Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious
November 22, 2008
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/
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.
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 
circuitous 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 
moral 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.
Exhuming Bob 15: Dylan’s Jesus Years Re-examined
November 20, 2008
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
November 17, 2008
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.
A Review: The Myth Of The Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg
October 30, 2008
A Review
The Myth Of The Twentieth Century
by
Alfred Rosenberg
Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, An Evaluation Of The Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations Of Our Age, The Noontide Press, 1982 New translation of the 1930 text.
Part One
Alfred Rosenberg
The Conflict Of Values
Subtitled ‘An evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age’ Rosenberg’s book is not only a valuable treatise on socio-psychological issues of his time but as recent events indicate also an accurate prophesy.
Adolf Hitler- The Scourge Of God
Alfred Rosenberg was, of course, the theorist of the Nazi Party in Germany over the twenties and thirties. He may be one of the lesser known figures. As such he is verboten to read or study, but as it is important to understand the mental outlook of this most important period of world history, that none can deny, I’m going to cast caution to the winds and try to deal with the reality rather than the prejudices.
This book was a key to Rosenberg’s earning the hangman’s close attention at Nuremberg as a result of the collapse of the Nazi State. The book is also on on the Jewish Index of Proscribed Books; it was only translated and published in English in 1980 by the Noontide Press, another proscribed outfit. So reading and discussing the book is a titillating forbidden thrill not unlike picking up an illicit copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1930. I’ve read both and this is the better book. One wonders how many on the Court at Nuremberg knew German well enough to have read it. I suspect that very few of the allies had and if so but cursorily.
As so many books that have been given high praise prove worthless on the reading so also many authors and their books that have been demonized prove worthwhile. The Myth Of The Twentieth Century is one of the latter. While Jewish hysteria would have you believe that The Myth is one long rabid anti-Jewish diatribe such is not the case. Rather Rosenberg cast his scenario in the ages long warfare between the Semitic East and Indo-European West. As he rightly says the issue is a spiritual and intellectual confrontation between the two.
There is no denying this fact no matter how unpalatable the reality may be.
That the conquest of Rome by the East in the waning years of the Republic and opening three centuries of the Empire was the key to the formation of the Roman Catholic Church in the mold of the Eastern mystery cults of which Judaism was an element, but only one, cannot be denied.
Indeed the church founders Sts. Peter and Paul were Jews of the Jews. Oddly the New Testament had nothing to do with the content of Catholicism. Before Gutenberg even the priesthood had never read the New Testament. How Jesus wormed his way in there is something of a mystery. As odd as it may seem one could be arrested in Spain for distributing or possessing a New Testament probably up to the 1931 Revolution that ended that nonsense.
Rosenberg believed and the facts attest that the Nordics, Germans or Aryans (if words frighten you, choose the least offensive) found the Asiatic doctrines to run counter to their innate beliefs. The fact that England and the North of Europe rejected Catholicism should be proof enough for anyone. Rosenberg’s main argument then is against the Catholic Church which in his view was based on Etruscan savagery, Jewish and other Eastern mystery religions.
In the savage warfare he depicts between the Semitic Catholic Church and Nordic dissidents it reads like so many holocausts led by the Semitic Church that the Jewish holocaust of the forties pales in comparison.
The savage campaigns of extermination against religious heretics like the Waldenses, Cathars and Huguenots makes your hair curl and the roots sweat. And then on top of those crimes against humanity on the part of the Semitic based Roman Catholic Church came the horrors of the Thirty Years War from 1608 to 1638 that devastated the Germans so badly it made the Jewish losses of the 1940s seem trivial. Over thirty years fully a third of the German people were destroyed while Rosenberg claims two thirds. As Liberal historians prefer to minimize German losses in accord with their anti-European prejudices I suspect Rosenberg is closer to the truth. As he says it took two hundred years for the Germans to recover in a greatly altered intellectual condition. That would bring the story up to Bismarck and modern times when the Pope declared himself infallible.
Rosenberg insists this was at the instigation of and was the policy of the Papacy. It would be impossible to disagree with him. In fact the Roman Catholic Inquisition extended from the thirteenth century to mid-nineteenth century. Some six hundred fifty years of Semitic hostility to things Nordic.
While that record of intolerance is deplorable it should be remembered that the Church was thoroughly saturated with a Semitic intellectual mindset. Its policies were based in the psychology of the Middle Eastern Semitic peoples. One is no less guilty than the other. Intolerance is characteristic of the Semites much moreso than the Europeans as will undoubtedly be learned first hand soon enough as we have failed to learn it from a distance.
2.
While Rosenberg deals with religious and racial confrontations that are in essence the same thing he also gives a nice concise analysis of the stock market economy. In the light of recent events the man was remarkably prescient. He blames stock jobbing on the Jews. As he was a Nazi one is tempted to cry: Shame, shame, without examining the facts, but in fact this recent managed debacle used the US Federal Reserve System. The Fed is a privately held semi-government agency of which the only non-Jewish component are the Rockefeller banks. Thus there appears to be a real foundation of the Nazi claim of Jewish dominance of finance.
If one looks at finance with an unjaundiced eye from this vantage point of history when everything is or should be clear, it is clear that the Jewish World Government sold the US a bill of goods in 1913 when the Fed was formed. The Fed was the vehicle that gave its owners the means to control world money matters. What an engine for construction or destruction. What a pity the course of destruction was chosen.
One has been forbidden to look too closely at Jewish financial management but when one does many things become clear. Henry Ford has been criticised for using the term The International Jew, but there you have it. See my essay at Contemporary Notes on Henry Ford and Louis Marshall.
http://contemporarynotes.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/henry-ford-and-louis-marshall/
Through their American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee formed during the Great War in preparation for the aftermath the Jews were able to use the Fed and ‘charity’ to move huge sums into Europe in support of Judaism against the Gentile nations. Engineering the tremendous inflation in Germany in 1923 that impoverished the indigenous population money from the US, Great Britain and France was supplied to German Jews who then, using the hard currency against the now worthless German currency, essentially bought up Germany on the cheap. Even as late as 1937 after years of disenfranchisement Jews still owned over 30% of German real estate.
If one compares that with the current debacle in the US and actually worldwide in which by using the vehicle of unsound loans the US and possibly the world has been financially gutted with all investments slowly sinking into worthlessness while the already bankrupt US government has been placed beyond redemption. The question is when it all comes down who will own what? It will all have to be owned by someone. If Germany of the Weimar Republic is any guide the answer is quite clear.
It seems obvious that the whole debacle was planned from the beginning. After all we have been conditioned from childhood to perceive the Jews as innately financial geniuses. We have also been conditioned to view Jews as the most intelligent people on the earth. Indeed the foremost Jewish intellect of the latter half of the twentieth century, Rabbi Schneerson, a man of profound scientific training, so we are told, fully believed that Jews have an extra intelligence gene that makes intellectual competition with them impossible.
So, who was in control of the Fed, who is Secretary of the Treasury, etc. etc. Jews. Now, I’m fairly low down on the totem pole but I could see the inevitable result of loaning money to people without the means to pay it back. I don’t have that extra gene that Jews have either. I’m not bragging, there were actually loads of us with the apparently missing intelligence gene who saw it coming. Heck, Rosenberg and the Nazis, all missing that extraordinary gene, predicted the thing eighty years ago. Sure, they were evil but that doesn’t mean they were stupid.
So, if the ‘most intelligent’ people on the planet didn’t see the inevitable result of their own policies then, possibly, the intelligence gene has an on-off switch but without the little light so we never know whether they’re switched on or off. But I’m betting the boys knew what they were doing and what the results would be. Can’t fool me. Quite obviously you didn’t need that extra gene and I’m betting that Rabbi Schneerson was just joshing when he dreamed the notion up.
I have to give Rosenberg full credence in his analysis of stock market economies. He saw it quite clearly eighty years ago. He couldn’t have been alone. Rosenberg was smart but he wasn’t that much smarter than anyone else. Henry Ford saw it.
So why weren’t Rosenberg and Ford listened to? Because the Jews used that ‘extra gene’- the charge of being an anti-Semite. Ford was discredited and neutralized while the Nazis taking on the whole world were destroyed root and branch.
That’s how Alfred Rosenberg evaluated a couple of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations in the first chapter of his very valuable work: The Myth Of The Twentieth Century.
There is more that I will take up in Part II.
Exhuming Bob 13 Fit 5: Bob As Messiah
October 19, 2008
Exhuming Bob 13
Fit 5:
Bob As Messiah
by
R.E. Prindle
Are you that Man Of Constant Sorrow
Of whom the authors write-
Grief comes with every morrow
And wretchedness at night?
Anon.
Source of quotes: Scott Marshall, Bob Dylan’s Unshakeable Monotheism- downloaded from Jewseek.com 
but no longer available. The site is no longer functioning. Roughly the same material can be found in Scott M. Marshall with Marion Ford, Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey Of Bob Dylan, Relevant Media, 2004. No longer in print new copies may still be obtained for under three dollars at Alibris.com for any who are interested.
In the dead of winter in 1961 Bob Dylan, ne Bobby Zimmerman, left Minnesota to try his chances in New York City. At this point he must have realized that his better chances lay with Folk Music than Rock n’ Roll. Indeed, upon his arrival in New York he realized that Tin Pan Alley had the recording world sewn up except for the ‘race’ musics of Country And Western and R&B, and the Alley was already fairly tight with R&B. He quickly and astutely realized that whatever he intended to do would find no home on the Great White Way.
While Bob traveled light as far as material possessions went he brought a lot of psychological and religious baggage with him. The kind of stuff you can’t leave in a locker at the bus station. As his whole career has been an unfolding of this religious impulse it would behoove us to examine it somewhat closely.
Bob received intense religious indoctrination in his youth until the time he left home in the Summer of 1959. This religious education was of an intense Orthodox Jewish kind. He recieved this from his family, both parents were deeply religious in the Orthodox mode, although the Hibbing syngogue was more often without a Rabbi of any kind than not. Perhaps of premier importance was his Bar Mitzvah indoctrination in 1954 from a Lubavitcher Orthodox Rabbi direct from Brooklyn. That combined with four years of extended stays at the Zionist summer camp, Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin.
In speaking to Paul Vitello of the Kansas City Times after announcing his call to Jesus/God, Bob told him:
I believe in the Bible, literally. Everything in it, I believe, was written by the hand of God.
That is the statement of a religious fundamentalist and one without much sense or discernment. If Bob doesn’t know the the ‘hand of God’ has written nothing then he can be written off as a rational human being. Bob in the same interview went further:
Everything that’s happening in the news today is prophesied in the scriptures. It’s all in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations.
For myself, I begin to run when I hear some Christian fundamentalist bring up the Book of Revelations. It has the same effect on me as anti-Semite has for the Jew.
We can assume therefore that upon his arrival in New York in 1961 Bob was a card carrying Biblical devotee. This religious baggage for the time being took a back seat to Bob’s psychological baggage but was absorbed into it. Hence the Biblical sounding ranting of Like A Rolling Stone.
At the same time as with most young people Bob was in rebellion against his upbringing. That is to say he was trying to find his own place in life while reconciling his upbringing to the emerging realities presented to him by life. As his line from his song My Back Pages would seem to indicate: I become my own enemy when I begin to preach. he realized that his religious beliefs would alienate any listeners and abort the possibility of establishing his career and reaching them later.
Indeed, the sixties, and expecially the New york fold crowd was intensely anti-religious. It was about this time that Bob read a headline on a Time Magazine cover asking the rhetorical quesiton: ‘Is God dead?’ Bob was extremely offended by it dating the decline of Western Civilization from that headline.
From 1961 to 1966 then Bob wrote mainly of his psychological problems and frustrations. His dream life, which is to say, subconscious, received a lot of attention during this period as well as later in his career.
It was precisely the speaking from his subconscious to the subconscious of his audience that drew this specific type of person to him.
Phil Ochs, a contemporary Folkie of Dylan, recognized what he was doing in stirring up deeply held resentment and thought he was brewing trouble for himself. However Dylan, while hating, did not necessarily stir up emotions that would lead to violent actions. Instead his hate was characterized by self-pity and resentment that would be satisfied by showing people how wrong people were in their judgement of him. Thus he would accentuate his God as a god of judgement. He left the actual judgemental punishment of them up to his god. Thus those of us in his audience who linked up were also characterized by self-pity and resentment but not violent.
For instance, in a 1983 interview with Martin keller he was quoted:
My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt. They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses- you know, the guy that killed the Egyptian, married an Ethiopian girl, and brought the Law down from the mountain. The same Moses whose staff turned into a serpent. The same person who killed 3,000 Hebrews for getting down, stripping off their clothes, and dancing around a golden calf. These are my roots. (My italics.) Jacob had four wives and thirteen children, who fathered thirteen chiidren, who fathered an entire people. These are my roots, too. Gideon with a small army, defeating an army of thousands. Deborah, the prophetess; Esther the Queen, and many Canaanite women, Reuben slipping into his father’s bed when his father wasn’t home. These are my roots.
