Cosmic Schmucks: Addenda in Rhetoric, Metaphor and Digression

Just a few items and then I'll let you get back to your porn. But first, if you'll permit me:

Addenda on Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Schmuck" Principle
I recently read a summary of academic philosopher and specialist in argumentation theory Daniel H. Cohen's TED talk (linked in this article). The most interesting thing to me was that, in the "argument as war" metaphor, the "winner" of the argument wins ego strokes, maybe some prestige, or maybe a firmer conviction that s(he)'s "right." What does the "loser" get? The loser learned a better way to think about an idea. (I am bracketing those who are truly interested in thinking better about topics from those who, when admitting the other has a much stronger argument nevertheless revert - everyday perversity? - to their comfortable positions.) The "war" metaphor presupposes "losing" as "learning." That's wonderfully wrong, it seems to me. I love Cohen's idea here. (My bias, stated outright: learning seems much more like "winning" something than the feeling of "losing.")

The monstrous and firmly-embedded "war" metaphor in our culture isn't going away soon, although Cohen has a vision of how we can improve on the quality of arguments, and move away from the structure of "I win/You lose" ugliness. Which I'll get to shortly (or you can watch his 9 minute spiel on a TED stage and skip ahead; the porn's tapping its toes).

Cohen doesn't mention George Lakoff or Mark Johnson, who, very early in their landmark 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, show how "argument is war" is a basic assumption in our culture, built into the fabric of our metaphors we subconsciously think with, viz:

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
-p.4, op. cit

Prof. Cohen also cites two other argument structures: argument as proof, which seems much closer to deduction and therefore more collaborative-in-agreeing-upon-principles or axioms. And then there's the argument as performance, which seems underrated to me, at least in the sense I imagine Cohen means and definitely in the senses that I imagine. But the argument as war (equality of the sexes, whether utilitarianism is the best ethical philosophy, whether we ought to let the poor starve, etc, etc, etc), is the most common and in Cohen's words, "deforms" our thinking because it accentuates tactics over logic, magnifies the differences between "me" and "you" and "us" and "them," and glorifies winning while encouraging the idea that the loser has been an abject, embarrassing failure in "defeat." (But the "loser" is the one who gets the "cognitive gains," remember?)

[But first: Let me get this out of the way: I've played the argument as war game far too many times. More than I can remember. Quite often I think I probably pretended to "know" more than I actually did, and so I was being a Cosmic Schmuck...which, by the Principle, makes me a little less of one by admitting it, just so you know I've fully internalized the meta-game rules of the Cosmic Schmuck Principle.]

What is it with all this pretentious chest-thumping in our culture? Do we secretly feel we're at sea, afraid we're clueless, so we become as much the Prosecuting Attorney as possible to force our fears back down, and keep up the Game that we're "right" on the Tough Questions? Prof. Peter Berger, one of the gods of late 20th/early 21st c. Sociology, wrote much on what he called the "epistemological elite," who were high-ranking intellectuals in institutions such as the church, psychoanalysis, Marxism, economics: these people were the masters of sectarian knowledge in their domains: "Any epistemological elite, religious or secular, must develop a system of cognitive defenses to defend its claims against outside criticisms but also, very importantly, to assuage the doubts harbored by insiders."
(see p.37 Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist)

The argument as war "winner" would seem to be heavily concentrated within the epistemological elite, although no doubt every street gang and sports team and gang of white collar business criminals has one of these guys too...

Maybe the worst aspect of argument as war is, according to Prof. Cohen (and I very much agree with him here), that it pretty much forecloses on deliberation, negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. (I'd add there seems to be something utterly antagonistic about the argument as war mode of thought and the ludic, fun-loving beings most of us want to "be.")

                                             Kenneth Burke, who changed the field of
                                             Rhetoric from an idea about literary and
                                             oratorical devices to basic human 
                                             communication, which seeks largely to
                                             persuade.

I think Robert Anton Wilson wanted much more of all of that (deliberation, negotiation, collaboration, compromise, playfulness) in his thinking that actuated the Cosmic Schmuck Principle. Why? Well, for one: the need to be "right" all the time seems linked with being repressive and Authoritarian. RAW used a term he attributed to Mike Hoy: "Correct Answer Machine": this is an assumption deeply embedded in out culture, so we take it in, seemingly, with mother's milk: that we must have The One True Answer to any question, as if there were a little machine in our brains that always knew the "correct" answer to everything. Wilson thought this was basically the same as an ideology, but an authoritarian one, almost always based on Aristotelian two-value logic, with no room for the Excluded Middle. Wilson called it "robot circuits in our brains." (see Email To The Universe, p.135) This seems cognate with the I Am Right You Are Wrong problem that Edward Debono wrote so engagingly about. Let's have more arguments using "water" logic and less having "rock" logic. Here! Here!

Wilson thought, somewhat Dao-istically that, from the most elemental forms of energy and life systems on up to inter-accomodative systems in nature and society: cybernetic feedback loops, unhindered by rigid and artificial stumbling blocks, were a key aspect of freedom and evolution. I simplify his views far too much here, but suffice: the need to consult a stupid-making Correct Answer Machine (installed when? by your daddy or the priest at age 13?) led to human misery. Open systems in nature, open minds in society: we go with the best we know, we make "gambles," but it's always contingent; we ought always be ready to take in new forms of information in order to hone our thought, and to never decide one day we needn't do this any longer, for we Have Arrived at The One True Way...

So: the need to be "right" is a big problem.

For another: "reality" does not seem to conform to the structure of our Indo-European sentences of SUBJECT +(linking verb) + PREDICATE all that well at all, at all. Not as well as we seem to assume. Especially those sentences with the troublesome linking verb forms of BEING (am, is, are, was, were, be), which tend to hypnotize us into going along with a static eternal Thing-ness to abstract nouns and ideas. Also: these linking verbs tend to make us forget the thousands of other "things" an idea could stand for. That's why he advocated for the use of E-Prime, or English without "is" forms in it, as a tool for improved communication and to root out bullshit in one's own thinking. (See any comments by Eric Wagner left on this blog for examples of E-Prime.)

I use E-Prime only some of the time, mostly because I "am" lazy, but I think some forms of "be" or "is" in sentences, while ontologically misleading according to D. David Bourland's standpoint, my language becomes stilted. I have not learned to use it in a consistently eloquent way. Finally: I am more impressed with ideas about how metaphor and rhetoric actually function in our nervous systems and culture, and the Big Names that have influenced me here are: Vico, Nietzsche, Cassirer, I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, and George Lakoff. I see E-Prime as a valuable tool for exploration as of this date.

As a way of making my way toward some sort of detente and the ethical problems around subtly hypnotizing others into possibly false artificial ontologies ("Xs are Qs" or "P is Y, and at times W and V"), notice any sentence I use with the form of "be" in it and "be" just a little bit suspicious of my intentions, okay? If I write, "What the NSA is doing will be found in any history of totalitarianism; with the Obama administration's blessings, Obama's being a fascist now," E-Prime would put it as, "From the reports I have read about what the NSA has done, this reminds me of my understanding of what gets labeled 'totalitarianism' in books and other discourse, and Obama seems to have over-rode the Constitution, which reminds me of certain historical examples often called 'fascism.'" Say what you will about the stilted style, but don't I sound a lot less know-it-all-ish in the E-Prime version?

Take away: stay vigilant about the OG's use of "is" "am" "was" "be" "being" "were." (This seems another way for me to lessen my Cosmic Schmuckitude.)

