A Review: Exhuming Bob 3: Weird Old Greil Marcus
January 17, 2008
A Review
Exhuming Bob 3
Weird Old Greil Marcus
by
R.E. Prindle
We have a very interesting phenomenon here. Greil Marcus is technically a non-fiction writer. I don’t know if I can fully agree with that. I think I would classify him as a fiction writer using a non-fiction base. I always have the feeling of reading a novel. That’s not bad but it’s not non-fiction. This is nowhere more evident than in his amusing The Old Weird America.
The interesting thing is that he has managed to convince his readers that his personal vision of Al Capp’s Dog Patch is in reality true, or factual. Yes, I’m afraid Greil’s vision of America falls into the Anglo-Saxon baiting genre I noted in my essay Exhuming Bob 2-2: Detourning The Folks. In this effort Greil continues to make a specific minority of people look goofy damning the whole people in the process.
In this respect he is reminiscent of the movies of Adam Sandler and Steven Seagal. Both of these Jewish actors, Greil is Jewish of course, constantly put down non-Jews in their movie roles. In Fire Down Below Seagal goes into the hills of old Kaintuck to show the Anglo-Saxon Hillbillies how to stand up for theyselves.
Part of Greil’s success is that the majority of his readers seemingly are as unfamiliar with country music as he is. As I pointed out in Exhuming Bob 2-2 the majority of White Americans despise, to use the old and correct term, Hillbilly music.
That is what the performers on Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music are. In a country of, shall we say, unusual ethnic musics it is difficult to understand why Hillbilly music should be considered quintessentially weird. Actually I’ve already explained it in Bob 2-2 but we’ll ignore that. Certainly the Country Blues of the Blacks, which is not so distant from Hillbilly, the Blacks had to learn somewhere and where closer than their Southern roots, is virtually unlistenable music. It take a lot of good will toward Negroes to sit through that stuff and that goes for the majority of Black Gospel.
The Klezmer music of Greil’s own Jews is some of the least listenable stuff available. If you want weird try Klezmer music of Weird Old Judaism. I could go on but I won’t.
The problem with greil’s reverence for Harry Smith is that he lacks background while having no real appreciation for the music. It’s too weird. Some of my ancestors came down from the hills of old Kaintuck so I was raised on Hillbilly music. I know most of the tunes of Harry’s Anthology without ever having heard the records. I mean, this stuff used to be played on the radio. Back in 1950 there wasn’t really all that much else to play. Heck, even guys like Hank Snow and Webb Pierce were just getting started. The great Hillbilly recordings of the fifties were still in the future. The world of the LP hadn’t even been thought of yet. 45 RPM records were introduced only in 1949 although they caught on fast. I remember the first spindle I ever saw with amazement yet. You just bought a spindle to connect to your radio. Amazing innovation. Unlike 78s, 45s didn’t break when you looked at them.
So, really, as far as Hillbilly went back then there wasn’t much else to listen to other than the stuff Harry collected. Patsy Montana’s I Want To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart could easily have made Harry’s collection if it had fit his particular psychosis. I mean, really, the guy was straining it, booze, drugs and all; living on the same street Greil Marcus would live on. That could unsettle an intellect…or two.
By the time Greil got hold of Harry’s compendium he was four or five times removed from the music, maybe more. He never talks about remembering Lonnie Donnegan so I don’t know if he knows him but Lonnie sang a lot of stuff as ‘weird’ as anything Harry Smith ever collected. I’ll even go on record as saying that old Lon was the greatest recording singer who ever lived. Yes, Sir, I would say that. He was that good.
Greil has Bob down in the basement mixin’ up the medicine at Big Pink which he surely was. Now, Bob goes back musically almost as far as I do.
He grew up in the same kind of semi-rural backwater. I mean, Little Jimmy Dickens held down the quarter hour Hillbilly show at noon right after the farm report on our local station. Little Jimmy was definitely Harry material if he had fit Harry’s psychosis. Little Jimmy sang such humorous, but ain’t they true, though sad songs, rueful actually, such as Take An Old Cold Tater And Wait and Sleepin’ At The Foot Of The Bed. I’ve been there done both those things so I didn’t think they was so weird. I knowed how it felt.
Having access to the same kind of midwest mega blaster radio stations that I had I’m sure Bob didn’t need Harry’s memorable compendium to give him any roots although he sure goes on like he did. Still, I think anyone who could sing Accentuate The Positive at four didn’t need Harry to give himself much help. There’s musical stuff going on in Bob Dylan’s mind that he cain’t even remember. I mean, that there boy’s got roots, roots down below the roots where they don’t even show and there ain’t nobody can never convince me other wise. Weird Old Bob they usta call him. Weird Old America. Weird Old Greil Marcus. Weird Old…well, just plain weird and old. I’ve been to both places and I’ll take weird over old. There, I said it and I ain’t sorry for it either and I ain’t goin’ ta ‘pologize to nobody neither. Don’t ask.
So, in point of fact bob’s got some weird old stuff running ’round his mind mixed in with the cocaine or whatever. Bob had seen a lot of movies. Weird Old Cinema, read some Weird Old Books. Weird old American stuff. Weird Old Jewish stuff; Bob was just into weird I guess. Sounds like it some times if you listen real close.
Greil locked onto this weird thing and began to run with it. Tom Wolfe did it lots better though. What was it the Tangerine Flake something or other. I can see the influence of Wolfe on Greil even if it’s not there. Remember that piece about the stock car driver? Compare that with Greil’s handling of Dock Boggs. There’s some real similarities there or I ain’t as weird as I usta be. Still just a Hillbilly boy though. You knowed that though didn’t yuh. I always like it in those hillbilly sharecropper movies when you can tell you’re dealing with real rural types when they say ‘knowed’ even though they look like they have a luxury apartment on Wilshire Blvd. I knowed that when I fust seen him. Yes, Sir, I did.
Greil creates this novelistic atmosphere out of his material but he doesn’t have the feel of the material. What did Bob say? Everything is phony. Actually Bob portrays himself as a better hick in Chronicles Vol. I. Some his book is OK.
So, really, I think Greil should have written after a couple of hours of reading Tom Wolfe. While the glow lasted he might have turned out some hot stuff; wouldn’t sounded any more authentic but the heat would have covered up the lack of authenticity.
Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Baby was pretty flashy but its a lot harder to do than it looks, even Tom Wolfe couldn’t keep it up but when he was hot he was hot like with that Hillbilly stock car driver. Loved it.
Even though Greil has made a terrific impact with Weird Old America very successfully detourning the image of Anglo-Saxon America in the direction he wanted it to go I’m afraid I’m going to have to give him his second C. If he had wanted to be more convincing he should have gone back to them hills of old Kaintuck and immersed himself in the culture for a weekend and made it his own. They got some snappy new modern motels now although yu can still find the old cabins if yu really want to do it up authentic.
End.
Book II-2 Something Of Value
January 11, 2008
Something Of Value
Book II-2
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
Your world is out of step in the planetary procession.
– Book Of Urantia
The melting of the ice caps threw the evolutionary world out of equilibrium. As the peoples fled, who can now be called Libyans, they bumped into populations settled in what were formerly the highlands. In Egypt this caused a confrontation with the Upper Egyptians that may have lasted a couple millennia or more until the Libyans of Lower Egypt were conquered by the Upper Egyptians uniting the Two Lands.
No one knows what took place on Crete which may already have been part of the Basin civilization while it is possible that the Cretans spread the Basin civilization to Pelasgia on the mainland.
Probably North Africa including Egypt and Crete received the bulk of the emigrants. Smaller numbers unable to hold their own obviously settled in the Levant and adjacent areas. The wonderful temples of Catul Huyuk dated to 6500 B.C. must have been built by the fleeing Libyans. These settlements may have later been overwhelmed by their savage neighbors. A group may have reached present day Hungary since this area seems to have been a hotbed of intelligence. Laurence Gardner in his interesting series of books believes writing originated there from whence migrants carried the knowledge to Sumer about- -4000. Might be true, timeframe is possible.
We tend to see such occurrences as History outside Darwinian evolution. Viewed from a perspective of Darwinian evolution what we have here is a clash of sub-species. Darwin poses this problem in his ‘Origin of Species.’
As the species of the same genus usually have, but by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distant genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates. In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congener. In Australia the imported hive bee is rapidly exterminating the small, stingless native bee. One species of charlock has been known to supplant another species; and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.
With Homo Sapiens we will be able to see precisely why. The discussion I make will not be based on morality but on the exigencies of the battle of life. The sub-species of Homo Sapiens are part of the natural order engaged in the struggle for survival and not outside it. Altruistic ideas about the brotherhood of man are all very well but such ideas can be interpreted in different ways. For instance one might argue that we will all be brothers when all are Moslems; or, we will all be brothers when under Chinese hegemony. But it is doubtful that very many but the totally naive believe we are all brothers as things stand.
Many peoples who have existed no longer have an existence and it is certain that in the not too distant future many others are going to become as extinct as the legendary Dodo bird. That’s why people talk about being dumb as a Dodo, you Dodo, etc. So no sentimentality here.
The initial clash came between the Semites and the Sumerians. While the origin of the Sumerians is in doubt, as they had a proto-scientific civilization they were not Semites. However as they built up their civilization creating something from, as it were, nothing, envy will draw attention. The Semites of the desert attracted by this glittering something which far exceeded their own thinking began to infiltrate Sumeria.
As Darwin put it: How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another… The Sumerians chose to be tolerant with a people who are by nature intolerant. By the year -2000 or the beginning of the Age Of Aries the Semites had overrun and displaced the Sumerians. Sumerian institutions which had great allure for the Semites were not abandoned or destroyed but the Semites gutted the forms of their scientific content replacing it with their own brand of stasis.
At the Dawning of Aries according to Genesis a conflict arose between the Terachites and the Mesopotamians over the nature of God. It will be remembered that the transition of the Ages between Taurus and Aries in Greece saw the replacement of Cronus by Zeus. In Greek mythology this was represented as the battle between Zeus and the Titans. In Sumerian mythology it was represented by the killing of the Bull of Heaven by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Having succeeded in their heroic task the haunch of Taurus was made a constellation over the North Pole. In other words a remnant of the previous Age.
The Lugal Banda assumed the reins from the fourth king after the Flood. Now, we are led to believe that the Terachites under their Astrological genius Abram objected to the notion of Ages. Abram insisted that there was one god who was eternal. As the Old Order would not give on this point we are told that the overriding genius Abram and the Terachites were caused to flee for their lives. They wisely did, however they kept this idea alive for two thousand years becoming an ever greater cause of disturbance during the transit from Aries to Pisces.
Thus, one may say the battle was joined between the Astrological Religion and Semitic religious ideas. This battle is central to understanding world history. We will see a refinement of the Jewish position when Mohammed formulated his own even sillier religion.
Let us take a moment to examine the Semitic position. The question is not one of Jews and Arabs as the two are parts of the same stock, but that of Semites. The religions of Judaism and the Moslemism that Mohammed formulated are quite close. They both give their people preeminence amongst the peoples of the world and they both take an adamant position against change. The Jews wish to make their god sole and eternal while the Moslems hope to stop time and change by declaring Mohammed the last prophet and his word the last word. Vain hopes!
Now, in the seventh century the Moslems burst from the desert overrunning large areas of North Africa and Asia forcing their religion on the subject peoples. Some people, Bernard Lewis for one, fancy that this rule was liberal but that something went wrong a couple centuries later. Nothing went wrong from the Semitic point of view, everything went right. It merely took them that long to suppress the scientific and intellectual vitality of the subject peoples. The story was the same as in Sumer. Once in control they suppressed science and knowledge in favor of their projection of Allah or his early formulation as the god of stasis.
Edgar Rice Burroughs recognized this in a passage of Tarzan Of The Apes that has not gotten the attention it deserves. Archimedes Q. Porter and Mr. Philander are walking down the beach apparently discussing the Alhambra and the Moors in Spain. Philander’s was a stock argument still current in my childhood and apparently still current with scholars of the stripe of Bernard Lewis.
Samuel T. Philander is speaking:
‘But, my dear professor,’ he was saying, ‘I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth century Moors in Spain the world would be to-day a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves.’
‘The Moors were essentially a tolerant, broad minded, liberal race of agriculturists, artisans and merchants- the very type of people that has made possible such civilization as we find in America and Europe- while the Spaniards-‘
‘Tut, tut, Mr. Philander,’ interrupted Professor Porter, ‘their religion positively precluded the possibilities you suggest. Moslemism was, is, and always will be a blight on that scientific progress which has marked…
Before 9/11 a reader might have skimmed over that passage without a remark but the Twin Towers have given it a new significance. Burroughs presciently put his finger on the Moslem problem that is its antipathy to science; to that knowledge that contradicts the word of Allah as imparted to Mohammed sitting on a rock baking in the hot desert sun.
Mr. Philander voices the received wisdom of society as it existed down to my childhood while if Mr. Bernard Lewis and his ‘something went wrong’ is representative of the present is still current today.
Burroughs through the mouth of Professor Porter boldly contradicts the almost universal opinion. Furthermore he is right as events have amply proven. ‘Moslemism was, is and always will be a blight on…scientific progress.’
Moslemism per se is a tool of the Semites in their bid for universal dominion as per Darwin. The Semite ever was and always will be opposed to any science that denies him that role. The Science of Bruce Lahn and genetics have driven that last nail in the Semitic coffin.
The Semite then as now seeks to arrest the development of knowledge and intelligence keeping things perpetually in stasis.
When Sigmund Freud gave us Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego the coupling of the two states means that there is a group ego and that it can be analyzed. A group, any group, has its objectives and goals for which it creates an agenda it follows. The Semites as a whole, both Jews, Arabs and others form a psychological group with objectives and goals. Therefore their group psychology can be analyzed.
Their methods and ways and means can be analyzed. As Freud indicates, such an analysis does not constitute bigotry or ‘hate.’ It is just scholarship. I didn’t mean to interrupt my narrative but I felt it was time to clear the air on that issue especially in light of what is happening to Mr. Le Pen in France.
Now, the Semite has a fear of being overwhelmed by numbers and being relegated to the dust bin of history. They wish preeminence. They realize wishful thinking won’t obtain it for them. It takes action. The year -2000 is when that action began in earnest.
First the Semites overran Sumer subordinating the people and its culture to Semitic ideals of Stasis.
I personally do not believe the Jewish account in Genesis. I believe that the Hebrews, as their Northwest Semitic dialect indicates, were located far to the West and North before they descended on Palestine. The whole of the first eleven books of Genesis must have been concocted from Mesopotamian records studied during the captivity after -586.
So I will not consider a Jewish influence before the final invasion of Palestine c. -1200.
After the investing of Sumer and the acquisition of Mesopotamia conflicts between the sub-species became more frequent. In the Darwinian sense the sub-special contest for dominance had begun. As Darwin stated: ‘We can see…why competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature…’
First Pharaoh toured the East disturbing the peoples, then the Hittites and Greeks entered civilization. The Asians countered by invading the Delta which was a long occupation before they were driven out.
The contest between the Semites and Egyptians was between HSII and the Semites. That of the Hittites was between the Semites and HS III. That of the Greeks between HSII and HS III and then as the Greeks and Semites clashed moving in the opposite direction between HS III and Semites.
As Greek legend tells it, the Semitic king, Agenor, had three sons (read surplus population) which he sent to populate new areas. One went to Cilicia in Asia Minor, another went to Crete while the third, Cadmus settled at Thebes in mainland Greece. This provoked a major war to eject them. Just before the assault on Troy the Argives waged a two generation war to eject the Semites, or sub-species competitors, that was commemorated in the legend of the Seven Against Thebes. Sarpedon, the son of Agenor, was also expelled from Crete returning to the mainland.
Subsequent to Troy the Greeks invaded and occupied the Anatolian littoral also occupying Crete and Cypress. The Aegean became an HSIII lake.
The Semites meanwhile threw out colonies from Phoenicia from whence came Agenor. The most famous was the Semitic power of Carthage which was to come into conflict with both Greeks and HSII Romans. The Semitic Assyrians who had become the paramount power in Asia found the strength to smash Egypt which terminated that ancient HSII nation as a power. The Assyrians and Babylonians were in their turn brought low by the HSIII Persians who seemed to have been or were assimilated by the Semitic culture.
Then the Macedonians organized a terrific military campaign under Alexander and his HSIII Greeks and Macedonians overran the entire Eastern Mediterranean. Alexander died at the end of the conquest which broke theEast into three Hellenic kingdoms. A Macedonian, a Greek kingdom, the kingdom of the Seleucids in Asia and the kingdom of Ptolemy in Egypt. For the moment than the HSIII were dominant.
The Hellenic culture was so attractive that the majority had no problem adapting to it. The Semites seemed pleased to act HSIII. Then, as Bernard Lewis might say, ‘Something went wrong.’ As might be expected there were Semitic dissenters.
Chief among these were the Jews. The Jews since their alleged expulsion from Ur had been active. Colonies of Jews had been established in all the major cities which transferred the struggle from the military to the religious sphere. Unlike today, at that time the Jews were active proselytizers.
They set themselves up as a quasi-empire in Jerusalem not unlike the later Roman Catholic Church based in Rome, in fact as the Roman Catholic Church is quasi-Semitic, Jerusalem probably served as the model. Tithes flowed from every part of the Mediterranean into the coffers at Jerusalem just as they later would to Medieval Rome.
The Jews fought the Seleucids to a standstill but then the really Big Boys entered the picture. The Romans had already disposed of the Semitic Carthaginians but now the Semitic Jews established colonies everywhere in the Empire including Rome itself. The chief authority for this period is the Jewish traitor Josephus. Burroughs had a copy of the works in his library.
So as the Age of Aries drew to a close the Mediterranean was under the military domination of the HSII Romans while the cultural and religious sphere was dominated by HSIII Greeks and Semitic Jews.
Just as the transition from the Taurean Age to the Arien Age was fraught with wars so now the transition from Aries to Pisces was blighted by a major conflict between HSII, HSIII and the Semites. As you may note the transition between Pisces and Aquarius is being fraught with a major war between the Semites and the rest of the world.
Much of the nonsense of the Jewish War can be explained by the notion that the Astrological Age change was the literal end of the world. When Jesus spoke of the end times he wasn’t being vague, he meant right then. The Jews on Masada could never have killed themselves if they hadn’t believed that they were going to rise up within the next few days and come into their inheritance. Poor deluded people, their successors probably won’t make that mistake again.
The terrific war with unbelievable bloodshed continued from 66 BC to 135 AD when with the defeat of Bar Kochba the Jews threw in the towel. Peace is just war conducted by other means as the famous General said.
2.
The Semitic Jews were defeated decisively in 135 AD. However the Kingdom of Heaven remained unconquered. The Jews had been proselytizing the Mediterranean world for centuries and not without success but it was slow work while having its limits. For too many people circumcision and the absurd dietary laws were an insuperable obstacle. Enter Saul/Paul to the rescue. There is no reason to take any of the legend of Paul too seriously. Stories like his are mere hagiography.
Suffice it to say that he discovered a way to turn the discredited Jewish messiah to account. Rather than making him the savior of the Jews he made him the savior of the world discarding the objectionable circumcision and the laughable dietary laws. Paul may have been a bigot but he wasn’t stupid.
What the Jews couldn’t accomplish on their own the hybrid Gentile-Jewish religion of Christianity did. The Semitic mentality was grafted unto the Gentile. Christianity was therefore repressive and bigoted. It is no accident that Freud made repression a centerpiece of his dogma.
Within only a couple centuries ‘something went wrong’ as Bernard Lewis would put it. Absolute Catholic orthodoxy was imposed which allowed for no further discussion or speculation. Anyone who questioned the central authority was run to earth and murdered, ‘exposed’ as a heretic and discountenanced in every way. It is interesting that Hitler is condemned for bookburning when these Semito-Catholics destroyed the greatest repository of ancient learning in a magnificent bonfire at the library in Alexandria. I doubt if any greater crime has ever been committed and that includes the so-called holocaust.
Thus just as in Sumer, when learning was crushed, everything was going right for the Semites. If Bernard Lewis weren’t a Semite he might see things somewhat differently.
The Semito-Catholics were still wrestling with stubborn dissidents when the ‘last of the prophets’ sat down on his rock amidst the burning sands to dictate his little notes and thoughts. Mohammed could neither read nor write. He still thought he could talk to God. God most have thought it was an amusing conversation. He’s probably still laughing.
The ‘brotherhood of man’ sure as heck isn’t.
I’m sure that Mohammed surveyed the scene, listened to the talk in the cafes, Semites complaining of how the nasty Gentiles prevented them from realizing the sovereignty of the world and how they had almost captured the whole ball of wax when by some dirty tricks they were defeated by the Romans. With a level playing field, you know, they would have won.
Undoubtedly they laughed because the stupid goyim were actually practicing Semitic religion and didn’t know it.
