Eugenics and Dysgenics
June 5, 2018
Eugenics and Dysgenics
by
R.E. Prindle
For some reason evolution keeps popping up as a problem rather than a solution. All of the evidence points to an upward evolution in complexity not only of humans but all mammals. There must be another problem and that problem is that not only are all species of Mammalia not equal but neither are all human species. If evolution exists, as it does, then humans have evolved at different stages also. That means some humans are being left behind and that means that not all humans have equal abilities and that means a social problem in that some humans are inevitably left behind.
In the past this was not problem because on the one hand there was very little knowledge and lot of ‘wisdom’ and the various species, or sub-species, if you prefer, were segregated by geography, they were allowed therefore to develop their racial identity with minimal interference- Asians lived in Asia, sub-Saharan Africans lived South of the Sahara, Semites lived in Arabia and the Middle east and Aryan races in their undiluted form lived in Europe, otherwise where they invaded they melded into Asian populations.
But then, in the fifteenth century something remarkable began to happen. The Aryan mind of the various races began to open. In other words, the Semitic yoke of ignorance as perpetuated by the Roman Catholic religion began to be cast off. Freed from that repression the naturally scientific Aryan mind was released from that repression; the naturally scientific Aryan mind was freed to function once again. Then began the period of the Enlightenment that resulted in the fulfillment of the Aryan mind in that most glorious of centuries, the Nineteenth. The Aryan mind flowered spectacularly changing the very way in which the world was perceived while leaving all other known species an age or two behind.
Central to that flowering was the realization that Aryans are more highly evolved than the other human species or sub-species, if you wish.
Initially overwhelmed by this efflorescence the other human species could offer little resistance; the Aryan flood rolled over the entire world. The Aryans, the Europeans conquered the whole planet and ruled it.
The Aryan supremacy was weakened fatally by internal divisions that resulted in two world wars thus destroying confidence in their emotional maturity that hadn’t kept up with their intelligence. While evolution had progressed quickly, Aryan’s great powers of intellect, evolution had no effect on altering their emotional nature and in that sense Aryans remained on the same emotional level as the other species, sub-species or races depending on how the reader might want to look at it.
-2-
To return to the origins of evolution. Charles Darwin was the man of destiny chosen to present the idea of Evolution to the world in his 1959 work, The Origin of Species; his vision of evolutionary speculation, not excluding that of his father Erasmus Darwin who explored the idea as a Romantic writer in long poems. The Frenchmen Buffon and Lamarck were significant contributors to the notion of evoluton. Lyell’s work in geology however destroyed the Biblical basis of the six thousand year old planet created by a god in six days opening the way for Darwin’s ages old theory of evolution.
Since we’re talking about the opening, in the small sense of the Aryan mind, an opening that would change our conception of reality. It might be worthwhile to give some indication of what that meant, what the Aryans could and did do that the other species couldn’t and didn’t do. And that was to lift the veil of Isis and show how the world was made beneath surface appearances. For really, Malthus, a Jew, was right given the knowledge of that day as to the limitation of resources. Without succeeding Aryan inventions of all kinds Mankind was actually up against the wall on a dead end street. It was just that Maltus couldn’t clearly see the future but he was not wrong considering conditions in his present. Freud, Sigmund Freud, the psychologist, said that there were three great discoveries that changed Man’s conception of self, the first was the understanding of the Solar System and Earth’s place in it, and hence, Man’s; the second was the concept of evolution that humbled man from his exalted place in the hierarchy of animals and third, Freud was ever humble, his discovery of psycho-analysis. Freud of course discovered nothing merely synthesizing what European scientists had discovered, much in the manner of Darwin.
According to Freud the net effect of these three discoveries was to diminish Man to relative inconsequence, a tiny speck on a miniscule planet in an insignificant galaxy on the far edge of the universe. As an aside, I disagree with this view that has paralyzed the mind of most people. The universe is so immense that we have no idea where we’re located in it. A seer named Edgar Allen Poe who was perhaps one of mankind’s great geniuses and perhaps the brightest of all Americans in his book Eureka speculated, as I believe correctly, that the universe was like the Earth, like the Solar System, itself a great ball, or lozenge, circulating around a center.
This must be true as all else is wheels within wheels so the universe must be the biggest wheel of all. Perhaps as one sci-fi writer speculated the universe itself being little more than a cell of some larger even more immense organism. So far beyond Man’s ability to define as to be beyond reason. And why not?
So, as I perceive it, our Solar System and Earth’s location in it with all the attributes that make the planet functional is unique in this entire universe. And the existence of life as we know it and especially human kind and more especially myself and yourself are miracles beyond explications. Rather than feeling small and insignificant one should feel like the miracle we are and glory and revel in it for the short duration of our existence. There’s always a catch-22 isn’t there? Take heart! Live, love, laugh and be happy. Once you’re gone, you’re gone, it’s over, so seize it while you can.
So, the imaginative life Man was living of Gods, Fairies and any number of wonderful creatures gave way before the advance of science and the Aryan mind. Marvelous imaginative structures and beings went up in smoke. Telescopes and microscopes, the advance of chemistry and physics, the actual cornerstones of what is considered science; the discovery of the magnetic field, that is electricity and radio waves and how to harness them, the breakdown of air into the various gases, even their isolation as in oxygen; it was all taking place in the Romantic Age as the fantasy world of the past clashed with the reality of life as discovered in the test tube.
For those who read, and since you’re reading this,you, there is a wonderful book by Richard Holmes called The Age of Wonder. Holmes captures the moment of the separation of mythopoeic thinking and science, that moment, perfectly. His sub-title: How The Romantic Generation Discovered The Beauty And Terror Of Science; really enjoyable read.
And there were great synthesizers: Gibbon in History, Auguste Comte the Positivist who organized the new knowledge into a coherent manageable whole. Herbert Spencer, the brilliant continuator of Comte who captured contradictions so aptly. In his Principles of Ethics he wrote:
How absolute throughout Europe is the contradiction between the codes of conduct adjusted respectively to the needs of internal amity and external enmity, we see in the broad fact that along with several hundred thousand priests who are supposed to preach forgiveness, there exist immensely larger armies than any on record.
Yes, Man evolves at different paces at different levels. No matter. It seemed to be the age of progress and not Man but Europeans, Aryans, progressively developed all fields for the others to follow if they could. Psychology, Sigmund Freud’s province, developed tools to measure intelligence and thus inequality, an unforgiving unequality, an absolute inequality one that couldn’t be transgressed became the fact. Science demanded an intelligence that could only be enjoyed by those to whom nature had given it and those were the chosen few. The many who were excluded found a method to negate the advantage of the few, they turned eugenics into dysgenics. The nineteenth century had been one of eugenics; the twentieth century would be one of dysgenics. How to find a place in science for the unqualified. Fool Mother Nature.
Continued in Part II.
Magic, The Land Of Faerie And The Liberal Mind
April 4, 2018
Magic, The Land Of Faerie
And The Liberal Mind
The March-April Issue Of Foreign Affairs:
A Discussion
by
R.E. Prindle
-1-
The March-April issue of Foreign Affairs arrived and once again it is dedicated to the denunciation of President Trump. As is well known Foreign Affairs is the propaganda arm of the Council On Foreign Relations. The CFR is not merely an informational service, it is also a potent influence within the government of the United States. Many members have even served as President of the United States. In fact, the last four presidents covering twenty-four consecutive years, that is Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama and had Hillary Clinton been placed a full twenty-eight, possible thirty-two years. Time enough to indoctrinate two and half generations.
Thus it was a bitter disappointment for them when Donald Trump made a run around end to win the White House. His mere candidacy had unleashed an unceasing barrage of hatred and since he has been under siege defending himself against innumerable CFR sappers. The March-April issue continues the assault. The five themed articles under the heading Letting Go are: Trump’s Lucky Year, Why the Chaos Can’t Last, The World After Trump, How The System Can Endure, The Rise Of Illiberal Hegemony: Trump’s Surprising Grand Strategy, The Post-American World Economy: Globalization In The Trump Era and Giving Up The High Ground: America’s Retreat On Human Rights.
As is evident the Liberal ‘system’ that the CFR presidents were putting in place and which would have been completed by the election of Hillary Clinton has been disrupted by the election of Donald Trump who is, in fact, dismantling the whole Liberal CFR system. Hence, an article on how the system can endure, one imagines, behind the scene: the so-called Dark Government.
This raises the question of what beyond specific goals as outlined in Foreign Affairs is the Liberal mind set. In the larger scope of human history to what psychological reality, Weltanschauung motivates the Liberal mind.
Many theories have been advanced about the motivating forces that direct human activity. The Hegelian/Marxist view is of course based on economics. But underlying theories such as Marxism is the fundamental dichotomy of the spiritual vs. the material. The fantasy of life vs. the reality. The Liberal utopian based ‘spirituality’ vs. the Conservative naturalistic based view of reality. The soft-headed vs. the hard-headed.
In many ways the Liberal mind is magical in nature. The Liberal desires and magically creates a reality that assumes that the desire is fact.
Thus Adam S. Posen who wrote the article The Post-American World Economy: Globalization in the Trump Era projects on the one hand the desire of the Liberal post-WWII system while on the other unconsciously contrasts the reality. The very title The Post-American World Economy contradicts the assumption that the Post-WWII US world order is still in operation. So, possibly, Trump is merely destroying the Liberal mental fantasy. Negating the magic. Post-American posits an end to the US domination and, indeed, under Obama the CFR destroyed the dominant role of the US with the result that a number of more or less equals are now jockeying for position.
Mr. Posen begins his article with the illusory view of this so-called seventy year post-war Liberal world order.
In the aftermath of World War II the United States set about building a global, rules base economic order. At the heart of the order it put the Liberal values of free trade backed up by U.S. power and bolstered by its growing legitimacy among other countries, prevented most economic disputes from escalating into mutually destructive trade wars, let alone military conflict. That allowed even the smallest and poorest countries to develop their social and economic potential without having to worry about predation by strange neighbors. By taking much of the fear out of the global economy, the U.S. led order allowed market decisions to be driven by business not bullying.
Adam S. Posen, The Post-American World
Economy: Globalization in the Trump
Era, pp 28-38
Having been present at the creation and having lived through the whole period in varying degrees of cognizance, I can tell you that the above view of the seventy years is contradicted fully by my own experience and understanding.
The problems of our times have become more difficult. The fantasy of the American Century has passed. It is no longer about ‘things’ but one of attitudes of which most that are held are not realistic. There is at the base of the matter still the conflict between the ‘spiritual’ and the materialist views; that is, the longing for the magical supernatural Land of Faerie vs. Science , or the reality of matter, or put another way religion vs. science. Let us review the evolution of human consciousness.
-2-
One must assume that early man was as unconscious as are wild animals today. In other words, early man had no rational explanation for external reality. And this extends back into hundreds of thousands, millions, of years of pre-Homo Sapiens existence. Presumably the more recent nomenclature homo sapiens, wise or knowledgeable man, indicates the beginning of consciousness of the world outside the mind. As it took until the twentieth century before psychologists began to significantly understand the working of the human mind it can be easily seen that the learning process was long and slow. Man was barely conscious of either his own mind or the world outside his mind, working with very little true knowledge he came up with some pretty bizarre explanations of how things functioned.
He invested all animate and inanimate objects with life and sensation. Thus he created the supernatural and the natural. The world was filled with invisible beings both good and bad. Gods and Devils, Faeries, Elves, Gnomes, Elementals. The air was packed with demons and angels and what have you. This was true down to and including the beginning of history and well beyond, even into the nineteenth century. Gods came and went, old gods died, gods who failed in their duties were discarded or transformed. Each people had their own gods. In the clash of peoples and therefore gods, peoples went under and with them their gods.
In this mental context I would like to examine the period in European history from 1100 to 1300, a very critical and rich period in Europe and the Middle East that would eventually affect the world when the European diaspora took place from c. 1400 to the beginning of the twentieth century.
By1300 the Catholic, that is the Universal, Church was the dominant supernaturally based force in Europe and the ME- Middle East. In order to confirm its position it had to eliminate all other supernatural belief systems. This was no easy task as other supernatural beliefs systems had the same credibility as the Christian and the Catholic Church was never completely successful. This was a wonderful period and I hope I can successfully display it with some justice.
There were many competing supernatural belief systems competing at this time, many remnants of old decayed and dying gods as well as their successors trying to establish themselves against the dominant Catholic Church.
The old Greco-Roman systems still survived in out the way places and pockets and even in the popular mind. The old Egyptian systems had been mutating since the Assyrian invasions of the seventh century BC. No longer with a national State to support the religion it had infiltrated Christianity to a degree and went on mutating over the centuries but was still a potent force as an element of the Catholic faith.
Of course the backbone of Catholicism came from the Jewish religious system through Christianity. The Catholic Church took over Jewish religious sites wholesale. Thus the erstwhile Jewish capital of Jerusalem became the holiest site of Christianity in Europe. With the founding of the Mohammedan religion of Arabia the so-called Holy City fell into non-Jewish-Christian hands.
As Europe reorganized and became somewhat unified under the Carolingian kings of France, the idea of the Holy City in Moslem hands became intolerable in Church eyes and so just prior to 1100 the Church instigated the idea of liberating Jerusalem giving the period under consideration the name of the Crusades.
This was done for supernatural reasons. On the European side one was under God and on the Moslem side one was under their deity who went by the name of Allah. Thus one had the War of the Gods.
The ME had always been a hotbed of competing supernatural religious ideas. Innumerable Gods and Goddesses. Some intriguing mental projections in the bargain. Generally speaking few if any had completely disappeared. If the actual religion has been suppressed the guiding ideas lived on.
The human mind has continued to evolve, that is consciousness, so that the internal unconscious mind has been enlightened toward a correct appreciation of the external world. That is, as Freud expressed it, the personality or mind is integrated when consciousness has illuminated the unconscious. The period under consideration was an important period in the evolution of consciousness. It should be remembered that any of these imaginary beings had equal validity in the consciousness of people of the times. God or Faerie, same thing.
