The Decadent Worker

For Robert LeFevre (1911-1986) who helped me understand what it must have been to hear William Jennings Bryan or Robert Ingersoll delivering orations; who spoke to me of drinks, of Yards O’Flannel that inebriated the Minute Men who formed that weaving line on Lexington Green where fired they the shot heard ’round the world so that I saw how the America loved in days past meant daring to wage war against tyranny, however sanctified, not just some better government; who convinced me, in fact — just as I had in hat I thought were mad moments suspected — government is not only dangerous, but unnecessary; who taught me exactly what a principle is in human conduct and how precious is human liberty and how significant the life devoted to no other cause than liberty for the sake of peace and prosperity for everybody, unalienably, all the time, forever; he understood what freedom meant and found many ways to be free. –Kerry Wendell Thornley (Reprinted from New Libertarian #17)

“Whenever they only give you a choice between one thing and another, tell them you want all three.” — Bruce Duncan, Berkeley Street Person.

There seems, as usual, to be a misunderstanding about my political beliefs concerning, first, their relevance and, second, their nature. My political opinions are my own business, not that of the community. I am not running for office; I am a witness to a war crime conspiracy that at this time — by means of landlordism and supression of energy alternatives — is orchestrating famines in the Third World, after previously making war in Indochina in order to spare Caucasian Cuba the ordeals of an invasion. (Besides, my politics have remained fundamentally the same since 1969 and will probably not change no matter how rudely I am treated by Marta bus drivers, store clerks, waiters, street hoodlums or other Nazi and Uncle Tom pawns.) Since 1959 I have been studying the tragedy of starvation in Third World nations in terms of its cause; since 1964 I have been studying the sociology of human liberty (due to Robert Lefevre’s inspiration). My politics stem from a lifetime of contemplation and uphold unswervingly the goals of individual rights and class justice (both, noe one or the other) and, contrary to what your rulers in the East and West would like you to think, these two goals are not logically antagonistic to each other.

I am against prisons, institutional secrecy, ground rents, usury, dividends, taxation and conscription under any names. I also especially oppose racism and puritanism of a coercive nature and disagree with every form of group chauvinism, including nationalism. Although I moreover oppose technological thought control, I do not think it can be effectively resisted on a short-term basis — since the mind control conspiracy simply turns its opposition into experimental fodder. Rather, a strategy of rendering mind manipulation unprofitable by eliminating absentee control of production (in accord with Individualist Anarchist and Anarcho-Syndicalist theory) is probably the only realistic way to reduce it in the future. (I further share with technocrats the opinion that mind control is sometimes the only way to deal with such atrocities as basement nukes, artificially induced earthquakes, weather-control warfare and corporate terrorism in the form of “accidental” spills of radioactive water, etc.)

28 years of sociological study, on campus and off — I was also a sociology major at GSU — have convinced me beyond doubt that a lasting free society is not possible without three things: sexual freedom and rational values in general among its majority; land and natural resource tenure rooted in labor and occupancy as against private or public absentee control; accurate information about the past, particularly the recent past. Everybody wants us to choose where to be chained instead of wanting to offer us all three.

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For the first time in the more-than-a-year-long history of KULTCHA and THE DECADENT WORKER, I am going in this issue to resort to an extensive use of canted terms, “tagged” in quotes as always — for: (1) brevity and (2) what-seems-to-me-a-rather-plastic type of credibility (for if I were to write it out plainly many would abandon me as a technophobic paranoid).

For many days, nearly a year, I’d been hatching escape plots in Tujunga with my new-found friends: “Jean” and “A.J.” and “Kiss” and the gang and, of course, “The Dart Band” and “Sweet Dick” and, of course, “Michael” and, lately , “Mike.”

