Something Of Value

Book II

Part 4

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion

by

R.E. Prindle

ERB And The World 1875-1950

Edgar Rice Burroughs

     Edgar Rice Burroughs entered a world he never made on September 1, 1875.  He would have some hand in editing the making of the next century or so.  He seemed a less than likely candidate for such a chore.  He was dealt a tough hand to play by life.  It took him some thirty-five years to learn how to play his hand but once he learned there was no stopping him.  He wasn’t perfect, probably had what we call an abrasive personality, and he didn’t always do the right thing but, then, who does?  He worked hard and he walked his dog with an ample leash.  But in this essay we’re not particularly concerned with ERB the personality but ERB the force.

     ERB’s world was made for him.  It was his job to navigate his way through it.  I have already prepared a view of the world and its history in terms of religion and evolution extrapolated from the writing of Burroughs.  It may be of use to give a bit of the local history that had such a profound effect on his development.

     ERB was born in Chicago.  The Chicago that he was born into was one of the seven wonders of the modern world.  There had been nothing like it seen before, not New York City, not Paris, not London, not even ancient Athens or Rome.  The Iron Chancellor of Germany, Bismark, lamented the fact that he would never get to see ‘that Chicago.’  It is hard to imagine the role Chicago played today.  Chicago was unique, both wonderful and terrible. It may be difficult to visualize but for the Chicago of Burroughs’ youth, to the East was civilization and directly to West was Indian Territory.  The Indian Fighters came direct from the battlefield to the metropolis of Chicago.  I mean, Buffalo Bill had Sitting Bull as one of his performers.  Blows my mind.

     As if to prove its uniqueness Chicago staged the 1893 Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair, the fabled White City.  The White City may be compared to OZ while workaday Chicago was known as the Black City.  You gotta work at visualizing this stuff.   The White City was as audacious as Chicago itself.  It only took fifty years to raise this strange, bizarre and wonderful city out of the muck alongside Lake Michigan and it only took a year to build what was really a spectacular purpose built city of some magnitude.  Even more  mindboggling it s purpose existed for only six months then it was discarded like so much waste paper.  Incendiaries burned this amazing effort to the ground the next year.  Nothing was left of this prodigious effort.  It is truly a crazy world.

     Bill Hillman of ERBzine made a valiant effort to present the wonder of this spectacle especially as it affected the young Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It was a valiant attempt and a worthy one opening my eyes to this wonder in ways they had never been opened before, however as good as Hillman’s effort was it couldn’t come close to the grandeur of the spectacle.

     To have visited this incredible fair for few days, a week, or even two was to have seen nothing.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, then 17, had the great good fotune to have spent the whole summer at the fair.  It was the experience of his life.  The world was on display.  Authentic Dahomean villages with real tribesmen brought  from the jungles for the purpose, authentic Irish villages- of course, there were enough authentic Irish around Chicago to staff those so they didn’t have to be brought over- Arab camps, evolution, religions of the world, scientific wonders, everything imaginable and in real authentic detail with real everything and it was cutting edge.  This was not any Disneyland fake.  It was like traveling around the world.  A diorama of realities.  It blasted through ERB’s existence like a tornado across the Kansas plains.  That was how the author of the Oz series, L. Frank Baum, who was in attendance saw it.  It was a regular tornado that transported him to another world- we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

     As Editor Hillman pointed out in his series of articles, the White City was a phenomenon of firsts.  Bill didn’t get them all though.  One he missed was that Frederick Jackson Turner, always be suspicious of three name writers, first presented his thesis ‘The Influence Of The Frontier In American History’ at the fair.  The disappearance of the frontier was as important an event in world history as any.  With the arrival of HSII and III on the Pacific shores all sub-species were in direct contact with each other around the world.  The stage for ev0lutionary Armageddon was constructed.

     In its own way 1893 was as important as 9/11/01.  A world change began to take place.  The previous four hundred years of HSII & III domination began to wane.  As usual the avant guard of writers and artists had a glimmer of understanding; the rest kept walking right along as though they hadn’t passed through the glimmer into this new parallel world.

     The writers perceived things differently.  Among the writers were H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe and of course Edgar Rice Burroughs.  As it is with artists they began writing in terms of the new reality, perhaps without being conscious that they had abandoned the old.  By the mid-teens and early twenties non-fiction accounts had begun to appear.  Most famous were those of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.  Stoddard’s The Rising Tide Of Color pinpointed the issue but after some initial success he was denounced as a bigot and throughly discredited.  It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was talking about but his message was offensive to certain pressure groups.

     In its own way so were the writings of the great mythographers.  With the exception of Wells they were all political conservatives.  Well’s success came as a mythographer before he declared himself a Red/Liberal in 1920.  From that point, which occurred just as the Great War ended, his novels fell flat although his Outline Of History was a great success.

     Every effort has been made to discredit the mythographers, but their creations have maintained a stunning popularity despite Red/Liberal efforts to destroy them.  Lately the Reds have turned to detournement.  In Well’s case, as a member of the prevailing orthodoxy he has, of course, been idolized and eulogized, but they can’t get anybody to buy anything but his science fiction.

     Perhaps because he tackled the different themes of religion and evolution in an independent manner great effort has been made to discredit Burroughs.  Frontal attacks have failed to this point although perhaps ridicule and detournement will be more effective.  The Disney Corporation may be successful in trivializing the Big Bwana unless we counter with a more effective campaign.

     Many thinkers were presenting scientific bases for the analysis of social and historical trends.  Two of the most prescient were Darwin and Freud of whom I have gone to some effort in integrate into my analysis.  These men presented scientific methods, where were real methods, objective bases not based on the inner world of wishful thinking.  I can understand how Red/Liberals wish to cast their web of wishful thinking over the mind of mankind but I don’t understand the unwillingness of people to see through this fantastic projection.  The reality principle has to take effect sometime.

     Yet these mythographic prophets of reality have been scorned or willfully miscontrued.  If one looks at Burroughs’ work carefully he is functioning as a prophet based on scientific principles that were plausible in his day.  Nothing he or any of the mythographers said has been disproved by further scientific advances.

     Before going into this further let us take a close look at Burroughs’ magnum opus Tarzan Of The Apes.  What he had read in evolution to this time except for Darwin isn’t certain.  In 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man he implies he has read Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel and August Weismann.  Lamarck was of the eighteenth century who believed in inherited characteristics.  Darwin published his Origin Of Species in 1859, Mendel wrote his genetic study in 1866 which was rejected by Darwin who eclipsed Mendel until, as the result of Weismann’s studies, he was rediscovered in 1900.  Weismann wrote during the eighties and nineties advancing the theory of germ and soma cells.  It is possible that Burroughs could have been familiar with all four by the time he wrote Tarzan Of The Apes.  Lamarck and Darwin are readily evident.  Burroughs favored the notion of Lamarckian inherited characteristics, which is justly out of favor today.  Thus as an allegory of the ascent of man Tarzan relies heavily on Tarzan’s heritage to explain his sense of his separation from the apes among which he grew up as a feral child.

      In Burroughs’ story Tarzan comes from the finest hereditary stock of noble Englishmen.  Thus according to Burroughs he inherits a number of moral and mental faculties rather than acquiring them.  There is no mistake that Burroughs considered the English to be the crown of creation.  As a one year infant Tarzan’s parents die while he is adopted by Kala the ape.  Burroughs’ apes are not known to any science perhaps representing the ‘missing link’ which used to be a hot topic.

     The idea of an unknown species of ape falling somewhere between known apes and human beings is not as unreasonable as it may sound.  It was only in 1902 that the existence of the Mountain Ape was confirmed.  The Mountain Apes of the Mountains of the Moon had been rumored for some time before the first specimen was killed and the skin brought back. These are amazing anthropoids.  So, within the context of the times the notion of such apes was not all that far fetched.

     Many wonders were thought to be hidden in Africa.  Even as late as 1920 The New York Herald ran an article seriously considering the notion that dinosaurs still existed in the Congo.  While at this day we may read Burroughs with a very large grain of salt much of what he writes about was discussable as possible fact at the time.

     As Burroughs’ apes are evolutionarily above the monkeys and gorillas they may be seen as the last stage of evolution before the First Born appeared.  Burroughs makes a big point that Tarzan passes through the full evolutionary program on his way to realizing his noble English heritage as a fully evolved human being.

     This theme is also reviewed in his The Land That Time Forgot.

     One of the most difficult feats of Tarzan to accept is the manner in which he taught himself to read and write English without knowing a single phonetic value.  However his ability to do so can be explained in a reasonable manner.

     While reading through John Chadwick’s work The Decipherment of Linear B, Linear B is, of course, the written language of the ancient Myceneans and Minoans, which was a terrific problem until Michael Ventris succeeded in breaking the code, I came across this passage:

     Cryptology has now contributed a new weapon to the sudent of unknown scripts.  It is now generally known that any code can in theory be broken, provided sufficient examples of coded texts are available.  The only method by which to achieve complete security is to ensure continuous change in the coding system or to make the code so complicated that the amount of material necessary to break it can never be obtained.  The detailed procedures are irrelevant, but the basic principle is the analysis and indexing of coded texts, so that the underlying patterns and regularities can be discovered.  If a number of instances can be collected , it may appear that a certain group of signs in the coded text has a particular function, it may, for example, serve as a conjunction.  A knowledge of the circumstances in which a message was sent may lead to other identifications, and from these tenuous gains further progress becomes possible, until the meaning of most of the coded words is known.  The application to unknown languages is obvious; such methods enable the decipherer to determine the meaning of sign-groups without knowing how to pronounce the signs.  Indeed it is possible to imagine (my italics) a case where texts  in an unknown language might be understood without finding the phonetic value of a single sign.

     The task before Tarzan was formidable but he had all the time in the world without any distractions.  I do not mean to say that it would be possible for a feral boy to develop this amazing intellectual ability since the feral children found are quite incapable of learning.  But, in Burroughs’ mind Lamarckian notions of inherited characteristics was foremost so that he believed as did most of his contemporaries and a signficant percentage of the population today that these characteristics were operative.

    As one reads one comes across some remarkable things.  Having just read Alexandre Dumas’ Memoirs Of A Physician I came across a tale somewhat reminiscent of Tarzan’s story.  In fact the similarities of some of the details between Dumas’ book and Burroughs’ are quite amazing although I do not suggest that Burroughs ever read this Dumas novel.

     In this scene a young man named Gilbert has met the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in the woods where Rousseau is collecting botanic specimens.  Gilbert does not know who he is talking to.

     ‘You can read and write.’  (Rousseau asked.)

     ‘My mother had time before she died to teach me to read.  My poor mother, seeing that I was not strong, always said, ‘He will never make a good workman; he must be a priest or a learned man.’  When I showed any distaste for my lessons, she would say, ‘Learn to read, gilbert, and you will not have to cut wood, drive a team, or break stones.’  So I commenced to learn but unfortunately I could scarcely read when she died.’

     ‘And who taught you to write?’

     ‘I taught myself.’

     ‘You taught yourself?’

     ‘Yes, with a stick which I pointed, and with some sand which I made fine by putting it through a sieve.  For two years I wrote the letters which are used in printing, copying them from a book.  I did not know that there were any others than these, and I could soon imitate them very well.  But one day, about three years ago, when Mademoiselle Andree had gone to a convent, the steward handed me a letter from her for her father, and then I saw that there existed other characters.  M. De Taverny having broken the seal, threw the cover away; I picked it up very carefully, and when the postman came again, I made him read me what was on it.  It was, ‘To the Baron de Taverney-Maison-Rouge, at his chateau near Pierrefitte.’  Under each of these letters I put its corresponding printed letter, and found that I had nearly all the alphabet.  Then I imitated the writing; and in a week had copied the address ten thousand times perhaps, and had taught myself to write.

      This is surely no less fantastic than Burroughs’ story but because Dumas is considered more credible nothing that I know of has ever been said about it.

     In Tarzan’s case Burroughs makes a point of saying that he had a number of children’s picture books so that he could, for instance match the printed spelling of B-O-Y with a picture of a boy.  In this way also he learned that he was not a freaky hairless ape but an entirely different species.  I cannot, of course, defend the plausibility of either Burroughs’ or Dumas’ story but there is a possibility.

     In some ways the notion of inherited characteristics seems as though it could be true.  In the course of evolution the thrust has always been towards more intelligence.  A species once evolved has its range of capabilities and once those are fully developed no further advance is possible in that sub-species.  It is up to the next stage of evolved sub-species or species even to advance to the limits of its capabilities and so on.  Thus it was not possible for Tarzan’s fellow ape, Terkoz, under any circumstances to succeed in Tarzan’s quest.  The necessary intelligence genes were missing.  Even though Tarzan was raised by apes less evolved than himself he himself did have the necessary inherited genetic makeup to undertake the task with some chance of success.  So, in that sense Lamarck’s inherited characteristics did apply.

     It may be argued that Tarzan couldn’t have recognized the signs as language.  In theory he could have.  Whether in fact he would have or whether it would have taken him much longer to break the code than eight years are of course valid realistic objections.  But Burroughs was writing the story so that against all objections there are methods by which it was theoretically possible for Tarzan to do so.

     This is no small point for the story as the story is, as I see it, an allegory of the ascent of man toward godhood.  Burroughs will repeatedly call Tarzan a jungle god.

     He is introduced to the next evolutionary stage when his ape mother is killed by one of the First born.  Drawn into contact with the FB Tarzan passes through this stage in evolution.  I don’t think there can be any doubt that Burroughs considered the First Born an antecedent level of evoltuion to HSII and III.  While some might inanely cry bigotry, mocern science, which was unavailable to Burroughs, has at least proven the plausibility of the position.

     Tarzan then comes into contact with a cross section of HSIIs and IIIs.  To my mind the differences are presented as innate and not a matter of environment or nurture.  Just as Tarzan must realize his noble English heritage because it is his innate nature so these ruffians are ruffians because of their innate nature.  Burroughs seems to be saying that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

     While withing a particular sub-species I am an environmentalist believing that people beocme what they are for reasons beyond their contro, the majority of mankind, at least those place in favorable circumstances, believe that they are innately better than the rest.  So if Burrughs was srong on this point, as I believe he was, he was in step with the prevailing prejudice.

     Thus under the tutelage of Paul D’Arnot, his French mentor, Tarzan realizes his full potential as a human being uniting the two ‘highest’ branches of what was then known as the White race.  Tarzan can read and write English but not speak it while he can speak French but neither read nor write it.  There’s something going in Burroughs’ mind but I haven’t decided what.  But he tosses off these details in such an offhand manner that all seems so natural there is no reason to note it.

     It must also be remembered that Burroughs wrote at the transition point where for the first time in US history there were more people living in cities than in the country.  The new city dwellers had just reason to long for the rural ‘paradise’ they had just left.  Thus Tarzan having seen all there is to see of civilization snubs his nose at it to return to his beloved jungles and its animals and primitive but honest First Born.

     In a sense then the jungle and the First Born can be interpreted as the farm and the crude but honest farmer.  An idealization to be sure.

     As far as I can see Burroughs was the first novelist, or at least successful one, to treat of evolution by which I don’t mean to say Lost World adventures.  Further he treats with it as established incontrovertible fact at a time when evolution was accpted by few while being rejected by the vast majority.  And I repeat, Burroughs was learned and thoughtful about the subject.  That he was also fanciful is beside the point.

     At the same time Burroughs was offering some serious reflection on evolution he was also presenting some serious thinking on the evolution of religion which is certainly on a par with Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

     Burroughs says and this is seemingly in his hown historical voice that the Dum Dum as practiced by the apes was the source of all social and civil rituals.  As I read Tarzan Of The Apes it seems that Burroughs thinks that Dum-Dums or something just like them really took place.  Of course such round or circle dances are in fact of great antiquity.  Perhaps something just like a Dum Dum did perform a role in the evolution of institutions.

     Following that explanation for the foundation of religious and civil institutions Burroughs goes into a very careful explanation of how Tarzan became the god, Manungo-Keewati of Chief Mbonga’s tribe.  This explanation is very carefully developed.  Burroughs is also very serious and I think believes he has a handle on the truth about the evolution of god.

     As part one of a trilogy on religion Tarzan Of The Apes is followed by The Gods Of Mars and then the Return Of Tarzan.  Gods Of Mars is a condemnation of formal religion with far reaching ramifications.  In Gods Burroughs plays the role of a savior through his character, J.C.- John Carter.  Carter destroys the ancient and flase religion which clearly resembles the Catholic Church, thus being the liberator of Barsoomkind.

     In The Return Of Tarzan he gives a fanciful but reasonable vision of ancient sun worship which would fall somewhere between Munumgo-Keewati and the Holy Therns of Barsoom.

     Thus under the guise of ‘pure’ entertainment the attentive reader can detect a serious attempt to explain evoltuion both special and religious while undermining established beliefs in the manner of a prophet.  It is not necessary to accept it only recognize it.

     I’m sure Burroughs in the light of all the unsetlling discoveries beleives he is a light bringer doing a service for mankind.  I accept him at his own valuation.

     Running through all Burroughs work is an unstated vision of psychology.  One may well ask where this vision came from as Burroughs was not fortunate enough to attend Yale which is two eldest prothers did and which he keenly regretted not having done.  I’m sure the man was reasonably well read in the subject while his views appear to follow rather closely those of his brothers’ partner in the Idaho ranch, Lew Sweetser.

     A very fine article on Sweetser by Philip R. Burger appears in issue #19 of the Burroughs Bulletin, since republished on ERBzine.  Now, Sweetser graduated from Yale in 1889 a little before Freud began his psychological publication and twenty years or more before his books were translated into English.  I doubt that Sweetser ever read Freud, but I can’t say.

     He was fully conversant with a concept of the unconscious and exceptionally well informed on the rule of suggestion and hypnosis.  Whether over the intervening eyars from 1889 to 1920 when he took to the stage as a lecturer he read extensively or whether re reworded his ideas acquired by 1889 I can’t say.  But he had a good grip on the concepts of the subconscious and suggestion including auto-suggestion.

     Burroughs came into contact with him as a 16 year old when he worked on the Idaho ranch in 1891.  Again in 1898-99 and once again in 1903.  Burroughs own views on psychology follows those of Sweetser very closely with add ons from further study.

     If not as systematic Burrughs presents a consistent approach which is as viable as Freud’s but different in the treatment of the subconscious.  Both Sweetser and Burroughs always speak of the subconscious, never the unconscious, while Freud chose to believe in a metaphysical unconscious.

     What I  hope I have shown here is that Burroughs had a fairly mature understanding of life and society when he began to write and which he continued to develop throughout his life.

     While hos own life was lived somewhat erratically his intellectual mooring was much more sound.  It is the latter which is telling for us.

     The importance of his intellect being developed by the time he began writing is that the period of the teens of the twentieth century is when subsequent history took shape.  Just as Burroughs collected the strands of neo-mythographers to give them their new direction so the teens did also for the evolution of the species and religion in both the United States and the world.

     While Burroughs and the other mythogrpahers realized very early that the tide of history had changed it was only by 1916 to 1922 that the concept found expression in an academic manner.

     In 1916 Madison Grant published his The Passing Of The Great Race and in 1922 Lothrop Stoddard published his The Rising Tide Of Color Agains White World Supremacy.  and here comes the division in society that can never be reconnected.  Both Grant and Stoddard are quite serious historians; both are men of good will, both have been seriously defamed by others who object to the resulsts of their investigations.

     These objectors seem to think that their opinion is of divine origin and that any other opinion is not only wrong but evil.  They take a stand not much different fromt he Inquisition and its witch hunting which I have already discussed.  Thus these people want to run dissenters to ground and if not actually kill them at least hurt them so bad or brand them as pariahs that they will shut up.

     A recent example is Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation.  The book is an attempt to squash writers such as Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs.  The first 225 pages of his mammoth book are dedicated to demonstrating that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a vile ‘racist’ who was influenced by the even more vile ‘racists’ Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

     While you can throw away the last five hundred pages of Gunslinger Nation which is inadequately researched and poorly presented, the first 225 pages are fairly interesting if skewed.  A lot of good information of possible influences on Burroughs.  Slotkin’s fine biographical sketch of Buffalo Bill is very informative.

     Slotkin lists a number of Burroughs’ books which he has apparently didainfully skimmed but without any understanding.  If he had read more carefully he ought to have realized that Burroughs’ ideas were fully developed before Grant and Stoddard were issued.  While many of the ideas of the latter writers may have been complementary to Burroughs’ ideas they couldn’t have been formative.

     Further with the customary tunnel vision of the Red/Liberal Slotkin ignores what was happening against which these men were reacting.  Of course he and his contemporaries give this data such a skew as to lack all credibility.

     Like all Liberals Slotkin believes that immigration is a prescriptive right for anyone who wants ‘to share what we’ve made here.’  While not wanting to get involved in immigration quarrels, which are fruitless, I do believe that as I have a right to say who can and cannot enter my home, any country has a aright to say who can and cannot immigrate to their country.  It doesn’t matter whether there’s a good reason or not nor does it matter if rejection is based on the grossest prejudice.  No one has a right to invite himself to your table.  You see why there is no chance of agreement.  So much for immigration.

     Now in Darwinian terms the various sub-species were not only in contact with each other, they were peacefully intermingling in the West and in the West only.  It is important to remember that HSII and III were about to be driven out of Africa and Asia.  The invasive flow was now beginning in the opposite direction only.  While the HSIIs and IIIs had been able to displace the American aborigenes without trouble this was no longer possible anywhere in the world.  The tide against the HSIIs & IIIs had turned.  While the IIs & IIIs  would slowly be expelled from Asia and Africa, Africans and Asians while already in Europe and America would begin to increase their numbers dramatically.

     Today a city of Toronto is 50% what Torontians call ‘visible minorities.’

     Thus while IIs & IIIs began a retreat the other sub-species began an advance into II and III territories while becoming highly organized.  The Eastern European Semites began to arrive in the United States in numbers beginning in the 1870s.  Always politically aggressive, the German Semites formed the B’nai B’rith in 1843.  the American Jewish Committee in 1906 and the horribly bigoted Anti-Defamation League in 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson entered the White House.

