A Review

The Myth Of The Twentieth Century

by

Alfred Rosenberg

Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, An Evaluation Of The Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations Of Our Age, The Noontide Press, 1982  New translation of the 1930 text.

Part One

Alfred Rosenberg

The Conflict Of Values

Subtitled ‘An evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age’ Rosenberg’s book is not only a valuable treatise on socio-psychological issues of his time but as recent events indicate also an accurate prophesy.

Adolf Hitler- The Scourge Of God

     Alfred Rosenberg was, of course, the theorist of the Nazi Party in Germany over the twenties and thirties.  He may be one of the lesser known figures.  As such he is verboten to read or study, but as it is important to understand the mental outlook of this most important period of world history, that none can deny, I’m going to cast caution to the winds and try to deal with the reality rather than the prejudices.

     This book was a key to Rosenberg’s earning the hangman’s close attention at Nuremberg as a result of the collapse of the Nazi State.  The book is also on on the Jewish Index of Proscribed Books; it was only translated and published in English in 1980 by the Noontide Press, another proscribed outfit.  So reading and discussing the book is a titillating forbidden thrill not unlike picking up an illicit copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1930.  I’ve read both and this is the better book.  One wonders how many on the Court at Nuremberg knew German well enough to have read it.  I suspect that very few of the allies had and if so but cursorily.

     As so many books that have been given high praise prove worthless on the reading so also many authors and their books that have been demonized prove worthwhile.  The Myth Of The Twentieth Century is one of the latter.  While Jewish hysteria would have you believe that The Myth is one long rabid anti-Jewish diatribe such is not the case.  Rather Rosenberg cast his scenario in the ages long warfare between the Semitic East and Indo-European West.  As he rightly says the issue is a spiritual and intellectual confrontation between the two.

     There is no denying this fact no matter how unpalatable the reality may be.

  That  the conquest of Rome by the East in the waning years of the Republic and opening three centuries of the Empire was the key to the formation of the Roman Catholic Church in the mold of the Eastern mystery cults of which Judaism was an element, but only one, cannot be denied.

     Indeed the church founders  Sts. Peter and Paul were Jews of the Jews.  Oddly the New Testament had nothing to do with the content of Catholicism.  Before Gutenberg even the priesthood had never read the New Testament.  How Jesus wormed his way in there is something of a mystery.  As odd as it may seem one could be arrested in Spain for distributing or possessing a New Testament probably up to the 1931 Revolution that ended that nonsense.

     Rosenberg believed and the facts attest that the Nordics, Germans or Aryans (if words frighten you, choose the least offensive) found the Asiatic doctrines to run counter to their innate beliefs.  The fact that England and the North of Europe rejected Catholicism should be proof enough for anyone.  Rosenberg’s main argument then is against the Catholic Church which in his view was based on Etruscan savagery, Jewish and other Eastern mystery religions.

     In the savage warfare he depicts between the Semitic Catholic Church and Nordic dissidents it reads like so many holocausts led by the Semitic Church that the Jewish holocaust of the forties pales in comparison.

     The savage campaigns of extermination against religious heretics like the Waldenses, Cathars and Huguenots makes your hair curl and the roots sweat.  And then on top of those crimes against humanity on the part of the Semitic based Roman Catholic Church came the horrors of the Thirty Years War from 1608 to 1638 that devastated the Germans so badly it made the Jewish losses of the 1940s seem trivial.  Over thirty years fully a third of the German people were destroyed while Rosenberg claims two thirds.  As Liberal historians prefer to minimize German losses in accord with their anti-European prejudices I suspect Rosenberg is closer to the truth.  As he says it took two hundred years for the Germans to recover in a greatly altered intellectual condition. That would bring the story up to Bismarck and modern times when the Pope declared himself infallible.

     Rosenberg insists this was at the instigation of and was the policy of the Papacy.  It would be impossible to disagree with him.  In fact the Roman Catholic Inquisition extended from the thirteenth century to mid-nineteenth century.  Some six hundred fifty years of Semitic hostility  to things Nordic.

     While that record of intolerance is deplorable it should be remembered that the Church was thoroughly saturated with a Semitic intellectual mindset.  Its policies were based in the psychology of the Middle Eastern Semitic peoples.  One is no less guilty than the other.  Intolerance is characteristic of the Semites much moreso than the Europeans as will undoubtedly be learned first hand soon enough as we have failed to learn it from a distance.

2.

     While Rosenberg deals with religious and racial confrontations that are in essence the same thing he also gives a nice concise analysis of the stock market economy.  In the light of recent events the man was remarkably prescient.  He blames stock jobbing on the Jews.  As he was a Nazi one is tempted to cry:  Shame, shame, without examining the facts, but in fact this recent managed debacle used the US Federal Reserve System.  The Fed is a privately held semi-government agency of which the only non-Jewish component are the Rockefeller banks.  Thus there appears to be a real foundation of the Nazi claim of Jewish dominance of finance.

     If one looks at finance with an unjaundiced eye from this vantage point of history when everything is or should be clear, it is clear that the Jewish World Government sold the US a bill of goods in 1913 when the Fed was formed.  The Fed was the vehicle that gave its owners the means to control world money matters.  What an engine for construction or destruction.  What a pity the course of destruction was chosen.

     One has been forbidden to look too closely at Jewish financial management but when one does many things become clear.  Henry Ford has been criticised for using the term The International Jew, but there you have it.  See my essay at Contemporary Notes on Henry Ford and Louis Marshall.

http://contemporarynotes.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/henry-ford-and-louis-marshall/

     Through their American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee formed during the Great War in preparation for the aftermath the Jews were able to use the Fed and ‘charity’ to move huge sums into Europe in support of Judaism against the Gentile nations.  Engineering the tremendous inflation in Germany in 1923 that impoverished the indigenous population money from the US, Great Britain and France was supplied to German Jews who then, using the hard currency against the now worthless German currency, essentially bought up Germany on the cheap.  Even as late as 1937 after years of disenfranchisement Jews still owned over 30% of German real estate.

      If one compares that with the current debacle in the US and actually worldwide in which by using the vehicle of unsound loans the US and possibly the world has been financially gutted with all investments slowly sinking into worthlessness while the already bankrupt US government has been placed beyond redemption.  The question is when it all comes down who will own what?  It will all have to be owned by someone.  If Germany of the Weimar Republic is any guide the answer is quite clear.

     It seems obvious that the whole debacle was planned from the beginning.  After all we have been conditioned from childhood to perceive the Jews as innately financial geniuses.  We have also been conditioned to view Jews as the most intelligent people on the earth.  Indeed the foremost Jewish intellect of the latter half of the twentieth century, Rabbi Schneerson, a man of profound scientific training, so we are told, fully believed that Jews have an extra intelligence gene that makes intellectual competition with them impossible.

     So, who was in control of the Fed, who is Secretary of the Treasury, etc. etc.  Jews.  Now, I’m fairly low down on the totem pole but I could see the inevitable result of loaning money to people without the means to pay it back.  I don’t have that extra gene that Jews have either.  I’m not bragging, there were actually loads of us with the apparently missing intelligence gene who saw it coming.  Heck, Rosenberg and the Nazis, all missing that extraordinary gene, predicted the thing eighty years ago.  Sure, they were evil but that doesn’t mean they were stupid.

     So, if the ‘most intelligent’ people on the planet didn’t see the inevitable result of their own policies then, possibly, the intelligence gene has an on-off switch but without the little light so we never know whether they’re switched on or off.  But I’m betting the boys knew what they were doing and what the results would be.  Can’t fool me.  Quite obviously you didn’t need that extra gene and I’m betting that Rabbi Schneerson was just joshing when he dreamed the notion up.

     I have to give Rosenberg full credence in his analysis of stock market economies.  He saw it quite clearly eighty years ago.  He couldn’t have been alone.  Rosenberg was smart but he wasn’t that much smarter than anyone else.  Henry Ford saw it.

     So why weren’t Rosenberg and Ford listened to?  Because the Jews used that ‘extra gene’- the charge of being an anti-Semite.  Ford was discredited and neutralized while the Nazis taking on the whole world were destroyed root and branch.

     That’s how Alfred Rosenberg evaluated a couple of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations in the first chapter of his very valuable work:  The Myth Of The Twentieth Century.

     There is more that I will take up in Part II.

 

The High Brow And The Low Brow

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep

Part VI

Living On Tulsa Time

by

R.E. Prindle, Dugald Warbaby and Dr. Anton Polarion

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

Gonna set my watch back to it,

‘Cause you know that I’ve been through it,

Livin’ on Tulsa Time.

– Danny Flowers

     During the ’60s a lot of energy was put into the notion that one live in the HERE and NOW or someone else’s impression of the NOW.  There used to be a big San Francisco poster with nothing but a black background with the giant word IS in white.  NOW IS NOW.

     They didn’t know how much they were asking.  It is impossible to actually live in the NOW; No one can do it.  Rather the past is a drag on NOW preventing a full involvement with the present.  The period of time it takes to digest the previous NOW and update to an approximate notion of the current NOW is excruciatingly slow.  The sharper the break between the past and present the more traumatic the reaction.

     In the song Living On Tulsa Time the singer, no matter what time zone he is in sets his watch to Central Tulsa time.

     I know where that one is at.  One of my shattering breaks with the past was when I went active in the Navy in ’56.  Sent from Eastern Standard to Pacific Standard I kept my watch set to Eastern Standard time nearly the whole three years of my enlistment.  I only switched to PST in 1959 when I accepted the fact that I would never return East; that California was my new home.

     Brought into contact with a new NOW I was still not ready for the present.  I continued to dress as we did in ’56 well into the sixties.  Got hard to find some new duds.  I only ceased dressing that way when I became a Hippie in ’66 and adopted fantastic Hippie garb.  I was an urban spaceman:

I’m the Urban Spaceman

I’ve got speed,

I’ve got everything I need.

I don’t feel pleasure,

I don’t feel pain,

If you were to knock me down

I’d just get up again.

I wake up every morning with a smile upon my face.

My natural exuberance spills out all over the place.

-Neil Innes

     I was really NOW there for just a little while but I wasn’t alone.  As Bob Dylan said, everytime I looked back the past was just behind.  When the Hippie era ended I reverted to a modified 1956 style.  The past came back again.  All those screaming about living in the NOW in ’67-’69 are still back there claiming they’re still living in the NOW but time has passed them by.  I didn’t wait around, baby, I slid out into limbo and I’m doing fine now, thank-you.

     Thus when ERB began writing in 1911 he was not so much concerned with his NOW as he was in vindicating his past from 1896 to 1905.  His reality in those early novels from 1911 to 1915 continue to reflect his earlier travails.  Thus in the group of novels embraced by The Girl From Faris’s he is trying to vindicate his past to his present and hopefully to his future.

     After nineteen-fifteen he was released from his past to a large extent and began to concentrate on adjusting to the NOW of his altered circumstances.  Change is NOW and ERB was going though a lot of ch-ch-changes.  His nerves were jangling as he was jerked from time frame to time frame but he didn’t enter the Promised Land of NOW.  Oh Lord, he might have prayed, if he could have seen the future- Deliver me from NOW.

     Ten years after and a world of different NOWs the Mucker far in a distant past that had disappeared behind a cloud where he couldn’t see he tackled almost the identical theme in a different world, a fast moving world, a world where NOW was so strange it was unrecognizable from day to day.  The political situation he had grown up with was no longer recognizable; it had been replaced by a new reality.  He was almost living by two different clocks in some strange Einsteinian time zone where the guide posts had been removed and renamed and everything was relative to another reality that couldn’t be recognized by any clock ticking.

     Living on Tulsa time in another time zone.  There I was in ERB’s sunny Southland with my watch running three hours ahead of everyone else’s.  It didn’t matter.  I was on the water where time stands still for everyone.  The crisis came in ’58 when I stepped back on land to journey through the time zones back to Eastern Standard Time.  I was all alone out there, you know, cut off from a past I was soon to learn couldn’t be retrieved.  Wolfe was right, you can never go home again.  The only secure place, as dangerous and that was, was my ship.  My terminal place was also a realtively secure harbor but I was stuck in the middle for six days between the time zones in which I had no place and no identity except the tenuous one of my leave papers.  A queer cop threw them into the wind and let those blow away in Illinois.  After that I was naked to the universe.  I’ve hated cops ever since.

     I wouldn’t recommend hitchhiking to anyone.  My life was on the line for twenty-five hundred miles and six days.  Twenty-five hundred miles and six days on the road without food or sleep.  I’d add without drink but in a gas station in Gary I downed six seven ounce bottles of Coca-Cola in a row.  Created a minor sensation.

     After surviving a lunatic who picked me up on the western edge of the Mojave who wanted to kill me because he was convinced I had two hundred dollars on me, which by a strange coincidence I had, I was picked up Mountain Standard in the Panhandle of Texas by a couple homosexuals who wanted a different treasure I possessed and dropped off Central Time in Tulsa.  My watch was only one ahour ahead by then.  I was getting close to some kind of NOW or was I?  No.  Time is much more relative than that.  I was soon to be living a strange combination of NOW and THEN.

     Tulsa was a tough town.  I don’t need to see Tulsa again.  I wasn’t about to start living on Tulsa Time.  I was an hour ahead which couldn’t have been better.  I had to walk through Tulsa, hungry and thirsty.  I spied a place across this great expanse of grass between it and the freeway.  As I approached the place began to glitter.  Fancy, but I could see a coffee shop at the top of a long flight of stairs to the left.  I didn’t want to spend money so I thought I’d just get a glass of water.

Oh Dan, can you see

That great green tree

Where the water’s running free

Just waiting there for you and me.

Water…cool…clear…water.

     But between me and the water was this big cowboy in high heeled boots, a tuxedo and ten gallon hat.  Fancy goings on as I noticed ladies entering to the right in ball gowns escorted by tuxedos.  I came prepared or thought I did.  I was in my dress blues and my Uncle Sam told me I should never be ashamed of my uniform, it could pass for a tuxedo anywhere.  Anywhere but Tulsa.  That cowboy had never discussed the issue with my Uncle Sam.

     I was bold but the problem was he had the advantage being on the landing at the top of the stairs and I had to climb the stairs to get past him.  He had his fist doubled and these high heeled boots with those silver plates on the toes.  That was a mean looking business proposition.  I had a lot further to fall than he did.  Get my uniform messed up and things.  Then where would I be out of time and place?  Whew! Why does one have to face tough choices?

     I’m getting a drink of water, I said, trying to combine thoughness with masculine geniality a al the cowboy ethic.

     Not here you ain’t.  He said, making a move to kick me down the stairs.

     Hey buddy, this is a tuxedo I’m wearing.  I faltered.

     His reply was not one of which my Uncle Sam would approve.

     I left Tulsa still thirsty not liking cowboys any better than I liked cops.  NOW has its perils.

     A day or so later I was still in Central Time.  Tulsa was a tough place and the rest of Oklahoma was no California.  I was heading North now which kept me in the same time zone.  Then I made the mistake of crossing the Mississippi into East St. Louis.  After just a couple minutes I really liked Tulsa.  Wished I was back there.

     I don’t know what evil forces made me want to hitchhike across country, damn Jack Kerouac, but I was within a hair’s breadth of being sliced and diced on the streets of East St. Louis.  Whould have tossed me in the river as so much driftwood.  Three Black guys with switchblades in their hands kept inching toward me while I kept inching closer to the middle of the highway.

     That morning some guy got in his car for a pleasant drive to Louisville.  He decided ot go through East St. Louis for some mysterious but critical reason.  He arrived in East St. Louis just as these three knives were deciding to make their move.  This guy sized up the situation from a couple blocks away, slammed on his brakes throwing open the passenger door at the same time shouting ‘Get In’ for God’s sake get in, NOW.’ Novel experience for a hitchiker.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to rush because if I made a break for it those three knives might move faster than i could.  I hopped in casually casting a smiling glance over my shoulder.  The driver peeled out of there nearly separating a hand from the wrist on the door handle.  I was saved from that particular NOW and END but I was on the road to Louisville which was still a far cry from Eastern Standard which was the time zone I so ardently desired.

     It took me another day or so as I had a lot of North to make up but I did get into Eastern Standard.  Now my watch matched the time zone but there was a mismatch between the present and the past.  Rather there were two different presents and pasts going on at the same time.  Mine and theirs.  I don’t think Einstein is right but well, maybe, time wasn’t that relative but the uses they and I were making of past and present sure were.

     That’s where memory comes in which makes time and space so relative.  I had been absent for two years and what I had been experiencing was much different than what they had been experiencing.  They had actually been living on Eastern Standard Time while I was just pretending.  I knew I was out of time.  For me time had been rapidly changing but for them time had more or less stood still or, rather traveled in a straight line.  To me they were still living in the past.  Oh, they had aged a couple years but their trajectory was different and slower.  Relatively they had stood still while I had rocketed away.

     It was as though I had been a gamma cloud burped from some collapsed star in some galaxy a billion light years away.  As is known once set in motion an object will travel in a straight line at the same speed unless some other agent interferes with it.  It was as though I had been careening through space ripping apart the fabric of time and space or disregarding it completely as though it wasn’t there; at any rate completely unaffected by this fabric which apparently has no tensile strength, there was no gravity of any force that deflected my course in a curve while if space is curved I was traveling so fast I careened right off the curved track.

     Who knows how many black holes i passed over without being drawn into the vortex; who knows how many puny suns I swept across without having one atom deflected by the puny gravitational pull of the strongest sun; who knows how many planets I depopulated.  One billion light years and running, my speed and trajectory were the same as when I was emitted from that distant star.

     Now, as though by some miracle here I was back where I began but in two different time zones at one time.  Theirs and mine.  Obvious I must have passed through a worm hole or fallen into a memory hole.  We stared at each other blankly each unable to comprehend the other.  They thought I have become weird,or perhaps weirder, because they had stood still while I had been careening through time and space in timezones they would never know.

     I smiled and got on a bus, enough of the adventures of hitchhiking.  One the way back to Standard Pacific Time I abandoned Eastern Standard adjusting my watch as I passed through Central Standard and Mountain Standard.  I was not exactly living in the NOW but I was in the correct time zone.

     Minor but vital adjustment.

     So, when ERB caught up with himself in 1914-15 he was no longer living on Tulsa time.  He was trying to adjust his watch to his current time zone.

     But as he was careening through space and time, space and time was moving at an even more frantic pace so it was difficult for him to get his bearings.

     Science was changing his world at a rate faster than the mind could follow.  Events in the far off Detroit that he had known and loved as a young fellow were going to affect his life just a few years hence.  In 1914 Henry Ford had shocked the industrial, moral and social world by ‘unilaterally’ doubling the wage for unskilled labor.

     This was a violation of ‘natural law’ which is to say religious sensibilities.  At the time a natural law of labor was believed and incorporated into religion.  The law was that if only one man can do a job he can command his price.  Skilled labor can demand more than unskilled labor but when anyone can do the job as in unskilled labor they will have to take what is offered.  Thus Ford pitted science against serious religious beliefs.

     At about this time a Judge in a labor dispute asked the strikers if they didn’t know they were going against God’s will on earth.

     This was at the time when the Liberal Coalition was forming and there were strangers in the land, to use John Higham’s expression, who believed they truly represented God’s Will.  There is no greater enemy to God’s Will on earth than Science and the Scientific Consciousness.  If you recall the so-called Christian Scientists reject scientific medical cures preferring to depend on the Will of God.  Apparently it has never occurred to them that a case of a ruptured appendix means God’s Will is death while a simple operation means life.

     Nevertheless Ford upset the natural or religious order of things and had to be stopped.  Ford himself believed he had discovered a universal law in mass production so that he was actually a prophet of his own new religion.  Believing himself in the possession of the truth he acted accordingly seeking to apply his method to each and every problem.  Thus when the Great War began it was deemed possible to negotiate with the participants on a personal level to get them to cease hostilities.  Ford believed he could do it.  The Strangers In The Land who were living on Babylon Time saw their opportunity to pit their religion against Ford’s science and they took it.  The Man of Science was in their pocket.  They convinced Ford to take a horde of well meaning but naive people to Germany for a confab with the Kaiser.  Ford fell for it.  This was the famous Peace Ship episode that shredded Ford’s reputation two short years after he had made it.

     Ford always maintained that after the ship was at sea the Strangers revealed themselves telling him that only they could change the course of the war.  They began it and only they could end it.  When he returned home he found the Strangers in charge of the War Industries Board and they and the Wilson Administration were telling him how to run his business.  Babylon Time had met the Twentieth Century and found it could make the clock run.

     Ford with his universal panacea was not the kind of man to take this sort of thing lying down.  Ford Motor Co. had as much cash laying around as Bill Gates and Microsoft does today.  Ford put his money to use.  These are complex times so I am going to edit out all information that doesn’t pertain to my moral.

     Ford believed in his method.  By applying it properly he saw no reason he couldn’t solve the age old problem of the Jews here and now.  He thought reason would work, poor man, so he bought himself a library of Jewish studies, put his man Bill Cameron on the job to study the library and publish the results in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, that he bought to disseminate his reasonable solution to the problem.  He made the Dearborn Independent a national newspaper, perhaps the first of its kind.  He even had a distribution system handy.  He made all his Ford dealers distribute the papers, even out in Hollywood, California.

     The Independent made such a noise that the papers couldn’t be given the silent treatment.

