Surveillance in Unistat Pre-Snowden, File #23a

"Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing." (see below)
--------------------------------------------------------
"A case can be made...that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of all Cold War regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us."
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, p.227

Moynihan the intellectual in the Senate. Published 10 books before going to Congress, vacillated from NeoLiberal to NeoCon. You figure it out.
----------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, after the Berlin Wall came down, the intellectuals I was reading (kicked out of academia or were never part of it), or Noam Chomsky (as special case), were (mostly) predicting "Islamic Terrorism" as what the Pentagon would need in order to keep their rotten Show on the road. None of these writers I was reading were allowed on TV, so for most Unistatians, this idea didn't exist.
----------------------------------------------------------

                                                Kathryn Olmsted, History professor at
                                                 University of California-Davis, who writes
                                                books on spies and national security issues

Earlier this year I read U.C. Davis History professor Kathryn Olmsted's book Right Out of California, which has the thesis that the Unistatian Right as it's now constituted started in the farmland of California in the Depression, because FDR's labor people realized he needed the South, so there were no protections for labor organizers of the farmworkers in California. I found it fairly persuasive, and I'm a fan of Olmsted's books now.

In this book I happened upon the story of a US General named Ralph Deman, who had accumulated a massive file on anyone he thought might harbor thoughts he might deem "dangerous," that is: anything that didn't toe the corporate state line. And he shared his files with right wing groups and the cops. (See Right Out of California, pp.151-157)

And some of us at one time thought J. Edgar Hoover was the only one. I thought so in my 20s.

*-regarding Ralph Deman, one of Olmsted's grad students responded to an email query about information sources on him. Obviously you can Duck Duck Go Deman, but Scott Pittman cited books titled Policing America's Empire and Negative Intelligence.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Esquire magazine decided to send William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, and Jean Genet to cover the 1968 Democratic Convention in "Czechago." Genet had a line: "The danger for America is not Mao's Thoughts; it is the proliferation of cameras." (see Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties, p.98)

Poet as Distant Early Warning system?
---------------------------------------------------------------
While Patty Hearst's trial was ongoing, it came out that her mother - Catherine - gave or lent $60,000 to $70,000 to a company called Research West back in 1969. What was "Research West"? It was "a private right-wing spy organization that maintained files supplied by confessed burglar Jerome Ducote." (Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders, Paul Krassner, p.35) There had been journalistic investigations of this, but Hearst-owned newspaper reporters were told to stop investigating, for obvious reasons. A Santa Cruz paper - the Sundaz, not owned by the Hearsts, did investigate, and found that, before Mrs. Hearst bought it, it was supported by "contributions" averaging $1000 and, well, I'll quote Krassner here on who was "contributing":

Pacific Telephone, Pacific Gas and Electric, railroads, steamship lines, banks, and [Hearst's own] The Examiner. In return, the files were available to those companies, as well as to local police and sheriff departments, the FBI, the CIA and the IRS. The Examiner paid $1500 a year through 1975 to retain the services of Research West. (p.35, Krassner)

It gets deeper and more (of course!) nefarious, but I'd like you to read Krassner's book to see how much we've missed from the Official Story.

                                        Investigative satirist and national treasure
                                         Paul Krassner

The good folks at Open Culture are currently (as of the date I'm writing this) featuring an animated 1958 Aldous Huxley predicting our world. "Dystopian threats to freedom." How alarmist! And yet...
Aldous immediately presented a threat to assholes like J. Edgar Hoover (who denied the Mafia existed, because they knew he was gay and could crush him, and furthermore, he protected and was friends with a major mobster, Frank Costello, see The Secret Histories: An Anthology, ed. by John S. Friedman, article "Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover," by Anthony Summers, 1993, pp. 192-200), and other protectors of the 1%. Huxley arrived in Unistat in 1938, and author Herbert Mitgang obtained Huxley's FBI files. "Of the 130 pages, 111 were released to me, many heavily censored. The net of them: he and his daring and original writings were watched." - Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors, pp.192-194

Mitgang surmises the FBI tried to understand Huxley's famous book Brave New World, but apparently couldn't. Most bright 10th graders I know understand it. This has always been what we're dealing with, folks: losers. Cops who profess to love the Constitution, but in reality hate every bit of it. They (not all of them, of course) seem to be carriers of what Wilhelm Reich called "the emotional plague." 

Mitgang notes from Aldous's file that Hoover and his loser cop-pals thought Huxley was a threat, largely due to his overt pacifism. Think about that for awhile. Furthermore, the FBI subjected Brave New World to "cryptographic examination," and Mitgang observes, "but nothing subversive was discovered."

[NB: A bit of divagation: The British philosopher Peter Strawson would read my judgments on Hoover and his minions (as "assholes," etc) and assert that my judgments, which merely imply that they should be held accountable, reflect attitudes which derive from my own participation in personal relationships: forgiveness, resentment, gratitude, indignation, etc. I find this a very plausible idea.- OG]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I'm a subscriber to Muckrock, which specializes in obtaining and making public government information via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Not long ago I wondered about Robert Anton Wilson's file, so I made a request and got nowhere. Then I realized Michael Morisy of Muckrock had already tried to get RAW's FBI file, and posted THIS. Note the FBI were "unable to identify main file records responsive to FOIA." ("Main file records"? What others might there be?)

Then, as we read "Congress excluded three discrete categories of law enforcement and national security records from the requirements of the FOIA." You and I wonder what this means. We can't know. We're given some bureaucratic numbers and symbols to prove that what Congress did is true. Okay. Obama ran promising the "most transparent" administration ever, and yet 'tis more Orwell: he's probably been the least transparent. What do these assholes think "Freedom of Information" means?

Stupidly, I then realized my blogging friend Tom Jackson had already covered this in 2013. (Note the one comment was from Bruce Kodish, who has self-published a wonderful fat biography on Alfred Korzybski. If you're as interested in Korzybski as I am, you must get hold of this; it's a gem and divulges scads of info on its subject, info that seems to have only been privy to Korzybski's closest colleagues.)

If you've been involved in trying to get info under FOIA, you may have acquired government files that are so redacted that what's left is meaningless. So, we go from Orwell to Kafka. If you're not convinced, look at what the FBI sent Morisy on RAW: they say records for the request might exist. Or they might not. They won't tell us.

But we can be practically certain RAW has a fairly substantial file, somewhere in the Belly of the Beast.

