I, Dynamo

The High Brow And The Low Brow

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep

Part VI

Living On Tulsa Time

by

R.E. Prindle, Dugald Warbaby and Dr. Anton Polarion

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

Gonna set my watch back to it,

‘Cause you know that I’ve been through it,

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

– Danny Flowers

     During the ’60s a lot of energy was put into the notion that one live in the HERE and NOW or someone else’s impression of the NOW.  There used to be a big San Francisco poster with nothing but a black background with the giant word IS in white.  NOW IS NOW.

     They didn’t know how much they were asking.  It is impossible to actually live in the NOW; No one can do it.  Rather the past is a drag on NOW preventing a full involvement with the present.  The period of time it takes to digest the previous NOW and update to an approximate notion of the current NOW is excruciatingly slow.  The sharper the break between the past and present the more traumatic the reaction.

     In the song Living On Tulsa Time the singer, no matter what time zone he is in sets his watch to Central Tulsa time.

     I know where that one is at.  One of my shattering breaks with the past was when I went active in the Navy in ’56.  Sent from Eastern Standard to Pacific Standard I kept my watch set to Eastern Standard time nearly the whole three years of my enlistment.  I only switched to PST in 1959 when I accepted the fact that I would never return East; that California was my new home.

     Brought into contact with a new NOW I was still not ready for the present.  I continued to dress as we did in ’56 well into the sixties.  Got hard to find some new duds.  I only ceased dressing that way when I became a Hippie in ’66 and adopted fantastic Hippie garb.  I was an urban spaceman:

I’m the Urban Spaceman

I’ve got speed,

I’ve got everything I need.

I don’t feel pleasure,

I don’t feel pain,

If you were to knock me down

I’d just get up again.

I wake up every morning with a smile upon my face.

My natural exuberance spills out all over the place.

-Neil Innes

     I was really NOW there for just a little while but I wasn’t alone.  As Bob Dylan said, everytime I looked back the past was just behind.  When the Hippie era ended I reverted to a modified 1956 style.  The past came back again.  All those screaming about living in the NOW in ’67-’69 are still back there claiming they’re still living in the NOW but time has passed them by.  I didn’t wait around, baby, I slid out into limbo and I’m doing fine now, thank-you.

     Thus when ERB began writing in 1911 he was not so much concerned with his NOW as he was in vindicating his past from 1896 to 1905.  His reality in those early novels from 1911 to 1915 continue to reflect his earlier travails.  Thus in the group of novels embraced by The Girl From Faris’s he is trying to vindicate his past to his present and hopefully to his future.

     After nineteen-fifteen he was released from his past to a large extent and began to concentrate on adjusting to the NOW of his altered circumstances.  Change is NOW and ERB was going though a lot of ch-ch-changes.  His nerves were jangling as he was jerked from time frame to time frame but he didn’t enter the Promised Land of NOW.  Oh Lord, he might have prayed, if he could have seen the future- Deliver me from NOW.

     Ten years after and a world of different NOWs the Mucker far in a distant past that had disappeared behind a cloud where he couldn’t see he tackled almost the identical theme in a different world, a fast moving world, a world where NOW was so strange it was unrecognizable from day to day.  The political situation he had grown up with was no longer recognizable; it had been replaced by a new reality.  He was almost living by two different clocks in some strange Einsteinian time zone where the guide posts had been removed and renamed and everything was relative to another reality that couldn’t be recognized by any clock ticking.

     Living on Tulsa time in another time zone.  There I was in ERB’s sunny Southland with my watch running three hours ahead of everyone else’s.  It didn’t matter.  I was on the water where time stands still for everyone.  The crisis came in ’58 when I stepped back on land to journey through the time zones back to Eastern Standard Time.  I was all alone out there, you know, cut off from a past I was soon to learn couldn’t be retrieved.  Wolfe was right, you can never go home again.  The only secure place, as dangerous and that was, was my ship.  My terminal place was also a realtively secure harbor but I was stuck in the middle for six days between the time zones in which I had no place and no identity except the tenuous one of my leave papers.  A queer cop threw them into the wind and let those blow away in Illinois.  After that I was naked to the universe.  I’ve hated cops ever since.

