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

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (2007)

I finished reading this novel a week ago, and it's haunting me. It was Diaz's first novel and he won the Pulitzer for it, now teaches at M.I.T. Won a MacArthur "Genius" award. Deserved it. I arrived eight years late, but I'm glad I came. (Just why I'm glad I came seems roughly the same answer you'd get when someone says she "enjoyed" Hamlet. q.v. the following.)

Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic, but moved to New Jersey as a youngster. His prose dazzles and reminded me of David Foster Wallace: not so much the style or voice or syntactical ju-ju, but overall Brilliant Mind, mixing a staggering number of allusions to history, pop kulch, esp. science fiction, gaming, and movies.  The anthropological intricacies of ideas and language involved with how Hispanics and Latinos from one society think about Hispanics and Latinos based on their relative degrees of melanin turned up my sociology nobs to 11. (I'm not saying I think this is the major criterion for snap-judgements or valuations, but it seems far more complex than my white-boy milieux, from one who grew up in the Los Angeles 'burbs.) I  also think Diaz writes on the subjects of desire, beauty and sex in particularly compelling ways.

Oscar is that fat, hopeless kid in school who gets picked on by everyone, and worries about ever getting laid. He loves women, but he's a Dominican non-macho gargantuan nerd. As a freshman in college, he's described as "307 pounds." It's some dark stuff. In college he constantly fools himself that finally some girl will love him. He attempts suicide. Still, a lot of him is in many of us, even us skinny folk. I'm haunted by Oscar, because we know this guy. And we wish we'd been nicer to him. And sometimes we were, but...and we sorta "get" why he speaks "like a Star Trek computer" and is so profoundly nerdy and clueless about social interactions, especially with the opposite sex. And still we wonder: is there more to why he's like this? The novel's - Diaz's main posit? - the family is under a curse: the fuku. 

Diaz woke up the Joyce (or, Pynchon)-reader in me in that many of his sentences are larded with references to obscure-to-me fantasy characters and there are citations to Dominican and other Hispanic and Latino histories and figures, Japanese pop culture, nerd culture, more than enough obscurities to delight my inner Wao, etc. The difficulties mount: Diaz writes in Spanglish, including many varieties of Spanish idioms and slang, and my copy was not an annotated version, so dictionaries helped, and so did the Net, of course. Finally, by page 40 or so, I stumbled onto one person's online annotations, which are a work-in-progress and "Kim" of San Francisco is crowdsourcing it. (Or is it sorta Wiki-ish?)

Diaz plays it coy with who the narrator of the story is, but eventually gives it away about halfway through. It wasn't who I thought it was...because I found I'd been prejudiced and didn't think the character in novel could be as thoughtful and compassionate as he had been drawn...but drawn by...who? Ahh, the pomo jukes of Diaz!

                             One of my favorite artists, Bob Campbell, did this for me as a 
                             surprise gift. Check him out!

Okay, the novel's about the story of Oscar's family as lived in the 20th century, mostly in the Dominican Republic. I confess that I'd heard this was a tremendous literary work, but someone in my book group picked it (egged on by me), even though I didn't know anything about what goes on in the book. Immediately we are informed about the Dominican Republic, a place I'd read a bit about, and it was all horrifying. I had read enough about Trujillo (dictator from 1930-61) that I hoped the novel wouldn't stay on the subject. It didn't. It went on and on about Oscar and his sexy feminist sister, and his workaholic, cancerous, and psychologically traumatized mother. There are no cardboard characters in the book. It's compelling on every goddamned page.

I said it didn't stay on Trujillo. But then He came back. And that's what's stayed with me.

Brief sort-of tangent: On at least three occasions I've had talks with friends about the old TV show The Twilight Zone. Usually someone brings up an episode and then we all chime in, then mention another episode and talk about our impressions and ideas about that one, usw. The show had me in a sort of Oscar Wao-ish way between the ages of 13 and 20. I was a total geek for that show, and watched some episodes over and over. I studied Marc Scott Zicree's book on the show. My favorite Twilight Zone episode is called "Walking Distance" but that has nothing to do with this. Another episode, "It's A Good Life," , which features a King-Ubu/Kim-Jong-il-like monstrous little boy with supernatural powers, has everything to do with Diaz's novel, so I'll return and try to get to the crux...

In going back to the life and times of Oscar's grandfather Abelard,  the accomplished medical doctor and center of intellectual activity in the DR, a man I'd have liked to have known, it's bluntly stated that living in the DR under Trujillo was like living in "It's A Good Life" (see p.224, ff forward and backward), which I have always thought was one of the most horrifying stories I'd ever seen. It continues to creep me out, after (easily) more than ten viewings. (See above link.)