Judging from the results Mohammed thought that what the Jews lacked to realize the Semitic dream was a sufficient military arm to convert the goyim by force. The man did create an ideological force that when joined to the Arab military force was able to overrun North Africa, Persia and the Asian interior as well as parts of Asian Byzantium. By the end of the +eighth century the Moorish auxiliaries of the Arabs occupied Spain. So as this period ended the Semite sub-species in the Darwinian sense had imposed themselves on much of HSII, part of HSIII and large goegraphic areas controlled by the Mongolids. They were doing as well as those swallows would in the United States.
3.
Brief Interlude
…presumptuous attempts to conquer the outer world of appearances by the inner world of wishful thinking.
-S. Freud. Letter to Arnold Zweig 5/8/32 as quoted by Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying.
Time now for a little recapitulation, reflection and analysis. Regardless of that endlessly repeated dogma that no system of thought is better than another, everything is relative; noting is good or bad but thinking makes it so, etc. there are some signal differences between the Astrological Religion and the Semitic Religion; the latter stultifies while the former liberates into a glorious freedom. Which would you rather be, a stupid slave or an intelligent free man? Judging from all the chat about freedom we hear I’m going to assume your answer rather than wait for it. Free and intelligent, right?
Freud hit the nail on the head in the above quote. The Astrological Religion accepts the world of appearances and attempts to adjust to them, hence it has a scientific outlook. Astrology is based on a mistaken apprehension of reality which is why on the intellectual level it is no longer taken seriously. However the Astrolgical theory is based on a great many correct astronomical facts. Astro in both words refers to the stars. I’m sure the ancients would have expressed their hard won knowledge differently if they had had more accurate facts. It is all very well to sneer at Astrology as stupid but Astrology is not stupid. It is merely mistaken. Determining the Great Year is a tremendous discovery made by people who couldn’t read while having mastered the barest rudiments of language. Do not sneer at your ancestors; they can still tell you a thing or two.
Furthermore by dividing the Great Year into Ages they left room for the evolution of intelligence. If you study the transits carefully you will see that at each transit a revolution was necessary for the new age to come into existence. Thus our genius ancestors made certain that mankind would never stultify itself by being unable to grow.
Now compare this freedom loving program with that of the Semites with whom we are now contending for supremacy or, in Darwinian terms, survival as a species.
Beginning with the failed Semito-Jewish revolt at the beginning of the Age of Aries the Semitic doctrine has been opposed to any change. Their god is ‘eternal’ and unchanging. The Jews created a psychological projection based on their ‘inner world of wishful thinking’ as defined by their compatriot Sigmund Freud. Thus the Semitic religion is closed to innovation. There is no consideration of the world of appearances. The Jewish god, Yahvey must be offensive to any thinking person. Nor can the Jews dismiss criticism as ‘oh, that’s anti-Semitism.’ That’s one interpretation, another is why should anyone be stultified by a religion that promises nothing to anyone who is not by blood a Semite?
Think that over now, fellas.
The same is true of the Arab god, Allah. Allah is not even a projection of the Arab people being only the psychological projection of the inner world of wishful thinking of a demented Mohammed.
My god, man.
As with the Jews and their Eternal Yahvey Mohammed creates his own eternal god to supplant that of the Jews and then declares himself the final prophet beyond whom no further speculation is permitted. Mohammed wants to stop history in its tracks. Mohammed had probably never heard of science. As Edgar Rice Burroughs pointed out science never shows up in Mohammed’s doctrine.
Mohammed was able to stultify his own people and a very large percentage of mankind. Bernard Lewis is mystified about ‘what went wrong?’ I’m mystified by Bernard Lewis.
Religious speculation did go on in the West while Moslem children bobbed and weaved ‘studying’ the worthless psychological projecton of Mohammed’s called the Koran. Here’s a guy who learned to fool all the people all the time.
The West produced a wonderful succession of speculators working against the ever vigilant Semito-Catholic Church. Paracelsus, Meister Eckehardt, Jacob Boehm, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth century Spiritualists including the incredible Madame Helena Blavatsky. Arising from all these is an astounding organization dating from 1955 in Chicago called Urantia.
Check this out: The Book Of Urantia claims his paper was presented by:
…a divine counselor, a member of the group of celestial personalities assigned by the Ancient of Days on Uversa, the headquarters of the seventh superuniverse, to supervise those portions of these forthcoming revelations which have to do with affairs beyond the borders of the local universe of Nebadon. I am commissioned to announce these papers portraying the nature and attributes of God because I represent the highest source of information available for such a purpose on any inhabited world. I have served as a Divine Counselor in all seven of the superuniverses and have long resided at the Paradise center of all things. Many times have I enjoyed the supreme pleasure of a sojourn in the immediate personal presence of the Universal Father. I portray the reality and truth of the Father’s nature and attributes with unchallengable authority; I know whereof I speak.
The writer wisely pefers anonymity to revealing his ‘earthly’ identity. Makes you smile doesn’t it? Yet that writer in his Book of Urantia is intelligent and well read. Much more so than Moses or Mohammed but you refuse to believe his claims and rightly so. But then why do you give credence to the equally laughable Moses and Mohammed. Just because they lived a couple thousand years ago?
How can you accept the psychological projections of Yahveh and Allah as ‘real’ when you would laugh at anyone who believed Bran Stoker’s psychological projection of Dracula was real. Or, if you think Yahveh and Allah are real why should you not think that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ psychological projection of Tarzan the Jungle God is not real?
Tarzan has as much reason to claim to be an extension of Dionysus as Jesus of nazareth. Now that the Age of Aquarius is dawning why shouldn’t this exemplar of Dionysus be the religious archetype of the Age of Aquarius and Edgar Rice Burroughs his prophet?
Tarzan’s world is based on scientific conceptions and their developments thus there is room to grow. Rather than being reserved for the so-called elect of God which excludes those of us who are not Semites any of us can aspire to be as Tarzan- a healthy mind in a healthy body. If you want to be a hulk, with application you can turn yourself into one. We can be men like gods if we elect or we can be stultified cretins if we follow the Semitic path.
The Age of Aquarius will be ruled by the more free masculine side of Dionysus as the Age of Pisces was ruled by the gentle, loving feminine side of Dionysus. Tarzan as a psychological projection for us all is a perfect specimen; he is master of both his conscious and sub-conscious minds as well as master of his environment. Thus he moves freely in the world of appearances while being in control of his inner world of wishful thinking.
Tarzan is God and Edgar Rice Burroughs is his prophet. Move over Mohammed.
Is that any less believable than Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet?
Think about it.
The next section should take us to the marriage of Burroughs and Emma.
Tarzan The Untamed
January 3, 2008
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#7 Tarzan The Untamed
By
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs seems to be searching for his sexual identity in Tarzan The Untamed. The untamed may refer to the notion that he may be married but Emma has not domesticated the roaring Lion Man.
On my first reading of the novel I merely picked up the surface story, that, to tell the truth, I don’t find very interesting perhaps even implausible and ridiculous. On the second and third readings however the story behind the story, ERB’s psychological dilemma begins to emerge coloring the story with interest.
The story even begins to assume a certain beauty, a poetic shimmer, that takes form as you stare into it. I began to relate Untamed to other novels and stories, that seemed to me to be related and partake of the same dilemma. I don’t know that I can successfully relate them to Untamed but I’ll give it a shot.
For the last few years shifting around in the back of my mind have been the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman. Just a moment ago as I write this I finished another tale of the German romantics, a charming story that I recommend highly, Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouque. And finally although this may be difficult to see Fyodor Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Untamed begins with the murder of Jane, Burroughs aspect of female sexuality, and Tarzan’s killing of the panther or his emasculated sexuality that manifests itself as a homosexual latency.
One then is led to believe that by killing sexual desire Tarzan or ERB believes that he has eliminated the troubling sexual ambivalence of his character. Yet, just a few pages on they flicker to life again in the character of the putative German spy Bertha Kircher. Tarzan first sees Kircher as a woman in the German camp so grasping at the obvious he assumes that she is a German spy. He doesn’t realize and we won’t be told until the end of the story that she is a double agent. In reality she is an English spy posing as a German spy. There’s a complexity there that eludes me at the moment.
She is thus introduced to Tarzan as a woman. The next time he sees her is as a man disguised as a British agent in the English camp. He doesn’t recognize her although he know he has seen him somewhere before. Thus the old sexual ambivalence resurfaces. In what seems to be your standard adventure story delicate psychological nuances begin to flicker around the action story like St. Elmo’s Fire. No matter what the surface story is about the secondary story is about something else.
La Motte Fouque in his Undine also addresses the problem of a man faced with a sexual dilemma that lies within. The path is clear for the hero, Huldbrand, it is only his own weakness that creates the problem for him. In Huldbrand’s case his decision is between two women amidst elemental forces of nature that contrast with the elemental human nature. Undine is a story of astonishing beauty that I can only slaughter in interpreting . I highly recommend you read it. For those deeply into fantasy you will find Undine as fantastic as anything you have ever read; for those into myth and fairytale it is a masterpiece of the kind. Anyone who reads around in this area will have heard it mentioned. I have known of the title for many years but recently in my researches into H.G. Wells it was mentioned that Undine was a favorite of his. I thought it necessary background so I added this gorgeous story to my memory stacks. I should have waited so long; it is a superb Anima-Animus story.
In the December 14th ERBzine George McWhorter provided a list of a few post-WWII books that ERB read. As ERB titles the list, a few of the books he has read, and the list is astonishingly long from a few one can only guess that ERB’s full list must have a couple hundred or more. As reading was a lifelong habit for him and if he consumed titles at that voracious pace then it is truly difficult to guess how many books he read from, say, 1888 to 1910 just before he began writing. Of course his potential list to select from before 1910 was much shorter than ours is today. Titles as obscure today as Undine were relatively well known then. I may be wrong but I pick up hints of Crime and Punishment in ERB’s corpus from time to time. Certainly by his WWII list he had crime on his mind.
We do know that the stories that disappeared into his capacious mind from the period before 1910 gestated for decades in the back of his mind finally finding expression thirty or forty years later. I’m thinking of George W.M. Reynold’s Mysteries Of The Court Of London that burst forth in the 1938 version of The Lad And The Lion. So while I can’t say for certain that ERB read these three authors there is a certain wistfulness and fairy tale quality to the story of Tarzan, Bertha Kircher and Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick that reminds one of the three authors that I have mixed up with Untamed.
So, a woman named Bertalda sends the knight Huldbrand into the elemental forest to prove his love for her. Thus Huldbrand goes to a destiny he never imagined. In the sense of C.G. Jung’s collective unconscious which as I interpret as a set of symbols common to the Western mind, Burroughs also sends Tarzan and his two sexual identities into the elemental jungles of Africa.
La Motte-Fouque invents the water spirit Kuhleborn to forward the action. The presence of so much water indicates that the action takes place in the subconscious of Huldbrand.
Water plays a very different role in Burroughs’ story. In his tale Tarzan braves a watered land to traverse eight very deep and steep ravines that become progressively drier until in the last he almost dies of thirst. As Burroughs’ story covers the four years in his life from late 1914 until mid-1919 one may assume that he had eight bouts of progressively severe depression the eighth and last occurring as he writes his story.
On the other side of the last canyon the well watered jungle begins again. Thus the main story of Tarzan, Bertha and Smith-Oldwick takes place on the edges of the forest and a meadow.
In La Motte-Fouque’s story the elements had set up the conflict from the beginning. As we are told Kuhleborn stole the baby Bertalda away from her parents in an apparent drowning. He then restored a child to the bereaved parents with the child Undine who was actually a water sprite. Bertalda was left by the side of the road where a noble couple found and adopted her. She is the lost daughter of the now aged couple of Undine’s adoptive parents to which Kuhleborn now leads Huldbrand.
Undine’s parents live on an isolated peninsula. As soon as the storm drives Huldbrand to the peninsula the elemental Kuhleborn in the form of a raging torrent turns the peninsula into an island from which there is no escaping. Huldbrand and Undine are thus thrown together. Elemental spirits have no souls. This notion would certainly have had great appeal for Burroughs for whom men without souls was a preoccupation. Undine can only acquire a soul, which she greatly longs for, from the love of a man who has one. She therefore in effect seduces Huldbrand. Kuhleborn disapproves but as to a point Undine’s magic is stronger than his he is reluctantly forced to accede on certain conditions.
A wandering priest is tossed up on shore by Kuhleborn who ties the knot for Undine and Huldbrand. They return to civilization and Berthalda where the conflict between a human woman with a soul and a water sprite without one puts Huldbrand to the test.
So Tarzan who is first associated with Bertha Kircher is once again presented with his emasculation conflict when Smith-Oldwick appears in the picture. The name Smith occurs in Burroughs’ work with some frequency while Old-wick may have sexual connotations unless I’m being too Freudian.
Before Smith-Oldwick does appear Tarzan has to cross the continent from East to West. His wish is to return to his father’s cabin, build an addition or two to make it more roomy and comfortable then settle in as a sort of gentleman farmer. Ah, to be so world weary. And yet that is what Burroughs is about to do.
In a rather remarkable episode Tarzan is crossing Africa when he comes upon Bertha Kircher out there somewhere. He takes her captive but for some unknown reason doesn’t relieve her of the pistol at her side. Even stranger he walks along in front of his captive. Bertha not slow to grasp an opportunity reaches up and lays the butt of her pistol alongside the back of the Big Fella’s head. There’s one bash in the head so far.
Bertha takes off for the railroad leaving Tarzan lying face down in the trail. As he lies Sheeta the panther comes upon him. This presents a sexual problem difficult of analysis. Does it mean that Tarzan is unaware of his attraction to Bertha or what? Tarzan is all but dead as Sheeta prepares to spring on him when who should appear but the Lion whose will Tarzan broke earlier in the story. Now totally devoted to his oppressor he kills Sheeta. Tarzan regains consciousness to find himself nose to nose with Numa. Reminds you of that horrid joke Hillman told a while back about the elephant. In this case it was the same lion.
So the Lion and Tarzan are united in spirit. Tarzan is not yet known as the Lion Man but he will be. In any event the Lion is a guardian spirit for him. In the second book after this one, perhaps reflecting this lion Tarzan will raise and tame the Golden Lion who will be his helpmate and guardian angel. I suspect that the lions Tarzan kills would have been tigers if someone hadn’t objected to the fact that there are no tigers in Africa. In some ways panthers are substitutes for the tiger.
Relieved to find that this lion is his lion Tarzan gets up giving the lion a pat and then trots off down the trail in search of Bertha. In a sort of hobo flashback Bertha finds the train line and hops a freight a few steps ahead of the White Ape. Tarzan misses the connection so we find him forsaking the middle terraces for a trudge down the tracks into town.
I don’t know how many people find these two sequences funny but I do.
Tarzan loses track of Bertha so he begins the long walk to Gabon. Here he has to traverse the eight deep canyons. These canyons have vertical walls while being very deep so that even for the Ape Man these thing become too difficult. Each crevasse gets drier and drier so Tarzan gets weaker and weaker being deprived of, as it were, the feminine water of life. By the time he hits the eighth canyon he is spent. I mean, he has had it. This may be as close to death as the Great Tarmangani has ever come.
He lays down in a manner that indicates he will never get up. The chapter is titled Blood Will Out. A little double entendre. A vulture descends to wait for his meal to die. Instead Tarzan grabs the vulture by the neck sinking his strong white teeth into it throat. Here’s the joke: Blood Will Out. Tarzan’s inherited greatness appears while the vulture’s blood saves his life. Tarzan sucks the vulture dry gaining liquid refreshment while eating the flesh. He now has just enough strength to climb out. He discovers he has crossed the desert and is now in a watered land.
One may assume then that Burroughs has fought off several bouts of severe depression from 1914 to 1919.
Back up on the surface he discover Bertha Kircher in the possession of a Black German trooper. At the same time Smith-Oldwick is flying on a reconnaissance mission when he develops engine trouble landing in a meadow. He whips out his monkey wrench, fixes the problem but before he can take off he is captured by the locals.
Thus he Tarzan and Bertha are brought together. So Tarzan having thought he had resolved his sexual hang-ups at the beginning of the book now learns he hasn’t. The old ambivalence returns in the persons of Bertha and Percy Smith-Oldwick.
In a series of interesting adventures the three Whites are brought together. Tarzan’s male figure falls in love with Bertha. The plane is relocated. An adventure with Usanga the Black German soldier intervenes that is not germane here. Tarzan’s intention is still to go off alone to his father’s cabin so he sees Smith-Oldwick and Bertha off as they begin the flight back to Kenya. Thus we have a second resolution to Burroughs’ sexual dilemma. He packs his sexual problems in a plane and flies them off higher above him than he is high above his daily cares in the trees. He is seen standing in a tree safely above it all watching the plane disappear into the distance. The plane is soaring very high over the tree tops when it takes a dive back to earth. Thus that dream of Burroughs’ getting rid of his ambivalence crashes.
Even this attempt to resolve his sexual dilemma is doomed to failure. He can’t abandon the two so he starts back into the desert from which he almost met his death. His sexual ambivalence has landed in the eighth and most desolate canyon. Undaunted Tarzan returns to near certain death to resolve his problem. The three are in an impossible situation from which it appears that there is no escape.
There he learns that a very unintelligent vulture had apparently mistaken the plane for a dead something. Descending on it the vulture became entangled in the propeller. Never one to lose a chance to bash someone/anyone on the head Burroughs has the bird break a piece of the propeller loose that bashes Smith-Oldwick in the forehead. The bashing definitely establishes Smith-Oldwick as Burroughs’ sexual alter-ego as he presumably now has the same scar on his forehead that both Burroughs and Tarzan sport.
The vulture is an ancient symbol of the mother. One can’t be too sure how aware Burroughs may have been of this but in the Jungian sense of the collective unconscious the symbol would have or may have suggested itself from the common fund. As a student of Africa Burroughs would certainly have had plenty of time to consider vultures especially as his idol Rider Haggard includes vultures in most of his African novels.
If Burroughs is using the vulture as a symbol for his mother that opens the interesting problem of what exactly his relationship to his mother was. First Tarzan strangles, drinks the blood and eats the flesh of the vulture, with perhaps a very sly joke of blood will out, and then the vulture attacks his sexual identity destroying any chance Burroughs may have had of successfully resolving the issue. I merely raise the point.
Having been bashed but not knocked unconscious Smith-Oldwick recovers in time to ease that airplane down. Tarzan arrives but there seems to be no hope of the three leaving the canyon alive.
At this point the residents of the lost civilization of Xuja capture them. Once again not germane to my point here after a series of very interesting hair raising adventures the trio is rescued by some British troops searching for Smith-Oldwick.
Burroughs and Tarzan still have to resolve the sexual dilemma.
The rescue officer advises Tarzan that Jane is not after all dead. This fact apparently resolves the problem for Tarzan. Bertha and Smith-Oldwick return to get married while Tarzan now psychically reunited with Jane returns to East Africa to begin the search for Pal-Ul-Don rather than returning to his father’s cabin.
We don’t know where this leaves Burroughs in August of 1919, more or less the anniversary of the beginning of the Great War in 1914, when he finished the book. We don’t know what his relations with Emma were except that possibly they had reached an accord psychologically.
The story began in Tarzan’s mythical Africa during the War. In the novel the story must take place in 1914-15 but in real life the war ended in November of 1918. This probably coincides with Tarzan drifting off from East Africa back West to Gabon. At the same time in real life Burroughs left Chicago in January 1919 moving West to Los Angeles.
So the village of Usanga in the middle of Africa must represent Chicago. The lost city of Xuja that is located in a desert valley watered by canals brought from a distance must represent the move to LA. So that Burroughs is recording his sexual dilemma and also the move from Chicago to LA against the background of the Great War. Pretty nifty footwork.
He and Emma must have been together as it is very difficult to believe he would have absented himself from her and Tarzana so that this long separation of Tarzan from Jane must represent a mental estrangement from Emma. Perhaps the strain of the move was more than she could bear.
In the next novel Tarzan The Terrible Tarzan makes the long trek to the lost land of Pal-Ul-Don in search of Jane. While the succeeding novel Tarzan And The Golden Lion opens with Jane, Jack and Tarzan returning from Pal-Ul-Don reunited again. At that time there is a distinct coolness between Tarzan and Jane. Whatever reconciliation took place between Emma and Burroughs it was less than satisfactory on Burroughs’ side.
In Golden Lion the two discover a lion cub on the trail that Tarzan takes home to raise as the Golden Lion. The Lion is always cool toward Jane while seeming to protect Tarzan from her. As soon as the lion is mature and trained Tarzan takes off to visit La at Opar. In this instance he and La come close to being a couple while the Golden Lion becomes a close male companion.
Thus Bertha and Smith-Oldwick have turned into La and the Golden Lion. Still unable to resolve his real life problem Burroughs ends Golden Lion by having Tarzan return to Jane. Burroughs has now resolved his emasculation problem by having the Golden Lion as Tarzan’s male buddy. As a beast he is not threat to Burroughs’ masculine identity. The Golden Lion remains Tarzan’s male pal throughout the remaining novels.