Delilah tempting Samson, killing him softly with her song. The mighty King David was an outlaw before he was king, you know. He had to hide in caves and get his meals at back doors. The wonderful King Saul had a warrant out on him- a ‘no knock’ search warrant. They wanted to cut his head off. John the Baptist could tell you more about it. [That’s a joke in this standup routine, Son.] Roots, man- we’re talking Jewish roots, you want to know more? Check up on Elijah the prophet. He could make rain. Isaiah the prophet, even Jeremiah, see if their brethren didn’t want to bust their brains for telling it right like it is. Yeah, these are my roots, I suppose.
Now, those are extremely violent, murderous roots but they form the staples of Bob’s conscious and unconscious minds. The selected examples, all from the Old Testament, are revealing in the Freudian sense. Vengeance dominates.
Nor are these ‘Jewish’ roots in any exlusive sense. These actors were Hebrews and not Jews. I know all this bullroar from Christian (Methodist) services. I was repelled at once and rejected this crap when I escaped the stultifying influence of my childhood. This crap is unworthy stuffing for human minds.
This mean spirit is felt throughout the whole of Bob’s corpus from 1961 to 1966, more especially in that most puerile of all his songs: Masters Of War.
Significantly Bob mentions nothing about Jesus or the New Testament; his roots are all Old Testament. This raises the question of whether his embracing of Jesus in 1979 was calculated or not. There is in fact little differentiation between his conception of jesus and the Jewish Yahweh. Indeed the idiot church I attended as a youth seemed to accentuate the Old Testament Yahweh over the New Testament Jesus. I have a much stronger conception of Yahwey over Jesus so one might say I share ‘Jewish roots’ as much as Bob does. I am as much a dual citizen as Bob is except more American/Ancient Hebrew rather than Israeli/American.
As of 1964 Bob Dylan wasn’t really going anywhere. True, his manager Albert Grossman was busy promoting his songs to others whose recordings then inflated Bob’s reputation but that didn’t necessarily translate into big sales for his own albums.
Then in 1964 Bob had a stroke of luck, the Beatles came to America. There had been a massive promotion along the lines- The Beatles Are Coming, The Beatles Are Coming. No one had ever heard of them but when they appeared on Ed Sullivan everyone was tuned in to see what the fuss was about. After it was over, other than the screaming girls in the audience, that, I might add, was a new phenomenon, few of us still knew what the fuss was about.
Nevertheless it seemed that from that point on the Beatles were on the news nearly every night. This was unprecedented attention for a mere ‘pimple’ music pop group which is all the Beatles were at that time.
Why the Beatles received this attention has never been clear to me. However these were four goi musicians although their manager Brian Epstein was Jewish. In the inter-cultural competition a Jewish super-star was now required. After all the first of the superstars Elvis Presley was an all-American hillbilly. Fabian the last before the Beatles was Italian. These four English kids then came up and so a Jewish kid was required to keep up the Jewish image. The only real alternative was Bob Dylan although few or any of us knew, or even suspected he was Jewish. Bob had sure worked hard to keep that a secret. Even his girlfriend Suze Rotolo was slow to find out.
Bob then was given the big media buildup also being on the news frequently, also being given the star treatment in the big national magazines. While the Beatles handled their fame with chipper aplomb Bob approached it with negative depression. But, it worked just as well. The pressure was enormous, plus Albert Grossman was pushing him too hard, working the kid to death. Literally according to Bob.
Whether there really was a motorcycle accident or Bob had a nervous breakdown from contemplating the next killer tour his manager had arranged may never be known for sure. After completing Blonde On Blonde that filled out his core oeuvre Bob went into seclusion for a period.
He put this seclusion to good use. Although his premier creative period was over, his golden age so to speak, he succeeded in a magnificent Silver Age. He and the members of his backup band, later known simply as The Band, created a huge and significant body of work. Dozens of songs, some of them really good while most of them were good. It was here that Bob perfected the technique of clothing his religious thoughts in Amerian indigenous Folk forms. This ability was exhibited on his next LP, John Wesley Harding, that was released not that long after Blonde On Blonde.
In one of this period’s songs, You Ain’t Going Nowhere, Bob had this to say: ‘Find ourself a tree with roots.’ Thus the cover of the Harding album showed Bob standing next to a tree with roots dressed in Jesse James era Western foul weather gear. Now, Bob had also sung: ‘I may look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James.’ This guy looked like the Minnesota Northfield raid while the tree with roots reprsented his Jewish affiliation.
Now Bob was on track for his Jewish liaison and subsequent demonstration of his Jewish Lubavitcher roots. Those who follow Bob’s religious odyssey, and there have been several books written on this topic, all call attention to the close relation of Biblical topics to his lyrics from 1961 to the present. If you have the backgound and take both a broad and narrow approach to looking for them you will find that they abound. The method becomes second nature for Bob so that he may not ever be aware of many of the references himself until they’re pointed out to him; or he may be conscious of them all.
What is clear is that Bob views his career as a religious calling; that is to say a messianic mission to bring the word of God to as many people as he can. In May 1980 he told interviewer Karen Hughes:
He was disarmingly honest with Hughes about his sense of God’s call: “I guess He’s always been calling me. Of course, how would I have ever known that, that it was Jesus calling me….
So now we have the anomaly of God calling to a Jew through Jesus. While both Christians and Jews who now view Jesus as a Western and not a Jewish figure had trouble accepting the fact that a Jew could accept Jesus and remain a Jew nothing is more reasonable. That Bob, a Jew living in a Christian country, could amalgamate Judaism and Jesus wasn’t even all that odd.
Jesus himself was a Jew while the early Christians were all Jews who accepted every Jewish rite including circumcision and the dietary laws. It was only when Saint Paul separated Christianity from these Judaic laws that Christianity succeeded.
As Marshall’s interviewees point out, the New Testament is a Jewish novel in which 25 out 27 books were written by Jews. John and Revelations being the exceptions. Even as Bob embraced Jesus, the Jews for Jesus, based in San Francisco, who themselves did not convert to Christianity were active. Just as the Jews persecuted the early Jewish Christians even to death so they put the screws to Jews For Jesus and have at least destroyed their effectiveness.
Thus in 1983 the Lubavitchers re-entered Bob’s life when as they thought they attempted ot reconvert him. As Bob had never left the faith, he has said in effect, I am a Jew of the Jews, I suppose he played along until they were satisfied then went along his way as a Jewish Christian. Makes perfect sense to me, I don’t have a problem with the manner in which Bob expresses his religiosity.
I have a problem in that he expresses it at all. I find it incredible in this this day and age of scientific reallty that anyone can make the statement that the Bible is the actual word of Yahweh or any other god.
Goodness gracious, Bob, shape up before it’s too late. We’re almost down to that last grain of sand. The lights are beginning to dim. It is getting dark.
:
Exhuming Bob 13, Fits 1 & 2: Bob As Messiah
October 12, 2008
Exhuming Bob
Fits 1 & 2:
Bob As Messiah
by
R.E. Prindle
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses; and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
– H.L. Mencken
I had planned to write further on Bob’s religious development after ‘Lubatitcher Bob’ at some time but the row caused by Sean Curnyn of Right Wing Bob has focused my mind wondrously.
Before getting to Bob per se I will have to discuss the flap caused by Curnyn who is something of a sidewinder. Basically this is a contest between religious superstition and scientific investigation. Facts conflict with belief and in the resolution one or the other has to give. Since superstition cannot stand up to fact religion has to be the loser whatever name it goes by. No matter how many violent names you call the scientist the facts remain the same.
Curnyns vitriol can be found in full at his site: http://rightwingbob.com.
I quote relevant parts below:
I didn’t happen to notice it yesterday (no date but probably 10/10/08) but it was brought to my attention in an email last night by reader Dovid (Dovid not David) Kerner, who tells me that he sent the following to the webmaster of ‘Expecting Rain’, Karl Erik Andersen.
Regarding your printing the link to Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob.
I love your website but this one shouldn’t have been printed- it’s really written with an violent anti-Jewish slant. Here’s the reply I left on the site.
<<Is it true that as you say there is “a Jewish world organization” which realized they had something in Bob Dylan and gave him maximum publicity?
And are the Jews taught, as you write, that they “are to rule the world and the peoples?” Or does the biblical term “chosen people” mean that Jews are to set an example for the rest of humanity? (I just finished a whole day in synagogue (Yom Kipper) and I don’t recall praying for Jews to rule the world.)
Your claims sound vaguely familiar- The Protocols ring a bell here.
Shalom and Happy New Year.
Dovid >>
I think you (expectingrain) should put an apology/warning to your readers regarding the matter.
Otherwise, thank you and keep up the great work.
As of this time of writing, the gjy who posted the orignal article hasn’t published Dovid’s comment (which really doesn’t suprise and the guy deserves to be ignored) and Karl Erik has not either taken down the link to the anti-semitic article, nor added any note about it. This disappoints.
Well and good. But this Dovid Kerner fellow, if there is one and he isn’t Sean Curnyn, lied about making a response on my site, I, Dynamo. He didn’t do it, hence no reply.
Sean Curnyn did leave a cryptic comment on my site that said nothing. I decided to check into his site. Lo and behold I found the above denunciation. When I checked Curnyn’s site for a response box I found to my dismay that there wasn’t one. Curnyn is apparently so insecure that he doesn’t welcome comments. Might be critical of him, I suppose. However, I did find an email address tucked away in an obscure place with a warning that he might publish emails. I had no choice but to ignore the warning and send him an email.
My first follows:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I received your cryptic message to my posting, Lubavitcher Bob, and have permitted it as I do all postings. You say that your reader Dovid Kerner left a comment on the LB posting. Maybe he thought he did but yours is the first notice I’ve received.
My suggestion is that you leave a response on the LB posting so that it can be responded to and that the readers may be informed of the dialogue rather than this sort of sneak email attack you’re undertaken.
I will say at this time that you apparently know nothing of either religion or Judaism or you wouldn’t make the silly comments you’ve posted on your website Right Wing Bob.
If it is any help to you I have sat through many hours of synagogue and am quite familiar with the content of the sermons.
The purpose of my essay that expecting rain courageously, apparently, published, is an attempt to get to the bottom of Bob’s career and what it means. If you disagree with me and wish to start a dialogue respond in the comments to my posting. If you don’t post I will have no choice but to think you are a coward and obscurantist. Your reader Dovid Kerner is welcome to join in if he has the courage. So far he has misrepresented to you and you have misrepresented to your readers that I have refused to reply to him.
I demand an apology and retraction which I know your kind never gives.
Thank you for time and attention.
R.E. Prindle
As you can see I openly challenged Both Kerner and Curnyn to respond and that I would reply.
Naturally neither did. I received no apology or retraction. I sent a second email:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I have just rechecked your site and find no apology or retraction and you have left the false posting on your site.
I’m tapping my foot, Sir or Madam. My patience is wearing thin. Get on it.
R.E. Prindle
Still no response. I sent a 3rd email:
Dear Sir or Madam:
You have now had several hours to apologize, issue a retraction and remove the slanderous post from your site. As you apparently refuse to right your wrong that you have committed against me I have no choice but to believe that you and Dovid Kernen are in collusion to defame me.
Your characterization of Lubavitcher Bob as ‘a piece of screwball Jew-hating screed’ is offensive and unintellectual in the extreme. Such filth is apparently characteristic of you and your site. As usual with those of your ilk you refuse to answer to the content of my essay and resort to ad hominem defamation.
Your kind disgust me.
I now feel free to write a rebuttal and expose you for the anti-social left-wing bigot that you are.
You are a disgrace to the internet.
R.E. Prindle
As of this date (10/12/08) I have received no reply from either party. I don’t expect to. That is the background. I will now attempt to refute Kerner and Cronyn’s defamations.
Fit 2.
The boys from Right Wing Bob seem to have been expecially offended by my notion of an International, world, or global Jewish organization. I am absolutely astonished that they think, or pretend to, that one doesn’t exist. All religions have a central authority.
Let us consider the Moslems first. Mecca is the world center of Moslemism to which all Moslems are expected to make a pilgrimage to look at the meteorite at least once in their life. While unity is not conspicuous in developed religions, yet the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula generally have charge of the Moslem religion. The Saudi Princes are directing the worldwide proselytization efforts of the religion.
Now as to Christianity in its two forms with which we are most familiar, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. I am not well informed on the conditions or intent of the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches.
Roman Catholicism like Moslemism is a global organization exercising some sort of authority over the faithful in all its dominions from its global administration center in the Vatican near Rome. Like the Moslems its goal is to convert all people of whatever relgious stripe to its faith.
The Protestants while splintered have their various administrative headquarters from whch they seek to proselytize the world.
The parent organization for Moslemism and Christianity is Judaism. Together these three religions form the Semitic group of religions.
If the former two didn’t borrow their organizational ideas from Judaism that would be odd indeed. Failing that one would think that Judaism would conform to its offspring and organize internationally along the same lines. if fact, they always have. Why Messers Kerner and Curnyn are offended by the notion and wish to deny the obvious baffles me. That they should respond to the innocuous suggestion by defaming me as an anti-Semite does not speak well for either their breeding or intelligence.