Back to Prof. Cohen: I loved his idea of changing the argument as war assumption in our culture with changing how we perceive the role of arguer. What he idealizes goes something like this: with deliberation, negotiation, compromise and collaboration (and I'd add our ludic nature), we enter into an argument as an arguer, but also as an audience member to that argument. The goal would be to arrive at the endpoint of an argument and have the participants (including any audience members) saying, "That was a satisfying argument!" So: even if you "lose" you feel no shame. And the "winner" feels a sense of accomplishment in bringing about an invigorating aesthetic experience for all. (I might be reading into what Prof. Cohen wants here, so these observations can be considered as Cohen/OG ideas, but let's give Cohen the kudos; I don't wanna come off as some Cosmic Schmuck!)

Prof. Cohen's ideas about improving the quality of argumentation remind me of a similar sort of idea that I first ran across in the journal Etc: A Review of General Semantics, when Edward MacNeal used the term "grokduel" on p.270 of vol.63, #3, July 2006. Apparently he coined the word in 1999, and here's a definition:

grokduel: a contest in which two or more parties vie to see who best understands the positions of the others.

MacNeal quite likely got the "grok" aspect of his coinage from Robert Heinlein's 1961 mindbending cult novel Stranger In A Strange Land. The idea plays out in my mind, somewhat ideally, as very much like what Prof. Cohen would want in new argumentative forms. There seems a sort of possibly ironic chest-thumping aspect to MacNeal's "grokduel," but I do think much mirth and learning could take place during such experimental arguments.

Back to Cosmic Schmuck: You know who's a quite a lot less of a Cosmic Schmuck these days? Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a very charming and handsome TV Doctor, who admitted recently - and quite publicly - that he'd been duped by anti-cannabis government propaganda. He - finally! - actually looked at lots of evidence for himself and concluded he'd been wrong, wrong, wrong. (I assume most readers of the OG wonder why anyone would believe what the government said in the first place!) And I barely know who Gupta is, but Unistatians love him, so his play within the game rules of the Cosmic Schmuck Principle (which no doubt he's never hoidda!), with regard to the subject (cannabis prohibition and the efficacy of marijuana for health reasons), makes his recent lessening of Schmuckiness quite a felicitous thing, aye?

So: get to grokdueling, my fellow schmucks! And lessen your schmuckiness a tad for the day! And then: on to porn! (829 gadzillion troglobytes of new porn went up while you read this...stuff you haven't yet seen! Have fun!)

                                     computer scientist Lofti Zadeh, who developed a 
                                     fuzzy logic that admitted a very large number of
                                    values between 0 and 1, but Zadeh took great pains to 
                                    distinguish his logic from probability theory.
                                    
                         

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Time of Useful Consciousness

The Irish/Anglican empirical philosopher and guerrilla ontologist Bishop George Berkeley (b.1685, same year as Bach/Handel/Scarlatti) said "Westward the course of empire takes its way...," and later, in far West California in the 19th century, a man named Frederick Billings, knowing Berkeley's line,  suggested "Berkeley" as the name for a college site, 1866, but perhaps this is all immaterial. (<---I hope at least one of you enjoyed what I did right there.)

Time of Useful Consciousness

In aeronautical lingo, the "time of useful consciousness" is the period between when your oxygen runs out and you go into unconsciousness. The hypoxia zone is in your cabin and you are in a life or death situation, high in the sky. You have a brief window of time in which to save yourself. Ferlinghetti, writing as well as he ever has at age 93 (!), thinks the world is at a similar point, and in less then 100 pages he's written a stream-of-American historical consciousness (and, it would seem to me: a skimming in the collective unconsciousness, the paideuma, if only by inhabitation of the territory over the course of a long poem), accelerando, the form somewhere between Eliot and cummings, and latter-day historically-minded American bards Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. (I consider Pound's similar project as far more expansive and taking the stream of consciousness of "humanity" as its subject OR: The Tale of the Tribe.) Let us consider Ferlinghetti's work here - and the book follows in wake of his earlier Americus vol I - to be telling fragmented shards of the Unistatian Tale?

But Ferlinghetti's work here is tight and a delight, if mostly Whitmanic, then waxing desperation, with a final-moment culminating in a Whitmanesque yea-saying, seemingly, if only because it's such a drag to dwell on the possibility of whimper-not-a-bang apocalypse, brought on by a collected willful ignorance.

Ferlinghetti, at the end of his poem, having moved structurally from East to West, and gotten darker with the skies and cars and Narcissistic Net, shouts:

Enough! Enough!
Enough of this "loud lament of the disconsolate chimera"
in some waste land of our impoverished imagination.

He then seems to plaintively ask for Whitman's presence: isn't there still hope? And as the poem draws to a close:

Walt Whitman, you should be living at this hour!
Optimist of humanity en masse

Why? His bardic love for Whitman...is Ferlinghetti saying, "I wonder if you could still 'Sing in the West' in a culture of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and the North Pole as a lake?" Or maybe: "Your type of loving optimism is needed now more than ever; if you can't show up I'll take your place, but know this, Walt: this is some serious shit we're dealing with here, now."?

In nine sections, we inhabit the Mind of the "hinternation," then "sailing westward/from the crenellated old world/of over-age Camembert Europe --/millions wash up on virgin shores/bright with promise"

Rarely have I read poetic lines more exuberant about the good of immigrants, and Einstein, Kerouac, Chomsky, W.E.B. Dubois, Emma Goldman, Zinn, Sacco and Vanzetti, and even Jim Jarmusch make it in here, along with other Unistatian "types" from far-flung lands. Chomsky and Zinn:

With other immigrants causing caustic critiques
of the American Way of Life
like Noam Chomsky
with a father from the Ukraine
and a mother from Belarus
and Howard Zinn rewriting history and herstory
with a father from Austria-Hungary
and a mother from Siberia

Then the impact of the Iron-Horse railroads on Unistatian consciousness, then a brief section on Chicago, which I loved. I hadn't known anything about the Dil Pickle Club, but now I want to read an entire book about it:

And on Near North Side Chicago
in a shack of a barn in broken-down Tooker Alley
the Dil Pickle Club (with one "l")
the hobohemian nightspot
after its glorious beginnings
in 1916 or thereabouts
didn't close 'til the 1960s
a place where everybody and everything was anti
"the flaming crater of Chicago's revolution in the Arts"
frequented early-on by the likes of
Big Bill Haywood Eugene Debs Emma Goldman
and Mother Jones

Aye, and James T. Farrell, Harriet Monroe, Vachel Lindsay, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Studs Terkel, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, and Nelson Algren, who apparently had had some interesting fling with Simone de Beauvoir in Paris that I need to look into.

And Thorsten Veblen drank the bitter drink alright

Ferlinghetti actually took a trip down the Mississippi from Minnesota to Louisiana, and, like the River and its own stream and Huck and Tom and Twain and their place in the consciousness of Unistat, it appears near the middle of the book:

But it ain't the river of Mark Twain's dream
the pre-coal river, the ancient dreamin' river
Ask the river pilots and they'll tell you
The river towns all dying
all the way down
(home-towns boarded-up
all over America
stamped out by shopping malls
on nearby Interstates

I guess Lawrence couldn't bring himself to include the noun Wal-Mart in his sounding.