Now I have to return to Tarzan The Untamed. This is a very complex novel and I don’t know if I can do it justice.
Book II Something Of Value 1
December 31, 2007
Something Of Value
Book II, Part 1
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Evolution And Religion
by
R.E. Prindle
God is not a cosmic accident;
Neither is he a universe experimenter;
The Universe Sovereigns may engage in adventure:
The Constellation Fathers may experiment:
The system heads may practice;
But the Universal Father
Sees the end from the beginning…
-The Book Of Urantia
Preface
While understood as a lightweight fantasy author Edgar Rice Burroughs tackled most, if not all, of the burning questions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of those questions was the nature of Time. H.G. Wells excited the world’s mind with his short novel, The Time Machine, in 1895. This was still an astonishing story when I was a kid; for all I know it still is. In his own way Wells hinted at possible universes. Then in 1905 Albert Einstein astonished the world with his Special Theory Of Relativity that posited certain ideas about Time and Space. Einstein undoubtedly owed a great deal to H.G. Wells. Einstein’s theory is posited on the objective existence of Time. In his Pellucidar novels beginning in 1913 Edgar Rice Burroughs denied the objective existence of Time. He said that Time didn’t exist as an objective reality.
I am in agreement with Burroughs. He examines the problem at great length not only in the Pellucidar series but in Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible.
He examines the problem of violence and war in detail with numerous examples including his final statement in Beyond The Farthest Star.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Burroughs dovetailed these questions into the really big questions of Evolution and Religion. He doesn’t argue Evolution he just takes it for granted. If you read only Burroughs you would have no idea that Evolution was a very controversial subject. He just assumes that his views are the norm and proceeds accordingly. Very daring for his time period.
On Religion his surface opinions which are conventionally anti-Priestcraft are more polemical in nature but, as Burroughs scholar Dale R. Broadhurst points out in his Gods Of Edgar Rice Burroughs series on the ERBzine magazine site, http://www.erbzine.com when you examine certain religious systems such as that of Opar closely Burroughs reveals some very subtle distinctions. He had read widely while the religious milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was particularly strong. For the first time society tolerated men like Robert W. Ingersoll who openly denounced religion and the very idea of God. Helena P. Blavatsky who presented a religion opposed to Christianity was also allowed to live. The price was that they were demonized in every way; but they were allowed to live.
The great archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Greece, Crete and Mesopotamia were seriously undermining the validity of the Jewish Old Testament. To the doubting or perceptive the scriptures were found to be based on much earlier texts as well on a much longer time line going back millions of years rather than a mere five thousand.
So, in this essay I would like to examine the evolution of the species and religion with an idea of how Burroughs understood them. It is important to remember that the state of knowledge in Burroughs’ time was much developed developed relative to the beginning of eighteenth century but primitive to what has been learned since 1950.
In his time and well into mid-century it was possible to seriously argue the question of canals on Mars for instance. We have now seen that there are no canals on Mars or anything approximating them. Since 1950 everything that was valid speculation in Burroughs’ time has now been shown in its true light, or at least, 90% or so.
The science of Biology has laid bare the progress of Evolution although it hasn’t explained it. Even so, no doubt fully 50% of Americans still denies the possibility, bound instead by the puerilities of ‘sacred scripture.’
Make no mistake, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a daring, ground breaking, forward thinking writer who put his fast ball over the plate waist high so hard that few people saw it.
1.
Scientists nearly universally believe that the genus Homo Sapiens originated in Africa. Most put a moral spin on this but if true it is merely a fact. Certain genetic markers point to this fact. Indeed, in Gods Of Mars, in itself a subtle examination of evolution, ERB describes his Black race as the First Born. He himself picked up the idea from the nineteenth century missionary David Livingstone from his book Missionary Travels In South Africa.
In Livingstone’s book in a conversation with a Bushman the Bushman tells Livingstone that God created the Black man first, then the White man.
Thinking in a Darwinian way Burroughs reasoned that first came the anthropoids then the Blacks and then the Whites. Thus, of the Homo Sapiens species the Blacks were the First Born. If the current scientific information is accurate then this is true. Burroughs was on solid evolutionary ground.
Current science teaches us that Homo Sapiens evolved from less mentally developed stock about a hundred fifty thousand years ago. As the most highly evolved hominid Homo Sapiens has displaced all other lines of development. The Neanderthal who existed as a separate hominid species until perhaps ten thousand years ago is now gone. As a distinct species it is generally now acknowledged that there was no inbreeding with Homo Sapiens.
In Africa all the predecessors of Homo Sapiens have also disappeared without a trace. As nature does not make great leaps but acts in small increments it is reasonable to believe that at one time several sub-species of hominids existed when Homo Sapiens first evolved one hundred fifty thousand years ago. Indeed, it is neither impossible nor improbable that the Bushman is the immediate predecessor of the First Born. If examined carefully and without prejudice it is possible that two or three sub-species of hominid predecessors are still alive.
Had the White man not interfered it is quite possible that the invading Bantus would have exterminated these peoples who had already been expelled from the rest of Africa into its Southern tip. An analogy would be the Gorillas who once surely roamed a greater range but are now pushed into the least habitable areas of the rain forest.
Even today the surviving species of anthropoids are finally being exterminated, much as the Neanderthal probably was, as the burgeoning population of Homo Sapiens cuts and burns over their jungle habitat. Except for zoos the great anthropoids are a thing of the past.
If the African was the first born then it follows that Whites, Semites and Mongolids evolved from the African. This raises a testy problem. Evolution means the development from a less developed organism to a more highly developed organism. As physically Homo Sapiens is developed to perfection being the most versatile of all species the only place development can take place is in the area of intelligence.
The development of the brain is what gives the Homo Sapiens the advantage over the anthropoids and all other beasts. A gorilla with human intelligence would be one formidable beast. Some argue that the brain began developing in response to challenges presented to it. This argument doesn’t explain why the Chimpanzees presented with the same or slightly different variations of the same problems, didn’t increase in brain capacity.
The above account assumes that evolution occurs for environmental reasons. This is patently impossible. When life was originated it was from internal reasons. As we all know life is dependent on water. Contrary to the Semitic account in the Bible man was not made from mud. It’s water. How life came into existence can be easily explained but probably not universally agreed with. The body has been described as a sack of water with a few elements dissolved into it. This is true so it is only necessary to determine how it happened. That too is not difficult to conjecture. Homo Sapiens and all life is built of the same universal elements of the universe. Most of a body is of six elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen being the most prominent followed by Nitrogen, Carbon, Phosphorus and Sulphur and a smattering of other elements.
It is impossible that water should have been introduced to earth from outer space. Forget outer space. Water was extruded from the core.
When a sufficient amount of water was formed on the surface rich with the above mentioned dissolved nutrients exposed to the sun for photosynthetic development it would seem obvious the atoms jostled against each other exchanging protons and bonding into molecules that in turn formed larger units and thus became animated. These single celled organisms than began to evolve in a number of directions. For millions of years life was confined to the seas of the world. Then in what seems as it though must be a programmed manner life left the water and began its existence on land. In what manner a program of evolution is encoded is beyond my understanding.
Rather than in response to the environment, evolutionary steps occur when a number of genetic mutations take place finally accumulating to the point where the next development takes place. Thus the number of pre-Homo Sapiens hominids ran through a long series of sub-species before Homo Sapiens emerged, as our scientists tell us, as the African First Born.
Now, most people assume that evolution ceased with the emergence of the First Born. The differences between the First Born, the Semites, Mongolids and the Whites are said to be merely cosmetic. The First Born bleach out in cold climates is their argument.
However it is quite obvious that evolution is still going on and that in Homo Sapiens. Very recently scientists have penetrated the chromosomal structure being able to identify the individual genes that compose each chromosome. While new studies of the functions of the various genes are very likely to be subject to revision nevertheless on 12/29/04 the Chicago Tribune published a report on studies conducted by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago.
Quote:
Reporting in the cover article in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Cell, Lahn and his colleagues, Eric Vollender and Steve Dorus, found that 17 brain building genes mutated at a tremedously rapid rate in humans, compared with the brains of champanzees, macaque monkeys, rats and mice….Once started, the selection of brain building genes snowballed, resulting in thousands of changes to thousands of genes in a relatively short period, Lahn explained….Lahn, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the U. of C., argues that the evolutionary forces that led to the big brain continue to act on humans today and are likely to produce bigger and better brains in the future.
Unquote.
Sign me up for a transplant when they’re available. Rapidly means over a few million years. Needless to say Lahn was forced to recant within weeks of his announcment declaring his findings null and void as the anti-Science creationists sprang into action. Just recently of course James Watson was forced to recant over similar comments regarding Africans. Watson was fired from his job; so far as I know Lahn was allowed to keep his. Thus bigots censor the truth.
The question is whether the same brain development is shared by all five species of Homo Sapiens or does the next evolutionary step surpass the abilities of the last. I’m afraid the latter must be true or there would be no reasonn to distinguish Homo Sapiens from its hominid predecessors. The latter would still be among us fully able to compete otherwise. Logic must prevail against Liberal bigots.
While many argue that the First Born left Africa to populate the world I do not find the opinion credible. If certain genetic markers indicate that the other four species evolved from the First Born that should explain the genetic markers.
What very likely happened is that the proto-Europeans who, let us call Homo Sapiens II- HSII- having evolved were either driven from or chose to leave Africa. Whether the Semites and Mongolids evolved from the First Born or whether they later evolved from HSII isn’t clear but I suspect the former in the case of the Semites and the latter in the case of the Mongolids.
It would seem that a sub-species once evolved has its set of attributes that can be developed within limitations but are incapable of change. Thus there were genetic changes to the brain of those evolved from the First Born while the First Born must remain mentally constituted as he was when he evolved one hundred fifty thousand years ago.
Nevertheless he was the first state of Homo Sapiens, the Main Evolutionary Stem. Obviously in the evolution of a genus there can be and have been many dead ends such as the Neanderthal of which we know but there were probably many dead end offshoots from the Main Stem over the twenty-five million year course of brain building.
While the Semite and Mongolid are more developed than the First Born they must be dead end evolutionary shoots. The main Stem of Evolutionary development was passed to the people who settled the Mediterranean Basin as it lay exposed during the last Ice Age. When they evolved isn’t clear but I imagine it may have been perhaps fifty thousand years after the First Born, say, one hundred thousand years ago.
With them the capacity for Civilization began. The First Born never created a civilization. Aided by additional genetic brain development the Meds approached life with an early scientific vision. Sometime later, perhaps another fifty thousand years, a further improvement in brain capacity created HSIII. Thus as the Neanderthal still roamed Europe with Homo Erectus still living in the East, and there is a problem there, the First Born occupied sub-Saharan Africa, the Semites the Arabian Peninsula, the Mongolids East Asia, HSII the Med Basin, and as groups will not tolerate other groups HSIII was driven away from HSII to occupy the area between the Caspian and Aral seas or perhaps the Central Asia steppes cheek by jowl with the Mongolids. That might seem to indicate that HSIII and the Mongolids are fairly closely related.
Van Daniken and others like to posit the notion that civilization began when extra-terrestrial visitors having landed and been greeted cordially, which is very unlikely, in a most friendly fashion instructed the rude savages who had no understanding into a very high civilization nearly overnight. Nice fantasy, although before you condemn this school remember accredited scientists believe both water and life arrived on Earth as extra-terrestrial hitchhikers on meteors.
I believe neither account. HSII began a long laborious effort to rise from ingnorance to knowledge the old fashioned way, hard work. Nor do I think it took that long for them to begin. Most scholars think that discovering the shortest day of the year took ninety-five thousand years for HSII to do. HSII could never have been that stupid. Building the tools to pass on the knowledge was a slow laborious process but certain men recognized the possibilities immediately and began to act on them.
Knowledge is a dangerous thing especially when that knowledge contradicts perceived reality as Bruce Lahn’s and James Watson’s treatment shows us to this very day. Thus, whatever the avant garde learned that the masses couldn’t accept had to be kept secret. In order for the work to go forward colleges of cognoscenti had to be formed. In order to protect them they had to be made inviolable or sacred. Hence Religion and the Priesthood arose.
The Priesthood was originally meant to develop and protect these acquisitions of knowledge. This function would endure until the differentiation of knowledge became noticeable in eighth century Greece. From that point on knowledge and thought take on a role independent of religion. From that point on the Priesthood had outlasted its function. Instead of encouraging the growth of knowledge it chose to suppress it.
Thus the tradition of denigrating the Priesthood arose. Edgar Rice Burroughs took this stance throughout his work. ‘Religion’ per se is imagined to be OK but the Priesthood had corrupted it. Burroughs and others imagined a time when a ‘pure religion’ a ‘natural religion’ existed. The differentiation of Religion into its three components or, in other words, the increase of knowledge was the culprit.
The Theosophist Helena Blavatsky sought to reconcile the three parts into one whole as it had once been. In point of fact Science was subsuming the other two.
Given a few thousand years of observation, if indeed, it took that long, a method for determining the shortest day of the year is relatively easy. Certainly the big brained HSII could tackle that problem.
The means of proof are indirect of course, but I believe shortly after leaving Africa for the Mediterranean Basin HSII did discover how to determine the Winter Solstice. With that discovery the worship of the Sun began. This would then evolve over the next ninety-eight thousand years into the religion of the Unconquerable Sun as practiced by the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and not just coincidentally in the religion of the Christ. The Christ is a Sun King. I say the Christ and not Jesus Christ because the latter name is a title affixed to the discredited Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth. More on that later.
Having once determined the length of the year it soon became obvious that by counting forward, the length of a sun cycle was approximately three hundred and sixty-five days. This is not a difficult task although it may have taken a few decades or even hundreds of years to get it right especially as that extra quarter day every year would have been a real clinker.
Once having determined the length of the year the college of Priests could then determine the time of the recurrence of natural events during the seasons. When we speak of ‘Time’ this was when time was born. Then gradually, in however crude a form the concept of the months came into existence. These divisions which numbered twelve became known as the Zodiac.
This was the beginning of the Astrological Religion of which Pisces or Christianity is only one Age. As we know the Zodiac only as the band of astral constellations surrouding the planet the divisions of the Zodiac make no sense.
First let me explain the terrestrial meaning of the signs then I will explain how and why they were translated to the heavens.
2.
The Zodiac
It is best to begin with the Winter Solstice which is when the Unconquerable Sun triumphant once again begins to wax toward the Summer Solstice when the forces of evil triumph driving Sol ever backward until once again with the Winter Solstice the Sun conquers yet once more beginning to wax. This is the central myth of the Mediterranean.
I can only apply the modern Zodiacal symbols which in themselves are of Cretan-Greek origin dating back to at least -2000. One may assume that over the millennia the symbols were modified but the meanings remained the same.
At the beginning of the year we have Sagittarius the Archer who is half horse half man. The horse corresponds to the first half of the year while the Archer facing the new year shoots his arrow into the air. The destination of the arrow is the Summer Solstice when I imagine it strikes Sol Invictus in the heel, much as Cancer the Crab seized Heracles by the heel dragging him toward the waters in symbol of the Sun’s decline.
After Sagittarius is Capricorn, half goat half fish. The fish probably denotes the beginning of the Spring rains while I am unsure of what the goat signifies, perhaps pointing to the rutting season.
Up next is a very important sign. Soon to be the prevailing age is that of Aquarius. In the Greek Zodiac this sign is governed by Hera. Indeed, the male god Aquarius is pouring out water onto Hera as the symbol of the Earth. The male fertilizes Hera in her capacity as Virgo the Virgin. Soon the Earth will sprout up into Virgin Birth.
Next is Pisces which denotes the rainy season followed by Aries the Ram. The Spring equinox occurs on March 21st in Aries. Equinox as I’m sure everyone knows means an equal day and night. Thus on March 21st the new year begins in earnest. Christ is risen. The Ram may be thought of as butting the new growth from the ground much as in the Greek illustration where Persephone is rising from the ground aided by Hermes and Apollo who chip the earth away to make her rise easier.
Taurus the Bull is just that, a figure representing the exuberant vitality of the new growth.
Gemini or the Twins passes the now nearly waxed year on to Cancer when Sol Invictus once again temporarily meets his match. Cancer is represented as a crab because the crab having captured a victim moves sideways or backwards indicating the shortening days. Thus while the period after the Winter Solstice seems to fly by as represented by the arrow the summer months seem to slowly recede. I don’t know about you but the second half of the year seems to be about twice as long as the first half to me.
Cancer is followed by Leo the Lion when the sun is at its seeming strongest. While the warmth of the sun has made everything grow and prosper the blazing heat of the sun of July causes growth to wither and die. Thus Virgo the Virgin succeeds Leo. This may be a little hard to follow but the Earth becomes barren once again or virgin. After the bath of rain virgin growth will begin again. Thus Hera who is both virgin and matron governs Aquarius who provides the showers in the Greek Zodiac.
Then follows Libra with her scales. the Autumn Equinox begins this period. Once again the night and day are equal hence Libra’s scales tip toward winter at this point.
Rounding out the year then is Scorpio the Scorpion. Its significance possibly is that it kills the old year by biting it on the heel. Sagittarius rises once again to shoot an arrow as the Unconquerable Sun marches on to victory.
It’s a pretty story.
Now, all the time the colleges of Priests were organizing this calendar they were watching the heavens. Much later the Hermetics would be given credit for the formula ‘As above, so below’ and vice versa. It is absolutely ridiculous to attribute the origin of the slogan to such late times. The roots of almost everything can be projected back to very early times. Actually everything can.
Having watched the skies while having developed the Zodiac as an annual terrestrial cycle, these ancients then transposed the Zodiac into the heavens. While watching the sky they noticed without knowing the reason the declination of the planet, that the North Pole because of the resultant wobble described a circle taking about 25,000 years to do so. They designated this phenomenon the Great Year.
Using the formula as above, so below it became clear that the Great Year must have twelve divisions just as the lesser terrestrial year does. So they merely transposed the Zodiac with the same twelve divisions and the same signs onto a belt of stars on the horizon which they organized into constellations that seemed to correspond to the signs.
As each sign corresponded to something over two thousand years in duration these periods were designated Ages with the corresponding qualities of the signs. Hence, when you haven’t seen someone in an age you literally mean two thousand some odd years ago.
How long it took the Ancients to discover the Great Year is beyond me but as I believe the discovery was made by observations rather than mathematics I assume a full cycle to a cycle and a half, perhaps a full fifty thousand years.
There wasn’t any hurry as a lot of other details had to be worked out first. Technology always has to catch up with imagination.
It’s all very well to say this but if true there must be historical evidence to verify its possibility, right? I’ll do my best. In the first place nothing was ever discovered, invented or developed over night. The times for things to come into existence are immense.
Even the transmission of this knowledge from generation to generation is an immense problem. The Priesthood must have spent great effort to first indoctrinate novices then drill them in the essentials so that they could in turn pass on the information.
One is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when the art of printing had been lost so that cadres of priests walked around memorizing the great books to pass on to the novices so that the works wouldn’t be lost.
Things were developing nicely when disaster struck destroying this first effort at civilization lock, stock and barrel. Having moved into the Basin during the last ice age, that ice age now ended. The waters began rising and continued to rise for several hundred feet. This must be the Great Flood which has come down to us from Mesopotamian records. There can be no other of this magnitude.
When the waters stopped rising the Mediterranean had assumed its present form. Some scientists say the waters rose very rapidly but still they couldn’t have risen so rapidly that the people couldn’t flee. Naturally they fled to the high places. This was the littoral of Africa, especially the best watered location, the effluence of the Nile and Crete, Pelasgian Greece and Phoenicia in the East and Spain and Sicily in the West. Apprently a group made their way into Sumer. Some say all civilization from West to East was the result of this disaster. I believe that it is so.
One asks do the civilizations have anything in common that would indicate a common origin? Yes, they do. For my purposes here a thing in common they all have is the Zodiac. They all share a form of the Astrological Religion.
The material aspects of the civilization perished beneath the waters. The more important intellectual heritage was preserved as the colleges of Priests fled to different locations. Egypt appears to have gotten the Mother Lode with Crete and Sumer next. Spain and Italy received little which probably indicates that the Metropolis was the on the South Side of the Basin. I suspect it was opposite the islands of Malta.
Crete may have indoctrinated Pelasgia or possibly a college reached the mainland. This much is certain, when the Greeks arrived in Pelasgia c. -1700 they brought no knowledge of the Zodiac or the Astrological Religion with them. The whole of Greek civilization was based on this earlier knowledge which must therefore have been highly develoed before -2000. Thus no Greek in +- 100 sat down and by a brilliant stroke of cogitation developed the astrology in a moment.
To begin with Mesopotamia. In their myth the fifth king after the Flood was the Lugal Banda. He comes into power as the Age of Aries begins. Therefore the Sumerians believed the Flood took place four kings or Ages previously. That would place the Flood either at the transition from the Age of Virgo to the Age 0f Leo or perhaps into the Age of Leo. That would amount to eight thousand years or so before 2000 BC. Are we on track for the ending of the ice age? Yes, we are.