     The independent appealed to a very large number of people although Liberal historians have given the impression that the paper went unread.  The paper didn’t go unread.  Out in Hollywood a man named Edgar Rice Burroughs apparently read the paper assiduously.  As, why not, even if you don’t agree with the premise of a movie like The Passion Of The Christ that doesn’t mean you don’t go to see it.  I used to read The Christian Science Monitor and I’ve never been a Christian Scientist.  I used to read the Daily Worker and I’ve never been a Communist.  A lot of people did go see the Passion making it one of the most lucrative films in history and lots of people read the Dearborn Independent, even devoured it.

     Each week the paper issued a new article exposing the true nature of the ‘Jewish Problem.’  The articles were well researched, reasonable and accurate, but as they criticized a religion, no religion will stand any criticism if they can help it, they were necessarily labeled heretical, infidelic, bigoted, anti-Semitist.  In this case you can check anti-Semitist.  From this particular religion’s point of view they were anti-Semitic but from a reasonable scientific viewpoint they weren’t and aren’t.

     The Jewish reaction was strong and violent.  As a member of the Liberal Coalition they called in their allies who branded Ford an anti-Semite and ostracized him.  Then Ford was out there all alone.  A major campaign of vilification and defamation was conducted against him.  All the hypnopaedic media were called into play against Ford.  William Fox, the Fox part of the later Twentieth Century-Fox, used his Movietone News shorts to portray every Ford that was in an accident as at fault and unsafe.  Now that’s defamation with a capital D.  By 1925 it was clear that Ford could use some allies.

     Enter Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marcia Of The Doorstep.

     As we know Marcia was never published so ERB’s aid was hypothetical.  A reasonable question is what evidence do I have for ERB’s intent.  I offer Marcia Of The Doorstep as my evidence and certain articles from the Dearborn Independent.  As I’ve said before ERB in Marcia exhibits a seemingly involved knowledge of the theatre.  I  have been puzzled as to where he got it.

     I think I may have his source.  The original Ford articles were issued weekly beginning in 1920-21 later being collected into a series of four volumes entitled ‘The International Jew’.  What I am dealing with here is literature and history.  I have no concern in the nature of the Ford articles.  My only interest is what Ford and Burroughs understood and how they expressed it.  Leave it at that.  (It wasn’t left at that.  As of 10/27/08 this essay has been censored by being left out my catalog of essays and not mentioned under any of the tags;  Old habits are hard to break, I guess.)

     Like Burroughs believed, or as Burroughs understood Ford there are two types of Jews.  The ordinary Jew who goes about his business and the international Jews who is causing all the mischief.  Thus the title International Jew excludes the mass of ordinary Jews and refers only the the International trouble makers.  For Burroughs there was the ‘type’ of Max Heimer corresponding the the International Jews and the type of Judge Berlanger representing the ordinary of ‘Good Jew.’

     In Volume II of the Interntional Jew there is a series of four atrticles on the American Theatre.

     The books themselves have long since been stolen from the libraries and destroyed in an informal kind of censorship but due to the wonders of modern technology they’re available on the internet.  The relevant theatre chapters can be fund at the URLs below:

     http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij28.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij29.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij31.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij32.htm

     The first is entitled Jewish Control of the American Theatre of 1/121; the second: The Rise of the First Theatrical jewish Trust of 1/8/21; the third:  Jewish Aspect of the Movie Problem; and the fourth Jewish Supremacy In The Motion Picture World of 2/19/21.  I believe all the necessary theatrical information is contained in these four atircles.  All were written in 1921 giving ERB plenty of time to involve himself by 1924.

     As you may remember ERB was sent a copy of the Jewish Bill Of Rights in 1919 and it was demanded that he endorse them.  Thus there are an additional three articles from Vol. II that may be applicable.  They are found at:

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij34.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij35.htm

http://jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij36.htm

     While the last three do not reflect on Marcia to a great degree they will provide a better backgrund to ERB’s thinking on the issues as he must have studied them carefully.

     —————–

     It is very probable that ERB coded information into the novel to let Ford know this one was for him.  For instance Clara Sackett was probably named after Clara Ford.  Could be coincidental but the engineer of the Lady X was named Sorenson while Ford’s Chief Engineer was Charles Sorenson.  Given ERB’s obvious connection to the Dearborn independent which Ford would easily have recognized, if he would ever have read the book, I think the references are conclusive.

     While on this topic I would also like to point out that when the ban on Tarzan movies was broken in 1926 it was done by the arch ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph Kennedy who owned FBO Studios at the time.  FBO was a little later bought by David Sarnoff of RCA who formed RKO.  Radio-Keith-Orpheum thus editing Kennedy and FBO out of the picture.  Punishment?

     Also if you want a lively account of these proceedings check out Upton Sinclair’s self-published Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.  Sinclair’s is a nice first person I Was There type thing plus when William Fox was driven out of the movies, this is really exciting stuff, he went to Sinclair with his story.  so Sinclair not only lives through this from a distance but is told part of the story first hand.  I just love this stuff.

     I am not particularly concerned here with whether the Dearborn Independent articles are true and accurate, although I am sure they are, but my concern is that Burroughs read them, believed them and acted on them.  Bearing in mind his contact with the AJC he had no reason to disbelieve the articles.

     In the first article ‘Jewish Control Of The American Theatre’, after an introduction that relates Jewish activities in Russia to Jewish activities in the United States a general statement on the theatre is made:

     The Theatre has long been a part of the Jewish program for guidance of the public taste (hypnopaedic media) and influencing the public mind…it is the instant ally night by night, week by week of any idea which the ‘power behind the scenes’ wishes to put forth.  It is not by accident that in Russia, where they now have scarcely anything else, they still have the Theater, especially revived, stimulated and supported by Jewish-Bolshevists because they believe in the Theater just as they believe in the Press; it is one of the two great means of molding popular opinion.

     Cameron should have mentioned movies and song publishing and he would have had the major elements of hypnopaedic conditioning so brilliantly illustrated by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World.

     As we all know Burroughs was opposed to the Bolsheviks; he undoubtedly believed as did any knowledgeable observer that the Bolsheviks were predominantly Jewish.  We may believe that he endorses the premises of these article.

     Further down (a shortcoming of the internet is that there are no page numbers) the article says:

     Down to 1885 the American Theater was in the hands of Gentiles.  From 1885 dates the first invasion of Jewish influences.  It meant the parting of the ways, and the future historian of the American stage will describe that year with the word “Ichabod.”

     Second paragraph below:

        About the time that Jewish control appeared, Sheridan, Sothern, McCollough, Madame Junuschek, Mary Anderson, Frank Mayo, John T. Raymond began to pass off the stage.

———————

     All that remained after the Hebrew hand fell across the stage were a few artists who had recieved their training under the Gentile school- Julia Marlowe, Tyrone Power, R.D. McLean and a little later Richard Mansfield, Robert Martell.  Two of this group remain, and along with Maude Adams they constitute the last flashingsof an era that has gone- an era that apparently leaves no great exemplars to perpetuate it.

     There you have the premise of ERB in Marcia and enough history to flesh out the fiction.  The old school was gone.  ERB then names several players as here.  The last surviving exemplar of this tradition is Mark Sackett.  But even for Mark there are no plays worthy to perform in.  As a member of Abe Finkel’s troupe he condescends to perform in problem plays and the new sex comedy.

     The article continues:

     “Shakespeare spells ruin”: was the utterance of the Jewish manager.  “High brow stuff” is also a Jewish expression.  These two sayings, one appealing to the managerial end, the other to the public end of the Theater have formed the epitaph of the classic era.

     So there you have the complete story of Mark Sackett.

     He was the last of the breed, a fine old Gentile actor of the old school of pre-1885.  Corrupted by the Jewish influence on the theatre he accepts demeaning roles.

     When he comes in to money he tells Max Heimer that he is going to perform Shakespeare.  Max takes the position that ‘Shakespeare spells ruin’ arguing for a Ziegfeld Follies type show, a problem play or a sex comedy which he feels is a surer hope of success than the ‘high brow’ stuff.  Straight from the Dearborn Independent.

‘…the rage is for extravaganze and burlesque.’

     Now,

     In this manner was laid the foundation of the latter day Theatrical Trust.  The booking firm was that of Klaw and Erlanger, the former a young Jew from Kentucky who had studied law, but drifted into theatrical life as an agent; the latter a young Jew from Cleveland with little education but with experience as an advance agent.

     Thus Abe Finkel is probablly the Klaw of Klaw and Erlanger.  It may be coincidence but Judge B-erlanger is Erlanger prefaced with a B.  thus those two would reprsent Klaw and Erlanger.  Another version would be Finkel and Heimer in Hollywood also patterned after the Potash and Perlmutter movies of Samuel Goldwyn.

      The trust was resisted just as Mark Sackett resisted.

(From The Rise Of The Theatrical Trust)

     The opposition offered by the artists was prolonged and dignified, Francis Wilson, Nat C. Goodman, James A. Herne, James O’Neill, (Eugene O’ Neill’s father) Richard Mansfield, Mrs. Fiske and James K. Hackett stood out for a time…

      Mark Sackett held out then in defiance of theatrical wisdom forming a Shakespearean company.  This might be seen as a form of the Little Theatre movement which Cameron says developed in reaction to the first Theatrical Trust.

     So the basis for the New York and theatrical end of Sackett’s career may be said to have been inspired by the two theatrical articles of Cameron in the Dearborn Independent.  ERB probably read them in newspaper form shortly after publication in 1921.  Because of the AJC approach to him as well as heightened anxiety over the immigrant question caused by loyalty concerns in the wake of the War Burroughs was especially receptive to Ford’s concerns.

     If the germ of the story was conceived in 1921 the concern over Ford’s struggle was becoming difficult by 1924 may have inspired Burroughs to come to his literary aid.  Thus we have this story of Marcia which when examined more closely is very involved in post-war Revolutionary and Jewish problems.

     While the novel was universally rejected for publication this was undoubtedly because of ADL censors closely watching the publishing industry.

     One can’t be certain but it is possible that Burroughs would have been finished in Hollywood but for Kennedy’s FBO Studios breaking the blacklist on Burroughs in 1926.  Jewish movies of Tarzan began again in 1927.  After 1932s MGM film which in itself may have been a parody to discredit the Big Bwana, the property became so lucrative especially in a Depression Era climate, that movies continued to be made saving Burroughs from complete ruin.

     The war on Ford continued.  Henry Ford is an interesting figure who, like Burroughs, would continue to be a Judaeo-Communist target into the thirties and forties, to the end of his life and beyond.

     Ford zipped into the NOW in the years around 1914 when his Model T transformed America.  But then he slipped back into Tulsa Time.  The Model T was so successful for him that he failed to keep up with developments in the industry.  The Model T remained essentially the same until 1925 when a better Chevrolet overtook the Ford as the best seller.

      Ford then did an extraordinary thing that baffled conventional minds.  He shut down production for over a year as he designed the new Model A.  For this model he revolutionized the industry by designing the V8.  The Model A was an instant success reviving Ford’s fortunes but the present and the future were now so commingled, things were changing so fast that the NOW was gone before you sat down to dinner.  Constant model changes were now necessary.  The world that Ford had created had gotten away from him.

     He realized that he had lost his battle with the Jewish establishment.  He capitulated in 1927 when Louis Marshall of the Jewish government demanded an ‘apology’ to call off hostilities.  Ford told him to write one out and he would sign it.  Marshall wrote an abject apology which Ford signed without edits or reading.  Marshall then had the ‘apology’ published, bound and sent to every library free of charge.  The apology is easier to find than the Dearborn independent articles.

     The fracas came to a humiliating end for Ford and the Scientific Consciousness.  ERB’s reaction isn’t known, however on December 10, 1929 (ERB Bio Timeline 1920-29) in a letter to his son Hulbert he made these observation on Religion and Science:

     A man can be highly religious, he can believe in God and in an omnipotent creator and still square his belief with advanced scientific discoveries, but he cannot have absolute faith in the teachings and belief of any church, of which I have knowledge, and also believe in the accepted scientific theories of the origin of the earth, of animal and vegetable life upon it, or the age of the human race…(Religious) enthusiasms and sincerity never ring true to me and I think there has been no great change in this all down the ages, insofar as fundamentals are concerned.  There is just as much intolerance and hyprocrisy as there ever was, and if any church were able to obtain  political power today I believe you would see all the tyranny and inustice and oppression which has marked the political ascendency of the church at all times.

         You can’t be any more clear sighted than that.  Here ERB has clearly and succinctly stated the religious problem of the twentieth century and beyond.  His is an objective analysis of facts; religion is a subjective projection of desires and wishes.  As he notes science and religion cannot be reconciled.  As he goes on to note in the conflict between the objective and subjective, the conscious and unconscious, the tyranny of the unconscious is an unavoidable fact.  The question of which religion he fears would impose all the tyranny, injustice and oppression was clearly the Liberal Coalition and more especially the Jewish element of its multi-cultural diversity.

     We now come back to Richard Slotkin and his charges against Burroughs as the ‘mastermind’ of My Lai.  that an objection was lodged against Burroughs because he was interested in Eugenics can be discarded.  People of all political persuasions were interested in Eugenics.  If any abuses of Eugenics were made, Burroughs didn’t make them.  Besides, it’s a matter of how you interpret Eugenics.  The half man, half beast of Stalin is obviously an objectionable use.

     On the score of whether Burroughs was an anti-Semitist, which is what Slotkin really means, from a subjective religious point of view that may be so but it is not a question for the religious to decide; they are not competent to do so.  Sigmund Freud himself said that religion is a neurosis.  (That means a departure from mental health.) If he is to be respected as a scientific genius why shouldn’t we respect his opinion?  If religion is a neurosis then it should be treated as a mental disease.

     On a Scienfitic basis then is it possible to call Burroughs an anti-Semitist?  Clearly not.  The man was a clear minded rational human being of great achievement and should be honored as such.

     Should his scientific opinions differ from those of a religious bent it is they who must take a back seat not Burroughs.

     Slotkin is clearly wrong in his interpretation of Burroughs.  Slotkin represents the unconscious rather than the conscious.

     For the foregoing reasons then I think that Marcia Of The Doorstep and 1924 was the pivot of ERB’s career.  After 1924 it was no longer possible for him to live on Tulsa Time.  He came under attack from the Liberal Coalition which was as formidable for him as it was for Henry Ford.

     His novels after Marcia reflect this attack.  Those novels are perhaps his greatest.  Certainly one of the high points where he meets his enemies head on is Tarzan The Invincible that he was forced to publish under his own imprint.  The title says it all.

     I may be sentimental but I like Marcia Of The Doorstep.  I only wish he had had the patience to flesh out the ending.

     ERB wrote well in any time zone there was from Babylon Time to Tulsa Time to the NOW.

You know that I’ve been through it

But I just can’t go back to it.

There is no living on Tulsa Time.

 

NOW is the time.

 

End of Review

    

    

 

Exhuming Bob 13

Fit 5:

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Are you that Man Of Constant Sorrow

Of whom the authors write-

Grief comes with every morrow

And wretchedness at night?

Anon.

 

     Source of quotes:  Scott Marshall, Bob Dylan’s Unshakeable Monotheism- downloaded from Jewseek.com dsc09906but no longer available.  The site is no longer functioning.  Roughly the same material can be found in Scott M. Marshall with Marion Ford, Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey Of Bob Dylan, Relevant Media, 2004.  No longer in print new copies may still be obtained for under three dollars at Alibris.com for any who are interested.

 

     In the dead of winter in 1961 Bob Dylan, ne Bobby Zimmerman, left Minnesota to try his chances in New York City.  At this point he must have realized that his better chances lay with Folk Music than Rock n’ Roll.  Indeed, upon his arrival in New York he realized that Tin Pan Alley had the recording world sewn up except for the ‘race’ musics of Country And Western and R&B, and the Alley was already fairly tight with R&B.  He quickly and astutely realized that whatever he intended to do would find no home on the Great White Way.

     While Bob traveled light as far as material possessions went he brought a lot of psychological and religious baggage with him.  The kind of stuff you can’t leave in a locker at the bus station.  As his whole career has been an unfolding of this religious impulse it would behoove us to examine it somewhat closely.

     Bob received intense religious indoctrination in his youth until the time he left home in the Summer of 1959.  This religious education was of an intense Orthodox Jewish kind.  He recieved this from his family, both parents were deeply religious in the Orthodox mode, although the Hibbing syngogue was more often without a Rabbi of any kind than not.  Perhaps of premier importance was his Bar Mitzvah indoctrination in 1954 from a Lubavitcher Orthodox Rabbi direct from Brooklyn.  That combined with four years of extended stays at the Zionist summer camp, Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin.

     In speaking to Paul Vitello of the Kansas City Times after announcing his call to Jesus/God, Bob told him:

I believe in the Bible, literally.  Everything in it, I believe, was written by the hand of God.

     That is the statement of a religious fundamentalist and one without much sense or discernment.  If Bob doesn’t know the the ‘hand of God’ has written nothing then he can be written off as a rational human being.  Bob in the same interview went further:

     Everything that’s happening in the news today is prophesied in the scriptures.  It’s all in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations.

     For myself, I begin to run when I hear some Christian fundamentalist bring up the Book of Revelations.  It has the same effect on me as anti-Semite has for the Jew.

     We can assume therefore that upon his arrival in New York in 1961 Bob was a card carrying Biblical devotee.  This religious baggage for the time being took a back seat to Bob’s psychological baggage but was absorbed into it.   Hence the Biblical sounding ranting of Like A Rolling Stone.

     At the same time as with most young people Bob was in rebellion against his upbringing.  That is to say he was trying to find his own place in life while reconciling his upbringing to the emerging realities presented to him by life.  As his line from his song My Back Pages would seem to indicate:  I become my own enemy when I begin to preach. he realized that his religious beliefs would alienate any listeners and abort the possibility of establishing his career and reaching them later.

     Indeed, the sixties, and expecially the New york fold crowd was intensely anti-religious.  It was about this time that Bob read a headline on a Time Magazine cover asking the rhetorical quesiton:  ‘Is God dead?’  Bob was extremely offended by it dating the decline of Western Civilization from that headline.

     From 1961 to 1966 then Bob wrote mainly of his psychological problems and frustrations.  His dream life, which is to say, subconscious, received a lot of attention during this period as well as later in his career.

     It was precisely the speaking from his subconscious to the subconscious of his audience that drew this specific type of person to him.

     Phil Ochs, a contemporary Folkie of Dylan, recognized what he was doing in stirring up deeply held resentment and thought he was brewing trouble for himself.  However Dylan, while hating, did not necessarily stir up emotions that would lead to violent actions.  Instead his hate was characterized by self-pity and resentment that would be satisfied by showing people how wrong people were in their judgement of him.  Thus he would accentuate his God as a god of judgement.  He left the actual judgemental punishment of them up to his god.  Thus those of us in his audience who linked up were also characterized by self-pity and resentment but not violent.

     For instance, in a 1983 interview with Martin keller he was quoted:

     My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt.  They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses- you know, the guy that killed the Egyptian, married an Ethiopian girl, and brought the Law down from the mountain.  The same Moses whose staff turned into a serpent.  The same person who killed 3,000 Hebrews for getting down, stripping off their clothes, and dancing around a golden calf.  These are my roots. (My italics.)  Jacob had four wives and thirteen children, who fathered thirteen chiidren, who fathered an entire people.  These are my roots, too.  Gideon with a small army, defeating an army of thousands.  Deborah, the prophetess; Esther the Queen, and many Canaanite women, Reuben slipping into his father’s bed when his father wasn’t home. These are my roots. 

     Delilah tempting Samson, killing him softly with her song.  The mighty King David was an outlaw before he was king, you know.  He had to hide in caves and get his meals at back doors.  The wonderful King Saul had a warrant out on him- a ‘no knock’ search warrant.  They wanted to cut his head off.  John the Baptist could tell you more about it.  [That’s a joke in this standup routine, Son.]  Roots, man- we’re talking Jewish roots, you want to know more?  Check up on Elijah the prophet.  He could make rain.  Isaiah the prophet, even Jeremiah, see if their brethren didn’t want to bust their brains for telling it right like it is.  Yeah, these are my roots, I suppose.

     Now, those are extremely violent, murderous roots but they form the staples of Bob’s conscious and unconscious minds.  The selected examples,  all from the Old Testament, are revealing in the Freudian sense.  Vengeance dominates.

     Nor are these ‘Jewish’ roots in any exlusive sense.  These actors were Hebrews and not Jews.  I know all this bullroar from Christian (Methodist) services.  I was repelled at once and rejected this crap when I escaped the stultifying influence of my childhood.  This crap is unworthy stuffing for human minds. 

     This mean spirit is felt throughout the whole of Bob’s corpus from 1961 to 1966, more especially in that most puerile of all his songs:  Masters Of War.

     Significantly Bob mentions nothing about Jesus or the New Testament; his roots are all Old Testament.  This raises the question of whether his embracing of Jesus in 1979 was calculated or not.  There is in fact little differentiation  between his conception of jesus and the Jewish Yahweh.  Indeed the idiot church I attended as a youth seemed to accentuate the Old Testament Yahweh over the New Testament Jesus.  I have a much stronger conception of Yahwey over Jesus so one might say I share ‘Jewish roots’ as much as Bob does.  I am as much a dual citizen as Bob is except more American/Ancient Hebrew rather than Israeli/American.

