Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob
June 25, 2008
Exhuming Bob X:
Lubavitcher Bob
by
R.E. Prindle
There’s something happening here
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
-Bob Dylan
Bob En Regalia
In 1979 Bob publicly embraced Jesus as his personal savior. This was widely seen as a conversion to Christianity because Bob went to the Vineyard Fellowship of Tarzana for indoctrination into the Christian mysteries. He could hardly have learned Christianity from Jewish circles although the Jewish group of Jews For Jesus was already active. Pharasaic Jews have always despised Jews For Jesus so that may not have been a viable option for Bob.
While non-Jews may be scandalized by the concept of Jews embracing Jesus there is no reason for them to be astounded. After all Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews in the Jewish tradition. The early Christian movement was entirely Jewish. They were Jews of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Christianity became a universal religion only after Paul reconstructed it shedding the practices most repellent to gentiles while the Hellennic or Greek religion and philosophy was grafted onto the religion which gave it substance and intellectual vigor displacing Semitic stultification.
There should be little wonder then that Jewish Christianity should resurface two thousand years later with Bob as its Messiah.
Bob was uniquely trained for the role. He grew up in a Christian community dominated by the Hillbilly music on the radio with a large and active Jewish congregation. His father thought of himself as a Jewish scholar while heading the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and ADL. His father was covertly ultra-orthodox.
In 1990 Bob wrote a letter to the editor of a publication called Sister2Sister. (Bob’s Unshakeable Monotheism, Part IV, Scott Marshall http://www.jewsweek.com/ ) in which he said:
…until the entire world believes and obeys the same God, there can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.
What that means in the age old Jewish notion that as God’s chosen people they are destined to bring their vision of God to all the peoples of the Earth at which time they will become a nation of priests, the rulers and overseers of all others. The Supreme People placed between God and humanity as demi-gods.
The notion did not necessarily occur to Bob in 1990 but was placed in his mind at a much earlier date. It would always have been present in the synagogue. Anyone who has ever attended Jewish services will be be struck by the insistence that Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples. It is the duty of every Jew to further that work.
Whether Bob had the Messianic impulse before his Bar Mitzvah is the question. It may have been there in embryo. In 1954 as Bob was about to turn thirteen his father, Abraham, who obviously believed the proper religious education was lacking in Hibbing sent for a Lubavitcher Rebbe from Brooklyn to come to Hibbing specifically to indoctrinate Bob in the more recondite lore of the ultra-orthodox. The intensity of the instruction would be virtual hypnosis. It was at this point, I believe, that the Messianic impulse was fixed in Bob’s mind.
The indoctrination had devastating results for the young boy’s character and personality. He went off the rails becoming wild and dissolute. In searching for a means to spread the message he had received he hit on music and from there it led into folk music. Folk music had a special appeal because it was a pure expression of the dominant culture. If one subverted folk music one subverted the culture.
Thus after being initiated into folk at Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota Bob left for the Big Apple, New York City. The Folk scene of Greenwhich Village in New York was a virtual Jewish enclave or colony. A great many Jews were already doing what Bob set out to do. Disoriented by his conflicts between his Jewish and Christian education Bob nevertheless set about changing Folk music, discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms. The Jewish world organization realizing they had something in Bob gave him maximum publicity actually turning him into a messianic figure through television and magazines.
The stresses of intense fame to his personality and character were terrific almost destroying him. Bob retreated at the height of his fame in 1966 after having established himself with three terrifically influential record albums. His mind was now focused and somewhat cleared. Placing a large Bible in the middle of his living room for easy reference Bob and his band worked and experimented with the Folk and old timey oeuvre of the White Christian hill people. Once again retaining the forms while stripping the material of the content, he infused Jewish Biblical content which was familiar to the Christian culture into the material. The immediate result was John Wesley Harding which is a Jewish religious album in tradtional White Christian dress.
The result is quite remarkable and on that basis is an astounding work of Jewish genius. Unaware of what was being done to them White Americans could offer no defense except rejection. There were quite a few of us who walked away from Bob at that point. I can’t say that I understood what Bob had done but I felt the insult to my sensibilities.
Thus, in retrospect, Bob’s so-called Christian period became inevitable as his strategy slowly unfolded in his mind. There is no conflict with Bob’s intense Jewishness in his combined religious entities, or reclaiming the Jewish Jesus for Judaism. Nothing could be more natural.
The preemption of the goi culture for Judaism is the astonishing achievement of little Bobby Zimmerman. Long after the fact there are still few who get it.
Note: The old Jewsweek format has been discontinuted. The text is no longer available on that site.
Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side: A Review
June 20, 2008
A Review
Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side
Some Thoughts On The Autobiography Of Suze Rotolo:
A Freewheelin’ Time
by
R.E. Prindle
1.
Sandoz The Great
In 1938 Albert Hofman, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz isolated LSD-25. In 1938 young Tim Leary was 18 years old. It was in 1943 that Albert Hofman discovered the effects of LSD. Seventeen years after that LSD burt onto the world through the agency of the now, Dr., Timothy Leary, a psychologist with Harvard University.
LSD was adopted by the Bohemian society and all its offshoots as the appearance of the new chemical Messiah: Better living through chemistry as the slogan was. Its use quickly spread through the folk music community of Greenwich Village in New York City.
Timothy Leary Is Dead
Goodbye Tuli. Died 7/12/10
In 1923 a fellow by the name of Tuli Kupferberg was born and his partner Ed Sanders came along in 1939 a year after I did. Kupferberg and Sanders were poets who became influenced by the folk scene forming a band sometime in 1964 originally called the Village Fugs, later the Village was dropped and they became simply the Fugs. In 1965 they released their first LP on Folkways. Now, cut one, side one was little number entitled Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side. Sort of OK as a song, funny, as were a lot of Fugs songs. Like Dylan they searched for social significance rather than write trite love songs. Unlike Dylan you could easily understand the meaning of the lyrics. Slum Goddess was one and then there was a song that many of us thought significant in the social sense back in those days entitled: Boobs A Lot. ‘Do you like boobs a lot? Gotta like boobs a lot.’ As I said deep and intense meaning. This was followed by a song eulogizing jock straps. ‘Do you wear your jock strap? Gotta wear your jock strap.’ So the Fugs were with it.
At some point after 1965 the Village Voice decided to run a feature depicting some East Village lovely as the Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side. Suze Rotolo had the dubious honor of being selected as the very first Slum Goddess.
To what did she owe this honor? Well, she was famous on the Lower East Side for being featured on the album cover of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan. She was at that time, 1962, I believe, Bob’s girl friend or, at least, one of them, perhaps the principle one but one can’t be sure as Bob had others as ‘part time’ girl friends.
Thus one has to go back to the summer of 1961 to discover how Suze Rotolo began her odyssey to become the very first Slum Goddess. Suze tells her story in her autobiography issued in May of 2008 called A Freewheelin’ Time. It is a bitter sweet story not lacking in charm. Bob was born in 1941 while Suze was born three years later. All the disparate elements in our story born at separate times were slowly moving to a central focal point in New York City from 1961 to 1965 or so.
Suze and Bob were of that age when freewheelin’ seemed possible while the psychological social moment was about to congeal and then vanish before it could be realized as psychological moments do. Some catch the golden ring as it come around, some don’t. Bob did, Suze didn’t.
Suze was born in Queens, over there on Long Island, as a red diaper baby. In other words in the romanticized Communist parlance her parents were Communists when she was born. She was brought up in the faith.
Bob described her as a libertine dream or some such epithet. I’m not sure Suze saw herself in the same way. I think she expected a little more of Bob than to be his sex toy. As a Communist she should have had a more freewheelin’ attitude.
Suze seems to have been brought up completely within the Red religion much as a Christian might be a Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran or as Jew in whatever stripe of Judaism it might be.
She edged into race agitation at a young age. She met Bob when she was seventeen while she had been working for CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality) for a couple years before that. She would have been fifteen or sixteen. Whether she had sexual experiences with the Africans she doesn’t tell us. In her search for a raison d’ etre for her life she found herself in Greenwich Village in the Summer of ’61 where she met the twenty year old Bob Dylan just in from the Iron Range of Minnesota. They were mutually attracted, quickly forming a sexual relationship.
Bob as everyone knows was and is Jewish. He came not only from a Jewish background but from an orthodox background. Hibbing, Minnesota, his hometown, had a Jewish population of about three hundred families with their own Jewish establishment and synagogue.
According to Beattie Zimmerman, Bob’s mother, Bob was a good boy who attended services regularly while investigating the nature of the various Christian churches. As a mother Beattie’s version of things must be interpreted through the eyes of mother love.
Father Abe was not only a practising Jew but the President of the Hibbing chapter of B’nai B’rith and its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League. In addition Beattie, Bob’s mother, was the President of the Women’s auxiliary, Hadassah. So Bob isn’t just Jewish but comes from a very committed Jewish background.
As the President of the Hibbing chapter, Father Abe would have attended statewide gatherings in Minneapolis, regional meetings wherever they were held and possibly if not probably national meetings in NYC and elsewhere. Now, within the international Jewish organizations heavy hitters attend various levels of meetings where they meet and learn something of the various local and regional people. Thus, it may be assumed that Abe Zimmerman as a name at least was known on the national Jewish level. Kind of the Jewish Who’s Who, you know. Bob says that he had contacts to help him when he got to New York. Those contacts would have come through Father Abe while being part of B’nai B’rith and ADL. Bob wasn’t entirely alone out there.
Bob’s Jewish name is Sabtai after the last acknowledged Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. There have been many that filled a Messianic role since Zevi not least of which was Sigmund Freud and possibly Albert Einstein. Bob may have been encouraged to take the role for himself.
At any rate when Bob approached thirteen and Bar Mitzvah time Abe brought in a special Rabbi from Brooklyn to instruct Bob. Now this is really signficant. He was probably a Lubavitcher or ultra-orthodox Jew. When Bob publicly expressed his Judaism after his Christian stint he chose to do so as a Lubavitcher. Very likely that was no coincidence. Having received his crash course in orthodoz Judaism Father Abe next sent his son to a Zionist summer camp for ‘several ‘ weeks for each of four successive summers ending at the age of seventeen. This would have the effect of introducing him to young Jews not only of the region but from around the world while at the same time estranging him from his fellow Hibbingites giving him his strange cast of character.
Camp Herzl was named after the originator of Zionism, Theodore Herzl. the camp with a spacious hundred and twenty acres is located on a lake near Webster, Wisconsin. Herzl is not your basic summer church camp but a national and international gathering place where young Jews from around the US and the world can meet and get known to each other somewhat.
The camp is conducted exclusively for Jews along Jewish lines eliminating as many goyish influences as is possible. At least when he was seventeen Bob was playing the Wild One showing up in a mini biker cavalcade. One may assume that many national and international Jewish figures made appearances over the four years to both instruct, encourage and look over the upcoming generation.
The post-war years were very traumatic for the Jewish people. The death camps of the Nazis dominated their minds. They were psychologically devastated and unbalanced looking for Nazis under their beds before they went to sleep at night. One may safely assume that Bob and his fellow campers had to watch extermination movies over and over lest they forget.
The State of Israel was founded in 1948 while the first of Israel’s successful wars occurred in 1956. The ’56 war was a seminal event bolstering the spirits of the Jews turning them aggressive as they now believed they could fight. After ’56 they began to come out of themselves.
For whatever reasons as Bob entered high school his personality began to disintegrate. Perhaps he had to cease being Bobby Zimmerman to become what his people expected of him which was a probable religious leader who then became Bob Dylan. As always Bob would combine two cultures, Jewish and Goyish.
After an extremely rocky year in Minneapolis where Bob shed the remnants of his goody goody image of Hibbing he became the dirty unkempt Bob Dylan of his rush to fame of the Folk years.
Thus as Bob and Suze met in the Summer of ’61 they were both searching for something to be.
Part 2.
Why Do Fools Fall In Love?
Just We Two
The question now that Suze and Bob have gotten together is to sort out the various accounts of what happened. Bob says everyone has gotten it wrong. However his own account in Chronicles I is no more factual than the accounts of his biographers and commentators. Suze doesn’t provide us with much more clarity. While Bob tells it like he wanted it to have been Suze on the the one hand protects her memory of what she wants to keep as a beautiful memory while glossing over her own actions at the time to keep it so.
Bob goes through the romantic notion of constructing their bed with saw, hammer and nails. This is a charming story and I’m embarrassed to say I took him at his word. You simply can’t. Chronicles came out four years ago so Suze has had plenty of time to read it and mull over Bob’s ruminations. Thus she must be aware of Bob’s story of the bed. She says it was an old bed the landlord left from another tenant. Another beautiful tale of Bob’s down the tubes.
Suze rather unflatteringly depicts Bob as a rouster and fairly heavy drinker. She was offended that Bob, who was posing as Bob Dylan, not yet having officially changed his name, didn’t level with her and confide that Dylan was a pseudonym that looked better on a marquee while his real name was Zimmerman and that he came from Minnesota rather than being an orphan from New Mexico. Coming home one night, as Suze tells it, Bob, stumblingly drunk, dropped his ID and she discovered the truth as she picked it up. Even then she had to drag the truth out of Bob.
These problems mounted up. There was immediate hostility between Bob, Suze’s mother and her sister Carla. The mother seems to have instinctively seen through Bob, while I’m sure Carla soon learned that Bob was doing her sister wrong.
As we know from Chronicles Bob had other ‘part-time’ girl friends, pick ups and whatever. As the folk crowd was a fairly tight knit group even if Suze didn’t want to hear the obvious Carla who was employed by the Folklorist, Alan Lomax, could hardly have been unaware that Bob had a laissez faire attitude toward romancing the girls.
Indeed, Bob’s understanding of Suze was that she was his Libertine belle. As a libertine therefore he could hardly have believed fidelity was a necessary condition. I don’t know if Suze considered herself a Libertine but as a Communist both fidelity and jealousy were forbidden by the dogma so speaking consistently with the belief system neither mother, Suze nor Carla had grounds for complaint. Nevertheless both mother and Carla wished to separate Bob and Suze.
Bob records his side of the conflict in his song Ballad in Plain D. In his usual high flown language Bob says in his song:
“The tragic figure!” her sister did shout,
“Leave her alone, goddamn you, get out.”
All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight.
I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight.
My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night
Leaving all of love’s ashes behind me.
Within a few months he was married to Sara who he kept waiting in the wings. Subsequently he tried to keep Sara and his growing family in Woodstock and the Slum Goddess Of The Lower East Side out on the side. Suze, apparently not quite as Libertine as Bob supposed, declined the honor.
Just as Bob blithely romanticizes his early NY years in some sappy Happy Talk that belies his songs and what nearly everyone has written about him so Suze adopts a near virginal girlish pose. Her story of how she left for Italy and her true blue yearning for the perfect love of Bob who sent those charming letters purloined from old country songs is also belied by the various biographers. To hear Suze talk she never looked at a boy in Italy and certainly never dated one let alone kissed or petted. Yet by her religious Communist ideology that would have been no sin, even would have been a virtue. In fact she did have an Italian boyfriend who was apparently dropped down the memory hole at autobiography time.
When she did return the road of romance was much more rocky than she lets on. Carla who stayed home where she could watch Bob was privy to his doings which were much more libertine than anything he accused Suze of. He had to have slept with Liam Clancy’s live in somewhere in there. He’s accused of being a womanizer and you can’t be a womanizer without a lot of women. So whatever Carla knew it was somewhat more than an earful and I’m sure that between Carla and her mother Suze heard it all.
Suze out of respect for this young love which, after all, must still occupy a sacred spot in her life never expresses but the mildest resentment of Bob but letting her sister speak for her she says that ‘she (Carla) felt I was better off without the lyin’ cheatin’ manipulative bastard.’ Right on all counts I’m sure except for the last although as Bob claimed to have no parents Carla could justly so surmise.
At any rate if Suze couldn’t make up her mind her mother and Carla could.