Going to Egypt, the Sphinx which was originally a lion with a woman’s head, was probably shaped at approximately the same time. It is placed beside the Place Of The First Time over which the Great Pyramid is built. The Place Of The First Time is a mound or hillock which was believed to be the first place to emerge from the Flood. This also fits the time frame.
Now let us go to Crete and Hellenic Greece. Crete was a very ancient civilization when the Hellenes or Greeks first arrived.
The Greeks were a people who had formerly lived in today’s Armenia at the Eastern edge of the Black Sea. It is believed that a pharaoh made an expedition to the area about -1900. I believe it probable. Soon after this date the Hittites dropped down into Anatolia, modern Turkey, where they became a power relative to both Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The Greeks began a migration around the Euxine, now the Black Sea, dropping down into Pelasgia from the North. They apparently brought little or no religion with them, taking over the religious structure of the various Aegean peoples. Zeus was a Cretan god and not Greek. Hera was indigenous to the Argive area being Pelasgian in origin.
At some point after the Greeks had captured the Oracle at Delphi they brought Cretan priests from the island to staff it. Hence Hellenic religion is a reflection of the original Astrological Religion.
Zeus who succeeded his father Cronus became the religious icon along with Hera of the Arien Age in Greece. His father Cronus was the male archetype of the preceeding Taurean Age. Cronus’ father Saturn was the archetype of the Geminian Age. So Greek Astrological Religion can be traced back to at least -6000. Further investigation will probably uncover at least the Cancerian and Leonine Ages.
Now, if the Astrological Religion was operative in the Age of Leo then its origin must also have been Ages before. Thus while it may be uncertain exactly when or in detail how the religion originated it must have been inherited from a previous civilization that existed in the Mediterranean Basis. Call it Atlantis or what you will.
As Zeus was the archetype of the Arien Age who had succeeded his father who was not killed but emasculated and banished to far Tartarus, which is to say 180 degrees due West of sunrise in the Zodiac it was augured that Zeus would have a son who would replace him. Of course. At the transition from Aries to Pisces. The son was Dionysus. However when the Age of Pisces rose the intellectual and racial situation was so confused that a Semitic prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, was given the mantle while the Greek cult of Kyrios Christos, based on Dionysus, was attached to him so that he became Jesus the Christ or Jesus Christ. Dionysus in a Semitic form
Now let us look a the evolution of the relationships of the sub-species of Homo Sapiens as they then stood.
Continued in Part Something Of Value II-2
Exhuming Bob 2-2 Detourning The Folks
December 24, 2007
A Critique
Exhuming Bob 2-2
Detourning The Folks
Greil Marcus has written of detournment extensively especially in his Lipstick Traces. The French word means hijacking, rerouting or diversion, or in other words changing the direction of the flow or meaning. Thus one strips an object of its familiar values and replaces them with others but leaves the object intact. In a conflict of cultures the question becomes who will assign the values or meanings to objects and words.
I will use as a starting point for my purposes here H.L. Mencken of the twenties. The values into which immigrants migrated were those of the Anglo-Saxons. From the immigrant viewpoint the Anglo-Saxons detourned their languages and cultures attempting to replace them with English and Anglo-Saxon values. The inevitable result was that immigrants felt that they had been devalued and demeaned. So it is no wonder that having recovered some balance by the end of WWII they fought back by attempting to detourne Anglo-Saxon culture in their favor.
This is nowhere more apparent than between the Jews and Angl0-Saxons. No matter whether you place the conflict between the Old Dispensation or the New Dispensation the Jews always view themselves as a separate, independant and potentially dominant culture. Hence the drive is always first for autonomy and then detourning the host culture to reflect Jewish laws and customs, hopefully making Hebrew the official language. To Jews, like Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan then ‘freedom’ means the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon law and culture with Jewish law and culture with the Jews as arbiters of the fate of what become essentially subject peoples. The Jews can never be ‘free’ no matter how unrestrained they may be so long as they are subject to others legal and social systems. This is the central problem the United States and the West refuse to face. The same is true of the Semitic Moslems. It is the purpose of Moslems to detourne Western culture for a Moslem Culture. It is quite simple.
By the time H.L. Mencken was making his rise Anglo-Saxon pride was at its maximum. I haven’t been able to determine whether Mencken was Jewish but he allied himself with the Jews making common cause with them. The approach naturally was to defame Anglo-Saxonism. Mencken naturally chose the least sophisticated Anglo-Saxons to represent the whole. Thus he went to the mountain folk of Appalachia and the hill country all along the Line. He began to ridicule these people as representative of all Anglo-Saxons. I mean, he was mean; he was vicious; his Jews caused a huge fuss for much less criticism or in their terms- defamation.
Expanding the arena, using these rural folk as their model the Communists then picked up on these people with the least possibility of education as the example of Anglo-Saxonism. In 1932 and 1933 following Mencken’s example Erskine Caldwell, a Communist writer, published two mammoth best sellers, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre. These books were especially mean and vicious making Mencken look laudatory in comparison. Perhaps using Mencken and Caldwell as inspirations a Jewish cartoonist by the name of Al Capp created the L’il Abner comic strip in 1934. This strip also ridiculed Anglo-Saxons but in a less demeaning manner that not only didn’t offend the majority but actually pleased them. There were some few of us who saw through the sham but there was nothing obvious enough that the majority could see.
Capp would be convicted on a morals charge late in his career that effectively ended his influence. The motif was carried forward on television in the series Archie Bunker.
Now, the Anglo-Saxons used to represent the whole were the custodians of the Folk music that was so revered by the New York City Jews of the late fifties and early sixties. So you actually have Jews imitating Hillbillies.
The vilification the Mountain Folk endured actually shamed the city Anglo-Saxons causing a dichotomy in their character. They rejected the Mountain Folk as representing all Anglo-Saxons. This is made quite clear in Caldwell’s novel when his urban relative throws his rural cousins out of his house and tells them to never come back. Something like a son testifying against his father. The Liberal-Conservative split was given a difinitive form.
The Mountain Folk formed what Greil Marcus calls the Weird Old America. After the Roosevelt administration was elected and the New Deal was established as a continuation of the Wilsonian New Democracy Jews flooded back into Washington as under Wilson.
During the twenties as radio became a reality and recording technology became more widespread and available a number of Mountain Folk and/or White Trash as they were alternately known, recorded their distinctive music in their own voice. Nor was this music ill received, many of the recordings were huge sellers according to the standards of the times while some like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family became very successful recording acts. Thus what was known as Hillbilly music until 1954 came into existence. For whatever reason whoever controls these things thought the term Hillbilly was insulting so the various rural flavored musics were grouped under the term, Country and Western. Hicks are hicks to me whatever you call them, Hillbilly or Country, I’ve been called worse. Having ancestors that came down from the Kentucky hills I have no objection to my Hillbilly ancestry.
The Anglo-Saxon dichotomy was such that those who were shamed by Communist efforts had an extreme aversion to Hillbilly or Country music that they considered ignorant while professing to admire the Blues simply because it was performed by Blacks even though the intellectual content was well below that of Hillbilly music.
Nevertheless the Hill Folk were the custodians of the old English folk traditions. Folk music was then separated from Hillbilly music and approved on that basis. Thus after the Roosevelt administration was installed in an effort to counter the Depression certain cultural programs were developed. One involved the attempt to preserve the quaint customs and music of the Hill Folk and the rural Blacks. These two peoples were treated as anthropological specimens on the same level as Tobriand Islanders and others.
The New Deal of the Roosevelt administration was a direct continuation of Wilsonian New Democracy. It was as though they’d never been gone. With the creation of a huge new bureaucracy Jews came flooding back into Washington as they had in the two Wilson administrations. In many if not most cases these people were the ones sent out to deal with our homegrown anthropological specimens as Superior to Inferior. Sort of a domestic Peace Corps. Yes, they did profess to revere the music of these simple folks.
So Folk Music always had an honored place in Anglo-Saxon cultivated circles perhaps spurred to some extent by the ‘field’ recordings of the New Dealers. Folk played a prominent part in popular music from the end of WWII on. Foremost practioners of the genre were the Almanac Singers and their successors The Weavers.
A key member of both groups was Pete Seeger. Pete was both Jewish and Red. This was a bad combination during the post-war anti-Communist reaction. While making hits of a number of Leadbelly songs under Seeger’s guidance The Weavers had a major success with the Jewish melody Hava Nagila. It was a catchy tune. I liked it.
Capitalizing on this success The Weaver’s under Seeger’s guidance concocted a ‘folk’ tune called Song of the Sabra celebrating Jewish ‘pioneer’ efforts in Israel. Apparently the Sabras were some kind of hobo outfit that sat around campfires and ate stew a lot. Thus the effort to detourne American Folk Music began. The Song of the Sabras was so egregiously promotive of Israeli/Jewish interests that the song caused a big reaction. If I remember correctly it was staged at least once on a TV version of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. That’s where I got the camp fire bit as Pete roasted his weeny and sang. Whether it was an extra or supposedly in the Top Ten I can’t remember.
Somewhere about then Seeger and The Weavers were found to be subservice giving a bad name to Folk Music as long as the genre lasted in 1966 or ’67. The Weavers disappeared from the air waves. However at least one member would be instrumental in guiding the musical direction of the Kingston Trio.
Folk music continued strong between the demise of The Weavers and the emergence of the Kingston Trio both as popular music and ‘purist’ Folk. The greatest of them all was Lonnie Donegan who had a successful career in the US and a tremendous impact on the British scene from England to Australia as Skiffle Music. Josh White, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders among others, one might add Mitch Miller, had many memorable folk tunes competing equally with Rock and Roll if not its superior. If one considers the Presley Sun recordings objectively they also can be seen as Folk or highly influenced by Folk. After all Elvis was known as the Hillbilly Cat.
The Kingston Trio with their Tom Dooley that was an actual sensation in 1958 sort of broke the taboo against Folk music although the Kingstons were plenty subversive. The great Chad Mitchell Trio emerged at this time also as an even more politically subversive group but also with a popular sound and enough bite to defuse Dylan’s claim to have introduced serious lyrics into popular music. The Chad Mitchell Trio is probably running neck and neck with the Kingstons as my favorite folk groups although Terry Gilkyson along with the Pozo-Seco Singers are right behind them. The old Seekers from Australia are hot stuff too.
So that brings us up to Grossman’s Gate of Horn in Chicago of ’58 and the founding of the Newport Folk Festival in ’59 as well as Dylan’s entry into the New York Folk Scene in ’61.
3.
After WWII the Jews had introduced the raw form of multi-culturalism designed to replace the Anglo-Saxon model of society with the Jewish. With the election of the Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy it appeared that the Anglos had been defeated.
The next phase of the Jewish program was put in place. The thing was to detourne or hijack American culture.
Detourning Folk music was part of it. The study of Dylan concentrates on the New York City East Village group that was virtually Jewish with its specific outlook. Actually the Folk scene was very diverse and different in its emphasis in each locale. Bob would focus the entire Folk movement in himself.
Boston with the Mel Lyman family and Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Geoff and Maria Muldaur was quite different from NYC. The strictly commercial LA scene with Randy Sparks’ New Christy Minstrels had its own flavor. In San Francisco Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and others had credentials that easily matched those of Dylan. The whole San Francisco Sound was Folk based.
The top bands like Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio and semi-pop groups like the Brothers Four and the Christy Minstrels really carried the banner for folk.
And then there was the Country or Hillbilly faction that was considerable. Great old tunes like Jimmy Brown The News Boy were Country smashes. Hank Snow recorded a passel of old Folk songs like Nobody’s Child. New murder ballads appeared for people who like that sort of thing that were fabulous like Snow’s Miller’s Cave and Lefty Frizzell’s dazzling The Long Black Veil. It would be years before it was known that Veil was newly written and not an old Hillbilly song. If you compare the Kingston’s Tom Dooley with Frizzell’s Long Black Veil you can’t tell the difference.
A word about Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music that Greil Marcus and Bob Dylan revere so much. The collection is a very small selection of songs culled from a huge mass of material that just happened to fit Harry Smith’s personal psychosis. Anyone going over the same mass of material could select an entirely different selection of songs that reflected their own personal outlook and would be just as ‘authentic.’ I mean, I heard The Cuckoo and I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground over the radio decades ago as a kid. I was signally unimpressed. I never called in to hear either again. So as far as being some authentic voice of America I rather think the collection reflects Jewish and Communist ideals.
What is the message exactly of ‘I wish I were a mole in the ground, I would burrow until I brought that mountain down.’
It that isn’t a call to detournement I don’t know what is. So Harry Smith is Harry Smith and welcome to him but I have my own agenda.
So Dylan left his old life behind to begin a new life in New york City but with an old agenda. His secret agenda was to detourne American culture. Of course the word ‘detourne’ was unknown in America at that time. I have to thank Greil Marcus for adding that very useful word to my vocabulary.
Bob started out detourning Woody Guthrie. Within a couple months he had hijacked Woody’s life. Clinton Heylin believes that even the Guthrie persona was second hand having been detourned from Jack Elliot who had of course detourned it from Guthrie. Boy, there was another stone bore I never could listen to, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.
Dylan more or less confirms this in his Chronicles Vol. I. I’m copying a quote from Chronicles as noted by Jim Kunstler in his excellent review of Bob’s memoir:
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_dylan.html
Quote:
“You’re trying hard, but you’ll never turn into Woody Guthrie,’ (John) Pankake says to me as if he’s looking down from some high hill, like something has violated his instincts. It was no fun being around Pankake. He made me nervous. He breathed fire through his nose. ‘You’d better think of something else. You’re doing it for nothing. Jack Elliot’s already been where you are and gone. Ever heard of him?’ No, I ‘d never heard of Jack Elliot. When Pankake said his name it was the first time I’d heard it. ‘Never heard of him, no….’ Pankake lived in an apartment over McCosh’s bookstore, a place that specialized in eclectic, ancient texts, philosophical political pamphlets from the 1800s on up. It was a neighborhood hangout for intellectuals and Beat types, on the main floor of an old Victorian house only a few blocks away. I went there with Pankake and saw it was true, he had all the incredible records, ones you never saw and wouldn’t know where to get. For somone who didn’t sing and play it was amazing he had so many….Pankake was right. Elliot was far beyond me….I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out in the cold street, aimlessly walked around, I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the deadmen walking through the catacombs. It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy….He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile. The US hadn’t been ready for him. Good. I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.”
Unquote.
Of course the US hadn’t been ready for Elliot. One Guthrie was one too many. Who needed a Guthrie detourned by another Jew? Let the English have Elliot. But that didn’t stop Bob from detourning both Guthrie and Elliot when he got to the Big Apple. He followed Elliot around studying and copying his mannerisms. Elliot should have painted on his guitar the slogan: This machine kills copycats.
Well, no matter Bob learned his error when he learned another Guthrie copycat wasn’t needed in NYC but Bob had mastered a style, a persona on which he could build. That was more than he had had before.
Pete Seeger and the Jewish busybodies were busy fomenting discord in the South. Already knee deep in the Big Muddy Seeger was encourging others to write political diatribe songs. The path was clear and Bob met a girl named Suze Rotolo. Rotolo worked at CORE. She then encouraged Bob to write ‘politically relevant’ songs. Well, what are you going to do but go with the flow, swim with the current? Bob didn’t like the topical songs though. You have to give him credit for good sense there. He wrote literary style lyrics that talked around the political issues without dealing with them directly.
Now there were songs that other voices could sing.
As a lyricist Bob was not a tunesmith so he merely borrowed tunes from old ballads and other people. In other words he detourned Anglo-Saxon folk tunes grafting on Jewish sensibilities. Heylin gives a perfect example in an exchange Dylan had with Martin Carthy in England. Carthy showed him the old English ballad Greensleeves. Bob dutifully learned the song. Then he went away for a few weeks. When he came back he collared Carthy and played him Greensleeves. Here’s your Greensleeves he said. Then he played the tune set to the words of Girl From The North Country. Thus he detourned tune after tune to his own Jewish sensibilities.
Now things were heating up on the Jewish revolutionary front. The so-called Free Speech Movement was being launched at UC Berkeley.
As I mentioned Jews could never be ‘free’ so long as they were merely part of a dominant other culture. So ‘Freedom’ meant to them detourning the dominant culture so that their own law and culture was supreme. Freedom for the Jews meant slavery for everyone else. Thus we have Greil Marcus in the bleachers cheering his heart out at Free Speech rallies for ‘freedom.’ There were many of us in the bleachers much less enthusiastic. But then we weren’t Jewish and we weren’t clear as to what was going on.
Dylan as a Jew came to Berkeley to play where he was received as a hero by his fellow Jews. Both must have been aware of what they were doing. Jerry Rubin was the sparkplug whether Greil Marcus slyly disagrees with him or not.
The revolt at Berkeley soon spread to Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League and across the country where it meshed with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Dylan himself progressed from his political associations to Another Side of Bob Dylan in which he worked out his own personal problems in a Jewish social context in highly symbolic language. The lyrics are complex, poetical and not easily understood. the concept of ‘Freedom’ plays a prominent role.
4.
Freedom as the idea of a complete lack of constraints developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Prior to this ‘freedom’ meant to be free so long as your own freedom didn’t conflict with the freedom of others. Latterly it has taken the meaning that others be damned so long as one can do what one wants. This entails the related notion: consequences be damned. Consequences won’t be damned so if one does the crime one must do the time. I suppose the notion is that if you can run fast enough you can avoid the consequences. I don’t know if one can but some have done a very presentable job of it. Mao was one, Dylan is another. Of course there was that one little incident at Redwing that didn’t work out too well but since then it has been fairly smooth sailing for Bob and he may leave the building without suffering too many serious consequences.
Now, in order to be free one has to dominate everyone else. If one is obligated to an other then one isn’t free according to this latter day interpretation of ‘freedom.’ In that sense in the entertainment industry Frank Sinatra was as free as anyone has ever been. The man need only place a call to anyone elses wife and she would leave her husband’s bed and run over and give Frank a blow job and there was nothing the husband could do about it. This is no joke. Sinatra could have anyone beaten up with impunity. When he was offended by President Kennedy, Kennedy was shot. There are those who maintain Frank had a hand in it. Never been proven but there are reasons to so believe. Frank Sinatra had ‘freedom’ while he escaped the most serious consquences dying in bed a very old man. Alone and despised perhaps but then one can’t escape all the consequences.
So while limiting himself to a field in which he could be successful Bob has perhaps been the most ‘free’ of the Rock ‘n Rollers. He never took on Frank however and if he had he would have discovered the limits of his ‘freedom.’ Although Albert Grossman may have limited Bob’s ‘freedom’ somewhat I find it interesting that Bob came out at least even in his brush with the current Hollywood hard-on, David Geffen.
Now, Bob wasn’t so free that he could achieve his goals without leaning on or being dependent on others. However to compensate himself he destroyed, trashed whoever and whatever he had used as stepping stones to achieve his ‘freedom.’ In the pursuit of his freedom he became a very vicious and nasty man.
There is no reason to believe that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival he wasn’t trashing the whole Folk scene that he had used to get him to the launching pad of his Rock ‘n Roll dream.
The arguments about how or who brought Folk Rock into existence may well be interminable. The fact is that both Folk and Rock at the time were stagnant. Whether the music died in that corn field in Iowa in 1959 or not the big labels had pretty well tamed the music of the fifties. Columbia had separated Dion from the Belmonts and had him singing standards to syrupy instrumentals. Ruby Baby was his last great effort before Columbia detourned him. Safe teen acts and emasculated falsettos dominated the airwaves . By late 1963 and early 1964 the Folk ethic had worn out as Folk groups dressed in loden green pull overs and sang like the Brothers Four. Even the emasculated and detourned version of Michael Row The Boat Ashore couldn’t prop up Folk for long.
So musicians had to be searching for something different if not new. Folk Rock was as new as anything while the electric blues served as different. Thus as the middle sixties came in one had Folk Rock, the electric blues and rough sounding garage bands like the Seeds. Oh yes, that was another development temper tantrum teenagers screaming ‘I don’t want to be like anybody else.’ Not to worry.
Folk rock would have or did develop without any real help from Bob. He already had electric recordings out so that if he didn’t want to stick it in their ear he could have done an acoustic set at Newport and let his electric side take its natural course.
I’m not so sure even then that electricity was the problem. Personally I welcomed the electric Bob. I was glad to see him leave the Folk stuff behind. I was on the West Coast but I didn’t run into many or any people who were emotionally involved. Even Greil Marcus doesn’t seem to be put out by the change.
I think you had to be emotionally invested in Bob the protest singer. When that fellow in Manchester cried out Judas I would have to think that his problem wasn’t an electric guitar but the fact that Bob seemingly betrayed the political stuff he had been singing. He had pandered to the protest crowd and now he wasn’t letting them down easy. He was turning his back on them. Rathr than being the standard bearer of spokesman for the generation that he had let them believe he was he now trashed everything they believed in. They had given him his and now he didn’t need them anymore.
