Something Of Value I

October 1, 2007

Something Of Value I

by

R.E. Prindle

If a man does away

With his traditional way of living

And throws away his good customs,

He had better first make certain

That he has something of value to replace them.

–Basuto proverb as quoted by Robert Ruark

Dedicated to

Greil Marcus

 

Part One

One Hundred Years In The Sewers Of Paris

With Jean Valjean.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud

And The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

1.

The Concepts Of The Unconscious And Emasculation

 

     It has been truly said that man does not live by bread alone.  He also requires a mythic foundation on which to base his actions.  In the neolithic era his mythology was governed by a Matriarchal vision of reality.  In the subsequent Egypto-Greco-Mesopotamian mythology the Matriarchal series went through a revision being replaced by an advanced Patriarchal mythological consciousness.  This system was followed by the Judaeo-Christian mythological system which endured as the basis of mythological belief until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the belief system was subverted by the emergence of the Scientific Consciousness.

     Unlike the mythopoeic consciousness which preceded it the Scientific Consciousness left no place for supernatural explanations; all had to be explained within a rational scientific framework.  This placed a great strain on a significant portion of the population which did not have the intellectual equipment to evolve.  Thus the basis of psychological comfort provided by religion was destroyed.  The code of behavior seemingly sent down from the sky had lost its validity.

     In place of an apparent unified consciousness it now became noticeable that EuroAmerican man had an unconscious or subconscious mind as well as a conscious mind.  Thus another evolutionary degree of differentiation unfolded that separated the advanced Scientific Consciousness  from the anterior Religious Conciousness.  A struggle has ensued in which advanced people are compelled to reintegrate their conscious and subconscious minds while the Religious Consciousness divided into the two camps of the Devout and the Reds resist.

     The discovery of what was known as the Unconscious began with the emergence from the Religious Consciousness during and  after the Enlightenment.  Anton Mesmer with his discovery of Animal Magnetism or hypnotism may have been the first stage.  Goethe and others carried the discussion forward until the Englishman FWH Myers isolated or identified the subconscious by the name of the unconscius in 1886.

     The notion of the unconscious as known during the twentieth century was formulated by Sigmund Freud during the twentieth century’s first decade.  Both Myers and Freud misconceived the nature of the sub or unconscious.  Myers’ conception was more generous than Freud’s and more in accordance with proto-scientific Patriarchal Greek mythological conceptions which were also mistaken but visionary.

     In Myers’ vision of the unconscious it had two aspects: the destructive aspect which he gave the Greek name of Ate and the constructive aspect he termed Menos.  Thus he recognized that the unconcious could be good or bad.

     Myers’ vision may have been based in Greek mythology.  It will be remembered that the creative god, Hephaestus, was married to the emotional goddess, Aphrodite.  Hephaestus and Aphrodite had their digs at the bottom of the sea which is to say the symbol of the unconscious which corresponds to the seeming location of the unconscious at the bottom of the mind or, in other words, the brain stem.

     Thus it is said that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which is to say irrationality, emerged from the sea on the half shell.

     So, I suppose, love, being never rational is a subconscious decision which is one sided or a half shell.  Love may be either constructive or destructive.

     Thus also good ideas, a la Hephaestus, seem to rise unbidden from the subconscious or the depths.

     Hephaestus and Aphrodite were ancient gods dating back to the Matriarchy.  The incoming Patriarchal god, Zeus, had no part in their creation; they were solely a part of Hera the great goddess of the Matriarchy.  She was much older than Zeus but the youthful Zeus united with her in the form of a cuckoo bird who as she clutched it to her breast slipped down her dress and ravaged her.  So the Patriachy subsumed the Matriarchy.

     When Hephaestus later sided with his mother against Zeus, the great Olympian threw him from heaven laming him.  Then Aphrodite was given to him to wife.  Unbridled lust combined with creative activity, Ate and Menos.

     Aphrodite was not happy with the lamed god.  While Hephaestus was on trips to Olympus she dallied with another Matriarchal god, Ares, the symbol of uncontrollable desire or rage.  Hephaestus having been informed of Aphrodite’s infidelity set a trap for her and Ares.  He constructed a finely meshed net of gold which he suspended over his bed.

     Aphrodite, unbridled lust, and Ares, uncontrollable rage, were literally caught in the act being unable to disengage.  Thus we have two aspects of Ate, lust and rage, caught by the efforts of creativity in the depths of the sea or the unconscious

     Hephaestus called the other gods to witness.  Athene, a new Patriarchal goddess who was the counterpart and antithesis of Ares and Aphrodite turned away in disgust.  Apollo, another new Patriarchal god and the antithesis of Hermes just laughed.  Hermes, the patron god of thieves, a Matriarchal god, said he would change places with Ares in a second.  Thus, lust, rage and dishonesty are combined in one figure of Ate in the subconscious.

     The image of Ate and Menos is what Myers meant by his idea of the unconscious.  Freud, on the other hand, understood the unconscious as pure Ate.

     Both the Greeks and Myers attempted scientific explanations while Freud gave the unconscious a religious and supernatural twist.  He seemed to believe that the unconscious has an independent existence outside the mind of man which is beyond man’s control while being wholly evil.

     Opposed to morality, Freud then wished to unleash this conception of the unconscious on the world.  He was uniquely prepared to do so.  All he had to do was manipulate the symbols of psychoanalysis of which he had full control.  The question then is did Freud have deeper understandings that he concealed in order to bring about his desired ends?

     Such is the case with his conceptions of sexuality.  There is no need for him to have had deeper understanding, after all he was a pioneer opening a new field of inquiry.  On the other hand…

     Defining the unconscious was done by many men preceding Freud so that his is only one of many understandings, not necessarily the best, although today in  common belief he invented the concept of the unconscious.

     Next he chose to define the concepts of sex.  He was equally successful in this field as far as the public was concerned, although I differ in understanding the matter as I do with the unconscious.

     In analyses with patients Freud discovered that there was a fear of castration out of all proportion to actual incidents of sexual mutilation.  It follows then that castration symbolizes something other than the removal of the genitals.  I contend that it was impossible for Freud to have missed the signficance of castration as a symbol.

     Castration as a symbol represents the broader concept of Emasculation, in this case psychological emasculation.  This does occur in everyone’s life in many different manifestations while being something to really fear or avoid.  Unless I am mistaken all neuroses and psychoses depend from it.

     Understanding Emasculation is as much a ‘royal road to the unconscious’ as dreams.

     I do not accept Freud’s map of the mind but we both agree that the Ego or Animus is the key to identity.  Freud fully understood the significance of the Ego.  Thus when the Ego is challenged with an affront or insult to which it is either unable or doesn’t know how to respond to successfully emascualtion to some degree takes place.  There is no unconscious, just as there are no instincts so that a fixation is suppressed in the subconscious as a result of the affront.  These fixations produce effects, which can be grouped in categories such as hysteria, paranoia, obsessive-compulsiveness and the whole panoply of general affects.  The affects then find expression physically and psychologically, or in another word, psychosomatically.  The mind and the body is one unit.  These affects answer to what Freud called neuroses and psychoses.

     When the Ego or Animus is denied its right to assertion the denial is frequently espressed in a hysterically sexual manner corresponding to the the insult.  If the victim feels he has been taken from behind he will undoubtedly resort to anal intercourse as one type of underhanded response in an attempt to get back his own as in the case with homosexuality.  Homosexuality is Emasculation par excellence.

     The human mind is very limited in its inventiveness so all these affects can be catalogued and matched with the insult so that, absent resistance under analysis, they can easily be addressed and exorcised.  The problem is not as complicated as it has been made out.

     Freud understood so much more than he was willing to tell the goys but then he was not a scientist but a Jewish prophet.  In his Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego to which we will return he gave the game away.

     The individual can and does submerge his own ego into a, or at various times, many group egos.  Prominent among these group egos are ethnic, national and religious group egos.

     Just as the individual can be emascualted so can ethnic, national or religious groups be emasculated which the individual will share.  I mention the Jews only as the most obvious case although Negroes, American Indians or any defeated people suffer emasculation to one degree or another.

     Thus I will discuss the unconscious from a general point of view with Freud’s concept prominent while the concept of Emascultion will be discussed by my understanding based on the studies of Freud on the castration complex and group psychology.

     Bear in mind that I think Freud criminally distorted scientific knowledge for ethnic, national and religious ends.

2.

Quo Vadis?

     Born with an integrated mind, circumstances soon disintegrate the personality so that the mind must be reintegrated  to return to a state of psychic wholeness.  A sort of personal mythology is created by one’s early disintegrative experiences which form one’s dreamscape in an attempt to deal with an overwhelming reality.  However, when a person gains some control over external reality when the personality is integrated and the initial  dreamscape based on early memories is eliminated  a sort of distressing vacuum ensues that exists until a new dreamscape is formed which, while sufficient to ease the discomfort lacks the depth and substance of the fully mythologized dreamscape of childhood.  One had reached a scientific consciousness.  It may not be as satisfying but it fills the space while not controlling one’s behavior.

     Western man, Euroamerican man, as the only segment of mankind so differentiated had then to begin to work out a new mythology based on rational scientific ideas.  In other words he had to create a comfortable basis from which to understand and interpret the world.

     Thus after a couple proto-mythographies in the early nineteenth century a cluster of writers or neo-mythographers began to create a mythology for the Scientific Consciousness.

     The destruction of the Religious Consciousness began to become obvious after the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in  England.  With the advent of steam the problem began to become acute.

     The proto-mythologers may be Walter Scott, Byron, Peacock and the Shelleys.  There is a departure in feel and style with these writers.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein posits the scientific problem laying a foundation for the new mythology but does not itself deal with the psychological effects.

     The first mythographer to make an attempt to explain the split consciousness from my own researches was the American, Edgar Allan Poe, 1801-49.

     Poe began his writing career as a psychologically troubled man ending it insane.  Along the way he wrestled with the problem of the void in the subconscious created by the elimination of the supernatural.  His message was received by the later group of mythographers who read him without exception all being influenced by his work.

     Poe caught the great intellectual change as it emerged.  The period from 1830-1880 was the period of the great initial scientific advances that would change the world.  From Poe’s death in 1849 to the emergence of the new breed of mythographers beginning in the 1880s was a period of literary quiescence.

     Poe began his influential masterpiece The Murders In The Rue Morgue with the paragraph:

     Quote:

      As the strong man exhibits his physical ability, delighting in such excercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in the moral activity which disentangles.  He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his intellect into play.  He is fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension as praeternatural.  His results brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth the whole air of intuition.

     Unquote.

     By analysis Poe didn’t mean the sort of educated guesswork that had passed for analysis in the pre-scientific consciousness.  No, this was scientific analysis that disassembled a problem into the component parts revealing the secret than reassembling the problem to its original state.

