Monthly Archive for May, 2007

Decadent Worker #31 - 23April87

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Decadent Worker 31My imaginary king was able because of his training to resolve all disputes in the manner of Solomon. Not then understanding anything about the SNAFU factors involved anywhere there is not communication between equals, I thought of it as a helluva nicer way to make a living than telephone soliciting.

If he really didn’t have me in mind for the job, I didn’t want to seem so low as to envy anyone else who might be appointed. To resent the line of work itself — like some raving anarchist hanging out at the Ryder Coffee House who was bitter at everyone and moreover possessed the nerve to look smug about it, seemed inappropriate.

If perhaps the idea Gary dreamed of wasn’t functional, there were still always the esthetic considerations to take into account. Omar Khayyam never wove such fantasies as these in the minds of Sultans. And that was so unusual for Gary, who generally preferred to discuss something ugly…. (pp. 53-54)

“And there is also the fable of a king,” he once mentioned, “whose people were forbidden to speak to him by a rival monarch, so he worked out a code where every article of clothing and every gesture stood for something, so they could tell him what was going on. Do you think you could do something like that in a similar situation?”

Yet another time or two he said, “Kerry, you know, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is that they develop whole languages of their own — using ordinary words, but ascribing their own private meanings to them.”

“Yes, I read that in one of Loy’s psychology textbooks from nursing school.” Loy was a French Quarter friend, one of my closest, a serene woman with long black hair who made her living as an artist.

“Well I wonder what makes them invent their own secret languages. Why would anyone, especially a crazy person, go to all that trouble?”

“Maybe because they are crazy. One kind of paranoia is paranoid schizophrenia.”

“But you know, Kerry, there are some people who have exhibited the symptoms of paranoia who were taken to psychiatrists, and when they began investigating their backgrounds and their life situations they found out the patient was really being persecuted.”

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that a couple of times before. There are also actual paranoids, though. Not all of them are really being persecuted.”

“No, Kerry — not all of them.”… (pp. 85-86)

“Kerry, I think the best person to solve a complicated political assassination would be an anarchist — because he would not be partial to any of the many political factions involved.”

“Yes, but anarchy isn’t practical.”

A smug smile brightened his expression. “Don’t be hasty in passing judgement on the writings of the anarchists. They had some good ideas, no matter how you feel about the need for government. For example, Bakunin and some of the other anarchists said some very perceptive things about money and banking.” His evident amusement puzzled me at the time…. (pp. 114-5)

LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Fascism: A political view holding that government is a necessary evil and that, therefore, the more evil there is the more the conditions of necessity are set.

Decadent Worker #30 - 20April87

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Decadent Worker 30“Democracy means a belief that people are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the averae man. The chief reason why the average man is not now worthy of more trust… is simply that he has not been trusted enough in the past.” — Randolph Bourne

“That same freedom which we demand for ourselves, we must grant to every one. Instead of falling with spite upon those who vary from the textbook rules of life, we must look upon their acts as new and very interesting hypotheses to be duly tested and judged by the way they work when carried out into action. Nonconformity, instead of being irritating and suspicious, as it is now to us, will be distinctly pleasurable, as affording more material for our understanding of life.” — Randolph Bourne

“Bourne had little patience with those who argued that the methods of rational science, if judiciously applied by disinterested experts, would lead to a more ordered and controlled society. ‘One does not have to live very long,’ he wrote in reference to the progressives’ programs that were designed to enhance social and economic efficiency, ‘to see that this belief in the power and desirability of controlling things is an illusion.’ Because, like James, Bourne was aware of the limits of scientific inquiry to determine the truth, he urged fellow radicals to explore ‘the boundless puzzling world’ without maps and charts, guides that, in the final analysis, he felt, offered little more than the satisfying fantasy of security and control. ‘It isn’t any static life to which we must get adjusted,’ he argued, ‘but a lot of moving tendencies.’ Although Bourne did not know it, the artists at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, based their new revolutionary work on the same principle.” (p. 43)

“As early as 1913 he (Bourne) pointed out that ’society… is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.’” (p. 45)

