Exhuming Bob VI Ramblin’ Jack Elliott And Bob Dylan
February 21, 2008
Exhuming Bob VI
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott And Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
I had the privilege the other night of viewing The Ballad Of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott which was filmed by Jack’s daughter. A little on the lengthy, repetitive side, could have used a judicious edit or two, but a very
Ramblin
creditable and enjoyable effort. She is to be commended.
The movie helped to put into perspective Bob in his relation to both the New York folk scene and Elliott himself. Both Jewish their careers have had great similarities from childhood to the present. Currently they are running parallel with the money going into Bob’s pocket.
Both have aspired to be cowboy or Western singers and both have succeeded. Elliott in his Ramblin’ Jack role and Bob in his Texas Bob Dylan persona. Both have tried to efface their Jewish heritage actually modeling their faces along cowboy lines. In the movie the transition from the Jewish face of Jack’s youth to his current cowboy face is readily apparent.
Elliot was born Adnopoz and Dylan was born Zimmerman.
There appears to be some real hard feelings towards Bob by Ramblin’ Jack. The cause is not far to seek.
Elliott was himself a disciple of Woody Guthrie as is Dylan. The difference is that Elliott had a ten year start on Dylan. Thus while Dylan was still in high school Ramblin’ Jack was over there in London town recording those records on Topic that would show up in Minneapolis in 1960. At that time the succession of Guthrie-Elliott-Dylan began, at least in Bob’s mind. If anybody else didn’t know what difference did that make? Already making a model of Guthrie Bob added Elliott and stole copies of the Topic records from a fellow named John Pankake and Bob was off to the races or at least New York City. By one of those strange coincidences, genuine in this case, Bob arrived in the Big Apple from the West at the same time that Elliott’s ship from London town docked New York City from the East. East met West so to speak. Now Bob not only had Elliott’s records to practice from but the living model himself. Ramblin’ Jack was living the exact life that Bob wanted to lead so Bob moved right in on him to learn everything he could.
When Jack left America’s sunny shores he was a nobody. He arrived in England just as the great Lonnie Donegan was introducing the Skiffle craze. Jack snapped right in there like the interchangeable part of an automobile. They liked him. They liked everything about him. Made him so comfortable he invited his friend Darrel Adams to come over and sing with him. Darrel did. They made one of those Topic records together that Bob stole from Pankake.
Caricature Of Bob
Well, to make a long story shorter those recordings found their way from London town to New York City making Jack a celebrity in the burgeoning New York folk scene. Jack was a hero. Bob got close to him. In one scene Bob is on stage telling Darrel Adams in the audience that he has a record of Darrel and Jack’s. Thus no further proof is needed that Bob stole Pankake’s records and wouldn’t give them back.
Over the course of a few months Bob studied Jack’s act and by the end of those months he was a Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in a Bob Dillon disguise. I never realized how completely Bob became Jack until I saw the movie.
At the time Jack didn’t think much of Bob’s stealing his act but over time he seems to have developed hard feelings towards Bob. He was real resentful in the movie. Did an interesting but bitter version of Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright. Were you listening Bob?
The fact of the matter is both Bob and Jack knew where they were going and they were going to different places by the same route. Bob wanted to be a star and Jack wanted to ramble. So while this single persona in two forms was a star ramblin’ round the world the other side was an irresponsible troubador ramblin; his serendipitous way round the highways and byways of Americky.
They both got what they wanted so there’s no reason for Jack to be bitter about the boy he called his ‘son.’ The only one with the right to be bitter is John Pankake who lost those great Topic records. But nowadays who’s ever heard of John Pankake?
Book II, Pt. 4 Something Of Value
February 13, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II
Part 4
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB And The World 1875-1950
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs entered a world he never made on September 1, 1875. He would have some hand in editing the making of the next century or so. He seemed a less than likely candidate for such a chore. He was dealt a tough hand to play by life. It took him some thirty-five years to learn how to play his hand but once he learned there was no stopping him. He wasn’t perfect, probably had what we call an abrasive personality, and he didn’t always do the right thing but, then, who does? He worked hard and he walked his dog with an ample leash. But in this essay we’re not particularly concerned with ERB the personality but ERB the force.
ERB’s world was made for him. It was his job to navigate his way through it. I have already prepared a view of the world and its history in terms of religion and evolution extrapolated from the writing of Burroughs. It may be of use to give a bit of the local history that had such a profound effect on his development.
ERB was born in Chicago. The Chicago that he was born into was one of the seven wonders of the modern world. There had been nothing like it seen before, not New York City, not Paris, not London, not even ancient Athens or Rome. The Iron Chancellor of Germany, Bismark, lamented the fact that he would never get to see ‘that Chicago.’ It is hard to imagine the role Chicago played today. Chicago was unique, both wonderful and terrible. It may be difficult to visualize but for the Chicago of Burroughs’ youth, to the East was civilization and directly to West was Indian Territory. The Indian Fighters came direct from the battlefield to the metropolis of Chicago. I mean, Buffalo Bill had Sitting Bull as one of his performers. Blows my mind.
As if to prove its uniqueness Chicago staged the 1893 Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair, the fabled White City. The White City may be compared to OZ while workaday Chicago was known as the Black City. You gotta work at visualizing this stuff. The White City was as audacious as Chicago itself. It only took fifty years to raise this strange, bizarre and wonderful city out of the muck alongside Lake Michigan and it only took a year to build what was really a spectacular purpose built city of some magnitude. Even more mindboggling it s purpose existed for only six months then it was discarded like so much waste paper. Incendiaries burned this amazing effort to the ground the next year. Nothing was left of this prodigious effort. It is truly a crazy world.
Bill Hillman of ERBzine made a valiant effort to present the wonder of this spectacle especially as it affected the young Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a valiant attempt and a worthy one opening my eyes to this wonder in ways they had never been opened before, however as good as Hillman’s effort was it couldn’t come close to the grandeur of the spectacle.
To have visited this incredible fair for few days, a week, or even two was to have seen nothing. Edgar Rice Burroughs, then 17, had the great good fotune to have spent the whole summer at the fair. It was the experience of his life. The world was on display. Authentic Dahomean villages with real tribesmen brought from the jungles for the purpose, authentic Irish villages- of course, there were enough authentic Irish around Chicago to staff those so they didn’t have to be brought over- Arab camps, evolution, religions of the world, scientific wonders, everything imaginable and in real authentic detail with real everything and it was cutting edge. This was not any Disneyland fake. It was like traveling around the world. A diorama of realities. It blasted through ERB’s existence like a tornado across the Kansas plains. That was how the author of the Oz series, L. Frank Baum, who was in attendance saw it. It was a regular tornado that transported him to another world- we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
As Editor Hillman pointed out in his series of articles, the White City was a phenomenon of firsts. Bill didn’t get them all though. One he missed was that Frederick Jackson Turner, always be suspicious of three name writers, first presented his thesis ‘The Influence Of The Frontier In American History’ at the fair. The disappearance of the frontier was as important an event in world history as any. With the arrival of HSII and III on the Pacific shores all sub-species were in direct contact with each other around the world. The stage for ev0lutionary Armageddon was constructed.
In its own way 1893 was as important as 9/11/01. A world change began to take place. The previous four hundred years of HSII & III domination began to wane. As usual the avant guard of writers and artists had a glimmer of understanding; the rest kept walking right along as though they hadn’t passed through the glimmer into this new parallel world.
The writers perceived things differently. Among the writers were H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe and of course Edgar Rice Burroughs. As it is with artists they began writing in terms of the new reality, perhaps without being conscious that they had abandoned the old. By the mid-teens and early twenties non-fiction accounts had begun to appear. Most famous were those of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s The Rising Tide Of Color pinpointed the issue but after some initial success he was denounced as a bigot and throughly discredited. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was talking about but his message was offensive to certain pressure groups.
In its own way so were the writings of the great mythographers. With the exception of Wells they were all political conservatives. Well’s success came as a mythographer before he declared himself a Red/Liberal in 1920. From that point, which occurred just as the Great War ended, his novels fell flat although his Outline Of History was a great success.
Every effort has been made to discredit the mythographers, but their creations have maintained a stunning popularity despite Red/Liberal efforts to destroy them. Lately the Reds have turned to detournement. In Well’s case, as a member of the prevailing orthodoxy he has, of course, been idolized and eulogized, but they can’t get anybody to buy anything but his science fiction.
Perhaps because he tackled the different themes of religion and evolution in an independent manner great effort has been made to discredit Burroughs. Frontal attacks have failed to this point although perhaps ridicule and detournement will be more effective. The Disney Corporation may be successful in trivializing the Big Bwana unless we counter with a more effective campaign.
Many thinkers were presenting scientific bases for the analysis of social and historical trends. Two of the most prescient were Darwin and Freud of whom I have gone to some effort in integrate into my analysis. These men presented scientific methods, where were real methods, objective bases not based on the inner world of wishful thinking. I can understand how Red/Liberals wish to cast their web of wishful thinking over the mind of mankind but I don’t understand the unwillingness of people to see through this fantastic projection. The reality principle has to take effect sometime.
Yet these mythographic prophets of reality have been scorned or willfully miscontrued. If one looks at Burroughs’ work carefully he is functioning as a prophet based on scientific principles that were plausible in his day. Nothing he or any of the mythographers said has been disproved by further scientific advances.
Before going into this further let us take a close look at Burroughs’ magnum opus Tarzan Of The Apes. What he had read in evolution to this time except for Darwin isn’t certain. In 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man he implies he has read Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel and August Weismann. Lamarck was of the eighteenth century who believed in inherited characteristics. Darwin published his Origin Of Species in 1859, Mendel wrote his genetic study in 1866 which was rejected by Darwin who eclipsed Mendel until, as the result of Weismann’s studies, he was rediscovered in 1900. Weismann wrote during the eighties and nineties advancing the theory of germ and soma cells. It is possible that Burroughs could have been familiar with all four by the time he wrote Tarzan Of The Apes. Lamarck and Darwin are readily evident. Burroughs favored the notion of Lamarckian inherited characteristics, which is justly out of favor today. Thus as an allegory of the ascent of man Tarzan relies heavily on Tarzan’s heritage to explain his sense of his separation from the apes among which he grew up as a feral child.
In Burroughs’ story Tarzan comes from the finest hereditary stock of noble Englishmen. Thus according to Burroughs he inherits a number of moral and mental faculties rather than acquiring them. There is no mistake that Burroughs considered the English to be the crown of creation. As a one year infant Tarzan’s parents die while he is adopted by Kala the ape. Burroughs’ apes are not known to any science perhaps representing the ‘missing link’ which used to be a hot topic.
The idea of an unknown species of ape falling somewhere between known apes and human beings is not as unreasonable as it may sound. It was only in 1902 that the existence of the Mountain Ape was confirmed. The Mountain Apes of the Mountains of the Moon had been rumored for some time before the first specimen was killed and the skin brought back. These are amazing anthropoids. So, within the context of the times the notion of such apes was not all that far fetched.
Many wonders were thought to be hidden in Africa. Even as late as 1920 The New York Herald ran an article seriously considering the notion that dinosaurs still existed in the Congo. While at this day we may read Burroughs with a very large grain of salt much of what he writes about was discussable as possible fact at the time.
As Burroughs’ apes are evolutionarily above the monkeys and gorillas they may be seen as the last stage of evolution before the First Born appeared. Burroughs makes a big point that Tarzan passes through the full evolutionary program on his way to realizing his noble English heritage as a fully evolved human being.
This theme is also reviewed in his The Land That Time Forgot.
One of the most difficult feats of Tarzan to accept is the manner in which he taught himself to read and write English without knowing a single phonetic value. However his ability to do so can be explained in a reasonable manner.
While reading through John Chadwick’s work The Decipherment of Linear B, Linear B is, of course, the written language of the ancient Myceneans and Minoans, which was a terrific problem until Michael Ventris succeeded in breaking the code, I came across this passage:
Cryptology has now contributed a new weapon to the sudent of unknown scripts. It is now generally known that any code can in theory be broken, provided sufficient examples of coded texts are available. The only method by which to achieve complete security is to ensure continuous change in the coding system or to make the code so complicated that the amount of material necessary to break it can never be obtained. The detailed procedures are irrelevant, but the basic principle is the analysis and indexing of coded texts, so that the underlying patterns and regularities can be discovered. If a number of instances can be collected , it may appear that a certain group of signs in the coded text has a particular function, it may, for example, serve as a conjunction. A knowledge of the circumstances in which a message was sent may lead to other identifications, and from these tenuous gains further progress becomes possible, until the meaning of most of the coded words is known. The application to unknown languages is obvious; such methods enable the decipherer to determine the meaning of sign-groups without knowing how to pronounce the signs. Indeed it is possible to imagine (my italics) a case where texts in an unknown language might be understood without finding the phonetic value of a single sign.
The task before Tarzan was formidable but he had all the time in the world without any distractions. I do not mean to say that it would be possible for a feral boy to develop this amazing intellectual ability since the feral children found are quite incapable of learning. But, in Burroughs’ mind Lamarckian notions of inherited characteristics was foremost so that he believed as did most of his contemporaries and a signficant percentage of the population today that these characteristics were operative.
As one reads one comes across some remarkable things. Having just read Alexandre Dumas’ Memoirs Of A Physician I came across a tale somewhat reminiscent of Tarzan’s story. In fact the similarities of some of the details between Dumas’ book and Burroughs’ are quite amazing although I do not suggest that Burroughs ever read this Dumas novel.
In this scene a young man named Gilbert has met the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in the woods where Rousseau is collecting botanic specimens. Gilbert does not know who he is talking to.
‘You can read and write.’ (Rousseau asked.)
‘My mother had time before she died to teach me to read. My poor mother, seeing that I was not strong, always said, ‘He will never make a good workman; he must be a priest or a learned man.’ When I showed any distaste for my lessons, she would say, ‘Learn to read, gilbert, and you will not have to cut wood, drive a team, or break stones.’ So I commenced to learn but unfortunately I could scarcely read when she died.’
‘And who taught you to write?’
‘I taught myself.’
‘You taught yourself?’
‘Yes, with a stick which I pointed, and with some sand which I made fine by putting it through a sieve. For two years I wrote the letters which are used in printing, copying them from a book. I did not know that there were any others than these, and I could soon imitate them very well. But one day, about three years ago, when Mademoiselle Andree had gone to a convent, the steward handed me a letter from her for her father, and then I saw that there existed other characters. M. De Taverny having broken the seal, threw the cover away; I picked it up very carefully, and when the postman came again, I made him read me what was on it. It was, ‘To the Baron de Taverney-Maison-Rouge, at his chateau near Pierrefitte.’ Under each of these letters I put its corresponding printed letter, and found that I had nearly all the alphabet. Then I imitated the writing; and in a week had copied the address ten thousand times perhaps, and had taught myself to write.
This is surely no less fantastic than Burroughs’ story but because Dumas is considered more credible nothing that I know of has ever been said about it.
In Tarzan’s case Burroughs makes a point of saying that he had a number of children’s picture books so that he could, for instance match the printed spelling of B-O-Y with a picture of a boy. In this way also he learned that he was not a freaky hairless ape but an entirely different species. I cannot, of course, defend the plausibility of either Burroughs’ or Dumas’ story but there is a possibility.
In some ways the notion of inherited characteristics seems as though it could be true. In the course of evolution the thrust has always been towards more intelligence. A species once evolved has its range of capabilities and once those are fully developed no further advance is possible in that sub-species. It is up to the next stage of evolved sub-species or species even to advance to the limits of its capabilities and so on. Thus it was not possible for Tarzan’s fellow ape, Terkoz, under any circumstances to succeed in Tarzan’s quest. The necessary intelligence genes were missing. Even though Tarzan was raised by apes less evolved than himself he himself did have the necessary inherited genetic makeup to undertake the task with some chance of success. So, in that sense Lamarck’s inherited characteristics did apply.
It may be argued that Tarzan couldn’t have recognized the signs as language. In theory he could have. Whether in fact he would have or whether it would have taken him much longer to break the code than eight years are of course valid realistic objections. But Burroughs was writing the story so that against all objections there are methods by which it was theoretically possible for Tarzan to do so.
This is no small point for the story as the story is, as I see it, an allegory of the ascent of man toward godhood. Burroughs will repeatedly call Tarzan a jungle god.
He is introduced to the next evolutionary stage when his ape mother is killed by one of the First born. Drawn into contact with the FB Tarzan passes through this stage in evolution. I don’t think there can be any doubt that Burroughs considered the First Born an antecedent level of evoltuion to HSII and III. While some might inanely cry bigotry, mocern science, which was unavailable to Burroughs, has at least proven the plausibility of the position.
Tarzan then comes into contact with a cross section of HSIIs and IIIs. To my mind the differences are presented as innate and not a matter of environment or nurture. Just as Tarzan must realize his noble English heritage because it is his innate nature so these ruffians are ruffians because of their innate nature. Burroughs seems to be saying that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
While withing a particular sub-species I am an environmentalist believing that people beocme what they are for reasons beyond their contro, the majority of mankind, at least those place in favorable circumstances, believe that they are innately better than the rest. So if Burrughs was srong on this point, as I believe he was, he was in step with the prevailing prejudice.
Thus under the tutelage of Paul D’Arnot, his French mentor, Tarzan realizes his full potential as a human being uniting the two ‘highest’ branches of what was then known as the White race. Tarzan can read and write English but not speak it while he can speak French but neither read nor write it. There’s something going in Burroughs’ mind but I haven’t decided what. But he tosses off these details in such an offhand manner that all seems so natural there is no reason to note it.
It must also be remembered that Burroughs wrote at the transition point where for the first time in US history there were more people living in cities than in the country. The new city dwellers had just reason to long for the rural ‘paradise’ they had just left. Thus Tarzan having seen all there is to see of civilization snubs his nose at it to return to his beloved jungles and its animals and primitive but honest First Born.
In a sense then the jungle and the First Born can be interpreted as the farm and the crude but honest farmer. An idealization to be sure.
As far as I can see Burroughs was the first novelist, or at least successful one, to treat of evolution by which I don’t mean to say Lost World adventures. Further he treats with it as established incontrovertible fact at a time when evolution was accpted by few while being rejected by the vast majority. And I repeat, Burroughs was learned and thoughtful about the subject. That he was also fanciful is beside the point.
At the same time Burroughs was offering some serious reflection on evolution he was also presenting some serious thinking on the evolution of religion which is certainly on a par with Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
Burroughs says and this is seemingly in his hown historical voice that the Dum Dum as practiced by the apes was the source of all social and civil rituals. As I read Tarzan Of The Apes it seems that Burroughs thinks that Dum-Dums or something just like them really took place. Of course such round or circle dances are in fact of great antiquity. Perhaps something just like a Dum Dum did perform a role in the evolution of institutions.
Following that explanation for the foundation of religious and civil institutions Burroughs goes into a very careful explanation of how Tarzan became the god, Manungo-Keewati of Chief Mbonga’s tribe. This explanation is very carefully developed. Burroughs is also very serious and I think believes he has a handle on the truth about the evolution of god.
As part one of a trilogy on religion Tarzan Of The Apes is followed by The Gods Of Mars and then the Return Of Tarzan. Gods Of Mars is a condemnation of formal religion with far reaching ramifications. In Gods Burroughs plays the role of a savior through his character, J.C.- John Carter. Carter destroys the ancient and flase religion which clearly resembles the Catholic Church, thus being the liberator of Barsoomkind.
In The Return Of Tarzan he gives a fanciful but reasonable vision of ancient sun worship which would fall somewhere between Munumgo-Keewati and the Holy Therns of Barsoom.
Thus under the guise of ‘pure’ entertainment the attentive reader can detect a serious attempt to explain evoltuion both special and religious while undermining established beliefs in the manner of a prophet. It is not necessary to accept it only recognize it.
I’m sure Burroughs in the light of all the unsetlling discoveries beleives he is a light bringer doing a service for mankind. I accept him at his own valuation.
Running through all Burroughs work is an unstated vision of psychology. One may well ask where this vision came from as Burroughs was not fortunate enough to attend Yale which is two eldest prothers did and which he keenly regretted not having done. I’m sure the man was reasonably well read in the subject while his views appear to follow rather closely those of his brothers’ partner in the Idaho ranch, Lew Sweetser.
A very fine article on Sweetser by Philip R. Burger appears in issue #19 of the Burroughs Bulletin, since republished on ERBzine. Now, Sweetser graduated from Yale in 1889 a little before Freud began his psychological publication and twenty years or more before his books were translated into English. I doubt that Sweetser ever read Freud, but I can’t say.
He was fully conversant with a concept of the unconscious and exceptionally well informed on the rule of suggestion and hypnosis. Whether over the intervening eyars from 1889 to 1920 when he took to the stage as a lecturer he read extensively or whether re reworded his ideas acquired by 1889 I can’t say. But he had a good grip on the concepts of the subconscious and suggestion including auto-suggestion.
Burroughs came into contact with him as a 16 year old when he worked on the Idaho ranch in 1891. Again in 1898-99 and once again in 1903. Burroughs own views on psychology follows those of Sweetser very closely with add ons from further study.