Section 8 of the poem completely floored me. It's not only a companion to Allen Ginsberg's writings on Moloch, but it's strongly reminiscent of Ezra Pound's "Hell" Cantos. And now the poem has moved to the Unistatian southwest and especially Las Vegas and the gangster-cowboy mind. In this sense, the poem contributes in a sense to Peter Dale Scott's writings on Nixon, Watergate, and the Mafia. It also seems to speak in a bardic way to Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War. I feel compelled to quote from this chapter at length, but will resist, as I wouldn't be able to stop and I've probably already skirted the fringes of Fair Use. Read this chapter - the longest one in the book, pp.45-61 - if only for the conjuring powers of a 93 year old Bard! Uncanny...

Neurogeographically the poem ends in San Francisco, across the Bay from Berkeley. And Ferlinghetti's famous bookstore City Lights is there, but...after a celebration of the Mind of the City, the trope of loneliness sets in. Sadness, homelessness, alienation, the Mind of Unistat in the 21st century. And Ferlinghetti came of age during the 1939-45 War. And so, in the City most associated with "progress" in the digital revolution:

It was still high noon in America
until along came the digital revolution
fated to destroy or ingest
all the age-old cultures
of the world
in a World Wide Web
of globalization
in an Ayn Rand projection
of world domination

Well, yes of course you'd say that: you're 93, a poet, and owner of a bookstore that still thrives somehow. (I admit some resonant sympathy here, relatively young cuss that I seem.)

At 5 o'clock the rush to the freeway to burn home to loneliness just bums and worries Ferlinghetti. As does what I call our Earthquake Ritual, but he puts it like this:

The bedsprings quake
on the San Andreas Fault
The dark land broods
Look in my eye, look in my eye
the cyclops tv cries
It blinks and rolls its glassy eye
and shakes its vacuum head
over the shaken bodies
in the bed

Possibly I make this rapid shutter-speed trip through Unistatian historical consciousness as a bad trip, and if I did I misrepresent the book. It seems Truth-Telling to me, and so even the unpleasant becomes somehow transformed into Beauty. And then there is the sheer beauty of many, many lines by a wizened old Bard who never considered himself a "Beat" but a bohemian. He wants us to make it. So do I. So do you. Enough of the thick haze of impoverished imagination! Let us do a rear-guard action and...not be a part of it, and thereby forestall its extensions. You know what "it" is or seems? We still have time of useful consciousness, and maybe in 200 years this book will be a curious relic from the Dark Days, who knows?

How easy  it would be to dismiss the Bardic filtrations of the Unistatian mind in history, tuned in by Ferlinghetti, at 93, as the expressions of the old boho who feels his cherished hopes thwarted. It's far more serious than that. Look at the facts and then yourself in the mirror: is he just on a bummer? I think not. He's on to something Big, and that's precisely why we want to read this sort of poetry. Admittedly, in the artificial hierarchy of data-information-knowledge-wisdom, the last term is, as Robert Anton Wilson said, "private, not public, and somewhat more mysterious." But who doesn't crave some wisdom these days? I say Old Man Ferlinghetti shows it here in spades and you're a damned fool to ignore it.

If only for these meagre reasons, I urge The Reader to read this book. In a unique semantic sense, it's completely fantastic! (Especially the Unistatians: check this jit out.)

Books: Passing Remarks On Select Titles, Fictional, Non-Fictional and Nonexistent

Not long ago I was nosing through Sally Wade's The George Carlin Letters. She was Carlin's love the last years of his life. Before they got together she was in Dalton's bookstore in Santa Monica and overheard his distinct voice: "I'll take Our Culture and What's Left of It, The Anatomy of Dirty Words, and Rationale of the Dirty Joke...if you can get 'em to me by Friday," he says to the clerk who's helping him, "I'll give ya a tip to buy yourself some weed." These titles may sound like they were made up in the mouth of Carlin, but as you can see by the links (which I do not profit monetarily by citing here; I'm merely a cheerleader for Book Kulchur), they're real. And I'm sort of surprised Carlin didn't own two of those already: Sagarin's Anatomy  and Legman's Rationale. They had long been in his wheelhouse. (Maybe he lost his old copies?) I looked up Our Culture and it's by Theo. Dalrymple, of whom I've only read a few articles. This one seems reactionary, no? But I don't know; haven't read it.

Sagarin was influenced by Benjamin Lee Whorf and was one of the intellectual founders of the modern gay rights movement. What a fascinating figure and unsung hero! He was a pioneer in using sociological analysis to show that laws that persecuted people for "obscene" language or other behaviors the dominator culture labeled as "deviant" were unjust laws; these "deviant" behaviors and utterances were legitimate expressions and should be protected and not prosecuted.

Legman was one of the great lone archivist-intellectuals. I own a copy of Rationale and it's a stunning, thick work of readable deep scholarship about a "taboo" subject. Note the line from folklorist Susan Davis about Legman's term "Hell Boxes": they're "a substrate of material that almost everybody knows is there, but can't talk about in polite circles." Legman was all about mining the Hell Boxes, which seem a level or two "above" what Frobenius and Pound called the paideuma. 

Robert Anton Wilson told me that the function of a good comedian was to touch on these subjects, because they discharged pent-up energy about the subjects into laughter.

Legman's archival bend reminds me of Ed Sanders, who supposedly has just an unbelievably large archive (500 banker's boxes? Wow) somewhere in upstate NY near Woodstock. In one of his books he mentions he was writing or had written (I lost my notes!) a history of surveillance by Authority of artists, poets, and other Thought Criminals. I have never seen it, and don't know of a library that owns it (a library I could borrow from). Here's a link to something called Sanders' Report: Surveillance Stories of the 60s and 70s, but I'm not convinced this - whatever it is - is the epic "surv" (as Sanders writes it) book from him. I hope something really huge comes from him, culled from his massive archive. As Charlie Parker blew, "Now's The Time."

This reminds me of a review of a book I haven't read: British Writers and MI5 Surveillance: 1930-1960, by Smith. The idea that intellectuals and poets were/are a threat to the existing order: artists seem to devoutly wish it were true, the evidence seems sketchy, and the spies and cops that persecute the artists, as Orwell points out as quoted in the review, don't know what the ideas "are" that has them arresting/harassing/bugging the "red" artist. The leader of the Communist Party in Great Britain considers the intellectuals "less than nothing of their value to the party."

Speaking of which: has anyone written an actual book called Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism? O'Brien, et.al in Orwell's 1984 wrote it; now seems the time to write an actual version. I'd read it if it came out, probably right after The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (a book by Hawthorne Abendsen in Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle), or The Bawdy Humor of Noam Chomsky (a sarcastic in-group joke title by McCawley, Lakoff and other of Chomsky's ex-students, as found in Randy Allen Harris's excellent Linguistics Wars).

While I'm on this stuff: William F. Buckley wrote The Wit and Wisdom of Vlad the Impaler in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. RAW has to be in the Top 20 of authors who loved to make up titles of books; his books are stacked with fictional fiction and fictional non-fiction, usually in his own fiction. Wigner's Friend by Timothy Leary (a fictional non-fiction book - about the epistemological underpinnings of quantum mechanics - by a non-fictional person); Little People With Big Ideas by Markoff Chaney is a non-fiction book, presumably, by a fictional character who's related to the family that produced Lon Chaney, but Markoff is a midget  (or "Mgt"), or "little person." His fictional name is a pun on a mathematical concept that I think I "grok" but maybe not. The idea that a "simple random walk" is an example of a Markov Chain...and this is related to Brownian motion, chaos theory, and Monte Carlo? Maybe I don't grok it yet.