Combine that with the most brutal banana republic fascist regime - where about half the population is a snitch or a cop or part of the secret police and the dictator doesn't wish you into the cornfield, but has goons waylay you in city traffic, kidnap you, then beat you with rifle butts until you're almost dead, then leave your body in the sugar cane fields. There's the wealthy class on the island, who own everything, there's the dictator and his goons, who can take that away from you and literally erase everything about your existence, even your signature. And then pretty much everyone else is in squalor and lives in a state of constant anxiety. And oh yea: the dictator has his goons monitor the populace for every beautiful girl, apparently the younger the better, and he gets to fuck her, or your family is ruined. No daddy can say no to Trujillo, or not for long. Torture of the Gitmo variety was commonplace. ("At least he was anticommunist!" - Unistat)

Just one of many delights from the Trujillo regime: when the price of sugar dropped - he'd stolen 80% of the sugar plantations for himself - he blamed the Haitian slaves who worked those fields, and had 20,000 of them massacred.

Unistat backed Trujillo for a long time, simply because he was anti-Communist. Eventually the CIA saw for themselves what a horror show the entire island was, and were vexed: yea, but he's anti-Commie! What do we do? JFK-lovers need to read up on his way of handling it. (This story will have to be told later. Or better yet: check into it fer yer own self?)

Throughout the book and the footnotes, Diaz sticks with the fuku narrative about why such horrific things happened to Oscar and his family and ancestors. In interviews he talks about Trujillo and how his family reacted when he brought up the topic. It's completely repressed.

So, the haunting has to do with my own silly neuroses about vast income inequality and the militarization of the police, a massive surveillance State, and sham political elections. Because I've read about these histories throughout my life. Because, when I read Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism and he showed that fascistic configurations of political life has been the default mode throughout most of what we call "history," it made sense to me, I hate to say. And because Reich and Orwell and other writers have suggested the psychological horrors of brutal regimes can last for generations.

And Oscar wanted to live in Akira. Or Middle-Earth. He just wanted a kiss from a beautiful girl and to fondle a breast, maybe even get laid.

I get it.

Shulamith Firestone: Second Wave Radical Feminist, Heretic, Visionary

Late this past August, in the East Village in New York, someone noticed a bad smell. Others said they hadn't seen Shuley for awhile and were a bit worried. Someone climbed up the fire escape to the 5th floor where Shuley had lived for about 30 years, among mostly books. Peering in, the person saw her on the floor. It was Shuley. She'd died. Later the coroner thought she'd been dead for about a week. The preliminary was "natural causes." She was 67. Shuley had had a rough life. I never met her; if I had met her it would've been weird: she was probably something along the paranoid-schizophrenic axis  by the time I would be old enough to try to have a conversation with her. I admire her wild intellectual chops. Her sister - a Rabbi in Boulder, Colorado - once said, if I recall correctly, that the reception her 1970 book - both positive and negative and everything in-between, eventually got to her, and it started to tear her down.

                                        Shulamith Firestone, who died at 67 in August

Born in Ottawa, Canada, on June 7, 1945 to orthodox Jews, she grew up in St. Louis and Kansas City and was a prodigy, at age 25 producing The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution. In a few short years she would drop out of the radical feminist scene she'd been a major player in, and move to Saint Marks and paint, and soon showed signs of mental illness. By the late 1980s she began her trek in and out of mental hospitals and in 1998 published a book, Airless Spaces, purportedly a bleak, haunting account of her life in those hospitals. I have not read that book yet.

In her magnum opus, The Dialectic of Sex, she draws upon and synthesizes Freud, Marx, Engels, Wilhelm Reich, Simone de Beauvoir, and, with the vision of a science fiction genius, foresaw a world in which the biology of women would not hamper them. That's what's most striking to me about Firestone: she thought carrying a baby around full-term and then raising it in the nuclear family was a total nightmare for women, it was practically a disease, and she thought this must be cured. She compared pregnancy to barbarism and said giving birth was like "defecating a pumpkin."

She called on cybernetics and science in general to free women of this plight. At the time, most intellectuals thought she was brilliant but crazy. She was indeed a little of both, but her visions are starting to become reality.