If not as systematic Burrughs presents a consistent approach which is as viable as Freud’s but different in the treatment of the subconscious. Both Sweetser and Burroughs always speak of the subconscious, never the unconscious, while Freud chose to believe in a metaphysical unconscious.
What I hope I have shown here is that Burroughs had a fairly mature understanding of life and society when he began to write and which he continued to develop throughout his life.
While hos own life was lived somewhat erratically his intellectual mooring was much more sound. It is the latter which is telling for us.
The importance of his intellect being developed by the time he began writing is that the period of the teens of the twentieth century is when subsequent history took shape. Just as Burroughs collected the strands of neo-mythographers to give them their new direction so the teens did also for the evolution of the species and religion in both the United States and the world.
While Burroughs and the other mythogrpahers realized very early that the tide of history had changed it was only by 1916 to 1922 that the concept found expression in an academic manner.
In 1916 Madison Grant published his The Passing Of The Great Race and in 1922 Lothrop Stoddard published his The Rising Tide Of Color Agains White World Supremacy. and here comes the division in society that can never be reconnected. Both Grant and Stoddard are quite serious historians; both are men of good will, both have been seriously defamed by others who object to the resulsts of their investigations.
These objectors seem to think that their opinion is of divine origin and that any other opinion is not only wrong but evil. They take a stand not much different fromt he Inquisition and its witch hunting which I have already discussed. Thus these people want to run dissenters to ground and if not actually kill them at least hurt them so bad or brand them as pariahs that they will shut up.
A recent example is Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation. The book is an attempt to squash writers such as Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs. The first 225 pages of his mammoth book are dedicated to demonstrating that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a vile ‘racist’ who was influenced by the even more vile ‘racists’ Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.
While you can throw away the last five hundred pages of Gunslinger Nation which is inadequately researched and poorly presented, the first 225 pages are fairly interesting if skewed. A lot of good information of possible influences on Burroughs. Slotkin’s fine biographical sketch of Buffalo Bill is very informative.
Slotkin lists a number of Burroughs’ books which he has apparently didainfully skimmed but without any understanding. If he had read more carefully he ought to have realized that Burroughs’ ideas were fully developed before Grant and Stoddard were issued. While many of the ideas of the latter writers may have been complementary to Burroughs’ ideas they couldn’t have been formative.
Further with the customary tunnel vision of the Red/Liberal Slotkin ignores what was happening against which these men were reacting. Of course he and his contemporaries give this data such a skew as to lack all credibility.
Like all Liberals Slotkin believes that immigration is a prescriptive right for anyone who wants ‘to share what we’ve made here.’ While not wanting to get involved in immigration quarrels, which are fruitless, I do believe that as I have a right to say who can and cannot enter my home, any country has a aright to say who can and cannot immigrate to their country. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a good reason or not nor does it matter if rejection is based on the grossest prejudice. No one has a right to invite himself to your table. You see why there is no chance of agreement. So much for immigration.
Now in Darwinian terms the various sub-species were not only in contact with each other, they were peacefully intermingling in the West and in the West only. It is important to remember that HSII and III were about to be driven out of Africa and Asia. The invasive flow was now beginning in the opposite direction only. While the HSIIs and IIIs had been able to displace the American aborigenes without trouble this was no longer possible anywhere in the world. The tide against the HSIIs & IIIs had turned. While the IIs & IIIs would slowly be expelled from Asia and Africa, Africans and Asians while already in Europe and America would begin to increase their numbers dramatically.
Today a city of Toronto is 50% what Torontians call ‘visible minorities.’
Thus while IIs & IIIs began a retreat the other sub-species began an advance into II and III territories while becoming highly organized. The Eastern European Semites began to arrive in the United States in numbers beginning in the 1870s. Always politically aggressive, the German Semites formed the B’nai B’rith in 1843. the American Jewish Committee in 1906 and the horribly bigoted Anti-Defamation League in 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson entered the White House.
The Great War beginning in 1914 closed off European immigration to the United States but increased the internal migration of the First Born. It’s an ill wind that blows no one good. The First Born began to organize on an international basis. African, Brazilian, Caribbean and American First Born began to act as a unit. This organization was led by West Indians who emigrated to the United States to agitate. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, personated this most important stage of evolution which has led to the present situation. At roughly the same time, under the guidance of Semitic Jews, the NAACP- Natinal Association For The Advancement Of Colored People- was formed.
In reaction to these very aggressive developments the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan was called into existence. On top of all these unpleasant developments the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia in 1917. Thus a whole new paradigm was formed within just a few years in the teens. Against this Burroughs’ mindset had been formed by the years from 1890-1910. the new developments sure appeared to him as a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat.
The world which emerged from the Great War was much different from that which preceded it. the balance of world emigration changed, as it were, overnight. A good harbinger of things to come was The Rising Tide Of Color Against The White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s title was very ill chosen although it represented the emerging reality. He might better have chosen a more neutral title such as ‘Changing Patterns in World Migration’ or some such. The book is unfairly characterized as ‘racist’ by its detractors, which it is not.
Stoddard pointed out the obvious: that from having been the dominant sub-species the tide had now turned and rather than being a dominant military presence the HSIIs and IIIs had become a minority in a world of sub-species seeking like Darwin’s ratos or cockroaches to drive the others before it. From having been invaders, Europe and America would now be invaded.
This is the way of the world: ;either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom. A world of equality is a world away.
Stoddard was the proverbial voice calling in the wilderness. The only people taking him seriously were the peoples he was warning about. Confident in teir seeming superiority the HSIIs and IIIs went about their business as if nothing had changed.
Not exactly as if nothing had changed because the Bolsheviks continued special and religious battles. Just as Catholicism was infused with Semitic ideals, through Karl Marx, Bolshevism was a Semito-Red/Liberal religion.
Of the five sub-species by far the smallest was the Semitic branch; they were and are therefore the most threatened. In order to hope to exercise world dominion, and don’t think world dominion isn’t the question, the Judaic and Moslem religions were created. The Jews had the daring to go it alone while the Moslems sought and seek to convert the world to Moslemism within which the Semites are the preeminent holy people. A nation of priests as the Bible says.
Thus while it might be possible for the largest sub-species as represented by the Chinese to overrun the world much more effectively than the HSiis and IIIs did, it would be equally possible for the Moslems to convert the Chinese with the Semites taking a position analagous to ERB’s Holy Therns in Barsoom.
Thus while stymied for the time being in the West Moslems were increasing by leaps and bounds in the East. They may have looked stagnant from the West but they were dynamic indeed when viewed from the East.
Having been disturbed in their homeland the Chinese and Japanese Mongolids began sending colonies out wherever they could be received and by this time all space on the earth was fully occupied. This wasn’t therefore the loud noisy colonization of the HSIIs & IIIs but a more peaceful infiltration. A lot of smuggling of small groups into the United States and Canada went on, as it still does. Large colonies were sent to South America. Peru passed a Chinese Exclusion Act for much the same reason the United States did. Didn’t really have anything to do with color, it was that the countries were being taken over by foreign elements. Japan had colonies in Brazil, Colombia and other South American States.These colonies were designed to retain their ethnic origins so that they wouldn’t assimilate. I’ve met Japanese from Japan via Colombia who were smuggled across the border from Tijuana.
Thus on the world scene Darwinian clash of sub-species continued outside Asia while the Mongolids were successfully expelling the HSII and III invaders from Asian homelands. This is essentially what the much despised Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard graduate, too, was pointing out.
In the United States the immigrating sub-species had to disarm the dominant Anglo-Saxon hierarchy. As pointed out, led by the West Indian immigrant First Born that sub-species was organizing its own conquest of America and Europe. Their own population was increasing prodigiously around the world. Even in the face of tremendous immigration into the United States the percentage of First Born has never declined but has increased. Today in the fact of even greater immigration FB percentages have increased to fifteen percent vis-a-vis HS II and III.
Under the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement between the US under TR and Japan the Japanese ‘voluntarily agreed’ to restrict the flow of immigrants. The US, a sovereign nation, accepted this ‘compromise.’ The early Japanese immigrants had been nearly one hundred percent male. These womanless men now demanded women so the other half of the invasion in the form of picture brides arrived swelling the Japanese population past double. The so-called Issei are the first generation born in America. As their parents paired up at the same time the whole next generation came of age about the time of 12/7/42. An interesting immigration fact. Thus by taking advantage of HSII and III goodwill the immigration agreement was evaded.
So the flow of populations contesting the same territories with the same Darwinian economic needs came into further conflict.
The Jewish race of the Semites had been poised to transfer their entire East European population tothe United States just as the Great War broke out. Now with the war over the Semites renewed their plans. However there had been problems with immigrants from the Central Powers including their Irish allies during the war which sent shivers down the spines of the Anglo-Saxons. TR himself voiced the fear that the United States had become merely ‘an international boarding house.’ So people do catch on after it’s too late.
After a hundred years of unrestricted immigration, a golden period worldwide actually well worth study, the opponents of immigration carried the day severely restricting immigration if not closing the door completely.
This action enraged the Judaic race of Semites who considered it their go-given right to go where they wanted when then wanted and whether a country wished to receive them or not. But there is more than way to skin a cat. The Anti-Defamation League whose ostensible purpose was to prevent defamation wherever it might occur began a defamation campaign against anyone with an independent point of view that conflicted with their own in any way.
The ADL was lined up with the Communist?Red/Liberal Coalition. The combinatin effectively split and weadened the HSIIs and IIIs putting the subspecies at war with themselves, something like Cadmus throwing a stone among the indigenous peoples setting them against each other until they killed each other off making the Semitic conquest of Boeotia easy. Divide and conquer.
Led by the ADL whith its ever potent charge of anti-Semitism the Liberal coalition opened war on any dissidents. The idea was to discredit anyone whether they were concerned or merely passive who didn’t follow their program. Prime targets were Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. ERB made himself conspicuous when in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution he sent around a draft of the Moon Maid which in the original version was apparently little more than an expose codemning the Bolsheviks.
Stoddard and Grant who were competent scholars and men of good will were nevertheless characterized as hopeless bigots and anti-Semites thereby being easily disposed of. By the end of the decade they were neutralized and by the end of the thirties disposed of. Quite naturally the Liberal coalition denied any involvement.
As the thirties dawned there were major activities affot. In Asia, Japan which deeply resented HSII & III penetration, began a campaign to drive them out. Talk about the tail wagging ghe dog, their plan was to conquer Asia from Japan to Australia in the South, and India in the East. It staggers the imagination. Yet it was no less than England had done with the same population. But, different measures for different times.
When TR said ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ the audacity of the Japanese plan which required a very big stick was beyond their powers of execution. Nevertheless they first invaded Manchuria and then China itself.
In Europe, in reaction to defeat and the Judeo-Communist threat the Nazis under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 which did not bode well for the world. In the United States also a disaster as big as Hitler and Nazis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President. That did not bode well for the United States. The world was then primed for the big explosion.
Perhaps because of the concept of Manifest Destiny under which the Red/Liberal tide was supposed to roll over the North American continent, jump the Pacific then race across China and Asia to return again to America in an unbroken wave of triumph the Red/Liberals looked upon the Chinese as a swell people who would offer no resistance to their goals, indeed, embrace and forward them. Thus in some sort of Disney fantasy China was seen as complicit in the Liberal design.
FDR was one devious son-of-a-gun. As the good guys were being attacked by the Japanese bad boys Roosevelt took it upon himself to aid the Chinese with American wherewithall. It would have been better to let the two combatants exhaust themselves and keep our ‘limitless’ resources to ourselves.
Remember that the Japanese hatred of the West was caused when the United States forced them out of their seclusion at gunpoing thereby emasculating them.
Now Roosevelt was trying to thwart their ends by disgorging America’s wealth on China. If you free your mind from false moral assumptions you wll see how stupid this was.
As an American I can do nothing but deplore Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor but as a psychologist and analyst I can see nothing but its inevitability as the result of the US’s inconsiderate actions.
The Japanese simply had to try to put a stop to American aid to China. Whatever the proof may be that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor before hand, if he didn’t know he was provoking such an attack he was denser than any man has a right to be which I don’t think he was.
In Europe the situation was intensified when the Communists elected sympathizers to most government who then formed a Popular Front against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Spain. The Roosevelt administration was a Popular Front government. On the religious front it was competition between Communism and established faiths.
To all appearances the Judeo-Communists had the Axis surrounded. Even before Hitler was elected the Jews of the United States were working hard to subvert him. Assassination attempts had already taken place. When FDR was elected, as with all Popular Front governments the Jews urged the United States to take first strike action against Germany.
As part of this program in the United States the Judeo-Communists demanded an Un-American Activities Committee by which unamerican meant non-Judeo Communist. In 1938 they succeeded when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created. To their disappointment the chairmanship escaped them going to a member who corrected believed that Communists were a bigger threat than Nazis. This infuriated Roosevelt.
When was was declared in Europe the American Judeo-Communists were for intervention. They changed their tune after the German-Soviet pact then changed back again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
As can be plainly seen what is at stake here are sub-special interests rather than national ones. On 12/7/41 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. All the sub-species were at war.
The War fatally weakened the HSIIs and IIIs much as the percipient Lothrop Stoddard had predicted. In the aftermath of the War HSIIs and IIIs were expelled from Asia. Although preifly garrisoned with American troops there was no other action taken against Japan other than that they were set on their economic feet.
In 1948 the HSIIs and IIIs were driven from India.
In 1948 the Judeo-Semites occupied Palestine.
In 1948 the Chinese Communists were clearly going to be victors in China thusputting the Chinese squarely at odds with the West.
While for a few years the United States was in the enviable position of arbitrating world affairs, it chose to favor the non HSII and III subspecies over the ‘colored’ peoples thus further weakening HSIIs and IIIs.
When Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 there had been little happening in his literary and business affairs for a decade. The only thing keeping the Burroughs literary legacy alive was his continuing popularity with the masses. You and me. But they could find few editions of any of the corpus to buy.
From 1945 to 1963 there was little of his literary oeuvre that was available although demand continued strong. For some strange reason ERB, Inc. refused to issue titles. Then in 1963 publishers seized on expired copyrights and the second boom in Tarzan began. Once more his message contained something of value for his readers. Let us now begin Book III of Something Of Value which cover the period from 1945 to 9/11/01 and the closing of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new.
The Age Of Aquarius was dawning.
Something Of Value Book II Part 3
February 5, 2008
Book II
Something Of Value
Part 3
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3
Bad Motorcycle With The Devil In The Seat
Don’t go out tonight,
They’re sure to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
-John Fogerty
(a.) The Evolution Of Religion 0-1875
Prior to, say, -800 the approximate date of Homer’s Iliad, religion was comprosed of all three facets of learning: Religion, Philosophy and Science. The reason for the Priesthood was intact. Then beginning with Homer in the Greek world, who was reverenced with good reason, learning became gradually secularized as the Pre-Socratics developed Philosophy and Science independently of the Priesthood. In the West this was the real deathblow to religion; in the Semitic East no such development took place. The Semites are incapable of either Philosophy or Science.
About this time also, Astronomy as a science developed, which doomed Astrology to insignificance although its traditions linger on as the world prepares for the Age of Aquarius. It will really happen too. Don’t ask me how, but it will, it is happening. If you want to read an excellent analysis of aspects of the Age of Pisces check out C.G. Jung. The amazing thing is that there is little to indicate a system for perpetuating this design of ancient times, no evidence of a secret society forwarding Astrological designs. The ancients having set the plan in motion apparently knew it would be self-perpetuating as individuals like myself, and I have no interest in Astrology per se would penetrate the workings of the design moving it forward whether advertently or inadvertently. But you have to look at it to see it. My interest was aroused when I detected a constant presence. I myself have no prejudices, I don’t dismiss phenomena out of hand. The Tarot has its significance also. You don’t have to believe it, you study its historical development.
Astrology was still a very active force as the Age of Pisces dawned. The Semitic Jewish reaction was based on the dawning of a new Age, the Piscean. When this mistaken adventure ended in 135 AD, when it became clear that the New Age meant little in concrete terms, although defeated militarily and dispersed from Palestine the Jews still had that old ace in the hole. Religion.
There was still the spiritual world. While the Rabbis censured Jesus of Nazareth as an imposter a cult of Jewish followers developed after the death of Jesus. The Jews in those days or just previous to the Jewish Wars had been active proselytizers. Large Jewish communities existed in all the cities of the Roman Empire including Rome itself. For various reasons these facts have been downplayed. Any serious historical study of the role of the Jews in the Roman Empire is severely discountenanced, at least in American Universities.
As orthodoxy required circumcision and following the ridiculous Jewish dietary laws, I mean, what makes wine kosher or not is whether it has been touched by non-Jewish hands somewhere in the winemaking process, the limits of conversion may have been reached. A lot of folks might think such a condition mere bigotry but I decline to comment. Paul realized this, thus he wisely discarded circumcision and the dietary laws in his version of Christianity. This at least made it possible to convert the Gentile although without bigotry Christianity could never have succeeded in being more than a prevalent religion. Persuasion can only go so far. A religion can’t get anywhere without bigotry.
After Constantine made Christianity the official religion, empowered, the Catholic Church went to work to suppress all other forms of thought, religious, philosophical or scientific. The academy of Plato was shut down while the library at Alexandria was burned to the ground.
Thus the Semito-Roman Catholic Church solidified its position as the official representative of Christ on Earth.
Now, after Jesus was crucified the remaining disciples and adherents were run to earth where possible and killed. It became expedient to flee into hiding. From this dispersal has arisen the tradition of the Holy Grail. This fabulous literary repository has come down to us attached to the exploits of King Arthur. Known to most through the collation of Mallory, the original documents run to tens of thousands of pages. The Vulgate-Lancelot alone is close to ten thousand 350-400 word pages.
The legends which begin with the crucifixion represent a secret history of Europe. There is much interesting investigation being forwarded on the topic currently by Laurence Gardner and his series of books, he can be accessed at his Mediaquest site on the web, and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in two interesting books: Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy. There are others but these two series are most direct. There’s a lot more actually but much of it is very speculative. Worth looking into though by the right minds.
According to these writers Mary Magdalen fled Palestine for Marseilles in southern France where she bore a son of Jesus. This son became the progenitor of the Merovingian line of kings of France. These in turn presented a challenge to the authority of the Semito-Roman Catholic Church. Thus the Church encouraged the usurpation of the throne by the line that would be known as Carolingian which when the Church succeeded in crowning Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor it gained the right to invest the royal houses of Europe. The Merovingians were thus dispossessed.
With the right to make or break kings in a quasi-theological empire the success of the Church was more of less assured although in a still very difficult political situation. Still, all Europe West of what became Russia was brought within its sway, hence the recent Polish pope.
Not content with leaving well enough alone the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the recovery of Palestine from the Moslems. Contact in the East introduced two heresies which were to have a decisive and devisive impact on subsequent history down to the present day.
The Europeans chose to invade Palestine during the heyday of the chief of the assassin cult, Hassan i Sabbah. Thus while having only a limited military success, still a Christian presence was maintained for over two hundred years which is about as long as the United States had been in existence, the crusaders were infected with a heresy. At the same time the Cathar heresy was introduced into Europe from the East. The Cathars also known as the Albigensians, and the Knights Templar presented the Semito-Catholic Church with a soul destroying problem. This is where the Church met its Waterloo although it would be difficult to understand what else they could have done.
Westerners don’t seem to understand that if you’re going to interfere in other people’s lives you have to go all the way or suffer the consequences. The assassins of Hassan i Sabbah introduced a very potent brand of heresy into Europe in vengeance for the invasion of Palestine. Both examples have proven very pernicious and ought to have been suppressed.
The watchword of the Cathars is given expression in the Rabelasian phrase: Do What Thou Wilt. I haven’t read Nietsche but he gave a different formulation in ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’
Thus the Moslems through the Assassins were able to corrupt the morality of the West. Thus Cathars prospered across Southern France where the aurthority of the Semito-Catholic Church was challenged. If the Cathar heresy, really an error, grew the Church would find itself displaced.
The rule of the Church is that the Church cannot shed blood, which is why heretics were burnt, but they could get others to do it for them. Establishing the Inquisition to smell out heretics the Church called on the French crown to crusade against the Albigensians. What do you do with people who will believe differently than you do? As Victor Hugo said, you have to kill them so that a new world may arise. As Lenin and Stalin believed, you have to exterminate the recalcitrants. As Hitler said, there is the final solution. Well, that’s what they did to the Albigensians. The soldiers asked how they were to determine whether one was or wasn’t a Cathar, they were told to kill them all, God would know his own.
The devastation if not total was a very serious attempt.
Here you have one of those insuperable problems, what are you going to do? If you do nothing you lose, if you let God sort out his own, you lose. The Cathars would have been enough trouble but then the Church was faced with the Templar heresy. Same solution, same results.
The only consolation the Semito-Catholics had was that at about this same time the troops of Genghis Khan swept over the Middle East rooting the Assassins out of their ‘impregnable’ mountain fastness.
The result of the Church’s action and that of their royal accomplices was a seething hatred of both by the survivors who after all, believed nothing was true and everything was permitted. Dangerous people with dangerous ideas. Several subversive organizations arose, the Free Spirits, Beghards and Beguines who eventually came together as the Libertines in pre-Revolutionary France.