From RAW's introduction to Donald Holmes's book The Illuminati Conspiracy: The Sapiens System:

During my last year of employment as Associate Editor of Playboy, a certain executive came into my office one day and closed the door behind him. He told me that my home phone was tapped and that I was under surveillance by the Red Squad of the Chicago Police Force. 

I was stunned, and asked how he knew this. 

He replied that certain people in the Playboy empire had made an arrangement with a Chicago police official. The official received regular money through some circuitous route that was not explained to me; in return he notified his Playboy contacts whenever an executive of the firm was under police investigation. 

That was when I first realized how often there are spies spying on spies.
-p.9

RAW finds that, because he was involved in the anti-war movement and had talked to some Black Panthers, some spook for some agency dreamed up that RAW was running guns to the Black Panthers. RAW guesses some low-level spy wanted to beef up his reports to justify his work. Later RAW found out that there were "over 5000 government agents assigned to infiltrate peace groups in Chicago alone" (p.8), and that this was all part of COINTELPRO, which was meant to make everyone in a peace group paranoid that one of another of their fellows were spies for the government, and in effect reduce the efficacy of the peace movement...because we're a "free country" and our "way of life" is so superior to the Rooskies.

RAW says no one at Playboy thought he was dangerous, and offered to support him legally if anything happened.

Then RAW became an intimate of Dr. Leary, so that file must be very thick. Or one would think. But we don't know how to ask/guess the right questions in order to obtain why they thought Robert Anton Wilson was worth surveilling/wiretapping, etc.

Through most of his time as counterculture writer and activist, RAW knew he was being spied on, but decided to be amused by it, quoting Helen Keller: "Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing."

I know all of this seems comparatively ultra-innocent in light of what we know now that we're in the Snowden Era; I just want y'all to be aware of how the Official Story about "who we are, as a nation" clashes so radically with "reality."

                                                  grafikai Bob Campbell
                                             

On the Snowden Revelations and Learned Helplessness

Quick like a bunny: name all the ways your communications are being tapped, tracked, and impounded.

If you said, "Every one of them, probably" congrats! You're a...winner?

Snowden was so, like two years ago, man. (Yea, but despite the fact a Federal Appeals Court ruled the indiscriminate Hoovering of all ALL all telephonic calls was "illegal" we have no reason to believe the NSA/CIA/DIA/all the other Fink-based alphabet soup assholes have stopped collecting. Sorry.)

Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel for NSA and a critic of Snowden's ironically admitted nine months ago we're only talking about the first thing Snowden leaked to Greenwald and Poitras:

"The only debate we're really having in the US is about the very first document that Snowden produced," said Stewart A. Baker, a former N.S.A. general counsel and outspoken critic of the leaks, referring to the secret court order authorizing the phone records program. "The rest of the documents have been used as a kind of intelligence porn for the rest of the world - 'Oooh, look at what the N.S.A. is doing.'"

I can't tell if Baker is embarrassed before the world (I somehow doubt it), or if the borderline traitor is ironically telling the rest of us, "You think the phone records are something, wait till you find out we can turn on your smartphone's mic and listen to what you're saying...even when the power's off! Or that we can turn on your laptop's camera and watch you have sex and take pics of you and your lovers nude."

(Have a look-see from Jeffrey T. Richelson's book The US Intelligence Community for info on those two programs, "Captivated Audience" and "Gumfish," and as they say on infomercials, "much much more!")

NB: in the NYT article I linked to above, with the quotes from Stewart Baker, there are the required quotes from a commissar-like CIA fink-traitor to the Constitution, Michael Morrell, who says flat-out Snowden's leaks helped ISIS. Morrell is quite likely a liar.

And you know who else is a liar about Snowden? Hillary Clinton. Forget that she and Bill are now so far inside Wall St they're filthy rich off others' suffering.

Hillary can "never condone" what Snowden did.

See also re: Hillary's lies about Snowden here:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/hillary-clinton-what-snowden-did-gave-all-kinds-of-information-to-terrorists/

https://freedom.press/blog/2014/04/fact-checking-hillary-clintons-comments-about-edward-snowden-and-nsa

Hey, I'd be happy to have someone with a vagina as Prez of Unistat, but not this one. It seems a sure bet she'd continue the retrograde moves Obama made. Snowden didn't vote for Obama, but believed him when he said, running in 2007-2008, well, let me quote Obama from 13 June, 2007:

No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime...No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.

The sorts of Authoritarian contemptibles who Just Follow Orders and work for the Unistat spy agencies now? Quite likely sexual fascists also. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was notoriously on the lookout for info on sex practices of freethinkers, in order to try and blackmail them. Snowden said his fellow NSA workers commented upon and even joked about the nude bodies and sexual acts they surveilled. 

So, what do you think Thomas Jefferson would make of all this?

On second thought, don't answer that...

Re: sexual fascism: Sorry, I know that "slut shaming" is horrible. But let's not pretend something far worse, more despicable and illegal isn't happening among the security-cleared Finks whose paychecks We the People fund. (I call anyone with such a heinous interpretation of the 4th Amendment a "fink." It's one of my quirks. If you're offended, pardonamente!)

On the real issue here, privacy, I feel compelled to link to another longstanding member of our commissar class, David Brooks. For me, Brooks has quite the punchable face. I really detest David Brooks. But lawdamercy! sometimes he can write something smart, as he did in this piece about why privacy is one of Our Values. I could have quoted one of "my" guys/gals; here I just like the irony of linking to one of my enemies. 22 months before this, Brooks wrote that he "disapproves" of Snowden. As they would say about Brooks at BoingBoing, "Christ What An Asshole."

Why did all this shit go down in the first place? You probably have something to say about this. I think the venerable Alfred W. McCoy seems pretty hot when he writes about "imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA's latest technological breakthroughs look like a seductive bargain when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line."

So, getting back to the prick from Stewart A. Baker, why aren't we all talking about all the other forms of our Orwellian Panopticon? Ted Rall wonders, "Is it the media's notorious inability to focus on stories, especially when they're complicated? Or are they consciously complicit in a conspiracy to keep silent about America's out-of-control security state - nothing to see here, just move on?" (p.212, Snowden) Rall says Greenwald and Poitras's The Intercept, which was started to handle the massive info from Snowden so we can all read and comment, has not - au grand dam to many of us - produced a steady drip drip drip until Obama had to reign it all in. Unistatians seem to have passively accepted they're being watched all the time. 