Anyway, Markoff Chaney also wrote a book called Reality Is What You Can Get Away With. (citation: see the omnibus edition of Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, p.538). This fictional character Chaney wrote a book about ontology, or how and what constitutes "reality" or Being-ness. Later, the writer that wrote Chaney's Being-ness into...some ontological status? himself wrote a book by that same title. There is no way to tell if both books "are" the same book, as one is a non-fiction book (maybe?) in a fictional work, while the other appears to be a "play" of some sort that includes a lot of non-fiction, but most librarians would consider it a "fictional" work...unless they classified it as "Screenplays - United States," which I'm not sure is a "real" Dewey or Library of Congress classification term or not...At any rate, "Robert Anton Wilson" appears to have written two books of the same title, and my educated guess is that the books are quite different. I hope I haven't lost you here, Dear Reader. The version with more ontological status seems HERE. Buy your own copy (more ontological status?) HERE. Do not confuse all this with something about Terry Gilliam!

A book that RAW seemed to have made up, but I found out was real, was Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, written and/or edited by Glenn C. Ellenbogen. RAW thought the book was a terrific parody of academic Psychology. I have not read the book, but when I need that sort of laff (PDQ), I'll seek it out.

Pseudo-Explicational Omnibus is the title of my own nonexistent book about certain writings by Borges, Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Robert Anton Wilson, and Stanislaw Lem. To give you an idea of what the book is about, see Lem's book A Perfect Vacuum.

Here's a book: Universal Ecstatic Tautology, by Alejandro Favian. This appears to exist. I found it in a book on that fabulous weirdo-genius-scientist-Egyptologist-Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. The title would sound like a satire on Kircher, but it was written by one of his greatest admirers, and it's in five volumes, totaling 3000 pages, and like Kircher's books, it's about everything.

3000 pages is nothing, really. The other day a few of us were talking about documentaries we'd seen that knocked our socks off. I struggled to recall the name of the documentary, but when I mentioned it was about the Outsider Artist Henry Darger, someone came forth with In The Realms of the Unreal, directed by Jessica Yu. (HERE's a trailer.) Darger invented his own world and painted it. The expansion of the mythos of his world, The Story of the Vivian Girls, In What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused By the Child Slave Rebelllion, allegedly runs to 15,145 pages. I have not read it.

Medicine Chest Against All Heresies sounds like something Wilson made up (to me), but it was written by the orthodox early Christian, Epiphanius of Salamis. When I first saw the title it seemed like something parodical about fundamentalist materialists, Ayn Rand followers, or far-right-wing Christians. It appears Epiphanius was on the ep and ep.

The Etymologicon was a book Giambattista Vico imagined, and if he'd had the support of Readers, he may have written it. It was a book that would give all the deepest roots of every word in every language, so the reader could travel back to the Beginning of human language. I found out recently that Mark Forsyth had written a book by that title (2011), with the intriguing subtitle, "A Circular Stroll Through The Hidden Connections of the English Language." It's only English, but I think Forsyth has me with "hidden connections." I'll get to it soon, or at least take a "stroll" through it.

One of my favorite thinkers, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, doesn't like business books much. Neither do I. NNT gives us advice on reading: "With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with academic books, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip the text and footnotes." Bed of Procrustes, p.46. Also: "What we call 'business books' is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writing that has no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication." (op.cit, 47)

I'd like to end yet another blog on books spew by returning to Prof. George Carlin, who thought a book called Doorway to Norway would be a good idea for a travel book to that country. (See Napalm and Silly Putty, p31)

Bigfoot: Impressions On Charles Fort's 139th Birthday

Bigfoot (Sasquatch, Yeti), has been included in the set of beings called Cryptids, and some cryptids have turned out to be "real." I have no idea if Bigfoot (about 1/3 of all "sightings" in the Pacific Northwest, the rest scattered all over the globe, except for Antarctica), "is" real, but, like Jane Goodall, I hope they're real. Around 10 years ago she told NPR's Ira Flatow she was "sure" Bigfeet were real; recently she admits there's no evidence, but still has hopes. (Video, bad sound, but skip ahead to 7:20)

In the last 24 months, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum of Texas, a veterinarian turned animal geneticist, has asserted she saw Bigfoot, obtained DNA that shows Bigfeet are a separate species that arose when males of some previous hominids (unnamed) had sex with female homo sapiens around 15,000 years ago, somewhere in or near Europe, then crossed the Bering Sea land bridge before the last Ice Age thawed ("they're very fast"), and are a sensitive, inquisitive but very shy species. And they need legal protection from Man.

                                                    Dr. Melba Ketchum

HERE's how Live Science reported on it.

One thing that struck me in following up this story: there is no end of articles from two groups on Ketchum: 1.) the True Believers, but even moreso; 2.) the sarcastic group Robert Anton Wilson called "fundamentalist materialists," or "skeptics," who knew her data must have been contaminated, or she was some nut, an attention hound, delusional, naive, a fraud out to cash in. I thought the Live Science article was fair. But HERE seems the fairest article I've seen, in my present state of ignorance.

Ketchum took her evidence to a forensic scientists, and note why Timmer sees this as a problem, a big one. Forensic scientists are very good at finding what they want to find, and presenting it in court. Also, I learned about how DNA breaks down over time. But the idea that Ketchum's team was coming up with human DNA that looks like it had coupled with something far more remote genetically from the Neanderthals and the Denisovans - primates we homo sapiens probably did/could have mated with...gave me pause. And yet Timmer thinks Ketchum's sincere in her beliefs that Bigfeet are human.

On the other hand, Bigfootologist Dr. Brian Sykes will release his study of DNA evidence collected from European sources in the Fall. So...Six or Eight weeks from now, we may get a Big New Wrinkle in the Bigfoot Story. Or maybe a wart or a zit...

                                              Charles Fort, proto-phenomenologist,
                                               surrealist, data-collector

A Procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
-Charles Fort, at the beginning of Ch.1 of his The Book of the Damned. A book that you may find works magick on your nervous system, simply by taking up and reading randomly: The Complete Books of Charles Fort: over 1100 pages of data he'd culled from newspapers or High Weirdness, and an overweening sense that the Scientists were too too enamored of, and blind to, the metaphors they were systematically sifting through to eliminate what Can't Be from What Is.

For (Robert Anton) Wilsonologists, it's indispensible, especially if you want to mine his stances on epistemology, his poetic humanism, his style in The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, which seems fed heavily by Fort and Swift. (His epistemology was also, of course!, heavily influenced by quantum mechanics, Hume, Korzybski, Nietzsche, Husserlian phenomenology, the most current neuroscience in perception, and literary modernists. And Charles Fort! Etc.)

                                         Our Man in the Pacific Northwest

Vico's Bestioni
Noah's sons, according to Vico who died in 1744, neglected their dad's one true God after The Floodwaters receded. They then scattered and wandered "like brutes through the earth's great forest." Where did Ham go? Through Southern Asia, into Egypt and the rest of Africa. What about Japheth? Through Northern Asia, into Europe. Shem? Central Asia to the Near East. (Vico is writing in Naples, Italy.) It's nice that the brothers, while "brutes," could divide the known world up so strategically.

To be fair, once they went their separate ways, within this great Vast Forest, they were pushed further away from each other by "wild beasts which abounded." And in seeking pasture and water, they were further separated. Vico also tells us the brothers "pursued women who in that state were wild, timid and intractable." (These must have been women who survived The Flood and were just wandering around the Great Forest in packs. Those are the best kind, I've found. So I have something in common with Noah's brutish sons. I also dig the vast forests. What's left of 'em, anyway.)