His whole career was based on trashing his believers. Not that I understood any of this at the time. I didn’t even know about it and if I had I wouldn’t have cared.
Positively Fourth Street was his ‘kiss my ass’ song to all those Folkies he had used and abused and now abandoned.
An interesting aside that could use closer examination was his visit to Carl Sandburg in 1964. All the biographers assume that Carl Sandburg snubbed Bob because he hadn’t heard of him. Maybe, I can’t say but it is significant that Sandburg was a folksinger himself or, at least, he sang folk songs. While Bob and Greil are enthusiastic about Harry Smith Sandburg himself had published his American Songbag in 1928 and then followed it up in 1950 with a new collection. Unless he was brain dead in ’64 there is little reason to believe he hadn’t maintained his interest in folk into the sixties and kept up with it.
After all the Christies were doing a number of songs from the 1928 Songbag so Sandburg must have experienced great satisfaction that everything he had been hoping for had come to pass. I don’t know his singing style, and he did publicly perform the songs, but I suspect it was more Christy style than the cacophony of Bob.
I don’t think it improbable that he in fact knew exactly who Bob Dylan was, had probably heard him on record and/or the radio and fully detested him, so that when he opened his door and found Bob Dylan, let us say the folk devil himself, standing there he just froze. It would be nice to know exactly what was said. I think it unlikely that he would have been familiar with Paul Clayton but as Clinton Heylin suggests if he had dropped the needle into the groove there is little doubt which record would have been played through.
If Sandburg had shown any preference for Clayton at all for any reason, manners for instance, there is little doubt that that sealed Clayton’s fate with Bob.
If It’s All Over Now Baby Blue was a put down of Clayton which seems likely then the odds are that it was resentment over something that was said or done at Sandburg’s is the reason.
That would have been added to the fact that Bob had stolen a couple tunes from Clayton that required the trashing of the man in ’64 to cover up the evidence. One can’t hold it against Bob that Clayton committed suicide, after all, we’re all big boys here, but he must certainly have contributed to a deteriorating mental state.
The trashing of Joan Baez also at this time doesn’t require further comment in this place. Suffice it to say that Bob had taken hers to keep with his and now it was her turn for the circular file. It is hard to believe Bob didn’t enjoy what he was doing amidst the flashing gongs on the road to ‘freedom.’
In ’66 Bob’s mind broke. He had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. In his terms a motorcycle accident. There was a long recovery period of several years. I certainly don’t hold the nervous breakdown against him. He was pushing too hard. Even if he had been straight he would have become distraught, but under the influence of what all his biographers agree were monumental amounts of drugs washed down with quantities of alcohol it is a wonder if not a miracle that he lasted as long as he did. Apparently he was driven to complete the sound in his head and vomit out all his rage accumulated up there in the North country before he cracked.
When he went down he went down hard but in pleasant enough circumstances.
Why he came out isn’t clear unless it was to trash his fans. It didn’t take much for me to catch on back then but then on the first hearing of Blonde on Blonde I realized he’d ridden his board all the way to shore. From there he would have to start all over again while he would never catch a wave like that again.
Bob still had a lot of past to bury though.
He achieved this in spectacular fashion in 1975 on his Rolling Thunder tour as an overseer on his very own Maggie’s Farm. The tour mayby be considered as a vision of Plantation Bob. And he was a sadistic overseer too.
As Heylin points out the shows were over four hours long while Bob may have been on stage only a few minutes to a half hour or possibly a little more. Thus his cast of characters were slaving on Maggie’s Farm while Maggie or Bob showed up from time to time to make sure his darkies were singing as they slaved. A very good joke. If you step back and look at it the gig is pretty transparent.
Now, Dylan asked people if they were for it. As the only ‘free’ man in the group Bob had no trouble in getting his victims to come on board his ship that had just come in. The performers couldn’t have been paid much if at all. The payroll and expenses of such an extravaganza couldn’t have been recouped at all. If there was any money left over it went into Bob’s pocket.
Bob reached way back in the past to bring Ramblin’ Jack Elliot aboard. Bob owed Elliot a lot so the old man had to be trashed. McGuinn was brought along because he had traded on Bob’s talent or else had done such sparkling versions of Bob’s songs that he had made Bob look bad.
Phil Ochs wasn’t allowed to come along not because Bob had pity on his fragile mental state but simply because Bob didn’t owe him anything. If he had had reason to trash Ochs you may be sure he would have.
One may guess that he was already finished with Sara, his wife, as he not only allowed her to come along to witness his degenerate behavior but actually cast her as a prositute in his movie Reynaldo and Clara. One just doesn’t allow the mother of one’s children much less a woman one respects to play a prostitute. I find it unforgiveable while Sara took him for much much more than thirty-five million if Heylin and Sounes are correct which is pretty good wages of sin.
As if that wasn’t enough Bob brought along his old inamorata Joan Baez to confront his wife, Sara. Gratuitously cruel and unnecessary so I suppose Bob was attempting to trash his entire pre-1975 past. Like a snake shedding his skin he was attempting to begin a new existence.
Here his Frankist upbringing rose up to bite him because you can’t pour out that quart and half of evil. As Bob said you can change your name but you can’t run from yourself. Bob wasn’t released and one can never be released, only the truth can set you free. You have to come to terms with yourself and acept things as they were and are. Even then your freedom is conditional; at best you are only out on parole. You can’t trash reality.
End of Exhuming Bob 2-2
Exhuming Bob 2: With One Hand Waving Free
December 19, 2007
A Critique
Exhuming Bob 2:
With One Hand Waving Free
by
R.E. Prindle
TEXTS
Scaduto, Anthony: Bob Dylan 1972
Shelton, Robert: No Direction Home 1986
Heylin, Clinton: Behind The Shades Revisited 2000
Sounes, Howard: Down The Highway 2001
Marcus, Greil: Articles and Essays.
Prindle, R.E.: Essays
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.
-Bob Dylan
Time to tackle a few basic assumptions. For instance what is the conception of freedom as entertained by Bob Dylan and latterly his alter ego, Greil Marcus. Both are Jews so freedom must be examined in the context of the Jewish understanding of the term and contrasted with the Gentile understanding.
With the emergence of the supremacy of cultural differences in the United States made stark by the doctrine of Multi-culturalism such a definition seems to be demanded. Cultural expectations are quite different. What is freedom for Jews is not freedom for others. My concept of freedom differs markedly from that of Dylan, Marcus and their fellow Jews.
As is pointed out by both Sounes and Heylin Dylan’s given Jewish name is Sabbatai. That means that his father was probably of the Sabbatian-Frankist Jewish sect. This sect holds that the messiah can never come until the Jews have expelled all the evil from their souls. Therefore they should commit any and all crimes in the effort to purge their souls of evil. In other words apparently according to Frankist beliefs there is, oh, about a quart and half of evil in a Jew which once that is poured out their souls will be purged of evil.
In his 12/30/04 review in Rolling Stone of Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. I Greil Marcus quotes Dylan recollecting a saying of his father:
Quote:
“My father,” Dylan writes of Abraham Zimmerman, “wasn’t so sure the truth would set anybody free”- and those words sound down through the book.
Unquote.
Marcus goes on to say:
Quote:
This isn’t just the stiff-necked Jew turning on Jesus pronouncing that “the truth shall set you free.”
Unquote.
Thus we are led to the core of the issue. If the truth won’t set you free, what will? This seems to be an internal Jewish problem as at the time Jesus is quoted he was merely an itinerant Jewish prophet speaking solely to his fellow Jews as a Jew while demanding recognition as a prophet.
It is often forgotten that prior to Paul’s universalizing of the teaching of the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus cult was confined to the Jews.
The Jewish Jesus cult only became Christian after it was grafted on to the Greek Kyrios Christos cult and therefore became Christian through the association with Aryan Greek religious thinking. Christos means merely the Expected One, the same as the Jewish term Messiah and the Moslem Mahdi. Who are you going to believe, right?
So, the question is what Truth did Jesus have to offer to his fellow Jews that would set them free and free from what? This seems to have been a problem that Abraham Zimmerman was pondering. As he was most likely a Frankist the struggle would have been between expelling the quart and half of evil by committing it while rejecting ‘the truth’ as expounded by the Jewish would be prophet, Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jews reacted violently to Jesus and his message causing his death, then persecuting his following attempting genocide on them. So whatever ‘truth’ Jesus sought to impart to his fellow Jews was thoroughly rejected.
Symbolically Dylan whose personality was divided between the goiish world of Hibbing and the Jewish world of his father speaks of ‘dancing with one hand waving free.’ Which hand?
There is quite obviously a terrific conflict going on in Dylan’s mind from then to now. Not only was his father probably a Frankist but Bob was sent to a Jewish summer camp over several years. This was Camp Herzl. Theodore Herzl was the founder of the Zionism that captured the Jewish identity in the twentieth century. Bob attended those camps in the decade or so after the realization of the Nazi extermination camps. He must therefore have been indoctrinated with the paranoia of post-war Jewry. When he is described as ‘plenty Jewish’ he obviously endured heavy indoctrination with the endless showing of heaps of dead bodies being pushed around with bulldozers.
So then, ‘one hand waving free?’
As Jesus’ message to the world was that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son this notion was in conflict with the traditional Jewish notion that God so loved the Jews exclusively that he made them his chosen people. The plea of the Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth to his people may well have been to come out of the isolation of their chosenness to join the rest of humanity and become ‘free’ of a ridiculous prejudice. This the Jews refused to do choosing to eliminate the messenger instead.
Abraham Zimmerman obviously understood this but chose the Frankist approach rather than the Jesusite. As Greil Marcus so aptly noticed he seems to have been successful in passing this notion on his son. Bob himself, it seems to me, has lived his life in the most represhensible manner running roughshod over everyone, indulging his evil impulses.
A key issue that Heylin emphasizes is what happened in the summer of ’59? This was the summer of Bob’s graduation and a year before he spent the summer in Colorado. The period seems to have been one of extreme psychological turmoil as Bob’s Jewish persona took over his life.
It seems pretty obvious that Dylan committed some crime around his graduation for which he was sent to the Redwing Reformatory of Minnesota. Heylin accepts Beatty Zimmerman’s explanation that Abraham for some reason voluntarily sent Bob to a reformatory in Pennsylvania. This makes no sense to me. As we know Bob committed more than one theft in the year after he began at U. Minnesota. I think it more likely that he appropriated something of someone else in Hibbing and ‘kept it with his.’ What it could have been must have been pretty serious to send a first time offender to the reformatory for a couple months expecially at the age of 18.
It seems possible if not probable that the offence was not Bob’s first and that he had been let off with a warning on earlier offences. At any rate Bob wrote a song concerning the walls of Redwing. It would seem likely that he was familiar with them from the inside.
If so he didn’t learn his lesson as he took to theft at Minnesota. It is also interesting that he also sang ‘why am I always the thief?’ The Pankake record theft at Minnesota was a most ill-considered and egregious theft as the material ‘kept with his’ led directly to him. Bob continued his thefts in Colorado where when the police were called, according to Sounes, he went into a real panic. The panic may have been caused by the fact that if the Minnesota police history became known, as a second offender and an adult, he may have been facing a more serious sentence and that in the men’s prison rather than the boy’s reformatory. Realizing he had outworn his welcome Bob skipped back to Minnesota.
When Pankake was tracking Bob down he discovered that a lot of people were looking for Bob. Why would they be looking for him? Either he owed them money or they too were missing something that Bob was ‘keeping with his.’
Whether Dylan actually wanted to go East to meet Woody or whether the times were changing enough that it was opportune for him to skip Minneapolis requires further investigation but it is probable that it was time to move along.
His mental turmoil was such that people posted an unwanted sign upon their hearts whenever he came around. Heylin quotes Bonnie Beecher concerning an incident that would have made me want to leave the planet. Apparently in mid-day Bob got so drunk that he collapsed in the middle of a campus sidewalk soaking in his own vomit. Beecher was more than a good friend to him in helping the besotted boy to his feet. When Dylan later described his song Like A Rolling Stone as pure vomit his mental state in both instances must have been the same.
At any rate at this point Dylan took his problems to New York City where he began to live out the most improbable of fantasies although in an almost 100% Jewish milieu.
2.
Go to: Exhuming Bob 2-2 Detourning The Folks
Exhuming Bob: The Jewel In The Forehead Of The Toad
December 11, 2007
Exhuming Bob:
The Jewel In The Forehead Of The Toad
By
R.E. Prindle
I ride on a mail train; can’t buy a thrill.
-Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan. How did this guy get into my life? As someone said of Hank Williams: Bob Dylan sang my life. Up to a point. How he could know so much about me is totally unbelievable. I’m three years older than Bob which is not all that much, especially at this age. Our mental states were quite similar while we were working out our mental problems in somewhat the same way, not that Bob had ever heard of me but one of the hazards of exposing yourself on records or in print is that kindred spirits recognize each other. One of the occupational hazards, I suppose.
I’m going to use as a starting point Dylan’s record of Mixed Up Confusion. I must confess that I had never heard the song until a couple years ago. I had bought three copies of Biograph when it came out but never opened one. I bought all three copies as an investment and that turned out to be one lousy investment. So after twenty years these sealed copies weren’t listed for much more than I paid for them so I didn’t think I’d be losing much by opening one. It was then I first heard Mixed Up Confusion. Was it a revelation you ask? Hell no. It was just a noisy song. But as I was sitting watching the river flow and reading Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces it occurred to me that the book needed some constructive criticism so I gave it. You may have read that criticism right here on this blog. Then having the kind of mind I do I had to read the rest of Marcus so as to make knowing and intelligent comments on the guy. Marcus reopened the subject of Dylan in my mind. I dismissed the guy a few years ago, right after hearing Mixed Up Confusion. I had to start thinking about the Bob again because I couldn’t figure out exactly what I used to see in him.
Bob and I first made extra-sensory contact back in ‘64 and as you are well aware this is ‘08. A lot of water had flowed by in the river and under the bridge while I was sitting and watching it since way back when.
In the interval I had worked out my mental problems even integrating my personality according to the tenets of C.G. Jung. I’ve got the same old face, and getting older, but I’m a different guy.
Here’s the rub. I lived by Dylan for maybe five years from Blonde On Blonde until my life began running so fast I had too many other things to think about. Greil Marcus raised some irritating points about Dylan that made me regret my former adulation. Now, this created a small problem because I love my life and I have the notion that I have perfect taste and that whatever I have ever liked I must still like or I don’t really have perfect taste. You can see how Marcus put me up against the wall. Another one of those extrasensory contacts. And there was Bob getting more ambiguous by the moment as Marcus plodded on.
Damn near threw me into a panic.
So now I had to develop a new perspective for my infatuation of the toad with the jewel in his forehead. That’s how I look at Bob now. Well, you know, I’ve read most of the books on Bob, not so much reviews or interviews so that I have the means to analyze this prime influence on my young manhood.
I’m standing in my library when my hand fell on a Dylan book I bought some time ago. It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t read this one yet. The book was the Rough Guide To Bob Dylan by Nigel Williamson. English fellow, obviously never been to America. Nigel had a pretty good handle on Bob so my mind focused on the jewel in Bob’s forehead. Mixed Up Confusion. This was where Bob was at in 1962. The rest of his career is the working out of this song. Trying to clear up the confusion. Get Straight. Walk like a man and the words of that tune..
Not enough attention has been devoted to Bob’s boyhood in Hibbing although guys like Howard Sounes in Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan have made a stab at it. Nobody has touched on the real source of Bob’s malaise though. I mean why was he living in mixed up confusion? His songs give off hints that could be investigated by someone in the right frame of mind but it’s not going to be me. I’ve got other things to think about. I’ve got my own life to live. Bob does generously provide the lyrics on his web site however for anyone interested.
Obviously the early years were not so happy as they could have been. Bob had difficulties with his mother and father; nothing too egregious but one gets the notion that perhaps Bob thought parents and child were mismatched. Should have been born to someone else. I live with that feeling too. Bob and I both knelt at the same altar praying: There must be some way out of here… But just through that door over there and when it closes behind you you can’t get back in. I didn’t design this place I just live here.
How well he got along at school isn’t absolutely clear but it seems that no one felt any compunction to take Bob at his word which should be the finger on the sign pointing: This Way.
That Bob had time on his hands is obvious by his listening habits on the radio and his reading habits. Bob took it all in as did I. Country, Rock, Swing, Folk, Easy Listening. He doesn’t seem to remember the Folk very much but he must have heard those Harry Smith songs before if he crawled all those late night country stations beaming up on a million watts or so from Del Rio, Texas. He must have got Waterloo real clear. One of the great country stations of the Midwest. I don’t know if he could get WCKY in Cincinatti O-ha-o, as the announcer always pronounced it up there in Hibbing or Wheeling West Virginia. Boy Wheeling used to play some unusual items. Came in pretty clear in Michigan where I lived. Carter’s and all that? Old hat.
So I don’t know what blew his mind so much when he got to Dinkytown down at U. Minnesota. Atmosphere I guess. The hip thing was pretty heady. Tickled my fancy.
I’m totally amazed he was blown away by Woody Guthrie. Never had much use for Guthrie myself. This machine kills fascists! Who the hell ever saw a Fascist in America? I never did and I looked. I was curious. I wanted to find one.
Read Bound For Glory too. Left me cold but then that’s a matter of taste or perhaps temperament. Anyway Bob’s got all these musical influences rolling around in his mind and he meant to do something with them. He took off hitchhiking for NYC in the middle of a Minnesota winter. God, what balls. If anything got him into the Hall of Fame that must have been it.
I’ve done it. Not Minnesota but over on the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan side. Must have been out of my mind. Well, just young and dumb, but even that’s no excuse. I bet Bob feels the same way. There I was in three feet of snow with trucks going by at fifty miles an hour. Rearranged my own personal snow bank every time it happened. But this isn’t about me, well, actually it is but only in relation to Bob.
This hitchhike through the winter wonderland must have left an indelible stamp on Bob’s mind. Did mine. Made him cold. Bitter. Put bite into some of his songs. Tears of rage. Hello New York City sayonara Chitown. Boy, there’s two places that’ll give you a vivid impression of mankind. Did me.
Bob was there at the creation of Rock and Roll and it was a life changing experience for him. Some guys like Eddie Cochran and Ricky Nelson could settle into quick and easy imitations but Bob had trouble sorting our his influences and making a sound that was his own. Landing in Greenwich Village and its vibrant Folk scene, if some of those guys can be called vibrant. I’ve got a whole collection of their records and some of ‘em are so dull they make Bobby shine.
So Bob settled in doing things like Talking New York and other folkie stuff as he put his musical roots down coming up with Hank Williams influenced Folk stuff. He was doin’ all right too but he couldn’t forget those Rock and Roll rhythms.
So just as he was drolling out Folk anthems in ‘62 he went into the studio and did this strange Rock and Roll record called Mixed Up Confusion. Tryin’ to be Elvis Presley. Sun years. Hot licks and all that jazz.
So Mixed Up Confusion is not good but it’s not bad either. All his miserable past is focused into that song and all his magnificent rise emanates from it. The song is a knot. It’s like when I first started writing. I could tell my whole life story in three Ernest Hemingway style sentences. Brief and pithy but there couldn’t possibly be that big a demand for a haiku on my life. I’d have to kind of elaborate, get loquacious, a little. That’s what Bob did after Mixed Up Confusion. He began to elaborate. Stretch it out. Separate those musical strands. Mercerize it whatever mercerize means. Seen the world somewhere. Memorized it. This might be the appropriate time to use it; might not.
2.
Now, I only heard the song in 2005 but in the way memory works I was able to shift it from here to there so that me and Bob was in two places at the same time together. You know, we went to the same school together at different times. It was a lot easier to do than explain.
Bob and I began to work out our problem in the same way, he singing, me listening. See, I told you it was easy. First though Bob had to dump those Folkies. He was made of stiff stuff though. It was a lot easier for him to do it than it would have been for me. But he was gonna climb that mountain no matter how high. When you get to the top you’ve left everyone behind anyway. I’ll say I know but that wouldn’t be 100% true. Wouldn’t be a 100% lie either though. Kinda half way between the pillar and the post. You could kinda reach out and touch each one with your hands. Have to be kind of a contortionist though. I saw a guy once who could fit himself into a shoe box, big shoes, cowboy boots, size nineteens, but I never wanted to emulate him.
So Bob had been laying this folk stuff on the people pretty thick. They believed in him. They thought he was sincere, didn’t bother to ask. But he got himself a hot electric band and showed ‘em what boogie folk was. That’s when the sh.., uh stuff, hit the fan. It was messy. Got all over everybody. But Bob was kind of a Magic Man. He survived it. Prospered. Took more balls than I got to do it though.
They booed him. Loud. Shouted things at him. Like, Judas and Traitor and Go Home. He said he didn’t believe them but that must have been sheer bravado. They had their point. Well, don’t look back as Farragut said in Mobile Bay. Full speed ahead boys. Let ‘em deal with this.
