The Deconstruction Of

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America

by

R.E. Prindle

Part I

Snapshots Of The Twentieth Century

     Hey mama, mama, hey papa, papa

Ridin’ on the Mobile Line.

Hey mama, mama, hey papa, papa

I’m talkin’ ’bout the Mobile Line.

 Theys a road to ride baby,

Ease your troubled mind.

Trad.

     The time is 1912, the place is Harry Hope’s Bar in New York City.  A number of hapless alcoholic anarchists and socialists lay about waiting for the Revolution, Lefty, Godot or the one bright spot in their year, the appearance of a traveling salesman named Hickey who will regale them all with free drinks until his money runs out.

     Larry Slade, a despondent tired anarchist sits numbly staring into thin air when Don Parritt a young Movement member blows in from the Coast.  The Utopian revolution has crashed on the rock of psychological realities.   Don Parritt could not tolerate his mother’s one night stands turning her and the West Coast Movement in to the police.

Eugene O' Neill

—–

     The scene now shifts to the inside of a rundown movie theatre in Manhattan in 1943.  On the end row in the middle back slumps a tall gangly man of twenty-eight intently almost breathlessly watching the flickering movement on the screen listening with great concentration to the words booming from the loudspeakers.

     Well he might for the movie is one of the most amazing ever filmed.  Originally shot in Germany in 1932 the movie had been confiscated by Dr. Goebbels shortly thereafter as subversive.  Dr. Goebbels was right on the mark.

page 1.

     Thus the film had disappeared to be discovered and reconstructed only in the post-war years.  Wait! How then could the man be watching The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in 1943?  Well, this is an amazing story.  The director, Fritz Lang, well knew his film would be suppressed by the German authorities so he had a parallel copy filmed in French at the same time.  This version was smuggled from Germany to France and from Occupied France to the United States even as the war raged.   What was so important about this film that it had been rescued twice and shown in the middle of the war? 

Fritz Lang

     The film was and is subversive and not only to Nazi Germany.  It is quite frankly a blueprint for the subversion of society, indeed, of all civilization.  Anarchism perfected.  The faithful were being given their post-war marching orders.  The Communists, of which faith the tall gangly man was, cleverly described the movie as an anti-Nazi polemic which it definitely was not.  They fooled a great many people but at the same time the faithful were directed to see the movie.  The message struck home.   The Capitalist State could be undermined.  As the man left the theatre he would always recall the moment as one of the great moments of his life.  A life changing moment.  He would subsequently review the movie many times, finally watching the German version when it was released.  The movie so overwhelmed his senses he never could get the story right.

     Three years later in 1946 the now thirty-one year old sat in a theatre watching a play with the same rapt intensity.  This too electrified him as much as the Testament Of Dr. Mabuse had in 1943.  The play depicting an earlier time had been writen in 1939 but for various reasons had never been produced until this evening.  The scene is set in Harry Hope’s Bar in New York City in 1912.  A group of alcoholic socialists and anarchists sat around waiting for the Revolution, Lefty, Godot or the appearance of a traveling salesman named Hickey whichever came first.  Hickey was first on the spot with money for drinks.

     Yes, the play was Eugene O’ Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.  The opening scene of the play occurred only in Eugene O’ Neill’s imagination.  True enough the story was nevertheless.  The tall gangly man watched this greatest of all American plays with feelings mixed with admiration and loathing.  Stunned by its brilliance, he resented the depiction of his fellow anarchists and socialists as bums.  The play was the antithesis of his favorite movie, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse.

     As he left the theatre he was one of the few who realized he had watched a masterpiece.  He had to strike back in the name of subversion.  The character of Hickey, the traveling salesman, haunted his mind mixed with images of the terrifying sociopathic and insane Dr. Mabuse.  As he brooded the faint outline of a play of his own formed in his mind.  His play would be about a traveling salesman but would combine both efforts to attack and undermine the fabric of the American State as his favorite movie had taught him.

     He and his had been attacked and ridiculed by what he considered  the reactionary Eugene O’ Neill.  In only one or two years Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman would assault and insult the American people.  Miller was clever, the Boobocracy didn’t even know it had been insulted.  The Judaeo-Communist propaganda machine went to work.  Today O’ Neill is all but ignored while Arthur Miller’s insignificant piece of fluff is mentioned in the same breath with Shakespeare.