     As of 1964 Bob Dylan wasn’t really going anywhere.  True, his manager Albert Grossman was busy promoting his songs to others whose recordings then inflated Bob’s reputation but that didn’t necessarily translate into big sales for his own albums.

     Then in 1964 Bob had a stroke of luck, the Beatles came to America.  There had been a massive promotion along the lines- The Beatles Are Coming, The Beatles Are Coming.  No one had ever heard of them but when they appeared on Ed Sullivan everyone was tuned in to see what the fuss was about.  After it was over, other than the screaming girls in the audience, that, I might add, was a new phenomenon, few of us still knew what the fuss was about.

     Nevertheless it seemed that from that point on the Beatles were on the news nearly every night.  This was unprecedented attention for a mere ‘pimple’ music pop group which is all the Beatles were at that time.

     Why the Beatles received this attention has never been clear to me.  However these were four goi musicians although their manager Brian Epstein was Jewish.  In the inter-cultural competition a Jewish super-star was now required.  After all the first of the superstars Elvis Presley was an all-American hillbilly.  Fabian the last before the Beatles was Italian.  These four English kids then came up and so a Jewish kid was required to keep up the Jewish image.  The only real alternative was Bob Dylan although few or any of us knew, or even suspected he was Jewish.  Bob had sure worked hard to keep that a secret.  Even his girlfriend Suze Rotolo was slow to find out.

     Bob then was given the big media buildup also being on the news frequently, also being given the star treatment in the big national magazines.  While the Beatles handled their fame with chipper aplomb Bob approached it with negative depression.  But, it worked just as well.  The pressure was enormous, plus Albert Grossman was pushing him too hard, working the kid to death.  Literally according to Bob.

     Whether there really was a motorcycle accident or Bob had a nervous breakdown from contemplating the next killer tour his manager had arranged may never be known for sure.  After completing Blonde On Blonde that filled out his core oeuvre Bob went into seclusion for a period.

     He put this seclusion to good use.  Although his premier creative period was over, his golden age so to speak, he succeeded in a magnificent Silver Age.  He and the members of his backup band, later known simply as The Band, created a huge and significant body of work.  Dozens of songs, some of them really good while most of them were good.  It was here that Bob perfected the technique of clothing his religious thoughts in Amerian indigenous Folk forms.  This ability was exhibited on his next LP, John Wesley Harding, that was released not that long after Blonde On Blonde.

     In one of this period’s songs, You Ain’t Going Nowhere, Bob had this to say:  ‘Find ourself a tree with roots.’  Thus the cover of the Harding album showed Bob standing next to a tree with roots dressed in Jesse James era Western foul weather gear.  Now, Bob had also sung:  ‘I may look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James.’  This guy looked like the Minnesota Northfield raid while the tree with roots reprsented his Jewish affiliation.

     Now Bob was on track for his Jewish liaison and subsequent demonstration of his Jewish Lubavitcher roots.  Those who follow Bob’s religious odyssey, and there have been several books written on this topic, all call attention to the close relation of Biblical topics to his lyrics from 1961 to the present.  If you have the backgound and take both a broad and narrow approach to looking for them you will find that they abound.  The method becomes second nature for Bob so that he may not ever be aware of many of the references himself until they’re pointed out to him; or he may be conscious of them all.

     What is clear is that Bob views his career as a religious calling; that is to say a messianic mission to bring the word of God to as many people as he can.  In May 1980 he told interviewer Karen Hughes:

     He was disarmingly honest with Hughes about his sense of God’s call:  “I guess He’s always been calling me.  Of course, how would I have ever known that, that it was Jesus calling me….

     So now we have the anomaly of God calling to a Jew through Jesus.  While both Christians and Jews who now view Jesus as a Western and not a Jewish figure had trouble accepting the fact that a Jew could accept Jesus and remain a Jew nothing is more reasonable.  That Bob, a Jew living in a Christian country, could amalgamate Judaism and Jesus wasn’t even all that odd.

     Jesus himself was a Jew while the early Christians were all Jews who accepted every Jewish rite including circumcision and the dietary laws.  It was only when Saint Paul separated Christianity from these Judaic laws that Christianity succeeded.

     As Marshall’s interviewees point out, the New Testament is a Jewish novel in which 25 out 27 books were written by Jews. John and Revelations being the exceptions.  Even as Bob embraced Jesus, the Jews for Jesus, based in San Francisco, who themselves did not convert to Christianity were active.  Just as the Jews persecuted the early Jewish Christians even to death so they put the screws to Jews For Jesus and have at least destroyed their effectiveness.

     Thus in 1983 the Lubavitchers re-entered Bob’s life when as they thought they attempted ot reconvert him.  As Bob had never left the faith, he has said in effect, I am a Jew of the Jews, I suppose he played along until they were satisfied then went along his way as a Jewish Christian.  Makes perfect sense to me, I don’t have a problem with the manner in which Bob expresses his religiosity. 

     I have a problem in that he expresses it at all.  I find it incredible in this this day and age of scientific reallty that anyone can make the statement that the Bible is the actual word of Yahweh or any other god. 

     Goodness gracious, Bob, shape up before it’s too late.  We’re almost down to that last grain of sand.  The lights are beginning to dim.  It is getting dark.

     :

 

 

    

    

 

Exhuming Bob 13

Fit 4:

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

 

The most difficult thing on earth is to believe in something that is palpably untrue.  “We must respect the other fellow’s religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we do his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

– H.L. Mencken

I become my own enemy the moment that I preach.

– Bob Dylan

dylan-gospel1 

     Religion is palpably untrue whether it be Christianity, Judaism or Moslemism.  The fundamentalist religious attitude is the enemy of reason and hence the mental development of mankind.  Such an attitude no longer has any place in society.  Nevertheless its influence lingers on like some spectre from the crypt of human consciousness.

     Part and parcel of religious fundamentalism is the notion of an external redeemer or messiah.  As the Piscean Age began society fixed itself on the notion that since individuals could not alter their behavior a redeemer or messiah would arise who would redeem their errant behavior.  While the notion was endemic in the ancient world at this change from the Arien to Piscean ages it found its purest expression among the Jews.

     While the Jews did not fix on any one exemplar as the Messiah the Western world did.  Thus Jesus became the  sole exemplar of a Messiah for them as they expectantly awaited his second coming.

     Christianity is at its bottom an offshoot of Judaism as is the later Arab edition of the Semitic religious group, Moslemism.  Both Judaism and Moslemism have a rather fluid notion of messianism.  Anyone may declare himself a messiah in Judaism as in Moslemism.  In Moslemism the messiah goes by the name of the Mahdi or Expected One.

     Over the centuries innumerable messiahs and mahdis have appeared, failed and disappeared while the Christian world of the West patiently awaited the return of its Jesus.  It’s been a long wait and it probably won’t end too soon.

     The appeal of messianism is very strong for the individual.  I would imagine that every boy with a Christian or Jewish upbringing has wondered whether he might be the embodiment of Jesus as the second coming or the Messiah to redeem the people.  As always Jewish claimants proliferate.  If he is not disabused of the notion by adolescence he could probably be found wandering around the insane asylum with the many other imitations of Christ.

     In the Eastern world such is not the case.   While weak personalities go under strong personalities may very well impress their fantasy on society although invariably with disastrous results.  Bob’s Jewish namesake, Sabbatai Zevi, was one of these who flourished in the seventeenth century.  Sigmund Freud was one in the last century.

     Naturally in the conflict between imagined anointment and actual realities a dual personality must come into existence, thus we have, for instance, Bobby Zimmerman and his alter ego Bob Dylan.  Beginning in the nineteenth century when science began to challenge societal religious fantasies dual personalities became more common or, at least, became more prominent in literature.

     Literature is full of dual personalities from the Dupin and the narrator of Poe through the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and a much longer list.  One of the more amazing examples is Bobby Zimmerman/Bob Dylan the little Jewish kid and the quasi-Cowboy pop star.  Throughout his career Bob has wavered between the two, now one, now the other.  In the late seventies and early eighties he appeared to embrace Christianity for a few years and then abruptly returned to that of the Orthodox Lubavitcher Jew.  Just recently he passed through a Cowboy phase and now, as per this recent picture he has re-emerged as a Hebrew prophet complete with peyos and a vaguely demented look like some ancient Ezekiel or Jeremiah. (go to touchingtheelephant.wordpress.com Bob Dylan Marchin’ To The City)

     Disquisitions such as this will disturb the equanimity of religious fundamentalists.

     Will Bob now regale us with Jeremiads as he preached to us in 1980?  To find that answer one must go back to the now ancient past in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing up on the Iron Range.

     Bob’s memories of the North Country are as dualistic as his personality.  He speaks of bittler cold winters, so cold that one slept in multiple layers of clothes and summers so swelteringly hot and humid as to be in the Great Dismal Swamp.

     And then he was Jewish in what has been characterized as a predominantly Catholic town.  A small Jewish island in a sea of foreign culture.  In those postwar days when his Jews lived in trembling fear of an impossible American Nazi holocaust.   Jews hid their origins and culture as much as possible denying their religion and seeking to blend in as seamlessly as chameleons.  Thus it was as young Bobby Zimmerman entered high school.  Then in 1956 as he approached the massive front doors of his high school the Jews of the eight year old State of Israel fought a lightning war with the surrounding Arabs.  Instead of being driven into the sea sas the Arabs propesied they themselves were humiliated and driven back.  How now?  The Jews became assertive in their identity emerging to challenge the dominant culture for supremacy.  They ceased to be humble, hence, the sixties.

     Already masters of Hibbing’s retail district one imagines they began to flex their muscles without fear of gas chambers.  Foremost among them, the President of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the ADL, was little Bobby Zimmerman’s own father, Abram.  Abram took to smoking huge black cigars, a sure sign of aggressive manhood.

     Years later when Bob Dylan had immured Bobby Zimmerman behind walls like in Poe’s Cask of Amontillado, Bob Dylan would return to Hibbing and combine the two images of his childhood of the two Zimmermans as he sat on a motorcycle on a corner smoking an immense black cigar.  What vision of vengeance was this?  As one of his cowboy heroes, Hank Snow, sang:  I’ve got a troubled mind.

     Bob’s father Abram viewed himself as something of a Jewish scholar.  He had a bent toward the Orthodox even toward the Lubavitcher.  In 1954 as his son’s Bar Mitzvah approached he sent for a Lubavitcher Rabbi to instruct his son in the puerilities of the Lubavitcher approach to Judaism.  The Rabbi, one Reuben Maier, was undoubtedly brought to Hibbing on a one year trial contract.  When the year was up and the congregation had rejected him he left.

     In telling of his Bar Mitzvah indoctrination Bob dramtizes Rabbi Maier’s arrival as a mystery with himself as the messianic center of the mystery.  As he tells it one day a Greyhound bus ground to a stop at the Hibbing terminal; the Rabbi stepped off and said:  Where’s Bobby Zimmerman, I’m here to indoctrinate him into the Lubavitcher mysteries.  I exaggerate for effect of course but true to the spirit.  Then having taught Bobby what he was supposed to learn he reboarded the bus and disappeared down Highway 61 as mysteriously as he arrived.  It could have seemed that way to a thirteen year old.  The key point is that Bobby learned what the Rabbi had to teach.  As Bob said he taught him what he had to know.

     If the accounts are correct Bobby Zimmerman’s was the first Bar Mitzvah in town for several years and it was huge.  Four hundred or more people were in attendance.  One assumes that the loot collected was beyond the avarice of the average thirteen year old.  Bob boasted of the Bar Mitzvah for years.

     But of more importance for us is what information Rabbi Reuben imparted to Bob.  I have pointed out in Fit 2 that Rabbi Maier was associated with Rabbi Schneerson in Brooklyn, New York.  Schneerson had strong notions of the superiority of the Jew to all other peoples while having a strong notion of the messianic nature of Judaism in bringing the word of the Jewish god to the peoples.  This is absolutely undeniable and calling someone who tells the truth to you an anti-Semite will not change the truth.  Such an accusation only makes the accuser look an ignoramus.

     It would seem to follow then that Rabbi Maier could teach his young disciple nothing other than the prevailing Lubavitcher doctrines of Rabbi Schneerson.

     Indeed in later life Bob Dylan would write the symbolical song Quinn The Eskimo while after his Christian stint say words to the effect:  ‘You know what?  Things are going to fall apart and all peoples are going to run to the Jews to save them.  But, guess what,  the Jews won’t be able to do it because they haven’t lived according to the Law.’   Sounds just like the Protocols, doesn’t it, Sean?

     Now, where do you suppose Bob would pick up an idea like that?

     Enduring heavy Jewish indoctrination during his high school years Bob was also conflicted by his immersion in the dominant culture thus contributing to his dual personality.  Thus we have Cowboy Bob who listened to endless hours of Country and Western and we have Rabbi Bob using his pulpit to preach Jewish tenets, whether in Christian form or not, to what passed for his faithful.

     Starting from a low base Bob was actually to gather a following of millions as of this date.  Many if not most of them see him as either a Christian savior or a Jewish messiah.

     Young Bobby Zimmerman left Hibbing in a state of Mixed Up Confusion that it would take him decades to order as much as he ever has.

     I hope I haven’t unduly offended anyone but the fanatics to this point.  They will always scream anti-Semite at anyone who challenges their cherished fantasies.  They are religious fundamentalists and are to be scorned by any intelligent people.  Disrgard them.  Laugh at them.  If the reader will find the story anti-Semitic then all I can say is that he or she find the truth anti-Semitic.

Owls- they whinny down the night;

Bats go zigzag by.

Ambushed in shadow beyond sight

The outlaws lie.

 

Old gods, tamed to silence, there

In the wet woods they lurk,

Greedy of human stuff to snare

in nets of murk.

 

Look up, else your eye will drown

In a moving sea of black;

Between the tree-tops, upside down,

Goes the sky-track.

 

Look up, else your feet will stray

Into that ambuscade

Where spider-like they trap their prey

With webs of shade.

 

For though creeds whirl away in dust,

Faith dies and men forget,

These aged gods of power and lust

Cling to life yet-

 

Old gods almost dead, malign,

Starving for unpaid dues;

Incense and fire, salt, blood and wine

And a drumming muse,

 

Banished to woods and a sickly moon,

Shrunk to mere bogey things,

Who spoke with thunder once at noon

To prostrate kings:

 

With thunder from an open sky

To warrior, virgin, priest,

Bowing in fear with a dazzled eye

Toward the dreaded East-

 

Proud gods, humbled, sunk so low,

Living with ghosts, and ghouls,

And ghosts of ghosts, and last year’s snow

And Dead Toadstools.

Outlaws by Robert Graves.

Fit 5 follows in another post.

     Bob

 

Exhuming Bob 13

Fit 3;

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     What was really an innocent exploration of Bob’s religious development is being given a sinsiter cast by various elements with an apparent axe to grind.

     The latest to join the fray is something called Mick Hartley: Politics and Culture.  It goes on this way:

     As David T. at Harry’s Place publicises a forthcoming conference at Goldsmith’s, University of London, on Jews and anti-semitism, it’s interesting to note the odd places where you find anti-semitism cropping up nowadays.  Expecting Rain as anyone who follows Bob Dylan’s career will know, is a website which provides daily links to all things Bob: concert and record reviews, articles, whatever.  There is, of course, no presumption that every article they link to is something they agree with or aprove of, but, as RightWingBob notes, it was nevertheless extremely odd to see them linking last Thursday to this piece, “Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob.”

     One would have to obsessed with anti-Semitism to find it in my scholarly essay.  Coded in the above quote is the notion that Andersen’s site, an aggregator, Expecting Rain, and my site, I, Dynamo, colluded to publish this ‘anti-Semitic’ essay on the first day of the Jewish New Year, or Yom Kippur in Jewish parlance.  This notion was put forward by Sean Curwyn and his alter ego Dov Kerner on his RightWingBob site.  This is what is known as a paranoid delusion in psycho-analytical circles.

     Curwyn and Kerner note that my essay was written in June and they think cleverly withheld until Yom Kipper when apparently as they believe as some sort of insult to the Jews Expecting Rain and I, Dynamo in collusion published it.  Karl Andersen who runs his site and I mine don’t even know each other and have never communicated about anything except contributions and that in the most perfunctory manner.

     While it is true that I wrote the essay in June it was only in October that I suggested the link to Expecting Rain.  I only became familiar with the aggregator a couple months ago after I wrote the essay.  Since then I have been a regular contributor to the site.

     So, this October I decided to suggest the link to ER as I thought it a very thoughtful essay on Bob’s religious attitude.  As Monday through Thursday have the heaviest traffic on ER I waited until Monday afternoon to submit the link.  As it happened Monday was a heavy newsday for ER which listed 30 links therefore excluding mine as a late submission.  ER carried it over using it on Tuesday which was a slow newsday.

     I doubt very seriously whether Karl Andersen was aware of when Yom Kippur was and I sure as heck didn’t know so if the essay was published on Yom Kippur there was no conspiracy to do so.  But as conspiracy theorists have no trouble making non-existent connections Messers Kerner, Curwyn and Hartley see the ugly head of anti-Semitism looming above the horizon like Fantomas over Paris.

     My compassion and pity goes out to them.  I hope they get well soon.  It is too bad Mr. Hartley who read psychology at Oxford (in England not Mississippi) became disillusioned with the discipline; all three need it badly.  Should they enter an analyst’s office the term they should employ in seeking help is…paranoid delusion.

Fit 4 will follow in another posting.

 

Exhuming Bob

Fits 1 & 2:

Bob As Messiah

by

R.E. Prindle

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses; and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

– H.L. Mencken

 

     I had planned to write further on Bob’s religious development after ‘Lubatitcher Bob’ at some time but the row caused by Sean Curnyn of Right Wing Bob has focused my mind wondrously.

     Before getting to Bob per se I will have to discuss the flap caused by Curnyn who is something of a sidewinder.  Basically this is a contest between religious superstition and scientific investigation.  Facts conflict with belief and in the resolution one or the other has to give.  Since superstition cannot stand up to fact religion has to be the loser whatever name it goes by.  No matter how many violent names you call the scientist the facts remain the same.

     Curnyns vitriol can be found in full at his site:  http://rightwingbob.com.

     I quote relevant parts below:

     I didn’t happen to notice it yesterday (no date but probably 10/10/08) but it was brought to my attention in an email last night by reader Dovid (Dovid not David) Kerner, who tells me that he sent the following to the webmaster of ‘Expecting Rain’, Karl Erik Andersen.

     Regarding your printing the link to Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob.

     I love your website but this one shouldn’t have been printed- it’s really written with an violent anti-Jewish slant.  Here’s the reply I left on the site.

<<Is it true that as you say there is “a Jewish world organization” which realized they had something in Bob Dylan and gave him maximum publicity?

     And are the Jews taught, as you write, that they “are to rule the world and the peoples?”  Or does the biblical term “chosen people”  mean that Jews are to set an example for the rest of humanity? (I just finished a whole day in synagogue (Yom Kipper) and I don’t recall praying for Jews to rule the world.)

     Your claims sound vaguely familiar- The Protocols ring a bell here.

     Shalom and Happy New Year.

     Dovid >>

     I think you (expectingrain) should put an apology/warning to your readers regarding the matter.

     Otherwise, thank you and keep up the great work.

     As of this time of writing, the gjy who posted the orignal article hasn’t published Dovid’s comment (which really doesn’t suprise and the guy deserves to be ignored) and Karl Erik has not either taken down the link to the anti-semitic article, nor added any note about it.  This disappoints.

     Well and good.  But this Dovid Kerner fellow, if there is one and he isn’t Sean Curnyn, lied about making a response on my site, I, Dynamo.  He didn’t do it, hence no reply.

     Sean Curnyn did leave a cryptic comment on my site that said nothing.  I decided to check into his site.  Lo and behold I found the above denunciation.  When I checked Curnyn’s site for a response box I found to my dismay that there wasn’t one.  Curnyn is apparently so insecure that he doesn’t welcome comments.  Might be critical of him, I suppose.  However, I did find an email address tucked away in an obscure place  with a warning that he might publish emails.  I had no choice but to ignore the warning and send him an email.

     My first follows:

Dear Sir or Madam:

     I received your cryptic message to my posting, Lubavitcher Bob, and have permitted it as I do all postings.  You say that your reader Dovid Kerner left a comment on the LB posting.  Maybe he thought he did but yours is the first notice I’ve received.

     My suggestion is that you leave a response on the LB posting so that it can be responded to and that the readers may be informed of the dialogue rather than this sort of sneak email attack you’re undertaken.

     I will say at this time that you apparently know nothing of either religion or Judaism or you wouldn’t  make the silly comments you’ve posted on your website Right Wing Bob.

     If it is any help to you I have sat through many hours of synagogue and am quite familiar with the content of the sermons.

     The purpose of my essay that expecting rain courageously, apparently, published, is an attempt to get to the bottom of Bob’s career and what it means.  If you disagree with me and wish to start a dialogue respond in the comments to my posting.  If you don’t post I will have no choice but to think you are a coward and obscurantist.  Your reader Dovid Kerner is welcome to join in if he has the courage.  So far he has misrepresented to you and you have misrepresented to your readers that I have refused to reply to him. 

     I demand an apology and retraction which I know your kind never gives.

     Thank you for time and attention.