The Church demonized the survivors, according to Laurence Gardner as witches, hence the witch hunts. I’m not sure it is true but it does make sense, provides a rational motive for the persecutions. With the inquisition in place Europe was made a hell on Earth. Nevertheless learning wiggled out from under the suppression of the Church to flower forth as the Enlightenment. Thus after the Cathars and Templars Science presented a challenge to the Church which has been the knock out blow. Both the Semito-Catholic Church and the Semitic Jews were presented with a very difficult problem which no amount of persecution could resolve.
The Church has stubbornly clung to its authority giving up only a minimum to reason. The Inquisition itself was only discontinued in mid-nineteenth century. The Jews, on the other hand, were thrown into complete disarray by the Enlightenment at least in the West. The great bloc of Judaism in the Pale of Eastern Europe responded much more slowly but then very large numbers of that group emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the religion faced even more serious challenges.
The Western Jews ran through a whole series of experimental forms before, under the influence of the Eastern Jews, the compromise of Zionism was evolved.
Along the way Marx, Einstein and Freud evolved political, physical and psychological pseudo-scientific ideas which had the effect of confusing the West.
Aiding the emergence of Science and the freeing of speculative religion from the suppression of the Church was the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution was as epochal an event in the Piscean Age as the crucifixion of Christ. The Revolutionists restarted their calendar at year one which was probably symbolically correct.
It is probably signficant that Jean Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck, was appointed professor of invertebrate zoology at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the critical year of 1793. As an evolutionist Lamarck preceded Charles Darwin. In his Tarzan And The Lion Man Burroughs mentions Lamarck along with Gregor Mendel and Darwin as well as the proposer of the germ theory of evolution, August Weismann, who Burroughs did not mention by name. While Burroughs played with evolution in many fantastic ways his playfulness was informed by a thorough grounding in the learning of his day.
One has to be very alert and attentive to see just how playful he is.
In Tarzan The Terrible the primitive species, mistakenly called races in most discussions, had tails. When Tarzan wishes to disguise himself he affixes a severed tail to his posterior. Now, there was a legend of a tailed people in the Congo Basin. The legend was based on the fact that this tribe affixed animal tails on their posteriors much as Tarzan does. Thus Burroughs combines evoltuionary speculation with historical legend and fact in a humorous episode. It’s possible he may have been waiting a hudred years anyone to get that joke. He picked up his information from H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.
The Revolution itself was not as spontaneous as it is often depicted nor is the wanton destruction the result of a frustrated peasantry. The Revolution was planned and coordinated by the descendants of those very Albigensians and Templars Church and Crown had crushed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Albigenian and Templar heresies and error were thus released on the world in a more concentrated form than previously. The disorder in society today is caused by the followers of those errors.
Burroughs was born a short 70 some odd years after the failure of the Revolution. Sixteen years after Darwin released his Origin Of Species on the world. In between incredible advances were made. Champollion broke the hieroglyphic alphabet of Egypt opening the ancient world to us. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East were unearthed. Surely all those ruins Burroughs speaks of were influenced by those discoveries. Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Cretans and other discoveries such as Schliemann’s unearthing of Troy and Mycenae. The Church was delivered one blow after another as the authority of its Holy Scriptures crumbled into falsehood.
At the same time a plethora of suppressed religious speculation burst the bonds of repression. Esotericists stumbled all over themselves to formulate doctrines. The Spiritualist movement sprang up fully formed like Athene from the forehead of Zeus. The greatest of the great, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, ransacked the religious speculative literature of the ages to reassemble it into a spectacular tour de force she called Theosophy. Just as religion, Philosophy and Science had diverged c. -800 she now tried to reunite them under one head. She couldn’t do it but her work is a magnificent effort none the less.
If you’ve got the time and patience The Book Of Urantia is an equally stunning tour de force. Great science fiction if nothing else.
Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this incredible religious, intellectual and scientific ferment. Learning had become so vast that no one mind could grasp all the details, but like Madame B, it were better to fail gloriously than never to make the attempt. Underneath all the foolery and fantasy of his fiction ERB went at with a will.
(b.) Relations Of The Sub-species 0-1875.
At the risk of being repetitious it might be appropriate here to quote Darwin again to keep the thought fresh in our minds:
Quote:
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera.
Unquote.
So, when the Semites erupted from the desert the modern phase of competition between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species began. The populations had now expanded so that there was not room for all. One sub-species must drive out all the others. Thus the outer reality, or world of appearances, will and must triumph over the inner world of wishful thinking. So the world turns.
Darwin again:
Quote:
We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congenor. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species, and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature, but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species had been victorious over another in the great battle of life.’
Unquote.
Let us never forget that there is a great battle for life while with Homo Sapiens we can precisely say why one species will be victorious. I cannot show the victory but I can show, for my purposes here, how the struggle progressed to 1875. The next section following will take us to 1950, the next after that to 9/11 and than a fictional effort will end with a possible scenario of the end of civilization as we know it.
The method followed by Homo Sapiens is easily learned, you just have to condition yourself to accept the facts, the outer reality rather than the inner world of wishful thinking. In encounters before this period the method was simple. A band of invaders conquered the indigenous folk, slew all the males, kept the females for themselves. In an evolutionary sense this is the natural method.
Amongst, lions for instance, a male is only allowed to enjoy his Pride for a limited time. Then a couple males gang up on him, driving him away. One of the new males then acquires the lionesses killing the former lion’s offspring at the same time. The complacent females then go into heat producing a new group of offspring for the new male. Simple. Why the simp lion helps his fellow for no reward is beyond me but it works the same way among Homo Sapiens.
So when the Saxons drove the Britons out of England into Brittany where the Britons conquered the natives, the Britons not only massacred the males but they cut the tongues out of the women so that the language wouldn’t be corrupted. Very offensive to our professed standards but completely within the range of normality. I mean, you know, get real. This sort of thing can and will happen again. Nazi Germany wasn’t any aberration. The Jews of today are calling for the extermination of one billion White people. This is a fact. Google Noel Ignatiev and see for yourself. Your problem will be that you just won’t take him seriously although the evidence is clearly before your eyes.
In this great struggle of life all sub-species of Homo Sapiens are more or less physically equal. Mental genetics have given HSII and III the edge in scientific intelligence. Along with the intelligence comes the ability to see farther and clearer so that lacking tunnel vision the will is blunted. Rather than following the ancient methods and disposing of indigenous peoples, which they could easily have done at the time, the HSIIs and IIIs created a legacy of ill will through their misguided benignity which at the end of this period began to come back to haunt them.
From the period of Mohammed the sub-species began to be moved around in earnest.
A legacy of the Semitic Moslem triumph was that the West was cut off from all intercourse with the East. The Moslems blocked all the formerly active trade routes. The legacy remains today when otherwise well educated historians know nothing of Africa and many points of the Near East.
Having conquered the Mediterranean littoral of North Africa the Semites began the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa. Superior in both intellignece and will to the First Born the Semites treated them as though they were mere animals, intelligent Apes. If the African slave trade hadn’t existed before, it began then. It was brutal.
Many Africans converted to Moslemism because it gained them immunity from being enslaved. They in turn captured non-Moslem Africans to sell to the Arabic Semites. This Moslem African slave trade began c. +700 and continues to the present day although the Semites will deny it.
North of Arabia the Moslems captured part of the Byzantine Asian lands while occupying Persia, central Asia and parts of India plus a fair penetration into China. Today if one includes Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as a unit the Indian subcontinent is predominantly Moslem.
In the West the Moslems were slowly driven from Spain which was accomplished just as the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the Middle East from Central Asia destroyed the last vestiges of the Roman or Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans then began the conquest of the Balkans moving into the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary to the very Gates of Vienna before the combined forces of Austria, Poland and Russia drove them back to the present borders just as Edgar Rice Burroughs was being born. An incredibly long struggle that was just a pause in hostilities. After that defeat the Ottomans were known as ‘the sick man of Europe.’
During this entire period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fifteenth century Europe was in turmoil as society reformed from a congeries of Germanic tribes into a semblance of the modern nation states.
In 1492 a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus changed the direction of European society. Cut off from the East by the Moslems who took advantage of straddling the trade routes to charge exorbitant prices for Easter luxuries, Portugal led European exploration of the world circumnavigating Africa finding an ocean route to the Orient thereby bypassing the Arabs eclipsing their prosperity sending them into complete stagnation. Maybe this is what Bernard Lewis means by ‘something went wrong.’
Columbus found the islands of the Caribbean Sea occupied by the Caribs. Here we can see clearly Darwin’s dilemma resolved. Between the introduction of virulent diseases to which the Caribs were unacclimated and brutal treatment the Europeans like the Asian cockroack drove their predecessors before them. What had been a Carib lake became a European lake and would soon become an African lake.
The islands were perfect for the labor intensive sugar industry but the Europeans didn’t want to do the intensive labor themselves. They in turn went to the great slave capitol of the world which the Semites had not yet exhausted to bring large numbers of the First Born out of Africa. Like all ruling classes the HSIIs and IIIs having displaced the native Caribs, were now displaced by the First Born who at present have possession of the Caribbean Islands.
So now if Darwin were alive he could see how it works. Caribs>HSIIs & IIIs>First Born. Simple.
The Spaniards also overran Mexico, Central America and South America. Here their numbers were few in comparison with the indigenes who were apparently of a hardier stock than the Caribs. The Spaniards were able to maintain their dominance over the indigenes of the area. Even today the President of Mexico is of obvious European descent while the peons are Indios.
Following Columbus’ lead the English and French invaded further North in lands that became the United States and Canada.
Once again here we can plainly see how one species of Homo Sapiens displaces another just as one species of swallow did to its great congenor.
The new invaders from Europe displaced the native Homo Sapiens along the seaboard then as their population steadily increased they rolled the aboriginals back before their advance. There was no attempt at extermination although there was callous disregard for life in the human sense. In the evolutionary sense there was no consideration of aboriginal rights.
At the same time the First Born were removed from Africa to serve as laborers in the English colonies of North America. The First Born would never have left Africa had they not been removed by the Semites and HSII and III. The First Born secured no presence in the Middle East with whatever implications that holds, but from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States First Born territories were extended greatly.
The orginal HSIII population which originally controlled Central Asia was either driven from the area by invading Mongolid tribes or exhausted their numbers migrating West. As numerous HSIII populations have existed in the Caucasus and in other pockets of central Asia the latter is unlikely. The HSIIs were undoubtedly driven before the Mongolids in the Darwinian sense. the Mongolids first made their appearance in the West with the fifth century Huns. They swept all before them until defeated in what amounts to a last ditch stand by the French. From the Huns forward Central Asia belonged to the Mongolids.
Then in the thirteenth century on the heels of the Western Crusades Genghis Khan organized the Central Asians to conquer both the Chinese Mongolids in the East as well as sweeping West to overrun Russia and Eastern Europe to the North before retiring back into the Steppes from which they exercised hegemony over Russia for hundreds of years.
To the South the Mongolids rolled over the Moslems before being defeated in Mesopotamia then, again, retiring back into the Steppes.
The russians eventually threw the Mongolid yoke off, then by running gunboats on the Volga they were able to prevent the Mongolid hordes from crossing. Thus Central Asia was brought under control.
The French and English quickly followed the Portuguese into the East. By then the Spanish had already seized the Philippines. European religious interference caused the Japanese to close their borders to both ingress and egress. From the early seventeenth century to nearly the birth of ERB Japan was isolated taking no part in world history.
With either superior luck or organization the English branch of HSII and III was able to be the most influenctial branch in the East. All of India was brought under their control, both Hindus and Moslems. Southeast Asia acknowledged at least the hegemony of England. The Dutch seized Indonesia while the French annexed Indo-China.
England, France and Germany were in the process of annexing China itself when they were interfered with by the United States. As usual the United States with so-called good intentions produced the opposite result. John Hay of the United States announced his Open Door Policy in regard to China forcing the European branches to back down from their concept of spheres of interest. America has been a very destructive force in world politics.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lacking sufficient colonists of their own, England began moving Indians and Chinese from their homelands into their colonies. Thus these peoples who up to that point had been quite content to remain where they were realized the advantages of colonization themselves. Before too long they would in their turn be colonizing Europe and the Americas.
Although Chinese and Japanese migrations will fall mainly in the period after ERB’s birth, well before mid-nineteenth century the Chinese had begun a substantial migration to the West Coasts of the Americas. In 1849, the time of the California gold rush, they represented a very substantial percentage of the West Coast population. It was because of the Chinese that Dennis Kearney announced that California was White Man’s Country.
Fearful of being overrun by the Chinese, which was a very well founded fear, Kearney led the effort for a congressional law excluding Chinese from immigration. This law was secured in 1882. It was repealed or superseded by the 1965 revision of the immigration act which was promoted by the Semitic Jews.
Americans concentrate only on what happens in this country but in fact once stirred up by the British the Chinese began to emigrate to all parts of the world as circumstance allowed. Americans refuse to allow volition to any other people assuming the role of world directors is some sort of perversion of Manifest Destiny
End Of Part III. Go to Part IV.
Exhuming Bob 5: Texas Bob Dylan
January 27, 2008
Exhuming Bob 5: Texas Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
While much is made of Bob’s Blues interests and his Folk career the truth is that Bob’s big musical influences were Country & Western. He apparently embraced Robert Johnson after 1961 attempting to make him a major influence while giving himself Black roots and credentials that were then needed. But when he talks of the pre-1959 period he invariably invokes the great C&W artists of the late forties and early fifties.
Hence in this photo in what may be his last persona he has returned to his true C&W roots. This is probably the Bob Bob has always wanted to be. As you can see he has abandoned any Jewish identity in favor of a forties and fifties Western recording star. Not so much the Hillbilly or Country aspect as that of the singing Cowboy. Perhaps he is also recalling his early sixties adulation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
Here he emulates Slim Whitman- the mustache- Elton Britt, Ernest Tubb the Texas Troubadour, Hank Williams or any number of artists before the Nudie Suit Of Lights came into fasion in the fifties.
Note the attention he has taken to remolding his face in the attempt to eliminate Jewish characteristics. The tight thin lips, the steely eyes. A remarkable and successful effort at becoming what he has always, apparently, wanted to be.
The photo is taken from the Rolling Stone issue of May 3-17 2007 without permission. If they object I’ll have to remove the post.
Exhuming Bob 4: Boulevards Of Broken Dreams
January 26, 2008
Exhuming Bob 4:
The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
by
R.E. Prindle
…the confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse…
I got mixed up confusion
Man, it’s killing me.
Bob Dylan
I walk the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams…
You laugh tonight and cry tomorrow
When you behold your shattered dreams…
Here is where you’ll always find me
Always walking up and down
But I left my soul behind me…
Harry Warren
The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
With each day of waiting
I love to pretend
One more tomorrow
And my waiting will end.
I’m waiting and watching
for ships that never come in,
I wonder where they can be.
after Jack Yellen
I’m Waiting For Ships That Never Come In
Everything’s Broken Down
Larry Hosford
I received a couple comments on With One Hand Waving Free from R.M. that brought some thoughts I have into focus. RM has a good understanding so I will incorporate some of her thoughts into this essay.
First, let’s deal with ‘multi-culturalism.’ Multi-culturalism is merely twenty-first century racism. If a separate cultural identity is being jealously maintained then this is done in oppostion to all other cultures; it is a form of exclusivity. Yet such cultural exclusivity is considered a sin if not a crime in the West. How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction?
The first law of ‘culture’ is that two or more cultures cannot occupy the same territory at the same time. Race and culture can be made synonymous for this purpose. The less or least tolerant culture will eventually drive the more or most tolerant culture out. This is a law. Thus to be tolerant is a one way ticket to oblivion.
In that sense tolerance will be made to seem to be intolerance. Thus for the last few centuries until very recently England had been praised for its extreme tolerance. Jews, Huguenots and whatever found a refuge there that delivered them from persecution. That was when the immigrants were relatively few and the English culture dominant. In the last few decades England has been all but swamped by Negroes, Moslems, Jews and whatever. The Moslems although coming from different countries and races are culturally united through the intolerant Moslem religion. Now that the immigrants are numerically strong enough to bully the ‘tolerant’ English the English are now described as intolerant monsters. Quite a change in the perception of them even though the English themselves have not changed. They do insist on the Common Law, their cultural norm, rather than adopting Moslem Sharia law as the Moslems insist. The grossly intolerant Moslems then will subject the tolerance of the English and Moslemism will prevail in England. Thus two cultures cannot coexist in the same space, one must eliminate the other.
The Moslem method of subjection is the same today as it was in the year seven hundred when they subjugated a large part of the world. The congeries of nations they thus created forced a temporary ‘tolerance’ on the Moslems. They had to ‘tolerate’ other cultures to maintain order. But they relentlessly forced intolerance in their dominions gradually imposing a culturally sterile Moslem uniformity on society that succeeded in quelling ‘diversity’ by the thirteenth century or so when a certain idiot maintains that ‘something went wrong.’ Nothing went wrong. The Moslem religion finally achieved its goal.
Now multi-culturalism is being forced on the West. There is no multi-culturalism in the East. China and Japan are as homogeneous as you can get and likely to remain so. There is little change in South-East Asia and apart from the continuing Hindu-Moslem conflict in India, none there. Africa is being occupied by the Chinese so that Africans in Africa will be all but eliminated.
So, this is the nature of multi-culturalism; a form of racism by which the tolerant will be exterminated by the intolerant. One may be view the process as a declared but non-shooting war.
The intolerant are being aided by Western ‘Liberals’ who are deliberately and legally disarming the less tolerant Westerners in favor of the intolerant. Liberals have actually passed laws making it a criminal offence for Westerners to defend or propagate their own culture or criticize anyone else’s.
This process has gone much further in Europe and the British dominions including Canada. The US is still protected by its Constitution but that is under attack. Thus in the Multi-Cultural Wonderland dissent is still possible. I do dissent. And I will speak my mind. I will not be tolerant of my own destruction or those of the West.
As an All-American Boy I have grown up sharing in all these cultures as my own while not being a part of any of them. I am as Jewish as a Jew, as Black as an African-American. As Rebel as any Southener and as Puritan as any New Englander. They are all my cultures. I can mix and match any symbols and being a free American boy, America means freedom, I can say and do as I please. I do and will.
In point of fact I was excluded from all cultures by being in an orphanage. I am probably closest to the Puritan heritage but neither it nor any other has any special meaning for me. I am outside them all as an observer. So, I’d appreciate it if you weren’t defensive about your own cultural hangups. That’s the way it is friends: If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror. I am a camera.
In her first comment RM gives a general discussion of the record business. As it happens I was in the record business for fifteen years between 1967 and 1982. I know something about records and musicians. Musicians are at the bottom of the entertainment hierachy. They have no, or little, status. During the sixties and seventies they broke the bounds of the records labels and were able to dictate terms to the labels. This was an anomaly and it didn’t last too long before the labels regained control.
Musicians are generally considered offensive by movie and TV people. They aren’t invited to many genteel parties. To a very large extent this opinion is merited. Witness all those stories about rock and rollers busting up hotels and being just generally rude and offensive. Sad but true. Just study those movies of Dylan and his entourage in London’s prestigious Savoy Hotel. Bob should be embarrassed.
Musicians are the ‘abused, confused, misused’ type of person Bob so unerringly identifies in his songs. Bob was one too. Consider his first rock song: Mixed Up Confusion. Relate it to The Chimes Of Freedom a couple years later. I do not exclude myself from this group so don’t get hostile.
The record industry above all others draws the type to it. There is something about the direct mental connection between the sound on the disc, in the grooves, and the mind that allows the listener to incorporate the lyrics into his identity. All the lyrics heading this essay are part and parcel of my mental makeup also. Some of the type have talent and skills but most don’t. Bob obviously was highly talented by no less psychotic for all that.
For myself I owned and operated a medium sized record store chain from 1967 to 1982. Until about 1979 I listened to everything issued. I suppose I heard thousands of LPs at least once. Some dozens of times. I occasionally met various artists. I was familiar with the record scene in LA and San Francisco. I dealt with tens of thousand of customers. I think I know the dreamy record type.
Without exception they have a broken down psychology. Consider songs like Broken down, second hand Rose, Here Comes The Rain, It’s Raining In My Heart, the talented but overlooked Larry Hosford’s Everything’s Broken Down. In my experience with record store employees their attitude was: If it ain’t broke, break it. And they did. I spent fifteen years dealing with broken people and I didn’t like it.
Bob was broken, probably still is. The part of his songs I identified with from 1964-66 was the broken down images of his ‘greatest’ work. All those put down songs were answered in my soul as I walked up and down the street of broken dreams. He spoke my own frustration and rage. I thought at the time the vicious put downs of Positively Fourth Street was Dylan at his best and I still do but I can’t bear to sing along anymore. The instrumentals he devised were pure genius. In fact I would give him higher marks as a composer than I would as a lyricist.
It scarcely needs pointing out but after Blonde On Blonde his pure rage was spent. He had apparently put down everyone he wanted to put down. His direction changed.
So what I am interested in here is the cause of his breaking down and subsequent rage. His biographers give scant clues when they assess his childhood. For the present we are compelled to guess from various clues scattered throughout his lyrics directed at unknown people and his comments.
In my estimation his put down songs are directed at people from Hibbing who he obviously feels put him down. Bob projects that rejection onto his New York scene.