The Aryan Land of Faerie has as much a claim to reality as did the God of the Jews, Isis of the Egyptians, Cybele, the God of the Christians, however as Jews and Christians were dominant the other imaginary deities were not disproved but ridiculed and suppressed. Thus, in this tremendous period of the Christian crusades to recapture the religious capital of Jerusalem there were many unintended consequences. The Crusades opened the gates to admit ideas from the other suppressed belief systems. Thus, the Cathar religion of Manichean sympathies had migrated West from Iran through the Balkans to gain a firm foothold in Southern France, also known as the Occitan.
This was a large trans-Alpine area including the Aquitaine. This area fostered the romances of King Arthur and the Round Table which was a Faerie kingdom. A land of magic and enchantment both anathema to Judeo-Christianity. The wonderful romances, far outshining the dull Jewish bible, were developed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Thus the Catholic Church was confronted by a number of competing belief systems. The Cathar problem was solved in the midst of the Middle Eastern crusades by a crusade against the Cathars. A genocidal war against the unfortunate Cathars was conducted by the French at the instigation of the Church. This involved an actual man hunt to destroy the Cathars root and branch. Apparently the Church remembered the Amalekites.
That solution was really easy for the Church but the Arthurian romances that involved England, France, Germany and associated peoples could not be dealt with so easily. Indeed, when the main assault came against the Church it would come from the three countries mentioned. They required boring from within, co-opting the ideology. Catholic writers thus chose to change the direction of the romances from a warrior cult to one of a quest for spiritual perfection. This was achieved through the introduction of the character of Galahad, the son of the nearly perfect but flawed knight, Lancelot of the Lake.
At the same time a French series of works called the Chansons de Geste- Songs of Adventure- were written to discredit the Land of Faerie. A key text along this line was an amazing story titled Huon of Bordeaux. Bordeaux was a key Cathar city, sort of the Faerie capital, bordering the the key Cathar stronghold of Mont Segur. Galahad ascended to heaven from that stronghold along with the Holy Grail to lay the Arthurian threat to rest.
Huon of Bordeaux introduces the king of the Faerie Land, Oberon. Oberon and God are in a contest to see which would most successfully aid Huon in his quest to exonerate himself from a punishment imposed by the ninth century king of France, Charlemagne. Bear in mind this was a contest between two imaginarily real gods, God and Oberon, king of the Faeries.
Huon, had violated chivalric protocol by successfully defending himself against Charlemagne’s evil son, killing him in the process. Charlemagne then banishes Huon, allowing him back only if he succeeds in a number of seemingly impossible feats in the Holy Land against a Moslem king. Huon doesn’t have a prayer, however passing through a forbidden forest in the Holy Land he is confronted by Oberon, king of the Faeries. This is equivalent to running into the Catholic God. Oberon, after extracting a number of vows, gives Huon a horn which if blown in dire straits Oberon will appear with a hundred thousand troops to rescue him. Huon is cautioned to never use it unless his situation is beyond redemption otherwise.
Huon is the light-headed sort so he blows the horn to test it. Oberon appears with his 100K troops but is miffed because Huon didn’t follow instructions. In any event Huon through Oberon’s aid performs the impossible tasks Charlemagne set him and returns to Bordeaux before returning to Paris and the king’s court as instructed. Another boo-boo in a long string of boo-boos. Huon could have been the prototype of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.
While absent from his home his brother Gerard had usurped his role and now refuses to give it up. Further adventures intervene but Charlemagne in the end comes to Bordeaux to receive evidences of Huon’s successes. Huon is unable to produce them as his brother has stolen them from him. At this time Oberon appears and magically exonerates Huon. As God had done nothing to help Huon one would think Oberon to be judged the greater than God but Huon irrationally chooses the ineffective God over Oberon even after Huon abdicates his kingship, and renounces Faerieland appointing Huon his successor. Right. Even though now King of Faerie Land Huon chooses to live happily ever after in his domain of Bordeaux while God is declared he victor in the contest with Oberon.
Meanwhile the Church was capturing the Arthurian Faerie Land so that as the fourteenth century began the Cathars, Faeries and the real life Knights Templar who had been associated with the Cathars had been disposed of. The Jews were suppressed and the Church and God were seemingly in control. However in the fifteenth century Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, was to fall to the Moslems releasing even more heretical ideas against the Catholic ideology that would result in the Enlightenment during which the European mind matured to the point where the scientific assumed prominence and scientific investigation began to reveal the true state of Nature. This development destroyed the basis of supernatural thinking placing all forms of the fantastic into defensive positions or beyond into fiction.
The Jews abandoned the idea of God, the Catholics refused to accept reality and Europeans who cherished the Faerie forced to blend the Faerie with science. That is to say, turn Faerie lands into fiction. Thus the Romantic Age took form in
Science continued to remove the Veil of Isis revealing nature to the human mind. The next big test was Darwin’s formulation of Evolution. The concept had been discussed for a hundred years previously but Darwin wrote the words that condensed evolutionary theory into fact. Romantics who had been holding on were now forced to adapt further. This adaptation produced the Second or Neo-Romantic who struggled in the face of scientific realities.
An interesting development occurred. Mankind refused to give up the supernatural. It would appear that the terrors of the real world required an imaginary refuge in which things could be controlled. Thus a transition from an imagined heaven or Faerie land began a conversion to an other world (parallel universe) that while equally unrealizable was equally comforting. The Pre-Raphaelites reached back into the past to idealize the world before the artist Raphael. From that beginning it blossomed into late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels. Among many others were the reactionary works of William Morris and the futuristic novels of the near great George Du Maurier. Du Maurier brought forward the Faerie projected into the future in a sort of science fiction.
In the US, L. Frank Baum created a modern fairy tale in his Land of Oz stories. This also meshed with the English Ruritanian novels of Anthony Hope and the US interpreter George Barr McCutcheon.
All these threads including Rider Haggard’s romantic African fantasies were brought together in the novels of the American Edgar Rice Burroughs. While not thought of as a Neo-Romantic, Burroughs was probably the greatest of the lot.
As a result of a brain injury as a young man Burroughs was capable of disappearing into his brain world to create amazing fictional realities.
His scientific background and romantic projections are nearly perfect blends. In his Tarzan series he employs Africa as a geographic reality but then transforms it into a romantic fairyland that could never exist. In his own way Burroughs character Tarzan is a reinvention of Oberon. This confused a lot of readers who insisted that the real Africa differed from Burroughs’ imaginary Africa. No contest.
For instance, Burroughs wanted to have tigers in Africa so he wrote them in to his Faerie Land. The magazine version of Tarzan of the Apes had tigers and made the story truly fabulous. However readers, being literal when their imaginations failed to embrace the flights of Burroughs’ fancy forced the writer to change the tigers to lions thereby wrecking the Faerie land Africa, this alternate reality that Burroughs wished to create. Burroughs himself was heavily influenced by the fairy tales of L. Frank Baum, with whom he became great friends, so that if you’ve read Baum and keep Oz in mind while reading Burroughs the stories take on an added dimension.
Burroughs didn’t stop with Tarzan and Africa but out of the same mind during the same period created another fairly land on Mars and another at the Earth’s core honoring the fabulous hollow Earth notion. Thus three complete Faerie lands.
Of course, there was already a fairly large body of Mars and space travel stories in existence but they took a fairly clumsy approach and turned it into a whole something else, sensational, perhaps, for the moment but without enduring appeal.
At the same time, early teens of the twentieth century, a man named Hugo Gernbach was taking science fiction to a whole new level beyond Burroughs that would result in the fantastic blossoming of sci-fi in the nineteen-fifties.
This was truly a romantic recreation of Faerie Land. Worlds beyond comprehension; the transformation of the Little Folk into space aliens of every description with their human counterparts. The true nature of sci-fi has been little appreciated.
The neo-Romantics of the second period also created the horror and fantasy genres that would dominate literature along with sci-fi. The two greatest and most enduring creations were the Frankenstein of Mary Bysshe Shelley of the first Romantic period and the greatest of the monsters, Bram Stoker’s vampire Dracula. Vampire stories had been around since Shelley’s friend Dr. Polidori wrote his short vampire piece. Varney the Vampire had made his appearance in mid-century England, attributed to Rymer but Stoker’s sensational novel formed the template for all future vampire stories including those of Anne Rice who was or is totally obsessed by the genre. Thus the supernatural transformed into quasi-scientific reality has survived to the present.
The Liberal mind evolved out of the Judeo-Catholic religious sphere, more specifically influenced by the Jewish aspects of the Old Testament, most especially by the notion of a people elected by god to rule mankind in his name. The notion is essentially amoral.
As the Jews are supposed to be creating God’s will on Earth, bringing his rule to all people they believe that means by any means necessary. That notion includes the elimination of whole peoples who may stand in the way of that realization. Thus the great Liberal novelist Victor Hugo would explain in his novel 1793 the advent of the new perfect Liberal world can never be achieved so long as ‘obstructionists’ live so that Liberals are justified in killing tens or hundreds of million or even a billion in what would be a vain attempt to eliminate differences of opinion.
Thus, today, we have the Liberals hoping, praying for the deaths of ‘old’ people who they fancy stand in the way of the realization of their utopia, while they imagine all people under say fifty are guided one mindedly by their utopian ideal.
On the other hand, Jews, Negroes and others believe that the whole White population of a billion people must be eliminated before their dreams can be realized. It was believed by them that their dream was approaching realization in this 2016 election.
This hope was upset by the maverick Donald Trump. Trump’s election set the Liberals off on a disappointed frenzy. Hence, Foreign Affairs issue Volume 97 no. 2 is devoted to expressing their disappointment by denouncing now President Trump.
Thus of the five articles under the collective Letting Go, three are definitely written by Jews, Eliot A. Cohen, Barry R. Posen and Adam S. Posen. The female contributor Sarah Margon is also Jewish. The only possible non-Jewish contributor is Jacob Sullivan, possibly of Irish derivation. As these articles are all assigned, that is written on hire, Sullivan may be assumed to be compliant.
It is evident therefore that the Jews are behind the extreme anti-Trump movement. While Trump seems to be obligated and subservient to the Jews for financial reasons their extreme opposition can only be based on the fact that Trump has taken a course independent of Jewish hopes and dreams.
The Jews, then, forming the core beliefs and fantasies of the Liberals give full and open access to the Liberal mind. The Liberals consider themselves to be justified sinners, the elect chosen by god to bring his heaven, his perfection to Earth as in heaven. There is no dissuading them, no ameliorating their extreme beliefs. They can only be quarantined or suppressed much as they hope to murder all opposition.
There is no room for discussion or compromises. Either they win or non-believers win. There is no other option.
The Remarkable Case Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Eyes
November 24, 2017
The Remarkable Case Of
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Eyes
by
Dr. Anton Polarion
Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest…in order that the creations of our mind should be a blessing and not a curse for mankind.
–Albert Einstein
In 1953 a sci-fi novel was published by Arthur C. Clarke which he entitled ‘Childhood’s End.’ I read it only a couple years ago and while I don’t believe I got his point the story has haunted my imagination since then. In the novel he depicts a situation in which the first phase of evolution has flowered, and a second phase is about to begin out of the blown flower or the seed of the first.
Just after the end of WWII Clarke may well have believed than an old order of evolution had matured and a new one was beginning. His symbolism notwithstanding it is clear the evolution was not beginning a new phase, unless he knew something he wasn’t telling, but it is possible to view the post-war period as a culminating point in the historical continuum.
Writers are frequently more sensitive to such shifts than other people. Assuming that the historical continuum had at least transited its first phase, as I do, and was in fact beginning a new phase, which I only postulate, then it is possible to review the historical evolution of mankind and its various sub-special components as completed units. I intend to place Edgar Rice Burroughs in his place in that historical continuum.
Now let us by a feat of Wells/Einsteinian legerdemain roll the paper into a cylinder and step across the seam into that earlier phase of the historical continuum.
For tens of thousands of years the flow of the historical continuum appeared to be nearly as even and uninterrupted as the flow of the mighty Congo from the immense distance of Stanley Falls to the Stanley Pool.
Change there was but so slow as to cause barely a ripple until the accumulated changes resulted in the disruption of human consciousness that occurred in the Victorian Period.
Since then the historical continuum has been as turbulent as the series of rapids on the Congo below Stanley Pool.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in file.
–Vachel Lindsay, The Congo
The French Revolution was important but that was mainly a political transition from the late feudal to the early modern. What we’re really concerned with is the challenge it gave to the psychology of man, that time when the Congo and the Jungle became a symbol of Man’s conscious and unconscious mind and his conscious mind cut through the darkness like a golden track. To put a convenient date on the psychological transition let’s put it at 1859 when Darwin’s
Origin of Species’ was published; nothing challenged the ancient mentality of Mankind more. It was then that the Congo crept North of the Equator to flow through the Euroamerican mind.
Darwin’s theories rent the mind of most men in two. Some like Edgar Rice Burroughs understood instantly but most resisted for decades while a hundred fifty years later the howl of disbelief can still be heard. The Semitic vision of the origin of man and the world as portrayed in Genesis became impossible for any reflective Westerner to believe. The hold of the ancient Semitic system of belief was so strong that exoteric scholars could not express their evolutionary views openly for fear of losing their jobs while having their lives ruined in what might risibly be termed ‘premature McCarthyism.’
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
–Vachel Lindsay -The Congo
Nevertheless the brief period from 1859 to 1914 was one of the most exciting and productive periods of history. The past had been or was being made intelligible to Western Man’s inquiring mind. As unpleasant as the fact may be to some people, modern understanding is solely the product of the mind of Western Man or Homo Sapiens III. Neither the African of HIS nor the sterile Semites nor the various sterile Mongolid races contributed one iota of understanding in this period, very little since and that only under the influence of the West.
While the Semitic Freud was delving into personal psychology his great rival, CG Jung, was exploring the development of human consciousness to open a psychological understanding of the mind of mankind in which the individual might be included and explained. In other words, he was placing the individual in the historical continuum. An esotericist of some note, it is to Jung and the school he founded that we are indebted for our understanding of all the phases of consciousness, their development and evolution.