How to account for this? Rall and others have cited M.E.P Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness" in human's dealings with stuff they don't think they can handle, which produces anxiety and human depression. People act like a dog reduced to whimpering helplessness after sustained abuse. (Followed by, I presume, self-medication with Facebook?)

Then also, I found in Robert Anton Wilson's book Everything Is Under Control an entry under P for "Passive Conspiracy." These are possibly more noxious than active conspiracies. The heroin problem circa 1998 will go on in Unistat, the author writes (I'm not sure if this is Wilson saying the following or the writer he's quoting from an NYU student he found on the Web) as long as it's perceived as a "black" "inner city" problem. The gummint will only pretend to care about stopping it. (Prophetic in 2016? You be the judge.)

RAW finishes the entry by linking the Passive Conspiracy idea with Wilhelm Reich's darker version, that "masses neurotically yearn to surrender to some fascist leader and will throw away their liberties as soon as a leader of that sort appears." (p.336) I guess Dick Cheney would've qualified here.

Just think of President Ted Cruz, ladies and germs: he has access to all your kinky sex stuff that Jesus wouldn't like. Gosh, what hijinks would ensue?

Some Sources:

The Intercept

Snowden, by Ted Rall

No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, by Greenwald and Ganser

The Snowden Files, by Luke Harding

Citizen Four (2014 Laura Poitras) must-see documentary if ya haven't already. In a sane country, we'd realize we were wrong after 9/11 and give Snowden the Medal of Freedom and a ticker-tape parade and an official national holiday named after him...but which day of the year?
Snowden Statue
"Snowden, Assange and Manning Statues Unveiled in Berlin"

                                         You too might have your own blog artfully tagged!
                                         For inquiries, see Bob Campbell

Five Reasons the MI6 Story is a Lie

[From OG: see end of article: author's postscript! - OG]

by Craig Murray:

The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie.

1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation.

3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.

4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.

5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?

There you have five reasons the story is a lie.

Author’s postscript:

The site is under a strong denial of service attack from a bot trying to crash it by overloading with millions of pings from multiple locations. I presume the objective is to take down the revelation of the fake MI6 Snowden story, which had been read by tens of thousands already and is now really taking off.

While the copyright in that article remains mine, I grant permission for it freely to be reproduced by anybody, anywhere. I shall be grateful for multiple copies to be posted around the web so it can’t be taken down.

OG-added addenda: If even CNN exposes you for what a Murdoch whore you are, you have problems. WATCH THIS.

Swift/Marx/Wilson: Ironies, Paradoxes, and Satires Mordant: Some Faves

De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess it's just one of those things, but I marvel at certain stylistic flair in satire. I think a struggling composer must feel similar things when listening to Bartok or Beethoven, or a young would-be Serious Novelist when reading Joyce or Pynchon.

                                               Jonathan Swift                        

Swift (1729)
My first example is Swift's A Modest Proposal. I dig the rhythm, the build-up before the modest proposal. There certainly were major problems with poverty/overpopulation among the poor in Ireland around 1729, no doubt. And the tone is exemplary of the "can-do" spirit among the well-fed. One of my favorite devices: Swift bolsters his rhetoric with statistics - as if he's some proto-policy wonk - the subtext being that we're reading a rational man here. And, from the first paragraph, we know we're in the midst of a writer filled with compassion and empathy, with a foolproof appeal to the heartbreaking difficulties of Motherhood. (If you haven't read the piece, it's very short, and I know you'll read it all "eventually" but for now click on the link above and read the first paragraph, so we can all be on the same page. Thanks.)

Swift has given this a lot of thought. He wants to alleviate misery. He's a practical man, too.  He's considered others' attempts at solving the problem and thinks he has a better solution. And so, before he tells us he's going to enumerate many reasons why the poor should sell off their children to be fattened and eaten by more wealthy gentry-types, he soberly writes, "I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection." He then follows with this sentence:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

He just wants to "ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance." Let's face it: a lot of these kids were born out of wedlock anyway. And you know what's really terrible? Many of these desperately poor kids are hired on as cheap labor, which, being so poor, they hardly have the strength to carry out. Eating these kids has so many advantages that Swift's argument is a slam-dunk. (To the madman who would take this seriously and not see that the real problem is vast income inequality and oppression by the church, state, and landlords...Are there such madmen amongst us? I mean besides Dick Cheney...)

Some of the benefits of this idea:

-Nine months after Lent, Catholics give birth at an inflated rate; eating their babies will lessen the number or papists in our midst.

-When the poor sell their babies for food, at least they'll have a slightly easier time paying off their landlords. The landlords have already (figuratively) devoured the parents.

-Butchers will do a bang-up biz. A kid can fatten up to 28 pounds after a year: delicious!

(As Swift cites esteemed, virtuous patriots who care about the dignity of humans, and while he keeps citing stats to bolster his claims...)

-A colleague - the same unnamed "American" who we find got his ideas from "the famous Psalmanazar"  - noted the problem of stores of venison being depleted too soon, so maybe we could eat boys and girls who have reached the age of 12 but not older than 14?: Swift is discerning: no, he's heard the boy-meat is "tough and lean" while you may as well let the girls live on, because they're almost of the age to produce more succulent meat from their own bodies. Point well-taken!

-Despite the practical reasons for not eating young teenage girls, as cited above, Psalmanazar's story about criminality - such as trying to poison the rich and powerful - should be considered if plump female teens commit such heinous crimes. Hey, it worked in Formosa...

-The argument against Swift - that he's not considered the aged, maimed, and diseased? Ah, but take this into consideration: they're already, every day, "dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can reasonably be expected." Objections overruled. Swift wins this one, too. And besides, who cares really? Those losers aren't working anymore, anyway. Practicality, people!

-This new source of succulent, tender meat, will provide for a "refinement of taste" for "gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom." Who in their right mind can argue with this?

-Poor people will have a few less mouths to feed. Swift cares. He really does. Bless him!

-This whole scheme will be an economic boost to taverns, where gentlemen who "justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating" will gladly pay whatever is asked for that sweet sweet kid-meat.

-It will enhance the quality of marriage, something every state wants. Why? Well, for one thing, fathers will attend with much more loving care their wives who are pregnant with the cargo that will help them pay the rent in a few month's time. Wife-beatings among the poor will diminish. And who can quarrel with that?

-We all like the fruits of pig-meat: bacon, pork, etc, but let's admit it: things can get a bit dull eating pork chops and bacon day after day. And no pig is "comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at lord mayor's feast or any other public entertainment." Such refinement!