Ballad In Plain D again:
Beneath a bare light bulb the plaster did pound
Her sister and I in a screaming battleground,
And she in between, the victim of sound,
Soon shattered the child ‘neath her shadows.
—–
The wind knocks my window, the room it is is wet.
The words to say I’m sorry, I haven’t found yet.
I think of her often and hope whoever she’s met
Will be fully aware of how precious she is.
And then Bob married Sara and ruined her life.
While Suze and Bob talked marriage there is no reason to take that seriously; he talked marriage with Echo too. I don’t think Bob had any notion of marrying aouside his faith. The mother is the culture carrier; Bob is firmly within the Jewish culture so there could have been no chance that he would have taken other than a Jewish wife. Even then he may have married only to fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Once he had fulfilled that duty he broke the marriage apart.
3.
The Slum Goddess
I'm Leaving Town Tommorow
Suze was now a young woman of twenty or twenty-one alone adrift in New York City. While she and Bob were having their tempestuous romance the times they were a changin’.
Tim Leary, up in harvard, had embraced psychedelics. Once in love with LSD he wanted to share his love with everyone. He became the High Priest of his psychedelic religion. I can recommend both his autobiography and his volume of reminiscences: High Priest. The latter is a spectacularly well written book if tending toward tediousness.
Leary’s experiments attracted the dark angel of the Hippie years, Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg also attached himself to Dylan tying the Beat and Hippie decades together. Vile man.
Bob had introduced Suze to Marijuana and what else I don’t know, perhaps LSD. He himself was into the pharmacopeia also undoubtedly dabbling in heroin although if he did he is still an addict or was successful in kicking the habit after his retreat from fame in ’66. That whole thing about the motorcycle accident may have been just rehab. He sure needed it.
As Bob notes the effect of LSD on the Greenwich Village folk scene was to turn people inward destroying any sense of community. Suze then was attempting to navigate this terra nova. Along with turning people inward, LSD, the drug scene, turned the scene sexually rasty in ways even the Communists couldn’t have imagined. The Pill coming along at this time certainly was as influential as LSD in changing sexual mores.
Suze, if aware of this, makes no mention of it in her auto. The Fugs released Slum Goddess in 1965 although they may possibly have been playing it around the Village for a year or two earlier. The Slum Goddess is not a savory woman.
That Suze was selected as the first Slum Goddess strikes my sensibilities as a negative compliment. Her presentation of it implies a souring experience. Shortly after her selection she chose to withdraw from Village life. She gives as the reason that her earlier relations with Bob caused upleasant curiosity and that was certainly true.
The scene turned absolutely rotten after 1968 when between drugs, profound negativity and the progressing degradation of the Hippie movement anyone with any sense of dignity was driven out.
Suze must have been one of us for she left the scene behind. There are few today who choose to remember it. As for me, life is life, there it was and there was I. I was who I was; je ne regret rien. I hope Suze doesn’t either. Bob? He just stays on the bus and doesn’t get off. Reality can be such a drag.
Forget About Yesterday
Conversations With Robin
June 19, 2008
Conversations With Robin
Robin Mark and R.E. Prindle
Conversations continued from Post: Lipstick Traces Part IX: Greil Marcus
OK, OK, OK. I’m getting it, took a while. STONE. Everybody must get stoned. What’s your mother’s maiden name, Bob? Stone. Right. Dylan might be tongue tied. I certainly was. Still am to a certain extent. But, I think one place to start is the religious conflict he had to endure.
His father, Abe, was a fundamentalist religious weirdo. Just because one is Jewish doesn’t mean you can’t be as religiously weird as Mike Huckabee. For Christ’s sake, Bob believes the Bible is literally the word of God. Somebody recorded his rants between songs and published them. Don’t have the book as yet but I’ve read a couple of exerpts. I already know all that crap. Spent much youthful time among the Nazarenes and other weird outfits. They had me for a while but I threw them off. The taste still lingers though. Bob apparently hasn’t. God, how can anyone believe that crap.
Beattie in Thompson’s book say Bob sampled the various churches as well as attending Jewish sabbath. Yes, I can believe that. So he’s got a father who’s king of B’nai B’rith and ADL and a controlling mother who’s quieen of Hadassah. As if this isn’t enough when he turns thirteen his old man straps him to the torture rack, pries his eyelids open with toothpicks and bombards the poor little bastard with Lubavitcher bullroar.
And then…and then, they send him off to be preached Zionist poppycock for a month or two every summer for four years. I can’t tell you how much I hated church camp. I mean, I can, but maybe later.
Apart from the religious issue then we have the personalities of Abe and Beattie. I got a vaguely uncomfortable mother feeling about Beattie from Thompson’s Main Street. I wouldn’t say I didn’t like her but I probably would have been very respectful and kept my distance if she had been the mother of my best friend.
So then, how does Bob tell her and Abe how he feels? Can’t just speak right up to his parents, who can? Consider the successive titles: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Like all artists Bob can combine several different influences into one song or even one line. Highway 61 is nowhere near Hibbing which is situated North of Duluth so if Highway 61 figures in anywhere it’s down at Redwing or perhaps the run back and forth to Minneapolis.
It is mere coincidence that Highway 61 continues to the Mississippi Delta. Has nothing to do with Bob’s thoughts. He can’t express himself plainly so he has a couple accusatory poses photographed looking straight at Abe and Beattie and goes into rants like ‘God said to Abraham…’
All that’s possible.
I’ve been reading on Bob’s religious odyssey in Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey Of Bob Dylan by Scott M. Marshall and Marcia Ford and also Marshall’s solo piece from the web on Jewsweek. Very enlightening stuff. Sounes and Heylin could have blended it into their biographies and given some sense to his later years.
The guy actually believes the Bible stuff literally. When he says: God said to Abraham… he means it. He thinks it actually happened. I spent a lot of time with those people in my yout’. Been there, done that. No thank you.
I am getting clearer on why I thought the Middle Period was so entrancing though. Still don’t forgive myself but I was there so I suppose I had to go through it.
Reconstruction, Tourgee And Dixon
June 9, 2008
A Review
Reconstruction:
Albion Winegar Tourgee And Thomas Dixon Jr.
by
R.E. Prindle
The conflict between the North and South is the central conflit of United States history. Whether the Civil War was fought to preserve the Union or over slavery the African issue was the central problem of the country. The aftermath of Reconstruction was and has been devastating to US history. Mark Sullivan comments the Reconstruction period in Our Times, Vol. III. He is writing c. 1930:
Hardly to this day has any unbiassed summation been made of the destruction that the North visited upon the South. Rarely has any conqueror in history been so ruthless- by comparison, the treatment of Germany by the Allies was the rebuke of a complaisant parent to a naughty child. The North, by abolishing slavery, wiped out five billion dollars’ worth of the South’s property. That was but the beginning. Abolition of slavery was the complete destruction of the South’s economic system, land in the South was made valueless. Then the North, by conferring suffrage on the negro, set the former slave in power over his recent master, and for ten years maintained him there by arms. The very aorta of civilization in the South was more near to being completely severed than historians have commonly realized. In the University of South Carolina, a State institution authority over which rested the legislature, a corn-field negro, barefooted, illiterate, sat in the chair and drew the salary of the Professor of Greek. Over a period of forty years, including war, reconstruction (ironic word!) and the aftermath of both, the lamp of education in the South was saved from complete extinction only by the devotion and patience of half a dozen men. With the other consequences went a discouragement which accepted the physical deterioration, through disease, of large portions of the rural South, as merely one detail of a fate it was useless to resist.
The excuse of the North was that Southern Whites had enslaved the African. For some reason the New England States made Southern slavery an issue although those states, as Bible pounders, were not opposed to slavery in principle. Shortly after the Civil War certain New England citizens established themselves in the Hawaiian Islands where they began to grow staple agricultural crops. Farm labor therefore became as big a problem for them as it had been in the South. They were not averse to establishng a contract labor system which was a form of wage slavery. The New Englanders, some of them churchmen, saw the Chinese as inferior coolie laborers not unlike the African. Learning from the Reconstruction African situation in the South they were reluctant to import the Chinese as permanent residents.
Thus the contracts of the Chinese specified that the Chinese return to China after the termination of their contracts. This the Chinese saw no reason to do staying on as permanent residents. Reluctant to import more Chinese the New England planters cast about for another alternative. They settled on the Japanese. Thus a ship sailed into Tokyo Bay and the Planters forcefully abducted, kidnapped, a hundred odd Japanese from Yokohama taking them back to Hawaii where they were put to work.
So we may assume that the New Englanders were not entirely sincere in their objection to Southern slavery.
In addition during the Grant administration while Reconstruction was in progress the annexation of San Domingo or Haiti was proposed. Under the French administration of the area using African slave labor San Domingo was the richest and most productive colony in the world. It could be made so again under American administration. How they proposed to farm the land without African labor remains a mystery. It could only have been achieved by some compulsive means.
As the Africans have never worked the land of this richest of areas without compulsion one would be amused to learn the proposed solution to this pressing problem of labor.
One can only conclude that as no region of the US objected to forced labor that truly the Union was the reason for the Civil War. The reason for Reconstruction has to be explained otherwise.
The next problem is the nature of the African. Nowhere in the world without an overawing show of force were the Africans docile. The history of Africa is perpetual genocidal, tribal warfare. The Africans had the very reasonable attitude that the way to treat an enemy was to stamp them flat. Exterminate them.
The attitude is apparent everywhere in Africa today most obivious at the moment in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
In Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century the small number of French planters proved unable to control the overwhelming number of Africans, the latter rising up and defeating their owners. In this action known as the San Domingo Moment the White males were exterminated to the man while the females were given the option of sex slavery or rape and death.
One might say this was race hatred but I say no. The response was no different than any other tribal conflict in Africa; the difference in Haiti being merely that the French were White.
In the US the White Planters managed the Africans by the threat of slightly superior numbers while overawing the Africans into if not total submission something very nearly so. Thus the character the North gave the Africans in the South was at complete variance with the worldwide reality.
The North took the forced submission of the African in the South that produced a seemingly submissive inoffensive, harmless type of being the actual nature of the African. Tourgee refers to Africans as ‘poor innocents.’ Northerners believed that the lack of apparent intellectual capability was due to ill treatment and the lack of opportunity for education. So the real question is who was right about the relative capability of the African to the Caucasian? The North or the South? This problem is important and has to be dealt with.
We are told that the African was first to evolve as a Homo Sapiens from the Last Hominid Predecessor. That was c. 150,000 years ago. Had the African not been disturbed by outside peoples he would be living today as he was when he evolved so long ago. Many peoples have visited sub-Saharan Africa, that is to say, Black Africa, over the last few millennia. Phoenicians and Carthaginians visited sub-Saharan Africa both overland and on voyages around the coasts. Greek traders visited the source of the Nile, identifying the Mountains of the Moon while Romans established trade routes across the Sahara. The Arabs established contact beginning in the seventh century at least while Malays from Indonesia established themselves on Madagascar while penetrating into the continent itself making settlements about the year +1000.
All influences were absorbed by the Africans without any serious changes to their intellectual or social organization. Europeans established stronger settlements in Africa ruling Africa for a hundred years or more. They have been or are being expelled from Africa while most notably in Zimbabwe and South Africa Africans are destroying any traces of European civilization and reverting to their ancestral ways. Only a liberal could deny these obvious facts.
The African capability for civilization was fixed one hundred fifty thousand years ago. The African mind is incapable of permanently adjusting to any higher level of civilization.
The Southern Planters in daily contact with Africans had this fact impressed upon them continuously. The mind is not so elastic that it can escape its evolutionary limitations.
As an example I quote Rudyard Kipling from his American Notes of 1889:
The Americans once having made them (the Africans) citizens cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspaper, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying this; but it is like to be a long job, because black blood is more adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets a religion he returns directly as a hiving bee, to the first instincts of his people. Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the Southern States. Up to the present two Messiahs and a Daniel have appeared and several human sacrifices have been offered up to these incarnations. The Daniel managed to get three young men, who he insisted were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, to walk into a blast furnace; guaranteeing non-combustion. They did not return. I have seen nothing of this kind, but I have attended a negro church. The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners bench. The motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were those of Zanzibar stick dancers, such as you see at Aden on the coal boats; and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one and I saw before me- the Hubsha (the Woolly One) praying to a god he did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the benches, the gray-headed elder by the window, were savages- neither more nor less. What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort with him….The North is every year less and less in need of his services. And yet he will not disappear. His friends will urge that he is as good as a white man. His enemies…it is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Of course the Liberal will say that Kipling does not observe accurately and that HE is a ‘bigot.’ Nevertheless if one looks at locales in the United States where the African dominates such as Mississippi, Detroit, Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Chicago, New Orleans, what does he find? A replica of Lagos or Zimbabwe. A return to ancestral ways.
I’m not one to quote IQ scores because they only prove what is obvious to the naked eye. Genetic studies prove that as Homo Sapiens continues to evolve, the African who, as a species, is fully evolved, will only continue to fall further and further behind. This may not be his fault but it remains a fact.
To counter these facts the Liberal merely says that a hundred fifty thousand years isn’t enough time to make an accurate assessment; we must be patient.
Thus when the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began Albion Winegar Tourgee went South with his prejudices as a carpetbagger to try to place the African over the Southern White.
Tourgee was an honest man who sincerely believed that he was doing right by punishing the White while trying to impose the African on him. Tourgee moved back North after Reconstruction and took up his pen to become a successful novelist. Among his works were two novels recounting his experiences and opinions during Reconstruction. The novels are: A Fool’s Errand by One Of The Fools and Bricks Without Straw. They are both reasonably good novels although the latter is more or less a strike off of the former but for my tastes a better story and novel.
It is in A Fool’s Errand that Tourgee tackles the problem more head on. Completely disrgarding the character of the African in Africa or Haiti he takes the paternalistic Liberal approach that he is dealing with innocent little children who need his protection. This attitude is actually only a variant on the Southern. His is a good Northern Charlie compared to the bad Southern Charlie.
His anlysis of the Southern attitude is quite accurate and well thought out; his solutions are faulty. A Fool’s Errand is well worth reading to contrast the two viewpoints. His own pretensions of innocence and superiority to the Souterners is revolting. He should have known of Grant’s plans to annex Haiti that should have given him an intimation of the vulnerability of Northern pretensions. I’m sure he probably wasn’t aware of Puritan doings in Hawaii and Japan.
Slavery is detestable, I myself have no problems with that although firms like Nestle’s and Starbuck’s are accused of benefiting from slave labor in the chocolate and coffee businesses. That means that you and I enjoy the fruits of slave labor with our coffee and chocolate. Those big screen TVs we all covet so much are made by slave labor in China. Tourgee if he had thought about it would have noticed that the African franchise he was attempting to force on Southern Whites was denied Africans in his home State of Michigan and nearly universally among all parts of the Northland and West. Kipling writing a few years later than Tourgee was speaking accurately.
Tourgee was indignant at what, as he puts it, the Southern Planter had done to the African. He says quite plainly that there was no punishment too severe for the Southern White nor should it end quickly. He virtually proclaims the need to boil the Southern White in oil. This seems extreme in a world where slavery was rife most especially on the African continent. He might have put just a little of the blame on those greedy African chiefs who sold their people into bondage for filthy lucre.
He might also have noted the Israelite Solomon who when he ran short of money to finance his temple to his god gathered together numbers of His people and sold them into slavery to get on with the building of the House Of The Lord.
Tourgee’s novels went unanswered while selling well for a decade or two. But then Thomas Dixon Jr. took up the cudgels on the behalf of the South and told their version of Reconstruction in his trilogy of The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor. Of course Liberals who control the seminaries of their religious system sometimes referred to as the American University System, dismiss Dixon as a stone cold bigot and ‘racist.’ One suspects without ever having read him which is of no consquence as they pay no attention to the other side of the story once their minds are made up.