“Following the romantics of the nineteenth century, Bourne declared that children were not empty vessels into which authorities should pour wisdom and knowledge but rather were active, creative, even superior individuals who needed only opportunities for personally directed growth.” (pp. 55-6)

“Bourne’s ‘Trans-National America,’ an important essay inspired by the feverish debate over the war and Americanization of 1916, expressed his opinion that the immigrants possessed an antidote to the sterility of Anglo-Saxon culture. He wrote that they represented the injection of a new vitality into the nation that might yet prevent America from becoming ‘a tasteless, colorless fluid uniformity.’ Bourn proposed instead that the United States develop into what he called ‘a cosmopolitan federation of national cultures.’” (p. 66)

“War is the health of the State.” — Randolph Bourne

These quotations are from The Lyrical Left by Edward Abrahams (University Press of Virginia, 1986) - Atlanta Public Library Central: 700.973.

LANGUAGE IS THEFT - Astrology: Conspiracy theories about the stars. — Ho Chi Zen

Decadent Worker #29 - 16April87

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Decadent Worker 29LANGUAGE IS THEFT Terrorism: An explicative used by the tiger when scolding the house cat for killing mice. — Ho Chi Zen

“Kerry,” Brother-in-law once said, “one good way to construct the government of the philosopher-king would be to arrange it so that whoever was king didn’t know it, and in such a way that he would be used for decision-making purposes while standing in line at the store and places like that.”

So incomprehensible a notion seemed academic to me, but I saw no reason to say as much. A stupid idea, anyhow, this philosopher-king jazz, because even if a dictator managed to rule benevolently, what was to guarantee an equally kind and wise successor. That objection I expressed. Slim and Gary both answering, “Yes,” and looking smug, as if they had thought about that one and solved it.

As for our unwitting philosopher-king, Slim contributed something now about that idea: “As one good way to do it. Not the only way.”

“Sure,” I said, eyeing them both with a mixture of skepticism and boredom, “that sounds like one good way to have a philosopher-king.”… (pp. 51-52)

Once Brother-in-law also asked me if I didn’t agree that the philosopher-king should also be someone who could keep “state secrets.”

I routinely concurred.

E. Howard Hunt writes in Undercover that he once received a cable signed jointly by Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes summoning him to headquarters. “Bissell had succeeded Frank Wisner as chief of the Clandestine Services, and after hospitalization brought on by overwork Wisner had been assigned to the relatively relaxed post of London chief of station. As a special aide to Allen Dulles, Bissell had created the concept of the U-2 aircraft, then managed that successful program. I had held several perfunctionary meetings with Bissell during consultation periods in Washington and a lengthier one during a Latin American chiefs of station in Lima, Peru.

“As principal assistant to Bissell, Tracy Barnes told me, I was needed for a new project, much like the one on which I had worked for him in overthrowing Jacobo Arbens. My job, Tracy told me, would be essentially the same as my earlier one — chief of political action for a project recommended by the National Security Council and just approved by President Eisenhower: to assist Cuban exiles in overthrowing Castro. Representative Cuban leaders were grouping in Florida and New York, and my responsibility would be to organize them into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would, once Castro was disposed of, form a provisional government in Cuba….”

Such an assignment may have given Hunt the opportunity to experiment with unusual forms of government. (p. 52)

…when Gary spoke of his “philosopher-king” it evoked in my imagination visions of an old man in trunks on a blanket with his legs crossed, surrounded by an orderly circle of Devil’s advocates of restrained and gentle nature — the image of a Hindu holy picture, quite distant from everything ugly except unavoidably relevant tales of human perfidity. (53) The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984

Decadent Worker #28 - 13April87

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Decadent Worker 28“Before the First World War, the Lyrical Left, a loose coalition of cultural radicals living in New York City, dreamed of changing the world with pens, paint brushes, and new publications. They thought they could liberate society by combining radical politics and modern culture. New expressions in art, drama, literature, and cultural criticism, members of the Lyrical Left felt, could have a revolutionary impact on the world’s social, economic, and political structures. To advance their belief, in a burst of creative excitement they founded experimental magazines, clubs, theaters, art galleries, and schools. These, they hoped, would shake the foundations of the established world.