At the same time that our increasing awareness allowed us to see clearly into the past for the first time, the pace of change was becoming so rapid that it was possible to project current trends into the near future. In conjunction with the rapid increase in scientific discoveries a futuristic or science fiction became possible.
In the popular mind the foundations for futuristic fiction were laid by the vastly underrated H.G. Wells.
Understanding the past, projections into the future and tremendous technological achievement, lent this period such great self-confidence that it was thought that anything was possible to the mind of man. The attitude was abruptly brought to an end in 1912; not by the First World War but rather by the unthinkable fact that Man’s mind had erred in thinking that it could build an unsinkable ship. When that great ship, the Titanic went down it took the pride of Western, which is to say human mind down with it.
The period of 1859 to 1914 was also one in which the absolute superiority of the ‘White race’ seemed not only apparent but real in fluorescent colors. In fact, White, or HSIII, superiority was acknowledged by all the people of the Earth, who were overawed by Western achievements. It was only after 1914 when the confidence of HSIII was shaken that the counter-attack became possible and success plausible. Even then this was an internal schism between the right people of the West and the wrong people of the Reds.
I have studied the notion of evolution of Dugald Warbaby in his essays ‘Tarzan Over Africa’ and ‘Tarzan Meets Mohammed.’ Based on his notion I would like to explain how the various sub-species are to be characterized during this first historical continuum.
The character of a sub-species is fixed from the moment of its mutation. Everything that it will ever be able to do it can envision at its inception; there is no evolution of ability within a sub-species its abilities unfold to its limits as its development progresses.
In you believe in Darwin’s concept of natural selection then you must believe that the various sub-species segregated themselves from the other sub-species on the basis of likeness. Further, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection so did various races form within a sub-species. Each race within a sub-species will by natural selection exclude all others who are not true to type until the race is uniform in appearance and psychology.
To use the African model: If one race is flat nosed and thick lipped then those characteristics will be valued. Any who do not conform to the ideal will be ejected from the race or killed.
If nearby thin lipped people with a bridged nose exist those two peoples will come into conflict with each other. The ensuing war between the physical and psychological types will be to the knife. In a word: genocide. Undisturbed by outside forces the battle will continue until either one race is exterminated or one or the other moves from the vicinity. This is what natural selection means. This is the history of Man. The notion of natural selection was also put into the words: survival of the fittest.
Thus HSI claimed sub-Saharan Africa for itself expelling the mutated HSII and possibly the Semites if they mutated at the same time . HSII migrated from the Mediterranean Basin and on into Western Europe. The Semites separated from HSI and HSII or were driven away migrating into the Arabian Peninsula, a backwater. HSIII when it mutated was either expelled from HSII or separated themselves to occupy the area near the Caspian Sea.
The English geneticist Bryan Sykes believes that the various Mongolid races mutated from HSIII a mere ten thousand years ago although this seems unlikely. The Mongolids like the Semites are also a sterile offshoot. They migrated across the steppes to the Eastern seaboard of Asia. Thus, following Darwin’s theory of natural selection when the traceable historical continuum becomes apparent one has HSI in Africa, HSII in Western Europe and HSIII in the Caspian area of Central Asia, the Semites occupying Arabia and the Mongolids in Eastern Asia.
The first confrontation between the sub-species in historical times came when a people of HS III derivation migrated to Mesopotamia. There they created a civilization which may have been influenced by an HSII population already in possession. Either HSIII alone or together with HSII, this people created the Sumerian Civilization.
From Sumer To The World Trade Center
In the present struggle in Eastern Europe the element of religious antagonism is the most important factor in the problem. The question originally one of race and government has become to a great extent one of religion. …Muslims…use the Sheriat, or law embracing or based upon the Cor-an and its commentaries, and this is declared by many persons in Western Europe to be utterly inapplicable to Christian subjects. Here, then, is the real difficulty; is Mohammedanism so plastic as to be adapted to the reforms which it is universally admitted…are required, or must it be eliminated altogether from Europe? If an affirmative answer be given to the latter proposition…there is no solution of the difficulty but a religious war, and such a war as the world has never yet seen.
–Mohammed and Mohammedanism.
Anonymous reviewer in the
Quarterly Review, January 1877
The answer has proven to be that Moslemism is not so plastic as to be adjusted to rational or Western psychology. Moslemism is an expression of the Semitic psychology. That psychology is particular to the Semitic sub-species. In the Darwinian sense it is part and parcel of natural selection. HSIII and the Semites are psychologically incompatible. That cannot be changed.
Now, the Semites could never have created a civilization on their own but the glitter of the HSIII Sumerian civilization drew them from their desert haunts much as the glitter of Western civilization has drawn the Semites from their desert oil fields today. Bear in mind that the Semitic character was set a hundred thousand years before Sumer and that no matter how circumstances may change their character cannot. Its stern limits are set by genetic evolution.
It is to be assumed that just as the Semites first infiltrated Western civilization then attacked and destroyed the symbol of Western supremacy, the World Trade Center in the Western capital of New York City, that they committed a similar outrage against Sumer five thousand years ago. Character, methods and tactics in a sub-species do not change; as it is it was and ever shall be.
If one analyzes Semitic methods and ethos which will have remained unchanged for the five thousand years of recorded history it will be readily seen what transpired in Sumer and why the Sumerian civilization was obliterated.
The main body of Semites undoubtedly blamed a militant minority for whatever crime was perpetrated against the Sumerians. The Semitic story of Cain and Abel may point the way to the nature of the dispute, just as the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu may present the Sumerian version of the quarrel. Believing they were dealing with an honorable people, rather than driving the Semites away, the Sumerians believed that the Semites were sincere and that they could get along with them. Thus, while palavering endlessly the Semites continued to infiltrate Sumer until they had sufficient numbers within and sufficient military power without to displace the Sumerians in their own land. ‘Ye shall live in houses that ye never built.’ As the Bible says.
Not having inherent scientific ability the Semites gradually replaced the scientific basis of Sumerian society with their own brand of fanatical ignorant religion.
Thus, the Semites appropriated Mesopotamia and Syria occupying the coasts of the Mediterranean while retaining Arabia. The deadly pall of Semitic ignorance settled over the Near East, or Western Asia, however you look at it. Contemporary Egyptians styled them ‘vile Asiatics.’
Over the centuries the Semites came into direct conflict with the Egyptians who, if I am right in the origins of the Libyans of Lower Egypt, were an HS II people. As empires grew larger and came into direct contact the Semitic empire of Assyria was able to conquer the HSIIs of Egypt in the seventh century BC. Thus, in the Darwinian struggle for supremacy the Egyptians were eliminated as a people. They have never recovered being now a remnant after a genocidal persecution of centuries. Their place has been taken by Semites.
As in Sumer the Semitic character immediately began to attack the scientific religious culture of Egypt in an attempt to destroy it while superimposing their own fanatical religious culture, the culture of ignorance.
The HSIII Persians ousted the Semitic Assyrians being in turn ousted by the HSIII Greeks who were replaced by the HSIII or possibly HSII Romans.
Now, following their sub-special manner a group or race of Semites, known in history as Jews, who had been displaced in an intra-sub-special conflict with the Assyrians in 586 BC, had been infiltrating the various kingdoms of the Mediterranean from Gaul to Egypt and Libya much as their ancestors had infiltrated Sumer. They followed the intolerant Semitic impulse by combating the religion of their host countries. They aggressively over turned altars and insulted the religion of these nations.
Unwilling and unable to assimilate themselves, as in the prototype of Sumer, they sought first to infiltrate and then to conquer. In the Roman case, much as in the Semitic attack on the World Trade Center, they made their move prematurely and had insufficiently infiltrated the enemy territory while having no military force without to complete conquest. In the resulting wars known to history as the Jewish Wars the Romans all but exterminated the Palestinian Jews while the Jews within the empire stood by helplessly.
In the ensuing syncretistic Semito-Christian religion the Semites acquired a disproportionate influence over the Greek scientific thought completely suppressing it. In keeping with the Semitic Sumerian tradition the Semito-Christians attacked all science and learning in an attempt to stultify the Greek or scientific influence in their attempt to impose the ignorance which was in keeping with their native intellect. The result in the West was what is know as the Dark Ages.
Then, in the seventh century AD an Arabian Semite by the name of Mohammed re-evaluated the situation to come up with a new and more determined attempt to impose Semitism on the world.
After Sumer, in the Jewish attempt of the conquest of HSII and HSIII, the Jews were so cranked out that in their pride they excluded all from their religion but their own small race of Semites. This created a situation which in a direct confrontation with the majority must always lose. Mohammed realized the error of exclusiveness rewriting the rules so that even forcible proselytization to his new Semitic religion was preferred.
Thus, by enrolling potentially unlimited auxiliaries under a religious banner he was able to augment the numbers of Semites so that there was a chance of conquering the world under the banner of ignorance.
Mohammed also undoubtedly realized that even though the Semites had gained a preponderant influence in the Semito-Christian religion that eventually the majority would reject the foreign Semitic influence. It was necessary then to impose Semitism on the majority by physical force. He thus organized the Semites into a military force capable of attacking the world.
The Arabs quickly overran North Africa while their converts the Moors entered Spain quickly conquering that nation. Without a pause they swept through the Pyrenees to penetrate deep into Europe where they stopped nearly at the gates of Paris from which they were driven back into Spain. The Spaniards then began the Reconquista which took them nearly a millennium to accomplish. Thus Europe barely escaped being impaled on the lance of ignorance.
Although it is generally believed that at the beginning of the Arab conquest a brilliant scientific civilization was created this notion is completely false. The Moslems rode over an existing HSIII Greek scientific culture which they immediately assaulted in much the same manner as that of the Semito-Christians. It took them about three hundred years to suppress the Greek scientific culture until today there is not one shred of scientific learning in Moslem lands. Instead they dynamite anything that challenges the ignorant bigoted Moslem view of religion.
From that first impulse to the present day the Semites have never ceased their worldwide attack on both the West and the East. What the Assyrians failed to do in Egypt, Mohammed’s fanatical Moslems have accomplished. With ceaseless tireless energy and will Moslems have sought to impose their ignorance on the world.
The situation in 1877 when the Russians, Poles and Austrians were driving the Moslems out of Central and Eastern Europe was essentially that of today. Whether you like it or not Milosevic was continuing and winning the war referred to by the prefacing quote in 1877. The reviewer in the Quarterly Review realized that one must drive the Moslems out or accept the stultification of the HSIII species. That is what Milosevic was doing.
There was some surcease for the West when the Slavs and Austrians succeeded in driving the Moslem power back into Asia at the end of the nineteenth century. However Moslems remained successfully active in Africa, India and the Far East.
It was only Western Science that provided the means to temporarily crush the Moslems and put them in their place. That is where matters stood when the first historical continuum ended in 1945.
Regaining courage and strength from their oil reserves the Semites once again following in their five thousand years practice began to infiltrate every country in the world while consolidating themselves in their core areas.
Whether the attack on the West in New York was premature or not remains to be seen in the response the West makes. If it follows the Sumerian model of toleration then it must lose this five thousand year battle with the forces of ignorance. If it follows the Roman model and destroys Mecca and Medina as the Romans were compelled to destroy Jerusalem, while either exterminating or confining the Moslems then civilization will survive at whatever cost. The Hitlerian solution is so extreme as to cause revulsion. However if we are truly a scientific people both in physics and psychology we do have the means although we probably lack the will to conquer. Perhaps that was the Sumerian problem, too much prosperity and comfort to imperil. Like them we will probably be too supine to assert our superiority. We should be able to manage pretty well if we assume the will the defeat the enemy. This battle will be fought as a test of wills. This is a colder war than the war with Communism.
This same sort of analysis can be applied to every sub-species on the planet; the potentialities and possibilities of each has become an established fact, their future actions can be forecast from their past history. I do not intend to go into each, but it should be clear that the former Chinese leader, Mao Ze Dong, was true to the Chinese sub-special type. No matter what the Chinese may say, Mao bared the Chinese soul.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Strides Into The Scene
The life of Edgar Rice Burroughs straddled the great 1914 division of this both terminal and seminal period from 1859 to 1945. His youth was lived in the shadow of the Little Big Horn where Custer died for our sins in 1876 the year after Burroughs was born. The Plains Indians were still being overrun in his youth while he himself participated in the last Indian battles against the Apaches in the Southwest. Even as the Indians were being defeated he saw the success of man’s attempt to fly, the introduction of the telephone and movies. Henry Ford introduced the Model T making a mass market auto industry a reality almost at the same time Burroughs sat down to begin his Tarzan stories. And then the Titanic sank.
Burroughs was a pulp fiction writer. I think it can be argued that the pulp fiction magazine originated with the Strand Magazine in England. Pulp fiction called for a different approach than literary fiction. Literary fiction is designed to appeal to refined, informed or cultured tastes while pulp fiction was designed as popular entertainment for the widest possible audience.
Thus, Literary authors have tended to look down on popular writers. However one result of universal literacy was that ‘common’ tastes prevailed over fine literature. Today almost no one can tell you who the American literary author William Dean Howells was or have even heard of him, yet you may be certain that he and his contemporaries thought his literary immortality was secured.
Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for literature yet I doubt that even one person in a million could identify him. Booth Tarkington won two Pulitzer prizes which no one else has ever done yet the mention of his name draws blank stares. He wrote good stuff too which one hopes won’t be forgotten. ‘Seventeen’ was a real charmer.
Strangely, the great popular fiction writers are known not so much for themselves as for their creations. Thus, everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, but many would be stumped by the name Arthur Conan Doyle. You almost have to be a specialist to know who Bram Stoker was yet Dracula is a piece of furniture in everyone’s mind. Not one in an infinite number can identify Gaston LeRoux but all know the Phantom Of The Opera, his creation. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ name is fairly well known but not everyone can connect him to his universally known creation, Tarzan. Not even in his home town, Tarzana.
Burroughs came at the tail end of that crop of popular writers who have been the staple of twentieth century literature. He was too young to be a part of the Kipling, Wells, Haggard and Doyle scene although circumstances did make him a friend of the OZ creator, L. Frank Baum.
