Vol. I, Clip 3: The Vampyres Of New York
December 28, 2015
Book I, Clip 3
The Vampyres Of New York
A Novel
by
R.E. Prindle
If you haven’t experienced that kind of mental agony you don’t know. I tossed and turned all afternoon and into the night. My brain was racked but not with pain. It was like all the connections had come loose and I had no control of my mental processes. There was no way to concentrate, to organize my thoughts to possibly think or be rational. It was like three fevers without temperature racking around in my brain.
I was exhausted and then possibly at one in the morning I heard a knocking. I sat up in bed wondering who in the world it could be. Then I heard Gaines again: Hello, I’m back. Let’s talk.
Well, Gaines! Of course I knew what was happening then. I was at that level of experience and conditioning between the birth process and more conscious experience. I had already cleared out the most compelling of my childhood fixations at forty-two when I integrated my personality. That freed me from compulsions and inhibitions but I gradually learned that there was another layer of control or influence yet beyond my reach. Gaines had now shown up so it was possible to free myself from that psychological layer. Small comfort at eighty but then few if any become so clear. Freud and Jung certainly never attained it. I flattered myself that I could be unique. The first of the New Men. Don’t smile, it was a pleasant thought.
This wasn’t the first incident of interior dialogue my mind had spoken to itself. I heard what they call voices back in my early teens. Of course like St. Augustine I had been convinced that one could talk to God. Unlike Augustine I wasn’t crazy enough to persist when God couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know when I asked.
And then back then I heard voices telling me to do inappropriate things like Kill your mother and Chuckles but I shut them up; I wasn’t to going to jail for any reason. And now, here was Gaines a more or less rational entity who would try to convince me to do evil I was certain. As in primeval days I was attached to the God Principle while Gaines was representing the Satanic Principle.
He seemed to be lodged in the right hemisphere just behind and above that ear. This puzzled me somewhat as I would have thought he would have been part of my Animus or Ego that being the male side of the brain; instead he was on my female side.
Then I realized that when Gaines had taken up a primal position in my consciousness I was sitting on the back steps of the Orphanage. When my mother had put me in the Orphanage and had walked away she had created this space in my mind, this psychological layer. Gaines and his evil comic books was therefore associated with my mother. Oh yes, my mother. Sometimes I wish I had heeded those early voices and offed both her and Chuckles. Chuckles, that mean assed bastard, was her second husband. They married when I was ten and I then came out of the Orphanage.
Well, you know, as I always told myself, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. I think I can say without comment that I played that lousy hand well. Here I was in New York City, the capital of the world, in a thirty million dollar apartment. Gaines wasn’t going to be a problem, after all, he was me and I was him. I had the upper hand with the God Principle on my side while Gaines might as well have been Abe Goldbladder of the Satanic Principle. I will discuss that more in my presentation to the New Serapion Brethren.
I was inside my skull with Gaines but my mind had cleared up, I might as well get started.
‘So, Gaines, what brings you here?’ A silly question because I already knew the answer. Still, in order to extinguish him I had to play along. However I did think it necessary to call in my old psycho-analyst Dr. Anton Polarion as an assist.
Who is Dr. Anton? I’m embarrassed to say this because then you might think I really am crazy. But that’s alright, I may be.
Dr. Anton Polarion came around several years ago when I was deep in my psychological studies. I was working a number of fields of study and I needed someone to handle the psychology for me when I was working another field. It was then I thought up Dr. Anton giving him the responsibility for memorizing and developing psychology.
I know it sounds kind of crazy but it’s not. Dr. Anton was and is a memory aide. If you read up on the art of memory you will learn that in Greek and Roman times people constructed memory palaces of many rooms extensively furnished and then assigned memories to various rooms and objects in order to more conveniently record them, prodigious feats of memory are recorded. Oh alright, but I wasn’t going to wander around a Memory Palace trying to find various rooms and objects with their assigned memories so I just handed the job to an imagined Dr. Anton rather than a Memory Palace. You can understand that can’t you? Seems reasonable enough to me but you never know what other people will think. Anyway Dr. Anton knows whereof he speaks. So when it comes to hearing voices it was now two to one against Gaines and I had another Ace or two up my sleeve.
I was loaded for bear and I was sure I could kick Gaines’ ass. Still, I had to hear Gaines out.
‘So Gaines, as I said, what brings you here?’
‘I’ve got some good advice for you,’ said Gaines.
‘Knowing who you are Gaines I doubt it could be good.’
‘Oh ho, you think you know who I am do you? Who am I?’
‘This will take some time Gaines but you’ve got as much as I do. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Your showing up here, now, puts things in place. I’m going to call in Dr. Anton for support. You know who he is don’t you Gaines?’
‘Of course, of course. I know as well as you know me. Hello Anton, welcome to the conversation.’
Anton: Hello Gaines. Well, let’s get started.
Partly: The key here is the Orphanage and me sitting on the back step reading Tales From The Crypt. That was one sado-masochistic piece Gaines with a certain portrayal of women. Strangely that portrayal was reminiscent of my mother. It is between you and my mother that this psychology revolves around.
Anton: Yes, your mother transferred her hatred of your father to you after she had put him away and tried to destroy any happiness for you. It is no coincidence that after she had your father committed to the asylum she committed you to the Orphanage. Of course, she had ‘good reasons’ for doing so but they weren’t the real reasons. When you turned eighteen she thought she had you again, enlisting you in the Navy and having you shipped off somewhere where she would never have to see you to remind her of her crime against your father. Thus the association of your mother, sado-masochism and Gaines.
Gaines also provides your connection to the Jews although that application came later in life. The content of Gaines’ comics, the sado-masochism, is part of the Jewish Weltanschauung that Freud expressed so well and it is that that Judaicized you, making the Jewish culture part of your own. It is that part, this Satanic consciousness that drags your spirit down causing your chronic low depression. We’ll try to shake it here but it may now be integral to your mentality.
Leaving Gaines for a moment the pre-Gaines component was your mother’s extreme selfishness. Of course your mother was three months gone when she married your father. This didn’t create so much guilt as anger. She held your father responsible preventing her from doing whatever she thought she would be doing later. You were born in 1938 in the depths of the Great Depression.
Jobs were not easy to come by and although your father was a good provider, that is you had a roof over your head and a shack to live in, even so your father ran out of jobs so he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and went to work planting forests. He was a good man; he sent most of his money to your mother. She unfortunately as you would learn was not a good woman.
It is difficult at this point to retrieve her motivation but she got laid in the back of a Chevrolet in the parking lot of a grocery store as you know well, Perry. She became pregnant with the little bastard palmed off to you as your brother. A child of sin he has always remained so. A point came where the pregnancy could no longer be concealed.
Needless to say the realization made your father angry. In an attempt to learn the culprit he began to punch her out. In the way of women she was stout refusing to give up his name. Your father said things like ‘I am out working CCC to provide for you and you’re out, words that were unintelligible to you. Do you remember that Partly?
Partly: Yes I do.
Anton: Less than two and half and you remember! What a memory Perry. The bastard was born, your father left and you saw him only once more several months later. Do you know what happened to him?
Me: No. Never saw him again after that last time.
Dr. Anton: Your mother had him committed to the insane asylum and he lived there all his life and died there.
Gaines: Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t know anything he doesn’t Anton. Where’s this coming from?
Dr. Anton: Just as you have been suppressed until now Gaines so has the knowledge I’m now revealing. It came in bits and pieces and I have put it all together. Partly is just now realizing it.
Where was I? Yes, committing him was a sadistic act on the part of a guilty woman. But it didn’t stop there Partly. To assuage her guilt while indulging her sadism she had removed her husband but you, a reminder of her crime, remained. She transferred her affection to her bastard and set out to torture and frustrate you. You remember the nightmares you had in high school where your mother was constantly betraying you? That was a subconscious recognition of what you wouldn’t allow yourself to acknowledge but still you knew.
The Orphanage was just four blocks from your grandparents house where you were living. She had to know the effect it would have on your mentality, you certainly did, but just as she had put her husband away in an asylum she put his memory away in another institution, the Orphanage.
Do you remember this Partly?
Me: Sure Anton, I remember but not as clearly and well organized as you do.
Dr. Anton: You’d be a better man for learning it although at eighty who gives a shit. You’ll take it to your grave soon enough.
Me: That’s alright Anton, I’ll die, as you say, a better man.
Anton: So your mother dropped you off and you were led away just like in prison or the asylum but with slightly better conditions. And thus you began to become who you used to be before your personality integration that introduced this current phase of your life at forty-two.