Shulamith (which she pronounced "shoo LUH mith") was part of the New Left, but helped lead splinter groups from not only SDS, but from less-radical feminist groups. A firebrand at the age of 23, she urged women to vote for themselves, and not how their husbands told them to vote. 50 years after women gained the right to vote she said, "what is the vote finally worth if the voter is manipulated?" She took seriously ideas such as community-raising of children, because the nuclear family was the nexus of sexual repression and emotional illness. "Marx was onto something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in miniature all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale in the society and the state." (Dialectic, p.12) I was drawn to her from her reading of Wilhelm Reich's ideas, and, more generally, because I'm congenitally drawn to brilliant heretics,  people whose ideas are so "dangerous" (I think: ahead of their time) to society they're either persecuted and locked up, or they are driven insane, or their genius and latent mental illness express themselves one after the other. Shuley - as her friends called here - was one of these.

The history of the feminist movement is for all of us who care about human freedom and should not  only be taught in Women's Studies classes once you get into university. The history of women's liberation tells us much about how the paideuma can be changed. It takes a long time. It takes brilliant, fearless weirdos who dare to envision a Better World. The history of women in the First World, in the  West, since the early 19th century, is a ceaselessly fascinating study. Freedom! Let us study it.

For, as a young male, I never understood why women should be considered "the second sex." Maybe because my mother was a (non-radical) feminist and I was not raised on the Adam and Eve story?

But Shuley ran with some rough gals. But I will give her this: she didn't shoot Andy Warhol!

By 1967, the hyper-educated radical feminists were tired of taking orders from the male leaders of SDS, so they split, while still protesting the Vietnam War and sexism in general. After the demoralizing victory of Nixon in 1968, Firestone and a few other militant, radical feminists got together around the moment of Nixon's inauguration in January of 1969 and formed the Redstockings, to honor socialist ideas that harken back to the Blue Stocking feminists of the 19th century. The First Wave of feminists included people like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Emma Goldman.

                                   Simone de Beauvoir, influence on almost all Second Wave
                                    feminists. Best known for her The Second Sex

Shuley thought that men couldn't truly love, but this was conservative compared to another Redstocking, Pam Kearon, who advocated openly for hatred of men (misandry), arguing that hatred is a natural human instinct, and unless women allowed themselves to hate men, they would turn that hateful energy back on other women. And children. Best to hate "men."

My reading of radical feminism, as of this date, totally deplores any hatred of any group. Group hatred is all-too-common, as we've seen with the Nazis and any other faction that thinks the "real problem" lies in getting rid of the muslims, the Palestinians, the jews, the Gypsies, the gays, the blacks, the whites, the "liberals," the Large Group of People Who Go Under Some Highly Abstract Noun, etc. This is a deep semantic sickness, no matter who is doing the persecuting. No one could possibly know enough about any of these groups to justify the kinds of things that Hitler wrote about "Jews," or Coulter writes about "liberals," or that Dennis Prager writes "secular humanists" or that Andrea Dworkin wrote about "men."

In the case of some but not all of the Radical Feminists, their open misandry, in my opinion, hurt the cause of women in general. Why? Because most young women are not mistreated by their fathers or brothers; in fact, when they hear of this "all men are sick, evil bastards who can't love; only want to use you to spread their disgusting seed inside you," they know it's not true...and they decline to call themselves "feminists." (But they stay in school longer and longer and now they're doing better than men, which we'll get to later.)

Because I believe in gender equality and negotiation, I will call anyone who uses language that seems to suppose they've experienced an entire group, and found "all" of them bad/dangerous/evil/etc: assholes. These individuals are assholes. Now: sure, they may have been mistreated themselves, but someone like Kearon is an asshole to me. She never met me, or my dad, or my brothers, or any of my male friends. What? Because she's a woman I'm not supposed to come right out and say it? Fuck that!: I believe in equality, as much as possible. Note: I'm calling Kearon (I think she's dead) an asshole, not "women." Why? First of all, I dig women. But for our purposes here: I do not have nearly enough knowledge of "women" to say what "they" really "are." And no one else knows enough, either.