R.E. Prindle

     As you can see I openly challenged Both Kerner and Curnyn to respond and that I would reply.

     Naturally neither did.  I received no apology or retraction.  I sent a second email:

Dear Sir or Madam:

     I have just rechecked your site and find no apology or retraction and you have left the false posting on your site.

     I’m tapping my foot, Sir or Madam.  My patience is wearing thin.  Get on it.

R.E. Prindle

     Still no response.  I sent a 3rd email:

     Dear Sir or Madam:

     You have now had several hours to apologize, issue a retraction and remove the slanderous post from your site.  As you apparently refuse to right your wrong that you have committed against me I have no choice but to believe that you and Dovid Kernen are in collusion to defame me.

     Your characterization of Lubavitcher Bob as ‘a piece of screwball Jew-hating screed’ is offensive and unintellectual in the extreme.  Such filth is apparently characteristic of you and your site.  As usual with those of your ilk you refuse to answer to the content of my essay and resort to ad hominem defamation.

     Your kind disgust me.

     I now feel free to write a rebuttal and expose you for the anti-social left-wing bigot that you are.

     You are a disgrace to the internet.

     R.E. Prindle

     As of this date (10/12/08) I have received no reply from either party.  I don’t expect to.  That is the background.  I will now attempt to refute Kerner and Cronyn’s defamations.

Fit 2.

     The boys from Right Wing Bob seem to have been expecially offended by my notion of an International, world, or global Jewish organization.  I am absolutely astonished that they think, or pretend to, that one doesn’t exist.  All religions have a central authority.

     Let us consider the Moslems first.  Mecca is the world center of Moslemism to which all Moslems are expected to make a pilgrimage to look at the meteorite at least once in their life.  While unity is not conspicuous in developed religions, yet the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula generally have charge of the Moslem religion.  The Saudi Princes are directing the worldwide proselytization efforts of the religion.

     Now as to Christianity in its two forms with which we are most familiar, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.  I am not well informed on the conditions or intent of the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches.

     Roman Catholicism like Moslemism is a global organization exercising some sort of authority over the faithful in all its dominions from its global administration center in the Vatican near Rome.  Like the Moslems its goal is to convert all people of whatever relgious stripe to its faith.

     The Protestants while splintered have their various administrative headquarters from whch they seek to proselytize the world.

     The parent organization for Moslemism and Christianity is Judaism.  Together these three religions form the Semitic group of religions.

     If the former two didn’t borrow their organizational ideas from Judaism that would be odd indeed.  Failing that one would think that Judaism would conform to its offspring and organize internationally along the same lines.  if fact, they always have.  Why Messers Kerner and Curnyn are offended by the notion and wish to deny the obvious baffles me.  That they should respond to the innocuous suggestion by defaming me as an anti-Semite does not speak well for either their breeding or intelligence.

     Judaism’s  two sister religions are intent on proselytizing the world.  Once completed the Moslem Arabs would be the directors of the theocratic state as a superior people.  Christianity’s Roman Catholic priesthood would enjoy the favored position if it achieved its goal.  Under Judaism the reward for having brought mankind to thier vision of God would also, as a nation of priests, be to administer the affairs of mankind.  What could be more obvious?  That is the meaning of the phrase, a nation of priests.  That is what it means to be ‘the Chosen People.’  What else could it mean?

     Moslems and Christians wish to proselytize while Jews don’t.  I hope Messers Kerner and Curnyn won’t disagree with that and won’t call me all the terrible names they can imagine because I point out this obvious fact.  Therefore the Jews have to establish their priestly dominion by other means.  They must persuade in some form or manner the peoples to accept their leadership or dominance.  this has always been the thrust of Messianic Jewish politics.

     In 1972 Naomi Cohen published a history of The American Jewish Committee entitled; Not Free To Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906-66.  The meaning of the title is that Jews are Not Free To Desist from the task of achieving the goal of establishing the priesthood over the peoples.  No one individual is expected to complete the task in their lifetime but none are free to desist from moving it along.

     Messers Kerner and Curnyn can deny this if they wish but to do so is to be merely perverse.

     Now, to be the Chosen of God must necessarily imply that the Chosen are better people than the rest and are therefore entitled to rule.  Indeed, Even Kerner admits this when he says:  ‘Or does the biblical term ‘chosen people’ mean that Jews are to set an example for the rest of mankind?’  To set an example is to be better so Dov defeats his criticism of me.

     The Rabbi who instructed Bob was undoubtedly a Lubavitcher from Brooklyn.  The leader of the Lubavitchers was a man named Rabbi Schneerson.  We are informed that Rabbi Schneerson in addition to being a great religious Rabbinical scholar also had scientific degrees from secular universities.  Back in the forties of the last century genetics seemed to have been his forte because he asserted with great confidence that Jews had a special gene that made them more intelligent than any other people in the world.  Undoubtedly that was how they intended to set an example for the rest of humanity.  Thus Jews were singled out not only by God as the Chosen of Heaven but by evolution right down here on earth.

     So, while I appreciate that Curnyn may believe my essay ‘a piect of screwball Jew-hating screed’ I have to say that Sean Curnyn is an ignoramus of the first water without either the background or education to understand what I am saying.  Indeed, as the Bobber says:  ‘don’t criticize what you can’t understand.’  Kerner and Curnyn should heed the Bob’s advice.

     But as to Bob and Rabbi Reuben Maier who as a Lubavitcher was educated by Rabbi Schneerson.

Fits 3 & 4 follow in another posting.

 

 

A Review

The Low Brow And The High Brow

An In Depth Study Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’

The Mucker And Marcia Of The Door Step

Part III

by

R.E. Prindle

Background Of the Second Decade Social And Political

 

     1.

     I have been criticized for discussing material that seems to bear no relationship to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The social milieu in which a man lives and works directly affect what and how he writes.  He will react within that milieu whether he can understand and articulate it or not.

     ERB understood much.  He understood the main conflict of his times- that between the Religious and Scientific Consciousnesses.  How he understood it is one thing, its exact nature is another.  The battle was not necessarily put into the terms of science versus religion.  On the objective level science had more prestige while on the subjective level religion had the upper hand creating a dualistic conflict.  As Voltaire said:  No one ever willed himself an athiest.  The same can said of Science.  The usual terms employed in the conflict was that of  spirtiualism versus materialism.  So those two words were supercharged masking the real conflict.

     While religion retained great strength in this period science was so strong that religions had to adapt to science, thus one had the ecumenical Congress Of Religions in Chicago in 1893 during which a common plan of resistance was discussed.

     One reaction to Science was American Liberalism.  Liberalism is in fact a religion founded on beliefs rather than facts.  American Liberalism developed out of the Puritan faith of New England.  The Puritans believed themselves  to be the successor of the Hebrews of the Old Testament as the Chosen People of God.

     Two very interesting studies have appeared in the last couple decades which illuminate the English background of the United States.  One is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed; the other is Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins Wars.  Both illustrate the continuity of behavior of the colonists between England and the Colonies.  That continuity began with the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and continues through the strange Liberal mentality of today.  Burroughs who was of the ‘Conservative’ mentality had to struggle with the forces of Liberalism in his day.

     When the Normans invaded England they enslaved the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants.  Anyone who has read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott has the image of Gurth with his iron colar inscribed on his memory.  This piece of arrogance was to have serious consequences in both England and America.

     The Normans occupied the Southern counties of England which Thomas Hardy caled Wessex, while the brunt of slavery fell on the East Anglian counties.  The insult of slavery was burned into East Anglian memories along with a desire for revenge made more savage by the the religious certitude that they were the Chosen People of God.

     The East Anglians, of course, revolted against the Norman Church Of England, emigrating to North America where they settled in the States of New England.  New England = New Anglia.  In England they fought the English Civil War against the Normans.  Puritan Roundheads against Norman Cavaliers.  It then became the turn of the defeated Cavaliers to emigrate to North America.  They chose to go to Virginia where they gave the colony its Norman Cavalier character and nickname.  The ancient enemies were now divided North and South.

     As Fischer points out, slavery by the Norman descendents in England had disappeared only about a hundred years before the English Civil War.  The Cavaliers now revived slavery in their Southern colonies.  First they brought indentured servants from England who were slaves subject to the whims of their masters for a stated period of years that could easily be extended.  Then African slavery was introduced.  For a period of time both White and Black slaves worked side by side in the fields with the Blacks gradually displacing the Whites.

     The New Englanders looked with fear and loathing on the Norman Virginians, who as they saw it, now resumed their old habits.  It was here that the American Civil War was conceived.  The Puritan New Englanders after having first rejected the king in the American Revolution which their East Anglian forebearers  had failed to do in England then turned to agitating a war against the Norman Cavaliers of the South, whose ancestors had enslaved them, on the basis of an anti-slavery abolitionist program.

     Just as they had succeeded against the Crown where their forebearers had failed they succeeded in absolutely crushing the descendents of the Normans.  This punishment of the Cavaliers was the most severe of any since 1066.  Thus subsequent US history with its notion of unconditional surrender was formed.  This was a vicious attitude formed from the same feeling of defeat.

     To return to the East Anglians in England to explain the American Liberal mindset.  Shortly after printed books became readily available  the East Anglians bought Bibles adopting the Old Testament notion of the Chosen People by substituting themselves for the Hebrew Children.  A British Israelite group formed calling the English people the new Chosen People.  Indeed, the British throne is believed to be in lineal descent from that of King David of Old Israel.

     Thus there were at least three Chosen Peoples in existence from the fifteenth century on- Jews, the English and the Puritan New Englanders.  New England became Greater New England as the Puritans multiplied spreading across the Northern tier of States.

     A psychological characteristic of Chosen Peoples is that they upload their needs and wishes to an imaginary god in the sky then download the same needs and wishes back to themselves as the Will Of God.  Thus they say not my will but they will be done, O Lord.  The faithful thus become justified sinners.  Any criminal act can be justified as the Will of God which it is the duty of the faithful to perform  This also creates a double standard because what is right for themselves in the eyes of the Lord is forbidden to others.  The children of Israel can exterminate other peoples with impunity, but it is wrong for other peoples to even defend themselves against the children of the Lord.  Serious stuff.

     These ends and desires are accepted then as a messianic or utopian goal.  It is the duty of the Chosen People to impose God’s Will on the rest of the world.  To resist that Will is evil making the non-believer a dastard, a heretic, an infidel, an anti-Semite or whatever.

     In the United States the Will of the god of the Puritans was transformed into Manifest Destiny, which in turn metamorphosed into the triumph of Democracy as defined by the Chosen People of America, who in turn metamorphosed from Puritans into Liberals.

     As a chosen people and as a result of the Civil War the Liberals identified with the victims who needed their help.  Thus the Civil War was fought in their minds by a virtuous people acting out the Will of God to rescue unfortunate victims from a malevolent White minority.  In the case of the Civil War it was the Negro slaves.  As the century and Liberalism developed the umbrella of help was extended to all the ‘enslaved’ or colonial peoples of Europe which is to say all the colored peoples of the world.  It was not enough that injustice as perceived by the Liberals should be corrected, but that the perpetrators should be condignly and brutally punished unconditionally in the name of and by the Will of their God, which is to say the projected desires and wishes of a self-appointed Chosen People.

     Utopian literature which flourished after the Civil War is the direct result of this Messianic fervor.  Utopian literature abounds in England, Greater New England and with the jews.

     Having then succeeded in crushing the Cavaliers of the South the Liberals attempted to demean, belittle and abuse the White South in the most draconian manner.  The period of Reconstruction is the blackest hour in American history.  The Whites were stripped of civil rights having the Negroes placed over them as masters.  The Whites, so far as possible, were expropriated of all property through taxation when not stolen outright.  The Whites, of course, reacted by forming the first Ku Klux Klan to protect their lives and interests.   Reconstruction lasted until 1877 well nigh into the twentieth century.  The South was impoverished and set back for at least a century and may still be recovering today if such is possible under the present Liberal regime.

     All factual references to Reconstruction have been obscured by references to the KKK but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries memories of Liberal crimes in the South were fresh and bleeding wounds.  As is well known Jim Crow was the inevitable result of the attempt to crush and bury the White South.

     As the nineteenth century progressed and utopian literature flourished the Puritans, now Liberals, identified with all the ‘oppressed’ which is to say colored peoples of the world against the European conquerors.  Everywhere America sided with the natives against Europeans.  In a feeling of total frustration Charles De Gaulle would remark:  America is a White country, but it acts like a colored country.

     At about mid-nineteenth century Jewish utopian messianists under the direction of Karl Marx formed the Communist Party.  Thus Jewish utopian messianism spread from England- Marx was based in London- throughout Europe to the world.  As Communism also opposed Western colonialism, although not Communist colonialism, these two powerful agencies worked to upset the Western hegemony of the world.  As someone will always have hegemony of the world what appears on the surface as ‘justice’ is merely the transfer of power to another agency and hence new ‘injustice.’  As of this writing it appears that the beneficiary of American and Communist efforts will be the Chinese.  This shift has already happened but has not yet been officially acknowledged.  Thus the result of the Liberal and Communist quest for ‘social justice’ will be merely to place Europe and America’s neck under a Chinese yoke rather than the other way around.  Obviously the Chinese god is not the same as the Utopian God.

     During the period of Reconstruction as the Liberals were punishing the Southern Whites and rewarding the Negroes immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began in earnest.  While the Irish and Germans had created their own set of problems yet culturally they were close enough to the original Anglo-Saxon colonists to be, after a fashion, readily assimilated.

     But with the congeries of nationalities from East and Southern Europe came many and diverse customs and languages.  Assimilating them into Anglo-Celtic-Teutonic America was not so easy.  Thus groups of Americans resisting immigration arose.  The Know Nothings fought the Irish but this was different.

     The Liberals could then pathologize the anti-immigration people as ‘nativists’, later White Supremacists and other derogatory terms.  They could afirm their own virtue against these people as they had against the Southern Whites.  When the power base of restrictionists took form in the South as the second Ku Klux Klan this only served to show the perfidy of Southern Whites in a new shade.

     The Liberals then allied themselves not only with the interests of Negroes but with the immigrants to form the Liberal Coalition which was to dominate American society from the Second Decade to the present.

     Already British and Puritan utopianists, they were now joined by the Jews who from 1870 to 1914 represented the largest nationality of immigrants.  Both the Liberals and the Jews were Bible based.  Liberals considered Jews as the successors to the Biblical Hebrews if not Hebrews themselves.  While Roman Catholics distanced themselves from Hebrewism the Protestant sects derived directly from the Old Testament considered themselves neo-Hebrews so they were quite willing to defer to what they considered paleo-Hebrews.  Thus the two versions of utopianism were joined.  Both forms of Hebrewism accepted anti-Semitism as the greatest vice.  The foregoing discussion has been a good account of what Semitism is:  that is a belief in one’s own divinely appointed role as the arbiter of the world’s fate.

     So far as I know neithr Semitism or anti-Semitism have ever been adequately defined so for the purposes of this paper anti-Semitism will be defined quite simply as the denial of the Semitist’s self-appointed role as the agent of God on earth.

     As one of a Scientific Consciousness  such a denial seems hardly necessary but as most people are of a Religious Consciousness there it stands.

     Needless to say Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness therefore per force an anti-Semitist although he would never have understood his position in those terms.

     As can be seen Judeo/Liberal/Utopianism is a religious matter that will defy reason.  It is a matter dependent upon a subjective, spiritual belief system.  It is beyond the reach of logic.  Never argue with them.  The adherents cannot be argued with, they must humored.  Reigions are revealed not thought out.

2.

     The nineteenth century also saw the rise of Science which is an objective materialistic sysem, conscious not subconscious, based on facts and reality.  It doesn’t take a genius to spot that the religious systems and the scientific systems are incompatible; one must subordinate or destroy the other.  Now, seriously folks, this is war to the knife.

     Knowledge is hard won and built up slowly while revealed religion is complete and entire at conception.  While the former is subject to trial and error the latter is seemingly pat- it is God’s own Word.

     As Freud pointed out the religious consciousness received three main blows.  The first was that the Universe was heliocentric rather than terracentric; the third was the malleable construction of the human mind as defined by psychoanalysis.  These two could be religiously managed; nothing had been revealed that couldn’t be manipulated to religion’s use.  The middle blow could not.  That was the concept of Evolution as enunciated by Charles Darwin.  Thus it was clear except to the most entrenched religionist that the world was not created by God in 4004 BC as Bishop Ussher stated but evolved beginning somewhat over four billion years ago.  There’s an incompatibility there that cannot be swept under the carpet or even ignored.

     Make no mistake: science and religion are at odds in the struggle for the human mind.  Writing in 1829 the incomparable Edgar Allen Poe expressed the problem in his brilliant poem:

Sonnet – To Science

Science! true daughteer of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Who preyest thus on this poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

     How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Has thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

     In addition to driving the Hamadryad from the wood, science also pulled God down from the heavens and exposed the fraud.  Freud showed God to be merely a projection of human desires.   How could religion counter the claims of Science?

     I do not single out any specific religion whether Christian, Jewish, Moslem or whatever.  All religions evolved in human consciousness and represent a phase of development in that evolution.  A phase of evolution but not its end.  Dig it!

     It then became necessary for religionists to absolutely deny Evolution.  In their favor was the fact that Darwin not merely but only enunciated the concept, but had no infallible proofs of the process.  Thus relgionists could say silly things like:  Do you really believe human being, you, actually descended from an ape? and be fairly convincing.  Most people were ashamed of such an ancestry.  Nobody asked the monkeys how they felt about the comparison.

     Inherent in Evolution is the idea of speciation.  Thus every time a species evolved there was a chance that it was an improvement on previous manifestations.  Between the Chimp and Homo Sapiens I are innumberable steps which have since disappeared.  If that were true then religious concepts which insisted that God created Man whole and entire without evolving were false.  If Creation was false than Religion was false.  There were many who empowered by the concept of Evolution and reasoning from appearances made the claim that was called ‘race’ rather than species.  The genetic differences between the ‘races’ were not yet clear.

     Until fairly recent times and the rise of genetics there was no infallible evidence to indicate speciation.  Today there is.  From 1859 when Darwin enunciated Evolution through the period under examination here, the second decade of the twentieth century, anyone asserting speciation could be ridiculed and destroyed as a bigot by the religionist.  Evolution itself was attacked and undermined in the thirties by the Boasian school of Anthropology which is still vital today.  (See Kevin MacDonald, The Culture Of Critique, 1998, 2002).

     In this period the Evolutionist was in a minority position.  Thus when Burroughs came down so strongly on the side of Evolution in his Tarzan series it is very surprising he created no uproar and there is no evidence the series was noticed on that account.

     It appears that Burroughs took the broad approach to these social problems.  He could see both sides of the issue deciding on the merits of the case rather than the ideology of the situation.  As has been noted he was quite capable of changing his mind on vital issues when presented with convincing evidence, i.e. life on Mars.  He was a true scientist.

3.

      Perhaps around 1910 it began to dawn on a significant number or people for the first time that unlimited and unrestricted immigration was causing unexpected and irreversible changes in the social fabric.  The war on Anglo-Saxon ideals, institutions and customs was well underway.  Such reactions had been a recurring feature of American society but now there was no West to escape to.   In addition industry had reshaped the cities.  Farm machinery was reshaping farming practices reducing the need for farmhands so that country boys migrated to the cities. By mid-decade for the first time more people lived in the cities than on the land.

     These changes were unwelcome and uncomfortable to a lot of people creating a malaise.  Those who viewed Reconstruction for the horror it was as well as those who considered themselves Old Stock were pathologized by the Liberals but their views found expression in books and articles but usually on the defensive side as with Jack London’s Valley Of The Moon and not on the aggressive side which would be visited by condign punishment as heresy.

     If one mentioned immigrants at all it was possible to discuss only positive attributes.  The Liberal turned a blind eye to the aggression of home countries preferring to see these home places too as victims who needed their protection.  As Chosen People the Liberal sees himself as naturally superior to the ‘victims’ but does not perceive his supposed superiority as ‘racism.’

     An honest and well meaning writer like Homer Lea who had actually been in the Orient and learned of Japanese plans first hand was pathologized and dismissed as a crank although his prognostications were based in fact as Pearl Harbor was to show.

     Some feelings are vague and can’t be articulated.  Even as a child I was disquieted by the notion that everyone came to america to escape oppression or to seek religious freedom.  I saw but couldn’t articulate the two facedness of this notion.  Only in the last decade or so have I found the means to acquire the necessary knowledge and developed modes to express it.

     Quite frankly the US was used as a haven for many, many revolutionary groups.  Perhaps the American Revolution  caused most Americans to look upon all revolutions as beneficent.  I couldn’t and can’t see it tht way.

     American ‘malcontents’ were told to shut up while a malcontent could come from anywhere else in the world and be honored for resisting repression.  I mean, criminals, murderers, mere disturbers of the peace in their own countries.  Cranks.  East Indian malcontents gathered in San Francisco to plot against the British Raj.  Sun Yat Sen lived in LA where he raised funds and was lionized.  Homer Lea was recruited by Sun Yat Sen to serve as a general in the Chinese Army.  Lea’s story may have been the influence that charmed Burroughs into seeking a place in the Chinese Army.

     The United States not only knew of the malcontents’ activities but even tolerated them perhaps abetting them.  The US role in European history has been that of a spoiler.  Looking upon all colored peoples as victims needing their help Liberals could do no other than work for their interests against the Europeans.