You became quite independent in that harrowing situation of the Orphanage. Fate left that copy of Tales From The Crypt lying on that little porch and a pain equal to your being abandoned seared your soul again striking through your subconscious to the structural level here. You were no longer a free man but controlled from, for lack of a better term, your subconscious. I don’t know how you made it through but here you are.
Your mother’s remarriage to the maniac Chuckles who was a match for your mother’s sadism nearly destroyed you during those eight long years until graduation. Enough of that for now. Let’s deal with Gaines here.
Me: Can we get rid of him?
Gaines: Hell no!
Dr. Anton: He is unfortunately part of the warp and woof of your personality but I’m pretty certain we can modify it and reduce his Satanic level considerably.
Gaines: Over my dead body.
Dr. Anton: Preferably Gaines, that is what we’re shooting for.
With that I collapsed back into my pillow exhausted but calmer with less of a feverish feeling. I was breathing somewhat heavily. I knew that this was a significant psychological event that had not yet achieved resolution and I was afraid to lose the thread. After about an hour Dr. Polarion returned. Anton was not an alter ego as Gaines but functioned more as a guardian angel, a good spirit so I welcomed him.
‘We’ve got to handle Gaines Partly.’
‘Yes. What is your suggestion Anton?’
‘This. It seems that Gaines is functioning as a node for a constellation of similar events. The two obvious strands of the constellation are he, that is your Jewish experience, and your mother. The first step must be to disentangle your mother and put her into her own constellation to be dealt with later. You already have a decent handle on her.
That leaves Gaines and your Jewish experience which is a distinct constellation which when knowledgeable about it you’ve done a lot a preparatory groundwork but certain resolutions are still necessary. That constellation has to be distended into its planetary elements so that each can be identified and dispensed with.
In addition there may be other elements concealed within or behind the constellation of which we have yet no knowledge. Time will tell.
And then there is what Gaines wants you to do which is why he’s made his appearance now. We’ll have to listen and go from there. You and I do understand that what he wants is going to be ridiculous and dangerous.
Me: OK Anton, your analysis is good and I do have a good idea what Gaines wants; I’ve also got my arguments ready and can direct him. But, God, this is painful.
Anton: Yes Partly, self-realization can be trying and I’m sure you’re in agony. You remember Hubert Selby the fellow who wrote his novel Last Exit To Brooklyn?
Me: Oh sure, Anton. Very interesting story. He was probing his mind to write his story. That once when he came up against a particularly painful remembrance it shattered him so that he had to take to his bed for a week writhing in agony. I can’t afford the time for that now. I have things to do and fields to plow.
Anton: You may have more than you think Partly. Get some rest and I’ll get Gaines back here in an hour or so. Control your feelings.
With images of Jekyll and Hyde in my fitful dreams was the titanic struggle of the Shadow with evil and the images of Superman and Clark Kent. Good must triumph over evil although it might not be as clear cut a victory as one might hope.
Just before dawn Dr. Polarion returned and shortly thereafter I heard Gaines’ Hello, I’m here.
Me: Alright Gaines. I’m ready.
Anton had already disentangled my mother from the constellational complex so he and I were dealing with just the Gaines/Jewish constellation. In that obscured constellation other traumas wouldn’t be clear at this time.
‘What’s up Gaines?’ Anton asked quietly with an implied menace that he wasn’t going to listen to nonsense.
Gaines: Why so hostile Doctor Polarion.
Anton: We know what you’re up to Gaines. I have to tell you that we know who you are and where you’ve come from so your Satanic power is negated.
Gaines: Oh, aren’t we clever. What is my pedigree Dr. Polarion?
Anton: Simply this: You infected Partly’s mind on that stoop of the Orphanage with your sado-masochistic claptrap. Partly only semi-consciously took in the sado-masochistic sexuality without knowledge of sex, he had to repress your Satanic influence and with some few exceptions he did. As he knew nothing of Jews and your own Jewishness that puzzling aspect of your Satanity was filed away for future reference. In the meantime following Jewish propaganda he was conditioned to revere Jews and did so.
Then in winter of nineteen fifty-eight in a fit of sado-masochistic lunacy the Jews pre-empted all TV channels at the same time on Saturday prime time and broadcast the most incredible pornographic sado-masochistic program imaginable. An hour of graphic snuff films depicting naked dead bodies being pushed about by bulldozers. The sexual implications were horrendous. While secretly fascinated Partly was resentful of the Jews for pushing this atrocity on him. Without articulating it to himself he was fatally disgusted. Also without noticing it he associated the ‘entertainment’ with you Gaines.
Gaines: I’m disgusting?
Anton: Eminently. Now, there comes an incident that was let slip by almost without recognition. Partly’s wife, now deceased, came from a Jewish background on her mother’s side; the father was nominally Catholic. The mother wanted a Jewish wedding while fearing that Partly would object. The venue was unimportant to Partly, in fact, with his Jewish conditioning he got a little thrill from it.
However to the Jews the notion that a Jewish girl would marry a, what they considered Christian boy, was anathema to them. Her parents approached all the synagogues in the East Bay but there was only one Rabbi in the East Bay that would consent to marry the couple. This was brought about by the intervention of his wife’s mother’s sister whose family was a prominent supporter of the synagogue. Even so the rabbi insisted on an interview with Partly.
As I say, Gaines, Partly had no religious scruples to marrying into a religious family, not quite true, he would never have married Catholic, and thought to be amiable with the rabbi. Both Partly and his wife were above religion despising them as relics from a primitive age. While Partly tried to be amiable the rabbi didn’t. Partly talked to the rabbi man to man while the rabbi as all rabbis do exalted his position believing as a Talmudic scholar that that worthless information placed him not only above Partly or his fellow Jews but all humanity and most of the angels. Resenting Partly’s familiarity he insulted Partly grievously as not worthy of a Jewish girl while being a Christian dog or words to that effect. At that point his respect for the Jews, intense conditioning or no, vanished.
This event was constellated with you Gaines and the TV atrocity to negate any positive feeling he had for the Jews. A couple decades of propaganda was wiped out in an instant. Partly’s future unpleasant relations with Jews will appear subsequently.
So that’s who you are Gaines. Satan on a stick.
Gaines: Yeah, well Dr. Polarion I know where Partly lives. I know he has suffered insults, injuries and indignities from many quarters including the ones you mentioned and I know this: He wants revenge. Who do you go to when you want revenge? Satan, baby, Satan. And here I am.
Anton: True, Partly?
Me: No. It’s true I have a lot of resentments but they’re from assholes and assholes can’t help being assholes; if they could they wouldn’t be assholes so one has to ignore them. It’s their cross to bear and I enjoy watching them be assholes. If Gaines thinks he’s going to lure me into criminal activity he’s not here.
Gaines: Kiss my ass Partly. Social unrest is developing rapidly, exponentially day to day. There are hundreds of racial and religious, what the authorities are pleased to call murders rather than the acts of war they are happening every week.
I know Partly that you were trained by your experiences to be a serial killer. You know it. I don’t know how you’ve resisted up to this time but now is the time to indulge those resentments. Not only are the cops overburdened trying to deal with all the killing and raping going on but they’re afraid to leave the station. Whole cities are no go zones for them. They’ll never identify you, never track you down. Come on buddy, let your inner Mr. Hyde see some light. Now’s the time for your revenge.
Me: I think you’re right about the time being the right time Gaines but remember that Vengeance is mine saith the Lord. I’ve learned that it is true.
Gaines: Vengeance is mine saith the Lord? Listen to this guy. Are you putting me on Partly?
Me: Certainly not Gaines, certainly not. Remember you were kicked out of heaven for the religious offence of chutzpah. God stuck his boot up your ass and down you came. You always tempt men to their destruction by exploiting their own weaknesses. If I were to act in revenge I would surely be caught. Even at eighty I don’t want to be thought of as a criminal.
Gaines: No, you don’t want to be thought of as a criminal. Here’s a tip for you Partly…
Anton: I…
Gaines: You stay out of this Anton, this is between Partly and me.
As above, so below, right Partly? God’s will is supposed to prevail on earth as in heaven, right?
Me: I’m not religious but the Bible does say so. What’s your point?
Gaines: As a lawbreaker I was kicked out of heaven, right. If so, then it is God’s will that I be persecuted on earth also, isn’t it?
Me: Well, you have to believe the Bible.
Gaines: No, you don’t. Freud replaced the Bible but as a Jew he follows the Bible’s rhetoric. Freud and I are one and not only am I part of your mind but Freud is too. That’s one of my attributes that Anton the so-called psychologist forgot to mention. So, if it is God’s will that it is to be on earth as it is in heaven then it is permissible to punish Satanic practices as he punished me isn’t it? As a God fearing person it is imperative that you do so.