“The Lyrical Left opposed the politics of reform even more than it opposed the forces of conservatism. Instead of programmatic solutions to real problems, such as those proposed by their progressive antagonists, they offered a transpolitical, redemptive vision of personal freedom and social liberation. Fun, truth, beauty, freedom, peace, feminism, and socialist revolution were their bywords and guideposts.” (p. ix)

“The moment the poet James Oppenheim heard that Randolph Bourne had died, he rushed to the apartment on West Eighth Street in New York City where Bourne lay, a victim of the flu epidemic of the winter of 1989. When he lifted the sheet that covered his friend’s face, he felt that Bourne’s death ’seemed to mean that all had stopped.’ It is not surprising that Oppenheim associated his fellow cultural radical’s untimely death, six weeks after the armistice, with the demise of a ‘new vision of the world.’ For his contemporaries as well as for many intellectuals since 1989, Bourne’s life represented an unfinished search for a new culture that would have enlarged personal freedom at the same time that it supported collective social ideals. Few of Bourne’s admirers did not interpret his passing as signifying the end of their own hopes for a cultural revolution in the United States…

“His short life — he was thirty-two when he died — was dedicated to creating radical transformation…. In particular, Bourne wanted to reform education in order to end the alienation of students from their environment and one another. He wanted to establish a cosmopolitan civilization in the United States in which immigrant communities and cultures could thrive and flourish. And, finally, he vehemently opposed the First World War, which he felt destroyed everything he had believed in.

“Bourne’s vision of a new America, however, represented more than the sum of its parts. His was an integrated ideology that stressed the cultural roots of social change, the necessity for diverse intellectual and ethnic communities, and, above all, the independence and integrity of the individual. These unshakable assumptions formed the bedrock upon which Bourne built his radical beliefs. If he directed his life and thought toward achieving a single goal, it was to liberate simultaneously both self and society from what he considered to be arbitrary and oppressive social systems. He dreamed of growth and expansion, but most of all he longed for a new freedom not only for himself but for the society in which he lived.” (pp. 23-24) — Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left (University Press of Virginia, 1986)

Decadent Worker #27 - 9April87

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worker
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in CIA, Interarm, JFK, KGB, Nazi, Rent Strike, The Decadent Worker and weather control
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Decadent Worker 27Q. “From your letter to me, you feel some imperialist thing is going on against the third world. As for those starvation figures, well hell man, it seems to me they are living in a desert. And there’s been a drought. I don’t see how I can get serious about your veiled connections. Other explanations are too obvious.

“A further point of difficulty is that the numbers are so low as to be meaningless in terms of the larger picture. No negative growth has yet occured. The starvation deaths are much less than the natural increase (in the third world). You are obviously selective in your facts in order to service a pre-determined mindset.

“Huh? If there’s some secret group of white manipulators who are the real power behind things it would seem they would be first of all concerned about the third-world immigration.” –J.B., Edina, MN

Thank you for at least addressing the problem. That’s more cooperation than I get from my intelligence community contacts — who incessantly offer unsolicited personal advice about how I could get laid if I would only jump through a few hoops, when and where and whether or not I should masturbate, whether I should or should not conform to traditional mores, whether I am or am not or should or shouldn’t be expressing myself in conspiracy cant, etc., etc. — who in fact engage in a non-stop filibuster to evade dealing with the origins of the Vietnam war and the related presentday conspiracy behind the holocaust of starvation.

Allow me to take your last objection first. Third World immigration is a source of cheap labor and those who choose to come here are usually political rightists — many so authoritarian as to be useful henchmen in violently supressing leftwing dissent. Further, discussion of the labor question here may be found in Triple Your Intelligence — $5 from Fry’s Modern Humans, 22511 Markham, Ferris, CA 92370 — in the form of an introductory editorial. For $10 they will also furnish you with whole batches of data from all manner of sources describing in detail alternative energy formulas, plans and articles. Their politics appear so para-military right that I never recommend them without a disclaimer on that score, so they are hardly guilty of sharing my left anarchist bias.