Judaism’s two sister religions are intent on proselytizing the world. Once completed the Moslem Arabs would be the directors of the theocratic state as a superior people. Christianity’s Roman Catholic priesthood would enjoy the favored position if it achieved its goal. Under Judaism the reward for having brought mankind to thier vision of God would also, as a nation of priests, be to administer the affairs of mankind. What could be more obvious? That is the meaning of the phrase, a nation of priests. That is what it means to be ‘the Chosen People.’ What else could it mean?
Moslems and Christians wish to proselytize while Jews don’t. I hope Messers Kerner and Curnyn won’t disagree with that and won’t call me all the terrible names they can imagine because I point out this obvious fact. Therefore the Jews have to establish their priestly dominion by other means. They must persuade in some form or manner the peoples to accept their leadership or dominance. this has always been the thrust of Messianic Jewish politics.
In 1972 Naomi Cohen published a history of The American Jewish Committee entitled; Not Free To Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906-66. The meaning of the title is that Jews are Not Free To Desist from the task of achieving the goal of establishing the priesthood over the peoples. No one individual is expected to complete the task in their lifetime but none are free to desist from moving it along.
Messers Kerner and Curnyn can deny this if they wish but to do so is to be merely perverse.
Now, to be the Chosen of God must necessarily imply that the Chosen are better people than the rest and are therefore entitled to rule. Indeed, Even Kerner admits this when he says: ‘Or does the biblical term ‘chosen people’ mean that Jews are to set an example for the rest of mankind?’ To set an example is to be better so Dov defeats his criticism of me.
The Rabbi who instructed Bob was undoubtedly a Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. The leader of the Lubavitchers was a man named Rabbi Schneerson. We are informed that Rabbi Schneerson in addition to being a great religious Rabbinical scholar also had scientific degrees from secular universities. Back in the forties of the last century genetics seemed to have been his forte because he asserted with great confidence that Jews had a special gene that made them more intelligent than any other people in the world. Undoubtedly that was how they intended to set an example for the rest of humanity. Thus Jews were singled out not only by God as the Chosen of Heaven but by evolution right down here on earth.
So, while I appreciate that Curnyn may believe my essay ‘a piect of screwball Jew-hating screed’ I have to say that Sean Curnyn is an ignoramus of the first water without either the background or education to understand what I am saying. Indeed, as the Bobber says: ‘don’t criticize what you can’t understand.’ Kerner and Curnyn should heed the Bob’s advice.
But as to Bob and Rabbi Reuben Maier who as a Lubavitcher was educated by Rabbi Schneerson.
Fits 3 & 4 follow in another posting.
A Review: Part III, The Mucker And Marcia Of The Door Step By Edgar Rice Burroughs
September 11, 2008
A Review
The Low Brow And The High Brow
An In Depth Study Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’
The Mucker And Marcia Of The Door Step
Part III
by
R.E. Prindle
Background Of the Second Decade Social And Political
1.
I have been criticized for discussing material that seems to bear no relationship to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The social milieu in which a man lives and works directly affect what and how he writes. He will react within that milieu whether he can understand and articulate it or not.
ERB understood much. He understood the main conflict of his times- that between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses. How he understood it is one thing, its exact nature is another. The battle was not necessarily put into the terms of science versus religion. On the objective level science had more prestige while on the subjective level religion had the upper hand creating a dualistic conflict. As Voltaire said: No one ever willed himself an athiest. The same can said of Science. The usual terms employed in the conflict was that of spirtiualism versus materialism. So those two words were supercharged masking the real conflict.
While religion retained great strength in this period science was so strong that religions had to adapt to science, thus one had the ecumenical Congress Of Religions in Chicago in 1893 during which a common plan of resistance was discussed.
One reaction to Science was American Liberalism. Liberalism is in fact a religion founded on beliefs rather than facts. American Liberalism developed out of the Puritan faith of New England. The Puritans believed themselves to be the successor of the Hebrews of the Old Testament as the Chosen People of God.
Two very interesting studies have appeared in the last couple decades which illuminate the English background of the United States. One is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed; the other is Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins Wars. Both illustrate the continuity of behavior of the colonists between England and the Colonies. That continuity began with the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and continues through the strange Liberal mentality of today. Burroughs who was of the ‘Conservative’ mentality had to struggle with the forces of Liberalism in his day.
When the Normans invaded England they enslaved the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants. Anyone who has read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott has the image of Gurth with his iron colar inscribed on his memory. This piece of arrogance was to have serious consequences in both England and America.
The Normans occupied the Southern counties of England which Thomas Hardy caled Wessex, while the brunt of slavery fell on the East Anglian counties. The insult of slavery was burned into East Anglian memories along with a desire for revenge made more savage by the the religious certitude that they were the Chosen People of God.
The East Anglians, of course, revolted against the Norman Church Of England, emigrating to North America where they settled in the States of New England. New England = New Anglia. In England they fought the English Civil War against the Normans. Puritan Roundheads against Norman Cavaliers. It then became the turn of the defeated Cavaliers to emigrate to North America. They chose to go to Virginia where they gave the colony its Norman Cavalier character and nickname. The ancient enemies were now divided North and South.
As Fischer points out, slavery by the Norman descendents in England had disappeared only about a hundred years before the English Civil War. The Cavaliers now revived slavery in their Southern colonies. First they brought indentured servants from England who were slaves subject to the whims of their masters for a stated period of years that could easily be extended. Then African slavery was introduced. For a period of time both White and Black slaves worked side by side in the fields with the Blacks gradually displacing the Whites.
The New Englanders looked with fear and loathing on the Norman Virginians, who as they saw it, now resumed their old habits. It was here that the American Civil War was conceived. The Puritan New Englanders after having first rejected the king in the American Revolution which their East Anglian forebearers had failed to do in England then turned to agitating a war against the Norman Cavaliers of the South, whose ancestors had enslaved them, on the basis of an anti-slavery abolitionist program.
Just as they had succeeded against the Crown where their forebearers had failed they succeeded in absolutely crushing the descendents of the Normans. This punishment of the Cavaliers was the most severe of any since 1066. Thus subsequent US history with its notion of unconditional surrender was formed. This was a vicious attitude formed from the same feeling of defeat.
To return to the East Anglians in England to explain the American Liberal mindset. Shortly after printed books became readily available the East Anglians bought Bibles adopting the Old Testament notion of the Chosen People by substituting themselves for the Hebrew Children. A British Israelite group formed calling the English people the new Chosen People. Indeed, the British throne is believed to be in lineal descent from that of King David of Old Israel.
Thus there were at least three Chosen Peoples in existence from the fifteenth century on- Jews, the English and the Puritan New Englanders. New England became Greater New England as the Puritans multiplied spreading across the Northern tier of States.
A psychological characteristic of Chosen Peoples is that they upload their needs and wishes to an imaginary god in the sky then download the same needs and wishes back to themselves as the Will Of God. Thus they say not my will but they will be done, O Lord. The faithful thus become justified sinners. Any criminal act can be justified as the Will of God which it is the duty of the faithful to perform This also creates a double standard because what is right for themselves in the eyes of the Lord is forbidden to others. The children of Israel can exterminate other peoples with impunity, but it is wrong for other peoples to even defend themselves against the children of the Lord. Serious stuff.
These ends and desires are accepted then as a messianic or utopian goal. It is the duty of the Chosen People to impose God’s Will on the rest of the world. To resist that Will is evil making the non-believer a dastard, a heretic, an infidel, an anti-Semite or whatever.
In the United States the Will of the god of the Puritans was transformed into Manifest Destiny, which in turn metamorphosed into the triumph of Democracy as defined by the Chosen People of America, who in turn metamorphosed from Puritans into Liberals.
As a chosen people and as a result of the Civil War the Liberals identified with the victims who needed their help. Thus the Civil War was fought in their minds by a virtuous people acting out the Will of God to rescue unfortunate victims from a malevolent White minority. In the case of the Civil War it was the Negro slaves. As the century and Liberalism developed the umbrella of help was extended to all the ‘enslaved’ or colonial peoples of Europe which is to say all the colored peoples of the world. It was not enough that injustice as perceived by the Liberals should be corrected, but that the perpetrators should be condignly and brutally punished unconditionally in the name of and by the Will of their God, which is to say the projected desires and wishes of a self-appointed Chosen People.
Utopian literature which flourished after the Civil War is the direct result of this Messianic fervor. Utopian literature abounds in England, Greater New England and with the jews.
Having then succeeded in crushing the Cavaliers of the South the Liberals attempted to demean, belittle and abuse the White South in the most draconian manner. The period of Reconstruction is the blackest hour in American history. The Whites were stripped of civil rights having the Negroes placed over them as masters. The Whites, so far as possible, were expropriated of all property through taxation when not stolen outright. The Whites, of course, reacted by forming the first Ku Klux Klan to protect their lives and interests. Reconstruction lasted until 1877 well nigh into the twentieth century. The South was impoverished and set back for at least a century and may still be recovering today if such is possible under the present Liberal regime.
All factual references to Reconstruction have been obscured by references to the KKK but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries memories of Liberal crimes in the South were fresh and bleeding wounds. As is well known Jim Crow was the inevitable result of the attempt to crush and bury the White South.
As the nineteenth century progressed and utopian literature flourished the Puritans, now Liberals, identified with all the ‘oppressed’ which is to say colored peoples of the world against the European conquerors. Everywhere America sided with the natives against Europeans. In a feeling of total frustration Charles De Gaulle would remark: America is a White country, but it acts like a colored country.
At about mid-nineteenth century Jewish utopian messianists under the direction of Karl Marx formed the Communist Party. Thus Jewish utopian messianism spread from England- Marx was based in London- throughout Europe to the world. As Communism also opposed Western colonialism, although not Communist colonialism, these two powerful agencies worked to upset the Western hegemony of the world. As someone will always have hegemony of the world what appears on the surface as ‘justice’ is merely the transfer of power to another agency and hence new ‘injustice.’ As of this writing it appears that the beneficiary of American and Communist efforts will be the Chinese. This shift has already happened but has not yet been officially acknowledged. Thus the result of the Liberal and Communist quest for ‘social justice’ will be merely to place Europe and America’s neck under a Chinese yoke rather than the other way around. Obviously the Chinese god is not the same as the Utopian God.
During the period of Reconstruction as the Liberals were punishing the Southern Whites and rewarding the Negroes immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began in earnest. While the Irish and Germans had created their own set of problems yet culturally they were close enough to the original Anglo-Saxon colonists to be, after a fashion, readily assimilated.
But with the congeries of nationalities from East and Southern Europe came many and diverse customs and languages. Assimilating them into Anglo-Celtic-Teutonic America was not so easy. Thus groups of Americans resisting immigration arose. The Know Nothings fought the Irish but this was different.
The Liberals could then pathologize the anti-immigration people as ‘nativists’, later White Supremacists and other derogatory terms. They could afirm their own virtue against these people as they had against the Southern Whites. When the power base of restrictionists took form in the South as the second Ku Klux Klan this only served to show the perfidy of Southern Whites in a new shade.
The Liberals then allied themselves not only with the interests of Negroes but with the immigrants to form the Liberal Coalition which was to dominate American society from the Second Decade to the present.
Already British and Puritan utopianists, they were now joined by the Jews who from 1870 to 1914 represented the largest nationality of immigrants. Both the Liberals and the Jews were Bible based. Liberals considered Jews as the successors to the Biblical Hebrews if not Hebrews themselves. While Roman Catholics distanced themselves from Hebrewism the Protestant sects derived directly from the Old Testament considered themselves neo-Hebrews so they were quite willing to defer to what they considered paleo-Hebrews. Thus the two versions of utopianism were joined. Both forms of Hebrewism accepted anti-Semitism as the greatest vice. The foregoing discussion has been a good account of what Semitism is: that is a belief in one’s own divinely appointed role as the arbiter of the world’s fate.
So far as I know neithr Semitism or anti-Semitism have ever been adequately defined so for the purposes of this paper anti-Semitism will be defined quite simply as the denial of the Semitist’s self-appointed role as the agent of God on earth.
As one of a Scientific Consciousness such a denial seems hardly necessary but as most people are of a Religious Consciousness there it stands.
Needless to say Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness therefore per force an anti-Semitist although he would never have understood his position in those terms.
As can be seen Judeo/Liberal/Utopianism is a religious matter that will defy reason. It is a matter dependent upon a subjective, spiritual belief system. It is beyond the reach of logic. Never argue with them. The adherents cannot be argued with, they must humored. Reigions are revealed not thought out.
2.
The nineteenth century also saw the rise of Science which is an objective materialistic sysem, conscious not subconscious, based on facts and reality. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that the religious systems and the scientific systems are incompatible; one must subordinate or destroy the other. Now, seriously folks, this is war to the knife.
Knowledge is hard won and built up slowly while revealed religion is complete and entire at conception. While the former is subject to trial and error the latter is seemingly pat- it is God’s own Word.
As Freud pointed out the religious consciousness received three main blows. The first was that the Universe was heliocentric rather than terracentric; the third was the malleable construction of the human mind as defined by psychoanalysis. These two could be religiously managed; nothing had been revealed that couldn’t be manipulated to religion’s use. The middle blow could not. That was the concept of Evolution as enunciated by Charles Darwin. Thus it was clear except to the most entrenched religionist that the world was not created by God in 4004 BC as Bishop Ussher stated but evolved beginning somewhat over four billion years ago. There’s an incompatibility there that cannot be swept under the carpet or even ignored.