Everything was all right with everyone except the Arab Liquor Store on Foothill when “Michael” entertained the community by sending me on one wild goose chase after another for day-after-day and month-after-month and, how can I say, “Time” after “Time.” Or when my bosses at the Record-Ledger ran out of credit with everybody in L.A. County, not simply with me alone. So many promises were made me and then broken at once, sometimes with a feeble attempt to convince me it was my fault, such as it would have worked if I hadn’t blown sonsos’ cover, etc.

Over and over I told everybody in the “Collective Muse” not to develop strategies requiring secrecy and to trust that I would always return to my nine “permanent universal issues” if events should require my abandoning them — somewhat contradictory, not antagonistically — and that only what I wrote on paper was to stand as my request or order, because I shoot my mouth off entirely too much all the time anyway and I have always been told that and I agree.

Things were dandy until the tedium, not so much of the broken promises — because who really knew? — got to me. Then I turned from “Irene” and “Michael” to “Mike.” To them this was like turning my back on the Peoples Republic of China and warmly embracing Imperial Japan. To me it was an expression of protest with quite another point: the information void in which I was being forced to live was causing my physical body to ache (not an exaggeration) and “Mike” was like a speedfreak on pot who just wanted to tell me things and answer questions and crack jokes, which I also needed because humorless people were stressing me out — and I had a big task outlined for myself: writing the book that would lead to solving the JFK Murder and could probably at least be expected to spark a revolution, besides.

So anyway, I bargained for “room.” I wrote on a wall that if they would give me live flesh-and-blood human friends to live with, I would stop listening to “Mike.” Later for the bit about the video.

So Jude Lasick came to work and invited me to live with her and Whitey and Mariposa for a couple of weeks. An agreement I had already made with the “Collective Muse” was that in living at Jude’s I would, in Mao’s words, “handle diferent contradictions with different methods.” Always an Alexander Berkman man in that respect, I felt both ways about the idea, deciding trying to adjust to the ways of this new-found community would help everybody.

There was, I gathered, somewhere at Jude and Whitey’s a microphone that needed to be put on. I soon figured out where it probably was — in their five-year-old daughter, Mariposa del Sol, an advanced-tech Bladerunner-type Manchurian Candidate. I got the idea I was just supposed to keep my ears open and say whatever I was asked to say — outside that much, I was free to babble all the time unless they suddenly indicated to shut up (which power they seldom if ever invoked).

One fine evening early in 1979 just before I split for Frisco, somebody kept saying at Mariposa but obviously intended for me: “Say ‘I promise’. I won’t give it to you until you say, ‘I promise.’”

What I was being asked to promise was that I would stop pushing the Permanent Universal Rent Strike — of all reforms, the dearest to me, personally. Why? Because, they said, it acts as a lock that keeps the rest of the shit from getting out.

Mariposa was standing within five feet of me. When I left the house later on I said, upon getting outside, I said that it sure ought to be entertaining, watching them trying to stamp out four words! I tragically underestimated their power.

Before long, in Berkeley, I deemed it needful to return to the land tenure issue. I passed out copies of: “It Ain’t the Landlord” — on street corners.

I was damned by the four winds as a result. I was compared to Lenin by stockbrokers while bankers thought I looked more like Ezra Pound. Then and there I happened upon the great unwritten law that governs the whole intelligence community: Thout Shalt Never Ever Break a Promise Made to a Landlord. What promises I broke with anyone else or what they broke with me obviously were of no consequence. Not since the White Man broke his treaties with the Indians has there been so much ado about promises as in relation to that one night’s ambush at Jude’s.

I figured this way. Maybe the landlords will foot the bill to expose Mariposa’s case in the newspapers before they find out that I think rent is a rip-off — in any case there will be no reason to be mad at Jude or Whitey. It isn’t them who can be blamed for my failure to convert to feudalism. Personally, I think anybody in their right mind, especially any black body, would get somebody besides the less than 10% owning 80% of the planet to finance investigations into any subject whatsoever.