—–

        Back once more to 1912 where a thirty-six year old man toils over what will be his second published novel.  The first novel was strange enough but the novel he is now writing will become perhaps the most unusual novel to ever become a best seller.

     O’ Neill wrote conventional prose, long winded sucker too; Lang’s Dr. Mabuse was comprehensible to the simplest mind although understood by few, the novel being written in 1912 would leave  men and women scratching their heads incredulously.  The novel defied conventional literary logic speaking instead to unspoken hopes and desires.  The author himself was terrified that the story was too strange.  But as he put a period to the last sentence of Tarzan Of The Apes and mailed it off, Edgar Rice Burroughs heaved a sigh and sat to wait for the verdict of the publisher.  It seems almost too incredible that such a bizarre story was immediately accepted with such enthusiasm.

DISASTER BY ANY OTHER NAME IS DISASTER

     The Heir to the first disaster, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932.

TWENTY YEARS OF TREASON BEGINS

     Samuel Dickstein, a congressman from New York, sitting in the House of Representatives was on the payroll of the Premier of the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics, Josef Stalin.

     In this capacity he pushed for a House Un-American Activities Committee to root out and punish opponents of the Soviet Union and Communism.  These people were labeled Fascists whatever their actual politics and defamed by the Judaeo-Communist Propaganda Machine.   They were usually anti-Communists opposed to the Soviet Union and perhaps to Uncle Joe himself.  Needless to say they were also characterized as anti-Semites.   This was done with the full blessing of Frank Roosevelt himself.

     In 1938 HUAC was created but the chairmanship went to a Congressman from Texas by the name of Martin Dies.  Although his name has been blackened by the Judaeo-Communist Propaganda Machine Dies was a good man.  A very good man.

     He promptly went after Communists as well as ‘Fascists’, which was not in Uncle Joe’s, Frank’s or Sam Dickstein’s script.  Dies was given a very hard time.  Captured by Parnell Thomas and the Roman Catholic religious faction after the war HUAC became dedicated to anti-Communism.  This was definitely not in the Red script so the Propaganda Machine was turned against HUAC after initially agitating for it.  The Communists now did everything they could to destroy the committee they had created.

WITH A SONG IN MY HEART

Irving Berlin

     Israel Baline, giddy with the success of the Russian Revolution sat down in Tin Pan Alley to write a sweet little song to the tune of an earlier hit, When Moses Led The Band With His Nose, entitled God Bless America.  He exhorted his fellow Culturalists to ‘stand beside her, and guide her’ as presumably he thought Americans were incapable of navigating a course without Semitic assistance.

     Presumably as part of the assistance and guidance the media of his ‘home sweet home’ was taken over and administered by his fellow Culturalists.  Tin Pan Alley, A Jewish cultural economic niche, was already accounting for a large part of culture forming popular songs.  Now in the twenties a flood of books was written by Jews, or Semites, debunking ‘Bad Old America’ as Greil Marcus has characterized it, and the poor ignorant boobs who formed the country the songwriter claimed to love, appeared.  Israel Baline’s Home Sweet Home was never to be the same as another of his Culture, Philip Roth, wrote a book eighty years or so on, The Plot Against America, in which, backdating a little to that critical year of 1943, Roth gives the Jewish Culture credit for creating ‘the land that he loved’ while the Bad Old American true creators are accused of corrupting it.

     God Bless America wasn’t orignally all that successful.  In the critical year of 1938, when HUAC was formed, Irving Berlin, for that’s who Israel Baline became, dusted the song off and rewrote it.  For now the game was afoot indeed.  In 1918 spreading a new song by sheet music and phonograph, without the use of radio, was along, laborious effort.  Things had changed by 1938.  In one night a new song broadcast over radio would be heard instantly by millions of people across this great land of ours.

     The contest between the Communists and Nazis was raging.  Uncle Joe Stalin, Sam Dickstein and Frank Roosevelt had established the House Un-American Activities Committee for the purpose of rooting out not only Nazis but, you guessed it, ‘anti-Semites’ and , if fact, enemies of the New Deal.  Irving Berlin’s song reintroduced in 1938 was a very strategic emplacement.  The same words have different meaning for different Cultures.  Thus the message sent to the Jewish Culture by the song was different from what was heard by the general culture, or most of it.  I always had difficulty with the song as a child, refusing to sing along.  I couldn’t reconcile the words:

God Bless America land that I love.