     In doing so Poe revealed himself as a master mythographer as well as a scientist.  In C. August Dupin, the initials spell cad, Poe created the archetype of the eccentric madman who would be the here of countless novels.  As a projection of Poe’s own mentality Dupin and his unnamed alter ego live in a dilapidated house.  The house is the psychological symbol for self which Poe used almost to exhaustion.  As the Fall of the House of Usher prefigured Poe’s own descent into insanity as to a number of alter egos representing his sane side figure in the House of Usher, William Wilson, Rue Morgue and most notably in the System of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether in which his sane alter ego drops his other half off at the door of an insane asylum.

     The two Dupins live in a darkened house during the day, creaking not unlike the House Of Usher, going out only into the depressed asylum of the night.

     Poe thus presents the separation of the conscious and subconscious modern man in the riddle of the murders in the Rue Morgue.  In the Rue Morgue the subconscious is represented by the Orang u tang or animal side of human nature while the conscious is represented by the sailor owner.  From Poe to at least Freud the subconscious was popularly considered a dangerous wild side of man.

     In Dupin and his alter ego versus the sailor and the Orang, Poe may have perceived the emergence of a new species much as H.G. Wells was to do at the end of the century.  Thus both men perceived that the antecedent consciousness and the Scientific Consciousness were not just matters of learning but a genetic difference although they didn’t put it that way that couldn’t be bridged.

     Both aspects were brought out brilliantly by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in his 1880 novel: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.  This book may properly be said to be the first true represention of the scientific myth.

     In this case the good Dr. Jekyll is the disciplined, self-controlled scientist committed to doing good in the world.  Beneath his intelligent exterior he feels the primitive wild man lurking.  The primitive of what is in fact a predecessor Homo Sapiens is very very appealing to him.  Unable to bring this aspect of his psychology to the surface by conventional means he resorts to drugs.

     Having once freed his wild side, who he names Mr. Hyde, he is unable to put Hyde back into the bottle or syringe, whichever the case may be.  Hyde assumes control of the personality which leads both aspects of the personality to destruction.  This is not unlike Freud’s notion of the unconscious.

     Thus Stevenson brilliantly prefigured the twentieth century future in which the scientist is dragged back to the level of the predecessor species through a psychological inability to take the great leap forward and turn his back on his past.

     The same sense of the alienation from a predecessor existence was evidenced in the work of a great transitional figure, H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925).  Let me say that Haggard is a much neglected literary figure.  As his topics concerned Esoterica and Africa, the former which is scorned and the latter ignored, his literary reputation has been allowed to virtually disappear.  Having read a large part of his work in the pursuit of these studies I would rank Haggard very highly, certainly among the top ten authors, possibly as high as number five.  one and two are Walter Scott and Balzac, while Dumas holds down third and possibly Trollope in the fourth spot.  Haggard is a writer of genius.

     He spent his late teens and early twenties in the South African provinces of Natal and Zululand where he acquired a vision of the difference between the first Homo Sapiens, the Negro, and the current scientific man.  As the saying goes, there’s something to be lost and something gained when you move up the ladder.

     Haggard never made it to scientific man himself being stuck in the Religious Consciousness.  He belonged to the Esoteric side rather than the Christian.  In the third novel of his great African trilogy, Allan Quatermain, Haggard examined the difference between the African and European in this manner.

     Quote:

     Ah! this civilization what does it all come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed?  No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.  I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…but in all essential the savage and child of civilization are identical.

     Unquote.

      In the same book Haggard also put the problem more poetically:

…he dreams of the sight

of Zulu impis

breaking on the foe

like surf upon the rocks

and his heart rises in rebellion

against the strict limits

of the civilized life.

      Here Haggard states the central thesis of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.  In the evolution of the species there is always a small gulf between two adjacent species: nature does not take great leaps, it moves in small increments.  Thus it may be a small leap between the two, expecially when the next transition creates not only a new variety but a new species, but the leap is backwards as in Jekyll’s case while it is impossible for Hyde to make the leap forward, nor is he capable of adjusting to the new strict limits.  Wasn’t Stevenson precocious?

     Haggard who was not of the Scientific Consciousness was left behind while his work formed the basis of the greatest of the scientific mythographers.

     Before moving on let us here consider the patron saint of the future Red/Liberal aspect of the Religious Consciousness, the Frenchman, Victor Hugo (1802-85).

Paris Is A Leaky Basket

Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries and its circulation, which is slime minus its human form.

~Victor Hugo- Les Miserables

     As Haggard was a transitional figure for the mythographers one might say that Victor Hugo created the literary foundation for the Red/Liberal faction of the Religious Consciousness.  His Les Miserables with its tragi-comic format forms the bedrock of Revolutionary beliefs.  Hugo was himself a Revolutionary.  His novel Les Miserables is the account, so he says, of the apotheosis of Jean Valjean from bestiality to salvation.  Along the way to his apotheosis Valjean makes a detour through the sewers of Paris.

     Hugo was a poet; his account of the sewers of paris is, shall we say, poetic.  In fact a scatalogical masterpiece worthy of our own Lenny Bruce.  If Lenny had studied Vic a little he would have been able to say everything he wanted to say while staying out of jail at the same time.

     One wonders whether Freud read Hugo.  There are certain similarities in style.  Certainly they both seem to have had the same notion of the unconscious.  Valjean’s trip through the sewers of Paris, he with the bleeding Marius on his back must have been intended as a representation of the unconscious.  And a very funny one at that.

     Freud would certainly have agreed with Hugo when the latter wrote:  The history of men is the history of cloacae.  From Hugo’s description of the sewers of Paris it is clear that Paris was not anal retentive.

     Freud was no less scatological in his approach to psychology than this astonishing  section of Hugo’s book.  Who wouldn’t be miserable down in a sewer; miserable enough if only your mind was in the sewer.  In Hugo one gets the same macabre, morbid sense of humor Freud exhibits in his own work.  Oh yes, read properly Freud tells a lot of jokes.  Didn’t he write a book titled: Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious?  Sure he did.  Knew what he was talking about too.

     The first chapter of the section of Hugo’s book, The Intestines Of Leviathan is a series of morbid one liners which are as funny as anything Lenny Bruce came up with.  Double entendre?  To say Paris is a leaky basket!  In the underworld homosexual argot of Jean Genet the term basket refers to a man’s crotch and penis.  Undoubtedly the same argot was current in Hugo’s time.  He was a student of criminal argot.  So Paris being a leaky basket is equivalent to saying Paris was incontinent, pissing all over itself.  Don’t you think that’s funny?

     And then: “The sewer is the conscience of the city.” Hm?  ‘This can be said for the garbage dump, that it is no liar.”  I ask you, does Victor Hugo know how to get down and boogie?  Let us follow Jean Valjean into the “Conscience of Paris” “which is no liar” from which Hugo says Villon talks to Rabelais.  Fabulous funny images, morbid but fabulous and funny.

     To be sure, psychology in 1862 when Les Miserables was published, had not been developed, yet notice how closely Hugo’s tongue-in-cheek, laughing in his sleeve, description of Jean Valjean’s journey through the pitch black maze of this subterranean worker’s paradise into which from time to time faint glimmerings of light enter answers to the images of Freudian Depth Psychology.  Depth psychology?  Was that a pun or play on words?

     Just imagine Jean Valjean as he enters the sewer.  Take time to construct concrete images in your mind.  After this, shall we say, harrowing of hell not unlike that of Theseus and Peirithous, from which Perithous never returned, Valjean receives his apotheosis not unlike Hercules.  One might also compare this scene with the temptation of Christ.

     Valjean is carrying the bleeding Marius on his back who might or might not be dead.  Hugo doesn’t let us know.  This might be compared to one’s old self before or during the integration of the personality.  In fact Valjean sheds Marius after emerging from the sewer from which the gatekeeper of Hell, Thenardier, allows him to emerge after being paid his obol.

     The sewer is certainly a symbol of the unconscious for the scatological Freud who seems to revel in such fecal images.  Amidst a chatty history of the sewers of Paris which Hugo keeps up as Valjean plods through the darkness always intuitively heading in the right direction, down.  He evades the thought police who are searching for him or someone just like him in the sewers.  A shot sent blindly down his gallery grazes his cheek.  Jesus!  Isn’t a man safe from harassment in the depths of his own mind?  If you think Paris is dangerous, try the sewers.

     Valjean is exhausted from his long walk carrying Marius on his back, poor suffering humanity, the sign of the cross, nevertheless with the heart of a lion he plods on.  He moves forward through deepening fluids as his bare feet sink into fecal matter “which does not lie” while Hugo carries on a charming separate conversation with we readers about little known facts of the Paris sewers.  No, the fecal matter, as well as Hugo, tells the truth however hard that may be to decipher from the material at hand as well as underfoot.

      As the fluid (also however that may be composed as Hugo is writing scatologically) rises, his feet sink up to his knees into “the conscience of the city.”  Get this!  Valjean is one of the great strongmen, he lifts the dead weight of Marius above his head on his extended arms still sucking his feet from the muck.  Hugo does not reveal whether Valjean lost his shoes during this ordeal or not but surely a while back.  Perhaps of all the details Hugo records this particular item which consumes my interest had none for him.

     Nevertheless, heedless of the the danger to her shoes, Valjean plods on.  Plod, plod.

     Now, here’s a detail of interest Hugo does record.  Feet and legs deep in the conscience of paris, Marius held above his head visualize this, the fecal fluid had risen above Valjean’s mouth and nose so that he has to tip his head back, I’m not sure this would have been effective, until only a mask can be seen rising eerily above the surface, as well as two arms and Marius.  He ain’t heavy, he’s my other self.  Seen in Stygian darkness that is.

     If we’re all in the same sewer here imagine particles of the conscience of Paris, scatologically know as turds, bumping up against the mask probably trailing behind Our Man Of The Sewer in a wake of fetid glory.

     Even in the pitch black Thenardier is watching this spectacle.  Fortunately the psychic crisis is past.  Valjean leaves the conscience of Paris which does not lie, you can say that about it, behind striking solid, er, ground.

     A striking vision of Freud’s and the Revolution’s reality.  Had Valjean been given the name Spartacus the Revolutionary vision would have been complete.  The Red/Liberals had spent a hundred years or more in the sewers of Paris before they turned this primary text of theirs into the Broadway musical of Les Miserables.  Next time you see it put it into this context of the sewers of Paris.  The songs will take on new meaning.

Part II of Something Of Value I follows.

A Review

Lipstick Traces:

Greil Marcus

Part IX

Into The Abyss

It sounded like a lot of fun wrecking the world.

It felt like freedom.

Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces

 

     It is probably time to look a little into Mr. Marcus’ antecedents.  He was born in the summer of 1945 between VE and VJ day as he tells us.  He was ten, then, in 1954-55 when Rock and Roll came into existence.  He doesn’t seem to imply that he was particularly interested in records in the next decade that would have made him twenty in 1964-65.  He would have been 15 to 20  from 1960-65 during which time he would have listened to the radio.  He also seems to have been in Philadelphia at some time during that period when he attended a Bob Dylan concert. I haven’t read yet where he mentioned that he had a record collection during that period.  He doesn’t seem to recall much from memory before 1965 with the possible exception of Bob Dylan.

     One is forced to conclude then that most if not all his record lore was acquired between his twentieth and thirtieth years from 1965 to 1974-75.  He began his career as a critic in 1966 when he went to work for Rolling Stone.  He left that post a year later to write for Creem Magazine. His first book Mystery Train was published in 1975 so he should have acquired his lore over maybe eight years.

     He should have been a sophomore in ’64 which means he should have graduated in’66 so his real record education would have been from ’66 to ’74.  Not much time  for someone posing as an expert in ’75. 

     He says he was born in San Francisco moving into Menlo Park in 1955 so that he went to Menlo Park-Atherton High.  The area is one of the ritziest in the Bay Area.  Atherton is top of the line for the Bay so his step-father must have been doing pretty well.  In other words Mr. Marcus is a rich kid.  I haven’t read exactly where he lived between 1948 when his mother remarried and 1955.

     At any rate he comes from a very well to do background.  After graduating from MPA he went over to Berkeley to attend UC.  He was there for the whole Free Speech brouhaha.  At some time after graduation from UC he returned to Berkeley to live which is his home base at the present time.

     At the time he wrote Mystery Train I would question the depth and breadth of his knowledge.

     He published Mystery Train at the last possible moment such a book could be published.  From ’66 to ’75 those of us concerned with records were convinced that something monumental and earth shaking was happening.  Wonderful theories of the music’s importance were spun of which Mystery Train is one.  I think it probable that Mr. Marcus saw a string of such books rolling off his pen.  A funny thing happened on the way to the forum however.  Disco and Punk blew up the Rock monolith about the same year destroying the grandiose notions we were all believing in.  All of a sudden as Mr. Marcus points out confidence was destroyed and survival became the issue.  Mr. Marcus and his plans were thrown for a loop.

     Not until 1989 did he find another tack to try to get back on track.  In that year he published Lipstick Traces.  Feeling that his first career had been blown out of the water by Punk he paid homage to it by concentrating on Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.  Broadening out some he incorporated the history of what he considered various Dada movements.  His concern with Dada had found expression in Mystery Train so it was only necessary to relate Dada to Punk with which he had no trouble.

     Since ’89 he has published a continuous series of books, the most recent being The Shape Of Things To Come.

2.

     I hesitate to do this but I feel the reader should know something of my credentials to give some basis for judging my criticism and analysis.

     I’m about seven years older than Mr. Marcus having been born in 1938.  I was therefore sixteen in 1954 which is more or less the cut off date for the beginning of Rock and Roll.

     I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan.  We were apparently out of the mainstream of Rock development.  Even though we had a fairly large Black population there was no Rhythm And Blues or Black music on the local radio.  There were only traditional music shows on radio in 1954 when Top Forty was in embryo.  By ’55 and ’56 we had full fledged Top 40 and what a blast it was.

     With Top 40 came Black artists like Bill Doggett, Fats Domino and Little Richard but they were a Top 40 sound whether they called it Rhythm And Blues or not.  One could tune into Detroit for Black records but I didn’t know anyone who did.  I tuned in a couple times but Black music per se repelled me.

     I was in the class of ’56.  The class of ’55 knew nothing of Rock and Roll at the time and very little of Top 40 radio.  I was in a distinct minority in the class of ’56 who listened to Rock at all.  The class of ’57 was the first class attuned to the music.

     As to first R & R records, who knows?  The early and mid-fifties were a blend of musics so I heard a fair amount of Swing.  Anyone who traces Rock and Roll directly to Swing is dreaming.  I know Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa and the Swing drummers.  None of them had the R&R feel.  Swing rhythm sections were miniscule compared to Rock which to my mind is a singer, lead guitar and a two or three piece rhythm section.  Very faint resemblance to Swing.

     When it became financially impossible for Big Band to survive I suppose the instrumental quartet was the next logical step which led to the Big Beat.  Neither Elvis nor Sun had a Big Beat.  He had rhythm but no beat;  he was essentially a hillbilly singer doing fast songs which is how everyone thought of him.  That’s what I heard and none of the people I knew would listen to him because he was a hillbilly.  As far as I’m concerned the Big Beat was developed by Lonnie Donegan and that is where the English Beat groups come from.  Lonnie’s early stuff was as much Rock as anything else although he was primarily a terrific Folk and Blues singers.  Unparalleled.  He was as good as Elvis but somewhat more traditional sounding than Presley.  Elvis could really move you.

     Elvis was virtually unknown in Saginaw before Heartbreak Hotel.  I missed out on the Sun records by a day.  The record store had returned them the day before I got there so I have all RCAs.  I never knew anyone else who had heard of Elvis between the time I bought my 45s and Heartbreak Hotel.

     I never thought of Elvis as a Rock and Roller on those early records.  There really was no Rock and Roll except for Bill Haley And The Comets and that stuff was really leadfooted.  I didn’t really enjoy Rock Around The Clock and I never bought it. Elvis was just a hillbilly cat who could really sing a song.  I knew from reading the labels that Arthur Crudup wrote That’s All Right Mama but that meant nothing to me.  Who ever heard of Arthur Crudup? 

     I don’t understand why I don’t have Sun Presleys as I bought every Sun record as it came out.  I had to have them special ordered as nobody wanted them but I was very familiar with the Sun sound.  Not impossibly Sam Phillips had as much to do with Rock and Roll as anyone because all the records he produced had that forward leaning scudding way.  You could have substituted Elvis for Johnny Cash on Get Rhythm and there wouldn’t have been much difference.

     When Elvis left Sun his production values changed with the sound becoming flat footed and vertical rather than forward leaning.  Elvis was always Elvis for me but I never had the incentive to buy his RCA produced 45s.

     Some may say the music died with Buddy Holly’s plane crash but that is a gross exaggeration.  Holly’s career was virtually over by February ’59.  He was singing solo and fading fast.  The Big Bopper was a no one who had one trash talking record while Richie Valens was as close to a zero as you can get.

     Elvis was kept alive by RCA during his Army years but Little Richard was finished after Heebie Jeebies and Jerry Lee’s Rock career was stalled.  High School Confidential was so-so.  Jerry Lee’s marriage to his cousin may have put him in bad odor in some quarters but that was a fishing expedition to discredit him.  Might have hurt his personal appearances but not his record sales, they were already down.  To my mind Duane Eddy came out with Rebel Rouser on the heel of the plane crash and Rock and Roll bounced right along without missing a beat.  Apparently not too many people remember the effect of Eddy and Rebel Rouser but it was the second kick in the pants after Presley.  Kept us all going.

     The big problem for Rock and Roll was Organized Crime.  The Mafia and Chicago Outfit controlled Juke boxes.  Those idiots determined that only their acts got on the Juke boxes.  If you want a good representation of what the record industry was like check out the best Rock and Roll movie ever made- The Girl Can’t Help It.  If you watch closely and pay attention you are being told exactly how it was.

     An Outfit figure greatly resembling Al Capone, although the time period was long after Capone, controls the Juke boxes for the Outfit.  That means the Juke boxes at least West of the Appalachians to the Coast.  The Juke boxes in Saginaw were stocked by the Outfit that for all practical purposes controlled the town.  All towns.

     Girl Can’t Help It stars Jayne Mansfield and Tommy Ewell.  Mansfield is the Mafia figure’s moll.  He wants to make her a record star which he figures he can do because he controls the Juke boxes.  All of ’em.  But the Girl Can’t Sing.  The producers are at their wits ends because they have to do something with her.  They accidentally discover that she has this high pitched squeal.  So, a la Tequila in which periodically the instrumental music stops and someone announces ‘Tequila’, at certain points in the record the music stops and Mansfield squeals.  This is so captivating the record does become a hit.

     Now, the movie highlights several Mafia acts like Teddy Randazzo and the Gum Drops that would never draw anyone into the theatres.  Teddy didn’t even have an attractive high pitched squeal to go along with his great accordion playing.  But as is usual with non-record types the belief is that if you can expose non-talent acts to enough people they will sell.  So the Outfit did understand they needed some draws to get people in to expose the non-talent.  Who are you going to go to?  Well, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard for starters.  I went because of Gene Vincent.

     The movie was released in ’58 so not many of us had ever actually seen any of these guys.  The Mob had their draws but they wanted to showcase the Italian acts which they did.  Gene Vincent was shot through the window of a recording studio for about half of Be Bop A Lula; Eddie Cochran did his Twenty Flight Rock shot off a TV set and Little Richard was shot through a crowd in a club about fifty feet away.

     As I say if you pay attention you can get a very good idea of what was going on.  Mansfield and Ewell were great but they were at the terminal point of their careers.

     The early sixties were pretty duddy as far as I was concerned, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I was right,  so I went back to my true love, Country and Western.  As I noted in Part One I was drawn back into pop by my brother-in -law.  As I said I then graduated from college in ’66 going up to Oregon from the Bay Area.  It was there in ’67 that I opened a record store.  From ’67 to ’80 I was a decent sized player in the record business.  I thought I heard everything but I am always amazed at the records for which I have no recollection even seeing. 

     I was there when the first Rolling Stone came out.  I don’t know where the magazine sold but it wasn’t Oregon.  Pretty boring actually.  Got worse as time went on and then it got Political. 

     I quit listening to records in 1980 when I closed my record store.  Punk was too ridiculous to waste your time on although I do have two or three Disco records I value.  Well, Rock and Roll was great while it lasted but it really did die in ’75.  Not only Punk and Disco but the untalented Epigone came along.  The splitting out of Heavy Metal as a genre didn’t help either.  God!  I know how Marcus felt.  Everything just crashed to the ground.

3.