Well, there was a thought. The Jews consider themselves God’s viceroys on Earth and that they are doing God’s will by forcing his, or theirs really on the rest of mankind, punishing those who resist, that is anti-Semites. It was a tough argument to counter while Gaines had cleverly appealed to my suppressed desires. Anton was no help at this point.
Me: To punish is vengeance Gaines and as I say Vengeance is the Lord’s. Therefore I cannot punish Gaines, however there is the question of justice, lawbreakers should not be allowed the fruit of their crimes with impunity.
As we know God has no temporal means to effect his will on earth so he must use intermediaries as his chosen vessels hence the Jews claim to be that vessel. However if God spoke to the Jews then he can speak to me. Thus if like Saint Augustine I were to hear his voice enjoining me to administer His justice on earth as he does in heaven, that is kicking Satan off the earth then I could obey his will and be judge, jury and executioner here on earth as the Jews consider themselves. Well, Gaines, that is a thought I will have to give consideration.
Gaines: Yes it is. Further…
Anton: Hold, hold it, stop Gaines. Be gone. Hold up Partly, we have to think about this. Later Gaines, later. Go.
And with a sly wink at me Gaines wandered away. He would be back, of course. But he had given me something to think about. I knew I was going to think about it too and as Gaines knew I would rationalize his suggestion into reality but only in a ‘legal’ manner.
Anton just looked at me and shook his head. He knew what was coming. So did I but neither of us could as yet admit it.
-IV-
Once again I lay back exhausted. Still I had to get to work. In an agitated state of mind I reviewed the correcting of my piece for the New Serapion Brethren that I was titling The Vampyres Of New York. I had put some preliminary thoughts up on the internet so I was searching Vampyres Of New York when I was startled to find that there was an actual group called The Vampyres Of New York that claimed to be a worldwide organization. Its spokesman was some guy calling himself Father Sebastian. He was a young guy who would have been further ahead claiming to be Brother Sebastian; in another thirty years he might pass for a father.
Anything associating itself with vampirism had to be Satanic while the guy was absolutely touting himself as a religion. The crude Satanism of the nineteen sixties was obviously morphing into an attempt at a universal religion. This was a far cry from the historian Arnold Toynbee’s cry for a new universal religion to replace Christianity. Gaines was obviously right about the Satanism in Freud being a part of me but apparently the drive was to make Freudianism the basis of a new religion. Thus as Christianity as a Jewish based religion had represented the Godly Principle so Freud as a Jewish based religion would represent the Satanic Principle.
This was a revelation to me that while new I would have to try to work into my essay. I had to think about it a little so while I was thinking I tinkered around working out disguises. Having seen street activity for a couple weeks now I was uneasy walking around in my own skin; I didn’t want to become that well known.
So, as I thought I tried out mustaches, wigs, glasses, different outfits, so I could walk the streets so as not to become obvious. But, time was passing and I was driven back to my writing desk. I wanted to avoid Gaines as long as possible so I put in some long sessions hoping I would be so tired when I went to sleep that that bastard Gaines wouldn’t be called up. I was successful for the week left before going to Farquhar’s.
I was a day ahead of the deadline so I went out to get a couple two or three bottles of wine to take along. Wanted to show I was a regular guy. I am a regular guy but usually not that regular. Boy, NYC is an alkie’s paradise. What a fabulous selection of spirits. I don’t drink much but in my earlier days I could do a limited justice to the bottle. In those days I favored brandy. Really good stuff if you’re going to drink. Oh lord, if I had known then what New York showed my now I might have been the man who never returned.
I wasn’t after liquor though I wanted wine so I asked for and got bottles of Ramey’s Claret. Ramey is a good Napa Valley vintner while his claret is moderately priced and more than good enough, excellent in fact. The vintage was 2014 that particularly dry year and of small berries. Excellent, I thought it should go over. I’d had it before and it really is a great vintage.
For dress I wore a 1960 vintage sport coat I bought at a second hand store. Nothing was ready at James Carter and I had tried Lord and Taylor and other stores but none was showing other than those idiotic short jackets cut small and I thought I looked a heck of a lot better. Charles Tyrwhitt shirt, one of their higher priced dark blue and white mini stripes, black in a low light. So what’s a boy to do? Ralph Lauren had turned ludicrous after he left.
Ragnar drove me and my bottles of wine up to fifty-second street off Madison to Farquhar’s condo, very good, twelfth floor. As I entered the building an explosion went off maybe three blocks away in some direction I couldn’t determine. Somebody was acting up, hard to tell who. It was beginning to happen fairly regularly. Cops weren’t catching anybody. So many people and organizations were claiming credit for these things it must have been a nightmare investigating these things using only electronics.
As these things were getting more frequent they didn’t even make the headlines in New York while except for certain sites on the internet the rest of the country was totally ignorant of them. The permanent Obama administration was still trying to explain them away as the work of domestic terrorists, actually by now the terrorists were domestic although not so-called White Supremacists. If by Global terrorists it was only just that we should be bombed as was said and that brought the thought of Gaines back as Lessing was rattling the locks on the other side of the door.
Once that ritual was completed I was admitted into a small foyer with a second door and a number of locks which were only locked at night or when Lessing was away. The door was now open for which I was grateful.
Through the second door one entered directly into a large living room, perhaps eight hundred square feet cutting straight through the apartment to the floor to ceiling windows that looked into the windows across the street unfortunately.
The room was comfortably decorated with expensive furniture but not the costliest. The usual New York abstracts, tasteful, were on the wall facing lovely floor to ceiling bookshelves admirably stocked. Books do furnish a room, don’t they?
I was the last to arrive. Seated, looking at me with expectant bemused expressions were Max Savings, Mark Giusty and Baron Cammell the other members of the New Serapion Brethren. Lessing was apparently a bachelor or, as I was to find, a widower.
As I could see I was the oldest of the four. Lessing was seventy-two but still in his prime. How well I remember being fourteen and finding the age of seventy incomprehensible as young people still do. While even people in their thirties and forties expect people of seventy or eighty to be decrepit. Most of us aren’t. Certainly Lessing and I were in full vigor. Diet helps, three or four years earlier I had been compelled to give up my sugar diet, and I mean I love sugar, and that and an improved diet recharged me considerably.
Lessing was more robust than I being taller, probably six-two and bigger boned. He was filled out but not fat or even heavy looking, his face like mine was unlined while he had a full head of white hair as did I although mine was removable and his wasn’t. He showed a little surprise as I was nearly bald at our two previous encounters.
Lessing introduced me to Max Savings who was small, perhaps five-six, and slight. Max was the youngest at sixty-two. He was dressed like an undertaker, had a slightly weasely face with a pointed nose. He had a sharp intelligence.
Marc Giusty was Italian standing a half inch or so below me, seventy years old, still athletic looking, spent a couple hours a day in the gym as I was to learn, lean and long headed in the Italian manner, thin mustache and good features.
Last to be introduced was Baron Cammell. Baron was his first name and not a title. He would prove to be the most difficult member of the group for me.
By the time I was finished with the introductions Max had a bottle of claret open and the glasses filled. Well, you know, two fingers. One sips, this was a cultured group no full water glasses at one gulp. We accepted our glasses and looking at each other took a sip.
Lessing: Oh, very nice.
Marc: Yes. Haven’t seen the label before.
Baron: (Sniffing slightly.) Yes, quite distinctive.
Max: (Smiling.) Enough said.
Me: Yes, well, Ramey apprenticed for many years in France before setting up in Napa. I like Bordeaux style blend and claret hits the spot for me after reading all those old English novels where claret and wine were synonymous. I like this one. So, we’re all ETA Hoffmann admirers, um?
Lessing: Yes, we are that. By way of curiosity Perry, how did you come to Hoffmann.
Me: Oh, you want my origin story as the comic books say? OK Lessing, I’ve got one. I’ll do this in the best comic book style. It was a dark and stormy day back in the middle of the last century when a thirty-six year man shoulders hunched against the cold and rain looked into a shop window. Perceiving it was a book store he being a bibliophile pushed the door open. A blast of warm air hit him as heads turned to look at the stranger. The man glanced casually about at the few inside, mostly help, with no particular object in mind. His attention was caught by a slip cased set of two. Always a sucker for so-called special editions he picked it up to examine it. ‘Hmm…’ he mused to himself, ‘Selected Writings Of Hoffmann? Hoffmann who?’ Extracted, Vol. I read from the title page, E.T.A. Hoffmann The Tales. The man had heard of ETA Hoffmann spoken of most highly and of course he knew of Offenbach’s opera Tales Of Hoffmann. Twelve dollars and fifty cents. OK.