     I wouldn’t recommend hitchhiking to anyone.  My life was on the line for twenty-five hundred miles and six days.  Twenty-five hundred miles and six days on the road without food or sleep.  I’d add without drink but in a gas station in Gary I downed six seven ounce bottles of Coca-Cola in a row.  Created a minor sensation.

     After surviving a lunatic who picked me up on the western edge of the Mojave who wanted to kill me because he was convinced I had two hundred dollars on me, which by a strange coincidence I had, I was picked up Mountain Standard in the Panhandle of Texas by a couple homosexuals who wanted a different treasure I possessed and dropped off Central Time in Tulsa.  My watch was only one ahour ahead by then.  I was getting close to some kind of NOW or was I?  No.  Time is much more relative than that.  I was soon to be living a strange combination of NOW and THEN.

     Tulsa was a tough town.  I don’t need to see Tulsa again.  I wasn’t about to start living on Tulsa Time.  I was an hour ahead which couldn’t have been better.  I had to walk through Tulsa, hungry and thirsty.  I spied a place across this great expanse of grass between it and the freeway.  As I approached the place began to glitter.  Fancy, but I could see a coffee shop at the top of a long flight of stairs to the left.  I didn’t want to spend money so I thought I’d just get a glass of water.

Oh Dan, can you see

That great green tree

Where the water’s running free

Just waiting there for you and me.

Water…cool…clear…water.

     But between me and the water was this big cowboy in high heeled boots, a tuxedo and ten gallon hat.  Fancy goings on as I noticed ladies entering to the right in ball gowns escorted by tuxedos.  I came prepared or thought I did.  I was in my dress blues and my Uncle Sam told me I should never be ashamed of my uniform, it could pass for a tuxedo anywhere.  Anywhere but Tulsa.  That cowboy had never discussed the issue with my Uncle Sam.

     I was bold but the problem was he had the advantage being on the landing at the top of the stairs and I had to climb the stairs to get past him.  He had his fist doubled and these high heeled boots with those silver plates on the toes.  That was a mean looking business proposition.  I had a lot further to fall than he did.  Get my uniform messed up and things.  Then where would I be out of time and place?  Whew! Why does one have to face tough choices?

     I’m getting a drink of water, I said, trying to combine thoughness with masculine geniality a al the cowboy ethic.

     Not here you ain’t.  He said, making a move to kick me down the stairs.

     Hey buddy, this is a tuxedo I’m wearing.  I faltered.

     His reply was not one of which my Uncle Sam would approve.

     I left Tulsa still thirsty not liking cowboys any better than I liked cops.  NOW has its perils.

     A day or so later I was still in Central Time.  Tulsa was a tough place and the rest of Oklahoma was no California.  I was heading North now which kept me in the same time zone.  Then I made the mistake of crossing the Mississippi into East St. Louis.  After just a couple minutes I really liked Tulsa.  Wished I was back there.

     I don’t know what evil forces made me want to hitchhike across country, damn Jack Kerouac, but I was within a hair’s breadth of being sliced and diced on the streets of East St. Louis.  Whould have tossed me in the river as so much driftwood.  Three Black guys with switchblades in their hands kept inching toward me while I kept inching closer to the middle of the highway.

     That morning some guy got in his car for a pleasant drive to Louisville.  He decided ot go through East St. Louis for some mysterious but critical reason.  He arrived in East St. Louis just as these three knives were deciding to make their move.  This guy sized up the situation from a couple blocks away, slammed on his brakes throwing open the passenger door at the same time shouting ‘Get In’ for God’s sake get in, NOW.’ Novel experience for a hitchiker.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to rush because if I made a break for it those three knives might move faster than i could.  I hopped in casually casting a smiling glance over my shoulder.  The driver peeled out of there nearly separating a hand from the wrist on the door handle.  I was saved from that particular NOW and END but I was on the road to Louisville which was still a far cry from Eastern Standard which was the time zone I so ardently desired.