     Mr. Marcus’ themes and direction remain the same from Mystery Train to The Shape Of Things To Come.  His attitudes are controlled by his dual Israeli and American passports: his Semitism and anti-Semitism.  These two citizenships coincide in his psyche with his twin racial concerns.  The Israeli citizenship as Semitism and his American citizenship with anti-Semitism. Naturally his Israeli Semitism takes precedence in his loyalty over his American anti-Semitism.  Americans are Nazis in his mind.  As with Adam in the Garden of Paradise and God, the twin concepts exist side by side in his mind with Adam representing Semitism and God anti-Semitism.  Thus his Jewish/Adamic/Israeli identity represents his absolute purity in his mind while America/God represent his foul or Devil side.  He and his fellow Jews think that by trashing the Garden, Europe, Palestine, America or wherever they happen to reside that their ‘purity’ will triumph and they will be as they represent themselves: a Holy People suited to govern mankind, Judge-Penitents.  That is what the eighteenth century messiah, Jacob Frank, meant by saying that if the Jews commited all the evil in their minds then this ‘purity’ will shine to light the way for the peoples.  You don’t have to be Freud to know it ain’t going to work.  Thus Mr. Marcus’ subliminal message is all good comes from Jewish musicians and all evil from American musicians.  The Jewish Bob Dylan becomes his ultimate hero taking precedence over the American anti-hero, Elvis Presley.

     That’s why in Lipstick Traces he juxtaposes the anti-hero Presley and the Jewish hero Isidore Isou.

     Mr. Marcus scatters several clues throughout his work to hint at what he’s attempting.  He mentions John Ford’s movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and one of its morals a couple times concentrating on the movie’s stated notion that once an event becomes legendary even though the received version may be untrue people prefer the myth to the fact.  There may be some truth to the notion although as Mr. Marcus explores the counter notion of detournement he gives us the means to strip such an ingrained notion from the story and turn it in any direction we want.  Thus in the twenties the Judaeo-Communists on the one hand debunked American heroes and myths while at the same time detourning them so that Jefferson and Lincoln become founding members of Communism as Communism in turn becomes Twentieth Century Americanism.  A neat trick that didn’t quite work.

     Actually the two practices denote the transition from one religion to another which also lays bare Mr. Marcus’ intent.  Thus in the first few centuries of the Piscean Age the Catholic Church detourned ancient Taurian and Arien religious sites by stripping them of their pagan connotations replacing the meaning with little balloons containing Christian messages.  Eventually they replaced Arien temples with Piscean churches.

      Jack Finney’s 1950’s novel The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers describes the same thing in which aliens while maintaining exact replicas of the bodies they take over inform the minds with entirely different content.  Finney understood detournement completely long before Guy Debord had it figured out.

     That is exactly what the Jews, who are attempting to replace Christianity are doing.  Mr. Marcus mentions Philip Roth’s The Plot To Destroy America approvingly.  Of course Mr. Marcus and Roth are both Jewish.  In Roth’s detournement of American history he portrays the Jewish rescue of the true America, which the Jews in their wisdom created, from the Weird Old Americans who are trying to twist the Promised Land into some Nazi hate filled paranoid perversion of what one is led to believe was the American paradise Jews had created.

      Roth chooses to recklessly defame Charles Lindhberg, a great and true American, but that is what detournement is all about.  Thus on the one hand Roth detournes ‘Weird Old American’ heroes into villains while at the same time creating the myth of the Jewish saviors a la Liberty Valence.

     The Jews then become the men who shot Liberty Valence thus destroying the Weird Old America while bringing into existence this Jewish paradise we enjoy today.  Shut your mouth, you anti-Semite.

     Why Liberty Valence?

     Well, Liberty is the opposite of collectivity or the Jewish Law.  He represents the sort of ‘rugged individualism’ that threatened Jewish collectivity or subordination to the Mosaic Law.  Valence means valour, courage or valiance.  That is, a man who has what it takes to stand out against the crowd or Mosaic Law.  I’m sure it was an unintended compliment.  No one of the collectivity has what it takes to stand up against him, not even the hero of the collectivity, John Wayne.

     The legend that is so hard to kill is that Jimmie Stewart shot Liberty Valance down in a fair and square man to man fight.  Actually Wayne is the agent of the collectivity who bushwhacked Liberty from a dark alley,  Wayne and his Negro servitor and alter ego who tossed his rifle to him.

     So this is the secret message of Lipstick Traces creating a legend and detourning existing beliefs that run counter to those of the collectivity.  For that reason the branch of academic history known as American Studies has been captured by Jews who stand up laughingly epatering the Americans, debunking and detourning as they go.  

     I see where Mr. Marcus and a yoyo by the name of Todd Gitlin are joining forces to epater the Americans together.  Ought to be funny if you’ve got the right sense of humor.

4.

     All the seeds of Mr. Marcus later work are apparent in his 1975 Mystery Train.  One should examine Mr. Marcus construction of Train carefully.

     He examines six recording stars.  Two of which he calls ancestors and four ‘Inheritors.’  The six are Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, Dylan/The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley.

     Out of the period of 1950-75 Mr. Marcus chooses a very personal list of bands.  One would call the list debateable but there’s not much to debate.  Whether they are supposed to be important or influential isn’t clear.  Apart from Presley none of them were overwhelming important  or influential.  Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, the Doors?  No, they aren’t on board Mr. Marcus’ Mystery Train.  So, what do we have? 

     The list is bracketed by two White performers, Harmonica Frank and Elvis Presley.  Robert Johnson and Sly Stone are Black.  Dylan/The Band are Jewish and Canadian while Robbie Robertson is mentioned as having a Jewish father.  Thus Dylan/The Band and Randy Newman are two Jewish outfits.  Two Whites, two Blacks, two Jews.  Obviously we have an agenda here.

     The two ancestors are questionable.  I may have a vague memory of having heard the name Harmonica Frank but the man influenced absolutely no one.  Technically he is no ancestor.  His only connection with, say, Elvis, is that both were produced by Sam Phillips at Sun records.  In that sense Harmonica Frank may be representative of what Phillips as a producer was trying to do but that represents Phillips and not Harmonica Frank.

     Thus when Phillips decided to produce Presley he used the same musical tenets or ‘ear.’ Elvis was very fortunate to have Phillips to hear his talent and draw him out.  Without Phillips there would never have been an Elvis Presley other than this guy driving a truck.

     As far as ‘White’ ancestors go Phillips would have been more appropriate than Frank.  I suppose what I am saying is that I find Mr. Marcus either too shallow or too tendentious.

     Mr. Marcus doesn’t use a Jewish ancestor but as a Black ancestor he chooses Robert Johnson.  As he states there were no Robert Johnson recordings available for anyone to hear before the 1960 Columbia release.  Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbettor would have been a much more influential ancestor.  Not only had his recordings been continuously available but his songs formed a staple for Folk artists from the post-war years on.  His Good Night Irene and Midnight Special were ten times more influential than anything Robert Johnson ever wrote, a hundred times…heck, a thousand times, more.  Johnson’s songs began to appear by other artists only in late sixties.

     Mr. Marcus’ enthusiasm for Johnson’s lyrics is absolutely inexplicable.  He quotes the following as an example of Johnson’s genius:

 

Me and the devil, was walking side by side

Oooo, me and the devil was walking side by side.

I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied.

 

     Pretty choice stuff, huh?  I’m surprised the ladies haven’t boycotted both Johnson and Mr. Marcus’ Mystery Train.

     Nevertheless his choice of Johnson seems arbitrary at the best and tendentious at the worst.

     I presume he chose the Band because of their association with Bob Dylan.  Mr. Marcus definitely sets Dylan up as the greatest of the era replacing Presley.  This is patently ridiculous.

     His final paragraph detournes Elvis in favor of Dylan.  Bear in mind that in 1975 Elvis still had two years to live so Mr. Marcus may be understood to be addressing Presley indirectly:

     Quote:

     All in all there is one remaining moment I want to see;  One epiphany that would somehow bring his (Elvis’) story home.  Elvis would take the stage as he always has; the roar of the audience would surround him, as it always will.  After a time, he would begin a song by Bob Dylan, singing slowly.  Elvis would give it everything he has.  “I must have been mad,” he would cry,  “I didn’t know what I had- until I threw it all away.”

     And then with love in his heart, he would laugh.

     Unquote.

     That’s a pretty tale.  As a detournement the kingof rock n’ roll passes the scepter to Dylan.  While as a hypnotic suggestion to the living Elvis Mr. Marcus is attempting to bring his dream to come to pass.  We’ll never know if it would have worked but it was the traditional Judaeo-Freudian method.

     Thus the two sections on Harmonica Frank and Elvis are slurs on Mr. Marcus’ concept of The Weird Old America.  That title of another of his books is itself a detournement of America.

     For the last few years I have been wavering but after reading Mr. Marcus’ ideas on Dylan I have probably irrevocably turned against him.  To write of the Band is to write of Dylan.  Dylan would always have been Dylan but the Band would never have been anything without Dylan.  The Band probably stands to Dylan as Presley does to Sam Phillips.

     The first two Band LPs are the result of direct contact with Dylan in the sessions that resulted in the basement tapes.  With the separation from Dylan the effect wore off with the Band returning to their R & R roots.  At their peak they were no Doors or Led Zeppelin.  Like Dylan I find them unlistenable today.

     Mr. Marcus wrote a two or three hundred page essay on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone which he seems to consider the greatest song ever written.  He perversely refuses to accept the song for what it is- a hymn to ingratitude.  In the song Dylan clearly resents his dependence on Joan Baez for his early success.  He, in fact, used her but now in his pride of success he spurns her from him- with his foot so to speak.  A real ingrate as a matter of fact.

     Mr. Marcus reproduces the lyrics in their entirety as a preface to the book.  I’m not going to do the same here but Like A Rolling Stone is in a genre of Dylan songs that can be defined only as mocking or ‘hate songs.’  Along with Rolling Stone one can include Positively Fourth Street, Please, Crawl Out Your Window, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Desolation Row and any number of others.  Sooner Or Later, One Of Us Must Know.

     Again with Dylan the tone of his voice is more important than the words.  For me I responded to the pain and anger in his voice that seemed to reflect my own experiences and which I interpreted in my own way.  The same attitude would be reflected differently by the baby boomers born in the early fifties.  As noted they came along at the time of Mystery Train’s writing to shatter Mr. Marcus immediate dream of a Rock And Roll Czardom.

     One presumes that the song Mr. Marcus wanted Presley to sing in order to detourne himself in favor of Bob Dylan ‘with love in his heart and a laugh’ thus allowing one religious idol to replace another was ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’

     Unfortunately due to Mr. Marcus’ interpretation I now see ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as an actual hymn of hate scorning and mocking Joan Baez.  Throughout Bob Dylan’s career he had the habit of purloining things of others…said the Joker to the Thief.  In Minneapolis and Colorado he actually stole records from other people.  His excuse was that he really needed them.  In New york he lifted the arrangement of a song of Dave Von Ronk’s and recorded it without permission.  He had a ‘good excuse’ for that too.  He needed it.

     Perhaps his greatest theft was of the career of Joan Baez.  Baez out of a generous heart used her influence and reputation to gain acceptance for the caterwauling Dylan.  He couldn’t admit this theft without exposing himself as an ingrate subject to the scorn of the Folk community of Greenwich Village.  This may possibly be the secret meaning of Positively Fourth Street in which he seems to heap scorn on the whole Folk community.