Make no mistake: science and religion are at odds in the struggle for the human mind. Writing in 1829 the incomparable Edgar Allen Poe expressed the problem in his brilliant poem:
Sonnet – To Science
Science! true daughteer of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Who preyest thus on this poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
In addition to driving the Hamadryad from the wood, science also pulled God down from the heavens and exposed the fraud. Freud showed God to be merely a projection of human desires. How could religion counter the claims of Science?
I do not single out any specific religion whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem or whatever. All religions evolved in human consciousness and represent a phase of development in that evolution. A phase of evolution but not its end. Dig it!
It then became necessary for religionists to absolutely deny Evolution. In their favor was the fact that Darwin not merely but only enunciated the concept, but had no infallible proofs of the process. Thus relgionists could say silly things like: Do you really believe human being, you, actually descended from an ape? and be fairly convincing. Most people were ashamed of such an ancestry. Nobody asked the monkeys how they felt about the comparison.
Inherent in Evolution is the idea of speciation. Thus every time a species evolved there was a chance that it was an improvement on previous manifestations. Between the Chimp and Homo Sapiens I are innumberable steps which have since disappeared. If that were true then religious concepts which insisted that God created Man whole and entire without evolving were false. If Creation was false than Religion was false. There were many who empowered by the concept of Evolution and reasoning from appearances made the claim that was called ‘race’ rather than species. The genetic differences between the ‘races’ were not yet clear.
Until fairly recent times and the rise of genetics there was no infallible evidence to indicate speciation. Today there is. From 1859 when Darwin enunciated Evolution through the period under examination here, the second decade of the twentieth century, anyone asserting speciation could be ridiculed and destroyed as a bigot by the religionist. Evolution itself was attacked and undermined in the thirties by the Boasian school of Anthropology which is still vital today. (See Kevin MacDonald, The Culture Of Critique, 1998, 2002).
In this period the Evolutionist was in a minority position. Thus when Burroughs came down so strongly on the side of Evolution in his Tarzan series it is very surprising he created no uproar and there is no evidence the series was noticed on that account.
It appears that Burroughs took the broad approach to these social problems. He could see both sides of the issue deciding on the merits of the case rather than the ideology of the situation. As has been noted he was quite capable of changing his mind on vital issues when presented with convincing evidence, i.e. life on Mars. He was a true scientist.
3.
Perhaps around 1910 it began to dawn on a significant number or people for the first time that unlimited and unrestricted immigration was causing unexpected and irreversible changes in the social fabric. The war on Anglo-Saxon ideals, institutions and customs was well underway. Such reactions had been a recurring feature of American society but now there was no West to escape to. In addition industry had reshaped the cities. Farm machinery was reshaping farming practices reducing the need for farmhands so that country boys migrated to the cities. By mid-decade for the first time more people lived in the cities than on the land.
These changes were unwelcome and uncomfortable to a lot of people creating a malaise. Those who viewed Reconstruction for the horror it was as well as those who considered themselves Old Stock were pathologized by the Liberals but their views found expression in books and articles but usually on the defensive side as with Jack London’s Valley Of The Moon and not on the aggressive side which would be visited by condign punishment as heresy.
If one mentioned immigrants at all it was possible to discuss only positive attributes. The Liberal turned a blind eye to the aggression of home countries preferring to see these home places too as victims who needed their protection. As Chosen People the Liberal sees himself as naturally superior to the ‘victims’ but does not perceive his supposed superiority as ‘racism.’
An honest and well meaning writer like Homer Lea who had actually been in the Orient and learned of Japanese plans first hand was pathologized and dismissed as a crank although his prognostications were based in fact as Pearl Harbor was to show.
Some feelings are vague and can’t be articulated. Even as a child I was disquieted by the notion that everyone came to america to escape oppression or to seek religious freedom. I saw but couldn’t articulate the two facedness of this notion. Only in the last decade or so have I found the means to acquire the necessary knowledge and developed modes to express it.
Quite frankly the US was used as a haven for many, many revolutionary groups. Perhaps the American Revolution caused most Americans to look upon all revolutions as beneficent. I couldn’t and can’t see it tht way.
American ‘malcontents’ were told to shut up while a malcontent could come from anywhere else in the world and be honored for resisting repression. I mean, criminals, murderers, mere disturbers of the peace in their own countries. Cranks. East Indian malcontents gathered in San Francisco to plot against the British Raj. Sun Yat Sen lived in LA where he raised funds and was lionized. Homer Lea was recruited by Sun Yat Sen to serve as a general in the Chinese Army. Lea’s story may have been the influence that charmed Burroughs into seeking a place in the Chinese Army.
The United States not only knew of the malcontents’ activities but even tolerated them perhaps abetting them. The US role in European history has been that of a spoiler. Looking upon all colored peoples as victims needing their help Liberals could do no other than work for their interests against the Europeans.
One of the more disastrous actions was John Hay’s Open Door policy in China. At the time in the 1890s the European States were about to partition China into spheres of influence. What the result would have been is anybody’s guess however the world would probably be much different today. Hay’s Open Door policy scotched the partition with the result that China remained a unified State. Of all the turning points one can find in history this is undoubtedly a turn in the tide of fortunes for the West. Subsequent to the Hay policy Chinese revolutionaries were hosted in California. Mexican gun runners operated from the US during the Mexican Revolution as Zane Grey records in novels like The Light Of Western Stars and Desert Gold.
Of course the Irish who called Ireland the Ould Sod and America the New Island acted as one people divided by an ocean. Funds and guns were raised in America and used in Ireland against the British. In the unrestricted immigration of the time Irish revolutionists moved back and forth across the Atlantic. If arrested in Ireland they claimed American citizenship and were released to return to the US.
In 1919 a most egregious example occurred which received no reprimand from the US, while England didn’t even bother to file an objection. Eamon De Valera, the future premier of Ireland escaped the British to be smuggled to the US where he functioned openly. William K. Klingaman tells the story in his popular history ‘1919’ of 1987:
Eamon De Valera, meanwhile, had been smuggled out of Ireland and into the United States, where he was touring the major cities along the East Coast, drumming up financial support for Sinn Fein and the Irish Republic. His reception was nothing short of spectacular. De Valera was given the presidential suite at the Waldorf; the Massachusetts state legislature received him in a special joint session; forty thousand wildly cheering supporters turned out to hear one of his speeches in Boston; and the press seemed to love him wherever he went. After all, he was excellent copy, and news of English injustices in Ireland always sold plenty of papers. As the Nation noted with bemusement, “He gets a front-page spread whenever he wants it, with unexampled editorial kindliness thrown in.” The tall, very thin, dark Irishman brought no message of peace and goodwill to the United States, however. Now that the Peace Conference was over and freedom-loving Irishmen still remained enslaved under the British yoke, De Valera told an enthusiastic audience in Providence, “the war front is now transferred to Ireland.”
So, while the Irish were embattled on the Ould Sod, the Irish of the New Island had enough influence and power to baffle any objections either in the US or England. They were truly functioning as a state within a state in the US and as revolutionists on the Ould Sod. Thus the US influence in international politics was unique indeed.
The Italians also functioned as emigrant workers of Italian citizenship before the War and were an irredentist population within the United States with many colonial beach heads. After the war, assuming the continuance of unrestricted immigration Mussolini attempted to shift the cost of medical treatment for wounded Italian soldiers by sending them to the US for free medical treatment. This is astonishing stuff that gets no notice in history books.
Of course, the most famous instance of dual citizenship of a divided homeland is that of the Jews.
A ship landed in the seventeenth century in New York City, New Amsterdam as it was known then, bearing a hundred plus Sephardic Jews from Brazil. The next immigrant cadre were the German Jews mainly from 1830 to 1850. These two immigrations were small compared to the influx of millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement usually known as Polish or Russian Jews. From 1870 to 1914 they came in increasing numbers. As I have detailed elsewhere the intent to transfer the whole population of Jews from the Pale to the United States was aborted by the outbreak of the Great War.
Jews had always been forbidden Great Russia. However during an expansionist phase Russian annexed the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the North. The annexed areas became the Pale Of The Settlement along with the Polish Jews acquired by the first partition of Poland. Thus Jewish nationalism came into conflict with Russian assimilationism. The Russians, of course, were sovereigns of the land while the Jews were a stateless nationality. The Russians along with the rest of their acquired peoples attempted to Russify the Jews. These along with Poles, Letts, Estonians, Lithuanians and whatever resisted Russification. In point of fact, the Czars had bitten off more than they could chew.
Had the Russians been facing mere dissident peoples they may have been able to manage them. But, along about mid-nineteenth century the political ideology of Communism provided a framework within which all peoples could combine thus submerging their national identities for their political goals. It is true that fifty to sixty percent of all Comunist parties were Jewish but the remainder which was substantial, wasn’t. As part of its ideology Communism discouraged nationality so it was possible for numbers of all nationalities to work together.
The Russians became the adversaries of the Jews, the Czar their bete noir. Thus a remendous undeclared war existed between the Communist Revolution, usually called just The Revolution and the Russian government and people.
By the time the Jewish emigration to America began in earnest in the 1870s the Jewish mind was conditioned by this warfare. Now, all Israel is one. Therefore the German Jews who had preceded the Jews from the Pale prepared the way for those from the Pale. Whole industries were immediately controlled by Jews. The male and female garment industries being the prime example. The work force of these industries was almost entirely Jewish. Thus the infamous sweat shop may be said to be of Jewish origin although it is usually used to defame the United States.
The whole garment industry of the country then was controlled from New York City. We’re talking big money with a lot of it flowing into Jewish agencies sometimes euphemistically called charities. This money in turn fueled worldwide Jewish warfare on Russia.
The Equitable Insurance fraud for instance was caused by the international banker Jacob Schiff who as administrator looted the Equitable of a couple hundred million dollars to finance the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war of 1903-05. The Japanese could not have fought the war without that money. Thus Schiff and his people paved the way to Pearl Harbor.
While the Russians had their hands full in the East Schiff and his fellow Jews engineered and financed the First Russion Revolution. The signing of the Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty was done at Portsmouth, New Hampshire ostensibly by then US President Theodore Roosevelt but under the watchful eyes of Schiff and his fellows.
As I have said simply because a people emigrated doesn’t mean they renounced their original identity. Witness the Irish. As is clear from their intent to evacuate the Pale in favor of America the Jews retained their Eastern European interests. This would be even more manfest after the restriction of immigration at the end of the War.
Like the Irish who used American citizenship to negate the laws of England the Jews used their American citizenship to thwart the interests of Russians, or the Czar as they put it.
The Russians forbade Jewish traffic over their borders in an attempt to contain Jewish subversion. If you were in, you were in, if you were out you were out. In line with European concepts of nationality this was workable. But Jews resident in America using their US citizenship, in this instance, demanded to be treated strictly as US citizens but of the Jewish ‘religion.’ Thus, they said Russia could not refuse them entrance on the basis of their ‘religion.’
The US with its polyglot population all with US citizenship whether Irish, Jewish, Italian or whatever had to insist on the rights of all US citizens. Thus Jews were able to travel freely across Russian borders to coordinate Jewish actions to subvert the Russian State. As I have pointed out, after the Revolution the name Russia was dropped from the State name as it became the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics governed almost exclusively by non-Russians.
The B’nai B’rith had been around since 1843. Then the American Jewish Committee was created in 1906. Within seven years Jewish influence had increased so signficantly that they were able to direct US policy to the extent that diplomatic relations were broken off between Russia and the US in 1913 the year the Liberal Coalition elected Woodrow Wilson as its first president. From 1913 to 1933 the US had no diplomatic relations with Russia/USSR. It is interesting that relations with a legitimate government were discontinued by Woodrow Wilson and resumed with an illegitimate government by his disciple Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On of his first acts as President.
In 1913 the B’nai B’rith created its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League. So there was actually a dual drive to acquire control of the USSR and the USA which one might add came very close to succeeding. And this be a very small but dedicated number of people.
As I point out in Part IV in 1919 the AJC contacted Burroughs undoubtedly amongst a host of others to endorse a Jewish Bill Of Rights. The program was in place by 1920 when this segment of my study ends.
As can be seen the unofficial role of the United States in world affairs was an unsettling and disturbing one of the inactive aiding and abetting of revolutionary movements from China to India, across the border into Mexico while actively aiding if not abetting the Irish against England and aiding and abetting if not supporting the Jewish war on Russia.
To the American Liberal all these revolutionary efforts were being conducted by victims. Hence Liberal efforts at directing American policy were in the interests of any revolutionary group which includes the Socialist and Communist parties. This Liberal attitude continues worldwide to the present time.
Within the United States these ‘victims’ were gathered together under the aegis of the Liberal Coalition. All dissenters whether anti-immigrationists, nativists or whatever were pathologized as mentally unstable people. Insanity then becomes a religious attitude complementary to terms such as heretic, infidel or anti-Semite; terms not to be taken seriously.
Liberalism is a religion thus assuming control over institutions of hgher learning. The University system of the United States was turned from one of educational insitutions into religious seminaries. The American university system of today is a religious system of Liberal seminaries. Only the correct religious view is permitted, any other is penalized.