To sum up, Swift can see no objection to his proposal. I mean, think of the beauty of it: it provides for the poor while also relieving them. It also gives "some pleasure to the rich."

I've read this piece maybe 15 or 20 times in my life, and it's never lost its power over me. I think what I admire most is the way Swift, whose voice here seems to emanate from a completely insane man, at the same time has us on his side, because this mode of rhetoric - satire of the highest level - is perhaps the fullest response to poverty and suffering when one feels angry that we can do better. The requisite distance between the rhetoric and the suffering of humans is enough that no one can take this seriously, even if the tone and "rational" argument implore us to consider such a ghastly idea.

The Irish government made lame attempts to silence him, but his character and esteem were of such elevation that Swift continued to publish whatever he pleased.

                                                       Karl Marx

Marx (1862/63)
In the so-called fourth volume of Das Kapital, "Theories of Surplus Value," Marx discusses previous economist's ideas about people who provide productive labor versus those who provide "unproductive" labor. Adam Smith (who Marx greatly admired) thought that the unproductive were, among others: "churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc." When Smith wrote men of letters and musicians, it frankly stung the OG. But "buffoons"? That one was like a punch to the gut. Anyway...All these lay-abouts were parasitical upon the labors of people who actually did real, honest work. But Marx, who knew his Swift (and everyone who ever wrote anything of interest, it seems), disagreed with the greatest classical economist of all time:

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor books and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection between the latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable book in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as "commodities"...

Think how much of our precarious economy owes to criminals! Where would judges or bailiffs or courthouse builders be without them? How about those fine men we call "police"? Jailers, makers of iron bars, gas chambers, badges and truncheons, guns, handcuffs? What about John Grisham and Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes and The Sopranos? They'd be nowhere without the productions of criminals. Marx reminds us of all the improved and applied science that went into torture devices, and just think how good locks have become because of criminals. In Unistat, the gun trade is booming (sorry); the criminal's at times murderous contributions seems most essential to our very way of life!

The value of crime upon the way we think about morality is endlessly productive, and furthermore, as Francis Wheen writes, "The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted..." (p.78, Marx's Das Kapital)

Here's more of Marx on the subject:

Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers?...And if ones leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn't the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

To those of my Dear Readers who find themselves unemployed, I offer Marx's riffs on productive labor here as merely a suggestion that perhaps we may frame our problems in different ways...

Wheen's slender book is one I found a delight, and he made me go back to reading Marx anew. There's a considerable take on Marx as a literary figure. Marx certainly wanted to produce something thoroughly along the lines of a literary masterpiece, but I personally would direct the reader to something like Dickens's Hard Times instead.

That said, Wheen covers the reception and attempts at categorizing Marx's sprawling work: "The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ('Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore top to toe and oozing blood from every pore')." Stanley Edgar Hyman saw the book as a Victorian melodrama: "The Mortgage on Labour-Power Foreclosed." The book can be seen as a black comedy, with a debunking of the "'phantom-like objectivity' of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality." (Wheen, p.75)

Wheen notes the critic C. Frankel saw Kapital as like a Greek tragedy: fate, tragic blindness, fixated ideas, seeing the truth too late, etc. In To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson saw Marx as the greatest ironist since Swift, as a supreme parody of classical economics texts, and that, having read Kapital, the classical economists "never seem the same to us again; we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask."

I can see you now, Dear Reader: you've gathered your family and closest friends in one room for an announcement. Everyone is whispering what it could be. Tension in the room is palpable. Finally, you enter through the very large main door into the parlor. Everyone becomes silent. All eyes are trained on your every move. You let the drama build, then finally, get down to brass tacks: "Friends, my most beloved family members...this has been a difficult period in my life, as you all know, but I've done a lot of thinking - soul-searching, if you will - and I've made a decision about what to do, and I hope you will all help me in my new endeavor as best you can."

"Well? What is it?!?!," your father shouts, not with a small note of anxiety in his voice.

"I've...decided to enter a life of crime."

                                                 Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (c. 1975?)
If Unistatians follow politics to any appreciable level, you will note that our "leaders" tell us that many things must be done in the name of "national security." The very phrase has proven to carry a mass hypnotic effect of considerable heft. "We cannot tell you anything about why we might be doing something that would make Al Capone look like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Trust us: it's about national security." And that is usually that. Oh, some Nosy Parker journalists will look behind the curtain and then report what vast cool and unsympathetic beastly doings are going on in our name, but who the fuck READS anymore?

Much less: who actually cares?

And maybe it doesn't matter at all. Why? Well, maybe we've had it all wrong in the first place. And I mean all wrong: it could be that "national security is the chief cause of national insecurity." This is the "First Law" of Hagbard Celine, a real character who uses the words of his author, Robert Anton Wilson.

The Reader would do well to consult the primary text, in The Illuminati Papers, pp.118-122. Wilson's virtuoso satirical chops are on display here, but like Swift and Marx - whose writings RAW knew well - it's only because he's at pains to convey the many invasions of our "privacies" that we find ourselves in. And I assert RAW was not drilling in a dry hole, but has shown that, in this First Law ("National security is the chief cause of national insecurity") he has, as of 2013, proven to be a Prophet. RAW made this observation around 40 years ago - probably after citizens broke into the FBI office in Media, PA in 1971 - and the essay was written (possibly) around the time Watergate became a news item, and (possibly) close to the summer of 1975 Church Committee hearings that "damaged" the CIA...at any rate, COINTELPRO was at work and possibly known, this was all well before Internet and the massive We Make the East German Stasi Look Like Pikers-era of Total Information Awareness by the NSA, FBI, CIA, local police, nefarious hackers, Wall Street, Facebook, Google, the TSA...et.al

RAW's main rhetorical ploy there was one he played with verve and aplomb like Bach played the organ: the reductio ad absurdum. That is, if we took the claims of "national security" seriously in the early 1970s, it meant that  the watchers must have watchers, because who can place total trust in the first group of watchers over our security and movements? But that second group can't be entirely trusted - something corrupt might happen - so we need another "security group" to watch the second group. And while they're at it, they should probably try to watch the first, initial group of security-providers. You can see where this went. For RAW, it was satire, but with a point. For us in 2014, it's something like Nightmare Prophecy come true: the (near) total Surveillance State.

Most of you are way ahead of me, so I'll just pick one story that I've mentioned with my friends that seems to have slipped through the cracks: NSA intercepts shipments of laptops purchased online and installs malware in them.  I'm sure you guys have a "favorite" that's "better" than this one. Have at it in the comments!