Bob knew a thing or two about himself, if you know what I mean. He was beginning to sort his Rock and Roll ideas out. Tears of Rage. All the anger and frustration of his youth was finding a vent. The mood was terrific, who in the hell cared what it meant. If you wanted your songs to sound heavy but mean something plain you could borrow the Sound of Silence from Simon and Garfunkle.
He was beginning to be able to project his vision of Rock and Roll. It would appear that he wanted to create an entirely new paradigm as he does manage to sound different but retains similarities to both Presley and Little Richard, two of his major influences. The tentative gropings of Bringing It All Back Home progressed through Highway 61 Revisited to full realization in Blonde On Blonde. Rainy Day Women is a weird and raucous vision of Rock music but in reality is neither fish nor fowl. The general reaction to Blonde On Blonde was one of puzzlement. The music of Rainy Day Women was repellent to most while the lyrics of that summer of ‘66 were impenetrable. Nobody and I mean nobody had any idea of what Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands was about. Still Dylan’s vision of Rock was loose and exciting.
Bob Dylan had also reached a plateau with the release of this his major opus. He had realized or perfected the style. No farther development was possible. The rage and resentment that had fueled the music even perhaps psychotic had reached a culmination.
Thus in the summer of ‘66 Dylan had no place to go. I presume he was out of ideas hence his accident and retirement.
The summer of ‘66 was traumatic for the Dylan, myself and the country. While Bob’s new record lay on the counter waiting to be bought on July 13th Richard Speck committed a horrific crime in Chicago. He ritually murdered a passel of nursing students. At the time the memory of Kennedy’s assassination was still strong. At the time he was shot there were people who thought and said that the assassination would release an epidemic of murder. I don’t know that Speck had any relationship to Kennedy, perhaps his killing was merely a harbinger of the murderous unrest stalking the land.
I had just graduated from Cal State at Hayward that June of ’66. I was taking graduate courses at UC Berkeley. Twenty-eight years old at the time. The Dylan record had hit the stores at the end of June. Now, the record was psychologically disturbing and unsettling by itself. Records were the generation’s means of expressing itself, replacing the movies of the previous generation and books of still earlier generations, so Blonde On Blonde had earth shaking qualities not present in CD s today. Not only did Blonde On Blonde erupt in that memorable summer but Procol Harum, Cream and Canned Heat first emerged. All exhibited a new form of craziness what with Cream’s I Feel Free and Canned Heat being named after a drug substitute. The following June, The Summer Of Love would see the release of the even crazier record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles.
So we were reeling from Speck’s astounding crime under the influences of the psychotic or near psychotic Blonde On Blonde when two weeks after Speck Charlie Whitman barricaded himself in his tower and opened fire on the world or at least as much of it as he could reach on the University of Texas campus. Whitman killed or wounded dozens.
At the time I was cracking my brain trying to learn a year’s worth of Latin in an intensive six week course while trying to prepare for a move to graduate school at the University of Oregon.
At the same time Bob was working out his rage and hatred in full view of the world with what were actually night thoughts I was privately doing the same under the influence of his lunacy as he exposed himself on records. I was still hurtin’ every single day searching for my own release and the way out of from where I was at. I was strange enough, hair parted in the middle getting longer by the day, to feel some affinity to Speck and Whitman as well as Dylan. Whatever I saw in Dylan I saw aspects of in Speck and Whitman. Dylan did too; at least he said so at an awards ceremony setting his audience on their ears. I know what he was talking about and everyone in that audience should have too. No man is an island, send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
3.
In the summer of ‘66 the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was in the mopping up stage. The new paradigm of ‘Freedom’ was in place at the home of the Golden Bears. The obscene rag The Berkeley Barb was being hawked on the street corners and wherever. The homeless and runaways were throwing down their sleeping bags in doorways creating the new street sitcom of the Brave New America.
The man who dubbed what went before as The Old Weird America had graduated from US Berkeley that very same June of ‘66. He was on his way over to San Francisco to become the reviews editor of the new journalism espoused by The Rolling Stone, the most successful of the generations publishing ventures. The San Francisco Oracle published for a year then disappeared.
I gathered my things together and headed North to the land of perpetual overcast, Oregon.
While I was familiar with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 with the addition of Blonde On Blonde I began to immerse myself in the three records for about three years. I listened to a side a day every morning when I got up. I know that when Bob talks about his hour of darkness he really means his whole life. That’s what I would mean by it. That’s what I meant by it. It wasn’t a question of not dark yet it was a question of when is the sun going to shine. I was trying to stay on the sunny side of the street but I just couldn’t figure out which side was it. It was going to be dark for a while yet.
Those Dylan years were dark years for me. Probably as dark as it has ever been. Let’s hope so because I don’t want to go there again. But I suppose I have to thank Bob for steadying me through the dark period. Apart from the stray line popping up in my memory from time to time I cannot remember the lyrics of a single song or could I quote a whole verse. The titles were terrific though and I remember a lot of them. Whole novels were in those titles. Whole novels were in many of the lines. I responded to the title It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry. How great. I didn’t need the song that rumbled and loped in the background of the thoughts it released. The tone and mood were the perfect background to the darkness swirling in my mind. Occasionally a line that was another novel in itself would break in like ‘I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy a thrill.’ One more line and I would have had a trilogy. Possibly I could have named the trilogy The Weird Old Greil Marcus. I might yet.
4.
Here’s Greil Marcus forming this weird extrasensory relationship with Bobby. Marcus gets himself all wrapped up in the lyrics of Like A Rolling Stone; begins to live his life like it’s the fifth gospel right after John. I mean, Dylan’s good, but…
Dylan had an effect on a lot of people not least Greil Marcus. Marcus had seen Dylan in ‘63 in Philly and was blown away. He attended several concerts between ‘63 and ‘66 each apparently a religious epiphany. As just a spectator in the audience he could do nothing but adore his idol. Beginning with his job at Rolling Stone in ‘66 he had an entrée backstage at anyone’s concert including his idol Bob’s. Thus he could get up close and personal with his hero. Ask almost any question; form a relationship. Shape Bob’s thinking and attitude a little even in time display his SI credentials.
Apparently Marcus got as involved with Bobby’s lyrics as much as I did, heck, as much as a multitude did. Marcus has followed Bobby down seemingly owning all the records and CD s having heard all the songs at least once, as indeed has Nigel Williamson who wrote the Rough Guide. I can’t really go much further than John Wesley Harding. I gave up on Bob after that, not necessarily because his stuff wasn’t that good, but wherever he was going I wasn’t following. Our minds and problems slipped out of sync. Most likely he went his way and I went mine.
But Greil Marcus became obsessed with one Dylan song: Like A Rolling Stone. He went so far as to write a long essay on the song published as a single volume. A song has to be in your gene’s to devote that much effort to it.
From this point on I’m going to refer to Marcus as Greil for convenience and because I’m going to get more personal. I hope there are no objections.
Speaking from the ‘bully pulpit’ that Greil has created for himself he has declared Like A Rolling Stone not only the best of Bobby’s extensive canon but the greatest song of all time. As an influential critic he has got the ball rolling in the direction he wants it to go. But, there are dissenters.
Nigel Williamson, who may be considered an authority on Dylan’s entire oeuvre equal to Greil, in his Rough Guide to Dylan lists what he considers Bobby’s Top 50. He lists Like A Rolling Stone no higher than eighteen of Dylan’s best not even considering the whole song corpus of the world. Williamson’s top 18 all come from Bobby’s albums before John Wesley Harding. Further of those songs which I know well I would agree with Williamson with the exceptions of #4 Girl From The North Country, #5 Mixed Up Confusion and #8 Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll. I would move To Ramona closer to the top. The Flying Burrito Bros. Version of the song is as good as it gets.
The extravagance of Greil is alarming in a critic. The excess can only be explained by Greil’s relation of the song to some intense personal problem. Now, Greil has not only written several books that almost repeat the same thematic material, John Winthrop- Abraham Lincoln-Mike King Jr., but he has written numerous reviews, essays and been interviewed many times. A great many are available for downloading from the internet so that Greil’s psyche can be searched. In searching through his essays one comes to a remarkably irrelevant and revealing essay. Irrelevant because it has nothing to do with any subject anyone would go to here him lecture about.
On Oct. 13, 2006 Greil read a piece for an audience at the Richard Hugo House. In it he revealed his central childhood fixation.. Because of the death of the inseminator of his mother, a father he never knew by the name of Greil Gerstley, Greil Marcus apparently considers himself an orphan which he is in a manner of speaking in fact.
The incident that catalyzed his feeling he tells thusly:
http://www.hugohouse.org/newwork/marcus_obsessive_memories/
Quote:
It was 1955; I was 10. We had just moved into a new
house in Menlo Park, California. There was a big radio set up, and I’d play with it at night, trying to pull in the drifting signals from across the country; Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha, even New Jersey. One night a few lines came out. I don’t remember the exact words, but the gist is clear: “When American GI s left Korea, they also left behind countless fatherless babies. Once everyone talked about this. Now nobody cares.”
————————–
As I got older I realized it was an echo of something other than what the words from the radio described. I know it was an echo of an absent memory of my own father, whose name was Greil Gerstley, who was lost in a typhoon in the Pacific when his destroyer went down.
———————————
So in times of teenage unhappiness, the fantasy that I might have lived a different life, been a different person with a different name, was more a fact than a fantasy. If my father had lived, both my mother and I would have lived very different lives. But it was the kind of fact that, when you try to hold onto it, slips through your fingers like water.
Unquote.
Alright. Bobby’s song is addressed to a woman while Greil dwells on, delights in the line ‘How does it feel.’ So, what woman does Dylan’s song call to mind in Greil’s experience. I’m afraid it must be his mother. I won’t speculate on whatever lingering fears Greil may have. Suffice it to say that his mother and father in the pressures of war were a dockside romance and marriage. Virtually as the marriage was consummated Greil Gerstner was shipped to his death in a Pacific typhoon.
Greil tells us that he was born six months and a day after his father’s ship went down. Thus as his father sank into the waters of the Pacific Greil was a mass of stem cells evolving into hands, fingers, ears, eyes, nose and…a memory. It is almost eerie the way he dates his memories from this period when he was scarcely recognizable as a human being..
I suspect he considers his mother’s remarriage in 1948 some sort of betrayal of the memory of Greil Gerstner. One wonders if Greil is a Junior. One has the feeling that he was never really comfortable with his adoptive father, Mr. Marcus. I can understand this. There was no genetic affinity to the man. When my mother remarried also in 1948 when I was ten I could never consider my step-father as other than a stranger and an interloper in my mother’s bed. I was furious that he was sleeping with her when my inseminator, my own genetic material, wasn’t.
Both Greil’s reaction and my own were irrational but fully natural and understandable. It matters little that the Gerstners would have undoubtedly been divorced within two years of his father’s return while he would have ended up with a step-father anyway. He can thank his lucky stars his mother remarried as well as she did.
At least his half brother Bill is looking out for him. Thank the Lord for what few favors he bestows.
Greil’s mother is his problem and the source of his admiration for his favorite song and he has become obsessed with his dead father. Then things began to happen. Someone was doing a documentary on the death of the Hull, his father’s ship. Certain stories were told Greil in the course of the documentary that don’t make sense to my experience.
I was in the Navy on a Destroyer Escort, a hundred feet or so shorter than a Destroyer. We were sent through the heart of a typhoon also. I know what the term ‘towering seas’ means. The ship came close to dying several times but we made it through. If the ship had rolled there would have been no survivors. I can’t understand how there were any survivors of the Hull, Gerstner’s ship. In seas like that the ship is tightly sealed to prevent flooding and consequent sinking. The only exit is on the bridge to allow changes of the watch and whatever. When that sucker rolls it is a floating coffin. Nobody gets out. If you happened to be on watch on the bridge you would be thrown into frigid waters with a life expectancy of two minutes at most. To protect myself from the numbing cold I had on so many clothes that they would have saturated and pulled me down before I could come up for air the first time.
I do not understand that there could be survivors of the Hull.
Greil should check his facts more closely, the ship rolls over it doesn’t pitch over. The ship will not right itself at something like a thirty degree roll. Anything more than that and it’s Hello, Davy Jones, goodbye San Francisco.
All that baloney about breaking out of a trough is sheer nonsense. Only a fool would cut the engines. There are so many things happening with the water that survival is sheer luck. At one time the seas were flowing beneath us faster than our headway. That makes the rudders useless. If you don’t have control of the ship you’re sunk. I don’t know how we made it. I really don’t.
So Greil should research his father’s situation more fully and stop blaming everyone. It was just one of those things. Could have happened to anyone. Ask me.
At any rate Greil made the connection of those abandoned Korean children with his own and his father’s. Greil obviously believes that he is as one of those abandoned kids.
The problem then gets back to the woman of Like A Rolling Stone. Only Greil’s mom situation makes Like A Rolling Stone the greatest song ever written. He has to come to terms with his feelings about his mother. That’s all I’ll say. If he rereads Obsessive Memories closely she should be able to find his way out and maybe find another world’s greatest song.
Greil’s obsessions with Like A Rolling Stone soured Bobby beyond redemption for me. However in forcing me to reexamine my own fixation on Bob’s three greatest LP s he has compelled me to come to a truer understanding of what I found in those songs. The use I made of them.
Unfortunately as one door closes another opens. Memories come flooding back of that memorable summer of ‘66. I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy a thrill while it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. Blonde On Blonde, Richard Speck, Charlie Whitman, there’s a novel or two or a trilogy in there somewhere. Can it be found before I die?
Evolution, Genes, Psychology And History
December 7, 2007
Evolution, Genes, Psychology And History
by
R. E. Prindle
I.
When Darwin introduced the idea of Evolution into society in 1859 he presented society with its thorniest problem. Initially Evolution was considered a conflict between Science and Religion. Recently with advances in science the idea has emerged as a racial threat to non-Whites. They will be much more determined and active in the ideas rejection than the religious people. As William Saletan put it in his Slate ezine article:
(Evolution) is a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellect”, “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing hope of reform,” “jeopardizing the doctrine of brotherhood,” and underming “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.”
And, it can be added, with the testing of intelligence by more or less objective means, the IQ Test, the chaff could be separated from the weak confirming just who was inferior in intelligence. No doubt, but change is change whether you choose to believe in it or not. Bryan was right on the challenges to Liberal ideology but wrong on the results. He was a little narrow in his evaluation of the Liberals and the colored peoples of the world who were not evolutionarily advanced. There were unintended consequences that Bryan didn’t comprehend.
Since Darwin and Bryan Liberals have been fighting the mounting evidence that the thrust of evolution is toward greater intelligence of the brain while the genes carrying it seem to be a monopoly of the Aryan species. The big problem for society is the inherent lack of mental capacity of the Africans. Liberals have caused untold suffering to intelligent men and women who contradicted their ideology even through current research has now confirmed that the Liberals, as usual, were wrong and their opponents right.
In November of ’07 the Liberals threw in the sponge on the African question. Scientific studies proved insurmountable to their bigotry. Liberals had to choose between becoming stultified or capitulating. They chose to capitulate but they needed a scapegoat to cover their anguish. He was found in the co-discoverer of DNA, James Watson. DNA has provided the incontrovertible evidence of the inherent differences between the various human species. He announced that there was bad news coming out of Africa and that news was that Africans were biologically afflicted with a low IQ average.
I have no proof but it seems probable that James Watson voluteered for the role of releasing the bad news. At 90 he had nothing to lose so he became the dreaded messenger to deliver the inescapable truth. They didn’t kill this messenger but he was forced to apologize for telling the truth while either being fired from a largely honorary job or resigning to humiliate himself so that the Liberals would have their sacrifice that somehow justified the abdication of their position.
Their ideology has not changed but will require a slight shift in tactics. Mr. Saletan in his essay that appeared a couple weeks after Mr. Watson’s announcement of the scientific facts gives some indication of the nature or the shift of emphasis in their tactics. No longer having the hope of ‘raising’ the Africans by education Mr. Saletan gave the direction a new thrust:
Intermarriage is closing the gap. To the extent that the difficulties (he prefers ‘human testing’ to scientific facts) are genetic the surest way to eliminate the gap is to reunite the human genome. (That’s what he said, devolution) This is already happening including in my own family. In 1970 1 percent of US marriages were between blacks and non-blacks. By 1990 it was 4.5 percent. It may the best punch line of the IQ debacle: the more genetic the racial gap is, the faster we can eliminate it.
Mr. Saletan’s solution, as spokesperson for the Liberals is to negate evolution, creating devolution, and dumb down the human race to one stultified level.
While I disparage undue reliance on IQ testing which as a human device is much less reliable than the evidence of Nature which evidence has been recognized by the unprejudiced for centuries, Mr. Saletan and others do. By their understanding of IQ scores Africans are the lowest with an average of 85. ‘Whites’ next lowest at 100, Mongolids nearly atop the heap at 106 but then Mr. Saletan does a remarkable thing, he shifts the emphasis from species to what he calls ‘races’ to an individual religious group within a broader species. He give the Jews a top score of 113, one suspects he’s Jewish, thus showing his lack of scientific acumen he mixes apples and oranges. In Israel Jews without a history with the West score lower at 85. So ‘Jews’ as a whole would average much lower. At the same time Mr. Saletan should have stuck with species and included Jews in the Semitic species which has a much lower IQ. So the apparent anomaly of the Western Jews requires explanation which I can’t go into here.
Regardless of any IQ scores it is obvious that global society has now organized around Aryan intelligence, including the Jews, and no other, so that may be another anomaly requiring explanation.
However, no matter with whom the Africans intermarry the result will be a reduction of the world’s intelligence or IQ. This isn’t really the issue. The issue is the genocide of ‘Whiteness’ as the coloreds put it or apparent superiority. The coloreds have no difficulty acknowledging that. There can be no doubt this is the intent of the intermarriage that Mr. Saletan proposes.
As you may be aware a Harvard graduate and sometime Harvard professor, Mr. Noel Ignatiev (Jewish) has called for the elimination of ‘Whites’ by ‘any means necessary.’ Recently a retired Black CNN newscaster ( I apologize for not remembering his name but I never watch CNN) announced that the half billion White men in the world had better be alert because they are a mere island in a sea of coloreds. Thus, as with Ignatiev, who by the way also has the entree of UC Berkelely and other prestigious universities, the threat is genocide of Aryan males.
The women can be kept because women are, well, desirable, besides which once impregnated the child will be colored and Whiteness will automatically disappear. Regardless of the increase in interracial marriages in the US noted by Mr. Saletan it is apparently not fast enough for more racially concerned societies. The President of France, Nick Sarkozy, announced in the Spring of 2011 that he was seeking a law that compelled White women to marry Black men only. White resistance must be a stubborn barrier to the emergence of the Golden Race.
In the US, television and movies hammer away at the elimination of racial differences as perceived by what passes for the Liberal mind. Blacks are universally portrayed as geniuses while Whites are quarrelsome and dumb. White women are always attracted to benevolent Black men while being sexually promiscuous. This portrayal is called a ‘role model.’
So the shift in Liberal emphasis will merely mean the further indoctrination and conditioning of Euroamerican women to accept Black men as lovers if not husbands. Marriage isn’t necessary.
I don’t like to think it but Evolution in all probability will be negated, devolution is coming and that shortly.
Part II
In opposition to the obvious states of human differentiation there are those who argue that differences don’t matter. At one and the same time they point out that Chimpanzees share 98% of human genes but fail to note the obvious and important differences between Chimps and and all human species.
Let us remember that life is a matter of chemistry, all living beings on the planet are composed from a certain group of elements, the most prominent being hydrogen and oxygen. In that sense earthworms and humans are nearly identical in chemical composition. All forms of life have DNA composed of chromosomes and genes.. So why isn’t there only one form of life? Well, genes. I haven’t checked but I’m sure that all mammals undoubtedly share 90-95% of the same genes, so the difference between an Ass and human must be negligible.
Since the decoding of the genome the emphasis has been on genes, but how genes function is not understood while the search is on for the genes that cause this and that, even for mental conditions that have no relationship to genes. On the one hand the concentration on genes overlooks the chomosome and or grouping of genes and their relationship to each other as well as the double helix whole while on the other hand the whole concept of Evolution is ignored and suppressed for social reasons. The truth would destroy the basis for societal inner wishful thinking. While the differences between the human species are controlled by the genes the genes are not static and unchangeable but are agents of evolution. The key is that the species are in the process of greater differentiation.
Evolution at this point seems to be occurring in the brain. A change toward greater intelligence.
The African’s intelligence limited by evolution is limited because as the first evolved Homo Sapiens, of which all agree, these genes were as yet unevolved while as the first Homo Sapiens the African is completely evolved in his manifestation. As the difference between the Last Hominid Predecessor and the African as first Homo Sapiens was not that large, perhaps merely a gene or two, the African must be the first step in the evolution of the genus Homo Sapiens.