     One of the more disastrous actions was John Hay’s Open Door policy in China.  At the time in the 1890s the European States were about to partition China into spheres of influence.  What the result would have been is anybody’s guess however the world would probably be much different today.  Hay’s Open Door policy scotched the partition with the result that China remained a unified State.  Of all the turning points one can find in history this is undoubtedly a turn in the tide of fortunes for the West.  Subsequent to the Hay policy Chinese revolutionaries were hosted in California.  Mexican gun runners operated from the US during the Mexican Revolution as Zane Grey records in novels like The Light Of Western Stars and Desert Gold.

     Of course the Irish who called Ireland the Ould Sod and America the New Island acted as one people divided by an ocean.  Funds and guns were raised in America and used in Ireland against the British.  In the unrestricted immigration of the time Irish revolutionists moved back and forth across the Atlantic.  If arrested in Ireland they claimed American citizenship and were released to return to the US.

     In 1919 a most egregious example occurred which received no reprimand from the US, while England didn’t even bother to file an objection.  Eamon De Valera, the future premier of Ireland escaped the British to be smuggled to the US where he functioned openly.  William K. Klingaman tells the story in his popular history ‘1919’ of 1987:

     Eamon De Valera, meanwhile, had been smuggled out of Ireland and into the United States, where he was touring the major cities along the East Coast, drumming up financial support for Sinn Fein and the Irish Republic.  His reception was nothing short of spectacular.  De Valera was given the presidential suite at the Waldorf; the Massachusetts state legislature received him in a special joint session; forty thousand wildly cheering supporters turned out to hear one of his speeches in Boston; and the press seemed to love him wherever he went.  After all, he was excellent copy, and news of English injustices in Ireland always sold plenty of papers.  As the Nation noted with bemusement, “He gets a front-page spread whenever he wants it, with unexampled editorial kindliness thrown in.”  The tall, very thin, dark Irishman brought no message of peace and goodwill to the United States, however.  Now that the Peace Conference was over and freedom-loving Irishmen still remained enslaved under the British yoke, De Valera told an enthusiastic audience in Providence, “the war front is now transferred to Ireland.”

     So, while the Irish were embattled on the Ould Sod, the Irish of the New Island had enough influence and power to baffle any objections either in the US or England.  They were truly functioning as a state within a state in the US and as revolutionists on the Ould Sod.  Thus the US influence in international politics was unique indeed.

     The Italians also functioned as emigrant workers of Italian citizenship before the War and were an irredentist population within the United States with many colonial beach heads.  After the war, assuming the continuance of unrestricted immigration Mussolini attempted to shift the cost of medical treatment for wounded Italian soldiers by sending them to the US for free medical treatment.  This is astonishing stuff that gets no notice in history books.

     Of course, the most famous instance of dual citizenship of a divided homeland is that of the Jews.

     A ship landed in the seventeenth century in New York City, New Amsterdam as it was known then, bearing a hundred plus Sephardic Jews from Brazil.  The next immigrant cadre were the German Jews mainly from 1830 to 1850.  These two immigrations were small compared to the influx of millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement usually known as Polish or Russian Jews.  From 1870 to 1914 they came in increasing numbers.  As I have detailed elsewhere the intent to transfer the whole population of Jews from the Pale to the United States was aborted by the outbreak of the Great War.

     Jews had always been forbidden Great Russia.  However during an expansionist phase Russian annexed the Ukraine, Byelorussia and the North.  The annexed areas became the Pale Of The Settlement along with the Polish Jews acquired by the first partition of Poland.  Thus Jewish nationalism came into conflict with Russian assimilationism.  The Russians, of course, were sovereigns of the land while the Jews were a stateless nationality.  The Russians along with the rest of their acquired  peoples attempted to Russify the Jews.  These along with Poles, Letts, Estonians, Lithuanians and whatever resisted Russification.  In point of fact, the Czars had bitten off more than they could chew.

     Had the Russians been facing mere dissident peoples they may have been able to manage them.  But, along about mid-nineteenth century the political ideology of Communism provided a framework within which all peoples could combine thus submerging their national identities for their political goals.  It is true that fifty to sixty percent of all Comunist parties were Jewish but the remainder which was substantial, wasn’t.  As part of its ideology Communism discouraged nationality so it was possible for numbers of all nationalities to work together.

     The Russians became the adversaries of the Jews, the Czar their bete noir.  Thus a remendous undeclared war existed between the Communist Revolution, usually called just The Revolution and the Russian government and people.

     By the time the Jewish emigration to America began in earnest in the 1870s the Jewish mind was conditioned by this warfare.  Now, all Israel is one.  Therefore the German Jews who had preceded the Jews from the Pale prepared the way for those from the Pale.  Whole industries were immediately controlled by Jews.  The male and female garment industries being the prime example.  The work force of these industries was almost entirely Jewish.  Thus the infamous sweat shop may be said to be of Jewish origin although it is usually used to defame the United States.

     The whole garment industry of the country then was controlled from New York City.  We’re talking big money with a lot of it flowing into Jewish agencies sometimes euphemistically called charities.  This money in turn fueled worldwide Jewish warfare on Russia.

     The Equitable Insurance fraud for instance was caused by the international banker Jacob Schiff who as administrator looted the Equitable of a couple hundred million dollars to finance the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war of 1903-05.  The Japanese could not have fought the war without that money.  Thus Schiff and his people paved the way to Pearl Harbor.

     While the Russians had their hands full in the East Schiff and his fellow Jews engineered and financed the First Russion Revolution.  The signing of the Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty was done at Portsmouth, New Hampshire ostensibly by then US President Theodore Roosevelt but under the watchful eyes of Schiff and his fellows.

     As I have said simply because a people emigrated doesn’t mean they renounced their original identity.  Witness the Irish.  As is clear from their intent to evacuate the Pale in favor of America the Jews retained their Eastern European interests.  This would be even more manfest after the restriction of immigration at the end of the War.

     Like the Irish who used American citizenship to negate the laws of England the Jews used their American citizenship to thwart the interests of Russians, or the Czar as they put it.

     The Russians forbade Jewish traffic over their borders in an attempt to contain Jewish subversion.  If you were in, you were in, if you were out you were out.  In line with European concepts of nationality this was workable.  But Jews resident in America using their US citizenship, in this instance, demanded to be treated strictly as US citizens but of the Jewish ‘religion.’  Thus, they said Russia could not refuse them entrance on the basis of their ‘religion.’

     The US with its polyglot population all with US citizenship whether Irish, Jewish, Italian or whatever had to insist on the rights of all US citizens.  Thus Jews were able to travel freely across Russian borders to coordinate Jewish actions to subvert the Russian State.  As I have pointed out, after the Revolution the name Russia was dropped from the State name as it became the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics governed almost exclusively by non-Russians.

     The B’nai B’rith had been around since 1843.  Then the American Jewish Committee was created in 1906.  Within seven years Jewish influence had increased so signficantly that they were able to direct US policy to the extent that diplomatic relations were broken off between Russia and the US in 1913 the year the Liberal Coalition elected Woodrow Wilson as its first president.  From 1913 to 1933 the US had no diplomatic relations with Russia/USSR.  It is interesting that relations with a legitimate government were discontinued by Woodrow Wilson and resumed with an illegitimate government by his disciple Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  On of his first acts as President.

     In 1913 the B’nai B’rith created its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League.  So there was actually a dual drive to acquire control of the USSR and the USA which one might add came very close to succeeding.  And this be a very small but dedicated number of people.

     As I point out in Part IV in 1919 the AJC  contacted Burroughs undoubtedly amongst a host of others to endorse a Jewish Bill Of Rights.  The program was in place by 1920 when this segment of my study ends.

     As can be seen the unofficial role of the United States in world affairs was an unsettling and disturbing one of the inactive aiding and abetting of revolutionary movements from China to India, across the border into Mexico while actively aiding if not abetting the Irish against England and aiding and abetting if not supporting the Jewish war on Russia.

     To the American Liberal all these revolutionary efforts were being conducted by victims.  Hence Liberal efforts at directing American policy were in the interests of any revolutionary group which includes the Socialist and Communist parties.  This Liberal attitude continues worldwide to the present time.

     Within the United States these ‘victims’ were gathered together under the aegis of the Liberal Coalition.  All dissenters whether anti-immigrationists, nativists or whatever were pathologized as mentally unstable people.  Insanity then becomes a religious attitude complementary to terms such as heretic, infidel or anti-Semite; terms not to be taken seriously.

     Liberalism is a religion thus assuming control over institutions of hgher learning.  The University system of the United States was turned from one of educational insitutions into religious seminaries.  The American university system of today is a religious system of Liberal seminaries.  Only the correct religious view is permitted, any other is penalized.

     Now, the Liberals who derived from the Puritans were an Old Testament biblical group who considered themselves the successosrs of the Hebrews as a Chosen People.  Beginning in 1870 the original Chosen People began their invasion.  It was like two Napoleons meeting in an insane asylum.  Each considered the other an imposter.  But the Jews had the whip hand over the Liberals as they quickly controlled the communiations media gradually eliminating anything seditious to its belief system.  As I explained earlier any writing that casts doubt on the claims of Judaism is anti-Semitist.  Americans were conditioned to view anti-Semitism as the worst possible crime deserving imprisonment or expulsion from the body social.  What we really have is the reimposition of the medieval Catholic Church in the form of Judaism.  Having seized control of the political system of the United States by 1920 the other important object was the discrediting of Science.

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from the flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

     And Poe might have added:  God from his heaven/ pleasant summer dreams of chosenness from our minds.  Yes, Science was the great enemy, the great anti-Semite.  It is not particularly well known but Jews are more anti-evolution than even the Christian fundamentalists of Tennessee in the twenties or the Kansans of today.  Evolution absolutely denies the fact that the world was created by god 4004 years before Bishop Ussher or the year 5778 or whatever of the Jewish calendar.  Make no mistake the notion of the world having been created by god recently is fundamental to Semitic religions.  Once it is disallowed the basis of the Semitic religions ends.  You can see why they fight so hard against Science.

     Science still being the problem religion was cloaked in its guise.  The scienfific Socialism of Marx is little more than Talmudic Judaism.  Freud’s exaltation of the subconscious is little more than an assault on the conscious rational thinking that makes Science possible.  Einstein’s preposterous notion of the ‘fabric’ of Time and Space among others is a disguised attempt at imposing faith.

     All of these movements came to fruition in the Second Decade.  Einstein’s theories were supposedly proven during an eclipse of the sun in 1919 during which it was ‘confirmed’ that the light of distant stars streamed around immovable bodies.   I mean, the Greeks said it:  What happens when an easily resistible force meets an immovable object?  It flows around it just like water around a rock suspended in a stream.  Boy, you have to be a genius to figure that one out- wrap it up in the facric of Time and Space and send it as present to God.

     So, the problem still remained what to do with the ‘pathological’ types who gave the lie to the Judeo-Liberal doctrine?  Science and Religion cannot co-exist.  This is a sea change in human consciousness comparable  to the transition from the Matriarchal to the Patriarchal.  Good will is not the problem and cannot solve the problem.  In 1943 Gustavus Myers devised the current method of interpreting American history in his book The History Of Bigotry In The United States.  He thus provided the means to pathologize the non-Judeo-Liberal people.  They became irrational, insane, evil bigots.  So then one has the people of the book the Judeo-Liberals on one side and ‘bigots’ on the other.  So, Moslem-Infidels, Semites-anti-Semites, and Liberals-Bigots.  It isn’t rational, it’s religious.  Virtue goes with the one; criminality with the other.  Once you are accused there is no argument.  Confess your heresy and take your punishment.  The role model is the Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

     Myers began from the beginning hitting his stride with the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s.  He essentially made all immigrants victims in the Liberal sense by depicting them as virtuous innocents insanely treated by American ‘bigots.’  Hence the title of his book.  His school took root and flourishes today.  Oscar Handlin, John Higham, Richard Slotkin.

     Handlin’s stuff is irrational.  John Higham’s Strangers In The Land is valuable but skewed.  The skewing can be easily unscrambled.  But Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is of importance to Burroughs and our theme here.  The first 225 pages of Slotkin’s book lead up to a denunciation  of Burroughs as the premier bigot of American literature actually making him responsible for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam.  The first 225 pages are worth reading although you can throw the rest of the book away.

     I’ll get back to the scientific aspects of the issue in a minute but, first, as Slotkin concentrates on the Western movie in American culture let’s take a look at one of the premier efforts in the genre, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.  The movie was scripted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck or, since this is Hollywood, men who would answer to those names. They are probably jewish.  The film perfectly inllustrates the Liberal dogma.

     John Wayne plays the Liberal lead as Tom Doniphon, strange name, along with his noble Negro sidekick, Pompey.  Lee Marvin plays a deranged psychopathic Anglo named Liberty Valence.  Jimmy Stewart plays the long suffering representative of the Law, Ransom- Rance- Stoddard.  Rance is an adjunct to Tom Doniphon.  Liberals = The Law, Bigots (Liberty Valence) = the outlaws.

     Tom can be seen as the abolitionist, justice seeking Liberal aiding the victims.  He is on the side of the victims of Liberty Valence (read, say, the KKK) which is the whole town except himself.  Tom has his negro valet while he helps all the cute immigrants in town still being aloof from the Southwest town’s sizable but segregated Mexican population.

     The scripters assigned the odd name of Liberty Valence to Lee Marvin.  Liberty is a positive virtue while Valence means strong- strong for freedom.  There is little positive about Valence.  He is in fact a psychopathic killer who terrorized the town of law seeking innocent sodbusters.  He actually becomes insane when he extends his whip handle just beating the tar out of his victims.  Valence is employed by the evil cattlemen (read, say, The South) above the Picket Wire (a river).  Why the cattlemen have sent Valence to the town isn’t clear.

     As the representative of the Old South and also any stray anti-Semitic clans who may happen to be about, Valence is especially offended by the peaceable but effeminate Rance Stoddard, who at one point actually wears an apron, the man who is bringing THE LAW West of the Pecos or at least below the Picket Wire.  Apparently the ranchers don’t need no law above the Picket Wire.  Valence harasses and bullies Stoddard who is usually protected by the omnipotent Tom Doniphon but comes a time when   Stoddard realizes he has to fight.  After all a man’s a man for all that.  Don’t know what for though, either his honor or life  or maybe to move the plot along.  Liberty is goading Rance into a gunfight that will be plain murder, as quite frankly, Rance don’t know how to handle a gun and Liberty does, oh boy.

     As the gunfight is filmed from behind Rance it appears that he actually guns Liberty down freeing all the victims of his menace. (The Law vs. The Outlaw; The Liberal vs. The Bigot, The Semite vs. the anti-Semite.)  Thus Rance brings the law to Shinbone, that’s the ridiculous name of the town.  You can see why Liberty terrorized it.

     Later we will see the same gun battle rotated ninety degrees to the right.  Ol’ Tom isn’t going to let Liberty gun down Rance, and also he doesn’t want Rance to be guilty of bloodshedding so he takes the guilt on hisself as he knowed he would.  He and his faithful Negro sidekick cum African gunbearer Pompey (This may be the reason Cassius Clay changed from his ‘slave’ name to Mohammed Ali, another slave name) are standing in an alley opposite Liberty’s left side.  Tom is in the middle of the side street, Pompey bearing the gun, stands against the side of the building.  With breathtaing precision just before Liberty shoots, Tom, in that awe inspiring quitet uncontradictable authority of his says like the Great White Hunter of Africa:  Gun, Pompey.  The ever faithful Negro flips the rifle across to Tom who snatches it from mid-air with is right hand, puts it to his shoulder and snaps off a head shot through the temple that killed Liberty Valence.  (Evil disappears from the town.)

     In order to kill Valence Tom had to shoot him in the left side of his head yet none of the dumbheads of the town wonders how Stoddard accomplished this miraculous feat.

     At any rate Rance is known as the man who shot Liberty Valence.  The old peace loving legalist is carrying his burden of blood guilt pretty well until he is nominated to be the new Congressman from the Picket Wire/Shinbone district (There’s a joke in there somewhere isn’t there?) and from whence he can put those damnable evil, bigoted ranchers in their place.  But damn it, he’s got blood on his hands; how can he serve the people in Washington since he is impure?  This mght have ruined a very promising and lucrative career and perhaps a good movie but Tom takes this moment to tell Rance the True story of the man who shot Liberty Valence.  Rance had to be told this.

     ‘Hot diggity-dog!’ Exclaims Rance trampling over Tom in his hurry to be the next and first representative for Picket Wire.  There may have been gold in them thar hills but it was as nothing compared to the gold to be found in Washington D.C.

     Like a good myth the movie can viewed on several different levels.  At face value the story is the story.  It doesn’t take much to view the film as a satire while on another level as a black comedy, or a wry commentary on the difference between the way things appear and the way they really are.

     But on the allegorical level in which I am viewing the story it allegorized the Judeo-Liberal vision of America.  Tom/ Rance represents their vision of themselves while Liberty is ther vision of bigots/anti-Semites.  I don’t know about the writers but John Ford was certainly able to see it that way.

     As a religious metaphor the movie expresses the Judeo-Liberal vision of itself.  That vision can only be realized if science can be disposed of because science, the truth, is the greatest anti-Semite of all.  As Poe realized Science disposes of the idea of God.  Without god there is no Judaism or Liberalism.  One or the other has to go.

     As I have said technological applications of science weren’t actually a threat but Evolutionists like Gall,  Darwin and Dalton were.  Gall was the man who first enunciated a theory that the different areas of the brain controlled different actions or responses.  In Steven Pinker’s terms he discovered the brain was more than a meatloaf.

     Darwin proposed the idea of evolution while Francis Galton proposed the idea of Eugenics.  As I said before, revealed Religion arrives complete and entire being a product of the imagination no different than Tarzan Of The Apes.  Science has to be built up step by step.  Gall, Darwin and Galton took the first developmental steps and while true in their limited way were easy to attack.

     Gall’s exploiters developed the theory of Phrenology which is of course unsupportable so If anyone has heard of Gall he is immediately discredited for Phrenology, something he didn’t do.

     Going into the Second Decade Darwin and Galton had great credibility, if being in minority positions, although Eugenics was very well received by every shade of the political spectrum from far left to far right.  Richard Slotkin bases his attempts to discredit Edgar Rice Burroughs and all non-Coalition writers over Evolution and Eugenics.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs is usually considered a fantasy writer.  One could hardly consider the writer of the Mars, Venus, Pellucidar and Tarzan series anything else.  Fantay writers are not usually taken very seriously being relegated to the non-literary end of of the fiction spectrum.  So then, one asks, why does a Myerian Judeo-Liberal like Richard Slotkin devote so much effort to prove that Edgar Rice Burrughs was ultimately responsible for the My Lai Massacre?

     The simple answer is that Burroughs is one of the most influential mind forming writers of fiction, worldwide, of the Twentieth Century…and counting.  There have been serious efforts to designate Burroughs as a bigot and an anti-Semitist.  The editions of the copies you read have actually been bowlderized.  Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation is a serious attempt to pathologize Burroughs.

     Gunslinger Nation Is the third volume of a trilogy on violence in America, a never ending tiresome concern of the Coalition.  Slotkin is more at home in the nineteenth century of the two first volumes than he is in the twentieth century of this volume.  He should have suspended his pen after the second volume.

     He not only has a shallow appreciation of his theme but he admits it.  The remaining 400+ pages succeeding those on Burroughs are based, I suspect, on one time viewings of several hundred Western movies.  At least he says he’s seen them.  His analysis of categories within the genre and individual films leaves much to  be desired.

     He admits that he read no, or very few, Western novels from 1900-1975 because the field is so vast no one could be expected to do it.

     His nineteenth century material, if skewed in interpretation, is admirably presented.  By rotating the images 180 degrees one can obtain a fairly accurate picture of his subjects.  His presentation on Buffalo Bill and his Wild West was really quite good.  His views on Fenimore Cooper and the Dime Novelists were attractive if prejudiced.

     By the time he gets to Burroughs of whom he has cursorily read a dozen novels or so he is both uncomprehending and imcomprehensible.  He has made no effort to understand the man yet he comes to preposterous conclusions.  As Burroughs was of the Scientific Consciousness which gives the lie to the Religious Consciousness Slotkin attacks on the scientific level.

     He attacks through Gall, Darwin and Galton.  The Liberal Coalition using its religious mentality is able to condemn in others what it applauds in itself.

     The mentality is quite capable of including Burroughs, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler in one breath as though all three men were on the same level.  What they call crimes in others they call virtues in themselves.

     Thus, during the French Revolution a factory was organized in Paris to make footwear from the skins of murdered aristocrats.  The fact has been suppressed while the story of the lampshades made from the skins of enemies of the Fascist State is held as inhuman.

     The great hero of the Revolution, Victor Hugo, writing in his novel 1793 during the 1860s about the massacres in the Vendee quite bluntly states that those people were in the way of the realization of the Utopian Communist State and had to be removed.  What was fact in 1793 was true in the 1860 mind of Victor Hugo, exercised by the Communists after 1917 and by extension is still applicable today.  Yet all other exterminations are evil in the Coalition mind.  Their own religion justifies their actions as justified sinners.

     During the second and third decades Galton’s ideas on Eugenics had become the vogue.  The use of Eugenics by Hitler and the Nazis is used to discredit the concept and yet Reds of all hues including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were enthusiastic Eugenicists.