O! To be able to write satire with the panache of Swift, Marx, Wilson!

On Archives: Personal and Public; Powerful and Perilous

"One's file, you know, is never quite complete; a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead." - Graham Greene, The Third Man

I've just finished reading a piece about how Stanley Kubrick amassed a personal archive - now housed in a climate-controlled wing of the University of Arts London - but intrepid journalist Jon Ronson somehow managed to peruse the extremely well-labeled and organized boxes upon boxes when they were still at Childwick Green, where Kubrick had lived in a rambling house in which Ronson had to drive past at least three electric gates to get to.

"There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen Portakabins, each packed with boxes. I notice that many of the boxes are sealed. Some have, in fact, remained unopened for decades." There are letters to and from Nabokov. There are fan letters from all over the world, filed by city of origin. There's an entire room devoted to Napoleon, with seemingly every book ever written about him, and 25,000 3x5 library cards filled with notes on Napoleon compiled by Kubrick and some assistants.

About the Napoleon note cards:

"How long did it take?" I ask.

"Years," says Tony. "The late sixties."

The Kubrick Napoleon film was never made. He ended up making A Clockwork Orange instead. (Napoleon will show up later, below, in the case of Giordano Bruno.)

It's a typically fine journalistic piece by Ronson, and it fed into my lifelong fascination with personal archives, and what they mean, or might mean, both to the collector and to others. To State power.
(see Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, pp.149-172, "Stanley Kubrick's Boxes")

Nachlass
Nowadays famous writers see bidding wars for their Nachlass, and it's made some writers ponder what their lives would be like once they sold their personal archives to an institution. Does it make you act "nicer" in all your emails? (The deal is: you get a sizeable sum, but must keep every scrap of writing from then on for the Institution.) What about love letters or writing that might hurt someone you love? How about what one might find embarrassing? If you opened a separate, secret email account, you are cheating the Institution and violating your agreement. You think to yourself, "Damn them! I have a life. And what sort of creep would want to go over my grocery lists?" Aye, but the Institution is backing you now; it's in their interests to play up how great you are...

Most of us who keep files about subjects we're interested in, or have built small personal libraries will not have to worry about this. Sometimes accidents happen. I remember when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's house in the hills of Los Angeles burnt down. He had built a famously large jazz record collection: all gone. He also lost priceless Korans, Asian and Middle Eastern rugs. A gentle giant of intellectual bend and perhaps the greatest NBA player ever, he always felt misunderstood and that fans loved him for helping the Lakers win games, but they thought he was a freak. The story of his house was all over the news, and for years afterwards strangers came up to him to give him rare jazz albums, which surprised him and altered his emotional assumptions about some "fans."

But Kareem's lost archives couldn't represent a threat to the State or other vested interests.

Some Countercultural Losses
I'd become aware of Terence McKenna's stupendously cool book collection. He seemed to be interested in everything that I was, but he knew more and could talk about what he knew in a way I could never dream. I thought how great it would be to meet him and be allowed to go through his library. But an accident happened at a Quizno's sandwich shop in Monterey, California, and all his rare books and personal notes were burned.

Aldous Huxley's incredible book collection, his letters, notes...all burned in the famous 1961 Bel-Air fire near Los Angeles. I've read various versions of this. Seared into memory: local TV news people were on the scene and found the Famous Man and asked him how he felt. Aldous said he felt "remarkably clean." I've yet to see if anyone had catalogued what was lost; I doubt if there was even a decent bibliography of what he'd had. Somewhat oddly, Huxley had published a piece in Vogue in 1947: "If My Library Burned Tonight." A passage: "To enter the shell of a well-loved room and to find it empty except for a thick carpet of ashes that were once one's favorite literature - the very thought of it is depressing."

Dr. Andrew Weil, involved with Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard, lost a large collection of "books, records, papers and other items" in the flooding of his Arizona house in 2006.

Peter Dale Scott, UC Berkeley professor emeritus, poet and originator of the concept of "deep politics," which I take to be conspiracy research by people with PhDs or people who are intellectuals of some sort who question power, had all his books and notes and research burned in the famous 1991 Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire:

Now my best files from two decades
are ashes on a hillside.
-Minding The Darkness p.15

I can feel no loss
that my best political files
have all burned
if their message is too complex
even for close Harvard-educated
friends with PhDs
Minding, p.8

In 1990 Genesis P-Orridge was in Kathmandu when right wing xtians raided his house in England and stole two tons of his personal belongings, convinced he was one of Satan's great minions and out to harm children, etc. Of course Genesis is something of a magickian and musician, and very weird and very intelligent, but would never harm anyone. The police and the yellow British press had a field day with this supposed satanic cult leader. As Genesis told Richard Metzger:

And it was a Right Wing, Christian lawyer who accessed the illegal files. But they never printed an apology, they never gave me back my archive, and in that archive are many hours of Brion Gysin being interviewed, talking about his notebooks, showing things, paintings, drawings, explaining all kinds of incredible things. He's dead now. That's gone. There was a movie that Derek Jarman made when we brought William Burroughs to London. Derek filmed William all the time, went around with me and filmed everything. There was only one print of that movie and it's gone. There are Throbbing Gristle concerts that there were only one master of, gone. Just incredible stuff. All the photo albums of the children, growing up, gone. A stuffed dolphin toy, gone. The girls' Carebears videos, gone...I mean it's just incredible and it's still missing. The department of Scotland Yard was disbanded not long after, two of the detectives died within a year and now it's just impossible to find anyone who says they know anything about where everything is. Of course, we were never charged with anything, because we hadn't done anything. - see pp. 162-166 of Disinformation: The Interviews, R. Metzger. Genesis has a lot to say about personal archives.

Ed Sanders - poet-historian, disciple of Charles Olson and one of my favorite living archivists - famously did exhaustive research on the Manson murders, attending the trials, etc. He interviewed E.J. Gold, who was calling himself Morloch the Warlock in Los Angeles, August, 1970. A note from Sanders on E.J. Gold: "He speaks well, although too didactically. He is wonderful." Anyway, Gold told Sanders that some weirdos at a commune in Indio, California, where a 6 year old boy had burned down a house that "destroyed priceless unpublished Crowley manuscripts that the commune had ripped off from Israel Regardie, a well-known publisher, occultist, and Crowley scholar. He said that his group was recently robbed; among the magical addiddimenta ripped off was a polished copper mirror once belonging to Aleister Crowley." - p. 409, The Family

A word about this last: E.J. Gold was something of a prankster and may have taken Sanders for a ride here. Does anyone know more about this supposedly missing Crowleyania?

