Book II, Pt. 4 Something Of Value
February 13, 2008
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 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.
Exhuming Bob 2-2 Detourning The Folks
December 24, 2007
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