When someone asked whatever happened to Shuley, Andrea Dworkin - another asshole - who once argued that any sex between a man and woman was "rape" (I am not making this up), but not if the man's penis was limp - told British journalist Linda Grant that Shuley was "poor and crazy," that she rents rooms and fills them with junk, gets kicked out and then rents another room and fills it with junk. Sisterhood is real powerful with Andrea Dworkin, eh? Maybe Shuley didn't hate men enough for Andrea's taste, I don't know.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
Andrea Dworkin 

Oh really? So artists are no different than totalitarian dictators, I assume? - OG

Shuley was instrumental in leading women to protest the 1969 Miss America show, which led to the media myth that women showed up and burned their bras. There is no evidence anyone burned their bra then, but many of the women who objected to Miss America as a sexist show threw their bras in a trash can. Shuley also led a heated protest at Ladies Home Journal in 1970. They burst in and demanded the editorial and advertising staff be replaced by women, and Shuley herself jumped on editor John Mack Carter's desk and began ripping up magazines, and threatening Carter himself, allegedly. It was widely seen as a publicity stunt, and Shuley was criticized for making the Movement look crazy. (Which, in hindsight, it pretty much was, right? But we're talking the Sixties/early 70s: Weather Underground, Baadher-Meinhof, the SLA, Mansonoids, MK-ULTRA, etc.)

Shuley's book is what will endure. As far as I can tell by Internet research, it's still taught in universities. She was quite brilliant and crazy, a heretic, my kind of thinker. I may not agree with everything, but I admire the overweening chutzpah. When I read in The Dialectic of Sex I feel the spirit of Wilhelm Reich, Timothy Leary, Ezra Pound, Nietzsche, the condensed righteous demand for equality - Emma Goldman, anyone? - from her feminist forebears, even William Blake. The Mad Heretical geniuses that changed the world.

Shulamith Fireston's Visions Slowly Coming To Fruition
I thought of Shuley today when, reading in Salon, I caught an article that said the nation's largest group of OB-GYNs have said that the Pill should be available over the counter. Shuley was way ahead on this one. Of course.

                                    Dr. Carl Djerassi, one of the major developers of the 
                                    oral contraceptive pill (OCP). Now at Stanford.

I recently read a play by one of the main inventors of the birth control pill, Carl Djerassi. He's concerned with conveying ideas about science and the quite-human lives of scientists in works he labels "science-in-fiction" and (as in his plays) "science in theater." The play was titled An Immaculate Misconception, and is surrounded by the story of ICSI, or IntraCytoplasmic Sperm Injection. When, for whatever reason, a man is infertile, he can ejaculate into a cup and the doctors can find one viable sperm, then inject it into a woman's egg, and place the egg back inside her. In 1992 a paper was published that made a big splash: they had figured out how to do this! Now there are tens of thousands of ICSI kids walking around, in their teens. The female scientist hero of the play envisions a world in which sex will only be for fun, procreation being a whole other thing altogether. This made me think of Shuley too...although I'm pretty sure she liked girls.

A recent article on ectogenesis - artificial wombs and Firestone's dream - are already possible, but they will be perfected in either 10 to 60 years, depending on which expert you read. Andrea Dworkin, contra Shuley, thought, in a hopelessly patriarchal society, women are only valued for being able to give birth. The rise of ectogenesis - a word coined by the great biologist JBS Haldane in 1924! - would make women "obsolete." The social, political, and ethical implications are truly staggering here. When will we get the "immaculate gestation," as two scholars are calling it? Haldane predicted that only 30% of births will be via a woman's body in 2074. Will the technique liberate women or further oppress them? My vague guess is that, in places like Idaho and Alabama and Saudi Arabia, it will further oppress women; in places like California and Vermont and the Netherlands it will further liberate them. But we shall see.

                      Hanna Rosin, editor at Atlantic Monthly and author of The End of Men

Finally, Hanna Rosin has stirred up quite a crapstorm with her recent book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women, which I have only read 60% through. First off, it seems giving your title The End of is both audacious and almost guarantees sales. But what of her argument? If you haven't read it and you're interested in men or women in the First World, you might find it interesting. If you don't have the time you might practice Bayard's art: listen to people talk about the book, read reviews, ask someone you know who has read the book to talk about it, and then go to a party and act like you've read the book and give your opinions. What's of recent interest to me is that some feminists seem threatened by Rosin's thesis, and if you read this article, you'll be both practicing some of Bayard's art and getting part of Rosin's argument: that women have adapted far better than men have to the changing world of work, the information economy, etc. In the First World, we're becoming less and less of a patriarchal world, and I think that's good for all of us...but the birth pangs of this New Thing will smart, pun intended.

One thing Ms. Firestone would still be most impatient about is...class and economic inequality, which has only increased since her 1970 book.

Shuley saw all this coming. RIP.
obit from The Villager
obit from NYT
obit from The Guardian
first of 2-part piece on Firestone at N+1 : Goes in-depth about her difficult life, really terrific.