As Dixon points out, those Puritan sea captains made a fortune or two out of the slave trade, the profits of which returned North to finance Puritan bigotry and possibly large bequests to Harvard University. Puritan cotton mills processed the cheap slave produced crop without worrying too much about its provenance. Dixon gives numerous examples of the hypocrisy of the New Englanders.
Slavery of any sort past or present cannot be justified but it was that very cotton that caused slavery to blossom and extend into Alabama and Mississippi. The institution then ran into the unique State of Louisiana.
Louisiana and more specifically New Orleans had a history dating back to the French Caribbean plantations, in fact, New Orleans was part of the French circle but a remote outpost in relation to the British colonies of the East Coast. As on Haiti and other French islands freed Africans were allowed full citizenship privileges including owning slaves. Thus, as the American settlers moved West after 1793 and the invention of the cotton gin becoming mere frontiersmen the closer they got to Louisiana, where the African, French and mixed races already were. Louisiana Africans, as in Haiti, were slave owners.
As W.E.B. Du Bois points out but gives no reasons for it, slavery in Louisiana where Africans were influential was of a different character than in the East. The East was as benevolent a form of slavery as is possible while in Louisiana as Du Bois himself points out the African owners preferred to work slaves to death, fhen buy replacements. This in turn created a market for slave breeders who arose in Kentucky.
The breeding of Africans for slaves was especially repellent to American sensibilities but had slavery continued public opinion would have gotten used to it as it gets used to every other perversion. It can however be no coincidence that slave breeding occurred just up river from the slave consuming States of Mississippi and Louisiana.
I mention this matter only to show that the subject of slavery is not monolithic but much more complex than normally discussed.
Both Tourgee and Dixon write about affairs in North Carolina on the East Coast. This differentiation should not go unnoticed. I suspect that a very large proportion of the illegal importation of slaves that occurred after 1800 was done through ports in Louisiana and Texas far from the central authority. If that should be true then the character of slaves fresh from Africa between, say, 1850 and 1860 would be much different than those Tourgee was familiar on the settled East Coast.
Tourgee, convinced that the Africans were gentle, innocent people, was blind to the outrages committed by both carpetbaggers and the more truculent Africans many of whom wore the Union uniform with the full backing of the Federal government which was bent on persecuting Whites.
Dixon then whose credibility the Liberals wish to destroy writing twenty years or so after Tourgee and probably in reaction to him wishes to give the Southern side of the Reconstruction story. He is much more realistic and sympathetic than Tourgee. The latter writes both his novels with nary a reference to the radical reconstruction of the insane abolitionists in Congress like Stevens and Stanton who quite literally wished to see Southern Whites exterminated ‘root and branch’ a la the San Domingo Moment and the entire South given over to the Africans. As Tourgee himself said, they believed there was no punishment too severe for the Whites.
One need not wonder how Tourgee would view the White genocide occurring in Zimbabwe and South Africa today as his current Liberal counterparts applaud lustily. In that light one shudders to think what will happen in the US if these Liberal assassins are not displaced before they seize the government in the Stalinist style and initiate the genocide of Whites they are currently advocating which one assumes will include themselves.
To understand the problem, the attitude among both Liberals and Africans from the Civil War/Reconstruction period that persist through today a reading of Tourgee, especially A Fool’s Errand, and Thomas Dixon would be some time well spent.
Finis
Exhuming Bob IX: Chronicles I Pensees3
April 27, 2008
Exhuming Bob IX
Chronicles Vol. I
Pensees 3
by
R.E. Prindle
…I needed to get my own place, one with my own bed, stove and tables. It was about time. I guess it could have happened earlier, but I liked staying with others. It was a less of a hassle, easier, with little responsibility- places where i could freely come and go, sometimes even with a key, rooms with plenty of hardback books on shelves and stacks of phonograph records. When I wasn’t doing anything else, I’d thumb through the books and listen to records.
Not having a place of my own was beginning to affect my super-sensitive nature, so after being in town close to a year I rented a third floor walkup apartent…
Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. I
Yes. Bob’s super-sensitive nature needed his own bed. He and Suze Rotolo were an item soon after he met her in July of ’61. He had to give up the the comfort of other people’s books and records in other people’s digs. He needed his own privacy now.
Suze would be an important influence in his life. She came from a long line of Communist agitators. She was not only Red to the- but was working for- CORE there in New York City. Bob wasn’t writing much as yet since his major influences hadn’t come together. While Bob doesn’t mention all those old C&W records as a songwriting influence he nevertheless has always written within a Country and Western context. Guthrie, his first attested major influence rose from a C&W milieu.
From being an apparent pauper, one reason Suze’s mother didn’t like him, Bob suddenly had the affluence to rent an apartment while being able to furnish it, even buying a used TV. He and Suze moved in. Suze is putting out an autobiography this month (May, 2008) so we’ll see if we can see what Bob saw in the girl.
As a Communist lass working for CORE Suze must have talked up Civil Rights and other Reconstruction views a bit so we may probably accurately assume that she influenced Bob’s songwriting direction when he gets his songwriting attitude organized here in a paragraph or two.
Bob came from small town Mid-West Hibbing. I do know where that’s at. While he was interested in records there was no indication he was ever interested in any other cultural areas. He doesn’t seem to have evidenced any interest in the varied cultural life of New York City before he met Suze. He was no habitue of museums although he does tell us he haunted the library where he read newspapers- those from 1855 to 1865. No news like old news.
His mind had been little prepared for what Suze had to show him. Mid-West small towns can be stifling and that’s no joke.
As Bob says: I began to braoden my horizons, see a lot of what the world was like, especially the off-Broadway scene. Then he mentions Le Roi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka) and the Living Theatre play, The Brig. Bob may have seeen those plays with Suze but he didn’t see them within the time limits of his story so they could have had no influence on his songwriting development at this time. Dutchman and The Baptism of Jones that he mentions were first performed in 1964 as was the Living Theatre’s, The Brig. It is interesting that Jones’ The Bapstism is described as anti-religious when Jones turned Moslem and became Baraka shortly thereafter. Baptism must have been more anti-White.
Jack Gelber’s The Connection was made into a movie in ’62 so he could have seen the play within this time period. I couldn’t find any time period for the play but it ran for over two years. I didn’t come up with anything for the Comedia Del Arte.
The Brecht-Weil show drew a blank but as he seems to have been knocked out by the song Pirate Jenny that may have influenced his song When The Ship Comes In, while he gives it prime importance as an influence that formed his skills he must have seen that sometime in the Fall of ”61 or the Spring of ’62.
He and Suze did visit the artist hangouts she was familiar with while broadening Bob’s horizons by trips to MOMA and the Metropolitan. Bob probably saw Picasso’s Guernica at MOMA where it was on display at the time. Bob developed a real interest in painting during this period.
So, we have the book thumbings from his freeloading days, the records, Suze and her art influences and then when John Hammond signed him he gave Bob an acetate of the first Robert Johnson album, which didn’t sell for beans I might add. The first Robert Johnson LP was released in 1960 so I don’t understand why Bob was given an acetate unless it was just lying around and Hammond picked it up or else acetates were a sop to new signees who had just been contractually screwed. You think managers are bad, try record companies.
Johnson was a revelation for Bob. He saw something in the LP which only a few people ever have. I’ve listened to it a couple of times and I’m with Dave Van Ronk. So What? There’s nothing to the vocals and he’s obviously a beginner on guitar. It’s not that he’s inventive he just doesn’t know how to play.
The story Bob tells is that a teenage Johnson is hanging around some Blues heavies and they shoo him off. Johnson then meets a supposed guitar wizard nobody’s ever heard of who teaches this very receptive student mega volumes of guitar lore so that Johnson returns to the Blues heavies a year later to knock their socks off with his virtuosity. As Van Ronk says: ‘…oh that lick’s from here, this one’s from there; that song is a reworking of another and so on. Greil Marcus quotes Johnson’s lyrics extensively in his Mystery Train. Wow! I guess too much of nothing can be a good thing.
But anyway Bob learned three or four times as fast from Johnson as Johnson learned from the old coot who taught him. Bob was up and running within three months.
However Superbob the Songwriter wasn’t ready to step forth from the phone booth yet, there was something else lacking, what was it, something or other. That’s it, in French, l’ autre. Bob had discovered that he was someone else. I know where that’s at too; I’ve been called somethin’ else a couple times I can remember. So Bob was somewhere between Bob1 and Bob2. The transition from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan had to be completed. Bob picked up a copy of Arthur Rimbaud. The book fell open in his hands and the words ‘Je suis un autre’ floated up before his eyes and were sucked into his soul. Bob too realized that he had or was un autre. Now Bob was ready to rock and roll.
This is a pretty story and I like it. I like it a lot. It might even be true, I’m sure I don’t know and maybe Bob isn’t real positive. Anyway the songs began to roll out. John Hammond who had seen only a couple when he suspicioned there might be more in Bob’s head so he sent the underaged lad to be signed by Lou Levy. Songs were in the air I guess and Albert Grossman had his radio tuned to Bob’s brain and must have heard them. Like a vulture spotting a dying man from several thousand feet in the air the eagle eyed Albert, and that is not meant as an insult, descended on Bob and scooped him up. Wish I’d been there with the gift of gab, a shovelful of chutzpah. A dream of a life time and Albert split it in two to come up with Bob and Peter, Paul And Mary. The Fearsome Foursome.
Although Bob was to have difficulties with Albert in later years when Albert’s cut was growing larger than Bob’s he seemed to have been welcome at this time. Peter Yarrow says that without Albert Grossman there wouldn’t have been a Bob Dylan and this may be God’s own truth. So how much did Bob really owe Albert? But like The Colonel and Elvis a manager seems to inevitably believe the whole belongs to him. The manager’s cut just seems to get larger and larger while the artist he’s working over gets to lick the plate. But, those problems were in the future and as Bob’s songwriting skills matured Albert got him much more money than he could have gotten otherwise.
Exhuming Bob Part IX: Chronicles Vol I: Pensees 2
April 26, 2008
Exhuming Bob
Part IX
Chronicles Vol. I:
Pensees 2
by
R.E. Prindle
I rather admire Bob’s method of integrating his life into history. He makes himself part of the unfolding plan of historical development. As some very ancient fellow once said: The unexamined life is not worth living. Having posted the rather narrow parameters of his story- that of his signing by Lou Levy and his subsequent redemption of the contract- he fits in most of his intellectual development to the time of the redemption of the contract.
He does this in an interesting way. In Chaper 2, The Lost Land, an interesting title in itself, gives the feel of prehistory, he begins by describing how like some insect he burrowed into the nest of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel where he lived in parasitic comfort.
The path to Ray and Chloe’s door is interesting. First he met Dave Van Ronk, through Van Ronk he met Paul Clayton and through Clayton Gooch and Kiel. Bob is going to suck off Van Ronk and Clayton to a very large extent also. Bob describes his hosts as quite eccentric, one might almost say, weird. As a foreign body in the cocoon he even studies them dispassionately, clinically, one might say. As one species of another.
As with the other people he attached himself to they had a terrific record collection and what appears to be a large very eclectic library. While Bob appreciates the library one feels that he believes the selection of books as odd and weird his hosts. The library apparently formed the basis of his adult education as he thumbed the books. This is really the first step in how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan the songwriter. Remember he has only a year or so before his career is fairly launched and he no longer has any use for people like Ray and Chloe. Both appear to have been queintessential Bohemians- or Bohos in brief.
In this environment Bob provides us with this biographical sketch. P. 28
I was born in the spring (5/24) of 1941. The Second World War was alreadey raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt- towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Ghengis Khans, Charlemagnes and Naopleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner. Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with- rude barbarians stampeding cross the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.
I don’t necessarily agree with the interpretation but one might ask what its intellectual background is. As bob was writing at the age of 53 of a period he didn’t remember and probably hadn’t formulated his opinions by 1959 he is projecting subsequently obtained knowledge back on his birth as falsified Persistence of Memory. I admire that. One has to have order in one’s life.
Actually if one has read more than somewhat in certain areas the intellectual foundations are more than apparent. Bob was born Jewish and for four years after his Bar Mitzvah- turning 13- he attended a Zionist summer camp for a month or month and a half in those summers.
There was a synagogue in Hibbing but it isn’t clear that Bob regularly attended services or was very observant. As an illustration of what being Jewish means let me cite an ad for the new cable channel called Shalom. This is the first all Jewish channel. In the ad or blurb a man is discussing his Jewish education. He says that they tell you that you will attend a goi school where you will learn to be an educated man. And then you will also attend this other school where you will learn what it means to be a Jew. The man says that he already knows what it means to be a Jew- You suffer. You suffer.
Thus at Camp Herzl- the Zionist Camp- Bob spent four summers learning to suffer as a Jew. Bob didn’t mention Camp Herzl in his book.
Now, Jewish teaching is that only Jews can rule a just world. Only Jews are cultured and learned, all others are like ignorant bulls in a china shop- mere barbarians. The last phrase In the quote from Bob is that the goi leaders were- rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out thier own ideas of geography. This is the exact opposite of how Jews imagine that they would be managing things.
the notion is that only Jews are capable of creating a just sane society. This notion hasn’t proven out well in post-WWI Russia, Hungary, and Central Europe or today’s Palestine but facts don’t disturb the notions of ideologues. We know that Bob is an Israeli citizen and it appears he follows the Party line. Can’t help himself, really, that was the way he was educated on the Jewish side.
Then, on pages 27 and 28 bob finds it important to mention Adolf Eichmann. Now, Bob only has 300 pages to work with here so we may assume he has selected only very key items to discuss. One could easily write 300 pages without mentioning Eichmann. I’ve written close to 3000 pages of autobiographical fiction and I don’t believe Eichmann has come up once. Nevertheless Bob writing of the time at the age of 53 has this to say:
(Ray worked) also an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what it was like. “You ever heard of Auschwitz?” Sure I had, who hadn’t? It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed this, had been put on trial recently, in Jerusalem….His trial was a big deal. On the witness stand Eichmann declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish. Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided on….The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution. the trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli State.
Spoken like a true Israeli patriot. There is no need to defend Eichamnn, the disposal of the conquered belongs to the conqueror without the legal hocus pocus of a trial. Did anyone believe that the Nuremburg Trial wouldn’t find the defendants guilty? Why the charade? There was no exonerting evidence that was going to be considered. The Israeli State was not even in existence during the Second Wrold War so by what right does the State of Israel act. None. Their own will. Be honest, they wanted to kill this guy, that’s all. They weren’t even one of the conquerors. They had nothing to do with the defeat of the Axis.
So what does the trial of Eichmann mean? The Israelis violated all international law by abducting an Argentine citizen without authority or extradition. If Eichmann was a thug the Israelis were no less so. Did they feel they had an overriding grievance? Bully for them. If they’re interested I’ll send a list of mine which I feel no less passionately.
And then the State of Israel has appointed itself to act as heir and executor of all who perished. That’s a convenient right to assign oneself. I, The Jury as Mickey Spillane said. What a convenient right. It doesn’t square with justice but then who among them are objecting. The Jews were self-righteously against capital punishment in all the other barbaric countries of the world. But…they would make an exception in Eichmann’s case. As time would show they would make a lot of exceptions. Assassination became there mode of operations.
As I say there is no need to defend Eichmann, if you want to kill him, kill him. No one will object, but to set aside all the rules, all the laws that separate civilization from barbarism seems a bit extreme. It does make one question one’s sincerity.
The trial does fit within the time frame of the novel though, so Bravo! Bob.
After that little moriaistic lesson for us all Bob brings us up to date on some of his musical influences, which were all excellent and then acquaints us with the foundation of his literary and intellectual education as provided by Ray and Chloe.
He says he did little reading as a kid. He also says he was not much of a student. One gathers then that the talk of the biographers about Bob being on the honor roll was a figment of Mother Beatttie’s imagination. She was apparently telling them of the Bob she wished Bob had been instead of the Bob that was. Primarily his own reading considted of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Luke Short and H.G. Wells.
