Rigorous Intuition (v. 2.0)

Hey hey, we're the monkeys

2009-09-03T13:22:00.010-04:00

He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him

- JK Huysmans, À Rebours

Here we come…

Write about what you know, they say, except what I don't know is much more interesting. So what am I supposed to do?

For instance. Lately I've been less impressed by the fact it's only three years till the end of the Mayan's Fifth Sun than that it's been eleven since the final episode of Seinfeld. Or eight months since my last post. (Is it nine yet?) Or, until Father's Day, that it had been four weeks since I'd visited my tumble-down dad. He told the hospital staff he'd thought only old people broke their hips. A 79-year old widower, whose kids launched their lifeboats years before he went down with the house, said that. The things that must slide by in the blink of his eye. Some more things that I don't know.

One thing I do know is that I'm going to miss Betelgeuse. The star has “mysteriously” shrunk by 15% in only 15 years. That's considerable: a loss of radius equivalent to the orbit of Venus. And it's quickening. Because modern astronomy is so young - we haven't even marked the centenary of the embarrassingly late discovery that the Milky Way isn't the sum of the universe - astronomers can't be sure of what it is exactly that they're observing, so what it means remains uncertain. But what it may, credibly, mean is that the star is rapidly burning through its last reserves of carbon and approaching the end its short life, in which case we could see it supernova during our much shorter, yet main sequence, human lifespans.

Betelgeuse is just four or five hundred light years away, the red giant nearest the Earth, and only six or seven million years old. (Its precise distance and date of birth being two more of those things that neither I nor astronomers know.) It appeared above, completing the constellation of Orion, as the first hominines appeared below, creating the evolutionary branch that differentiates us from chimpanzees. Australopithecus was obsolesced by increasingly sophisticated models of symbologic acuity, able to connect the dots of the night sky into pictograms of their world. And in due, deep time, Orion became our superlative, celestial representation.

When Betelgeuse dies - if it hasn't died already, and we're just belated mourners awaiting the public viewing - its luminosity is expected to increase ten thousand fold, outshining the Moon, before diminishing over several weeks until its shell passes from unaided sight. And when that happens, Orion dies as well. And even for the billions whose night vision has been impaired by electric light, that’s some kind of collateral damage.

To the first humans who saw the heavens as a storyboard, what must it have meant for them to recognize their own form in the sky's most magnificent pattern? If the records we have are suggestive of the accounts that we’ve lost, it meant a great deal, and perhaps even entrained human consciousness to believe us a most favoured and peculiar beast. And if that's true, then its suddenly not being there will mean something for us as well. Even if many of us can’t see it any longer on a cloudless winter night.

We don't need to swallow Robert Bauval whole to admit the barefaced as above, so belowness of the Giza complex. Like Washington’s Federal Triangle was laid out upon the blueprint of the constellation Virgo to create an auspicious sacred space, the three principal pyramids create a fair facsimile of the three stars of Orion's belt, with the southern shaft of the Great Pyramid’s King’s Chamber aligning to the belt’s brightest star, Al Nitak. Though of course he wasn't Orion then. He was Osiris himself, and Sirius wasn't his companion dog star but rather his wife, Isis. And his seasonal course retold the story of his perpetual murder by Set and his perpetual resurrection by Horus.

When I was a teenage evangelical I learned the fanciful doctrine of the “Gospel in the Stars,” that God had arranged the heavens like a dispensational chart to forewarn illiterate antediluvians on the plan of redemption. Virgo, the Virgin Mother, holds a branch: “a familiar Old Testament name for the Messiah.” Aquarius with his water pitcher represents the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the elect. That sort of thing. And Orion depicted the risen Christ himself, triumphant, foot crushing the serpent’s head.

Until Betelgeuse fails. Then Horus fails, and Set buries Osiris once and for all time. Christ and the Great Hunter lose his red, right shoulder, taking the colour out of space, and the dots which remain above our heads reconnect to depict another form. One in which we won’t recognize ourselves.

Perhaps for the stars to come right, some stars for us have got to go out.

People say we monkey around

And there’s Lovecraft again, several dismaying assumptions ahead of us, implausibly relevant.

But there's more bad news for us, and for those nearly us, playing out our options on Team Hominid. (And what a lonely and denuded bench since we made a last supper of the last Neanderthal.) The UN has called this the Year of the Gorilla, when it is rightly the Year of the Jellyfish, so we should know that for the Great Apes the signs are truly dire. Almost entirely because their survival depends upon our selfless forbearance, which we are too inclined to dispense grudgingly, sparingly and belatedly.

In the Earth’s current extinction event, precipitated by humanity’s going viral, the species most at risk are those that are most complex: the ones that have appeared most recently. The ones most like us. Three per cent of all fish and amphibian species are considered “threatened”; four per cent of reptiles; eleven per cent of birds; and 24 per cent of all mammals. The happy accident of our genus, the late Cretaceous wipe-out of the top of the food chain that left our shrew-like ancestors huge boots to fill, is being undone by our calamitous footprint. It's not the end of the world, but it maybe the end of the Cenozoic Era as we know it.

Nature doesn’t need our two-hanky sentiments to see this for a tragedy. If chimpanzees were in our place, they might try to kill us all, too. They’re that much like us. In her concluding note to Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, Jane Goodall writes that in her 45-year study of chimpanzees she has witnessed "emotions similar to those we label happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and so on.... They care for each other and are capable of true altruism. Sadly, also like us, they have a dark side: they are aggressively territorial, and may perform acts of extreme brutality and even wage a kind of primative war." One part of our heritage Goodall never saw was the calm, premeditated manufacture and stockpiling of weapons. Out of his wild and into ours, Santino, the 30-year old chimp incarcerated in a Swedish zoo, recently did just that. "These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," says Mathias Osvath of the University of Lund. "It implies they have a highly developed consciousness, including life-like mental simulations of days to come."

After her pet chimp/life-mate Travis chewed through her friend's face, Sandra Herold sobbed on the Today show that she couldn't understand what had happened: "Chimpanzees share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans." He could brush with a Water Pik, surf the web and use the toilet - how could he be so vicious? They could probably even travel by night bus to Winnipeg and tear somebody’s head off, but they lack our facility for imaginative violations. (Even with opposable thumbs I doubt chimpanzees would think to pluck out someone’s eyes, stuff the sockets with live maybugs and sew the lids shut. It took humans, precisely three Vichy militiamen, to conceive of that.) As Edmund Kemper put it, in a jailhouse reminiscence of his own career in atrocity: "I'm sitting there with a severed head in my hands, talking to it, and I'm about to go crazy... [But] wait a minute: I've seen paintings and drawings of Viking heroes, talking to severed heads, taking them to parties, carrying enemies in leather bags - part of our heritage." So I don't know: does the answer to Sandra Herold reside in the 98 per cent DNA common to both species, or in the unshared two?

"Life is a hideous thing," begins Lovecraft's Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His family, "and from the background behind it peer daemonical hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." The facts poor Arthur uncovered took the shape of a mummified ape wearing a locket which bore the Jermyn family arms: his own great-great-great-grandmother. (So Sir Wade's reclusive Congo bride hadn't been the daughter of a Portuguese trader after all.) Impossible, over five generations, but over five thousand it's evolutionary canon. "If we knew what we are, we should do as Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night." Family tree? You're swinging in it.

Lovecraft's story first appeared in the March, 1921 issue of The Wolverine. Five years later, while America assessed the damage of its own monkey trial, Stalin's Bride of the Monster-like whim for an army of atomic supermen set "Russia's top animal breeding scientist," Ilya Ivanov, on the task of crossing humans with apes. "I want a new invincible human being," Stalin reportedly ordered, "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." On a budget of $200,000 – considerable funding for a Soviet scientist in 1926 - Ivanov traveled to West Africa to conduct his first experiments in cross-breeding humans and chimpanzees. Though Stalin’s dreams could be as big and as ugly as Lovecraft’s, and he had more will and obvious resources to avail their manifestation, Ilya Ivanov was no Wade Jermyn, and he had no better success when he returned to Georgia to continue his monkey insemination project, after which the stink of his failures inevitably condemned him to the Gulag. Stalin didn’t have the patience for it, nor the sophistication of our own culture’s various devolution projects, but perhaps the unfinished story of human speciation is just another tragedy that, in due time, produces comedy.

Yet despite evidence and ominous portents, our presumed end has often been thought transcendent and divine. Maniacs and the criminally religious have been beatified for seeking God's face, while a few, like Albert Fish who believed the voice holy that told him to make a Eucharist of children, get the electric chair. There’s always been an urgency about the endeavor, but since the 20th Century’s premature triumphalism of positivists it’s taken on a neurotic urgency for those who might ask, What Would Arthur Jermyn Do? Though that annihilating question didn’t exhaust itself on the descent of man, but also implicates the character of God, and all pretenders to the Throne who would claim credit the way Zodiac would claim the souls of his innocents.

Significantly, it wasn’t that the existence of God was in doubt, so much as the benevolence and soundness of the divine mind. The terrible proposition of the 20th Century wasn’t What if there’s no God? but rather, What if there is?

Come and watch us sing and play

“Our little brains,“ rants a feverish character in Frank Belknap Long’s 1928 short story “The Space Eaters,” “what can they know of vampire-like entities which may lurk in dimensions higher than our own, or beyond the universe of stars?

Suppose they had shape unknown on Earth? Suppose they were four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional? Suppose they were a hundred-dimensional? Suppose they had no dimensions at all and yet existed? What could we do?

They would not exist for us? They would exist for us if they gave us pain. Suppose it was not the pain of heat or cold or any of the pains we know, but a new pain? Suppose they touched something besides our nerves – reached our brains in a new and terrible way? Suppose they made themselves felt in a new and strange and unspeakable way? What could we do? Our hands would be tied. You cannot oppose what you cannot see or feel. You cannot oppose the thousand-dimensional. Suppose they should eat their way to us through space!

Long described himself as agnostic, and wrote that he "always shared HPL's skepticism ...concerning the entire range of alleged supernatural occurrences and what is commonly defined as 'the occult.'" In other words, he, like Lovecraft, regarded cosmic horror as purely a pulp genre rather than also a metaphysical suspicion. Yet Lovecraft has become the avatar of our doom-struck age because the arguments for such fantastic pessimism have basis, even if only imaginatively so, in science sounder and stranger than Ilya Ivanov’s.

By the mid-twenties, physicists were demolishing Enlightened assumptions about the fundamental states of matter, and though the quantum revolution was still too young to rewrite the textbooks - those "pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science,” in Thomas Kuhn's phrase – its early outrages were known well enough for materialists like Lovecraft and Long to lift them for the premises of their pulp fiction. The weird science informed the weird tales, but the authors themselves could remain untouched and observe the world for their own purposes as old school Newtonians. (Not all artists could. Wassily Kandinsky wrote that “the collapse of the atom model was equivalent, in my soul, to the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly the thickest walls fell. I would not have been amazed if a stone appeared before my eye in the air, melted, and became invisible.”)

In 1926, Schrödinger published his theory of wave mechanics, while Heisenberg began work on what was to become the Uncertainty Principle. Lovecraft wrote “The Materialist Today” in the same year. "The Call of Cthulhu" also, though it wasn't published for two more years. His thin tract is frightening in its own right.

All is illusion, hollowness, & nothingness - but what does that matter? Illusions are all we have, so let us pretend to cling to them - they lend dramatic values and comforting sensations of purpose to things which are really valueless & purposeless.

Illusions have always mattered - our facility with illusion is the greatest achievement, and perhaps even the point, of our biological speciation - but a science of collapsed wave functions, uncertainty and entanglement suggested that illusions are of paramount concern to physics as well. New physics and ancient intuitions were sources for Lovecraft's weird fiction dream quest - "non-Euclidian geometry" was the signature of the Great Old Ones - but the first mythographer of hyperspace remained resolutely materialist. (Shortly before Houdini's death in 1926, he hired Lovecraft to write a never to be completed book entitled The Cancer of Superstition.) Nevertheles, the shattering of the atomic model prompted a re-evaluation of scorned, occult studies such as alchemy, and non-locality and its spooky actions meant even astrology could merit another look. Early in the course of his own revolution in the science of consciousness, Jung saw the virtue in both. And the later discovery of the double helix suggested the Sumerian-derived alchemical caduceus of Hermes had all along been modelling unaware the structure of DNA.

As the science has grown only weirder, its congruence with Lovecraft's weird fiction has become ever more apparent. Earlier this year, researchers studying gravitational waves in the depth of space may have discovered holographic noise - the "graininess" that comprises our space/time - while the first "tunable electromagnetic gateway or "hidden portal" has this month been scientifically described:

While the researchers can't promise delivery to a parallel universe or a school for wizards, books like Pullman's Dark Materials and JK Rowling's Harry Potter are steps closer to reality now that researchers in China have created the first tunable electromagnetic gateway.

The work is a further advance in the study of metamaterials, published in New Journal of Physics (co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society).

In the research paper, the researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fudan University in Shanghai describe the concept of a "a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities" like a "'hidden portal' as mentioned in fictions."

The gateway, which is now much closer to reality, uses transformation optics and an amplified scattering effect from an arrangement of ferrite materials called single-crystal yttrium-iron-garnet that force light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in complicated directions to create a hidden portal.

McKenna's alien spores and Crick's directed panspermia were foreshadowed in Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth. The mysterious, deep-sea "bloop" from 1997 of a massive and unknown organic source, "possibly a many-tentacled giant squid," was provocatively heard near Lovecraft's coordinates for the sunken city of R'lyeh. The proliferation of cephalopods and jellies in our ever more alien seas, and our skies and fields as well. And then there's the uncanny and ugly efficacy of his imagined grimoire. Because it's not the science only with Lovecraft: it's the myth, magick and religion as well, because his fiction is a conversation with archetypes, and like all fiction that matters, is evocative, which can be about as magical as it gets. (And all grimoires, lets remember, are no less imaginative works.) Whether something exists in itself may now be rightly dismissed as a meaningless question, for gods no less than for a quantum of information. And Lovecraft's myths are acutely resonant in postmodernity, because the dread of his cosmos is its radical indifference to such haughty apes as ourselves.

In 1926, the same busy year for Lovecraft, Einstein wrote his letter to Max Bron from which is cribbed the famous misquote that God doesn't play dice with the universe. His actual words were that quantum mechanics "does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'Old One'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

In 1938 Einstein helped a young German Jew emigrate to California. Theodore Gottlieb had seen men eaten alive by dogs in Dachau, where he'd signed away his family fortune for a single Mark, and was to lose much of his family to the Nazis, including the mother rumoured to have been Einstein's lover.

Gottlieb became Brother Theodore, exponent of "stand-up tragedy." ("The best thing is not to be born. But who is as lucky as that? To whom does it happen? Not to one among millions and millions of people.") Einstein balked at the implications of his own discoveries. (Lovecraft would think the fuss over his fiction foolishness, too.) Last March, Scientific American asked Was Einstein Wrong? A more timely question may be, was Brother Theodore right?

We’re the new generation

Time flies. Into tall buildings.

I was four years old when John Kennedy was publicly executed, and I was inconsolable all weekend because my cartoons were preempted. Last November I travelled to Dallas for the 45th anniversary commemoration and JFK Lancer conference, and during a Jim Marrs lecture on Obama’s Illuminati-bred socialism I fell inconsolable all over again. Reading Crossfire was my first occasion to have good reason for my doubts and for why I shouldn't get over them, but now Marrs’ cornpone dialectics made me wish I were back my hotel room eating mesquite chips and drinking Texas-bottled Dr Pepper made with real cane sugar. The quiet of a November 21st on Dealey Plaza's grassy knoll was more of an education than another Discovery Channel documentary, but aside from the remarks of consequential researchers such as John Judge and Dick Russell, the funery burlesque of the 22nd was more disheartening than a month of Shark Week.

By 1968 my favourite shows were Mr Dressup and The CBS Morning News. So when our Grade 3 teacher wrote "Robert F. Kennedy" on the blackboard and told us to copy it while she stepped into the hallway to collect herself, I knew why she was crying. I'd woken up as well to the blanched scenes of grief from the Ambassador Hotel.