Many other possible realities have suggested themselves since then — not one of which permits me to equate landlordism with anything but genocide. Although there may be some genocidal racists who favor land reform only after two-thirds of the world’s population is wasted, on purpose.

Count me out. And think about a PERMANENT UNIVERSAL RENT STRIKE! And expose the genocide conspiracy!

–Kerry Wendell Thornley

Neither my policies nor my emotions nor my analyses about Jude’s mileu were free of contradictions. If history repeats itself, the defeat of post-civil war Spanish anarchism by Stalinists collaborating with landlords may be a lesson to heed.

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“There was once a society of frogs that lived at the bottom of a deep, dark well, from which nothing whatsoever could be seen of the world outside. They were ruled over by a great Boss Frog, a fearful bully who claimed, on rather dubious grounds, to own the well and all that creeped or crawled therein. The Boss Frog never did a lick of work to feed or keep himself, but lived off the labors of the several bottom-dog frogs with whom he shared the well. They, wretched creatures, spent all the hours of their lightless nights drudging about in the damp and slime to find the tiny grubs and mites on which the Boss Frog fattened.

“Now, occasionally an eccentric skylark would flutter down into the well (for God knows what reason) and would sing to the frogs of all the marvelous things it had seen in its journeyings in the great world outside: of the sun and the moon and the stars, of the sky-climbing mountains and the fruitful valleys and the vast stormy seas, and of what it was like to adventure the boundless space above them.

“Whenever the skylark came visiting, the Boss Frog would instruct the bottom-dog frogs to attend closely to all the bird had to tell ‘For he is telling you,’ the Boss Frog would explain, ‘of the happy land whither all good frogs go or their reward when they finish this life of trials.’ Secretly, however, the Boss Frog (who was half deaf anyway and never very sure of what the lark was saying) thought this strange bird was quite sad.

“Perhaps the bottom-dog frogs had once been deceived by what the Boss Frog told them. But with time they had grown cynical about such fairy tails as skylarks had to tell, and had reached the conclusion also that the lark was more than a little mad. Moreover, they had been convinced by certain free-thinking frogs among them (though who can say where these free-thinkers come from?) that this bird was being used by the Boss Frog to comfort and distract them with tales of pie in the sky which you get when you die. ‘And that’s a lie!’ the bottom frogs bitterly croaked.

“But there was among the bottom-dog frogs a philosopher frog who had invented a new and quite interesting idea about the skylark. ‘What the lark says is not exactly a lie,’ the philosopher frog suggested. ‘Nor is it madness. What the lark is really telling us about in its own queery way is the beautiful place we might make of this unhappy well of ours if only we set our minds to it. When the lark sings of sun and moon, it means the wonderful new forms of illumination we might introduce to dispel the darkness we live in… Most important, when it sings of soaring wild and unfettered among the stars, it means the freedom we shall all have when the onus of the Boss Frog is removed from our backs forever. So you see: the bird is not to be scorned. Rather, it should be appreciated and praised for bestowing on us an inspiration that emancipates us from despair.

“Thanks to the philosopher frog, the bottom-dog frogs came to have a new and affectionate view of the skylark. In fact, when the revolution finally came (for revolutions always do come), the bottom-dog frogs even inscribed the image of the skylark on their banners and marched to the barricades doing the best they could in their croaking way to imitate the bird’s lyrical tunes.” — The Skylark and the Frogs: A Postscript to Herbert Marcuse’s Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Freely Adapted from the Fable by Chuang-Tzu, Rosak, The Making of Counter-Culture, pp. 121-2

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“Among the first and oddest things Brother-in-law was to bring up in our talks at his house were instances of freak radio reception. A woman had picked up a radio broadcast through her hair curlers. Every now and then, someone discovered their tooth fillings were sensitive to radio waves.

“‘Things like that actually happen,’ he said, ‘although rarely.’

“‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I think maybe once or twice it happened to me. A few months ago, when I was living across from Lafayette Square in a little room over Fred’s Inn I seemed to hear radio programs as I was drifting into sleep during afternoon naps — with station breaks, news, commercials, weather reports and music. When I woke up afterwards, though, I couldn’t remember the call letters of the station.’

“Brother-in-law nodded — as if to indicate that, yes, he knew about that.

“Since I had not discussed it with anyone, I dismissed his response as simply inappropriate. From such an unusual man I did not expect entirely comprehensible behavior at all times.

“I think I failed to add that I had also experienced audio hallucinations of a different nature when going to sleep at nights sometimes when I was in the Marines — during the interval I was serving with Lee Oswald in Marine Air Control Squadron Nine. I had written them off as a peculiar category of dreams. Nor did I tend to think that my radio program dreams experienced more recently had other than psychological causes.

“I gathered early on that Brother-in-law had a perchant for the exceptionally bizarre, and that his mind tended to wander from one weird variety of trivia to another without the benefit of a healthy skepticism…” (p. 46-A)

“Then there was something he mentioned once or twice that seemed even less credible than flying saucers powered by German secrets of perpetual motion. ‘In the state of California, Kerry, there is a plan to begin performing mind control experiments on people who live there. I.G. Farben, the economic arm of the Third Reich is involved in it. They are going to put surveillance devices in the heads of their experimental victims, in order to monitor them, and then they are going to subject them to mind control. So, if I were you, Kerry, I would think maybe it would be a good idea to stay out of California in the future.’…

“A couple of other times he spoke of what, perhaps because of the way he phrased it, sounded more credible. ‘Kerry, the Fascists are now experimenting with advanced thought control techniques. You know, there are Fascists in this country. Among them is Henry Luce, who publishes Time and Life Magazines. They are planning to build a society comprised of nothing but human robots, with translators installed in the backs of their heads, so that they will be absolutely obedient to subliminal messages.’” (p. 140-1) — The Dreadlock Recollections, Kerry Wendell Thornley (c) 1984 (manuscript version)

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To guess what must have happened when a well-camouflaged propaganda network and a Vril Burg collided with a CIA project in the Marines, we have to examine the probable nature of the crypto-Nazi beast.

Although most notorious of US Nazi groups, the German-American Bund was splintered. Anton Haegels led a nearly successful revolt to Americanize it. Bundists got scant German aid. Donald Shea’s American Gentile League, Father Coughlin and Christian Mobilization were more highly regarded in the fatherland. The Bund was corrupt. Bundesleiter Fritz Kuhn was convicted of embezzling its funds.

Conspicuously absent from known US Nazi fronts were any aimed at fundamentalist Protestants, unless we count the KKK, for Catholics and Lutherans compromised the bulk of Christian Mobilization. Such ailure to exploit so much latent anti-Semitism is puzzling. Did Goebbels’ well-camouflaged propaganda network in fact lurk behind just such a front?

Logic would lead us to suspect an evangelistic organization with international outreach and with politics of the capitalist pacifist variety then in vogue with the pro-Nazi Isolationist Right. Such a sect would, even if it survived detection, have by now quite a reputation for intrigue and might even be called “Germany” in the older cant language.

Moreover, it would have to be well-camouflaged with not one, but many layers of disguise — so that whoever sensed it was more than a run-of-the-mill denomination would nonetheless be thrown off the track. Instead of an Aryan club they might find evidence of a heavy-duty secret society of rich Black and/or Jewish leatherfreaks devoted to anti-racist terrorism.

One of the first things Brother-in-law told me was that after the war, I.G. Farben financed Nazi secret societies which infiltrated East and West. A wealthy flying saucer cult founded in the fifties called the Urantia Foundation is almost bound to be the principal recruiting front in the US for these.