     The Great War beginning in 1914 closed off European immigration to the United States but increased the internal migration of the First Born.  It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.  The First Born began to organize on an international basis.  African, Brazilian, Caribbean and American First Born began to act as a unit.  This organization was led by West Indians who emigrated to the United States to agitate.  Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, personated this most important stage of evolution which has led to the present situation.  At roughly the same time, under the guidance of Semitic Jews, the NAACP- Natinal Association For The Advancement Of Colored People- was formed.

     In reaction to these very aggressive developments the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan was called into existence.  On top of all these unpleasant developments the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia in 1917.  Thus a whole new paradigm was formed within just a few years in the teens.  Against this Burroughs’ mindset had been formed by the years from 1890-1910.  the new developments sure appeared to him as a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat.

     The world which emerged from the Great War was much different from that which preceded it.  the balance of world emigration changed, as it were, overnight.  A good harbinger of things to come was The Rising Tide Of Color Against The White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard.  Stoddard’s title was very ill chosen although it represented the emerging reality.  He might better have chosen a more neutral title such as ‘Changing Patterns in World Migration’ or some such.  The book is unfairly characterized as ‘racist’ by its detractors, which it is not.

     Stoddard pointed out the obvious:  that from having been the dominant sub-species the tide had now turned and rather than being a dominant military presence the HSIIs and IIIs had become a minority in a world of sub-species seeking like Darwin’s ratos or cockroaches to drive the others before it.  From having been invaders, Europe and America would now be invaded.

     This is the way of the world:  ;either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom.  A world of equality is a world away.

     Stoddard was the proverbial voice calling in the wilderness.  The only people taking him seriously were the peoples he was warning about.  Confident in teir seeming superiority the HSIIs and IIIs went about their business as if nothing had changed.

     Not exactly as if nothing had changed because the Bolsheviks continued special and religious battles.  Just as Catholicism was infused with Semitic ideals, through Karl Marx, Bolshevism was a Semito-Red/Liberal religion.

     Of the five sub-species by far the smallest was the Semitic branch; they were and are therefore the most threatened.  In order to hope to exercise world dominion, and don’t think world dominion isn’t the question, the Judaic and Moslem religions were created.  The Jews had the daring to go it alone while the Moslems sought and seek to convert the world to Moslemism within which the Semites are the preeminent holy people.  A nation of priests as the Bible says.

     Thus while it might be possible for the largest sub-species as represented by the Chinese to overrun the world much more effectively than the HSiis and IIIs did, it would be equally possible for the Moslems to convert the Chinese with the Semites taking a position analagous to ERB’s Holy Therns in Barsoom.

     Thus while stymied for the time being in the West Moslems were increasing by leaps and bounds in the East.  They may have looked stagnant from the West but they were dynamic indeed when viewed from the East.

     Having been disturbed in their homeland the Chinese and Japanese Mongolids began sending colonies out wherever they could be received and by this time all space on the earth was fully occupied.  This wasn’t therefore the loud noisy colonization of the HSIIs & IIIs  but a more peaceful infiltration.  A lot of smuggling of small groups into the United States and Canada went on, as it still does.  Large colonies were sent to South America.  Peru passed a Chinese Exclusion Act for much the same reason the United States did.  Didn’t really have anything to do with color, it was that the countries were being taken over by foreign elements.  Japan had colonies in Brazil, Colombia and other South American States.These colonies were designed to retain their ethnic origins so that they wouldn’t assimilate.  I’ve met Japanese from Japan via Colombia who were smuggled across the border from Tijuana.

     Thus on the world scene Darwinian clash of sub-species continued  outside Asia while the Mongolids were successfully expelling the HSII and III invaders from Asian homelands.  This is essentially what the much despised Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard graduate, too, was pointing out.

     In the United States the immigrating sub-species had to disarm the dominant Anglo-Saxon hierarchy.  As pointed out, led by the West Indian immigrant First Born that sub-species was organizing its own conquest of America and Europe.  Their own population was increasing prodigiously around the world.  Even in the face of tremendous immigration into the United States the percentage of First Born has never declined but has increased.  Today in the fact of even greater immigration FB percentages have increased to fifteen percent vis-a-vis HS II and III.

     Under the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement between the US under TR and Japan the Japanese ‘voluntarily agreed’ to restrict the flow of immigrants.  The US, a sovereign nation, accepted this ‘compromise.’  The early Japanese immigrants had been nearly one hundred percent male.  These womanless men now demanded women so the other half of the invasion in the form of picture brides arrived swelling the Japanese population past double.  The so-called Issei are the first generation born in America.  As their parents paired up at the same time the whole next generation came of age about the time of 12/7/42.  An interesting immigration fact.  Thus by taking advantage of HSII and III goodwill the immigration agreement was evaded.

     So the flow of populations contesting the same territories with the same Darwinian economic needs came into further conflict.

     The Jewish race of the Semites had been poised to transfer their entire East European population tothe United States just as the Great War broke out.  Now with the war over the Semites renewed their plans.  However there had been problems with immigrants from the Central Powers including their Irish allies during the war which sent shivers down the spines of the Anglo-Saxons.  TR himself voiced the fear that the United States had become merely ‘an international boarding house.’  So people do catch on after it’s too late.

     After a hundred years of unrestricted immigration, a golden period worldwide actually well worth study, the opponents of immigration carried the day severely restricting immigration if not closing the door completely.

     This action enraged the Judaic race of Semites who considered it their go-given right to go where they wanted when then wanted and whether a country wished to receive them or not.  But there is more than way to skin a cat.  The Anti-Defamation League whose ostensible purpose was to prevent defamation wherever it might occur began a defamation campaign against anyone with an independent point of view that conflicted with their own in any way.

     The ADL was lined up with the Communist?Red/Liberal Coalition.  The combinatin effectively split and weadened the HSIIs and IIIs putting the subspecies at war with themselves, something like Cadmus throwing a stone among the indigenous peoples setting them against each other until they killed each other off making the Semitic conquest of Boeotia easy.  Divide and conquer.

     Led by the ADL whith its ever potent charge of anti-Semitism the Liberal coalition opened war on any dissidents.  The idea was to discredit anyone whether they were concerned or merely passive who didn’t follow their program.  Prime targets were Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  ERB made himself conspicuous when in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution he sent around a draft of the Moon Maid which in the original version was apparently little more than an expose codemning the Bolsheviks.

     Stoddard and Grant who were competent scholars and men of good will were nevertheless characterized as hopeless bigots and anti-Semites thereby being easily disposed of.  By the end of the decade they were neutralized and by the end of the thirties disposed of.  Quite naturally the Liberal coalition denied any involvement.

     As the thirties dawned there were major activities affot.  In Asia, Japan which deeply resented HSII & III penetration, began a campaign to drive them out.  Talk about the tail wagging ghe dog, their plan was to conquer Asia from Japan to Australia in the South, and India in the East.  It staggers the imagination.  Yet it was no less than England had done with the same population. But, different measures for different times.

     When TR said ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ the audacity of the Japanese plan which required a very big stick was beyond their powers of execution.  Nevertheless they first invaded Manchuria and then China itself.

     In Europe, in reaction to defeat and the Judeo-Communist threat the Nazis under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 which did not bode well for the world.  In the United States also a disaster as big as Hitler and Nazis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President.  That did not bode well for the United States.  The world was then primed for the big explosion.

     Perhaps because of the concept of Manifest Destiny under which the Red/Liberal tide was supposed to roll over the North American continent, jump the Pacific then race across China and Asia to return again to America in an unbroken wave of triumph the Red/Liberals looked upon the Chinese as a swell people who would offer no resistance to their goals, indeed, embrace and forward them.  Thus in some sort of Disney fantasy China was seen as complicit in the Liberal design.

     FDR was one devious son-of-a-gun.  As the good guys were being attacked by the Japanese bad boys Roosevelt took it upon himself to aid the Chinese with American wherewithall.  It would have been better to let the two combatants exhaust themselves and keep our ‘limitless’ resources to ourselves.

     Remember that the Japanese hatred of the West was caused when the United States forced them out of their seclusion at gunpoing thereby emasculating them.

     Now Roosevelt was trying to thwart their ends by disgorging America’s wealth on China.  If you free your mind from false moral assumptions you wll see how stupid this was.

     As an American I can do nothing but deplore Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor but as a psychologist and analyst I can see nothing but its inevitability as the result of the US’s inconsiderate actions.

     The Japanese simply had to try to put a stop to American aid to China.  Whatever the proof may be that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor before hand, if he didn’t know he was provoking such an attack he was denser than any man has a right to be which I don’t think he was.

     In Europe the situation was intensified when the Communists elected sympathizers to most government who then formed a Popular Front against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Spain.  The Roosevelt administration was a Popular Front government.  On the religious front it was competition between Communism and established faiths.

     To all appearances the Judeo-Communists had the Axis surrounded.  Even before Hitler was elected the Jews of the United States were working hard to subvert him.  Assassination attempts had already taken place.  When FDR was elected, as with all Popular Front governments the Jews urged the United States to take first strike action against Germany.

     As part of this program in the United States the Judeo-Communists demanded an Un-American Activities Committee by which unamerican meant non-Judeo Communist.  In 1938 they succeeded when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created.  To their disappointment the chairmanship escaped them going to a member who corrected believed that Communists were a bigger threat than Nazis.  This infuriated Roosevelt.

     When was was declared in Europe the American Judeo-Communists were for intervention.  They changed their tune after the German-Soviet pact then changed back again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

     As can be plainly seen what is at stake here are sub-special interests rather than national ones.  On 12/7/41 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  All the sub-species were at war.

     The War fatally weakened the HSIIs and IIIs much as the percipient Lothrop Stoddard had predicted.  In the aftermath of the War HSIIs and IIIs were expelled from Asia.  Although preifly garrisoned with American troops there was no other action taken against Japan other than that they were set on their economic feet.

     In 1948 the HSIIs and IIIs were driven from India.

     In 1948 the Judeo-Semites occupied Palestine.

     In 1948 the Chinese Communists were clearly going to be victors in China thusputting the Chinese squarely at odds with the West.

     While for a few years the United States was in the enviable position of arbitrating world affairs, it chose to favor the non HSII and III subspecies over the ‘colored’ peoples thus further weakening HSIIs and IIIs.

     When Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 there had been little happening in his literary and business affairs for a decade.  The only thing keeping the Burroughs literary legacy alive was his continuing popularity with the masses.  You and me.  But they could find few editions of any of the corpus to buy.

     From 1945 to 1963 there was little of his literary oeuvre that was available although demand continued strong.  For some strange reason ERB, Inc. refused to issue titles.  Then in 1963 publishers seized on expired copyrights and the second boom in Tarzan began.  Once more his message contained something of value for his readers.  Let us now begin Book III of Something Of Value which cover the period from 1945 to 9/11/01 and the closing of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new.

The Age Of Aquarius was dawning.

A Critique

Exhuming Bob 2-2

Detourning The Folks

     Greil Marcus has written of detournment extensively especially in his Lipstick Traces.  The French word means hijacking, rerouting or diversion, or in other words changing the direction of the flow or meaning.  Thus one strips an object of its familiar values and replaces them with others but leaves the object intact.  In a conflict of cultures the question becomes who will assign the values or meanings to objects and words.

     I will use as a starting point for my purposes here H.L. Mencken of the twenties.  The values into which immigrants migrated were those of the Anglo-Saxons.  From the immigrant viewpoint the Anglo-Saxons detourned their languages and cultures attempting to replace them with English and Anglo-Saxon values.  The inevitable result was that immigrants felt that they had been devalued and demeaned.  So it is no wonder that having recovered some balance by the end of WWII they fought back by attempting to detourne Anglo-Saxon culture in their favor.

     This is nowhere more apparent than between the Jews and Angl0-Saxons.  No matter whether you place the conflict between the Old Dispensation or the New Dispensation the Jews always view themselves as a separate, independant and potentially dominant culture.  Hence the drive is always first for autonomy and then detourning the host culture to reflect Jewish laws and customs, hopefully making Hebrew the official language.  To Jews, like Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan then ‘freedom’ means the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon law and culture with Jewish law and culture with the Jews as arbiters of the fate of what become essentially subject peoples.  The Jews can never be ‘free’ no matter how unrestrained they may be so long as they are subject to others legal and social systems.  This is the central problem the United States and the West refuse to face.  The same is true of the Semitic Moslems.  It is the purpose of Moslems to detourne Western culture for a Moslem Culture.  It is quite simple.

     By the time H.L. Mencken was making his rise Anglo-Saxon pride was at its maximum.  I haven’t been able to determine whether Mencken was Jewish but he allied himself with the Jews making common cause with them.  The approach naturally was to defame Anglo-Saxonism.    Mencken naturally chose the least sophisticated  Anglo-Saxons to represent the whole.  Thus he went to the mountain folk of Appalachia and the hill country all along the Line.  He began to ridicule these people as representative of all Anglo-Saxons.  I mean, he was mean; he was vicious; his Jews caused a huge fuss for much less criticism or in their terms- defamation.

     Expanding the arena, using these rural folk as their model the Communists then picked up on these people with the least possibility of education as the example of Anglo-Saxonism.  In 1932 and 1933 following Mencken’s example Erskine Caldwell, a Communist writer, published two mammoth best sellers, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.  These books were especially mean and vicious making Mencken look laudatory in comparison.  Perhaps using Mencken and Caldwell as inspirations a Jewish cartoonist by the name of Al Capp created the L’il Abner comic strip in 1934.  This strip also ridiculed Anglo-Saxons but in a less demeaning manner that not only didn’t offend the majority but actually pleased them.  There were some few of us who saw through the sham but there was nothing obvious enough that the majority could see.

     Capp would be convicted on a morals charge late in his career that effectively ended his influence.  The motif was carried forward on television in the series Archie Bunker.

     Now, the Anglo-Saxons used to represent the whole were the custodians of the Folk music that was so revered by the New York City Jews of the late fifties and early sixties.  So you actually have Jews imitating Hillbillies.

      The vilification the Mountain Folk endured actually shamed the city Anglo-Saxons causing a dichotomy in their character.  They rejected the Mountain Folk as representing all Anglo-Saxons.  This is made quite clear in Caldwell’s novel when his urban relative throws his rural cousins out of his house and tells them to never come back.  Something like a son testifying against his father.  The Liberal-Conservative split was given a difinitive form.

     The Mountain Folk formed what Greil Marcus calls the Weird Old America.  After the Roosevelt administration was elected and the New Deal was established as a continuation of the Wilsonian New Democracy Jews flooded back into Washington as under Wilson.

     During the twenties as radio became a reality and recording technology became more widespread and available a number of Mountain Folk and/or White Trash as they were alternately known, recorded their distinctive music in their own voice.  Nor was this music ill received, many of the recordings were huge sellers according to the standards of the times while some like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family became very successful recording acts.  Thus what was known as Hillbilly music until 1954 came into existence.  For whatever reason whoever controls these things thought the term Hillbilly was insulting so the various rural flavored musics were grouped under the term, Country and Western.  Hicks are hicks to me whatever you call them,  Hillbilly or Country, I’ve been called worse.  Having ancestors that came down from the Kentucky hills I have no objection to my Hillbilly ancestry.

     The Anglo-Saxon dichotomy was such that those who were shamed by Communist efforts had an extreme aversion to Hillbilly or Country music that they considered ignorant while professing to admire the Blues simply because it was performed by Blacks even though the intellectual content was well below that of Hillbilly music.

     Nevertheless the Hill Folk were the custodians of the old English folk traditions.  Folk music was then separated from Hillbilly music and approved on that basis.  Thus after the Roosevelt administration was installed in an effort to counter the Depression certain cultural programs were developed.  One involved the attempt to preserve the quaint customs and music of the Hill Folk and the rural Blacks.  These two peoples were treated as anthropological specimens on the same level as Tobriand Islanders and others.

     The New Deal of the Roosevelt administration was a direct continuation of Wilsonian New Democracy.  It was as though they’d never been gone.  With the creation of a huge new bureaucracy Jews came flooding back into Washington as they had in the two Wilson administrations.  In many if not most cases these people were the ones sent out to deal with our homegrown anthropological specimens as Superior to Inferior.  Sort of a domestic Peace Corps.  Yes, they did profess to revere the music of these simple folks.

     So Folk Music always had an honored place in Anglo-Saxon cultivated circles perhaps spurred to some extent by the ‘field’ recordings of the New Dealers.  Folk played a prominent part in popular music from the end of WWII on.  Foremost practioners of the genre were the Almanac Singers and their successors The Weavers.

     A key member of both groups was Pete Seeger.  Pete was both Jewish and Red.  This was a bad combination during the post-war anti-Communist reaction.  While making hits of a number of Leadbelly songs under Seeger’s guidance The Weavers had a major success with the Jewish melody Hava Nagila.  It was a catchy tune.  I liked it.

     Capitalizing on this success The Weaver’s under Seeger’s guidance concocted a ‘folk’ tune called Song of the Sabra celebrating Jewish ‘pioneer’ efforts in Israel.  Apparently the Sabras were some kind of hobo outfit that sat around campfires and ate stew a lot.  Thus the effort to detourne American Folk Music began.  The Song of the Sabras was so egregiously promotive of Israeli/Jewish interests that the song caused a big reaction.  If I remember correctly it was staged at least once on a TV version of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade.  That’s where I got the camp fire bit as Pete roasted his weeny and sang.  Whether it was an extra or supposedly in the Top Ten I can’t remember.

     Somewhere about then Seeger and The Weavers were found to be subservice giving a bad name to Folk Music as long as the genre lasted in 1966  or ’67.  The Weavers disappeared from the air waves.  However at least one member would be instrumental in guiding the musical direction of the Kingston Trio.

     Folk music continued strong between the demise of The Weavers and the emergence of the Kingston Trio both as popular music and ‘purist’ Folk.  The greatest of them all was Lonnie Donegan who had a successful career in the US and a tremendous impact on the British scene from England to Australia as Skiffle Music.  Josh White, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders among others, one might add Mitch Miller, had many memorable folk tunes competing equally with Rock and Roll if not its superior.  If one considers the Presley Sun recordings objectively they also can be seen as Folk or highly influenced by Folk.  After all Elvis was known as the Hillbilly Cat.

     The Kingston Trio with their Tom Dooley that was an actual sensation in 1958 sort of broke the taboo against Folk music although the Kingstons were plenty subversive.  The great Chad Mitchell Trio emerged at this time also as an even more politically subversive group but also with a popular sound and enough bite to defuse Dylan’s claim to have introduced serious lyrics into popular music.  The Chad Mitchell Trio is probably running neck and neck with the Kingstons as my favorite folk groups although Terry Gilkyson along with the Pozo-Seco Singers are right behind them.  The old Seekers from Australia are hot stuff too.

     So that brings us up to Grossman’s Gate of Horn in Chicago of ’58 and the founding of the Newport Folk Festival in ’59 as well as Dylan’s entry into the New York Folk Scene in ’61.

3.

     After WWII the Jews had introduced the raw form of multi-culturalism designed to replace the Anglo-Saxon model of society with the Jewish.  With the election of the Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy it appeared that the Anglos had been defeated. 

     The next phase of the Jewish program was put in place.  The thing was to detourne or hijack American culture. 

     Detourning Folk music was part of it.  The study of Dylan concentrates on the New York City East Village group that was virtually Jewish with its specific outlook.  Actually the Folk scene was very diverse and different in its emphasis in each locale.  Bob would focus the entire Folk movement in himself.

     Boston with the Mel Lyman family and Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur was quite different from NYC.  The strictly commercial LA scene with Randy Sparks’ New Christy Minstrels had its own flavor.  In San Francisco Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and others had credentials that easily matched those of Dylan.  The whole San Francisco Sound was Folk based.

     The top bands like Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio and semi-pop groups like the Brothers Four and the Christy Minstrels really carried the banner for folk.

     And then there was the Country or Hillbilly faction that was considerable.  Great old tunes like Jimmy Brown The News Boy were Country smashes.  Hank Snow recorded a passel of old Folk songs like Nobody’s Child.  New murder ballads appeared for people who like that sort of thing that were fabulous like Snow’s Miller’s Cave  and Lefty Frizzell’s dazzling The Long Black Veil.  It would be years before it was known that Veil was newly written and not an old Hillbilly song.  If you compare the Kingston’s  Tom Dooley with Frizzell’s Long Black Veil you can’t tell the difference.

     A word about Harry Smith’s  Anthology Of American Folk Music that Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan revere so much.  The collection is a very small selection of songs culled from a huge mass of material that just happened to fit Harry Smith’s personal psychosis.  Anyone going over the same mass of material could select an entirely different selection of songs that reflected their own personal outlook and would be just as ‘authentic.’  I mean, I heard The Cuckoo and I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground over the radio decades ago as a kid.  I was signally unimpressed.  I never called in to hear either again.  So as far as being some authentic voice of America I rather think the collection reflects Jewish and Communist ideals. 

     What is the message exactly of ‘I wish I were a mole in the ground, I would burrow until I brought that mountain down.’

     It that isn’t a call to detournement I don’t know what is.  So Harry Smith is Harry Smith and welcome to him but I have my own agenda.

     So Dylan left his old life behind to begin a new life in New york City but with an old agenda.  His secret agenda was to detourne American culture.  Of course the word ‘detourne’ was unknown in America at that time.  I have to thank Greil Marcus for adding that very useful word to my vocabulary.

     Bob started out detourning Woody Guthrie.  Within a couple months he had hijacked Woody’s life.  Clinton Heylin believes that even the Guthrie persona was second hand having been detourned from Jack Elliot who had of course detourned it from Guthrie.  Boy, there was another stone bore I never could listen to, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.