I didn’t cry on September 11th. Though like Lovecraft's New York detective Malone, I promptly "acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in." No, I cried the next Tuesday, when Mr Dressup died. I could have imagined commercial airliners striking the twin towers. But that, I didn’t see coming. A stroke; possibly a stress-induced casualty of the Twin Towers' second-hand smoke. It was hearing on the radio report the familiar, tinkled theme that set me off.

I'm not saying it's all about me. I'm saying, I'm all about it. My own, private Long Count is measured in decorated caskets and bulletins of grim tidings. I suppose that's the inescapable condition for all who share the communion of where were you when, but I don't think that's something to be celebrated.

Eight summers ago, George W Bush sat in a Sarasota classroom looking like a mannish boy draped in his dad's old suit on picture day. Ten summers before that, Paul Rubens was down the road in a darkened theatre choking the chicken out of America's singular boyish man, Pee Wee Herman. Only one of them has a criminal record for his public indecency but neither could get elected president. And I think it's appropriate to speak of them in the same breath, now that they're both returning to the stage.

My own stage, with respect at least to the vigor of the dissenting culture, I’d characterize as acceptance, having idled a long while at grief and anger. Good research and analysis still happen, significant stories still break, but like most deserving things they either fly beneath the radar or someone somewhere has switched off the media’s transponders.

The Truther wars are over, and Loud, Dumb and Misguided hold illimitable dominion over all. The moment for justice has passed, and the truth movement has become an Alex Jonestown. Regardless of how the best and most nuanced work doesn’t deserve it, 9/11 skepticism now wears the clown nose of National Chauvinists suiting up for the Red Chinese on the Mexican border and Obama’s FEMA guillotines. (The noise on the right is now amplified mainstream by the opportunistic likes of Glenn Beck, who keeps his armchair militia in a perpetual state of apprehended Apocalypse while ridiculing the real ruin of the world.) Serious questions and connections re September 11th have been berated and beaten down for the quick confirmation thrill of slapstick forensics which sustained controlled demolition’s imaginary crime. Since first viewing Jones’ The Obama Deception, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt have been “nonstop researching the Internet...for information for at least a month all day every day." Pratt is so changed, his “first rap album is going to be called Infowars.”

Mr Dressup – Ernie Coombs - was a lovely man. Pee Wee Herman was always more creepy than funny. Atlas shrugged, but Jesus wept.

And we've got something to say

Though I won't say I'm having a mid-life crisis. I turned 50 in July, and even with the unearned benefit of a North American life expectancy that would be unaccountably optimistic. The crisis is the same companion I’ve had since reading Lovecraft and Marrs and seeing the Kennedys shot, though I’m finding it more companionable at this time of life. Art Spiegelman, in In the Shadow of No Towers, wrote “I can no longer distinguish my neurotic depression from well-founded despair.” I would have said the same when he wrote that five or so years ago. But now, I’m no longer depressed. I just despair heartily.

But neither is the Earth middle-aged. It’s already about a third as old as the universe, and it took nearly all of that time to turn out overreaching hominids. If we fail, then Earth’s highest iteration of enfleshed consciousness fails with us. (Until we educated ourselves right out of nature, we knew well enough that consciousness doesn’t demand the medium of meat to manifest.)

The planet will be here for five or so billion years before it's cinders and ashes, but most of that time it will be essentially barren. Right now, the acidiphying seas bloom with jellies and tentacled things. Life goes on, but reduced, and reversing direction towards simplicity. Even with that, a biosphere habitable for all but the simplest extremophiles ought to be done by a tenth of the Earth's projected remaining lifespan. And that’s without an assist from our compounding calamities, and the odd but inevitable asteroid impact. We'll be the end of the line for biological complexity, not because we’re as good as it gets, but because there’s not enough time left on the clock, after the rise and fall of the great reptiles and the higher apes, to say third time's the charm.

In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, James Lovelock writes that the proximate cause of this prognosis is the “ineluctable increase in heat from the sun":

Our star, like all stars, burns hotter as it ages, and in 500 million years the radiant heat from the sun will be about 6 per cent greater than now.... [slowly enough to give] ample time for adaptation and further evolution. Already we have a new photosynthetic process due to the evolution of a new class of plants, which biochemists call C4, able to live at much lower carbon dioxide abundances.... [T]his evolutionary step might enable the contemporary biosphere to continue for another 100 million years. Beyond that, further genetic changes would surely extend the lease of life, but given the fundamental limitations of mainstream biology and the inevitability of perturbations, it is difficult to see life extending beyond 500 million years.

Lovelock regards the Earth's carrying capacity for our species to be overtaxed on the order of several billion souls, which will trigger a corrective and unprecedented culling by one means or another as early as this century. This hard truth-telling by the light of his science has marked him, particularly among anti-NWO-styled "patriots", as an apologist for elitist eugenics and mass murder. But to do so is to not distinguish deserved pessimism from wishful thinking, or even wishfulfilment. And there's an irony about this, as Jones' Infowars is content to use Lovelock's words to trash the inefficiencies of renewable energy and the green economy as "verging on a gigantic scam," while remaining in full denial of his gloomy rationale for so doing. Jones prefers the analysis of Spencer Pratt - "It's mind-boggling trying to say there's global warming right now" - and Steven Anderson, Arizona's please taze me bro so I can post it on Youtube pastor who hates the environmental stewardship nearly as much as he hates Barack Obama. ("Let that stupid whale die," says Anderson. In church, yet. "God’ll create a new one in the Millennium and I’ll look at it for a thousand years and Al Gore will be burning in hell!")

Lovelock is 90 this year. That's about three times the life expectancy in AIDS-stricken Swaziland, and barely a flutter of coronal muscle to the brainless immortal turritopsis nutricula. But everything that dies has first to live. (Even if, upon death, the remains are converted to fuel for corpse-eating robots, as a Defense Department-funded project envisions.) Like now. I’m listening to Blossom Dearie sing "Peel Me a Grape," realizing it’s maybe 15 years since I sat 10 feet from her piano at Toronto's lost Top o' the Senator. I left intent to become her lyricist. (I sent her a pastiche of Dave Frishburg and she graciously pretended I hadn't.)

Dearie was 82 when she died a few months ago. The week earlier, Lux Interior of the Cramps passed away at 63, marking another kind of wrong.

The Cramps threw a free concert in 1978 at the State Mental Hospital in Napa, California. “Somebody told me you people were crazy,” said Lux, “but I don’t know about that. You look alright to me.” The same year I voluntarily committed myself to a religious institution, where the Lord taught us different songs. It took another five years or so for me to suspect the likes of Steven Anderson's god might not be the Phantom of the Paradise, since none of his best show tunes were originals.

We're too busy singin'

And maybe that's the question behind all questions: who writes the songs that make the whole world sing?

And you know, maybe it actually is Barry Manilow. When I was in Dallas itching to be a Pepper, it was his old jingle that did the let's all go to the lobby dance in my head. Before Manilow met fanilow, he was catapulting the propaganda for McDonalds ("you deserve a break today"), Kentucky Fried Chicken ("finger lickin' good!") and State Farm Insurance ("and like a good neighbor"). It doesn't matter what you think of Mandy, if you're a child of North America, Manilow's intrusive earworms have made you do things, and made you think it was you deciding to do them. In other words - William Irwin Thompson's words - we're trapped in a commercial from which there is no escape.

Of course Barry was only punching the clock at America's ersatz pop bottling plant, but just following orders shouldn't cut it as an excuse there, either. Manilow and his fellow corporate minstrels would probably become physically ill if confronted with the enfleshed consequence of their art of persuasion: the child obesity, the diabetes, the cancer and the heart disease. Wordsmiths like Himmler and Eichmann didn't have the stomach for seeing their own words made flesh, either.

America may romanticize the singer-songwriter, but it's the factory system that weaned Manilow which produced the country's great songbooks: composers toiling in the sweatshops of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building and Motown, performing their labour to create an audience and then manufacture its consent. (Or the beats-for-sale of "urban contemporary" that can make a recording artist of a real housewife of Atlanta, so long as the voice modulator is turned up to 11). True, original talent - the diamond in the rough - becomes a commodity only when it's machined, polished and sold. Students of politics will recognize the process.

America doesn't elect singer-songwriters to high office, though its culture industries are happy to write for the wurlitzer and play let's make believe otherwise. (Come to think of it, it's perhaps apt that a contracted murder is also known as a "hit.") Obama, like so many succesful candidates before him, even had his own song. He didn't write it, but he sure knew how to sell it. Though some weren't buying.

"Expectations got fueled," Joan Didion wrote last December. "The spirit of a cargo cult was loose in the land":

I couldn't count the number of times I heard the words "transformational" or "inspirational," or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade's war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism—by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions—"convenient" because such redefinition makes those questions seem easier to answer, "dangerous" because this was a time when the nation was least prepared to afford easy answers.

Yes we can and Hope we can believe didn't sound quite like the Sixties; they sounded more like the Seventies' tin-eared counterfeits you would hear on Quinn Martin productions whenever a crime trail might lead Cannon or Barnaby Jones to a go-go club. There was nostalgia, though not for the dangerous and authentic historical moment, but for the regurgitated mush of the first nostalgia.

And they earned Obama the White House: perfect for a relaunch of that establishment hit factory which hadn't topped the charts since Let's Roll! and Bring 'Em On (Get it on). But Obama is a President like Franklin Roosevelt only in the sense that the Monkees were a pop group like the Beatles. A radical departure from "beltway consensus" was as unwise, to his producers and Chicago entourage, as letting Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork write and perform their own material. Iraq, Afghanistan, Bernanke, Blackwater: a new house singer may bring his own interpretation, but the song remains the same.

Sometimes presidents, like their prefab pop equivalents, balk at their impotent glamour and attempt to find their own voice by trying out original material. It took Kennedy some time to find his, so who knows, Obama may yet decide to do the same. But if he’s attempting to emulate the smart Beatle by provoking the CIA director to launch into a "profanity-laced screaming match" at the White House over a probe of the agency's use of torture, then God help him. Because America's musical isn't a lone nut show, and some nutty lyrics are being written to some ominous music.

During a period of pauperization, the people with a little who have been told all their lives that they have a lot and now risk losing even that are those most inclined to learn the Horst Wessel song. Fascism may be more voodoo than economics, but as Klaus Theweleit writes, “susceptibility to fascism is explicable in terms of the economic degradation of large sections of the middle classes.” And Glenn Beck is mobilizing the Freikorps.

Stupify, scare and starve the middle class long enough and they'll become the perfect mob to torch the least hope for their own best interests. Television, radio or the web will tell them how, because apparently in the United States today, where Vietnam is still the name of an American tragedy and not a South Asian holocaust, there's none more hive-minded than the "rugged individualist" who believes the ad copy written for him. The Ku Klux Klan, let's remember, didn't burn crosses until they saw it depicted in Birth of a Nation. And the art of persuasion has come only a long way since.

We get the funniest looks

But then there are other songs, no less important for all the noise of modern life that render them barely audible.

In folklore, magick and religion, an opening to other realms or an approach to the divine is frequently initiated by ceremonial music and dance, or sounds resonating at particular frequencies. Familiar stuff ("If life is vibration, then music must not be incidental to it"), but not exactly the top of the pops. And perhaps to its credit, it never was.

"It was the weirdest music you ever heard...indescribable," says Mikmaq Mary Rose Julian, describing her family's introduction to the fairy realm in an isolated woods of Nova Scotia. "I asked my oldest 'Do you hear it?' She said yes, and I really panicked then because, you know, I wasn't hearing things."

Julian yelled for her kids to get in the car, then sped away, warning them not to look back. Yet her daughter still glanced out the rear window:

They were, like, just holding hands, jumping around in a circle sort of thing. And another one came out of the woods and they grabbed him, and they kept - they were singing. It was that noise that we heard. It was likethe were singing and dancing all over the place, in a circle. Just over there....

Of course it's effortless to think nothing of this story, even though this story has been repeating since forever in the places where our domesticated world encroaches upon the feral wood. "This was well-appreciated by the Ancient Greeks," says Phil Hine in The Pseudonomicon, "who designated such frontier places as sacred to the wild gods who might well visit terror or transformation upon those who strayed into them." Lars von Trier knows it, too. It's why we have the word "panic," after all.

"As sure as you are sitting down I heard the pipes there in that wood" [on the Hill of Tara], the Reverend Peter Kenney of Kilmessan tells Walter Evans-Wentz in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. "I often heard it in the wood of Tara. Whenever the good people play, you hear their music through the field as plain as can be."

And they're called the good people, remember, to not risk incurring their offence and inviting horror. The same way it's always a good life in Peaksville, Ohio.

Walkin' down the street

The Earth has its song, too. And it always closes out the show.

If not the least of our worries, then perhaps the likelihood of huge solar storms – to peak, wouldn't it just, in 2012 - may be the more prosaic. Because if we’re right, or perhaps just not completely wrong, about the South Atlantic Anomaly, the tremendous new holes in our magnetic shield - breeches in our planet’s offworld levees - may grant greater privilege to still wilder things that sometimes manifest in visible light.

And not light only. Since the transfer of energy is vibration, we may also experience it as sound. The Earth’s electromagnetic field is a power trio - a soaring ionosphere, fronting a rhythm section of north and south poles, creating an electrodynamic resonating cavity that finds a frequency of 10 hertz. Coincidentally, the same same alpha brainwave frequency for humans and all animals. The sky losing Orion and the Earth changing its tune are not auspicious prospects for the life we call life.

In 1926 HP Lovecraft wrote The Silver Key, in which Randolph Carter "lost the key of the gate of dreams." It was a hard loss for someone accustomed to Lovecraft's imagined landscapes peopled by oddly-robed figures and gibbering ghouls who saw "Earth's gods dancing by moonlight." But by the age of 30, the custom of waking life "had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions." Well-meaning and wise men explained to him the workings of the material world, and he came to be chained to it. But Carter's chains have shown themselves to be one of the weakest of Lovecraft's fictions.

I think of them when what became of the dinosaurs crosses my path: a subway pigeon pecking through litter and pools of piss and purple Slushee. Its ancestors have been bird-like far longer than my own have been man-like; longer even than ape-like. (And the folk knowledge of ancestry predates Darwin and scientific theory. In his Maps of Time, David Christian quotes a Portuguese missionary to West Africa in the early 17th century, Father Alvares, that "there are heathen that claim to be descendants of this animal [the chimpanzee], and when they see it they have great compassion: they never harm it or strike it, because they consider it the soul of their forefathers.... They say they are of the animal's family.") Beneath the K/T boundary that marks humanity's most fortuitous extinction event ever, we're represented by Cretaceous rodentia too slight for the appetites of the feathered theropods.

Yay, team.

"There is no such constellation...." - Lars von Trier, Antichrist

Book Launch, Wed Dec 17

2008-12-16T16:35:00.002-05:00

Don't show me no picture show or give me no book to read - Bob Dylan

Well this says everything anyone needs to know about how together I am. I'm having a book launch on Wednesday, December 17, and I haven't posted anything here about it.

Conspiracy Culture bookstore, 7 to 9 pm, 1696 Queen St. W. Toronto. More details here.

Hope to see you there. Or maybe, hope to see you first.

A genuine update coming. Honest.

My Barack Pages

2008-11-08T00:03:00.002-05:00

Memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow - Bob Dylan

Just because there's a Democrat in the White House is no reason to stop reading Lovecraft.

From "The Shadow in the Attic":

There was a moment that was as if the Earth had taken a half turn backward or something of that kind, and I had not gone along with it but were suspended somewhere far out in space at the instant before plunging into orbit of my own - and then the moment passed, the Earth resumed its regularity of turning, the room lightened, the flame in the lamp steadied.

It was the longest moment for some, lasting eight years, since the done-deal that was Gore's Florida flipped columns. Old certainties, even among cynics, of how bad things could get, suddenly seemed wretchedly naive as the Earth staggered like a drunk, with Dick Cheney its designated driver. As kleptocracy and high crime compounded illegitimacies and low comedy, many millions - conservative Republicans and conspiracy debunkers among them - came to feel themselves in a strange place, with unlikely companions and no sure footing, and entertaining hypotheses they had once thought unimaginable. And as the years dragged, it became difficult to conceive of anything different, or to reflect upon what "different" might even mean.

And now, it would seem, the moment has passed. The Earth has resumed its kinder, gentler course, and the shadow in America's attic has been dispelled by - I dunno; shall we call it a thousand points of light? Democrats can awake from a nightmare and fall into a dream, and conspiracy theory can once more become the property of the "patriot" right.