One must rely on reports but it seems that everyone in New York was unusually supportive of this stranger from Minnesota. People seem to have gone out of their way to be supportive. They fed him didn’t they? They offered their couches, they let him play their records, read their books. In fact, they educated him to Bohemian standards. Bob didn’t get there by himself. Bob couldn’t have written those songs without that education that they gave him for free, from the goodness of their hearts.
A complete greenhorn when he arrived, within the very short space of two years he was a star. Nothing at 19, by 21 he was on his way. Life wasn’t that good to me and yet Bob sees no reason to be thankful for his good fortune. To my taste the music that gave him his start is detestable yet Robert Shelton, a very influential music critic for the NYTimes, the most influential newspaper in NYC and America, gave Bob a glittering review that his fellow folk singers wondered about at the time while being no less a source of wonder today.
John Hammond at CBS, one of the three largest labels in the US, a very experienced judge of talent, apparently saw something in the caterwauling Dylan that I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen, signing Bob to a recording contract. Any contract young Bob got would have been a wonderful contract even if he had worked gratis. Once again as with Shelton, Hammond’s associates were set wondering. Hammond’s Folly they called it.
So what exactly did Bob have to complain of about his reception in NYC. Nothing that I can see. From what I gather from his biographers his hero Woody Guthrie even accepted him. Why then all those bitter diatribes against his fellow folksingers in NYC? Quite simply, Bob was projecting. He’s not talking about the present, he’s talking about the past although he puts his lyrics in the present. We have to go back to Hibbing. He’d only been absent from Hibbing a little over a year when he hit the Big Apple so all his antecedents were very fresh in his memory. If RM is correct it was exactly at this time that he wrote his song The Walls Of Red Wing. The shock of his incarceration was searing his mind.
In Hibbing we have two influential formative processes. One, the interaction between Bob and his classmates and the other between Bob and his father. The latter is especially important. I am weak on being able to judge father-son relationships because I never had a father. From I’ve seen of father-son relationships I have absoltutely no cause for regret. I consider it a psychological trap I miraculously escaped.
One thing is clear from the biographers, Bob did not run with the In Crowd of his high school class. He obviously suffered rejection thus he visits rejection on everyone in his songs from ’64-’66. All those songs are meant to show that he’s the one and they ain’t. ‘Sooner Or Later One Of Us Must Know’, ‘There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you?’ Sour grapes. Even when they know they don’t care. You’re still you and they’re still them and they’re still in control of the social structure. You’re still on the outside and nothing’s changed except, of course, you’re famous.
Those of us who learn, learn the hard way. Unfortunately that is the only way. If you don’t know let me tell you. What’s done is done.
As the Persian poet, Omar Khayam put it:
The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.
Here’s the hard part- that’s just the way it is and the way it must stay. If you can’t deal with that, too bad. Bang your head against the wall until you die. Who cares? Hard and mean, but true. What did they used to say? You’ve got to be cruel to be kind? It’s all over now, Baby Blue. Don’t forget it; learn from it. But don’t you grieve no more. However it may go on raining in your heart.
One can’t know what happened to Bob but I suspect it happened early, probably before Junior High. When his biographers discuss his childhood he is always in the company of outsiders. So Bob became broken down at an early age.
Probably in an effort to win his classmates approval he chose to become a rock and roll musician. It worked so well when he was four performing Accentuate The Positive for his family why wouldn’t it work at sixteen with his classmates? Well, it didn’t. What he wanted to play they didn’t want to hear and what they might have wanted to hear he wouldn’t play. It was his way or no way. They booed him roundly but he didn’t care. Strangely Bob recreated the exact same scenario on his world tour. He was not only booed in the metropolis of Hibbing but he was booed around the world. Didn’t care, but how many people can say that? Very unusual personality.
Undismayed back in Hibbing he was undismayed around the world. I can understand his continued playing against the boos but that doesn’t mean it didn’t break his heart. The miracle is Bob Zimmerman went on to become Bob Dylan. You can listen to him turn into Bob Dylan on Another Side. Before that he’s Bob Zimmerman trying on the name Bob Dylan.
So, I think we can assign all those put down songs to his rejection back in Hibbing even though he’s singing Positively Fourth Street to his NYC coterie.
Probably Bob thought that whatever form the initial reaction took to his rejection back in Hibbing was that he had been a victim of a form of theft. Something valuable had been stolen from his personality, his self-respect. This is completely understandable. But as something was stolen from him, in vengeance he became the thief. Thus, if Bob wants an answer to his question: Why must I always be the thief: the compulsion can be found in whatever this childhood incident was.
I suspect Bob began small pilfering from that age, whatever year it may have been. As he was definitely sentenced to a Reformatory for a crime commited in the twelfth grade I have to believe he was caught stealing items of sufficient value for him to have been brought before a court where he was convicted and received a sentence.
It seems unlikely that as a first offender he would have been given time in a reformatory therefore it seems likely that he must have been arrested a couple times before and let off with a warning. That’s the way it was back then before they put you in jail for first offence jay-walking.
That Bob was not averse to breaking into other’s property is made clear by Howard Sounes story of Echo Helstrom’s jimmying the lock of the Moose Lodge. That Bob was not particularly careful is evident by the fact that having broken in Bob banged away at the piano and sang. After making an unauthorized entry that would seem foolhardy. Bob wasn’t just a kid either. That occurred sometime in the eleventh grade.
I suspect these earlier crimes were all thefts. As he was not a good thief, seemingly always being caught, he must have wanted his thefts to be discovered much as he himself was aware that something of value had been stolen from him. The last theft for which the judge thought he had no choice but to give Bob time must have been a good one, perhaps a burlary or store break-in. The crime may have been committed weeks or a couple months before graduation so Bob was allowed to finish school before serving his sentence in the Summer of ’59. Worst summer of Bob’s young life. Worse than church camp. This much is certain, he was in a reformatory for a couple months in the Summer of ’59. The question is where, and how does Father Abraham fit in?
Bob seems to have had a difficult relationship with his father. When that began and whether it had anything to do with his Judaism is the question. There most certainly is a conflict in Bob’s mind between his Gentile cultural identity growing up in Hibbing amongst Gentiles and his Jewish cultural identity imposed on him by his family and probably most especially by his father. Thus in later life Bob would first become a born again Christian, then revert to Judaism, and a fundamental Judaism at that, then form a compr0mise between the two that he is evidently following today. His autobiography, Chronicles Vol. I, wasn’t involved with religion that I remember. I’ll have to read it again.
As I read the biographies Bob was relatively ignorant of the tenets of Judaism as of his Bar Mitzvah at 13. In a situation that I would consider extraordinary a Rabbi was flown in especially for him just prior to his Bar Mitzvah to indoctrinate him and then returned to wherever he came from shortly after. I don’t know, seems like Abraham was really concerned that Bob understand his relationship to Judaism. They would have had to pay the Rabbi. It would be interesting to know Bob’s reaction to this event.
For myself I was forced to attend church through Junior and Senior High which I deeply resented, even hated. I can control myself if I am forced to enter a religious edifice today, that mainly because I am a real trooper who does his duty, but there wouldn’t be any need for anyone to push it too hard. I could break out cursing. Oddly I’ve been in everthing from Catholic Churches to Jewish synagogues over the years. What did I ever do to anybody?
Also in subsequent years Bob attended a religious summer camp called Camp Herzl. Whether he was compelled to or not I don’t know but in my case I was compelled to attend those accursed church camps. If there is anything in my religious background I care to take back it is those few weeks spent there. Absolutely hated it. It would be interesting to know how Bob enjoyed the experience.
Now, Bob tells us that his father Abraham at one time told him that it was possible for a son to become so defiled himself that his father and mother would disown him. Bob doesn’t tell us when or under what circumstances his father told him this. Was it a sort of admonition Abe thought every father should tell his son at, say, ten, or possibly at his Bar Mitzvah, or was it something Abe told Bob just before the authorities took Bob away for his sojourn at the reformatory- possibly even, probably Red Wing? Certainly his departure would have been as horrific an occasion for his father as it was for Bob.
So here’s the crux of the father problem. RM in her comment described Abraham a ‘passive-aggressive’ but clearly abusive father. RM says that an old girlfriend said that Bob seemed quite afraid of his father but she didn’t know if he hit him or not. RM seems to think Abe did but I’m not so sure but as we’ll see there is evidence that points to the fact that he may have.
A statement like ‘I’m not so sure the truth will set you free’ may sound innocuous enough but who knows how many lectures lay behind it or how they pertained to it. Enigmatic at best, what religious truth was Abraham trying to convey to young Bob? Not so clear to me. I’ve known some pretty nutty religious types in my time, just because Abraham was Jewish doesn’t mean he wasn’t a nutty religious type, and some of them were quite terrifying. I mean, de Lawd gave them verbal instructions and they heard it. A statement like a boy may become so defiled his parents would reject him is enough to set any boy shaking especially as Bob had already been rejected by his classmates. If a kid isn’t secure in his parents estimation who is he secure with? To me that statement was a terrific threat.
Defiled? Defiled? Bob might ask himself, I must be defiled but am I that defiled yet? I mean, why tell me Dad? I mean, do you want me to leave now? Crap like that going on for seventeen years or so would make you afraid of any parent. I could learn to hate a guy like that.
Judging from appearances Bob’s subsequent life seems to have been to determine how defiled he could be before everyone would turn away from him. What kind of test would it be? Getting drunk at midday and collapsing in your own vomit in the middle of the Minnesota campus? Was that enough? No. Bonnie Beecher didn’t deny him; she showed her love. The question there is how it is Bob collapsed where Bonnie would likely be? Coincidence? Nah. It wouldn’t taken too much to know her class assignments and be in the the appropriate place. Maybe planned, maybe not. We won’t know unless Bob tells us.
Bob’s whole career from that point on seems to consist of tests to see how much others will endure before they disown him. I mean, think about it. What kind of character does it take to offend his fans with noise you know beyond doubt they don’t want to hear, to go on doing it when you know they are going to go on booing you unmercifully? Bob did this around the world and was booed round the world. Amazingly his fans didn’t desert him but continued to show up if for no other reason than to boo him. Bob wasn’t too defiled for his fans, was he? They continued to accept anything he did.
Of course he lost a few of these contests. Suze Rotolo for instance. Bob was just too much for her mother and sister if not Suze herself. Otherwise the boy forced the world to take him on his own terms. Defilement was the issue between him and his dad. Bob seems to have won that particular defilement issue too.
Did he do time at Red Wing or not? RM and I both think he did. I agree with RM that the lyrics to Walls Of Redwing sound like authentic although very generalized experience. The Minnesota DOC (Department Of Corrections) says on one of their websites that Bob Dylan was never incarcerated at Red Wing. Maybe not. But if Bob Dylan wasn’t how about Robert Zimmerman? There is not doubt however that he was incarcerated somewhere. Wherever that was records must exist.
I believe that if one has the key all Bob’s lyrics ’64-66 will be found to be autobiographical. Why should Bob be different than any other writer? All writers are autobiographical. What else can they be? Thus in relation to Red Wing if RM doesn’t have the right slant the song has to relate to Bob’s life in some way, and some way that goes back to before he left Hibbing. The title Highway 61 Revisited has to have that exact meaning. Bob is revisiting Highway 61 whatever meaning the phrase has for him. RM’s understanding of the following lyrics seems brilliant to me whether it turns out Bob did his time at Red Wing or not. Remember it is certain that he did time somewhere, that is not the question. If the song does not physically describe Red Wing then the ‘country club’ in Philadelphia must.
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man you must be puttin’ me on.”
God say. “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”
RM goes on: Red Wing is DIRECTLY on Highway 61 separated only by a barbed wire fence. Thus, Bob may have experienced his incarceration as a form of psychological death for which he held his father, Abe, responsible. Highway 61 as I see it has no signficance otherwise. The Civil Rights stuff going on in the South couldn’t possibly have figured largely in Bob’s imagination besides it had nothing to do with killing a son.
Consider also these lines from Chimes of Freedom:
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking track
For the lonesome hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
As we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Starry eyed and laughing, as I recall, when we were caught…
I think those lines can be related back to Highway 61 and the crime for which the ‘unharmful gentle soul’ Bob paid. The last line would imply that he and Echo? were caught together. That sounds like a burglary or break-in.
Another word on possible influences for Highway 61.
While both Folk and Pop music were important to the era, equally as important, possibly more so, were the Comedy records. The late fifties and early sixties were the golden age of comedy LPs. The three most important were Bob Newhart, The Smothers Brothers and Shelley Berman. These three were huge. Trailing behind them were Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Allan Sherman, Jose Jimenez and a couple others.
Newhart and the Smothers would have have had the most direct influence on Bob at this time. Both artists did monologues or dialogues of an historical nature. The Smothers Brothers were, of course, a comedy Folk act. Overwhelming in their appeal. We were all blown out of the saddle by these comedy records that seemed so nouveau and groundbreaking that they could easily be seen as the Chimes of Freedom flashing. Thus the first verse of Highway 61 can be seen as a comedic takeoff on God, Abraham, and Isaac a la Newhart or the Smothers.
After the first and obviously key verse that deals with the Son and father, Abe, Bob cobbles some historical verses together. Mack the Finger (Knife) and Louie (XIV) the king. Verse two deals with Jesse James:
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down Highway 61.
As we all know Bob Ford was the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, the name Jesse James was living under at the time. I think we can chalk Highway 61 up as an attempt to emulate the Smothers and Newhart along with Bob’s other needs. Think about Desolation Row as a comedy routine.
If one does want to really understand the early sixties it is essential to be familiar with Newhart, the Smothers and Shelley Berman. Still good stuff too.
Bob would have been released from the reformatory just in time to leave for U. Minnesota. One can only imagine his state of mind as he left for Minnesota as the defiled son. He began by testing everyone. As a nobody there were few who would put up with his antics. We can’t be sure how far he would go with his antics or exactly what he would have done. If the scene with Bonnie Beecher is any indication he had pretty wide parameters to work within. He claimed that in New York he hustled, that is sold his behind as a male prostitute. Did he? I don’t know but having consciously established himself as a liar or teller of tall tales he could tell any preposterous truth and not be taken seriously. Thus he would be able to get such things off his chest while being disbelieved. Hustling would probably be a form of defilement that would offend his father. He told the journalist Al Aronowitz that he had done time in Red Wing. Why would anyone tell stories that were reputation destroyers?
Testing people is one thing, of course, but would a guy who puked all over himself and lay down in the middle of campus balk at hustling in NYC? You tell me.
Through ’66 Bob exhibited all the characteristics of the man walking up and down the boulevard of broken dreams. Everything in his life was broken down. He was apparently filthy and unkempt. Many people refer to his complete lack of hygiene. They use such emphatic terms as Bob must have been avoiding soap and water. Hygiene, he didn’t have any.
Except for the brief honeymoon period with Sara after his acident he always affected a bum or hobo like character. He even called his recording studio, Rundown Studios. The pain lived on in his heart as a steady downpour. He made his environment reflect the shambles in his mind. He had mixed up confusion and man it was killing him. He built a multi-million dollar house and then made it look like a junkyard.
He made one attempt to escape the Boulevard. There is some question as to the seriousness of the motorcycle accident. There seems to be evidence that he wasn’t seriously hurt if hurt at all. I think that after Blonde On Blonde his initial torment was spent. At best Grossman was working him so hard, setting up the next grueling tour that as Bob said if he had gone on it would have been the death of him so he opted out, took some much needed time off to recover.
During the brief period of recuperation he seems to have calmed down somewhat. If the photos of Elliot Landy are accurate evidence,
http://www.landyvision.com he seems to have cleaned up his act trying to be the good country squire for Sara. The photos look as though he were bathing and wearing clean clothes. It couldn’t last. His inner devastated compulsion urged him on. At some point he must have decided how much defilement Sara would take before he could drive her away.
Lord, how he tried that woman’s soul. Bob was shameless beyond belief. She finally threw in the towel when she came to breakfast to find Bob eating with another woman.
In the divorce proceedings she claimed she was in fear of her physical well being, that Bob had offered her physical violence. It is quite possible that after years of drug and alcohol abuse Bob’s decency was so lowered that he did offer her violence. Perhaps he was then visiting the violence on her that RM thinks his father dealt him. Perhaps he was only trying to see exactly how much defilement she would take before checking out. Perhaps Bob merely wanted Sara to be as defiled as himself so that they would be equals.
Bob cruelly shattered the poor woman’s life. After standing by him through terrific emotional abuse Bob had the audacity to remonstrate ‘But people in my family just don’t get divorced. Chutzpah on a stick. Didn’t he even care what the effect on his children would be? Hard to feel sorry for ya, Bob.
Bob punished himself to the tune of many millions of dollars. It must have hurt so good. Balm for a wounded soul. Not satisfied Bob had another brief marriage bestowing additional millions on that wife. These sexual adventures compelled him to work non-stop to support his various establishments. It isn’t cheap being Bob Dylan. A life style was forced on him that required vast sums, perhaps millions a year to maintain.
Thus Bob laughed tonight and cried tomorrow when he beheld his shattered dreams, but no matter how defiled Bob was he was holding his own in the war. Everything was still broken down, rundown, second hand Rose but then for the psychological type, Only A Hobo, there’s a certain pleasure in that.
End.
e
A Review: Exhuming Bob 3: Weird Old Greil Marcus
January 17, 2008
A Review
Exhuming Bob 3
Weird Old Greil Marcus
by
R.E. Prindle
We have a very interesting phenomenon here. Greil Marcus is technically a non-fiction writer. I don’t know if I can fully agree with that. I think I would classify him as a fiction writer using a non-fiction base. I always have the feeling of reading a novel. That’s not bad but it’s not non-fiction. This is nowhere more evident than in his amusing The Old Weird America.
The interesting thing is that he has managed to convince his readers that his personal vision of Al Capp’s Dog Patch is in reality true, or factual. Yes, I’m afraid Greil’s vision of America falls into the Anglo-Saxon baiting genre I noted in my essay Exhuming Bob 2-2: Detourning The Folks. In this effort Greil continues to make a specific minority of people look goofy damning the whole people in the process.
In this respect he is reminiscent of the movies of Adam Sandler and Steven Seagal. Both of these Jewish actors, Greil is Jewish of course, constantly put down non-Jews in their movie roles. In Fire Down Below Seagal goes into the hills of old Kaintuck to show the Anglo-Saxon Hillbillies how to stand up for theyselves.
Part of Greil’s success is that the majority of his readers seemingly are as unfamiliar with country music as he is. As I pointed out in Exhuming Bob 2-2 the majority of White Americans despise, to use the old and correct term, Hillbilly music.
That is what the performers on Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music are. In a country of, shall we say, unusual ethnic musics it is difficult to understand why Hillbilly music should be considered quintessentially weird. Actually I’ve already explained it in Bob 2-2 but we’ll ignore that. Certainly the Country Blues of the Blacks, which is not so distant from Hillbilly, the Blacks had to learn somewhere and where closer than their Southern roots, is virtually unlistenable music. It take a lot of good will toward Negroes to sit through that stuff and that goes for the majority of Black Gospel.
The Klezmer music of Greil’s own Jews is some of the least listenable stuff available. If you want weird try Klezmer music of Weird Old Judaism. I could go on but I won’t.
The problem with greil’s reverence for Harry Smith is that he lacks background while having no real appreciation for the music. It’s too weird. Some of my ancestors came down from the hills of old Kaintuck so I was raised on Hillbilly music. I know most of the tunes of Harry’s Anthology without ever having heard the records. I mean, this stuff used to be played on the radio. Back in 1950 there wasn’t really all that much else to play. Heck, even guys like Hank Snow and Webb Pierce were just getting started. The great Hillbilly recordings of the fifties were still in the future. The world of the LP hadn’t even been thought of yet. 45 RPM records were introduced only in 1949 although they caught on fast. I remember the first spindle I ever saw with amazement yet. You just bought a spindle to connect to your radio. Amazing innovation. Unlike 78s, 45s didn’t break when you looked at them.
So, really, as far as Hillbilly went back then there wasn’t much else to listen to other than the stuff Harry collected. Patsy Montana’s I Want To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart could easily have made Harry’s collection if it had fit his particular psychosis. I mean, really, the guy was straining it, booze, drugs and all; living on the same street Greil Marcus would live on. That could unsettle an intellect…or two.
By the time Greil got hold of Harry’s compendium he was four or five times removed from the music, maybe more. He never talks about remembering Lonnie Donnegan so I don’t know if he knows him but Lonnie sang a lot of stuff as ‘weird’ as anything Harry Smith ever collected. I’ll even go on record as saying that old Lon was the greatest recording singer who ever lived. Yes, Sir, I would say that. He was that good.
Greil has Bob down in the basement mixin’ up the medicine at Big Pink which he surely was. Now, Bob goes back musically almost as far as I do.
He grew up in the same kind of semi-rural backwater. I mean, Little Jimmy Dickens held down the quarter hour Hillbilly show at noon right after the farm report on our local station. Little Jimmy was definitely Harry material if he had fit Harry’s psychosis. Little Jimmy sang such humorous, but ain’t they true, though sad songs, rueful actually, such as Take An Old Cold Tater And Wait and Sleepin’ At The Foot Of The Bed. I’ve been there done both those things so I didn’t think they was so weird. I knowed how it felt.