Tucking the parcel under his arm under his coat and lowering his head against the blast he proceeded down the street. I was that man.
Me: There you go Lessing and an identical copy can be found on your bookshelf right over there.
Ha, ha, ha came as a chorus from the four men: Nicely done, Perry, nicely done.
‘The lad shows promise, doesn’t he?’ said Lessing.
Max Savings: This could prove interesting.
Me: And since then then I’ve added a dozen volumes filling out, I think, what’s available in English except for that magnificent nineteenth century volume you have on your shelf.’
Lessing: That one. I’m quite proud of that find. I tramped London looking for that one. But you have never reviewed Hoffmann on your site Perry, how come?
Me. I don’t feel adequately prepared Lessing. I have added a number of Romantic writers to my library in the last four years, Kleist, Tieck and like that but nothing in the way of critical reviews so I don’t think I’m prepared to speak authoritatively. And I still have to read Goethe, the key Romantic. If you’ve read my stuff you probably are aware that I speak without concern of contradiction. I can’t do that with Hoffmann yet. So, if I may ask, give me a thumbnail of yourselves.
Lessing: I’m host so I might as well go first. The salient point is that I spent my career practicing law, mainly real estate and financial issues. That is an area where much of the money sticks to the lawyer and I am in a comfortable situation as you can see having made my share or more of the money stick to me. Although remunerative I found the law and its cases fairly loathsome so as soon as I felt financially independent I left all that behind and turned my attention to what I loved much as you have Perry. Much more rewarding.
Max Savings: I’m not quite so financially independent as Lessing and still at my desk at Chase. I certainly am not so accomplished literarily as you and Lessing but I squeeze in time in an effort to keep up.
Marc Giusty: I was a university prof all my working life, loved it at Columbia uptown here. History was my subject. Unfortunately I was just a yeoman and not a star. I wrote a few papers for academic publications and a couple slim volumes that disappeared down the memory hole but allowed me to keep my position. By the way, this is a nice wine.
Me: Glad I chose to your taste. And you Baron.
Baron: I’m somewhat of a polymath, expert in several fields. I’m working on a unified field theory to arrange the liberal arts in a chronology with commentary. That’s all you need know of me.
Me: Quite so, quite so. Now that we’ve been introduced and had a little wine what say I begin my presentation? I’m anxious for your opinion and hope to please.
Lessing: That sounds right. What is the title of your presentation Perry?
Me: I call it The Vampyres Of New York.
I noticed a little uneasiness in the Brethren at the title. Lessing spoke:
Is this a vampire story, Perry? I thought the understanding was that we present historical essays.
Me: Exactly Lessing. But lesser known aspects, other sides so to speak and that is what mine is. Don’t let the title throw you. By the way as you’re not looking at the paper I spell vampire v-a-m-p-y-r-e. I chose the spelling to indicate a difference from a Dracula type blood vampire. My essay will concern what is known as psychic vampires. When I was searching Vampyres Of New York on the internet to see if my first couple of posts had registered yet I was surprised to find that there is actually an organization called The Vampyres Of New York, spelled with a Y.
I was further astonished that it claims to be worldwide although the claim seems a little dubious. At any rate the possible leader is a guy calling himself Father Sebastian who divides his time between New York and Paris.
As you know since the first Disney version of Star Wars a recent religion has sprung up based on the concept of the Force and whatever. It seems probable that the Vampyre organization is a type of Satanic religion too. This brings to mind that after the challenge to the Jewish religion in the West after the Scientific Revolution following the Enlightenment the Western Jewish religion under the Scientific challenge dissolved into a number of splinter religions seeking a center. The center of course came from the East and was called Zionism so that Judaism with some atavism and Zion are one.
Christianity has taken longer to find a new center but under the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century Satanism we may be seeing a jelling into some form of a universal Satanic religion. It is something to bear in mind. So my historical investigation is concerned with the Jewish and Christian religious disintegration of the previous two centuries under some sort of vampiric influence. Is that alright? It won’t offend any sensibilities?
Lessing: If it is historical we have no objections.
Me: Alright. I’m pretty sure this will be a different approach to what you’re used to so I have a prologue explaining the difference between a Dracula type Vampirism and psychic Vampyrism which will concern us. This is longish but not hugely long so fill your glasses and sit back. It is written out so feel free to interrupt at any time for explanations or comments, discussions or whatever.
OK? I begin: The Vampyres Of New York.
Clip 4 following contains the text of Vampyres Of New York.
Part III: Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
November 24, 2013
A Review
Henry Ford’s War On The Jews
by
Victoria Saker Woeste
Part III
Aaron Sapiro Takes On Henry Ford For Profit
Review by R.E. Prindle
Victoria Saker Woeste
Woeste, Victoria Saker: Henry Ford’s War On The Jews And The Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, 2012, Stanford University Press
The remarkable thing about Jews is that they think Aryans don’t have the intelligence to analyze their activities. To my mind Aryans are analytical geniuses. Who else could have or did create Chemistry through the analysis of complete intangibles. Neither the Jews nor any other people had anything to do with Chemistry or the development of any of the other scientific disciplines. Yet the Jews are there to take the credit while claiming to be more intelligent than Aryans.
What other people have ever weighed the invisible carbon atom? What other people have ever determined the distance from the Earth to the Sun, the speed of light?
What other people organized the sciences, the social sciences, psychology? Do the Jews believe that the men who could resolve those seeming impossibilities are not able to scan the history of the Jewish people and not understand their motives and methods? Are all the historians and people who have explained those methods and motives truly wrong, stupid, malignant or…anti-Semites? Of course not. The truth is plain to see.
Do the Jews believe that men like Henry Ford who could create from scratch huge industrial organizations actually be blind to what was going on before their eyes? I hope not. Do they believe that they didn’t give Henry Ford reasons to expose their machinations? I don’t think so. I think that they think they are magicians and hypnotists who can make you see what isn’t there and deny what is.
Let us search the historical memory of recent times, that is post-French Revolution, to see if we can show what Henry Ford and his times saw. In 1843 the small Jewish community in the US founded the Order Of The B’nai B’rith. The order went international. In 1895 Sigmund Freud joined the Vienna lodge to which he belonged for the remainder of his life. The B’nai B’rith was international. Psycho-analysis was international.
In 1860 in France the Alliance Israelite Universelle, an international organization, was founded to guard and promote Jewish interests around the world, that included Czarist Russia. In 1895 when world wide prospects could be better controlled from the United State the AIU was moved to New York City under the guidance of Jacob Schiff. Schiff immediately produced results by using the 200 million dollars in the cash assets of the Equitable Assurance Co. to finance the Japanese in their war against Czarist Russia. At the same time Jewish bankers refused to make loans to Russia. This is coordinated international activity.
The Jews had been warring with Russia for nearly a hundred years. From their base in NYC they caused the US to sever diplomatic relations with Russia in 1910.
In 1906 the Alliance Israelite Universelle was transformed into the American Jewish Committee the governing agency of the Jewish world government with Schiff as President and Louis Marshall as Secretary of State. In 1913 when the socialist Woodrow Wilson became president Jews flooded into DC while B’nai B’rith founded its terrorist enforcement agency the Anti-Defamation League. Functioning in a para-military manner the League began terrorizing anyone they deemed anti-Semites, the first step in shutting down freedom of speech. The ground work for the legalization of the concept of ‘hate’ speech was laid.
In 1917 Jews established the NAACP to further destabilize Aryan society.
Louis Marshall
Now, sometime after the collapse of Sabbatai Zevi as the latest Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century the Rabbis decided that there was to be no future for individual messiahs but that the whole Jewish people would act as their own messiah to bring about the millennium. The tabs set for the Jewish Revolution were 1913 to 1928 hence the furious Jewish activity during those years.
This was the situation that Ford saw. In 1914 came the Great War, WWI, the most destructive war on European manhood that could possibly be imagined. There were many who believe the war was engineered by the Jews.
Henry Ford, a farm boy from humble origins had spent his life trying to invent an automobile. In 1908 he succeeded, creating his Model T, a functional inexpensive car available to the multitudes not only the wealthy. By 1914 he become perhaps the richest man in the US. He was in a position to make his mark on the world. He did believe he had found a universal principle to bring on the millennium.
There is always a certain exhilaration to success. It always goes to your head to some extent no matter how hard you try to keep your balance. Convinced that he had found a universal rule to money making, that of lowering prices to increase volume, Ford shared his success with his work force by doubling their wages in 1914. This deed brought him unmeasured renown. It also aroused the envy of the Jews who thought the role of messiah was theirs.