As for no negative growth indicating that the problem is not serious, runaway population growth is a symptom of abject widespread poverty. A sociological rule of thumb is that the richer people are the fewer offsprin they produce. One out of every three people in the world goes to bed hungry every night according to the same sources that furnish the estimates that between 13 and 18 million starve fatally each year. Had I wanted to select my facts I could have, for example, instead quoted: “Twenty milllion Africans will die over the next weeks. One hundred million Africans will die in the intermediate range future of the next months.” If those are facts. “Like the New York Times… the Washington Post has not seen fit to inform its readership of the scale of the ongoing disaster. Television networks, apart from isolated stories, have provided no better information than the print media.

“As a result, the largest holocaust in recent human history is taking place without the accompaniment of protest and moral outrage that could normally be relied on to stop those like Katharine Graham, whose policies and commitments, as we shall show, are festering and expanding the largest genocide in recent human history.” This material is from Save Africa from Volcker’s Genocide, published by the Committee for a New Africa Policy (1980), an organization inspired by Lyndon LaRouche.

I instead cited Creative Loafing, a commercial apolitical Atlanta weekly, because I think it is more effective in the long run to err on the side of understatement — if err one must — than to exaggerate, only to be demolished later on. Moreover I find LaRouche’s pathological perchant for branding his enemies “pederasts” and “pot-smoking fops” so divisively Gouldist that I therefore distrust him on all other counts. Emotional Plague via psychological well poisoning and stirring up the most bigoted and violent superstitions of the ignorant isn’t a matter I take lightly.

Nevertheless, much of the pamphlet is impressive: “Most Africans suffer from chronic malnutrition, eating less than 2,000 calories per day, and most of that starch.” And: “In the broad extent of black Africa that is suffering from famine and drought, nearly every regional, religious, national, local and tribal division of the population is hit with war and insurgency. In all such cases, ‘outside’ influence, whether from the intelligence agencies of Western or East bloc powers, is provable.”

That these people are living in a desert is due in part to the very existence of governments, as their borders are protected by armed guards who make extensive migration impossible. I have said before: “All starving people are under the gun.” A Permanent Universal Tax Strike could simplify that problem greatly.

Moreover, I am personally convinced there is a weather control conspiracy. According to an article in a 1977 American Opinion it was created by a CIA-KGB clique. Due to the unusual nature of my involvement with the intelligence community, I was treated to a demonstration of its reality — although I am at a loss as to how I could convince others. If such a conspiracy did not cause the drought, it could certainly at least cure it, if it wanted.

Also, I personally have been beaten, robbed and subjected to the most humiliating invasions of my personal life and have been told in many such instances that I am being “made to pay” for supporting the Permanent Universal Rent Strike — the only peaceful measure that could abolish the feudal land tenure system that comprises the main cause of starvation and poverty. I have moreover been told that other supporters of the P.U.R.S. have been killed with sodium morphate heart attacks and that Sam Cummings of Interarm, the munitions cartel, has gotten the U.S. to classify the Permanent Universal Rent Strike as a dangerous “weapon,” so as to provide a legalistic cover for its fascist supression. Add to that my conversations about, and before, the JFK murder with a probable CIA agent who said it would be a shame to fight Caucasian Cuba instead of an Asian race — recalling that Charles Cabell, for whom this agent was probably working, sabotaged the air support for the Bay of Pigs — and you begin to get the picture. There is a genocidal conspiracy in control of the intelligence community — perhaps the Vril Society, explaining why no Caucasians and no Japanese and no Chinese are perishing of hunger en masse, why the one out of three who goes to bed hungry is virtually always “racially inferior” in Nazi terms.

Decadent Worker #26 - 6April87

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Decadent Worker 26“…Following the Boss Frog’s overthrow, the once dark, dank well was magnificently illuminated and made a much more comfortable place to live. In addition, the frogs experienced a new and gratifying leisure with many attendant delights of the senses — even as the philosopher frog had foretold.

“But still the eccentric skylark would come visiting with tales of the sun and the moon and the stars, of mountains and valleys and seas, and of grand winged adventures it had known.

