Exhuming Bob XVI

Bob Dylan’s Dream or…Nightmare?

by

R.E. Prindle

I’ll let you be in my dream if you’ll let me be in yours.

-Bob Dylan

dylan-10

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/print.html?id=1725

     When Dylan wrote those words, was he sincere or was it just part of the con?  I was recently asked not ot contribute anymore to expectingrain.com by person or persons unknown.  The webmaster refuses to identify he or them to me.  Too ashamed to let their names by known, I guess.  Or chicken.  I know I’d rather not be known as a rasty, nasty censor.

     I was ejected for voicing pretty much the same sentiments as Jay Michaelson does in the above referenced review of Joel Gilbert’s The Jesus Years.  Maybe the difference between Jay and me is that I don’t think Dylan is such a mysterious elusive guy.  Anybody with a little Freud under his belt has got Dylan pinned.

     He suffers from a fairly severe depression while being very emasculated.  He is so emasculated he can’t even fix on an identity for himself.  His natal Bobby Zimmerman failed him so he apparently attempted to become Elston Gunn which he wasn’t able to sustain so he then became Bob Dylan which also became too much of a burden to him so he threw that identity up for grabs saying anybody can be Bob Dylan who wants it, then he became Masked and Anonymous eschewing any identity whatever.  An empty suit.

     If that isn’t clear to you then there is no reason for you to tackle Freud or psychology now.

     So, what was the conflict?  Duh.  Could it have been that between his Jewish upbringing and his Christian milieu?  Gosh, I don’t know, do you?  Is there anything in his subsequent history that would suggest such a conflict?  Let me think.  I think there is, therefore I am.

     Is there a conflict in the minds of Dylan’s disciples.  Well, now there we’re on firm gound.  Just listen to Jay:

     There’s a telling moment in Joel Gilbert’s new (?) documentary Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years:  an interviewee says that when Dylan became a born again Christian, he went, in two short years, from being an American Jewish hero to the “greatest apostate of the twentieth century”… But worse, because Dylan embodied a specific kind of liberal American Jewish hope that someone would speak truth to  power, and that the world would listen.  These were very Jewish dreams, and Dylan fulfilled them for awhile.

     Damn, then it wasn’t anything I said as the messenger.  I guess it was just not being Jewish that I shouldn’t have attempted to deliver the message.  Right message, wrong face.  Gee, I guess I can’t be in Dylan’s dream because I’m not Jewish.  Whatever happened to One World, One Dream?  Everybody being brothers?  The Global Village?  They didn’t think there wouldn’t be variations  on the theme I hope.  Well, no matter Dylan and his People can still be in my dream.  I’m inclusive.

     But Jay and his People themselves apparently feel excluded from Dylan’s dream also.  Jay says:

     Dylan never wanted to be the voice of his generation, and he certainly never asked to be King of the Jews or vessel for our hopes and dreams.  (My italics.)

     Wow!  King of the Jews, Jesus Christ.  I may have thought it but I didn’t have the cojones (My italics), Jay does and actually says it.  Jesus, I’d be running for my life let alone being kicked off expectingrain.com.

     Jay and his People just can’t seem to get it.  Dylan never became a Christian, he became a Jew For Jesus.  Jay even has the answer before him but his religious bigotry won’t let him see it:  “Why did Dylan…record two religious albums proclaiming the word of G-d?”  There you have it Jay.  Dylan was conflating Jesus and God into one and then substituting G-d for Jes-s.  Jesus is Christian, God is Jewish. Duh.  For Christ’s sake, c’mon Jay.

     Well enough of that.  I’m sure you can’t stop laughing.  Jay is supposed to be reviewing Gilbert’s documentary.  Michaelson; is not either well read on his subject of Dylan or well researched.  Maybe he smoked enough dope that he thinks he automatically knows everything about Dylan.  I’ve seen it happen. 

     As far as the film goes, it may not be a particularly good movie but then it is a documentary and has to judged differently.  As documentaries go I found it more than satisfactory.  The clip art was an unusual special effect but I actually found some of them humorous.  I wouldn’t have done it that way myself but Gilbert can do as he pleases and did.

     Gilbert doesn’t mysteriously look like Dylan as Jay says.  There is no mystery involved.  Gilbert is trying to clone himself as Dylan; does a good job.  He has a good understanding of his subject, after all he’s trying to be Dylan.  His selection of subjects provided enough penetrating information that I have to think they were well chosen.  Perhaps they were all that Gilbert could get, in which case the film maker drew them out well.  Rob Stoner was the key.  He was intelligent, understanding, and well informed- he knew what he was talking about.  Kasha and Glaser gave you all the information you needed to understand the Christian-Jews For Jesus scam.  Come on Jay, open your eyes.

     Weberman has been saying that Dylan was a heroin addict since Christ was a baby.  At least from 1964.  It may have been true, I don’t know, but it didn’t have anything to do with Dylan’s crash.  If Jay knew anything about his subject he would realize that the divorce was the key.  Dylan had finally, after a life time of trying, become so defiled that he had to turn to God/Jesus to lead him back.  I hope he found the way.  Freud again.

     For Michaelson who can’t separate his Jewishness from Dylan the problem is a paramount betrayal because ‘We’re (Jews) scarred and traumatized by two thousand years of Christian hegemony…  So, there you have it, the cat’s out of the bag, couldn’t have said it better myself.  Jay and his People thought Dylan was the Messiach who was going to establish a Jewish hegemony over ‘Christians,’  ‘speak the truth to power.’

     I’m not so sure Dylan won’t still try but that has little to do with the documentary.  The con and exploitation was not that of Dwyer on Dylan but Dylan over the Vineyard Fellowship.  Dylan was using them to try to reach his fellow Jews in  his faith of Jews For Jesus.  As we are never tired of being told:  Jes-s was a J-w.  Case closed.  Forget hegemony.

    In summation Gilbert, in my estimation, did an excellent job for what he set out to do.  I was properly instructed and…I got it.  But, I was still kicked out of Dylan’s dream.  He conned me too.  What a nightmare!

 

A Review

You Really Turn Me On

Rock Odyssey

by

Ian Whitcomb

Review by R.E. Prindle

Whitcomb, Ian: Rock Odyssey, 1973

     I don’t suppose too many people today remember Ian Whitcomb.  He surfaced in 1965 with his hit song

Young Ian

Young Ian

‘You Really Turn Me On.  In 1965 I was a very old twenty-seven but getting younger every day.  I saw Whitcomb once while visiting my wife’s relatives.  Her young cousin was watching the Lloyd Thaxton show out of LA.  I’d never heard of Lloyd Thaxton either but according to the cousin he was the hottest thing on TV.  If I remember correctly the Kinks had just sung Dedicated Follower Of Fashion that I thought was very OK.  The Ian came on and did his breathy falsetto androgynous song:  You Really Turn Me On.  At one point after suggestively fondling the microphone stand he shot down out of sight like a tower from the World Trade Center resurfacing moments later.  Pretty startling stuff at a time when nearly every new group was an actual mind blower- The Rolling Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five and this was just the beginning.  More and even stranger and stronger stuff was to follow quickly only to begin a slow fizzle even as it peaked ending in the Rap and stuff that passes for music today.  A very old Bob Dylan trying to bring light into the heart of his growing darkness.  After the startling sixties came the sedentary seventies.  But then Whitcomb disappeared like his fall from the microphone stand and I never saw or heard of him again.  A true one hit wonder.

     Years later I came across his LP Under A Ragtime Moon.  Then I knew why he had disappeared.  He was into that English music hall stuff.  But then, I didn’t mind that.  He sounded quite a bit like one of my personal favorites The Bonzo Dog Doo Wah Band.  Of course they didn’t really get that far with that stuff either.  You have to be a member of the cult to really dig it.  In order to like the Bonzos you have to have a fairly eccentric side to your musical taste.  A little out of the mainstream which  is where I preferred to live my life.  I thought the Bonzos were wonderful, still do.  But I was pretty much all alone out there.  I liked and like, Neil Innes and the late great Viv Stanshall, two of the Bonzo stalwarts.  ‘Legs’ Larry Smith.  Ragtime Moon lacked the modern rock foundation the Bonzos infused into their music but to this day I couldn’t tell you whose version of Jollity Farm I’m familiar with.  Anyway I have a soft spot for this sort of thing so over the years I’ve played a side of the Bonzos fairly often and dusted off my copy of Ragtime Moon occasionally.