Libraries
Take a gander: HERE's a Wiki for famous destroyed libraries, some done in the name of "cultural cleansing." As a pre-teen holed up in a library, I first read about deliberate burning of libraries in H.G. Wells's Outline of History, which I read all the way through three times before age 20. The case was the first one mentioned in the chart in the linked Wiki page:

While Alexander was overrunning Western Asia, China, under the last priest-emperors of the Chow Dynasty, was sinking into a state of great disorder. Each province clung to its separate nationality and traditions, and the Huns spread from province to province. The King of T'sin (who lived about eighty years before Alexander the Great), impressed by the mischief tradition was doing in the land, resolved to destroy the entire Chinese literature, and his son, Shi-Hwang-ti, the "first universal Emperor," made a strenuous attempt to seek out and destroy the existing classics. They vanished while he ruled, and he ruled without tradition, and welded China into a unity that endured for some centuries; but when he had passed, the hidden books crept in again. - p.182 of volume 1 in the 2-volume set.

A more recent take is HERE.

In the Afterlife, I imagine Plato coming up to the Emperor, now known in the West as "Qin Shi Huang," and saying, "Jeez man! I thought maybe I had some extreme ideas about controlling thought in my Republic, but you? You didn't even blink an eye, did you?"

These book-burners and book-haters and knowledge deniers are my mortal enemies yet I know they will always be with us. One wonders what a Ted Cruz/Sarah Palin Administration has in store for us. Just a couple weeks ago: "Singapore Library Will Destroy LGBT-Friendly Kids' Books at Behest of Bigot".

"Who Firebombed London's Oldest Anarchist Book Shop?"
"City Settles Lawsuit Over the Destruction of the Occupy Wall Street Library"

And so it goes...

Brief Idiosyncratic History of Authority/The Fearful vs. Mind and Books
The story of the Nag Hammadi Library is, for my purposes, the Ur-story. The Gnostic texts were ruthlessly hunted down and burned; the Church wouldn't allow any deviations from its carefully-assembled God Story. But someone collected as many of those texts as she/he could find and buried them...until they were found in Egypt in 1945. I love reading my copy of The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M. Robinson. It's amazing how many xtians I've met who 1.) have not heard of the gnostic texts; 2.) heard of 'em but ain't never read a one of 'em and won't be lookin' out fer 'em; or 3.) haven't heard of the texts but assume I've been duped by Satan.

We jump to the 1500s, conveniently for moi. From John Higgs's book on Timothy Leary, I Have America Surrounded: John Dee's library:

Dr. Dee was one of the leading scholars of his day, and a man who played a leading role in the development of the science of navigation. He was also court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and he used her horoscope to choose the day of her coronation in 1558. He possessed what was believed to be the largest library in Britain, until the local townsfolk, believing him to be an evil sorcerer, burned it down. He was also a spy for the Crown, and was sent on intelligence missions in various other European countries. It seems fitting, therefore, that he used to sign his documents with the code "007."
-p.140

1600: The Venetian Inquisition confiscated the great Renaissance mystic, humanist, magician-scholar Giordano Bruno's works. He was ratted out as a heretic. The Vatican bureaucracy compiled a large processo arguing for a mass of evidence that Bruno was a dangerous heretic. There were eight heretical propositions taken from Bruno's works that he needed to recant in order to save his neck. One of them may have been his wild idea that there may be an infinity of other worlds in the universe. (We now know this is virtually true.) Bruno at first said he'd retract his wild statements, but then changed his mind, "obstinately maintaining that he had never written or said anything heretical and that the minsters of the Holy Office had wrongly interpreted his views. He was therefore sentenced as an impenitent heretic and handed over to the secular arm for punishment. He was burned alive on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome on February 17th, 1600." Bruno's works and the Inquistion's case against him were "lost forever, having formed part of a mass of archives which were transported to Paris by the order of Napoleon, where they were eventually sold as pulp to a cardboard factory." - both quoted passages from p.349 of Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

1786: Filippo Michele Buonarruti, a most interesting figure, possibly aligned with the Bavarian Illuminati, which had been recently forced underground. Some sources refer to him as the "first professional revoutionary." Florentine police raided his library and confiscated all of his Masonic and anticlerical books. (see Music of Pythagoras, Ferguson, p.287) In the same year, in the Bavarian town of Landshut, police raided Xavier Zwack's house and a "considerable number of books and papers were discovered, the latter containing more than two hundred letters that had passed between Weishaupt and the Areopagites, dealing with the most intimate affairs of the order, together with tables containing the secret symbols, calendar, and geographical terms belonging to the system, imprints of its insignia, a partial roster of its membership, the statutes, instruction for recruiters, the primary ceremony of initiation, etc." (see The Bavarian Illuminati In America: The New England Conspiracy Scare, 1798, Stauffer, pp.180-182; 211)

1917: The Unistat government seized five tons of written material by the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World/IWW) on September 5th. A Grand Jury indicted 161 IWW leaders "for conspiracy to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes."

1975: Michael Horowitz, keeper of Timothy Leary's archives, on the "Archival Catastrophe of 1975."
Once again, this blog spew has run overtime, and if I started in on the Leary case I'd go on for another 2000 words, so maybe another day.

Final Word for Archivists
Your work has consequences. After Ellsberg, the COINTELPRO findings, continued revelations about Hoover's FBI, Assange and Snowden, do we need more proof that there will always be certain elements of the State apparatus who see free thinkers as a threat? Your work is not "neutral." It cannot be: knowledge has a social origin with social uses. There is more than enough kowtowing for The State and monied interests. Howard Zinn, who shares my fascination with Karl Mannheim's book Ideology and Utopia - the grounding text in the sociology of knowledge - says that knowledge:

Comes out of a divided, embattled world, and is poured into such a world. It is not neutral either in origin or effect. It reflects the biases of a diverse social order, but with one important qualification: that those with the most power and wealth in society will dominate the field of knowledge, so that it serves their interests. The scholar may swear to his neutrality on the job, but whether he be physicist, historian, or archivist, his work will tend, in this theory, to maintain the existing social order by perpetuating its values, by justifying its wars, perpetuating its prejudices, contributing to its xenophobia, and apologizing for its class order. Thus Aristotle, behind that enormous body of philosophical wisdom, justifies slavery, and Plato, underneath that dazzling set of dialogues, justifies obedience to the state, and Machiavelli, respected as one of the great intellectual figures of history, urges our concentration on means rather than ends. -p. 520, The Zinn Reader, "Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest," originally a talk given in 1970.