      Mr. Marcus is especially impressed with the disgustingly hateful lines:

Ain’t it hard

When you discover that

He really wasn’t

Where It’s at

After he took from you everything

He could steal?

 

How does it feel?

How does it feel to be on your own

No direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone.

     Dylan has identified the person he is speaking to as ‘Miss Lowly’ who went to a fine school and here he says that he has stolen everything from her that he can steal and then he taunts her as though he had reduced her to his condition when he first arrived in New York City.  ‘How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown?’

     Yes.  It must have been terrifying for Dylan to arrive in New York City as a complete unknown with no understanding of how to get started, homeless and starving.  Dylan solved his problem by scrounging lodging and his next meal.  He just moved in on people, ate their food, read their books, listened to their records, picked their minds, stole from them everything he could steal and then turned his back on them.  Cut them cold.  Scorned them as in Positively Fourth St.  Well, all right. OK.  But I don’t find it as admirable as Mr. Marcus does.  As I say I never really thought of Like A Rolling Stone deeply before reading Bob Dylan At The Crossroads.  (Robert Johnson again.  Is Mr. Marcus suggesting that Dylan sold his soul to the Devil?) but now that I have I am appalled at the coarseness of actually composing a song about your perfidy and advertising it to the world.

     If Mr. Marcus had handed Presley the song saying this is going to be what you’ll sing next, Presley who had perfect musical sense would have said:  ‘Not on your life, Baby Blue.’

     No laugh and a shrug from the King.

     After Dylan/The Band Mr. Marcus moves on to Sly Stone.  Sly was not a major talent.  He had a couple fair R&B songs bordering on open racism.  Sinking rapidly beneath drugs Sly Stone rapidly sunk his career.

     Moving next to Randy Newman I must confess that Mr. Marcus has lost me.  Perhaps he is trying to help the career of a fellow Semite along.  Got me.  Newman’s songs were always repulsive to me and Mr. Marcus’ quotes merely make them more repellent.  Gee, I wonder why Elvis never sang ‘Short People?’

     And then of course we come to what Mr. Marcus intends as his piece de resistance of criticism, Elvis himself.  This piece is a regular tear down job.

     Mr. Marcus was a trifle too young during the late forties and first half of the fifties to understand the situation.  During those years the musical culture was in the hands of Jews and Italians.  New York’s Tin Pan Alley from the twenties on had controlled American popular music.  The clubs in which artists performed were all mobbed up as all the artists were mobbed up will they nil they.  Thus nobody got through who wasn’t thoroughly vetted.

     On the fringes one had areas of Black musicians who were outside the scope of popular music hence not worried about.  At the same time one had Hillbilly music that was so despised that proper Whites retched at the mere mention of it and that is no exaggeration.  Concomitant with Hillbilly although culturally acceptable was Folk music.  Postwar from 1946 to 1964 in my estimation Folk was the only listenable pop musical expression.  Unfortunately Folk music was in the hands of the Reds making it culturally suspect.

     During the twenties and thirties Tin Pan Alley songs were vital enough to satisfy the nation’s listening ear although there were those who complained about it.  Whatever had worked for Tin Pan Alley between the wars the ethic had worn too thin between ’46 and ’54.  The music was so godawful and stiff that few could listen to it especially the young.  Into the Jewish vacuum stepped the Black and Hillbilly songwriters and performers.  While Hank Williams may have slipped slightly over the line of pop his songs were welcomed with open arms by pop cover artists.  At that time there was no shame in covering a song made popular by another artist, even as the original version was still moving up the charts.

     A golden time was created for unvetted performers and songwriters to step into the vacuum.  While Eddie Fisher, Ezio Pinza and Mario Lanza  and a stable of Italian pop singers attempted to hold the Tin Pan Alley fort Black street singers were emerging as Doo Wop groups while in Memphis Sam Phillips was developing the distinctive Sun Sound of which Elvis was the cornerstone.  Elvis and his songs were completely unvetted by Tin Pan Alley and the Mob.  As far as I’m concerned Presley’s breakthrough was such a fortunate concatenation of circumstances as to be miraculous.  There are few times when things work out so perfectly for all concerned from Sam Phillips to Elvis to Colonel Parker and RCA.  While Elvis was the transcendant talent he was only a component in the Elvis Presley success story.  He had the good sense to stick to singing while he had the good fortune to be associated with managers of talent, circumspection, genius and above average integrity.  So rare as to be almost unbelievable.

      Phillips brought the talent to the surface that anyone else would have overlooked.  A shy retiring Elvis given the opportunity dug deep to release the inner singer to become a polished singer almost immediately- in fact immediately.  All of his Sun singles are absolutely stunning.  There was no reason not to be swept off your feet from the first note of That’s All Right Mama.

     Elvis’ genius was that he handled songs in a perfect blend of hillbilly and pop.  He may have used some songs written by Blacks but there was no Black singer that could possibly have made of those songs what Elvis did.

     Greil Marcus, Guralnick and others seem to be of the opinion that something went wrong with Elvis.  Nothing went wrong with Elvis; he had the perfect career from his first single to his death in 1977.  He was unable to withstand the pressures of his unparalled success.  Unable to move in public because of his fans he was virtually under house arrest.  For crying out loud, the guy couldn’t even go to McDonald’s.  On top of that he aroused the anger and enmity of the ‘greatest generation’, the Mob and if Mr. Marcus is any example, the Jews.  I’m sure he had difficulty just staying alive.

     His goal was the movies.  Thus his singing style changed to fit the venue.  As much as I loved the Sun Elvis there is no possible way he could have continued in the same vein and sustained popularity  for twenty some odd years.  The new Elvis of Heartbreak Hotel and the early RCA years lost me as a record buyer.  Still, as Dr. Hook sang:  Elvis, he’s a hero, he’s a superstar…. as a hero Elvis always retained my loyalty.

     While the Army seemed a disaster, his tour of duty may have been fortuitous for his career.  The Army allowed the excitement to abate even as anticipation increased but when he returned it was as a return with a different feel.  His style once again changed from the early RCA years.  Listening to those old Mario Lanza and Ezio Pinza records inspired him to sing operatic C&W.  Rather startling to my ear but with sure musical sensibility it worked for Elvis.

     And then his popularity was so immense that he was able to star in two to three movies a year with all of them being money makers.  The songs may have been less than memorable but he had to reach a mass audience for which popular music allowed of no vocal eccentricities.  His fan base was strong enough and his talent great enough to sustain his popularity through a couple dozen movies that were frequently scorned and mocked but as Mr. Marcus generously points out they offered something that set them apart. 

     As all things must his movie career passed its ethic and cannily realizing it Elvis moved on.  Thus in 1968 he produced a special that catapulted him back to the top of the musical scene.  Even Mr. Marcus was overwhelmed by the ’68 transition from movie star back to recording master.

     Nor did Elvis stop there but went on to a musical triumph that dwarfed anything that had gone before it including Frank Sinatra’s whole career- that was the satellite transmission form Hawaii to the whole world, the entire planet, simultaneously.  The whole world tuned in to Elvis at one time.  The equivalent of several hundred Woodstocks and something that has never been equaled by any other performer or groups of performers.

     So, what did go wrong?  Elvis had an unimaginably perfect career.  The tragedy is that the enormous pressures were too great for this amazingly centered performer.  It took a lot to beat him down.

     Now, Elvis had a popularity that Bob Dylan couldn’t even dream about.  Dylan could sing cranky little songs of hatred and viciousness such as Like A Rolling Stone to the ‘abused, confused, misused strung out ones and worse’ but Elvis couldn’t sing such viciousness to a worldwide audience.  Imagine Elvis Live from Hawaii singing to a mob of adoring women lines like this:

Aw, you’ve

Gone to the finest school alright Miss Lowly but you know you only used to get

Juiced in it.

Nobody’s ever taught you to live out on the street

And now you’re gonna

Have to get

Used to it.

You say you never

Compromise

With the mystery tramp but now you

Realize

He’s not selling any

Alibis

As you stare into the vacuum

Of his eyes

And say:

Do you want to

Make a deal?

How  does it feel?

How does it feel?

To be on your own

With no direction home

A complete unknown…

      Pardon me, I’m laughing so hard at the image I’m falling out of my chair.  Oops, there I go.

—–

     I’m back.  Didn’t hurt myself.

     So, anyway I consider Mr. Marcus’ whole critique so skewed as to be vitiated.  It would take a whole lot of love in Elvis heart to make such a musical gaffe, blowing his career in one misguided song and then say:  ‘I didn’t know what I had until I till I threw it all away.’  Sorry Greil, Bob Dylan is actually a minor talent.  Let us not forget that he once opened a show for the Rolling Stones.

5.

     There was a long hiatus of fourteen years between Mystery Train and the appearance of Lipstick Traces in 1989.  During that period one assumes that Mr. Marcus had ‘no direction home.’  How the elements that make up Lipstick Traces formed is open to conjecture.  He attributes his direction to one John Rockwell on the dedication page.  His style was also apparently heavily influenced by the Firesign Theatre hence the herky jerky, jumpy non-sequitur style.  The Firesign Theatre was one of the great recording acts of the late 60s and the 70s, still going too.  They have continued to release CDs on into their old age, such as it is, but, as I say, I stopped listening to anything after 1980.

     As the Firesign is essential to Mr. Marcus I suspect there is loads of humor in Traces that I’m not getting.  Hard enough to make those difficult jumps.  Juxtaposing Presley and Isou wasn’t even a jump, it was a gap.

      John Rockwell was some sort of music critic at the NYT so not exactly the sort of influence one would want.  As Mr. Marcus would have been already familiar with the Frankfurt School of which he is a continuator and mentions Dada in Mystery Train one imagines that critic Rockwell pushed him in the direction of the Presley lookalike Isidore Isou and incidents like the rather obscure Invasion of Notre Dame.  Mr. Marcus was five at the time of the Invasion; one doubts he remembers it.  Thus, perhaps Mr. Rockwell directed his eyes to the morgue of intriguing but all but forgotten news clippings with which he would have been familiar.  Thus Mr. Marcus found the Lettrist/Situationist International.

     The Paris disturbance following on the heels of the Free Speech brouhaha  would then have given him a focal point.  It appears that at some point Mr. Marcus met Debord becoming very well acquainted with the old drunk and pervert, as it were, a disciple.  When Debord shot himself through the heart in 1994 as with Drs. Mabuse and Baum Debord’s soul apparently entered Mr. Marcus’ body so that he appears to have assumed leadership of the SI.