Even thought H.G. Wells was only six years his senior Well’s writing career began in the 1890s. He had been famous nearly twenty years before Burroughs put pen to paper. And yet Burroughs writing connects him to this pre-1914 literary scene as a sort of younger sibling; he belongs to this tradition. Nor is his creation, Tarzan, inferior in reputation to any other literary creation of the time with the exception of the archetype of the twentieth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Even then, many, if not most people don’t realize that there is not only one Tarzan novel but a series of them.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ eyes had seen most of the seminal events of this productive pre-1914 period when he sat down to write. He was able to reflect on them all. Unlike his near contemporaries he did not create the era so much as recapitulate it. From 1914 to 1945 was pretty much a playing out of these earlier developments.
Darwin’s theory of evolution had created a defined racial hierarchy at the bottom of which was the Negro and at the top of which was the EuroAmerican White. In between were the Semites and Mongolids. This notion is reflected in Burroughs’ writing.
While it was believed that this was the order of evolution there was no scientific basis for proving what was apparent to the eyes.
The great disrupting discoveries in physics and psychology had already been made and were becoming popularized. Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and others were leading a sexual revolution; the Feminist Movement was in full tilt while in a few years the unthinkable would occur when Communism seized power in Russia in 1917 which made the post 1914 world so different while people were slow to understand the magnitude of the change. And then there was the introduction of the income tax which disturbed ERB so much in ‘Tarzan And The Ant Men.’
Amazingly Burroughs eyes were so acute he was able to understand and incorporate all these developments in the Tarzan novels without ever mentioning any by name. In his dedication to ‘entertainment’ he was able to write around, below, above and through these developments without letting any of them obtrude didactically into his stories. Therein lies, I think, the secret of his success. While H.G. Wells became a didactic preacher for his causes at the end of his career thereby dating himself; Burroughs sublimated his opinions while yet always coming down on the right side of the question. He cannot be considered a reactionary or even a conservative; he always understood the nature of the question and saw the correct viewpoint. Thus, he remains ‘modern’ or current.
Burroughs has been accused of ‘racism’ for his views on evolution but the accusation misses the point. Bear in mind the consequences of evolution and natural selection. To speculate on the nature of evolution and apply the results is not ‘racism.’ After all, not only did Burroughs have no trouble with evolution but he seems to have a well thought out notion of it which differs little from Darwin’s natural selection and seems to be closer to the more accurate scientific genetic explanation. One might call ERB a speculative evolutionist.
This is a remarkable achievement as in 1912 when he began to write, no academic could openly reject religion in favor of evolution without being expelled from the academic community. Even though they knew better they still proclaimed that evolutionary beliefs did not challenge religious opinions.
Burroughs, courageously one might say, disregards all religious considerations, writing about evolution as though it were an accepted and undeniable fact. Tarzan experiences every phase of evolution in his development. He was reared as a beast, consorted with the Africans, then considered the lowest form of humanity, and went directly to being a civilized EuroAmerican and then backtracked to become the chief of the Black Waziri then becoming the Great White Potentate of all Africa.
The significant point here is that Burroughs apparently considers the Negro as a distinct species. Rokoff, the Russian villain in ‘Son of Tarzan’, tells Jane that as her husband was born a beast so Jack, his son, will be placed amongst an African tribe to be reared in the evolutionary stage of the Negro, that is, between the apes and homo sapiens.
Blacks are also differentiated culturally by Burroughs; he does not deal in rude stereotypes. He is aware of cultural differences between African tribes. His proud Waziri are the crème de la crème of the African tribes in every respect, especially in never having submitted to Arab slavers. American Blacks such as Robert Jones of ‘At The Earth’s Core; who have been subjected to different cultural influences in the United States are portrayed entirely differently from the various African Blacks. ERB has a keen eye for distinctions, in dialect and speech most especially.
He himself was an avid reader. This is no more apparent than in his treatment of his Arab characters. He never traveled outside the United States so his knowledge of Moslemism and Arabs had to be acquired completely from books. As Warbaby pointed out in ‘Tarzan Meets Mohammed’ Burroughs was a keen student of Moslem culture. He perceived the complete lack of Science in Moslem thought nearly predicting 9/11.
It is very true that he has no great liking for his Arab characters. They are uniformly disreputable and bad.
Yet they are not stock characters. There is a great deal of individuality about them. Personally I found Amor Ben Khatour, the abductor of Miriem in ‘Son of Tarzan’ a terrifying and realistic character. I thought the sub-plot between Meriem’s father and Khatour well handled.
That the Arabs are all villains may be attributed less to ‘racism’ than the fact of their occupation. They are all slave traders. The Arabs living in Africa were associated with the slave trade. Being a slave trader in Arab society was something like being a dope dealer in ours. Just because someone want to buy the product doesn’t mean they want to be associated with the dealers. The dealer is usually a disreputable person whether in drugs or slaves. Anyone who has read his Burton and Stanley can form a pretty accurate idea of a slaver’s character.
How then could Burroughs depict his Arabs as any less than brutal, mean, disreputable men. This is what a slaver is; this is what Burroughs understood; there is no racism involved. He doesn’t descend into name calling. Rather Burroughs grapples honestly and accurately with some fairly difficult problems.
Burroughs was cleverly synthesizing the ideas and learning of the 1859-1914 period in a way in which those of us of the post-1945 generation who were at ‘Childhood’s End; could use his opinions and attitudes to build a base of opinion on which to extend our own attitudes into the future as a basis of our own lives.
As evidence that Burroughs succeeded is the fact that his character named Tarzan who no longer has a home in a geographical location called Africa still exists as the Lord of the Jungle in a psychological projection of our subconscious called Africa.
NOW I SEE THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Yes, that terrifying Congo, that symbol of the Heart of Darkness, the savage untutored wildness creeping through the jungle of our nocturnal fears, the psychological malaise that affects us all. How to find that golden track of consciousness that will relieve us of our uncertainties and make the world safe for us, that is the question.
Perhaps Burroughs’ greatest success was that he created a character to represent our conscious minds while reducing the world of subconscious terrors of this jungle of Africa called Life to a manageable form. In this mental Africa by the force of character we can all feel less threatened and more at home as we cruise down our personal Congo in our very own ‘Lady Alice.’
Long live Tarzan and God Bless Edgar Rice Burroughs.
A Review: David Amram, Vibrations & Downbeat
August 6, 2017
A Review:
David Amram’s Vibrations and Offbeat
by
R.E. Prindle
Amram, David: Downbeat: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002
Amram, David: Vibrations, original MacMillan’s 1968, this issue Thunder’s Mouth Press 2001
Wakefield, Dan: New York In The Fifties, Houghton, Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992
While apparently but few have ever heard of David Amram yet he was a significant figure in the Sixties and beyond. He was or is a musician, French Horn player and composer. A couple of his movie soundtrack credits, The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor In The Grass of the Fifties give some indication of his recognition in the entertainment world although having seen both movies I had no idea he scored them while Imdb gives credit to Amram and Irving Berlin and Grass to a Euphemia Allen. So there you have it.
No one to whom I have mentioned him has ever heard of him. As I was in the record business in the Sixties and Seventies I knew the name but nothing more. I don’t recollect selling any of his records or even carrying them. I called his name up on Amazon’s Echo or Alexa and listened to a couple hours of stuff a couple of times and while the music is pleasant enough I find it undistinguished.
My attention for this review was brought to me because his book Offbeat is a record of his association with Jack Kerouac the author and founder of the Beats. I will deal with the association in the appropriate place. Vibrations, David’s first book, is a discussion of his life from birth in 1930 to his thirty seventh year in 1967, the book was published in 1968. Vibrations is a very interesting psychological study whether the reader has heard of Amram or not. As of this writing (8/2/17) he is still living at 87 years and looking very presentable. Significantly he doesn’t call Vibrations an autobiography but a memoir.
David was born in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where he spent his early years on a farm until his father took a war job and moved the family to Washington DC in 1942, the move was very traumatic for twelve-year old David who loved his life on the farm and never recovered from losing it. Later in life he would buy a farm.
The move to DC was especially traumatic because his family moved into a house in what was called a checkerboard neighborhood, that is a mixed Negro and White area. David and his family were themselves Jewish. The central childhood fixation that governed David’s life was when he entered Gordon Jr. High. He describes the experience in detail and since it is so important to the telling of his story I will quote in full, pp. 17-18:
A few days later I entered Gordon Junior High School. Because I had just come from a small rural school, Gordon Junior High seemed enormous. The playground alone was larger than the entire school area in the country. The atmosphere was completely different because of the large number of students, the fact that it was a southern school and the air of seething violence that seemed to be everywhere. The atmosphere of violence was constant and when it erupted the teachers as well as the students seemed to take the idea of fighting for granted.
The moment I arrived I saw three or four serious fights in the school playground.
Six or seven boys were holding someone’s arms behind him while he was being smashed and stomped by two or three others. I was used to being in fights myself, but at least we used to go at it one at a time and when I got to be a good fighter myself, the fights finally stopped. But I noticed that here the parents of some of the smaller kids led them right into school or they came in with older kids who served as protection. It took me a little while to realize there were several organized gangs in the school, including one called the Foggybottom Gang. My sister was going to boarding school in Florida because of her health. I was sure glad she didn’t have to through this with me. When we had gone to school in the country she used to lie down on the floor of the car on the way home so the kids wouldn’t see her. She was terrified then because of the abuse I used to take being called a Jew. I had gotten used to it, but she never could.
But there at least she was safe on the floor of the car. In 1942 at Gordon Junior High no one was safe. Even teachers- those who couldn’t fight back- were in danger of being punched pummeled kicked or even knifed. It was a madhouse and I enjoyed every minute of it. I had never liked school anyway except for music and sports, so the chaotic conditions in the classroom, with kids yelling and insulting the teachers, setting their desks on fire, throwing snowballs with razors and rocks inside, fighting and even one student being pushed out the window- it all seemed wonderful and exciting to me. By the third day I felt at home. The classes were so backward that in about thirty minutes I could do all my homework and spend the rest of the afternoon practicing the piano or playing in the back with Walter and some other kids I met.
The fifth day in school I was coming from the science class when a boy named Joe punched me on the shoulder and almost knocked me down.
“Watch that, Joe.” I said.
He seemed surprised that I knew his name. “How do you know my name?” he said.
Suddenly the casual group behind him seemed to become an organized gang standing stiff and hostile. All the kids behind me also stopped and in a few seconds later the immediate rumble was inevitable.
“Never mind how I know your name, just watch who you’re pushing,” I said. With that he threw a right at me. Because I was expecting something like this, I slipped his punch. Next he hit me in the left shoulder, spinning me half around. Then he leaped for me and I caught him with my right elbow in the stomach, hit him three or four times in the face put my leg behind him, hit him on the Adam’s apple and knocked him backward into a locker. He didn’t feel like fighting anymore.
Then all of a sudden, one of the larger teachers materialized out of nowhere, hit me in the face and knocked me down. He then proceeded to knock four or five other students as well while everyone else scattered. I was stunned. Kids who hadn’t even had anything to do with the fight were lying on the floor, wondering what had happened. He pulled up and marched us up to the principal’s office. While we were waiting for the principal to come out, another teacher was rushing down the hall, yelling for the teacher to get to another class where a serious fight was going on. He left and by the time the principal came back, Joe and some of the other students had slipped out of the office leaving just one other boy and myself. The principal was a kindly old man in his seventies and obviously was nearly ready to retire. His name was Mr. Winston, a sweet old man with white hair, a white mustache, stooped and worn out by all the years in Washington’s public school system and very upset about the chaos that had developed since the war began and the younger teachers were all away.
“Boys,” he said in a genteel southern moan, “The good Lord didn’t put you on earth to act like animals. Fighting is for an animal, not for gentlemen. I want you two boys to shake hands and promise never to fight no more.”
“But I wasn’t even fighting,” said the other poor boy, about to break into tears.
“Don’t sass me son, I don’t even want your name. Just don’t let me see you in here again with fights. I don’t know what’s happened to the school and to young people today. In my day people would fight each other fair and square, out behind the schoolhouse. It’s just with the fathers away, there doesn’t seem to be any discipline.” He looked through his thick glasses at both of us almost expecting us to sympathize with him. “All right, boys,” he said wearily, “you all go back to your classes and don’t let me see you in here again.”
We got up and left and went back to our classes. After a hysterical Latin class, during which the teacher, a kindly woman in her fifties with an incredible case of dandruff, was shouted down and almost knocked to the floor by one of the students, I left in disgust. I knew you weren’t going to learn anything that way. Outside I saw Joe and the members of the Foggy Bottom Gang waiting. I noticed that two of them had knives, which I could see glinting in the sun. They were not switchblades but the kind of knife used for shucking oysters in Chesapeake Bay, easy to hide in your pants and very sharp. I had heard of several stabbings the year before, and I didn’t want to be the first victim of the new academic year, so I went out the back way through the boiler room and walked home.
And David says he loved that and was right at home. Apart from pretty spectacular total recall the story sets out the problem of Black and White relations from then on. Of course the effect of this incredible first week at school was very traumatic for David fixating him it would seem with a variation of the Stockholm syndrome. Nor was this an isolated incident but the ‘normal’ situation that would go on for years, his entire youth, in David’s checkerboard neighborhood. While seeming to maintain a rigid separation between his Black and White identities as well as White and Jewish identities his primary identity seemed to be White during this period while he sank into a medium grade depression. He immersed his mind in music to escape his desperate situation and his music the rather odd combination of French Horn and Negro Jazz. Probably the French Horn was a desperate clinging to his White identity.
But, first let us put his situation into a perspective that must lead to the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education. The Brown decision assumed that schools were not segregated and that there was no experience to indicate what the result of integration would be. Yet, here in DC in the forties and probably the thirties one has a sociological situation that indicates precisely what the result would be. There was no need for guesswork.
The Supreme Court justices who would make the Brown decision had integration information on the residential level that was horrendous. Eventually all the White people would leave DC or were driven out by the Negroes and DC became something of a cauldron of crime. One in which even Negroes were desperate to escape.