Here's a recent 6 minute interview with Rosin about her book, to help you practice Bayard's art:

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 3

More on Leo Strauss and...Me?
Clearly, if Wilhelm Reich's model of history in The Mass Psychology of Fascism is even close to being accurate, even "in the ballpark," then fascist systems are the default mode in all societies since roughly the rise of agriculture. There are short gains made, lots of reversions to the old class warfare of the Few against the Many, until the Many get pushed so far they revolt, and the Few make a concession or two...then work furiously to nullify it. This story runs all through Vico, too.

If something like this "is" right, then it makes sense that there has always been a need for some writers to write obscurely, in some sort of code that can cover for them if called in for questioning. Concomitant to this, there has probably always been some form of samizdat, probably going back to Chinese writing on rocks. (Anyone got the goods on that, by the way?)

[This seems like the perfect time to mention that I'm very much aware of Umberto Eco's idea about "paranoid overinterpretation." It doesn't worry me, but it does at times come in quietly and haunt me for a while, before leaving me alone. I jest, but slightly. Let me say there are times when I allow myself the indulgence of some scary-movie paranoia based on some reading of a text: they're - and you know how They can be - out to get me, but "get" seems the operative word here; it seems murky and a pinch lovecrafty. HERE's some interesting writing by a blogger on this sort of stuff, ya know, like...if you're into it.]

I brought up in Part 1 my personal dissonance vis a vis Isaiah Berlin disagreeing with Godfather of the NeoCons Leo Strauss in that Strauss thought writers write obscurely, sometimes 'cuz their minds work that way (even though he was a Mage, I can't help but feel the exceedingly odd Austin Osman Spare fits in here), but other times because writers fear Authority. Berlin thought that was basically wrong; I have long thought it was right, but find it uncomfortable agreeing with anything Strauss thought (the more I delved into him, the creepier he and his cabal looked to me); after vexing about this before sleep two nights ago, I awoke with my answer, and felt much better and kinda lame for not realizing and elucidating it earlier: Strauss picks which texts he thought one must "read between the lines" to understand in his own convoluted secret society of NeoCon hermeneutics; I assume almost all writers are saying what they're saying unless I have very good reason for thinking otherwise. I have my own hermeneutics, influenced by many a disparate thinker.

I assert Strauss's system is more about reading so that the texts will say what he wants them to say: that there's Good and Evil, relativism is wrong, almost every political philosopher after the Renaissance has it all wrong, and he and his acolytes know by reading the texts in a special way how to see this. HERE is a pretty good article on Strauss. Pay special attention to sections three and six, "esotericism" and "esotericism revisited." (But I still urge the interested reader to search out Xenos's Cloaked in Virtue. Saul Bellow's last big novel was a roman a clef called Ravelstein, centered around a character who was perhaps Strauss's most famous pupil for a long time, Allan Bloom - the same guy who wrote The Closing of the American Mind - who hated relativism of all sorts, hated rock 'n roll, and was a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS. Strauss appears in that book as "Felix Davarr.")

So: I think my bend is more toward writing and less toward reading, although obviously these two acts can never really be separated. I think any one of us would find reading and writing much more difficult to disentangle than we might have thought. I don't think it can be done, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

James Joyce, Luigi Serafini, the OULIPO, and the Voynich Manuscript
And not all esoteric texts are about evading persecution, obviously. Most devotees of Finnegans Wake are well aware of Joyce's statement about hoping to keep the scholars busy for a thousand years and that he wrote for "an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia." Joyce's dreambook used a template based on Vico's theories about rising and falling throughout history, and Vico appears on the first page of the..."novel"?

Luigi Serafini seems to not be hiding anything that will bring down the current order in his miraculous, marvelous work of surrealism replete with a writing system that has only been decoded maybe about 5%, the Codex Seraphinianus.

                                         a page from the exceedingly obscure Codex Seraphinianus

The wonderful - mostly French - writers in the OULIPO group write obscure texts, but this is mostly because they are interested in what can be yielded, textually, by utilizing a mathematics of constraint. Now, there may be something very radical politically going on among some of the OULIPO, but I have not seen it, nor have I read of anyone else finding something there. At this point, I'd like to say that the Italian writer Italo Calvino was the greatest oulipean yet (see especially his If On A Winter's Night A Traveller), and I'd also like to put in a good word for American oulipean Harry Matthews, especially his Singular Pleasures, which, even though he doesn't consider this work oulipean, still: 61 little vignettes about masturbation? You gotta hand it to him.