Now, the Liberals who derived from the Puritans were an Old Testament biblical group who considered themselves the successosrs of the Hebrews as a Chosen People. Beginning in 1870 the original Chosen People began their invasion. It was like two Napoleons meeting in an insane asylum. Each considered the other an imposter. But the Jews had the whip hand over the Liberals as they quickly controlled the communiations media gradually eliminating anything seditious to its belief system. As I explained earlier any writing that casts doubt on the claims of Judaism is anti-Semitist. Americans were conditioned to view anti-Semitism as the worst possible crime deserving imprisonment or expulsion from the body social. What we really have is the reimposition of the medieval Catholic Church in the form of Judaism. Having seized control of the political system of the United States by 1920 the other important object was the discrediting of Science.
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from the flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
And Poe might have added: God from his heaven/ pleasant summer dreams of chosenness from our minds. Yes, Science was the great enemy, the great anti-Semite. It is not particularly well known but Jews are more anti-evolution than even the Christian fundamentalists of Tennessee in the twenties or the Kansans of today. Evolution absolutely denies the fact that the world was created by god 4004 years before Bishop Ussher or the year 5778 or whatever of the Jewish calendar. Make no mistake the notion of the world having been created by god recently is fundamental to Semitic religions. Once it is disallowed the basis of the Semitic religions ends. You can see why they fight so hard against Science.
Science still being the problem religion was cloaked in its guise. The scienfific Socialism of Marx is little more than Talmudic Judaism. Freud’s exaltation of the subconscious is little more than an assault on the conscious rational thinking that makes Science possible. Einstein’s preposterous notion of the ‘fabric’ of Time and Space among others is a disguised attempt at imposing faith.
All of these movements came to fruition in the Second Decade. Einstein’s theories were supposedly proven during an eclipse of the sun in 1919 during which it was ‘confirmed’ that the light of distant stars streamed around immovable bodies. I mean, the Greeks said it: What happens when an easily resistible force meets an immovable object? It flows around it just like water around a rock suspended in a stream. Boy, you have to be a genius to figure that one out- wrap it up in the facric of Time and Space and send it as present to God.
So, the problem still remained what to do with the ‘pathological’ types who gave the lie to the Judeo-Liberal doctrine? Science and Religion cannot co-exist. This is a sea change in human consciousness comparable to the transition from the Matriarchal to the Patriarchal. Good will is not the problem and cannot solve the problem. In 1943 Gustavus Myers devised the current method of interpreting American history in his book The History Of Bigotry In The United States. He thus provided the means to pathologize the non-Judeo-Liberal people. They became irrational, insane, evil bigots. So then one has the people of the book the Judeo-Liberals on one side and ‘bigots’ on the other. So, Moslem-Infidels, Semites-anti-Semites, and Liberals-Bigots. It isn’t rational, it’s religious. Virtue goes with the one; criminality with the other. Once you are accused there is no argument. Confess your heresy and take your punishment. The role model is the Inquisition of the Catholic Church.
Myers began from the beginning hitting his stride with the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s. He essentially made all immigrants victims in the Liberal sense by depicting them as virtuous innocents insanely treated by American ‘bigots.’ Hence the title of his book. His school took root and flourishes today. Oscar Handlin, John Higham, Richard Slotkin.
Handlin’s stuff is irrational. John Higham’s Strangers In The Land is valuable but skewed. The skewing can be easily unscrambled. But Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is of importance to Burroughs and our theme here. The first 225 pages of Slotkin’s book lead up to a denunciation of Burroughs as the premier bigot of American literature actually making him responsible for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam. The first 225 pages are worth reading although you can throw the rest of the book away.
I’ll get back to the scientific aspects of the issue in a minute but, first, as Slotkin concentrates on the Western movie in American culture let’s take a look at one of the premier efforts in the genre, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. The movie was scripted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck or, since this is Hollywood, men who would answer to those names. They are probably jewish. The film perfectly inllustrates the Liberal dogma.
John Wayne plays the Liberal lead as Tom Doniphon, strange name, along with his noble Negro sidekick, Pompey. Lee Marvin plays a deranged psychopathic Anglo named Liberty Valence. Jimmy Stewart plays the long suffering representative of the Law, Ransom- Rance- Stoddard. Rance is an adjunct to Tom Doniphon. Liberals = The Law, Bigots (Liberty Valence) = the outlaws.
Tom can be seen as the abolitionist, justice seeking Liberal aiding the victims. He is on the side of the victims of Liberty Valence (read, say, the KKK) which is the whole town except himself. Tom has his negro valet while he helps all the cute immigrants in town still being aloof from the Southwest town’s sizable but segregated Mexican population.
The scripters assigned the odd name of Liberty Valence to Lee Marvin. Liberty is a positive virtue while Valence means strong- strong for freedom. There is little positive about Valence. He is in fact a psychopathic killer who terrorized the town of law seeking innocent sodbusters. He actually becomes insane when he extends his whip handle just beating the tar out of his victims. Valence is employed by the evil cattlemen (read, say, The South) above the Picket Wire (a river). Why the cattlemen have sent Valence to the town isn’t clear.
As the representative of the Old South and also any stray anti-Semitic clans who may happen to be about, Valence is especially offended by the peaceable but effeminate Rance Stoddard, who at one point actually wears an apron, the man who is bringing THE LAW West of the Pecos or at least below the Picket Wire. Apparently the ranchers don’t need no law above the Picket Wire. Valence harasses and bullies Stoddard who is usually protected by the omnipotent Tom Doniphon but comes a time when Stoddard realizes he has to fight. After all a man’s a man for all that. Don’t know what for though, either his honor or life or maybe to move the plot along. Liberty is goading Rance into a gunfight that will be plain murder, as quite frankly, Rance don’t know how to handle a gun and Liberty does, oh boy.
As the gunfight is filmed from behind Rance it appears that he actually guns Liberty down freeing all the victims of his menace. (The Law vs. The Outlaw; The Liberal vs. The Bigot, The Semite vs. the anti-Semite.) Thus Rance brings the law to Shinbone, that’s the ridiculous name of the town. You can see why Liberty terrorized it.
Later we will see the same gun battle rotated ninety degrees to the right. Ol’ Tom isn’t going to let Liberty gun down Rance, and also he doesn’t want Rance to be guilty of bloodshedding so he takes the guilt on hisself as he knowed he would. He and his faithful Negro sidekick cum African gunbearer Pompey (This may be the reason Cassius Clay changed from his ‘slave’ name to Mohammed Ali, another slave name) are standing in an alley opposite Liberty’s left side. Tom is in the middle of the side street, Pompey bearing the gun, stands against the side of the building. With breathtaing precision just before Liberty shoots, Tom, in that awe inspiring quitet uncontradictable authority of his says like the Great White Hunter of Africa: Gun, Pompey. The ever faithful Negro flips the rifle across to Tom who snatches it from mid-air with is right hand, puts it to his shoulder and snaps off a head shot through the temple that killed Liberty Valence. (Evil disappears from the town.)
In order to kill Valence Tom had to shoot him in the left side of his head yet none of the dumbheads of the town wonders how Stoddard accomplished this miraculous feat.
At any rate Rance is known as the man who shot Liberty Valence. The old peace loving legalist is carrying his burden of blood guilt pretty well until he is nominated to be the new Congressman from the Picket Wire/Shinbone district (There’s a joke in there somewhere isn’t there?) and from whence he can put those damnable evil, bigoted ranchers in their place. But damn it, he’s got blood on his hands; how can he serve the people in Washington since he is impure? This mght have ruined a very promising and lucrative career and perhaps a good movie but Tom takes this moment to tell Rance the True story of the man who shot Liberty Valence. Rance had to be told this.
‘Hot diggity-dog!’ Exclaims Rance trampling over Tom in his hurry to be the next and first representative for Picket Wire. There may have been gold in them thar hills but it was as nothing compared to the gold to be found in Washington D.C.
Like a good myth the movie can viewed on several different levels. At face value the story is the story. It doesn’t take much to view the film as a satire while on another level as a black comedy, or a wry commentary on the difference between the way things appear and the way they really are.
But on the allegorical level in which I am viewing the story it allegorized the Judeo-Liberal vision of America. Tom/ Rance represents their vision of themselves while Liberty is ther vision of bigots/anti-Semites. I don’t know about the writers but John Ford was certainly able to see it that way.
As a religious metaphor the movie expresses the Judeo-Liberal vision of itself. That vision can only be realized if science can be disposed of because science, the truth, is the greatest anti-Semite of all. As Poe realized Science disposes of the idea of God. Without god there is no Judaism or Liberalism. One or the other has to go.
As I have said technological applications of science weren’t actually a threat but Evolutionists like Gall, Darwin and Dalton were. Gall was the man who first enunciated a theory that the different areas of the brain controlled different actions or responses. In Steven Pinker’s terms he discovered the brain was more than a meatloaf.
Darwin proposed the idea of evolution while Francis Galton proposed the idea of Eugenics. As I said before, revealed Religion arrives complete and entire being a product of the imagination no different than Tarzan Of The Apes. Science has to be built up step by step. Gall, Darwin and Galton took the first developmental steps and while true in their limited way were easy to attack.
Gall’s exploiters developed the theory of Phrenology which is of course unsupportable so If anyone has heard of Gall he is immediately discredited for Phrenology, something he didn’t do.
Going into the Second Decade Darwin and Galton had great credibility, if being in minority positions, although Eugenics was very well received by every shade of the political spectrum from far left to far right. Richard Slotkin bases his attempts to discredit Edgar Rice Burroughs and all non-Coalition writers over Evolution and Eugenics.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is usually considered a fantasy writer. One could hardly consider the writer of the Mars, Venus, Pellucidar and Tarzan series anything else. Fantay writers are not usually taken very seriously being relegated to the non-literary end of of the fiction spectrum. So then, one asks, why does a Myerian Judeo-Liberal like Richard Slotkin devote so much effort to prove that Edgar Rice Burrughs was ultimately responsible for the My Lai Massacre?
The simple answer is that Burroughs is one of the most influential mind forming writers of fiction, worldwide, of the Twentieth Century…and counting. There have been serious efforts to designate Burroughs as a bigot and an anti-Semitist. The editions of the copies you read have actually been bowlderized. Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is a serious attempt to pathologize Burroughs.
Gunslinger Nation Is the third volume of a trilogy on violence in America, a never ending tiresome concern of the Coalition. Slotkin is more at home in the nineteenth century of the two first volumes than he is in the twentieth century of this volume. He should have suspended his pen after the second volume.
He not only has a shallow appreciation of his theme but he admits it. The remaining 400+ pages succeeding those on Burroughs are based, I suspect, on one time viewings of several hundred Western movies. At least he says he’s seen them. His analysis of categories within the genre and individual films leaves much to be desired.
He admits that he read no, or very few, Western novels from 1900-1975 because the field is so vast no one could be expected to do it.
His nineteenth century material, if skewed in interpretation, is admirably presented. By rotating the images 180 degrees one can obtain a fairly accurate picture of his subjects. His presentation on Buffalo Bill and his Wild West was really quite good. His views on Fenimore Cooper and the Dime Novelists were attractive if prejudiced.
By the time he gets to Burroughs of whom he has cursorily read a dozen novels or so he is both uncomprehending and imcomprehensible. He has made no effort to understand the man yet he comes to preposterous conclusions. As Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness which gives the lie to the Religious Consciousness Slotkin attacks on the scientific level.
He attacks through Gall, Darwin and Galton. The Liberal Coalition using its religious mentality is able to condemn in others what it applauds in itself.
The mentality is quite capable of including Burroughs, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler in one breath as though all three men were on the same level. What they call crimes in others they call virtues in themselves.
Thus, during the French Revolution a factory was organized in Paris to make footwear from the skins of murdered aristocrats. The fact has been suppressed while the story of the lampshades made from the skins of enemies of the Fascist State is held as inhuman.
The great hero of the Revolution, Victor Hugo, writing in his novel 1793 during the 1860s about the massacres in the Vendee quite bluntly states that those people were in the way of the realization of the Utopian Communist State and had to be removed. What was fact in 1793 was true in the 1860 mind of Victor Hugo, exercised by the Communists after 1917 and by extension is still applicable today. Yet all other exterminations are evil in the Coalition mind. Their own religion justifies their actions as justified sinners.
During the second and third decades Galton’s ideas on Eugenics had become the vogue. The use of Eugenics by Hitler and the Nazis is used to discredit the concept and yet Reds of all hues including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were enthusiastic Eugenicists.
Joseph Stalin, the greatest Red who ever lived, rather amusingly embraced Eugenics. (see: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=2434192005 )
In the 1920s before Hitler, Stalin ordered his scientists to breed a new super warrior. “I want a new invincible human being, insensible to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”
You can see where this leading I’m sure. Apparently Stalin had been reading Burrughs’ Beasts Of Tarzan because he ordered the scientists to cross a human and an ape to create his New Order warrior. Imagine a couple divisions of these shaggy haired ape men trudging through the snow behind a line of tanks with a AK 47 in one hand and a frozen banana in the other.