     It took me another day or so as I had a lot of North to make up but I did get into Eastern Standard.  Now my watch matched the time zone but there was a mismatch between the present and the past.  Rather there were two different presents and pasts going on at the same time.  Mine and theirs.  I don’t think Einstein is right but well, maybe, time wasn’t that relative but the uses they and I were making of past and present sure were.

     That’s where memory comes in which makes time and space so relative.  I had been absent for two years and what I had been experiencing was much different than what they had been experiencing.  They had actually been living on Eastern Standard Time while I was just pretending.  I knew I was out of time.  For me time had been rapidly changing but for them time had more or less stood still or, rather traveled in a straight line.  To me they were still living in the past.  Oh, they had aged a couple years but their trajectory was different and slower.  Relatively they had stood still while I had rocketed away.

     It was as though I had been a gamma cloud burped from some collapsed star in some galaxy a billion light years away.  As is known once set in motion an object will travel in a straight line at the same speed unless some other agent interferes with it.  It was as though I had been careening through space ripping apart the fabric of time and space or disregarding it completely as though it wasn’t there; at any rate completely unaffected by this fabric which apparently has no tensile strength, there was no gravity of any force that deflected my course in a curve while if space is curved I was traveling so fast I careened right off the curved track.

     Who knows how many black holes i passed over without being drawn into the vortex; who knows how many puny suns I swept across without having one atom deflected by the puny gravitational pull of the strongest sun; who knows how many planets I depopulated.  One billion light years and running, my speed and trajectory were the same as when I was emitted from that distant star.

     Now, as though by some miracle here I was back where I began but in two different time zones at one time.  Theirs and mine.  Obvious I must have passed through a worm hole or fallen into a memory hole.  We stared at each other blankly each unable to comprehend the other.  They thought I have become weird,or perhaps weirder, because they had stood still while I had been careening through time and space in timezones they would never know.

     I smiled and got on a bus, enough of the adventures of hitchhiking.  One the way back to Standard Pacific Time I abandoned Eastern Standard adjusting my watch as I passed through Central Standard and Mountain Standard.  I was not exactly living in the NOW but I was in the correct time zone.

     Minor but vital adjustment.

     So, when ERB caught up with himself in 1914-15 he was no longer living on Tulsa time.  He was trying to adjust his watch to his current time zone.

     But as he was careening through space and time, space and time was moving at an even more frantic pace so it was difficult for him to get his bearings.

     Science was changing his world at a rate faster than the mind could follow.  Events in the far off Detroit that he had known and loved as a young fellow were going to affect his life just a few years hence.  In 1914 Henry Ford had shocked the industrial, moral and social world by ‘unilaterally’ doubling the wage for unskilled labor.

     This was a violation of ‘natural law’ which is to say religious sensibilities.  At the time a natural law of labor was believed and incorporated into religion.  The law was that if only one man can do a job he can command his price.  Skilled labor can demand more than unskilled labor but when anyone can do the job as in unskilled labor they will have to take what is offered.  Thus Ford pitted science against serious religious beliefs.

     At about this time a Judge in a labor dispute asked the strikers if they didn’t know they were going against God’s will on earth.

     This was at the time when the Liberal Coalition was forming and there were strangers in the land, to use John Higham’s expression, who believed they truly represented God’s Will.  There is no greater enemy to God’s Will on earth than Science and the Scientific Consciousness.  If you recall the so-called Christian Scientists reject scientific medical cures preferring to depend on the Will of God.  Apparently it has never occurred to them that a case of a ruptured appendix means God’s Will is death while a simple operation means life.

     Nevertheless Ford upset the natural or religious order of things and had to be stopped.  Ford himself believed he had discovered a universal law in mass production so that he was actually a prophet of his own new religion.  Believing himself in the possession of the truth he acted accordingly seeking to apply his method to each and every problem.  Thus when the Great War began it was deemed possible to negotiate with the participants on a personal level to get them to cease hostilities.  Ford believed he could do it.  The Strangers In The Land who were living on Babylon Time saw their opportunity to pit their religion against Ford’s science and they took it.  The Man of Science was in their pocket.  They convinced Ford to take a horde of well meaning but naive people to Germany for a confab with the Kaiser.  Ford fell for it.  This was the famous Peace Ship episode that shredded Ford’s reputation two short years after he had made it.