Stand beside her,

And guide her

Thru the night with a light from above.

        ‘Land that I love’ implies a choice of lands and I knew no other lands nor any other choice.  As I was ‘America’ to ‘stand beside her, and guide her’ meant that I would have to be beside myself which was clearly impossible.  I considered the last line pure nonsense.

     I couldn’t articulate my understanding at the time but I was not alone in my perception.  Apparently feeling the insult, Woody Guthrie wrote an answer in 1940 originally entitled God Bless America For Me.  It seems clear he understood the cultural implications.  He later changed the title to the very aggressive This Land Is My Land- this land is your land, from California to the New York Island.’  I didn’t know it but I wasn’t alone.

     One of the most popular radio shows of 1938 starring the most stellar of Anglo-Saxon singers was chosen for the debut to make sure the song had strong ‘American’ credentials.  Berlin and his culture knew what the song meant.  Georgie Jessel wasn’t right for this one.  Kate Smith could really belt it out too.

     The Kate Smith Society historian Richard K. Hayes tells the story like this:

http://katesmith.org/gba.html

     Quote:

     Now Kate Smith was the No. 1 popular songstress in America in 1938, and her weekly Kate Smith Hour was heard by many millions of radio listeners that Thursday, November 10.  The shy composer was invited to attend the show but he declined, opting to listen with a few friends in his office at his music publishing company in New York.  Kate sang it as her closing number after which Berlin’s phone began to ring, as people began to ask, ‘Where can we get that song Kate Smith just sang?”

     The new anthem electrified the nation and Kate sang it on nearly every broadcast through December, 1940.

     Unquote.Kate Smith

     The song was revived in the equally crucial year of 1943 when Kate Smith rendered it in the Warner Brothers movie This Is The Army.  This was the year it became clear in Jewish circles that the Nazis were bent on exterminating European Jewry.  It would be more urgent than ever to reinforce the notion of a Jewish and American ‘partnership’ which is what the song implies.  The protection by America of the Jews was paramount in Jewish minds.  Now more than ever it was necessary for the Culture ‘to stand beside her, and guide her.’

SO LONG, IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW YA

     FDR did the United States a favor by passing away in 1944.  Could have done it earlier and made it a big favor.  Succeeded by his VP Harry Truman  the FDR-Truman years would be characterized by the stout Roman Catholic anti-Communist, Joe McCarthy, as Twenty Years Of Treason.  Joe got it right but heavily infiltrated by Judaeo-Communists he was made to look ridiculous and a fool.  Needless to say the Propaganda Machine has ground an honest American to dust.

BETRAYAL

     The man who created Tarzan had been working away developing his creation, who was well on his way to becoming the reigious archetype for the Aquarian Age.  Himself a stout anti-Communist, capable of creating a new scientifically based religion, it became necesary for the Machine to co-opt his creation while neutralizing Burroughs himself.  Accordingly, the Judaeo-Communists at MGM lured Burroughs into a contract in 1931 then stripped him of his creation while ultimately exiling Burroughs himself from Hollywood in 1940.

SOUR GRAPES

     Anxious to join the war against Germany, John Dos Passos joined the ambulance corps in France.  the experience of the war was the making of Dos Passos (1896-1970) as a writer.  In 1924 he published his novel, Manhattan Transfer, since become a minor classic of the period.  During the thirties he began to write and publish his magnum opus the USA Trilogy.  Composed of The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money the trilogy would cover the years from approximately the time of his birth to the 1920s.

     In 1906 he would have been called a muckraker; in 1935 he was one of the Jewish debunkers.  He didn’t just debunk one person he debunked a whole people.  There is not one single admirable person is his story and few if any immigrants.  One asks as one reads, why would anyone want to know these people or live in the US?  He’s attacking the ‘Anlgo-Saxons’.  These are all Bad Old Americans in Bad Old America.   While others were writing utopias Dos Passos ground out these dystopias- people you didn’t want to know in a place you didn’t want to be.

