism. He began to write strong women into his plays. When Claude Debussy was staging Maeterlinck's masterpiece, 'Pelleas and Melisande', Leblanc strongly believed that she was just perfect for the role of Melisande. Alas, Debussy chose someone else. Maeterlinck challenged Debussy to a duel. Maeterlinck later apologised and said that he was solely to blame - a true gentleman alway takes all the blame in matters of love.

Now Maeterlinck had lost his faith before reaching twenty years of age, and was converted to "Symbolism". The Symbolists of his day were fascinated by the hidden meaning of visible things. Enthused by the occult, their figures symbolized the occluded spiritual realm. That is not to say that romance was left out of the equation, especially not where the younger Symbolists were concerned. Many Romantics of the day were Symbolists. After all, is not occultism a response to intense erotic desires? Yet Maeterlinck himself became more and more realistic, perhaps due to the advent of the mysterious appearance of a strong woman in his life. Yet he remained fascinated by the greatest mysteries of life. A quote is in order here, from his 'Evolution of Mystery':

"It is not unreasonable to believe that the paramount interest of life, all that is truly lofty and remarkable in the destiny of man, reposes almost entirely in the mystery that surrounds us; in the two mysteries, it may be, that are mightiest, most dreadful of all - fatality and death.... Our consciousness of the unknown wherein we have being gives life a meaning and grandeur which must of necessity be absent if we persist in considering only the things that are known to us; if we too readily incline to believe that these must greatly transcend in importance the things we know not yet." (1)

Maeterlinck's early influences were Plato, Plotinus, Boeme, Coleridge, Novalis, Ruysbroeck, Villiers, Carlyle, Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, and other illustrious authors who rendered fresh expressions of timeless platitudes. He appreciated his Jesuit instructors, but he complained of their obsession with carnal sin and deficient hygiene. No doubt they were in part responsible for his early morbidity and abiding absorption with the imponderables of human existence.

Again, mystic-minded Emerson had a fine influence on Maeterlink's life. As for the rest of the Americans he encountered during his visit to the United States, he found them friendly and likable, but complained of their ignorance and lack of cultural traditions.

Notwithstanding Maeterlinck's research into occluded subjected including the secret intelligence of flowers, bees, ants, and termites, he did not see his destiny coming, in the form of Georgette Leblanc. Nor did he foresee his fate when actress Renee Dahon mysteriously appeared and asked him for his autograph one day. Nor was he any the wiser when Renee became protege to him and Leblanc, living with them for awhile. But finally it dawned on him - he broke off his long relationship with Leblanc and married Dahon in 1919.

One never knows. That was precisely Maurice Maeterlinck's conclusion towards the end of his long life (1862-1949). He observed that, despite all his studies of the great mysteries, he still did not know their nature. Neither did Georgette Leblanc.

"If anything troubles me" Leblanc reminisced, "it is the epoch in which that love was born - the symbolist epoch, more false than all the others, since everything in it was a simulation. The most simple things were garlanded, surrounded by an artificial mystery, complicated with absurd interpretations in which their true meaning was lost from sight. Under Symbolism even a carpet sweeper would have been endowed with profound pretensions.

"Furthermore", Leblanc went on, "I cannot imagine that any other form of literature would have been so seductive for my love.... My flowing hair and interminable costumes bore witness to the amplitude of my ideas. It was in a forest of capital letters that Maeterlinck and I met. Both were wandering with the golden lamp of Goodness, the frantic love of Beauty and the happy anguish of advancing along the luminous paths of pure... 'Consciousness'.... Alas, I know now that in the span of a whole life our greatest efforts barely allow us to conceive what it might be, because we have as a means of approaching it only our experience, learning and our five senses - all falsified." (2)

So the estranged lovers arrived at the same conclusion after all. However that may be, I hope that my friend who lives thousands of miles away and whom I have never seen nor heard nor touched, will succeed in her active search to be hugged. And perhaps even I, as remote as I am from the details which I prefer not to be touched by although I do dearly love them in general, will be struck by Love's arrow before Mother Kali embraces me.

I don't know.

E

Sources:

(1)Maeterlinck, Maurice, THE BURIED TEMPLE, Trans. Alfred Sutro, New York: Dodd Mead, 1913

(2)Leblanc, Georgette, MAETERLINCK AND I, Trans. Janet Flanner, London: Methuen, 1932

2004-05-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

Hypocrisy is in the air

Hypocrisy is in the air - everywhere we turn we hear someone being called a hypocrite. When a man changes his clothes to suit the weather, he is deemed prudent, but when he changes his ideology to suit the occasion, he is deemed a hypocrite, therefore he tends to cling to it come hell or high water. If he happens to contradict his professed ideology, he might deny the contradiction until hell freezes over, perhaps because he believes his natural tendency to hypocrisy is the worst offense of all. It is as if no matter what he does or does not do he is damned for being insincere.