I think the worst of conspiracy theory - actually all theory, and no conspiracy - must be the unfalsifiable, post hoc prediction. If you haven't seen it yet or don't know what I'm talking about, you will, as theorists retool their cottage industries to react to a Democratic administration. Fintan Dunn calls it the "Red Coup gambit" of the New World Order, absurdly describing Obama as an "undercover Marxist ideologue." Webster Tarpley gets in on the action with his book The Postmodern Coup, which shoe-horns Obama into his meta-analysis as the next, inevitable Manchurian Candidate of the Brzezinski faction. Alex Jones, like some Star Trek energy entity that feeds on pure hysteria, is whipping up a new batch to keep those cards and letters coming. ("Congressman, are you feeling the dread many of us are feeling right now?")

But it's neither that complicated nor so ridiculous, is it? Real history, even in the living of it, isn't a seamless narrative that enfolds all events into a single narrator's construct. As recently as September, I thought there was no clear path for an Obama victory. Still, the election didn't need to be staged, not with a vetting process designed to winnow out all contenders who don't know what and to who they owe, who might do something, even by chance, that could divest the true rulers of their rule. (And McCain didn't actually run to lose, not really, though the creepiest incompetent campaign in American history might as well have been managed by Kid Gleason.) That Obama could be taken for a progressive, even in the beltway sense of the term, is a testament to the polish of his blank slate and the desperation of an orphaned Left anxious for a win, even if it means their loss. To whom the coming surge in Afghanistan, the likely deferral of a meaningful withdrawal from Iraq (one that might include private armies and troops that have had the "combat" redefined out of them), the appointment of Rahm Emanuel and other "moderates" will smell like...victory.

Last Thursday, as President Elect, Obama received his initial briefing of classified intelligence pertaining to national security. Friday, CNN's Candy Crowley asked "whether anything's given you pause," to which he replied "I'm going to skip that." Whatever he heard, and however long he paused, I'm fairly certain he didn't hear anything like what Evo Morales means to brief him:

Bolivian leader Evo Morales on Thursday accused the US government of encouraging drug-trafficking as he explained his decision to banish the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).... "The worst thing is, it did not fight drug trafficking; It encouraged it," the Bolivian leader said, adding that he had "quite a bit of evidence" backing up his charges.

Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana presented a series of documents and press clippings at a news conference, which he described as "object data" that had influenced Morales' decision to suspend DEA activities last week.

Quintana said Morales was ready to present the evidence to incoming US president Barack Obama "to prove the illegality, abuse and arrogance of the DEA in Bolivia."

When Bill Clinton entered the presidency, he sought some back-channel answers to questions not addressed in his classified briefing. His Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell wrote in Friends in High Places:

Clinton had said, 'If I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs?" Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting.

Clinton might have curried the Deep State's favour in Mena, but it withheld its deeper secrets from him and his Arkansas capo as from middle managers just passing through without a legitimate need to know. (The seeming otherworldliness of the Bush/Cheney years is largely accounted for by the broad, intuitive dread that Cheney knows.) Obama doesn't even display Clinton's idle curiosity, though he and his Chicago Mafia do show some of his hubris. Should he change in office, and light a lamp in America's shuttered rooms, he may feel the Earth take a half turn backwards, while its true rulers decide what to do with him.

Afterwords and Forewords

2008-10-29T06:50:00.004-04:00

The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak - Bob Dylan

News, some good and some meh, before shaking out the mothballs.

Happily, and no thanks to me, the Rigorous Intuition book has at last gone to press. It wound up running about 500-pages, words and art, plus index. (And most of all, I'm thrilled about the index. Better books than mine are made useless without them.) It can be ordered directly from Trine Day, or through Amazon or Indigo, and I'm sure elsewhere. I'm planning for a launch at Toronto's Conspiracy Culture, and it would be fun and probably scary to see some of you there, or wherever else the book leads me.

Though I'm not so thrilled about this: my bill-paying gig has gone under, for the second time in four years, and almost certainly for the last. The economy's never great for magazines, and especially not now, or so the money people say.

But the consequences of both are complementary. The weight of the book has finally lifted, and Frank's daily deadlines won't distract me again from the work I think I should be doing instead. And so I'll be posting here with more regularity, adding long-deferred enhancements to the site and the forum, and drafting a proposal for a book that would take me away from the desk and into the field for some original research.

And if you're able and so inclined, I've at last fixed the Paypal link in the bar to the right.

A proper, content-heavy post is forthcoming.

Attention Deficit World Order (Part Two)

2008-10-02T05:42:00.005-04:00

"Judgement day," he said, in a mocking voice. "Ain't no judgement day, old man. Cept this. Maybe this here judgement day for you." - Flannery O'Connor, "Judgement Day"

I wish I could blame all my bad blogging upon writer's block, but it's not just the words that have been lacking; it's been any sensible thought to penetrate America's strange dreamtime. And unlike Sarah Palin, I'd rather say nothing when that's all that I know. And that's just sad, because as novel as these events seem, they are still all recurring dreams, though we greet them like goldfish seeing the world anew every time we circle the bowl.

Perhaps the truest and most essential thing Michael Moore ever said, he said at the Oscars. We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times. But I dunno; maybe he's spent too much time since that night playing a character in a false narrative, because on the eve of Congress's campy read through of an early draft proposal for a trillion dollar grift - a fictitious fix to a fictitious crisis of fictitious money - Moore advised Americans to "call or e-mail Senator Obama" and "call your Representative in Congress." So that's how it works. How about rather, as soon as you discover you've already seen the movie, walk out of the theatre and demand your money back?

Is this the way the world ends? European astrologers at the turn of the 16th century forecast devastating floods for the year 1524. One result, as the date approached, was a "Great Fear," as recorded by Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo. Another, for Venice, was a tremendous investment in public works in order to prevent the silting up of the city's lagoon. (Sadly, the careful consideration of Renaissance engineers of the city's effect upon its environment had been forgotten by the mid-20th Century, when channel dredging and groundwater extraction saw Venice rapidly sink 20 centimeters in 20 years.) And a further effect was an increased popularity of satirical doom singers. One Venetian cantastorie going by the name of "Master Pegasus Neptune" predicted "conjunctions of cheese and lasagna," and comically prophesied that "In those days cats and dogs will be enemies, swords will cut better than radishes, fields and mountains will be out in the open, and the taverns will be well frequented." We might add, that in these days, the stock market will crash, and the stock market will rally.

That's not the end. Hell, that's not even the world.

Perhaps this is more like it? From a dispatch last week by Dr. Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, aboard the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi in the Arctic Ocean:

We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.

Days later, the British research ship the James Clark Ross reported counting "about 250 methane plumes bubbling from the seabed in an area of about 30 square miles in water less than 400 metres (1,300 feet) deep off the west coast of Svalbard." Deeper plumes at three times the depth were found near by.

If the thawing permafrost and warming oceans lose the integrity of their methane sinks, if the billowing chimneys of Arctic methane represent their tipping point, then the climate is soon to run away from a tolerable mean. A feedback loop even more catastrophic than Reaganomics will have been initiated. But as with Reaganomics, a happy ending can't be written for us.

But never mind that. There are millions of lives lived right now in apocalypse. Zimbabwe - does that look like the end of the world? Another world at least, where children are eating toxic, indigestible roots to stave off hunger, though malnutrition will kill them if relief isn't sent "very fast." What percentage of Wall Street's "rescue" would it take to rescue them? What percentage of Henry Paulson's personal wealth of $700 million? It's crazy that it seems crazy to ask. But that's Zimbabwe, and Mugabe's small time grifters aren't hooked up with the global syndicate. There's no need to know, and since so much of news is supposed to be news you use, they lose.

And we do too, if we don't know this Zimbabwe story, from last April:

American film maker Randall Nickerson is currently visiting southern Africa to make a documentary that follows up an incident that happened at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994, when 62 children aged between eight and 12 reported seeing a UFO and “strange beings” during their morning break.

Those children are now young adults scattered around the globe. Nickerson is tracking them down and interviewing them about the experience. “Their stories have not changed at all,” he says. “Not what you would expect if they had made it all up.”

So what exactly happened on that day in 1994 at the school in Ruwa just east of Harare? “It was morning break and they were out in the school yard playing,” says Nickerson. “They saw one main silver craft that had four others around it,” says Nickerson. “It came down on a hill beyond the school yard that was out of bounds. The boundary was the edge of the school yard, then it was bush and the hill.

“They ran to the edge of the school yard to see what this thing was. They saw this small creature walk around on top of the craft while another came down to check out the children. He was all in black, with a very tight suit. The children said he had big eyes ‘like rugby balls’.

“The children had direct eye contact with this creature. There seems to have been some kind of communication with the children about the state of the world — what we are doing to the planet, the destruction we are causing, although not all the children got this message. Some of the children were traumatized, others were excited. The young children were the most traumatized as they were at the front of the group.

African UFO researcher Cynthia Hind was at the school the next day. One little girl told her "I swear by every hair on my head and the whole Bible that I am telling the truth." Harvard's John Mack soon followed, and interviewed dozens of witnesses with whom Nickerson is now following up.

One is Isabelle:

He was just staring, and we like, tried not to look at him, because he was quite scary.

MACK: What was scary about him?

His big eyes I think. I think - I think they want people to know that we're actually making harm on this world and we mustn't get too technoledged [sic]

MACK: What gave you that feeling?

I don't know.

MACK: But it came to you when you were with the strange beings?

Yeah. When he was looking at us. It came through my head. My conscience I think.

MACK: Had you been a person who thought a lot about what we were doing to the world?

No. Only after this.

I don't know what happened at Ruwa, but something real, really did, which means it has more authenticity than John McCain's David Blainesque "suspension" of his campaign, upside down, above the head of David Letterman, and more weight than the Treasury Department's rationale for the figure of $700 billion. ("It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number.") If we can't explain it or understand it, maybe we should fight the impulse to ignore it. As well as real, it could be important. Or maybe just kill us.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of Australian pilot Frederich Valentich's disappearance, whose last words before his microphone captured an unidentified sound of grinding metal was "That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it's not an aircraft."

Driving home in a company van the evening of March 17, 1978, Englishman Ken Edwards saw a strange figure on top of an embankment. As Peter Hough tells it in Visition, The being was tall and broad, with a head like a goldfish bowl, and its arms appeared to sprout from the top of its shoulders. It descended the steep hill at an impossible right angle to the ground, and before walking across the road and straight through a chain link fence as if it wasn't there, turned to face the van and shot narrow beams of light from its eyes into the cab. A power surge burned out all of its major components, Edwards' watch stopped, and he showed Hough marks on his hands that had been clutching the steering wheel which resembled sunburns. He soon began complaining of stomach pains, and was found to be riddled with cancer, and died at 42. Maybe he would have anyway, if he and something unknowable hadn't crossed paths, but like Barbara, his widow, told Hough, "A thing that can burn skin, stop watches and destroy an expensive radio might well be capable of bringing harm to a human being."

Last July 20, Vince Weiguang Li delivered an Edmonton newspaper that carried a lengthy feature on the Windigo, "a terrifying creature in native mythology that has a ravenous appetite for human flesh. It could take possession of people and turn them into cannibalistic monsters."

Li abruptly quit his job and took a bus across the Canadian prairie, where he beheaded and cannibalized 20-year old Tim McLean. "I just don't know what to think of it, quite frankly," says the piece's author, and Windigo expert, Nathan Carlson. He'd documented numerous cases of people believing they were "turning Windigo" who would beg to be killed "before they started eating people." At Li's first courthouse appearance, the only words he spoke were a soft, "Please kill me."

On McLean's myspace page, under Who I'd like to meet, he posted "an alien, the wolfman, frankensteins monster, a vampire...."

The Tuesday after the market dropped 777 points, the front page of a Toronto newspaper headline told me there's a "monster lot of fear out there."

Ooooh, I'm scared.

Attention Deficit World Order (Part One)

2008-08-10T22:22:00.004-04:00

"Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension."

- HP Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House

The more things strange, the more I want to stay the same.

Suddenly, just when it seems UFOs are everywhere, I'd rather be nowhere. America's late-term, lame-duck housecleaning of suspicious suicides and self-inflicted gunshot wounds is in full swing, and I'd just as soon clean the porch. And I've never wanted to clean the porch. Now a new, "optimistic" estimate gives the world 100-months to forestall the tipping point of a runaway greenhouse effect, but I prefer to focus on the short term, and speculate idly upon how much ass next year's Watchmen adaptation will or will not kick.

I've been struggling for a year and a half with writing an introduction to my book. A year and a freaking half. I haven't been able to account for the missing time to my publisher, though I don't need a hypnotist to tell me where it's all gone. I have been good at stammering apologies and repeating vain promises, and revisiting false starts and bad ideas. (And naturally the blog suffered, because how could I justify spitting out posts like watermelon seeds while using the book for a spittoon?)

Maybe, in another year and a half, I'd have something to say. Maybe if I kept looking I'd eventually find a place to start. But I think it's more sensible to say I can't do it, and instead write my conclusions and stick them at the front. (And maybe even squeeze a blog post out of it at the same time.)

So here it is: they've won. Or let me rephrase that, since there will never be universal agreement as to who "they" are: we've lost.

Because life is short, even if I get another turn after this one, I'd rather not waste half of it relearning all the secret wrongs done to the world that I can't undo. So I need to know what, if anything, we get out of knowing what they get away with. And if it's so we may better "organize," then good luck and God bless us playing catch-up, since the priesthoods and kingly classes have had a 10,000 year head start.

I suppose it counts for something, that so many have been able to recognize the holes in the FBI's posthumous stitch-up of Bruce Ivins for the anthrax attacks. That we haven't jumped when they say jump to the conclusions of guilt and case closed may be some comfort to his family and colleagues, who watched Ivins break under the relentless There can be only one ethos of America's Lone Gunman. But all our reservation of judgment amounts to nothing but a sympathy card - an e-card at that - against the prosecution of a dead man who can be tried and convicted now only because he is dead and undefended.

Stalin's show trials, what was it do you think that they showed? Not that Zinoviev and Kamenev and the other Old Bolsheviks were "terrorists" and "sexual deviants" (though it is instructive how often the prosecuting state conjoins the two). Rather, they demonstrated Stalin's rule by absolute whim. That loyalty and service, innocence or guilt, afforded no protection. It was irrelevant if Soviet citizens were convinced that justice was served by their state. They just needed to note that if they demurred, there was nothing they could do about it.

Senator Patrick Leahy has a speaking part in The Dark Knight. It looks like his mouth talking, but it sounds like his ass. "We're not intimidated by you thugs," Leahy stares down the knife-wielding Joker who's crashed a political fundraiser. It was The Dark Knight's only moment for which I could not suspend disbelief, since two hundred billion particles of finely-milled anthrax were enough to erase the Senator's initial qualms concerning the Patriot Act. But I won't judge him, except as a character in a superhero movie, because I wasn't there and it wasn't me. Most of the time we don't make ourselves targets by our objections to their plans, because there's not much we could do to impede them. And besides, as the Joker later says, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

I don't have a reasonable doubt that Edgar Mitchell is telling the truth about his being briefed by government officials on Roswell and alien visitation to Earth. I have considerable doubt they were telling him the truth. Because I don't think it's part of the plan to tell the truth, of which, almost certainly, even the highest and darkest government officials would have only partial knowledge. If "disclosure" ever comes, its purpose may not be to persuade us of a lie, but rather to tell a terrifying joke.

Master of our Domain

2008-06-12T14:03:00.012-04:00

Half the people had turned into squealing pigs, the other half were cooking - Nick Cave

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch in which Mark McKinney plays a loner who's injured his toe. By the swelling, the pus and the change of colour he knows it needs attention, but he can't get motivated to go to the hospital, because "as it is, I'm fascinated by the process!" His leg has gone numb below the knee, and he can stick a fork in it and not feel a thing. "Now that," he says, "is interesting!"

Here's the thing.

In the dying days of Hillary Clinton's campaign, a wistful and perhaps at last unhinged Bill liked to say how there comes a time when we know we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. For civilizations, too. And the borrowedness of our moments of plenty should be, finally, achingly manifest.