The current feeling seems to be that if a certain quality is needed the human body will produce a gene for it. Thus Liberals believe that the African is Black because Blackness was needed as a protection from the tropical sun. This ignores the fact that gorillas are not only Black but have a heavy coat of hair which is even better protection from that devilish tropical sun. So the question would seem to be why the African either lost his coat of hair or failed to develop one which would have been even more advantageous than being merely black. Obviously the African would be in much better shape with a protective coat of hair. Thus Evolution instead of working to his advantage has actually worked against it.
What is more likely is that the African is Black for genetic reasons and genetic reasons alone. His color has nothing to do with the tropical sun.
In the Liberal collection of Just So stories then they say that Whites , who they believe are nothing but displaced Africans, developed a gene for Whiteness in response to Europe’s cold pale sun. This doesn’t explain why White people at the same time didn’t develop a fur coat that shed in the summer and increased for protection from the cold in winter, perhaps becoming protectively white to camouflage them in the snow. Nor do they deign to advise us how long it takes for the genes to recognize the need for Whiteness and begin adaptation.
Thus we are told that Homo Sapiens first evolved in Africa c. 150,000-200,000 years ago and that he was Black. While the other human species evolved from these first Black Homo Sapiens they give us no hint as to when this happened. With absolutely no evidence to support their thesis they hypothesize that Africans as Black people migrated from Africa c. 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. One assumes that the process of genetic adaptation proceeded at a very rapid rate unlike in the historical past being accomplished within a few thousand years or so.
The problem with Europeans changing their spots in adaptation to the weather is that Europe was buried under hundreds of feet of ice during the last Ice Age when Africans are supposed to have left Africa. Northern Europe might not have been habitable and then only the Southern parts until 30,000 years ago. So as of 30K years ago the Black African emigrants could not have begun their genetic change to White. While Neanderthal Man occupied Northern Europe at the same time we don’t have evidence as to whether they were Black or White. If they were White but an earlier Hominid then how did that happen?
Further the current occupants of Europe weren’t even in Europe until very recent historical times. The Celts who came from the steppes of Asia entered Europe c.1000 B.C. the Goths followed on their heels. The first Mongolids to enter Europe were the Huns c. 500 B.C. Thus White Europeans developed on the steppes, of Asia where the European climate couldn’t have affected their genetic makeup and yet they were White while they were living cheek by jowl with dark toned Mongolids. For some reason the Mongolids who must have been out on the steppes as long as the Whites didn’t develop a climatic White gene. Why not?
Further still, the most recent settlers of the Americas are said to be Asian immigrants. Yet according to Mr. Saletan the Asians register spectacular I.Q.s ranging over 110 while their American descendents register only 89 or so. Did the I. Q.s of the Asian immigrants sink for some weather related reason or have the East Asians artificially raised theirs by contact with a superior stock and manipulation of tests or test results? How do the Liberals intend to explain such disparities? They don’t. Obviously they just sweep them under the rug then pass laws to make questioning their conclusions illegal.
They refuse to consider the obvious explanation and that is Evolution.
Evolution occurs in small increments. As the first Homo Sapiens to evolve, the African is a rather primitive model. What is obvious is that Whites, Asians and Semites are all more highly evolved models. As late as the end of the nineteenth century Africans had progressed no further than a stone age life style. This is not their fault of course but it is nevertheless true. After having been in contact with higher civilizations for several hundred years Africa is slipping back into a stone age existence as evidenced by Zimbabwe and South Africa and any number of former colonies of Europe instead of absorbing the higher cultures.
One can’t expect more as Nature cannot evolve higher models without leaving less evolved models behind. For instance it is ridiculous to believe Gorillas have always lived in the undesirable areas in which they have been found. They must obviously have preferred the better areas but were driven into the wastes by the superior Africans. This is so obvious it isn’t even worth mentioning but one must. This is just a fact; you can live with it or grouse.
The question then is are all Homo Sapiens species at the same stage of Evolution?
It doesn’t seem possible.
First let me state that I think it probable that there are two or possibly three species of Whites in existence. The first evolved from the African settling in the Med Basis the water level then several hundred feet below its current level. When the ice age ended this civilization was flooded out of the Basin with the bulk of the population settling on the shores of the Med, most notably Crete and Lower Egypt. Their was probably diffusion throughout the rest of the world bringing advanced learning with it.
The succeeding two species are genetic improvements of the first White species. As the former migrated from Central Asia it is probable that HSIII or the second White species were forced out of the Med as HS II had undoubtely been from Africa by HSI. The origin of Neanderthals remains a mystery.
As Evolution is continuing it can only be doing so in the second White species and not there if a third White species is in existence. That means that as the African is fully evolved with no futher improvement possible so is HSII or the first White species and possibly the second or nearly so. Now the range of IQ scores in Whites ranges from say 85 to 160 or possibly beyond. The range of Africans is much lower. It is not unreasonable then to hypothesize that HSII may have a range of from 85 to 110 or so, while HSIII may range from, say, 100 to 130 and HSIV above that. In addition as the scientific mentality is nearly always White male that implies special genetic organization that may or may not be reflected in IQ. Given the enormous IQ range of Whites I think it more than probable that one is dealing with two or three species. Differences will show up in physical manifestations if you look for them and are willing to see them for what they are.
The above means that the Semites and Mongols are sterile species who have also realized their full potential. That there may be deed end Homo Sapiens species should surprise no one. After all Neanderthal man among others was an evolutionary dead end.
I put little faith in IQ test per se that are human contrivances and as such will be made to produce results that gratify human expectations but in the mass they offer a general guide.
If one looks at the result of human development at the present time all of the other species are living according to the results of White intellectual development. All societies on earth today are organized along White lines with the possible exception of the primitive African who seems to sliding back to his traditional stone age organization. This should be indicative of White intelligence.
The colored are keenly aware of this and find it acutely embarrassing hence the Get Whitey scenario announced by the Semite Noel Ignatiev of Harvard University and Barack Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder.
In conjunction with this intellectual and emotional problem a second and even more important one has evolved as was predicted by Charles Darwin and with predictable results.
Part III.
If you can accommodate your mind to the notion that Evolution has created a hierarchy of Human Species it is not necessary that you accept my understanding of the hierarchy, I’m sure you can work out your own vision.
The emergence of the scientific method in the nineteenth century resulting in a rapid unfolding of the human intellect was a test and trial for mankind as every conceived notion came under examination being radically revised or discarded. The world of religion and magic disolved before one’s eyes. That which was abstract displaced that which was concrete; the evidence of the imagination challenged the evidence of the senses. One couldn’t see atoms but they were there.
With the unfolding of intelligence investigations were carried on in areas thought impenetrable to the human mind or just taken for granted. The realm of human psychology was quickly laid bare. Perhaps one of the most significant discoveries was contained in Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation Of Dreams. At last the dream mechanism if not perfectly explained was put on a sound path of discovery. More important than one might think.
Along with the discovery of the mind went this development of psychological and intelligence measurement. Led by Francis Galton and quickly developed by Binet and others it was possible to determine an approximation of an individual’s capacity for abstract thought. Thus humans could be classified by physical strength which could be irrefutably confirmed by observation and by abstract intelligence. The strong man who could rule by brute force now found himself displaced and diminished by wimps with more powerful brains. A true class system to which there was no appeal was thus created.
Nor, as Darwin was to show the way, was the ability for abstract thinking evenly distributed through out the human species. The ability belonged to one species only, the Aryan or White and as I have tentatively determined only a portion of that.
Science was very hard on the conceived notions of mankind. Darwin’s theories not only undermined religion which was immediately obvious but the human species of the world slowly came to realize that scientific advances condemned them to a perpetual inferiority from which again there was no appeal.
At the same time scientific advances in agriculture and medicine disturbed the balance of births and deaths that had depressed population growth so that in the nineteenth century the populations of Africa and the Orient began to explode. The Aryan or White population was 20% of the world total in the nineteenth century but has now fallen to under 10%.
Thus all the human species no longer had room to move and began to uncomfortably jostle each other. Thus five human species are fighting to occupy the same economic niche. In his Origin Of Species Darwin explained the inevitable biological consequences from which, once again, there is no appeal. If you don’t choose to accept the reality, too bad for you. I quote:
As species of the same genus have usually, though by no means invariably, some similarities in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct genera. We see this in the recent extension in parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal-thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates! In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it its great congenor. One species of charlock will supplant another and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the battle of life.
Nature decrees that when two or more species occupy the same economic niche the most advantaged will eliminate the others. Now, Darwin did not make this rule up out of his head; he merely recognized and articulated what his study of Nature revealed. Darwin has no personal responsibility.
Nature does not make exceptions to its general rules. What is true with birds, rats and cockroaches and any other species is true of Homo Sapiens.
One doesn’t have to seach far for examples of this. Neanderthal man is no longer with us. The Bushmen and Whites of South Africa are being systematically exterminated by various African tribes. The Caribs have been history for some time not to mention the Tasmanians who were hunted down and killed to the man. A fine example of a human species causing the decrease of another and displacing it is the European invasion of America. In that invasion a program of extermination of the native Asiatics was commenced but not completed. The remainder were collected and placed in circumscribed areas. The European species took possession of the land.
This was a natural result of the competition between species within a genus filling the same economic niche. Was it brutal? You bet it was. Was it wrong? That all depends on which side you were on as we’ll see in current exterminations which are being carried on no less brutally. When grazing land is needed for species preferred by Homo Sapiens all other ruminants, such as the buffalo, are destroyed or driven into waste spaces. These are natural consequences of population growth.
When one realizes the natural process then the understanding of current natural migrations becomes understandable but no less hazardous to one side or the other. The Asiatic migrations into the same North America in which Europeans formerly displaced Asiatics is now occurring in reverse. Asiatics from Mexico and points South and Asiatics from China and elsewhere, Viet Nam, India, the Philippines etc. are now displacing Europeans. Do they feel guilt or embarrassment? Not at all. Their invasions are totally justified in their own minds. Only Aryans feel guilty.
Southern California is now majority Mexican; the complacent Aryans, who have it in their ability to kill tens of millions of Mexicans without firing a shot, are now a minority while being ethnically cleansed. The city of San Francisco is today one third Chinese; again the Aryans are being ethnically cleansed. Within a matter of a few years the Aryans will have been displaced, ethinically cleansed, by both Chinese and Mexicans and then the conflict will change to between Mexicans and Chinese of which the winner will be the Chinese I have no doubt. Once again the Chinese are completely in the hand of the Aryans who will not utilize their means.
Unlike the Asiatics displaced by the Europeans who put up a stiff resistance the current European population is not only passive, putting up no resistance at all, but are actively encouraging the whole world to come to America and displace them. They hold the door open for the invaders, an unprecedented situation.
The same is true in the Aryan European homeland where major invasions of Semites, Africans and Asiatics are occurring with no resistance but full complicity. As unbelievable as it may seem the President of France, Nick Sarkozy, is calling for a law to compel Aryan women to mate with Africans only thus completely violating any civil rights enjoyed by the women while essentially legalizing their slavery. If this had been suggested by anyone fifty years ago they would have been declared insane, and yet….
That Darwinian principles are involved is evident from the stated intentions of Semites, Africans and Asiatics to exterminate the indigenous population of Aryans. The colored populations of the world have temporarily united to wipe what they call ‘whiteness’ from the face of the earth. The process is far along while resistance is not only feeble but non-existent; the result is virtually certain is not a virtual actuality.
Once the Euroamericans are exterminated it seems reasonably certain that the Chinese who are currently in the process of occupying Africa will exterminate the most primitive of the Homo Sapiens species. From that point on is anybody’s guess. While a few years back I would have hesitated to express such a prophecy things are now so far advanced that if you can’t see it the onus is on you.
Part IV.
If you can accept the concept of Evolution and the progression of the species as well as the inevitable conflict of the species when they come in contact we can briefly examine the nature and progress of those contacts.
It follows that as the first evolved Homo Sapiens species the African realized their full potential rather quickly entering into a relatively stable stone age life style that remained unchanged until they came into contact with Semites and Europeans.
Although Africans had contact with Europeans in the persons of Ancient Greeks and sustained contacts with the Roman Empire they seemed to have learned little from them.
The Semites with whom the Africans had sustained contact from at least 700 AD merely extracted Africans as slaves or assimilated themselves changing color while retaining Arab culture. The Semites themselves had realized their own fulfillment at least by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The fulfilled Semitic culture is represented by the Middle East c. 1800. Whatever technological developments the Semites employed were purchased or taken from the West. As the Ugandan chief Mtese was to say, he noticed that all the goods the Arabs brought to trade were manufactured in Europe.
C. 1500 when Europe began its invasion of the world then, Africans and Semites had realized their full potential as human species as had the Mongolids of East Asia and the Indians of the subcontinent. All were stagnant societies that would have remained unchanged forever without the introduction of the European yeast.
As I stated before the main stem of active evolution progresses from Africans who may be styled H.S I (Homo Sapiens One) to the Whites who did not begin in Europe. HS II which must have evolved from HS I during the last Ice Age undoubtedly settled in the exposed Mediterranean Valley. They apparently developed the first civilization. When the ice melted and the waters rose they were flushed out of the Med Valley around its shores thus civilization as we date it began.
In so far as HS II occupied Spain , Crete, Greece and Italy these must have been the first Europeans. In all probability HS II has also realized its full potential but even so is more highly evolved than Africans. Semites and Mongolids.
Here comes the part that’s going to stick in your craw. In the steppes of Asia the second ‘European’ or Aryan people began to realize its destiny. They must have evolved from HSII and been forced out of the Med Basin migrating to Central Asia. As Aryans they then either migrated from or were driven out of Asia by the Mongolids. Over the centuries they settled in India, the Middle East and the northern latitudes of Europe. They were the last to begin to realize their potential. That potential may now be fully realized while HS IV s either have evolved in small numbers or ready to be evolved.
So, as of c. 1500 all species of Homo Sapiens seemed to be at the same level of development. It would have taken a sharp eye to notice the differences although as Tennyson was to say: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
From c. 1500 to 1900 the Europeans went through an amazing stage of development rapidly developing technology in unheard of directions while beginning scientific researches that have now decoded the genetic structure of not only the human but various other genomes.
This knowledge was gained as Europe successfully but briefly obtained hegemony of the world.
Now, I am not going to appeal to anything so questionable as I.Q. tests but the actual results of the societies and civilizations the various human species have organized.
Thus when Europeans began their invasion of the world c. 1500 all societies were more or less equally evolved, but only the Europeans had not realized the full potential of their Homo Sapiens species. While the other species remained static the Europeans rapidly surpassed them.
By 1800 Europeans were clearly superior on the basis of their accomplishments while by 1900 they had lapped the field. However in their intellectual development they became more far seeing, sensitive to the effect they were having on the other species, while having what all other species lacked as a result, a conscience.
As conquerors the Western invasion was a new departure from that of all previous conquerors. The West brought benefits to the conquered peoples rather than just subjugating and looting them.
Rather than going into Africa and stamping the Africans flat they tried to do the impossible or elevate them beyond the limits of the species. For one hundred fifty thousand years the Africans had been exterminating each other in the literal sense of the term or driving the defeated tribes onto the least desirable land where the defeated either perished or were vastly reduced in numbers thus posing no further threat.
This is what the Europeans should have done to the Africans rather than encourage them. Instead today Euroamericans are on the brink of being exterminated by the Africans in their turn. The Africans have merely returned to their ancestral stone age ways except with machine guns that since they haven’t the knowhow to manufacture are supplied by the Whites of the West for the extermination of their own people. I ask you, what does a high I.Q. mean?
One fatal mistake Euroamericans made was to share hygienic and medical advances with the other species. Thus instead of natural means such as famine and disease controlling their populations the populations of all these peoples skyrocketed.
The Chinese went from 300 million to a billion and a half, the Indians from 250 million to one billion plus while the Africans shot up from 150 million to well over a billion. During that same time Euroamericans increased only marginally dropping from a 20% share of world population to less than 10%.
When the conquered peoples taught and armed by the Europeans, instructed in modern civilization by them, began to assert themselves the Europeans retreated back into their original territories thus sealing their doom. The only Euroamerican choice once the invasion of the world had begun was conquer or die.
Having now lost the will to win which was quickly apprehended by the formerly conquered people they in their turn began to invade Europe and America where they have met no or at best, feeble resistance. Indeed Euroamericans seem to welcome and encourage their own conquest and extermination. They pass laws making it a crime for their own people to resist.
Whether this is unprecedented is difficult to say. Certainly the Sumerians allowed themselves to be infiltrated and submerged by the surrounding Semites. Possibly the Aryan Indic civilization did the same in their area. Indeed, such a lack of sustained effort may be a shortcoming of the Aryan peoples. If so they are only getting what they’ve got coming to them.
Less intellectually developed than the Indo Europeans lacking a conscience the other species have already planned and are in process of exterminating the Euroamericans. I refer you once again to the plan put into execution under the name of Noel Ignatiev.
V.
If one looks at how ancient patterns are being worked out today I hope I won’t shock by the following comments. In Africa today when Robert Mugabe was installed in Zimbabwe at the insistance of Liberal Euroamericans who forced the White government to abdicate the first thing Mugabe did as Shona tribal chief was to begin an extermination of the competing tribe of Matabele Zulu thus renewing a war begun a hundred years or more years previously. At the same time he bnegan the dispossession and driving out of Whites.
In America the Blacks seething in resentment because of slavery which was abolished a hundred fifty years ago expanded their own war on Whites as Liberals had given them the power by installing the Negro Barack Obama as President of the United States. It began as Blacks attacking lone Whites on buses and subways. Gaining courage by White inaction the Blacks escalated to raving gangs attacking Whites on the streets after dark. With still no response so-called ‘flash mobs’ are being organized to plunder and trash White shops, most notably on Chicago’s vaunted Miracle Mile. The Attorney General, the Negro Eric Holder, has openly stated that he will not prosecute ‘his people’ who he believes justified by past events. His position is backed by Negro President Obama. With the laws preventing Whites from defending themselves it is only a matter of time until Blacks become embolded to escalate into wholesale assaults with WMD.
Semites in America with Noel Ignatiev as their spokesperson openly call for the extermination of a billion Whites ‘by any means necessary.’ One might be justified in believing America was Nazi German with Jews in the role of Nazis. These are shocking happenings in both Africa and Euroamerica in what are supposed to be enlightened times. But enlightment is only shared by Euroamericans which Semitic and African activities around the world show. So in reality Europeans should have acted toward Africans in the time honored traditions of exterminating them or driving them into the deserts and waste spaces to survive or perish as they would. It would seem by Ignatiev’s actions that Hitler merely anticipated the Jewish Semites by a few years.
As in Darwinian terms when two or more species of the same genus occupying the same economic niche come into conflict one must, I repeat, must, eliminate the others. In this context Whites have willingly surrendered and are patiently waiting to be eliminated.
The Africans, Darwinian illiterates, are foolishly inviting the Chinese into the continent. The Chinese like the even more primitive Africans have no developed conscience and will have no compunction in either exterminating the Africans or driving them into wast lands just as the Africans drove Gorillas and Apes into waste spaces before them. Gnash your teeth and lament if you like but nature will out.
The Europeans missed their opportunity. They foolishly permitted, even encouraged, the colored populations of the planet to explode while at the same time limiting their own population growth. As the colored populations have spiraled out of control Euroamericans have become an ever diminishing percentage of humanity. While with decreasing numbers they have foolishly squandered their technological superiority.
In addition the colored populations are enraged by the undeniable evolutionary superiority of the Whites. Nothing hurts more than to realize one’s inherent inferiority. When the Whites retreated within the borders of their homelands the Africans, Semites and Mongolids then began the invasion of Euroamerica with the full, even openly, acknowledged intent of eliminating and replacing Whites. Following ancient tradition they will kill the men and keep the women.
Now, this invasion would have been difficult or impossible without Fifth Columns inside the two continents. The West was emasculated by the White Liberals on the hand and more improbably by a splinter group of Semites, the Jews, on the other. Historically the West must be thought of as encompassing Europe and West Asia, otherwise known as the Middle East including African Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. At the beginning of history a conflict arose between the two species occupying the Eastern Mediterranean. The Semites on one hand and the Aryans or Europeans on the other. Over time the Moslemized Turks would appropriate Anatolia, now Turkey, while the Persian Aryans retained Persia, now Iran. Both groups have been Semitized by religion and hence stultified into ineffectiveness while subordinated to the Semites.
The nature of the conflict was explained by the Greek historian Herodotus but his explanation has never been taken seriously. His story explained the age old conflict as between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe.’ By those terms is meant the conflict between Semites and Aryans. In the conflict the Aryans were usually the military victors. The Semite Cadmus established a foothold in Boeotia of Ancient Greece but was beaten down and driven out by the Aryans of Sparta. The Romans later eliminated the Semitic Carthaginians from the Western Med. Alexander had appeared somewhat before to crush the Semites of the East Med.