And what of the possibly eldritch, possibly forged, possibly dangerous Voynich Manuscript? It hasn't been cracked, but from the writing I've read about the problem of the text, it seems like the writers were trying to keep something from somebody...but who? And why? And what is going on there? (WARNING: If you have a certain caste of mind and have yet to look into the problem of the Voynich, it might suck you in. Please take this warning seriously! Be careful! The Voynich has claimed more than one victim! - the OG)

Religious Texts and Peoples Persecuted: A Few Melancholy Notes
Along the lines of books so powerful to Authority they must be hunted down and burnt due to their possible danger and threats to official Power, I will simply type the term Albigensian Crusade and the term Gnostic Gospels.

Clearly, some other times and places in which alternative visions of religious "truth" were more heavily frowned upon than persecuted with extreme prejudice. But eventually outright persecution devolved upon deeply pious mystics, from their own people and from the powerful, fearful and ignorant outsiders. An example of this would be the early mystical writings among the Jews, which eventually evolved into kabbalah. Perhaps the greatest scholar of kabbalah, Gershom Sholem says early on in his Kabbalah that early mystical writers in the Judaic tradition not only had very esoteric ideas, but they wrote under pseudonyms and stressed an ascetic life of contemplation and deep study of texts, but that "The clear tendency toward asceticism as a way of preparing for the reception of the mystical tradition, which is already attested to in the last chapter of the Book of Enoch, becomes a fundamental principle for the apocalyptics, the Essenes, and the circle of the Merkabah mystics who succeeded them." Unfortunately, the more orthodox, those outside the tradition, and others found this very pietistic asceticism threatening: "From the start, this pietist asceticism aroused active opposition entailing abuse and persecution, which later characterized practically the whole historical development of pietist tendencies (hasidut) in rabbinic Judaism." (page 11) Here the outward appearance of pietism and asceticism aroused hostilities towards these groups, and of course, their books. Which were "weird." (Even today, when someone professes to have studied the kabbalah, I listen and doubt quickly and seriously they've put the time in. 'Tis a rare devoted reader of kabbalah, it seems to me, even though it has possibly never been more "popular" on the world stage than right now...

Hermeticists
It could be that, for most of Joyce's "nightmare of history" magicians, hermeticists, and alchemists (are there really any differences between those?) feared persecution but also had other reasons for writing in obscure modes. One idea that seems intuitively "right" to me is that these people - at least they at times professed this - it could be because they knew they were going to be hounded. As Alexander Roob says in his Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet , "Many voices, even within their own ranks, were raised agains the 'obscure idioms' of the alchemists. And their own account of their communication technique hardly sounds more encouraging: 'Whenever we have spoken openly we have (actually) said nothing. But when we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth.'" - Rosarium Philosophorum.

Roob goes on:
"The tendency towards arcane language in 'obscure speeches,' in numbers and in enigmatic pictures, is explained by a profound skepticism about the expressive possibilities of literal language (my emphasis - OG), subjected to Babylonian corruption, which holds the Holy Spirit fettered in its grammatical bonds." (pp.8-9) This all might qualify as some species of group denial: but about what, why, on whose part? And how conscious was this denial that they are writing oddly because a skepticism about the possibilities of "literal" language, and not because they feared violent persecution by some Diocletian, some Shi Huang Ti, some model for King Ubu? You write so obscurely because of "a profound skepticism about the expressive possibilities of literal language"?

Yes, and I wonder what happened when they told that to the Judge?

But I jest. This subject is not all that filled with hilarity, I admit. But we have all had a bad cover story at one time or another, haven't we?

Or at least it must've appeared "bad" to Authority. "But dad...I was smoking pot only because it allows me to get closer to God."

Free Sex, Free Love, Sex-Politics, and Neat Stuff Like That

I have this uhh...friend, see? And we got to talking about subjects that people who read my blog might be interested in. I said, well, obviously, books and ideas. I then remarked that, for reasons I'm not clear about, a blogpost/quasi-book review I had done on the subject of epigenetics, for which I gave a slightly sensationalistic title, "Epigenetics: The Revenge of Lamarck," had blown away all of my other blog posts as far as page views, and that I probably ought to think about writing about topics in science more often. Because I love science! She said, yea, maybe. "But the smart money is on sex." Hmmm. Yea, sex is good...Is this the same "friend" who suggested I write about drugs a couple of weeks ago? Yes. So what the fuck: sex.

Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich, Anarchism, and the History of Free Love (Brief)
My colleague Tom Jackson over at RAWillumination.net has tracked down yet another "lost" article by Robert Anton Wilson, and he got a librarian from some remote location to photocopy it, and paid handsomely with his own dough, then put it in a file and got it into Google Docs as a public service. What a guy!