The schools were such that, as in Amram’s case he was terrorized for life but the White fantasy was that no resistance by Whites should be offered to the atrocities. Now, this was not just young Negroes mixed with young Whites. In high schools grown men were entered as students who then directed the young Negroes in terrorizing the Whites to gain control and dominance. Thus,. Whites were taught or required to accept the criminal behavior quietly or they would be charged with the horrendous crime of ‘racism’. If they fought back win or lose they would be charged as the aggressors and have their young lives destroyed, sacrificed on the altar of integration. The saying then and now was ‘you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Interestingly David has a song with the refrain, ‘all my eggs are broken.’
Any rational White person could see and understand the result of forced integration. Whites were being denied equality and their rights, essentially enslaved to the Negroes. The Whites of the South against whom the Brown decision was actually directed with their long experience with the Negro were clear as to the outcome. If nothing else they had this sociological experiment in DC before their eyes as well as the deplorable conditions in Northern schools which were already integrated. It was quite obvious that integration would lead to disintegration of society so it must be obvious that the intent of the Supreme Court justices was the disintegration of society.
The Southern Whites therefore put up a stout resistance refusing to accept the Justices’ decision which, after all, was merely the Justices’ intention. It would take the Executive to enforce the decision. This led then President Eisenhower to his decision to mobilize army troops and if tanks were not used my memory projected them on the scene. These were regular Army bearing arms to conduct a Negro Student into Little Rock’s Central High School.
Of course, the propaganda value of a switchblade bearing six foot four, two hundred pound Negro giant being led by an army squad into the high school was nil. Not being totally ignorant of propaganda effects, as their model student they chose a petite little girl in a pink pinafore and pigtails to be escorted by appropriately huge soldiers bearing arms. Resistance at that point was futile and Little Rock’s Central High was turned into the same hell hole that David Amram experienced at DC’s Gordon Jr. High. Rape and turmoil.
In today’s schools, one doesn’t see too many petite Negro girls wearing pink pinafores with their hair in pigtails. The propaganda effect of Eisenhower’s action was that the US government valued Negroes over Whites and that has been proven in the sequel. No integrated school today is an educational institution. Today, however, as well as knives, guns are much in use, so students pass metal detectors on the way to classes. Was Brown an improvement in race relations? As the current situation was predictable it must have been according to plan.
David Amram endured this torture all through Jr. High and High School. He must have needed some escape and he found it in his music allowing him to retreat into the safety of his own mind. Trapped in a Negro culture the music given him to express himself was Negro jazz. However the instrument he chose was the French Horn which is not a jazz instrument. He might have done better to have chosen the saxophone or trumpet if he had really chosen to excel as a jazz musician. Rather the French Horn was his rather obvious connection to his White heritage. He carried it around with him like a child and his security blanket.
Perhaps in an effort to gain some security he sought the company of Negro musicians who accepted him and his French Horn although they usually remarked: ‘Hmm, a French Horn, you don’t see those much in jazz bands.’ I never have. David must have been a semi-comical figure on the band stand. ‘Who’s the dude with the French Horn?’ Thus he had a presence in the DC area. I presume he graduated high school although he says that what with the constant chaos in class the academic standards weren’t too demanding. Sufficient to say he attained a degree of competence on his symbolic French Horn.
I suspect that he was a mental wreck by his late teen years. The military draft had not been discontinued after the war so the probable necessity of serving in the military loomed before him. He solved this problem by volunteering just as the Korean War burst upon the scene.
Following so quickly on the heels of the Second World War the Korean War, referred to as a ‘police action’ had a psychologically disturbing effect on society especially just after the Soviet Union exploded their own atomic bomb in 1949, relying heavily on US spies. The idea that Americans would betray the country to Russians was very traumatic, causing a lot of self-doubt. It shook the country to its foundations.
-II-
David was fifteen when WWII ended and he probably graduated high school in 1948. The Korean War began in June of 1950. The military draft was still in effect so rather than wait to be called up David volunteered for a two year tour of duty in the Army. Joining the Army also got him out of DC a movthat might have been more difficult otherwise. For the first time since Jr. High, then, he was removed from a Negro environment. The military at the time was averse to social experiments so there were few Negroes in the Army. The Army, of course, had had Negro regiments since the Civil War but they had White officers and were not integrated otherwise. The Navy had never had Negro sailors except for Stewards and other service personnel and would evade integration until 1957.
While his memoir balances David’s Negro, Caucasian and Jewish heritages it must have been true that the Negro characteristics of his heritage dominated his personality at the time. He was clearly a hipster and may have been what Norman Mailer called a White Negro. Certainly his speech must have been heavily Negro and hipster, or cat, to use an alternate term.
At any rate with his trusty French Horn tucked under his arm he began his military experience. As luck would have it he was not sent to Korea but to the other side of the world to monitor the Germans and keep the Soviets on their side of the Iron Curtain. The fear of an invasion of Europe by the Soviets kept people on edge along with the A-bomb.
Psychologically his Army service must have been a healing period for David’s mind even if the military experience is nearly as traumatic as David’s DC Negroland life. But, the Army would probably have been less dangerous to navigate. And then, at twenty he was older and more able to deal with things.
To compare my own experience of a very difficult childhood that left me with certain psychological impairments and my military experience following immediately after high school graduation I was removed from the scene of my youthful pressures, and, even though under the stresses of the military, my mind began healing as soon as I left the scene of their creation so about eight months on the worst psychological effects lifted much to my relief. I’m sure that happened to David also because like me he spent the next decade or so in the process of realizing not only his White heritage but even more deeply his Jewish heritage. At this period he became a Jew. Indeed, his memoir that carries his life only up to the age of 37 was a record of that journey of realization.
David’s descriptions of his states of mind and person are presented only incidentally. There are no detached descriptions and no analysis. So looking through his narrative one sees a beat up hommey running very nearly on auto-pilot, unkempt, close to dirty, making his way through the army. His trusty French Horn removes him from the more onerous aspects of army life into a twilight zone of musical misfits forming the Seventh Army Band.
As David describes the band they are one subversive lot, refusing to wear their uniforms properly while evading all other regulations to the best of their ability. It should be noted that most were draftees and not regular Army. There was always conflict between those coerced to serve and the regulars who chose military service as their vocation, so his group wasn’t too far out of line. David describes how he grew his hair as long as possible carefully stuffing it under his hat. I know where that’s at. I too was I wouldn’t say rebellious, bur resentful, not only of the Navy but of life, I too grew my hair as long as possible and stuffed it under my hat.
I hadn’t his congenial atmosphere but I’m sure that being in with these musicians eased his two years which in different circumstances might have been disastrous. With a better frame of mind his tour of duty would have been delightful as the band toured Europe giving concerts thereby living the high life compared to foot troops.
Somewhat rescued from himself David was discharged into the world in 1953 having contributed his two years to the destiny of America. However he was still an ill man suffering the after effects of Washington DC. Consequently unable to face returning to that future he chose not to return to the United States taking up residency in Paris instead.
He was still a beat up hommey hence he chose the Bohemian way of life. While he wallowed in his misery his intention was still to reclaim the Feasterville life he enjoyed before his disastrous removal to DC. Thus, after gathering his psychological bearings to some extent he returned to the US landing in NYC in 1955. Having no desire to return to the horrific memories of DC he found his way to Greenwich Village and the Boho way of life.
-III-
From 1955 when David Amram returned to the US from Europe to 1966 when he climbed the mountain of respectability to become the resident composer of the New York Philharmonic was a short eleven years, only a decade. For the major part of those years David was a dirty, ragged Bohemian who most frequently offended his friends by his appearance and the rat holes he lived in, by his own admission. His depression must have been fairly deep yet he avoided drugs in a druggy atmosphere, stayed fairly sober and worked like the devil.
He had been advised that composing music would be his deliverance rather than his horn playing. Indeed, while David assures us that he was a superior horn player a professional shows up, befriends him, and gives him lessons on horn playing to correct his defects. Regardless then of David’s self-evaluation capable horn players thought he needed help. Composing was to be his meal ticket.
Now, let us concentrate on the subject of Amram’s second book, Offbeat, concerning his relationship with the writer Jack Kerouac. I’m sure that most people will recognize Kerouac as the author of the Beat bible, On The Road. Perhaps some of those know that Kerouac wrote reams of material throughout a couple dozen books. Critics at the time castigated the writer as close to worthless. I have to agree with them although I have to say that Kerouac is one of the all time greatest word slingers. The words slip mellifluously from his pen but with small content. His books are the equivalent of well produced B movies. For me they always leave a bad taste. I mean, he wrote about bums.
Kerouac had a difficult time getting On The Road published. Indeed from the time he wrote the book to its publication he wrote ten other unpublished books and he didn’t stop there. I was probably among the first to read On The Road. The Beats, of which Kerouac is considered the originator, were considered to be revolutionary, but as unsavory types they succeeded indirectly. Revolution was in the air in the Fifties through the Sixties and it permeated my time in the US Navy just before the beginning of 1957 through 1959.
My ship was leaving for a Pacific tour of duty at the end of the summer of 1957. Just before we shoved off, this is true, a sailor on the dock passed a blue bound advance copy to our Communist Yeoman telling him this was an important book for the revolution. I missed what was revolutionary about it reading only about a bunch of footloose losers. It was talked about aboard ship however and it changed attitudes.
Subsequently the book became a bible of sorts for a certain type of guy. I could never understand why but it was a major influence on their attitude toward life.
So, Offbeat is a three hundred page book about Jack and David’s relationship. David met him in 1956 just as the Beat movement was about to surface nationwide. According to David in Offbeat their relationship was intense; at times one can almost believe that they were married. David says that he wrote the book at the insistence of a friend who thought Dave’s experiences were too valuable to go unrecorded. However, in Dave’s six hundred page memoir Vibrations Kerouac gets only a couple mentions with no indication of an involved relationship, not even a hint of Kerouac’s significance. Where the truth lies, from my reading is indeterminate. Nonetheless certain indisputable facts are recorded.
In 1959 Kerouac wrote the script for a movie titled Pull My Daisy. A short film of twenty minutes. David was asked to score the film. His accounts between Downbeat and Vibrations vary wildly. In Downbeat he says Jack asked him to score it; in Vibrations he says Leslie and Frank did. I would imagine most people have not heard of the movie, Pull My Daisy. David makes it sound like a major cultural event. I have watched part of it. I left off maybe halfway through. David who is a real booster of anything his friends did thought it was terrific.
For those immersed in the Beat period it may be of interest to see their heroes in action. Ginsberg, Corso, Amram, they’re all there in their beatnik glory. For my tastes they looked like a bunch of bums goofing around a dump of a house. In Variations David gives credit for the film to the artist Alfred Leslie and the filmmaker Robert Frank. Leslie was an artist, apparently of some renown, I have to confess I have never heard of him, he has a couple of published collections, while Robert Frank has a reputation as an early ‘experimental’ filmmaker. Having become somewhat familiar with various experimental films I find them more self-indulgent than impressive.
In Offbeat David characterizes the performance as improvisational to the nth degree, the actors cutting up in totally undisciplined disarray. In Variations he portrays the filming as carefully planned by Leslie and Frank. Indeed Leslie ‘revealed’ in 1968 that while the production was thought to be improvisational it was actually carefully plotted. You’d have to read the sources to make up your own mind. Offbeat seems the most reasonable approach to me.
It is a silent film with no dialogue but Kerouac does a voice over completely improvised according to David while David improvises the musical background as Kerouac speaks. He says Kerouac and he were satisfied with the result while Leslie and Frank wished to make several takes to get the best possible results. Kerouac and Amram who value extemporaneity more than a hoped for perfection demur but agree to one more take and then refuse any further effort.
In Variations David says the he reworked his music separately seeking perfection corroborating Leslie’s 1968 revelation. There does seem to be a clash of ideals that reduces the integrity of David’s two texts while casting doubt on the veracity of his memories.
Dan Wakefield in his 1992 memoir, New York In The Fifties makes mention of Amram, usually positive and even admiring, as a spreader of sunshine so I suspect David of speaking well, putting things in their best light for the occasion rather than strict accuracy. This is nowhere more evident than in his account of poetry readings. He credits Kerouac and himself as introducing musically accompanied readings to Bohemia in New York. This is probably true as Kerouac and Ginsberg had been doing the same in San Francisco. I think he gives too much credit also to the quality of the poets and their poetry. I attended a coupe readings in North Beach, San Francisco and came away singularly unimpressed with the poetry although the social scene was nice.
For some delightful accounts of poetry reading in the New York of the Sixties Ed Sanders of the Fugs has wonderful accounts in his Tales Of Beatnik Glory. There are also some filmed readings on the internet, but without the ambience of being in the audience it’s not the same thing.
While David is great for waxing enthusiastic about his relationship with his horn he fades away on the historical background of his activities. For instance, he mentions the jazz bar the Five Spot as being important but fails to give context. Dan Wakefield on the other hand found the Five Spot so significant that he goes into great detail even providing some information on its ambiance. In fact, those places, jazz clubs, were holes requiring a great deal of enthusiasm for jazz to endure the environment.
I never visited any NYC jazz clubs during the day but I did pay a visit to the Blackhawk in San Francisco. The Blackhawk was one of the premier jazz clubs in the country. Let me say from the outset that I am not a jazz buff. The depression, pain and rage that underlies the music is offensive to my tastes, especially the classic jazz of the Fifties. The Negro artists of the Fifties were sui generis. As they aged they were never replaced although that fact seems to have gone unnoticed. Jazz began withering during the Sixties, was commercialized in the seventies and eighties and what remains is probably formulaic today.
The mystique of the Negro players was incredible. If the Blackhawk was any indication the club was a church for jazzists and the players were its high priests. Essentially they could get away with anything in those dark nasty hypnotic caves. The Negro artists were themselves worshipped by the Whites. Dan Wakefield tells the following story of one of the highest of the priesthood Charlie Mingus, p. 309:Mingus was a figure all right, and could be as dramatic and surprising off stage as on. The novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer will never forget the time he took a beautiful girl to the Five Spot when he was nineteen years old. “I wanted to impress her,” he says. “Mingus was playing, and I could tell he noticed the girl- everyone noticed her. When the last set was over, Mingus came up to our table and took out a pair of handcuffs. He didn’t say a word, just clamped one of the handcuffs on his own wrist and then clamped the other on the wrist of my date. She didn’t say anything, and he pulled up her arm, so she stood up, and then they walked out the door together, neither of them saying anything.”