Having access to the same kind of midwest mega blaster radio stations that I had I’m sure Bob didn’t need Harry’s memorable compendium to give him any roots although he sure goes on like he did. Still, I think anyone who could sing Accentuate The Positive at four didn’t need Harry to give himself much help. There’s musical stuff going on in Bob Dylan’s mind that he cain’t even remember. I mean, that there boy’s got roots, roots down below the roots where they don’t even show and there ain’t nobody can never convince me other wise. Weird Old Bob they usta call him. Weird Old America. Weird Old Greil Marcus. Weird Old…well, just plain weird and old. I’ve been to both places and I’ll take weird over old. There, I said it and I ain’t sorry for it either and I ain’t goin’ ta ‘pologize to nobody neither. Don’t ask.
So, in point of fact bob’s got some weird old stuff running ’round his mind mixed in with the cocaine or whatever. Bob had seen a lot of movies. Weird Old Cinema, read some Weird Old Books. Weird old American stuff. Weird Old Jewish stuff; Bob was just into weird I guess. Sounds like it some times if you listen real close.
Greil locked onto this weird thing and began to run with it. Tom Wolfe did it lots better though. What was it the Tangerine Flake something or other. I can see the influence of Wolfe on Greil even if it’s not there. Remember that piece about the stock car driver? Compare that with Greil’s handling of Dock Boggs. There’s some real similarities there or I ain’t as weird as I usta be. Still just a Hillbilly boy though. You knowed that though didn’t yuh. I always like it in those hillbilly sharecropper movies when you can tell you’re dealing with real rural types when they say ‘knowed’ even though they look like they have a luxury apartment on Wilshire Blvd. I knowed that when I fust seen him. Yes, Sir, I did.
Greil creates this novelistic atmosphere out of his material but he doesn’t have the feel of the material. What did Bob say? Everything is phony. Actually Bob portrays himself as a better hick in Chronicles Vol. I. Some his book is OK.
So, really, I think Greil should have written after a couple of hours of reading Tom Wolfe. While the glow lasted he might have turned out some hot stuff; wouldn’t sounded any more authentic but the heat would have covered up the lack of authenticity.
Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Baby was pretty flashy but its a lot harder to do than it looks, even Tom Wolfe couldn’t keep it up but when he was hot he was hot like with that Hillbilly stock car driver. Loved it.
Even though Greil has made a terrific impact with Weird Old America very successfully detourning the image of Anglo-Saxon America in the direction he wanted it to go I’m afraid I’m going to have to give him his second C. If he had wanted to be more convincing he should have gone back to them hills of old Kaintuck and immersed himself in the culture for a weekend and made it his own. They got some snappy new modern motels now although yu can still find the old cabins if yu really want to do it up authentic.
End.
Book II-2 Something Of Value
January 11, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II-2
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
Your world is out of step in the planetary procession.
– Book Of Urantia
The melting of the ice caps threw the evolutionary world out of equilibrium. As the peoples fled, who can now be called Libyans, they bumped into populations settled in what were formerly the highlands. In Egypt this caused a confrontation with the Upper Egyptians that may have lasted a couple millennia or more until the Libyans of Lower Egypt were conquered by the Upper Egyptians uniting the Two Lands.
No one knows what took place on Crete which may already have been part of the Basin civilization while it is possible that the Cretans spread the Basin civilization to Pelasgia on the mainland.
Probably North Africa including Egypt and Crete received the bulk of the emigrants. Smaller numbers unable to hold their own obviously settled in the Levant and adjacent areas. The wonderful temples of Catul Huyuk dated to 6500 B.C. must have been built by the fleeing Libyans. These settlements may have later been overwhelmed by their savage neighbors. A group may have reached present day Hungary since this area seems to have been a hotbed of intelligence. Laurence Gardner in his interesting series of books believes writing originated there from whence migrants carried the knowledge to Sumer about- -4000. Might be true, timeframe is possible.
We tend to see such occurrences as History outside Darwinian evolution. Viewed from a perspective of Darwinian evolution what we have here is a clash of sub-species. Darwin poses this problem in his ‘Origin of Species.’
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species; and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.
With Homo Sapiens we will be able to see precisely why. The discussion I make will not be based on morality but on the exigencies of the battle of life. The sub-species of Homo Sapiens are part of the natural order engaged in the struggle for survival and not outside it. Altruistic ideas about the brotherhood of man are all very well but such ideas can be interpreted in different ways. For instance one might argue that we will all be brothers when all are Moslems; or, we will all be brothers when under Chinese hegemony. But it is doubtful that very many but the totally naive believe we are all brothers as things stand.
Many peoples who have existed no longer have an existence and it is certain that in the not too distant future many others are going to become as extinct as the legendary Dodo bird. That’s why people talk about being dumb as a Dodo, you Dodo, etc. So no sentimentality here.
The initial clash came between the Semites and the Sumerians. While the origin of the Sumerians is in doubt, as they had a proto-scientific civilization they were not Semites. However as they built up their civilization creating something from, as it were, nothing, envy will draw attention. The Semites of the desert attracted by this glittering something which far exceeded their own thinking began to infiltrate Sumeria.
As Darwin put it: How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another… The Sumerians chose to be tolerant with a people who are by nature intolerant. By the year -2000 or the beginning of the Age Of Aries the Semites had overrun and displaced the Sumerians. Sumerian institutions which had great allure for the Semites were not abandoned or destroyed but the Semites gutted the forms of their scientific content replacing it with their own brand of stasis.
At the Dawning of Aries according to Genesis a conflict arose between the Terachites and the Mesopotamians over the nature of God. It will be remembered that the transition of the Ages between Taurus and Aries in Greece saw the replacement of Cronus by Zeus. In Greek mythology this was represented as the battle between Zeus and the Titans. In Sumerian mythology it was represented by the killing of the Bull of Heaven by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Having succeeded in their heroic task the haunch of Taurus was made a constellation over the North Pole. In other words a remnant of the previous Age.
The Lugal Banda assumed the reins from the fourth king after the Flood. Now, we are led to believe that the Terachites under their Astrological genius Abram objected to the notion of Ages. Abram insisted that there was one god who was eternal. As the Old Order would not give on this point we are told that the overriding genius Abram and the Terachites were caused to flee for their lives. They wisely did, however they kept this idea alive for two thousand years becoming an ever greater cause of disturbance during the transit from Aries to Pisces.
Thus, one may say the battle was joined between the Astrological Religion and Semitic religious ideas. This battle is central to understanding world history. We will see a refinement of the Jewish position when Mohammed formulated his own even sillier religion.
Let us take a moment to examine the Semitic position. The question is not one of Jews and Arabs as the two are parts of the same stock, but that of Semites. The religions of Judaism and the Moslemism that Mohammed formulated are quite close. They both give their people preeminence amongst the peoples of the world and they both take an adamant position against change. The Jews wish to make their god sole and eternal while the Moslems hope to stop time and change by declaring Mohammed the last prophet and his word the last word. Vain hopes!
Now, in the seventh century the Moslems burst from the desert overrunning large areas of North Africa and Asia forcing their religion on the subject peoples. Some people, Bernard Lewis for one, fancy that this rule was liberal but that something went wrong a couple centuries later. Nothing went wrong from the Semitic point of view, everything went right. It merely took them that long to suppress the scientific and intellectual vitality of the subject peoples. The story was the same as in Sumer. Once in control they suppressed science and knowledge in favor of their projection of Allah or his early formulation as the god of stasis.
Edgar Rice Burroughs recognized this in a passage of Tarzan Of The Apes that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Archimedes Q. Porter and Mr. Philander are walking down the beach apparently discussing the Alhambra and the Moors in Spain. Philander’s was a stock argument still current in my childhood and apparently still current with scholars of the stripe of Bernard Lewis.
Samuel T. Philander is speaking:
‘But, my dear professor,’ he was saying, ‘I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth century Moors in Spain the world would be to-day a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves.’
‘The Moors were essentially a tolerant, broad minded, liberal race of agriculturists, artisans and merchants- the very type of people that has made possible such civilization as we find in America and Europe- while the Spaniards-‘
‘Tut, tut, Mr. Philander,’ interrupted Professor Porter, ‘their religion positively precluded the possibilities you suggest. Moslemism was, is, and always will be a blight on that scientific progress which has marked…
Before 9/11 a reader might have skimmed over that passage without a remark but the Twin Towers have given it a new significance. Burroughs presciently put his finger on the Moslem problem that is its antipathy to science; to that knowledge that contradicts the word of Allah as imparted to Mohammed sitting on a rock baking in the hot desert sun.
Mr. Philander voices the received wisdom of society as it existed down to my childhood while if Mr. Bernard Lewis and his ‘something went wrong’ is representative of the present is still current today.
Burroughs through the mouth of Professor Porter boldly contradicts the almost universal opinion. Furthermore he is right as events have amply proven. ‘Moslemism was, is and always will be a blight on…scientific progress.’
Moslemism per se is a tool of the Semites in their bid for universal dominion as per Darwin. The Semite ever was and always will be opposed to any science that denies him that role. The Science of Bruce Lahn and genetics have driven that last nail in the Semitic coffin.
The Semite then as now seeks to arrest the development of knowledge and intelligence keeping things perpetually in stasis.
When Sigmund Freud gave us Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego the coupling of the two states means that there is a group ego and that it can be analyzed. A group, any group, has its objectives and goals for which it creates an agenda it follows. The Semites as a whole, both Jews, Arabs and others form a psychological group with objectives and goals. Therefore their group psychology can be analyzed.
Their methods and ways and means can be analyzed. As Freud indicates, such an analysis does not constitute bigotry or ‘hate.’ It is just scholarship. I didn’t mean to interrupt my narrative but I felt it was time to clear the air on that issue especially in light of what is happening to Mr. Le Pen in France.
Now, the Semite has a fear of being overwhelmed by numbers and being relegated to the dust bin of history. They wish preeminence. They realize wishful thinking won’t obtain it for them. It takes action. The year -2000 is when that action began in earnest.
First the Semites overran Sumer subordinating the people and its culture to Semitic ideals of Stasis.
I personally do not believe the Jewish account in Genesis. I believe that the Hebrews, as their Northwest Semitic dialect indicates, were located far to the West and North before they descended on Palestine. The whole of the first eleven books of Genesis must have been concocted from Mesopotamian records studied during the captivity after -586.
So I will not consider a Jewish influence before the final invasion of Palestine c. -1200.
After the investing of Sumer and the acquisition of Mesopotamia conflicts between the sub-species became more frequent. In the Darwinian sense the sub-special contest for dominance had begun. As Darwin stated: ‘We can see…why competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature…’
First Pharaoh toured the East disturbing the peoples, then the Hittites and Greeks entered civilization. The Asians countered by invading the Delta which was a long occupation before they were driven out.
The contest between the Semites and Egyptians was between HSII and the Semites. That of the Hittites was between the Semites and HS III. That of the Greeks between HSII and HS III and then as the Greeks and Semites clashed moving in the opposite direction between HS III and Semites.
As Greek legend tells it, the Semitic king, Agenor, had three sons (read surplus population) which he sent to populate new areas. One went to Cilicia in Asia Minor, another went to Crete while the third, Cadmus settled at Thebes in mainland Greece. This provoked a major war to eject them. Just before the assault on Troy the Argives waged a two generation war to eject the Semites, or sub-species competitors, that was commemorated in the legend of the Seven Against Thebes. Sarpedon, the son of Agenor, was also expelled from Crete returning to the mainland.
Subsequent to Troy the Greeks invaded and occupied the Anatolian littoral also occupying Crete and Cypress. The Aegean became an HSIII lake.
The Semites meanwhile threw out colonies from Phoenicia from whence came Agenor. The most famous was the Semitic power of Carthage which was to come into conflict with both Greeks and HSII Romans. The Semitic Assyrians who had become the paramount power in Asia found the strength to smash Egypt which terminated that ancient HSII nation as a power. The Assyrians and Babylonians were in their turn brought low by the HSIII Persians who seemed to have been or were assimilated by the Semitic culture.
Then the Macedonians organized a terrific military campaign under Alexander and his HSIII Greeks and Macedonians overran the entire Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander died at the end of the conquest which broke theEast into three Hellenic kingdoms. A Macedonian, a Greek kingdom, the kingdom of the Seleucids in Asia and the kingdom of Ptolemy in Egypt. For the moment than the HSIII were dominant.
The Hellenic culture was so attractive that the majority had no problem adapting to it. The Semites seemed pleased to act HSIII. Then, as Bernard Lewis might say, ‘Something went wrong.’ As might be expected there were Semitic dissenters.
Chief among these were the Jews. The Jews since their alleged expulsion from Ur had been active. Colonies of Jews had been established in all the major cities which transferred the struggle from the military to the religious sphere. Unlike today, at that time the Jews were active proselytizers.
They set themselves up as a quasi-empire in Jerusalem not unlike the later Roman Catholic Church based in Rome, in fact as the Roman Catholic Church is quasi-Semitic, Jerusalem probably served as the model. Tithes flowed from every part of the Mediterranean into the coffers at Jerusalem just as they later would to Medieval Rome.
The Jews fought the Seleucids to a standstill but then the really Big Boys entered the picture. The Romans had already disposed of the Semitic Carthaginians but now the Semitic Jews established colonies everywhere in the Empire including Rome itself. The chief authority for this period is the Jewish traitor Josephus. Burroughs had a copy of the works in his library.
So as the Age of Aries drew to a close the Mediterranean was under the military domination of the HSII Romans while the cultural and religious sphere was dominated by HSIII Greeks and Semitic Jews.
Just as the transition from the Taurean Age to the Arien Age was fraught with wars so now the transition from Aries to Pisces was blighted by a major conflict between HSII, HSIII and the Semites. As you may note the transition between Pisces and Aquarius is being fraught with a major war between the Semites and the rest of the world.
Much of the nonsense of the Jewish War can be explained by the notion that the Astrological Age change was the literal end of the world. When Jesus spoke of the end times he wasn’t being vague, he meant right then. The Jews on Masada could never have killed themselves if they hadn’t believed that they were going to rise up within the next few days and come into their inheritance. Poor deluded people, their successors probably won’t make that mistake again.
The terrific war with unbelievable bloodshed continued from 66 BC to 135 AD when with the defeat of Bar Kochba the Jews threw in the towel. Peace is just war conducted by other means as the famous General said.
2.
The Semitic Jews were defeated decisively in 135 AD. However the Kingdom of Heaven remained unconquered. The Jews had been proselytizing the Mediterranean world for centuries and not without success but it was slow work while having its limits. For too many people circumcision and the absurd dietary laws were an insuperable obstacle. Enter Saul/Paul to the rescue. There is no reason to take any of the legend of Paul too seriously. Stories like his are mere hagiography.
Suffice it to say that he discovered a way to turn the discredited Jewish messiah to account. Rather than making him the savior of the Jews he made him the savior of the world discarding the objectionable circumcision and the laughable dietary laws. Paul may have been a bigot but he wasn’t stupid.
What the Jews couldn’t accomplish on their own the hybrid Gentile-Jewish religion of Christianity did. The Semitic mentality was grafted unto the Gentile. Christianity was therefore repressive and bigoted. It is no accident that Freud made repression a centerpiece of his dogma.
Within only a couple centuries ‘something went wrong’ as Bernard Lewis would put it. Absolute Catholic orthodoxy was imposed which allowed for no further discussion or speculation. Anyone who questioned the central authority was run to earth and murdered, ‘exposed’ as a heretic and discountenanced in every way. It is interesting that Hitler is condemned for bookburning when these Semito-Catholics destroyed the greatest repository of ancient learning in a magnificent bonfire at the library in Alexandria. I doubt if any greater crime has ever been committed and that includes the so-called holocaust.
Thus just as in Sumer, when learning was crushed, everything was going right for the Semites. If Bernard Lewis weren’t a Semite he might see things somewhat differently.
The Semito-Catholics were still wrestling with stubborn dissidents when the ‘last of the prophets’ sat down on his rock amidst the burning sands to dictate his little notes and thoughts. Mohammed could neither read nor write. He still thought he could talk to God. God most have thought it was an amusing conversation. He’s probably still laughing.
The ‘brotherhood of man’ sure as heck isn’t.
I’m sure that Mohammed surveyed the scene, listened to the talk in the cafes, Semites complaining of how the nasty Gentiles prevented them from realizing the sovereignty of the world and how they had almost captured the whole ball of wax when by some dirty tricks they were defeated by the Romans. With a level playing field, you know, they would have won.
Undoubtedly they laughed because the stupid goyim were actually practicing Semitic religion and didn’t know it.
Judging from the results Mohammed thought that what the Jews lacked to realize the Semitic dream was a sufficient military arm to convert the goyim by force. The man did create an ideological force that when joined to the Arab military force was able to overrun North Africa, Persia and the Asian interior as well as parts of Asian Byzantium. By the end of the +eighth century the Moorish auxiliaries of the Arabs occupied Spain. So as this period ended the Semite sub-species in the Darwinian sense had imposed themselves on much of HSII, part of HSIII and large goegraphic areas controlled by the Mongolids. They were doing as well as those swallows would in the United States.
3.
Brief Interlude
…presumptuous attempts to conquer the outer world of appearances by the inner world of wishful thinking.
-S. Freud. Letter to Arnold Zweig 5/8/32 as quoted by Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying.
Time now for a little recapitulation, reflection and analysis. Regardless of that endlessly repeated dogma that no system of thought is better than another, everything is relative; noting is good or bad but thinking makes it so, etc. there are some signal differences between the Astrological Religion and the Semitic Religion; the latter stultifies while the former liberates into a glorious freedom. Which would you rather be, a stupid slave or an intelligent free man? Judging from all the chat about freedom we hear I’m going to assume your answer rather than wait for it. Free and intelligent, right?
Freud hit the nail on the head in the above quote. The Astrological Religion accepts the world of appearances and attempts to adjust to them, hence it has a scientific outlook. Astrology is based on a mistaken apprehension of reality which is why on the intellectual level it is no longer taken seriously. However the Astrolgical theory is based on a great many correct astronomical facts. Astro in both words refers to the stars. I’m sure the ancients would have expressed their hard won knowledge differently if they had had more accurate facts. It is all very well to sneer at Astrology as stupid but Astrology is not stupid. It is merely mistaken. Determining the Great Year is a tremendous discovery made by people who couldn’t read while having mastered the barest rudiments of language. Do not sneer at your ancestors; they can still tell you a thing or two.
Furthermore by dividing the Great Year into Ages they left room for the evolution of intelligence. If you study the transits carefully you will see that at each transit a revolution was necessary for the new age to come into existence. Thus our genius ancestors made certain that mankind would never stultify itself by being unable to grow.
Now compare this freedom loving program with that of the Semites with whom we are now contending for supremacy or, in Darwinian terms, survival as a species.
Beginning with the failed Semito-Jewish revolt at the beginning of the Age of Aries the Semitic doctrine has been opposed to any change. Their god is ‘eternal’ and unchanging. The Jews created a psychological projection based on their ‘inner world of wishful thinking’ as defined by their compatriot Sigmund Freud. Thus the Semitic religion is closed to innovation. There is no consideration of the world of appearances. The Jewish god, Yahvey must be offensive to any thinking person. Nor can the Jews dismiss criticism as ‘oh, that’s anti-Semitism.’ That’s one interpretation, another is why should anyone be stultified by a religion that promises nothing to anyone who is not by blood a Semite?
Think that over now, fellas.
The same is true of the Arab god, Allah. Allah is not even a projection of the Arab people being only the psychological projection of the inner world of wishful thinking of a demented Mohammed.
My god, man.
As with the Jews and their Eternal Yahvey Mohammed creates his own eternal god to supplant that of the Jews and then declares himself the final prophet beyond whom no further speculation is permitted. Mohammed wants to stop history in its tracks. Mohammed had probably never heard of science. As Edgar Rice Burroughs pointed out science never shows up in Mohammed’s doctrine.
Mohammed was able to stultify his own people and a very large percentage of mankind. Bernard Lewis is mystified about ‘what went wrong?’ I’m mystified by Bernard Lewis.
Religious speculation did go on in the West while Moslem children bobbed and weaved ‘studying’ the worthless psychological projecton of Mohammed’s called the Koran. Here’s a guy who learned to fool all the people all the time.
The West produced a wonderful succession of speculators working against the ever vigilant Semito-Catholic Church. Paracelsus, Meister Eckehardt, Jacob Boehm, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth century Spiritualists including the incredible Madame Helena Blavatsky. Arising from all these is an astounding organization dating from 1955 in Chicago called Urantia.
Check this out: The Book Of Urantia claims his paper was presented by:
…a divine counselor, a member of the group of celestial personalities assigned by the Ancient of Days on Uversa, the headquarters of the seventh superuniverse, to supervise those portions of these forthcoming revelations which have to do with affairs beyond the borders of the local universe of Nebadon. I am commissioned to announce these papers portraying the nature and attributes of God because I represent the highest source of information available for such a purpose on any inhabited world. I have served as a Divine Counselor in all seven of the superuniverses and have long resided at the Paradise center of all things. Many times have I enjoyed the supreme pleasure of a sojourn in the immediate personal presence of the Universal Father. I portray the reality and truth of the Father’s nature and attributes with unchallengable authority; I know whereof I speak.