     Dylan more or less confirms this in his Chronicles Vol. I.  I’m copying a quote from Chronicles as noted by Jim Kunstler in his excellent review of Bob’s memoir:

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_dylan.html

     Quote:

     “You’re trying hard, but you’ll never turn into Woody Guthrie,’ (John) Pankake says to me as if he’s looking down from some high hill, like something has violated his instincts.  It was no fun being around Pankake.  He made me nervous.  He breathed fire through his nose.  ‘You’d better think of something else.  You’re doing it for nothing.  Jack Elliot’s already been where you are and gone.  Ever heard of him?’  No, I ‘d never heard of Jack Elliot.  When Pankake said his name it was the first time I’d heard it.  ‘Never heard of him, no….’ Pankake lived in an apartment over McCosh’s bookstore, a place that specialized in eclectic, ancient texts, philosophical political pamphlets from the 1800s on up.  It was a neighborhood hangout for intellectuals and Beat types, on the main floor of an old Victorian house only a few blocks away.  I went there with Pankake and saw it was true, he had all the incredible records, ones you never saw and wouldn’t know where to get.  For somone who didn’t sing and play it was amazing he had so many….Pankake was right.  Elliot was far beyond me….I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out in the cold street, aimlessly walked around, I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the deadmen walking through the catacombs.  It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy….He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile.  The US hadn’t been ready for him.  Good.  I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.”

     Unquote.

     Of course the US hadn’t been ready for Elliot.  One Guthrie was one too many.  Who needed a Guthrie detourned by another Jew?  Let the English have Elliot.  But that didn’t stop Bob from detourning both Guthrie and Elliot when he got to the Big Apple.  He followed Elliot around studying and copying his mannerisms.  Elliot should have painted on his guitar the slogan:  This machine kills copycats.

     Well, no matter Bob learned his error when he learned another Guthrie copycat wasn’t needed in NYC but Bob had mastered a style, a persona on which he could build.  That was more than he had had before.

     Pete Seeger and the Jewish busybodies were busy fomenting discord in the South.  Already knee deep in the Big Muddy Seeger was encourging others to write political diatribe songs.  The path was clear and Bob met a girl named Suze Rotolo.  Rotolo worked at CORE.  She then encouraged Bob to write ‘politically relevant’ songs.  Well, what are you going to do but go with the flow, swim with the current? Bob didn’t like the topical songs though.  You have to give him credit for good sense there.  He wrote literary style lyrics that talked around the political issues without dealing with them directly.

     Now there were songs that other voices could sing.

     As a lyricist Bob was not a tunesmith so he merely borrowed tunes from old ballads and other people.  In other words he detourned Anglo-Saxon folk tunes grafting on Jewish sensibilities.  Heylin gives a perfect example in an exchange Dylan had with Martin Carthy in England.  Carthy showed him the old English ballad Greensleeves.  Bob dutifully learned the song.  Then he went away for a few weeks.  When he came back he collared Carthy and played him Greensleeves.  Here’s your Greensleeves he said.  Then he played the tune set to the words of Girl From The North Country.  Thus he detourned tune after tune to his own Jewish sensibilities.

     Now things were heating up on the Jewish revolutionary front.  The so-called Free Speech Movement was being launched at UC Berkeley.

     As I mentioned Jews could never be ‘free’ so long as they were merely part of a dominant other culture.  So ‘Freedom’ meant to them detourning the dominant culture so that their own law and culture was supreme.  Freedom for the Jews meant slavery for everyone else.  Thus we have Greil Marcus in the bleachers cheering his heart out at Free Speech rallies for ‘freedom.’  There were many of us in the bleachers much less enthusiastic.  But then we weren’t Jewish and we weren’t clear as to what was going on.

     Dylan as a Jew came to Berkeley to play where he was received as a hero by his fellow Jews.  Both must have been aware of what they were doing.  Jerry Rubin was the sparkplug whether Greil Marcus slyly disagrees with him or not.

     The revolt at Berkeley soon spread to Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League and across the country where it meshed with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

     Dylan himself progressed from his political associations to Another Side of Bob Dylan in which he worked out his own personal problems in a Jewish social context in highly symbolic language.  The lyrics are complex, poetical and not easily understood.  the concept of ‘Freedom’ plays a prominent role.

4.

     Freedom as the idea of a complete lack of constraints developed in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Prior to this ‘freedom’ meant to be free so long as your own freedom didn’t conflict with the freedom of others.  Latterly it has taken the meaning that others be damned so long as one can do what one wants.  This entails the related notion:  consequences be damned.  Consequences won’t be damned so if one does the crime one must do the time.  I suppose the notion is that if you can run fast enough you can avoid the consequences.  I don’t know if one can but some have done a very presentable job of it.  Mao was one, Dylan is another.  Of course there was that one little incident at Redwing that didn’t work out too well but since then it has been fairly smooth sailing for Bob and he may leave the building without suffering too many serious consequences. 

     Now, in order to be free one has to dominate everyone else.  If one is obligated to an other then one isn’t free according to this latter day interpretation of ‘freedom.’  In that sense in the entertainment industry Frank Sinatra was as free as anyone has ever been.  The man need only place a call to anyone elses wife and she would leave her husband’s bed and run over and give Frank a blow job and there was nothing the husband could do about it.  This is no joke.  Sinatra could have anyone beaten up with impunity.  When he was offended by President Kennedy, Kennedy was shot.  There are those who maintain Frank had a hand in it.  Never been proven but there are reasons to so believe.  Frank Sinatra had ‘freedom’ while he escaped the most serious consquences dying in bed a very old man.  Alone and despised perhaps but then one can’t escape all the consequences.

     So while limiting himself to a field in which he could be successful Bob has perhaps been the most ‘free’ of the Rock ‘n Rollers.  He never took on Frank however and if he had he would have discovered the limits of his ‘freedom.’  Although Albert Grossman may have limited Bob’s ‘freedom’ somewhat I find it interesting that Bob came out at least even in his brush with the current Hollywood hard-on, David Geffen. 

     Now, Bob wasn’t so free that he could achieve his goals without leaning on or being dependent on others.  However to compensate himself he destroyed, trashed whoever and whatever he had used as stepping stones to achieve his ‘freedom.’  In the pursuit of his freedom he became a very vicious and nasty man.

     There is no reason to believe that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival he wasn’t trashing the whole Folk scene that he had used to get him to the launching pad of his Rock ‘n Roll dream.

     The arguments about how or who brought Folk Rock into existence may well be interminable.  The fact is that both Folk and Rock at the time were stagnant.  Whether the music died in that corn field in Iowa in 1959 or not the big labels had pretty well tamed the music of the fifties.  Columbia had separated Dion from the Belmonts and had him singing standards to syrupy instrumentals.  Ruby Baby was his last great effort before Columbia detourned him.  Safe teen acts and emasculated falsettos dominated the airwaves .  By late 1963 and early 1964 the Folk ethic had worn out as Folk groups dressed in loden green pull overs and sang like the Brothers Four.  Even the emasculated and detourned version of   Michael Row The Boat Ashore couldn’t prop up Folk for long.

     So musicians had to be searching for something different if not new.  Folk Rock was as new as anything while the electric blues served as different.  Thus as the middle sixties came in one had Folk Rock, the electric blues and rough sounding garage bands like the Seeds.  Oh yes, that was another development temper tantrum teenagers screaming ‘I don’t want to be like anybody else.’  Not to worry. 

     Folk rock would have or did develop without any real help from Bob.  He already had electric recordings out so that if he didn’t want to stick it in their ear he could have done an acoustic set at Newport and let his electric side take its natural course.

     I’m not so sure even then that electricity was the problem.  Personally I welcomed the electric Bob.  I was glad to see him leave the Folk stuff behind.  I was on the West Coast but I didn’t run into many or any people who were emotionally involved.  Even Greil Marcus doesn’t seem to be put out by the change.

     I think you had to be emotionally invested in Bob the protest singer.  When that fellow in Manchester cried out Judas I would have to think that his problem wasn’t an electric guitar but the fact that Bob seemingly betrayed the political stuff he had been singing.  He had pandered to the protest crowd and now he wasn’t letting them down easy.  He was turning his back on them.  Rathr than being the standard bearer of spokesman for the generation that he had let them believe he was he now trashed everything they believed in.  They had given him his and now he didn’t need them anymore.

     His whole career was based on trashing his believers.  Not that I understood any of this at the time.  I didn’t even know about it and if I had I wouldn’t have cared.

     Positively Fourth Street was his ‘kiss my ass’ song to all those Folkies he had used and abused and now abandoned.

     An interesting aside that could use closer examination was his visit to Carl Sandburg in 1964.  All the biographers assume that Carl Sandburg snubbed Bob because he hadn’t heard of him.  Maybe, I can’t say but it is significant that Sandburg was a folksinger himself or, at least, he sang folk songs.  While Bob and Greil are enthusiastic about Harry Smith Sandburg himself had published his American Songbag in 1928 and then followed it up in 1950 with a new collection.  Unless he was brain dead in ’64 there is little reason to believe he hadn’t maintained his interest in folk into the sixties and kept up with it.

     After all the Christies were doing a number of songs from the 1928 Songbag so Sandburg must have experienced great satisfaction that everything he had been hoping for had come to pass.  I don’t know his singing style, and he did publicly perform the songs, but I suspect it was more Christy style than the cacophony of Bob.

     I don’t think it improbable that he in fact knew exactly who Bob Dylan was, had probably heard him on record and/or the radio and fully detested him,  so that when he opened his door and found Bob Dylan, let us say the folk devil himself, standing there he just froze.  It would be nice to know exactly what was said.  I think it unlikely that he would have been familiar with Paul Clayton but as Clinton Heylin suggests if he had dropped the needle into the groove there is little doubt which record would have been played through.

     If Sandburg had shown any preference for Clayton at all for any reason, manners for instance, there is little doubt that that sealed Clayton’s fate with Bob.

     If It’s All Over Now Baby Blue was a put down of Clayton which seems likely then the odds are that it was resentment over something that was said or done at Sandburg’s is the reason.

    That would have been added to the fact that Bob had stolen a couple tunes from Clayton that required the trashing of the man in ’64 to cover up the evidence.  One can’t hold it against Bob that Clayton committed suicide, after all, we’re all big boys here, but he must certainly have contributed to a deteriorating mental state.

      The trashing of Joan Baez also at this time doesn’t require further comment in this place.  Suffice it to say that Bob had taken hers to keep with his and now it was her turn for the circular file.  It is hard to believe Bob didn’t enjoy what he was doing amidst the flashing gongs on the road to ‘freedom.’

     In ’66 Bob’s mind broke.  He had what used to be called a nervous breakdown.  In his terms a motorcycle accident.  There was a long recovery period of several years.  I certainly  don’t hold the nervous breakdown against him.  He was pushing too hard.  Even if he had been straight he would have become distraught, but under the influence of what all his biographers agree were monumental amounts of drugs washed down with quantities of alcohol it is a wonder if not a miracle that he lasted as long as he did.  Apparently he was driven to complete the sound in his head and vomit out all his rage accumulated up there in the North country before he cracked.

     When he went down he went down hard but in pleasant enough circumstances.

     Why he came out isn’t clear unless it was to trash his fans.  It didn’t take much for me to catch on back then but then on the first hearing of Blonde on Blonde I realized he’d ridden his board all the way to shore.  From there he would have to start all over again while he would never catch a wave like that again. 

     Bob still had a lot of past to bury though.

     He achieved this in spectacular fashion in 1975 on his Rolling Thunder tour as an overseer on his very own Maggie’s Farm.  The tour mayby be considered as a vision of Plantation Bob.  And he was a sadistic overseer too.

     As Heylin points out the shows were over four hours long while Bob may have been on stage only a few minutes to a half hour or possibly a little more.  Thus his cast of characters were slaving on Maggie’s Farm while Maggie or Bob showed up from time to time to make sure his darkies were singing as they slaved.  A very good joke.  If you step back and look at it the gig is pretty transparent.

     Now, Dylan asked people if they were for it.  As the only ‘free’ man in the group Bob had no trouble in getting his victims to come on board his ship that had just come in.  The performers couldn’t have been paid much if at all.  The payroll and expenses of such an extravaganza couldn’t have been recouped at all.  If there was any money left over it went into Bob’s pocket.

     Bob reached way back in the past to bring Ramblin’ Jack Elliot aboard.  Bob owed Elliot a lot so the old man had to be trashed.  McGuinn was brought along because he had traded on Bob’s talent or else had done such sparkling versions of Bob’s songs that he had made Bob look bad.

     Phil Ochs wasn’t allowed to come along not because Bob had pity on his fragile mental state but simply because Bob didn’t owe him anything.  If he had had reason to trash Ochs you may be sure he would have.

     One may guess that he was already finished with Sara, his wife, as he not only allowed her to come along to witness his degenerate behavior but actually cast her as a prositute in his movie Reynaldo and Clara.  One just doesn’t allow the mother of one’s children much less a woman one respects to play a prostitute.  I find it unforgiveable while Sara took him for much much more than thirty-five million if Heylin and Sounes are correct which is pretty good wages of sin.

     As if that wasn’t enough Bob brought along his old inamorata Joan Baez to confront his wife, Sara.  Gratuitously cruel and unnecessary so I suppose Bob was attempting to trash his entire pre-1975 past.  Like a snake shedding his skin he was attempting to begin a new existence.

     Here his Frankist upbringing rose up to bite him because you can’t pour out that quart and half of evil.  As Bob said you can change your name but you can’t run from yourself.  Bob wasn’t released and one can never be released, only the truth can set you free.  You have to come to terms with yourself and acept things as they were and are.  Even then your freedom is conditional; at best you are only out on parole.  You can’t trash reality.

End of Exhuming Bob 2-2

 

    

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider

By

 

R.E. Prindle

 

…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.

=Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

 

And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.

Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.

After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.

Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.

Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.

Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.

As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.

Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.

How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.

His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.

The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.

It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.

McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.

The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.

As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.

While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.

His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.

Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.

One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.

Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.

The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.

Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.

It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.

Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.

In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.

He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.

Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.

The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.

Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.

So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.

Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.

ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.

He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.

He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.

It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..

At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.

When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.

It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.

While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.

Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.

It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.

Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.

Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.

Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.

On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.

Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.

Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s

Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.

His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.

 

2.

 

By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.

One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.

And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.

His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.

Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.

It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.

Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.

In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.

So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.

There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.

Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.

Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.

Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.

I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.

At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.

So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.

In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.

Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.

When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.

ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.

His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.

This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.

Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.

Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.

That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.

Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.

Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA

God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.

Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.

Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.

Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.

Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.

Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.

With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.

Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.

I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.

The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.

Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider

By

 

R.E. Prindle

 

…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.

=Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

 

And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.

Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.

After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.

Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.

Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.

Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.

As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.

Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.

How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.

His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.

The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.

It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.

McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.

The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.

As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.

While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.

His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.

Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.

One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.

Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.

The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.

Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.

It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.

Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.

In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.

He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.

Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.

The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.

Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.

So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.

Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.

ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.

He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.

He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.

It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..

At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.

When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.

It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.

While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.

Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.

It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.

Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.

Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.

Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.

On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.

Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.

Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s

Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.

His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.

 

2.

 

By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.

One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.

And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.

His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.

Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.

It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.

Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.

In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.

So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.

There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.

Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.

Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.

Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.

I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.

At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.

So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.

In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.

Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.

When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.

ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.

His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.

This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.

Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.

Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.

That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.

Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.

Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA

God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.

Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.

Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.

Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.

Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.

Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.

With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.

Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.

I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.

The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.

Pt. 4 Something Of Value I

October 30, 2007

Something Of Value I

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 4

 

     A minor mythographer who emerged at the same time as Burroughs and his  Tarzan was the famous character Dr. Fu Manchu of the Irishman Arthur H.S. Ward writing under the name of Sax Rohmer.  While his subject is in disrepute at the present time, Rohmer was aware that the times were one of a world sea change.  He sensed, along with a few others, now equally in disrepute, that the EuroAmerican tide had crested; its flow was now out.

     Rohmer running counter to Western trends made careful ethnic identities even to the point of identifying Irish and Anglo sub-groups although some of the characteristics he attributed to them seem mistaken to my eye.

     Nevertheless he sensed the world was entering a period of Mfecane, to use the African term, or a time of troubles to use the Western term.

     The African Mfecane which occured among the Bantu tribes of South Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century, and recorded so ably by Burroughs’ major influence, Rider Haggard, was a time when rapdily expanding population pressed on available resources.   This was the time when the Zulu chief Chaka organized the Zulu impis or military battalions so excitingly described by Haggard.  They were used, in the Zulu phrase to ‘stamp the ememy flat’ which is to say, exterminate them.

     Numerous Bantu tribes were either exterminated or driven out to find new lands which is to say stamp non-Zulu tribes flat or drive them off good lands into the desert.  Such is the historical process which operates without respect to race.  Now, historically all peoples consider themselves the true men while all others are an emasculated inferior sort.  This was and is true of the Semites.  We all know the legend of diabolical Jewish cleverness.  As is well known the Jews consider themselves the Chosen People of not only their tribal god but they have made of their god a universal god that has been accepted by an astonishingly large number of people.  The Chinese peoples, which Dr. Fu Manchu represented, consider themselves of the Celestial Empire or Middle Kingdom to which all must bend the knee.  The Arab Semites pray:  Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation…Guide us in the right path, the path of those whom you have favored.

     Thus both leading Semitic peoples believe they are Chosen peoples which explains that conflict.  In the United States, of course, we believe we have god on our side.  We are naturally right being unable to be wrong.  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

     Strangely enough the contemporary world believes it is living outside the historical process, that evolution has ended leaving all species in stasis whereas nothing could be further from the truth.  A mythographer like Sax Rohmer is in possession of the truth.  This was made apparent with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution when Mfecane took definite shape.

     In this long wave action by the Jewish people that began with the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666 it seemed momentarily that the messianic years of 1913-28 would be crowned with success, that the Jews would achieve world domination by 1928.  The Bolshevik Revolution created a storm of anti-Jewish reaction.

     This period from the Revolution of 1917-24 when Lenin died was one of intense apprehensive literature about worldwide Jewish intentions.  Not counting the new Nazi reaction in Germany there was a burst of literature criticizing the Jews.  In the United States, usually so placid, a reaction was led by Henry Ford then at the crest of his reputation as an auto maker.  He had his reasons.

     Ford thought he was dealing with an intellectual problem.  He wasn’t aware that he had involved himself in an emascualtion contest, or pissing match as they are vulgarly called.  The Jews, of course, never let the problem be examined on its merits but immediately raised the spectre of anti-Semitism.  Ford was accordingly branded an anti-Semite.  Why he or anyone else shoud favor the manhood of Jews over his own is, or should be, open to conjecture but no one can withstand the charge of anti-Semitism and remain respectable in his community.  Ford lost the fight on the grounds of anti-Semitism, not the facts, while the Jews now confess to his accusations.

     Disregarding all the benefits Ford conferred on civilization, which are very, very many, his fellows deserted him and he has no reputation today.

     Thus, as of 1924, it seemed to the Jews as though the millennium had come but then Lenin died.  Stalin seized the reins of Soviet government while Hitler’s star was in the ascendance in Germany.

     The pall of Freud’s vision of the unconscious spread over the world.  All other interpretations of the unconscious had been suppressed.  Men like Jean Genet were coming into their own.  Then, a year before the messianic years ended when things didn’t look quite so rosy Freud wrote another book, calling this one the Future Of An Illusion.  This is a difficult book to understand.  To merely condemn religion in the abstract seems redundant, even puerile.  Freud appears to be responding to the defeat of the Jewish revolution in the Soviet Union.  This must be the illusion whose future concerns him.  While Hitler had not yet crushed the Judaeo-Communist revolution in Germany matters were in hand.

     Stalin was neutralizing, if not yet eliminating, the cadre that executed the Revolution.  It would be another two years before Freud realized that his instructions in 1917 had been in vain.  In fact his releasing of his negative vision of the subconscious was about to backfire on him in the hands of Stalin and Hitler in a spectacular way.

     I think that it is also signficant that, in these later years of his life, the Castration Complex became more signficant in his thinking, almost displacing the Oedipus Complex in importance.  His concentration on it has the sound of an hysterical shriek as the failure of the millennium would be a type of group castration.

     For the mythographers, the Burroughs of 1911-17 had been a plateau.  Burroughs had brought all the mythological strands together.  Like the arrow shot in the air to land one knew not where now one knew where Burroughs’ writing had been leading.  It was his turn to inseminate many minds.  Those minds no longer had only books to disseminate their views but they had even more potent forms of communication.  The nickelodeon of the eighteen nineties had evolved into movies shown in palaces.  Looking back, the early movie theatres were a temporary but spectacular moment.  In my hometown the chif theatre was appropriately called:  The Temple.

     The movie makers seized on the psychological projections of the mythographers which could be interpreted and manipulated quite independently of the intentions of the authors.  This brought a number of projections which might have been overlooked into the forefront of world consciousness.  The exploration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula began in earnest, soon bearing little relation to Stoker’s book.  Another stunning projection that would have gone unnoticed except for the movies was Gaston Le Roux’s Phantom Of The Opera.  While not a particularly good book, although arresting, the character was coopted by a Hollywood producer while the book was being serialized in a New York paper.  Strangely, the Phantom has become a counterpart of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean among the Red/Liberals.

     Radio had come along in 1920 to be a force from the thirties on.

     Movies and radio appealed directly to the subconscious in the brain stem through the eyes and ears which are connected to the brain stem more or less bypassing the conscious mind.  With the movies there is too much content to consciously assimilate while the speed with which it passes leaves no room for consideration.  Books on the other hand are read into the brain stem but are immediately evaluated by the conscious mind.

     At least until the emergence of video tapes beginning in the 1970s movies were an ephemeral form of entertainment.  Memories of movies are extremely unreliable as the subconscious manipulates the material for its own uses.  Today one can review this ephemera which had such an influence on you, understanding and correcting any misconceptions.

     Even more ephemeral and now lost forever was the radio show.  One that left the most indelible impression was influenced by Burrough’s work.  That most mortal but penetrating pyschological projection was The Shadow.

     Today he can live only in the minds of those who were there although abut 350 pulp novels were written about the Shadow of which 280 were written by one man, if you can believe it.  He was Walter Gibson. One believed that the Shadow stepped through the creaking door of the Inner Sanctum.