Agricultural soils are being eroded at a rate 10 to 40 times that of soil formation. (Iowa alone has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years.) The ingestion and absorption of industrial toxicities has contributed to an endocrine disruption that's resulted in a 40% decline in sperm count in 50 years. And the atrocities of global industry has so contaminated the milk of Inuit mothers that it can be categorized as hazardous waste.

Energy and food are being priced out of reach of the poor. (I mean our poor: the genetic detritus of developed nations. The rest? Let them eat mud cakes. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but it’s still the world they have always known.) Like a deleted scene from Children of Men, a pray-in was held five weeks ago at a San Francisco Chevron station to beseech God for lower fuel prices. Gas has risen about 40 cents since. Demand for cheap and "green" biofuels is devastating forests, and stealing food and habitat from the other poor. Besides other things, Soylent Green is fuel efficient.

Climatologists are throwing out their most pessimistic forecasts, since reality has already outstripped them. More carbon dioxide is being discharged into the atmosphere now than even the worst-case scenario in last year's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Adelaide University's Barry Bock told the Canberra conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, and anticipates a temperature rise of six degrees. Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth. "Oxygen isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch [the release of the ocean's methane hydrates] than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene":

Sedimentary layers show that most of the world's plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a "fungal spike" as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.

One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

I don't know if time's speeding up or we're winding down, but Nostradamus doesn't seem of much use anymore. The last few months have felt, to me, like the closing of a door. Ahead is another door, only one, and we have no choice but to walk through it.

As it is, I'm fascinated by the process! Which, I suppose happily enough, can still appall me.

Conspiracies, too, fascinate, and are the reality of parapolitical culture, but conspiracy culture is its reality television. Even if someone does bust the conspiracy wide open! as Alex Jones has promised that so many of his broadcasts would do, justice would be served to the same extent The Bachelor is genuinely searching for true love. Seven years gone since September 11, and the singular accomplishment of "9/11 Truth" appears to have been the creation of another Great American Pastime. Sirhan could not have killed Robert Kennedy, but four decades later he's still in prison. And even when an American Court found the federal government and its agencies to be co-conspirators in the death of Martin Luther King, the judgment left no mark upon the guilty.

The Internet is often thought an egalitarian blessing by those who would hold high criminals accountable, yet the only accounting rendered is online. I don't think the guilty regard this as an unfortunate development. I think we've been corralled into cyberspace, taken as freedom its "free speech zones," and adopted its virtual and vulnerable bantustans as our "domains." (Appropriately so called, since its mastery entered mass culture as a euphemism for masturbaton.) We can win the blog wars, but we may as well have been playing World of Warcraft for all the difference it will make when the power goes out and we lose our connection. The connection for which we may have forsaken many others of much higher worth.

So this is my dilemma, and my paralysis. It's not every day you get to spectate the real-time collapse of a planetary civilization and biosphere. (Or, I suppose I should say, I remember a time when it wasn't.) But watching this unfold with fascination feels complicit and worse than if I were blithely ignorant, and analyzing it at this seeming late stage futile and ridiculous. What's important now, what's more important than ever, are the close-to-home matters: being a good father and husband, and learning how to best cushion the crash of our coddled urban lives.

That's why I'd lost my words. I'm getting them back, and I'll be posting with regularity again, which feels good because I'm a writer and I don't know what else to do with them. But my regard for them has changed.

It's like Harvey Pekar says, in the August issue of American Splendor:

"I thought about it and I realized that i might be part of the last generation that has experienced 'normal life' for some time... I try to think of positive things, you know, like I'm happy about what's been happening with my writing. But in the face of the upcoming disaster everything seems futile."

I'd have rather posted something else, but I couldn't write anything until I'd written this.

I needed to look away for a while...

2008-05-09T16:55:00.004-04:00

...and I'm finding it harder than expected to look back.

I'm working on a lengthy post that touches a number of subjects but it hasn't jelled for me quite yet. I'm hoping to have it up in this space soon. (That's the illustration for it.) Regardless, there's always the forum.

Time keeps on slipping

2008-04-17T13:44:00.005-04:00

I have lots to cover, and lots to pull together for the next post. Which I was hoping would have been last week. Early next, more likely now.

Blogger apparently blinked out on the last entry and began refusing comments. I don't imagine there was much left to be said, but I apologize for that.

See you in a few days.

On edit: It's no longer early in the week, but it will be today.

On edit, again: Predictably, I was wrong. I'm hoping today will be different.

The Deep Ones and the Madness of Crowds

2008-03-27T16:50:00.012-04:00

The Deep Ones

I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground - HP Lovecraft, The Crawling Chaos

The Overlords of Childhood's End hide their true form for the first 50 years of their benevolent space brother stewardship, calculating that a half century of alien new order will be sufficient to overthrow millennia of religious patterning and superstition. It almost is. But there is still shock at their appearance: barbed-tail, horns and leathery-wings, like the demons of discarded faiths. The classic imagery of a demon had been a prefigurement imprinted upon humanity at the revelation of its doom, and cast back through race memory as an instance of reverse causation.

It would be bad enough if Clarke were right, though his godlike aliens had the grace of intellect and empathy even as they took Earth into receivership. Lovecraft's gelatinous, slobbering gods, not so much. And it's Lovecraft I worry about, and his Deep Ones dreaming.

Narrating the IMAX documentary Deep Sea, Johnny Depp's first words are to assure us we're not watching science fiction, and the creatures are not from another planet. The creatures are jellyfish, and the assurance that this is our own world fails to comfort me. Their biomass now surpasses ocean vertebrates, and are found in staggering quantities where they have never been seen in number before, because we have sickened the waters with overfishing and the climate is trending towards conditions unseen since the Carboniferous Era.

Complexity is the product of cooling, a process observable on every order of scale. The world we recognize and of which we're a part is the product of a climate mild enough to encourage diversity and intricacy. Brainless and simple jellies thrive in warm waters, and catastrophic warming means devolution of the seas back into primordial soups. The new plague of jellies appears as a harbinger of the end of the world we know from out of the world we didn't: from out of Deep Time. From slime, back to slime.

Billions of luminescent mauve stingers, "in a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep," wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm last November. "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it," said Northern Salmon's Managing Director John Russell. "It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing." This is more than three months old and you may have already forgotten the report, but is there a rival to this horror in all of Lovecraft's fiction? More than three months on and I still can't shake it, and it's at least worthy of the signs and wonders of a blind idiot god.

Translucent, mutable and iridescent, 98% water and almost entirely not there, a jelly is perhaps as close to a phantom as a creature can be and yet still belong to the material realm. In this respect at least it transcends the material, and gives great metaphor for the ineffable and alien yet familiar Other. Which may partly account for why they're seen these days in even less likely places than off the coast of Ireland. The sky above, for instance.

In October 2005, Bolivian Gustavo Ponce reported something above the town Oruro that was so foreign to his frame of reference that at first he refused to believe what he was seeing:

"It was a very strange and shiny figure that could be seen through the binoculars. I went ahead and took out my camcorder to videotape the UFO in the sky. As the camera zoomed toward the object, I could how it was breaking down into a shape resembling a jellyfish or something like it. It was very strange."

He added that the object was flying over the eastern part of the city and that it was the first time he had ever seen such an object, having never had previous visual contact with a UFO. [Newspaper] La Patria visited Ponce's home to see the images captured by his camcorder, attesting to the fact that the shining object broke down into a full circumference, adopting the shape of a jellyfish.

Last June, a "jellyfish-shaped UFO" was seen over Shanghai. And from Sidney, British Columbia:

I stepped outside at 9:10 PM, to have a smoke and saw a bright orange ball of light heading south directly at me on September 9, 2007. My wife came out and we watched it pass overhead. I grabbed the binoculars and we both had multiple turns viewing it. My wife describes it as an "orange jellyfish" that I agree with looked like that to me too but it had a structure to the leading edge of the sphere like a crescent. It was very brilliant, pulsated and jiggled slightly. It looked like a glowing orange jellyfish and flew south over Sidney at a increasing rate of speed dimming from view.

Four days later, while Greg Lauver was driving through the Colorado town of Durango:

While driving through town on US Highway 550 on September 13, 2007, I saw an object like a glowing diamond filled with countless strands of yellow-white light at 4:50 PM. Each strand was a string of countless beads of gleaming white, all of which floated in a transparent medium which permitted the sky color to pass through yet also glowed faintly due to its contents. It reminded me of a spectacular back-lit picture of a live jellyfish by National Geographic.

Then most recently, and famously, the Stephenville UFO.

Witness Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan describes his January 12, 2008 encounter:

I watch this thing in the police video and it appears to be some type of aerial object that is round. It changes from white to these different colors. The police officer says, ‘Keep watching,’ and I watched for approximately another eight minutes. And then this thing, right in front of my eyes, changes and it looks almost like a jellyfish. I compare it maybe even to a parachute – and now a very bright white. The green and blue and red is no longer flashing. It holds that shape for probably two minutes. And then to my surprise, it changes vertically like a line straight up and down.

The deeper a Lovecraft protagonist delves towards the realm of the Deep Ones, beneath the banal surface order of things, the closer he draws to madness. There's no bargaining; no appeal to reason or mercy. It's a doomed commitment to seek out pitiless truth that will either kill the hero or render him senseless. Devotion to the dumb lords is no escape. Devotion's only reward is the privilege of being eaten first.

The Madness of Crowds

Foremost among the living objects were inky, jellyfish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped.... - Lovecraft, From Beyond

Prey evolve adaptive strategies for species' survival. It's in the predators' interest that they do. The prey is their feed pool, their life, and if they drive it to extinction then it becomes their doom as well. Prey needs to thrive for the health of the predator. And if the prey cannot adapt fast enough then the predator must, suppressing its appetite in ways that sometimes create bizarre codependencies.

According to the theory of endosymbiosis this is a story written in our Deep Biology, in the nucleated cells of nearly every living thing. In our mitochondria.

What doesn't kill us makes us...different. In their Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, authors Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan write "imagine the ancestor of our mitochondria: a ruthless attacker, capable of breathing oxygen when it was around, or maybe even doing without it if necessary":

The ancestors of mitochondria invaded and reproduced within our other bacterial ancestors. At first the occupied hosts just barely kept alive. But when they died, they took the invaders with them. Eventually only cooperators were left. The invaded victims and tamed mitochondria recovered from the vicious attack and have lived ever since, for 1,000 million years, in dynamic alliance.

In the long run, the most vicious predators, like the dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation - the attack that doesn't quite kill or does kill only slowly - is a recurring theme in evolution. The predatory precursors of mitochondria invaded and exploited their hosts, but the prey resisted. Forced to be content with an expendable part of the prey (its waste) instead of the entire body of the prey, some mitochondria precursors grew but never killed their providers.

In this primitive example the predatory proto-mitochondria knew a good thing when they ate it, and adapted to the point of domestication, the resultant symbiant becoming the conveyor of two independent sets of DNA in virtually all living things on Earth. However, Margulis and Sagan allow that the story is still being written, and may not end happily ever after. Some cancers, they write, may represent a "sort of atavistic return to the original state of prokaryote animosity." And through his study of the behaviour of mitochondria in cancerous tissue, Philip John of the University of Reading has concluded that "mitochondrial rebellions have not been permanently quelled."

Political animals are still animals, and politics as practiced at the top of the food chain may be just another instance of restrained predation, whose signature distinction is merely that it is happening to us. This would be intra-species predation, at least for now ("humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time," says evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry), but that too is found in nature. Here is the unnatural: if humanity does eventually bifurcate into sub-species, it will be only biology's punctuation to the division of class, effected 6,000 years ago by the global emergence of an urbanized, priestly patriarchy whose rule is typically equated with "civilization."

Paedophile rings that cater to the elite are great practitioners of restrained predation, preying typically upon orphans, their own and the children who fall between the cracks, such as those of Boy's Town in the Franklin scandal and Jersey's dungeon-like Haut de la Garenne, from which kids were reportedly "loaned out" to wealthy yachtsmen for "rape cruises." They don't need all the children, or so many that the lattice of their privilege and appetite would draw attention. (The Pale Man leaves the ones who don't touch his banquet table; some are taken, and some are left by the hungry black car of The Reflecting Skin.) They take enough to feed well, but not enough to be noticed by those who have already been told there is nothing to see. (And I think it deserves noting that it was the hysterical overstatement of the numbers of victims by the likes of Ted Gunderson, who speciously contended that upwards of a million American children a year go missing, which 20 years ago helped consign ritual abuse to the domain of urban legend.)

So predators inhibit their appetites to avoid detection. But when they are above detection, they had better do so anyway in order to preserve the feed stock. That they didn't, may be one of the measures of the Nazis' madness. If they had killed Europe's last Jew they would have destroyed themselves as surely as the Onceler who chopped down the last Truffula tree, because their machineries would have lost the lubricant of Jewish blood. And perhaps it's because they didn't, that they won and are still with us.

(One other thing: in so far as the predator class operates with seeming inhumanity, it becomes easier for their natural prey to imagine that they may be other than human. This may account for both the truth and the lie of Icke's reptillian "secret," and how it could ever find currency.)

John Lamb Lash, in his Gnostic reinterpretation of sacred history, Not In His Image, puts it this way (and though I normally balk at the use of "Illuminati" to talk about anything but Weishaupt's Bavarian order, I do like Lash's application of it to describe the followers of a deviant shamanic path who falsely employ initiatory knowledge to social control):

Around 4000 BCE, with the rise of urban civilization in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering. They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show. Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods. The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment, or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority. Kingship rituals were distinct from the rites of initiation that led to instruction by the Light and consecration to the Great Goddess. Their purpose was not education and enlightenment, but social management. Gnostics refrained from assuming any role in politics because their intention was not to change society but to produce skilled, well-balanced, enlightened individuals who would create a society good enough that it did not need to be run by external management....

Historians recognize a split in the Magian order, but do not understand either its origin or its consequences. Within the order, the telestai [spiritual initiates] were given the title of vaedemna, "seer," "wise one," as distinguished from the priest, the zoatar, who officiated openly in society and advised Middle Eastern theocrats on matters of statecraft and social morality.... So arose the first theocratic city-states in the Fertile Crescent. Urban populations required social control, and the Illuminati assumed the role of planners and controllers - more often than not, hidden controllers.

...

The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its cover, perpetrator religion. While it cannot exactly be said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it. And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states ("entrainment"), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person ("platforming"), and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (the "Manchurian candidate" technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world. If we accept that the Mysteries were schools for Gaian coevolution dedicated to the goddess Sophia, they could not have been run by the Illuminati, as some contemporary writers (who believe they are exposing the Illuminati) have supposed. Everything the Gnostics did in the schools was intended to counterbalance and correct the machinations of the deviant adepts. Initiation involved melting the ego boundaries in preparation for deep rapport with nature, not lowering of ego consciousness so that the subject could be "sectioned" and behaviorally programmed using the power of suggestion, imprinting, and other psychodramatic methods. These behavioral modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by Gnostics.

This, I think, is the deep context in which we should situate the perpetual travesty machine of American politics. Here too, restrained predation "doesn't quite kill or does kill only slowly." Here, rather, it "keeps hope alive."

All through the Bush years, scores of non-Republicans have anticipated the brutal full-flowering of traditional dictatorship with all the trappings: martial law, mass internment and the cancellation of elections. Through much of the Clinton years, many non-Democrats looked for the same. It didn't come (though some are still waiting). It's as if they've not only expected the worst, but sought it, to put them out of their misery. But the worst exceeds their expectations, and their misery is to be protracted indefinitely.

The Kennedys and King, the October Surprise and Mena, anthrax and Wellstone, Gore and Kerry, Florida and Ohio: you might think that would be enough to make most Democrats say You know what? This isn't working out. But elections are paced like the Olympics, and in another four years the Jamaican bobsledders may really have a shot. Hey, anything's possible. And so long as people believe that, and that anything means everything they want, the cycle repeats and self-perpetuates.

The great assassinations of the Sixties were decapitation strikes, never intended to kill the host or to extinguish hope. It's only the hopeless who are dangerous. Hope must be encouraged, because you don't need to do anything to have it, and it keeps the prey from becoming wise to its own nature and seeking extraction from the cycle. Hope makes it possible to write and believe such things as "Al Gore will save the planet but Barack Obama will save this country." Hope that the system works, even if it is just a digestive system.