     You Really Turn Me On always stuck in my mind, great song.  Kinda struck my lost chord and made it gong into the distance.  If you’re only going to have one hit you might as well make it a good one.  And then for some reason, I don’t know, I googled Whitcomb and saw that he’d written a few books, including this autobiographical sketch cum pop history so, as it was cheap on alibris, I sent for a copy.  I was delighted with the volume as I read it through.  As biographies go this is one of the better ones, right up there with Wolfman Jack’s not to mention that of that phony Jean-Jacques Rousseau although I stop short at Casanova.  Casanova is one hard one to top.  As a history of the period it is more balanced and beats the hell out of that crap from the Boys Of ’64.

     Ian took offense at being a one hit wonder; he really wanted to be up there with, say, Jim Morrison of the Doors, Mick Jagger, people of that ilk.  I have to believe that stories Ian tells are true although some are stunningly improbable but then those things can and do happen that way, you know.  It’s all in how you see what goes on around you.  Toward the end of the book he’s pondering on where he went wrong, he’s sunk into a fair depression over this, he flees from his apartment in his pajamas one early morning to take a stool in a coffee shop.  That’s depression.  But, let Ian tell it in his own inimitable fashion.  As improbable as it may seem he took a stool next to Jim Morrison who recognized him first.

     When ‘Light My Fire’ had reached number one, Jim had gone out and bought a skintight leather outfit.  At the Copper Skillet, it wasn’t so skintight anymore.

     “How do you do it?”  I asked.

     “I never dug Jerry And The Pacemakers.  How do I do what?”

     I wanted to kick myself for bringing up my obsession with pop success, but I plowed on:  “How do you stay intellectual and still be a hit with the kids, the masses?”

     “You could have done it.  You were into the theater of the absurd.  I saw you on ‘Shindig’ and ‘Lloyd Thaxton’ goofing off and telling the audience that rock n’ roll was a big joke.  That the whole of existence is a big bad joke.  You were too comic.  Tragedy’s the thing.  Western civilization is ending and we don’t even need an earthquake; we’re performing crumble music for the final dance of death and you know what?  Truth lies beyond the grave. I’ll pick up the tab.”

     I couldn’t have put it better.  Ian’s problem was that he was working from a different ethic.  He didn’t understand that the singer and the song was the show, the whole show.  Nothing else was needed. We were only there to see the singer sing his song.  It’s nice to know that Jim and I were watching the same Thaxton show together.  If I hadn’t seen Ian on Thaxton I wouldn’t have been as impressed because on that show singer and song were a single projection.

     Due to the wonders of the internet I was recently able to catch several versions of Ian’s song but not the Thaxton one.  One had him and a half dozen other guys charging around a series of pianos.  Completely missed the point of the singer and his song.  Not even good entertainment.  Ian considered himself an entertainer bacause of a childhood encounter with a music hall comic named O. Stoppit.  Fateful encounter.  Because of it Ian wanted to be a comic, ended up a singer and as Morrison noted the two were too dissimilar to work.

     Ian was probably headed for depression from the age of five or six or so as he came to terms with bombed out London in ’46 or ’47.  His biographical sketch is a wonderful tale of a seemingly cheerful man’s descent into a deep depression.  By book’s end Ian is nearly out of his mind.

     He quotes a psychoanalyst for his definition of depression:

     It was the great Serbian psychoanalyst Josef Vilya who concluded that chronic depression is the result of a head on collision between dream and reality.  The patient dreams of becoming King but goes on to become a member of the tax paying public.

     That’s probably what Morrison meant by tragedy.  Life always fails to meet our expectations so that humanity responds by assuming at least a low grade depression that makes comedy an adjunct to tragedy.  Thus in the Greek theatre  there was a terrifically depressive tragic trilogy followed by some comic relief.  The burlesque of an Aristophanes.

     Ian’s problem was as Morrison noted that he saw the absurdity of the human condition but was too jokey about it.  Absurdity is a serious thing and has to be so treated.  O. Stoppit taught Ian a silliness unmixed with tragedy.  A tragedy in itself.  When silliness such as You Really Turn Me On met the tragedy of a one hit wonder Ian began his descent into depression as Vilya suggested.

     I’ve never been depressed myself, never had the blues, but I have visited the lower depths as a tourist so I have some notion of what Ian’s talking about.  Dirty Harry in drag.  I just never got off the bus that’s all, except once, to walk through Haight-Ashbury where I saw first hand how horrible true depression could be.  Boy, did Ian find out about that.  Good thing he never found his Debbie.

     In his narrative combining grim humor with his developing depression Ian gets off some rippers.  I had a good many uproarious belly floppers.  Try these few lines.  Two good ones in succession.  You do have to have the same sense of humor.  The North and South are those of England.

     These frightening stories of Southern travelers stranded in woebegone depressed cities and suffering under the rough natives.  For example a well known Shakespearean actor, having missed the last train out of Crewe, knocked on the door of a hotel.  “Er, do you have special terms for actors?” the traveler asked.  “Yes- and here’s one:  Fuck off!” 

     And if they weren’t being aggressive, the Northerners were acting daft.  One heard of a Lancashire lad down in London demanding another helping of dressed crab (in the shell):  “Give us another of them pies- and don’t make the crust so hard.”

     Of course Ian can’t do that on every page but laughs are liberally sprinkled throughout the underlying depression.

     Ian’s book opens with his youthful encounter with O. Stoppit and ends with another unifying his theme nicely.

     In between Ian enters the world of rock almost serendipitously with his one hit song:  You Really Turn Me On.  After that his story is a search for a sequel that he can never find but which he pursues somewhat as Alice down the rabbit hole.  He loved his one brush with fame so much that the clash between his cherished hopes of finding his sequel and the grim reality of not being able plunges him deeper and deeper into depression.  Personally I would have gone out and found a songwriter.  There were thousands in LA.

     However his odyssey, as he calls it, Brave Ulysses ne Ian, led him through the heart and soul of the Golden Age of Rock And Roll from the Beach Boys and Beatles and Rolling Stones through Morrison and the Doors, Procol Harum, Cream, Pink Floyd, Donovan, you know, like that.  After that crescendo followed the diminuendo ending in Rap and the current rather laughable music scene.

     Ian has encounters with the aforementioned Morrison, Mick Jagger and others.  His observations of the social scene are trenchant.  He makes an acute observation do in place of a couple hundred pages of twaddle a la Todd Gitlin and Greil Marcus.

     Along the way he sprinkles the little known odd fact:

     Procol Harum is Latin for ‘beyond these things.’  Have no idea what that has to do with Procol Harum’s music.

     …the name Pink Floyd was taken from a record by two Georgia bluesmen named Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.  Amaze your friends with that one.

     And in conversation with Bobby Vee he confirmed a question about Bob Dylan that I needed confirming:

     The afternoon I taped “Hollywood A Go Go” a syndicated TV rock n’ roll show that’s allegedly seen as far away as Rhodesia and Finland.  The set was sparse- cameras, lights and a few rostrums.  The empty spaces were filled with boys and girls who danced or gazed.  All the acts had to lip synch their records.  Chubby Checker (the Twist King) was on the set and, when he heard my record he pronounced it “bitching!”  Bobby Vee was a special guest and looked every inch a star in his sheeny silk suit.  He really had his hand movements and head turns down to an art.  We chatted during a break and I brought up the subject of Bob Dylan and my concern about him.  To my amazement, Vee told me that Dylan- before he got into the folk kick and when he was plain Bobby Zimmerman back in Minnesota- had played a few gigs with Vee’s band- as pianist!  Vee said Dylan was very good, in the Jerry Lee Lewis sytle, but he could only play in C.  He said he knew a lot about country music, too.  As it was hard to find pianos at their gigs Dylan didn’t play with Vee very long.  But as he has fond memories of him and said he was really well versed in current rock n’ roll at the time of their meeting.  He had the impression that Dylan was very hip to whatever was happening.  ;I wondered if the young Zimmerman had ever been a Bill Haley fan.

     So, that would confirm that Dylan did play with Vee in the summer of ’59 after his graduation.

     The book is a great read, a very good book, as Ian struggles and fails to find success.  In a fit of depression he returns to the seaside pier on which he had seen O. Stoppit.  An old poster is hanging that he secures then finding his model’s address he visits him to present him with the poster.  O. Stoppit tells him bluntly to stop living in the past.  A fine thing to tell a historian but Mr. Stoppit was apparently a blunt, unfeeling brute.  Also well past the sunny side of life.