Of course, the important thing here is that Wurlitzer made no protest, he acquiesced in her abduction although he was responsible for her safety. No one else in the jazz church said anything either. The high priest had his prerogatives. That and the mystique accorded to the Magic Negro.
Indeed, Amram, Wakefield and others were all working hard for the integration of the bands themselves, perhaps thinking that was a panacea for something. Wakefield himself, accounts the advent of the Beatles in 1964 as the disruption of the integration dream and perhaps the beginning of the end for jazz. Certainly, the musical priesthood was transferred from Negroes to Whites when the Beatles became the high priests. As Wakefield complains, the Beatles and the bands following from England were all White. So, while there were a few exceptions in Rock- Jimi Hendrix- that jazz dream was destroyed. It should be noticed that there is a Hendrix church. Negro energy was transferred to the all Black soul bands of the Sixties led by Detroit’s Motown label.
According to Wakefield the Lit., Music and Art crowds of Greenwich Village were separate, the artists favoring the Cedar Tavern, the Literature crowd the White Horse Tavern and the music crowd the Village Vanguard and other spots. The Folk crowd was not prominent in Wakefield’s mind during the Fifties for some reason. They were certainly there. Wakefield says that while most crowds stuck to respective groups Amram was a curiosity as he moved freely through all groups with a reputation as Mr. Sunshine.
Indeed, he was something of a touch giving small sums of money to anyone who asked for it. He complains about being broke while at the same time he says that he gave his money away, living in digs few would tolerate. If his sweater, of which he speaks so lovingly, hadn’t been so raggedy, worn and smelly he would have given that off his back to anyone willing to take it. A real St. Francis. He must, then, have had many acquaintances who would speak well of him in place of returning the loans.
In addition to pushing for integrated bands and racial harmony David rediscovered his own racial roots in Judaism. A synagogue beneath his window whose religious music rose through it awakened his interest through its mournful dirge answering to his own depression as jazz did. Consequently David offered to compose sacred music for the services, which music was well received. Thus his ties to Judaism were revived.
As a composer he composed furiously, able to turn out reams and reams of compositions. Now, the Fifties, they were not a dull time unless, of course, you were dull, although my own familiarity with the later years was disrupted by entering the Navy, losing contact with those critical years for the future; I was in exile, as it were, in the military. Nevertheless, so-called world music began after WWII in the nascent Folk music scene by the group called the Weavers led by the ever present Pete Seeger. Wakefield seems to have ignored the Folkies but Folk was very largely White as well as Rock music and the two actually coalesced in the Sixties.
After the War it seems like there were hundreds of songs celebrating the charms of far away places with strange sounding names. Martin Denny’s LP The Quiet Village was a whole album of songs celebrating exotic tropical paradises.
At this time also Electra Records began a series of LPs of ethnic musics that was very in with the knowing, the avant guard. On its Nonesuch label Electra issued two terrific albums of Balinese Gamelon music including the memorable Ramayana Monkey Chant, a real listening experience. A Bulgarian record was much revered and well as several others. The African record Missa Luba is a not to be missed classic. That’s only if you are of the ilk otherwise you won’t appreciate such discs
So, David was a leader of this Travel Poster Crowd. Travel posters of far away place were de riguer on everyone’s walls especially after the Boeing 707 changed international travel in 1959. David Amram was riding the wave of a future on that score even though jazz was emitting a dying moan. By the seventies these Fifties jazz artists were so passe that a record producer by the name of Creed Taylor fashioned a line of easy listening records employing various of these old passe Negro players with reputations as a front to legitimize his easy listening and he made a fortune. There’s gold out there you just have to know where to find it. It was the end of an era.
David then had conquered all musical worlds except for the White world of classical music. As I see it he had made a million friends with his zippity doo dah attitude expecially and most importantly in the Jewish religious world.
The background story here is unknown or, at least, undiscovered by me. The New York Philharmonic had never had a resident composer but in 1966 the position was created for David. David was appreciative and by his account overwhelmed and well he might be. There appears to have been a great gulf between what he was doing and the professional world of the New York Philharmonic of Leonard Bernstein.
The impression one gets is that the Philharmonic gave into pressure from somewhere to create a respectable paying position for Dave. In doing so, of course, they enabled him to rise from his declassed state caused by his entrance into DC’s Gordon Jr. High. He now became a man of all classes and was enabled to regain his lost self-respect. He probably would never fit in to the over world because of the underclass characteristics he had acquired in his long and traumatic exile among the subteranneans.
If I had to guess as to how he was offered his newly created position I think it would be his association with the rabbis and his sacred compositions for them. The upper music world of New York is almost all Jewish. Leonard Bernstein himself, then the conductor of the Philharmonic, was himself Jewish and subject to pressure from the rabbis. I’m guessing it was all in the synagogue, but David realized his goal and immediately commemorated it in his memoir. David was only thirty-seven, living today at 87 his life wasn’t even half over.
-IV-
Up to 1967 David’s is an American story. A collection of racial, ethnic and religious heritages to be reconciled: in his case White American, Jew and Negro. The conflation of all three could have destroyed David’s life but he had what it took to blast through to salvation. Salvation to at least 1967, the sequel remains to be seen. David continues his story in a 2008 book he titles Upbeat: Nine Lives Of A Musical Cat. I have yet to read that but I may report on it when I do.
David grew up under a Melting Pot hope of immigration. Under that fantasy the immigrants would gradually assimilate themselves to Anglo-American mores, forget their antecedents and then the US would be a great big harmonious happy family Anglo Saxon family because Anglo-Saxons had discovered he secret of governing. One fault to that theory was that Negroes weren’t immigrants and the Melting Pot theory didn’t include the Negro race. No matter what happened the Negro problem would be insoluble.
The theory also broke down because some immigrant groups wished to impose their mores on the Anglo-Saxons rather than those of the Anglo-Saxons on them. Chief among those were those of David’s Jewish heritage. As it was their intention to impose their mores made it necessary to dissolve the Melting Pot into its constituent parts and then reassemble them under the Jewish aegis. Thus for several years after 1945 it became a custom to have various national festivals in which people dressed in their national dress and did a couple dances. That didn’t last too long because under American conditions it was humiliating; we were supposed to be one and for most other national customs really had no place. The time for that sort of celebration had passed.
David’s Negro heritage was a more convenient lever for disintegration as well as his Jewish heritage itself. Lest we have confusion let me say I share David’s three heritages, as do all Americans whether they realize it or not, plus a heritage of the orphanage and several lesser ones, most notable Polish an English but I consider myself American First, White second and devil take the hindmost. But, we all, because of immigration, share in each and every heritage. The Jews, the Negroes and whoever have given up any exclusivity to their heritage, like it or not.
As there was tremendous White guilt over slavery this was cultivated as the Negro question and was a great tool as witness the White girl Mingus abducted for sexual purposes no doubt and neither she nor her boyfriend nor anyone objected. No other race or nationality could have pulled that off. It is significant that Mingus knew he could. No one has to excuse his conduct because he was Black and objecting would make one a racist. Absolute nonsense. Injustice wherever it is found should be resisted.
It is also indicative of how society had disintegrated when David as a Jew, within the synagogue if I’m correct, had the job of resident composer created just for him.
America rather than being a Melting Pot was being created as diverse before our eyes consolidating under a Jewish aegis.
In order to do that it is necessary to destroy the symbols of power of the dominant culture. Thus, the well documented War on Christmas, reducing it from a national custom to a parochial one, depriving Anglo-Saxon of the notion that America is Christian. This, even though the Jews are only two percent of the population. In the last couple of years any symbol ‘offensive’ to a non-White culture such as statues, trademarks etc. are being forcibly removed by sub-cultures. Not only the Confederate flag but the US flag itself is under assault. The law, the Supreme Court Justices, enforces minority rights against the majority. Since the election of Trump resistance to these encroachments has become permissible but not legal.
The problem is not that sub-cultures want their own monuments that exist along side traditional monuments, names, titles, whatever but that the dominant culture and its monuments shall be replaced by the minority cultures and monuments.
Rather than follow that line of reasoning for the time being I think I will break off here and continue when I have read Amram’s Upbeat, see how the nine lives have worked out.
Red Octopus vs. The Nazi Hydra: Boring From Within
July 11, 2017
The Myth Of The Twenty-First Century
Red Octopus vs. The Nazi Hydra
Boring From Within
by
R.E. Prindle
The whole contest between the Red Octopus and The Nazi Hydra was framed on race. The myth was that the evil White Man through no special talent of his own had seized the wealth of the world and subjected the colored peoples from who he stole. Hence the White Man must be made to pay. Pay with his life.
Thus all the colored peoples of the world are arrayed against the evil White Man. IN the US the Democratic Liberal Party is home to the colored peoples and the sanctimonious White Liberal. The next step in the myth was the White Man as the oppressor of Homosexuals and White Women. The motto of the Octopus is Whiteness must disappear from the earth before justice can reign. The plan of action is: Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civilization has got to go.
The myth of the Devil White Man began to form in the wake of WWI and the revolutions and skirmishes that continued for several years. WWII put paid to White Supremacy. The Liberal Coalition that contained only a small minority of White men, and those mostly homosexual, began to organize and as a first attack selected the university system of the US.

The Red Octopus , regardless of their enormous crimes against humanity always considered themselves the virtuous Party. The atrocities of two world wars cooled their ardor for violent action. They chose to bore from within. Always a tactic from WWI and before it now became more active. The first all out assault was the so-called Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement was the first Occupy assault. A small faction of revolutionaries managed to shut the University down by occupying Halls and preventing the school from functioning.
The action was called the Free Speech Movement because Free Speech in America is a prime virtue. Thus the slogan or name made the assault defensible as a virtuous action. Of course, within the Red Octopus free speech had no place. One either hewed to the Party line or were disciplined or worse.
The Berkeley assault was entirely successful and free speech disappeared on campus. The Movement soon spread across the country, Columbia University of New York being the prime example but the whole Ivy League succumbed immediately. Moving from Free Speech to race the lack of Negroes attending universities was then included in the list of grievances. Race is another virtue thus reinforcing the impregnable virtue of the Movement.
The remarkable thing about the Movement was the complete surrender of college presidents and faculties. It therefore follows that the college administrations were complicit; they were sleeper agents already in place. The first capitulations set the tone for all that followed. Of course having arrogated virtue to themselves any opposition therefore was vile, and being vile anyone holding other views was discreditable. They automatically became racists, anti-Semites, opposed to Blacks and Browns.
Soon they began to lose their jobs often for something they may have said in private or may have said or only reported to have said decades before. To be accused was to be found guilty; no proof was needed.
Once the universities were captured and cleansed and the curriculums appropriated all else followed.
By the 2016 presidential election the stage for the coup to what was euphemistically called the one party system was set. The Red Octopus would be triumphant.
However the Hydra becoming alarmed managed to put forward an able candidate in Donald Trump who moved to disestablish the Octopus and put in place a Hydra agenda.
The stage has now been set for the Clash of the Titans: a global contest for supremacy between the Red Octopus and the Hydra.
To be continued…
Opening A Case For The Reexamination
Of The History Of The Twenties And Thirties
by
R.E. Prindle
No period of US history, or world history for that matter, is more misunderstood than the nineteen twenties and thirties. Some reevaluation is beginning to appear but much remains to be done.
In the following two essays I attempt a more accurate understanding of the squabble between the Jews and Henry Ford. You may be shocked, yes, shocked to find that Ford was not in the wrong nor was he an anti-Semitic demon. This is really interesting stuff.
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/henry-ford-and-the-international-jewish-conspiracy/
http://reuprindle.blogspot.com/2013/11/henry-ford-and-aaron-sapiro-case.htm
https://contemporarynotes.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/part-ii-henry-ford-and-the-aaron-sapiro-case/
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/part-iii-henry-ford-and-the-aaron-sapiro-case/
https://contemporarynotes.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/part-iv-henry-ford-and-the-aaron-sapiro-case
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/part-v-henry-ford-and-the-aaron-sapiro-case/
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/part-vi-henry-ford-and-the-aaron-sapiro-case/
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/part-viii-henry-ford-and-the-aaron-sapiro-case/
Vol. I, Clip 3: The Vampyres Of New York
December 28, 2015
Book I, Clip 3
The Vampyres Of New York
A Novel
by
R.E. Prindle
If you haven’t experienced that kind of mental agony you don’t know. I tossed and turned all afternoon and into the night. My brain was racked but not with pain. It was like all the connections had come loose and I had no control of my mental processes. There was no way to concentrate, to organize my thoughts to possibly think or be rational. It was like three fevers without temperature racking around in my brain.
I was exhausted and then possibly at one in the morning I heard a knocking. I sat up in bed wondering who in the world it could be. Then I heard Gaines again: Hello, I’m back. Let’s talk.
Well, Gaines! Of course I knew what was happening then. I was at that level of experience and conditioning between the birth process and more conscious experience. I had already cleared out the most compelling of my childhood fixations at forty-two when I integrated my personality. That freed me from compulsions and inhibitions but I gradually learned that there was another layer of control or influence yet beyond my reach. Gaines had now shown up so it was possible to free myself from that psychological layer. Small comfort at eighty but then few if any become so clear. Freud and Jung certainly never attained it. I flattered myself that I could be unique. The first of the New Men. Don’t smile, it was a pleasant thought.
This wasn’t the first incident of interior dialogue my mind had spoken to itself. I heard what they call voices back in my early teens. Of course like St. Augustine I had been convinced that one could talk to God. Unlike Augustine I wasn’t crazy enough to persist when God couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know when I asked.
And then back then I heard voices telling me to do inappropriate things like Kill your mother and Chuckles but I shut them up; I wasn’t to going to jail for any reason. And now, here was Gaines a more or less rational entity who would try to convince me to do evil I was certain. As in primeval days I was attached to the God Principle while Gaines was representing the Satanic Principle.