At any rate Slotkin wishes to link Burroughs up with these ideas that Liberals themselves promoted. As the second decade wore on a number of writers dealt with these emerging problems of the age. The two most prominent American bete noirs of the Judeo-Liberals are Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his The Rising Tide Of Color of 1920. As these men are scientists they were labeled ‘bigots’ which is to say heretics or anti-Semites by the Liberal Coalition.
It is not impossible that Burroughs may have read these books but there is no indication he did so so that there is no confirmed connection between he and Grant and Stoddard. As I read Slotkin he believes that Burroughs is complicit with both Madison Grant and Stoddard. Further there is no doubt Slotkin believes all three men are bad with evil intent. As the Scienfific findings of these men contradict the religious tenets of the Myersian Liberal Coalition I suppose Slotkin can do no other. How he manges to lump Burroughs in as an evil malicious bigot seems a stretcher.
In the first place although the findings of Grant and Stoddard are offensive to Slotkin and the Liberal Coalition they nevertheless show the honest unbiased scientific results of the research of honest scholars who are no less decent and honorable than any of the Liberal Coalition. Grant’s work is an essay into proto-genetics for which subsequent learning shows no fault. Stoddard’s work is an excellent faultless political analysis which has been borne out by subequent developments.
While the Liberal Coalition has chosen to pathologize and demonize all three of these writers their opinion should just be waved aside, disregarded as irrelevant. Their opinions should be marginalized. Grant and Stoddard are good and honorable men.
When I first read Slotkin’s analysis of Burroughs I was outraged and then baffled. I rejected the criticism but as Slotkin obvously believes this stuff although he poorly documents it his notions were filed in the bck of my brain while I began to search for his reasons.
From a scientific point of view Slotkin has no basis for his claims but when one lays the Judeo-Red-Liberal matrix over the science all becomes clear. This is a conflict betwen Arien Age religion and twentieth century science.
If one looks closely at Burroughs one will find he has embraced science and rejected religion thus immediately becoming classified as a bigot/anti-Semite in their eyes.
While Burroughs was from the North he is not in full sympathy with abolitionist and Liberal ideals. he appears to reject the harshness of their attitude toward Southern Whites. As in Marcia, John Hancock Chase from Baltimore living in New York City seems to be an attempt to reunify the country according to the ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and his Reconstruction novels and D.W. Griffith’s movie The Birth Of A Nation. To merely be sympathetic to Southern Whites is to deny the victimhood of the Negroes which arouses the animosity of Liberals. Burroughs has thus identified himself as a ‘bigot, heretic, anti-Semite’. He is plainly the enemy of the Liberal Coalition.
And, then, while Burroughs didn’t join organizations like the A.P.A.- American Protective Association- still, like his fellow writers Jack London and Zane Grey he regretted the passingof Anglo-Saxon dominated America. He hated to see the Old Stock in decline. Thus in the Myersian sense he becomes pathologized as a ‘bigot.’ From the Liberal point of view Burroughs is clearly guilty and should be banned from literature. Put on the Liberal Index. However one has to accept the Liberal point of view to think so.
He rejects all religion but as to whether he specifically singles out Catholics, Jews or any other sect I don’t believe that there is a shred of evidence.
One can’t read with his contemporaries eyes so perhaps what isn’t so clear now leaped out of the page then. Burroughs ruminations on Eugenics, especially in the pages of Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, may then have been more obvious to them than to us. But at the same time his opinions wouldn’t have been offensive to them. As the Liberals accepted Eugenics then as readily as anyone else it would seem that the present emphasis on Burroughs’ fascination with the subject arises primarily from the Liberal rejection of their own past although it is still possible that what contemporary Liberals accepted in themselves they rejected in others as they do today.
While I originally rejected the notion that there was any reason to suspect Burroughs of being an ‘anti-Semite’ I think that if one is looking for indications from the Coalition point of view one can find them. As I point out in Part IV the American Jewish Committee contacted him in 1919 while there are passages in Marcia Of The Doorstep that the Coalition could construe as anti-Semitism and for which Burroughs was possibly punished.
Finally Burroughs as a follower of Teddy Roosevelt rather than Woodrow Wilson might have been suspect. The period after the Great War when it became evident that a very large percentage of the immigrants did not really consider themselves American’s caused TR to remark that America had become merely an international boarding house. Quite true but who would have thought anything else was possible? Today the term ‘international boarding house’ might be interpreted as Diversity or multi-culturalism. TR was head of his times.
The period ending in 1919 also represented the changing of the guard. Buffalo Bill died in 1917 taking hs mythic Wild West with him to the grave. He also represented the end of the first America. The Anglo-Saxons who had won the West. Of course the winners of the West were not nearly so Ango-Saxon as represented but in general it was true. There are almost no non-Anglo-Saxon names in the novels of Zane Grey other than Mexican.
Also in 1919 TR himself passed away just as he was scheduled to be the Republican Presidential candidate for 1910. His loss was keenly felt by Burroughs and his friend Herb Weston. I doubt TR could have adapted to the new problems America was facing even as well as Warren G. Harding did. How TR might have interpreted the challenge to American Democracy of the Liberal Coalition isn’t too obvious.
4.
Recapitulation
In 1066 and succeeding centuries the Norman Conquerors enslaved the Anglo-Saxons of East Anglia which was an affront deeply resented. Take a lesson.
In the sixteenth century when the printed Old Testament became universally available the East Anglians identified with the enslaved Hebrews of Exodus. They elected themselves a Chosen People and developed the compensatory Utopian attitude of inherent virtue as the Chosen People Of God.
In the seventeenth century New England was settled by emigrants from East Anglia. Not just English but East Anglians. Virginia was settle by descendents of the Norman conquerors of 1066. The Virginians once again chose slavery as the method of labor. First indentured White people then Africans.
While Utopian ideals developed in New England the abolitionist movement began which resulted in the Civil War-War Between The States. War between regions or actually a war between ideologies. There was no chance the South was going to discontinue slavery anythime soon no matter what anyone says.
In revenge for 1066 the Cavaliers (Whites) of the South were absolutely crushed giving up all rights by surrendering unconditionally.
The nascent Liberal Party of Puritans elevated the Africans over the Cavaliers thus establishing their protectorship over the ‘victims’ which is characteristic of the faith while establishing their power over dissident Whites. Thus the Liberals ultimately aligned themselves with all colored revolutionary movements in the world against White European conquerors.
Within the United States they viewed immigrants as ‘victims’ of the Old Stock pathologizing the Old Stock as ‘bigots’ no better than the Cavaliers of the Old South or the Europeans. All opponents of of their Liberal religious ideology which included the intellectual mindset of Science thus became wrong headed vile ‘bigots’ who had no right to live. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the utopian Communist ideology became their politics; call it Socialism it comes out the same.
As Edgar Rice Burrough was not a Liberal, not a Communist and not Religious but Scientific he unwittingly placed himself in opposition to the Liberal Coalition. On that basis a serious attempt was made to abort his career while subsequently an attempt to erase his name and work from history is being conducted.
Thus the twenties ushered in a new changed era fraught with new adjustments which were misunderstood or not understood at all.
Burroughs career after 1920 has to be seen in the light of this concealed antagonism that he had to counter without being clear as to its causes.
Thus the contrast between The Mucker and Marcia Of The Doorstep can be seen as a response to two different challenges united by Burroughs personal psychological development.
Go To Part IV:of The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep
Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7: Into The Lost Land
July 6, 2008
Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7:
Into The Lost Land
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Dylan, Bob, Chronicles Vol. I, Simon And Schuster, 2004
Prindle, R.E. Exhuming Bob, VIII The Walls Of Red Wing, idynamo,wordpress.com 2008
Thompson, Toby, Positively Main Street, U. Minnesota, 2008, reprint from 1971
http://www.hibbing.org/dylan1/story.html Life In Hibbing: Hibbing Chamber Of Commerce
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-dec.htm Bob Dylan Is Not Like A Rolling Stone Interview, Spin Magazine, Volume One, Number Eight, December 1985
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan 1978
http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan February 1966
1940
Abe And Beattie
In attempting to put together a reasonable facsimile of Bob’s life in Hibbing and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City as he mythologized it in his chapter of Chronicles, The Lost Land, I have come to the following tentative conclusions.
Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota on 5/24/41. In 1943 he was taken to Hibbing where he lived from then until graduation from high school in the Spring of 1959.
Within the concept of normal Bob had a fairly advantaged childhood. His parents were indulgent buying him anything he wanted while providing adequate pocket cash. Bob’s family was one of the more important in town both within the Jewish community and the town at large. In what appears to have been a tight small town social scene Bob either excluded himself or was excluded from the dominant social groups within which he had a right to be included.
Perhaps Bob’s conception of the Hibbing period could be best interpreted from his favorite movie, Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Bob is said to have seen the movie several times. This was unusual as few people ever saw a movie more than once. He would have been a very impressionable fifteen at the time. Most of us didn’t have the money while quite frankly few movies, if any, were worth watching twice including Rebel Without A Cause. I was seventeen when I saw it and while I was in awe I wasn’t submerged. Of course Bob’s relatives owned the theatres so he got in for free.
As he set up a Dean shrine in his basement which greatly offended Father Abe we may be justified in assuming that Dean was a controlling influence in his life from the time he saw the movie. It is of interest that Abe was to remove the Dean shrine from the basement after Bob left replacing it with a shrine to his own son Bob Dylan ne Zimmerman.
Abe Zimmerman (1911-1968) worked for Standard Oil in Duluth when Bob was born. According to the C of C he lost his job in 1943 moving to Hibbing where his wife’s family, the Stones, could help the young couple. Why Standard Oil should lay Abe off in the middle of the war during a manpower shortage seems to pose a question. As can be seen from the photograph of Abe and Beattie above borrowed from the Flickr photostream of <drineevar> he was a well set up handsome man. He appears to be exceptionally self-possessed, sound in the eyes. Beattie appears to be a haughty high fashion queen which would accord with later facts.
Abram Zimmerman, for such was his name. Usually called Abraham, the name on his tombstone is Abram, and his two brothers Maurice and Paul bought the Micka Electric Company in 1943 changing the name to Zimmerman Appliance. In 1968 Paul Zimmerman told Thompson that they had been in business for twenty-five years which would mean 1943 although the date seems odd.
According to the C of C Abe came down with polio in 1946 requiring a lengthy convalescence. The C of C says that the Zimmermans bought Micka’s after his convalescence but if Paul Zimmerman is accurate it would have to have been 1943. There would be no record of what Abe did for a living then from 1943 to 1946. As Bob says both his uncles served in the Army it would seem that they bought Micka’s going into the Army shortly thereafter leaving Abe to tend the business.
Maurice and Paul became President and Vice-President of the corporation while Abe siginficantly assumed the controlling post of Secretary-Treasurer. Managed the money, paid the bills.
During the fifties at least Abe spent a fair amount of money on both Bob and Beattie. Angel Marolt whose family bought the Zimmerman residence after Abe’s death was trying to tell him of Beattie’s several fur coats, diamonds and Cadillac but Thompson says he wasn’t paying attention.
Thompson quotes Echo Helstrom as saying that the Zimmermans had stores in both Hibbing and Duluth. Having a customer base of approx. 250,000 makes more sense when one considers the amounts of Abe’s expenditures and the fact that the profits had to be split three ways.
The C of C describes Abe as a ‘big man’ in town partial to those big thick long cigars.
The Dylan Home
The couple had enough money on arrival to buy the large nine room house that Bob grew up in so Abe must have been well paid at Standard Oil before he was laid off. Both he and Beattie are well dressed in the picture while Beattie is actually overdressed.
Bob was entrolled at Alice School for his kindergarten year in 1946 at five years of age. The status of Alice School is unclear. Perhaps it was closed the following year or consolidated with the Hibbing High complex as Bob was transferred. Hibbing High housed kindergarten through twelve as well as the Jr. College. Thompson describes it as a huge and rambling building.
So from first grade to graduation Bob was with the same group of students. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to move into town in tenth grade and try to break into that one. While he wouldn’t have known them all well he must have known the entire student population on sight. This presents the problem then of why Bob, who was the son of the Big Man in town, wasn’t included in the top social cliques. Those cliques undoubtedly formed early persisting through graduation. If Bob was in one he was either forced out early or found it uncongenial to remain for whatever reason. Perhaps he thought his Jewishness excluded him. So if something happened we don’t know what it was and won’t; unless Bob tells it’s going to be difficult to trace.
Growing up in a small town anyone with any ambition looks around and sees very limited opportunities. Working for his father wasn’t a viable option. Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer either. Nuclear Science is OK but a lot of those guys are out of a job now too. My next door neighbor when I was a kid for one.
Bob’s mind turned early to music and then to Rock and Roll. While Rn’R went on to conquer the world and become as respectable as such a spectacle could it was definitely considered discreditible and low class almost volunteer outlawry in the fifties. At the very least it was ‘pimple’ music. It took a certain amount of courage to say you liked Elvis Presley. Pat Boone was set up as his rival and you had better say you liked ol’ White Bucks. If you don’t think Elvis was considered a social criminal check out a couple of his movie roles like King Creole or Jailhouse Rock. What was the Colonel thinking? Clown roles, that’s all Elvis ever got.