     Joseph Stalin, the greatest Red who ever lived, rather amusingly embraced Eugenics.  (see:  http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=2434192005 )

     In the 1920s before Hitler, Stalin ordered his scientists to breed a new super warrior.  “I want a new invincible human being, insensible to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

     You can see where this leading I’m sure.  Apparently Stalin had been reading Burrughs’ Beasts Of Tarzan because he ordered the scientists to cross a human and an ape to create his New Order warrior.  Imagine a couple divisions of these shaggy haired ape men trudging through the snow behind a line of tanks with a AK 47 in one hand and a frozen banana in the other.

     At any rate Slotkin wishes to link Burroughs up with these ideas that Liberals themselves promoted.  As the second decade wore on a number of writers dealt with these emerging problems of the age.  The two most prominent American bete noirs of the Judeo-Liberals are Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his The Rising Tide Of Color of 1920.  As these men are scientists they were labeled ‘bigots’ which is to say heretics or anti-Semites by the Liberal Coalition.

     It is not impossible that Burroughs may have read these books but there is no indication he did so so that there is no confirmed connection between he and Grant and Stoddard.  As I read Slotkin he believes that Burroughs is complicit with both Madison Grant and Stoddard.  Further there is no doubt Slotkin believes all three men are bad with evil intent.  As the Scienfific findings of these men contradict the religious tenets of the Myersian Liberal Coalition I suppose Slotkin can do no other.  How he manges to lump Burroughs in as an evil malicious bigot seems a stretcher.

     In the first place although the findings of Grant and Stoddard are offensive to Slotkin and the Liberal Coalition they nevertheless show the honest unbiased scientific results of the research of honest scholars who are no less decent and honorable than any of the Liberal Coalition.  Grant’s work is an essay into proto-genetics for which subsequent learning shows no fault.  Stoddard’s work is an excellent faultless political analysis which has been borne out by subequent developments.

     While the Liberal Coalition has chosen to pathologize and demonize all three of these writers their opinion should just be waved aside, disregarded as irrelevant.  Their opinions should be marginalized.  Grant and Stoddard are good and honorable men.

     When I first read Slotkin’s analysis of Burroughs I was outraged and then baffled.  I rejected the criticism but as Slotkin obvously believes this stuff although he poorly documents it his notions were filed in the bck of my brain while I began to search for his reasons.

     From a scientific point of view Slotkin has no basis for his claims but when one lays the Judeo-Red-Liberal matrix over the science all becomes clear.  This is a conflict betwen Arien Age religion and twentieth century science.

     If one looks closely at Burroughs one will find he has embraced science and rejected religion thus immediately becoming classified as a bigot/anti-Semite in their eyes.

     While Burroughs was from the North he is not in full sympathy with abolitionist and Liberal ideals.  he appears to reject the harshness of their attitude toward Southern Whites.  As in Marcia, John Hancock Chase from Baltimore living in New York City seems to be an attempt to reunify the country according to the ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr.  and his Reconstruction novels and D.W. Griffith’s movie The Birth Of A Nation.  To merely be sympathetic to Southern Whites is to deny the victimhood of the Negroes which arouses the animosity of Liberals.  Burroughs has thus identified himself as a ‘bigot, heretic, anti-Semite’.  He is plainly the enemy of the Liberal Coalition.

     And, then, while Burroughs didn’t join organizations like the A.P.A.- American Protective Association- still, like his fellow writers Jack London and Zane Grey he regretted the passingof Anglo-Saxon dominated America.  He hated to see the Old Stock in decline.  Thus in the Myersian sense he becomes pathologized as a ‘bigot.’  From the Liberal point of view Burroughs is clearly guilty and should be banned from literature.  Put on the Liberal Index.  However one has to accept the Liberal point of view to think so.

     He rejects all religion but as to whether he specifically singles out Catholics, Jews or any other sect I don’t believe that there is a shred of evidence.

     One can’t read with his contemporaries eyes so perhaps what isn’t so clear now leaped out of the page then.  Burroughs ruminations on Eugenics, especially in the pages of Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, may then have been more obvious to them than to us.  But at the same time his opinions wouldn’t have been offensive to them.  As the Liberals accepted Eugenics then as readily as anyone else it would seem that the present emphasis on Burroughs’ fascination with the subject arises primarily from the Liberal rejection of their own past although it is still possible that what contemporary Liberals accepted in themselves they rejected in others as they do today.

     While I originally rejected the notion that there was any reason to suspect Burroughs of being an ‘anti-Semite’ I think that if one is looking for indications from the Coalition point of view one can find them.  As I point out in Part IV the American Jewish Committee contacted him in 1919 while there are passages in Marcia Of The Doorstep that the Coalition could construe as anti-Semitism and for which Burroughs was possibly punished.

     Finally Burroughs as a follower of Teddy Roosevelt rather than Woodrow Wilson might have been suspect.  The period after the Great War when it became evident that a very large percentage of the immigrants did not really consider themselves American’s caused TR to remark that America had become merely an international boarding house.  Quite true but who would have thought anything else was possible?  Today the term ‘international boarding house’ might be interpreted as Diversity or multi-culturalism. TR was head of his times.

     The period ending in 1919 also represented the changing of the guard.  Buffalo Bill died in 1917 taking hs mythic Wild West with him to the grave.  He also represented the end of the first America.  The Anglo-Saxons who had won the West.  Of course the winners of the West were not nearly so Ango-Saxon as represented but in general it was true.  There are almost no non-Anglo-Saxon names in the novels of Zane Grey other than Mexican.

     Also in 1919 TR himself passed away just as he was scheduled to be the Republican Presidential candidate for 1910.  His loss was keenly felt by Burroughs and his friend Herb Weston.  I doubt TR could have adapted to the new problems America was facing even as well as Warren G. Harding did.  How TR might have interpreted the challenge to American Democracy of the Liberal Coalition isn’t too obvious.

4.

Recapitulation

      In 1066 and succeeding centuries the Norman Conquerors enslaved the Anglo-Saxons of East Anglia which was an affront deeply resented.  Take a lesson.

     In the sixteenth century when the printed Old Testament became universally available the East Anglians identified with the enslaved Hebrews of Exodus.  They elected themselves a Chosen People and developed the compensatory Utopian attitude of inherent virtue as the Chosen People Of God.

     In the seventeenth century New England was settled by emigrants from East Anglia.  Not just English but East Anglians.  Virginia was settle by descendents of the Norman conquerors of 1066.  The Virginians once again chose slavery as the method of labor.  First indentured White people then Africans.

     While Utopian ideals developed in New England the abolitionist movement began which resulted in the Civil War-War Between The States.  War between regions or actually a war between ideologies.  There was no chance the South was going to discontinue slavery anythime soon no matter what anyone says.

     In revenge for 1066 the Cavaliers (Whites) of the South were absolutely crushed giving up all rights by surrendering unconditionally.

     The nascent Liberal Party of Puritans elevated the Africans over the Cavaliers thus establishing their protectorship over the ‘victims’ which is characteristic of the faith while establishing their power over dissident Whites.  Thus the Liberals ultimately aligned themselves with all colored revolutionary movements in the world against White European conquerors.

     Within the United States they viewed immigrants as ‘victims’ of the Old Stock pathologizing the Old Stock as ‘bigots’ no better than the Cavaliers of the Old South or the Europeans.  All opponents of of their Liberal religious ideology which included the intellectual mindset of Science thus became wrong headed vile ‘bigots’ who had no right to live.  After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the utopian Communist ideology became their politics; call it Socialism it comes out the same.

     As Edgar Rice Burrough was not a Liberal, not a Communist and not Religious but Scientific he unwittingly placed himself in opposition to the Liberal Coalition.  On that basis a serious attempt was made to abort his career while subsequently an attempt to erase his name and work from history is being conducted.

     Thus the twenties ushered in a new changed era fraught with new adjustments which were misunderstood or not understood at all.

     Burroughs career after 1920 has to be seen in the light of this concealed antagonism that he had to counter without being clear as to its causes.

     Thus the contrast  between The Mucker and Marcia Of The Doorstep can be seen as a response to two different challenges united by Burroughs personal psychological development.

Go To Part IV:of The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep

 

A Review

Conquest Of A Continent

by

Madison Grant

Madison Grant

Madison Grant

Review by R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Grant, Madison, Conquest Of A Continent, Liberty Bell Publications, 2004. Reprint of 1933 Edition

Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways In America, Oxford, 1991

Higham, John, Strangers In The Land: Patterns Of American Nativism 1860-1925 Rutgers U. Press 1955

Myers, Gustavus, History Of Bigotry In The United States, Random House, 1943

Wittke, Carl, We Who Built America: The Saga Of The Immigrant, Case Western Reserve, 1939

     In the immediacy of the moment one frequently overlooks or forgets the history leading up to the moment.  One might think for instance that the current flap over Diversity and Multi-Culturalism is a recent occurrence.  While the two terms are of recent provenance the argument under different names goes back much farther while the protagonists are essentially the same.

     The story of immigration into America is almost always told from the point of view of the immigrant.  Few books tell the tale from the Nativist point of view and they are universally and viciously derided as a tale told by bigoted idiots.  While charity is demanded from the Nativists none is to be expected from the immigrationists.

     Thus we get volumes like Strangers In The Land by John Higham and Carl Wittke’s We Who Built America that distort the issue in favor of immigrants while deprecating the Natives.

     Qustavus Myers’ History Of Bigotry In The United States on the other hand appears to be a willful misunderstanding of the nature of the relative status between immigrant and native resulting in a slanderous approach like that of the contemporary Greil Marcus.

     Conquest Of A Continent has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Anti-Semitic Books.  Based on that I expected a detailed derogatory examination of the Jews from their entry into America perhaps being the conquerors referred to.  The President of the American Jewish Committee sent a letter to every Jewish publisher in the United States demanding that they refrain from either reviewing the book  or noticing it at all.  Dynamic silence was to prevail.

     After reading Conquest I can only conclude that the AJC was hyper sensitive to a degree.  Since his 1916 Passing Of The Great Race Mr. Grant had learned that ‘You Don’t Mess With Rohan’ to quote Adam Sandler.  Grant all but ignores the Jews in his volume.  No, his offense, according to the AJC was even more egregious, he uses the world Nordic and dares to imply that they are ‘the Great Race’ rather than the AJC’s own Semites.

     The other volumes mentioned and, indeed, all writing in this genre which is pretty extensive, defers to the Jews as ‘the Great Race’ probably genetically superior to all others.

     So Madison Grant is interested in telling the story of how the Nordic race conquered the continent.  This approach can only be considered as a sin by non-Nordics.  Grant then tells the story of how the US and Canada were occupied by peoples other than the native Indians.

     He begins early referring to twelfth century attempts to settle by Scandinavians.  In the 1100s the firece native Indians were able to exterminate the invaders and may well have been able to exterminate the Puritan settlers but for the fact that a small pox epidemic shortly before the Puritan arrival had reduced the native population by as much as half while weakening them concomitantly.  Such is the luck of the draw.

     Grant thus traces immingration back to its origins colony by colony and then State by State as the Nordics moved Westward.

     David Fischer in his excellent Albion’s Seed retraces the same ground fifty years after Grant with much addional detail concerning the places of origin and their activities once in the US.

     Grant’s approach is in some ways superior to that of Fischer since as an unabashed Nordic advocate he is interested in detailing the exact racial content of the occupation of the various states and provinces.  If you aren’t aware of the progress of settlement and by whom there are numerous surprises.  My own notions were certainly vaguer before I read Grant.

     I was surprised at the seeming numerical superiority of Southern migrants in the Westward movement.  It seems that Whites did not like to live in the South where they were compelled to compete with slave labor while being despised by both the plantation owners and their slaves.  Thus there was a constant stream of the best and brightest  of the South moving into the North and West.  As Grant notes, Virginia was the mother of States.

     Then too some of Grant’s population statistics are of interest also.  At the 1790 census before the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 there were less than a million Africans in the United States.  Seventy years later as the Civil War began the number had increased to four and a half million. Thus natural increase was out of the question.  It follows then that between 1800 and 1860 more Africans were brought to the US than there were before 1800.  As a result the slave trade fluorished more than ever.

     Prior to 1800 Alabama and Mississippi had no settlers so that in 1860 these two States were still rough frontier States still in a state of organization.

      There is much good background here as to how the US came under settlement.  The continent was accupied in its entirely when the truly major immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began to accelerate in the 1870s and 1880s changing the basic Nordic institutions  of the country.  The change in Grant’s eyes was much for the worse.

     Carl Wittke’s We Who Built America published in 1939 was undoubtedly in response to Grant’s Conquest Of A Continet.  Wittke, was published by Case Western Reserve University.  Grant explains the meaning of The Western Reserve which has always puzzled me.  The Western Reserve was three million acres set aside as a concession to the State of Connecticut for giving up other territorial rights.

     Wittke made a great impression with his his volume, his opinions being taken as overriding fact.  I remember my sixth grade teacher in Michigan lauding the book to the skies.  I finally read it a couple years ago.  Not so much.

     As is usual with books and writers of this type Wittke overstates his case and underproves his facts.  A contribution to the dialogue at best.

     Grant’s book should prove useful to any unbiased reader.  If his attitude of Nordic superiority offends you, ignore it.  His history as history is sound.  For those of you reared on Myer’s History of Bigory attitude you will probably be surprised to find that there is another point of view.  Bigotry is not a matter solely of American destestation of immigrants as the program of Diversity and Multi-Culturalism indicates, bigotry is a red herring and not the issue.  The issue is who will be Top Race.  The contestants for the Top Spot have turned out to be the Africans, Semites (both Jews and Arab Moslems) Hispanics, Chinese and Euro-Americans. (Grant’s Nordics)  As you can see race has replaced nationalism.

     The contest is real and ongoing.  Peace is merely another form of war.  The prize will go to who wants it the most.  If you don’t see the contest in these terms I suggest you remove your rose colored glasses.

 

Men Like Gods

Tarzan Pays Homage To Heracles

by

R.E. Prindle

First published in the online Magazine: ERBzine

Cover of The Mighty Atom

Cover of The Mighty Atom

 

The Golden Age of Strongmen had captured the imagination of the world between 1890 and 1910….Into the 1920s the strongman continued as a living wonder and inspiring vision that could be had for the modest price of admission

-Ed Spielman: The Mighty Atom:

The Life And Times Of Joseph L. Greenstein

 

     When I was a child and youth in the 1940s and ’50s the legendary strongmen of the turn of the twentieth century were, if no longer living, living legends.  At least one, Bernarr Madfadden, the father of American bodybuilding, was still going strong.

     The most legendary of the strongmen was Frederick Mueller who was known professionally as the Great Sandow.

     In his heyday Sandow was so strong that he was capable of ‘exploding’ or breaking the ‘Test Your Strength’ machines in the arcades of Vienna, Austria.  There were so many broken machines that it was thought a vandal was destroying them but when apprehended it was discovered that Sandow was not only testing his own strength but the strength of the machines.  He flippantly suggested that they be made of better materials.

     On stage as Spielman relates, Sandow, who was trained as a turner, could do a back somersault over a chair with a thirty-five pound dumbbell in each hand.  He could do a one arm chin-up with the grip of any of his fingers of either hand, including his thumbs.

     He could…wait a minute!  I’ve heard something like that before.  Oh yea, I remember now.  In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan And The Lion Man he has Tarzan leap up to seize stakes pointing down from a ten foot high wall, then draw himself straight up until his torso was above the stakes, then roll over the top defeating the purpose of the stakes.  Was he thinking of the Great Sandow when he wrote that?

     I think he was.

     Burroughs was a fan of boxing and a great admirer of the strongmen of the Golden Age, although he didn’t like the bulky physiques.  He repeatedly denounces the physical build of the Strongmen in preference for Tarzan’s ‘smooth rippling muscles.’  In my day the bodybuilders were ridiculed as being ‘muscle bound.’  But the ladies panted when they said it.  Tarzan is as strong or stronger than the strongmen but sleek.

     Next one asks is there any place that it can be shown that Burroughs ever saw Sandow?  yes, and where else?  The Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893.  The Expo was a life changing experience for 17 year-old Ed Burroughs.  Bill Hillman of ERBzine has written a wonderful series on the influence of the Fair on young Burroughs.

     The influence of the Fair was as moving for the rest of America and the World as it was on Our Man.  There apparently has never been so influential a World’s Fair as that of Chicago of 1893.

     One of the best attended features of the Fair was put on by the Great Sandow.  Bodybuilding had already gotten started in England.  Sandow was a student of the innovative Professor Attila in London.  He came to the attention of Florenz Ziegfeld while performing in New York.  Ziegfeld brought him to Chicago for the Expo.  Sandow was a sensation.

The Great Sandow

The Great Sandow

     He created quite a stir at the fair.  Not only did Burroughs see him there but so did a man named Bernarr Macfadden.  At the time he was known as Bernard McFadden but he chose Bernarr because it sounded more like a lion’s roar and Macfadden because he thought it looked more distinguished in print.  As a result of seeing Sandow Macfadden became the father of bodybuilding and the health movement in the United States.  John Dos Passos spoofs him in Vol. III, The Big Money, of the his USA Trilogy.

     Macfadden was the discoverer of isometric exercises, which his student, Charles Atlas, renamed Dynamic Tension and made a fortune.

     Unless I’m mistaken Macfadden would cross ERB’s path sometime between 1908 to 1912.

     Sandow made bodybuilding a rage after the Fair while Macfadden organized the sport around his magazine ‘Physical Culture’ which he began publishing in the wake of the Fair.  Sandow also opened the way for a number of strongmen to build careers on their physiques.

     They all passed through Chicago.  How many of them ERB paid the modest price of admissio to see we can’t know, but as he always speaks of the strongmen in the plural one assumes that he saw several.

     Anyone who has watched the Strongest Men In The World competition on cable TV will understand how impressive both the feats and the physiques of these men were.

     In ERB’s day a man called Warren Travis Lincoln could lift a platform that held twenty-five men with his back.  That was a weight of about 4200 pounds.

     G.W. Rolandow could stack three decks of playing cards and tear them in two.  One assumes that was before they were plastic coated.

     Emil Knaucke who weighed in at five hundred pounds, a spectacle in itself, could hold a car above his head with one hand.  Spielman doesn’t specify make or model.

     Louis Cyr, one of the most famous strongmen, could restrain a team of horses on either side at the same time.  Really spectacular stuff.

Bent Press Arthur Saxon

Bent Press Arthur Saxon

     A man like Arthur Saxon of the Saxons was considered to be the strongest man in the world.  He could do a bent press of nearly five hundred pounds.  As in the photo, in the bent press a lifter raised a barbell above his head with one hand in a bent posture then raised another weight with his other hand.

     Eighteen ninety to nineteen-ten were formative years for ERB.  He would have from fifteen to thirty-five so that when he saw Sandow in ’93 at seventeen he was at a most impressionable age.

     ERB turned 40 in 1915 and 50 in 1925.

     By the twenties vitamins and food supplements had been discovered and were being developed for commercial use.  Vitamins were still novel when I was kid in the late forties.  Not everyone knew of their value as late as then.

     The Great Sandow, Louis Cyr, and a trio of German strongmen called the Saxons were all naturally strong but by the 20s it was possible to build muscular Adonae from the scratch of a 98 lb. weakling.  With vitamins, food supplements and a rigorous regimen for bodybuilding a normal body could be turned into as mammoth a specimen as Tarzan, as witness Arnold Schwarzenegger and his contemporaries who emerged from New York City gyms in the 1960s.

     In point of fact you didn’t even need all that gym equipment.  If you followed the body building plan of the most famous Adonis of the 40s and 50s, Charles Atlas, all you needed were your own opposed muscles.

     Atlas took Macfadden’s isometric exercises and called them the more commercial sounding Dynamic Tension.  By pitting one muscle against its opposite fantastic results could be achieved.

     Charles Atlas, who changed his name from Angelo Siciliano, was voted the world’s most perfectly developed man in 1922 by his mentor, Macfadden and Physical Culture magazine.

     Angelo, born in 1894 in Acri, Sicily came to the US in 1904, thus he would have been 18 in 1922, 18 in 1912.

     Siciliano actually had been a 98 lb. weaking who had sand kicked in his face by a bully.  His girl friend actually did walk away from him.  Siciliano then built himself up into what I’ve always considered to be the image of Tarzan and changed his name to Charles Atlas.

    I was not as successful with the Dynamic Tension plan Chuck sold me in the 50s but then I didn’t try that hard and I couldn’t afford the food supplements which are indispensable.  Nevertheless it had become possible to turn out ‘Men Like Gods’ on an assembly line basis.

     It is more than likely that Burroughs was very familiar with the bodybuilding or fitness program of Macfadden.  That photo of him flexing his muscles on the dock at Coldwater is that of a man who has been working out.  I can’t beleive that a man who was interested in magazines as Burroughs was couldn’t be familiar with Physical Culture Magazine.  Not only would he have the living memory of the Great Sandow in his mind from the Expo but Bernarr Macfadden had moved his headquarters from Battle Creek to Chicago in 1908.  He had a very prosperous looking facility.