     Ford always maintained that after the ship was at sea the Strangers revealed themselves telling him that only they could change the course of the war.  They began it and only they could end it.  When he returned home he found the Strangers in charge of the War Industries Board and they and the Wilson Administration were telling him how to run his business.  Babylon Time had met the Twentieth Century and found it could make the clock run.

     Ford with his universal panacea was not the kind of man to take this sort of thing lying down.  Ford Motor Co. had as much cash laying around as Bill Gates and Microsoft does today.  Ford put his money to use.  These are complex times so I am going to edit out all information that doesn’t pertain to my moral.

     Ford believed in his method.  By applying it properly he saw no reason he couldn’t solve the age old problem of the Jews here and now.  He thought reason would work, poor man, so he bought himself a library of Jewish studies, put his man Bill Cameron on the job to study the library and publish the results in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, that he bought to disseminate his reasonable solution to the problem.  He made the Dearborn Independent a national newspaper, perhaps the first of its kind.  He even had a distribution system handy.  He made all his Ford dealers distribute the papers, even out in Hollywood, California.

     The Independent made such a noise that the papers couldn’t be given the silent treatment.

     The independent appealed to a very large number of people although Liberal historians have given the impression that the paper went unread.  The paper didn’t go unread.  Out in Hollywood a man named Edgar Rice Burroughs apparently read the paper assiduously.  As, why not, even if you don’t agree with the premise of a movie like The Passion Of The Christ that doesn’t mean you don’t go to see it.  I used to read The Christian Science Monitor and I’ve never been a Christian Scientist.  I used to read the Daily Worker and I’ve never been a Communist.  A lot of people did go see the Passion making it one of the most lucrative films in history and lots of people read the Dearborn Independent, even devoured it.

     Each week the paper issued a new article exposing the true nature of the ‘Jewish Problem.’  The articles were well researched, reasonable and accurate, but as they criticized a religion, no religion will stand any criticism if they can help it, they were necessarily labeled heretical, infidelic, bigoted, anti-Semitist.  In this case you can check anti-Semitist.  From this particular religion’s point of view they were anti-Semitic but from a reasonable scientific viewpoint they weren’t and aren’t.

     The Jewish reaction was strong and violent.  As a member of the Liberal Coalition they called in their allies who branded Ford an anti-Semite and ostracized him.  Then Ford was out there all alone.  A major campaign of vilification and defamation was conducted against him.  All the hypnopaedic media were called into play against Ford.  William Fox, the Fox part of the later Twentieth Century-Fox, used his Movietone News shorts to portray every Ford that was in an accident as at fault and unsafe.  Now that’s defamation with a capital D.  By 1925 it was clear that Ford could use some allies.

     Enter Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marcia Of The Doorstep.

     As we know Marcia was never published so ERB’s aid was hypothetical.  A reasonable question is what evidence do I have for ERB’s intent.  I offer Marcia Of The Doorstep as my evidence and certain articles from the Dearborn Independent.  As I’ve said before ERB in Marcia exhibits a seemingly involved knowledge of the theatre.  I  have been puzzled as to where he got it.

     I think I may have his source.  The original Ford articles were issued weekly beginning in 1920-21 later being collected into a series of four volumes entitled ‘The International Jew’.  What I am dealing with here is literature and history.  I have no concern in the nature of the Ford articles.  My only interest is what Ford and Burroughs understood and how they expressed it.  Leave it at that.  (It wasn’t left at that.  As of 10/27/08 this essay has been censored by being left out my catalog of essays and not mentioned under any of the tags;  Old habits are hard to break, I guess.)

     Like Burroughs believed, or as Burroughs understood Ford there are two types of Jews.  The ordinary Jew who goes about his business and the international Jews who is causing all the mischief.  Thus the title International Jew excludes the mass of ordinary Jews and refers only the the International trouble makers.  For Burroughs there was the ‘type’ of Max Heimer corresponding the the International Jews and the type of Judge Berlanger representing the ordinary of ‘Good Jew.’

     In Volume II of the Interntional Jew there is a series of four atrticles on the American Theatre.