And then Bob chose as his hero and model Little Richard. People looked at you funny if you said you
Young Bob On Harley
liked Little Richard! I mean, Bill Doggett was a respectable Negro with music you could understand, Fats Domino was as lovable as a chubby ten year old but Little Richard! They hadn’t even created the ghetto he could come out of. His band might have passed but then he opened his mouth. If there was ever a direct challenge to middle class sensibilities Tutti-Frutti was it. Not only was the song incomprehensible it was about queers. Nobody ever quoted the lyrics correctly, while I’m walking around saying ‘Tutti Frutti, I want Rudy?’ What does that mean? I hope no one overheard me. So when Bob gets up, ignoring Pat Boone entirely, and launches into some screaming vision like Rip It Up or She’s Got It or God only knows what, was the crowd taken aback? Chuckle, chuckle.
So Bob having opted for the lifestyle was forced to associate with the hoody crowd or have become a loner. Besides Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider had appeared in 1956 that began a cult of The Loner that peopled the early sixties. These guys, who were by no means rebels but deep thoughtful guys who had a line on the truth denied anyone else and that penetrated sham and hypocrisy sat alone ever ready to resolve a situation setting things right were highly romanticized fellows. There were as many Loners in those days as there were Hawkeyes a couple generations later. So Bob wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of as weird, strange but a Loner. A Loner was next door to weird and strange. Thin line if you get my meaning.
On the other hand the C of C describes the L&B Cafe as a regular jumping Bop Street right there in the heart of Hibbing, Minnesota. Bands set up and played continuously. They knew how to party in Hibbing. The C of C even says there was a radio station in town playing Bob’s kind of music thereby contradicting every other source even Bob. He says he had to go to Shreveport on the radio waves to get his kind of music. In this case I’m betting on Bob.
The C of C tells of Bob’s musical debut like this putting the best possible face on it:
Described by fellow students as polite, easy to talk with, and somewhat introspective, it was a total shock when he pushed back the piano bench and stood up to pound the first notes of a song into the auditorium, electrifying the student body. Kids jumped up, stared at each other open mouthed not knowing what the reaction would be.
Well, yes, they were electried but did they like it?
Rockin' Bobby Zimmerman
According to the C of C, looking back fondly, Bob went over real well with his fellow students. If you like this version don’t check the other sources as this is at variance with every other known account but then this is the Chamber Of Commerce speaking. Up to this point in the C of C account there is no reason for Bob to be as bitter as he is about Hibbing at all.
A note of interest is the reoccurence of Fourth Street in Hibbing, Minneapolis and New York City. Quite a coincidence, I knew there had to be some association with Fourth St. in Hibbing. So far we learn that Bob attended Jewish shule there. Whether the synagogue was also located there isn’t clear. The synagogue Bob attended is no longer anywhere at any rate. Tore it down. It was in the way. Had to go. Even though Bob’s father was the most prominent Jew in town, the President of B’nai B’rith and ADL as well as his business interests, and even though Bob had a mega Bar Mitzvah with four hundred people in attendance some say at the most prominent spot in town, the Androy Hotel, some say at the synagogue, he wished to conceal he was Jewish. This attitude may have contributed to his renouncing the Jewish fraternity house to which he pledged at UM while also hiding his religion in New York. The attitude was strange since he seemed to prefer Jewish musicians around him to the exclusion of goys.
Bob’s father Abe, was quite frankly a marvelous provider, spending very large sums of money on son Bob, wife Beattie and his second son, David. When he died in 1968 the house on 7th Ave., now Bob Dylan Ave. was sold. The owners at the time of Thompson’s visit were the Marolts. Angel Marolt who was at home when Thompson called offered to show him around. One thing he learned was that Bob had a clause in the sale’s contract that allowed him to stay in his old room in the Marolt’s house whenever he was in town. Too weird.
What quirk in Bob’s mind compelled him to live in other people’s houses? Perhaps Rebbe Maier back in 1954 impressed on Bob that Biblical scripture presribes that Jews would live in houses they never built. As an article of religion that injuction is a mind boggler. One can’t predict how anyone’s mind will interpret instruction. Bob who functions out of his subconscious very heavily must have accepted such teachings in literal ways. Rebbe Maier was a definite turning point in Bob’s life. Imagine getting out of school, going upstairs at a Rn’R cafe to sit before the only bearded man you may ever have seen, dressed completely in black with a black yarmulke perched on the back of his crown intoning things like: The Jews shall live in houses they never built and then go downstairs to boogie. Pretty spooky, don’t you think? And then as Bob says, he disappeared like a ghost. Let that roll around your brain for little while and see what you come up with.
Mrs. Marolt was trying to tell Thompson something about Mrs. Zimmerman’s multiple furs, heaps of diamonds, I’m sure all the latest fashions and her own Cadillac.
Bob was indulged to the extent of apparently more than one motorcycle, a car, lots of amplifiers and electronic gear for his bands, whatever he wanted plus free movie admissions and plenty of pocket cash. He must have had a large record collection for a kid as he spent his spare time at Crippas record store ordering the odd title. You can bet Crippas didn’t discount either, charging full bore. At the time (after 1958) stereo was 5.98 and mono was 4.98.
As the profits from a sole Hibbing store divided three ways could not have supported this sort of expenditure, having a store in Duluth could account for it. It is significant also tha Abram died in June 1968 and the store closed a few months later. Was the store a losing proposition for the last few years? Did Bob provide the difference so Abe wouldn’t be embarrassed by going banko? Then with his father gone there was no reason to support Uncles Maurice and Paul?
There really is something happening here, isn’t there?
Also as a petty expenditure for Bob (it would have been huge in my life) according to the C of C:
Almost every day Bob came in after school for his regular snack: cherry pie a la mode and coffee (or Coke.)
And then to dinner? No wonder the young Bob had all that baby fat.
If Echo bought those hot dogs for Bob and bought his story that his dad didn’t give him an allowance she was had in more ways than one.
So, Abe was nothing if not a generous father and husband. Beattie as President of Hadassah as well as a Stone must have made the Zimmermans the most powerful Jews in the syngogue while actually giving she and her husband the means to be petty dictators of the town, I saw something like this in Eugene, Oregon in the sixties and seventies, or, as the C of C says a Big Man and big people.
Bob must have a quirk in his mind to misrepresent his childhood so. He was the Fortunate Son John Fogerty only sings about.
In Thompson’s interview with Beattie he quotes her:
How can you know you have a genius in your house, when all my time is spent trying to feed him and keeping his clothes pressed.
In Bob’s story, The Lost Land, Chloe Kiel is shown ironing Bob’s shirts and at the end of the chapter she ‘slaps’ a plate of steak and fried onions in front of him just before he darts out the door to begin the next chapter, A New Morning, just as in the old days when he returned home from school for lunch and was fed by his mother he darted back to school.
Ironing his shirts and providing free steaks was a signal service for bare acquaintances like Ray and Chloe.
Chloe comes across as cold and indifferent and indeed there is a tinge of resentment and anger beneath Beattie’s statement. Motherly, of course, but there. Still, she doesn’t impress me as any Yiddishe Mama of the Mrs. Goldberg variety. Whether Bob was a good boy or not he does have an ambivalent attitude toward his parents. But then he claims that he was really raised by his grandmother, whether Stone or Zimmerman isn’t clear.
I believe the big change came over Bob with his Bar Mitzvah and I’m not talking puberty alone. According to the C of C Bob attended Jewish shule during his young years. This was done after public school hours. Then in 1953-54 when his Bar Mitzvah was approaching Father Abe sent to Brooklyn, New York to have an ultra-orthodox, almost certainly a Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent to Hibbing to indoctrinate Bob in untra-orthodox teachings. It can’t be any surprise that when Bob exhibited his Jewish reverence after his Jesus indoctrination with the Vineyard Fellowship he chose to show himslef as a Lubavitcher. Welcome home, Bob. The C of C tells it this way:
According to a 1985 Spin Magazine interview by Dave Engel, Bob said it was above the (L&B) Cafe that Rabbi Reuben Maier stayed while giving Bob Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. The Rabbi and his wife showed up one day and stayed for a year while Bob got ready for his big event . The article quotes Bob as saying he would learn Hebrew after school or in the evening for an hour, then go downstairs and boogie at the L&B. After completing his Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi just disappeared.
In the interview Bob tells it this way:
There weren’t many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota. Most of them I was related to. The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of the winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs in the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock n’ roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. I used to go there everyday to learn this stuff either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour, or so, I’d come down and boogie. The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after conducting the bar mitzvah, he just disappeared. The people didn’t want him. He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a rabbi. He was an embarrassment. All the Jews there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturdays. And I never saw him again. It’s like he came and went like a ghost. Later I found out he was Orthodox. Jews separate themselves like that. Christians, too. Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists. God has no respect for a person’s title. He don’t care what you call yourself.
The C of C knows the Rebbe’s name was Reuben Maier and Bob Dylan doesn’t? There were enough people in Hibbing to have a temple and shule but they didn’t have a Rabbi? The Rebbe Maier showed up in time for Bobby Zimmerman’s Bar Mitzvah but what? it was the first Bar Mitzvah in Hibbing’s Rabbiless history? No wonder four hundred people showed up. The Jews in Hibbing shaved their heads and worked on Saturday’s? I presume Bob means they didn’t wear beards but shaved their faces unlike the Lubavitcher in white beard and one of those funny round hats. I serously doubt there were three hundred or more Jews walking around Hibbing with shaved heads in 1954.
They took one look at Rebbe Reuben’s weird beard and outre attire and told him to get out of town? Now that I can believe. Beards in ’54 were a sign of great eccentricity or a psychotic desire to draw attention to oneself. But why in ’85 the mysterioso act? He just showed up to teach Bobby Zimmerman, a complete unknown with no direction home Lubavitcher tales like this: (actually this is pretty standard esoteric doctrine adapted for Jewish needs)
The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is. This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years. Six thousand years of this where man has his way and 1,000 years when God has his way. Just like the week. Six days work, one day rest. The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age, Messiah will rule.
Essentially what we have here is a variant of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy along with a little Hebrew Theology. If one looks real closely one can see the outline of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
According to Beattie Bob knew, oh, two hundred words of Hebrew. So much for several years of shule and a year of intensive training by Rebbe Reuben.
Whether Bob knows or admits it, it must be true that Father Abram sent for Reuben to instruct Bob in mysteries that Abe thought were essential to his vision of Jewish religion while they were not part of the services of the Hibbing congregation.
It is possible that Abram brought the Rebbe in on the approval of the congregation who rejected him. The comment by Bob of working Saturdays may be signficant here. The Jewish sabbath begins on Friday sundown and continues to Saturday sundown.
As a Lubavitcher, Rebbe Reuben could not have tolerated working during the sabbath while the congregation found it essential amidst a gentile population. Likewise beards are an integral part of the orthodox religion so that the congregation also refused to stop shaving. The only thing mysterious is why it took Reuben so long to catch on. Or maybe he had a contract for one year and the year was up. Of course Bob did need help on those two hundred words.
So Bob’s upstairs memorizing his two hundred words while the throbbing beat pounds insistently through the floor. The super patient Reuben and his wife never object. Bob shortly joins the revelers with his two hundred Hebrew words rattling round his skull, steps up to the mike and begins screaming: I’ve got a girl and her name is Echo. Hmmm. Quite an image out there in the Lost Land of Bob.
Now indoctrinated in quaint antiquarian rites Bob is bundled off to Webster, Wisconsin and Camp Herzl to steep himself in Israeli style Jewish living. Camp Herzl was conducted as Israel in America so those two hundred Hebrew words came in handy in that surrogate for summer in a kibbutz in the Holy Land.
The summer sojourns must have set Abram back a handsome fee for the times. Six to eight weeks of essentially summer boarding school does have expenses. Abe apparently was deeply religious: in Protestant circles he would have been known as a Fundamentalist nut. He and Mike Huckabee would have gotten along fine. One wonders if younger son David was given the same treatment.
So Bob from 1954 on is definitely the product of two nations. The world of the Three Hanks as the C of C puts it and this world of Adam, Moses and the Messiah. Bob was named after Sabbatai Zevi the last acknowledged Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century, his Jewish name is Sabtai.
As kids we all have a lot to reconcile, begin working out at graduation. Bob had a double load; he had two Bobs to reconcile. Personalities wander and widen in those years, Bob made a clean split. On the one hand he was the twerp Bobby Zimmerman of whom it may be said: There’s no success like failure while on the other he was struggling to be the super successful Bob Dylan in which he failed to assume the mantle so that failure is no success at all. At least he made this split off persona’s name mean something. As a note, it was not generally known Dylan was Jewish until after Blonde On Blonde.
Thus in his movie Renaldo and Clara he is not Bob Dylan. Anybody can be Bob Dylan he says, you can be Bob Dylan. Toby Thompson thought he could be and did a pretty good job of it walking a mile or so in Bob’s shoes. Sounded just like him.
As remarkable as it is that Bob realized his fantasy beyond anything he could have dreamed and became the hugely successful Bob Dylan he created an entire new set of problems whose solution eluded him. Well, you know, there’s something lost and something gained while it’s hard to know whether the gain was worth the loss. However the money has disappeared from the table.