     Has Ian ever adjusted to his being a one hit wonder?  I’m afraid not.  It still rankles.  As late as December 1997 in an essay written for American Heritage Magazine Ian quotes a letter from fan Arlene:

Dear Mr. Whitcomb:

     I have watched you several times now and I want to say that sure you have talent and you’re magnetic, but why, oh, why, do you screw it all up by horsing around, being coy, by camping, as if you’re embarrassed by show business?  You could be great if you found your potential and saw it through, but that would take guts.  Instead you mince, and treat it all as big joke.  Come on now!

     Well, that was the same thing Morrison told him thirty years earlier; the vaccination didn’t take then either.

     I think Ian entered his depression early in life, as many of us do.   Then one has to face it.  Some become phony chipper optimists in their attempt to overcome the conflict between expectations and reality.  Some become goofs and jokers.  Something I fought for years.  Some like Ian become silly.  The most extreme type of this I ever saw was Red Skelton the ‘great’ clown who was painful for me to watch.  In fact I couldn’t do it.  I saw too much of myself in him and ended up hating the bastard.

     If Ian wants that second hit and more he has to master his silliness.  Weld the singer and the song like greats like Jagger and Morrison.  Be to some extent what his fans want.  A good sense of humor on songs done with respect for the song, himself and his audience.  Scratch Red Skelton.  People want to love Ian, just as Ian wants to be loved, but as the saying goes, he won’t let ’em.  I’m not criticizing or demeaning, I know where that’s at too.  I am recommending the course of action however.  I, Arlene, Jim of blessed memory and others want a sort of closure that has been left hanging.

     The book is a great one through Ian’s struggles to come to terms with his times, himself and the future.

 

Ian Later On

Ian Later On

 

 

 

Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious

Redefining A False Vision

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition,  Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004

Movie:  The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/

freud-6

     Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition.  Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely.  You never know though.

     However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents?  Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere?  Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu.  I don’t believe this to be true.  The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian traditions as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture.  Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD.  This is probably true.

     The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted.  Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth.  The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs.  The whole can be traced back to Alexandria.  It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.

     The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, and it was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century.  Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.

     According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse.  While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.

     Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order.  While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations of which he was a member extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada.  Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.

2.freud-3

     A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur.  Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.

     Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life.  He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.

     However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans.  As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church.  Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism.  This experience had a great effect on young Freud.  In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation.  From Bakan:

     …that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.

     On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother speaking about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:

     “Of  course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed.  She was always taking you to church.  When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”

     His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was.  He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hating her.  When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail.  Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her.  But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge.  If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.

     Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung.  As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung through his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this.  So much for his self-analysis.  He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud.  Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.

     A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism.  Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian.  This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity.  Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys.  A neat job of transference.   Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.

     Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him.  He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations.  No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.

3.

     Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a freud-5circuitous route.

     The editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:

     In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his  Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade.  “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”

     He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter.  As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the personal meanings behind the general meaning of his words.  Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.

     As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah.  Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew.  Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.

     I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915.  My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the coming Jewish Revolution  until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895.  That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches.  Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution.  At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah.  I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence.  Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind.  As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’

     Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’  That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism.  Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing.  Then, sometime between 1913, the year of the beginning of the Jewish revolution, and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’  In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.

     Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways.  Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key.  In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot.  Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly without the uninitiated understanding, while only those with the key can twig it.  Ya dig?

     The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter.  Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’  while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation, developed his program.  Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.

     Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan.  Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe.  Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.

     Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans.  In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’

     Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity.  In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind.  Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career.  Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.

     Lang also had a hand in the making of The Cabinet Of  Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed.  Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending of that movie to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane.  Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud.  Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane.  Although the problem appeared to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell, now occupied by Dr. Baum who has assumed Dr. Mabuse’s identity, looms like a spectre over the denouement.

     While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud.  It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief of Gradiva’s heel on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office.  The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.

     Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture.  He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism.  At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs  are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory.  One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.

     As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.

     His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse.   Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations.  This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion.  Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation with Jung.  His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity.  His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities.  He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.

     From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization.  His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there.  In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US.  While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale.  Act locally, think globally.  Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there.  This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner.  Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.

     At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail.  While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years Freud has been given the credit for discovering it.  The exact nature had not been determined before Freud nor does Freud determine it.  His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.

4.

      In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’

     Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any freud-1moral precepts, to achieve fame.  Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams a quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo.  Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell.  Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality.  Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’

     As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil.  This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.

     He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious.  He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven.  The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be.  There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious.  If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.

     Now, nature is not flawless.  The order that the religious seem to find is not there.  Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way.  It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.

     However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it.  The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but functions through the conscious and subconscious minds.

     The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference.  Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference.  The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for the appropriate response.  When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations.  This is very easy to see in Freud.

     However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points.  If an appropriate response is made there is no problem.  If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response.  Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.

     The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity.  In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.

     The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit.  Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses.  None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.

     Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi.  Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war.  While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.

     The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War.  Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia.  Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations.  If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews.  Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting.  To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form.  This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details.  The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious.  In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known.  Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by.  All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.

     In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly.  Don’t ever think that historical memories are short.  Remember the Amalikites.

     Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred.  If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924.  By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution in Russia was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion.  By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished.  The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.

     In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes.  Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.

     David Bakan closes his volume with these words:

     …under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests.  In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah.  Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.

     Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’.  Language as a screen.

     Bakan’s is a hefty statement.  Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans.  Truly in this scenario good comes from evil in the Jewish mind, assuming that the Messiah is good.  In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming.  Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture.  Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.

     By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored.  The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today.  Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.

     The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings.  He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact.  As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits imposed by science.  Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible.  The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels.  Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock.  Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.

     Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t.  there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence.  Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up.  As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects.  He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it.  But as Fritz Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist of the asylum, the objective scientist himself, Dr. Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did.  Indeed, as the West has.  Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution.  The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise.  Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties.  Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.

     To return to 1919.

freud-4

 

Exhuming Bob 15:

Dylan’s Jesus Years Reexamined

by

R.E. Prindle

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/exhuming-bob-14-the-law-and-bob-dylan/

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/exhuming-bob-13-fit-5-bob-as-messiah/

http://www.forward.com/articles/14574

     Stephen Hazan Arnoff has broached an interesting possiblity in his Jewish Forward article cited above.  He implies that Dylan is a ‘messianic’ Jew in conspiracy with Mitch Glaser and Al Kasha of Jews For Jesus to promote Jesusism as a sect within the Jewish faith.  I think there is some evidence to support this contention.

     First let us review the nature of Jesus and relationship to the Judaic faith at the transition from the Arien to the Piscean Age.  So far as I know there are no authentic third party references to the Jesus hubbub in Israel.  Whatever happened in Israel regarding Jesus was beneath the notice of the outside world.  Thus the only accounts we have of the historical Jesus are the accounts of the various gospels.  These while hagiographic appear to be eyewitness accounts.

     Jesus opposed himself to the Pharasaic establishment.  Because of this the Sanhedrin had the Romans arrest and execute him.  Yes, I know the Jewish version imposed on the world denies this fact as reported by the eyewitnesses but as the story becomes meaningless outside the context I’m going to stick to the ‘official’ story.

     With Jesus removed from the scene the Jesus sect within Judaism flourished nevertheless.  The Pharasaic establishment persecuted the Jesusites onto death.  Often referred to as Jewish Christians this is a misnomer.  The Jesusites didn’t become Christians until after Paul combined Jesusism with the Greek Kyrios Christos cult and the ‘savior’ became Jesus the Christ combining Greek and Jewish influences.  That is, he was the Messiah, the Mahdi, the Awaited One.

     Jesus the Christ then expanded out of Judaism and the very last in Judaism became the first in the world.  The Jews because of the Jewish heretic, Jesus, then made Christians their enemies both within and without the faith.  One might compare Jesus to Judaism as Luther to Catholicism.

     The Jesus sect has always existed within Judaism.  Then sometime in the seventies of the last century Mitch Glaser and Al Kasha formed the sect Jews For Jesus and began to proselytize.  Initially Glaser was in San Francisco and Kasha was in LA where Dylan ran into him.

 2,

     Now, the question of Dylan’s interest in Jesus arises.  Dylan, I believe, has the emotional problem where he must be in rebellion against whatever.  Whatya got? As Marlon Brando intoned. Also the movie Rebel Without A Cause was Dylan’s favorite.  Thus, while he was indoctrinated by Rebbe Reuben Meier, a Lubavitcher, which is to say Ultra-Orthodox and reared by a father and mother of the same persuasion he was in rebellion against those authorities.  There can be no question that Dylan was reared as a Jew of the Jews and accepted the role.  When Jews For Jesus came into existence Dylan may have found the vehicle for his rebellion against his Orthodox upbringing.  Nothing could be more rebellious to the Orthodox Lubavitchers than turning to the arch Jewish heritic, Jesus of Nazareth.  Forget this Christian stuff; Dylan was never a sincere Christian.  As a Jew of the Jews there was no way he could have been.