Amid these activities the Semitic Jews came into existence after their deportation to Babylon in -586 and then created a Trojan Horse to defang the militarily superior Aryans without resort to war. Paul of Tarsus used the Jewish sect of Christians to inject an enervating religious creed into the Aryans. A sort of bacillus. Unable to defeat Aryans in the field Christianity taught Aryans to turn the other cheek. The notion of the ‘brotherhood of man’ was given them. While ‘brotherhood’ has been abjured by Mongolids, Semites and Africans, Europeans were taught to place the interests of others before their own. More specifically they were taught to put the interests of the Jews as ‘little brothers’ before theirs.
Thus the Jewish Bible was made the holy book of the Aryans. At that time Northern Europe was outside the civilized pale so that Christianity took more effective hold on Romanized Europe. As the Jews express it they are the trunk of the tree to which the Aryans have grafted as a branch.
Christianity and the Bible was then injected maliciously on Northern Europeans once the Frankish king Charlemagne was converted to Catholicism. The North resent the imposition of Christianityh having since thrown off the yoke.
By the end of the French Revolution Liberalism became the dominant outlook. Thus the apparent willingness of today’s Liberals to subordinate their manhood to the colored peoples of the world probably arose from this history. As religionists the Liberals adopted the Holier Than Thou attitude characteristic of them while the Euroamericans who cast off the Biblical or Jewish yoke became second class citizens outside the pale.
In both Europe and the United States Liberals took up the cause of the colored majority functioning as a colored Fifth Column. They constantly hamstrung and sabotaged all efforts to hold the place that had been won in the world. Liberals have always been pro-African, pro-Semite and pro-Mongolid. Historically they cheer every European defeat and deplore every European victory.
Liberals have invited the colored peoples of the world and the Moslems who one and all resent their former subjugation to Europeans and consequently hate White people. Liberals have even made a gift of the West’s economies to the Chinese. There can be nothing more false than that the Chinese have the highest I.Q. in the world. Historical evidence is against any such notion. Euroamericans have simply set them up in business.
Now, as Darwin pointed out the competition between species is always the most vicious as, indeed, are civil wars. The economy we have enjoyed for the last hundred years or so has been based on abundant resources. Those resources are not unlimited but are actually exhausted. Without abundance of resources not only cannot the world economy be supported but not even one national economy such as China or the United States can be supported. The critical resources at present of course are oil and water.
As the Liberal credo has always been that no one can be prosperous if all are not prosperous they have naturally transferred the prosperity of the West to the East. There’s nothing that can be done with the Africans. Thus with oil supplies declining rapidly while oil use in the East is increasing dramatically not only will there not be enough to go around but because of the Jewish direction of North America’s foreign affairs such deep resentments have been created at all levels of the Middle East that all of those supplies will go East.
The West impoverished by the East and invaded or emasculated by immigrants however you choose from every direction will thus be eliminated from the face of the earth.
There is absolutely no informed person who cannot see this. Conservatives lament but meekly consent although some few do complain. The Liberals on the other hand applaud and forward the result because of Biblical indoctrination and conditioning of one world, people, one hell hole.
The question is then will it come to pass or is rejection possible?
VI.
No one can positively say what will happen or how soon but there are factors militating against the realization of Liberal desires. It should be clear by now that Liberals are the prime enemy. They must be disabled first. Anyone not willing to take up that fight should quietly submit and stop irritating us with complaints.
Along with tight resources the burgeoning global population now approaching seven billion is already too much for the planet to sustain. Malthusian limits have already been reached and passed. Water and oil are the keys. The level of the Great Lakes in North America are already receding steadily from over consumption. A conspiracy to bring Africa and Asia to North America is adding millions of new water consumers per year. One can drain the Great Lakes, for instance, only once. After that the well has run dry.
With another million people or so added to the Statein Georgia’s current drought that State would be dry in more ways than one. The same is true all over the world. Everyone, I repeat, everyone already knows this but they still persist in what can only be considered an insane enterprise.
Further Liberals know that it is an insane enterprise because they pass laws forbidding anyone to say it is an insane enterprise.
At any rate it is very probable that population pressures on resources will disrupt all plans in progress. When that happens the very hostile populations within regions will begin wars of extermination on each other so that the pressures on Euroamericans will be disrupted and distributed over a wide area. Blacks and Whites will not only be at war but Blacks vs. Mexicans, Mexicans vs. Chinese and all against each other. This may happen within ten years or so. It is best then to be prepared. These will be wars of extermination. Ruthless. One must be mentally prepared to kill.
In all probability regions will find it difficult to impossible to invade other regions so all the warfare will probably be intra-regional.
As the colored peoples have already gotten their Liberal handlers to pass laws forbidding Whites to combine those laws will have to be disregarded. It would be best to organize now and repeal them but that seems scarcely likely. So far Conservatives just talk.
So if Evolution is to be allowed to run its course the gene pool of HS III and possibly IV must be kept intact. A viable psychological approach must be devised and propagated. Psychological training is a first priority. That means a rejection of the Biblical ethos. The way is clear. This is no longer a nation of two approaches but a region of several potential warring populations. The first enemy is the Liberal faction. While nothing can be obtained by palavers it is still best to keep up the appearance of a dialogue but know that nothing can come of it so that military preparations continue. Organize.
The Ballad Of Bobby And Albert
November 30, 2007
by
R.E. Prindle
For some reason the notion has grown that Folk music erupted in 1958 with the Kingston Trio’s version of Tom Dooley. I don’t understand this. We sang Folk and Old Timey all the way through grade school. Grade school ended for me in 1950. Folk music was always a conscious part of my life. I grew so tired of singing Go Tell Aunt Rhody and She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain that I shouted for joy upon hearing The Weaver’s sing On Top Of Old Smokey and Goodnight Irene.
That was in the days of ‘Your Hit Parade’. That show was a key program before TV wiped programmed radio off the Networks. They thought radio was dead. Didn’t think anyone would listen to music twenty-four hours a day. We not only did that but we listened to the same four songs over and over in fifteen minute segments. They called it Top Forty but I remember it more like the Top Four. When one song wore out they plugged in another one and kept going. Of course that was only temporary; things evolved fast.
Folk and Folk related music was a strong stream all through the fifties. Burl Ives was the rage for a while but you can only get so far on Jimmie Crack Corn And I Don’t Care and The Blue Tail Fly. Tennessee Ernie Ford and his Sixteen Tons was as close as you could get to Folk without actually stepping over the line. Harry Belafonte occupied the mid-fifties as a Folksinger, academic quality, with his stupid Mark Twain. In a more pop vein Mitch Miller churned out stuff like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Bowery Grenadiers. I didn’t care for it at the time but his sing along stuff is pretty good.
Who can forget the greatest of them all with his fabulous hit tune The Rock Island Line in 1955. The Great
Lonnie Donegan. The song was played once every fifteen minutes around the clock on every station for a couple of weeks. I once artfully shifted stations so that I got to hear the song seven times in a row. Lonnie Donegan could sing circles around the entire Greenwich Village crowd including any number of Dylans. He was very successful in combining a listenable approach to a trad style. All the trad stuff done trad style was OK for the enthusiasts but had no commercial potential. None of the Greenwich Village crowd had a future except Dylan. Even the best of them, Fred Neil, fell flat.
Fred Hellerman of the Weavers was musical advisor to the Kingstons who merely continued the Weavers’ tradition. The music that Bob Dylan tuned into in 1959 had been an established fact for ten years or better. His future manager Albert Grossman had established the premier folk venue, The Gate Of Horn in Chicago the year before while helping to establish the Newport Folk Festival in 1959
The trad folk types were running the Village by the time Dylan got there. Some people liked the traditional style, they usually smoked pipes. I can handle it but I don’t like those precious antiquarian stylists; I much prefer the pop styles of the Kingstons and the Chad Mitchell Trio. Did you ever listen to Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders? Pozo Seco Singers?
It didn’t take Dylan long to understand that the way to success was through the pop style rather than the trad. Thus Dylan as a folk act can be classed with the Kingstons, the Mitchell Trio and The New Christy Minstrels.
His muse, however, spoke with a purer voice; the muse belonged to him, he said, or at least she shacked with him for a couple years before moving on. As talented as Dylan was in those years he did not make it alone. As he said, he wanted to sing to people on his own wavelength. That was a small audience.
While he was shifting the dial to the high numbers at the right hand side of the band he passed through the broad band. In order to get to his own audience he had to appeal to a broader cross section; so he wrote stuff like Blowin’ In The Wind.
As someone who was there at the time I had to roll my eyes at the song’s obviousness while Bob’s vocals drove me up the wall. The sales figures for the first three or four albums bear me out.
So how did Bob get from there to superstar? Two words- Albert Grossman. This article might be subtitled: The Genius And The Promoter. For that brief one or two year period Bob turned out generalized songs that caught the spirit of the g-g-generation. It is questionable how far the songs would have gone had not the promotional genius of Albert Grossman seized the main chance.
Grossman would be as fascinating a study as Bobby. While Dylan has gotten all the credit his early career was in fact a fifty-fifty partnership with Albert.
Bob had no business sense, still doesn’t; nor should any artist be expected to. Everyone would have
stolen him blind. It’s the music business. The performers about him either professed to reject financial success because they couldn’t find the handle or may have been so purist that they actually despised the money. Sorta hard to believe but that’s the way they talked.
Now, Albert not only saw the financial potential of the caterwauling Dylan but more importantly he foresaw that phonographs records would be the medium of expression for the entire generation. Records were how the generation would communicate. Rather than looking back at what the recording industry had been he looked foward to what it would be.
Noting the song writing potential of the 1962-63 Dylan he determined to make Bob the keystone of his grab for the golden ring. He succeeded in capturing Bob. He had his keystone but he lacked the supports. He’d already thought that out working at it from the time he founded the Gate of Horn. Having gotten himself a fecund folk style songwriter he now needed a sweet singing Top 40 folk style group a la the Kingston Trio. The latter was perhaps the easiest part of the equation.
Secure in his source of material Albert organized the commercial sounding folk group called Peter, Paul and Mary, three former purists who opted for the cash. Packaging a sound for his group was relatively easy. Taking the songs of his keystone he had them set to pretty three part harmonies. Presto! Albert had dumped the harsh cacophony of Dylan and the songs shone.
Parts one and two of his plan were complete. He had partnered himself with Dylan and he owned Peter, Paul and Mary. The rest fell into place. The public was entranced by the songs of Bob Dylan; now they wanted to know who the writer was. Essentially the singer-songwriter was called into existence by demand. Albert put his publicity act in motion. It is doubtful that he knew how Dylan would respond but Dylan’s mysterioso act was perfect for the times while being executed to perfection. Albert’s keystone captured the imagination of the world.
As a genius promoter Albert understood his contribution to the equation. Albert engineered Bobby’s success while with an artist’s ego Dylan totally underestimated Albert’s contribution. Nevertheless Albert Grossman wanted his fair share which he calculated as much higher than the established ten percent for perfunctuory management while probably going over the line of fair which a promoter’s ego will.
The structure of the contemporary music business was in its formative stages. Albert was a presage of the future. He formed groups with an identity in which he took only fifty percent, but the groups were his creation he was entitled to it. Later the artists would simply be put on salary. By the end of the century when the music industry had evolved, his successors concceived a group concept from start to finish providing concept and songs while merely hiring some musical working stiffs, probably not all that musical, just stiffs. The performers were interchangeable like members of a sports team. Heck they didn’t even play or sing they just danced to records. It didn’t matter whether one or more or the whole group was replaced. The performers had no talent merely acrobatic skills. Promotion had evolved since Albert.
Albert understood the artistic ego but too well. Two colossal ambitions came into collision.
One of the first things Albert did when he captured Bobby was to buy back the publishing from M. Witmark. He then set up a new publishing company, Dwarf Music, in which he gave himself a fifty percent interest. At first glance fifty percent looks like he really took advantage of Bobby.
Certainly he was underhanded. Remember, this is only the record business and Albert was relatively honest. He never explained himself to Bobby. He did go to lengths to conceal the fifty-fifty split from Dylan. Albert Grossman was after all a promoter. The record industry itself will never get high marks for probity. The equation for theft is when one group controls the money and the other group provides the product.
The question here is not whether Albert stole from Bobby in the sense of juggling the accounting, you can be sure Albert took advantage of his position, but whether he cheated Bobby by taking a fifty percent interest in Dwarf is open to qestion.
I don’t think so.
It is hard to believe that Bob Dylan would have amounted to much if Albert Grossman hadn’t been a promotional genius who recognized the potential which no one else, in fact, could see.
Of course, today, long after the fact, Dylan’s genius seems to have ensured success. At the time that genius wasn’t quite so obvious, indeed, I’m not so sure it ever existed.
I wasn’t Johnny on the Spot when it came to recognizing Dylan’s talent. I didn’t hear of him until 1964 when my brother-in-law played the first couple records for me. All I could hear was a guy thwacking away noisily on guitar punctuating his horrid screeching with cacophonous bursts on an harmonica. It might as well have been an air raid.
I was thoroughly repelled. I wouldn’t have listened to Dylan again but my brother-in-law who had a curious ability to scent out the next big thing insisted I listen to what he was saying. ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.’ To be sure. Well, I’m from the midwest too. I recognized the catch phrases; Dylan uses a lot of midwest catch phrases. I still wasn’t impressed.
To me Dylan sounded illiterate. I ask you, what does ‘How many times can a man look up until he sees the sky?’ mean? What does ‘How many seas must a white duck cross before it can sleep in the sand?’ mean? Is there such a thing as a migrating white duck and do they ever sleep in the sand? Am I supposed to let my heart bleed for white ducks who can’t sleep in the sand tonight? The anwer to those questions, my friend, aren’t blowing in the wind.
The guy just said whatever came into his head. After his mind broke in 1966 and his muse left him he came up with ‘Shut the light, Shut the shade, you don’t have to be afraid.’ I mean, shade and fraid do rhyme. I had problems understanding where the talent was.
Protest singer? What’s that to me? I never did march anyway.
If you listen to the 1963 Newport Folk Festival album Dylan’s singing of Blowin’ In The Wind is sandwiched between Joan Baez and the Freedom Singers. Both back Bobby with a religious fervor the song doesn’t bear before launching into an even more religious shouting of We Shall Overcome…Someday.
Masters of War? You’ve got to be kidding? This is a really puerile song. Dylan just said what no one else wanted to put into words, although once said all those Sing Out types seemed to love it. But, does anyone really believe that wars are promoted by a bunch of professional warriors sitting in a room trying to come up with ideas? Before Bush I mean. Is that a valid explanation of how politics work? What happened to Bobby’s notions of ‘fixtures and forces.’
I really couldn’t go with stuff like this.
Impressed more by my brother-in-law’s unerring ability to spot the next big thing than Bobby I went out and bought the records but I didn’t listen to them although I was increasingly impressed by the number of cover versions that were appearing. Albert Grossman was doing that work, not Bobby.
And then Bringing It All Back Home with its vicious sounding title tuned into my wavelength down around 1600. I was one of those confused, accused, misused, abused, strung out ones and worse. I placed myself in the accused, abused and misused categories; A.J. Weberman obviously placed himself with the strung out ones and worse sorting through garbage cans. But, here we have the spectrum of Bobby’s wavelength.
It just keeps right on a hurtin’.
By the time of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde Bobby was like strong drink to me. I became a bobaholic as he backed deeper and deeper into the inner recesses of his mind where a different logic prevailed in an attempt to narrow his audience as much as possible. Strangely the more he found his own audience the greater his reputation grew.
Even though I became absorbed in Bob Dylan’s ‘genius’ I always remembered those lovely cover versions of his early songs. Don’t you think those Byrds’ covers are too beautiful? I asked myself would I have stuck with Bobby if it hadn’t been for those. I can’t say, but they homogenized Bobby’s quirky personality into a palatable product. When you couldn’t handle Bobby’s Mr. Tambourine Man you could switch to that of the Byrds.
Those cover versions Albert obtained are what made Bob Dylan successful.
Bob wrote them but he had nothing to do with either their placement or production. Bobby’s self appointed ‘partner’ Albert did.
First he created Peter, Paul and Mary. Grossman’s group was the key to Bob’s success. It must be credited
to Grossman that he seized the moment. This was his one chance for success and he caught the Golden Ring as it came around. The rest of Grossman’s career was trying to replicate this golden moment and that he could not do although he did have a ‘critical’ success in establishing Bearsville Records. The label turned out some nice stuff including the very lovely catalog of Jesse Winchester.
However Grossman’s success was based on PP&M. Albert cleverly recognized the quasi-religious spirt of the times. While the catchword at the time was ‘God Is Dead’ Albert chose to name his group after three Christian saints. This was mildly off-putting to those of us of the time. Grossman, himself a Jew, had his private joke as these three ‘Christian’ saints were all Jews.
His group started out singing stupid quasi-religious songs like If I Had A Hammer and This Land Is Your Land. Guthrie Stuff. Grossman was actually mired in the tastes of the fifties. This material in itself was off-putting, even though popular, as being too overtly political. PP&M really caught fire when Bobby, Albert’s ace in the hole, came up with Blowin’ In The Wind. The song was still quasi-religious in tone but cleaner and more modern sounding while being, from my point of view, completely apolitical.
After a couple successful covers by PP&M the Byrds came in with really stunning contemporary versions of Bobby’s songs. Within a year or two of that whole albums were issued trying to cash in on Bobby as a songwriter. Barry McGuire ex of the New Christy Minstrels for Chrissakes. Even that embarrassing Sinatra clone, Trini Lopez.
So Albert had turned Bobby’s catalog gold. Not a trick to be despised.
Bobby’s star rose as his reputation as a songwriter rose.
Albert pushed the envelope to secure as large a portion of the revenues for himself and Bobby as he could. Columbia had conned Dylan into a disadvantageous contract so Albert forced a change. He secured twenty-five percent of the revenues from Bobby’s records for himself which was far in advance of practice. However Albert had been right. Pop album sales which had been miniscule in 1960 burgeoned into a mult-billion dollar segment by the end of the decade. Albert had positioned Bobby to benefit from this huge market.
Albert had bullied Columbia Records, Bobby’s label, into giving him producers who would make the most of his talents. His unusual terroristic tactics threw the fear of god into Columbia’s executives. If Bobby hadn’t signed a new contract, a fairly generous contract, behind Albert’s back Albert probably would have secured an even richer contract. Remember Albert had the incentive of twenty-five percent of Dylan’s record revenues.
One must accept the fact that Albert Grossman managed Bob Dylan’s career to perfection. One must accept the fact tht Dylan would have been worth much less financially, perhaps, worthless without the aid and support of Albert Grossman.
But then, Bob discovered that Albert had, and this is improtant, given himself fifty percent of Dwarf Music not only without telling Bobby but actively preventing his knowing.
Bobby saw only his own genius while ignoring Albert’s. Without thinking it out he chose to feel betrayed. Albert traded on Bobby’s trust but I do not believe Albert betrayed him. I think Albert was the best friend Bobby ever had.
I believe that Albert was entitled to fifty percent of Bobby’s earnings in perpetuity. I’d have to say that Bobby played the churl in not recognizing Albert’s contribution to his success.
Still, Bobby is the artist, Bob Dylan, while Albert is only the promoter, Albert Grossman. Which is the tail and which is the dog? Did you ever see a dog run round and round chasing its tail?
The End.
Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider
November 25, 2007
Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider
By
R.E. Prindle
…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.
=Edgar Rice Burroughs
And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.
Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.
After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.
Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.
Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.
Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.
As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.
Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.
How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.
His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.
Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.
The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.
It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.
McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.
The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.
As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.
While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.
His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.
Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.
One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.
Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.
The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.
Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.
It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.
Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.
In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.
He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.
Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.
The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.
Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.
So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.
Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.
ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.
He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.
He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.
It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..
At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.
When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.
It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.
While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.
Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.
It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.
Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.
Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.
Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.
On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.
Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.
Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s
Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.
His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.
2.
By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.
One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.
And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.
His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.
Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.
It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.
Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.
In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.
So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.
There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.
Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.
Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.
Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.
I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.
At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.
So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.
In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.
Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.
When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.
ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.
His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.
This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.
Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.
Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.
That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.
Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.
Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA
God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.
Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.
Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.
Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.
Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.
Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.
With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.
Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.
I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.
The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.
Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider
By
R.E. Prindle
…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.
=Edgar Rice Burroughs
And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.
Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.
After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.
Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.
Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.
Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.
As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.
Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.
How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.
His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.
Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.
The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.
It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.
McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.
The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.
As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.
While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.
His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.
Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.
One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.
Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.
The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.
Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.
It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.
Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.
In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.
He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.
Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.
The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.
Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.
So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.
Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.
ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.
He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.
He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.
It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..
At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.
When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.
It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.
While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.
Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.
It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.
Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.
Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.
Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.
On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.
Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.
Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s
Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.
His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.
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By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.
One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.
And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.
His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.
Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.
It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.
Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.
In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.
So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.
There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.
Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.
Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.
Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.
I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.
At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.
So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.
In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.
Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.
When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.
ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.
His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.
This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.
Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.
Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.
That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.
Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.
Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA
God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.
Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.
Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.
Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.
Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.
Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.
With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.
Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.
I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.
The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.