Restrained predation upon the Democratic Party may be at an advanced stage of domestication, but it also mimics molecular endosymbiosis with the injection of alien organelles in the form of the Trojan horse DLC to which, of all the contenders, both Clinton and Obama are closest in tactics and ideology. Funny how that happened.

And how did that happen? I think there's an institutional instinct at work, in the Deep Context, that maintains the insectival social engine of power. Does Obama know his role? That may be irrelevant, because the volition and cognition of the individuals who form the living manifestation of the system may be grossly overstated. They have given themselves to the system, the system has groomed them and raised them above all others, and they instinctively know what the system requires.

Is it hopeless? Thank Christ, yes, so get used to it. There's a liberation to hopelessness, in knowing what can't be done (or more typically, politically, be done for you), which I personally find preferable to another four years of huffing one's own jenkem. There's no salvation within the political cycle of death and rebirth, consumption and excretion - jellies eat and shit through the same simple hole, which could also be a reasonably sophisticated media analysis - and to hope for such a savior is to be the doomed hero of Lovecraft's fiction.

Perhaps it's not be so far from the Deep Ones to Deep Politics. You could say it all comes out right in the end, but you know what comes out in the end.

2008-03-24T07:18:00.001-04:00

Updating today.

On edit: It's been the longest day.

Seriously: today.

The Deep Ones and the Madness of Crowds (Part One)

2008-03-07T04:54:00.007-05:00

"I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground" - HP Lovecraft, The Crawling Chaos

The Deep Ones

The Overlords of Childhood's End hide their true form for the first 50 years of their benevolent space brother stewardship, calculating that a half century of alien new order will be sufficient to overthrow millennia of religious patterning and superstition. It almost is. But there is still shock at their appearance: barbed-tail, horns and leathery-wings, like the demons of discarded faiths. The classic imagery of a demon had been a prefigurement imprinted upon humanity at the revelation of its doom, and cast back through race memory as an instance of reverse causation.

It would be bad enough if Clarke were right, though his godlike aliens had the grace of intellect and empathy even as they took Earth into receivership. Lovecraft's gelatinous, slobbering gods, not so much. And it's Lovecraft I worry about, and his Deep Ones dreaming.

Narrating the IMAX documentary Deep Sea, Johnny Depp's first words are to assure us we're not watching science fiction, and the creatures are not from another planet. The creatures are jellyfish, and the assurance that this is our own world fails to comfort me. Their biomass now surpasses ocean vertebrates, and are found in staggering quantities where they have never been seen in number before, because we have sickened the waters with overfishing and the climate is trending towards conditions unseen since the Carboniferous Era.

Complexity is the product of cooling, a process observable on every order of scale. The world we recognize and of which we're a part is the product of a climate mild enough to encourage diversity and intricacy. Brainless and simple jellies thrive in warm waters, and catastrophic warming means devolution of the seas back into primordial soups. The new plague of jellies appears as a harbinger of the end of the world we know from out of the world we didn't: from out of Deep Time. From slime, back to slime.

Billions of luminescent mauve stingers, "in a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep," wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm last November. "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it," said Northern Salmon's Managing Director John Russell. "It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing." This is more than three months old and you may have already forgotten the report, but is there a rival to this horror in all of Lovecraft's fiction? More than three months on and I still can't shake it, and it's at least worthy of the signs and wonders of a blind idiot god.

Translucent, mutable and iridescent, 98% water and almost entirely not there, a jelly is perhaps as close to a phantom as a creature can be and yet still belong to the material realm. In this respect at least it transcends the material, and gives great metaphor for the ineffable and alien yet familiar Other. Which may partly account for why they're seen these days in even less likely places than off the coast of Ireland. The sky above, for instance.

In October 2005, Bolivian Gustavo Ponce reported something above the town Oruro that was so foreign to his frame of reference that at first he refused to believe what he was seeing:

Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

2008-02-07T17:10:00.000-05:00

Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much - Bob Dylan

Reposting the earlier segments together with new material. As it should have appeared in the first place.

People are crazy

I've been thinking a lot this week about last week's leaked internal memo from Associated Press. Frank Baker, AP's LA assistant bureau chief, issued the directive that "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal." I've been thinking how right and how proper this is.

What should US cable news be doing, other than leading the hour with live updates from Britney Spears' custody hearing? Put another way, what does US cable news do better that it should be doing instead? The answer, my answer, is nothing. It's perfectly tuned by the lords of the manor to service the land of genetically modified bread and circuses. What has it ever demonstrated to justify a higher expectation?

But the failed expectations are not the media's alone. Most responsibility rests with the broken subjects of America's broken media. Does Clinton versus Obama really merit more attention and sober analysis than Spears versus Federline? I don't see why it should. One pair speak of "change," and the other of mood swings, but it's the same, leveled spectacle.

Did the Clinton team hack the New Hampshire vote? Bradblog makes its usual strong case for electoral fraud, but I'm finding it hard to get my indignant mojo working. Because here's the thing: even when the system works as advertised it contemptuously defrauds and disenfranchises citizens who take their politics like detached spectators. Obama and Clinton are two contenders in a fight club of closed ranks and consensus brutality with interchangeable corners. The outcome of this contest for advancement upon our lives - American lives and everyone else with a seat at the arena - will mean just as much as who wins the Super Bowl or the Oscar, should we have any emotional investment in the outcome of those contests. Because the only change to be registered will be how we feel about it. That's supposed to be enough, and it's been that way long enough that for many, it is.

Most everyone loves a good breakdown. At least ever since breakdowns have become public spectacle, and we can revel in celebrities' madness at physical and emotional distance. But even if we're so emotionally removed from the circus that we don't care whether the fallen idol is a danger to herself, we still care should she become a harm to others. So we're relieved when Britney loses visitation rights, so her crazy train can keep chugging along without running over her children. Unfortunately, there's no court that can slap the wrists America's already slashed, whose own breakdown would be far more entertaining with a restraining order.

Times Are Strange

Crazy people see things. Most everyone who's not crazy knows that. You'll likely remember than when it's your turn to see something, and be circumspect about to whom you tell it.

People have been seeing things in America since it was known by other names and hosted other nations. In the early 15th Century, in present-day New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, the first wave of Spain's explorer-conquerors were reportedly astonished to find indigenous people with apparent preemptive knowledge of Roman Catholicism, who had even crafted their own crosses and rosaries. The Europeans were told that a pale figure known locally as the "Blue Lady," had appeared to them many times in recent years, floating above the ground in an azure haze, preaching a foreign faith in their own language. When friars carried the story back to Spain in 1635 it was received with interest by the Inquisition, which was just then trying an abbess named Maria de Jesus Agreda.

About a dozen years earlier, after having put on on the blue habit of the Franciscan order, Maria Agreda had begun experiencing ecstatic visions and "raptures," and told her cloistered sisters tales of her more than 500 out-of-body travels to a distant land where she preached to "savages." She eventually wrote a book detailing her spiritual journeys, and she soon came to the attention of the heresy-hunting Inquisition. The story of the "Blue Lady," and the rapidity with which the Spanish were able to pacify and baptize the inhabitants of the lands she had visited, earned Sister Maria both an acquittal and a place in the court of King Philip. Regardless of the century, secular power always stands ready to recruit magicians, miracle workers and devils to its side.

Maria Agreda's etheric adventures and xenoglossia were understood by both the native North Americans and Spanish Catholics as religious events (the only question for the Inquisition was whether they were divine or infernal). Four hundred years later, what once could be called only either miraculous or fraudulent may be regarded as perhaps another category of the merely human.

Similar to Maria Agreda's recruitment by King Philip and John Dee by Queen Elizabeth, Robert Monroe's astral navigations were weaponized by the Pentagon, which schooled itself in his Virginia institute for bilocation. In Journeys Out of the Body, he writes of "raising himself out of the physical" and whoring about on the astral plane, eventually having "sex" - a "giddy electrical-type shock" - with with a female friend who, the next week, volunteered the information that she had had an erotic dream about Monroe the same night, in which he had given her "a detailed physical examination." In 16th Century Spain Monroe would have been called an incubus, and he would have been burned alive.

Robert Bruce describes witnessing his nephew Matt's first real-time OBE in his book Astral Dynamics, during a two-week visit coaching the boy on projection.

A few days before he was due to leave, while meditating late at night, I clearly saw Matt's projected real-time double float through the wall and come into the room I was sitting in. He waved cheerfully at me and I slowly waved back at him, without breaking my entranced state - no mean feat in itself - immensely pleased that Matt had finally managed to get out of his body. Matt floated about the room, seemingly having some difficulty with movement and directional control, but apparently thoroughly enjoying himself. He soon floated out of my sight and that was the last I saw of him that night.

Bruce writes that the next morning, Matt "vividly remembered" floating through the wall, seeing his uncle sitting below and the two waving at each other. And if we can believe his account, the fact that Bruce himself was in an altered state would have heightened his receptivity to seeing things, which makes me wonder whether the "Blue Lady" first manifested herself among entranced shamans.

Which returns me to America's ongoing manic episode. Which is the greater crazy: to see things, or to pretend that you don't?

All the truth in the world

In movies, America breaks for monsters. In real life, not so much. But since America recognizes itself largely by the false images of pop mythology, it thinks it would know a monster when it sees one, and so never sees one.

Remember the boy's birthday party video in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs? It was perhaps the film's singularly true fright, and one of its many wrong notes. The alien was glimpsed only fleetingly in the street, and what most impressed was the shock and confusion of the young witnesses. But what is this amateur video from Passo Fundo, Brazil doing making breaking news on US television? Where is the anchor's disarming happy talk and cynical drops of pop culture bombs? ("Plan 9 from Passo Fundo? Some Brazilian youngsters think so -.") I can't imagine the circumstance, not even an unambiguous alien invasion, that would see a newscaster state "all initial opinions are that this is genuine." In our world, the video would go straight to Youtube and the six-foot tall hominid alien would be dismissed as some joker in a green monster suit. Which, of course, is what he was. And the anchor can't see that only because she's in Shyamalan's world.

January's striking UFO flap in Texas, centered over Stephenville, was never serious news, though credible witnesses included a county sheriff who presumably has a stake in maintaining a sober reputation. ("It’s a bit bewildering when upstanding citizens insist they’ve seen a UFO," admits Noel Williams, who also wants to pretend it's just a movie. "They may otherwise be reputable, but their close encounters are probably as fictitious as films like The Day the Earth Stood Still.") If it had occasioned more than novelty profiteering, that would have at least been different. Even for Stephenville. In 1897, the town was reportedly visited by the famous cigar-shaped "mystery airship," and contact made with its pair of apparently human occupants, who identified themselves as contract employees performing a test run for "certain New York capitalists." Perhaps it was a hoax. Perhaps, this was a test run of then black technology controlled by the day's elite. Or perhaps, as has often been the case with extraordinary encounters, contactees are told a story that makes some sense to their cultural markers.

Over the summer of 1692, Gloucester, Massachusetts endured a flap of "ghost militia" sightings - a raiding party of a dozen seeming Frenchmen with the properties of phantoms who were heard to converse in an "unknown tongue." They only menaced; never actually harming residents or property, and no evidence of their campsites were found.

Near the end of July, Gloucester's Ebenezer Babson came upon three of the men when he was gathering his cattle in the woods. Cotton Mather's ecclesiastical history and proto-Forteana of New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana, describes Babson's putative ambush when, creeping within 40 yards of the party, he took aim, fired and nothing happened. He fired 12 times, and still nothing. Then they three turned and slowly began approaching him in an unthreatening manner. They didn't even "take any notice of him, than just to give him a look; though he snapt his gun at them all the while they walked toward him, and by him: neither did they quicken their pace at all , but went into a parcel of bushes and he saw them no more." Returning home, Babson tested his gun several times, "and yet it did not once miss fire. After this, there occurred several strange things; but now, concluding they were but spectres, they took little further notice of them."

Anyone familiar with the literature of contact events will recognize the sudden and inexplicable failure of mechanical devices, notably of those which could inflict damage.

In our world, which may not be ours after all so much as also theirs, the monsters won't get the attention of cable news by walking down the street of a South American city. They won't even hold Larry King's attention by buzzing Texas towns with strange craft, or by hovering over an O'Hare Airport terminal or the Channel Islands. Monsters must go for our culture's big value targets fraught with myth and symbolism. So it's New York City that must be razed, drowned, frozen, nuked, crushed and trampled over and over again.

Signs was shooting in rural Pennsylvania in September, 2001 when monsters from the deep politic attacked New York City. Crop circles can't hold a boxcutter to that spectacle, nevermind that they too are more than a movie and the sum of its many hoaxes. Strange things are allowed to happen in the countryside. It's always been expected, just as it's also more easily tuned out.

Take 1964's "Solway Spaceman." Picnicking with his family six miles out of town, James Templeton snapped a photograph of his youngest daughter Elizabeth picking wildflowers. When developed, the picture also showed the image of a large man in a strange white suit, someone the family was quite sure had not been there. After taking the picture to the police and the Ministry of Defense, "which expressed interest," Templeton was contacted by two men he assumed to be Ministry officials. They picked up Templeton and traveled together to the site, where he was questioned queerly and then left him stranded. They also refused to provide their names, identifying themselves only numerically, one as "9" and the other as "11." Templeton, now 87, is still unsettled about his own, private 9/11, and hopes there may be something in Ministry files to account for it.

Adds up to one big lie

If all the world's a stage, then America must be it's favourite long running production. The Mousetrap, say. And as with The Mousetrap, I don't think I'm giving anything away to say the detective did it.

Britney Spears is not a distraction. That's what politics, and America's national bipolar disorder, is for. Her current boyfriend, photographer Adnan Ghalib, is a British Pakistani who "earned his expertise in weaponry fighting abroad in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Macedonia." Billy Bush, the co-host of Access Hollywood, is George W Bush's first cousin. Not only will John McCain be the Republican nominee, he could have been the Democratic nominee as well, since he was "very close" to crossing the aisle in 2001. Ann Coulter has pledged to campaign for Hillary Clinton, and Rush Limbaugh has defended both Clinton and Barack Obama by acknowledging no substantial difference on "national security" between them and the Bush legacy. In his words, "they are not going to surrender the country to Islamic radicalism or the war in Iraq." Obama's vague sermonizing about the future recalls Jacques Vallee's messengers of deception, and how the "space brothers" have yet to tell us one thing we don't know, and have yet to make good on a single promise. If the Spears' drama distracts from the Audacity of Remulak, then perhaps, when you think about it, it's not such a bad thing.

The salvation-model politics of hope and change finds its happy opposite in the doomsong of Alex Jones, for whom martial law is always one broadcast away. Both come from the same fraudulent dichotomy of salvation and damnation, in which the future redemption or Armageddon never quite arrives. The harder truth may be that this is our destination. And they're not coming for us; they're here already, and they've always had us.

Take Back America. Maybe America belongs to others, and that's what they're doing.

Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown II

2008-01-28T07:48:00.000-05:00

People are crazy and times are strange - Bob Dylan

[Not done yet; I'll try to wrap it up tonight.]

Times Are Strange

Crazy people see things. Most everyone who's not crazy knows that. You'll likely remember than when it's your turn to see something, and be circumspect about to whom you tell it.

People have been seeing things in America since it was known by other names and hosted other nations. In the early 15th Century, in present-day New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, the first wave of Spain's explorer-conquerors were reportedly astonished to find indigenous people with apparent preemptive knowledge of Roman Catholicism, who had even crafted their own crosses and rosaries. The Europeans were told that a pale figure known locally as the "Blue Lady," had appeared to them many times in recent years, floating above the ground in an azure haze, preaching a foreign faith in their own language. When friars carried the story back to Spain in 1635 it was received with interest by the Inquisition, which was just then trying an abbess named Maria de Jesus Agreda.

About a dozen years earlier, after having put on on the blue habit of the Franciscan order, Maria Agreda had begun experiencing ecstatic visions and "raptures," and told her cloistered sisters tales of her more than 500 out-of-body travels to a distant land where she preached to "savages." She eventually wrote a book detailing her spiritual journeys, and she soon came to the attention of the heresy-hunting Inquisition. The story of the "Blue Lady," and the rapidity with which the Spanish were able to pacify and baptize the inhabitants of the lands she had visited, earned Sister Maria both an acquittal and a place in the court of King Philip. Regardless of the century, secular power always stands ready to recruit magicians, miracle workers and devils to its side.