“‘Perhaps,’ conjectured the philosopher frog, ‘this bird is mad, after all. Surely we have no further need of these cryptic songs. And in any case, it is very tiresome to have to listen to fantasies when the fantasies have lost their social relevance.’

“So one day the frogs contrived to capture the lark. And upon so doing, they stuffed it and put it in their newly built civic (admission-free) museum… in a place of honor.” — The Skylark and the Frogs, pp. 121-3 of The Making of a Counter-Culture by Theodore Rozak (continued from DW #22)

“William Goode (1957, p. 195) recognizes that ‘the elite of any profession are usually conscious of a communal identity.’ As this identity extends and becomes commonplace among the general community population, its sense of solidarity should increase. This appears to be the case with the intelligence community, the other characteristic and conditions of which encourage an identification with the professional community and virtually exclude identification with any other potentially competing community or even reference group.” — Fred M. Kaiser, “Secrecy, Intelligence, and Community: The U.S. Intelligence Community,” Secrecy by Standon K. Tefft (Human Sciences, 1980)

“A vigorous and open exchange of ideas is vital to a healthy government. And on this issue the Reaganites have a terrible record.

“The administration clearly prefers to work under wraps, unencumbered by strict accountability to the public…

“It has sought to weaken the Freedom of Information Act. It has required government workers with access to top-secret material to sign a written pledge that they will get prior approval for speeches and articles. It reversed a Carter administration policy that instructed officials to consider the public’s right to know as they decided whether to classify documents.” — “Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial, 21 March 1987

“In the context of the intelligence community, several important mores and associated norms apparently predominate — obedience, discipline, dedication, and most critically, defense of secrecy and internal security… The fact that illicit activities within the intelligence agencies went unexposed for decades testified to the importance of this norm.” — Fred M. Kaiser, Tefft, Ibid.

If secrecy is national security, than voting with our eyes shut could insure the safety of democratic rule. — Ho Chi Zen

Decadent Worker #25 - 2April87

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Decadent Worker 25From The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984:

Gary said many times over again that the best government was that of the philosopher-king. At great length he would go on about the traits a philosopher-king should possess — such as being able to distinguish between coincidence and conspiracy and such as not punishing messengers for bringing bad news.

Surrounding a man with liars until he became so disgusted with lying that he would not tolerate an untruth was one of his ideas for preparing the philosopher-king for the job. On a separate occasion he told me that someday I would be surrounded by liars, and if I could find a way to make them tell me the truth I would become philosopher king.

“Kerry, there are tribal secret societies that surround their king with beautiful women all his life and watch him make love to them — then they sacrifice him.”

That sounded like a dubious honor.

“Kerry, do you think a philosopher-king should have a good enough memory to remember something for thirteen years?”

Of course.

“Rosenberg should not be accused of wanting dictatorship as a principle,” Peter Viereck tells us in Metapolitics: Roots of the Nazi Mind, adding soon afterwards: “He follows the spirit of Wagner’s complicated distinction between King and monarch. Rejecting alike government by parliament or by kaiser (monarch), Rosenberg demands the Volk-king, the hero-dictator risen from the ranks, whom Jahn and Wagner prophesied.

“The qualities and justification of the Volk-king are outlined in the Fuhrer section of the chapter on Wagner’s metaphysics. This Wagnerian concept is basic to nazism. Rosenberg says: ‘We want to see in a German king a person like ourselves… but yet the incarnation of a hero myth.’…

“The gist of the Fuhrer myth is that the Fuhrer is (incarnates) the Volk, instead of ruling it detachedly like monarch or economic class or representing it like a democrat. The Fuhrer is an organic part of the Volk instead of a detached atom. This myth is absolutely basic to Hitler’s rule today. Of course, it is only a myth….”

“Kerry, I think the philosopher-king should be a very gentle person, someone with the soul of a poet, but that he ought to be surrounded for protection by mad dogs — the worst and meanest badasses around!”

Though wondering what type of administration that would produce, I kept my speculations to myself.

“Kerry, you know at the end of the war Hitler came up on the radio and gave a speech calling for the werewolves of Germany to come to the aid of the Nazi cause.”

“Yes, you have mentioned that before,” was my response after the first telling. (pp. 49-51)