     Now, it appears that he took up with Al Kasha in LA before he turned up at the Vineyard Fellowship.  Dylan was very close to Kasha not only living in his house, old habits are hard to break, but he was given a key to it.  He composed many of his religious songs on Kasha’s piano.  There is no flirtation with Christianity here.

     There must therefore be an ulterior motive in his exploitation of the Vineyard Fellowship.

     Let’s follow the sequence of events.

3.

     Having written and recorded Slow Train Coming Dylan the decided to introduce his new persona and songs in the city of San Francisco.  Why SF?  Los Angeles has the largest concentration of Jews in any one city in the world.  Why not there?  Perhaps because SF also with a very large Jewish population was the Rock mecca of the world.

     Now, an interesting thing happens.  Dylan already has a close association with Jews For Jesus.  Having been a house guest of Kasha while udoubtedly becoming a convert to Jews For Jesus it seems improbable that Mitch Glaser hadn’t also spent some time with Dylan at Kasha’s place in LA.  What could be more natural?

     Well, gosh, now we go through a charade where Jews For jesus ask if they could proselytize outside the Warwick burlesque house where Dylan was playing.  No answer.  Then someone ostensibly from Dylan’s organization calls and says Dylan’s amenable.  Well, Glaser’s no fool, he and the other Js for J  get their heads together and determine to ask for passes as proof.  If those are at the window they’ll know Dylan is sincere.

     What’s going on here?  Obviously this had been planned for months.  Dylan is a Jew For Jesus, he knew Glaser pretty well.  So why the mysterioso act?  Possibly because Dylan wanted to dupe the real Christians, however many of these might have attended his shows, while allowing the Js for J intruders access to any obvious Jews attending for proselytization purposes.  Dylan had a very large following amongst the Jews so a very large proportion of the audience would be Jews.  Sort of making it easy for them to crack that hard nut.

     As Arnoff says of the Js for J:

     (The Jews For Jesus were) almost universally regarded by non-messianic Jews as being beyond the margins of organized Jewish life.

     Hence they are outside the Law of the Talmud.  Thus we have the meaning of Arnoff’s title: Jesus, Bob: To Live Outside The Law You Must Be Honest.  Dylan was now both outside the Law and dishonest in Arnoff’s mind at least.  A marked man.

     However, confusion here, not long after:

     Dylan submitted fully to the Law that provides a singular answer to plow through the doubt, paradox, hurt and unbelief…

     What more do you need?  By that Arnoff means that Dylan submitted to a course in re-indoctrination from Orthodix Lubavitcher Rebbes.  If you believe that there’s a bridge that isn’t too far called Brooklyn with your name on it:  Fool.  Arnoff should think this through twice.  It’s not alright.

     The Beatles were bigger than Jesus and Bob Dylan undoubtedly thinks he’s bigger than Judaism.  At least as a Messiah in the Jesus mold.

4.

     So, Joel Gilbert went to a lot of trouble and expense to produce his four hour movie:  Rolling Thunder And The Gospel Years.  Note: Gospel Years rather than Christian years.  In the hopes of spreading his message and failing that, getting his money back Gilbert has separated The Gospel Years from Rolling Thunder and renamed it Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus years: Busy Being Born…Again!  Still no mention of Christianity.

     Arnoff is nearly beside himself that anyone would promote such a film.  Of course as Dylan said in his song Motorcycle Nightmare:  If it hadn’t been for freedom of speech I would have wound up in the swamp.  Thank G-d for small favors hey?  I don’t know why it isn’t proper to spell God out since he doesn’t exist but that’s the way these people do it, so me too.  But hang on tight.  Arnoff:

     Gilbert’s mere desire may have been to find an audience for his work, but placement of the event by Glaser’s group, as well as messianic Congregation (Jews For jesus) Sha’ar Adonai at The Society For Ethical Culture- founded as a nonsectarian movement by the humanist Jew Felix Adler- added an element of irony to the insult of a messianic soft sell throughout.

     Imagine a nonsectarian humanist Jews of you will.  A contradiction in terms if I’ve ever seen one.  Mr. Arnoff somehow sees himself as nonsectarian while being aghast at the idea of outlaw messianic Jews being allowed to use this ‘nonsectarian’ facility.  As he says the insult of a messianic soft sell.  Freedom of speech.  Right.

     So, what about it?  Was Dylan brought back within the Law as Mr. Arnoff says or is he still a messianic Jewish outlaw?

Well…he may look like Robert Ford

But he feels just like Jesse James.

Addendum:  As a sort of addendum Dylan’s words at the election night bash at U. Minnesota should be looked at more closely.

Now, I was born in 1941.  That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor.  I’ve been living in a world of darkness ever since.  But it looks like things are going to change now.

     What can that mean?  The first two sentences set the scene for the last two.

     ‘I’ve been living in darkness ever since (I was born in 1941.)  Does that mean that Dylan thinks Pearl Harbor made the world dark for everyone or does it just mean that Dylan has been denied the light personally ever since the day he was born?

     Such a state of things would seem impossible.  Born on 5/24/41, Pearl Harbor was bombed on 12/7/41.  So Dylan wouldn’t have been aware of that until say 1946 or 1947-48.  So, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is related to the bombing or darkening of Dylan’s psyche. He believes himself mentally affected since birth.

     ‘But it looks like things are going to change now.’  Alright.  The change or lifting of his personal darkness is related to Barry Obama.  Dylan’s too realistic to believe any politician is going to change anything, so what does he have to look forward to to brighten his outlook?

     In his vanity he considers himself a ‘great’ poet.  Indeed Christopher Ricks compares him to Shakespeare and Milton.  Dylan introduces himself at his concerts as ‘The Poet-Laureate of Rock And Roll.  (Snicker, snicker.)

     In Chronicles Vol. I in his discussion of the Poet Laureate of the United States he seems to show some interest in succeeding Archibald McLeish in that role.

     The idea had already occurred to me that it might happen but I read on the web recently a suggestion that Barry make Dylan the Poet Laureate of the United States.  It would cheapen the title but perhaps the deal was a Poet Laureateship for an Endorsement.  Cheap enough for Barry while the appointment would apparently lift Dylan’s inspissated gloom.

     Ain’t life too strange for words?

    

 

Exhuming Bob 14:

The LAW And Bob Dylan

by

R.E. Prindle

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/exhuming-bob-13-fit-4-bob-as-messiah/

http://www.forward.com/articles/14574

 

     Stephen Hazan Arnoff wrote the aove referenced Forward article titled:  Jesus, Bob: To Live Outside The LAW You Must Be Honest: Dylan’s Born Again Years Documented.

   Mr. Arnoff is very difficult to follow.  Kern writing in the comments to Mr. Arnoff’s article puts it succinctly:  Mr. Arnoff you have written a lot of words, but after reading them all, I have no idea what you are saying.

     I think part of the problem is cross cultural references.  By living outside the LAW Mr. Arnoff means Talmudic Law and not the legal code of the United States of America.  Mr. Arnoff is what I suppose he would call a ‘secular’ Jew reviewing ‘messianic’ Jews in the Jewish Forward, a ‘secular’ Jewish web magazine.

     I have no idea what Kern is but as a goy I have to read standard English words and try to put them into trans-cultural contexts.  If I make a mistake or two I hope I may be forgiven.

     I perceive the title To Live Outside The Law You Must Be Honest to mean that Dylan is living his life outside the Jewish Law rather than an outlaw to the US legal code.  This is a construction of Dylan’s line I hadn’t made but it may very well be accurate.  Depending on whether the line from ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, read, possibly, Mary, is addressed to his fellow Jews explaining a seeming dalliance with goyish ways or in some sort of general ‘poetic’ license referring to the US legal code or societal mores, Arnoff’s understanding of the line may be correct.  As we are coming to realize Dylan’s religious conflicts appear to dominate his work.  After all anyone who believes the Bible is the actual word of God is living a religious delusion.  After he had established himself by 1966 his mother proudly informed us that Dylan had an open bible on a stand in his living room, of all places to which he hopped up regularly to check for references.  There is a C&W connection here in the song, If Jesus Came To Your House.  The rhetorical question was would he find a Bible open on the table or a Playboy Magazine.  Dylan could answer affirmitively:  The Bible.  That’s what his mother proudly announced.