     I have never seen the pulp novels but, as Gibson was in charge of both the show and the novels, the results must be the same.  The stories were unimportant, as indeed all stories are, the important thing was and is the attitude, the myth.  What mythographers call the truth.  Thus if you hear only the literal story you have missed the real story.  All good writing is done in keys.

     The shows could only have been written post-Freud as well as post-Burroughs.  the images do not appeal to the conscious mind.

     The Shadow had learned ‘the hypnotic power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him.’  (p. 608 On The Air:  The Encyclopedia Of Old Time Radio, John Dunning, Oxford 1998) This may sound like so much hocus pocus, yet if one reads Freud’s Group Psychology carefully one will see that what Freud is proposing is hypnotizing groups to achieve one’s ends unnoticed.

     If you watch the movies of Hitler working up a crowd you are watching a master hypnotist at work.  Perhaps he also had read Le Bon.  He comes quietly to the fore after his introduction, stands quietly watching and listening,  his hand drops down to manipulate some items on the table.  The audience, in their thousands, sit waiting in anticipation.  Hitler begins to speak, quietly, indifferently; then his pace picks up, his intensity increases, passion flows from his voice while he gestures wildly, dramatically bringing his huge audience into a trance which he is able to satisfy completely before terminating the seance in a wild orgy of screaming indignation and wildly flailing gesticulation.  It may not look impressive viewing it with cool dispassion on film but he’s good, even an artist.

     Watch him.  You don’t even have to understand German.  He was terrific.

     Freud also, merely through the force of his personality and reputation was able, through his writing, to influence large numbers of influential people, through them the masses, just by telling them in abstruse terms what they wanted to hear.  To wit:  Let your unconscious rule, the more sex you have the better a person you will be, do not allow any fancy you may have to be repressed.  It’s bad for you.  The unconscious, sex and free expression of the libido are good.  You like that don’t you?  If you act on it you may as well consider yourself hypnotized.

     The Shadow in the Freudian sense and the Burroughsian sense was a man of many identities.  One becomes a personality of many facets in the unconscious, one might almost say multiple personalities.  Indeed, the Shadow lived in the everyday world under a borrowed identity not even his own.  “To two persons only is the Shadow’s true identity known- that of Kent Allard, internationally known aviator- and those persons are Xinca Indians, servants picked up by Allard during a stay among their tribe in Central America.  A guise often used by the Shadow is that of Lamont Cranston, world renowned big game hunter and traveler, when Cranston is away on his travels.  This is by leave of the real Cranston, a man of deep understanding.” (The Pulps: Fifty Years Of American Pop Culture, compiled by Tony Goodstone, Bonanza 1970, p. 228)

     Cranston must indeed have been a man of deep understanding while Kent Allard was freed from responsibility for his acts.  Nice situation if you can get it.  Like all the psychological projections the Shadow was a man of many identities.  Most of the projections were experts of disguise, being able to imitate a vast variety of human conditions perfectly from street sweeper to nuclear scientist.  Real Urban Spacemen.  In Burroughs’ case he created a number of alter egos including John Carter, John Clayton also known as Tarzan, Lord Passmore and other identities, David Innes and Normal Bean.  Unlike Freudian/Liberals they were and are more aligned with a firm grip on morality.  Jekyll to the core.  As the Shadow said:  Crime must go!  He gave his mocking laugh and said:  ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows.’  Purge your hearts f0r there is no escaping the Shadow.

     There was a lot of evil lurking in the hearts of men during the thirties.  A very large part of it was centered in Germany and the Soviet union where the epic struggle between good and evil was taking shape that was to end in that catastrophic war.  I know you will think that the evil was represented by Adolf Hitler and the good by Judaeo-Communism.

     Hitler has been represented as the nadir of evil.  He was certainly one of the bad boys of history but then his Freudian style subconscious had been released.  Besides, as I have pointed out he was the antagonist and not the protagonist; in other words he could not have existed without Judaeo-Communism, possibly not without Freud:  he was acting in self-defense.

     Hitler was not outside history as some would have it.  It is time to integrate him into the historical process so the period can be understood.  The period from 1913 to 1945 was one in which the great goddess Kali danced merrily around the world while Shiva played the pipes.  Death is the eternal dance of life in the deepest mythological sense.  Nor do Shiva and Kali care how many or who die.  Many go, many more come.  Since 1913 mankind, not Hitler, but mankind has murdered its hundreds of millions but Nature has replaced the dead with billions.  After the human destruction of seven decades the world population has grown to life stifling levels.  If the world population is twelve billion by 2050 as has been predicted, mankind will see Kali dance more wildly than ever before while Shiva plays faster, faster and more madly still.  Hitler an arch demon?  What?  Grow up.

     From the point of view of Religious Consciousness and this holds true for Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism anything and everything that happens, is merely the will of god.  God works in mysterious way his wonders to perform while his mind is beyond the ken of man.  I mean…if you believe this religious stuff then you have to accept all of it or else.  This is religious fact!  Thus Hitler was merely peforming the will of god as he had no other choice.  God had created set and setting.  From the Religious point of view Hitler must therefore be blameless while god is accountable for all that transpired.

     From the scientific Darwinian evolutionary point of view the great wars were inevitable.   The wars were the inevitable consequence of natural selection.  I know that the general consensus is that not only do we live outside the historical process but that all the evolutionary rules have been set aside in our case.  To those people I say believe as you will.  In point of fact the struggle for human special existence goes on today as it did in the thirties and forties.  One species will triumph over the others if society as we know it is not ended by natural causes by c. 2050.

     The period under consideration was a confllict between Slavs, Germans and Jews.  It occurred adjacent to and was partially caused by Jewish millennial ideas.  Germans and Slavs had been contending for centuries both along the Slavic German border as well as in Courland which ran around the southern and eastern Baltic and within Russian itself.

     During the nineteenth century  the Czars encouraged Germans to colonize the Ukraine as farmers.  A large German colony was established at the mouth of the Volga River.  An alien Semitic people, the Jews, resided in Germany and Russia.  While the Jews claim to have been loyal German and Russian subjects this notion is nonsense which will not bear up to historical analysis.  They were part of the international Jewish community residing in their respective States.  Just as the Germans and Slavs wished them to accept their national identities, as Semites the Jews wished to impose their world view on them.  Hence one has a classic example of Natural Selection, varieties and species in conflict.  In addition Hitler and the Germans were suffering from Emasculation as a result of the Great War while in the new USSR the State was being administered by Emasculated formerly subject peoples.

     While one may say this contributed to the savagery of the period from 1913 to 1945 what we have here is a classic Mfecane or Time of Troubles that is still developing.  The only solution was to ‘stamp flat’ or exterminate rival combatants.  This was merely a part of the historical and evolutionary process.  A harsh reality but true.  Kali don’t mind, Krishna plays on.

     Had the Jews been powerful enough they would have stamped flat both the Germans and Russians just as they began to do with with the Crimeans and as they would do with the Palestinians if let loose today.  As it was, both Hitler and Stalin set about exterminating the Semitic Jews.  Stalin would have completed the job in 1954 but Kali beckoned to him first.

     The Jews always preferred German culture so that in the nineteenth century when the Russians compelled them to take surnames a great many Jews resident in Russia chose German names.  As Judaeo-Communists they moved back and forth between Germany and Russia creating the illusion from 1917 to 1945 of German collaboration with Russia.  To have called them Jews would have opened one to the charge of anti-Semitism.  Who needs that?

     If the Czars had attempted to Russify the subject peoples it was as nothing compared to the effort of the USSR under Stalin.  Nationality was outlawed under the Communists.  Stalin made the resident Germans a special target.  Unable to dent the Volga colony’s nationalism he merely exterminated them after WWII.

     You could watch Kali dance and Shiva pipe.

     Reverting to the Religious Consciousness what purpose of God’s will did Hitler serve?  I’m sure His mind is too deep for me, but if you’re religious this point has to be considered.  Well, at the time the Popular Front governments in 1936 that were all Red, Judaeo-Communism seemed on the verge of world conquest from China to the USA.  Except for Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan Reds were in the ascendant.  Even Germany and Italy had adopted variants of Red socialism.

     While it may not appear to be so at first glance Hitler smashed the Red economy.  The USSR never truly recovered from the war, limping along until its economic collapse during Reagan’s administration in the US.

     The war also gave the democratic forces of the US time to organize their resistance to the Red Menace.  Unfocussed and in disarray before the war the Scientific element seized control of the State Department and the armed forces so that with the death of the Popular Front president, Roosevelt, the United States actually assumed the role of Hitler and his Nazis as the bulwark against Communism forcing the Jews in the United States to reconsider their position vis-a-vis Communism.  It was really at this point that many Jews became anti-Communist in the United States.  Hence the Jews assumed their traditional good cop/bad cop role.  The US position against Communism gave rise to Jewish charges of Fascism in their bad cop role.

     If from a religious point of view everything that occurs is the will of god then god must have been a Red baiter.  Today’s Reds take note.

     Nevertheless as the mythographers to a man were opposed to Red totalitarianism they all came under attack from the Red/Liberal forces.  Every attempt was made to abort established careers while stifling new ones.

     If you remember a while back I described a scene in which Commissars were reading Tarzan to employees of the Worker’s Paradise.  That fact made Edgar Rice Burroughs a marked man.  A concerted effort was begun to interfere with his career.  Unfortunately for the Reds this effort resulted in a dozen of the best novels of Burroughs’ career supplying him with a fresh batch of material.

     At the same time publishing became more difficult for him while his editors at the pulps became hypercritical of material they had once begged for.  Also at this critical time Burroughs changed secretaries.  His new secretary, who became his business manager and de facto head of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.  was a man named Ralph Rothmund.  Rothmund claimed to be Scotch although I’m sure the sept of Rothmund must have been lacking its own Tartan.

     The name translates from the German to Red World.  It may be coincidence or it may be a joke.  Certainly when an organization is being infiltrated the most sought after post is that of secretary.  All information passes through the secretary’s hands.  Rasputin, for instance, not surprisingly had a Jewish secretary which led to the charges of his complicity with the Germans.  You may be sure that Rasputin was not complicit while you may be equally sure that his secretary was.  At least with the German Jews.

     There hasn’t been much work done on Rothmund by Burroughsians nor do I have any new information to report but let us examine Rothmund’s record as secretary and business manager.  What was the result of his twenty-five years of work?  Was Burroughs further ahead or further behind when Rothmund went to his greater reward?

     The man nearly brought the business to a halt.

     He disrupted all relations with the publishers of Burroughs’ early novels, bringing the flow of royalties to a halt in 1946, they had been miniscule even laughable since 1940.  Nor did he actively pursue the publication of titles owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.  The lucrative radio show was discontinued in 1936.  In what some fancy as a coup Rothmund sold the movie rights to Tarzan to MGM for a flat fifty thousand a picture, no residuals.  By 1940 Burroughs was so broke, or told he was by his business manager, that Rothmund advised him to leave the country for Hawaii where the great creator of Tarzan lived on the meager $250.00 a month that Rothmund allotted him.  What was Rothmund’s salary at this time?  How much was the corporation earning?

     In addition this supposed business manager allowed Burroughs’ copyrights to lapse, never renewing them.  By 1945 the most popular titles of Burroughs were available to whoever wanted to publish them.  Amazingly no one did while Burroughs’ long time reprint publishers, who knew the copyrights were lapsed, Grossett and Dunlap, honored argreements they were under no obligation to do.

     Burroughs’ bacon was pulled from the fire by an earlier more lucrtive movie deal he had nogotiated with a producer named Sol Lesser.  When MGM tired of the Tarzan series they let Lesser assume the rights.  The revenues from Lesser’s productions defeated Rothmund’s apparent purpose.

     Still, after Burroughs died in 1950 Rothmund made no attempt to keep any Burroughs’ titles in print.  From 1950 until 1963 at which later date publishers discovered that the copyrights had never been renewed, nothing was available but a few titles from Grossett and Dunlap.

     Even then, Burroughs’ most famous book, Tarzan Of The Apes, had been out of print for twenty years or more.  Some business manager.

     Thus, as is probably true, as a Red infiltrator Rothmund had destroyed the career of the arch Americanist, Edgar Rice Burroughs.  the greatest of the mythographers was almost silenced.

     While Rothmund worked to silence the Master, the Freud/Hitler/Stalin confrontation in Europe broke out into the most destructive war the world had ever seen.  Unlike the previous wars there were no rational minds seeking to ameliorate the damage.  Freud had unleashed the Hyde-like destructive subconscious of the West.  Hitler, who had always said if the Jews involved Europe in another disaster like the Great War, they would pay the price, meant it.  He was no empty boaster.  He had the will, he had the ways and means.  In the coldest, most scientific way imaginable he systematically rounded the Jews up deeding them to the flames  Wow!  Not since the great Roman manhunt of 135.  Here was new meaning to the Jewish concept of passing the enemy through the fires.  Wow!

     Hitler raged East and West but he raged beyond his power.  As must have inevitably happened before the first shot was fired, after the initial surprise German forces were driven back on all fronts.  Driven into isolation by his enemies there was no possibility for a negotiated terminus to the war.  In the struggle between the revolution and counter-revolution the only end could be unconditional surrender.  That sick madman in Washington, crippled in body and mind, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, working from his subconscious no less than Hitler, insanely persisted in the demand for unconditional surrender.  What a different world it would have been if the West had accepted Germany’s surrender before the Russians entered Poland.  Heck, Roosevelt wouldn’t have had to honor any deal he made with the Germans any more than his mentor Wilson did in the Great War.  What kind of man was Roosevelt anyway?

     So here we have a man emasculated by disease, a seriously emasculated man by circumstance and a politically emasculated man directing the affairs of the three most powerful States in the world.  Wow!

     In defeat Hitler acted in the self-destructive way of the emasculated.  He knew he had to die so he wanted nothing left standing in Europe when he was gone.  Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were nothing loath to help him.

     Hitler ordered Paris wired for total destruction.  The city was to be blown off the earth in the face of the advancing allies.  Wow!  However, with the intellectual superstructure of the City of Light destroyed it would have collapsed into the Sewers of Paris, that would have remained intact.  Freud had destroyed Morality  as D.H. Lawrence had feared:

     Quote:

     With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing into the cavern of darkness….He was making to the origins.  We watched his ideal candle falter and go small.  Then we waited as men do wait, always expecting the wonder of wonders.  He came back with dreams to sell.

      But sweet heaven, what merchandise!….What was there in the case?….Nothing but a huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and myriad repulsive little horrors spawned between sex and excrement.

     Unquote.

 Wow!

Double Wow!

       Yes, Freud hd destroyed the conscious mind and morality and reaped the Sewers of Paris.  As the payback for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain the Jews had stultified Europe.  What came out of the sewers as intellectual Paris burned?

Jean Genet!

     Of course any right thinking person is appalled by the course of history from 1913 to 1945 (or from year one to the present not excluding what went before) but for every right thinking person there are at least two who aren’t.  The Third Reich was a paradise for a significant minority.  Jean Genet was one of those.  Check out a French movie titled ‘Dr. Petiot’ if you want to see another. (The Varieties of Sexual Experience) Genet enjoyed the period.  He was a man come into his own.  As he has been quoted previously, he delighted in the union of the criminal mind with authority.  Why wouldn’t he?

     But just as the French Revolution allowed the Marquis de Sade scope for his personality, Napoleon, when he assumed the reins of government clapped de Sade into the insane asylum at Charenton.  So the Post-war Fourth Republic sentenced the petty thief Jean Genet to life imprisonment.

     Genet might very well have died in prison but for the fact that he, while lying in his bunk smelling his farts, composed the novel entitled:  Our Lady Of The Flowers.  (What scents are these?)  While respectable non-Communist writers were being hounded out of literature this criminal, homosexual, severely emasculated creep found a publisher.  Saint, indeed!

     Not only that, he found a friend.  Jean Paul Sartre had surfaced in 1936 with his novel: Nausea.  From this novel he developed what was known in the post-war world as existentialism.  This notion was supposedly philosophy.  I have been called an existentialist by people who should know what it is but I have to say that I have never understood what Sartre means by it.  I’ve even read his trilogy, Roads to Freedom.  Still don’t know what he’s talking about; I deny all charges.

     Nevertheless by war’s end he had a tremendous reputation within France and without.  For some reason he and other literati felt that any criminal who can write a book shouldn’t be in prison, as though Genet had been sentenced for the crime of never having written a book.  So they sprung Genet.  He could now steal with impunity.  Ain’t life just too  funny for words. Sartre later wrote a book of some six hundred odd pages about this petty thief entitled:  St. Genet: Thief and Martyr.  The two must go together.  Sort of Geminis perhaps.

     Genet had Sartre’s numbers.  He dedicated his autobiography, The Thief’s Journal to Sartre:  a Sartre au Castor.  To Sartre as Castor.  If Sartre was Castor then his twin brother Genet, was Polydeukes.  As we all know Castor was the mortal twin while Polydeukes was the immortal.  Genet was prescient as well as mocking.  Today his myth lives on while Sartre and his existentialism is all but forgotten.

     The point is that Genet was instrumental in creating the cult of the homosexual.  It was through him that the homosexual was allied to the post-war Red coalition.  In this union of Emasculates that seized control of US culture, if not always the government, the criminal mores of the homosexual as taught by Genet formed the basis of Red morality, or immorality, as you would have it.  Freud was wrong in thinking men can live without the notion of a moral code.

     The great mythographers who had attempted to give mankind a positive approach to morality by a union of the conscious and subconscious minds with consciousness preeminent were driven underground as the Red/Liberals seized control of the media preventing any view but their own being expressed.

     Freudian visions seem to have triumphed, still, though Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 his great psychological projection Tarzan lived on.  He still lives.

     To recapitulate:  In the course of evolution a new type of man came into being in mid-nineteenth century who required a new vision of psychology.  Society, for our purposes here, was thereby split into two divisions.  One of Scientific man and two factions of Religious man.  One of the latter was the reaction of Christianity which refused to make any accommodation with the new reality while its fellow the Red/Liberal faction while in as violent a reaction as the Christians adopted pseudo-scientific modes while seeking to subvert the Scientific Consciousness.

     On the literary level the cudgel of Science was taken up by a group of neo-mythographers who treated psychology and evolution according to the tenets of science.

     The Red/Liberal faction developed a revolutionary program guided by the religious conception of science led on the literary level by Sigmund Freud.

     Taking the various concepts of the unconscious developed at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries Freud twisted them to his purposes to envision the unconscious as a bale of evil impulses; he then convinced the West to release their impulses under the rubric of liberating the unconscious.  The immediate result was an orgy of hate, sadism and murder that lasted, for our purposes from 1917 until 1945 at which time the old order collapsed.

     The mythographers who had been less assertive were eclipsed by the Red/Liberals who now led the post-war era.  They continued their campaign to sabotage the Scientific Consciousness by instigating a subtle reign of terror from the released unconscious.

     Having now completed a survey of the first hundred years centered on the concepts of psychology I will now consider the same period from the point of view of evolution as reflected in the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  In the final part I will entwine both the psychological and evolutionary strands in a survey of society from 1945 to the present.

I dreamed I saw Ed Burroughs

As live as live could be.

‘Ah, but Ed, you’re dead.’  Says I.

‘I never died.’   Says he.

‘I never died.’  Says he.

     As he stood smiling at me he had Something Of Value in his hand which he gave to me.  It was a copy of Tarzan.  I became as a pillar of smoke leading the people through the desert to freedom.

  End of Something of Value I

Something Of Value II follows.

Part 3 Something Of Value I

October 24, 2007

SOMETHING OF VALUE I, PART III

by

R.E. Prindle

Part 3 of Vol. I.

Sigmund Freud 

     Freud was severely emasculated in both personal ego and in his group ego.  He was in fact a practicing homosexual.  His relationship with Fliess was homosexual in nature which Freud confessed vowing never to do it again.  His group, the Jews, were and are a severely emasculated people.  They have been since they walked away from Ur.  But on with Freud.

     Freud was fond of telling the story of his father and his hat,  it seems that Mr. Freud related a story to Sigmund, or Sigismund as he was known then,  (His Hebrew name significantly was Solomon) of how when he was a young man walking down the street proudly wearing his new hat, a gentile knocked the hat from his head into the gutter, snarling:  ‘Go get your hat, Jew.’

     When Sigmund asked breathlessly what his father did, expecting an heroic response, the old gentleman replied:  ‘I stepped into the gutter and picked up my hat.’ severely disappointing the young boy.

     Since Freud told and retold this story we may be forgiven for believing it had a profound effect on his young conscious and subconscious minds and possibly his ‘unconscious’ too.  On the one hand he may have been so ashamed of his father’s very reasonable reaction that he shared his emasculation encapsulating it in his subconscious as a fixation.  It is possible that this story either made or contributed to his homosexuality.  On the other hand we know for a fact that it inflamed his group ego with an ardent desire for revenge against the gentiles.

     As a result of the story he made the Carthaginian Semite, Hannibal, his alter ego.  When Hannibal’s father was defeated by the Romans he had his son swear that the would never cease waging war on the Romans until he died.  Obviously Freud made his vow against the Europeans although his father didn’t demand it. 

     It is no coincidence that both Freud and Hannibal were Semites and that the Romans and Europeans were gentiles.  Nor is it a coincidence that both Hannibal and Freud were defeated after seemingly winning the war and that rather than fighting the enemy to the end both fled.  Now, it therefore follows that Freud never ceased waging war against the Europeans.

     You say:  How?  Come along.  I can’t take you into the Inner Sanctum, which way you will have to find on your own, but I can show you some of the records I have been allowed to abstract from the files.

     This will involve the secret history of the human race but don’t be alarmed.  If you don’t want to believe it you don’t have to.  It still is a rousing good story.  Besides, if you should ever come around the archives you’ll find it is true.

     Freud himself made an attempt to explain a little of the origins of the Jewish psyche in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and Moses And Monotheism.  The earlier millennia don’t concern us here.  The Jews throughout history in their egotism have felt much put upon.  This sense of grievance grew until with the expulsion from Spain after the Reconquest their sense of injustice burst into open flames.  The group swore revenge on Europe.  It must be remembered that at the end of the thirteenth century they were expelled from England, at the beginning of the fourteenth from France and for the duration, well, they were really welcome nowhere.