Good influences all. Luke Short was also my favorite Western writer, him and Ernest Haycox. Of course I remember not a shred. The choice of H.G. Wells is probably represented by Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells. His reading or Wells probably consisted of The War Of The Worlds, The Island Of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man. The other four didn’t get read very often but I have come to really appreciate The Food Of The Gods and In The Days Of The Comet. I’m a big Wells fancier myself having read about 90% of a very large corpus, some of it two or three times. At Bob’s age however I was only familiar with the volume Seven Science Fiction Novels Of H.G. Wells.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is my forte as my essays on I, Dynamo and ERBzine will attest. So both Bob’s and my own influences closely mesh. It is of interest to note that having read Tarzan Bob married a Black woman and installed her in Tarzana. Burroughs of course founded Tarzana naming it after Tarzan. Cute.
Bob goes on to discuss items he read in Ray’s library. Ray was a pretty interesting reader. Bob really fell through the rabbit hole when he moved in with Ray and Chloe.
I don’t feel the need to run through what he read, the reader can check it out himself if he wishes, but Ray provided Bob with a nagnificent foundation in a very short time. I am impressed that Bob found Honore de Balzac a great writer. Damn, that Bob does have an unerring nose for the best in both records and literature. Balzac is one of my favorites too although I’ve only read about twenty volumes of the immense corpus Balzac called the Human Comedy. If you want to read a really stunning story, a novelette, get The Girl With The Golden Eyes and have your life changed. Too bad Bob got confused by being forced to try to combine a liberal education with a Jewish one. I’ve got a Jewish one too, acquired late however, but I scrapped it as useless.
Book II, Pt. 4 Something Of Value
February 13, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II
Part 4
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
ERB And The World 1875-1950
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs entered a world he never made on September 1, 1875. He would have some hand in editing the making of the next century or so. He seemed a less than likely candidate for such a chore. He was dealt a tough hand to play by life. It took him some thirty-five years to learn how to play his hand but once he learned there was no stopping him. He wasn’t perfect, probably had what we call an abrasive personality, and he didn’t always do the right thing but, then, who does? He worked hard and he walked his dog with an ample leash. But in this essay we’re not particularly concerned with ERB the personality but ERB the force.
ERB’s world was made for him. It was his job to navigate his way through it. I have already prepared a view of the world and its history in terms of religion and evolution extrapolated from the writing of Burroughs. It may be of use to give a bit of the local history that had such a profound effect on his development.
ERB was born in Chicago. The Chicago that he was born into was one of the seven wonders of the modern world. There had been nothing like it seen before, not New York City, not Paris, not London, not even ancient Athens or Rome. The Iron Chancellor of Germany, Bismark, lamented the fact that he would never get to see ‘that Chicago.’ It is hard to imagine the role Chicago played today. Chicago was unique, both wonderful and terrible. It may be difficult to visualize but for the Chicago of Burroughs’ youth, to the East was civilization and directly to West was Indian Territory. The Indian Fighters came direct from the battlefield to the metropolis of Chicago. I mean, Buffalo Bill had Sitting Bull as one of his performers. Blows my mind.
As if to prove its uniqueness Chicago staged the 1893 Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair, the fabled White City. The White City may be compared to OZ while workaday Chicago was known as the Black City. You gotta work at visualizing this stuff. The White City was as audacious as Chicago itself. It only took fifty years to raise this strange, bizarre and wonderful city out of the muck alongside Lake Michigan and it only took a year to build what was really a spectacular purpose built city of some magnitude. Even more mindboggling it s purpose existed for only six months then it was discarded like so much waste paper. Incendiaries burned this amazing effort to the ground the next year. Nothing was left of this prodigious effort. It is truly a crazy world.
Bill Hillman of ERBzine made a valiant effort to present the wonder of this spectacle especially as it affected the young Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a valiant attempt and a worthy one opening my eyes to this wonder in ways they had never been opened before, however as good as Hillman’s effort was it couldn’t come close to the grandeur of the spectacle.
To have visited this incredible fair for few days, a week, or even two was to have seen nothing. Edgar Rice Burroughs, then 17, had the great good fotune to have spent the whole summer at the fair. It was the experience of his life. The world was on display. Authentic Dahomean villages with real tribesmen brought from the jungles for the purpose, authentic Irish villages- of course, there were enough authentic Irish around Chicago to staff those so they didn’t have to be brought over- Arab camps, evolution, religions of the world, scientific wonders, everything imaginable and in real authentic detail with real everything and it was cutting edge. This was not any Disneyland fake. It was like traveling around the world. A diorama of realities. It blasted through ERB’s existence like a tornado across the Kansas plains. That was how the author of the Oz series, L. Frank Baum, who was in attendance saw it. It was a regular tornado that transported him to another world- we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
As Editor Hillman pointed out in his series of articles, the White City was a phenomenon of firsts. Bill didn’t get them all though. One he missed was that Frederick Jackson Turner, always be suspicious of three name writers, first presented his thesis ‘The Influence Of The Frontier In American History’ at the fair. The disappearance of the frontier was as important an event in world history as any. With the arrival of HSII and III on the Pacific shores all sub-species were in direct contact with each other around the world. The stage for ev0lutionary Armageddon was constructed.
In its own way 1893 was as important as 9/11/01. A world change began to take place. The previous four hundred years of HSII & III domination began to wane. As usual the avant guard of writers and artists had a glimmer of understanding; the rest kept walking right along as though they hadn’t passed through the glimmer into this new parallel world.
The writers perceived things differently. Among the writers were H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe and of course Edgar Rice Burroughs. As it is with artists they began writing in terms of the new reality, perhaps without being conscious that they had abandoned the old. By the mid-teens and early twenties non-fiction accounts had begun to appear. Most famous were those of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s The Rising Tide Of Color pinpointed the issue but after some initial success he was denounced as a bigot and throughly discredited. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was talking about but his message was offensive to certain pressure groups.
In its own way so were the writings of the great mythographers. With the exception of Wells they were all political conservatives. Well’s success came as a mythographer before he declared himself a Red/Liberal in 1920. From that point, which occurred just as the Great War ended, his novels fell flat although his Outline Of History was a great success.
Every effort has been made to discredit the mythographers, but their creations have maintained a stunning popularity despite Red/Liberal efforts to destroy them. Lately the Reds have turned to detournement. In Well’s case, as a member of the prevailing orthodoxy he has, of course, been idolized and eulogized, but they can’t get anybody to buy anything but his science fiction.
Perhaps because he tackled the different themes of religion and evolution in an independent manner great effort has been made to discredit Burroughs. Frontal attacks have failed to this point although perhaps ridicule and detournement will be more effective. The Disney Corporation may be successful in trivializing the Big Bwana unless we counter with a more effective campaign.
Many thinkers were presenting scientific bases for the analysis of social and historical trends. Two of the most prescient were Darwin and Freud of whom I have gone to some effort in integrate into my analysis. These men presented scientific methods, where were real methods, objective bases not based on the inner world of wishful thinking. I can understand how Red/Liberals wish to cast their web of wishful thinking over the mind of mankind but I don’t understand the unwillingness of people to see through this fantastic projection. The reality principle has to take effect sometime.
Yet these mythographic prophets of reality have been scorned or willfully miscontrued. If one looks at Burroughs’ work carefully he is functioning as a prophet based on scientific principles that were plausible in his day. Nothing he or any of the mythographers said has been disproved by further scientific advances.
Before going into this further let us take a close look at Burroughs’ magnum opus Tarzan Of The Apes. What he had read in evolution to this time except for Darwin isn’t certain. In 1933’s Tarzan And The Lion Man he implies he has read Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel and August Weismann. Lamarck was of the eighteenth century who believed in inherited characteristics. Darwin published his Origin Of Species in 1859, Mendel wrote his genetic study in 1866 which was rejected by Darwin who eclipsed Mendel until, as the result of Weismann’s studies, he was rediscovered in 1900. Weismann wrote during the eighties and nineties advancing the theory of germ and soma cells. It is possible that Burroughs could have been familiar with all four by the time he wrote Tarzan Of The Apes. Lamarck and Darwin are readily evident. Burroughs favored the notion of Lamarckian inherited characteristics, which is justly out of favor today. Thus as an allegory of the ascent of man Tarzan relies heavily on Tarzan’s heritage to explain his sense of his separation from the apes among which he grew up as a feral child.
In Burroughs’ story Tarzan comes from the finest hereditary stock of noble Englishmen. Thus according to Burroughs he inherits a number of moral and mental faculties rather than acquiring them. There is no mistake that Burroughs considered the English to be the crown of creation. As a one year infant Tarzan’s parents die while he is adopted by Kala the ape. Burroughs’ apes are not known to any science perhaps representing the ‘missing link’ which used to be a hot topic.
The idea of an unknown species of ape falling somewhere between known apes and human beings is not as unreasonable as it may sound. It was only in 1902 that the existence of the Mountain Ape was confirmed. The Mountain Apes of the Mountains of the Moon had been rumored for some time before the first specimen was killed and the skin brought back. These are amazing anthropoids. So, within the context of the times the notion of such apes was not all that far fetched.
Many wonders were thought to be hidden in Africa. Even as late as 1920 The New York Herald ran an article seriously considering the notion that dinosaurs still existed in the Congo. While at this day we may read Burroughs with a very large grain of salt much of what he writes about was discussable as possible fact at the time.
As Burroughs’ apes are evolutionarily above the monkeys and gorillas they may be seen as the last stage of evolution before the First Born appeared. Burroughs makes a big point that Tarzan passes through the full evolutionary program on his way to realizing his noble English heritage as a fully evolved human being.
This theme is also reviewed in his The Land That Time Forgot.
One of the most difficult feats of Tarzan to accept is the manner in which he taught himself to read and write English without knowing a single phonetic value. However his ability to do so can be explained in a reasonable manner.
While reading through John Chadwick’s work The Decipherment of Linear B, Linear B is, of course, the written language of the ancient Myceneans and Minoans, which was a terrific problem until Michael Ventris succeeded in breaking the code, I came across this passage:
Cryptology has now contributed a new weapon to the sudent of unknown scripts. It is now generally known that any code can in theory be broken, provided sufficient examples of coded texts are available. The only method by which to achieve complete security is to ensure continuous change in the coding system or to make the code so complicated that the amount of material necessary to break it can never be obtained. The detailed procedures are irrelevant, but the basic principle is the analysis and indexing of coded texts, so that the underlying patterns and regularities can be discovered. If a number of instances can be collected , it may appear that a certain group of signs in the coded text has a particular function, it may, for example, serve as a conjunction. A knowledge of the circumstances in which a message was sent may lead to other identifications, and from these tenuous gains further progress becomes possible, until the meaning of most of the coded words is known. The application to unknown languages is obvious; such methods enable the decipherer to determine the meaning of sign-groups without knowing how to pronounce the signs. Indeed it is possible to imagine (my italics) a case where texts in an unknown language might be understood without finding the phonetic value of a single sign.
The task before Tarzan was formidable but he had all the time in the world without any distractions. I do not mean to say that it would be possible for a feral boy to develop this amazing intellectual ability since the feral children found are quite incapable of learning. But, in Burroughs’ mind Lamarckian notions of inherited characteristics was foremost so that he believed as did most of his contemporaries and a signficant percentage of the population today that these characteristics were operative.
As one reads one comes across some remarkable things. Having just read Alexandre Dumas’ Memoirs Of A Physician I came across a tale somewhat reminiscent of Tarzan’s story. In fact the similarities of some of the details between Dumas’ book and Burroughs’ are quite amazing although I do not suggest that Burroughs ever read this Dumas novel.
In this scene a young man named Gilbert has met the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in the woods where Rousseau is collecting botanic specimens. Gilbert does not know who he is talking to.
‘You can read and write.’ (Rousseau asked.)
‘My mother had time before she died to teach me to read. My poor mother, seeing that I was not strong, always said, ‘He will never make a good workman; he must be a priest or a learned man.’ When I showed any distaste for my lessons, she would say, ‘Learn to read, gilbert, and you will not have to cut wood, drive a team, or break stones.’ So I commenced to learn but unfortunately I could scarcely read when she died.’
‘And who taught you to write?’
‘I taught myself.’
‘You taught yourself?’
‘Yes, with a stick which I pointed, and with some sand which I made fine by putting it through a sieve. For two years I wrote the letters which are used in printing, copying them from a book. I did not know that there were any others than these, and I could soon imitate them very well. But one day, about three years ago, when Mademoiselle Andree had gone to a convent, the steward handed me a letter from her for her father, and then I saw that there existed other characters. M. De Taverny having broken the seal, threw the cover away; I picked it up very carefully, and when the postman came again, I made him read me what was on it. It was, ‘To the Baron de Taverney-Maison-Rouge, at his chateau near Pierrefitte.’ Under each of these letters I put its corresponding printed letter, and found that I had nearly all the alphabet. Then I imitated the writing; and in a week had copied the address ten thousand times perhaps, and had taught myself to write.
This is surely no less fantastic than Burroughs’ story but because Dumas is considered more credible nothing that I know of has ever been said about it.
In Tarzan’s case Burroughs makes a point of saying that he had a number of children’s picture books so that he could, for instance match the printed spelling of B-O-Y with a picture of a boy. In this way also he learned that he was not a freaky hairless ape but an entirely different species. I cannot, of course, defend the plausibility of either Burroughs’ or Dumas’ story but there is a possibility.
In some ways the notion of inherited characteristics seems as though it could be true. In the course of evolution the thrust has always been towards more intelligence. A species once evolved has its range of capabilities and once those are fully developed no further advance is possible in that sub-species. It is up to the next stage of evolved sub-species or species even to advance to the limits of its capabilities and so on. Thus it was not possible for Tarzan’s fellow ape, Terkoz, under any circumstances to succeed in Tarzan’s quest. The necessary intelligence genes were missing. Even though Tarzan was raised by apes less evolved than himself he himself did have the necessary inherited genetic makeup to undertake the task with some chance of success. So, in that sense Lamarck’s inherited characteristics did apply.
It may be argued that Tarzan couldn’t have recognized the signs as language. In theory he could have. Whether in fact he would have or whether it would have taken him much longer to break the code than eight years are of course valid realistic objections. But Burroughs was writing the story so that against all objections there are methods by which it was theoretically possible for Tarzan to do so.
This is no small point for the story as the story is, as I see it, an allegory of the ascent of man toward godhood. Burroughs will repeatedly call Tarzan a jungle god.
He is introduced to the next evolutionary stage when his ape mother is killed by one of the First born. Drawn into contact with the FB Tarzan passes through this stage in evolution. I don’t think there can be any doubt that Burroughs considered the First Born an antecedent level of evoltuion to HSII and III. While some might inanely cry bigotry, mocern science, which was unavailable to Burroughs, has at least proven the plausibility of the position.
Tarzan then comes into contact with a cross section of HSIIs and IIIs. To my mind the differences are presented as innate and not a matter of environment or nurture. Just as Tarzan must realize his noble English heritage because it is his innate nature so these ruffians are ruffians because of their innate nature. Burroughs seems to be saying that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
While withing a particular sub-species I am an environmentalist believing that people beocme what they are for reasons beyond their contro, the majority of mankind, at least those place in favorable circumstances, believe that they are innately better than the rest. So if Burrughs was srong on this point, as I believe he was, he was in step with the prevailing prejudice.
Thus under the tutelage of Paul D’Arnot, his French mentor, Tarzan realizes his full potential as a human being uniting the two ‘highest’ branches of what was then known as the White race. Tarzan can read and write English but not speak it while he can speak French but neither read nor write it. There’s something going in Burroughs’ mind but I haven’t decided what. But he tosses off these details in such an offhand manner that all seems so natural there is no reason to note it.
It must also be remembered that Burroughs wrote at the transition point where for the first time in US history there were more people living in cities than in the country. The new city dwellers had just reason to long for the rural ‘paradise’ they had just left. Thus Tarzan having seen all there is to see of civilization snubs his nose at it to return to his beloved jungles and its animals and primitive but honest First Born.