     While Mr. Arnoff proudly says that Dylan was busy trashing goy, what he calls Christian, culture he fails to note that Dylan was no less disrepectful of traditional Jewish ways.  But that brings us to what Mr. Arnoff’s ostensible intent is, that is, to review Joel Gilbert’s film: The Gospel Years.

     As I understand it, Mr. Gilbert, who is Jewish trying to be a Dylan clone, made a four hour film entitled Rolling Thunder And The Gospel Years from which he abstracted the final two hours and has reissued it in the two hour version.  Acting on that information I obtained the four hour DVD while I haven’t seen the two hour film, if it is different.  I’m assuming that it is identical to the four hour version.

     As I am not a Jew my sensibilities are different than Mr. Arnoff’s who is ensconced within the Jewish faith, culture, nation or by whatever name it is going by this week.  Mr. Arnoff, ignoring Dylan’s early upbringing, see my above referenced essay Fit 4, Bob As Messiah, and psychology assumes that Dylan abandoned Judaism and turned to Christianity because:

…deep pain drives deep “witnessing” in the realm of born again Christian acolytes; that the tumult of drugs, social and political burnout and the failures of the sexual revolution left many people broken in ways that the Jesus movement- rooted in heady Southern California, where Dylan and many other counterculture heroes lived at the time- exploited to attract vulnerable souls.

     One assumes that Mr. Arnoff is characterizing Dylan as a ‘vulnerable soul’ rather than a conscious human being.  The question in my mind is who was exploiting whom.  My notions of Christianity and Judaism and their relationship to each other is obviously culturally opposed to that of Mr. Arnoff.  I believe Dylan was much more calculating, or to put it another way, had an agenda, then might appear at first glance.  His vision of Christianity and Judaism was also much different than that of the ‘secular’ Mr. Arnoff.

     Life is more complex, as are psychologies, than any of us can possibly express but we must try.  Gilbert’s full video, Rolling Thunder And The Gospel Years, seems to be such a serious attempt.

     Dylan’s life may be characterized as a downward spiral from, say, 1959 when he left home to his encounter with Jesus in 1979 when as Mr. Arnoff suggests, he hit bottom but for different reasons than Mr. Arnoff suggests.  Mr. Arnoff seem oblivious to the fact that Dylan was indoctrinated by a Lubavitcher Rebbe for his Bar Mitzvah.

     Gilbert picks up Dylan’s life from 1975 to 1981 the last few years before the singer bumped against the lower depths, and examines it closely.  Viewed from one perspective Dylan led a disgusting life from 1955 to 1979 as he groped to ind his way out of his self-confessed confusion.  A large part of his confusion was the conflict between his Jewish and Christian milieux.

     The few years between the abandonment of the first phase of his career when ‘He Threw It All Away’ and the resumption of his profligate ways with 1975’s Rolling Thunder Review after he had given birth to his brood in fulfillment of the Jewish Law to be fruitful and multiply was his only attempt to quiet his confusion.  Those few years were also years in which he studied the Bible evidently trying to reconcile his Orthodox Jewish upbringing with his surrounding Christian milieu.

     After this relatively quiet period, having fulfilled the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, Dylan savaged his marriage so brutally that his wife had no choice but to leave him.  Incredibly in view of his behavior this astonished him so much that it caused him to reevaluate his conduct somewhat and thus ‘deep pain’ drove him into the realm of born again Christian acolytes.’

     On one level this may be true. However it must be borne in mind that at one time, or perhaps many times, his father told him that a son could become so defiled that his parents would reject him but that God could lead him back to virtue again.  This notion seems to have dominated his life from that point on so that when he hit the bottom of the divorce fulfilling his father’s prophecy he began to seek God to bring him ‘home.’  A little analysis might have been more fruitful but Dylan is a ‘true believer.’  Thus on another level it is not improbable that Dylan attempted to resolve his confusion by an attempted amalgamation of Christianity and Judaism into one faith.  One faith=no more confusion.  Not by converting the one to the other but gently leading them to one confession.  Of course, since this would obliterate the distinction between Jews and Christians the idea is as much anathema to the Jews as actual conversion to Christianity.  At that point then Dylan contravened Judaic LAW and become an outlaw to Judaism.

     Thus it appears that Mr. Arnoff accuses Dylan of both living outside the LAW and being dishonest.  This seems to be his complaint.  That combined with the review of the film being conducted by the ‘messianic’ Jews For Jesus.  The mere mention of the word Jesus throws the ‘secular’ Mr. Arnoff into a frenzy.  He excuses Gilbert on the grounds that he is merely trying for exposure for his film but can’t conceal his distaste for Mitch Glaser and Al Kashi of Jews For Jesus.

     Mr. Arnoff doesn’t seem to understand what Dylan is doing so that he is conflicted between Dylan’s ‘jewish’ work and his Jesus period.  Note I do not use the term ‘Christian.’  That is because I don’t think Dylan ever embraced Christianity but approached Jesus as a Jewish persona from a standpoint similar to Jews For Jesus; Dylan was essentially blowing smoke into the eyes of Christians.  Mr. Anrnoff complains:

     Most of the time, Dylan embodies a multi-layered approach to his subject- with wordplay, rich cultural allusions, insinuations, irony and clusters of unexplained questions.  In his writing and perforning, Dylan grasps at defining themes with ferocity and dynamism that allow renowned critics like Milton scholar Christopher Ricks (who dedicated some 500 pages to Dylan in his 2004 book “Dylan’s Vision Of Sin”) to compare his canon without reservation to that of Shakespeare and Milton.  With few exceptions including the aforementioned songs, the Christian (Jesus) period of Dylan’s work remains unconvincingly simplistic, overly literal, humorless and blunt.

     Well maybe so.  I’ve never listened to it having no interest in what I consider an unlistenable singer after Blonde On Blonde.  Whatever happened the muse walked away from Dylan after 1966 and never spoke his again.  While as Mr. Arnoff approvingly notes of the Jewish Dylan, Christopher Ricks compares Dylan favorably  to Shakespeare and Milton, I can only say that Mr. Ricks is bereft of his senses.

     Dylan wrote some nice songs, most of them on Another Side, but that’s just about as far as you can take it.  Always highly derivative, after 1966 borrowing became so explicit as to narrowly skirt plagiarism.  Indeed not a few of his contemporary folk singers openly accuse him of plagiarism.  I’m a little more lenient; hell, they’re only popular songs, not even good Country and Western.

    

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

November 16, 2008

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     ERB scholars have long noted that the entire corpus of novels reads almost as one long book.  I believe this is because ERB records his life in his novels.  If one reads the novels in the sequence in which they were written and if one understands the symbolism used by Burroughs against a background of what’s happening in his life ERB actually records his mental state of the moment.

     In this essay I am going to concentrate on a role of John Carter in the Mars series and that of Ulysses Paxton in the Mastermind Of Mars. 

     In real life before ERB began writing he was powerless on earth.  I would call him an abject failure but even though he appeared one he was only on the verge of being one and if his attempt at a writing career in 1911 had failed he would have been plunged into the abyss.

     As he was a failure or at least an unfulfilled seeker in 1911 he makes John Carter into a mold he admired, that of a Virginian and a soldier who was seeking his post-Civil War fortune in the deserts of the Southwest.  Carter, whose initials are JC, actually finds his gold mine but attacked by Indians he escapes death by transporting himself to Mars.

     Mars has a lesser gravity than Earth so on Mars he has superhuman powers.  Thus unable to realize any of his ambitions on Earth ERB transports himself in his imagination to Mars as the Superman, John Carter.

     Amazingly the idea struck a responsive chord in his soon to be Editor at Munsey’s, Metcalf, who bought the story.  It doesn’t matter for how much, the point is it validated ERB’s lofty opinion of his destiny.  Fortified by this response he brought himself down to Earth in the fantastic form of Tarzan Of The Apes in an imaginary Africa.  Here was the gold mine he as John Carter was seeking.  There was no one, no Indians, to drive him off so he was off to the races.

     The first rush carried him through the line into 1920 when he left Chicago behind and fled to Los Angeles.

     In LA his careless financial habits soon led him into hot water virtually bankrupting him but definitely stripping him of his assets.  By 1926 when he wrote The Mastermind Of Mars he was virtually financially prostrate.

     The hero of Mastermind is Ulysses Paxton.  Ulysses can stand for the Greek wanderer and seeker Odysseus or for the great warrior, Ulysses S. Grant.  So what we have is a duplicate of John Carter.