     They swore to stultify Europe.  Judaism is the history of messianism. 

     Sabbatai Zevi.

Zevi- The Last Of The Messiahs

     This man was the last great messianic imposter.  In 1666, the number of the beast plus a thousand, the Jews of Europe awaited the word from Sabbatai, then at the Ottoman Court to begin the slaughter.  But Zevi apostatized to Moslemism instead.  The uprising never came off.  Hung fire.  Fizzled.

     Hope beats eternal.  The learned Rabbis vowed never to place their hopes on a single individual again.  They now concocted a plan for the group to rise as one man in rebellion.  The date selected for the revolution was the period 1913-28.  You want to give yourself a little leeway there.  Born in 1856, in 1913 Sigmund Freud was fifty-seven years old.   Although none of his biographers say much about his his Jewish background it is quite clear that he was read in Jewish lore.  You may say that he wasn’t a religious Jew but he nevertheless was devoutly Jewish.

     Freud quite consciously hated the gentiles for personal reasons that meshed quite well into those of his group identity.

     During 1913-17 Freud’s reputation was immense both within and without the Jewish community.  It was true his heir apparent, C.J. Jung had broken with him perhaps for this very reason but he and Psychoanalytic Movement had suffered no damage.

     In psychoanalyis Freud had the means to instruct his group and control the gentiles.  It is said that he gave up hypnotism when he turned to psychoanalysis but as a perusal of ‘Group Psychology’ will show he was preparing for a breathtaking attempt at hypnotizing the entire Western world not unlike that of Burroughs’ Lotharians against their invaders.

     Freud lived in Vienna where for years, even decades before 1913, emigrating Jews had flowed through from the entry port into Austria from the East of Brody on their way to America via the North German ports.  The prosperity of the whole German shipping lines was built on steerage passengers.  Nor were the decisions to emigrate necessarily individual; it may have begun that way but to emigrate was soon organized and directed by the international Jewish community.  Check the career of Baron Maurice Hirsch.

     The Jewish establishments of both Europe and America provided funding.  At about this time provisions were made to transport the entire Jewish population of the Pale, from Lithuania to Romania, to the United States Of America.  At the time the international Jewish goverment led by Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall was located in the United States, New York City.  The decks were being cleared so as to remove resistance in America.  So as not to call too much attention to the fact by having hordes disembark entirely in New York and Boston, for there would be resistance however feeble, the ports of New Orleans and Galveston were organized to deal with millions of immigrants.

     This plan was aborted by the Great War.  The Jews had already been at war with Russia, or the Czar as they personalized it, for a hundred years.  The international Jewish community had engineered the Russo-Japanese war almost pulling off a revolution in its wake in 1905.

     Activities were now intensified.  At the time and for about the next sixty years the Jews threw a veil of obfuscation over their activities always denying involvement in Communist or Revolutionary matters.  In recent years Jewish scholars, for whatever reason, have now found it expedient to admit that which they were accused of but always denied.  They now admit that every national subversive Communist part was over fifty percent Jewish.  Those of Russia and Germany were considerably higher.  Freud had been involved in Jewish subversive organizations like the B’nai B’rith for many years.  As the master psychologist, an expert in the unconscious, he prepared the Jewish mind for the great task of the millennial years in Central and Eastern Europe, which would require much bloodshed, while formulating his psychological plan of conquest not dissimilar from the military plans of his hero, Hannibal.

     Freud himself was centered in Vienna.  A lieutenant, Abraham, was his man in Berlin while Frerenczi was posted to Budapest in Hungary.  The three crucial central European points were covered.  Jung in Zurich had split off shortly before this.  It is interesting that the Jewish psychoanalytic extablishment spitefully denounced him as a Nazi.

     The Jewish millennial years began in 1913.  The Great War began in 1914.  The Bolshevik Revolution occurred in 1917.  Freud’s Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis appeared in 1917 also, even though there must have been an extreme paper shortage; it is not a short book.  Freud encoded last minute instructions to the Revolutionists in the book.

     At this point in 1917 Freud released the inhibitions of millions of Mr. Hydes in Russia, Hungary and Germany.  The Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war signing a seemingly humiliating peace treat at Brest-Litovsk.  As Lenin said the peace treaty was meaningless because it was his intent to stab Germany in the back.

     Germany had a huge Communist Party which it is now admitted was around sixty percent Jewish.  Now with the United States in the war, Germany debilitated internally and crippled psychologically, thousands of Jewish revolutionaries intent on the realization of the millennium flowed back into Germany from Russia in hopes of achieving the Revolution there, giddy with the hopes of thereby annexing Central and Eastern Europe.  That they didn’t was because of the efforts of the German Volkish groups such as Hitler and his Nazi Party.

      The unconscious psychoses of the Jewish people who it will be remembered as a group were suffering from severe emasculation were erupting.  Emasculation of the Ego is always expressed in a sexual manner frequently sadistic.  Freud had been preaching the practice of unrestrained sexual activity for years.  Murder is a sexual act.  He was against ‘repression’ you remember.

     When Russia began its program of expansion under the Romanovs it annexed an enormous number of nationalities.  The Russians then tried to impose their language and manners on the conquered peoples in an attempt to form an homogeneous State.  In so doing they emasculated the subject peoples.  Those same subject peoples were now the masters of the Russians with permission to indulge their ‘unconscious.’

     Jews, Letts, Poles and others let loose.  Stalin himself was a Georgian.

Jacob Schiff- PM of the International Jewish Government at this time.

     As Jean Genet correctly saw of the Nazi State, in Russia a criminal intellect was now joined to the political and legal apparatus of the State.  The criminal code was changed from an objective one to a subjective one; one of vengeance.  For a period of years law was suspended in Russia.  Amidst the chaos International Jewish organizations including those of the United States operated openly to coordinate their hopes for the millennium.

Bela Kun- Communist Psychopath

     What I’m about to say has been denied and suppressed  but the example was before both Hitler and Stalin.  In Hungary Freud had his man Ferenczi to coordinate the Hungarian Jews.  The Jewish  Bela Kun (Cohn) seized the government beginning a reign of terror against the gentiles during which thousands of non-Jews were murdered in a horrible sadistic manner commensurate with a severely emasculated Ego.

     For some time the Jews had been clamoring for a State of their own.  Taking advantage of the chaos in Russia the Jewish American Joint Distribution Committee under the leadership of Schiff and Marshall decided to appropriate the Crimea.  Bela Kun who had escaped Hungary during the inevitable reaction, going to Moscow, was sent down to the Crimea to exterminate the population to make lebensraum for the Jews.  He was in the process when Lenin died.  Stalin then recalled him to Moscow where he was subsequently shot.

     All these activities were obscured and suppressed.  It is forbidden in American universities to study the subject to this day.

     Still, Europe was so horrified that they declined to discuss it or even acknowledge it.  But Hitler and Stalin remembered.

     The Communists in Moscow being composed solely of emasculated peoples functioning from Freud’s vision of the unconscious like so many Hydes conducted a criminal homosexual style State that would have delighted Genet had he been there.  The author the The Thief’s Journal would have gasped at the warehouses full of stolen furs, diamonds and other jewels, art objects and whatever of value that the poor emasculated wretches had stolen from their murdered victims.  It was the triumph of the Common Man.

     As soon as Stalin gained power he began to discredit and remove Jews from influential positions.  Trotsky was sent to a malarial swamp in Siberia to die but from which he escaped to be killed by Stalin’s assasins later.  As Stalin consolidated his power he acted more directly until he held the famous show trials  of 1936.  He then began the systematic elimination of Jews which resulted by the end of 1945 in the death of millions.

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Stalin

     Thus Hitler, an emasculated man leading an emasculated people had the Judaeo-Communist example before him.  As an avid anti-Communist and open anti-Semite he was virtually isolated by the world that by 1936 was under the control of Judaeo-Communists.  He was the antagonist not the protagonist.

     While Stalin who had religious training was clever enough to seemingly work through the system openly followed legal controlled methods although the law had been subordinated to his ends.  Hitler acted as a homosexual with an ax in his hand.  Stalin’s officers dispatched prisoners hidden in the depths of the Lubyanka with a bullet in the back of the head, which method, by the way, was favored by Jewish and Italian members of Organized Crdime in America of the time, while the Nazis brutally beat prisoners, finally shooting them in  the back while escaping.

     Stalin, Hitler, Freud, which was worse?  Freud enabled, Stalin and Hitler executed.  They were all the same.

     In Russia during the first year or so of Lenin some Russian workers were being read to as they worked.  Were they being read the works of Marx or Lenin?  No.  They were being read the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burrougs.  This infuriated the Politburo.  The State was trying to impose a collectivist unconscious psychology on the Russians while Burroughs and his great psychological projection  were individualist and responsible.  In fact, Burroughs offered a concept of the unconscious which was directly opposed to that of Freud.  One might say that Burroughs was Dr. Jekyll to Freud’s Mr. Hyde.

     Burroughs himself had been severely emasculated at the age of nine.  The situation seems to be this:  Burroughs came from a prosperous Chicago family.  His parents were very proud of their English ancestry.  If you’re unwilling to understand national and racial prejudices that were very pronounced at the time then you probably won’t be able to understand.  There were strong feelings between the Anglo-Saxon and Celt or English and Irish.  The Anglos considered the Celts if not inferior at least eccentric.  The Burroughses  employed two Irish girls as servants.  In all probability Young Burroughs assumed an attitude of superiority  which the girls resented.   They then concocted a plan to cut young Burroughs down to size.

     They had a friend or relative by the name of John who was aged twelve to Burroughs’ nine.  Being much larger and tougher than Burroughs he stopped the younger boy on the way to school one day where he thoroughly intimidated and terrified him.  It is quite possible that Burroughs messed his pants.  In any event, he suffered severe emasculation that was to haunt him all his life.  He does not seem to have ever practiced homosexuality although he was haunted by a feeling of sexual ambiguity.

     The incident with John the Bully not only played havoc with Burroughs personal psychlogy in the narrow sense of creating a psychosis but there was also an effect in what Freud’s erstwhile associate, C. J. Jung called the collective unconscious.  The individual is limited by his very humanity to a small number of general responses.

     Thus Burroughs was given a cast of mind which the Hindus denoted as Shivaistic.  This is a general outlook or philosophy of life, if you wish, which one adopts unconsciously as the consequence of one’s experience.  I share it although it took me nearly a lifetime to recognize and accept it.

Edgar Allan Poe- The Father Of Modern Literature

     Burroughs himself was aware of the fact by at least 1931 when he wrote Tarzan And The Leopard Men.  In one key or on one level the story is one of Shiva and Kali his consort.  Burroughs names his heroine Kali while she is selected to be the White Goddess of the Leopard Men as part of their death cult.

     As can be seen by their complete disregard for life Freud, Hitler and Stalin were also Shivaites.

      Shiva and Kali are the Hindu representation of Life and Death.  Shiva plays unconcernedly on the pipes while the carnage of life and death goes on around him.  The song goes on.  Kali, his consort, the goddess of death and regeneration dances on the bodies of the dead to Shiva’s music  while wearing a necklace of skulls.  Death means nothing because she as the eternal mother has the means to multiply unendingly.  Do multitudes die?  Why then, multitudes die.  Not to worry.  Life goes on.

     Burroughs also developed an interest in psychology in his attempt to free his mind of the fixation given him by John the Bully.  As his psychological notions were well formed by 1911 when he began to write in his attempt to expiate his guilt it follows that he acquired his knowledge during his early married years from 1900 to 1911.  He married at 24.  He had little opportunity to do his reading before then as the major works were only appearing in the late ’90s.

     His main concern was the subconscious mind.  While his evolutionary ideas are easier to trace he has left no mention of his psychological reading.  It seems certain that he was familiar with FWH Myers who, as noticed, first defined the notion of the unconscious in 1886.  He must have read James while Freud’s notions would have been discussed, if not yet translated; thus DH Lawrence had highly developed ideas on the Freudian unconscious in his 1911 Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious while I doubt Burroughs had read Freud in the German.

     Also it seems probable that Burroughs had read Le Bon.

     Burroughs’ idea of the unconscious differed greatly from Freud’s while being more soundly based in the actual functioning of the mind.  While Burroughs’ hero Tarzan seems to function with an integrated personality from his creation in 1911-12 Burroughs himself came very close to integrating his own from 1913 to ’17 or may have although he always had trouble with his Animus and Anima.

     Even though Freud advertised the fact that he had taken a year off  (golly, a whole year) for self-analysis, whatever the results may have been he never succeeded in integrating his personality or, apparently, realized he should have.  He was severely conflicted all his life.  Just take a look at his photo where you can see that huge welt running from his lover right cheek across his nose into  his forehead.  That was caused either by excessive cocaine use or mental conflict in the brain stem, probably both.

     As did all mythographers, Burroughs had read his Poe, like them he was concerned with the conscious and subconscious minds.  While Stevenson’s Jekyll lost his conscious mind in his subconscious mind, Burroughs cencentrated on the concept of the beast within the man, the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious.  In Chapter 3 of The Return Of Tarzan, in what appears to be a plagiarization of the murder scene of Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue, Burroughs has Tarzan act out the parts of both the Sailor and the Orang.

     Lured up to the apartment on the pretext of helping a young woman, Tarzan is set upon by her accomplices.  Discarding the trappings of his recently acquired civilization Tarzan reverts to his anthropoid education of the Jungle becoming Poe’s Orang, yet always retaining the restraints of his humanity or the Sailor.

     When the police come he leaps out the window to a telephone pole which one imagines were more common in Chicago than Paris.  (Burroughs had never been to Paris so he replicated the urban scene he knew.) While still in his ape guise he has the sense to look down where he sees a policeman below so he climbs up leaping to a rooftop.

     Racing across the rooftops of Paris he climbs down another pole.  Then in a Hyde-like transformation back to Jekyll he shakes himself from his ape self back into his human self, without the aid of drugs, enters a restaurant to clean up in the rest room then saunter jauntily down the street as though nothing had happened.

     Thus the plagiarization of not only Poe but Stevenson was merely an attempt to give a better solution by using the mythological symbols.

     Return was written at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913.

     Burroughs’ own self-analysis would continue through his astonishing output of 1911-17 when he finally integrated his personality with the final volume of his Mucker Trilogy published as the Oakdale Affair but alternately titled Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid which is the better title.  At that time he had exorcised his major fixations which should have integrated his personality.

     In understanding that the disintegration of the personality was caused by an affront or affronts to the Ego or Animus that resulted in the creation of fixations that festered in the subconscious that in turn manufactured affects that evidenced themselves in various physical and psychological ways he realized that the same could be exorcised returning the Ego to a whole state.

     Unfortunately he strung his theory on through a couple dozen works of fiction disguised as incident.  A very few would read all the novels while the only possible interpreters could be those who had read them all not only with a psychological background but an open, inquisitive mind.  We’re a very small minority.

     If I hadn’t been through the same process on my own I probably never would have recognized it.  However as his theories were embodied in his hero Tarzan as mythology they passed into the unconscious of his readers of which, as a teenager, I was one, so shall we say, my mind was prepared.

A Review

Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus

Escape From Reality

by R.E. Prindle

 

      One gathers the impression from Mr. Marcus’ work that all his characters are in an extreme flight from reality.  This would be equally true of the historical movements he describes of the Begins and Beguines and Free Spirit.  His conception of the Free Spirit is a downright denial of reality and a full scale unlimited retreat into fantasy.  Coinciding with this is an impossible demand for absolute freedom.  The freedom of the Free Spirits, the Dadaist/Lettrist/Situationists and indeed, the Jews in general, is a freedom that requires passive objects- in other words Masters and Slaves.  The freedom of the Free Spirits that on one level demanded unlimited sexual gratification for men at the same time required the abuse and degradation of women.  Indeed, the image of a woman having sex with ten different men in succession is sexual abuse of a major kind that must irreparably damage the psyche of the woman.

     I return again to the striking images of the insane asylum or Maison de Sante of Poe’s The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether.  There is a great similarity in that story between the inmates seizing control of the asylum and the present situation in which all the disaffected factions such as homosexuals, Jews, Blacks and whatever have turned society on its head suppressing the asylum attendants or establishing an order in their own favor.

     As I read Mr. Marcus’ remarkable book there is no one loonier than Guy Debord and the Lettrist/Situationist International.  Both he and Isou are busy inventing systems that have no relationship to a just or benevolent society.

     Their purpose while framed in grandiose proclamations of ‘changing society for a better world’ merely mask a desire of revolution for revolution’s sake as with the 1968 Paris disturbance that seems to have been meant only to ‘epater le bourgeoisie.’  To sow discord for the sole purpose of giving meaning to Debord’s life, to make him feel that indeed he was a Mastermind and powerful individual.

     How the Situationist International meshed with the Frankfurt School for the furtherance of the Jewish Revolution is predictably left unexamined by Mr. Marcus.  By the early fifties the Institute For Social Research was once again headquartered in Europe.  Herbert Marcuse had been left behind in the US where he took up residence at UC- San Diego translating the claptrap of Adorno and others into English.

     As a continuator of the Frankfurt School then Mr. Marcus provides a link between the Dadaists of 1916, The Frankfurt School of 1923 and the postwar Lettrist/Situationist International.

     Thus as Debord replaced Isou in ’57-’58 the path then led into the so-called Free Speech Movement at UC- Berkeley and spreading from there to US campuses during the decade of the sixties linking up with the Cultural Revolution of Mao that made 1968 such a significant year not only in Paris but worldwide.

     Mr. Marcus gives us a stirring account of his peripheral involvement in the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley  of which he seems to be very proud.  While he doesn’t inform us that he himself was a chief in any committees of public safety or actually involved in any sit-ins with consequent arrest he was present at several large rallies and assemblies in which as he tells us he cheered lustily.

     He seems to be convinced that the cause of ‘freedom’ was thereby greatly advanced.  If so, one asks, ‘freedom’ for whom?  As in Poe’s Maison De Sante for the inmates as opposed to the guards obviously.  The inmates won their freedom from the asylum administrators and guards by capturing and imprisoning them.  Thus as Paul Simon has been known to chant:  One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.  Oh, yes, indeed!

     Now, Mr. Marcus’ works are sprinkled with images and metaphors drawn from the act of fellatio.  While I have drawn my conclusions on the matter I leave it to the reader to draw theirs.  No matter what happens then the issue at hand is of a not so subconscious sexual nature.  Ultimately Mr. Marcus’ ‘total freedom’ gets down to the unlimited sexual gratification of an elite.

     In pre-Revolutionary France this elite was the hereditary aristocracy.  Their victims were drawn from the ‘lower orders’.  For a fair example of how that aristocracy conducted itself it is only necessary to turn the pages of the works of the Marquis de Sade which Mr. Marcus undoubtedly has.

     I hope I won’t offend if I say that what the Revolutionaries want is purely to displace the old elite and substitute themselves if for no other reason than to be able to gratify their sexual fantasies.

     There have been several sex havens in the twentieth century where Western men could go to gratify these illicit passions.  One need only mention Marrakesh, Tangiers, Thailand and locations where one can or could get all the dope one wanted, young girls and boys whose bodies could be violated at will for the appropriate price.  One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.  One’s sexual passions can only be gratified on someone else’s body.  That is what makes de Sade’s writings so terrifying.

     While these sexual retreats are balms for perverted souls it is damned inconvenient to have to go so far at such great expense for such transient pleasures that require constant renewal.  What to do?  Why create possibilities closer to home of course.

      Thus one has women lured from far away with false promises, to be installed in brothels in your home town.  Or local girls plied with drugs until they will do anything you want.  Better still are the hypnotic drugs, but I don’t have to go into detail on the date rape drugs.

     Or, better yet, train whole generations to perverted sexual practices in the public schools from kindergarten up.  Catch the little bastards at five and fill their brains with sexual filth in the name of mental health and sexual liberation. 

     This stuff isn’t new but what is new is its public nature and audacity.  There have been small scale attempts to train men and women to gratify an elite.  The Geishas of Japan are a famous example.  And then there were the Irish slave women and mulattoes of the West Indies brought up to gratify the sexual needs of the planter elite with no unpleasant frictions.

     One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.  Full freedom for the elite is complete slavery for the majority.  If Huxley’s gammas are needed they will be created, for elites need gammas.

     The elite has even cleverly arranged matters so that they can train five year old little boys and girls to be buggers and whores.  In control of the mainstream media they plump continuously for ‘freedom’ from ‘Puritanical strictures.’  They demand sex ‘education’ in the name of developing the full ‘human’ potential of the little buggers.

     The law is perverted for the purpose.  While the concept of the Law may be sacred, laws created by a minority for their convenience aren’t.  As in the sixties when civil disobedience was a sacred duty it is now no less a sacred duty to disobey these laws that benefit the few to the injury of all.  The principle of Law will not be violated anymore now than it was in the sixties.  That was when Greil Marcus was in the bleachers of Freedom howling his lungs out.

     Well, so Guy Debord somehow brought this civil disturbance in France in 1968 to fruition or so he claimed and believed.  As Mr. Marcus justly points out President De Gaulle lamented the fact that the entire disturbance was caused by a few malcontents.  The ‘freedom’ of Debord and the French Situationists meant the disruption if not the destruction of the lives and happiness of those who were trying to create a better civilization.  But, and this is a key point, in order to do so  they had to work.  Debord’s key slogan was ‘ne travaille jamais’.  Never work- suck off the productive.

     This is where I disagree with Mr. Marcus, I don’t find the attitude admirable.  One again asks the question who is the new elite that will replace the pre-Revolutionary elite?  One asks for whose benefit was the babel of languages introduced in that ancient never never land or multi-culturalism into today’s Europe and America?  There’s the real question Mr. Marcus isn’t critiquing.  When the old world is destroyed who will rule the new order?  Who will be masters and who will be the slaves?  Where will the new Law and laws come from?  Ah, Mr. Marcus, write a new book and tell us.