He seemed to be lodged in the right hemisphere just behind and above that ear. This puzzled me somewhat as I would have thought he would have been part of my Animus or Ego that being the male side of the brain; instead he was on my female side.
Then I realized that when Gaines had taken up a primal position in my consciousness I was sitting on the back steps of the Orphanage. When my mother had put me in the Orphanage and had walked away she had created this space in my mind, this psychological layer. Gaines and his evil comic books was therefore associated with my mother. Oh yes, my mother. Sometimes I wish I had heeded those early voices and offed both her and Chuckles. Chuckles, that mean assed bastard, was her second husband. They married when I was ten and I then came out of the Orphanage.
Well, you know, as I always told myself, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. I think I can say without comment that I played that lousy hand well. Here I was in New York City, the capital of the world, in a thirty million dollar apartment. Gaines wasn’t going to be a problem, after all, he was me and I was him. I had the upper hand with the God Principle on my side while Gaines might as well have been Abe Goldbladder of the Satanic Principle. I will discuss that more in my presentation to the New Serapion Brethren.
I was inside my skull with Gaines but my mind had cleared up, I might as well get started.
‘So, Gaines, what brings you here?’ A silly question because I already knew the answer. Still, in order to extinguish him I had to play along. However I did think it necessary to call in my old psycho-analyst Dr. Anton Polarion as an assist.
Who is Dr. Anton? I’m embarrassed to say this because then you might think I really am crazy. But that’s alright, I may be.
Dr. Anton Polarion came around several years ago when I was deep in my psychological studies. I was working a number of fields of study and I needed someone to handle the psychology for me when I was working another field. It was then I thought up Dr. Anton giving him the responsibility for memorizing and developing psychology.
I know it sounds kind of crazy but it’s not. Dr. Anton was and is a memory aide. If you read up on the art of memory you will learn that in Greek and Roman times people constructed memory palaces of many rooms extensively furnished and then assigned memories to various rooms and objects in order to more conveniently record them, prodigious feats of memory are recorded. Oh alright, but I wasn’t going to wander around a Memory Palace trying to find various rooms and objects with their assigned memories so I just handed the job to an imagined Dr. Anton rather than a Memory Palace. You can understand that can’t you? Seems reasonable enough to me but you never know what other people will think. Anyway Dr. Anton knows whereof he speaks. So when it comes to hearing voices it was now two to one against Gaines and I had another Ace or two up my sleeve.
I was loaded for bear and I was sure I could kick Gaines’ ass. Still, I had to hear Gaines out.
‘So Gaines, as I said, what brings you here?’
‘I’ve got some good advice for you,’ said Gaines.
‘Knowing who you are Gaines I doubt it could be good.’
‘Oh ho, you think you know who I am do you? Who am I?’
‘This will take some time Gaines but you’ve got as much as I do. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Your showing up here, now, puts things in place. I’m going to call in Dr. Anton for support. You know who he is don’t you Gaines?’
‘Of course, of course. I know as well as you know me. Hello Anton, welcome to the conversation.’
Anton: Hello Gaines. Well, let’s get started.
Partly: The key here is the Orphanage and me sitting on the back step reading Tales From The Crypt. That was one sado-masochistic piece Gaines with a certain portrayal of women. Strangely that portrayal was reminiscent of my mother. It is between you and my mother that this psychology revolves around.
Anton: Yes, your mother transferred her hatred of your father to you after she had put him away and tried to destroy any happiness for you. It is no coincidence that after she had your father committed to the asylum she committed you to the Orphanage. Of course, she had ‘good reasons’ for doing so but they weren’t the real reasons. When you turned eighteen she thought she had you again, enlisting you in the Navy and having you shipped off somewhere where she would never have to see you to remind her of her crime against your father. Thus the association of your mother, sado-masochism and Gaines.
Gaines also provides your connection to the Jews although that application came later in life. The content of Gaines’ comics, the sado-masochism, is part of the Jewish Weltanschauung that Freud expressed so well and it is that that Judaicized you, making the Jewish culture part of your own. It is that part, this Satanic consciousness that drags your spirit down causing your chronic low depression. We’ll try to shake it here but it may now be integral to your mentality.
Leaving Gaines for a moment the pre-Gaines component was your mother’s extreme selfishness. Of course your mother was three months gone when she married your father. This didn’t create so much guilt as anger. She held your father responsible preventing her from doing whatever she thought she would be doing later. You were born in 1938 in the depths of the Great Depression.
Jobs were not easy to come by and although your father was a good provider, that is you had a roof over your head and a shack to live in, even so your father ran out of jobs so he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and went to work planting forests. He was a good man; he sent most of his money to your mother. She unfortunately as you would learn was not a good woman.
It is difficult at this point to retrieve her motivation but she got laid in the back of a Chevrolet in the parking lot of a grocery store as you know well, Perry. She became pregnant with the little bastard palmed off to you as your brother. A child of sin he has always remained so. A point came where the pregnancy could no longer be concealed.
Needless to say the realization made your father angry. In an attempt to learn the culprit he began to punch her out. In the way of women she was stout refusing to give up his name. Your father said things like ‘I am out working CCC to provide for you and you’re out, words that were unintelligible to you. Do you remember that Partly?
Partly: Yes I do.
Anton: Less than two and half and you remember! What a memory Perry. The bastard was born, your father left and you saw him only once more several months later. Do you know what happened to him?
Me: No. Never saw him again after that last time.
Dr. Anton: Your mother had him committed to the insane asylum and he lived there all his life and died there.
Gaines: Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t know anything he doesn’t Anton. Where’s this coming from?
Dr. Anton: Just as you have been suppressed until now Gaines so has the knowledge I’m now revealing. It came in bits and pieces and I have put it all together. Partly is just now realizing it.
Where was I? Yes, committing him was a sadistic act on the part of a guilty woman. But it didn’t stop there Partly. To assuage her guilt while indulging her sadism she had removed her husband but you, a reminder of her crime, remained. She transferred her affection to her bastard and set out to torture and frustrate you. You remember the nightmares you had in high school where your mother was constantly betraying you? That was a subconscious recognition of what you wouldn’t allow yourself to acknowledge but still you knew.
The Orphanage was just four blocks from your grandparents house where you were living. She had to know the effect it would have on your mentality, you certainly did, but just as she had put her husband away in an asylum she put his memory away in another institution, the Orphanage.
Do you remember this Partly?
Me: Sure Anton, I remember but not as clearly and well organized as you do.
Dr. Anton: You’d be a better man for learning it although at eighty who gives a shit. You’ll take it to your grave soon enough.
Me: That’s alright Anton, I’ll die, as you say, a better man.
Anton: So your mother dropped you off and you were led away just like in prison or the asylum but with slightly better conditions. And thus you began to become who you used to be before your personality integration that introduced this current phase of your life at forty-two.
You became quite independent in that harrowing situation of the Orphanage. Fate left that copy of Tales From The Crypt lying on that little porch and a pain equal to your being abandoned seared your soul again striking through your subconscious to the structural level here. You were no longer a free man but controlled from, for lack of a better term, your subconscious. I don’t know how you made it through but here you are.
Your mother’s remarriage to the maniac Chuckles who was a match for your mother’s sadism nearly destroyed you during those eight long years until graduation. Enough of that for now. Let’s deal with Gaines here.
Me: Can we get rid of him?
Gaines: Hell no!
Dr. Anton: He is unfortunately part of the warp and woof of your personality but I’m pretty certain we can modify it and reduce his Satanic level considerably.
Gaines: Over my dead body.
Dr. Anton: Preferably Gaines, that is what we’re shooting for.
With that I collapsed back into my pillow exhausted but calmer with less of a feverish feeling. I was breathing somewhat heavily. I knew that this was a significant psychological event that had not yet achieved resolution and I was afraid to lose the thread. After about an hour Dr. Polarion returned. Anton was not an alter ego as Gaines but functioned more as a guardian angel, a good spirit so I welcomed him.
‘We’ve got to handle Gaines Partly.’
‘Yes. What is your suggestion Anton?’
‘This. It seems that Gaines is functioning as a node for a constellation of similar events. The two obvious strands of the constellation are he, that is your Jewish experience, and your mother. The first step must be to disentangle your mother and put her into her own constellation to be dealt with later. You already have a decent handle on her.
That leaves Gaines and your Jewish experience which is a distinct constellation which when knowledgeable about it you’ve done a lot a preparatory groundwork but certain resolutions are still necessary. That constellation has to be distended into its planetary elements so that each can be identified and dispensed with.
In addition there may be other elements concealed within or behind the constellation of which we have yet no knowledge. Time will tell.
And then there is what Gaines wants you to do which is why he’s made his appearance now. We’ll have to listen and go from there. You and I do understand that what he wants is going to be ridiculous and dangerous.
Me: OK Anton, your analysis is good and I do have a good idea what Gaines wants; I’ve also got my arguments ready and can direct him. But, God, this is painful.
Anton: Yes Partly, self-realization can be trying and I’m sure you’re in agony. You remember Hubert Selby the fellow who wrote his novel Last Exit To Brooklyn?
Me: Oh sure, Anton. Very interesting story. He was probing his mind to write his story. That once when he came up against a particularly painful remembrance it shattered him so that he had to take to his bed for a week writhing in agony. I can’t afford the time for that now. I have things to do and fields to plow.
Anton: You may have more than you think Partly. Get some rest and I’ll get Gaines back here in an hour or so. Control your feelings.
With images of Jekyll and Hyde in my fitful dreams was the titanic struggle of the Shadow with evil and the images of Superman and Clark Kent. Good must triumph over evil although it might not be as clear cut a victory as one might hope.
Just before dawn Dr. Polarion returned and shortly thereafter I heard Gaines’ Hello, I’m here.
Me: Alright Gaines. I’m ready.
Anton had already disentangled my mother from the constellational complex so he and I were dealing with just the Gaines/Jewish constellation. In that obscured constellation other traumas wouldn’t be clear at this time.
‘What’s up Gaines?’ Anton asked quietly with an implied menace that he wasn’t going to listen to nonsense.
Gaines: Why so hostile Doctor Polarion.
Anton: We know what you’re up to Gaines. I have to tell you that we know who you are and where you’ve come from so your Satanic power is negated.
Gaines: Oh, aren’t we clever. What is my pedigree Dr. Polarion?
Anton: Simply this: You infected Partly’s mind on that stoop of the Orphanage with your sado-masochistic claptrap. Partly only semi-consciously took in the sado-masochistic sexuality without knowledge of sex, he had to repress your Satanic influence and with some few exceptions he did. As he knew nothing of Jews and your own Jewishness that puzzling aspect of your Satanity was filed away for future reference. In the meantime following Jewish propaganda he was conditioned to revere Jews and did so.
Then in winter of nineteen fifty-eight in a fit of sado-masochistic lunacy the Jews pre-empted all TV channels at the same time on Saturday prime time and broadcast the most incredible pornographic sado-masochistic program imaginable. An hour of graphic snuff films depicting naked dead bodies being pushed about by bulldozers. The sexual implications were horrendous. While secretly fascinated Partly was resentful of the Jews for pushing this atrocity on him. Without articulating it to himself he was fatally disgusted. Also without noticing it he associated the ‘entertainment’ with you Gaines.
Gaines: I’m disgusting?
Anton: Eminently. Now, there comes an incident that was let slip by almost without recognition. Partly’s wife, now deceased, came from a Jewish background on her mother’s side; the father was nominally Catholic. The mother wanted a Jewish wedding while fearing that Partly would object. The venue was unimportant to Partly, in fact, with his Jewish conditioning he got a little thrill from it.
However to the Jews the notion that a Jewish girl would marry a, what they considered Christian boy, was anathema to them. Her parents approached all the synagogues in the East Bay but there was only one Rabbi in the East Bay that would consent to marry the couple. This was brought about by the intervention of his wife’s mother’s sister whose family was a prominent supporter of the synagogue. Even so the rabbi insisted on an interview with Partly.
As I say, Gaines, Partly had no religious scruples to marrying into a religious family, not quite true, he would never have married Catholic, and thought to be amiable with the rabbi. Both Partly and his wife were above religion despising them as relics from a primitive age. While Partly tried to be amiable the rabbi didn’t. Partly talked to the rabbi man to man while the rabbi as all rabbis do exalted his position believing as a Talmudic scholar that that worthless information placed him not only above Partly or his fellow Jews but all humanity and most of the angels. Resenting Partly’s familiarity he insulted Partly grievously as not worthy of a Jewish girl while being a Christian dog or words to that effect. At that point his respect for the Jews, intense conditioning or no, vanished.
This event was constellated with you Gaines and the TV atrocity to negate any positive feeling he had for the Jews. A couple decades of propaganda was wiped out in an instant. Partly’s future unpleasant relations with Jews will appear subsequently.
So that’s who you are Gaines. Satan on a stick.
Gaines: Yeah, well Dr. Polarion I know where Partly lives. I know he has suffered insults, injuries and indignities from many quarters including the ones you mentioned and I know this: He wants revenge. Who do you go to when you want revenge? Satan, baby, Satan. And here I am.
Anton: True, Partly?
Me: No. It’s true I have a lot of resentments but they’re from assholes and assholes can’t help being assholes; if they could they wouldn’t be assholes so one has to ignore them. It’s their cross to bear and I enjoy watching them be assholes. If Gaines thinks he’s going to lure me into criminal activity he’s not here.
Gaines: Kiss my ass Partly. Social unrest is developing rapidly, exponentially day to day. There are hundreds of racial and religious, what the authorities are pleased to call murders rather than the acts of war they are happening every week.
I know Partly that you were trained by your experiences to be a serial killer. You know it. I don’t know how you’ve resisted up to this time but now is the time to indulge those resentments. Not only are the cops overburdened trying to deal with all the killing and raping going on but they’re afraid to leave the station. Whole cities are no go zones for them. They’ll never identify you, never track you down. Come on buddy, let your inner Mr. Hyde see some light. Now’s the time for your revenge.
Me: I think you’re right about the time being the right time Gaines but remember that Vengeance is mine saith the Lord. I’ve learned that it is true.
Gaines: Vengeance is mine saith the Lord? Listen to this guy. Are you putting me on Partly?