RAW writes with his formidable logical chops, defending free love and free sexuality as the basic stance of the libertarian/anarchist thinker. See HERE, and go to p.25 for the article, "Free Love, Sexism, and All That," published in his best friend Robert Shea's anarchist journal, No Governor, in 1975.

Wilson, in his 35-odd books and around 1000 published articles, often wrote about the heretical Freudian and Marxist-anarchist Wilhelm Reich. (For a very direct and artistic take from Wilson on Reich, see Wilson's play, Wilhelm Reich In Hell, which has a Shavian preface the Reader might find illuminating.)

The New Yorker recently ran an article about Reich that shed light on the history of free love, and how we always think we're the ones who have pioneered really hot, abandoned monkey-sex, or at least it was done near "our" generation. And this relates to why a lot of us have a tough time imagining mom and dad fucking each other's brains out. Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe that was an indelicate choice of words. How about mom and pop enjoying a loving "genital embrace"?

College Kids and Their "Hook-Ups"
A recent study shows that around 54% of college kids reported that they actually had a "hook-up" in the past year, while they think that 90% of their peers had had two or more hook-ups during the school year. (It's always everyone else who's getting more than us, right?) Why? Because there's so much talk of "hooking up" (sex outside of a relationship, no commitments). And the quality of talk and the belief that it's rampant - though it looks like it's not rampant - might tend to lead to riskier sexual behavior.

Social networks seemed to have a large influence on defining, perceiving, and participating in "hook-ups," which sound to me like a very intense and brief "meet and greet" to me. But how different is the "hook-up" from what college kids were doing in the 1980s, 70s, 60s..? The digital social networks, I'd imagine. I often read about the frequency of kids sending photos of their "junk" (a too-deflationary term, in my eyes) to each other via their gizmos. That was something we did not have when I was in college. I could not have imagined, and would not have believed, that in only a decade (or two, or so) <ahem>, one college kid would meet another for sex...having already seen their partner's genitals on a magical gadget that would fit in one's hip pocket. This is a scenario that eluded even such uncanny science fiction forecasters as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. TV, nuclear-powered submarines, atomic weapons, yes. Wells and Verne saw those coming. Not the cell phone email photo of the genitals from that cutie in English 101.

Unless I missed it in Wells's The Shape of Things to Come. (Can I get a rimshot there?)

                  Brilliant, funny non-fiction writer Mary Roach, author of Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex                 
                                      
Getting Into the Mile High Club, and National Security
Slate recently ran an article on how two people who disappeared into an airline bathroom for what seemed like too long...caused fighter jets to scramble, it being near the date of 9/11 and all. What a world!

I wonder how often these acts are "hook-ups" with previously unknown people? For some reason I'd like to think most of the members of the Mile High Club (Of which I admit it: I'm not a member. Yet) just met the person they're exchanging fluids with. Yep, they met not 45 minutes ago, and already they've worked out a cozy agreement and they're altering all kinds of neurochemicals, un- or re-balancing their hormonal profile, blood-flow is being diverted to where the heavy action is, they're rearranging the mess of that lovely phonebooth-sized room. Maybe it was in the jet they met, maybe before boarding, in the bar in the airport. (Why do I even care? Maybe I need to go "break one off" or "be my own best friend," or "audition a hand puppet" before I sully this blog too much?)

...Continuing in my reverie, the notion that in the 1960s and 70s, stewardesses merely laughed at passenger-sex, and greeted the glowing couple once they emerged from the bathroom with a cigarette and a glass of champagne??? That's almost too good. But I'm going to go ahead and believe that story for awhile, 'cuz it's fun and I ain't a-hurtin' no one. How times have changed! One day you're getting your rocks off with a honey you just met in coach in that cramped, icky bathroom, and are celebrated for it; a few years pass and you're going at it with a gorgeous stranger in the lavatory and it's a national security incident.

Anyway, airplane sex sorta gives another meaning to the phrase, "Fly United," doesn't it?

"How Sex Built the Internet"
Here's a gentle reminder that sex drives new technology. The Disinformation guys got this from NPR (follow the link). I thought it interesting that private chat was the thing that really got AOL going.

But home video was driven by sex too. People bought VCRs so they could watch porn at home. Yes, there was a time when you had to drive to that wonderfully seedy part of town, and watch porn in the dark with a bunch of gnarly strangers! O! Those rugged days...And when you got home from the theatre you had your clothes cleaned with steam. Or maybe you just burned them. Our ancestors from the mid-1970s had it rough!