Maria Agreda's etheric adventures and xenoglossia were understood by both the native North Americans and Spanish Catholics as religious events (the only question for the Inquisition was whether they were divine or infernal). Four hundred years later, what once could be called only either miraculous or fraudulent may be regarded as perhaps another category of the merely human.

Similar to Maria Agreda's recruitment by King Philip and John Dee by Queen Elizabeth, Robert Monroe's astral navigations were weaponized by the Pentagon, which schooled itself in his Virginia institute for bilocation. In Journeys Out of the Body, he writes of "raising himself out of the physical" and whoring about on the astral plane, eventually having "sex" - a "giddy electrical-type shock" - with with a female friend who, the next week, volunteered the information that she had had an erotic dream about Monroe the same night, in which he had given her "a detailed physical examination." In 16th Century Spain Monroe would have been called an incubus, and he would have been burned alive.

Robert Bruce describes witnessing his nephew Matt's first real-time OBE in his book Astral Dynamics, during a two-week visit coaching the boy on projection.

A few days before he was due to leave, while meditating late at night, I clearly saw Matt's projected real-time double float through the wall and come into the room I was sitting in. He waved cheerfully at me and I slowly waved back at him, without breaking my entranced state - no mean feat in itself - immensely pleased that Matt had finally managed to get out of his body. Matt floated about the room, seemingly having some difficulty with movement and directional control, but apparently thoroughly enjoying himself. He soon floated out of my sight and that was the last I saw of him that night.

Bruce writes that the next morning, Matt "vividly remembered" floating through the wall, seeing his uncle sitting below and the two waving at each other. And if we can believe his account, the fact that Bruce himself was in an altered state would have heightened his receptivity to seeing things, which makes me wonder whether the "Blue Lady" first manifested herself among entranced shamans.

Which returns me to America's ongoing manic episode. Which is the greater crazy: to see things, or to pretend that you don't?

Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I

2008-01-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

People are crazy and times are strange - Bob Dylan

People are crazy

I've been thinking a lot this week about last week's leaked internal memo from Associated Press. Frank Baker, AP's LA assistant bureau chief, issued the directive that "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal." I've been thinking how right and how proper this is.

What should US cable news be doing, other than leading the hour with live updates from Britney Spears' custody hearing? Put another way, what does US cable news do better that it should be doing instead? The answer, my answer, is nothing. It's perfectly tuned by the lords of the manor to service the land of genetically modified bread and circuses. What has it ever demonstrated to justify a higher expectation?

But the failed expectations are not the media's alone. Most responsibility rests with the broken subjects of America's broken media. Does Clinton versus Obama really merit more attention and sober analysis than Spears versus Federline? I don't see why it should. One pair speak of "change," and the other of mood swings, but it's the same, leveled spectacle.

Did the Clinton team hack the New Hampshire vote? Bradblog makes its usual strong case for electoral fraud, but I'm finding it hard to get my indignant mojo working. Because here's the thing: even when the system works as advertised it contemptuously defrauds and disenfranchises citizens who take their politics like detached spectators. Obama and Clinton are two contenders in a fight club of closed ranks and consensus brutality with interchangeable corners. The outcome of this contest for advancement upon our lives - American lives and everyone else with a seat at the arena - will mean just as much as who wins the Super Bowl or the Oscar, should we have any emotional investment in the outcome of those contests. Because the only change to be registered will be how we feel about it. That's supposed to be enough, and it's been that way long enough that for many, it is.

Most everyone loves a good breakdown. At least ever since breakdowns have become public spectacle, and we can revel in celebrities' madness at physical and emotional distance. But even if we're so emotionally removed from the circus that we don't care whether the fallen idol is a danger to herself, we still care should she become a harm to others. So we're relieved when Britney loses visitation rights, so her crazy train can keep chugging along without running over her children. Unfortunately, there's no court that can slap the wrists America's already slashed, whose own breakdown would be far more entertaining with a restraining order.

[MORE TO COME]

Where do we go now but nowhere?

2008-01-04T00:04:00.000-05:00

one more doomed time and without much hope
going round and around to nowhere - Nick Cave

The genius of the Christian Hell isn't the suffering; it's the suffering in perpetuity.

Most faiths that incorporate into their theologies a place of punishment make it a way station where the souls can be purged of wickedness or impurities or bad karma before they can resume their progress, not a place of torment for the eternally damned. In such underworld afterlifes, the suffering may be great but it has an end and a rehabilitative purpose. In the Christian Hell, the suffering is without end and wholly punitive. Think of it as differing philosophies of incarceration. If nobody gets out of here alive, nobody gets out of there dead or alive.

I can't help it. Hell is what I think about when I think about the Iowa Caucuses. When I think of Hillary or Obama and Mitt or Huck I see only Titanic's deck chairs being rearranged on the bottom of the ocean. The familiar vain hope of another election cycle has turned desperate and evangelical, as though Hell were still only where we might end up, Ron Paul forbid. And Paul's millenarians, who regard him as America's latest last chance, keep doomsday watch against the blue helmets and detention camps of some imagined mongrel-socialist "New World Order." But that's to miss the more profound disorder, and the passing of each tipping point that locks us into its deeper circles.

It could have been another inside joke of the archly ironic universal mind that found Arlen Specter in Rawalpindi when Benazir Bhutto was struck down by her own magic bullet. If nothing else it does have good comic timing, but we've all seen its routine before and heard all the punchlines. Ever since the Roman Republic cut down the Gracchi brothers you'd think the assassination of another patrician reformer should cease to astonish, and perhaps at last it has. We've been living this hell long enough we should expect it, as Bhutto herself almost certainly did.

Our dying oceans incubate slime and bloom strange with jellyfish, North America's birds are disappearing on the order of tens of millions, and amphibians the world over are tumbling to extinction. It's 2008, the "Year of the Frog" to "generate public awareness and understanding of the amphibian extinction crisis which represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity." But to too many, 2008 will be a triumph of sorts simply because Bush and Cheney will be out of office by its end. "Change" and "Hope" are great vote multipliers, but to imagine that merely outlasting a term limit could be something like a victory is to misunderstand the meaning of public office in a deep criminal state, and to misapprehend our intractable circumstance whose closest analogy may be damnation.

Let the mystery be

2007-12-24T18:42:00.000-05:00

Iris Dement

Still low with the flu, but my spirit is lighter than it was last post and I wanted something up here to reflect that.

New content next week. Have a safe and encouraging holiday.

It came upon a midnight clear

2007-12-19T09:37:00.000-05:00

Gottfried Helnwein, "Epiphany I: Adoration of the Magi"

Blogging has been suspended until the new year to accommodate the seasonal influx of illness and spiritual anguish. But there's always fresh meat on the discussion board.

"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it a thousandfold more hideous."

And a Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr Lovecraft.

Note: I closed comments last night because my identity was being hoaxed by two blogger accounts fraudulently created in my name. I'm reopening comments now, with the notice that l will not be posting further to them (I've since made an exception, and commented at Dec 22 09:17:00 AM), and the warning that if I am hoaxed again the accounts will be traced and complaints will be filed.

The things that don't add up

2007-12-06T16:27:00.000-05:00

"Well what do you think they're going to say?"

Alex Cox introduces The Parallax View

Like Margo Timmins, I'm just thinking of some things that don't have to add up to something. Say, eight dead in an Omaha shopping mall massacre an hour after Bush left the city, while Cheney shopped the ammo aisle of Mack’s Prairie Wings in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, caused by a collision of a French munitions ship and a Norwegian vessel chartered to carry relief supplies to Belgium. Eleven thousand people were killed and injured. It wasn't until 1945, and another war, that humanity triggered a bigger bang, and this time on purpose.

As well, today marks the 45th anniversary of a near-collision at 18,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico between a B-29 and an exceptionally fast something. It was detected first by radar, and with each radar sweep the object drew closer to the aircraft by 13 nautical miles or 5,240 miles per hour. Radar operator Sidney Coleman alerted Captain John Harder, who asked him to recalibrate his equipment. Coleman did, and found the radar returns correct, as four other blips appeared, one rapidly accelerating towards the B-29.

The assistant radar operator rushed towards a right window and made visual contact in the expected position, "a blue lit object streaking by the plane...circling around it." Other sets of blips appeared on all three radar sets, and other members of the flight crew confirmed visual contact with "blue-white lights streaking at a fantastic speed":

Captain Harter was studying his radarscope; he noted that forty miles behind the B-29, at the relative position of 6 o'clock, a group of five object was cutting the flightpath of the B-29, and turned as to follow the B-29 from behind. They were heading straight to the B-29 at fast speed, then slowed down when they were closing in on the B-29. The remained right there at the back of the B-29 for ten seconds.

Meanwhile, a larger blip had appeared on the radarscopes. This blip made a motionless half inch spot on the radarscopes, a size impossible to any known plane. The group of five objects pacing the B-29 then turned, and started to accelerate. The entire crew saw on their radarscope that the group of five approached the huge motionless blip and seemed to merge into it. Now, only the large blip remained on the scope. In a moment, the huge blip took speed.

Coleman called Harter on the intercom and told him that he and Bailey clocked the huge blip. Coleman said: "You won't believe this. It was making over 9000 miles per hour." Harter replied: "I believe it, all right. That's just what I figured."

Nothing links the two events except the calender, that they both actually happened in our world, and within the orbit of the military.

Last weekend in Oakville, Ontario, a man named Steve Remian was shot to death by police in a possible suicide-by-cop. Remian had recently returned East from British Columbia, and was still driving with BC plates when he was chased from a donut shop brandishing a pistol and confronted in an affluent park.

Last March, Remian's name surfaced in the trial of Robert Pickton, the BC pig farmer charged with the murders of six Vancouver prostitutes but who has confessed to 49. The jury heard that a suitcase belonging to a Steve Remian was recovered from Pickton's bloody workshop, and his DNA had been recovered from a blanket that also contained the blood of a missing woman. A friend has been quoted as saying Remian "was stunned" to learn he had been tied to the case, though Vancouver's Missing Women's Task Force issued a statement that he "was not a suspect nor was he a person of interest in relation to any of their investigation." Yet Remian had once been charged with sexual assault (the charge was dismissed, though an accomplice was convicted), and a freezer containing the remains of two victims was found to bear an unknown palm print. The RCMP has compared it only to Pickton's.

From the start, the prosecution built its case upon a portrait of Pickton as the lone maniac, though the farm was a "constant buzz of activity, with people and vehicles coming and going all the time." Frequent parties at "Piggy Palace" included bikers wearing Hells Angels' colours and the mayor of Port Coquitlam, who says he attended a "get to know you" event in 1996 when he was on the school board, the year victims Tanya Holyk and Olivia Williams vanished. It's always been all about Pickton, though he told police "I'll take the fall for everything. I'm the head-honcho and you've got me."

Pickton implies that there were others involved, but no snuff films as was whispered about, no Hells Angels on the periphery, though they were often at his home. He's being gallant, he implies, taking the fall, now that police had him in their cross-hairs, in jail.

Remian is dead, Pickton will take the fall, and whoever else may be involved remains protected. And meanwhile, in Edmonton...

On November 18, Jennifer Lopez fled with her husband George DeJongh and her three boys rather than hand them over to their grandfather for a court-ordered period of 90 days. The grandfather is California Republican Congressman Gary Miller. DeJongh and her family had contended that Miller's son Brian had molested the children, an accusation the congressman denies, though Brian Miller pled guilty in 2000 to charges of spousal and child abuse and served four years probation and performed 224 hours of community service. (Congressman Miller claims his son pled guilty only because he wanted to put the case "behind him," and has since "learned to control his temper.") That a court would reverse custody and award care to a convicted abuser "speaks for itself," though perhaps what it says is more complex than Congressman Miller's spin.

Six days later, early on the morning of November 24, Miller's daughter Elizabeth "died unexpectedly." I haven't seen a cause of death yet, though an early report has medical examiners "waiting on the results of toxicology tests." Reportedly, Elizabeth was "the one family member who refused to testify against Jennifer Lopez."

While on November 5 17-year old Benjamin Stanford disappeared, his car abandoned on the emergency lane of an interstate, the passenger side door open. On November 13 his body was found with a gunshot wound to the head. The coroner has ruled it a suicide, though he was shot behind the ear, and his cell phone and car keys were not recovered. Stanford was the grandson of Jim Preuitt, Democratic State Senator and former Chair of the Rules Committee, and his family is not accepting the verdict. It is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in his death.

I'm not suggesting there is a link between the deaths. Only the obvious: that innocents are pawns of power, and power knows no natural decency. Like the Duke says in Pasolini's Salo, "the bourgeoisie has never hesitated to kill its own children."

And then there are other things that don't add up, or at least not all by themselves, which is how such stories are told. A Blackwater veteran of Iraq who has been charged for possession of child pornography, and a Senate aide arrested for attempting to arrange a lunchtime encounter with a 13-year old boy. An article in the Idaho Statesman detailing eight more allegations against Larry Craig states that Craig's "denials began June 30, 1982, when CBS broke news of a scandal alleging gay sex between congressmen and underage pages. The following day, before any public allegation that he was involved, then-Rep. Craig issued a denial. Craig married a year later and adopted the three children of his wife." Trent Lott's liasons have been corroborated by Hustler's editorial director Bruce David, who claims to have sources other than expensive escort Benjamin Nichols, but may not publish because of Lott's resignation. "Our whole reason for doing this is to get them out of power," says David. (Presumably, since Dennis Hastert has also resigned, we won't be hearing more of the former wrestling coach's unusual relationship with live-in chief-of-staff Scott Palmer and deputy Mike Stokke.)

But that is to miss the point, of this story and so many like it. It's not the hypocrisy, stupid: it's about the nature of power itself, who is allowed a measure of it, and what they have over their heads.

Thanks to Lisa Pease for forwarding Gaeton Fonzi's Reply from a Conspiracy Believer to Vincent Bugliosi for his "tautologically strained" Reclaiming History. Fonzi was one of the principal staff investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and his account, The Last Investigation, should be on every shortlist of essential titles pertaining to the JFK assassination. Bugliosi both lists The Last Investigation as a source and dismisses it as biased because Fonzi "had long been a conspiracy theorist.” Fonzi never was. "I went from an agnostic to a conspiracy believer," he writes, on the weight of evidence he had a hand in uncovering. (Most significantly, and convincingly, the identification of the CIA's David Atlee Phillips as Veciana's - and hence Oswald's - "Maurice Bishop.")

Bugliosi is a strange one. He could hardly make the claim that his own JFK book is unbiased scholarship. Rather, it's a prosecutor's case for Oswald as the lone gunman. Yet he was an early champion of reopening the RFK case against Sirhan Sirhan, and contributed some important investigative work that undermined the official account:

In 1975, Vincent Bugliosi, who was then working with Schrade to get the case reopened, tracked down the two police officers depicted in the photograph. To that time their identity had been unknown. Bugliosi identified the two officers as Sgt. Charles Wright and Sgt. Robert Rozzi. Both Wright and Rozzi were sure that what they observed was not only a bullet hole, but a hole containing a bullet.

If the hole contained a bullet, then it would have been the ninth bullet, since seven bullets had been recovered from victim wounds and the eighth was to have disappeared into the ceiling (necessary to account for acknowledged holes in the ceiling tiles). So any additional bullet presented a serious problem for those wishing to state there was no conspiracy.

In a declaration filed with the courts, Bugliosi stated:

"Sgt. Rozzi had told me and he told me unequivocally that it was a bullet in the hole and when I told him that Sgt. Rozzi had informed me that he was pretty sure that the bullet was removed from the hole, Sgt. Wright replied 'There is no pretty sure about it. It definitely was removed from the hole, but I do not know who did it.'"

Shortly after the assassination, the LAPD removed the doorjambs and ceiling panels in the Ambassador Hotel and booked them into evidence. One has to wonder why someone would tear off a doorframe or book a ceiling panel into evidence if it contained no evidence of bullets.

Bugliosi is also major figure in Turner and Christian's important The Assassination of Robert F Kennedy, passionately arguing there was a "conspiracy mosaic" behind Sirhan's conviction, and in the same year defended KCOP-TV in televangelist Jerry Owen's libel suit that the Los Angeles station had falsely accused him of a relationship with RFK's conspirators.