The writer wisely pefers anonymity to revealing his ‘earthly’ identity. Makes you smile doesn’t it? Yet that writer in his Book of Urantia is intelligent and well read. Much more so than Moses or Mohammed but you refuse to believe his claims and rightly so. But then why do you give credence to the equally laughable Moses and Mohammed. Just because they lived a couple thousand years ago?
How can you accept the psychological projections of Yahveh and Allah as ‘real’ when you would laugh at anyone who believed Bran Stoker’s psychological projection of Dracula was real. Or, if you think Yahveh and Allah are real why should you not think that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection of Tarzan the Jungle God is not real?
Tarzan has as much reason to claim to be an extension of Dionysus as Jesus of nazareth. Now that the Age of Aquarius is dawning why shouldn’t this exemplar of Dionysus be the religious archetype of the Age of Aquarius and Edgar Rice Burroughs his prophet?
Tarzan’s world is based on scientific conceptions and their developments thus there is room to grow. Rather than being reserved for the so-called elect of God which excludes those of us who are not Semites any of us can aspire to be as Tarzan- a healthy mind in a healthy body. If you want to be a hulk, with application you can turn yourself into one. We can be men like gods if we elect or we can be stultified cretins if we follow the Semitic path.
The Age of Aquarius will be ruled by the more free masculine side of Dionysus as the Age of Pisces was ruled by the gentle, loving feminine side of Dionysus. Tarzan as a psychological projection for us all is a perfect specimen; he is master of both his conscious and sub-conscious minds as well as master of his environment. Thus he moves freely in the world of appearances while being in control of his inner world of wishful thinking.
Tarzan is God and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet. Move over Mohammed.
Is that any less believable than Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet?
Think about it.
The next section should take us to the marriage of Burroughs and Emma.
Tarzan The Untamed
January 3, 2008
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#7 Tarzan The Untamed
By
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs seems to be searching for his sexual identity in Tarzan The Untamed. The untamed may refer to the notion that he may be married but Emma has not domesticated the roaring Lion Man.
On my first reading of the novel I merely picked up the surface story, that, to tell the truth, I don’t find very interesting perhaps even implausible and ridiculous. On the second and third readings however the story behind the story, ERB’s psychological dilemma begins to emerge coloring the story with interest.
The story even begins to assume a certain beauty, a poetic shimmer, that takes form as you stare into it. I began to relate Untamed to other novels and stories, that seemed to me to be related and partake of the same dilemma. I don’t know that I can successfully relate them to Untamed but I’ll give it a shot.
For the last few years shifting around in the back of my mind have been the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman. Just a moment ago as I write this I finished another tale of the German romantics, a charming story that I recommend highly, Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouque. And finally although this may be difficult to see Fyodor Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Untamed begins with the murder of Jane, Burroughs aspect of female sexuality, and Tarzan’s killing of the panther or his emasculated sexuality that manifests itself as a homosexual latency.
One then is led to believe that by killing sexual desire Tarzan or ERB believes that he has eliminated the troubling sexual ambivalence of his character. Yet, just a few pages on they flicker to life again in the character of the putative German spy Bertha Kircher. Tarzan first sees Kircher as a woman in the German camp so grasping at the obvious he assumes that she is a German spy. He doesn’t realize and we won’t be told until the end of the story that she is a double agent. In reality she is an English spy posing as a German spy. There’s a complexity there that eludes me at the moment.
She is thus introduced to Tarzan as a woman. The next time he sees her is as a man disguised as a British agent in the English camp. He doesn’t recognize her although he know he has seen him somewhere before. Thus the old sexual ambivalence resurfaces. In what seems to be your standard adventure story delicate psychological nuances begin to flicker around the action story like St. Elmo’s Fire. No matter what the surface story is about the secondary story is about something else.
La Motte Fouque in his Undine also addresses the problem of a man faced with a sexual dilemma that lies within. The path is clear for the hero, Huldbrand, it is only his own weakness that creates the problem for him. In Huldbrand’s case his decision is between two women amidst elemental forces of nature that contrast with the elemental human nature. Undine is a story of astonishing beauty that I can only slaughter in interpreting . I highly recommend you read it. For those deeply into fantasy you will find Undine as fantastic as anything you have ever read; for those into myth and fairytale it is a masterpiece of the kind. Anyone who reads around in this area will have heard it mentioned. I have known of the title for many years but recently in my researches into H.G. Wells it was mentioned that Undine was a favorite of his. I thought it necessary background so I added this gorgeous story to my memory stacks. I should have waited so long; it is a superb Anima-Animus story.
In the December 14th ERBzine George McWhorter provided a list of a few post-WWII books that ERB read. As ERB titles the list, a few of the books he has read, and the list is astonishingly long from a few one can only guess that ERB’s full list must have a couple hundred or more. As reading was a lifelong habit for him and if he consumed titles at that voracious pace then it is truly difficult to guess how many books he read from, say, 1888 to 1910 just before he began writing. Of course his potential list to select from before 1910 was much shorter than ours is today. Titles as obscure today as Undine were relatively well known then. I may be wrong but I pick up hints of Crime and Punishment in ERB’s corpus from time to time. Certainly by his WWII list he had crime on his mind.
We do know that the stories that disappeared into his capacious mind from the period before 1910 gestated for decades in the back of his mind finally finding expression thirty or forty years later. I’m thinking of George W.M. Reynold’s Mysteries Of The Court Of London that burst forth in the 1938 version of The Lad And The Lion. So while I can’t say for certain that ERB read these three authors there is a certain wistfulness and fairy tale quality to the story of Tarzan, Bertha Kircher and Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick that reminds one of the three authors that I have mixed up with Untamed.
So, a woman named Bertalda sends the knight Huldbrand into the elemental forest to prove his love for her. Thus Huldbrand goes to a destiny he never imagined. In the sense of C.G. Jung’s collective unconscious which as I interpret as a set of symbols common to the Western mind, Burroughs also sends Tarzan and his two sexual identities into the elemental jungles of Africa.
La Motte-Fouque invents the water spirit Kuhleborn to forward the action. The presence of so much water indicates that the action takes place in the subconscious of Huldbrand.
Water plays a very different role in Burroughs’ story. In his tale Tarzan braves a watered land to traverse eight very deep and steep ravines that become progressively drier until in the last he almost dies of thirst. As Burroughs’ story covers the four years in his life from late 1914 until mid-1919 one may assume that he had eight bouts of progressively severe depression the eighth and last occurring as he writes his story.
On the other side of the last canyon the well watered jungle begins again. Thus the main story of Tarzan, Bertha and Smith-Oldwick takes place on the edges of the forest and a meadow.
In La Motte-Fouque’s story the elements had set up the conflict from the beginning. As we are told Kuhleborn stole the baby Bertalda away from her parents in an apparent drowning. He then restored a child to the bereaved parents with the child Undine who was actually a water sprite. Bertalda was left by the side of the road where a noble couple found and adopted her. She is the lost daughter of the now aged couple of Undine’s adoptive parents to which Kuhleborn now leads Huldbrand.
Undine’s parents live on an isolated peninsula. As soon as the storm drives Huldbrand to the peninsula the elemental Kuhleborn in the form of a raging torrent turns the peninsula into an island from which there is no escaping. Huldbrand and Undine are thus thrown together. Elemental spirits have no souls. This notion would certainly have had great appeal for Burroughs for whom men without souls was a preoccupation. Undine can only acquire a soul, which she greatly longs for, from the love of a man who has one. She therefore in effect seduces Huldbrand. Kuhleborn disapproves but as to a point Undine’s magic is stronger than his he is reluctantly forced to accede on certain conditions.
A wandering priest is tossed up on shore by Kuhleborn who ties the knot for Undine and Huldbrand. They return to civilization and Berthalda where the conflict between a human woman with a soul and a water sprite without one puts Huldbrand to the test.
So Tarzan who is first associated with Bertha Kircher is once again presented with his emasculation conflict when Smith-Oldwick appears in the picture. The name Smith occurs in Burroughs’ work with some frequency while Old-wick may have sexual connotations unless I’m being too Freudian.
Before Smith-Oldwick does appear Tarzan has to cross the continent from East to West. His wish is to return to his father’s cabin, build an addition or two to make it more roomy and comfortable then settle in as a sort of gentleman farmer. Ah, to be so world weary. And yet that is what Burroughs is about to do.
In a rather remarkable episode Tarzan is crossing Africa when he comes upon Bertha Kircher out there somewhere. He takes her captive but for some unknown reason doesn’t relieve her of the pistol at her side. Even stranger he walks along in front of his captive. Bertha not slow to grasp an opportunity reaches up and lays the butt of her pistol alongside the back of the Big Fella’s head. There’s one bash in the head so far.
Bertha takes off for the railroad leaving Tarzan lying face down in the trail. As he lies Sheeta the panther comes upon him. This presents a sexual problem difficult of analysis. Does it mean that Tarzan is unaware of his attraction to Bertha or what? Tarzan is all but dead as Sheeta prepares to spring on him when who should appear but the Lion whose will Tarzan broke earlier in the story. Now totally devoted to his oppressor he kills Sheeta. Tarzan regains consciousness to find himself nose to nose with Numa. Reminds you of that horrid joke Hillman told a while back about the elephant. In this case it was the same lion.
So the Lion and Tarzan are united in spirit. Tarzan is not yet known as the Lion Man but he will be. In any event the Lion is a guardian spirit for him. In the second book after this one, perhaps reflecting this lion Tarzan will raise and tame the Golden Lion who will be his helpmate and guardian angel. I suspect that the lions Tarzan kills would have been tigers if someone hadn’t objected to the fact that there are no tigers in Africa. In some ways panthers are substitutes for the tiger.
Relieved to find that this lion is his lion Tarzan gets up giving the lion a pat and then trots off down the trail in search of Bertha. In a sort of hobo flashback Bertha finds the train line and hops a freight a few steps ahead of the White Ape. Tarzan misses the connection so we find him forsaking the middle terraces for a trudge down the tracks into town.
I don’t know how many people find these two sequences funny but I do.
Tarzan loses track of Bertha so he begins the long walk to Gabon. Here he has to traverse the eight deep canyons. These canyons have vertical walls while being very deep so that even for the Ape Man these thing become too difficult. Each crevasse gets drier and drier so Tarzan gets weaker and weaker being deprived of, as it were, the feminine water of life. By the time he hits the eighth canyon he is spent. I mean, he has had it. This may be as close to death as the Great Tarmangani has ever come.
He lays down in a manner that indicates he will never get up. The chapter is titled Blood Will Out. A little double entendre. A vulture descends to wait for his meal to die. Instead Tarzan grabs the vulture by the neck sinking his strong white teeth into it throat. Here’s the joke: Blood Will Out. Tarzan’s inherited greatness appears while the vulture’s blood saves his life. Tarzan sucks the vulture dry gaining liquid refreshment while eating the flesh. He now has just enough strength to climb out. He discovers he has crossed the desert and is now in a watered land.
One may assume then that Burroughs has fought off several bouts of severe depression from 1914 to 1919.
Back up on the surface he discover Bertha Kircher in the possession of a Black German trooper. At the same time Smith-Oldwick is flying on a reconnaissance mission when he develops engine trouble landing in a meadow. He whips out his monkey wrench, fixes the problem but before he can take off he is captured by the locals.
Thus he Tarzan and Bertha are brought together. So Tarzan having thought he had resolved his sexual hang-ups at the beginning of the book now learns he hasn’t. The old ambivalence returns in the persons of Bertha and Percy Smith-Oldwick.
In a series of interesting adventures the three Whites are brought together. Tarzan’s male figure falls in love with Bertha. The plane is relocated. An adventure with Usanga the Black German soldier intervenes that is not germane here. Tarzan’s intention is still to go off alone to his father’s cabin so he sees Smith-Oldwick and Bertha off as they begin the flight back to Kenya. Thus we have a second resolution to Burroughs’ sexual dilemma. He packs his sexual problems in a plane and flies them off higher above him than he is high above his daily cares in the trees. He is seen standing in a tree safely above it all watching the plane disappear into the distance. The plane is soaring very high over the tree tops when it takes a dive back to earth. Thus that dream of Burroughs’ getting rid of his ambivalence crashes.
Even this attempt to resolve his sexual dilemma is doomed to failure. He can’t abandon the two so he starts back into the desert from which he almost met his death. His sexual ambivalence has landed in the eighth and most desolate canyon. Undaunted Tarzan returns to near certain death to resolve his problem. The three are in an impossible situation from which it appears that there is no escape.
There he learns that a very unintelligent vulture had apparently mistaken the plane for a dead something. Descending on it the vulture became entangled in the propeller. Never one to lose a chance to bash someone/anyone on the head Burroughs has the bird break a piece of the propeller loose that bashes Smith-Oldwick in the forehead. The bashing definitely establishes Smith-Oldwick as Burroughs’ sexual alter-ego as he presumably now has the same scar on his forehead that both Burroughs and Tarzan sport.
The vulture is an ancient symbol of the mother. One can’t be too sure how aware Burroughs may have been of this but in the Jungian sense of the collective unconscious the symbol would have or may have suggested itself from the common fund. As a student of Africa Burroughs would certainly have had plenty of time to consider vultures especially as his idol Rider Haggard includes vultures in most of his African novels.
If Burroughs is using the vulture as a symbol for his mother that opens the interesting problem of what exactly his relationship to his mother was. First Tarzan strangles, drinks the blood and eats the flesh of the vulture, with perhaps a very sly joke of blood will out, and then the vulture attacks his sexual identity destroying any chance Burroughs may have had of successfully resolving the issue. I merely raise the point.
Having been bashed but not knocked unconscious Smith-Oldwick recovers in time to ease that airplane down. Tarzan arrives but there seems to be no hope of the three leaving the canyon alive.
At this point the residents of the lost civilization of Xuja capture them. Once again not germane to my point here after a series of very interesting hair raising adventures the trio is rescued by some British troops searching for Smith-Oldwick.
Burroughs and Tarzan still have to resolve the sexual dilemma.
The rescue officer advises Tarzan that Jane is not after all dead. This fact apparently resolves the problem for Tarzan. Bertha and Smith-Oldwick return to get married while Tarzan now psychically reunited with Jane returns to East Africa to begin the search for Pal-Ul-Don rather than returning to his father’s cabin.
We don’t know where this leaves Burroughs in August of 1919, more or less the anniversary of the beginning of the Great War in 1914, when he finished the book. We don’t know what his relations with Emma were except that possibly they had reached an accord psychologically.
The story began in Tarzan’s mythical Africa during the War. In the novel the story must take place in 1914-15 but in real life the war ended in November of 1918. This probably coincides with Tarzan drifting off from East Africa back West to Gabon. At the same time in real life Burroughs left Chicago in January 1919 moving West to Los Angeles.
So the village of Usanga in the middle of Africa must represent Chicago. The lost city of Xuja that is located in a desert valley watered by canals brought from a distance must represent the move to LA. So that Burroughs is recording his sexual dilemma and also the move from Chicago to LA against the background of the Great War. Pretty nifty footwork.
He and Emma must have been together as it is very difficult to believe he would have absented himself from her and Tarzana so that this long separation of Tarzan from Jane must represent a mental estrangement from Emma. Perhaps the strain of the move was more than she could bear.
In the next novel Tarzan The Terrible Tarzan makes the long trek to the lost land of Pal-Ul-Don in search of Jane. While the succeeding novel Tarzan And The Golden Lion opens with Jane, Jack and Tarzan returning from Pal-Ul-Don reunited again. At that time there is a distinct coolness between Tarzan and Jane. Whatever reconciliation took place between Emma and Burroughs it was less than satisfactory on Burroughs’ side.
In Golden Lion the two discover a lion cub on the trail that Tarzan takes home to raise as the Golden Lion. The Lion is always cool toward Jane while seeming to protect Tarzan from her. As soon as the lion is mature and trained Tarzan takes off to visit La at Opar. In this instance he and La come close to being a couple while the Golden Lion becomes a close male companion.
Thus Bertha and Smith-Oldwick have turned into La and the Golden Lion. Still unable to resolve his real life problem Burroughs ends Golden Lion by having Tarzan return to Jane. Burroughs has now resolved his emasculation problem by having the Golden Lion as Tarzan’s male buddy. As a beast he is not threat to Burroughs’ masculine identity. The Golden Lion remains Tarzan’s male pal throughout the remaining novels.
Now I have to return to Tarzan The Untamed. This is a very complex novel and I don’t know if I can do it justice.
Book II Something Of Value 1
December 31, 2007
Something Of Value
Book II, Part 1
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
God is not a cosmic accident;
Neither is he a universe experimenter;
The Universe Sovereigns may engage in adventure:
The Constellation Fathers may experiment:
The system heads may practice;
But the Universal Father
Sees the end from the beginning…
-The Book Of Urantia
Preface
While understood as a lightweight fantasy author Edgar Rice Burroughs tackled most, if not all, of the burning questions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of those questions was the nature of Time. H.G. Wells excited the world’s mind with his short novel, The Time Machine, in 1895. This was still an astonishing story when I was a kid; for all I know it still is. In his own way Wells hinted at possible universes. Then in 1905 Albert Einstein astonished the world with his Special Theory Of Relativity that posited certain ideas about Time and Space. Einstein undoubtedly owed a great deal to H.G. Wells. Einstein’s theory is posited on the objective existence of Time. In his Pellucidar novels beginning in 1913 Edgar Rice Burroughs denied the objective existence of Time. He said that Time didn’t exist as an objective reality.
I am in agreement with Burroughs. He examines the problem at great length not only in the Pellucidar series but in Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible.
He examines the problem of violence and war in detail with numerous examples including his final statement in Beyond The Farthest Star.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Burroughs dovetailed these questions into the really big questions of Evolution and Religion. He doesn’t argue Evolution he just takes it for granted. If you read only Burroughs you would have no idea that Evolution was a very controversial subject. He just assumes that his views are the norm and proceeds accordingly. Very daring for his time period.
On Religion his surface opinions which are conventionally anti-Priestcraft are more polemical in nature but, as Burroughs scholar Dale R. Broadhurst points out in his Gods Of Edgar Rice Burroughs series on the ERBzine magazine site, http://www.erbzine.com when you examine certain religious systems such as that of Opar closely Burroughs reveals some very subtle distinctions. He had read widely while the religious milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was particularly strong. For the first time society tolerated men like Robert W. Ingersoll who openly denounced religion and the very idea of God. Helena P. Blavatsky who presented a religion opposed to Christianity was also allowed to live. The price was that they were demonized in every way; but they were allowed to live.
The great archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Greece, Crete and Mesopotamia were seriously undermining the validity of the Jewish Old Testament. To the doubting or perceptive the scriptures were found to be based on much earlier texts as well on a much longer time line going back millions of years rather than a mere five thousand.
So, in this essay I would like to examine the evolution of the species and religion with an idea of how Burroughs understood them. It is important to remember that the state of knowledge in Burroughs’ time was much developed developed relative to the beginning of eighteenth century but primitive to what has been learned since 1950.
In his time and well into mid-century it was possible to seriously argue the question of canals on Mars for instance. We have now seen that there are no canals on Mars or anything approximating them. Since 1950 everything that was valid speculation in Burroughs’ time has now been shown in its true light, or at least, 90% or so.
The science of Biology has laid bare the progress of Evolution although it hasn’t explained it. Even so, no doubt fully 50% of Americans still denies the possibility, bound instead by the puerilities of ‘sacred scripture.’
Make no mistake, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a daring, ground breaking, forward thinking writer who put his fast ball over the plate waist high so hard that few people saw it.
1.
Scientists nearly universally believe that the genus Homo Sapiens originated in Africa. Most put a moral spin on this but if true it is merely a fact. Certain genetic markers point to this fact. Indeed, in Gods Of Mars, in itself a subtle examination of evolution, ERB describes his Black race as the First Born. He himself picked up the idea from the nineteenth century missionary David Livingstone from his book Missionary Travels In South Africa.
In Livingstone’s book in a conversation with a Bushman the Bushman tells Livingstone that God created the Black man first, then the White man.
Thinking in a Darwinian way Burroughs reasoned that first came the anthropoids then the Blacks and then the Whites. Thus, of the Homo Sapiens species the Blacks were the First Born. If the current scientific information is accurate then this is true. Burroughs was on solid evolutionary ground.
Current science teaches us that Homo Sapiens evolved from less mentally developed stock about a hundred fifty thousand years ago. As the most highly evolved hominid Homo Sapiens has displaced all other lines of development. The Neanderthal who existed as a separate hominid species until perhaps ten thousand years ago is now gone. As a distinct species it is generally now acknowledged that there was no inbreeding with Homo Sapiens.
In Africa all the predecessors of Homo Sapiens have also disappeared without a trace. As nature does not make great leaps but acts in small increments it is reasonable to believe that at one time several sub-species of hominids existed when Homo Sapiens first evolved one hundred fifty thousand years ago. Indeed, it is neither impossible nor improbable that the Bushman is the immediate predecessor of the First Born. If examined carefully and without prejudice it is possible that two or three sub-species of hominid predecessors are still alive.