When the Great War began, then, it was widely assumed that the US would be forced in. At that point preparedness became an issue. To prepare the country for the inevitable entry by arming. A large segment of the population led by the fatuous Teddy Roosevelt wanted to arm in preparation while many others led by Woodrow Wilson procrastinated. Still others thought the war could negotiated to a halt, heeding the rule of reason so to speak. Ford was a peacenik. Inflamed by his notoriety and confidence in his abilities to perform wonders he ran full page advertisements in NYC papers and elsewhere proclaiming his beliefs.
A Jewish woman by the name of Rosika Schwimmer showed up on his doorstep to induce him to travel to Europe to negotiate an end to the war. Ford stepped into the trap. This was his first contact with ‘international’ Jews. Ford chartered a ship, he had the ways and means as well as intent, and invited many notables to take a free ride to Europe to talk things over with the various combatants.
While the idea wasn’t as preposterous in the context of the times as it sounds now, the more solid citizens declined the offer while the cranks and crazies and certain Jews signed on. Chief among the Jews were Rosa Schwimmer and a key member of the American Jewish Committee the propagandist Herman Bernstein. Bernstein wrote several tracts for the American Jewish Committee. Needless to say Ford’s Peace trip was botched shortly after taking to sea so that upon docking in Norway Ford returned home.
Ford’s side of the story was that a couple days out Miss Schwimmer and AJC agent Herman Bernstein took Ford aside explaining the facts of the matter to him. As they explained it the Jews were in control of the situation through international linkages and that Ford was wasting his time as Jews were the only people who could stop the war. Schwimmer and Bernstein of course denied Ford’s account. That leaves one with the choice of believing Ford or the Jews. I have more confidence in Ford and choose his statements. The Jews as usual deny everything.
In point of fact, as the Czar was considered by the Jews as their great enemy, so long as Russia was one of the allies the Jews supported Germany as the enemy of their enemy rejecting any aid to the Allies. The Jews were considered a powerful people whose assistance was courted by the Allies. It was thus they extorted the Balfour Declaration from England.
With the February Revolution in Russia by the Mensheviks and the removal of the Czar who with his entire family was later murdered by the Jews they could turn their attention to destroying Germany replacing the Kaiser with their own as was actually done for a short time in Bavaria. With the Czar dethroned, on April 2, 1917 Woodrow Wilson went before Congress to seek a declaration of war against Germany thus making the US the decisive factor in the defeat of the Kaiser. First the Czar then the Kaiser.
Lenin already en route to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station arrived there on the next day April 3rd, 1917. In October Lenin’s Bolshevik Party displaced the Mensheviks in the October Revolution quickly murdering the Czar and family. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution Jacob Shiff representing the American Jewish Committee forwarded very large loans to help finance the Bolshevik Revo. This did not go unnoticed as President Wilson commanded him to come to the White House to explain his actions. Masters of Bullshit as always Schiff was able to placate Wilson.
None of this was secret at the time, anyone who cared could know about it. One has to believe that after being shamed and ridiculed by Jews as he saw it in the Peace Ship episode one may be sure Ford was an attentive bystander. The Jews as always denied everything.
Ford’s next encounter with the Jews came over the War Industries Board directives. The Detroiters had significant differences with Wilson’s clearly socialist program. The WIB under the direction of the Jew Bernard Baruch tried to subordinate the nation’s manufacturers to the government, actually nationalized the railroads, in what amounted to quasi-nationalization for industry.
So by the beginning of 1918 Ford had had two very unpleasant encounters with the Jews. If he hadn’t been suspicious of them before he was by then and especially so after January 1919 when he received a copy of the Jewish Bill Of Rights from the AJC, that is Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall demanding his compliance to their special ‘rights.’
At the same time Ford was being sued by his investors for dividends instead he bought them out. For the first time in life he was forced to apply to the bankers for a loan, this one into the tens of millions. The bankers too were Jews and they pressed him for immediate repayment. Unable to meet their demands from cash reserves Ford went through a crash reorganization to convert non-essential assets into cash at which he succeeded thus retaining ownership of Ford Motors. Another two unpleasant encounters.
In 1920 ,then, having acquired the Dearborn Independent newspaper that Ford took international he began publishing a series of articles exposing Jewish methods and motives. None dare call it self-defense. Among the essays were three dealing with the AJC’s Jewish Bill Of Rights. Abe Foxman of the ADL characterizes the Ford Essays this way:
The International Jew also attacked the Jews for speaking out about injustice and defending their constitutional rights. “Jewish rights seemed to be summed up in the right to banish everything from their sight and hearing that suggests Christianity and its Founder,” it commented. In fact these so-called “attacks on Christianity” were reasonable Jewish objections to governmental expressions of Christianity which clearly violated the separation between church and state enshrined in the Constitution.
.
As the above quote indicates Foxman is intellectually dishonest. He intentionally confuses the so-called Jewish Bill Of Rights to which Ford was objecting with the US Bill of Rights associated with the Constitution. He knows that Ford is referring to the Jewish Bill Of Rights when Cameron writes “Jewish rights seem to be summed up in the right to banish everything from their sight and hearing that suggest Christianity or its Founder.”
The Constitution is available for all to read and ponder but the Jewish Bill of Rights has sagely been withdrawn and is nowhere to be found. Abe, almost facetiously, recognizes this knowing that but few have ever heard of the Jewish Bill Of Rights while none of us have actually been able to read it. He maliciously then accuses Ford of wishing to deny Jews constitutional rights as American citizens. An outright lie if there ever was one.
Further, Ford was telling the truth as anyone observing Jewish efforts to ban Christmas and even Halloween in schools and public places today can attest.
Abe then tries to justify specious claims by saying “these so-called “ attacks on Christianity were reasonable Jewish objections to governmental expressions of Christianity which clearly violated the separation between church and state enshrined in the constitution.
None of it! They were expressions of the people without any reference to governmental intervention. They were the vox populi. Enshrined in the Constitution! Give us a break.
Christmas in schools and public places is not clearly a governmental expression of Christianity; however what Abe probably really objects to is that it is an expression of an Aryan solstice custom with a very pagan Santa Claus as a symbol.
Lest Abe accuse me a defender of Christianity or any Semitic religion we all should know that whole Bible-Talmudic trash is total Arien Age bullshit. We’d all be better off without it. That would settle the church/synagogue-government Constitutional conflict wouldn’t it? Let’s work it out together Abe. Finish Henry’s work.
Now, the people who didn’t send the AJC questionnaire back or did so with adverse comments were placed on a Jewish blacklist just as I have been today. Some of my essays are republished by the ADL on their site as examples of anti-Semitism. Who says so Abe? You? That’s defamation of my good name, Abe.
So, as Ford had been black listed in 1919 as an anti-Semite it follows that his retort to the tort was to begin publishing articles exposing Jewish machinations. Tit for tat. Turnabout is fair play.
Still Ford was portrayed as the aggressor. A lunatic anti-Semite with a ‘hole’ in his heart against angelic defenseless Jews.
As important and central as the Jews were was there anything else happening in America that might have attracted Ford’s attention? Well, a few things and they found their way into the vast majority of the Independent’s pages. Coming out of the war the America of the New Era was in upheaval. There was a seeming sharp break between 1914 and 1920. Newspapers were becoming more sensational by the day. Bernarr Macfadden was out there. Watch out! As has been said ‘when the music changes the walls of the city shake. And music was changing very rapidly. Not only changed but become ubiquitous with the success of radio and the phonograph record. Jazz, Hillbilly, Blues anything even classical music could be heard with the turn of a knob or crank. And the dances! Gone were the stately dances of Henry’s youth replaced by the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hop, the Charleston and Black Bottom. Nothing compared to today’s twerking, lap dancing and other direct terpsichorean imitations of coitus. Henry saw it coming being the prescient sort he was. He was on the money.
Bobbed hair, skirts up to here but not quite there, Jesus! And lawlessness fueled by prohibition! Not quite the lawlessness of today but I doubt if anyone could have seen that coming short of Billy the Kid and the Daltons. Ford was aghast at all the social expressions of the twenties longing for a return to the good old days just before the introduction of his Model T.
The Jews only saw a little bit of what Ford was saying and their reaction was immediate. The ‘defenseless’ Jews struck back led by Louis Marshall. Marshall ridiculed Ford for stating that the movies were Jewish controlled. Such audacity on the part of Marshall. The leading film maker at the time William Fox turned his cameras on Fords and gave Henry hell. I find it incredible that Fox had, I read this and can’t believe it’s true, fifty percent of the market in the early twenties including for a time an exclusive on newreels with his MovieTone News.