In his closing argument (Owen, by the way, won the case, and the TV station was found guilty of slander), Bugliosi contended that "not too long ago, anyone who uttered 'conspiracy' or 'CIA' was chalked off as a 'conspiracy buff':

But recent revelations, your Honor, have indicated that there is a little more credibility to the word "conspiracy." If there is a conspiracy here it could possibly involve people in the highest levels of our government, or people out of the government who had substantial political interests inimicable to Senator Kennedy. And if it was a conspiracy, it most likely was a conspiracy of considerable magnitude, and someone like Owen would have been a lowly operative.

Yes, that's Vincent Bugliosi talking.

So how do we explain him? How could he be so right about Sirhan and RFK - not to mention the stolen election of 2000 - and so wrong about Oswald and JFK? Maybe he's in someone's keep; maybe he's too smart to be so stupid. Or maybe, here, he's just sincerely wrong. I'm often told off in shrill emails that I must be a shill, because how can I possibly not see what they see? (And I think, in every instance, they've had something to do with controlled demolition, Ron Paul or the International Jewish Conspiracy©.) So perhaps Bugliosi, like Chomsky, just doesn't see this, and it will have to remain a mystery to me why they can't. Because I believe that it's possible for intelligent people to sincerely arrive at conclusions I believe profoundly wrong. That may lead me sometimes to naive assumptions, but I also believe it hubris to think otherwise.

And as long as it took me to post about Marvel Zombies, I feel I still didn't get to the point.

Zombies are perfectly nihilistic monsters, but zombie stories needn't be. If they're parables then they're certainly not. And if that's what Marvel Zombies is, then its apparent nihilism is something else: a Twilight of the Gods. (Nietzsche gets the rap of nihilism too, but he's exhilaratingly not.) Heroes need to die if we're ever to do anything ourselves, and they can't die heroically if we're ever to be free of them.

Finally, I'm reopening the comments to unregistered readers. Let's see how that goes.

America Ate My Brain (Part Two)

2007-11-29T17:12:00.000-05:00

There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky
Since I found out, I know I can cry - John Lennon

'Nuff Said

Even when there's nothing funny about it, satire's a funny thing. The better it's executed, the fewer people you can expect will get it. This affords satire a particular value under tyranny as a vehicle for dissent, when dissent can endanger life or livelihood if the wrong people get it.

Even when those who can read the intended meaning remain few, there can be a much larger crowd who are merely entertained by its dressing of transgressions. ("Swift says we should eat Irish babies." - "Duuude!") This can make satire commercially viable, because its narrow purpose is compensated by mass appeal, which also disseminates subversion far more broadly.

I think this is what's going on with Robert Kirkman's Marvel Zombies. Marvel, the corporation, may care only about the bottom line (a hard cover compilation has sold out an unprecedented four printings), and major advertiser the US Army may be simply happy to reach a young male readership with an appetite for destruction. They may not even give a thought to the text, let alone the subtext, but we should pay attention to both.

Since 2005 the zombie story arc has ranged over several comics titles but remains quite simple to summarize: a zombie virus is carried to New York, which quickly infects the superheroes of the Marvel universe, who methodically devour all life on Earth. When they've exhausted the planet, they take to space and extinguish life there as well. The End. Though the end hasn't been written, there can be no coming back from that.

It's supposedly set in an "alternate reality," though that doesn't spare us or the familiar heroes the degradation of say, Spiderman feasting on Aunt May or the Hulk snapping off the head of the Silver Surfer. And to many readers of American politics, the last seven years feel very much as well like an alternate reality, so that disclaimer doesn't carry much comfort anymore.

There is a lot of unredacted horror here. Hank Pym, Giant Man, keeping his uninfected friend the Black Panther alive so he can cut away fresh meat when the urge strikes. ("You want to know something really scary?" he confesses. "I like the way flesh tastes. Really, I do. If I were to somehow find a cure for whatever's going on with us - if things went back to the way they were - or as close as they could get...I think I'd still eat people.") Spiderman, tormented as ever, agonizing in the moments his head clears after a feed. ("I ate my wife - my aunt! - Why?! Why did I do that?!") Call them "alternates," but there can be no looking at these characters the same way. And honest to God, it's about time.

Publishing success stories are rare in comics these days, and while Marvel Zombies is one it also has its detractors. ("There comes a point where death isn’t funny anymore," says a reader. "I cannot trust in a hero anymore!" says another.) And here I think is the subtext: your heroes are dead. Or worse: undead.

There are a lot of monstrous metaphors available to describe America's descent from pulp fiction superhero to real world arch-villain, but perhaps the most apt is the zombie. There's the relentless and insatiable consumption of goods, fuel and lives which devours entire nations without thought or apology - Iraq's genetic future may be "for the most part destroyed" - and threatens even the viability of life on the planet. It even eats brains. Consider the occupation's targeted slaughter of Iraqi intellectuals.

A vampire would be preferable. I could see trying to talk things out with one. Probably not successfully, but there's at least the vain hope. A zombie? First of all, it's already dead. And last, I'm only food. Do you explain yourself to your breakfast?

There's no coming back from Iraq. There's no homecoming for Captain America. And don't wait for a hero, because he's only going to eat you.

America Ate My Brain (Part One)

2007-11-16T05:26:00.000-05:00

Tell me great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in? - Bob Dylan

Face Front, True Believers

So it's 1966, and I'm six years old, and I buy my first comic book: X-Men number 21. And I can remember 41 years later because I've long since catalogued it, sealed it with a cardboard backing and filed it by title and number in an oblong archive box.

I'd explain, to anyone who couldn't understand, or to whom I'd embarrassed myself trying to be understood, that they were "investments." But only people as foolish with money would fall for that, and they probably had comparable indefensible collections themselves. The stories were always for reading, even after I could read between them.

But I couldn't yet, in 1967, when I became a paid-up member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society. The flexi-disc still plays, and if I ever write a letter again I still have the stationary. I wanted to be a hero too, and so I wished I'd been born an American. I told my mother, and she never tired of reminding me.

Steve Ditko appointed my adolescence with fantasies of vigilantes and loners above the law: the Übermensch who was also everyman. I didn't know, and it wouldn't have meant anything to me if I had, that Ditko was devoted to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he explored and evangelized in his comic titles. In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Moore took Ditko's "Mister A" - "an absolute insane fascist but done absolutely straight" - to his mad end with the character Rorschach. Ditko didn't get it. ("Oh yes - he's the one who's like Mister A, except Rorschach is insane.")

Stan Lee was always a bit seedy and very much a huckster, but he knew that he was and worked it, and to a kid raised on Silver Age comics he seemed on our side, and the comics industry seemed as disconnected from the real powers of this world as its readers. Neither was true, long before the scandal of his former partner in Stan Lee Enterprises, Peter Paul. He now styles himself a "whistleblower," and panders to the American right and its Clinton fixations, and accompanying blindspot to the bigger picture and the Clintons place within it. But by the time he'd turned 27 Paul was the President of the Miami World Trade Center, had been employed by four major intelligence agencies and "was recruited by operatives of our government for a plan to embarrass Castro" by defrauding Cuba of millions of dollars worth of coffee. He pled guilty on a charge of conspiracy, and served time for cocaine trafficking and trying to enter Canada on a false identity. In 2000 Paul was the largest contributor to Hillary Clinton's Senatorial bid, and he threw her a Hollywood gala reputed to have cost nearly $2 million. Two days later, the Washington Post reported Paul's criminal past and Clinton denied even knowing him.

There's a video online of Lee in Paul's office, shot by Paul, of the two meeting with Stanley Myatt., who has been variously described in the press as "a CIA assassin, a consort of Italian and Russian mafiosi, a Wall Street scam artist, a loan shark, and an informant for the FBI and the DEA." In Paul's memorandum of 2005, he says he was introduced to Myatt

in 1978 at the direction of the FBI in order to obtain Paul’s assistance in resolving an anti-Castro effort involving an international coffee deal for which the government through Myatt in the end induced Mr. Paul to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to send wire messages in furtherance of the scheme perpetrated by others to defraud the Cuban government. (Exhibit A). Since then, Myatt has been the root cause of Mr. Paul’s entire "criminal" history from 1978 to 1983 and is responsible for his guilty pleas to three separate felonies arising out of government/Myatt sponsored anti-Castro, anti-Communist covert operations. At all times since 1978 Myatt has been enabled and encouraged by the government to abuse the authority of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Parole Office, and Treasury Department.

Once a Marvel reader came to political consciousness, it didn't take a decoder ring to know that Lee's own leaned grievously to the right; far enough to make a costumed hero of a military industrialist, and to make his costume iron, as though his enfleshment was a weakness to be overcome, and then give him a sidekick called "War Machine." In the movie adaptation of Iron Man to be released next Spring, his origin has been updated to include a kidnapping by jihadists. Two US Air Force F-22 Raptors and a Global Hawk make supporting appearances, which "shows they really went out of their way for us"; or so director John Favreau tells it on this Youtube posting of the Air Force News Agency.

Eventually, the Nick Fury-wannabes of this universe saw the upside in recruiting Lee's original, and making the comic universe another front in the war on adolescent imagination. As though admitted an arrested development to their own fighting force, in 2005 the Department of Defense partnered with Marvel to launch a custom imprint for troops deployed to the Middle East. The event at the Pentagon "coincided with 'Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day,' so plenty of youngsters were on hand to get the first copies of the special comics":

"That's really cool. They said that they're trying to help all the people [in the military]," said 11-year-old Kaitlin Lee, who was visiting the Pentagon with her younger brother and sister and their soldier dad. Kaitlin explained that it's good for the superheroes to show support for the troops because some kids want to be like their favorite superheroes.

She used her 6-year-old brother, Josh - who was holding tight to his own "Spidey" - as an example. "Like Josh here," she said. "He wants to be like Spiderman and [Spiderman] wants to help out [the troops]. So it's just kind of showing that we would like to help out too and we want to show [the troops] that we care."

The bracketed additions "for sense" are the Army's own.

The fifth issue, released last month to soldiers serving with Centcom, depicts Captain America striking an iconic pose with Avengers assembling behind him, overshadowed by and armed and masked enemy. And at a glance, through the menacing figure's eye slits, he's obviously depicted with a complexion by which Centcom identifies the enemy.

Marvel's privileged relationship with the Pentagon, as tacit incubator and explicit feedlot for its slaughterhouse, makes its latest phenomenal success of particular grim interest.

And in the second part, I'll get to the point.

The Unnameable

2007-11-05T07:17:00.000-05:00

"There are things all around. Things you never see because you don't have the words, you don't have the names. you only learned the 26-letter alphabet.

"Here are some names for things...." - Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

Speaking the World

There are only, maybe, 350 members of the Pirahã tribe, but its language is confounding linguists for all that it lacks. There are no subordinate clauses and no past tense; no words for colours and hardly any for time. The language contains no numbers.

The debate amongst linguists about the absence of all numbers in the Pirahã language broke out after Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.

The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."

Gordon's work revived interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism: that our language sculpts the way we think about the world, and that without a word for something, we can't think of it. This is the premise of Orwell's Newspeak: to greatly reduce the vocabulary by stripping it of words and constructs which could describe rebellion and even an alternative to Big Brother, in order that it become impossible to even think of such things.

Linguist Daniel Everett, who spent seven years living with the Pirahãs and says "their thinking isn't any slower than the average college freshman," devoted eight months trying to teach them simple Portuguese numbers used by Brazillians, but "in the end, not a single person could count to ten." In Gordon's Science article "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence From Amazonia" he asks, "Is there any case where not having words for something doesn't allow you to think about it?" And then answers, "I think this is a case for just that."

Clifford Pickover in Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves reflects upon vocabulary's role in shaping his world when he studied entomology, and learned insect orders and names for body parts:

When I had names for everything, I perceived insects so differently, remembered insects so differently, and communicated about insects so differently. The names helped focus and consolidate my attention in strikingly new ways. Certainly, before I knew the names, I could see that one bug had large wings and another did not, or one had a hypognathous jaw and another did not, but I doubt that my mind was tuned to manage, compartmentalize, and take note of this new information. Before I knew the words, did I wonder why the insects were different or did I just accept that a bug is a bug?

"Need to Know"

Boundary experiences are so-called in part because they transgress the boundary of our ability to describe them. They transcend concepts which can be accommodated by our language, and even introduce a new language that cannot be wholly translated back into our native tongues once the experience ends.

DMT may introduce "three dimensional 'glyphs' of pure meaning which defy my every attempt to describe them." Terence McKenna regarded these encountered objects as a "new dispensation of the logos. They are holding out the possibility that language need not be processed by the ears, that language can become, under certain radical situations of neurological perturbation, visible." And with some frequency, the DMT experience includes failed attempts at communication and instruction by encountered entities. ("The two beings seemed to be trying to attract my attention, and to communicate something to me, but I could not understand. It was as if they were trying to make me understand where I was.")

UFO contactees also often have difficulty finding words, post-encounter, to accurately describe experiences which occurred out of their familiar time and space and sometimes with no seeming reference to their own language. They may be shown texts of strange symbols, the meaning of which is evident in the moment but afterwords, attempting to reconstruct the event in their natural syntax, the symbols are entirely foreign and beyond translation.

Dr Mario Pazzaglini authored a 16-year study of "received" text entitled Symbolic Messages, He told Greg Bishop that the symbols "are so spatial that they transmit tremendous amounts of information at one blast":

And you may not always be able to relay that information back as a reported word, but as an internal experience, it's pretty rich. So if the symbols continue in that vein, they'll be very valuable. We are well built for that, because biologically we have this system called "entrainment." If you and I are talking, we just look at each other and there's tremendous amounts of information passed besides what's passed verbally. So you have some feelings about me, I may have some about you, and you may at some point visualize what you think I am, which will encode information about me (not necessarily what I look like) and all that stuff is going on. So that's what might be the value of these symbols - that they're not trying to communicate to us (if that's what they are doing) the particular thing that the symbol is supposed to be saying, but there's a whole downloading of experience and possibility that is going on that we're not even aware of yet. Certainly the culture is different for this phenomena existing.

"Almost overnight," just 50,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans began acting differently, by demonstrating abstract thought in the creation of art and religion. People were talking, not just communicating by gesture and intonation, and things had names. Categories were being defined and ideas were shaping words, filling our ancestors' heads and animating their lives. And now, 2,000 generations later, are our vocabularies rich enough to paint in abstract the real world? Or have we lost or abandoned concepts along the way, as Oldspeak, that could help us see that which may be all about us, but for which we have no meaningful words, and so can't see?

When Tim Russert attempted to dispatch the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich with a question regarding his close encounter, Kucinich replied "It was an Unidenfied Flying Object, okay? It's unidentified - I saw something." Except "UFO" is not a contentless placeholder. UFO is identified with little green men, ET and Mars Attacks. There is no meaningful way to speak about the subject in the English language without reference to its debased and comic acronym, and if language shapes our view of reality, then it may take an effort of will or a boundary experience of our own to see that there is more to the phenomenon than a punchline.

Having the wrong word may be even more a hindrance to our perception of reality than not having a word at all. And that misperception, about UFOs and much else, is almost certainly managed to some measure to keep our vision blurry.

Budd Hopkins shared a story in 2003 about the late UFOlogist Allen Hynek, who got to know Donald Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford. On one visit to Washington, Hynek met Rumsfeld in his office and said, "I have been in this for years looking at the UFO phenomena. I feel like at this point in my life I am in a position of 'need to know' what you know or what some agency might know that I don’t know. I have a 'need to know' I feel." Hopkins said that Hynek told him "Rumsfeld stood up and pointed a finger at him and said, "You have no 'need to know' and then sat down again. That was the end of it."

There are a lot of things we can't know with certainty about that story, not least of which is whether it actually even happened. But we can know that for some things we don't know their true names, and until we do we won't know them, or even see them.

Splendid Isolation

2007-10-24T12:38:00.000-04:00

I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows
Lying down in the dark to dream
I don't want to see their faces
I don't want to hear them scream - Warren Zevon

Illness

Symptomatic of Capgras Syndrome is the delusion of doubles: that those closest to you, or your familiar objects, have been replaced by impostors and replicas. Tony Rosato, a Toronto comic actor who put in time on SCTV and Saturday Night Live, served two years in prison for criminally harassing his wife on account of it. (Last month he was remanded to a psychiatric hospital after a conditional discharge.)