So: you collectors of weird books, file-stuffer of articles on Those Things That Few Seem To Notice, those modern-day Thomas Paines out there, you who care about injustice of a thousand stripes: carry on! Your work matters and has consequences, as we have seen. It's possibly powerful. I have touched on perhaps 1/30th of the "archives in trouble" notes from my own archives/research/files. I'd like to read your notes on the subject, if'n ya got any.

Other Articles and Books Consulted
"My Life, Their Archive," by Tim Parks
"In the Sontag Archives"
"Timbuktu Libraries in Exile"
Buckminster Fuller: Anthology For a New Millenium: pp.319-325, "The R. Buckminster Fuller Archives"
Huxley In Hollywood, by David King Dunaway
Investigative Poetry, by Ed Sanders
Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin
Wilhelm Reich In Hell, by Robert Anton Wilson
My Life In Garbology, by A.J. Weberman (too many JFK assassination researchers/archivists to mention here, but sources on Mae Brussell's files and a few others are mindblowing)
Wobblies!, ed. by Paul Buhl
-at minimum five books about Philip K. Dick: theories about the break-in of his house.
The New Inquisition, by Robert Anton Wilson: see pp.83-84, about Jacques Vallee's records of UFO sightings destroyed
The Cultural Cold War, by Frances Stonor Saunders
Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, ed by Bravo: Allen Ginsberg's files on the CIA, drug busts, and sexual persecution
-at minimum four sources on how James Jesus Angleton of the CIA got hold of Mary Pinchot Meyer's diary immediately after she was murdered
Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, "former" CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives were destroyed

On Gossip

I once worked in a music store that was owned by a good Christian family man who had been arrested for molesting children (or so the allegations held). His name appeared in the paper but he never went to prison. This was a long time ago, and I remember finding this out, thinking of my previous moments with the guy (who seemed pent-up but like a decent guy), and wondering how to know more without appearing that I knew more: what Robert Anton Wilson calls the Burden Of Nescience in a hierarchical social system. I was merely one of many music teachers in the guy's store; I made enough to pay my bills and eat, and buy my girlfriend (and myself) drinks. I couldn't afford to know too much.

However, over the years, I certainly heard a lot. I had soon decided to just doubt everything I heard about him. Why? Well, he was never going to get near any of the kids I taught, but the area I lived in was filled with middle-class christian right wingers and I'd read books like Satanic Panic: rumormongering can really get out of hand. In the end I guess I sorta thought, "If he really is doing this and he keeps doing this he'll get caught and won't be able to buy his way out of it and he'll go to jail and the store will either be run by the family or it'll close down and I'll be out of a job. I won't worry about it until then. And besides: what if he's not guilty?  What if there's something else going on and he has enemies who are trying to ruin him? I'd rather give him a part of the benefit of a doubt and remember no jury heard the evidence and convicted. Imagine what it would be like to be unfairly charged."

That's sorta how I feel about Woody Allen right now: he has a very well-known enemy. I, unlike the normally decent Katie McDonough of Salon, will not convict Woody based on what appears to be hearsay.

I've been thumbing through a bunch of books on gossip: Joseph Epstein's Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (appeared pre-Snowden Era), philosopher Emrys Westacott's The Virtue Of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness and Other Bad Habits (also appeared pre-Snowden), and a few others.

Two Alleged Etymologies For "Gossip"
1. It comes from "god-sibling" and originally pertained to the talk between two god-parents of a child, the talk having to do with the child's well-being.

2. George Washington told his spies to "go-sip" by infiltrating Brit troops and drinking with them, trying to learn of military maneuvers.

                                          Anthropologist Robin Dunbar

Problems With Semantics
The Bible has some line about how "Gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret." It's somewhere in the prequel to The New Testament. How many of us have had unpleasant moments when we found out a friend said something that arrived back at us, thinking our secret was held in confidence? Two years ago I said something that I either didn't know was supposed to have been in confidence, or had forgotten because it seemed trivial, or I was drunk on red zinfandel when hearing that which was supposed to have been confidential. And I later heard about it; I got an earful. I felt like an asshole. The information I had conveyed to a third party was gossipy about the good news of a friend's love life. I could go into why I thought it shouldn't be a secret anyway, but all of this feels catty.

In 5th century BCE Athens, once a year, the citizens could vote to not only ostracize but send into exile anyone who seemed to have too much dirt on others, or anyone who seemed potentially too tyrannical or possessed with the idea of power over others. We don't do this anymore, but should we? (Or do we still do the exile trip, but in other ways? We shall see...)

Eleanor Roosevelt is usually credited with saying that great minds talk about ideas, average minds events, and small minds talk about other people. How can gossip occur if it's about ideas? I can see certain events having gossipy possibilities. Many of the sections of books and articles I've read on gossip attest to how it's not only unavoidable, but FUN!

Okay, in what sense is it "fun"? At Staffordshire University a study suggests that gossip can be good for our self-esteem, but we need to be nice. Here's how to test it: Say positive things about a fictional person to someone else. Or - but be careful - say nothing but good stuff about a real person. Then note how you feel. Then say a bunch of unsavory things about another fictional person and note how you feel.

In studies about gossip conducted at Berkeley and Stanford, it's suggested that spreading true info about bad actors prevents exploitation, maintains social order, and even lowers stress levels of the gossipers. The researchers emphasize that the content of the gossip in the controlled studies be about "reputational information sharing" and not about petty nitpicking, hearsay unverified, or malicious rumors. The gossip must be reliable. Participants in the study were tested beforehand to determine their relative levels of altruism or selfishness, then they played an online game having to do with economic trust. When it was learned that players can spread gossip (or "knowledge"?) about how another player tends to cheat, the games became more fair, and the most-impacted players were the ones who had scored low on altruism and high on selfishness: knowing that other players know about you and can easily spread info (gossip) about you tended to put you on the straight and narrow.

How does gossip lower stress levels in the gossiper? Answer: Witnessing cheating raised the heart rate; telling someone else about the cheater lowered it.