     Traumatized by the Punkers who he gives credit for bringing down Rock he also became fascinated with Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols as well as several other Punk units.  Personally I have always thought Punk was absolutely useless hence I find Mr. Marcus’ fascination with this sub-marginal trash actually objectionable.  While his subjects knew that they were nothing and sought to be everything the means they chose to raise their chances of becoming something were ill advised.

     However as Mr. Marcus integrates them into the Dada/Lettrist/Situationist program it may be worth considering at least Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols who according to Mr. Marcus are an outgrowth of the SI.

     After the failure of the 1968 disturbance in Paris Debord’s SI seems to have become truly international what with Greil Marcus in the US and people like Malcom McLaren and Jamie Reid in England.  God only knows how many covert cells there were and what looneys they were allied with.

     McLaren and Reid were casting about for some way to epater the bourgeois when McLaren had an interview with the New York Dolls.  From them he conceived the notion  that no talent was needed at all to become a rock band.  One only needed the ability to make noise.  Fortunately for Reid and McLaren there were myriads of young losers who felt the same way.  One only had to pick and choose the most likely candidates on a cosmetic basis and give their repertoire a Situationist slant.  You know, create a situation.

     Mr. Marcus wonders from where the musical infuences for the Punkers came.  I have to say that their inspiration was largely Bob Dylan.  Johnny Rotten (ne Lydon) was born in 1956 so in 1975 he was twenty years old.  The Punks then would have been eighteen to twenty-five.  A primary influence on them would have been Bob Dylan.  Dylan’s first records give the impression of an untutored musician.  The stuff was just noisy.  He could neither sing nor play.

     The mean streak that Mr. Marcus finds so attractive in Like A Rolling Stone runs throughout the corpus.  As much as I hate to admit it that hateful mocking derisive attitude is the essence of Dylan’s style.  After having Mr. Marcus point this out to me so unmistakably I’m having to rearrange my memories of Bob to change their faces and give them all brand new names.  I’m having to become a revisionist of my own history.

     While Dylan is a real cultural name dropper so that he gives the impression of being learned, he isn’t.  Chronicles proved that.  His criticisms of society are merely emotional rants rather than informed or intellectual critiques.  That he could wing tripe like Masters of War past what must have been a fairly sophisticated Folk crowd is truly phenomenal.  Or, maybe I was wrong about them too.

     At any rate the Punkers were merely unhappy with their teenage angst.  I can assure you that I and my age cohort were too.  If the right social environment had been provided perhaps we would have responded in the same way.

     Johnny Rotten could not have had many of the thoughts Mr. Marcus attributes to him, the kid was only nineteen, so one must believe that McLaren and Reid filled in the blanks with Situationese and Rotten rearranged the words.  While McLaren and Reid may have turned a few dollars from the act it is difficult to see what else they accomplished.

     Society was developing rapidly without their help.  The band Devo released their significant LP Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo that quite clearly reflected the direction in which society was headed.

     The amazing thing is that Mr. Marcus can discuss these insignificant nits at such length and with such seriousness.  His long discussion of Johnathon Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’ was entirely uncalled for.  Neither Richman nor his song had any influence in record circles.  The record wasn’t even available for sale.

     As Mr. Marcus neither owns up to being in the SI or gives any idea of the direction of the SI and ‘revolutionary’ groups I find that his book while full of interesting details is pointless.  I have read the thing five or six times for this review.  I have given the book more thought than it deserves.  If the intent is a sly joke I don’t find it very funny.  If the intent is to recruit members for the SI I find nothing agreable in the organization.  I remain unrecruited.  As a collection of non-sequiturs I find the book actually unreadable.

     If Mr. Marcus modeled himself on the Firesign Theatre his choice was admirable but his execution was execrable.  As a historian I’m afraid I would have to grade him below a C.  Perhaps the quality of the book is best expressed by the cover.

Why is he nothing when he should be everything?

End Of Review

 

 

 

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.

A Review

Lipstick Traces:

Greil Marcus

Part VI

by R.E. Prindle

 

     Sometime in the early 1920s that supreme fantasist Sigmund Freud belatedly discovered the supreme impediment to the Jewish fantasy of world dominion- the Reality Principle.  He should have discovered it in the Garden Of Paradise right at the beginning.

     Freud had spent most of his life constructing a shining vision of the realization of Jewish dreams but he encountered that wall so wide you can’t go around it and so high you can’t go over it and it wouldn’t matter how many masochists beat their head against it that wall won’t fall down.

     This was exactly the problem that the Free Spirits who are the centerpiece of this chapter faced.  The Free Spirits of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries sect who evolved into the Libertines of the 18th century essentially were precursors of the ancient Jewish attitude that nothing was to be denied them; all things were permitted to the elect.  As wild fantasists as the Jews they purportedly believed that if a woman had consecutive sex with ten different men if the last was a Free Spirit her virginity would be restored.  As you can see the Reality Principle had no meaning for either sect.

      Freud in the end chose to ignore the Reality Principle  although how he maintained hope for the redemption of Jewish hopes is difficult to follow.  It should have been clear to him that no matter how strenuously Jews pursued their dreams and fantasies they would always be doomed to failure.

     As with the Garden of Paradise expulsion destruction would always be their lot.  Ah, but there would always be that…remnant.  What sort of dream is that?

     Thus as Mr. Marcus points out even after the devastation of the death camps the Jews of Europe bounced back even before the ovens were cold with schemes to take over ‘our’ Europe.  That is the remarkable story that Mr. Marcus tells us in this chapter.

     I don’t know if Mr. Marcus is aware that every character in his historical novel is a psychotic.  All of them are in full retreat from the Reality Principle.  While I’m not sure he intends it all of them are facing terrific tensions in their daily living especially the ostensible protagonist of this story, Michel Mourre.  I’m going to treat Mr. Marcus’ book as a novel and accept his interpretation of the feelings and emotions of his characters as real.  Certainly he puts thoughts and notions in their minds that are beyond historians.  So while the situations and characters he portrays may be factual enough his story isn’t.

     The ostensible protagonist of the Invasion Of Notre Dame is a disturbed, psychotic Roman Catholic by the name of Michel Mourre.  He had been reared a Communist with all the attendant utopian projections and fantasies.  The test of the Communists and Mourre’s disillusionment came in 1940 when the Nazis arrived and the brave Communists including his father who had indoctrinated him crowded the train stations in an attempt to flee South.

     Having lost one faith Mourre attempted a replacement in Catholicism.  Catholicism failing him he was intellectually adrift wandering around the cafes of Paris spouting his discontent.  He was a perfect tool.  He quickly found those who knew how to use him.

     These were a group of young Jews seeking to epater l’eglise.  Scarcely skipping a beat on the way back from the extermination camps if they were ever in one they were continuing the Jewish war on Christianity and Europe that began long before Hitler and Stalin.

     The group worked up a plan using Mourre as a tool to disrupt Easter services at Notre Dame in the year of Our Lord, 1950.  How Mourre could allow himself to be duped in such an egregious manner is beyond me.  Well, maybe it’s not.  I was absolutely amazed- non-plussed, blown out of the water- to watch on television when Queen Elizabeth visited Jamaica to watch her being handed a sheaf of paper just before the cameras rolled and told that this was her speech.  She actually read it sight unseen.  If the Queen of England with a body of advisors to protect her from just such egregious errors can be duped, managed, hustled by bunch of ganja smoking hustlers then perhaps Mourre wasn’t at fault or perhaps White people are just fools.  I’m still working on that one but I’m afraid of the conclusion I might have to reach.

     At any rate Mourre wearing a Dominican outfit rushed up the aisles bearing a speech written for him by his Jewish confreres.  Mourre must have been drugged or hypnotized.  I don’t know what Queen Elizabeth’s excuse might be.

     According to Mr. Marcus the speech was written by a Serge Berna one of Mourre’s Jewish handlers.  The speech is written in the familiar J’ accuse manner made popular by the dupe and fool Emile Zola during the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s.  One wonders whether Zola drafted his own letter or whether his Jewish handlers wrote it for him as in the case of Mourre.  One is reminded of the ‘apology’ of Henry Ford that the American Jews wrote for him.

     Although written in the first person so that Mourre mouthing the words would appear to be voicing his own thoughts he is actually expressing the views of his Jewish handlers.  The language is violent, vicious and coarse expressing the deep Jewish hatred of Europe and America.  It seems incredible that this message went unheeded especially coming as it did on the heels of the war.  Despite both Hitler and Stalin the Jews had learned nothing.

     Two quotes are outstanding of this deep abiding hatred.  One should never hate nothing but hatred- Bob Dylan.

     Quote:

     I accuse the Catholic Church…of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West (and)…your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.

     Unquote.

     That is very strong and violent language.  The reference to our Europe clearly states that the conflict between Hitler, Stalin and the Jews was not one sided.  It is less a question of Hitler and Stalin exterminating Jews than whether they authorized the killing of Jews before the Jews authorized the killing of Europeans.  I have already mentioned the Jewish plan as expressed by their spokesperson, Noel Ignatiev, to exterminate  the entire billion strong White species.  The plan has been made public.  If the reader refuses to take the plan and threat seriously the more fool he.

     Once can cite numerous examples of Jewish murderousness as I have in my writing both on I, Dynamo and my writing on the site, ERBzine.  I’m not going to repeat them now.  You may consider me a prophet as Mr. Marcus considers himself.

     The whole plan to bring ‘multi-culturism’ to the West is merely a variation on the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.  Just as the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Paradise shows the contradiction of the Jewish mind in which Semitism and anti-Semitism exist side by side so the story of the Tower of Babel that is a product of Jewish aspirations merely elucidates the principle of divide and conquer.  The original notion said to be that in the building of the tower all spoke one language hence they could effectively coordinate their efforts.  ‘God’, or the Jewish intellect, realized that if they spoke many languages i.e. if ‘multi-culturalism’ were introduced the peoples would not only not be unable to coordinate their efforts but there would be perpetual fighting.

     Hence ‘multi-culturalism’ was introduced into Europe and America after the holocaust.  That the Euroamericans would eagerly buy such a bill of goods shows what superb salesmen the Jews are.

     Mr Marcus rather confusingly posits the origin of Lettrism to 1952 but then, if I read correctly, attributes the invasion of Notre Dame in 1950 to Isou and the Lettrists.  I’m sure if I make Lipstick Traces my life’s work all will come clear.

     At any rate Isou and disciple somehow kept Lettrism alive until 1957 when Guy Debord became involved and began the conversion  of Lettrism to Situationism.  Situationism somehow became involved with Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School.  As soon as things calmed down in Europe and the Jews were safe again Adorno and the School sans Herbert Marcuse returned to the scene.  Thus in this mysterious way Debord and the Situationist International, Adorno and the Frankfort School and Greil Marcus are brought into the same bundle and Mr. Marcus assumes his prophetic role.