     ERB is on record as saying that he thought that every man was two persons not unlike Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, some more divided , some less.  Under stress the two personas like Jekyll and Hyde became distinct.

     Now, in 1911 ERB was an unrealized genius but in 1926 he was a failed genius.  In other words he had had his legs cut from beneath him.  He might as well have been dead.  Therefore Ulysses Paxton while serving in the Great War has a shell explode beside him.  When he comes to he realizes his legs have been blown away.  While he lies dying he looks up to Mars as John Carter had fifteen years before.  When he next comes to his legs are restored and he is standing in a garden on Mars.

     Thus in real life ERB imagines himself figuratively in Paxton’s situation returning in his imagination to the Red Planet in the hope of making lightning strike twice.

     He hadn’t written a Tarzan novel since Ant Men four years previously.  He was black listed by the movie colony that refused to make any Tarzan movies even though they would have been lucrative.  He was under attack nationally and internationally by the Reds who were doing everything possible to destroy his sales and reputation.  ERB truly had his back to the wall or figuritively had had his legs cut off.

     Fortune would once again favor him when FBO Studios broke the blacklist against him.  After a couple fumbling attempts at Tarzan novels he would hit a magnificent stride through the Tarzan novels from 1929 to 1936.

    The Mastermind Of Mars was his attempt to recover his career.  His style while revered by his fans was old hat by 1926 so he could no longer take the world by storm as he had in 1911.

     Mastermind is a complex novel of which I haven’t completely broken the code but let us concentrate on two aspects.  The first is ERB’s troubled state of mind over his marriage.  Thus he invents the story of Xaxa and Valla Dia as he fights to deal with his sexual problem.  The second is the religious problem caused by his confrontation with the Jews beginning in 1919 and continuing not only through 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep, and 1926 but  to the end of his career.

     In 1926 ERB had not yet met Florence Dearholt although he was probably already familiar with her husband Ashton and through that acquaintance he may already have seen her, and perhaps, also on the screen as she was an actress.  He did meet her in March of ’27 when Dearholt approached him on a movie deal and was either immediately smitten or had the opinion of her he already had confirmed.

     In Mastermind ERB expresses the thought that he has a wife to whom he owes everything but who he hates.  This strong emotion would be realized at his own Emma’s death.

     In this novel Emma is represented by the brain of the horrid Xaxa.  Ras Thavas, the demon mastermind of Mars and physician nonpareil, has transplanted the brain of Xaxa into the beautiful body of Valla Dia and vice versa.  Dia is Latin for goddess.  I don’t know what Valla means.

      The body of Xaxa containing the brain of Valla Dia is held in suspended animation by Ras Thavas.  Bringing the body to life Paxton is smitten by the beauty of Valla Dia’s brain.  Knowing that her body is of incomparable beauty he conceives the notion of restoring her brain to her body and taking her to wife.  Valla Dia may also be seen a version of Helen of Troy.

     I interpret this to mean that ERB’s Anima ideal was the beautiful Valla Dia, perhaps as he had once viewed Emma.  But to his mind Emma had developed an ugly mind that animated the body of his Anima ideal.  the beautiful mind he sought was thus in an ugly body while an ugly mind was in a beautiful body.  ERB’s dilemma was to shuck Emma and find a beautiful mind in a beautiful body.  When he met Florence in 1927 he thought he had found his Anima ideal of a beautiful mind in a beautiful body.  His problem then was how to rid himself of Emma.

     On that level then ERB is struggling with his sexual problem.  In this book his struggle would take the form of an astonishing number of dual and split personalities.  This is quite a study in that sense and an indication of ERB’s extreme stress.  Perhaps Mastermind is a worthy successor to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.

     The second and less resolvable problem is the religious issue.  At this moment in time the Jews of Hollywood have got ERB boxed.  Indeed, they have cut off his legs.  The logjam was about to be broken by FBO Studios which would free ERB up until the late thirties when he was forced into exile in Hawaii.  For now though he has to deal with this very difficult problem.  He has by now learned that freedom of speech ends where Judaism begins.  If I am right he was denied publication of Marcia Of The Doorstep because of the manner in which he discussed his dilemma.

     In Mastermind while the religious issue assumes primary importance ERB puts it into an ecumenical form denouncing all religion.  Does he refer to his Jewish situation in any cloudy form?  I think he does.

     The god in this story is a huge several story high idol named Tur to which all must bow down.  The name Tur is an odd name for a god, at least in my mind.  I have said before you cannot talk about that which isn’t in your mind.  If you haven’t studied religions there is nothing you can say about them. As ERB has a great deal to say it is obvious that he knows something about religion and religions.  Theology isn’t the issue here, that is a separate matter.

     Given ERBs method, when he learned he had a problem with Judaism I’m sure he went out and learned something about it.  It isn’t necessary that he had a profound knowledge; it is only necessary that he learned some things.  We can’t be sure what.  The word Tur is signficant in Jewish historiography.  His use of Tur may be a coincidence but there you have it- Tur is Tur any way you turn it, frontwards or backwards, Tur is Tur.

     The word Tur appears in Judaic lore in this manner:

     …Rabbi Jacob (Yaakov) ben Asher (1270-1343) the “Baal ha-Turim” compiled the Arba Turim, first printed in 1458.  “Tur” is used as shorthand for both the title of the whole work and for Rabbi Asher himself since it is customary in Judaism to call a compiler by the name of his compilation.  The Tur is the predecessor of Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Schulchan Aruch.  The four part structure of the Tur and its division into chapters (simanim) were adopted by Karo in the later code, Shulchan Aruch.  Each of the four divisions of the work is a Tur, so a particular passage is cited a Tur…

     p. 127 Hoffman, Michael, Judaism Discovered, 2008

     While one can’t be certain ERB learned the above fact it isn’t particularly recondite and might have been easily learned.  At the least the use of Tur for the god is a remarkable coincidence.

     Making Tur an idol to which all must bow would have been an egregious offence to the Jews and one which any knowledgeable Jew, who might have read the book, always a precondition, would have picked up on it  whether Burroughs intended it or not.  Paranoia strikes deep.

     The idol itself could possibly be modeled on the Alexandrine Egypto-Greek god, Sarapis.  Burroughs would have known of this from the Bible if not from his readings in the classics.  We know he reread Plutarch’s Lives at least twice with one of those times just previous to writing Mastermind.  If he read the Lives twice he undoubtedly read other classics so there is no reason to believe that he didn’t have knowledge in these matters.

     The manner of Paxton’s posing as Tur and bamboozling the bamboozlers is a mockery of religion in general although given the context of the word Tur the application of the mockery might have been taken more personally.

     Forced to use the most discreet measures to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism ERB may have thought he was undetectably clever while he is certainly having a good laugh.  Paxton congratulates himself  and gives himself a couple pats on the back at the success of his ruse.

     The end result, of course, is that he frees the people from the bondage to the false religion of Tur. 

     I’m not quite clear on the nature of Ras Thavas who is named after the Ethiopian Prince Ras Tafari who became the Emperor Haile Selassie and the namesake of the Jamaican Rastafarians.

     The book is a worthy of the attempted second birth of ERB’s faltering career.  The characters are magnificent and finely drawn.  Ras Thavas is surely one of the great characters of pulp fiction.  Mastermind paired with The Synthetic Men Of Mars makes for one of the greatest diptyches of science fiction.

 

Conversations With Robin

Page Two.

Chatter Between

Robin Mark and R.E. Prindle

 

     Well, you know, the river just keeps right on a flowin’ and you have to stay afloat but the bozos in Washington just don’t seem to have a clue and they’re so cynically dishonest.  Eighty percent were against the bailout but they said we had to have it or the world would end yesterday.  Now the bailout has gone away.  first there was a bailout, then there was no bailout.

     I thought both Obama and McCain were genuninely crazy to want to step into Bush’s shoes and I hope Obama gets what he’s got coming.to him before I get mine.  The Commies have to be stopped this time; twice was enough of that bull roar.

     But to turn the radio back up.  Have you read any of Miss Pamela’s latest:  Let’s Spend The Night Together?  she interviews twenty-four groupies mining their minds for golden memories.

     As super Presley buff you’ll want to read the first chapter by someone called Tura Satana.  Taught Elvis nearly every thing he knew.  How to kiss, the whole works.  Came to her as a country bumpkin and left as The Sheik.  Funny I haven’t heard you vent on her before.

     And then a Catherine James invents the most improbable story about Dylan you’ve ever heard.