In a sense then the jungle and the First Born can be interpreted as the farm and the crude but honest farmer. An idealization to be sure.
As far as I can see Burroughs was the first novelist, or at least successful one, to treat of evolution by which I don’t mean to say Lost World adventures. Further he treats with it as established incontrovertible fact at a time when evolution was accpted by few while being rejected by the vast majority. And I repeat, Burroughs was learned and thoughtful about the subject. That he was also fanciful is beside the point.
At the same time Burroughs was offering some serious reflection on evolution he was also presenting some serious thinking on the evolution of religion which is certainly on a par with Freud’s Totem and Taboo.
Burroughs says and this is seemingly in his hown historical voice that the Dum Dum as practiced by the apes was the source of all social and civil rituals. As I read Tarzan Of The Apes it seems that Burroughs thinks that Dum-Dums or something just like them really took place. Of course such round or circle dances are in fact of great antiquity. Perhaps something just like a Dum Dum did perform a role in the evolution of institutions.
Following that explanation for the foundation of religious and civil institutions Burroughs goes into a very careful explanation of how Tarzan became the god, Manungo-Keewati of Chief Mbonga’s tribe. This explanation is very carefully developed. Burroughs is also very serious and I think believes he has a handle on the truth about the evolution of god.
As part one of a trilogy on religion Tarzan Of The Apes is followed by The Gods Of Mars and then the Return Of Tarzan. Gods Of Mars is a condemnation of formal religion with far reaching ramifications. In Gods Burroughs plays the role of a savior through his character, J.C.- John Carter. Carter destroys the ancient and flase religion which clearly resembles the Catholic Church, thus being the liberator of Barsoomkind.
In The Return Of Tarzan he gives a fanciful but reasonable vision of ancient sun worship which would fall somewhere between Munumgo-Keewati and the Holy Therns of Barsoom.
Thus under the guise of ‘pure’ entertainment the attentive reader can detect a serious attempt to explain evoltuion both special and religious while undermining established beliefs in the manner of a prophet. It is not necessary to accept it only recognize it.
I’m sure Burroughs in the light of all the unsetlling discoveries beleives he is a light bringer doing a service for mankind. I accept him at his own valuation.
Running through all Burroughs work is an unstated vision of psychology. One may well ask where this vision came from as Burroughs was not fortunate enough to attend Yale which is two eldest prothers did and which he keenly regretted not having done. I’m sure the man was reasonably well read in the subject while his views appear to follow rather closely those of his brothers’ partner in the Idaho ranch, Lew Sweetser.
A very fine article on Sweetser by Philip R. Burger appears in issue #19 of the Burroughs Bulletin, since republished on ERBzine. Now, Sweetser graduated from Yale in 1889 a little before Freud began his psychological publication and twenty years or more before his books were translated into English. I doubt that Sweetser ever read Freud, but I can’t say.
He was fully conversant with a concept of the unconscious and exceptionally well informed on the rule of suggestion and hypnosis. Whether over the intervening eyars from 1889 to 1920 when he took to the stage as a lecturer he read extensively or whether re reworded his ideas acquired by 1889 I can’t say. But he had a good grip on the concepts of the subconscious and suggestion including auto-suggestion.
Burroughs came into contact with him as a 16 year old when he worked on the Idaho ranch in 1891. Again in 1898-99 and once again in 1903. Burroughs own views on psychology follows those of Sweetser very closely with add ons from further study.
If not as systematic Burrughs presents a consistent approach which is as viable as Freud’s but different in the treatment of the subconscious. Both Sweetser and Burroughs always speak of the subconscious, never the unconscious, while Freud chose to believe in a metaphysical unconscious.
What I hope I have shown here is that Burroughs had a fairly mature understanding of life and society when he began to write and which he continued to develop throughout his life.
While hos own life was lived somewhat erratically his intellectual mooring was much more sound. It is the latter which is telling for us.
The importance of his intellect being developed by the time he began writing is that the period of the teens of the twentieth century is when subsequent history took shape. Just as Burroughs collected the strands of neo-mythographers to give them their new direction so the teens did also for the evolution of the species and religion in both the United States and the world.
While Burroughs and the other mythogrpahers realized very early that the tide of history had changed it was only by 1916 to 1922 that the concept found expression in an academic manner.
In 1916 Madison Grant published his The Passing Of The Great Race and in 1922 Lothrop Stoddard published his The Rising Tide Of Color Agains White World Supremacy. and here comes the division in society that can never be reconnected. Both Grant and Stoddard are quite serious historians; both are men of good will, both have been seriously defamed by others who object to the resulsts of their investigations.
These objectors seem to think that their opinion is of divine origin and that any other opinion is not only wrong but evil. They take a stand not much different fromt he Inquisition and its witch hunting which I have already discussed. Thus these people want to run dissenters to ground and if not actually kill them at least hurt them so bad or brand them as pariahs that they will shut up.
A recent example is Richard Slotkin’s Gunslinger Nation. The book is an attempt to squash writers such as Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs. The first 225 pages of his mammoth book are dedicated to demonstrating that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a vile ‘racist’ who was influenced by the even more vile ‘racists’ Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.
While you can throw away the last five hundred pages of Gunslinger Nation which is inadequately researched and poorly presented, the first 225 pages are fairly interesting if skewed. A lot of good information of possible influences on Burroughs. Slotkin’s fine biographical sketch of Buffalo Bill is very informative.
Slotkin lists a number of Burroughs’ books which he has apparently didainfully skimmed but without any understanding. If he had read more carefully he ought to have realized that Burroughs’ ideas were fully developed before Grant and Stoddard were issued. While many of the ideas of the latter writers may have been complementary to Burroughs’ ideas they couldn’t have been formative.
Further with the customary tunnel vision of the Red/Liberal Slotkin ignores what was happening against which these men were reacting. Of course he and his contemporaries give this data such a skew as to lack all credibility.
Like all Liberals Slotkin believes that immigration is a prescriptive right for anyone who wants ‘to share what we’ve made here.’ While not wanting to get involved in immigration quarrels, which are fruitless, I do believe that as I have a right to say who can and cannot enter my home, any country has a aright to say who can and cannot immigrate to their country. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a good reason or not nor does it matter if rejection is based on the grossest prejudice. No one has a right to invite himself to your table. You see why there is no chance of agreement. So much for immigration.
Now in Darwinian terms the various sub-species were not only in contact with each other, they were peacefully intermingling in the West and in the West only. It is important to remember that HSII and III were about to be driven out of Africa and Asia. The invasive flow was now beginning in the opposite direction only. While the HSIIs and IIIs had been able to displace the American aborigenes without trouble this was no longer possible anywhere in the world. The tide against the HSIIs & IIIs had turned. While the IIs & IIIs would slowly be expelled from Asia and Africa, Africans and Asians while already in Europe and America would begin to increase their numbers dramatically.
Today a city of Toronto is 50% what Torontians call ‘visible minorities.’
Thus while IIs & IIIs began a retreat the other sub-species began an advance into II and III territories while becoming highly organized. The Eastern European Semites began to arrive in the United States in numbers beginning in the 1870s. Always politically aggressive, the German Semites formed the B’nai B’rith in 1843. the American Jewish Committee in 1906 and the horribly bigoted Anti-Defamation League in 1913, the year Woodrow Wilson entered the White House.
The Great War beginning in 1914 closed off European immigration to the United States but increased the internal migration of the First Born. It’s an ill wind that blows no one good. The First Born began to organize on an international basis. African, Brazilian, Caribbean and American First Born began to act as a unit. This organization was led by West Indians who emigrated to the United States to agitate. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, personated this most important stage of evolution which has led to the present situation. At roughly the same time, under the guidance of Semitic Jews, the NAACP- Natinal Association For The Advancement Of Colored People- was formed.
In reaction to these very aggressive developments the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan was called into existence. On top of all these unpleasant developments the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia in 1917. Thus a whole new paradigm was formed within just a few years in the teens. Against this Burroughs’ mindset had been formed by the years from 1890-1910. the new developments sure appeared to him as a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat.
The world which emerged from the Great War was much different from that which preceded it. the balance of world emigration changed, as it were, overnight. A good harbinger of things to come was The Rising Tide Of Color Against The White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard’s title was very ill chosen although it represented the emerging reality. He might better have chosen a more neutral title such as ‘Changing Patterns in World Migration’ or some such. The book is unfairly characterized as ‘racist’ by its detractors, which it is not.
Stoddard pointed out the obvious: that from having been the dominant sub-species the tide had now turned and rather than being a dominant military presence the HSIIs and IIIs had become a minority in a world of sub-species seeking like Darwin’s ratos or cockroaches to drive the others before it. From having been invaders, Europe and America would now be invaded.
This is the way of the world: ;either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom. A world of equality is a world away.
Stoddard was the proverbial voice calling in the wilderness. The only people taking him seriously were the peoples he was warning about. Confident in teir seeming superiority the HSIIs and IIIs went about their business as if nothing had changed.
Not exactly as if nothing had changed because the Bolsheviks continued special and religious battles. Just as Catholicism was infused with Semitic ideals, through Karl Marx, Bolshevism was a Semito-Red/Liberal religion.
Of the five sub-species by far the smallest was the Semitic branch; they were and are therefore the most threatened. In order to hope to exercise world dominion, and don’t think world dominion isn’t the question, the Judaic and Moslem religions were created. The Jews had the daring to go it alone while the Moslems sought and seek to convert the world to Moslemism within which the Semites are the preeminent holy people. A nation of priests as the Bible says.
Thus while it might be possible for the largest sub-species as represented by the Chinese to overrun the world much more effectively than the HSiis and IIIs did, it would be equally possible for the Moslems to convert the Chinese with the Semites taking a position analagous to ERB’s Holy Therns in Barsoom.
Thus while stymied for the time being in the West Moslems were increasing by leaps and bounds in the East. They may have looked stagnant from the West but they were dynamic indeed when viewed from the East.
Having been disturbed in their homeland the Chinese and Japanese Mongolids began sending colonies out wherever they could be received and by this time all space on the earth was fully occupied. This wasn’t therefore the loud noisy colonization of the HSIIs & IIIs but a more peaceful infiltration. A lot of smuggling of small groups into the United States and Canada went on, as it still does. Large colonies were sent to South America. Peru passed a Chinese Exclusion Act for much the same reason the United States did. Didn’t really have anything to do with color, it was that the countries were being taken over by foreign elements. Japan had colonies in Brazil, Colombia and other South American States.These colonies were designed to retain their ethnic origins so that they wouldn’t assimilate. I’ve met Japanese from Japan via Colombia who were smuggled across the border from Tijuana.
Thus on the world scene Darwinian clash of sub-species continued outside Asia while the Mongolids were successfully expelling the HSII and III invaders from Asian homelands. This is essentially what the much despised Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard graduate, too, was pointing out.
In the United States the immigrating sub-species had to disarm the dominant Anglo-Saxon hierarchy. As pointed out, led by the West Indian immigrant First Born that sub-species was organizing its own conquest of America and Europe. Their own population was increasing prodigiously around the world. Even in the face of tremendous immigration into the United States the percentage of First Born has never declined but has increased. Today in the fact of even greater immigration FB percentages have increased to fifteen percent vis-a-vis HS II and III.
Under the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement between the US under TR and Japan the Japanese ‘voluntarily agreed’ to restrict the flow of immigrants. The US, a sovereign nation, accepted this ‘compromise.’ The early Japanese immigrants had been nearly one hundred percent male. These womanless men now demanded women so the other half of the invasion in the form of picture brides arrived swelling the Japanese population past double. The so-called Issei are the first generation born in America. As their parents paired up at the same time the whole next generation came of age about the time of 12/7/42. An interesting immigration fact. Thus by taking advantage of HSII and III goodwill the immigration agreement was evaded.
So the flow of populations contesting the same territories with the same Darwinian economic needs came into further conflict.
The Jewish race of the Semites had been poised to transfer their entire East European population tothe United States just as the Great War broke out. Now with the war over the Semites renewed their plans. However there had been problems with immigrants from the Central Powers including their Irish allies during the war which sent shivers down the spines of the Anglo-Saxons. TR himself voiced the fear that the United States had become merely ‘an international boarding house.’ So people do catch on after it’s too late.
After a hundred years of unrestricted immigration, a golden period worldwide actually well worth study, the opponents of immigration carried the day severely restricting immigration if not closing the door completely.
This action enraged the Judaic race of Semites who considered it their go-given right to go where they wanted when then wanted and whether a country wished to receive them or not. But there is more than way to skin a cat. The Anti-Defamation League whose ostensible purpose was to prevent defamation wherever it might occur began a defamation campaign against anyone with an independent point of view that conflicted with their own in any way.
The ADL was lined up with the Communist?Red/Liberal Coalition. The combinatin effectively split and weadened the HSIIs and IIIs putting the subspecies at war with themselves, something like Cadmus throwing a stone among the indigenous peoples setting them against each other until they killed each other off making the Semitic conquest of Boeotia easy. Divide and conquer.
Led by the ADL whith its ever potent charge of anti-Semitism the Liberal coalition opened war on any dissidents. The idea was to discredit anyone whether they were concerned or merely passive who didn’t follow their program. Prime targets were Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. ERB made himself conspicuous when in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution he sent around a draft of the Moon Maid which in the original version was apparently little more than an expose codemning the Bolsheviks.
Stoddard and Grant who were competent scholars and men of good will were nevertheless characterized as hopeless bigots and anti-Semites thereby being easily disposed of. By the end of the decade they were neutralized and by the end of the thirties disposed of. Quite naturally the Liberal coalition denied any involvement.
As the thirties dawned there were major activities affot. In Asia, Japan which deeply resented HSII & III penetration, began a campaign to drive them out. Talk about the tail wagging ghe dog, their plan was to conquer Asia from Japan to Australia in the South, and India in the East. It staggers the imagination. Yet it was no less than England had done with the same population. But, different measures for different times.
When TR said ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ the audacity of the Japanese plan which required a very big stick was beyond their powers of execution. Nevertheless they first invaded Manchuria and then China itself.
In Europe, in reaction to defeat and the Judeo-Communist threat the Nazis under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 which did not bode well for the world. In the United States also a disaster as big as Hitler and Nazis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President. That did not bode well for the United States. The world was then primed for the big explosion.
Perhaps because of the concept of Manifest Destiny under which the Red/Liberal tide was supposed to roll over the North American continent, jump the Pacific then race across China and Asia to return again to America in an unbroken wave of triumph the Red/Liberals looked upon the Chinese as a swell people who would offer no resistance to their goals, indeed, embrace and forward them. Thus in some sort of Disney fantasy China was seen as complicit in the Liberal design.
FDR was one devious son-of-a-gun. As the good guys were being attacked by the Japanese bad boys Roosevelt took it upon himself to aid the Chinese with American wherewithall. It would have been better to let the two combatants exhaust themselves and keep our ‘limitless’ resources to ourselves.
Remember that the Japanese hatred of the West was caused when the United States forced them out of their seclusion at gunpoing thereby emasculating them.
Now Roosevelt was trying to thwart their ends by disgorging America’s wealth on China. If you free your mind from false moral assumptions you wll see how stupid this was.
As an American I can do nothing but deplore Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor but as a psychologist and analyst I can see nothing but its inevitability as the result of the US’s inconsiderate actions.
The Japanese simply had to try to put a stop to American aid to China. Whatever the proof may be that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor before hand, if he didn’t know he was provoking such an attack he was denser than any man has a right to be which I don’t think he was.
In Europe the situation was intensified when the Communists elected sympathizers to most government who then formed a Popular Front against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Spain. The Roosevelt administration was a Popular Front government. On the religious front it was competition between Communism and established faiths.
To all appearances the Judeo-Communists had the Axis surrounded. Even before Hitler was elected the Jews of the United States were working hard to subvert him. Assassination attempts had already taken place. When FDR was elected, as with all Popular Front governments the Jews urged the United States to take first strike action against Germany.