Had the White man not interfered it is quite possible that the invading Bantus would have exterminated these peoples who had already been expelled from the rest of Africa into its Southern tip. An analogy would be the Gorillas who once surely roamed a greater range but are now pushed into the least habitable areas of the rain forest.
Even today the surviving species of anthropoids are finally being exterminated, much as the Neanderthal probably was, as the burgeoning population of Homo Sapiens cuts and burns over their jungle habitat. Except for zoos the great anthropoids are a thing of the past.
If the African was the first born then it follows that Whites, Semites and Mongolids evolved from the African. This raises a testy problem. Evolution means the development from a less developed organism to a more highly developed organism. As physically Homo Sapiens is developed to perfection being the most versatile of all species the only place development can take place is in the area of intelligence.
The development of the brain is what gives the Homo Sapiens the advantage over the anthropoids and all other beasts. A gorilla with human intelligence would be one formidable beast. Some argue that the brain began developing in response to challenges presented to it. This argument doesn’t explain why the Chimpanzees presented with the same or slightly different variations of the same problems, didn’t increase in brain capacity.
The above account assumes that evolution occurs for environmental reasons. This is patently impossible. When life was originated it was from internal reasons. As we all know life is dependent on water. Contrary to the Semitic account in the Bible man was not made from mud. It’s water. How life came into existence can be easily explained but probably not universally agreed with. The body has been described as a sack of water with a few elements dissolved into it. This is true so it is only necessary to determine how it happened. That too is not difficult to conjecture. Homo Sapiens and all life is built of the same universal elements of the universe. Most of a body is of six elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen being the most prominent followed by Nitrogen, Carbon, Phosphorus and Sulphur and a smattering of other elements.
It is impossible that water should have been introduced to earth from outer space. Forget outer space. Water was extruded from the core.
When a sufficient amount of water was formed on the surface rich with the above mentioned dissolved nutrients exposed to the sun for photosynthetic development it would seem obvious the atoms jostled against each other exchanging protons and bonding into molecules that in turn formed larger units and thus became animated. These single celled organisms than began to evolve in a number of directions. For millions of years life was confined to the seas of the world. Then in what seems as it though must be a programmed manner life left the water and began its existence on land. In what manner a program of evolution is encoded is beyond my understanding.
Rather than in response to the environment, evolutionary steps occur when a number of genetic mutations take place finally accumulating to the point where the next development takes place. Thus the number of pre-Homo Sapiens hominids ran through a long series of sub-species before Homo Sapiens emerged, as our scientists tell us, as the African First Born.
Now, most people assume that evolution ceased with the emergence of the First Born. The differences between the First Born, the Semites, Mongolids and the Whites are said to be merely cosmetic. The First Born bleach out in cold climates is their argument.
However it is quite obvious that evolution is still going on and that in Homo Sapiens. Very recently scientists have penetrated the chromosomal structure being able to identify the individual genes that compose each chromosome. While new studies of the functions of the various genes are very likely to be subject to revision nevertheless on 12/29/04 the Chicago Tribune published a report on studies conducted by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago.
Quote:
Reporting in the cover article in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Cell, Lahn and his colleagues, Eric Vollender and Steve Dorus, found that 17 brain building genes mutated at a tremedously rapid rate in humans, compared with the brains of champanzees, macaque monkeys, rats and mice….Once started, the selection of brain building genes snowballed, resulting in thousands of changes to thousands of genes in a relatively short period, Lahn explained….Lahn, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the U. of C., argues that the evolutionary forces that led to the big brain continue to act on humans today and are likely to produce bigger and better brains in the future.
Unquote.
Sign me up for a transplant when they’re available. Rapidly means over a few million years. Needless to say Lahn was forced to recant within weeks of his announcment declaring his findings null and void as the anti-Science creationists sprang into action. Just recently of course James Watson was forced to recant over similar comments regarding Africans. Watson was fired from his job; so far as I know Lahn was allowed to keep his. Thus bigots censor the truth.
The question is whether the same brain development is shared by all five species of Homo Sapiens or does the next evolutionary step surpass the abilities of the last. I’m afraid the latter must be true or there would be no reasonn to distinguish Homo Sapiens from its hominid predecessors. The latter would still be among us fully able to compete otherwise. Logic must prevail against Liberal bigots.
While many argue that the First Born left Africa to populate the world I do not find the opinion credible. If certain genetic markers indicate that the other four species evolved from the First Born that should explain the genetic markers.
What very likely happened is that the proto-Europeans who, let us call Homo Sapiens II- HSII- having evolved were either driven from or chose to leave Africa. Whether the Semites and Mongolids evolved from the First Born or whether they later evolved from HSII isn’t clear but I suspect the former in the case of the Semites and the latter in the case of the Mongolids.
It would seem that a sub-species once evolved has its set of attributes that can be developed within limitations but are incapable of change. Thus there were genetic changes to the brain of those evolved from the First Born while the First Born must remain mentally constituted as he was when he evolved one hundred fifty thousand years ago.
Nevertheless he was the first state of Homo Sapiens, the Main Evolutionary Stem. Obviously in the evolution of a genus there can be and have been many dead ends such as the Neanderthal of which we know but there were probably many dead end offshoots from the Main Stem over the twenty-five million year course of brain building.
While the Semite and Mongolid are more developed than the First Born they must be dead end evolutionary shoots. The main Stem of Evolutionary development was passed to the people who settled the Mediterranean Basin as it lay exposed during the last Ice Age. When they evolved isn’t clear but I imagine it may have been perhaps fifty thousand years after the First Born, say, one hundred thousand years ago.
With them the capacity for Civilization began. The First Born never created a civilization. Aided by additional genetic brain development the Meds approached life with an early scientific vision. Sometime later, perhaps another fifty thousand years, a further improvement in brain capacity created HSIII. Thus as the Neanderthal still roamed Europe with Homo Erectus still living in the East, and there is a problem there, the First Born occupied sub-Saharan Africa, the Semites the Arabian Peninsula, the Mongolids East Asia, HSII the Med Basin, and as groups will not tolerate other groups HSIII was driven away from HSII to occupy the area between the Caspian and Aral seas or perhaps the Central Asia steppes cheek by jowl with the Mongolids. That might seem to indicate that HSIII and the Mongolids are fairly closely related.
Van Daniken and others like to posit the notion that civilization began when extra-terrestrial visitors having landed and been greeted cordially, which is very unlikely, in a most friendly fashion instructed the rude savages who had no understanding into a very high civilization nearly overnight. Nice fantasy, although before you condemn this school remember accredited scientists believe both water and life arrived on Earth as extra-terrestrial hitchhikers on meteors.
I believe neither account. HSII began a long laborious effort to rise from ingnorance to knowledge the old fashioned way, hard work. Nor do I think it took that long for them to begin. Most scholars think that discovering the shortest day of the year took ninety-five thousand years for HSII to do. HSII could never have been that stupid. Building the tools to pass on the knowledge was a slow laborious process but certain men recognized the possibilities immediately and began to act on them.
Knowledge is a dangerous thing especially when that knowledge contradicts perceived reality as Bruce Lahn’s and James Watson’s treatment shows us to this very day. Thus, whatever the avant garde learned that the masses couldn’t accept had to be kept secret. In order for the work to go forward colleges of cognoscenti had to be formed. In order to protect them they had to be made inviolable or sacred. Hence Religion and the Priesthood arose.
The Priesthood was originally meant to develop and protect these acquisitions of knowledge. This function would endure until the differentiation of knowledge became noticeable in eighth century Greece. From that point on knowledge and thought take on a role independent of religion. From that point on the Priesthood had outlasted its function. Instead of encouraging the growth of knowledge it chose to suppress it.
Thus the tradition of denigrating the Priesthood arose. Edgar Rice Burroughs took this stance throughout his work. ‘Religion’ per se is imagined to be OK but the Priesthood had corrupted it. Burroughs and others imagined a time when a ‘pure religion’ a ‘natural religion’ existed. The differentiation of Religion into its three components or, in other words, the increase of knowledge was the culprit.
The Theosophist Helena Blavatsky sought to reconcile the three parts into one whole as it had once been. In point of fact Science was subsuming the other two.
Given a few thousand years of observation, if indeed, it took that long, a method for determining the shortest day of the year is relatively easy. Certainly the big brained HSII could tackle that problem.
The means of proof are indirect of course, but I believe shortly after leaving Africa for the Mediterranean Basin HSII did discover how to determine the Winter Solstice. With that discovery the worship of the Sun began. This would then evolve over the next ninety-eight thousand years into the religion of the Unconquerable Sun as practiced by the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and not just coincidentally in the religion of the Christ. The Christ is a Sun King. I say the Christ and not Jesus Christ because the latter name is a title affixed to the discredited Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth. More on that later.
Having once determined the length of the year it soon became obvious that by counting forward, the length of a sun cycle was approximately three hundred and sixty-five days. This is not a difficult task although it may have taken a few decades or even hundreds of years to get it right especially as that extra quarter day every year would have been a real clinker.
Once having determined the length of the year the college of Priests could then determine the time of the recurrence of natural events during the seasons. When we speak of ‘Time’ this was when time was born. Then gradually, in however crude a form the concept of the months came into existence. These divisions which numbered twelve became known as the Zodiac.
This was the beginning of the Astrological Religion of which Pisces or Christianity is only one Age. As we know the Zodiac only as the band of astral constellations surrouding the planet the divisions of the Zodiac make no sense.
First let me explain the terrestrial meaning of the signs then I will explain how and why they were translated to the heavens.
2.
The Zodiac
It is best to begin with the Winter Solstice which is when the Unconquerable Sun triumphant once again begins to wax toward the Summer Solstice when the forces of evil triumph driving Sol ever backward until once again with the Winter Solstice the Sun conquers yet once more beginning to wax. This is the central myth of the Mediterranean.
I can only apply the modern Zodiacal symbols which in themselves are of Cretan-Greek origin dating back to at least -2000. One may assume that over the millennia the symbols were modified but the meanings remained the same.
At the beginning of the year we have Sagittarius the Archer who is half horse half man. The horse corresponds to the first half of the year while the Archer facing the new year shoots his arrow into the air. The destination of the arrow is the Summer Solstice when I imagine it strikes Sol Invictus in the heel, much as Cancer the Crab seized Heracles by the heel dragging him toward the waters in symbol of the Sun’s decline.
After Sagittarius is Capricorn, half goat half fish. The fish probably denotes the beginning of the Spring rains while I am unsure of what the goat signifies, perhaps pointing to the rutting season.
Up next is a very important sign. Soon to be the prevailing age is that of Aquarius. In the Greek Zodiac this sign is governed by Hera. Indeed, the male god Aquarius is pouring out water onto Hera as the symbol of the Earth. The male fertilizes Hera in her capacity as Virgo the Virgin. Soon the Earth will sprout up into Virgin Birth.
Next is Pisces which denotes the rainy season followed by Aries the Ram. The Spring equinox occurs on March 21st in Aries. Equinox as I’m sure everyone knows means an equal day and night. Thus on March 21st the new year begins in earnest. Christ is risen. The Ram may be thought of as butting the new growth from the ground much as in the Greek illustration where Persephone is rising from the ground aided by Hermes and Apollo who chip the earth away to make her rise easier.
Taurus the Bull is just that, a figure representing the exuberant vitality of the new growth.
Gemini or the Twins passes the now nearly waxed year on to Cancer when Sol Invictus once again temporarily meets his match. Cancer is represented as a crab because the crab having captured a victim moves sideways or backwards indicating the shortening days. Thus while the period after the Winter Solstice seems to fly by as represented by the arrow the summer months seem to slowly recede. I don’t know about you but the second half of the year seems to be about twice as long as the first half to me.
Cancer is followed by Leo the Lion when the sun is at its seeming strongest. While the warmth of the sun has made everything grow and prosper the blazing heat of the sun of July causes growth to wither and die. Thus Virgo the Virgin succeeds Leo. This may be a little hard to follow but the Earth becomes barren once again or virgin. After the bath of rain virgin growth will begin again. Thus Hera who is both virgin and matron governs Aquarius who provides the showers in the Greek Zodiac.
Then follows Libra with her scales. the Autumn Equinox begins this period. Once again the night and day are equal hence Libra’s scales tip toward winter at this point.
Rounding out the year then is Scorpio the Scorpion. Its significance possibly is that it kills the old year by biting it on the heel. Sagittarius rises once again to shoot an arrow as the Unconquerable Sun marches on to victory.
It’s a pretty story.
Now, all the time the colleges of Priests were organizing this calendar they were watching the heavens. Much later the Hermetics would be given credit for the formula ‘As above, so below’ and vice versa. It is absolutely ridiculous to attribute the origin of the slogan to such late times. The roots of almost everything can be projected back to very early times. Actually everything can.
Having watched the skies while having developed the Zodiac as an annual terrestrial cycle, these ancients then transposed the Zodiac into the heavens. While watching the sky they noticed without knowing the reason the declination of the planet, that the North Pole because of the resultant wobble described a circle taking about 25,000 years to do so. They designated this phenomenon the Great Year.
Using the formula as above, so below it became clear that the Great Year must have twelve divisions just as the lesser terrestrial year does. So they merely transposed the Zodiac with the same twelve divisions and the same signs onto a belt of stars on the horizon which they organized into constellations that seemed to correspond to the signs.
As each sign corresponded to something over two thousand years in duration these periods were designated Ages with the corresponding qualities of the signs. Hence, when you haven’t seen someone in an age you literally mean two thousand some odd years ago.
How long it took the Ancients to discover the Great Year is beyond me but as I believe the discovery was made by observations rather than mathematics I assume a full cycle to a cycle and a half, perhaps a full fifty thousand years.
There wasn’t any hurry as a lot of other details had to be worked out first. Technology always has to catch up with imagination.
It’s all very well to say this but if true there must be historical evidence to verify its possibility, right? I’ll do my best. In the first place nothing was ever discovered, invented or developed over night. The times for things to come into existence are immense.
Even the transmission of this knowledge from generation to generation is an immense problem. The Priesthood must have spent great effort to first indoctrinate novices then drill them in the essentials so that they could in turn pass on the information.
One is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when the art of printing had been lost so that cadres of priests walked around memorizing the great books to pass on to the novices so that the works wouldn’t be lost.
Things were developing nicely when disaster struck destroying this first effort at civilization lock, stock and barrel. Having moved into the Basin during the last ice age, that ice age now ended. The waters began rising and continued to rise for several hundred feet. This must be the Great Flood which has come down to us from Mesopotamian records. There can be no other of this magnitude.
When the waters stopped rising the Mediterranean had assumed its present form. Some scientists say the waters rose very rapidly but still they couldn’t have risen so rapidly that the people couldn’t flee. Naturally they fled to the high places. This was the littoral of Africa, especially the best watered location, the effluence of the Nile and Crete, Pelasgian Greece and Phoenicia in the East and Spain and Sicily in the West. Apprently a group made their way into Sumer. Some say all civilization from West to East was the result of this disaster. I believe that it is so.
One asks do the civilizations have anything in common that would indicate a common origin? Yes, they do. For my purposes here a thing in common they all have is the Zodiac. They all share a form of the Astrological Religion.
The material aspects of the civilization perished beneath the waters. The more important intellectual heritage was preserved as the colleges of Priests fled to different locations. Egypt appears to have gotten the Mother Lode with Crete and Sumer next. Spain and Italy received little which probably indicates that the Metropolis was the on the South Side of the Basin. I suspect it was opposite the islands of Malta.
Crete may have indoctrinated Pelasgia or possibly a college reached the mainland. This much is certain, when the Greeks arrived in Pelasgia c. -1700 they brought no knowledge of the Zodiac or the Astrological Religion with them. The whole of Greek civilization was based on this earlier knowledge which must therefore have been highly develoed before -2000. Thus no Greek in +- 100 sat down and by a brilliant stroke of cogitation developed the astrology in a moment.
To begin with Mesopotamia. In their myth the fifth king after the Flood was the Lugal Banda. He comes into power as the Age of Aries begins. Therefore the Sumerians believed the Flood took place four kings or Ages previously. That would place the Flood either at the transition from the Age of Virgo to the Age 0f Leo or perhaps into the Age of Leo. That would amount to eight thousand years or so before 2000 BC. Are we on track for the ending of the ice age? Yes, we are.
Going to Egypt, the Sphinx which was originally a lion with a woman’s head, was probably shaped at approximately the same time. It is placed beside the Place Of The First Time over which the Great Pyramid is built. The Place Of The First Time is a mound or hillock which was believed to be the first place to emerge from the Flood. This also fits the time frame.
Now let us go to Crete and Hellenic Greece. Crete was a very ancient civilization when the Hellenes or Greeks first arrived.
The Greeks were a people who had formerly lived in today’s Armenia at the Eastern edge of the Black Sea. It is believed that a pharaoh made an expedition to the area about -1900. I believe it probable. Soon after this date the Hittites dropped down into Anatolia, modern Turkey, where they became a power relative to both Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The Greeks began a migration around the Euxine, now the Black Sea, dropping down into Pelasgia from the North. They apparently brought little or no religion with them, taking over the religious structure of the various Aegean peoples. Zeus was a Cretan god and not Greek. Hera was indigenous to the Argive area being Pelasgian in origin.
At some point after the Greeks had captured the Oracle at Delphi they brought Cretan priests from the island to staff it. Hence Hellenic religion is a reflection of the original Astrological Religion.
Zeus who succeeded his father Cronus became the religious icon along with Hera of the Arien Age in Greece. His father Cronus was the male archetype of the preceeding Taurean Age. Cronus’ father Saturn was the archetype of the Geminian Age. So Greek Astrological Religion can be traced back to at least -6000. Further investigation will probably uncover at least the Cancerian and Leonine Ages.
Now, if the Astrological Religion was operative in the Age of Leo then its origin must also have been Ages before. Thus while it may be uncertain exactly when or in detail how the religion originated it must have been inherited from a previous civilization that existed in the Mediterranean Basis. Call it Atlantis or what you will.
As Zeus was the archetype of the Arien Age who had succeeded his father who was not killed but emasculated and banished to far Tartarus, which is to say 180 degrees due West of sunrise in the Zodiac it was augured that Zeus would have a son who would replace him. Of course. At the transition from Aries to Pisces. The son was Dionysus. However when the Age of Pisces rose the intellectual and racial situation was so confused that a Semitic prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, was given the mantle while the Greek cult of Kyrios Christos, based on Dionysus, was attached to him so that he became Jesus the Christ or Jesus Christ. Dionysus in a Semitic form
Now let us look a the evolution of the relationships of the sub-species of Homo Sapiens as they then stood.
Continued in Part Something Of Value II-2
Exhuming Bob 2-2 Detourning The Folks
December 24, 2007
A Critique
Exhuming Bob 2-2
Detourning The Folks
Greil Marcus has written of detournment extensively especially in his Lipstick Traces. The French word means hijacking, rerouting or diversion, or in other words changing the direction of the flow or meaning. Thus one strips an object of its familiar values and replaces them with others but leaves the object intact. In a conflict of cultures the question becomes who will assign the values or meanings to objects and words.
I will use as a starting point for my purposes here H.L. Mencken of the twenties. The values into which immigrants migrated were those of the Anglo-Saxons. From the immigrant viewpoint the Anglo-Saxons detourned their languages and cultures attempting to replace them with English and Anglo-Saxon values. The inevitable result was that immigrants felt that they had been devalued and demeaned. So it is no wonder that having recovered some balance by the end of WWII they fought back by attempting to detourne Anglo-Saxon culture in their favor.
This is nowhere more apparent than between the Jews and Angl0-Saxons. No matter whether you place the conflict between the Old Dispensation or the New Dispensation the Jews always view themselves as a separate, independant and potentially dominant culture. Hence the drive is always first for autonomy and then detourning the host culture to reflect Jewish laws and customs, hopefully making Hebrew the official language. To Jews, like Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan then ‘freedom’ means the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon law and culture with Jewish law and culture with the Jews as arbiters of the fate of what become essentially subject peoples. The Jews can never be ‘free’ no matter how unrestrained they may be so long as they are subject to others legal and social systems. This is the central problem the United States and the West refuse to face. The same is true of the Semitic Moslems. It is the purpose of Moslems to detourne Western culture for a Moslem Culture. It is quite simple.
By the time H.L. Mencken was making his rise Anglo-Saxon pride was at its maximum. I haven’t been able to determine whether Mencken was Jewish but he allied himself with the Jews making common cause with them. The approach naturally was to defame Anglo-Saxonism. Mencken naturally chose the least sophisticated Anglo-Saxons to represent the whole. Thus he went to the mountain folk of Appalachia and the hill country all along the Line. He began to ridicule these people as representative of all Anglo-Saxons. I mean, he was mean; he was vicious; his Jews caused a huge fuss for much less criticism or in their terms- defamation.
Expanding the arena, using these rural folk as their model the Communists then picked up on these people with the least possibility of education as the example of Anglo-Saxonism. In 1932 and 1933 following Mencken’s example Erskine Caldwell, a Communist writer, published two mammoth best sellers, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. These books were especially mean and vicious making Mencken look laudatory in comparison. Perhaps using Mencken and Caldwell as inspirations a Jewish cartoonist by the name of Al Capp created the L’il Abner comic strip in 1934. This strip also ridiculed Anglo-Saxons but in a less demeaning manner that not only didn’t offend the majority but actually pleased them. There were some few of us who saw through the sham but there was nothing obvious enough that the majority could see.