     During these years from 1899 when ERB was bashed in the head in Toronto to 1910 at least, he complainedof excruciating headaches that began when he got up in the morning and lasted through half the day.  These would have been very enervating affecting his ability to work.  In The Girl From Farris’s he has his hero Ogden Secor suffering from the same headaches going from doctor to doctor ‘tinkering with his skull’ in hopes of finding relief.  The doctors could do nothing for Secor so he undertook a fitness regime which eased his situation.  So must have ERB.

     Once again, the picture of ERB standing with his legs apart flexing his muscles on the dock at Coldwater in 1916 shows that he was either proud of a moderate physique or he was trying to develop those ‘rippling’ muscles like Tarzan and Charles Atlas.

     At fifty in 1925 ERB probably thought himself beyond the age when he could develop his physique into a semblance of his creation, Tarzan.  Ten or twenty years younger and you might have seen Burroughs as another Charles Atlas or Tarzan.

     There is every reason to believe that sometime between 1908 and 1912 he developed an interest in Macfadden’s program.

      When he sat down to begin his Tarzan series at the end of 1911, Burroughs’ mind must have been filled with the feats of Sandow and the other strongmen.  Anent this, Tarzan’s leopard skin loin cloth was borrowed from the strongmen.  Leopard skin shorts were de riguer for the bodybuilding crowd.

     Of course the role models for these strongmen were Samson and Heracles.  The latter is better known in his Roman usage as Hercules.  For the purposes of this essay I will refer to him as Heracles in hs Greek manifestation.

     Especially in his original manifestation Heracles was a Sun god as the companion of the Earth Mother, Hera.  When the Patriarchal system was imposed on the Matriarchy Hera was wed to Zeus while her former consort, Heracles- The Glory Of Hera- was demoted to the role of Holy Fool and the strngest man in the world.

     ERB often refers to Tarzan as a Jungle God and a latter day Hercules.  Burroughs had a good Greek and Latin education so one might asume that he had some familiarity with the cycle of myths devoted to the feats and tribulations of that ancient type of all strongmen, Heracles.

     In fact, without stretching the point unduly, one can posit a relationship between the Pelasgian Sun God, Heracles and the Flaming God of Opar and through them to Tarzan; they can be construed as one.

     Whether ERB was conscious of what he had done in conflating the three cannot be determined for sure but as he was manipulating valid historical data why shouldn’t he have been conscious of what he was doing?  The Aztec ritual of tearing the heart out to offer to the sun god is implicit in scenes where Tarzan lies across the sacrificial block, pardon me, altar.  The annual sacrifice of the queen’s consort is implicit once again as La raises the sacrificial knife.  A blatant resemblance to Cybele and Attis.

     While the subconsious is always important it is the conscious mind that organizes, plots and writes.  As a writer I may have subconscious motives which may emerge but assembling and organizing my material is a conscious intellectual act.  It is axiomatic that one cannot write what one does not know.

     One of the great mysteries of mythological studies has been the relationship of Heracles to his namesake the former Matriarchal Earth Goddess, Hera.    I noted just previously, during the matriarchy as the Sun, Heracles would have been appropriately called ‘The Glory Of Hera’ or of the Earth.  The same notion can be applied to Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology.  For instance, as David Adams points out somewhere, the lion is a symbol of both the sun and the matriarchy.  It is a fact that the body of the Sphinx at Memphis is older than the head.  The head of the original has been replaced by that of a man.  It therefore follows that the Sphinx was carved during the Matriarchy having either a lion’s or a woman’s head.  After the succession of the Patriarchy the head was changed to reflect the New Order.

     In the Greek Oedipus myth the Theban Sphinx was still represented as the original matriarchal symbol of a lion with a woman’s head.  Woman-lion/sun/Heracles.  The answer to her riddle after which she committed suicide was ‘man’ which denied the Matriarchy, hence she had to kill herself as the Patriarchy thus symbolically replaced the Matriarchy.  Apply that to the Egyptian Sphinx and the change of heads.

Theban Sphinx

Theban Sphinx

     Now, the original Egyptian Sphinx was exactly the same as the Theban Sphinx: a woman’s head on a lion’s body.  the Sphinx is positioned to be looking due East at sunrise in the Age Of Leo.  Thus, perhap, the secret of the Sphinx is simply that as Mother Earth she sat waiting for her consort Heracles (or his Egypian counterpart) to appear on the horizon each morning.

     The notion has simplicity to recommend it.

     As we all know, Oparians were a group of Atlanteans isolated from the main body when mythical Atlantis broke apart and sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.  The worship of the Flaming God was inherited from the parent civilization by Opar.

     Thus whether Burroughs knew what he was doing or not he always gets the sequence of events right.

     Without getting into any discussion of if, where or when Atlantis may have existed, let me say, neverttheless, that all the evidence points to a predecessor civilization anterior to Crete, Pelasgian Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia in much the same way Atlantis preceded Opar.

     The predecessor civilization must have existed in the Mediterranean Basin during the last ice age when ocean levels, scientists tell us, were several hundred feet lower than they are today.  There are evidences of quarrying several hundred feet below sea level on the flanks of the island of Malta for instance.  Given this as a fact, then when the ice melted and the waters rose during the Great Flood to their present levels any society or civilization that existed in the Mediterranean Basin was forced to move to higher ground which is to say above the present sea level.

     One thing is certain, if the Basin was habitable it was inhabited.

     The disruption caused a long dark age from which mankind only slowly recovered.  At the same time these relatively highly developed people moving into less developed savage societies had a fertilizing influence introducing more sophisticated ideas and methods such as agriculture.

     Lower Egypt, one of Two Lands, was obviously settled by the displaced Libyan dynasty.  After centuries of warfare the Upper Egyptians succeeded in conquering Lower Egypt uniting the Two Lands.  The Third Dynasty was a Libyan Dynasty so that the warfare was translated from an external one to an internal one in which the Libyans defeated the Upper Egyptians.  During the Libyan Dynasty the great pyramids were built reflecting in some way the the flooded predecessor civilization.

     So Crete and Pelasgian Greece received survivors also.  The Sumerians of Mesopotamia attribute their civilization to the advice of Oannes, John in English, who came from the sea.

     Often ignored by classical scholars but obviously part of this great Mediterranean culture is ancient Spain.  Now, Spain has one of the great traditions of the worship of Heracles as a Sun god.  This tradition preceded and was uninfluenced by any Patriarchal tradition from Greece.  In point of fact the Patriarchal Heracles went West to annex the Spanish traditions to the Patriarchal cause.  In the process he rounded up the cattle of the Sun i.e. the Matriarachal Heracles to bring back to Greece.  Throughout history, including modern Africa, lifting another man’s cattle transferred his authority to oneself.  See the great cattle raid of Cooley in Irish mythology.  It therefore follows that the Greek Patriarchal myths of Heracles are built on an earlier Matriarchal mythological cycle while being perverted or converted to Patriarchal needs.

     Heracles was originally a sun god.  He was the original of the Flaming God.  I can’t say Burroughs knew this either consciously or subconsciously, however as we will see there is substantial evidence to indicate that he was consciously manipulating the material.

     The city of Seville in Spain is built over a Sun Temple in which Heracles was the sun deity.  This site beneath Seville can still be vistited today.  Assuming that the history of the Spanish Heracles developed independently of the Greek Heracles which after all is a Greek interpretation of a Pelasgian god then it follows that the two traditions must have come from a common source.  That source cannot have been other than the ante-deluvian civilization of the Mediterranean Basin.

     It follows then that whatever names they were known by in this anterior civilization Hera was the Great Mother Goddess while her ‘Glory’ Heracles must be no other than the Flaming God, the Sun.  What else could the ‘Glory’ of the Earth Mother be?

     Thus when the Great Flood, which must be the same as that spoken of by the Sumerians who would have gotten the story from Oannes, destroyed the civilization of the Mediterranean Basin the inhabitants fled to the former highlands surrounding them taking their traditions with them.  The Spanish Heracles was yet identical to the Pelasgian and Cretan models which later became variant.

     When the Greeks entered Pelasgia at the beginning of the Arien Age, the Zodiac dates back to the anterior civilization, they found this remnant of the ante-deluvian civilization with immemorial religious traditions occupying the land.  As the Arien Age began a great shift in the mental and social organization of man progressed in its evoltuion.  The shift was from a Matriarchal consciousness to a Patriarchal consciousness.  In other words, the God replaced the Goddess as the most important sex.  Fecundation became more important than actual reproduction.

     This meant that all the divine myths had to have all the sexual relationships reversed so that the God took precedence over the goddess.  Hera could no longer be allowed to have a male god as her subordinate ‘Glory’, the roles had to be reversed. Hera would have to become the dependent of Zeus.

     Homer’s Iliad is one key in the story of this reversal.

     As Hera was unwillingly made subordinate to her Lord and Master, Zeus, Heracles had to be appropriated by the God.  The Patriarchy then turned Heracles into a scourge of Hera and she his enemy in ridicule of the previous dispensation.  Kind of a Burroughsian style sly joke.

     The meaning of the name Heracles as the glory of Hera was thus lost.  Heracles lost his identification with the Sun becoming a buffoon as the greatest of men; a physical giant of somewhat dim intelligence.  Hera’s glory was turned into a laughing stock but still a good sort of fellow who could aspire to godhood at death.

     In the Patriarchal myths Heracles destroyed various Matriarchal cult centers such as the Hydra at Lerna, the Stymphalian Swamps, the Stag of Artemis, the Nemean Lion and others.  His cycle of adventures was involved in replacing the Matriarchal with the Patriarchal sarcastic ‘Glory’ of Hera.

     To make a feeble Patriarchal attempt at accounting for the meaning of Heracles’ name Homer tells the following story in book XIX of the Iliad.  Zeus, influenced by the goddess Folly, announced to the assembled Gods on Olympus that before the day was out a descendant of his lineage would be born to a mortal woman who would be the greatest man in the world.

     Hera, who hated the infidelities of Zeus, heard his proclamation with scorn.  She knew her husband but too well.  She knew he referred to Alcmene who was bearing Heracles but she also knew that a son was to be born to the wife of Sthenelus who was only seven months pregnant.  Sthenelus was of the lineage of Zeus.

     Hera rushed off to visit Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to ask her to hasten the birth of Eurytheus while delaying that of Heracles.  The former having been born first became the greatest monarch of the age after the Patriarchal fashion but by Matriarchal means.

     Hastening back to Alcmene Eileithyia uncrossed her legs allowing Heracles to be the younger son of Zeus born on that day.  While Heracles was the bravest and strongest of men he was nevertheless compelled by Hera’s resourcefulness and prompt action to be subservient to Eurystheus.  Thus the will of Zeus which could not be averted was perverted by Hera to thwart the Big Guy’s will.

     Heracles was still the strongest man alive but he was subordinate to the will of Hera through Eurystheus, portrayed as one of th weakest and most cowardly men of his time hiding behind his mother’s skirts but by the grace of Hera and the matriarchy, the greatest ruler.

     Zeus, appalled by his lapse of judgment threw Folly off Olympus from which she is still banned.

     In that sardonic manner Homer explained the meaning of Heracles as the glory of Hera.  She had used him to Ace Zeus.  Heracles had been stripped of his role as the glorious Sun companion of Hera.  He comes down to us as the strongest man who ever lived.  In the Roman nomenclature of Hercules he became the role model of every strong man who ever lifted a dumbbell.  Yet they all wore leopard skin shorts, the leopard being a symbol of the Matriarchy.  You can’t fool Mother Nature.

     To Burroughs who was a student of Greek mythology the great strongmen of the Golden Age must have appeared as men like gods.  Their feats of strength, their marvelous physiques, were so far beyond the abilities of ordinary men that they must have seemed to be in a class by themselves far above mortal men.

     In that sense Tarzan is the greatest of the strongmen, above Sandow, Arthur Saxon and even Heracles.

     Heracles himself had been demoted to a mere mortal although his legend was so great that he was allowed immortality by the Patriarchy after his mortal death.  Unwilling to grant him too much credit he was allowed to be the doorman of Olympus.  He held this position throughout the Arien Age being replaced by St. Peter in the New Dispensation of the Piscean Age.

     Burroughs, familiar with the mythic cycle of Heracles, however he understood it, plays with both identities of Heracles in the person of Tarzan at Opar.  He also brings in a number of elements from H. Rider Haggard’s novel She.  There can be no doubt of the influence of Haggard.  Burroughs even names his heroine La which is what ‘She’ is designated as in French translations of Haggard’s novel.  The palance of Opar is also based to some extent on the labyrinthine caves of She.

     There are many literary influences for the creation of Tarzan not least of which are the real life H.M. Stanley and Haggard’s fictional heroes Sir Henry Curtis and Allan Quatermain.  I would now like to direct attention to a third, that of the heor of She, Leo Vincey.

     If one closely examines Vincey it will be discovered that he too was a Sun King whose death had been caused in an earlier incarnation by She.  The cartouche which contains the name of Leo’s distant Egyptian ancestor was translated as ‘The Royal Son Of Ra’ or son of the Sun as in Egyptian mythology Ra is the sun.

     Leo also translates from the Latin as Lion so we have the Son of the Sun who also is a Lion Man which is how Burroughs refers to Tarzan in ‘The Invincible’ and undoubtedly as how he always thought of his creation.

     Haggard translates Vincey as the Avenger.  Tarzan is the ‘Avenger’ or guard of Africa.  Haggard describes Vincey as almost inhumanly beautiful while Tarzan is the most handsome man in the world not unlike Charles Atlas.

     Haggard’s She is indescribably old kept forever youthful by having bathed in the fire of eternal youth.  Hera was also eternally youthful and a virgin queen.  She restored her youth and virginity by bathing annually in a holy spring.  Hera’s bath obviously refers to the Spring rains which inundated Mother Earth just prior to vegetation springing forth in virgin birth.  After the summer heat the vegetation dies down and Earthy Hera becomes barren once more to await her bath and return to virginity.

Mr. Dynamic Tension- Charles Atlas

Mr. Dynamic Tension- Charles Atlas

     So a connection can be made between Sun>Heracles>Vincey>Tarzan and Mother Nature>Hera>She>La.

     Burroughs La was neither ancient nor immortal in the personal sense although she was the latest in an immortal line of Priestesses.  She is a priestess of the Sun or Ra, The Flaming God.

     Haggard’s Leo Vincey was the direct descendant of Kallikrates She’s great love of two millennia past.  She, or Alyesha, to use her name, had killed Kallicrates in a rage.  Kallikrate’s descendants were sworn to avenge the murder.  Thus Vincey travels from England to far off Africa to locate this fabulous woman.

     Kallikrates was the love of Alyesha’s very long life.  When she recognizes Leo Vincey as her lost lost love she saves his life while offering him eternal youth if he will only bathe in the flames of eternal life.  He hesitates to do so.  To encourage him Alyesha steps once again into the flames which was a serious miscalculation.  She crumbled to dust.  Thus while Leo Vincey doesn’t actually avenge the death of Kallikrates she is nevertheless his victim.

     Tarzan while actually born in Africa was conceived in England so he made the trip to Opar from England although he is ignorant of La.  When Tarzan is captured in Opar he is laid on the altar of the Flaming God, La with the sacrifical knife raised, looks down on this Jungle God, this man like a god, and falls in love.  Thus we have a replay of the She-Kallikrates situation.

     Unable to take Tarzan’s life, La releases him begging him for his love.  Alyesha’s full title was She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed in the Matriarchal sense.  The old conflict arises, Tarzan is more on the Patriarchal side, he has his moly in the waistband of his loin cloth, monagamous we are led to believe, happily married, so the Lion Man Sun King declines the honor of being mated to La>Hera.  He asserts his Patriarchal prerogative to disobey although he always has a soft spot in his heart for La.

     In a fairly masterful way ERB conflates the legend of Heracles, the fiction of H. Rider Haggard and the incredible strongmen of the Golden Age and his own little bit to write a charming and beautiful story which is fairly simple on the surface but one which becomes immensely rich with a deeper understanding of the sources.

     Ernest Hemmingway once said that before one sat down to write one should have ten time the information in your possession as you put on paper else the story will seem shallow and contrived.  It would seem that the sources upon which Burroughs was drawing, from the bodybuilding strongmen of his day to the legendary cycle of Heracles to the adventures of H.M. Stanley and the fiction of H. Rider Haggard might well fulfill Hemingway’s dictum.

     When one searches for the sources of Burroughs one finds layer after layer of golden riches while discovering that in fact ERB did indeed create a man like a god- Tarzan The Magnificent.

Addendum

      This is a quote taken from Bonzo Dog’s song Mr. Apollo.  I don’t know whether the reader is familiar with the Bonzos but they were one of my favorites.  Several glorious LPs.  Neil Innes came from them as well as the great but tragic Viv Stanshall.  Leave those drugs alone, boys.

Follow Mr. Apollo,

Everybody knows a healthy body

Makes a healthy mind.

Follow Mr. Apollo,

He’s the strongest man the world has ever seen.

If you take his courses

He’ll make you big and rough.

And you can kick the sand right back in their faces.

 

 

A few years ago I was a four stone apology-

Today, I am two separate…Gorillas.

Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

Long may they wave.

 

Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7:

Into The Lost Land

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Dylan, Bob, Chronicles Vol. I, Simon And Schuster, 2004

Prindle, R.E.   Exhuming Bob, VIII The Walls Of Red Wing, idynamo,wordpress.com 2008

Thompson, Toby, Positively Main Street, U. Minnesota, 2008, reprint from 1971

http://www.hibbing.org/dylan1/story.html  Life In Hibbing: Hibbing Chamber Of Commerce

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-dec.htm  Bob Dylan Is Not Like A Rolling Stone Interview, Spin Magazine, Volume One, Number Eight, December 1985

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm  Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan 1978

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm  Playboy Interview:  Bob Dylan  February 1966

                                                                               1940

Abe And Beattie

Abe And Beattie

     In attempting to put together a reasonable facsimile of Bob’s life in Hibbing and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City as he mythologized it in his chapter of Chronicles, The Lost Land, I have come to the following tentative conclusions.

     Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota on 5/24/41.  In 1943 he was taken to Hibbing where he lived from then until graduation from high school in the Spring of 1959.

     Within the concept of normal Bob had a fairly advantaged childhood.  His parents were indulgent buying him anything he wanted while providing adequate pocket cash.  Bob’s family was one of the more important in town both within the Jewish community and the town at large.  In what appears to have been a tight small town social scene Bob either excluded himself or was excluded from the dominant social groups within which he had a right to be included.

     Perhaps Bob’s conception of the Hibbing period could be best interpreted from his favorite movie, Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean.  Bob is said to have seen the movie several times.  This was unusual as few people ever saw a movie more than once. He would have been a very impressionable fifteen at the time.   Most of us didn’t have the money while quite frankly few movies, if any, were worth watching twice including Rebel Without A Cause.  I was seventeen when I saw it and while I was in awe I wasn’t submerged.  Of course Bob’s relatives owned the theatres so he got in for free.

     As he set up a Dean shrine in his basement which greatly offended Father Abe we may be justified in assuming that Dean was a controlling influence in his life from the time he saw the movie.  It is of interest that Abe was to remove the Dean shrine from the basement after Bob left replacing it with a shrine to his own son Bob Dylan ne Zimmerman.

     Abe Zimmerman (1911-1968)   worked for Standard Oil in Duluth when Bob was born.  According to the C of C he lost his job in 1943 moving to Hibbing where his wife’s family, the Stones, could help the young couple.  Why Standard Oil should lay Abe off in the middle of the war during a manpower shortage seems to pose a question.  As can be seen from the photograph of Abe and Beattie above borrowed from the Flickr photostream of <drineevar> he was a well set up handsome man.  He appears to be exceptionally self-possessed, sound in the eyes.  Beattie appears to be a haughty high fashion queen which would accord with later facts.

      Abram Zimmerman, for such was his name.  Usually called Abraham, the name on his tombstone is Abram, and his two brothers Maurice and Paul bought the Micka Electric Company in 1943 changing the name to Zimmerman Appliance.  In 1968 Paul Zimmerman told Thompson that they had been in business for twenty-five years which would mean 1943 although the date seems odd.

     According to the C of C Abe came down with polio in 1946 requiring a lengthy convalescence.  The C of C says that the Zimmermans bought Micka’s after his convalescence but if Paul Zimmerman is accurate it would have to have been 1943.  There would be no record of what Abe did for a living then from 1943 to 1946.  As Bob says both his uncles served in the Army it would seem that they bought Micka’s going into the Army shortly thereafter leaving Abe to tend the business.

     Maurice and Paul became President and Vice-President of the corporation while Abe siginficantly assumed the controlling post of Secretary-Treasurer.  Managed the money, paid the bills.

     During the fifties at least Abe spent a fair amount of money on both Bob and Beattie.  Angel Marolt whose family bought the Zimmerman residence after Abe’s death was trying to tell him of Beattie’s several fur coats, diamonds and Cadillac but Thompson says he wasn’t paying attention.

     Thompson quotes Echo Helstrom as saying that the Zimmermans had stores in both Hibbing and Duluth.  Having a customer base of approx. 250,000 makes more sense when one considers the amounts of Abe’s expenditures and the fact that the profits had to be split three ways.

     The C of C describes Abe as a ‘big man’ in town partial to those big thick long cigars.

 

The Dylan Home

The Dylan Home

    The couple had enough money on arrival to buy the large nine room house that Bob grew up in so Abe must have been well paid at Standard Oil before he was laid off.  Both he and Beattie are well dressed in the picture while Beattie is actually overdressed.