As part of this program in the United States the Judeo-Communists demanded an Un-American Activities Committee by which unamerican meant non-Judeo Communist. In 1938 they succeeded when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created. To their disappointment the chairmanship escaped them going to a member who corrected believed that Communists were a bigger threat than Nazis. This infuriated Roosevelt.
When was was declared in Europe the American Judeo-Communists were for intervention. They changed their tune after the German-Soviet pact then changed back again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
As can be plainly seen what is at stake here are sub-special interests rather than national ones. On 12/7/41 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. All the sub-species were at war.
The War fatally weakened the HSIIs and IIIs much as the percipient Lothrop Stoddard had predicted. In the aftermath of the War HSIIs and IIIs were expelled from Asia. Although preifly garrisoned with American troops there was no other action taken against Japan other than that they were set on their economic feet.
In 1948 the HSIIs and IIIs were driven from India.
In 1948 the Judeo-Semites occupied Palestine.
In 1948 the Chinese Communists were clearly going to be victors in China thusputting the Chinese squarely at odds with the West.
While for a few years the United States was in the enviable position of arbitrating world affairs, it chose to favor the non HSII and III subspecies over the ‘colored’ peoples thus further weakening HSIIs and IIIs.
When Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 there had been little happening in his literary and business affairs for a decade. The only thing keeping the Burroughs literary legacy alive was his continuing popularity with the masses. You and me. But they could find few editions of any of the corpus to buy.
From 1945 to 1963 there was little of his literary oeuvre that was available although demand continued strong. For some strange reason ERB, Inc. refused to issue titles. Then in 1963 publishers seized on expired copyrights and the second boom in Tarzan began. Once more his message contained something of value for his readers. Let us now begin Book III of Something Of Value which cover the period from 1945 to 9/11/01 and the closing of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new.
The Age Of Aquarius was dawning.
Something Of Value Book II Part 3
February 5, 2008
Book II
Something Of Value
Part 3
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3
Bad Motorcycle With The Devil In The Seat
Don’t go out tonight,
They’re sure to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
-John Fogerty
(a.) The Evolution Of Religion 0-1875
Prior to, say, -800 the approximate date of Homer’s Iliad, religion was comprosed of all three facets of learning: Religion, Philosophy and Science. The reason for the Priesthood was intact. Then beginning with Homer in the Greek world, who was reverenced with good reason, learning became gradually secularized as the Pre-Socratics developed Philosophy and Science independently of the Priesthood. In the West this was the real deathblow to religion; in the Semitic East no such development took place. The Semites are incapable of either Philosophy or Science.
About this time also, Astronomy as a science developed, which doomed Astrology to insignificance although its traditions linger on as the world prepares for the Age of Aquarius. It will really happen too. Don’t ask me how, but it will, it is happening. If you want to read an excellent analysis of aspects of the Age of Pisces check out C.G. Jung. The amazing thing is that there is little to indicate a system for perpetuating this design of ancient times, no evidence of a secret society forwarding Astrological designs. The ancients having set the plan in motion apparently knew it would be self-perpetuating as individuals like myself, and I have no interest in Astrology per se would penetrate the workings of the design moving it forward whether advertently or inadvertently. But you have to look at it to see it. My interest was aroused when I detected a constant presence. I myself have no prejudices, I don’t dismiss phenomena out of hand. The Tarot has its significance also. You don’t have to believe it, you study its historical development.
Astrology was still a very active force as the Age of Pisces dawned. The Semitic Jewish reaction was based on the dawning of a new Age, the Piscean. When this mistaken adventure ended in 135 AD, when it became clear that the New Age meant little in concrete terms, although defeated militarily and dispersed from Palestine the Jews still had that old ace in the hole. Religion.
There was still the spiritual world. While the Rabbis censured Jesus of Nazareth as an imposter a cult of Jewish followers developed after the death of Jesus. The Jews in those days or just previous to the Jewish Wars had been active proselytizers. Large Jewish communities existed in all the cities of the Roman Empire including Rome itself. For various reasons these facts have been downplayed. Any serious historical study of the role of the Jews in the Roman Empire is severely discountenanced, at least in American Universities.
As orthodoxy required circumcision and following the ridiculous Jewish dietary laws, I mean, what makes wine kosher or not is whether it has been touched by non-Jewish hands somewhere in the winemaking process, the limits of conversion may have been reached. A lot of folks might think such a condition mere bigotry but I decline to comment. Paul realized this, thus he wisely discarded circumcision and the dietary laws in his version of Christianity. This at least made it possible to convert the Gentile although without bigotry Christianity could never have succeeded in being more than a prevalent religion. Persuasion can only go so far. A religion can’t get anywhere without bigotry.
After Constantine made Christianity the official religion, empowered, the Catholic Church went to work to suppress all other forms of thought, religious, philosophical or scientific. The academy of Plato was shut down while the library at Alexandria was burned to the ground.
Thus the Semito-Roman Catholic Church solidified its position as the official representative of Christ on Earth.
Now, after Jesus was crucified the remaining disciples and adherents were run to earth where possible and killed. It became expedient to flee into hiding. From this dispersal has arisen the tradition of the Holy Grail. This fabulous literary repository has come down to us attached to the exploits of King Arthur. Known to most through the collation of Mallory, the original documents run to tens of thousands of pages. The Vulgate-Lancelot alone is close to ten thousand 350-400 word pages.
The legends which begin with the crucifixion represent a secret history of Europe. There is much interesting investigation being forwarded on the topic currently by Laurence Gardner and his series of books, he can be accessed at his Mediaquest site on the web, and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in two interesting books: Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy. There are others but these two series are most direct. There’s a lot more actually but much of it is very speculative. Worth looking into though by the right minds.
According to these writers Mary Magdalen fled Palestine for Marseilles in southern France where she bore a son of Jesus. This son became the progenitor of the Merovingian line of kings of France. These in turn presented a challenge to the authority of the Semito-Roman Catholic Church. Thus the Church encouraged the usurpation of the throne by the line that would be known as Carolingian which when the Church succeeded in crowning Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor it gained the right to invest the royal houses of Europe. The Merovingians were thus dispossessed.
With the right to make or break kings in a quasi-theological empire the success of the Church was more of less assured although in a still very difficult political situation. Still, all Europe West of what became Russia was brought within its sway, hence the recent Polish pope.
Not content with leaving well enough alone the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the recovery of Palestine from the Moslems. Contact in the East introduced two heresies which were to have a decisive and devisive impact on subsequent history down to the present day.
The Europeans chose to invade Palestine during the heyday of the chief of the assassin cult, Hassan i Sabbah. Thus while having only a limited military success, still a Christian presence was maintained for over two hundred years which is about as long as the United States had been in existence, the crusaders were infected with a heresy. At the same time the Cathar heresy was introduced into Europe from the East. The Cathars also known as the Albigensians, and the Knights Templar presented the Semito-Catholic Church with a soul destroying problem. This is where the Church met its Waterloo although it would be difficult to understand what else they could have done.
Westerners don’t seem to understand that if you’re going to interfere in other people’s lives you have to go all the way or suffer the consequences. The assassins of Hassan i Sabbah introduced a very potent brand of heresy into Europe in vengeance for the invasion of Palestine. Both examples have proven very pernicious and ought to have been suppressed.
The watchword of the Cathars is given expression in the Rabelasian phrase: Do What Thou Wilt. I haven’t read Nietsche but he gave a different formulation in ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’
Thus the Moslems through the Assassins were able to corrupt the morality of the West. Thus Cathars prospered across Southern France where the aurthority of the Semito-Catholic Church was challenged. If the Cathar heresy, really an error, grew the Church would find itself displaced.
The rule of the Church is that the Church cannot shed blood, which is why heretics were burnt, but they could get others to do it for them. Establishing the Inquisition to smell out heretics the Church called on the French crown to crusade against the Albigensians. What do you do with people who will believe differently than you do? As Victor Hugo said, you have to kill them so that a new world may arise. As Lenin and Stalin believed, you have to exterminate the recalcitrants. As Hitler said, there is the final solution. Well, that’s what they did to the Albigensians. The soldiers asked how they were to determine whether one was or wasn’t a Cathar, they were told to kill them all, God would know his own.
The devastation if not total was a very serious attempt.
Here you have one of those insuperable problems, what are you going to do? If you do nothing you lose, if you let God sort out his own, you lose. The Cathars would have been enough trouble but then the Church was faced with the Templar heresy. Same solution, same results.
The only consolation the Semito-Catholics had was that at about this same time the troops of Genghis Khan swept over the Middle East rooting the Assassins out of their ‘impregnable’ mountain fastness.
The result of the Church’s action and that of their royal accomplices was a seething hatred of both by the survivors who after all, believed nothing was true and everything was permitted. Dangerous people with dangerous ideas. Several subversive organizations arose, the Free Spirits, Beghards and Beguines who eventually came together as the Libertines in pre-Revolutionary France.
The Church demonized the survivors, according to Laurence Gardner as witches, hence the witch hunts. I’m not sure it is true but it does make sense, provides a rational motive for the persecutions. With the inquisition in place Europe was made a hell on Earth. Nevertheless learning wiggled out from under the suppression of the Church to flower forth as the Enlightenment. Thus after the Cathars and Templars Science presented a challenge to the Church which has been the knock out blow. Both the Semito-Catholic Church and the Semitic Jews were presented with a very difficult problem which no amount of persecution could resolve.
The Church has stubbornly clung to its authority giving up only a minimum to reason. The Inquisition itself was only discontinued in mid-nineteenth century. The Jews, on the other hand, were thrown into complete disarray by the Enlightenment at least in the West. The great bloc of Judaism in the Pale of Eastern Europe responded much more slowly but then very large numbers of that group emigrated to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where the religion faced even more serious challenges.
The Western Jews ran through a whole series of experimental forms before, under the influence of the Eastern Jews, the compromise of Zionism was evolved.
Along the way Marx, Einstein and Freud evolved political, physical and psychological pseudo-scientific ideas which had the effect of confusing the West.
Aiding the emergence of Science and the freeing of speculative religion from the suppression of the Church was the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution was as epochal an event in the Piscean Age as the crucifixion of Christ. The Revolutionists restarted their calendar at year one which was probably symbolically correct.
It is probably signficant that Jean Baptiste de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck, was appointed professor of invertebrate zoology at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the critical year of 1793. As an evolutionist Lamarck preceded Charles Darwin. In his Tarzan And The Lion Man Burroughs mentions Lamarck along with Gregor Mendel and Darwin as well as the proposer of the germ theory of evolution, August Weismann, who Burroughs did not mention by name. While Burroughs played with evolution in many fantastic ways his playfulness was informed by a thorough grounding in the learning of his day.
One has to be very alert and attentive to see just how playful he is.
In Tarzan The Terrible the primitive species, mistakenly called races in most discussions, had tails. When Tarzan wishes to disguise himself he affixes a severed tail to his posterior. Now, there was a legend of a tailed people in the Congo Basin. The legend was based on the fact that this tribe affixed animal tails on their posteriors much as Tarzan does. Thus Burroughs combines evoltuionary speculation with historical legend and fact in a humorous episode. It’s possible he may have been waiting a hudred years anyone to get that joke. He picked up his information from H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.
The Revolution itself was not as spontaneous as it is often depicted nor is the wanton destruction the result of a frustrated peasantry. The Revolution was planned and coordinated by the descendants of those very Albigensians and Templars Church and Crown had crushed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Albigenian and Templar heresies and error were thus released on the world in a more concentrated form than previously. The disorder in society today is caused by the followers of those errors.
Burroughs was born a short 70 some odd years after the failure of the Revolution. Sixteen years after Darwin released his Origin Of Species on the world. In between incredible advances were made. Champollion broke the hieroglyphic alphabet of Egypt opening the ancient world to us. The ancient civilizations of the Middle East were unearthed. Surely all those ruins Burroughs speaks of were influenced by those discoveries. Babylonians, Sumerians, Hittites, Cretans and other discoveries such as Schliemann’s unearthing of Troy and Mycenae. The Church was delivered one blow after another as the authority of its Holy Scriptures crumbled into falsehood.
At the same time a plethora of suppressed religious speculation burst the bonds of repression. Esotericists stumbled all over themselves to formulate doctrines. The Spiritualist movement sprang up fully formed like Athene from the forehead of Zeus. The greatest of the great, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, ransacked the religious speculative literature of the ages to reassemble it into a spectacular tour de force she called Theosophy. Just as religion, Philosophy and Science had diverged c. -800 she now tried to reunite them under one head. She couldn’t do it but her work is a magnificent effort none the less.
If you’ve got the time and patience The Book Of Urantia is an equally stunning tour de force. Great science fiction if nothing else.
Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this incredible religious, intellectual and scientific ferment. Learning had become so vast that no one mind could grasp all the details, but like Madame B, it were better to fail gloriously than never to make the attempt. Underneath all the foolery and fantasy of his fiction ERB went at with a will.
(b.) Relations Of The Sub-species 0-1875.
At the risk of being repetitious it might be appropriate here to quote Darwin again to keep the thought fresh in our minds:
Quote:
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera.
Unquote.
So, when the Semites erupted from the desert the modern phase of competition between the Homo-Sapiens sub-species began. The populations had now expanded so that there was not room for all. One sub-species must drive out all the others. Thus the outer reality, or world of appearances, will and must triumph over the inner world of wishful thinking. So the world turns.
Darwin again:
Quote:
We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congenor. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species, and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature, but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species had been victorious over another in the great battle of life.’
Unquote.
Let us never forget that there is a great battle for life while with Homo Sapiens we can precisely say why one species will be victorious. I cannot show the victory but I can show, for my purposes here, how the struggle progressed to 1875. The next section following will take us to 1950, the next after that to 9/11 and than a fictional effort will end with a possible scenario of the end of civilization as we know it.
The method followed by Homo Sapiens is easily learned, you just have to condition yourself to accept the facts, the outer reality rather than the inner world of wishful thinking. In encounters before this period the method was simple. A band of invaders conquered the indigenous folk, slew all the males, kept the females for themselves. In an evolutionary sense this is the natural method.
Amongst, lions for instance, a male is only allowed to enjoy his Pride for a limited time. Then a couple males gang up on him, driving him away. One of the new males then acquires the lionesses killing the former lion’s offspring at the same time. The complacent females then go into heat producing a new group of offspring for the new male. Simple. Why the simp lion helps his fellow for no reward is beyond me but it works the same way among Homo Sapiens.
So when the Saxons drove the Britons out of England into Brittany where the Britons conquered the natives, the Britons not only massacred the males but they cut the tongues out of the women so that the language wouldn’t be corrupted. Very offensive to our professed standards but completely within the range of normality. I mean, you know, get real. This sort of thing can and will happen again. Nazi Germany wasn’t any aberration. The Jews of today are calling for the extermination of one billion White people. This is a fact. Google Noel Ignatiev and see for yourself. Your problem will be that you just won’t take him seriously although the evidence is clearly before your eyes.
In this great struggle of life all sub-species of Homo Sapiens are more or less physically equal. Mental genetics have given HSII and III the edge in scientific intelligence. Along with the intelligence comes the ability to see farther and clearer so that lacking tunnel vision the will is blunted. Rather than following the ancient methods and disposing of indigenous peoples, which they could easily have done at the time, the HSIIs and IIIs created a legacy of ill will through their misguided benignity which at the end of this period began to come back to haunt them.
From the period of Mohammed the sub-species began to be moved around in earnest.
A legacy of the Semitic Moslem triumph was that the West was cut off from all intercourse with the East. The Moslems blocked all the formerly active trade routes. The legacy remains today when otherwise well educated historians know nothing of Africa and many points of the Near East.
Having conquered the Mediterranean littoral of North Africa the Semites began the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa. Superior in both intellignece and will to the First Born the Semites treated them as though they were mere animals, intelligent Apes. If the African slave trade hadn’t existed before, it began then. It was brutal.