     Elvira makes her guest appearance with some more info on Elvis that sounds like it might be as true, at least, as a Hollywood movie.

     It’s kind of a kiss and invent book but Miss Pamela is her usual charming self.  Get’s a little gruesome after a while though, but, Hey, here it is 2008 and they’ve all survived.  Even Miss Mercy.  Carazy mama but she’s got a few more tidbits on Elvis.  Did he ever have an interest in a Memphis area club called Hernando’s Hideaway?

     Those girls did get around but the question is what can they actually remember?  It makes you wonder how Jimmy Page ever had a spare moment to practice guitar.

     Good luck with your school.  We’re a long way from the bottom yet.  It amazes me how few people understand how far its fallen and that it is absolutely impossible for it to bounce back.  For crying out loud the Faller has barely gotten ‘Timber’ out his mouth already.

     I pity those poor Liberals who’ve finally gotten their wish.  Now what are they going to do with General Motors.  There is no forgiveness in my heart for them.

 

A Review

Let’s Spend The Night Together

by

Pamela Des Barres

Review by R.E. Prindle

Des Barres, Pamela, Let’s Spend The Night Together, 2008 Chicago Review Press

Wild thing,

You make my heart sing.

Wild Thing,

You make everything,

groov-eh.

Chip Taylor

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

For tomorrow brings but sorrow,

The girls that are so sweet today

Will be mothers-in-law tomorrow.

College Humor

Pamela

 

     Pamela Des Barres having apparently exhausted what appeared to be an inexhaustible fund of rock n’ roll memories returns to the publishing fold with a whole book full of other groupies’ memories.  She introduces some twenty-four supergroupies to tell their back stage secrets of rock gods.

     If you’re into titillating sexual stuff you’ve just found the Dutchman’s lost gold mne.  For those into this stuff Cynthia Plaster Caster is pictured fondling the immortalized member of Jimi Hendrix.  At least we know that one’s true.  However some of the memories recorded seem to be sort of stretchers to me.  Making a good story better is OK but pure invention is something else.

     I did catch one of the girls, women, mothers-in-law, almost all grandmothers, in a fabrication or, shall I say, a delusion.  I don’t want to be unkind because the lady in question, Catherine James, did time in the orphanage while having one of those mothers from hell.  I can sympathize, a double whammy like that can do things to you.  I had a number of issues with my mother, who has now gone to her greater reward wherever that may be, while she too put me in the orphanage. So, as I say, I can sympathize.

Catherine

     Well, Miss James says she quit the groupie game in 1971 at the age of nineteen while she began at age thirteen.  That would have made her beginning in 1965.  As she tells it those six years were eventful enough for any busload of wayward girls.

     As I read my eyebrows kept going up.  This was too amazing, it seemed, to be true.  After reading her chapter I put the book down while my eyes were spinning around in my head.  Then I began going over the details looking for that fatal flaw.  As there was no way I could contradict her stories based on her revelatory details, I would have to examine dates and when I did I found that flaw. Not gentlemanly, but I do have that inquisitive mind that just won’t be satisfied.  As it happened the flaw involved the ‘spokesman of his generation’ Bob Dylan.

     Miss James says that she met Bob, as I gather he was the first, at thirteen.  As she tells it Bob gave her some good soul saving advice about her mother; otherwise she might have been driven mad.  I can dig that, too.

     But there was a problem with that.  Miss James lived in the LA area.  She says she met Bob in California between the recording of Bob Dylan and The Free Wheelin’.  That would probably have been about the time Bob was heavy with Suze Rotolo in NYC.  At any rate in ’62 Miss James would have been about ten years old not thirteen.

     Miss James who has extraordinary faith in the art of cosmetology believes that at thirteen she could make herself up successfully enough to fool a guy into thinking she was minimally legal.  That alone seems like a mega stretcher to me.  But what are cosmetics going to do for a ten year old?

     Quite clearly Miss James could not have met Bob when she was thirteen in LA.  She would like to have met Bob and gotten that good advice but she couldn’t have.

     Making a good story better she compounds the delusion by saying that still at thirteen she made the pilgrimage to Greenwich Village to be with Bob.  In an interesting dream sequence she describes arriving in NYC broke, not unlike Bob, with no place to stay.  Talking to some young people in the Village she told them she was there to visit Bob.  Naturally this admission was greeted with snickers.  But, lo and behold, who should drive up to the street corner at that instant but Bob himself.  She ran over to greet him.  He rolled down the window to say he was off to a concert and drove away.

     As I say I don’t wish to cause Miss James distress and I’m sure she ins’t any less truthful than any of these girls, women, mothers-in-law, but much of this stuff requires that extra grain of salt.

     The opening chapter concerning the adventures of someone called Tura Satana and Elvis requires some documentation.  But, why go into it.  As Samuel Johnson said who but a blockhead wouldn’t write for money.  I presume that Miss Pamela would like to see a nice fat royalty check.  Lord knows Frank Zappa left Miss Pamela short when she was a member of the GTOs, so buy a copy if you like this stort of thing and make that ageing Wild Thing’s heart sing.  She’s got it coming, believe me.

 

A Review

The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Part III

Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/hello-world/

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/men-like-gods-tarzan-pays-homage-to-heracles/

 

     In contrasting the spiritual and intellectual attributes of the Semites and Nordics Rosenberg seems to confuse tenacity with will.  The Semites pursue their goal so tenaciously because they don’t have the intellgence to compare different intellectual and spiritual views.  There is really no intellectual progression of evaluation in the Semitic psyche.

     Contrast for instance the approach taken by the Hebrew predecessors of the jews with the Greeks in this primary problem of the evolution of society and the human psyche;  that of the change from human sacrifice to that of animal and then vegetable sacrifice.   The Semitic Bible tells the story under the title of Cain and Abel.

     At one time we are led to believe the standard approach to appeasing the gods was human sacrifice. If the Cain and Abel story had been written down c. -2000 to -1000 the content would have been about human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice.  By c. -500 to -400 when the story was written human sacrifice, except under extraordinary circumstances had been abandoned.  Animal sacrifice was still retained by the Abelites while the Cainites had abandoned animal sacrifice for an offering of the fruits of the earth.

     As the Bible tells it the Abelites offered animal sacrifice to the god Shamash,  while the Cainites offered vegetable produce.  As the Abelites are telling the story their god being as conservative as the Abelites preferred the flesh sacrifice to the vegetable rewarding the Abelites and rejecting the Cainites.  The Abelites then lorded it over the Cainites who retaliated by killing the Abelites.

     In the Greek version as recounted by the late nineteenth century A.B. Cook in his magnum opus, Zeus, the story is told quite differently.  It doesn’t appear that Cook understood the Greek story to be their version of Cain and Abel or, in other words, the evolution of sacrifice to the gods.

     Zeus was always known as the god of the sky.  In this story he is called Zeus Lykaios thus seemingly associated with the wolf; as Cook supposes, a wolf god.

     I don’t think this is the case.  I think the tale should be something like Zeus vs. Human Sacrifice or Zeus against the wolfish practice of man eating that might be supposed a habit of wolves.  In the myth a tribesman as scapegoat is singled out, stripped naked, compelled to swim across a body of water then live for ten years in this primitive or wolfish condition.  If he passes the ten years without eating human flesh he is allowed back into the community.  One may assume that during this probationary period the community itself is forbidden human sacrifice thus ending the practice. 

     An offering is then made to the gods of a wheaten wafer.

     One can compare that story to that of the Christ who offers a glass of wine in substituion of his blood and a wafer for his body but is still a human sacrifice on the cross.

     The messages seem quite clear.  Zeus disapproves of human sacrifice and cannibalism of the human sacrifice.  The above way is the Greek way of demonstrating disapproval of the practice while the acceptance of the wafer is an example of what is considered appropriate. Semitic development is halted at animal sacrifice.

     Thus one is able to compare and contrast the psychological attitudes of the Semites and the Aryans.  Ye shall be judged by your acts.  On the one hand the Semitic story is extrememly dogmatic while the Aryan story shows more science and intelligence.

     The two attitudes remain constant down through history.

     Thus the unyielding dogmatic or bigoted approach has the advantage over a more yeilding or understanding attitude.  It is the former attitude to which Rosenberg is actually objecting.

     When developed in the religious sphere the hatred of the opposing point of view is translated into an inquisition in which the holders of the opposing viewpoint are tortured to death or burned at the stake.  Put on the cross.  The temporal authorities are called in as in the cases of the Waldenses, Cathars, and Huguenots to exterminate the entire body of the dissidents.  Whether done by Catholics, Jews or Moslems extermination of unbelievers is the inevitable result whether a single individual, tens of thousands or in the case of the current crusade, a billion of Whites.