I read a few articles on the Berkeley-Stanford gossip studies and found them interesting but from what I gathered about the assumptions behind the methodology, it all seems far too artificial and overly-rational. I mean: only "reputational information sharing" was considered gossip (actually: "prosocial" gossip) in the studies? Okay. But in real life, in situ: school, workplace, etc: gossip in more traditional semantic senses can seem fairly malicious. Picking on a kid because he's "weird." Or not beautiful. Or too smart. Or let's all make fun of Helen in Accounting because of that dress. And kids and adults seem perfectly happy to be rumormongers and spread all sorts of malicious hearsay. 'Cuz it's fun! And we're still fairly tribal beings...

Lines from Stephen Burt's poem, "Rue", in which he seems to be replaying his own high school years about The Ramones, what kids wore, how they wrote on every surface, what we all saw going on in the back of the bus between him and her, etc:

Gossip in school makes a kind of electrical storm,
or else
             a medium of exchange:
once you share what you know, then you learn what you can.
-p.42, Belmont

This rings true on a certain anthropological level, and indeed Robin Dunbar's 1997 book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language made quite the splash, the ripples still visible.

So:
Good gossip: spreading true information about actors in a situation
Bad gossip: everything else thought of as "gossip"?

"It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's own back that are absolutely and entirely true." - Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Other Possible Goods From Gossip
My sources allege that a mild slamming of one's friends and loved ones is understood as "normal" and not egregious. Snobbery has its own occult rules for propriety, to be found out with experience. Snobbery seems related to gossip, but I'm not sure how to delineate it. Rudeness likewise. But: many sources seem to stick up for the salutary aspects alleged by researchers at Berkeley: it could lessen bullying, counteract secrecy, strengthen human relationships, be emotionally cathartic, infuse justice in power structures, and even be a part of Socrates's "examined life."

Or at least that's the buzz around here, lately. This is strictly on the down-low, but the scuttlebutt on gossip is that, if you're relaying true information about good and bad behavior of others in the local environment, it's a socially powerful thing.

I do wonder about the epistemology problems. How does someone know they're relaying something true? It may be called "reputational information sharing" by scholars, but how does a gossiper actually know what they're perceiving is the truth? Perhaps that's beyond the scope of both the researchers' and my own inquiries, but I tend to assume I'm probably missing some information when I engage in this sort of behavior, so I tend to hedge.

Finally here: this business about relaying information that results in salutary outcomes: what of Assange, Snowden, Kiriakou, et.al? If the sort of research results coming out of Berkeley are correct, how does it reflect on The Whistleblowers? Just a thought...

Dishin' It
So...you know the great playwright Arthur Miller? He had a child who was disabled so he dumped the kid in an institution for life, yea. Oh yea. And not long ago I read the wild memoirs of some guy who ran around 1940s-60s Hollywood, and Spencer Tracy? I'd never heard he was gay! (I forget the name of the book, but I could dig it up for you...) Fidel Castro fucked Kenneth Tynan's wife, wow. What do you make of that?

Really: how do you feel when you read that stuff, to whatever degree of truth was there? I feel oddly childish just typing it. And yet: it sort of...seems...kinda...fun. Stanford neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky enjoys talking about People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People issue, because he says it shows how we're just like the baboons he's spent decades studying in the wilds of Africa: they are intensely social, like us. They have status hierarchies, like us. And they like hanging with their friends, like us. But when two baboons get into a fight? It's just like the rubberneck session on the freeway: everyone must slow down to gawk at the carnage, the primate-drama of it all.

I Hear This Site Is Really Something To Look At
Hell, I have looked at it. And you probably have too. Frank Warren calls his PostSecret.com  site the "largest advertisement-free blog in the world."

Internet Trolls and Malice of Forethought
Much of the latest "gossip can be good for us" research points out that the scads of heinous, vicious, stupid and downright disturbing comments on the Net are due to anonymity. When there's no price to be paid - from gossip? - viral hatred has free reign. Point well-taken. It's a problem and we're working on it.

Ian Leslie's piece in Aeon
It's here. Why do we overshare online? Because this Net thing caught us evolutionarily off-guard. For most of our existence as hominids we had no walls. Although our saner minds on this issue say we have an instinct for privacy, the evidence shows we have almost no sense of how privacy works on the Net. "Every day, embarrassments are endured, jobs lost and individuals endangered because of unforeseen consequences triggered by a tweet or a status update." Indeed, when I read Leslie's piece it reminded me of a haunting and criminally underrated (so far!) book called Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, that does a fairly thorough job on this phenomena. I found it a page-turner of a non-fiction book, but like a real-life horror-story, seeing as how Niedzviecki wrote it before the Snowden Era and I read it while the Era was giving birth to itself. Sobering as all get the fuck out...Indeed, Leslie in his Aeon piece has a line about the type of person at the NSA who's supposed to be monitoring us that fits in with Niedzviecki's thesis that we're all already spying on each other anyway.

Daniel Kahneman
In another semantic sense of "gossip" the Nobelist in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow freely uses "gossip" as something he wants to encourage: the vocabulary about unconscious biases and their mechanisms that he and his colleague Tversky found and named? He wanted this vocabulary to worm its way to the "water cooler" at work. He thinks it's all gossip-worthy stuff! (And I agree with him. I just wish it actually played out more than it seems to...) (See index or even just pp.3-4)

Wilson's Jocoserious Use of Gossip
Humans' "instinct to gossip" shows up in Robert Anton Wilson's work in a few places. In one of two footnotes on p.302 of his novel The Widow's Son, the 'patapsychologist and "theo-chemist" de Selby has advocated for the flat earth "on the grounds that nobody has 'encountered and endured' a spherical earth (which is a theory generated by 'the instinct to gossip.')" In a piece titled "The Persistence of False Memory," encountered and endured in Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology, RAW argues that the "instinct to gossip" is AKA public opinion, and falls under the rubric of Preposterous Perception as found in 'Patapsychology, and seems similar to the role of Nietzsche's "will to power" in his books and "the Id" in Freud's books.

Wilson makes us wonder how much of "reality" - our everyday, taken-for-granted assumptions about what is unquestionably "real" - how much of this was generated by gossip? If we keep talking about stuff we can't see, smell, taste, hear, touch, or even detect with any manmade instruments...how "real" is it?

Last Word: Prof. Carlin
Here's something I never knew. Prof. Carlin simply drops this tantalizing hint on p.57 of Napalm and Silly Putty: "At one time there existed an entire race of people whose knowledge consisted entirely of gossip."

I wish he's elaborated, but he was wily that way, even cryptic. But I want to know more. Heck and golly: Enquiring minds want to know.