Here's Vico, in the section of The New Science, on "Poetic Wisdom":

(It's after the Flood):

Since mothers abandoned their children, they grew up without hearing any human speech, or learning any human behavior, and sank to an utterly bestial and brutish state. In this case, mothers merely nursed their infants and let them wallow naked in their own feces, abandoning them forever once they were weaned. Wallowing in their feces (whose nitrous salts wonderfully enriched the soil), these children struggled to make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent flood. And as their muscles expanded and contracted in this struggle, the children absorbed more and more nitrous salts. At the same time, these children lacked that fear of gods, fathers, and teachers which tempers the most exuberant phase of childhood. As a result, their flesh and bones must have grown inordinately large, and they became so vigorous and robust that they turned out to be giants.

...Vico then goes on to elaborate his theory of giants by citing Caesar, Tacitus, Procopius, Jean Chassagnon's treatise On Giants, archaeology (such as it was in Vico's 18th century), Greek and Latin myths...and he's sure most accounts are exaggerations! People tend to go on and on and let their poetic ingenium go wild. Let's be more sober-minded about giants. Clearly though, they interbred and covered the Earth. (I'm drawing from 369-371 from the Marsh translation.)

The Jews - Noah's clan - were taught cleanliness and fear of fathers and so they remained of normal stature.

Okay: so, for Vico, after the Flood, Noah's sons forgot all about the Jewishness, caroused about the Forests of the Earth, shitting everywhere, fucking any Wild Women they could find, and behaving like Freshmen from State on Summer Break, for a long, long time. They were, after all, hopped up and fortified by nitrous salts from all the shit in the soil, which, we all know, makes you huge like Andre the Giant. Or Lou Ferrigno. (Or Barry Bonds?)

The "poetic wisdom" here, as I glean it, not being descended from Jews myself, is this: I am descended from Bigfeet. It's a long story and Vico and tell you a lot more about it - or ask me about my ancestors, according to Vico! -  but right now I'm hungry for something nitrous, a timid and intractable woman, and maybe a Pop-Tart and some wrestling on the telly.

So: The Bigfoot Q: I don't know. Let's see what Prof. Sykes comes up with?

Drug Report: Matthew Gavin Frank's Pot Farm and Some Other Pot Books

So: if you're part of the "true" Stoned Literati, you've probably read Terry Southern's Red Dirt Marijuana, you're somewhat likely a Pynchonite and are pretty sure you read Vineland, but...that was back when some really good stuff came down from Mendocino or Humboldt; it seems like you read it. Zoyd? Oh yea! You've read scads of non-fiction books on pot, and the number of good ones has flowered over the last 12-15 years, with the Kulch (if not the Feds) becoming evermore accepting. I liked Martin Lee's  Smoke Signals and Julie Holland's The Pot Book is something I want on my shelf; I read it via public library and dug her research and style.

                                        Poet-novelist Professor Matthew Gavin Frank

Getting back to "fiction" (I'll explain the quotes in a bit), T. Coraghessan Boyle's Budding Prospects illustrated how hard it can be to cash in on America's biggest cash crop if you don't know what you're doing, have bad luck, and are kinda lame. That's some mordant stuff. Harsh, even. But the sentences flit like the tiny starry flame of a roach behind a barn in a Sonoma County pitch black night. Even better - to my poetic ears and eyes and oh hell entire nervous system - was Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. Although it takes place on the East Coast, the novel, like Robert Anton Wilson's books, will always function as a reliable contact high if I don't have any of the sticky icky lying around. (Charitable friends give some to me every now and then - possibly for the entertainment value of the buzzed talking OG? - 'cuz I can't afford to buy it.) The allusions, the pop culture guru's bizarre contrarian yet learned opinions on everything, and his seeing of conspiracies everywhere...would be enough. But the influence of Philip K. Dick, coupled with Saul Bellow (!) and Hitchock's Vertigo...I'm feeling buzzed just writing about it.

                             photographer unknown, but looks like a pot farm to me

Alright: Pot Farm, by an assistant professor of creative writing at Northern Michigan University, had at first glance an enticing title, cool cover art...but it was thin (223 pages) (this seems a bit light, man!) and it was on U. of Nebraska Press, so I had my doubts. I was skeptical this stuff would be any good. I had never heard of Matthew Gavin Frank. I tried it anyway.

This one's a "creeper" as we said back in high school: it's filed under "fiction" in my library, but this was one book that could easily be given a Dewey Number and filed under non-fiction, say with Julie Holland's and Martin Lee's books; there's enough of the sociological/ethnographical this-is-what-it's-culturally-like-working-on-a-pot-farm-in Northern-California-ishness to it. In my eyes, the mixed approach in the novel makes it guerilla-ontological; the structure alternates subtly between poetry and ethnographic "facts" and I felt mentally disjointed, and I'm freak enough to admit I do enjoy that buzz.

And yet: it's filled with astonishingly great poetic writing, and Frank - an itinerate writer, who's worked in vineyards in Italy and restaurants in Key West and who knows what in New Mexico, married a Swedish girl who quit being a nun, is a Chicago boy, widely traveled and no stranger to living in tents - enchants with his poetic prose to the point where, despite the well-researched facts about the legal status of cannabis in California, how a large crop is cured, how any number of local/state/federal cops can do violent harm to you with impunity (including local "militias," something I didn't know), that farms employ spotters/snipers housed high up in redwoods to protect their interests, how pot farm owners gave many of the victims of Katrina good jobs, how the economy in Northern California changes overnight when the harvest is in (there's a surreal, carnivalesque chapter 10 about being on the scene in a small town in the cannabis-steeped economy of Mendocino County, waking up to the sudden smell of the pot harvest and money and the...uhhhhh..."free spirits" that attend this scene, mostly in the streets, and I found it contact-high-ish), this feels like poetry.

Just the ethnographic factual-ness of what it's like living on a large pot farm in Mendocino County...but I can see why librarians are filing it in fiction. Yea...(Why am I using ellipses there? Why the frag sentences? The commas above and not semicolons? Why?)

It's autobiographical, although Professor Frank is steeped in his postmodernism enough he uses the device of a baldly stated "I am an unreliable narrator" (because I was stoned/want to tell a good story/human memory is all-too fallible/my notes are illegible so I'll just say this/I can't remember if I dreamed this or if it really happened to tell you the truth, etc) throughout. That aspect alone may have turned librarians toward the fiction section. But - I think - it's all true! Hell: it may as well be. It harmonizes with my intuition well enough. (What does that even mean?)

(If it's not "true" - and I've read a few interviews with Frank - he's a better fake than Carlos Castaneda, no doubt!)

                   Fiercely secretive sphinx-like recluse Thomas Pynchon, on The Simpsons

And it's about loved ones dying and death, how your childhood bedroom mixes in with your adult life somehow, and how listening to your co-workers for their poetic minds' utterances can make life worth living, and the awkwardness of being an itinerate writer, wondering what "home" means, what it means to be with the chronically ailing and downtrodden. And yet, most delightful: the characters and then Frank's virtuoso phanopoeia! His melodious prose, his evocation of memories surrounding family and upbringing, his luminous details: read this book!

A few years ago, I read Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire, and there's some terrific non-fiction writing about cannabis in it. In one passage he discusses the findings of Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam, who discovered the structure of THC and that the body makes its own THC analogues, called the anandamides, and how both neurochemicals help us to forget, which is very important. (Or, this is what I remember Pollan writing about; I don't have the book on hand and I might be mixing it up with someone else?) We take forgetting for granted, but if we didn't have anandamides flowing through our exquisite little neurochemistry sets, we'd remember far too much trivial stuff! Who cares, what can it possibly matter, if the 97th car you passed on your way to work was a parked 1994 Toyota, red with a slight dent on the driver's side? There are millions of things we encounter every day, just puttering around the house, that are more than worth forgetting. Think about it.