     It takes a tangled mind to tell a tangled tale.

     The next stop on Mr. Marcus’ itinerary is entitled The Attack On Charlie Chaplin.  A review of that will follow in Part VII.

A Review

Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces

Part V

The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art

by R.E. Prindle

 

     At this stage of the review it will turn into a secret history of the secret history.  Since last writing I have read Mr. Marcus’ opus on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, The Dustbin Of History and Mystery Train plus a few articles available on line.  The qualities not as apparent from a volume or two become more apparent when enough material is read.  No writer can write several hundred pages without revealing himself and his intentions.

     Thus it becomes clear that Mr. Marcus was reared as both a Communist and a Jew.  Of course he uses the palliative, socialist.  He seems to have come from a privileged background while having received a Jewish conditioning.  He was born in the summer of 1945.  His father, Greil Gerstner, died during WWII so he must have been adopted by his stepfather, obtaining the name of Marcus.

     As part of the Critical Theory of The Frankfurt School he has been trained to view life as one tragedy after another.  Whereas in the Western tradition we are trained to see life as a series of adventures in which if we triumph, good; if not, then efforts must be taken to rectify the situation.  There is no mystery in situationism; it is just the way it is.  Thus the Westerner even more that the Jewish Guy Debord is trained as a situationist.

     In his criticism Mr. Marcus unremittingly condemns the United States as fatally flawed and ripe for destruction.  As this is his vision he is compelled to work toward its realization.  This might be considered strange because when his grandparents or great-grandparents landed on these shores c. 1900 they thought they had found the Promised Land.  So what happened in the years between then and now to turn the Promised Land into the shitheap Mr. Marcus sees?  Nothing.  The conditioned Jewish character merely asserted itself and Paradise turned into fecal matter.  One might look to Freud for a solution but I think the answer can be found even earlier in that ridiculous Holy Book of the Jews that Westerners call the Bible.

     Now, they are always looking for a paradisical ‘situation.’  According to their Holy Book 5700 and some odd years ago which is when they believe that the world was created they lived in the literal Paradise.  All they had to do was keep their nose clean and mind their manners.  So as to leave room for no mistakes their mentor God, or as Jews spell it G-d, told them all of Paradise was theirs to enjoy but they must never eat of the fruit of a forbidden tree.  Pretty clear wasn’t it? 

      So then the Jews defied their mentor by eating the forbidden fruit.  This act enraged their mentor so greatly he picked them up and bodily threw them from Paradise thus beginning a very long list of expulsions.  Also their God did not fool around.  He was unforgiving telling them to never come back at the same time setting up a guard who couldn’t be fooled to make sure they never did come back.  Thus the first act of the conditioning of the Jewish people took place.

     So, the scenario is that the Jews are welcomed, then the Jews repel  mentor or hosts, the host eventually becomes sufficiently angry with the Jews to expel them from their midst.  This scenario has been repeated for, by Jewish calculations, 5700+ years.

     C. 1900 Mr. Marcus’ ancestors arrived in what they jubilantly described as the Promised Land, in another word, Paradise.  They prospered mightily.  Mr. Marcus himself is the product of that prosperity but, like the Jews in the Garden of Paradise, Mr. Marcus is busily trashing the Land of Promise.  As he sees it the United States is fecal matter that has to be flushed down the toilet.  Further he wants you to view the United States the way he does and trash the only home you have ever known or will ever know.  Mr. Marcus is a dual citizen; when the country is trashed he and his successosrs will just move on as they have always done.

     That’s the short form.

     Now, Mr. Marcus and his fellow culturalists have declared war on the Aryan species as well as on the United States and, actually Europe.  They will settle for nothing less, according to their spokesperson Mr. Noel Ignatiev, than the abolition or genocide of the entire species, one billion strong.

     While this goal can be achieved by psychological means, indeed is well advanced, the fun comes from openly fuddling people.  To do that one needs a power base.  A power base was first achieved in Russia in 1917 but that one slipped through their hands.

     But then this summer Sarkozy got himself elected President of France thus placing the power of that State in Jewish hands.  One of the first things Sarkozy did was to begin to distribute French atomic weapons to France’s enemies.  Unless the Jews and Moslems are secretly allied this act seems suicidal for the Jews.  Who knows maybe it has reached that point in Jewish minds.  It should be clear to all that as there is no God  the story of Paradise is merely a reflection of the Jewish ego.  In the search for anti-Semitism it is quite clear that it is a product of the Jewish outlook.  In the conflict within the Jewish mind God became the first anti-Semite.  The whole Jewish scenario develops from this inner psychological conflict.

     A second thing that began happening after the Sarkozy election was that key Jews were beckoned to France for instructions in somewhat the same manner as Judaeo-Communist revolutionaries returned to Russia just after the October Revolution when as Mr. Marcus quotes Trotsky as saying, the Mensheviks were tossed into the dustbin of history.

     Mr. Marcus was called to France in July of this year under the auspices of The Cartier Foundation For The Contemporary Arts [ http//www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1649503,00.html  ]

ostensibly to give his views on Buddy Holly.  Whether Mr. Marcus actually met with Jewish conspirators in private to receive instructions I can’t say but it would have to be proved to me he didn’t, especially as this ‘cultural’ forum turned into a podium for America bashing in which Mr. Marcus gleefully participated.

     Speaking of Elvis Presley and Jackson Pollack the director Alain Perrin described them as “Two young people living in a society that they want to provoke to rebel against, and to mock sometimes.”  I think perhaps Mr. Perrin is projecting his and France des Juifs’ opinion on Elvis, I don’t know about Pollack.  I never had the notion that Presley was mocking America and I wouldn’t have liked him if he did.  The early Rock n’ Rollers were not mocking anything they were just trying to break in a different musical form against great opposition and make it big.  That opposition merely had to do with people who were shocked at the musical departure.

     I graduated HS in ’56 and was one of a minority who accepted the music in my class.  The new era began really with the class of ’57 when the form had penetrated to the youth consciousness.

     The skewed Mr. Perrin goes on to say “This was the America that had liberated the world of Nazism…’  Surely Mr. Perrin meant France although in his skewed imagination it may have seemed like the world. “…but this was also a racist America, a puritan America, (no capital.  It might be possible to say America was still Puritan but it was not puritan.) a hyper conservative, McCartyite America.”  Well, one out of five ain’t bad especially for France as America did what the French couldn’t do themselves.  I hope Mr. Perrin wasn’t offended that America wasted its own men, some of whom were my relatives, money and resources to save an ungrateful France from itself.  As I understand it there was no scarcity of French collaborators in that glorious lovely Liberal Communistic ‘pure’ France of Mr. Perrin’s imagination.  One would expect a Communist of Mr. Perrin’s stripe to be opposed to weird old ‘conservative’ America.  But, then I’m sure he doesn’t want to talk about that in an open forum.  No one expects gratitude from the French but a little realistic appraisal of the past wouldn’t hurt.  Liberals are Liberals, but, geez.

     Mr. Marcus slips and slides in with his two cents worth: 

     Quote:

     In the 1950s (ten long years note) the official story was that America was back to normal (the Depression?) women were out of the factories, (happened in the forties) everything was working like clockwork, (not so, but Mr. Marcus was a nine year old and it may have seemed so) but underneath this was an entirely different story (secret history again) of confusion, conflict, desperation, (how did I survive?) desire for grandeur.  Life could have been an epic story, life was dangerous ( aw,  come on, Mr. Marcus, don’t put me on with all these cliches) you could step outside the role that had been preordained for you.  (by whom?)

     Unquote.

     Now, let’s see.  How many cliches are in that novelistic approach to history.  Mr. Marcus says he was born in the summer of ’45.   McCarthy was shot down in ’54 so Mr. Marcus would have been eight or nine. His memories of the fifties then are pretty thin so he must be reading the Time-Life Decade series for the 50s.  Even then they wouldn’t have made such puerile remarks.  Well, I’ve read the series and they do, so…  My memory of the time was that there was no normal.  The discord was right on the surface and that was no fooling around.  Our town was virtually in the hands of the Chicago Outfit.  Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamster bomb wielders were serious, the Korean War, the Commie Threat (that Mr. Marcus and the French refer to as ‘McCarthyite America’) produced great tensions.  The Atom Bomb, my god Mr. Marcus don’t you ‘remember’ the Rosenbergs in 1953?

      If you’re going to try to write history give up your sophomoric Jewish presentation.  Hunker down.  Get objective.

     Mr. Marcus has his own secret history and mocking America is central to it.

     In concentrating on the nonentities clowning it up in Zurich Mr. Marcus fails to relate Da Da to the course of the evolutionary development of Western society thus exaggerating the importance of these clowns grossly.  Their effect on the development of society was minimal.  The Da Da art movement did have some effect.  Bear in mind that Da Da is merely a state of mind shared by a percentage of any age cadre from say 17 to 25 or so when they are struggling to find their way.  Finding one’s way isn’t easy and does have its stresses.  The situation of this particular group occurred as the Scientific Revolution, the real revolution, begun in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin Of Species was disrupting Western society to the maximum extent.  Science challenged religious concepts including those of the Jews.

     The ethos of art had run its course having achieved all that representational art could achieve.  The search for novelty or an avant garde, if you will, produced Cubism, Da Da and Surrealism.  Thus these clowns in Zurich who produced nothing but had a narcissitic crush on themselves were presumably able to make a noise.  In reading Mr. Marcus  one isn’t sure exactly what that noise was.  In any event the Cabaret Voltaire changed nothing that had not already been changed or was changing.

     Other than rescuing this crew from the dustbin of history and amusing us aside it is difficult to understand what significance Mr. Marcus finds in this clown act performing hackneyed stunts.

     He somehow segues this act into his following act, even more insignificant than the opening act.  The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art concerns the career of another complete and insane non-entity, one Isador Isou.

     In order to give some significance to Isou he manages to compare him with both Elvis Presley and Tony Curtis.  Not bad footwork for a fancy dancer.

     As is usual with Mr. Marcus all the people he considers important are Jewish and those he denigrates are goys.  Thus in the comparison between the earth shaker Presley and the non-entity Isou the latter comes out as the more signficant of the two.  How Tony Curtis comes in isn’t clear unless it is his famous pompadour that is said to have influenced Presley’s hair style.  At any rate the two Jews to one goi with Presley basing his hair style on one Jew while the other’s portrait often mistook him for a ‘pop star’ which it would appear raises him to a level slightly above Presley seems relevant in Mr. Marcus eyes.  I don’t know, hard to dicipher.

     As Mr. Marcus describes the megamaniacal Isou it would appear that he could have been at the famous dinner at the Maison de Sante described by Edgar Allan Poe in his famous The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether.  In fact much of Mr. Marcus writing reminds me of nothing so much as Poe’s lady who tried to get outside her clothes rather than in them.  I have great difficulty taking Mr. Marcus discussion of Isou as seriously as he seems to, although I find the story a fascinating bit of trivia.