In my opinion there were CIA types who belonged covertly to either or both the pre-war and post-war Nazi secret societies. When the Vril thoroughbred baby boom reached military age and young men such as Oswald and I joined up, we were bugged and surrounded by Nazi conspirators. So the double agents, the CIA’s crypto-Nazis, were uniquely qualified to play both ends against the middle — the government against the societies and the secret clubs against the State. As a result, men of very much the same water as Nixon and Howard Hunt were suddenly to be reckoned with as never before. Assassinating JFK four years later did not make them powerful; the JFK murder was a consequence of their power.

What later was called the “rogue elephant” CIA was created at Atsugi, Japan, in Marine Air Group Eleven (MAG-11) and for that reason is known in the intelligence community as a Nazi secret society called “Maggie” — which engaged the services, I believe, of Skorseny’s German commando organization gone underground, the Werewolves — who were so brutal that even the SS disliked them.

“Did you know that in the last days of the Third Reich Hitler went on the air and called for the werewolves of Germany to come to the aid of the Nazi cause?” — Old Illuminati Proverb

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Brother-in-law said, to quote page 137 of The Dreadlock Recollections manuscript: “‘Remember Mendel, Kerry, who discovered genetics? His accomplishments were never recognized within his own lifetime. Wouldn’t that be horrible? To make an important discovery and yet remain anonymous and unrecognized?’

“‘A fate worse than death,’ I replied.”

“In 1972 a new book by Martin Caidin was published called The Mendelov Conspiracy. Martin Caiden has six other titles on the shelves which are selling quite well. The only one of his seven books which has either been withdrawn from sale or made extremely difficult to obtain is The Mendelov Conspiracy. The reason would be most obvious to anyone who has had the good fortune to read the book. It is thinly disguised fact in the form of science fiction; it involves a plot to take over the world. The conspiracy is headed by Dr. Vadim Mendelov. The conspirators are discovered by a US newsman named Brady who writes a series of articles on ‘anti-gravity’, UFOs, and ‘electro-gravitics.’ He’s fired by the newspaper after the third article… The incredible fact is that ‘UFOs’ of the book are built on the principle that is an existing technology — right now. The names of key characters and the large aircraft corporations in the book were changed ever so cleverly to conceal the real names of the conspirators — whom Caiden, himself, had obviously already identified. Why did Martin Caidin write the book? Why has it been made so scarce when the demand for it is so intense?” — Eric Wynants, “The UFO Connection: Anti-Gravity Machines, Bruce Cathie, Wilhem Reich, Etherian Physics, and the Conspiracy,” — Critique, Box 11451, Santa Rosa, California 95406.

Senator William Proxmire gave his monthly ‘Golden Fleece’ award to the National Institute of Health for spending $160,000 to conduct a study in ‘voodoo physiology.’… NIH spokeswoman Sylvia Shaffer… said a University of Utah team demonstrated how ‘rapidly drawing an imaginary X across the sternum of your opponent’ ultimately weakens that person in hand-to-hand strength tests. ‘It’s an unusual phenomenon that’s well-known to martial artists and physical therapists,’ Mrs. Shaffer said.” — Atlanta Journal, 5 Sept. 1985

One of the tactics of the Conspiracy that amounts to a cheap censorship campaign is their repeated assertions that I express myself cryptically, in cant language. Although I created one of the cant languages presently in use, my purpose was to make it possible for spies to smuggle information to me. There is no purpose for me to disguise my communications, since I am exposing conspiracies — not endeavoring to participate in them or adjust to them. Between early 1979 and late 1981 I was trying to make such accomodations, because virtually everyone treated me as if I were speaking in cant and “flying,” signaling with gestures, anyway. So I tried to adjust. So many misunderstandings were generated that I would up half mad. On 27 December of 1981 I abandoned cant language, except for an occasional brief phrase — always “tagged” with quotes or a clearing of my throat. I abandoned signaling with cryptic gestures entirely.

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When Joel Thornton introduced himself he claimed the similarity between his last name and mine was responsible for his visit that night in the early spring of 1978. A guy named David Bucknell who was in the Marines with Oswald and me, but who only vaguely recalled my name, had looked Thornton up in the Sunland, California, phone book. Then, somehow, Joel found out about the little house on the hill in Tujunga where I lived and came calling.