Then forget it.

Of course, smoking pot tinkers with this set a bit, but many of us know it's worth it. I mean, if it wasn't for cannabis alleviating pain and making suffering more tolerable, while making food, music, colorful speech, jokes and sex even better than those things already "are" (and don't get me wrong: those things are "good" enough as they "are"), then the drug would be utterly worthless.

With that in mind, Pot Farm is worth reading if only for the gorgeous poetic prose, and the little instances of almost Pynchonesque whackiness, like the origins of Fred Flintstone's joyous "Yabba Dabba Do!" as the horn sounds for him to get off work. Trickster etymology, stoned, involving a Thai meth-like drug, the phenomenology of working a rough job, a Hanna-Barbera conspiracy theory, etc. (see pp.53-54)

Where was I? Oh yea: Mechoulam's findings and I was reading Pollan. I...oh yea!: followed up Pollan with a reading of Paul Krassner's One Hand Jerking: Reports From An Investigative Satirist. I know I did this because I made notes of it. Anyway, in a piece seemingly flung far from Pollan, about how politicians have evaded tough questions by saying they "forgot," Krassner cited from a passage in the neuroscience journal Neuron, about findings in memory and the hippocampus. Then, he quoted his old friend Wes "Scoop" Nisker's The Big Bang, The Buddha, and the Baby Boom - a book I'd happened to have read a year or so before:

"Recent research in molecular biology has given us a clue to the connection between THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and the actual experience of getting high. It turns out that our own body produces its own version of THC and that the human brain and nervous system have a whole network of receptors for this cannabinoid-like substance. That means you've got a stash inside you right now, and nobody can even bust you for it. Our body's natural THC was discovered by Israeli neuro-scientists, who named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit word for 'inner bliss.' The scientists believe that our system produces this THC equivalent to aid in pain relief, for mild sedation, and also to help us forget, because if we remembered everything that registers in our senses from moment-to-moment, we would be flooded with memory and could not function. So anandamide helps us edit the input of the world by blocking or weakening our synaptic pathways, our memory lanes." (p.148 of Krassner's book. I don't recall the pagination from Nisker's book, largely because of anandamide or its analogues found in flowering plants. It does seem like Jorge Luis Borges foresaw or posited what a faulty anandamide system would look like when he wrote his immortal and literally unforgettable "Funes the Memorious.")

Sorry for the above being somewhat repetitious, but it's good for the memory. What goes around comes around?

I end with an apt passage from Pot Farm:

They both pronounce the word 'equivalent' as if they had invented it moments ago. In their mouths it seems so new, deserving of endless repetition. Of course, they're probably high. Of course, I am too. Who remembers? When a brain cell falls into the cerebral spinal fluid, and not a single of his compatriots is alive to hear it, does he, in attempting to recall the truth, make a sound?

American Coup D'Etat Semantics: You Can't Just Pee On A Stick

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"'The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

-A long time ago a logician wrote a book that was double-coded: Children could enjoy it on a child's level, while mum and pop were edified at an adult level. The author's name was "Lewis Carroll" and "Charles Ludwidge Dodgson."

In my studies of assassinations in Unistat history, and associated events, certain years pop up as ones authors more or less argue could be construed as something on the order of some subspecies of the coup d'etat, or "blow against the state." 1947 and the National Security Act is still my personal object for deep study. But certainly: 1963, 1974, 1980 (the "October Surprise" and what resulted from long-time FBI snitch-President Reagan), and 2000 are all "up there." Now let's consider 2013. I think it has a lot to say to us, but because I fear I bore you far too often, I'll try to make it brief.

But first, a digression of sorts: historically the coup d'etat has been associated with a military take-over of the corridors of power, and for good reason: a very high percentage of total coups are of this sort. (See the still-seminal Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, by Edward Luttwak, skip right to the amazing Appendices.)

We think of the President hopping on a helicopter with a suitcase in some Third World country, rushing to exile in Lichtenstein, the generals storming into the Palace, or some scenario we've ingested with spy thrillers filtered through Hollywood. 

What about a different sort of coup? One you may not have seen depicted in a novel of film or history book. Something like a "slow-motion coup d'etat"? That's the term a Berkeley professor has recently used. An M.I.T. professor used the exact same term recently. They were both talking about Unistat.

                                                      Robert Reich

Rosa Brooks

On the 4th of July last, Rosa Brooks wrote "America the Coupless" for Foreign Policy. It's about how military leadership increasingly self-identifies as "more conservative and more Republican than the general population." I find this harrowing, but she's concerned about a military coup in the US, writing on July 4, 2013. Less than 1/2 of 1% of the population actively serves in the military, and Unistatians show a very high degree of respect for the military while having almost zero knowledge about what military life is like, what problems people in the military face, etc. Brooks finds this alarming. She ends her piece this way: 

"Tocqueville famously quipped that in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. It's a good thing we don't yet have the military we deserve: If we did we might be seeing tanks in our own public squares."

Andrew Bacevich

Well, to catch the younger Sarnaev brother, we did see a militarized local police force that ought to make Rosa Brooks nuance her thinking a bit. But a military coup seems unlikely in Unistat, at this stage, largely for the reasons that Prof. Andrew Bacevich gives here, from the blog Crossed Crocodiles, 2 August, 2009, an excerpt from a discussion that included Luttwack himself and other experts on the possibility of a military coup. Bacevich thinks the military - the Pentagon - after 1945, learned to play politics with Congress and the media and they get what they want: just look at the "defense" budget! Bacevich uses the term "creeping coup" to describe a deflection of concerns from domestic needs to "national security" ones (and how hard can it be when you have morons like Michelle Bachmann on the Intelligence Committee?). No, but seriously: go back to the Crossed Crocodiles blog-link and read the back-and-forth between Bacevich and Richard Kohn, especially the part blogger "xcroc" has highlighted.

Bacevich: "creeping coup."

[Sidelight: Here's one of my main guys, George Scialabba, reviewing a book that came out in 2006 and its inconspicuousness - James Carroll's book House Of War, not Scialabba's review - seems to me unmerited and unjust. Maybe it's just another case of the Murrrkins being prejudiced against fat books?]

Chris Hedges

Hedges seems to me like a tortured, very dramatic soul, extremely well-educated, a brilliant speaker, and he has some valuable ideas that seem to want to harness a left-wing religiosity dormant in the Unistatian mind. This righteous fervor would link working class people (most of us) with an intelligent, populist progressive politics. But I'm oversimplifying Hedges, who deserves your attention if you haven't already given him some of it. In the 17 September 2012 issue of The Economist he answered questions about a very slow capitalist coup that has happened in Unistat. It perhaps started with the destruction of popular/radical movements during World War I and gained momentum under an almost religious movement called "anticommunism" in Unistat (I think this point is woefully underrated). Hedges (and this is but one of many interesting aspects of his thought, to my eyes) sees the New Left as weaker than the Old Left. In the 1970s a neo-feudalism is seen in which the Empire went from being an Empire of Production to an Empire of Consumption. He tears Neoliberal Bill Clinton a neo-one, and says that the populace was kept mollified for a spell by easy access to credit and cheap market goods, but now the jig is up, the jobs are gone, it's a Temp/McDonald's/Wal-Mart Reality Sandwich for Unistatian workers, and they don't know what...wha?...wha happened? Read this piece: he wonders if Aldous Huxley or George Orwell was right, then he splits the difference - as I would - and gives Huxley the criminal level of hedonism untinged by any humanistic ethics, and Orwell gets the surveillance state nod. Here's Hedges on video for 17 minutes, from very recently, explaining why we're now in "corporate totalitarianism."