Fox refused to use the Model T in any of his obviously numerous movies while Movie Tone News shot every accident a Ford car was in that they could find. Oh, defenseless?, I should say so.
As an interesting aside, in the late twenties when the NYC money men were consolidating the movie industry Fox saw no need to be consolidated thus placing himself in the way of progress. The money men destroyed him combining the rump of Fox Pictures with Twentieth Century to form Twentieth Century-Fox with no Fox in sight. As the waters closed above him Fox had the chutzpah to ask Ford to rescue him.
It’s interesting that today’s Fox network dropped the Twentieth Century and resuscitated William Fox’s name.
The Jews then were searching anxiously for a legal excuse to bring Ford down. This was provided in 1924 when Aaron Sapiro brought his lawsuit against Ford on very specious, one might say, nonexistent grounds.
Abe the Fox in his disingenuous way says that the International Jew did not portray Jews as individuals, but as a single minded, calculating cabal. Apparently Abe isn’t aware that the millennium with the whole Jewish people as the messiah was being fought out at the time. Abe is not correct as the title The International Jew indicates Ford was referring only to that cabal of Jews such as the AJC’s Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall who were in fact functioning as part of an international government looking after the interests of Jews throughout the world. Some few years after Ford’s forged apology the Jewish World Congress was formed adding it to the organizations who were shepherding the worldwide Jewish flock.
Ford rather fatuously divided the Jewish people into one group of regular people and the other group of international Jews while the regulars had no idea what the IJs were doing in the Jewish name. In fact this division could have been demonstrated although all Jews went through the same education, indoctrination and conditioning so that there did exist a collective hive mind that could be relied on. Thus when Aaron Sapiro filed his suit it became clear that the issue was not the issue of his being somehow maligned but the whole Jewish people had been also hence the need for ‘hate’ speech legislation.
One sometimes feels embarrassed by Abe Foxman’s circumlocutions. Nothing is clearer than that Ford’s international Jews became involved in the litigation. Louis Marshall himself forged Ford’s so-called apology and for what anybody knows signed it himself. But, on to the litigation.
2.
Henry Ford
The account of Victoria Saker Woeste appears in the journal of the American Bar Foundation. The ABF defines itself as the nation’s leading research institute for the empirical study of law. Located in Chicago it says that it is an organization dedicated to advancing justice through rigorous research on the law, legal processes, and the laws impact on society.
Nevertheless Miss Woeste begins with the sentence: This project examines a well known event in the life of Henry Ford- a 1927 federal libel lawsuit against him and his anti-Semitic newspaper- from the perspective of the people who sought to stop him.
So at the outset Miss Woeste admits her account is biased. So much for the empiricism of the ABF and its concern for justice.
While Miss Woeste limits her investigation to the perspective of her fellow Jews I think I can be a little more inclusive.
First, let’s put Henry Ford into perspective. Ford was not a man of the present or the future, he was a man of the past. His formative period ended with the perfection of the Model T. To him the auto was a continuation of the buggy. The first Fords were essentially self-propelled buckboards. The Model T was meant for people to enjoy the world as it was, not as the Model T would change it.
When ‘progress’ presented the world with the New Era- the twenties- Ford rejected it completely, he didn’t like anything about it. He tried to re-establish the past, now containing his Model T. It should be noted in this context that the Model T did not substantially change from 1908 to 1926.
The results of unrestricted immigration apparently caught both him and the nation by surprise but he manfully tried to reconstruct his world in the pre-war image as did the nation through restriction of immigration.
The course of business propelled him then into a future as unrecognizable to him as the New Era. While Ford’s was not the first billion dollar company it was the first created by one man; and in the incredible short time of a mere decade.
The heading of his newspaper describes it as The International Dearborn Independent. Ford himself had established his company as a huge international corporation represented in nearly every country on earth. Like the British Empire Ford could say that the sun never set on his dealerships.
His was a totally vertically integrated company. He owned mines for metals, forests and shipping companies. His freighters could be seen out on Lake Huron bearing a huge F-O-R-D amidships. As one exercise in efficiency his company once manufactured a completed auto from his own iron ore and own blast furnaces to the roll out of the black painted Tin Lizzie in twenty-four hours. A mind boggling achievement.
This is an aside: Ford has been criticized for saying when asked why he offered no other colors than black, ‘they can have any color they want so long as its black.’ Through the decades this has been considered a most arrogant statement. However, today the only colors offered as standard by most auto companies are black or white. You have to pay extra for any other color. Henry should have thought of that one. But today you can have any color you want so long as it’s black or white unless you want to fork over another thousand dollars.
When glass companies couldn’t turn out the quantities of glass he needed Ford’s technicians took over a glass company, devised a method to mass produce glass and showed the glass makers how to do it. And the list goes on and on. This was one amazing man.
Unfortunately as a man of the past he failed to keep up with or incorporate new advances into his Model T. Or possibly he couldn’t add them and keep his price the lowest in the industry. He never thought of add-ons I guess. GM’s Chevy turned out a better cheap car than Ford although the price was higher, people began to approve of the improvements edging the Chevy closer to top sales. By 1925 it became clear to Ford that he had to bring the Ford into a new present. He couldn’t become a me too Chevy and just add its improvements; he had to leap frog over the Chevy.
In 1927 then he closed Ford’s doors for eight months to redesign his car. The new Model was the most sensational auto introduction of all time.
The libel trial was artfully brought to court in 1927 as an harassed Ford was struggling to design and get the Model A into production. He had always stretched himself too thin but the problems of the new car and the libel trial was too much for him to bear. Thus, it was either the new Model A or the trial. As unpleasant as it may have been Ford opted for the Model A and abandoned the trial.
Aaron Sapiro then began the suit in 1924 after the series of twenty articles in the Independent exposing his machinations appeared.
Were the articles slanderous? No more so than any expose and the Jews were famous for writing exposes with the intent to destroy the objects of their books and articles. In point of fact it appears that Sapiro and his associates were trying for a corner in commodities of all sorts both in the US and Canada, that is internationally. Had they succeeded would they not have connected new world commodity markets with old world commodity markets also in the control of Jews? It would have been foolish if they had not, wouldn’t it? Would Aryans attempting the same thing have denied it?
I can’t believe Sapiro’s activities weren’t apparent to the interested observer. Nor can there be any doubt that if he had succeeded in organizing the producers who would remain producers and not become administrators while Sapiro and his associates would administer the ‘co-op.’ So who was going to make the money whether crops were good or bad?
I was once a member of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. In other words Walter Reuther and his UAW organized the commodity of unskilled labor in auto manufacturing. Reuther and his union goons then had to be paid for their efforts. They set their own wages and benefits to manage our commodity of labor.
We of the commodity then paid them dues withdrawn from our wages by our employer- Fisher Body of GM in this instance, which paid them to the union because we the commodity couldn’t be trusted individually to voluntarily pay up. They were wise in this.
Now, it only cost the union X dollars to manage our affairs. But Reuther and his goons charged X times 4 more or less leaving them with a huge excess. This made no sense to we of the commodity. Adding insult to injury Reuther and his goons used this excess for their own purposes. They made political contributions and donations according to their own prejudices that I couldn’t approve of. Reuther himself built a lodge for himself and union execs at a very exclusive lake that we the commodity paid for but would never be allowed to use and bought a plane to fly himself in and out.
So obviously Reuther exploited his commodity and its producers for his own benefit and that of his cronies.
Alright. What would have been the result of Sapiro and his associates efforts? According to Miss Woeste and her Henry Ford’s War On The Jews before the war Sapiro reported an annual income of 80,000 dollars not counting expenses. To put that into perspective in today’s dollars that might be as much eight million dollars depending on your multiplier.
The farmers knew they were getting bilked and began to turn away from him. According to Miss Woeste by the time Sapiro sued Ford he had already peaked being distrusted within the farm community. In essence his career was over. Perhaps that is why he filed a million dollar suit against Ford. Remember in today’s dollar the would be twenty or thirty million.
He appears to have had a weak position so that is why he shifted the issue to anti-Semitism. But what does Sapiro say of his motives? Miss Woeste quotes him, p.143.
3.
As an individual I was immaterial: but I was there as a representative, first, of the cooperative marketing movement, and second, as a representative of the Jews [the whole Jewish people] who were trying in their own ways to bring social light to disorganized industry in America.
So he says the suit wasn’t about his own insignificant self. No, no. Pure altruism. He had two grander objectives that he says he represented, that of the cooperative movement that had been existing pretty well without him and the dissimilar objective of the Jews. He characterized the Jews as trying to impose their vision of industrial organization on the hopeless mess created by the Aryans.