Capp would be convicted on a morals charge late in his career that effectively ended his influence. The motif was carried forward on television in the series Archie Bunker.
Now, the Anglo-Saxons used to represent the whole were the custodians of the Folk music that was so revered by the New York City Jews of the late fifties and early sixties. So you actually have Jews imitating Hillbillies.
The vilification the Mountain Folk endured actually shamed the city Anglo-Saxons causing a dichotomy in their character. They rejected the Mountain Folk as representing all Anglo-Saxons. This is made quite clear in Caldwell’s novel when his urban relative throws his rural cousins out of his house and tells them to never come back. Something like a son testifying against his father. The Liberal-Conservative split was given a difinitive form.
The Mountain Folk formed what Greil Marcus calls the Weird Old America. After the Roosevelt administration was elected and the New Deal was established as a continuation of the Wilsonian New Democracy Jews flooded back into Washington as under Wilson.
During the twenties as radio became a reality and recording technology became more widespread and available a number of Mountain Folk and/or White Trash as they were alternately known, recorded their distinctive music in their own voice. Nor was this music ill received, many of the recordings were huge sellers according to the standards of the times while some like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family became very successful recording acts. Thus what was known as Hillbilly music until 1954 came into existence. For whatever reason whoever controls these things thought the term Hillbilly was insulting so the various rural flavored musics were grouped under the term, Country and Western. Hicks are hicks to me whatever you call them, Hillbilly or Country, I’ve been called worse. Having ancestors that came down from the Kentucky hills I have no objection to my Hillbilly ancestry.
The Anglo-Saxon dichotomy was such that those who were shamed by Communist efforts had an extreme aversion to Hillbilly or Country music that they considered ignorant while professing to admire the Blues simply because it was performed by Blacks even though the intellectual content was well below that of Hillbilly music.
Nevertheless the Hill Folk were the custodians of the old English folk traditions. Folk music was then separated from Hillbilly music and approved on that basis. Thus after the Roosevelt administration was installed in an effort to counter the Depression certain cultural programs were developed. One involved the attempt to preserve the quaint customs and music of the Hill Folk and the rural Blacks. These two peoples were treated as anthropological specimens on the same level as Tobriand Islanders and others.
The New Deal of the Roosevelt administration was a direct continuation of Wilsonian New Democracy. It was as though they’d never been gone. With the creation of a huge new bureaucracy Jews came flooding back into Washington as they had in the two Wilson administrations. In many if not most cases these people were the ones sent out to deal with our homegrown anthropological specimens as Superior to Inferior. Sort of a domestic Peace Corps. Yes, they did profess to revere the music of these simple folks.
So Folk Music always had an honored place in Anglo-Saxon cultivated circles perhaps spurred to some extent by the ‘field’ recordings of the New Dealers. Folk played a prominent part in popular music from the end of WWII on. Foremost practioners of the genre were the Almanac Singers and their successors The Weavers.
A key member of both groups was Pete Seeger. Pete was both Jewish and Red. This was a bad combination during the post-war anti-Communist reaction. While making hits of a number of Leadbelly songs under Seeger’s guidance The Weavers had a major success with the Jewish melody Hava Nagila. It was a catchy tune. I liked it.
Capitalizing on this success The Weaver’s under Seeger’s guidance concocted a ‘folk’ tune called Song of the Sabra celebrating Jewish ‘pioneer’ efforts in Israel. Apparently the Sabras were some kind of hobo outfit that sat around campfires and ate stew a lot. Thus the effort to detourne American Folk Music began. The Song of the Sabras was so egregiously promotive of Israeli/Jewish interests that the song caused a big reaction. If I remember correctly it was staged at least once on a TV version of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. That’s where I got the camp fire bit as Pete roasted his weeny and sang. Whether it was an extra or supposedly in the Top Ten I can’t remember.
Somewhere about then Seeger and The Weavers were found to be subservice giving a bad name to Folk Music as long as the genre lasted in 1966 or ’67. The Weavers disappeared from the air waves. However at least one member would be instrumental in guiding the musical direction of the Kingston Trio.
Folk music continued strong between the demise of The Weavers and the emergence of the Kingston Trio both as popular music and ‘purist’ Folk. The greatest of them all was Lonnie Donegan who had a successful career in the US and a tremendous impact on the British scene from England to Australia as Skiffle Music. Josh White, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders among others, one might add Mitch Miller, had many memorable folk tunes competing equally with Rock and Roll if not its superior. If one considers the Presley Sun recordings objectively they also can be seen as Folk or highly influenced by Folk. After all Elvis was known as the Hillbilly Cat.
The Kingston Trio with their Tom Dooley that was an actual sensation in 1958 sort of broke the taboo against Folk music although the Kingstons were plenty subversive. The great Chad Mitchell Trio emerged at this time also as an even more politically subversive group but also with a popular sound and enough bite to defuse Dylan’s claim to have introduced serious lyrics into popular music. The Chad Mitchell Trio is probably running neck and neck with the Kingstons as my favorite folk groups although Terry Gilkyson along with the Pozo-Seco Singers are right behind them. The old Seekers from Australia are hot stuff too.
So that brings us up to Grossman’s Gate of Horn in Chicago of ’58 and the founding of the Newport Folk Festival in ’59 as well as Dylan’s entry into the New York Folk Scene in ’61.
3.
After WWII the Jews had introduced the raw form of multi-culturalism designed to replace the Anglo-Saxon model of society with the Jewish. With the election of the Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy it appeared that the Anglos had been defeated.
The next phase of the Jewish program was put in place. The thing was to detourne or hijack American culture.
Detourning Folk music was part of it. The study of Dylan concentrates on the New York City East Village group that was virtually Jewish with its specific outlook. Actually the Folk scene was very diverse and different in its emphasis in each locale. Bob would focus the entire Folk movement in himself.
Boston with the Mel Lyman family and Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur was quite different from NYC. The strictly commercial LA scene with Randy Sparks’ New Christy Minstrels had its own flavor. In San Francisco Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and others had credentials that easily matched those of Dylan. The whole San Francisco Sound was Folk based.
The top bands like Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio and semi-pop groups like the Brothers Four and the Christy Minstrels really carried the banner for folk.
And then there was the Country or Hillbilly faction that was considerable. Great old tunes like Jimmy Brown The News Boy were Country smashes. Hank Snow recorded a passel of old Folk songs like Nobody’s Child. New murder ballads appeared for people who like that sort of thing that were fabulous like Snow’s Miller’s Cave and Lefty Frizzell’s dazzling The Long Black Veil. It would be years before it was known that Veil was newly written and not an old Hillbilly song. If you compare the Kingston’s Tom Dooley with Frizzell’s Long Black Veil you can’t tell the difference.
A word about Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music that Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan revere so much. The collection is a very small selection of songs culled from a huge mass of material that just happened to fit Harry Smith’s personal psychosis. Anyone going over the same mass of material could select an entirely different selection of songs that reflected their own personal outlook and would be just as ‘authentic.’ I mean, I heard The Cuckoo and I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground over the radio decades ago as a kid. I was signally unimpressed. I never called in to hear either again. So as far as being some authentic voice of America I rather think the collection reflects Jewish and Communist ideals.
What is the message exactly of ‘I wish I were a mole in the ground, I would burrow until I brought that mountain down.’
It that isn’t a call to detournement I don’t know what is. So Harry Smith is Harry Smith and welcome to him but I have my own agenda.
So Dylan left his old life behind to begin a new life in New york City but with an old agenda. His secret agenda was to detourne American culture. Of course the word ‘detourne’ was unknown in America at that time. I have to thank Greil Marcus for adding that very useful word to my vocabulary.
Bob started out detourning Woody Guthrie. Within a couple months he had hijacked Woody’s life. Clinton Heylin believes that even the Guthrie persona was second hand having been detourned from Jack Elliot who had of course detourned it from Guthrie. Boy, there was another stone bore I never could listen to, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.
Dylan more or less confirms this in his Chronicles Vol. I. I’m copying a quote from Chronicles as noted by Jim Kunstler in his excellent review of Bob’s memoir:
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_dylan.html
Quote:
“You’re trying hard, but you’ll never turn into Woody Guthrie,’ (John) Pankake says to me as if he’s looking down from some high hill, like something has violated his instincts. It was no fun being around Pankake. He made me nervous. He breathed fire through his nose. ‘You’d better think of something else. You’re doing it for nothing. Jack Elliot’s already been where you are and gone. Ever heard of him?’ No, I ‘d never heard of Jack Elliot. When Pankake said his name it was the first time I’d heard it. ‘Never heard of him, no….’ Pankake lived in an apartment over McCosh’s bookstore, a place that specialized in eclectic, ancient texts, philosophical political pamphlets from the 1800s on up. It was a neighborhood hangout for intellectuals and Beat types, on the main floor of an old Victorian house only a few blocks away. I went there with Pankake and saw it was true, he had all the incredible records, ones you never saw and wouldn’t know where to get. For somone who didn’t sing and play it was amazing he had so many….Pankake was right. Elliot was far beyond me….I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out in the cold street, aimlessly walked around, I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the deadmen walking through the catacombs. It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy….He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile. The US hadn’t been ready for him. Good. I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.”
Unquote.
Of course the US hadn’t been ready for Elliot. One Guthrie was one too many. Who needed a Guthrie detourned by another Jew? Let the English have Elliot. But that didn’t stop Bob from detourning both Guthrie and Elliot when he got to the Big Apple. He followed Elliot around studying and copying his mannerisms. Elliot should have painted on his guitar the slogan: This machine kills copycats.
Well, no matter Bob learned his error when he learned another Guthrie copycat wasn’t needed in NYC but Bob had mastered a style, a persona on which he could build. That was more than he had had before.
Pete Seeger and the Jewish busybodies were busy fomenting discord in the South. Already knee deep in the Big Muddy Seeger was encourging others to write political diatribe songs. The path was clear and Bob met a girl named Suze Rotolo. Rotolo worked at CORE. She then encouraged Bob to write ‘politically relevant’ songs. Well, what are you going to do but go with the flow, swim with the current? Bob didn’t like the topical songs though. You have to give him credit for good sense there. He wrote literary style lyrics that talked around the political issues without dealing with them directly.
Now there were songs that other voices could sing.
As a lyricist Bob was not a tunesmith so he merely borrowed tunes from old ballads and other people. In other words he detourned Anglo-Saxon folk tunes grafting on Jewish sensibilities. Heylin gives a perfect example in an exchange Dylan had with Martin Carthy in England. Carthy showed him the old English ballad Greensleeves. Bob dutifully learned the song. Then he went away for a few weeks. When he came back he collared Carthy and played him Greensleeves. Here’s your Greensleeves he said. Then he played the tune set to the words of Girl From The North Country. Thus he detourned tune after tune to his own Jewish sensibilities.
Now things were heating up on the Jewish revolutionary front. The so-called Free Speech Movement was being launched at UC Berkeley.
As I mentioned Jews could never be ‘free’ so long as they were merely part of a dominant other culture. So ‘Freedom’ meant to them detourning the dominant culture so that their own law and culture was supreme. Freedom for the Jews meant slavery for everyone else. Thus we have Greil Marcus in the bleachers cheering his heart out at Free Speech rallies for ‘freedom.’ There were many of us in the bleachers much less enthusiastic. But then we weren’t Jewish and we weren’t clear as to what was going on.
Dylan as a Jew came to Berkeley to play where he was received as a hero by his fellow Jews. Both must have been aware of what they were doing. Jerry Rubin was the sparkplug whether Greil Marcus slyly disagrees with him or not.
The revolt at Berkeley soon spread to Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League and across the country where it meshed with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Dylan himself progressed from his political associations to Another Side of Bob Dylan in which he worked out his own personal problems in a Jewish social context in highly symbolic language. The lyrics are complex, poetical and not easily understood. the concept of ‘Freedom’ plays a prominent role.
4.
Freedom as the idea of a complete lack of constraints developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Prior to this ‘freedom’ meant to be free so long as your own freedom didn’t conflict with the freedom of others. Latterly it has taken the meaning that others be damned so long as one can do what one wants. This entails the related notion: consequences be damned. Consequences won’t be damned so if one does the crime one must do the time. I suppose the notion is that if you can run fast enough you can avoid the consequences. I don’t know if one can but some have done a very presentable job of it. Mao was one, Dylan is another. Of course there was that one little incident at Redwing that didn’t work out too well but since then it has been fairly smooth sailing for Bob and he may leave the building without suffering too many serious consequences.
Now, in order to be free one has to dominate everyone else. If one is obligated to an other then one isn’t free according to this latter day interpretation of ‘freedom.’ In that sense in the entertainment industry Frank Sinatra was as free as anyone has ever been. The man need only place a call to anyone elses wife and she would leave her husband’s bed and run over and give Frank a blow job and there was nothing the husband could do about it. This is no joke. Sinatra could have anyone beaten up with impunity. When he was offended by President Kennedy, Kennedy was shot. There are those who maintain Frank had a hand in it. Never been proven but there are reasons to so believe. Frank Sinatra had ‘freedom’ while he escaped the most serious consquences dying in bed a very old man. Alone and despised perhaps but then one can’t escape all the consequences.
So while limiting himself to a field in which he could be successful Bob has perhaps been the most ‘free’ of the Rock ‘n Rollers. He never took on Frank however and if he had he would have discovered the limits of his ‘freedom.’ Although Albert Grossman may have limited Bob’s ‘freedom’ somewhat I find it interesting that Bob came out at least even in his brush with the current Hollywood hard-on, David Geffen.
Now, Bob wasn’t so free that he could achieve his goals without leaning on or being dependent on others. However to compensate himself he destroyed, trashed whoever and whatever he had used as stepping stones to achieve his ‘freedom.’ In the pursuit of his freedom he became a very vicious and nasty man.
There is no reason to believe that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival he wasn’t trashing the whole Folk scene that he had used to get him to the launching pad of his Rock ‘n Roll dream.
The arguments about how or who brought Folk Rock into existence may well be interminable. The fact is that both Folk and Rock at the time were stagnant. Whether the music died in that corn field in Iowa in 1959 or not the big labels had pretty well tamed the music of the fifties. Columbia had separated Dion from the Belmonts and had him singing standards to syrupy instrumentals. Ruby Baby was his last great effort before Columbia detourned him. Safe teen acts and emasculated falsettos dominated the airwaves . By late 1963 and early 1964 the Folk ethic had worn out as Folk groups dressed in loden green pull overs and sang like the Brothers Four. Even the emasculated and detourned version of Michael Row The Boat Ashore couldn’t prop up Folk for long.
So musicians had to be searching for something different if not new. Folk Rock was as new as anything while the electric blues served as different. Thus as the middle sixties came in one had Folk Rock, the electric blues and rough sounding garage bands like the Seeds. Oh yes, that was another development temper tantrum teenagers screaming ‘I don’t want to be like anybody else.’ Not to worry.
Folk rock would have or did develop without any real help from Bob. He already had electric recordings out so that if he didn’t want to stick it in their ear he could have done an acoustic set at Newport and let his electric side take its natural course.
I’m not so sure even then that electricity was the problem. Personally I welcomed the electric Bob. I was glad to see him leave the Folk stuff behind. I was on the West Coast but I didn’t run into many or any people who were emotionally involved. Even Greil Marcus doesn’t seem to be put out by the change.
I think you had to be emotionally invested in Bob the protest singer. When that fellow in Manchester cried out Judas I would have to think that his problem wasn’t an electric guitar but the fact that Bob seemingly betrayed the political stuff he had been singing. He had pandered to the protest crowd and now he wasn’t letting them down easy. He was turning his back on them. Rathr than being the standard bearer of spokesman for the generation that he had let them believe he was he now trashed everything they believed in. They had given him his and now he didn’t need them anymore.
His whole career was based on trashing his believers. Not that I understood any of this at the time. I didn’t even know about it and if I had I wouldn’t have cared.
Positively Fourth Street was his ‘kiss my ass’ song to all those Folkies he had used and abused and now abandoned.
An interesting aside that could use closer examination was his visit to Carl Sandburg in 1964. All the biographers assume that Carl Sandburg snubbed Bob because he hadn’t heard of him. Maybe, I can’t say but it is significant that Sandburg was a folksinger himself or, at least, he sang folk songs. While Bob and Greil are enthusiastic about Harry Smith Sandburg himself had published his American Songbag in 1928 and then followed it up in 1950 with a new collection. Unless he was brain dead in ’64 there is little reason to believe he hadn’t maintained his interest in folk into the sixties and kept up with it.
After all the Christies were doing a number of songs from the 1928 Songbag so Sandburg must have experienced great satisfaction that everything he had been hoping for had come to pass. I don’t know his singing style, and he did publicly perform the songs, but I suspect it was more Christy style than the cacophony of Bob.
I don’t think it improbable that he in fact knew exactly who Bob Dylan was, had probably heard him on record and/or the radio and fully detested him, so that when he opened his door and found Bob Dylan, let us say the folk devil himself, standing there he just froze. It would be nice to know exactly what was said. I think it unlikely that he would have been familiar with Paul Clayton but as Clinton Heylin suggests if he had dropped the needle into the groove there is little doubt which record would have been played through.
If Sandburg had shown any preference for Clayton at all for any reason, manners for instance, there is little doubt that that sealed Clayton’s fate with Bob.
If It’s All Over Now Baby Blue was a put down of Clayton which seems likely then the odds are that it was resentment over something that was said or done at Sandburg’s is the reason.
That would have been added to the fact that Bob had stolen a couple tunes from Clayton that required the trashing of the man in ’64 to cover up the evidence. One can’t hold it against Bob that Clayton committed suicide, after all, we’re all big boys here, but he must certainly have contributed to a deteriorating mental state.
The trashing of Joan Baez also at this time doesn’t require further comment in this place. Suffice it to say that Bob had taken hers to keep with his and now it was her turn for the circular file. It is hard to believe Bob didn’t enjoy what he was doing amidst the flashing gongs on the road to ‘freedom.’
In ’66 Bob’s mind broke. He had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. In his terms a motorcycle accident. There was a long recovery period of several years. I certainly don’t hold the nervous breakdown against him. He was pushing too hard. Even if he had been straight he would have become distraught, but under the influence of what all his biographers agree were monumental amounts of drugs washed down with quantities of alcohol it is a wonder if not a miracle that he lasted as long as he did. Apparently he was driven to complete the sound in his head and vomit out all his rage accumulated up there in the North country before he cracked.
When he went down he went down hard but in pleasant enough circumstances.
Why he came out isn’t clear unless it was to trash his fans. It didn’t take much for me to catch on back then but then on the first hearing of Blonde on Blonde I realized he’d ridden his board all the way to shore. From there he would have to start all over again while he would never catch a wave like that again.
Bob still had a lot of past to bury though.
He achieved this in spectacular fashion in 1975 on his Rolling Thunder tour as an overseer on his very own Maggie’s Farm. The tour mayby be considered as a vision of Plantation Bob. And he was a sadistic overseer too.
As Heylin points out the shows were over four hours long while Bob may have been on stage only a few minutes to a half hour or possibly a little more. Thus his cast of characters were slaving on Maggie’s Farm while Maggie or Bob showed up from time to time to make sure his darkies were singing as they slaved. A very good joke. If you step back and look at it the gig is pretty transparent.
Now, Dylan asked people if they were for it. As the only ‘free’ man in the group Bob had no trouble in getting his victims to come on board his ship that had just come in. The performers couldn’t have been paid much if at all. The payroll and expenses of such an extravaganza couldn’t have been recouped at all. If there was any money left over it went into Bob’s pocket.
Bob reached way back in the past to bring Ramblin’ Jack Elliot aboard. Bob owed Elliot a lot so the old man had to be trashed. McGuinn was brought along because he had traded on Bob’s talent or else had done such sparkling versions of Bob’s songs that he had made Bob look bad.
Phil Ochs wasn’t allowed to come along not because Bob had pity on his fragile mental state but simply because Bob didn’t owe him anything. If he had had reason to trash Ochs you may be sure he would have.
One may guess that he was already finished with Sara, his wife, as he not only allowed her to come along to witness his degenerate behavior but actually cast her as a prositute in his movie Reynaldo and Clara. One just doesn’t allow the mother of one’s children much less a woman one respects to play a prostitute. I find it unforgiveable while Sara took him for much much more than thirty-five million if Heylin and Sounes are correct which is pretty good wages of sin.
As if that wasn’t enough Bob brought along his old inamorata Joan Baez to confront his wife, Sara. Gratuitously cruel and unnecessary so I suppose Bob was attempting to trash his entire pre-1975 past. Like a snake shedding his skin he was attempting to begin a new existence.
Here his Frankist upbringing rose up to bite him because you can’t pour out that quart and half of evil. As Bob said you can change your name but you can’t run from yourself. Bob wasn’t released and one can never be released, only the truth can set you free. You have to come to terms with yourself and acept things as they were and are. Even then your freedom is conditional; at best you are only out on parole. You can’t trash reality.
End of Exhuming Bob 2-2
I, Dynamo 