Many Africans converted to Moslemism because it gained them immunity from being enslaved. They in turn captured non-Moslem Africans to sell to the Arabic Semites. This Moslem African slave trade began c. +700 and continues to the present day although the Semites will deny it.
North of Arabia the Moslems captured part of the Byzantine Asian lands while occupying Persia, central Asia and parts of India plus a fair penetration into China. Today if one includes Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as a unit the Indian subcontinent is predominantly Moslem.
In the West the Moslems were slowly driven from Spain which was accomplished just as the Ottoman Turks who had invaded the Middle East from Central Asia destroyed the last vestiges of the Roman or Byzantine Empire.
The Ottomans then began the conquest of the Balkans moving into the Ukraine, Romania and Hungary to the very Gates of Vienna before the combined forces of Austria, Poland and Russia drove them back to the present borders just as Edgar Rice Burroughs was being born. An incredibly long struggle that was just a pause in hostilities. After that defeat the Ottomans were known as ‘the sick man of Europe.’
During this entire period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fifteenth century Europe was in turmoil as society reformed from a congeries of Germanic tribes into a semblance of the modern nation states.
In 1492 a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus changed the direction of European society. Cut off from the East by the Moslems who took advantage of straddling the trade routes to charge exorbitant prices for Easter luxuries, Portugal led European exploration of the world circumnavigating Africa finding an ocean route to the Orient thereby bypassing the Arabs eclipsing their prosperity sending them into complete stagnation. Maybe this is what Bernard Lewis means by ‘something went wrong.’
Columbus found the islands of the Caribbean Sea occupied by the Caribs. Here we can see clearly Darwin’s dilemma resolved. Between the introduction of virulent diseases to which the Caribs were unacclimated and brutal treatment the Europeans like the Asian cockroack drove their predecessors before them. What had been a Carib lake became a European lake and would soon become an African lake.
The islands were perfect for the labor intensive sugar industry but the Europeans didn’t want to do the intensive labor themselves. They in turn went to the great slave capitol of the world which the Semites had not yet exhausted to bring large numbers of the First Born out of Africa. Like all ruling classes the HSIIs and IIIs having displaced the native Caribs, were now displaced by the First Born who at present have possession of the Caribbean Islands.
So now if Darwin were alive he could see how it works. Caribs>HSIIs & IIIs>First Born. Simple.
The Spaniards also overran Mexico, Central America and South America. Here their numbers were few in comparison with the indigenes who were apparently of a hardier stock than the Caribs. The Spaniards were able to maintain their dominance over the indigenes of the area. Even today the President of Mexico is of obvious European descent while the peons are Indios.
Following Columbus’ lead the English and French invaded further North in lands that became the United States and Canada.
Once again here we can plainly see how one species of Homo Sapiens displaces another just as one species of swallow did to its great congenor.
The new invaders from Europe displaced the native Homo Sapiens along the seaboard then as their population steadily increased they rolled the aboriginals back before their advance. There was no attempt at extermination although there was callous disregard for life in the human sense. In the evolutionary sense there was no consideration of aboriginal rights.
At the same time the First Born were removed from Africa to serve as laborers in the English colonies of North America. The First Born would never have left Africa had they not been removed by the Semites and HSII and III. The First Born secured no presence in the Middle East with whatever implications that holds, but from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States First Born territories were extended greatly.
The orginal HSIII population which originally controlled Central Asia was either driven from the area by invading Mongolid tribes or exhausted their numbers migrating West. As numerous HSIII populations have existed in the Caucasus and in other pockets of central Asia the latter is unlikely. The HSIIs were undoubtedly driven before the Mongolids in the Darwinian sense. the Mongolids first made their appearance in the West with the fifth century Huns. They swept all before them until defeated in what amounts to a last ditch stand by the French. From the Huns forward Central Asia belonged to the Mongolids.
Then in the thirteenth century on the heels of the Western Crusades Genghis Khan organized the Central Asians to conquer both the Chinese Mongolids in the East as well as sweeping West to overrun Russia and Eastern Europe to the North before retiring back into the Steppes from which they exercised hegemony over Russia for hundreds of years.
To the South the Mongolids rolled over the Moslems before being defeated in Mesopotamia then, again, retiring back into the Steppes.
The russians eventually threw the Mongolid yoke off, then by running gunboats on the Volga they were able to prevent the Mongolid hordes from crossing. Thus Central Asia was brought under control.
The French and English quickly followed the Portuguese into the East. By then the Spanish had already seized the Philippines. European religious interference caused the Japanese to close their borders to both ingress and egress. From the early seventeenth century to nearly the birth of ERB Japan was isolated taking no part in world history.
With either superior luck or organization the English branch of HSII and III was able to be the most influenctial branch in the East. All of India was brought under their control, both Hindus and Moslems. Southeast Asia acknowledged at least the hegemony of England. The Dutch seized Indonesia while the French annexed Indo-China.
England, France and Germany were in the process of annexing China itself when they were interfered with by the United States. As usual the United States with so-called good intentions produced the opposite result. John Hay of the United States announced his Open Door Policy in regard to China forcing the European branches to back down from their concept of spheres of interest. America has been a very destructive force in world politics.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lacking sufficient colonists of their own, England began moving Indians and Chinese from their homelands into their colonies. Thus these peoples who up to that point had been quite content to remain where they were realized the advantages of colonization themselves. Before too long they would in their turn be colonizing Europe and the Americas.
Although Chinese and Japanese migrations will fall mainly in the period after ERB’s birth, well before mid-nineteenth century the Chinese had begun a substantial migration to the West Coasts of the Americas. In 1849, the time of the California gold rush, they represented a very substantial percentage of the West Coast population. It was because of the Chinese that Dennis Kearney announced that California was White Man’s Country.
Fearful of being overrun by the Chinese, which was a very well founded fear, Kearney led the effort for a congressional law excluding Chinese from immigration. This law was secured in 1882. It was repealed or superseded by the 1965 revision of the immigration act which was promoted by the Semitic Jews.
Americans concentrate only on what happens in this country but in fact once stirred up by the British the Chinese began to emigrate to all parts of the world as circumstance allowed. Americans refuse to allow volition to any other people assuming the role of world directors is some sort of perversion of Manifest Destiny
End Of Part III. Go to Part IV.
Exhuming Bob 5: Texas Bob Dylan
January 27, 2008
Exhuming Bob 5: Texas Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
While much is made of Bob’s Blues interests and his Folk career the truth is that Bob’s big musical influences were Country & Western. He apparently embraced Robert Johnson after 1961 attempting to make him a major influence while giving himself Black roots and credentials that were then needed. But when he talks of the pre-1959 period he invariably invokes the great C&W artists of the late forties and early fifties.
Hence in this photo in what may be his last persona he has returned to his true C&W roots. This is probably the Bob Bob has always wanted to be. As you can see he has abandoned any Jewish identity in favor of a forties and fifties Western recording star. Not so much the Hillbilly or Country aspect as that of the singing Cowboy. Perhaps he is also recalling his early sixties adulation of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
Here he emulates Slim Whitman- the mustache- Elton Britt, Ernest Tubb the Texas Troubadour, Hank Williams or any number of artists before the Nudie Suit Of Lights came into fasion in the fifties.
Note the attention he has taken to remolding his face in the attempt to eliminate Jewish characteristics. The tight thin lips, the steely eyes. A remarkable and successful effort at becoming what he has always, apparently, wanted to be.
The photo is taken from the Rolling Stone issue of May 3-17 2007 without permission. If they object I’ll have to remove the post.
Exhuming Bob 4: Boulevards Of Broken Dreams
January 26, 2008
Exhuming Bob 4:
The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
by
R.E. Prindle
…the confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse…
I got mixed up confusion
Man, it’s killing me.
Bob Dylan
I walk the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams…
You laugh tonight and cry tomorrow
When you behold your shattered dreams…
Here is where you’ll always find me
Always walking up and down
But I left my soul behind me…
Harry Warren
The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
With each day of waiting
I love to pretend
One more tomorrow
And my waiting will end.
I’m waiting and watching
for ships that never come in,
I wonder where they can be.
after Jack Yellen
I’m Waiting For Ships That Never Come In
Everything’s Broken Down
Larry Hosford
I received a couple comments on With One Hand Waving Free from R.M. that brought some thoughts I have into focus. RM has a good understanding so I will incorporate some of her thoughts into this essay.
First, let’s deal with ‘multi-culturalism.’ Multi-culturalism is merely twenty-first century racism. If a separate cultural identity is being jealously maintained then this is done in oppostion to all other cultures; it is a form of exclusivity. Yet such cultural exclusivity is considered a sin if not a crime in the West. How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction?
The first law of ‘culture’ is that two or more cultures cannot occupy the same territory at the same time. Race and culture can be made synonymous for this purpose. The less or least tolerant culture will eventually drive the more or most tolerant culture out. This is a law. Thus to be tolerant is a one way ticket to oblivion.
In that sense tolerance will be made to seem to be intolerance. Thus for the last few centuries until very recently England had been praised for its extreme tolerance. Jews, Huguenots and whatever found a refuge there that delivered them from persecution. That was when the immigrants were relatively few and the English culture dominant. In the last few decades England has been all but swamped by Negroes, Moslems, Jews and whatever. The Moslems although coming from different countries and races are culturally united through the intolerant Moslem religion. Now that the immigrants are numerically strong enough to bully the ‘tolerant’ English the English are now described as intolerant monsters. Quite a change in the perception of them even though the English themselves have not changed. They do insist on the Common Law, their cultural norm, rather than adopting Moslem Sharia law as the Moslems insist. The grossly intolerant Moslems then will subject the tolerance of the English and Moslemism will prevail in England. Thus two cultures cannot coexist in the same space, one must eliminate the other.
The Moslem method of subjection is the same today as it was in the year seven hundred when they subjugated a large part of the world. The congeries of nations they thus created forced a temporary ‘tolerance’ on the Moslems. They had to ‘tolerate’ other cultures to maintain order. But they relentlessly forced intolerance in their dominions gradually imposing a culturally sterile Moslem uniformity on society that succeeded in quelling ‘diversity’ by the thirteenth century or so when a certain idiot maintains that ‘something went wrong.’ Nothing went wrong. The Moslem religion finally achieved its goal.
Now multi-culturalism is being forced on the West. There is no multi-culturalism in the East. China and Japan are as homogeneous as you can get and likely to remain so. There is little change in South-East Asia and apart from the continuing Hindu-Moslem conflict in India, none there. Africa is being occupied by the Chinese so that Africans in Africa will be all but eliminated.
So, this is the nature of multi-culturalism; a form of racism by which the tolerant will be exterminated by the intolerant. One may be view the process as a declared but non-shooting war.
The intolerant are being aided by Western ‘Liberals’ who are deliberately and legally disarming the less tolerant Westerners in favor of the intolerant. Liberals have actually passed laws making it a criminal offence for Westerners to defend or propagate their own culture or criticize anyone else’s.
This process has gone much further in Europe and the British dominions including Canada. The US is still protected by its Constitution but that is under attack. Thus in the Multi-Cultural Wonderland dissent is still possible. I do dissent. And I will speak my mind. I will not be tolerant of my own destruction or those of the West.
As an All-American Boy I have grown up sharing in all these cultures as my own while not being a part of any of them. I am as Jewish as a Jew, as Black as an African-American. As Rebel as any Southener and as Puritan as any New Englander. They are all my cultures. I can mix and match any symbols and being a free American boy, America means freedom, I can say and do as I please. I do and will.
In point of fact I was excluded from all cultures by being in an orphanage. I am probably closest to the Puritan heritage but neither it nor any other has any special meaning for me. I am outside them all as an observer. So, I’d appreciate it if you weren’t defensive about your own cultural hangups. That’s the way it is friends: If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror. I am a camera.
In her first comment RM gives a general discussion of the record business. As it happens I was in the record business for fifteen years between 1967 and 1982. I know something about records and musicians. Musicians are at the bottom of the entertainment hierachy. They have no, or little, status. During the sixties and seventies they broke the bounds of the records labels and were able to dictate terms to the labels. This was an anomaly and it didn’t last too long before the labels regained control.
Musicians are generally considered offensive by movie and TV people. They aren’t invited to many genteel parties. To a very large extent this opinion is merited. Witness all those stories about rock and rollers busting up hotels and being just generally rude and offensive. Sad but true. Just study those movies of Dylan and his entourage in London’s prestigious Savoy Hotel. Bob should be embarrassed.
Musicians are the ‘abused, confused, misused’ type of person Bob so unerringly identifies in his songs. Bob was one too. Consider his first rock song: Mixed Up Confusion. Relate it to The Chimes Of Freedom a couple years later. I do not exclude myself from this group so don’t get hostile.
The record industry above all others draws the type to it. There is something about the direct mental connection between the sound on the disc, in the grooves, and the mind that allows the listener to incorporate the lyrics into his identity. All the lyrics heading this essay are part and parcel of my mental makeup also. Some of the type have talent and skills but most don’t. Bob obviously was highly talented by no less psychotic for all that.
For myself I owned and operated a medium sized record store chain from 1967 to 1982. Until about 1979 I listened to everything issued. I suppose I heard thousands of LPs at least once. Some dozens of times. I occasionally met various artists. I was familiar with the record scene in LA and San Francisco. I dealt with tens of thousand of customers. I think I know the dreamy record type.
Without exception they have a broken down psychology. Consider songs like Broken down, second hand Rose, Here Comes The Rain, It’s Raining In My Heart, the talented but overlooked Larry Hosford’s Everything’s Broken Down. In my experience with record store employees their attitude was: If it ain’t broke, break it. And they did. I spent fifteen years dealing with broken people and I didn’t like it.
Bob was broken, probably still is. The part of his songs I identified with from 1964-66 was the broken down images of his ‘greatest’ work. All those put down songs were answered in my soul as I walked up and down the street of broken dreams. He spoke my own frustration and rage. I thought at the time the vicious put downs of Positively Fourth Street was Dylan at his best and I still do but I can’t bear to sing along anymore. The instrumentals he devised were pure genius. In fact I would give him higher marks as a composer than I would as a lyricist.
It scarcely needs pointing out but after Blonde On Blonde his pure rage was spent. He had apparently put down everyone he wanted to put down. His direction changed.
So what I am interested in here is the cause of his breaking down and subsequent rage. His biographers give scant clues when they assess his childhood. For the present we are compelled to guess from various clues scattered throughout his lyrics directed at unknown people and his comments.
In my estimation his put down songs are directed at people from Hibbing who he obviously feels put him down. Bob projects that rejection onto his New York scene.
One must rely on reports but it seems that everyone in New York was unusually supportive of this stranger from Minnesota. People seem to have gone out of their way to be supportive. They fed him didn’t they? They offered their couches, they let him play their records, read their books. In fact, they educated him to Bohemian standards. Bob didn’t get there by himself. Bob couldn’t have written those songs without that education that they gave him for free, from the goodness of their hearts.
A complete greenhorn when he arrived, within the very short space of two years he was a star. Nothing at 19, by 21 he was on his way. Life wasn’t that good to me and yet Bob sees no reason to be thankful for his good fortune. To my taste the music that gave him his start is detestable yet Robert Shelton, a very influential music critic for the NYTimes, the most influential newspaper in NYC and America, gave Bob a glittering review that his fellow folk singers wondered about at the time while being no less a source of wonder today.
John Hammond at CBS, one of the three largest labels in the US, a very experienced judge of talent, apparently saw something in the caterwauling Dylan that I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen, signing Bob to a recording contract. Any contract young Bob got would have been a wonderful contract even if he had worked gratis. Once again as with Shelton, Hammond’s associates were set wondering. Hammond’s Folly they called it.