This last objective was not dissimilar to what Ford was claiming he was doing qua the Jews. We know what reward Sapiro had already received in wages and what he was claiming from Ford but what was the reward he thought the Jews expected for setting America aright? A million dollars? Get serious! Leadership? Preeminence? The reins of government? Well, wasn’t that what Ford was claiming?
Compare Sapiro’s vision to that of Irving Berlin who wrote God Bless America at about this same time: ‘Stand beside her and guide her’ [America]. Berlin was addressing the Jews in his song, telling him what they should do. So, once again, we have an incompetent disorganized America needing the help of the omniscient Jews to bring social light and guidance. This was exactly Ford’s claim or part of it.
In his quest for personal profit from the accusation of anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is in the eye of the beholder, that Sapiro was asking for he was opposed by no less than the Pres. Of the American Jewish Committee Louis Marshall who scented the beginnings of a race racket by exploiting Jewishness that he feared would backfire on them. At that point then Marshall did not want Sapiro to win the suit. It was in his interest to see a mistrial to prevent Ford from winning on one hand and from Sapiro’s profiting on the other.
A mistrial was called because of jury tampering although it is not clear who tampered with the jury.
Thus when Ford was in the trammels of trying to invent the V8 and the Model A his attention would have been diverted if not consumed by a new trial. At this point Marshall brushed Sapiro aside stepping in to free Ford for more important work demanding an apology to the Jews as a whole in full compensation. Sapiro more or less went broke with this long and very expensive trial.
In a forgery of no less magnitude than the Protocols Of Zion that ostensibly started the trial Marshall himself drew up every obsequious confession of anti-Semitism or, in other words, ‘hate’ speech that according to Miss Woeste was the true purpose of the trial laying the foundation for the Jewish ‘hate’ laws enacted in our day.
Marshall’s forging of the apology was not enough, still not content with only an apology the Jews continued their war on Henry Ford waging a campaign of defamation that has not ceased with Ford’s death in 1948 as Miss Woeste’s book attests. An endless stream of defamatory books condemning Ford has been emitted from that day to this. In her book Miss Woeste might better have said the Jews war on Ford or at the very best with.
As Miss Woeste says, hers is the first book that examines the Sapiro suit in detail making her effort valuable from that point of view. Unfortunately the book is so polemical that it can’t really qualify as a history. Indeed, one is amazed that a university press of Stanford’s stature would even issue it without heavy editing and guidance. They should have stood beside Miss Woeste and pointed toward the true academic path.
Still, I do find uses for the volume.
Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side: A Review
June 20, 2008
A Review
Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side
Some Thoughts On The Autobiography Of Suze Rotolo:
A Freewheelin’ Time
by
R.E. Prindle
1.
Sandoz The Great
In 1938 Albert Hofman, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz isolated LSD-25. In 1938 young Tim Leary was 18 years old. It was in 1943 that Albert Hofman discovered the effects of LSD. Seventeen years after that LSD burt onto the world through the agency of the now, Dr., Timothy Leary, a psychologist with Harvard University.
LSD was adopted by the Bohemian society and all its offshoots as the appearance of the new chemical Messiah: Better living through chemistry as the slogan was. Its use quickly spread through the folk music community of Greenwich Village in New York City.
Timothy Leary Is Dead
Goodbye Tuli. Died 7/12/10
In 1923 a fellow by the name of Tuli Kupferberg was born and his partner Ed Sanders came along in 1939 a year after I did. Kupferberg and Sanders were poets who became influenced by the folk scene forming a band sometime in 1964 originally called the Village Fugs, later the Village was dropped and they became simply the Fugs. In 1965 they released their first LP on Folkways. Now, cut one, side one was little number entitled Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side. Sort of OK as a song, funny, as were a lot of Fugs songs. Like Dylan they searched for social significance rather than write trite love songs. Unlike Dylan you could easily understand the meaning of the lyrics. Slum Goddess was one and then there was a song that many of us thought significant in the social sense back in those days entitled: Boobs A Lot. ‘Do you like boobs a lot? Gotta like boobs a lot.’ As I said deep and intense meaning. This was followed by a song eulogizing jock straps. ‘Do you wear your jock strap? Gotta wear your jock strap.’ So the Fugs were with it.
At some point after 1965 the Village Voice decided to run a feature depicting some East Village lovely as the Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side. Suze Rotolo had the dubious honor of being selected as the very first Slum Goddess.
To what did she owe this honor? Well, she was famous on the Lower East Side for being featured on the album cover of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan. She was at that time, 1962, I believe, Bob’s girl friend or, at least, one of them, perhaps the principle one but one can’t be sure as Bob had others as ‘part time’ girl friends.
Thus one has to go back to the summer of 1961 to discover how Suze Rotolo began her odyssey to become the very first Slum Goddess. Suze tells her story in her autobiography issued in May of 2008 called A Freewheelin’ Time. It is a bitter sweet story not lacking in charm. Bob was born in 1941 while Suze was born three years later. All the disparate elements in our story born at separate times were slowly moving to a central focal point in New York City from 1961 to 1965 or so.
Suze and Bob were of that age when freewheelin’ seemed possible while the psychological social moment was about to congeal and then vanish before it could be realized as psychological moments do. Some catch the golden ring as it come around, some don’t. Bob did, Suze didn’t.
Suze was born in Queens, over there on Long Island, as a red diaper baby. In other words in the romanticized Communist parlance her parents were Communists when she was born. She was brought up in the faith.
Bob described her as a libertine dream or some such epithet. I’m not sure Suze saw herself in the same way. I think she expected a little more of Bob than to be his sex toy. As a Communist she should have had a more freewheelin’ attitude.
Suze seems to have been brought up completely within the Red religion much as a Christian might be a Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran or as Jew in whatever stripe of Judaism it might be.
She edged into race agitation at a young age. She met Bob when she was seventeen while she had been working for CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality) for a couple years before that. She would have been fifteen or sixteen. Whether she had sexual experiences with the Africans she doesn’t tell us. In her search for a raison d’ etre for her life she found herself in Greenwich Village in the Summer of ’61 where she met the twenty year old Bob Dylan just in from the Iron Range of Minnesota. They were mutually attracted, quickly forming a sexual relationship.
Bob as everyone knows was and is Jewish. He came not only from a Jewish background but from an orthodox background. Hibbing, Minnesota, his hometown, had a Jewish population of about three hundred families with their own Jewish establishment and synagogue.
According to Beattie Zimmerman, Bob’s mother, Bob was a good boy who attended services regularly while investigating the nature of the various Christian churches. As a mother Beattie’s version of things must be interpreted through the eyes of mother love.
Father Abe was not only a practising Jew but the President of the Hibbing chapter of B’nai B’rith and its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League. In addition Beattie, Bob’s mother, was the President of the Women’s auxiliary, Hadassah. So Bob isn’t just Jewish but comes from a very committed Jewish background.
As the President of the Hibbing chapter, Father Abe would have attended statewide gatherings in Minneapolis, regional meetings wherever they were held and possibly if not probably national meetings in NYC and elsewhere. Now, within the international Jewish organizations heavy hitters attend various levels of meetings where they meet and learn something of the various local and regional people. Thus, it may be assumed that Abe Zimmerman as a name at least was known on the national Jewish level. Kind of the Jewish Who’s Who, you know. Bob says that he had contacts to help him when he got to New York. Those contacts would have come through Father Abe while being part of B’nai B’rith and ADL. Bob wasn’t entirely alone out there.
Bob’s Jewish name is Sabtai after the last acknowledged Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. There have been many that filled a Messianic role since Zevi not least of which was Sigmund Freud and possibly Albert Einstein. Bob may have been encouraged to take the role for himself.
At any rate when Bob approached thirteen and Bar Mitzvah time Abe brought in a special Rabbi from Brooklyn to instruct Bob. Now this is really signficant. He was probably a Lubavitcher or ultra-orthodox Jew. When Bob publicly expressed his Judaism after his Christian stint he chose to do so as a Lubavitcher. Very likely that was no coincidence. Having received his crash course in orthodoz Judaism Father Abe next sent his son to a Zionist summer camp for ‘several ‘ weeks for each of four successive summers ending at the age of seventeen. This would have the effect of introducing him to young Jews not only of the region but from around the world while at the same time estranging him from his fellow Hibbingites giving him his strange cast of character.
Camp Herzl was named after the originator of Zionism, Theodore Herzl. the camp with a spacious hundred and twenty acres is located on a lake near Webster, Wisconsin. Herzl is not your basic summer church camp but a national and international gathering place where young Jews from around the US and the world can meet and get known to each other somewhat.