     In Rosenberg’s case his scientific Nordics have nothing like the insane Semitic god.  Thus in the religious sphere the Whites have never had an alternative to the Semitic god hence being at a disadvantage.

     A certain type of mind prefers a storming Yahweh figure to an intelligent Zeus.  No intelligent person can accept the notion of a supernatural diety whether Yahweh or Zeus.  Thus, to some extent Hitler himself was ofered a a version of a man-god.  As no flesh and blood man can successfully pose as a god what was and is needed is an idealized man-god not as a supernatural person but as an ideal toward which one can strive.

     Perhaps it is time to create one.  Actually this has already been done.  The American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs of the first half of the twentieth century created the only acceptable version of the ideal man-god, Tarzan Of The Apes.

     Burroughs is seldom taken seriously and yet a careful reading in any  of the novels of the Tarzan series is seen to be drenched with explorations on religious themes.  Not the least important position is the need to abandon supernatural deities for a realistic man-god.

     This is not to say that any living man should be accorded the status of a god but that a god like ideal would replace the supernatural psychological projections.  After all any notion of god is merely an intellectual projection of a given people in their own image.  Thus the Greek pantheon is a reflection of the Greek psyche, Yahweh is the projection of the Jewish psyche and its god.  So with Buddha, he is merely the aspirations of the Indian psyche.

     Tarzan, it follows is a projection of Burroughs’ psyche and one might add satisfactory to millions around the world as a god like projection.  The Tarzan religion is already in place.  It remains only to develop and codify it.  Further as an ideal he is attainable to the dedicated aspirant.  When Burroughs wrote the ability to build bodies of ideal proportions  was in its infancy but has been perfected over the years to such magnificent specimens as Charles Atlas and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their primes. These two men realized the physical perfection of Tarzan.  My essay Men Like Gods looks into this aspect more closely.

     Psychological perfection can be attanined but may be more restricted than physical perfection and take longer to achieve but refined methods may be able to break the crust sooner.  As Burroughs portrays Tarzan he seems to have the essential integrated personality; that is his conscious and subconscious minds are unified.  To achieve this goal one must have an accurate idea of how the subconscious functions in relation to the conscious.  Freud’s notion of the ‘unconscious’ is completely erroneous.  I examine that problem and offer a solution in my essay on Freud a link for which is provided at the head of this essay that for some reason is titled Hello World.

     And finally in the area of intelligence we have the means to prepare the mind with accurate scientific knowledge.  Because of varying intellectual capacities that are unavoidable success in education will depend on the innate intelligence of the individual.

     Yet with the proper guidance and the ideal of the man-god before him the youth will be ale to see that to which he is to strive.  Of course, the physical is the most easily attained by nearly all healthy men; psychology and education will depend on the individual.

     The old gods are dead; they are no longer viable.  Each represented a stage in the psychology of human evolution.  It is now time to evolve into scientific man and leave the religious mind behind.

     If Rosenberg didn’t explcitly state the goal it was implied.  Edgar Rice Burroughs did state the goal and gave an example of the ideal.  The time has come for the man-god.  It remains only to set up the ideal as a beacon to draw people to it.

     In so doing an acceptable and soul satisfying ideal can be supplied to heal and anneal the troubled soul of man that so disturbed Rosenberg, troubled Burroughs and plagues the world.

     The old gods, almost dead, must go.

  Part IV to follow.

 

    

 

 

A Review

Part II

The Myth Of The Twentiety Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982.

 

     It should be borne in mind that The Myth is subtitled:  An evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age.  The book then is an attempt to objectively analyze the political situation in those terms.  While himself a Nazi this is not a Nazi tract while at the same time it is inevitable that Rosenberg ananlyze the situation from a Nordic or Aryan viewpoint.  If Nazi and Aryan are synonomous in your mind you should disassociate the terms.

     When Rosenberg says the conflict is one of differing values between Asiatics and Europeans it is necessary to know what he means as his basis of interpretation is accurate.  The conflict between Asia, which is to say the Middle East, began fifty-five hundred years ago on the plains of Mesopotamia, todays Iraq; and has slowly spread outward until today the Asiatics, or specifically, Semites, stand on the verge of worldwide victory.  Even though the Semites themselves are divided between Jews and Arabs, which is why the Jews support Arab Semites outside the Middle East, the Jewish segment is confident that they will be able to manage the Arab Moslems in the triumph.

     The major conflict then in Rosenberg’s mind was the prime conflict between Semitic values and Aryan values.  He considered the Roman Catholic Church as auxiliaries.  The Church may be said to be a third Semitic religion.

     The situation as Rosenberg perceived it, and he was a very perceptive man, was that the German people were surrounded on three sides by Semitic forces alien to Aryan ideals.

     He saw a Roman Catholic Semitic Church centered to the South of Germany that had also infiltrated and alienated a large part of his German people.

     To the East he saw the Semitized Soviet Empire looming as a threat.  He had no doubt, and sincerely believed that Communism was a Jewish political system managed according to Semitic ideology.

     Just as the behemoth to the East was controlled by Jews so with the ascension of Franklin D. Roosevelt was the behemoth of the West, the United States of America.  Of course, denial is the order of the day but denials are ridiculous in the face of facts.

     Just as Jews had managed the hyper inflation of German currency in 1923 so Jews had maneuvered the West into the Great Depression through their control and literal ownership of the Federal Reserve Banking System of the US.

     Through the manipulation of credit and currency in the years leading up to the Great Crash of 1929 the Fed, which is to say the Jews, created the speculative stock market bubble.  At the same time they created the unsound practice of holding companies  of holding companies.  Thus shares with no substance behind them collapsed entirely losing all value.  Between such failures as these and extended credit for margin speculation the stage was set, as in Germany, for the complete collapse of the US economic system.  This was no different than the real estate and credit bubble of today.

     While many many volumes on the crash have been written over the decades none of them would deal with the problem as it actually was for fear of being denounced as anti-Semites.

     You may be sure that Rosenberg, Hitler and the Nazi think tank understood the situation completely. The question is how the Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht interrelates with his banking counterparts of the West.

     That the situation was created that ‘discredited’ the capitalist system, allowing a Judeo-Communist like FDR to assume the the reins of power you may be assured.  Roosevelt was a disciple of Woodrow Wilson.  Just as the Jews flooded into Washington  in 1913 managing Wilson’s presidency so in 1933 they returned to power with FDR.  You can see how urgent it was for Roosevelt to stay in office for as many terms as he lived.

     The situation of today is a replica of 1929-33 with the hope of putting Barry obama into the role of FDR.  Rosenberg and the Nazis predicted this scenario in the 1930s.  They also predicted the dissolution of the United States over racial problems.  This is bound to and must happen.

     In addition to the USSR and the USA the Jews were running France and directing England so that Rosenberg believed the Germans to be beleagured, which they were.

     The history of the entire period has been written by Liberals, Communists and Jews, hence you have been conditioned to see the issues soley from their point of view.

     If you were to view the times from a slightly different perspective a quite different picture would appear before your eyes as if by magic.

     It is true that the Nazis took a direct and brutal route to obtain their objectives.  They have been thoroughly castigated for this however they merely did what had already been done during and after the Great War in Russia and Hungary and what the Liberal/Jewish/Negro/Communist coalition is in process of doing today as regards the White species.  So in light of current deeds what makes the Nazis so evil?

     While we were all astonished in the fifties as the insanity of the Nazi attempt became real to us we should no less condemn the Liberal/Jewish/Negro/Communist coalition for their plan to exterminate the entire White species of a billion plus people.  This means you.

     I am sure that Rosenberg and Hitler are sitting up in Heaven looking down upon us with wry bemusement.

     So, this is the way in which Rosenberg perceived the racial aspect of the spiritual and intellectual confrontation of early twentieth century Europe.

     Rosenberg calls it the struggle for freedom rather than submission to a false god, which is to say Semitic intellectual belief systems.  He rightly says that the confrontation is between Asia and Europe going back fifty-five hundred years.  The Fascist States, that is to say Germany, Italy and Spain placed themselves in battle with the entire semiticized world.  The Semites themselves without military might did as the ancient Semite Cadmus did in ancient Boeotia of Greece when he incited the indigenous peoples into a ruinous civil war that allowed his Semitic invaders to take control.

     Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Part III will follow in another post.