     The books themselves have long since been stolen from the libraries and destroyed in an informal kind of censorship but due to the wonders of modern technology they’re available on the internet.  The relevant theatre chapters can be fund at the URLs below:

     http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij28.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij29.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij31.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij32.htm

     The first is entitled Jewish Control of the American Theatre of 1/121; the second: The Rise of the First Theatrical jewish Trust of 1/8/21; the third:  Jewish Aspect of the Movie Problem; and the fourth Jewish Supremacy In The Motion Picture World of 2/19/21.  I believe all the necessary theatrical information is contained in these four atircles.  All were written in 1921 giving ERB plenty of time to involve himself by 1924.

     As you may remember ERB was sent a copy of the Jewish Bill Of Rights in 1919 and it was demanded that he endorse them.  Thus there are an additional three articles from Vol. II that may be applicable.  They are found at:

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij34.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij35.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij36.htm

     While the last three do not reflect on Marcia to a great degree they will provide a better backgrund to ERB’s thinking on the issues as he must have studied them carefully.

     —————–

     It is very probable that ERB coded information into the novel to let Ford know this one was for him.  For instance Clara Sackett was probably named after Clara Ford.  Could be coincidental but the engineer of the Lady X was named Sorenson while Ford’s Chief Engineer was Charles Sorenson.  Given ERB’s obvious connection to the Dearborn independent which Ford would easily have recognized, if he would ever have read the book, I think the references are conclusive.

     While on this topic I would also like to point out that when the ban on Tarzan movies was broken in 1926 it was done by the arch ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph Kennedy who owned FBO Studios at the time.  FBO was a little later bought by David Sarnoff of RCA who formed RKO.  Radio-Keith-Orpheum thus editing Kennedy and FBO out of the picture.  Punishment?

     Also if you want a lively account of these proceedings check out Upton Sinclair’s self-published Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.  Sinclair’s is a nice first person I Was There type thing plus when William Fox was driven out of the movies, this is really exciting stuff, he went to Sinclair with his story.  so Sinclair not only lives through this from a distance but is told part of the story first hand.  I just love this stuff.

     I am not particularly concerned here with whether the Dearborn Independent articles are true and accurate, although I am sure they are, but my concern is that Burroughs read them, believed them and acted on them.  Bearing in mind his contact with the AJC he had no reason to disbelieve the articles.

     In the first article ‘Jewish Control Of The American Theatre’, after an introduction that relates Jewish activities in Russia to Jewish activities in the United States a general statement on the theatre is made:

     The Theatre has long been a part of the Jewish program for guidance of the public taste (hypnopaedic media) and influencing the public mind…it is the instant ally night by night, week by week of any idea which the ‘power behind the scenes’ wishes to put forth.  It is not by accident that in Russia, where they now have scarcely anything else, they still have the Theater, especially revived, stimulated and supported by Jewish-Bolshevists because they believe in the Theater just as they believe in the Press; it is one of the two great means of molding popular opinion.

     Cameron should have mentioned movies and song publishing and he would have had the major elements of hypnopaedic conditioning so brilliantly illustrated by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World.

     As we all know Burroughs was opposed to the Bolsheviks; he undoubtedly believed as did any knowledgeable observer that the Bolsheviks were predominantly Jewish.  We may believe that he endorses the premises of these article.

     Further down (a shortcoming of the internet is that there are no page numbers) the article says:

     Down to 1885 the American Theater was in the hands of Gentiles.  From 1885 dates the first invasion of Jewish influences.  It meant the parting of the ways, and the future historian of the American stage will describe that year with the word “Ichabod.”

     Second paragraph below:

        About the time that Jewish control appeared, Sheridan, Sothern, McCollough, Madame Junuschek, Mary Anderson, Frank Mayo, John T. Raymond began to pass off the stage.

———————

     All that remained after the Hebrew hand fell across the stage were a few artists who had recieved their training under the Gentile school- Julia Marlowe, Tyrone Power, R.D. McLean and a little later Richard Mansfield, Robert Martell.  Two of this group remain, and along with Maude Adams they constitute the last flashingsof an era that has gone- an era that apparently leaves no great exemplars to perpetuate it.