Me: Certainly not Gaines, certainly not. Remember you were kicked out of heaven for the religious offence of chutzpah. God stuck his boot up your ass and down you came. You always tempt men to their destruction by exploiting their own weaknesses. If I were to act in revenge I would surely be caught. Even at eighty I don’t want to be thought of as a criminal.
Gaines: No, you don’t want to be thought of as a criminal. Here’s a tip for you Partly…
Anton: I…
Gaines: You stay out of this Anton, this is between Partly and me.
As above, so below, right Partly? God’s will is supposed to prevail on earth as in heaven, right?
Me: I’m not religious but the Bible does say so. What’s your point?
Gaines: As a lawbreaker I was kicked out of heaven, right. If so, then it is God’s will that I be persecuted on earth also, isn’t it?
Me: Well, you have to believe the Bible.
Gaines: No, you don’t. Freud replaced the Bible but as a Jew he follows the Bible’s rhetoric. Freud and I are one and not only am I part of your mind but Freud is too. That’s one of my attributes that Anton the so-called psychologist forgot to mention. So, if it is God’s will that it is to be on earth as it is in heaven then it is permissible to punish Satanic practices as he punished me isn’t it? As a God fearing person it is imperative that you do so.
Well, there was a thought. The Jews consider themselves God’s viceroys on Earth and that they are doing God’s will by forcing his, or theirs really on the rest of mankind, punishing those who resist, that is anti-Semites. It was a tough argument to counter while Gaines had cleverly appealed to my suppressed desires. Anton was no help at this point.
Me: To punish is vengeance Gaines and as I say Vengeance is the Lord’s. Therefore I cannot punish Gaines, however there is the question of justice, lawbreakers should not be allowed the fruit of their crimes with impunity.
As we know God has no temporal means to effect his will on earth so he must use intermediaries as his chosen vessels hence the Jews claim to be that vessel. However if God spoke to the Jews then he can speak to me. Thus if like Saint Augustine I were to hear his voice enjoining me to administer His justice on earth as he does in heaven, that is kicking Satan off the earth then I could obey his will and be judge, jury and executioner here on earth as the Jews consider themselves. Well, Gaines, that is a thought I will have to give consideration.
Gaines: Yes it is. Further…
Anton: Hold, hold it, stop Gaines. Be gone. Hold up Partly, we have to think about this. Later Gaines, later. Go.
And with a sly wink at me Gaines wandered away. He would be back, of course. But he had given me something to think about. I knew I was going to think about it too and as Gaines knew I would rationalize his suggestion into reality but only in a ‘legal’ manner.
Anton just looked at me and shook his head. He knew what was coming. So did I but neither of us could as yet admit it.
-IV-
Once again I lay back exhausted. Still I had to get to work. In an agitated state of mind I reviewed the correcting of my piece for the New Serapion Brethren that I was titling The Vampyres Of New York. I had put some preliminary thoughts up on the internet so I was searching Vampyres Of New York when I was startled to find that there was an actual group called The Vampyres Of New York that claimed to be a worldwide organization. Its spokesman was some guy calling himself Father Sebastian. He was a young guy who would have been further ahead claiming to be Brother Sebastian; in another thirty years he might pass for a father.
Anything associating itself with vampirism had to be Satanic while the guy was absolutely touting himself as a religion. The crude Satanism of the nineteen sixties was obviously morphing into an attempt at a universal religion. This was a far cry from the historian Arnold Toynbee’s cry for a new universal religion to replace Christianity. Gaines was obviously right about the Satanism in Freud being a part of me but apparently the drive was to make Freudianism the basis of a new religion. Thus as Christianity as a Jewish based religion had represented the Godly Principle so Freud as a Jewish based religion would represent the Satanic Principle.
This was a revelation to me that while new I would have to try to work into my essay. I had to think about it a little so while I was thinking I tinkered around working out disguises. Having seen street activity for a couple weeks now I was uneasy walking around in my own skin; I didn’t want to become that well known.
So, as I thought I tried out mustaches, wigs, glasses, different outfits, so I could walk the streets so as not to become obvious. But, time was passing and I was driven back to my writing desk. I wanted to avoid Gaines as long as possible so I put in some long sessions hoping I would be so tired when I went to sleep that that bastard Gaines wouldn’t be called up. I was successful for the week left before going to Farquhar’s.
I was a day ahead of the deadline so I went out to get a couple two or three bottles of wine to take along. Wanted to show I was a regular guy. I am a regular guy but usually not that regular. Boy, NYC is an alkie’s paradise. What a fabulous selection of spirits. I don’t drink much but in my earlier days I could do a limited justice to the bottle. In those days I favored brandy. Really good stuff if you’re going to drink. Oh lord, if I had known then what New York showed my now I might have been the man who never returned.
I wasn’t after liquor though I wanted wine so I asked for and got bottles of Ramey’s Claret. Ramey is a good Napa Valley vintner while his claret is moderately priced and more than good enough, excellent in fact. The vintage was 2014 that particularly dry year and of small berries. Excellent, I thought it should go over. I’d had it before and it really is a great vintage.
For dress I wore a 1960 vintage sport coat I bought at a second hand store. Nothing was ready at James Carter and I had tried Lord and Taylor and other stores but none was showing other than those idiotic short jackets cut small and I thought I looked a heck of a lot better. Charles Tyrwhitt shirt, one of their higher priced dark blue and white mini stripes, black in a low light. So what’s a boy to do? Ralph Lauren had turned ludicrous after he left.
Ragnar drove me and my bottles of wine up to fifty-second street off Madison to Farquhar’s condo, very good, twelfth floor. As I entered the building an explosion went off maybe three blocks away in some direction I couldn’t determine. Somebody was acting up, hard to tell who. It was beginning to happen fairly regularly. Cops weren’t catching anybody. So many people and organizations were claiming credit for these things it must have been a nightmare investigating these things using only electronics.
As these things were getting more frequent they didn’t even make the headlines in New York while except for certain sites on the internet the rest of the country was totally ignorant of them. The permanent Obama administration was still trying to explain them away as the work of domestic terrorists, actually by now the terrorists were domestic although not so-called White Supremacists. If by Global terrorists it was only just that we should be bombed as was said and that brought the thought of Gaines back as Lessing was rattling the locks on the other side of the door.
Once that ritual was completed I was admitted into a small foyer with a second door and a number of locks which were only locked at night or when Lessing was away. The door was now open for which I was grateful.
Through the second door one entered directly into a large living room, perhaps eight hundred square feet cutting straight through the apartment to the floor to ceiling windows that looked into the windows across the street unfortunately.
The room was comfortably decorated with expensive furniture but not the costliest. The usual New York abstracts, tasteful, were on the wall facing lovely floor to ceiling bookshelves admirably stocked. Books do furnish a room, don’t they?
I was the last to arrive. Seated, looking at me with expectant bemused expressions were Max Savings, Mark Giusty and Baron Cammell the other members of the New Serapion Brethren. Lessing was apparently a bachelor or, as I was to find, a widower.
As I could see I was the oldest of the four. Lessing was seventy-two but still in his prime. How well I remember being fourteen and finding the age of seventy incomprehensible as young people still do. While even people in their thirties and forties expect people of seventy or eighty to be decrepit. Most of us aren’t. Certainly Lessing and I were in full vigor. Diet helps, three or four years earlier I had been compelled to give up my sugar diet, and I mean I love sugar, and that and an improved diet recharged me considerably.
Lessing was more robust than I being taller, probably six-two and bigger boned. He was filled out but not fat or even heavy looking, his face like mine was unlined while he had a full head of white hair as did I although mine was removable and his wasn’t. He showed a little surprise as I was nearly bald at our two previous encounters.
Lessing introduced me to Max Savings who was small, perhaps five-six, and slight. Max was the youngest at sixty-two. He was dressed like an undertaker, had a slightly weasely face with a pointed nose. He had a sharp intelligence.
Marc Giusty was Italian standing a half inch or so below me, seventy years old, still athletic looking, spent a couple hours a day in the gym as I was to learn, lean and long headed in the Italian manner, thin mustache and good features.
Last to be introduced was Baron Cammell. Baron was his first name and not a title. He would prove to be the most difficult member of the group for me.
By the time I was finished with the introductions Max had a bottle of claret open and the glasses filled. Well, you know, two fingers. One sips, this was a cultured group no full water glasses at one gulp. We accepted our glasses and looking at each other took a sip.
Lessing: Oh, very nice.
Marc: Yes. Haven’t seen the label before.
Baron: (Sniffing slightly.) Yes, quite distinctive.
Max: (Smiling.) Enough said.
Me: Yes, well, Ramey apprenticed for many years in France before setting up in Napa. I like Bordeaux style blend and claret hits the spot for me after reading all those old English novels where claret and wine were synonymous. I like this one. So, we’re all ETA Hoffmann admirers, um?
Lessing: Yes, we are that. By way of curiosity Perry, how did you come to Hoffmann.
Me: Oh, you want my origin story as the comic books say? OK Lessing, I’ve got one. I’ll do this in the best comic book style. It was a dark and stormy day back in the middle of the last century when a thirty-six year man shoulders hunched against the cold and rain looked into a shop window. Perceiving it was a book store he being a bibliophile pushed the door open. A blast of warm air hit him as heads turned to look at the stranger. The man glanced casually about at the few inside, mostly help, with no particular object in mind. His attention was caught by a slip cased set of two. Always a sucker for so-called special editions he picked it up to examine it. ‘Hmm…’ he mused to himself, ‘Selected Writings Of Hoffmann? Hoffmann who?’ Extracted, Vol. I read from the title page, E.T.A. Hoffmann The Tales. The man had heard of ETA Hoffmann spoken of most highly and of course he knew of Offenbach’s opera Tales Of Hoffmann. Twelve dollars and fifty cents. OK.
Tucking the parcel under his arm under his coat and lowering his head against the blast he proceeded down the street. I was that man.
Me: There you go Lessing and an identical copy can be found on your bookshelf right over there.
Ha, ha, ha came as a chorus from the four men: Nicely done, Perry, nicely done.
‘The lad shows promise, doesn’t he?’ said Lessing.
Max Savings: This could prove interesting.
Me: And since then then I’ve added a dozen volumes filling out, I think, what’s available in English except for that magnificent nineteenth century volume you have on your shelf.’
Lessing: That one. I’m quite proud of that find. I tramped London looking for that one. But you have never reviewed Hoffmann on your site Perry, how come?
Me. I don’t feel adequately prepared Lessing. I have added a number of Romantic writers to my library in the last four years, Kleist, Tieck and like that but nothing in the way of critical reviews so I don’t think I’m prepared to speak authoritatively. And I still have to read Goethe, the key Romantic. If you’ve read my stuff you probably are aware that I speak without concern of contradiction. I can’t do that with Hoffmann yet. So, if I may ask, give me a thumbnail of yourselves.
Lessing: I’m host so I might as well go first. The salient point is that I spent my career practicing law, mainly real estate and financial issues. That is an area where much of the money sticks to the lawyer and I am in a comfortable situation as you can see having made my share or more of the money stick to me. Although remunerative I found the law and its cases fairly loathsome so as soon as I felt financially independent I left all that behind and turned my attention to what I loved much as you have Perry. Much more rewarding.
Max Savings: I’m not quite so financially independent as Lessing and still at my desk at Chase. I certainly am not so accomplished literarily as you and Lessing but I squeeze in time in an effort to keep up.
Marc Giusty: I was a university prof all my working life, loved it at Columbia uptown here. History was my subject. Unfortunately I was just a yeoman and not a star. I wrote a few papers for academic publications and a couple slim volumes that disappeared down the memory hole but allowed me to keep my position. By the way, this is a nice wine.
Me: Glad I chose to your taste. And you Baron.
Baron: I’m somewhat of a polymath, expert in several fields. I’m working on a unified field theory to arrange the liberal arts in a chronology with commentary. That’s all you need know of me.
Me: Quite so, quite so. Now that we’ve been introduced and had a little wine what say I begin my presentation? I’m anxious for your opinion and hope to please.
Lessing: That sounds right. What is the title of your presentation Perry?
Me: I call it The Vampyres Of New York.
I noticed a little uneasiness in the Brethren at the title. Lessing spoke:
Is this a vampire story, Perry? I thought the understanding was that we present historical essays.
Me: Exactly Lessing. But lesser known aspects, other sides so to speak and that is what mine is. Don’t let the title throw you. By the way as you’re not looking at the paper I spell vampire v-a-m-p-y-r-e. I chose the spelling to indicate a difference from a Dracula type blood vampire. My essay will concern what is known as psychic vampires. When I was searching Vampyres Of New York on the internet to see if my first couple of posts had registered yet I was surprised to find that there is actually an organization called The Vampyres Of New York, spelled with a Y.
I was further astonished that it claims to be worldwide although the claim seems a little dubious. At any rate the possible leader is a guy calling himself Father Sebastian who divides his time between New York and Paris.
As you know since the first Disney version of Star Wars a recent religion has sprung up based on the concept of the Force and whatever. It seems probable that the Vampyre organization is a type of Satanic religion too. This brings to mind that after the challenge to the Jewish religion in the West after the Scientific Revolution following the Enlightenment the Western Jewish religion under the Scientific challenge dissolved into a number of splinter religions seeking a center. The center of course came from the East and was called Zionism so that Judaism with some atavism and Zion are one.
Christianity has taken longer to find a new center but under the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century Satanism we may be seeing a jelling into some form of a universal Satanic religion. It is something to bear in mind. So my historical investigation is concerned with the Jewish and Christian religious disintegration of the previous two centuries under some sort of vampiric influence. Is that alright? It won’t offend any sensibilities?
Lessing: If it is historical we have no objections.
Me: Alright. I’m pretty sure this will be a different approach to what you’re used to so I have a prologue explaining the difference between a Dracula type Vampirism and psychic Vampyrism which will concern us. This is longish but not hugely long so fill your glasses and sit back. It is written out so feel free to interrupt at any time for explanations or comments, discussions or whatever.
OK? I begin: The Vampyres Of New York.
Clip 4 following contains the text of Vampyres Of New York.