     Bob was entrolled at Alice School for his kindergarten year in 1946 at five years of age.  The status of Alice School is unclear.  Perhaps it was closed the following year or consolidated with the Hibbing High complex as Bob was transferred.  Hibbing High housed kindergarten through twelve as well as the Jr. College.  Thompson describes it as a huge and rambling building.

     So from first grade to graduation Bob was with the same group of students.  I sure wouldn’t have wanted to move into town in tenth grade and try to break into that one.  While he wouldn’t have known them all well he must have known the entire student population on sight.  This presents the problem then of why Bob, who was the son of the Big Man in town, wasn’t included in the top social cliques.  Those cliques undoubtedly formed early persisting through graduation.  If Bob was in one he was either forced out early or found it uncongenial to remain for whatever reason.  Perhaps he thought his Jewishness excluded him.  So if something happened we don’t know what it was and won’t; unless Bob tells it’s going to be difficult to trace.

     Growing up in a small town anyone with any ambition looks around and sees very limited opportunities.  Working for his father wasn’t a viable option.  Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer either.  Nuclear Science is OK but a lot of those guys are out of a job now too.  My next door neighbor when I was a kid for one.

     Bob’s mind turned early to music and then to Rock and Roll.  While Rn’R went on to conquer the world and become as respectable as such a spectacle could it was definitely considered discreditible and low class almost volunteer outlawry in the fifties.  At the very least it was ‘pimple’ music.  It took a certain amount of courage to say you liked Elvis Presley.  Pat Boone was set up as his rival and you had better say you liked ol’ White Bucks.  If you don’t think Elvis was considered a social criminal check out a couple of his movie roles like King Creole or Jailhouse Rock.  What was the Colonel thinking?  Clown roles, that’s all Elvis ever got.

      And then Bob chose as his hero and model Little Richard.  People looked at you funny if you said you

Young Bob On Harley

Young Bob On Harley

liked Little Richard!  I mean, Bill Doggett was a respectable Negro with music you could understand, Fats Domino was as lovable as a chubby ten year old but Little Richard!  They hadn’t even created the ghetto he could come out of.  His band might have passed but then he opened his mouth.  If there was ever a direct challenge to middle class sensibilities Tutti-Frutti was it.  Not only was the song incomprehensible it was about queers.  Nobody ever quoted the lyrics correctly, while I’m walking around saying ‘Tutti Frutti, I want Rudy?’  What does that mean?  I hope no one overheard me.  So when Bob gets up, ignoring Pat Boone entirely,  and launches into some screaming vision like Rip It Up or She’s Got It or God only knows what, was the crowd taken aback?  Chuckle, chuckle.

     So Bob having opted for the lifestyle was forced to associate with the hoody crowd or have become a loner.  Besides Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider  had appeared in 1956 that began a cult of The Loner that peopled the early sixties.  These guys, who were by no means rebels but deep thoughtful guys who had a line on the truth denied anyone else and that  penetrated sham and hypocrisy sat alone ever ready to resolve a situation setting things right were highly romanticized fellows.  There were as many Loners in those days as there were Hawkeyes a couple generations later.  So Bob wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of as weird, strange but a Loner.  A Loner was next door to weird and strange.  Thin line if you get my meaning.

     On the other hand the C of C describes the L&B Cafe as a regular jumping Bop Street right there in the heart of Hibbing, Minnesota.  Bands set up and played continuously.  They knew how to party in Hibbing.  The C of C even says there was a radio station in town playing Bob’s kind of music thereby contradicting every other source even Bob.  He says he had to go to Shreveport on the radio waves  to get his kind of music.  In this case I’m betting on Bob.

     The C of C  tells of Bob’s musical debut like this putting the best possible face on it:

Described by fellow students as polite, easy to talk with, and somewhat introspective, it was a total shock when he pushed back the piano bench and stood up to pound the first notes of a song into the auditorium, electrifying the student body.  Kids jumped up, stared at each other open mouthed not knowing what the reaction would be.

     Well, yes, they were electried but did they like it?

Rockin' Bobby Zimmerman

Rockin' Bobby Zimmerman

     According to the C of C, looking back fondly, Bob went over real well with his fellow students.  If you like this version don’t check the other sources as this is at variance with every other known account but then this is the Chamber Of Commerce  speaking.  Up to this point in the C of C account there is no reason for Bob to be as bitter as he is about Hibbing at all.

     A note of interest is the reoccurence of Fourth Street in Hibbing, Minneapolis and New York City.  Quite a coincidence, I knew there had to be some association with Fourth St. in Hibbing.  So far we learn that Bob attended Jewish shule there.  Whether the synagogue was also located there isn’t clear.  The synagogue Bob attended is no longer anywhere at any rate.  Tore it down.  It was in the way.  Had to go.  Even though Bob’s father was the most prominent Jew in town, the President of B’nai B’rith and ADL as well as his business interests, and even though Bob had a mega Bar Mitzvah with four hundred people in attendance some say at the most prominent spot in town, the Androy Hotel, some say at the synagogue, he wished to conceal he was Jewish.  This attitude may have contributed to his renouncing the Jewish fraternity house to which he pledged at UM while also hiding his religion in New York.  The attitude was strange since he seemed to prefer Jewish musicians around him to  the exclusion of goys.

     Bob’s father Abe, was quite frankly a marvelous provider, spending very large sums of money on son Bob, wife Beattie and his second son, David.  When he died in 1968 the house on 7th Ave., now Bob Dylan Ave. was sold.  The owners at the time of Thompson’s visit were the Marolts.  Angel Marolt who was at home when Thompson called offered to show him around.  One thing he learned was that Bob had a clause in the sale’s contract that allowed him to stay in his old room in the Marolt’s house whenever he was in town.  Too weird.

     What quirk in Bob’s mind compelled him to live in other people’s houses?  Perhaps Rebbe Maier back in 1954 impressed on Bob that Biblical scripture presribes that Jews would live in houses they never built.  As an article of religion that injuction is a mind boggler.  One can’t predict how anyone’s mind will interpret instruction.  Bob who functions out of his subconscious very heavily must have accepted such teachings in literal ways.  Rebbe Maier was a definite turning point in Bob’s life.  Imagine getting out of school, going upstairs at a Rn’R cafe to sit before the only bearded man you may ever have seen, dressed completely in black with a black yarmulke perched on the back of his crown intoning things like:  The Jews shall live in houses they never built and then go downstairs to boogie.  Pretty spooky, don’t you think?  And then as Bob says, he disappeared like a ghost.  Let that roll around your brain for little while and see what you come up with.

     Mrs. Marolt was trying to tell Thompson something about Mrs. Zimmerman’s multiple furs, heaps of diamonds, I’m sure all the latest fashions and her own Cadillac.

     Bob was indulged to the extent of apparently more than one motorcycle, a car, lots of amplifiers and electronic gear for his bands, whatever he wanted plus free movie admissions and plenty of pocket cash.  He must have had a large record collection for a kid as he spent his spare time at Crippas record store ordering the odd title.  You can bet Crippas didn’t discount either, charging full bore.  At the time (after 1958)   stereo was 5.98 and mono was 4.98.

     As the profits from a sole Hibbing store divided three ways could not have supported this sort of expenditure, having a store in Duluth could account for it.  It is significant also tha Abram died in June 1968 and the store closed a few months later.  Was the store a losing proposition for the last few years?  Did Bob provide the difference so Abe wouldn’t be embarrassed by going banko?  Then with his father gone there was no reason to support Uncles Maurice and Paul?

     There really is something happening here, isn’t there?

     Also as a petty expenditure for Bob (it would have been huge in my life) according to the C of C:

Almost every day Bob came in after school for his regular snack: cherry pie a la mode and coffee (or Coke.)

     And then to dinner?  No wonder the young Bob had all that baby fat. 

     If Echo bought those hot dogs for Bob and bought his story that his dad didn’t give him an allowance she was had in more ways than one.

     So, Abe was nothing if not a generous father and husband.  Beattie as President of Hadassah as well as a Stone must have made the Zimmermans the most powerful Jews in the syngogue while actually giving she and her husband the means to be petty dictators of the town,  I saw something like this in Eugene, Oregon in the sixties and seventies, or, as the C of C says a Big Man and big people.

     Bob must have a quirk in his mind to misrepresent his childhood so.  He was the Fortunate Son John Fogerty only sings about.

     In Thompson’s interview with Beattie he quotes her:

How can you know you have a genius in your house, when all my time is spent trying to feed him and keeping his clothes pressed.

     In Bob’s story, The Lost Land, Chloe Kiel is shown ironing Bob’s shirts and at the end of the chapter she ‘slaps’ a plate of steak and fried onions in front of him just before he darts out the door to begin the next chapter, A New Morning, just as in the old days when he returned home from school for lunch and was fed by his mother he darted back to school.

     Ironing his shirts and providing free steaks was a signal service for bare acquaintances like Ray and Chloe.

     Chloe comes across as cold and indifferent and indeed there is a tinge of resentment and anger beneath Beattie’s statement.  Motherly, of course, but there.  Still, she doesn’t impress me as any Yiddishe Mama of the Mrs. Goldberg variety.  Whether Bob was a good boy or not he does have an ambivalent attitude toward his parents.  But then he claims that he was really raised by his grandmother, whether Stone or Zimmerman isn’t clear.

     I believe the big change came over Bob with his Bar Mitzvah and I’m not talking puberty alone.  According to the C of C Bob attended Jewish shule during his young years.  This was done after public school hours.  Then in 1953-54 when his Bar Mitzvah was approaching Father Abe sent to Brooklyn, New York to have an ultra-orthodox, almost certainly a Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent to Hibbing to indoctrinate Bob in untra-orthodox teachings.  It can’t be any surprise that when Bob exhibited his Jewish reverence after his Jesus indoctrination with the Vineyard Fellowship he chose to show himslef as a Lubavitcher.  Welcome home, Bob.  The C of C tells it this way:

According to a 1985 Spin Magazine interview by Dave Engel, Bob said it was above the (L&B) Cafe that Rabbi Reuben Maier stayed while giving Bob Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah.  The Rabbi and his wife showed up one day and stayed for a year while Bob got ready for his big event .  The article quotes Bob as saying he would learn Hebrew after school or in the evening for an hour, then go downstairs and boogie at the L&B.  After completing his Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi just disappeared.

     In the interview Bob tells it this way:

There weren’t many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota.  Most of them I was related to.  The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed.  Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year.  He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of the winter.  He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff.  He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes.  They put him upstairs in the cafe, which was the local hangout.  It was a rock n’ roll cafe where I used to hang out, too.  I used to go there everyday to learn this stuff either after school or after dinner.  After studying with him an hour, or so, I’d come down and boogie.  The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after conducting the bar mitzvah, he just disappeared.  The people didn’t want him.  He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a rabbi.  He was an embarrassment.  All the Jews there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturdays.  And I never saw him again.  It’s like he came and went like a ghost.  Later I found out he was Orthodox.  Jews separate themselves like that.  Christians, too.  Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists.  God has no respect for a person’s title.  He don’t care what you call yourself.

     The C of C knows the Rebbe’s name was Reuben Maier and Bob Dylan doesn’t?  There were enough people in Hibbing to have a temple and shule but they didn’t have a Rabbi?  The Rebbe Maier showed up in time for Bobby Zimmerman’s Bar Mitzvah but what? it was the first Bar Mitzvah in Hibbing’s Rabbiless history?  No wonder four hundred people showed up.  The Jews in Hibbing shaved their heads and worked on Saturday’s?  I presume Bob means they didn’t wear beards but shaved their faces unlike the Lubavitcher in white beard and one of those funny round hats.  I serously doubt there were three hundred or more Jews walking around Hibbing with shaved heads in 1954.

     They took one look at Rebbe Reuben’s weird beard and outre attire and told him to get out of town?  Now that I can believe.  Beards in ’54 were a sign of great eccentricity or a psychotic desire to draw attention to oneself.  But why in ’85 the mysterioso act?  He just showed up to teach Bobby Zimmerman, a complete unknown with no direction home Lubavitcher tales like this:  (actually this is pretty standard esoteric doctrine adapted for Jewish needs)

The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is.  This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years.  Six thousand years of this where man has his way and 1,000 years when God has his way.  Just like the week.  Six days work, one day rest.  The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age, Messiah will rule.

     Essentially what we have here is a variant of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy along with a little Hebrew Theology.  If one looks real closely one can see the outline of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious.

     According to Beattie Bob knew, oh, two hundred words of Hebrew.  So much for several years of shule and a year of intensive training by Rebbe Reuben.

     Whether Bob knows or admits it, it must be true that Father Abram sent for Reuben to instruct Bob in mysteries that Abe thought were essential to his vision of Jewish religion while they were not part of the services of the Hibbing congregation.

     It is possible that Abram brought the Rebbe in on the approval of the congregation who rejected him.  The comment by Bob of working Saturdays may be signficant here.  The Jewish sabbath begins on Friday sundown and continues to Saturday sundown.

     As a Lubavitcher, Rebbe Reuben could not have tolerated working during the sabbath while the congregation found it essential amidst a gentile population.  Likewise beards are an integral part of the orthodox religion so that the congregation  also refused to stop shaving.  The only thing mysterious is why it took Reuben so long to catch on.  Or maybe he had a contract for one year and the year was up.  Of course Bob did need help on those two hundred words.

     So Bob’s upstairs memorizing his two hundred words while the throbbing beat pounds insistently through the floor.  The super patient Reuben and his wife never object.  Bob shortly joins the revelers with his two hundred Hebrew words rattling round his skull, steps up to the mike and begins screaming: I’ve got a girl and her name is Echo.  Hmmm.  Quite an image out there in the Lost Land of Bob.

     Now indoctrinated in quaint antiquarian rites Bob is bundled off to Webster, Wisconsin and Camp Herzl to steep himself in Israeli style Jewish living.  Camp Herzl was conducted as Israel in America so those two hundred Hebrew words came in handy in that surrogate for summer in a kibbutz in the Holy Land.

     The summer sojourns must have set Abram back a handsome fee for the times.  Six to eight weeks of essentially summer boarding school does have expenses.  Abe apparently was deeply religious: in Protestant circles he would have been known as a Fundamentalist nut.  He and Mike Huckabee would have gotten along fine.  One wonders if younger son David was given the same treatment.

     So Bob from 1954 on is definitely the product of two nations.  The world of the Three Hanks as the C of C puts it and this world of Adam, Moses and the Messiah.  Bob was named after Sabbatai Zevi the last acknowledged Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century, his Jewish name is Sabtai.

     As kids we all have a lot to reconcile, begin working out at graduation.  Bob had a double load; he had two Bobs to reconcile.  Personalities wander and widen in those years, Bob made a clean split.  On the one hand he was the twerp Bobby Zimmerman of whom it may be said:  There’s no success like failure while on the other he was struggling to be the super successful Bob Dylan in which he failed to assume the mantle so that failure is no success at all.  At least he made this split off persona’s name mean something.  As a note, it was not generally known Dylan was Jewish until after Blonde On Blonde.

     Thus in his movie Renaldo and Clara he is not Bob Dylan.  Anybody can be Bob Dylan he says, you can be Bob Dylan.  Toby Thompson thought he could be and did a pretty good job of it walking a mile or so in Bob’s shoes.  Sounded just like him.

     As remarkable as it is that Bob realized his fantasy beyond anything he could have dreamed and became the hugely successful Bob Dylan he created an entire new set of problems whose solution eluded him.  Well, you know, there’s something lost and something gained while it’s hard to know whether the gain was worth the loss.  However the money has disappeared from the table.

     The result then is Bob looking backward from 2004 to create a fantasy of how it was in Ray and Chloe’s place on Vestry Street in NYC.  The chapter is approriately titled The Lost Land or possibly Never-Never Land might have been better.  The chapter isn’t a complete fabrication but it is fiction.  Something like the various incidents might have happened but not exactly the way Bob tells it.  The framing story of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel is pure fiction however.  They could not possibly have existed.

     Bob tells the whole story of the Lost Land within the reference of Ray and Chloe and their fabulous apartment near Vestry below Canal near the Hudson across the street fromt he Cathedral with its bell tower.  Thompson got it right.

     A troubling aspect of Bob for me is his insistance on bumming other people’s apartments.  This seems to be compulsive behavior.

     Bob was actually voluntarily homeless from January of ’61 to October  or November of the same year when he and ‘roommate’ Suze Rotolo took up digs on Fourth St.  I suspect that Father Abe would have been only too happy to supply Bob with funds to live on Vestry Street if he had asked.  Bob is simply untrustworthy in any of his stories.  As he said of what he learned from folk music:  If you told the truth, well and good; if you told the untruth, well and good also, so in Bob’s mind there are no lies, there is only the truth or untruth both having the same value and whichever is more serviceable at the moment.  You can’t believe him.

     A troubling aspect of Bob’s behavior is his habit of bumming couches in other people’s nests; gaining meaning, as it were, from other people’s lives.  Perhaps that was the way he felt of his life in his mother and father’s house.  Or perhaps as a Jewish outsider in a goyish land it was his attempt to insinuate himself in the main stream much as he appropriated Woody Guthrie’s persona.  Of the houses I have traced they have all been those of goys; he didn’t choose to insinuate himself into the houses of his fellow Jews.  His imaginary hosts Gooch and Kiel are obviously goys.

     The Lost Land then is a mythologized version of his childhood and first few months in New York City.  To my mind Ray Gooch is a combination of Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, Matt Helstrom and his father.  Chloe seems simply to be an idealized notion of his mother.  (Study her picture for a few moments again.)

     As the Gooch frame brackets the period from Bob’s encounter with Gorgeous George to the apartment with Suze Rotolo it must represent a time frame from sometime in ’58 to October ’61.  In October Bob Dylan ceased sponging off others to take up his own apartment.

      The only one in this time frame he knew who had a large gun collection was Matt Helstrom.  The Helmstroms also had a large record collection that Bob listened to.  The couch and apartment undoubtedly belonged to Van Ronk while certain exoticisms of Gooch are characteristic of Clayton.  The library of Gooch may simply be the New York City Library of which the long narrow room would merely describe the stacks.

     The Southern character of Gooch must represent a time after Bob studied the South in the library since there are several references to his Civil War studies.  Gooch himself is a Southerner from Virginia gone North which is a symbol in itself.  This can be symbolically described as Father Abe being a Jew in Gentile America.

     Here then Bob creates or accentuates the more pleasant aspects of his memories in contrast to the very bitter unpleasant memories of the songs.  He tells us a great deal about his dream life but little of its realities.  At this point I am of the opinion that the party of Camilla ( who Bob says he gets to know quite intimately) is another fabrication of the based on a true story variety.

     As Bob would say, folk music taught him that if what you said was true,well and good; if what you said was untrue well and good also.  We may probably construe the Lost Land as both true and untrue while a good folk tale.  Even the title has a fictive quality a la Edgar Rice Burroughs.

     To round off the period back in the C of C milieu of Hibbing:  Bob spent his last summer at Camp Herzl in 1957.  In the summer of ’58 he was running back and forth between Hibbing and Minneapolis.  At that time he would have become familiar with Highway 61.

     In his Junior year of ’57-’58 he took up his relationship with Echo Helstrom.  They were going steady hence were not supposed to be dating others.  As he was in Minneapolis most of the summer he left Echo sitting home alone.  She resented this.  As the Senior year began she told Thompson, she took a revenge on Bobby returning his token in public in the hall at school.  Boy, that hurts.

     The feelings must have been much harder than either Bob or Echo portray them.  A key problem area is did Bob spend time in Red Wing Reformatory on Highway 61 below Minneapolis and if he did what did he do to receive his sentence:  I examine this more fully in Exhuming Bob VIII:  The Walls Of Redwing.

     He says in Chronicles that he was absent from school from some time at the beginning of April of ’59.  He was back at least by the June 5th graduation.  His birthday is May 24th.  After that date he would have been eighteen and subject to adult sentencing.  For what It’s worth he says in his song that no inmate was over seventeen.  I’m suggesting that he spent a month of two at Red Wing returning in time for graduation.  Certainly a Big Man in town like Abe could have arranged the graduation if he couldn’t get Bob off that time.

     The question is what did Bob do?  By the middle of this Senior year it appears that he had been in enough scrapes to be known as a troublesome boy; perhaps living out a Rebel Without A Cause persona.  Father Abe used his influence up to that time to avoid unpleasant consequences for the lad.

     I believe Bob’s song The Chimes Of Freedom tells the story of his crime.  Quite simply Echo set him up.  She obviously was not quite as complacent as she tells it.  See Exhuming Bob VIII:  Walls Of Red Wing.

     Returning home from Red Wing his parents threw a graduation party for him.  Bob was reluctant to attend the party, perhaps with good reason but was persuaded to do so.

     This then leaves a very sketchy account of the three or four months of the summer of ’59 for which Bob provides little information.  In Walls Of Red Wing I place his stint at Red Wing in August but that is probably wrong.  In any event the period from April of ’59 to September of ’59 needs to be explained more fully.

     Bob gives some brief details of his stay at Dinkytown but not much.   A little bit of the John Pankake episode while avoiding the important details of his theft of Pankake’s records.

     Thompson has some good information from Ellen Baker whose father’s folk song collection Bob used extensively.

     Then to NYC and his account of The Lost Land segues into his New Morning.