So what exactly did Bob have to complain of about his reception in NYC. Nothing that I can see. From what I gather from his biographers his hero Woody Guthrie even accepted him. Why then all those bitter diatribes against his fellow folksingers in NYC? Quite simply, Bob was projecting. He’s not talking about the present, he’s talking about the past although he puts his lyrics in the present. We have to go back to Hibbing. He’d only been absent from Hibbing a little over a year when he hit the Big Apple so all his antecedents were very fresh in his memory. If RM is correct it was exactly at this time that he wrote his song The Walls Of Red Wing. The shock of his incarceration was searing his mind.
In Hibbing we have two influential formative processes. One, the interaction between Bob and his classmates and the other between Bob and his father. The latter is especially important. I am weak on being able to judge father-son relationships because I never had a father. From I’ve seen of father-son relationships I have absoltutely no cause for regret. I consider it a psychological trap I miraculously escaped.
One thing is clear from the biographers, Bob did not run with the In Crowd of his high school class. He obviously suffered rejection thus he visits rejection on everyone in his songs from ’64-’66. All those songs are meant to show that he’s the one and they ain’t. ‘Sooner Or Later One Of Us Must Know’, ‘There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you?’ Sour grapes. Even when they know they don’t care. You’re still you and they’re still them and they’re still in control of the social structure. You’re still on the outside and nothing’s changed except, of course, you’re famous.
Those of us who learn, learn the hard way. Unfortunately that is the only way. If you don’t know let me tell you. What’s done is done.
As the Persian poet, Omar Khayam put it:
The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.
Here’s the hard part- that’s just the way it is and the way it must stay. If you can’t deal with that, too bad. Bang your head against the wall until you die. Who cares? Hard and mean, but true. What did they used to say? You’ve got to be cruel to be kind? It’s all over now, Baby Blue. Don’t forget it; learn from it. But don’t you grieve no more. However it may go on raining in your heart.
One can’t know what happened to Bob but I suspect it happened early, probably before Junior High. When his biographers discuss his childhood he is always in the company of outsiders. So Bob became broken down at an early age.
Probably in an effort to win his classmates approval he chose to become a rock and roll musician. It worked so well when he was four performing Accentuate The Positive for his family why wouldn’t it work at sixteen with his classmates? Well, it didn’t. What he wanted to play they didn’t want to hear and what they might have wanted to hear he wouldn’t play. It was his way or no way. They booed him roundly but he didn’t care. Strangely Bob recreated the exact same scenario on his world tour. He was not only booed in the metropolis of Hibbing but he was booed around the world. Didn’t care, but how many people can say that? Very unusual personality.
Undismayed back in Hibbing he was undismayed around the world. I can understand his continued playing against the boos but that doesn’t mean it didn’t break his heart. The miracle is Bob Zimmerman went on to become Bob Dylan. You can listen to him turn into Bob Dylan on Another Side. Before that he’s Bob Zimmerman trying on the name Bob Dylan.
So, I think we can assign all those put down songs to his rejection back in Hibbing even though he’s singing Positively Fourth Street to his NYC coterie.
Probably Bob thought that whatever form the initial reaction took to his rejection back in Hibbing was that he had been a victim of a form of theft. Something valuable had been stolen from his personality, his self-respect. This is completely understandable. But as something was stolen from him, in vengeance he became the thief. Thus, if Bob wants an answer to his question: Why must I always be the thief: the compulsion can be found in whatever this childhood incident was.
I suspect Bob began small pilfering from that age, whatever year it may have been. As he was definitely sentenced to a Reformatory for a crime commited in the twelfth grade I have to believe he was caught stealing items of sufficient value for him to have been brought before a court where he was convicted and received a sentence.
It seems unlikely that as a first offender he would have been given time in a reformatory therefore it seems likely that he must have been arrested a couple times before and let off with a warning. That’s the way it was back then before they put you in jail for first offence jay-walking.
That Bob was not averse to breaking into other’s property is made clear by Howard Sounes story of Echo Helstrom’s jimmying the lock of the Moose Lodge. That Bob was not particularly careful is evident by the fact that having broken in Bob banged away at the piano and sang. After making an unauthorized entry that would seem foolhardy. Bob wasn’t just a kid either. That occurred sometime in the eleventh grade.
I suspect these earlier crimes were all thefts. As he was not a good thief, seemingly always being caught, he must have wanted his thefts to be discovered much as he himself was aware that something of value had been stolen from him. The last theft for which the judge thought he had no choice but to give Bob time must have been a good one, perhaps a burlary or store break-in. The crime may have been committed weeks or a couple months before graduation so Bob was allowed to finish school before serving his sentence in the Summer of ’59. Worst summer of Bob’s young life. Worse than church camp. This much is certain, he was in a reformatory for a couple months in the Summer of ’59. The question is where, and how does Father Abraham fit in?
Bob seems to have had a difficult relationship with his father. When that began and whether it had anything to do with his Judaism is the question. There most certainly is a conflict in Bob’s mind between his Gentile cultural identity growing up in Hibbing amongst Gentiles and his Jewish cultural identity imposed on him by his family and probably most especially by his father. Thus in later life Bob would first become a born again Christian, then revert to Judaism, and a fundamental Judaism at that, then form a compr0mise between the two that he is evidently following today. His autobiography, Chronicles Vol. I, wasn’t involved with religion that I remember. I’ll have to read it again.
As I read the biographies Bob was relatively ignorant of the tenets of Judaism as of his Bar Mitzvah at 13. In a situation that I would consider extraordinary a Rabbi was flown in especially for him just prior to his Bar Mitzvah to indoctrinate him and then returned to wherever he came from shortly after. I don’t know, seems like Abraham was really concerned that Bob understand his relationship to Judaism. They would have had to pay the Rabbi. It would be interesting to know Bob’s reaction to this event.
For myself I was forced to attend church through Junior and Senior High which I deeply resented, even hated. I can control myself if I am forced to enter a religious edifice today, that mainly because I am a real trooper who does his duty, but there wouldn’t be any need for anyone to push it too hard. I could break out cursing. Oddly I’ve been in everthing from Catholic Churches to Jewish synagogues over the years. What did I ever do to anybody?
Also in subsequent years Bob attended a religious summer camp called Camp Herzl. Whether he was compelled to or not I don’t know but in my case I was compelled to attend those accursed church camps. If there is anything in my religious background I care to take back it is those few weeks spent there. Absolutely hated it. It would be interesting to know how Bob enjoyed the experience.
Now, Bob tells us that his father Abraham at one time told him that it was possible for a son to become so defiled himself that his father and mother would disown him. Bob doesn’t tell us when or under what circumstances his father told him this. Was it a sort of admonition Abe thought every father should tell his son at, say, ten, or possibly at his Bar Mitzvah, or was it something Abe told Bob just before the authorities took Bob away for his sojourn at the reformatory- possibly even, probably Red Wing? Certainly his departure would have been as horrific an occasion for his father as it was for Bob.
So here’s the crux of the father problem. RM in her comment described Abraham a ‘passive-aggressive’ but clearly abusive father. RM says that an old girlfriend said that Bob seemed quite afraid of his father but she didn’t know if he hit him or not. RM seems to think Abe did but I’m not so sure but as we’ll see there is evidence that points to the fact that he may have.
A statement like ‘I’m not so sure the truth will set you free’ may sound innocuous enough but who knows how many lectures lay behind it or how they pertained to it. Enigmatic at best, what religious truth was Abraham trying to convey to young Bob? Not so clear to me. I’ve known some pretty nutty religious types in my time, just because Abraham was Jewish doesn’t mean he wasn’t a nutty religious type, and some of them were quite terrifying. I mean, de Lawd gave them verbal instructions and they heard it. A statement like a boy may become so defiled his parents would reject him is enough to set any boy shaking especially as Bob had already been rejected by his classmates. If a kid isn’t secure in his parents estimation who is he secure with? To me that statement was a terrific threat.
Defiled? Defiled? Bob might ask himself, I must be defiled but am I that defiled yet? I mean, why tell me Dad? I mean, do you want me to leave now? Crap like that going on for seventeen years or so would make you afraid of any parent. I could learn to hate a guy like that.
Judging from appearances Bob’s subsequent life seems to have been to determine how defiled he could be before everyone would turn away from him. What kind of test would it be? Getting drunk at midday and collapsing in your own vomit in the middle of the Minnesota campus? Was that enough? No. Bonnie Beecher didn’t deny him; she showed her love. The question there is how it is Bob collapsed where Bonnie would likely be? Coincidence? Nah. It wouldn’t taken too much to know her class assignments and be in the the appropriate place. Maybe planned, maybe not. We won’t know unless Bob tells us.
Bob’s whole career from that point on seems to consist of tests to see how much others will endure before they disown him. I mean, think about it. What kind of character does it take to offend his fans with noise you know beyond doubt they don’t want to hear, to go on doing it when you know they are going to go on booing you unmercifully? Bob did this around the world and was booed round the world. Amazingly his fans didn’t desert him but continued to show up if for no other reason than to boo him. Bob wasn’t too defiled for his fans, was he? They continued to accept anything he did.
Of course he lost a few of these contests. Suze Rotolo for instance. Bob was just too much for her mother and sister if not Suze herself. Otherwise the boy forced the world to take him on his own terms. Defilement was the issue between him and his dad. Bob seems to have won that particular defilement issue too.
Did he do time at Red Wing or not? RM and I both think he did. I agree with RM that the lyrics to Walls Of Redwing sound like authentic although very generalized experience. The Minnesota DOC (Department Of Corrections) says on one of their websites that Bob Dylan was never incarcerated at Red Wing. Maybe not. But if Bob Dylan wasn’t how about Robert Zimmerman? There is not doubt however that he was incarcerated somewhere. Wherever that was records must exist.
I believe that if one has the key all Bob’s lyrics ’64-66 will be found to be autobiographical. Why should Bob be different than any other writer? All writers are autobiographical. What else can they be? Thus in relation to Red Wing if RM doesn’t have the right slant the song has to relate to Bob’s life in some way, and some way that goes back to before he left Hibbing. The title Highway 61 Revisited has to have that exact meaning. Bob is revisiting Highway 61 whatever meaning the phrase has for him. RM’s understanding of the following lyrics seems brilliant to me whether it turns out Bob did his time at Red Wing or not. Remember it is certain that he did time somewhere, that is not the question. If the song does not physically describe Red Wing then the ‘country club’ in Philadelphia must.
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man you must be puttin’ me on.”
God say. “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”
RM goes on: Red Wing is DIRECTLY on Highway 61 separated only by a barbed wire fence. Thus, Bob may have experienced his incarceration as a form of psychological death for which he held his father, Abe, responsible. Highway 61 as I see it has no signficance otherwise. The Civil Rights stuff going on in the South couldn’t possibly have figured largely in Bob’s imagination besides it had nothing to do with killing a son.
Consider also these lines from Chimes of Freedom:
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking track
For the lonesome hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
As we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Starry eyed and laughing, as I recall, when we were caught…
I think those lines can be related back to Highway 61 and the crime for which the ‘unharmful gentle soul’ Bob paid. The last line would imply that he and Echo? were caught together. That sounds like a burglary or break-in.
Another word on possible influences for Highway 61.
While both Folk and Pop music were important to the era, equally as important, possibly more so, were the Comedy records. The late fifties and early sixties were the golden age of comedy LPs. The three most important were Bob Newhart, The Smothers Brothers and Shelley Berman. These three were huge. Trailing behind them were Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Allan Sherman, Jose Jimenez and a couple others.
Newhart and the Smothers would have have had the most direct influence on Bob at this time. Both artists did monologues or dialogues of an historical nature. The Smothers Brothers were, of course, a comedy Folk act. Overwhelming in their appeal. We were all blown out of the saddle by these comedy records that seemed so nouveau and groundbreaking that they could easily be seen as the Chimes of Freedom flashing. Thus the first verse of Highway 61 can be seen as a comedic takeoff on God, Abraham, and Isaac a la Newhart or the Smothers.
After the first and obviously key verse that deals with the Son and father, Abe, Bob cobbles some historical verses together. Mack the Finger (Knife) and Louie (XIV) the king. Verse two deals with Jesse James:
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down Highway 61.
As we all know Bob Ford was the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, the name Jesse James was living under at the time. I think we can chalk Highway 61 up as an attempt to emulate the Smothers and Newhart along with Bob’s other needs. Think about Desolation Row as a comedy routine.
If one does want to really understand the early sixties it is essential to be familiar with Newhart, the Smothers and Shelley Berman. Still good stuff too.
Bob would have been released from the reformatory just in time to leave for U. Minnesota. One can only imagine his state of mind as he left for Minnesota as the defiled son. He began by testing everyone. As a nobody there were few who would put up with his antics. We can’t be sure how far he would go with his antics or exactly what he would have done. If the scene with Bonnie Beecher is any indication he had pretty wide parameters to work within. He claimed that in New York he hustled, that is sold his behind as a male prostitute. Did he? I don’t know but having consciously established himself as a liar or teller of tall tales he could tell any preposterous truth and not be taken seriously. Thus he would be able to get such things off his chest while being disbelieved. Hustling would probably be a form of defilement that would offend his father. He told the journalist Al Aronowitz that he had done time in Red Wing. Why would anyone tell stories that were reputation destroyers?
Testing people is one thing, of course, but would a guy who puked all over himself and lay down in the middle of campus balk at hustling in NYC? You tell me.
Through ’66 Bob exhibited all the characteristics of the man walking up and down the boulevard of broken dreams. Everything in his life was broken down. He was apparently filthy and unkempt. Many people refer to his complete lack of hygiene. They use such emphatic terms as Bob must have been avoiding soap and water. Hygiene, he didn’t have any.
Except for the brief honeymoon period with Sara after his acident he always affected a bum or hobo like character. He even called his recording studio, Rundown Studios. The pain lived on in his heart as a steady downpour. He made his environment reflect the shambles in his mind. He had mixed up confusion and man it was killing him. He built a multi-million dollar house and then made it look like a junkyard.
He made one attempt to escape the Boulevard. There is some question as to the seriousness of the motorcycle accident. There seems to be evidence that he wasn’t seriously hurt if hurt at all. I think that after Blonde On Blonde his initial torment was spent. At best Grossman was working him so hard, setting up the next grueling tour that as Bob said if he had gone on it would have been the death of him so he opted out, took some much needed time off to recover.
During the brief period of recuperation he seems to have calmed down somewhat. If the photos of Elliot Landy are accurate evidence,
http://www.landyvision.com he seems to have cleaned up his act trying to be the good country squire for Sara. The photos look as though he were bathing and wearing clean clothes. It couldn’t last. His inner devastated compulsion urged him on. At some point he must have decided how much defilement Sara would take before he could drive her away.
Lord, how he tried that woman’s soul. Bob was shameless beyond belief. She finally threw in the towel when she came to breakfast to find Bob eating with another woman.
In the divorce proceedings she claimed she was in fear of her physical well being, that Bob had offered her physical violence. It is quite possible that after years of drug and alcohol abuse Bob’s decency was so lowered that he did offer her violence. Perhaps he was then visiting the violence on her that RM thinks his father dealt him. Perhaps he was only trying to see exactly how much defilement she would take before checking out. Perhaps Bob merely wanted Sara to be as defiled as himself so that they would be equals.
Bob cruelly shattered the poor woman’s life. After standing by him through terrific emotional abuse Bob had the audacity to remonstrate ‘But people in my family just don’t get divorced. Chutzpah on a stick. Didn’t he even care what the effect on his children would be? Hard to feel sorry for ya, Bob.
Bob punished himself to the tune of many millions of dollars. It must have hurt so good. Balm for a wounded soul. Not satisfied Bob had another brief marriage bestowing additional millions on that wife. These sexual adventures compelled him to work non-stop to support his various establishments. It isn’t cheap being Bob Dylan. A life style was forced on him that required vast sums, perhaps millions a year to maintain.
Thus Bob laughed tonight and cried tomorrow when he beheld his shattered dreams, but no matter how defiled Bob was he was holding his own in the war. Everything was still broken down, rundown, second hand Rose but then for the psychological type, Only A Hobo, there’s a certain pleasure in that.
End.
e
I, Dynamo 