In his testimony, Rosato repeated his worries for his family, and his contention that his wife Leah had been replaced by twins or triplets and that their baby was a changeling. The judge, in ruling Rosato to be in need of psychiatric care, cited Leah's alarm at Tony's claims that her family was connected to a paedophile ring, and his fear of entities he called "astral attackers."

In Taboo: Sex, Religon and Magick, psychotherapist Christopher Hyatt tells of a patient he treated in the 1970s. One day she came to him with a troubling dream of being carried into a church by a priest and raped upon the altar. Within a week she had suffered a "complete psychotic break" and was hospitalized. Hyatt, noting that her father was a deacon in a nearby church, diagnosed that "the breaking of the taboo (even in a dream) so overpowered my patient that her mind literally broke down."

Could be. Probably. She was Hyatt's patient, and to me she's just an anecdote in Hyatt's book. But as I read it, I thought something that should have been considered, if only to rule it out, was that the dream was the manifestation of a suppressed memory of abuse, whether sexual or merely assuming a sexual expression, and his patient's psychotic break was the result of the dissociative effort of denial.

More evidently, Rosato is an ill man. But his strong delusion doesn't necessarily render crazy each of his unhealthy obsessions. There are, evidently, paedophile rings, and many individuals considered wise and well have themselves described astral attacks. Rosato isn't sick for mentioning them, but applied to his circumstance he is almost certainly wrong.

All of which makes me wonder about our own sick circumstance.

In October, 1963, a US Army private first class named Eugene Dinkin, working in Metz, France as a crypto operator with top secret clearance, picked up indications that "a conspiracy was in the making by the 'military' of the United States, perhaps combined with an 'ultra-right economic group." (The quote is from a declassified FBI report of April 3, 1964.) One of his duties as a code breaker was to decipher traffic that originated with the OAS, though he contended he first became alerted to a conspiracy by a study of subliminal "psychological sets" in Stars and Stripes and certain Hearst papers which, writes Lisa Pease, he believed "were deliberately maneuvered to set up a subconscious belief on the part of one reading these papers to the effect that President John F. Kennedy was 'soft on communism.'" He became convinced an attempt would be made on the president's life in Texas in late November, and that it would be pinned on the Left.

Alarmed, Dinkin wrote Robert Kennedy and then, realizing the warning had little chance of reaching the Attorney General, abruptly left his unit, going AWOL to try to contact ambassadors in nearby Luxembourg. On Nov 6 he showed up at the UN press office in Geneva. He couldn't find an American correspondent and so told his story to the editor of the Geneva Diplomat. On Nov 13 he was "hospitalized" by the US army in a closed psych ward and kept in virtual isolation until the assassination. On the evening of Nov 23 he was interviewed by a Secret Service agent who said that since Dinkin was in a psych ward he would be giving the government "absolutely no information."

He was transferred to Walter Reed in December and, in his words, "began receiving 'therapy' to help me understand that my warning of the assassination had been 'coincidental.'" He was told if he didn't improve he would be electro-shocked. Naturally, he feigned cooperation, "improved" and was released. His story, because it's told by a sick man, goes unmentioned by the Warren Commission.

Metaphor

In Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag writes that "the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking." But then ani difranco says we're 90% metaphor, which is a nicer thought than biology's animated sacks of blood and water, so perhaps it's alright after all. Though that still doesn't make us alright.

Capgras remains a rare condition in the material world usually precipitated by head trauma, but in the deep world it's a pandemic afflicting us metaphors. Many of us now know we're in a strange place that only resembles our home, and those who don't may no longer recognize us. (I know I've lost friends because of this; because they couldn't fathom where I was going or didn't want to come along. It makes me wish sometimes that when I told my wife, "You know, I've been thinking of starting a blog," that she'd replied, "You know, I don't think that's such a good idea.")

The canyon that's being carved in the West between underclass and overclass, and into which the middle class is being made to tumble, reifies the syndrome of the unrecognizable familiar. We have rulers who look like us, and appear to talk to us about what we're told are our concerns and values, yet whose experience and environment and whose own values are so alien to our own that they may as well be aliens themselves. In turn neither do they recognize themselves in us, and only grudgingly and for their own ends use the power of state with egalitarian beneficence. You could call them reptiles, but just as truthfully you can call them Morlocks. And if you do then you must know what they eat.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry says that "humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells." He expects the emergence of "a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass":

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims. Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Clearly Dr Curry has an acute case of Capgras-by-proxy. The onward-and-upward progress ideal upon which he mounts his projection bears only tangential resemblance to the future that is already squatting on our present. Decades before the worst-case scenarios it appears we've already entered a greenhouse gas feedback loop, while according to a study released this week by the Energy Watch Group world oil production peaked in 2006, and extreme near-term shortages can be expected to herald war and social breakdown.

Like Curry, HG Wells had it backwards, too. In our world, for whatever foreseeable future remains of it, it's the Molocks with their appetites and devil machines who are equipped to thrive. The ruling class won't be living a soft and pasty fantasy life for 100,000 years. They'll show, unambiguously, their goblin face.

Yet it's hard to argue with Curry's expectation of a "dim-witted underclass." Since there is a correlation between higher education and liberal and progressive values, a "dimming-down" has been long in the works by those who hold neither, but hold much else.

Mark Morford writes today of the horror in the heart of an Oakland high school teacher nearing retirement, who "says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain":

[He] simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

Morford adds that their discussion then turns to "the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens." Perhaps the lack of need is, from the perspective of Morlocks, a need for lack among its overstocked herd of the tazed and confused.

In Nightside of Eden Kenneth Grant, Outer Head of the Typhonian OTO and founder of the Cult of Lam, writes that "the Mysteries, the true Gnosis, are of a predominantly psycho-sexual nature." If so, and if this is a time of mystery and revelation, perhaps we should expect more manifestations of psycho-sexual disturbance, both by way of illness and metaphor. And perhaps that's what we're seeing sometimes, when we can bear to look.

Blow'd Up Real Good (Part Two)

2007-10-12T15:22:00.000-04:00

What can you see?

from Antonioni's Blow Up

I must be something of a disappointment as a conspiracy theorist, because I don't know what the fuck is going on.

I mean, I have an inkling. Like David Hemmings in Blow Up, the closer I look the worse things appear, and it doesn't take a Dante to know that everything is going to Hell. Though perhaps it takes a Nostradamus to believe we know how, and when, because maybe he just made shit up, too.

The End has been a long time coming and its anticipation has been with us from the beginning, so perhaps abductees and channelers and psychonauts have been on strangely familiar ground when entities and "spirit guides" and the chemistry of nature have reportedly told them that "Earth time is desperately short" (as Arthur Shuttlewood related he was told, in his Warnings from Flying Friends.)

Albert Bender, arguably the first "Men in Black" contactees, was warned of a pole-shift due in 1953. Knud Weiking, supposed voice of "Orthon," claimed he'd been told there would be a nuclear holocaust on Christmas Eve, 1967. Alarms raised of the Earth's imminent incineration, flood, or "cleansing" are not just facts of the fringe, but also of mainline contactee religions. (As virtually every religion is.) Perhaps one example is the closely guarded and apocalyptic "Third Secret" of Fatima, which the "Beautiful Lady" shared with her three young contactees.

It's a game tricksters play, whether human or not quite so, as John Keel experienced during the Mothman flap. He was warned of a catastrophic plane crash by an "Asian-looking character" calling himself Apol, seated in the back of a black Cadillac. He went on to say the Pope would soon be assassinated, followed by three days of darkness and worldwide power failure. There were many other warnings from other strange sources and allegedly channeled spirits that something dreadful was about to happen, but none which pointed unambiguously to the dreadful thing which did, except perhaps for a lucid dream Keel was told six weeks earlier by a Point Pleasant resident of "a lot of people drowning in the river and Christmas packages floating everywhere in the water." For the most part, wrote Keel, the "contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it."

Does this trade in fear and false prophecy sound familiar? Or maybe rather, does it feel familiar, because it's not something I've often heard discussed.

Fritz Springmeier, the "Christian Identity" white supremacist, convicted bank robber and victim-triggering expert in "Illuminati mind control," published in a mid-90s newsletter that "The leadership in both Russia and the U.S. are preparing for war. From 8:00A.M. to 6:00P.M. on June 6, 1996 the proper alignments will occur to detonate numerous nuclear devices." Then in 1999, he wrote "Over two weeks ago, this author was given inside information that the New World Order had pulled all their key people -- specialists, and so forth out of San Diego, CA. These people were given a secret high-level briefing which told them to leave San Diego by April 3 [1999] and that their reason to leave was that Russia was going to drop nuclear bombs on San Diego, Seattle, NYC...."

On his October 18, 2001 broadcast, Alex Jones said "Within 2 years I'm predicting...that you're going to see a suitcase nuke in this country. You're probably going to see a release in a few years of something communicable. And I am predicting that you will see a lot of conventional bombings in the next year or so." In March 2005 he predicted Arnold Schwarzenegger would "save children at a school shooting, or there'll be some type of bombing, and he will land by helicopter and run in and direct things. I predict it - I see it all aligning. I see it all coming together. I see their plan, clear as day." More soberly, on August 10, 2006 he announced "There is a 90% chance we are gonna see bone-shattering mega-attacks in the United States, Canada, or England or Israel in the next couple months - by mid-October. We're talking about the total end of America, total martial law. I am predicting you will have huge terrorist attacks in the Western world by, at the latest, late October."

More recently, last August, there was the so-called Kennbunkport Warning issued by Webster Tarpley, alleging "massive evidence" for a "new 9/11 terror incident...over the coming weeks and months." A number of its signatories, including Cindy Sheehan and Cynthia McKinney, have since claimed their endorsements were forged and their support for its claims misrepresented, while critical readers of the Statement have been labeled "divisive" and "COINTELPRO" by Tarpley and his supporters.

I've been guilty of it, too. I've been suckered by channeled "insiders" who predicted the other shoe was about to drop. I don't want to be again. Conspiracy research is not a prophetic art. We can see clearly enough to make out the broad strokes on the big canvas, and we can tell it's not going to be a pretty picture, but we're kidding ourselves - actually, entertaining ourselves - if we believe we know how it's all going to turn out. Or that some Unnamed Other is going to come along and tell us, rather than trick us.

Fixing dates for the end of the world and bouncing with goosebumps from one fabricated scenario to the next is imposing a false narrative upon a story that has yet to be told. And the temptation is great, in part because many of the plot points are whispered suggestions of the storyteller who'll never tell us the whole story, but simply means to give us a good fright. This seems to hold, whether the story is Springmeier's "insider's" or Shuttlewood's "flying friend's."

It's a perverse fact of the conspiracy industry that it incubates credulity within those who claim to "Question Everything." But that's the nature of industry, to nurture its market, and the nature of conspiracy, to place every honest and dangerous inquiry into disrepute.

What can you see now?

Blow'd Up Real Good (Part One)

2007-10-01T17:04:00.000-04:00

The atrocities over there, the interior paralysis over here -
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain. - Leonard Cohen, "S.O.S. 1995"

Situation Serious, But Not Too Serious

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," so goes one of the signature quotes of our time, which doesn't much seem like our time. "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." But I don't know anymore what is meant by that way, and if the world ever worked like it.

Of course it was shocking, and shockingly true (and shockingly relevant, given the current pre-war show with Iran), but empires aren't alone in reality creation. We do it all the time, or we should, if we take ownership over the life of our minds. If we don't, then we're as good as "owned" in the Fortean sense of property, and pwn'd in the cyber slang of having our asses hacked and handed to us in an attachment.

Sometimes - perhaps most of the time in America and its decadent outposts - our reality is little more than a lifestyle choice. Opposition to empire amounts to which news network you watch, taking conspiratainment in a nightclub routine, and couch-dissenting with court jesters like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

In last week's interview with Bolivia's Evo Morales, Stewart wisecracked that in America elections were "a little rigged," to laughter, as if the joking acknowledgment of an historic tragedy were a revolutionary act. Morales' reality isn't satisfied by a punchline, and so he replied, though most guests likely wouldn't have imagined to thoughtfully follow-up on the quip. "So, if it's rigged," he said, to cheers and applause and Stewart's dumbfoundedness, "something needs to be done to change that."

Jeremy Thorpe, then leader of Britain's Liberal Party, was on trial in 1979 for conspiracy to murder his former gay lover, whose allegations of their affair was tarnishing Thorpe's career. The presiding justice was roundly castigated for his Old Boy bias, and was almost instantly immortalized in Peter Cook's satire "Entirely a Matter for You," which ends with the instruction to the jury, "you are now to retire, carefully to consider your verdict of 'Not Guilty.'" In this documentary clip, Terry Jones says of the Thorpe sketch "it still seems relevant, in the wake of the Hutton Report."

Yes it does. But here's the problem: jokes notwithstanding, Jeremy Thorpe was still found innocent, David Kelly is still dead, and presidential elections are still rigged. So maybe laughter isn't the best medicine to cure our world of empire.

In other places, the realities people choose can save them, kill them or free them, and sometimes all of the above. If you're a Buddhist monk, your excommunication of the "pitiless soldier kings" of Burma and their families may be a deadlier weapon than the one which may end your incarnation.

Freak Out

Freelance author Paulette Cooper was born into one hell of a reality, in Auschwitz, to parents who didn't survive the camp. In 1971 her first book was published, entitled The Scandal of Scientology, and included an interview with the disaffected L Ron Hubbard Jr, which revealed for the first time to a general readership the relation of Hubbard Sr to Aleister Crowley, and of Scientology to the occult. The Church had already sued Cooper for an article she'd written that appeared in London's Queen Magazine in December, 1969, which was also the month she received her first death threat, so of course they sued again. And neither did it end there.

Cooper found herself frequently followed, and multiple attempts were made to break into her apartment. Her phone was found to be tapped, and calls were often obscene and menacing. Anonymous hate mail piled up. She soon felt compelled to move to a residence with higher security, and her cousin Joy took over her apartment. Soon after, Joy opened the door to an unexpected delivery of flowers, and the deliveryman "unwrapped the flowers and there was a gun in it," Paulette told a Clearwater City Council hearing on Scientology in 1981:

And he took out the gun and he put it at Joy's temple and he cocked the gun, and we don't know whether it misfired, whether it was empty and it was a scare technique, what happened, but somehow, the gun did not go off. And he started choking her, and she was able to break away and she started to scream. And the person ran away.

And so she called a detective and he said, "It's a very wild attack because there doesn't seem to be any motive for it." There was no attempted rape, there was no attempted robbery, and why should somebody just suddenly try to kill her....

Then things got crazy.

About a week or two later at my apartment, I received a visit from the FBI. And they informed me that the public relations person from Scientology had claimed that she had received a couple of bomb threats and asked -- and had named me as somebody likely to send bomb threats.

Cooper didn't take the accusation very seriously, and consented to be fingerprinted. On May 19, 1973, she was indicted on three counts of sending bomb threats through the mail. (This is one of the letters.) And it came to that because, although she testified before a grand jury she had never before seen the letters, somehow, her fingerprints were found on them. ("I felt like a grand piano had just hit me on the head. I -- I fainted sitting up; the whole room just turned upside down and I didn't know what to do. And the, of course, the lawyers wanted more money.")

It wasn't until 1977 that the FBI, by its seizure of Scientology documents, learned that the Church had entirely forged the bomb threats to discredit its critic, and had crafted a project called "Operation Freakout" to either drive Cooper to suicide or a mental institution. Part of the plan consisted of a Scientology volunteer impersonating Cooper and making verbal threats towards the President and Henry Kissinger, and a second volunteer reporting them. Another named Jerry Levin moved into Cooper's building and befriended her during her darkest months, and reported back to the Church such things as "She can't sleep again...she's talking suicide. Wouldn't this be great for Scientology!"

Cooper very nearly lost her reality, because Scientology's reach was not exceeded by its means and intent to destroy it. And if we indwell our philosophies and make them our life rather than our lifestyle, we may evoke the same order of determined forces and find similar life and death consequence. If not, then we're more likely to merely freak ourselves out by paranoid invocation and commend ourselves as "info guerrillas."

A hard choice. But property doesn't have to choose.