     I don’t think we’ll be hearing from Mr. Marcus on that issue soon even though I am eager.

     So, by 1968 the inmates were well on the way to being in charge of the asylum trying to get outside their clothes  rather than in them.  As I noted earlier Mr. Marcus begins his story at the end.  I will now continue, taking the head of the ouroboros and place its tail in its mouth.  We proceed to the first chapter of Mr. Marcus’ book, Lipstick Traces and the last part of my review.

  

 

A Review

Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus

Part VII

The Assault On Charlie Chaplin

by R.E. Prindle

 

     Apparently satisfied with the attention called to themselves by The Invasion Of Notre Dame in 1950 Isou and the Lettrist International next made an assault on the film industry and Charlie Chaplin.

     Mr. Marcus doesn’t say where Isou announced his views on film or if anyone was listening but…

     Qu0te:

     …(Isou) both pronounced and demonstrated the manifesto of cinema decrepant, mixing up his images and his soundtrack, negating the filmic aspect of the film with torn and scratched celluloid, intentional flickering and passages of blank screen.  “I believe first of all that the cinema is too rich,” he proclaimed.  “It is obese.  I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of rupture in this fat organism we call film.”

     Unquote.

     What does one say to such grandiose nonsense as this?  What does “the first apocalyptic sign of rupture” mean?  While Isou was concentrating so heavily on letters he should have worked on the vocabulary of words a little bit.  How many people listened or cared?  Not many.  No one, actually.  Cinema decrepant?  Well, it was a concept but when you peeled away all the meaning, the ‘fat’, and showed nothing but black or white film, and made the strips of blank film unconscionably long, what then?  No one was willing to sit thrugh four and a half hours of blank film.  Once you’d seen one frame you’d seen them all, literally.

     Attention was required.  How to get it?  The Invasion Of Notre Dame had gotten the proto-Lettrists world wide attention.  That was one successful prank.  If coopting someone else’s gig worked once then it ought to work twice or perhaps three or four times running.  Well, that’s questionable, the old adage is never try the same joke three times running.  Isou, Debord and the other guy hadn’t heard that old adage.

     The second running of the joke got results but not all that much attention.

     The Lettrists stormed the citadel of the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival in a blazing display of chutzpah.  The boys were resisted but through the efforts of the homosexual lobby led by Jean Cocteau the Lettrists had a modest success.

     Quote:

     Through the graces of Cocteau, the festival actually awarded Isou the ‘Prix de l’ Avant Garde’ which was contrived on the spot.

     Unquote.

     With or without the Prix de l’ Avant Garde few people were interested in viewing four and a half hours of blank film.

     The joke worked twice so the boys decided to ‘epater le bourgeouisie’ one more time without variation.

     Charlie Chaplin was coming to Paris to premier his film ‘Limelight’.  Chaplin was already in the afterglow of his long career.  Limelight wasn’t his last film but it should have been.  By the time he produced A Countess Of Hong Kong his career had turned into one eternal yawn.

     The boys launched a campaign printing leaflets of the most insulting and tasteless content.  Except that they were of the Left they would have been jailed.  An excerpt:

     Quote:

     Go to sleep, you fascist insect.  Rake in the dough.  Make it with high society (we loved it when you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elizabeth.)  Have a quick death, we promise you a first class funeral.

     Unquote.

     All chutzpah and no civility.  It’s like these guys crawled out of the sewer for the occasion.  Three in a row was no charm.  Who the hell cared about Charlie Chaplin?  In the first place he was a Commie not a Fascist.  But you can’t call a guy a Commie and insult him in France.  What was he compared to Easter Mass at Notre Dame or even the pitiful Cannes Film Festival.  Next to nothing.  Nothing.  Three strikes and you’re out.  The not very interesting notion of cinema decrepant made little progress.  Even the ‘films’ have disappeared.

     I hope Mr. Marcus was being intentionally funny or perhaps his humor was unconscious but he says that although the film had disappeared he was working from a printed ‘script.’  It apparently takes more to write about a blank screen than to show it.

     So much for cinema decrepant.  So now the Lettrist-Situationist International is in mid-career from 1950-52 to 57 when Debord and Isou split.  So far these guys have made no impression at all.  It might be of interest to note that Lawrence Sterne in his eighteenth century novel, Tristram Shandy, had a chapter that was a blank page so Debord and Isou had an illustrious predecessor.

     At any rate we’ll next attempt a review of the last chapter, titled Lipstick Traces, before returning to the first chapter.  When I first saw the title Lipstick Traces I leaped to the conclusion of lipstick traces on a man’s collar betraying clandestine activities but Mr. Marcus following his song source closely gives the chapter title in full as Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette.) Nothing clandestine there, just vulgarity.  To Part VIII.

Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus

A Review

Part IV

The Art Of Yesterday’s Crash

 by R.E. Prindle

 

     As I mentioned in Part II Mr. Marcus seems to consider himself first an Old Testament prophet prophesying fire and destruction for the United States.  Secondly he sees himself as a continuator of the Frankfurt School or New School Of Social Research and thirdly the spiritual successor to Guy Debord and perhaps the new leader of the Situationist International.

     In the situations under consideration he turns his New School For Social Research and SI sides up.

     Now as it happens that when I attended Cal State At Hayward one of the professors was a fellow named Theodore Roszak.  Mr Roszak wrote a volume called The Making Of A Counter Culture while teaching at Cal State; probably something called American Studies or some such, I can’t remember, which these Frankfurters always aim for and we’ll see why.

     We are now talking ’64-’65.  Sixty-five is probably best known for the Black rebellion in LA’s Watts district.  That kicked off the violent revolt of the Blacks which smolders on today flaring up here and there.  Thus in Mr. Marcus’ The Shape Of Things To Come he prophesys blood in the streets.

     It was also the beginning of the San Francisco Scene.  The San Francisco Mime Troop- a Communist outfit- had been active in street theatre for some little time.  Then Kesey organized the Merry Pranksters, Owsley entered the picture and the Acid Tests began.  I was invited to the Acid Test but declined to go.  Couldn’t see the social utility; it would have been interesting but I’m not sorry I missed it.

     Roszak.  So everybody assumed that this book he advertised he was writing called The Making Of A Counter Culture was about what Jack Kerouac called ‘The Rucksack Revolution.’  These were the post-British Invasion days so long hair was slowly making inroads into the East Bay.  I didn’t have long hair but I had a strange long ducktail from the fifties.  Cal State was on a windy plateau so everytime I went outside I looked like a hurricane walking around.  This was enough for the profs and administration who were terrified that the Free Speech Movement would edge up from Berkeley to classify me as a ‘radical.’

     I was sent to Roszak as he was presumably writing a book on the ‘counter culture’ which is what the hip movement was known as.  I found Roszak one guilty customer.  Dark mind too, repellent.  He thought I was sent as a spy.  That increased his guilty reaction.

     When his book came out it didn’t have anything to do with a Hippie counter culture.  It was all about the Frankfurt School, Marcuse et al.  The book was about the Jewish Revolution.  Roszak must have thought the ‘anti-Semites’ sent me.  So, now I understand Mr. Marcus; use of the term ‘Secret History.’  He doesn’t just mean obscure.  Roszak was part of history being made but it was unintelligible to the uninformed mind.  Even though the Frankfurt School was operating openly I don’t know if anyone knew that subterranean history was being lived in the open but there it was as plain as day.  Roszak was a continuator.  I don’t know if Mr. Marcus knows Mr. Roszak but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did, they are both Jews etc, but as a continuator of the Frankfurt School Mr. Marcus may be described as having the baton passed to him through Mr. Roszak.  Mr. Marcus is more prolific and effective while being more obscure and secretive than Mr. Roszak.  The reader, even the informed reader, probably doesn’t know he is being spoon fed Semitism.

     Mr. Marcus even allows himself to be called by the presumptuous title of The Holy Greil even further insulting his subordinate Euroamerican culture.  I don’t mind Mr. Marcus and others insulting the half-Jewish Jesus but I do want him to keep his hands off the essence of Euroamerican Culture.  I can accord Mr. Marcus neither Holiness nor any association with the Grail stories even though his style incomprehensible as it is is pretty entertaining.  Must have learned that from Old Bob.

     Mr. Marcus establishes himself as a continuator of the Frankfurt School and then says he is going to criticize the living crap out of everything.  Well, alright, OK!  I would like to point out however that criticism is not analysis.  Any fool can criticize but analysis requires a little science.  There’s a serious rub in Mr.  Marcus’ style, not science, all, well, not all, blather.

     I will give him credit for not beginning this Situation with the Armory Show.  My god and Jesus H. Christ we know how that changed America but, well, as an Israeli citizen and man of the world Mr. Marcus isn’t talking about America or anything as earth shaking as the Armory show.  No.  He’s talking about six inconsquential nerds pulling sophomoric stunts in Zurich in 1916 while there was a war going on.  All a bunch of draft dodgers too, except for the woman doing the splits with the madonna face  whatever one of those is.  I been looking but not finding.

     These six Mr. Marcus informs us created Da Da.  They gave their shenanigans a name that stuck.  While Mr. Marcus seems to revere their stuff I have to confess that it doesn’t seem much different than the shenanigans of any other generation.  Da Da is just a state of mind that certain people experience at a certain stage and condition of life. 

     If Mr. Marcus had looked around Berkeley and the Bay Area he would have seen plenty of evidence of the state of mind in the Mime Troupe, the whole San Francisco Sound was Da Da.  Kesey was Da Da, and everyone was pulling the same kind of stunts with the same results.  That trick with the splits and madonna face is so commonplace it doesn’t bear mentioning.  A guy playing an imaginary violin?  Whew!  Wow, who in the world could ever have thought that one up?

     The hell with this Da Da crap.  Real men dying in the trenches and these guys are scraping an imaginary violin?  Not too impressed, Mr. Marcus.  Let’s get on to the real stuff.  This gets passed over by The Holy Greil.  The foundation of the Frankfurt School c. 1923.  Here’s the real crux of Mr. Marcus; psychology, the culture wars between the Semitic intellect and the European intellect.  A lttle clash of loyalties here in that dual citizenship Mr. Marcus holds.

     While the clowns in Zurich, for that is what they were , were trying to live down their antics at the  Cabaret Voltaire the real revolution was forming in Frankfurt.  This the revolution of which Mr. Marcus is the continuator.  This is the real substance of Mr. Marcus’ work.  Nice work too, don’t get me wrong.

     I’ve done some work on this subject but I’m going to refer any possible readers to this web page for a quick history of the Frankfurt School:  http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2007/07/great-historical-outline-of-cultural.html   The article was posted by Mr. Rob Fedders.  Bear in mind this analysis represents the foundation of Mr. Marcus thought, intellect and purpose.  His writing makes much more sense in this context.

     Quote:

     Before World War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working classes in every European country would rise in revolt overthrow their govenments and create a new Communist Europe, but when war broke out in the summer of 1914, that didn’t happen.  Instead the workers of every European country lined up by the millions to fight their country’s enemies….After World War I ended in 1918, Marxist theorists had to ask themselves a question:  What went wrong?…two leading Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and George Lukacs in Hungary…independently came up with the same answer.  They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interests, that a Communist revolution was impossible in the West, until both could be destroyed.  That objective, established as cultural Marxism’s goal right at the beginning, has never changed.

     Unquote.

     There’s a little secret history for you.  The Frankfurt School employed the political theory of Marx, the psychological theory of Freud and the relativistic nonsense of Einstein to undermine Western culture backed up by the ever potent charge of ‘anti-Semitism.’  Their BS could easily have been resisted and rejected but for their alliance with Liberals.  To merely state that a critic was anti-Semitic was enough to set the conditioned Liberals on the accused and make him or her a non-person in society.  Thus without their Liberal slaves the Frankfurt School would not have been that effective.  Liberals are the true enemy. 

     Now, skipping the interim machinations, by the time of the Free Speech Movement the Jewish Revolution had been nearly completed.

     In addition to the music the introduction of hallucinigens made the capture of the whole generation child’s play.

     As with the so-called Free Speech Movement the problem was not one shared by society as a whole which was functioning quite nicely, thank-you, but a cultural problem within the Semitic species.  As always the inability of the Semites to compete effectively with the Indo-Europeans, or to be brief, Aryan species was the crux of the problem.  The Terachites challenged the Ur of the Chaldees.  In the ancient conflict between the Semites and the Aryan Sumerians the latter were centered about Ur while the Semites were centered further North.  So Abram as a Semite was challenging the Aryan Sumerians who had understood and developed Astronomy.  The Egyptians were an amalgam of the HSII Libyans and the Egyptians of the Upper Nile valley.  In my opinion the intellectual content of Egypt was injected by the Libyan refugees from the post-ice age flooding of the Mediterranean.

     The Semites then came into collision with the superior intellecual and scientific civilization of the Hellenes more especially in Greek Alexandria where Philo attempted to subvert Hellenic science in favor of ‘Talmudic’ mythology.  The Romans who created the most amazing empire the Mediterranean world had ever seen once again, as it were, illuminated the inferiority of the Semitic intellect.  The Jews set about to subvert and destroy the Roman Empire which, in my opinion they did both in the exhausting Roman-Jewish Wars and the succeeding Pauline Judeo-Christian subversion.  Matters were then stalemated for centuries until Aryan science finally pushed through the Judeo-Christian meshes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

     Once again the inferiority of the Semitic intellect was displayed.  Marx, Freud and Einstein created the basic non-scientific means posing as science to subvert the Aryan scientific intellect.  The groundwork laid by the big three, the epigone went to work.  The nitwits of Da Da may be considered shock troops while the Frankfurt School- The Institute For Social Research- formed c. 1923 began the serious work of undermining Western Civilization.  Once again, Mr. Marcus seems to consider himself first a continuator of the Frankfurt School, a reincarnation of Guy Debord and then in The Shape Of Things To Come to graduate to the role of a Hebrew prophet.

     Now, in every instance in which the Jewish Semites have confronted the Aryans they have failed to excel them although taking advantage of the reluctance to face the problem directly on the part of the Aryans the Jewish Semites have been able without exception to destroy the Aryan achievement.

     The Jews also insist that they are the Chosen People of mankind just as the Arabs insist that they are The Central People.  Chosen, Central are the same things.  We are talking a characteristic of the Semitic species.  Yet evolutionarily they are constitutionally or genetically inferior to Aryans.  No matter what happens they will never be able to match or sustain Aryan achievements.

     What to do?  I know most readers have never delved deeply into this area of study so that the reader may be astonished by what is going on and find it unbelievable.  It isn’t.  Realizing that they can never excel the Aryans the Jewish Semites have resolved to exterminate- that is commit genocide- on the whole species.  They propose to and are fairly well advanced in their program to eliminate a species of over a billion people.

     Astounding and unbelievable isn’t it.  Well, while you were sleeping astounding developments were in progress.  It is time for the sleeper to awake.  Be patient with me and I’ll explain how it is being done and why Mr. Marcus may possibly see himself advance from Hebrew prophet to Judge-Penitent of the Aryan peoples.  (See my review of Albert Camus’ The Fall here on I, Dynamo.)

     The plan is available on line at a site run by a former Harvard professor, Noel Ignatiev called Race Traitor.  Mr. Ignatiev believes in races even though he is a Jew and the current Jewish line is that races do not exist.  The first stage of this program is part of psychological warfare based on the Freudian model.

     Mr. Ignatiev as spokesman for the Jewish culture asserts that all the evil in the world proceeds from the Aryan ‘races.’  It is true that the Jews argue in other situations that ‘race’ exists only as a social construct however as ‘race’ is useful in this instance the idea is reconstituted.  The approach is a key tenet of ‘critical theory’ in which the critical base point is one’s relative need at the moment.

     As all evil proceeds from the Aryan ‘race’ it follows that if the Aryan race is eliminated from the face of the earth by ‘any means necessary’ that evil will disappear from the world.  This notion is apparently a variation on the eighteenth century Jewish notion of Jacob Frank that Jews will only become good when they expend all the evil in their system.  Apparently at that time Jews were the evil ‘race’ but at some point between then and now they have expended all the evil in their system and have become ‘good’ along with the rest of the world.  All this stuff sounds good according to Jewish ‘critical theory’ but falls apart under ‘Aryan’ scientific analysis.

     The problem is the obvious Aryan superior intelligence so that Mr. Ignatiev invents the concept of  ‘White Skin Privilege.’  Using critical theory the only reason Aryans or Whites, to which term I will revert, have obtained the prominent position among the ‘races’ is because Aryans have White Skin.  Real Tarzans if you know what I mean.  Thus the superiority is based on cosmetics.   Change the cosmetics and the superiority will go away.  Not bad reasoning really.  It therefor follows that if Whites can be persuaded to give up their ‘White Skin Privilege’ why, the Utopia will become a reality and evil will disappear from the world.  I’m not making this up.

     Therefore from sheer shame Whites should voluntarily abandon ‘Whiteness.’  Remember this line of reasoning comes from a Harvard graduate and a Harvard professor.  I would have been laughed out of a ‘third rate’ college like Cal State for proposing such nonsense.  To my knowledge neither the Jewish culture or Harvard University have ever publicly repudiated Mr. Ignatiev so one must assume he speaks with the full approval of both.

     Mr. Ignatiev also calls his program the New Abolitionism calling for the abolition of the White ‘race.’

     The easiest course, or least painful, for Whites to abolish themselves, actually, is to marry Black people.  Any resulting offspring will be non-White so that if all Whites could be persuaded to do this ‘Whiteness’ would disappear within, well, a generation.

     Realistically this isn’t going to happen although historically conquerors have killed the men and kept the women.  Without White men White women will have to produce colored children.  This was actually done during the Haitian revolution from France.  The men were killed and the White women were told that they could live only if they served as wives to Black men.  Most of them did.  Thus we have the result of Haitians being the most beautiful people in the world while having constructed the most successful and glorious society not to mention culture.

     Now, if you follow what’s happening in education, kindergartners are being taught to be homosexuals.  Is it necessary to say that homosexuals cannot reproduce themselves?  It therefor follows that if White boys are raised as homosexuals White women will have to turn to Black men while if such a program is successful White men will diminish say by a half life a generation.  Thus another method to eliminate Whites.  And White people are dumb enough to go for it.  Can’t ask for more than that, can one?

     And then for the remainder of hard cases there are always industrial means to eliminate them.  Gas chambers or whatever means necessary, who cares?

     So as you can see Mr. Ignatiev is not theorizing but helping to implement a program that is well advanced.

     Now then, the strength of the US economy and well being of Whites as a result is a standing rebuke to the other ‘races’ of the world and a cause of the most destructive envy.  We don’t want to look at Zimbabwe and South Africa do we?  Naw.  How’s that going to prove anything?  Thus jobs were exported out of the country to everywhere.  The US economy as a whole was picked up and moved to China which for all practical purposes is run with the lowest cost slave labor possible.

     The unions have been broken and the well being of the working man has been destroyed by unrestricted Mexican immigration which is lower cost.  Technical jobs have been given to lower cost immigrant labor via the worker visa program.

     Back in the eighties the savings and Loan industry was savagely looted.  One of the beneficiaries of that theft was the family of the current President of the United States.  The housing debacle which will be a blow from which the US economy will not recover was engineered from the start to impending finish with the full knowledge of that President.

     It only remains to gut the savings of the older generation.  At the appropriate time this will be done by inflation.  At that point the United States and the West will be defenseless.  One can’t imagine what the Liberals have to gain from this.

     So, within the matter of a few decades ‘White Skin Privilege’ will be just a memory.  Of course other ‘situations’ may enter in to redirect the course of history.  No one can accurately prophesy including Mr. Marcus.

     Thus if Mr. Marcus lives long enough he may finish his life as a ‘Judge Penitent’ choosing who may live and who not.

     I will end this Part here and meld the end of The Art Of Yesterday’s Crash with the next situation The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art.

GREIL MARCUS

LIPSTICK TRACES

A Review

Part III

Legends Of Freedom

 

Greil En Repose

 

     So Mr. Marcus’ question is:  Why am I nothing when I should be everything?  Sounds like a lot of frustration to me.  If the questioner doesn’t understand the answer then he is in a veritable quandary.  In the first place nobody can be ‘everything.’  Nobody can corner all the money in the world although it doesn’t stop some people from trying, some people who have a more effective plan than Karl Marx or…Johnny Rotten or…Guy Debord or…do I dare say Greil Marcus? 

     One must question in this novel of frustrations, for that is what it is, to what extent is the author talking about himself; he certainly sems to identify with his characters.  He named a subsequent book The Shape Of Things To Come after a title of the man who wrote The Anatomy Of Frustration, H.G. Wells.

     Writing is a dangerous vocation.  I’m terrified by it everytime I put pen to paper.  No matter how careful you are you must expose your real self to a readership that may or may not be all that forgiving.  For myself I have abandoned any hope of concealment and write as my needs dictate.  However once published your fate is in the hands of any readers.  So, I sympathize with Mr. Marcus but wonder if he himself isn’t frustrated by a lack of monetary success that he thinks he deserves.

     Why else would he concentrate on such nonentities as Johnny Rotten, Guy Debord and these non-entities hanging around the Cafe Voltaire.  I have a feeling that Lipstick Traces could have been titled The New Anatomy Of Frustration.

     Why am I nothing when I should be everything?

     Did Guy Debord think he would become everything by plastering grafitti like Ne Travaille Jamais all over Paris?  Ne travaille Jamais?

Guy Debord

     There’s a defeatist slogan if I ever heard one.  Mr. Marcus has worked plenty hard to realize his something.  My god, the effort I have put in trying to make a success as a writer.  Mr. Marcus at least has made it into print for which he has been paid something I should think.  I’ve spent twenty years writing with no recompense and I still am.  The only consolation I have is that the readership of my blogs seems to be growing.  That’s something, no money, but something.

     Ne travaille jamais?  Why does Mr. Marcus want to make a hero out of some yo-yo sitting around a bar cadging drinks from people who do travaille?  Unless Mr. Marcus explains, that is going to remain a mystery to me.