It is true: we can find a hypocrite in front every mirror, each one hoping to be the most beautiful of them all for one reason or the other, yet falling dreadfully short of the ideal. Ironically, those who accuse others of hypocrisy are often the biggest hypocrites of all. Still, the show must go on. The hypocrite fears being seen as he is. Some of us are worse hypocrites than others, but none of us are exempt from the underlying crisis. No doubt if the truth were fully revealed, plants and animals and men would perish from the face of the Earth along with the lovely butterflies who deceive us into believing they belong to the inedible Monarch family. Alas, we are vulnerable. Since we know very well that Man is the most dangerous of all animals, we might assume an aggressive stance and make offense our best defense. In any case, as social animals we are not about to go it alone in this war against ourselves, therefore we fashion verbal justifications for our divisions. When superficial racial differences are not obvious enough to serve as battle flags, signs and symbols will have to be contrived along with superficial creeds and dogmas appertaining thereto to suit each bloody occasion.

In modern times ideologies serve as tooth and claw in the wars of words that seem to inevitably lead to another foregone conclusion - mutual slaughter. Religions have been blamed for wars, but who really needs god for war? Upon the alleged death of god theologies were traded for ideologies - people are not about to give up the ritual worship of Power and the politics of warring for its distribution. Political creeds justified the belligerent display of instinctive aggressiveness - in the form of some of the most vicious onslaughts in human history. Those creeds, supported by their respective political theologies, have provided sufficient dogmatic justification for the usual violent upheavals which are on the whole a self-destructive revolt of mankind against mankind.

Barely a half-century had passed since World War II, yet optimistic authors were already proclaiming in best-selling books that the end of the history of man's crimes against man was nigh, and that no final apocalyptic baptism in fire and blood would be necessary to achieve the final peace. Said paradise would be gained by the neo-liberal corporatism sweeping the world, led by the leader of civilization itself, the greatest superpower the world has ever known, whose mightiness is founded in righteousness and proven by double-entries in holy books according to generally accepted accounting principles. All that was required of the undeveloped world was a few painful adjustments for the sake of long-term comparative advantages. Hopes rose to incredible heights with the soaring stock market indexes. More and more investors bought into the craze the higher the worry-wall was erected - many momentum investors filtered out all stocks with a PE of less than 250, or, better yet, they avoided stocks with any PE at all, buying those whose rise on the charts was already spectacular. We should have known the crash was near when the hemline rose above the knee again and the stained skirt was found in the closet. "Wolf!" We heard the cry, but most of us ignored it.

Pessimists are ignored during manias, whatever the object of the craze may be: Tulips, South Seas, Florida Real Estate, World Wide Web, or World Peace through Organized Greed. Civilizations decay on the laurels of the last victory while the barbarians sharpen their swords. During the recent mania, a few die-hard pessimists recalled the proclamations of universal peace and prosperity made by professors of free-market capitalism shortly before the Great War. It was said that nations interlocked by organized greed would hardly want to wage war. After all, what capitalist in his right mind would want to destroy capital? But patriotic German generals were nursing old wounds and were poring over the same old maps whereupon the strategic plan for the glorious invasion had been carefully drawn. The plan was no big secret. Nobody could say precisely why, but war was a foregone conclusion. Millions of lives and untold loss of property ensued. The Germans lost, but there was a great sequel led by synthetic barbarians.

The manly virtue of civilization is its vice when confronted by brutal barbarians who do not give a hoot for sophisticated ethics or the religious opium of the stupefied masses. Therefore, it is said, mutual barbarism is necessary: by all possible means, kill or be killed. Ideologies are fabricated to clothe the murderous campaigns. Hence upon the battlefields we find capitalist barbarians, fascist barbarians, communist barbarians, fundamentalist barbarians and so on. If one does not have an ideology or an ism, the enemy will invent one for him. Now there is an idealogy for every barbarian, some sort of perverse logic for dividing the world into friends and foes. Every ideology is partial and therefore hostile to the whole reality of which it is part and over which it would erect its rigid version of Totalitaria if only it had the power to do so. In fact every ideology is the cultivation of stupidity, and none shall have the absolute power or absolute, unstoppable freedom they crave. As for the ultimate resolution of conflict in wars made necessary because people cannot agree on the difference between good and evil, on right and wrong - that is in the invisible hands of god, or natural law if you prefer; which is to say we justify our ignorance with ignorance, or rather our lust for bloodshed with more bloodshed.

If there be no humane god, if there exists some "natural law" of godless evolution, it is an evolution to the extinction of our species. If man is to leave himself ungoverned; if he is to keep his hands off his base nature, leaving it to some invisible hand; if passions are to be left unbridled by man's reason to run amuk about the Earth without any rhyme or reason but the unconscionable maxim, Might is Right; then, given the marriage of high technology to low morality, premature annihilation by mad design or sad mistake is assured. Since all will die in one way or another, maturely or prematurely, there is really no long-term disadvantage in killing people instead of loving them. But we live for the short-term enjoyments today, and we might enjoy life more at least in the near future if we would only apply our reason to the task; after all, man has regulative reason for his special nature, hence that is his natural law. Maybe he can stop killing and start living to the full extent made possible by his reasonable nature.