The first book sellers made a big part of their profit by selling "erotica." Much ink has been spilled over this topic. Other fluids have been spilled too, and isn't that to be expected?

Sex and new media technologies: they go together like hand and...(_____________<----you go ahead and fill in that hole there, no one's lookin'.)
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To end this blogspew, I'm reminded of Woody Allen being asked:

Q: Do you think sex is dirty?
Woody: It is if you're doing it right.

Woody Allen, the object of far more female erotic daydreams than you'd guess. I remember reading something long ago (a likely story!) about women who thought Woody Allen was sexy. Which gave me hope. But I have personally found a sense of humor has, at times, somewhat offset my lack of good looks. And I've stolen liberally from Woody, too. Just wait, you'll see how good I am in bed because I spend so much time practicing alone. You know, heterosexuality is fine and all, but bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for getting a date for Saturday night. That sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's way up there. When you mention "masturbation" in a negative sense just know you're knocking one of my hobbies, and besides, what's so negative about masturbation? It's sex with someone I love, etc.

Feel free to use these lines from me and Woody Allen if you're trying to hookup with someone at the airport. And thanks again for reading!

Heretics: A Short Pass

From that quasi-heresy of social epistemology, Wikipedia, 19th century doctor and "savior of mothers," Ignaz Semmelweis:

>Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he ironically died of septicemia, at age 47.<


Heretic! Wash our hands? This is not what we were taught! 


"I know, I know, you want your 'geniuses' and you're ready to honor them. But you want nice geniuses, well-behaved, moderate geniuses with no nonsense about them, and not the untamed variety who break through all barriers and limitations. You want a limited, cropped and clipped genius you can parade through the streets of your cities without embarrassment."
-Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!


Reich died in an American prison, persecuted and prosecuted by the US government, egged on by the AMA, his books burned only 10 years after Unistat fought a war against people who, among other affronts to basic ideas of human dignity...burned books.


Robert Anton Wilson, who saw value in the ideas of such heretics as Wilhelm Reich and Timothy Leary, told Lewis Shiner in a 1988 interview, "As long as one heretic is locked up, part of my brain is locked up, and I'm not getting the nourishment I need."


And Kevorkian has died, much to the joy of many. No joy for me.


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"Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as one million European women, most of them poor and many of them widowed, were executed for witchcraft, taking the blame for bad weather that killed crops." - Superfreakonomics, p.20


There is a long debate about why these women were killed, and the one I grew up with - the narrative I grew up with that I found most compelling - was that the all-male disastrous "doctors" (bleeders, leech-appliers, etc) were jealous of the success old crones living in the woods or on the outskirts of town had in healing...with no formal training at all! They were a threat to male power over the body. Knowledge - empirical! - passed down through the ages, much of it orally transmitted, about plants, water, use of herbs, symptoms, loving care, hand-holding: dangerous! Levitt and Dunbar in the book cited above mention weather and the crops. There's probably something to that. But they're all dead anyway. 


For being heretics, for not belonging to orthodoxy, as established by Authority. 


 -------------------


U. of Washington zoologist, biologist and evolutionary psychologist and public intellectual David Barash urges in one of his essays in Natural Selections that, from a sociological and existentialist view, far more damage has been done by preaching obedience to authority; we must teach disobedience to the authority of political authorities, social authorities, and to "genetic inclinations." That is: we are probably genetically hardwired to do some nasty things to each other: let us disobey these "natural" urges!


_________________________


"Heresy is charisma's boisterous child, its role being to challenge the deadening effects of orthodoxy." - from Prophets, Cults and Madness, p.63 


Same book, p.175: "The essential difference between the messiah and the charismatic prophet is that the messiah advocates renewed submission to the Almighty whereas the charismatic advocates heresy." The authors of this book, John Price and Anthony Stevens, bring a sort of evolutionary psychology-psychiatry with a Jungian bent to the age-old phenomenon of origins of religions and "cults" and prophets, holy-men, Mansonoids, etc. What a fascinating book that was, and now that I'm quoting from it I feel like reading it again...


My cardinal sin: prolixity. One last word: At what point does a religion lose its authority for you? Take any religion. (I'm not conventionally religious in any sense of the idea, but am fascinated by religion, if only for the simple fact that it seems I MUST be fascinated by it; it plays such a large role in this mad world!) At what point in its history did it "blow it"? 


I like Ezra Pound's poetic answer:


"A religion is damned, it confesses its own ultimate impotence, the day it burns its first heretic." - Selected Prose, 1909-1965