     What is Guy Debord doing as he sits around drinking cadged absinthe, ruining his liver?  Yes, but he’s trying to dream up ‘situations’ in which he can bring the society that won’t recognize his greatness to its knees.  And according to Mr. Marcus he nearly succeeded in the Paris of 1968.  That was the the work of the SI he says.  SI, Situationist International.

     Debord and his SI remind me of nothing so much as the fable of the Ants And The Grasshopper.  You remember that.  The Ants worked hard all summer storing up supplies against the long cold winter that inevitably follows the short pleasant summer while the grasshoppers lived heedlessly off the land fiddling and dancing.

     When the inevitable happened as the inevitable will they who had thought they were everything turned out to be nothing.  They demanded charity, much as Debord and his kind do, when they were refused their response was that they would burn the stores of the Ants and they wouldn’t have anything either.  Mr. Marcus appears to admire this attitude.

     What did Shakespeare say in Hamlet of  ‘the spurns that patient merit takes of the unworthy’?  Are those who will not contribute to be given the same consideration as those who do?  The people who trashed Paris in ’68 thought so.  The Grasshoppers did the only thing they knew how, they burned what les travailleurs had created.

     Mr. Marcus admires that.  Unless I read him wrong he considers that ‘freedom’.  Guy Debord is one of legends of freedom.

     SI.  Situationist International.  International- some guy sitting in a bar in Paris cadging drinks dreaming that he runs an International subversive organization.  Some legend of freedom.  So far Mr. Marcus’ argument is not very convincing.

     During some very very formative years Mr. Marcus and I were subjected to many of the very same influences.  I’d gotten out of the Navy in late ’59 moving into the East Bay of the SF Bay.  Mr Marcus at that time, as I gather, was growing up in Menlo Park on the Peninsula.  I was based in San Leandro-Castro Valley-Hayward.  I worked in Oakland and San Francisco while hanging out as much as I could in Berkeley.  While as I gather Mr. Marcus was fortunate enough to attend UC-Berkeley I was running the gamut of various Junior Colleges beginning with Oakland City finally ending up at Hayward State from which I graduated in ’66.

     I’m willing to bet that Mr. Marcus is familiar with Henry Miller, The Story Of O, Steppenwolf and several other similar titles that were de rigeur in that cockpit of Freedom, the so-called Free Speech Movement from ’64 or slightly earlier on.  Needless to say the apostles of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Fromm, Reich, Marcuse et al. were running around trying to force that crap on everyone.

     Since we’re talking Legends Of Freedom here that Mr. Marcus identifies, jokingly I hope, p.181:

     They were “enfants perdu” Debord often said, lost children, and so they claimed any father in whose faces they could recognize their own; (cough, cough)  the surrealists, the dadaists, the failed revolutionaries of the first third of the twentieth century, the Communards, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, medieval heretics-and all, as Debord and the others began talking in the 1950s, were moribund, forgotten memories and rumors, manque, maudit.  All were, at best, legends- to the LI and SI, part of the legend of freedom.

     Legends of freedom!  Hmm…pardon me while I smile, pardon me further, I’m beginning to shake uncontrollably from laughter.  Karl Marx and the Soviet Union legends of freedom?  Oh yes, indeed, Mr. Marcus.  A trick of perspective perhaps?

     Listen now.  Mr. Marcus hopes that the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley may be included in those great freedom battles.  But I ask Mr. Marcus, Freedom for who?  As it happens Cal-State was a new college with a very small library so we were given library privileges at UC.  So I was actually on campus when a lot of this was going on.  I even tried to join up but was rejected in this great experiment in freedom because I wasn’t…Jewish.  But I would be allowed to carry a sign and throw my body on the barricades…if I wanted to help this legend of freedom along.  Well, I declined, envisioning myself in a more exalted postion as I did, I who should have been everything spurned away with the foot as nothing.

     As I say I graduated in’66 so I spent the summer attending summer school at Berkeley.  By this time the Revolution was over and the revolutionists were in control.  When I came up from Hayward I entered the campus through the famous Sather Gate, perhaps since renamed Legends Of Freedom Gate, I don’t know.  I used to see the ‘fabled’ Allen Ginsberg there trying to sell the Berkeley Barb or whatever.

     Just inside the Gates Of Freedom, I think Dylan sang about some such fantasy, just inside the gates of freedom the Jewish Commissars of the revolution sat.  One was supposed to submit one’s free American manhood to these ‘revolutionary’ slugs if one wished to attend classes unmolested.  I just walked by these slugs because I didn’t know what was going on.  I was told what was going on.  Well, I’m a free American boy, born that way, not going to give it up, you dig?  I don’t submit my manhood to anybody least of all some degenerate looking slug pretending to be Cheka, Gestapo, Che or whatever.  Fuck that… pardon me, none of that for me.

     Now, Berkeley had these huge thousand member or something like that, lecture classes.  The teaching genius who wrote a book or two you’ve never heard of, lectured from a podium about a mile away then we were all divided into groups of about thirty and turned over to teaching assistants who were, you guessed it, vetted by the Commissars.  You know where I stood in that great battle for, what was that word Mr. Marcus?  Freedom?  A legendary one too.

     And you mentioned all these legends of freedom that preceded the so-called Free Speech Movement of Berkeley as representative?

     And did we all dance with one hand waving free with no fences but the sky facing?

      Don’t be disingenuous sir!  None of the people you mention were interested in the least in freedom for anyone but themselves and I’m afraid that might include you.  So was Berkeley a mere created situation that preceded the situation in Paris in ’68?  Were the Commissars active in Paris as they were in Berkeley?  I’ll bet they were.

     Actually I’m beyond the third reading which is quite a tribute to Mr. Marcus.  I’m up to five readings of Legends Of Freedom and I’ll probably be at five for the rest of the situations Mr. Marcus records.  I may do some more detail work when I finish the main outline.

     Next let us turn to the second situation.  The Art Of Yesterday’s Crash.

End Of Part III

Lipstick Traces

A Review

Greil Marcus:

A Few Back Pages

by R.E. Prindle

 

The Man Who Shook The World

For even if they should say something true, one who loves the Truth should not, even so, agree with them.  For not all true things are the Truth nor should that truth which seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true Truth- that according to faith.

 –Clement Of Alexandria

 

     Clement was a man defending orthodox Christianity against not only the Pagans but competing Christian sects.  Here he enunciates the credo  of the true believer- it is True because we believe it, any other opinion even if true, or truer, must be considered false according to the faith.

     In the twentieth century the Jewish comedian  Woody Allen has a scene in one of his movies where some Jewish men are discussing things at a seder.  Allen has one say that he would take God over the Truth.  Or, like Clement he would sacrifice reason to the Faith or, in other words, Superstition.

     There we have the crux of the matter.  To criticize Jews is to criticize God in the Jewish mind.  The inevitable result for those who do not accept the true Truth is to be labelled as anti-Semites.  Thereon hangs the whole of Jewish history, past, present and future.  It is to be devoutly hoped that the following discussion will not be defamed as Semites vs. anti-Semites but approved as Reason vs. Superstition.  After all in the age of Science one would hope that Superstition is a thing of the past.

     The argument will center on the ideas and career of Sigmund Freud- the man who shook the world.  But first the world will have to be placed in the context of competing viewpoints within a Jewish context.

     For many millennia the role of Science was given a subsidiary position below that of Religion.  The truths of Science were denied because they conflicted with the true Truth of Religion.

     In this environment the Jews were advantageously placed to dispute with Roman Catholics.  After all Catholicism used the Jewish texts as its holy scripture.  Thus in debating contests with Catholicism the Jews almost always came out the victors.  This gave them great pride as being superior to the Gentiles.  Their very high opinion of themselves seemed justified.

      Had things remained a matter of faith the Jewish opinion of themselves would probably still be unchallengeable.  However Science which had been treated by the Church more roughly than the Jews refused to be suppressed.  Actually a higher percentage of Scientists were persecuted to death by the Church than Jews but this fact has to my knowledge never been considered.

     The rise of Science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only shook the faith of the religious to its roots but actually cast the Semitic faiths into the dust bin of history.  With the rise of Science Judaism became irrelevant.  It could not win any debates with Science.

     In the many crises of the Jewish soul this was a very significant one.  It caused the breakup of medieval Judaism.  For the first time the Jews left their ghettos and attempted to enter the mainstream of European life.

     The Talmud which the Jews had always considered the repository of all true wisdom and knowledge now appeared to enlightened Jews to be the collection of nonsense the goys had always claimed it was.

     As the Jews, then, began to enter the mainstream of European society they did so consciously as inferiors trying to impose themselves with their old dignity on superiors.  The raison d’ etre of Judaism had to be replaced or the faith would just fade away.

     The Talmud was useless to them in argument; they could only embrace the alien ideology of Science and try to excel the European originators of it.

     Bearing in mind their desire to avenge themselves on the Europeans by befuddling them because of their expulsion from Spain they campaigned both politically and intellectually.

     The first major attempt at establishing a science was that of Karl Marx who espoused ‘scientific’ socialism which was superior to ‘utopian’ socialism.  Thus a Jewish social system supposedly scientifically constructed was placed in opposition to a European social system.

     In the realm of Physics Einstein managed what seemed to be a more accurate description of reality.  So in politics and physics the Jews had established a seeming scientific superiority.

     At the same time as Einstein Sigmund Freud coalesced a theory of psychology that was superior to the fragmented state of psychology.

     All three men then tried to turn their achievements to the benefit of the Jewish culture.  As much as anything this was the cause of the two European wars as Hitler so accurately recognized.

     As a little aside it is interesting to note the career of Immanuel Velikovsky.  Like Einstein Velikovsky was a very competent Scientist, that is to say, working within an European intellectual milieu.  But whereas Einstein stopped short at attempting to prove the veracity of Genesis and Exodus Velikovsky plowed straight ahead.  Using his scientific skills to attempt to validate the literal accuracy of every fable he broke on the rock of superstition.  Still, he wrote some very entertaining books, somewhat along Marcusian lines.

2.

     The influence of Sigmund Freud on psychology has been immense while that influence has been almost entirely of a negative character.  The increase in crime can be attributed to the implementation of his theories.  Certainly the self-centered attitude of the homosexuals aboard the Teufelsdreck is about to lead to crimes and thwarted crimes which can be laid to Freud’s teachings.  Let us review Freud’s ideas in the light of his milieu.

3.

     One of Freud’s discoveries was the neurotic need to repeat.  In other words, the subject repeatedly acts out the encysted subconscious fixation in an attempt to exorcise or realize the fixation.  This phenomenon applies to cultures as well as individuals as Freud taught.  In cultures it is called the ‘national character.’  In other words, a people must always act out its characteristic view of reality, the true Truth of the faith vs. the actual scientific state of things.

     The Jews by and large have been a Stateless people since their origins.  If one takes Genesis as fact, and it is psychological fact for sure, the Jews enter history ‘On The Road’ having been expelled from Ur of the Chaldees seventy-five years after having come into existence as a people.  The theme of expulsion is a repeated figure in Jewish history.  They are never tolerated for long.  This is a fact, a truth, but in variance with the true Truth of the faith.

     If we take the Jewish historian, Josephus, at face value they were expelled from Ur because of the jealousy of the Chaldean astronomers who were angry at Abram’s superior skills.  The Chaldeans were known as the foremost astronomers of the ancient world so the Jewish ego must excel them at their own game.

     The Jews then went to Egypt which was the home of the greatest magicians.  After having outperformed Pharaoh’s magicians at feats of magic they take to the road again, fleeing Egypt.

     Thus the main tenets of the Jewish character are fixed.  They see themselves as an invasive people who are naturally superior to any people whose territory they invade and then they leave.  These two themes repeat and repeat.

     Thus in the nineteenth century when the Jews move West out of the Pale of Settlement into Vienna the migration must be seen as an invasion of a hostile culture intent on taking over the State as in Ur or Egypt.

     A historical characteristic  of Jewish invasions is that they are not usually militaristic but infiltratory.  Like the military invasion of Hungary by the Magyars the Jewish invasion of Vienna was no less belligerent and exhibited the same needs to impose its culture.

     In the biblical account of the invasion of Palestine the Jews put entire peoples to the sword to make living space for themselves.  Thus they committed genocide several times over.  There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t have done the same in Vienna given time and opportunity.

     The bulk of the Jewish people after 1700 had been collected in Eastern Europe in what became known as the Pale of Settlement.  This was mainly in Eastern Poland and Western Russia.  When Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Germany in the eighteenth century Austria acquired a large Jewish population in Galicia and its other Eastern provinces.

     The Western Jews had already realized that the great challenge to their sense of superiority came from Science.  What is called the Emancipation of the Jews was done by the French Revolution c. 1789-93.  The Emancipation allowed the Jews to begin participation in European society.  The work of the Church was undone.  Thus the Jewish intellect came into conflict with the European intellect. In Germany this created a reaction known as the Kulturkampf.  What the Germans had done was to give their intellect a name.  They opposed German Kultur to Jewish Semitism.  Semitism is the Jewish name for their intellect.  Hence both anti-Semitism and anti-Kulturism came into existence. 

      Once within the Austrian Empire the Jews began to migrate toward its capitol, Vienna.

     The Austro-Hungarian Empire was already an unwieldy amalgam of disputing nationalities and races.  Its German governors had their hands full.  Austria was sort of an early version of the United States.

     Unable to destroy the Germans by the sword the Jews made a cultural assault on the institutions of the Empire.  They pitted the Jewish intellect, Semitism, against the German intellect, Kultur.  Freud who fully understood the meaning of Kultur wrote a book denouncing it- Civilization And Its Discontents.

     Now, Jews are not smarter than anyone else although the mythology of the West so asserts.  In fact, Jews are not under the same constraints as the indigenous peoples.  Thus, the Jews are always a free, if circumscribed, people.  The indigenous peoples were seldom as free.  Medieval Europe had been a caste society in which only certain castes had freedom of movement.  The Russian Serfs were both unfree and circumscribed until 1861 when they were at least nominally freed although not allowed to freely participate in society.  They and other European peasants had a role akin to the American Negro of 1900 in the South who were supposed to know their place and keep it.

      Thus a university education was beyond the aspirations of the indigenous lower classes but open to Jews of any class.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that social advancement is much facilitated by a solid education.  The Jews accordingly flooded European universities in greatly disproportionate numbers to the population.  Any Jew could thus place himself above the majority of the indigenous population.

     It was inevitable that they be disproportionately represented in law, the judiciary, medicine, education, the arts and all prestigious occupations.  As Semitism was unassimilable to Kultur it was inevitable that if the invasion was not resisted that Semitism would  replace Kultur.  This left the Germans in a difficult situation.  They must either discriminate against the invaders, kill them, or go under.

     Given more freedom of movement than the indigenous population and possessing a universal language, Yiddish, the Jews could form the international business corps of any community unrestrained by the business mores of the indigenous people.  They could make their own rules, upsetting established traditions and customs as in Egypt and Chaldea.

     This too is an established Jewish custom.  Things don’t absolutely have to be done in the manner in which they are being done.  When the Jews invaded Egypt they began to slaughter the sacred animals which the Egyptians had protected for millennia.  The Jews saw no reason for the custom so they rudely pushed Egyptian mores aside.  This habit is repeated in every country they invade.  The peoples can learn to do it the Jewish way like it or not.  They feel they speak with the authority of the true Truth of God.

     By 1899 they were over 10% of the population of Vienna which is where critical mass begins.  Muscling into the cultural life of the city they acquired a disproportionate number of seats in the symphony orchestras.  As in Chaldea and Egypt they assumed that the Semitist style of playing was superior to that of Kultur.  As music in Germania occupied an analogous position to astronomy in Chaldea and magic in Egypt the Jews naturally assumed they were better musicians than the Germans although music had never played a large part in their culture before.

     As the scientific demands of music are greater than ancient astronomy and magic the Jews were never able to muster a composer of the first rank although their instrumentalists dominated the stage.  But then all the empresarios were Jewish so they would necessarily hear with the Jewish intellect.  Even today the Jews believe that without the Semitic intellect the orchestras of Europe sound nowhere as good as before the Holocaust.

     They established their own newspapers and publishing houses.  They used them to defame anyone who dissented from their program.

     Without physical resources they had to resort to psychological means to disarm their opponents.  They had to ‘psyche’ them out.  Anyone who opposed or criticized them was branded as an anti-Semite and his own people were instructed by the Jews to ostracize him.  Thus German nationalists became, if not criminals, at least, pariahs in their own land.  The Austrian reaction to Jewish nationalism was extremely violent giving expression to itself only after the Anschluss.

     These German defense forces were active and powerful during the period from approx. 1890-1914.  After 1918 resistance to the Jewish invasion crumpled everywhere.  The Millennial Revolution had gone swimmingly.  Jews assumed the top positions or became dominantly influential in nearly all governments including the United States.  The Jewish Invasion was for all practical purposes a success.

     Two men were born into this Viennese environment that would have a profound impact on world history, Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler.

4.

         Freud’s main desire was to become a great man.  This idea was planted in his intellect by his Christian nurse as a child.  He succeeded in realizing this in the field of psychology.  Freud was himself an immoral man nor does he advocate morality for others.  He advocates an unbridled self-indulgence.  Like he says:  Life is short.  To succeed in one’s aims it is permissable to take immoral shortcuts even to use criminal means.  The Mafia believes the same thing.

     As a young man he was schooled in the tradition of Anton Mesmer from whom modern psychology descends.  He was heavily indebted to the teaching of the French psychologist Jean Martin Charcot as well as to the school of Nancy.  His own approach was an adaptation of their methods.  He at first used Mesmerism or hypnotism as did the schools of Paris and Nancy but later abandoned it in favor of a form of self-hypnotism that he called free association.  Hypnotism as a result went into a period of disfavor although applications are being found for it once again.

     He got his real start by insinuating himself into the good graces of Josef Breuer whose work he very nearly appropriated.  Having plundered Breuer he broke off with him never speaking to him for the rest of Breuer’s life.  Thus does conscience make villains of us all.

     Unable to admit his indebtedness to his teachers he repudiated their influence acting as though he had evolved his theories out of whole cloth.  As an aspect of his character he was unable to suffer any criticism or advancement on his own ideas by others.  He eventually acrimoniously broke with any of his associates with intellegence and independence.

     Freud was a Jew which is to say devoutly so.  He did not consider himself Austrian or German but an ethnic Jew.  He believed in the supremacy of the Jewish people.

     The most revealing anecdote concerning him was that as a child he was walking with his father who told him how when a young man he was wearing a new hat when a Gentile knocked it off his head into the street.

     ‘What did you do?’  Freud asked breathlessly expecting the answer to be that his father knocked the Gentile down.

     ‘I went out into the street and picked it up.’  His father replied.

     Freud then lost all respect for his father which troubled him greatly for he wrote:  ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father protector.’  His dad wasn’t it.

     So Freud’s own psychic needs distorted his approach from one of science as Jung claimed to one based on his personal needs.  He falsely maintained that the father figure is the most important in a man’s life.  When his disciple Otto Rank had the courage to correctly insist that the mother was the most important, Freud drummed him out of the ranks.

     Disappointed by his own father he took as a surrogate father figure Hamilcar Barca, the father of Hannibal.  Hamilcar Barca having suffered an injury at the hands of the Romans made his son swear on his sword, which is only a substitute for the ‘thigh’ or penis, that he would avenge him on the Romans.  Clearly Freud would have promised his dad to avenge him on the Europeans if he had asked.  Maybe he did.

     Curiously Freud doesn’t carry Hannibal’s story through to its conclusion.   The Romans exterminated the Carthaginians and razed their city.

     Freud’s lapses in the application of his psychology are very peculiar.  Having discovered the psychological compulsion to repeat he applied it neither to an analysis of himself or of his culture and people.  He might have saved the Jews much suffering if he had.  In his desire to avenge his father he became a central figure in the millennial period of 1913-28 which ended in yet another attempt to exterminate the Jews.

     Post exilic history for the Jews began rather favorably.  They returned to Palestine just as the Middle Eastern Empires were entering a time of troubles.  The succeeding Hellenistic period left them more or less independent until in 186 BC the Seleucids interfered in their internal affairs.  Under the Maccabbees the Jews were able to defeat the relatively weak Seleucid Emperors who were besieged on all sides.  The victory gave them a feeling in invincibility.

      The feeling was shattered by the Romans.

     The Jews tried again and failed in seventeenth century Europe.

     Their third repeated attempt was in 1913-28 which can be extended to the present.

     Freud made the incredible and mind boggling statement on the eve of the Bolshevik, or Jewish Revolution in Russia:  We tell ourselves that anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality even though the standard of morality may differ in some respects from that which is customary in society.  He then goes on to say especially since the existing standards of morality are beneath contempt.

     Thus he advocates that a private, personal, obviously self-serving morality is superior to an ideal morality that has evolved over millennia extending those millennia anterior to the Old Testament.

     What could Freud, knowing the imperfect nature of man, have found so objectionable about the existing morality?  I don’t experience it as he did.  It can only have been that it was based on European traditions and not Freud’s Jewish heritage.

     The birth of modern Judaism was caused by the rise of the European Scientific attitude.  Science was the sole creation of Europeans with which the Jews had nothing to do.  Prior to the Enlightenment in their argument with Roman Catholicism the Jews had not only been equals but superiors.  As the creator of the corpus followed by the Church the Jews were in a better position to understand and interpret it through the repository of the Talmud.

     When as a result of the Enlightenment, scientific Europeans left the puerile biblical debates behind the Jews were hopelessly medieval.  The Talmud, so effective against the bible, was worthless against science.  The more intelligent or, perhaps, less traditional Jews began to reorganize Judaism to meet the Scientific times.  This left them second rate beneath the Europeans, a serious affront to their amour propre.

     The real challenge then was to regain their superiority.  This could only be done by excelling in Science as they could invent nothing superior to it.  The true Truth of religion broke on the rock of reality.  If they merely excelled in Science they merely excelled in an European milieu. They were clearly then no longer the Chosen People; they became lost in the ruck.  Freud at one time says that he saw no reason why the ‘wisdom’ of the Talmud couldn’t be raised to a level with Science thus bringing the Jews level with the Europeans in their dreams.