Hedges: a slow "capitalist coup." We're now under "corporate totalitarianism."

Brief digression: on the subject of Americans and the violence that erupts from their imposed amnesia: Henry A. Giroux: "The Violence of Organized Forgetting" (The OG does NOT want to absolve the Unistatian citizenry for allowing themselves to get into this mess!)

Robert Reich

Prof at Berkeley, formerly of the Clinton administration. On 5 June, 2012, Reich blogged that "I fear that at least since 2010 we've been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d'etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful - who haven't been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age or the late 19th century."

How have the new plutocratic oligarchy pulled off the coup? Citizen's United, and their ownership of media and the overwhelming repetition of lies about "Obama is increasing the debt by $4 billion a day! Stop the liberal spending, black man! You're  'out of control'!" The fascist Koch brothers and other billionaire right-wingers are "job creators" (they're actually job-destroyers), the government is evil, regulation is strangling every thing that's good, true, and wholesome, etc. Obama's "mortgaging our childrens' futures!" As if these multi-billionaires need to worry about their kids. The reality is that the debt is growing because the Republicans in Congress refuse to repeal the Bush tax cuts, threatening to throw the country off a "fiscal cliff" if we dare make the billionaires pay something close to their fair share of taxes. Remember: Bush and Cheney started two wars while cutting taxes on the rich, which...has that ever been done in history? It's...sorry: it's fascism. And the amnesiac public (see Giroux) let 'em get away with it. Oh hell, maybe the public is just fucking stupid. There. I said it.

Now check out succinct Robert Reich from approximately 1 year, 1 month, and I week later!

Reich: a "slow-motion coup d'etat." And: "treason?" 

Paul Craig Roberts

13 July, 2013: the American people are "hesitant to acknowledge it..." (yea yea...see Giroux?)

Roberts was one of the architects of Reaganomics! So: quite some distance from Reich, Brooks, Hedges, and Bacevich. Not that any of the aforementioned are squarely in any of the others' camp.

What gets me here is the style: the appeal of the "Founding Fathers." That Bush/Cheney/Obama/Biden and their minions and cabinet are "usurpers." It's an Executive Branch coup for Paul Craig Roberts. The leadership in Unistat is "illegitimate" and the Unistatians are serfs: we can be picked up for no good reason at all, kept incommunicado, thrown in a dungeon, tortured, no lawyers, no court appearance, no evidence. We can be placed on lists compiled by the "National Stasi Agency" and killed by drone, if Caesar (at the moment: Obama) so deems. We are no longer a nation of laws or Constitution. It's sheer "lies and naked force." The only Amendment left standing is the 2nd, which is a joke in the face of the Empire's forces (see Roberts's prose). When Obama intercepted the Bolivian jet that had Morales on it, because they were sure Snowden was stowed onboard, they showed that they cared more for "revenge" than International Law. 

It's a short piece, but this former Reaganite is sure we've undergone a coup. While I find much sympathy with Roberts here, the style - for what it's worth - doesn't gleam for me. He repeats at least three times that since 2000 the leadership is not legitimate, but he asserts it's less legit than So.Africa under apartheid, Israel in Palestine, the Taliban, Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein. Okay, yea. Maybe. I'll give ya this, brother Paul: it's one clusterfuck of a mess.

I like that he took pains to single out John Yoo and Jay Scott Bybee as legal legitimators of the Imperial President who is above Constitutional Law. (maybe see my blogspew on NeoMedievalism?

Roberts: "a coup" with heavy stress on the Executive Branch; and "illegitimate."

Jimmy Carter

The same week that Roberts blogged - it's really all starting to coalesce now, <cough> isn't it? - Jimmy Carter was in Atlanta, giving a talk to further German-Unistat relations. Der Spiegel covered it in German, but oddly, it wasn't "news" to the hordes of dipshits who get paid as "journalists" in Unistat, so it didn't appear in mainstream press here, but some guy Tweeted, and...well, read the very very short piece. Basically, Carter thinks that the Snowden revelations mean there's a "suspension of American democracy." (As opposed to actual democracy? Anyway...) Carter apparently added that the NSA story will leave Google and Facebook with less credibility worldwide, which...don't hold your breath. Still: Carter is not exactly in any of these other peoples' camp, is he? 

Carter: vague: didn't utter the "c" word, but a "suspension" of "democracy." A real cliff-hanger.

                                                          John Tirman

John Tirman

M.I.T. professor at the Center for Intl. Studies, and along with Reich and Hedges, my favorite. He boldly asserts Unistat has undergone a coup, and tells why: five days after the 4th of July, Tirman wrote that the Snowden revelation are a "blow to the traditional authority of constitutional government, the sine qua non of American political experience." He's no Paul Craig Roberts, clearly.

Tirman is a man after my own heart by reminding us of Unistat's fomenting of traditional-style military coups in Iran (1953), Gautemala (1954), Chile (1973), and Turkey (1980). 

What I appreciate most about Tirman is his use of the terms "parallel state" and "deep state," which deserve far wider use by the citizenry. Yes, we have the FISA court, which resembles democracy in the way a horse resembles a hippo. The parallel state, now in its 12th year, is secret, nondemocratic, up to its ears in spooks, spies on everyone, friend and foe alike, and is basically lawless. It has had 12 years to grow structures that institutionalize an alternative authority, a hidden set of rules, and who knows what is permissible. Thomas Jefferson, that old wig, is spinning at 78 rpms as he hears about this. As Paul Craig Roberts wouldn't hesitate to say: "illegitimate."

Tirman says that Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin warned us, and he's worth quoting when he's quoting them:

Snowden's and others' revelations should not be completely surprising, given the work of Dana Priest and William Arkin in their 2011 book Top Secret America. Many of the most shocking bits were excerpted in the Washington Post , where Priest is a reporter. They uncovered a vast, opaque security bureaucracy, extremely inefficient but aggressively intrusive. "The federal-state-corporate partnership has produced a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that collects, stores, and analyzes information about tens of thousands of US citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing," they wrote.  It involved, they calculated, nearly 4000 organizations in the United States, "each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions."

After Tirman ticks off a litany of explosively obvious corrosive effects of Big Money and corporations on the body politic, he ends with this: "The seduction of policymakers by corporate money is sad. The psychotic, parallel state is terrifying." 

Tirman: "slow-motion coup d'etat."

Here's Dana Priest on NPR for 39 mins. Take what she says with a pinch of Snowden, and a snifter of Cheney, add some torture and the Patriot Act and a dash of All-American Idiocy, and tell me Unistat hasn't undergone a coup, that, in the immortal prose of Paul Craig Roberts, is an "illegitimate" state.

Are We Living In A Robert Anton Wilson Novel?

This topic is related to a recent question over at my blogger-colleague Tom Jackson's blog RAWIllumination.

My knee-jerk reaction: it seems evermore so, aye.

With some introspection (okay, a bowel movement): definitely maybe.

Ken Cuccinelli (my friends and I just refer to him affectionately as "Cooch") is quoted very recently thus:

“My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that … They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.”