In May of that year Joel and his wife, Andrea, paid my air fare to San Jose, where Bucknell had been conferring with another ex-Marine from M.A.C.S.-9, Botello. Although Botello was indisposed unexpectedly, the remaining four of us went ahead with our plan to drive to San Francisco where we visited Greg Hill and recorded our conversation.

Shortly after the New Year’s Day Cuban Revolution of 1959, Bucknell remembered, he and Oswald and I had been paged on the squadron p.a. system and, upon reporting, were ordered to base security at the annex of El Toro Marine Air Base where we were stationed.

On our way there, Bucknell and Oswald were ahead of me, engaged in a quiet discussion. When I caught up with them, Oswald informed me bluntly that the conversation was private, so I fell back a few steps. That much I still recalled in 1978. What Oswald and Bucknell were talking about was a loan sharking operation they were running. Oswald was assuring him that they wouldn’t be in trouble for that reason, because in that case I wouldn’t have been called up with them — Bucknell now said.

When we arrived at base security we were directed into a meeting room where several Marines from other outfits were also assembled, according to careful notes David Bucknell made the next day and was reading aloud nineteen years later. “You men have been called together because it is our understanding that you are all admirers in one way or another of Fidel Castro,” said a civilian speaker introduced by a Marine captain only as Mister B. “We have reason to believe that Castro’s new government has been infiltrated by Soviet agents,” he continued. That much I vaguely remember hearing at a lecture somewhere along the line. As I was slated to soon go overseas a whole spate of orientation classes happened around the same time, probably immediately afterwards. For the same reason I was probably not eligible to volunteer for this super-secret project to help Castro get rid of his Russian spies, since it probably involved Stateside schooling — although I’m unable to explain why I don’t remember any request for volunteers.

Bucknell says he volunteered and so was interviewed privately by Mister B. at once, who looked bewilderedly at his references on the application and asked, “Who is E.H. Hunt?” Upon learning it was Bucknell’s maternal grandfather (and, as Bucknell speculates, not E. Howard Hunt), Mr. B. laughed, “Oh.” So this mysterious Latin civilian with a flattop and ducktail probably knew Edward Howard Hunt who, with Nixon, was in charge of the Cuban invasion preparations under Eisenhower.

Greg or Joel later contacted Botello who said he did not remember Bucknell being in M.A.C.S.-9. I recall him, though, as someone nicknamed Bucky Beaver and I remember enough of the incident he described to be sure it or something like it happened. — Kerry Wendell Thornley

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DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.

THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).

TAX: That form of coercion or interference with the Free Market in which the State collects tribute (the tax), allowing it to hire armed forces to practice coercion in defense of privilege, and also to engage in such wars, adventures, experiments, “reforms,” etc., as it pleases, not at its own costs, but at the cost of “its” subjects.

PRIVILEGE: From the Latin privi, private, and lege, law. An advantage granted by the State and protected by its powers of coercion. A law for private benefit.

USURY: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group monopolizes coinage and thereby takes tribute (interest), direct or indirect, on all or most economic transactions.

LANDLORDISM: That form of privilege or interference with the Market in which one State-supported group “owns” the land and thereby takes tribute (rent) from those who live, work, or produce on the land.

TARIFF: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which commodities produced outside the State are not allowed to compete equally with those produced inside the State.

CAPITALISM: That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.

CONSERVATISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which claims allegiance to the Free Market while actually supporting usury, landlordism, tariff, and sometims taxation.

LIBERALISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to the existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until “everything not forbidden is compulsory” and “everything not compulsory is forbidden.”

SOCIALISM: The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete. (Leviathan, Part III of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (Dell, 1975), pp. 70-2 — Hagbard Celine, “Never Whistle While You’re Pissing”

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