But no, I am informed by a lecturer whom I encountered on campus this morning, man must not stop killing. In fact a great increase in killing is necessary for the increase of our enjoyment even a few years hence, and, or so he said,"What is necessary is reasonable." He claims that population growth is humankind's real enemy, therefore whatever diminishes it is good for the future of the race. His political heroes are Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. Whatever works is right, according to him. He believes tactical nuclear weapons should be used against North Korea and Iraq at once, under the mere pretext of disarming them of their weapons of mass destruction. As for the hundreds of thousands of people that might die as a consequence of the bombing and the war and chaos sure to follow, he says that is precisely the point: population control. He also thinks a nuclear war between Pakistan and India is an excellent idea, as the reduction of the population in that region accords with his thesis on genetic hygiene. He claims we are becoming too effeminate and finical about killing. He recommended me to a selection from the writings of the Marquis de Sade; I walked over to the Hamilton Library and found this:

"What is man," asks Sade, "and what difference is there between him and the other plants, the other animals of the earth? None, certainly.... Then there is just as much harm in killing an animal as a man, or just as little, and the difference rises solely from the prejudices of our vanity.... If Nature cannot create without drawing on the mass of dead matter prepared for her by death, then the idea of annihilation which we associate with death becomes meaningless; there will be no more simple annihilation; what we call the end of a living creature will no longer be the actual end but a mere transmutation of matter, which is accepted by all modern thinkers as one of the first laws.... Altering the forms of Nature is beneficial to her, since it produces the material for her reconstructions which would be impossible for her if nothing were destroyed.... The man who destroys his fellow is to Nature what a plague or famine is, sent by her hand in the same way, for she uses all possible means to obtain the raw material of destruction so essential to her work.... This is already more than sufficient to convince any enlightened reader that murder could never be an offense against Nature. Is it a political crime? Let us frankly admit that it is, on the contrary, one of the greatest powers in politics.... All over the world... it is rightly believed that the murderer, that is to say, the man who stifles his sensibility to the point of killing his fellow man and defying public or private vengeance, must be very brave and therefore very valuable to a warlike or republican society...."

The lecturer recommending Marquis de Sade believes the efficient war machinery of the wealthy United States should be more frequently used on whatever pretext in order to radically reduce certain populations. Old Solomon warned us not to count on our riches in war, but he did not have our technology. We do count on our riches; we call ourselves unstoppable; we use high technology to advance low morality - some professors however claim it is the highest morality. In any event, what difference does good and evil make to an unstoppable superpower? Might is right, especially in the eyes of the mighty. But beware, perhaps God Almighty or Chance is only sleeping. Maybe god does decides the outcome, or maybe there will be an unlucky streak when fickle Fortuna decides to take a powder and leave us with the barbarians in our midst.

Our native barbarians are simple-minded; they do not have the disadvantage of complex, civilized virtues; they do not require libraries of ideological texts to justify their barbarism; they are on the verge of having the most devastating technology of all in their private hands, the technology that will soon make uniformed troops and conventional warfare superfluous everywhere. The liberal movement of history, the broadening distribution of God or Power, the democratic dispersal of absolute freedom, has taken the form of atomic liberty, rendering any reasoning or ideological doctrine irrelevant - any manifesto will do, no matter how crude. Wherefore may the human race go up in smoke as an offering to the invisible hands of invisible gods or as a grand capitulation of the race to its nature.

In retrospect it appears that all the theologies and ideologies designed to bring people together in hate-based love were embraced in vain because the group-love was founded on hate for other parts of humanity. It seems our juxtaposed ideologies are excuses for mutual murder. If there really be a universal god of love for humankind, every warring ideology has been a systematic revolt against god. And even if there be no god but ourselves projected as a unity, the revolt against each other is absurd. But how can this be? We revolted against the absurd. We wanted a universal way out of the hateful labyrinth of the war of all against all. We hoped for an eternal flame from which each might light a torch to shed a reasonable light on the golden threads that would lead each person and folk out of the seemingly endless horrors perpetuated by the bullish bully. We turned to Reason, the father of reasoning, in most auspicious conjunction with Wisdom, mother of unconditional love. We wanted the mountain to love the valley and the valley to love the mountain equally that we might ascend and descend and transcend the heights and depths gracefully. To that end certain enlightened Frenchmen contributed a science of ideas to our noble cause and named it IdeologieThomas Jefferson praised Ideologie and added the course to the curriculum of his beloved university.Ideologie resulted in ideologies, and ideologies have become cultivated stupidities. Where have we gone wrong since the Enlightenment fostered Ideologie to replace the theological celebration of gross ignorance?