     Some caricatures are easily recognizable.  Bernarr Macfadden is laughable present.  There are some incidents reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs who in the 1930s was a world renowned figure.  Dos Passos was born in and spent some of his youth in Chicago but would have been too young to actually have observed what he was writing about.  He was only sixteen when he left for France and his ambulance.  Thus his writing was based on hearsay and rumor.

     John Dos Passos may be considered a key figure in the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America.  His constant derogation of people, places and things either set or reinforced the negative critical attitude which has since become the norm.  My most recent reading left me with a slight feeling of nausea for have visited Dos Passos dystopian Bad Old America.

A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE MOVES ON

  Invictus

W.E. Henley

Out of the night that cover me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable Soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeoning of Chance,

My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this Place of wrath and tears,

Looms but the Horror of the Shade,

And yet the Menace of the years

Finds and shall find me Unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the Master of my Fate,

I am the Captain of my Soul.

     In March of 1950, if not one of the greatest men of the 1850-1950 period, certainly one of the most influential shuffled of this mortal coil and did his cake walk over to the other side.  Edgar Rice Burroughs had seen enough.  This stuff wasn’t funny anymore.

     It was a tough fight.  Burroughs was a tough fighter but life is a fight one must inevitably lose.  Like his generation and three or four following it Burroughs embraced Henley’s Invictus of 1896 as his own creed.  There are no golden ages except in retrospect; his was as tough and violent as they come.  Born at the end of that great criminal holocaust known as Reconstruction, Burroughs was always sympathetic to the South.  He owned volume three of Thomas Dixon’s trilogy on Reconstruction while certainly having read the first two.

     When it comes to holocaust denials liberals have no interest in acknowledging the great crimes they have perpetrated.  The Reconstruction period is barely mentioned in US histories and then with no references to the egregious crimes committed in the name of ‘social justice.’  This is not the place to go into them.

     Suffice it to say the bigoted Old Testament Hebrew immitating Puritan wannabes  of New England- read New Anglia- meant to reverse the situation in the South making the Whites virtual slaves of the Negroes.  That they failed is one of the great epic histories of mankind.  Reconstruction is a story that remains untold.  In control of the media, text books and all, Liberals have attempted to bury the truth with a slight condemnation of a ‘small minority’ of Yankee thieves known as carpetbaggers.

     The crimes of the Reconstruction period rival and surpass even those of Adolf Hitler against the Jews.  Many more people were affected by Reconstruction while millions lost their lives during Reconstruction and in the war that preceded it that had nothing to do with Negro slavery.

     Filled with stories of the evils of Reconstruction perhaps heard from the lips of victims and victimizers, young Burroughs followed the Indian Wars of the eighties in the pages of his native Chicago papers.  He in fact participated in the final suppression of the Apaches.

     As a young man he witnessed the terrific technological expansion of America.  All the inventions we take for granted today were invented in his lifetime with the exception of photography.  He saw the first airplanes  fly and watched them metamorphose into supersonic jet planes.  He saw the first Model T and watched it metamorphose into what is now considered the classic 1949 models.  Movies, radio and even the first glimmerings of television.

     Amonst all these positive developments he also watched the deconstruction of the America he grew up in.  The advances in technological developments themselves brought about incredible changes.  The propaganda capabilites of movies, radio and TV by a process of gradualism in the hands of a selfish culture graually eroded the values of his childhood and youth beginning their replacement by the antithesis of everything he believed in.  They turned the Bad Old America of their fancy into the cesspool America has become under their guidance while they stood beside us.

     He had been a central figure in the deconstruction of America himself whether he knew it or not.  He embodied his character of Tarzan with all those venerable  American values placing himself under attack by those who wished to replace them.  He survived the brutal battering he took in the thirties his ‘head bloody but unbowed.’

     In the menace of those years he continued to patiently endow Tarzan with those qualities we his successors would need to be the  ‘Masters of our Fates; the Captains of our Souls.”  He was able to organize a hope and belief for the coming Aquarian Age.

     So, here’s to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his great projection, Tarzan.

     Rest not in peace Old Warrior but alert to the dangers we face on this side of the divide.  Live on in our hopes and needs.  You continue to inspire and guide us.  May we be worthy of your trust.

End of Part I  of The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America.   Part II Follows.