     Strangely he didn’t understand that the entry into full consciousness caused by the understanding of the workings of the psyche obviated all forms of consciousness that went before including the so-called wisdom of the Talmud.

     So, to whom was Freud speaking about educating himself against the danger of immorality?  By Freud’s own admission his fellow Jews.

     Freud’s vision of psychoanalysis is personal, dealing exclusively with the subjective workings of the subject’s mind.  He doesn’t even seem to grasp that the fixations are caused by external forces.  He seems to think the mind functions independently of the outside world.  Input does not seem important to him.

     To Jung and others Man’s relationship to his world is based more on a Challenge and Response system.  In other words, the intellect, which Freud denies, plays a very important part.

     Freud’s own intellect cast against his ideas places them in a different light.  The man was born in 1856 in a Central European Jewish milieu.  It will be remembered that the Hasidic religious movement grew out of psychological trauma that occurred in 1648.  Founded c. 1700 the Hasidic movement was only about a hundred fifty years old at his birth thus retaining much of its original vitality.

     Also arising out of the Jewish disappointments caused by the failed Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, in 1666 a movement was led by a follower of Zevi by the name of Jacob Frank.  This movement also took shape in the first half of the eighteenth century and was still flourishing during Freud’s young manhood.

     As a consequence of Zevi’s failure Frank believed that man was inherently evil thus God would never redeem him until the evil was spent.  The only way to expel evil was to commit enough crimes to get it out of one’s system.  Novel pyschology to say the least.  Thus he taught to a large and attentive Jewish audience that one must commit evil for evil’s sake and that good will come of it.  So, in a manner of speaking, one is doing good by doing evil.

     Now, one can trace the spread of this idea in various forms and guises through space and time.  One very interesting advocate who deserves more study is an eighteenth century English Jew by the name of Samuel Falk.  Another is a twentieth century American Jew  by the name of Arnold Rothstein.  And of course, Marx and Freud.

     Freud does not go into the external influences that formed his outlook or life or personal Weltanschauung but this emphasis on a personal morality that is superior to prevailing morality seems a sublimation of Jacob Frank and his evil for evil’s sake.

     Now, to whom was Freud speaking and why?  Certainly Freud considered himself a prophet of the Jewish people amidst the dawning millennium.  He had an intense desire to avenge his people on the goyim.  Did this Hannibal in that role have anything to do with organizing or directing the Jewish Revolution of the dawning millennium?

     There is no question that his statement that anyone who has educated himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality (and hence a guilty conscience) could be construed as advance absolution for any acts of the Bolsheviks that would be considered crime by ‘conventional morality.’

     Freud’s statement and role resembles those a great deal of Simeon Bar Yochai, a second century rabbi of the Roman Wars.  The Roman-Jewish war of 66-135 AD was perhaps the first of the Holy Wars.  Its rationale and leadership was provided by the religious leaders of Judaism.

     Simeon Bar Yochai was a leading architect of that war, probably its guiding light.  After Bar Kochba’s defeat in 135 AD Yochai was compelled to go into hiding in a cave from which he daren’t move for many years until the Romans gave up the search.  As a tribute to his influence in the war his obituary at his death said that he was the man who shook the world to its foundations.

     Just before the bloodbath of 116 when the Jews rose up to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Gentiles a moral quandary arose in the Jewish community.  They wondered whether it was permissable to kill ‘good’ Gentiles as well as the ‘bad.’  The rabbis without a moments hesitation replied that it was permissable to kill any and all Gentiles.

     In 1666 with the expected advent of the millennium heralded by the messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, the Jews had been prepared on the strength of ‘God’s promise’ to rise up and murder Europeans much as they had done in the Roman War.

     The third repeat of the Jewish Revolution of which the millennial date was 1913-28 had come to a slow boil with the Communist Manifesto of 1847.

     It will be remembered that following Marx’ manifesto all the national Communist parties were over half Jewish.  The non-Jew, Kropotkin, as leader of the anarchists had been discredited and the anarchists disenfranchised from the Communist Movement.  The Jews than held all the leading positions.

     Thus four Jews led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia- Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky.  All the abortive revolutions of Central Europe were led by Jews.  They actually repeated the massacres of the Roman Wars in Russia and Hungary and were prepared to do so throughout the world as the Revolution rolled on to success.

     In Russia slaughterhouses were established in which Jewish murderers ‘worked’ all day long slaughtering Gentiles until they stood ankle deep in blood and gore.  Were they able to do this because Freud and made known to them truths about themselves that prevented them from committing immoral acts?  Were they absolved of their crimes in advance as were the Jews of the Roman Wars?  They must have been or they couldn’t have performed their ‘work.’  As it was numbers of them had nervous breakdowns as a result.

     The atrocities in Hungary and the projected total annihilation in the Crimea have already been mentioned.  The similarities between the Roman and European slaughters are quite pronounced in their ferocity.  Of course all the details of the former had been recorded in that epistle of ‘science’, the Talmud.

     Did the Jews go to Freud to justify their atrocities as they had to Simeon Bar Yochai two thousand years earlier?  There is the compulsion to repeat.  The Jews were very well organized before, during and after the Great War.  Agents of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee swarmed over Central and Eastern Europe after the War in an attempt to rehabilitate their brethren first so they could assume control.  The AJC and B’nai B’rith were the leading components of the ‘Joint.’  Freud had been a member of B’nai B’rith since 1895.  He lectured to them in Austria on a consistent basis for years, even decades.  As a psychoanalyst what was he telling them?  His intellect deserves closer examination for what else can ‘anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to a few truths about himself is permanently defended against immorality’ mean except a license to kill.  If a Jewish supremacy arose out of that evil wouldn’t good have come out of it in Jewish eyes?  Yochai, Frank, Freud, there is a succession.

     Placed in that context one must reevaluate the whole period as well as the careers of Hitler and Stalin, for as Freud wrote openly in a universal idiom his rationale can be appropriated by any individual for his personal morality.

     The invasion of Vienna was preceded by and coincident with the rise of Jews in France.  At the time of the Russian Revolution a document became prominent called the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion.  The document outlines a method for creating discord in society so that a junta can easily assume control.  It was said that this document was a Jewish blueprint for world dominion.  The provenance of the Protocols has never been established for certain.  The Jews say it is a ‘forgery’ while their opponents say it is authentic.

     Over the years the Jews have managed to discredit the document and have its study suppressed.  This is a great disservice because whoever wrote it its precepts are currently being followed by several groups.  Have you ever looked at Homeland Security carefully?  It behooves every person interested in current affairs to be conversant with the Protocols of Zion.

     In point of fact the Protocols are of Jewish provenance.

     One thing all disputants agree on is that the Protocols were based on an earlier document of Franco-Jewish provenance called in English:  Dialogues Between Montesquiou And Machiavelli In Hell.  The Dialogues are of Jewish provenance so whether the Protocols are or not is a moot point.

     The Dialogues were attributed to a French Jew by the name of Maurice Joly but internal evidence indicates several hands including that of the ‘Gibbon’ or Jewish historians, Heinrich Graetz.

     The creation of the Dialogues was coordinated by a French Jew by the name of Adolph Cremieux.  Little known outside Jewish circles but extremely important to a number of situations Cremieux also deserves further study.  He was a lawyer and politico deeply involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.  If one takes the Jewish ‘Gibbon’ Graetz at his word both revolutions were the result of Jewish machinations.  On this point Graetz and Hitler are in accord.

     Cremieux was responsible during the annexation of Algeria in 1830 under cover of that year’s revolution for obtaining French citizenship for the Algerian Jews.  Thus with the annexation the barbarous medieval Jews of Algeria became full French citizens gaining precedence over the native Algerians in one fell swoop.  Clever move for the Jews bad move for France.

     As Jewish affairs were consolidating nicely in France twelve years after the 1848 revolution a Jewish central governing body called the Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded by Cremieux in 1860.  The Dialogues were supposed to have appeared in 1862.  The name means The International Alliance of Jewry or in a slightly different translation:  The International Jewish Conspiracy.  Actually the Alliance was the seat of the Jewish government until c. 1900 when the seat was transferred to the United States under the guidance of the financier, Jacob Schiff.

     Thus the Protocols arose out of the Dialogues in direct succession sometime during the 1880s.  It should be noted that the Dialogues was never seen in bookstores.  The whole printing was confiscated by Napoleon III according to report against whom they were supposedly directed.  It follows that the only people who could have known of the book and provided a copy as a model for the Protocols were its producers the Jews of France.

     Nevertheless, as masters of misinformation, disinformation and misdirection the Jewish government was able to shame the liberal parties into rejecting Jewish provenance of the Protocols.  The Liberals then condemned any Gentiles who persisted in saying so as anti-Semitic cranks.  That is actually the nature of the ‘proof’ that the Protocols aren’t of Jewish provenance.

     Jacob Schiff himself was a very effective Prime Minister.  He was able to engineer the First Russian Revolution of 1903-05 by funding the Japanese war machine from America while he and European financiers prevented funding to the Russians.

     Schiff was able to disrupt American and Russian diplomacy for the benefit of the Jews from 1900 to 1913 when he succeeded in persuading the US to break off diplomatic relations completely.  Immediately with the Bolshevik succession he rushed huge loans of American dollars to their coffers even during the Great War to shore up the regime.

     Thus absolved by Freud of guilt and supported by  world resources from 1917 to 1924 it looked as though the Jews were on the eve of success in their millennial pursuit.  With the possible exceptions of Mussolini and Ford it looked at though there were no fences facing.

     However Hitler and Stalin sensed the danger.  Hitler himself was always hostile to Freudian beliefs; it may be assumed that Hitler read at least some Freud.  He was hostile to Freud for much the same reasons that Freud was hostile to Kultur.  Living in the Vienna under the governance of the ‘anti-Semitic’ Mayor Lueger Hitler was self-educated.  He spent years in the libraries organizing his view of the world.

     In Freudian terms both he and Stalin certainly knew truths about themselves which prevented them from committing ‘immoral’ acts.  Freud’s dictum could be construed as also authorizing their crimes.

     Coming to maturity in the Red Terror of 1917-24 Hitler had a good understanding of the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe.  It is silly to think that he acted solely from his own impulses.  There was a civil war going on between Reds and Whites from 1918-33 in Germany.  Judeo-Communist atrocities were daily before his eyes.  As he said, he knew his head would roll in the sand if he lost.   That was not mere rhetoric.

     Hitler’s experience in Vienna convinced him of the nature of the war between Jews and Gentiles.  The evidence is clear that the Viennese shared his views.  Once given the upper hand over their invaders the Austrians were much more obdurate than the Germans.  Never forget that an Austrian, Hitler, directed the fate of the German nation.

     Hitler’s book burning in 1933 might be construed as nothing more than a vindictive censorship of ideas he didn’t like.  But the books burned were those of Jewish writers, expecially Freud, it should probably be seen as an attempt to eject Semitism from Kultur.  In other words the triumph of Kultur over Semitism.  In the end the Germans chose to kill the Jews rather than discriminate against them or go under.  You may be sure the Jews would have done the same.

     As Stalin usurped power from the Jews in Russia a strange thing happened.  Psychoanalytic methods assumed great importance.  Spectacular show trials ensued.

     When Freud’s disciple Otto Rank defected from the ranks of Freudian pyschoanalysts he was excommunicated.  The validity of his views was not examined; even if true they were not the true Truth of the faith.  Hence Rank was compelled to submit to criticism, confess his faults and beg for acceptance back into the faith.

     The Show Trials of 1936 were conducted in the exact same manner except that the sinners were given the death sentence.  The method surfaced again in Red China in 1966 when the Red Guards and Cultural Revolutionaries of Mao Ze Dong overturned that society.  The accused were criticized in mass meetings, compelled to confess their ‘faults’ and beg to be allowed to rehabilitate themselves through hard labor.

     Thus Marxist and Freudian ideas converged in an orgy of evil to destroy the oldest continuous civilization in the world.

     The notion prevails in Politically Correct circles in the US today.  Thus Freudianism has had a profound if unsuspected impact on the world.

     Freud remained confident through 1928, began to waver in 1930 and by 1938 the horror of the impending destruction of the Jews as a repeat of the Roman War was before his eyes as fled Austria for England.  In Moses and Monotheism he pitifully whines that the Jews had given up those notions of world dominion long ago.  Or, in other words, I’m sorry.

     Like Hannibal, his attempt to avenge his father resulted in the destruction of his people.  As in the Roman War the Nazis conducted a manhunt to find every single Jew and kill him.  Not only had Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi failed the Jews as messiahs; so had the Revolution.  The Jews failed in this third attempt to take over the world but the legacy of Sigmund Freud lives on in the ambiguous words of his corpus.  His immediate political aims failed but his undermining of European society was much more successful.

     Apart from his political intent Freud had uncovered a great scientific area of study.

5.

The Shirt Of Nessus

     While Freud’s short term political goals ended in disaster for his people, as did those of his role model, Hannibal, Freud’s long term goal of destroying the social foundations of the Gentiles has succeeded quite well.

     As an innovator Freud cannot be expected to have had a complete and final idea.  Much of the information that became available after 1950 was undeveloped in Freud’s time, such as the Matriarchal and Hetairic periods, so he cannot be held accountable for not knowing them.  Physiology has made tremendous strides since his day.

     Freud’s errors do not so much lay in areas of knowledge but in the areas of intent or motive.  He was unable to separate his own psychology of hatred from that of his scientific discipline.  Hence his mistaken emphasis on the importance of the father figure and his misbegotten notions of the Oedipus Complex.  Then too, he projected his hatred of the Gentiles into his views of religion and sexuality.

     The only thing of value Freud had to offer, that of the formation of neuroses, has been rejected by the lay and medical communities alike.

     Strangely his nonsense is revered as great revelations of truth, largely because they fit in with prevailing prejudices.  In his attack on the Christian religion Freud was curiously unaware that the Scientific Consciousness displaced the anterior consciousnesses of Hetaira, Matriarchy and Patriarchy.  Thus the people who were dependent on Religion as the basis of the mentality were people whose beliefs could not be dislodged.  On the one hand were the various esoteric religions whose beliefs do not depend on the divinity of Jesus and the Fundamentalists whose belief is so secure that nothing can shake it.  For those who need a supernatural agency in their lives New Age people using science as a tool have created alien intelligence from beyond the solar system to serve as their ‘God.’

     If Freud thought dispelling Christianity as a religious belief would bring the Gentiles down he was mistaken.  The ‘illusion’ had already been replaced by a ‘reality.’  The futility of trying to dispel religious beliefs should have been clear to Freud.  The exposure of the illusion or, even delusion, of the compact between the Jewish people and their god had no effect on them; they continue to believe the compact exists and that Palestine was given to them by their tribal god inalienably.

     The most potent dissolvent in Freud’s arsenal was his sexual theory.  He was quite severely criticised for his sexual beliefs then and they should be rejected now.

     Everything Freud believed on the subject was wrong.  Basic to his misunderstanding was the physical structure of the human organism. 

     He quite correctly picked up the ovate and spermatic halves of the psyche but since he didn’t associate them with physical origins he mistakenly thought that men were part woman and vice versa.  This was a critical misconception as it opened the door to much erroneous speculation on homosexuality.

     There may be rare cases of sexual ambiguity caused by birth defects in the physical apparatus or defective hormonal systems but any other expression of ambiguity is a perversion that is not part of the most perfect specimens but comes about only when the ovate is fixated and spermatic repressed or, in other words when the organism is mentally disturbed.  Psychological perversion has nothing to do with the physical organization.

     Since Freud misunderstood the physical organism he equated sexuality not with the Power Train itself but only with sexual intercourse.  Freud actually equated fucking with mental health.  Because psychic discomfort is reflected in sexual urges he actually believed that the more fucking one did the better person one would be.  Such nonsense has not only passed unchallenged for eighty years but is actually embraced today as the Gospel of Fuck.

     Freud did not believe in the intellect or the effectiveness of intelligence.  While he made the grandiose pronouncement:  Where Id is, Ego shall be, he failed to explain how this would come about.  For whatever reason he considered the intellect nonexistent and intelligence ineffective and unimportant.  In keeping with his times he believed in the hereditary transmission of mental traits.

     More importantly he invented a whole category of affects he identified as self-sufficient ‘instincts.’  Like the Unconscious instincts do not exist.  There are no instincts, not a single one, all is a matter of learning and education.

     Even eating is not an instinct but taught at the mother’s breast.  Hunger may be a physical reality but it is not an instinct.  Assuaging hunger must be learnt and that literally at the mother’s breast.  The first lesson an infant is taught is when the mother inserts the nipple in his mouth.  His mouth is blocked he has no choice but to resist by sucking.  Imagine his surprise when the liquid emitted seems delicious and when he swallows it because he can’t spit it out the physical reaction is terrific.  It feels good.  Having learnt to eat he wants more.  Being a quick learner, from that point on the infant will demand to be fed.  But without that first infusion he would die hungry not knowing what the desire to eat meant.

     Because Freud wanted to project his own psychic vision he gave instincts precedence over all other psychic functions.  He professed that the individual was incapable of resisting or controlling what the Ancients characterized as the Raging Bull and what he called the Ego.

     Both the Church and Esoteric religions have devised rigors to control or domesticate this Bull or Ego/instincts by using intelligence.  Freud thought that to use your intelligence to control your ‘instincts’ was to incur damaging inhibitions and repressions.  Hence he was opposed to European morality.  Freud imagined this did irreparable damage to the psyche especially sexual inhibitions and repressions hence the Gospel of Fuck.

     If fucking actually made a person better, then the logical conclusion is that libertines and homosexuals would be the best people in the world.  Fucking dominates the libertine and homosexual mind.  It is not unusual for them to commit thirty or forty sex acts a day for as many days as they can sustain it.

     As the only thing that counts in this view of sexual activity is the climax it follows that if machines were placed in prominent places to masturbate the individual on an hourly basis or less that society would be darn near perfect.  I don’t know why people are leery of buying the Brooklyn Bridge when they have bought the myth of sexual intercourse.

     The fact is that libertines and homosexuals are the worst people in the world so the basis of Freud’s argument is very limp.

     The West has generally embraced Freud’s misguided sexual theory.  The United States is actually fucked.  Freud’s sexual theory was picked up by the lame third rate novelist Henry Miller who actually formulated the Gospel of Fuck during the twenties and thirties in the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

     Henry Miller was gaining respectability during the fifties with psychotic fringe groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere.  By the sixties he would have a profound impact on society with the reverence given his two volumes of the Tropics.

     As Freud was interpreted in the common mind repression and inhibition were the causes of psychic discomfort.  The common mind had no idea how inhibitions and repressions were caused except by not being allowed to do whatever you wanted to do.  Through the forties and fifties children of innumerable families were encouraged to indulge their whims and fancies regardless of who they might hurt.  They were given no instruction or correction lest they become inhibited and repressed.  It was thought that when they grew up they would naturally gravitate to the intelligent choice.

     The so-called ‘Me’ generation of the sixties and seventies lacked proper instruction in managing their ‘instincts.’  The pervading influence of past mores prevented them from expressing themselves with true lack of ‘inhibition’ or repression.  The wave of high school shootouts of the later century when the succeeding generation had moved out from the shadow of earlier mores were committed by the offspring of the ‘Me’ generation.  They are the logical progression of Freudian sexual theory.

     Employing metal detectors and other ‘inhibitory’ or ‘repressive’ systems will not solve the problem.  Freud has to be amended.

     Freud’s thesis was advanced by the Jewish monologist Lenny Bruce as well as furthered by Jewish interests in Hollywood who produced innumerable ‘action’ films in which the uninhibited and unrepressed protagonist attempts to solve his problems from the barrel of a gun rather than reason them out.

     So, this brings us up to Greil Marcus and the present.  Greil Marcus is himself a Jew so the question is how does Greil Marcus and his writing fit into this Jewish cultural scheme of things.  On my first reading of the book I had no idea what Mr. Marcus was talking about.  I had heard of the Situationist International but knew nothing about it.  Reading the blurbs I was under the impression that Mr. Marcus was going to explain the SI.  Not very clearly anyway.  As I turned the last page I had no idea what the book was all about.

     Second reading same as the first.  Then I read his 2006 effort The Shape Of Things To Come.  I gathered from that that Mr. Marcus considered himself in direct descent from the Old Testament Hebrew prophets and that he had conflated Israel and the United States.  Armed with that understanding I had the thin edge of the wedge.  I went back to a third reading of Lipstick Traces.  Pay dirt!  I think.

     I gather from the third reading that Mr. Marcus considers himself also a direct lineal descendent of Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, in other words The Frankfurt School or alternatively The Institute For Social Research or alternatively still The New School For Social Research.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  In addition his intellectual romance with fellow Jew Guy Debord who was the Situationist International seemed that in much the same way Dr. Baum assumed the soul of Dr. Mabuse in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse I gather that Mr. Marcus may feel that like some Buddhist Lama the soul of the dead Debord has passed into himself and he is the new leader of the Situationist International.  So as I perceive it  Mr. Marcus views himself as an ancient Hebrew prophet, a critic in the mold of the Frankfurt School and the leader of the Situationist International.

     For some in depth background on the Frankfurt School the interested reader might try Kevin MacDonald’s  ‘The Culture Of Critique.’

     Following the above notion of who Greil Marcus might think he is and what he thinks he’s doing I will attempt an interpretation of Lipstick Traces.  Mr. Marcus as the leader of the Situationist International seems to have compiled his book which is as much a stream of consciousness impressionistic novel as anything else as a number of situations.

     I will deal with each situation as a separate entity which indeed a situation is.  Rather than begin with the first situation which as I see it should be last I will begin with the second situation, part of Version Two- A Secret History Of A Time That Passed- Legends Of Freedom.

     The theme of the book as a whole seems to be the saying of Karl Marx that Mr. Marcus refers to repeatedly:

I am nothing and I should be everything.

End of Part II.