     Leaving Isou’s manias aside it seems that his contribution to the deconstruction of Western Civilization was to insist that paragraphs, sentences and words were meaningless while the only thing of importance was the bare letter itself.  A building block.  You see what I mean by trying to get outside one’s clothes than inside.  Mr. Isou grandiloquently called his ‘organization’ The Lettrist International with he and his other member.  He wished to establish the Lettrist Dictatorship.

     Actually as a Jew Isou was merely following the letter mysticism of the Jewish alphabet in which not only does each letter have incredible symbolic meaning but each curve and segment of a letter is also endowed with incredible symbolism.  A whole several hundred page volume could easily be written concerning the letter aleph and each additional letter thus adding up to a magnificent Harvard five foot shelf of the Jewish alphabet.

     Somehow Charlie Starkweather and Caril figure in here but I’ll have to go back and study to get it which would scarcely be worth it.  I’ll see if I can find the time.

     Mr. Marcus also recasts a version of his musings on what appear so be his favorite song:  It’s Too Soon To Know of the mid-forties.  Favorite songs are often inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t ‘get it.’  I know the song and while I like it, I don’t get it like Mr. Marcus does.  On the other hand I don’t expect Mr. Marcus to get a couple of secret favorites of mine, one by a singer whose name I forget, Clint something or other, although I should still have the 45.  I got the disc in a close out mystery package of 10 for 99 cents.  The song goes something like ‘Bertha Lou, Bertha Lou, I wanna conjugate with you.’  I like it however I have never met another person who has ever heard the song.

     Another favorite of mine is by the Crows (Orioles-Crows- the bird, the bird, the bird’s the word) of Gee fame that reads something like this:

I’ve got a girl named Rosie Lee,

I wanna tell ya what she did for me.

She took me in when I had nowhere to go

And that is the reason I love her so.

—-

Face like a tadpole, shape like a bear,

But when it comes to lovin’ Rosie is there.

     The lyricist is certainly no Allen Ginsberg but as you can see both these songs and Ginsberg’s Howl are concerned with a certain word begining with the letter F.  And the usage is indeed international.  God bless Isidore Isou and the Lettrist International.

     Well, enough of this funnin’, let’s get on with the serious stuff.  So Isou and his Lettrist Interntional is going to segue into Guy Debord and his Situationist International but first we have to go to church.  It seems to me that I have a vague memory of Part VI so the invasion of Notre Dame must have been a true international scandal.

Part VI Follows.

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.

The Beginning Of A Review Of

Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces

She Belonged To Him:

Me And Bob Dylan

by R.E. Prindle

 

     I was bouncing around the internet the other day and I came across a guy who wondered why Dylan since his sales were so poor had become such an overriding influence.  And then I was working my way through Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces for the third time trying to figure out where he was coming from, where he wanted to go and how he proposed to get there when he posed the problem of where were the roots of Punk.

     And then, I’ve been thinking about Dylan lately wondering where he went after Blonde On Blonde and I think I may be able to answer all three questions.  I don’t listen to Dylan anymore, can’t, whatever charm he had for me went South and I mean South Of The Borders, I mean South of the Equator, I mean…South.

     Can’t listen to him but Bob’s overriding influence remains.  I still buy every book about him that comes out.  Bought one today.  I even bought and read and reread Chronicles Vol. I.  Disappointing.  Wish he hadn’t written it.  But if Volume II comes out you can bet I’ll buy that too.  So, Yes, Dylan was a major influence on my life but only three records- Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde.  God, what great titles.  The mystique was built in.

     I was at grad school at the University Of Oregon in 1967-’68.  My mental state was such that I began each day, right after getting up, with a side from one of those three albums.  Everyday for a year and a half.  You’d think I’d have those records memorized but, you know, I couldn’t quote one complete verse but I remember the tones of his voice and the moods of the songs quite well.

     I don’t know what my wife thought of those records.  Never said anything to me about them, never complained but she’s never put a Dylan record on the turntable and she still has never mentioned those records.

     So, the influence came from those moods, those seeming articulations of the 60s angst.  The lack of sales came from that godawful voice he used.

     I was out in California in ’64.  Had no idea what was going on in Greenwich Village in the Big Apple.  I’d never heard of Bob Dylan but one day I dropped in on my brother-in-law.  The guy had an impeccable ear for the next big thing at the time.  He took off the Righteous Brothers and said listen to this.  I don’t know what record it was of Dylan’s but one of the first three.  What godawful noise, the guy couldn’t sing and he couldn’t play.  Sounded like he’d just picked up a guitar and blew harmonica like a six year old.  I was shocked beyond description.  Well, listen to the words my brother-in-law said.  Well, they still weren’t much but the guy seemed offended at everything going on in the world and was sincere.  Boy, there’s a recommendation. 

     That’s where the Punk came in.  You can interchange early Dylan with Johnny Rotten and you’ve got Punk.  Dylan was an eye opener for younger kids with no talent and a lot of angst.  Check out the Chocolate Watch Band and their ‘I’m Not Like Anybody Else’  Post Dylan-pre Rotten.  I don’t understand why the Sex Pistols didn’t do this, uh, song.

     Actually I’m grateful to Bob; he saved me from myself.  In 1964 I was on my way to being a mental eighty year old man.  Following Dylan I’m younger than that now.  He pulled me back from the mental graveyard and restored my youth.  Of course Bob would have been in the musical graveyard except for a little good luck.

     I wasn’t there so what I’m going to say now comes from reading all those books.  Dylan started out as a complete snit.  I don’t care if he changed his name or not.  Tiny Tim had the right idea.  If one name isn’t working try another.  Well, Dylan worked perfectly for Bob so he only needed one name change.  Tiny Tim went through several.  Probably looking for a new one right now if he’s still alive.

     Bob’s early adventures in Minnesota may be interesting but they don’t concern me now.  Somewhere along the way he developed a fixation on Woody Guthrie.  God, I wouldn’t give you a quarter for any record Guthrie made unless I could turn a quick profit on it. 

     So, Bob shows up in New York City as a Guthrie clone.  Didn’t do him any good.  Dressed funny too.  Like a Hollywood vision of the Dust Bowl.  People said things to him about it.  Dylan realized he was peddling his bicycle as fast as could down a dead end street.  He decided to give it up.  Had to search around for a new persona.  Took him a while but he found one.  Plundered all his friends of their styles but, a boy’s got to learn somewhere.  What’s plagiarism to some is education to others.

     He was bright and he could mangle words and images.  If you really parse ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ it doesn’t hang together, makes no sense.  But the MOOD, god, the mood is terrific.  The lyrics don’t have to mean anything.  Of course with his raucus voice and guitar banging and harp blowing the song would have just lain there.  But as Bob would later sing- She belonged to him.  And she planted a kiss on him the likes of which very few ever experience.  Don’t want to get over confident though.  Like Jesse Winchester later sang- First She’s yours and then She’s his and that’s the way it is and always will be.  In ’63 and ’64 She was just toying with him.  Albert Grossman was on the other end of the line.   Enough to scare anybody.  He formed Peter, Paul And Mary, kind of a sweet singing Kingston Trio and they picked up on Blowin’ In The Wind and coming from their sweet harmonies Bob became established as a songwriter.  That’s where the mega influence came in.  Pretty soon all the good singers were doing his songs.  Songs that no one would listen to on his own albums.  The Byrds called it Folk Rock.  The generation loved it.

     So people began to reverence Bob Dylan as a songwriter.  Then in ’64 or so She really entered his life.  Both Sides Of Dylan was a record groping for the future and in the next Bringing It All Back Home he really began to do that.  We went into the future and the future sold.

     Bringin’ It All Back Home was supposed to be a radical departure for Dylan; he threw over Folk for Rock n’ Roll.  Smart move.  He may have sounded terrible but he wasn’t dumb besides with a sharp rock band behind him you couldn’t hear him as well.  Look what Frank Zappa did for Wild Man Fischer.  Folk had worn out its ethic; there was no future for it; all past tense.  Now, when Johnny Rotten sang no future, no future in 1975 Rock had also worn out its ethic.  It was on the verge of becoming stale or already over the line, so sounding as rotten as early Dylan the Sex Pistols pulled the plug on Rock.  Had to happen.  Everything gets old.

     Well, anyway Bringin’ It Back opened the eyes of all us doubters while Highway ’61 Revisited made us sit up and pay attention.   There was something happening there wasn’t there?  Not much in retrospect but it was a revelation at the time.  That was when She came to live with Bob for a year or so.  It was bliss, you ask him.  Words just spilled out of his mouth.  Highway ’61 was such an advance on rock n’ roll you just didn’t know what to think.  Everyone stood around breathlessly waiting for the next one.  That came out in the summer of ’66.  I had just graduated from Cal State At Hayward attending summer school at UC Berkeley.  Boy, was I a strange one in a state of transition from squarish to hippish.  Bob’s Blonde On Blonde lay there next to Procol Harum and Canned Heat.  Man, the rock revolution was really on.

     She and Bob were really making it.  Blonde On Blonde was such a peak no one could see how it could ever be topped.  It couldn’t.  That was when She and Bob split.  She went one way and Bob went another.  We heard about his accident.  Reports came he was alive but had broken his neck.  I stopped worrying about what Bob would do next; I knew it wouldn’t top Blonde.  I wasn’t sure about Her but I knew his mind had stopped.  I knew because I saw Her walking down the street.  I tried to catch up but She was too fleet for me.

     Bob recovered and came back with the insipid John Wesley Harding- Lay Lady Lay- for Chrissakes, give me a break.  For Bob a kiss was just a kiss but what a kiss.  The kind you never forget.

     I tried to follow his career but the stuff was just, well, ordinary.  Blood On The Tracks was so-so.  Tangled Up In Blue was a good song but that’s just it, it was a good song.  A simple narrative with a beginning, middle and end, certainly no Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands or Desolation Row.  I’m not big on depression, at least not anymore, but I sure loved those songs.  Stuck Inside Of Mobile Again?  She was cooing in his ear during that sweet moment of bliss.  Lay, lady, lay?

     So Johnny Rotten did MacDougal And Bleecker Revisited and went over like the proverbial lead.  Nobody liked Rotten’s crap; nobody listened to it.  Don’t know what Greil Marcus is talking about; who does he think he’s kidding?

      Anyway, kid, you wanted to know why Dylan is so important and sold so few records.  This is the crux of the matter.  Might be a little more to it.  I’m still working on Greil Marcus and what he is trying to say in Lipstick Traces.  I’ll get back to you on it.  This is only a beginning.