     There you have the premise of ERB in Marcia and enough history to flesh out the fiction.  The old school was gone.  ERB then names several players as here.  The last surviving exemplar of this tradition is Mark Sackett.  But even for Mark there are no plays worthy to perform in.  As a member of Abe Finkel’s troupe he condescends to perform in problem plays and the new sex comedy.

     The article continues:

     “Shakespeare spells ruin”: was the utterance of the Jewish manager.  “High brow stuff” is also a Jewish expression.  These two sayings, one appealing to the managerial end, the other to the public end of the Theater have formed the epitaph of the classic era.

     So there you have the complete story of Mark Sackett.

     He was the last of the breed, a fine old Gentile actor of the old school of pre-1885.  Corrupted by the Jewish influence on the theatre he accepts demeaning roles.

     When he comes in to money he tells Max Heimer that he is going to perform Shakespeare.  Max takes the position that ‘Shakespeare spells ruin’ arguing for a Ziegfeld Follies type show, a problem play or a sex comedy which he feels is a surer hope of success than the ‘high brow’ stuff.  Straight from the Dearborn Independent.

‘…the rage is for extravaganze and burlesque.’

     Now,

     In this manner was laid the foundation of the latter day Theatrical Trust.  The booking firm was that of Klaw and Erlanger, the former a young Jew from Kentucky who had studied law, but drifted into theatrical life as an agent; the latter a young Jew from Cleveland with little education but with experience as an advance agent.

     Thus Abe Finkel is probablly the Klaw of Klaw and Erlanger.  It may be coincidence but Judge B-erlanger is Erlanger prefaced with a B.  thus those two would reprsent Klaw and Erlanger.  Another version would be Finkel and Heimer in Hollywood also patterned after the Potash and Perlmutter movies of Samuel Goldwyn.

      The trust was resisted just as Mark Sackett resisted.

(From The Rise Of The Theatrical Trust)

     The opposition offered by the artists was prolonged and dignified, Francis Wilson, Nat C. Goodman, James A. Herne, James O’Neill, (Eugene O’ Neill’s father) Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske and James K. Hackett stood out for a time…

      Mark Sackett held out then in defiance of theatrical wisdom forming a Shakespearean company.  This might be seen as a form of the Little Theatre movement which Cameron says developed in reaction to the first Theatrical Trust.

     So the basis for the New York and theatrical end of Sackett’s career may be said to have been inspired by the two theatrical articles of Cameron in the Dearborn Independent.  ERB probably read them in newspaper form shortly after publication in 1921.  Because of the AJC approach to him as well as heightened anxiety over the immigrant question caused by loyalty concerns in the wake of the War Burroughs was especially receptive to Ford’s concerns.

     If the germ of the story was conceived in 1921 the concern over Ford’s struggle was becoming difficult by 1924 may have inspired Burroughs to come to his literary aid.  Thus we have this story of Marcia which when examined more closely is very involved in post-war Revolutionary and Jewish problems.

     While the novel was universally rejected for publication this was undoubtedly because of ADL censors closely watching the publishing industry.

     One can’t be certain but it is possible that Burroughs would have been finished in Hollywood but for Kennedy’s FBO Studios breaking the blacklist on Burroughs in 1926.  Jewish movies of Tarzan began again in 1927.  After 1932s MGM film which in itself may have been a parody to discredit the Big Bwana, the property became so lucrative especially in a Depression Era climate, that movies continued to be made saving Burroughs from complete ruin.

     The war on Ford continued.  Henry Ford is an interesting figure who, like Burroughs, would continue to be a Judaeo-Communist target into the thirties and forties, to the end of his life and beyond.

     Ford zipped into the NOW in the years around 1914 when his Model T transformed America.  But then he slipped back into Tulsa Time.  The Model T was so successful for him that he failed to keep up with developments in the industry.  The Model T remained essentially the same until 1925 when a better Chevrolet overtook the Ford as the best seller.