The camp is conducted exclusively for Jews along Jewish lines eliminating as many goyish influences as is possible. At least when he was seventeen Bob was playing the Wild One showing up in a mini biker cavalcade. One may assume that many national and international Jewish figures made appearances over the four years to both instruct, encourage and look over the upcoming generation.
The post-war years were very traumatic for the Jewish people. The death camps of the Nazis dominated their minds. They were psychologically devastated and unbalanced looking for Nazis under their beds before they went to sleep at night. One may safely assume that Bob and his fellow campers had to watch extermination movies over and over lest they forget.
The State of Israel was founded in 1948 while the first of Israel’s successful wars occurred in 1956. The ’56 war was a seminal event bolstering the spirits of the Jews turning them aggressive as they now believed they could fight. After ’56 they began to come out of themselves.
For whatever reasons as Bob entered high school his personality began to disintegrate. Perhaps he had to cease being Bobby Zimmerman to become what his people expected of him which was a probable religious leader who then became Bob Dylan. As always Bob would combine two cultures, Jewish and Goyish.
After an extremely rocky year in Minneapolis where Bob shed the remnants of his goody goody image of Hibbing he became the dirty unkempt Bob Dylan of his rush to fame of the Folk years.
Thus as Bob and Suze met in the Summer of ’61 they were both searching for something to be.
Part 2.
Why Do Fools Fall In Love?
Just We Two
The question now that Suze and Bob have gotten together is to sort out the various accounts of what happened. Bob says everyone has gotten it wrong. However his own account in Chronicles I is no more factual than the accounts of his biographers and commentators. Suze doesn’t provide us with much more clarity. While Bob tells it like he wanted it to have been Suze on the the one hand protects her memory of what she wants to keep as a beautiful memory while glossing over her own actions at the time to keep it so.
Bob goes through the romantic notion of constructing their bed with saw, hammer and nails. This is a charming story and I’m embarrassed to say I took him at his word. You simply can’t. Chronicles came out four years ago so Suze has had plenty of time to read it and mull over Bob’s ruminations. Thus she must be aware of Bob’s story of the bed. She says it was an old bed the landlord left from another tenant. Another beautiful tale of Bob’s down the tubes.
Suze rather unflatteringly depicts Bob as a rouster and fairly heavy drinker. She was offended that Bob, who was posing as Bob Dylan, not yet having officially changed his name, didn’t level with her and confide that Dylan was a pseudonym that looked better on a marquee while his real name was Zimmerman and that he came from Minnesota rather than being an orphan from New Mexico. Coming home one night, as Suze tells it, Bob, stumblingly drunk, dropped his ID and she discovered the truth as she picked it up. Even then she had to drag the truth out of Bob.
These problems mounted up. There was immediate hostility between Bob, Suze’s mother and her sister Carla. The mother seems to have instinctively seen through Bob, while I’m sure Carla soon learned that Bob was doing her sister wrong.
As we know from Chronicles Bob had other ‘part-time’ girl friends, pick ups and whatever. As the folk crowd was a fairly tight knit group even if Suze didn’t want to hear the obvious Carla who was employed by the Folklorist, Alan Lomax, could hardly have been unaware that Bob had a laissez faire attitude toward romancing the girls.
Indeed, Bob’s understanding of Suze was that she was his Libertine belle. As a libertine therefore he could hardly have believed fidelity was a necessary condition. I don’t know if Suze considered herself a Libertine but as a Communist both fidelity and jealousy were forbidden by the dogma so speaking consistently with the belief system neither mother, Suze nor Carla had grounds for complaint. Nevertheless both mother and Carla wished to separate Bob and Suze.
Bob records his side of the conflict in his song Ballad in Plain D. In his usual high flown language Bob says in his song:
“The tragic figure!” her sister did shout,
“Leave her alone, goddamn you, get out.”
All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight.
I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight.
My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night
Leaving all of love’s ashes behind me.
Within a few months he was married to Sara who he kept waiting in the wings. Subsequently he tried to keep Sara and his growing family in Woodstock and the Slum Goddess Of The Lower East Side out on the side. Suze, apparently not quite as Libertine as Bob supposed, declined the honor.
Just as Bob blithely romanticizes his early NY years in some sappy Happy Talk that belies his songs and what nearly everyone has written about him so Suze adopts a near virginal girlish pose. Her story of how she left for Italy and her true blue yearning for the perfect love of Bob who sent those charming letters purloined from old country songs is also belied by the various biographers. To hear Suze talk she never looked at a boy in Italy and certainly never dated one let alone kissed or petted. Yet by her religious Communist ideology that would have been no sin, even would have been a virtue. In fact she did have an Italian boyfriend who was apparently dropped down the memory hole at autobiography time.
When she did return the road of romance was much more rocky than she lets on. Carla who stayed home where she could watch Bob was privy to his doings which were much more libertine than anything he accused Suze of. He had to have slept with Liam Clancy’s live in somewhere in there. He’s accused of being a womanizer and you can’t be a womanizer without a lot of women. So whatever Carla knew it was somewhat more than an earful and I’m sure that between Carla and her mother Suze heard it all.
Suze out of respect for this young love which, after all, must still occupy a sacred spot in her life never expresses but the mildest resentment of Bob but letting her sister speak for her she says that ‘she (Carla) felt I was better off without the lyin’ cheatin’ manipulative bastard.’ Right on all counts I’m sure except for the last although as Bob claimed to have no parents Carla could justly so surmise.
At any rate if Suze couldn’t make up her mind her mother and Carla could.
Ballad In Plain D again:
Beneath a bare light bulb the plaster did pound
Her sister and I in a screaming battleground,
And she in between, the victim of sound,
Soon shattered the child ‘neath her shadows.
—–
The wind knocks my window, the room it is is wet.
The words to say I’m sorry, I haven’t found yet.
I think of her often and hope whoever she’s met
Will be fully aware of how precious she is.
And then Bob married Sara and ruined her life.
While Suze and Bob talked marriage there is no reason to take that seriously; he talked marriage with Echo too. I don’t think Bob had any notion of marrying aouside his faith. The mother is the culture carrier; Bob is firmly within the Jewish culture so there could have been no chance that he would have taken other than a Jewish wife. Even then he may have married only to fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Once he had fulfilled that duty he broke the marriage apart.
3.
The Slum Goddess
I'm Leaving Town Tommorow
Suze was now a young woman of twenty or twenty-one alone adrift in New York City. While she and Bob were having their tempestuous romance the times they were a changin’.
Tim Leary, up in harvard, had embraced psychedelics. Once in love with LSD he wanted to share his love with everyone. He became the High Priest of his psychedelic religion. I can recommend both his autobiography and his volume of reminiscences: High Priest. The latter is a spectacularly well written book if tending toward tediousness.
Leary’s experiments attracted the dark angel of the Hippie years, Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg also attached himself to Dylan tying the Beat and Hippie decades together. Vile man.
Bob had introduced Suze to Marijuana and what else I don’t know, perhaps LSD. He himself was into the pharmacopeia also undoubtedly dabbling in heroin although if he did he is still an addict or was successful in kicking the habit after his retreat from fame in ’66. That whole thing about the motorcycle accident may have been just rehab. He sure needed it.
As Bob notes the effect of LSD on the Greenwich Village folk scene was to turn people inward destroying any sense of community. Suze then was attempting to navigate this terra nova. Along with turning people inward, LSD, the drug scene, turned the scene sexually rasty in ways even the Communists couldn’t have imagined. The Pill coming along at this time certainly was as influential as LSD in changing sexual mores.
Suze, if aware of this, makes no mention of it in her auto. The Fugs released Slum Goddess in 1965 although they may possibly have been playing it around the Village for a year or two earlier. The Slum Goddess is not a savory woman.
That Suze was selected as the first Slum Goddess strikes my sensibilities as a negative compliment. Her presentation of it implies a souring experience. Shortly after her selection she chose to withdraw from Village life. She gives as the reason that her earlier relations with Bob caused upleasant curiosity and that was certainly true.
The scene turned absolutely rotten after 1968 when between drugs, profound negativity and the progressing degradation of the Hippie movement anyone with any sense of dignity was driven out.
Suze must have been one of us for she left the scene behind. There are few today who choose to remember it. As for me, life is life, there it was and there was I. I was who I was; je ne regret rien. I hope Suze doesn’t either. Bob? He just stays on the bus and doesn’t get off. Reality can be such a drag.
Forget About Yesterday
I, Dynamo 