The result then is Bob looking backward from 2004 to create a fantasy of how it was in Ray and Chloe’s place on Vestry Street in NYC. The chapter is approriately titled The Lost Land or possibly Never-Never Land might have been better. The chapter isn’t a complete fabrication but it is fiction. Something like the various incidents might have happened but not exactly the way Bob tells it. The framing story of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel is pure fiction however. They could not possibly have existed.
Bob tells the whole story of the Lost Land within the reference of Ray and Chloe and their fabulous apartment near Vestry below Canal near the Hudson across the street fromt he Cathedral with its bell tower. Thompson got it right.
A troubling aspect of Bob for me is his insistance on bumming other people’s apartments. This seems to be compulsive behavior.
Bob was actually voluntarily homeless from January of ’61 to October or November of the same year when he and ‘roommate’ Suze Rotolo took up digs on Fourth St. I suspect that Father Abe would have been only too happy to supply Bob with funds to live on Vestry Street if he had asked. Bob is simply untrustworthy in any of his stories. As he said of what he learned from folk music: If you told the truth, well and good; if you told the untruth, well and good also, so in Bob’s mind there are no lies, there is only the truth or untruth both having the same value and whichever is more serviceable at the moment. You can’t believe him.
A troubling aspect of Bob’s behavior is his habit of bumming couches in other people’s nests; gaining meaning, as it were, from other people’s lives. Perhaps that was the way he felt of his life in his mother and father’s house. Or perhaps as a Jewish outsider in a goyish land it was his attempt to insinuate himself in the main stream much as he appropriated Woody Guthrie’s persona. Of the houses I have traced they have all been those of goys; he didn’t choose to insinuate himself into the houses of his fellow Jews. His imaginary hosts Gooch and Kiel are obviously goys.
The Lost Land then is a mythologized version of his childhood and first few months in New York City. To my mind Ray Gooch is a combination of Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, Matt Helstrom and his father. Chloe seems simply to be an idealized notion of his mother. (Study her picture for a few moments again.)
As the Gooch frame brackets the period from Bob’s encounter with Gorgeous George to the apartment with Suze Rotolo it must represent a time frame from sometime in ’58 to October ’61. In October Bob Dylan ceased sponging off others to take up his own apartment.
The only one in this time frame he knew who had a large gun collection was Matt Helstrom. The Helmstroms also had a large record collection that Bob listened to. The couch and apartment undoubtedly belonged to Van Ronk while certain exoticisms of Gooch are characteristic of Clayton. The library of Gooch may simply be the New York City Library of which the long narrow room would merely describe the stacks.
The Southern character of Gooch must represent a time after Bob studied the South in the library since there are several references to his Civil War studies. Gooch himself is a Southerner from Virginia gone North which is a symbol in itself. This can be symbolically described as Father Abe being a Jew in Gentile America.
Here then Bob creates or accentuates the more pleasant aspects of his memories in contrast to the very bitter unpleasant memories of the songs. He tells us a great deal about his dream life but little of its realities. At this point I am of the opinion that the party of Camilla ( who Bob says he gets to know quite intimately) is another fabrication of the based on a true story variety.
As Bob would say, folk music taught him that if what you said was true,well and good; if what you said was untrue well and good also. We may probably construe the Lost Land as both true and untrue while a good folk tale. Even the title has a fictive quality a la Edgar Rice Burroughs.
To round off the period back in the C of C milieu of Hibbing: Bob spent his last summer at Camp Herzl in 1957. In the summer of ’58 he was running back and forth between Hibbing and Minneapolis. At that time he would have become familiar with Highway 61.
In his Junior year of ’57-’58 he took up his relationship with Echo Helstrom. They were going steady hence were not supposed to be dating others. As he was in Minneapolis most of the summer he left Echo sitting home alone. She resented this. As the Senior year began she told Thompson, she took a revenge on Bobby returning his token in public in the hall at school. Boy, that hurts.
The feelings must have been much harder than either Bob or Echo portray them. A key problem area is did Bob spend time in Red Wing Reformatory on Highway 61 below Minneapolis and if he did what did he do to receive his sentence: I examine this more fully in Exhuming Bob VIII: The Walls Of Redwing.
He says in Chronicles that he was absent from school from some time at the beginning of April of ’59. He was back at least by the June 5th graduation. His birthday is May 24th. After that date he would have been eighteen and subject to adult sentencing. For what It’s worth he says in his song that no inmate was over seventeen. I’m suggesting that he spent a month of two at Red Wing returning in time for graduation. Certainly a Big Man in town like Abe could have arranged the graduation if he couldn’t get Bob off that time.
The question is what did Bob do? By the middle of this Senior year it appears that he had been in enough scrapes to be known as a troublesome boy; perhaps living out a Rebel Without A Cause persona. Father Abe used his influence up to that time to avoid unpleasant consequences for the lad.
I believe Bob’s song The Chimes Of Freedom tells the story of his crime. Quite simply Echo set him up. She obviously was not quite as complacent as she tells it. See Exhuming Bob VIII: Walls Of Red Wing.
Returning home from Red Wing his parents threw a graduation party for him. Bob was reluctant to attend the party, perhaps with good reason but was persuaded to do so.
This then leaves a very sketchy account of the three or four months of the summer of ’59 for which Bob provides little information. In Walls Of Red Wing I place his stint at Red Wing in August but that is probably wrong. In any event the period from April of ’59 to September of ’59 needs to be explained more fully.
Bob gives some brief details of his stay at Dinkytown but not much. A little bit of the John Pankake episode while avoiding the important details of his theft of Pankake’s records.
Thompson has some good information from Ellen Baker whose father’s folk song collection Bob used extensively.
Then to NYC and his account of The Lost Land segues into his New Morning.
Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob
June 25, 2008
Exhuming Bob X:
Lubavitcher Bob
by
R.E. Prindle
There’s something happening here
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
-Bob Dylan
Bob En Regalia
In 1979 Bob publicly embraced Jesus as his personal savior. This was widely seen as a conversion to Christianity because Bob went to the Vineyard Fellowship of Tarzana for indoctrination into the Christian mysteries. He could hardly have learned Christianity from Jewish circles although the Jewish group of Jews For Jesus was already active. Pharasaic Jews have always despised Jews For Jesus so that may not have been a viable option for Bob.
While non-Jews may be scandalized by the concept of Jews embracing Jesus there is no reason for them to be astounded. After all Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews in the Jewish tradition. The early Christian movement was entirely Jewish. They were Jews of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Christianity became a universal religion only after Paul reconstructed it shedding the practices most repellent to gentiles while the Hellennic or Greek religion and philosophy was grafted onto the religion which gave it substance and intellectual vigor displacing Semitic stultification.
There should be little wonder then that Jewish Christianity should resurface two thousand years later with Bob as its Messiah.
Bob was uniquely trained for the role. He grew up in a Christian community dominated by the Hillbilly music on the radio with a large and active Jewish congregation. His father thought of himself as a Jewish scholar while heading the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and ADL. His father was covertly ultra-orthodox.
In 1990 Bob wrote a letter to the editor of a publication called Sister2Sister. (Bob’s Unshakeable Monotheism, Part IV, Scott Marshall http://www.jewsweek.com/ ) in which he said:
…until the entire world believes and obeys the same God, there can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.
What that means in the age old Jewish notion that as God’s chosen people they are destined to bring their vision of God to all the peoples of the Earth at which time they will become a nation of priests, the rulers and overseers of all others. The Supreme People placed between God and humanity as demi-gods.
The notion did not necessarily occur to Bob in 1990 but was placed in his mind at a much earlier date. It would always have been present in the synagogue. Anyone who has ever attended Jewish services will be be struck by the insistence that Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples. It is the duty of every Jew to further that work.
Whether Bob had the Messianic impulse before his Bar Mitzvah is the question. It may have been there in embryo. In 1954 as Bob was about to turn thirteen his father, Abraham, who obviously believed the proper religious education was lacking in Hibbing sent for a Lubavitcher Rebbe from Brooklyn to come to Hibbing specifically to indoctrinate Bob in the more recondite lore of the ultra-orthodox. The intensity of the instruction would be virtual hypnosis. It was at this point, I believe, that the Messianic impulse was fixed in Bob’s mind.
The indoctrination had devastating results for the young boy’s character and personality. He went off the rails becoming wild and dissolute. In searching for a means to spread the message he had received he hit on music and from there it led into folk music. Folk music had a special appeal because it was a pure expression of the dominant culture. If one subverted folk music one subverted the culture.
Thus after being initiated into folk at Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota Bob left for the Big Apple, New York City. The Folk scene of Greenwhich Village in New York was a virtual Jewish enclave or colony. A great many Jews were already doing what Bob set out to do. Disoriented by his conflicts between his Jewish and Christian education Bob nevertheless set about changing Folk music, discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms. The Jewish world organization realizing they had something in Bob gave him maximum publicity actually turning him into a messianic figure through television and magazines.
The stresses of intense fame to his personality and character were terrific almost destroying him. Bob retreated at the height of his fame in 1966 after having established himself with three terrifically influential record albums. His mind was now focused and somewhat cleared. Placing a large Bible in the middle of his living room for easy reference Bob and his band worked and experimented with the Folk and old timey oeuvre of the White Christian hill people. Once again retaining the forms while stripping the material of the content, he infused Jewish Biblical content which was familiar to the Christian culture into the material. The immediate result was John Wesley Harding which is a Jewish religious album in tradtional White Christian dress.
The result is quite remarkable and on that basis is an astounding work of Jewish genius. Unaware of what was being done to them White Americans could offer no defense except rejection. There were quite a few of us who walked away from Bob at that point. I can’t say that I understood what Bob had done but I felt the insult to my sensibilities.
Thus, in retrospect, Bob’s so-called Christian period became inevitable as his strategy slowly unfolded in his mind. There is no conflict with Bob’s intense Jewishness in his combined religious entities, or reclaiming the Jewish Jesus for Judaism. Nothing could be more natural.
The preemption of the goi culture for Judaism is the astonishing achievement of little Bobby Zimmerman. Long after the fact there are still few who get it.
Note: The old Jewsweek format has been discontinuted. The text is no longer available on that site.
Conversations With Robin
June 19, 2008
Conversations With Robin
Robin Mark and R.E. Prindle
Conversations continued from Post: Lipstick Traces Part IX: Greil Marcus
OK, OK, OK. I’m getting it, took a while. STONE. Everybody must get stoned. What’s your mother’s maiden name, Bob? Stone. Right. Dylan might be tongue tied. I certainly was. Still am to a certain extent. But, I think one place to start is the religious conflict he had to endure.
His father, Abe, was a fundamentalist religious weirdo. Just because one is Jewish doesn’t mean you can’t be as religiously weird as Mike Huckabee. For Christ’s sake, Bob believes the Bible is literally the word of God. Somebody recorded his rants between songs and published them. Don’t have the book as yet but I’ve read a couple of exerpts. I already know all that crap. Spent much youthful time among the Nazarenes and other weird outfits. They had me for a while but I threw them off. The taste still lingers though. Bob apparently hasn’t. God, how can anyone believe that crap.
Beattie in Thompson’s book say Bob sampled the various churches as well as attending Jewish sabbath. Yes, I can believe that. So he’s got a father who’s king of B’nai B’rith and ADL and a controlling mother who’s quieen of Hadassah. As if this isn’t enough when he turns thirteen his old man straps him to the torture rack, pries his eyelids open with toothpicks and bombards the poor little bastard with Lubavitcher bullroar.
And then…and then, they send him off to be preached Zionist poppycock for a month or two every summer for four years. I can’t tell you how much I hated church camp. I mean, I can, but maybe later.
Apart from the religious issue then we have the personalities of Abe and Beattie. I got a vaguely uncomfortable mother feeling about Beattie from Thompson’s Main Street. I wouldn’t say I didn’t like her but I probably would have been very respectful and kept my distance if she had been the mother of my best friend.
So then, how does Bob tell her and Abe how he feels? Can’t just speak right up to his parents, who can? Consider the successive titles: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Like all artists Bob can combine several different influences into one song or even one line. Highway 61 is nowhere near Hibbing which is situated North of Duluth so if Highway 61 figures in anywhere it’s down at Redwing or perhaps the run back and forth to Minneapolis.
It is mere coincidence that Highway 61 continues to the Mississippi Delta. Has nothing to do with Bob’s thoughts. He can’t express himself plainly so he has a couple accusatory poses photographed looking straight at Abe and Beattie and goes into rants like ‘God said to Abraham…’
All that’s possible.
I’ve been reading on Bob’s religious odyssey in Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey Of Bob Dylan by Scott M. Marshall and Marcia Ford and also Marshall’s solo piece from the web on Jewsweek. Very enlightening stuff. Sounes and Heylin could have blended it into their biographies and given some sense to his later years.
The guy actually believes the Bible stuff literally. When he says: God said to Abraham… he means it. He thinks it actually happened. I spent a lot of time with those people in my yout’. Been there, done that. No thank you.
I am getting clearer on why I thought the Middle Period was so entrancing though. Still don’t forgive myself but I was there so I suppose I had to go through it.
I, Dynamo 