Robert Anton Wilson writes in his book Natural Law (Or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy):

"It appears that the reason that the term 'Natural Law' is preferred to 'Moral Law' may be that many writers do not want to make it obvious that they speak as priests or theologians and would rather have us think of them as philosophers. But it would seem to me that their dogmas only make sense as religious or moral exhortation and do not make sense in any way if one tries to analyze them as either scientific or philosophical propositions."

Two recent articles on Cooch and his moralic acid-laced Low-Medium Level Bullshit:

Katie McDonough's "Ken Cuccinelli Keeping The War On Sodomy Alive"
Amanda Marcotte's "Ken Cuccinelli Really Wants To Ban Oral Sex"

Are the voters in Virginia really this retrograde? We'll see. At this point I'll believe anything. 

Also, no doubt Cuccinelli as a Republican in 2013 agrees that government is intrusive on the rights, liberties, and freedoms of his corporate sponsors. 

Robert Anton Wilson often said he not only wanted government "off our backs" but "off our fronts, too." This latter proposition would seem to exclude Cooch.

Are You Naturally "Unnatural"?

 -------------------------------

   RAW with his old friend and fellow heretic Timothy Leary, circa 1992? (if you know who took this 
   pic I'll be happy to give credit)      

One of the weirdest interviews RAW ever did was in November, 1996, with someone named Nardwuar; RAW seemed to think it was a put-on but he played along with good humor. 

17 years later, Mark O'Connell at Slate has crowned Nardwuar as the "pop music's best interviewer." (Neil Strauss on Line 1!)

Anyway, I was very surprised that anyone would raise Nardwuar to such lofty heights. But as RAW often said, "Different lanes for different brains."
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A link between quantum mechanics and game theory seems to have been found.
Yes, the two areas seem far apart, and RAW did not accentuate Bayesian games, but from the age of 16, in 1948 (!) he was interested in the findings in both areas and how they may interact. The article I cited doesn't mention John von Neumann, but JvN was an early theorist in both areas, and RAW wrote about John S. Bell, Norbert Wiener, von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Erwin Schrodinger and the philosophical implications of the wave equation, the interplay between The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and multi-valued non-Aristotelian logics, semantics, the ontological basis of math, the EPR gedankenexperiments, Einstein's disagreements with Niels Bohr, how information might play in biology, and psychological theories of interpersonal communication and "games" and how quantum mechanics, language, information, games, and the human nervous system all interact in social "reality."
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A few weeks ago, Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse advocated for Philosophy to go public, for the public good. They consider "repackaging" philosophy - by which they mean: the stultifying and dull Thing that philosophy has become in the Academy - and make it more accessible. They reject this as impractical. I disagree with them here, mostly because their arguments using specialized philosophy-language is pretentious in the first place, and they ought to realize that if they unpack their epistemology and ontology and hook it up to their Wittgenstein and other turns of language, they'll see that their use of the copulae "to be" (i.e, use of "is" "am" "are" "was" "were" and "be") seems inconsistent with their overly technical language in the first place. They're writing for each other in small journals, hoping for citations and to keep their jobs as the Humanities wither under the Leviathan of corporate capitalism.

If they can't write about their Big Topics for the intelligent layperson, maybe they aren't as fine thinkers as they suppose themselves "to be"? Take more English courses, academic Philosophers?

Aikin and Talisse then consider that philosophy should go public by addressing the concerns of the public and not arcane subjects. But then they look at the journals and see that philosophers have been writing about immigration, surveillance, human enhancement technologies, the biology of race, the nature of lying and the ethics of torture. But while they don't bluntly say it: those articles are impenetrable. To quote the Beat poet Jack Spicer out of context, "My vocabulary did this to me!"

Circling back around, these advocates for a public philosophy finally realize that philosophy must be repackaged nonetheless, and I wholeheartedly agree with them here:

"On this version of “public philosophy,” what is called for is not a change in what philosophers do or in the topics they address; rather the call for public philosophy is call for better spokespersons for philosophy.  It is a request that those who are especially skilled at presenting complex and difficult ideas come forward and speak publicly for the discipline.  It is also a call for the profession at large to acknowledge the need for such spokespersons, and to find ways to recognize the scholarly importance of public outreach.  But, importantly, it is also implicitly a call for those philosophers who are not very good at representing the discipline to go back to their offices."

And many of us who are longtime readers of Robert Anton Wilson would argue that RAW was doing this in the 1960s, but the exigencies of rising in the Academy, together with an iron curtain put up by mainstream media and the "counterculture" concerning identity and publishing and who gets reviewed and what topics are to be considered out-of-bounds, and "style" (and other Damned Things)...militated against RAW being taken more seriously by people who think public philosophy is important for a healthy democratic society. A "science fiction writer" was not to be taken seriously by Serious People, the guardians of True Philosophy. A writer who wrote so candidly about sex, drugs, Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley and Wilhelm Reich and Ezra Pound and Alfred Korzybski (all banished to the Region of Thud by the curators of Official Culture) could not be taken seriously. A writer who speculates about the phenomenology of UFO contactees, who mixed genres (too irresponsible and promiscuous?), who openly declares himself an "anarchist" and who chronicles a 14-odd-year odyssey of self-experimentation to probe the vast reaches of his own consciousness...this was something not fit for mainstream Philosophy. And then there is the ludic play with deep researches into conspiracy theory, a subject so demonized by the True Knowers of Unistat, there's no way this Wilson should be allowed anywhere near the Conversation about true Philosophy. Best to ignore his work until he finds himself living in the marginalist's milieux, where he properly resides...

So I argue: RAW was at least 40 years ahead of Aikin and Talisse. But RAW's readers found him anyway, and they think his unified field hypotheses about media and language extremely interesting, philosophically. RAW's ideas about the acceleration of culture, propelled by technological innovation, and its sociological fallout: paranoia, alternate religions, a Nietzschean multiperspectivalism, and the analysis of Conspiracy Theories as a way to test one's own epistemological plasticities? His readers enjoy these philosophical ideas too. Indeed.

While we may model the worlds we inhabit as "texts" we know these are only models, and that language does not map directly onto any sort of "reality" in a one-to-one correspondence, as RAW wrote about starting in the 1960s, largely influenced by discarded thinkers. 

I would like to suggest to Aikin and Talisse that their world has finally caught up with Robert Anton Wilson's but after many years of talking to academics, I'm afraid the response would be, "Who?"

I asked Prof. George Lakoff of Berkeley if he knew of RAW's work, and he said, "I once had a student who was really into him." That's the only admission I've personally ever heard from a True Serious Thinker that RAW even existed. 

RAW can never serve as a "spokesperson" that Aikin and Talisse advocate for, because he was not from academe. However, I strongly suggest that their sought-after spokespersons take into account the playfulness and sense of humor Wilson brought to philosophical topics, especially the officially outre topics of conspiracy, altered states, and pop kulchur. And because humor is difficult, the Aikin and Talisse plea may not gain traction. If so, 'tis a pity. (I'd like to once again suggest George Carlin as a sociolinguist for any who'd be interested...)
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Coming back around, Tom Jackson wrote a concise and cogent piece on the occasion of the death of Holy Blood, Holy Grail co-author Michael Baigent, and defended a court's findings in favor of Dan Brown, who the authors of HB,HG sued. If you like the OG and you haven't read RAW's The Widow's Son, consider adding it to your Summer Reading list. It might be instructive to compare its literary qualities to Brown's Da Vinci Code, and even more revelatory when you realize which one the public clamored over and which one is the "obscure" novel.