      Ford then did an extraordinary thing that baffled conventional minds.  He shut down production for over a year as he designed the new Model A.  For this model he revolutionized the industry by designing the V8.  The Model A was an instant success reviving Ford’s fortunes but the present and the future were now so commingled, things were changing so fast that the NOW was gone before you sat down to dinner.  Constant model changes were now necessary.  The world that Ford had created had gotten away from him.

     He realized that he had lost his battle with the Jewish establishment.  He capitulated in 1927 when Louis Marshall of the Jewish government demanded an ‘apology’ to call off hostilities.  Ford told him to write one out and he would sign it.  Marshall wrote an abject apology which Ford signed without edits or reading.  Marshall then had the ‘apology’ published, bound and sent to every library free of charge.  The apology is easier to find than the Dearborn independent articles.

     The fracas came to a humiliating end for Ford and the Scientific Consciousness.  ERB’s reaction isn’t known, however on December 10, 1929 (ERB Bio Timeline 1920-29) in a letter to his son Hulbert he made these observation on Religion and Science:

     A man can be highly religious, he can believe in God and in an omnipotent creator and still square his belief with advanced scientific discoveries, but he cannot have absolute faith in the teachings and belief of any church, of which I have knowledge, and also believe in the accepted scientific theories of the origin of the earth, of animal and vegetable life upon it, or the age of the human race…(Religious) enthusiasms and sincerity never ring true to me and I think there has been no great change in this all down the ages, insofar as fundamentals are concerned.  There is just as much intolerance and hyprocrisy as there ever was, and if any church were able to obtain  political power today I believe you would see all the tyranny and inustice and oppression which has marked the political ascendency of the church at all times.

         You can’t be any more clear sighted than that.  Here ERB has clearly and succinctly stated the religious problem of the twentieth century and beyond.  His is an objective analysis of facts; religion is a subjective projection of desires and wishes.  As he notes science and religion cannot be reconciled.  As he goes on to note in the conflict between the objective and subjective, the conscious and unconscious, the tyranny of the unconscious is an unavoidable fact.  The question of which religion he fears would impose all the tyranny, injustice and oppression was clearly the Liberal Coalition and more especially the Jewish element of its multi-cultural diversity.

     We now come back to Richard Slotkin and his charges against Burroughs as the ‘mastermind’ of My Lai.  that an objection was lodged against Burroughs because he was interested in Eugenics can be discarded.  People of all political persuasions were interested in Eugenics.  If any abuses of Eugenics were made, Burroughs didn’t make them.  Besides, it’s a matter of how you interpret Eugenics.  The half man, half beast of Stalin is obviously an objectionable use.

     On the score of whether Burroughs was an anti-Semitist, which is what Slotkin really means, from a subjective religious point of view that may be so but it is not a question for the religious to decide; they are not competent to do so.  Sigmund Freud himself said that religion is a neurosis.  (That means a departure from mental health.) If he is to be respected as a scientific genius why shouldn’t we respect his opinion?  If religion is a neurosis then it should be treated as a mental disease.

     On a Scienfitic basis then is it possible to call Burroughs an anti-Semitist?  Clearly not.  The man was a clear minded rational human being of great achievement and should be honored as such.

     Should his scientific opinions differ from those of a religious bent it is they who must take a back seat not Burroughs.

     Slotkin is clearly wrong in his interpretation of Burroughs.  Slotkin represents the unconscious rather than the conscious.

     For the foregoing reasons then I think that Marcia Of The Doorstep and 1924 was the pivot of ERB’s career.  After 1924 it was no longer possible for him to live on Tulsa Time.  He came under attack from the Liberal Coalition which was as formidable for him as it was for Henry Ford.

     His novels after Marcia reflect this attack.  Those novels are perhaps his greatest.  Certainly one of the high points where he meets his enemies head on is Tarzan The Invincible that he was forced to publish under his own imprint.  The title says it all.

     I may be sentimental but I like Marcia Of The Doorstep.  I only wish he had had the patience to flesh out the ending.

     ERB wrote well in any time zone there was from Babylon Time to Tulsa Time to the NOW.

You know that I’ve been through it

But I just can’t go back to it.

There is no living on Tulsa Time.

NOW is the time.

End of Review